One-Way Street

The Nothing But Anxious Man

I've read a couple of sources that claim James Lasdun is the "best writer you've never heard of." These are from people who want us to read his new collection It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories, but the form of his praise is ambivalent. An author's finest quality, in other words, is the fact that you haven't read him before.

However, the key endorsement is from critic James Wood, who writes a nice blurb on the back cover. A few pages into the collection it becomes clear why Wood likes Lasdun so much, and not just because they're both Brits transplanted to the US. In each story in Lasdun's collection there are two or three sentences so perfectly made, so true, that they deliver a shock of recognition.

Lasdun brilliantly conveys a way seeing particular to vacillating and temporizing middle class white men. Lasdun's men are the kind of guys who've never really resolved the extra crispy or regular recipe dilemma.  After watching his modest hopes crumble through his own inaction, the main character of "An Anxious Man" observes, "Whatever you did, it seemed you were bound to regret doing it, or not having done it sooner . . . It was as though some malicious higher power, having experienced the workings of the human mind, had calibrated a torment for it based on precisely the instincts of desire and caution that were supposed to enable it to survive." (Ellipses in original)

The sentence neatly sums up the man's predicament: watching other people screw up his dreams. The sentence's effect is exactly what Wood means by effective realism, and by extension great fiction. The sentences ring true in the sense that they seem plausible, for a middle class white male reader, at any rate. Lasdun does not have a talent for vivid metaphors--note how abstract those sentences from "An Anxious Man" are--so his insights rely heavily on the cultural knowledge of the reader. I wonder how exchangeable the experiences are in Walter Benjamin's sense of a transmitting an experience from afar through storytelling. Would a reader deeply effected by Jhumpa Lahiri's stories be equally moved by James Lasdun's?

Lasdun shares at least one common quality with Lahiri: neither seems capable of writing a bad sentence. It's been a while since I've met a writer like that. I'd long ago accepted the clumsy, overreaching sentence here and there as the price of good writing elsewhere. Sometimes I want to ask the author, did you read that on paper before you submitted it for publication? Because that sentence doesn't work. It may have worked on the screen, but here in real paper it stinks.

This isn't to say Lasdun doesn't have some other limitations of the quality realist. His characters may be keen in their perceptions, but the force of sudden emotional clarity comes at the cost of a lot of muddled thinking, and misreadings of other people. The insights are about locking someone into place in the grand scheme of things, but rarely do they involve penetrating insights into other people, or worse, decisive or even interesting action. His men are passive receptacles of social miscues. Lasdun's men exist in a fixed point in the universe, but they have no agency. They are uncertain in their being. The more intimate their experiences, the more likely they will be in the past tense. This is the tragic dimension of realism: wisdom comes, but always too late.

The Digi-Novel

Another new publishing model has emerged.

Anthony Zuiker, the executive producer of the ubiquitous CSI television series, has announced the launching of what he calls a "digi-novel," which is a bound book, in this case a crime novel called Level 26, with "cyber-bridges" every 20 pages. The cyber-bridges are short online films linked to the story, but Zuiker says you can skip them if you like. He's billed the digi-novel as a breakthrough in convergence, but the experience truly converges only on a device that doesn't exist yet except in a spider hole in the Apple development labs: the Apple tablet. Otherwise, you have to switch back and forth between a book (or an ebook reader) and a PC.

Despite its name, Zuiker doesn't see the digi-novel as the future of the novel, but as the future of television:

Every TV show in the next five, 10 years will have a comprehensive microsite or website that continue the experience beyond the one-hour television to keep engaging viewers 24/7. . . Just watching television for one specific hour a week ... that's not going to be a sustainable model going forward.

The digi-novel is less innovative and elegant than the projects in development at Vook, but Zuiker has hit upon a radical idea: The book rescuing television from the short attention spans the latter exacerbated.

Architectural Bookshop to Close

When I was in my twenties one of my favorite things to do was linger in a bookstore looking for something to read. I discovered the great Latin American novelists at Barbara's Bookstore on Broadway in Chicago. Later, I spent a good portion of my graduate school stipend in the lit crit section at the Border's on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. Both bookstores are now gone, and while they were both chains, they understood their local clientele as well as any independent bookstore.

Amazon has everything for sale, which is both its strength and its weakness. The Borders near my house, like most chain bookstores, exists to sell bestsellers. Independent bookstores, of course, are the best places to buy books, but it's rare that I find one in which the owner's tastes mesh with mine.

