Wray’s novel became one of the few that he made a priority, but still it took him weeks to finish it as his other obligations returned and once again began consuming his time.  Still, the story commanded enough attention that he was able to continue making that time, that he didn’t feel comfortable leaving the story behind, unfinished and abandoned.  He felt that most important of readerly emotions: curiosity about the outcome, anticipation of the ending.  He wanted to know what would happen and how.

He continued reading, then, continued to the end to find out whether sixteen year-old, escaped schizophrenic Will Heller, Lowboy, would lose his virginity and with whom.  He kept reading to discover whether Detective Lateef and Will’s mother, Violet, would find him.  He pressed on to learn Lowboy’s fate and that of his protectors.  He read on to confirm the particulars of the secret that Wray had withheld from his readers, that hides within the folds of this novel.

Our reader knew a secret revelation was coming and did not find the secret, upon revelation, surprising.  Rather he expected it.  His first clue was how uniform the voice remained even through the multiply subjective voiced narration, each chapter alternating between a third person rendering of Will’s escape and one of his mother’s search for him.  Thus clued into the identity, the sharing between the protagonists, he came remarkably close to voicing Wray’s secret out loud very early while reading the story.  The revelation struck him as satisfying because inevitable.  First the writer must make their rendering of a plot credible, then they should try to make it inevitable.  And so our reader found Wray’s tale to be both credible and inevitable.

Until the final paragraph.  Our reader feels cheated by that final paragraph because the events, the action of that paragraph remain obscure to him, uncertain.  He does not feel he knows Will Heller’s fate.  Did he die upon that platform or was Wray simply allowing his story to merge with the wailing of the trains, dissolving into the whitest of noises?  Our reader may never know.

What organizes fiction is conflict—and only characers experience conflict, [so find] the dominating human conflict in your situation.

—Stephen Koch on how to find your story when writing.

I realize, reading this, that one thing that makes J. M. Coetzee’s work so unusual, and so powerful, is his understanding and depiction of humanity as decidedly unspecial.  Rather than anthropomorphizing non-human “characters”, he depicts humans as merely creatures like any other.

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It’s a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate’s court. I think it’s far better, as Burroughs did and I’ve tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.

—J. G. Ballard in an interview about William S. Burroughs
(via porous borders)

A string of superficial facts.  Paul Auster confesses here to the greatest weakness of his work of the past decade: his stories are summarized rather than detailed.  Readers want to immerse themselves in the details of a story.  The mechanism for that immersion may be the plot, the characters, the setting, the psychology, the ideas, the language, any of the elements of the form.  But merely outlining the contours of a story will never be enough to satisfy the readerly itch.

There is a story told in Man in the Dark, the recent Auster novel in which this scene occurs, about an alternative Earth, one that diverged with our own after Bush v. Gore in 2000, with New York leading a secession from the Union and America going to war to return the wayward states to the fold.  The story, whose main power comes from this scenario, comprises most of the story and, according to reviewers, is the story at the heart of this novel.  But that isn’t true.  The story of the war between the American states is ended abruptly and abandoned in the second half of this book to be replaced by the reminiscences about the dead wife of August Brill, who had been telling himself the story of that civil war to avoid thinking about the past.

The story at the heart of Man in the Dark is Brill’s story, and to a lesser extent, that of his granddaughter, who blames herself for the death of her ex-boyfriend, who was decapitated in Iraq while serving as a contractor driving supplies.  Brill and his granddaughter, Katya, are not simply in mourning for those they have lost but are seriously traumatized by the boyfriend’s vicious and gruesome death, which they witnessed in an online video.  They have spent months trying to drown the image of that death with other beautiful images by watching the finest movies ever made.  One of the best sections of the book are discussions of some of their recent viewings—Tokyo Story, The World of Apu, Grand Illusion, and The Bicycle Thief—and what makes them so beautiful and meaningful.  But this story of trauma and recovery and the meaning of story in our lives isn’t given the same texture, isn’t revealed through detail as the alternative America was, and it suffers from that lack.  That is why so many reviewers claimed the novel was about that other America rather than about the people suffering so much they would tell themselves such a story.

