New Year’s Resolution

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here.  The past semester nearly drowned me, and although I’ve been reading, I haven’t been writing anything that hasn’t been absolutely required of me in order not to make a terrible fool of myself (and then, I may have done that anyway).  As is somewhat usual by now, my world is a precariously balanced set of items – work, money, family, among others – that I have so far put together in such a way that they have not collapsed (yay, me!) but could, it seems, do so at any moment.  I’m in the middle of another uncertain (perhaps doomed) academic job cycle and the future looks fairly dim.  There’s a little pinprick of light out there, but it’s far away and I know I can’t count on it.  I wouldn’t in any way compare my current situation to the grieving, drug-addled Cheryl Strayed of her memoir Wild, but let’s just say the book resonated with me particularly well at the moment.  As I scroll constantly though a list of both sane and crazy options in the event that I don’t get a permanent position, I’ve added “Hike the Pacific Crest Trail” to my list, although I’ve thus far avoided thinking about the damning logistics of doing so with a young family.  Probably not going to happen.  Nonetheless, sometimes the idea gives me a little glimmer of hope, or just makes me smile.

Cheryl Strayed

Strayed has a great story, but so many things about this book could have gone wrong: it could easily have veered into sentimentality, self-help platitudinousness (this has to be a word, right?), or hectoring.  But Strayed is a really good writer, and she keeps it simple, mostly allowing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions/life lessons/caveats from the situations she describes, avoiding many common pitfalls of a memoir of this type.  This is probably also why the book has been extremely popular, and why I found it resonated with me: although her situation is unique and her solution extreme, there is a certain universality of emotion and response described in the book.  I might be facing a different set of problems than she did, and I might not decide to solve them by dropping everything and unadvisedly hiking the Pacific Crest Trail with no preparation, but I’ve certainly felt whatever sense of grief and abandon that leads her down that path, and the idea (as noted above) certainly sounds tempting.  In other words, Strayed does a good job of allowing me (or you, or anyone) license to both feel the extremity of whatever it is that’s on our minds or in our hearts and follow that to its logical conclusion.  She doesn’t allegorize her story, but she offers it as an allegory to you.  Make of it what you will.  I appreciated the opportunity to escape into my own fantasies about living on houseboats or moving to a country whose language I don’t speak or disappearing onto the PCT.

The Pacific Crest Trail

I won’t give away all the details of the story here, but Strayed, having lost her mother and gotten divorced within the space of a year and at an age when most people are thinking about graduate school, not marriage (much less divorce) or death, does a lot of stupid things and then decides, with the kind of clear thinking we expect from a grieving, possibly drug-addicted, immature person, to hike a good portion of the PCT, a wilderness trail that runs from the Mexican border to the Canadian, through California, Oregon, and Washington.  Unfortunately, she’s never even really camped before, much less backpacked hundreds of miles on her own.  Despite her ill-considered decision (which she regrets within the first ten miles), she sticks with it, more or less, figuring out along the way how to do the things she doesn’t know how to do and making alterations to her route when it is proves impassable.  It’s not really a traditional tale of stick-to-itiveness or goal achievement, which is both the essence of the story and the source of its appeal.  If she executed her plan perfectly and emerged whole and healed from the experience everyone would smell a rat, despise her, and hate the book.  Instead, she mostly accomplishes what she set out to do, not quite in the way she set out to do it, and ends up in a better, but by no means perfect, place at the end.

Maybe the kind of messy reality the book winds up with is another source of my personal resonance with Strayed’s story.  Of course, I haven’t quite ended up where I thought I would, in senses large or small.  I’ll leave aside the bigger issues for now, but certainly as regards this blog I have no illusions that I will accomplish my goal by my birthday, which is now a few weeks away.  I really did think that it was an achievable mark, 40 books in a year, and maybe in another year it would have been.  I’m not giving up; I’ll try to post on as many books as I can before the 25^th, but I’m not going to delude myself or chastise myself about my prospects.  I probably am not going to do what I set out to do, but I did what I could and at this point that has to be enough (I’ve been working on applying this principle to my professional life for years and I’ve been less successful; maybe this will help).  I do plan to keep the blog going, and I hope people will continue to read it.  I’m going to try not to beat myself up about it or call it a failure.  Rather, I’ll take what feels like a success – writing about what I want, sharing it with people, reading more books and thinking seriously about them – and leave everything else.  Part of Wild was about achieving tremendous goals, but an equally important part was about keeping those goals within the realm of the possible, or even the probable.  And that’s what I’ll take with me into the new year.

