Welcome Back

An underrated pleasure in life: something familiar, pleasurable, accessible, and reasonably high quality that we can visit and revisit as we please.  Like having a special restaurant in the neighborhood, a place you know well and enjoy when the time is right.  The food is very good if not five-star, you’re a known and valued customer, you’ve never had a bad meal, and you feel at home.  You can stop by for a comforting and pleasing experience and get a little bit of the relaxation of coming home.

That’s how I feel about Paul Theroux.  He’s written lots of books, and he’s still producing.  I always enjoy reading his work.  I think I know his strengths, and I also know what his fiction is not and probably never will be. But I keep coming back for more, and I’m rarely disappointed.  He has a special talent for getting across the essence of an exotic locale at a particular time in history.  OK, so maybe the plot is sometimes a little contrived.  Maybe the characters don’t exactly resonate with the depth of Tolstoy or Flaubert.  Maybe the language doesn’t have quite the sophistication of Banville or Trevor.  But I don’t know another living author that can give such a sparkling and detailed sense of place and time.

Malawi

‘The Lower River’ is his latest novel.  It deals with the backwater of Malawi.  We learn about how the country has changed in the last forty years (not for the better, despite the all-too-good intentions of many) through the life of Ellis Hoch, an American who spent several years working there in his early twenties, then returns at the age of sixty after his traditional life in Massachusetts explodes.  There are some aspects of plot and character that don’t ring quite true.  But I now feel that I know something about Malawi, its people, its precarious position in the world today.  Not somewhere I’m anxious to visit, but I almost feel that I have, thanks to Theroux’s writing.

We’ve all had the experience of reading a good general newspaper or magazine and learning about this and that.  Until we read something there about a subject we know well; then we suddenly think that the publication is superficial and misleading.  Is that what’s happening about Theroux and Malawi?  I’ve never been there so I guess I’ll never know.  But I do find the portrayal convincing, and I guess that will have to suffice.  Theroux offers no easy answers to the country’s serious problems, nor does he take sides in the various conflicts he portrays.  It’s frankly quite a mess.  That makes the Hollywood ending all the more improbable, but who cares about the last two pages?  The rest is well worth reading.  And it would make a very good movie.

So sit back at your favorite table, have a friendly chat with the waiter you’ve known for years, and order something from the menu you haven’t had before.  The kitchen you know so well will not disappoint you.

More Munro

It’s such a pleasure to read a review or critical essay that instantly clarifies one’s own feelings about an author’s work. Cathleen Schine’s piece on Alice Munro (NYRB, January 10, 2013, unfortunately behind the paywall, so I won’t link to it here), for me, at least, absolutely nails several special aspects of Munro’s stories.  I’ve always loved Munro’s work, and have never been able to figure out what makes the experience of reading her stories so unique. 

‘What Munro has done with this distancing, what she does so powerfully in all her work, is not to withdraw us from her characters or her characters from us, but to create room around them: room for sympathy.  They are not always easy to sympathize with, either.  The inhabitants of Munro’s stories are troubled, peculiar, pinched, violent, prideful, ignorant, envious, meddling, superior – as imperfect as human beings get.  She does not hold back in revealing the wormy crawling activity beneath the rocks of small-town life, the disgust with anyone different or ambitious or literary or imaginative or, worse yet, all these and female, too.  But Munro, like some brisk clear wind, reveals the errors and evils and simultaneously blows away our own initially judgmental reaction.’

The piece covers several other aspects and is well worth reading carefully.

Hmm, looks like Ms. Schine has written some fiction of her own.  And criticism published in The New Yorker and NYRB.  Was married to the film critic David Denby.  Will have to look out for her.

An English Estate in a Little Town Called 'Hope'

Patrick Melrose is now a little older, a little further away from the trauma of his childhood, and maybe a little wiser.  He's severely damaged, but he's beginning to recover. For the moment he’s past the worst of his substance abuse, and he’s primed to find a way to move his life in a positive direction.  He’s just not quite sure how to do it.

‘Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent.’

Like the first two novels in the Patrick Melrose series, Edward St. Aubyn’s ‘Some Hope’ focuses on the events of a single day leading up to a particular event.  Here it’s an elaborate party to celebrate the birthday of an aristocratic friend, one who has his own share of problems.  Princess Margaret is an honored guest at the party, and St. Aubyn’s satirical and cynical pen is especially sharp here.  One guest, a young woman looking to find her way in aristocratic society remarks:

‘Looks didn’t last forever and she wasn’t ready for religion yet. Money was kind of a good compromise, staked up somewhere between cosmetics and eternity.’ 

Patrick says of the host:

‘There’s a blast of palpable stupidity that comes from our host, like opening the door of a sauna. The best way to contradict him is to let him speak.’

Patrick is beginning to come to terms with his deceased father.  His mother is another story:

‘His mother was really a good person, but like almost everybody she had found her compass spinning in the magnetic field of intimacy.’

It will require one more book (‘Mother’s Milk’) for Patrick to come to terms with his mother.

At any rate the social satire in ‘Some Hope’ is stunning and very entertaining indeed.  Here’s an exchange between a minor character (Johnny Hall) and Princess Margaret:

‘It must be funny having the same name as so many other people,’ she speculated.  ‘I suppose there are hundreds of John Halls up and down the country.’

‘It teaches one to look for distinction elsewhere and not rely on an accident of birth,’ said Johnny casually.

‘That’s where people go wrong,’ said the Princess, compressing her lips, ‘there is no accident in birth.’

And here’s another minor character expounding on Europeans and his efforts to fit in:

‘I love the French.  They’re treacherous, cunning, two-faced – I don’t have to make an effort there, I just fit in.  And further down in Italy, they’re cowards as well, so I get on even better.’

The writing is razor sharp and witty.  It’s comforting to see Patrick slowly finding his way to a more normal, productive life given the trauma of his childhood and the paralyzing 'advantages' of his birth.  St. Aubyn at his best. We really feel tremendous sympathy for this remarkably privileged young man.

I’m looking forward to the final two novels in the series.  Already a little sad that the end is in sight.

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!