So Clever

Can you imagine reading a full-length novel, and only at the very end do you understand what the text you’ve been reading really is?  And when we gather that knowledge in the last few pages, we can then deduce the fates of the two main characters without having to be explicitly told. And we also then understand some of the 'weaknesses' that we'd encountered in the book along the way.  It really is astonishingly clever.  I didn’t see it coming, and I was grinning for quite a while after finishing the book.  In retrospect it seems a little unlikely, but it’s just so much fun, who cares?

Ian McEwan brings it off in his latest novel, ‘Sweet Tooth’.  It’s a tale of some pretty tame British domestic espionage in the 70’s.  He does manage to evoke the time very nicely.  There are undoubtedly many specifically British references (especially political and literary) that I missed, but I got enough to remember how those times felt. The writing is slick and professional without calling undue attention to itself.

‘Sweet Tooth’ is part spy novel, part love story, part commentary on what it means to write fiction.  There’s a good dose of autobiography: one of the main characters is clearly a stand-in for McEwan himself.  I’m in no position to judge the extent of truthful correspondence to his own life.  And yes it’s another work of fiction in part about fiction itself.  We do seem to be a bit stuck on that these days.  So many writers have become self-conscious and feel the need to write about themselves writing, all within the boundaries of more-or-less traditional fiction.  Here there's just a hint of self-referential dizziness, and it’s annoyingly indulgent in a few places.  About two-thirds of the way through I got mildly discouraged.  The plot was starting to bog down and I wondered where all this was going.  But the ending makes it all worthwhile.  I don’t know another book quite like it.

Our Own Chekhov?

Alice Munro keeps turning out interesting and exquisitely crafted stories.  She’s no spring chicken at this point, and it would be understandable if she were to opt for the Philip Roth escape hatch of retirement.  But if the latest collection, ‘Dear Life’, is any indication, she still has much to express and lots to teach us about life and writing.

The fourteen stories in the collection had been published elsewhere individually.  I had read a few of them in The New Yorker.  As a set the stories are well matched.  They’re less kinky than some of her recent stories, less explicitly focused on evil.  For the most part the tone is quite neutral; the language is unpretentious.  We see the characters as if from a great height, and the stories maintain a very controlled and almost wistful tone.

My favorites are ‘Amundsen’, ‘Gravel’, ‘Corrie’, and ‘Dear Life’.  Some have interesting plots, a few have a dramatic turn or two, but most are quite even in tone and plot.  Suffering, pain, and joy are referred to but from a distance.  We know they’re there, but Munro doesn’t want us to experience them first-hand in the moment.  Rather years later we come to know the puzzled wondering, the loving reminiscence, the warm recollection, the regrets, the hidden dangers. 

I don’t know how she does it.  The language is so straightforward and calls no attention to itself.  Not much happens.  It can take some effort from the reader to figure out what’s what.  Feels a little like the detached rambling narration of a senior citizen who sometimes mixes times, people, and events in random but telling ways, and always from the point of view of someone who is no longer deeply involved. It must take some effort to keep out anything dramatic, jarring, or strongly felt.  Doing that leaves room for the more subtle intimations of danger, evil, love, and regret that lurk in many of these stories.

Whatever Alice Munro writes I will read.  I will do my best to follow wherever she leads.

A French Pose?

I spent some time in France as a young American music student, and some (not all) aspects of traditional French pedagogy were for me just plain insufferable.  The teacher’s first goal was to show me that I knew absolutely nothing and was basically a worthless piece of shit.  But if I was submissive and unquestioning of their authority, wisdom, and methods, I could gradually build myself into something of value. For me it was a hypocritical pose that was more often than not just an excuse for bad behavior and laziness on their part, and I wanted no part of it. I had enough insecurities of my own and didn’t need a pompous authority figure reinforcing my own self-doubts.

There seems to be a similar pose in some French writing these days.  Instead of simply writing about experience and feeling, some authors are compelled to interject intellectual theory stated as fact.  For me it often comes across as exaggerated and out of place.  I have that reaction to Bernard Henri Levy.  I often want to ask him to stop preaching at me and just say what he has to say in a more modest way.  The ideas are often fascinating if speculative.  But to state them as fact to me is off-putting.  The author claims to have all the answers (even if the answers contradict each other); the reader knows nothing.

So with some trepidation I decided to revisit Michel Houellebecq, whose ‘Platform’ I had read years ago when it first came out.  ‘Platform’ is a fascinating novel that focuses on sexuality and predicts the inevitable conflict between strains of conservation Islam and Western society.  In some ways it’s an outrageous book, full of exaggeration to the point of parody.  Nonetheless, the ideas themselves are captivating.