In Which Contemporary Literature Exposes the Fallacy of the Theory-Practice Dichotomy

I feel like I’ve been writing a lot lately about the theory-practice dichotomy.  The thing is, I’m not a big fan of false dichotomies or generic absolutism, but when ideas about language and writing are poorly wedded to the writing itself, the divide rears its ugly head.  This is what makes this kind of poor writing so awful: it calls into existence a problem that isn’t really there.  Theory and practice are one, or are each other, or don’t really exist as pure categories as such, unless you work really hard to pull them apart and isolate them in an effort to be showoffy.

Fortunately, I think there are a lot more contemporary writers working to use ideas about writing in order to make writing do the aesthetic and emotional work it can do than whatever the opposite of that is.  Two recent books of short stories by American writers, Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove and George Saunders’ Tenth of December are fabulous examples of this.  Each of them, in different yet related ways, touches the heart of something human and real while still foregrounding the literariness and unreality of representation itself.

What both collections have in common is the whiff of the fantastical.  Strange, even supernatural occurrences abound, the impossible is.  It might seem strange to claim that stories that trade so heavily in the unreal make up some of the most real and honest writing I’ve read, but there is something about their experimentation with genre and language that gives access to a depth of feeling and beauty that is both unsentimental and unironic.  Why does this work here and not in, say, Embassytown?  Partly this is probably attributable to the skill of the writers, but partly I think it’s an attitude toward the unfamiliar and the unusual that doesn’t mark all difference as Other.

For example, the title story of Russell’s collection, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” re-envisions vampires simply as immortal versions of ourselves, captive to monstrous myths not about the terrifying Other, but about themselves.  These vampires don’t need blood to survive, but the legends they’ve heard about this need influence their desires.  They do suffer from a perpetual, unquenchable thirst, from which they find respite in various things, including, for a time, fresh lemons from the grove in the title.  Mostly, however, they are lonely; an immortal in a world of ephemeral beings, the narrator has only ever met one other vampire, his wife and partner of centuries.  But like all couples, their relationship suffers from misunderstanding, miscommunication, changing needs and desires.  The characters may be vampires, but their lives are recognizable, even quotidian, and their terrible thirst is our own.

Not all of the stories in Russell’s collection are as serious or supernatural, but they cover a wide array of locations and time periods as well as genres and themes: from the 19^th century American West to Imperial Japan, from horror to science fiction to humor.  In a sense, Russell seems to play with all of these places and attitudes in order to underscore what is common between them: the human characters at their hearts, who share similar fears, joys, disappointments and triumphs no matter where or who they are.

A similar premise underlies George Saunders’ work, although his literary world is more uniform from story to story, typically set in a present that looks much like our own but often with some of its most troubling features exaggerated in some small way that calls our attention to their injustice without being heavy handed.  George Saunders has become the poet of the vanishing American middle class, a prophet for those of us who wonder what we did wrong.  Recently, a commencement address Saunders delivered at Syracuse University’s 2013 graduation ceremony was widely circulated on the internet; in it, he argues in favor of kindness as the highest human goal, the thing that gives us access to our best selves, a true way of achieving success.  I think what makes his fiction so good, so important, is that even the silliest (and there is lots of silliness), most brutal (also some brutality), sad (of course: sadness) stories are also infused with this deep, profound awareness of everyone’s humanity and our shared burdens that can only be described as kindness.  It is a rare writer who could, say, make us sympathize with an incarcerated murderer subject to psycho-pharmalogical experimentation that has the hint of a science-fiction future but seems like it also might be happening right now.

