In Search of . . .

‘A Prayer for Owen Meany’, ‘The Cider House Rules’.  These are favorite books for me.  Much of John Irving’s output since about 2000 seems different to me.  I keep coming back to him with the hope of finding a new novel that will please me as much as the older ones.  But alas, I haven’t found one yet.  Latest attempt: ‘The Fourth Hand’.

The writing is a little simpler than in some of his works.  Pared down and plain, very serviceable if rarely glowing.  Irving has always been a very intricate and masterful plotter.  In the earlier books, the plots were largely realistic and believable, even if they included some fantastic elements.  The later books may seem to be realistic novels along the same lines, but I don’t really think that’s the case.  The plots are still intricate, but much less realistic.  More diverse thematic elements are juxtaposed repeatedly.  In ‘The Fourth Hand’, there’s loss, sex, responsibility, journalistic integrity, parenthood, new beginnings, etc.  They’re interwoven in ways that produce jarring and thought provoking contrasts, but not believable plot lines.  It seems that Irving has moved on from traditional realism (as a vehicle for poignant thematic development) and is now content to go straight for the themes.  He throws a lot against the wall, and much of it sticks, but it’s often not a pretty or well organized picture that results.  It seems arbitrary and contrived, even when the thematic points are clear. All of the subplots float in a zero-G environment where there isn't much of a sense of up and down. Anything much can happen, and lots of unlikely things do happen.  But it doesn't matter much that they're unlikely.  In that environment there is no gravity holding us down, and few likelihoods or probabilities to make us expect or want particular outcomes.

There’s humor, some of it really funny. There are some striking passages here and there.  And the sentimental ending depicting an opportunity for a new beginning is a little cheap, but I don’t object.  Maybe that aspect is so close to my own recent life experience that I’m inevitably drawn to swallow that one without complaint.

But I miss the long-winded sagas that read like tales from a wise grandfather.  These more recent books are more condensed and at heart more modern. I’m not sure this one hangs together so well, but I’ll take just about anything that comes from Irving.

Still hoping.

Leftward Bound

Vanessa Vaselka’s first novel, ‘Zazen’, came highly recommended by some pretty serious readers.  I can see why.  She is a writer; that much is certain.  There is some strong prose here.  She expresses a young person’s alienation with stinging precision:

‘Yes, I want to look like you.  I want to be so thoroughly anchored into some sort of pop culture aesthetic that nothing can knock me over or wash me away or make me hate everyone. I want to sleep again.’

‘ . . . I remember thinking, like I do now, that I would love to love something, especially if I could do it without feeling like I was watching it die right in front of me . . . ‘

The book takes place in an unspecified future time of near apocalypse.  Society is collapsing and the most crucial question for each individual is when and how to abandon ship.  The entire plot takes place within a left wing fringe group that is actively though not very craftily plotting to promote the demise of traditional society.  We get no direct glimpses of what or whom these folks are reacting to.  The entire book takes place on the fringe.  Vaselka both skewers and sympathizes with her leftist characters.  Some of them are frauds, some are more genuine but will never have the courage to act, others act in irrational and unexplainable ways. 

‘Credence agreed it might be good for me to work in a more positive environment.  I don’t know why he thinks watching Wal-Mart crush impoverished communities isn’t a positive experience.  Listening to the snap of infrastructure?  Cheering when something essential resists failure more slowly -- strain … strain … (screaming fans) … strain … SNAP!’

Some of the writing is pretty far out there.  I admit to shifting into virtual skim mode at times.  Just didn’t have the patience to adopt a more careful reading mode, something that might be more akin to reading poetry.  But nonetheless I could appreciate what she’s trying to do, even if I couldn’t follow every step of the way.

There’s plenty of outrageous behavior, amusing caricature, sex, and colorful happenings.  But plot is secondary.  Even though the last third of the book is a bit of a thriller, rest assured: nothing really happens.  It’s about the main character, her complete and utter alienation, and her search for some kind of meaning in the midst of chaos.  In the end she doesn’t really succeed, but we do have the feeling that she might in the future.  As for society as a whole, that’s a lost cause from page one.

