by John Fowles (1965). Published by Little Brown & Company.
26 May 2007. Up to page 227 of 607.
A good author can manipulate the reader’s general interest into a sort of hunger. One way of doing this is to create suspense. You see this a lot in the Harry Potter books. Halfway into the book, you’ve got about seventeen different storylines going at once and are smacking your arm like a junkie waiting for the next little hit of information on any subject whatsoever. Here, the author is playing on the natural instinct of the human mind to constantly orient itself. By being stingy and tantalizing with information, JK Rowling hooks us firmly and well.
John Fowles traps his readers in a different sort of way. The first section of his book, “The Magus,” follows the life of a jaded and selfish young man named Nicholas Urfe. The story is quite believable. We see how Mr. Urfe falls in love with a feisty young Australian girl named Alison, only to leave her in order to run away to a solitary Greek island named Phraxos, where he plans to teach English and nurture his own poetic talent. Shortly after he gets to the island, he comes to the sobering realization that he has no poetic talent worth nurturing. Furthermore, the people of the island bore him to death; the children he teaches are more interested in their job prospects than in literature; the other teachers are all stick-in-the-muds. He contemplates suicide but can’t bring himself to do the deed.
The whole story is told in the first person, and the language is so rich and spirited that, while we can’t bring ourselves to really like Nicholas Urfe, we do think he might be a tad harsh when he labels himself untalented. Indeed, he seems to be a man of wonderfully acute and active intelligence. The danger is that all this intelligence is now trapped on an island with nothing to apply itself to. We’ve come right into a cul-de-sac of the soul, and we’re only a tenth of the way through the book. We can’t help but imagine that the rest of the book will be an excruciatingly detailed meditation on loneliness and boredom and routine, with a prose whose eloquence and beauty grow in inverse proportion to the suspense quotient.
So by the time the character of Maurice Conchis makes his entrance, we’re SO ready for a little bit of magic.
Maurice Conchis is an old man who lives an apparently solitary life in a mansion almost hidden from view. He is surrounded by books and beautiful paintings, periodically immersing himself in elaborate harpsichord music and in the undersea life of the nearby reefs and islets.
It certainly seems that Conchis is the Magus described in the book’s title, but what sort of magic does he have at his command? At first, it seems that the magic referred to is only the magic of enlightenment, of friendship, the magic of hope and engagement in life. But that’s only part of what’s going on, because Conchis also starts dropping hints that he’s a more literal type of magician; that he’s discovered a secret method for gaining contact with the spirit world.
Soon we’re caught up in a game of many-layered ambiguity. As Conchis spins out the story of his early life at a leisurely pace, the characters he describes begin appearing in real life. But Nicholas Urfe refuses to believe they’re actually ghosts, and he soon puts his intellect to the task of figuring out how exactly Conchis has organized this extensive charade. At the same time, he finds himself falling in love with one of Conchis’s “ghosts,” the delightfully coquettish Lily, who corresponds to Conchis’s first love, a woman whose erotic coercion prompted him to enlist in the army as a foot soldier in the first world war.
So is Conchis a teacher? A charlatan? A dandy? A philosopher? What is the purpose behind the elaborate masque that he constructs around poor Nicholas Urfe?
I can’t tell yet, but it seems as though Conchis’s masque is very much meant to be a collection of all the kinds of magic that fiction and literature can offer to rescue us from boredom and despair. Fowles seems to be gleefully mixing up a potion that includes just as much of the profane as it does the profound: mystery and romance, mythological symbolism and historical intrigue as well as serious meditations on death, free will, and the inevitability of evil all come together around Conchis, and the real magic behind it all is the way that the reader’s mind comes alive when faced with the many emotional and intellectual challenges presented by this truly fascinating book.
2 June 2007; pp. 227-351
It’s important when reading this book to keep remembering that as the reader, you have an advantage over the narrator. You, after all, are reading a work of fiction. Anything goes. And if the fiction you’re reading is a book called “The Magus”, you at least have to entertain the fact that some real magic is going on.
You have to remind yourself of this fact to keep from getting annoyed by the way that poor Nicholas Urfe keeps dragging his feet, concocting less and less plausible theories to explain the strange things that are going on around him. How is it that he sees the beautiful Lily—supposedly a ghost conjured up from Mr. Conchis’s past—down by the beach and moments later standing up on the balcony of Conchis’s mansion, looking wistfully to sea? Nicholas U of course rules out the supernatural and becomes convinced that “Lily” has a twin sister. He suggests the matter to Conchis, who at first scoffs at it, but soon the twin sister reveals herself, and Nicholas Urfe feels smugly confirmed that he worked out the secret.
To me, though, it seems more likely—because it’s more interesting—that Nicholas hasn’t discovered the existence of twins, he’s created their existence. At one point, Conchis tried to convince Nick that Lily is actually a schizophrenic, compelled to always put on new masks and pretenses. And at one point, Lilly refers to herself as Astarte, a Semitic Goddess of mystery who corresponds to the High Priestess of the Tarot deck. The reference to Astarte appears playful, and almost passes unnoticed amidst the many other mythic and cultural references dropped around this book, unless you recall that John Fowles has dedicated the book “To Astarte.”
So for my money, Lilly (who later claims that her real name is Julie Holmes, sister to June Holmes) is most probably the goddess Astarte herself, a sort of mad goddess who needs the enraptured imagination of a clever young man like Nicholas Urfe in order to guide the constant changes of her own identity.
All of which would be a fascinating intellectual game that we as readers could play alongside poor Nick Urfe, if it weren’t for the fact that Urfe seems to have chosen the wrong game to play. He’s determined to have sex with Lilly–Julie. He thinks about her constantly. The more he thinks about her and how to get her away from Conchis, the more Conchis fades into the background, and also the promise of a gift of wisdom and enlightenment that Conchis seemed once to extend. Earlier in the book, Conchis seemed to have something to say, something about morality and mortality. He had survived the horrors of the trenches in the First World War; he had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second. In one creepy incident, he uses a loaded die and a cyanide tablet to bring Urfe face-to-face with the fear of death.
There’s a sense that if Nicholas weren’t so dead set on sexual conquest, he might listen more to Conchis, and Conchis would then have more to say. But instead, he keeps pursuing Julie through all her various identities. And as he does so, he keeps encountering more and more frightening characters, including a man dressed as Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, and a troop of men dressed as Nazi soldiers (Nick, of course, is convinced that they’re actors in Conchis’s hire).
The book seems both a fantastical retelling of the story of “Faust” and more especially “The Tempest.” But the references to the World Wars suggest that the turmoil of the twentieth century make it impossible to escape fully into fantasy. Heaven may still be something phantasmagoric, but Hell has already been brought into being in this world in the recent past, and new generations discover this at their peril.
This is a fun book to review, although it’s so unusual that it’s hard not to want to just summarize the whole thing.
