Thanks for All the Fish

Posted 21 March, 2008 in Book Reviews | 2 comments

Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner (trans. by Lazer Lederhendler). Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95 cloth, 298 pp., ISBN: 978-0-676-97879-7.

Canada is a nation of regions. That’s axiomatic to the point of cliché, but literary critics often elide the extent to which Canada’s regionalism influences its literature. Despite living in Toronto, Wayne Johnston’s fiction is inextricably linked to his native Newfoundland, the same way that W.O. Mitchell will always be associated with the prairies and Rudy Wiebe with the west.

It would be reductive to presume that regionalism is the driving factor in Canadian writing, and a writer’s geographical point of origin, while in many cases laying the groundwork for the kind of writer that person will become, is not necessarily a determinant of the calibre or kind of work he or she will ultimately produce. There is one region in Canada, however, that has consistently boasted a steady stream of quality literary fiction for the last decade or so, even though much of that fiction goes unnoticed or unappreciated by the majority of English readers in the rest of the country. That one fertile region is Quebec. Since the turn of the millennium, la belle province has given us strong novels by Élise Turcotte, Christianne Frenette, Jacques Poulin, Gaétan Soucy, and last year’s Giller-nominated Daniel Poliquin, to name just a few of the Franco-Canadian novelists who have been translated into English (a distressingly small number of those actually writing in the province).

Among Anglos writing in Quebec, Rawi Hage is perhaps the best-known recent addition to a list that already includes Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen, to name just two of the authentic greats of CanLit.

So it should perhaps come as no surprise that thirty-two-year-old Montreal resident Nicolas Dickner’s first novel is a startling, structurally ambitious work that leaves most of its English-Canadian contemporaries in the dust. Maybe it’s something in the water.

The aqueous metaphor is only partly glib, since Nikolski is, if nothing else, a waterlogged novel. Images of the sea and of seafaring suffuse the book, including repeated allusions to the greatest seafaring novel of all time, Melville’s Moby-Dick. The 1851 novel is referenced directly in Dickner’s book, but long before it makes a literal appearance, the attentive reader will have noticed how Nikolski’s opening line — “My name is unimportant.” — sounds suspiciously like an ironic inversion of the iconic imprecation to “Call me Ishmael.” The attentive reader will also recognize that the town from which Joyce, one of the novel’s three main figures, hails is called Tête-à-la-Baleine, literally, “head of the whale.”

Joyce holds down a job filleting fish at the Poisonnerie Shanahan in Montreal, while she dreams of following in the footsteps of her aunt, who was a pirate. Meanwhile, Noah, an archaeology student, foregoes studying in the American History or Georgraphy and Anthropology sections of the university library, preferring “the tranquility of Section V (Naval Sciences, Travel Narratives and Sea Serpents).” It is here that he meets Arzina, a transplanted Venezuelan who disappears at night into what Noah describes as “the Bermuda Triangle.”

As the novel opens, the final member of the narrative trio, the unnamed first-person narrator, is cleaning up his mother’s house after her death. His mother once lived on Water Street in Vancouver, and when the garbage truck hauling off her worldly possessions disappears at the end of the first chapter, a moving van pulls up “[i]n its wake.”

The repeated water motifs are only one of the many strands uniting our three protagonists. Each shares a familial connection — Noah and the unnamed narrator are half-brothers, their father is Joyce’s uncle. Early in the novel, Joyce, the would-be pirate, wonders if she would “have to escape to Vladivostok in order to elude the clutches of her family tree”; prior to this Noah’s mother speculates that his father “had shipped out in the direction of Vladivostok or had flown off to Fairbanks.” Noah is interested in the archaeology of trash, and Joyce becomes a bin diver, looking for discarded computer parts that have been disposed of throughout Montreal. While evading security guards and policemen, she discovers “piles of broken-down computers, display screens smudged with fingerprints, keyboards with missing teeth, modems, printers, hard disks, floppies, fragments of printed circuits,” all of it “so obsolete, so covered in grime, that Joyce often feels she has stepped into the shoes of an archaeologist.”

The internecine connections between and among the book’s three central characters provide Dickner with the mechanism for a structurally coherent story in which the structure never feels imposed from without. Everything in this novel appears organic; the disparate parts, far from being random or scattered, all tend toward a central purpose. This is a rare example of a novel in which the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts in isolation.

Dickner doesn’t really need to include the repeated leitmotif of a coverless book that passes from one character’s hands to another, or the narrator’s “Nikolski compass,” which points at the Mickey Spillane section of the bookstore in which he works, beyond which lies the tiny Aleutian island of Nikolski, where his and Noah’s father may — or may not — have decamped. Still, these elements provide additional layers of connectivity in a story that otherwise might be in danger of appearing overly diffuse or obscure.

Nikolski is a mass of contradictions: it is virtually plotless, yet never seems wayward or boring; it is an urban novel set in the recent past (in the decade between 1989 and 1999), yet it is redolent of history and anthropology; it is a novel in translation that nevertheless depends on the buoyancy of linguistic play for its effects (and, to this end, much credit should go to Lazer Lederhendler for a seamless translation). Above all, Nicolas Dickner is an author who is robustly unafraid to take risks, and for the most part the risks pay off.

