My review of Elissa Schappell's Blueprints for Building Better Girls and Lily Tuck's I Married You for Happiness is in the Philadelphia City Paper this week. Those 600 words only begin to describe how much I loved both books: the sharpness with which Schappell's characters flout social expectations even as they succumb to the rules, the elegance with which Tuck elides the laws of love and math. And I don't even like math! She makes me want to like math! Honestly, I can't decide which these two writers know more about: writing women or writing sentences. They do both excruciatingly well. Read the books. (No, you can't borrow mine. Not right now, anyway, because I've already loaned them out. So just BUY THEM, for the love of god. Please.) And while you're at it, read their other books, too. Schappell's first is the novel-in-stories Use Me, featuring Evie Wakefield, a character so brimming with selfhood she has to make a cameo appearance in Blueprints, too. It's about growing up in suburban Delaware; and trying to be an artist; and having a rich, promiscuous best friend; and breast feeding; and mourning the death of a glamorous, cancer-stricken father for years before he even dies. The book is all sexed up and devastatingly alive. Tuck's previous novel, The News From Paraguay, which won the National Book Award in 2004, is a cool, unflinching story about the Irish mistress of a 19th century Paraguayan dictator, and a small, ambitious nation in the midst of civil war. I'm reading an older collection of her stories now, Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived, and I'm still smitten. Wherever she wants to take me, I'll go. If only Schappell had more for me as well.
1 Comment
On the wall outside the bathroom at the New York Theatre Workshop: "This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." (George Bernard Shaw) These lines are from the "Epistle Dedicatory" Shaw included with his script for Man and Superman. He is writing to Arthur Bingham Walkley, the English theatre critic who gave him the idea to write a Don Juan play, and Shaw's wide-ranging discussion eventually lands on this statement of artistic values, which he ascribes to the artist-philosopher. Turns out that Shaw's actually taking a stab at Shakespeare here, whom he calls a "fashionable author who could see nothing in the world but personal aims and the tragedy of their disappointment or the comedy of their incongruity" rather than the "constructive ideas" he wants artists to espouse. Hmm, well. Despite my initial surge of good feeling at these words, I can't completely agree with Shaw. This is good advice for living, and even for art as a vocation in general (a mighty purpose if ever there was one) -- but I tend to think that feverish, selfish little clods make for great characters, assuming they are human and emotionally alive. They can even work in service of stories that, among their many other effects, serve as critiques of our social world. (See: Shakespeare, of course, and Hardy and Woolf, and also Aleksandar Hemon, Lorrie Moore, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, T.C. Boyle...and so on.) But I guess Shaw, the Fabian, is never very implicit in his arguments. Don't get me wrong, his attention to injustice and the exploitation of women and the working classes is admirable and often very finely rendered, but literature cannot always be about publicizing injustice and exploitation. Sometimes it has to be about personal demons -- which after all, help build all sorts of unjust worlds. Anyway, this was great food for thought during the intermission of Elevator Repair Service's production of The Select. As an adaptation of The Sun Also Rises, it served up three and a half hours worth of the Lost Generation's most iconically feverish, selfish (and drunken) little clods. And a damned fine lot of them, too. See it before it's gone, New Yorkers. You've only got till October 23. It can't be denied: Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette made me want to eat cake and drink champagne. More than usual, I mean. It also gave me a new appreciation for Antoinette herself -- not necessarily as an historical person, or even as a character embodied by Kirsten Dunst, but as a mythic figure of cloistered girlhood, decadence, and desire. Coppola's 2006 film used Antonia Fraser's biography as a source, and I imagine Kathryn Davis's episodic 2003 novel, Versailles, largely narrated by the beyond-the-grave soul of Marie Antoinette, did as well. I haven't read Fraser, but it's a fair assumption: the film and the novel are so similar in their presentation of the dreamy, wry, and ultimately doomed girl queen. Antoinette who loved to eat, dress, and gamble and whose inner and outer lives are equally filled with the rooms of Versailles. (Not to mention that Fraser's