A few years back I read Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. In it I found evidence that Prose was an excellent reader, but for some reason I didn’t go further and test out whether she was also an excellent writer. I’m not sure why but, despite her prolific and relatively acclaimed output, her name rarely comes up when I’m talking with people about books — in fact, I’m not sure it ever has. I know this says much more about whom I discuss books with than about Prose and the reception of her books; she is an established writer, after all. However, I also don’t recall seeing her name come up on many blogs. I became interested in Goldengrove (2008), however, when I saw a few places where it was considered (derisively, I should add) to be a young adult book — a book that is great for those lower beings, but hardly worth the time of a serious reader.
Interestingly, there was little substantive criticism backing up the claim that this was a YA novel, as if that classification alone suggests the book’s perceived faults. Predictable? Unsophisticated? Sentimental? Clichéd? I don’t think these labels apply to Goldengrove. Furthermore, the more I put my head out there, the more I realize that these labels do not apply to YA as a category. I admit I have my own prejudices against what many (most) young adults read and against those authors who do little more than change characters’ names (or species) in a marketable formula. Of course, I have the exact same prejudices against what many (most) adults read and against those authors who do little more than change characters’ names (or psychoses) in a marketable formula. My wife has helped me to see what I always knew: there are brilliant writers writing for young adults who are just as skilled, who produce books that are just as complicated and subtle and provoking as the brilliant writers writing for adults. To suggest that YA is lesser is to do these important writers a grave disservice — which is exactly what’s happening. Admittedly, there’s a stylistic and thematic difference between YA literature and adult literature, but the idea that “if this book were written for teens I’d consider it a masterpiece, but if it is for adults it’s a major disappointment” doesn’t work for me. Good writing is good writing — to suggest a YA novel is lesser suggests that there are no intelligent young adults and that there are no YA writers who write for that crowd. It shouldn’t be reduced to “milk for babes.”
All of that is a tangent — Goldengrove is a highly self-consciously crafted novel; that is to say, Prose cleverly constructs a book whose substance as a book is as much the topic as is the narrated grief the characters suffer through — maybe it is the central topic. Adults, young and old, reading closely will find some fascinating play going on here.
Goldengrove’s narrator is Nico, a thirteen-year-old girl. Perhaps that’s why some consider it YA. Or maybe it’s because the book is centralized around a summer of grief, familiar terrain in many books (good and bad) written for young adults. But this is not a book about coping with grief. Grief is present, and wonderfully — unsentimentally – rendered, but in Goldengrove grief is a vehicle to explore other ideas, ideas which seem to have flown by many readers, though I can’t help but think they are obvious. Then again — and I’m certainly a culprit here — when we read a book thinking we already know what it’s about, we often miss the points of departure in the narrative that will expand our experience.
“Goldengrove” comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” one of my favorite poems in my poetry reading days (I hope my ability to read and digest poetry will return to me). The word “grief” is used in that poem, but it is not necessarily a poem about “grieving” someone’s death — at least, not the way we commonly think of such grief. This book, however, is on the surface about grieving someone’s death. And admittedly, the first paragraph does seem to usher in a tone and setting that could be cliché:
We lived on the shore of Mirror Lake, and for many years our lives were as calm and transparent as its waters. Our old house followed the curve of the bank, in segments, like a train, each room and screened porch added on, one by one, decade by decade.
When I think of that time, I picture the four of us wading in the shallows, admiring our reflections in the glassy, motionless lake. Then something — a pebble, a raindrop — breaks the surface and shatters the mirror. A ripple reaches the distant bank. Our years of bad luck begin.
The “four of us” are Nico, her older sister Margaret, and their parents. Margaret, like the book, is named after the Hopkins poem. Margaret, who suffers some heart ailment, drowns in Mirror Lake in the first chapter, causing a summer of grief and emptiness for the surviving three (well, four — but we’ll get to the boyfriend in a minute). Goldengrove really could be a simplistic book about grief paying homage to a beloved poem. But there is another creature here.
Nico is named after the late German singer most famous, at least around my home, for her tenure with The Velvet Underground. So Nico, Margaret, and the book itself are named after something else. “Goldengrove” also happens to be the name of the father’s bookshop. So there’s something going on with the naming — or it could just be the way the author selects the names (I don’t believe that is the case). The lake is named Mirror Lake, and within the first few chapters we not only see several mirrors, but we have constant references to films that feature mirror-scenes: Persona, Ninotchka. Nico calls herself and Margaret the mimics. And now when Nico looks into the mirror she sees Margaret more and more each time. Something besides grief is going on in these pages — or these leaves of Goldengrove, if we want to bring another perspective of Hopkins’ poem here.
Again, there is a surface explanation. Aaron, Margaret’s grieving boyfriend, finds that it is easier to talk to Nico about Margaret’s death. They each feel they’ve found the only other person who understands. They attempt to overcome their grief together; part of that process involves watching some old movies (the book is full of film references). The book takes a very disturbing turn when Nico realizes that Aaron is trying to turn her into Margaret. There’s the reference to Vertigo.
But what of all of these references to film? To mirrors? To names? And that’s not all — there are many references to music and to painting, and probably several other forms of art. They stand out all over the pages. But I doubt I would have been able to put it together without the help from a review of this book by D.G. Meyers at A Commonplace Blog. There he illuminates the book by explaining that “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” is itself derivative of another work of art: George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. Apparently Hopkins wasn’t inspired to write this poem because of some real life experience but rather by a literary experience. And Meyers suggests that there is evidence that Eliot’s book is also derived from another work of art. To me, this pulls together the aspects of naming in this book, as well as the various artistic references and the references to mirrors.
In a very impressive way, this book is self-conscious of its own derivation from art and its own status as a piece of art. Besides grieving, this book is about the role of art in interpreting our world. Only, it goes further than that. This is not art just to help interpret experience; this is art as a precursor to experience — or, in other words, art as the basis for experience.
