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“Out Stealing Horses” and “I Curse the River of Time” by Per Petterson

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

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This month I read, back-to-back, two recent novels by the contemporary Norwegian writer Per Petterson. “Out Stealing Horses,” Petterson’s breakthrough novel from 2003, became an international bestseller. His follow-up, “I Curse the River of Time,” has just been released in the U.S. and is receiving a more muted reception. With both books fresh in my mind, I thought I’d take advantage of a “compare and contrast” opportunity. (It occurs to me this is something I haven’t done formally, at least not with aesthetic material, since college days.)

Wonderfully translated by Anne Born, “Out Stealing Horses” is an astonishing work, one that generously rewards the open-hearted reader. Petterson himself has an easy command of English (as is apparent from this video of his acceptance speech delivered at the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ceremony) and he worked cooperatively with his translator. The result, he proudly says, is this: “Sometimes I think the English version is better than the Norwegian.”

If you’re the type of reader who keeps a pencil nearby to mark passages that “wow” you, if you’re in the habit of drawing stars and exclamation points next to paragraphs that “pierce to the root” of truth, then be prepared to scratch lead onto many a page margin. My copy of “Out Stealing Horses” is now a personal artifact — the sort of heavily marked-up book that, were I to come across something like it at a yard sale, I’d quickly toss aside as wholly unreadable, since who wants some third party interrupting your communion with the author? (OK, maybe if the annotations are the handiwork of a friend of the author, or the bon mots of a later, famous devotee — creating what rare book dealers call an association copy — then I’d consider a purchase, like the critic who confesses to a covetous urge, here.)

It seems to me every great author — and Per Petterson surely is one — possesses in his mind and nurtures in his heart a distinctive worldview. To say this is, admittedly, to accept notions of imagination, intuition and emotion associated with the Romantic era. So be it. I see romanticism not as a stalled literary movement that flourished and foundered in the nineteenth century, but as an artistic spirit essentially continuous with the present. In large measure Per Petterson belongs to this ongoing tradition. Petterson’s worldview is unlocked and offered to readers most convincingly in “Out Stealing Horses”. Consider the heroic isolation of the book’s 67-year-old narrator, Trond Sander, who has retired to a remote riverside cabin; think of his desire for communion with untamed nature; note how nature’s agnostic beauties and onslaughts humble and mold the novel’s characters — all of these facets, each of them close to Petterson’s heart, are Romantic themes.

The reader should be prepared to find the emotion in “Out Stealing Horses” to be of the most subtle kind — mostly unstated, internalized, “suppressed.” Call it Nordic Stoicism. Trond’s father tells him: “You decide for yourself when it will hurt.” The prospective reader should also understand that the book’s principal characters (Trond’s family and neighbors near the family’s summer cabin on the Norway-Sweden border in 1948) are not about to launch into the “talking therapy” as a way to reconcile themselves with their own failures or the universe’s cruelty. Any reader harboring a dislike of characters locked into a Yankee reserve (to compare an American “type” to the book’s Norwegians), or anyone annoyed by Cormac McCarthy’s characters’ Western-based muteness, or anyone bothered by taciturnity in general, should just stay away. So too should readers who prefer flowing plots. Peterson forms this novel not from a smooth story arc but from punctuated incidents of revelation.

But oh what incidents grace the pages of “Out Stealing Horses” — and oh what simple but evocative prose. Time after time, nonverbal communication — gaze and sign, gesture and touch — ushers in direct-to-the-heart epiphanies. Episodes of gorgeous nature-writing transport you. Set pieces describing communal activities in rural Norway six decades ago (harvesting hay and forming hayracks without benefit of machinery; felling trees with hand saws and launching logs on their journey downriver; the morning rounds of a milkmaid) yield a nostalgic glow. So too does the young Trond’s fondness for Zorro, Davy Crockett, and Lassie. The adult Trond’s dog, Lyra, whose character shines through as elementally as any other creature, provides quiet comic relief. Then you shudder as a father who means everything to his son (“we had a pact”) betrays that pact. And always there are bitter truths to bear. Trond’s father tells him: “That’s life, that’s what you learn from, when things happen. You just have to take it in and remember to think afterwards and not forget and never grow bitter. Do you understand?”

This is a book that provides each new reader new reasons to praise it.

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Now, if you have read and were awed by “Out Stealing Horses,” you will find things to admire in “I Curse the River of Time,” translated by Charlotte Barslund and released in the U.S. earlier this month.

The two books have much in common, starting with a reflective male narrator who recalls, in a chronologically jumbled fashion, a handful of events that shaped his current moral and emotional condition. Both novels, at their most poignant, focus on the vicissitudes of the bonds between parent and child: a father and son in “Stealing Horses” and a mother and son in “River of Time.” In both books the eldest character — the retired narrator of “Stealing Horses; the narrator’s dying mother in “River of Time” — travels to a second home at water’s edge to live out their days.

Yet beyond these similarities there are significant differences in setting and tone. There is also a stark contrast in the maturity of the two narrators. If you are a reader entirely new to Petterson, these differences may be important as you select the book most apt to please.

“Out Stealing Horses,” with its spare, classic qualities, and its emphasis on the character-defining power of raw nature, is reminiscent of such American authors as Hemingway and Jack London. Petterson obviously admires their writing. The remote rural setting of “Stealing Horses,” its cast of unaffected men and women who meet hardship with stoicism, and the fact that its narrator is looking back on events that occurred over half a century ago in the era of World War II, allow the story to take on aspects of myth, a feeling at times of Biblical tragedy. No similar elegiac glow illuminates “I Curse the River of Time.” It is set in more recent decades, largely in the industrial and contemporary urban environment of Oslo, leaving little room for myth. Yet “River of Time” is richer in its psychological probing of the central parent-child bond. (This is a paramount interest of the author; in a 2007 interview he noted, “All I ever think about is families.”). Also, “River of Time” is a more interesting study of another recurring Petterson theme: how historical events — in this case, the fall of Soviet-style communism — interrupt the fates of men and women.

One reason why I prefer “Stealing Horses” to “River of Time” is the flawed character of the new novel’s narrator. The elements behind 37-year-old Arvid’s existential crisis — his membership in the Communist Party has lost its meaning; his wife is asking for a divorce; his dying mother still considers him “too fragile” to survive in the world — are to my taste simply not interesting enough to sustain my sympathy. It is true that Trond, the elderly narrator of “Stealing Horses,” shares Arvid’s nostalgia for the self-centeredness of childhood. But Trond has lived a full life beyond that station while Arvid is maundering through life, hopelessly fixed on the irrecoverable. Arvid whines, he daydreams (in younger years “I had all the time in the world in a way I have never had since”) and laments his present status “adrift in time and space.” His childishness is unaltered — even, shockingly, at book’s end. A preference for one book over the other may also be influenced by the age of the reader; indeed, the author himself plays with the notion of the “age-appropriateness” of certain novels; this is a pet idea of Arvid’s mother.

What partially redeems “River of Time” is Petterson’s command of incident and prose. As in “Out Stealing Horses”, his prose is at once unflashy and gorgeous. There are many beautifully rendered episodes. One is the lyrically described November stay at a country cabin where Arvid and his then girl friend spent a cold afternoon rowing a boat through the thinly iced lake. The author’s easeful way of pulling philosophical reflections from commonplace events is on display as well. When Arvid takes a friend’s dog to the vet to be euthanized, his imagination breaks free: “What worried me was that no one had asked if the dog was really mine. It felt unsafe, ambiguous, anything could happen, to anyone, if the one it was happening to had a trusting heart.”

If you decide to read “I Curse the River of Time” as your introduction to Petterson, please know that the gifts you receive from it will be more than matched if you experience, next, “Out Stealing Horses.”

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Note 1: The content of this post appears, slightly altered, as separate book reviews on Amazon, here and here.

Note 2: Graywolf Press of Minneapolis, MN, the publisher of “I Curse the River of Time,” has created a book that, as a physical object, is quite fine: acid-free paper of rich tone; elegant and readable typeface; and clear, crisp, dark printing. Would that equal care were taken in the making of all books. And a special shout-out to the cover designer, Kyle G. Hunter, who slyly split the six words of the title into two lines, the first line beginning in the middle of the frame, the second wrapping around to start again at the left margin “beginning” — a visual analog to the text’s chronological displacements.

