Archive for the ‘Review’ Category
There is a short documentary on YouTube, about twenty minutes long, about the Aokigahara Forest (also known as Jaiku) in Japan. The documentary follows Azusa Hayano, a geologist who frequents the forest, as he explores the undergrowth, looking for signs of people who might have committed suicide there. The forest, after all, is famous as one of the most popular sites in the world for people to commit suicide, a tradition that stretches back even before modern times – in times of famine, the locals used to leave the elderly, unwanted babies, the sick, and other people that society sought to exclude for the sake of survival, leading to a longstanding association of the place with death and, not surprisingly, the ghosts of those who died there.
The forest, with its rugged density and lack of wildlife, enveloping the place in an eerie blanket of silence, seems particularly conducive to this kind of mythologizing. In 1960, Seichi Matsumoto captured the Japanese imagination with the publication of his (as yet untranslated) novel Kuroi Jukai (Black Sea of Trees), a romantic story of two doomed lovers. Robert James Russell’s novella seems to have been inspired by a conjunction of these sources.
The narrative is simple enough. Divided into chapters with headings like “Sacrifice” and “Enlightenment,” the main story follows two characters, Junko, a beautiful young Japanese woman, and Bill, an American, the two having met and fallen in love while they were students. The purpose of their journey is to discover some sign of Izumi, Junko’s older sister, who had disappeared in the forest, presumably having committed suicide. Each chapter concludes with a self-contained, italicized story about an unrelated character (or characters) who died in the forest due to various motives: shame, guilt, murder, and even a simple fascination with death.
I had a number of problems with Sea of Trees. For a start, so many of the elements from the aforementioned documentary seemed to have been incorporated into the basic details of the story: the abandoned car in the parking lot, the deserted campsite, the forlorn body of a deceased person, the doll nailed to a tree with a suicide note nailed next to it. Often it felt as though the novella I was reading was a transposition of the documentary into written form, with only minor modifications.
As we get into the second half of the book, the personalities of the two main characters start to emerge, revealing a major weakness of Russell’s abilities as a writer. Both Bill and Junko are disappointingly flat characters – Bill simply switches back and forth between lusting after Junko and meekly allowing her to walk all over him, while Junko is so unrealistically obsessed with finding her sister that she abandons all logic and, particularly in the final pages, believability. She reveals secrets about Izumi that make sense of her sister’s suicide, but her own behavior is so over the top that she made no inherent sense to me at all – her actions seemed a rather artificial device on Russell’s part to push the plot to its culmination rather than any explicable, organic development in her character.
The element of Sea of Trees that I was least able to stomach, though, was its uncritical romanticism. Let’s not forget that the world’s first romantic novel – Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) – also deals with the issue of suicide. While I can sympathize with the seductive power that Aokigahara, with its legends of demons and death, wields over the human imagination (it was what sparked my interest in Russell’s novella in the first place) what I found both lazy and problematic about the book was its wholesale acceptance of this tradition. The reader is not only led to empathize repeatedly with the suicide victims in the book, but also to accept the mystical power that is associated with the place. Bill does make some feeble attempts to give voice to reason, but they are quickly lost in the emotional deluge of Junko’s mania.
Sea of Trees could have been a powerful and complex examination of what life means in the face of death, especially when humanity is faced with the complex phenomenon of its own self-destruction. Russell draws on the operatic, emotional power of the romantic tradition to give his novel punch, but the problem is that this formula is so worn out that, quite simply, I can’t believe in its nobility anymore. I read Goethe’s Werther, for instance, and I think “Put the pistols away, young man – this Lotte woman is not worth it. Your momentary, youthful despair is far less daring than having the maturity to face life with all its prismatic hardness.” Surely that is what novelists, in the twenty-first century, ought to have learned, too – or at the very least, that romanticism is fine when it arouses us into life, but pushed to its extreme it descends into the very worst kind of nihilism.
Rating: 2.5/5
© 2014 Peter Mathews. All rights reserved.
Tao Lin is hot property in the world of contemporary literature, with Taipei, his third novel, being hailed as his breakthrough work. Part of his appeal lies, no doubt, in his capacity to divide: whether as a person and a writer, he tends either to inspire adoration as the voice of his generation or hatred for being a shallow impostor. Lin also complicates matters further by blurring the lines between fiction and autobiography in making Paul, the protagonist of Taipei, into a rather transparent stand-in for his own self. Paul essentially shares every aspect of Tao Lin’s history, from his Taiwanese background to his rampant drug use.
One of Lin’s champions is Bret Easton Ellis, and it is perhaps no surprise that Taipei is being compared to Ellis’s debut novel Less Than Zero (1985). In terms of personality, though, these two writers could not be more different. Unlike the self-promoting, egoistic Ellis, Lin, to coin a term, is a “black hole” provocateur. In the interviews I have read, he comes across as curiously passive and non-committal, much like the protagonist of Taipei, in a way that initially makes me want to punch him in the face for his apparent pretentiousness but, after further consideration, makes me also admire his ability to provoke such a reaction in spite of his utterly flavorless personality (nonetheless, I still want to punch him in the face).
Taipei had a similar effect on me as I was reading it. The opening pages were a lesson in patience: endlessly detailed descriptions of Paul’s passive-aggressive interactions with his initial girlfriend Michelle, introductions to a myriad of characters who bobbed in and out of the story without much significance, a lack of clear plot direction, and most grating of all, the minutiae of Paul’s online activity, as he cycles through an assortment of online chats, emails, blogs, texts, and other social media that are just as boring to him as they are to us as readers. Taipei is a boring, plot-less novel about a pretentious, self-absorbed protagonist who fritters away his time on worthless pursuits, goes to parties, does LOTS of drugs, whines about his poor relationships with his family, friends, and girlfriends while doing everything in his power to alienate them, and generally inhabits a zone of hipster privilege that is itself a cultural cliche. Not only that, but the novel’s title misleads the reader into expecting that it will shed some light on Taipei in some way, but when Paul goes to that city he does the exact same things he does in America: takes lots of drugs, plays with his MacBook, and sets about alienating his female companion.
