linked stories and two linked novels by Elizabeth Strout

Took a step backward in time yesterday as I paused in reading Elizabeth Strout's Anything Is Possible (2017) to begin reading her previous novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016). Anything is a collection of linked stories about various people in the small Illinois town all of whom have some connection to or remembrance of Lucy, who grew up ostracizeD nad impoverished in a troubled family, virtually if not entirely friendless, and who has become an author living in NYC and who has just published a memoir. That memoir is obviously the eponymous 2016 novel, which purports to answer the question as to how this young woman could have risen above her deprived background and become a serious writer. What we read in Anything (first three stories/chapters anyway) shows us that the people who touched her life (including her parents and sibs) and scorned or shunned her during her childhood had significant problems of their own - mental, moral, ethical problems including in particular infidelity that broke apart families and scarred the children of the broken marriages. Stepping back to read Lucy, Strout introduces us to the successful author and devoted mother and it takes sometime before we comprehend the deprivation of her family and community background. We meet her as she is recovering form sepsis in a hospital and her mother visits - I was surprised that she's kind tho shy and somewhat distant tho not as monstrous a sister I'd expected from what I'd read in Anything. Sprout gives us a glimpse into Lucy's odd family tho when Lucy recalls her first visit home w her new husband and the coldness w which her father treats him, allegedly because he's German and her father feels guilt about killing two young Germans in WWII - I don't buy that entirely. Her mother also begins telling L about the fate of the Nicely sisters - a family broken up by scandal surrounding mother's affair - and we get much more about that in the subsequent volume. I don't know of any two literary works linked in quit the same way - one as a source document referenced in the 2nd - as these two, linked stories and linked novels embracing each other.

The dark themes and incidents in Elizabeth Strout's Anything Is Possible

Here are some of the traumatic incidents in just the first 3 chapters/stories in Elizabeth Strout's recent novel (or linked short stories, if you prefer), Anything Is Possible: arson, extreme poverty, bullying, public masturbation, physical and sexual abuse, infidelity (witnessed by teenage daughter), infidelity (aided and tolerated by spouse), suicide (jumping from a hotel window), voyeurism (spying on a house guest), rape - am I leaving out anything? These are painful stories that portray life in a small, impoverished town in the Midwest as anything but pastoral, and they'd be unbearable save for Strout's clear and precise language and the glimmer of hope that some at least can escape the miseries of life in this circuit. In fact, the link connecting the stories is a character, not yet seen in the 1st 3 stories in the book, Lucy Barton, a young girl from an ostracized family in town, extremely shy in her youth, who is now living in New York City - almost unfathomable to those back in town - and in a successful career as a writer, in fact one who's just published a memoir (on sale in the local bookstore - yes, they have one). Be it noted that Strout - whom I think shares some autobiographical details w/ Lucy - has published a novel called Lucy Barton, so these 2 books are of a piece. Another notable feature that ameliorates the pain of this novel: Strout pays loving attention to the boring details of everyday life; e.g., in the first story in the book she spends a lot of time an 80-something man in town to buy a couple of presents for his wife - a scarf, and a book on gardening, and he has several dull and un-portentous meetups with a few townsfolk (hi, how are you, etc.) before the story explodes in an act of violence, confession, and painful guilt.

No happy endings in Beasts Head for Home

And...following up on yesterday's post...we don't get a "happy" ending in Kobe Abe's Beasts Head for Home (1957). I won't give away details, but will tip my figurative hat to Abe for building this narrative - story of two men crossing a vast winter landscape in Manchuria w/ virtually no provisions, trying to get to Japan while avoiding potential attacks from various competing armies - to an exciting, dramatic conclusion. We (and the protagonist, Kyuzo) have known for some time that the traveling partner (Ko) was a heroin smuggler who will use and discard Kyuzo or anyone else who gets in his path. Abe plays this drama out to the end in the final (4th) section of the novel, as Ko insists that Kyuzo hide out in an abandoned tower at a city park while he arranges their transport to Japan. Kyuzo, rightly, suspects that this is a set-up - and unsurprisingly Ko abandons Kyuzo, leaving him without food or funds or any connection in the city where he's been left. The final section of the novel follows Kyuzo in his pursuit of Ko - all pretty good and continuation of the trek motif as a Japanese officer (or so he seems) brings Kyuzo to a port where he boards a small boat headed for Japan. We know of course that he's not through w/ Ko, and they have a remarkable reunion on the boat, where several "secrets" are revealed and novel builds toward its conclusion. All told, this is a really good, cinematic adventure tale; is it anything more? Despite the special pleading in the nearly unreadable "introduction" (really, a scholarly essay) to the Columbia U Press edition, it doesn't seem to me as if Abe is making any great universal statement about human life and destiny, about identity, about the cultural conflicts in Manchuria as various armies scrapped for territory after the defeat of Japan in the WWII. This novel doesn't have the dreamlike sense of mystery in Abe's famous Woman in the Dunes, and I don't think Abe intended it to do so. It's more like a Western, in an exotic (to us) setting, with survival skills, drug smuggling, and doubling of identity - somewhat reminiscent of the doubling of character in The Secret Sharer, for ex. - just enough to give it the sheen and allure of psychological and sociological significance - but don't get lost seeking a world view within this novel; take it for what it is at its best, an exciting story of endurance and, perhaps, survival.

We don't expect a happy ending in Beasts Head for Home

The 3rd section of Kobo Abe's Beasts Head for Home (1957) brings the two travelers - the young and naive Kyuzo headed for his homeland, Japan, and the older man who's taken the lead on this entire trek, Ko - at last to a small town that seems to be a Chinese military encampment. After several weeks of enduring hardships that nearly killed both men, they now get reasonably good housing provided by a Chinese "general" (it's hinted that rank means little in this army, as there are more officers than rank-and-file enlisted men), along w/ a promise of conveyance to truck or van to the coastal town of their destination. Seems good, but we can also see that Ko is in the process of setting Kyuzo up for a fall; Ko admits to Kyuzo that's he's smuggling raw heroin and that he's a "wanted man" (Kyuzo has already figured out some of this); he gets Kyuzo to wear the heavy jacket he's toted through the entire trek - weighted with packets of the drug - and he uses Kyuzo's hoarded money to pay for their passage - promising Kyuzo that he'll get a large cut of the profits from the smuggling. All very doubtful - he's letting Kyuzo carry all the risk and he'll no doubt cut him loose when and if he unloads the heroin. Though some of the details are still foggy to me even 3/4 of the way through the novel, it's a pretty good adventure story with some really powerful scenes along the way: the encampment in a ruined brick kiln at which Kyuzo stumbles on the mummified remains of a family, the desperate attempts to keep warm by igniting clumps of grass. What about the title, though? There's a reference in part 3 to human beings as not much different from wild beasts - but it still seems a strange title, as this is by no means a conventional odyssey or a "homeward bound"journey; in fact, Kyuzo doesn't really have a home - he's escaping from his home town, which is under Soviet rule, and heading toward a country he's never seen (at least I think that's so - details are scarce). Strange title to be sure. 

