“Turkmenbashi’s acolytes had recently pronounced him the “national prophet,” a harmless enough conceit if you’re a civilian, but a pathological,if not fatal, one in a despot. In support of this claim, Turkmenbashi had written a sort of national Bible, called “Ruhnama” (“Book of the Soul”), and he regarded himself as an accomplished writer—a clear sign of madness in anyone.”
—Paul Theroux, “The Golden Man: Saparmurat Niyazov’s reign of insanity.” From the May 26, 2007 The New Yorker
I reread Girl, 20 and had new thoughts about my previously uncharitable assessment. Some of the criticisms still stand: the novel isn’t a great one. But it does have moments of poignant humor, even if it doesn’t transcend its limits as social commentary anchored in the time and place it was written.
The hapless narrator, a nattering mandarin of the classical music profession, is of little use to anyone, including himself, although he does follow in the tradition of Gatsby and All the King’s Men in following a greater man. The narrators in those novels are more portentous and at least somewhat more self-aware than Douglas Yandell, whose perpetual bumbling is all the more amusing because he seems to take himself seriously enough that he’s not an idiot but not so seriously that we hate him. In the margin of one page I wrote “This is so ridiculous yet… good.” It came from a scene in which the older wife confronts the much younger mistress and a fight ensues for no particular reason—as fights often do:
[Sylvia the mistress] advanced on Kitty [the wife], who swung her umbrella; a mistake, for any umbrella, though a potentially dangerous lance, is an effective club. Sylvia easily fended off the blow, and the two closed with each other. I came out of my lethargy, or put away my distaste for the prospect of touching Sylvia, and moved to intervene. She brought her knee up into my crotch, upon which I retired from the conflict for perhaps half a minute, listening vaguely to sounds of struggle and to cries of outrage from Kitty.
The altercation continues in a manner more appropriate to drunken clowns performing or intellectuals, which, when it comes to physical exertions, are probably not so dissimilar.
The odd register of events isn’t limited to fights. Here’s Yandell acting older than his age while Sir Roy acts much younger as a member of the faux rock band Pigs Out: “I registered a strong impression that, should the choice arise, I would reject them in favour of a joint Nazi-Soviet tribunal as arbiters of destiny […]” Sir Roy, Yandell’s idol, is behaving more like a man his daughter’s age, while Yandell, who is just 30, behaves more like a man Sir Roy’s age. This kind of mix-up drives Girl, 20, along with Kingsley Amis’ lucid, often understated prose, which improves as Girl, 20 advances and has traces of the liveliness of Lucky Jim. It’s still not a great novel, but something about Girl, 20 compelled me to pick it back up and give it another shot, which indicates that there’s something more within than I initially gave credit for.
“It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they got together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.”
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Maud Newton liked it and so did the New York Times. The Elegant Variation heard Chabon in L.A. for what sounds like a fascinating discussion.
Judging from the links above, everyone compares it to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, although I haven’t read any in-depth analysis comparing the two. Superficially they have much in common: Jews, alternate history surrounding World War II and the Holocaust, writers normally associated with capital-L Literary fiction. I’m haunted by the suspicion that Chabon’s first detective fiction may not be his best; like early Leonard, it has too much explanation and not quite enough flow. As much as I like the idea of the Literary Writer expanding their horizon, I’m not sure he’ll pull it off, although I’m becoming more engrossed as the story develops.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union still qualifies for being Literary, at least if you’re willing to accept science fiction and Raymond Chandler. One obvious stylistic quirk stands out in Chabon’s book compared to Chandler and Elmore Leonard in that the first few chapters—all I’ve read so far—have a surprising amount of exposition interspersed between and maybe even interrupting the dialog. This is atypical of science fiction, which usually lets the reader pick up the “rules,” and it’s not at all like Leonard, who he conveys so much through dialog and little through direct speech. I find the running backstory in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union distracting, but perhaps without it I would be confused.
