Writing at the LRB about Andrew Motion's memoir, Frank Kermode touches on some questions about language and experience that have been recently very much on my mind:
Its structure is determined by a fatal accident [the poet's mother] suffers while hunting, when Andrew is 17. We begin and end there: the first chapter concerns the day of the disaster, and the misery of the days that followed as she lay in a coma. We return to that scene at the end. Between these poles the main part of the book is a flashback to earlier youth, which in the course of its telling takes us round to the beginning again.
This design is well executed, and the opening chapter is brilliantly written. Andrew goes off, mildly excited, for an overnight stay at some girl’s house, where he gets news of his mother’s fall. Later he hears about it in more detail from his younger brother. The cause and nature of the accident are very exactly rendered, and this record of a personal loss that might seem too profound to allow artful description is in fact a work of art. Here and elsewhere it might be complained that the writing seems too calculated. There is dialogue, apt, convincing in its way, yet always tempting the reader to think its detail improbable to the point of falsity:
I keep expecting Ruby to say everything will soon be back to normal, but she doesn’t. She goes on crying, making odd quivery whimpers, and then Kit’s crying too, and then I am. The light from outside, flicking off the bare branches of the chestnut tree, swings over us in pale yellow waves. The mattress on my bed gives a muffled creak as it recovers from our weight.
The commonplace opening sentence here may make the rest of the quotation sound a bit too researched, the tree too splendid and the bed’s creak likely to have occurred rather at the moment of composition than at the time described.
Why be suspicious of what is so moving? Why is it slightly embarrassing that at a critical moment a pan of potatoes boils dry on the Aga, or Kit glances at his brother and ‘rolls his eyes’? The blurb says the book is written ‘from a teenage child’s point of view, and without the benefit of hindsight’, but of course it is a work of maturity, a work of hindsight. In fact Motion sets himself a virtually impossible task: an adult writer is setting down what he imagines to be the thoughts and observations of a teenage boy who is, in turn, remembering and reflecting on his earlier life. This complicates a problem that would exist even if there were only two, not three, Motions involved in the business. It is impossible to imagine what an account of childhood ‘without benefit of hindsight’ might be like, unless it resembled Joyce’s attempts in the opening pages of Portrait of the Artist.
The imagined speaker in this book reflects soberly that whereas the childhood of others ends slowly, in fits and starts, his has ended ‘suddenly. In a day.’ Not, surely, a child’s observation; and neither is this: ‘I don’t want to talk about it in grown-up language I haven’t learned yet.’ Of course that is what he does and has to do, with some effect of falsity. The voice is inevitably the voice of the artist: someone ‘made a face’ or ‘lit another cigarette and dotted the ash into the blue glass ashtray’ or clasped and unclasped her hands. When a lamp ‘buzzes’, or the boy kicks aside a mistletoe berry or a yew berry (feared as poisonous), we must assume the adult writer’s imagination is pretending to be the teenager’s memory. Perhaps there are moments when the man has remembered his childish language, betrayed by his fondness for such words as ‘wriggle’, ‘slither’ and ‘squish’. But mostly I think we understand that the grown man is doing the talking and thinking, sometimes with slightly uncomfortable results.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
The Last of Her Kind
I have just read a most extraordinarily good novel, certainly one for my best-of-the-year list but really far more than that, a really exceptional book: The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez.
The book came into my possession during a purchasing frenzy this spring, but I didn't even open it then (it was book-buying substituting for book-reading, I had too much work to do and also had to read all those Cambridge library books before I moved back to New York). Then late last night I was moping around the apartment looking for something good to read, in that mood where nothing seems at all appealing (which given the extent to which my apartment is simply bursting with books is obviously ludicrous, I was probably just tired after a week of what was presumably pre-school-starting-jitters-induced insomnia), picked this up and entered the world of the novel with something approaching delight.
I've just finished it this evening--I realize I have been suffering serious novel-deprivation, reading one seemed suddenly more important than getting any work done although of course that might be self-deluding rationalization--and I am simply overwhelmed with its moral and stylistic excellence. Two girls meet as first-year roommates at Barnard College in 1968; one of them narrates the intervening years (including the incidents surrounding the other woman's trial and conviction for shooting a cop to death) in a first-person voice that's one of the best things I've seen in ages (I'm putting it conjecturally with Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in the category of most-interesting recent first-person novels).
I really can't be bothered to describe to you what happens, it's grippingly readable in a way that a lot of literary fiction isn't but it's also serious about ideas and ethics and politics in a way that very few novels manage to be. I was reminded of some of my favorites: there's a bit of a Joyce Carol Oates feel, and the Rebecca West/James Baldwin thing that always gets to me; Susan Choi's also very good novel American Woman explored some of the same themes and material, and so have any number of other books I suppose, but this one really is special.