Existential journey or buddy movie?: Abe's Beasts Head for Home

Halfway through Kobo Abe's 1957 novel, Beasts Head for Home, and I'm thinking it's best to just read this as an adventure story of two men trying to survive on a trek through horrible conditions, limited supplies, Arctic cold, poor navigation, threatened by wolves and other creatures, in time of war with dangerous armies of all factions, forced to keep clear of cities and even villages, vague about their destination, and in fact not sure if they can trust each other - whether this is a cinematic adventure story of suffering and near-death and constant danger or whether (like Abe's most famous novel) this is an existential commentary modern life and the struggle for existence and meaning, who knows? It's a powerful if often confusing narrative, especially for an American reader unfamiliar with the details of the Sino-Soviet war under way at the time of this trek. The central character, a 20-year-old man, Kyuzo, is trying to get to Japan - his ancestral home, though it seems he was born in occupied Manchuria; he meets an older man on a train headed in some way toward his destination, but the train is stopped by soldiers and wartime sabotage and the two, under the strict guidance of the older, more experienced man, who says his name is Ko (maybe it's a nom de guerre), and Kyozu is uncertain whether he can trust Ko to actually be leading him toward safety. This whole novel could probably be transposed to a contemporary setting and made into a successful, or at least accessible movie - though we'd need to no more about the motivation of the two characters, what draws them together and how or why each may be suspicious of the other. Does sound like a # of movies (e.g., The Defiant Ones), though - maybe too many others. Still worth a read; relatively short and pretty easy to follow if you just put the politics and military history aside.

The surprisingly cinematic style of Abe's Beasts Head for Home

The late Japanese novelist Kobo Abe, best known in America for The Woman in the Dunes, has a new translation out (2017 translation) of his 1957 novel, Beasts Head for Home, which I've started and read through the first (of 4 sections). As always, I did not read the introduction before starting to read the novel; I've found that "introductions" too often give you tons of info that will make no sense to you until you read the book or give too much away about the plot or provide a critical judgment that will inevitably color and shape your reading experience, so, no - but in this case I wonder: Maybe I should (have). This novel differs significantly from Dunes; in this one we follow a 20-year-old Japanese man who has been more or less held captive (though treated well) in Manchuria by occupying Russian soldiers, during the Sino-Soviet war ca 1947. The book begins w/ his plotting his escape from the Russians and though it's not entirely clear it seems he's headed for Japan, his ancestral home (though not clear if he ever lived there). The whole first section of the book is much like a thriller and told in a cinematic manner (though Dunes was in fact made into a fine movie, and Abe wrote the screenplay, that was more of a surprise success; reading it, the novel did not feel at all cinematic, in fact the opposite). There's the plotting of his escape, the challenge of boarding a train, the train he boards gets caught in some kind of crossfire and ordered to return to station, and so forth. The problem for me though arises from my complete lack of familiarity with the war and with its geography; I can't quite track who's after whom, which way the train is headed, how the man - Kyoko - plans to cross the Japan, and even if that's his intended destination. Maybe the intro would have helped me; I'm far enough in now, that, that I'll keep w/ the story, at least though section 2.

The wit of Elaine Dundy - but not enough to carry me to the end of her novel

At the end of section 1 (past the half-way point) in Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avacado (1958), a loosely autobiographical novel about her year post-college in Paris, and I can see why the book has been republished several times and seems to have drawn an eclectic following to say the least (Dundy's afterword to the 2007 NYRB reissue includes her boasts about praise she received on its initial publication from such luminaries as Groucho Marx and Ernest Hemingway, who said her dialog, unlike his, was realistic - sounds like apocryphal if not delusional quote. The book is what you might call jaunty and her writing style is crisp and funny, with many unusual turns of phrase, e.g., from one that sticks in my mind re the jazz bands at a particular club that "ranged from the professional to the inadequate." You can see how her choice of a single work turns this mere observation into a quip; the book is full of those. Yet: the book lacks any sense of plot (she should probably given it up and written a memoir) - just a series of a young American's adventures and misadventures and various liaisons and crushes. I know this is unfair w/out my following her to the end of her journey (in her "real" life she left Paris after a year of minor success in theater, moved to London, married the famous critic Kenneth Tynan, and wrote this book w/ others to follow), but I have little sense of the development of a character and no sense of her work in theater aside from a good description of her stage fright before 1st performance (and one good quote picked up in the intro essay to NYRB edition: asked how actors can say the same lines night after night she replies: Isn't that what we all do? Why not get paid for it?). She is cruel and self-destructive in love, dumping a smart, talented, caring young man and taking off with a guy she hardly knows for few weeks near Biarritz. But she's an adventuress, enabled by a generous grant from her wealthy uncle, and she seems careless about danger, responsibility, or commitment of any sort - a luxurious insouciance that few of her friends can indulge. For those charmed by her witty style, my quibbles about lack of direction would be immaterial, but my interest flagged by the half-way point.

What makes Roth great?

What makes Roth great? I'd say above all else it's his narrative voice. His narrators are most often variants on the author's own voice, whether directly identified as "Philip Roth" or identified with him through an avatar who shares many but not all of Roth's professional and biographical qualities and status details, or sometimes, through a more distant 3rd-person narration, his narrators inhabit Roth's familiar landscapes - Newark in the 1950s, the Berkshires and (less frequently) Manhattan in the 80s and 90s (Roth lived part-time in rural Conn., but the Berkshires serve his pastoral purposes. But the voice is always Roth's: full of mordant humor, obsession, confession, a deep interest in American politics and history, a bewildered Jewish faith and a wryly skeptical vision of contemporary Israel, nostalgia for a vanished community and way of life (2nd-generation Jewish working class Newark), and a frankness bordering on the confessional (if not obsessional) about sex. Despite the many different settings of his 30+ novels and several stories, I believe you could identify Roth as the author almost by selection of random paragraph and passage of dialog. Roth was not an experimental writer by any means - he began as a realist, and though his novels sometimes include elements that touch on magic realism (the "death" of the narrator in The Counterlife, e.g.), he was never taken by the formal inventiveness of postmodern fiction that dominated American academic fiction from the 70s through maybe the 90s, nor did he work in the surreal, dreamlike mode of many of the Eastern European writers whom he championed. But he was experimental, even avant garde, in his conceptual ability; many of his novels establish a "what if" and play out the concept: What if a professor accused of making a racist remark turns out, himself, to be a black man who has hidden his racial identity? What if an American hero, who turns out to be a fascist, were elected president? His fiction included topical themes - militant radical youth (American Pastoral), the polio epidemic of the 50s (Nemesis), e.g. - but was never in itself topical; he was always focused on the effect of world events on individuals and families. Roth will never be remembered for great plots - some of his best works (American Pastoral, Human Stain) just end abruptly, the way stories sometimes do but novels, rarely - which is probably why there has never been a great film of a Roth novel (the film of his early story Goodbye, Columbus is a great film, however). And I don't think he ever created a great female character (his women are stereotypes and his men are by no means "woke"). But there's so much greatness in his work, so much plenitude, so much humor, and so much fine writing that's never pretentious or arch or willfully inaccessible. His work will endure.

