Extrapolation

The Tenth of December made such a splash (and was IMHO so good) I'm continuing to catch up with Saunders's earlier work.  In Persuasion Nation (2006) is another collection of stories.  While not as varied, far ranging, and ambitious as The Tenth of December, these stories nonetheless are inventive and provocative.  Saunders excels at creating a particular slant, a certain view that is key to each story.  He requires a bit of trust and patience from his readers. At first you may not know where you are, what is real, what is not. But through skillful and creative use of language Sauders manages to paint a singular picture in each story.  It's a picture you view at first from only an inch away. Gradually you pull back and get the full image and the larger significance.

Saunders is particularly good at positing new future realities based on extrapolation of troubling trends observed in our present. In other words, if we take these disturbing present-day tendencies and follow them into the future, we might get this peculiar picture. He presents the image with verbal nuances and tricks, and part of the fun is gradually figuring out in each story what we're actually reading: working back from the strangeness of what we read and finding today's familiar reality embedded in the narrative.

It's a formula that can get tiresome, but there is plenty of inventiveness, humor, pathos, and just plain good writing here. My Amendment is a brilliant satire of conservative view on gender.  In Persuasion Nation is a terrific send up of ubiquitous marketing images. Brad Corrigan, American is a telling exaggeration of current trends in reality television and pop culture.

For someone so solidly entrenched in academic and highfalutin' literary circles Saunders is surprisingly in touch with popular culture. His eyes are open, and he's not spending all of his time in the ivory tower.  He's out among us observing, indeed perhaps taking notes as a secret agent that reports back the latest to headquarters. I hope HQ is listening.

Father Knows Best

Mention the name Amis to a reader today, and everyone assumes you're referring to Martin.  But let's not forget Kingsley Amis, Martin's father.  OK please,  we're not exactly talking Chaucer here. Kingsley was born in 1922 and died in 1995.  He wrote his fiction from the 50's to the early 90's.

Lucky Jim was his first novel, and it remains my all-time favorite novel about academia.  It's simply hilarious but also dead serious.  If you don't know it, just get it and read it. If you've ever lived in academia, you'll laugh out loud.

The Russian Girl is one of his last novels (from the early 90's).  I vaguely remember reading it when it came out, but it didn't make much of an impression.  When I saw a paperback version in a used bookstore a few years ago, I couldn't resist picking it up.  Not sure why it took me this long to get to it, but I'm so glad I did.

First of all, Kingsley Amis has to be the master of the British comic novel of the second half of the twentieth century.  It's P. G. Wodehouse combined with Fawlty Towers. Yes, it's so so British and all that, very proper and buttoned down.  The contrived style can be a bit off-putting at times, but do try to go with it. Think Maggie Smith at her best. But there's real heart, genuine modesty, and strong opinions to be reckoned with.  And then there's the writing itself, which will delight you unexpectedly.

OK it's old-fashioned, it's a bit sexist.  Yes, he was an alcoholic with all the issues that come along with that particular shortcoming.  But there is also genuine craft here, a writer that took care with words, with structure, and with ideas. In The Russian Girl, Amis manages to express some very serious thoughts on how various worlds can collide in an individual life.  There's our everyday outer life (the face we show to society), there's literature (and art in general), there's politics, there's academia, there's our inner emotional life, there's sexuality.  All of these overlap in countless ways, and those overlaps while sometimes fruitful, often simply contaminate one another. How do we sort it all out?

Art is art; life is life.  We do our best with personal morality.  Why confuse morality with politics and literature?  We vote, we have political affiliations, as citizens we must make expedient political decisions.  Why mix that up with art or personal morality?  Sorting all that out is the real subject of this book, and Kingsley's advice is well taken.  Do the best you can at the moment.  Don't make connections between worlds that are not there in the actual real-life context.  Artificial and contrived connections are dangerous and may lead to serious error.  And real contradictions and conflicts are inevitable, and we must be prepared to deal with them, no matter how confusing.

Funny, but that's not the whole story.

Most of all, Kingsley shows tremendous faith in our ability to get it right in the long run, or at least be more correct as we stumble down the road of life.  Yes, the book has some plot contrivances. Yes, it all doesn't quite play out believably, but then again what's so realistic about Solzhenitsyn's fiction?  Yes, there are deux ex machina moments, characters that are introduced simply to express an idea, and then they disappear.  I get it.  In the end I was happy to know Amis's thoughts, and I was reassured with his assessment that though in the small scale we often get it so so wrong, we are always capable of growth and insight.  No matter what bad choices we've made in the past, we can continue to learn.  If we're willing to pay the price (without resentment) for those bad choices, we can begin again ... and again ... and again as needed.  Maybe it's the alcoholic needing forgiveness or trying hard to reconcile his capabilities with his failings.