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“Mitz” by Sigrid Nunez

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

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Sigrid Nunez is a contemporary American novelist with a quiet reputation as a writer’s writer. She’s caught my eye. September will bring the release of her latest novel, “Salvation City.” It is set in the near future after a flu epidemic has devastated America, leaving too many orphans for society to absorb. The book is on my must-read list. In the meantime, in preparation for that upcoming heavy meal, I thought I’d try an hors d’oeuvre, a smaller piece (of an entirely different flavor) by the same author.

“Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury” is a small book Nunez wrote in 1998 that takes as its ostensible subject the life of a household pet of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Some readers might consign the narrative to the facetious genre of pet biography. I place it, instead, securely within the category of terrifically enjoyable reads. This is not because I am a fan of Bloomsbury (I am in fact suspicious of the durability of that circle’s artistic output), but for the reasons expressed below.

In 1934 a sickly marmoset — “a mere scrap of a monkey; you could have balanced her on your palm, like a fur apple, a head no bigger than a walnut” — came into the care of Leonard Woolf, who gained the animal’s affection and nursed her back to health. For the next few years Mitz was a ubiquitous presence in Bloomsbury society, surveying the world from atop Leonard’s shoulder (when she was not resting warmly in his waistcoat pocket). Mitz moved with the Woolfs between their homes in London (at 52 Tavistock Square) and Sussex (in the village of Rodmell, a seventeenth-century cottage called “Monk’s House”). The animal once traveled with them through Europe — a journey that saw the trio caught in heart-stoppingly slow car ride through a Nazi rally in Bonn. Mitz died on the eve of World War II, one snowy December night in Sussex, far from her South American birthplace. Nunez takes the references to Mitz found in Bloomsbury records (letters, diaries, and memoirs) and blends them with her own sure imagination, to reconstruct the wee creature’s brief yet full life.

Nunez’s writing style is simple and self-effacing. She prizes clarity above all. Hers is a very American voice, in the way E.B. White and F. Scott Fitzgerald are American voices.  One reviewer of “Mitz” noted how the novel unfurls its prose in so relaxed a manner as to resemble, at times, a children’s book. Indeed, Nunez has since mentioned that this was the original plan for the tale.

Amid the book’s anecdotes and antics, the dominant theme is the nature of — and quest for — a well-lived life.  Gently, the reader is reminded that a marmoset is predestined to live only 4 or 5 years, and that Mitz’s time in the cold foreign clime of England will be especially stressful. Yet, despite the pain, what a life she led!  It was a life not to be pitied but celebrated.

Among the subtle triumphs of this book is Nunez’s avoidance of traps that otherwise would sink its quiet message and its quiet charms.  Yes, through the marmoset Mitz (a stranger in a strange land) the reader is led to witness human folly in a sober light. But Nunez measures out this message (the objective strangeness of mankind) winsomely, so as not to turn the book into a clichéd satire.

Within its slim frame the book accomplishes many things.  It is a playful writer’s holiday. It is a recreation of a time and place in history.  It is a deft exercise in stagecraft as the author is called on to direct the moves of heavy-weight actors, among them T.S. Eliot, John Maynard Keynes, and Vita Sackville-West — not to forget the quintessential literary power couple known affectionately by friends (and not so affectionately by enemies) as “the Woolves.”  The book is a window into a storied household and the quotidian pleasures sheltered therein: reading, writing, eating, talking, quarreling. Nunez’s touch is light as air as she anatomizes domesticity via the device of a domesticated (or, for the most part domesticated) pet. “Mitz” charts the breathing of a successful marriage. It offers lessons in patience and protectiveness and love.

In its final dozen pages the book takes a breathtaking turn. Nunez gambles that her simple and, up to that point, dispassionate prose will satisfy a new challenge:  recounting the young Mitz’s expulsion from the paradise of her tropical rainforest home in South America, as men arrive to seize her and dozens of her fellow creatures for exportation. It’s a winning gamble on Nunez’s part. The reader feels the harrowing experience of forced dislocation, of becoming a refugee, broken and condemned to live out one’s life far from home.  The parallels to the devastation that Europeans were about the face is unmistakable. A shared sadness also comes to Bloomsbury: just as nothing can hold back Mitz’s swiftly oncoming date with death, so too can nothing stay the inexorable decline in Virginia Woolf’s mental state.

Nunez is a wonderful writer. Here is how she describes Virginia visited by her muses:

“One morning while she was working in her studio in the basement of Tavistock Square, Virginia put down her pen, aware of a faint vibration, as of some deep nerve being plucked. She leaned forward; she held her breath. The eerie and rapturous feeling that something was about to be communicated to her, as from another world. She half closed her eyes and she waited. What came: a muffled music, like distant horns; a soft rising and falling, a rhythm to which she matched her breathing when she breathed again. Looking around her studio, she saw a kind of haze over all — and the next instant her mind took flight: people, houses, streets, landscapes, weather, seasons, friendships, passions, fates, patterns, necessities –

A new novel. ”

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Notes:

1.  Nunez was inspired to write “Mitz” by Virginia Woolf’s “Flush,” her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Brown’s cocker spaniel, published in 1932.  That book is currently out of print, but its full text (E-Text) is available online, here.

2.  52 Tavistock Square, London, which Virginia and Leonard Woolf occupied from March 1924 to August 1939 (and was home to Mitz as well), was bombed in October 1940 and replaced with a Hotel in 1951.

3.  A version of the above review is posted on Amazon, here.

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“The Glass Rainbow” by James Lee Burke

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

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This is the latest installment in James Lee Burke’s series of crime novels featuring the New Iberia, Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux. It finds Dave caught up in solving the mystery behind a series of murders of young women.

First things first: “The Glass Rainbow” maintains Burke’s high standard of engaging prose as the author revisits his signature theme of good and evil. As in previous outings, Dave Robicheaux’s world-view remains a tragic one.  Once again Tripod, the three-legged pet raccoon, climbs trees and enjoys ice cream.  Dave acquires yet another nickname (Robocop). As before, Dave teams up with his pal Clete to vanquish foes. As always, the coastal Louisiana environment, lyrically serenaded, is an ever-present protagonist, more than eager to convert to antagonist during a climactic (and, you know, not unprecedented) home-invasion episode. In short, here is everything we want in a Robicheaux novel. While “The Glass Rainbow” has its flaws, it is a fine addition to the now 18-volume series and a pleasure to read.

Picking up a newly-released Dave Robicheaux novel is like getting together with that super-charged friend from school days, the inveterate trouble-magnet, the one who long ago ventured off and settled in some exotic locale. Every year or two he pays a return visit, and so you get together for a long session of catching-up and you hear the kind of first-person stories only he can tell, told in a good-hearted, world-weary voice that commands your attention. Your friend’s character-driven tales twist and turn, shifting from factual to lyrical, from realism to the metaphysical, and then back again. His newest story ends, as they always do, in an improbably baroque climax, leaving the narrator battered but alive to see another day, leaving you slack-jawed and sated.

In “The Glass Rainbow,” each scene is masterfully constructed, building to a crescendo of tension, pushing the narrative forward with a shard of revelation.  The economical way Burke sketches characters, and his visceral handling of action, are the skills of a fine craftsman. My past experience, when reading the previous novels in the series, was to come upon moments when, I felt, the pace slackened or the prose almost went off the rails. This feeling never arose with “The Glass Rainbow.”

I would not categorize “The Glass Rainbow” as one of Burke’s plot-heavy, plot-driven books.  In fact, major components this ostensible whodunit are left unrevealed at the book’s end.  It contains the usual cohort of colorful, sometimes over-the-top minor characters. My favorite is a wise-cracking 12-year-old named Buford who gets into snap insult contests with Clete Purcel, Dave’s longtime friend.  The now adult Alafair, Dave’s daughter, has become a distinctive force of her own, possessing her own whip-smart voice in argument.  Like her father, Alafair is a bundle of contradictions: a Stanford Law student with an off-the-chart IQ who is as gullible as a child; a receptive and resourceful woman who nevertheless is caught up in an obvious snare.