The death of a great American writer

Woke up about 15 minutes ago to the sad news that Philip Roth has died at 85. Roth was without question among the great English-language writers of his time and ours - among the pantheon of Updike, Bellow, Munro, and Trevor. Of these only Munro is survives, and I believe she (like Roth some years ago) has retired from writing. Of them all, as a fellow American, male, white, Jewish literary aspirant from Essex County, I felt the closest to Roth. I knew very well his childhood landscape of the Newark and the western suburbs (the title story in his first collection, Goodbye, Columbus, was set on the streets where I first lived), and his novels have been part of my life for as long as I have been a reader. I've posted on his work many times on this blog, and will probably do so again as I'm sure I'll go back to read many of his works - many have recommended rereading The Plot Against America, a strangely prophetic story about a right-wing presidency - but what comes to mind this morning  in the immediate wake of this sad news are beautiful moments in many of his works: the description of glove-making and the encounter with the daughter under the highway in Newark, the visit to the cemetery and to the childhood haunts in Asbury Park in Sabbath's theater, this hilarious concept of Jews returning from Israel to the desecrated shtetls of Eastern Europe advanced by a shyster named "Philip Roth" in Operation Shylock, this shocking (in its time) sexuality of Portnoy's Complaint, the boy on the roof of the temple in the story The Conversion of the Jews, the sorrowful and tender recollections of Roth Sr. in Patrimony, the images of Newark in a hot summer during the polio epidemic in his final work, Nemesis, and more - but I'll leave it there for the moment. Although, especially in my years as a books editor, I got to meet many great writers (including another gone last week, Tom Wolfe), I never met Roth. Probably just as well. I know him in the way we "know" all the great writers we read and admire, the living and the dead. I am sure that much of his life was a struggle - to write, to live with the opprobrium that followed publication of many of his books, to overcome serious physical pain and mental strain - but out of this struggle he has produced great art and insight into our time and place. May he rest in peace.

Who could resist a novel (The Dud Avocado) w/ a blurb from Groucho Marx?

For some time I've been meaning to read Elaine Dundy's 1958 novel, The Dud Avacado, and honestly how could you resist a novel that comes w/ a jacket blurb from Groucho Marx? The book, popular in its time, was reissued in 2007 by the great New York Review Press, another reason to read (I'll read or at least start reading anything NYRB publishes). In fact, a recent NYT feature on how NYRB books are becoming fashion accessories (!) noted that Dud Avacado is supposedly Greta Gerwig's favorite book. Easy to see why. The DA is an American (woman) in Paris novel of its time, with the narrator, Sally Jo (?) Gorce, settled into Paris (as the novel opens she's been there about 3 months, so we don't get any of the laborious stuff about finding an apartment etc.) on a two-year stint funded by her rich uncle. She seems very much like a Greta Gerwig character - smart, funny, quirky, endearingly awkward both physically and socially - it's easy to imagine GG playing the role or directing a film adaptation (if in fact the novel has enough plot to be film-worthy - not sure yet). In the opening pages (I'm about 20 percent through, 50+ pages in), the Gorce (as she's often called by fellow American) runs into an old friend and crush, Lenny; they have a couple of drinks and she feels flushingly in love w/ this young man, an aspiring theater director. This sudden crush leads to complications as she needs to break things off w/ the 30-something Italian diplomat w/ whom she is having an affair; the diplomat doesn't give her up so easily - gives her a sob story that his wife has left him because they can't have children - and actually proposes to Gorce, which she wisely rebuffs, suspecting he's after her $ - and he slaps her around: This is a '50s novel in every sense. The writing is breezy and at times hilarious; we don't, however, have much of a sense of what makes Gorce tick, what she does in Paris other than flirt and drink (she does aspire to be in a play that Lenny will direct, but she doesn't seem driven by a passion for art or drama). There have of course been many "my year in Europe" novels (guilty!), and the ones from the '50s such as this differ from more recent entries, such as Prague: The dollar was dominant, so young Americans could live on little money or could spend pretty lavishly (Gorce shuns the Metro and rides in taxis, for ex.) and pretty much everyone who went settled in London or Paris: other countries were less stable, and of course communication was nothing like what it is today. So far, DA is completely fun to read, and we'll see if it develops any gravitas and cultural insight or if it becomes a series of emotional pratfalls and dubious relationships.

A (semi-autobiographical? story about aspiring Jesuits and their struggles with faith and feelings

John L'Heureux's story in the current New Yorker, The Long Black Line, tells of a class of young men entering a Jesuit order in the mid 1950s (he calls the group of men "postulants" - I think they don't become novices until after an initial period of a year?), a story that appears to be if not autobiographical at least based on JL'H's experience (a note after the story invites readers to go online and listen to HL'H discuss his time in a Jesuit order). Several of them en, including the protagonist, drop out of the program before entering the order; one, who a novice assigned to leading the group of initiates, washes out of the order in a tragic manner. At least two of the Jesuits suffer post-war trauma (WWII and Korea), a different time from now for sure. The is interesting to read not so much for its literary qualities, although it is well written, clear, not self-consciously stylish (JL'H had a long career as a writing prof at Stanford), as for its account of a world little know to most outsiders: the rigorous schedule, the assigned work some of it pointless and tedious, the lengthy periods of silence, the obliteration of feelings and desires, the cruel hierarchy not all that different from boot camp - and also the sly and surprising ways in which the young men defy the system, in particular the vulgar language when on work duty outside of the main building (where silence is enforced) and the frank if awkward sexual advances (and rebuffs). I almost wish JL'H had written a memoir rather than a story - although of course I recognize that the factual details may be elusive to him some 60+ years after the events. But the (suppressed?) feelings endure - at least until they're given new life in fiction.

Impressive accomplishments in Urrea's House of Broken Angels

In the end, there are many impressive accomplishments in Luis Roberto Urrea's new novel, The House of Broken Angels, including some snappy dialogue, a great scene of partial reconciliation between the two de la Cruz half-brothers on the verge of the imminent death of Big Angel (family patriarch and heart of this novel), a raucous account of mucho eating, drinking, flirting, and genera carousing at Big Angels 70th and final birthday party, some good passages that present in microcosm some of the history of the de la Cruz family, in particular its emigration north from Mexico to the San Diego area. This novel is the absolute antagonist of minimalist fiction - so many characters, so many relationships, so many plot elements, some of them developed in full, others left open. As noted in several previous posts, it can be a challenge to read this novel and it would probably pay off to read it twice (which I will probably do, as it's our book-group selection for next month); it's a novel of great ambition, and a success for the most part - the dramatic and threatening confrontation near the end of the book seems to come out of nowhere as we hardly know the central character in this scene; the sheer abundance of characters and incidents can lead to confusion at a # of points (a family tree would have helped!), we really don't know enough about the half-brother Little Angel, the only one who has migrated away from this family and who's reconciliation w/ Big Angel is probably the key moment in the novel - perhaps Little Angel (who, from the author's extensive note at the end of the novel, seems to be the character closest biographical detail to Urrea) may be the protagonist in a future novel - Urrea seems to have more material in his (real and imagined) family life to populate more than one novel.

