On Literary Sex

Posted 4 March, 2008 in Literary Criticism | 1 comment

A couple of weeks ago, I quoted approvingly Russell Smith’s desire to see more sex in novels. Here’s the counterargument, from the Guardian:

When novelists try to make their sex scenes literary, when they try to orchestrate each moan and groan into the book, wasting all that time trying to create the perfect scene, trying to make it seem believable, they fail miserably. The literary approach to writing a decent, believable sex scene is the most embarrassing thing about contemporary literary fiction today.*

To illustrate his argument, the author of the Guardian piece, Lee Rourke, makes reference to the novels of Michel Houellebecq, which he claims are “saturated with badly written sex scenes.” Houellebecq’s sex scenes are nevertheless “a joy to read,” because “if sex is to be used at all, it should be mechanical, dreary and, most importantly, clichéd, which is precisely what you get with Houellebecq.”

This is disingenuous, because Houellebecq’s novels are nihilistic dissections of modern anomie; they’re about the lack of human connection in a world riven by consumerism, technology, and fanaticism. The “mechanical” sex scenes are manifestations of this; complaining that they are “badly written” is akin to complaining about Patrick Bateman’s compulsively detailed descriptions of the sex in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho — it’s an indication that the complainant has pretty much missed the entire point.

Rourke goes on to complain about the sex in Ian McEwan’s novella On Chesil Beach, which he finds self-consciously literary and “laughably unreal.” (By contrast, the “mechanical,” “dreary,” and “clichéd” sex in Houellebecq “seems real” to Rourke.)

Granted, sex in novels is very difficult to pull off. Done badly, it becomes unintentionally funny or embarrassing. Not for nothing is the Bad Sex Award presented every year, and always finds a full roster of candidates to choose from. Russell Smith highlights the difficulties involved in writing sex in his introduction to Diana: A Diary in the Second Person:

The English language is not suited to graphic descriptions of passionate acts. … [T]here are only so many words for body parts and the actions they perform (for in fact, there are only so many actions), and constant use of them becomes repetitious. And really, none of these words is satisfactory: if you use the correct, everyday word for a body part — penis or vagina, say — you risk sounding cold and clinical, like a medical textbook or a how-to guide. Slang words, on the other hand, tend to be either ugly or humorous. Cock and pussy are harsh and, well, childish, and from a register of language that I suppose you’d have to call proletarian; that register does not suit every scene and every character.

It is perhaps this limitation of language that rouses the ire of people like Rourke. Certainly it has stymied writers, even otherwise talented and worthy ones. John Updike, whose influence in breaking down barriers in terms of descriptions of erotic acts in mainstream literary novels is enormous, has always evinced difficulty in this regard. His 1968 novel Couples was scandalous at the time for the explicitness with which it threw back the veil on the sexual lives of middle class American suburbanites. However, much of the sex in that novel seems to be cut from the self-consciously literary cloth that Rourke has such disdain for:

She showed behind and between her legs a wealth of listening curves and damps. She tugged her gown to her throat and the bones of her fingers confided a glimmering breast to his mouth, shaped by an ah of apprehension; when with insistent symmetry she rolled onto her back to have him use the other, his hand discovered her mons Veneris swollen high, her whole fair floating flesh dilated outward toward a deity, an anyoneness, it was Piet’s fortune to have localized, to have seized captive in his own dark form.

The overly clinical term “mons Veneris” would no doubt have Smith cringing, but the “wealth of listening curves and damps” is equally disconcerting, as are the fingers that “confided a glimmering breast to his mouth” (”glimmering”?) and the overly twee alliteration of “fair floating flesh.” This, safe to say, is not writing that one could get lost in.

Part of the difficulty with passages such as the one above is that there is no sense of exuberance to it, nor a sense of danger. In short, it doesn’t feel as though anything is at stake. In Amy Sohn’s novel My Old Man, Powell, the screenwriter who has an affair with the book’s much younger protagonist bristles at the thought of wearing a condom during sex: “I believe people should feel that every time they have sex they could die from it.” Powell understands that sex needs to have an edge, which is often what is missing from literary depictions of the act, which frequently feel too dryly intellectual, stripped of all passion and spark.

It was precisely this edge that made Nabokov such a compelling writer when it came to sexual matters. Not just the fact that he took up taboo subjects — sex with an underage girl, incest — but that he wrote about sex with abandon, as though he were allowing his pure id free rein on the page. Van’s dream from Ada, or Ardor, for example:

Bad Ada and lewd Lucette had found a ripe, very ripe ear of Indian corn. Ada held it at both ends as if it were a mouth organ and now it was an organ, and she moved her parted lips along it, varnishing its shaft, and while she was making it trill and moan, Lucette’s mouth engulfed its extremity. The two sisters’ avid lovely faces were now close together, doleful and wistful in their slow, almost languid play, their tongues meeting in flicks of fire and curling back again, their tumbled hair, red-bronze and black-bronze, delightfully commingling and their sleek hindquarters lifted high as they slaked their thirst in the pool of his blood.

Nabokov is intentionally pushing buttons in passages such as this, and his description of the ear of ripe Indian corn could be read as a bawdy parody of Freudian dream analysis. It is the vibrancy of the language commingled with a sharp sense almost of discomfort — due in large part to his wanton flouting of the incest taboo — that gives the passage its full effect.

The energy — of both language and substance — that Nabokov displays is also apparent in Harold Brodkey’s masterful short story, “Innocence,” which features an extended, twenty-page description of a man trying to bring a woman to orgasm orally. Brodkey’s great insight — “Bad sex can sometimes be stronger and more moving than good sex” — is rhymed off almost as an aside, and the pitch of the story follows the ebb and flow of the lovers’ exertions. It is a bravura performance, and should be more than sufficient to put the lie to naysayers such as Rourke who believe that there is no such thing as a good literary sex scene.

(Thanks to Claire Cameron for pointing me in the direction of the Guardian article.)

*An odd redundancy, that.

James Wood and the Nature of Exceptionalism

Posted 28 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism | No comments

There is a remarkable moment in James Wood’s critique of character from yesterday’s Guardian, in which he does something that most lesser critics go to extreme lengths to avoid: he admits to uncertainty. In the midst of a lengthy meditation about the nature of character in fiction Wood actually asserts that he is “not sure what a character is.” The phrase is so innocuous as to utterly belie its radical nature.

