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Ambition is not enough! The author Richard Powers and Orfeo
By jmakansi On April 8, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature
Ambition in a novel is necessary but not sufficient.
…..
Orfeo is about a older man, once a musician (in college) in love with another musician, who has a penchant for home experiments bent on discovering new connections between music and the scientific world, who then “arouses the suspicions of Homeland Security,” runs away, visits […]
Ambition in a novel is necessary but not sufficient.
…..
Orfeo is about a older man, once a musician (in college) in love with another musician, who has a penchant for home experiments bent on discovering new connections between music and the scientific world, who then “arouses the suspicions of Homeland Security,” runs away, visits loved ones, reminisces about his college love, and disgorges thoughts that will remind you of people who got 800s on their SATs but never learned how to tell a joke with their friends.
This is the third Richard Powers’ novel I’ve read. I doubt there’s a novelist out there who I admire more for the ambition of his fiction. I want to love him. I also want to un-torture his story-telling. In an asymptotic way, I see clearly where he wants to go. But in the end he seems to sacrifice story for lofty concept.
I am especially disheartened that I could not finish Orfeo because he weaves music into his prose. I love this! I try to do this with my writing. And damn him, he selects works that are high on my list of all-time faves, like Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Mind you, he doesn’t just refer to these works, or have characters listen to them or talk about them. They are stitched into the text as if you are following the score in parallel with reading the story.
Powers’ doesn’t stop with music. He integrates scientific, engineering, environmental, medical, literature, and just about every other academic discipline into this prose too. If I pulled a passage out to illustrate, I’d have to type ten pages.
Instead, here’s Powers’ on pot:
“Pot was a private aha. All the glories were sealed in the locked room of the smoker’s brain, and turned to a joke when he sobered. Els [main character] was after something more solid, a priori, shared–durable wonder raining down on whole roomfuls of listeners.”
I spent many late nights stoned in my dorm room in college, having edge-of-the-universe conversations with friends. The difference must be that Powers’ went back to his dorm room and recorded all of his. I just crashed.
About a third of the way through the book, Powers’ takes a detour and dwells on this favorite work of mine, Quartet for the End of Time. This is what probably kept me plugging away through the second third, after which I quit. I mean, how many times are writers told, “show, don’t tell?” Between pages 106-121, Powers’ gives us a history lesson on the circumstances surrounding Messiaen’s composing this work in a gulag in France. Okay, he seemingly gets away with it because Els is delivering a lecture to his students. But still. It’s a great story, a heartbreaking story, but in this context, pretty dry stuff, and I suspect it only “moves the story along” if you know and love Messiaen’s work, or you can run down the hall and have a eureka moment with a music humanities professor.
Powers’ is in that league with Pynchon, William Gass, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, John Barth, and I suppose, Faulkner, Joyce, and others, who are praised for their ambition and scope and audacious intentions, usually by people who make a living off of teaching such novels to students, reminding us how complex but important they are, and making the rest of us feel like Charlie Brown when he is asked by Lucy and Linus what he sees in the clouds. “I thought I saw a horsey and a duckie,” he says, after Linus woos and waxes philosophically.
I wrote the word asymptotically earlier, because one, I love this word, but two, it perfectly describes Powers’ in relation to some of the others in this league. An asymptote is the limit of a curve that is plateauing. Over the course of the x- or y-axis on a graph, the curve approaches the asymptote but never reaches it as the variable goes to infinity. It’s like seeing the goal posts or home plate but never getting there. I guess the fact that I use a word like asymptote tells you I feel a kindred spirit to Powers. Maybe that’s part of my issue. Envy. But I digress. The difference with Powers, say, and the others in his league, is that I see where he is going. I know where the goal posts are when I read his stuff. I don’t lose my bearings because I have context in the three-dimensional plane (unlike Faulkner, early Pynchon, Gass, etc, where I generally have no ideas what’s really going on.). BUT, I am too frustrated, exhausted, and annoyed. I want to punish him by not finishing. I know I shouldn’t but I do. I wish the guy would focus on little
Don’t get me wrong, I love complex stories, ambition, and a literary challenge. But if a horsey and duckie aren’t in there somewhere, I have to wonder whether the intention is to leave a lasting impression in the halls of academia (and The New Yorker) or an enriching (even if challenging) experience with your audience.