That's why the impending loss of the Prairie Avenue Bookshop is so dispiriting. It's one of those rare bookstores where you can trust the tastes of the owners, where everything in the store is worth reading. Interestingly, according to the owners, Wilbert and Marilyn Hasbrouck, their business is being killed by people who find what they're looking for in the bookstore, then buy the books online to avoid Chicago's 10.25% sales tax, the highest in the county. (Thanks, Todd Stroger!) Unless a buyer can be found by September 1st, the store will close. Wilbert Hasbrouck is looking for someone who can rejuvenate the store's web presence and turn it into the best place in the world to buy architectural books--an interesting challenge that doesn't sound too daunting.

Mistress Overreach

It’s been made into a major motion picture and it’s listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, but when I purchased my copy of Cold Comfort Farm (1932), the bookstore clerk was befuddled. “Look at that cow on the cover!” Why isn’t Stella Gibbons’s novel better known?

I don’t know if the cow on the cover was Aimless, Feckless, Pointless, or Worthless, the four cows at Cold Comfort Farm who are tended by a garden gnome of a man named Adam. He’s one of the Starkadders, inhabitants of a Sussex farm whose way of life has remained the same since before the Norman invasions. Digging a new well is the first capital improvement in centuries, but the project keeps getting delayed because the Starkadder men playfully throw each other into its depths. The family matriarch Ada Doom keeps the Starkadders imprisoned in their Iron Age squalor because she fears being left alone on the farm, where, as a child, she witnessed “something nasty in the woodshed.”

Into this benighted world steps Flora Poste, newly liberated from school and her parents, who have recently died. Flora brings little more than a teapot and a fresh change of clothes with her, but to the Starkadders, it’s like Louis XIV had moved in. Immediately upon wakening on her first day at the farm she resolves to improve the poor Starkadders’ lives. She begins modestly enough by buying Adam a small mop with which to clean the dishes. He’s so awed by the mop, which is evidently the most advanced piece of technology he’s ever seen, that he hangs it like a talisman over the sink, then continues to clean dishes as he has for eighty years—by scraping them with a twig.

Undaunted by this mixed success, Flora sets about improving the lives of the other Starkadders. Her next project is Elfine, a seventeen-year-old wood nymph in love with Dick Hawk-Monitor, the son of the local gentry, a class of people “who speak once every twenty minutes.” Flora sets a copy of Vogue magazine in front of the girl and her life is changed forever. Ada Doom’s sixty-year obsession with the wood shed is undone by nine hours of Flora speaking sense to her. A doomsday-preaching uncle is dispatched to Chicago. The brooding, Lawrencian eldest son is whisked away to Hollywood. By the conclusion of the novel so many people are getting married that the ceremonies happen at the rate of two a day.

The transformations occur with the haste and totality one finds only in farce, of which Cold Comfort Farm is a prime example. Gibbons wrote the novel as a parody of a genre now lost to us, the rural novel. The genre was wildly popular in Britain in the 1920s and 30s and, like most products of idealized English life, inspired both ridicule and longing. Gibbons’s writing is tartly comic throughout, but it’s interesting that Gibbons took the trouble to invent rustic terms like “rennet-post” and “sukebind.”  Ostensibly the imagined vocabulary is meant to convey the depths of the Starkadders’ isolation, but Gibbons’s neo-rustic language also invokes the pleasures of the pastoral tradition, itself a largely urban invention.

With her London dresses and familiarity with telephones, Flora is supposed to be thoroughly modern, but her literary lineage runs back to pastoral comedies of the Jacobean and Restoration theaters. These comedies staged conflicts over land and money in the form of narratives about love and marriage. In these plays there was often a meddlesome character named Wellborn or Overreach intent upon improving the lives of the tenant farmers toiling on the land. The self-appointed reformer generally succeeded but had to be dismissed from the stage before the end. The ultimate victors in these conflicts were the middle classes with their privatized interests determined in the family home rather than the courts of London.  It’s significant, in view of this tradition, that Cold Comfort Farm ultimately becomes the sole proprietorship of Rueben, the most bourgeois of the Starkadders.

At the conclusion of the novel, Flora boards an airplane and returns to London, her duties as Mistress Overreach fulfilled. Gibbons mocks the rural novel genre of her time through tart comic language and the invocation of the morality of improvement, which dates back to the English Civil War. Ironically, Gibbons’s most enduring literary triumph depended on a tradition as old as the Starkadders themselves.

The Wrong Woman

Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is set in a run-down place during run-down times. The novel tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young woman living in a small town in south-east Ireland in the 1950s. The novel has all the elements of a story of youthful restlessness, but Eilis is actually rather well suited for a life of limited prospects. She’s stubbornly decent and without any visible trace of personality. However, she has a head for numbers, which, in her wind-swept town, qualifies her as something of a genius.

