Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘contemporary fiction’

Nina-Marie Gardner – Sherry & Narcotics

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This week at Necessary Fiction, I had the pleasure of reviewing Nina-Marie Gardner’s début novel, Sherry & Narcotics:

It isn’t easy to publish a love story these days—somehow we’ve all decided this is the stuff of cliché. As if the back and forth success and failure of looking for love doesn’t concern most people most of the time. Which is why Nina-Marie Gardner’s Sherry & Narcotics stands out in its genre of contemporary urban fiction. Here is a novel whose central movement is fixedly concerned with a young woman and a young man and whether or not the two will find a way to be together. (…)

There’s an argument to be made for Sherry & Narcotics as a coming-of-age novel for Generation X.  Mary is very much a member of that tribe—financially and geographically independent, at ease in the greater world, with more choices and possible connections than any of the previous generations, and yet, true to the Generation X crisis, slow to negotiate her way to emotional adulthood and at risk to the dangers of her precious independence.

Read the full review here.

 

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Patrick Michael Finn – From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet

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Before leaving on holiday, I reviewed (at Necessary Fiction) Patrick Michael Finn’s excellent collection of short stories, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet:

The eight stories in Patrick Michael Finn’s collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, are so thematically and stylistically cohesive they create a story collection that reads very much like a novel. These are not linked stories, not in the traditional sense; they do not share characters or even strict time periods. But they do share Finn’s rigorously consistent narrative style, his delight in intense sensory description and a firm geographic anchor in the city of Joliet, Illinois.

Together, these miniature novels create an unsettling fictional world of mid-western America, a detailed and vivid narrative rendering of the outcome of the area’s immigrant, industrial and social history.

I make it very clear in the review how much I enjoyed this collection. Finn’s writing is wonderfully consistent and although his narrative voice transforms itself for each story to create a unique perspective or voice, it also maintains a really satisfying stylistic harmony. Also, these are long stories. Stories that take time to get through, that draw you inside a detailed and complicated world. Each piece felt like it could easily be expanded into a full-length novel and I loved that about each one.

Find the full review here.

 

xTx – Normally Special

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Today at Necessary Fiction I reviewed Normally Special by xTx:

The narrators of these short pieces are worth commenting on because there is very little differentiation between them—all first person, all with a similar emotional tone, and all concerned with the pain, aches and losses from a related set of categories. This harmony gives the collection a real sense of unity as well as gives the reader a feeling that these are all the fictionalized abstractions of one person’s experience. In this way, the reader becomes an authorized voyeur of the narrator’s confessions and revelations. This intimacy is both unnerving and a source of the collection’s appeal.

The longer stories, however, because of their ability to involve more detail and real narrative complexity, do not create the same narrator-confessor/reader-voyeur impression. Despite also working from a first-person narrator, these stories each create a separate and distinct narrator negotiating a unique fictional landscape, alive with its own set of difficult questions.

Click here for the full review.

 

a little afraid of experimental lit: Giraffes in Hiding by Carol Novack

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I’ve been thinking about experimental narratives lately, for a number of reasons, but mainly because I was working on a review of an extremely unique book called Giraffes in Hiding: The Mythical Memoirs of Carol Novack. I read this book all the way back in January, and then re-read it and then jumped around inside it for awhile, re-reading certain pieces and basically just trying to figure out how to write about it. I almost didn’t write about it because I didn’t feel like I was up to the task.

I wrote the review eventually (and happily, and honestly) because it bothered me too much that I couldn’t seem to find a way to write about it. Not knowing what else to do, I forced myself to come up with a metaphor that helped me envision the text as a whole. (Hopefully that metaphor will help potential new readers, too, but that isn’t for me to decide). Envisioning the text as a whole is, I think, where some people, maybe even many people, get stumped when they’re confronted with experimental writing. This mass and tumble of words and ideas just sort of spills off the page toward you, attacks you maybe, or just slides on by indifferently; either way, you’re not sure what to do with it, because:

  • it doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever read before
  • it’s maybe a little confusing, even purposefully confusing
  • you worry that you’re not smart enough or not well-read enough (in this tradition of non-traditional literature) to understand what’s going on
  • you’re not sure you like it, or, maybe you love it – but in either case you can’t say why exactly
  • you can’t “see” it the way you can “see” the shape and structure and filler of other narratives—it’s all globby or too spikey or too empty

Something that helped me find the courage to write this review is the series of articles and interviews “What is experimental lit?” by Christopher Higgs at HTML giant. His third essay is about reading strategies. He suggests:

For the former, what may prove to be invaluable might be a close attention to patterns of repetition, rhythm, connectivity and gaps between words and phrases, the moments of caesura, the sites of tension, the magnitudes of intensities, or the ways in which the text unsettles the limitations of genre and convention, subverts familiarity, articulates emotional states for which there are no nouns, or enacts the reader’s sublime.

