Jack (1989) by A. M. Homes
Our freshman have to read this novel at the University I now teach at, probably so we can claim to teach them something about literature during whatever internal political debates that take place. We never discuss the novel in class and the only subsequent engagement with the work will be a series of questions on the mid-term exam designed to gauge whether they actually read it. I wish we could ask more of them, but the courses for freshman are more like advanced foreign language courses than English courses focused on literature. Only the upper division courses take on the character of a literature department, and farangs seldom get to teach such courses.
If we were going to teach them literature, I would not teach this book. I didn’t particularly like it and was often bored. There are some nice set pieces and no one can fault Homes’ writing — she’s a fine craftsman of American prose — but I just thought it too pat and predictable. I thought it rather ordinary, common, and unremarkable. This is the third book of Homes’ that I’ve read and I would say the same about all of them (although, to be fair, I’ve not read the one’s that are most highly praised). She strikes me as an ordinary but gifted writer working in a very conventional mode exploring rather obvious and common subjects. I don’t mean that to be as damning as it may sound, but to be descriptive. Many people like reading conventional stories — that’s why genre fiction always does so well, for how well it adheres to and plays with the conventions — about everyday life. If you are one of these people, then A. M. Homes writes books you might enjoy. If you are not, then avoid her whenever possible because that is her métier.
Friday, 6 July 2007 | [3] 
“This may be the best novel I’ve ever read,” I thought after the first 100 pages of The End of the Affair by Graham Greene many years ago, but I found the 150 pages that followed disappointing. A friend of mine who read it not long afterward concurred, even on the point at which the book falters. This time I intended to understand why and how the book changes after that point.
Not to spoil the book’s plot, but the story is of the tumultuous affair and between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles, who is married to a high-ranking British civil servant named Henry, during the Second World War. Bendrix, a writer, narrates and details his hatred for Sarah, who mysteriously left him one day in June 1944. After a chance encounter with Henry, Bendrix finds himself as obsessed with Sarah as ever and engages a private detective to follow her. He learns, of course, that she has secret and surreptitious meetings with a man bearing a strawberry birthmark across his face, then the detective provides him with her diary. The point at which the novel changes is when Bendrix (and Greene’s readers) read the diary and learn why she left Bendrix — the promise she made to God when she thought he had died in a V-1 bomb explosion. The rest of the novel concerns Bendrix’s attempts to reunite with her and much talk of religion and miracles and God. I’ll spare you the details in case you’d like to read it yourself (and you really should, for it is a fine novel), but the change in the novel for the worse has already occurred.
After he learns of her reasons for leaving him, and her continued love for him, Bendrix no longer has the ferocity that his rage conferred on him throughout the novel’s opening. He is now, he says, secure in his love and in hers. So Bendrix’s voice no longer compels the readers’ absolute attention as it did at first. Before that, though, the switch to another narrator also jars because Sarah’s milder tone deflates readers after Bendrix has been so compelling and energetic a narrator. Another reason I found the latter half of the novel less engaging than the first is the turn toward theological themes and the explicit depiction of miracles, both of which dragged the novel from its exemplary depiction of human passion and emotion — which the novel explores and informs better than any other literary form — into topics about which I have few questions and so less need to ponder: the existence of God, the possibility of miracles, the place of coincidence in human affairs. I read this book because I wanted to learn about jealousy and love and revenge not about piousness and God and miracles.
For Graham Greene, however, these questions were paramount, overwhelming at times, so I can certainly understand why he took the novel where he did, why he pushed on beyond the point when Bendrix admits a novel ought to end. Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926 at the age of 22, and his sense of guilt and sin permeates his work; he constantly struggled with his God and his failures as a Catholic and a Christian. This novel embodies that struggle for him, so should be judged in that light, as a work intimately tied to the psyche and life of its creator. On that criteria, it is a wonderfully written and evocative novel.
