A novel on the border between pop and literary fiction - The Great Believers

Based on first 6 or so chapters - about 60 pp.? - Rebecca Makkai's 2018 novel, The Great Believers (in what, I wonder - don't know yet) appears to be one of those books that stands on the border between literary and popular fiction - a good place to be, if you can make it work! In part it feels like a big, gossipy novel w/ lots of friends and lovers and their complex inter-relations over time: The first chapter takes place at and around the funeral of one of the first victims of the AIDS crisis (set in 1985) as seen from within the vibrant and lively male gay community in Chicago. We focus on one of the men, named Yale (yes), and his sorrow at the loss and his puzzlement about how this emerging epidemic will affect his life and his current partnership. Makkai constructs the novel in oscillating chapters - one set in 1985 and the other some 30+ years later into the near present. As the narrative progresses, we learn more about Yale and his work, as a development officer at an art museum on the Northwestern campus. His work brings him in contact w/ a potential donor - the great-aunt of the man mourned in the 1st chapter, as it happens, and he has to coddle this donor and assess the value of her potential bequest. The other chapters involve the sister (?) of the man mourned in the first chapter, Fiona, now (in the present) of mature adult woman who travels to Paris in her quest to track down her adult daughter who has vanished into some kind of cult or political group. The relationship between these two plot strands, other than the tenuous connection via the link to the mourned man - Nico - is not yet clear to me. Makkai has an unusual way of leading the plot down some intriguing byways and then pulling back a bit: For example, Fiona meets a man on the plane to Paris who is clearly trying to scam her, pretending he left his wallet back at the gate and needs some money to get by; we don't see him again once she's landed, however - at least it appears that we don't. What to make of this? Similarly, during the mourning for Nico, Yale goes upstairs to take a break in one of the bedrooms and when he returns to the scene of the gathering the entire group of friends and mourners has vanished w/out a trace; it seems mysterious and sort of Twilight Zone-like, but as it turns out they just all took off and left Yale to himself upstairs - not really credible, to me, and an interesting plot twist unraveled to quickly and to no effect.

Fiiction, autofiction, and postmodernism in Nunez's The Friend

The last chapter of Sigrid Nunez's The Friend tells us what happens to "the dog," so, yes, this is a novel about a woman's friendship with her dog and her insights into the life from the canine point of view, or point of smell if you like - a book for dog lovers, and congratulations to her on a readable book that has unsurprisingly found a large readership. But the next to last chapter is extremely strange; this chapter entails the unnamed narrator paying a visit to her friend and mentor, the older writer (also unnamed) who, wait a second, had committed suicide and left his great dane in her care. So in this chapter, the narrator visits the man - still alive, but following a suicide attempt and a convalescence in a mental hospital; apparently, during his time in the hospital, the narrator cared for his god, not a GD but a small dog (a pug I think). So SN could not resist that narrative postmodern trickery: Reader, do not presume or assume that a fictional narration is the same as a memoir (notably, the narrator is involved in preparing a course on auto-fiction and has been reading Knausgaard, as we are reminded several times). The narrator explains, in this penultimate chapter, to her friend that she made use of him, and of his dog, in the work she is writing - but that she'd made his suicide "successful" and translated the dog into a Dane. Oho, so nothing in the first 10 or so chapters actually happened, at least not in the way SN presented it - but then again, who's to say that this penultimate chapter is "true to life," or that any writing is more true than any other? And once we ask that, the only response is: Who cares? Treat all writing as "text" and get on w/ it. But then again, if that's the case: Why not just write the story, why burden us w/ worry about whether the story as told is real or fictive? There's no difference after all - though of course, I admit, I have been curious since page one about the identity of the narrator's writer-friend. I guess the point Nunez is making is: Take this on its own terms as a work of art and as an entertainment. As noted previously, my interest in the recent novel Asymmetry was based entirely on the insight the author provided into the life of Roth, the clear and acknowledged model for the main character; to try to read every novel as such, however, is to race down a blind alley.

An interpretation of Sigrid Nunez's The Friend

My interpretation of Sigrid Nunez's novel The Friend, which I have nearly finished reading (things could change in final chapters): Her mentor/writer/friend who committed suicide and to whom the narrator speaks in this second-person novel is full of lamentations and misgivings about the writer's life: students today are stupid, nobody reads novels anymore, novelists are petty and competitive, any good novel is unappreciated, and so on. The (unamed) writer bequeaths to the (unnamed) narrator, also a writer and professor of writing though far less successful than her mentor, his Great Dane, which she takes in and over time comes to love, and much of the novel is about dogs and our relationships w/ dogs. So in effect the writer (let's call him) gives the narrator a gift that will completely chnage not only her attitude toward dogs (she is a "cat person") but material for her writing, which had foundered - and that material is the book that we are reading. Had this novel been a mourning of her lost mentor and a Jeremiad about the state of contemporary fiction, who would read it? (Me, maybe.) But no, she has written a novel about - dogs! Who won't read that? And of course this has become her breakthrough novel and winner of at least 1 top literary prize. And probably movie rights are in the works. So I don't know if there's any autobiographical element behind The Friend (whose title has two possible referents, man and dog) - I definitely don't know whom the "writer' is meant to represent, if anyone - but if there is a story behind the dog-bequest Nunez has made the most of it - and if the entire work is fictional, she has come up w/ a rare concoction of an esoteric, insular novel that will appeal, that has appealed, to a readership far beyond the narrow scope of "literary fiction."

The strange balance between light and dark moods in Nunez's The Friend

Yes, still enjoying through first 4 chapters (1/3 of book) Sigrid Nunez's NBA-winning novel, The Friend, though I'm still not sure what this novel is really about. On one level it's the "heartwarming" story of how this cat-person Manhattanite inherits a Great Dane from her lifelong mentor/friend/fellow-writer, who died in a suicide (and to whom the novel, in 2nd person, is addressed. We see the various expected tribulations: Super warns he must inform the landlord and that she may be ejected from her rent-controlled apartment; dog insists on sleeping in her bed; apartment too small for giant dog, dog brings unwanted attention street, dog growls at her at one point, is dog in mourning? These are the movie-ready elements in this easy-to-read novel. The other aspect is not at all cinematic nor is it expected: The narrator (unnamed) spends a lot (too much?) time lamenting the difficulties of being a writer, including lengthy discussion w/ friend who gave up writing aspirations and became a psychologist and is helping trauma victims - the narrator is drawn into teaching a writing class for women who were abused though sex-slavery and other atrocities. This is the dark center of the novel, and the strange balance between the light-hearted dog story and the dark trauma of these women (and how little writing can really help them) make for the dramatic tension of this novel. I wish there were less self-flagellation and less complaining about how writing alienates one from family and friends, pays so little, reaches so few people - an all-to-common lament, often voiced by successful writers to their students and supposed acolytes. It's still damn good life if you're good enough and fortunate enough to make a living publishing and teaching, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I'd add that there's a huge difference between those who want to "be a writer" and those who want to "write," w/ the latter - a much smaller group - having a much more likely chance for success in the field.