‘The Elementary Particles’ is another well reviewed Houellebecq novel.  Again sexuality plays a major role in the book. Ideas are prominent, often to the detriment of the fiction itself.  The juxtaposition of narrative and something like pedagogy in this passage is typical:

‘Just after writing this, Bruno had slipped into a kind of alcoholic coma.  He was woken some hours later by the screams of his son.  Between the ages of two and four, human children acquire a sense of self, which manifests itself in displays of megalomaniacal histrionics.  Their aim in this is to control their social environment ... ‘

For me the sudden shift from fictional narrative to a lecture on child psychology is jarring.  The lecture takes me out of the world of fiction as experience and puts me in a different mode, back in the place of that music student that was forced to accept pearls of wisdom from the know-it-all pompous music professor. Can’t the author find a way to make us understand what he wants to express without resorting to a lecture?  Can’t we stay in the realm of experience and feeling?

OK, so the conflict between human feeling and a more objective reality is part of the point of the book.  I get that.  And those ideas are very interesting indeed.  There are many insights here into human experience that are well worth reading and worth thinking about long after finishing the book.  But why do the ideas have to be framed in such a sterile intellectual context? It’s strange to read about life (in a story) and be analyzing life, drawing cerebral conclusions about it, and often making fun of it all at the same time.   Why be haughty?  The characters have real issues, and they experience pain and suffering.  When the author breaks the narrative with these ‘objective truths’ he implies that he’s above the suffering, understands the larger issues in ways that his unfortunate and limited characters cannot, and therefore can live himself by different rules.  Hence for me the basic hypocrisy of the pose itself. 

I’m much more at home with the Philip Roth approach in which the author is clearly just as confused and helpless as his characters.  There are no objective truths that can make sense of the suffering or place any of us above it.  We’re all in the same mess.

How sad that there are no new Philip Roth novels coming our way.  It will be hard to stop anticipating the next one. 

In the Eyes of the Beholder

Ask any serious pianist.  The keyboard changes all the time.  One day the keys feel long, skinny, wet, and slick.  It’s almost impossible to keep your finger from sliding off that thin slippery black key onto the adjacent white key.  Other days the keys seem fat, dry, and sluggish.  On Monday it takes a huge effort to get a certain sound.  On Tuesday it happens with no effort at all.  And on Wednesday it’s pretty much impossible.

Does anything really change in the instrument?  I know my piano sometimes sounds like it has a cold.  At those times in certain registers the sound is muffled and indistinct.  On other days the sound is overly bright, almost painfully brittle.  That’s mostly a function of weather.  A period of humidity really does change the sound.  And dry weather (or running the heat inside, which produces very dry air in the room) can make noticeable changes as well.  More or less moisture in the felt hammers changes the sound. And the action may be a little more sluggish or a little more responsive on certain days.  Again, I think weather is the culprit.  The action is largely wood, and wood changes with weather.

Beyond that, I don’t think the instrument changes much.  The keys don’t resize.  These days they’re covered with plastic (not ivory), and plastic is a dead and unchanging material.  So what does account for the very different feel of the keys from day to day?  For the most part it’s me that’s changing.  Some of that is probably physiological.  Like an athlete, there are times when I’m particularly stiff and inflexible; other days I'm flexible and strong.  But my brain doesn’t read that as a change in me; instead it attributes the change to an external entity, the keyboard.

I’m also certain that much of this is not in my hands, but in my head.  Probably has to do with expectations and state of mind.  There is that famous story about the concert pianist (pianist A) that had unusually small hands.  He was very successful and had money to burn, so he had a piano custom built with slightly narrower keys (maybe 5% smaller, I’m guessing) so that his small hands could reach larger stretches more easily.  Another pianist (pianist B) knew about it and went to visit him.  Pianist B was greeted at the door by a family member and shown to a large room to wait for Pianist A.  While waiting alone Pianist B sat at the piano he found there and played.  He was amazed at how much further he could stretch and how much easier it was to play certain passages.  Eventually Pianist A showed up and a conversation began.  Pianist B expressed his delight at the new found ease he had discovered at the special piano.  Pianist A then confessed that though he did have that specially scaled piano built, that instrument was in fact in another room.  The instrument that Pianist B had been playing was a normally scaled piano. Because Pianist B expected greater ease, he experienced greater ease: pianistic placebo.

