The thrill of discovering a new author is that his or her merits can't be put into easy previous categories, a kind of "best of" from a particular trend or sub-interest. Orhan Pamuk's 2009 novel The Museum of Innocence is such a find. For all the talk, most of it academic wanking, regarding "new" forms and movements, explorers are either hitching their star to recombinations of existing postmodern angles, or shooting off past several Milky Ways. Some work to limited effect, some don't work at all. But what often intrigues me are works such as Pamuk's latest, which use the historical panoply to impressive and detailed variation.
Sexual-spiritual obsession is a well-stamped novelistic tradition. The protagonist in Thomas Hardy's masterpiece Jude the Obscure is ultimately crushed by society, and even worse, by invisible fate through an absent or indifferent God, but Pamuk's Kemal is harder to get a read on. There are many ways, all legitimate, to feel about, and for, the besotted rich scion who seduces the poor shopgirl, loses her to social pressure and expectation, presses her throughout marriage to another, and .... (elision for plot maintenance). He's patronising, insensitive, sensitive, observant, forgetful, wilful, tender, narcissistic, and loyal to the point of madness. These traits are presented seamlessly and through mind-bending repetitions which nevertheless unspool in carefully crafted nuance and variation. But it's the stylistic and form-altering scope which overwhelms.
Pamuk occasionally refers, through his first-person voiced narrator, to Aristotle. The dual sub-modes of diegesis and mimesis in The Museum of Innocence are used flawlessly in their back-and-forth elucidations. Pamuk, throughout his novel, also supports Aristotle's view of the separation of life and art through various means, not least of which is the authorial postmodern trick of inserting Orhan Pamuk as idiosyncratic character into the novel, especially during its delightful denouement. Pamuk doesn't break new ground here (Martin Amis and Will Self, among others, plunged into the scenescape before him), but that's part of the point. In an eternal recurrence of indefinite origin, it doesn't matter who gets to be the groundbreaker. Or perhaps these ideas have always been with us. But what Pamuk does with the trick (as in so many other epochal examples) is unique and intelligent and brave. We've been hammered with the idea that nothing can be communicated to one another, in art even more so than life, with any authoritative and accurate force. In fact, it's become doctrine for disaffected literary atheists. But Pamuk's narrator's concluding response to Pamuk the character (who may or not be an accurate portrayal of the author, or perhaps a partial depiction) includes, "I'm not going to say, as your character did, that readers cannot possibly understand us from afar. On the contrary, visitors to the museum and people who read your book will most certainly understand us." What a wonderfully triumphant assertion about the nature and validity of memory and imagination! The museum, of course (Kemal's detailed shrine for his beloved Fusun), acts as narrative and thematic device, a commentary on love's endurance but also on the persistence, the incredible palpability of the ephemeral.
But I've bookended, in a Coles Notes snippet, the history of the novel from Aristotle to Amis. Aristotle's tragic and epic definitions come to life in the lengthy narrative, especially so in what may (let's not kid, will) try the patience of the plot-searching tendency of many readers. Eight years of cozying up to his now-married ex-lover in the house of her, her husband, and her mother and father, all as a fond "friend" and distant cousin (in the interminable middle-to-late section), may seem excessive to no purpose. But one of the responsibilities of the novel is to depict a simulacrum of life as it is lived, without condensing for dramatic or salient effect. Every visit Kemal makes to the unassuming house in the run-down neighbourhood has a unique spin even while the narrator consolidates the boring routines. In this, I am reminded of Shostakovich's Symphony #15 in which, in the second movement adagio, repetitions are given striking variations, the dramatic arc is subtle, even sleepy at times, yet the build-up is surprising and highly emotional. Speaking of that symphony, postmodern quotations are also similar to the aforementioned authorial insertion with the four-note DSCH motif, the classical period is evoked with references, highly ironic, to Rossini, and other works in the composer's corpus are tapped just as Pamuk's Snow is also mentioned. Back to the novel, other references of the classical period in literature are brought in -- most notably to Flaubert's Madame Bovary -- and the reader will have no trouble in contrasting the difference in mood while noting its narrative similarities. The classical period is also evident in the novel's stately style, while the Romantic period is brought to mind with the obsessive pursuit and the identification of every event and thought to the "I". Modernist ironies and disjunctions are evident in the social critique of 1970s Istanbul. Retrograde? Postmodernism got under way a decade earlier, and half a century from when this was written, but again, Pamuk is using movements in an artistic and highly structural, well-thought-out sense, not a faddish building of superficial momentum.
