Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘book review’ category

Gregory Sherl – I Have Touched You

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Gregory Sherl’s I Have Touched You:

Despite the collection’s overall mood of “being stuck,” Sherl’s prose is not stagnant. His pieces have movement; they often feel like a stacking of interconnected bridges, one sentence crossed with a parallel thought, intersected by a tangent, re-lifted onto a previous platform, winding back to an earlier reflection. This is untidy scaffolding but it helps fight against a mood with a dangerous potential for monotony.

Click here for the full review.

Ashley Cowger – Peter Never Came

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Ashley Cowger’s Peter Never Came:

The stories in Peter Never Came, by Ashley Cowger, are like so many artifacts of our rebellion, and they take as their mascot that most famous Time-rebel, Peter Pan. This is not to say that Cowger’s stories are harmless, playful tracings of the all-too-human desire to somehow avoid growing up. Cowger is interested in how this longing for the simplicity of childhood can disrupt a life, can cripple the adult harboring this desire. She is also quick to point out the falsity in assuming either side of the equation—childhood or adulthood—to be some kind of promised land.

Click here for the full review.

Steve Himmer – The Bee-Loud Glade

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Back in January I mentioned a book called The Bee-Loud Glade*, by Steve Himmer, whom I should say for reasons of full-disclosure is a very good friend of mine. The book comes out on April 4th, so this is now the right time to tell you more about it. I’ve just had the pleasure of re-reading this novel and I realized that the short announcement I gave for it in January only scratches the surface of all that this book contains.

At first glance, this is a novel about a man called Finch who works in the Brand Awareness department of a big corporation selling “hyperefficient plants” (fake plants, fake nature), who loses his job and gets hired by a billionaire named Mr. Crane to live as a hermit. Finch is asked to take a vow of silence, to wear a horrible wool garment that gives him hives, to share his garden with a drugged lion, and lots of other tasks as invented by his whimsical and powerful employer – beekeeping, music, painting, gardening, you name it. If some hermit somewhere in history was asked to do something, Mr. Crane wants his hermit to do the same.   

But there’s more. Beyond the gentle comedic tension and satire created by Mr. Crane’s tasks, the novel has a serious heart. Finch must slowly learn how to be a hermit, dealing with loneliness and fear and boredom along the way. Not to mention with the repeated visits of Mr. Crane’s wife, a beautiful woman with plenty of opinions and questions for Finch about why he remains and “performs” his work as a hermit. She is a difficult temptation for Finch as he settles into a solitary existence but she also forces him to clarify exactly why he continues with his difficult project.

A hermit’s days are quiet, with plenty of time for observation and reflection. And Finch is a confirmed city-dweller, a nice twist on the story, and by that I mean he isn’t someone who already loved nature and so plotted and planned his retreat into the wild for ages. Finch has never had much experience with nature, and his withdrawal from the world has more to do with his dissatisfaction with society and with the kind of person society makes him. When he begins to get settled into his cave and his garden, much of the natural world comes as a revelation to him, giving the reader similar opportunities for reflection.

So I learned a lot about mushrooms and their shy lives. I learned that they’re quick to cower and quick to hide, that they’re willing to keep quiet and small so long as they’re left to grow…

Thinking like a mushroom came quickly to me, and it worked. In the first place I looked, brushing aside a soft curtain of moss and weeds, I found three perfect mushrooms crouched in the shadow of a large rock. They were so close they were practically—but not quite—touching each other, and as soon as I leaned close and disturbed the air around them my nostrils filled with the sweet scent of secrets, of wine cellars and old canning jars and the thrilling surprise of turning a stone to find a bustling community of potato bugs and millipedes thriving beneath. The excitement of life where it wasn’t expected.

This main story, however, actually takes place in the past and is framed by a narrative of Finch as an old man, alone in his wilderness, voluntarily forgotten by the world until one morning, after a violent storm, a pair of hikers trundle their way into his universe. These are the first people Finch has seen in a very long time, and the complexity of their intrusion is compounded by the fact that Finch has become nearly blind. The necessary relationship that develops between the hikers and the now-old Finch is where a part of the novel’s social commentary resides, adding a nuanced response to Himmer’s question about the value of living in complete isolation from other human beings.

