Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Reading Writer – Julia Glass, Three Junes

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One of the articles in the most recent issue of The Writer’s Chronicle asserts that contemporary fiction has lost its appreciation of the omniscient narrator. The idea got me thinking about whether or not this was true. I won’t go into a critique of the article but I think the author actually ended up contradicting herself a little – at first saying the omniscient was lost, no longer taught in writing programs and then intimating that most readers actually confuse the omniscient with a 3rd person limited. She then went on to give examples of numerous contemporary novels which use an omniscient point of view to great success. So, I think we can safely say that an appreciation of the omniscient point-of-view isn’t lost at all. We might not be pegging it correctly each time, but it is still being explored in contemporary fiction.

Nevertheless, I think the author was right to bring our attention to what a skillful use of the omniscient narrator can achieve. One of my favorite examples of this point-of-view in action comes from Part I – Collies – of Julia Glass’s 2002 novel, Three Junes.

“Collies” is actually a novella, the first installment of the triptych that forms Three Junes and it is one of those unique pieces of fiction that manages to get many things right – an interesting POV, careful use of metaphor, no cop outs on exploring difficult emotional situations. It’s a story about the contradictory emotions of anger and relief, freedom and regret inherent in the process of grieving for a loved one. It is a softly-told story, recounted by a discerning narrator with an immense amount of compassion for the novel’s characters.

Structurally, it is also interesting, as the forward action is limited to a short holiday trip in Greece, a week in the life of a grieving widower, while the past tense back story covers nearly a lifetime. It’s very neatly done and worth looking at for anyone struggling with how to appropriately place back story. Glass plays the two time periods off one another quite expertly, giving just enough of the past to make the present meaningful and vice versa. Writers can get so caught up in the pasts of their characters, inventing scenes and events for the pure delight of discovery. Knowing how to trim that to the essentials takes hard work and a merciless finger on the delete button.

But I wanted to talk about the omniscient POV. At first glance, it seems that “Collies” is written in the 3rd person limited – we are allowed access into the consciousness of our grieving widower, Paul – which is true, and we do get frequent and in-depth access. But actually, the front story taking place in Greece has an omniscient narrator which dips into other people’s minds from time to time as well as moves far enough back to grant the reader a nicely broad view of the scene and its animated trimmings.

This is a completely different tactic from what I talked about in my last post in regards to Don Delillo’s The Body Artist (also a book about grieving). With the front story of “Collies” the reader is given a lot of space, freedom to watch and wait and see what Paul will do with himself, to get to know him slowly, as it were. That isn’t to say the novel doesn’t get the reader involved with Paul and his grieving. It’s just a very different process. In many respects, Glass’s omniscient narrator presents the story of Paul’s grief through a prism – with each insight adding another layer of depth to our understanding of his sorrow. The Body Artist gives us one intensely concentrated perspective and holds us fast.

The back story of “Collies”, however, is written with a close 3rd person limited. This slight narrative shift between the present story and the back story does a marvelous job of rendering the past scenes with a greater degree of intensity than the front story scenes. Which I think mirrors Paul’s state of mind quite nicely. He’s in Greece to sort through his grief, part of that sorting is a sifting of his memories and they don’t belong to anyone else. The difference between the two narrative perspectives is so subtle, so smooth that without careful reading you don’t really see it. And that’s good. The reader shouldn’t really notice it – they should only feel the difference in the impact of the story.

Reading Writer – The Body Artist cont.

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I mentioned in my recent reading review of The Body Artist that reading this novel was a bit awkward and felt like attending a performance piece. I want to talk more about where I think the reader’s self-consciousness comes from.

In the novel, Delillo positions the narrator within the main character Lauren’s head – third person limited. There is the smallest sliver of distance in the odd formulation of “she thought”, but most of the narration comes unhampered by any tags. In this way, the narrator is fused to her movements and thoughts. In essence, Lauren is the narrator, even if technically the point of view is third person. This free indirect technique creates a sort of tunnel vision that in less expert hands would lead to a lot of confusion. (This is something that beginning writers often do without realizing it (yep, been there, done that) and it can create a real problem for the reader). There isn’t any place for the reader to move back and look at the larger scene. The largest “visual” we ever get that isn’t filtered by Lauren’s eyes is something like, “They sat reading…” with anything that follows unfolding through Lauren’s perception and thoughts.