Many themes are given free rein, with multiple angles and repetitive force through different perspectives: the dual pull of virginity's value in a society where tradition is revered socially and politically at the same time many have been forever altered by trips to Parisian lycees, contact with American black market whiskey and soda, lucrative aping of Western porn in a shamefully anemic film industry, and overall civic architectural upheaval. Political terrorism of the right and left frequently erupt, and while the apolitical Kemal records it without emotion, the point is made that narcissism doesn't win. No one can shut out the world (some of Kemal's friends, associates, and acquaintances are directly affected). Then we have the urban horror of European road rage. Several times traffic casualties occur, and the bleak foreshadowing is telling on a number of levels. (Perhaps I've said too much here, already.) The themes of gossip, social class, gender expectations, and cultural habits are either lampooned in gentle fashion, or are investigated from all sides. No one is let off the hook, though everyone is treated with compassion. Sibel, engaged to Kemal at the outset, who then leaves him, is drawn with a particularly fine and complex brush. She starts out as a sympathetic character and, as convention has it, would appear to have all moral weight on her side. Yet her closing misunderstanding of Kemal (based on seeing him a day before his death) is superficial, and her fussiness and disingenuousness in protecting her reputation from the petty gossips of her circle, when talking to Pamuk the character, is fascinating in what it tells the reader of life's turns and misdirections. And reassessments. Because however much we understand, in oppositon to the common "who knows?" irresponsibility of the literary present, it's still a work of fiction, and the tone of much of the novel has a very subtle irony, a humour that is both disquieting and pleasurable.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Joanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists
Unlike many other reviewers and critics, I don't automatically dump on authors who attempt difficult sentence constructions. Convoluted? Self-important? Abstract? Diffuse? Turgid? Nonsensical? Higgledy-piggledy slop? It's a case-by-case investigation, not an all-offboard damnation. Here are six examples, three each by two authors, of serpentine clauses and shifting insertions:
A) "She watched the final light condense into the clock face, and the dial change from a round orifice in the darkness to a disc suspended in nothingness, the original chaos, and change in turn to a crystal ball holding in its still and cryptic depths the ordered chaos of the intricate and shadowy world upon whose scarred flanks the old wounds whirl onward at dizzy speed into darkness lurking with new disasters."
B) "The way that he , scattered into a thousand, inchoate, diffusive directions ... he, a singular thing, a particle -- a part-icular -- body, still hurtling itself objectively through space and time, has yet, by accident, come to rest somehow, briefly, now."
C) "He stood there while on both sides of him they passed in a steady stream of little colored dresses, bare-armed, with close bright heads, with that identical cool, innocent, unabashed expression which he knew well in their eyes, above the savage identical paint upon their mouths; like music moving, like honey poured in sunlight, pagan and evanescent and serene, thinly evocative of all lost days and outpaced delights, in the sun."
D) "Shot through with an affection so fierce that it mingled in us with an equivalent sense of terror: at the amount that we had already taken from her, and also from the world, which we feared that we would never be able, or even willing, to return."
E) "Which leads me finally to believe that the small estuaries to which I have been blown are just as true as the rest, and that the deep and open and still untried waters have been left uncharted because they do not in fact exist at all; except, that is, in the magic lantern pictures of my mind where they are just a simple shadow-play of death, which someday, and far too soon, will have us all freely sailing there."
F) "She sat limp in the corner of the seat, watching the steady backward rush of the land -- pines in opening vistas splashed with fading dogwood; sedge; fields green with new cotton and empty of any movement, peaceful, as though Sunday were a quality of atmosphere, of light and shade -- sitting with her legs close together, listening to the hot minute seeping of her blood, saying dully to herself, I'm still bleeding."
(A), (C), and (F) are from William Faulkner's Sanctuary while (B), (D), and (E) are from Joanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists, published in 2009 (though I guess the initial run from Gaspereau was in 2008).
