Review: THE CURFEW by Jesse Ball

I’ve read some quite beautiful prose this year (Patchett and Obreht come to mind), but I’ve read only one truly great novel—and that is The Curfew by Jesse Ball.

One of the difficult things about writing a rave is that it sometimes devolves into writing a list of adjectives about certain elements of the novel; with a pan, it is easier to be both specific and entertaining. The passionate reviewer/recommender will, in their efforts to blow the trumpet as loudly as they can, sometimes focus on decibel and not on articulation. I think there is a good reason for this: in our age of ubiquitous recommendation,  volume is the only means of getting attention.And there is plenty of reason to wield hyperbole when writing about The Curfew.

My temptation is to stop at a pat, blurbable hybridization along the lines of “The Curfew is like a combination of Kafka and Calvino, drawing on the former’s dread but tempering it with the latter’s fancy.” And I believe that, to an extent, but it falls prey to over-praise trap. What have I really even just said about it? To say that it is a cross between Calvino and Kafka is really to say it is like neither, since it’s difficult to imagine Calvino writing the futility of The Trial or Kafka to let his imagination rip as Calvino does in Invisible Cities.

2011 Tournament of Books: Breaking Down Week One

The first week of the 2011 Tournament of Books has come and gone. While there were no real shockers, that doesn't mean there weren't items of interest.

Here are few match-by-match highlights:

Match 1 Winner

Match 1: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen versus Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne, judged by Sarah Mancuso

Mancuso on Freedom:

"...Freedom focuses on two fully human adults who, despite their history of betrayals, return to each other. When Patty and Walter drive away from the lake house, they complete the book’s convincing depiction of a mature marriage—one that survives serious conflicts and requires serious mercies. It isn’t nostalgia for Walter’s affair that broke my heart; it’s Patty’s forgiveness, and Walter’s forgiveness of her own betrayal, and the reminder that such forgiveness is possible..."

Mancuso reads Freedom's end with considerably more hope than I do. In her assessment of these novels, Mancuso provides compelling textual evidence, but here at the end she abandons direct quotation of the text. To my mind, one paragraph describes the nature of Walter and Patty's reconnection, and it is the reader's interpretation of that paragraph that will determine how positive their reconciliation is. I'll quote at length:

"Her eyes weren't blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold empty space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside of him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind" (p. 559).

I find it difficult to call this moment forgiveness. Forgiveness implies a kind of ethical transaction in which wrongs against a moral system are pardoned. Here, the moral system is completely obliterated by "the void." This absence of ethics makes any transgression meaningless, any emotional benevolence null. Their relationship here is cast as a strategic alliance against nothingness--not a turn to each other as subjects of meaning and value.

But that’s me.

Match 2 Winner

Match 2: Room by Emma Donogue versus Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky, judged by Jennifer Weiner 

Weiner on Bad Marie:

"It’s a world where grownups are savages, and children, even worse. (“Caitlin grinned. Caitlin was happy when she got her way. She seemed to get her way most of the time.”). The men are duplicitous and weak, other women are competition, the sex has more to do with power than affection, and everyone behaves badly."

Weiner on Room:

“Still, the book is, to resort to a cliché, unputdown-able, and it raises fascinating questions: What is a mother’s obligation to her child? How much of her independence must a mother sacrifice for a son, or a daughter’s, well-being? How do you survive hardship? How do you survive joy?”

First, I'm going to preen a little and say I called this in my odds-making for the first round:

“Room is essentially a conservative book, reifying conventional beliefs about motherhood, child-reading, and how freaky men can be. Bad Marie is libertarian: the main character acts on impulse only, and we get very little sense of what she wants at all. I suspect Jennifer Weiner, the judge for this round who writes books with relatively familiar values, will go for Room.”

Second, does Room really raise "fascinating questions" about maternal obligation and freedom? Hardly--those questions require the ability to make choices that the mother in Room doesn't have.

Third, a kid getting what they want most of the time makes them "worse" than savage?

These points show the easy morality of Room, hidden in plain view by the narrative conceit and first-person narration. That’s not to say Bad Marie should move on necessarily; it relies heavily on awe-inducing coincidence. But considerations of form offer can more interesting discussion here.