(Not to mention the narrator--enchanting in her prickliness and complicated honesty--writes a college essay, the only one she gets an A for, on why The Great Gatsby is not the great American novel--this book could and surely will be taught as a companion piece to Gatsby, an antidote/riposte to what is pretty much my least favorite of Fitzgerald's fictions--I still haven't recovered from that awful green light and the wretched thing of learning about symbolism in English class, I hate that stuff.)
Anyway, there is so much in this book that's wonderful that really everyone should just read it for themselves, but here is one passage that particularly struck me (this is a topic that's come up now and again here, obviously I have taken sides on the question and generally prefer not to write negative reviews myself, though lest I sound annoyingly high-minded and saintly I will say that you can expect at some point during the next week or so some scathing remarks from me about a major recent work of American fiction that I have just read and that struck me as one of the most gut-turningly offensive and overrated books I have read in, oh, my whole life).
But back to the matter at hand, here is Nunez's narrator speaking about her second husband, the editor of a literary journal:
Long before he'd published a word, he was poring over reviews (his desire one day to edit his own journal supposedly also went as far back as high school) and, with few exceptions, not liking what he saw. Most reviews were badly written, often by people who didn't seem to know or care much about their subject. A lot of critics were lazy; they wrote the same damn review over and over. They made stupid mistakes. They took far too many of their ideas from one another. They were overawed by Names. They opened wide for pablum and pap, but whatever was truly original and brave and strange set their teeth on edge. They swallowed the false and choked on the real. All this he told me the first time we met. He was on the rise then, a cultural critic at large, writing for a number of different publications. He wrote about books and movies and the theater, but also about painting or photography, and occasionally about restaurants or about some cultural trend or fad. The best of his essays would be collected and published, and then it was his turn to be reviewed, and though largely praised he was also faulted--for being too harsh.
"Because I care. These are matters of life and death to me": his justification when he was accused of brutality. (But then, when has it not been the justification? No one ever says, Because I was feeling mean, because my wife had just dumped me, because my own book had just flopped, because I'm a misogynist, because I know the author he is a fucking prick I have always hated his arrogant guts. I couldn't stop myself.)
But--here we go again--I do not trust myself, writing about husbands. I fear I am making Val out to be too flat and cartooonish. Why did I not begin by saying that he was very good, since that is the truth? He did care, he was serious, and he wrote very, very well. He wrote about things that mattered, and he wrote about them deeply, itneligently, and bravely. He always said exactly what he thought, regardless of what people would think of him--and wasn't that his job? And yet, and yet. Why were the majority of the reviews he wrote pans?
The narrator goes on to describe herself reading C. S. Lewis aloud to her daughter and finding herself thinking of her husband when they come to the passage about Edmund's addiction to the enchanted Turkish Delight: "It could not be good for the soul, I thought, to be constantly attacking other people, to be making fresh enemies daily..." (I seriously just the other day was saying how writing negative reviews isn't good for the soul! I love this character, and I love her voice as Nunez has made it work.)
Anyway, Here's Joy Press's review at the Voice--it's funny, I want you to go and read that review, it's a very thoughtful & well-written one and I completely agree with the first four paragraphs, but I dissent from what I take to be Press's conclusion that the novel loses its way in its latter sections and that the narrator Georgette is left in the shadows in contrast to her saint/martyr of a roommate Ann. It seems to me that this is a novel about transcendence, and that Georgette and Ann are equally transformed by the novel's conclusion. (And here's a roundup of all the major reviews.) I hope this book gets a lot of prizes and finds huge numbers of readers, I found it quite magical.
The book came into my possession during a purchasing frenzy this spring, but I didn't even open it then (it was book-buying substituting for book-reading, I had too much work to do and also had to read all those Cambridge library books before I moved back to New York). Then late last night I was moping around the apartment looking for something good to read, in that mood where nothing seems at all appealing (which given the extent to which my apartment is simply bursting with books is obviously ludicrous, I was probably just tired after a week of what was presumably pre-school-starting-jitters-induced insomnia), picked this up and entered the world of the novel with something approaching delight.
I've just finished it this evening--I realize I have been suffering serious novel-deprivation, reading one seemed suddenly more important than getting any work done although of course that might be self-deluding rationalization--and I am simply overwhelmed with its moral and stylistic excellence. Two girls meet as first-year roommates at Barnard College in 1968; one of them narrates the intervening years (including the incidents surrounding the other woman's trial and conviction for shooting a cop to death) in a first-person voice that's one of the best things I've seen in ages (I'm putting it conjecturally with Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in the category of most-interesting recent first-person novels).
I really can't be bothered to describe to you what happens, it's grippingly readable in a way that a lot of literary fiction isn't but it's also serious about ideas and ethics and politics in a way that very few novels manage to be. I was reminded of some of my favorites: there's a bit of a Joyce Carol Oates feel, and the Rebecca West/James Baldwin thing that always gets to me; Susan Choi's also very good novel American Woman explored some of the same themes and material, and so have any number of other books I suppose, but this one really is special.