My opinion started to moderate a little not because the novel improved dramatically as it went on or suddenly took on some kind of coherent plot, but because I began to see some unexpected similarities between Lin’s writing and earlier works of literature. Throughout Taipei, for instance, Lin uses quotation marks to indicate phrases that seem like cliches, and while in the early stages of reading I reacted, for instance, to Kyle’s description of Traci as “really hot” in quotation marks with an angry note in the margin (“what is this? high school?”), I reluctantly remembered that Flaubert does much the same thing in Madame Bovary, albeit with italics rather than quotation marks. I remembered also reading about Sartre’s drug habits, about how he was so amped up on speed that if you examine his handwritten manuscripts you can see where his handwriting slides off the edge of the page from writing so quickly.
It was the Sartre connection that really got me thinking, making me ponder a possible resonance between Taipei and Sartre’s first novel Nausea (1938). Nausea is a meditation on the anxiety of existence, a haunting feeling which troubles all human beings but that bothers, in particular, the novel’s sensitive central character Antoine Roquentin. Roquentin seems to be more attuned than others to this existential condition, and Sartre explores his protagonist’s ongoing dilemma through two main avenues: Roquentin’s ambivalent relationship with an Englishwoman, Anny, and various lyrical moments of philosophical insight, the most famous of which occurs when Roquentin sits on a park bench and contemplates the root of a chestnut tree (a passage that was inspired, it is said, by Sartre’s experiments with mescaline).
The best parts of Taipei more or less follow these aspects of Sartre’s novel. In place of Anny, Lin inserts Erin, a writer from Baltimore, into the story, who provides a breath of fresh air after Paul’s earlier, insipid entanglements with Michelle and then Laura, relationships that revealed little about the characters and did not move along the plot in any way. Erin, by contrast, provides an excellent foil to Paul’s character in the second half of the book, indulging his immature impulses by sharing drugs, making amateur films with Paul on their ubiquitous MacBooks, going to Las Vegas with him, visiting his family in Taipei, and then returning to New York for the novel’s final binge on heroin and magic mushrooms. Erin is the only character in the novel with any warmth and depth, and it is for this reason that she actually manages to shed some light on the colorless protagonist in Paul.
The true potential of this novel, however, comes into focus whenever Lin follows Sartre by providing the reader with lyrical contemplations about the meaning of existence. Normally, the prose style of the novel is either dull (tedious, in-depth descriptions of drug-taking and email-checking) or, in some cases, laughably clumsy. Lin comes up with some awful similes, from comparing Paul’s inability to understand others to “an amoeba trying to create a personal webpage using CSS” (p.10), to his protagonist’s social discomfort being “not unlike playing a difficult Nintendo game alone, with no instruction manual” (p.37). But these moments are somewhat redeemed by some glimpses of true lyrical beauty, such as this passage in which Paul imagines technology subverting its role as humanity’s slave and slowing taking over society:
“At some point, Paul vaguely realized, technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness. Instead of postponing death by releasing nanobots into the bloodstream to fix things faster than they deteriorated, implanting little computers into people’s brains, or other methods Paul had probably read about on Wikipedia, until it became the distant, shrinking, nearly nonexistent somethingness that was currently life— and life, for immortal humans, became the predominate [“predominant”?] distraction that was currently death— technology seemed more likely to permanently eliminate life by uncontrollably fulfilling its only function: to indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter, for the sole purpose, it seemed, of increased functioning, until the universe was one computer. Technology, an abstraction, undetectable in concrete reality, was accomplishing its concrete task, Paul dimly intuited while idly petting Erin’s hair, by way of an increasingly committed and multiplying workforce of humans , who receive , over hundreds of generations, a certain kind of advancement (from feet to bicycles to cars, faces to bulletin boards to the internet) in exchange for converting a sufficient amount of matter into computerized matter for computers to be able to build themselves.” (p.167)
Or, to give an another example, here is a beautiful passage from late in the story in which Paul, high on mushrooms, imagines that his being is melding with that of Erin:
“His steady, controlled petting of one of Erin’s vertebra with the cuticle of his right index finger gradually felt like his only method of remaining in concrete reality, where he and Erin, and other people, shared a world. Sometimes, forgetting what he was doing, his finger would slow or stop and he would become aware of a drifting sensation and realize he was being absorbed— from an indiscernible distance, beyond which he wouldn’t know how to return— and, with some urgency, move his body or open his eyes, seeing grid-like overlays on the walls and holograms of graph paper in the air, to interrupt his being taken. The effort became gradually smaller and more unconscious and, as if for something to do, in place of what was now automatic, Paul began to discern his rhythmic petting as a continuous striving to elicit certain information from Erin by responding or not responding to her rhythms, in a cycle whose goal was to produce momentary equilibriums. He felt increasingly attuned to the speed and quality of her breathing and heart rate, until he felt able to instantly discern changes in her physiology, which in entirety began to seem like an inconstant unit of unique, irreducible information (an ever-changing display of only prime numbers) that was continuously expressed and that bypassed the parts of them that allowed for deliberation or perception or intuition, beginning and ending in the only place where they were exactly together, undifferentiated and unknowable, but couldn’t, in their present form, ever reach, like a thing communicating directly with itself, rendering them both irrelevant.” (pp.243-4)
These are the kind of occasional gems that are buried in the midst of a novel that is otherwise focused on the annoying and pretentious task of enumerating the banality of a certain class of people in America. Could it be that one style cannot exist without the other, that these lyrical passages need the tedium of Paul’s postmodern life in the same way that a picture needs a frame, that light needs darkness? Whatever the case, I certainly don’t think that Taipei is the next great work in contemporary literature, nor that Tao Lin is mature enough to break through at this stage, even though the consensus seems to be against me. Young writers tend to suffer from a lack of discipline, but Taipei perhaps suffers from too much: its relentlessly unemotional style is suffocating, a drawback made all the more stark by the intrusion of its best, most lyrical moments, those rare times when the novel breaks free from its pretentious shackles and shows glimpses of the writer that Lin might someday become.
