Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Philip Roth – The Ghost Writer

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Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer is a book working on several levels. On its most surface level, there is humor. On another, a bit deeper, there is a simple tale of ambition and personal journey with predictable ups and downs and tangents and all the trappings of traditional “story”. And on yet another, there is real tragedy and brokenness.

 

It’s a short little book, and not at all straightforward. It starts out innocuous enough, negotiates a few careful twists and turns and then suddenly takes a hard left into an unfamiliar and thrilling metafictional neighborhood. I wasn’t expecting this. It turned the book into something completely different. Something completely interesting.

 

So here are the two stories: Story one – fledging writer Nathan Zuckerman spends the night at the home of his literary idol, a man named E. I. Lonoff. They talk literature, love and writing. Zuckerman meets Lonoff’s wife and his assistant (i.e. his mistress) whom Zuckerman is extremely attracted to. Story two – Lonoff’s assistant, a woman named Amy Bellette, is actually Anne Frank.

 

Story two is Zuckerman’s brilliant invention. In my opinion it is the absolute best part of the entire novel. I actually wish it were the entire novel. Yes, I know, I know, metafiction has another purpose. And in The Ghost Writer I think Roth uses his metafictional element to the benefit of Zuckerman’s Jewish identity crisis – which is quite interesting in its own right. I just think he asks the same questions from a much more fascinating perspective in the Amy Belette/Anne Frank story. Put another way, story one is not much without story two, but story two rewrites history and asks some phenomenal questions in just a few pages and all on its own.

 

I haven’t yet read enough Roth to really understand all that he’s exploring in the whole Nathan Zuckerman-as-Roth-alter-ego thing. I get the sense that his exploration of the writer’s pysche is as important to him as the story he has his writer telling. In The Ghost Writer, the idea that he is a Jewish writer is very important. In fact, his being Jewish is really the central question of his role as a writer. (And I believe this is Roth’s fundamental preoccupation in all his novels).

 

Although I do somewhat wish the Amy Bellette/Anne Frank story could have stood on it’s own without any connection to Nathan Zuckerman, I did love the idea of Zuckerman inventing this fiction while snooping through his hero’s desk in the middle of the night. This is such an exquisite example of how a writer’s imagination can work. He meets a person who intrigues him, someone whom he really knows nothing about and then blithely invents her entire life. Early in the novel, Roth makes it clear that Zuckerman relies heavily on autobiography in his own writing. So everything Zuckerman comes in contact with is a potential narrative. This all winds back around then to the idea of writerly responsibility and what Zuckerman owes his culture and society.

 

For some reason I have always been wary of Roth’s work and I put off reading him for quite some time. I read a lot of male writers so I’m not sure what about Roth made me think he was a MALE writer but this is the impression I had. I read Everyman a few months ago and it didn’t do much to rewrite my initial expectations. And even after finishing this second book, I’m not sure I will ever find an easy port of access into Roth’s particular project, but The Ghost Writer asked some interesting questions, poked a bit of fun at writerly pretensions and at the same time took itself very very seriously. I see more Roth on my horizon – any suggestions? Anyone have a favorite?

 

 

Nadine Gordimer – My Son's Story

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I believe Gordimer probably begins each of her novels with an idea – by that I mean her characters often represent a philosophy instead of an active element of some story. I don’t mean this as a criticism, her characters are never ‘types’ because she eventually fills them with enough inner life to sink a lifeboat, but in essence her work is more about context than it is about story. In some of her novels, however, I think the story does get a bit too pushed aside but in others the balance of idea and story comes out just fine.

 

Her tenth novel, My Son’s Story (1990) takes up several ideas – interracial love, adultery and the ongoing revolution to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, and settles them firmly inside an engaging, well-told story. The novel begins with a teenage boy playing truant who catches his father doing much the same. The two run in to one another at the movie theatre. The son’s minnow of a lie is swallowed up by the enormous shark of his father’s obvious infidelity. But without batting an eyelash, his father introduces him to his white mistress.