The emotional spine of the book is the relationship between Nick and his old flame Alison, who tries to draw him back into her life during a weekend trip to Mount Parnassus. Nick seems to view her as nothing more than a distraction and an annoyance until at one point something she does reminds him of a poem he once read, at which point he decides he has to have her as well as Lilly.
The argument that ensues is the most real thing in the book. Alison accuses Nick of being too cowardly to be capable of love, and Nick proves her right by only being able to respond with lame attempts at wit and romance, constantly calling her ‘darling,’ and calling himself a worthless bastard. Which is only an excuse because it’s obvious that this is a man who is actually quite in love with himself.
Before the argument with Alison, the game between Conchis and Nick seems like a wonderful second chance at life and fulfillment. But once we see that Nick has the chance to be with this woman who loves him, and blindly wounds her by chosing a woman who seems only to be a fantasy, or who rather seems to be fantasy itself, we can’t help but felt hat the game has become hollow. And at this point, Nick shifts from being someone we have difficulty liking to someone we sort of hate.
16 June 2007; p. 235-end
In order to discuss this book, I have to mention another book I read a long time ago: “Illuminautus!” by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert J. Shea. Today, the book is known mainly as a cult classic. It breaks all the rules, it fails majestically, it reads like bad 70s porn, it’s full of adolescent attempts at far-out chaotic montages of images that are almost unreadable. The sex is raunchy, the violence is graphic, and the whole this seems to have been plotted in a drugged-out haze.
But at the time I read it, I was only twelve years old, and it was the book that got me truly interested in reading. Although it’s not the sort of book I would like to reread now, it does hold a special place in my heart, and it’s important for me to think about it and understand what made it so meaningful at the time.
Cut down below all the psychedelic and the stew of conspiracy theories, get passed all the injudicious slang and you’ll find the story of Hagbard Celine, a renegade sea captain and philosopher who’s created his own alternative world inside a golden submarine, the “Leif Erickson.” Many of the book’s subplots are about people who are somehow abducted or tricked by Celine, and are subsequently put through a barrage of weird psychological situations, often involving sex, drugs and the threat of death.
What makes the book remarkable is the fact that Celine turns out to be a teacher at heart. His mind-games are tailor-made for his subjects. He sets out to identify a person’s own fears and taboos, and break them open; he teaches cops to hate authority; he teaches rapists to empathize with their victims; he teaches believers to be skeptics and skeptics to be believers.
The most interesting student of Celine’s is George Dorn, a headstrong intellectual hippie radical who begins to learn from Celine to stop living in his head and start living in his senses, who begins to learn bravery and confidence.
Corny as it sounds, this theme of learning and personal growth raises the novel up a notch from just being a piece of shock anarchic trash. Throughout his career, the late Robert Anton Wilson was always moved by the idea most people live their lives imprisoned in a rigid set of ideas. In dozens of books and articles he tried to incorporate Celine-like games to create satori-like revelations, to wake people up to . . . something vague and hard to define, yet exciting. The revelation, perhaps, that we are free.
What’s particularly interesting to me is the idea of a character like Hagbard Celine. By the time we’re adults, we all recognize to some degree that there are pivotal moments in life, galvanic moments when you realize who you are or you drastically change the course you’re going to take in life. For many people, these are moments of trauma; many report having such experiences in war; becoming a parent can trigger such moments; sometimes, just a conversation with someone very significant can be enough to trigger a massive change in perspective.
There’s usually an element of chance in the way these moments enter our lives . . . but what if someone created a system to engineer such moments, to accelerate the progress of humankind by creating carefully controlled psychological moments of crisis and enlightenment? Hagbard Celine is just that; he’s a sort of super genius whose purpose in life is to raise consciousness, an authority figure whose goal is to teach people to question authority, an entrepreneur who invests millions of dollars into getting people to cross personal thresholds, an old man who seeks not to censor the impulses of youth, but to enhance them.
The character of Hagbard Celine always seemed to be the most original, unprecedented part of “Illuminautus!” so I’m both proud and disappointed to have discovered at last his direct predecessor in John Fowles’s Maurice Conchis.
As in “Illuminautus!” the story of the Magus is ultimately one of teaching. Nicholas Urfe finds himself caught up in a sort of game of secrets and lies with this strange, possibly crazy old man on the island of Phraxos. As in “Illuminautus!” there is a recognition of the fact that a young man’s mind is much more receptive and malleable when he’s in a state of sexual excitement; Maurice orchestrates a bevy of beautiful women who play on Nicholas’s vanity, social pretensions, and predatory urges. Alternate explanations keep be offered for what is “really” going on. Conchis presents himself at various points as a psychic conjurer of ghosts; the well-meaning ward of a beautiful madwoman; an avant garde theatrical director creating a drama without an audience; and as a psychologist engaged in a bizarre and unethical experiment with Nicholas Urfe as the subject.
Each of these identities is somewhat accurate. Also, as readers, we should be alert to the fact that Conchis prefers his name to be pronounced with a soft “ch,” so that it resembles the word “conscious.” He represents the evolutionary process by which a young man like Nicholas rises from narrow selfishness to a more nuanced awareness of sharing a world with other people, a world where freedom and love are not simply abstract concepts and where there are no pat answers to ethical dilemmas.
Conchis’s own ethical dilemma took place during the German occupation of the island during WWII, when a sadistic German soldier presented him with the choice of personally executing three freedom fighters or standing by and watching as the Germans execute eighty civilians—including woman and children—in their stead.
It’s easy to see that John Fowles was a more artful and meaningful writer than Wilson and Shea ever were. “The Magus” is a masterful work, partly because it is a more focused work. He is able to tie together ideas about love, politics, free will and the existence of God without sacrificing believability because he shows the way that all these issues can tie into a single person’s life.
In contrast, “Illuminautus!” is a sprawling, disorganized work that makes a failed attempt to chronicle dozens of characters being subjected by Celine in parallel journeys of self-discovery. Although this weakens the novel, we shouldn’t see “Illuminautus!” as a failed rip-off of John Fowles’s work. Fowles is concerned mainly with the individual; in his novel, set in and informed by the moral climate of a world that had just recently witnessed the Holocaust and Hiroshima, learning is a lonely and painful experience reserved for the few.
“Illuminautus!” on the other hand is a novel grounded firmly in the 1960s when it seemed for a time as though whole western cultures were prepared to undergo a revolutionary change into something more open and exciting. If you ever saw Robert Anton Wilson speak before an audience, you realize that he was a very social man interested in broadcasting his ideas to the many than enclosing them in gilded envelopes and passing them on to a chosen few. The grand awakening promised in the 1960s by people such as Robert Anton Wilson’s mentor Timothy Leary never occurred, probably never had a chance of occurring, but the impetus to believe in it is a beautiful things.