Fortunately for the reader, what is the irreducible core of the book, it’s true propellant, is the Dave and Clete Show. The repertoire of this pair of lawmen is broad and deep. The two call to mind Mutt and Jeff, Felix and Oscar, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.  There’s more love between them than in most marriages.  Their repartee now includes bittersweet reflections on growing old (or, in Clete’s case, his adamant refusal, at times, to grow up).  I chuckled whenever Clete’s irrepressible descriptions of his recent sexual exploits caused the prim Dave to squirm and say, Shut up — I don’t want to hear that stuff!

“The Glass Rainbow” differs from several earlier Robicheaux books in grounding its story more solidly in realism. Earlier volumes experimented with Burke’s theme that the dead live amongst us and the past is not past but always present (a notion he shares with Faulkner). On occasion Burke eased close to adopting a Southern Gothic version of Latin Magic Realism, most sensationally in the sixth book in the series, “In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead.”  In contrast, “The Glass Rainbow” is part of a pull back, as was “The Tin Roof Blowdown,” set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Real horrors trump imagined grotesques.

Dave and his third wife Molly now live in town. Abandoned is Dave’s former bayou home with its dock and Bait Shop that figured so prominently as a setting for the first dozen or so books. I miss Dave’s stalwart manager of the dockside business, Batiste.  This means Dave’s domestic milieu lacks an immediate, immersive relationship to nature; he now only “visits” that raw natural world in his pickup. After finishing “The Glass Rainbow” it occurred to me that not once had I heard the cry of a nutria; instead, the patron animal for this book seems to be a blue heron.  “The Glass Rainbow” also eschews a serious confrontation with Louisiana political power that energized earlier books (and no federal agents stop by this time either). There is also a diminished role for religion. Characters occupy a smaller circle, closer to home.  While these are all losses, the situation is redeemed by the opportunity to move the strong Dave-Clete and Dave-Alafair relationships to center stage.  This provides more than enough substance and depth to support a 433-page tale.

It goes without saying that Burke is in firm control of his material, yet the veteran reader may feel the author is taking a play-it-safe approach this outing.  Or say that Burke’s ambitions are muted.  The trajectory of the plot is more streamlined than usual, the action centered on the present day, with few flashbacks (except for asides designed to familiarize new readers with Dave and Clete’s background). There is no complex layering of multiple subplots. The cast of characters is a bit narrower than usual. All of this serves to make “The Glass Rainbow” one of the quickest-to-read books in the series.

Solving the mystery of the murders of a group of young women is not the real subject of the book (in fact, their stories soon recede into the background, and much is left unexplained at the book’s end). Instead, the focus of the suspense is on the fate of three persons: Dave, Alafair, and Clete. It is through dialog that these three are seen at their best (and worst) — and it is dialog that provided me with maximum delight, particularly when it serves as the platform for comic relief.

When the supremely self-aware Dave observes others, he lets no gesture go unremarked, no suppressed twitch unnoticed. Clete and Alafair’s perceptivity is nearly as acute.  They too skillfully track the emotional states of others, except when they themselves are blinded by love.  All in all, you could not ask for better guides to the moral dimensions of the story.

The real subject of “The Glass Rainbow,” as with all Robicheaux narratives, is good and evil. That is a large subject, of course. Over the course of an intriguing hour-long interview conducted with the author in 1998 (its first segment is available here), Burke made the following points:

-   There is a minority of people who thread their way in and out of the fabric of society who are indeed wicked.

-   Dave Robicheaux recognizes environmental and genetic sources for criminal and psychopathic behavior, but he’s most intrigued by the existence of a third category.  Not directed by environment or genes, there are people “who reach a moment of choice where, of their own volition, they step across a line and deliberately murder the light of God in their soul. They eradicate His thumbprint from the soul, as Dave says. It’s a conscious choice. And they enter the Kingdom of darkness.”

-   Evil always consumes itself; it’s just a matter of time. That’s not only the nature of the universe, its also the path of the human soul.

-   In terms of a story line, the hand of justice works from somewhere outside of the criminal justice system.

In that same interview, Burke mentioned his belief in the presence of  “the other side” (in “The Glass Rainbow,” Dave has repeated encounters with a 19th century steamboat, whose crew calls out to him to join the realm of the dead).  Burke explained:

“I subscribe to a belief in the unseen. I believe those spirits [the dead] are with us. I believe the visible world is the external manifestation of one that’s far more complex than we could ever imagine in our wildest dreams. . . . I believe the world is inhabited as much by the dead as by the living.”

Are there deficiencies in “The Glass Rainbow”?  Yes. A central character named Kermit Abelard, wealthy scion of Louisiana aristocracy whom we come to learn is a member of Dave’s “third category” of evildoers, is insufficiently developed.  Kermit’s passivity and his lack of charisma weaken the climactic home-invasion battle, an episode which desperately needs a three-dimensional figure if it is to sustain the reader’s loyalty. A related flaw is that Kermit’s relationship with Alafair does not ring true, a condition not assisted by the fact that Burke keeps the pair’s intimacy offstage. Another disappointment is that not much is done with another favorite theme of Burke’s: the path from atonement to redemption to restoration. Significantly, this book ends abruptly, with Dave’s successful defense of his home. Unlike previous books, Burke offers us no epilogue, no period for a calm aftermath.

People new to James Lee Burke are likely to ask where they should start. Should it be with this latest release? My view is that reading the novels chronologically is ideal . . . and not very realistic since by now the size of the backlist is daunting.  Plus, I suspect most fans did not follow a pristine chronological path, anyway. I first met Dave in the middle of his life (in the rambling “Dixie City Jam”). I then looped back to the starting point (“The Neon Rain”); proceeded to tear through paperbacks; got caught up; and followed him ever since.

So where to begin?  Most of us, even if we hesitate to claim a single favorite Robicheaux book, do have a more-favored book — the one that inches slightly ahead of the pack.  For me that book is “Purple Cane Road” (maybe because uncovering his mother’s story meant so much to Dave). Burke himself in the interview I mentioned previously said he felt “Sunset Limited” was the best in the series up to that point. When asked about “In the Electric Mist with Confederate Men,” he admitted, “I’m real fond of that book as well.” I’m guessing among serious readers there’s no consensus on which is “best”.  When you consider the consistent quality of the writing, the recurring thematic concerns, and the immutability of Dave and Clete, I think the newcomer can jump in at any point.  And keep in mind that if  “The Glass Rainbow” provides your first introduction, Burke has already considered your situation: as the story unfolds, whenever the reader needs to know some element of Dave or Clete or Alafair’s past, Burke is there with a quick and clear synopsis.

So my advice is this: Just start.  James Lee Burke is too good to miss.

(A condensed version of this post appears as a book review on Amazon, here.)

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“Sleepless Nights” by Elizabeth Hardwick

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

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Melancholy suffuses “Sleepless Nights.” A collage of memories, ruminations, vignettes, and character sketches, its 150 pages encompass a lifetime of poignant observations by a first-rate writer.

The book is most powerful as a remembrance of persons, mostly women, now dead (“They are gone, with all their questions unanswered”). Hardwick recaptures the essence of their lives, examining without compromise “the niceness and the squalor and sorrow.” Hardwick’s prose is a wonder. She assembles telling details in the service of building a series of fateful narratives. She produces writing that is in the best sense “novelistic” — even if the resulting book falls outside the category of a novel. The book is beyond category, and is no less rewarding for that fact.

Every few pages Hardwick recounts another love story she either participated in or was a wide-eyed witness to. She refers to them as “love affairs with energy and hope.” Each affair begins well. For example, she describes a temporary roommate in her Manhattan apartment, a gay man who “was one of those who look into new eyes and say: Now I am going to be happy.” Yet every affair turns tragic, in its own way. These stories are so fully (yet economically) modeled that you’ll swear, by the close of the book, that you’ve read several novels. With Hardwick, the relationships of men and women, of both high and low station, almost always lead to bitter endings. Closest to home, a sad bitterness attaches to Hardwick’s own reflections on men, from her earliest encounters (among the “couples, looking into each other’s eyes, as if they were safe”) to her caustic memory, at the book’s end, of “a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off.”

