Category Archives: American literature

December 2, 2011 · 4:10 pm

Everything is Illuminated: Brilliant.

     So Jonathan Safran Foer sounds like a prat on the radio. He sounds like a self-assured genius, who is maybe also judging you for eating meat. And so I put off reading Everything is Illuminated because I thought it might be infused with self-righteousness or self-congratulatory brilliance. But after finishing the novel I no longer care what Safran Foer sounds like on the radio, or whether he is arrogant and self-congratulatory. I don’t care because the book is brilliant. And so I’ve been (again) reminded that books are not their authors, and while Safran Foer probably is a prat, that’s no reason not to read (and love) his book.

What do I love about it? Let me describe the ways:

Character voice: While the characters themselves appeal to me in the way all brilliant characters do – in their unpredictable, yet believable, reactions; in their failings; in their changes over the course of the novel; in their revelation of something about me – the voices of the characters in this novel are staggering. I don’t simply mean Sasha’s (genius) voice as a translator come to English that reverberates (I’m not sure if that’s the technical word for it, but whatever it is when you’re still hearing the voice hours later), I mean the kind of distinct clarity of a singular character: when grandfather is speaking the diction, the meter, the pacing could only belong to him. The characters are each unique and complex, but they are made exponentially more so by the lilt and precision of their voices.

Form: Postmodern play with form can be annoying. There are occasions, I think, when adding blank pages, or runonsentences, or cacophonous ellipses (if ever there was an oxymoron….) are nothing but authors trying to show that they too have read Paul Auster, William Faulkner, and Kafka, and that they too recognize the dismemberment of form can parallel the collapse in certain truths. But here! But here! Oh but here formal play does not distract, does not serve as formal play for the sake of formal play. Here the introduction of unusual and unexpected formal elements provoke, they punch, they do something to meaning that makes the words mean MORE. And that’s it, I think. That instead of the postmodern ennui, here the formal disintegration is meant to emphasize just how acutely we feel, just how poignant love and loss can be and are, just how sincerely feelings are emphatically FELT. The form makes you feel  – perhaps, and individually, disoriented or annoyed or awed – in order to remind you that living is an exercise in feeling.

Plot: Neither too saccharine or too cold, the simplicity and elegance of this story is brilliant. Unfolding over protracted time, but an isolated location, the plot weaves in ways that both surprise and satisfy. A cliched expression on my part, but nevertheless true.

And then, and then! The questions this novel raises around responsibility to others are devastating. It points a finger at all of us for being selfish, for not being capable of truly understanding the other (in such exact Butlerian terms that I’m tempted to see who wrote their work first), for acting out of cowardice, for acting out of grand delusions of self-importance. It accuses each of us of a piracy of spirit and then says, but you are human, this is the only way you could be, and so perhaps, in this predetermination, you are forgiven.

So yeah, I liked this one.

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October 30, 2011 · 2:40 pm

City of Glass: the Mystery of Self

                 A few pages into Paul Auster’s City of Glass I realized I’d read the book before. Except this realization proved false, as I soon worked out that I’d read the first few chapters before, but never the whole thing. From this uncanny beginning of recognizing what I thought ought to be unfamiliar, the book proceeded to confirm my initial suspicions: this is a book I’ve read before, but forgotten, as all books are those we have read before, but forgotten – as all people are those we’ve already met. And ourselves? We are perhaps people of convenience, decision makers of circumstance, individuals without a tether: kite strings caught in a hurricane.

The narrative follows Daniel Quinn Paul Auster William Wilson Henry Dark Paul Stillman a character as he wanders the city trying to work out the mystery – or the potential for a mystery – of who is (or might be) (or will be) out to harm Stillman and moreover who is (or might be) (or will be) Daniel Quinn. The plot itself is brief and focused, principally the actions of Quinn, but peppered with thoughtful conversations with other characters that meditate on authorship, credibility and the continuity of self.

A passage to clarify this kind of embedded musing (that masterfully does not annoy as some quasi-philosophical ramblings do, but does not go unnoticed as a passage on Who We Are): “Was ‘fate’ really the word he wanted to use? It seemed like such a ponderous and old-fashioned choice. And yet, as he probed more deeply into it, he discovered that was precisely what he meant to say. Or, if not precisely, it came closer than any other term he could think of. Fate in the sense of what was, of what happened to be. It was something like the word ‘it’ in the phrase ‘it is raining’ or ‘it is night.’ What that ‘it’ referred to Quinn had never known. A generalized condition of things as they were, perhaps; the state of is-ness that was the ground on which the happenings of the world took place” (207-8).

This passage well captures the tone of the book – somewhere between detached third person omniscient (a suitable choice given the premise that the events are being reported by a third person who has stumbled on Quinn’s account recorded in a red notebook) and minimalist. The passage also highlights the preoccupation in the narrative with the parallel opacity of language and selves. In this sense Auster (reasonably we might think) connects the post-structuralist boo-ra-ha-ha about the permanence of language, the (supposed) crisis in epistemology and extends this to the condition of individuals as patchwork pieces continually reconstituted.