Vaselka is a courageous writer.  Read her and be reassured that there are young writers out there that love language. The publisher, Red Lemonade, is a bit amateurish.  Typos and mistakes of various kinds abound.  But we should be grateful that works like this get out there, however it happens.  I look forward to more from her.

In Search

Proust.  I was always too intimidated to try.  But when I heard about the goodreads.com reading group to read all of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (ISOLT) in 2013, I decided to give it a try.  Nothing like peer pressure to keep you motivated, and the discussions might well help to give me some clue what I was [trying to] read.  So I plunged into ‘Swann’s Way’ (the Lydia Davis) translation with fear, anticipation, humility, and trepidation.

Well, I made it through ‘Swann’s Way’.  So many reactions, many of them very surprising to me.

Highlights:

It’s not all that difficult to read.  It requires patience, and the ability to plow through long passage that may not seem relevant, but it’s not Greek. 

The book is long and sprawling.  At first it seems dreamlike and almost unstructured, and that’s troubling.  Then it seems dreamlike and almost unstructured, and that’s not troubling at all.  It’s wonderful. 

Reality, illusion, dream, wakefulness, deception, truth.  Proust weaves these together seemingly without effort to produce an all-too-accurate portrayal of what it is to be alive and trapped in human consciousness.  At least some of the spirit of Freud (leavened with a French sensibility) prevails.  Yes, it’s all terribly self-conscious, and there are points where you want to scream “Get over it!”  But that is also what I scream at myself on a regular basis in my life.

I know of no comparable literary expression of the role of art and beauty in life.  The description of a musical performance and the emotional effects on the listener is closer than anything I’ve ever read to my deepest experiences of music.  And there are similar depictions of the effects of literature, architecture, and painting.  Stunning.

Yes, there were passages where I became hopelessly lost.  Yes, there were passages where I had to reread several times.  Sometimes I made progress, sometimes not.  I guess reading Proust is a lifetime affair.  One time won’t cut it.

There is a surprising amount of humor, some of it really, really funny.  I didn’t expect that.

Over the month of reading I became absolutely seduced by the inward-looking self-conscious and reflective pose of the narrator.  It’s like having a very effective therapist.  The experience is one in which you can be very very honest and confidential with yourself.  Somehow most of the usual day-to-day embarrassment melts away.  If Proust can be this honest, why withhold as a reader?

There is some achingly beautiful prose.  I’m not qualified to comment on translation issues.  I can only testify that there were sometimes tears at the pure beauty of the prose itself.

Reading Proust affected my reading in general.  I was generally reading ‘Swann’s Way’ and another book at the same time during the month.  I was always comforted on returning to the Proustian womb.  So warm, comforting, and reassuring.  Also very limiting.  But it’s a trade-off that I can buy off on.  At least for now.

So will I continue on with the next book in the ISOLT series?  Not sure.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Depends on what other reading might take me elsewhere.

For now I bow to Proust and his unique take on the human condition.  I take comfort in knowing that I can return to the Proustian cathedral should my soul tell me that I need to do so.  I don’t think it was wise for me to postpone my first Proust until the age of sixty.  But better late than never. 

Before it’s too late.

“George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

That was the headline in the NYT.  Well, you can’t really ignore that, can you?  I guess not.  Saunders has published several books.  The first came out in 1996.  Why haven’t I heard of him?  Why haven’t I read him?  He was close to DFW.  He’s well known in certain literary circles.

Shame on me.

My new hero

So I read his latest story collection, “Tenth of December”, and yes, it may well be the best (new) book I’ll read this year.  It is extraordinary.  Ten stories.  Each in its own distinct voice.  A bit of avant-garde here and there.  But these stories all get to an emotional (if complex) truth, a place of intense feeling that can be scary, telling, funny, reassuring, and loving all at the same time.  At heart Saunders seems to be quite traditional, even if the surface is modern, or even a bit post-modern.  FINALLY, a writer that uses experimental techniques in the service of old-fashioned goals.  FINALLY a writer that is truly comfortable in the 21^st century, a writer that can use modern technique without waving the post-modern flag, and he doesn’t require the reader to enter the writer’s self-conscious ‘Creative Writing Workshop’.  We can read Saunders and relax.  We can savor our role as a reader. He’s the writer, we’re his readers.  Simple.  Also rare these days among forward-thinking writers.

