Otsuka – The Buddha in the Attic

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Buddha in the AtticOtsuka, Julie, (2011). The Buddha in the Attic. New York: Random/Anchor.

This short (129 page) prose-poem addresses the lives of Japanese women who came to San Francisco in the early 1900’s as mail-order brides for Japanese laborers already there. The women were young, naïve, and gullible, having believed they were to be married to bankers and ranchers, only to find, upon their arrival, that they had been sold to crude day laborers. Their tribulations are described in first-person-plural, the voice of a collective consciousness, making a sort of group memoir. We did this, we did that, some of us did some other thing.

The list of chapter titles (there is no Table of Contents), outlines the content of the memoir:

  1.  Come, Japanese!  [Squalor and anxiety on the boat coming over.]
  2.  First Night [The horror of having sex with their new husbands.]
  3.  Whites [Working for whites as field labor in California, feeling alien.]
  4.  Babies [Babies are born, often in fields, always in squalor, never in hospital.]
  5.  Children [Americanized children reject the traditional values of their parents.]
  6.  Traitors [News of WW II, disappearances of neighbors, rumors of internment.]
  7.  Last Day [Japanese-Americans are evacuated to concentration camps.]
  8.  Disappearance [Shift in POV to an omniscient narrator: Japanese are all gone.]

My bracketed summaries of each chapter are reductive, but they give some sense of what the book is about. The “group memoir” POV humanizes the immigration experience, although there are no individual characters, only descriptions of the collective experience.

The structure of the narrative is lists, an approach similar to Tim O’Brien’s classic story, The Things They Carried. The lists are populated with poignantly evocative detail, perfectly observed. Within and between lists are occasional italicized comments, presumably made by some member of the community, which characterizes the group’s experience. “My husband was a gambler who left me with only forty-five cents.”  The cumulative effect is to convey the sense of struggle, a sense of difficult lives lived, from a female point of view.

The list format makes the narrative read like a poem, with each list entry carrying more meaning than any objectively described scene would. The language supports that poetic mood. For example, every paragraph in the first chapter begins with a similar phrase: “On the boat we were mostly virgins.” “On the boat, we slept down below…” “Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto…”  The pattern can become Dr. Seussian, but it’s a nice way to set the book’s tone in the first chapter.

My specific dissatisfactions with the book are three. First, the group memoir in list format, while an interesting, innovative narrative voice and style, quickly wears thin. Even at 129 pages, I found myself skimming. I longed for characters, scenes, and dialog. There is a reason why writing teachers admonish us to “show, don’t tell.”

Second, The story itself is not new. It adds no historical information or insight, and has no evaluative point of view on the events. It falls into a category I call the “Ain’t it awful” story. Yes, the hardships were hard, the injustices unjust. But since they were not connected to any characters the reader is invested in, one feels cruelly distanced from it all.

Third, there is a curious omission of context when members of the community are rounded up and moved to the concentration camps in Idaho, Nevada, and so on. I expected  the narrator to offer reflections from the immigrant group’s POV. The community is characterized in the first two-thirds of the book as a tight collective consciousness, almost a group-mind. Yet when Pearl Harbor is bombed, there is no reaction in the community. Mainstream newspapers are quoted calling the aggressors “the enemy,” but the immigrant group-mind offers no comment about its own reaction. Instead, group members are characterized as uncomprehending, child-like victims with no context for what is happening to them. This approach struck me as disingenuous and inconsistent with what had gone before.

Despite these complaints, the book is gracefully written, and despite its overt sentimentality, or maybe because of that, it will be an excellent assignment for high school students to learn about this shameful Japanese internment episode in U.S. history, but for anyone who knows the history, the book will be only mildly interesting.

Bowles – The Sheltering Sky

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Sheltering SkyZombies in Love

Bowles, Paul, (1949). The Sheltering Sky. New York: Harper Perennial.

This classic novel is set in the Sahara of North Africa during WW II, about 1940. A young, American married couple, Port and Kit, travel with their male friend, Tunner, from village to village, in Algeria, mostly. They are footloose adventurers, not tourists. They have no return date, and might expect to wander for years. They also have no agenda, no motivation, no interest in the local people, customs, languages, food, geography, history – nothing. They walk around like zombies, going nowhere, for no reason. The “action” in the book rarely rises above eating, drinking, smoking, sleeping, walking and driving around.

Port and Kit might have loved each other once, but even that is not clear. Now, there is little affection between them. What keeps them together is egocentric insistence by Port that they continue the nomadic life, for no particular reason, and Kit’s pathologically passive acquiescence. The characters are barely described, more like translucent ghosts than people.