Okay.  There are no absolutes.  I get it.  Heisenberg uncertainty.  But we have to get by from moment to moment.  Our brain has to instantaneously reach useful deductions from a baffling diverse and huge set of data. If we don’t jump to conclusions we’re likely to get eaten by that lion.  Such is the human condition.

Extrapolate this to human relationships. Multiple variables on all sides. No absolute truth. Pretty much total chaos.  All changeable. This is the human world we live in.  Small wonder we make any sense of it at all.  I’m all for artificial self-constructed reality, as long as the people in my life that matter to me are willing to graciously and patiently withstand my version. Maybe that’s what it’s all about?  We construct an artificial reality that helps us get by.  After all, we just need to get to tomorrow, right? We do the best we can and we search for others that will tolerate our peculiar construct. Inevitably conflicts ensue. Alter the construct as needed, but don't forget that the lion may be nearby.  Look for consolation and comfort, but do your best to see the sun come up tomorrow. Be compassionate and somehow keep in mind that others are facing the same daily struggle.

Season to taste.

Good luck, fellow travelers.

Happy Thanskgiving!

An Experiment at the Keyboard

Learning a new piece is a complicated process.  I need to understand the music, how it works, what it has to say, what I want it to say.  I also need to figure out how to play the damned thing, and that means learning the notes, working out fingering, practicing technical passages, etc.  But arriving at musical understanding often depends on being able to execute.  You don’t know what the music is until you perform it, even if you can’t.   And blind under-tempo execution can be devoid of musical intent.  The two areas depend on each other.  Chicken and egg.  Adam’s navel.

I’m a good faker and a good sight-reader.  So I generally take a dual approach.  I spend some time faking through the piece at tempo just to achieve an understanding of how it works and what I want.  (I confess that this betrays a certain impatience.  ‘Let’s just make believe I can play this.  I’d really like to think that I can play this.’) I also spend time working out the technical passages slowly and, I hope, accurately, but sacrificing musical intent. Ideally the two approaches eventually meet.

A version of op76 #1 in Brahms's own hand.

The disadvantage of faking it is that we learn whatever we do.  Every time I fake my way through (to develop understanding, or just for self-deceptive fun) I learn to not execute cleanly.  And that makes it harder to learn to play it well down the road.

So I’m going to try something different.  Lately I've been learning Brahms op.76, a set of eight ‘short’ pieces.  They really are spectacular, and I've never taken the time to study them closely.  But I know some of them well by ear, so I have a pretty good concept of what I want from them.

Op. 76 #1 is a piece I’ve never really learned, but I do (I think) understand it.  So there’s really no need to fake it.  So I’m trying to learn it without EVER faking it.  Just play it ever so slowly.  Never make a mistake.  If I do, I need to go even more slowly.  That means I won’t ever play it up to tempo until I’m ready to do so flawlessly.  No faking.

It’s a little frustrating.  I want to wing it.  But I’m not letting myself do that.  I so hope that playing it slowly over and over will not chip away at the expressive concept that I have for the piece and turn it into drudgery.  I don’t think that will happen.  I’m pretty clear about what I want, and I can imagine it happening, even if I’m playing quite slowly.

Do I have the discipline to stay with this approach?  We’ll see.  I've never attempted it in quite this way.  The best possible outcome would be to arrive at a reliable performance of the piece which says what I want to say and involves minimal technical risk.  On the other hand, I could become frustrated that I never seem to be able to play it cleanly at tempo, and just stop trying.

I’ll keep you posted.

Warm-Blooded Murder

Banville’s ‘The Book of Evidence’ is a short novel written in a peculiar way: it’s a first-person account of a murder written by the murderer while in custody. The criminal then submits the document to the court as evidence. It is both a confession and an attempt at an explanation. The protagonist, Freddie Montgomery, is a well-off Irishman who almost inadvertently commits the crime (the murder of a stranger, a maid who interfered with Freddie's theft of a valuable painting) as part of a scheme to rescue himself and his family from financial difficulties.  Banville certainly makes the events seem possible; I’m sure that law enforcement around the world deals with crimes like this one every day.  Banville carefully explains (or has Freddie explain) every step of the way.  We come to know the events of that fateful day in excruciating detail.  We understand what led to those events. We understand what happened after the murder.  We understand these things because Banville explores Freddie’s feelings, observations, and motivations along every step of the way. The usual Banville sensibilities are on display here.  Even the most subtle emotional reverberations are up for examination.  Also lots of irony and a good bit of humor here and there.

