Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts tagged ‘contemporary fiction’

Nadine Gordimer – Burger's Daughter

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Well, I didn’t think it could happen but it finally did. I shouldn’t feel so disappointed about this but I do. I was prepared to love all of Nadine Gordimer’s work wholeheartedly. And its not that Burger’s Daughter is bad – on the contrary, it’s a rich story with a lot of very interesting questions. And there are those moments of pure Gordimer – exquisite writing with just the right reflection or description. But as a whole, in its movement through and from each scene to scene, it just kind of got lost in itself along the way.

 

The novel has three distinct parts and if I explain what they are to any extent, I will give the story away. I wanted very much for these three parts to work together – and I suppose that on the surface they do. They represent three distinct phases of Rosa Burger’s self-actualization. But instead of leading one to the other, they felt more like images taped together a bit awkwardly at the seams. There was a moment in the middle of Part II that I thought Gordimer had changed course for an entirely different story and I was ready to feel cheated or at the very least confused. An act of almost-believable coincidence puts the story back on track and eventually it traipses forward to an ending which felt…well, I suppose it felt okay.

 

It must be difficult when writing fiction with a political purpose to keep your eye fixed firmly on storytelling. There were moments when certain characters got far too involved in making speeches and I admit I started reading diagonally. If Gordimer is anything, she is thorough. I don’t doubt that when politically engaged people get together their meetings are everything she portrays them to be – intricate, involved, passionate. But to read through their every detail is frustrating for me – the reader – because I want to stay focused on a character I have come to appreciate or worry about. I don’t want Marxist or any other theory explained to me or examined ad nauseum by characters who will leave the story as quickly as they came in.

 

I mentioned in my review of her sixth novel, The Conservationist, that Gordimer uses a particular technique of having the main character speak to another character (or characters) in their mind. A kind of imaginary conversation which gives the main character the right to explain himself, complain, or defend himself. In The Conservationist this device was a source of some of the most moving passages of the entire book. In Burger’s Daughter she uses the very same stylistic device, but at first I found it horribly distracting. The person to whom Rosa addresses her thoughts is an ex-lover – someone the reader never meets on the page. It was frustrating never having that person in the flesh – just a construct of Rosa’s mind. In Part II, she switches to “thinking at” her father’s first wife, the woman she is staying with in France. I don’t think it works particularly well in that section either, but not for the same reasons. More because all of Part II seems disjointed and apathetic until we reach the coincidence I mention above. But then all of a sudden, in Part III, I saw why Gordimer continued to use the device. Suddenly Rosa is addressing her dead father. And I think this was the whole point. Her transformation is complete and she can safely begin a conversation she has been longing to have but never felt confident enough to do.

 

I won’t put Burger’s Daughter on my list of favorites but as always I’m glad to have read it. Her eighth novel, July’s People, is one I have already read and enjoyed. It’s short so I think I will re-read it before moving on.

Richard Ford, Wildfire

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At some point last year or the year before I read several short stories by Richard Ford – Rock Springs, Communist and Under the Radar, and knew immediately I would like to read more of his work. I recently mooched his fourth novel, Wildfire, and within a few pages had this strange feeling I had read it before. I hadn’t in fact but the voice and the situation in Wildfire is nearly identical to the story Communist. I actually love it when something like this happens because it lets me see how Ford was playing with an idea, a situation, a certain voice and a type of character. Communist was published in his collection titled Rock Springs in 1987; Wildfire was published as a novel in 1990.

 

The bulk of the story of Wildfire occurs over a few short days in the fall of 1960 and is told by sixteen-year-old Joe. Joe, the only child of golf-pro Jerry and homemaker Jeanette, gives us a first person account of essentially three days. The three days which culminate in a two-year separation between his parents.

 

The novel begins like this:

 

In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.

 

It wasn’t until we meet Mr. Miller thirty pages later that I thought about the technique of opening the novel with this line and how it functioned against the novel as a whole. It’s a big statement. In fact, it’s a complete summary of what the next 163 pages are going to be about. The advantage of opening with a line like this is that I know when I first see Warren Miller on the page that he is someone I need to pay attention to, someone who will affect the story in a significant way. The risk is that it prohibits tension from building on its own.

 

Do I think Ford pulls it off? Yes, but that’s maybe not the real question. What I find more interesting is that Ford creates a certain mood around Warren Miller when we do meet him for the first time that this first hint about him is entirely unnecessary. Without it, I would still have “met” him and thought – pay attention, something interesting is going on here. The line works only as an introduction to the overall story and the information it gives is less important than the first person voice it establishes. Which is, I think, more to the point.