Tunner is even more of a cipher. Throughout the novel there are occasional languid declarations of love, or at least mild longing, slight suggestions of residual affection, some faint implications of jealousy and envy among the trio of characters, but melodrama, this isn’t.

There is no plot, no character arcs, and nothing happens for over three hundred pages. There is no point to it, and that is the point. This is all about the mood of meaninglessness, emptiness, and nihilism. The characters are mere punctuation for the enveloping mood. As Port muses in one scene, the difference between something and nothing is nothing. Even the title of the book is despairing: the sky does not, after all, shelter anyone from anything; it is the opposite of shelter. There is no shelter.

For Bowles, as for Camus, Beckett, and many other existentialist writers of the time, the mood was the message. After the war, when Sheltering Sky was written, many intellectuals, stunned and disoriented by the monumental and senseless destruction, carnage, brutality, and irrationality they had just lived through, concluded that the very foundations of civilization had been exposed as delusions. The war patently demonstrated that no ideals can withstand barbarism; there is no purpose to anything, no future to hope for. Nothing was worth anything and nothing meant anything. The vast, alien, and inhospitable Sahara is the perfect setting for a meaningless, featureless life, and the characters stumble through it like the post-war rag dolls many people felt like at that time.

Bowles’ narrative skill is superlative. How could anyone write 300 pages of nothing and make it interesting? He does that through the sheer force of his artistry, and that’s what keeps the pages turning. Some samples:

[Beginning of chapter 1:] “He awoke, opened his eyes. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire. He was somewhere, he had come back through vast regions from nowhere; there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar.”

“’Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus.  It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth–’ she hesitated. 
Port laughed abruptly. ‘And now you know it’s not like that. Right? It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don’t even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize its nearly burned down to the end. And then’s when you’re conscious of the bitter taste.’” (p.159)

Mitchell – Cloud Atlas

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Cloud-atlasAuthor as Flasher

Mitchell, David (2004). Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House.

Robert Frobisher, a character in one of the six novellas that make up Cloud Atlas, is a composer in 1931 Europe who describes his new work in a letter to a friend.  It is a “’sextet for overlapping soloists’: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color.  In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order.  Revolutionary or gimmicky?” (p. 445).

Well, gimmicky, is my judgment, although that does not rule out thought-provoking and clever.  But revolutionary?  I don’t think so. It’s an experimental novel that plays with structure rather than content as its innovation.

Like Frobisher’s musical sextet, each of the six stories presented does have its own language, setting, and time, and its own population of characters. Each story is also interrupted abruptly, sometimes in mid-sentence, by its successor. The sixth story, however, the keystone in the arch, finishes uninterrupted. Then each of the first five stories, in reverse order, resumes from where it left off.

The first story is presented as the journal of a 19th century gentleman on a commercial ship operating somewhere around New Zealand. The language is archaic, as if were from Moby Dick. The traveler has various adventures, until his story simply stops in mid-sentence at the bottom of a page. We assume that the rest of the journal pages were missing. However, the author provided no context for interpreting the interrupted diary – no prologue, no introduction, no framing device, so the abruptness of the interruption is unexplained, and the reader may feel abused.  

Robert Frobisher begins the second story, also epistolary, like the first. We are presented with a succession of letters he wrote to his friend and lover, a young man named Sixsmith back in London. We learn that Frobisher is a well-educated dandy and musical prodigy. He writes imperiously and cynically to Sixsmith about trying to hustle a living on the continent. His last letter is dated September, 1931, ending his story without resolution. Again the reader is left unsatisfied. There might be additional, missing letters, but without context, one’s reaction is, “What is the point of this?” We have seen this trick once already, so it is not as shocking as it was for the seaman’s diary, but still, we are left wondering, why does David Mitchell insist on showing himself like a flasher in the park? Why can’t he just tell a straightforward story we can believe in?

The third story is a thriller, set in 1970’s Pennsylvania. Naturally, I do not expect it to end properly and I start reading very much expecting the rug to be pulled out, but I figure it is going to be much harder for him to trick me this time. This is a straight narrative story and he wouldn’t dare end it in mid-sentence with no explanation. Wary, I read on.

The plot moves along with fairly good, albeit clichéd suspense: a reporter discovers a huge safety problem at a nuclear reactor. The problem is being covered up by greedy and murderous executives. She gets the incriminating documents and is speeding away from the nuclear plant when she drives off a bridge into an ocean bay sixty feet below and her car sinks. The End. The author has flashed me again!