There is also a very subtle twist in The Bee-Loud Glade, a question of the modern world intruding on Finch’s haven in an unexpected way. This is not an overwhelming plot turn by any means, but it is quite effective in getting Finch to formulate his ultimate understanding of the meaning of his life.

It should be pretty obvious that this is a novel that looks with much curiosity, censure and concern at the way in which humans live now, and which tries to identify other ways of engaging with the natural world and with one another. Himmer is careful, however, not to draw unbreachable boundaries around the ideas the novel offers. There is a deep criticism in The Bee-Loud Glade, but that criticism isn’t paralyzing or desperate, instead it orients the reader toward reflection, compassion and study. For a novel about a man living alone in the wilderness who hasn’t spoken for thirty or forty years, this book has quite a lot to say.

*The title of the novel, for anyone as curious as I was, comes from a poem by Yeats called The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Here are the first lines: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree / And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; / Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, / And live alone in the bee-loud glade

 
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Eric G. Wilson – My Business is to Create

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About two weeks ago I finished an interesting non-fiction book written by Eric G. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, and which will come out later this spring from the University of Iowa Press. I wrote a more formal review at Necessary Fiction, but thought I’d mention it here as well.

The book is called My Business is to Create: Blake’s infinite writing and it was an interesting combination of scholarly analysis of William Blake’s poetry and art with a kind of writer’s handbook. Wilson traces a ‘method,’ if you will, inspired by Blake, that he thinks creative types might find useful. I like the thought of combining these two ideas because I can see how close reading and literary analysis can be inspiring and, apparently, as Wilson points out, William Blake has been a source of inspiration for musicians, artists and writers for hundreds of years.

There was also something quite moving about Wilson’s evident admiration for Blake. I get that when you’ve studied someone for a very long time, you kind of can’t help becoming their champion. Not that Blake wouldn’t deserve this anyway, but Wilson’s esteem for Blake’s artistic fervor infused the book with a lot of earnest energy.

I know only a little about William Blake, so the biographical information and excerpts that Wilson provide are fascinating. I can see how across the centuries Blake has become a kind of mythical figure—the perfect stereotype of the struggling artist. A little bit crazy, a little bit eccentric, but touchingly devoted to his life’s work.

And Wilson is really serious about the method part. He traces out a way of conceiving of yourself as an artist and a way of developing a process of intense but ultimately liberating self-criticism. Underneath all of this is the simple truth that all art takes an immense amount of work and personal energy.

My Business is to Create is a slim little book, just under 100 pages, and Wilson’s writing is lively, if, at times, a little overly poetic, sacrificing clarity for exuberance. Ultimately, however, I found it an engaging and thought-provoking read.

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James Baldwin clears the issue for me

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One of my favorite aspects of being a bookworm is the serendipity of book interaction. Since writing down my intense reaction to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom the other day, I’ve been thinking and re-thinking why I got so upset in the first place. I mean, it’s just a book, right?

But then at noon yesterday I went out to the mailbox and got the mail and there waiting for me was a collection of essays published by Graywolf Press in 1988 called Multicultural Literacy, a book I’ve been waiting for from Bookmooch for a couple of weeks.

Being the impatient reader that I am, I opened to the first essay, delighted to see it was by James Baldwin. I was first introduced to Baldwin’s work with his short story, “Sonny’s Blues” which became one of my favorite stories of all time. It is an incredible story—filled with all the subtlety of a difficult sibling relationship and the pain of creative ache. It is also probably one of the most beautiful meditations on how music moves through an individual that I have ever read. To make the excerpt below understandable, you need to know that Sonny is a musician, but also a heroine addict, and the story is told from the perspective of Sonny’s brother, a teacher, who is watching his brother slowly die. The story ends in a nightclub, where Sonny is playing the piano, hitting deep on a blues tune in an attempt to transpose the essence of his entire life into something tangible:

I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now. I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. […] And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

I include this excerpt for the simple reason that it’s beautiful, but also because of that sneaky word, freedom. Baldwin’s freedom here is like a little origami figure, the more you pull on the folds, the more it opens itself up, leaving you to contemplate the intricate creases. He’s talking about Sonny, of course, and Sonny’s feeling of being trapped, but he’s also talking about the greater black American experience and how it has shaped Sonny, himself, and everyone in the room at this club.

