“If you’re suicidal and you don’t actually kill yourself, you become known as ‘wry.’ ”

That about sums up Lorrie Moore's new story collection, Bark.  Funny, dark, insightful, troubling. The stories are varied and satisfyingly focused, yet I did come away with a sense of Moore as a sharp observer with a cynical yet empathetic eye.  These are traditional stories (nothing Saunderesque here), bleak and contemporary in spirit. I look forward to her next novel.

For me, on to Goldfinch.  I've packed supplies for the long trek. Hoping for the best.

Last Respects

Let’s pay our respects to the omniscient narrator, that rickety old piece of claptrap machinery that served the likes of Fielding, Dickens, and Trollope. Our skeptical twentieth century saw that all-powerful narrator replaced by that of a single character in the drama, one whose point of view was individual and specific, but who could for the most part be trusted.  Then we moved on to the possibly untrustworthy narrator, to multiple narrators, and then on to the blatantly limited or even mentally ill narrator. There can be no viewpoint other than that of an individual, and any individual is deeply flawed.  Snapshots in consciousness, views into the mind of another, glimpses into the void.  These developments reflect an acceptance of the fundamental relativity of all viewpoints.  No single vantage point has any qualitative advantage over another. We’re all good.  We all suck.

Now we have authors whose works are devoted to the point of view of the obviously limited: Rivka Galchen, Mark Haddon, Rief Larson.  These and many others have written fiction that depicts a wrong-end-of-the-binoculars viewpoint that can be fascinating, might instruct us, and can encourage us to deepen our mistrust of our own limited powers of perception and analysis.  Very cynical, verging on the bitter.  Jenny Offill continues that trend with Dept. of Speculation, a short novel that portrays a marriage from the point of view of "the wife", a young, intelligent, and disturbed female writer.  The character is funny, witty, unhappy, pitiful, and perhaps unsalvageable.  She sees what she wants to see.  She manages to make the worst of just about any situation. She gradually descends into a terrifying personal hell far from her early aspirations:

“How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.”

And then there’s the literary form.  Offill follows the lead of Jennifer Egan in her short story Black Box (The New Yorker, 2012). Egan’s story is told as series of tweet-like paragraphs. The NewYorker published it in traditional hard copy, but also put it out as a series of tweets. Offill’s main character narrates in much the same way: a series of short self-contained paragraphs, seemingly random thoughts or diary entries direct from the therapist’s couch. Is that the point? Are readers now therapists for these disturbed characters?  Instead of the author presenting characters and situations with an explicitly "objective" point of view, perhaps the reader is supposed to connect the dots and supply a diagnosis from the random thoughts and expressions brought forth by the narrator? We don’t read someone else’s interpretation of a series of incidents, rather we witness those incidents not through a character’s eyes, but through their mind’s deeply flawed memory.  We get heavily edited and biased reports, and it’s up to us to piece together whatever truth we can find.  Or maybe there is no truth, there is just experience, and the most we can hope for is to bear witness to another’s experience?

This novel is short, easy to read, insightful, and ultimately coherent. It's definitely worth your time and effort.  It will make you think, and more importantly you will feel. Yet I for one miss the omniscient narrator, the one that invited us to gather round and listen to his story, who lent his special voice and tone, who offered his comments on the action, who teased us into coming back for the next installment, who didn’t hesitate to chide us when we exhibited bad behavior like that of his characters or praise us for holding to our better instincts, and who thanked us for our loyalty and attention over the long haul.  He still makes an appearance here and there, but in progressive circles he has pretty much vanished, or at least now hides furtively in the prompter’s box. Perhaps we should put the bearded old chap into the ground and shovel some dirt into the grave. The objective storyteller is dead.  Long live the objective storyteller.

This, That, The Other

Fiction that straddles conventional boundaries is often very interesting, but can also disappoint because it’s neither this nor that.  When it succeeds we know that it stands on its own two feet, but it’s also a little of this and a little of that and a bit of the other.  Francesa Marciano’s story collection The Other Language does indeed straddle, but thankfully it does so gracefully and rewards us with a satisfying and gracious reading experience. We get to interact with a broad range of settings, characters, and situations.  We can sample, savor, and move on.  Each story seems that it could be expanded into a full-length novel.  But that’s what a good short story feels like.  It’s a self-contained and satisfying world unto itself, and who can blame the reader for wanting more? That tapas plate was terrific.  I wonder if they offer that as a main?

These stories take place in locations (some exotic) around the world, and the sense of place in each of them is very strong.  Just as in most of Paul Theroux’s fiction, the place is maybe the most important character.  We get a sense of geography and a stronger sense of culture.  We humans have built peculiar social structures that drastically differ from place to place. And when those structures are juxtaposed (usually by a person from one place visiting or moving to another) the contrasts can be fascinating. And those moves afford Marciano's characters the opportunity to forge a new start, or even a new identity.  That contrast among past, present, and future is important in all of the stories.  Marciano is especially strong in delineating the fine lines of difference and of commonality.  These stories are part travelogues, part character studies, part cultural portraits.

Outwardly very traditional.  No meta-gimmicks here, no preoccupation with self, no experimental structures, no characters in extremis. The language is pleasing if not gorgeous. Just well-told stories that reveal insights into the human condition of the ordinary individual and his cultural context.  The small details are well chosen and telling, even if the writing doesn’t push the boundaries into new territory.  This is a bit old-fashioned, but that’s fine with me.