The game continues. The fourth story is ostensibly a memoir, of a man held captive in an old folks home. Every once in a while, the narrator violates the memoir form to address the reader directly, such as, “You probably spotted it pages ago, dear Reader.”  What does it mean? It is just the author flashing again. The story comes to an abrupt end. I expected it, of course, but it comes in a goofy, childish manner. The character says, “…and then I died.”

Story number five is set in the future. It is a sci-fi tale, with special, “futuristic” language. Evil overlords have enslaved all workers. The format is again epistolary, the supposed transcript of an interview with one of the workers who was a key figure in a failed revolution. The end of the transcript comes as the height of the action and intrigue are described, and is abrupt, but more reasonable than the previous ones.

The center story of the book is a weird tale in a post-apocalyptic future earth, set in Hawaii. The narrator uses a strange, invented dialect, hard to read, but not as difficult as the previous story’s language. It is as if  Huck Finn spoke a Hawaiian Islander’s pidgin. The tale meanders over one thing and another while the narrator indulges in neo-romantic speechifying. Nothing happens and the story ends normally. 

Subsequently, the five previous, interrupted stories pick up where they left off and finish.  But why bother reading them? Isn’t the game up at this point? Essentially yes. The stories themselves are not very good, even if you can remember how each started, so there is little dramatic drive to get you through the last half of the book. Nevertheless game methodically plays out to the last line of the last (and first) story, when all the music falls away and the sextet ends on a single, quiet note.

Interesting?  Extremely, but only if you are a writer and care about the normally hidden mechanics of how stories are told. The stories themselves are mundane and clichéd, illuminating nothing, overwritten, and being all chopped up, difficult to follow. If you enjoy being jerked around by a novelist who violates the implicit contract between writer and reader, and if you don’t mind an author jumping out of the narrative to flash himself at you, the book can be recommended.

Baker – The Mezzanine

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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MezzanineGetting Small

Baker, Nicholson. (1988). The Mezzanine.  New York: Grove Press.

This strange little book (107 pages) is the stream of consciousness of a generic office worker in a generic company in a generic American city in the 1980’s.  He comments on his sensations and experiences, and relates them back to his childhood and to changes in American industrial design. His comments are thoughtful, often humorously faux-naïve, phenomenological reflections on life’s little mysteries and frustrations, like how difficult it is to find a new pair of shoelaces of the right length, style, and color.

His office is on the mezzanine floor of a building and he reflects repeatedly, obsessively, on escalators: how they look, how they work, their aesthetics, their dangers, his childhood memories of them, how they compare to airport baggage conveyors, and dry cleaners’ conveyors; the intrinsic beauty of their grooved steps and comparison to the grooves on the ventral side of the sperm whale, and the grooves in vinyl records.

He talks about office carpeting, the frustration of taking the last piece of tape from a tape dispenser, the pleasures of refilling a stapler. He gives an excellent analysis of tying a bow in a shoelace, which, when you think about it, is a remarkably complex skill.

“Howie,” the office worker is called, remembers his delight upon ordering his first rubber stamp; he comments on sliced olives in cream cheese, the demise of home milk delivery, and how to put on deodorant without removing your shirt (related to how women  remove a bra without removing their shirt). He is impressed by the technological innovations in public rest rooms.  He is nostalgic for cigarette machines, paper straws, and the aluminum foil that once wrapped sticks of gum.

The fun of the book is the extreme attention to tiny detail.  Every writer knows how difficult it is to “get small” and look, really look at the world, and how easy it is instead to write vague abstractions.  So it is not only enjoyable, but instructive to get small with the author.  The tiny details are often described in poetic language, which illustrates even further how much reflection the author put into each tiny aspect. Many ordinary objects and practices are described in so much detail that you wouldn’t think it possible to say another word about them.  Then you notice a footnote, which continues the discussion in a “digression” that can run over a page, although what counts as a digression and not as just another thought in Howie’s chaotic stream of consciousness, is arbitrary.

On the downside, Howie is a one-trick pony. He has a knack for extreme close up observation and excellent phenomenology, but little else. We learn next to nothing about him, who he is, where he comes from, what he believes, what motivates him, what he wants, what he looks like.  He is presented to us only as an associative flow of linguistically sophisticated, intellectual conceptualizations. One’s clinical impression is that he is mentally disturbed, possibly suffering from mild Asperger’s syndrome, possibly comorbid with OCD.

The endless free-association does become tedious, even in such a short “novel,” if that’s what this book is. Some serious questions are raised, but not analyzed or resolved, such as the nature of nostalgia and how it differs from sentimentality. He implicitly questions our fascination with industrial design and marketing of consumer technologies, but says no more than that. The deadness of office life is well-evoked, almost as succinctly as in Roethke’s poem, Dolor, which begins, “I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places.”

