It's been a pretty good year. Better than average. My novel found a publisher. A good one. My historian found a job. Also a good one. Which is probably how you know that the Mayans might've been off by a few days, but were otherwise totally right. So before the world ends, I figured I'd better summarize the Year in Reading. I got a Kindle. I finally read Infinite Jest. These things are not unrelated. I got a frequent buyer card at Harvard Book Store. I vowed never to buy another book from Amazon, cancelled my Rewards Card, and continued to feel mega-guilty about my Kindle. These things are not unrelated. Yet despite all the book buying, it was a fairly frustrating reading year. Where was the transcendence? Where were the books that showed me the world as I believed it but had not yet recognized it to be? Of course it's possible that as my own book gets closer and closer to being born and as I grow tougher and tougher on it, I am also growing tougher on every other narrative I encounter. That would be one vaguely positive, and entirely self-justifying, way to spin it. Regardless, here are my scattered highlights. Mountains Conquered Underworld, Don DeLillo Bottom line is I loved Underworld: creation and waste and mushrooms, neighborhood life in 1950s Bronx, J. Edgar Hoover and Lenny Bruce, the trajectory of a single (perhaps apocryphal) baseball. The central character, Nick Shay, is -- honestly, I have no idea what he is or why his emotional flatness should be so interesting to DeLillo -- but it's the vignettes about everything else in the Cold War United States that really keep the novel going, and they are moving and intelligent and gorgeously layered, so really, who cares about Nick...? Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest on the other hand? I wrestled with this gorgon for about three months, took lots of breaks, got annoyed at syntax, got angry at mood, and now it's all I can think about. Distracting pharmacological notes aside, I feel I understand a lot more about addiction than I ever did before and I feel grateful for the character of Don Gately. But I also feel that this book never let me get a word in edgewise and for all its effort to make me feel it often just left me cold. I feel it's too much of one thing (despairing, isolating pain) and not enough of all the other things (especially joy in other people) that make up the infinity of human experience. I feel I need to educate myself a lot more to form a considered appreciation of this undeniably major late 20th century American work, cast off all my formal and stylistic prejudices, and etc etc and so on. But I also still feel that I never want to read another suicide by microwave and that everything to do with Quebecois separatist wheelchair assassins is really, really stupid. So maybe I still have some growing to do as I enter 2013? I can only hope. I really do want to grow. Most Overdue Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi Sometimes there are no words so you have to draw a black box. This graphic memoir of the Iranian Revolution really does live up to the hype.(Also, a great antidote to the America-centric story in Argo.) Most Topical We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver An exceptional novel, culturally daring and intellectually sharp, about the mother of a disturbed adolescent who commits a terrible crime at school. Several months back, I read it as a brilliant allegory for the terror of American parenthood in an individualistic and politically divided society. I still read it that way, though the events described remain far too real and unresolved. Most Original Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner Perhaps a self-loathing, self-medicating poet's meditation on his alienating year abroad doesn't sound terribly original. Or fun. But Lerner's first novel, about a poet like him named Adam who spends a fellowship year in Spain, is at once clever, curious, hilarious and sad. How can a privileged, accomplished American have anything genuine or valid to say about the terribly ugly real world? Adam starts by taking drugs and going to the Prado. The rest unfolds from there. Biggest Treats The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides When I read this at the beginning of 2012, I didn't know enough about David Foster Wallace to see any resemblance to Leonard. He was just Leonard to me -- a brilliant, mentally ill guy in love -- which, whatever his source of inspiration, was surely what Eugenides intended. Likewise Madeline was just Madeline and Mitchell just Mitchell: three Ivy League graduates educated in theory on the cusp of becoming real. Look at Me, Jennifer Egan After A Visit from the Goon Squad, I was an Egan convert. Her language, her sharp vantage on American culture, her ability to create a book that encapsulates all that is written and all that is not. I needed more more more. But I'm a savorer, so I only allowed myself one this year. Look at Me was it: about the post-industrial Midwest, and high-fashion Manhattan, and a masochistic model whose face is never quite the same after a devastating car crash. Best Alternate History Pym, Mat Johnson What if Edgar Allen Poe's one novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, were actually inspired by a true story? And what if you were an embittered black academic who was just denied tenure for refusing to teach African-American literature, and what if you discovered a slave narrative linked to Pym that might resurrect your pitiful career? Obviously, you would set sail for whitest Antarctica with an all black crew and hundreds of Little Debbie cakes only to get yourself enslaved by a brutal race of foul-smelling abominable snowmen. "Turns out though that my thorough and exhaustive scholarship into the slave narratives of the African Diaspora in no way prepared me to actually become a fucking slave." Ha! Johnson's novel is high satire -- of the academy, of art, and of course of racial politics, the Atlantic World's enduring irresolvable theme. Article That Spoke Most Directly to My Heart "Some Notes on Attunement," Zadie Smith, The New Yorker, 12/10/12 On Joni Mitchell, emotional evolution, and not being a connoisseur. God, I can't wait to read NW.