Enter Father Flood, delivered by divine provenance from Brooklyn Heights to Enniscorthy. Eilis has a part-time job as a clerk in a small shop run by the wickedly prim Nelly Kelly. Father Flood sees a smart young woman in a tiny shop and dares to dream big: he imagines a smart young woman in a much bigger shop. He promises to arrange passage to Brooklyn, where Eilis can work in a department store.

Characteristically, Eilis recoils at the notion. Surely her more glamorous and prettier sister Rose—the Katharine Hepburn of Wexford—would be a better candidate for immigration. Indeed, throughout the novel there’s a feeling that the wrong woman ended up in Brooklyn. Little outbursts of life go off around Eilis like firecrackers, but Eilis is a passive vessel for others’ designs. Really, the woman who should have gone to Brooklyn was Isabel Archer.

In Brooklyn Eilis is taken care of by a gaggle of women who make sure she has everything she needs to succeed in the New World, which, as it turns out, is a good pair of shoes and a properly fitting bathing suit. Eilis wins the heart of a young man who finds niceness erotic. She visits Coney Island and Ebbets Field. She attends night classes at Brooklyn College. African-Americans start shopping in the store in which she works.

This under-dramatized world goes against type. No rollicking drunks, no squalor—this isn’t Far and Away. Eilis was born and will die in the petit bourgeoisie. The flatness of her world is reflected in Tóibín’s prose, which can sometimes work itself up into small fits of bitterness, but otherwise remains spare, each sentence wrapped in a brown paper bag.

She was nobody [in Brooklyn]. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything . . . . Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday.

This small world contracts even further when Rose dies suddenly, compelling Eilis to return to Enniscorthy. In this last section of the novel Tóibín picks up the narrative pace, injecting some dramatic tension that the Brooklyn scenes often lack. Eventually, the sense that the wrong woman was sent overseas begins to resolve itself. Rose’s death frees Eilis to choose her own destiny.

Just as the action alternates between the Old World and the New, Brooklyn alternates between Henry James and William Trevor, between psychological nuance and dogged realism. The novel gradually builds in power, like a James novel, yet remains true to its characters’ modest virtues. Supposedly, Brooklyn was to be Tóibín’s Atonement, but instead it is closer to McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Brooklyn could end up a really good Terence Davies film, or be remembered as something William Trevor could have written had he a touch more talent.

Eyes Wide Open

Sándor Márai died in obscurity in 1989, nine years before his novel Embers was translated into English and published to great acclaim. Like Irène Némirovsky, Márai was a minor writer plucked from history to reintroduce us to a vanished world. Esther's Inheritance (1940) is Márai’s fourth novel to be translated into English, this time by the Hungarian poet George Szirtes. Inheritance was written two years before Embers and shares the same basic plot structure: a cast of characters reunite after decades of separation, only to find not much has changed.

In her youth the title character and narrator was jilted by her one true love, Lajos, a charismatic con man. Well into her fifties in the present action of the novel and still pining for Lajos, who married her sister, Esther is surrounded by eminently sensible people to whom she barely pays any attention. When Lajos sends word that he wants to visit Esther, she immediately smells a rat—and she can’t wait.

Lajos arrives in a red car and an entourage of decadent Europeans that includes his conniving daughter and virtually inert son. As soon as he gets Esther alone he makes the demand for which she’s been waiting: he wants her house to pay his debts. She tries to resist, but not very hard. She’s enjoying his performance too much. Lajos, she observes, “lied the way the wind howls, with a certain natural energy, in high spirits.” She knows he’s just a garden-variety romantic dissembler, but she also sees a grander form of prevarication at work. When Esther points out that he rejected her for her unsavory sister Vilma, Lajos responds a Nietzschean outburst, blaming Esther for the collapse of their courtship. “We did not love each other courageously enough. And that is your fault... Love is of your making. It is the only respect in which you achieve greatness.”

As Esther herself notes, Lajos’s performance is “operatic.” The dramatic tension in this brief novel’s final pages comes from the clash between Esther’s steadfast faith and Lajos’s struggle to believe in something. Márai sets up a confrontation between two people who seem to have mismanaged their lives and their love. As far as Esther’s final decision is concerned, Márai gives the game away at the very beginning of the novel. The surprise comes when we realize Esther and Lajos neither seek nor receive any redemption for their failed lives.  Esther, it turns out, is every bit the Nietzschean Lajos is. Nietzsche must have had a life like hers in mind when he wondered aloud,

What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?