First off, I can anticipate the rushed furor of "well, how many can stack up against Faulkner? That's blatantly unfair!" Fair enough, but using extreme contrasts is a great exercise in just how wide is the chasm between great lit and prate lit.
After reading the above (preferably aloud, if you have the opportunity and inclination), notice that Faulkner breaks the same rules as Skibsrud, the rules that knuckle-rappers often warn against. Faulkner's (A), especially, is rife with abstraction, but of course it's unfair, in the case of both authors, to use these examples in isolation. (I don't have the time, inclination, or legal means to print out chapters, though I encourage those with any follow-up interest to look backward and forward from these quotations.) The point I want to emphasize in example (A), though, is that Faulkner occasionally makes these oracular highlights as a rhetorical buttress to the surrounding action or mirrored psychological state of the featured (at the time) character. The contrast is shocking in its aptness, emotionally stark in its prophetic conclusion, eerie in its quick metaphorical sweep.
In turn, note Skibsrud's (B). Also stuffed with incorporeal words, the rhythm is haphazard, jerky. There is no momentum, no force. The tone is non-existent. The sentence is riddled with delayed cliches. The diction is uniformly dull. But, again, we have to look at the sentence in the context of what comes before and after it. Well, that's the clincher. Because most of the book is of a similar hue. The above three Skibsrudianisms are put forth because of their especial stop-in-your-tracks effectiveness (or ineffectiveness).
As for the other four examples, look at how Faulkner's rhythm gathers and shifts in pace, uses repetition to increase the discomfort (balls, again, to those idiotic puritans who promote "elegant variation" as an automatic reaction against "lazy" repeaters: I suppose D H Lawrence and Shakespeare also lacked imagination, wut?), alters the length of clauses to capture conflicting moods (F), and even manages to evoke humour in syntactical units! (The monumental delay, that is, in the first and last three words, in C. Though some may link "in the sun" to the girls, and they would be technically correct in so doing, I much prefer to go with the alternate spirit, irony, and character-teasing link to the sentence's subject.)
Skibsrud's other two sentences? More cliches. Also note the grand statement. This is pretentious in two ways since there is no action or detail to pin any weight on in the first place, and there is nothing added to any universal stock of knowledge (in E). We're all gonna die, and all too soon, at that? Well, I never ... Note, also, the meaningless, inexact phrases: "equivalent sense of terror", for one. What does this mean? It sounds profound at first pass. But by this point in the book, any leftover readers are already running on fumes, so alert parsing is probably rare. How can any terror be "equivalent? Terror is alarming, obviously unique in contour and force. When Faulkner invoked the universal "chaos", he's doing what most critics, in our postmodern madness, abhor and fear: using the big, abstract words, here and elsewhere: sin, morals, endurance, honour. The difference between Skibsrud's "terror" and Faulkner's "chaos", though, is that Faulkner creates, through sound and sight and touch, a world in which those judgements are not only invited, but inevitable. Terror in The Sentimentalists? No. Boredom, yes. Which leads into a more focussed discussion of her novel.
Yeah, the book under review shouldn't ultimately be compared to Sanctuary, or even to Pylon. But it won the Giller, and a lot of people read it. They've responded with good sense. Despite my sentence-by-sentence excoriation, the biggest fault with The Sentimentalists isn't its writing, but its structure and content. Troubled narrator moves in with her father Napoleon, and Henry, father of Napoleon's murdered Vietnam confrere, Owen. Part one deals with the difficult communication between daughter and father. Part two deals with Vietnam reminiscences, ending with a historical transcript of a particular incident that went to trial (Napoleon on the stand as moral fink). That's it. So how to fill up two hundred eighteen pages? Why, with internal philosophising, and sadness, of course.
