Category Archives: Fiction

November 19, 2011 · 4:30 am

The Cement Garden: Imitation or Isolation?

                          Ian McEwen’s first novel, The Cement Garden, shares the suffocating claustrophobia of DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and the same preoccupation with the weird intimacy of familial love. Is it unfair to compare and collapse novels in this way? To see such parallels that it becomes difficult to separate plot? (What are the other doppleganger novels?) If the author self-consciously evokes a predecessor is that more excusable than the author who (seemingly) accidentally replicates the themes and questions of an existing work? I’m not demanding the invention of new stories or themes – far from it, I think there is a decidedly short list of topics and questions in literature – rather the mirroring of mood, tone, point of view, theme and abstracted-plot, do provoke questions about the expectation for the ‘new’ when we read, and whether this is a fair or desirable thing.

Proviso! This parallelism may very likely be an exaggeration of my part. I could write a persuasive essay on the similarities, but I suspect that in the conclusion of that essay I’d be pointing too often to “mood” or “atmosphere” rather than plot or character – and replicating a “mood” hardly feels like a justifiable case for inquiring about the boundaries of originality.

No surprise then that I’ll commend The Cement Garden for outstanding development of an oppressive – dare I say “fixed in stone”? – atmosphere. The characters each evolve over the course of the novel, but only within the extreme confines of both their setting and psychology. The narrative only leaves the house on one, brief, occasion, and that journey precipitates the crises that undoes the fragile – and perverse – family dynamic, as if to suggest that any alteration to this (or a?) family ecosystem risks not simply disruption and disorder, but disaster. That we exist as families only in the temporary space of the home and only insofar as we refuse the entry of outside people and outside events. Within these confines, behaviours and morals might be set by the family itself, and it is only with the introduction of these outsiders – whether death or a courting man – that moral codes can be recognized as immoral. Put simply, only in contrast can something be recognized for what it is. So the attempt to seal up and cement over is an act of preservation not just of a body, but of a code and way of life that does not see itself as deviant, but does recognize that the operation of its difference relies on an enforced isolation (and so singularity).

I think DH would like this one. I know I did.

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November 8, 2011 · 1:10 pm

Be More Chill: Women with low self-esteem!

                   So here’s the premise: teenage boy is awkward, nerdy, uncool. He hears about a pill, a “squip,” that is a microcomputer that will give him instructions on how to be cool (or “more chill”). He gets a squip, becomes cool, and eventually the squip fails – its technology isn’t perfect yet.

You might have been thinking – wait, wait, as YAF shouldn’t this book have ended with the boy realizing he’s better off as himself, without the aid of a microcomputer telling him exactly what to say? No. No, that’s not the moral: the moral is wait to buy yourself the exact piece of technology that will make imperfect-you more perfect so that you might have money, friends, and sex.

And the sex part? Apparently young women lack self-esteem to such an extraordinary degree that not only do they cut themselves while purging while gossiping about their slutty ex-best-friend, but they are also willing and committed to having sex with any man who might be interested. The only exception to this rule the young woman that our hero is in love with – and it turns out she’s “weird,” and hence “frigid.”

This book shouldn’t be read by anyone, let alone a young adult trying to sort out how they might learn to be okay with their awkward weirdness, because the message? You’re not okay, and it’s not likely you’ll be okay unless you buy something really expensive and/or have sex with an self-loathing young woman. The book, as a result, both deeply disturbing and depressing. Maybe that’s how it is with kids these days? Nah. I think instead Vizzini might try being less chill, and instead he might try to be more responsible.

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November 4, 2011 · 7:21 pm

Nothing Right: I blame…

                          Antonya Nelson’s collection, Nothing Right, does three things very, very well: theme, image and smash-bash beauty.

Focusing chiefly on the relationships in families the collection explores what constitutes “family” and how family might differently be understood as either biology or care. As each story explores these familial relationships they also tease out what responsibilities we hold to our family – individual relations and the institution as a whole. It reminds the reader that perfection – once glimpsed or imagined – in person or relationship is an ideal best abandoned, though rarely done away with. That despite the logical recognition that we cannot be perfect mothers, or siblings, or friends – that we will make mistakes and that we are inevitably flawed – that we all (is all an overstatement? the collection suggests “all,” so I’ll say “all,” and definitely me) continue to castigate ourselves for these failures, these most mundane disappointments.

There are breath-taking images in the collection that function to complicate theme or to enrich character, but occasionally appear to serve the exclusive purpose of proving This is a Literary Collection. It’s not a complaint, really, because these are images that I marveled at and felt buoyed by, and yet still felt a tinge of doubt: were these images adding something or simply there to demonstrate the (really quite accomplished) skill of the author?

And then I settled on “beauty” as the answer. In several instances I stopped bothering about whether Nelson was showing off, or whether the image or metaphor added anything exceptionally rich to the story itself, and just allowed myself to indulge in these kernels of beauty. Tucked away phrases that remind me that while there may be ‘nothing (absolutely) right’ there are these exquisite instances – here in text, but perhaps in all of our lives, in all of our persons – that (attempt to) hold at bay the potential for crushing nihilism or self-loathing that might accompany the recognition and admission that we are only ever degrees of failure. That abandoning the ideal or the hope of perfection doesn’t allow a concomitant abandonment of effort, because occasionally we may deliver, or be delivered, stunning beauty.

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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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