Unsaid

Dan Chaon (pronounced ‘Shawn’) has always intrigued me.  His two novels (‘You Remind Me of Me’ and ‘Await Your Reply’) both are intricately and interestingly plotted.  The reader only gradually becomes aware of what’s what, who’s who.  During the experience of reading little by little we figure it out.  Some of our suspicions along the way may prove to be correct, others not.  There’s often a macabre element.  Chaon’s subject matter is often not pretty.

So I was happy to see a new collection of stories by Chaon, ‘Stay Awake’.  The novels are long and complex.  How would Chaon deal with the short story form?

Very well indeed.  These are stories about characters that are in the process of discovery.  Often we don’t know what they are about to discover.  They are often stuck in a kind of limbo after a difficult experience that they don’t fully understand.  They may be hiding it from themselves, or others may be concealing the truth.  The actual unveiling doesn’t happen in the story itself.  At the end of the story we are left with a strong feeling of anticipation.  Something important is going to happen. 

The last sentence of the story ‘I Wake Up’ is:

‘---Oh yes I remembered I remembered and jolted up and grabbed for my flashlight even before I was fully awake.’

This from a character with real trauma in his past, but who has been living in a kind of trance.  As readers we know something is difficult will be revealed to him.  As readers we’re left with a strong feeling of anticipation.  We can speculate about what he will remember, but that’s not the point.  Chaon is masterful at depicting the feeling that something important is about to happen.  His characters here are like the readers of his novels:  they know something, but not the whole story.  That is only revealed in time.  And the process of getting there is fascinating.

Convention, In Life and In Words

Gaughin's Manao Tupapau (The Spirit Watches Over Her)

I adore Somerset Maugham’s novels.  While reading ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ recently I started to think about narrative flow.  It’s a fairly short novel of 240 pages, but it’s divided into 58 chapters of approximately equal length.  That’s an average of 4.13 pages per chapter, and all those chapter endings followed by a chapter beginning on the next page make for quite a bit of white space.  So the chapters are quite short.  A few of the early chapters are almost set pieces of a sort, but most of the chapters just take the story from one point to the next.  The chapters do fall into groups which deal with a certain time or place, but those groups are not explicitly shown on the page.  We’re simply presented with 58 short chapters.  What effect does this structure have on the reading experience?  How is the experience different from reading a Philip Roth novel, where there are fewer chapters and some of them are very very long indeed?

There are no cliffhangers or teasing links to pull the reader from one chapter to the next in the Maugham work.  If anything the style is quite formal and old-fashioned.  The action is carefully laid out, and the author (through the narrator) provides a good deal of commentary and speculation along the way.  My experience is of casual storytelling that is more-or-less evenly paced.  No Roth-like riffs or virtuoso passages that take your breath away.  The narrative proceeds without obvious effort from one topic to the next.  Each is dealt with in turn in a way that seems natural and appropriate.  The book has a certain propriety to it.  It bows to convention in a way that makes the reading experience comfortable and easy.  Nothing unusual gets in the way of the overall flow.

Would the reading experience be much different if Maugham had left the text the same, but combined several chapters into one?  There might be only a third or a quarter as many chapters, but would the experience be the same?  Dunno.  There is something comforting about digesting consistently short chapters.  And Maugham’s style of narration is nothing if not comforting.  It has echoes of the 18^th-century British novels that were written as a collection of letters, also of the serialized novels of 19^th-century writers like Dickens.  Maybe it’s just our familiarity with this structure that makes it easy and comforting.  Or is there just something pleasing about reading a book one short chunk at a time?

The plot is very loosely based on the life of Paul Gaugin, but Maugham’s protagonist is British.  Maugham seems caught up in the contrast between a truly artistic temperament and the accepted strict norms of British respectability.  I don’t think the main character’s transformation from workaday London stock broker to remarkably dedicated Parisian artist is well explained, but I don’t know that it’s important that the story be believable.  Maugham is highlighting the differences between two approaches to life.  Packing them both into the same character may not be entirely credible, but it does make the contrast more striking.

Maugham (through the narrator) seems to come down ultimately on the side of respectability, but with some looks of longing over the fence to the other side where a truly artistic temperament rules the day.  The conflict is fascinating.  And depicting this cruel, relentless, brilliant and somewhat unstructured artistic life in thoroughly conventional language in a reassuringly familiar structure gives the reader another clue to Maugham’s own choices.

A Tangled Web

‘The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life’ is the subtitle of Robert Trivers’s new book ‘The Folly of Fools’.  Trivers is Rutgers scientist who studies behavior from the point of view of evolutionary biology.  It’s a field that has interested me in a casual way since reading Robert Wright’s ‘The Moral Animal’ almost twenty years ago followed by some E.O. Wilson here and there.  Back then we were fascinated by altruism, and we tried to see the Darwinian advantage it might give to the survival and replication of an individual’s genetic code.  Trivers’s interest is in self-deception, how it helps us and how it can harm us.

First of all Trivers is quite a character.  Yes, he’s a serious scientist, but he’s also out there … sometimes pretty far out there.  He doesn’t mind speculating, and his range is huge.  He reveals something of his personal life.  His politics are close to Noam Chomsky’s.  If that bothers you don’t read this book.  He has a seriously negative (and I think prejudicial) view of psychotherapy.  I’ll bet he’s a fascinating teacher.

There are so many intriguing ideas in this book.  His accounts of many studies are incredibly revealing.  He discusses deception on both individual and collective levels.  Topics include molecular and chemical deception, family life, sex, language analysis, politics, airplane and spacecraft disasters, immunology, and false historical narratives.  Sure does give the reader lots to think about.  There is much work yet to be done in the field, and Trivers is quick to point out that he has few of the answers himself.  Nonetheless the questions themselves are so so provocative.

I think the book suffers from the lack of a clearly targeted readership.  It’s not hard science, though much supporting documentation is offered at the end of the volume.  But it’s not really popular science either.  The writing is not entertaining or engaging.  If anything I found it off-putting.  It sometimes combines the worst of scientific jargon, dry logic, and unimaginative presentation.  It’s popular science that never got properly dressed up for the general public.  Unfortunately the lab coat still prevails, and often with a good dose of dust from the research shelves of the library.  I guess that’s what can happen when a scientist tries to write for the public.  He can’t quite shed his scientific skin.  And that doesn’t serve the general reader very well.

There were times when I thought I might not make it through the book, but I did hold out.  And I’m glad I did.  Just think about your own image of yourself.  Think about the ways you distort reality to create an image for yourself that serves your interests.  Now imagine that everyone else is doing something similar.  And you react to their deception, they react to yours, and the endless contest of distortions goes on and on.  It never ends.  ‘Reality’ is only a starting point.  We manufacture our own reality to suit us.  And we change it when we feel we need to. 

The human brain is an incredible filter and interpreter that needs to make sense of huge amounts of data.  We pay a high price in terms of energy for that processing.  We need to get something useful out of it.  We construct whatever narrative works for us, even if that narrative is at least in part obviously false.  Doesn’t matter.  If it serves us, we’ll use it.  Of course sometimes the deception catches up with us.  But then we just create another narrative to explain that one as well.  It’s what we do.  And we’re damned good at it.