I know I rave about books all the time. I’ve been called out more than once by N. for overselling a book that’s only really good. Not the case with David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. This novel is genius. Extraordinary in so many ways: in its approach to genre, to plot, to character.In its hyper-imaginative renderings of the near future world and of the past. It’s a book that asks about mortality, familial-responsibility, ecological-responsibility, identity and grief. It’s a book that gives the finger to genre tick-boxes and plots made-for-movies. It revels in the brilliant beauty of its own writing without being showy. It’s exuberant in the possibilities for the novel as a form and for readers as enthusiastic consumers of imagined worlds and people. Continue reading
Category Archives: Fiction
Sweetland: Chills
I got chills reading the last pages of Michael Crummey’s *Sweetness.* Real chills. Okay, okay, I was outside when I finished it, but they weren’t cold chills. They were beauty chills mixed in with the eerie turn of the conclusion of this most excellent novel.
The eerie-ness pervades the novel as our protagonist, Moses Sweetland, after refusing to leave Sweetland Island (yes, they share the name) along with the rest of its inhabitants (bought-out by the smarmy government man), finds himself alone… or is he? Not actually that dun, dun, dun dramatic: the quasi-supernatural elements of the text read as entirely believable, if also wholly unsettling. Another way of putting it: the “realist” portrayal of the Island already reads as magical and out-of-time and so when eerie things begin happening the reader accepts these moments as what they are: eerie and entirely possible in the space/place of Sweetland.
Sweetland as space/place is some great setting. The Island assumes its own character with a personality that is alternately forgiving and vengeful. If you weren’t already contemplating a trip to Newfoundland (as I am!), the representation of the expanse and the mystery might well have you planning.
Minor quibble? Descriptions of some of the “action” plot moments were a bit too heady for me to follow. I couldn’t quite visualize where people were and what they were doing and so just accepted that Things Were Going Wrong, read the descriptions, then waited for the description of the outcome to really piece together what happened. There aren’t many of these moments, but when they do happen this reader felt a little left out of the action (particularly as these moments occurred in climactic scenes).
On reflection, part of my feeling of being left out might be purposeful: I am not from/of Newfoundland. These slightly muddy descriptions happened in boats and on rocks. It’s not impossible that my confusion stems from not knowing enough about boats and Newfoundland geography. Perhaps these moments are a way of echoing one of the themes of the novel, that is that those of/from Newfoundland will always have a special connection to the land that others will not. In this way these moments of dislocation for the Ontario-reader are a way of letting me know what it feels like to leave/be forced out of Newfoundland.
The character, setting and plot of this book are beautiful and magical. Another brilliant read from Crummey. Enjoy! (Also I’m tagging this as a prize winner as I have little doubt that it will be!)
Filed under Book Club, Canadian Literature, Prize Winner
Look at Me: Conceptually rich; Practically dull
We’re fat, we’re image obsessed and we hate ourselves. The irony at the heart of Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me is that we’re all so busy looking at ourselves and imagining other people looking at us that no one is properly seeing anyone. Obsessions with image and identity collapse under the surfaces, glosses, mirrors and refractions that reveal nothing but continued obfuscation. Impermeable even to – or especially to – themselves, the characters in Egan’s novel complete Odyessian searches (complete with siren calls and tortured transformations) for a core sense of self that might anchor their choices and relationships.
Central to the plot is the New York fashion model Charlotte’s experience of radical physical transformation: after a car accident, her face is reconstructed to such a degree she goes unrecognized by her friends, coworkers, lovers and family. In this way Charlotte enacts the fantasy of beginning again, the chance to re-form an identity without the cumbersome logistics of fleeing to a far off island or buying a fancy car. What she discovers – as do the supporting characters who experience their own sorts of attempts at beginning again and reforming past selves (both in the sense of forming anew and correcting for poor behaviour) – is that without exteriority, the recognition of others, the self-itself collapses: to be unrecognized is to cease to be. In place of “I think therefore I am,” Look at Me posits: “I’m seen, therefore I am.”
While there’s a conceptually rich idea here the pace of the novel and the complexity of the characters and their interaction fall under the weight of the premise. Too busy insisting that the reader “get” this message, the novel misses opportunities to look at many possible layers of spectacle. There are passing nods to the way gender and class shape the way we are viewed, and a fuller exploration of racial politics in the character of Z. Z, we learn, is a would-be terrorist on a mission to destroy the image-obsessed America and who carries out his mission by trying on identities as one tries on bathing suits: not effortlessly or enjoyably, but with a sense of purpose (note the book was written pre-9/11). Yet these treatments feel – perhaps appropriately – cursory and surface, throw-away lines rather than meaningful dialogue.
Which is not to say it’s an arduous slog. Egan writes genius sentences of arresting beauty (I suppose there’s another irony to be found in the lushness of writing that demands the reader stop and re-read (look again) at the marvel of its beauty) and there is enough interest in how the wayward characters will all meet in climactic wonder. Interest, too, in the prescience of Egan who seemed to anticipate both 9/11 and Facebook in one masterful rendering.
All the same it was decidedly not the perfection of A Visit From the Goon Squad, but it is certainly a great book to teach about performativity and metaphor. And the advantageous of a good moisturizing regime. And the perils of binge drinking. And strangers. Except for Egan, we’re all strangers: most particularly to ourselves.
Literary Vice 