 

First person narration of this kind is a delicate and often difficult technique. The narrator, from some distant point in the future, is going over the events of a significant moment in his life. In some instances, a life-changing moment. But presumably the narrator is now beyond that moment, so how does he go about recreating the intensity of that instance for the reader? There is a certain amount of hindsight and analysis involved in the narrator’s recreation (elements which help represent the story on multiple levels and add deeper meaning), but at the same time, the narrator needs to reproduce the events in a way that will captivate the reader. The trick is to find a balance between self-awareness and disconnect so as to avoid melodrama and using a heavy-hand with revelation.

 

 

 

In Wildfire, Ford handles his narrator with a lot of understatement and subtlety. Sometimes too much, however, because there were moments I started to wonder whether this kid was going to react to anything. But I think this is probably the better side to err on, because if he’d been throwing things left and right and getting in people’s faces, he would have taken over what was happening between his parents and the novel would have become his story. Instead, he functioned as a watcher, a listener, a timid evaluator. And although he did venture contemplative reactions to what was going on around him, he did not ever “act” or put anything into motion on his own.

 

This is an interesting choice for Ford to have made. I should re-word one of my phrases above, in the sense that this novel maybe isn’t supposed to be “life-changing” for the narrator, but instead, eye-opening. It is essentially a sequence of events from his adolescence which teach him a valuable lesson – about adults, about love and about his family ­– and that he tells slowly and carefully over 160 or so pages. It’s a clever way to side-step the structure of a traditional coming-of-age novel.

 

Another aspect of the novel which was fun to chart was the dialogue. It very skillfully mirrors the increasing disjointedness between Joe and his parents. As their lives grow more haphazard and out of control, so does the dialogue grow more awkward and uncomfortable. Joe was a particular catalyst for this. He rarely offers anything more than variations of “I agree” or poses simple, fairly naïve questions. This reticence allows the adults around him to say too much. I can’t think of anything more conducive to awkward honesty than someone who doesn’t dare offer the slightest contradiction or opinion.

 

I think it is difficult to create a narrator who doesn’t “act” – and perhaps frustrating for a reader who might be more accustomed to the “I” being the novel’s mover and shaker, the one who will undergo some kind of overt transformation or affect change. In Wildfire, Joe doesn’t seem to change much at all. But as a witness to the transformation of those around him, a transformation which renders his world particularly unstable, he’s powerfully sympathetic.

 

The writing in Wildfire is quite exquisite so I’ll finish up with this passage:

 

I watched a tall spruce tree catch fire high in the dark. A spark had found it, and it exploded in a bright, steepling yellow flame that leaped and shot out bits of fire into the night toward other trees, and swirled its own white smoke, flaming and then dying quickly as the wind on the hillside- a wind that did not blow where we were – changed and died. It all happened in an instant, and I knew it was dangerous though in a beautiful way. And I understood, just as I sat there en the car with my mother, what I thought dangerous was: it was the thing that did not seem able to hurt you, but quickly and deceivingly would.

 

 

Rosy Thornton – Hearts and Minds

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Finally have some time today to write about my recent reading. I’ve shuttled my friend to the airport and although I had a lovely time taking her around the region, I’m also happy to get back into my quieter routine. Which I will kick off by finally writing up my thoughts on Rosy Thornton’s novel Hearts and Minds. 

Books about life at university often have a certain energy to them. A lot of life packed into the pages, and from all directions – from the students with their natural enthusiasm for life and penchant for melodrama, from the professors with either their honest desire to pass something along or a personal agenda (or perhaps both), and finally, from the simple concentration of so many people living and interacting within the academic bubble. Obviously this sort of microcosm is just ripe for conflict. And conflict is what Rosy Thornton gives us in this, her second novel.  

The tension in the novel is multi-faceted – gender wars, political infighting, family dynamics – and centers on two main characters, James Rycarte and Martha Pearce and their respective roles at St. Radegund’s College for women in Cambridge. Rycarte is the new Master, the school’s first male head of house and a non-academic (two unalterable sins only a few people are willing to forgive him) while Pearce is St. Radegund’s Senior Tutor, a woman struggling beneath the weight of her school and family responsibilities. 

I suspect most reader sympathies will lie most easily with Martha Pearce. She’s an intelligent and caring professor, a loving mom and devoted wife but she’s also overworked and faced with a raft of difficult personal and academic decisions. Her daughter has fallen into depression, her husband is just about the most unsupportive lay about lout possible and she’s worried about her current job and what her professional options might be for the future.  