As a postscript, several people have told me that The Goldbug Variations is his best novel. I will probably give that one a go if I live long enough. Because I really do want to love this guy.
You need experiences to write compellingly. Yet having experiences naturally quells the palate. Seen this, done that. How can anything measure up?
……………….
A Norman Mailer essay, “Birds and Lions,” in The New Yorker back in 2002 spoke to me. He wrote of the need for writers to have experiences before they are able to […]
You need experiences to write compellingly. Yet having experiences naturally quells the palate. Seen this, done that. How can anything measure up?
……………….
A Norman Mailer essay, “Birds and Lions,” in The New Yorker back in 2002 spoke to me. He wrote of the need for writers to have experiences before they are able to write stuff worth a reader’s time. So much fiction, he wrote (I paraphrase heavily), is dull because writers young and old can’t capture and enhance the lives of bricklayers, bus drivers, bureaucrats, bullfighters, barmaids, beauticians, baseball players, ballet dancers, barbers, or babysitters because, well, they are professional writers, often with MFAs, whose excitement was mostly limited to the halls of academia and summer workshops. Plus,writing is by its nature, a solitary experience.
I think about that essay all the time. His words encourage me, a middle-aged guy with a successful career in engineering and consulting emboldened to write fiction. You accumulate experiences by living. You take risks. You deal. I had experiences worth the reading public’s time. I have lived.
Like most things in life, these accumulated experiences are a double-edged sword.
After you’ve traveled around the world, worked for 35 years, raised a family, seen hundreds of movies and televisions show episodes, read a thousand or two books and hundreds of short stories, bought hundreds of CDs and been exposed to thousands of songs and compositions, eaten in hundreds of restaurants whipping up every kind of ethnic cuisine, dealt with thousands of people in hundreds of different normal and abnormal situations, played a few musical instruments, owned six different houses (not at one time, no John McCain here), and driven nine different cars, been there, done that, what, really, is new?
What comic situation could you write about that hasn’t been beaten to death by Seth Rogen, the SNL players, and the rest of Hollywood? What scenes in a contemporary novel could impress when, lurking in the subconscious and screaming from the forefront, are a dozen images that are similar playing the mind’s movie reels?
This isn’t just a challenge in writing. It’s a challenge in reading and viewing, too. It’s a challenge in simply having a conversation. My kids plead with me not to list the bands that came before, and sound much like, the one they just suggested I might appreciate. I visibly shut down with people because I’ve had the conversation before, with them, not once, but several times.
If you are the type that likes a certain format (i.e., a genre type person), maybe this isn’t so troublesome. If you are the type, like I fashion myself, who constantly seeks to discover the new, it’s frustrating as all hell.
Your warehouse of accumulated experiences is inventory for the next writing project, but it’s also where the new enters and, usually, exits immediately, humbled and hung. When will I read a novel written in second person that can stand up to Bright Lights, Big City? Do I die before I read a western that bests Lonesome Dove? Who would tackle a novel about race relations in the deep south when To Kill a Mockingbird (book and movie) exists? I can’t write a 900 page novel, not about baseball, but about a baseball, the one hit by Bobby Thompson in the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951, because Don DeLillo already did. I wouldn’t even attempt a novella about a baseball now.
Of course, writers make the old new again all the time. I don’t think I can be that kind of writer.
How to discover the new? I read differently now. I start lots of novels (lots of non-fiction too) and don’t finish. I make endless lists of new music and books. I listen to a community radio station that prides itself on keeping its distance from the tried and true (they aren’t as successful as they’d like to believe, but still better than commercial radio). I’m not sure I write differently, but I try to think about all the other people out there who have vast experiences just like me.
Mailer’s words have proven to be doubled edged. It’s not just about your experiences. It’s about exposing your experiences to the accumulated light of everyone else’s out there, then determining whether you’ve truly illuminated something that could blind someone, or not.