Anis Shivani, in a review of American poet Jorie Graham's career, wrote: "Part of the project of leading American poets today is to purge public memory of all excitement. If and when the external world does impinge on the poet's private thought processes, it is only to illumine some internal dilemma of the worrying poet, to strengthen or invigorate some pitiful struggle of his." Such is the cross-linked appropriateness, the ubiquitous and sad exactness of this insight, that it can and does describe the procedure and desire in a book from another country, in another genre, and decades after Graham wrote the volumes which inspired the above quoted critique. To recap: Skibsrud's outward "hook" is Vietnam, and its effects on one man, her father. But the father, despite his drinking and occasional shouting, suffers a subdued form of shell shock (I don't used the euphemistic post-traumatic stress syndrome -- so much language has had its rough edges, its onomatopeia neutered and sterilized); he's a lovable dude, with his harebrained stock-buying excursions, Bogart-mimicry, and shoulder-rubbing (of his daughter). Oh, he breaks a few bones, gets cancer, goes senile, and finally expires. But the relations between he and daughter-narrator are subdued, even when at their most strained. The theme is the impossibility of communication and of accurate memory. Daughter mopes and tries to make sense of it all. Ad nauseum. Meanwhile, there's a good story bursting to get out. What really happened in Vietnam with Owen and Napoleon, and how does it tie in to the latter's haunting post-war life? What's more, (and what the novel never takes into account), how much of who Napoleon became was due instead to who he was before the war. Much of our personality, and indeed our capacity for qualities like equanimity and courage, is formed in the first six years. Vietnam obviously complicated this, but none of us are blank slates until a traumatic event transpires.
But none of that matters. In fact, though some have said part two is more engaging, narrative-driven, interesting, I found it to be even worse. Because the experience itself was filtered (first) through Napoleon's confused memory, then through the daughter's understanding, and especially through the author's non-changing internal reordering. The transcription that effectively concludes the novel is puzzling within the novel's overall puzzling arc. The whole point of the "I think so", "I believe so", "I'm not sure" is to reinforce, as if it needed reinforcing, the theme of uncertainty, of memory's unreliability, and of the danger in reaching impatient conclusions. But here's the upshot: that, in a damning irony, is also untrue. "Truth" with a capital T doesn't have to be mounted like Everest. There are a lot of near truths, a lot of subjective, but strong truths, which many of us can find not only plausible but probable. The entire scientific procedure is built upon a series of truths which are themselves superseded. Does that mean everything is false because it's dated or always evolving? Of course not.
One reason I've gone into such detail about Skibsrud's cowardly sidestepping of anything notable to say about Vietnam is that I've known a few Vietnam vets myself. Not to the extent of the author's own relationship with her father, but enough to know some emotional truths about that war, about specific political hypocrisy, about detailed stratification among soldier classes, about torture procedures, about the grim post-war relationships these men (unsurprisingly) went through, about the nature of the daily grind without constant philosophical rumination. That brings me to the only scene in the novel that resonated. During Napoleon's only lucid telling of the war incident to his daughter, he brings her up short by saying women always want to know things in order to rework and figure them out, as if that will somehow reduce the sadness. Men are guilty of that, too. Perhaps all artists. But this gets back to the core problem with the novel. It's not about Napoleon Haskell. It's not about Vietnam. It's not about her half-page confession of marital break-up after she caught her husband in bed with another woman (that's all we get of her "story"). It's about the narrator's own wayward thoughts about life's difficulties in communicating, about her own existential sadness and "growth".
The premise of the novel had great promise. Too bad it was just an excuse for a smothering postmodern shrug.
A) "She watched the final light condense into the clock face, and the dial change from a round orifice in the darkness to a disc suspended in nothingness, the original chaos, and change in turn to a crystal ball holding in its still and cryptic depths the ordered chaos of the intricate and shadowy world upon whose scarred flanks the old wounds whirl onward at dizzy speed into darkness lurking with new disasters."
B) "The way that he , scattered into a thousand, inchoate, diffusive directions ... he, a singular thing, a particle -- a part-icular -- body, still hurtling itself objectively through space and time, has yet, by accident, come to rest somehow, briefly, now."
C) "He stood there while on both sides of him they passed in a steady stream of little colored dresses, bare-armed, with close bright heads, with that identical cool, innocent, unabashed expression which he knew well in their eyes, above the savage identical paint upon their mouths; like music moving, like honey poured in sunlight, pagan and evanescent and serene, thinly evocative of all lost days and outpaced delights, in the sun."