 

The book takes place in the political environment which preceeded the final dismantling of the apartheid system. It was no longer strictly illegal for a black man and a white woman to be together, but Gordimer shows it was not accepted either. But this is less the point, really, because Sonny’s affair coincides with his political awakening. His love for Hannah runs parallel to his developing passion for revolution, for justice, and the two experiences are simply inseparable and will remain inseperable. A reality which will cause big problems for Sonny.

 

The story is told in alternating viewpoints – first person Will (the son) and third person Sonny (the father). This technique and the access it grants us to both men’s experience of Sonny’s revolutionary development and his affair is what propels the book forward. Sonny represents a movement toward the future, toward a new kind of society where relationships are based on ideas and sharing and aren’t first and foremost defined through skin color, but his evolution is due mostly to knowledge passed along to him by Hannah. Will, on the other hand, wants to reject that structure. He’s torn between wanting to maintain his quiet life between the lines set for him by someone else and bursting out, but on his own terms, with no help from the oppressive system that made him who he is in the first place.

 

This tension between the two men is already a lot for the story to contain but it goes further, delivering a number of interesting surprises along the way. Mostly to do with Sonny’s wife – Aila, one of the novel’s more intriguing and rich characters.

 

And there are also those moments of pure Gordimer. The reason why I read her novels slowly.

 

Here is the narrator describing how Sonny categorizes the difference between his wife and his mistress:

 

Joy. That was what went with it. The light of joy that illuminates long talk of ideas, not the 60-watt bulbs that shine on family matters.

 

And later, a moment of quiet reflection on Hannah:

 

The face of a woman who uses no makeup has unity with her body. Seeing Hannah’s fair eyelashes catching the morning sun and the shine of the few little cat’s whiskers that were revealed, in this innocent early clarity, at the upper corners of her mouth, he was seeing the whole of her; he understood why, in the reproductions of paintings he had puzzled over in the days of his self-education, Picasso represented frontally all the features of a woman – head, breasts, eyes, vagina, nose, buttocks, mouth – as if all were always present even to the casual glance. What would he have known, without Hannah!

 

 

Sue Miller – The Good Mother

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It strikes me that one of the more fundamental issues explored in Sue Miller’s The Good Mother is how little control we actually have over our own lives. It all starts in our childhood – all that shaping and influencing that our families exert over us, our attempts to define ourselves within, or, in extreme cases, completely outside that framework, and then the relationships we start to build with teachers, friends, partners, children. Most of all with society. Miller really gets at the tension between those ties and the individual. How does an individual continue to be an individual in the constantly evolving development of those ties? How does an individual decide which of those ties are best cultivated, best respected, or, when necessary, best severed?

 

To explore these questions Miller creates a specific situation – she gives us Anna Dunlap, a recent divorcée with a young daughter, who finds herself falling in love, redefining her sense of self, exploring her sexuality for the first time, and learning to cope with the shifting demands of single motherhood and singledom. Anna eventually becomes embroiled in a horrible custody battle which requires she find a way to justify some of her choices to both society as well as to a number of her personal relationships. She is forced to question, nevermind make a public account, of her way of life, her thinking, her sexual experiences and her value as a mother.

 

The Good Mother made me consider how difficult, how dangerous it can be for someone to be a sexual being and a parent at the same time, especially without the sanctioned framework of marriage to help set some of the rules. Sexuality without established guidelines is threatening for many people. As Anna loses her right to privacy about her most personal thoughts and experiences, that reality is really put into glaring perspective. People love roping other people into their moral comfort zones because it is much easier to do this than genuinely step into someone else’s shoes, or engage in earnest conversation about these difficult issues.

 

The book was written in the 1980s, an era which I think concentrated a significant portion of its emotional energy on divorce. Was it always bad? Was it destroying our societies? Miller’s novel is a distinctly feminist look at divorce and it exposes some of the double standards which may, for all I know, still burden any divorce procedure. But it also takes a very serious view of divorce; it reminds the reader that children really suffer when their world suddenly splits into two, distinctly different universes. 

 

The quote on the very-cheesy front cover of my copy of The Good Mother reads:

 

To whom is a woman more deeply bound, the man she loves, or her own child?