Rycarte is appealing in a different way. He’s a bit more fragile, less inwardly confident than Pearce and quite unsure of the best way to proceed, both in his new job at St. Ragegund’s but also at this stage in his life – as a divorced father settling into a very different lifestyle than the one he’d engaged in for many years as a journalist and foreign correspondent. His awareness of the precariousness of his new situation makes him an endearing character. 

Hearts and Minds examines the inner workings of this type of small university with its suitably lofty ideals and worrying financial concerns and scratches away at the sore spot where these two preoccupations come at odds. Despite this serious focus, this isn’t a heavy book, as Thornton’s writing is brisk and clear and she strides confidently through the novel’s various intersecting themes. There is a lightness about the novel, brought about, I think, from the reader’s nearly immediate approval of both Rycarte and Pearce and how they conduct themselves through their academic and personal ups and downs.  

Family, influence, academics, political machinations, integrity, new love and weathered love…the book takes up each of these ideas and turns them over a few times in its vigorous movement through the hustle of St. Radegund’s calendar year.

Reading Writer – Never Let Me Go cont.

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Narrator, narrator, narrator. What a powerful creature you are.

On Tuesday evening, I started reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and then I finished it up on Wednesday afternoon. It’s a rare treat to focus on a book in what feels like essentially one sitting. This kind of intensive reading exaggerates the feeling I get of having completely exited my own reality and gone visiting another. And the smooth, unwavering quality of Never Let Me Go’s narrator Karen kept me firmly within the confines of the story.

I don’t want to go into too many details about the actual story of Never Let Me Go because I think it would spoil the fun of reading the book for those who don’t know anything about it. Suffice it to say the novel presents an alternate version of contemporary reality where certain scientific decisions require a new kind of social segregation. I’ve heard the novel labeled science fiction and I suppose that might be true, but I think it’s really beside the point. The point for me is the writing, combined with the novel’s careful exploration of Ishiguro’s idea.

I want to focus on the narrator. I was dubious of Ishiguro’s handling of Karen at first. I wanted her to have a different kind of voice – less explanatory, less hesitant, less flat. I felt like I wasn’t in good hands and that the way she told the story needed to be cleaned up or edited or smoothed somehow. I was worried it might be a case of a very successful writer not being held to certain standards anymore, which is something I do think happens as editors become less certain whether they can criticize or offer changes. And I held tight to that criticism for nearly a third of the book until it slowly dawned on me that Ishiguro was doing this on purpose and for a very good reason.

From the very beginning, Karen’s overall tone is one of jaded resignation. And it was driving me insane. I couldn’t detect the level of emotion I thought she should have. Nor could I understand why she felt compelled to do so much over-explaining. Until the details of Ishiguro’s frightening world started coming into clearer focus and then it all made sense. Especially when we remember that Karen begins her story at the end, when she’s eight months from leaving her job and taking on her “real” role in society, when what she has to tell us has already happened. It’s only when we get to the end, that it makes sense why she has the tone of voice she has. She’s worse than resigned. That’s the whole point.

But the point of letting this kind of narrator tell her story (something I think most writing classes or instructors would tell you to avoid like the plague because in essence she is lifeless) is where I think Ishiguro made a clever decision. Her tone of voice is specifically calculated for who she is. This sounds silly and maybe what I’m saying won’t make sense unless you’ve read the book. But she isn’t just telling her story – she IS the story. And her voice, her resignation, her understanding of herself at the end, becomes the greatest piece of evidence of the novel’s tragedy.

And Ishiguro gives us everything we really need to know about her right on page one. Pretty damn clever.

Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go

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There are times I wish I knew a lot more about sociology or psychology, when I wish I knew more about what we’ve discovered in terms of human emotional and behavioral development, for example, or how our psycho-social needs shape our transformation into functional members of society. I have some basic assumptions about social conditioning but nothing in depth. Nothing I’m definite about or feel confident in adopting as a theory. 

However, this seems to be what Kazuo Ishiguro is exploring in his novel Never Let Me Go. What is the emotional or intellectual essence of being human? The fictional construct he’s come up with to explore this idea is a good one – at least it struck me as well-suited to his purpose. I don’t want to give too much away, however, because I think the experience of reading this particular novel is a lot more interesting if you know nothing about the story at all. A lot of the tension for me came about through my labored understanding of what exactly was going on.  

In the most basic terms, the novel concerns a trio of individuals who have grown up together. The story centers on their coming-of-age, as it were, and their understanding of their role in a larger society. That sounds all rather ordinary, doesn’t it? But it’s not at all. I’ll recycle a line from my other post on Never Let Me Go, in an attempt to explain without giving too much away – the society they’re meant to live in, because of certain scientific discoveries, requires a strict and terrifying kind of social segregation. And our trio is on the wrong side. 