Hardwick always shows a remarkable empathy for the life journeys of others, especially for the deprived, those she finds “worn down by life.” Of a janitor, Hardwick notes: “He was one of those men who acted as if he expected to be shouted at and would not know how to reply.” Early in the book she profiles the doomed Billie Holiday, whom Hardwick knew in New York City in the 1940′s and 1950′s. The author re-envisions the jazz singer’s life, starting with a quick sketch of her physic presence (“the heavy laugh, marvelous teeth, and the splendid head, archaic, as if washed up from the Aegean”), moving on to her performances, then offering the lesson of her early death (“she shared the changeling’s spectacular destiny and was acquainted with malevolent forces”). A later chapter of the book, Part Nine, stands apart as a remarkable essay about the cleaning women whose lives intersected with Hardwick, as she moved from homes in Maine, Boston, and New York City.

The scope of Hardwick’s curiosity is wide-ranging, yet three of her interests struck me as noteworthy. One is her odd fascination, her obsession, with people’s teeth. While she tends to introduce new characters with only minimal physical descriptions, she invariably tales note of the person’s dental health, as if it were a critical component of moral character. Is this a bit of folk wisdom absorbed in her youth spent in the horse-breeding state of Kentucky? A notable item in her bag of writer’s resources is her familiarity with farm animals and their behavior, which she freely applies to people. A Depression-era socialist organizer in rural Kentucky “had the look of a clever turkey.” Two city street people, homeless women, “wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for.” A final attachment is Hardwick’s love/hate relationship with New York City. Early in the book she argues for a clear linkage between person and place: “It is not true that it doesn’t matter where you live.” Her verdict on Gotham: “This is New York, with its graves next to its banks.” And then there’s this surprising statement: “A woman’s city, New York.”

I recommend “Sleepless Nights” to writers who want to write better. Hardwick belongs to the elite class of “writers’ writer”; come and learn from her. I also recommend the book to anyone fascinated with Manhattan of the post-WWII era, and to anyone who wants to spend a few hours with a companionate teller of women’s truths.

[A version of this review appears on Amazon, here.]

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“Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” – John Updike on Ted Williams

Saturday, May 1st, 2010

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Published this week is a commemorative edition of “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” John Updike’s loving tribute to the character and craft of Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams.  First published in The New Yorker magazine a few weeks after Updike sat in the stands of Fenway Park watching Williams’ final at bat on September 28, 1960, the essay has over the years attracted the highest praise from trustworthy observers. Garrison Keillor sums up the consensus view when he says, “no sportswriter ever wrote anything better.” The accolades are accurate and deserved.

If you follow baseball and care about its storied past, or if you admire the writing of John Updike, then you will enjoy reading this piece. If you happen to belong to both camps — if you’re both an Updike fan AND a baseball fan — then put this at the top of your list of must-reads.

The question is whether you should spend your money on this particular setting of  “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” The article is available online where it can be read for free on several websites, including that of The New Yorker and Baseball Almanac.  In book form the piece has been much anthologized. It appears alongside contributions from the likes of William Carlos Williams, Don DeLillo, and Stephen King, in the elegant 721-page hardcover volume, “Baseball: A Literary Anthology.” It can be found in “The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Tales from the Diamond” (paperback), edited by Jeff Silverman, where it sits amongst 30 fiction and nonfiction pieces from a motley crew of writers such as Doris Kearns Godwin, Pete Hamill, Ring Lardner, P.G. Wodehouse, Vin Scully (on Sandy Koufax), and Abbott and Costello (whose “Who’s on First” comic routine is gloriously reprinted in its entirety).

The answer to why you might choose to buy this latest issuance of John Updike on Ted Williams comes down to personal preference, convenience, sentimentality, maybe even aesthetics.  The essay has a special-ness to it. Its pages offer a sharp character study, a lyrical capturing of a moment of grace, and an essential moral lesson.  It is, to use the corny metaphor, a small gem.  Think of Duke Ellington’s description of Ella Fitzgerald: “beyond category.” The quality-conscious publishers at The Library of America respect good writing and have taken care to design the book, simply as a physical object, as an attractive product to hold in your hands.

Three photos of Ted Williams grace the book: one in color on the jacket (pictured above); one in black and white that’s used as the frontispiece, showing the slugger ascending to the Fenway field on that final day; and one near-sepia in color spread horizontally across the front and back boards, freezing in time his celebrated swing — making this a hardback that looks just as fine with or without its jacket.  (Updike approved the choice of photos but in a note to the editor forbade further illustrations: “There shouldn’t be too much attempt to ‘juice up’ the little volume. Austerity is always in style.”)

Inside, the main essay from 1960 (with a dozen factual footnotes Updike added a few years later) is, of course, the big draw.  This text (33 pages in this wide-margined edition) is flanked by a three-page Preface, written only weeks before Updike died in 2009, and a meandering nine-page Afterword that served as an obituary for the ballplayer who died in 2002.  The preface and afterward may strike you as workmanlike exercises — common stones wildly outshone by the diamond at the center of the book.

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Updike’s essay begins with the stuff baseball fans demand: a concise chronicle of Williams’ unsteady two-decade career; a plethora of statistics; a swiftly delivered argument on the slugger’s position in the firmament: “From the statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made that in the combination of power and average Williams is first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories.  Finally, there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go back to Shoeless Joe Jackson  — another unlucky natural — rank him and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have seen.”

The essay’s special hold on the reader depends not just on Updike’s extraordinary skills as a chronicler, but in the poignancy of the fact that here, at the start of his writing career, is a young author (a man of the mind) paying homage to a seasoned master (a practitioner of a physical craft) whose career is ending. It is a pairing of a novitiate with a soon-to-be retiree. Both men were unstinting strivers toward perfection. These two — one the observer, the other the observed — are well matched. Indeed, they are so “of a piece” that the reader finds the essay coming around full circle to become a profile of the author himself. It is Updike defining Williams in order to define himself. There are, to begin with, physical similarities between the men (both were a lanky six-foot-three-inches), plus some intriguing biographical congruences. In the essay Updike compares the long “affair” between Williams and Boston to a marriage (“a marriage composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end …”). On September 28, 1960, Updike, whose first marriage was disintegrating in its seventh year, was in town to visit his new love’s apartment, and it was only because he found her absent that he decided, instead, to head over to Fenway Park.

Similarities in the two professionals’ character and aspirations are strong. Williams, in Updike’s eyes, is one of those players “who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art.” Their approach to their respective professions, baseball and literature, is identical. Updike approvingly writes that “baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out” — as if he knew, in 1960, that the next five decades would see the release of over 60 books under his name. Was he envisioning his own hoped-for obituary when he describes Williams’ “rigorous pride of craftsmanship [that] has become a kind of heroism”? Consider their common stubbornness: here, in what is ostensibly a sports essay, Updike dares to insert references to Leonardo, Calder, and Donatello — because that’s the kind of writer he is. And, Ted-like, he gets away with it. As for Williams’ scientific interest in the muscular mechanics of swinging, Updike refers to this as the ballplayer’s “intellectuality, as it were.” You can sense the young Updike setting a goal for himself in this summation: ”No other player visible to my generation concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, so assiduously refined his natural skills, so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.” And then you come across four words that could serve as an epitaph for both men:

“A thing done well.”

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Updike’s reference to Donatello’s sculpture of David victorious over Goliath appears in the course of his attempt to describe the effect of Williams’ bodily presence on base. The body is not an easy subject for American authors. Even as loose and modern an American writer as David Foster Wallace falls back on a Victorian reticence in his 2006 essay, “Federer as Religious Experience” (published in the New York Times, here) when addressing the magical physicality of the tennis great. In that profile of Roger Federer, in what is perhaps the best sports essay since Updike’s, DFW notes: “in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body.”

