Olive, Wherefore Art Thou?

I just loved Olive Kitteridge, and was very happy when it won the Pulitzer a few years back.  The character of Olive is unforgettable.  She’s likable, annoying, funny, boring, even detestable at times, but you won’t forget her.  The setting of rural Maine shown to be just as interesting and idiosyncratic as Olive, and Strout’s talents as a writer are clear in her handling of dialogue and in the careful interweaving of the independent but interwoven stories that comprise the novel. Unfortunately we get only pale reflections of those strengths in Elizabeth Strout’s latest, The Burgess Boys.

Elizabeth Strout

It’s a very straightforward story, one in essence we’ve encountered many times.  The main characters are adults, but they’re all strongly influenced by a violent family incident from childhood, one they remember in a certain way but actually happened very differently.  The deception and false memories take their toll.  The strong successful and dishonest sibling ultimately falls apart and the weaker less successful siblings are allowed to rethink the past and gradually shed some of their guilt.  I’m reminded of Ursula Hegi’s Salt Dancers, in which a childhood incident is misremembered and shaped by the forces of personality and subsequent events.  The book takes us on that path of rediscovery and relearning the past, and I was quite moved by Hegi’s account. Also makes me think of Eliot's Adam Bede. Now there's a book where emotional truth and honesty ultimately wins out, but also exacts a steep price.

For me, The Burgess Boys falls quite short of the mark.  There is no main character with which to empathize, nor are any of the characters particularly compelling.  There is almost no humor, and though half of the book takes place in rural Maine and half in New York City, not much is made of the contrast. And the writing is just fine, I guess, but nothing to write home about.  Olive Kitteridge encouraged me to expect something more ambitious in a literary sense, something a little off the beaten path but rewarding in a truly interesting way. Didn’t happen for me, but I’ll hang in there for Strout. Olive was just that good.

Grim(m) for Grownups

Ben Marcus’s TheFlaming Alphabet was recommended by none other than George Saunders in an NPR interview.  Never read anything by Marcus, so why not give it a try?

 Well, it probably ranks among the top ten strangest books I’ve ever read.  This is a serious book by a serious writer, don’t get me wrong.  But such an unusual blend of genres: science fiction, apocalyptic vision, Jewish mysticism, traditional thriller.  The basic premise is that language itself (the element that elevated humans to a unique position of dominance in the animal kingdom) becomes toxic to human adults.  There’s just too much of it everywhere, and especially the speech of children causes adults to become severely ill, and in many cases to die.  The children themselves are mostly unharmed, but they will mature, and when they do they will be subject to the same curse.  Eventually all language (written, spoken, even thought) becomes deadly. Survival means giving it all up and ‘living’ in an uninviting, unrewarding, and utterly empty space. Or maybe that’s where we are now and we don’t know it?

Ben Marcus

What a strange idea: a novel (language in a particularly potent and seductive form) in which language itself becomes toxic. Ironies abound.  While in the early sections there is a slightly humorous approach to the dynamic of two parents living with a teenager (we’ve all been there and can relate), when that dynamic is exaggerated to the extreme things get ugly pretty quickly.  The remainder of the book is dark and gory.  Things go from bad to worse to awful damned fast, and there really is no way out.  Many places feel like holocaust literature.  It’s not a pleasant read.

Marcus indulges himself in many places, allowing himself to splurge in linguistic feasts that ultimately exhaust and defeat the reader.  For him there really is no way out.  Those miniature verbal orgies are upsetting but also very telling.  It’s a truly virtuosic performance, but a poignant portrayal of utter degradation and loss is not fun to read.  It was tough for me to get through, though I’m glad I did.

