Less Is Different

Family Life by Akhil Sharma is a short novel that took twelve years to write.  Many drafts, many revisions, many fresh starts.  Sharma’s difficulties have been well documented.  Some may have arisen from the autobiographical aspects of the novel (and the inevitable emotional consequences), while others are mostly technical. Such is the life of the creative artist.  He deals with the technical aspects of his art.  Those have their own demands, their own momentum.  But if he’s creating something worthwhile, there will also be pains and difficulties akin to childbirth.  He’s extracting (expelling?) something personal, something that will therefore have special value to the reader, and that process can hurt, and it can take time.

Here the question of narrator is paramount.  The story is told in the first person by one of two sons in an Indian family that emigrates to the United States. As the narrator ages his outlook matures, but nonetheless his viewpoint is limited by his age, his nature, and his cultural background.  He sees life in the USA through the eyes of a young recent immigrant, and as such his take can be misleading, insightful, amusing, and sad.  Like Rief Larson in The Selected Works of T S Spivet, or Mark Haddan in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, the child narrator (in these cases very special ones) have particular gifts to bestow.  Their limitations are also their strengths.  It’s a way for the author to get us look at things with a fresh (if constrained) perspective.  The limitations here are severe, and the result is rewarding.  This is far from the Indian family epic novel (A Suitable Boy).  There is no sprawling, no horizontal spread of any kind, and little appeal to the senses as well. This is a pared down matter of fact version of events that says as much about the teller as about what is told.

In the end we know what matters to the narrator, but we know mostly because of what is not said, what has been omitted.  It’s a reminder that any viewpoint is limited.  It’s a blow to the heart of the omniscient narrator, and it’s a reminder that humility is never out of place.  Is there a meta-narrator that is offering us this limited view, someone who knows its limitations?  An actor, an impersonator, a master of ceremonies?  Perhaps, but her never makes an explicit appearance.  Except as author.

But for the Grace of God . . .

To complete my first pass at a Didion survey, I had to read A Year of Magical Thinking. While The White Album and Play It As It Lays have elements of memoir embedded in nonfiction and fiction respectively, this book is pure memoir.  So it seemed logical to go for the pure gold. The personal touch made those two books special, so maybe the unalloyed memoir would be especially rewarding.

Yes and no. The writing is awesomely good.  But the focus becomes unrelentingly personal, and yes, self-indulgent. I recognize that unexpectedly losing a long-held significant other (husband of more than thirty years) must be life changing, Yet I’m not sure I would choose to spend that much time in the exclusive company of the bereaved spouse. The reading experience is meaningful, painful, and revealing.  But I’m not there and I don’t necessarily want to go there with you unless you can relate your experience to aspects outside of your own particular context.

Didion and Donne

I’m not sure that Didion manages to do that. Given a strong will to enter her sealed intimate world I did just fine. But if I resisted going through customs and instead remained in my own world, I did at times lose patience with her unrelenting focus on self, her obvious blind spots to the weaknesses of her loved ones, and her inability to see outsider her own necessarily (I guess) limited view. Reading the book was probably just like spending time with such a bereaved and lost soul.  You can hold your breath and immerse for a while, but every so often you must come up for fresh air and reconnect with your own reality.

Particularly telling:

‘When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that his will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.”

I’m glad if writing the book did her some good. Her mastery of language and technique is stunning. The unrelenting honesty is admirable if at times hard to take. I know that I’ll come back to it if and when I find myself grieving a loved one. For now I’ll file it away as “to be revisited when needed . . . hopefully never.”

Didion's Oblivion

I was so taken with Joan Didion’s The White Album, I had to go on to sample her fiction.  Play It As It Lays is a 1970 short novel. It’s set in the Hollywood scene of the late 60’s, and it is truly terrifying.  The language is sparse; the action not quite the point. The main character, Maria Wyeth, is a young actress who is married to a writer/director. Her life, so promising at times, has completely fallen apart.  Her marriage is a shamble, her daughter is institutionalized, her career is on the rocks.  She has lost all semblance of dignity and self-respect. She has truly entered a state of oblivion where nothing applies, nothing matters, nothing holds. She is not evil, but she is broken and helpless. Didion’s prose keeps us staring at that awful place with no chance to avert our gaze.  The book is difficult to read in places.  I just wanted to put it down and seek some small comfort.  If this is life, then …. why bother?

From the 1972 movie with Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins

Sex, alcohol, drugs play a part.  But the characters (there isn’t a sympathetic one in sight) bring their unhappiness on themselves with unwavering determination.  In an effort to be known, to be someone (in the world’s eye), to prevail against the odds, to create something worthwhile, they lose their souls in the torrent of the present.  What’s left is wreckage.  Reading this book suggests what it must be like walking through a disaster zone after a tsunami.  Debris everywhere.  Countless signs of what maybe was, what could have been, but is now simply wreckage.  And there are no signs of rebuilding.  These lives cannot be salvaged.

