Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Archive for ‘May, 2008’

Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road

By

Yesterday, I settled down with Revolutionary Road and once I got started I just kept on going. What a rich, and complex book. I’m curious whether my experience reading this novel is also affected by my status as an expat. Revolutionary Road does a lot of picking and scraping at American society, at the myth of the American Dream, at that truly American style “selling” of psychological stability and me-centered philosophy. What is it about America that produces this angsty, hyperactive self-consciousness? Don’t misunderstand me, it happens elsewhere and, of course, not all Americans suffer from this special breed of narcissism but despite my need to moderate what might be interpreted as hyperbolic statements, there’s no denying that Yates makes some astute observations about many fundamental paradoxes of American culture.

 

Frank Wheeler is so self-conscious, so worried about his persona – interpreting it to himself, presenting it to others and refining it for both audiences – that he can’t get through a single conversation without play-acting. He imagines the things he will say, practices expressions and gestures when no one is looking, interprets each encounter in terms of its reflection on his own self-definition. Living inside his mind would be frightfully exhausting.

 

This makes it sound like I had no sympathy for him. Which wasn’t the case. If I ever met someone like Frank Wheeler face to face I think I’d scream and run in the other direction, but letting him function as a stand-in for “the American male” with a neurotic need to prove himself was really interesting. The same goes for April, his wife. As a specific individual, she’s nearly unbearable. But as a symbol of repression, of indecision, she’s quite powerful.

 

Revolutionary Road was published in 1961 and I was expecting the text and some of its ideas to be somewhat dated. But they weren’t at all. Frank and April’s constant anxiety about getting trapped into their suburban nothingness, filled with people riding high on complacency and stale conversation, is a theme we still have room to move around in. In many ways, it felt like reading a male-oriented version of Rachel Cusk’s The Lucky Ones or Arlington Park – a population of people trapped inside a painful understanding of their own mediocrity.

 

What I’m curious about is what creates this tension. What is generating the disconnect between what we think we will be and this sudden, horrifying understanding that we have no idea who we really are? I can’t help contrasting the emotional current of Revolutionary Road against my recent read of The Fountainhead – a novel which glorifies the antithesis (or the conquest) of the anxiety Yates so carefully explores. Take these two novels out of the time period in which they were written and it’s evident both “stories” still exist inside American culture. Rand’s vision of the self-made man who knows from day one exactly what his Purpose is and how to get there vs. Yates’s idealistic but insecure weakling.

 

I’m fascinated by the kind of destructive interpersonal interaction Yates is getting at in Revolutionary Road. Maybe that’s because I now live in a society which works very hard to avoid anything emotionally grandiose or self-promoting. But it wasn’t just that difference that kept me reading the novel, it was also how lovingly Yates gave us his dysfunctional characters. Not to mention his amazingly skilled use of an omniscient third person POV – something we don’t see very often anymore. And just the overall mood of the book. Ennui. The ins and outs and horrors of ennui.

 

Both Frank and April embody several contradictions – shallow and sensitive, self-important and insecure, intelligent and paralyzed – which is what, I suspect, keeps the reader attached to them. And their constant attempts to get the better of these contradictions created an explosive form of neurosis. It also left no room for anything beyond their selves and their couple. One of the book’s tragedies is an awfully quiet one – the legacy the Wheeler parents will bequeath their children. Again, lots to ponder when you think about it in terms of generational symbols.

 

Thank you to Zhiv for putting this book on my radar and for mentioning that there is a film version coming out in December. I will be very interested to see how well the director and the cast might render the complicated inner lives of the Wheelers. Something to look forward to!

 

 

Reading Writer – Gordimer's #5

By

I’ve finally reached the half-way point in Nadine Gordimer’s fifth novel, A Guest of Honour. As I mentioned before, this novel takes a broader scope than her previous four. It isn’t so much about the individual perspective and experience of apartheid but more about the legacy of that system on an entire culture – both sides, those who had power and those who were never allowed the same responsibility or privilege.

 

The novel isn’t set in South Africa, but in a fictional neighboring state which has just gained its independence. A Guest of Honour asks two preoccupying questions – first, what are the elements of colonialism most difficult for the no-longer-colonized nation to move beyond and second, what role can (or, more importantly, should) the liberal white individual play in the dismantling and subsequent reconstruction of a culture he/she participated in along the way. For a novel written in 1970, Gordimer is exceptionally prescient as well as compassionate and I’m eager to work my way through to the end and experience either the solution she might offer or a deeper investigation of these important questions.

 

But what I really wanted to talk about today was style. In terms of writing technique, I get a lot from Gordimer. She’s a fantastic study and I just wanted to point out some of the things I’ve been noting throughout this book.

 

First, and I’ve mentioned this before when talking about Gordimer, is her remarkable facility with description. Her use of symbolic language is never heavy or extended – just a word or two, but she somehow manages to pick just the right word or image. A few examples:

 

The road to the village would be blocked, the dog ran over the soft fields breathing like a dragon…the kernel of the house was warm with oil-fired heating…

 

The spiders came out from behind the pictures and flattened like starfish against the walls.