The seminal challenge today for a writer, especially of literary, contemporary, or experimental fiction, is to engage with readers without plunging through pools of writers. Here’s one idea: Wherever you live, there’s bound to be dozens if not hundreds of reading groups. Ask one or more of them if they would consent to read a […]
The seminal challenge today for a writer, especially of literary, contemporary, or experimental fiction, is to engage with readers without plunging through pools of writers. Here’s one idea: Wherever you live, there’s bound to be dozens if not hundreds of reading groups. Ask one or more of them if they would consent to read a draft of your novel or a few of your short stories and discuss it/them. (Bring pastries and booze when the big day comes!).
I am a consultant to the electricity industry in my day job. Usually when I mention that to people at a party, they slither away towards the bar. Except every five years or so, when the energy industry gets hot in the stock market. Then I hold court with people seeking free investment advice.
Whether I am helping them communicate about their technology to customers or venture capitalists, often, clients ask me, well, what should we say? How should we respond? My answer always is, “honesty seems to work best in my experience.”
I’ve been writing fiction for about fifteen years. Mostly short stories, Now I’ve completed a novel. I am in a slow (painfully so often) transition out of consulting to something else. What, I am not sure. But I know that writing, and writing fiction, will be part of it. Writing has been part and parcel of my life since sixth grade when I started a family newspaper (it lasted two editions).
Honestly, what does a fiction writer want? To connect with readers, I think. If you write mysteries, thrillers, crime, romance, science fiction, etc., it’s a little easier. Genre writing is pretty organized and a very open field today given the disruptions to the traditional publishing business model. But if you write literary fiction, which is what I think I am writing, it’s not so easy. Literary fiction is still very controlled by the traditional publishing apparatus. If you don’t have a academic platform or an MFA (Masters in Fine Arts), it’s really difficult to reach readers of literary fiction.
Writers are passionate readers for the most part. Most writers hope to find readers through other writers. We all participate in writers groups, on-line and face-to face. Let’s face it though. We are mostly reaching people like ourselves, people who have a story to tell…and sell. Isn’t the real goal to connect with readers?
Only a pure reader can give a writer pure feedback, free of a subconscious “I would have done it this way,” or “They say never to do this in workshop,” or “She’ll never get an agent with this as a first chapter.” Readers are looking for great reads, great ideas, great story concepts, engaging characters, momentum in the plot. This is doubly true because writing is so subjective. They don’t care how a book got to them. They crave a great read.
Trying to connect with readers through other writers is like trying to sink to the bottom of a salt-laden sea. Mostly, you float on top of what other writers think and say.
As you write a novel or a short story, shouldn’t you inform your thoughts on revision based on what other readers think? I’m not talking about line edits, I’m talking about more general impressions.
Genre writers have expertly applied social media to interact with their readers. But let’s not kid ourselves. This is as much soliciting feedback and engagement as marketing, building loyalty among the customer base or fans, as it might be informing the writing or revision process. It’s hard enough to get feedback from five people (in a critique group, say) to converge on useful revisions that don’t destroy the story. Imagine soliciting from dozens or hundreds on-line?
We all know (or should know) that the vast majority of literary journals out there are read (or place on their shelves) by other writers and exist because academics survive under the publish or perish paradigm. I don’t care how much noise their staff makes about “seeking new literary talent, fresh voices, etc,” what they really want is for wanna-bees to buy or subscribe to their publication. I mean, I can’t tell you how many of these lit journals I’ve purchased or read over the years because, in submitting, I am admonished to read the journal to understand what they publish. I read them, and have no earthly clue what they expect in their submissions. These are the journals which have the gall (well, fewer do this today) to demand that you submit to them exclusively while they take their sweet time, often months, to respond. Most operate under the slave labor of graduate students, too.
When it comes to literary novels, the buying public, the customer, is largely conditioned by the opinions of leading opinion-makers, namely the New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and a few other leading outlets. With few exceptions, these channels are part of the traditional publishing model. The five big publishing houses remaining (with their myriad acquired presses), much like the characterization of Goldman Sachs as the “vampire squid,” courtesy of Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, are for the most part impenetrable without a New York agent. As just one example, many of the short stories published in The New Yorker (Yes, The New Yorker) appear timed to help the author promote a collection or a new novel. I doubt anyone at the publication is going to admit that this is deliberate, but my informal analysis, and the suspicions I have heard from many others, suggests it’s a credible conclusion.
