Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Jonathan Lethem – The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye

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So, still no big decisions on a project. I’m going to take the weekend to think about it, try some books and see what suits me. Thank you everyone for the wonderful suggestions, I feel so lucky to have such thoughtful readers to discuss these things with. It feels very strange to be floundering in this way with my reading – I suspect it is a combination of things going on in my everyday life and not taking the right amount of time to focus. I’m not reading as much as I would like to these days, but I’m not worried. The right book will come along and everything will fall into place.

So without further ado – some thoughts on one of my recent reads…

My first experience with Jonathan Lethem was through his novel Motherless Brooklyn, a book that has remained one of my favorites. Lethem is an interesting writer because he started out writing mainly science fiction and has since broadened his project into a versatile and fascinating mix of several genres with what I can only consider a traditional literary style. In Motherless Brooklyn, Lethem called upon noir fiction techniques and mystery writing to tell the story of an orphaned young man with Tourrette’s syndrome who tries to understand how his mentor and “father” figure was killed. It is both funny and touching and complicated and really well written.

So when I saw his short story collection The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye in a used book shop in the states over my January holiday, I picked it right up.  These stories have a very different feel than Motherless Brooklyn – mostly because instead of mystery, they dip heavily into science fiction. And they are all quite dark.

Now I don’t mind dark at all, but I don’t usually have a lot of interest in science fiction. However, Lethem does a great job of blending the sci-fi elements into a more “literary” story. (I really hate to make this distinction, because I think what matters is whether a story or a novel is a pleasure to read, but for the purposes of looking at Lethem, I think it’s interesting to call attention to the way he blends these styles so successfully.) I think the story that does this best is Light and the Sufferer, which is at heart a simple story of brotherly love. But it involves an alien – called the Sufferer – who lurks through every scene and functions as a trigger for the story’s more difficult questions. I also love that Lethem does not ever answer the questions he raises about the Sufferer’s purpose or behavior. The focus remains on the narrator and his grief and anger. Extremely well done.

The other stories are extremely varied: there is an ingenious version of Hell (this story actually gave me nightmares), a futuristic landscape where people are divided into those that live in their cars on the interstates and those that live in a “real” city, a bizarre parable about the dangers of co-dependence (the least successful story in the collection, in my opinion) and a story about a bunch of “sleepy people”, militias and roving bands of thugs called dinosaurs. All very bizarre and extremely creative. All of them, however, more concerned with more fundamental questions like suppressed trauma, loneliness, and heartache. The science fiction elements work as scaffolding while the stories keep their focus on human (easily identifiable) narratives.

Pat Barker – Blow Your House Down

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So, I’ve spent a few days thinking over Pat Barker’s 1984 novel Blow Your House Down. This was a difficult and disturbing little book. At the same time, I had a hard time putting it down. Mostly because Barker’s straightforward style kept it from turning into something vulgar or sensational.

The bare bones of the story are that prostitutes in northern England are being murdered by a serial killer. That obviously doesn’t even scratch the surface of what this book is really about. Part I begins with Brenda and her story of becoming a prostitute – the man that abandoned her in staggering debt and with two children, the horrible job at a chicken factory, the discovery that the woman watching her children is abusing them and her eventual first ‘customer’. It is also a story of friendship, as one of the other prostitutes, Kath, takes Brenda under her wing and teaches her about surviving on the streets. But Part I takes a ghastly turn at the end, adopting the serial killer’s perspective and laying out a gruesome, detailed murder. It was one of the most difficult 12 pages I think I’ve ever read. But if I’m not mistaken, Barker is never one to spare the hard details.