The final pages of “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” are a miracle; they crowded my throat with joy. Having finished his warm-up recitation of Williams’ career statistics and highlights, Updike switches back to the here-and-now, to the air of expectancy inside Fenway Park that memorable afternoon. What Updike’s writing does is conjure up the grand feeling that grabs you when the overture ends and the curtain rises. His words place us squarely among the ten thousand fans. He guides us through every phase of the ensuing wash of emotions. Common sports announcer lingo (“high fly to deep right”) is mixed with Updike’s own literary mode (‘The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on — always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession”).

Then comes a single paragraph that relays the climatic event (Williams hitting a final home run). Only when I read the paragraph again did I recognize the conjurer’s trick: Updike never uses the words “home run” or “homer” or even “hit”.  Instead, the simplest of words — “it” — takes the place of those expected nouns. His pregnant prose has rendered direct identification superfluous and (in a sense) blasphemous. Here is the paragraph’s keystone sentence. Notice how the sentence builds a crescendo out of three phrases of diminishing length:

Fisher threw the third time,

Williams swung again,

and there it was.

Notice, too, how the steps of the crescendo track the three elements Updike later says defined the day’s glory: “A perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution.” The craft behind this paragraph (and the even more memorable paragraph that follows, tracking Williams’ run of the bases and disappearance into the dugout) explains why readers of the essay often become re-readers of it. To mention one final bit of magic: We all have a cliched notion of time “standing still” at moments such as this. Updike will have none of that. He convinces us this was an episode even more mystical, a moment that touched all time, past and present and future. He writes: ”It was in the books while it was still in the sky.”

A 35-second video of Ted Williams’ last at bat at Fenway Park on September 28, 1960 is available online here. If you watch it, pay special heed as Williams rounds third and heads for home. At that moment the cameraman pans up to show the crowd in the stands behind third base, the very section where, we now know, John Updike was on his feet joining in the stadium-wide “beseeching screaming.” The tape is too pixilated for us to spot him. But he’s there, absorbing the moment — and starting work on his own a piece for the books.

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(A shorter version of this post appears here.)

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“Antwerp” by Roberto Bolano

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

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Antwerp differs categorically from Bolaño’s mature novelistic output marked by such fully-formed successes as By Night in Chile and The Savage Detectives — books in which the author constructs a story line rich enough to communicate his considered view of the world. Antwerp dates from 1980 when the author was shifting his principal mode of expression from poetry to fiction. It consists of 56 numbered chapters totally a mere 76 pages. The setting is Barcelona. Characters include a Hunchback; a mysterious young woman caught in an abusive relationship with a cop and who appears slated soon to die; and the 27-year-old Bolaño. There is little in the way of plot connecting the 56 vignettes or mini-narratives or prose poems: each segment tends to be provisional, contingent, and relative. Antwerp, with its frustrating fragmentation and hallucinations, gives the impression of being a cobbled assemblage of pages. Not even Bolaño’s celebrated skill as a fabricator can dislodge this impression. There is no journey; instead, there is a seeming lack of intention. Yes, there is textual inventiveness throughout the book, but if the author meant this to be an experiment in meta-fiction, what he has rendered is, in my judgment, not a success.

To avoid disappointment the reader must alter his or her expectations before delving into Antwerp. In fact, it may be best if you take a pass on Antwerp unless you count yourself among the hardy crew of Bolaño aficionados. To those souls I offer these words.

One way to prepare for the book is to adopt the style and practice of a detective. Treat Antwerp as a sheaf of papers found in the drawer of a prospective master. (As explained in the author’s preface — for me the most interesting pages in the book — this is how Bolaño himself viewed the scatter-shot material when he decided to publish it 22 years after its creation.) Abetting this plan are the physical contours of the book — a small, slim object, jacket-less, black in color, looking like an intimate notebook, divorced from any context, apparently casually set aside. In his intentional novels, Bolaño routinely foregrounded detective activities. 2066 is the most rigorous example. And so I think the reader should adopt that mode when beginning carefully to thumb through Antwerp‘s pages. As many Bolaño protagonists soon learn, your work will consist of much drudgery . . . and lead to uncertain revelations. The principal payoffs in this instance are occasional poetic passages (“Someone stands in the shadows preparing for his death and his subsequent transparency” (p. 7)).  Not surprisingly, mordant observations predominate (“Nothing lasts, the purely loving gestures of children tumble into the void” (p. 51)), with only occasional humor (“Some people choose the worst moments to think about their mothers” (p. 71)). Much of the text is cryptic, though parts have a Zen tang: “The word ‘shoes’ will never levitate” (p. 6). Cinematic touches abound. You know not to expect answers, or (in this book) a sustainable melody.

Another way to approach Antwerp is to consider it a derivative of a fully-formed novel that doesn’t exist. If you are one of those readers so in love with an author, or a particular book, that you search for illumination in the author’s notebooks, journals, log-books, flotsam and jetsam, then here is another occasion to indulge your passion. Chapter 41, for example, is a straightforward 300-word diary entry about a night spent in a decrepit train station, as Bolaño and his (sleeping) girlfriend wait for the morning train to Portugal. I had a sense while reading Antwerp that it was not so much a novel as a preparation for a piece of fiction that defies categorization, mixed with a running account of Bolaño’s own emotional crises, blended further with actual dreams and other elusive autobiographical details. The text contains signs Bolaño knew Antwerp was a failure: “No work could justify the slowness of movements and obstacles” (p. 62); “There’s something obscene about this” (p. 64); “Poor Bolaño, writing at a pit stop” (p. 66); and a dangling reference to “undisciplined writing” (p. 51). Yet Bolaño needed to write.

When the day comes that a full-scale biography of Roberto Bolaño is published, I believe Antwerp will be cited at length in a chapter devoted to his residence in Europe, circa 1980. On the evidence of the book’s hallucinatory fragments (there’s a chilling recurrent image of persons without mouths, for example) and references to illness (“nervous collapse in cheap rooms” (p. 32)), this was a difficult period of transition in the author’s young life (“My innocence is mostly gone and I’m not crazy yet” (p. 52); “I no longer ask for all the solitude in the world, but for time” (p. 62); “But you write … and you’ll get through this” (p. 44)). In retrospect, we know greatness awaited.

On final consideration, Antwerp is best viewed as an appurtenance to Bolaño’s legacy — a rickety outbuilding found on a sprawling literary estate, far from the main mansion; an inessential stop for all but the most devoted visitors.

Stray sentences from the notes I recorded as I read the book:

Sophie Podolski is mentioned on pages 4 and 10. Bolaño must have seen her as a true contemporary: both were poets, born in 1953. He recounts news of her suicide (on page 4) and her unfulfilled promise (she “wrote like a star” and “would’ve been twenty-seven now, like me” (p. 10)). She appears in “The Savage Detectives”.

As for Colan Yar, a mysterious figure mentioned throughout, I remain in the dark.

There is recurring mention of voices or, even more frequently, applause, coming from “a dark corner” or off-stage. In a variation, this device becomes the “wizened youth” who oppresses the priest in By Night in Chile.

Illness will be a major motif of any Bolaño biography, I predict. Not just the liver failure that took his life at age 50, but earlier illnesses, episodes of “blankets pulled up to my ears, motionless in bed, sweating and repeating meaningless words to myself” (p. 7).

Sometimes he is redeemed by love: “Doubly afraid of himself because he couldn’t help falling in love once a year at least” (p. 66). Or not: “One day the person you love will say she doesn’t love you and you won’t understand. It happened to me. I would’ve liked her to tell me how to endure her absence. She didn’t say anything.” (p. 47).

Bolaño’s love 0f film is ever-present, from the makeshift movie screen erected in the woods for villagers’ delight (p. 21 and elsewhere), to some of the vignettes (chapters 18, 25, 40) that take the form of film scenarios, to a final bit of advice: “Don’t stop going to the movies” (p. 53).

In Chapter 49 Bolaño tests out the possibility of a narrative that interleaves a barroom pick-up with a news item about a traffic accident involving an overturned truck carrying pigs. (Hah!)

Chapter  50 is an apparent autobiographical snippet observing how additionally seductive it is when two persons seeking connection don’t understand each other’s language.