Auster, clearly, recognizes this, knows that contrasting a detailed peripheral story with a sketched central story will put the central story in a bad light.  So why would he purposely undermine his story?  Auster gives us a two-part answer.  The first comes near the end, when Brill considers another memory, “an image from the distant past, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, I can hardly tell the difference anymore.  The real and the imagined are one.  Thoughts are real, even thoughts of unreal things.”  Stories, then, are important, just as important as real life.  But this doesn’t say anything about stories well-told rather than briefly discussed.  This part of the answer comes from that earlier discussion of the great films, when Katya offers this theory of greatness: “Inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions.  That’s the language of film.”  Again, Auster points us not toward abstraction but toward specificity as the necessary ingredients of greatness, and greatness in terms of emotional truth, of meaning in art.

No matter how much steam is coming out of my ears as I’m stuck in traffic between Santa Cruz and Boulder Creek, no matter how ridiculous and sick my rage against the slow driver ahead of me might be, I can’t help putting my rage in the context of gasoline prices, exurbanization, sprawl, consumer-based individuality, consumer “freedom”— all those things that being stuck in an automobile now brings to mind. I don’t write about these things because I want to be a “social novelist.” I do it because I can’t ignore them as a person.

—Jonathan Franzen (from an interview in boundary2)

Apparently, Junot Díaz is the same kind of reader because he is certainly that kind of writer.  In The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the narrator, who bears a strong resemblance to but should not be equated with his author, repeatedly interrupts his narrative with asides, history lessons, disquisitions, slang-fu, and allusions, lots and lots of allusions to comic books and science fiction, to all of that vast social wasteland that was pre-internet nerdery.  He seems to be doing this to satisfy the two impulses driving his novel: the desire to tell the story of the Dominican Republic in the twentieth century, at least from the rise of Trujillo to the dispersal of the diaspora, and to pay homage to the comics and science fiction that he loved growing up.  The weakness of the book lies in the distance between these two impulses.

Oscar Wao is the nickname of the ultimate nerd whose story this novel relates, with long sojourns into his ancestry.  He also, evidently incongruously, is Dominican.  Before reading this book, I had no idea that Dominican men were so inordinately fly that they spent all their time sexing up any and every available woman.  But that is what Junior, our narrator, suggests, which is why he finds the likes of Oscar, who makes it into adulthood still a virgin thanks to his “Hail! Well met” method of communicating and the unique overeating problem of the nerdly isolate, such a paradox and so worthy of having his story told.  If you don’t find this incongruity surprising, however, you might wonder if Oscar’s life is so wondrous if still brief.

Díaz, too, may have his doubts about the power and interest of his protagonist’s story, because he can’t stick with it.  Through Oscar and Junior’s voice (the latter being one of the two best things about the book) Díaz satisfies his impulse to honor his childhood lifelines.  But because Oscar is so atypical of a Dominican, he doesn’t allow Díaz to fulfill that other impulse, the one to tell the Dominican story.  Instead, he gets into the Dominicana through the story of Oscar’s mother and her father under Trujillo, through the story of the family and how they ended up dispersed from their Island home.  It is quite a tale of woe and superstition and political reality and it offers the best sustained narrative in the novel.  The diasporan Dominican as represented by Oscar, in contrast, gets short shrift.  We learn more about the diaspora through glimpses of Junior’s life and that of Oscar’s sister but since they are peripheral to the novel, the glimpses are incomplete and lack the depth and luster of the sections in the DR itself.

The failure of the novel, to the extent it fails in spite of it’s manic energy and many accolades and strengths, lies in this imbalance: the Dominican story as told here doesn’t do justice to the experience of the Diaspora, as it does for the earlier period, because Díaz’s chosen protagonist is only nominally a member of that group.  I understand why he was chosen, but that choice still weakens the novel.

Trying to compete head-on with the national political narrative was a dead end. You know, the novel is a bourgeois liberal form, and it succeeds to the extent that it confers importance on relatively Everyman figures—on the non-famous, on the non-consequential. It’s not a tragic form. It works just the opposite of Macbeth. It’s a matter of what you’re able to experience as you read. What a president is able to experience is so far beyond most readers’ ken as to not produce a recognizable texture. There are obviously exceptions to this, but I think the broad majority of novelistic production is based on forging some kind of connection between the texture of a fictional character’s life and the ordinary reader’s life. Somehow it’s a lot easier to do with a child soldier in Africa than with Idi Amin. The child-soldier character gets to live as a character, whereas the Idi Amin character walks around in the chains of being Idi Amin. There is a large body of historical fiction about these great figures and about the specialness of them, and I find it unreadable, pretty much to a book. There are a very few exceptions, like Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower and a few others. By and large, though, fiction thrives on the anonymous. The anonymous life can be inhabited, the public life is closed to you. Historical fiction works more like a kind of non-fiction. It’s non-fiction in all but name to write about the king, the president, the great one. I prefer straight biography and imagination.