 

Well, that doesn’t at all do justice to the question I think this book is really asking. The novel does put that difficult challenge before Anna, but it goes a lot farther in exploring whether Anna should choose between herself and her own child. This seems more universal to me because I don’t think a parent needs something as extreme as a custody battle or a new lover to become confronted with that essential question. How much of ourselves do we sacrifice, voluntarily or otherwise, to our children? Do our desires, or certain essential elements of our personality, necessarily take second seat once we’ve brought a child into the world? Is our happiness less important than our child’s?

 

 

 

Nancy Horan – Loving Frank

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I’ve got politics on the brain these days and a large translation contract this week so I haven’t had as much time as I would usually have for keeping up with my reading projects. But never fear – I do manage to squeeze in a few hours here and there!

 

Last night my Swiss bookgroup met for a really involved discussion of Nancy Horan’s novel Loving Frank. I suppose I should admit right away that I did not love Loving Frank, but I didn’t dislike it either. What I did love was our discussion – so many questions, so many different opinions. Loving Frank is the retelling of an affair the architect Frank Lloyd Wright had with a woman named Mamah Borthwick at the turn of the century. The story is told from Mamah’s perspective and deals mostly with what happened to her personally, and intellectually, as the result of falling in love with someone other than her husband – and a famous someone to boot.

 

The book deals with the reality and consequences of infidelity and this is what fueled most of our discussion – especially because the story took place at a time when Mamah had little options for getting a divorce without ruining her own life as well as the lives of her children. Although I think most of us in the room enjoyed reading about Mamah’s struggle to assert her own intellectual and emotional identity, we all had a hard time understanding her willingness to abandon her children for a life with Frank Lloyd Wright.

 

Our discussion went round and round but we ended up going back to one fundamental question – does motherhood trump everything else? Even selfhood? (I’d like to pose that question using the word parenthood, but Horan’s book is focused specifically on Mamah, and I think it’s also fair to say that men are unfortunately not held to same standards when it comes to involvement in their children’s lives.) The answer to that question is obviously entirely personal but it’s a hard one for me to sort through. Horan portrays Mamah’s husband as a kind, generous man who loved her. But he wasn’t an intellectual match for her and she was slowly suffocating in the life they lived. She had two children and she loved her children. Along came Frank Lloyd Wright (married with six children of his own) and her entire world turned upside down.

 

So is there a way to correct an error like that? Should Mamah have been punished for the rest of her life for choosing the wrong man? There is an interesting moment in the book when Wright receives a letter from his minister, urging him to return to his wife and children with the implication that it would be all right to keep Mamah as his mistress. And at least in the beginning of their affair, Mamah’s husband is willing to forgive her if she would only decide to come back. Is that the solution? Should she have stayed with her husband, continued some charade of a family unit and kept up her passionate affair with Wright on the side? Would that have been better for her children? Horan creates a Mamah who couldn’t do that – who wanted all or nothing but who ended up with all and nothing.

 

The ending of the book comes as a horrible surprise and if anyone knows the true story of what happened to Mamah Borthwick, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Real life doesn’t ever follow a neatly packaged narrative and so the book is forced to strike out into territory that doesn’t have much to do with its central question. I couldn’t help being somewhat disappointed by that, even if I realize Horan was just trying to stay true to the facts. It’s just the book was written very much like a novel, so that sudden derailing seemed to significantly undermine what I felt was the heart of the story.

 

 

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Enchi Fumiko – The Waiting Years

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Since graduating from college I have moved house five times, hopping from where I grew up on the west coast to Japan, then to the midwest, the east coast and finally setting up what seems to be a semi-permanent life (or at least for a few more years) in Switzerland. All that moving means I’ve carted my possessions across nearly 16,000 miles. As most of you bibliophiles can imagine, those book boxes start to get pretty heavy. So I learned to be very careful about which books I hold on to and which books I don’t mind leaving behind.

 

One of the books I have lugged with me, literally from continent to continent is Enchi Fumiko’s Masks. I first read this book for a Japanese literature class in college and count it as one of my all-time favorites. It’s a dark, gritty book dealing with issues of sexuality, manipulation and the oppression inherent in Japan’s patriarchal culture. The best word I have to describe this novel is intense. Everything about it is intense – structure, theme, intertextuality, social criticism. In short, it can withstand a lot of re-reading.