The tendency among literary critics — most evident in those who can least afford it — is to adopt a baldly authoritarian tone, to write as though individual perceptions and biases carried the weight of divine fiat. Wood, by contrast, is an essayist in the true sense of the word: he is making an attempt, a try at understanding, and feels no need to adopt the mantle of the infallible expert. Indeed, when he asserts that “a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction — from those who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little,” one finds it difficult to take issue.

Wood finds equal fault with the naive and unsophisticated reviewers who post on Amazon.com, demanding likable characters that they can identify with — Wood diagnoses a “contagion of moralising niceness” in such readers — and with those on the postmodern left, whose involuted and overly intellectualized deconstructionist readings render the entire point of fiction moot: “of course characters are assemblages of words, because literature is such an assemblage of words: this tells us absolutely nothing, and is like elaborately informing us that a novel cannot really create an imagined ‘world’, because it is just a bound codex of paper pages.”

By starting from a point of uncertainty and humility, Wood is able to chart a critical course that avoids any kind of dogmatism, but rather takes the characters in different novels on their own terms, without demanding that they perform some predetermined function or slot easily into some preexisting ideology.

Here is the crux of Wood’s argument, which could — and probably should — be pasted above every literary critic’s desk:

The truth is that the novel is the great viruoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown at it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as a “novelistic character”. There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.

Amen, Mr. Wood, and thank you.

Hav U Red My Novl?

Posted 24 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism, Writing Life, Technology | 2 comments

Genji had only grown more thoughtful as he rose to new heights of glory, and he ordered things so well that he wrought a wondrous change, for her residence was soon amply populated. Where once rank foliage had cast a dismal and pervasive pall there now ran a newly diverted stream, while shrubbery near the house yielded cooling shade, and junior household staff, barely noticed so far but zealous to serve him, so clearly discerned his deep interest that they danced most assiduous attendance upon her.

Those words were taken from The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu (trans. by Royall Tyler), an 11th-century Japanese epic that is widely considered to be the world’s first novel. What is most apparent about the lines above is their sensuous detail, the specificity of the “dismal and pervasive pall” cast by the “once rank foliage,” and the subtle eroticism of the junior household staff who “danced most assiduous attendance upon” their mistress.

Now imagine that those lines had been composed on a cellphone.

You can’t, because there’s no way that those lines ever would be composed on a cellphone. They are too long, for one thing, too full of description and elevated vocabulary. The Tale of Genji, which in its unabridged English translation runs to 1,120 pages, is replete with passages such as this, and remains in print to this day.

One wonders if the same fate will befall If You, the 142-page novel by twenty-one-year-old Japanese author Rin, which was composed entirely on a cellphone. Certainly, If You and its literary compeers are enjoying popularity in the short term in their native Japan. According to a recent article in the New York Times, five out of the ten bestselling novels in Japan last year were cellphone novels, “mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels.”

These novels appeal largely to a younger cohort, who grew up with text messages and emoticons and who are not even terribly used to typing long-form sentences on a computer. But, if these ad hoc novels — which devoid of incidentals such as “plotting or character development” may in fact stretch the definition of the word “novel” — are getting young people to read, then everything’s fine, right?

Not necessarily.

The most aggravating part of the Times article for me is Rin’s own assessment of cellphone novels’ place in the literary pantheon, as against more traditional novels:

Rin said ordinary novels left members of her generation cold.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

So traditional Japanese novels by writers of repute — Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, say, or even genre fiction like Natsuo Kirino’s Out — are not read by younger readers because of the difficulty of their sentences, as opposed to novels tapped out on the miniature cellphone keypad, which, by necessity to avoid early onset carpal-tunnel syndrome or arthritis, are composed of short, choppy, fragmented sentences and paragraphs more closely resembling the dialogue bubbles in a manga comic book.

I am reminded of a story Sven Birkerts related in his volume The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (which, notwithstanding the fact that it was published fourteen years ago, seems more relevant today than it ever did). Birkerts is discussing the frustration that a group of college students experienced with a short story by Henry James:

These students were entirely defeated by James’s prose — the medium of it — as well as by the assumptions that underlie it. It was not the vocabulary, for they could make out most of the words; and not altogether the syntax, although here they admitted to discomfort, occasional abandoned sentences. What they really could not abide was what the vocabulary, the syntax, the ironic indirection, and so forth, were communicating. They didn’t get it, and their not getting it angered them, and they expressed their anger by drawing around themselves a cowl of ill-tempered apathy.

Or by reading readily accessible adolescent love stories written on someone’s cellphone. Birkerts’ students’ complaints about Henry James are exactly analogous to Rin’s comment that readers of her generation don’t read professional novelists because “their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them.”

So what is the problem, you ask? Why should college students and Japanese youth read traditional novels as opposed to novels composed on technology that they are more familiar with, that speaks to them in a way that traditional novels don’t? Birkerts supplies the answer by characterizing what James does that his students weren’t getting:

He is inward and subtle, a master of ironies and indirections; his work manifests a care for the range of moral distinctions. And one cannot “get” him without paying heed to the least twist and turn of the language.

It should not be necessary to point out that James’s inwardness and subtlety, his “ironies and indirections,” and his “care for the range of moral distinctions” cannot — simply cannot – be replicated using the denuded language available to a cellphone texter. Moreover, the fact that James’s implications are impossible to grasp “without paying heed to the least twist and turn of the language” presupposes a level of concentration and deep engagement with the text that would be anathema to most of today’s distracted, media-addled youth.

It’s not difficult to see that we risk losing something in the translation from page to cellphone screen (or computer screen, for that matter). We risk losing an appreciation of subtlety and irony, we risk losing an ability to recognize indirection or to delineate between fine moral distinctions. In short, we risk losing some of what makes us essentially human. I don’t think that’s too grand a statement to make, nor do I think it’s a risk we should be willing to take.

Ba-zing!

Posted 5 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism, Marketing | No comments

Kerry at Pickle Me This has already pointed this zinger out, but it’s just too good to pass up. Philip Marchand, on Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero:

The [Governor General’s literary] award also made it clear that if Vassanji was a “mystic,” Ondaatje was no slouch in the spiritual department either. “Grace, after all,” the jurors noted, “is the ultimate gift which Ondaatje offers us in Divisadero.”