Think of it as a cautionary fairy tale:  what might happen if we don’t recognize and cherish the redemptive power of language.  If we continue to abuse our words we will forfeit their potential for enlightenment, growth, and expression, and we will be forced to live without language and its positive capabilities. We will retreat from our elevated human status. Perhaps the book could be shorter.  Maybe it’s really a novella or even a short story.  But just think of how much ‘fast food’ language surrounds us in our everyday lives, and how infrequently we protect ourselves from language inflation and devaluation.  No wonder that serious poetry is so far from the mainstream.  Too many words to consider any of them carefully and lovingly. Too much of a good thing.  Way too much.

Say it ain't so.  Please?

Boston

Organized road races for runners have always felt special to me.  Though I’ve never run a full marathon, I have run in many shorter races, and I’ve also provided support for other runners on race day.  The events are held on public roads and can be a major inconvenience for the local residents.  Nonetheless there is almost always a good spirit in the air.  There aren’t many such events where we set aside differences of class and race, smile a lot, help each other, and act like real community members. We leave our jackets and water bottles unattended and trust that no one will take them.  Maybe the feat of a human being (no equipment, no machines) running a long distance as fast as possible is just so obviously difficult and painful that we can’t help but empathize and therefore support.  Or maybe those that object simply go elsewhere for the day.

 

So the bombings at this year’s Boston Marathon are particularly poignant for me.  Such a shame that an event that consistently brings people together should be tarnished with chaos, grief, and sadness.  Security for an event held on the streets over 26 miles is a real problem.  At least in a stadium there are gates where people can be searched.  Here there can only be a significant police presence and large doses of common sense.

But on the other hand let’s not lose perspective.  Bombings have long been a part of our history; many of the worst in our past were deadly and remain unsolved.  Only since WWII do we seem to expect that such things cannot happen here.  Well, they always have, and they probably always will.  American exceptionalism is an illusion.  We’re just as vulnerable as any other country, and if we look around the world we realize that we’ve dodged a good deal of our fair share of political violence at home in recent years.

On the other hand, in the US over 100 people a day are killed in traffic accidents.  Another 100 die each day from firearms.  250 die every day from taking prescription drugs (as directed).  These are not natural deaths; they arise from human action or lack of action.  Yet we’ve come to accept them as unremarkable and inevitable, though they need not be, at least not to that extent. But when a small number die in a terror incident and the media run with it 24/7 for days, an entire city is paralyzed, and we all scratch our heads wondering what’s wrong with the world.  Terror just makes for a better narrative, and our thirst for narrative cannot be quenched.  Humans have probably always been addicted to narrative; it helps us to make sense of a confusing world.  But now technology gives us the opportunity to have stories at our fingertips at every moment.  And we can ‘enjoy’ everyone else’s narrative, too, not just our own.  In fact, we often just about stop living our own life because we’re too busy following someone else’s, or at least the version that that person is exposing, no matter how real or unreal that might be.

And as we eavesdrop on the amped up stories of others, the temptation is to view our own experiences in that bright stage light.  It’s so easy to get caught up in the drama.  One Watertown resident reported be ‘terrorized’ by the helicopters hovering over her neighborhood.  Well, I get it, but how much is her reaction conditioned by those stories, movies, and news reports of Apache attack helicopters in real war zones? We can get trapped in a feedback loop of drama and exaggeration that doesn’t seem to have an end.  An entire city is shut down in fear of a 19-year old who is bleeding and hiding in a boat?  Try living in Afghanistan or in Palestine.  There you justifiably wonder if that helicopter will blow up your house in the next minute.  And your fear is well grounded because that just happened to your friend down the street last week.  At some point you realize that you just have to go on with life, accept the risks involved, be courageous.