Promsing start to the award-winning The Friend

Started reading Sigrid Nunez's NBA-winning 2018 novel, The Friend, and finding it so far easy to read and curiously enjoyable - curiously, because of the darkness of the plot. The first paragraph as in account of Cambodian women who went blind after suffering rape and torture, and apparently their blindness was a mental not a physical affliction of symptom: They willed themselves not to see. So perhaps that tells us something about the narrator: A writer in NYC who addresses her friend/mentor/one time only lover, a novelist (British?) living in NY who was the narrator's teacher years back and now he is a victim, apparently, of suicide - after a long life as a famous author with three wives left behind and numerous affairs, brief encounters, and even paid encounters in the till. The narrator tells of their long-term friendship and her testy relationships w/ the various wives - we can't help but think she was interested in him, sexually and romantically, more than he was in her and more than she will admit. At the end of the first section, Wife #3 asks the narrator to adopt their Great Dane, which she feels totally incompetent to handle but obliged to do so - so the dog must the the eponymous friend? - and thus the story begins. So is it a literary tell-all - can't help but remind me of Asymmetry, which I was primarily interested in because of the insight into the life of Philip Roth; in this novel, I have no idea if it's a roman a clef - full of NY literary gossip (I'm in!) or a novel of death and trauma (present in the first chapter but lightly passed over) or a girl-meets-dog story (best seller!, movie rights!). Very much liked the first chapter, but I'm unsure how this novel will unwind or develop and whether Nunez will hold my interest over the course of the narrative.

Mary Gaitskill's sad story in current NYer

The Mary Gaitskill story, Acceptance Journey, in the current NYer, despite its loose connection to the xmas season (the protagonist, Carol, poses as the Grinch and carries on a "secret" correspondence w/ a young girl living across the street) is a typical Gaitskill story in the vein she's been working since her groundbreaking debut story collection from the 80s. This story like so many of her others tells of a woman with terrible luck or very poor decisions about relationships, beautiful though by now in a fading light (Carol is 57), on a wobbly career path (Carol doing a one-semester fill-in in the admin office at an upstate college, Bard it seems like), lonely, w/ lots of thoughts about sex, probably drinking too much, and always in search of a better, cleaner life that always seems elusive and out of reach. What's somewhat different in this story is that Carol seems to have some spiritual yearnings; the title refers to some sort of healing service that she sees promoted on billboards in her aimless driving around the rural outskirts of her temporary home. She actually tries to join a church service that she mistakenly believes to be the Acceptance Journey, but recognizes that she's not especially welcomed at the black church that she enters and that the Acceptance Journey is another service altogether  - one she never joins (she hears that it's a program for individuals in gender transition). The story ends in to abrupt a manner - although that's typical of MG's work as well - her characters never quite get to the resolution that we often expect from short fiction. She's troubled at the outset - marriage dissolved, walked out on man she dismissively calls "the boyfriend" (in quotes), no kids, probably w a fair # of friends plus a sister but the communication w/ these feels strained and distanced, and not at all fitting into the neighborhood where she's received temp housing - and we see nothing of her interaction w/ colleagues or students. In short, a sad story part of the sad ouvre that MG has developed and chronicled over the past 40 or so years - and not at all, not that it should be, in the xmas spirit.

The conclusion of Death of the Heart and why it's slipped into obscurity

All right so let's get right to the end of this odd novel, The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen (1938), in which the orphaned teen, Portia, rebuffed by the bizarre young man who can't seem to make up his mind whether he's in love w/ her or despises her and having just learned from a so-called friend of her indifferent sister-in-law that the adults in her life have been sneaking looks at her diary, heads off for the dumpy hotel where Major Buhle, or whatever his name is, is living while he tries to find any kind of job. She throws herself at the Major - he's got to be about 40 years old - and goes up to his room and suggests that they run away together and get married - and he shows himself to be the one and only adult in this novel w/ mores and common sense: He says they have to call her brother and sister-in-law, w/ whom she's living, and get her home. He says how much he respects her family, and she tells him that he's to them nothing more than a joke, that they laugh about him behind his back. This is crushing, the saddest moment in the novel. Then we watch the family slightly worried about what's happened to Portia, but not really willing to do anything about her absence, and when they get the call from the Major go into a long debate about who should go get Portia. Unsurprisingly, the agree to send the housekeeper. These are horrible people, start to finish, and these last two are the best scenes in the novel, laying bare the emotions, or lack of same, in all of the major characters. Om the final scene however - and I will tell the ending - we are in the cab w/ the housekeeper (Matchett) and in her consciousness as she frets about whether the driver knows the locale and whether she can trust the driver. What? Bowen has an opportunity here to really wrap up this novel, which she totally abandons. At the end, Matchett gets out of the cab and pushes open the door to the hotel. No final scene, no dramatic encounter, no telling what happens to Portia - as if Bowen reached her page count and dropped the pen. Didn't an editor even wonder: Did you forget to send me the last chapter? This is a novel so full of intelligence, so open to possibilities for greatness or at least excellence, and the author retreats at every turn. I can see what Bowen's work, unlike that of many of her contemporaries, has slipped into obscurity.

Surprising similarities between Bowen's novel and the contemporary movie Roma

Oddly - although echoes like this seem to happen more than I'd expect - the book I'm reading - Elizabeth Bowen's 1938 novel The Death of the Heart - makes a companion piece or counterpart to the movie I saw last night, Roma (Alfonso Cuaron). In Bowen's novel, as noted in previous posts, a well-to-do young London couple take in the husband's 16-year-old half-sister, recently orphaned, but greet her and treat her with such coldness and suspicion that she feels unwanted and alienated, though she finds some solace in long conversations w/ the family servant and with a 23-year-old guy, friend of the family, who begins to date her but seems to have huge problems forming and sustaining relationships. In Roma, a well-to-do couple in Mexico City, with 4 young children, begin to come apart at the seams as the father walks out on the family and the mother, frustrated and angry, takes her anger out on the servant; the servant, meanwhile, seems to be the only one w/ whom the children have a positive and loving relationship. So the "structure" of these two works and the social milieu of each seem to me strikingly similar - though in Bowen's the focus is on the teenage daughter (Portia) while Roma focuses on the household servant (Cleo). In Roma, unlike the Bowen novel, the servant undergoes huge trauma of her own; the family helps her, at least a little, but the adults are largely oblivious to her presence - she's of a lower social class and hence disposable. In the Bowen novel, the servant - Matchett? - is hard-working and proud of her position in the family and, so far as we see, has no social, intellectual, or family life of her own. Roma is by far the more emotional and caring of the 2 similar works; the further I read in Bowen's Death of the Heart the more I'm struck by the coldness and reserve of the couple (Thomas and Anna) and their inability to provide a loving home for Thomas's young half-sister.

Further problems with reading Bowen's Death of the Heart

I'm completely befuddled by Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (1938). It takes a while for the novel to focus on the main character (I assume, part 3 may be different entirely), the 16-year-old orphaned Portia, who's shunted around from home to home, more or less unwanted (don't cry for her too much, though - her living conditions are hardly Dickensian) and her relationship with a cad, 23-year-old Eddie. But why does Bowen make everything so obscure and inscrutable? It's one thing for Portia to be confused by Eddie, who talked to her endearingly all the time - darling, he always calls her - and then who backs away from her and does all he can to make himself unattractive to her: flirting openly with other women, getting staggeringly drunk at dinner - and then he tearfully apologizes. For all their talk - even talk of marriage - we sense that both, especially Portia, are inexperienced, and as far as Bowen lets us know they never do more than kiss, if even that. The only conclusion I can draw is that Eddie is a repressed homosexual, fighting an internal battle against his urges, w/ Portia as the victim. But maybe that's too much of a contemporary reading (or a 1980s reading?). Whatever Eddie may be suffering from or through remains obscure through the first 2/3 of the novel, and we have no sense of why Portia is drawn to him unless it's that she sees no other options. But Bowen continues to make reading this novel as difficult as possible; I don't expect novelists to spell out everything for the reader, but at least give us some clue - especially if you include, as Bowen does, several sections of Portia's diary and of Eddie's correspondence to her: These sections could at least open up the characters in a new and more compelling way, but they're instead dusty dry - Portia's diary in particular no more than a cursory record of what she does each day. Why clog up your narrative w/ a diary unless it's revealing and insightful?

