Year: 2012

K. Arnold Price: The New Perspective
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The New Perspective
by K. Arnold Price (1980)
Littlehampton Book Services (1980)
85 pp
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A few years ago, The Guardian ran an article titled “How did we miss these?” Here, “50 celebrated writers” chose one book that was a lost literary treasure. (I have been happy to see a few from this list come out from NYRB Classics in the past few years). Colm Tóibín picked a book by a fellow Irish author. According to Tóibín, K. Arnold Price was 84 when she published her debut, The New Perspective. I don’t think I saw this article until a few years later, and when I did I didn’t run out and find the elusive book. William Rycroft did, though, and loved it (his review is here). Loved it so much, in fact, that he lent me his copy, hoping this book finds another admiring reader. It did.

I had read Will’s thoughts onThe New Perspective, but I couldn’t remember what it was about, and that cover didn’t help. So I just dug in, without even reading the jacket cover. I was a bit surprised at how quickly the book’s tone settled on me and I felt I knew the two main characters, Cormac and Pattie, husband and wife. But not knowing these characters is part of the point.

For much of the book, Pattie is a first-person narrator, and here she is as she and Cormac drive home from her son’s wedding:

At any rate the unflagging movement of the car is satisfying. We are driving away from — yesterday we were driving to. The thing is done, accomplished, not brilliantly, not even with the excitement that might be expected on such an occasion, but at least carried through and settled — as far as any human contract can be said to be settled.

Price puts Pattie’s mood on page perfectly. She herself is rather unassuming for herself but also for other people. It’s as if she doesn’t expect much from them and they never fail to meet that expectation. On this occasion, though, she feels she might should feel something:

Later, lying on our backs in bed in a room faintly lighted from a street lamp, I confess my guilty feelings to Cormac.

I couldn’t feel any proper sentiments! Everything seemed absurd — I couldn’t get up any interest in Valerie. She is a dull girl, Cormac!

M’m . . . dull to you, perhaps. She suits Bob. It’ll last, I think.

And I couldn’t stop criticising. Did you notice Valerie’s mother? I thought she looked grotesque, poor thing! I felt we were taking part in some elaborate clowning — and not even well done . . .

A wedding, says Cormac, yawning, is a survival. It’s archaic, a Feast of Unreason.

That’s what it is. Nothing was real.

Don’t worry, says Cormac. It’s the last. There won’t be any more in this family.

When this last son has left the house, Pattie and Cormac have been married for 26 years. They are the quiet type. They have no real interest in society, and Pattie finally feels like they can now phase into their private life together, a private life in which she has the utmost confidence. Pattie feels secure that she and Cormac have weathered whatever storms would come their way, and she doesn’t want to be with anyone besides this man who may not communicate much vocally but “whose power of physical communion I must call perfection.” He is obviously kind to her, expects her to do as she pleases.

To start off their new life together, they move to a new home, one they can make their own, stripped of the obligations of their past lives. Pattie is excited to set it up with Cormac. One day Cormac comes home and simply tells Pattie that he’s purchased a violin. And then, the stranger, proceeds to play it. Pattie had no idea he had ever touched one. He hasn’t since a few years before they were married. He had other priorities that needed taken care of, so he put it aside and never mentioned it.

Over and over again I hear our voices in question and answer:

Didn’t you miss it?

Terribly.

When has Cormac ever admitted to missing anything? To being disappointed? Depressed? Frustrated?

Never.

And yet a silent renunciation for thirty years.

Nearly all those years he was with me.

This is what shakes me.

I don’t know him. I don’t know my husband.

This is still fairly early in this short (84 pages) book, and what follows is a one-sided unravelling of years of comforting assumptions. The central premise reminded me of one of my favorite devastating passages in literature, in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” when Gretta Conroy tells her husband Gabriel about a young boy who a long time ago loved her and died. A failure to even know about a spouse’s passion is a terrible thing, and we see Pattie’s certainty wash away and then become restored into something darker. Price’s controlled, layers prose opens this new, dark space nicely — I’m overstating a bit to say she reminded me of Cynthia Ozick, but only a bit.