Two big metaphors dominate the book so far: chess, a game Landsman, the protagonist, hates because of his complicated relationship with it as a child, and the perpetual uncertainty stemming from the status of the Jews. The political situation of Sitka, a semi-autonomous state in Alaska looms large, and the angst of its status reflects much of the angst Israel has felt over all the years of its existence. The point is direct: all states are changing and no state permanent; while the Jews feel that issue more acutely than many, they are not alone in their anxiety or the larger push and pull of the world’s forces.
I’m looking forward to Chabon’s talk in Seattle on May 16 and will be there for it.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is the softest of “soft” science fiction: it focuses not at all on science as a process or its industrial applications, but on how science affects a small group of people who know little about the genesis of their situation. The clever premise didn’t become fully evident to me until most of the way through the book, though it defines the characters’ lives because, unlike most of us, they know the approximate date of their premature death as well as the means of its delivery. They learn steadily more about the purpose of their lives always just before they are old enough to fully comprehend it, like someone being told they are adopted before grasping what society thinks adoption means. Ishiguro’s technique is a variation on the older stories that grant some unlucky soul the ability to see his own death, like the story Appointment in Samarra, except that the characters in Never Let Me Go take no futilely evasive action.
That they perceive their purpose and yet seem curiously resigned to it seems odd and foreign to me. I actually asked the professor I had in college who recommended Never Let Me Go about this, and she said they were acculturated to accept their fate, and thus had no mental framework they could use to question the outcome. Ishiguro is pointing out the importance of culture in our lives.
It’s a sound explanation if one I find unsatisfying, as the self-preservation instinct seems too high to ignore. But that was my former professor’s point: that the self-preservation instinct, or the drive toward individualism, liberalism, and liberty, are culturally constructed, and that people raised away from those concepts would react in ways that do seem alien to me. In addition, Never Let Me Go takes places in England, and the characters have some contact with the outside world; how likely is it that they would encounter none of the innumerable works, including books, songs, and movies, that privilege the individual over the group?
Despite my expectation of an escape attempt, or at least some thrashing about against the tide, neither came because the characters are raised in environments without such thoughts. Maybe Ishiguro is playing with his Western audiences here, who know that science fiction is filled with improbable escapes and moves toward freedom (like in The Stars My Destination). The weakness of the explanation remains, even if it does make artistic sense.
The book does get at the issue obliquely. Around Chapter 10 the question of fleeing arose in my mind, and I kept expecting to find some evidence of an attempt by the Hailsham students to go, despite the foreboding that remained from Chapter 1 where we discovered their destiny immutable. That it took ten chapters for me to think about leaving demonstrates how we learn about them in the same understated way they learn about themselves. The link between the way the story is told and the subject of the story is tight, the form making the content make sense.
As I said, ‘Never Let Me Go differs from the science fiction of, say, Heinlein or Dan Simmons, where the characters fight to escape the inescapable instead of being resigned to his—and the hero is usually a “him”—place. Even calling Never Let Me Go science fiction is a stretch—something closer to an alternate reality or possible future fits better. Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America falls in the same category or sub-genre. Yet the genre tells us something beyond what most science fiction does; for all the strangeness of the preordained characters, there are points of universal description of those moments of life and culture that have nothing to do with the underlying story. The recognition of life’s feelings make Never Let Me Go so familiar and thus dreadful, allowing its exotic elements to be more jarring than the aliens in Speaker for the Dead or futuristic weapons in Dune. All fantastical literature inevitably comments on its own time, but Never Let Me Go does so by mostly being in its own time with twists that are paradoxically both subtle and tremendous. The recognition aspect happens when Tommy looks for a remembered song, or brief sightings students have of teachers and the speculations as to why something half-seen and misunderstood happened the way it did. The sense of mystery remains far into the book.
So does the almost elegiac tone, which bothered me at times in an emotional rather than stylistic way. In the first few chapters I didn’t understand why it was being used or how to differentiate the characters. Never Let Me Go explains why Chapters 2 – 6 seem elided: “The earlier years… they tend to blur into each other as a kind of golden time, and when I think about them at all… I can’t help feeling a sort of glow. But those last years feel different.” Again, the structure and the form come together. Later on, starting in Chapter 7, come more adult years, and the axe above Hailsham students is more palpable than the ones hanging over everyone, because they have definite knowledge more foreboding of its arrival. The clarity of the novel follows the clarity of childhood turning to adulthood.