subtitle "The Journey" is echoed in Davis's opening line: "My soul is going on a trip.") Unlike Coppola, though, Davis actually dares to show us the fallen queen -- the jaded queen in prison -- and for me, this was the novel's most appealing section: "Outside, it was the rage for women to tie red ribbons around their necks, a la victime, and for men to shave their throats. Making fashion out of fear, I guess, the idea being that if you got there first, Death would have to look elsewhere. "Meanwhile yet one more escape plan was under way, involving yet more costumes, forged passports, a boat to Normandy, etc. etc. My little boy would be hidden in a basket of dirty laundry, the ever-watchful Tisons dispatched with drugged snuff. Of course it came to nothing, but since I expected nothing I wasn't disappointed." There are so many other startling lines and passages, mixing poetry with prose, bleakness with wit, directness with sublime indirectness -- too many to document here. But all right, here are a few, on the theory that typing out Davis's sentences might help improve my own. Certainly, they kept me reading eagerly even when this rather elliptical dreamscape challenged my desire for a more conventionally realist book... On Memory "You can make yourself remember almost anything, as long as it isn't too boring." On Sex with Louis XVI "Of course, he had no practice. Just as, pamphleteers to the contrary, I had no basis of comparison. Antoinette and Louis, as inept in bed as on the throne, though goodness knows we tried... "But did I feel stirred? Yes, I admit, I did, a little. It was like the way I'd sometimes feel when I was sitting for my portrait, an almost unendurable sense of my self, of the surfaces of Antoinette, her eyes trying not to blink, her lips growing more and more pursed and dry, her tongue dying to lick them. And then just when I'd think I couldn't bear to sit there like that one minute longer, I'd suddenly find myself on the outside looking in, a traveler in a carriage passing an apparently deserted house at nightfall. The windows dark, no hint of movement, yet somewhere deep inside, in the deepest, darkest corner of the cellar, there would be a little sleeping animal who would prick up its ears." On Royal Families "It's a miracle, really, that any of the royal children went on to become King. But maybe there's no version of childhood that could adequately prepare you for that particular future." On Fashion "Everything perfect except, no surprise, my husband, who'd come out wearing shoes that didn't match. "I was in agony, I admit it. As if the shoes were a moral failing." On Escaping Your Fate "I thought it was like an ant trying to climb out of a teacup. All those painstaking small steps up a steep smooth wall, across the tiny, hand-painted forget-me-nots and rosebuds and the next thing you know you're back where you started. Back in the Tuileries, back in the mess at the bottom of the cup, and the people of Paris are out of their minds with joy. They're organizing street fairs, sending up hot-air balloons. They're hanging thousands and thousands of lanterns in the Tuileries Gardens, as if the idea of hanging lanterns from trees was something they'd only just come up with, and not something I'd been doing at Versailles for years." When you think about the people of Paris and what they were going through, it's pretty difficult to sympathize with the Antoinette of history. But what a person Davis makes her in this novel. What a flawed and towering self. Everyone knows the Fourth of July is the beginning of the end anyway, so it feels no less fitting to have finished Richard Ford's second Bascombe novel a week before Labor Day than it would've had I read it over the July 4th weekend, as I'd originally promised David Goldfarb. In Independence Day, Frank Bascombe of The Sportswriter is still divorced but no longer profiling football players for a glossy magazine in New York (i.e. Sports Illustrated). It's 1988 and he's now a residential real estate agent in his adult hometown of Haddam, New Jersey, full of wisdom on home-shopping, -thinking, and -buying that has me more convinced that ever that renting is the way to go: "Buying a house will, after all, partly determine what they'll be worrying about but don't yet know, what consoling window views they'll be taking (or not), where they'll have bitter arguments and make love, where and under what conditions they'll feel trapped by life or safe from the storm, where those spirited parts of themselves they'll eventually leave behind (however over-prized) will be entombed, where they might die or get sick and wish they were dead, where they'll return after funerals or after they're divorced, like I did...Sometimes I don't understand why anybody buys a house, or for that matter does anything with a tangible