I started journaling on a film, Beasts of the Southern Wild. I began by writing, "this film is beautiful and richly imagined." Gee, I thought, that sounds awfully trite; I try to shy away from sounding like the barfy book blurbs that are everywhere, and then I started thinking about those blurbs. I read blurbs a lot; they are my way of sussing out a book on a shelf, particularly a new work. Because I am an admitted library addict, and I spent long hours haunting shelves for what is new to me or new in the world, I have my methods. With new books, with shiny new plastic wrapped covers, I immediately flip them over to see who has written what. Is there is a long list of what are (in my ever so humble opinion)
overly enthusiastic comments by relatively mediocre contemporary
writers? Do these look like blurbs done for pay, or as a professional favor by those who have a dog in that big fight with critics, critics who might have a tepid response to the work in hand? Or is there a quote from an actual book review, published in a relatively respected journal or newspaper? These operate like those silly film blurbs, of course, trimmed to trick. Sometimes the writing is just crazy.
Here's what I found this week, on the back of The Submission by Amy Waldman:
"The Submission is a wrenching panoramic novel about the politics of grief in the wake of 9/11."
"Wrenching panoramic"? Why do those go together, and without a comma? I'm also not sure about the "politics of grief," either, though it is a phrase that gets a lot of traction lately.
"Amy Waldman writes like a possessed angel."
What the hell does that mean?
Okay, to be fair, The Submission did have a blurb from both Booklist and Publisher's Weekly, and my husband, who was sort of reading it, said the subject matter was important and provocative. The book had a compelling premise (a 9/11 memorial commission) and many good ideas, AND it is on the NY Times notable books list so I did give it a try.* Here's my imaginary back cover quote: "Waldman has a cracking good idea of a story here, bursting with ideas about art, grief, and national identity and overflowing with the worst sentences imaginable." Here's one of those sentences: "As heads bowed, he glimpsed the part in Claire's hair, the line as sharp and white as a jet's contrail, the intimacy as unexpected as a flash of thigh. Then he remembered to think of the dead." That's the kind of thing you read over and again, wondering if you need reading glasses. Sure, we all get the jet reference here, but why not just use a 2 x 4 and hit me over the head? There are also obtrusive verbs sprinkled throughout sections of dialogue: "Claire snapped"; "observed Leo"; "Wilner barked." I tried to keep reading--it wasn't a difficult or slow read---but I kept obsessing over the syntax, rereading and rewording in my head so frequently that I couldn't keep track of the plot. Too bad. Writer Lorraine Adams is quoted on the back saying that "It's a literary breakthrough that reads fast and breaks your heart." Indeed.
In the middle of writing the above paragraph I stopped to google "book blurbs." As usual, I am late to the party. I don't care, but I did want to see what other people said. There was actually a debate on this over at the NY Times in March. I just read that novelist Colum McCann (loved his Let the Great World Spin but don't know if that will last) believes that the blurbs weren't actually for readers. I beg to differ, sir. Certain novelists serve as warning beacons to me, big signs that say "don't bother with this
one." For example, if there's a word on the back by Ann Patchett, who seems to be in a lot of places lately, that one usual
gets tossed out right away. Some novel, somewhere, recently had her
breathless quote: "Quite simply, the best thing I've read in a long
time." I am sure it wouldn't be for me. Had I found Patchett's novel, State of Wonder a bit more, um, wonderful, I might give her some credence. While I read the whole thing because, yes, I wanted to see what would happen, I just didn't believe the story or the protagonist. Despite Emma Donoghue's exorbitant praise on the paperback---"Perfect from first page to last...her masterpiece"---it wasn't perfect. While I'm at it, neither was Donoghue's much touted novel, Room, which I put down in less than five pages. "Utterly gripping" is the quote on the cover there, but I didn't believe the voice in this book was a five year-old. I've heard many people tell me how much they liked Room, or Patchett's Bel Canto but I couldn't get past the first ten pages of that one, either. I just didn't buy it. Not a single word. I didn't even like the characters names.**
Of course these blurbs are for selling. If you visit an author's website, there are countless reviews cut and pasted for effect. After I read enough blurbs for the above novels ("Astounding"; "Terrifying"; "Heart-stopping"; "Thrilling, disturbing and moving in equal measures") I start to doubt my own judgement. How could these books have been all these things? Did I miss something? (Nah.) If you love Patchett---and who am I to say you ought not?---then her recommendation might be just the thing.
Some book blurbs are works of art in miniature. The fabulous and recently departed John Updike seems to be on the back of every fifth book around, spreading his book critic cred like mustard on corned beef (sorry). Here's a particular favorite of mine, on the back of a Vintage Classics edition of Madame Bovary: "Madame Bovary is like the railroad stations erected in its epoch: graceful, even floral, but cast of iron." We could argue with Updike about his choice of the verb "erected" for this particular novel, but I couldn't agree more with the sentiment. I think.