Esther’s chaste surrender to the demonic has led some critics to detect an anti-fascist political allegory in Esther’s Inheritance: Esther as Europa sleepwalking her way into fascism. Márai was fiercely anti-fascist, but his novel, written during the darkest days of the way against fascism, isn’t polemical enough to fit into a clean allegorical mold.

The key moment in the novel occurs when Esther’s lawyer makes a half-hearted attempt to convince her of the irrationality of signing over her house to the scoundrel Lajos. She points out, however, that if she had lived her life rationally she would have eloped with Lajos two decades ago and her life would have probably turned out worse that it actually did. If Esther’s Inheritance had been a neat anti-fascist allegory, Márai would have presented a more plausible alternative to the demonic. If her world had offered a better alternative, Esther wouldn’t have tossed away her inheritance with such enigmatic resignation. In other words, she isn’t sleeping. She’s wide awake and enjoying watching her world evaporate.

Summer Reading 2009

I've never really understood why summer books, like summer movies, are supposed to be less substantial and less challenging than books we read at any other time of the year. For most people summer is pretty much like every other time of year. Most of it is spent in climate-controlled environments--cars, trains, homes, offices, airports, hotels--that scarcely change with the season. How much time do people really spend reading at the beach or in a hammock? It seems that summer reading lists are all about the summer we wish we were having rather than the one we actually are having.

Generally my only concession to reading in the summer is that the book shouldn't be too long. I don't mind having to do some work unpacking an argument or a dense patch of prose fiction; I just don't want to feel like I'm going to spend the entire summer with one book.

So here's my ideal reading list for this summer. These are the books I intend to read this summer. I may not get through the list, although I'm determined to read a lot this summer because, for various reasons, I haven't been reading very much this spring. Midsummer I may find other books I'm more interested in reading. That's OK. Choosing books and wine are my favorite shopping activities, so I don't like to get too programmatic about reading lists.

Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn. It sounds like it could be a novel of fey miserablism, but I really liked The Master and the blurbs I've read so far reassured me that Tóibín's is more than the sum of its Brooklyn Irish cliches.

Ada Louise Huxtable, On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change. This has been on my to read list since it came out last fall. I've already started reading this collection of columns from Huxtable's years as the New York Times architecture critic. She was there when Modernism ran out of gas and Post-Modernism arrived with a jolt of energy and some questionable buildings.

Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image. Ordinarily I steer clear of philosophers writing about the cinema--has anyone, anywhere, really read both volumes of Gilles Deleuze's Cinema and learned anything from them?--but Rancière is one of the most interesting aesthetic philosophers around. Besides, it's a short book.

Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm . I've been meaning to read this for a long time, and this is the summer I'm finally going to pick it up.

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice. This doesn't come out until August. I didn't love Against the Day, to say the least, but Pynchon is still Pynchon. He can't be ignored.

Francis Mallmann, Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way. OK, so yes, summer reading should have an element of escapist fantasy about it, and without fantasy we will never change. The American in Provence/Tuscany genre is usually pretty reliable, but this year the crop is very thin, a sign that the genre is exhausted. What better way to escape the quotidian than to cook your way through another culture? 

Does anyone have any recommendations for a new book on the cinema?

Gangsters Go to Poetry School

Genichiro Takahashi's novel Sayonara, Gangsters is one of the legendary texts of the postmodern era. Originally published in Japan in 1982, it wasn't translated into English until 2004. Yet long before that the novel somehow gained a reputation among English-speaking readers as an important postmodernist novel. Even if it was more widely praised than read in this country, the novel lent itself to intellectually charged summary. First, there are Japanese gangsters; they're ritualistic and tetchy, like American gangsters, but better dressed and less sentimental. The novel also features the Derridean conceit of naming: people give each other names according to the whims of a particular moment. The novel's narrator is called Sayonara, Gangsters by a girlfriend, and other characters sport zanily descriptive names like Relief Pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. The narrator teaches in a poetry school where he chats with Virgil reincarnated as a refrigerator and instructs yakuza in the fine art of verse writing. And, as one might expect with a novel entitled Sayonara, Gangsters, it's a bit of a genre blender, mixing high-brow poetics and pulp fiction.

Takahashi's crisp sentences and amiable narrator carry the reader through the dull patches, such as the conversation with Virgil that goes on way too long. Perhaps inevitably, given the Takahashi's ambitions, the novel is uneven. For every ill-advised detour there's a moment of genuine feeling. We're told that a river runs through the sixth floor of the poetry school, but it doesn't seem worth the effort to try to figure out what it may mean. But the death of the narrator's daughter is heartbreaking. I was equally relieved when both episodes were done.

