The Power to Please

I recall watching Robin Williams interviewed at the desk on The Tonight Show years ago when Johnny Carson was still hosting.  Williams was absolutely brilliant.  Carson skillfully played the straight man, and Williams changed accents, characters, pace, gesture styles every few seconds.  It was amazing to watch but at the same time it deeply saddened me.  Williams couldn’t NOT do it; because he could please, he couldn’t stop.  He couldn’t just be himself, and to me he seemed manic, desperate and lost.

Of course I have no idea if Williams’s abilities had anything to do with his battle with depression and his eventual suicide.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if his power to please made it more difficult for him to stay in touch with his inner self. 

Celeste Ng’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You tells the story of a teenage girl with the power to please her family (her mother in particular), and also to serve as the glue that held together her fragile immediate family.  In so doing she sacrificed her own pleasures and goals, her own well-being, and ultimately her life.  The story touches on a number of modern themes, including cross-cultural issues and parenting styles.  The approach is very traditional, a straightforward story told in a straightforward way.  We learn about the main character from several points of view.  In the end we piece it all together. The writing is serviceable if not remarkable.  The plot unfolds predictably.  Like The Lovely Bones, we know from the beginning that the girl is dead. The book is about how and why that comes about.

I did learn a few things about my own past.  I too had the power to please my parents, and most often I couldn’t resist it, even when I should have.  I can blame my parents, who to a large extent tried to live through my successes, but I also used their tendencies to avoid my own difficulties, and in the long run those pressures and consequent confusion and pain were my own doing, not theirs.  I don’t think I particularly longed for the applause, but they wanted it for me, and I wanted them to be happy.  If I could provide that, I did, even when I knew (or at least sensed) that there were better paths for me as an individual.

It’s hard enough for an adult to skillfully draw the boundaries between self and others, to navigate the waters in a way that provides both self-fulfillment and strong connections with others.  Children need good models in that way; they need to see the important adults around them make good choices for themselves and lead their lives with appropriate focus and grace.  When parents don’t provide good models, children often make bad choices, or at least choices that may work short-term, but in the long run lead to serious problems.

Ng’s book is an easy read, and I think worth the time if these issues interest you.  If not, move on.

Doris Lessing

I have a vague memory of hearing about a talk that Stravinsky once gave in which he drew some sketches on the blackboard.  This, he said, represents Wagner’s music.

This represents Schoenberg’s music.

Those are my hand drawn recollections of the sketches, but I trust you get the point.  Wagner had lots of irrational expressionist impulses brewing inside, but he framed them in a strictly tonal structure.  Schoenberg simply removed the frame.

Never read a single work by Doris Lessing.  My bad.  Not sure that Briefing for a Descent Into Hell was the right choice for my initiation.  It is maybe the strangest most complex book I’ve ever read.  It is very much like the Schoenberg sketch by Stravinsky:  stream of consciousness and lots of expressive language with no clear or helpful overarching framework.  It’s up to the reader to figure it all out … or not.  It’s a short book, but not easy to get through.  There were numerous places on the way where I almost gave up.  But it does reward the reader that hangs in.  There is meaning even without the framework.  It’s up to the reader to provide the framework.

Unlike, say, David Mitchell’s literary pyrotechnics, where the foreground might be messy but the overall structure is strict (and where the overall structure actually informs the local narrative), here there is no overall structure.  We float.  We have no idea where we are and what it might mean.  We have no clue where it’s going and what the images might signify.  The reader has to place himself in the same uncomfortable uncertainty (and perhaps insanity) that the narrator is experiencing.  We don’t know where we are, what’s real, what’s not. It's a kind of inner science fiction.

What results is an extraordinary view from a higher level, from an almost god-like point of view that is both enlightening and frightening.  To understand at that level is almost more than a mortal can bear, more than we can handle and at the same time cope with day-to-day life.  Hence the insanity. 