I wasn’t sure about this angle as I continued reading the book. In fact, in the last few pages I felt that if Prose didn’t revisit this angle, it wouldn’t have actually been anything other than over-reading — but there it all comes together in a family trip to Rome where the father finds the perfect cover for his book Eschatology for Dummies– a picture of Fra Angelico’s The Last Judgment. And there’s the final scene where the adult Nico goes to an art gallery in France. When some clouds cover the sunlight, the pieces of art lose their shimmer and look more like mirrors.
There’s more to this book. Even reading it from the perspective outlined above leaves me feeling like I’ve only grasped a part of it. Somehow all of those artistic aspects are tied to the grief — and it’s saying a lot about this book that it convinced me it is worthy of closer readings in the future. That is not unsophisticated or clichéd. And I believe close readings would reward both adults and young adults.
If you have a print subscription to The New Yorker (which comes at the very reasonable price of $40 for a year’s worth of 47 issues — 5 are “double-issues”) you get access to their complete digital archive. I hope they never take away this perk. To me, access to every past issue of The New Yorker, in digital images of the original pages, is worth $40 per year on its own — more than $40, actually. There are countless treasures in there. I spend a bit of time each week going through old articles, particularly old essays, book reviews, and features on authors. With the death of Salinger, I was reminded yet again of the literary wealth found in these archives — most of his stories were originally published in The New Yorker. I thought, then, that it might be a worthwhile ongoing project to highlight some of the fiction from the past 85 years (The New Yorker was first published on February 21, 1925, so it’s almost anniversary time with its classic Eustace Tilley cover).
I plan on making this a regular feature on The Mookse and the Gripes. For now — and maybe forever – it is going to be called “The Clock at the Biltmore” as an homage to the place where J.D. Salinger and The New Yorker editor William Shawn met, a collaboration that in my mind represents a particular aspect of classic New Yorker fiction. William Shawn (besides being father to Wallace Shawn) was editor from 1952 – 1987, longer than any other. Franny and Zooey is dedicated to Shawn. “The Clock at the Biltmore” will also remind me of when I started this feature, and of this first post’s subject. Ideally I would have liked to have worked in some sort of reference to William Maxwell, who was the fiction editor from 1936 – 1975. While I believe The New Yorker has always had high standards and high quality, there’s no denying that these were fantastic years for fiction — American fiction in particular. I’ll just assume that William Maxwell met with Shawn and Salinger at the clock at the Biltmore too, and if someone could confirm that for me, I’d love it.
So here is the plan. Fortnightly I’ll revisit some piece of fiction first published in The New Yorker. I’ve already reviewed a few here: Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” and “Sexy” and “The Third and Final Continent” in Interpreter of Maladies, Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith” in Goodbye, Columbus, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” and “Rosa” in The Shawl (I don’t count the ones like Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” or Tobias Wolff’s “Class Picture” because they were part of and became something else). Obviously, The New Yorker is a favorite of mine, so on The Mookse and the Gripes you’ll also find a round-up of all the fiction published in 2009. And, of course, there’s the new New Yorker fiction forum on the left sidebar where we discuss the fiction being published in each week’s issue – we’d like to get some more participants there, if you’re interested. Why all of this attention to The New Yorker when great short stories are also published elsewhere? Because The New Yorker has a corner on the market — and because I have a subscription for it.
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This past week KevinfromCanada did a blog tribute on J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, and he spent some time focusing on that collection’s first story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” While Salinger’s death reminded me that I need to revisit Nine Stories (it had been a decade since I read them all in one day — along with The Catcher in the Rye), it was Kevin’s post that really prompted me into action.
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” published January 31, 1948, was Salinger’s second story in The New Yorker, and it set the bedrock for a relationship that would help, in part, define the two. Also, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is the first of Salinger’s stories to feature the Glass family. Besides the ones found in Nine Stories, I’ve never read Salinger’s Glass stories, almost all of which (all but one) were first published in The New Yorker, so I’m hoping this project gets me to read them all finally. After rereading this story, I can’t wait.
Interestingly, the first member of the famous Glass family we meet is an in-law. Muriel Glass, “a girl who for a ringing phone dropped nothing,” is married into the Glass family by way of the oldest son Seymour. When the story opens Muriel and Seymour have been married for around six years (1942 – 1948), and they are in Florida celebrating a second honeymoon. Since they married, however, Seymour has been deeply scarred from fighting in World War II. People, particularly Muriel’s parents, have noticed. While the phone rings we watch Muriel fix her nails, slowly. When she finally picks up, she hears her worried mother. Seymour is the topic of this telephone conversation, and we’ll meet him in a few minutes, but this conversation says a lot about Muriel and her mother — a lot that helps understand the ending to the story. It’s been said ad infinitum over the past week, but Salinger is a master at dialogue. You feel like you’re in the room watching with an analytical eye.
“Muriel? Is that you?”
The girl turned the receiver slightly away from her ear. “Yes, Mother. How are you?” she said.
“I’ve been worried to death about you. Why haven’t you phoned? Are you all right?”
“I tried to get you last night and the night before. The phone here’s been — “
“Are you all right, Muriel?”
The girl increased the angle between the receiver and her ear. “I’m fine. I’m hot. This is the hottest day they’ve had in Florida in — “
“Why haven’t you called me? I’ve been worried to — “
“Mother, darling, don’t yell at me. I can hear you beautifully,” said the girl. “I called you twice last night. Once just after — “
“I told your father you’d probably call last night. But, no, he had to — Are you all right, Muriel? Tell me the truth.”
“I’m fine. Stop asking me that, please.”
“When did you get there?”
“I don’t know. Wednesday morning, early.”
“Who drove?”
“He did,” said the girl. “And don’t get excited. He drove very nicely. I was amazed.”
