10 posts from February 2009

Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

Lahiri writes stories of immigrant displacement, from the point-of-view of Bengali-Americans. I'm always a little surprised at the depth of that displaced feeling in her works--I understand the second generation fully embracing its roots, but I wonder to what extent any second- or third-gen kid can genuinely long for the parental homeland, which they may have seen occasionally or never. Regardless, Lahiri knows feeling and nuance; reading her is like watching someone scrutinize an egg, turning it over and over to understand its weight, texture, and strength. Her stories are almost Japanese in their aesthetic, impeccably written, restrained, simply worded, without fireworks. If I have any complaint about her writing, it's the controlled quality--she's not going to cut loose with something hilarious, or drop a sentence that sucker-punches you with its out-from-left-field brilliance. On the other hand, if you don't get fireworks, you do get undertow, as the cumulative force of a story pulls you in. That effect is most evident in the last three stories in this book, a trio about Hema and Kaushik--the conclusion, and especially that last, devastating sentence, knocked me flat. Here's a cut from the final story:

She still remembered her first impression of him, a quiet teenager in a jacket and tie, refusing her mother's food. She remembered the ridiculous attraction she had felt that night, when she was thirteen years old, and that she had secretly nurtured during the weeks they lived together. It was as if no time had passed.

After lunch he drove her back, inviting her to his place, in a quiet neighborhood where laundry hung between apricot-colored houses and old men sat in folding chairs on the streets. The men watched, silently, as Kaushik unlocked the bolts and Hema waited at his side. It was unquestioned that they would not part yet, unquestioned that though they had not seen or thought of each other in decades, not sought each other out, something precious had been stumbled upon, a newborn connection that could not be left unattended, that demanded every particle of their care.

Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency

Amazon.com reckoned this was the book of the year. My opinion is not so lofty, though I did zip through fairly happily. The Northern Clemency reads a little like what Dickens would write, if he were writing today--a big cast of characters (and few fully 3D), all classes, criminals and strivers, and lots of loving detail for the time and place, in this case the industrial, northern English town of Sheffield in the '70s and '80s. Hensher takes you right there with his description of one woman's stab at a swank party:

Katherine Glover was relaxing, now that her party was being a success. They were eating the food; she'd made pastry cases with mushroom filling, and prawn, she'd made three different quiches, she'd made Coronation Chicken (a challenge to eat standing), she'd made assemblages of cheese-and-pineapple and cold sausages, she'd made open Danish sandwiches in tiny squares, a magazine idea, and they were eating it all. There were dishes of crisps, too, and Twiglets, but those didn't count in the way of making an effort. They were drinking the wine, Malcolm's choice—she'd had three glasses—and in the background, the music was exactly right, Mozart, Elvira Madigan. It was all being a great success.

In my corner of  '70s Midwestern suburbia, those appetizers would've been cheese cubes, stuff on Triscuits, and Blue Nun, but I know exactly what Hensher's talking about. It's the kind of domestic drama women writers have been known to serve up (and have often been dismissed for). Hensher doesn't have Dickens' gift for plot, the bones a book needs to support all those pages. Instead, the plot here seems like an afterthought--but I won't offer any spoilers to explain why. However, if the little things sustain you, dig in, enjoy, try the fondue.

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

It's neither here nor there, the tenuous life of the immigrant--"there" has been left behind, and "here" the immigrant is not yet--maybe never will be entirely--at home. Hemon is a neither-here-nor-there, former citizen of a country that doesn't exist anymore, Yugoslavia. The namesake of The Lazarus Project is Lazarus Averbuch, a real historical figure who escaped a pogrom and emigrated to the U.S., only to be killed by the Chicago police chief in 1908. Pursuing the story of Lazarus and his sister Olga is Vladimir Brik, our narrator, a writer who's having trouble writing, a husband married to a woman who seems to have a frictionless existence, and an immigrant in a constant state of disorientation--enough that he experiences a visual Freudian slip:

I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES. It was too late for recovery, for sadness was now the dark matter in the universe of still objects around me: the salt and pepper shakers; the honey jar; the bag of sun-dried tomatoes; the blunt knife; a dessicated loaf of bread; the two coffee cups, waiting. My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.

Brik reconnects with a Bosnian friend, a photographer and raconteur named Rora whose larger-than-life stories can scarcely be credited. However, before the war, being a self-made man was an option:

The one thing I missed from the before-the-war Sarajevo was a kind of unspoken belief that everyone could be whatever they claimed they were--each life, however imaginary, could be validated by its rightful, sovereign owner, from the inside. If someone told you he had flown in a cockpit or had been a teenage gigolo in Sweden or had eaten mamba kebabs, it was easy to choose to believe him; you could choose to trust his stories because they were good.