Urrea's ambitious narrative strategy in House of Fallen Angels

I will give Luis Roberto Urrea his props for the extremely ambitious narrative strategy in his new novel, The House of Fallen Angels - essentially a multi-generational family saga about the de la Cruz clan of Mexican-Americans who emigrated in about 1960 from the Baja Peninsula, settling south of San Diego (except for one of half-brother who his moved to Seattle). Urrea chooses to tell this complex story involving multiple characters through the events of just a few days: the funeral of the matriarch, a 70th-birthday party for the oldest of her sons who is pretty much the family patriarch, and I think a 3rd day that comes later in the novel (I'm about 2/3rds through it). Most writers would tell a complex family saga in a straightforward narrative: Think of the Buendia narrative in One Hundred Years of Solitude, for a great example; sometimes this conventional approach, however, can feel boring and tedious, as we work our way, year by year, generation by generation, across a predetermined narrative path (think of the recent successful novel Pachinko, which had many strengths but which at some point I just stopped reading, largely because of this march-through-time approach). So Urrea tells the family story through occasional memories, flashbacks, characters filling others in about family lore - and we get the picture(s) piece by piece, the novel becoming ever more clear as we near the conclusion. And some of the scenes/memories that Urrea presents are terrific: Big Angel's memories of his near-enslavement and physical and sexual abuse aboard a fishing boat and his daring escape and migration north if probably the high point of the novel. All that said, I am still wringing my hands, figuratively, in frustration as I try to keep the characters clear in my mind. As noted yesterday, it's as if we readers had wandered into Big Angel's birthday celebration and we're trying to figure out who's who and who's related to whom. I'm still trying, far too often, even as I near the conclusion. This is a book that, I think, you need to read twice. The same might be said, say, of Ulysses, Absalom Absalom!, or maybe even its forefather, 100 Years. Unfortunately, most readers probably won't do that. There's still plenty of value in a first reading, but it's tough going, by design.

A difficult novel but worth reading further - House of Broken Angels

I'm accepting that Luis Roberto Urrea declined w/ intent to not include a family tree in his new novel, The House of Broken Angels, because he wants us to feel uncertain and to grope around, trying to figure out the relations and interrelations and family histories of all the members of this clan - and even at 1/e of the way through this novel I'm still groping and trying to remember characters' names and to keep the relationships straight. But it's a feeling, I think, much as if we'd walked into the family gathering in progress and got to know the people present in bits, snatches, and pieces; only toward the end (I hope!) will the family stories clarify. At this point I'm pretty sure of the main character, Big Angel, 70 years old and w/ about a week to live (his family members know he's ill but don't know the dire prognosis, his wife, Perla - we see them in a tender scene lying in bed next to each other, Big Angel unable to move much and sexually impotent but with an alert mind full of many observations about death and dying and trying to take stock of his long and complex family life; and his youngest brother (half-brother), Little Angel, who's other was white and who has drifted farthest from his Mexican-American family, living in Seattle where he teaches college English, a life and locale that seems to his family like life on another planet. There are many hints and references to a dead brother, possibly shot in a gang incident, but we don't know a lot about his death at this point. If this novel weren't written w/ such vivid intensity I (and many readers I think) would shrug and put it down at some point, but Urrea's fine writing carries the day, even when we're unsure of where this plot is heading (the first 1/3 of the novel is about the day of Big Angel's mother's funeral and the post-funeral family gathering) or even who's speaking. Urrea gives us some beautiful descriptions of the Mexican-American neighborhood south of San Diego, some barbed and witty dialog, and much access to the peculiar mind of Big Angel, on the verge of death and its mysteries.

Why doesn't Urrea's House of Broken Angels include a family tree?

About 20 percent in (ridiculous Kindle edition doesn't even give you page #s!) on Luis Alberto Urrea's new novel, The House of Broken Angels, and am still trying to get my bearings. Is it me, the novel, or the Kindle format? I can't even remember most of the characters' names (that's probably on me, although a quick Google search of the title shows me that at least one reviewer notes that novels with such complex family relationships often - and should - include a family tree to help readers; GG Marquez did so!). The central character, Big Angel, is a 70-year-old patriarch of a large Mexican-American family living in the San Diego area; the novel opens as he wakes up and realizes that he (and the whole clan, who depend on him to keep them on schedule) will be late for the 100-year-old mother's funeral. We quickly get to meet his wife and several children and learn a little of his background, most notably that he worked in an office (the utility company?) and was extra-vigilant about keeping on schedule so as to combat the image of Mexican-Americans as perennially late. We also learn that he is mortally ill, has about a week to live, though he's kept this secret from his family (although they must know he's infirm, as among other things he's confined to a wheelchair). We have hints of various dramas involving family dynamics, particularly the relationship between Big Angel and his half-brother, Little Angel, who is half-Anglo and lives in Seattle where he is an English professor; there's a sense that he has betrayed his family heritage by these life choices and that rainy Seattle might as well be on another planet. The family does get to the service just about on time, where they (we) encounter several other siblings and their spouses, with a younger generation ever-present and speaking only in English (Big Angel and his cohort prefer Spanish but speak both at the needs arise; there are many Spanish words and phrases throughout the novel, but they're pretty easily deciphered by context alone for those who don't know the language). In short, the opening of the novel presents a lot of possibilities for plot and character development, but the story has not yet lifted off the ground.

The promise and the shorcomings of McGuane's first novel

By the end, I have to write off Thomas McGuane's debut novel, The Sporting Club (1968), as a highly promising first novel by a young (28) author who shows throughout a great writing style, a talent for smart and sharp dialog, a lot of arcane knowledge put to good use (lots of detail about fishing!), a talent for building up a dramatic scene and for building to a dynamic conclusion - yet, yet, can anyone really accept the end of this novel, in which the hunting/fishing camp in the Michigan woods turns orgiastic and bloodthirsty, in which the camp is essentially destroyed? The novel has a lot of promise but the young writer's skill and enthusiasm gets the best of his ability to tell a credible story; what starts as a naturalistic novel about a conflict of personalities, in particular between two old friends and lifetime rivals, becomes an exaggerated, sometimes ridiculous conflagration. In a way it's typical of the over-the-top narratives of its era - the end of civilization as we know it - and also typical of young writers learning what it means to design and construct a novel, a narrative, a plot. I would guess McGuane looks back on this novel w/ some pride and with much bemusement - because it was in fact predictive of a fine young writer at the start of his career. McGuane has gone on to an incredibly successful career - somewhat underappreciated and out of the mainstream of American letters, in part by his choosing to avoid the academy and to settle in Montana. And of course has writing style has matured and settled over the years; it's hard to walk back from his current stories about life in the newly prosperous Northwest to the Dionsysian rambunctious happenings of Sporting Club, but in retrospect we can see that the talent was there and that McGuane developed that talent, even if in unpredictable ways.