 

So knowing how I feel about that book, I was not at all surprised to find myself absorbed in another dark, intensely feminist novel by the same author – Enchi’s The Waiting Years. Enchi took over eight years to write The Waiting Years and for it she won Japan‘s highest literary award – no small feat for a novel with such a glaring social critique.

 

The Waiting Years is also a ripping good read. The novel details the life of Tomo, a paragon of wifely submission, and her husband Yukitomo, a paragon of selfish arrogance. Not only does Yukitomo bring a concubine into their household, he has Tomo go to Tokyo to pick the girl out. Later, he seduces (although rape is more likely what happened) one of their servants and makes that woman his second concubine. Eventually, he begins an affair with his daughter-in-law. Tomo must bear each of these insults in silence as well as stamp out any desire for self-assertion or self-fulfillment. Literally, her entire life is lived only to validate her husband’s life. She has nothing, and is nothing, on her own.

 

In exchange for her willing subservience she has what none of the other women in the novel are allowed to have – legitimacy. Enchi dives freely into the minds of the other women, portraying their own stifled unhappiness. As his mistresses, they are assured Yukitomo’s love and consideration but no necessary legal benefits, neither for themselves nor for their children. As his wife, Tomo is guaranteed the outward strappings of happiness (a home, money, the power to do business in her husband’s name, the respect offered to her by strangers in recognition of his status) but Enchi makes it very clear that Tomo remains celibate, and horribly lonely, for almost forty years once Yukitomo has tired of her physically. And she has no right to want anything for herself. None. That the women are offered this choice between two equally miserable fates is, I believe, Enchi’s point. The entire system is inherently flawed.

 

To add to her worries, Tomo has the thankless job of working frantically behind the scenes to ensure the family name (which is only hers through marriage, yet the only name that will ever be associated with her and therefore vitally important) is never blemished by Yukitomo’s indecent behavior.

 

The Waiting Years ends dramatically with Tomo asserting herself for the first and last time. But I won’t say more. Think bittersweet revenge. Think soul-crumbling revelation. Very satisfying.

 

I mentioned in my first post about The Waiting Years that the Japanese title of this novel is 女坂 (Onna zaka) which literally means the woman’s slope. Traditionally, Japanese temples had a men’s path and a women’s path, the second a supposedly gentler, easier walk. Enchi seems to be using this title ironically, because Tomo’s “path” is anything but easy. This title (and the beautiful scene symbolizing it when Tomo struggles up a hill in the snow one evening to get back home) turns the whole concept of 家 (ie – home, household) upside down by suggesting that a woman’s work inside the home is just as dangerous and difficult as a man’s.

 

One of the book’s other ironies is that we rarely see Yukitomo outside the home, unless he’s taken one of his mistresses on some cultural expedition. Tomo on the other hand is often running left and right, arranging financial matters and keeping busy with tradesman to insure the house has all that it needs. Yukitomo’s “life” is focused almost exclusively on his sexual needs and Tomo’s on a denial of that same sexuality. That this might be a hidden meaning behind the concept of 家and one which destroys its other more positive associations, is a fascinating notion.

 

 

Enchi wrote seven novels in total, all of which have been translated I believe.

 

 

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Nadine Gordimer – A Sport of Nature

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I finished Nadine Gordimer’s novel A Sport of Nature last night and believe this will be the most difficult of her novels to write about thus far. It was complicated – but not in a way I was expecting. This is a novel I will have to read at least twice, and slowly, to come to any firm conclusions about what Gordimer was trying to do.

 

In the simplest sense A Sport of Nature is a personality profile, telling the story, from childhood to adulthood, of Hillela, a white South African woman who “becomes” a revolutionary in the struggle against Apartheid. Hillela’s political and psychological trajectory is unusual, mainly because Gordimer reveals her transformation from unconcerned to concerned (about her country’s social injustices) through a distillation of the idea of human contact. It makes sense that falling in love with another human being is one of the best ways to smash up racial boundaries and I think this is often the story that gets told – how better to understand our shared humanity than to really and truly fall in love. But Hillela’s story is more than this familiar one – her character, her self, struck me as Gordimer’s personification of the idea that love is blind.

