"The Golden Vanity" by Ben Lerner Originally published in the June 18, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
As requested by Aaron, here is a placeholder for “The Golden Vanity.” I’ve started this one and am almost done, but I keep getting pulled away (we are preparing to move across the country). In the meantime, do you think this is overdone or done just right (surely, not underdone, right?)? A glimpse into my thoughts so far: I’m enjoying it, but I’ve found it easy to be pulled away.
The winner of the IMPAC was announced a bit ago:
I haven’t read this one yet, though a couple of years ago it got quite a lot of attention from bloggers I respect. For differing views, check KevinfromCanada’s positive review here and John Self’s negative review here. I don’t currently have plans to read it.
I’m a bit late, but earlier this week the finalists for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award were announced.
I haven’t read any of the collections, and the only one I may have sampled are the Englander (click here for my thoughts on “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” which I didn’t like but many did) and the Keret (click here for my thoughts on “Creative Writing,” which I liked).
The Planets by Sergio Chejfec (Los planetas, 1999) translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary (2012) Open Letter Books (2012) 227 pp
One of my favorites for the Best Translated Book Award was Sergio Chejfec’s My Two Worlds (click here for my review). Since finishing it last year, it has continued to build in my memory, particularly the way Chejfec used city geography to delve into the narrator’s state of mind. Upset that it was the only book by Chejfec available in English, I nevertheless waited patiently for Open Letter to publish his The Planets. It was worth the wait (and now begins another wait; Open Letter will publish Chejfec’s The Dark next year).
The Planets has a fascinating premise: one day the narrator reads about an explosion in the countryside and immediately he thinks of his lost childhood friend, M, abducted during Argentina’s dirty war. Though he has no idea what happened to M, the narrator convinces himself that M died in this explosion. He admits the faulty logic: “I should say that I lacked then, as I do now, any proof that M was in that explosion.” Nevertheless, the narrator has a need to believe this is the case; after all of the years, he’s trying to imagine an end.
Since we all know that good may be limitless, perhaps within the sphere of evil the need to bring stories to their conclusion becomes urgent. Maybe this is why I thought of M’s abduction when I read the news of the explosion. The time between those two events was an exercise in panic during which I imagined the cruelties he suffered, prior to the moment of that equalizing blast, which ended both life and horror.
This event and the narrator’s ruminations are placed very early in The Planets. What follows is a series of vignettes that explore the loss and the narrator’s mourning in uncertainty. He thinks back to stories M told him (one particularly lovely one about two boys who decided to switch places for an evening, teasing their parents; their parents didn’t catch on). Many are about their wanderings around the city and countryside, with one particularly memorable because the narrator found an eye by the railroad tracks. Just an eye:
An eye silently calls out for its complements: the lid, the lashes, eyebrows, even the rest of the face (a face, in turn, would demand a head, and the head a body, the body a life, et cetera; something is always missing, in that moment).
I admit I was thrilled that, as in My Two Worlds, many of the vignettes used geography — of the city, of the country, whether walking straight or in curves — to underline the narrator’s emotional state, whether they are simply wandering, searching for a car, or searching for the missing M. In fact, The Planets goes even further and plays with space and time (“time took on intolerable, immeasurable dimensions”) and their relationship, and all of this ties nicely — and uniquely, I think — to people, their influence, attraction, trajectory.
Underlying all of this is the cause of M’s disappearance: the dirty war of the 1970s that left thousands dead made unknown thousands disappear: “It seemed that there were more dead than living and more corpses than dead.”
More so that the tightly structured My Two Worlds, The Planets can feel a bit meandering, and not, in my mind, because the characters themselves are meandering. There’s definitely a sense that Chejfec himself is showing his own struggle to pin down his points, which is admirable, but while I like it when an author shows he’s struggling with something, wrestling words to get out ideas, it sometimes feels very loose here. Still, my complaints there are almost beside the point; this is a brave work, personal and filled with a refreshing intellect. Bring on The Dark!
