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I grew up in a very small town in Idaho. The nearest big city was Salt Lake City, 250 miles south — and even it’s not a big city. Now that I work in New York City, now that 25 miles is a big distance (it seems to take the same amount of time to go 25 miles here as it did 250 miles in Idaho), I find myself missing the open spaces and the mountains and plains landscape of the West. So one thing I loved about Maile Meloy’s recent collection of short stories, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (2009), was the immediate familiarity with that vastness. Meloy grew up north of me in Montana, where many of these stories take place.
I’ll state it up front: this is one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read. From beginning to end, always just when I thought Meloy couldn’t pull it off again, I was fully engaged and drawn into the lives of her torn characters. Some of my admiration certainly comes from my relationship to the landscape and to the characters here — she portrays them so well — but that’s not really it. Meloy’s writing is direct and incisive. Within these eleven stories Meloy’s characters breathe and their depths are shown in strong and unique plotting.
Often, the stories are fairly simple and straightforward. My favorite, one I almost wish I hadn’t read so that I could still read it for the first time, was the book’s first, “Travis, B.” Immediately we get to know the central character, Chet Moran, and the small town he grew up in:
Chet Moran grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered, but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his mother always thought he would die young.
There’s no evasiveness here. In prose so direct as to appear simple when linked together with “and” and “but,” Meloy sets up a sad but matter-of-fact tone. Loneliness is just below the surface as the characters go about their lives. Quickly, Chet is around twenty years old and still walks “as though he were turning to himself to ask a question.” The direct prose continues as Meloy sets up the foundation for a story that is both sad and innocent and terrifying.
He left home at twenty and moved up north to the highline. He got a job outside Havre feeding cows through the winter, while the rancher’s family lived in town and the kids were in school. Whenever the roads were clear, he rode to the nearest neighbor’s for a game of pinochle, but mostly he was snowed in and alone. He had plenty of food, and good TV reception. He had some girlie magazines that he got to know better than he’d ever known an actual person. He spent his twenty-first birthday wearing long johns under two flannel and his winter coat, warming up soup on the stove. He got afraid of himself that winter; he sensed something dangerous that would break free if he kept so much alone.
In order to get out and meet people, Chet begins driving up and down the streets, looking for groups. One night he sees a bunch of people going into the school, so he parks the pickup and joins them in a classroom. These people, all teachers, have come together for the first of what will be a bi-weekly course on education law. The young, pretty, flustered instructor enters the room, and Chet decides to stay and enjoy the pleasant company, even if he doesn’t participate or even care about what everyone is talking about.
One night the instructor asks Chet where she can find some food quickly. It turns out that she is not from the area. In fact, she lives on the opposite side of the very long state of Montana. She signed up to teach the course because when she was finishing law school she was afraid of not having a job; she went for whatever she could find. Now she regrets it because she has a “real job” back where she’s from, and partly as a joke they have given her the license to complete her term in this miserable teaching job. I can’t imagine. In order to teach these Tuesday and Thursday night classes, she must drive for nine hours each way — thirty-six hours per week on the long winter roads. After a few weeks she is obviously exhausted.
On the other hand, Chet’s only solace in his lonely, empty week are those few hours with her. Waiting to see her on those nights is nearly more than Chet can stand. There are tender moments when Chet does his best to charm her and try to make her time there a bit more palatable. We know that Chet is incredibly lonely, has always been lonely, and we want him to find some happiness in this budding relationship. Still, he and the instructor are worlds apart, and we’re not sure, though he’s always been polite and good natured, what he might do to ensure those worlds come together. It’s a wonderfully crafted, lonely story, amplified by the vast, open distance in Montana.
Though this was my favorite story in the book, I was not disappointed by the rest. For the most part the premises continue to be fairly simple as we watch simple people struggling with their conflicting desires and sometimes getting into situations that make the reader’s throat go dry.
Two examples where I found myself physically affected by the story (short breath, dry throat, tensed muscles) are “Red from Green” and “The Girlfriend.” Both stories put older men in close proximity with younger girls. Though the initial motives are guilty but not sexual, the tension reminded me of the hotel scene in Roth’s American Pastoral (though what happens is very different).
In “Red from Green” a young girl accompanies her father on a boating trip. Their companions on the trip are her uncle, a private attorney, and the central plaintiff in a class action law suit her uncle is litigating. The trip is meant to smooze the plaintiff who is thinking of dropping the suit and moving away; if he leaves, the case dries up. Throughout the day the girl watches as her father (who is a district judge) allows the man to take advantage of his desirability. The plaintiff catches fish that are too small but keeps them anyway, something her father usually has no tolerance for. Later the plaintiff takes the girl out to practice shooting, using illegal hollow point bullets. Late in the evening, after the uncle has already retired to his tent, the father also gets up from the fire and goes to his tent. Before entering it he looks back at his daughter whom he has now left alone with this strange plaintiff, who has just asked if she could please kneel on his back to help him loosen up some tight muscles. It’s horrifying to read and wonder just what is going to happen. Worse, why? Did the father expect nothing to happen? Why would he leave it to chance? Did he actually expect something to happen? We have no reason to disrespect this judge. From all accounts, he’s a fine man who runs a disciplined life and courtroom. He’s a protector. But what is that moment of ambiguity about? It’s a great story.
“The Girlfriend” begins when Leo, a man in his fifties, shows up at a hotel room to meet a teenage girl. The air is tense. We soon find out that the girl is the girlfriend of the man who murdered Leo’s only daughter. The case has just ended with a guilty verdict, but this girlfriend lied on the stand to protect this boy who raped and killed another woman. It’s more than Leo can stomach, so he’s asked her to explain it. The tension in the prose makes it feel like we’re in the room with them, and it’s very uncomfortable to witness the discussion between these two broken and desperate people interact. Leo learns more about himself than he’d hoped.