(Not to mention the narrator--enchanting in her prickliness and complicated honesty--writes a college essay, the only one she gets an A for, on why The Great Gatsby is not the great American novel--this book could and surely will be taught as a companion piece to Gatsby, an antidote/riposte to what is pretty much my least favorite of Fitzgerald's fictions--I still haven't recovered from that awful green light and the wretched thing of learning about symbolism in English class, I hate that stuff.)
Anyway, there is so much in this book that's wonderful that really everyone should just read it for themselves, but here is one passage that particularly struck me (this is a topic that's come up now and again here, obviously I have taken sides on the question and generally prefer not to write negative reviews myself, though lest I sound annoyingly high-minded and saintly I will say that you can expect at some point during the next week or so some scathing remarks from me about a major recent work of American fiction that I have just read and that struck me as one of the most gut-turningly offensive and overrated books I have read in, oh, my whole life).
But back to the matter at hand, here is Nunez's narrator speaking about her second husband, the editor of a literary journal:
Long before he'd published a word, he was poring over reviews (his desire one day to edit his own journal supposedly also went as far back as high school) and, with few exceptions, not liking what he saw. Most reviews were badly written, often by people who didn't seem to know or care much about their subject. A lot of critics were lazy; they wrote the same damn review over and over. They made stupid mistakes. They took far too many of their ideas from one another. They were overawed by Names. They opened wide for pablum and pap, but whatever was truly original and brave and strange set their teeth on edge. They swallowed the false and choked on the real. All this he told me the first time we met. He was on the rise then, a cultural critic at large, writing for a number of different publications. He wrote about books and movies and the theater, but also about painting or photography, and occasionally about restaurants or about some cultural trend or fad. The best of his essays would be collected and published, and then it was his turn to be reviewed, and though largely praised he was also faulted--for being too harsh.
"Because I care. These are matters of life and death to me": his justification when he was accused of brutality. (But then, when has it not been the justification? No one ever says, Because I was feeling mean, because my wife had just dumped me, because my own book had just flopped, because I'm a misogynist, because I know the author he is a fucking prick I have always hated his arrogant guts. I couldn't stop myself.)
But--here we go again--I do not trust myself, writing about husbands. I fear I am making Val out to be too flat and cartooonish. Why did I not begin by saying that he was very good, since that is the truth? He did care, he was serious, and he wrote very, very well. He wrote about things that mattered, and he wrote about them deeply, itneligently, and bravely. He always said exactly what he thought, regardless of what people would think of him--and wasn't that his job? And yet, and yet. Why were the majority of the reviews he wrote pans?
The narrator goes on to describe herself reading C. S. Lewis aloud to her daughter and finding herself thinking of her husband when they come to the passage about Edmund's addiction to the enchanted Turkish Delight: "It could not be good for the soul, I thought, to be constantly attacking other people, to be making fresh enemies daily..." (I seriously just the other day was saying how writing negative reviews isn't good for the soul! I love this character, and I love her voice as Nunez has made it work.)
Anyway, Here's Joy Press's review at the Voice--it's funny, I want you to go and read that review, it's a very thoughtful & well-written one and I completely agree with the first four paragraphs, but I dissent from what I take to be Press's conclusion that the novel loses its way in its latter sections and that the narrator Georgette is left in the shadows in contrast to her saint/martyr of a roommate Ann. It seems to me that this is a novel about transcendence, and that Georgette and Ann are equally transformed by the novel's conclusion. (And here's a roundup of all the major reviews.) I hope this book gets a lot of prizes and finds huge numbers of readers, I found it quite magical.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Unreliable witness
Barry Unsworth has an excellent essay at the Guardian about Robert Graves's Claudius books. I must say that I loved, loved, loved those books as a child, I think the peak of my Claudius addiction was at age eleven or so when I read them again and again (I think I had seen some of the Masterpiece Theater television episodes, but it was the voice of the books that really captured my imagination), and throughout my adolescence I was obsessed with Graves and read pretty much everything of his, even the really peculiar ones. (And he featured on an orals topic later in my life, a funny topic on the historical novel that included Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal--the last great grad-school gasp of my teenage reading years, that's one way of looking at it. All my other topics were much more suitably British-literature oriented, on the Chaucer-Shakespeare-Milton-Pope-Wordsworth kind of lines.) I, Claudius is really a remarkably good novel, though; pity I have spoiled it for rereading by having already read it about twenty times....
And another Roman-themed one I want to read: Tom Holland praises Robert Harris's new novel Imperium, it sounds wonderfully appealing.
And another Roman-themed one I want to read: Tom Holland praises Robert Harris's new novel Imperium, it sounds wonderfully appealing.