Some readers would have been satisfied with a good novel.

Get Real

Posted 4 January, 2008 in Literary Criticism | 4 comments

Dan Green, responding to a post on Jacob Russell’s Barking Dog:

Reviewers privilege narrative, but not necessarily realism. There is no necessary connection between “story” and “realism,” although narrative in literary fiction has been used so often as a way of nominally depicting “real life” that most reviewers–and many readers–assume that they are inseparable, that real life can only be presented to us through a summarizable “story.” Thus, I would argue that the stituation [sic] Jacob describes is a consequence less of laziness or apathy on the part of reviewers than of the widely held assumption that “fiction” correlates to “story” which correlates to “realism” in a more or less natural progression.

While my own stance is not so rigorously anti-narrative as Green’s appears to be, I do have a certain amount of sympathy with his argument that book reviewers — or, perhaps more fairly, book review editors, since it is they who decide which books to assign for review — have historically given short shrift to books and authors that do not fit into a prescribed mould of “the well-made novel.” David Markson’s anti-narrative The Last Novel was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and in the Globe and Mail’s Books section in 2007, but it seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

What makes me a tad uneasy is Green’s and Russell’s apparently dogmatic reaction against realism as a legitimate — or, indeed, interesting — literary mode.

It is important to define our terms precisely here. Realism is often employed as a catch-all, often used interchangeably with naturalism or mimesis, which are similar, yet distinct concepts, and different critics will have different interpretations of its meaning and import. In the entry for Realism in The Harper Handbook to Literature, Second Edition, the authors assert:

Realism is a slippery term, sometimes used too loosely to be of value except as an indicator of a reader’s reaction. What seems real to one reader seems preposterous to another, and the common reader’s idea of reality is different from the professional philosopher’s. Realism is most useful in literary studies when understood in the context of the nineteenth-century movement that first applied it to literature, discussed its qualities, and in the end gave it the widespread currency it still enjoys.

The 19th-century realist movement was modelled on the French school of réalisme, which was first applied to Rembrandt, but later came to describe Flaubert and his followers. Contemporary critics of Flaubert scorned him and other proponents of réalisme for what they perceived to be the baseness of their subjects and the immorality inherent in their treatment.

But as Ian Watt points out in his seminal study, The Rise of the Novel, what set the 18th-century creators of the English novel — Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding — apart from prose writers before them was their commitment to “formal realism,” which proceeds from the premise “that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience”:

Formal realism is, of course, like the rules of evidence, only a convention; and there is no reason why the report on human life which is presented by it should be in fact any truer than those presented through the very different conventions of other literary genres. The novel’s air of total authenticity, indeed, does tend to authorise confusion on this point: and the tendency of some Realists and Naturalists to forget that the accurate transcription of actuality does not necessarily produce a work of any real truth or enduring literary value is no doubt partly responsible for the rather widespread distaste for Realism and all its works which is current today.

Watt’s book was published in 1957, so the revolutions of modernism and early postmodernism had already occurred, but it is clear that fifty years on, the “rather widespread distaste for Realism and all its works” that Watt identified is alive and well in the culture.

Boredom can account for at least part of this. Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719; 289 years later, Defoe’s formal innovations do not seem nearly as revolutionary as they must have done in the early 18th century. By contrast, when confronted with yet another carefully rendered slice-of-life novel about farming on the prairies, a reader in 2008 is most liable to roll her eyes in despair and frustration.

And yet one hesitates to dismiss realism altogether, if for no other reason than it has a large claim to being the generic characteristic that sets novels — even anti-narrative novels — apart from other forms of writing. Watt continues:

[W]e must not allow an awareness of certain shortcomings in the aims of the Realist school to obscure the very considerable extent to which the novel in general, as much in Joyce as in Zola, employs the literary means here called formal realism. Nor must we forget that, although formal realism is only a convention, it has, like all literary conventions, its own peculiar advantages.

The advantages of this kind of formal realism do not run to baldly mimetic descriptions of places and things, but rather comprise what the American critic William Dean Howells called “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” It is this more philosophical notion that is most useful in assessing realism in novels, as in any art: the authentic literary artist, whether he be Stephen Crane or Stephen Dixon, must maintain fidelity to his art, which presupposes a “truthful treatment of material.” That such truthfulness can be found in abstraction or innovative exercises in style is not something I would wish to argue against; it can also exist, indeed flourish, in more traditional modes of storytelling.

Finally, what is important is a recognition that, as Henry James put it, the house of fiction contains “not one window, but a million.” The critic Wayne C. Booth points this out in The Rhetoric of Fiction when he writes:

Fortunately, the alternative to dogmatic realism is not dogmatic antirealism. There are many other routes we can follow; whichever one we choose, our success will depend on our remembering the warning that Robert Louis Stevenson once gave James: what is the “making of one book, will in the next be impertinent or dull.”

A New Feature: The Dialogue-Review

Posted 26 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Book Reviews, Guest Blogger | 1 comment

Long Story Short, by Elyse Friedman. House of Anansi Press, $29.95 cloth, 216 pp., ISBN: 978-0-88784-219-1.

If you’re an inveterate reader of this site’s comments, you may recall me responding to Finn Harvor’s thoughts about the potential for blogs to resemble online magazines by suggesting that I’d like to get a few more voices than just my own into the mix around here. Accordingly, I’ve decided to inaugurate a new feature: the dialogue-review. These posts will focus on a specific title, but rather than me pontificating as from on high, I’ll be engaging in a dialogue with selected guest bloggers. We’ll see how this works. If the response is positive, this is a feature I’d like to continue.

In its first iteration, TSR is pleased to feature Derek Weiler, editor of Quill & Quire magazine and author of the blog Stuff in the Attic, discussing Elyse Friedman’s collection of stories and a novella, Long Story Short.

Warning: There are some spoliers contained in the discussion below.

Derek Weiler: Hey Steven,

Thanks for having me a as a guest. I’ll start with “The Soother,” since that’s the story in the book that I’ve read the most, beginning when it first appeared in Toronto Life a couple years ago. I fell in love with this one when I read the scene where Lucas – a Toronto businessman who’s in the middle of one of those breakneck heart-attack days full of errands to run and people to please – has come to his pregnant daughter’s apartment with the groceries she requested.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?”