 

Her early life is marked by a series of transgressions, all of them having to do with sex. She develops a relationship with a man from a township, whom she doesn’t even realize is black (a first allusion to exactly how colorblind her experience of falling in love will become) and is kicked out of her private school, she woos her cousin and is eventually caught in his bed and has to leave home, she follows a lover illegalIy into Ghana, escaping South Africa not for political ideals but romantic ones.

 

Through all this Hillela seems to possess some incredible luck. She is taken in again and again by the right people and kept back from the edge of poverty. She becomes friends with the wife of the French Ambassador to Ghana, moves in with this family as a sort of nanny and eventually has an affair with the Ambassador. It’s during this period that she meets Whaila, the black man who will become her husband.

 

This is the moment when Hillela changes, when she becomes engaged in the fight to overthrow Apartheid. This is Whaila’s passion and Hillela has fallen in love with him so it becomes her fight too. On the one hand, I saw Hillela’s “transformation” as quite shallow – to love this man, she will also love his politics. A subject she had no use for previously. But on the other hand, this is the moment she becomes aware of her disregard for skin color. She isn’t in love with Whaila as an exotic other, but with him – his mind, his person, his whole self. She was raised under Apartheid, and although rationally she rejected it as many of her generation did, she had never confronted its reality emotionally. So then to finally experience, emotionally, the absolute meaninglessness of that system is nothing short of revelation.

 

What happens to Hillela after this is also really interesting but I’ll give the story away if I say any more. So I’ll just say a bit more about Hillela as a character – after this transformation she continues to create a personal, rebellious world where Apartheid has absolutely no power over her. But the power she uses to fight the world beyond her personal circle isn’t physical, it isn’t intellectual, and it isn’t even emotional – her power is purely sexual. Gordimer is exploring a really interesting idea here, even if I found it somewhat uncomfortable. Her portrait of Hillela is intriguing and provocative. She is essentially a nobody who manages to rise to considerable political power…through love but mostly through refusing to choose a specific ideology except her own colorblindness.

 

As I mentioned above, there is definitely more to this novel than can be picked up in one reading. So in the meantime, before I tackle a re-read or any of the critical work about Nadine Gordimer I’ve been delighted to discover over the last 8 months, I have three more of her novels to read by the end of the year. Next up: My Son’s Story, published in 1990.

 

 

Anna Gavalda – Je L'Aimais

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How wonderfully tricky French can be. I wrote on Thursday that I was reading Anna Gavalda’s novel Je L’Aimais and I translated the title as I Loved Him. But this was wrong – or at least it was only partly correct. In French the article gets placed before the verb and when the verb begins with a vowel, like aimer, the “le” or “la” is contracted so we don’t know without more context whether it is “him” or “her”. I assumed “him” because the story seemed to belong to Chloé, the narrator, who has just lost her husband to another woman. But as the novel progresses I realized that the story belongs just as much to Pierre, Chloé’s father-in-law, and his own story of love lost…so the title could just as well be I Loved Her.

 

Well, I did a quick check and the title of the novel has been translated as Someone I Loved – that’s just perfect.

 

This is a novel about adultery. About the worst kind of betrayal most people can imagine and the shock of having to try and understand why the person you love doesn’t love you anymore.

 

Au bout de combien de temps oublie-t-on l’odeur de celui qui vous a aimée ? Et quand cesse-t-on d’aimer à son tour ?

Qu’on me tende un sablier.

 

La dernière fois que nous nous sommes enlacés, c’était moi qui l’embrassais. C’était dans l’ascenseur de la rue de Flandre.

Il s’était laissé faire.

 

Pourquoi ? Pourquoi s’était-il laissé embrasser par une femme qu’il n’aimait plus ? Pourquoi m’avoir donné sa bouche ? Et ses bras ?

 

Ca n’a pas de sens.

 

[How long does it take to forget the scent of the person who loved you? And when do you stop loving them?

Someone hand me an hourglass.