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When I was in growing up, my parents had HBO. The local college library was good for classics like National Velvet and all manner of screwball Lily Tomlin comedies, but if you really wanted to keep up with current releases, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the 1994 effort of my then-favorite director Kenneth Branagh (yes, really), then HBO was your source. Things I learned from Branagh's Frankenstein: 1) Who Robert DeNiro was. (Actually, I may have learned that from Cape Fear a few years earlier...) 2) Frankenstein is the scientist not the monster. Everyone has this realization at some point. Mine I owe to shirtless Branagh. 3) It would really, really, really suck to be falsely accused of murder. Especially if the punishment is being thrown off a dizzying tower with a noose tied around your neck. Having just (belatedly) read the novel for the first time, I'm pretty tempted to revisit that no doubt outrageous, action-packed film, but for now, a completely different movie comes to mind -- in part because Frankenstein the novel is less action-packed than I might've expected. Big moments like the animation of the creature and Victor's wedding receive but one sentence. Murders happen primarily off-stage and are told back to us in (mostly) bloodless summary. When Shelley does indulge in long descriptions, they usually address the creature's plight in a hostile world, Victor's anguish over his own hubris or, true to the Romantic movement, the awesome natural world around them. On one of his many perambulations, on which he broods over What He Has Done, Victor encounters the shimmering Swiss mountains of his youth: "The Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings." "Another earth," of course, calls to mind Mike Cahill's 2011 film of the same name, in which a young woman named Rhoda dreams about starting over on Earth 2, a twin body that has suddenly appeared in the sky over our own planet. Like Victor, Rhoda has some blood on her hands, and like him, she experiences paralyzing remorse. What better way to purge that guilt than to enter a parallel universe, a majestic one you can see from the bleak place you inhabit now, where none of your crimes exist? It's an irresistible fantasy -- to escape and start fresh as a better version of yourself who would never, ever destroy a life. Is it relevant here to mention that Mary Shelley was pregnant when she wrote that line? I think it is. What's more, having just returned from Seattle, where clouds do fun things to mountains, I can affirm that snowy peaks really do often look like perfect castles in the sky. All of a sudden, the school year is winding down at Mighty Writers. I can now count the number of days I have left in the studio on one hand, and that just makes me feel miserable. Where am I going to go in July to read the clever poetry and space capers of Philadelphia middle schoolers? Who's going to play with my hair on Tuesday afternoons?
I was honored to be Volunteer of Month for May, and I'm wracking my brain to figure out how to stay involved from Boston next year, and from Jersey thereafter. In the meantime, if you live in Philly, like kids okay, and care deeply about improving literacy in our city, please think about volunteering your time when Mighty Afterschool starts up again next fall. You won't regret it. If you have long hair, you might even get it braided. For some reason, April has been the month of charitable writer friends asking me to join their recorded conversations. And for some reason, adolescence continues to be the organizing theme. Having recently come to suspect that I was at my smartest as a 16-year-old in AP English, I was more than eager to revisit those awkward halcyon days on a panel for The Common magazine at the Kelly Writers House and on Barrelhouse magazine's wildly successful (and Sam Lipsyte-endorsed) Book Fight podcast. By all means, have a look/listen. Then see if you agree with me that I say "right, right" WAY too much when other people are talking. Writing About Place: The Common at Penn's Kelly Writers House In which I discussed place-based writing and read from Issue 3 of The Common with founding editor Jennifer Acker, fellow contributor Rolf Potts and KWH's indispensable Jamie-Lee Josselyn. (4/12/12) Book Fight Episode 4: Judy Blume, Forever...