Why Elizabeth Bowen is no Henry James

I guess there's a reason why people - some people, anyway - still read Henry James while few people read Elizabeth Bowen; their styles are similar - generally a limited # of characters, use of dialoge to advance the plot (in both cases, dialog that does not sound like spoken dialog - it's obvious to any reader why James was a failure at theater, such a mismatch of talents and needs! - relatively little topical descriptions, and sometimes extended narrative commentary analyzing the nuances of social mores and personalities. But James at least knew how to get a plot moving and how to set high stakes for his characters, placing them in situations in which their whole life lies in the balance. Bowen's The Death of the Heart (1938), presumably an example of her style at its best, seems confident and assured and insightful, but I keep waiting for something of consequence to happen. As noted yesterday, the novel gradually comes into focus w/ the 16-year-old Portia, orphaned and pretty much unwanted, shunted around from one adult household to another, w/ the focus always on the needs of the adults, not her; but now I'm more than halfway through this (400+ p.) novel and Portia is as much of a cipher now as at the outset. She seems to be in love w/ a 23-year-old man named Eddie, who seems to me like a scoundrel who's just using her, for unclear reasons (she's not much of a "catch," from Eddie's standpoint - w/ neither money nor family), but so far all is OK between the 2: He comes to visit her during her enforced stay in an off-season coastal town and they go to a movie together and more or less act like shy preteens rather than young adults. To b a great novelist, Bowen would have to push her characters to a point of crisis or a moral dilemma, and so far in this novel I find neither, though because of the overall strength of her writing (despite some truly obscure passages in which she opines about human nature) and my interest in the fate of her main characters, I will keep reading w/ an open mind

The central character and theme in The Death of the Heart

It's taking me a while - Elizabeth Bowen doesn't make it easy for her readers - to get to the "heart" of The Death of the Heart (1938), but now reading the 2nd of three sections the focus of the novel becomes more clear. The novel opens with a lengthy account of the trials and tribs of the Quayne family, as told, to a friend, by Anna Q., who recounts her husband's family, the 2nd marriage of his father (after he got his 2nd-wife-to-be pregnant), the birth of their daughter, and the death of both parents. Throughout this narration and through most of the first section I felt I had no sympathy for and little interest in Anna, her husband (Thomas?), and their entourage - privileged people in the finest of London neighborhoods with a litany of complaints about servants, hangers-on, and most of all Thomas's half-sister, Portia, who keeps her room a mess, is in and out at all hours, is indifferent to her schooling (finishing school, we would say today), and keeps a diary about which Anna, that snoop, is put off by what Portia says about, observes of the Q family. By the 2nd, section, however, I have come to see that this novel is really about Portia and her mistreatment: She's a 16-year-old girl, orphaned, sent to live in London, where she's never been, with her brother and his wife, whom she hardly knows - and she's treated w/ cruel neglect. Anna and Thomas go off to spend the xmas holidays in France, but do they even consider bringing Portia w/ them? No, they find a place - basically, the home of the woman who was a servant in Th's family when he was a child, where they can stash Portia away for a few weeks, or maybe longer. She obviously feels like a boarder there - we're not in Dickens territory by any means, but Portia certainly feels abandoned and neglected and unwanted - as well as confused by her first glimpse of life in a crass, difficult family, For all her troubles, she's been sheltered and she knows little about the world. The only person who seems interested in her is Eddie, a 23-year-old guy who works for Thomas and is hitting on Portia with no obvious good intention or concern for her welfare. For reasons obscure to me, she gives him her diary for safekeeping; Bowen gives us a few pages of her extremely mundane diary, which contains no scary revelations. She's just a lonely kid, a stray whom nobody really wants to take in; her fate will be the fate of this novel.

Strengths and weaknesses in the Jamesian Death of the Heart

Is Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (1938) a great novel? Well, on the plus side it's obvious from the first page that Bowen is writing serious fiction, albeit of a limited scope - a domestic drama about a troubled highly prosperous London family. At her best, some of the depictions of various moments in time and space - e.g., a winter walk around the lakes in Regents Park - are of the highest order. I'd guess her major influence and perhaps favorite write was Henry James, and therein lies the problem. First of all she has no ear for dialog; her characters sound like a highly intelligent narrator, but the things they say to each other and their manner of speaking rings entirely false: In the first chapter a 30-something woman, Anna, narrates basically her entire life history to her friend, St. Quentin (yes, that's his name!), and we have to think: Why is Bowen telling this through dialog, or actually monologue? Other scenes seem equally stilted and false, notably the long conversation between the teenage Portia and the house servant, Matchett. It's all so bookish, and not credible as narrative. Second, Bowen does adopt the stance of an omniscient 3rd-person narrator, there are times, when she's trying to explain the nuances of the thoughts and emotions of one of the characters, that I literally cannot understand what she's saying. Her writing can be impenetrable and abstract, like James at his worst. That said, her obvious intelligence keeps my hopes and interest alive. Over the course of the narration she builds our interest in and concern for the young Portia, a woman w/ terrible judgment living among those w/ no respect for privacy - despite their excruciatingly nuanced British "manners" - they think nothing of seizing this teenager's diary and letters she received, for no good reason; Portia has given them no reason to be seriously concerned about her safety or well-being. But we're concerned, given the vipers she lives among, especially the 23-year-old Edde - 7 years her senior - who purports to be in love w/ her but is mainly in love w/ himself, and maybe hoping to "marry up." What are we to make of his telling her that he's very handsome, or his getting her to entrust him w/ her diary for fear that others may read it? He's a horrible person and she's too young to know that - reason enough to keep reading.

Midlist authors and first-world problems in English fiction

Reading, and consequently publishing, in England seems to differ from that in the U.S., as in England there always - that is, for at least the last century - seems to be an endless supply of "mid-list" authors. In America, it seems to be all or nothing: Lots of attention to first-time novelists and, for those few who emerge from that pack w/ best-sellers, lots of support for an attention to the best-selling authors, but little or no publishing patience or nurturing of the midlist: those authors who reliably turn out a novel every two years or so, maintain modest but not blockbuster sales, get good reviews from time to time but rarely win a prize or major recognition. These guys still exist in England, and they have their loyal followers and remain afloat, and surprisingly many are still in print or at least on library shelves. At suggestion of from AF who found this novel mentioned on some list or other of the 100 best books of, what?, the 20th century? All time?, I've started reading Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (1938), and so far it seems to be classic British mid-list: No new ground, no truly distinct authorial voice or style, but an intelligent novel about what today we call "first-world problems": The central character, Anna, living in a beautiful house on Regents Park with a large staff of servants, evidently from a wealthy family though her husband (they're in their 30s) runs a successful ad agency, has taken in, for at least a year, her husband's now orphaned half-sister, Portia, and is finding P to b a troubled teen, with a truly messy room, ill-mannered, and sometimes flirtatious with guests, indifferent toward her schooling, and the only friend she's found thus far in England is another social misfit at her school. Horrors! In other words, she's a typical teenager, and Anna can't really manage her. The "crisis" that gets the narrative under way occurs as Anna is poling around in Portia's messy room and finds that P has been keeping a diary, which contains caustic comments about her brother and Anna. Well, first of all it's outrageous that she's violated this young woman's privacy (she has no cause for alarm about P's well-being or safety) and further, what's the big deal? She's not going to publish her diary - and of course this novel predates social media by about 80 years - so just leave it alone and get on w/ your life. But something about the presence of this young woman truly disturbs Anna; how this will or might develop in a plot w/ serious stakes, we shall see.