—Jonathan Franzen on character (from an interview in boundary2)

Postmodernism is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. It’s definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done. This is partly because, like many terms that begin with “post,” it is fundamentally ambidextrous. Postmodernism can mean, “We’re all modernists now. Modernism has won.” Or it can mean, “No one can be a modernist anymore. Modernism is over.” People who use “postmodernism” in the first, “mission accomplished,” sense believe that modernism—the art and literature associated with figures like Picasso and Joyce—changed the game completely, and that everyone is still working through the consequences. Modernism is the song that never ends. Being postmodernist just means that we can never be pre-modernist again. People who use it in the second sense, as the epitaph for modernism, think that, somewhere along the line, there was a break with the assumptions, practices, and ambitions of modernist art and literature, and that everyone since then is (or ought to be) on to something very different. Being postmodernist means that we can never be modernist again.

—Louis Menand on Postmodernism (in an essay on Don Barthleme)

The novel centers around Akbar the Great, the Mughal emperor of India and his fictional encounter with a Florentine adventurer who has come to his court with a story to tell.  The story this Florentine, who calls himself Mogor dell’Amore, tells comprises the bulk of the novel but doesn’t begin until more than a third of the way through.  Before that story begins, other stories and ideas and beings are created and introduced: we meet the thoughtful Akbar and learn how Mogor came to the emperor’s doorstep; we learn that through the force of his imagination and will that Akbar has created the perfect woman, Jodhabai, to be his Queen; and we learn of the wondrous kingdom, the apotheosis of culture and thought that he created.  And Mogor’s story brings into being a lost Mughal princess, Angelica, Qara Köz, Lady Dark Eyes, whose story and beauty capture the hearts and lives of all she encounters, both those within the story and those who hear it.  For Rushdie, all imaginative acts, especially narrative ones, are generative; they bring things into being, into life.

This profusion of narrative, of story, is an act of creation, even if used for destructive ends.  As Rushdie knows, the most powerful, persistent stories are religious in nature, so the truth of a story has little to do with its power or its resilience.  In many ways, this novel, much like The Satanic Verses, tries to contend with the power of religious stories.  At one point I thought, “This is his book against god,” which would connect this novel with the recent bestseller by his good friend and fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens.  But Rushdie is too respectful of the power of story to capture us, to imprison us, to dismiss religion out of hand.  However much he may want people to abandon these old stories, he knows we will hold onto them regardless of the anachronisms, the untruths, the full brief that the New Atheists level against religious belief.  We are believing creatures, as Rushdie shows in novel after novel.  The novelist may be able to tell a story engaging and moving enough to capture our minds for a moment, perhaps even for centuries, for the length of posterity, but the breadth and strength of that hold will never supplant that of religious myth.

How well has Rushdie succeeded in this novel in his professional rivalry with religious myth?  The story of Qara Köz is as enthralling as everyone in the story claims it is, but the story around feels flat and not simply in comparison.  I think the flatness of his prose can be attributed to the omniscient voice that he adopts.  What has always given Rushdie’s prose its vitality, and what does so in the Qara Köz sections, is the personal, multi-lingual voice bubbling over with the story it needs to tell.  Mogor’s voice is like that, but until he begins his story, so late into the novel, Rushdie employs an omniscient third-person narrator that maintains a great psychological distance from his characters and from his readers.  The question of voice and point of view determines the distance between the reader and the action of the narrative, and this voice as employed by Rushdie is very removed from the events and characters of the novel, a remove that the readers come to share.  This point of view is called omniscient because it affords the writer the most power to shape his story, but it also approximates the view that an omnipotent being would have of human activity: disinterest, even boredom.  While this decision may have been dictated by the structure of Rushdie’s novel, it does weaken it and make it less engaging than it might have been.

Another thing differentiates this novel, and all his recent novels, from his great early novels.  The protagonists in those early novels were characters who had been disgraced or defeated in some way, who told their stories in hopes of posthumous vindication.  History had taught them that they were inconsequential, did not matter regardless of how close they may have come to greatness.  His latest novels, and this one is no exception, are about the unequivocally great.  Akbar means “great” so his name literally means “The Great Great One” or ”His Great Greatness”.  The main characters of Shalimar the Clown are the greatest beauty of her time, the greatest diplomat of the age, and the great assassin who hunts them.  No more does Rushdie write about failures, even ambitious ones, as he once did, and at least for this reader, that makes his characters much less likely to illumine the reader’s self.