Martel – Life of Pi

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Life of PiA Well-told Story With A Hidden Agenda

Martel, Yann (2001). Life of Pi.  New York: Random/Harcourt.

This adventure novel recalls Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and the middle part is a rousing adventure tale of a boy castaway at sea that would be enjoyed by young readers.  The boy, perhaps 15, lives in southeastern India and takes on the nickname, “Pi.” The suggestive title of the book has nothing to do with mathematics.

A prologue, cleverly called “Author’s Note,” is critical to the structure of the book. In a few italicized pages, the author describes, in realistic journalistic prose, how he discovered Pi as an adult in 1996 and interviewed him, learning his story. That is the framing device for the narrative that follows in Pi’s own voice, presented as a recorded oral history.

Pi begins as a son of a Indian zookeeper.He studies Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, to the distress of his family, and spouts vapid, sentimental philosophy and authoritarian opinions that sometimes verge on cheesy poetry. (“We are all born Catholics.”  “Agnostics choose doubt, which is like choosing immobility as a form of transport.”) This naïve philosophizing is important spadework for Martel’s later thesis: Only humans, not animals, are concerned about religion.   

Pi’s discourses on animals also serve an important purpose, to define and condemn anthropomorphism, the spurious attribution of human characteristics to animals, an error to which nearly all uneducated people are prone. This point is crucial for understanding the rest of Pi’s story and Martel’s ultimate agenda, and is very skillfully inserted into the text.

In a half dozen, interspersed, short chapters of a few paragraphs each, the presumptive author (not Martel, but the fictional journalist who wrote the prologue to Pi’s story) describes, in italic font, the old man, Pi, who he interviewed. This clever device gives further anthropological credence to the memoir, building the case that it is a true story, but it also muddies Pi’s voice.

Pi, the child, is given to pompous speechifying, and is not much of a natural storyteller. Martel tries to leaven the dense exposition by having Pi address the reader directly with phrases such as “…if I may say so myself,” or, “So you see…”  This technique attempts to remind the reader that this is an orally presented story by a young boy. However, sometimes Pi uses cutesy, childish phrases, and in the next sentence Latinate constructions and sophisticated adult concepts and vocabulary. This ambiguous mix of childish and adult diction prevented me from engaging with the character.

With all the pins set up, we are ready to bowl. The zoo must be closed. The animals are caged and loaded onto a cargo ship like Noah’s ark, and several days out in the western Pacific, the ship sinks. Life boats are launched and Pi shares one with an enormous Bengal tiger, an orangutan, a hyena, and a zebra.  

Much of the subsequent drama depends on the universal childish fear of being eaten by wild animals. If Pi had been castaway with only the zebra, the story just wouldn’t have worked. In due course, the tiger eats all the other animals with bloody tooth and claw, leaving only Pi and the tiger. Pi builds a raft out of oars and life jackets, tethering it to the boat, so he doesn’t have to sleep near the tiger. He catches fish and turtles, and deploys solar stills found in the lifeboat.

The two castaways are literally dying of dehydration and hunger, yet the detailed descriptions of daily behavior include gallons of fresh water from the stills and abundant sea life. Much of the adventure depends on enduring deprivation, yet having renewable food and water lets the story drag on, with the castaways surviving seven months at sea. That story device stuck out as an unconvincing error.

Another problem was Pi’s decision to keep the tiger alive by feeding him some of his food and water, a  decision not well-explained. Pi, did not believe in anthropomorphism, was not sentimental about the tiger, and was terrified by it. So why didn’t he just wait him out? That decision is key to the story, of course, since there would be no story without the tiger, but it was another artificial device that didn’t make any sense.

As hunger and thirst become dire, Pi becomes “animalistic.” He catches fish with his bare hands and bites their heads off and sucks out their eyeballs, and so on. This supposed descent into animality is well described and constitutes the best part of the adventure story.  However, Martel has an agenda, so Pi periodically must spout religious ideas to show that he is still a human, superior to the tiger, not a mere animal. That device, I found artificial, heavy-handed, and not convincing, but it is a core message of the book.

After the rousing and vivid adventure story of the castaways, which exhausts every conceivable event that could happen (weather, sharks, hallucinations, etc.), the castaways make landfall in Mexico. The tiger escapes into the jungle and Pi recovers with villagers. Officials from the shipping company come to interview him, hoping to learn why their boat sank. He tells the story of his survival. The officials simply don’t believe it, because it “goes against nature,” they say. Pi retorts that many things are hard to believe if you have not personally experienced them, such as God. And, ta-da! Martel unveils his argument that belief in God is based on personal experience which no amount of skepticism can penetrate. While the argument is old and tired, unworthy of argumentation, its dramatization nevertheless makes for a good read by a skillful author, as long as you don’t mind being sucker-punched at the end.