Here's another one from Updike, on Lolita: "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." An arguable statement, certainly, absolute silliness, except that Lolita is an example of ecstatic writing, isn't it?
This one, on Milan Kundera's The Joke, has me scratching my head: "A thoughtful, intricate, ambivalent novel with the reach of greatness in it." So, Mr. Updike, does that mean you thought it worthwhile? That it might have been great, but didn't quite make it? I gotta love him for trying.
Moving on from Updike, here's a blurb I particularly like:
"I had only to read the two opening sentences to realize that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller." This is on the back of Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer. You know what? Those two sentences are fucking awesome. I do wonder, though, about the word choice here. I suspect that the critic, Robert Towers, (NY Review of Books) was having some fun, given Roth's oeuvre. Philip Roth is "superbly endowed" with what, exactly, Mr. Towers?
I could go on, but I actually want to read a book and finish that journal entry.
*I am still working my way through that list and discarding half of what I start. I may not be ready for 2012's list when it comes out.
**That was kind of nasty. I liked Truth and Beauty, Patchett's account of her friendship with writer Lucy Grealy, very much. It doesn't change my opinion of her novels, but saying this does assuage my guilt.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Saturday, June 23, 2012
The Sense of an Ending
Note: I'm not going to do a single bit of summary. If anyone out there hasn't read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (which, btw, won the Man Booker prize for 2011) this may or may not make sense. I hope you read it: it is worthwhile and very fast.
I'm quite sure I am not the first to note that Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending engages with Ian McEwan's much-acclaimed ("and now, a major motion picture") Atonement. Before I run off and read some critical reviews, I would like to engage in some speculation on my own. I would call The Sense of an Ending a rebuttal to the wild narrative speculations of McEwan's narrator, Briony. Briony's (and McEwan's? Where is the line between the author and the authored here?) ability to invent and lie, is in part, the result of her failure of moral imagination. McEwan's considerable skill in constructing and manipulating a narrative and a narrator are inextricably linked for me in this failure. For many readers, as I know I am not alone in this, Atonement was an infuriating read. I should ponder that further. But on to Barnes.
Barnes seeks an antidote to this, I think. Ending's narrator, Tony Webster, has another sort of reconstruction of the past going on---it is a reconstruction most of us are likely to recognize. Our own version of events, our perceptions, are centered on our own emotions and reactions, and likely we put ourselves at the focus of the action, as the locus of attention, the butt of jokes and slights that may or may not be directed at us. This is human nature and it is particularly embedded in the young: it is all about me. If it isn't, then it ought to be. What Barnes forces the reader to do---or at least forced this reader to do--is to consider, with care, what exactly of our memories is selected by us, and how we interpret those memories. How, to flip the equation on its head, are others affected as the result of that self-centering of perception and emotion, particularly when they suffer the from the same solipsism? Am I even using that in the best sense here?
Webster's look back at a series of past events and his reassessment of his own character are illuminating in every sense. What senses are those? You tell me; I can only report how personally this affected me, and that isn't use to anyone. This is a wonderful read, though. Ruminative, melancholic, and graceful, Barnes' writing is smooth and elegant. The structure of the book is also elegant, and straightforward: part one is Webster's retelling of said past events and part two is the present day reassessment, as the past comes to life in some unexpected ways. Tony Webster tries to understand, fails, tries again, succeeds, and comprehends his failure. Perhaps apprehends his failure is a better word choice. To whit:
We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. but it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--it's not useful--to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
This ruminative quality is interspersed with narrative. We have event; we have contemplation. The result is a seamless, sublime reading experience that goes all too fast. I found myself slowing down, just to savor and reread sections. Will it hold up? I don't know.
Barnes argues for the end of solipsism (if he's making an argument at all--my own discussion here may just be more of that). He does it compactly and beautifully; it is a lovely novel. If I am to read this novel as engaging with the moral vision of Atonement then I would argue that McEwan (excuse me, Briony) affirms the truth of solipsism. Or perhaps I am reading McEwan all wrong, and Briony's paucity of moral and ethical imagining is supposed to irritate the hell out of me, and that was his point. McEwan is so skilled that I read it all as narrative pyrotechnics, though, and that is where I conflate the narrator with the author. Perhaps that is the final conundrum here, and I am, finally, guilty of that which I set out to condemn.