There are other male-female struggles, like in “Lovely Rita” when a young man is killed in an accident at a construction site and his girlfriend comes to his best friend for help: she’d like him to set up a raffle at the construction site for a night with her. In “Two Step,” a wife who suspects her husband is unfaithful discusses the matter with the very woman he is being unfaithful with — and then he arrives, and we feel sorry for both women.
There is also the quirky “Liliana,” which begins with a sentence that echos Kafka’s Metamorphosis:
On a hazy summer afternoon in Los Angeles, while my wife was at work and our children were napping, I answered the ringing doorbell to find my grandmother, two months dead, standing on a stoop.
Liliana, the grandmother, was a very rich woman with a past in war-time Germany cinema. She and her grandson never saw eye-to-eye. She seemed to think him unworthy and never shared much, if anything, with him, forcing him to make his own modest way through the world. He despised her. He doesn’t want anything from her – has resigned himself to that fate, actually — but he certainly resents her. And here she seems to have returned from the dead.
While I stripped the master bed and carried the sheets to the wash, I thought about Jesus and Elvis. People had wanted them back, badly, and still did. But who would have willed Liliana back.
There’s some nice comedy when Mina, the wife, arrives home:
“Mina, dear,” Liliana said, standing to take my wife’s hand. “I haven’t seen you with this Sapphic haircut. Your children are lovely.” / Mina’s hair was cut short because she had no time to deal with it, and I thought of it as gamine-like and sexy. “Thank you,” Mina said. “You look great. Especially under the circumstances.”
As quirky as this story may seem, it actually — and it’s incredible how Meloy always succeeded in doing this — is a subtle look at this man, his insecurities and his strengths and his final devastating revelation.
I was so pleased with this collection I immediately marked Meloy as one of my favorite authors. She’s written one other collection of short stories, which one the PEN/Malamud, and two novels. I believe I have all three waiting for me in the mail today. And I can’t wait to see what she produces in the future.
While growing up I often heard about the fighting in Lebanon, though I was too young to understand just what that meant. It occupied a large part of my young imagination, but when I was older and learned the basics of the conflict, I never bothered to look into specifics. One great thing about a good book: it makes you want to learn more about whatever its talking about. Elias Khoury, who lived through the civil war, wrote White Masks (Al-Wujûb al-baydâ, 1981; tr. from the Arabic by Maia Tabet, 2010) right in the midst of it.
Incidentally, this is one of the best constructed books I’ve had the pleasure to hold. It is a nice, practically square hardback with a sharp-edged binding. The paper is exquisite to touch. Good books should be packaged well.
When I say good book, however, I don’t necessarily mean enjoyable, at least, not enjoyable in the way I would typically use that word. I found White Masks a very difficult book to wrestle with due to a mixture of evasive writing and boring writing. Though I’m glad I stuck through it, I knew throughout that if I put it down for long I might not return to it. Well, more on that in a minute, because the book wasn’t always a struggle. The book begins with a great little introduction.
This is no tale. And it may not be of particular interest to readers, as people these days have more important things to do than read stories or listen to tales. And they’re absolutely right. But this story really did happen.
This is how we meet our nameless narrator (though he won’t always be our narrator). He is a young, though he has already left journalism school behind. Still, he has the urge to chase down stories:
One morning, I saw in the paper a short piece entitled “Dreadful murder in the UNESCO district” and, don’t ask me why, but whenever I see the word “dreadful,” the word “wonderful” springs to mind.
The victim is Khalil Ahmad Jaber, but there seems to be no reason for his murder. For one thing, he is just a simple civil servant, hardly worth the trouble of what appears to be a very brutal, deliberate assault. But even more peculiar is the fact that Jaber is the father of one of the young men killed in the war. The young man being a martyr, all honor to the parents. The mystery called to our narrator.
The murkier the story got, the greater my interest grew. Thanks to a variety of sources I was able to contact, as well as my daily perusal of the papers, I was able to collect a vast amount of information pertaining to the murder, which, according to medical reports, took place on the morning of April 13, 1980.
The narrator interviews many people with even a slight connection to the victim. The result is a series of oral histories, somewhat reminding me of The Good War by Studs Terkel. The narrator steps back and, almost without inserting his own voice, allows the speaker to tell a story.
As each speaker begins his or her story, the victim and the murder often go into the background and the speaker becomes the subject. In fact, one of the longest stories is told by one of the men who found the body. This man had only a few minutes with the victim, and he never knew him alive. However, in these digressive narratives, though the war seems like incidental backstory, there is a lot of subtle criticism.
In the wife’s story, for example, we watch as the Jaber, before his death, goes about hanging up posters of his son the martyr. (Here is a great link to the American University of Beirut Jafet Library that shows a few of these martyr posters.) He does this compulsively. Years pass, people think the war is over, yet he is still going around hanging up posters. His madness continues to develop as he pastes up the propaganda for the cause that killed his son. And in his madness the only support he and his wife receive is from the party’s martyr stipend.
This madness and the posters are a fascinating theme throughout, especially when Jaber begins to use erasers to erase the posters, all amidst his own commentary that the posters erase the wall (probably a partially destroyed wall thanks to the bombs) they are plastered on.
Still, these digressive narratives became, for me, too much of a maze. I admit that pages would go by where I just didn’t know how what I was reading fit into the greater narrative. I’m sure my ignorance is partly to blame. But also, I suspect that meandering could have been part of the point, a way to show that these characters were in control of their story and wouldn’t deviate despite the narrator’s prompts and despite reader expectations.
The reader could just refer to the forensic pathologist’s report and dispense with all the attendant detail; alternatively, he might find it sufficient to read the wife’s statement or those of the municipal workers — they were the ones to discover the naked corpse dumped on the roadside. Indeed, the reader might even regard this introduction as adequate, and leave it at that. Every one of us has a story, after all, and that’s more than enough. We have no need of other people’s.
And in the end, the narrator offers some more commentary on his search for the mystery behind the murder:
I find myself completely baffled: the author feels he doesn’t really know what happened in his story and that he is not in full possession of the facts . . .