So, okay, details. And I think most readers who are even open to considering experimental literature do this almost instinctively, because it is the first and only access into the text. Since the whole is denied upfront (not indefinitely, but often at first) the parts become really important. The sound of the words, the play of the language and how that engages with the ideas behind the work.

This was definitely the case for my reading of Giraffes in Hiding. I had to throw out my deep-seated and learned notions of how to experience a text and get as intimate as I could with the details. The details finally led me toward a conception of the whole. I found the experience interesting. I won’t say pleasant, because I am far too emotionally connected to my usual reading experience, and by that I mean I love being submersed into a continuous and coherent narrative. I am unapologetically Aristotelian.

But I’m open to experimental literature because I like the questions that it asks. I like being nudged to find new ways inside a piece of fiction, even if it proves difficult or frustrating. I may never gravitate toward this type of fiction instinctively, but I’m very glad there are other readers and writers who do—they enrich my reading world.

Here are links (series overview, Q&A overview) to the rest of Higgs’ series, for anyone interested.

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From Wood to Saramago to Houellebecq

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I wrote last week how Wood champions literary realism at the end of How Fiction Works. But really, he does this subtly throughout the entire novel. Not by ever contending that experimental fiction doesn’t have as much to say about the relationship between fiction and life, but through a kind of censure, again related to craft, which is detectable in passages like this:

Is there a way in which all of us are fictional characters, parented by life and written by ourselves? This is something like Saramago’s question; but it is worth noting that he reaches his questions by traveling in the opposite direction of those postmodern novelists who like to remind us of the metafictionality of all things. A certain kind of postmodern novelist (like John Barth, say) is always lecturing us: ‘Remember, this character is just a character. I invented him.’ By starting with an invented character, however, Saramago is able to pass through the same skepticism, but in the opposite direction, toward reality, toward the deepest questions.

Wood is talking about José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, a novel I’m now really eager to read. I do really like postmodern fiction, but there are times it can get tiresome. A bit shouty. But based on Wood’s description, it sounds like I would love Saramago’s way of negotiating a postmodern existential crisis.

What I understand Wood to be saying here is that he approves of Saramago’s existential exploration because it doesn’t just stop at revealing the artifice to the reader. Instead, it uses that revelation to ask a further question. His quote is lovely:

Yet the novel suggests that perhaps there is something culpable about being content with the spectacle of the world when the world’s spectacle is horrifying.

Because I am deep into my Houellebecq project at the moment, this makes me consider the metafictional aspect of his work. I am slowly getting the sense that Houellebecq is unable to forget for a moment that he is writing, that he is creating a story for others to read, to be consumed. A certain narrative personality—either Houellebecq himself or an authorial personality he uses when writing—hovers over his work. It isn’t so much like Barth and the constant reminder of the invented character, but more like Houellebecq just can’t get out of the way.

I’m slowly starting to get a feel for Houellebecq’s overall aesthetic, and his project, and the more I read of his work, the more I think that he uses this form of metafiction because he would consider it dishonest to write the kind of fiction that pretends the writer doesn’t exist. I find that notion of dishonesty pretty interesting.

But I’m still working through all of his work and I think I’ll wait to expand on this idea until I’ve finished, or at least, nearly finished. I want to think about it a little more in case I’m misreading him…

*Thank you to careful reader, Guilherme, who kindly reminded me that it is Saramago and not Saramango! This post now corrected.

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About the end of James Wood's How Fiction Works

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I have been meandering my way through James Wood’s How Fiction Works for the last month or so and finally finished it up over the weekend. I think what I love the most about this little book is how easy Wood makes the study of literature appear. He condenses years of study and probably thousands upon thousands of hours of passionate, careful reading into a series of thematically-linked paragraphs. Paragraph 1 begins with narrative perspective and Paragraph 123 ends the book with a succinct appeal to craft:

…for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continually about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable ageing. The true writer, that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.