I'm quite sure I am not the first to note that Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending engages with Ian McEwan's much-acclaimed ("and now, a major motion picture") Atonement. Before I run off and read some critical reviews, I would like to engage in some speculation on my own. I would call The Sense of an Ending a rebuttal to the wild narrative speculations of McEwan's narrator, Briony. Briony's (and McEwan's? Where is the line between the author and the authored here?) ability to invent and lie, is in part, the result of her failure of moral imagination. McEwan's considerable skill in constructing and manipulating a narrative and a narrator are inextricably linked for me in this failure. For many readers, as I know I am not alone in this, Atonement was an infuriating read. I should ponder that further. But on to Barnes.
Barnes seeks an antidote to this, I think. Ending's narrator, Tony Webster, has another sort of reconstruction of the past going on---it is a reconstruction most of us are likely to recognize. Our own version of events, our perceptions, are centered on our own emotions and reactions, and likely we put ourselves at the focus of the action, as the locus of attention, the butt of jokes and slights that may or may not be directed at us. This is human nature and it is particularly embedded in the young: it is all about me. If it isn't, then it ought to be. What Barnes forces the reader to do---or at least forced this reader to do--is to consider, with care, what exactly of our memories is selected by us, and how we interpret those memories. How, to flip the equation on its head, are others affected as the result of that self-centering of perception and emotion, particularly when they suffer the from the same solipsism? Am I even using that in the best sense here?
Webster's look back at a series of past events and his reassessment of his own character are illuminating in every sense. What senses are those? You tell me; I can only report how personally this affected me, and that isn't use to anyone. This is a wonderful read, though. Ruminative, melancholic, and graceful, Barnes' writing is smooth and elegant. The structure of the book is also elegant, and straightforward: part one is Webster's retelling of said past events and part two is the present day reassessment, as the past comes to life in some unexpected ways. Tony Webster tries to understand, fails, tries again, succeeds, and comprehends his failure. Perhaps apprehends his failure is a better word choice. To whit:
We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. but it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--it's not useful--to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
This ruminative quality is interspersed with narrative. We have event; we have contemplation. The result is a seamless, sublime reading experience that goes all too fast. I found myself slowing down, just to savor and reread sections. Will it hold up? I don't know.
Barnes argues for the end of solipsism (if he's making an argument at all--my own discussion here may just be more of that). He does it compactly and beautifully; it is a lovely novel. If I am to read this novel as engaging with the moral vision of Atonement then I would argue that McEwan (excuse me, Briony) affirms the truth of solipsism. Or perhaps I am reading McEwan all wrong, and Briony's paucity of moral and ethical imagining is supposed to irritate the hell out of me, and that was his point. McEwan is so skilled that I read it all as narrative pyrotechnics, though, and that is where I conflate the narrator with the author. Perhaps that is the final conundrum here, and I am, finally, guilty of that which I set out to condemn.
Friday, May 25, 2012
The Warmth of Other Suns
The Warmth of Other Suns is journalist Isabel Wilkerson's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Great Migration. Wilkerson looks to have a broader and longer view of this historical phenomenon. Using historical documents and extensive interviews with those who undertook this migration, Wilkerson argues that the Great Migration has been both under reported and, to an extent, misunderstood. Her take on the Great Migration is that more than the result of economics, the economics were in part a function of the social structure of entrenched racism and segregation in the South. The reason for the length and breadth of the exodus north and west were to escape violence, degradation and rigid codification that were the Jim Crow laws. Wilkerson builds this case convincingly (if one needs convincing) by overwhelming the reader with historical and personal accounts of blatant racism. They are too numerous to count, and each one is as compelling in its horror as the last.
Forming the structure of the book are three people and three separate decades of the migration. This reliance on the narration of a life's trajectory make for entertaining reading. The reader wants to know what happens next and what happens to, specifically, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, and as each of them makes their way from the south in the 1930's, 40s and 50s, respectively. These people are also geographically representative, as Ida Mae Gladney heads to the Midwest, Starling to the northeast, and Foster to California. The idea here, as Wilkerson states, is that the stories of individuals are "the least replaceable sources of any understanding of this great movement of people out of the South to the American North and West."
However, Wilkerson's structuring of these stories is a bit problematic as a book, for Wilkerson chooses to jump back and forth between each narrative, sometimes within just a few pages. I had trouble, at time, keeping the decades, and occasionally, the cast of characters, straight in my head. Further, these episodes were often interlaced with bits of history, and that history wasn't necessarily from the same time period, though it typically related geographically. This also created what was at times a jarring repetition of detail. At times, Wilkerson repeats some piece of information or anecdote that had been recounted some twenty pages (or less) earlier. I kept thinking that the book could have been a hundred pages shorter with some careful editing.