So even knowing that the digressions and evasiveness are deliberate, it made for some very frustrating reading. At times it made me think of my experience with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which was also frustrating in its evasiveness and digressions. However, in 2666 I was never tempted to put the book down. The writing was powerful and visceral, and the story, as pointless as its point may be, was fascinating. Thankfully, after finishing White Masks I was glad I’d been through it. The writing is not Bolaño’s (and I never wanted it to be), but it is strong, the voices are interesting, and some of the conceits are illuminating. It is a worthwhile book, but make sure you have the energy to grapple with it.
Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat was so strange, so not what I was expecting from the author of The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie, that I couldn’t wait to find out what else she had up her sleeve. There are quite a few to choose from, and unfortunately I don’t see them that often in the bookstores. But New Directions recently released a new edition of Not to Disturb (1971) that in its lovely black, matte cover called out to me as I was passing it one day.
Not to Disturb (perhaps obviously from its cover) follows Spark’s stranger, more moribund fiction, though I didn’t find it quite as strange as The Driver’s Seat . . . still, it’s pretty strange.
When the book begins, we are thrown into an already ongoing conversation. Several servants are talking about some future event — some future death or murder — as if it has already happened.
‘Small change,’ he says, ‘compared with what is to come, or has already come, according as one’s philosophy is temporal or eternal. To all intents and purposes, they’re already dead although as a matter of banal fact, the night’s business has still to accomplish itself.’
There is a meeting about to take place in the library between the home’s regal owner, his wife, and one of his private secretaries. They have locked the door from the inside and said they are not to be disturbed. For some reason, these servants are preparing for death. How? By arranging their alibis and signing contracts with journalists who will want their personal perspective. They think the police and camera crews will show up first thing in the morning, if not sooner. By their estimation, the event should occur around 3 o’clock in the morning or maybe 6 o’clock.
‘I really could sleep,’ she says. ‘I really feel like another nap.’
‘No,’ says Pablo. ‘Lister wants us all to be suffering from shock when the police arrive. Lack of sleep has the same effect, Lister says.’
Brewing underneath that macabre surface are the strange relationships between all of the people. One of the young maids is pregnant, and they don’t know who the father is.
‘I never went with him,’ says Heloise. ‘I had the chance, though.’
‘Didn’t we all?’ says Pablo.
Sex is very much the issue here. There are a series of other strange relationships too, and not just among the servants.
‘Sex is not to be mentioned,’ Lister says. ‘To do so would be to belittle their activities. On their sphere sex is nothing but an overdose of life. They will die of it, or rather, to all intents and purposes, have died. We treat of spontaneous combustion. One remove from sex, as in Henry James, an English American who travelled.’
Not to Disturb is a very short book. And it seems everything I can say about it would reveal its secrets, and they are more fun to learn — or, rather, discern – from the book itself. The whole book is a lot of fun, even if it is a dark criticism of the upper class and their world, which includes their servants. The characters are revealed through incisive dialogue that is almost always evasive (that’s part of the fun). However, I didn’t find in it the depth of The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie or even of The Driver’s Seat. Still, it suited my mood perfectly when I read it. There is a lot to decipher, interesting people to meet, and Spark fills it with dark comic lines like this one.
‘Death is that sort of thing that you can’t sleep off . . . .’
I have a lot more Spark to enjoy. An exciting prospect considering the fact that I have no idea what to expect next. In a way, it’s the same feeling I get when I anticipate another Aira novel: who knows what is going to be between the covers, but it will be interesting.
A few weeks ago The New Yorker had a story about some books that were on display. These books had been in the personal collection of various famous authors, and all contained interesting marginalia. One was Nabokov’s edition of a collection of New Yorker short stories from the 1950s. In it, he’d assigned each piece a grade, some getting Cs, Bs, As or whatever. He’d only assigned two the high grade of an A+: J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish” (discussed here) and his own “Colette,” published July 31, 1948. It turns out that both stories take place during a nice little summer vacation at a resort, though that’s about where the comparisons stop. July is a good time to read either.
Click for a larger image.
This story eventually found its way into Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory. I haven’t read that yet. ”Colette” is also sometimes titled “First Love.” It is the memory Nabokov has of a summer trip taken in 1909, when he was 10. The first two pages (of a four page story) take place on the train journey from St. Petersburg to Biarritz in southern France. I kept waiting for Colette to show her face, but she doesn’t. It turns out that is far from a bad thing. In Nabokov’s hands, this train journey memory is magical. For example:
It was marvelously exciting to move to the foot of one’s bed, with part of the bedclothes following, in order to undo cautiously the catch of the window shade, which could be made to slide only halfway up, impeded as it was by the edge of the upper berth.
Like moons around Jupiter, pale moths revolved about a lone lamp. A dismembered newspaper stirred on a bench. Somewhere on the train one could hear muffled voices, somebody’s comfortable cough. There was nothing particularly interesting in the portion of station platform before me, and still I could not tear myself away from it until it departed of its own accord.
There’s such lovely peace there in that night, “somebody’s comfortable cough.” A decade later Nabokov’s life — all of Russia — would be in turmoil, but in 1909 they were still able to travel to France for a two-month vacation. The details feel like memory; the reader feels the nostalgia and the comfort.
Colette, who is nine (and whose real name was Claude Deprès), finally arrives at the narrator’s side: “On the browner and wetter part of the plage, that part which at low tide yielded the best mud for castles, I found myself digging, one day, side by side with a little French girl called Colette.” As often happens with young children, they jump right into friendship, having no reason to distrust one another. Our narrator develops an innocent passion for the young girl:
Two years before, on the same plage, I had been much attached to the lovely, sun-tanned little daughter of a Serbian physician, but when I met Colette, I knew at once that this was the real thing. Colette seemed to me so much stranger than all my other chance playmates at Biarritz! I somehow acquired the feeling that she was less happy than I, less loved.