What comes out of Ishiguro’s construct is an attempt to locate the soul. Maybe that seems rather lofty, but I do think that’s what he’s getting at. Do we have a soul because all human beings necessarily have a soul, or do we learn what having a soul means and therefore have one? And what if, finally, it actually doesn’t matter whether we have a soul? Of all the novel’s questions, this one struck me as the most frightening. 

I wrote above that a lot of the novel’s tension comes through the reader’s slow understanding of the details of Ishiguro’s fictional world – we keep imagining the worst and waiting for some kind of confirmation or denial. But there’s something else in terms of reader-narrator tension: as the story progresses, the narrator entertains similar questions about the soul and free will as the reader does and the reader keeps waiting for the moment when the narrator might hazard a realization. But it slowly becomes apparent that everything about the narrator’s life precludes her from being able to form the questions in the same way as the reader. To me, that fundamental difference is Ishiguro’s attempt at answering his own question. 

I’ll definitely be adding more Ishiguro to my mountain of books to be read someday. Several years ago I read An Artist of the Floating World and if I remember correctly it has a similar aesthetic – disturbing but quiet. Thoughtful but mildly strange.  

I’m switching gears somewhat for the weekend and finishing up Rosy Thornton’s intricate Hearts and Minds. And I hope to settle down and read Nadine Gordimer’s fourth (and very short) novel The Late Bourgeois World. Other than that I will see what leaps off the shelf! 

Also, before I forget – Victoria from Eve’s Alexandria has put together an informative and witty post about the Orange Prize long list. Some of these look really interesting.  

Nadine Gordimer – Occasion for Loving

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I love it when you’re reading a book and you’re just enjoying the scenes, the ideas and the prose and then suddenly you come across a few passages that change everything. That put the entire novel into perspective. That transform the story into something much greater than thoughtful fiction. 

Nadine Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving kind of sneaks up on you like that. I was reading this book and although I was enjoying it, I was also kind of thinking it might turn out to be one I’d leave on the shelf after finishing and not think much about again. Instead, the book packs kind of a surprising wallop.  

The basic story centers on a family, The Stilwells, and their relationship with another couple, Boaz and Ann Davis. The Stilwells, as represented mostly by the mother Jessie, do not agree with South African apartheid and live their life as much as possible as though the color barrier did not exist. In some ways they convince themselves they exist outside the system – their home is open to anyone, they travel freely to the townships and work within the political parties that are actively fighting against the apartheid system – and this is their way of believing they have kept their own integrity intact. 

But of course this isn’t possible. Their attempt at living as though apartheid doesn’t affect them gets called into question when Ann begins an affair with one of the Stilwell’s black friends. Everything about this affair serves to highlight what it means to have your life defined through the color of your skin. There is one line, taken from somewhere smack in the middle of the book, that I felt encapsulated this very idea: 

Every contact with whites was touched with intimacy; for even the most casual belonged by definition to the conspiracy against keeping apart. 

Ann and her lover Gideon are engaged in an act of political transgression. In a situation like theirs, this will always be more important than anything else between them. So how is it possible for anyone to consider the affair without first considering that Ann has power and freedom and choice and Gideon has none? Even Ann’s husband, who should be allowed to honestly experience all the emotions involved in a betrayal cannot forget for one moment that the relationship will always be more complicated than that. 

Another thing that struck me the more I got into the story was how Gordimer skillfully reveals just how difficult it is for someone in a privileged class, no matter their sympathies for the oppressed, to really understand what’s it like to live without any freedom. Jessie comes close, toward the end in a conversation with Gideon but even then she can only frame her understanding from her own perspective: 

She smiled, looking at him from a distance. “We’re not talking about the same thing. It’s a question of freedom.”

“Freedom?” He was astonished, derisive.

“There’s more than one kind, you know.”

“Well, one kind would do for me.”

“Yes, perhaps it would, because you haven’t got it. Perhaps you’ll never have to ask yourself why you live. A political struggle like yours makes everything very simple.” 

The book also contains a tangential story about Jessie and her son from a first marriage. It offers a nice parallel, a side-route exploration about freedom and responsibility, about natural ties to family members and whether those are created or grow up all on their own.  

Occasion for Loving surprised me. Early on I thought I had figured out what the book was going to be about, thought I knew what the experience of reading it would feel like. But I was wrong. What appears to be a calm and careful story is actually destabilized with a tremendously angry undercurrent. The novel nurses a veiled rage about the injustice of social segregation based on skin color.