"The Republic of Empathy" by Sam Lipsyte Originally published in the June 4 & 11, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
Two weeks ago, when the Science Fiction issue came out, I started this story. Instead of finishing it, I read the other stories. I tried it again. Again, rather than finish, I read the rest of the magazine. Finally, and not a day too soon, I have finished “The Republic of Empathy,” and it was only this blog project that got me through it.
For some reason, Sam Lipsyte’s sarcastic style drives me crazy. I find no room in it for a genuine examination of anything other than clever tricks with voice and observation — and I don’t find it very clever. Also, I always find the voice to be the same. This story is told from the perspective of seven individuals and includes dialogue from others. They all sound the same. For example, here we have a father walking with his child, Philip, and Philip sounds just like the other characters.
I took Philip for a walk. He tired easily, but his gait was significant. He tended to clutch his hands behind his back, like the vexed ruler of something about to disintegrate.
“How about a brother or sister?” I asked.
“How about I just pooped,” Philip said.
“Thanks for your input.”
Peg always said I shouldn’t model sarcasm for the boy, but who will? Everybody’s so earnest around children. Besides, I’ve always wanted to model. To strut down the runway under all that strobe and glitter, while the fashion aristocrats cheer on my sarcasm.
Yes, the idea here is that the child is alreayd following his father’s footsteps; it’s possibly just me, but the whole thing bugs me.
Taking a step back, the first narrator (the father above) is William. His wife wants to have another child (tells him if he doesn’t agree, it’s a deal-breaker). Then we go on that walk with Philip, and finally we end up on a rooftop, smoking some dope with Gregory, his friend. While up there, the two witness two men fighting on another rooftop. One of them finally goes over the edge and dies (“The falling guy fell.”). When William gets home that night, he goes to sleep and wakes up the next morning only to find he already has another son, and a third is on the way.
This is just the first of the six segments, all interrelated to some degree or another. We meet Gregory’s son, the two men who brawled on the roof, a rich man who wants Gregory to copy some famous art for him, a drone headed toward William, and finally Peg, William’s wife. Also, to one degree or another, the characters are worried about authenticity. Indeed, if it weren’t so similar to other Lipsyte I’ve read, I’d even say the sarcasm is part of the look at authenticity. However, it doesn’t ever add up, and it seems the concerns with authenticity cease after they are explicitly stated, leaving little for the reader to grapple with, not that what we have is much in the first place.
And science-fiction? No. It’s sad that The New Yorker had an opportunity to showcase some genuine science-fiction, and this is what they came up with. Strangely, rather than broadening the scope of science-fiction itself, this issue showed the narrow perspective of the fiction editors.
The Walk by Robert Walser (Der Spaziergang, 1917) translated from the German by Christopher Middleton, 1957, with Susan Bernofsky (2012) New Directions (2012) 96 pp
The Walk is a tiny, and very strange gem (indeed, it is the latest addition New Direction’s line of “Pearls”). I’ve noted elsewhere just how exuberant Walser can be about little moments in life, and this seemingly simple account of a walk is no exception, but in this Pearl (perhaps only because I’ve now got a few more Walsers under my belt) the idea of “exuberance as performance,” a performance meant to cover up something darker, really came out, even if I can’t entirely accept that the vibrancy wasn’t absolutely genuine. Not incidentally, the idea of “exuberance as performance” was introduced to me by Pykk in a comment made to my post on Berlin Stories (you can see that comment here).
That there’s evidence of darkness is not to say that the comedy and the heightened attentiveness to life isn’t present — it is — but, well, just check out Walser’s first sentence:
One morning, as the desire to walk came over me, I put my hat on my head, left my writing room, or room of phantoms, and ran down the stairs to hurry out into the street.
One can see the Walser of the early Berlin Stories here — morning, a young man bursting onto the street, out of his dark room, excited to experience the day — but what are those phantoms? And what do they have to do with his writing? And so the strangeness begins: here we have a story about a man escaping his writing to go on a lovely walk, but we know that, whatever his experiences on that walk, the account we are reading was written in that room of phantoms.