It doesn’t matter you find more truth in isolationist books like “The Magus” or “Steppenwolf,” or communalist books such as “Illuminautus!” “Gravity’s Rainbow,” or (I’d argue) “Harry Potter.” What matters is seeing what makes these books special: in all these books magic itself serves as a symbol for something sealed away from us, something capable of nurturing us and bringing us toward ripening maturity. Because of this they speak to those of us who grow up feeling trapped in life, hemmed in by a culture riddled with prejudice, mendacity and self-centeredness. At their worst, books of this class tempt us to regress into childish fantasizing; but at their best, they encourage us to bring forward a child’s spirit of openness and exploration to matters which are very much adult.
Requiem for a Dream
by Hubert Selby Jr, 1978. Published by Thunder Mouth Press. 279 pages.
Reviewed 11 May 2007
When I first started reading this book, I saw the faces of a lot of my friends light up. That’s a GREAT book, they told me. It was a little surprising, because my previous experience with Hubert Selby Jr. was reading “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” When people talk about reading “Last Exit,” it’s with a sense of residual devastation. It’s like recollecting a famine or a plague, a notable event but not one that you’d call enjoyable.
It wasn’t as though “Requiem for a Dream” seemed like a bright and cheerful book. The main plot follows the parallel addictions of an aging Brooklyn widow and her son. He’s a heroin dealer who’s hooked on the drug himself, and she’s a lost soul who gets addicted to amphetamine tablets prescribed to her as diet pills. It’s clearly a book about downward spirals, and yet people come away from it with a “Holden Caulfield” reaction; they feel as though they’ve spent valuable time with someone who really understands them.
Maybe it’s because “Requiem” strolls along at an amiable pace. There isn’t the sense of dread that pervades “Last Exit” from beginning to end. In “Last Exit,” we know almost immediately that the characters are already living in Hell. We know it, but the characters don't quite, and the plot rushes us toward the moment of ugly revelation. Here, on the other hand, there’s a sense of innocence. Although the book opens with a disturbing scene (Harry Goldfarb locking his mother Sara into her closet so that he can steal her television and sell it for money to buy heroin) the clouds seem to lift when we see Harry and his dealing partner Tyrone shooting up with their friends who work at the morgue. The drugs seem to disarm these supposedly rough and dangerous characters; it makes them cuddly and giggly. There’s a feeling of rightness, of return to sanity. Later in the book, as things become more desperate, I found myself almost hoping that Harry and his friends would score so that they could escape back into their protected world.
There are strong religious undertones in this book, which opens with Biblical quotes and reaches climax with a near-death experience in which Harry finds his soul caught between light and darkness. But as with “Last Exit,” the cause of our downfall is not partaking from the tree of knowledge; rather, it’s ignorance. In a key scene, Harry brings a new television set to his mother. She’s overjoyed, not by the set, but about seeing her son. Harry feels a flash of something like love, something that seems almost like a heroin high. Although the moment seems to capture his attention, he never comes back to it.
In “Last Exit,” another character named Harry finds himself in a gay bar and notices for the first time that the place he’s in makes him happy. In discovering his own homosexuality, this Harry seems to grow as a person, but he’s too naïve to translate discovery into understanding. Rather, it’s as if the newfound energy gives him only the power he needs to bring on his downfall.
A consistent idea in Selby's work seems to be that our desires are not sinful. Indeed, desire is like a compass pointing us toward salvation. But we have somehow lost the key to read the compass, or maybe we have been maliciously misled into believing that love and charity can be substituted with addiction and brutal domination of our fellow human beings.
In “Requiem,” television plays the role of the seducer, of the malicious misleader. As the heroin addicts grow less and less capable of dealing with the world, the orbit of their lives constricts itself until its radius is nothing but the short line between the tv set and the sofa. And then there’s Sara Goldfarb, who’s so enthralled by a bogus offer to appear on a television game show that she becomes a pill popping imbecile, condemned at last to electroshock therapy and brain-numbing Thorazine at the hands of the same medical establishment that encouraged her addiction in the first place.
Sometimes when Hubert Selby is talking about Sara, you get the sense that he’s become a bit like Erskine Caldwell, looking down on his benighted subjects and tsk tsk-ing about the way they’ve all been duped so bad by the Man. But at the same time, the book is more universal than “Last Exit,” less focused on revealing the secrets of a squalid demimonde and more interested in using the Brooklyn setting and characters to diagnose the illness that effects us all. Whereas heroin and amphetamines wreak havoc on people’s lives, Selby keeps reminding us that their effects on the system are predictable and well understood. The more sinister drug lurking in the wings is television, evolving, irresistible, always reaching out to a wider audience, distorting the needle of our inner compass, consuming us by equating consumerism with joy.
Reviewed 11 May 2007
When I first started reading this book, I saw the faces of a lot of my friends light up. That’s a GREAT book, they told me. It was a little surprising, because my previous experience with Hubert Selby Jr. was reading “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” When people talk about reading “Last Exit,” it’s with a sense of residual devastation. It’s like recollecting a famine or a plague, a notable event but not one that you’d call enjoyable.
It wasn’t as though “Requiem for a Dream” seemed like a bright and cheerful book. The main plot follows the parallel addictions of an aging Brooklyn widow and her son. He’s a heroin dealer who’s hooked on the drug himself, and she’s a lost soul who gets addicted to amphetamine tablets prescribed to her as diet pills. It’s clearly a book about downward spirals, and yet people come away from it with a “Holden Caulfield” reaction; they feel as though they’ve spent valuable time with someone who really understands them.
Maybe it’s because “Requiem” strolls along at an amiable pace. There isn’t the sense of dread that pervades “Last Exit” from beginning to end. In “Last Exit,” we know almost immediately that the characters are already living in Hell. We know it, but the characters don't quite, and the plot rushes us toward the moment of ugly revelation. Here, on the other hand, there’s a sense of innocence. Although the book opens with a disturbing scene (Harry Goldfarb locking his mother Sara into her closet so that he can steal her television and sell it for money to buy heroin) the clouds seem to lift when we see Harry and his dealing partner Tyrone shooting up with their friends who work at the morgue. The drugs seem to disarm these supposedly rough and dangerous characters; it makes them cuddly and giggly. There’s a feeling of rightness, of return to sanity. Later in the book, as things become more desperate, I found myself almost hoping that Harry and his friends would score so that they could escape back into their protected world.
There are strong religious undertones in this book, which opens with Biblical quotes and reaches climax with a near-death experience in which Harry finds his soul caught between light and darkness. But as with “Last Exit,” the cause of our downfall is not partaking from the tree of knowledge; rather, it’s ignorance. In a key scene, Harry brings a new television set to his mother. She’s overjoyed, not by the set, but about seeing her son. Harry feels a flash of something like love, something that seems almost like a heroin high. Although the moment seems to capture his attention, he never comes back to it.
In “Last Exit,” another character named Harry finds himself in a gay bar and notices for the first time that the place he’s in makes him happy. In discovering his own homosexuality, this Harry seems to grow as a person, but he’s too naïve to translate discovery into understanding. Rather, it’s as if the newfound energy gives him only the power he needs to bring on his downfall.