Sayonara, Gangsters is a playfully transgressive period piece, like a Shohei Imamura film. Its most up to date quality is its abstract feel. Despite its literary roots in gritty urban crime melodrama, the novel is almost completely lacking in place names. It wears its déclassé influences lightly, unlike the more pop culture obsessed narratives of the 1990s. The novel is a quick read, which, in a way, is too bad, for it took such a long time to finally arrive.

Leftovers from A Moveable Feast

When I went to Paris a couple of months ago, I had only one day to prepare for the trip. (It was a surprise birthday present to my wife, sprung only 36 hours before we left.) When I went to our local Borders for reading material, I struggled for a long time to find something appropriate. They store did have any of my first choices, and as for their stock, either I'd already read the book or it seemed too much of a cliche. Eventually I settled on Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book, which didn't really fit the occasion but it was an enjoyable read. Our whirlwind trip didn't allow for much reading time. I ended up reading most of the novel on the plane ride home.

One book I didn't consider buying was Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I read it in college, but I don't remember whatever happened to the volume I read. I haven't read a word of Hemingway since I completed a chapter on The Sun Also Rises in my dissertation, but I'm tempted to pick up A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition when it comes out in July. Christopher Hitchens, who is always about 5% right about things, points out that Hemingway's book is "an ur-text of the American enthrallment with Paris. To be more precise, it is also a skeleton key to the American literary fascination with Paris." This is true. In the rest of his review Hitchens picks through the dirty bits left out of the original edition. Hitchens' sourness extends to the city itself. He dismisses the Left Bank as "a banal tourist enclave in a Paris where the tough and plebeian districts are gone, to be replaced by seething Muslim banlieues all around the periphery."

I didn't comb every square meter of the Left Bank when I was there, but I didn't find a banal tourist enclave there. We encountered some mediocre restaurants and a half-dozen Roche Bobois stores on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and we ditched out of Les Deux Magots before ordering because it was so lifeless. But during a chilly week in late March, when the streets were full of Parisians going about their business, it was possible to imagine what a daunting and exciting experience it must have been for the young Hemingway family.

Patio Man Land

James Boice's second novel NoVA opens with a high school boy committing suicide. The time and place are clinically presented: Tot Lot, Third Entrance. November 28, 1998. The boy's death is described in a clinical tone, but with long, sinuous sentences, as if the narrator doesn't know where to look. The narrator details the contents of the boy's stomach, counts up the number of kids named Brian in his town (10), and relates the musings of the fifteen-year-old girl who first spots the body hanging limply from a basketball hoop.

We learn quickly that the dead boy is merely a unifying device for a novel about a place. Northern Virginia (NoVa) is the realm of the mid-level bureaucrat in a government-related industry. NoVa is Patio Man land. Everywhere you look you'll see "lives being lived and nothing in the way." After we meet the one person whose life has reached the ultimate roadblock, Boice's prose loosens up, his gaze becomes steadier. We get a series of spot-on first-person narratives from people whose lives may look smooth and untroubled, but they're really just circling the cul-de-sac. There's a fabulously vulgar layabout who still lives with his parents, four years after graduating from high school. He has no prospects for employment, isn't serious about applying for college, hasn't a single social grace, and he doesn't care.

While Trent remains happily stuck in adolescence, Ellen tries to forget that she peaked in high school. She consoles herself with long baths, and her monologues range over the usual array of anxieties and disappointments of a mother of two hot tubbing her way into middle age. Trent, Ellen and the rest of the large cast of characters in NoVa all share the narcissism of the mediocre, but there's a distinct generational gap cutting across the novel. Boice's ventriloquism works better for the adolescent characters than the adults. The adolescents' attention is focused on the immediate and the tangible. They can only see the world through their own mundane desires, so their surroundings seem more provisional, still full of possibility, however modest. Ellen and the rest of the homeowning class fret about their souls and their places in their world. But because their world is so banal, they can't help but appear banal themselves.

Boice labors mightily to make the ordinary interesting, and for the most part he succeeds. His characters come alive through Boice's keen eye and mordant humor. Boice is particularly skilled at dropping a simple declarative sentence for a powerful effect. Trent's egocentrism infuses every sentence he utters, but no more than when he tells us just before he's about to drive off to the shopping mall, "I am well known for my car." Such is the world of NoVa that claims like this really matter.