His is a story of life in all its manifest contradictions, absurdities, and coincidences. Its ease of readability belies its weighty thematic heft, and its humour is grafted onto a deeply philosophical meditation about the nature of existence, the meaning of place, and the definition of home. The result is an intriguing, beguiling novel that may just be the CanLit find of the year.

Don’t Bother Reading Me

Posted 17 March, 2008 in Book Reviews | No comments

Go read Mark Anthony Jarman, one of the unsung heroes of Canadian literature. My review of Jarman’s new collection, My White Planet, is online, here.

A Case of Literary Déjà Vu

Posted 11 February, 2008 in Book Reviews | 2 comments

Duma Key, by Stephen King. Scribner, $32.00 cloth, 614 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4165-8555-8.

What happened to Stephen King? There was a time — this would have been the late ’70s and early to mid ’80s — when America’s self-styled “literary bogeyman” could reliably be counted upon to turn out solid works of popular fiction, albeit with a pronounced dark streak. ‘Salem’s Lot; The Shining; Cujo; Pet Sematary — each of these novels operates as a kind of machine designed to deliver what Poe referred to as “a certain single effect” — the effect, in King’s case, being to scare the bejesus out of his readers. His early fiction is marked by an effortless storytelling verve combined with a talent for creating believable characters and a willingness to pull out all the stops in his attempts to manipulate his readers’ emotions. It is also possessed of an almost preternaturally observant eye, able to sketch settings and locales in such minute detail that readers feel transported, as though they have become part of the scene they are reading. (Even The Stand, an otherwise bloated and overly schematic exercise in good vs. evil Manichean mythology, has the trip through the Lincoln Tunnel, which is one of the most vividly creepy sequences I’ve ever read.)

By contrast, King’s recent fiction seems like a pallid imitation of the earlier books: warmed-over themes are trotted out again and again, plot elements from previous books are recombined and incorporated in more recent novels but with a steady diminution of their effects; the later novels have the consistency of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

True, King has always borrowed liberally from his literary predecessors. ‘Salem’s Lot is an admitted reworking of Dracula. Pet Sematary incorporates elements of W.W. Jacobs’ classic short story “The Monkey’s Paw.” King’s 2006 novel, Cell, is dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero, which is entirely appropriate, since the novel is little more than a recapitulation of Masterson’s I Am Legend by way of Romero’s zombie films. But more to the point, the postapocalyptic vision that serves as the book’s faintly beating heart hearkens back to the more potent vision of a plague-ridden wasteland in The Stand. In short, King has started cannibalizing himself.

This is apparent in Duma Key, which features a number of King staples: its protagonist is a tortured artist (The Dark Half, Bag of Bones, “Secret Window, Secret Garden”) who has suffered a traumatic accident (Misery, The Dead Zone); he is gifted with a kind of second sight (The Shining); and he is plagued by revenants from beyond the grave (see S. King, passim).

At the heart of the story is Edgar Freemantle, the survivor of a construction-site accident that left him with serious brain trauma and minus his right arm. Following a nasty divorce, Edgar’s therapist tells him that he needs a change of scenery and Edgar relocates to Duma Key, an island off the Florida coast. There he meets Elizabeth Eastlake, the aged scion of the family that owns most of the land on Duma Key, and Wireman, an ex-lawyer who acts as her guardian and keeper. Edgar also begins painting. He starts with rough sketches in coloured pencils, but quickly graduates to more ambitious paintings of a girl who resembles his beloved daughter Ilse and a vaguely menacing ship. It gradually becomes apparent that his paintings have the ability to foretell the future and, in some cases, to change it.

All of this is developed throughout the languid first half of this 600+ page book. King takes his time setting the scene and laying out the various relationships among Edgar, his family, and his new neighbours on Duma Key, but it doesn’t take long for a kind of torpor to set in. Much of the novel’s first half deals with Edgar’s attempts to heal himself following his accident, a subject that King is intimately familiar with as a result of being run down and almost killed by a careless driver in a blue van during the summer of 1999. But despite drawing from this clearly harrowing life experience, the early stages of the novel come across as strangely lifeless, and are certainly nowhere near as potent as King’s description of his own near-death experience, which appeared first in The New Yorker, and later, in a reworked version, in his memoir, On Writing.

There are indications that King is aware of the book’s flagging pace, since around the halfway point things kick into overdrive with the arrival of those pesky revenants. It is at this stage in the proceedings that the book takes on the mantle of a fairly straight-ahead horror novel, as Edgar and Wireman band together to defeat the evil that plagues Duma Key. There is no denying the relentless forward momentum of the novel’s final third — once King finally manages to get his pot boiling, he ensures that we keep turning the pages — but, again, it all feels like territory we’ve covered before. Indeed, the climactic sequence involving the disposal of a malevolent china figurine (don’t ask) is strikingly reminiscent of the rainswept climax in Bag of Bones, arguably King’s last really solid work of fiction.