“Well … no, it’s nothing.”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“Look, I appreciate you bringing this stuff, I mean, I didn’t even ask for half of this, but the thing I did ask you to get is wrong.” Megan looked as if she was going to cry. “I specifically said not to get the plain mango. I don’t like the plain mango.”

“You said mango-vanilla.”

“Yeah, together – mango and vanilla swirled together.”

“I know. I looked for it, but they didn’t have it, honey. So I got mango and I got vanilla and I figured you could mix them yourself.”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s exactly the same thing. Except this way you get twice as much.”

“Fine. It doesn’t matter.”

What a pitch-perfect capture of human behaviour! Your impulse is to sneer at the daughter, but after all, who doesn’t occasionally feel like a thwarted child over some tiny thing, trying not to and thereby resorting to mental contortions that come out as insufferable passive-aggressive whining?

“The Soother” sets up a hurdle with its gimmicky opening: we see the middle-aged Lucas dressed as a baby, drooling in the arms of a paid, um, fetish-enabler, I guess. But the story works for me because as Friedman proceeds to lay out this guy’s life, we see why he needs to be secretly pampered. Over the course of a day, he’s harassed, put upon, and taken for granted by everyone who’s close to him, from his surly son to his hypochondriac, cheating wife. Sure, everything is just a tiny bit … louder than real life, but not so exaggerated that it doesn’t ring true. It’s also hilarious.

That said, I’m still not convinced the baby conceit is really necessary – it feels like a kind of gaudy gift-wrap, and I think the story would be as strong or stronger without it. But “The Soother” gave me so much pleasure that I was willing to waive my reservations.

Which leads into my overall experience of Long Story Short, which I found wildly uneven. Sometimes mildly so: as with “The Soother,” I found myself overlooking minor flaws in stories that I generally loved, like the novella “A Bright Tragic Thing.” Sometimes more egregiously: there are a couple of stories here, “Truth” and “Wonderful,” that for my money should never have been included at all.

In “Truth,” a couple on a blind date communicate by saying exactly what they’re thinking, rather than the usual bland dissembling. Well, “exactly what they’re thinking” isn’t quite right – what these two actually voice are the subconscious impulses and motives that most of us don’t even articulate to ourselves. And here it’s all played for straight laughs. “Listen,” says the man, “my self-esteem will be temporarily boosted if I get you into bed tonight, and that waitress is making me horny. Why don’t we go to my place.” The woman replies, “Why not. I have masochistic inclinations and I’m feeling self-destructive.”

“Truth” has some bite in its highlighting of modern anxieties and foibles, and I think it could be a very funny short film or comedy sketch. But for me, that was the problem – there’s no reason for it not to be a film or comedy sketch rather than a short story. It would lose nothing in the translation, and in fact it would work better in those media; the humour’s mostly mild and flat on the page here, because it doesn’t feel like it was meant to be read.

And “Wonderful,” I’d argue, has no value at all. It’s another comedy-sketch premise: a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life that imagines the angel Clarence setting out to show George Bailey that in fact his life has been meaningless and there’s no reason not to kill himself. It’s a too-obvious switcheroo that plays out too obviously for too long – 20 pages! And it’s not rendered with much imagination or verve – unlike “Truth,” I can’t see this one working in any format.

I don’t mean to come on all negative; I’ve barely even discussed “A Bright Tragic Thing,” which, as mentioned, I loved. And I thought the other stories were fairly solid too. In a more expansive collection it would be easier to overlook a couple of duds like “Truth” and “Wonderful.” But Long Story Short is a slim book – one novella, five stories, 200-odd pages – so they have a disproportionate impact.

How about you, what did you think?

***

Steven W. Beattie: You’ve pretty much nailed what most annoyed me about a number of the stories in this collection: they feel more like jokes or gimmicks than well-wrought or carefully crafted works of short fiction. And you’ve hit on the two most egregious examples of this: “Truth” and “Wonderful.”

My problem with “Truth” is that it’s basically one joke stretched out over fifteen pages. It scores all its points around page two; the rest just seemed redundant to me.

Having said that, I do admire the way Friedman pulls the rug out from under the reader in the story’s early stages. When Leslie and Martin first meet in the Starbucks coffee shop, the initial impression a reader gets of Martin is that he’s just a gigantic asshole: “I’m too cheap to pay more than a buck for a cup of coffee. Besides, I’m already buzzing. Just had two cups with another prospective partner at the doughnut shop around the corner.”

And Leslie’s tepid response – “ ‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘How did it go?’” – makes her seem like a bit of a doormat. It’s only as the story progresses that you realize what Friedman’s up to: these are two people without interior monologues, and they vocalize everything they are thinking either consciously or, as you suggest, subconsciously.

The tension between a blind date that follows a rather traditional trajectory – meeting in a coffee shop, moving on to drinks, back to his place for sex – and the absolute, brutal honesty of the two characters results in a kind of absurdism that is rare in Canadian fiction. But you’re right that the story would seem more at home on Saturday Night Live or Comedy, Inc. than in the pages of a literary collection.

And the recapitulation of It’s a Wonderful Life is really unnecessary. This is the weakest story in the collection. Although, having said that, I do admire the ambiguity in the finale. After taking us on a very predictable journey, she manages to leave us with a note of uncertainty as to George’s fate, and I found this impressive. It’s emblematic of my reaction to the collection as a whole that even in the stories I disliked, I could find something of value, even if it was only a moment at the end.

“The Soother” is one of my favourites among the shorter stories, and again I admired the kind of bait-and-switch she pulls on the reader in the early stages. The opening scene reads like a piece of straight naturalism and as a reader you don’t question it or think that there’s anything amiss until you realize that Lucas isn’t a baby at all, but a grown man. The trick over the following pages is to humanize him sufficiently for us to understand his particular fetish.

This story reminded me a lot of Barbara Gowdy’s “We So Seldom Look on Love,” another story about a man who engages in what society views as aberrant behaviour but who is humanized through the course of the story.

If I had a complaint about “The Soother,” it would be the same complaint I have about the collection overall: it’s a story that’s predicated on a gimmick and it tends to beat the reader over the head with that gimmick. We need to understand Lucas, obviously, and his interactions with his wife and his pregnant daughter are well handled in this regard. But the stuff with the other daughter’s impending marriage and the son who needs to be bailed out of jail felt like overkill to me. We get the point: Lucas is so constantly harassed by his demanding and selfish family that he needs to find succor in the arms of Irma, his surrogate mother, who allows him to return to the oblivious innocence of childhood.