I like how the love is innocent; it certainly feels true and pure. He loves playing beside her, he worries about her, he empathizes with her. She must trust his love, for one day while looking at a starfish, he kissed him on the cheek:
So great was my emotion that all I could think of saying was “You little monkey!”
I kept wondering just what would happen to this young couple. Naturally, this summer fling could not last forever. They were too young to have any power to make it last beyond, yet it does last in Nabokov’s memory:
The leaves mingle in my memory with the leather of her shoes and gloves, and there was, I remember, some detail in her attire (perhaps a ribbon on her Scottish cap, or the pattern of her stockings) that reminded me then of the rainbow spiral in a glass marble. I still seem to be holding that wisp of iridescence, not knowing exactly where to fit it in, while she runs with her hoop ever faster around me and finally dissolves among the slender shadows cast on the gravelled path by the interlaced arches of its border.
This is a wonderful short story about an innocent love and its effect through the years. An A+? Well, I think “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish” is the better of the two (I like Lolita quite a lot more than Catcher in the Rye, so that is not just a statement in support of the man who inspired this bi-weekly feature and its title), but it was such a pleasant read with some hearty sadness, perfect for a warm summer day when one doesn’t want to contemplate suicide.
Using random.org I plugged in the appropriate numbers for the Bolaño/Walser giveaway. Though both winners have their own blogs, I promise that was not a condition of winning — it was all random.org’s doing. Also, one winner was a brand-new commenter whose first comment was for this contest. The other has been here as long as I have — almost.
I appreciate everyone who entered the contest, and I especially thank you all for your kind words of well-wishing on my two-year anniversary. It’s been a lot of fun and much of that is due to your reading, commenting, and support. This is a great community. So . . .
A copy of Roberto Bolano’s Amulet goes to Selena who writes at Like Glass – congrats! Now I expect you to comment more :)
A copy of Robert Walser’s Microscripts goes to Isabel who writes at Books and Other Stuff — congrats too! Isabel has been a very welcome presence on this blog since its earliest days. Thanks!
Emails are going out to Selena and Isabel.
A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010): I would have prejudged this book based on its title. It brings to mind the contemporary loud, voice driven, substance-less, contemporary literary showy pieces. I would have been very very wrong. I didn’t prejudge it because I became interested in – in fact, excited for – A Visit from the Goon Squad after reading some of Jennifer Egan’s fiction in The New Yorker (see the forum here). Her first piece this year was “Safari,” which I didn’t particularly like, though it showed she was obviously a great writer. Then I loved her second piece, ”Ask Me If I Care.” When I found out that piece formed a part of her new book, I couldn’t resist.
Review copy courtesy of Knopf.
This book is a series of inter-connected yet entirely independent short stories dealing with a limited cast of characters and ranging fifty years, from the early 1970s to the early 2020s. Each story could be read alone; each has its own world, its own voice, its own problems, its own inner structure. There is a vast range of styles: the conventional third-person narrative, a second-person narrative (which is often jarring for me but works great here), a piece of journalism (which also works tremendously well — Egan writes for The New York Times Magazine too), and a PowerPoint presentation (again, I feel I should say this to fend off anyone thinking this is just a showy piece — this works very very well; somehow Egan has created a deep story that just wouldn’t be as deep were it not a PowerPoint presentation). Each part comes together so nicely that the formal elements go into the background and do their work to enhance the ongoing narrative. In other words — and Egan deserves an ovation – the virtuosic form and style don’t detract from the elegant substance of the book. Simply, the substance is the outstanding element here.
Though each story can be read independent of the others, I wouldn’t recommend picking and choosing that way. Egan has laid them out in such a way that it feels more like a novel. We watch characters grow older and younger, we see their dreams fall apart and then we go back and see them formed. Fittingly, the book begins with an epigram from Proust, something about time and memory . . .
Then we are suddenly engrossed in the first story where Sasha, thirty-six and a rising assistant to one of the country’s best record executives, is about to steal some poor woman’s purse while that woman is using the restroom in some downtown New York City bar. With a smooth transition, we are with Sasha on the couch as she describes the event and her feelings to Coz, her psychiatrist. This dual narrative continues on seamlessly, and we learn that waiting for Sasha outside of the restroom is/was Alex, her date for the evening, someone who has just moved to New York. When the woman from the restroom appears sobbing, Alex starts up a little mission to help her find her missing purse, shocked that many people don’t get involved the way he thinks they should.
After the hullabaloo at the bar, Alex and Sasha go back to her apartment. The descriptions of downtown Manhattan in the wake of 9/11 are fantastic, bringing the physical space — the absence of two big buildings and their light – into the mentality of the residents (really, they’re small parts, but probably as good as anything I’ve read trying to get a grip on those earlier post-9/11 days). In Sasha’s apartment, Sasha maintains a little shrine of objects she’s stolen through the years.
Alex leaned over to peer at the tiny collection on her windowsills. He paused at the picture of Rob, Sasha’s friend who had drowned in college, but made no comment. He hadn’t noticed the tables where she kept the pile of things she’d stolen: the pens, the binoculars, the keys, the child’s scarf, which she’d lifted simply by not returning it when it dropped from the little girl’s neck as her mother led her by the hand from a Starbucks. Sasha was already seeing Coz by then, so she reorganized the litany of excuses even as they throbbed through her head: winter is almost over; children grow so fast; kids hate scarves; it’s too late, they’re out the door; I’m embarrassed to return it; I could easily not have seen it fall — in fact, I didn’t, I’m just noticing it now: Look, a scarf! A kid’s bright yellow scarf with pink stripes — too bad, who could it belong to? Well, I’ll just pick it up and hold it for a minute. . . . At home she’d washed the scarf by hand and folded it neatly. It was one of the things she liked best.
Toward the end of the story, Sasha is looking through Alex’s wallet when she finds a note that has been there for who knows how long. The note, in pencil, simply says: “I BELIEVE IN YOU.” Before she knows what she’s doing, she’s taken the note.
