May 2022: Shirley Hazzard, Allice Munro, Vladimir, Groundskeeping, Fortune Men (The),Occupational Hazards

 Elliot’s Reading - May 2022

Just a few words on Shirley Hazzard’s first published book, the story collection Cliffs of Fall (1963), collected in her Collected Stories, in which Zoe Heller’s Foreword recounts how SH sent the story Harold unsolicited to the NYer, w/ a note that there was no need to return it if they didn’t want to publish, which led to a call from the fiction editor who enthusiastically picked up the story and many other subsequently from SH. So is Harold still an amazing story? SH’s writing sentence by sentence is immaculate - both her eye and ear for topical detail and nuances of speech but in particular for her thousands for social observations and insights - we can see this quite well in Harold, whose eponymous central character is an obviously disturbed young man living w/ tyrannical parents. So, yes, her fiction stands up well to the test of time - if not as well as the more dramatic and eccentric likes of O’Connor or Welty, to name 2 s-s masters. What holds SH back from the very top ranks is the confinement of her work, her settings - almost all in this first collection involving Brits and Americans spending the summer in various pensions in Italy - a way of life possible when the dollar was so strong (and the lira weak) but now remote, as if from another planet. At some point I’ll read further in her fiction and see if she breaks out of the tight confines of a narrow social set.

I

ll say this about Julia May Jonas’s novel, Vladimir (2022): It will keep you reading (it kept me reading) right to the end, which is more than most contemporary novels manage to do. It’s pretty tense and intriguing throughout - a first-person narration in which a highly intelligent intellectual professor novelist recounts her infatuation with a new colleague, the eponymous Vladimir, and how her infatuation and the ludicrous terms of her marriage in which they each pledge to tolerate the dalliances and worse of each other - you can imagine how that works out as she gets older, in her own eyes, and husband continues to attract his adoring students - until he suddenly doesn’t as the world caves in around him and he finds himself facing public hearings and discipline. There’s an extraordinary amount of drinking and smoking throughout the novel (plus a lot of high-end grocery shopping and home cooking) and I have to say that none of the leading characters is appealing (to me) in any way and the satire of university politics wears a little thin - such an easy target! - but I love the many literary allusions (sorry, can’t help myself there) and name-dropping and, though the conclusion isn’t entirely credible, it’s at least quite dramatic, and how can you not see this novel as the prelude to a miniseries? If nothing else, this novel must the success de scandale of the year, maybe the century, at Skidmore College, the thinly veiled setting. So, look, lots to enjoy here, lots of insight into the character of a middle-aged woman desperately seeking to retain and rekindle the allure of her youth, some great skewering of academic politics, and all at not much more than 100 pp. 

Lee Cole must be a really nice guy, as the characters in his debut novel, Groundskeeping (2022) are pleasant, friendly, and credible people - esp noteworthy in that this is yet another campus-based novel, a genre prone to cynicism, irony, and deep character flaws (see above - post on the recent novel Vladimir). A review of a Richard Russo novel some years back - and it’s no coincidence that this novel carries a blurb from same - said that RR initiated a 3rd novel “type” - someone takes a journey, a stranger comes to town, and, in Russo’s case, Schmo stays at home. Cole’s novel stays at home or close to it, and it feels as if it must be somewhat autobiographical, as it’s about the coming of age of an aspiring novelist - though it’s clearly not a work of auto-fiction. That said: This novel is, how else can I put this?, really dull. The plot in essence - this based on a reading of the first 100+ not-small pp., about 1/3 through the book - entails a protagonist meeting an alluring woman at a grad-student party, he learns that she’s a visiting writer (he’s enrolled in one fairly ludicrous writing course, a perk he gets because he works on the grounds crew of the U.), he pursues her w/ some ardor, she tells him she’s in a relationship however, and he learns that said relationship is w/ a guy in his writing course. They all converge at a downtown (Louisville) club, without any serious consequences. Meanwhile, writer living with his grandfather (quaint, old-fashioned, veteran) and his uncle with disabilities (cranky, selfish). Schmo stays at home. In some ways this novel reminds me of the talk and gossip in a Sally Rooney novel - a worthwhile role model, as perhaps a male-centered v. will take off - or at least make another good miniseries. In other ways, I ask: Why the fuss over this debut? The jacket blurbs are of the highest order, and there was a rave review in the NYTBR, which drew me to this work. I guess I’m missing something - it’s a pleasant enough work, which in itself sets it apart, but there must be more to it than this. 