Is it all about redemption?  Perhaps. I haven't read much of Martin Amis, but what I have read (and I get the tremendous intelligence, the literary skill) makes me despair that redemption is just another illusion.  For now I prefer Kingsley's outlook, and I will dream on. It might be painful to truly look at ourselves, but in the long run it's the only way to find a better path. Pain itself cannot be the only end.

I prefer to think of life as a comedy. Full of errors, pain and pathos, but nonetheless a comedy.

Once Upon A Time

Murakami has given us a little bonus, a little something extra for his American fans.  It's actually a new American edition of a 2008 Japanese novella, and it’s handsomely and cleverly designed with many colorful and striking illustrations.  Kudos to the designer, Chip Kidd.  The Strange Library is a modern fairy tale.  It contains none of the modern cultural references that Murakami is so fond of in his novels.  It’s quite abstract, timeless, yet narrowly focused.  The symbols are striking and thought provoking.  It’s about growing up (as so many fairy tales are) and the changes and sadness that come with leaving childhood behind.

The typical protagonist in a Murakami novel is a young adult male, alone, rather withdrawn and prone to contemplation and stillness.  This tale might be seen as a prequel of sorts, an account of how a more-or-less normal child might grow into that particular adult state.

It’s certainly not my favorite Murakami, but it’s worth a read. It will take you less than an hour.  You could almost read it aloud to a child, albeit not a very young child. At least it’s worth thinking about in that way, as if we were reading it to the child in ourselves.  Don’t look for the obvious.  Just let the mood and the crazy symbols resonate in your mind.

I’ll bet you’ll want to read it again.  Just like the child that wants to hear that same book over and over.

Reader Beware

Teju Cole’s Every Day Is For The Thief

It’s a short book. It’s clearly in part autobiographical.  Yet it’s presented as fiction.

It describes present-day Nigeria, but it’s really about various uses of language, some to express, others simply to deceive.  Indeed expression may be at least in part always deceptive. Like memoir presented as fiction.  What is true and what is not? Can there be such a thing as truth?

Cole represents Nigeria as a country riddled with corruption and deception. From internet scams to street crime enabled by verbal intimidation to false history to willful misrepresentation and honest attempts at communication that inevitably fall short.  It’s all language, and language is inherently manipulative. There are some hopeful signs in Nigeria.  They are mostly in the arts (yes, the magical and deceptive arts), and they have their own limitations.

And then there are the author’s black-and-white photos interspersed here and there in the text. What place can photos have in a work of fiction?  The author’s photos?  They further obscure the line between documentation and fiction. They are blurred and unclear, subject to the interpretation of the viewer but also suggestive representations of portions of the text.  But they’re photographs (not drawings or paintings).

A representation of Teju Cole

Cole seems intent at exploring a gray zone where all must be questioned, and where there are no absolute answers.  He brings much of the ambiguity and resonance of poetry to his prose.  The writing is clear and plain, and that also is part of the deception.  Like the acquaintance that says “I’m just tellin’ you how it is, man”, it’s hard not to trust him.  But part of his point is that nothing can be believed, nothing can be taken at face value, we all seek to deceive one another, we all willfully misrepresent.  What makes the scam work is the false modesty, the appearance of trustworthiness, the veneer of truthfulness. And the resulting isolation.

Ultimately the main character can only rely on himself, his own values (even if conflicted and very privately held), his own preferences.  I guess Freud would quibble with even that, but that’s all Cole has. It’s lonely and disheartening to think that any human communication or connection is in part deceptive. Are we all just authors doing our best to create in a world where publication must always include misrepresentation and skepticism? Perhaps.

Should that be the case, I take solace in deception: the deception of honest communication, in the false comfort of empathy, and in generous caring for others.  Works for me.  Don't really care all that much if it's true.  It’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it. 

But it is a story.

February 12, 1809

That Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin share the same birthdate at first seems a marvelous coincidence that must carry a deep meaning.  On the other hand, we’ve all been amazed by how often the birthday coincidence occurs, and I at least am still surprised that it only takes 23 people in the room to have 50-50 odds that two will have the same birthday (day, not year).  Nonetheless the Lincoln-Darwin alignment prompted Adam Gopnik to write a short book, Angels and Ages, about the two men, their lives, families, work, writing, and contributions.  There are uncanny parallels and of course real differences.  Gopnik also speculates on the role that each played in pushing Western society into a new political and scientific age.