This story is well balanced and controlled. Egan is dealing with a complex structure, keeping the reader present both in that night with Alex and in the psychiatrist’s office some time later. The themes that rise are subtle and have the aching feel of nostalgia. We also get the sense that things aren’t going to get better for these two. Sasha’s self-destructive habit is bound to keep her from reaching her potential — but she feels like she was lost years ago. And whatever past Alex came from, with that note that meant so much he kept it with him, is quickly receding. This perfectly sets up what is to come in the rest of the book.
After the first story, the book begins to go back and forth in time, though it only ventures into the future in the last two pieces. We meet several of the main characters in one of the early pieces, “Ask Me If I Care.” Though familiar, this piece is better than it was in The New Yorker. Part of that is because it is expanded and more polished. However, it is also better because we are reading it in the light of the stories we’ve already read. We’ve met at least one of the characters in a previous story, and we already have some of the larger themes. This doesn’t detract from the great individuality of the story.
Taking us back to San Francisco in 1979, Egan introduces us to a group of punk-rock teenagers about to go out into the world they really hate, though, as Rhea, the young narrator, comes to realize, only one of them is truly angry. Part of this story is devoted to the sad story of Jocelyn (not the angry one — yet) who is seduced by a forty-something-year-old record executive named Lou. The narrative takes on the opaque air of late nights filled with drugs, alcohol, and sex. Still, through that our Rhea keeps her unique voice and her subtle, perhaps unintentional, insights. Here she is talking to Lou, the aging record executive:
I go, Do you even remember being our age?
Lou grins at me in my chair, but it’s a copy of the grin he had at dinner. I am your age, he goes.
Ahem, I go. You have six kids.
So I do, he goes. He turns his back, waiting for me to disappear. I think, I didn’t have sex with this man. I don’t even know him. The he goes, I’ll never get old.
You’re already old, I tell him.
The next story turns out to be “Safari,” the piece I didn’t like in The New Yorker (imagine my surprise — I had no idea how that would fit here; it does). In A Visit from the Goon Squad, it is fully fleshed, well balanced, not as blatant; in fact, I found it a beautiful piece that slows down the rushing blood of “Ask Me If I Care.” In it we find Lou in the early 1970s on an African safari with his much younger girlfriend and his two teenage children. He’s a lot more likeable here than he is in “Ask Me If I Care,” somewhat revising our opinion of him and preparing us for the pity and disdain we will feel for him when he lies on his death bed in another story.
Time is the goon in the title: “Time’s a goon.” Time comes and takes out these folks’ knee-caps — or puts a bullet through their head — as they squander their dreams, sometimes through no fault of their own. In a piece where a publicist takes a twenty-eight-year-old has-been movie star named Kitty Jackson to help polish the public image of a genocidal dictator, we watch that young star freshen up a bit as she prepares to meet the mass-murderer, bringing back a bit of the promise she once had. In another piece, the fabulous journalistic piece, we read about an attack on Kitty when she was a young star. This piece brought visions of Humbert Humbert to me as the journalist uses his incredible writing ability and narrative thrust to give an almost charming veneer over a horrific event that leads to a very sad vision of lost hope — his own, not Kitty’s.
Egan’s book is all over the place, but she has controlled it so well one never feels knocked around by it. Instead we feel a bit of the violence of time, especially as we see characters we recognize but that are no longer who they once were: “That wasn’t me, in Naples . . . I don’t know who it was. I feel sorry for her.” The last story of the book takes us back to Alex, that young man with the “I BELIEVE IN YOU” note. He wouldn’t recognize himself in that earlier story either, and it’s hard to watch him try to remember that night, that girl, while he tries to organize a public concert for one of the kids we first met in 1979, over forty years ago.
After writing all of that, I’m sure the book might still look like a stylistic, structurally ambitious flight of fancy. I assure you that Egan pulls it off. The ambition, the variety — they never cloud over the intimate settings she’s created where we can spend quiet moments with these compelling individuals. This is an exceptional book that, despite its appearance of flare, should be taken seriously. I hope and expect to see it show up in awards season.
On July 1, this blog had its two-year anniversary. To celebrate I thought that today, rather than post a review (though a review of a really really good book will be up in a couple of days), I would celebrate the anniversary with a giveaway of not one but two books.
First, Robert Walser’s Microscripts. I have an unread copy still in its shrinkwrap.
Last year I read and completely enjoyed Walser’s The Tanners. It is a classic book that finally made its way to the English language with the help of New Directions Publishing and through the wonderful talents of Susan Bernofsky. I recommend it completely. A month or so ago, New Directions released another Walser collection, Microscripts. Walser developed a minute script he used so he could write stories on any found paper lying around. An entire story might find itself on a postcard, or a ticket stub, whatever was there. For years the script was thought indecipherable, but through years of diligent scholarship and scrutiny, these texts were produced in intelligible German. Again through the talents of Susan Bernofsky, these short stories are available to us.
But this book is more than just text. New Directions, with its usual high standards of publishing has created a beautiful book (it also just released the gloriously produced Nox by Anne Carson, which I hope to review soon). This is hardbound and contains complete color scans of the original microscripts in their original size. So we get to see that business card Walser wrote on and his tiny script. On the facing page is the translation. At the back of the book, along with an essay by Walter Benjamin, are the German translations of the text.
I’m afraid that I can’t offer an opinion on the stories themselves because I haven’t read most of them, but what I’ve sampled is quirky and astoundingly intricate.
Second, Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet. I have an extra unread paperback edition for someone.
New Directions is also the publisher behind this giveaway. Over the past few years they’ve steadily released Bolaño’s work for us, and I’m always anxious to see what’s next. This is one of the ones I haven’t read yet. I’ve been saving this book for a bit of a dry spell. Several trusted sources claim it is one of his best, and since I don’t have many more of his works to read, I’ve been saving it — but not for too much longer. Perhaps whoever wins my extra copy of Amulet will accompany me in a read-along when the time comes.