Themes in the final stories in Jean Stafford's collection

The last 3 stories in Jean Stafford's Collected Stories (1969) shed some light, albeit obliquely, on her life and career and give us an insight to and appreciation of her work. One tells of an elderly, somewhat well-to-do woman living in an apartment in a declining neighborhood in Manhattan (hah, today it would be untouchable) whose social life consists of daily visits from friends and a regular correspondence w/ family members, particularly a much-beloved nephew in the army (the time seems to be during WW2). The nephew writes letters gushing w/ adoration of his aunt, so much so that they seem a little strange, beyond the pale. She hears word - JS just slips this in - that her nephew may be troubled. He sends her a package that, it turns out, contains a long lock of blond, beribboned, clipped at the nape; the aunt is frightened and repulsed by this. There's a reference, at the outset and conclusion of the story, that she seems completely unaware of the war that's going on across the ocean (she dreams of visits to Europe). I take this as a commentary and confessional from JS - as it's amazing how little her stories have to say about ongoing events, including 2 wars, taking place in her lifetime; her stories are completely apolitical in that sense, and perhaps she is doing some reckoning here. The final story in the Manhattan section (honestly, the specific city makes little difference in most of the Manhattan stories) tells of a woman who was a beauty throughout her life, but what her friends don't know is the extent to which she undergoes surgery and other treatments to maintain this beauty. At last the aging of her hands betray her, which leads to her bizarre reaction when a friend presents her w/ a gift of gloves. I have to wonder if this story emerges from JS's body-image issues, as she seems to have suffered from a disfiguring accident in her youth - recounted in some detail in the Interior Fortress story. The final piece - never published in book from until this edition - is The Influx of Poets, a clearly autobiographical story about her early marriage to Lowell and the immature, selfish, chauvinistic behavior of him and other poets who act out the poetic life - up all night reading aloud, drinking, supposedly writing - while their set-upon spouses maintain the household and earn a living. Lowell in particular is a sad case, as she depicts what seems obviously to be a bipolar condition, with huge swings of emotion and absurd regimens that he insists on imposing on her as well. It's a story of vengeance for sure, and there must be many identifiable characters aside from her and Lowell - but none of whom I'd like to meet.

Stories, novels, and the sadness of Stafford's Manhattan stories

Although the first and possibly the best-known of Jean Stafford's stories in Collected Stories (1969). Sundays the Children Are Bored, picks up on one of her key themes - woman from the West or from a small-town background feels intellectually and culturally inferior to her new social setting - Europe, NE, or NYC - not all of the stories are on this theme. Beatrice Trueblood's Story - one of the more interesting to me because of its Newport setting - is about woman (and men) of the same rarefied social set (for the most part) who make terrible decisions in marriage; the eponymous Beatrice suddenly goes deaf, in a symbolic and, her friends suspect, psychosomatic way to "tune out" and end a potential disastrous engagement. Other stories involve street life - one piece about a woman with only a few coins in pocket wrestling w/ whether to donate in the church or to a drunkard/beggar; another - w/ the cool title I Love Someone (spied on a bit of graffiti - involves a woman who witnesses a brutal street fight from her window. One of the amusing sidelights of reading these fine stories with the detailed and elegant diction - out of fashion today, since the passing of Updike I'd say - is how we note the changes in neighborhood values: Her description of a 70s East Side apartment and another apartment on 16th and 6th as marginal, almost slum locales, today seems hilarious, ludicrous. Cops and Robbers is among her most powerful indictments of marriage, particular among the well-to-do, as we see an estranged husband and wife at war with their youngest child the hostage. Stafford is never a cheerful writer, but her Manhattan stores are especially dark; it's actually surprising how few of her stories are set in NYC, given that she lived in Manhattan during much, even most, of her working life. Stories tend to be a genre in which writers examine their earliest memories and the formative years of their lives; novels dwell more in the present.

In praise of Linn Ullman's essay/story about life with her famous father

Linn Ullman has a piece in the New Yorker that does not seem to be fiction in any conventional sense but more of a memoir-essay written with literary techniques most often associated with fiction: scenes, back story, jumps back in time, precision of detail, insight into personality, sensibility - a fine piece of writing however we categorize it, and the defining lines between fiction and nonfiction may already be obliterated or at least obscure. Yes, Linn Ullman is the daughter of world-famous parents, Liv Ullman and Ingmar Bergman. Her parents never married,; Linn is, as this essay notes, the youngest of his 9 ?) children, and Bergman had 6(?) wives, including one after Linn's birth. In this essay (as I will call it for convenience of reference) Ullman examines her relationship over decades with her famous and famously difficult father; obviously much of our interest as readers comes from our insight into the private life of Bergman, but that's not the whole of it. In fact, I'm not sure there's anything new in what she reveals of his personality - protective of his privacy, enjoying his isolation on the Baltic island, devoted to his work, extremely punctilious, a bit of an autocrat with his family, wealthy though never extravagant, and a true connoisseur of cinema (he refused to watch digital films and had on staff a full-time projectionist; the family would gather daily at 3 - actually, 10 minutes earlier to provide Time for the Eyes to Adjust (Ullman's title). These details aside, it's heartening to see that IB was close to all of his children tright through to the end of his life, w/ perhaps particular affection for Linn U., his youngest, and a prominent Norwegian novelist in her own right. This essay is notable for Ullman's account of her visits over the years to her famous yet reclusive father, of the warmth and understanding between them - never sentimentalized - and of his gradual mental decline, all told with efficiency and precision. Obviously Ullman could get a major book contract for a tell-all autobiography with  detail about both of her parents (her mother has written a memoir), but this piece makes me think she has no desire to pursue that course - she tells her story with such concision here; what's told in a single essay would be tedious and probably salacious if drawn out to book length.