downside." If 1988 was an uncertain time, I can only imagine what Bascombe would make of 2011. (Fun coincidence: 2011 and 1988 align perfectly, with July 4th falling on a Monday.) After two 450-page novels, Bascombe is still something of an enigma to me, full of (like so many men in American fiction) private poetic musings but less-than-forthcoming conversation, mislabeled (according to him) by nearly everyone he meets. And he meets a lot of people. In the course of this book's three-day holiday weekend, he has substantial encounters with his angry mixed-race renters; a picky, middle-aged, white Vermont couple who've been looking to buy a home for months; the manager of a hot dog and root beer stand in which he is part-owner; his tall, beachfront dwelling girlfriend whose husband disappeared years prior; a black truck driver in a motel parking lot where someone has just been killed; his beleaguered, richly remarried ex-wife; his good-humored, over-achieving daughter; his depressed and possibly bipolar son; a party girl chef at a Cooperstown B&B; and his Jewish ex-step-brother who's done well for himself in the flight simulator business. Not to mention the several past relationships he meditates upon and the dozens of insubstantial encounters at pay phones across New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, the details of which are recorded impressively, even at times ecstatically, but with a precision too precise to be believed. They frequently left me exhausted. Meanwhile, Frank keeps a running tally of all those false monikers: "In three days, I've been called a burglar, a priest, a homosexual, a nervous nelly, and now a conservative, none of which was true. (It was not an ordinary weekend.)" And yet it's hard to blame anyone for misunderstanding Frank, lodged as he is in his dreamy Existence Period, as even he himself admits. There's so much to take away from this East Coast holiday tour, but for now, it's the exquisite descriptions -- some of them plot-centered, many just generously observed -- that are staying with me. The darkened ocean on a Jersey shore. A preteen daughter flopped on a Connecticut lawn. A helicopter lifting off from a hospital in the Catskills. Parachuters descending upon a village green. Only a writer as confident and skilled as Ford would use "blameless" to describe the light on a day for which our narrator (rightly) feels himself to blame. It is the sort of perfect, surprising, moralizing word, one of many in this book, that together turn a story about the world in which we live into an original vision of that world -- a vision, like that of Bascombe's hero Emerson, well worth engaging. When the Spring/Summer 2010 issue of Ninth Letter rejudged the National Book Award of 1960, the new panel of writers -- Steve Almond, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Brock Clarke, and Michael Griffith -- awarded the prize not to the historical winner, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, but to Evan S. Connell's Mrs. Bridge, a novel I'd never heard of outside of a vague recollection of a Paul Newman-Joanne Woodward film I hadn't seen. The judges gave a panel on their process at the AWP Conference in DC last February, and the case they put forth for Mrs. Bridge so struck me that I immediately put it on my reading list. Here was a book praised for its endurance -- a story about an affluent and proper, but strangely listless, Kansas City housewife that nonetheless manages, in its crisp style and personal focus, to feel as much of our time as it is of India Bridge's 1930s or Evan Connell's 1950s. Months later, I devoured the book over a long August weekend in Vermont. The judges were right. Mrs. Bridge -- for India is a name from which she feels tellingly alien -- hardly knows herself. And yet, through Connell's 117 "chapterlets," many no longer than a page, we come to know her fears and preoccupations -- a distant but devoted husband, a trio of mysterious children with minds of their own, the embarrassment of having too much money and not enough to do -- which are, after all, the fears and preoccupations of many a modern, upper-class American. Of course there are discussions of laundresses, hats, and electric toasters that place the book in its time, but none of these details can really be accused of "dating" it. When the book happens upon a particular historic moment or reality -- the Nazi invasion of Poland, for instance, or de facto segregation of blacks and whites -- it does so in such a way that practically reintroduces those particulars to the reader of fifty years later, even as we know exactly where everything is headed. Like Salinger, Connell deftly mixes ironic detachment with unmistakeable tenderness in his portrait of this lady. The result is a character whose innocence is a genuine