Despite these flaws, The Warmth of Other Suns is well worth reading. Wilkerson's writing is often beautiful, poetic even:
In the half light of morning, when the mist hung low and the dew was thick on the bolls, the pickers set out to the field as their slave foreparents had done year in and year out for two centuries...Each one looked out across the field to infinity. The quarry was spread over acres and rows far from the starting plant, and they could not see the end of what they were expected to pick.
On large fields during the height of the season---which began in August in south Texas and moved eastward, reaching the Carolinas by early fall---the star pickers sped like fan blades through the cotton, a blur of fingers and bolls, arms and torsos switching from the left row to the right, picking on both sides of them and tossing the cotton like feathers into their sack...
It is in these early sections of the book that Wilkerson's writing is at its best. There are countless of these beautiful, descriptive passages and these are, indeed, most essential to Wilkerson's thesis: the Great Migration was an escape from the untenable living situation of the South. Contrary to a hazy misconception enjoyed by much of the country, slavery did not end with the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Any move by African-Americans to improve their situation, socially or economically, was met with resistance and violence. Repeatedly in the book, we read of blacks having to move off the sidewalk to avoid sharing it with a white person; repeatedly we read of insults and injuries perpetuated without cause. The level of entrenched racism may be surprising for many Americans, particularly the younger generations. Wilkerson wants the reader to know that "their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making." Wilkerson is also interested in correcting the common misconception that the migration caused social problems and unrest in the urban centers of the North. Her careful documentation reflects what we now know about those migrants: they were more likely to work continuously, have lower poverty rates and have stabler family structures than many of their counterparts who stayed in the south AND the European immigrants who shared those urban centers. All these revelations makes this book an important source for understanding a historical migration that altered the fate and face of this nation.
See more at isabelwilkerson.com
Forming the structure of the book are three people and three separate decades of the migration. This reliance on the narration of a life's trajectory make for entertaining reading. The reader wants to know what happens next and what happens to, specifically, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, and as each of them makes their way from the south in the 1930's, 40s and 50s, respectively. These people are also geographically representative, as Ida Mae Gladney heads to the Midwest, Starling to the northeast, and Foster to California. The idea here, as Wilkerson states, is that the stories of individuals are "the least replaceable sources of any understanding of this great movement of people out of the South to the American North and West."
However, Wilkerson's structuring of these stories is a bit problematic as a book, for Wilkerson chooses to jump back and forth between each narrative, sometimes within just a few pages. I had trouble, at time, keeping the decades, and occasionally, the cast of characters, straight in my head. Further, these episodes were often interlaced with bits of history, and that history wasn't necessarily from the same time period, though it typically related geographically. This also created what was at times a jarring repetition of detail. At times, Wilkerson repeats some piece of information or anecdote that had been recounted some twenty pages (or less) earlier. I kept thinking that the book could have been a hundred pages shorter with some careful editing.
Despite these flaws, The Warmth of Other Suns is well worth reading. Wilkerson's writing is often beautiful, poetic even:
In the half light of morning, when the mist hung low and the dew was thick on the bolls, the pickers set out to the field as their slave foreparents had done year in and year out for two centuries...Each one looked out across the field to infinity. The quarry was spread over acres and rows far from the starting plant, and they could not see the end of what they were expected to pick.
On large fields during the height of the season---which began in August in south Texas and moved eastward, reaching the Carolinas by early fall---the star pickers sped like fan blades through the cotton, a blur of fingers and bolls, arms and torsos switching from the left row to the right, picking on both sides of them and tossing the cotton like feathers into their sack...
It is in these early sections of the book that Wilkerson's writing is at its best. There are countless of these beautiful, descriptive passages and these are, indeed, most essential to Wilkerson's thesis: the Great Migration was an escape from the untenable living situation of the South. Contrary to a hazy misconception enjoyed by much of the country, slavery did not end with the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Any move by African-Americans to improve their situation, socially or economically, was met with resistance and violence. Repeatedly in the book, we read of blacks having to move off the sidewalk to avoid sharing it with a white person; repeatedly we read of insults and injuries perpetuated without cause. The level of entrenched racism may be surprising for many Americans, particularly the younger generations. Wilkerson wants the reader to know that "their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making." Wilkerson is also interested in correcting the common misconception that the migration caused social problems and unrest in the urban centers of the North. Her careful documentation reflects what we now know about those migrants: they were more likely to work continuously, have lower poverty rates and have stabler family structures than many of their counterparts who stayed in the south AND the European immigrants who shared those urban centers. All these revelations makes this book an important source for understanding a historical migration that altered the fate and face of this nation.