That Duma Key is grossly overlong is readily apparent, although its author would probably accuse me of being churlish by saying so. In his introduction to the story collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes, King asserts that “[i]n reviews of every long novel I have written, from The Stand to Needful Things, I have been accused of overwriting. In some cases the criticisms have merit; in others they are just the ill-tempered yappings of men and women who have accepted the literary anorexia of the last thirty years with a puzzling (to me, at least) lack of discussion and dissent.” But the fact remains that a goodly number of Duma Key’s 611 pages are expendable, and even diehard fans of the man’s writing will likely find themselves becoming impatient at points during the course of the book.

But it is not the book’s excessive length, or its case of split personality, that ultimately dooms it. What is most distressing is the reader’s sense of déjà vu, the feeling that we’ve been here before. This sense of the novel as a pale imitation of its literary predecessors is exacerbated by King’s refusal to push his story to its nightmarish limits. King has mellowed in his later work, which could be seen by some as a sign of maturity, but it also blunts his edge. A case could be made that the worst thing that ever happened to King’s literary sensibility was his discovery of the happy ending.

What we are left with is a novel that feels like a paint-by-numbers copy of a master’s work. King’s words keep coming, but Duma Key provides readers with the terrible question: does he have anything more to say?

Apocalypse Now?

Posted 11 January, 2008 in Book Reviews | No comments

Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, by John Gray. Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cloth, 246 pp., ISBN:978-0-385-66265-9.

“The modern world began with wars of religion.” So states John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and author of the alternately frightening and enraging new volume, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Frightening, because of Gray’s considered analysis of how secular utopian projects are giving way in the post-9/11 era to a kind of apocalyptic thinking fuelled on both sides — East and West — by openly fundamentalist religion. Enraging, because his detailed and carefully constructed arguments underline how little humanity has learned from history, despite having its lessons hammered home again and again on bloody battlefields around the globe.

Exactly how little have we learned as a result of our unforgivable short-sightedness and ignorance of history? Gray provides a potent example by opening his discussion of the Iraq war, which he calls “the first utopian experiment of the new century,” with a quote reading in part: “It is in the nature of things that the progress of reason is slow and no one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies. One can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force.” The man who uttered those words was not an American general nor any of the policy advisers giving counsel to the American administration in the run-up to the disastrous invasion of March 2003. It was Maximilien Robespierre, in a 1792 speech to the Jacobin Club.

It is entirely appropriate that Gray invokes one of the key figures from the French Terror to give context to his discussion of Iraq, since he is able to draw a direct line from the Jacobin revolution in France through the secular revolutionary movements of the 20th century — Bolshevism in Russia and Nazism in Germany — to the current American imbroglio in the Middle East. What each movement has in common, Gray argues, is a secular utopian vision, a belief that humanity is perfectible and that a revolutionary conflict can lead to what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”: the point after which ideological, civilizational battles would cease and the world would exist in harmony.

The problem with this utopian ideal is that it is fantasy. In addition to eliding certain important aspects of human nature — the tendency towards opportunism, for example — in the specific case of Iraq, it assumes that the popular sentiment will run to the same kind of liberal democracy that exists in the West. If, however, the popular sentiment tends more towards a fundamentalist reading of the Koran, then certain groups that might have found some protection under a secular despotic regime — women, for example — will actually find themselves less well off when that regime is displaced. “No constitution,” Gray writes, “can impose freedom where it is not wanted or preserve it where it is no longer valued.”

Gray is by no means the first person to point out that the American supposition that it could export democracy to a region mired in thousands of years of tribal conflict is a delusion: Gwynne Dyer has made the same point in his books Future: Tense and The Mess They Made. What separates Gray’s analysis is his positioning the neo-conservative American ideology firmly within the context of repressed religion. Many people today forget that America had two founding groups. The first were the (relatively) secular individualists who authored The Federalist Papers and drafted the American Constitution. The second were the Puritans, and they’ve never gone away. As Gray saliently points out, “Where America differs from other nations is in the persistent vitality of messianic belief and the extent to which it continues to shape the public culture.”

In its utopian fervour, its notion of human perfectibility through violence, the current American administration is not sui generis, although its close links to Christian fundamentalist groups that believe the Rapture is imminent does tend to tie it more closely than other governments to the early Christians, who Gray refers to as an “eschatalogical cult.” However, as Gray rightly asserts, “The political ideologies of the last two hundred years were vehicles for a myth of salvation that is Christianity’s most dubious gift to humanity.” That myth found its secular outlet in the revolutionary movements of the Jacobins in France, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the Nazis in Germany. Clearly, the wanton violence that can be unleashed by an adherence to notions of earthly utopia is frightening to contemplate.

But if the era of faith in utopia is, as Gray suggests, coming to an end, only to be replaced by an adherence to eschatalogical religious thought based on notions of the end times, how are we to survive the coming sea change?

Gray’s answer is by returning to “the lost tradition of realism” championed by Machiavelli. In this endeavour, Gray argues, the “cardinal need is to change the prevailing view of human beings, which sees them as inherently good creatures unaccountably burdened with a history of violence and oppression. Here we reach the nub of realism and its chief stumbling-point for prevailing opinion: its assertion of the innate defects of human beings.”

