Welcome Back

An underrated pleasure in life: something familiar, pleasurable, accessible, and reasonably high quality that we can visit and revisit as we please.  Like having a special restaurant in the neighborhood, a place you know well and enjoy when the time is right.  The food is very good if not five-star, you’re a known and valued customer, you’ve never had a bad meal, and you feel at home.  You can stop by for a comforting and pleasing experience and get a little bit of the relaxation of coming home.

That’s how I feel about Paul Theroux.  He’s written lots of books, and he’s still producing.  I always enjoy reading his work.  I think I know his strengths, and I also know what his fiction is not and probably never will be. But I keep coming back for more, and I’m rarely disappointed.  He has a special talent for getting across the essence of an exotic locale at a particular time in history.  OK, so maybe the plot is sometimes a little contrived.  Maybe the characters don’t exactly resonate with the depth of Tolstoy or Flaubert.  Maybe the language doesn’t have quite the sophistication of Banville or Trevor.  But I don’t know another living author that can give such a sparkling and detailed sense of place and time.

Malawi

‘The Lower River’ is his latest novel.  It deals with the backwater of Malawi.  We learn about how the country has changed in the last forty years (not for the better, despite the all-too-good intentions of many) through the life of Ellis Hoch, an American who spent several years working there in his early twenties, then returns at the age of sixty after his traditional life in Massachusetts explodes.  There are some aspects of plot and character that don’t ring quite true.  But I now feel that I know something about Malawi, its people, its precarious position in the world today.  Not somewhere I’m anxious to visit, but I almost feel that I have, thanks to Theroux’s writing.

We’ve all had the experience of reading a good general newspaper or magazine and learning about this and that.  Until we read something there about a subject we know well; then we suddenly think that the publication is superficial and misleading.  Is that what’s happening about Theroux and Malawi?  I’ve never been there so I guess I’ll never know.  But I do find the portrayal convincing, and I guess that will have to suffice.  Theroux offers no easy answers to the country’s serious problems, nor does he take sides in the various conflicts he portrays.  It’s frankly quite a mess.  That makes the Hollywood ending all the more improbable, but who cares about the last two pages?  The rest is well worth reading.  And it would make a very good movie.

So sit back at your favorite table, have a friendly chat with the waiter you’ve known for years, and order something from the menu you haven’t had before.  The kitchen you know so well will not disappoint you.

More Munro

It’s such a pleasure to read a review or critical essay that instantly clarifies one’s own feelings about an author’s work. Cathleen Schine’s piece on Alice Munro (NYRB, January 10, 2013, unfortunately behind the paywall, so I won’t link to it here), for me, at least, absolutely nails several special aspects of Munro’s stories.  I’ve always loved Munro’s work, and have never been able to figure out what makes the experience of reading her stories so unique. 

‘What Munro has done with this distancing, what she does so powerfully in all her work, is not to withdraw us from her characters or her characters from us, but to create room around them: room for sympathy.  They are not always easy to sympathize with, either.  The inhabitants of Munro’s stories are troubled, peculiar, pinched, violent, prideful, ignorant, envious, meddling, superior – as imperfect as human beings get.  She does not hold back in revealing the wormy crawling activity beneath the rocks of small-town life, the disgust with anyone different or ambitious or literary or imaginative or, worse yet, all these and female, too.  But Munro, like some brisk clear wind, reveals the errors and evils and simultaneously blows away our own initially judgmental reaction.’

The piece covers several other aspects and is well worth reading carefully.

Hmm, looks like Ms. Schine has written some fiction of her own.  And criticism published in The New Yorker and NYRB.  Was married to the film critic David Denby.  Will have to look out for her.

An English Estate in a Little Town Called 'Hope'

Patrick Melrose is now a little older, a little further away from the trauma of his childhood, and maybe a little wiser.  He's severely damaged, but he's beginning to recover. For the moment he’s past the worst of his substance abuse, and he’s primed to find a way to move his life in a positive direction.  He’s just not quite sure how to do it.

‘Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent.’

Like the first two novels in the Patrick Melrose series, Edward St. Aubyn’s ‘Some Hope’ focuses on the events of a single day leading up to a particular event.  Here it’s an elaborate party to celebrate the birthday of an aristocratic friend, one who has his own share of problems.  Princess Margaret is an honored guest at the party, and St. Aubyn’s satirical and cynical pen is especially sharp here.  One guest, a young woman looking to find her way in aristocratic society remarks:

‘Looks didn’t last forever and she wasn’t ready for religion yet. Money was kind of a good compromise, staked up somewhere between cosmetics and eternity.’ 

Patrick says of the host:

‘There’s a blast of palpable stupidity that comes from our host, like opening the door of a sauna. The best way to contradict him is to let him speak.’

Patrick is beginning to come to terms with his deceased father.  His mother is another story:

‘His mother was really a good person, but like almost everybody she had found her compass spinning in the magnetic field of intimacy.’

It will require one more book (‘Mother’s Milk’) for Patrick to come to terms with his mother.

At any rate the social satire in ‘Some Hope’ is stunning and very entertaining indeed.  Here’s an exchange between a minor character (Johnny Hall) and Princess Margaret:

‘It must be funny having the same name as so many other people,’ she speculated.  ‘I suppose there are hundreds of John Halls up and down the country.’

‘It teaches one to look for distinction elsewhere and not rely on an accident of birth,’ said Johnny casually.

‘That’s where people go wrong,’ said the Princess, compressing her lips, ‘there is no accident in birth.’

And here’s another minor character expounding on Europeans and his efforts to fit in:

‘I love the French.  They’re treacherous, cunning, two-faced – I don’t have to make an effort there, I just fit in.  And further down in Italy, they’re cowards as well, so I get on even better.’

The writing is razor sharp and witty.  It’s comforting to see Patrick slowly finding his way to a more normal, productive life given the trauma of his childhood and the paralyzing 'advantages' of his birth.  St. Aubyn at his best. We really feel tremendous sympathy for this remarkably privileged young man.

I’m looking forward to the final two novels in the series.  Already a little sad that the end is in sight.

So Clever

Can you imagine reading a full-length novel, and only at the very end do you understand what the text you’ve been reading really is?  And when we gather that knowledge in the last few pages, we can then deduce the fates of the two main characters without having to be explicitly told. And we also then understand some of the 'weaknesses' that we'd encountered in the book along the way.  It really is astonishingly clever.  I didn’t see it coming, and I was grinning for quite a while after finishing the book.  In retrospect it seems a little unlikely, but it’s just so much fun, who cares?

Ian McEwan brings it off in his latest novel, ‘Sweet Tooth’.  It’s a tale of some pretty tame British domestic espionage in the 70’s.  He does manage to evoke the time very nicely.  There are undoubtedly many specifically British references (especially political and literary) that I missed, but I got enough to remember how those times felt. The writing is slick and professional without calling undue attention to itself.

‘Sweet Tooth’ is part spy novel, part love story, part commentary on what it means to write fiction.  There’s a good dose of autobiography: one of the main characters is clearly a stand-in for McEwan himself.  I’m in no position to judge the extent of truthful correspondence to his own life.  And yes it’s another work of fiction in part about fiction itself.  We do seem to be a bit stuck on that these days.  So many writers have become self-conscious and feel the need to write about themselves writing, all within the boundaries of more-or-less traditional fiction.  Here there's just a hint of self-referential dizziness, and it’s annoyingly indulgent in a few places.  About two-thirds of the way through I got mildly discouraged.  The plot was starting to bog down and I wondered where all this was going.  But the ending makes it all worthwhile.  I don’t know another book quite like it.