Lipsyte – The Ask

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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Ask The - LipsyteThe Difficulty of Being Funny

Lipsyte, Sam (2010). The Ask.  New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

A book universally acclaimed as “hilarious” is usually disappointing. There are some funny lines and scenes in The Ask, to be sure, and it is well-written:

“Our intimacy was largely civic.  We spoke at length about our shared revulsion for the almost briny-scented, poop-flecked plunger under the bathroom sink, and also of a mutual desire to cut down on paper towels, but we never broached topics like hopes, or dreams.”  (p. 13)

“’Dean,’ said Vargina. ‘This is the man we were telling you about, Milo Burke.’
‘Nice to meet you.’  We’d met a dozen times before, at lunches, cocktail receptions.  He had stood beside me while his wife explained a project she’d embarked upon in her student days, something to do with Balinese puppets and social allegory. (p. 23)

“I woke up with a heart attack…Maybe it was not a heart attack. Maybe in fact it was Bernie, lying between us in bed, nursing, firing mule-kicks into my sternum…’Baby,’ I whispered. ‘What the hell are you doing?  You weaned him.  He’s weaned.’
‘We’re snuggling.’
‘He’s sucking.’
‘No, he’s not.’
‘I’m not,’ said Bernie.
‘Maura, come on, stop it.’
‘It’s okay. It’s just a little regression. It’s normal. I read about it.’…” (p. 86)

This is a novel, about Milo, an incompetent fund-raiser at a nonprofit foundation for the arts.  “The ask” is the potential donor you are pursuing for a contribution, which is known as “the give.”  But Milo cannot get past the cynicism of it. The novel is thus a social satire, combined with the story of one loser’s inability to make a life that works, economically, or interpersonally. I worked for a nonprofit for a decade (not as a fund-raiser, thank God), so I feel Milo’s pain, but even with my predisposition to connect to him, I remained detached. I found the story boring, and the humor sophomoric.

Milo and his wife are revulsed by the poop-flecked plunger under the sink.  Is that funny?  Yeah, in a puerile way. “Poop-flecked plunger” is a very fine phrase. The level of observational detail is good. And I appreciate remote associations, which are funny (Balinese puppets, etc.). But after a few pages of this sort thing, my attention drifts.

I think the problem with in-your-face humor is that the book becomes all about the clever writing and that keeps the reader at arms’ length from the story. Is that a hazard for any novel that aspires to be humorous? I can think of several novels that do not suffer this fate (e.g., Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job, Adam Langer’s Thieves of Manhattan), so my conclusion is that Lipsyte’s attempt to write a humorous novel was simply not successful.  Not for me, anyway.

Silko – Ceremony

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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CeremonyGlimpse Of Another World

Silko, Leslie Marmon (1977). Ceremony. New York: Viking.

Hailed as a masterpiece of Native American literature, this novel has endured over decades and is still a good read. In part that is because the situation of Native Americans has hardly changed in thirty-five years, so the descriptions are still vivid.

The main character is Tayo, a Pueblo Laguna Indian (from the region between Albuquerque and Gallup). He was a Japanese POW in the jungles of Asia during WWII and has returned to the reservation, but he suffers from “shell shock,” a psychiatric disorder somewhere between severe PTSD and schizophrenia. He is mostly bedridden in the first parts of the book, tended by his grandmother and aunt. He is visited by a mysterious medicine man, but it is not clear that does him any good. He eventually recovers and finds love – but he recovers only in the sense that his hallucinations and debilitating weakness leave him; he never does overcome his chronic melancholy and sense of dreamy irrealism.

Conveying that dreamlike view of the world is Silko’s strength as a writer.  Tayo’s dreamy psychosis is extremely well-rendered, interwoven with transcriptions of Native mythical tales, such as creation stories. However the conflation of mental disorder and Native myth is confusing. Are we to believe that Native Americans have no concept of mental illness and can’t tell the difference between psychosis and mythology?

Throughout the book, Natives are uniformly portrayed as childlike, unreasoning, superstitious, petulant, profoundly uneducated, uninformed about the world outside the reservation, and claustrophobically obsessed with their own families, traditions, sad fate, and their rage against the whites. Tayo is a despised outsider because he is only half-Indian. This small-mindedness and lack of diversity among characters flattens what little dramatic tension the story has. The characters are stereotypes that do not develop in any dramatic or insightful way. Tayo recovers from his illness and meets a girl. That’s about it.