I would quarrel with Gray on this point: the notion of humans as fallen creatures is not necessarily the great stumbling block to a Machiavellian realist way of thinking. Indeed, the great religions all take human fallibility and weakness as their starting points, so this mode of thinking is not confined to the realist camp. The chief stumbling block to a rigorous realist philosophy is the human need for myths, for stories and narratives that provide structure and hope for the future.

Gray is clear on the dangers of viewing history as an extended narrative: “this benefit is purchased at a high price: a price measured in the lives of others who are forced to act out a role in a script they have not read, still less written.” History, for Gray, is not a coherent narrative with a plot that can be followed in the way one would follow the plot of a novel. This idea is comforting to human beings who crave structure and meaning, who are most afraid of history that “is a meandering flux without purpose or direction.”

The “meandering flux” of history may indeed be the correct reading, but it is also clear that it will be inimical to humanity’s need to impose a coherent structure on historical events. If the idea of an earthly utopia is a secular political fantasy, so too is the notion that human beings can abandon their need to turn the events of their lives, and the world around them, into stories. That abandoning the comforts of historical narrative for the rockier shores of a history devoid of meaning or coherence may be humanity’s best hope for survival is a tough pill to swallow, and to his credit Gray doesn’t try to candy-coat it. Where he stumbles is in his assumption that such an intellectual sea-change may be possible given humanity’s need for hope and structure.

Gray’s analysis throughout is rigorously dispassionate and intellectual. No dogmatic academic liberal, he is equally critical of folly on the right and the left of the political spectrum. Liberals, with their knee-jerk adherence to “rights” as a political and social trump card, come in for just as much criticism as do their conservative (and neo-conservative) counterparts. This dispassion will prove difficult for readers used to Oprah and The View, but it is a welcome alternative to the liberal platitudes of the CBC on the left and the histrionic conservative screech of Fox News on the right.

The fact that Gray’s final prescription for humanity may be unachievable adds to the discomfort level inherent in his book. Black Mass is a difficult, discomfiting read, but nonetheless a necessary one.

Down in the Depths

Posted 2 January, 2008 in Book Reviews | No comments

Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis. William Morrow, $27.95 cloth, 280 pp., ISBN: 978-0-06-072393-4.

“I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug.”

That is the opening line of Crooked Little Vein, the debut novel by acclaimed graphic novelist Warren Ellis. If that line in any way offends, repulses, or otherwise unnerves you, you’d be well advised to give this novel a very wide berth, because in the pantheon of outrageous perversity that unfolds over the following 280 pages, that’s about as effete and as tasteful as things get. If, however, you have a taste for the macabre, if you laughed out loud at the little dogs getting murdered in A Fish Called Wanda, and if you set aside American Psycho because it wasn’t edgy enough, this short novel — which reads like what would have resulted if Hieronymous Bosch had written The Da Vinci Code — might be for you.

The story — such as it is — involves one Michael McGill, a luckless private investigator whose last case involved a group of men engaged in amorous relations with a flock of ostriches, “a human shit-tick, swimming through the toilet bowl of America,” “renowned for plucking diamonds from that skyscraper of blood-flecked turds that is the American cultural underworld.” McGill is hired by the chief of staff to the President of the United States to track down a book, an alternate Constitution complete with twenty-three “Invisible Amendments,” which “is reputedly bound in the skin of the extraterrestrial entity that plagued Benjamin Franklin’s ass over six nights in Paris during his European travels,” and “is weighted with meteor fragments. The design is such that the sound of the book being opened onto a table has infrasonic content, too low for human hearing. The book briefly vibrates at eighteen hertz, which is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball.”

Still with me?

Not that this admittedly outlandish premise matters that much, really. Crooked Little Vein is nominally a hard-boiled detective story modelled on Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but the mystery story is just an excuse for Ellis to provide us with an increasingly deranged series of set-pieces featuring the denizens of the “American cultural underworld” that McGill encounters on his trek to find the missing volume. What evolves is a kind of picaresque on acid involving saline-infused testicles, philosophical serial killers, and a cocaine-addled millionaire who takes advice from a talking teddy bear. Ellis is clearly operating in the Jerry Stahl mode of literary provocation, and his takes evident glee in dreaming up his outrageous and polymorphously perverse scenarios.

What is surprising is not the book’s compulsivity: this is a novel that dares you to look away, to stop reading, and it comes out of the gate at full speed. If you make it past the first chapter, you’re likely not going to stop, and the spiralling depravity of the events in the novel ensures that a willing reader is propelled forward on an ever-increasing current of narrative energy.

No, what is surprising is that there is a moral centre to the story, and that the author actually manages to score a number of rhetorical points while constantly upping the gross-out ante. Ellis is interested in what defines the cultural mainstream of our society as against what exists at the margins. In a world where serial killers are more popular than rock stars in the mass psyche and large-scale Internet sex sites catering to every kind of fetish or paraphilia are patronized by soccer moms and librarians, is it even possible to speak of margins any more? If so, where are they, and to what extremes does a person have to go (or to sink) to find them?