It’s hard for me to pick a favorite among these stories, but “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” which I first read in The New Yorker, is one of the best.  It contains all of Saunders’ stylistic hallmarks: a conversational, colloquial syntax premised on the notion that the story is made up of diary entries; the hint of the fantastical, in the form of yard decorations made of young girls from third-world countries who volunteer to be strung together on a wire that passes through their brains; a protagonist struggling with the burdens of family, finances, and his own and others’ expectations.  Somehow, the intimate, almost jokey yet self-deprecating first-person voice combined with the strange device of the Semplica Girls evokes a tender, devastating portrait of suburban family life: the competition with the neighbors, the teetering upper-middle-class lifestyle, the balance between openness with and protection of one’s children and spouse.  And surrounding this, the chilling, not-quite-fictional atmosphere of international capitalism and its victims, both foreign and domestic.  These stories are short, precise, and clever, but there are deep pools of meaning swirling beneath the surface.

Both Russell’s and Saunders’ work represents some of the best of contemporary American fiction and its tremendous possibility.  It also does a service to literature more generally in its almost tender treatment of grand literary ideas and theories through unadorned, beautiful prose.  These are the kinds of stories that renew my faith in humanity, and in literature.

Theory and Practice

At one point, after coming across a reference to the difference between langue and parole in China Miéville’s Embassytown, I said to my husband, “This guy must have some kind of background in language theory or the philosophy of language, because he’s throwing around jargon like a grad student.”  The next day I googled him, and it turns out I was right, or at least partially so.  Miéville has a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and published a book based on his dissertation, a Marxist analysis of international law, in 2005.  As a good Marxist scholar, I’m sure he’s read Volosinov and Bakhtin, among others, and he seems steeped in theory of all kinds, so I think my original guess was a fair one.

The problem is that the theory that often makes for fascinating and revolutionary scholarly work also makes terrible fiction if not handled carefully.  That’s not to say that there are not masterful works of fiction that also address complex theoretical issues through form, structure, narrative, dialogue, plot, and other means.  But it takes a special touch to pull this off and still make the work entertaining and beautiful.  David Mitchell serves as one example of a great writer who addresses larger theoretical and formal issues through intricately constructed, aesthetically gorgeous fictions.  His Cloud Atlas is probably the most ambitious work of fiction ever written in this vein, the theory quite literally entwined with the narrative.

Mieville’s Embassytown is not as successful, to be judicious.  Oddly for a book with a plot this convoluted, it’s mostly boring.  Without attempting to summarize the entire twisty story, suffice it to say that it centers on an alien planet where humanoid  creatures live as the guests and trading partners of the native alien life form, which communicates in a unique, non-signifying, doubled language.  That is to say, they have two mouths out of which they speak simultaneously, but everything they speak must have a real-world referent: there is no abstraction, no metaphorization, and, most importantly, no lying.  Ultimately, the most interesting part of the novel, which comprises about the last quarter of the book, centers on the question of lying as the key to signifying language that allows for a plasticity of thought necessary for survival.  Even here, though, the text descends into Derridean obfuscation: “Similes are a way out.  A route from reference to signifying.  Just a route, though.  But we can push them down it….To where the literal becomes….something else.  If similes do their job well enough, they turn into something else.  We tell the truth best by becoming lies.”  Huh?

China Mieville

Miéville’s work is usually classified as science fiction or fantasy, and he’s won a lot of awards in these genres.  I haven’t read anything else of his, so his other books might be of much better quality, but unfortunately it seems to me that the awards belie much lower standards in what we call “genre” fiction than “literary” fiction.  (Incidentally, if Miéville is a good Marxist scholar, he would probably deny the validity of the distinction.)  There are some other contemporary writers who, in recent years, have tried hard to blur the boundaries between these categories with much more success.  One need only think of Michael Chabon’s work (especially The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) or, again, of David Mitchell to know that literary fiction can be genre fiction, and vice versa, or maybe that those categories are just not particularly useful.  The problem with a book like Embassytown is that, in an apparent attempt to create a theoretical, literary work of science fiction it only reinforces the categories it seems intent on breaking down, reminding its readers with every plodding sentence that there is something better out there.

Magic Undone

It seems uncharitable to admit that I was less than enthralled by Joan Didion’s memoir of the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne.  I was expecting to love The Year of Magical Thinking, having been a Joan Didion fan since I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem in high school.  And I didn’t exactly dislike the book, I just found it surprisingly flat for an account of such a difficult, turbulent time (Didion’s daughter was also mortally ill during the period about which she writes).  There were a number of wonderful moments in the book, and its circular chronology mimics the mourning process well, but on the whole it lacked some vital spark that seemed to leave it a little bit empty.