“He drove? Muriel, you gave me your word of — “
“Mother,” the girl interrupted, “I just told you. He drove very nicely. Under fifty the whole way, as a matter of fact.”
“Did he try any of that funny business with the trees?”
I love how Salinger conveys his information. We don’t even know Seymour’s name yet, but we have an accute sense of him that continues to build over the next few pages as the conversation continues to talk about him without ever approaching specifics. Much comes by alluding to something else — for example, Muriel asks her mother where that German book of poetry that Seymour sent her from the war is. It seems a minor point in the conversation — Muriel wants to know where it is because Seymour asked about it on the way to Florida, wondering if she had read any of it. The mother exlaims, ”It was in German!” The poet is never mentioned here by name, and the dialogue moves on, but by simply alluding to Rilke Salinger has added a whole new dimension to this very short story.
After the phone conversation, we move out to the beach where Seymour sits in a terry-cloth robe, conversing with the five-year-old (or so) Sybil Carpenter. He is very kind to Sybil, plays with her, tries to get her to be more kind to the three-and-a-half-year-old Sharon Lipschutz who sits by Seymour when he is playing the piano in the evenings (Sybil wants Seymour to push Sharon off the bench). There’s some vitality to Sybil, something pure, that Seymour loves, and he adores it — he kisses her foot. As kind as he is, though, we can’t help but fear him when he takes Sybil out to play in the sea, even though (or perhaps because) he is exciting the little girl with a nonsense story about bananafish eating so many bananas they get stuck in holes under the water.
There is much to this short story, and it completely stands on its own, meaning it does not require any knowledge of the Glass family at all. But, of course, there is much more about the Glasses — perhaps volumes and volumes more.
To continue on my project to read Tobias Wolff I chose his “other” ”novel,” The Barracks Thief (1984; PEN/Faulkner Award). I put “other” in quotation marks because due to Wolff’s own repudiation of his first novel Ugly Rumors, this and Old School are considered the only two novels he’s written. I put “novel” in quotation marks because this is really a novella, in some ways much more closely related to his short stories than to Old School.
The Barracks Thief begins by introducing Guy Bishop, basically a failure of a man (when Boeing was hiring anyone, he they still fired him), who will eventually cave in from the weight of an affair and leave his wife and two sons. But in the first lines of the book, Wolff presents Guy from a contrasting perspective, in a moment of deep intimacy:
When his boys were young, Guy Bishop formed the habit of stopping in their room each night on his way to bed. He would look down at them where they slept, and then he would sit in the rocking chair and listen to them breathe. He was a man who had always gone from job to job, and, even since his marriage, woman to woman. But when he sat in the dark between his two sleeping sons he felt no wish to move.
When he can no longer stay, he seems to most deeply regret the effect his leaving would have on his family, particularly on his wife — she’ll be so lonely without him, it will be very hard for her raising these two boys on her own, etc.
Philip did learn to get along without his father, mainly by despising him. His mother held up, too, better than Guy Bishop had expected. She caved in every couple of weeks or so, but most of the time she was cheerful in a determined way. Only Keith lost heart. He could not stop grieving. He cried easily, sometimes for no apparent reason. The two boys had been close; now, even in the act of comforting Keith, Philip looked at him from a distance. There was only a year and a half between them but it began to seem like five or six. One night, coming in from a party, he shook Keith awake with the idea of having a good talk, but after Keith woke up Philip went on shaking him and didn’t say a word. One of the cats had been sleeping with Keith. She arched her back, stared wide-eyed at Philip, and jumped to the floor.
“You’ve got to do your part,” Philip said.
Keith just looked at him.
“Damn you,” Philip said. He pushed Keith back against the pillow. “Cry,” he said. “Go ahead, cry.” He really did hope that Keith would cry, because he wanted to hold him. But Keith shook his head. He turned his face to the wall. After that Keith kept his feelings to himself.
There is more emotion and narrative packed into the first few pages of The Barracks Thief than in many novels of any size. The fracture in the family is swift, but we feel its depth in such moments when we see Philip just keep shaking Keith. The effects of this hard childhood will reverberate through the book even though the book takes place primarily in a barracks where Philip is preparing for a tour in Vietnam. Though we leave Guy Bishop, the first character we met, in a moment of intimacy, in the first sentence of the book, there is no sudden lurch in the narrative as it moves to other subjects; it flows smoothly from one moment to the next, the first pages echoing in the background.
After briefly watching Phillip and Keith grow older, we move to the barracks for the remainder of the novel, and get a shift in perspective as Phillip becomes our narrator. As the new guy at the barracks Philip hesitates to be seen too much with the two other new guys, Lewis and Hubbard. If they group together, they’ll forever be “the new guys.” However, on the Fourth of July the three of them get placed on guard duty together. This is not the typical assignment, though. They drive several miles from the barracks to an ammunition dump. They are to shoot to kill anyone who gets too close. When their commanding officer leaves, we get to see them settle in and start to get familiar with each other. Sometime during the night, a truck approaches, and a man gets out to speak with them:
“Okay, mister,” Hubbard said, “we’re all here.”
“Bet you’d rather be someplace else, too.” He smiled at us. “Terrible way to spend the holiday.”
None of us said anything.
The man stopped smiling. “We have a fire,” he said. He pointed to the east, at a black cloud above the trees. “It’s an annual event,” the man said. “A couple of kids blew up a pipe full of matches. Almost took their hands off.” He turned his head and barked twice. He might have been laughing or he might have been coughing.
“So what?” Lewis said.
The man looked at him, then at me. I noticed for the first time that his eyes were blinking steadily. “This isn’t the best place to be,” he said.
Thus begins a very tense interchange between the man, apparently trying to save their life from the fire, and the three new soldiers, trying to act their roles with their guns. They surprise themselves, and are exhilarated by, their capacity for violence now that it is expected of them. Naturally, after such a transformative event, the three new boys become much closer.