These are pressing questions, and Ellis deals with them head on. He throws an unforgiving, incandescent light on a society that has passed — almost without our realizing it — through the looking glass. Even in a cultural landscape that resembles a funhouse mirror, there are moral lines to be drawn, and Ellis is adept at locating them, while always remaining non-judgemental of those outsiders who enjoy more alternative or esoteric — yet essentially harmless — pursuits.

There is fun to be had here, for sure, but beyond and beneath the fun there is also a serious artist asking some probing questions about the way our culture is constructed in the early years of the 21st century. Crooked Little Vein could never be mistaken for great literature, but as a quick, dirty, entertaining diversion it is to be recommended. That it also asks some provocative questions is just the icing on Ellis’s perverse little cake.

The Old Devil

Posted 27 December, 2007 in Book Reviews | 1 comment

Jake’s Thing, by Kingsley Amis. Vintage Books, $19.95 paper, 270 pp., ISBN: 978-0-099-51217-2.

Jake’s thing is his penis. At fifty-nine years of age Jake’s thing — unlike the seventy-one-year-old Nathan Zuckerman’s thing in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost — still functions effectively. The problem is not one of mechanics, but one of desire. Once a ribald Lothario, Jake has recently lost all interest in sex. Or, as Dr. Rosenberg, the youthful sex therapist to whom Jake is sent for consultation, puts it in a typical Amis exchange:

“Now your trouble is that your libido [lib-eedo] has declined.”

“My what?” asked Jake, though he had understood all right.

“Your libido, your sexual drive.”

“I’m sorry. I’d be inclined to pronounce it lib-ighdo, on the basis that we’re talking English, not Italian or Spanish, but I suppose it’ll make for simplicity if I go along with you. So yes, my lib-eedo has declined.”

Jake is an Oxford don, “Reader in Early Mediterranean History there and a Fellow of Comyns College,” and as such is one in a line of Amis academics stretching back to his first novel, Lucky Jim. Published in 1954, that novel established Amis’s reputation as a notable prose stylist and is still considered one of the finest examples of postwar British comic writing.

By the time Amis came to publish Jake’s Thing in 1978, much had changed in the world, notably the rise of feminism. The author, who along with his good friend Philip Larkin was a key figure in the group of British postwar writers known as the Movement, had begun to take on the mantle of misogynistic, racist misanthrope that would hound him in throughout his later career. The titular figure in Jake’s Thing, albeit a patently comic character, nevertheless espouses attitudes toward women that were outdated at the time, and that seem positively Neanderthal from the perspective of 2007:

Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.

The passage’s final clause is perhaps meant to indicate ironic distance, to forestall what Philip Roth in Exit Ghost referred to as “the deadly literal-mindedness and vulgarity that attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way.” Thirty years after the publication of Jake’s Thing, however, it is unlikely that any enlightened reader coming across the passage above would not be brought up short by its scabrous dismissal of the female gender as shallow, deceitful, and gormless.

A similar reaction is prompted by Jake’s diatribe during a faculty debate about the merits of admitting women to Comyns College:

No doubt they do think, the youngsters, it’d be more fun to be under the same roof, but who cares what they think? All very well for the women, no doubt, it’s the men who are going to be the losers — oh, it’ll happen all right, no holding it up now. When the first glow has faded and it’s quite normal to have girls in the same building and on the same staircase and across the landing, they’ll start realising that that’s exactly what they’ve got, girls everywhere and not a common-room, not a club, not a pub where they can get away from them. And the same thing’s going to happen to us which is much more important, Roger’s absolutely right, all this will go and there will be women everywhere, chattering, gossiping, telling you what they did today and what their daughter did yesterday and what their friend did last week and what somebody they heard about did last month and horrified if a chap brings up a topic or an argument. They don’t mean what they say, they don’t use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that’s the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing’s supposed to be about. So let’s pass a motion suggesting they bugger off back to Somerville, LMH, St Hugh’s and St Hilda’s where they began and stay there. It won’t make any bloody difference but at least we’ll have told ‘em what we think of ‘em.

That Jake is a misogynist should by now be abundantly clear; that his declining libido is inextricably tied to his hatred of women seems likewise inescapable. His genuine tenderness toward his wife, Brenda — whose low self-image locates Jake’s lack of desire in what she perceives to be his distaste for the fact that she is overweight — coupled with his willingness to undergo a series of increasingly embarrassing and degrading sexual “therapy” sessions in an attempt to overcome his problem, is the only counterpoint to his growing notion that the benefits derived from sex are not worth the effort of engaging with women in the first place.