D) "Shot through with an affection so fierce that it mingled in us with an equivalent sense of terror: at the amount that we had already taken from her, and also from the world, which we feared that we would never be able, or even willing, to return."
E) "Which leads me finally to believe that the small estuaries to which I have been blown are just as true as the rest, and that the deep and open and still untried waters have been left uncharted because they do not in fact exist at all; except, that is, in the magic lantern pictures of my mind where they are just a simple shadow-play of death, which someday, and far too soon, will have us all freely sailing there."
F) "She sat limp in the corner of the seat, watching the steady backward rush of the land -- pines in opening vistas splashed with fading dogwood; sedge; fields green with new cotton and empty of any movement, peaceful, as though Sunday were a quality of atmosphere, of light and shade -- sitting with her legs close together, listening to the hot minute seeping of her blood, saying dully to herself, I'm still bleeding."
(A), (C), and (F) are from William Faulkner's Sanctuary while (B), (D), and (E) are from Joanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists, published in 2009 (though I guess the initial run from Gaspereau was in 2008).
First off, I can anticipate the rushed furor of "well, how many can stack up against Faulkner? That's blatantly unfair!" Fair enough, but using extreme contrasts is a great exercise in just how wide is the chasm between great lit and prate lit.
After reading the above (preferably aloud, if you have the opportunity and inclination), notice that Faulkner breaks the same rules as Skibsrud, the rules that knuckle-rappers often warn against. Faulkner's (A), especially, is rife with abstraction, but of course it's unfair, in the case of both authors, to use these examples in isolation. (I don't have the time, inclination, or legal means to print out chapters, though I encourage those with any follow-up interest to look backward and forward from these quotations.) The point I want to emphasize in example (A), though, is that Faulkner occasionally makes these oracular highlights as a rhetorical buttress to the surrounding action or mirrored psychological state of the featured (at the time) character. The contrast is shocking in its aptness, emotionally stark in its prophetic conclusion, eerie in its quick metaphorical sweep.
In turn, note Skibsrud's (B). Also stuffed with incorporeal words, the rhythm is haphazard, jerky. There is no momentum, no force. The tone is non-existent. The sentence is riddled with delayed cliches. The diction is uniformly dull. But, again, we have to look at the sentence in the context of what comes before and after it. Well, that's the clincher. Because most of the book is of a similar hue. The above three Skibsrudianisms are put forth because of their especial stop-in-your-tracks effectiveness (or ineffectiveness).
As for the other four examples, look at how Faulkner's rhythm gathers and shifts in pace, uses repetition to increase the discomfort (balls, again, to those idiotic puritans who promote "elegant variation" as an automatic reaction against "lazy" repeaters: I suppose D H Lawrence and Shakespeare also lacked imagination, wut?), alters the length of clauses to capture conflicting moods (F), and even manages to evoke humour in syntactical units! (The monumental delay, that is, in the first and last three words, in C. Though some may link "in the sun" to the girls, and they would be technically correct in so doing, I much prefer to go with the alternate spirit, irony, and character-teasing link to the sentence's subject.)
Skibsrud's other two sentences? More cliches. Also note the grand statement. This is pretentious in two ways since there is no action or detail to pin any weight on in the first place, and there is nothing added to any universal stock of knowledge (in E). We're all gonna die, and all too soon, at that? Well, I never ... Note, also, the meaningless, inexact phrases: "equivalent sense of terror", for one. What does this mean? It sounds profound at first pass. But by this point in the book, any leftover readers are already running on fumes, so alert parsing is probably rare. How can any terror be "equivalent? Terror is alarming, obviously unique in contour and force. When Faulkner invoked the universal "chaos", he's doing what most critics, in our postmodern madness, abhor and fear: using the big, abstract words, here and elsewhere: sin, morals, endurance, honour. The difference between Skibsrud's "terror" and Faulkner's "chaos", though, is that Faulkner creates, through sound and sight and touch, a world in which those judgements are not only invited, but inevitable. Terror in The Sentimentalists? No. Boredom, yes. Which leads into a more focussed discussion of her novel.