Wednesday, 23 May 2007 |
Wickerby (1998) by Charles Siebert
I decide, shortly after opening Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral, Charles Siebert’s story of his months in a dilapidated cabin across the Canadian border, to think of it as a novel rather than a memoir or personal narrative. How, I wonder, might this change the way I read it: will the story offer the shape and satisfaction of a finely wrought narrative? will it seem more or less immediate or true as fiction? Recent controversies over falsified journalism and fictionalized memoir, as well as my own mostly-true fiction, has me pondering the distinctions. I believe that each form differs from the others, that the novel does something for readers distinguishable from the essay which in turn bears little resemblance to the workings of poetry. But how do they differ and can a memoir be read with equal satisfaction as fiction or is something lost?
Pondering these heady if not altogether abstract questions, I am overwhelmed when Siebert’s story begins, and one might say actually centers upon, my own old neighborhood in Brooklyn, the place I first washed up in New York those many years ago — the intersection of Crown Heights and Prospect Heights, a mere block away from Siebert’s apartment. He probably could see my building from his.
I remember that apartment well. It was tiny and I had two gigantic pieces of furniture that I would not part with: a desk four feet deep by five long, and a four-poster queen-sized bed. The apartment was exactly large enough to hold those two pieces of furniture while still allowing someone to scoot around them. I lived in these cramped quarters for 18 months before moving to larger accommodations on the other side of the park. I remember lying in bed or sitting at my desk (the only options) looking out the window at the space behind the buildings that faced Washington Avenue. In summer, small children would play in the yard next door while their mother aired out rugs, or late at night on Fridays and Saturdays, folks seeking fresh air would step out back of the bar/club that opened during my time there. I remember at least two occasions when I heard gunfire exchanged on the street, but since my apartment didn’t open to the front of the building, my fear was less pronounced and dramatic than what Siebert experienced. The neighborhood had become significantly less dangerous by the time I arrived — Siebert lived through significantly leaner years than the one plus that I endured. It was a shabby place and a difficult time in my life, but I remember it and that apartment fondly, perhaps because it was the last time that could discover myself anew without reference to anyone else, alone and happy.
Siebert, too, is alone in Brooklyn, now that his almost-wife has left for Africa for however long. His fears about her absence leads him further into solitude and eventually to that cabin in the woods that belongs to his missing near-wife. There he encounters himself and the changes that being alone make in him. He realizes, too, that this place is no more natural than his apartment in Brooklyn, and that he is no more alone there than anywhere. He seems to fear the possibility of giving into his solitude, of diving too deeply into it, as if he might never be able to return once he has gone too far. So, before winter comes, he decides to return to Brooklyn, just as whimsically as he had decided to leave it.
I cannot escape my own thoughts and recollections, vivid or vague, of the place he calls home, and that I once did too, cannot set these images far enough aside to answer my questions about the ways that fiction and non-fiction differ and relate. I cannot read this book as other than what it is, the reflections of a man about the place in which he lives and how it relates to another place he stays for a time. Perhaps that is one way to measure the effectiveness of writing, how much it insists on being whatever it happens to be.
Tuesday, 15 May 2007 | [1]
Contempt (1954) by Alberto Moravia
I discovered it in the last remaining corner of English language books in a bookstore that must have once been grandly envisioned but had since fallen into despair. The tables below the front windows were littered with piles of out of date magazines, the detritus from the days when the store carried a wide selection of periodicals. Test preparation guides covered all available display tables, the nearby preparatory academy most likely providing the bulk of the store’s clientele. Contempt by Alberto Moravia stood out from the stacks of crime novels and celebrity biographies because the New York Review of Books publishes classics of world literature draped only in the cleanest of modern designs.
I wondered if Alberto Moravia was the Italian poet whose aesthetic was so vociferously lauded when his collected works were finally published in English in the final years of the previous century. It would be weeks before I remembered the poet was Eugenio Montale, a countryman and contemporary of Moravia but otherwise unrelated.
According to the book jacket, Jean-Luc Godard based his film of the same name on this very novel. I had seen the film many lifetimes ago, but could remember little of it except Brigitte Bardot pouting throughout while bathed in this unbelievable Mediterranean light. Opening the cover to read Moravia’s first paragraph, I laughed with delight when that paragraph showed Moravia to be a master stylist with complete command of his craft. Voice, it was the voice Moravia conjured that compelled me, from the first moment of reading his words, to take this book home with me.