The book again, after this additional intensely emotional episode, shifts gears. Someone in the barracks begins stealing money from his fellows. Its very disturbing that an individual within such a tight group could steal from those with him in these terrible circumstances. It has a bad effect on everyone, but a particularly troubling effect on the new recruits.
Because the stealing was something new, and I was new, I felt accused by it. No one said anything, but I felt in my heart that I was suspected. It made me furious. For the first time in my life I was spoiling for a fight, just waiting for someone to say something so I could swing at him and prove my innocence. I noticed that Lewis carried himself the same way — swaggering and glaring at everyone all the time. He looked ridiculous, but I thought I understood. We were all breathing poison in and out. It was a bad time.
In its ability to shift from one momentous scene to the next without throwing the reader, The Barracks Thief reminded me of Old School. I love that Wolff lets his works go where they will. Despite this appearing loose, though, it is actually a very tightly structured novel. In it we get a variety of situations dealing with a variety of characters, including a prostitute I haven’t even introduced here.
Groups come together and break down, and in breaking down we see that they were never really on the same page at all. But those two forces — the ones that pull people together and the ones that drive people apart — are wonderfully rendered in this fascinating novella.
I know, I know — sometimes these celebratory Man Booker awards can seem a bit indulgent. But I love them.
I did not know this, but in 1969 and 1970 the Booker Prize was awarded retrospectively. In 1971 it became a prize for the best novel in the year of publication. From the Man Booker webpage:
At the same time, the date on which the award was given moved from April to November. As a result of these changes, there was a whole year’s gap when a wealth of fiction, published in 1970, fell through the net. These books were simply never considered for the prize.
Now, to correct this, forty years later, a longlist of 22 books “which would have been eligible and are still in print and generally available today” has been chosen. This long (very long) list will be wittled down to six by a three-judge panel: Rachel Cooke, Katie Derham, and Tobias Hill.
Their shortlist will be announced March. Then we, the “international reading public” get to pick the ultimate winner with our votes. This time, Salman Rushdie will not win — I don’t think.
Here is the list:
- Brian Aldiss: The Hand Reared Boy
- H.E. Bates: A Little of What You Fancy?
- Nina Bawden: The Birds on the Trees
- Melvyn Bragg: A Place in England
- Christy Brown: Down All the Days
- Len Deighton: Bomber
- J.G. Farrell: Troubles
- Elaine Feinstein: The Circle
- Shirley Hazzard: The Bay of Noon
- Reginald Hill: A Clubbable Woman
- Susan Hill: I’m the King of the Castle
- Francis King: A Domestic Animal
- Margeret Laurence: The Fire Dwellers
- David Lodge: Out of the Shelter
- Iris Murdoch: A Fairly Honourable Defeat
- Shiva Naipaul: Fireflies
- Patrick O’Brian: Master and Commander
- Joe Orton: Head to Toe
- Mary Renault: Fire from Heaven
- Ruth Rendell: A Guilty Thing Surprised
- Murial Spark: The Driver’s Seat
- Patrick White: The Vivisector
I haven’t read a one of them. I haven’t heard of most of them — or several of the authors. I look forward to hearing about them, hopefully picking up a gem, and perhaps I’ll try to make my way through the shortlist when it comes next month.
The first W.G. Sebald book I heard of was The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Satrun, Eine englische Wallfahrt, 1995; tr. by Michael Hulse, 1998). Something in the tone of the recommendation and the title of the book made me start to imagine how the book would feel and how I would feel about it — you’ve been there too. I tried to avoid such imaginings, but with all of its positive criticism it was hard to hold back my expectations. About a year ago I began my Sebald project (to read all four of Sebald’s books of “fiction” in the order in which he wrote them), and Vertigo and, particularly, The Emigrants just made my anticipation for this book all the more acute.
When I began reading The Rings of Saturn I knew next to nothing about the book. Sure, I knew that it was structured as as walking tour around Norfolk, in eastern England. I knew from the other two books I’d read that this walking tour would be replete with ruminations on the past, complete with documentary photos. But the main theme? I didn’t know what this one would be about.
The title, with no context, did little to help. What do the rings of Saturn have to do with East Anglia or even with modern history in general? I see it now: a lot, in a very beautiful metaphorical sense. This is a book about the ravages of time, about destruction, particularly the destruction (self- or otherwise) of human endeavor. East Anglia was once the scene of thriving communities living off of some of the most important ports in Europe. Today, little of that remains. The fishermen Sebald encounters facing the east, sitting on the beach ”just want to be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness.” That line alone, and the orientation of the fishermen, nicely sums up the book. The rings of Saturn were once large moons in orbit, but through time and great destruction they’ve been reduced to an ephemeral dust — something tragic, something whose trace haunts the present with its reminder of the past — yet it’s beautiful.
And that’s one of the best ways I can think of to describe this book — tragic, yet beautiful. Sebald begins the book in his unassuming manner; he’s just finished a project that entailed a lot of work (I see many think he’s referring to his book The Emigrants), and he wants to relax and settle down again by taking a walking tour around Suffolk:
At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place.
What follows would be very difficult for me to summarize in any decent way in the space I’m giving myself here. It’s a walking tour, so Sebald encounters many people, many sights, and many artifacts. During such encounters, he lets his mind roam through his own personal past as well as into the history of the region — and of the world (I particularly liked the segment on the silk worm’s migration). One of the firs things he encounters is the skull of Thomas Browne, a seventeenth-century physician (whose father was a silk merchant). As a doctor, Browne was very interested in the human body, but his other interests also brought in the natural world. Sebald briefly discusses Browne’s book Urn Burial. In this book, Browne describes an ancient Roman burial site found in Norfolk. Urn Burial becomes very melancholy when Browne discusses mortality and destruction. Browne’s view (which reminded me of Yeats’ view) is that “On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation. For the history of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark.”