Facebook gives us the opportunity to transform countless simple everyday events into high drama.  I wonder if over time that makes it more difficult for us to differentiate between what matters and what doesn’t?  Can we tell the difference anymore?  Do we even want to?  Language is probably our only useful tool for maintaining perspective, a real-time view of our own lives which is realistic, humble, gracious, and meaningful. But language itself is being abused and devalued every day around us, and is perhaps losing its ability to grant us that view?  It’s our only chance at an ‘examined’ life, our only opportunity to see ourselves live as we live.  I wonder if a new kind of ‘language obesity’ is taking hold?  Modern fiction would suggest that is the case, witness much of DFW, for example, or White Noise, or The Flame Alphabet. We defend the need for fiscal austerity, and we understand that we must eat less and eat better.  Maybe it’s time for verbal austerity.  Let’s keep our own narratives in perspective.  Let’s not binge on media.  Let’s give ourselves space and time to think.  ‘Just say no?” At times perhaps ‘enough for right now’ would be helpful.

Magic Maugham

Back to Somerset Maugham for good storytelling, well defined boundaries, relief from anything remotely post-modern, and just plain good writing. I’ve read most of his famous novels, so I picked up ‘The Narrow Corner’, published first in 1932.  Never heard of it.

It’s quite unlike anything else by him that I’ve read.  Yes, it’s a bit of a seafaring yarn; the locale is exotic and the characters are odd and idiosyncratic.  But the action is slow, and the main character is fascinating in a mostly passive way.  What he doesn’t do is more interesting than what he actually does. Another important character is quite funny and quaint.  But what distinguishes the book for me is its consistent focus on ideas, on approaches to life and the consequences thereof.  It’s almost Maugham’s ‘Magic Mountain’, though it’s not nearly as long or pedantic.  Take these passages, for example:

“Do you really want to know? I believe in nothing but myself and my experience. The world consists of me and my thoughts and my feelings; and everything else is mere fancy. Life is a dream in which I create the objects that come before me. Everything knowable, every object of experience, is an idea in my mind, and without my mind it does not exist. There is no possibility and no necessity to postulate anything outside myself. Dream and reality are one. Life is a connected and consistent dream, and when I cease to dream, the world, with its beauty, its pain and sorrow, its unimaginable variety, will cease to be.”

Another character responds, “You’re content to wallow in the gutter.”

“I get a certain amount of fun watching the antics of the other creatures that dwell there.”

And later, “I have acquired resignation by the help of an unfailing sense of the ridiculous.”

And the very last sentence of the novel:

 “He sighed a little, for whatever it was, if the richest dreams the imagination offered came true, in the end it remained nothing but illusion.”

Those are not exactly traditional British (or even Western) views.  The novel takes place in the South Seas where Western and Eastern cultures collide and mix in interesting ways.  The ideas are downright subversive for the time.  It’s interesting to compare this work to Hesse’s ‘Siddhartha’. Both books attempt to present non-Western approaches to life in the guise of a Western novel.  It’s not an easy thing to bring off, and as a novel I’m not sure this one is entirely successful.  The plot has some dull stretches, and at times Maugham uncomfortably stretches our credulity.  Characters sometimes act in ways that don’t seem quite real or believable.  But they do so to make a point.  Indeed a few minor characters seem to exist only to represent opposing viewpoints in the larger debate about how to live life.

All this may not make the most compelling novel, but it does raise lots of interesting questions.  Is it really possible to be resigned to the circumstances and happenings that life presents, or is that a luxury reserved for those that can afford it? Does a strong moral imperative inevitably lead to disappointment and heartbreak? Are strong feelings necessarily self-defeating?  Is it easier to be resigned from the outset to whatever is and never take up the fight to make a difference?  What if everyone took that approach?  How would society function?  What does that mean about capitalism?  What does it mean for religion? Does it help anyone or anything to truly attempt to be good? To love strongly and fully?

[As we approach commencement season, it strikes me that these are not the ideas we’ll hear in those commencement speeches.  No encouragement here for those graduates. There can be no real success, so why even try?]

Well, there is some fine writing.  My favorite passage is one in which the main character (Dr. Saunders) sees a glimmer of something deep in another character, a young man who so far had seemed uninteresting:

“Perhaps it was his good looks that deceived him, perhaps it was due to the companionship of Eric Christessen, but at that moment he felt that there was in the lad a strain of something he had never suspected. Perhaps there was there the dim groping beginning of a soul. The thought faintly amused Dr. Saunders. It gave him just that little shock of surprise that one feels when what looked like a twig on a branch suddenly opens wings and flies away.”