Cinematic narrative style and why Coover blurbed McGuane's debut novel

In yesterday's post I surmised that the antagonist and genuinely destructive, vengeful character, Stanton, was the one who dynamited the dam causing a dangerous flood and depletion of a lake at the hunting-fishing lodge in Thomas McGuane's The Sproting Club (1968), this based on the observations of the central character, Quinn, caught in the flood and nearly drowned, who'd heard Stanton singing as he went under. I knew, though, that this made little sense, as the obvious one to dynamite sites at the camp was Olive, the property manager, part of the trashy country folks who over the generations had been abused and displaced by the wealthy club members. So we don't know exactly who did the damage, although all the club owners believe it's Olive (the damage continues, as Olive or someone destroys the camp lodge) and they form a vigilante squad to protect the property and to bring justice to Olive and his backers. What's striking here is how these club members believe they have every right to "frontier justice," taking the law into their own hands and attacking and maybe killing Olive and his followers. These are men of white privilege, business and academic leaders of greater Detroit who have owned shares of the camp for generations and have accumulated wooded acreage by who knows how many crooked ways and means - to this novel is building into a class war, a cataclysmic end-of-days fight between the haves and have-nots. Whom would you bet on? Olive and his crew are tougher, meaner, probably better fighters; the camp owners are better armed and better educated and far better connected, if that matters. We can see from this debut novel that McGuane has a cinematic style - building toward a tumultuous, violent resolution - although I don't think this among his novels was ever made into a film and I can see why - the characters, esp the women, are just barely sketched in; I can also see why a young Robert Coover gave this novel a generous advance quote: Something about the narrative build-up toward a conflagration and the clash of social classes reminds me of Coover's own great debut novel, The Origin of the Brunists.

The stupid behavior of the men in McGuane's Sporting Club

To give you an idea of the stupidity of the men at the fishing/hunting lodge in Thomas McGuane's novel The Sporting Club (1968), they engage not 1 by 3 times in a "duel" with pistols  (this just in the first half of the book). The nasty club member Stanton has a collection of antique pistols; he prods others to duel with him - ten paces, turn, fire, each gets one shot, just as in a Western. In the opening scene of the novel, the protagonist, a more reserved and intelligent character, Quinn, believes they're just playing around and is literally stunned when he feels that he's been shot in the heart and knocked down. Laughingly, Stanton informs Quinn that it's "lust" a wax bullet that he has "poured" himself - but was or not it still had an incredible impact. A shot like that could easily take out someone's eye - plus consider the shock of being hit when you didn't know the pistol was armed. Of course we also learn that Stanton in his gun obsession is also crafting real lead bullets for his pistols - so who wants to bet that before the end of the novel someone gets shot and killed, inadvertently or not. The right and mature way to behave in a situation like this, as anyone who is a true outdoorsman/woman must know, is to say put that pistol down, guns are not to be played with. We are meant to sympathize and empathize with the main character, Quinn, who's a well-meaning victim and who does give his old friend and antagonist, Stanton, a piece of his mind now and then. But he bears complicity; he allows Stanton to act like a child and an idiot - toward the middle of the book, Stanton (we think - not yet clear who did this), in pique against the newly hired club manager, blasts down the dam that holds back water in a retaining pond that controls the water flow into the fishing stream - almsot drowning Quinn in the process - so we have to wonder why Quinn doesn't just abandon his association w/ Stanton, or possibly with the entire club of rich, old, cantankerous men of privilege.

Hemingway v McGruane in the debut novel, The Sporting Club

Just to give a brief sense of how Thomas McGuane's debut novel, The Sporting Club, may seem at first to be Hemingwayesque - how could a novel about men in a private rod & gun club, with many beautifully written passages describing fly fishing and hunting, set in Michigan no less! not be compared with Hemingway?; what a long shadow for a young writer to try to come out from under - but is in fact the kind of narrative Hemingway never wrote and never would have. Though the setting affords McGuane ample opportunity to display not only his writing skills but also his arcane knowledge about fishing and hunting, the plot of the novel is a conventional threesome romance (closer, come to think of it, to FS Fitzgerald than to EH): two men with houses at the camp, Quinn (the protagonist) and Stanton (the antagonist) are both descendants of long-time club members, both successful in the Detroit business world, childhood friendly rivals, still as 30-something adults working out the rivalry. Quinn is apparently a bachelor; Stanton has brought a woman, Janey, w/ him to the camp - she seems at the halfway point to be the only woman in the camp - whom members suppose to be his new wife (he confesses to Quinn that they have not married). Stanton is an incredible egotist, cannot stand not being the best at everything he does, including the usually noncompetitive outdoor sports. He feels shown up by the manager of the club, Olson, a young man who grew up in the vicinity, from an impoverished family (unlike all the club members), an extraordinary skilled at hunting and fishing and knowledgeable about local terrain. Stanton can't stand being one-upped by anyone, so he begins a campaign to fire Olson - and at the halfway point succeeds and Olson is replaced by a brusque, weird, suspicious guy, Olson's personal pick as his successor. This cannot work out. All the while, all readers will be alerted by the stupid gunplay that Stanton entices Quinn to partake of - sure to lead to some kind of tragic climax, but involving whom? In Hemingway, a gun is a gun; in McGuane, it's an omen,

Thomas McGuane's first novel and his literary career, reputation, and influences

Thamas McGuane has had a long and highly successful writing career, with a focus on Western themes; somehow, I'd not read any of his novels but have for several years been enjoying his stories, which seem to appear regularly in the New Yorker. From his stories we sense that he's a Westerner - most are set in Montana - though he's not a writer of "Westerns"; his Montanans are contemporary, often prosperous, usually middle-aged men, making good money in the New West, particularly in real estate, as $ from Hollywood and Silicon Valley moves to Big Sky. In style, he's a brother of Richard Ford and a descendant of Raymond Carver. Inspired by a mention I came across somewhere regarding his novels, I picked up his first book, The Sporting Club (1968), which came w/ glowing jacket blurbs, introducing a young (28) writer. About 25% through, I'm impressed. He's a writer who seems to have found his footing and his style right from the outset - reminding me in this of Updike (Poorhouse Fair) in particular. How could a writer at that age be so confident, assured, and knowledgable? Well his career has not followed the arc of Updike's, perhaps in part because of his westward migration. Initially, he was compared w/ Hemingway (another writer who found is "voice" at the outset of his career), largely because of a shared interest in the outdoors and the Michigan setting that they shared as well - a big shadow that no doubt TMcG felt compelled to move out from under, because in fact his sensibility is quite different from Hemingway's. His writing is more expansive and his interest is more sociopolitical: The Sporting Club tells of one of those Michigan fishing and hunting lodges, a private enclave for well-off Detroit businessmen (white and Anglo, of course). Teh setting allows McGuane to write in loving detail about hunting and fishing (I know that he still is a devoted fly fisherman; don't know about the hunting), but his literary focus is on the rivalry between two old, ever-on-edge friends at the lodge and their immature, entitled behavior. An aura of tension hangs over this novel; the 2 friendly rivals at the outset engage in some stupid gunplay. Can we doubt that, under the influence of their rivalry, jealousy, competition (only one, Stanton, has come to the lodge w/ a woman - not his wife, he confides), and much drinking gunplay will lead to no good outcome?