What this near-fusion of main character into narrator accomplishes in The Body Artist is to turn the reader into a voyeur. Delillo doesn’t let Lauren tell us her story in her own voice, something which would be a more traditional experience for the reader and wouldn’t feel so intrusive, instead he traps us inside her experience at the same time as he reminds us that we’re only watching:

She tried to work past the details to the bird itself, nest thief and skilled mimic, to the fixed interest in those eyes, a kind of inquisitive chill that felt a little like a challenge.
When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see. Think. What a shedding of every knowable surface and process. She wanted to believe the bird was seeing her, a woman with a teacup in her hand, and never mind the folding back of day and night, the apparition of a space set off from time. She looked and took a careful breath. She was alert to the clarity of the moment but knew it was ending already. She felt it in the blue jay. Or maybe not. She was making it happen herself because she could not look any longer. This must be what it means to see if you’ve been near blind all your life. She said something to Rey, who lifted his head slightly, chasing the jay but leaving the sparrows unstarted.

It’s a technique with very definite aesthetic repercussions. It creates a restriction for the reader, turning the character’s mood and psychic state into a filter for the story. Both these things can be quite meaningful when executed skillfully. I think the benefit of using this for The Body Artist is that the technique marries so nicely with the novel’s thematic preoccupation. Grief is a dictatorial emotion – it weighs on us, makes us hyper-aware and uncomfortable or unreasonable. Grief becomes a filter for everyday experience and so forcing the reader into that experience is a meaningful narrative experiment.

Don Delillo – The Body Artist

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The more I read Don Delillo, the more I enjoy the dark aesthetic of his fiction. I sat down last night with the short and brutal The Body Artist and read it in one sitting. I re-read it this afternoon and decided that might be the best way to enjoy this particular novel – in repeated samplings.  

The Body Artist is an uncomfortable and uneasy read. Both for its narrative peculiarities and for the alarming substance of its story. On the surface, the story couldn’t be simpler -man and woman together, man kills himself, woman grieves. But that triptych has a much more intriguing focus in its investigation of emotional expression through our physical being.  

Lauren is a body artist. Someone who creates an exploration of an idea with her movements, corporal presence and acting. We meet her first in a moment of comfort – a morning with her husband. Delillo presents even the smallest detail of their interplays of exchange. Lauren exists in a hyper-deliberate state, moving from gesture to gesture and thought to thought. We have to savor their interactions slowly to catch the hints of discord. They are extremely subtle, but they are there.  

The next chapter relates the details of her husband’s death. Within two pages we are back with Lauren, and by this point we’re so tightly merged with her it is difficult to come up for air. She discovers a young man stashed away in the house. He cannot speak properly on his own but begins to repeat verbatim entire conversations that occurred between Lauren and her now dead husband. In her grief, Lauren begins to believe he’s some manifestation of her husband and instead of calling the police or a hospital, tries to take care of him. She just wants him to keep speaking to her. 

The experience of reading The Body Artist is similar to attending an intense play or observing a performance piece. It’s disturbing to see our main character humiliate and endanger herself. This kind of reader-character fusion doesn’t occur often. Usually, there is more distance. But the narrative perspective of The Body Artist doesn’t allow for any detachment. We follow Lauren like a voyeur, listen to her thoughts and watch even her most mundane movements. Time runs too slowly. It’s suffocating and frustrating. But each time she snaps out of her trance, we’re brought up short and offered a glimpse of the heartache and disbelief that inform her most routine actions.  

Of the three Delillo novels I’ve now read, this was the most experimental but also, I felt, the most powerful. In the past, I’ve criticized him for holding me at an arm’s length from his characters. The Body Artist did the exact opposite. It was a visceral experience, both severe and wearisome (I mean those to be taken as positives, or at least for their intensity). I think a longer book would have been far too exhausting so I approve of his restraint. Definitely a novel I will go back to again.

Reading Writer – Coetzee's Disgrace cont.

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The dialogue in Disgrace churns along with a quiet energy. Especially after David has arrived at his daughter Lucy’s farm, their conversations perfect and polish the novel’s thematic preoccupations.

During their extended greeting when she’s showing him about the property, Lucy asks David about his work and he replies that he’s working on an operatic play about Lord Byron. She expresses her surprise:

“I didn’t know you still had ambitions in that direction.”
“I thought I would indulge myself. But there is more to it than that. One wants to leave something behind. Or at least a man wants to leave something behind. It’s easier for a woman.”
“Why is it easier for a woman?”
“Easier, I mean, to produce something with a life of its own.”
“Doesn’t being a father count?”
“Being a father…I can’t help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business. But let us wait and see what comes.”