A consistent idea in Selby's work seems to be that our desires are not sinful. Indeed, desire is like a compass pointing us toward salvation. But we have somehow lost the key to read the compass, or maybe we have been maliciously misled into believing that love and charity can be substituted with addiction and brutal domination of our fellow human beings.
In “Requiem,” television plays the role of the seducer, of the malicious misleader. As the heroin addicts grow less and less capable of dealing with the world, the orbit of their lives constricts itself until its radius is nothing but the short line between the tv set and the sofa. And then there’s Sara Goldfarb, who’s so enthralled by a bogus offer to appear on a television game show that she becomes a pill popping imbecile, condemned at last to electroshock therapy and brain-numbing Thorazine at the hands of the same medical establishment that encouraged her addiction in the first place.
Sometimes when Hubert Selby is talking about Sara, you get the sense that he’s become a bit like Erskine Caldwell, looking down on his benighted subjects and tsk tsk-ing about the way they’ve all been duped so bad by the Man. But at the same time, the book is more universal than “Last Exit,” less focused on revealing the secrets of a squalid demimonde and more interested in using the Brooklyn setting and characters to diagnose the illness that effects us all. Whereas heroin and amphetamines wreak havoc on people’s lives, Selby keeps reminding us that their effects on the system are predictable and well understood. The more sinister drug lurking in the wings is television, evolving, irresistible, always reaching out to a wider audience, distorting the needle of our inner compass, consuming us by equating consumerism with joy.
The Game
by A. S. Byatt (1967) Published by Vintage International. 286 pages.
Reviewed 20 April 2007
I’ve been carrying this book around for the last couple of weeks, and people keep asking me if it’s any relation to the David Fincher film starring Michael Douglas. The book and movie have no relation, except for their shared title, and for the fact that both works set out to expose elements of brutality embedded in what we see as the normal world.
This is an early work by Byatt, an author whose later books “Possession” and “Babel Tower” I've liked very much. I’m not sure if this is her first novel, but it reads very much like a first novel, ambitious, uneven, and with all the elements there to tell a good tale but lacking ultimately in vitality.
The story is about two sisters from Newcastle who developed an unusually elaborate game of pretend when they were children. The eldest sister, Cassandra, had a vivid and often violent imagination. The younger sister, Julia, developed on her sister’s ideas and expanded on them. Later in childhood she incorporated elements of the Game into a short story that won a prize. Later still, the sisters competed over a boy named Simon who had a passion for snakes. Now the time is 1963. Simon is in the Amazon rainforest, the subject of a series of BBC documentaries. Audiences think he’s quite sexy. Julia is a frustrated housewife who writes novels about frustrated housewives. And Cassandra is a professor at Oxford, lonely and spinsterish.
When Julia and Cassandra’s father die, they meet again for the first time in years. They're able to reach a truce in their estranged relationship, and Julia invites herself over for a visit to Oxford. There, a concerned friend of Cassandra suggests that the lonely Oxford don might be suffering from schizophrenia. The concept appeals to Julia, who can’t resist the temptation to build a new novel around this scenario. The novel is a huge success, but what will the consequences be for Cassandra and her precarious mental state?
Summed up like this, the plot sounds interesting, even a little lurid, and you could imagine a director like Fincher developing it into a dark, brooding film full of special effect tropes and suspenseful flashbacks. It would probably wind up hokey and lurid, but it would be better than the overly earnest mess that Byatt has served up here.
The worst flaw is that Byatt seems to have little confidence in the book's main plot. She goes out of her way to work in situations where characters might debate weighty issues, as if she is constantly trying to remind the reader that she is determined to write Serious Fiction. Therefore, we learn that Cassandra and Julia were raised as Quakers. Both have broken away from Quakerism, but Julia’s husband, Thor (!), is still quite dedicated to the Quaker ideals of humanitarian beneficence. As the novel goes on he becomes more and more of a pill. He sulks and pouts and throws around insults when Julia expresses reservations about moving, at the drop of a hat, to the Congo for a charitable project; while Julia’s away at Oxford, he invites a homeless family to live in their already crowded apartment; and finally, a woman Thor has been trying to help commits suicide, causing him to break out in a tantrum that seems both violent and contrived.
Why does Quakerism play such a big role in this novel? For all I know, Byatt herself comes from Quaker roots. But even then, it seems suspiciously as if Byatt has included the religion as a way to substitute a set of social issues (the will to improve the world through charity) for a believable character history. At heart, Thor is just your typical Bad Husband from your typical domestic romance novel, but Byatt seems to think that by giving him this philanthropic side, she’s creating an ethical dilemma for the readers. She’s not. Thor’s a complete asshole. It’s a no-brainer. He treats his without the slightest shade of respect. We’re not sad to see him go, we just wish he wouldn’t talk about it so much on his way out.
Byatt also treats Cassandra’s schizophrenia as an opportunity to make a point. What point's being made is never clear. Cassandra seems preoccupied with inanimate objects and feels that they’re somehow oppressing her. She’s sometimes unsure whether her own life is real or just a fiction. The passages dealing with her are absolutely unconvincing; she doesn’t have the sort of loss of mental control that you sense when talking to someone who really has a thought disorder. Her thoughts are actually more lucid than those of the other characters. So why does she have such a problem?
I suppose this is a really book where the young Byatt uses a story of two sisters to sort out two sides of her own style. Julia represents the more grounded part capable of human interest, and Cassandra represents the more abstract part, caught up in ideas.
But in the end we simply see that Julia’s life is too full of nasty people to be of much interest, and Cassandra’s conversations are too vague to seem like fiction at all; they’re an author’s attempt to work out a concept on the page.
Surprisingly, it's fun to see a young author work stuff out on the page, even when it fails. The novel implies that that passionate Julia and abstract Cassandra will never reconcile, and that any attempt to do so leads straight to tragedy. But Byatt’s later work is remarkable precisely because she’s so able to bring the abstract and the passionate side-by-side.
Reviewed 20 April 2007
I’ve been carrying this book around for the last couple of weeks, and people keep asking me if it’s any relation to the David Fincher film starring Michael Douglas. The book and movie have no relation, except for their shared title, and for the fact that both works set out to expose elements of brutality embedded in what we see as the normal world.
This is an early work by Byatt, an author whose later books “Possession” and “Babel Tower” I've liked very much. I’m not sure if this is her first novel, but it reads very much like a first novel, ambitious, uneven, and with all the elements there to tell a good tale but lacking ultimately in vitality.
The story is about two sisters from Newcastle who developed an unusually elaborate game of pretend when they were children. The eldest sister, Cassandra, had a vivid and often violent imagination. The younger sister, Julia, developed on her sister’s ideas and expanded on them. Later in childhood she incorporated elements of the Game into a short story that won a prize. Later still, the sisters competed over a boy named Simon who had a passion for snakes. Now the time is 1963. Simon is in the Amazon rainforest, the subject of a series of BBC documentaries. Audiences think he’s quite sexy. Julia is a frustrated housewife who writes novels about frustrated housewives. And Cassandra is a professor at Oxford, lonely and spinsterish.