Yes, “faintly amused’.  That about sums up Maugham’s approach here.  Sit back, relax, watch carefully, and accept what happens.  Perhaps the best one can hope for is to be ‘faintly amused’ or perhaps a ‘little shock of surprise’. Getting ruffled and agitated or having strong feelings of any kind never seem to get anyone anywhere here. Interesting to remember that writers like Faulkner, Mann, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf were gaining critical acclaim at this time. Though Maugham’s voice is by comparison traditional, at least some of the ideas are not.

The Birth of Media Power?

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I had no idea what to expect when picking up ‘Arthur andGeorge’, by Julian Barnes.  I’d read ‘The Sense of an Ending’, and was very impressed with the sensitivity of the writing, the subtlety of thought and feeling, the integrity of the writer.  A collection of short stories also impressed me.  I just glanced through the Barnes section at Kepler’s, and picked it up.  It's a very well reviewed work (finalist for the Booker).  If acclaimed and by Julian Barnes, I couldn’t go wrong, right? I half-expected it to be a book about a gay almost-couple, but really had no idea.

Turns out to be historical fiction.  Arthur is none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes).  George is George Edalji, a modest first-generation Brit wrongly convicted of heinous crimes.  Arthur takes up the case after the fact, and does manage to have the stain erased, though the full correction sought is not achieved.  Yes, this really did happen.  It’s a pleasure to be so skillfully led into the world of England around 1900.  What a fascinating time; the empire is starting to crumble, and ethnic tensions are brewing at home.  Old-fashioned concepts of honor, duty, and faith are upheld, but the stresses and strains are all too evident.  The London of Monica Ali’s 'Brick Lane' is well in sight.

George Edalji

The book is an admirable performance, but I’m not sure that historical fiction is Barnes’s optimal genre. Barnes is capable of expressing more direct and striking insight into the human condition, but that's just not the primary aim of this book. The first third of the book is structured in short chapters that alternate between the early history of Arthur and that of George.  Both depictions are compelling and fascinating in their way, and are probably my favorite parts of the book. But the constant alternation and short chapters created (for me) an annoying rhythm that I wasn’t comfortable with.  I kept wishing that Barnes would stay with one story for longer and get to a deeper level.

But then the chapters do indeed get longer, and alas I was not entirely happy then either.  The narrative drive just didn't have the strength to push the prose through longer segments.  This is a true story and Barnes is constrained by the facts; a more satisfying but fictional conclusion is not available. I felt set up for a ‘Holmes’ satisfying ending, but real life intervened.  Unfortunately that means that the novel is also similarly constrained.  Not a fatal flaw.  To bring these two historical characters to life is admirable.  I’m sitting here in California in 2013, and having read the book I have a better appreciation of the unusual transitional state of Britain around 1900.  That is a testament to the novel’s success. And the has-to-be-intentional contrast between real-life legal/criminal entanglements and the literary convenience of the Sherlock Holmes stories is striking and apt.

There really is quite a bit to be learned here.  Consider the America of 2013.: tensions over immigration,  gun policies, racial issues.  It’s not all that different.  If we could see ourselves through that lens we could save ourselves a lot of trouble.  But no, we’re human.  That’s the good news and the bad.

Bravo to Mr. Barnes, but also a caution:  The raw literary talent clearly evidenced by Mr. Barnes in other works is significantly hemmed in here.  But given the task he set for himself, Barnes has succeeded.  I’m not overwhelmed by the result, but I have great respect for both the task and the effort required.