As I mentioned above, one of the innovative and interesting things about the book is its somewhat circular chronology, which moves slowly forward in time while always doubling back on itself and on memory.  Didion repeats events and memories, always from a slightly varied perspective, much the way the human mind does when preoccupied, anxious, or sad (at least this is true of my human mind, and I am narcissistically extrapolating).  She recounts the stages of grief not in a procedural way, but through a kind of formal mirroring in which the structure of the book elucidates the mourning process.

There were also many moments that seemed real in the way of shared secrets, things no one admits but everyone shares.  Didion recounts that the first night after Dunne’s death, she felt she absolutely had to be alone.  After considering it from several angles, she realizes, “I needed to be alone so that he could come back.  This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.”  It is this very kind of magical thinking that we all naturally engage in, I think, when something unimaginable or tragic happens, and yet it is rarely disclosed.  We are so quick to pathologize any emotions, thoughts, or behaviors outside of our narrow norms that we often don’t share our “magical thinking,” although in some ways it is the very thing that makes us human.  This is the major strength of the book, and its value, despite its faults or lack of energy.

Joan Didion

Here I must also admit that part of what turned me off of this book, despite the very real strengths I’ve described, was the kind of unthinking privilege Didion describes in her every memory.  She rarely acknowledges that her spontaneous family trips to Hawaii or celebrity life in Los Angeles are fantastic luxuries, available to few, or essentially none.  She jets back and forth from New York to L.A., spending weeks at the Beverly Wilshire hotel when her daughter falls ill unexpectedly in California.  I don’t begrudge Didion the time with her daughter for one minute, but the casual assumption implicitly contained here is one of normality, of universal experience, and I found it difficult to relate to the emotional truths contained in the shell of extreme and unacknowledged privilege.  Perhaps I am too sensitive because of my own straitened circumstances or my concern about privilege and its political and social consequences in the present moment more generally, but I found this consistently off-putting and it really affected my ability to sympathize, which, of course, a memoir about grief requires.

I wonder now if I reread Didion’s older work, writing I once loved and made me want to write, if I would have the same reaction.  I think I’ll let it live in my memory rather than reread it and risk losing it forever.

Liking the “Unlikeable”

Recently, the writer Claire Messud attracted attention for her response to an interviewer’s question about the likeability (or unlikeability) of the female main character of her most recent novel.  Messud rightly pointed out a long list of mostly male unlikeable but iconic characters and noted, “If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.”  A flurry of commentary on sexism and likeability ensued.  I relate this recent anecdote as preface because it underlines the achievement of Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout’s 13 connected short stories about a small town in Maine, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 despite our literary culture’s apparent aversion to prickly or “unlikeable” female characters.  Olive, the title character, who is central to some of the stories but appears only peripherally in others, is angry, depressed, disagreeable, and short-tempered, yet she also proves to be loyal, wise, kind, and sympathetic, a woman with a rich inner life that is frustratingly out of accord with her outer one.

In addition to telling Olive’s story, the book tells the story of the town and many of its inhabitants, linked in complicated but quotidian ways.  Nothing much happens, but a lot always seems to be happening.  Marriages form and break up, people get sick and die, make friends, move away, remember their childhoods, which invariably include memories of Olive Kitteridge, who for many years was the math teacher at the local junior high school.  This links Olive to virtually every other inhabitant of Crosby, Maine, and makes her in some small way indispensible to many of the characters.  We learn of her hidden wisdom, sympathy, and understanding through the eyes of former students, who remember years later advice or comfort she once gave.

But these moments of softness are only punctuation marks to Olive’s aggressive, biting personality.  When her son gets married and she overhears her new daughter-in-law complaining about her, you feel sympathy for Olive but know that you would think the same if you were her daughter-in-law.  In fact, right after Olive hears her daughter-in-law making some  mildly critical comments about her son’s upbringing and the dress she’s worn to the wedding, Olive goes into her closet and draws on one of her sweaters with a black marker, then steals one shoe and one bra, just to mess with her head.  It’s incredibly childish, ridiculous even, but also very Olive.