 

The last time we held each other, I was the one who was kissing him. It was in the elevator on the rue de Flandre.

He let me kiss him.

 

Why? Why did he let himself be kissed by a woman he no longer loved? Why did he give me his mouth? And his arms?

 

It makes no sense.]

 

But it’s also a novel about love. How do we know we’ve found love? How do we know it will last? What happens when love arrives at the most inconvenient moment? When you think about it, this whole loving thing is a pretty fragile affair. And I think this is what Gavalda wants to explore in Je L’Aimais. Love is often a tricky experience to negotiate, filled with some wild ups and downs and often a lot of unexpected and potentially dangerous mundanity. Gavalda presents two versions of the experience of love – first through Chloé and her raw, painful astonishment of what has just become of marriage. And then through Pierre, thirty years her senior, and what he reveals about his own passionate discoveries.

 

Stylistically, the novel is interesting because it unfolds almost completely as a long conversation between Pierre and Chloé. I felt Gavalda managed this back and forth really well, dropping well-placed hints to remind us of their surroundings but for the most part she just let their dialogue do all the hard work.

 

And Pierre and Chloé do venture out into some thorny territory, especially in terms of duty vs happiness. Still, the book is an easy read and I might even argue that Gavalda’s attempt at a moral (a very small one, but its still there) might not have been a good idea, because I think, as horrible as it is, there just aren’t any straightforward answers where adultery is concerned. But despite her debatable conclusion, I liked very much how the book mostly focused on negotiating/exploring the very frightening reality that love is not always a permanent experience.

 

 

Reading Writer – Amsterdam and structure

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It has been ages since I put together a Reading Writer post and since I’m still coming off the high that is my weekly Tuesday morning meeting with my writing partner, I thought I might continue the conversation I’ve been having about structure and extend it a bit to what I’ve been reading lately.

 

When we talk about the structure of a novel, what exactly does that mean? For me, structure is the place where the author’s fingerprints are most likely to be visible. It’s what gets me asking questions like: Why was this particular scene placed after the last one instead of that scene on page 42? Why did parts of the story need temporal displacement? Why are we given four different points of view, shuffled to each give us a part of the story? And so on and so forth. Structure is about configuring the fictional elements and I enjoy trying to figure out why writers make the choices they do.

 

Because I read it recently, let’s look at Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. The book is divided into 5 parts, each of which has anywhere from 3 to 6 short chapters. Almost exclusively each chapter encompasses a single scene. I counted and McEwan uses only 22 scenes to structure his entire novel. Of note about these 22 scenes is that they are linear, branching directly forward from the first funeral scene both temporally and thematically. They build on one another, using either an event or a piece of dialogue to propel the story onward. It is an incredibly simple but also nearly airtight structure.

 

I am quite certain that McEwan did not divide his book into 5 parts by chance. So it follows that we can look at each part as an element of a traditional 5-part drama. And when I compare my notes on what happens in each of Amsterdam’s 5 acts, they follow exactly:

 

1 – exposition which ends with the “inciting moment”

2 – rising action involving secondary complications

3 – climax or turning point

4 – falling action

5 – conclusion

 

Amsterdam is a satire and the evilness of its characters quite exaggerated so it makes sense McEwan would have tipped his hat to burlesque theatre. It’s funny, when I first read this book I only liked it, I didn’t love it. But looking at its structure has bumped it up a few notches in my estimation. I love it when that happens.

 

But now for some nitty-gritty details (and maybe a small spoiler) – because otherwise talking about structure just wouldn’t be that much fun. McEwan does something interesting in terms of structure within two of the sections. The first comes in Part 2, when the story is still developing and when we are in Vernon’s perspective. Part 2 has five chapters and without the last three the entire book would fall apart. Sorry for getting so technical, but I’m going to use numeric indicators to make this easier. In Part 2, Chapter 3 (2 – 3), Vernon receives Clive’s suicide proposal, which he rejects as ridiculous along with the reader. But then something huge happens in 2 – 4 which changes everything so that 2 – 5 sees Vernon not only accepting Clive’s suicide proposal but requesting it be a mutual contract. The nesting of the presumably big event in between two smaller, seemingly benign events is a very cool structural trick with implications on how the ending impacts the reader.