When Julia and Cassandra’s father die, they meet again for the first time in years. They're able to reach a truce in their estranged relationship, and Julia invites herself over for a visit to Oxford. There, a concerned friend of Cassandra suggests that the lonely Oxford don might be suffering from schizophrenia. The concept appeals to Julia, who can’t resist the temptation to build a new novel around this scenario. The novel is a huge success, but what will the consequences be for Cassandra and her precarious mental state?
Summed up like this, the plot sounds interesting, even a little lurid, and you could imagine a director like Fincher developing it into a dark, brooding film full of special effect tropes and suspenseful flashbacks. It would probably wind up hokey and lurid, but it would be better than the overly earnest mess that Byatt has served up here.
The worst flaw is that Byatt seems to have little confidence in the book's main plot. She goes out of her way to work in situations where characters might debate weighty issues, as if she is constantly trying to remind the reader that she is determined to write Serious Fiction. Therefore, we learn that Cassandra and Julia were raised as Quakers. Both have broken away from Quakerism, but Julia’s husband, Thor (!), is still quite dedicated to the Quaker ideals of humanitarian beneficence. As the novel goes on he becomes more and more of a pill. He sulks and pouts and throws around insults when Julia expresses reservations about moving, at the drop of a hat, to the Congo for a charitable project; while Julia’s away at Oxford, he invites a homeless family to live in their already crowded apartment; and finally, a woman Thor has been trying to help commits suicide, causing him to break out in a tantrum that seems both violent and contrived.
Why does Quakerism play such a big role in this novel? For all I know, Byatt herself comes from Quaker roots. But even then, it seems suspiciously as if Byatt has included the religion as a way to substitute a set of social issues (the will to improve the world through charity) for a believable character history. At heart, Thor is just your typical Bad Husband from your typical domestic romance novel, but Byatt seems to think that by giving him this philanthropic side, she’s creating an ethical dilemma for the readers. She’s not. Thor’s a complete asshole. It’s a no-brainer. He treats his without the slightest shade of respect. We’re not sad to see him go, we just wish he wouldn’t talk about it so much on his way out.
Byatt also treats Cassandra’s schizophrenia as an opportunity to make a point. What point's being made is never clear. Cassandra seems preoccupied with inanimate objects and feels that they’re somehow oppressing her. She’s sometimes unsure whether her own life is real or just a fiction. The passages dealing with her are absolutely unconvincing; she doesn’t have the sort of loss of mental control that you sense when talking to someone who really has a thought disorder. Her thoughts are actually more lucid than those of the other characters. So why does she have such a problem?
I suppose this is a really book where the young Byatt uses a story of two sisters to sort out two sides of her own style. Julia represents the more grounded part capable of human interest, and Cassandra represents the more abstract part, caught up in ideas.
But in the end we simply see that Julia’s life is too full of nasty people to be of much interest, and Cassandra’s conversations are too vague to seem like fiction at all; they’re an author’s attempt to work out a concept on the page.
Surprisingly, it's fun to see a young author work stuff out on the page, even when it fails. The novel implies that that passionate Julia and abstract Cassandra will never reconcile, and that any attempt to do so leads straight to tragedy. But Byatt’s later work is remarkable precisely because she’s so able to bring the abstract and the passionate side-by-side.
The Underpants
by Carl Sternheim, adapted by Steve Martin
Reviewed 14 April 2007
This is a really fun little play with a good dose of pain mixed in. The story is set around an unhappy marriage between a hearty but passionless German beauraucrat and a wife who’s ready for something far more romantic. When the wife Louise stands on her tiptoes to see the King passing by in a parade, her panties fall down, which wins her a lot of admiring suitors. The characters are all stereotypes from the stage plays of the late 19th and early 20th century plays—the sexy old maid living upstairs, the overblown romantic who’s too worked up trying to write about beauty to actually be able to make love. I’m curious what exactly Steve Martin did to adapt this play. I imagine that he’s partly responsible for making the dialogue so snappy. It move along at a terrific pace. And I also guess that he may have fleshed out the character of Ben Cohen from an anti-Semitic humbug charicature of a neurotic Jewish barber to a complex and ultimately sympathetic guy who helps our heroine reach a moment of independence similar to that in Ibsen’s “Doll’s House.” I wonder if it wasn’t also Martin’s choice to end the play on this emancipatory note?
Reviewed 14 April 2007
This is a really fun little play with a good dose of pain mixed in. The story is set around an unhappy marriage between a hearty but passionless German beauraucrat and a wife who’s ready for something far more romantic. When the wife Louise stands on her tiptoes to see the King passing by in a parade, her panties fall down, which wins her a lot of admiring suitors. The characters are all stereotypes from the stage plays of the late 19th and early 20th century plays—the sexy old maid living upstairs, the overblown romantic who’s too worked up trying to write about beauty to actually be able to make love. I’m curious what exactly Steve Martin did to adapt this play. I imagine that he’s partly responsible for making the dialogue so snappy. It move along at a terrific pace. And I also guess that he may have fleshed out the character of Ben Cohen from an anti-Semitic humbug charicature of a neurotic Jewish barber to a complex and ultimately sympathetic guy who helps our heroine reach a moment of independence similar to that in Ibsen’s “Doll’s House.” I wonder if it wasn’t also Martin’s choice to end the play on this emancipatory note?
The Areas of My Expertise
(2005) by John Hodgman. Published by EP Dutton. 229 pages.
Reviewed 4 April 2007
I’m a member of that pitiful subset of human beings who has lost romantic partners because of a sense of humor that’s often too obscure. I just can’t help it. If I’m in mixed company and the urge strikes me, I’m just going to make up a story about how Judd Nelson actually starred in a three-movie biopic of the life of Grover Cleveland, or the fact that the expression “No Way, José” is actually a quote from “Don Quixote.” I can understand why this sort of joke bothers some people, who feel they’ve been taken in by a deadpan delivery or they’ve somehow made a fool of themselves by not spotting the joke right away. The truth is, the impetus of this sort of joke is not at all to try and put other people down or take the piss out of anyone’s gullibility. Rather it’s a pure creative instinct; it’s rooted in the yearning for a world that’s more anarchic and interesting. Or perhaps (I like this theory better) it’s an edifying attempt to open people’s eyes to the fact that the world actually IS far more anarchic and interesting than we all tend to assume, that in fact it’s only our backward desire to only discuss the 100% truth (especially as it applies to the all important topics of Judd Nelson’s filmography and the depiction of President Cleveland on the silver screen) that makes the world seem so dull and predictable.
Still, after a few dozen regrettable breakups, you learn to sort of keep this kind of humor reserved for those who’ll appreciate it.