A terrible piece of news
Not on the scale of Iraq or Lebanon, of course, but it's pretty much incredibly depressing: as Motoko Rich now officially reports at the Times, Village Voice Dismisses 8, Including Senior Arts Editors.
One of those editors is Ed Park, who is quite simply the best editor I've ever worked with. Writing for him has been a pure luxury, pure & simple in the most decadent way (M. F. K. Fisher has a famous passage about eating bread and chocolate and it being the perfect meal, if you see what I mean)--he assigns books with great imaginative flair and wit, he's an immensely well-read and stylish writer himself (a writer with a real sensibility, too, which is the thing I most care about), he's got an incredibly delicate hand as an editor and a sure sense of ethics and literary tact and all that sort of thing, in short he has made the Voice books section into something quite exceptional--unique, I'd say, and altogether wonderful in my opinion--in American literary & cultural commentary.
(He's also just now finishing a novel that is one of the most delightful things I've read in quite a while. Future readers have a great treat in store for them. It's a bit Nicholson Bakeresque but it is also like nothing but itself, in the best possible way.)
I have surely now embarrassed Ed almost to death, since he is also one of the more unassuming and modest literary geniuses in this town, but I wanted to register my dismay and disappointment at this latest development at the Voice.
One of those editors is Ed Park, who is quite simply the best editor I've ever worked with. Writing for him has been a pure luxury, pure & simple in the most decadent way (M. F. K. Fisher has a famous passage about eating bread and chocolate and it being the perfect meal, if you see what I mean)--he assigns books with great imaginative flair and wit, he's an immensely well-read and stylish writer himself (a writer with a real sensibility, too, which is the thing I most care about), he's got an incredibly delicate hand as an editor and a sure sense of ethics and literary tact and all that sort of thing, in short he has made the Voice books section into something quite exceptional--unique, I'd say, and altogether wonderful in my opinion--in American literary & cultural commentary.
(He's also just now finishing a novel that is one of the most delightful things I've read in quite a while. Future readers have a great treat in store for them. It's a bit Nicholson Bakeresque but it is also like nothing but itself, in the best possible way.)
I have surely now embarrassed Ed almost to death, since he is also one of the more unassuming and modest literary geniuses in this town, but I wanted to register my dismay and disappointment at this latest development at the Voice.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Did everyone other than me
already know that Jeffrey Archer has a blog?!? I am not sure I've ever read one of his novels, but I've been interested in him ever since reading the pretty much work-of-genius-y profile of Archer in Iain Sinclair's altogether brilliant and demented Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London, a book I highly recommend if you like the stranger end of place-writing.
(Thanks to Frank for the tip.)
(Thanks to Frank for the tip.)
Great Jones!
Now up at the Voice (that fun title, by the way, was not mine but the brainchild of the literary genius behind the Dizzies): my review of Edward P. Jones's latest story collection. All Aunt Hagar's Children is a book I think everyone must read, at least if you are at all serious about literature or about life; this guy is one of the great geniuses of our time, I find reading his stuff a quite extraordinary experience. It's only a handful of writers who give me quite this feeling of the humanity and warmth of the characters (even though many of these stories are quite bleak); I really felt as I was reading this the same thing that draws me back again and again to my particular can't-live-without-them favorites (Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, James Baldwin's Just Above My Head, Barbara Trapido's novels, David Copperfield).
FSG goes into the trailer business
Check it out. The book in question is Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest, translated by Lorin Stein. It sounds very good, I am curious (it also sounds vaguely reminiscent of Harry Mathews' My Life in CIA, which I read the first half of this summer & then had to return to the library--it wasn't that I didn't like it, I did, but something about its cool clinical masculinity struck me as ever-so-slightly offputting, and I have not quite bothered to request it again at the library). However I will not hold this against Bouillier. . . .
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
At the TLS
Siddhartha Deb on William Boyd's new novel Restless. I love Boyd's fiction, he is sometimes a bit Anthony Burgess-like i.e. writing novels of variable quality but at his best he's absolutely what I love: Armadillo is the perfect literary-light reading hybrid (and also one of English-language literature's great novels of insomnia); Brazzaville Beach is my favorite novel about chimpanzees and human society (it's really a great read, excellent female character too, reminds me of some of those Iain Banks books I like so much).
Also of note: Dinah Birch on Philip Waller's book about literary afterlives in late Victorian Britain; and Victor Brombert on Frederick Brown's Flaubert biography (I've got to get that one, it sounds great and I've got a thing for Flaubert in any case).
Also of note: Dinah Birch on Philip Waller's book about literary afterlives in late Victorian Britain; and Victor Brombert on Frederick Brown's Flaubert biography (I've got to get that one, it sounds great and I've got a thing for Flaubert in any case).