Whatever gloom he feels in that room is (apparently) pushed aside on the walk, but only just. Here he is at the beginning of the day, the beginning of his walk:
Everything I saw made upon me a delightful impression of friendliness, of goodliness, and of youth. I quickly forgot that up in my room I had only just a moment before been brooding gloomily over a blank sheet of paper. Sorrow, pain, and grave thoughts were as vanished, although I vividly sensed a certain seriousness still before me and behind me.
As we move through the small book, we almost forget our narrator had gloomy thoughts as it began, so vivacious does he approach his walk, with such vim does he greet those he meets, including the reader, such as in this passage, which shows that Walser, as microscopically as he wrote, was not minimalist:
Since, dear reader, you give yourself the trouble to march along with the inventor and writer of these lines attentively out forthwith into the bright and good morning air, not hurrying and hastily, but rather quite tidily, at ease, with level head, discreetly, smoothly, and calmly, now we both arrive in front of the aforementioned bakery with the boastful gold inscription, where we stop, horrified, because we feel inclined to be exceedingly dismayed as well as honestly astonished at the gross ostentation and at the disfigurement of the sweetest rusticity which is intimately connected with it.
This is a good example of just how much Walser stuffs into his sentences (and we’ve seen this in his other works), but we might begin to wonder when the sadness we’re running from will come back. The answer: not soon. The first part of the book is a wonderful reminder of the small scenes of life that happen all around us, that we could see if we were only paying attention. Walser’s narrator extols the virtues of walking even when others, like a tax collector, consider him rather lazy and unproductive since he seems to wander around most days. In truth, it’s on his walks that he stores in the material that will make him productive.
As the book and day progress, the shadows in the narrative and in the pathways move from the periphery. The narrator, mainly overcome by joys caught in the moment, experiences a shift: “My pensiveness increased till it became sorrow.” For the remainder of the book, this sorrow doesn’t go away, and the book ends (no spoiler, I don’t think) with the narrator returning to the room of the phantoms:
“Did I pick flowers to lay them upon my sorrow?” I asked myself, and the flowers fell out of my hand. I had risen up, to go home, for it was late now and everything was dark.
And it is in that room of phantoms that he lovingly puts down the events of the day, with a pen overflowing with exuberance — yet while darkness pervades the air and his mood. Is the joy performance? Perhaps to an extent, yet it also seems to me that the joy is genuine. The narrator has certainly convinced me of the value of a good walk and just how fulfilling the observant life can be. Reconciling this with the just-as-genuine sadness is tricky, but I’ll leave my further thoughts out of this post, hoping others will take this on and return to discuss in the comments.
"Monstro" by Junot Díaz Originally published in the June 4 & 11, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
Here’s my experience with “Monstro”: (1) feeling that it was the same-old-same-old Díaz, (2) building excitement at an interesting take on the end of the world, and (3) ultimate disappointment as the pieces failed to develop (let alone come together) in any meaningful way. Let’s take that one at a time.
One of my problems with Díaz is the sameness of his voice. I find it a grating voice to begin with, but there’s not denying Díaz knows how to use this completely informal voice to make a narrative move forward quickly, leaving subjects out of sentences, mixing Spanish slang, the narrator successfully deflecting any responsibility for the ugly things he says about women and Haitians. I can handle when an author explores similar territory many times over, but I generally fail to get nuanced changes with Díaz. This story deals with the end of the world, but if you know Díaz, the anticipation of the end of the world is not new; it’s just that here it becomes fact. Here’s how “Monstro” opens; if it weren’t for the strange disease, it would be much like most other Díaz stories:
At first, Negroes thought it funny. A disease that could make a Haitian blacker? It was the joke of the year. Everybody in our sector accusing everybody else of having it. You couldn’t display a blemish or catch some sun on the street without the jokes starting. Someone would point to a spot on your arm and say, Diablo, haitiano, que te pasó?
