I started reading David Foster Wallace’s epic Infinite Jest at the cottage. I set myself an (overly) ambitious target of 100 pages a day. Ambitious because it took me an hour to read 15 pages. And I could only reasonably avoid my family and read on the dock for seven hours of the day. Because reading Infinite Jest is an exercise in focus, absorption and dedication. Like the ‘entertainment’ that so bewitches characters that they cannot look away (choosing death by starvation or dehydration rather than stopping the consumption of the entertainment) the novel asks for (demands?) complete attention if the reader is to make sense of the overlapping plot lines, constantly shifting points of view, temporal and geographic locations, narrative styles and relationships among characters. Continue reading
Category Archives: New York Times Notable
Infinite Jest: Why Reading this Book Makes You a Hero
Filed under American literature, Fiction, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner, Reader Request
Everything I Never Told You: Secrets, Lies and Misunderstandings
One of the questions at the heart of Celeste Ng’s excellent Everything I Never Told You is what might be the difference among secrets, lies and silences, and where responsibility falls for speaking (truth or lies) and for listening.
At first blush the novel is about unravelling mystery and secrets. The opening sentence “Lydia is dead,” invites the immediate line of questioning of who, what, when, where and how. Talk about using conflict to drive plot. In exploring the mystery of her death we learn of Lydia’s family – Marilyn, James, Nath and Hannah – and how they collectively and individually both keep secrets and assign meaning to one another’s behaviours (and silences).
To me the most engrossing parts of the novel are those when characters inaccurately – and frustratingly – ascribe meaning to someone else. Layers of misunderstanding and misinterpretation are confounded by a resolute and seemingly intractable refusal to ask one another about the validity of these (deeply held) (and false) beliefs. Of course the more certain we are of the motivations and beliefs of those we love the less likely we are to realize we might be best off checking whether these are, after all, true. Hardly the case that those we love are lying to us, or keeping secrets, rather the responsibility for the falsehood is ours as we fail to check our assumptions and instead walk around certain of the falsehood we have created.
It’s been well established that I love good character-driven stories, and the characters here are richly drawn. There are moments when their motivations seem a bit rigidly defined by what the character is ‘like,’ but these motivations do evolve as the characters learn about themselves, grow and change.
The first line (and chapters) primed me for a murder mystery, but this is not a who-dunnit novel. The initial frenetic pace of setting the scene for Lydia’s death tempers after the opening chapters and settles into something more of a family and character drama. I say that not as a complaint, but more of a caution that while you may find yourself staying up late to read this one it won’t be because you’re driven to figure out the crime, so much as to figure out when – and if – the family members will recognize their false assumptions, the limits of their beliefs about themselves and those they love, the necessity to openly share.
I’ll be putting this one on my ‘books to buy or borrow’ list (post to come soon…) as you think about possible holiday shopping. I’d say it’s a great book to buy for any reader on your list, and perhaps for yourself. And certainly one to prompt you to ask yourself what do I actually know about my family and myself, what stories do I tell myself, and when is a secret simply the question we never thought or borthered to ask.
Filed under American literature, Fiction, Mystery, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner
A Visit from the Goon Squad: PostModern Perfection
I resisted posting this image of the interconnection of characters – and chapters – from Jennifer Eagn’s *A Visit From the Goon Squad* because part of what makes the book SO GOOD is its use of form – chapters narrated by different characters, at different points in time, who are all, loosely connected to one another through this odd web – to mirror how we (or me, at least) experience social life and memory. My experience of friendship, family and connection is one of loose recollection that ‘oh yes, I was at a party with so-and-so once’ or ‘I remember you from where exactly?’ but also that there are people who weave in and out of our lives with varying degrees of impact – some who spend short periods and leave (as they say) lasting impressions. And so I don’t want this image because it makes it easier to remember who everyone is and how they are connected than they have any right to be: our memory of these characters *should be* scattered and fragmented and pieced together with glimmers, because that’s how we go about remember people (again, I might be speaking for my own failing memory here).