And the exotic locales and diverse cultural viewpoints makes the reader seem cosmopolitan, wise, a bit jaded. Been there, done that … even though of course we haven’t.  Not even remotely. But we’ve been offered glimpses at people and places that do make us more aware (especially of what we don’t know, even about our own small world), maybe even a little smarter.  Or so it seems.  Well done.

Convergence

Doing IT work for a paycheck, playing the piano two to four hours a day, reading literature, playing tennis, being in a loving, committed relationship, tending to family, caring for pets, maintaining a household, going to church, cultivating friends. Lots of pieces that often don’t fit neatly together.  They all are important to me, but where are the common threads?

At least a few of them were nicely woven together for me by George Saunders Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness.  This tiny book is a cleaned up version of his 2013 Syracuse commencement address. It's short and conversational, a good example of the new style of commencement addresses by famous people: low on formality, high on sincerity.  Saunders is a great fiction writer. His stories are full of imagination, complexity, and contradictions.  They challenge and puzzle us, but his commencement address is by comparison simple. How refreshing that a leader in the intellectual world reminds us about the importance of spiritual values, of kindness, of the need to combat selfishness, and of the purity and goodness that resides in each of us. It’s a message I hear regularly at church (Unity Palo Alto), but to get it from Saunders does connect a few strands for me.

In the last few years I have learned a few lessons. Making demands, even just politely asking the people around you to treat you the way you want to be treated doesn't usually get you what you want.  The only way to get it is to give it, freely and unconditionally.  No strings, no explanations, no fuss.  Doors will open, doors you perhaps have never seen or imagined.  Give your love, offer your insights and your music, give your best athletic skills and your best attitude on the tennis court, be a good friend, a good worker, be a caring partner. It really is that simple. The rest will take care of itself.

The Joy of Paradox

Why do we do what we do? Seemingly we long for something different as we continue to invest in what we have? As soon as we get something different, our longing gets displaced to a new goal, a new difference, a new not-what-we-have.  These issues play out especially dramatically in the realm of romance and life partnerdom, and on that heady subject Adam Phllips, a British psyschoanalyst, Freud expert, and writer teases us with insights, prods, tickles, insults, and caresses. 

Monogamy is a short monograph comprised of 121 aphorisms or short meditations.  Some are only a couple of sentences, a few as long as two pages.  They remind us that there are no simple solutions, that contradictions abound, and that we can savor those contradictions at the same time that they baffle us.  Better to be amused and intrigued at our complex human condition than to be defeated by the entanglements, or depressed by the failure to find ultimate solutions.

Some samples:

“We work hard to keep certain versions of ourselves in other people’s minds; and, of course the less appealing ones out of their minds. And yet everyone we meet invents us, whether we like it or not. Indeed nothing convinces us more of the existence of other people, of just how different they are from us, than what they can make of what we say to them. Our stories often become unrecognizable as they go from mouth to mouth.

Being misrepresented is simply being presented with a version of ourselves – an invention – that we cannot agree with. But we are daunted by other people making us up, by the number of people we seem to be. We become frantic trying to keep the numbers down, trying to keep the true story of who we really are in circulation. This, perhaps more than anything else, drives us into the arms of one special partner. Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to a minimum. And, of course, a way of convincing ourselves that some versions are truer than others – that some are special.”

“It is not a question of what we belive, but that we believe at all. It is not a question of who we are faithful to, but that we are faithful.

Fidelity shouldn’t always be taken personally.”

“At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness. They are easily confused.”

“If sex brought us in to the family, it is also what breaks us out of the family. In other words, people leave home when what they have got to hide – their sexuality – either has to be hidden somewhere else, or when it is best shown somewhere else.

If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nowhere to go. Which is one of the reasons why couples sometimes want to be totally honest with each other.”

“We can never be quite sure whether we are competing for something that doesn’t exist, or winning a competition in which no one else is competing. This is why in marriage we are never quite sure who the joke is on. Nothing defeats us like success. It is always more baffling – more essentially ironic—than failure.”

“It is often easier to get other people to do what one wants than to get oneself to. So it’s often the person in the couple who isn’t having the affair that wants to, and the one that is that is bitterly unhappy.

We delegate more in our erotic lives than anywhere else. Someone has to do the dirty work.”

“The compulsive monogamist is like the compulsive libertine. For both of them something is too extravagant. For both of them there is a catastrophe to be averted. Monogamists are terrorized by their promiscuous wishes, libertines by their dependence. It is all a question of which catastrophe one prefers.”

“More has been written about how relationships don’t work, than about how they do. We have virtually no language, other than banality, to describe the couple who have been happy together for a long time. We would like them to have a secret, we would like them to have something they could give us. Or that we could give them, other than our suspicion.

There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There’s nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage.”

“We begin to feel safe – a litte uneasy, perhaps, but safe – when a new relationship begins to change into a familiar one. When we have settled into our routines, when all the false notes and small misunderstandings have become part of a larger understanding that we call our life together. We don’t need to think about it – or think about it like this – we just enjoy each other’s company. We cannot imagine ourselves without each other. And when we cannot imagine ourselves without each other, we are no longer together.”

“We are never misunderstood, we are just sometimes understood in ways we don’t like. We are never unfaithful, we are just sometimes faithful in ways we don’t like.”

Good stuff.  I need to look at his other books.

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.”