Part III and IV, I think, are what make this book truly remarkable. In III, another prostitute, Jean, who has been particularly affected by the serial killer’s two most recent murders, decides to go after him. I am hard put to decide which character would have been more difficult for Barker to inhabit while writing – Jean or the serial killer. And yet she does both with considerable care and precision. Jean’s section is much more interesting, however, in the sense that we are never quite sure if her decisions are based on ‘fact’ or ‘fear’ – although she is one of the most courageous women in the entire book. The book opens with a quote from Nietzsche, which seems to speak to this section – Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. It strikes me on second thought, though, that this is equally true of the police trying to catch the killer, who are perfectly happy using the prostitutes as bait.

Part IV is the bridge between the prostitute’s world and ‘the rest of us’. It’s where Barker very cunningly reveals how, although we might like to ignore the violence out there, smug in our belief that we’re safe because we’ve kept ourselves separate from ‘that world’, we can’t, in fact, escape it at all. Most of the men who visit these prostitutes come from ‘our world’, the killer is someone who moves back and forth, someone we would never suspect if we met him outside those ‘dangerous’ places. And Barker makes it very clear that these women working the streets aren’t so different from the rest of us; the two worlds are highly entangled.

I’ve heard wonderful things about Barker’s writing style and it was really interesting to experience it on my own for the first time. She is incredibly precise and I couldn’t find a single instance of ornamental or superfluous description – yet there were moments when she brought two or three lines together and this incredibly vivid image just leapt off the page. And her transitions are very subtle. In Part I, when we switch to the killer’s perspective she does this wonderful trick of having him finish the line of a song one of the prostitutes is singing as she stumbles, drunk, down the street. He finishes that line and suddenly we’re seeing her through his eyes. Very effective. Very creepy.

Blow Your House Down was Barker’s second novel, and it’s set in the same area as her first, highly-acclaimed novel, Union Street. I think I’ll get a copy of this first one right away, I actually wish I had read it before Blow Your House Down. And then I’d like to read the Regeneration Trilogy, which numerous friends have recommended.

Kirsty Gunn – Featherstone

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I discovered Kirsty Gunn, a writer from New Zealand who now lives in Scotland, through her first novel, a novella really, called Rain. I remember taking this slim little book off the shelf one day last spring, stretching out on a chair in the garden and not putting it down until I turned the last page about an hour and a half later. Rain was positively enchanting. Very poetic, very descriptive but with a powerful story peeking out from beneath all that beautiful language.

Since then I’ve been on the lookout for more of her work and at some point this Fall I ordered her third novel, Featherstone, published in 2002, which I finally started to read last week and which has already found a home on my favorite’s shelf.

Featherstone is a collage, a collage which when finally finished creates a portrait of the complexity and intricacy of longing. The story begins on a Friday evening in the town of Featherstone, takes up with a number of Featherstone’s residents and then wraps up early Sunday morning with the aftermath of tragedy. The reader spends a few short hours inside this bewildering world and then is asked to leave it as abruptly as he was welcomed within. These aren’t really characters you will be taking with you, if that makes any sense, because they would dissolve when removed from this place. The world Gunn creates is a bit magic, a bit Hell, mysterious and delicate and dark.

There is a story in Featherstone – the presumed reappearance of a young woman who left years and years before, who left quite a hollow in the wake of her departure  – but that preoccupation is minor compared to the gentle exploration of each different character and their own particular landscape of longing. The overall effect is quite sad, but not hopelessly so. And everyone is given a sense of beauty, though stark, and the ability to face-off with despair.

I was unsettled and a little confused by the ending, but instead of it irritating me, as might a different book, I can’t help taking this as an invitation to pick up the novel again and read it slowly a second time. It’s a book that wants careful consideration. Gunn’s prose style is, as I mentioned before, extremely poetic. And unapologetically so. She gets right inside her character’s thoughts and gives the reader their uncertainties, their illogical thinking, their emotional bartering and the way they worry at the tenderest of their wounds.