Now, imagine I have two hats, one for Walser and one for Bolaño. To win, leave a comment below indicating which hat you’d like to throw your name in. You can, by the way, through your name in each hat if you’re interested in both titles, though you will only be allowed to win one of them. So your chances of winning will go up since you’ll put your name in each of the two hats. However, your name won’t be entered to the same hat twice, so multiple comments be counted (though you can certainly leave multiple comments about the books or the process or whatever).
I will draw the two winners on this Friday, July 9. Since I’m not sure when I’ll do the drawing, whether early that day or late, please feel free to enter until I’ve announced the winners.
I admit that I bought The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) because of the great cover NYRB Classics gave it on their recently released edition. Of course, it helps that the book is an NYRB Classic. When you trust an imprint as much as I trust them, you can afford to select their books based on their covers. It also helped that Moore was Booker shortlisted three times in his career, and that several of my favorite bloggers rate him highly. But really, the cover was the kicker.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne takes place in Belfast in the middle of the century. Miss Hearne is just over forty. She was raised to be the wife of a wealthy man, though none have ever paid her much attention. To make things worse, when her aunt was growing older, Judith sacrificed her most eligible years in order to take care of her. Her powerful aunt didn’t give her much choice in the matter. But for Judith, this might just have been a good way to excuse away the fact that at forty she is not married, has no prospects, and has little skills she can use to earn some money to pad her meager annuity.
This may sound familiar. We’ve encountered women in this situation before. This is similar to the fate left to Lily Bart, though at least Lily was beautiful and had some pride; she had many chances and could blame society for much of her downfall. Judith lives with the repressed knowledge that she’s unattractive to men. Judith’s mind has developed all sorts of ways to delude herself. She also gets comfort from the protection and love she receives from two figures given life by her imagination; these figures also render judgment. It’s horrifying, really, and the first few paragraphs lay the horrors out nicely as Judith moves in to a new flat.
The first thing Miss Judith Hearne unpacked in her new lodgings was the silver-framed photograph of her aunt. The place for her aunt, ever since the sad day of the funeral, was on the mantelpiece of whatever bed-sitting-room Miss Hearne happened to be living in. And as she put her up now, the photograph eyes were stern and questioning, sharing Miss Hearne’s own misgivings about the condition of the bedsprings, the shabbiness of the furniture and the run-down part of Belfast in which the room was situated.
After she had arranged the photograph so that her dear aunt could look at her from the exact centre of the mantelpiece, Miss Hearne unwrapped the white tissue paper which covered the coloured oleograph of the Sacred Heart. His place was at the head of the bed, His fingers raised in benediction, His eyes kindly yet accusing. He was old and the painted halo around His head was beginning to show little cracks. He had looked down on Miss Hearne for a long time, almost half her lifetime.
Moore begins the book perfectly! Not only is his writing captivating but in a few short paragraphs we get a sense of how damaged Judith is as well as the a glimpse at some of the elements that hold such strong power over her.
All of that is superbly done, but the book is made even better by the additional damaged characters. The home Judith has moved into is ran by Mrs Henry Rice. Mrs Henry Rice’s son Bernard is a fat drop-out with long curly hair who believes he is the next great poet. His greatness gives him license to live off his mother, which she doesn’t deny. In another softly horrifying scene, Judith goes downstairs to find Mrs Henry Rice washing Bernie’s hair in the living room, Bernie half naked by the tub of water. Those two characters are terrifying forces who eventually set themselves up against Judith.
The reason they come against Judith is Mrs Henry Rice’s brother, James Madden. Madden has recently returned from America. Thinking Judith must have some money, he pursues her interest for business gain. She, of course, misunderstands — or is misled.
Her busy hands flew, unpacking the linen sheets, putting them away in the dresser drawer. But she paused in the centre of the room. He noticed me. He was attracted. The first in ages. Well, that’s only because I’ve been keeping myself to myself too much. Go out and meet new people and you’ll see, she told her mirror face. And the face in the mirror told it back to her, agreeing.
When Madden learns that Judith has no money, he stops. There’s worse to Madden, though, and this is tied to an ugly secret he shares with Bernard. Bernard wants Madden to leave, so he convinces Judith that she should pursue Madden more directly.
If it seems that I’ve given away a lot of the story, I can assure you I haven’t. There’s much more to it. There is also more to this book than the sad story alluded to above. Moore’s writing is exceptional. There are multiple perspectives, all clearly defined. He describes the setting in such a way that the reader can feel physical discomfort:
There, under the great dome of the building, ringed around by forgotten memorials, bordered by the garrison neatness of a Garden of Remembrance, everything that was Belfast came into focus. The newsvendors calling out the great events of the world in flat, uninterested Ulster voices; the drab facades of the buildings grouped around the Square, proclaiming the virtues of trade, hard dealing and Presbyterian righteousness. The order, the neatness, the floodlit cenotaph, a white respectable phallus planted in sinking Irish bog. The Protestant dearth of gaiety, the Protestant surfeit of order, the dour Ulster burghers walking proudly among these monuments to their mediocrity.
And there are may echos of James Joyce, from the actual syntax and diction, where we often catch a glimpse of “stately plump Buck Mulligan,” to the interior dialogue, to the blur between the physical and mental world.
No, she said, smiling at the bottle. You’re behind the times. There is, she told the bottle, no earthly reason to feel sorry. Because there is no heavenly reason to feel guilt. At least, nobody has shown me that there is. And I’m waiting to be shown, dear bottle. I’m waiting patiently. It’s five o’clock already. / Too much, the black bottle said. Nearly empty. You are drunk. You drink too much.
Drunk? And why not, nobody’s to mind, nobody minds if I’m anything. Nobody, not a single soul. I’m free. I’m — falling.