I’m working a little backwards here, because I read the Baldwin essay first, which then brought me to reread “Sonny’s Blues” just after. What I realized after I had finished both pieces was that I finally understood exactly why my reaction to Franzen’s Freedom was so sharp, so angry. I will try to explain.

The Baldwin essay was written in 1963 and it addresses the extremely topical issue at the time, and the unfortunately ever-pertinent issue now, of racism in American society. There are several really strong quotes I’d like to pull out, on a number of issues, but for what I’m writing about today, this one should suffice:

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life.

So what does this have to do with Freedom? I’m not suggesting that for a book to be worthy, to be considered Serious Literature, it must take up with the very difficult and specific questions of racial identity in American society. No, Baldwin’s overarching lament in his essay is that American society cannot move forward until it recognizes its own inherent fallacies. His particular example is cultural (and still depressingly pertinent) but in the forty-eight years since his essay was published, we’ve added a few more issues into the mix.

This is where I should probably stop and say immediately that none of what I’m saying here is actually a criticism of Freedom the book, the story or the writing. It’s a well-written book, an engaging story, it asks interesting questions about a limited section of American society, it’s even funny at times and it attempts to make some statements about contemporary America.

But it does NOT move America forward by addressing any of those inherent fallacies. If anything it perpetuates them. If the self-indulgent, middle-class notion of ‘freedom’ as examined in Freedom is all that America has to agonize about, then we should consider ourselves pretty damn lucky.

So ultimately my frustration is with the conversation around Freedom, the intense desire to make this the defining book of the century, make it the greatest commentary on American society of the last fifty years. What a load of nonsense.

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first thoughts on Houellebecq – La Carte et le Territoire

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Well, reading my first Michel Houellebecq novel was not exactly what I expected. I imagined I would have to put up with some gritty and depressing sex scenes (there were none) and I thought I would be impressed nevertheless with his writing (yes, and no). As I mentioned before, I came to his latest novel, which won the 2010 Prix Goncourt, with the preconceived notion that he was a good writer, but probably not to my taste.

This is all just to say that hype is ridiculous, and try as I may to avoid it, there is always some amount of hype that filters its way into my reading brain, thus coloring my reading experience. So okay. Despite all that, what did I think?

La Carte et le Territoire (Eng: The Map and the Territory, which will probably come out later this year) is a strange novel – on one hand it’s extremely clever, on the other I couldn’t help finding it a little dull.

I want to say quickly why I found some of the book dull. First, I think I was simply expecting Houellebecq’s writing to be more intense or more daring. The book is well-written. But the prose is straightforward. Not very lyrical or descriptive. Most of the descriptive work is spent on labeling things. Objects are given their brand names, for example, and people are presented as static images, much like a photograph. The animation of each person comes through the 3rd person omniscient narrator who dips into the thoughts of the characters—fluidly, but again, almost always through exposition.

There is definitely a cynicism in Houellebecq’s writing, a cynicism toward human beings. I was expecting this aspect of his work, and I even agree with some of his vision, and yet there were moments that startled me. Moments in which Houellebecq expounds on some thought or notion of one of the characters and I just found myself thinking—how sad, how untrue.

Despite all that, I think what I’m really resisting about this book is its purposeful unwillingness to engage me in a seamless story. Time and time again, the novel does something to remind me of its fictional status. Where I got frustrated with this is that La Carte et le Territoire doesn’t necessarily do anything unusual with that pointed revelation. It just becomes a clever twist layered on top of a conventionally-told conventional story.