Books were stacked in these few remaining shelves higgledy-piggedly, the literature mixed with musicology, biography, philosophy, history, and true crime. T. E. Lawrence sat next to Jim Thompson, the Pope next to Yukio Mishima. Larry McMurtry shared a shelf with the Dalai Lama, and Virginia Woolf one with one of Bob Woodward’s flaccid descriptions of the Bush war machine. A similar, equally dismal, conglomeration of books in Thai occupied the opposite corner. The store dedicated such a small percentage of its significant floorspace to literature, to books of any kind save those of interest solely to children and their parents, that I doubted it could continue to survive, a victim of not of the cancerous growth of superstore overabundance but of a culture completely indifferent to literature and its adherents. Surely, a bookstore only half-heartedly and inconsistently concerned with books couldn’t go on indefinitely, even when this attitude properly reflected the attitude of the surrounding culture, its prospective buyers.
Moravia’s story centers on Riccardo Molteni who narrates the story of how his wife comes to despise him, but the contempt of the title may come from Molteni’s own attitude toward others rather than from his wife’s attitude toward him. For he holds himself to be superior to everyone else in the novel: his simple-minded wife, his vulgar producer, the degraded directors. Molteni considers only himself to be civilized, intelligent, creative. Although Molteni only late in the novel comes to understand anything about why his wife despises him, he concludes the novel still proclaiming ignorance of her feelings, her motivations. At every opportunity, he chooses the least effective means of solving his dilemma but continues to blame everyone but himself, or rather to blame everyone and excuse himself. Molteni is a very human creature in this way, for he brings his considerable intellect to bear only on the problem of absolving himself of sin, of guilt, of blame; he is a rationalizing creature to the core.
It would be weeks between beginning to read this novel and completing it, due in no small part to the birth of my daughter not long after I first found it on the shelves of that lonely bookstore. I read a few pages, haphazardly scattered throughout the text, to my daughter and my wife, nights before the birth then many more later, mainly because the play of words in my voice soothe the little one, bring her some sense of my presence in her life. Ironic perhaps that I read to a newborn infant of the dissolution of a marriage, but only if you think it matters what words they hear before they recognize words. Rather, I give her Alberto Moravia’s words not because what he has to say would be of interest to a one-week old but because the lyricism of his voice, that voice I could not resist, will penetrate the barrier of comprehension and give her a sense of beauty, and the beauty of language, even before she has language herself.
Saturday, 21 April 2007 |
I took Bombay London New York by Amitava Kumar with me to Singapore last weekend, reading it on the plane each way and briefly before falling asleep that solitary night. This memoir with literary criticism tells the story of how Kumar came to leave India for the diaspora and of how his perception of India and himself has changed with the circumstances. He says, as he wraps up his narrative, that those who leave change, thus making it possible for them to leave, while others do not change and never fully enter their new world even as they’re cut off from the old one. Sometimes they return, sometimes they flounder and fail, perhaps even die. I realized while reading the description of the stories he would like to have told, that he longed for the story told by Kiran Desai in her recent Booker-winning novel. I find myself wondering if it pained him to finally see it so poorly written.
Kumar describes the difficulties of emigration, of leaving your old world behind so that you can never return, of becoming open enough to new experiences that you change in ways that make you incompatible with your own past, your own history. I’m moved if often confounded by his words, his depiction of nostalgia. He seems to argue that even those who stay behind are changing and part of the globalized culture, at least at the books opening, but then as he moves further from his small town origins, he suggests that some people never change, even if they stay away.
I know the feeling of leaving the past behind you, though, of closing yourself to the past in order to open yourself to the future. I cannot recall my past with the vividness or emotion that Kumar does; as I through myself into the present circumstances and struggle to make my way, previous circumstances and places come to seem like something I read once, a story told me about someone else.
While writing this, I have searched for my own hometown, much smaller and more provincial than Kumar’s origins. Population: 3000 and falling. Median income: $30,000 (per capita: $15,000). I don’t often think of it, but my desire to leave was just as strong as Kumar’s, perhaps stronger, and explains my trajectory away as well, or as poorly, as Kumar’s origins explain his own, reverse trajectory. I wanted a different life than such a small place could offer, and understand the longing for opportunity, for the wider world that literature and film and travel can open for one.
