Oh Danny Boy

The Gathering (2007 Booker Prize Winner) somehow slipped under the radar for me.  Totally missed it.  The Green Road is Anne Enright’s latest, it’s been favorably reviewed, so why not?

It’s the story of a modern day Irish family headed by a domineering and emotionally limited mother. Each of her children follows their own distinct path, some successful, some not, but each is crucially influenced by the unintentional yet inevitable inadequacies of the mother.  For me the most pleasing aspect of the book is the careful balance between overall plot and sectional episodes.  The novel is divided into several parts, each devoted to a particular character and time, and culminating in a holiday gathering at which the entire family ‘comes together’.  The sections are in essence short stories and vary in tone, setting, and time.  There are large chronology gaps between sections that the reader is left to piece together on his own.  Seems to be a bit of a trend these days …. short stories that connect, novels that are comprised of stories, etc.  Enright pulls it off nicely with just the right proportions of explicit revelation and tantalizing gaps.

The climactic holiday gathering is a bit predictable, but Enright at least resists the temptation to tie it all up with a neat ribbon and bow.  We’re left to speculate about how the characters will go forward, but I for one was happy to spend a few days with them.

Enright’s writing doesn’t have the spectacular Irish depth and warmth of Banville.  She relies more on plot and traditional structure, but I rarely found the writing clunky and awkward.  These are real characters that I ended up caring about.

Booker worthy?  Not sure.  I’ll have to try The Gathering.

Unsettling

In 2001 Michel Houellebecq published Platform, about a Western-owned sex resort in Asia which is brutally attacked by a Muslim fundamentalist group. Timing is everything.  The book was written and published just before 9/11/2001, and it eerily anticipated some of the main themes and the brutality that was seared into our consciousness that month.

Now we have Submission, a 2015 Houellebecq novel about France in 2022, the fictional year in which France, in a political crisis engendered by large-scale Muslim immigration, adopts a limited version of Sharia law.  Yes, it seems entirely implausible.  But reading this book during the recent Paris attacks was very unsettling.  Some of the novel’s political figures are taken from real life, and to be reading about them in the book and hearing them on the news the same day is very strange. I’m not sure of much, but I am pretty sure that we really don’t know where all this is headed.  Fear mongering abounds, and it seems that just about anything can happen now, be it a swing far to the left or to the right.

Accidental oracle?

First, let’s acknowledge that Houellebecq is a French intellectual, and as such just about everything he produces is cloaked in abstraction and intellectual tradition.  The protagonist in the novel is a scholar specializing in Huysmans, hardly an everyday writer for American readers.  And much of the cleverness of the book relies on that conceptual underpinning.  The bored protagonist at the beginning of the novel struggles for sexual and existential fulfillment.  By submitting to Islam at the end, he ends up exactly where he wants to be, except without the struggle.  In certain ways this parallels Huysmans life, and that’s the intellectual conceit here.  It’s very clever, it’s contrived, it’s intricately planned, it’s annoyingly abstract.

But how does Houellebecq seemingly anticipate current events with uncanny accuracy?  I’m sure he’s not happy that Paris was attacked, but he can’t be discontent that sales of his book will undoubtedly skyrocket as a result.  The book has a ‘look at me!’ smugness about it that is not attractive.  A bit too clever, too abstract, and also perhaps unsettlingly plausible.

Pikkety Lite

Pikkety’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is one of those big books that I optimistically pick up just about every time I see it in a bookstore. I really would like to be someone who would read it cover to cover.  But when I leaf through it in the store I realize I’m not that reader.  It’s too technical for me.  I’d never make it halfway through.

So that being the case, what’s next best?  Perhaps Joseph Stiglitz. He falls into a similar camp and his writing is much more accessible.  I searched for the most popular Stiglitz and came up with The Great Divide.