2 representative Jean Stafford's stories and what they signify

Two stories in the "Western" section of Jean Stafford's Collected Stories (1969) show the two aspects of her major themes (discussed in yesterday's post): First, The Liberation, in which a 30-year-old woman, stuck in a dead-end job teaching German in the local college in her small, provincial, impoverished town of Adams, Colorado, and oppressed by the constant demands and intrusions of her aunt and uncle, both hypochondriacs who expect their niece to attend to their every need and share their prejudicial beliefs and assumptions (that her family is the best in town, etc.), announces to them that she is leaving Colorado and moving to Boston where she will marry a Harvard prof., of whom they know nothing and whom, it seems, she hardly knows herself - is it love, or a final chance to escape an dreary and oppressive existence? Many if no most of the Stafford's stories involve this kind of escape or "liberation" and migration from a provincial life to the intellectual life of a city, in the East or Europe. The story takes a turn toward the melodramatic, but it's still a great illustration of the forces that drive Stafford's writing, many of which readers must assume are autobiographical. The next story in the collection, A Reading Problem, is one of the few in the first person and also one of the few w/ almost grotesque comic elements - in the vein of Welty or even O'Connor. This story picks up on the life of a character in an earlier piece, a young woman who craves solitude in which she can read and who has a sharp wit and an attraction to trouble-makers. This young woman, while sitting in a remote park trying to read a novel (and to memorize the books of the Bible so as to win a contest) attracts the attention of a guy who's an obvious con man and tries to sell her a copy of his self-published tract and then tries to get her to invite him and his daughter to dinner. The narrator here seems to be a younger version of the woman-who-would-escape, although at this point in her life she doesn't have that yearning - she doesn't yet know enough about the world. This story is in the vein of McCullers, w/ a precocious narrator who can fend well for herself, at least up to a point. Stafford's satire and critique of the trials of life in a small town feel quite different from the viewpoint of a young woman than they do from the viewpoint of an older woman who feels her life is slipping away. I don't know anything about Stafford's (3) novels, but I have a sense that these stories set forth themes and tableaux that she later incorporated - and maybe connected - in longer works.

Themes that run throgh Jean Stafford's stories

So many of the pieces in Jean Stafford's Collected Stories (1969) concern escape, specifically, a young woman's escape from a stifling, small, rural community - usually on the plains of Colorado (sometimes the town is called Adams, interesting foreshadowing - and making her way to a new environment in the East - generally in NY (e.g., Sundays the Children Are Bored) or New England - where she feels, at least initially, culturally inferior and out of place (e.g., The Bleeding Heart). There are variants on this theme, in particular in the "Innocents Abroad" stories (e.g., Maggie Merriwether's Rich Experience) in which an American woman of privileged background feels similarly out of place and inferior on a visit to England or Europe. A few of the stories more explicitly examine the small-town, rural life, but always w/ an attention to social class: Even in the remote, impoverished town on the plains there is a social strata, with the top rung commandeered by Easterners who come to Colorado for vacation, either their own pastoral retreat, (the Mountain Day) for the very wealthiest, or a time on a dude ranch for others (Healthiest Girl in Town); in either case, there is generally a young woman whose family needs obligate her to work at the ranch or to cater in some manner - nursing, sometimes, or living in a boarding house where she is unloved and unwanted (In the Zoo, the Liberation). I know little about Stafford's life but suspect that she lived through a similar metamorphosis or migration - leading from an impoverished and emotionally scarred childhood to the literary scene in NY, among which she never felt quite at home as those, like her troubled husband, to the manner born.

Who are the one-hit wonders of literature?

Discussion last night w/ friend and poet AF led to reflection on one-hit wonders of literature. AF had seen one of the many lists of the 100 greatest books or 100 greatest writers, and we concurred that to be among the 100 greatest writers an author needed more than one book to his or her credit, at least generally. (AF wondered about Carson McCullers, but I noted that she has at least 2 major works.) There are exceptions of course: Cervantes, obviously; the Brontes (despite publication of juvenalia); Proust, although I'd count the Search as 7 distinct books; Ralph Ellison (despite a posthumous publication) - all of whom are clearly major writers. But who are the Juice Newtons - the true one-hit wonders - of literature? Top of the list probably is the posthumously published Lampedusa (The Leopard); AF and I shared our amazement that this work from an unknown was turned down by numerous publishers - draw your own conclusions. Then there's Harper Lee (posthumous publication aside) and Margaret Mitchell - one book each, but each one an industry unto itself. Other nominees: William Gaddis (The Recognitions, which I admit I've never read). Perhaps add to the list two recently deceased writers who had break-through novels in the 80s: Katherine Dunn (Geek Love) and Joan Chase (During the Reign of the Queen of Persia). No others come to mind, but I'd be interested in other nominees. And of course who knows which debut novelist of recent years will fold it up and move onto other things in life; I sure hope Atticus Lish and Gabriel Tallent are at work on follow-up novels.

Class relations in Jean Stafforrd's Western stories

The 3rd (of 4) sections in Jean Stafford's Collected Stories (1969) is called Cowboys and Indians, and Magic Mountains, which tells me that this section is a grab-bag holding stories that didn't fit into the other 3 and more obvious categories. The first few stories do have Western settings, and perhaps others in this section are set at sanatoriums? In any event, one common thread that we see in the Western stories (and not so much in the stories in the first 2 sections, Bostonians and Innocents Abroad) is class consciousness. The West, in Stafford's view, is largely a place from which intelligent people flee, as we see in some of her Boston stories as well, notably in The Bleeding Heart, a great story about a young woman from the West come to NE to work in a boarding school. Among the Western stories, both Healthiest Girl in Town and The Tea Time paint a horrific picture of class prejudice and ignorance, that we largely see through the eyes of one who suffers in service to the wealthy people in town and to the tourists and vacationers (one of the stories is in the 1st person, an outlier among Stafford's narrators). Stafford gives us in these stories a totally unconventional vision of the West, which is usually either romanticized or ignored (the Midwest is different - plenty of stories about leaving an Ohio/Nebraska/prairie farm/small town for the East, Cather, Anderson, even FS Fitzgerald to a degree). With Stafford we see those who serve - in particular at the dude ranches or, in healthiest, in nursing service to those who come to the mountain states for the air. Than, in another 1st-person narration, The Mountain Day, Stafford turns the POV upside down; this story is told by an 18-year-old from an extremely wealthy family, ensconced in their summer place - a vast spread including a lake, mountains, trails - who becomes engaged and who feels as if she's on the top of the world, so to speak, until an unexpected tragedy involving servants ruins their day. Everyone treats the servants well, or at least she sees it that way!, but we have the clear sense throughout that the labor of others, no matter how well treated, is spent on the pampering of the wealthy and on maintaining their illusions of peace and beauty and prosperity.

More on Stafford's elegant prose style

About halfway through Jean Stafford's Collected Stories (1969), I'm struck by her reluctance to write in the first person. As noted in yesterday's post, her style is antithetical to that of most contemporary writers of short fiction, most of whom follow in the wake of Carver minimalism or Barthelme/Saunders surrealism and satire. Stafford was one of the last of the elegant stylists, and as such almost all of her short fiction - unless the final two sections of this collection change my view - are in the third person, w/ few or no sentence fragments, and never in the present tense, a favorite mode of contemporary writers. The one first-person story in the first half (first two sections - Innocents Abroad and Bostonians) of the the collection is a slight piece about a young woman who accompanies a cranky, older man as he gahers wild plants and bemoans the deforestation of his land. The last piece in the Bostonians section - The Interior Castle (had to look up the title; most of her story titles don't stay w/ me, and apparently not w/ Stafford either, as she changed several for inclusion in this volume) - is really striking: a close examination of the state of mind of a woman badly injured in a car accident, which smashed up her face, as she prepares to and undergoes reconstructive surgery. One would think that nobody could write about such excruciating pain and such weird associations - waves of hatred for and then love of her operating physician - w/out having lived through this kind of procedure. And Stafford had: Apparently she was badly injured in car accident as her then-young husband, Robert Lowell, was driving; she disguises the incident through alteration of key facts, but today most readers know the back story, and how this accident and her recovery pushed her apart from her Lowell. This seems a natural story for first-person narration, but Stafford's commitment to 3rd person makes the story more profound and sorrowful, less of a plaint. Of course readers today will also be struck by the antiquated medical care, which seems more 19th century than 20th (let alone 21st) - limited options for anesthetics, extensive stay in the hospital before and after surgery. Looking forward to reading the 2nd half of the collection, particularly the New York stories (the Bostonian, btw, has little to do w/ Boston - but it could well have been called New Englanders? - most take place in Maine), though I am still frustrated by the editors' decision to leave out information on publication dates.