This is a fine book, a lost treasure indeed (something NYRB Classics specializes in, ahem).
July 26, 2012
2012 Booker Longlist
They’ve announced the 2012 Booker longlist today:
- The Yips, by Nicola Barker
- The Teleportation Accident, by Ned Beauman
- Philida, by André Brink
- Skios, by Michael Frayn
- The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce
- Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy
- Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel
- The Lighthouse, by Alison Moore
- Umbrella, by Will Self
- Narcopolis, by Jeet Thayil
- Communion Town, by Sam Thompson
- The Garden of Evening Mists, by Tan Twan Eng
Also, I was surprised and upset (as were many) that when the Man Booker revamped its homepage they discontinued the forum. I met many of my literary friends there, and it has been a lively place.

As luck would have it, I have recently been putting together a forum dedicated to my favorite publishers and to short stories. I thought, why not add in literary prizes as well. So we did, and several familiar faces from the old Booker forum have made there way there already.

Feel free to join us discussing all things Booker related there, http://mookseandgripes.myfreeforum.org.
July 25, 2012
Zadie Smith: “Permission to Enter”
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"Permission to Enter"
by Zadie Smith
Originally published in the July 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I admit I’m excited to read this one by Zadie Smith, though I am disappointed the magazine has again opted to publish an excerpt from a forthcoming novel by a prominent novelist.
July 23, 2012
Carlos Fuentes: Vlad
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Vlad
by Carlos Fuentes (2004)
translated from the Spanish by E. Shaskan Bumas and Alejandro Branger (2012)
Dalkey Archive (2012)
112 pp
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We’re all very familiar with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, even those of us who have never read the book. Through various radio, film, and cartoon iterations as well as simple word of mouth, we know the basic story of the innocent, newly-wed solicitor called to help a strange client in Transylvania move to London. Interestingly, in Vlad, Carlos Fuentes opts not to become trendy and reimagine the basic structure of the myth or original story. But while he presents us with something familiar, he does so from a unique perspective, searching some new shadows in the old material.

I admit to being a traditionalist when it comes to my vampire fun. (How can I say that having never read Stoker’s book? Anyway . . . ) Most of my joy has come from old films like F.W. Murnau’s brilliant Nosferatu and Carl Theodor Dryer’s eerie Vampyr, so I admit that a certain degree of skepticism I had going into this book was washed away when Fuentes’ fidelity to old conceptions of the vampire became apparent.

On the first page, our terrorized solicitor introduces us to the horrific story he has already lived. Navarro is an attorney in Mexico City. In his forties and relatively senior in his law firm, he’s not as young as Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, but, importantly, the love and intense passion he feels toward his wife, Asunción, has never died down. It appears they make love every single night and reflect on the bliss during breakfast in the morning. While young Harker’s love for Mina is pure and innocent and filled with adoration, Navarro’s love for Asunción has matured, allowing room for bright lights and shadows to co-exist. They have one daughter, Magdelena, and one son, Didier, who has unfortunately died, creating one of their darkest shadows. “This is our everyday life. I need to emphasize, however, that this is not our normal life, because there can be no normal life for a couple that has lost a son.”

Other than the death of his son, Navarro is content. He is successful in his practice and in love with his family. One morning he is mildly surprised when his boss, Eloy Zurinaga (R.M. Renfield in Dracula) says, “I wouldn’t trouble you, Navarro, if Dávila and Uriarte were available.” Don Eloy, the old, eccentric partner, wants Navarro to help an old friend, “displaced by wars and revolutions,” immigrate to Mexico City. We know where this is going, of course. But in this iteration, the attorney is not simply an unlucky man with an equally unlucky young wife; this plot of terror has been circling the content attorney for some time. Dávila and Uriarte are subordinates in the law firm, and Navarro initially (until the terror is over) assumes their absence was simply chance, that he was given this task simply because he was at hand.Why else, after all, would he be asked to find a house (with no windows) for his boss’s friend?