Gunn has four other books, including two novels, The Keepsake (1997) and The Boy and the Sea (2006), a collection of short stories called This Place You Return to is Home (1999), and a book of personal reflections, 44 Things (2007). I can’t recommend her enough and will just finish this with a passage from Featherstone, so you can see for yourself:

The air rustled again outside the window, and again Harland had the sensation of someone so close, so close she could touch him, like he could feel her breath moving across his skin. He was stirred again, as he was before, stirred deep within him, by the touch, by the sensation fo touch. The scent was still there in the air, close to him, watery, rivery, mingled with the scent of the leaves and trees and grasses, the scent of a shadow, a thing too small and soft to ever be a wife.

Toole – A Confederacy of Dunces

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On Thursday of last week, Jacob Russell published a very thoughtful post about how we access story – what are the ways in which the story opens itself up to us and how does our movement inside and toward that story alter it and alter us…I’ve been thinking about his post since I finished John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, mostly because I’m at a loss as to how I want to engage with this particular novel and how exactly I’m supposed to approach it.

I should take that word back – supposed to. I don’t think there is a correct way to engage with a text. There are a nearly endless variety of tools which can be used to approach literature. I have my favorites, which tend to focus on the way a story takes over my thinking, the way it creates its visuals inside my mind and the way the skeleton of the narrative (at the most basic level, I mean simply the words and how they fit together) is constructed to create its particular effect. That experience is what I try to pick apart and understand when I’m reading.

Beyond that, I am interested in what the story accomplishes. Where does it begin, where does it take me, who does it introduce me to and where does it ultimately end up…in this sense, I’m on a journey with the book, alongside its own journey and standing quietly by to see where we might end up crossing paths.

I don’t mind not crossing paths. Sometimes it’s enough to be a bystander and to try and puzzle through the logic of a particular work. This is where I stand with A Confederacy of Dunces. I watched and listened, spied and kept myself nearby, but I didn’t really step inside Toole’s incredibly bizarre universe.  It was a vivid landscape and interesting, even funny, I suppose, but my overall impression left me baffled and a little disgusted.

A Confederacy of Dunces reminded me of Rabelais more than anything else. Grotesque beyond belief. Exaggerated. Outrageous. Grotesque doesn’t sit well with me, unless it’s funny. I’m still not sure whether this book was meant to be funny. I suspect it wasn’t. I suspect it was meant to be sad. The characters are diminished in every sense of the world – intellectually, emotionally, financially, physically.  Even Ignatius, whom we are meant to believe is academically bright, struck me as the most diminished. He’s a psychopath. In the strictest sense of the word.

So now you might be wondering what this story is about. And instead of answering that question,  I want to go back to something Jacob Russell wrote:

…the ‘is’ in ‘the story is about’ is not an equal sign, but an arrow. An arrow within the story pointing out. Not a one-way arrow, but an operational sign that points in two directions, away from the work (where the interpretation occurs, where the explanation is deciphered, where the reality of the fictional universe encounters and interacts with that of the reader’s experience) and back into the work, where it (the story) receives its meaning though that very interaction.

Okay, so this means I’m a participant in that phrase. I am a factor of the “is”. This is something I have always agreed with. The reader is an essential part of that narrative skeleton I mentioned before.

What this reminds me, though, is that the reason I’m struggling with how to approach this novel is because I’m unsure where I want to let that outward arrow land. Whether I want to accept Toole’s “grotesque” or reject it. If I reject it completely, the novel becomes funny. A total farce. And that outward arrow points at an easily digestible target. However, if I accept the grotesque in A Confederacy of Dunces as something still very human, as a part of our shared experience, then that outward and inward arrow ask a lot more of me.

I realize if you haven’t read A Confederacy of Dunces, this may all sound a little strange. But take any work of fiction which doesn’t soothe and I think you can apply a similar principle. I don’t ask my fiction to be redemptive, I think that’s false. But when its unwavering focus is the ugliness of the world and of people – and I think this is ultimately the project Toole’s novel takes up – without a single, solitary reprieve, it can be hard to find the energy to access the story, to want to move around inside it.