The title comes from the historical controversy about exactly what Stanton said at Lincoln’s deathbed.  Did he say “He belongs to the ages now” or “He belongs to the angels now”?  Reports differ, and it’s interesting to think about the differing implications of each.  Ultimately Gopnik (like others) can’t really decide, but he does provide an interesting discussions and a conclusion of sorts.  Gopnik visited the death room as a tourist, and writes about the experience.  I can best do him justice by quoting him directly:

“The sentence forms in the mind, and with it the thought that there would be a good place to end: he belongs to both. But as the queue inches forward and I can see, at last, into the room that I have been reading about – I want to laugh.  This place isn’t small; it’s tiny. They brought him here, to this back room, I had learned, because all the other rooms in the house were to messy for a president to die in, and yet – four people would make it crowded; six would overwhelm it; the forty or so who passed in and out, and the ten or twenty who crowded inside at the end, would have turned it into the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.

In the brief moment given to a visitor to look inside, I wished for a machine that would be able to re-create every breath of air, every vibration that ever took place in a room.  And then I knew that we probably would not have understood any better had we been standing there then than we do now.  Stanton was weeping, Lincoln had just died, the room was overwhelmed, whatever he said was broken by a sob – the sob, in a sense, is the story.  History is not an agreed-on fiction but what gets made in a crowded room; what is said isn’t what’s heard, and what is heard isn’t what gets repeated.  Civilization is an agreement to keep people from Shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, but the moments we call historic occur when there is a fire in a crowded theater, and then we all try to remember afterward when we heard it, and if we ever really smelled smoke, and who went first, and what was said. The indeterminancy is built into the emotion of the moment.  The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.  If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said.  All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.”

Of course the book’s title also refers to the tremendous religious and cultural controversy stirred by Darwin’s theory. Darwin was reluctant to publish.  His wife was very religious,  His family was dear to him.  He in no way welcomed the storms that would necessarily follow.  Yet he stayed firmly rooted in his scientific methods of observation, and his writing can indeed tire us with countless details before even hinting at the radical conclusions to come.  Nonetheless, when they come the arrive with the force of the inevitable denouement of a great novel.  In retrospect we see that it could be no other way.

And on the question of geological time (a concept very much at odds with theology and in some ways plain common sense) Gopnik writes about Darwin:

“For that, far more than God and man, is what Darwin is really always returning to: live and time, life and time, and their complements, death and sex, and how they make the history of life.  In Darwin’s work, from The Beagle to the earthworm, time moves at two speeds; there is the vast abyss of time in which generations change and animals mutate and evolve, and then there is the gnat’s-breath, hummingbird-heart time of creaturely existence, where our children are born and grow and, sometimes, die before us. The space between the tiny but heartfelt time of human life and the limitless time of Nature became Darwin’s implicit subject, running from The Beagle to The Origin. Religion had always reconciled quick time and deep time by pretending that the one was in some way a prelude to the other -- a prelude or a prologue or a trial or a treatment. Artists of the Romantic period, in an increasingly secularized age, thought that through some vague kind of transcendence they could bridge the gap. They couldn’t. Nothing could. The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much.  There isn’t a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows.  The human challenge that Darwin felt, and that his work still presents, is to see both times truly – not to attempt to humanize deep time, or to dismiss quick time, but to make enough of both without overlooking either.”

Gopnik also writes extensively about the way Lincoln and Darwin used language, and how in each case that was integral to the personality, mission, and success of each.  Gopnik is a skilled writer.  I’ve read him for many years in The New Yorker. I’m glad to hear his thoughts on language and writing, and I’m glad to read something by him that is longer than (even a longish) New Yorker piece.  He is a very talented writer, a skilled journalist, and a thinker as well.  Good company for a reader.  Very good.

Soll's Ja So Sein

It’s the first line of the fourth verse of an early 17^th-century Lutheran chorale. The most famous setting is by Bach in cantata BWV 48, and it’s one of the most profound Bach chorale settings.  The theology underlying the verse is horrific (hence the unusual setting), so let’s just say that the line itself translates roughly as “If it must be so …”.  (The full translation takes us directly into Lutheran fire and brimstone.)  I hate fire and brimstone, and this chorale downright frightens me.

If it must be so ...... If we accept Richard Flanagan's premise in his Booker-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North .... then we really have no control.  Larger forces are always in play, and those forces make our own efforts futile.  We struggle, we try, we love, we fail.  It's all in service of larger forces that we cannot and probably should not try to fathom. The book is a wonderful and painfully poignant representation of that fatalistic point of view, though I strongly doubt that Flanagan actual espouses it.