So why do we want to read about Olive, or any other unsympathetic character?  For each of them there is probably a different reason.  Humbert Humbert’s a pedophile, but he’s a literate, passionate lover of Lolita; Raskolnikov’s a murderer, but he’s thoughtful about his crime; and Olive Kitteridge is a bitter woman disappointed in life, but one whose human capacity for emotion surfaces at exactly the right moments.  In a way, her own sadness allows her a measure of empathy with other suffering characters that offer them support or help no one else could.  She inadvertently interferes with the suicide of one of her former students when she happens upon him as he is on his way to shoot himself in the woods, slowly changing his mind, it seems, as she speaks frankly and presciently about her own father’s suicide.  In another story, when a number of the town residents encounter an anorexic girl who needs help, it’s Olive who gets through to her, recognizing that her own overeating comes from the same place as the girl’s need for starvation.  Like many tender moments in the book, this one is encapsulated in an almost inexplicably moving image: “Hesitantly, she [Olive] raised her hand, started to put it down, then raised it again, and touched the girl’s head.  She must have felt, beneath her large hand, something Harmon [the main character in this story] didn’t see, because she slid her hand down to the girl’s bone of a shoulder, and the girl – tears creeping from her closed eyes – leaned her cheek on Olive’s hand.”

Elizabeth Strout receiving the Pulitzer for Olive Kitterirdge in 2009.

It’s quite an achievement to humanize a character as difficult as Olive, but Strout manages to make her both sympathetic and likeable by the end, perhaps because she grows and changes, despite her age.  One of the lovely things about this book is its depiction of the inner lives and relationships of the late-middle-aged and elderly without sentimentality.  Like Olive’s character, the other, mostly older, characters in the book are shown to be fully human, not simple or doddering or having lost interest in life over time.  Like Olive, they don’t just want to live, but they want to live fully, despite the infirmities or inevitable losses of age.  Age is perhaps the least sympathetic character of all, yet in Olive Kitteridge, like Olive herself, it’s treated with honesty and respect.

Looking Back (or Down)

Rereading a book you loved as a child is a little like visiting your old elementary school as an adult: the lockers weren’t always that short, were they?  Everything that once seemed huge and mystifying and tremendous looks, well, small.  It hasn’t changed, though – you have.  So I began rereading Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game with some trepidation.  I remembered, vaguely, that I once thought it was brilliant, that it changed the way I thought about the power and potential of words.  I feared that reading it as an adult might make me feel like I was standing in a familiar hallway looking down at the top of a locker I once looked up at.

It turns out that The Westing Game is not the brilliant literate mystery I once thought it was, at least not to an adult jaded both by years of cultural abuse and misuse of language as well as exposure to magnificent literature.  But it’s still clever enough to hold an adult reader’s interest, its linguistic puzzle still mystifying until the end (since I had forgotten both plot details and resolution).  And although I no longer felt the book unlocked the mysteries of language the way I once did, I found other things to appreciate (and, perhaps, to critique).

What I did not notice as a child was the book’s careful breakdown of racial, ethnic, and social stereotyping, although it seems only partially successful as a challenge to those stereotypes.  First published in 1978, its depiction of an apartment building with white, black, and Asian tenants from both professional and working-class backgrounds must have been somewhat unusual.  And it’s not just a token collection of diverse people and families – the book itself, and its characters, is self-conscious about the unusual group it assembles, and the Westing Game is at least partially designed expressly to bring together people who would never otherwise meet.  It’s also highly conscious of the potential pitfalls of its own approach.  Describing a meeting between the African-American Judge Ford and the pretentious wannabe aristocrat Grace Windsor Wexler, Raskin writes, “Proud of her liberalism, Grace Windsor Wexler stood and leaned over the table to shake the black woman’s hand.  She must be here in some legal capacity, or maybe her mother was a household maid….”  And no one is completely immune from Raskin’s critical eye – even the most seemingly virtuous characters are skewered, their flaws laid bare.

For all that, occasionally the book seems to resort to its own stereotyping either for comic purposes or simply because it tilts slightly into the realm of caricature.  But for the most part it’s a sympathetic, deeply human portrait of a group of people who aren’t much like each other and don’t really want to get to know one another, but when forced to spend time together become real neighbors and friends.  That, it turns out, was the real goal of the Westing Game, which I missed at the time.  Sure, it’s about language and puzzles and solving a mystery, but it’s equally about families, friends, neighbors and the way we see ourselves and each other.  It turns out there was another story sitting on top of the locker the whole time.