This is a book about writing; among the observations is this one: “What poems lack is characters who lie in wait for the reader” (p. 71). By 1980, Bolaño was transitioning from poet to prose writer to novelist. He was in state of  transitioning not only as a writer but as a person; or in his case did this amount to the same thing? There is an air of post-adolescent expectancy in the book, a feeling that “something’s coming,” that the surviving narrator is on the cusp of a new life.

Embossed on the back cover of the jacket-less book is this author statement: “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp.” I think this is a riddle whose decipherment requires, first, rejection of the premise that “Antwerp” is a novel at all. The statement is a smokescreen, a subterfuge, a lie that shields the truth of his feared descent into sentimentality, of his condition post-Antwerp.

Ultimately the reader is left confused. Is this a novel driven by a postmodern, meta-fictional agenda? Is it the developmental record of a potentially fully-formed novel? Is it a denatured autobiography?

[Note: A condensed version of this review is found here.]

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“By Night in Chile” by Roberto Bolano

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

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“By Night in Chile” takes the form of a deathbed confession delivered by a Chilean priest, poet and conservative literary critic, Fr. Urrutia. The book’s principal challenge to the uninitiated reader is that it is set in a time, place, culture and political atmosphere unknown to all but a few American readers. An understanding of all the foreign details of the story, and a familiarity with the real life figures who pop up in the priest’s stream of memories (Pablo Neruda, Ernst Junger, General Pinochet, Marta Harnecker) are useful, without doubt. But such foreknowledge is not essential to an immediate enjoyment of the book, so long as you are the kind of reader who takes greater delight in experiencing a literary tour de force that draws you toward a readily understandable moral, a simple truth.

“By Night in Chile” is a bravura performance by Bolaño in which the author has found a distinct way to enwrap and deliver each recollection, each story within a story, each aside, each shift in time, each gruesome discovery, and each blow to the soul, that passes through the dying priest’s sometimes clear, sometimes feverish, mind. One reviewer cites as a defining characteristic of the book, this constant outpouring of side-stories, little morsels, poetry masked by prose. Some readers may find this “meandering” style off-putting, but others of us appreciate the strategy as Bolaño’s signature mode. For us it is an ever-surprising joy. I think the generative force of Bolaño’s communicative charm is the practice and spirit of an all-night “bull session” conducted in college dorms and in fact wherever the intellectually curious are assembled in strange new quarters for purposes of undergoing mind-altering training. If you are of a mindset or personality that typically avoided invitations to join in such sessions, you should avoid “By Night in Chile.”

According to available biographical details, Bolaño life was bohemian — peripatetic, but immersed in the social lives of other poets, painters, musicians, actors. One imagines him as a great talker and a great listener. In a moment of fantasy — never to be fulfilled, alas — I imagine a chance meeting of Roberto Bolaño and the painter/collagist Robert Rauschenberg. What amazing things would have flowed forth had those two spent an afternoon interviewing each other. In my dream I imagine hidden microphones and cameras capturing the sparkling flow of dialog, an outpouring which turns heavenward after I bring to the gentlemen a bottle of Jack Daniels, for RR, and a drug of his choice, for RB.

Literature has been enriched by the confessional form. Think of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” Camus’ “The Fall.” The confession is a hospitable device for an author interested in psychological exploration and revelation. A man unspools a story of some evil he witnessed or participated in, a sin that weighs upon him, a sin he now owns up to or, alternatively, seeks to justify. His speech ends with a request, express or implied, for the listener (the reader) to understand, to expiate. And yet, while the framework of “By Night in Chile” borrows from this tradition, the book is frustrating as a confession. Perhaps it is as much of a confession as the present era allows. The state of Fr. Urrutia’s soul at the close of his tale is, at least to me, uncertain. That uncertainty led me to trace my steps back to the beginning of the book, where I found the priest’s opening statement of purpose.

Then I understood this is a deeply religious tale, a profoundly moral story. The dying priest, who hoped he could convince himself he had committed no crimes, is by his own reckoning guilty of sins of omission. It is on page one that he reveals a simple credo. The reader, when first encountering these words, may dismiss them as a bromidic utterance, jejune, self-congratulatory. But when read a second time, after curling back from the novel’s end, the words shine clear:

“One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them . . . so one must be very careful with one’s silences.”

[Note: A slightly altered version of my review appears on Amazon here.  Superior reviews are found here and here.]

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“Noir” by Robert Coover

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

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To borrow the second person voice (“you”) that controls the narrative of Robert Coover’s new novel, “Noir”, let it be noted at the outset that you fall within one of three groups.

1 -   You are a Coover aficionado and have read most or all of his output to date. You will buy or borrow the newly released “Noir” and read its slim 192 pages in a feverish swoon, critics be damned. If, at some point, you find yourself reading reviews of “Noir”, it’s because you’ve finished the book and want to relive the experience or compare your reaction to others.  For you, there are comments further below.

Or:

2 -   You have read one or two Coover books (maybe as part of a post-modern lit course) and want to catch up with what the 78-year-old author is doing nowadays. Is he still in the game, you wonder?  The news is positive. You will find the pages of “Noir” spellbound by Coover’s signature mordant wit and claustrophobic worldview. Elsewhere you may have come across the much repeated statement by NY Times book critic Michiko Kakutani: “Of all the post-modernist writers, Robert Coover is probably the funniest and most malicious.” So, yes, you’ll find “Noir” fitfully laugh-inducing — especially if you’re in the mood for a relentless, demented, hallucinogenic parody of crime fiction. If at its end you are still ambivalent about the book, well, that it not uncommon with Coover. At its close you may place a hand on your belly and think to yourself, that was not so much a satisfying meal as a bitter entrée. Or, you may be so delighted by its denouement, incorporating street philosophy, word play, puns, double entendres and all-around cleverness, that you will forgive being dragged through some slow sections.

Or:

3 -   Coover is entirely new to you. If so, you are wondering how do you get a good sense of what “Noir” will mean to you as a reading experience? You’re finding most reviews of the book are frustratingly un-useful to a novice reader.  (There seems to be a jargon-loving Coover clique that luxuriates in the cryptic.) Well, you might consider first checking out a short interview in which Coover himself explains the style and themes of “Noir”. This is available online (use these three words in Google search: Coover bookslut interview). Consider also spending a few minutes watching Coover in action, as he reads an early scene (and arguably the best pages) from “Noir”.  The video is available using four terms in Google search: Coover Penn Reading Video.  (His reading from “Noir” occupies the final minutes of the QuickTime video).  If the interview and video generally pique your interest, and if you would not be put off by what is essentially a light entertainment somewhat burdened with down and dirty stretches of bleak pessimism and erotic haunting, then by all means read “Noir”. Or, consider one of the following alternatives to “Noir” as a better first experience of Coover: “Pricksongs and Descants”, his ground-breaking short story collection; or “The Origin of the Brunists”, a conventionally generous and very American tale of the spawning of a religious cult in a mining community; or, if you can find a used or library copy of  “A Political Fable: The Cat in the Hat for President” (unfairly, it is currently out-of-print).  “A Political Fable” may very well become your favorite piece of zaniness by any author ever.  It is mine.

Finally, here are a few stray perceptions of my own to share with Coover fans who have finished the book.

Coover is nothing if not quotable. Wherever you are in “Noir” you are not far from coming upon yet another comment on humankind’s bleak condition. Coover spins endless variations on an astringent melody whose lyrics tell of “your incorrigible weakness in a meaningless universe” (page 103), a ballad “meant to provoke reflections upon life’s brevity, and its thin sad beauty” (page 108). Other examples: “It’s not the story you’re trapped in but how you play it out … your style … steppin’ round the beat … How long does that matter? As long as you live, meaning, no time at all.” (page 52).  “What’s the connection? No idea. Connections [are] probably an illusion in such a fucked-up world as this. Why you’re down here. Illusory connections” (page 113). “The city was as bounded as a gameboard, no place to hide in it, no way but one to leave it, you alone defenseless in it, your moves not even your own” (page 175). Most Hobbesian of all is this: “The body has to eat and drink so it can stay healthy long enough to enjoy an agonizing death, and the mind, to help out, has to know where the provisions are and how to get them and who else is after them and how to kill them” (page 159). The novel’s close brings a softer tone: “You can’t escape the melody but you can make it your own.”