revelation. (Unlike, say, the underwritten Betty Draper in AMC's "Mad Men," a latter-day cousin who in the hands of January Jones is a genuine irritation.) This is not a novel that overturns our assumptions about bland, dignified surfaces. Mrs. Bridge feels as empty as she appears, but that's what makes her portrait so heart-breaking and (remarkably) not the least bit condescending. She knows something is wrong, but how on earth can she fix it? She doesn't really know what it is. In her passiveness, her inarticulateness, and her conservatism, she is as lovable as she is unforgivable. For more on Evan Connell, here's the excellent Mark Oppenheimer in The Believer. Great stuff here, particularly in the comparison to The Remains of the Day. Obviously, Mr. Bridge, that distant husband, is going be added to my list. On Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf sells herself a bit short: "...the mind takes its bias from the place of its birth, and no doubt, when it strikes upon a literature so alien as the Russian, flies off at a tangent far from the truth." I had no other way to read Dostoevsky but as an alien (and I admit I often felt more alien reading it in translation than I did traveling through Russia without a drop of Russian beyond the constant, obsequious "spasiba") -- and yet, I had to read Dostoevsky. Eight weeks after starting The Brothers Karamazov on the train from Ulaanbaatar, in Central Mongolia, to Irkutsk, in deep Siberia, I finally finished the damn thing. It surely didn't help that Matt and I were sharing a single volume (the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation that people in the know seem to think is the truest) or that I spent more of my train time documenting every ordinary thing I saw, ate, and thought each day in my notebook. I'd visited two Dostoevsky museums -- one in Omsk, where he was imprisoned, and one in St. Petersburg, where he died -- before I'd read more than 200 pages of his final novel. And yet I persevered well after I was back in the States, flushing paper down the toilet and drinking water from the tap. Why? Because this was a failure I didn't want on my record? Partly yes, of course. But also because the book really does begin to overwhelm its reader after awhile. Even a reader who tends to shut down in the face of Christian philosophy and emotion.
And why does it overwhelm? Aside from the fabulous murder mystery that takes over the novel like a runaway troika somewhere around page 300? It overwhelms because the soul overwhelms. Here's Virginia again, in a delightful appraisal of what goes on in the pages of Dostoevsky: "The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading. We open the door and find ourselves in a room full of Russian generals, the tutors of Russian generals, their step-daughters and cousins, and crowds of miscellaneous people who are all talking at the tops of their voices about their most private affairs....We are souls, tortured, unhappy souls, whose only business it is to talk, to reveal, to confess, to draw up at whatever rending of flesh and nerve those crabbed sins which crawl on the sand at the bottom of us." ("The Russian Point of View," The Common Reader) David Foster Wallace puts it this way: "The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that's really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being -- that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal." ("Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky," Consider the Lobster) I can't say tracts are entirely absent from The Brothers K. Each of the three brothers -- Dmitri, Ivan, and Aloysha -- are people, 100% themselves, yes, but they also each represent a way of being in the world. Dmitri the way of desire, Ivan of reason, and Aloysha of love. Of course these ways are firmly rooted in the cultural-political climate of 19th-century Russia (which, as a deeply interested non-expert, Wallace summarizes nicely), but they are also rooted in Dostoevsky's own Christian purview. Often, when they speak their souls, these characters (along with the the dozens of other officials, ladies, and devils in the novel) speak their beliefs -- and their beliefs are nothing if not hysterical, discursive, and (partly owing to "brain fever," partly owing to essential humanness) maddeningly conflicted. It can be exhilarating but it can also, at times, get a bit tiring, and a bit confusing. Discussions of guilt turn to blows, which in turn, turn to discussions of the acceptability of turning to blows, which in turn, turn to idle chatter about the utility of learning French. And, of course, there's a whole lot about the separation of Church and State and loving God and all the rest. Sometimes, though, directness bursts through. Two maxims of Aloysha's mentor Father Zossima stand out. All are guilty, he