In which Barrelhouse editors Mike Ingram and Tom McAllister allowed me to be their special teen girl correspondent. No, really, I was honored. (4/23/12) Thanks to Iron Husband Matt Karp, the movies of 2011 occupied most of my blogging brain in recent months (see the fruits of those labors over at the Iron List). But I've been reading, too. Not as much as I would like, but enough to blab about it for a little while here. First up, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, which, a few debatable plot points aside, really is that good. I mean, I read that thing jealously in every sense of the word -- wishing people would leave me alone and just let me read, wishing I'd written it myself. Damn him. I guess I understand why it might be a hard sell for some readers: there's really only one female character, and there's a LOT of stuff about baseball. But Harbach succeeds where so many otherwise talented sports novelists fall short (I'm looking at you, Richard Ford); he really captures the experience of the athlete. Not just the punishing work-outs, the throbbing knees, and the pain of losing (though that's all beautifully, viscerally there), but also the rare single-mindedness of athletic pursuit -- the rather extraordinary (and also rather limited) way that the best athletes can deafen themselves to background noise, suppress interest in other human activities, and make an entire life of one motion, performed again and again and again. While transcendence is what everyone's after, Henry Skrimshander is remarkable for his narrowness, Mike Schwartz for his tolerance for pain. So, OK, yes, I'm sucker for jocks, but baseball is not my sport. In fact, my apathy borders on hatred: those long games, that long season, those stupid uniforms with those embarrassing belts. Why watch a misshapen guy stand around in the outfield when you can watch Dwyane Wade unleash himself for a steal and a rearing, hurtling fast break? But Harbach made me kind of like baseball, and that may well be a literary triumph in itself. Leaving the Atocha Station was another literary darling of 2011, and another take on ambition. It's a slim novel by the young poet Ben Lerner about a self-loathing, over-medicated young poet on a prestigious fellowship in Spain. I assume it's autobiographical, because, among other coincidences, both the author and the narrator, whose name I can't remember, are from Topeka, and son to a famous feminist psychologist. (Having worked on Harriet Lerner's backlist in a past life, this particular coincidence pleased me to no end.) The book looks and feels like a monograph you're forced to read for a sociology course, but otherwise, Coffee House Press did very well by it. This is a delightful, chastening novel about personal and political anxiety and the perils of trying to speak Spanish when you can't. Highly recommended. And then, of course, there's Stewart O'Nan, who gets ordinary American life better than almost anyone. It's incredible how much he notices. He takes care to refer to the "ass-end" of the dishwasher, which I can only assume is exactly what a Red Lobster line chef would call it (Last Night at the Lobster). He can build an entire chapter around the mysterious appearance of spray-painted numbers on a sidewalk, and the breathless manner in which an older woman harps on it to her grown children, though she knows that neither one cares (Emily, Alone). He can capture the exact cranky feeling of standing in line in the cold on vacation (The Odds). I read all three of these treasures in the past few months, and I can't stop being impressed with O'Nan. He's a writer who makes characters and story out of details so mundane, most other writers would just as soon skip them -- which turns out to be those other writers' loss. O.K., full disclosure: I'd read Eugenides before. Not The Virgin Suicides (though I loved the movie), but Middlesex, the 2002 Pulitzer-winner about a hermaphrodite coming of age in a Greek-American family. Having found it initially exhilarating but ultimately broad and moralizing, as though Eugenides were responding to a writing prompt that asked him to please demonstrate in your own words the ways in which America has a legacy of persecuting people who are different, I wasn't too eager to pick up his latest effort. He seemed to me a literary version of an immensely talented burlesque dancer: an exceptional sentence-maker, scene-setter, and character-builder who was finally most interested gimmicks. I was so not eager to read him again that it wasn't until I was trading recommendations at a holiday party that I even registered the new book's title, let alone learned what it was about. A novel about a Brown student studying marriage plot novels in the 1980's that is a marriage plot novel itself. Hmm. It sounded interesting. You could say gimmicky. But given my long and intense interest in marriage and love stories of all kinds, and the bookish enthusiasm with which this new one was recommended, I was pretty sure it wouldn't be long before my resistance to Eugenides gave way. Sure enough. I read the book in a passionate, almost manic bender -- on a bus to New York, in bed, on the couch while laid up with a head cold -- that lasted as long as I could make it, which was finally only a week. Middlesex aside, it seems clear to me from The Marriage Plot that Eugenides has a rare gift for narrative arc. Like the best of the Victorian novelists heroine Madeleine Hanna studies, his third person narration moves fluidly from character to