This last sentence is Wood’s answer to the assertion that literary realism is no longer a viable genre. To get to this statement, he visits several of realism’s loudest denouncers (Roland Barthes, Rick Moody, William Gass…) and disagrees with their conclusions that because fiction suffers from convention it therefore cannot ever express what is real:

…just because artifice and convention are involved in a literary style does not mean that realism (or any other narrative style) is so artificial and conventional that it is incapable of referring to reality.

Wood concedes that literary techniques are constantly becoming conventional. Of course narrative techniques, expressions, metaphors and all the other building blocks of fiction are always and forever ‘at-risk’ of rendering themselves ineffective. What is called into question is their ability to render ‘truth’ in an original and novel way, but never their ability to reflect reality.

I’ve never been particularly fussed about the debate on literary realism. I think both perspectives provide insight into how fiction works as an art form, how it is negotiated by readers. I am definitely more rooted in literary realism, however, so I would never be the kind of reader to chuck it out the window anyway, but I appreciated Wood’s championing of the genre as well as his celebration of the writer who simultaneously embraces realism while writing to escape all that has already been written.

So, I’ve only touched on approximately 20 pages of this excellent 180-page book. I’ll see if I have more to say another day…

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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.

 

Iris Murdoch – Under the Net

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If you had asked me to describe Iris Murdoch a few months ago, when all I had read of her fiction was The Sandcastle and The Nice and the Good, I would have described her as skilled at sharp, biting domestic fiction. The kind of writer who picks apart personal relationships – friendships, marriages, sibling dynamics – with careful and sometimes frightening acuity. I would have tempered those two statements with a comment on her ability to render her characters with sympathy, with shades of gray, with feeling and with compassion.

But now, after reading Under the Net, I realize she is not so easily categorized. With Under the Net I must add humorist and satirist to her accomplishments. It isn’t every writer who can do both straightforward fiction and satire, and I was very impressed to get into the novel and realize how different it was from the other books of hers I had read.

Under the Net is about Jake Donaghue, a struggling novelist who translates French potboilers on the side. Jake is about as self-absorbed as you can get. But he is also wonderfully clever and likeable. He has a personal philosophy against work, so he does a lot of sponging off of friends and girlfriends.

This personal philosophy is what sets the entire book in motion. His current girlfriend, Madge, has decided to kick him out. So Jake and his friend Finn (most excellent character, by the way, a kind of Jake-shadow, who chimes in from time to time with many of the novel’s best lines) must move. Their options are limited, and Finn suggests Jake go look up an ex-girlfriend named Anna. The suggestion appears to unmoor our poor Jake.

One of the aspects of the book I enjoyed so much is Jake’s constant hyperbole. Suddenly, although we’ve never heard of her before, although he hasn’t mentioned her until now, suddenly Anna is the lost love of Jake’s life. And finding her, getting her to love him back, sends him on a series of wild capers across London and all the way to Paris and back. And many of these capers raise a measure of doubt as to whether Jake really cares for Anna at all. But of course Under the Net isn’t just about Anna and Jake.

If I had to hazard a statement to sum up in one line what the novel is about, I’d say it’s about poking fun at that pervasive myth of the artistic temperament. Jake, who is so committed to his writing that he’s willing to live in relative poverty in order to devote himself to his typewriter, doesn’t write a single word for the entire book. And he considers himself a deep, intellectual and perceptive person but most of the novel’s action results from his misunderstandings.

Now, despite the humor of the book, there is a subtle philosophical discussion running its way through Jake’s antics. About friendship and politics and about the individual. I think this works and never gets heavy because Jake remains so completely likeable. I think if I were to meet someone like Jake in person I’d want to throw him off a bridge, but within the universe of the novel, I followed him with great sympathy and support. As a reader, I wanted Jake to eventually succeed. I leave it to anyone else who reads the book to determine whether they think he does.

Maryse Condé – Les Belles Ténébreuses

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Just finished the most recent Maryse Condé novel, Les Belles Tenebreuses*. I have admired Condé’s style and work since studying her in graduate school. She’s a masterful, interesting, and thoughtful writer. But something’s gone wrong in Les Belles Tenebreuses. This new novel appears to be navigating many of contemporary society’s uglinesses. So in that sense, it has something to say. But I felt that several of the pieces didn’t seem to fit together and I think she cut some corners in her narrative.