 

The next interesting bit of structural work comes in Part 3, which has only three chapters. 3 -1 shows Clive on a “morning after”. We don’t know of what, only that he is upset and happily escaping to the Lake District to finish work on his symphony. 3 – 2 then jumps back in time to the “night before” to explain what got Clive so worked up in the first place. This chapter shows Clive and Vernon having a mammoth argument (related to that something huge in 2 – 4), which nearly ends their friendship on the spot. Then, in 3 -3, McEwan jumps back to Clive, now beginning his hike around the Lake District.

 

This back and forth is the only time the novel breaks with its strictly linear progression and the effect is quite interesting. In 3 – 1, Clive proclaims his friend a villain, in 3 – 2 we see exactly why he might be so but then in 3 – 3, Clive reveals his own spectacular failings. This structural movement is quite balanced, arguably better than a strict linear one which would have whalloped the reader with their fight and then sent Clive off to brood for two chapters. It is an interesting choice for McEwan to have made and it gives those three chapters an undulating emotional texture.

 

Well, I suppose I have rambled on here long enough and hopefully I haven’t bored too many of you who might not give a pickle for technical issues like this. Admittedly, I’ve picked a book with a structure just begging to be mentioned. I’ll try this again sometime later using a book with a more subtle structural pattern. That will be harder.

 

John Banville – Eclipse

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I wish I could quote out long passages from John Banville’s Eclipse, in lieu of a review. I would enjoy typing them, a kind of slow and careful re-read of the pages I’ve so loved reading. I am a fast reader and Eclipse is a short book but I took over a week working my way through it, savoring the lines and the scenes and the narrator’s reflections.

 

Before, what I contained was the blastomere of myself, the coiled hot core of all I was and might be. Now, that essential self has been pushed to the side with savage insoucience, and I am as a house walked up and down in by an irresistibly proprietorial stranger. I am all inwardness, gazing out in ever intensifying perplexity upon a world in which nothing is exactly plausible, nothing is exactly what it is.

 

Narrator Alex has retreated from the world, into his childhood home on the Irish coast to muse over, or, I suppose it would be more accurate to say, to nurse a set of bewildering wounds. Alex is a stage actor who has taken an early retirement, abandoned his family to hide out in a state of hyperaware limbo, conscious of the ghostly presences of his past that have followed him to his retreat. Followed him isn’t quite right; perhaps some of them were already waiting there for him.

 

Everything here is twilight and half-dream, yet the appearance of these phantoms is naggingly insinuative, as if I should, or would, know them. There is something in them of those ancestral resemblances that will spring unnervingly up at one from the cradle or the deathbed.

 

Growing domestic disturbances and a traumatic professional event brought Alex to seek solace in his hideaway to sort out the personal ramifications of his crisis. To hear him describe it, his entire self has become wrapped up in an ability to transform into an “other” which necessarily engendered a slow loss of what was originally “him”. Do all actors experience this tension and fear? It’s a wonderful metaphor for helping a non-thespian understand the emotional and personal investment in stage performance.

 

Eclipse is also about Alex’s relationship with his daughter, a young woman suffering from what must be schizophrenia, although her specific illness is never named. The parallel between these two is stunning – that he needs to create new voices inside himself in order to succeed in his work, that she cannot stop manufacturing similar voices but which threaten to destroy her.

 

Indeed, such was her calm at times that she would seem to be not there at all, to have drifted off, lighter than air. It is a different air in which she moves, a separate medium. For her I think the world is always somewhere other, an unfamiliar place where yet she has always been. This is for me the hardest thing, to think of her out there, standing on some far bleak deserted shore, beyond help, in unmoving light, with an ocean of lostness all before her and the siren voices singing in her head.

 

As you can see from the passages I’ve included, Banville writes with rich, vivid prose, filled with complicated words and sometimes twisty grammar. I loved the complexity of his language and the way it forced me to slow down and really think about his word choices and images. And for all of Alex’s intense interior musing and remembering, the book moves forward through a steady procession of tense scenes and dialogues.