We understand immediately why Navarro is uneasy during his first meeting with the hairless, creepy Vlad, and Fuentes doesn’t need to give any specifics when Navarro begins to feel disoriented during his usually peaceful nights with his wife. Fuentes can simply say, “In my dream someone had been in my bedroom but then that someone walked out of it. From then on, the bedroom was no longer mine. It became a strange room because someone had walked out.”

So, as is apparent now, the basic structure of the story follows Dracula, so I want to hone in on one thing that makes Fuentes’ work worth reading: the mature love between Navarro and Asunción, which has survived the death of their only son. The children also add a new dimension to the seductive powers of Vlad. For Harker and Mina, the appeal may be lust and eternal youth, but since Navarro and Asunción are no longer particularly young, how can Vlad upend their world? They have had children:

“You don’t want to sentence children to old age, do you Mr. Navarro?”

I protested with a helpless gesture, slamming my hand down, spilling the remnant of my wine on the lead table.

“I lost a son, you old bastard . . .”

“To abandon a child to old age,” the Count repeated impassively, “to old age. And to death.”

Borgo picked up my glasses. My head fell to the metal table.

Just as I lost consciousness, I head Count Vlad continue, “Didn’t the Unmentionable One say, ‘Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come unto me’?”

Vlad is not essential Fuentes, but it’s fun Fuentes, and, given my expectations, surprisingly deep (which is not to say it is particularly deep). I’m a fan of the myth of the vampire as it emerged in the early part of the twentieth century, so I may be predisposed to enjoying this more than others. That said, Fuentes gives the material reverence and respects it with his fine writing. Also, it’s short and, with Fuentes’ unfortunate recent death, we know getting “new” Fuentes will soon end.
July 17, 2012
Junot Díaz: “The Cheater’s Guide to Love”
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"The Cheater's Guide to Love"
by Junot Díaz
Originally published in the July 23, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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More Junot Díaz in The New Yorker? That’s three so far this year, and in such close proximity. It’s been a bit crazy around here, but I’m getting on me feet again, and I will have this post up soon together with some other reviews of books.
July 16, 2012
Tessa Hadley: “An Abduction”
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"An Abduction"
by Tessa Hadley
Originally published in the July 9 & 16, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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I have generally really enjoyed Hadley’s many pieces in The New Yorker. They unravel slowly and bring familiar bits of the past forth with unique characters. “An Abduction” was similar in tone and style to what we’ve had before, but unfortunately it didn’t quite do it for me. Strangely, though, I do believe — as usual with me and Hadley — that I will remember it and the characters for quite some time; Hadley again does a great job developing her character. The problem is — and I don’t usually complain about this — she cuts it short.

Here’s how it begins:

Jane Allsop was abducted when she was fifteen, and nobody noticed.

That’s an intense and provocative beginning, but the story (purposefully, I believe, and to great effect) does not deliver the thrill we might expect from “An Abduction.” The first few pages take us through one of Jane’s mornings in upper-class Surrey in the 1960s. We know she is about to get abducted, but Hadley let’s us spend some time with her on this warm day as she wanders from thing to thing, never quite finding what it is she is looking for, feeling there’s something she wants but unable to find it. She’s both too young and too old to enjoy the day.

Jane was listless, her mind a blank with vivid little jets of dissatisfaction firing off in it. Real children, somewhere, were wholesomely intent on untying boats or building dams or collecting butterflies to asphyxiate in jars (as she and Robin had done one summer). She should be like them, she reproached herself; or she should be more like some of the girls at school, painting on makeup, then scrubbing it off, nurturing crushes on friends’ brothers she’d only ever seen from a distance, cutting out pictures of pop stars from Jackie magazine. Jane knew that these girls were ahead of her in the fated trek toward adulthood, which she had half learned about in certain coy biology lessons. Yet theirs seemed also a backward step into triviality, away from the thing that this cerulean day — munificent, broiling, burning across her freckled shoulders, hanging so heavily on her hands — ought to become, if only she knew better how to use it.