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
On Katrina
Poppy Z. Brite has an op-ed at the Boston Globe:
As a New Orleans native planning to spend the rest of my life in this half-drowned but still vibrant city, I'm scared to address you. A year after Hurricane Katrina, I'm scared that you've forgotten me or are sick of me or think I'm stupid to keep living in a place that almost killed me.
I'm a great admirer of Brite's fiction; her blog's also been my clearest and most persistent means of understanding Katrina and its aftermath.
As a New Orleans native planning to spend the rest of my life in this half-drowned but still vibrant city, I'm scared to address you. A year after Hurricane Katrina, I'm scared that you've forgotten me or are sick of me or think I'm stupid to keep living in a place that almost killed me.
I'm a great admirer of Brite's fiction; her blog's also been my clearest and most persistent means of understanding Katrina and its aftermath.
Monday, August 28, 2006
Back from the country
where I saw mummified cats and crocheted poodle-shaped vodka-bottle cozies in an interesting museum and also more generally hung out in nature and stuff, watched two lamb carcasses be dismembered and marinated in a bathtub and roasted in a pit, etc. etc.
Miscellaneous desirable books at the Guardian: William McIlvanney's new novel Weekend, reviewed by Irvine Welsh (my Scottish grandfather was a great detective-novel addict, his house was full of books in any case but the cupboards were bursting with old green Penguin crime novels in particular, and one of his very favorite writers--someone whose novels he pressed on me in the last couple years of his life--were McIlvanney's Laidlaw books); and Nigel Smith's new edition of Marvell for Longman, which Nicholas Lezard praises to the skies.
I've got a total thing for Marvell, I think I would have to say that Marvell and Elizabeth Bishop are my two favorite poets (I have very mainstream tastes in poetry, nothing surprising there--of course I love Swift's poetry and Byron & Keats & Shelley & such, whatever...), and this edition really sounds excellent.
My favorite Marvell poems include Upon Appleton House and The Mower Against Gardens (the latter makes a brief appearance in my breeding book, though in the midst of a long section on grafting that I am 99% sure I am going to have to cut almost in its entirety, ah well....); but I have a special passion for the less well-known poem called A Dialogue between the Soul and Body, which I am going to paste in here because it is so extraordinary:
SOUL:
O, WHO shall from this dungeon raise
A soul enslaved so many ways?
With bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands;
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear;
A soul hung up, as 'twere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;
Tortured, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart?
BODY:
O, who shall me deliver whole,
From bonds of this tyrannic soul?
Which, stretched upright, impales me so
That mine own precipice I go;
And warms and moves this needless frame,
(A fever could but do the same),
And, wanting where its spite to try,
Has made me live to let me die
A body that could never rest,
Since this ill spirit it possessed.
SOUL:
What magic could me thus confine
Within another's grief to pine?
Where, whatsoever it complain,
I feel, that cannot feel, the pain;
And all my care itself employs,
That to preserve which me destroys;
Constrained not only to endure
Diseases, but, what's worse, the cure;
And, ready oft the port to gain,
Am shipwrecked into health again.
BODY:
But Physic yet could never reach
The maladies thou me dost teach;
Whom first the cramp of hope does tear,
And then the palsy shakes of fear;
The pestilence of love does heat,
Or hatred's hidden ulcer eat;
Joy's cheerful madness does perplex,
Or sorrow's other madness vex;
Which knowledge forces me to know,
And memory will not forego;
What but a soul could have the wit
To build me up for sin so fit?
So architects do square and hew
Green trees that in the forest grew.
Miscellaneous desirable books at the Guardian: William McIlvanney's new novel Weekend, reviewed by Irvine Welsh (my Scottish grandfather was a great detective-novel addict, his house was full of books in any case but the cupboards were bursting with old green Penguin crime novels in particular, and one of his very favorite writers--someone whose novels he pressed on me in the last couple years of his life--were McIlvanney's Laidlaw books); and Nigel Smith's new edition of Marvell for Longman, which Nicholas Lezard praises to the skies.
I've got a total thing for Marvell, I think I would have to say that Marvell and Elizabeth Bishop are my two favorite poets (I have very mainstream tastes in poetry, nothing surprising there--of course I love Swift's poetry and Byron & Keats & Shelley & such, whatever...), and this edition really sounds excellent.
My favorite Marvell poems include Upon Appleton House and The Mower Against Gardens (the latter makes a brief appearance in my breeding book, though in the midst of a long section on grafting that I am 99% sure I am going to have to cut almost in its entirety, ah well....); but I have a special passion for the less well-known poem called A Dialogue between the Soul and Body, which I am going to paste in here because it is so extraordinary:
SOUL:
O, WHO shall from this dungeon raise
A soul enslaved so many ways?
With bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands;
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear;
A soul hung up, as 'twere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;
Tortured, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart?