Now, it seems, the self cannot be satisfied with story alone; Brik wants the truth, and that may be a fool's errand. Rora, on the other hand, turns discomfort and existential blues into jokes:

Mujo is a refugee in Germany, has no job, but has a lot of time, so he goes to a Turkish bath. The bath is full of German businessmen with towels around their waists, huffing and puffing, but every once in a while a cell phone rings and they pull their phone out from under the towel and say, Bitte? Mujo seems to be the only one without a cell phone, so he goes to the bathroom and stuffs toilet paper up his butt. He walks back out, a long trail of toilet paper behind him. So a German says, You have some paper, Herr, sticking out behind you. Oh, Mujo says, it looks like I have received a fax.

Despite the humor, this novel is no lark--it's suffused with sadness and loss, but it's thoughtful and beautifully written. And it's good to be reminded that America's anti-immigrant, wall-building hysteria is not new: Alarmist in the early 1900s worried about European anarchists much as today's bigots fear invading terrorists. New century, old prejudices, leaving us neither here nor there.

Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances

Writing "crazy," like acting "drunk," is too often done sloppily and stereotypically, with tics we all recognize but no sense of how the individual personality influences--perhaps even necessitates--the symptoms. I suspect the reality of mental breakdown--whether schizophrenia or Alzheimer's--is a slippery process, the needles of doubt at first just one or two in a haystack, the reliable and unreliable mingling and hard to distinguish, until a line is crossed and the stack is more needle than hay. I liked, in this novel, the narrator's description of his own mind, which applies as well to the sane as the in-:

Indecisiveness, capriciousness--these qualities in Rema never irritated me. I've always thought of my own mind as an unruly parliament, with a feeble leader, with crazy extremist factions, and so I don't look down on others for being the same.

Full points to Atmospheric Disturbances, then, for merging style and substance, giving a first-person account of a psychiatrist who becomes convinced that his wife has been replaced with an exact double. From the critical praise for the author's avant-garde sensibilities, I feared one of those books that exercises theory at the expense of a good story, but in fact Galchen's strategies enhance the sense of a mind out of joint, and the cognitive disconnects proved to be surprisingly moving, at least for me. The narrator has a way of reasoning against himself, as in this sensible-sounding passage that belies his feelings of loss and obsessive love for his "real" wife:

People naturally perseverate on their personal tragedies, even though such perseveration doesn't really serve anyone, neither the living nor the dead. I mean, there's research on these things. It's simply not a practical use of time to think constantly of the dead. I'm not heartless, and I do regret that I must sound that way, and I understand how resilience is in its way a demonic kind of strength, a strength not unrelated to a capacity for indifference, a strength that is discomfiting evidence against the existence of true, eternal love. But is it better for the living to burn themselves in others' funeral pyres? As I wrote, once, "Mourning should be mortal."

Anne Enright, Yesterday's Weather

Once in a while you finish something and immediately think, "Ooh, I'd like to do that again." The unread book tower having now reached six stories, I rarely reread, but I was tempted, with Enright's short fiction, to pull down the lap bar and go again. She does that masterful trick: turn ordinary scenes of domesticity into something both alien and wholly familiar. And she does it with language that's un-gussied and frank yet lively. Snippet:

"I wouldn't go near her with a bag of dicks," said his companion, who was left-handed--or at least that was the hand that was holding his pint. He had the thin Saturday-matinee face of a villain; of the man who might kidnap the young girl and end up in a duel with Errol Flynn. She saw him swinging out of velvet drapes, up-ending tables and jumping from the chandelier, brandishing, not a sword, but a hessian bag from which come soft gurgles and thin protesting squeaks.

Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork

As the observer effect in physics has it, looking at an object can change it, so the truth depends on who's looking. Certainly detectives, novelists, and ethnographers know that eyewitnesses and narrators are unreliable. All three professions converge in Fieldwork, a novel about an anthropologist and a missionary family among a Thai hill tribe, and their cross-purposes, which result in two deaths. Our narrator is, uh, Mischa Berlinski--a distracting mistake, I think, trying to seem meta, particularly when the story is not. Fortunately this first-time author doesn't make many other rookie errors; the novel zips along, revealing more layers to the story.

We have three strands to the tale: the narrator/investigator; the Walker family of missionaries, who have been among the fictional Dyalo tribe for generations; and Berkeley-educated anthropologist Martiya van der Leun, who gets embedded with the tribe so deeply that she loses her scientific objectivity. Naturally there's a tug-of-war between the anthropologist tending the fieldwork and the missionary shepherds, though it's not quite as simple as that--Berlinski doesn't take sides, and ultimately it's the people at the ends of the tug-of-war rope, not the Dyalo, who suffer and lose their grip. For all their longing for certaintly, the narrators are all unreliable to themselves.