Up the road come three young men, on break from Oxford, also anxious to find something to satisfy whatever urges they have. They need a girl, they say, and when they see Jane they figure she’ll do. At this point, we know that Jane is going to go with them willingly, and as selfish and despicable as the three Oxford boys are, they never become the dangerous boys we might expect. Yes, things happen, and Jane believes she is on the path to adulthood. Enjoying the change she feels, Jane is deflated when it becomes obvious she’s going to go back home, the path she started merely a cul-de-sac that, somehow, stunts her for life.

In the last few paragraphs, we fast-forward through Jane’s life (as well as the life of one of the boys, who will not remember this day), and it’s here, right when I’m completely involved in what that day did to Jane, that I wanted more since Hadley was at least interested enough in the consequences to summarize them. Unlike Munro, who can summarize a life in such a way we almost feel we’ve lived it, here Hadley seems to be wrapping up a bunch of things she wanted to describe but didn’t have the space to develop. Central to the story is Jane’s state of limbo between that childhood of “cerulean” days and adulthood, and, when it becomes clear she’s staying in that limbo for a long time, we get more, but it’s essentially no more than an afterthought. Consequently, the story, despite its promise, didn’t do much more than many other stories about the threshold of adulthood.

It may well be that as this story and its characters sit in my mind for a few days, I’ll start to find more and more to them, but I’m doubtful. Nevertheless, I was completely engaged and, as I said, won’t be forgetting it anytime soon.
July 2, 2012
Raymond Kennedy: Ride a Cockhorse
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Ride a Cockhorse
by Raymond Kenney (1991)
NYRB Classics (2012)
307 pp
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Some of you may know that I recently moved across country (that’s the cause of the relative lack of posts this June). The primary reason for the move was to get closer to family, but a large part of our motive was to get away from a job in New York City that threatened to suck me under. Ride a Cockhorse, one of those rare books of fiction that speaks coherently and knowledgeably about banks, the financial markets, and some of the people who thrive in those fields, only assured me that my decision to move was correct for me. Remarkably, it did that while making me laugh out loud.

The book begins in the fall of 1987 in small-town New England. Outside, the highschool marching band treks around, and everyone seems to be slipping into another comfortable autumn. This is not the case for Frankie Fitzgibbons, who up to now has been “ordinarily very reasonable and sweet-tempered,” and, falling “like an early winter storm,” she’s about to do her part to ensure fall 1987 is not normal for many others. “Almost overnight” Frankie changes; here are the novel’s fantastic opening lines:

Looking back, Mrs. Fitzgibbons could not recall which of the major changes in her life had come about first, the discovery that she possessed a gift for persuasive speech, or the sudden quickening of her libido. While the latter development was the more memorable of the two, involving as it did the seduction of young Terry Sugrue, the high school drum major, it was Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s newfound ability to work her will upon others through her skills with language which produced the more exciting effects.

The first highly disturbing chapter (disturbing in a way that makes you chuckle covertly) details the seduction — and I’d say destruction — of the young Terry Sugrue. A heretofore kind-speaking boy is, by the end of the chapter, not long after meeting Mrs. Fitzgibbons, saying filthy, terrible things about his kind girlfriend. Terry is only the first to fall prey to Frankie’s personality shift.

For the past twenty years, Frankie has been a mild-mannered home loan officer at a relatively small and conservative bank. People were kind to her and she was kind to them; it is doubtful even days before that she would have expected her sudden change, though now her perspective is such that “[s]he had played the part that life assigned her, of caring wife and mother, and of responsible employee, an unwitting champion of the very things that had obscured her light.” With her new powers, almost immediately she manages to replace and demote her own boss. It takes little more time to elevate herself to CEO of the bank, firing people here and there as her whim called. But she loves it:

One evening, before going out, she caught an unexpected glimpse of herself in the hall mirror and was delighted to discover a stranger looking back at her.