John Banville – The Sea

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Over my holiday I read John Banville’s The Sea very slowly. I think he is a good author to take slowly, and I liked being able to take up with the book a little each day and meander through his careful sentences. The Sea is an interesting novel, with not much resembling any sort of plot. Despite the quietness of the narrator’s account and his sometimes hazy focus, there are two stories vying for attention – narrator Max’s childhood memory and his feelings about a more recent, but significant loss. But even without any overt plot, there is movement. Max uses his memories of the one painful experience to get to the heart of the other, much more powerful one.

I mentioned before that my initial experience with The Sea was slightly disappointing because it reminded me so quickly of the Banville novel I read and loved last year – Eclipse. As I got deeper into The Sea, some of the resemblance wore off, but the more striking similarities remained. Especially the overall narrative tone and how the book features a narrator escaping into the past to deal with a present trauma.

Now I happened to really like the narrator in Eclipse, so finding him in slightly altered form in The Sea wasn’t necessarily a problem for me. I just had to make some small adjustments to my expectations, to try and banish my vision of Alex from Eclipse and let Max come into his own. There were differences, although mostly in detail, not much in tone and emotional structure.

There was something very ominous about The Sea, a moody and threatening subtext which I think created much of the novel’s tension. I felt this mostly when Max went into the past to describe his relationship with the Grace family but it was there in his more recent memories as well and in his current-day conversations with his daughter or the other residents of the hotel where he is staying. I saw this as Banville’s acceptance of the more dangerous aspects of grief. Not the danger of suffering, or the way sadness can surreptitiously and wholly take over, but more a kind of simmering violence. The understanding that things are not right, and that they won’t ever be right.

This is only my second Banville novel and I’m sure I’ll be looking for more, if anything just to enjoy the thick texture of his writing. There were moments when I wished he’d taken a simpler route to convey a thought or two, but on the whole I like his layering and complicated sentences, his obscure word choice and heavy images. This type of writing asks me to slow down and measure out the rhythm of each word.

 

 

Reading Writer – Swift's Last Orders

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Let’s go back to Graham Swift. I’ve been thinking some more about Last Orders. I talked about the story when I wrote up my first post, but I want to spend some time looking at the jumble of voice and structure and detail that transformed this particular story into such a wonderfully-written book.

 

What strikes me only a few lines into the very first paragraph is the particular emotional structure of Ray’s voice. His edgy melancholy and gruff sadness. He is a sappy stoic. Ray is set up right away as our guide to the novel. He opens THE story and signals that this story will also be HIS story. There are a lot of characters introduced across the next few pages and sly allusions to almost every single subplot which means the novel threatens to become confusing. But it stays firmly in Ray’s perspective for 18 pages, long enough for the reader to feel steadied again, before switching to Amy.

 

Amy’s voice is the “chin-up, old girl” variety – a perfect blend of bitter self-pity and desperate pluckiness. She is so angry but she’s trying not to let that anger win. One of the novel’s strengths is its willingness to keep us in suspense as to why. And we’re also meant to wonder about June, the person to whom Amy is talking.

 

Eventually, although Ray remains the most frequent POV, each of the men gets a turn leading the narrative – Vince, Lenny, Vic. And Amy shows up a few more times. The effect created is very much like a gathering in a noisy neighborhood pub. Someone starts reminiscing and everyone adds the detail most important to them. The stories intersect but also swiftly diverge. Details start to get cluttered or vague. The voices of the novel’s seven narrators are similar because they all come from the same place and have lived similar lives, a feature of the novel that frustrated me at first, but as I read further, I think Swift manages to differentiate them where it matters – their judgments of others, their interior decisions.