But I take comfort in Lessing’s strong assertion that there is something larger, some bigger purpose, some higher level of existence which really is out there.  In our daily lives we struggle to sense it, but every so often we get a signal that it’s out there.  The book is a kind of mythology about those signals.  If you’re often disappointed by your day-to-day life, take solace.  Read Lessing.

Thoroughly Unmodern

This isn't just a throwback.  This is what you get when you bring out the way-back machine.  My former colleague Jeannette Haien's second (and last) novel, Matters of Chance, is old-fashioned in many ways.  The prose is the product of a highly educated and intelligent mind, but dated indeed. Quotations from classic literature abound, and the stilted language hangs out there just waiting to be speared.  I wonder if it took a conscious effort from Jeannette to avoid all temptations and references to modernism ... and by modernism I mean anything on the forefront of English literature in the 20th century.  I got used to the style, and ended up not bothered by it, but the prose is very unusual indeed for a book written in the 1990's.

More to the point though are the characters and the story itself. This book is the very embodiment of that 1930's to 1950's approach to life:  Buck it up.  It won't help you to express those feelings, it will only lead you into a self-indulgent black hole, so be strong, be tough, and do what you have to do.  It's a view that I grew up with and know first hand, and it certainly didn't work for me.  But I'm willing to believe that it was appropriate for a large proportion of a few generations that experienced the Depression and WWII.  It got done what had to be done; it got them through. Is it an ideal approach to life?  Well, I guess there really isn't an ideal universal approach separate and apart from a specific cultural and temporal context.

I don't think this book is nearly as successful as Jeannette's first book.  The war scenes are telling, but the second half of the book drags on and on with superficial plot, a surfacy account of lives well led. I wish we had the opportunity to know these characters better, but that's pretty much the point.  They didn't know themselves better, and they didn't want to.  Repression is very useful at times.  But I'm not sure it makes for great fiction.

From a recent New Yorker

Oh, well.  I have great respect for Jeannette.  She was a great musician and teacher.  Her presence would fill a room (yes, often to the uncomfortable exclusion of all others).  There was only one Jeannette.  I witnessed the strength of her convictions on many occasions, and she was a formidable presence.  I urge anyone with an interest to watch her interview with Bill Moyers (you can find it easily).  It does provide a glimpse into her power, her insight, and her moral authority.

Rest in peace.

Abradacabra

It’s an illusion. When it works we temporarily believe with all our heart and soul, even though we know it's an illusion.  It happens to me when listening to a great piece of music.  The real world falls away; the music creates an alternate reality which my brain accepts as a complete, self-contained, and satisfying space.  All that I need and want is there; if I just surrender, truly believe, I will be enriched.

 

The creator (composer, author, actor, whatever) needs great technical skill to bring this off.  He must be on intimate terms with his medium; he must know every nook and cranny, every nuance and subtlety.  And he must use consummate skill in stitching together his work so that no seam shows, no evidence of his craft is left visible. We just believe.  And he also must have an underlying message, something important that gets communicated without ever being explicitly stated.

The wizardry displayed in David Mitchell’s prose continues to impress me.  Cloud Atlas is downright virtuosic.  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is more constrained, but nonetheless impressive.  So in working my way back through Mitchell’s fiction the next step was Black Swan Green.  It’s a straightforward first-person narrative of one year in the life of a young British teen.  No sci-fi here, no narrative jumbles, nothing but a traditional narrative.

Yes, it’s an eventful year for Jason, the main character, but the primary strength of the book is not plot but rather the prose itself.  There’s dialect and dialogue, there’s a good bit of superficial detail, there are lots of words, but none of it seems the least bit contrived.  The main character is totally believable and lovable (I wonder how much is autobiographical.).  It’s a credible and realistic depiction of what that awkward age actually feels like. And there are lessons to be learned here.

Maybe I’m just a naïve reader.  Like the person watching the magician, I probably allow my attention to be diverted easily so I don’t notice what’s ‘really’ happening.  But I don’t actually want to know how he does the trick.  I like being entranced.  I want to believe in magic.