It should be noted at this point that Jake’s Thing is a comic novel. But its comedy is of a distinctly nasty stripe: dark, vicious, calculated to offend. Jake is in many ways a relic of a bygone era — or, at least, of an era that was rapidly waning in the Britain of 1978. Jake is contemptuous of anyone or anything he decides is beneath him, and his derision knows no bounds. He is brutal toward his neighbours Alcestis, whom he refers to privately as “Smudger,” and her husband, Geoffrey, “Christendom’s premier fucking fool”; toward his long-suffering cleaning lady, Mrs. Sharp, who is “born of that mysterious power … of unconsciously sensing how and when and where to be most obstructive and acting on it”; and toward Dr. Rosenberg, “a student of the mind who didn’t know where Freud had come from.” He is likewise suspicious of the “therapeutic” techniques that Dr. Rosenberg and his colleagues employ with him, including “sensate focusing” sessions, the viewing of pornography to overcome his guilt and shame in the realm of sex, and a bizarre workshop that involves his ritual humiliation by exposing his genitals to a room full of strangers. It is harder to take umbrage at these satirical jabs, since so many of them still ring true in today’s Dr. Phil besotted culture: “If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the War, it’s Workshop. After Youth, that is.”

But by and large, Jake’s Thing is an historical document, a snapshot of a time and a place that no longer exist. This is perhaps one reason why Amis is not more widely read at the close of 2007. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, critic Michael Dirda opines, “a lot of people felt that [Amis’s] books were coldhearted, and certainly no one could deny that the male protagonists were often despicable, no matter how artfully portrayed. Not least, because Amis’s books eschewed formal innovation, they have never held much appeal to literary scholars or classroom teachers.”

Amis was notoriously antithetical to formal innovators such as Joyce or Nabokov, and his novels display none of the structural or linguistic pyrotechnics of those authors. He was, instead, a proponent of clear, crisp, efficient prose, and it is perhaps this very clarity and precision that makes the content of the novels seem that much more untenable to 21st-century readers.

As for being coldhearted and despicable, these adjectives could easily be applied to Jake and to the novel that he inhabits, but these seem less like legitimate literary criticisms and more statements of emotional affect on the part of discomfited readers. There is nothing inherently wrong with writing about despicable characters; it is a peculiar brand of literary philistinism that demands that characters in novels be sympathetic or cleave to a politically correct worldview. Particularly when the novel is placed in its proper historical context, the backward views of its lead character — a British-educated male of a certain age — tend to become more understandable.

None of which is to excuse Jake’s more reactionary or offensive attitudes. It would be a shame, however, if a short-sighted political correctness were ultimately to deny a careful literary artist his rightful place in the pantheon of late 20th-century literature.

One More

Posted 21 December, 2007 in Book Reviews | No comments

My review of David Helwig’s novella, Smuggling Donkeys, is online, here.

A Bit of Seasonal Goodness

Posted 21 December, 2007 in Book Reviews | No comments

Since it’s the season of goodwill, and given that my encounter with the Giller shortlist might have left all you dedicated TSR readers (both you dedicated TSR readers?) with the impression that I thought this year in CanLit really, well … um … sucked, I thought I’d point you in the direction of two collections of short stories by young Canadian writers that are well worth checking out.

Matt Shaw’s The Obvious Child is a rarity in CanLit: an anti-naturalistic, Borgesian collection of fables and philosophical detective stories. Andrew Hood’s collection, Pardon Our Monsters, is more immediately recognizable vis à vis the CanLit short fiction template, but is nevertheless a strong first collection.

You can find my reviews of both these books online, here.

Advice You Can Take to the Bank

Posted 19 December, 2007 in Book Reviews | 2 comments

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, by Elmore Leonard, illus. by Joe Ciardiello. William Morrow, $17.50 cloth, 92 pp., ISBN: 978-0-06-14546-1.

On July 16, 2001, the New York Times published an article entitled “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.” The article was written by Elmore Leonard, one of the greatest American prose stylists since Hemingway, and it contained his prescription for good writing. Leonard’s ten rules (actually eleven, if you count the last one) should be pasted on the wall of every would-be writer’s workroom. Rule one: “Never open a book with weather.” Rule three: “Never use a verb other than ’said’ to carry dialogue.” Rule nine: “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.”

These are admonishments (accompanied by Leonard’s acknowledgement that it’s okay in certain circumstances — and for certain authors — to break the rules) that can’t help but make prose better: cleaner, more direct, more efficient. Over the years I’ve used Leonard’s rules as teaching tools with students and authors I’ve edited, and I’ve employed them — to a greater or lesser degree — in my own writing. Leonard’s NYT article was a brilliant distillation of his theory of writing.

It was also, not incidentally for the current book under discussion, brief. 1,048 words to be exact. Now, while just over one thousand words may be an appropriate length for a newspaper article, it is not clear that it is an appropriate length for a book, even one as sparse as the current volume, which weighs in at a mere ninety-two pages. When I first heard about this book, I assumed that the author would bundle his rules with other pieces of writing, the way Kurt Vonnegut did when he reprinted his (equally useful) rules of writing in his essay collection, Bagombo Snuff Box, which in paperback runs to a more respectable 384 pages. At the very least, I assumed there would be some additional material to augment the original article, particularly given the fact that the article is readily available online in its original form.

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing does contain original material in the form of amusing caricatures of writers such as Steinbeck, Tom Wolfe, Margaret Atwood, and, of course, Leonard himself.