People don’t leave for America because it is better but because it is different. I have left America not because it’s worse (although it is worse than some places), but because there can be no end to opening, to discovering, even if what you discover are your own limits.
Sunday, 1 April 2007 | [2]
After the recent review of the latest collection of essays from J. M. Coetzee, I thought it time I read some of his essays myself. I had been contemplating returning to Elizabeth Costello soon, but thinking I’d try his straightforward literary criticism first, I picked up Stranger Shores. It’s true that reading his criticism provides clues to his own work, nuggets of perspective that can shift the way you think about what he’s doing.
An essay on Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa he wrote while working on Disgrace argues that the title character’s eventual suicide results from her identification with the Christian ideal of virginity, and that the villain who raped her was in fact smitten by transcendent beauty. Who cannot think, when reading this defense, of the attraction of David Lurie for his student and the way that he defends it as required by his enslavement to beauty, to art?
Many of the essays lead to similar connections, but one thing I want to note is how frequently he writes about literature in translation, and therefore, about the difficulties and necessities of translation as a craft (for he would argue it is not an art). More than two-thirds of the twenty-six essays in this collection deal with questions of translation or with translated work. This reminds me of something I easily forget about Coetzee, given that he writes in English and seems so firmly situated within the European cultural milieu: that Coetzee is a provincial from the periphery of the Anglophone empire.
Although it’s clear that his astringency is temperamental in origin, I imagine that he must have struggled to claim European art as his own, to merge himself with it. He tells a story, perhaps apocryphal, in the first essay, entitled “What is a Classic?” about being transfixed by an overheard Bach recording one day in his backyard as a boy. He asks if he, at that moment, was overtaken by beauty or if, subconsciously, he calculated the historical necessity of clasping onto Western high culture and art as his salvation from a backwater he fairly loathed, even at that age. It’s a question he does not answer even though the essay suggests that the answer to that very question will answer its titular query. A classic will be historically and politically situated but will endure; but how does that answer whether he was moved by historical or transcendent forces?
In many ways, his blistering intellect and acerbic commentary on almost every writer (even Kafka is taken to task for imprecision) can be seen as the need for a provincial to assert his ability and right to engage with the greatest of artists. Hence the preponderance among his criticism of translated work that english-speaking critics otherwise avoid—he sees them as a means to assert himself as well as like himself, from outside the mainstream of the English literary tradition. Despite these historical considerations, he never fails to give each author a deep and careful consideration.
Coetzee would, no doubt, object to this sort of gross psychoanalyzing, this simplification of a complex human being into a single thing, a single idea. And I wouldn’t blame him, but his abject discomfort with everyday human discourse (as can be seen in the video link on this page) has made him indecipherable as a man to me, even having read one of the volumes of his memoirs. So these glimpses into his self and not just his thinking and presentation of ideas through literature are welcome. With everyone I read, an image of the person—the man, the woman—behind the words begins to form and inform the experience of reading, that enhances the reading experience, that makes it personal, a conversation. Coetzee remains a mystery—how could anyone be so unflinching—but reading his essays makes him somehow more human.
Wednesday, 14 March 2007 |
He reads No god but God, a riveting work of non-fiction by Reza Aslan that relates the stories of the origins and history of Islam then proceeds to analyze, critique, and deconstruct those stories for the reality behind them, while sitting in a Buddhist temple, a Thai wat. He learns about the differences between the Meccan and Medinan suras, the historical context of Muhammad’s revelation, the internecine conflicts between the Rightly Guided Ones, the compilation of the Quran and other sources of Islamic law, the five pillars of the faith, of Shi’ism and Sufism, and of the modern developments, all to the accompaniment of a prerecorded Buddhist lesson broadcast over loudspeakers from the consecrated sala behind him, the monk’s indistinct low drone punctuated by the squawk and twitter of birdsong.
Our reader quickly grasps Aslan’s partisanship, his respect for Ali — Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law who became the first Imam of Shi’ism — and his consistently sympathetic portrait of Shi’ism. He flips to the author’s biography to recall Aslan’s origins: just as he thought, a Shi’a from Iran.