 

Someone with a better background in drama will probably find the novel filled with allusions to the world of the theatre. I found myself looking up a lot of Alex’s references to certain characters, and without that I would have missed some of his emotional orientation. Eclipse was definitely one of the best reads of the entire year so far. Which makes me really look forward to reading Banville’s prize-winning novel, The Sea, already waiting for me on the shelf.

 

Paul Auster – Oracle Night

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Metafiction is fiction about fiction, writing that draws attention to the fact that it is writing, that it is not real, that it is a construct. There are zillions of different varieties of metafiction – novels about fiction writers writing other novels, novels about readers reading other books, stories within a story…that kind of thing. It’s a very old device and it works to add layers of awareness and meaning to an otherwise straightforward story.

 

Metafiction brings the reader into a story in a way that regular fiction does not – it asks you to divide your attention between what’s going on in terms of basic plot and how the story is being constructed or who is constructing it. In this sense, it reveals the narrative blueprint and attempts to show you something you might not otherwise have noticed – something about the power of fiction, about fiction’s relationship to what, I suppose, is its opposite, reality. This kind of fiction works in direct opposition to what John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, calls the vivid, continuous dream:

 

These novels give the reader an experience that assumes the usual experience of fiction as its point of departure, and whatever effect their work may have depends on their conscious violation of the usual fictional effect. What interests us in these novels is that they are not novels but instead, artistic comments on art.

 

It took me two or three tries to read past page 5 of Paul Auster’s Oracle Night, mainly because I generally dislike straightforward novels with writers as the main character. It wasn’t until I hit page 8 that I realized this wasn’t a straightforward novel and that Auster wasn’t writing a novel at all – but an artistic comment on art. So, I waited a few more days and finally sat down with it when I was in the mood to see what he might be doing.

 

Oracle Night begins with Sydner Orr, a writer, who is recovering from some unnamed but very serious illness. For the first time in months, Orr is able to begin work on a new manuscript which he bases on a small episode from Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon. Orr’s novel deals with a set of characters, who are also dealing with a manuscript – about a man who can predict the future. Already we have three stories floating around. Later in the book, Orr gets asked to write a screenplay about time travel. At another point, another character in the book, also a writer, shares some of his own work with Orr. Woven in and out of these other stories remains Orr’s ongoing account of his troubled marriage. The novel is a tangle of story after story after story. Somehow, hopefully, they are all connected. 

 

Unless their being connected is beside the point. Metafiction asks us to get over the idea of coherent story and look at a text’s fictionality. For Oracle Night this brought me to re-examine Orr, our first-person narrator, and to doubt him. I know that a first-person unreliable narrator is common in traditional fiction, but in that situation most often the reader learns early on that their narrator is not to be trusted, which then informs their unfolding understanding of the rest of the novel. In Auster’s world, the smooth surface of Orr’s narrative authority is never punctured. Instead, it was only at the end, looking back at Orr’s uncanny ability to create and maintain multiple stories coupled with his need to fictionalize his own reality that eventually had me wondering – it was like being handed an extreme version of the writer as puppet master. And suddenly I was looking at a whole other book.

 

But for the last week or so, I’ve been debating this interpretation. I realized that holding Oracle Night to my own strict definition of metafiction might have me reading a whole lot more into it than is really there. It’s a seductive idea but I can’t rule out the possibility I may just have it wrong. I see Auster commenting on the use of fiction and storytelling to mediate reality, on fate vs. destiny, on self-fulfilling prophecies…and maybe that’s all, and maybe that’s enough. But if Orr is a legitimate protagonist then a lot of that exploration stays too close to the surface for me.

 

Part of my hesitation may also come from the fact that I found myself disappointed with Auster’s writing style, so I’m unwilling to give him too much credit. I’m planning to read more of his stuff before deciding for sure, but I felt there was too much flat, sometimes clichéd writing in Oracle Night along with a lot of lengthy, unrealistic dialogue. Perhaps I am not forgiving enough of his homage to noir mystery or maybe he uses that style on purpose to make some point that I’m failing to see. Any Auster fans out there? How does Oracle Night compare with his other work?