 

Besides Ray, I found myself really drawn to Vic. He speaks directly to the reader only seven times and each time with this kind of fierce pride and solemnity about him. He is the only man in the group who seems to be at peace with himself and his life. Although he’s just a little pompous too. He can’t help feeling the power his job gives him, although he tries to be respectful of it for the most part. I suppose I liked the contradiction in that. A character that recognizes the authority he has over people at their weakest moments and who tries to honor that but who can’t help feeling just a bit superior. That seems very human to me.

 

Part and parcel of the constantly shifting point-of-view in the novel is the way each man describes the others, and his friendship in relation to each and then to all. It was interesting to compare how Vic thought others saw him with the glimpses Swift gives the reader of how they actually did. Same for Ray and Vince and Lenny. Human relationships are so complicated, with so much room for misunderstanding and false impression. The men in Last Orders have known each other for something like forty years and Swift does an excellent job of using a particular blend of their voices to bring all that baggage, both good and bad, into the present moment of their car ride to Margate.

 

This is a novel I could write pages and pages about. And after my first post, so many of you mentioned his other novel Waterlands, which I now have waiting for me on the shelf, along with Shuttlecock, so I’m really looking forward to both.

 

 

Nadine Gordimer – The House Gun

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Rereading Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun over the weekend confirmed to me that it will remain one of my all-time favorites. I think this was the third Gordimer novel I ever read and I sought it out because I had so enjoyed the first two. It is her twelfth novel and was published in 1998, when she was 75 years old. And yet it is a novel with incredible insight into contemporary problems of violence and sexual concerns.

 

In 2006, I wrote this about the novel:

 

In The House Gun Gordimer literally unstitches the seams holding together the lives of her main characters, Claudia and Harald, as they cope with the reality that their only child, their son, has committed a murder. Part One begins with the coy words, Something terrible happened but this is not yet Harald and Claudia’s “terrible”, it is only the news, the busy hum of everyday violence the couple are watching on TV one evening. But then within a paragraph, that hum infiltrates their living room. A messenger arrives. Their lives will never be the same.

 

This dichotomy between the violence “out there” and the violence “within” soon becomes one of the central sources of the novel’s power. Harald and Claudia have lived relatively quiet and happy lives, not so much oblivious to the violence in their society, but discreetly distant from it. They are quick to point out that they didn’t agree with the apartheid system but neither did they risk their life and security fighting against it. Claudia is a doctor and an atheist, while Harald is the director of an insurance company and a contemplative Christian. They are both politically liberal, in theory supportive of equality but yet admittedly still enmeshed in the mores dictated by an earlier cultural system. The unfathomable act committed by their son soon becomes their only point of reference and each aspect of their life must pass through its prism as they try to understand the unthinkable.

 

I would say The House Gun has two main preoccupations – one is Gordimer’s traditional dissection of the legacy of apartheid on the South African pysche (from both sides of the color barrier) but the other takes up the issue of longstanding violence within a community and how that poison, for lack of a better word, seeps into everything. With an incredible amount of sympathy, Gordimer presents Harald and Claudia’s son Duncan as someone who can’t help having assimilated that violence (which is both sexual and physical) because, in essence, everyone in the entire culture has had to do the same. The title emphasizes this fact – the group of young people living with Duncan has this “house gun”, an object of incredible violence that everyone treats as no big deal.

 

The novel is one of Gordimer’s most compelling narratives, in the traditional sense, in that the story literally keeps you on the edge of your seat. For those of you a bit shy of Gordimer’s sometimes roundabout narrative style, this would be an excellent book to start with. It is simply packed with her discerning prose and vivid descriptions but also with a story that grips you right from the beginning.

 

Nadine Gordimer – None to Accompany Me

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Things have been quiet around here – sorry for the unexpected blogging break but I’m back today with more Nadine Gordimer. I finished her 11th and 12th novels over the weekend – None to Accompany Me and The House Gun. Both excellent – of course you all guessed I would say that right?

 

None to Accompany Me meanders in the way that several of her novels meander. It doesn’t have a precise, focused story. Instead it charts a period of time, following the lives of two women (one black, one white) during South Africa‘s transitional period away from apartheid.