Over this burial ground, over the centuries, battles were fought and forgotten — or remembered with a slant, as this one Sebald describes from a painting:
This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. I requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position?
As with the other two Sebalds I’ve read, The Rings of Saturn has no strong narrative. Sebald goes from topic to topic at will. Yet the book is held together wonderfully by melancholy and that central theme of destruction. It’s got a beautiful, respectful tone. And it is full of wonderfully rendered scenes, my favorite being that of a massively destructive storm that Sebald witnessed first-hand — fantastic writing (and translation). I think this may change at times through my life, but right now my favorite Sebald book is still The Emigrants, but I can see how The Rings of Saturn could swap positions — they are both marvelous works, full of insight and beauty as they force us into astonishment as we gaze at a great void.
For those of you who have been interested in but wary of Roberto Bolaño, you might find a friendly meeting place (more friendly than, say, 2666, which was my meeting place) in Monsieur Pain (1999; tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, 2010). This is one of Bolaño’s earliest works — that’s not to say “easy” works, but I think it is more accessible than anything else of his I’ve read. It was published as Monsieur Pain only in 1999, but it was written in 1981 or 1982 and titled The Elephant Path, an apt title that connotes both trailblazing and following, though I can’t say that is why the title was used. Under this title it won a few awards in Spain; under another, it won some more. Though it’s an early work, and one in which we can see seeds of what would sprout in his later books, I would hesitate to call this an apprentice novel. To me, that means the novel is useful primarily to the author, helping him or her develop something else that is of benefit to readers. That is not the case here, though, because in Monsieur Pain we see an already mature author. More than an apprentice novel, then, it is a fully developed point of departure. Rather than follow the elephant track created by other writers, which he shows he can do in this book, he shows he is also going to create his own elephant track through the bushes. In his later books he starts knocking down the trees.
Review copy courtesy of New Directions.
Of the works I’ve read, this is Bolaño’s most traditional prose piece. He sets up what appears to be a fairly conventional story set in Paris in 1938. In fact, the setup (and Chris Andrews’ excellent translation) seems to come from this period in literature. It adheres to formal constructs while showing an awareness of what’s going on underneath the text. Here are the first lines in the novel; they reminded me, to my pleasure, of modern European literature:
On Wednesday the sixth of April, at dusk, as I was preparing to leave my lodgings, I received a telegram from my young friend Madame Reynaud, requesting, with a certain urgency, my presence that evening at the Café Bordeaux, on Rue de Rivoli, relatively close to where I live, which meant that if I hurried, I could still arrive punctually at the specified time.
The narrator is Monsieur Pierre Pain, a veteran of the first world war, in which, he says he might have been a deserter had he not nearly died when his lungs were burned out by gas. He doesn’t have much direction in his life, but since his convalescence he has stumbled into a profession of sorts.
From then on, supported by a modest invalid’s pension, and perhaps as a reaction agains the society that had imperturbably sent me forth to die, I gave up everything that could be considered beneficial to a young man’s career, and took up the occult sciences, which is to say that I let myself sink into poverty, in a manner that was deliberate, rigorous and not altogether devoid of elegance. At some point during that phase in my life I read An Abridged History of Animal Magnestism, by Franz Mesmer, and, within a matter of weeks, became a mesmerist.
At the beginning of the book, as is seen in the first quote above, Pain receives a telegram from the young widow of one of his ex-patients. Pain rushes out of his apartment to meet her, but on his way out he is surprised to run into two men who are speaking Spanish. When they see him, they go quiet and stop going up the stairs. They also don’t move aside to let him by easily. They seem confused by his presence or by his leaving, and do not hide the fact, even as he is walking out the door, that they are watching him. The narrative then interrupts a bit, and we go back to the short week when Pain was treating the widows husband, truly trying to save this admirable man’s life even though he knew it was too late. This interruption is one of the novel’s highlights, in my opinion — he, of course, falls in love with the widow, but he can never tell her. He and the widow have met several times in the intervening months, but this telegram is unprecedented. When he meets her, she requests his assistance:
“Pierre,” she repeated, stressing each word, “you must see my friend’s husband, professionally, it’s urgent.”
I think I ordered a glass of mint cordial before asking what illness Monsieur . . .
“Vallejo,” said Madame Reynaud, adding, with equal concision, “Hiccups.”
Throughout the remainder of the novel, Pain tries to meet with this man dying of hiccups. The first time, he is thwarted by doctors who scoff at him and his strange trade, though they can find nothing wrong with Vallejo. But even after Pain has left, thinking his assistance will not be needed, the two men speaking Spanish show up and ask him not to treat the dying man. They offer him quite a large bribe to just go away.
I can already tell that if I try to recount even just a little bit more of the novel I’m going to describe something the novel is not. Yes, Pain continues to attempt to meet and treat Vallejo, but that is not really what the story is about. Pain is an interesting character in Bolaño’s universe because, though like others he is seeking an elusive target through strange mazes, he does not have the ability to ascribe meaning to his search — he’s no poet, in other words. He tends to reflect the following description of mesmerism well:
For me, mesmerism is like a medieval painting. Beautiful and useless. Timeless. Trapped.
Still, he is an interesting character to watch as he becomes increasingly paranoid, and perhaps delusional (we’re not really sure if the horrors he believes are coming are really on their way). The book becomes surreal and dreamlike at times, and we’re sailing smoothly on Bolaño’s flowing prose. Interestingly, I wouldn’t classify the other Bolaño books I’ve read as surreal. Here, the disorientation he conveys is more akin to Kafka’s type of absurdity; his later works tend to show a disorientation brought on by an empty shock caused by violence or loss. Perhaps, because of its surrealism, it also feels more conventional. But even while this seems more like a conventional novel, within it are the fascinating rifts, subtly placed, the anti-climactic dead ends that leave his character (and his reader) wondering what the buildup was for, that show what Bolaño will be capable of when he throws convention out. If you cannot tell, I am becoming more and more a Roberto Bolaño fan.