As a consequence, I was unfamiliar with the picture of a man in a suit and jacket falling headfirst from the Towers after which Don Delillo named his novel, Falling Man.  I only saw the picture after Delillo’s novel was dismissively reviewed by the man, Tom Junod, who wrote the original article about this figure.  I did not read the obituaries about those who died in the attack.  I did not read the story of the terrorists who hijacked and piloted the planes.  I did not read the 9/11 Commission Report.  I didn’t think any of that relevant to how I needed to understand what happened.  I had no duty to the dead but to myself, my country, my world, in short, to the living.  Perhaps it would have been different if I had lost someone close to me or if I had been closer to the epicenter of the attack when it happened.  I did not.  I was not.  I dealt with it in my own way as best I could, as we all did.

Three figures, whose names grace the three major sections, haunt Delillo’s novel, all of them ghosts of a sort, terrorists of a sort, but they are not the central characters.  The three central figures are Keith, his estranged wife Lianne, and a member of the terror crew named Hammad, each of whom provide the point-of-view for sections of the novel.  I call them figures because it may not be appropriate to call them characters for they do not seem real in their actions or speech, do not behave as people.  Rather they seem like cyphers, unfathomable to themselves, to each other, to readers, perhaps even to their creator.

Most critics who denigrated Falling Man when it first appeared in 2007 did so for the way that it failed to honor the psychology of character.  Junod thought it disrespectful of the dead and the living to use characters, the victims of this event, in the way that Delillo does here.  I don’t remember if James Wood reviewed Falling Man, but I know why he would have disliked it, dismissed it as less than a novel, as immoral.  He would have been antagonized by the utter abandonment of psychology, of any attempt to understand or portray a human mind from the inside.

That description of Delillo’s writing isn’t entirely fair, however.  I noted a number of places where the narrative voice drifted into the perspective of his characters.  But their voices never shine through; they are subsumed by Delillo’s style with its distinctive cadence and insistent indirectness.  Delillo’s style is daring and beautiful, but it sounds nothing like human speech or human thought.  It, nevertheless, feels real, captures something true about our condition and nature as human beings, as creatures living in this particular historical moment, when fear of death has been overwhelmed by the fear of annihilation, of species extinction.  For this has always been Delillo’s true subject: life in the shadow of Hiroshima and mutual assured destruction; that’s why his greatest works explore the history of the Cold War.  These books explore the free-floating dread and nihilism that characterized the lives of so many in those years.

In Falling Man, Delillo is trying to bring the same insights and techniques he used to illuminate the apocalyptic mind of Cold War America to bear on this age of terrorism.  Delillo recognizes the break with the previous epoch while simultaneously believing that the dread and fear of today’s world is an extension, a metastasizing of the apocalyptic mind.  I believe he is right about both the break and the continuity, and Falling Man is his first, if inadequate, attempt to understand this apparent contradiction.  For me, what makes this book worth reading is precisely that for which others dismiss it: Delillo’s style, which is as engaging a portrait of the human psyche–Delillo’s own psyche–as one gets from full-bodied character development.

Delillo writes here in a flattened, affectless voice, perhaps to avoid sensationalizing or exploiting a raw historical event, but that is only the surface.  Beneath it roils powerful emotions that his characters do not understand and cannot control or contain.  In a more effusive style, his character’s feelings would become maudlin and trite melodrama.  Delillo tries to portray both the sense of withdrawal and despair that many people felt along with the grasping after meaning, the newfound capacity or desire for faith, for belief that also characterized those first years after the attacks.  The portrayal feels true but reading the novel is ultimately unsatisfying because the end of the story lies beyond the end of the novel.  We are still living that story, still trying to come to an end.  Perhaps our recent economic woes has made terrorism feel unimportant again, tangential to our lives.  But none of us, including Delillo, yet have the perspective to know what this new epoch will be like or how humanity will respond, what human life will become for those of us living in it.  So, while Falling Man may not be perfect or adequate to the task of defining our era, it is a powerful novel that evokes much that is true about the moments we first came to recognize that the times had changed.