Rating: 2.5/5
© 2013 Peter Mathews. All rights reserved.
Most readers already know the basic structure of Cloud Atlas, which consists of six overlapping stories: a mid-nineteenth-century journal written by Adam Ewing, an American lawyer on his way home from business in Australia; a series of letters from an ambitious young composer, Robert Frobisher, to his lover Rufus Sixsmith, about how he has apprenticed himself to an ailing composer, Vyvyan Ayrs, shortly before the rise of the Nazis; a pastiche of a 1970s reporter/detective novel in which feisty journalist Luisa Rey investigates corruption at a nuclear power plant; a contemporary piece about a small-time publisher, Timothy Cavendish, whose brother tricks him into entering a nursing home; a post-apocalyptic interview with an android, Sonmi-451, who has transcended her programming to become fully human; and campfire account told by Zachry, who lives in a tribal world set even further in the future, and focuses on his encounters with a woman named Meronym, whose people still possess advanced technology. Only the last narrative is told in full: each of the other stories is told in part, with Mitchell returning to each narrative in reverse sequence until the book ends, once again, with Ewing’s account.
I have mixed feelings about this book that have mostly to do with its technical execution. The success of the different accounts, for instance, varies greatly: some of them are quite dull in the first half, but pick up measurably in the second, and it is for this reason that the first-time reader should be somewhat patient with this book. It does drag at first, but as more connections start to appear, it definitely gets more interesting. Two sections in particular stand out for me: the Luisa Rey section is hilarious if you are familiar with 1970s culture, especially because of the hyperbolic way in which Mitchell frames the narrative as a knee-jerk reaction to the times, from the Three-Mile Island accident to Watergate. But the best parts of the book belong to Sonmi, both because she is the most sympathetic character and because Mitchell’s technique seems at its smoothest here.
Mitchell is a very good writer, but he still has some polishing to do before he becomes truly great. Like many other readers, I did not appreciate the silly flourishes he gives to the English language of the future, and my reading speed noticeably slowed in that sixth story because of it. However, the greater technical flaws lay for me in two other areas. First, Mitchell’s characters are not always as interesting or developed as they might be, so that they sometimes seem to be ciphers for ideas rather than complex beings. Second, Mitchell’s use of literary allusions can sometimes be really clumsy. When Cavendish is waking up from his apparent stroke, for instance, he thinks the words “speak, memory” in a very unsubtle allusion to Nabokov’s autobiography. Similarly, there is Mitchell’s decision to call the faceshaper Madam Ovid after the Roman author of The Metamorphoses because, you know, she metamorphoses people. Such references are too unrealistically close to the surface of the text, and as such they are jarring. I really wish authors would trust the intelligence of their readers rather than using such clumsy devices.
Where Mitchell’s novel really hits home, though, lies not so much in the writing, but in the probing questions it asks about human existence. The shifting time periods of the narratives is a calculated tool designed to push readers outside the received political and philosophical assumptions of our time. When we strip these away, Mitchell shows, what remains are the ineradicable differences between weak and strong, which express themselves in different ways throughout human history. Through a logic that is explicitly informed by Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche, Mitchell argues for a qualified version of eternal recurrence: not that history repeats itself literally, but rather that it follows a cycle of birth, strength, decline, and fall in a way that applies equally to individuals, civilizations, and ideas. Mitchell aligns these ideas in the Timothy Cavendish story, which pointedly overlays Cavendish’s decrepitude, both in terms of his physical weakness and his out-dated ideas and slang, with quotes from Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In terms of its ideas, Cloud Atlas delivers a brilliant, incisive blow to the modern reader’s assumptions, a potential for greatness that, unfortunately, is not quite matched by Mitchell’s technical skills as a writer.
Rating: 4/5
© 2013 Peter Mathews. All rights reserved.
In 1972, the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published a short story called “The Other,” in which his elderly self, seated on a bench in Cambridge (the alma mater of Serena Frome, the protagonist of Sweet Tooth), bumps into his younger self. The two versions of Borges engage in a dialogue from which each comes away disconcerted by the differences between them, a device that is used by Borges to reflect on the disparate selves that we inhabit in the course of our lives. McEwan replicates a similar but fleeting moment in the course of his narrative. Toward the end of the book, as Serena is making her way through the crowd at Victoria station, she has a sudden vision: “I happened to glance to my right, just as the crowd parted, and I saw something quite absurd. I had a momentary glimpse of my own face, then the gap closed and the vision was gone.” Sweet Tooth follows the same logic as Borges, for McEwan, now sixty-four and the author of more than a dozen books, uses this novel to reflect back on his early career.