Others love it, too. Not only does she raise the amount of deposits by 5% the day after a mendacious feature article appears, but she manages to continue the streak through Black Monday, when Wall Street and many other regional banks are in a panic. How does she do it? Well, she says, “you have to find a way to be both cautious and daring”; in other words, much like many other financial institutions have grown, at least for a period. She knows the right phrases and has the “appropriate” mindset: “If I hadn’t had murder in my heart all day, I’d be in ruins now.” But obviously she’s building what could be called the “Mrs. Fitzgibbons Bubble,” for what substance can she possibly add? As her frightened competitors say, “The woman’s a rabble-rouser. She works on people’s fears. She plays to the balcony.” It’s fitting that she is “unleashed” during one of the worst financial crises the United States has suffered.

She has her detractors and her devoted, witless acolytes. Though biting to the point of absurdity, Kennedy manages to show us that this absurdity is a reality we face even today.

Ride a Cockhorse is always fun and always insightful, rightfully a classic. My only complaint, if it can be called that, is that the book can seem a bit repetitive: how many ways can Frankie confront an obstacle, even if the obstacles are getting bigger and her nerve more outrageous? That said, the management in the financial world is filled with this on a day-to-day basis, so the repetition is spot on.
June 29, 2012
Deborah Eisenberg: “Cross Off and Move On”
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"Cross Off and Move On"
by Deborah Eisenberg
Originally published in the July 12, 2012 issue of The New York Review of Books.
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The New York Review of Books fiction issue is on the stands for a few weeks, and, like last year, they have included a fairly lengthy piece of fiction from the great short story writer Deborah Eisenberg. “Cross Off and Move On” is a slowly paced walk into the past after our narrator, at around 54 years old, happens upon her cousin Morrie’s obituary in The New York Times; had she not happened to register the slightly familiar person in the photograph she “might have gone on for years assuming that my only known remaining relative was out there somewhere.”

The piece begins here:

Adela, Bernice, and Charna, the youngest — all gone for a long time now, blurred into a flock sailing through memory, their long, thin legs streaming out beneath the fluffy domes of their mangy fur coats, their great beaky noses pointing the way.

They come to mind not so often.

These three women are her father’s sisters. It’s been over thirty years since she had much to do with any of them, but her cousin’s obituary brings them to mind. So disoriented is she that she even calls Jake, a man she has been with for most of those thirty years, though they are now separated. When he asks if she’d like him to come over, she says no. “Or, I fiercely wanted him to come by, but only if he was going to be a slightly different person, a person with whom I would be a different person.”

Jake is a scientist, and when the narrator remarks on Morrie’s age at death, he for some reasons takes that moment to say that measuring age by the rotation of the sun and moon is arbitrary. She responds indignantly:

“How do you suggest we measure the life of a human being?” I said. “By weight? Would that be less primitive? By volume? By votes? By distance commuted? By lamentations? By beauty?”

That conversation was one of the only times in the entire story that I felt Eisenberg was forcing something that didn’t quite work naturally, but it does serve to give the remainder of the story some foundation. Every relative the narrator knew as a child — and they have had a strong influence on her life (it’s not only the passage of time that has made it so the narrator things of them not so often) — is dead and “sailing through memory.” Some are more ghostly than others, their weight in this world having dissipated a great deal already, which is the fate of them all.

The story, in a series of nicely crafted episodes, takes us back to the narrator’s childhood. Her aunts are omnipresent, even in their absences. Her mother, you see, deathly unhappy with her life, sees herself in some sort of competition with the three sisters, who “live at a convenient distance from us, close enough so that I can be parked with them whenever my mother is indisposed or out late into the night but far enough away so that we don’t run into them at every turn, as my mother puts it.”

Many of the episodes deal with the narrator’s relationship with her mother, a cranky, sickly, witty woman. One of my favorite passages comes when Jake first meets her. Thoroughly charmed, he takes the time to instruct the narrator.

“Look, I know this is painful. I know that it’s easier just to give over to resentment and to simplify the past by demonizing your mother rather than leaving yourself open to the stress of complex and ambiguous emotions. But you’re an adult now. Your life is your own. Why not accept what a difficult life she had, and leave that all behind. Because even though it was necessary for you at one time, and gratifying, by now this resentment is obsolete, and it’s just stunting you.”

