December 19, 2013 · 3:05 pm

We Need New Names: Lingering

                     you should*

I’m two books behind on blogging in part because I wasn’t sure how to review Noviolet Bulawayo’s *We Need New Names.” Not that I wasn’t sure whether it was a great book – it is  – but because I wasn’t sure how to capture its complexity and subtlety. I haven’t come any closer to figuring it out, but I ought to do my best before my classic E. memory loses the details. Though it’s been over a week and the narrative lingers, so perhaps that’s a telling enough quality. 

The book follows Darling as she immigrates from an unnamed African country to America. (Though we might suppose from the details of its political history that the country is Zimbabwe, except in some senses trying to ‘figure out’ the country takes away from the message in the book that African countries are imagined by Western audiences as uniform and interchangeable.

The book opens with rich scenes of her childhood at home: the bonds among her friends, the tensions among her community, the NGOs that service it and the white inhabitants of the town. These scenes are then contrasted with Darling’s arrival in America where the refuge she seeks and the prosperity she imagines is complicated by the American problems of minimum wage, eating disorders, porn and alcoholism. She arrives in her oft imagined DestroyedMichigan, or Detroit – one of the most masterful elements of this book is the way Bulawayo plays with and comments on language. Through the manipulation of words on the page she demonstrates the thematic question she explores through her characters about the power of English, the limitations of language to express real affect, trauma and dislocation and the ways in which mastering/mimicking English is imagined as a parallel to gaining mastery over one’s self and world.

Unfolding in her journey are questions for the reader about inequality, resource management, international relations and concomitant questions about exploitation (of the poor, the environment, other countries). But for me the most disturbing questions were around relativism of suffering. Darling’s life in America certainly reveals the many ways in which the “Paradise” of the West is fraught with its own traumas and suffering – not the least of which is the irreconcilable sense of an identity that is neither American nor of Zimbabwe. But these traumas are diminished by Darling for not being *as* terrible as those experienced at home. Her hometown in Zimbabwe is named Paradise – a perhaps too-obvious irony and invitation to question where the “true” Paradise might be located: no where. And if the book argues that the so-called traumas of American life are insignificant in comparison to those suffered abroad, what does that do to the reader who must – on some level – identify with and experience the “injustices” of Western life? How can the individual reconcile their specific experience of suffering with the recognition that elsewhere the causes/sources/experience of suffering is exponentially worse? 

I suppose I (perhaps unfairly) wanted the book to offer some explanation or solution to the question of the relativism of suffering, some way to mitigate guilt or self-recrimination? maybe. or perhaps a way to think about inequality in a way beyond the level of recognition. A way, too, for Darling to make sense of her stuck-between identity. That any emotion she has she must always reimagine in light of what she has been spared. She doesn’t allow herself to feel lonely because it could be so much worse. Where does this refusal of suffering leave Darling? or the reader?

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December 1, 2013 · 8:23 pm

A Star Called Henry: Marvellous

You should*

I read historical fiction because I love the careful (and sometimes casual) intersection of the factual and the imagined, the playful ways these two imagined-as-discrete categories reveal one another to be permeable and fluid. The ways I learn the traditional historical timeline – the IRA formed in these years under these leaders with these goals – as well as the ahistorical lessons of any good fiction – the cruelties of income inequality, sacrifices of parents for their children, the transient/eternal commitment of lovers. A balance between these two elements – the history lesson and the human lesson – can be tricky to achieve. So much historical fiction becomes unreadable as it tries to force an independently brilliant narrative onto the historical lesson it wants to teach; similarly, the stories that miss the opportunity to tell a resonant story in the peculiar (misguided?) commitment to telling it Just The Way It Was.

Roddy Doyle’s *A Star Called Henry* is perfect historical fiction. It imagines an unsung hero of Irish history and gives him a biography, a set of triumphs and losses, a grand and history-making ending — even though he never existed and isn’t “real” by any historian’s estimation. It’s perfect in that Henry’s biography – that of a homeless orphan who becomes a larger-than-life myth – depends on fiction and myth for its making (metafiction!) just as the novel relies on the imagined to tell its truer-than-truth story of Irish history.

And what a story. Like my understanding of Russian history I had previously wandered about in an embarrassed ignorance of Irish history hoping I’d never be in a circumstance when I’d have to expose how very little I knew. I knew that the IRA was a thing. That “the troubles” existed. Bombs had exploded, etc. But why? when did it start? who cares? Well *A Star Called Henry* gives this history through Henry in a way that makes it personal, non-partisan and engrossing.

My one complaint comes in what/who gets lost in this story. Henry’s mother, Melody, figures as the tragic figure of the Irish underclass. Lost because of the triumvirate of poverty: inadequate housing, nutrition and health care. Henry, who takes to an independent life on the streets at age four loses his mother and that’s the end of her story. At that point in the novel she becomes the functional symbol of loss and grief for Henry. Likewise his wife – first name unknown – is an independent, fierce and unstoppable woman in her own right, but we know her only through her relation to Henry. I appreciate the narration that makes this Henry’s story, I do. And perhaps its a testament to the strength of these characters and this novel that I wanted more of these secondary characters. I wanted their narratives as full as Henry’s – even though his is a patchy work of missing periods and jumped chronology.

Though having poked around I see that *A Star Called Henry* is but the first novel in a triology. So perhaps this complaint gets redressed in the later two novels. I’ll definitely be reading them, so will let you know. In fact, I’m embarrassed both by my scant knowledge of Irish history and that this is the first book by Roddy Doyle I’ve read. He’s brilliant. Really. And this book, well, I do think it’s historical fiction perfection. So there.