I just wish that Friedman would trust her readers more and maybe pull back a little rather than constantly underlining her points for us. This is one of the signal problems with stories that depend on gimmicks for their effects. They tend to trade in subtlety for a broader, more obvious presentation. Which is not to say I disliked “The Soother,” only that I wish she’d pulled back a little.

I see the same kind of problem – the repetitiveness and heavy-handedness born of adherence to a fictional conceit (or gimmick) – at work in the novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing,” although interestingly it didn’t bother me as much in the longer work. Perhaps because the gimmick here was less self-conscious, or perhaps it had something to do with the room she gave herself to develop the various characters in more detail.

It might be appropriate to turn our attention more directly on the novella for a moment.

***

DW: Not to dismantle “The Soother” even more, but one major difference between that and “We So Seldom Look on Love” is that Friedman’s story is much more pat: guy suckling a soother on one side of the equals sign, everyone in his life taking advantage of him on the other. Which is why I wished the baby-fetish angle had been left out altogether; for me, Lucas’s dynamics with his family were plenty interesting and funny enough without having to be used to justify a pathology or something. “We So Seldom Look on Love” is (at least as I remember it, not having read it for a few years) more associative and mysterious, which I think is more suited to a story that is truly interested in “aberrant” behaviour.

But back to the novella. “A Bright Tragic Thing” is about two Toronto teenage boys, Dave and Todd, who like to collect the autographs of cheesy TV celebrities for their ironic kitsch value. Dave writes to Murray Mortenson, who was a teen star on Mother Knows Better in the 1980s and who now lives in conveniently-close-to-Toronto Rochester, New York. Dave is just hoping for a tacky souvenir of some kind. But Murray, who was a Z-list celebrity at the best of times and is clearly unused to fan attention, starts calling him on the phone for long heart-to-hearts – which Dave surreptitiously tapes so that he and Todd can chortle over them later. The only problem is that Murray seems to be developing an unhealthy attachment to his new phone chum.

Whew. Let me catch my breath.

Like most of Friedman’s work, this one benefits immensely from taking place in a world that is recognizably Toronto in 2007, and not, like so much CanLit, some alternate reality where supermarkets and televisions and the Internet don’t exist. And her teenage characters are also refreshing – gawky and cruel and snide but plausible and, at least in Dave’s case, still sympathetic.

Mostly, though, I liked the progression of the story. The escalation of Murray’s encroachment on Dave’s time. The way Friedman slowly differentiates Dave from his friend Todd, first by circumstance, later by temperament, and eventually by moral choices. Dave’s high school romance, which felt a bit rote but was still quite charming.

I especially liked the ambiguity of what exactly the story seems to be about. As Murray gets increasingly needy and eventually shows up in Toronto, you wonder just how much he’s going to invade/ruin this boy’s life. But at the end it becomes clear that “A Bright Tragic Thing” is really concerned with something else entirely, something much more resonant and satisfying.

That said, the novella certainly has imperfections. I won’t dispute that Murray is cartoonish, never totally gelling as a believable person. The proverbial Chekhovian gun on the wall serves as an obvious plot device. And technically, Friedman’s prose is serviceable but unremarkable. As you mentioned, she could stand to trust the reader more; she has a habit of spelling things out just a touch more than necessary. (The last two sentences of the novella, for example – are they not completely superfluous?)

And you?

***

SWB: Well, the last two sentences make explicit something that could have been inferred from the paragraph before, and you’re probably right that the ending would have been more effective if we’d been allowed to make this inference ourselves rather than having it spelled out for us. However, that didn’t really bother me.

What did kind of bother me about the two teenage boys (and Helen, Dave’s would-be girlfriend) is that they seem to suffer from the Dawson’s Creek syndrome: that is, they speak and interact at a level that seems far too advanced for what normal teenagers might be expected to engage in:

“Your unsullied Klinger is comparatively lacklustre. In short, a bore.”

“I’m depressed.”

“You should be.”

“It’s more effective to shoot yourself.”

“True.”

“Why waste good narcotics?”

“You’re right. Especially since my father owns several pistols.”

“Well there you go. Pistols at dawn.”

“I can challenge myself to a duel.”

This dialogue is self-consciously ironic and witty, but it doesn’t sound like the kind of dialogue teenagers – even smart, self-consciously ironic teenagers – would actually carry on. This lends a note of artificiality to the story for me, but is not enough to entirely mar the experience of reading it.

“A Bright Tragic Thing” evinces the same kind of repetitiveness around a central conceit that is evident in “Truth” and “Wonderful,” but the gradual escalation in the relationship between Dave and Murray, the ex-TV “star,” prevents this from becoming boring or tedious.

Some elements of the novella do capitulate to the obvious: the gun on the wall is not just proverbial or metaphoric – it’s an actual gun, and there’s little question from very early on about how the story is going to end. I would have been happier with a more cynical ending, which would have had the effect of implicating the reader in the story’s satire. As it is the reader, along with Dave, is allowed off the hook: we can laugh at Murray’s gormlessness while always retaining the moral high ground. This feels ever so slightly like a cop-out.

I realize that to a certain extent I’m criticizing the story based on what I wish Friedman had written rather than what she actually did write, which is unfair. And I don’t want to suggest that I didn’t enjoy the story – I did, I just wish that she’d been a little more uncompromising with it.

I agree with you that “We So Seldom Look on Love” is superior to “The Soother,” and perhaps I link the two in my mind only because they’re both about fetishists of one kind or another. Gowdy’s story is much more allusive and subtle, whereas Friedman tends (here and elsewhere in the collection) to make all of her connections explicit for the reader.

In this regard, we haven’t even touched upon “Lost Kitten,” which is the one story that largely eschews this kind of explicitness. It’s a darker story, with an ambiguous ending that opens out into some very creepy areas of implication. The woman in it is obviously touched in some way, but exactly how is never made clear. And the relationship between the two roommates – their respective moral codes (or lack thereof) – is nicely handled. This is the darkest story in the collection, but also, I think, the most elliptical and least contrived.

Or is that just me?