And when you find someone who shares it, it’s a happy day indeed. Eddie Izzard’s early stand-up comedy is an example (consider his routine about the end of the Trojan War in “Glorious”), but Izzard is such a master of maintaining a rapport with the audience that he often cuts short his exegeses into surrealist territory. The all-time masterpiece in this sort of performance is the Firesign Theater’s “Dear Friends,” a collection of radio sketches that includes a used car ad as presented by Aleister Crowley; a cheerful Mexican children book about racism in the Los Angeles Police Department; an interview with a man who breaks bricks with his head; and an infomercial about mutated blue chinchillas.
And then this week a friend introduced me to John Hodgman, and I laughed so hard it’s a sin. Hodgman (who appears as the PC in a popular series of ads for Apple computers) has concocted the best collection of shameless poppycock I’ve ever seen in print. He presents the book as an almanac, but he’s not satirizing almanacs so much as he is poking fun at the very idea of serious information. The topics are not ripe for satire; this isn’t a wacky spoof about George W. Bush or a topical riff on the rise of the Internet. This is a spoof about facts. Facts about the United States (Alaska’s nickname is “Land of Moustaches”; Jackie Kennedy used to hunt voles on a single speed bicycle; for a while in the early 20th century the US Senate was taken over by a cannibalistic raven disguised as a German) facts about submarines (the favorite food aboard a submarine is cocktail onions, but sub-mariners call them “cockions” in order to conserve oxygen) and facts about crime (a common con routine involves convincing the mark that you need money to sponsor a team for a Lenny & Squiggy impersonation contest).
The real joke here is the way we’re taught to deal with facts. We’re taught to either get very wonky with them—to take them in total earnest—or to decide that they’re not worth a fig. The dichotomy between expertise and apathy is an ugly and (I believe) unnecessary divide in our culture. That’s why it can be so much fun and so liberating to sit and read someone like Hodgman, who spends 229 pages gleefully being wrong about everything.
You can really pick up this book at any point and find something funny within a few lines, but the “point” is maybe best encapsulated in the way he summarizes the plot of “The Muppet Movie”: “This is a movie about puppets who go to Hollywood to become stars. . . .When they reach Hollywood, they begin making a movie about the movie the viewer has just been watching. The puppets build plywood simulacra of props that, earlier in the film, were presented as real. Then the roof of the soundstage smashes in and a powerful rainbow shines down and obliterates everything, including a plywood imitation of the fake rainbow that had appeared in the first scene. . . . the puppets then look directly into the camera and instruct the viewer that ‘life’s like a movie: write your own ending.’”
Reviewed 4 April 2007
I’m a member of that pitiful subset of human beings who has lost romantic partners because of a sense of humor that’s often too obscure. I just can’t help it. If I’m in mixed company and the urge strikes me, I’m just going to make up a story about how Judd Nelson actually starred in a three-movie biopic of the life of Grover Cleveland, or the fact that the expression “No Way, José” is actually a quote from “Don Quixote.” I can understand why this sort of joke bothers some people, who feel they’ve been taken in by a deadpan delivery or they’ve somehow made a fool of themselves by not spotting the joke right away. The truth is, the impetus of this sort of joke is not at all to try and put other people down or take the piss out of anyone’s gullibility. Rather it’s a pure creative instinct; it’s rooted in the yearning for a world that’s more anarchic and interesting. Or perhaps (I like this theory better) it’s an edifying attempt to open people’s eyes to the fact that the world actually IS far more anarchic and interesting than we all tend to assume, that in fact it’s only our backward desire to only discuss the 100% truth (especially as it applies to the all important topics of Judd Nelson’s filmography and the depiction of President Cleveland on the silver screen) that makes the world seem so dull and predictable.
Still, after a few dozen regrettable breakups, you learn to sort of keep this kind of humor reserved for those who’ll appreciate it.
And when you find someone who shares it, it’s a happy day indeed. Eddie Izzard’s early stand-up comedy is an example (consider his routine about the end of the Trojan War in “Glorious”), but Izzard is such a master of maintaining a rapport with the audience that he often cuts short his exegeses into surrealist territory. The all-time masterpiece in this sort of performance is the Firesign Theater’s “Dear Friends,” a collection of radio sketches that includes a used car ad as presented by Aleister Crowley; a cheerful Mexican children book about racism in the Los Angeles Police Department; an interview with a man who breaks bricks with his head; and an infomercial about mutated blue chinchillas.
And then this week a friend introduced me to John Hodgman, and I laughed so hard it’s a sin. Hodgman (who appears as the PC in a popular series of ads for Apple computers) has concocted the best collection of shameless poppycock I’ve ever seen in print. He presents the book as an almanac, but he’s not satirizing almanacs so much as he is poking fun at the very idea of serious information. The topics are not ripe for satire; this isn’t a wacky spoof about George W. Bush or a topical riff on the rise of the Internet. This is a spoof about facts. Facts about the United States (Alaska’s nickname is “Land of Moustaches”; Jackie Kennedy used to hunt voles on a single speed bicycle; for a while in the early 20th century the US Senate was taken over by a cannibalistic raven disguised as a German) facts about submarines (the favorite food aboard a submarine is cocktail onions, but sub-mariners call them “cockions” in order to conserve oxygen) and facts about crime (a common con routine involves convincing the mark that you need money to sponsor a team for a Lenny & Squiggy impersonation contest).
The real joke here is the way we’re taught to deal with facts. We’re taught to either get very wonky with them—to take them in total earnest—or to decide that they’re not worth a fig. The dichotomy between expertise and apathy is an ugly and (I believe) unnecessary divide in our culture. That’s why it can be so much fun and so liberating to sit and read someone like Hodgman, who spends 229 pages gleefully being wrong about everything.
You can really pick up this book at any point and find something funny within a few lines, but the “point” is maybe best encapsulated in the way he summarizes the plot of “The Muppet Movie”: “This is a movie about puppets who go to Hollywood to become stars. . . .When they reach Hollywood, they begin making a movie about the movie the viewer has just been watching. The puppets build plywood simulacra of props that, earlier in the film, were presented as real. Then the roof of the soundstage smashes in and a powerful rainbow shines down and obliterates everything, including a plywood imitation of the fake rainbow that had appeared in the first scene. . . . the puppets then look directly into the camera and instruct the viewer that ‘life’s like a movie: write your own ending.’”
Dear Mili
(1988) by Wilhelm Grimm. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Michael di Capua Books. (21 March 2007).
28 March 2007
The text of this book is from a recently discovered manuscript by Wilhelm Grimm. The dust-jacket blurbs make it out to be a previously undiscovered fairy tale to complement “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Red Riding Hood.” But actually, the story here is much closer to religious allegory than what you’d expect to find in a normal Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale—and this is an excellent vehicle for Maurice Sendak, whose talent is to mix images from the worlds of adulthood and childhood and to invite readers from each side of the age divide to look at the details from their counterparts’ perspective, details they normally would filter out. This is a story of the enduring love of a mother for her lost child. Images of trees and flowers, of spreading roots and ruined chapels and crumbling tombstones fill every page and give us a sense of the power time has both to deepen our sorrows, and to bring about a sea change into ripeness and redemption.