Les Belles Tenebreuses is the story of Kassem, a perfect example of our fractured society. He comes from a Guadeloupean father and a Romanian mother, but he was born in France, in relative poverty, in a violent and dysfunctional family. When the novel opens, Kassem has been working at a kind of tourist wonderland in northern Africa as a chef. The complex where he lives and works is destroyed by a terrorist bombing and he is left without a job, without any money, without a girlfriend (she was killed in the bombing), and without any chance of going home. Kassem, because of his strange cultural background, and undoubtedly his name, is at first suspected in the bombing. This works itself out, but he is left adrift in a culture of which he knows nothing. He ends up going to a local mosque, because it’s the only place that will let him in.

At the mosque he meets a man named Ramzi, who is a famous doctor and political figure. Ramzi hires him and the two begin working together, although it is never quite explained what Ramzi sees in the young, awkward Kassem. At this point, the book begins to read like a grotesque fairytale involving a mass epidemic, embalming techniques, despotism, social and political displacement. I don’t mind grotesque and I think fairytales have much to offer a reader. But. Well. Ramzi and Kassem move from Africa, to France and eventually to America. Where much the same things happen over and over again. Kassem falls in love, people die, Ramzi becomes involved with political insiders, people become suspicious of Ramzi, confide their suspicious to Kassem, who then tells Ramzi (being mysteriously unable to lie to Ramzi) and so on and so forth, more people die.

Kassem is an antihero, with no real character or will of his own. He lets himself be sort of blown from situation to situation, never addressing what it is that he wants, aside from a good screw. That isn’t quite fair. There is some feeling that Kassem is a stand-in for the “youth of today” – adrift in the world, without a sense of heritage or self. But he is a witness to a staggering number of heinous crimes, and each one revolts him or scares him, but he never does anything. I would like to give Condé more credit for what she’s doing, in the sense that she is investigating the difficulties and violence in modern society, perhaps caused by globalization, perhaps caused by our increasing distance from our families and our roots. These are all issues she mentions. But where she could go into detail and carefully work the psychology of her characters, instead she blasts from event to event with little more than cursory narrative.

Take Kassem’s spiritual transformation, for example. Throughout the course of the novel, he becomes a Muslim. And a fairly devout one, Condé tells us. Yet Kassem’s journey to Islam does nothing to change his character, does not affect his fate or the events of the story in any way. It’s just one of the things he does. He meets some people he might not have met otherwise, but they do not alter him.

Essentially, I am criticizing this book because, despite its clear ambitions and worthy subject, the writing felt rushed and patchy – Kassem sobs, he cries, he stands around dumbfounded. Events are larger-than-life with no attempt to persuade the reader of their meaning. Ideas are introduced and then never dealt with again, making the story inconsistent. And the characters are all types. I won’t even go near the ending, which was baffling to say the least.

Whatever the issue, I feel the book wasn’t successful. I will go back and soothe myself with Condé’s other work that I have so loved… Crossing the Mangrove and Segu and Tree of Life.

*The book hasn’t been translated into English but I’m sure it will, and it will be excellent (the translation, I mean). Condé’s husband Richard Philcox has been her translator for just about ever now. And his translations are beautifully, wonderfully done.

Sten Nadolny – The Discovery of Slowness

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From The Discovery of Slowness:

It was an evening sky of infinite duration, shadows becoming gigantically long, and when swaths of mist rose, they turned at once into reddish clouds, changing colors up to the northern horizon.

John looked out on the ice, studied its forms, and tried to understand what they meant. It was true, then, that with its own power the sea could surpass itself. Here was the proof. Here he discovered the meaning of his dreams.

I loved this book.

Sir John Franklin was a real person and Nadolny follows his fascinating life with great care from what I can only assume came out of a formidable amount of research. The novel does so much more, however, than recount the facts of Franklin’s life. It investigates an aesthetics of thought.

On the surface the book is about Franklin’s passion for the ocean, for exploring and discovery. But Nadolny only uses this “fact” of Franklin’s life to engage with the more complex notions of intellect, empathy and honor (to oneself and to others). I was most interested in this idea of slow, deliberate thinking and how Franklin was aware of the way his mind worked. His “character” develops along with the movement of the story and the great events he lives through, but more interestingly, his perception and understanding of his capacity for reflection is subject to a more subtle, but ultimately more profound, revelation.

This book was originally published in German in 1983 and translated into English by Ralph Freedman in 1987.