The bed, not mine at all. The hotel. The drink spilled on the bedspread. I’ll have to pay, who cares? Only money as Dan Breen used to say. Only money. And meanwhile, as long as I’ve fallen on this bed, I might as well sleep. My shoes, I should take off. Off with my shoes. Sleepy shoes.
Sleepy smiling shoes.
Sleep.
This book actually took me quite a while to read. At just over 200 pages, I expected to breeze through it, but it demanded that I slow down — in a good way. The language and the cadence of the story, at first delicate and then raucous, made it impossible to read quickly. The best thing about this book is not the cover.
I have loved David Mitchell. He wowed me with Cloud Atlas (I was not one who thought it was mere gimickry). And even though many thought it to be a lesser work, a kind of break from ambitious writing, I also loved Black Swan Green, his wonderfully structured and wonderfully described narrative of a small English town in the early 1980s told by a stuttering young boy. Nevertheless, when I saw that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was on the table, I was a bit nervous it would lessen my esteem for Mitchell. I’m sure this is due to the many glowing reviews it had received already, heightening my expectations to the point where I felt there was no way Mitchell could meet them. Well, if you’ve yet to read this book, this review might deflate some of your expectations, which I hope will be a service. For me, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a step backwards.
Review copy courtesy of Random House.
A step backwards from those earlier works doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. For one thing, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet took me to a place that I didn’t know existed, a small man-made island named Dejima, which sat in Nagasaki harbor during Japan’s period of Sakoku. I didn’t know what Sakoku was either. From 1633 – 1853, Sakoku was the Japanese foreign relations policy: no foreigner could enter Japan and no Japanese could leave. Violators were put to death. For two hundred years the little island of Dejima was a peephole into and out of Japan because it was only there that foreigners could come and trade goods.
For much of the time, the Dutch were the primary (if not the only) ones allowed to trade at Dejima, as is the case in July 1799, when this book begins. Jacob de Zoet has just arrived on Dejima. He is a young Dutch clerk working for the Dutch East India Company. A clerk of impeccable morals, he arrives with a new chief, Mr. Vorstenbosch, to clean Dejima of the corruption it had been suffering for years. The last chief deputy had been engaging in illicit trades and privateering. You already know that Jacob was not well received.
“To man its ships, maintain its garrisons, and pay its tens of thousands of salaries, Mr. Oost, including yours, the company must make a profit. Its trading factories must keep books. Dejima’s books for the last five years are a pig’s dinner. It is Mr. Vorstenbosch’s duty to order me to piece those books together. It is my duty to obey. Why must this make my name Iscariot?”
Even the fairly honorable among the workers stretch around the rules, which is somewhat understandable if you consider that they are stuck on a small island all year round; they’re not far off when they call it a prison. They really don’t want someone coming in to stop the only things that make working on Dejima bearable. Here’s an exchange where de Zoet expresses genuine shock that the illegal activities can go on under the noses of those in charge.
“The guards and friskers at the land gate don’t find this odd?”
“They’re paid not to find it odd. Now, here’s my question for you: how’s the chief goin’ to act on this? On this an’ everythin’ else you’re snufflin’ up? ‘Cause this is how Dejima works. Stop all these little perquisites, eh, an’ yer stop Dejima itself — an’ don’t evade me, eh, with your ‘That is a matter for Mr. Vorstenbosch.’”
To me, the first section was very good. In a way, the subtle development of subjugatoin and betrayal reminded me of the much better — because it is much subtler – first and last sections in Cloud Atlas. Getting to know de Zoet and watching him navigate the traps in his way is a real pleasure. De Zoet is the pragmatic and fiercely loyal type we’d expect to see wandering around yelling about “duty!” Back home he has left a fiancé whose father doesn’t approve of the match, so de Zoet is anxious to honorably claw his way to the top. We get the sense that he holds a lot of promise because of his loyalty to duty, but that that loyalty might just be his biggest obstacle. His motivation gets a bit muddied when he begins to fall in love with a Japanese midwife named Orito Aibagawa. The best advice he can get, though, is “If you do love her, express your devotion by avoiding her.”
The story, divided, essentially, into three parts, is very good. The first part focuses on de Zoet’s trials in his first months as Dejima’s despised sanitizer. The second follows Aibagawa to a monastery in the interior. The third features a menacing British frigate, come to use diplomacy or force to benefit from the Dejima trading post. It’s exciting and I didn’t want to put it down though there were two issues that bothered me from the beginning and that ultimately led me to the conclusion that an interesting story in a fascinating setting is most of what this book has to offer: (1) it became clear fairly early on that Mitchell was going to explain everything fairly nicely, taking me out of the narrative process, and (2) that the characters, once setup in clever passages, were going to be predictably good or bad.
Regarding my first issue, this is Mitchell’s first third-person narrative. In an interview with John Self he said in the past he had found this ”infinite” perspective a challenge because he never knew what to leave out. As clever most pieces were, I wish he’d left more out. The character’s thoughts were often shown in tell-all itallics (which leads to my next issue with the book). I kept trying to look for more complexity underneath what was being said and thought and then explained, but I always felt that it was all there on the surface. The plot brings out many of Mitchell’s main themes — the will to power, subjugation and exploitation, mortality and the fight to achieve immortality — but I felt these themes were there to make the plot interesting and not that the plot was there to explore these themes.
As for my second issue with character development, for the most part once Mitchell lays the first stone of character development, we know how the overall structure of that character is going to look. I found that lack of complexity frustrating. Though I felt the characters were likeably good or likeably bad, they never veered from that course, no matter what the plot threw at them. This made them, if not the plot, frustratingly predictable. The plot revealed what happened to the characters but that didn’t give them new contours for the reader to consider.