This back and forth settles so naturally into the action of the scene, and they move from this more important exchange to another mundane one with the turn of the next sentence. But these particular lines tell the reader so much about David Lurie and the kind of man we’re dealing with. They also show us Lucy’s subtle challenge and disapproval. It feels so natural – the uneasy dynamics of this father and daughter.

Coetzee accomplishes this kind of subtle revelation on nearly every page. Just after this conversation ends, Petrus walks in – to both the novel and the scene. Petrus shares the farm with Lucy. He’s a black African. And the tension between Petrus and David upon their first encounter is so strong:

He is left with Petrus. “You look after the dogs,” he says to break the silence.
“I look after the dogs and I work in the garden. Yes.” Petrus gives a broad smile. “I am the gardener and the dog-man.” He reflects for a moment. “The dog-man,” he repeats, savouring the phrase.
“I have just travelled up from Cape Town. There are times when I feel anxious about my daughter all alone here. It is very isolated.”
“Yes,” says Petrus “it is dangerous.” He pauses. “Everything is dangerous today. But here it is all right, I think.” And he gives another smile.

David thinks he’s being nice, engaging with Petrus like an equal but he’s nearly shouting his suspicion in the man’s face. And of course there is Petrus’s first big smile. It is a slightly exaggerated gesture so we know right away to pay attention. He’s either nervous or being just as arrogant. It’s so well done. Coetzee keeps things very subtle.

This is something particularly difficult for a developing writer to learn – how to keep things to the minimum and feel confident we’ve made the emotional tension clear. In a general sense, less tends to be more. But we often have to fight our instincts about how to go about doing this – especially in today’s world of TV series and daytime drama. We’ve become quite accustomed to kitsch emotional displays, so much so they start to feel natural.

But Coetzee manages to get his characters to carry out intense, difficult discussions about uncomfortable subjects. I think this works because of how clearly Coetzee has created David. There isn’t a moment in Disgrace when we doubt that David Lurie would say what he says. From the moment the narrator introduces him to us, we can hear his voice in our heads. He’s cynical but careful. A confident intellectual but less confident in emotional territory. He wants people to listen to what he says and so he speaks slowly, precisely, intelligently but yet everything is tinted with his particular prejudices. Part of his development is to move from a place of emotional dishonesty to truthfulness, and this process is reflected quite expertly in what he says. His dialogue is also supported by a lot of internal dialogue, but not too much. Too much would bog us down instead of informing the choices he makes between what he says out loud and what he thinks.

Reading Writer – Coetzee's Disgrace

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For a fiction writer looking to consider technique, Disgrace provides plenty to sink our teeth into. Coetzee makes some interesting stylistic choices as well as engages with some difficult subject matter. It is not an easy book, to read or study.

I’m going to start with some ridiculously simple basics, but I think in this case they are important. Disgrace is written in the present tense. That alone is a choice worth examining. The present tense is a powerful, but tricky medium. Obviously, it brings immediacy to the story. What is happening is happening right now, in something close to real time. It may sound contradictory, but being this close to a story can actually slow things down. The narrator can get bogged down in the minutiae of each and every action.

Fortunately, Coetzee imposes some necessary distance on the present tense story by using the third person. In other words, a filter:

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex very well. (A description of his arrangement with a prostitute named Soraya follows).
Soraya is tall and slim, with long black hair and dark, liquid eyes. Technically, he is old enough to be her father; but then, technically, one can be a father at twelve.

This is a strong opening with a particular narrative voice. It establishes a close third person (allowing us access into the head of our main character, David Lurie) while at the same time making it very clear that a wry, opinionated (even slightly patronizing) narrator is in control of the story. This layering is one of the novel’s most successful elements.

This attentive narrator takes us through a period of Lurie’s life beginning with his regular appointments with a prostitute and ends with him confronting the fact he has lost the ability to seduce any woman he chooses. This story unfolds quickly, 10 pages in total, and weaves together back story, descriptions of Lurie’s thoughts and habits, and the situation leading him to the real story. Chapter One is an introduction of sorts, skillfully handled and economical. It doesn’t start in the thick of the action but brings us to the real story much more quietly. But appropriately. Words aren’t wasted and this is really important.

Chapter Two is an intense, extended scene. Lurie attempts to seduce one of his students. In this chapter the narrator virtually disappears. Between each line of dialogue or action, we get Lurie’s unfiltered thoughts. This is quite hard to pull off without losing the larger picture of what’s going on. But as the scene draws to a close, the narrator steps back in and asserts his more objective view over what’s been going on. An extremely effective method of making sure the reader understands the parallel emotion of the scene – Lurie’s nearly pathetic intensity and the girl’s wavering thrill. She’s flattered but also nervous.

