Elliots Reading February 2021: Eliz. Spencer, James McBride, Lauren Groff, Akhtar, Mishima

 Elliot’s Reading - February 2021

A compelling story by Lauren Groff, The Wind, appears in the current New Yorker; I’m no expert on Groff’s work, but from what I can recall of her previous stories she has tended to focus on various communities of contemporary Floridians, many of them in the central Florida setting in and near Gainseville - the university town, so there are some obvious abrasions between long-time Floridians and the peripatetic academes. This story, however, has the feeling of autobiography - told in the first person by a narrator who could well be Groff, I don’t know for sure - and the setting, different from what I know of her other work, is a generation back in a small town probably in upstate NY near the Vt line, maybe just north of Albany. In any event, the story is about a woman who surreptitiously, though with the aid of several sympathetic friends and co-workers, grabs her three kids and takes flight from her abusive husband (a cop, no less). We learn early on that the woman is the narrator’s (and Groff’s?) grandmother and her mother is one of the 3 kids. There’s a really nice coda in which the narrator recognizes how her mother prepared her for the challenges a woman will face through life and prepared her for adulthood. I did wonder, in reading the story, if it would be better to hold off till the final paragraphs the reveal that the protagonist was the narrator’s grandmother … but ultimatelyI think Groff has it right, the other way would feel manipulative and a heavy-handed writerly trick. Stay w/ what you’ve got. 

Yukio Mishima’s posthumously published novel Spring Snow (1968) the first of a posthumous tetrology, is at first a challenging novel to read, at least for most American readers, who like me will be largely ignorant of life in Japan ca 1912, in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War and who’d be completely ignorant of the nuance of the Japanese caste system and of Shinto Buddhism. Additionally, thanks to our xenophobic, isolate culture, even reading (and retaining) the Japanese names and titles can be daunting and off-putting. But putting all that aside, I’d say this novel - unusual in many ways, quite traditional (as a late burst of neo-realism) in others - is well worth staying with. It grows on one much more than almost any novel I can recall. The story, in essence, is of 2 young men - in last year of school before university - one (Kiyoaki) quite handsome, wealthy, and without much direction, the other (Honda - an easy name to remember!) more serious, studious, not as wealthy (tho his fa. is a judge). In short, K is in love w/ a young woman, Satoko, since childhood, but as their relationship grows more serious as they mature, she insults him and they have a nasty break-up. Her family - of old nobility but not much wealth or stature - arranges for her marriage to a member of the Emperor’s family, a huge step up for them/her politically and socially - but the romance with K. resumes w/ potentially terrible consequences: One never snubs a member of Empire. In many ways, this novel could easily be translated to the present day, as these relationships and struggles are universal, though it’s also clearly meant to be a record of its time - the Mishima estate would never give up the rights, I would think, esp given his right-wing political/military stance - and should probably best remain as such. Though many readers will skim some of the passages about Buddhism, it’s a good idea to appreciate this novel on a # of levels: Not only the romantic plot and the buddy-story subplot but also a vision of a Japanese culture, just emerging in the modern world (and well before the international ambitions), with its strict sense of social hierarchy, the almost creepy reverence for the royal blood, the terrible mistreatment of devoted servants and working people (notably, the omnipresent and tireless rickshaw men), and for several absolutely beautiful scenes: K and S riding through the snow in a rickshaw (cf the scene in Madame Bovary in the carriage), the final moments in the high mountains above Kyoto where K goes in pursuit of his now unattainable love. 

Good, troubling story in the current New Yorker, A Wrinkle in the Realm, by Ben Okri, a two-pager that tells of a man who has become concerned that people seem to be purposely moving away from him in public spaces and even crossing the street as he approaches, clearly afraid of him for some reason. What reason? I admit that I interpreted this situation as racial, or racist, assuming that this character is a black man - but why do I assume this and what does it mean that I’ve done so? Was it a racist assumption? Or is it just an awareness of a social condition with which we, and especially black men, live? As you might expect, the story twists this thesis predicament around a bit, especially as the young man begins wearing a mask to hide his face and perhaps end this predicament - and this action has unforeseen consequences, which I won’t divulge - just read the story. But it’s amazing that Okri is able to probe two distinct social phenomena of our age - the ingrained racism and now, a more contemporary and perhaps ephemeral phenomenon - the protection afforded by masks, which may in surprising ways go beyond the medical antiviral protection. As we know, wearing a mask in public, or not, can also be a political statement.

It’s seldom that I have a lot of praise for a contemporary novel - readers of this blog will know my taste and reading preferences by now - but I would recommend to any reader the 2020 novel from Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies. Without ever becoming patronizing, petulant, or didactic, this novel from a mid-career author - who won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his plays - gives readers a sense, better than just about anything I’ve read on this topic - of the divided loyalties, sense of alienation, sense of danger, and unalloyed patriotism of those born in the U.S. into an immigrant family, in this case a family of highly educated Pakistanis. The novel feels really close to a memoir, as the known facts coincide roughly with the life events AA treats in the novel, and it certainly has the sense of confession and life story that we know from such authors recently as Knausgaard - but there’s a sharp sociopolitical edge in AA’s writing that makes this novel at times feel like a gut punch - and nobody could accuse this writer of navel-gazing. Overall, it’s about family relationships, making it in the world of drama, surviving as a much-loathed minority in the post 9/11 nation, defending oneself as an American native born, struggles with love and commitment, living large in NYC during the boom years, and most of all coming to terms with his successful (cardiologist) but self-destructive father. So much is within this novel, and told so well - we can see, from several long dialog passages, how AA earned the drama Pulitzer - that, even in his moments of deep shame and self-loathing, makes AA’s narrator come off always as a sympathetic and credible character/author. 