Nevertheless, the language Silko uses is lofty and lyrical, so much so that the reader can easily enter a woozy dream state while reading, to glimpse another world that modern white people can hardly grasp. I thought young Tayo was going to end up as a medicine man because of his sensitivity and access to the other world, but he doesn’t. He’s just a mixed up kid.

Artistically, Silko uses numerous time cuts to convey the Native American idea of eternal time (so-called “non-linear time”). Silko uses jump-cuts to put Tayo back at the army recruiter’s even after he is home from the war, has his uncle buying the cattle after he already owns them, and so on. Another technique is to flit among places and times in the present. These techniques of fragmentation convey the disjointedness of experience in a culture that has a long history but no future, and which is grasping for a story to understand the present. It’s effective but makes the novel hard to read. The book meanders, with only the slightest thread of storyline.

The insertion of traditional (I assume) Native myths, ceremonies, and songs in seemingly random parts of the story also helps to convey the sense that the other world is ever-present in this one. The book’s main point, apparently, that ceremony (and more generally, story) is all that makes us human, is well-conveyed by that, although it is by no means a convincing thesis. The Native stories and chants are often lyrical, but far too “insider” and alien to a non-Native reader to understand as anything other than pretty poetry.

Some  ideas in the novel are disturbing. One is that Indians should not hate the whites because actually, the whites were conjured by evil Indian shamans in the first place for the purpose of making the Indians hate themselves. The idea that your nemesis is your own projection and that victims are more noble than the oppressor (“the meek shall inherit the earth”) is an old and wrong idea. It is troubling to see it here as the guiding idea of the main character.

There are many other problematic ideas presented in the book, such as those around law, land ownership, patriotism, and so on, but perhaps these contradictions and confusions are genuine reflections of Native intellectual life at that time. Overall, the invocation of this particular culture’s world, and worldview, is rich, compelling and rewarding.

Addonizio – Ordinary Genius

Posted on by April 28, 2014
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ordinary-genius-Words as Tools

Addonizio, Kim (2009). Ordinary genius: A guide for the poet within. New York: W.W.Norton.

Poet Addonizio describes her process of creating poetry, supplemented with description of other possible methods, and plenty of fine examples.  She recommends everyone memorize a poem by heart, such as a Shakespeare sonnet, because in the process you will come to understand it, and thereafter you will always have it for your pleasure and inspiration.

There are good discussions of how to observe keenly, working with metaphor and humor, making use of fairy tales and myths, mastering meter, and the process of revision.  It’s all solid, well-articulated advice, none of it too simple for even the most experienced writer.

While I am an appreciator of poetry, I am intimidated by it.  I thought if I had a better understanding of the craft of writing poetry, it would help my fiction writing.  That strategy was only partially successful. I do not share the author’s fascination with words for their own sake. I like ideas. Words are tools for expressing ideas. I appreciate words for their rarity or complexity or sonority, but what I wanted to know is how to find better words for ideas. Perhaps that is something that cannot be taught.

I did get a few helpful tips.  For example, this exercise was useful: “Study an object closely and think about its inner life.”  That’s a great way to slow down, even stop time, which, it seems, is necessary to get inside any idea. Another section, on “waking up clichés,” was also helpful. Take a cliché like “love stinks,” interpret it literally, then reconstruct it, as in “I passed by a dumpster full of love and held my nose.”  That’s a technique I can use.

However, when it comes to the crucial question of how, or from where, do you get the fur on the ball-turret gunner, there is no clue. Perhaps that can only come from poetic genius, whereas this book is about ordinary genius.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Randall Jarrell
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

DeLillo – White Noise

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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White Noise De LilloLife in The System

DeLillo, Don (1985). White Noise. New York: Viking/Penguin.

“White noise” is a hissing sound, similar to static on a radio or the sound of ocean surf. Don DeLillo’s White Noise takes that phenomenon metaphorically.  The noise is the incessant background of advertising and other mass media in everyday life, and the complementary noise of a consumerist society. There is so much information, every message projected with equal intensity, that the result is merely a hissing sound. Modern life is white noise.

That is the central insight and message of this novel of ideas, but there are others. The white noise of life in the consumer culture is punctuated by moments of awareness of mortality, something that is never mentioned in mass media.  People “pass away,” but one’s personal mortality?  It cannot be mentioned, for it is not a thought that will sell products and services.

