Wheels Within Wheels

In the lobby of the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY there’s a fun piece of art that’s just perfect to stare at for a few minutes while waiting in line to get in to your movie.  It’s one of those complicated Rube Goldberg contraptions in which balls enter at the top and make their way through a fascinating series of ramps, levers, see-saws, etc. and end up at the bottom, only to be reinserted at the top.  You can’t help but be intrigued by how each little part of the mechanism works.  The variety seems endless, and the rhythms and counter rhythms set up by all the balls bouncing through the different parts at the same time is very entertaining.  Well, at least for a few minutes while you’re waiting for your movie.

That’s my overall impression of The Luminaries, this year’s Booker prize winner from Eleanor Catton.  At 830 pages, it's one of those big ones that require a tray table on an airplane.  Would probably be a good candidate for reading on an e-reader.  There’s nothing special about the hard copy except that I found the font to be a little light and hard to read after a while. Catton combines an old-fashioned complicated story with some newfangled concepts:

Old:  A real plot which is revealed to the reader gradually, point by point, through the entire book.  Lots of characters that are well differentiated from each other. A striking opening scene that does recall Dickens, at least in spirit.  A trial scene.  A love interest.  A who-done-it mystery. Lots of assumed names and legal documents. And a touch of the supernatural, a la Wilkie Collins.

New: The plot does not unfold chronologically, but rather the narration jumps around in time, and follows a complex astrological sequence of precession.  While the book is divided into chapters, the length of the chapters is carefully controlled.  The first is 360 pages.  The last is less than a page, and there’s a logical (in this case mathematical?) progression from the length of the first to the length of the last.

The story takes place in the New Zealand gold rush of the mid 19^th century.  It’s not a period I know much about, and that held some interest for me.  But except for the Asian influence (a few Chinese characters and a major role played by opium) and the obvious British flavor of it all, it all seems familiar from accounts of the California and Alaska/Yukon gold rushes from about the same time:  the chance to start one’s life again in a new place with new opportunities, the makeshift amenities, the greed, the improvised and fickle sense of law, the corruption, the alcohol and prostitution, the eccentric characters, the impermanence of it all.

We enter the outer layer of the plot at a point close to the end of the chronology, as it turns out.  We gradually follow the wheel around into inner wheels, and then into inner inner wheels.  The mechanism is fascinating and complex.  It’s fun to see the tiny pieces fall into place one by one.  There are clues skillfully dropped here and there, and also some blind alleys that end up going nowhere.

But the writing itself is disappointing.  It doesn’t have the sharp wit and playful exaggerations of Dickens, nor the other-worldly glow of Wilkie Collins.  It comes across to me as imitative and bland.  There just isn't much beauty or interest in the words themselves.

And the plot?  Well, there are many many characters, and while Catton does differentiate them pretty well, I just didn’t really care about any of them.  They're elements in a complex mechanism and are essentially controlled by the mechanism.   I guess the clockwork itself is the point?  Consider, for example, the love interest.  There are two characters very much in love.  Their love is very deep, even supernaturally so.  But one of these characters doesn’t actually appear until near the end of the book, and the scene in which they fall in love, while we know vaguely of it early in the book, Catton only describes it near the end, and even there she tells us what we need to know to understand the machinery.  There’s no glow, no attraction, no human interest.  The interest is the mechanism itself.  It almost feels like the machinery and the artificial structural rules are in charge.  The result is interesting, but quite detached and ultimately (for me) unsatisfying.  Not nearly enough to keep me happily engaged through 830 pages.  I ended up not caring a whit about the astrology or the strict structure because I didn’t really care about the characters or the writing.

How different is Murakami’s 1Q84, a book of about the same length.  The plot is also complex (albeit in different ways), it unfolds in an interesting fashion, and there is a love story at the center of it all.  But here we really care about the characters, and the love story packs an enormous emotional wallop.  Yes of course Murakami is a different sort of author with different ideas about writing and different goals.  But I still find the comparison useful.