Playacting History

Reading Wolf Hall, the first volume of Hilary Mantel’s fictional trilogy on the life of Thomas Cromwell, adviser to Henry VIII, I found myself wishing that Peter Jackson had become interested in sixteenth-century England rather than the fantasy worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien.  Because, despite all my initial misgivings about historical fiction, anything that occurred before the nineteenth century, and the English monarchy, I am now certain that I would much rather watch three 3-hour movies about Thomas Cromwell than about Bilbo Baggins.

Particularly because of the potentially stultifying subject matter – I know there are people who think that both history and monarchy are interesting, but they are not me – it is entirely to Mantel’s credit that this book is any good at all.  Luckily, Mantel shows her skill early; I knew the book was worth reading by page 15, the end of the first section, when Mantel describes Cromwell’s first view of the open sea: “a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.”  The book is full of details and descriptions like this, and they lend humanity and color to what is otherwise a humdrum tale of political maneuvering and religious schism.  It seems likely that Mantel could even make the current sorry workings of the U.S. government interesting, which is saying something.

Henry VIII, by Hans Holbein, who also makes an appearance in the novel. Check out that codpiece!

I have no idea how faithful Mantel is to Cromwell’s life, and so much of the novel is internal that much of it must be invented, but it is his uniquely sympathetic character that makes the events of the book come to life.  The plot of this first part of the trilogy focuses on the creation of the Church of England and its roots in Henry’s somewhat banal desire both for a legitimate male heir and to get into the pants of the virginal and mysteriously attractive Anne Boleyn.  At the same time, the novel charts the rise of Thomas Cromwell from his low breeding as a blacksmith’s son (the book opens with a terrific scene of his drunk father beating the crap out of him at age 15) to being, first, the confidant and fixer of Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor, and, by the end of the novel, Chancellor of the Exchequer and councilor to the king.  These developments parallel each other, as Cromwell survives the ouster of his first master, the cardinal, over matters relating to the king’s divorce only to become indispensible to the king’s fortunes, both literal and figurative.

Cromwell, who belongs both to the humble, proletarian world he comes from and to the aristocratic, noble world he has risen into, has a vision greater than either, and in his machinations in the king’s interest we see that he serves, more than anything, his own vision of England, a progressive vision that we might recognize.  The Europe of this period is poised on the brink of modernity: the printing press has been invented, ideas are beginning to circulate, people are learning to read, and both monarchy and church are challenged by the new developments.  Cromwell, it becomes clear, is the symbol of modernization.  Literate and self-taught, experienced in commerce and knowledgeable of the various languages and cultures of Europe, he is, quite literally, a Renaissance man.  Ridiculed by Stephen Gardiner, the king’s Master Secretary, for wishing to swear the English populace to an oath of loyalty to Henry and his royal line through Anne Boleyn, he responds: “Look at any part of this kingdom, my lord bishop, and you will find dereliction, destitution.  There are men and women on the roads.  The sheep farmers are grown so great that the little man is knocked off his acres and the plowboy is out of house and home.  In a generation these people can learn to read.  The plowman can take up a book.  Believe me, Gardiner, England can be otherwise.”

Cromwell as rendered by Holbein, in a portrait whose creation is also chronicled in the novel.

And though Cromwell serves the needs of the king – to secure his lineage, to legitimate his queen and his rule, to establish his control over the church in England – we see that it is this vision, of an England otherwise, to which he ultimately dedicates himself.  The idea of dual purposes, of appearing to be or do one thing while simultaneously, and secretly, working at an entirely different, although not necessarily mutually exclusive, goal, is the overarching theme of the book.  Repeated references to the theater, to acting, to plays remind us that half the work of governance is appearance, and that there is always something being concealed.  One reason for Cromwell’s success is his ability to conceal his hand, to control his reactions and emotions.  He reminds himself of Erasmus’ advice to “put on a mask, as it were” each morning as he leaves his house.  “He applies that to each place, each castle or inn or nobleman’s seat, where he find himself waking up.”  Part of the intrigue of the novel is that only we, the readers, know what Cromwell really thinks.