If you write literary fiction, then, you have a few poor choices – try to penetrate the traditional publishing apparatus, try to break into the recognized literary journals set up for a publish or perish paradigm, or publish in the proliferating print and on-line journals essentially established to gratify writers with more writers as readers – at best.
So, I maintain that the seminal challenge today for a writer, especially of literary, contemporary, or experimental fiction, is to engage with readers without plunging through pools of writers. Here’s one idea: Wherever you live, there’s bound to be dozens if not hundreds of reading groups. Ask one or more of them if they would consent to read a draft of your novel and discuss it. (Bring pastries and booze, chocolate and red wine, when the big day comes!). Or work with branches of your local library to arrange a discussion of your draft or stories.
Yes, we need all the help we can get with editing and revising. I maintain (two decades of experience as the lead writer, chief editor, reporter, and technical and business specialist for an industry trade publication taught me this) that writers cannot edit their own stuff.
But what we crave is the feedback from the reading experience. That, more than anything, will keep us from becoming “workshop boy or girl.”
Your thoughts on how to connect with real readers are welcome.
Reading stories by emerging writers, unknown writers, struggling writers, and widely regarded authors is a delight. Most recently, I was gratified to judge the St. Louis Writers Guild Short Story Contest. A few days ago, I listened to the six winners (three honorable mentions) read their work. I was surprised to learn that one […]
Reading stories by emerging writers, unknown writers, struggling writers, and widely regarded authors is a delight. Most recently, I was gratified to judge the St. Louis Writers Guild Short Story Contest. A few days ago, I listened to the six winners (three honorable mentions) read their work. I was surprised to learn that one of the winners was a young man barely out of high school or into college, one was a lady who had never entered a contest before, and one was a lady who read her work beautifully.
Gems in a stack of manuscripts are rare. Let’s face it. Entries inducing the onset of headache are frequent. But writers coaxing their work into a new dimension through reading are the rarest of all. All writers are told how important reading aloud is. Writers are rarely taught how to read aloud well. In writing conferences I have attended, writers are encouraged to read, and “readings” are always an integral part of the program. In workshops, writers whose works are about to be discussed often are asked to read a passage first. But I have yet to attend, or hear of, a writing conference or workshop where reading is taught or work-shopped as a parallel craft.
Big name authors who come to town, or sign up as workshop faculty, usually read well. I don’t know if it’s because they read the same passage and get better at it by repetition, or their agents or publishers make them practice.
But I digress. For several years, I volunteered to review story collections for an on-line publication called The Short Review. The collections came from the English speaking countries around the world. Most of the time, only one or two stories were memorable in any way. But glimpsing what writers are trying to get from the inside to the outside is always fascinating to me. Even more, comparing what is being done on the “emerging,” “struggling,” and local/regional stages to what gets published and widely circulated through the usual national and international outlets (The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, the better known literary journals, and most recently the story apps delivering stories to your computer or device) is instructive.
What shocks me is the ratio of what is memorable or worth reading again or saving for another time to read again is about the same – sadly, very, very low. I guess the moral is a perfectly publishable story from a pro, or bubbling through the literary cognescenti, may be no more worth reading than an imperfect one ripped from the pen of an “amateur.” Past acceptances are no guarantee of future enjoyment. Perfecting a story for publication may take all the fun out of it.
Every time I read another perfectly written, duller than dirt, short story in my favorite magazine of all time, The New Yorker, I take a deep breath, revert to a momentary zen-like state, and remember two things. One, at least The New Yorker still publishes short stories. Two, three of my favorite short stories from […]
Every time I read another perfectly written, duller than dirt, short story in my favorite magazine of all time, The New Yorker, I take a deep breath, revert to a momentary zen-like state, and remember two things. One, at least The New Yorker still publishes short stories. Two, three of my favorite short stories from contemporary authors are part of their archives. After I read Tobias Wolff’s “All Ahead of Them,” in the latest issue, I went back and read “Another Manhattan,” by Donald Antrim. Not only is this story hilarious and sad, it does what a short story, or all good fiction, should do, in my humble opinion: Make reality tremble with Brownian motion, engage the reader at a heightened state of awareness, and give us a roller coaster ride that pushes the envelope of physics, exhilaration, and fear.