character, as details introduced early on -- the wallpaper in Madeleine's childhood bedroom, a particular quote from Barthes about the meaning of the phrase "I love you" -- return with sharp, heartbreaking new meaning later on. Speaking of love, here's a breath of fresh air: Eugenides really loves his characters. He admires and pities the rakish, brilliant, but disturbed scientist Leonard Bankhead: Through the window he could see the night surf, the crests of waves catching the moonlight. The black water was telling him things. It was telling him that he had come from nothing and would return to nothing. He wasn't as smart as he'd thought. He was going to fail at Pilgrim Lake. He regards with tenderness Mitchell Grammaticus's unrequited love not to mention his quest for spiritual and social goodness: Mitchell's concern that he wasn't coming up to the mark at Kalighat coexisted, oddly enough, with a surge of real religious feeling on his part. Much of the time in Calcutta, he was filled with an ecstatic tranquility, like a low-grade fever. His meditation practice had deepened. He experienced plunging sensations, as if moving at great speed. For whole minutes he forgot who he was. Outside in the streets, he tried, and often succeeded, in disappearing to himself in order to be, paradoxically, more present. And he's half in love with the half-assured, half-embarrassed, and entirely romantic Madeleine: Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty- handed after jogging with hand weights. After getting out of Semiotics 211, Madeleine fled to the Rockefeller Library, down to B Level, where the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold, and grabbed something -- anything, The House of Mirth, Daniel Deronda -- to restore herself to sanity. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen in it in a place resembling the world. Then, too, there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men. Eugenides is so in love, in fact, that he manages -- with real, hard-won wisdom -- to forgive her her patrician upbringing, which makes both Leonard and Mitchell quiver in their boots. I can't deny it: I love her, too, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the first romantically-minded English major to see herself in this character. (That she's also the daughter of a former college president is almost too much.) But yes, she's a Victorian heroine for sure. Eugenides even gives her a name worthy of Hardy's most imperious, reckless best. Madeleine Hanna is right up there with Bathsheba Everdene and Eustacia Vye -- just slightly more plausible for a child born in Connecticut in 1960. As for my torrid affair with these pages, there are many reasons a reader might be gripped by a novel, but the most common scenario, I think, occurs when the writer gives us the world the we crave -- the full back story of every relevant character, including all the places, people and events that made him who he is right now, sometimes in depth, sometimes with sublime concision -- while simultaneously churning his plot forward over a compressed and significant period of time. Eugenides does this maddeningly well. In the history of literature, and in the contemporary mind (right or wrong), there is perhaps no more significant time of life than the early twenties. This, we tell ourselves, is when we emerge from childhood into adulthood, when kittenish fun wanes and the serious beasts we will grapple with for years to come first show their frightening claws. Eugenides looks steadily at this fast, spiraling time, acknowledging that the kittenish fun has claws of its own and the serious beasts their silliness -- because what is childish and what is adult, what is fun and what is serious, is never so easily delineated. He makes us wonder, breathlessly, "But what will become of these people in this place resembling the world? What will they grow up to be?" It's a question you might ask of any confused twentysomething in love, however talented, however ambitious, however tormented (especially, I guess, if you're that twentysomething's parent). But it seems especially right to ask it of twentysomethings who want to be taken seriously, who see in themselves some capacity for greatness, and who feel the pressures of greatness constantly, having spent time at a venerable place like Brown. What will become of these people? There's no more propulsive question for a novel. And I don't think it's giving too much away to say that it's the best novelists who leave the question intensely discussed but finally, somewhat unanswered. When a great novel is adapted for the screen, everyone complains. They changed this, they changed that. She wasn't at all as I imagined her. Et cetera. In many cases, these are valid gripes, if also a little beside the point. The real problem with film adaptations is time. A novel, even a short one, is meant to be read over several hours, maybe even several days or weeks -- or in the Victorian era, several months. (Months!) It has to settle. It ought to live with you for awhile, allowing you to mistake your doctor friend for the doctor in your book. Classic Scribner edition. A movie, on the other hand, is meant to be watched in a single ninety to two hundred minute session. (And when it's the latter, all the doctors in the room fall asleep.) But even in two hundred minutes, there simply isn't time to get it all in. Everything happens too fast. In response to this thorny dilemma, the BBC has studiously offered miniseries adaptations