The transition is without the fireworks often accompanying the transition. Never Let Me Go is a quiet book that still expresses loud emotions, and that is a valuable thing when it’s comparably easy to use explosions and exotic journeys as metaphors for feelings that most of us experience inside or only in conversation. Kazuo shows those emotions, quietly and significantly, as they are, rather than employing external manifestations to represent them.
I see why the book earned its reputation. Not long after writing the above, I saw an article which has since gone offline from the Guardian about A-Level exams in Britain that included this quote: “You sense [Ishiguro’s] nearly-Booker of last year, Never Let Me Go, is destined to be a set text. It has the winning combination of apparent simplicity (the narrator has a limited vocabulary and intellectual horizon) and real complexity (the better the reader, the more is to be inferred).” Though the purpose of the article is to dissect what puts modern novels on reading lists, the slighted compliment about Never Let Me Go is accurate and even if its description signals the sophistication of Never Let Me Go because it’s easier to make something overly complex than simple. The writer is correct in that there is more unsaid than said, and much to be read between the lines Never Let Me Go (Maybe the title refers to the book itself). I’ve only begun the process of reading what’s not written.
Another delightful novel set in academia arrives—or at least arrives in my consciousness, as it was published 25 years ago. This time she’s an American, and she wrote The Mind-Body Problem, which reminds me of Posession and Mating. Rebecca Goldstein’s novel is narrated by Renee Feuer, a lapsed Orthodox Jew who discovered—or gained the freedom to discover—sex in college, and she mastered a body of knowledge that complements her already vast but not overwhelming intellect. Don’t groan from fear that The Mind-Body Problem is another bildungsroman: the story proper occurs after that growth spurt, when Renee is trying to navigate the world of adult relationships.
Hers is particularly unusual, given that she’s found a math genius who she loves despite his genius, though the genius attracts her initially. The situation isn’t as confusing as the previous sentence makes it sound, as the lucid narrative flows with smooth control. More importantly, I laughed constantly while reading The Mind Body Problem. The comedy didn’t flag during the marginally more serious points. Humor isn’t easy to explain, although trying to resolve the paradox of bodily lust and mental philosophy does make for a good set up that could also have a heavier treatment, like Narcissus and Goldmund.
The novel starts with a brief mediation on Himmel, brilliant if socially awkward mathematician, and then looks back to see how Renee developed from Orthodox girl to less-than-Orthodox woman, her present vantage a view of the devout through the eyes of the fallen without making caricatures of the devout. The Jewish tinge is reminiscent of Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev, since both concern the efforts of Orthodox Jews to integrate into and reconcile with the majority society. The struggle for reconciliation in those novels is much stronger than in The Mind-Body Problem, particularly given the pool Renee swims in, where the majority society becomes the minority: “At Columbia even the non-Jews had seemed Jewish.” That contrasts, though, with her home with Himmel: “There were Jews at Princeton, of course, but nobody seemed Jewish” (italics in original). Observations like these, politically incorrect though some are, form the realistic and shrewdly aware narrative voice. That and Renee’s recursive knowledge of herself make her, if not precisely a happy woman, at least content with her intelligence, but not always the way it is applied.
Though The Mind-Body Problem focuses on Judaism, some of Renee’s problem could easily be transported to other kinds of Others, as when she has an affair with a college professor who had never before had a Jewish lover and lamented that he hadn’t: “It was as if someone who professed a great love and knowledge of wines told me he had just sampled a Bordeaux for the first time and thought these wines merited further investigation.” And that’s toward the end, when too many funny novels have lost their spunk in their efforts to finish the plot. Sometimes that’s okay—as in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, where the schmaltz floodgates open at the end—but more often you wish for more of the beginning. But The Mind-Body Problem never loses its focus.
