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Though I’ve not read many of her books, I have a suspicion that Francine Prose is one of our underrated — or, at least, underread – novelists. I very much enjoyed Goldengrove, and found much more to it than most critics, some of whom attempted to dismiss it as young adult (whether such a claim should be dismissive is another argument). Despite my good experiences with her, I wasn’t really looking forward to My New American Life (2011). The plot sounded too much like a polemic against the Bush-Cheney years. Not that those years don’t deserve their criticism; it’s that they do get plenty of criticism, every day, almost everywhere. What could this book offer? The cover didn’t add anything to my excitement nor did it do anything to dispel my wariness that this book might be a bit overstated.
Review copy courtesy of Harper Collins Publishers.
It turns out my wariness was justified. Despite the book’s strengths, it is rather blunt criticism, familiar to anyone who pays attention, of the last decade. It begins in October 2005, a little less than a year into Bush’s second term, which was already considered the Cheney administration.
But, all that aside for a minute, I must say that Prose can write wonders. I was fully engaged in the novel until about the last quarter, despite my belief that the characters were typical and familiar. She has a great pen, and her ability to tell a story is what pulled me through this otherwise disappointing novel.
It’s a fine day in October 2005. Lula, an Albanian immigrant who has been living illegally in the United States, has found a sponsor and is now living in my neck of the woods in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City. Her sponsor is Stanley Larch, an economist who gave up teaching at a univeristy (a job he loved) to make more money working at an investment bank. Of course, he’s now miserable but cannot afford to go back. It does his troubled heart wonders to help Lula. With the assistance of one of his childhood friends, immigration lawyer extraordinaire Don Settebello, Stanley has secured Lula legal status. It’s a wonderful morning. And Lula is happy to help Stanley and Don feel like they’re doing good:
Lula knew that some Americans cheered every time INS agents raided factories and shoved dark little chicken-packagers into the backs of trucks. She’d seen the guys on Fox News calling for every immigrant except German supermodels and Japanese baseball players to be deported, no questions asked. But others, like Mister Stanley and Don Settebello, acted as if coming from somewhere else was like having a handicap or surviving cancer. It meant you were brave and resilient. And being able to help you made them feel better about themselves and their melting-pot country. Their motives were pure, or mostly pure. They liked power and being connected, they liked knowing which strings to pull.
Lula’s job is fairly simple: don’t worry too much about the house, just focus on Stanley’s teenage son Zeke. About one year earlier, on Christmas Eve, Zeke’s mother abandoned him and Stanley. Lula feels she can be some sort of balm for this family, especially since Stanley and Zeke never see each other, and don’t particularly like it when they do. In her spare time, which is substantial, Lula, encouraged by Stanley and Don Settebello, writes stories from her homeland and about her new American life (they suggest she call the journal My New American Life). Lula passes the stories off as her own, though in fact they are not. Her life has been hard — she lost her parents during the UN bombings — but in fact the real drama she injects into her journal, the stuff that really makes her seem like a lost immigrant, comes from her ancestors or is made up. It’s not even fully true that her parents died in the bombings; her dad, drunk, was driving back to his homeland when the bombings were occurring – he wrecked the car.
But back to the first chapter, to that fine October morning. In the very first lines Lula sees a black Lexus SUV approaching. It passes the front of the house ominously but does not stop. Nevertheless, she’s nervous: “Blame her delicate nervous system on growing up under a system that thought the Soviet Union was too liberal and was best friends with China until the dictator decided that China was too liberal, and China cut them loose.” It’s here we get a bit of the backstory. But then the SUV approaches again. This first chapter goes back and forth in time, we constantly see the black Lexus SUV approaching, but it is drawn out nicely and fluently; the tension builds, but Prose moves away from that scene to the past so smoothly, we don’t complain. It isn’t until page 25 that the SUV finally stops in front of the house and three Albanian males get out.
They come because they found out — connections — that Lula was Albanian and granted legal status. All Albanians are family, they say, so they’ve come to ask a minor favor. Can she please just watch this gun for them. Obviously worried her fresh legal status is in jeopardy, Lula nevertheless complies. On the one hand, how can she say no now that they’re there; on the same hand, she’s extremely attracted to one of them — The Cute One. The Cute One, whose name, it turns out, is Alvo — at least, that’s what she knows him by — is the one in charge. In the days that come, rather than fret about her legal status, she cannot wait until Alvo comes back for the gun or for another favor.
From there the story continues decently as Lula’s relationship with Stanley and Zeke (and Alvo), and with American culture in general, develops. At the same time, the plot becomes more and more stretched to get around the book’s concepts. For me, the book is set up nicely, but this contortion of the plot prevents it from ever going deeper. It is entertaining, a nice read, but it doesn’t dig down and expose anything new or interesting. I’m pretty sure that, despite little description here, you already have a fine idea for just who Stanley, Zeke and Don Settebello are. I doubt you’re far off.
Nevertheless, as in Goldengrove there is more going on under the surface of the story: “the relationship, however regrettable, between deception and survival”; putting Lula’s story against this time in American history. Lula finds it to her advantage to make things up. Lying is, often, the most natural reaction in any situation. In fact, when she feels she can tell the truth, she’s relieved. Prose is digging a bit deeper here as some of the characters, because of deception lose “the right to say what had happened.” The journals are fake, much of who she’s presented herself to be is not true. Interetingly, Stanley and Don know this and
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.
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