One way I like to judge a short story is to think about what an oscilloscope screen would look like monitoring my brain waves while I’m reading it. “All Ahead of Them” flat-lines. “Another Manhattan” sends that green wave indicator off the freaking screen! It packs the energy of a pound of uranium. Two couples meet for dinner. Each woman is having an affair with the other guy. One of the husbands buys an outrageous bouquet of flowers for his wife, and tries to pick up the young girl in the shop. They’re all present or future members of alcoholics or pills anonymous. It’s life in Manhattan in the modern age of pharmacology and narrowly defined neuroses. It’s “Annie Hall” and the 1970s on doses of steroids prescribed for much larger mammals. It makes “All Ahead of Them” read like taking enteric-coated aspirin.
The other two stories in my trilogy of favorites are “The Spot,” David Means, and “The Cold Outside,” John Burnside. One of these days I may do an extended post on all three of these stories, which could not be more different from each other ( I wrote a short piece on “Another Manhattan” in a previous entry here). One characteristic all of these authors share is that their names do not show up in writers workshop faculties, or as blurb writers for other authors. Well, until recently. David Means blurbed Jamie Quatro’s collection, I Want to Show You More. After I finally read one of her stories which was worth the time, “1.7 to Tennessee,” a truly heart-wrenching tale, I hoped upon hope that this was the story which convinced Means’ to surface on a back cover.
Writing a good short stories is like leading the league in triples, much harder than hitting home runs, or taking the batting title with singles. Great short stories are rare. Having one in a published collection is a feat, in my opinion. So, I try not to fault The New Yorker for publishing mediocre to awful ones issues after issue, but instead sing the praises of the great ones the publication has exposed me to over the years.
Tagged with: All Ahead of Them • Another Manhattan • David Means • Donald Antrim • Jamie Quatro • John Burnside • The Cold Outside • The New Yorker • The Spot • Tobias Wolff
For whatever reason, I’ve been “into” Asian novels lately. I guess I am just trying to bust out of that Western literary tradition. I haven’t been all that enthusiastic with what I’ve read so far. I almost checked out Haruki Murakami’s latest, 1Q84, when I was at the library a few weeks ago, even though […]
For whatever reason, I’ve been “into” Asian novels lately. I guess I am just trying to bust out of that Western literary tradition. I haven’t been all that enthusiastic with what I’ve read so far. I almost checked out Haruki Murakami’s latest, 1Q84, when I was at the library a few weeks ago, even though two stalwart readers told me they couldn’t get through it. Then I thought, hell, I’ll be at this for a few months (the novel comes in three volumes, to give you an idea) and I don’t have that kind of time or patience these days. Lying next to it, somewhat misplaced on the shelf, was Kafka on the Shore. A more modest single volume work, it not only appeared digestible, I knew it had received much acclaim since publication around ten years ago. If I had actually noticed the cover art, the kind of image that shows up at five in the morning, somewhere between the last bit of Rem sleep and the alarm clock, and so scares the crap out of you, the alarm is superfluous, if I had noticed, I would have probably let out a yelp that’d cause the librarian to wonder if the after-school crowd was let in early. If I could explain the image, I would. All I really knew about the novel was that the author was supposed to be one of those magical realism types.
This is a remarkable novel. And I grappled with why. I read lots of novels. I’ve read half a dozen since the start of the year. Why does this one stand out?
It stands above, I’ve decided, because it has an unnerving amount of energy but Murakami controls it, effortlessly, it seems, even as it emanates from four principal sources.
- Story energy – at the elementary level, it’s a coming of age novel. It reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye, one of the seminal coming-of-age stories of the last century, but kind of in the sense that an apple reminds me of apple pie. (Pie is the only food I will not share, just to give you a clue what I mean by that analogy). And I loved Catcher in the Rye! The fifteen-year old narrator who runs away (he’s two years younger than Holden Caufield) has similar experiences that make a man out of him. I thought Holden got to do mature things for his age, like stay overnight in Manhattan in a hotel and get roughed up by a pimp, but this guy, Kafka Tamura, well, let’s just say he manages to check himself into a library several hundred miles from Tokyo and that’s where his adventures start. He has the mountains to climb and the oceans to cross, but Murakami never belittles his quest with false heroics or manufactured outcomes.