Freedom? At Last?

The fifth and final Patrick Melrose novel by Edward St. Aubyn, At Last, is a fitting conclusion to this important literary series.  The book focuses on the funeral of Patrick’s mother and includes many flashbacks to earlier periods.  This may be the one novel in the series that might not stand so well on its own.  There are many references to characters and incidents from the previous books, and I wouldn’t pick up this one without having read at least some of the others first.

Patrick has suffered terribly over the years from both the overt and passive cruelty of his two parents.  Now that his mother is dead (his father passed away some time ago) he can circle back yet again and try to put it all in perspective.  The pain has been punishing, as have the self-limiting and sometimes self-destructive habits learned to avoid feeling the full brunt of the blows. At times Patrick’s intelligence is his own worst enemy as he willfully contorts reality in his efforts to survive emotionally, to support his children, to satisfy his own needs.

As always the writing is condensed, striking, and often just plain stellar.  St. Aubyn is a great prose stylist.  Even if the emotional drama isn’t your cup of tea, the words are to be savored.  These are really, really good books.  They will last. Serious readers need to read them.

Has Patrick found some measure of safety?  I dearly hope so. His parents are gone. Free?  At last?  If this is freedom . . .

Wishing peace for Patrick.

I'll Take the Apple Pie, Thanks

Mother's Milk is the fourth of Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels.  The book may be somewhat uneven, but nonetheless it is St. Aubyn in his most cynical and writerly mode, and as such it is not to be missed.  I won't go into the particulars.  I've blogged about the previous three books, and this one is no different.  The writing is a joy, the outlook anything but joyful.  I suspect this is not for most female readers, but I would happily be corrected on that score. In this book we witness scathing prose on a young child's view of the world, motherhood, long-term marriage, alcoholism, sexual desire, philanthropy, assisted suicide, and American culture in general. 

Edward St. Aubyn

It's a short book that won't hold you up for long, but there are so so many gems to be examined and reexamined along the way. As you please ... go straight through or dally along the jaded way.

If you haven't read the Patrick Melrose books, you're missing something important. They may not be your cup of tea in some ways, but no serious reader should be without that particular tasting experience.

Still Life

In my 1968 high-school biology class, we were shown a human fetus floating in formaldehyde inside a glass jar.  On the outside of the glass was a label that named the fetus “Al Most”. It sat on a shelf for any of us to contemplate at any time.

A little gross, a lot tasteless.  And given the today’s contentious political climate I’m not sure that the presentation would pass muster in most public schools.  But it was striking to view something potentially human that never quite got there, but instead was caught in a kind of permanent suspended animation (or de-animation). I couldn’t help but wonder what “Al” might have become.

Something similar occurred to me when reading Yiyun Li’s KinderThan Solitude, a new novel by a talented writer born in China, living in America. Much has been made of the book in terms of the immigrant experience, but for me it there were other more striking elements.  Three main characters are all transformed and suspended by the unsolved poisoning of a Chinese compatriot.  The political and cultural chaos in China at the time also muddy the waters. Two of those characters immigrate to the US, the other stays in China.  The two that leave China live tightly self-circumscribed lives, limited and safe, and at least in part defined by Eastern cultural norms.  Paradoxically the one how remains in China leads a more outwardly Western and outwardly active life, but he too is caught in a kind of suspended animation until current events open a door forward.

This is not a long book, but it is not to be taken lightly.  The voice is serious and the language is compact.  I often had to reread paragraphs that I knew I didn’t get on the first go round.  But the rewards are significant.  In a larger sense I did learn something about Eastern values and a particularly not American approach to life, and that was very rewarding.  This is cross-cultural fiction at a very high level.

Three lives suspended, in a way wasted, or at least in no way living out their full potential.  There is no obvious scapegoat.  But I did appreciate the tremendous loss of what could have been. 

What might “Al” have become?