BODY:
O, who shall me deliver whole,
From bonds of this tyrannic soul?
Which, stretched upright, impales me so
That mine own precipice I go;
And warms and moves this needless frame,
(A fever could but do the same),
And, wanting where its spite to try,
Has made me live to let me die
A body that could never rest,
Since this ill spirit it possessed.
SOUL:
What magic could me thus confine
Within another's grief to pine?
Where, whatsoever it complain,
I feel, that cannot feel, the pain;
And all my care itself employs,
That to preserve which me destroys;
Constrained not only to endure
Diseases, but, what's worse, the cure;
And, ready oft the port to gain,
Am shipwrecked into health again.
BODY:
But Physic yet could never reach
The maladies thou me dost teach;
Whom first the cramp of hope does tear,
And then the palsy shakes of fear;
The pestilence of love does heat,
Or hatred's hidden ulcer eat;
Joy's cheerful madness does perplex,
Or sorrow's other madness vex;
Which knowledge forces me to know,
And memory will not forego;
What but a soul could have the wit
To build me up for sin so fit?
So architects do square and hew
Green trees that in the forest grew.
Friday, August 25, 2006
The Emperor's Children
So I read Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children this week in hundred-page chunks, and it's a really excellent novel, wonderfully enjoyable and intelligent and interesting (and rather like the novel that On Beauty should have been but wasn't). In contrast to Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen, Messud has a really lovely empathy for her characters, so that the satirical impulse is softened or mitigated by this very intelligent understanding and refusal--temperamental disinclination might be a better way of putting it--to judge. I like that a lot.
Anyway, this book's being reviewed all over the place, I won't bother to link except to this very interesting interview with Michelle Huneven in LA Weekly. And here's a paragraph of prose that shows Messud at her very best (this character is the one we feel closest too, I think--but I must say that the character of Marina Thwaite is extraordinarily well-drawn, and the reactions of those around her to her combination of privilege and annoyingness amazingly true to things I have seen myself), thirty-year-old Danielle Minkoff is at home in her apartment just after her secret lover (her best friend Marina's father, eminent journalist Murray Thwaite) has gone:
When he had left, Danielle lay on her bed, which smelled of them and faintly, too, of the gin-and-tonic cologne, and she thought first of Marina, and of what would have to be kept from her now. Danielle had never before had a secret that she couldn't confide in anyone, but this, she knew, was such a secret. She couldn't tell Randy, even, who so wanted her daughter to find love. If that was what she had found. She held in her mind two disparate realities: one was the fierce tenderness she felt for this disintegrating giant, the joy at his small kindnesses and vulnerabilities, the sense--overwhelming and surely false, even she could see--that she could anticipate all of them, that, like a blind person, she had developed some extra sense, where he was concerned, and could practically finish his sentences. The other was a certainty of wrong, a moral repugnance. This she experienced abstractly, with her mind; it was, consequently, the weaker of the two realities. She was fascinated by the internal conflict, or by the notion of it, because in truth, she didn't really contemplate renouncing him. The disgust was an idea, something she knew she ought to conjure, the way an autistic child can learn to smile at his mother to show happiness. Her bones, her flesh, the tickle of her scalp and the pads of her fingertips all spoke without prompting a chorus of desire. Pressed to his chest she'd felt safe and exhilarated at once, as if swept by a great internal breeze; and there seemed little point telling herself that this was immoral. Marina--or even Annabel--didn't come into it. This in the space of a week or two. She'd become a person she would never have anticipated being.
Four slightly irrelevant observations/criticisms:
1. My friend M. aptly observed that it is a pity Messud's three college friends are said to have gone to Brown, since they are clearly Yale types! (The narcissism of small differences. But it creates a minor implausibility.)
2. The character of Bootie doesn't work for me. This type is a particular one that I feel I know fairly well, the clever and idealistic and unappealing and frankly rather frightening teenage male misfit, and I don't think he's nearly as plausibly characterized as the book's other major figures. This is the novel's only significant flaw.
3. The description of the death of the cat called the Pope is uncannily good, and was for me the one part of the book where I suddenly felt like I was in my world, I knew exactly this cat and he lived in a similarly spacious Morningside Heights apartment and his demise was late and awful. Oh, that poor Hobbes! He was an Abyssinian of very strong personality and small size, skin and bone (those vertebrae!) by the time I knew him, and Messud's description of the Pope brought him painfully strongly to mind. RIP Hobbes.
4. The strangest thing for me reading this book is that although on the face of it it's about a world awfully much like the one I live in, I find it absolutely alien and estranging. If I experienced life in the way these characters seem to I would be in absolute despair! It is utterly off-putting. I was reminded of why I do not feel like I'm really an Upper West Side-type person, really my spiritual home is somewhere within walking distance of the Houston Street 1 station, this novel's world is that Hannah and Her Sisters Woody Allenesque world of privilege and spacious Upper West Side apartments and it is really unsavory.