Yeah, the book under review shouldn't ultimately be compared to Sanctuary, or even to Pylon. But it won the Giller, and a lot of people read it. They've responded with good sense. Despite my sentence-by-sentence excoriation, the biggest fault with The Sentimentalists isn't its writing, but its structure and content. Troubled narrator moves in with her father Napoleon, and Henry, father of Napoleon's murdered Vietnam confrere, Owen. Part one deals with the difficult communication between daughter and father. Part two deals with Vietnam reminiscences, ending with a historical transcript of a particular incident that went to trial (Napoleon on the stand as moral fink). That's it. So how to fill up two hundred eighteen pages? Why, with internal philosophising, and sadness, of course.
Anis Shivani, in a review of American poet Jorie Graham's career, wrote: "Part of the project of leading American poets today is to purge public memory of all excitement. If and when the external world does impinge on the poet's private thought processes, it is only to illumine some internal dilemma of the worrying poet, to strengthen or invigorate some pitiful struggle of his." Such is the cross-linked appropriateness, the ubiquitous and sad exactness of this insight, that it can and does describe the procedure and desire in a book from another country, in another genre, and decades after Graham wrote the volumes which inspired the above quoted critique. To recap: Skibsrud's outward "hook" is Vietnam, and its effects on one man, her father. But the father, despite his drinking and occasional shouting, suffers a subdued form of shell shock (I don't used the euphemistic post-traumatic stress syndrome -- so much language has had its rough edges, its onomatopeia neutered and sterilized); he's a lovable dude, with his harebrained stock-buying excursions, Bogart-mimicry, and shoulder-rubbing (of his daughter). Oh, he breaks a few bones, gets cancer, goes senile, and finally expires. But the relations between he and daughter-narrator are subdued, even when at their most strained. The theme is the impossibility of communication and of accurate memory. Daughter mopes and tries to make sense of it all. Ad nauseum. Meanwhile, there's a good story bursting to get out. What really happened in Vietnam with Owen and Napoleon, and how does it tie in to the latter's haunting post-war life? What's more, (and what the novel never takes into account), how much of who Napoleon became was due instead to who he was before the war. Much of our personality, and indeed our capacity for qualities like equanimity and courage, is formed in the first six years. Vietnam obviously complicated this, but none of us are blank slates until a traumatic event transpires.
But none of that matters. In fact, though some have said part two is more engaging, narrative-driven, interesting, I found it to be even worse. Because the experience itself was filtered (first) through Napoleon's confused memory, then through the daughter's understanding, and especially through the author's non-changing internal reordering. The transcription that effectively concludes the novel is puzzling within the novel's overall puzzling arc. The whole point of the "I think so", "I believe so", "I'm not sure" is to reinforce, as if it needed reinforcing, the theme of uncertainty, of memory's unreliability, and of the danger in reaching impatient conclusions. But here's the upshot: that, in a damning irony, is also untrue. "Truth" with a capital T doesn't have to be mounted like Everest. There are a lot of near truths, a lot of subjective, but strong truths, which many of us can find not only plausible but probable. The entire scientific procedure is built upon a series of truths which are themselves superseded. Does that mean everything is false because it's dated or always evolving? Of course not.
One reason I've gone into such detail about Skibsrud's cowardly sidestepping of anything notable to say about Vietnam is that I've known a few Vietnam vets myself. Not to the extent of the author's own relationship with her father, but enough to know some emotional truths about that war, about specific political hypocrisy, about detailed stratification among soldier classes, about torture procedures, about the grim post-war relationships these men (unsurprisingly) went through, about the nature of the daily grind without constant philosophical rumination. That brings me to the only scene in the novel that resonated. During Napoleon's only lucid telling of the war incident to his daughter, he brings her up short by saying women always want to know things in order to rework and figure them out, as if that will somehow reduce the sadness. Men are guilty of that, too. Perhaps all artists. But this gets back to the core problem with the novel. It's not about Napoleon Haskell. It's not about Vietnam. It's not about her half-page confession of marital break-up after she caught her husband in bed with another woman (that's all we get of her "story"). It's about the narrator's own wayward thoughts about life's difficulties in communicating, about her own existential sadness and "growth".
The premise of the novel had great promise. Too bad it was just an excuse for a smothering postmodern shrug.