insists. That, and life is paradise. (Or maybe it's just that Matt, the speedier, greedier reader, got to those maxims first, and had been wondering aloud about them for several days before they filtered down to me...But anyway...) These are beliefs we can grasp right away, and yet they are deceptively complicated, echoing and refracting throughout the novel in all sorts of interesting ways I'm still just beginning to understand. Or, to paraphrase George Steiner, Dostoevsky is a writer people have not just read and loved, but actually believed in. ("Could one say that one 'believes in Flaubert'?" Steiner asks. The answer, I guess, is no. Nuts.) From my alien, American, secular vantage, which much prefers the incorrigible, desperate binges of Dmitri to the endless grace of Aloysha (however heroic!), I can't say I really believe in old Fyodor. But I loved reading him, and I do think I know what Steiner means. Summer destination: China-Mongolia-Russia. By train. We fly out a week from today, and the kind woman at Air Canada has assured me that we will have many movies to watch on the 13-hour leg from Toronto to Beijing. For the past few months, between online hostel-hunts and mini-meltdowns over confusing train timetables, I've been reading contemporary fiction from the countries we're visiting and cursing myself for not having already read more. (In the middle of this post, I dashed over to the Penn library to hustle up a couple more tales of contemporary China: Zhu Wen's I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China and Ma Jian's novel The Noodle Maker. More on those later...assuming I get to them.) Amusingly, the Russian titles I selected -- Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's much-praised collection of "scary fairy tales" There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby and Vladimir Sorokin's novel The Queue -- feature characters at a loss for information. Petrushevskaya's grief-stricken characters (mostly women) are just trying to survive in late-20th century USSR/Russia. In these short, spare, and off-kilter fables, they often find themselves in the middle of roads or other unfamiliar spaces, awoken as if from a dream, not knowing how they got there, or even, in some cases, who they are. Ghosts appear and food is rationed, and life changes dramatically, as in the title story, when the birth of a child poisons a relationship between two close female friends. Meanwhile Sorokin's cast of thousands is, as the title implies, waiting in line in Moscow sometime in the late 1970s. As they stand there in Godot-esque fashion, they speculate on the quality of the goods they're waiting for, how long they'll have to hang on to get them, and why it has to be this way at all -- sometimes drinking, sometimes sleeping, sometimes playing ball or making love, but all without surrendering their coveted places in line. The novel is composed of a steady stream of untagged dialogue, which sounds confusing but isn't -- at least no more than necessary for a novel about mass confusion. [*After writing this, I read Sorokin's post-Soviet afterword to the novel, in which he compares queues to church services. In the Russian Orthodox tradition parishioners stand, and the sentence "I stood through an all-nighter" can apparently also be translated as "I stayed through the all-night mass" or "I stood in line all night." The queue, says Sorokin, whose work was banned during the Soviet period, ritualized the collective body.] It occurred to me at some point that Petrushevskaya and Sorokin are actually preparing me for my trip in more concrete ways than I initially imagined. On this adventure I'm about to take, I will be almost constantly arriving in places I don't recognize, frequently queuing to board trains and enter museums, and often unable to understand the systems that are operating around me. I will almost definitely have to ask the same question over and over, as Sorokin's characters do. Such is the nature of foreign travel for anyone who doesn't speak the language. The waking dream, and the beguiling order of things, are in some ways what we seek... Of course these themes are also classically Soviet and Russian, at least as far as American audiences have encountered them. (Or as far as my experience trying to buy train tickets on Russian language websites would suggest.) But now, after months of planning and years of hearing about Mother Russia, I'll finally get to experience it myself -- with The Brothers Karamazov coming along for the ride. Thanks to Barrelhouse, I am going to be out of my depth (and maybe out of my genre) in this awesome line-up of writers tomorrow night: Elise Juska, Lee Klein, Tom McAllister, Stan McDonald, Christian TeBordo...and Katherine Hill? Should be fun, assuming I don't embarrass myself. Well, maybe even then.