A favorite and representative passage.  It comes from the end of the title story.  The characters have been through a wrenching and complicated experience:

‘They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever . . .’

There’s some sci-fi, there’s humor, there’s poignancy.  I won’t reveal details.  Just read it.  You won’t be sorry.  The writing is challenging in places.  There are times when the reader doesn’t know quite what’s what.  But it all sorts out soon enough, at least enough to be satisfying.  Some ambiguity remains.  There is no preaching, there are few judgments.  Humanity abounds.

And there is plenty of really good writing.  Each story seems to start from a particular writer’s place, a certain voice, rhythm, dialect, point of view.  And Saunders runs with it, spins it out in front of our very eyes.  He never breaks character, and he never goes for the cheap shot or the cheap laugh.

I pledge that sooner or later I will read everything he’s published.

Very happy.

Disappointment

Have always been a big fan of Kingsley Amis’s ‘Lucky Jim’, for me one of the funniest novels ever about academic life. Had never read anything by his son, Martin Amis, so I decided to try ‘The Pregnant Widow’.  Martin’s is now a much bigger literary reputation than his father’s, so my expectations were high.  I was looking for something smart and funny as a break from Proust.  I joined the 2013 Proust reading group on Goodreads.com.  The plan is to read all of the Recherches during 2013.  No idea how long I’ll stick it out, but I am currently ahead of the reading schedule and enjoying ‘Swann’s Way’ very much.  Nonetheless it’s very dense and sometimes tough going, so something light and witty seemed like the perfect intermission.

Martin and Kingsley Amis in 1965

I couldn’t have been more wrong.  By the middle of the book I was longing to get back to the engaging and confidential (if twisted and neurotic) prose of Proust.  It was a real chore to get to the end of ‘The Pregnant Widow’, and I almost wished I had honored my first instincts and put it down after the first hundred pages.

First of all, Martin Amis is brilliant, well-read, and insightful.  But all in service of what?  I don’t mind negativity at all.  The St. Aubry Patrick Melrose novels are witty and also very bleak, but they engage real feelings, sometimes to a painful degree.  I found the Martin Amis to be slick, snotty, snarky, and utterly devoid of any character that might evoke real feelings in me.  All of the characters are lost in one way or another, most to a degree that they seem to inhabit an artificial world devoid of basic human emotion.  They can’t really feel anything except vague self-hatred  and snotty “Why is everyone happier than I am?” that gets them nowhere.  They’re trapped in a place that frankly I don’t find all that interesting. 

Ok, so yeah I get the basic premise about the difficulties presented to young folks by the sexual revolution.  I’m of exactly that generation.  I was facing some of those same choices in 1970, the year when most of the novel’s plot takes place.  Some of my reactions were constructive, some were self-destructive, but I did manage to feel something and react.  These characters just blunder on and spend page after page wondering in witty, abstract, smart, and ultimately boring ways why they’re not as happy as their overwhelming sense of entitlement tells them they should be.  

Amis manages to bring in references to pretty much the entire history of the British novel, and he does a disservice to every single book he cites.  And I realize he knows he’s doing that.  I just don’t want to read about it unless there’s going to be some kind of genuine heartfelt reaction invoked at some point.  But no.  Nothing.  Zilch.  The writing is full of witticisms, many of which I’m sure I missed.  Some are probably too specifically British for me, some too erudite.  Who cares?  These are people I choose not to spend time with.  Period.

I hope this book is not representative of Martin Amis’s overall output, and I hope the book’s outlook is in no way an accurate reflection of his take on life.  If so, what a terrible waste.