On the surface, the plot seems to belie this strategy. Set in the 1970s, its first-person narrator is a young woman who, after graduating from Cambridge with a degree in mathematics, is recruited by MI5. Although women are usually given MI5’s lowliest tasks, Serena is given a break: she is assigned to an operation called Sweet Tooth, which provides covert funds to authors who have an established anti-communist bias. As such, Serena recruits Tom Haley, a budding young writer with whom she soon begins an affair. In this layer of the story McEwan provides a searching and sometimes hilarious examination of artistic integrity in relation to the state, a subject that resounds in a number of directions: the rise of a neoconservative ideology that has seen cuts to arts funding over the last four decades, the grounding of Sweet Tooth in the real-life precedent of the CIA’s funding of the magazine Encounter, and even Haley’s choice of Spencer’s Faerie Queene as the topic of his doctoral thesis, since Spencer’s work is an allegorical epic poem that bears a similarly complicated relationship to the politics of the Elizabethan age. Indeed, one might argue that the Faerie Queene, rather than any spy thriller, is McEwan’s biggest clue as to how to read this particular dimension of the novel (although I suspect that Spencer will somehow not see a dramatic spike in sales as a result).
Concealed within this story is a recurrent set of in-jokes about McEwan and his early career, expressed through the character of Tom Haley. As part of her background research, for instance, Serena reads Haley’s published stories, which bear strong similarities to the style and themes of McEwan’s early fiction. Like Borges, McEwan treats his younger self with a mixture of appreciation and amusement, establishing a deliberately ambiguous relationship with those earlier works. On the surface, he asks us to admire them, but underneath he seems to be smirking at their now-apparent youthful enthusiasm. McEwan also gives Haley many of his own biographical features, from his lanky frame to his home university of Sussex. Again, this quasi-portrait is undercut with an Austen-like irony that is easy to miss the first time through, most notably McEwan’s repeated insistence on Haley’s being a “swordsman” whose mastery in bed is commented on at every turn by Serena. It is difficult – and therefore deeply humorous – to work out whether McEwan is engaging in sexual boasting by proxy, or whether these moments arise from self-deprecating humor, or whether, like in Austen, the line between the two has become so blurry that it is no longer possible to judge the difference. Either way, careful readers of the novel, especially those who are reading it for a second time, should have wonderful time picking out these shades of ambiguity.
Sweet Tooth has wrongly been billed as a spy novel in the vein of, say, John le Carré, or even a thriller in the mold of McEwan’s earlier novel The Innocent, but that is not what this book is about at all. Instead, it asks searching questions about the value of literature to both the educational and political vitality of a society. Serena is a voracious but poor reader: she reads purely for the surface entertainment of a book, for instance, while missing the subtle underlying meanings of the text. As such, she avoids poetry and experimental prose, refusing to grapple with difficult works in what McEwan intimates is a symptom of a larger failure to engage in true critical thinking. Books are in danger, he warns us, of becoming as useless as the defunct telephones in Haley’s dystopian novella: “Without a telephone system, telephones are worthless junk.” Without a critical reading audience, McEwan implies, works of literature, including Sweet Tooth, are “worthless junk,” toys that are reduced to lowly entertainment when they could be used for so much more.
To conclude, if you have never read a book by Ian McEwan, then do not start with this one. The reason is simple: Sweet Tooth is in many ways a literary retrospective, an oblique reflection by the author back on the origins of his career. As such, if you haven’t read any early works by McEwan – especially In Between The Sheets – and don’t know anything about his life, you will miss a great deal of the logic and rich humor embedded in this novel.
Rating: 4.5/5
© 2013 Peter Mathews. All rights reserved.
The Quantity Theory of Insanity is Will Self’s first book, and although I had previously read Cock and Bull before I picked up this text, I felt as though I was starting over with his oeuvre. Reading Self from the start, in sequence, is not a bad strategy – after all, his fiction is littered with intratextual references, recurring characters, and little in-jokes that build from one book to the next.
Self is a polarizing writer whose reputation usually precedes him. He tends to be either loved or hated as a consequence, which is unfortunate, because authors should not be judged solely on the emotional reactions they provoke. You see, Self is clever and witty and erudite in a way that only the English seem to be able to pull off. Personally, I was captivated by the stories in The Quantity Theory of Insanity. Self is not merely showing off here: his satire has real teeth, and is grounded in a fierce intellect that attempts to be revolutionary even as it acknowledges such precursors as Kafka and Chekhov.
My experience of reading the first story in here, “The North London Book of the Dead,” is a perfect example of the unsettling yet amusing nature of Self’s texts. What appears at first to be a tragic tale of how a man loses his mother to cancer gradually transforms itself into minor pathos. The dead don’t go away altogether, the narrator discovers, they merely move to a different part of London. I was, by turns, confused and then amused as I realized the true purpose of the metaphor that Self was creating.
This biting caricature of the dullness of English life is replicated in other stories, such as “Understanding the Ur-Bororo.” The story follows the career of Janner, an aspiring anthropologist who dedicates his career to studying this obscure tribe, the Ur-Bororo, winning a special grant dedicated to this specific purpose. What Janner discovers, however, is that the romance surrounding the tribe derives purely from their obscurity. In reality, they are the most boring people in the world, whose culture shows a remarkable indifference to sex and whose conversations consist of bland observations about the weather. Janner marries one of the tribe and, in a brilliant satirical twist, brings her back to England, where she fits right in.
The stories in The Quantity Theory of Insanity thus typically explore one of two themes: the unexciting, self-limiting way in which humanity tends to live life, as exemplified by the two stories mentioned already as well as the book’s closer, “Waiting,” and Self’s exploration of madness, rationality, and power. It is in this book, for instance, that we first meet Self’s most important recurring character, the experimental psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner, together with his notorious mentor Alkan (a not-too-subtle but utterly enjoyable caricature of Jacques Lacan). This latter theme is by far the most profound and interesting, and I particularly liked “Ward 9” (an inversion of Chekhov’s “Ward 6”) and the title story, which engages in a brilliant deconstruction of psychology’s attempts to legitimize itself through “objective” testing, a message that few will appreciate and even fewer will understand.