The NBCC finalists were announced today.
- Bonnie Jo Campbell: American Salvage
- Marlon James: The Book of Night Women
- Michelle Huneven: Blame
- Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall
- Jayne Anne Phillips: Lark and Termite
American Salvage and Lark and Termite were finalists for the National Book Award in November, but Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin took that prize. Wolf Hall took the Booker in October. I’ve seen a lot of positive coverage for The Book of Night Women, probably from several of the critics who will choose the final winner. The only finalist I’ve already read is Lark and Termite. I also interviewed Jayne Anne Phillips about the book and a few other things early last year. I wish her the best. The book is fantastic.
After feeling, slightly, like I was reading Philip Roth’s memoir when I was reading the Zuckerman books (I know it is not really autobiographical), I have been very interested in reading his real memoir, Patrimony (1991; National Book Critics Circle Award). Roth’s books have such a real feel to them, such a sense of history, that I never doubted for a second that Patrimony would be less substantial than his books.
When the book begins, Roth tells us that his father, at age 86, was incorrectly diagnosed with Bell’s palsy. He woke up one morning to find that he couldn’t move half of his face. Apparently, if the paralysis was caused by Bell’s palsy, it would go away eventually. Unfortunately, Roth soon learns from the doctors that this diagnosis was incorrect. For the last decade a tumor had been growing in his father’s head. Here is how, in a scene where Roth tells his father the bad news, Roth weaves together so many of the themes he will focus on a decade and a half later:
I sat in the chair across from him, my heart pounding as though I were the one about to be told something terrible. “You have a serious problem,” I began, “but it can be dealt with. You have a tumor in your head. Dr. Meyerson says that given the location, the chances are ninety-five percent that it’s benign.” I had intended, like Meyerson, to be candid and describe it as large, but I couldn’t. That there was a tumor seemed enough for him to take in. Not that he had registered any shock as yet — he sat there emotionless, waiting for me to go on. “It’s pressing on the facial nerve, and that’s what’s caused the paralysis.” Meyerson had told me that it was wrapped around the facial nerve, but I couldn’t say that either. My evasiveness reminded me of his on the night my mother had died. At midnight London time, he had told me that my mother had had a serious heart attack and that I’d better make arrangements to fly home because they didn’t know if she was going to survive. “It doesn’t look good, Phil,” he said; but an hour later, when I phoned back to tell him my flight plans for the next morning, he began to cry and revealed that she had actually died in the restaurant where they had had dinner a few hours earlier.
The main narrative in the rest of the memoir focuses on the events leading up to the death of Herman Roth. Herman Roth has not always been an easy father: expecting perfection, he constantly berated his quiet wife and, even during his illness, does the same to his girlfriend; he frequently gives advice where none is wanted, saying it is because he truly loves and is truly caring for those around him. Nevertheless, Roth also develops the vulnerable side of Herman Roth, a first-generation American Jew who, unlike the father in the Zuckerman novels, fully supported his son’s literary endeavors.
Also, while Roth describes the vulnerabilities of his father, he also shows us his own weaknesses, some of which came unexpectedly and were most unwelcome given the circumstances. Here, for example, is where Roth learns that he has been mostly cut out of the will. Roth himself told his father to do this, that he didn’t need the money. Nevertheless, with death imminent, he is shocked by a bit of bitterness:
Didn’t I think I’d deserved it? Did I consider my brother and his children more deserving inheritors that I, perhaps because my brother, by having given him grandchildren, was more legitimately a father’s heir than was the son who had been childless? Was I a younger brother who suddenly had become unable to assert his claim against the seniority of someone who had been there first? Or, to the contrary, was I a younger brother who felt that he had encroached too much upon an older brother’s prerogatives already? Just where had this impulse to cast off my right of inheritance come from, and how could it have so easily overwhelmed expectations that I now belatedly discovered a son was entitled to have?
I think this small passage also shows how many angles Roth can add to his themes. This matter with the will is just a small side-road in the narrative. It shows Roth dealing with what he considers to be selfishness that he is now entitled to. It shows how sentiment can get attached to otherwise unimportant things like money. And through all of this are constant questions as Roth tries to pin down the cause. It is a very philosophical novel, and it hearkens, at times, to another great rumination on death: “Had it been the MRI of Yorick’s brain that Hamlet had been looking at, even he might have been speechless.”
The entire book is a well controlled look at many of the intimations that come when death is imminent. One of my favorite aspects was the look at Newark, New Jersey. Herman raised his family in Newark. He and his Jewish neighbors spent years toiling in poverty, as first-generation immigrants, hoping to give their children the opportunities they could never have. And that generation, and their city, is passing away seemingly with Herman Roth:
He only quieted down about it when I turned up from Elizabeth Avenue toward Bergen Street and began to drive through the most desolate streets of black Newark. What in my childhood had been the busy shopping thoroughfares of a lower-middle-class, mostly Jewish neighborhood were now almost entirely burned out or boarded up or torn down. The only ones about seemed to be unemployed black men — at any rate, black men standing together on the street corners, seemingly with nothing to do. It was not a scene conducive to alleviating the gloom of three people on their way to consult with a brain surgeon, and yet the rest of the way to the hospital, my father forgot the encounter awaiting him there and, instead, reminisced in his random fashion about who had lived and worked where when he was a boy before the First World War and on these streets immigrant Jews and their families were doing what they could to survive and flourish.
Newark is haunted by memories. Memory is also one of the central themes in the novel. Here is a passage where Roth and another man are discussing suicide. Both men had been tempted at times in their life, but Roth says that is not the case with his father:
“Not him. He doesn’t even have a fantasy solution. I was over there today to get him to the doctor. I had to drive him across poor, poor, poor old Newark. He knows every street corner. Where buildings are destroyed, he remembers the buildings that were there. You mustn’t forget anything — that’s the inscription on his coat of arms. To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory — to him if a man’s not made of memory, he’s made of nothing. . . .”