The degree of condensation employed by Didion is remarkable.  Incidents are recounted in few words.  The narrative jumps around, but one can piece together the timeline.  What remains constant is the inevitable slide into non-functional degradation despite the evident talent and considerable financial resources that remain available. It’s the downside of here-all-things-are possible California. Go ahead, try. The gates of hell are wide open.

Intense, scathing and disturbing, this novel will stay with me.

Where Have I Been?

Joan Didion

It’s one of the best aspects of reading. You can read for a long, long time and still discover an author that makes you wonder how you've missed her for so long.  Joan Didion is not exactly an obscure writer, but nonetheless I’ve managed to avoid reading her. Granted she’s not so popular in New York where I lived most of my life.  But having moved to California, several  readers here have recommended her works as serious and worthwhile. So I picked up The White Album.  Very glad I did.

The White Album is a collection of non-fiction magazine pieces (published in 1979) by the relatively young Didion.  For me it’s a new kind of non-fiction that combines traditional non-fiction, memoir, and many techniques from fiction to make a unique style.  It’s both intensely personal and strictly objective.  No real argument presented, at least not explicity. Just multifaceted takes on some important themes, including the late 60’s, the 50’s, California as a place, technology, feminism, and the personal vs. the collective.

I won’t dwell on specifics here, but suffice it to say that I’ve never read anything more insightful on any of the above topics.  She has a wonderful way of coming at a subject from a number of different angles, all personal, all intensely felt, and all telling.  It’s up to the reader to try to assemble those takes into something coherent.  In some cases it’s not possible, and that’s OK.  It’s a curiously creative approach to non-fiction: impressions, ideas, feeling, all presented as strong but divergent vectors that may or may not add up. It’s Didion’s way of portraying complexity, and it borrows from fiction writers who use different characters (even different narrators) to present divergent views of the same events. Didion manages this in the realm of non-fiction.  The kaleidoscope keeps turning, and the views are striking.

Mark di Suvero sculpture in San Francisco

One might expect that just about anything published on these topics in 1979 wouldn't have much relevance today.  Think again.  These pieces will last for a long time; each is filtered through an intensely personal lens. She presents a series of vectors which precariously balance each other and contribute to a shimmering whole. In the long run we learn more about Didion than about the subject at hand, and I wish I had the opportunity to know her personally in those times.  Well maybe not.  I wouldn’t have been up to the challenge.  I’m grateful to know her through her writing.

Fiction as Argument

“And another thing.  And what about this idea?  But you should really also consider this somewhat contradictory line of reasoning.  This is all messy, but I come down squarely on this side of the argument.”

This is the typical subtext of Dave Egger’s novel, The Circle.  It’s the story of a young woman hired for an entry-level position by a powerful Facebook/Google-like company of the near future.  She quickly rises through the ranks to a position of great visibility, and we as readers witness her gradual conversion to the dark side, to the place where privacy is evil, secrets are lies, transparency is paramount, and human values are essentially lost.  The ending is very dark, indeed.

It’s a long parable.  Parables should last a few pages and be done.  This one goes on for five hundred pages.  Eggers makes his arguments; the points are well taken.  In the end, the debate judges predictably side with the author.

But when I read fiction I’m looking for much more than argument.  I’m hoping for richness of language, depth of character, complex situations where morality is severely strained by the understandable immediacy of human need.  I’m seeking contradictions that both delight and baffle; I’m looking for imagery that glimmers and characters that frustrate.  None of this comes here.  It’s really not a novel at all. It’s an argument thinly disguised as third-person narration of one character’s Google-glass-like take on her experience.  It comes across as adolescent, and is severely

constrained by Egger’s evidently urgent need to make point after point.

I have great respect for Eggers.  I’d love to read the fifty-page non-fiction piece that makes his well-considered argument.  It might well be both interesting and compelling. But the propagandistic novel that he actually wrote requires paragraph-by-paragraph translation from fiction to argument.  Just write the argument, dude.

 That being said I am haunted by Egger’s take on this topic as I go about my daily digital life.  Just catching up on my Twitter feed now has a sinister resonance that it didn’t have before.  OK, I get it.  But I didn’t sign up for reading a long young-adultish quasi sci-fi novel that nags at me like a Jewish grandmother.

It is easy to read, and take into account that I am old[ish].  But go forth with caution. Even dystopian fiction should do more than ask us to track the argument on a scorecard.  We also need to wonder, cry, laugh, and maybe shiver. I'm more interested in the questions than the answers.

Croton-On-Hudson

T.C. Boyle and I share a few things:  we both attended SUNY Potsdam, and we both lived for some time in northwest Westchester County, NY in the area around Croton-On-Hudson. I lived there from 1982 until 2010.  As I write this I look up at my wall to the right where I’ve hung a satellite image of the very that very section of the Hudson. Boyle grew up there.  His 1987 novel World’s End takes place there in modern times and in earlier historical periods, including the Dutch/English colonial periods and the post-WWII era.  Because Boyle is true to geography (though a few place names are inexplicably slight altered), I often know exactly the place he refers to.  I have a feeling for the land there, for the river (I’ve spent a decent amount of time on boats and kayaks in that part of the Hudson), for the forest and the rock, for the weather. 