 

One of the things I’ve grown to appreciate with Gordimer is her willingness to put what I can only call “story” onto a smaller stage and let the details and intricacies of the lives of her characters create an effective storyline on their own. On the one hand, both women (and their husbands) are involved in dismantling the apartheid system, on the other, they are concerned with more personal issues – a teen daughter’s pregnancy, the death of a co-worker, a son’s divorce, their own marital commitment, new employment and shifting friendships. And all of this is set against the evolving political landscape into which each of the four must somehow fit or transform their identity.

 

The book made an interesting parallel between apartheid and a certain kind of marriage in which one person holds all the power. The kind of relationship in which one person does all the defining for both halves of the couple. Gordimer makes the point carefully, showing that although it is possible for the parties on opposite sides to connect, even care for one another, until that original imbalance is corrected, the connection remains a false one.

 

I’m finding it difficult here to put together a neat synopsis of the novel because it encompasses such a wide variety of human experience. None to Accompany Me is a fairly complicated and weighty read (with exquisite writing, however, to make things just a little easier). The story is deceptively quiet when in fact it takes on a steady stream of huge issues and treats them each with a particularly painful honesty.

 

 

Deborah Lawrenson – Songs of Blue and Gold

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Over at Tales from the Reading Room, Litlove has posted an interesting and informative interview with author Deborah Lawrenson. I enjoyed reading the interview yesterday, not just because Lawrenson reveals herself to be a thoughtful and dedicated writer but because in her responses she actually addresses some of the questions I had in reaction to my recent reading of her novel Songs of Blue and Gold.

 

For those of you who haven’t read the novel, Songs of Blue and Gold is a quiet but serious book. It tells two stories, the first following Melissa Quiller as she searches for answers related to her mother’s past while experiencing a difficult passage in her own marriage, while the second tells the story of Melissa’s mother, Elizabeth, and her relationship with a renowned writer, Julian Adie. Melissa moves between Greece and England and France hunting for clues to a past she didn’t know her mother had and hoping to understand, through that process, what decisions she might have to take in her own life. The two stories communicate on several levels – how is trust built between two individuals, how do men and women need and use one another, how do we define ourselves in relation to our parents, what does it mean to be generous in love, how do we manage the shifting details of our parents lives as we grow to understand and appreciate them as people in their own right, separate from our relationship with them as our parents.

 

On the one hand, the book follows closely the mystery of Elizabeth’s past and Melissa’s quest for information and understanding. She investigates, talks to people, searches for clues. In this sense, it has the aesthetic of a more conventional, plotted novel with an equally conventional emotional structure and writing. On the other hand, there is a consistent and compelling element of unique, specific description and careful interior exploration.

 

These two elements of the novel meant that my reaction to Songs of Blue and Gold became a little complicated. Readers read for different things. My particular reading bias means that most often I could honestly care less about plot because I’m looking for sentences and words put together in a new way, for scenes and dialogue that reveal exactly how complicated human beings really are. I certainly won’t accept incoherence or the complete absence of plot but I’m more interested in an emotional or philosophical movement within a story, than a specific or logical series of events.

 

So my experience with Songs of Blue and Gold was that I would get happily lost in a section of brilliant writing, in looking at Melissa or Elizabeth’s particular interior processing and then suddenly be brought up a little short by a reminder that there was a larger story at work that needed to be brought to conclusion. But I struggled with that reaction because it reminded me why I dislike literary criticism that attempts to label fiction as either good or bad. Ignoring extreme examples, fiction must exist outside simple qualifiers like good or bad. If we are to let fiction work its magic, we have to recognize that fiction is experienced one person at a time. A novel creates a one-of-a-kind relationship with an individual reader. And then goes on to create another, different relationship with another reader.