Match 3 Winner

Match 3: Savages by Don Winslow versus The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen, judged by Rosencrans Baldwin

Baldwin on The Finkler Question:

"I read novels for plot, but I don’t need it—but in its place I do need life. Perhaps Finkler’s point is that Julian is not the center of the book. Maybe the point of Finkler isn’t to dramatize events or entertain its readers, but to flay, to scrutinize, to attack."

Baldwin makes an interesting point here about the problems of writing compelling satirical novels: they must, perhaps counter-intuitively, have an excess of plot to pull the reader along. Think of the great literary satires: Don Quixote, Candide, Gulliver's Travels---they overflow with narrative. Two reasons for this come to mind. First, story might provide a bulwark against ponderousness and self-importance. Second, the pleasure of compelling narrative might make the reader more receptive to the ideological content of satirical critique.  The Finkler Question's only real defense against preachiness and readerly fatigue is style; as Baldwin mentions, Jacobsen writes some extraordinarily fine sentences. Craft, however, doesn't seem to be enough sugar to help the medicine go down.

Match 4 Winner

Match 4: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan versus Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, judged by Anthony Doerr

Doerr on A Visit from the Goon Squad:

"One of the things I enjoy most about being a fiction writer is the unpredictability of what each individual reader brings to the work. If I write a story about a character with a stutter, say, a reader with a speech impediment will probably react to the story differently than a reader without one. If Jennifer Egan writes a book about time overwhelming characters and turning them into parents, a reader like me, who feels himself being overwhelmed by time and being turned into a parent, will plug into it in a certain way."

Doerr's judgment was my favorite of the first four matches, and this meditation on affection and timing was particularly insightful. One of the great pleasures of the Tournament of Books is that critical subjectivity provides as much of the fun as the winning and losing. This then allows us to revel in what we already know: that there is no high ground of evaluation, no semi-divine objective consciousness that can "properly" assign value. Like many truths, this is both liberating and frustrating. And devilish fun.
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Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Larry Watson: Recent Reading Round-Up

Sunset Park by Paul Auster
You would be forgiven if you thought, from the cover synopsis and most of the reviews, that Sunset Park is a downer. A quartet of confused, lonely, and otherwise discontented 20-somethings living in an abandoned house on a forlorn street in a forgotten neighborhood does not portend sweetness and light. However, this novel, especially by Auster's standards, is really pretty darn uplifting. Arranged around the reconcilition of a father and son, the various characters all use their time of isolation and exile to regroup (if they ever were "grouped" at all). Friendships are made. Love blossoms. Dissertations get written. Compared to what I was expecting, it's a bleeding Disney movie—albeit one with statutory rape, police brutality, sibling murder, and extended discussions of Chinese political dissidents.

Nemesis by Philip Roth
Man is it interesting to be here for Roth's endtimes. To my mind (and to the minds of many others), he is one of the two or three most interesting American writers of the last half-century, with a scale, scope, and diversity of work that will probably only be recongized in the years to come. It's quite difficult to avoid seeing his last few novel/novellas as the dusk-watching thoughts of an old man. By turns frightened, angry, nostalgic, bitter, and elegaic, they are possessed of the chaos, thrashing, and poignancy of a raged-against mortality. Nemesis is a novel of remembrance, of growing up in Weequahic, New Jersey during the Second World War. Roth's evocation of place is as masterful as it is understated: dress, demeanor, and decorum suffuse this story of the polio scare of 1945. His protagonist, viewed by the narrator some four decades after the main action of the story, seems to stand in for a generation: once vigourous, purposeful, and secularly righteous, but now worn down by fortune's outrageous arrows. This will not, I don't think, find its way into the first, or perhaps even second rank, of Roth's work, but seen in the real-time decrescendo of Roth's life, it is fascinating.

Montana, 1948 by Larry Watson
I've been working by way through Milkweed Prize Winners and this one is my favorite so far. It is a burnished, quietly ferocious story of a boy watching what will be the signal, tragic event of his family's life. His uncle, the doctor both to the white and Native American populations of a small part of Montana, has been abusing some of his patients until one day the boy's father, town sheriff, gets wind of the goings-on. The novel, as you might imagine, gets a little tense at this point, with almost Sophoclean levels of moral tumult. On the punch-per-page scale, Montana, 1948 might be belt-holder for my 2010 reading.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

For the life of me, I can't formulate a coherent reading of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. There are plenty of reviews out there, so I was hoping to offer some kind of different perspective on the book, but find myself unable to corral them into anything. So, to the devil with corralling and let commence a parade of critical non-sequitors! These observations are probably best suited for those who have already read the book, since I don’t go into anything like context or summary, so I apologize for those who have yet to read it. (Past here, there be spoilers.)