Especially at the novel’s climax, borrowings from films are abundant: the shifting cityscape of “Dark City” (page 163), the mirror room scene in “The Lady from Shanghai” (page 181), and the false-identity caper “Catch Me If You Can” (page 186).

At one point Philip Noir tries to recall who once likened an odd juxtaposition to “a pearl onion on a banana split.” This is a line used by Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe. When another character advises, “Plant you now, dig you later, man” (page 111) , this is a twofer or maybe a three-way: its source is the jazz world of the 1920′s/30′s, but the phrase also was used as a title of song in “Pal Joey” and later as the title of a “Gilligan’s Island” episode — facts surely not lost on pop culture maven Coover. Other more careful readers (with or without benefit of Google search) will best me in this endless game of spot-the-allusion, but final mention should be made of one “high culture” reference I spotted, a reference that informs the musical ambiance of the book. Philip Noir notices a few words carved into the wooden tabletop at a jazz joint: “You are the music while the music lasts.” This is a line from “The Dry Salvages”, the third section of “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot.

I wonder whether the sympathetic character of Michiko (“she’s a work of art”) is Coover’s homage to the sympathetic critic of his work, Michiko Kakutani. But, given the fate Coover confers on the fictitious Michiko, I’m thinking maybe this is best left unexplored. As the author himself cautions:

“It’s all quite simple. But sometimes not knowing is better. It’s more interesting.”

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One final observation (to be filed under “Annoyances, Petty”):  The covers of both the American and French editions of the novel sport photos that are at odds with the story. Both photos are of daytime scenes of a walker in a city. But the perambulations of Philip Noir take place entirely at night. Does the discrepancy matter? Probably not, but wouldn’t it be nice if the photographer, or the editors who selected the final images, had actually read the book?

(A version of this review appears on Amazon.com, here.)

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“Solar” by Ian McEwan

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

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“Solar” is something of a departure for McEwan.  It is also something of a disappointment.

The novel traces a decade in the life of Michael Beard, a British Nobel laureate in physics. The book begins in the year 2000 as the 52-year-old scientist’s fifth marriage is dissolving (through every fault of his own), and it ends in 2009 as Beard is about to open a cutting-edge renewable energy facility in New Mexico (with personal disaster imminent).

Readers of McEwan’s earliest books (dark psychological explorations; morbid, perverse, violent) and his most recent novels (grandly serious, elegantly crafted) may be taken aback by this new work. “Solar” is being touted by its publisher and editor, Nan A. Talese, as a “comedy” — a book, she promises, you’ll find filled with “comedic antics”.

I agree with the emerging consensus among readers who’ve had access to an advance reading copy: this is not among McEwan’s best efforts.

In the best of his recent novels McEwan provides readers with the supreme pleasure of a plot and characters that fully seize your consciousness. He composes passages with such fine craft that the reader forgets the act of reading and loses awareness of the author’s hand. There are moments when you find yourself being pulled along by a frictionless, seemingly unmediated flow of story and emotion. The opening of “Enduring Love” and parts of “Saturday” achieve this magical state. Many readers, myself included, experienced this phenomenon most fully in the sweep of “Atonement”.

So a caution is in order: if you pick up “Solar”, do not expect to enjoy anything similar.

The Humor Deficiency

Why is there no magic this time? One answer is that “Solar” is, ostensibly, a “comedy”. Whether the demands of comedy are compatible with McEwan’s strengths as a writer is debatable, and there are few subjects more subjective than the question of what’s funny. Then, too, developing a sustainable comic voice is a matter of practice, of paying dues; no one should expect mastery on a first outing. I join with those who find “Solar” lacking in the art of comedy.

The first 50 pages or so are especially dispiriting: filled with lame humor, sub-Neil-Simon one-liners, and flat-footed stabs at wit. Soon thereafter comes an otherwise well-written episode set in the Arctic Circle, featuring a group of artists on an environmental tour. But when McEwan launches his jokes, there’s precious little originality. Even granting allowances for the piratical practice of comedy, you may be struck by how the best laughs are borrowed ones.

[Spoiler alert] For example, you’ve  laughed  many times at the dilemma of a child straight-jacketed by winter clothing (a staple of kid-centered comic strips, sitcoms, and movies), and so you’ll laugh again as McEwan spends page after page detailing the helplessness of a childish, roly-poly guy, preparing for a sub-zero trek, donning layers and layers of clothes including multiple gloves — who discovers he cannot then put on his boots, or answer a call of nature. You might squirm with delight (as you’ve done before) when the same guy is afflicted by a variation on the gag in the film, “There’s Something About Mary”, getting his genitals caught by a pants zipper.  You may be familiar with the caption written by Robert Mankoff back in 1993 for his oft-reprinted cartoon in The New Yorker (the one in which an executive, trying to avoid agreeing to a meeting, rebuffs the supplicant by saying: “No, Thursday’s out. How about never — is never good for you?”). If that cartoon is part of your memory bank, you will smile when reading the flash-back scene in “Solar”, set in the 1960’s, when a coed parries young Michael Beard’s request for a date by replying: “How about never? Can you make never?” [End of Spoiler Alert]

The funny business eases off in the remainder of the book, as if McEwan grew bored with the assignment. Yes, the author can construct solid episodes of mirth, and there are bits of bright irony and satiric commentary throughout “Solar”. But McEwan falls short of nailing the tricky task of sustaining a course of original comedy for the book’s length.

The Character Deficiency

If you are a reader who prefers strong main characters and an engaging story arc, “Solar” may disappoint. It does not help matters that, for his choice of a protagonist — the figure who will be the sole thread of continuity among the vignettes that jump around in time and geography — McEwan has conjured up, in the character of Michael Beard, a thoroughly despicable man. Beard is, by his own estimation, “neither observant nor sensitive.” Worse still, he is an inveterate liar and thief, a criminal in the making, and morally bankrupt to boot (“But why should he feel guilt? Someone please tell him why.”) Being in his company is a chore — certainly so for his five discarded wives and the professional colleagues he mistreats. Perhaps for the reader too.

Do not expect any new perspective on adultery or failed relationships.  At one point, when Beard is trapped by the prospect of his two current lovers bumping into each other, he sighs: “Someone, or everyone, would be disappointed. Nothing new there.” I expect at least one unhappy critic will grab onto those words for use in her or his indictment of the entire book. (Click here to read one online reviewer’s lengthy analysis, headlined with a four-word verdict: “A flabby character-portrait”). But I can’t agree with those who are totally dismissive of the work.

Extenuating Circumstances

However shaky its humor and however repulsive its protagonist’s antics, “Solar” still offers redemptive qualities and content. This is, after all, Ian McEwan, one of our best writers, and the bones of his talent cannot be disguised even in this ill-fitting raiment.

McEwan is a master analyst of decaying relationships, of psychological gamesmanship, of battles for personal supremacy. Beard’s failed marital relationships and his disputes with associates provide opportunities for the author to rehearse those tensions.

McEwan seeks to explore nested worlds: Beard’s personal circumstances; the larger sphere of the scientific community of which he is a prominent member; the enveloping social and political order (rapidly descending into disorder); and finally, the natural order of the planet (also under threat). McEwan is a terrific observer of the interrelationship of these spheres.

I was charmed by McEwan’s take on America, where he sets the final third of the book. This British author is evidently fond of our country. At one point he mentions “the plenitude and strangeness of America as represented by its television.” Beard’s American physician “could be counted on to deliver a clinical judgment with the proper neutrality, without the moral undertones, the hint of blame or poorly suppressed outrage Beard had come to expect from his [British doctors].” McEwan approvingly observes “the intimate politeness at which Americans excel.” He notices the way “Americans good-naturedly declare a class affiliation” — citing, by way of example, a woman  who chews gum remorselessly. Here is how Beard’s female companion in New Mexico is described: “She was so merry, so hopelessly optimistic and well-disposed. So American.” And, of course, the weather is better here:

“Always a delicious moment to be savoured, and never to be had in the British Isles, when, showered and perfumed and wearing fresh clothes, one steps out from the air-conditioning into the smooth, invincible warmth of a southern evening.”