Briefly – the story:

Jed Martin is an artist. The novel recounts his entire life, with particular emphasis on his 30s and 40s, his relationship with a Russian woman named Olga, his friendship with the writer Michel Houellebecq and his feelings about his father.

Martin and Houellebecq meet because Houellebecq gets asked to write the catalog for Martin’s biggest exhibit. The men develop a strange friendship, which is cut short when Houellebecq is savagely murdered.

There are several layers of admirable cleverness to the metafictional trick of Houellebecq putting a writer named Michel Houellebecq into the novel:

First, Michel Houellebecq appears as a character for the first time when Jed and his father are having their annual Christmas dinner together. Jed mentions the fact that a write named Houellebecq was asked to write the catalog. The father says, “Michel Houellebecq?” and Jed says, “Do you know him?” The father answers:

“He’s a good writer, I think. An enjoyable read, and he has a pretty accurate vision of society.”

This is funny, obviously – Houellebecq having a character tell the reader that Houellebecq knows what he’s talking about when he portrays the world.  

Second, the catalog. In the novel, Houellebecq writes the catalog of Jed Martin’s art exhibit and this catalog takes the form of an overview of Martin’s artistic development and vision. But of course, the novel is exactly the same thing. Houellebecq writing about the life and art of Jed Martin.

Third, on page 151-153 of my edition, Jed Martin falls asleep at a café in the Shannon airport (after meeting Houellebecq to discuss the catalog project) and dreams that he is in a book, a book that recounts his life. He walks around a moment in this book, looking at the black letters against a white surface, at the names that appear and then disappear. And then he wakes up. As soon as he arrives in Paris, he calls Houellebecq to say that instead of giving him any old painting as a thank you for the catalog, Martin will paint Houellebecq’s portrait. Thus the two men are creating each other.

I haven’t even gotten to the murder part yet, or what I think Houellebecq might be doing with his Jed Martin character…but I’ll save that for another day.

It’s probably fairly clear that I’m a bit undecided about this work. I could discuss it for hours, for that reason alone it’s a fascinating piece of literature. I wish I’d read Houellebecq’s other novels first, so I’d know where to place this latest work. I have the sense this is a departure in many ways for Houellebecq, but I need to start reading if I want to see how…

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Jean Louis Fournier – Where We Going, Daddy

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Where We Going, Daddy by Jean Louis Fournier and translated by Adriana Hunter:

Where We Going, Daddy is not a memoir in the traditional sense. This is not Fournier’s attempt to work his way to some form of catharsis through well-structured essays, poetic descriptions of his suffering and a philosophical attitude toward Thomas and Mathieu’s handicap. This slim book, written in part as a letter to his sons and in part a collection of vignettes of remembered moments, is appropriately stark.

Click here for the full review.

Virginia Woolf – Night and Day

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This may be completely off the mark, but I’d like to hazard that Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day, published in 1919, was written not because the story came to her as an idea, but because Woolf had a question she wanted to take apart and examine and so created a story to suit it. I suppose one of the characters may have come to her first – if that’s the case, I’d guess it was Katherine Hilbery – but again, most likely even the most basic details of character were formed within the context of her question.

I say this because although Night and Day follows a relatively simple, domestic storyline, it is clearly more concerned with getting to the very heart of its question than it is with containing all the threads of its story. So on one level, this is a book about several people meeting, falling in love and getting engaged. To do this, they walk in the city, have dinner together, visit each other’s homes, have conversations, and spend time at various points in London. All rather mundane. On another level, however, this is a book that wants to investigate what ‘love’ means, whether it is even possible for a person to truly love another, and whether marriage has any meaning at all. That question then brought out some truly incredible passages of writing.

Now, in my experience, Woolf is a writer who wanted to understand and represent how thinking works, on both an emotional and a practical level. Again and again, she goes inside the minds of her characters, parceling out their thoughts in an orderly, detailed fashion, showing how thoughts shift from moment to moment, how emotions influence thoughts, how conversation effects and inspires a person’s thinking. This kind of writing can take a single instant in someone’s life and stretch it out to the length of that person’s interior reflection about said instant. Now imagine an entire book constructed around this kind of stop-time expansion. This is what reading Night and Day felt like.