Renee’s awareness helps. When another professorial relationship—see a pattern?—has Renee as an accessory to his midlife crisis, she sees him playing out his own family pattern by having “[a] son and daughter pursuing their adolescent rebellion with the same uninspired conformity to the norm as their father was demonstrating in response his own life change.” Mythic patterns that hold over the course of time aren’t of much interest to Renee, though she lives one too. But Goldstein doesn’t need explicitly mythological constructs to perceive how her characters are operating in their society, much as she doesn’t need a somber tone to explore the issues that make her characters tick.
Again like High Fidelity, the humor makes a deeper point: that we are creatures of the flesh, and we neglect either the abstract power of the mind or the body at our own peril. In addition, we have to accept that we are creatures with needs that need to be fulfilled even while we need to be cognizant of the needs of others, who in turn need to be aware of our needs. Does that sound recursive and, as with so many valuable points in literature, like a balancing test? It is, and the people I consider wisest realize this, and the hilarity in serious subjects like how to experience the pleasures of mind and body without leaving either behind.
I commented previously on the decline of newspaper book reviews, and even in the short month and a half since then much has happened, as chronicled in the National Book Critics Circle Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. Note particularly Michael Connelly’s perspicacious post.
Now the New York Times weighs in. They’re hardly a disinterested party, given that they have one of the strongest, if not the strongest, newspaper book reviews in the country, but the article covers the debate: do book reviews matter in the age of blogs, and if so how much? The debate is occurring chiefly among bloggers—or the public part is, anyway. I like Maud Newton’s assessment:
“I find it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger,” Ms. Newton said. “But I also find it kind of silly when people in the print media bash blogs as a general category, because I think the people are doing very, very different things.”
I agree, and I do not like to think of myself as a “triumphalist blogger.” But I cannot perceive what force could stem the decline of newspaper reviews, and enlightened self-interest seems unlikely to suddenly ascend in newspapers, and so view the rise of blogs as more or less inevitable, whether it is a net gain or loss. In an ideal world both would coexist, complementing each other, but that works only if newspapers continue to provide real coverage.
“Secrecy begets tyranny.”
—Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach has a June United States publication date, but Amazon.co.uk sent a British copy of this thin novel—novella would be more accurate if less marketable—which manages to be both understated and vibrant. It has an abstract, ethereal feel about a practical, seldom-discussed subject explored without euphemism or pretension, sort of like a fable for hard-eyed adults. Concrete problems of the real world and the ideas underlying those problems come together in prose that, like all of the McEwan I’ve read so far, perfectly walks the wavering line between simplicity and complexity; his sentences always feel as easily understood as they can be and not forced one bit more.
The story follows two young people, who had just been through their marriage ceremony as the first chapter starts, but whose preceding courtship is told in subsequent chapters and interspersed with their present day. “Courting” describes the relationship—they are on the verge of the cultural revolution of the 60’s that would make “dating” more appropriate, and they reflect their elders’ ideals propriety in a way that, say, Kingsley Amis does not. The juxtaposition of this novel and the recently flurry of pieces on Martin and Kingsley is quite interesting, as the novel chronicles the 50’s culture that Kingsley killed and Martin, as far as I could tell, never really had to fight. It’s a world almost as alien to me as that of the Victorians, as prim and proper as a stately matron out of Jane Austen.
Yet Edward and Florence do not share my perception of their zeitgeist, and identify themselves with the spirit of change. Dramatic irony fills the novel, as the reader understands the young marrieds: they do not generate the winds of change so much as they are blown by them. The irony is particularly thick when Edward and Florence mock the staid old people listening to the telly downstairs from their room, even though the values of those old people bind the younger people far tighter than either will verbally or intellectually acknowledge. The names Edward and Florence have an old-fashioned ring to my ears (though perhaps not to British ones), and I can think of only one person, a distant acquaintance, my age named Edward (though he goes by Eddie) and no one named Florence. The pair are as mired in the Nineteenth Century as the burghers they mock and the word “burghers” itself.
I feel sympathy for the two, as well as some empathy I wish I didn’t feel, because one point On Chesil Beach makes is that things change, but maybe not so much as we’d like to imagine, and at some point nearly everyone is in a situation as awkward as that of Edward and Florence, whether it comes earlier or later in life. Today most, but not all, remedy it earlier, and as a result may scorn Edward and Florence. But we cannot judge the past purely by today’s standards; The Scarlet Letter only looks old-fashioned today because it helped changed the climate it describes, as do all forms of cultural production.