I got myself a separate room for the night, and after I called my mother in the morning to say goodbye, I met with Jake for breakfast and I couldn’t help mentioning to him that she had wished me better luck with him at least than she’d had with my father and said that he seemed like a decent man but a bit self-important, overly susceptible to flattery, and maybe not all that bright.

He took a quick breath in, and of course I was very, very ashamed of myself. “Your mother is as mean as a mace,” he said.

“She’s had a difficult life,” I was evidently not too ashamed to say.

As a young child, much doesn’t make sense. She doesn’t even know she’s Jewish until she’s quite old. The past is a painful one, filled with losses of all sorts. So accustomed is she to the phrase “We mustn’t dwell on it” that it’s a long time before she thinks to question what it means:

What mustn’t we dwell on? Well, everybody knows that, really: we mustn’t dwell on what came before.

And right there we meet a whole host of human lives whose weight in this world is dissipating quickly. No one will talk about them. All around her are absences and the “murmur of indecipherable allusions.” “Cross Off and Move On” itself is filled with intimations of much more, making it, despite its length, one of those great short stories that suggests much more than it reveals, mimiking the childhood of this poor, embittered woman. It leaves its impact slowly and cumulatively.

I loved it.
June 27, 2012
Paul La Farge: “Another Life”
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"Another Life"
by Paul La Farge
Originally published in the July 2, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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“Another Life” is a relatively short story made up of two long, basically equal-length paragraphs. In the first paragraph we meet the four main characters: the husband, the wife, Jim LaMont (the sleazebag), and April P (the bartender). For most of the story, the narration closely follows the husband, who rather unwillingly is accompanying his wife to her father’s sixtieth birthday party in Boston. He only lasts a few hours at the party, returning to the hotel early, planning to read some of Rousseau’sDiscourse on the Origin of Inequality.

It’s when he reads the line “Nature commands every animal and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impulsion, but knows that he is free to acquiesce or resist.” And thus, the husband takes his first steps to another life. He realizes he doesn’t want to read Rousseau (why should he feel compelled to read about freedom?), so he does something he never does: goes down to the hotel bar for a drink. After having a friendly conversation with April P, the husband sits back while she goes to talk to another customer, the sleazebag: “This man is a total sleazebag, although the husband doesn’t know it yet.” Soon the wife has returned. To my surprise, the wife runs off with the sleazebag after a minimal attempt at covering up what she’s going to do:

The sleazebag shakes his wife’s hand, and it looks as if her hand kind of lingers in his. Then the sleazebag leaves. The wife stands up. I left my shawl at the party, she says. I’m going to run back and get it. Will you be all right? Sure, the husband says. The wife hurries out of the bar.

This is still in the first paragraph, and you can probably guess the rest, even the sudden appearance of drugs and awkward sex. This is a fairly predictable story that at times feels a bit like a summary (see the passage I just quoted); while I liked that the husband and the wife are simply called “the husband” and “the wife,” that also enforced the sensation that I was reading a summary. “Another Life” also kind of beats you over the head as it covers familiar ground: is the husband more free by resisting or by doing whatever he wants?

That said, the ending of the story put me on the positive side of indifferent. It’s a bit tricksy (and perhaps a bit reminiscent of a story or two we’ve just read, so I know a few of you won’t like it), but for me it made the story a bit deeper and a bit more interesting, even giving some additional depth to the simple names “the husband” and “the wife.” It also showed that La Farge was not simply retreading familiar ground. Nevertheless, a passable story, in my opinion.
June 25, 2012
Shani Boianjiu: “Means of Suppressing Demonstrations”
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"Means of Suppressing Demonstrations"
by Shani Boianjiu
Originally published in the June 25, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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We are still in the process of moving (this is the big week), so I haven’t had a chance to read this yet and am not entirely sure when I will. Looking forward to getting this move done and getting hopefully even more time back on here. In the meantime, please feel free to comment below.
June 18, 2012