But the text simply reprints the NYT article, without adding so much as a word. Printed on heavy stock, the layout features pages that often contain only a single sentence, and the text is often awkwardly broken, such that material that was meant to flow together in the newspaper article appears on different pages of the book. The voluminous white space (nearly every verso page is completely blank) is perhaps meant to provide aspiring writers with a place to scribble notes and cavils with the author; to me it just looks like wasted space.

The volume is packaged as a gift book, with a price point that is relatively low for a hardcover edition. Appearing as it does right at Giftmas, when relatives and friends of aspiring writers are going to be searching for appropriate presents to give, this little book might make a suitable stocking stuffer. The advice contained between the covers is worth its weight in gold; but the book’s entire look and feel and raison d’être smacks of little more than a cash grab.

The Life Whose Meaning Comes to Matter Most

Posted 13 December, 2007 in Book Reviews | No comments

Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth. Viking Canada, $32.50 cloth, 294 pp., ISBN: 978-0-670-06729-9.

Philip Roth concludes his autobiography, The Facts, with a letter from his most famous character, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, addressed to Philip Roth. Zuckerman is responding to the letter that opens the book, penned by Roth to his fictional creation, asking the character to tell his creator whether The Facts should be published.

Zuckerman suggests that Roth refrain from publishing the volume of autobiography, saying that Roth is “far better off” narrating Zuckerman’s adventures than reporting on his own. “Could it be that you’ve turned yourself into a subject not only because you’re tired of me but because you believe I am no longer someone through whom you can detach yourself from your biography at the same time that you exploit its crises, themes, tensions, and surprises?”

The detachment that Zuckerman highlights is a signal aspect of Roth’s approach, as it must be for any novelist who so rigorously plumbs “the facts” of his own life for the source of his fiction, going so far as to include a protagonist named “Philip Roth” in his novels Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America. For such a resolutely “autobiographical” novelist, the process of filtering one’s own life through the machinery of narrative necessitates an intricate navigation of the line between fiction and reality, the former encompassing a careful artistic reworking of the latter.

Zuckerman’s letter to Roth continues:

What you choose to tell in fiction is different from what you’re permitted to tell when nothing’s being fictionalized, and in this book you are not permitted to tell what it is you tell best: kind, discreet, careful — changing people’s names because you’re worried about hurting their feelings — no, this isn’t you at your most interesting. In the fiction you can be so much more truthful without worrying all the time about causing direct pain. You try to pass off here as frankness what looks to me like the dance of the seven veils — what’s on the page is like a code for something missing. Inhibition appears not only as a reluctance to say certain things but, equally disappointing, as a slowing of pace, a refusal to explode, a relinquishing of the need I ordinarily associate with you for the acute, explosive moment.

On the one hand, this is a kind of self-satisfied postmodern conceit: the fictional creation excoriating his creator for the faults he (Zuckerman? Roth?) sees in the creator’s own autobiographical book. It is also a sly end-run around criticisms of the autobiography: if The Facts is, indeed, marked by “a reluctance to say certain things,” “a slowing of pace,” and “a refusal to explode,” if it is devoid of “the acute explosive moment” that characterizes so much of Roth’s fiction — a case could be made — Roth has neatly circumvented this criticism, as much as admitting that he is cognizant of these failings by having Zuckerman vocalize them.

But framing the autobiography with letters to and from a fictional character is a quintessential example of Roth’s habit of blurring the line between fiction and “the facts.” Indeed, the quotation marks around those words are necessary to underscore the irony in Roth’s chosen title, something he himself attests to in his opening letter: “I suppose that calling this book The Facts begs so many questions that I could manage to be both less ironic and more ironic by calling it Begging the Question.”

If The Facts involves a layering of fictional techniques onto what is essentially autobiographical material, the same cannot be said for the Zuckerman novels. Roth himself has been very clear about this: Zuckerman is not a doppelgänger, and the critics who insist on viewing the fiction as a thinly veiled representation of “the facts” of Roth’s life elide the essential aim of the novels, which at its heart is different from that of autobiography. In an interview with Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson, reprinted in the essay collection Reading Myself and Others, Roth takes pains to draw this distinction:

Though some readers may have trouble disentangling my life from Zuckerman’s, The Ghost Writer — along with the rest of Zuckerman Bound and The Counterlife — is an imaginary biography, an invention stimulated by themes in my experience to which I’ve given considerable thought but the result of a writing process a long way from the methods, let alone the purposes, of autobiography. If an avowed autobiographer transformed his personal themes into a detailed narrative embodying a reality distinct and independent from his own day-to-day history, peopled with imaginary characters conversing in words never spoken, given meaning by a sequence of events that had never taken place, we wouldn’t be surprised if he was charged with representing as his real life what was an outright lie.

Besides presaging Oprah Winfrey and l’affaire Frey, Roth’s comment is essential for understanding his method as a novelist, and it is a perfect gloss on one of the central themes in Exit Ghost: the inability — or unwillingness — of unsophisticated readers to separate the art from the artist, or, as Zuckerman puts it, “the deadly literal-mindedness and vulgarity that attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way.”

Much of Exit Ghost is concerned with the process of creating fiction out of lived experience, and throughout the novel Zuckerman insists on the importance of interpreting fiction through the prism of the fiction itself rather than attempting to impose some artificial correlation upon the fiction and the facts of a novelist’s life.