The Ice Age cometh (Anna Kavan) and a new novel about Jonestown (Arnold Ludwig)

My final take on Anna Kavan's novel Ice (1967) is thata if you knew nothing of her troubled life - her attles with mental illness, addiction, abusive relationships and marriages, struggles to write, flight from Europe during World War II, death in near  obscurity in1968 at age 67 - the book would hold little or at least much less interest. As noted previously it's a dystopian novel about the coming of a 2nd Ice Age that will destroy the planet and end human life, but it's by no means a science-fiction novel - she has no interest in the cause of this impending disaster nor in any efforts by the human race to avert death. The novel is without plot - just a series of loosely connected events, as a protagonist pursues a beautiful (ice-like) woman across several continents; when he at last captures her he seems to rape her - Kavan is elusive on this matter - and the two of them take off by car - to nowhere. Could have been another chapter, it really doesn't matter. So this is a novel of its time - trippy, hallucinogenic - but doesn't make a lot of sense today aside from art of the life story of the unusual, outsider author.

On another note, I've been reading a new novel from Amazon/Kindle, by friend Arnold M. Ludwig - Blue Smoke & Mirrors. Not sure why Dr. Ludwig - a well-know professor of psychiatry and medicine - was unable to (or chose not to) find a traditional publisher, as this novel is a potential commercial success I would think: A thriller based on extensive research Ludwig has done on the Jonestown massacre. Ludwig has some intriguing and surprising theories about the events that led up to this debacle, and he tells the story through the eyes of a participant and unlikely survivor. For those interested in more information on religious cults and the mesmerizing powers of a cult leader - particularly those who've watched the recent Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country - this book is worth a good look.

Kavan's Ice: Written under a spell, and presented as a first draft unedited?

Section 10 (about the half-way point) in Anna Kavan's 1967 novel, Ice, is probably (along with section 1) the passage in this novel so far, largely because it steps aside from the so-called plot and just presents the scene, a landscape of global fear and destruction. Evidently vast stretches of the earth are becoming encased in ice, which has led to battles among rival factions in the ice-encrusted regions, panic and flight from these polar and far-northern (and southern?) latitudes, panic and inflation in the still habitable territories or countries, great disruptions and migrations, and a complete shutdown of global communications, with fact and information replaced by rumor. In a way, Ice becomes a dystopian - rather than a paranoid delusion - novel, and there have been many of those before and since 1967, but a few things make Ice a unique example from the genre. First, Kavan has no interest in the politics of this global catastrophe, nor in the science of the great freeze out. In some ways she anticipated the international concern w/ climate change, but she never actually attributes the encroaching ice to human action and malfeasance. In fact, Ice may not be a predictive narrative at all; it's possible that Kavan is imagining the destruction of much of the planet during the previous Ice Age (she makes it clear that human settlements are reduced to ruin, and the whole sociopolitical system seems medieval (at most): castles, fortresses, conveyance by boat (I think there are no references to trains and airplanes, not completely sure), feudal government, hand-to-hand combat, no reference to nuclear arms, to world history as we know it, certainly no anticipation of the advanced global communication of our age, no topical references to art or literature, etc. And of course it's possible that the entire novel is meant to be visionary rather than historic or predictive. A second difference between Ice and other dystopian novels is Kavan's indifference to plot and plausibility; the two central characters, each poorly defined, just proceed from one event and place to another, transported miraculously as we are often in dreams - she's not interest in the why the world is freezing or how people manage to survive, or not - boats just appear when needed, and the protagonist and the woman he's trying to rescue more ever-closer to the equatorial islands that hold a certain allure for the man (he's interested in a species of monkey that lives in Surinam, go figure). In short, the novel feels as if it were written under a spell and presented to us as a "completed" first draft, inconsistencies (plus many typographical errors in the Penguin reissue) be damned.

Kavan's ice as dream narrative, horror story, and '60s rock song

Anna Kavan's novel Ice (1967) continues to read like a dream narrative. We have a vague sense of the protagonist - a man in search of a young woman with whom he had been in love and who is now being held captive by "the warden," the absolute ruler of an unnamed northern country. We also have a vague sense of a world at a point of impending doom: cities are in ruins from some recent past upheaval (perhaps a world war), and the world is threatened by encroaching ice (a climate-change warning that, though not grounded in science so much as in horror-fantasy, was decades ahead of its time). That said, the narrative, like most dreams, consists of a cascading series of events - narrow escapes, death and destruction, flight and pursuit, strange and incongruous observations, sudden appearance and disappearance of significant characters - rather than any true plot development. Your patience with this type of novel will depend on your tolerance for hearing long recitations of someone else's dream narratives; mine is pretty low. At times Kavan's writing is really good, and she has a place among gothic-horror writers such as Poe and Lovecraft, but any attempt to truly make sense of this novel is probably doomed from the start. It's not about making sense, it's about establishing a mood and an atmosphere - one of violence, disruption, and catastrophe. Reading this novel is much like listening to some of the lesser-ranked popular rock music of its time (the late '60s): Starts off great and draws you in, your clapping and swaying and singing along, but at about 4 minutes in you're thinking this is getting pretty boring, let's wrap this one up, and by the end the only folks still into the music are the boys in the band. Kavan seems to have had a tragic life, and a note on the back cover of the Penguin reissue of this novel suggests that in part she was writing about her struggle to free herself from addiction; that's hard for me to see so far, but I'll think about that in reading further into Ice, at least for one more day.