That is the glorious delusion of the historical novel, the idea that you can know or understand  people long dead whose thoughts and feelings are lost to history.  Like the machinations of government or the process of wooing a lover, the historical novel itself is a kind of play in which the roles have already been written but the lines must be improvised.  Wolf Hall, like Cromwell, understands that its success lies in the quality of that improvisation.

A Defense of Difference (and Sentimentality)

Reading Far From the Tree, Andrew Solomon’s epic tome on what he calls “horizontal identities” – conditions or situations that link people across familial, racial, and national categories – is a little bit like eating a gigantic ice-cream sundae: it’s delicious and you never want it to end at the same time that it’s overwhelming and at every moment you feel you might need to take a break.  What makes this book, which covers some very difficult topics in painstaking detail, both readable and enjoyable is Solomon’s gorgeous prose and his deeply empathetic sensitivity to his subjects.  Far From the Tree chronicles families contending with deafness, dwarfism, Down Syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple disabilities, prodigiousness, children born of rape, children who commit crimes, and transgender issues.  Solomon operates from the premise that, as he puts it, “Difference unites us….to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.”  And as I read each of his chapters, none of which have any direct bearing on my own life, I nonetheless found myself relating to the people he profiled through this very premise.  It seems the ways in which people are different end up being very much the same.

Part of the success of the book is attributable to Solomon’s method.  He uses both statistical and historical exposition and personal anecdotes and stories to illustrate the complexity of each situation he covers, because, as he writes, “numbers imply trends, while stories acknowledge chaos.”  The book, while clearly written and perfectly organized, does not wrap its conclusions up in a neat little bow, but allows the kind of difference which is its very center to proliferate.  No one responds in exactly the same way to the same situation, or maybe its that no one’s situation is exactly the same, despite similarities, and Solomon includes as much variation as he can.  It’s not exactly chaos, since he controls it with an expert hand, but it’s definitely as close as one could get to experiencing human thought and emotion in its infinite variety.

This is another long book (over 700 pages, plus notes and bibliography), and it would be impossible here to chronicle all the myriad ways in which is succeeds (and the few in which it is less successful), but suffice it to say that as I read, in particular, the chapters on physical disabilities, it caused me to question some of my deeply held assumptions both about deaf people and dwarves, say, but also about myself.  This is a book that is as much about parenting and families as it is about medical and social outliers, and in that sense almost anybody will be affected by its conclusions and revelations.  And insofar as Solomon’s primary premise, about the ubiquity of difference, is true, we all can also see ourselves in the differences he describes, though ours may differ by shape or degree.

Andrew Solomon

One of the greatest pleasures of this book, however, has nothing to do with its substance.  I’ve rarely read prose as rich or precise as Solomon’s; the only  other writer I can compare him to is Lorrie Moore, who is fearless in her prose in a similar way.  A tiny, tiny example, drawn from his chapter on prodigies, describing one of the musical prodigies he chronicles: “You may reach into his joy and pull out a surprising handful of sorrow, but when you examine that sorrow, you find it suffused with particles of joy.”  I mean, who writes like that?  It’s absolutely transcendent, and just the experience of reading the words on the page was often as great a delight as the things described therein.

It may sound strange to describe a book that chronicles such difficult subject matter, that I had to put down more than once out of emotion or frustration, as a delight.  But it transforms its difficulty into delight in a magical way that I can’t quite pinpoint.  This, of course, is the alchemy of truly great writing.  The magic is catalyzed by Solomon’s willingness to engage in (I won’t say indulge in, because it suggests a negative valence) sentimentality.  He writes, “I am unabashed by this book’s occasional whiff of rapture and reject the idea that beauty is the enemy of truth, or that pain can’t be the hare to joy’s tortoise.”  Insofar as he succeeds, yet another of the accomplishments of this book is that it repudiates myths of scientific and journalistic objectivity and a culture of irony at the same time.   The great strength of this book is its lack of embarrassment in the face of the rapturous, the sentimental, and the beautiful, all things we encounter far too rarely in literature or in life.