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November 25, 2013 · 8:40 pm

Lost Girls: Ice Cold

Rating: If you’re so inclined, or you shouldn’t

I love thrillers and police procedurals. So much. Law and Order is a staple in my life – feeling anxious? watch the predictable unfolding of 44 minutes. With Andrew Pyper’s *Lost Girls” (see a few posts ago for his Demonologist) I wanted to be swept up and riveted by the book. The back cover made me hopeful. The early chapters even more so. But, like the Demonologist, the premise and the opening salvo left so much to be desired.

In reading the acknowledgements (aside: I *love* the acknowledgements in novels. I wish they were longer – see Dave Eggers’ acknowledgements in AHWOSG for a good model – just kidding, but not really) I noticed that Pyper had previously published sections of the novel in journals. I suspect (because the book makes me a detective?) that the few chapters at the beginning – briefly returned later in the novel – focused on the young kids at the lake was a brilliantly written and published short story. But the rest of the novel that tries to take this exceptional opening premise and extend it is just… not good. 

The suspense isn’t suspenseful. I don’t care about our protagonist. I don’t believe his fear. Even if I did, I don’t care whether he’s scared. The unbelievable elements – ghost woman at the lake who steals children – is introduced as a ghost story within the narrative, not as something compelling or real in her own right. As a result the story-within-a-story that lacks the thematic depth that you might expect from a story-within-a-story and instead serves a simple plot purpose: to introduce the complicating “ghostly” element of the murder mystery. It’s a weak way to introduce this element and that the rest of the plot is premised on this weak element means that well… the rest of the plot is similarly shoddy.

So no, I won’t read anymore Andrew Pyper. Even if all the Canadian presses keep telling me he’s all that. I get it. He’s got some great components, and I’m guessing he’s a brilliant short story writer. But going 0-2 makes me less willing to climb on board again.

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November 18, 2013 · 1:31 am

Looking for Alaska: Making Meaning *You Should

On the prompting of my childhood/adolescent/lifelong friend, J., I’m testing out a new way of starting reviews. At dinner last night she told me that she skimmed my reviews as quickly as possible to find out whether the book was worth reading, without spoiling the read itself (it’s true I’m prone to spoilers). She asked whether I might include some kind of rating system in the first paragraph to alert would-be readers to the urgency, necessity or avoidance of a particular read. Less keen on the scale of 1-10 model, she suggested something like “must,” “maybe” and “don’t.” So I’ll try it out and you can let me know what you think. I think 3 choices is a bit limiting, so I’ll go with five: Urgent Priority to Read (5), You Should (4) If You’re So Inclined (3) You Shouldn’t (2), Priority to Avoid (1).

For John Green’s *Looking for Alaska* I’ll offer a “You Should” rating.

And now for the proper review:

My high school Philosophy teacher, Mr. M, approached the existential philosophers with a certain (albeit appropriate) skepticism. He suggested that the existential questions, while worth considering, were most often ignored by “the masses” or easily solved by “making meaning” (given that life has no inherent meaning to an existentialist) in one of two ways: creation or destruction. He fingered all of us in the room and urged us to consider how we might make our own meaning. I (obviously) still remember this lesson and often reflect on whether my desires to have babies or write a novel are borne more out of panicked impulse to make my life count for something than from any intrinsic desire to have a [baby] [novel] [marathon completion]. 

John Green’s *Looking for Alaska* has its own Mr. M in the form of the curmudgeonly Religion teacher who pushes his students to think beyond memorizing names or dates and to think instead about the implications of religious questions in their everyday lives. But more than a teacher figure, the text asks and answers the same question: What can we expect out of life? What makes life meaningful? What responsibility/authority do we have to make our lives worth living? 

These questions are explored against the usual drama of teenagers at boarding school: pranks, lust, foreign exchange students and too much calculus. Think John Knowle’s A Separate Peace rewritten for 2006 and with a massive online cult following. 

It’s a brilliant book not for any particular innovations in plot – that much is pretty staid – but for its novel answer to the question of what makes life meaningful? I won’t do too much spoiling in giving the answer, but the novel took my usual atheist angst about my inevitable death and consumption by worms and brought to it a fresh and even (gasp) hopeful promise about why life (and death) might be meaningful.

And for the intended teenage audience I imagine these questions and the answers presented in *Looking for Alaska* are ever more urgent. That the novel does not gloss or diminish the poignancy and “reality” of these questions for an adolescent audience seems at once both respectful of its readers intellect, but also of its readers complex emotional life. I appreciate that much young adult fiction – including that which I read when I was myself a teen – doesn’t shy away from the difficult, confusing and overwhelming. But this book more than many others I’ve read presents these questions as *actual questions* and sees the problem of answering them as one that all people – not just young people – have to muddle their way about answering. I guess it offers the reader some responsibility, too, to sort out for him/herself what the answer might be. 

And so because this is a book that asks difficult questions and presents compelling – and fresh! – answers, and because it gives funny/smart/round characters a chance to grapple with these questions/answers, and because it’s set at a boarding school and who can resist a good boarding school story (hello Harry Potter fans) I’ll give this book its (4) You Should rating. Go read it. You Should for the book’s sake and because it will help you look/be hip and cool with the teenage crowd (so hot right now). 

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