Unfolding over little more than a week at the outset of November 2004, the novel opens with Zuckerman returning to New York, the city he had fled eleven years previously after receiving a series of increasingly threatening anti-Semitic letters from an unknown correspondent. Zuckerman has spent the last eleven years secluded in a house on a mountain in western Massachusetts; now recovering from prostate surgery that has left him impotent and incontinent, he returns to the big city for a consultation with a urologist who has suggested that there is a procedure that might take care of the latter problem, if not the former.

During his stay in New York, Zuckerman has three interconnected encounters with figures who dredge up events and emotions from his past. The first involves Amy Bellette, whom Zuckerman first met in 1956 when he was an overnight guest at the home of E.I. Lonoff, a famous short-story writer who was Zuckerman’s literary hero as a youth. (That story is told in Roth’s 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer, the first Roth book to feature Zuckerman as a protagonist; its titular echo in the current novel is not at all accidental.) Bellette, who was twenty-seven when Zuckerman first met her, is now seventy-five, and is herself disfigured as the result of surgery to remove a cancerous brain tumour.

The second encounter is with Billy Davidoff and Jaimie Logan, a couple in their early thirties who want to swap houses with someone outside the city for a year. Jamie, a burgeoning writer whose first story was published in The New Yorker, has been shaken by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and wants to flee the city, which she perceives as a target, for the safer environs of rural New England. When he answers their ad in The New York Review of Books, Zuckerman finds himself captivated by Jamie’s youthful beauty, and begins to experience the kind of erotic feelings he hasn’t had in over a decade.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Zuckerman is thrown on a collision course with Richard Kliman, a young literary upstart who has managed to acquire the first half of an unpublished Lonoff manuscript — the only novel the writer ever produced — that contains what Kliman thinks is a shattering secret about the deceased writer — a secret that Kliman wants to exploit for a tell-all biography of Lonoff.

Kliman, whose pious avowals of wanting to resurrect the reputation of a neglected author serve to mask his craven desire to profit off of a dead man’s scandal — a scandal that may indeed amount to nothing more than salacious gossip — is anathema to Zuckerman; the more persistently Kliman attempts to engage the older writer, the more furiously Zuckerman works to sabotage his nemesis. This antagonistic relationship turns the mentor/adoring acolyte relationship in The Ghost Writer on its head, but it also entrenches Roth’s own stated distinction between fiction and autobiography, and the concomitant warning not to confuse the two. “Spare me the lecture about the impenetrable line dividing fiction from reality,” Kliman sneers late in the novel. “This is something Lonoff lived through. This is a tormented confession disguised as a novel.” Zuckerman replies: “Unless it’s a novel disguised as a tormented confession.”

In case the reader is in doubt as to how the process of fictionalizing lived experience works in practice, Roth helpfully provides us with a practical example woven into the schema of the novel itself. Zuckerman’s encounters with Jamie are fraught with the writer’s longing for her — for her youthfulness, her beauty, her brazen intelligence — but behind this longing is the untenable fact of his impotence. The only kind of consummation the writer can possibly achieve with the younger woman is to return to his hotel room after visiting with her and write down the encounters as he imagines they might have occurred.

What develops is a dramatic pas de deux entitled He and She; the fictionalized dialogues have the same broad trajectories as the actual meetings, but the imagined interchanges read very differently: they are more raw, more honest, more explicitly sexual. In fictionalizing his relationship with Jamie, Zuckerman finds himself able to verbalize all the things he wishes he could say to the real woman, and to have her respond in the way he would like for her to respond to him. The Jamie of He and She has little to do with the actual wife of Billy Davidoff, and everything to do with the imaginative creation of the tormented Zuckerman.

If the actual exchanges between Zuckerman and Jamie display all the faults that Zuckerman identified in Roth’s autobiography — they are kind, discreet, and careful — their dramatic counterparts are anything but. They embody what Roth spoke of as the transformation of a novelist’s “personal themes into a detailed narrative embodying a reality distinct and independent from his own day-to-day history, peopled with imaginary characters conversing in words never spoken, given meaning by a sequence of events that had never taken place.” He and She becomes its own argument against Kliman’s stubborn literalism, and a cautionary note for any reader who might be tempted to ape it.

Exit Ghost — the title derives from a stage direction in Hamlet — is about many things: the dissolution of the body and the mind associated with aging, the divergent perspectives of the old and the young, the terror of engaging with the world as opposed to the blissful oblivion of leaving the world behind to live on a mountain in Massachusetts. But beyond and beneath all that, it is about the process of novel writing — about the acute dangers of creating a fictional universe that is all too easily mistaken for the novelist’s own. It is about readers and writers, about understanding and misunderstanding, about the exquisitely painful experience of focusing one’s own life in all its pain onto the page, and exaggerating it, distorting it, in the noble endeavour of grasping a larger artistic truth. Although he’d doubtless deny it, one can almost see Roth peeking out from behind the guise of his longtime narrator when he has Zuckerman proclaim:

But isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.