Excellent stories by a nearly forgotten author, Jean Stafford

Inspired by reading an excellent story by Jean Stafford in the recent New Yorker throwback edition, I've been reading in her Collected Stories (1969) and am impressed with all that I've read so far. She's been largely a forgotten author, perhaps because she was primarily a writer of short fiction, and perhaps because she lived in the shadow of her more famous and deeply troubled husband (of a decade or so), Robert Lowell. Also, by today's standards, her stories feel a little over-wrought: elegant language, Latinate vocabulary, much exposition - all of which to me mark them as elegant and classic, but they must seem even to today's serious readers as quaint and heavy - like a prime roast when everyone's now eating quinoa. (Compare her stories w/ those in any recent well-received story collection - say, Forida or Goon Squad - and you'll immediately see the difference in tone.) Her range of topics may be narrow - many of the stories center on a young woman who feels out of place in her world, generally because of what she sees as a limited or sheltered background, and who feels ignored and humiliated by a "higher' social set - but she explores w/in that range with great insight and precision. Among the more notable stories, aside from the one that was in the New Yorker (Children Are Bored on Sunday) would be The Nemesis (a clearly disturbed young woman in some sort of study abroad program) and others whose titles I can't recall: One about a young woman from the far West working in a New England boarding school and having fantasies about the lives of those living near her - whom she completely misjudges; another about a young woman in France who finds herself completely silent, unable to utter a word in the language. Some of the stories are vicious in their depiction of racism and class-snobbery; one turns the usual Stafford motif on its head and centers on two new faculty members - more aware and self-confident that the stuff shirts in their Midwest academic community - who start as friends and colleagues and inevitably fall in love. I have to note, re this edition, that it's infuriating that the editorial team at FSG give no information on the publication dates of the stories (they had to have been written in the 40s,50s, and 60s) and that they are grouped by 4 loosely defined themes (e.g., Innocents Abroad) and not even, so far as we can tell, arranged chronologically with groups. What's that all about? Author's direction or editorial whim?

The 5 Most Disappointing Books I Read in 2018

Most - actually, all - of the books I read I expect to like. I'm not working, not taking classes - why would I read anything that I didn't expect to like? Sometimes, though, I can see right away that a book isn't for me - and I'll stop reading. Please explain to me why anyone would force themselves to read to a the finish a book that's not working for them? But there are the oddities, books that I think I'll like and I keep wanting and expecting to like, pretty much all the way through - and these are to the most disappointing books for me. Here are my thoughts on the five most disappointing books I read in 2018, arranged alphabetically:

Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday (2018). I usually like to single out debut works of fiction only for praise, but Halliday's has been so lavished w/ praise by so many critics and writers that I think she can withstand my disappointment in her book. The writing is good throughout, but, seriously, 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 Dud Avacado, by Elaine Dundy (1958). Who could resist a weirdly titled novel (from NYRB no less) that earned blurbs from Hemingway and Groucho Marx? In the end - or at least halfway through, when I quit - Dundy offers a lot of quips and gags, but overall this is a thinly disguised memoir of a year in Paris by an adventuress, enabled by a generous grant from her wealthy uncle, who seems careless about danger, responsibility, or commitment of any sort - a luxurious insouciance that few of her friends can indulge.

My Struggle: Book 6, by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2018, English tr.) Though I have been a huge van of Knausgaard's series of autobiographical novels and this final volume has a few excellent scenes, Book 6 would have been more powerful had KOK set aside the long middle section in which he analyzes Hitler's writings, delivering a fatal blow to this already meandering, unfocused volume.

Other Men's Daughters, by Richard Stern (1973). In this NYRB reissue it all works out for the guy who walks out on his marriage and his family and shacks up w/ a student half his age. Very nice; and it's too bad there's nothing in this novel, not even a hint, from the woman's point of view because I don't think it worked out so well for wife, Sarah. But also guess what: Sarah has the last word, in a sense. Take a look at popular and literary fiction over the past 40 years, since the publication of Stern's novel, and see whose story is told most often.

To Have and Have Not, by Ernest Hemingway (1937). Despite some powerful scenes that translated well into the movie adaptation (The Breaking Point), we can  see right away why no one reads this novel today. EH's racism is appalling right from the start: He can't even begin to describe much less to justify the barbarity and ignorance of his language, and, yes, it may be that his language is "appropriate" to the narrator, Henry, but still H could at least write about this guy in a civilized if not enlightened manner.

The Ten Best Recent Works of Fiction I Read in 2018

Most of the books I read this year were classics that have remained in print for a long time or have recently been brought back to life by publishers like the New York Review Books. It's unrealistic to expect the novels and story collections from any one year to stand up well against any list of top-ten classics, but I read several books published or first available within the last year (some novels first published in Europe took a year or so to reach American readers) that could stand the test of time - maybe not a top-ten list but a top-eight at least, arranged alphabetically:

Early Work, by Andrew Martin. Martin's cleverly titled debut novel, about a group of 20-something aspiring writers with varying degrees of talent and commitment is one of the few contemporary novels I've read that gets better as it moves along (with most, the opposite is true).

Florida, by Lauren Groff. This collection of stories sets forth the key themes in Groff's writing: women in distress and suffering or about to suffer because of mistakes in judgement, female protagonists with strong personalities and opinions - so strong that they tend to alienate friends and even family, and portraits of a neighborhood, establishing a real sense of place, particularly in the environs of the University of Florida.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, by Denis Johnson. In this final collection, we see what makes Johnson at his best so great: He describes a world - often one of drug addiction, despair, imprisonment, and ruined lives - that is nothing like the world that we, that is, most of his readers, have ever experienced and he makes us believe in it completely.

Last Stories, by William Trevor. Trevor was without doubt one of the greatest English-language writers of our time, in particular for his short stories, the closest any English-language writer has come to the tone and style of Chekhov. Everyone interested in the art of the short story should read his collected stories and then Last Stories as a sad coda.

The Ninth Hour, by Alice McDermott (2017, I actually read this in December 2017 but too late to appear on last year's list). This novel beautifully depicts life in a small convent of urban nuns helping the impoverished in their community. Those who long for the days before Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, Social Security, DCYF and case workers, CHIPs, SNAP, and so on should take a look at the world McDermott re-creates to see if things were better for the poor and the outsiders, and then think again.

Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward. Though I couldn't buy into all the ghost voices Ward uses, particularly late in the novel, I was moved and impressed by her use of first-person voice to establish a number of radically different characters, her understanding of the difficult life in rural poverty in the Mississippi delta, her information about the horrors of abuse in a Mississippi work prison, and her ability to create characters who are deeply flawed while maintaining her (and our) sympathy and compassion for them.

Solar Bones, by Mike McCormack (2016). This tour de force novel follows the flow of the thoughts and remembrances of the narrator in what appears to be a single day or perhaps a single afternoon - though his mind roams freely back and forth in time, including recollections from his childhood right up to present-day events, crises, and issues.