28 March 2007
The text of this book is from a recently discovered manuscript by Wilhelm Grimm. The dust-jacket blurbs make it out to be a previously undiscovered fairy tale to complement “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Red Riding Hood.” But actually, the story here is much closer to religious allegory than what you’d expect to find in a normal Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale—and this is an excellent vehicle for Maurice Sendak, whose talent is to mix images from the worlds of adulthood and childhood and to invite readers from each side of the age divide to look at the details from their counterparts’ perspective, details they normally would filter out. This is a story of the enduring love of a mother for her lost child. Images of trees and flowers, of spreading roots and ruined chapels and crumbling tombstones fill every page and give us a sense of the power time has both to deepen our sorrows, and to bring about a sea change into ripeness and redemption.
White Teeth
(2000) by Zadie Smith. Published by Random House.
Up to p. 217 of 448; 28 March 2007
If you want to understand how far a writer can push the envelope her audience’s sympathy, look no further than the character of Samad Iqbal, the creation of one Zadie Smith. Iqbal is an ageing Bangladeshi who served in WWII. Frustrated in his ambitions to become a renown scientist, he scrapes along as a waiter in London. He bolsters his ego by nurturing an obsession with his ancestor Mangal Pande, a failed rebel whose story constitutes the most minor sort of footnote imaginable.
When Iqbal gets into a love affair with one of his sons’ teachers, he’s filled with shame, but he can’t really recognize it for what it is. He blames the decadence of modern English society, and can only remedy his guilt by splitting up his twin sons, sending one back to Bangladesh.
Zadie Smith is almost cruel. At every turn she invites us to laugh at Iqbal’s pomposity and blindness to the way others see him. But her portrait of Iqbal also includes so many little intimacies and scraps of humanity that we can’t hate him; we can’t even think he’s a particularly bad guy. Like all the characters he’s been loaded up with flaws that have to do with the past.
While reading this book, I keep thinking back to Naslund’s “Ahab’s Wife,” in which the main character, Una, was essentially a person far superior to her time, impervious to any hint of bigotry or chauvanism. It’s a grand thing to wish for, but it doesn’t tell us nearly as much about how real people work as does Smith’s novel in which the characters’ are living in and of a world packed with prejudices and misunderstandings.
In general, the men in this book are a little shabbier than the women. While Samad and his best friend Archie are fixated on their trumped up stories about their respective pasts, their wives Alsana and Clara are at least able to take steps toward adapting to the world of the present. But this gender skew isn’t exactly unfair because Smith recognizes that our ideas about our past, make-believe or not, are essential to our sanity and survival. Samad and Archie are a couple of old geezers who are long on talk and short on heroic deeds, but Smith doesn’t negate the importance of their inflated stories—rather, she pays subtle tribute to them, as in the section where she describes how old men telling stories in cafés use salt shakers and eating utensils to stand for the heroes and villains of their own stories, and how the act of storytelling brings these old men to the full flush of life in a way that nothing else can.
4 April 2007; pp. 217-338
One of the first writers’ manuals I first looked through was Rita Mae Brown’s “Starting From Scratch.” Brown is remarkable for how frankly and directly she deals with matters of social class in American life. The middle class, she says, never interested her much as a fictional subject; rather, she focuses on the tensions that come up when the poor and the rich come into contact.
You can tell that Zadie Smith has entertained some of the same contempt for the people in the middle as Brown does. In the third part of the book, the children Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal are sent to spend some quality time every week with the Chalfans, a stable, upstanding family who are seen to have a lot to offer to kids from “disadvantaged or minority backgrounds.”
Well. Of course, once we see inside the home of the Chalfans (and especially when we see inside the mind of mother Joyce Chalfan) the results are scathing. The family is immensely self-satisfied, and nearly every comment out of everyone’s mouth is packed with unconscious bigotry and condescension. Joyce, a popular author of books about houseplants, is overflowing with ridiculous theories about how Asian societies “mess kids up,”; when Millat’s lesbian cousin Neena and her lover come over for dinner, Joyce can’t resist asking, “Do you use each other’s breasts for pillows?”
What’s remarkable about the portrait of the Chalfans, though, is how compassionate it is. Zadie Smith has an ability to let her mind run on parallel tracks; she never cuts herself off from the funny, disparaging aspect of observing her characters; but deep down, there’s something very fair-minded and objective determining the overall structure. The cool, scientifically detached part of her mind seems to determine what elements to describe when fleshing out the details of a character’s culture. And the human part (the part with sharp, white teeth) is in charge of how to describe it.
Take the subplot involving Millat Iqbal, a young man blessed with the charms of Adonis and hence with a nonstop sex life. Just as Millat seems to be actually falling in love with somebody, his friends from the group KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation) start blitzing him with pamphlets about the flaws of Western sexuality. All of a sudden, Millat finds he can’t be around his darling Karina without thinking she dresses like a prostitute. He’s trying to get her to cover up the belly he used to find beautiful to look at. He’s stopping random women in cafés and trying to talk to them about how much more alluring it is to conceal than to reveal.
In the real world, whole European legal systems are reduced to slobbering incoherence by the issues of headscarves in public places, but Zadie Smith can saunter right into this territory without missing a step. Millat is neither a villain, nor is he wholly a fool; when he cuts himself off from Karina, we’re in no doubt that he’s messing up a good thing, but we also get a hint of the real draw that the KEVIN pamphlets have on his psyche.
Smith does an good job giving us brief immersions into a great variety of cultures: Bangladeshi, British middle class, Jamaican, Jehovah’s Witness, white imperialist, academic, bureaucratic and the little nameless subcultures that spring up at the intersections of these larger categories that supposedly explain so much.
14 April 2007; pp. 338 to end.
Something I liked about this novel is that it never tries to be exhaustive. I always had the feeling that there was a lot to be said about the various characters, that their lives had been plotted out in detail, but Smith is decisive in only giving the facts necessary to tell this particular story. This is really nice to see in a young writer, because it indicates at once an awareness of the huge potential territory to be explored during a career, and the necessary ability to zero in on one particular part of it.
In the last sections of the book, Smith focuses more and more on ideas about genetic engineering, by way of Marcus Chalfen’s scientific process of creating a FutureMouse™ whose seven-year destiny has been entirely determined in advance by genetic engineering. This hot topic in bioethics fits very well with the themes of religion, race, family and attachment to the past that overshadow the first parts of the book.
And yet the books denoument, in which we follow all the characters to the much heralded unveiling of FutureMouse™, is pretty weak. The point-of-view shifts between too many characters who have too little to do. It’s impressive that Smith is able to show how various fundamentalist groups (Jehova’s Witness, militant Islamist, animal rights’ extremists) are all unified in their opposition to this tinkering with nature, but it still feels artificial . . . and moreover, bringing all these conflicting elements on the same stage is only setting the reader up for disappointment if the ending is anything less than a massive cataclysm. It isn’t, and you leave the book feeling a little sad that the only really misstep was right at the end.