of literary classics for years, and while these multi-hour affairs usually come closer to representing the full novels on which they're based, even they lose something in translation. Adaptation is, after all, a fairly imperfect operation. But what if you didn't adapt the text at all. What if you just...read it? (Stunned silence. Somewhere out there, a doctor is already asleep.) It sounds awful, like one of those marathon novel readings brave nostalgists are always organizing of Ulysses and Moby-Dick. But could it possibly also be transcendent? Elevator Repair Service certainly hopes so. This is the NYC-based company that thrilled me with The Select, its production of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises back in October. So thrilled was I that I hunted down the next performance of Gatz, its most celebrated production (of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby). It would be playing in Scott's own Princeton, New Jersey, in December. Matt was interested, and so were our parents. We would all drive up and see it together! This marathon eight-hour experience. And don't get me wrong: it was a marathon. There were many things to consider. Should I drink more coffee to stay awake, or less to avoid unnecessary trips to the bathroom? (Even with a break every ninety minutes, this was somehow a concern.) Who gets to sit on the aisle -- the person with the longest legs, or the person with the stiffest joints? Can I even be comfortable in a knee-tight theater seat this long? How long before one of us just loses it and snaps, too cranky and worn-out from sitting right next to each other all day to be on our best in-law behavior? Somewhere in the middle of the first act, the spacey-cool voice of Ted, from my morning yoga video, came back to me. Life throws challenges at you, he'd said, as we lunged forward, tangling our arms up between our legs. You've just gotta let yourself sink down a little further and breathe through them. Be still. Be strong. I sank. I was still. I tried very hard not to accidentally elbow my mom. It was excruciating. But as does yoga for my stubborn hips, eventually, Gatz opened me up. Jim Fletcher (Gatsby), Susie Sokol (Jordan), and Scott Shepherd (Nick). E.R.S. starts with the premise of a bunch of people in a vaguely 1990's-era office. A guy comes in wearing a tan trench over a blue shirt and slacks, lost in his routine. He turns on his computer, he sits down, prepared to face another day. But the computer will not start. He pushes buttons. He counts off the seconds on his hand and pushes buttons again. Nothing. He looks around his desk, and at the other, silent coworker in the room. What to do? Idly, he flips open a large Rolodex. There, inside, is a paperback book. And not just any book. Even from the back row, we can see that it's that vaguely glossy, inflexible Scribner edition of The Great Gatsby we all read in high school, with the art deco title and the weird face emerging from the blue. He opens it. He begins to read aloud, haltingly and rather bemused at first, as though it were the first time he'd encountered the voice of Nick Carraway, and the miniscule, but merciless divide between East and West Egg. Other coworkers emerge before long, delivering memos, sorting mail, none looking too happy to be there. The boss comes in too, a tall, balding man with confident, money-making strides and a tragic loom like Frankenstein's monster. And still, despite their interruptions, our blue-shirted hero reads on, becoming gradually more absorbed in the book, as I sank deeper into my seat, and breathed. Myrtle Wilson's party. Eventually, the sluggish co-workers perk up, and join in, metamorphosing in turn into Nick Carraway's spirited, wealthy cousin Daisy; her arrogant, ex-jock of a husband Tom Buchanan; the slim golfer and girlfriend to Nick, Jordan Baker; and of course, the enigmatic Jay Gatsby himself. The blue-shirted guy, our Nick, still reads all the exposition, right down to every last "he said" and "she said," but in the hands of the office crew -- all of them, like Scott Shepherd as Nick, extremely fine actors -- the book literally comes to life. There are few costume changes. Props are often deliberately not the thing they purport to be -- a rag doll is a puppy, a wooden spoon a hairbrush -- and the set is basically always an office, though in time the computer disappears, ferried away by a tech guy in coveralls, as do many of the chairs and the mail trays and any pretense of business as usual. Sound effects seem to come from nowhere, but are actually run by the quiet coworker who has been in the room with Nick from the beginning. All the characters are utterly absorbed in their roles, casting off their real lives for Fitzgerald's haunting language and the mysteries and turns of his iconic Jazz Age tale. So is their audience. With each passing act, I loved the play a little more, leaning in over my amazingly less and less cramped knees to relish sentences I remembered loving from the book, which I've air-headedly quoted often, but haven't read for at least ten years. Other lines surprised me, and made me consider the story anew. They flew at me, washed over me; even word-for-word over a spine-crunching 6.5-hour performance, the whole thing went by so fast. "Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning -- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." By the time we got here, to the end, Nick was sitting alone at his table, reciting from memory, and I was crying, for