James McBride’s Deacon King Kong is an occasionally uproarious and largely entertaining novel with a plenitude of characters (hard to keep them straight at times) set in the summer of 1969, year of the Amazin’ Mets, in a Brooklyn housing project, now inhabited mostly by Black families though denizens from a previous age, the Italians in particular (now mostly involved in smuggling items through the port and in the drug trade, with the street-level work farmed out to young Black men in gangs) and less so the Irish (now mostly cops and other city employees). The complex plot centers, to the extent it centers at all, on the eponymous character, who goes by the monitor Sportcoat and his friends, whose camaraderie centers on serious drinking. By and large, don’t read this novel for the plot, which becomes increasingly Byzantine and improbable, but for the terrific characterization and street humor. There’s a laugh-out-loud line on almost every page, as the old Black gentlemen constantly duel with words, exaggerate, and reminisce about days gone by. That said, the novel also abounds in racial stereotypes to the extent that, had it been written by any but a well-established Black writers such as McBride, the author would likely be pilloried. On a broader scale, however, the novel is an ambitious social  portrait of a city in distress, as the drug trade is first making its way into the community and is ruining many lives, those of the users, the abusers, and the street-corner dealer who will never thrive. 

Jhumpa Lahirii’s story in the current New Yorker, Casting Shadows, is, like all of her work, well-crafted and at times beautiful - in particular, I have to say I was taken by the ending, which cast the whole story, for me, in a different light and made me rethink and revisit the whole narrative. Good! But overall the story remains a bit of a puzzle, as the narrator tells of her lonely life, inability to create or sustain a meaningful love relationship, falling for guys who will never commit and who in fact turn out to be snakes while also devoting a lot of time to relationships that she knows will never work. I can only admire JL for continuing to take on new material in her career - she broke out 20 years ago as a young literary star with some gorgeous and thoughtful stories mostly about children of immigrant Indian families and their adaption to life in America (where most had been born). She has since moved on to material set in Italy, where JL has apparently settled for her life. What’s a little weird is that she now writes in Italian - why? I guess because she can - and then translates her own stories for publication in the U.S. OK, but her translations are sometimes odd, as if she’s lost touch w/ her native language. For example, in this story characters repeatedly go out for “a coffee”; we would never say that - though what I think she’s translating is characters in Italy going for “an espresso” - which, perhaps in her mind, would be too unusual in a U.S. setting (it would not). Similarly, one of the main characters is a man whom she calls her “friend” - and we sometimes confuse him w/ the man’s wife (also a “friend”): nouns with cases would make this clear in Italian, but nowhere to go w/ that in English. Some of the scenes, too, strain credibility, such as the narrator’s following, unseen, her friend and his wife on a long walk in the unnamed city (Rome?) to eavesdrop on their loud and enduring argument about something or other. Impossible for that to happen on many levels: no one argues that long and loud in public, she’d have been spotted anyway, and so forth. All told, I still have faith in JL as a world-class writer, but this story seems to have jumped the rails. 2/23

Elizabeth Spencer was a much-published author in her day, largely identified w/ Southern-regional fiction and short stories, unfairly, and best known by far today for her excellent short novel, The Light in the Piazza, thanks largely to its second life on stage. Her novel The Voice at the Back Door (1956) is not so well known today, and probably shouldn’t be. I suspect it was her attempt to, using a current phrase, “go big,” to shake off the mantle of regional, small-scale writer and to take a place alongside RP Warren, Harper Lee, and maybe even Faulkner (esp Light in August). Voice at the Back Door is an ambitious novel of race, politics, and romance, centered on a Mississippi county sheriff (Duncan) running for re-election and opposed by some thugs involved in the illegal liquor trade if not worse who enlists a corp of racist supporters who try to upend the valiant Duncan by framing him as a supporter of voting rights for blacks (which he does support - though it’s not helping his election chances). I suspect this book might make a good miniseries today, despite its now-remote setting (post WWII); however, reading this book was a chore: Spencer for all her strengths is really weak at introducing characters and at sustaining her sometimes Byzantine plot line. A bit of back story on the lead characters, a bit more guidance from an authorial hand - perhaps a first-person narration? - would help, but, honestly, right down to the concluding chapters I had to constantly name-check and ask myself: Which one was this? That? Too bad, because there are some beautiful passages and moments, and the plot does build toward an exciting conclusion (some of which is still hazy for me, however, thanks to Spencer’s oblique narrative style, never revealing too much, or even enough). The book today would need some “trigger warnings,” as the entire novel is rife with racist language and stereotyping - no doubt quite accurate in this period and locale but painful to read regardless. 2/28