Because the rest of the book is great fun. Indeed, maybe the reason that the ending doesn’t work so well is because Smith created such a perfect climax a little earlier when the fast-maturing Irie Jones finally gets together with her longtime crush Millat. The outcome is so artfully done, weaving together all the themes of the book so beautifully, that it can only be called genius.
Up to p. 217 of 448; 28 March 2007
If you want to understand how far a writer can push the envelope her audience’s sympathy, look no further than the character of Samad Iqbal, the creation of one Zadie Smith. Iqbal is an ageing Bangladeshi who served in WWII. Frustrated in his ambitions to become a renown scientist, he scrapes along as a waiter in London. He bolsters his ego by nurturing an obsession with his ancestor Mangal Pande, a failed rebel whose story constitutes the most minor sort of footnote imaginable.
When Iqbal gets into a love affair with one of his sons’ teachers, he’s filled with shame, but he can’t really recognize it for what it is. He blames the decadence of modern English society, and can only remedy his guilt by splitting up his twin sons, sending one back to Bangladesh.
Zadie Smith is almost cruel. At every turn she invites us to laugh at Iqbal’s pomposity and blindness to the way others see him. But her portrait of Iqbal also includes so many little intimacies and scraps of humanity that we can’t hate him; we can’t even think he’s a particularly bad guy. Like all the characters he’s been loaded up with flaws that have to do with the past.
While reading this book, I keep thinking back to Naslund’s “Ahab’s Wife,” in which the main character, Una, was essentially a person far superior to her time, impervious to any hint of bigotry or chauvanism. It’s a grand thing to wish for, but it doesn’t tell us nearly as much about how real people work as does Smith’s novel in which the characters’ are living in and of a world packed with prejudices and misunderstandings.
In general, the men in this book are a little shabbier than the women. While Samad and his best friend Archie are fixated on their trumped up stories about their respective pasts, their wives Alsana and Clara are at least able to take steps toward adapting to the world of the present. But this gender skew isn’t exactly unfair because Smith recognizes that our ideas about our past, make-believe or not, are essential to our sanity and survival. Samad and Archie are a couple of old geezers who are long on talk and short on heroic deeds, but Smith doesn’t negate the importance of their inflated stories—rather, she pays subtle tribute to them, as in the section where she describes how old men telling stories in cafés use salt shakers and eating utensils to stand for the heroes and villains of their own stories, and how the act of storytelling brings these old men to the full flush of life in a way that nothing else can.
4 April 2007; pp. 217-338
One of the first writers’ manuals I first looked through was Rita Mae Brown’s “Starting From Scratch.” Brown is remarkable for how frankly and directly she deals with matters of social class in American life. The middle class, she says, never interested her much as a fictional subject; rather, she focuses on the tensions that come up when the poor and the rich come into contact.
You can tell that Zadie Smith has entertained some of the same contempt for the people in the middle as Brown does. In the third part of the book, the children Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal are sent to spend some quality time every week with the Chalfans, a stable, upstanding family who are seen to have a lot to offer to kids from “disadvantaged or minority backgrounds.”
Well. Of course, once we see inside the home of the Chalfans (and especially when we see inside the mind of mother Joyce Chalfan) the results are scathing. The family is immensely self-satisfied, and nearly every comment out of everyone’s mouth is packed with unconscious bigotry and condescension. Joyce, a popular author of books about houseplants, is overflowing with ridiculous theories about how Asian societies “mess kids up,”; when Millat’s lesbian cousin Neena and her lover come over for dinner, Joyce can’t resist asking, “Do you use each other’s breasts for pillows?”
What’s remarkable about the portrait of the Chalfans, though, is how compassionate it is. Zadie Smith has an ability to let her mind run on parallel tracks; she never cuts herself off from the funny, disparaging aspect of observing her characters; but deep down, there’s something very fair-minded and objective determining the overall structure. The cool, scientifically detached part of her mind seems to determine what elements to describe when fleshing out the details of a character’s culture. And the human part (the part with sharp, white teeth) is in charge of how to describe it.
Take the subplot involving Millat Iqbal, a young man blessed with the charms of Adonis and hence with a nonstop sex life. Just as Millat seems to be actually falling in love with somebody, his friends from the group KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation) start blitzing him with pamphlets about the flaws of Western sexuality. All of a sudden, Millat finds he can’t be around his darling Karina without thinking she dresses like a prostitute. He’s trying to get her to cover up the belly he used to find beautiful to look at. He’s stopping random women in cafés and trying to talk to them about how much more alluring it is to conceal than to reveal.
In the real world, whole European legal systems are reduced to slobbering incoherence by the issues of headscarves in public places, but Zadie Smith can saunter right into this territory without missing a step. Millat is neither a villain, nor is he wholly a fool; when he cuts himself off from Karina, we’re in no doubt that he’s messing up a good thing, but we also get a hint of the real draw that the KEVIN pamphlets have on his psyche.
Smith does an good job giving us brief immersions into a great variety of cultures: Bangladeshi, British middle class, Jamaican, Jehovah’s Witness, white imperialist, academic, bureaucratic and the little nameless subcultures that spring up at the intersections of these larger categories that supposedly explain so much.
14 April 2007; pp. 338 to end.
Something I liked about this novel is that it never tries to be exhaustive. I always had the feeling that there was a lot to be said about the various characters, that their lives had been plotted out in detail, but Smith is decisive in only giving the facts necessary to tell this particular story. This is really nice to see in a young writer, because it indicates at once an awareness of the huge potential territory to be explored during a career, and the necessary ability to zero in on one particular part of it.
In the last sections of the book, Smith focuses more and more on ideas about genetic engineering, by way of Marcus Chalfen’s scientific process of creating a FutureMouse™ whose seven-year destiny has been entirely determined in advance by genetic engineering. This hot topic in bioethics fits very well with the themes of religion, race, family and attachment to the past that overshadow the first parts of the book.
And yet the books denoument, in which we follow all the characters to the much heralded unveiling of FutureMouse™, is pretty weak. The point-of-view shifts between too many characters who have too little to do. It’s impressive that Smith is able to show how various fundamentalist groups (Jehova’s Witness, militant Islamist, animal rights’ extremists) are all unified in their opposition to this tinkering with nature, but it still feels artificial . . . and moreover, bringing all these conflicting elements on the same stage is only setting the reader up for disappointment if the ending is anything less than a massive cataclysm. It isn’t, and you leave the book feeling a little sad that the only really misstep was right at the end.
Because the rest of the book is great fun. Indeed, maybe the reason that the ending doesn’t work so well is because Smith created such a perfect climax a little earlier when the fast-maturing Irie Jones finally gets together with her longtime crush Millat. The outcome is so artfully done, weaving together all the themes of the book so beautifully, that it can only be called genius.
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