The novel is an historical tour de force, jumping back and forth in time, making obvious (sometimes all too obvious) connections among eras and characters.  Most of it is believable though some stretched my credulity beyond the breaking point.  But no matter, that’s not really the point.  The area is a product of its past, and I know enough of the area’s present to see and appreciate the historical roots that Boyle so painstakingly illustrates.

 

Looking south on the Hudson towards World's End

I’m not sure how I could have lived there for so long and remained ignorant of the area’s post-war past. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing of the Peekskill riots of 1949.  I’m proud that the place had socialist elements, but not so proud of the violent backlash.  And the telling details of the hardships of colonial life are striking indeed.  The Native American thread is also fascinating.  Boyle is rarely noted for his subtlety after all, and he is a little heavy handed in his bold implied assertion that nothing much changes, the same strands continue to interweave over and over, pretty much without resolution or reconciliation.  Despite all the technical and economic progress over the centuries, people are just about the same: capable of empathy and good behavior but more often than not repeatedly falling short and letting each other down.

The language is a little exaggerated, but not as much as in some of his other novels. The plot is contrived.  Some of the themes (eating disorders, racism, rampant out-of-control capitalism) get tiresome.  It’s a long book and I did lose interest here and there.  If you like Stegner on California history, you should give this a try. Different place and a different literary approach, but there are some similarities. I’m not sure how it would come across to someone unfamiliar with the area.  It might seem like science fiction instead of the ultimate historical realism that Boyle was (I’m pretty sure) trying for.  That’s the price to be paid for exaggeration and caricature.  Never stopped Dickens.

From The X-Book Files

No, it’s not x-rated; it’s experimental.  S, by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst is a book within a book.  It exists only in old-fashioned hard copy for good reason.  The physical object is carefully crafted to look like a well-used library book with many handwritten margin notations.  The library book is ostensibly Ship of Theseus by V.M. Straka.  Straka (a fictional author of fiction) is a mysterious 20^th-century author whose very identity is in dispute by literary scholars (at least by the scholars in this book).  Nobody really knows who he was, but we do know he was tied to decades of political and literary turmoil, and that he was tied in some ways to a group of such figures known loosely as “S”.

The margin notes are written by two young adults, one a college senior, another an ex-graduate student.  They discover each other by accident through the physical object of the book.  Indeed they don’t even meet for some time, but they do leave the book in secret places for the other to pick up after adding more notes in the margin.  The notes are handwritten, and by taking into account the handwriting and the color of the writing, the reader can piece together the chronology of the notes.  A real conversation ensues in these notes, a conversation that turns into a loving relationship. In addition various freestanding documents are inserted in the text for our pleasure and illumination: postcards, handwritten letters, archival documents, newspaper clippings, etc.

So there are multiple simultaneous levels here:  the original Straka text, the accompanying documents, the mystery of the historical figure Straka, the longstanding scholarly debate over his identity (some of this in footnotes), and several layers of conversation between the two present-day young adults.  Ideally one would read the book several times:  first just the Straka text, then the footnotes, then one time through for each layer of handwritten annotation.  But it’s not a short book, and just getting through it once is an effort.  It takes a while to find a reading rhythm for this odd arrangement, so I couldn’t imagine going back through it all multiple times. In a way it was fun to read and juggle the layers all at the same time page by page.

Conspiracy theories abound; intrigue and danger (some imagined, some perhaps real) lurk around every corner. The atmosphere is intense. Complexity abounds in the form of multiple historical characters, multiple theories about what the author might have intended, and hidden codes in the text that the young adults gradually crack.  The Straka text provides lots of vague passages that the young adult annotate to express their feelings about themselves, their past, and each other. The connections between fictional text, historical past, and actual present events are very cleverly drawn.

But what’s missing is the richness of human experience and emotion.  We don’t really care much about the codes because they don’t unlock anything that matters to us.  Yes, pieces of the puzzle are revealed, but the larger puzzle seems to be made up almost entirely of mood and atmospherics.  We don’t much care which way the history turns out.  We do care a little about the present-day characters, but there is no direct narration about or from them.  It’s all indirect, like a hall of mirrors.  If the mirrors don’t reflect anything we care about, then the mirrors become an effective but shallow trick that fails to keep our attention.  The book has two authors.  That should be enough to tell us that this will not be a book with deeply personal insight.

Very clever and well worth a read, but don’t expect a fulfilling experience. I smiled many times. I was delighted by the clever interplay, but in the end I wanted more depth.  But experiments are experimental. They’re meant to give us new knowledge about how things might work. They don’t have to answer all the questions at once.  This is a hint at an interesting new approach to fiction.  Will it bear fruit?  Not for me to predict. For now I’ll say that cleverness isn’t enough here.  But maybe there’s a path forward from here.