On the whole, I loved The Quantity Theory of Insanity with only a couple of reservations. The first is that I didn’t like the story “Mono-Cellular,” a testament to the occasional tendency of English fiction writers to overreach their abilities (I’m looking at you, A.S. Byatt). The second is that, well, at times it felt strangely dated, in the same way that reading literary and critical theory from the same period feels dated. I get the same feeling when I read Self’s other books, too, as if he is still trying to push the boundaries of 1980s postmodernism without realizing that the rest of the world has moved on. Nonetheless, it’s wickedly clever stuff, for all its strange anachronisms, and I highly recommend it if you are in the mood for something intelligent and anarchic.
Rating: 4.5/5
© 2012 Peter Mathews. All rights reserved.
Alexander Chee’s novel Edinburgh deals with some difficult issues, as the book’s main character, Fee, struggles to deal first with the sexual abuse meted out by his choir master, Big Eric, and then, as he grows up, with his own identity as a homosexual man. Such problems, as one might imagine, run deep, and there is a repeated desire on Fee’s part to destroy himself, just as so many others in his life have done.
As I was reading Edinburgh, I wanted to be moved by these themes. After all, if these issues were being told to me directly, by a friend, then I would certainly be touched. But the more I read, the more I wondered: doesn’t this belong more properly in a memoir? That is to say, are these topics the proper domain of fiction?
There are some ways in which the answer to that question is a resounding “yes.” The rise of so-called “dirty realism” in the 1980s – think Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver – is a clear influence on Chee’s style in this novel, which remains detached and economical, as if to counterbalance the melodrama of the story’s content. The subject matter also occupies the familiar territory of dirty realism: sex, drugs, perversion, all the emotional fabric of everyday life filtered through the lens of the novelist.
I share the view that no subject ought to be viewed as off-limits. But there is always a twin danger when treading along the borders of transgression. The first danger, which Chee successfully avoids for the most part, is becoming too emotional, either through hysteria or sentimentality. The second, however, he does not, and that is the feeling that the reader is being blackmailed into an attachment with the story at hand.
This feeling of emotional blackmail tells me that I ought to care about Fee because of his struggles simply because they are so weighty, that I somehow “owe” him something as a reader for this pain. But the truth is, I don’t. He’s a fictional character, and his difficulties are, in the end, made up. I would bestow my compassion on a real-life friend in Fee’s situation because their pain is real, stemming as it does from the weight of experience. In the case of a novel, however, the burden lies with the author to make me care by drawing me into the story. That requires a certain level of narrative skill and seduction that Chee, presuming on my pity, does not enact.
The reality is that, in fiction, the heaviest misery comes cheaply. Writers can destroy cities, unleash plagues, wipe out worlds in the blink of an eye, all with a few strokes of the pen. Suffering – that is, imaginary suffering – is cheap because, without the sparkle of narrative interest, any reader can see that it’s counterfeit, fake, made-up.
The fact is that Alexander Chee is merely another product of the great MFA sausage factory of empty fiction writing. Yes, I know he went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop – it may be a superior sausage factory, but it is a sausage factory nonetheless. The writing sparkles with meaningless, “poetic” phrases that sound pretty when you read them but reveal absolutely nothing. Take these sentences, for instance:
“Blue. Blue because it’s the color people turn in the dark. Because it’s the color of the sky, of the center of the flame, of a diamond hit by an X ray. Blue is the knife edge of lightning. Blue is the color, a rose grower tells you, that a rose never quite reaches. Because when you feel threatened by a demon you are supposed to imagine around you a circle of blue light. You do this because the demon cannot cross blue light.” (pp.191-2)
What on earth does that mean? Passages like these are fool’s gold: they promise some kind of profundity, but the more closely you examine them the more you realize that they are nothing but decorative nonsense.
The greatest weakness in the novel, though, is the flatness of its narrative voice. There is nothing but surface in Edinburgh, no playful sense that our first-person narrator may be lying or mistaken (he is too transparent, too insipid for that), no desire to explore alternative viewpoints or other voices. There was a moment – the advent, in the middle of the book, of another narrator – when I thought we were going to see inside the mind of Fee’s abuser, but instead it turns out to the Warden, the abuser’s son, who, in keeping with the novel’s Narcissus references, is as dully monological in his admiration of Fee as the rest of the narrative. Chee mentions Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope” at one point, but he seems to have overlooked Bakhtin’s key idea that “polyphony” – “many voices” – is what makes a novel interesting.
So let’s just say that Chee’s attempt at blackmail didn’t work on me. It’s not that I’m heartless – but in the realm of fiction, where pain comes cheaply, you have to demonstrate some narrative skill to make me care.
Rating: 2/5
© 2012 Peter Mathews. All rights reserved.
Having now read both The Impressionist (2002) and Transmission (2004), Hari Kunzru’s first two novels, I have to admit that I am torn between mixed emotions. You see, I really like these works – a lot – and yet, at the same time, I get the feeling that Kunzru is an author who has not quite fulfilled his talent to its greatest extent. So while Transmission is very good, especially for a second novel by a young writer, I get the feeling that Kunzru may yet go on to bigger and better things.
Transmission is the story of the havoc wreaked on society by a computer virus named Leela, named after a fictional Bollywood star named Leela Zahir. At its center is a young Indian computer programmer, Arjun Mehta, who releases the virus when his tenuous, exploitative job with a Silicon Valley antivirus company comes under threat.
Kunzru interweaves this main story with several other threads: the rise and fall of Guy Swift, a British new-money entrepreneur who runs a company called Tomorrow*, which seems to specialize in marketing empty rhetoric to various multinational businesses; the career of Gabriella Caro, Guy’s girlfriend, who works as a public relations manager and suffers from her family’s old money; and briefly, Leela Zahir herself, who has been thrust into the world of show-business by her pushy mother.