***

DW: First, to defend “A Bright Tragic Thing” a bit: the dialogue doesn’t seem that implausible to me, given that these are seniors about to graduate, and brainy/geeky seniors to boot. Sure, it’s a little stylized and more polished than the way real people would talk, but hey, that’s true of almost all dialogue. (I think it was Van Wyck Brooks, though I might be misremembering, who wrote an essay pointing out that it’s a mistake to think that Huckleberry Finn captures “real speech,” because if it did, the book would be repetitive, incoherent, and boring.)

I’m also not sure that your proposed ending would be more effective; in fact, I feel like a more cynical “oh, what a crazy world we live in” ending would just end up letting everyone off the hook, reader included. There’s something almost refreshingly old-fashioned in the story’s finale, with its insistence that the choices we make matter. Though I will concede that the moral victory Dave appears to earn – by, um, showing some compassion and no longer acting like a complete asshole – is a pretty minor one.

But yes, “Lost Kitten.” I absolutely agree that the woman is one of the most memorable characters in the book, exactly because we know she’s off in some way but we don’t know how or why. And I thought Friedman brilliantly handled the scenes in which the reader picks up significance that eludes the woman: the visit from the two sons of her mother’s “friend,” or the description of the Late Serial Killer décor in the guy’s apartment. For me, the revelation of the split personality of the “roommates” (OK, I guess you should really make sure that spoiler warning goes up) still felt a little gimmicky, but not so much that I didn’t enjoy the story. And I agree that the weird moral distinctions that the psycho “roommate” makes were very well rendered.

Personally, I didn’t find the ending ambiguous, though; I just assumed she was a goner. Similarly, I assumed that the man had jumped into the river at the end of “Wonderful.” But in neither case are we shown anything definitive, so it is open to interpretation.

***

SWB: It’s those moments that are open to interpretation that really mark the collection for me. They tend to open the book up in ways that the more obvious, contrived conceits don’t allow for. I think that if Friedman could just allow for her readers to make certain connections for themselves, rather than insisting on beating them over the head at every turn, she could produce something really spectacular.

2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 5

Posted 6 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize | No comments

The Assassin’s Song, by M.G. Vassanji. Doubleday Canada, $34.95 cloth, 328 pp., ISBN: 978-0-385-66351-9.

Previous Scotiabank Giller nominations/wins: 2004, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (winner)

1994, The Book of Secrets (winner)

Other Awards: 1990, Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (The Gunny Sack)

From the Publisher: “A story of grand historical sweep and intricate personal drama, a stunning evocation of the physical and emotional landscape of a man caught between the ancient and the modern, between legacy and discovery, between the most daunting filial obligation and the most undeniable personal yearning — The Assassin’s Song is a heartbreaking ballad of a life irrevocably changed.”

From reviews: “Intertwining a 700-year-old family epic with a mystical mystery, Vassanji … crafts an intense and haunting work of fiction.” — Christian Science Monitor

“The chapters set in the present, especially those in the 1960s and ’70s — American hippie culture, Karsan’s marriage and fathering of a son — become increasingly clichéd. The connection hinted at between Mansoor and Nur Fazal — the repetition of religious violence through history — is clearly intended to be central but is never sufficiently explored. As a result, the tension established in the initial chapters leaks away.” — Vancouver Sun

“There are echoes of Rohinton Mistry in Vassanji’s lampooning of post-independent India’s frenetic nationalism, of V.S. Naipaul in the insistence that solutions can arrive only from a thorough understanding of the past, of Salman Rushdie in the disclosure of a history composed of personal narratives and myths. But the quiet lyricism of Karsan’s contemplations, the careful evocation of place, the writer’s obvious warmth for his characters, the sense of compassion layered into the story — these are all Vassanji’s.” — Washington Post Book World

Representative passage: “I imagine Bapu-ji sitting on the floor in his beloved library, his writing table across his knees, addressing his apostate son, uncertain about his own life and fearful for the ancient shrine of which he is the spiritual lord. Extreme violence has spread across the state, narratives of the horror out there keep arriving with every fresh batch of devotees, and this time it looks impossible to stanch the flow outside the village, there seems to be an absolute intention to its fury and no force to counter it. The police are nowhere. I can’t see his face: that old official photo won’t do, and I don’t have a recent picture in my mind to help me visualize him. He must have retained those outlines of his face that I always knew — though how much did that beatific smile shrink over the years? The elongated face I recall, and the large flat ears; the hair must have grown white and thin … There is no preaching in this letter, only a confession of sorts. Does this portend closeness or distance?”

My assessment: What begins as a coming-of-age story about Karsan, the next in line to be the Saheb, or lord, of the Shrine of the Wanderer in Pirbaag, India, becomes a story about filial duty and the cost of pursuing personal freedom.

There is a sense that Vassanji has attempted to do too much in this novel, incorporating the history of India post-independence with the story of a young man who is in line to be a lord, interspersed with the history of a fictional thirteenth-century sufi. The theme of filial duty and tradition clashing with the forces of modernity is certainly not new to post-colonial literature set in India, having appeared in the work of authors as diverse as Rohinton Mistry, V.S. Naipaul, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Shyam Selvadurai; it’s not entirely clear that Vassanji has anything particularly new to add to this rather well-covered literary territory.

Still, the scenes in 1960s Pirbaag are the most successful in the novel, largely because they are the most fully developed. Karsan’s interaction with Mr. David, a teacher at his school, is presented as a complete arc (although it’s patently obvious from the outset where this particular subplot is headed), and his involvement with a nationalistic youth group provides some good moments.

But by the time Vassanji bundles his character off to Harvard, and then to British Columbia, the narrative has dispensed with any pretence of developing dramatic scenes and become little more than a synopsis of Karsan’s adventures in the West. Poorly fleshed out characters appear and disappear within pages; in one instance a putatively tragic event befalls one character, but since the character in question was introduced a scant ten pages prior to this event’s occurrence, it’s impossible for the reader to work up any emotional investment and the scene falls flat. Even using the word “scene” is stretching a point: the “tragedy” is dispensed with in a single sentence.

Vassanji tries to cram so much into the second half of his book that the whole thing comes off feeling rushed and underdeveloped. He ignores the hoary old writing school directive to “show, don’t tell,” and even goes so far as to include the kind of plot-advancing letters I was complaining about in the Poliquin novel.