Two excellent and quite different stories this week, first, Alice Munro’s Runaway, the title story in one of her final collections, and if anyone is in doubt about her deserved winning of a Nobel Prize take a look at this piece; there’s a twist at the end, and I won’t give anything away - but this story in about 40 pp. covers as much ground as many novels, but in a clear, sharp manner, never feeling rushed or arbitrary - quite conventional, in fact, in the technique, a series of short narrative patches that follow part of the life course of a young woman on a remote Ontario farm, her fears about her temperamental husband, tensions with the nearest neighbors who are of an entirely different social class and milieu (he’s a famous poet; the young couple are working class and not well educated; the young woman is their cleaning-lady). In fear of her husband’s violence, the young woman - is she the runaway? - expresses her worry to the neighbor woman who takes exulting joy in helping the young woman to feel to Toronto and a new life. The consequences of her impulsive flight resound right to the final sentence. Second story not by a eminence but by a writer unknown till now to me, Occupational Hazards, by Jamil Jan Kochai - and the entire store is told as a series of imagined job applications spanning the course of the life of a man born in Syria (?), later emigrating to the U.S. and trying amid much hardships to support a family and raise children. It’s a truly sad story, and truly global in its scope, and though I doubt whether another writer will ever take on the same narrative strategy it in this appearance feels organic and right, never gimmicky. As in Runaway, the story concludes with a surprising twist of fate, which again I won’t give away, and along the course of the narration there is much heartbreak, struggle, and intensity - and a close look at a culture and way of life rarely addressed in American fiction. 

O had a lot of trouble engaging w/ Nadifa Mohamed’s Booker-finalist novel The Fortune Men (2021) - maybe it’s just me but from the outset I had trouble developing a clear picture of the major characters, of which there are several, and the novel to me didn’t really get going until the central event - a murder - and the arrest of an innocent man, mistreated misjudged by the police in Cardiff because he’s a Black man (Somali). Much of the novel feels to me over-written and willfully difficult (there are throughout so many foreign (as in, not English) terms that I literally could not understand some of the sentences. It’s a novel of high ambition and apparently based on “true events,” but for a novel with such potential - racial conflict, injustice, crime and punishment - I just never felt drawn to the story nor to the plight of the protagonist. Gave up half-way through. 

Shirley Hazzard’s 2nd book, People in Glass Houses (1967), also a collection of stories almost all of which appeared in the New Yorker, would today probably be marketed as “linked stories” forming a novel. Well, they are linked in that all have the same setting, the thinly disguised United Nations (always called the Organization) HQ (where SH had worked), though I think only 1 of the characters appear in more than 1 of the stories. Whatever we call it, however, it’s an incredible tour de force that, though it’s read rarely today holds up well as a chilling portrayal of a bureaucracy run amok - almost Kafka-esque, especially in the weird, almost frightening account, of one of the employees’s attempt to get a small pay raise. The stories were particularly poignant in their day, when the UN was relatively new and seemed a beacon of hope lighting the way for peace and prosperity - and here we see what it’s like working in the UN, the petty bureaucratic fights, the endless reports and position papers, the subtleties and nuances and need for across-the-board approval for any statement or action, all of which lead nowhere and die in an endless cycle of review - familiar to anyone who’s worked for a bureaucracy: But we somehow expected more of the UN. Even the building - the glory of the world back in the ‘50s, feels archaic and inhuman; as noted in one point, the founders cared about how the building would look from the outside - cool, reflective, “modern” glass - and how it looks for those inside: offices in long windowless hallways. Her turns of phrase and her names for the many offices and programs are hilarious (e.g., DALTO: The Department of Aid to the Less Technically Oriented).