The piece on the wall at the Jacob Burns is fun to look at for a while, but after a few minutes of waiting in line you have your movie.  With The Luminaries, that’s it.  That’s all she wrote.

Austerity

The latest Paul Auster memoir, Report from the Interior, disappointed me.  He’s such an innovative writer I expected something more striking.  It’s a book in three parts.  The first is about his boyhood.  The second is about two Hollywood movies and the influence they had on him as a boy.  The third, and by far the most interesting, quotes letters from him to Lydia Davies from his twenties.  Davies (a prominent and important novelist and translator in her own right, winner of the 2013 Mann Booker International Prize) was his girlfriend at the time.  They would marry later.  Some notable passages from the letters:

‘. . . to get going again, to write, you must meditate, in the real sense of the word. Honest, painful. Then the hidden things will come out. You must forget the everyday Lydia, your sister’s Lydia, your parents’ Lydia, Paul’s Lydia – but then you will be able to come back to them, without loss of inspiration next time. It’s not that the two worlds are incompatible, but that you must realize their interconnections.’

 

The Book of Illusions is one of my all-time favs.

‘He <a friend> spoke of order, precision, limited tasks, I of chaos, life and imperfection, unable to agree with him about the imminent annihilation of the individual. For me the problem of the world is first of all a problem of the self, and the solution can be accomplished only be beginning within and then . . . moving without. Expression, not mastery is the key. <He>, I believe, is still too much of a critic, too absorbed in abstractions that are not counterbalanced by the brute facts of gastral pains. Stick to life, I say. I will make it my motto. Do you agree? Stick to life, no matter how fantastical, repulsive, or agonizing. Above all freedom. Above all dirtying your hands.  . . . I saw that I had once and for all broken the bond with … academic prattle, with the seduction of neat ideas, with literature spelled with a capital L, elegantly embossed in fancy leather bindings.’

The memoir is written in the second person, which gives it an almost eerie personal tone. Knowing more about his literary pedigree does make me respect him more. Nonetheless I was hoping for more. 

Second Hand

Love used bookstores.  So many authors from the recent past fall out of favor and just don’t make it on to my radar.  They’re not discussed much in the periodicals and blogs I read, and their books aren’t available in the usual bookstores. Often it’s the generation or two before the current one that is most ignored.  Those writers seem so old and passé, often trite, and why read what we’re so busy reacting against? But in used bookstores I often come across authors whose names I recognize, and I might know a little something of their reputation, but I've never read a word. 

John O'Hara 1905-1970

A recent find: a collection of 26 short stories, Assembly, by John O’Hara.  It was originally published in 1960.  About half of the stories had appeared in The New Yorker.  The others were new.  Over 200 of his stories were published in The New Yorker, starting in 1928.  That’s a remarkable achievement that may never be duplicated.  I didn’t start reading The New Yorker until the 70’s (O’Hara died in 1970), so I entirely missed his long run there.

Most striking to me is O’Hara’s incredibly sensitive ear for dialogue.  Many of the stories are just about all dialogue, almost screenplays in essence. It’s amazing how in what passes for a literal transcription of a conversation O’Hara can deliver so much information about character, social and economic status, and state of mind.  I’m not at all sure how he manages it.  Rereading some of the stories I realize that though the dialogue reads with a natural flow, it’s not actually very natural.  People really don’t talk like that (true also of many plays).  But nonetheless it seems absolutely true-to-life.  That takes talent and effort.

The stories that are more plot driven were for me less pleasing ('In a Grove', 'The Free').  My favorites are more static, a snapshot in time rendered through conversation.  'Call Me, Call Me' is just two conversations (hence the title), that’s all.  The similarities and differences between the two conversations are fascinating.

'Weakness' is a telling portrait of a boxer, and 'In The Silence' is a stunning depiction of veteran with what we would now call PTSD. 