Here's the missionary's take on the indigenous spirits:

Nobody knows what the spirits really are — maybe they're fallen angels, that's certainly a possibility, or maybe some other being created in the spiritual realm. The biblical evidence certainly associates the spirits with Satan. But you know how I've always thought of the Dyalo spirits? They're like a giant powerful bureaucracy, which imposes a million and one rules on the Dyalo. Fines them a pig or a chicken or something worse when they do something wrong. Punishes them, kicks them around, treats them like dirt. You ever try and get a residence here in Thailand? Go from office to office, lose two whole days? It's like that all the time for the Dyalo. If the spirit of the big rock makes your kid sick, ask the spirit of your ancestor to protect you. So you slip him a bribe, a chicken, a pig. Maybe he'll help you, maybe not….

Pat Barker, Life Class

WWII was so massive--in geography, in lives lost and damaged, in ongoing impact on how we talk about war and politics and culture--that is has largely obscured its predecessor. And that's terrible, because the first world war may have killed fewer (20 million, compared to WWII's 70 million), but it was enormously traumatic, unprecedented in scale, and has had equally lasting after-effects (see: the former Yugoslavia). Barker has been a one-woman rescue committee, fiction division, through her outstanding Regeneration trilogy and now Life Class, which is not the match of that trio but is rewarding nevertheless.

The novel takes us from London's Slade School of Art to the Western Front. It's a diverging convergence: two artists, Paul and Elinor, grow together and apart as he goes to the front lines as a volunteer for the Red Cross and she drifts into the Bloomsbury circle of artists and pacifists. Life splits away from class--both the academic environment and social class (Paul is working class; Elinor, middle)--and Barker keeps her loyalties divided, too: Is art its own answer, or does it matter only when it's born from the blood and guts of the world? Here's their mutual friend on his art--lines that today's directors of Iraq movies could use just as well:

"I think that once the bloody war's over nobody's going to want to look at anything I paint... [I]t's a Faustian pact. I get all this attention for a few months, however long the bloody thing lasts, but once it's over--finish. Nobody wants to look at a nightmare once they've woken up."

Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?

Recently I saw a band list itself as Healing & Easy Listening/Folk/Ghettotech, and thought: I haven't heard you and never will, because that's just ass. Librarians and store clerks and shoppers like categories, because genres help them organize and find things, but artists should only give a crap about making something good. That's why (well, one reason why) Kate Atkinson rocks. Call her novels detective stories, mysteries, or literary fiction; it doesn't matter--they work any which way and work well. When Will There Be Good News? brings back characters from previous books, former private detective Jackson Brodie and no-BS, hard-ass police detective Louise Monroe, and introduces a new girl, Reggie, intrepid, continually underestimated, and of course the key to it all. They're people you'll enjoy spending time with, and you'll be glad they're therapy-proof:

The basic principle was that she should learn to avoid negative thinking, freeing her to have a more positive attitude to life. The therapist, a hippyish, well-intentioned woman called Jenny who looked as if she'd knitted herself, told Louise to visualize a place where she could put all of her negative thoughts.... The problem was that when she had safely locked up all the negative thoughts at the bottom of the sea, there was nothing left, no positive thoughts at all.

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

Novels set in India tend to fall into one of two camps: (1) Bollywood fabulist, all about color, costume, fantasy, romance, and (2) Dickensian dire, all about poverty, brutality, a struggle that often comes down to an unsavory choice between death and degradation. (If you've seen Slumdog Millionaire, that combines the two camps.) The White Tiger is in group (2), with underdog Balram Halwai as our narrator, down but definitely not out, working his way up from nameless child to chauffeur to entrepreneur...well, the hard way. He's a man of action, he keeps saying, but he's also a man of thought and makes an engaging storyteller. Balram has no illusions about life in India:

These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in.

And he has no illusions about himself, acknowledging the consequences of survival with intimacy but not regret:

Here's a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life--possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life; only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth.

If you're somehow in the mood for more of man's inhumanity to man, see Uwem Akpan's Say You're One of Them. The author is a Jesuit born in Nigeria, and his stories are set in several African nations. Many of those stories from the perspective of children, which is not only emotionally gripping but strategic: We who are ignorant of such extreme privation, trauma, and political opportunism can identify best with those children, losing our innocence as they lose theirs.

Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Nobody wants to die, but Julian Barnes really freaks out at the prospect of death; he is entirely unreconciled to it. And honestly, why wouldn't you be? Despite the people who declare, with a put-upon air of serenity, their utter certainty in an afterlife, there is no evidence one way or the other, and the prospect of nonexistence is terrible. You might even, like Barnes, snap to in the middle of the night screaming "No, no, no!" If that kind of fear can be paralyzing, denial or dismissal can be just as damaging, because if you don't understand that ultimate mortal limitation, you don't know who you are or how you want to live. Barnes tackles his subject with wit and warmth, intellectual inquiry, and family anecdotes:

I don't believe in God, but I miss Him. That's what I say when the question is put. I asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: "Soppy."