But these memories are all contained in perishable human beings. These archives do not last. Once Herman Roth is gone, so are his memories of his first-generation life — that whole generation will have passed away. And therein lies some of Roth’s main themes, themes that must keep him up at night given how pervasive they are in his fiction and the quality of his ruminations and his rants on mortality:
“Understand,” my father said, “I’m talking about just another three or four years . . .”
The doctor nodded; he understood very well. The original request for a couple more years had, in a matter of minutes, been extended to three or four, I noticed. My father was obviously coming to trust and even to imbue with a certain divine might this doctor who was at once so much more patrician and potent-looking that haimisher, heavyset Dr. Meyerson, who had proposed to do rather more than stick a needle up through the roof of his mouth. It occurred to me that if we were all to sit and talk together in Benjamin’s office for another day or two, my father would eventually overcome his fear of calling down even worse misery upon himself by appearing sinfully greedy and proclaim to his doctor what had to be in his heart, which was that he wanted not just three or four years more, but to tackle the whole damn thing all over again: “I raised myself up out of the immigrant streets without even a high school education, I never knuckled under, never broke the law, never lost my courage or said ‘I quit.’ I was a faithful husband, a loyal American, a proud Jew, I gave two wonderful boys every opportunity I myself never had, and what I am demanding is only what I deserve — another eighty-six years! Why,” he would ask him, “should a man die at all?” And of course, he would have been right to ask. It’s a good question.
It’s a terribly touching memoir through and through. I was reading the last few pages on the trainride home and I got choked up. From page one we know what will happen to Herman Roth, but that knowledge doesn’t stop the emotional response — Roth is a master. Amidst all of the distractions on the train — the noise, the people getting up, my approaching stop, the fact that I didn’t want to get emotional in front of a bunch of strangers — I was still completely emotionally engaged with the story. I put this up with The Ghostwriter and American Pastoral as my favorite Roth.
So a few book awards have already been announced. These are more in my wife’s specialty, though I like to see what happens here and often find myself really admiring the work.
Newberry:
- Winner – Rebecca Stead: When You Reach Me
- Honors – Phillip Hoose: Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice; Jacqueline Kelly: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate; Grace Lin: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon; Rodman Philbrick: The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg
My wife read When You Reach Me a few months ago, and she liked it but doesn’t think it’ll be that accessible to children because the ideas are much more prominent than any story. In fact, for most of the book she kept telling me that she had no idea what the point was. I don’t mind that for me — plotlessness can be a great thing — but I see what my wife means when we’re talking about children reading. The Newberry seems to go back and forth on that line, don’t they. One year they pick a book that parents will want their chilren to read and understand (like this year) and another they will pick a rather substance-less book that the children will enjoy (like last year’s The Graveyard Book). I can see each side: on the one hand, let’s immortalized (as best we can) a book with great ideas we want children to consider, even if they won’t do it until they are much older; on the other had, let’s immortalize a book that children can read and love when they are children.
Caldecott:
- Winner – illustrated and written by Jerry Pinkney: The Lion and the Mouse
- Honor — illustrated by Marla Frazee and written by Liz Garton Scanlon: All the World; illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski adn written by Joyce Sidman: Red Sings from Treetops: A Year in Colors
Because of its fine illustrations, we’ve had our eyes on The Lion and the Mouse for a while, but we haven’t got it for our boys yet. Maybe soon.
Printz:
- Winner – Libba Bray: Going Bovine
- Honor — Deborah Heiligman: Charles and Emma: The Darwin’s Leap of Faith; Rick Yancey: The Monstrumologist; Adam Rapp: Punkzilla; John Barnes: Tales of the Madman Underground: An Historical Romance, 1973
The Printz is my wife’s favorite book award. It deals only with young adult literature. With their audience, they seem to succeed where the Newberry fails, meaning they award books that deal with real issues but that do so by approaching the reader. I’ve read two of the nominees: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation:Vol. 1 — The Pox Party (I really need to read Vol. 2, also a Printz finalist, which came out in paperback not too long ago). My wife loved last year’s winner Jellico Road. Also, one of her favorite books of the last year was Northern Light, a YA book that deals with the same case as An American Tragedy.
Some five years ago, my wife, on a whim, bought This Boy’s Life (1989; PEN/Faulkner winner). I thought it looked interesting (and I’d seen previews for and clips from the film version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro), but I never bothered to pick it up. My wife then completely forgot that she was the one who bought it with the intention of reading it. Last year I finally entered the work of Tobias Wolff with his exceptional novel Old School. I was surprised at how good that novel was because Wolff (if he is known — and more people should read him) is better known for his short stories and this memoir. So I finally pulled This Boy’s Life off the shelf. I will make sure my wife reads it soon because this is, again, exceptional.
After reading Old School and knowing that it is in part inspired by Wolff’s own adolescence at an exclusive private boys’ school (The Hill), I was taken completely off-guard when he presents himself as a young delinquent child of a poor single-mother. How does this boy who rolls cars down hills, smashing them into other cars, who doesn’t do his homework and cheats on his tests, whose wealth is gained by robbing his paper route patrons, and whose wealth is lost in a carnival game binge become a Hill School boy who grows up to be the award-winning author of such disciplined prose?