My liberal leanings on inequality are pronounced, but I don’t have a wealth of technical knowledge to back them up.  The Great Divide provides some of that backup, but not a lot.  The book is a compilation of many short magazine and newspaper articles by Stiglitz, and it is fascinating to see what he was writing as our economic story has unfolded over the last twenty years.  So many of his predictions have come true (unfortunately). The pieces tend to be largely political and not technical.  And unfortunately so many of the pieces make the same points over and over.  It doesn’t really add up to a coherent and well organized book.

I find myself agreeing with Stiglitz at just about every point, but not much better armed to defend my position at a cocktail party.  Preaching to the choir, I guess.  And that’s part of the problem with political discourse today.  There are so many parallel channels, and if we keep our attention focused on a particular channel we miss out on real interchange of ideas.  If we only listen to those we already agree with, we don’t make much progress.

Nonetheless, I did find Stiglitz’s larger concept of ‘rent’ enlightening.  And the contrast that he draws between grabbing a larger piece of the pie and working to make the pie larger is also telling. To what degree inequality is an inevitable part of capitalism is something I'm not qualified to judge.  I was hoping for more enlightenment, but Stiglitz is light on theory, heavy on polemics.  I’m still looking for the economic guru who can explain our current plight and take into account opposing viewpoints.  Don’t just say trickle down doesn’t work, show the numbers and explain the underlying theory.

Well, Pikkety Lite is definitely less filling.  Doesn’t taste bad either.  But is there a full-bodied brew that is drinkable?

Wars of Commerce

I loved Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first installment in his trilogy about the Opium Wars in China in the mid-19^th-century. Yes, I learned something about history, but I was entranced by his playful use of language.  The Opium Wars represented a mixture and clash of many cultures and languages, and Ghosh reveled in the richness of the stew.  The writing is playful, clever, and often downright funny (almost like Victor Borge or Syd Caeser doing their language schticks). Yes, there is a conventional plot, but for me it doesn’t matter much.

The second installment, River of Smoke, was a little disappointing.  Less playful, more plot driven, more seriously historical.

The third and last of the trilogy, Flood of Fire, unfortunately continues the trend.  The language just isn’t much fun anymore, history dominates in a less interesting way, and Ghosh spends lots of time tying up plot lines from the previous two books.  But I didn’t care much about those plot lines when I read the earlier installments, and I didn’t even remember them clearly on reading the third. 

So I was disappointed in the finale.  Ghosh ends up focusing greater attention on the weaker points of the series, and neglecting what made the first book so enjoyable.

Well, I do know a lot more about the Opium Wars now. It's interesting to think about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the context of the Opium Wars.  Nonetheless, Flood of Fire is not what I was hoping for.

In Memorium

The recent passing of James Salter saddened me, especially since I have been so lazy in getting around to reading his fiction. He spent his entire adult life writing from his heart and I have taken far too long getting around to reading it.  I’d read only two of his novels to date.

Light Years is perhaps his most renowned work, and rightly so.  Salter is a writer’s writer.  I don’t think I’ve read better writing anywhere, anytime.  I’m not sure it all adds up a great book, but paragraph after paragraph are simply stunning.

A master

You can pick just about any passage, but here’s one chosen at random from near the end of the novel.  It’s about the main male character, late in life, alone on a cruise to Europe:

Viri dined at the second sitting. He had a drink at the bar, where people entered with cries of greeting to the bartender. In the corridor were women of fifty, dressed for dinner, their cheeks rouged. Two of them sat near him. While one talked, the other ate long, triangular bread and butter pieces, tow bites to each. He read the menu and a poem of Verlaine’s on the back. The consommé arrived. It was nine-thirty. He was sailing to Europe. Beneath him as he lifted his spoon, fish were gliding black as ice in a midnight sea. The keel crossed over them like a comb of thunder.

And Salter writes about sex better than anyone I’ve read.  In this book the writing is not especially explicit (as it is in A Sport and A Pastime) , but he gets to the crucial point, every time.  He understands the significance and manages to communicate the essence.  I’ve never read anyone quite like that.