The sexual factor can also be read as a metaphor for other feelings of confinement or torpor: “[Edward] was simply impatient for his life, the real story, to start[…]” Yet we are reading his story, and while Edward waits for his “real story” to begin, it is evident to us if not to him that it already has. His failure to recognize the way his story is happening all the time is his own fault, and it is not clear that the epiphany I hoped and expected he would have actually occurs: that “real” life is happening wherever you are and whatever you are doing, and that it is your reality whether you accept it or not. The same is true of Florence, who seems to be waiting to do what her parents tell her to. Yet once the two creatures of their time come together, their expectations are a wide chasm apart and their ability to communicate those expectations stunted.
Their ability to communication is stunted because they have none of the light and heat they need to grow. On Chesil Beach demonstrates the dueling realities and sensibilities of Edward and Florence, although with slightly more sympathy for Edward. His vision is myopic, however, and he confuses the story of his sexual life with the story of the rest of his life; though the former is certainly an important part of the latter, it is not necessarily the most important part, and the strength of its importance seems more important before it begins than afterward. The anticipation makes the beginning of the latter harder to confront: “[Edward] felt trapped between the pressure of his excitement and the burden of his ignorance.” We only learn about it through the narrator, and Edward cannot or will not say it to Florence, who cannot speak of her own fear and dread to Edward. They are caught, and caught by themselves.
The idea of the trap is always there, as is the laughable idea of them as a modern couple. Take this description of Florence’s reality: “As [Florence] understood it, there were no words to name what had happened, there existed no shared language language in which two sane adults could describe such events to each other.” In other words, she is still mired in an ignorance as profound if not moreso than those telly watchers she and Edward looked down on. Nor is she better than Edward, and combined they represent the product of a society valuing propriety above all else—and they buy into that society. Florence cannot discuss the events the unnamed narrator describes with a mixture of medical precision and human compassion, neither of which the main characters can summon, and the appropriateness of a distant voice of knowledge becomes apparent when it slips into the characters’ thoughts with more dexterity than novelist of the Nineteenth Century.
The comparisons to the Nineteenth Century are deserved, as the larger swirls of how history develop are a macrocosm of the way those swirls affect people’s lives. McEwan has long been concerned with how past implicates present. On Chesil Beach shares the concerns with the past and one’s relationship to time that haunt McEwan’s Atonement, a meaty novel I discussed briefly in conjunction with John Banville’s The Sea. The Great Gatsby also examines the way we construct the past and the way it remains with us; for On Chesil Beach’s Edward, the past was a time of ignorance he could not fully overcome, while Jay Gatsby idealizes the past and hopes to bring himself back to the golden age with Daisy Buchanan. Despite the divergence of views of Gatsby and Edward, that lost early time drives them. Something about these retrospective books lends themselves to awesomely lyrical writing at the end; though I won’t reveal the last page of On Chesil Beach, the last two paragraphs of Gatsby are worth rereading:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
On Chesil Beach does not have the hint of wistful, rueful optimism present in the penultimate paragraph of Gatsby, but I could hear Nick Carraway in Edward’s reminisces about the blurring of memory over time. The scope of On Chesil Beach widens at the end, and as it does so it also shows the way Edward’s early feelings of shame deaden as time lengthens. The same technique is used, and is slightly disorienting and equally appropriate, in Atonement, and the brief sensation of disorientation, like the changing perspective that happens in a fast glass elevator, gives way to enhanced understanding and the realization that life, regardless of the petty indignities of the moment, goes on.