Our narrator (who is unnamed, and I don’t believe it is Yunior this time), is nineteen at the time of the end of the world. It begins it Haiti when people started becoming infected with the Darkness. Here’s where I started enjoying the story more. In establishing the Darkness and the exponential horror, Díaz seems to be setting up for some fascinating ideas. The infected start acting collectively. First comes the Silence, when nothing you did could get them to talk. Then the Chorus, when at different times of the day all of the infected, even those in comas, would bellow out something terrifying. Then the absolute need to group together:
Doctors began reporting a curious change in the behavior of the infected patients: they wanted to be together, in close proximity, all the time. [. . . .] Once viktims got it in their heads to go, no dissuading them. Left family, friends, children behind. Walked out on wedding days, on swell business. Once they were in the zone, nothing could get them to leave.
Since there are already quarantine zones, that’s where the infected go. They will not leave once there. Perhaps I just like Tarkovsky too much, but this sounded like the beginning of something really interesting. And what was the narrator doing while all of this was going on? Chasing a girl. Back to familiar Díaz territory, and just when things were getting interesting to me. We take a relatively long detour from the developing apocalypse and focus on the narrator and his college friend Alex. They’re both young (the narrator is nineteen), and have returned — bad timing — to the Dominican Republic from Brown University to do what young men free from worry do. One of Alex’s friends is the beautiful Mysty, and that’s who our narrator falls for. After several pages, we get back to the doom. There’s a climax, meant to further develop the story, and then we end fairly suddenly.
You see, this is another excerpt. It may not even be that, as Díaz has said he hasn’t written the rest of the book and isn’t even sure he’s going to, though the image that inspired the story in the first place has yet to occur. There must have been truckloads of genuine short, science fiction stories that would chase down interesting ideas; instead, The New Yorker opted to publish a sketch with two story lines that fail to develop individually or merge together from an author they published just one month prior.
Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam (1985) Europa Editions (2012) 265 pp
I read Jane Gardam’s Old Filth before I started this blog, and it occurs to me now that, since starting this blog, I don’t know if I’ve seen anyone else reading her. This surprises me, because Gardam is phenomenal, at once tender and biting. I was very happy when I saw that Europa Editions was bringing back to print Gardam’s own favorite novel (according to her new introduction, “by far the favourite of all my books”), Crusoe’s Daughter. Boy, this is a lovely book, perfect for a long summer day when you’re looking to brush against loneliness.
Our narrator is an old woman named Polly Flint. She’s lived out most of her life and we benefit from her reflection, which has a purpose: “Bringing the years to an end as a tale that is told.” This is a book about a life and a book about narrative, and it succeeded beyond my expectations in both regards. In fact, each level is complementary to the other; the sum is greater than its parts.
The book takes us back to 1904, when six-year-old Polly Flint is delivered by her sea-faring father to her two aunts. They live at Oversands, the yellow house on a sand-marsh in Yorkshire. Her mother died years before, and her father, unbeknownst to anyone, has two months until his own death at sea, effectively leaving Polly stranded. It’s to Gardam’s credit that the sense of being stranded is mixed in with the genuine love and affection Polly feels toward her new life and her two aunts. Emotion, and its many layers, is handled well throughout.
On one level, this is a book about a woman’s life in England throughout the twentieth-century; abandonment and loneliness, introduced in the first pages when Polly’s father dies, flare up all the time, even amidst joy. In fact, maybe it’s the loneliness that makes any joy feel more pronounced, though Gardam never flirts with sentimentality. On the narrative level, then, it’s the compassionate story-telling, the subtlety of the emotions, and, perhaps particularly, the wry humor that make this book a pleasure as we move with this stranded soul through the century and its atrocities.