So too the brilliance of the passage of time in these layered and asynchronous chapters. Midway through the first chapter I had a horrifying thought that perhaps I had started reading a short story collection (the record is quite clear on how I feel about short stories) because the plotting was so dense, the characters so rich and the evocative images, well, evocative. When I realized in the second chapter that no, perhaps these were *linked* short stories, and then as the thematic resonances and character repetitions continued I decided that I was, in fact, reading a novel, what became clear – through the muddy plot and disappearing/reappearing characters – is that our lives and our memories function in much the same way: we have crystallized memories that appear ‘out of time’ but that feel full and colourful, and then there are long blanks of no connection or seeming non-event. What we recollect – the sensational, the exceptional *and* the utterly banal – stays with us for reasons unclear (to me), but stays with us all the same in these sharp moments so beautifully and expertly captured by Egan.
I have nothing but praise for this incredible novel that so beautifully weaves characters together. I loved the questions it raises about what we decide to make of our lives, how we go about making decisions, overcoming grief, regret and our own impetus for self-destruction, how we decide to create *anything* in a world so bent toward massification, how we believe in the possibility of unique individuality in an era that simultaneously promises and scorns such a chance. It is a beautiful novel full of reasonable hope that we might do well with the little, parcelled time we have and that we might impress our lives and our singularity on those around us.
I realize I’ve made it sound overly optimistic or some kind of “audacity of hope” sort of thing. It’s not that. It doesn’t ignore or gloss the failures, the inadequacies, the regrets, but it also doesn’t *dwell* in these spaces, or declare these states to be the de facto position for humanity. It asks whether we might do something different (if not something more) with the little time we’re allotted.
So read it, okay?
A Gate at the Stairs: Sort of unbelievable
I say “sort of unbelievable” not because any of the events in A Gate at the Stairs are unbelievable, but rather because there are sentences in this book, full paragraphs really, that so capture some essence of the world or of worldly experience in ways that would be, well, unbelievable, were they not regularly happening. Each page, each paragraph offer up gems – what is it when gems are not rare, but simply precious? – that left me feeling like I had been punched (such accuracy in describing (my) human experience does feel, for whatever reason, visceral) and hugged (such palpable beauty cannot but feel like an embrace?).
Suspending (however difficultly) my adoration of the descriptions in the text, the plot and characters are closer to pretty good than to outstanding. The protagonist, Tassie, does not always behave in ways I might expect her to, and I suppose this might be meant to get at the unpredictability of human behaviour, and yet, it didn’t feel like a reasonable level of variability, and more an unevenness in character development. (SPOILER: This was particularly the case in the scene when Tassie climbs in the coffin – while her decision to do so allows for a captivating description of Robert and a thoughtful meditation on grief and uncertainty, her action does not properly align with Tassie as we know her. This sort of “surprise” character decisions extend to secondary characters like Sarah and Edward, and are, for this reader, distracting and disappointing (as the text is otherwise… brilliant).
I sat for a few minutes with the conclusion of the book. I felt at the point that Mary-Emma leaves that the book ought to end with her departure. My sense that the book could have concluded there asked me to reconsider the central themes and foci (yeah! foci!) of the novel: was the book to be about the relationship between Tassie and Mary-Emma or about the relationships Tassie has (and ignores) more generally? Given that the book does *not* end with Mary-Emma’s departure we must give credit to the latter idea that this is a book about Tassie and her interactions with the world – with her family, with her roommates, with her ridiculous (and poorly constructed) boyfriend. If that’s the case I might have liked fuller, and earlier, development of her relationship with her family. Except that perhaps the poignancy of the conclusion might be lost had she “attended” to her family better. Ah… let it be that I am unsettled by the conclusion both for the material it contains and for its impact on how the rest of the novel reads.
I’ll suggest reading this book because of its forceful beauty in capturing the essence of moments, places and people. With the caveat that the plot and character may leave you frustrated – not because they are (in any way) bad, but because they are only very good.
Literary Vice 