His first political memory is of yellow ribbons girdling trees in solidarity with the Americans taken hostage during the Iranian revolution. Throughout his life, Iranians have been depicted as the enemy, as villains: issuing fatwas against novelists, sending children to die in battle, brokering illegal deals with corrupt politicians. The difference, he’d been told, between Iran and other Muslims was their Shi’ism; so Shi’ites, too, became villains for our reader.
The wind rustles the leaves overhead and Thai people stroll by, shoes slapping against the cobblestones, some hurrying through their day after praying, others taking the air and pushing a pram. He lifts his eyes to watch and greet them with a slight bow of his head and a wordlessly mouthed sawasdee krap. An insect alights on his book and he watches it crawl across the pages. He thinks briefly of what his wife would say if he were to crush this harmless tropical gnat, her warnings about the karma of such an act, just as she does at home when he stamps out the ants that have infiltrated their home since the rains left and swarm wherever food appears. It flies away before he moves to act.
Over the years his view has changed as he discovered the crimes committed by his own people, his own country, crimes that inspired, provoked, or necessitated the Iranian crimes of his youth. He has met charming Iranian exiles, seen beautiful Iranian films, and read of the daring expressive yearnings of Iranian youth facing systematic oppression. He has learned how much like himself Iranians are, can now imagine himself acting the same as them if he were in similar circumstances, if he had been born in the arms of a revolution. He has, finally, learned to distinguish the people of Iran from the ayatollahs who rule over them.
Aslan aims to convince his readers that Islam has a heterodox history, full of schisms and sects and competing claims to authenticity and traditions, that it embodies a coherent and progressive moral viewpoint that includes the liberation of women and men conducive to representative democracy. Our reader finds Aslan persuasive but too quick to dismiss the backlash of political reality; as Aslan makes abundantly clear, the conservative forces of tradition and convention have always succeeded in holding back the process and forces of reform in Islam: why should today be any different?
Four schoolboys approach the gazebo where our reader sits, their leader bowing to him before they all settle in across from him. One runs off, shoes flying off as he bounds up the steps to the sala. The other boys talk and share a piece of fruit until he returns a few moments later carrying a toy pellet gun. They take turns pumping it and shooting each other in the backpack before packing it away in one bag and getting up to leave. The boy who had brought the gun goes back to the sala, perhaps to work at the wat and make merit for his family, while the others turn toward the exit, the barrel of the gun sticking up through the top of the pack.
Friday, 2 March 2007 |
Perhaps its merely the times in which we live, but I found Lord of the Flies by William Golding not a disquisition on how easily humanity can devolve into savagery but how democracy devolves into tyranny.
I’ve returned to read LOTF after twenty years because most of my high school pupils have either just read it or are reading it now for school. One of them told me, though, that they don’t actually read the novel; instead, their teacher reads it to them, abridging it as he goes by skipping what he considers the boring parts. It’s not a terribly sophisticated novel, wearing its themes and ideas so close to the surface, but it is well-crafted and easy enough for 14 and 15 year-olds to understand and appreciate. I’m rather appalled by this teacher’s lax techniques, particularly since these students attend one of Bangkok’s premier private international schools. No wonder these kids can’t write or read with any level of sophistication.
Certainly the standard interpretation that I remember from my own schooldays reading of the novel holds up: the shipwrecked boys try vainly to develop a sort of society with laws, but eventually end up as bloodthirsty tribesmen with painted naked bodies. The savagery in us all unleashed by extreme circumstances.
But I want to suggest that the transformation prompted by this extremity isn’t one from civilized men to primitive savages because the so-called primitives were also a society with rules and rituals and values and goals. These rules, rituals, values, and goals are simply bloodier and more autocratic than the one Ralph tried to form at the novel’s opening. Ralph is elected leader because of his size (he’s the largest and, presumably, eldest boy) and dashing good looks (ah, democracy), and he establishes goals (keep the fire burning as a rescue signal), rules (each boy has a job), rituals (the assemblies called by blowing and holding the conch shell), and values (debate, election, cooperation) but these goals are subverted slowly by Jack Merridew, largely out of personal bitterness and spite but also because he carries the spark of tyranny inside him. I suppose we all do, but Jack has always savored power (as leader of his choir of boys, who become his hunters): enjoyed exercising and currying and flaunting power. Jack wrests control of the tribe away from Ralph once “the beast” becomes real, their inchoate fears and anxieties manifested in the form of an only briefly glimpsed dead fighter pilot parachuted into their midst. Once their fear becomes immediate and tangible, the boys desire an autocratic leader who will simply tell them what to do, who will never show doubt or fear.