See more at isabelwilkerson.com
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Behind the Beautiful
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity is Katherine Boo's celebrated book whose title sums up the subject. Unlike many anthropological/sociological studies, this book is successful for one reason in this reader's opinion: the reliance on narrative. Rather than give historical overviews, or including interviews with experts, Boo lived in the slum of Annawadi for three years while interviewing people over and over while following them and spending time with them---not sitting them down in a typical interview format. The book gives us stories of the people who live there, focusing the plot lines on a few people whose dramas are very compelling and very human. The details are vivid, while being instructive and Boo somehow manages to give us the horrific without hysteria or hyperbole; the quotidian itself is often terrifying. Two of the story's "protagonists" are teenagers named Abdul and Sunil who make a living collecting and sorting recyclables to sell by scavenging garbage. It is horrible work, and Boo gives us this:
Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair, gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die.
Sunil had his own guess: the deranged guy who talked to the hotels and believed the Hyatt was trying to kill him...But Abdul said it would be a Tamil guy whose eyes had gone from yellow to orange, and Abdul turned out to be right.
Boo's prose gets it just right---we don't notice her as the author. Her own story of living in this slum, and how she got into the lives and minds and hearts of her subjects doesn't appear in the text; there is only a short 'Author's Note' at the end. This is Boo's first book, but the topic is one that she has pursued in her career as a journalist: "to [press] uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity." Boo does this by conveying how human her subjects really are, and how much the story of their existence makes this an indictment of economic stratification. This is, finally, a story of people's desire to be human, to be seen as human, to appreciate their own uniqueness, or in the thoughts of one subject, "that a boy's life could still matter to himself." Too often, though, this means resorting to extreme measures, as when a woman named Fatima immolates herself over an argument with a neighbor:
There was no mirror...but she didn't need to see herself to know that she was bigger. The swelling was part of it, but there were other ways in which the fire had increased her....she'd started to be treated as a mattering person. 'What have I done to myself!' she cried out to sympathetic bystanders near the Hyatt. 'But it is done now, and I will make them pay!'
This book is a good antidote to the current narrative of India's rise as an economic power, in which the prosperity is trickling down and the middle class is growing. Maybe it is, but that's not enough. The continuing corruption and failed infrastructure of India aren't altered enough to significantly affect the lives of the poorest. Ironically, many these slum dwellers aren't even the poorest--a hierarchy of wealth exists even here.
I was reminded, while reading this, of Aravind Adiga's novel, The White Tiger. This novel's bitterness obliterated the manufactured, bullshit feel-good ending of a movie like Slumdog Millionaire. But that isn't my point here, much as I love to make that point. (There are only a few movies I hated more, one of them the stupidly offensive Life is Beautiful, which I mean to dissect one day for my own personal satisfaction). The point is the level to which the corruption has seeped into Indian daily life, and how much of a family's money, time and personal resources must go in to managing a system that is designed to exploit and keep under those already at the bottom. What Boo has done is to address what other writers---Robert Coles and Elie Wiesel come to mind--- have said: narrative makes us human. So Boo humanizes her subjects, the slum dwellers of Mumbai, by telling their stories. She does not reify their poverty. Boo offers no prescriptions for change, nor does she point fingers, though admittedly the irony of the animal rights group that comes to the aid of a particular slumdweller's "zoo" is frustrating as well as satisfying to read. The implicit challenge is this: if we are all to recognize the poor as fully human this puts an ethical dimension on global (or local) economic repression. I'd argue that this ethical problem has always been with us. I contrast with this the idea that "the poor have always been with us" as I've heard said again recently, an idea which strikes me as ethically lazy and reliant on a dichotomy of self and other. It is an ever more convenient position as globalization seems to be leading to an increase in such economic stratification. For these slumdwellers, opportunity only comes in the form of luck or graft; the myth of hard work and pluck to make one's fortune is a fabrication.
Interestingly, Boo doesn't make an issue of this. She doesn't have to. That, finally, is why reviewers, like the strange collection on the back cover (we have Barbara Ehrenreich, Amartya Sen and David Sedaris) saying things like "I couldn't put Behind the Beautiful Forevers down even when I wanted to." That's good storytelling.
Read more here: www.behindthebeautifulforevers.com
Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair, gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die.
Sunil had his own guess: the deranged guy who talked to the hotels and believed the Hyatt was trying to kill him...But Abdul said it would be a Tamil guy whose eyes had gone from yellow to orange, and Abdul turned out to be right.