The politics and the dream-like (though not truly Kafkaesque) narrative of Kavan's Ice

Anna Kavan, from the brief intro note in the 50th-anniversay edition of her (last?) novel, Ice (1967), appears to have been a writer (British?) who suffered from a number of mental illnesses and other troubles and used these struggles, or managed them?, by incorporating dream-like and paranoid episodes into her narratives. Ice, judging from the first 50 or so pp., is an unusual work in many aspects: It's a story of a man who returns to an unnamed country (presumably England) from some kind of traumatic event (possibly WWII?), to help the country in some unspecified way through an approaching crisis. His mission, which at this point anyway is completely vague and unclear, gets sidetracked as he goes to visit a woman whom he used to be in love w/ (she's now married to someone else). On his visit he gets lost and waylaid on dark country roads and then has visions of massive forms of ice filling the landscape, and of the woman he's to visit as encased and angelic in block of ice. The narrative proceed apace as he follows someone he thinks is this woman into a northern country (probably Norway?) where much lies in ruin (as much of Norway did after the war). He visits the head of the government to get a permit to stay and study the history of the region; the leader lives in a remote castle, and the narrator's visit to him will call to mind in most readers the dark, scary absurdities of Kafka; Kavan is not as dark nor as "political"; her writing is more surreal and dreamlike, with quick shifts of scene and atmosphere and elements of the supernatural. She is, however, prescient in her politics, as much of what she's writing about is today known as climate change: She envisioned an ice age (with the odd explanation that the planet would cool as the polar caps melted because less heat would be reflected from the polar ice - a theory anyway).

A novel (in part) about motherhood that defies many conventions

Jenny Offil's 2014 novel, Dept. of Speculation, is a series of scenes from a marriage, specifically from the POV of a character, perhaps much like the author, whom she refers to only as "the wife"; the novel is a sequence of what appear to be journal entries - sometimes one of the wife's observations on the state of her love life and, later, her marriage and motherhood; sometimes quotes or citations. This is a story - uncertainties of courtship, early married bliss, stresses of parenthood and career on hold, jealousy and infidelity ("the husband"), agony and battered self image, violent arguments, dramatic walkouts, consolation from friends and potential new love interest, tentative reconciliation, hopes and fears for the daughter - that has been told many times, but seldom if ever with such precision, pathos, and wit. It's like a novel pared back to its bare essence; many, even most, of these diary entries could be expanded into stories or chapters - but why do that when the message can be carried so swiftly and efficiently w/ just a few words? I really have no knowledge of Offil's practice of composition. Perhaps these are pared and selected from among thousands of journal entries; perhaps she composed it in a short times span rather than the 7 or so years that the novel seems to encompass. We do know, however, that she's a thoughtful writing instruction - one set of entries show her commentary on student work (imagined student or real? - we don't know for sure). A recent review of another novel cited this one as one of a slew of motherhood-anxiety works; that kind of pigeonholes Dept. of Spec. Unlike others in the genre, it's not full of whining and self-pity, and though "the husband" is a skunk Offil recognizes that there's blame to go around in a break-up: "the wife" is a powerful character in part because of her own ambivalence and ambiguity.

Why did the New Yorker publish I.B.Singer's The Boarder?

Not sure what to make of the appearance this week in the New Yorker of a story (The Boarder) by the late, great Nobel Prize winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer. He's been dead now for, what, at least 20 years I think. And though he's probably best known for his haunting, beautiful early stories about life in a Polish shtetl (most notably: A Crown of Feathers, Gimpel the Fool), famed for their unusual blend of the supernatural, the legendary, and the diurnal, in a place and way of life long gone (eradicated by the Nazi hordes). But he also wrote, later in life, many fine stories and short novels (e.g., Enemies) about life among the Jewish community in New York, where IBS had settled and lived - many of these stories were published in the original Yiddish in one of the Yiddish journals - another way of life long gone. (The New Yorker pretty much "discovered" IBS and published many of his stories from across his career, in English translation of course, some translated, like The Boarder, by IBS himself.) So the NYer tells us nothing about the provenance of this story: Was it published in Yiddish and never surfaced till now? Was it among IBS's papers as an unpublished story or an incomplete story? A draft? Because it's clearly one of his weaker pieces, although if it were developed further it might have had potential, even as material for a novel: An elderly, widowed, impoverished, and devout Jewish man rents a room in his apartment to a contemporary who as it happens is an atheist, or, more specifically, a Holocaust and Russian purge survivor who believes in God but who thinks God must be cruel and sadistic. The boarder keeps up a stream of invective, challenging the old man's faith, and the old man has no answers but stubbornly clings to his belief that we must have faith in that which we don't understand. IBS does a fine job presenting their dialog, but at the end we have to shrug and ask: Is that all there is? Because there's no revelation or conclusion to the narrative; they just each state their case - and we can understand why the boarder would be angry and cynical of course - and their life goes on. Should the New Yorker have published this story? Sure, even though it does nothing to advance or reconsider IBS's reputation, but a little context might have helped, either appended to the story or in the "about the authors" table.

An unusual narrative style in a completely accessible novel by Jenny Offil

Jenny Offil's short novel Dept. of Speculation (2014, I think) could probably be called an experimental novel but that would miss the whole point: Her narrative style is unusual, possibly unique, but the novel is quite accessible, conventional and appealing in its design, funny at times, sorrowful as well. In essence it's a chronicle of I think about 7 years in the narrator's life, a span that begins with a NY dating scene, leads to a serious relationship, marriage, motherhood - and the novel examines all the diurnal crises of each of these life stages, as the narrator, through wit and perseverance, gets by. I'm sensing that things don't work out well for her marriage (I'm about half-way through) but overall not sure where the narrative will lead us, which is as it should be. What makes Offil's style so unusual is that the entire work is made up of short snaps, much like brief entries in a journal, arranged chronologically; we don't get background or back story, we don't get direct access to the consciousness of any but the narrator (who is an obvious stand-in for the author, a young NY writer with 1 novel published and now wondering what's happened to her career), but each of these snaps is sharp and revealing and taken together they create of full narration - like a novel pared back to its essence. The entries remind me of some of Lydia Davis's best stories, but in a way they're better because they build upon one another. Quoting or rather paraphrasing from memory, here's an example, to give you a sense of the dry wit and the pathos: "We went to look at the new apartment building. 11 floors. I said to my daughter that we'd have to use the stairs in a fire. She asked: What about a flood. There won't be a flood I said. Telling the truth. For once." See how this places her parenthood on the line, how it subtly suggests an uneasiness in both mother and daughter, how the mother turns a moment of reassurance into a cloud of doubt hanging over her relationship with her curious child? There are many more such fine moments, moments all readers can recognize, regardless of whether their lives and careers are anything like Offil's.