But how probable is it that such a criminal have enough self-awareness to be able to produce such a document?  That’s where I have trouble with the book. Near the end of the book Banville takes a stab (oops) at explaining the moral deficiency which allowed the criminal to act as he did:

‘This is the worst, the essential sin, I think, the one for which there will be no forgiveness: that I never imagined her [the victim] vividly enough, that I never made her be there sufficiently, that I did not make her live. Yes, that failure of imagination is my real crime, the one that made the others possible. What I told that policeman is true – I killed her because I could kill her, and I could kill her because for me she was not alive. And so my task now is to bring her back to life. I am not sure what that means, but it strikes me with the force of an unavoidable imperative. How am I to make it come about, this act of parturition? Must I imagine her from the start, from infancy? I am puzzled, and not a little fearful, and yet there is something stirring in me, and I am strangely excited. I seem to have taken on a new weight and density. I feel gay and at the same time wonderfully serious. I am big with possibilities. I am living for two.’

Yes, it’s very poignant, insightful, even moving. But the same person whose limitations as a person led to murder is now, just a few weeks later, capable of this deep self-reflection? For most of the book Freddie is drifting through life, and seems not to be concerned with concepts like moral culpability. Indeed Freddie describes his thoughts and feelings at the moment of the killing as confesses that his real crime may be his tendency to let things drift:

‘There is no moment in this process of which I can confidently say, there, that is when I decided she should die. Decided? – I do not think it was a matter of deciding. I do not think it was a matter of thinking, even. That fat monster inside me just saw his chance and leaped out, frothing and flailing. He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him. I could not stop him. Or could I? He is me, after all, and I am he. But no, things were too far gone for stopping. Perhaps that is the essence of my crime, of my culpability, that I let things get to that stage, that I had not been vigilant enough, had not been enough of a dissembler, that I left Bunter to his own devices, and thus allowed him, fatally, to understand that he was free, that the cage door was open, that nothing was forbidden, that everything was possible.’

Is it possible to have such insight and such lack of control at the same moment? If you can understand what's happening, would you just let it happen?  Banville writes in the first person, but with the insight and detachment of a third-person narrator.  I would venture to guess that most murderers are so screwed up emotionally (or just plain emotionally deficient) that they will never have the insights that Banville describes so beautifully, or if they do, it would take years and years of therapy to get there.

Contrast Banville’s approach with ‘In Cold Blood’, for example, where the criminals’ utter lack of perspective or feeling about what they’re doing is both stunning and chilling and of course part of the point.  It’s more believable, perhaps, but also more depressing.  For such a person there is little hope. Freddie is well on his way to some kind of redemption at the end of the book.  That may not be credible, but it is comforting.

Banville also writes crime fiction under the name Benjamin Black.  Never read any.  Will have to try one soon.

All that being said there is much good writing here, and lots of insight into how we can be led (or lead ourselves) to actions that we will later regret.  I don’t think it’s Banville’s best book, but it’s a courageous experiment and a short and easy read. 

A Fork in the Road

In a piece of music there are almost always repeating patterns of one sort or another.  But the repetitions can lead to new places.  That’s part of the musical narrative.  First A leads to B.  Later A reappears, bit this time it no longer leads to B; instead it leads to C.

The process of learning and memorizing those passages is interesting to me.  I learn A.  I can execute it easily.  Then I continue to B.  It may take some effort, but I learn B and I learn that A leads to B. Now I can execute the passage A-B just fine. I've built the A-B entity in memory.

Who's old enough to remember the
 Slauson cutoff and the fork in the road?

Next I have to learn a new passage, where A leads to C.  I can execute A, but it takes considerable conscious effort and concentration to get A to go directly to C.  It wants to go to B.  But with time and repetition I get it.  A goes to C.

Unfortunately now I've lost the A-B connection.  In my memory, A now leads to C, not to B.  Now I have to go back and relearn the A-B connection.  It won’t take as long to learn it as it did the first time, but it will take some effort.  And doing that may make the A-C connection a little shaky.  Now that path has to be reinforced.

Eventually I get to the point where I can execute both A-B and A-C without a problem.  But it’s quite a complicated process to get there.

The brain seems have a hard-wired proclivity to assume the highest level ‘truth’ that it can find.  That’s what makes us so smart.  We look for large patterns that will help us survive.  But sometimes the largest pattern needs to be broken, and a smaller pattern added at a lower level.  We can do it, but it seems to run counter to our nature.

We find patterns that help us.  We jump to conclusions. It’s part of who we are.  But we have to be willing to go back and reconsider another outcome.  There might be possibilities that we might not have imagined at first. Might some of those conclusions be faulty, or at least incomplete?

But we can’t consider every outlandish possibility.  Up is not down, right?

Or might it be? Do we have courage to find out?