Another occasional spike in the smooth white noise of ordinary everydayness is reason. Advertising depends on unreason. If you applied reason to advertising, it would be apparent that the message is nonsense. Instead, the ad tries to emotionally persuade you that you would be a better person if you were more like the ideals portrayed, and the same goes for the news, movies and magazines, in university history courses, and in every form of modern mass communication. Reason must be devalued in a consumerist society.

In the novel, a comfortable middle-class family in an imaginary, isolated, rural town, lives the white noise life. The protagonist, Jack Gladney, is a distinguished professor of Hitler studies at the small College On A Hill.  His wife teaches classes in yoga, reading, and “food and drink” for various charitable organizations.  Their house is full of four young children from previous marriages. They live a secure, passive, cocoon-like, domestic life, happy with the children, but by no means blissful, for the Gladney adults suffer from paralyzing fear of death.

The Gladneys, and everyone in their town, suffer from the Nietzschean “slave” mentality, meekly following the intellectual agenda set by the master elites. The elites are the people who control the mass media, the advertisers and newscasters, anyone on TV, but also “the system” in general, the unseen people who run the world, the financial people who make money come out of the ATM, the police and emergency responders who suddenly appear to take charge when natural disaster strikes, and even airline pilots who somehow get you to your destination. Those figures, authority figures, bigger than life, are the ones who pull the levers behind the curtain. They represent “the system” that controls and yet protects and sustains ordinary everydayness.

The humor in DeLillo’s satire arises from the characters’ fascination with television, magazines, and brand names, especially with packaged products in the supermarket, a modern-day holy place.  “With groceries, we achieve a fullness of being, a plenitude.”  Jack desperately tries to learn German before a big Hitler conference, to cover his shame of being a pre-eminent Hitler scholar who does not know German. In the supermarket, an anonymous voice announces over the loudspeaker, “Kleenex, your truck is blocking the entrance.”  It’s the reassuring, god-like voice of the system.

Featureless, anonymous consumer life offers insulation from dying because everything is static and predictable.  But the cost is meaning.  If every product announcement is equally intense, nothing stands out as meaningful. Facts about Elvis Presley’s life are just as meaningful as facts about Hitler’s life. Again, the characters don’t realize all this. The social satire is DeLillo’s joke, not theirs. They play their parts straight, giving DeLillo setup for his deadpan humor.

DeLillo’s writing style is crisp.  Every sentence is edited down to its essentials. Sentences in the form of a well-observed list of nouns or features is a technique he uses often. Dialog often borrows the rat-a-tat rhythms of a Beckett or Mamet. Another interesting technique is the insertion of the non-sequitur, often a quote from the TV running in the background.

“Later I sat up in bed in my bathrobe studying German…The TV said: “And other trends that could dramatically upset your portfolio.”  Denise came in…”

These non-sequiturs contribute to the sense of all-pervading white noise. Another fascinating technique is the seamless blending of objective narrative description with flashback.  “Alfonse sat at the head of the table, a commanding presence even in a campus lunchroom. He was large, sardonic, dark-staring, with scarred brows and a furious beard fringed in gray. It was the very beard I would have grown in 1969 if Janet Savory, my second wife, Heinrich’s mother, hadn’t argued against it. “Let them see that bland expanse,” she said, in her tiny dry voice.”

There are many other innovative and skillful techniques used to make every sentence, every dialog, every scene, about as gripping as it possibly could be. I admire such skilled writing.  On the down side, there is no plot, no narrative throughline to speak of. There is a weak, sardonic drama at the end, with a lame, unresolved ending, but basically, this is a slice of life drama.  What makes it interesting is that it is neither character- nor plot-driven.  Rather it is driven almost solely by the sheer force of DeLillo’s writing. 

Hamid – The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Posted on by January 24, 2014
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reluctant-fundamentalist-1Pouty Financial Analyst Goes Home

Hamid, Mohsin (2007). The Reluctant Fundamentalist. New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Most novels are written in either third-person or first-person voice Second-person is rare, and there is a good reason for that: it’s clunky.  Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist is written in the second-person.  Here’s how it opens:

“Excuse Me Sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.”

The narrator talks to some other person (the second person), who does not talk back. Another version of second-person occurs in advertising, where the Other is “you,” the reader/consumer: “You will experience glorious sunsets and tropical breezes. You will relax like never before.” When second-person narration is directed at you, the reader, it quickly becomes preachy, authoritarian, and tedious (as advertising does). We can ignore that version of second-person in this context.