What I find so curious about this is that I usually describe Woolf’s writing style with words like lively, frenetic, animated, energetic, even sometimes, exhausting. And on a sentence per sentence level, Night and Day certainly made use of Woolf’s prose energy. But the combination of the novel’s relatively fixed and flat storyline with that constant ballooning of thought, forced me to read slowly. I could not have raced through this novel if I wanted to, in fact, it would have made for a frustrating reading experience. Instead, I took up with the book chapter by chapter, curious to see how Woolf would approach this question of love and marriage in whatever scene or character would greet me.

Taken that way, Night and Day makes for a fascinating read. Here are all these young people trying to figure out whether attaching themselves to another being for the rest of their lives is a good idea, whether doing this will change them – possibly for the better, or unthinkably, for the worse. Woolf’s main character, Katharine Hilbery, internalizes this debate so fiercely she practically explodes (while remaining outwardly composed, of course) before the end of the novel. Because the book involves several different characters, Woolf offers several solutions to this difficult problem, something which, arguably, dilutes the story a bit, but I couldn’t help approving of the honesty of that response.

I’m still thinking about this book, and will undoubtedly go back to it, and her first novel, The Voyage Out, as I continue to read all of Woolf’s work.

Quim Monzo – Gasoline

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This week I reviewed Gasoline over at Necessary Fiction:

Satire is best when it doesn’t pull its punches, and Humbert is thoroughly skewered in Part Two. But Monzo takes this a step further by casting a shadow backward on Heribert, the very standard used to set Humbert up in the first place. Suddenly, he is no longer a foil, an example of true artistic integrity to be held against Humbert’s absurdity. We begin to suspect that Heribert, in the heyday of his own artistic success, was equally ridiculous. This cannibalizes Monzo’s questions and broadens the scope of the novel’s irony.

Click here for the full review.

 

Joanna Ruocco – The Mothering Coven

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I recently reviewed this book at Necessary Fiction :

But this is not a book to read with blithe inattention, as much of what happens and what is said could be perceived as nonsensical whimsy. A slower, more careful read detects the fragile threads of what makes this a novel and not a playful and poetic montage.

If you are interested in discovering a charmingly eccentric universe created out of a string of elegant and bizarre little scenes featuring eight formidable women and other unconventional characters, please look for this book.

I wanted to add a few words here about the experience of reading Ruocco’s style of experimental fiction. Experimental fiction can ask a lot of a reader – either in concentration or complicity – and not all readers are willing to enter into that exchange. Including myself. I think a person either falls willingly, happily, dizzyingly, into the experimental universe or is kept, for whatever reason, at too far a distance to engage with the text.

As I began to turn the pages of The Mothering Coven, I was at first curious, then amused, then agreeably puzzled. I found myself both delighted at and concerned about the strange world and characters Ruocco had created. Eventually, I fell into the rhythm of the book’s intriguing vocabulary and shifting perspective. I am a sucker for a carefully-placed first-person plural, unusual description and poetic imagery. Especially if all of that comes packaged within enough “story” to keep me invested in remaining along for the rest of the journey.

Also, I appreciated Ruocco’s ability to combine whimsy with real feeling. So much of what happens in The Mothering Coven is, for lack of a better world, silly. But somehow, inexplicably, none of it is really silly at all. This is a novel about people feeling unsteady in their world and about missing loved ones. It is both comical and ridiculous, making it a lighthearted read, and yet wholly serious, making it difficult to forget.

Finally, to end, here is one of my favorite passages from the book:

The action has moved to the kitchen. It must be time for lunch. For Agnes, it is a working lunch. She is researching vermilions, the tiny lions crushed by the thousand to color the crimson velvets of Versailles. Her heart isn’t in it. Vermilions had many hearts. Of course, they have been crushed to extinction.