Cruelty, love, violence, sensuality ... it's all the same, all a manifestation of unknowable controlling forces combined with biological inevitability.  We simply play out the hand we're dealt.

I very much admire this book.  I very much dislike the outlook that this book represents.  If this really is life, then 'check, please'. But the representation is fascinating and captivating. I live in Silicon Valley in 2014, where failure is simply a rest area on the way to success, where cash is sloshing around looking for a home, where real estate valuations are more insane by the day, where programmers have agents, where life is good for many.  The novel portrays the plight of allied POW's in Burma forced under terrible duress to build the Burma Railway of Death. Thousands of lives lost under brutal conditions. But that plot line is just the most radical manifestation of people caught up in larger forces beyond their control.  Love, war, family, illness, accident, fire ... they all are beyond our control, yet seemingly part of a larger pattern that we can only imagine exists ... that we actually must imagine exists.  We must simply assume that it exists and go on.

Flanagan skillfully weaves in traditional Japanese haiku as well as 19th-century British poetry. In his hands both seem to resonate on similar wavelengths despite the cultural disparity. Yes, the plot is a little contrived here and there.  The writing is superb. This subject matter is full of pitfalls, and Flanagan navigates the waters with aplomb.  There are some thrilling moments, some lyrical moments, and very few thuds indeed.

I'll quote the rest of the chorale here, though the philosophical point of reference is quite different. Nonetheless, every time I think of this text I shudder.  And my most important reaction to the book is to shudder in a similar way.

Solls ja so sein, Daß Straf und Pein Auf Sünde folgen müssen, So fahr hie fort Und schone dort Und laß mich hie wohl büßen.

If it must be so, that punishment and pain must follow after sin, so go on (punishing) here and be merciful there (in the next life) and let me well suffer here.

Awful thoughts, inhibiting and oppressive thoughts.  Downright scary thoughts.  A scary book.  I so hope it isn't true. But I must consider the possibility.

This Is Personal

Marilynne Robinson is receiving accolades and awards by the bucketful these days.  I’m not sure why I hadn’t read her until now.  Some would say that Home was not the best choice for a first read, but it’s what happened to be on my bookshelf.  It’s a lovely book with gracious writing.  The content makes me angry, and that’s clearly my problem.

Home is the second of the Gilead trilogy.  It takes place in rural Iowa around 1960, though at times it seem more like 1860.  There’s an ageing patriarch (retired Protestant minister), a wayward though kind daughter who has come home to care for him, and a prodigal son whose return is the main event of the novel.  Yes, the language is lovely.  Yes, writerly skill is on full display here. 

“Your Honor, I object!”

What does it mean to apply a high degree of literary polish to a septic (my take) human environment? The father is, while clothed in the clerical robes of immunity, passive aggressive, controlling, inaccessible to those who care for him, and incapable of honest emotional communication.  Everything is expressed indirectly.  Censure comes out as praise; silence is the ultimate punishment.  Religion becomes an excuse for lack of honesty and openness. Scripture is the perfect way to comment: it judges from afar, and it is invulnerable to criticism or refutation.  It’s the perfect refuge for those who have shied away from life, chosen a sheltered and safe (though perhaps limited and sad) path, and wish to denigrate those who have taken greater risks in hope of greater reward. That stance is IMHO cowardly and self-serving, and I will have none of it.

Some choose a riskier path.  Some have to deal with more difficult individual impulses.  For some, the safe haven of conventional theology just doesn’t work.  And when some of those risk takers run into trouble, how are they treated by the faithful?  Not with compassion.  Not with genuine empathy.  Instead they encounter a condescending mercy whose primary intention is to protect the forgiver.  Those who cloak themselves in religion have to keep reapplying that coat of immunity whenever they encounter those who stray and sin.  Because the coat keeps wearing off no matter how they smile, no matter how much scripture they quote, no matter how conventionally charitable their actions.  They refuse to acknowledge their own double-edged emotions, their own destructive and selfish impulses, their own humanity, the sadness that is the result of their own decision to shy away from challenge and genuine emotion.  They hide their sadness and their flaws, they go underground, they act in secret, they whisper and titter.

Yes, the growth of trust between the brother and sister is marvelous to observe.  Yes, the historical resonances from the time ring true.  Yes, even the neighbors deserve our empathy. But the suffering imposed on those who choose an alternate path is inexcusable, and witnessing it as a reader makes me angry. Very angry.

I’m told that Housekeeping is a safer bet.  It’s on my list for the future.  For now I need to step aside from this skillful and gracious portrayal of hypocrisy and resultant suffering.  It hurts too much.

Sorry.