Of course, I’m reminded of how easily my country has succumbed to fear and sought out the least nuanced and short-sighted of leaders in recent years. That’s what I mean by the times in which we live, interesting like those in the Chinese curse. Perhaps this interpretation is simply a projection of my own sense of bewilderment and shame over the course my country has taken, but I think the text will support it — certainly the path from democracy to tyranny was fresh in the minds of everyone who came through the 1940s. I still need to think about the role of the other main characters: Piggy and Simon. Piggy represents reason while Simon has a sort of instinctual wisdom he can never articulate, but how do their stories — both of them perish under Jack’s rule — connect with the question of how democracy becomes tyranny when confronted by fundamental fear?
Thursday, 22 February 2007 |
Antigone (c. 441 BCE) by Sophocles
Antigone, like Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire, is a story of a character or characters destroyed by social expectations and obligations. The primary conflict of Antigone is that between the state as represented by King Creon and the traditions that call for proper burial of the dead. I’ve not read this play since I was about the age my students are now. I’m struck by the brevity of it, by how much is stripped away, by how it moves so quickly from plot point to plot point. It wastes nothing.
This is true of drama in general, the way plays condense and distill stories into only the most essential scenes, ignoring time whenever and however they wish. My drama professor, back in college, made a distinction, possibly taken from Aristotle, between the story and the plot. The story of the characters — their lives — encompasses everything they are and would ever be, everything that has happened to them or would ever happen. The story is their lives. The plot is only a small selection from these stories, carefully chosen and presented by the playwright to convey just what she wants to convey. The plot is the play. And Antigone serves the plot almost exclusively (except for allusions to the other sections of Sophocles’ Theban trilogy).
Of the three plays I’ve read this week, I would say that Streetcar is the best at making this distinction and overcoming it. We get quite a deep appreciation for much of the story that lies behind the plot, especially the story of Blanche Dubois. Salesman is built around revealing the hidden story, but much remains untold (which could be why I can never appreciate Willy — his charm remains invisible to me, too far removed from the plot).
Saturday, 17 February 2007 |
I’ve always despised Willy Loman for the simple and obvious reason that he is one of the most self-deluded figures I have ever known. I recognize that Arthur Miller must have succeeded wildly for me to consider Willy Loman a human being of my acquaintance worthy of despising rather than a literary figure created to serve a literary purpose. But my hatred of the character has always led to my hatred of Death of a Salesman, despite its many merits and profound accomplishment.
The play expresses much more sympathy and pity for Willy than I have ever been able to muster. Everyone in the play who knows him, even Biff at the end, sees him as a tragic, heroic creature, one whose life has been full of error but still somehow beyond reproach, a prince among men. Only Biff’s late disillusionment with himself more than with Willy leads any character to feelings similar to my own. Wife Linda and neighbor Charley are the people who offer the most solace and comfort and sympathy to Willy, never wavering in their commitment to helping and supporting him; they defend him the most vigorously from Biff and from the world. I can’t forgive him the way he resents and disdains them so; what venom he spews at them. Happy sees him not as a failure but as a model to be emulated if also surpassed.
Only Biff sees him for what he was: a petty insignificant man who spent his entire life lying to everyone, but most especially to himself. So my sympathies have always lain with Biff, the agrieved son, but I noticed something in this reading I don’t remember from before: that Biff seems to have forgotten what Willy sees as the main point of contention between them — the other woman he caught his father with all those years ago. Biff never mentions her and seems not to recognize Willy’s allusions to it. He resents his father the lies he told him that made him misapprehend himself more than anything else. He hates himself for fallling for his father’s many lies, for the grandiose and unreachable expectations that his father planted and tended in his heart just like the vegetables wants to grow in their back yard. What I had failed to realize is how Biff’s feelings about his father are as self-indulgent as his father’s own.
Thursday, 15 February 2007 |
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