Kunzru has a brilliant eye for satire. Guy Swift’s proposal, for instance, that Europe be rebranded as a sort of “VIP zone” for elites in the same way that certain nightclubs market themselves toward the rich and the famous is comedy gold, especially given what happens to him later in the novel. The only problem, in my opinion, is that most readers are a little too used to having their hands held: that is, they often want authors to reveal the satirical facade, just for a moment, to drop a wink after delivering a piece of searing irony so as to say “hey, it’s just satire, I’m only kidding.” What I admire about Kunzru is that he doesn’t do this, and so those who don’t get joke, well, they miss out. It’s a daring strategy, one that, as a quick perusal of the academic criticism about Kunzru’s novels suggests, leads to some overly literal interpretations of his work.
The main shortcoming I found in Transmission was that Kunzru struggled to find a consistent range for his considerable comedic talents. A deliberately flat character like Guy Swift, for example, seems better designed for a much broader kind of comedy than was on offer. Mostly, I think this problem had to do with how Kunzru deals with social class, since the grand conceits of those in charge generally make them a perfect target for the kind of humorous poetic justice which is conferred on characters like Swift or Darryl Gant, Arjun’s passive-aggressive boss at Virugenix. The strategy works less well when it comes to the more difficult aspects of society, for disillusionment, poverty, and exploitation are much harder to laugh at from the bottom up.
Kunzru usually manages to address such issues without seeming preachy, but it does make it seem as though the novel proceeds at two different speeds that don’t quite gel with each other. Thus, there is the touching story of Arjun, who seems like a kind of holy fool, on the one hand, on whom is conferred a mixture of innocent sincerity and frustrated pathos, and on the other hand, the broad satire of the delusional Guy Swift, who could easily have wandered out of the pages of a Martin Amis story. The result is an entertaining but uneven novel, one in which the various threads are tied together competently but a little too glibly for my taste.
Rating: 4/5
© 2012 Peter Mathews. All rights reserved.
I have to admit that The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen’s debut novel, was a book that I found difficult to get through. I picked it up the first time, read about a hundred and fifty pages, then put it down again. A year later, I picked it up again with greater determination, started over, and managed to finish it, in spurts, over the course of five months.
Perhaps that admission will not surprise those who have read my scathing review of his latest novel, Freedom, but the two works, in terms of both difficulty and reward for effort, constitute a night and day difference. Where Freedom is pointless, angry, and worst of all, self-pitying, The Twenty-Seventh City is a complex and insightful look at the state of modern politics.
What is it, then, about The Twenty-Seventh City that makes it such a tough read? For many readers, it will be the difficulty of the prose. Despite the fact that Franzen is supposedly stepping away from the postmodern games of someone like Thomas Pynchon (who is briefly, gratuitously, mentioned in passing in the novel) toward a greater sense of realism, the fact is that his debut novel reads in many ways, like a throwback to modernism – one could easily imagine, for instance, that Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913) was a model for this text.
I’d like to think, though, that I have enough literary muscle to handle difficult prose, so I don’t think that was the only culprit. No, the thing that made the novel such a hard read for me was the way that Franzen continues to introduce new characters, even up until the very last pages. The sheer amount of names becomes impossible to keep track of, and this problem is compounded by the fact that Franzen doesn’t provide enough signals from the outset as to which characters are important and which are not. Everyone is named and described in with seemingly equal importance, giving no indication about whether they will continue to be important to the plot or not.
In the end, there are two characters are elevated above the rest: Martin Probst, a local developer and community leader, and S. Jammu, an Indian woman who was unexpectedly hired as St Louis’s new police chief. Once the reader realizes that these are the two figures that stand above the cacophony created by such a dizzyingly large array of characters, the novel starts to click. I am sure that rereading the novel with that knowledge would be a different, more rewarding experience.
That’s not to say that other characters aren’t important, including: Barbara Prost, Martin’s wife, and their daughter Luisa; Luisa’s older boyfriend Duane Thompson, whose relationship with Luisa begins the process of fragmenting the Prost family; Rolf Ripley, who is obsessed with Barbara despite the fact that he is married to her sister, Audrey; Jack DuChamp, an old buddy of Martin’s who acts as a barometer of the “man in the street;” RC, a black cop who plays an important role in the novel’s denouement; General Norris, a right-wing conspiracy theorist who smells something fishy in Jammu’s dealings; Asha Hammaker, an Indian princess who marries one of St Louis’s richest men and conspires with Jammu; Shanti Jammu, the police chief’s controlling mother; and Jammu’s various goons and pawns, most notably the handsome and ruthless Balwan Singh and the drug-addicted Barbara Prost lookalike, Devi Madan. There are more characters, many more, illustrating just how difficult it can be to keep track of which character is which in the novel.
While the pitfalls of such an approach are obvious, this vast canvas on which Franzen lays out his story also has its strengths. His deep knowledge of St Louis and its culture comes from the fact that he grew up there, but the skill with which he portrays the city in all its complexity is quite extraordinary, with the diverse array of characters on display a reflection of the city’s multifaceted nature. In spite of its particular context, however, The Twenty-Seventh City has a much broader scope that transcends both its time and location. Franzen states early on that “all cities are ideas, ultimately” (p.24), and thus St Louis, itself defined by the symbol of the Arch and its connection to Manifest Destiny, is also transformed into an idea.
So it is that The Twenty-Seventh City unfolds as a political novel of ideas, a “textbook dialectic” that pits “absolute freedom” against “absolute terror, the French Revolution à la Hegel” (p.198). Probst and Jammu are the opposing terms in this dialectic, which contrasts his rigid sense of ethical “decency” with her utter ruthlessness. Probst and Jammu thus find themselves on opposite sides of the fence in the political fight to unite the city and county of St Louis, only to find in their opposition a hidden attraction that perversely brings them together.