One of my favorite chapters in the entire novel — the only one in which I marked many passages — was the one small chapter done in the first person. I think Mitchell’s work is much more interesting when he takes that omniscience out of the formula and allows the intimacies of one human mind to suggest what’s going on, limited though that one mind might be in the grander scheme. This passage is told by one of deputy Fischer’s slaves (Fischer being one of the bad characters). The slave has just been deducing what he owns and what he doesn’t own, being a slave, finally determining that he himself owns his thoughts:
Master Fischer owns my body, then, but he does not own my mind. This I know, because of a test. When I shave Master Fischer, I imagine slitting open his throat. If he owned my mind, he would see this evil thought. But instead of punishing me, he just sits there with his eyes shut.
Once this chapter is over, the book resumes the third person and that intimacy leaves. So I enjoyed The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but I don’t feel the desire to read it again, and I feel it would have been better if I hadn’t read quite a portion of it the first time through.
I usually use The Clock at the Biltmore feature to highlight an older (hopefully classic) story from the magazine, but since this week is the mid-year mark (next issue will be July’s!) I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the first half of 2010. It’s also been my misfortune to have dug up a handful of old stories I didn’t like and didn’t want to write about, but I’ve got a good one for the next feature.
Click for a larger image.
Because it takes place in the interior of this blog, I’m not sure everyone who would be interested is aware of the New Yorker fiction forum. On the left-hand sidebar you can see the link to the forum’s main page, as well as the individual pages for the most recent five issues. I do my best to stay on top of the weekly fiction, offering my thoughts and hopefully taking part in a larger discussion about what’s good and bad there. The forum has been active since the first issue of 2010. There are many great comments. Not so many commenters recently, unfortunately. Is it summer? Have the lackluster stories put off readers? Are people not getting what they want from the forum? Perhaps any or a combination of those is the cause.
The good news is that any of you can help make it better (unless the problem really is the run of ho-hum stories — in that case, I’m afraid we’re in the hands of the editors). Most of the fiction is available for free on The New Yorker website, and I’ve linked to them in the individual pages here. If you’re ever interested in some generally good short stories and some always intriguing discussions about them, check out the forum and share your comments.
Furthermore, if you have suggestions for how to make the forum better, please leave your comments below or contact me via email if you don’t want to look critical in public.
Okay, on to the fiction.
There have been 31 pieces published so far this year. The next half of 2010 will have less, I presume; three of the five double issues will be published, and we probably won’t see another issue featuring eight pieces of fiction as we did in the recent June 14 & 21 issue. I’m hoping, however, that the latter half of 2010 has more top-tier stories. I’m afraid the first half has only a dozen stories I thought were worth reading, perhaps a dozen that were mediocre — the rest I thought were quite awful.
Though my general impression of the first half of 2010 is that there was more mediocrity than anything, when I look at the individual titles, I must step back and remember just how superb a few of them were. All in all, reading each issue was more than worth it. Yes, I read Joshua Ferris’s “The Pilot” (which I still think was just thrown in because the magazine wanted something from him), but I also got to read Philip Meyer’s “What You Do Out Here, When You’re Alone.” Also, just as finding a superb short story by an unknown author might lead to a very rewarding relationship over the years, the bad ones eliminate any desires I might have had to explore that authors work. Perhaps unfairly, but, hey, only so much time, etc.
So if I look at the first half of 2010 with those eyes, it has been a great six months. Here are my favorites of the first half of 2010. I’ve even tried to rank them.
- Philip Meyer: “What You Do Out Here, When You’re Alone” — I didn’t write much about this short story when I typed up my thoughts on it, but that isn’t because I didn’t like it. As you can see, I think it’s the best of the years so far, and I’ve acquired his novel American Rust and can’t wait to see if it’s as great. Sadly, this is the one story in this list that is not available for free online.
- Allegra Goodman: “La Vita Nuova” — Strangely, I also didn’t write much about this story. But I did put at the end, “This is what we read this magazine for.” Hopefully that was enough to tempt some to read this great story. I haven’t rushed out to read her other works though.
- Nicole Krauss: “The Young Painters” — This is the last offering of this half of 2010, and I loved it. I thought the writing exquisite. I’ve heard from others that Krauss’s novels are superb in parts and other parts not quite. I’m curious about how I’d feel. From this story, I certainly am excited for her new book.
- Claire Keegan: “Foster” — “Foster” has been a favorite of commenters. In fact, the page devoted to “Foster” has had more hits than almost any other post on this blog — if you don’t count my Home Page, it is number five in all-time hits. It’s an incredibly well written piece, very subtle and touching.
- Jonathan Franzen: “Agreeable” — Despite the fact that I’ve really enjoyed everything I’ve read by Franzen, I can’t bring myself to read his novels. Something tells me I’m going to be disappointed, though I like him a lot in these small doses. However, this piece has convinced me to give up my baseless prejudice and read The Corrections — I’m just not sure when I’ll do that.
- Jennifer Egan: “Ask Me If I Care” — After not enjoying, particularly, “Safari,” Egan’s first offering in 2010, I was surprised to find myself really enjoying “Ask Me If I Care,” which forms a part of her newly released novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. I haven’t read that novel yet — haven’t got it yet — but I am intrigued.
- Jeffrey Eugenides: “Extreme Solitude” — I look forward to anything I can get my hands on by Jeffrey Eugenides. The Virgin Suicides made me a fan for life, so not even my disappointment in Middlesex could take that away. This is a great short story that is derived from his future book.
- Janet Frame: “Gavin Highly” — Some commenters didn’t like this story at all, but I couldn’t shake it. I thought it was written so well and that it’s implicit reflection on story telling was superb. The story telling, from the perspective of a six-year-old, completely covers up the horrors going on — well, almost covers up.
So if I stop griping about “The Pilot” and focus on these eight (and a few others) then I realize how much I’ve enjoyed this year’s fiction up to this point. In the next 11 weeks we’ll see the stories submitted by the remaining 20 Under 40 authors. Hopefully they’ll all be great. Some I’m particularly looking forward to are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Adrian, Daniel Alarcón, Yiyun Li, and Karen Russell (though, really, I’m looking forward to them all).
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