Now that we’re so wrapped up in avoiding ‘realism’ with all kinds of literary devices, subterfuge, and yes sometimes gimmicks, it is instructive to read someone from a few generations ago how mastered an old-fashioned approach to realistic storytelling.  I’m reminded that it’s not in fact very realistic.  It’s perhaps just as artificial, just as carefully constructed and balanced and hence unnatural.  But it’s better at concealing the artifice, and quite a bit less self-conscious.  The writer isn’t calling attention to himself quite so directly, and he’s not trotting out techniques with the self-satisfied smile of a young magician that has just learned a new trick.  But it’s just as artful in a more modest, less obvious way.

True, today new and experimental non-mainstream fiction is much more accessible than 40 years ago.  But if reading eventually becomes all digital, what will become of the used bookstore?  With nothing new being printed, will the trickle-down process from new to used eventually dry up completely? How will we discover these worthy authors who just don’t get much exposure in today’s world?  I hope the work of writers like O’Hara will be somewhere for readers to stumble across. Fifty years from now the works of many of today’s hot young writers may well dwell in similar obscurity. Where will we find them?

Holy Hialeah, Batman!!!

The latest Tom Wolfe is, well, Tom Wolfe.  Back to Blood isn’t short, and it can’t and shouldn’t be taken seriously.  It reads like a comic book, and it’s lots of fun.  The overall plot isn’t particularly interesting or believable, but each chapter is a set piece, like a scene in a play.  Each  has a setup and a dramatic (often overly dramatic) climax.  The language is action packed and over the top, but not in any pretentious way. Lots of all-caps, made up words to represent sounds, some profanity, plenty of exclamation points … you get the picture.  You can’t even take the character names seriously. There’s a minor character, a fat man, whose last name is Belli.  Another minor character is a stylist, i.e. makeup artist, named is Maria Zitspoppen. 

 

A real circus: and here's the ringmaster.

Many of Wolfe’s pet peeve issues reappear in the book: the fakery (in Wolfe’s view) of most modern art, violent clashes between races and economic strata, ignorance in high places, selfishness that masquerades as charity, lust that presents as professional expertise.  It’s all on display here, and in Technicolor.

The story takes place in Miami, and just as Bonfire of theVanities was in one sense a portrait of New York City at that time, this is a portrait of today’s Miami.  And it’s not a pretty picture.  As usual, it’s pretty much a catalog of The Seven Deadly Sins, with a few more tossed in for good measure.  Don’t look here for any real heroes, or any relationships between characters that might be generous and loving. That would be far outside the purview of Wolfe’s intensely cynical outlook. Or for that matter don’t look for any complexity or depth in these characters either.

But here and there there’s a wink from the author, as if he’s silently and slyly admitting to us that he’s exaggerating, that it really isn’t so bad, that he’s just doing his best to entertain us.  So read it with a smile.  Bring on the dancing bear, the chorus girls, the strong man, the dwarf, and the incredible fire eater.  There’s plenty of evil to go around, but in the end it’s pretty much harmless comic-book evil.  Gosh, if any of this were truly believable there really is no hope.  I’ll go with the wink, thank you.

A Gem

I knew Jeannette Haien when I worked at The Mannes College of Music in the 1970’s and 80’s. She was one of the strongest forces on the piano faculty at that time. She had few students, but she chose wisely. Her presence on a jury was formidable; indeed she was not always an amiable colleague. She demanded respect, and she could be very abrasive if she thought she wasn’t getting her full share. Over the years she helped to form some big talents, but her role was always a bit controversial. I respected her judgment and her taste even as I feared her scorn and dreaded having to cross her. There was only one Jeannette; yes there was probably only room for one Jeanette Haien on the planet.

Jeanette Haien

I do remember vaguely that she had published something close to when I left the school, but at that time I paid little attention. So last week I got to wondering what had happened to Jeanette and I was sad to discover that she had died in 2008; but I was happy to learn that she had published two novels, and I quickly acquired copies of both. The All of It is the first, published initially in 1986 when Jeanette was in her sixties.  I have no idea how someone could publish a first novel of this quality at that age.  She was an accomplished musician and teacher.  Where from this skill with words, literary form, dialect, structure, and character?  These are techniques that writers develop over decades, but Jeanette published this gem late in life seemingly from out of nowhere.