The story is a straightforward one about the history of a couple, from young adulthood to old age.  Salter maintains a very objective point of view.  We don’t see much drama first-hand.  Instead, we get a view from elsewhere, observation after the fact, and much reflection.  The result can feel detached, and that’s the main downside of his writing.  We don’t so much feel the experience as the ripples and consequences of the experience. We are left knowing we have witnessed lives honestly led.

I don’t know how else to say it.  The writing is phenomenal.  It’s a tour de force.  The writing itself almost overwhelms the book.  As when you read poetry, just savor every moment.  You hold in your hand a finely chiseled piece of art.  Enjoy each moment.

So sad that he is gone.

Freud Revisited?

Kazuo Ishiguro has for me been a master of mood, setting, and atmosphere.  The Remains of the Day is one of my all-time favorite books, and Never Let Me Go is a stunning achievement.  As I read the press releases and reviews I was a little skeptical about his latest novel, TheBuried Giant.  But it’s Ishiguro.  Gotta go there.

The underlying themes are compelling.  Memory (its reliability or lack thereof), the need to forget, the central importance of love, the eventual emergence of truth.  All of these are fascinating and worthy of exploration.  But the tone, the plot, the vehicle Ishiguro chose to carry those thoughts didn’t work so well for me.  It all seemed a bit like a cheap Prince Valiant story, something not for serious consideration.  The end moved me deeply, but along the way I was annoyed that it took so long in the book to know what it’s really about.  That comes back to my lack of enthusiasm for the medium, for the story, the time, the characters.  It just didn’t mesmerize me the way Ishiguro has in other novels.

To spin a yarn like this one just about every aspect of the thread has to be interesting and compelling, and I just didn’t find it so.  Perhaps it’s a book that demands a second read to see how the themes are actually carefully woven in from the first page.  But I don’t have the patience to wade through all of the scenery and plot again.  At least not right now.

In a way the book is a metaphor for psychoanalysis, a process designed to recover accurate memory, see the past more usefully and allow us to move forward without the unnecessary constraints of experience. But it also has to provide page to page interest as a narrative, and there I was disappointed.

Inside Out

Since my daughter pointed me to The Windup Bird Chronicles several years ago I’ve been a big Murakami fan. For me, his writing reverberates in unexpected ways.  I don’t know where he’s going until all of a sudden I’m there. I’ve tried to figure out how he does it, but alas I’m no literary critic.  I just know that for the most part it works for me.

Two thoughts come to mind about his fiction.

First, the point of origin in many of his storied is stillness, a Zen-like neutrality in which no much is moving and listening is intense.  From that meditative emptiness often emerge interesting and bizarre plots which couldn’t happen without the previous silence, without the intense listening. From the quietness the ideas seem to evolve on their own in natural if unusual ways.

Second, the story lines often externalize internal conditions and emotions.  The stillness opens a path from the deeply personal out into the external world.  Sometimes the outward representation is ostensibly realistic, sometimes fantastic.  But more often than not the externals represent a kind of creative prismatic refraction of an inner state.  And that complex shimmering tunnel of light between inner and outer can be striking. We see the outside, we look inside, our gaze is reflected back out, then in. And it’s all made possible by the stillness that allows that special vision to penetrate along the Murakami path that connects the two. 

I’ve read most of the novels, will catch up on the ones I’ve missed, and will certainly read everything he publishes (in translation) going forward. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of twenty four short stories. They are all worth reading though there is quite a bit of variety in the collection. In looking back through the book a few weeks after finishing it I’m struck that each story evokes in me that specific memory of the inner/outer connection, that special pathway that Murakami uncovers. He doesn’t so much forge the pathway in an aggressive way, but rather out of stillness just shines an enticing dim light in a place we didn’t know existed.  Except we really did know, we just chose not to connect the dots.