Lest the entire cruelest month pass without a post... Between pushing A Visit From the Goon Squad on everyone I know, watching a certain historian dashingly defend his dissertation, and planning a rather complicated trip on the Trans-Siberian railroad, my reading life has been somewhat abbreviated. That can be good for poems, though, which usually aren't very long anyway. Full disclosure: I know very little about contemporary poetry beyond the names of various "famous" poets and the terms I had to learn in school. My appreciation of poetry is pretty similar to my appreciation of food -- I like it when it tastes good and then I really like it. Sometimes I can see and admire the forms and structures underneath, but that only matters to me if I already like what I'm eating. This month, I'm liking Anne Carson (again). I will probably never stop liking her. Current title: The Beauty of the Husband, a "fictional essay" about an impossible (but incredibly desirable) marriage. Carson favors poems that tell stories, which probably explains my affinity for her, but she also writes lines that would be brilliant in any context -- the kind I'd like to steal for my next story, email, or grocery list. The first poem in the book, a dedication to John Keats, opens with a stunner of an idea: "A wound gives off its own light / surgeons say. / If all the lamps in the house were turned out / you could dress this wound / by what shines from it." It's prose-y and dry, yet rhythmic, and just strange enough to make me wonder, Gosh is that true? (While another reader who shall remain nameless felt certain he'd read it before. Such is the power of a good line.) Soon enough, in the lines and pages that follow, marriage and many other things are caught shining, too. Other images and themes join in (the nape of a neck, letters, hesitation) making a metaphoric collage of this couple's life, and before I know it, I'm caught up in the very specific yet entirely universal emotion of their wounds. Do wounds actually give off light? (Seriously, doctors, do they?) Whatever the answer, they do here. Often, as I enter the final pages of a book I love, I begin to mourn its end. So it was with Jennifer Egan's novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, which I just finished. And it's actually sort of fitting I felt this way, because this is a novel about the passage of time -- and the gnawing anxiety that time's passage means it one day has to end. I didn't know much about this book before I started it. I knew that it had just won the National Book Critics Circle Award, that my friend Marcela (who never steers me wrong) had loved it, and that rock music was a central theme. Somehow, despite my failures at music coolness, this was enough to get me to buy it and dive in, and I'm so glad it was. Egan, who I'd only encountered in short fiction here and there, is a relentlessly hip and intellectual writer with deep sense of life's pains and an even deeper sympathy for her characters. This sensibility carries her through a layered narrative and more than makes up for the few missteps she inevitably makes along the way. (Hey, novels are messy, okay?) Goon Squad can't be said to move in any one direction, instead spanning forward and backward over decades, characters, and locales. (New York City, Naples, Kenya, San Francisco...) At the center of it all is Bennie Salazar, a rock producer at the height of his powers in the late 1990's and early 2000's, and his assistant, Sasha, a beguiling redhead and kleptomaniac who keeps Bennie going. A different character anchors each of the book's thirteen chapters, so that the novel could be said to be a collection of connected stories, except that the stories are so masterfully connected and the themes they cover so epic that "novel" seems the only proper term. Certainly, Goon Squad makes a reader think -- but as pure entertainment, it's also completely riveting. Whether I was dipping back several decades or plunging ahead, I read in a constant state of suspense -- for more information about the people I had met, and yes, for some further sense of what would happen to them “next.” Large gaps in people's lives are masterfully deployed, as we join many of the characters in wondering how on earth they got "from A to B." From skinny, spastic guitar hero to obese has-been with cancer. From hot young thing in Manhattan to mother of two in the California desert. This is purely brilliant in a book about time and the mysteries of change. Always, I wanted to rush forward to find out, but I also wanted to prolong the reading process as long as possible to preserve the captivating experience of the book. To live in its moment, and be young with it, before it got away. [BONUS MATERIAL: On her website, Egan talks about the inspiration and writing process for each section. Just click on the time and place for a look behind the scenes -- after you've read the book, of course.] |
Aboutauthor of The Violet Hour, reader, prodigious eater of ice cream Archives
June 2014
Categories
All
|