Boo's prose gets it just right---we don't notice her as the author. Her own story of living in this slum, and how she got into the lives and minds and hearts of her subjects doesn't appear in the text; there is only a short 'Author's Note' at the end. This is Boo's first book, but the topic is one that she has pursued in her career as a journalist: "to [press] uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity." Boo does this by conveying how human her subjects really are, and how much the story of their existence makes this an indictment of economic stratification. This is, finally, a story of people's desire to be human, to be seen as human, to appreciate their own uniqueness, or in the thoughts of one subject, "that a boy's life could still matter to himself." Too often, though, this means resorting to extreme measures, as when a woman named Fatima immolates herself over an argument with a neighbor:
There was no mirror...but she didn't need to see herself to know that she was bigger. The swelling was part of it, but there were other ways in which the fire had increased her....she'd started to be treated as a mattering person. 'What have I done to myself!' she cried out to sympathetic bystanders near the Hyatt. 'But it is done now, and I will make them pay!'
This book is a good antidote to the current narrative of India's rise as an economic power, in which the prosperity is trickling down and the middle class is growing. Maybe it is, but that's not enough. The continuing corruption and failed infrastructure of India aren't altered enough to significantly affect the lives of the poorest. Ironically, many these slum dwellers aren't even the poorest--a hierarchy of wealth exists even here.
I was reminded, while reading this, of Aravind Adiga's novel, The White Tiger. This novel's bitterness obliterated the manufactured, bullshit feel-good ending of a movie like Slumdog Millionaire. But that isn't my point here, much as I love to make that point. (There are only a few movies I hated more, one of them the stupidly offensive Life is Beautiful, which I mean to dissect one day for my own personal satisfaction). The point is the level to which the corruption has seeped into Indian daily life, and how much of a family's money, time and personal resources must go in to managing a system that is designed to exploit and keep under those already at the bottom. What Boo has done is to address what other writers---Robert Coles and Elie Wiesel come to mind--- have said: narrative makes us human. So Boo humanizes her subjects, the slum dwellers of Mumbai, by telling their stories. She does not reify their poverty. Boo offers no prescriptions for change, nor does she point fingers, though admittedly the irony of the animal rights group that comes to the aid of a particular slumdweller's "zoo" is frustrating as well as satisfying to read. The implicit challenge is this: if we are all to recognize the poor as fully human this puts an ethical dimension on global (or local) economic repression. I'd argue that this ethical problem has always been with us. I contrast with this the idea that "the poor have always been with us" as I've heard said again recently, an idea which strikes me as ethically lazy and reliant on a dichotomy of self and other. It is an ever more convenient position as globalization seems to be leading to an increase in such economic stratification. For these slumdwellers, opportunity only comes in the form of luck or graft; the myth of hard work and pluck to make one's fortune is a fabrication.
Interestingly, Boo doesn't make an issue of this. She doesn't have to. That, finally, is why reviewers, like the strange collection on the back cover (we have Barbara Ehrenreich, Amartya Sen and David Sedaris) saying things like "I couldn't put Behind the Beautiful Forevers down even when I wanted to." That's good storytelling.
Read more here: www.behindthebeautifulforevers.com
Monday, February 6, 2012
When the Killing's Done
T. C Boyle’s latest novel, When the Killing’s Done, continues his thematic exploration of the environment and the complex balance of ecosystems both natural and man-made. Set in the central Coast of California and the Channel Islands off that shore, the tensions between animal rights activists and the National Park Service, and the conflicts in the natural world that result of those tensions form both narrative and theme. Boyle is covering old territory; a Friend of the Earth and Tortilla Curtain, among other works, cover these ideas.
Boyle asserts a sort of contemporary naturalist's idea about nature. What makes it contemporary is that Boyle folds society and the fabrications of humankind into a part of "nature"; if not quite a conflation of the natural and the man-made, he problematizes the very definition of the word "nature," (and our relationship with it--or lack thereof). His descriptions of the natural world are frequently mirrored by his descriptions of the man-made, and their many intersections, both actual and metaphorical.
On this particular day, a Saturday in June, the ship encountered dense fog on entering the Santa Barbara channel from the north and Captain Nishizawa himself appeared on the bridge to oversee operations....He was right dead center in the middle of the southbound lane and nothing was showing on the radar up ahead of him. If there was an emergency, the Tokachi-maru would take two miles and three and a half minutes to come to a stop. The tightest turn of which she was capable was nearly a mile across. And at seven stories above the surface, even in the clearest conditions, the crew on the bridge would have little chance of sighing any small craft below in any case.
That was the way it was. That was what the shipping lanes---and the Separation Zone---were meant for. Was the system perfect? Of course not. The Separation Zone functioned like the median on a freeway, but here were no lines drawn on the water to delineate the lanes and no concrete bumpers, palms or oleanders to separate north- and southbound traffic. Were there accidents? Of course there were. But in most cases the crew of a freighter or tanker never saw, felt or heard a thing when a small craft was unlucky enough to blunder across its path. Think of it this way: a heavyset woman, heavier even than Marta at the Cactus Cafe, a real monument of flesh and bone and live working juices, plods out to her car on aching feet after a double shift and can't begin to know the devastation she wreaks on the world of the ant, the beetle and the grub.