The Assassin’s Song does deal, if only peripherally, with terrorism and the clash of religious ideologies, and so has a contemporary resonance; it’s hard to escape the feeling that the Giller jury nominated this book more for its subject matter than for its literary merit.

2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 4

Posted 5 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize | 2 comments

A Secret Between Us, by Daniel Poliquin, trans. by Donald Winkler. Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95 paper, 296 pp., ISBN: 978-1-55365-272-4.

Previous Scotiabank Giller nominations/wins: None

Other Awards: 2007, Ottawa Book Award (La Kermesse)

2001, Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing (In the Name of the Father: An Essay on Quebec Nationalism)

1998, Trillium Award (The Straw Man)

From the publisher: “A startling evocation of a pivotal era in Canadian history, from one of French Canada’s most esteemed writers.”

From reviews: “This kind of thing lives or dies by its writing, and here, at least in this translation, the prose is mannered and monotonous. In the end, it’s all just one damn thing after another, with the characters weaving in and out of each other’s lives over the years, everyone’s dreams unrealized and their lives inconsequential.” — Quill & Quire

“Though Essiambre and the secret between them does form one plotline in the novel, La Kermesse is the better title, with its nod to the church (kerk/mis) and to the funfairs it most typically suggests. Lusignan is the local character in one of those fairs, and this book is his midway.” — Globe and Mail

Representative passage: “We played Brébeuf after Sunday mass. Naturally, I was often the Jesuit and Gertrude was Mother Marie de l’Incarnation, transfixed by my suffering. She also had the right to go to the kitchen for biscuits to feed the famished Iriquois. For authenticity’s sake Hector and Donatien stripped to the waist, and I allowed myself to be tied to the stake, saying, ‘Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do.’ We never failed to tell the story as we went along, as children will: ‘Me, I’m wounded in the chest, you’re attacking me with the tomahawk.’

“There too things went badly from time to time. One day when it was Hector’s turn to be Brébeuf, he who had been a decidedly cruel Iroquois, Donatien and I tied him solidly to the torturers’ stake and left him out in the rain for an hour. Hector Brébeuf yowled, ‘Come untie me, damned asshole Iroquois! I’m going to tell the good Lord!’ On that occasion the good Lord took the form of their father, who saw red when he got angry. I escaped in time.

“Another time it was their mother who punished them, because Donatien had invented a new torture that consisted of tying up Father Brébeuf so he couldn’t move, and farting in his face. That day I was the Jesuit.”

My assessment: If you’re like me, you’ll notice something about the passage quoted above that instantly sets A Secret Between Us apart from the other books on this year’s Scotiabank Giller shortlist: it’s funny. Not funny in a droll, chuckling-wryly-over-tea-and-crumpets kind of way, but really funny. This alone puts Poliquin’s novel in a category by itself vis à vis the other shortlisted books.

The first-person narrator of A Secret Between Us, Lusignan, is a drunk and a liar and a thief. This makes his narration somewhat suspect; he encompasses many of the traits of the quintessential unreliable narrator. But it also makes his narration lively and enjoyable: the reader laughs at his jokes and his bad behaviour, all the while engaged in an enterprise of trying to decide how far he can be trusted. Truth, for Lusignan, is a malleable quality; as a novelist, he says, “I rewrote history according to my tastes. All I needed was a credulous public for everything to be true.”

The novel takes place during the first half of the twentieth century, and travels from the trenches of World War I to Ottawa’s LeBreton Flats. But this is not the kind of ponderous, oh-so-earnest novel that is typical of Canadian historical fiction. At least, not entirely.

The novel has a flaw, one that almost does it in. Although Lusignan’s own narration is engaging, it is frequently interrupted to make way for long letters written by Amalia Driscoll, the lover of Essiambre d’Argenteuil, a lieutenant in the war, with whom Lusignan shares the titular secret. Driscoll’s letters are everything the rest of the novel is not: plodding, dull, overly detailed, and tedious.

There is a technical term for using letters, journals, diary entries, etc. to convey information in a novel: cheating. Novelists usually resort to these devices because they can’t think of a more creative or integrated way to get this information across in the story. In A Secret Between Us, this problem is compounded by the way in which the letters force the narrative — which was ticking along so well under its own steam — to a virtual standstill for their duration.

Still, while far from perfect, Poliquin’s novel is certainly the most enjoyable of the bunch thus far.

Next: The Assassin’s Song

2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 3

Posted 3 November, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize | 1 comment

Late Nights on Air, by Elizabeth Hay. McClelland & Stewart, $32.99 cloth, 368 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7710-3811-2.

Previous Scotiabank Giller Prize nominations/wins: 2000, A Student of Weather (nominee)

Other awards: 2004, Ottawa Book Award (Garbo Laughs)

2001, Marian Engle Award

From the publisher: “Hay has a skewering intelligence about the frailties of the human heart. Weaving stories from the past into the present, she builds a fresh, erotic, darkly witty and moving tale, replete with sentences that stop you dead because of their unexpected wisdoms and startling beauty.”

From reviews: “In the course of her story, Hay swoops down like a raven on odd, shiny bits of information about the North. The tufts of soft muskox hair that snag on branches in the bush are called qivuit; the violet shades of the northern lights are due to nitrogen; the sound of someone crawling into a tent pitched on dry lichen in the tundra is a dry crackling, like wrapping paper. Nothing escapes her.” — The Walrus

“Hay seems to have fallen too much in love with her own words, too much in love with the North (where she once lived), too much in love with real-life explorer John Hornby (what is it with novelists’ need to jam a square peg of historical context into every round-holed narrative?) and too much in love with her characters, whom she gives too much rein to meander about the tundra as they see fit.” — NOW Magazine

“Late Nights on Air isn’t a page-turner in the sense of having an action-packed plot; it’s gripping in the more satisfying sense that it’s psychologically astute, richly rendered and deftly paced. It’s a pleasure from start to finish.” — Toronto Star

Representative passage: “This was the night, July 17, Eleanor elected not to go to bed at all in order to experience the brief middle-of-the-night twilight with its profusion of violet clouds directly overhead and its yellow gleam in the northern sky. Dressed in wool pants, wool jacket, gloves, with bug repellent smeared on her face and neck, she lay on her back on the warm, mattressy tundra whose thick growth held on to the day’s heat. Tweedy smells rose from the soft tangle straight into her nostrils. The colours and textures at eye level, the russets, browns, blacks, reds, formed an embrace so gently erotic she dozed off with a smile on her lips, only to come awake when a ptarmigan whirred by, or a snowy owl flew down and sat on a big stone twenty feet away, or loons cried in the distance. The loon’s long call seemed to her like a statement of the hour, a horizontal sound that tapered off into the horizon, while its laughter was vertical, high, flashy, rippling. The Barrens themselves were horizontal, but vertical, too, she thought. A vertical world of air: a country of clouds, and abundance of wind.”