 

This doesn’t mean criticism, even the kind that revels in its definitive judgments, isn’t useful or interesting or worthwhile. Criticism provides a particular critic’s exploded view of the inner mechanics or hidden meaning of a work of fiction, and often to the benefit of the reader. But what it does mean is that my immediate knee-jerk reaction of wanting to dismiss or ignore the more commercial elements in Songs of Blue and Gold is flawed. It’s based on my accepting a bit too easily the rigid categories defined by someone else for me.

 

In Lawrenson’s interview with Litlove, she mentions that it was difficult to place her fourth book, The Art of Falling, with a publisher because it didn’t fit into either of the generally accepted categories of commercial or literary fiction. I haven’t read The Art of Falling but I would say that Songs of Blue and Gold also walks that line – although I felt it leaned decidedly further over the literary side of the fence. But this isn’t what should define the book, even if I was slow to come around to that understanding. A novel shouldn’t have to be one or the other. Readers are much more intelligent and nuanced than this.

 

Lawrenson has written a thoughtful, lovely, well-researched and interesting book that draws on elements of journalism, mystery writing, real-life inspiration and literary fiction. That unique blend meant I engaged with it on a variety of levels. I fell in love with certain passages, I got caught up in the vivid descriptions of the novel’s geography, I experienced a few minor frustrations, I was confronted with a number of questions and I was engaged, as a writer, to study Lawrenson’s technical choices.

 

I look forward to reading The Art of Falling and I will certainly be on the lookout for Lawrenson’s next book.

 

Graham Swift – Last Orders

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I can no longer remember who recommended Graham Swift’s Last Orders. It may have been Stephen…is that right? But in any case, whoever suggested this wonderful book deserves a huge thank you. What a gem. What a treat to read.

 

I love complicated books with multiple points-of-view and an intricate timeline. Books which are hard to put down because of a real risk of losing the thread. The main, forward action of Last Orders takes place in a single day but the story jumps around from person to person, covering a lifetime of short scenes and powerful experiences. A hodge-podge collection of the moments which gave meaning to each character’s life and which led them all to this particular day.

 

The day in question is not an easy one. Jack Dodds has recently passed away and a group of his friends – Ray, Lenny and Vic – along with his son Vince are on a road trip from London to scatter his ashes on the sea. Swift takes a single car journey and transforms it into the ride of a lifetime. Heartbreak, friendship, treachery, sorrow, luck and joy and everything else you can imagine a person’s life can contain all hitchhike along with the four men as they carry out Jack’s last request.

 

Behind Jack’s story is another, more subtle one. The loud, bravado-filled presence of the four men in the car is made conspicuous by the absence of the women who should be with them – Ray’s wife and daughter, Lenny’s daughter, Jack’s wife and daughter, Vince’s daughter. These are men who have suffered heavy losses. Their sorrow at losing Jack is really the tip of the iceberg, an accumulation of losing much more across a lifetime.

 

Ray has a more central role in the novel and his story is one of the more compelling narratives. His life was intertwined with Jack’s to an incredible degree, for both better and worse. Witnessing the arc of his grief as the four men journey toward the seashore is a wonderfully complicated and riveting experience. I think Swift really gets at the heart of what makes grieving such a horrible process – if it were a simple feeling we would know how to deal with it. But grief surges forth out of the messiness of our day to day and the convoluted details of our relationships. It will never be simple or easy.

 

There is so much going on in this novel – differences between the four men, fathers and daughters, love lost and love found, abandonment, and even a look at social class. Not to mention Swift’s structural and narrative choices. I think Last Orders is a great candidate for a Reading Writer post, because from a writing technique perspective there is a lot to look at and examine. I’ll have to save that for another day.

 

This was my first experience reading Graham Swift and it goes without saying that I really enjoyed it. Has anyone else read anything else by him – any suggestions? I just went and bookmooched his second novel Shuttlecock and his third novel Waterland so will be looking forward to those.