Fitzgerald's achievement in writing the book, for the actors' achievement in performing it, and even for my own comparatively tiny achievement in committing my day to this work from the past I so admire. To experiencing its power again in its totality. No excuses, no escape. It's playing again in New York at the Public Theater, March 14 to May 6, 2012. Do you dare live the dream? This, it turns out, is the week in which I must periodically kick myself for not having read The Moviegoer sooner. All those years without its example. All those years without Walker Percy's language rotating and certifying in my brain. (Those are his words, of course: rotate, certify.) I'm 29 now, which means who knows how many wasted years, but fortunately Binx Bolling is 29 too (almost 30), so at least my tardiness is also kind of timely. Poor Binx: Korea veteran, small-time stockbroker, lover of secretaries and films. He's beset by the malaise. That's what he calls his condition, and it's as good a word as any: Francophone and drawling, general and elastic enough to absorb loads of specific meanings from Binx's specific Southern setting. (Merriam-Webster: "A vague sense of mental or moral ill-being." Binx Bolling: "The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo's ghost.") Every walk Binx takes into town, every secretary he falls in love with, every conversation he has with his Aunt Emily at her piano or his cousin Kate on a streetcar or his brother Lonnie on their bayou dock -- all of these are symptoms of the malaise as well as possible definitions. "A green snake swims under the dock," he observes while talking to Lonnie. "I can see the sutures between the plates of its flat skull. It glides through the water without a ripple, stops mysteriously and nods against a piling." The malaise pursues him even out of New Orleans. Honestly, I could devote an entire Tumblr to heart-breaking, still-fresh, damn-how-does-he-do-it passages from The Moviegoer, but for now I'll settle on this one, from Binx's train trip to Chicago for a conference: "Chicago is just as I remembered it. I was here twenty five years ago. My father brought me and Scott up to see the Century of Progress and once later to the World Series. Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or it is not a place. I could have been wrong: it could have been nothing of the sort, not the memory of a place but the memory of being a child. But one step out into the brilliant March day and there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. Until now, one genie-soul and only one ever proved too strong for me: San Francisco--up and down hills I pursued him, missed him and was pursued, by a presence, a powdering of fall gold in the air, a trembling brightness that pierced to the heart, and the sadness of coming at last to the sea, the coming to the end of America. Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and the Wilderness and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk abroad by day and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he step off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco than he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder." Genie-soul: a cartoon concept Percy rotates, and rotates again, until it is entirely real, entirely his, and entirely certified. If observation is, by nature, an act that requires distance, what effect does that distance have on the observer? Is he less of his world, or more of it? Julius, the Nigerian psychiatry resident who narrates Teju Cole's exalting, yet mystifying novel Open City, seems to be a perfect argument for the former. He's a worldly and deeply intellectual thinker, a bedtime reader of Barthes and a devotee of Mahler, whose solitude amid three crowded cities (Brussels and Lagos, but mostly as an ex-pat in New York) allows him to see fresh meaning in objects, places, activities, and people about which we might've thought there was nothing left to say. A tree in Central Park for instance: A flock of tiny birds -- they might have been starlings -- swirled around a tree in the distance. I had the distinct impression that the tangled branches, and the birds that wove expertly in and out of them, were made of the same brown substance, the latter different only because they were in an active state. At any moment, I thought, the jagged little branches would unfold their hidden wings and the entire crown of the tree would become a living cloud. The surrounding trees, too, would lose their heads, leaving sentrylike stumps behind, and in the sky above the park there would be a massive canopy of starlings. What a haunting image, and how right. Metamorphosis, after all, isn't just a theme from Ovid; it's an ever-present possibility of human perspective. In the right light, in the right mood, branches and birds can be made of the same brown substance. That they most of the time are not makes this moment of unity all the more wondrous. Yet for all his clarity of observation, Julius lacks a lot. He is estranged from his German-born mother for reasons he doesn't fully explain. He says he wants to reconnect with his grandmother -- and even goes to Belgium, where she might live, to find her -- but his quest feels desultory at best. His closest male friend he refers to only as "my friend," as though he were just another fascinating stranger, like the Haitian shoe shiner or the Moroccan internet cafe clerk he encounters on his meditative walks. There is about Julius a constant deep and disquieting reserve. Teju Cole For