Croton-On-Hudson

T.C. Boyle and I share a few things:  we both attended SUNY Potsdam, and we both lived for some time in northwest Westchester County, NY in the area around Croton-On-Hudson. I lived there from 1982 until 2010.  As I write this I look up at my wall to the right where I’ve hung a satellite image of the very that very section of the Hudson. Boyle grew up there.  His 1987 novel World’s End takes place there in modern times and in earlier historical periods, including the Dutch/English colonial periods and the post-WWII era.  Because Boyle is true to geography (though a few place names are inexplicably slight altered), I often know exactly the place he refers to.  I have a feeling for the land there, for the river (I’ve spent a decent amount of time on boats and kayaks in that part of the Hudson), for the forest and the rock, for the weather. 

The novel is an historical tour de force, jumping back and forth in time, making obvious (sometimes all too obvious) connections among eras and characters.  Most of it is believable though some stretched my credulity beyond the breaking point.  But no matter, that’s not really the point.  The area is a product of its past, and I know enough of the area’s present to see and appreciate the historical roots that Boyle so painstakingly illustrates.

 

Looking south on the Hudson towards World's End

I’m not sure how I could have lived there for so long and remained ignorant of the area’s post-war past. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing of the Peekskill riots of 1949.  I’m proud that the place had socialist elements, but not so proud of the violent backlash.  And the telling details of the hardships of colonial life are striking indeed.  The Native American thread is also fascinating.  Boyle is rarely noted for his subtlety after all, and he is a little heavy handed in his bold implied assertion that nothing much changes, the same strands continue to interweave over and over, pretty much without resolution or reconciliation.  Despite all the technical and economic progress over the centuries, people are just about the same: capable of empathy and good behavior but more often than not repeatedly falling short and letting each other down.

The language is a little exaggerated, but not as much as in some of his other novels. The plot is contrived.  Some of the themes (eating disorders, racism, rampant out-of-control capitalism) get tiresome.  It’s a long book and I did lose interest here and there.  If you like Stegner on California history, you should give this a try. Different place and a different literary approach, but there are some similarities. I’m not sure how it would come across to someone unfamiliar with the area.  It might seem like science fiction instead of the ultimate historical realism that Boyle was (I’m pretty sure) trying for.  That’s the price to be paid for exaggeration and caricature.  Never stopped Dickens.

From The X-Book Files

No, it’s not x-rated; it’s experimental.  S, by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst is a book within a book.  It exists only in old-fashioned hard copy for good reason.  The physical object is carefully crafted to look like a well-used library book with many handwritten margin notations.  The library book is ostensibly Ship of Theseus by V.M. Straka.  Straka (a fictional author of fiction) is a mysterious 20^th-century author whose very identity is in dispute by literary scholars (at least by the scholars in this book).  Nobody really knows who he was, but we do know he was tied to decades of political and literary turmoil, and that he was tied in some ways to a group of such figures known loosely as “S”.

The margin notes are written by two young adults, one a college senior, another an ex-graduate student.  They discover each other by accident through the physical object of the book.  Indeed they don’t even meet for some time, but they do leave the book in secret places for the other to pick up after adding more notes in the margin.  The notes are handwritten, and by taking into account the handwriting and the color of the writing, the reader can piece together the chronology of the notes.  A real conversation ensues in these notes, a conversation that turns into a loving relationship. In addition various freestanding documents are inserted in the text for our pleasure and illumination: postcards, handwritten letters, archival documents, newspaper clippings, etc.

So there are multiple simultaneous levels here:  the original Straka text, the accompanying documents, the mystery of the historical figure Straka, the longstanding scholarly debate over his identity (some of this in footnotes), and several layers of conversation between the two present-day young adults.  Ideally one would read the book several times:  first just the Straka text, then the footnotes, then one time through for each layer of handwritten annotation.  But it’s not a short book, and just getting through it once is an effort.  It takes a while to find a reading rhythm for this odd arrangement, so I couldn’t imagine going back through it all multiple times. In a way it was fun to read and juggle the layers all at the same time page by page.

Conspiracy theories abound; intrigue and danger (some imagined, some perhaps real) lurk around every corner. The atmosphere is intense. Complexity abounds in the form of multiple historical characters, multiple theories about what the author might have intended, and hidden codes in the text that the young adults gradually crack.  The Straka text provides lots of vague passages that the young adult annotate to express their feelings about themselves, their past, and each other. The connections between fictional text, historical past, and actual present events are very cleverly drawn.