Of course, Barnes also reveals that his philosopher brother keeps llamas and likes to wear knee breeches, buckle shoes, and a brocade waistcoat. Carpe diem. But soppy the book is not; you'll more often find incisive, suck-your-breath-in statements like: "I look around at my many friendships, and can recognize that some of them are not so much friendships any more as memories of friendships." Ouch, and true.

David Carr, The Night of the Gun

Every hangover begins with an inventory. The next morning mine began with my mouth. I had been baking all night, and it was as dry as a two-year-old chicken bone. My head was a small prison, all yelps of pain and alarm, each movement seeming to shift bits of broken glass in my skull. My right arm came into view for inspection, caked in blood, and then I saw it had a few actual pieces of glass still embedded in it. So much for metaphor. My legs both hurt, but in remarkably different ways.

David Carr's first chapter includes that description, but the entire book is an inventory, first of a multiyear circuit of drug and alcohol benders, hangovers, and rehab; then an inventory of success--sobriety, career, marriage, children. It's a feel-good story everyone can get behind, but as an addict and a journalist, Carr has a stronger bullshit detector than the average human, and he's not about to let himself off the hook for the bad stuff, nor approach the good stuff with anything less than humility. "The meme of abasement followed by salvation is a durable device in literature," Carr acknowledges, "but does it abide the complexity of how things really happened? Everyone is told just as much as he needs to know, including the self." To get to the truth, Carr became an investigative journalist researching his own life. But truth is a trickster: He soon discovers the Rashomon effect of people remembering events differently, and worse, finds that he not only can't rely on his memory of events, he can't rely on himself, what he thought were the bedrock principles of his personality. The Night of the Gun is a fascinating account, a page-turner that's thoughtful.

John Hodgman, More Information Than You Require

Fun fact: Hodgman was once Bruce (Evil Dead) Campbell's literary agent. Who knew that Campbell needed a literary agent? And yet it seems appropriate that it should be Hodgman, minor television celebrity, tweedy embodiment of PC, and purveyor of fine fake-trivia tomes. More Information picks up where Areas of My Expertise left off, and I found it even funnier, apart from the mole-men names, which were not as entertaining as the hobos'. But you will find a useful table of American presidents that includes commonly neglected information, such as their nicknames, whether they had a hook hand, and humanizing details, like this for Reagan:

After a failed assassination attempt on Reagan's life, Nancy Reagan reportedly slept with one of his shirts to be comforted by his familiar aroma. Presumably it was not the shirt he was wearing when he was shot, because the president rarely smelled like blood. Rather, one historian described Reagan's scent to be "a kind of folksy, doddering man-musk, the round, reassuring nose lingering somewhere between pancakes, saddle oil, and grandfather fart, with just a hint of crushed air traffic controller.

David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Unless you've been living under a concrete toadstool for the past 10 years, you know that Sedaris is hilarious--the live appearances are unmissable for his off-color anecdotes; the books, conducive to the kind of snowballing giggles that can get you the stink eye on public transit. The latest collection offers more of same. And there's one of my favorites, "Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool," about his parents' misguided art collection:

Her first puchase was an elongated statue of a man made from what looked like twisted paper but was actually metal pressed into thin sheets. He stood maybe two feet tall and held three rusted wires, each attached to a blown-glass balloon that floated above his head. Mr. Balloon Man, she called it.

"I'm just not certain he needs that top hat," I told her.

And my mother said, "Oh, really?" in a way that meant: If I want your opinion, I'll ask for it.

Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

Vowell's account of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans is not her best book--she's done her homework, but the results are uneven, some parts more polished than others. However, her good humor, genuine interest, and ability to clarify the complex makes the book entertaining. If nothing else, Shipmates is worth checking out for how she debunks Reagan's (and others') misuse of John Cotton's "city on a hill" sermon, and for her explanation of how the seemingly small differences among Puritan thinkers led to the Constitution, the First Amendment, and other long-lived American principles. For example, here she is on Puritans versus evangelicals:

The seventeenth-century Puritans are seen as the ancestors of todays' anti-intellectual Protestant sects--probably because of high school productions of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a fictionalization of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, an exercise in stupidity that took place more than forty years after [Massachusetts Bay Colony founder] John Winthrop's death. In fact, today's evangelicals owe more to the Great Awakening revival movement of the eighteenth century, in which a believer's passion and feelings came to trump book learning. Subsequent Great Awakening sequels over the next two centuries brought forth recent innovations, including the ecstatic outbursts known as speaking in tongues.