1. I can't help associating Patty Berglund, the female lead in Freedom, with Mad Men's Betty Draper. And you know what? Betty Draper is more interesting and I'll tell you why. In Freedom, we get a couple hundred pages of Patty's diary, explaining the ins and outs of her personality, her childhood, her fantasies, and her disappointments. Betty, on the other hand, is still a mystery. Her future therefore seems more open and unpredictable, whereas Patty's psychology is so over-determined that there's really nothing left to be interested in.

2. Much of the coverage of Freedom seems to figure the book as somehow standing apart from most contemporary literary fiction (the Time cover would seem the most striking embodiment of this exceptionalist view). But I couldn't help but see the long line of Freedom's literary forebears: Henry James' The Golden Bowl, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, John Updike's Couples, Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, James Salter's Light Years and on and on; the long trail of American novels about married couples of the ruling class (and the just under the ruling class) feels quite present here.

3. This reminds me of something one of my undergraduate professors, the great James Carothers, once told me: "I have never yet read an accurate portrayal of the silent life of a couple that has lived together for many years." My own reading experience has born this out as well, but the absence of any sustained effort on Franzen's part to show us how Patty and Walter were together during their good years empties their later struggles of much interest. (For the record, Prof. Carothers also said that he thought repetitive manual labor and excruciating physical pain were unrepresentable in prose. Always found this fascinating. And true.)

4. Even though Patty's "autobiography" takes up a significant part of the novel, I am reminded that we should not be fooled into thinking we know her any better than any of the other characters. In fact, I might argue that we know her less well. In literature, a character's direct composition (diary, letters, etc.) are actually further removed from their interiority than direct narration for one simple reason: they have control over their self-representation in these moments. A great example is Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For most of the novel, we get Stephen Daedalus' story in the form of third-person omniscience. However, the last part of the novel is Stephen's diary, and we end up knowing less about what he's feeling and thinking for it.

5. With this in mind, you can see the trouble Franzen has with writing women. Patty's text (with a prose style that is remarkably similar to the rest of the novel) is really an end-around of having to write her as Franzen writes Richard, Walter, and Joey. And none of the other important female characters (Lalitha, Jessica, Connie, Carol) have passages in which Franzen explores their interiority. Even the history of Walter's family is strikingly patrilinear. It's somewhat difficult not to see Franzen's depiction of women here as somewhat akin to Richard's womanizing; they find women interesting and important, but distant and unknowable--with Patty, for both of them, the exception that demonstrates the rule.

6. Franzen's success as an essay writer in the years since The Corrections has, to my mind, had a deleterious effect on his fiction. There are simply too many essayistic moments in Freedom (close-reading the persona of Conor Oberst being perhaps the most glaring example) for my taste. His impulse seems to be to diagnose, rather than to portray, the world around him. The Berglunds are so overtly emblematic of a particular swath of American life that they, conversely, represent no one. Compare them to a literary couple like, say, Nicole and Dick Diver from Tender is the Night, and I think Franzen’s deductive portrayal which culls character from the zeitgeist is less effective than Fitzgerald’s inductive one, which achieves transcendence through specificity.

7. I am no longer really interested in this story. The domestic struggles of the well-off seem sufficiently well-trodden in popular culture. Frazen's strain to connect the Berglund discord to larger social issues seems to me to exemplify the barrenness of this particular milieu. Maybe there's something new and interesting to be said about it, but it has to be, you know, new and interesting.

8. To add my ballot to the voting on the meaning of the title: I think it's a canard. Like the fate of the Cerulean Warbler, freedom here is seen as an end in itself whose propagation and maintenance justifies a great deal of wrong-doing. In Walter's professional life, the warbler provides cover for huge crimes against the environment by corporate America. This situation is doubled in his son Joey's foray into defense-contracting, in which he profits mightily from the war in Iraq where "freedom" is the nominal casus belli. This association between the warbler and "freedom" is codified, perhaps even too overtly, on the cover of the American edition itself: the warbler and freedom stand nearly face to face.