Among the themes McEwan briefly explores in “Solar” is the trendy academic movement that would define all areas of knowledge as “socially constructed” – even the hard sciences. The malleability of memory is a recurrent motif, as is the related phenomenon of our all too human capacity for woeful misunderstanding, leading to catastrophe. There is lively (but, again, abbreviated) attention paid to the Two Cultures debate: science versus the humanities (or, more particularly, in the case of Beard’s first marriage, physics versus poetry; Beard’s scientific way of “knowing the world” locks him out of an appreciation of “other ways” of knowing the world.).

Final Observations

In an effort to propel “Solar” forward, McEwan employs the same device used by John Irving in his most recent novel, “Last Night in Twisted River”. Each subsequent section of the book leaps ahead several years, and, after the reader is duly situated into the new period, the author uses flashbacks to fill in the gap. This technique, which might annoy some as desultory, actually does the work of keeping the reader engaged.

The book’s second most important character — a young post-doctorate member of the team of scientists at the British Centre for Renewable Energy — hides a clue to the novel. His name is Tom Aldous. That name, I believe, is a conflation of the names of two real persons, from two previous centuries. McEwen, whose 21st century novel features the dominant science story of our day (climate change) as its “background hum“, has decided to invoke Thomas Henry Huxley, the 19th century scientist who championed the world-altering scientific development of his era, Darwinism. “Tom” Huxley is linked to his grandson, Aldous Huxley, the 20th century author of the enduring utopian novel, “Brave New World”. Aldous was also a writer of satiric novels, some of which featured a topical scientific twist. There may be a humbling lesson in the fact that those satiric novels have long since been forgotten.

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Addendum: A Weird Coincidence (a/k/a, the Bacon Bookmark)

On page 167 of “Solar”, McEwan illustrates Michael Beard’s disorderly habits with the story of the time his third wife, while cleaning their home, “discovered in the pages of a valuable first edition an ancient rasher of his breakfast bacon doubling as a bookmark.” A day after I read that passage — cringe-inducing if you’re a book lover — I happened to be watching Stephen Colbert’s interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, author of “Eating Animals”. At the end of the segment, Colbert uses a strip of bacon to mark his place in his copy of Foer’s book. Check out the video, here; Colbert brings out the bacon at 4:45.

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“Monsieur Pain” by Roberto Bolano

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

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Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) wrote “Monsieur Pain” in 1981-82, at the start of a brief but productive career as an imaginative writer of fiction. The Chilean-born Bolaño is best known for his dazzling breakthrough novel, “The Savage Detectives,” and the posthumously published “2666″. (For an excellent summary of Bolano’s main themes and motifs, see Henry Hitchings review of the “summative” novel “2666″ here.)

“Monsieur Pain” is a short (134-page) work, and two audiences may find pleasure in spending a few hours in its spell:

Happy veterans — readers who have been entranced by one or more of Bolaño’s celebrated later works and who want to trace the origin of his mature themes, his obsessions, and his methods, back to the time of their youthful first expression, will find revelations in “Monsieur Pain”.

Wary novices — new readers who are intrigued by, yet also skeptical of, the Bolaño phenomenon. A Washington Post critic, reflecting on Bolaño’s death in 2003, declared: “Bolano has joined the immortals” — and this kind of passionate celebration, echoed many times over by the mainstream critical establishment, garners attention and maybe distrust among general reader population. Some potential readers are, understandably, daunted by the weight of his final writings. They may also be confused by negative reactions to the author, as voiced in the two dozen one- and two-star complaints among the customer reviews of  ”2666″ on Amazon.com. For those wary readers I recommend this novel as good investment of your time.

Another reviewer described Bolaño’s worldview as “strange and marvelous and impossibly funny, bursting with melancholy and horror.” By Bolaño’s own reckoning, his formative literary influences were all over the map.  In the case of “Monsieur Pain” Bolaño turned to Edgar Allan Poe as the animating force for his narrative. This is not hidden. Between the Dedication Page and a Preliminary Note, on what is sometimes referred to as an Inspiration Page, Bolaño placed a dialog excerpt from Poe’s short story of 1844, “Mesmeric Revelation.” That tale is told as a conversation between a hypnotist and an invalid, a man on the cusp of death, who is placed under hypnosis in an experiment to see whether it will afford him a glimpse of the after-life.  At one point the hypnotized patient confides: “the mesmeric condition is so near death as to content me.”

“Monsieur Pain” combines elements of a mystery and a detective story, the latter a genre Poe pioneered. But it is much more than that; the novel genuinely defies categorization. It is narrated by Monsieur Pierre Pain, a veteran survivor of the battle of Verdun, where he was gassed. Two decades later, he is a pensioner living, poorly, in the Paris demimonde. He has studied mesmerism. Pain is called upon to apply his mesmeric skills to save the life of a hospitalized poet. Not long after his initial visit to the Clinic, events begin to assume a surrealist bent. Blended with a free-floating paranoia, this surreal atmosphere holds sway over the remainder of the novel. Time and space bend: time, at one point, is described as running faster than a clock; the Clinic morphs into a prison, its corridors a labyrinth.

Try as he might, Pain cannot shake off a pair of Spanish assassins, one of whom, when given the chance, attempts to escape, Oswald-like, by ducking into a movie theater. (Whether Bolaño, who would have been 10 1/2 at the time, followed the news of the JFK assassination, is unknown.) Pain is amused by an odd pair of young artists, genuine twins, ensconced in a bizarre cafe whose every fixture and surface is painted a shade of green. These brothers construct miniature disaster scenes (car crashes, train wrecks) inside fish-tanks. (The novelty of this art eerily anticipates Jeff Koons’ likewise surreal basketballs-in-a-fish-tank constructions?) Pain learns about a conspiracy that may involve radiation experiments; he’s made privy to a rumored love affair involving Madame Curie’s daughter. Pain encounters a former friend who has since become a torturer for Franco’s forces.

Which brings us to the political. The dread hanging over Paris in the year 1938 is the specter of totalitarianism. For Bolaño, who considered himself primarily a poet, the personal sorrows of a young Keats (half in love with easeful death) are distant indulgences, supplanted in the modern era by men powerfully in love with half death. Poe would not have been surprised by this turn of events. The question of the poet’s response to fascism, hinted at in “Monsieur Pain,” will take on greater urgency in Bolano’s subsequent novels.

By the mid-point of “Monsieur Pain,” the narrator has fallen sway to paranoia, he is captive to waking dreams. (Those many dreams had a real effect on me: I went to sleep immediately after finishing the book, and that night had more vivid dreams than I’d had in a long time.) Encounters with labyrinths, real and metaphorical, multiply. No matter where you are, you never really find the way out of the labyrinth. The novel ends with an Epilogue for Voices that reveals the main characters’ fates.

Some readers will find all of this a weird, indigestible brew, a fun-house ride not worth taking. If the prospect of Poe meets Borges meets Paul Auster meets Thomas Pynchon is off-putting, best stay away. But if you stick with it, you will appreciate how economically Bolaño sketches scene after scene, how he manages to maintain a fast pace throughout, disorienting the reader yet maintaining equilibrium. For me, the reading experience was similar to watching a film noir with an experimental bent. From time to time I was reminded of Hitchcock, especially in the way Bolaño “edits” a sequence for the reader’s consumption, and the way he uses physical surroundings to reveal psychological space, and vice versa. There is a cleverly unfurled scene in a movie house in which Bolaño’s piecemeal description of the plot of the film being screened serves as counterpoint to the stories exchanged by two former friends catching up in the audience. True, the book offers no big pay-off; it never soars. Instead, its rewards are modest. Yet you are sure to come away respecting how Bolaño, the poet, can access beauty through sensitive description. You will learn how touching he can be.

Despite or maybe because of the book’s incoherence I wound up liking it; another short novel of his, “By Night in Chile,” is on my near-term reading list.

[Update (01-30-2010): An abridged version of this essay is published as a book review on Amazon.com, here.]

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