Reviewers, like the novelists and short story writers they
judge, as well as citizens in the “real world” taking in their cars for major
overhauls, need to be shrewd in going undercover. If the characters are leaking oil for two hundred-plus pages,
perhaps it’s a good idea to look under the hood oneself, even if one isn’t an
expert, in order to discover whether the problem is serious and systemic, or
trivial though persistent. In the latter case, the book under review is a loose
bolt in the oil pan, which is to say the “problem” doesn’t really exist if one
is satisfied with last-minute plot resolutions while ignoring the psychological
filtering between and behind the covers and metal intestines. In the first instance, one has
to dig into every nook and cranny of the book to find that both crankshaft
seals are defective. What to do then? Well, the reader isn’t a mechanic, that’s
the author’s job. In a perfect fantasy world, the car owner would then tell the
mechanic to keep the car since he (the owner) could just purchase another one that wouldn’t
keep getting these strange noises every time a spin is taken.
I’ve drawn out the metaphor to make a point. Most readers
are happy if the book just needs a screw tightened in the pan. But that’s only
possible if they’re part-time passengers in their friends’ cars, the equivalent
of romance readers plundering a book a day before throwing the year’s supply
into a Guy Fawkes Day apolitical inferno. Because in a literary work, the oil
leak is devastating no matter the source. And one leak – two leaks, actually –
that readers keep putting off going to their mechanics about have to do with
race and class, and the cultural enclaves that follow from them.
How so? Well, peruse some of the comments on GoodReads about
novels and short story collections that contain or omit those two
hot-button subjects. Glib melodrama, leaving its slick from carport to
destination, is “colorful” or “poetic” or “romantic” or “sincere”, even though
its “others” – the sapper Kip in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient
is a good example – are more parabolical than human. And money (class)? Novels
which flatter, and which are about and for, the middle class get traction for
that alone. Note Carol Shields’ popularity.
Then we have the otherwise exciting Martin Amis who avoids the middle class
while grinding the lower and upper molars against one another, often as caricature fillings.
Earnest depictions of insular communities or romantic
peripatetic excursions in various exotic settings (usually in past centuries to
avoid any exposure to charges of jejune characterization) guarantees that class
is either analyzed in a vacuum or outsourced to fantasy.
Enter Anis Shivani’s The Fifth Lash and Other Stories
(C&R Press, 2012). Born in India, though living most of his life in
Houston, Texas, Shivani’s collection of fourteen short stories burrows into the
accelerating realities of mobile personae not as obtuse social document or
facile moralizing, but as character-driven dilemma and existential frustration
and/or reckoning and realization. Shivani’s first story collection (covered
last year in this blog), Anatolia and Other Stories, was published
first, though most if not all of The Fifth Lash was written earlier. The
concerns are similar, though in the book currently under review, the stories
are set either in Pakistan or the U.S.
Shivani’s most audacious effort is the titular story as told
by an aide to Pakistan’s (then) president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It’s devilishly
difficult to cram the sinuous detourings of political intrigue within a short
narrative while keeping a sense of drama percolating, and Shivani sometimes is
guilty of info dump overload, but at its best, the machinations are relevant,
haunting, even prophetic. (At least this reader experienced an unwelcome
frisson at “Bhutto’s mimicry of Zia, both in front of him and behind his back,
had ceased earlier that winter.” No need to detail the twentieth-century
despots Zia reminds one of, pre-ordainment. As for the "prophetic" plaudit, note how Bhutto's nationalization of various industries, and the stagnation that ensued, reminds one of Obamacare and Detroit wheels.)
“Jealousy”, typical in a Shivani exploration, turns what is
often a well-worn premise – sexually inexperienced young wife flirts with
charismatic male friend and discovers new resources of power – on its head. In
this story, the male friend is Asian, and isn’t just an excuse for the
protagonist to work through her problems. All of these characters have their
stories, and though Shivani here doesn’t always integrate the back story seamlessly
into the propulsive present, the quirks and exasperations, the intelligence and
guile of these people are vivid challenges to the rather pale category
assertion of “round” characters as laid out by E. M. Forster.
One of my favourite stories in the collection is “Growing Up
Blind in a Hotly Contested State”, which depicts the formative years of a
Muslim who escaped his parents’ stultifying social expectations and
intellectual inadequacies by (first) spying on his Caucasian neighbours only to
be invited to their artists’ soirees and reveling in a many-sided freedom. But
these artists (and artists’ friends) had pedigree. “Exiles” in their own land,
the connection with Safdar may seem too easy, but it’s to Shivani’s credit that
the connection has its own life, and isn’t a closed loop. This is eventually
made clear in a brilliant first-person epiphany when Safdar grows up even more
– (Blake’s Songs Of Experience, the higher third, comes to mind) – “I got to
know the characters in the Robartses’ pantheon of heroes all too well: the
minimalist poets and abstract expressionists, and their hangers-on, no longer
surprised me with a well-chosen word or quotation from obscure European
intellectual texts.”
“Alienation, Jihad, Burqa, Apostasy” deals with ... well, you
get the barebones of it in the title. But again, Shivani goes beneath the
headlines to get at the conflicting tensions that animate and confuse his
characters. Similar in some ways to “Growing Up Blind in a Hotly Contested
State”, this short story deals unflinchingly with the sexual awakening of a
Muslim who has taken up the serious dictates of the mosque, and who grows
(rather, stultifies) into an orator and strict pedagogue himself. The sexual
revelations are both infuriating and funny, not an easy combination to get
right. But Shivani is never about painting with a broad brush, nor about using
only the centre of the canvas. Here’s Salman’s own observations as his
experiences at university develop: “The Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley
graduates, who had seemed so idealistic and verbally accomplished, baffled me
with their hard-nosed practicality, an obsession with the nitty-gritty,
particularly money matters.”
“The Rug Seller’s Daughter” is a particularly affecting
story, a short one in two scenes, concentrating on the American buyer of the
goods in the house of the father in Pakistan. Matchmaking stories have a long
literary history. In Shakespeare, it’s all japes and folderol. Here, Shivani
moves the reader on a different emotional path, again with an ending both
inevitable and surprising.
Another challenging story, and perhaps the best in the book,
is “What It’s Like To Be a Stranger In Your Own Home”, the deeply troubling
exploration of identity post 9/11. Paranoia, downsizing, terror alerts, personal
disintegration, post-marital anger, sexual expectation and fantasy
image-setting by the protagonist, but also by his current lover and others:
this has all the checkpoints for a maudlin outpouring, but Shivani skillfully
and expansively engages the reader on all these concerns without turning the
proceedings into a stump sermon. It’s his most impassioned story in the
collection, and though some may find the realization a little too confident,
it’s certainly hard-won and organic.
If there’s anything exotic about The Fifth Lash and Other
Stories, it would reside in the gorgeous cover art by Tapu Javeri depicting
two naked men (or is it one?) seemingly caught in a revolution, but in the
twelve-and-six position, somewhat reminiscent of Shiva, the destroyer, in this
volume, of illusion.