- Archetypal energy – a great novel in the literary tradition has to artfully include those universal symbols common to all other great novels (“The river is life”). Kafka on the Shore has plenty of them. Not one of them hits you over the head reminding you how intellectual you are reading this.
- Spiritual energy – this is perhaps the novel’s greatest strength. The feeling I got reading it was this: We humans, as we float in the ether of our lives, hope that we are anchored to some larger purpose, something eternal, something universal. Kafka on the Shore makes you know this, not just hope it. And yet I can’t say that it’s a novel of redemption or salvation. Never does it drift into the fantasy that life has a purpose that is fathomable 24/7 or, for that matter, ever makes itself fully apparent.
- Mythological, psychological, philosophical, and pathological energy – there’s incest, family rivalry, father-son and mother-son issues, adolescent dreams and fantasies, talking animals, prophetic simpletons and simple proletarians, abandonment, genetic and familial oddities, and strange coincidences reminiscent of Kazantzakis, Homer, Shakespeare, Kafka, Marquez, Swift, Faulkner, and many others no doubt I can’t name off the top of my head.
One way Murakami keeps this energy from exploding is through the novel’s structure. There are two primary interwoven stories, with parallel main characters. One is told in present tense using Kafka as the first-person narrator. The other is told in past tense using a third person limited or omniscient (sometimes hard to tell) narrator. Another technique is having the main characters connected back to a single event in the past, a tragic but bizarre incident that occurs towards the end of World War II. The anchor location for the story is a small library far from Tokyo in the hinterland of Japan, more of a research institution, funded by a wealthy landowner. What better place for a literary masterpiece to take place than where great stories ultimately reside for the rest of their lives? Can I tell you why structure and place keep the thing from exploding? No.
Does it have flaws? Probably. The only one I can think of is that the story is male-dominated. There are only two female characters and one, on reflection, seems like she could have been axed in rewrite, were it not that she heightens the overtones of incest, and the other almost seems a stand-in for all women-kind, a generic life-mother, an object of male sexual desire, the mythical librarian who is ravishing when she takes off her glasses, and so on. Then again, that’s something else I love about this book. Murakami employs these subtle and not-so-subtle references to popular culture and popular stereotypes that ground the story in everyday life, as mundane and unfortunate as that might be considered out of context.
In the end, I can’t really explain why I loved this book. It’s wonderfully balanced. What does that tell you? Nothing. It doesn’t stretch the credibility of any of its literary licenses, e.g., talking animals, a truck driver who learns to love Beethoven and philosophy, fragmented time sequences, a fifteen year old runaway mature beyond his years by a decade or two. Does that help you? Probably not. See if this helps. There’s something called the triple point in chemistry. It’s the combination of temperature and pressure at which a substance can exist as a solid, a liquid, and a gas. How many books have you read, will you read, that comfortably exists at the equilibrium of reality, dream, and imagination? To me, this is that sort of novel.
Strong Men Need Not Apply: Richard Ford’s Canada
By jmakansi On February 3, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature
Like most of Richard Ford’s books, all of which I have thoroughly enjoyed since reading The Sportswriter back in the 1980s, Canada is first and foremost about how events, small or large, out of our control shape our lives. The events or situations in Canada which would be the main course for most other authors […]
Like most of Richard Ford’s books, all of which I have thoroughly enjoyed since reading The Sportswriter back in the 1980s, Canada is first and foremost about how events, small or large, out of our control shape our lives. The events or situations in Canada which would be the main course for most other authors and readers – murders, robberies, deviant behavior, ripped apart families, etc – are side dishes or even left in the kitchen. Ford isn’t so interested in the inflection points themselves, but how they shape the characters from that point onward.
But here is what I find most fascinating about Ford’s novels (and Canada is no exception): So often the events are experienced as out of the character’s control, but they really aren’t. For the most part, his characters don’t make decisions, and hardly make an effort to take control of their lives. They just bob on the surface of life. They take what comes and leave what goes, few questions asked. For the most part, they are spineless and weak human beings. And they are fascinating under Ford’s pen.