There are countless such encounters as the one presaged here. Shipwrecks and boating accidents past and present shape the narrative of this novel, and show the entwining of animal and man and sea. In true, old-fashioned narrative fashion, Boyle gives the reader satisfaction along with a lot of fun writing. Yet Boyle sometimes uses stock figures and easy marks. Character Dave LaJoy, an animal-rights activist, is obsessed, short-sighted, and ferociously angry at everyone and everything. The main focus of his fury is the National Park Service, which is undergoing controlled extermination of rats on Santa Cruz Island---an extermination that really took place (Boyle did extensive research on the Islands and the work of the Park Service). These rats---hitchhikers traveling by boat—are not native, and their presence has threatened several species found only on the islands. Without the removal of the rats, extinction of certain birds found nowhere else in the world is certain. Is the Park Service doing the right thing? In the novel, Alma Boyd Takesue, Park Service officer, has science on her side; she is invested in the long-range reestablishment of the delicate balance of the islands’ ecosystems. Unlike the character of LaJoy, Takesue actually considers, weighs and struggles with decisions. In contrast, LaJoy’s hypocrisies are laid bare bluntly and the character is devoid of nuance, making him less than interesting. This could be Boyle’s point, as he clearly has no patience with the sort of dogmatism that characterizes the obsessed of any political stripe. The activists of LaJoy's organization, FPA (For the Protection of Animals) are portrayed by Boyle as completely inept and misguided. They believe Takesue and the Park Service are acting out of hubris, but fail to see their own attempts to manipulate nature in the same light. Boyle reads the Park Services work as more Sissyphean---both the forces of nature and the forces of human society (if we are to separate them) are unlikely to be controlled. LaJoy’s ignorance is clearly garden-variety American, an ignorance born of removal---he is well-off, and his money and leisure feed a sense of superiority that clouds his mind. His paucity of information and lack of context and perspective on the very issues that he claims to champion seems representative of a willful ignorance that marks much political debate, whatever the issue.
These are clearly lessons taken from the moment. As this book came to publication, a very contested move to restore Malibu Lagoon, instigated by the government and supported by the environmental groups Heal the Bay and the Surfrider Foundation met with resistance from well-meaning, beach-loving locals who found the plan suspect. The rhetoric and subsequent protest on this restoration was, according to a source in Outside magazine’s on the topic, “.. another example of how facts, reason, and nuance have lost their place in America’s public discourse.”
Boyle’s style is very much of the moment, replete with references to contemporary culture and send-ups of stereotypical suburban and urban denizens of all types. His typically descriptive, sometimes lush writing is loaded with scenes of the natural world, but nature for the most part mediated and viewed by humans--with some notable exceptions. Some of it is over the top, but it is all in service of the ideas and generally very fun.
Boyle could be accused of overwriting; I think it true in spots, but it’s also a matter of taste. Hemingway he’s not. He's T.C. Boyle.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
City of Thieves
I was stuck in the bookstore--if anyone is "stuck" in a bookstore--and I gathered a stack of books to see what I felt like reading. I was failing miserably in my attempt to read through the NY Times notable list for 2011 (seven down, ninety-three to go) and had started and put down a dozen different titles in as many days. So I started through the stack, reading no further than the first page. One, two, four, six books, no luck, no zing, no first page tingles, no spark. Blah. I picked up another and another and put them down. I was in the mood for some quick-start, well-written fiction. Then I picked up David Benioff'a City of Thieves, opened it up to chapter one and read this:
You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold. When we slept, if we slept, we dreamed of the feast we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier--all that buttered bread, the potato dumplings, the sausages--eaten with disregard, swallowing without tasting, leaving great crumbs on our plates, scraps of fat. In June of 1941, before the Germans came, we thought we were poor. But June seemed like paradise by winter.
These sentences, these models of beautifully constructed parallel clauses begins this tale of Leningrad (Piter, to its denizens) during World War II. Under siege by the Germans, everyone is starving, cold and desperate---with a few notable exceptions. City of Thieves tells the story of an odyssey, the journey of teenage Lev and the soldier Kolya, and their search for a dozen eggs in a place where all the chickens have long been soup. Benioff's novel is alternately horrifying and hilarious, gruesome and gratifying. It is a fast, effortless read, owing largely to Benioff's excellent pacing and beautiful syntax. It is no surprise to find that he is a screenwriter first, novelist second. His scenes are often cinematic in nature, and that is no criticism: some of the best writers conjure up the visual in just that way (Hawthorne, anyone?).