Schtick

Take a bunch of current literary mannerisms, add a good portion of sitcom talent, a more modest portion of literary talent, and a modicum of ambition and ego: you get Maria Semple’s ‘Where’d You Go,Bernadette?’  It’s quick, funny, witty, and ultimately a bit disappointing.  But it’s a fast read and well worth a few hours of relaxed time.  Take it to the beach, or to that place where you need an escape from more serious matters.  There are very, very funny paragraphs.  Stand-ups will drool in envy over the laughs-out-loud from some passages.

But enduring literature?  I think not.  The clock gets wound very tight in interesting ways.  The first two-thirds of the book bubble along promisingly.  The last third tries to deliver, but isn't quite up to the task.  It’s a lot easier to get those lovers into the grandfather clocks (an opera reference) than it is to get them out in a convincing and satisfying way.

I’m not sure that we need worry about the particulars here.  She’s talented, but don’t expect a consistently satisfying experience. 

Have ya heard the one about the . . .

Harvest

I once made the mistake of recommending Jim Crace’s ‘Being Dead’ to a new acquaintance.  She came across as an avid and inquisitive reader, and Crace’s award winning novel is among the most inventive and curiously moving books I’ve ever read.  The next (and I think last) time I saw her she returned my copy to me, grimaced, and remarked ‘Why would anyone want to read a book like that?’  Since then I’ve been much more careful in recommending Crace.

His latest novel, ‘Harvest’ did not disappoint me.  Both ‘Being Dead’ and ‘The Pesthouse’ focus on destruction and disintegration.  Crace’s special gift is to reflect multiple layers of beauty and emotion in  the dismantling of what humans have spent lifetimes building.  He manages this partly by investing so much meaning in the physical world, both natural and human crafted.  Buildings, animals, objects, plants, tools, clothes . . . they’re all described simply but poignantly in ways that immediately communicate their history, uses, and significance.  So when they are lost, mutilated, or destroyed (as so much is in a Crace novel) we sense the history and we experience both love and grief.  It’s uncanny that a writer can focus so unrelentingly on destruction but have such a profoundly positive message.

‘Harvest’ is the story of the destruction of a medieval English village.  The agents of change include strangers from the outside world, the forces of economic ‘progress’, and human nature itself.  The main character (first-person narration throughout) has spent parts of his life in different economic and social segments of the medieval world, and at the end he is forced to move on yet again.  The depiction of the peasants’ intimate (and perhaps shortsighted) connection to the land is quite beautiful.  So much of the power of the book comes from intimate representations of ‘things’.  We get to know what life feels like by learning about many of the physical details of daily life.  It all starts to go downhill when an outsider is brought in to map the land in an effort to convert the primitive and risky farm economy into a more advanced commodity based system.  But it’s almost as if the mapping effort itself, creating a representation which is a step removed from the physical reality, is the beginning of the end.  For Crace so much of the beauty and meaning resides in the immediacy of the physical world.

At the conclusion the main character departs, alone, somewhat broken, but also with hope for a new life in parts unknown.  He brings with him just a few necessities.  The one non-essential item he brings with him is a piece of blank vellum that he had made himself for the mapmaker.  The map was never completed, but the blank vellum had been painstakingly prepared.  It’s a symbol of the next story, his new life yet undiscovered, but also of the failed attempt to ‘lift’ the peasants one step up from their difficult and risky lives as more-or-less subsistence farmers.

Indeed the path of ‘progress’ is a difficult one, and it’s often true that we must first destroy what we have in order to be free to move on to something at least potentially better.  We’ve invested so much in what we have, so much history, so much meaning.  But in that destruction there is not just pain and regret; at the same time there is also beauty and much potential.  That seems to be the lesson that Crace teaches us over and over again in his books.  The human experience incorporates a kind of large-scale seasonal aspect that includes winters of destruction and springs of renewal.  And much of the harshness and the beauty of nature’s seasons can be found in man’s cyclical histories as well. We seem to have no choice but to build and invest, only to destroy so that we can build again.

Not every reader will appreciate Crace’s focus on the destruction.  I won’t make the mistake of recommending him to just anyone.  But you, reader, might want to give it a try.