But what’s missing is the richness of human experience and emotion.  We don’t really care much about the codes because they don’t unlock anything that matters to us.  Yes, pieces of the puzzle are revealed, but the larger puzzle seems to be made up almost entirely of mood and atmospherics.  We don’t much care which way the history turns out.  We do care a little about the present-day characters, but there is no direct narration about or from them.  It’s all indirect, like a hall of mirrors.  If the mirrors don’t reflect anything we care about, then the mirrors become an effective but shallow trick that fails to keep our attention.  The book has two authors.  That should be enough to tell us that this will not be a book with deeply personal insight.

Very clever and well worth a read, but don’t expect a fulfilling experience. I smiled many times. I was delighted by the clever interplay, but in the end I wanted more depth.  But experiments are experimental. They’re meant to give us new knowledge about how things might work. They don’t have to answer all the questions at once.  This is a hint at an interesting new approach to fiction.  Will it bear fruit?  Not for me to predict. For now I’ll say that cleverness isn’t enough here.  But maybe there’s a path forward from here. 

Magic

You hold down the sustaining pedal on the grand piano.  You reach inside a pluck the bass strings to sound a pleasing, plausible, but slightly dissonant chord.  Sensible enough, pleasant.  Keeping the pedal down you pluck a related but different chord in the mid-range, then something a bit similar in the treble.  The sounds are individually interesting if not fascinating, but together they start a sympathetic vibration where one chord causes the previous one to echo again, and so on to the next.  Every new combination of chords is revealing, and the chords keep coming until the entire instrument pulses with striking sounds that contrast but also reinforce one another.  You lose track of beginning and end; the result is a sustained shimmer that in which all the components sound, but the total is something different again, something that seems to contain the answers to all the questions ever and never asked.

For me that’s what it’s like to read Paul Auster’s fiction.  Moon Palace is no exception.  The words are well chosen but ordinary.  There is nothing flashy or poetic, no Updike thesaurus and no Banville lyricism.  The plot starts out as something ordinary, but step by step the main character becomes separated from objective reality, he loses his grip and enters a world where truth and fiction blur, where real and unreal become one, where art and reality become confused, where causation becomes indeterminate.  Observing the dissolution while reading the seemingly ordinary prose is pleasure enough, but the surreal
experiences that follow in the Austerian landscape are both chilling and beautiful.  You look into the kaleidoscope and you see that the individual fragments are all realistic, but the whirling pieces together form a kind of meta-world, a way of seeing and experiencing which is truly special.  Objectivity and emotion combine to form a vision which belongs uniquely to Auster.

No need to go into details about Moon Palace.  There are plots and subplots, repeating themes, unlikely coincidences, startling revelations.  We go further and further into the looking glass, and we end at a beginning, at a place where we see the world anew, where nothing can be taken for granted, where all is accepted, and in which human experience through all of history reverberates forever.  We are dazed and a little confused, but we feel part of something epochal where interior and exterior merge, where past, present and future come together.

No idea how he does it. 

Serious Pleasure

My first love was music.  As a boy I played the piano every day, and I was lucky to find a teacher that skillfully introduced me to the great classical composers. When I lost myself in their worlds, I was happier and more fully engaged than I ever was in my own.  I also studied music theory early on, so I acquired a vocabulary that helped me understand that music. As a young adult I became deeply immersed in the world of music theory; understanding how it all worked was just as important to me as experiencing the music itself.

Though I always read fiction, I never got the same guidance in that field.  Public school English classes were a joke, and in college those discussions of literature just didn't work for me.  I wasn't ready for it. Paradoxically, verbal language was imprecise for me; music was specific. Not to equate myself in any way with Felix Mendelssohn, but he wrote:

"People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words. These, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite."

Hence the title of Wendy Lesser's Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books jumped out at me.  I had to give it a try. And I wasn't disappointed.  In music I can understand pretty well not only what a composer actually did, but I can also be aware of the alternatives he rejected.  And that can make it so much more meaningful: to witness the specificity of his intent.  Lesser's book opened that door for me a bit in literature. She discusses some very basic issues: the author's voice, the space between the reader and the writer, innovation, authority, grandeur and intimacy, etc.  She covers many genres and styles.  For this literary amateur the discussion was enlightening if a bit scattered.  The proof of the pudding is that reading has changed for me. I am more aware of what the author is doing (or at least what I think he's doing).  There's a level of discourse in which I'm watching myself experience the writing, and that changes the experience.  It's almost like being part of the editorial process, seeing the finished work emerge from the unformed block of marble.  I've always been able to do that in music, and to get a glimmer of that insight in literature is exciting for me.

I'm certain that his book is not for everyone.  For many her 'insights' are self-evident; for others irrelevant. As for me, I'm a better reader now.