It is when Franzen engages with these grand political ideas that The Twenty-Seventh City rises above its limitations and truly soars. Franzen does not allow himself to get carried away, in contrast to so many other American writers during the 1980s, with railing simplistically against the conservative Reagan years. There is no easy dichotomy between freedom and tyranny, for it is the sheer apathy of the St Louis public that saves the day. There is a beautiful but sad irony in the fact that this lack of interest in their own political future is what eventually saves them from the traps that Jammu lays.
The Twenty-Seventh City was published, coincidentally, in the same year as Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, and in many ways the appointment of Jammu in the novel addresses a parallel dilemma to what Spivak is describing. The faults that Franzen delineates in Jammu’s character, however, seem to me more incisive, more penetrating than Spivak’s analysis, suggesting as he does, through comparisons of Jammu’s character to Napoleon and Lenin, that the advent of revolutionary discourses of freedom is always endangered by the practical necessities of seizing power. Franzen’s key insight is that these apparently counter-revolutionary forces are not anomalies, but an integral part of the revolution itself, an inherent problem that easily inverts the original relationship between “theory and praxis” in such a way that “praxis dictate[s] that theory, in the short run, be its apologist” – that is, the ends come to justify the means in the most vulgarly Machiavellian sense (p.394). It’s a complex, clear-eyed view of politics that Franzen delivers in his debut novel that, sadly, he has been unable to sustain in his most recent work.
Rating: 4/5
© 2012 Peter Mathews. All rights reserved.
A.S. Byatt is one of those writers that has grown on me over the years. I first encountered her work, as most of her readers do, through her highly-decorated novel Possession, only to come away from it disappointed by a sense that an opportunity had been lost. The recurrent fault that I found in Byatt’s work was that she has a tendency to overwrite, with too many superfluous details and ornaments (think of her pastiches of Victorian poetry in Possession, for example, which were masterly yet, for me, void of interest) that distracted from the story she was trying to tell.
While I haven’t yet returned to Possession to gauge whether my initial impression was correct or not, I have nonetheless continued to read Byatt’s other works with an ever-deepening sense of appreciation. What I like most about her fiction is her sense of intellectual adventure. Byatt may be the most intelligent writer in British literature today. She is an author who demands from herself – and thus, in turn, from her readers – a rigorously honest and complex appraisal of whatever issue is at hand. While this determination sometimes leads to a tendency to overreach her skill as a storyteller, when it works, as it does in Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, the results are outstanding.
As its subtitle suggests, Elementals takes the classic metaphorical opposition between hot (passion) and cold (rationality) and plays with it in new ways. There is, of course, an implicitly Blakean twist to how Byatt goes about doing this, in which hot and cold are never simple oppositions, but are instead made to depend upon each other in order to understand fully their meaning. This idea gets its fullest treatment in the allegorical story “Cold,” a full-blown modern fairy-tale that confirms Byatt’s long-acknowledged debt to Angela Carter.
While Byatt, in treating the opposing symbols of hot and cold in these stories, nods several times toward the Romantics – the narrator of “Jael,” for instance, remarks on her appreciation of Jane Eyre, a novel that gives particular weight to this metaphor – she also targets them repeatedly for critique. The Romantics, after all, privileged emotion and passion in their work, whereas Byatt urges the reader to consider the other side of the equation by pondering the pleasures and rewards of coldness and detachment.
Although this thread runs through the entire collection, Byatt makes her most articulate plea in “A Lamia in the Cévennes,” the underlying message of which forms an implicit riposte to John Keats’s poem “Lamia.” At the center of the story is Bernard Lycett-Kean, a painter who moves from Britain to France in order to pursue his rigidly solitary investigations into the problems of color. There he is visited by a lamia, a mythological, snake-like creature who promises him that, should he kiss her, she will be transformed into the woman of his dreams and love him eternally. Bernard, wary of such a pact and wary of giving up his solitude, proposes to paint her instead.
The story’s message hinges on a key couple of lines from Keat’s original poem: “Do not all charms fly/At the mere touch of cold philosophy?” This Romantic suggestion that we should not look too closely at things, that we ought willfully to blind ourselves for the sake of preserving an illusion, is vigorously opposed by Bernard. Instead, Byatt shows that, rather than leading to a simple opposition between science and art, Bernard’s rationality possesses an artistic impulse with a beauty all its own.
Byatt thus makes a repeated argument in Elementals for qualities such as coldness, rationality, and solitude – qualities that, while obviously more difficult to embrace than their warm, emotional counterparts, nonetheless have their own rewards and advantages. Byatt is not, of course, opposed either to Romanticism or emotions as such, but champions this cause out of a sense of balance. Today’s culture is unthinkingly sentimental, it seems, and so Byatt prescribes the qualities of coldness as an important corrective.
Byatt’s occasional tendency to overreach means that sometimes her work can be a bit hit and miss, but Elementals is impressive in its consistency. Byatt also helps matters by concluding the book with “Christ in the House of Jesus and Mary,” one of her best stories, in which she imagines the story behind a Velasquez painting of the same name. Speaking to the distraught cook Dolores, who will later become the model for Martha in Velasquez’s painting, the artist says: “You must learn now, that the important lesson… is that the divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms, and those who merely subsist, worrying or yawning” (p.226). There are few statements with which I can agree more wholeheartedly. It encapsulates why it is that Byatt, whatever her occasional faults, is truly a great writer: for her, art and literature are not merely intellectual pastimes, they are intimately bound up in the living, breathing moments of living one’s life.