Both plot and character driven, I dare say no more just in case anyone actually reads City of Thieves (I hate it when people tell me what happens). I enjoyed the story so much that I stayed in that bookstore and finished the first two chapters before I got up and bought the darn book. City of Thieves, btw, was published in 2008---did I mention this was a used bookstore?
You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold. When we slept, if we slept, we dreamed of the feast we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier--all that buttered bread, the potato dumplings, the sausages--eaten with disregard, swallowing without tasting, leaving great crumbs on our plates, scraps of fat. In June of 1941, before the Germans came, we thought we were poor. But June seemed like paradise by winter.
These sentences, these models of beautifully constructed parallel clauses begins this tale of Leningrad (Piter, to its denizens) during World War II. Under siege by the Germans, everyone is starving, cold and desperate---with a few notable exceptions. City of Thieves tells the story of an odyssey, the journey of teenage Lev and the soldier Kolya, and their search for a dozen eggs in a place where all the chickens have long been soup. Benioff's novel is alternately horrifying and hilarious, gruesome and gratifying. It is a fast, effortless read, owing largely to Benioff's excellent pacing and beautiful syntax. It is no surprise to find that he is a screenwriter first, novelist second. His scenes are often cinematic in nature, and that is no criticism: some of the best writers conjure up the visual in just that way (Hawthorne, anyone?).
Both plot and character driven, I dare say no more just in case anyone actually reads City of Thieves (I hate it when people tell me what happens). I enjoyed the story so much that I stayed in that bookstore and finished the first two chapters before I got up and bought the darn book. City of Thieves, btw, was published in 2008---did I mention this was a used bookstore?
Friday, January 13, 2012
Lost Memory of Skin
Russell Banks' latest novel is in the tradition of his other work---which is to say that it is about a completely different topic than anything he has worked on previously, and that it is focused on a particularly American narrative, yet situates it very much in place.
I've long been a fan of Banks. From the devastating Affliction to the fascinating Cloud Splitter Banks looks closely at the lives of Americans and the ways in which society shapes the individual. His writing can be wildly different from book to book and stylistically it doesn't always work. I had to put down The Reserve, for example, because I didn't believe it.
Lost Memory of Skin exposes the lives (via a single life) of convicted sex offenders and how, through the legal process, we have isolated these individuals to the extent that we have created a tiny, new, marginalized class of quasi-citizens. Banks did a great deal of research for the novel, using the actual predicaments of these men (for most are men) in shaping the situations and setting. This is a heartbreaking read, and though the some plot twists aren't always believable (and they don't have to be, do they?), it is very readable and engrossing. Banks uses lengthy descriptions of the landscape of Florida, past and present, perhaps to link the protagonist's fate to something larger--or perhaps not.
The human thought, emotional cost portrayed here is quite real. Bank's writes an indictment of an indiscriminate justice system, one that condemns as sex offenders a rapist of children along with the nineteen year-old that has sex with his underage girlfriend.
This book made me recall another novel, Stewart O'Nan's The Good Wife (2005) which is based on the author's close look at the toll the penal system takes on families. Book books give us heartbreaking tales of mistakes made and lives misspent. Both these novels skillfully illuminated a parcel of life I'd known nothing about.
I've long been a fan of Banks. From the devastating Affliction to the fascinating Cloud Splitter Banks looks closely at the lives of Americans and the ways in which society shapes the individual. His writing can be wildly different from book to book and stylistically it doesn't always work. I had to put down The Reserve, for example, because I didn't believe it.
Lost Memory of Skin exposes the lives (via a single life) of convicted sex offenders and how, through the legal process, we have isolated these individuals to the extent that we have created a tiny, new, marginalized class of quasi-citizens. Banks did a great deal of research for the novel, using the actual predicaments of these men (for most are men) in shaping the situations and setting. This is a heartbreaking read, and though the some plot twists aren't always believable (and they don't have to be, do they?), it is very readable and engrossing. Banks uses lengthy descriptions of the landscape of Florida, past and present, perhaps to link the protagonist's fate to something larger--or perhaps not.
The human thought, emotional cost portrayed here is quite real. Bank's writes an indictment of an indiscriminate justice system, one that condemns as sex offenders a rapist of children along with the nineteen year-old that has sex with his underage girlfriend.
This book made me recall another novel, Stewart O'Nan's The Good Wife (2005) which is based on the author's close look at the toll the penal system takes on families. Book books give us heartbreaking tales of mistakes made and lives misspent. Both these novels skillfully illuminated a parcel of life I'd known nothing about.
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