Skip ahead. The next few chapters catalogue the love affair. He pursues, she gives in, she draws back, he fumbles. The affair becomes a scandal and Lurie must quit his position at the university where he teaches. Again, Lurie’s actions and thoughts are both explained and then sometimes criticized by the narrator.

He does not feel nervous. On the contrary, he feels quite sure of himself. His heart beats evenly, he has slept well. Vanity, he thinks, the dangerous vanity of the gambler; vanity and self-righteousness. He is going into this in the wrong spirit. But he does not care.

This distance remains extremely important, the only way for the narrator to help the reader develop his/her own feelings about the situation and more importantly, about Lurie.

A close third person narrator can be difficult to pull of effectively. We want to get inside our character’s head but in doing that can lose perspective beyond that character and, more importantly, about that character – which is the whole reason to use third person instead of first. Coetzee keeps just about as close to David Lurie as possible but he doesn’t merge with him and this is really important. He keeps a thin boundary – with narrative tone and an eye to Lurie’s surroundings. Lurie translates most of the reader’s impressions of each scene but he doesn’t dictate them – that distinction is key.

Carson McCullers – The Ballad of the Sad Café

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Last night I settled in to finish Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café. What a curiously dark and strange novella. So brooding and unusual. And yet, it really only tells the story of an ordinary love triangle. But the language and the visuals, the eccentric characters and the dreary misery of the town turn everything about that commonplace theme into something remarkable. 

The narrator opens by describing a bleak little town and its boarded up buildings, its miserable dullness and desperate surroundings. Then the reader is invited to consider what used to be a café. Here is where the real story begins.  

The back of my Penguin edition summarizes things so nicely, I’ll just quote it here: 

For this is the tale of Miss Amelia, gaunt and lonely owner of a small-town store; and how she squandered her love on Cousin Lymon, the little strutting hunchback who turned the store into a café; and how her rejected husband, Marvin Macy, the meanest man in town, came back and stole the hunchback’s heart; and of the gargantuan fight that followed. 

Sounds a bit grotesque, doesn’t it? A hunchback, a lonely, eccentric woman and an ex-convict. And there was something definitely fantastic about it – Miss Amelia in her swamp boots carrying Cousin Lymon on her back, and Marvin Macy greasing himself up for the fight like a hog. The chocolate and sugar snuff that Cousin Lymon kept packed between his teeth or the outlandish remedies Miss Amelia practiced on her willing patients.

But despite the fantastic quality of the situation, the overall aesthetic was both melancholy and sad. Miss Amelia’s initial hardness wears away, revealing the anxious lover beneath. Cousin Lymon loses his magical aura and becomes pathetic and weak, willing to do anything for the attention of Marvin Macy. And Marvin Macy just wants his revenge. The ending is ugly and desperate, a truly sad ballad.  

McCullers is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers. She has four novels in total, several short stories and a collection of poetry. All of them are purported to exhibit her tragicomic vision of existence. It doesn’t surprise me in the least to learn that she wrote poetry, as all I’ve read of her writing until now is strongly infused with what I would consider a poetic sensibility – a certain rhythm in the sentences and a dependence on unexpected visual imagery. Engaging and thoughtful, with a real sympathy for misfit-type people, she’s a pure delight to read.

Nadine Gordimer – A World of Strangers

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Have I made it clear how much I respect Nadine Gordimer? In case anyone missed it, let me mention yet again how often I pick up one of her books, read for a while and settle in to the comfortable bliss of admiration. Her talent and insight are immense. I particularly appreciate that she dedicates that talent to the creation of a discussion about the injustice and moral poverty of any situation of apartheid or discrimination.  

However, it isn’t the political agenda of her work that establishes its excellence. It is much more than that. It is her profound understanding of the human creature, with all our whims and contradictions, our emotional complexity and frightened empathy. Somehow, she manages to get right to the essence of a character, an essence which, I think, is quite simply a reflection of the reader. Her characters are not just people she’s invented and sent off to wander the landscape of her imagination. They are us.  

Which is why the title of her second novel, A World of Strangers, is really more of a challenge thrown at the reader. Yes, the book is set in South Africa during the early years of apartheid and many of us don’t have first hand experience with that system. But yet the division she considers, the ignorance and racism she puts on display, is chillingly familiar. 