Trick, by Domenico Starnone (2016). Starnone does in 200 or so pages what Knausgaard and fellow Neapolitan Ferrante do in thousands: delineate the struggles - personal, political, aspirational, and familial - in the life of an artist.

The 10 best classic works of fiction I read in 2018

Looking back at another year of reading, this is the first of a series of posts on the best books I read in 2018. As in previous years, most of my reading has been devoted to "classics," which I'll loosely define as any fiction that's not new (past year or two), so the reading in classics ranges across three centuries of writing, and this year across 4 continents. Here is my list, arranged alphabetically, of the 10 best classic works of fiction that I read in 2018:

The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendahl (1839). This novel ostensibly about 19th-century Italy will strike a contemporary note for American readers: hand-picked judges coming up with the verdict that they know their benefactor, will prefer; jobs and titles awarded based entirely on political and family connections; do-nothing sinecures; contempt among the highest-ranking for the working classes; malleable religious leaders; politicians feathering their nests; women forced to promise sexual favors to advance their causes; demonizing of free expression; and a simple-minded leader demanding deference but essentially incapable of running a government.

The Enigma of Arrival, by V.S. Naipaul (1987). A mournful look at life gone by and as well as  novel about missed connections, missed perceptions, and assumptions about the pastoral life that prove at every turn to be wrong.

The Group, by Mary McCarthy (1963). A terrifying look at the fates and fortunes of 8 Vassar grads ('33), intelligent and attractive young women who at the start of the novel have bright futures - yet all of them are troubled, each in her own way.

The Life and Times of Michael K, by J. M. Coetzee (1983). A detailed account of K's life in Cape Town, a city torn by some kind of war, with shortages of all staples and with the constant movement of troops and surveillance by authorities - a highly political novel that feels true today, telling a story of exile and wandering and despair.

The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanazaki (1948). A terrific novel about the complex relationships among 4 sisters - a smart study of individual psychology and family dynamics, set against the background of life in Japan ca. 1935-41; the war is a dark cloud of truth that casts its shadow across this work of fiction.

Transit, by Anna Seghers (1944). Set in Marseilles during the German Occupation, this novel is about fear, flight, survival, and the petty forces of resistance, the nightmarish attempt to get all papers in order and all belongings packed and ready for flight, with constant disruptions and disappointments - a novel set in a specific time of crisis but really about the universal human condition.

True Grit, by Charles Portis (1968). The 14-year-old girl who sets a posse of bounty hunters into action to avenge the shooting death of her father turns out, as she looks back on her youth, to be a great narrator, giving us throughout the novel a sense of place, vivid characters, and a brisk narrative pace.

The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill (1983). Unlike most ghostly spirits that appear simply "haunted," Hill's ghost is truly vengeful and malevolent - harming innocent people (children, especially) who caused her no harm or pain during her stay on earth.

The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe (1963). This novel is an adventure/thriller/horror story about a man who finds himself entrapped and captive in a small house deep in a swale, surrounded by ever-encroaching sand dunes, but it is also an allegorical novel about a man struggling against an ineradicable force and trying to maintain at least a vestige of his individuality and humanity while under constant assault.

Zone, by Mathias Enard (2008). This challenging, monumental novel is made up of a stream of consciousness flowing throughout the narrator's train journey from Milan to Rome, over the course of which we receive first-hand accounts of a century of war crimes and crimes against humanity across all of the Mediterranean nations and Europe.

The most ambitious novel of the century that I've read (so far)

I don't think I'm giving anything away, especially in that Mathias Enard's Zone (2008) is not exactly plot driven (the plot such as it is entails a man riding a train to Rome where he intends to turn over to the Vatican a cache of documents naming war criminals from across Europe and the Mediterranean) but the novel ends pretty much in the only way it can: a freeze-frame, reminiscent of the end of a Truffault movie, perhaps. Whether that's satisfactory or not after such a long journey - 500+ pp in the mind and consciousness of Francis, a French spy, who plans to take on a new name, Yvand (?) and a new life - is immaterial. We have learned so much over the course of the supposed 3-hour journey, a panopticon of the horrors, pogroms, deportations and war crimes over the past century of history - w/ occasional references the Homeric epics as well - that at the end most readers will feel drained and shaken and guilty about all human transgressions. In the final chapters of Zone we learn some key info about the narrator: How he chose the identity that he plans to assume, what war crime he committed while serving w/ the Croat army, why his girlfriend - fellow spy Stephanie - has abandoned him, what actually happened on the night in Venice when he had a brush w/ death. These details help complete the picture of the narrator, but, like any true secret agent, he remains at the end a mystery and a cypher. In my view this book merits the comparisons it's received - comparisons with Melville, Joyce, even Homer, and other; it's the most ambitious 21st-centry novel I've read so far, and I would agree w/ the author of the brief preface - Brian Evenson - that readers should not be put off by Enard's unusual style - the entire novel consists of a single sentence - as the writing is surprisingly easy to follow and in fact it has a nice and steady pace that, as Evenson notes, is well suited to the onward rush of an intercity, high-speed train. Yet: This novel is demanding and not something to take up lightly, filled as it is w/ references to atrocities and massive deaths in war and in political, racist oppression. I'd encourage all serious readers to give it a try, but know what you're getting into beforehand.

A great novel - but one I'm unlikely to re-read

Like the narrator (Francis) of Mathias Enard's novel Zone (2008), I, too, am glad to be nearing the end of this journey; the novel (aside from a few interpolated chapters that are from a book the narrator is reading) is entirely made up of a stream of consciousness flowing throughout the narrator's rr journey from Milan to Rome, over the course of which, following the narrator's career as a French secret agent and his service in the the Croat army during the Serbo-Croation war, plus his family history and extensive research, we experience a century of war crimes and crimes against humanity across all of the Mediterranean nations and Europe - a completely overwhelming accomplishment in a novel that leaves me and I imagine every reader drained and saddened - what a dark view of the world! All of us know of the some of these atrocities, of course, in particular the Nazi concentration camps, probably the epitome of all of these horrors, but to bring them all together in the course of one narrative makes for a completely misanthropic view of the world. Is there no peace, no redemption? Well, maybe - as Francis plans to turn over secret documents on war crimes to the Vatican and to begin a new life under a new name - so much depends on how Enard ends this novel. I think by every measure it's a great book, worthy of comparison w/ Melville and Joyce, but I also have to say it's not a book that I'll re-read, even though there's much I didn't "get" on first reading. It's monumental, but some monuments - like the several Holocaust museums, for example - are just too sorrowful to visit more than once.