The main character in Canada, Del Parsons, is only fifteen so we can more easily forgive him for not making decisions that could more positively affect his life. He’s not mature enough. As the narrator (fifty years later than the timeline of the story), he even tells us readers this in so many words. But as with Ford’s adult characters, especially the men, should we really give Del a pass?
Here’s a minor but excellent example. Del wants to go to school but can’t because he has followed blindly what the adults have planned for him after he is separated from his parents. He learns of a school near where he is forced to live in Saskatchewan. He rides his bike there to check it out. It’s a girls school run by nuns. Two girls come to the fence he stands at and taunts him. Then the nun comes over and shoos him away. We know that Del desperately wants to go to school, it’s his obsession, but this is the sum total of his effort to do so.
He doesn’t, for example, even ask the nun or the girls where boys in the area go to school, nor does he ask the adults he lives with. Of course, we also know he is scared – his living conditions are at the ragged edge of hostile. But still. He makes no effort.
While most readers would throw up their hands and wish Ford would send his characters to assertiveness training, I see it differently. Ford novels reflect American society’s problem with boys and men. Political and cultural trends of the last forty years – you can read about this in countless articles – favor girls over boys. Men, or at least traditional males (whoever they are), are being “hollowed out.” Of course, this is highly controversial and probably doesn’t get much support from one entire gender.
I’m not making the argument for or against men being hollowed out here, just the observation that Ford brilliantly captures this cultural ethos in his novels. Even more so in Canada. Del’s sister and fraternal twin, Berner, takes matters into her own hands when faced with the separation from the parents (and from her twin), even though, ultimately, life punishes her for it.
Canada exemplifies once again Ford’s concern with the white space around events. His writing is meticulous, excessively detailed, but emotionally restrained, or even bereft. Some will find it lugubrious, rather than exuberant. But know this: His characters may let life control them, but Ford has a white knuckle grip on his narrative and the characters who populate his stories.
Boat People
By jmakansi On January 26, 2013 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature
I just read Ship of Fools, circa 1963, Katherine Anne Porter. Strangely, the book I read just before it was Mosquitoes, circa 1927, one of William Faulkner’s earliest novels. Even stranger, the book Ship of Fools reminded me of the most is Death on the Installment Plan, circa 1952, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. All three take […]
I just read Ship of Fools, circa 1963, Katherine Anne Porter. Strangely, the book I read just before it was Mosquitoes, circa 1927, one of William Faulkner’s earliest novels. Even stranger, the book Ship of Fools reminded me of the most is Death on the Installment Plan, circa 1952, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. All three take place on a boat. Well, at least the first part of the Celine work – I read it in college. It’s a great technique, stuffing everyone on a boat. The author can focus on the characters and their interactions. You can’t go very far on a boat. There’s only so much to describe. Not much to do (none of these are today’s luxury cruise liners). Water is water. Minimal setting. Minimal plot. What’s left, in terms of the story? Characters.
And they don’t look look very pretty. In fact, Ship of Fools is probably the most despairing look at social human interaction I’ve ever read. You won’t find a good egg in this carton. It’s a deep dive into prejudice, social and economic status, class boundaries, ethnic hatred, disconnecting family bonds, and gender wars. The passengers have all boarded in Mexico and Cuba, bound for the Germany of the late 1930s. While the book was published in 1963 (some parts of it earlier), it was the first major work of Porter’s in twenty years. Obviously, she must have spent a lot of time brooding over the human catastrophe that was Nazi Germany. The novel offers an imagined glimpse into the behaviors and attitudes that presage a holocaust. The reader of today can easily extrapolate the attitudes of Porter’s characters and arrive at what happened in Germany, what happens in countries today, and the simmering disdain different classes of humans seem to have for each other. Perhaps what is most horrifying is that the portrayal, to this reader, feels universal, inevitable.