A World of Strangers is thematically quite similar to her first novel, The Lying Days – the story of an individual coming to grips with South African culture in the initial years after the Nationalist Party came to power and established the legal institution of cultural segregation. However, whereas The Lying Days is about coming to terms with one’s own culture and defining oneself within that culture, A World of Strangers approaches the same questions through the eyes of an outsider looking in.  

Our narrator Toby is a young Englishman sent to South Africa to work for the family business. He comes from the upper middle class but also from a family with open-minded political beliefs. Toby doesn’t negate those beliefs but he doesn’t embrace them in the same eager way as his family. At best, he agrees but is uninterested in wasting his time on the debate. As he gets established in Johannesburg, he begins to move between two worlds – the contented and extremely wealthy white suburbs and the animated but poor black townships. These two worlds are embodied in two of his relationships – a love affair with Cecil, a white divorcée, and a close friendship with Steven, an educated and dashing young black man.  

Toby considers himself immune from the rules of apartheid and travels freely, even carelessly, between his white friends and the townships. He knows enough to keep his worlds separated, not allowing the two to meet. One of the things I found so honest about Toby was his understanding that neither of those two lives was really for him. He disdained many aspects of his wealthy friends’ undemanding and counterfeit lives but at the same time understood he would never have the courage to face the poverty and violence of the townships.  

Toby slides back and forth between the two worlds, and in a way, he becomes a smug voyeur. Sampling the best of both worlds, keeping himself apart when it suits him and never feeling guilty about his own double standard. Of course this kind of social schizophrenia cannot really last. Eventually, a tragedy requires Toby to confront his emotional sightseeing. He’s forced to face up to the disaster of apartheid and what it means to him personally. No longer a system that has nothing to do with him but one that is him, is in him, that he cannot just walk away from. 

A World of Strangers was published in 1958. It was banned in South African for twelve years.     

Tran thi Thuong-Thuong – Letters to a Teacher

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A friend of mind has just published a lovely little book called Letters to a Teacher: Six years in the Vietminh War Zone 4 and I want to write about it in the hopes of generating some interest in her project. The book is a translation of a series of letters written by Tran thi Thuong-Thuong, my friend’s mother, to her former school teacher. The letters were written in 1995 when Tran was finally living in the United States and were sent to her teacher who had also relocated to America and who was at that point bed-ridden, quite elderly and longing to remember the country she had left behind.  

Tran has an incredible story to tell about a short period of her life (1946 to 1952) when she was living and teaching in the Communist-controlled area of North Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The book contains five richly detailed letters just bursting with stories about the necessity of teaching every lesson with a Marxist-Leninist slant, about trying to help students learn while all around them their world grew more and more violent, about having two young children in such a frightening and unstable situation.   

Eventually, Tran and her husband decide they will escape to the South in the hopes of securing a better future for their children and reuniting with Tran’s family (whom she had not seen or heard from in years because of the fighting). They escape separately, Tran going first with her two children – she tells of hiding her three-year-old daughter under a load of bananas to avoid detection and then watching as the bananas get covered in water by soldiers, preparing bamboo arm sheaths to ward off attacks by orangutans in the jungle, and watching her five-year-old son walk hot railroad tracks for miles and miles and never once complaining at the blisters and welts that soon appeared on his feet. 

Quite an incredible memoir. Tran remembers what she calls the death of her youth with honest precision and painstakingly explains what went on for ordinary citizens at a time of such political and social turmoil. Many of the stories are frightening – about torture, brainwashing and poverty, while others describe endless indoctrination meetings and the dwindling trust between former neighbors and friends along with the frustrating necessity of negotiating a complex and often terrifying government system. 

For anyone looking to learn about this period of Vietnamese history, Letters to a Teacher provides an excellent entry. And in a more general way, it is quite simply a moving story of one woman trying to be a teacher and a mother under some extraordinary circumstances.

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Martin Amis – Time's Arrow

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On Saturday I finished Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis. If anyone remembers from last year I read Amis’s House of Meetings and think it might have been the very best book of 2007, so I was very excited when a friend of mine recommended Time’s Arrow to me. She described the novel as unique and unique is exactly right.

Time’s Arrow moves backward. And not like most reverse novels which have forward moving sections that go backward in time, section by section. In Time’s Arrow, everything is in reverse. Letters are ‘born’ out of fire or garbage cans, death is actually an act of creation, doctors do damage to patients who have come in looking healthy and well. The book is genius. And short enough that this distinctive narrative stance doesn’t become too exhausting.  