It Must Be Me

Russell Banks is highly regarded, indeed.  Lost Memory of Skin didn’t do much for me, but I thought that was a one-time misfire. So I picked up the new collection of stories, A Permanent Member of the Family. No, I don’t get what all the fuss is about.  The stories are very traditional.  Nothing wrong with that.  Every author doesn’t have to venture far afield like George Saunders or David Foster Wallace.  But there needs to be something special, be it the precision of Tobias Wolff, the warmth of Lahiri, the deadly social commentary and deeply personal insights of Cheever, the sumptuous sentences of Updike or even the flashy bling of Tom Wolfe.  None of the above here, and I’m left wondering.

Must be me.

Early Banville

How does a twenty-something writer turn out something like Banville’s Birchwood?  I just don’t get it.  It’s a level of raw talent that defies explanation.  The book takes place during the Great Famine, and the apocalyptic scenes remind me of Crace in The Pesthouse or The Harvest.  Banville tackles so many big issues here: the unreliable narrator, the nature of memory (bow to Proust), the meaning of family, the radical politics of the time.  But the writing, oh, the writing.

Banville declares his intent early on:

John Banville

“Listen, listen, if I know my world, which is doubtful, but if I do, I know it is chaotic, mean and vicious, with laws cast in the wrong moulds, a fair conception gone awry, in short an awful place, and yet, and yet a place capable of glory in those rare moments when a little light breaks forth, and something is not explained, not forgiven, but merely illuminated.”

A boy’s take on religious dogma:

“That day down in the crippled wood, while we sat like frogs by the fire with our ears buried in our collars, he told me about hell. It appears that if we follow the dictates of the nature god has given us, our reward will be to fry eternally in a lovingly prepared oven, whereas if we persist in denying the undeniable truth about ourselves we will be allowed to float for all time through an empty blue immensity, the adoration of the lord our only task. A most extraordinary concept, which we found screamingly funny, though we acknowledged the humour of it only by thoughtful sighs and gloomy silences, which is how children laugh at the vagaries of adults.”

A young man’s love affair draws to a close:

“Out idyll was ending. The strange fact is that we were not drawing apart, on the contrary, we were beginning to get to know one another. We had each dreamed a lover for ourselves, but dreams are brittle things, and piggish reality tramples them to bits under its trotters.”

A fever:

“The room seemed thronged until the early hours with unbearable busy nurses. Mama would lean over me in the bilious yellow lamplight, trumpeting incoherently, and then another, Aunt Martha perhaps, would fling open the door, step up to the bed and thrust her rubbery face down on mine. There was a troubling dichotomy between their frenetic activity and their voices, for all sound had slowed down to an underwater pace, an intermittent booming in my ears broken into regular beats whose rhythm, I suspect, corresponded to the fretful flutter of my pulse. I swung vertiginously in and out of sleep, and at last subsided into something which was not sleep, but rather a comatose sentry duty over my quietly pulsating body.”

It may be that the youthful Banville has crammed too much into a short novel.  It’s a gothic thriller complete with perverted family secrets fully revealed only at the end, political commentary, a travelling circus, social and political commentary, and some truly odd (sometimes mad) characters. I’m not sure why this jumble doesn’t bother me more, but it doesn’t.  It’s probably just the beauty of the writing itself, and the sentence-to-sentence coherence that holds it all together. There’s Banville in every paragraph, and that’s enough for me.

Michelin Mishigas

 Aravind Adiga made a big splash with The White Tiger (2008 Booker prize), and I love the intensity of that book, the cynicism, the burning quality on both personal and political levels.  So I’ve looked forward to each of his subsequent publications.  Last Man in Tower disappointed me, and Between the Assassinations, while interesting, is also not a worthy successor to The White Tiger. Though published later, Between the Assassinations was actually completed before The White Tiger, and a few of the incidents in Between the Assassinations also appear in The White Tiger.

The premise of Between the Assassinations is fascinating.  It’s a collection of 14 short stories, all of which take place in the fictional Indian town of Kittur.  (There is a real Kittur in India, but the one in the book is quite different; Adiga has created a fictional city to suit his purposes here.)  Ostensibly the book is laid out as a travel guide, with short descriptions of the prominent areas and features of the city.  Each description prompts a story of fictional characters that live and work there.  It’s a very clever premise, and it works well here.  Each story illustrates a distinct caste, group, or issue, and the contrast between the fake salesy travel blurbs and the all-too-real personal stories is very effective.

Unfortunately the stories themselves, while illustrative and informative, are not all that compelling.  The writing is not particularly interesting, and the characters not especially memorable.  I keep longing for the white-hot intensity of The White Tiger, but it’s just not there.  Nor is the more leisurely approach of Lahiri in The Lowlands.  Lahiri’s characters are unforgettable, even if the plot sprawls a bit here and there. For me, Adiga needs to recover the hard edge that won him the Booker in 2008, or find a different voice that works for him.  I will keep reading and hoping.  The White Tiger was that good.