There are no heroes on Porter’s ship. The Europeans hate the Latins (especially the gypsy dancer/acting troupe). The young American couple torment each other. The one Jewish man (who sells Catholic Church furnishings!) barely tolerates the other Jewish man (or maybe he’s partly Jewish and his wife is Jewish, I can’t recall), and neither has any use for the Christians. A son hates his father (for hoarding his money even when he’s almost dying). In fact, it’s easy to imagine that the victims of the coming ethnic cleansing could have been any one of the groups represented, perpetrated by any of the other groups represented. Perhaps this is Porter’s raison d’etre – we are forced to confront the notion anyway that all of us have these little voices of hate in our head, since no character manages to sing above their background noise. All of us create “others” in our minds, and/or act out against these others in real life. No one is absolved. We all carry the potential for depravity even if most of us (hopefully anyway) manage to refrain from making it kinetic.
Death on the Installment Plan, at least the beginning passages I recall, also depicts utter human depravity, with a physical manifestation as well (the boat is tossing and turning and people are puking everywhere). But the difference is that the depravity is cut with humor. It’s so depraved, it’s funny. We tell ourselves this can’t be real. You can’t get through Ship of Fools thinking this is anything but visceral, vivid real life. Think of a Hudson School painting (Thomas Cole, for example, one of my favorites) turning subtly and slowly over the course of the book into a Bosch painting of hell. Of two quotes preceding the start of the novel in the version I read, one uses the word comedy and the other the word humor. I derived none of either.
But I loved this book, even though I needed an infinite tank of oxygen for this deep and disturbing dive. Maybe it’s more appropriate to read as an exercise in social psychology rather than fiction. The only quibble I had with it is the number of characters, so many in fact, it borrows from the gargantuan Russian novels and lists them in the front.
The characters in Faulkner’s Mosquitoes, as the title implies, are pests. They aren’t depraved – they all are similar in social status, if not economic – but that doesn’t stop them from being hostile and mean to each other. But their hostility stems from boredom. They are the gentility. With nothing better to do, they snark at each other behind backs, but at least they keep up appearances. Porter shows hostility and hatred in the raw, laid bare, intimate, every hair in the brush making its mark in every stroke.
The takeaway: Being confined to a boat brings out the worst in the human condition. Think about that next time you gaze into an advertisement for a cruise.
Tagged with: Death on the Installment Plan • Katherine Anne Porter • Louis Ferdinand Celine • Mosquitoes • Ship of Fools • William Faulkner
Sometimes you have to stare at something for a long time for it to become real. A copy of Caleb J Ross’s Charactered Pieces was sitting on the table in front of the television for almost two years. Someone brought it home, said I might like it, and so I left it lying about, good […]
Sometimes you have to stare at something for a long time for it to become real. A copy of Caleb J Ross’s Charactered Pieces was sitting on the table in front of the television for almost two years. Someone brought it home, said I might like it, and so I left it lying about, good intentions surrounding it, along with junk mail, the TV remote, empty bottles, and sweating tumblers. It became the smallest coffee table book I’d ever propped my feet on watching the tube.
Then, the unthinkable happens. My morning newspapers don’t show up at the appointed time. I go fog. Man, I can’t start the day without my New York Times and Wall Street Journal. I’ll even settle for a USA Today, even though that’s like ingesting bootleg rather than store-bought. Then I start to shut down. I search desperately for something to read, something that might fill the same time slot. I pick up Caleb J Ross’ slim 65-page volume with its yellow orange cover and an artistic rendering of a tiny foot pushing through, what, a pillow, or something? (When you read the story that image refers to, better have a prayer book by your side). Oh, and the cover really is yellow, it didn’t age waiting for someone to pick it up.
Perhaps I read under extreme duress, as a prisoner of my morning routine. Perhaps.
For several years, I reviewed short story collections at the The Short Review. For most collections I read, the common shortcoming I identified was that, while one or two stories ranged from “worth reading” to “gems,” the rest of the collection I found lacking.
Charactered Pieces is NOT like that. Each story has momentum. Characters take what society gives them and deconstruct under their own illusions or delusions. Ross’s language is crisp, even as the sentences accelerate you effortlessly into the story, the unimaginable becoming all too real, then gently guide you into a deep pool of reflection and contemplation at story’s end. His themes offer about as much uplift as the Wright Brothers first experimental airplane, but they make you think at exit velocity. Regardless of how you feel after you read these stories, you can’t help BUT feel, with empathy and tolerance for the lives portrayed, and respect for the author.
Thank you, newspaper delivery guy. When Ross’s next volume arrives, believe me, I won’t be staring at it.
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