Rating: 4.5/5
© 2012 Peter Mathews. All rights reserved.
Often long-established authors, having been overlooked several times, end up being decorated for their lesser works, and in the case of Amsterdam, for which Ian McEwan won the Man Booker Prize, this pattern holds true. Not that Amsterdam is a bad book, but when I compare it to McEwan’s best – Atonement, of course, along with Black Dogs and Enduring Love – it doesn’t quite reach those same heights.
Nonetheless, it is hard not to admire the way McEwan writes. While managing to be as urgently postmodern in his style and themes as any other contemporary writer, McEwan pays great attention to the intricacies of plot and character. There is no navel-gazing in Ian McEwan’s novels, which always have at their center some motivating event or other that, like a stone being dropped into a still pool of water, sends a series of waves rippling through the rest of the plot – the discovery of the corpse in The Innocent, the balloon accident at the beginning of Enduring Love, the false accusation of Robbie in Atonement, and so on.
Although the death of Molly Lane at the beginning of Amsterdam appears set to follow this same pattern, it is not the central event. Instead, her death brings together two of her former lovers, the composer Clive Linley and the newspaper editor Vernon Halliday. Rather than a single event, McEwan provides his two main characters with two moments that have broader consequences: for Clive, his failure to intervene in a possible rape so that he can grasp hold of a moment of musical inspiration; for Vernon, his decision to publish front-page pictures of Julian Garmony, a right-wing politician who was also a former lover of Molly’s, dressed as a woman.
McEwan draws Clive and Vernon together first as friends and then, when circumstances turn against them, as enemies out to destroy each other. This pattern bears a strong resemblance to what happens to Bernard and June Tremaine, the husband and wife in Black Dogs who, having been drawn together by their Communist ideals, have their marriage torn apart by deep philosophical disagreements. Amsterdam and Black Dogs are both intended by McEwan, it seems to me, to be documents of their time, a summary judgment of the failures of the twentieth century as it draws to a close.
Like Bernard and June, Clive and Vernon are given opposing perspectives on the world – highbrow and lowbrow, artistic and commercial – that, for all their apparent disagreements, end up collapsing into an orgy of self-righteousness and mutual hatred. The perspective we get on the British media is, as one might expect, scathing, with McEwan delineating its willingness to plumb the depths of human depravity at the expense of any sort of sophistication or culture. Pages dedicated to literature and the arts are reassigned to sports, and real news is converted into grotesque sensationalism.
Just as scathing, though, is McEwan’s description of the complacency of the cultured elite. His assessment of how Clive has benefited from the post-war boom while denying the same privileges to the next generation is razor sharp, particularly when one considers that McEwan himself is a product of this era. “Nurtured in the postwar settlement with the state’s own milk and juice, and then sustained by their parents’ tentative, innocent prosperity, to come of age in full employment, new universities, bright paperback books, the Augustan age of rock and roll, affordable ideals,” writes McEwan. “When the ladder crumbled behind them, when the state withdrew her tit and became a scold, they were safe, they consolidated and settled down to forming this or that – taste, opinion, fortunes” (p.13). Such, then, is the state of post-Thatcher Britain, which forms part of a repeated pattern of social ideals that end in despair and inequality.
The curious thing about modernity, McEwan notes, is that this despair and inequality seems to emerge, paradoxically, from cultural origins that promise great beauty, joy, and hope. In making this point, Amsterdam points repeatedly back to the Romantics. The Millennium Symphony that Clive Linley is composing, for instance, is compared to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” In a conversation toward the end of the novel, Clive tells how he once set the Romantic poet William Blake’s “The Poison Tree” to music. And of course, when he is in need of inspiration, Clive habitually retreats to the Lake District, a region of England that occupies a privileged place in English letters, having inspired authors such as William Wordsworth and Jane Austen.
Initially when I got to the end of Amsterdam I was a bit nonplussed by the way that McEwan failed to upstage my expectations as to how the story would end. Upon further reflection, however, I realized that the novel’s depressing spiral was crucial to the point that McEwan was trying to make about the history of modernity, which is that no matter how forceful the push for change and reform, no matter how “enlightened” and scientifically advanced we become, the tedious fact remains that human society continues to resort to the old tactics of brutality and conflict. The more things appear to change, the more they stay the same. The city of Amsterdam comes to symbolize this paradox in the novel. “There was never a city more rationally ordered,” writes McEwan, and yet it turns out to be the place where people can get away with murder (p.168).
What makes Amsterdam a somewhat less successful novel than its closest cousin, Black Dogs, is its lack of a third perspective. In Black Dogs that role is played by Jeremy, Bernard and June’s son-in-law, who mediates between the conflict of the two central characters, and whose ability to see the gray areas that Bernard and June miss provides the novel with a hint of ambiguity and even hope. Amsterdam, however, feels a little unbalanced in this respect, and therefore underdeveloped – one might easily, one suspects, have transcended the doom and gloom of the bitter fight between Clive and Vernon by complicating our view of one of the other characters – Julien Garmony, perhaps, or George Lane, or even, best of all, Molly.
Rating: 3.5/5
© 2012 Peter Mathews. All rights reserved.
There is a short documentary on YouTube, about twenty minutes long, about the Aokigahara Forest (also known as Jaiku) in Japan. The documentary follows Azusa Hayano, a geologist who frequents the forest, as he explores the undergrowth, looking for signs of people who might have committed suicide there. The forest, after all, is famous as one of the most popular sites in the world for people to commit suicide, a tradition that stretches back even before modern times – in times of famine, the locals used to leave the elderly, unwanted babies, the sick, and other people that society sought to exclude for the sake of survival, leading to a longstanding association of the place with death and, not surprisingly, the ghosts of those who died there.
English Literature Today 