all that he knows about the world, and for all that he can see in it, he seems to lack some fundamental knowledge of himself. He mulls over the history of human cruelty (war, genocide, racism) a great deal, but when an old friend accuses him of past cruelty, he can't really respond, thinking instead of something he once read about Nietzsche. Julius's worldly, and often over-serious, memories and meditations are as governed by these lapses in self-knowledge as they are by his keen power of observation. "AIDS remained a devastating problem, especially for the poor, and for people who lived in the poorer countries," he declares in a passage on the horror of bed bugs. Yes, obviously, Julius! I wanted to shout. AIDS is worse than bed bugs! Even in your melancholy, you have to be able to recognize that! At the time, the line read like poor judgment on Cole's part -- an editorial lapse at best -- but I guess it's possible that we are supposed to balk at Julius's failed sense of proportion. The same eyes that merge branches and birds might, despite years of moral reading and training, merge AIDS and bed bugs as well. The acquisition of knowledge and the writing of literature are, in some ways, activities that lend themselves to moral relativism -- that constant conversation of on the one hand, on the other hand. They make us better thinkers, and better seers, less prone to extremism or lazy logic. But do they make us better people? Cole's W.G. Sebald-esque approach, as open and sensitive as it is closed and remote, is still settling into me. But it's worth puzzling over, as are the many puzzles of modern civilization -- marathons, the mass death of bees, the treatment of mental illness, the never-easy feeling of being the one black man in a grand old room full of whites, the centrality of the self in any life -- that he, through Julius, so exquisitely maps and discusses in this book. Most of my professional perks come from my job. "There are cookies in the kitchen!" reads a common 2 pm email. But there are a few perks to being a freelance writer, too. Case in point: having reviewed a couple Graywolf books over the years, I now frequently get advance copies of new titles I wouldn't otherwise have known about, including, because of my apparently irrepressible love of all things Scandinavian, every novel having anything to do with Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Finland. The latest, Child Wonder by the Norwegian novelist Roy Jacobsen, came to me this summer, and in my post-Eurasian hangover, when I was still very much lusting for Cold War stories from northern climes, and feeling nostalgic for Siberia's vast miles of birch woods every time I looked at my Marimekko shower curtain, I picked it up and hoped to be transported. The book, which was published last month, did not disappoint. Child Wonder is a great read, the story of 9-year-old Finn and his single mother, scrimping by stoically in the working-class suburbs of Oslo, circa 1961, the era of the Berlin Wall and Finn's hero Yuri Gagarin. As the novel opens, Finn and his mom are redecorating their apartment. They are self-sufficient, and they are finally indulging in a little affordable luxury: Swedish wallpaper. But the IKEA dream requires a little extra cash, and soon they are taking on a lodger, a well-dressed young man who comes with a television as well as a much-valued education. Another interloper -- a half-sister Finn didn't even know he had -- arrives soon after, and before long, the "delicate balance" of Finn's family of two has been transformed forever. Jacobsen manages the double-voice of an adult looking back on his youth brilliantly, narrating entirely from the young Finn's incomplete perspective, but with strong, ironic dashes of the adult knowledge that's still to come. It's pretty hard to do both at once, but somehow, through long, breathless, multi-clausal sentences that speak both to childish exuberance and grown-up complexity, Jacobsen and his English translators Don Bartlett and Don Shaw pull it off. The book is completely transporting. I was in 1960s Norway -- a time of rapid social change -- the entire time, but I think my favorite aspect was less specific to Scandinavia or the 1960s, and more general to single mothers and only sons. As much as he is eager for certain adventures, Finn constantly mourns the changes he witnesses in his life, and Jacobsen roots this ambivalence beautifully in Finn's relationship with his mother, right down to the suddenness with which their arguments flare as a growing son learns more about his mom: "I don't understand what you're on about," I said, ill-humoredly, and went into my room to lie down on the bed to read in peace, a Jukan comic. But, as is the case with protest reading in general, I couldn't concentrate, I just got angrier and angrier lying there with my clothes on, wondering how long a small boy has to lie like that waiting for his mother to come to her senses and assure him that nothing has changed, irrespective of whether Yuri Gagarin has blown us all sky high. As a rule it does not take very long, not in this house at least, but this time, oddly enough, I fell asleep in the middle of my rage." I've been to IKEA numerous times, so I can fully picture that little wooden bed. The mother-son dynamic is somewhat less pre-fabricated -- but in these pages certainly no less real. |
Aboutauthor of The Violet Hour, reader, prodigious eater of ice cream Archives
June 2014
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