Strangely the book I've just read that felt much more exactly like the world I live in, and want to live in, was Edward P. Jones's All Aunt Hagar's Children. (I won't say more now, my review is coming out shortly & I'll link when it's up, but Jones is in my opinion one of the couple great fiction-writing geniuses of our time. So I'm not knocking Messud, just saying that her writing doesn't give me the sense of great spiritual and intellectual openness that I get from Jones.)
Anyway, this book's being reviewed all over the place, I won't bother to link except to this very interesting interview with Michelle Huneven in LA Weekly. And here's a paragraph of prose that shows Messud at her very best (this character is the one we feel closest too, I think--but I must say that the character of Marina Thwaite is extraordinarily well-drawn, and the reactions of those around her to her combination of privilege and annoyingness amazingly true to things I have seen myself), thirty-year-old Danielle Minkoff is at home in her apartment just after her secret lover (her best friend Marina's father, eminent journalist Murray Thwaite) has gone:
When he had left, Danielle lay on her bed, which smelled of them and faintly, too, of the gin-and-tonic cologne, and she thought first of Marina, and of what would have to be kept from her now. Danielle had never before had a secret that she couldn't confide in anyone, but this, she knew, was such a secret. She couldn't tell Randy, even, who so wanted her daughter to find love. If that was what she had found. She held in her mind two disparate realities: one was the fierce tenderness she felt for this disintegrating giant, the joy at his small kindnesses and vulnerabilities, the sense--overwhelming and surely false, even she could see--that she could anticipate all of them, that, like a blind person, she had developed some extra sense, where he was concerned, and could practically finish his sentences. The other was a certainty of wrong, a moral repugnance. This she experienced abstractly, with her mind; it was, consequently, the weaker of the two realities. She was fascinated by the internal conflict, or by the notion of it, because in truth, she didn't really contemplate renouncing him. The disgust was an idea, something she knew she ought to conjure, the way an autistic child can learn to smile at his mother to show happiness. Her bones, her flesh, the tickle of her scalp and the pads of her fingertips all spoke without prompting a chorus of desire. Pressed to his chest she'd felt safe and exhilarated at once, as if swept by a great internal breeze; and there seemed little point telling herself that this was immoral. Marina--or even Annabel--didn't come into it. This in the space of a week or two. She'd become a person she would never have anticipated being.
Four slightly irrelevant observations/criticisms:
1. My friend M. aptly observed that it is a pity Messud's three college friends are said to have gone to Brown, since they are clearly Yale types! (The narcissism of small differences. But it creates a minor implausibility.)
2. The character of Bootie doesn't work for me. This type is a particular one that I feel I know fairly well, the clever and idealistic and unappealing and frankly rather frightening teenage male misfit, and I don't think he's nearly as plausibly characterized as the book's other major figures. This is the novel's only significant flaw.
3. The description of the death of the cat called the Pope is uncannily good, and was for me the one part of the book where I suddenly felt like I was in my world, I knew exactly this cat and he lived in a similarly spacious Morningside Heights apartment and his demise was late and awful. Oh, that poor Hobbes! He was an Abyssinian of very strong personality and small size, skin and bone (those vertebrae!) by the time I knew him, and Messud's description of the Pope brought him painfully strongly to mind. RIP Hobbes.
4. The strangest thing for me reading this book is that although on the face of it it's about a world awfully much like the one I live in, I find it absolutely alien and estranging. If I experienced life in the way these characters seem to I would be in absolute despair! It is utterly off-putting. I was reminded of why I do not feel like I'm really an Upper West Side-type person, really my spiritual home is somewhere within walking distance of the Houston Street 1 station, this novel's world is that Hannah and Her Sisters Woody Allenesque world of privilege and spacious Upper West Side apartments and it is really unsavory.
Strangely the book I've just read that felt much more exactly like the world I live in, and want to live in, was Edward P. Jones's All Aunt Hagar's Children. (I won't say more now, my review is coming out shortly & I'll link when it's up, but Jones is in my opinion one of the couple great fiction-writing geniuses of our time. So I'm not knocking Messud, just saying that her writing doesn't give me the sense of great spiritual and intellectual openness that I get from Jones.)
Stage fright
John Lahr has a great essay on stage fright in the New Yorker issue of 28 August 2006; it's not available online, unfortunately, but here's the link for some of his other articles. Did everyone other than me know that Carly Simon has such bad stage fright that "she has been known to take the stage in tight boots, to jab her hand with clutched safety pins, and even, just before going on, to ask band members to spank her"?