How my Miscarriage Made Me More Pro-Choice

You can read my recent guest post on Feministe here.

Monsters Assimilated

According to Jewish legend, in the late 16^th century the rabbi Joseph Loew ben Bezalel of Prague, known by his acronym as the Maharal, fashioned a mythic creature out of clay from the banks of the Vlatava and animated it through a series of mystical incantations.  This creature, known in Jewish folklore as a golem, is the most famous incarnation of that monster of the Jewish imagination.  Stories abound about the golem of Prague: he defended the Jews against expulsion or pogroms; he fell in love and went berserk; his remains lie in the attic of the Alt-Neu Shul.  Most tales about golems in general, however, agree on at least two consistent elements of their natures: their obedience to their masters, whom they serve like slaves, and their propensity for violence in the face of an affront.

Everybody, it seems, loves a good golem.  Contemporary American literature is peppered with them – Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers – and modern Hebrew and  Yiddish literature have produced too many belletristic incarnations of the golem to list here.  The golem, whose very existence is fraught, has been a potent symbol for writers interested in addressing  questions about the nature of creation, sentience, and humanity.  Enter Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni, which ingeniously pairs the golem with a legendary creature of another tradition, the jinn, also known as the genie, of the Arab world.

In this case, the two meet in the most likely place possible: New York.  Where else could two such different creatures come into contact but in the immigrant bustle of turn-of-the-century Manhattan (the 20^th century, that is).  Although The Golem and the Jinni makes liberal use of the supernatural, both in the form of golem and jinni and in the form of some ancient magic that’s invoked in the last, breathless, thrilling chapters, there is nothing particularly supernatural about the story itself.  It’s not a work of fantasy but resolutely realist in its orientation, and perhaps that’s what makes it so compelling.  This novel is interested in the human development of golem and jinni, in the ways they are like us, which seem to number more than the ways they differ.

At the heart of this exploration is a familiar question to us all, especially parents: how much of who we (or our children) are is nature, and how much nurture?  Are we born (or created) whole, or do we become who we are through our interactions with those around us, our loved ones and our community?  The golem, called Chava, was created to be obedient to one man.  But after her master dies on the ocean voyage to America, she’s at loose ends.  Able to sense the desires of everyone around her, programmed to conform and obey, yet in possession of intellect and curiosity, the golem struggles to contain her own impulses.  Inversely, the jinni, called Ahmad, has been imprisoned by a wizard in human form for over a thousand years.  In his natural state the jinni is a loner, literally a free spirit, with tremendous physical and magical power.  Stuck in a human body, with all of its frailties and demands, the jinni fights against the containment of his impulses.

The golem and the jinni thus embody an old conflict between free will and determinism, here overlaid with a parallel conflict between individual and community.  Both of them represent natural impulses – for the golem, violence; for the jinni, sex – unfettered in nature (and the world of the supernatural) but brought under control by community mores and customs.  This causes both internal unrest, as the golem and the jinni try to live in the human world, and trouble between them as they slowly become friends, two aliens disguised in human form.  As the golem puts it, “We’re our natures, you and I.”

In the end, though, both golem and jinni prove to be something more than their natures.  Given human characteristics, they are also able to make human choices.  The actual humans in the story are also awakened to the power that inheres in choice.  As the many threads of the plot come together Owen-Meany style, one of the peripheral characters makes a heroic choice that reminds us, even in a story in which so much seems inevitable, that not everything is predetermined.  (If this sounds vague, it’s because I’m trying desperately not to reveal any spoilers; it would be a shame not to enjoy the story for yourself.)

Of course, the golem and the jinni are also a metaphor for the masses of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island every day, all of whom struggle to fit into American culture and society, living in the way stations of their insular linguistic and cultural communities.  In what is perhaps too pat an ending, the golem and the jinni, individually, together, and with their wider communities, make their peace with their situation.  Sometimes the novel seemed to gloss over what a central problem: the way golem and jinni effortlessly cross a seemingly uncrossable boundary between Little Syria and the Lower East Side, between Christian and Jew, Arab and European.  But if we see the novel as a kind of American parable, the ending makes sense.  Golem and jinni assimilate.  Two people, two communities, who otherwise would never mix meet and form connections unimaginable anywhere else, perhaps, other than here.