A chronicle of evil and war crimes that will shake your faith: Zone

As I near the end of Mathias Enard's 2008 novel, Zone, we still face the mystery of what precisely the narrator, Francis, plans to do w/ the suitcase he's transporting; he has indicated that the suitcase contains papers and discs that he's stole from this employer, the French spa agency, and that these records pertain to the various horrendous war crimes and crimes against humanity that the narrator has witnessed or studied. He obviously feels remorse, recognizing that the agency he works for has been part of a century of war crimes - so he is in part atoning for his guilt - and he also is seeking some kind of revenge for the death in the Serbo-Croation war of his best friend, Andri. In his leaving France w/ these documents, he is cutting off all ties w/ his previous life, notably ending his relationship w/ fellow spy, Stephanie; he will travel and live under an assumed name - though of course we have to believe that the French agency will track him down, it can't be that hard.  But what will he get from the Vatican representative when he passes on the suitcase? What could he want, and what could they provide other than money? And what will they do with this information - the Vatican isn't exactly known as a paragon of the investigation of evil. In any event, the novel takes an odd detour when the narrator recollects his visits to Morocco - which he notes is actually just outside his "zone' - i.e., the region across Europe, the Mideast, and North Africa that is his "territory" - athough in a broader sense the "zone" encompasses all locations of war crimes and crimes against humanity going back to the first World War, a litany of abuses that drives this novel and shakes any reader's faith in humanity. In any event, as he ponders Morocco he thinks primarily of the writers, Burroughs in particular, who went to M to indulge in various vices, particularly abuse of powerful hallucinogens (he does also mention the concentration camps that the Morrocan monarch set up in the desert - no regime is untouched). Not sure when he's so interested in the literary history of Morocco, but there is its.

Among the most ambitious works of literary fiction of the century - Zone

It's difficult to summarize the narrative of Mathais Enard's novel Zone (2008), in that doing so misses the whole point of the narration. As noted in previous posts, this ambitious and monumental novel is told as a stream of consciousness of a man - Francis, but traveling under a pseudonym on a fake French passport - as he heads by train from Milan to Rome where he intends to deliver a suitcase to someone from the Vatican; the suitcase contains discs and documents presumably identifying numerous war criminals and collaborators across Europe. Unlike most novels, this narrative does not give us a straightforward back story nor a clearly delineated plot line; it truly unfolds like the process of a man thinking about his life. At first, the novel feels hazy and unclear - though vivid in its particular accounts of certain scenes; as you progress through the novel, things fall into place and we get a more comprehensive picture of this man and his life. So in brief summary - recognizing that this goes against the spirit of this novel: Francis, born to a French father and Croat mother, volunteers to serve in the Croat military and fights against the Serb forces (early 90s?), where he traumatically witness the death in battle of his best friend, Andri; Francis later, encouraged by his father, applies to work in the diplomatic core. He's rejected, but is welcomed into the French secret service, i.e., the equivalent of our CIA. He wonders at first whether they know about his war experiences; of course they do! After several years of tedious work on dox and records, he gets assigned to several dangerous missions, leading him to witness the dark side of wars and struggles in Europe, the mid East, and North Africa (where his father had also served and perhaps committed war crimes). These experiences in what he calls "the Zone," combined w/ his voracious reading, make him aware of war crimes across the century and to a lesser extent reaching farther back into history (all the way to Homer), which seems to be what motivates him to turn over secret records to the Vatican and then to go off on a new life under the assumed name. In doing so, he leaves behind a woman he'd been close to (Stephanie?), who worked w/ him in the ministry - but he's apparently a loner, like many spies, who cuts off ties to everyone. His knowledge of - which is to say, Enard's knowledge of - war crimes and military history is astonishing, and all of the war scenes (including some from Israel that we read of in a few brief chapters that show the book he's reading while on the night train) are powerful, compelling, and frighteningly credible. Enard's is among the most ambitious works of literary fiction of this century; it's probably not for all readers - neither is Ulysses, for that matter - but those who are serious about contemporary literary fiction should give it a serious look.

A new perspective on a Jean Stafford story

Strangely, I don't think I'd ever read a Jean Stafford story until i read Children are Bored on Sunday, a 1946 story in the current throwback issue of the New Yorker; Stafford has long been a familiar name to me, but only, I hate to admit, as the abused wife of the great poet Robert Lowell. Reading this 1946 story - which is very much of its time and era yet stands up well after 70+ years - makes me want to go back and read more of her work. This piece is from the POV of a young woman living in New York, welcomed to or at least tolerated by the intellectual set in Manhattan in that era, but feeling herself to be a rube (her term) and unsophisticated, not nearly as quick nor as clever as those w/ whom she socializes. At the time of this narrative, she has withdrawn from her social set, at least temporarily, and is wracked by doubt and loneliness - and dangerous drawn to serious drinking. The story opens w/ her in the Met Museum on a Sunday as she spots a young man in the same social set, with whom she has "flirted" at a party some months back. She takes various evasive steps so as not to have to speak w/ him and is somewhat resentful that he has ruined her solitary visit to the Met - she has lost her focus on the artworks and keeps thinking about her sorrowful social life and her self-doubt. As she leaves the museum, the young man hales her, and she recollects some gossip she'd picked up about his failed marriage and his depression - and in fact he looks ill and sorrowful. The two head off for a nearby bar on a less posh street, where they, presumably, will drown their sorrows. So overall, the piece captures a moment in time in the NY literary-cultural scene, long gone, as well as the anxieties familiar to anyone who's moved to NY or to any big city hoping to make it but feeling like an outsider, and ends on a wistful yet scary note: People drank heavily in those days of course, more than today I think, and we know how alcoholism undid so many marriages and minds in that social set, most likely Stafford (and Lowell), too. If the story may have had a patina of glamour in its day, our perspective now gives it an aura of darkness and foreboding.

Among the most ambitious novels I have ever read: Enard's Zone

It's hard to overstate the achievement of Mathias Enard's novel, Zone (2008, may have had date wrong in previous post), which one of the jacket blurbs compares with Moby-Dick and which I would also compare w/ Ulysses - by any measure it stands up well against any of the great Modern masterpieces, and written by a 30-something author? Surely it would have drawn more attention across the world if it were written in English, but so be it. I'm not quite half-way done reading this 500-page novel, so things can change over the course of a narrative, but to this point it's among the most impressive novels I've read in years - yet this should come with  significant caveat. This novel is not for all readers - it's intensely demanding, full of information and geographic locations that will be obscure to many readers, in particular non-Europeans (including this one). Maybe it demands more than one reading - there's no way one could "get" it all  on first pass-through (also true of Ulysses). But serious readers of contemporary fiction should give Zone its due. Part of the challenge arises directly from Enard's narrative technique: the entire novel is told from within the consciousness of the narrator and occurs over the course of several hours as he travels by train from Milan to Rome. Because this novel is entirely stream-of-consciousness, many of the conventions of narrative are over-ridden. For example, in most novels, if you read through the first, say, 50 pages, you'll have a good sense of the narrator, his or her back story, the direction of the plot. This novel dispenses w/ back-story and w/ conventional episodic development. Rather, it's as if we're in the mind of a man taking stock of his whole life, not sequentially but the way one would do over the course of a long meditation (cf Joyce/Molly Bloom) - so his background and his life experiences get filled in as we go, something like the gradual increasing clarity of a puzzle being pieced together. The narrator , we learn, is traveling under and assumed name and is en route to the Vatican to deliver a suitcase containing the names of and information about several thousand war criminals. The narrator is or was an employ of the French equivalent of the CIA and he formerly served in the Croate army during the war against Serbia. Over the course of his life - military service and many spy missions (to among other places Syria, Israel/Lebanon) he has witnessed, and recalls for us, numerous atrocities and crimes against humanity; similarly, his father served with the French in Algeria and had witnessed (and maybe participated in) atrocities and war crimes - and the narrator also recalls and recounts other horrors of the 20th century in Europe, including both World Wars and in particular the Nazi concentration campus. So this is an astonishingly dark novel, but also among the most ambitious novels I've ever read (cf Melville/Moby-Dick), encompassing an entire continent and century of history in its scope. My several comparisons don't do this novel full justice; it's really sui generis.