At a celebration for President Bill Clinton's fiftieth birthday, at Radio City Music Hall, in 1996, Simon, terrified of following Smokey Robinson, invited the entire horn section to let her have it. 'They all took turns spanking me,' she says. 'During the last spank the curtain went up. The audience saw the aftermath, the sting on my face. I bet Olivier didn't do that.'
I like the idea of the fact-checker contacting the members of the horn section and asking them about the time they spanked Carly Simon....
It seems to me that there's a very fine line between the adrenaline rush you need to produce a good performance and the incapacitating stage fright that keeps someone like Stephen Fry from doing theater work these days. You have to like working on sheer nerve in order to thrive as a performer, but obviously the terrifying part is that one day all the accommodations you've made and that have served you well over the years suddenly stop working. It's beyond any rationality, and it's clearly often almost impossible to get over that kind of a collapse.
At a celebration for President Bill Clinton's fiftieth birthday, at Radio City Music Hall, in 1996, Simon, terrified of following Smokey Robinson, invited the entire horn section to let her have it. 'They all took turns spanking me,' she says. 'During the last spank the curtain went up. The audience saw the aftermath, the sting on my face. I bet Olivier didn't do that.'
I like the idea of the fact-checker contacting the members of the horn section and asking them about the time they spanked Carly Simon....
It seems to me that there's a very fine line between the adrenaline rush you need to produce a good performance and the incapacitating stage fright that keeps someone like Stephen Fry from doing theater work these days. You have to like working on sheer nerve in order to thrive as a performer, but obviously the terrifying part is that one day all the accommodations you've made and that have served you well over the years suddenly stop working. It's beyond any rationality, and it's clearly often almost impossible to get over that kind of a collapse.
I do want
to read Mark Haddon's new novel, it sounds rather delightful. I loved The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, parts of it were so funny that I was almost in tears.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Just a quick one
to say that I've had a most perfect two-for-two theater-and-dinner evening (I know it is frivolous to rank the dinner with the play, a really good play will certainly carry a bad dinner, and yet it is also true that a terrible play can be assuaged by an excellent dinner afterwards--I remember my friend A. in college, one of my many friends A., very seriously explaining why he thought the whole symposium idea distasteful, intellectual conversation should not be sullied by the materiality of food and drink, and while I quite see the point of his youthful belief I think that surely the two things--in this case art rather than philosophy, of course--are compatible). If you're in NY you must see this play while it's still on, the tickets are amazingly only $15: it's August Wilson's Seven Guitars at the Signature Theatre (and you know, I almost said I couldn't go because of work, it is a lesson in not turning down opportunities--fortunately I came to my senses in the nick of time after realizing I had never seen an August Wilson play & that this was ridiculous).
It's a magically good play, it's got that great noir thing going on so that you think a lot about character and free will and determinism (and the counterbalance between the character of Hedley with his fallen mythic legacy and Floyd with his desperately ambitious and continually thwarted upward mobility is totally amazing, that's what makes the whole thing work); and the production is amazing too, beautiful set and amazingly good acting. Lance Reddick is perfect as Floyd; but there is this moment when Roslyn Ruff as Vera, who we have only seen as a wary and almost sullen woman, finally relaxes enough to trust Floyd again and you suddenly see in her what these men who love her have seen and what they also have taken away from her so that the audience has hardly caught a glimpse of her charm as it has been beaten down into suspicion, it is an acting moment of great genius as well as an acutely-well-timed-in-the-arc-of-the-play moment.... Anyway, trust me, it's superb, see it if you can.
And then the also perfect dinner afterwards at Esca, I had an heirloom-tomato-and-arugula salad with some sort of cheese crumbled over and then a small but absolutely delicate sashimi-style mackerel crudo, everything just tastes exquisitely as it should & like what you most want to eat in the world.
(But August Wilson is better than dinner.)
It's a magically good play, it's got that great noir thing going on so that you think a lot about character and free will and determinism (and the counterbalance between the character of Hedley with his fallen mythic legacy and Floyd with his desperately ambitious and continually thwarted upward mobility is totally amazing, that's what makes the whole thing work); and the production is amazing too, beautiful set and amazingly good acting. Lance Reddick is perfect as Floyd; but there is this moment when Roslyn Ruff as Vera, who we have only seen as a wary and almost sullen woman, finally relaxes enough to trust Floyd again and you suddenly see in her what these men who love her have seen and what they also have taken away from her so that the audience has hardly caught a glimpse of her charm as it has been beaten down into suspicion, it is an acting moment of great genius as well as an acutely-well-timed-in-the-arc-of-the-play moment.... Anyway, trust me, it's superb, see it if you can.
And then the also perfect dinner afterwards at Esca, I had an heirloom-tomato-and-arugula salad with some sort of cheese crumbled over and then a small but absolutely delicate sashimi-style mackerel crudo, everything just tastes exquisitely as it should & like what you most want to eat in the world.
(But August Wilson is better than dinner.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