What does second-person do for us in literature?  Like first-person, it is somewhat intimate, as the only voice is that of the narrator. But since that narrative voice is directed at another character, it gives the reader the feeling that he or she is eavesdropping. It seems to me that second-person is a blend of first- and third-person with the advantages of neither.

However, one thing second-person does well is silence the Other. Only the narrator can speak. The Other cannot talk back.  In Hamid’s book, the Other is an American in Lahore, Pakistan, sitting at a café. He is joined by the narrator, a Pakistani named Changez (“Chongas”). It is a sometimes tense conversation, between a Pakistani and an American just after the 9/11 attacks. With second-person narration, the result is not an argument, not even a dialog, but a monologue. The American voice is silenced, giving the Pakistani voice all the air time it wants to make its case, which is what Changez does over the course of 185 pages.

So I can appreciate Hamid’s artistic choice to use the second-person voice, but I still say it makes a clunky narrator and I fought it throughout, especially in the passages where Changez attempts to bring the American Other to life:

“Do you see those girls, walking there, in jeans speckled with paint?  Yes, they are attractive. …”

That reminds me of old Bob Newhart recordings in which we only got one side of a telephone conversation: “What’s that you say, President Lincoln?  You’d rather go to the theater tonight?  I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”  And I kept getting images of the old Lassie TV show: “What is it, Lassie? Timmy has fallen down the well again?”

Changez’s story is ostensibly an autobiography. He earns a full scholarship to Princeton, where he fits in with his American classmates. He falls in love with one of them, Erica, but their relationship remains Platonic. I assumed that Erica stands for Am-erica, and that the relationship is allegorical.

After college, Changez gets a high-paying and prestigious job at a consulting firm that does financial evaluations of businesses about to be bought or sold. He is a star performer because he learns to examine a company’s fundamentals. The title of the book ostensibly refers to that financial “fundamentalism”, coyly disguising the religious and political variety. Religious fundamentalism does not enter explicitly into the book but is implied.

Changez is unable to consummate his relationship with Erica because she can’t get her mind off her recently deceased boyfriend, and is unable to “get into the mood” with the man right in front of her. Allegorically, America dwells in its past colonial glory, unable to face the new realities of the world in front of it. In the finest scene in the book, Changez suggests to Erica that she pretend he is the dead boyfriend and sure enough, that works and they make love.

It is a humiliating situation when the only way your girlfriend can be with you is if she pretends it is not you. And worse, it was his suggestion: I want to be admitted so badly that I’ll deny my personal identity and become some other person you are more comfortable with, if that’s what it takes. Is that what America is asking Pakistan to do on the world stage today?

Changez begins to realize that while he is superficially admired, he is in fact not accepted into the inner circle of American society, presumably because of his ethnicity. Any westerner who has traveled in Asia will recognize this feeling. People are polite, generous, and cordial, but you feel, you know, that you will never, ever, be admitted to what’s really on people’s minds. There is an inner life and an outer life, and the foreigner will never get past the foyer, regardless of appearances and actions that say otherwise.

Changez slowly begins to realize this about himself in America, and resents it. Finally there is an epiphany, provoked by a fellow named John the Baptist (get it?). Changez quits his job, leaves America, and returns to Lahore, embittered.

Why is he embittered?  Because he fell in love with New York, Princeton, America, and Erica, then realized he would never be fully accepted, then he fell out of love. His reaction seems naïve and petulant, greatly disproportionate to his experience. Toward the end he rants on about the blindness, bigotry, and stupidity of Americans, individually, institutionally (e.g, harassment while traveling), and in international politics. There is some truth to his ravings, but for the most part they are exceptionally naïve. Xenophobia and ethnic bias in America after the 9/11 attacks?  Who could have seen that coming?

My feeling is that Hamid’s intention was literally to “give voice” to a Pakistani’s view of American culture (without letting the American talk back), in order to point out how America’s arrogant sense of entitlement is hurtful, personally and internationally. So Changez’s story boils down to a cross-cultural diatribe that for me was heavy-handed and simplistic. Changez is clearly a mouthpiece for the author. The story, falling into and out of love with America, is blasé.

It would have been a much better story, I think, if Hamid could have used his considerable skill in showing subtle shifts in psychology, to demonstrate how an intelligent, Americanized character like Changez could reasonably and logically become a virulent and violent Islamic extremist. Some of that is mildly and distantly intimated near the end, almost as an afterthought. The excellent movie adaptation of the novel handles this aspect much better (and dispenses with the second-person voice).

There is such a wide gulf between ordinary Americans and violent Islamists, it could have been helpful and fascinating to show a transformation from one into the other. Instead, what we have is that Changez feels slighted so goes home to pout. A disappointment.