The book was written in 1985. An important date only if you’re concerned that these ideas are old hat. Not so, I think. I’m sure there too many narratives written that ask the same questions: who are we? why do stories matter? how can we know anything? anything about ourselves? But Auster’s text is simply masterful in asking these questions as genuine concerns. The narrative wants no answers, it argues against the possibility of answers, instead it contents itself with being as the New York Times Book Review says on the back cover “for all those who seek the truth behind the fictions they read and the fictions they live.” And why shouldn’t I end with the NYTimes? Their words are mine, too.

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September 21, 2011 · 9:35 pm

Zeitoun: Novel News

       At age fifteen or sixteen I began a semi-permanent ban on television. The no-television-under-any-circumstances policy lasted from 1999-2001, with a reprieve on Sept 11, and then again enforced as of Sept 12. I began university in 2002, and from that point until the present I haven’t owned a functional tv. I’m still a voracious consumer of news – listening to daily reports on the radio and reading newspapers in print and online – just a consumer of news without the barrage of images to accompany the stories. This consumption pattern meant that in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans I didn’t see (m)any images of the disaster. I certainly heard reports, read stories of the damage, looting, and unpredictably zealous or absent support from the authorities.

So when I read that Dave Eggers – one of my long favoured authors* – had written another news-novel (more on the genre distinction in a moment) about one family’s experience of the Hurricane, I put it on my list. I admit that what I read amounted to novel news to me in the sense of altogether unknown news about the hurricane. I had little idea that so many citizens were wrongfully and illegally detained in the aftermath of the hurricane; I wasn’t sure about the reports of rape, looting, assault (though to be fair, the novel does a fairly poor job of clarifying whether these events did in fact take place; rather, Eggers points out that there were contradictory news reports and leaves it – frustratingly – at that).

Grounding the hurricane (ha!) in the story of one family – the Zeitoun family – allows the reader to care deeply about the disaster because it has been carefully and thoroughly personalized. I wonder whether the Zeitoun family already inhabited a host of compelling issues in contemporary American life, or whether Eggers emphasized these issues in order to craft a more compelling novel (okay, so I don’t actually wonder, but it’s worth asking the question), but whatever the case, the Zeitoun’s embody questions of race, religion, patriotism, the precarious middle class in ways that read as genuine and appropriately complex.

In terms of genre I have a hard time accepting the designation of ‘non-fiction’ (as assigned by my library). The book is a novel, a historical one, perhaps, or what I’m calling here a news-novel. It has the usual plot, characters, and setting, but more crucially in the ‘novel’ designation – for this reader, anyway – it has thematic preoccupations (what can one man accomplish when set against nature? against the state?), symbols (the flood, drowning, risks of water, rainbows, bleh), and a shifting point of view. Much like What is the What the news-novel asks the reader to accept that what is written is for all intents ‘true,’ but allows that in any telling there will be fictional elements. It is, in short, a genre I like.

*I also like Dave Eggers. Those with reservations who have only read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius would do well to try reading something else he’s written. I myself enjoyed AHWOSG, but see a stark (really) difference between the autobiographical work and his news-novels and short stories. So here’s my plug for an author I adore (not like he needs a plug, but still): he’s really very good.

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August 13, 2011 · 9:46 pm

Player Piano: Meh.

     In one of the more awkward chapters of my adolescence, my dad started to read me Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, which if you haven’t read before, or if it’s been awhile, you ought to know opens with graphic (literally) descriptions of beavers – animal and otherwise. While I knew enough to be mortified, and my dad knew enough to immediately stop reading, I couldn’t help but recognize something addicting about an author who wrote in such a sacrilegious tone, with such disregard for the pretensions of readers. And so later, under the covers and lit by the hallway light, I read Breakfast of Champions, and decided that Mr. Vonnegut was okay by me.

Now, decades (!, well, a lie, just a decade) later I’ve read Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, and I’m reluctant to report that it’s… not very good. Not bad! (I’d rather not post at all if it meant besmirching the good name of one of my better, favourite authors) Just, not very good. The novel follows Paul Proteus as he sorts out what it means to be human in the age of machines, and what it means to be smart/wealthy (smalthy?) in the age of mass unemployment and ignorance. His journey (a short one) to the climatic not-epiphany takes us through farming, summer camp, and nights at the bar. His not-epiphany? Art might make us human; hierarchies, while troubling, might ultimately be for the greater good. Always might.

To what do I attribute my dissatisfaction? Well, Paul, despite his ostensible ideological journey, doesn’t evidence any noticeable character change – I’d just as easily believe he swears allegiance to the company as to the radicals (is this the point? maybe…) and the symbols bear down on this reader like too much bread and potatoes.

Why does it still count as not bad? Well, expert in tone, Vonnegut delivers in the first novel the same wry tone you’ll know and love in later novels, as well as the simplest of questions – what makes us human? – explored as it ought to be, through a fiction we recognize as true (enough).

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