And the humor comes often. One of my favorite passage occurs early on when Polly explains that even as a young girl she didn’t feel any need to follow her aunts’ religious devotion. They are indignant when she rebels (as someone explains to Polly, what else do they have, these two old maids?). Still, despite her affection for them, Polly cannot bring herself to be confirmed. It may have all started when she was young and misunderstood what “suffer the little children” meant:
For perhaps five or six years — perhaps many more — I thought that ‘suffer the little children’ meant that Jesus had been all for measles and mumps, and this made me thoughtful. In spite of all the care and generosity and approbation and the lovely security that breathed everywhere in the compelling yellow house, I became wary of God there. Oh very wary, indeed.
Maybe I’m the only one who finds that humorous. Most often, humor comes with the characterizations. A bit later in the book, Polly moves in with the Thwaite family for a time. Many artists find refuge with the Thwaites, the Lady being a great patron of the arts, but, where Polly hopes to experience invigorating conversations about art, she instead finds a bunch of pretentious imbeciles — and it’s a lot of fun! Yes, a lot of fun, even while we see its effects further isolating Polly.
Sadly (but in a good way) the book is not all humor. Polly is denied most things in which humanity conventionally installs value (reminding me, somewhat, of Alice James (my thoughts Jeane Strouse’s magnificent biography of Alice James here)). Besides that, there’s a string of deaths that threaten to obliterate Crusoe’s Daughter itself as we wonder just how much this narrative can take before capsizing. But the narrative overcomes.
In fact, it’s the book’s examination of narrative itself that I found most compelling, and it certainly strengthens the story. Here we have a girl whose earliest memories are of staring at the row of books in Oversands. As we can glean from the title, one book had a particular influence on Polly: Robinson Crusoe. When Polly feels abandoned in real life, it’s with Crusoe she finds companionship, and not really just as a literary friend. It becomes a conscious choice when she is twenty and her childhood crush, Theo, leaves.
Monumental, godlike Crusoe. Monumentally and deistically taking control of his emotions. And I, Polly Flint, after the knowledge of my loss, set out to be the same. Theo’s face and being and presence at her shoulders, Polly Flint blots out, and lets the noble and unfailing face and being and presence of Crusoe become her devotion and her joy.
Crusoe is her idol and her king.
Crusoe’s mastery of circumstances.
Crusoe, Polly Flint’s father and her mother.
Polly looks back on this time and her elderly perspective kicks in, still a bit in shock:
Sitting in the yellow house with nothing in the world to do. Polly Flint. Twenty years old. Might there be time?
I became very odd. Oh, really quite odd then.
By the end of Crusoe’s Daughter, the narrative, which has been flirting with Robinson Crusoe from the beginning, merges with that early novel. It is less clear whether Polly herself has ever achieved the virtues she instills in Crusoe himself. Certainly, both are stranded, abandoned, lonely, and both step back from the situation to get some perspective and control, but while Crusoe could manipulate his environment to overcome some of his problems, Polly can only change herself.
Really, a sublime book. Let’s stop being silent about Jane Gardam.
"Black Box" by Jennifer Egan Originally published in the June 4 & 11, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
If you didn’t know, The New Yorker has made a few headlines because they’ve been tweeting this story, sentence by sentence, each evening at 8:00 p.m. EST. I believe it is currently around the halfway point.
I have been tuning in each night, and the results have been pretty dismal for me. It just hasn’t worked. Egan has crafted a story that can seem like a series of short tweets coming in real-time, but the sentences in “Black Box” still lack the immediacy of Twitter. Consequently, for me it came across as very choppy and, perhaps since it was Twitter, almost like a series of independent aphorisms rather than a developing story. Here, for example, are the first six tweets, which probably took me five minutes to read the first time. If you’d like to simulate the Twitter experience, read the first one, go away for a minute, the come back to read the next, and proceed accordingly:
People rarely look the way you expect them to, even when you’ve seen pictures.
The first thirty seconds in a person’s presence are the most important.
If you’re having trouble perceiving and projecting, focus on projecting.
Necessary ingredients for a successful projection: giggles; bare legs; shyness.
The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible.
When you succeed, a certain sharpness will go out of his eyes.