The power of On Chesil Beach comes McEwan’s aesthetic command in telling a story of misunderstanding as old as time but infrequently chronicled, at least as far and as wide as my reading goes. His narrative technique employs a clever variation on the omniscient viewpoint in a way similar to but different from the way he wrote Atonement, and it conveys the uncertainty of the characters while informing and clarifying for the reader. We are left with a central scene from a life, but not a still life, for the motion of the characters’ minds and the aftermath of their encounter reverberates through time. Their encounter is symbolic of the inchoate changes in the larger society and Western world. The time and place stultifies Edward and Florence, but like Edward, society is on the brink of change, and as the narrative viewpoint undergoes a reverse telescope, we see Edward moving toward a reality bigger in some ways but still very small in others. On the scales of time, how heavily does an awkward night made so by circumstance weigh? To Edward, it would appear the answer is “not too heavily,” unlike Gatsby. Too bad Edward and Florence could not even form or consider the thoughts behind my question. If they could, perhaps they could move toward understanding.
This post is intentionally written in a style that should recall On Chesil Beach while still being more opaque than the book because I don’t want to describe exactly what happens: the unfolding of the story should be the privilege of the author. I describe some aspects of On Chesil Beach, but I do not want to be so clear as to give a synopsis. The framework underlying the story is partially described here but should not detract from the finished product of the story. Call this a commentary on the commentary.
The New York Times Magazine from yesterday ran a long article on “the curious writerly firm of Amis & Amis, founded by Kingsley, who died in 1995, and now run by his son Martin.” It deals with an obvious question in the lives of both writers, but one that hasn’t often been seriously examined because Martin is equally often hostile and dismissive of those who ask one-off questions about how Kingsley affected his writing. Take this response from January titled Martin Amis: You Ask The Questions; The novelist writes in answer to ‘Independent’ readers about misogyny, Islamism, Iran’s nuclear threat and Kirk Douglas’s naked body:
How do you think you might have ended up spending your working life if your father hadn’t been a famous writer? JOHN GORDON, Eastleigh
Well, John, that would depend on what my father had chosen to do instead. If he had been a postman, then I would have been a postman. If he had been a travel agent, then I would have been a travel agent. Do you get the idea?
That echoes dialog between John Self and a character named Martin Amis in Martin’s novel, Money:
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘Your dad’s a writer too, isn’t he? Bet that made it easier.’
‘Oh sure. It’s just like taking over the family pub[,]’ [Martin said.]
Money also tempts an autobiographical reading into aspects of the protagonist, John Self, as he also has an overbearing, promiscuous father and other similarities to Martin. To be sure, I doubt even people inclined towards biographical readings would argue that the Self’s excesses reflect Martin’s lifestyle, but there are certainly parallel elements.
The father figure issue is a subject Martin must get far too many questions about—perhaps his equivalent of “where do you get your ideas?” or like John Banville being asked about Benjamin Black. As a result, the article from The New York Times provides as good a summary as one’s likely to find about them in particular and literary progeny (in a literal sense) in general.
This Amis mania—the links above are just a smattering of recent press coverage—probably comes in part from Martin’s new novel, House of Meetings, and from Zachary Leader’s new biography, The Life of Kingsley Amis. Christopher Hitchens reviewed it favorably in The Atlantic. “Favorably” probably isn’t a strong enough word, as Hitchens says: “In this astonishingly fine and serious book, which by no means skips the elements of scandal and salacity, Zachary Leader has struck a near-ideal balance between the life and the work, and has traced the filiations between the two without any strain or pretension.” The rest of the article discusses little about the book but much about Hitchens’ recollection of Kingsley, as Hitchens knew the father and knows the son, and so complements the larger work.
Like Hitchens, I loved Lucky Jim when I read it, but I didn’t care for Girl, 20 the first time through. I recently gave it another shot, though, and changed my opinion, making posting the previous link a tad embarrassing to post. Regardless, “The Amis Inheritance” is worth reading, as are the books of Amis & Amis.
An update: The New Yorker also has a piece on The Life of Kingsley Amis available online.
Update # 2: Terry Teachout writes more on Kingsley in Commentary magazine.
falls in the same category or sub-genre. Yet the genre tells us something beyond what most science fiction does; for all the strangeness of the preordained characters, there are points of universal description of those moments of life and culture that have nothing to do with the underlying story. The recognition of life’s feelings make Never Let Me Go so familiar and thus dreadful, allowing its exotic elements to be more jarring than the aliens in 