But even without that mystifying angle – which is certainly a real angle to the story (indeed, it is the angle that helps this memoir transcendant) – the young Wolff’s life is heartbreaking and captivating. The book begins on the road. Wolff, who at this point in his life would prefer to be called “Jack” instead of “Toby” (because he knew a girl named Toby), and his mother Caroline are fleeing an abusive relationship in Florida. “Jack’s” father and mother are divorced — he lives, they think quite comfortably, in Connecticut with the older son (Geoffrey Wolff — an acclaimed writer himself, and who wrote his own memoir about living with the father: The Duke of Deception). The two sides of the split family have little contact. After Florida, Caroline hopes to settle in Utah where she wants to take advantage of the uranium mining opportunities in the 1950s. When they see that Moab is over-populated by others with the same goal, they continue on to Salt Lake City. The fact that no one has found any uranium in Salt Lake City just means there’ll be more for them when it is found. When the boyfriend they left behind in Florida finds them, but not before he settles in with them again, mother and son eventually flee again, this time to maybe Phoenix . . . or Seattle — Seattle it is.
In this first part of the story Wolff gives a penetrating portrait of his relationship to his damaged mother. She loves him tremendously and with no small amount of guilt, though she recognizes that it is an asset to him if he is tough. He tentatively takes advantage of her love and guilt from time to time (the book opens just before a truck crashes down a canyon; seeing his mother’s grief and worry that he witnessed such a tragedy, Jack gets her to buy him some souvenirs, which he knows she cannot afford). Caroline actually grew up quite wealthy, and she misses that lifestyle somewhat. But all is lost now. Worse, she was emotionally beaten down by her own father, and we see how much she does not want to do the same to her young son. He has her trust and her loose discipline. Though he sees himself as becoming a better person, at this time in his life he can hardly stop himself from exploiting her softness. Though the book doesn’t explore this too much, there might even be a punitive motive to how Wolff acts out; he’s aware of what he doesn’t have.
To many who freely give their opinion, Jack needs a father. Caroline, obviously, has bad luck with men, and she doesn’t really want to get into a relationship again. But for her son, she does her best. Here is a poignant scene of intimacy between mother and son after a failed date with a charming man who has promised to buy Jack a Raleigh bicycle:
I slept badly that night. I always did when my mother went out, which wasn’t often these days. She came back late. I listened to her walk up the stairs and down the hall to our room. The door opened and closed. She stood just inside for a moment, then crossed the room and sat down on her bed. She was crying softly. “Mom?” I said. When she didn’t answer I got up and went over to her. “What’s wrong, Mom?” She looked at me, tried to say something, shook her head. I sat beside her and put my arms around her. She was gasping as if someone had held her underwater.
I rocked her and murmured to her. I was practiced at this and happy doing it, not because she was unhappy but because she needed me, and to be needed made me feel capable. Soothing her soothed me.
She exhausted herself, and I helped her into bed. She became giddy then, laughing and making fun of herself, but she didn’t let go of my hand until she fell asleep.
In the morning we were shy with each other. I somehow managed not to ask her my question. That night I continued to master myself, but my self-mastery seemed like an act; I knew I was too weak to keep it up.
My mother was reading.
“Mom?” I said.
She looked up.
“What about the Raleigh?”
She went back to her book without answering. I did not ask again.
Among her several suitors after they arrive in Seattle is the very persistent Dwight. Each weekend, he drives from his home in Chinook, a few hours away, to see her. Tobias’s actions in school and in the street are increasingly cause for alarm. Worse are the things she doesn’t know about; for example, when home alone he points a loaded rifle at pedestrians outside. Dwight sees the mother’s concern as leverage to get her to marry him:
Dwight drove down that weekend. They spent a lot of time together, and finally my mother told me that Dwight was urging a proposal which she felt bound to consider. He proposed that after Christmas I move up to Chinook and live with him and go to school there. If things worked out, if I made a real effort and got along with him and his kids, she would quit her job and accept his offer of marriage.
She did not try to make any of this sound like great news. Instead she spoke as if she saw in this plan a duty which she would be selfish not to acknowledge. But first she wanted my approval. I thought I had no choice, so I gave it.
It’s terrible to see what is happening here. Nevertheless, the young Tobias moves out of his mother’s house to live with a new family in Chinook. Not wanting to hurt his mother, and still unaware that there is any choice, he never tells her just how horrible a person Dwight is.
My mother told me she could still change her mind. She could keep her job and find another place to live. I understood, didn’t I, that it wasn’t too late? / I said I did, but I didn’t. I had come to feel that all of this was fated, that I was bound to accept as my home a place I didn’t not feel at home in, and to take as my father a man who was offended by my existence and would never stop questioning my right to it. I did not believe my mother when she told me it wasn’t too late. I knew she meant what she said, but it seemed to me that she was deceiving herself. Things had gone too far. And somehow it was her telling me it wasn’t too late that made me believe, past all doubt, that it was. Those words still sound to me less like a hope than an epitaph, the last lie we tell before hurling ourselves over the brink.
Needless to say, the marriage takes place. But this is still the beginning of the book. And, without giving much away, as looming a character as Dwight is, his relationship with Tobias is still secondary. This is a story about growing up into an identity you’ve always imagined as yours but that seems completely unlikely. It is highlighted with sometimes fun and sometimes terrible images and perspectives of youth. I can’t recommend it enough.
* This book has started me on two mini-projects. One is to read everything I can find written by Tobias Wolff. I’ve already got his other novel The Barracks Thief, his other memoir In Pharaoh’s Army, and many of his short stories in the collection Our Story Begins. I am so delighted by his writing that I think I’ll get through all of this in no time.
Maybe to pace myself in the Wolff project, I set myself up on another project: to read some other literary memoirs. By literary memoir, I mean that it has to be more than recollections — I want to feel the same as I do when I read a great novel. I’ve only dabbled in the genre (love Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, don’t love Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes). For this project, I’ve slated Philip Roth’s Patrimony, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (I know, is it really a memoir? close enough for my purposes), Primo Levi’s Survival at Auschwitz, Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, and, killing two birds with one stone, Tobias Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army. This list may grow. I already feel I should go buy Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception. I’m not sure how interspersed these will be among other reading projects, but I’m looking forward to getting through these titles, most of which have been sitting on the bookshelf far too long. If you can think of some other literary memoirs, please feel free to list them below.
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