The point-of-view structure of the book adds wonderful texture. It is narrated in the first person, by Tod or Hamilton or Odilo, depending on the period of his life, but at the same time it is in the third person. The narrator is writing about himself but with a forced disassociation. What results is two layers of consciousness, a spliced version of “my life passed before my eyes”. Our narrator feels that this backward movement is all wrong which helps mediate it for the reader. But he also misinterprets almost everything about the story which makes us feel for him as we read along. 

You want to know what I do? All right. Some guy comes in with a bandage around his head. We don’t mess about. We’ll have that off. He’s got a hole in his head. So what do we do. We stick a nail in it. Get the nail – a good rusty one – from the trash or wherever. And lead him out to the Waiting Room where he’s allowed to linger and holler for a while before we ferry him back to the night.  

Time’s Arrow is the story of one man’s life – in reverse, from the moment of his death to the moment of his birth. He is an extraordinary man who takes on successive identities as we follow him back in time, from Tod Friendly, a reputable doctor near Boston, to Odilo Unverdorben, a Nazi physician at Auschwitz. The peculiar inverse linearity of the novel twists and challenges our understanding of his life’s acts. Especially when we finally arrive at the concentration camp.  

It is a commonplace to say that the triumph of Auschwitz was essentially organizational: we found the sacred fire that hides in the human heart – and built an autobahn that went there. But how to explain the divine synchronies of the ramp? At the very moment that the weak and young and old were brought from the Sprinkleroom to the railway station, as good as new, so their menfolk completed the appointed term of labour service and ventured forth to claim them, on the ramp, a trifle disheveled to be sure, but strong and sleek from their regime of hard work and strict diet. As matchmakers, we didn’t know the meaning of the word failure; on the ramp, stunning successes were as cheap as spit. When the families coalesced, how their hands and eyes would plead for one another, under our indulgent gaze. We toasted them far into the night. 

Amis’s atypical rendering of the timeline emphasizes the actual horror of what happened. And the reversal of Tod’s acts as a physician in Boston (harming people) compared to his work as a Nazi doctor (healing people) presents an uncomfortable reality. The two layers of consciousness run in opposite directions – the Tod being described who spent his entire life moving deliberately away from his past as a Nazi doctor but the Tod telling the story who is racing, unaware of what’s awaiting him, back into that terror. The tension created from these opposing realities is simply overwhelming. 

Definitely a book I will go back to again and again.

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Nadine Gordimer – The Lying Days

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Reading Nadine Gordimer’s first novel The Lying Days (1953) is a bit like being introduced to someone you’ve been wanting to meet for a long time. There’s a huge amount of expectation involved and not just a little preconceived notion. I was uneasy to start that first page, nervous she wouldn’t live up to all I’ve decided she already is. 

Thankfully, I wasn’t at all disappointed. All of her subsequent accomplishments can be easily spotted in the pages of this first sampling of her art. As much as the term can annoy me with its ability to reduce a larger work into some easily pocketable catch-phrase, The Lying Days is a coming-of-age novel. Our narrator Helen will grow up in these pages, discover herself, discover the world and come to contemplate her own substance.  

The novel begins with a vivid evocation of both transgression and trespass. Young Helen, maybe 7 or 8, quarrels with her mother and as a result ventures out of her safe white community into the roiling and colorful atmosphere of a nearby township. This first voyage into a place she should not be is a visceral experience for our narrator, both frightening and exciting, that serves as a template for the rest of the novel – the sensual and intellectual delight of contravention.  

Gordimer is interested in the space where the political and the emotional interact. This is where her characters really come to life. This first novel makes that very clear. However, it doesn’t merge the two as seamlessly as most of her later work. But what The Lying Days does reveal, quite splendidly, is Gordimer’s uncanny perception into those unique moments of human interaction. 

I could nearly pick a page at random and find something similar but this particular passage struck me – these lines come from when Helen has left her family and set up a new life in Johannesburg:

So I, who had inherited no God, made my mystery and my reassurance out of human love; as if the worship of love in some aspect is something without which the human condition is intolerable and terrifying, and humans will fashion it for their protection out of whatever is in their lives as birds will use string and bits of wool to make a nest in the city where there are no reeds.  

Where the first sections of the book remain subtly political, the second half is intensely so. Helen becomes involved with a man who is passionately fighting against the newly elected National Party and their policy of apartheid. These sections do lose some of “Helen’s story” in a larger sense but they are still quite fascinating. And the events she witnesses shape her as much as her love affair and her friendships. By the end of the book, Helen has become a complicated character who comes into her own both powerfully and honestly.