 

Every now and then the trumpet blurted like a shout of obese laughter.

 

There were bats at the fruit, the most silent and unobtrusive of creatures, torn-off rags of darkness itself.

 

Second, she has unapologetic transitions. Simply effortless. In the example here, she moves her character from one side of town (his house) to another (his friend Hjalmar’s), to a completely different scene, as well as brings in another character, with a semi-colon and the word “yes”. It’s brilliant:

 

The trousers were a little short. He looked at himself in the damp-spotted mirror on the door of the wardrobe in his room. He had forgotten to buy a dress tie, after all; but Hjalmar would have one. Yes; and it was a beautiful tie, finely made of the best ribbed silk, with a Berlin label still on it. Emmanuelle laughed. “Nobody wears those butterflies anymore. Ras will lend you one of his.”

 

In her other novels, Gordimer already captures the flow of what I would call “party” conversation. Streams of sentences that don’t always connect, batted back and forth across whatever scene she’s got set up. In A Guest of Honour, which is heavily peppered with these kinds of busy scenes, she refines the technique. This novel features state dinners and policy discussions, dinner parties and after-hours political brainstorming. She gets the mood of these either heated or weary dialogues just perfect. I won’t quote them because they can go on for a long time but suffice it to say Gordimer can be useful to look at if you want to work on the musicality, the nonsensical nature, and the flow of written dialogue.

 

Finally, the third person omniscient narrative style she favors lends itself well to this kind of socially/morally investigative novel because she can telescope between her characters’ observations and more general insights. Here is one such example, taken from a scene when the main character Bray meets another white woman at a state dinner:

 

She did not know who he was; the curious fact was that people like him and her would not have met in colonial times, irrevocably separated by his view of the Africans as the owners of their own country and her view of them as a race of servants with good masters. They were brought together now by the blacks themselves, the very source of the contention, his presence the natural result of long friendship, hers the equally natural result of that accommodating will to survive – economic survival, of course; her flesh and blood had never been endangered – that made her accept an African government as she had had to accept the presence of ants in the sugar and the obligation to take malaria prophylactics.

 

This particular example is a bit longer than most, but I still think she carries it off because she’s able to sculpt our understanding of both characters with this kind of confident narrator. It’s such a smooth omniscient.

 

A Guest of Honour is a heavy book, rich with political maneuvering, complicated social philosophy and historical information. It’s a slow read. But at the same time, the sheer delight of turning the page to come across yet another of Gordimer’s stunning images or insightful descriptions significantly lightens the experience. Definitely one of those books I’m eager to keep reading but that I don’t really want to finish.

 

 

Kirsty Gunn – Rain

By

Sometimes everything in my little book-reading universe conspires wonderfully and I come across a book, completely by chance, by an author previously unknown to me, with a story and a style perfectly suited to my tastes and expectations. What a good feeling it is to close that back cover, march right over to my book shelves and slip it next to that line of well-worn favorites. I love it when this happens. Not only because I have the memory of a blissful hour spent in the company of some pretty spectacular prose but also because I can now look forward to searching out any other work by this new author.

 

A week or so ago I ran across a wonderful review by Lily of Kirsty Gunn’s debut novel Rain. Her thoughtful review prompted me to search out the novel and thanks to bookmooch I had a copy in my hands by Saturday morning. This morning, quite happy to take a break from what has been a hectic few days, I sat down out in the garden in the sun and read the entire thing.


Rain is slim even by novella standards but its 95 pages contain some breathtaking writing and a weighty story. One of my favorite “genres” of contemporary fiction is when an author takes an event, most usually a tragedy, and then creates a meditation or a portrait of what that tragedy feels like to a particular character. Even better when the narrator is the character and when that individual’s voice flexes, both subtly and heftily, with the responsibility and familiarity of the event.

 

I like the intimacy of this type of writing. The way the story works to expand those minutes and seconds of a life-altering moment. The way the details surrounding a significant experience fuse themselves into the scaffolding of memory or regret.

 

Despite the reader’s knowledge of the book’s tragedy as early as the first paragraph –

 

Up in that part the water smells rivery. We hadn’t even passed the little bay at the end of the first beach but already the air was touched by the promise of our destination. All the trees were drowning. They reached their long skinny branches into the lake, leaning so far that their gnarled roots could barely hold the clay. You knew it was only time before whole bodies would be dislodged, allowed to drift, then sink. The water would seal over them again and that’s how it would end: you would never know there had been trees there at all.

 

– Rain just throbs with looming threat. Each page circles the event, the danger, the imminent loss. Gunn brings us into a scene, gives us exactly enough confirmation/revelation for us to understand what’s at stake and then moves on, hurtling the reader toward what we already know is coming. That push and pull creates a tremendous pressure.

 

Despite its brevity, the novella amasses a rich array of subject matter in its wake. This is a story of brokenness, of wanting, of irresponsibility and lost innocence, of parental instinct, of absolute devotion and irremediable loss.