The postmodern conclusion to Halliday's Asynmmetry

The final (brief) section (Ezra Blazer's Desert Island Discs) of Lisa Halliday's novel, Asymmetry, puts a postmodern spin on the entire work, creating a "hall of mirrors" effect - whow "real is any character in a novel? can we trust the author as a reliable narrator? does the character "Ezra" represent the author Philip Roth or not?, to name just a few of the provocative edges of this odd novel. As noted in previous posts, the first section seems to be closely based on LH's life and on her friendship with Philip Roth; the second section, intentionally, seems to have little or no autobiographical elements, which both demonstrates LH's range as a writer and forces us to consider what it means for a novel to "represent" or "mirror" reality. This short third section is a written as a transcript of a BBC radio broadcast of an interview with "Ezra" (Roth?) on a show whose format is to ask a famous person to discuss the 6 discs that they would take w/ them to a desert island. So we see immediately, as the interviewer discusses Ezra's background, that he is in some ways much like Roth (the humor, the literary recognition, the age, the middle-class urban Jewish background) but by careful selection of salient details LH distances Ezra from Roth (something she did not do in the first section, w/ minor exceptions), e.g., he's from Pittsburgh (not Newark), he went to Allegheny College (not Bucknell), and, guess what?, his career was capped with a Nobel (should have happened but hasn't happened yet and is unlikely to happen as PR has retired from fiction writing - but who knows?). The point is that LH is going out of her way to show that she's played a bit of a trick on us; the character that we thought of as PR is now evolving - and btw his taste in music seems more elevated and esoteric than Roth's who, as far as I know, has never written seriously about music (as he has about another passion LH spends a lot of capital on in part 1, baseball). In the interview, Ezra say something quite striking (p 261 I think), when he notes that a young woman, whom he declines to name, is writing a book about someone closely resembling him and about someone not like him at all - which raises the question: Who is the referent here? Is it the character Alice? Or the novelist LH, who has now made herself into a character in her own novel? These head-spinning remarks don't really clarify anything, but they force us to put on the brakes, to be cautious about ferreting in fiction for autobiographical (or biographical) details - especially helpful in that, at the end of the interview (and the novel) Ezra acts in a particularly lascivious and creepy way as he comes on the the interviewer. It would be a mean way for LH to repay her debt to PR, but of course she's made it cleat that the character and the author can never be one and the same. (LH also includes an especially detailed set of acknowledgements, which are really copyright/permission citations for the most part - but did she really need to cite the edition she used for a quote from Dickens? And should she perhaps have noted that the long quote from the lyrics of Who's Got the Last Laugh? spotlights a song recently featured in Halt and Catch Fire?)

Why Halliday's Asymmetry works, and why it doesn't

Having finished the second section of Lisa Halliday's novel, Asymmetry, I can see that my surmise in yesterday's post was correct: The "link" between the two major sections of this "novel," is the "asymmetrical" distance from each other. In the first section, Halliday recounts in a 3rd-person narration an affair and friendship between a young editorial assistant, by all accounts much like LH, and a world-famous novelist who is clearly modeled (closely) on Philip Roth (w/ whom LH did in fact have a relationship). In other words, this section is as close as can be to a writer wring "what she knows." The second section, which tells of a 20-somethiung man, Aram, Iraqui born and U.S. raised, en route to visit Iraq to see his brother, who has repatriated to Iraq and is working as a doctor; passport control in England holds Amar up, and we see much interrogation of him regarding his complicated itinerary and, in intervening chapters, we learn about his family, some members of which still live in Iraq, and about a previous visit to the country. In other words, this material is something that LH does not know about from personal experience. On p. 225 she has a few intriguing paragraphs about a novel holding the mirror up to nature (as Flaubert and also Stendahl I think have remarked) while noting that sometimes the mirror is a reflection of the author and sometimes it provides an entirely different perspective. So there; okay, what of it? We have here to stories or short novels that taken together show the range of LH's talent, which is prodigious. Yet I have to say that neither section would stand alone well; though she's great at re-creating a scene and sense of place, and very good on dialogue, she seems indifferent to building a plot with any sort of narrative arc or resolution (resolutions are one of Roth's only weaknesses, btw); it's almost like this is a thesis in a graduate writing program - two exercises completed, A student. Would this novel have received such praise, let alone such attention, had it not been for its appropriation of the private life of a major literary figure?

The strengths and the enigma of the 2nd part of Halliday's Asymmetry

First of all, I think the second section of Lisa Halliday's debut novel, Asymmetry, is good, in fact far better than the first section whose main interest for me (and I believe for most readers) comes from its portrayal of a character who closely modeled on LH's friend, Philip Roth. The second section is about a young man, Amar, born in Iraq but raised in the New York area, a Ph.D in econ, who is returning to Iraq (in yesterday's post I said Syria, my bad) to visit his older brother, a doctor, whom he has not seen in about 10 years. This section alternates between passages that give us Amar's back story - his faltering relationship with a young, ambitious, American-born woman who switches out of a drama major to go premed, Amar's time volunteering in a children's hospital in London, a previous trip w/ his parents to Iraq involving a long desert crossing by car through scary checkpoints - and the present time at which he is held, interrogated, and basically humiliated at passport control at what seems to be Heathrow. Halliday shows off all her strengths in this section, not only her ability to create a tense scene and keep to keep the story moving, but also an amazing assimilation of knowledge, including much about war correspondents, life in Iraq during war, medical science, bureaucracy, and more. She does have an annoying way, though, of dropping in just enough info for we readers to "decode" and to feel smart because we did so (e.g., Amar's brother we learn in an aside revered a pianist who grunted and groaned while performing; why not just say it's Glenn Gould?). I'm still not sure of the overall meaning of this section, however: Are we meant to feel outrage at this tight passport-control procedure (I feel it's necessary and I'm glad they take such precautions; many might disagree, as see Alie Smith's recent grumpy novel about UK bureaucracy, Autumn). And I'm still befuddled as to why this is a novel and not a 2-story collection. Is this meant to be an asymmetrical response to the first section: One section follows closely the most basic advice to young authors, write about what you know, whereas the 2nd section is the complete opposite - a narrative that, though contemporary,  seems completely apart from the life (gender, nationality, lived experience) of the author.

Is Asymmetry a novel?

As foretold by various reviewers, the 2nd half/section of Lisa Halliday's debut novel, Asymmetry, embarks on a completely new narrative that, through about 50 pp. or so, bears absolutely no relationship to the first section of the novel (a thinly disguised account of the LH's friendship and relationship with Philip Roth, which, let's face it, is why this novel has gotten so much early attention and which is also why I'm reading it). The second section tells of a Syria-born American citizen stopped by passport control in, I think, Heathrow, as he's on his way to Syria to visit his older brother whom he has not seen in several years. LH does a nice, brisk job recounting the traveler's family background (he is much more "assimilated" than his older brother, who has built his life in Syria/Kurdistan) and the frustrations he's experiencing while being held up at the airport; his itinerary and his "purpose of visit" raise a # of obvious red flags, which he seems not to have properly anticipated - not clear why he wouldn't as he's intelligent and mature. In any event, part 2 of this "novel" seems so far to be a good narrative - though not unlike a # of other novels and stories on the theme of immigration and assimilation (Hamid, Yiyun Li, Ngueyn, to name 3 that come quickly to mind) - but still a good and forever timely topic. I'm taking it on faith that something will tied these two sections together, in particular because the "Roth" section ends abruptly. Are they meant in some way to be narrative opposites (hence the title)? Or is one of them meant to be a mss by the Roth character? I really have no idea at this point, and have to wonder whether these are really two relatively long stories bound together in one book that has been anointed as a novel. (A glance ahdead reveals that here is a short 3rd section that revives the "Roth" character, so that may have something to do with the overall design.)