9. Speaking of mirrors, what an amazing selection for Oprah. I've only read a dozen or so of the books she has selected, but I can't imagine there has been one that represents her viewership so directly. How many Patty Berglunds will read Freedom? And what will they see in it?
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Recent Reading Round-Up

Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie
This collection of short stories captures the range of Alexie's larger body of work quite well. In ten "little" stories, he gives a grand tour of what it means to be Native American in contemporary America, to be both inside and outside, revered and obliterated, living and yet extinct. Considering his somewhat limited scope, his variety is remarkable: these stories are tender, fun, sad, and uplifting by turn--and all take place within a small population of Spokane Indians living in central Washington. Some writers jump from one historical moment and setting to another to spur their creativity (Doctorow comes to mind especially), but Alexie shows that fully exploring the possibilities of even a small group, if done well, offer seemingly limitless possibilities.

Bloodroot by Amy Greene
Bloodroot as several elements that would seem, at first blush, to turn us off the novel: child protagonists, sections labeled by speaker, agrarian mysticism, violence against women as the inciting incident, and an obivous, banal horticultural metaphor. Still, we found ourselves strangely compelled. For one, Greene is fantastic with setting and her rendering of life in the foothills of the Appalachian is reason enough to read Bloodroot. We think perhaps a less complicated narrative and an easing-off of the allegorical pedal would serve Greene well; she writes well enough to do without so much, well, art.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
If Eggers has done nothing else, he's confirmed that the phrase "non-fiction novel" is not a logical absurdity. Combined with What is the What, Zeitoun gives us the beginning of a fascinating direction for Eggers, whose first, blockbuster work, A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, was more a display of textual gymnastics than it was coherent. These true stories of people in the middle of major historical events give Eggers a project worthy of his skills. Zeitoun tells the story of a Muslim man and his family during Hurricane Katrina. It is a dizzying and unbelievable tale, told with reamarkable clarity and restraint.  Part Huck Finn, Part Native Son, Zeitoun is readable, poignant, infuriarting, and, impossibly, true.

Quick Review: Yann Martel's Beatrice and Virgil

Yann Martel's Life of Pi was an enormous hit; it enjoyed the kind of commercial success that writers of literary fiction daren't hope for because very few ever experience anything like it. And I can imagine that it was hard for Martel to process. One day you are an obscure writer and suddenly, improbably, your book is translated into 40+ languages and selling millions and millions of copies. What, for the love of all that is holy, do you do next?

Unfortunately, for Martel and for us, what he did next was spend eight years writing a mess of a book. It's a little hard to know where to start. I suppose some plot summary is in order, but hold on to your hats--it gets weird. Beatrice and Virgil begins with about 30 pages of what would seem to be thinly-veiled autobiography; a writer named Henry is trying to write a follow-up to a best-selling novel. After struggling for five years, he comes up with an idea to write about the Holocaust as fiction and non-fiction simultaneously (I would explain more about this, but it was so titanically boring the first go-round that I can't bear to go through it) only to find that both his publisher and editor killed it dead. O that they would have done us the same favor here.

Anyway, distraught at the end of this project, Henry and his wife move to a large unnamed city where Henry regroups by joining a theatre cooperative, working at chocolate shop, and answering fan mail. Now, let the coincidences pile. First, Henry is captivated by a bizarre fan-letter that includes a highlighted Flaubert short-story, a draft of a surreal play featuring a monkey and a donkey (the titular characters, we'll soon discover) discussing pears, and a terse request for help. Henry, for reasons passing understanding and credulity, is interested and decides to find the guy. Luckily, he lives down the street. And guess what? He's writing a Holocaust allegory! Whoda thunk it. The rest of the novel unravels in ways that manage to be both contrived and oddly predictable.

I'm usually willing to overlook a certain "serendipity" in narrative, but the plotting here just seems so lazy and the metaphors so ham-handed. Acutally, it would be one thing if the metaphors were ham-handed, but here they are also clumsily explained. Martel, apparently worried that we may not understand every last detail, has his protagonist "realize" things that would be best left for the reader to ponder on their own. The combination of spoon-fed symbolism and nakedly artificial plot makes the work feel condescending. One of the admirable qualities of Life of Pi is that the central metaphor of the novel went largely unexamined or explained until the very end. In short, the story worked on its own; Beatrice and Virgil is an allegory in search of a story.

My advice? Leave Beatrice and Virgil be. If you are still interested, then do yourself a favor and wait a few months for a remaindered copy--they are sure to be bountiful.