My assessment: With its Yellowknife setting, and a final third that features a lengthy canoe trip through the Barrens in the Arctic wilderness, place is a dominant feature of Late Nights on Air. Hay’s descriptions of the northern landscape are extensive, and contain the kind of supple, sensuous detail that might appeal to fans of the two American Annies: Proulx and Dillard.

Those who are not fans of either writer, however, and those who prefer novels that privilege story over place, are likely to find much of this book plodding in the extreme. What story there is on offer involves a group of people who work at CFYK, the local Yellowknife radio station. Much of the first half of the book — before that extended canoe trip — is taken up with characters chattering away to each other in dialogue that is baldly expository and not terribly engaging:

The smile widened on Dido’s lips. She shifted and looked at her watch. Then she looked at Gwen. “Why are you sitting on a chair? All the rest of us are on the floor.”

“I’m comfortable on the chair.” But she didn’t feel comfortable. And didn’t look it either, she knew that.

“You don’t look comfortable.”

“I’m as comfortable as I ever am.”

“But you’re apart from us, sitting up there. You’ve set yourself apart.”

“I know. I know I’m sitting on a chair and everyone else is on the floor.”

Hay’s tendency to take the reader by the hand and explain everything in explicit detail derails much of her narrative’s potency: “Ralph was saying, ‘A day like today makes me appreciate a day like yesterday.’ He meant coming to a standstill made him appreciate a day of hard slogging.” And her incessant, heavy-handed use of foreshadowing does the novel a disservice: when the much-anticipated tragedy finally occurs, it has the effect of being palely anticlimactic.

Like the canoe trip that the characters embark on, the act of reading this book feels like a tough slog over unforgiving terrain.

Next: A Secret Between Us

2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist, Part 2

Posted 31 October, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Scotiabank Giller Prize | No comments

Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje. McClelland & Stewart, $34.99 cloth, 278 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7710-6872-0.

Previous Scotiabank Giller Prize nominations/wins: 2000, Anil’s Ghost, winner

Other awards (selected): 2000, Governor General’s Award for Fiction (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Irish Times International Fiction Prize (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Prix Médicis (Anil’s Ghost)

2000, Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize (Anil’s Ghost)

1992, Booker Prize (The English Patient)

1992, Governor General’s Award for Fiction (The English Patient)

1979, Governor General’s Award for Poetry (There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do)

1970, Governor General’s Award for Poetry (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid)

From the publisher: “Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakeable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory. It is Michael Ondaatje’s most intimate and beautiful novel to date.”

From reviews: “Truths amply demonstrated by character, imagery, and action are repeatedly double-underlined for the reader with ponderous generalizations such as ‘There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known only briefly.’” — Quill & Quire

“The work is written like a well-prepared meal, with the perfect amounts of appetizer and main course and dessert; just enough and not too much.” — January Magazine

“The more you reread Divisadero, the more you come to understand the sleight of hand that Ondaatje performs here. The sleuthing, for the novel is a detective story of the heart. The craft, for the author blends sex, drugs, and gambling with homesteading, caravans, and war. Every story it tells is really one story; every account of loyalty and betrayal, of people divided, is one account.” — Georgia Straight

“There is something endearingly human about this book, for all its art: who can’t forgive a hopeless romantic?” — New York Times

Representative passage: “There were nights when Lucien startled himself awake at his daughter’s wildness. How had she, the one daughter he had known as obedient and well mannered, evolved into such a person? Was it simply that Pierre was the man she demanded above every other principle? There was this live coal of desire on her tongue that had altered her, so that she could no longer be sheltered by the husk of a family. And he realized he loved even more this proud indelible daughter, his Flammarion companion, who had leapt beyond him into the life of this dangerous stranger, a man he was unable to like except through the knowledge that Lucette had placed herself in the cup of his hand, just as she had bent over and moved back into his body, defenceless with pleasure in the garden shower.”

My assessment: Divisadero is really two separate books, written in two divergent styles.

The first book is about a ranch hand, Coop, who has an affair with Anna, one of the daughters of the farmer for whom he works. When the father discovers the affair, he beats Coop almost to death. The story follows Coop’s adventures as a cardsharp in Vegas and Tahoe, where he becomes a “mechanic” — a cheat who is proficient at dealing stacked cards in such a way as to avoid notice.

The second book focuses on Anna, who flees the farm after the incident with her father and winds up in France, researching the life of a writer named Lucien Segura.

With a title like Divisadero, it is not surprising that the novel features diverging storylines. “Divisadero,” Anna says, “from the Spanish word for ‘division,’ … Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning ‘to gaze at something from a distance.’” And lest we feel that the two halves of the novel are unconnected, Ondaatje provides numerous parallels between the two stories: both feature rural settings; both involve makeshift families; both feature an illicit love affair that a father discovers; both feature acts of violence in which shards of glass play a key role; and both are touched by war.

The problem is not the substance of these two narratives, the problem is their wildly divergent styles. The first half of the book is tough, direct, and often violent, propelled forward by strong storytelling and a seething undercurrent of menace.

When the focus shifts to Anna and her musings about the French writer, Ondaatje capitulates to the kind of flowery, mannered, purple prose that characterized The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost, and the book comes to a complete standstill. In place of the lean, crisp prose of the first half, this part of the book showcases the Ondaatje who never encountered a metaphor he didn’t fall instantly in love with: a purloined wooden flower retained by the thief is “a stolen thing like a live alouette in his pocket,” and a sexual liaison is described as moving “the heat of her cave onto his coldness.”

This is the kind of writing that has won Ondaatje accolades, but it generally comes off feeling overwrought and cloying. Following immediately upon the much more satisfying, less show-offy first half, it has the net effect of rendering Divisadero one of the most frustrating and disheartening reading experiences of the year.

Next: Late Nights on Air.

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