It’s a compact novel, traditional in structure; it takes place in Ireland.  Yes, there’s a priest and also some mysterious racy conduct. But this is a book with great regard for both literary and cultural tradition.  No modern touches here, no tricks, no self-referential mirrors.  But there is great beauty of language, and much subtlety in morality and human values.  The language recalls Banville minus his modern touches. The brevity makes the narration riveting. Once you get a bit into the 140 pages you’ll read it straight through.  I was both captivated and moved. This is one of those side lines that spin off from the main railroad line of literary evolution.  It probably won’t lead anywhere important in the future; rather it looks back to other times, other places, other techniques.  I’m glad to have it with us.

Jeanette, I understand from this book that I knew only small parts of you.  My loss. But I’m glad to have read your first novel, and I look forward to reading the second (and last) novel as well.  Your teaching continues.

Is Hollywood Listening? Bollywood? Anywood?

When Aravind Adiga’s first novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker Prize in 2008 I read it with high expectations, and for the most part I was not disappointed. It’s high energy fiction that is both serious and dark.  So his second novel, Last Man in Tower, has been on my list for a while. Having just finished the latest Lahiri I decided to stay in India for a bit longer and see what Adiga has been up to.

One aspect of Mumbai

Again, it’s high energy.  The hustle and bustle of modern Mumbai jostle the reader along on every page.  And that aspect I did enjoy. Economic development against the backdrop of colonialism, extreme poverty, diverse religious traditions, and deep-seated corruption are jarring, but both the voltage and the financial stakes are high.  Nonetheless this book is not nearly as dark as his first. I didn’t feel the same power of potential violence around every corner nor did I ever feel threatened in any way. It’s a modern tale that weaves together historical forces, individual idiosyncrasies, historical baggage, and old-fashioned storytelling. We do sense the outcome from the outset.

Another

Here, the real protagonist is modernization. It has its own momentum, and all characters pale alongside its brilliance.  It’s an unstoppable force, and the real interest is in how various individuals react. Some accommodate, some resist, some abdicate, some flourish. But it is unstoppable, and the inevitability is the only scary part here. It will happen, like it or not.  You can laugh (there are many funny passages); you can cry. Choose your stance in reaction; place your bet. But the country will careen forward even without a carefully charted course. That momentum is the one truth that cannot be questioned; it is today’s faith in India.

In essence the story and the narrative technique are very traditional.  The characters are not especially memorable, mostly because the writing is not unexceptional and fairly shallow. But I do think this book could make a very good movie.  With the right director and good casting this would be fabulous cinema.  The high energy would push the movie along from scene to scene, and the quirky characters could provide lots of foreground interest. This Is more Slumdog Millionaire than The Lowland. 

I hope Adiga feels empowered to move towards a more serious literary approach in his next book. There were plenty of signs in the first book that indicate he’s fully capable of it. This book is a bit of a step back.  A good read, but not the forward progress I had hoped for.

A Canadian Thanksgiving

Thank you, Nobel Committee.  Alice Munro, Nobel Laureate. Finally.

Alfred Nobel.  Made his fortune in explosives.

So gratifying to see that a writer who has devoted her career to cultivating a relatively small bit of land exquisitely well has finally been recognized with the biggest prize of all. Yes, it may be a bit old-fashioned, but her prose is exquisite and sparse, and there are many doses of truly modern thought hidden within. The space between the words is just as important as the words themselves. What's not said is crucial.

And no ego.

Speaking of ego, when will Philip Roth be recognized by the Swedes? So often we (they) get things wrong. As Roth put it in American Pastoral:

'You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we  all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive; we're strong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well lucky you.'

Alas, Nobel Committee, you got one right this year, but your track record leaves quite a bit to be desired. You are in good company.