Now that it’s all laid out in front of me, I can see it: this is actually a pretty good beginning to this strange and satisfying story. But on Twitter, where every night the illusion of a continuous Twitter story is killed at 9:00 (not to mention the fact that other tweets are popping up to interrupt the flow constantly, even after day three I still didn’t particularly know or care what was going on, and I really doubted my ability to dedicate ten hours to following this story in its intended form. So I, for one, was glad to have the chance to read the story in the magazine, without distraction.
In the print form, the story is still formatted as a series of sentences, but they flow better, especially once the narrative begins to emerge. The setting is the future. A thirty-three-year-old, American woman has volunteered for the American government. Her job is to use her body to take advantage of common perspectives of women, all the while collecting valuable data about the men who possess her. She is to be their “beauty,” a future term that means exactly what we today think it might.
This nameless “hero” has been sent to the south of France to surveille her “Designated Mate,” a powerful enemy to America.
So what about this strange form? And can Egan, who in her most recent novel wrote a long chapter in PowerPoint, pull it off? I think she pulled off her PowerPoint chapter, and I think she pulls of this form (though not on Twitter). We are soon aware that the single sentences are almost like a series of real-time instructions this field agent is receiving. For example, as the story begins, she is receiving tips as she begins to infiltrate this criminal’s life, to become “a part of his atmosphere: a source of comfort and ease.” They are swimming in the sea, and the instructions help her maintain her role as a simple, non-threatening “beauty”:
Eagerness and pliability can be expressed even in the way you climb from the sea onto chalky yellow rocks.
“You’re a fast swimmer,” uttered by a man who is still submerged, may not be intended as praise.
Giggling is sometimes better than answering.
Soon, the agent is receiving real-time help utilizing the Dissociation Technique, which “is like a parachute — you must pull the cord at the correct time.” At this point, the choppy burst of single sentences works incredibly well:
You will be tempted to pull the cord when he surrounds you with arms whose bulky strength reminds you, fleetingly, of your husband’s.
You will be tempted to pull it when you feel him start to move against you from below.
You will be tempted to pull it when his smell envelops you: metallic, like a warm hand clutching pennies.
The directive “Relax” suggests that your discomfort is palpable.
“No one can see us” suggests that your discomfort has been understood as fear of physical exposure.
“Relax, relax,” uttered in rhythmic, throaty tones, suggests that your discomfort is not unwelcome.
These real-time instructions are not meant just for this particular agent. They take into consideration what is happening in order to log data that may be helpful for other agents. Once this agent has returned, her log will be downloaded for others.
One aspect of this that I found confusing at first, or at least problematic, was the personal nature of some of the “instructions.” For example, “Mirror your Designated Mate’s attitudes, interests, desires, and tastes” is a straight-forward instruction; “Cold fish is unappealing, even when served in a good lemon sauce” is not. Just when I was getting used to the idea that I was looking at a real-time log of instructions, a sentence about, say, cold fish would arise and take me out of that. Thankfully, Egan has reconciled this, finding an ingenious solution that allows us to follow the instructions and, to a limited extent, the agent’s own feelings and fears. This log is not coming from some external source; it is implanted in the agent and, as it responds to the external world to give aid it also includes “stray or personal” thoughts, which may be deleted later.
And it is in this area that I found most to enjoy: here is a female who is playing the role of the submissive sex object who actually has already submitted to the government. All over her body recording and downloading devices have been implanted, as if she were a robot whose sole purpose was to bring back information in her physical body, whether she is still alive or not.
“Black Box” was an exciting read, because of its formal inventiveness, its increasing tension, and the ideas of a woman being, in a few difference senses, a black box. I hope people who were turned off as it was tweeted (and I know there were many) give it a shot in its printed form — here it shines.
Tonight the winner of the 2012 Orange Prize was announced:
While I wanted either Ozick or Enright to win, I’m interested in this piece. I have always loved the classics and classical history, so I think I will check it out. Congratulations Madeline Miller!