Monday, March 26, 2012
J. A. Konrath's Whiskey Sour
Not a book critic, but a critic of the entire traditional publishing industry, Joe Konrath spearheaded, and continues to be a leading blogger for, the mushrooming ereader industry. (Note the symbolism of "mushrooming", however.) He started out the usual way, with contacts and contracts from the New York houses, but soured on them when he saw the potential for, and realization of, greenbacks from slapping his work on Amazon and other ebook facilitators. Other factors for his switch are important, as well, but for the purposes of this review, I'll shelve outlining them, and focus (eventually) on his first book, Whiskey Sour, published by Hyperion in 2004.
Books? I'm a snob. An elitist. As to hybrid forms, literary crime fiction is useless if the "literary" side of the procedure lets up or is insufficient, whereas it can be just fine if the writing is excellent but the crime devices are shaky or missing. I guess you could call Graham Greene's Brighton Rock literary crime fiction, but it didn't need the cloak-and-dagger, though it would be nothing without the wonderful writing and incisive characterisation.
Before Whiskey Sour, I hadn't read a single book of crime fiction. Oh, I've tried. But when encountering books for the first time that I have deep scepticism about, I like to give it the John Metcalf test: read the first sentence or paragraph and see if I need to waste any more time. In my adaptation, I'll often open a book at random and read a sentence. Performing this daring feat on one of Clive Cussler's books, I chanced upon, " "Get out!", she hissed furiously. "Get out now!" ". Three seconds of that is much preferable to twelve or fifteen hours. And last I saw, Cussler's books filled a row of a library, the author name on each resembling the type on blazing billboards decorating Highway One. But Cussler's got nothing on the omniprevalence of James Patterson's writing corporation. I didn't even need to make the one sentence test with Patterson Inc. Here's a cut-out on the inside jacket of his Cradle and All: "And in cities all around the world, medical authorities are overwhelmed by epidemics, droughts, famines, floods, and worse. It all feels like a sign that something awful is coming." (Bolding mine.) Unfair, I know. So let's open the book. P 71: "The sprawling festival of people stared upward with open mouths and widening eyes." Need another? P. 219: " "Believe me, Kathleen, evil is all around us right now. I know this to be true."//"You're scaring me badly," she said, "and I'm already so scared. I can't bear it. I can't listen anymore." ".
So you can imagine my trepidation when picking up Whiskey Sour. The first sentence: "There were four black and whites at the 7-eleven when I arrived." Short. To the point. A decent hook. Gathering action. All good. In fact, much of the book is economical yet propulsive, what I would take to be the perfect style for crime fiction in general. Characterisation is sacrificed to plot, as it must be, but Konrath's characters, while lacking many dimensions, nevertheless are believable as types. There is much humour in the book! And it fits pretty seamlessly. In any genre, and especially in the often portentous lit world, this is welcome. The only quibbles I had were the choice of police Lieutenant Daniels as woman (I kept picturing the ballsy heroine as a man with maxi dress in block heels), and the ridiculously implausible climax. But it ain't supposed to be Zola, and doesn't pretend to be.
If I can get by the one sentence test again, I might even read more crime fiction.
Books? I'm a snob. An elitist. As to hybrid forms, literary crime fiction is useless if the "literary" side of the procedure lets up or is insufficient, whereas it can be just fine if the writing is excellent but the crime devices are shaky or missing. I guess you could call Graham Greene's Brighton Rock literary crime fiction, but it didn't need the cloak-and-dagger, though it would be nothing without the wonderful writing and incisive characterisation.
Before Whiskey Sour, I hadn't read a single book of crime fiction. Oh, I've tried. But when encountering books for the first time that I have deep scepticism about, I like to give it the John Metcalf test: read the first sentence or paragraph and see if I need to waste any more time. In my adaptation, I'll often open a book at random and read a sentence. Performing this daring feat on one of Clive Cussler's books, I chanced upon, " "Get out!", she hissed furiously. "Get out now!" ". Three seconds of that is much preferable to twelve or fifteen hours. And last I saw, Cussler's books filled a row of a library, the author name on each resembling the type on blazing billboards decorating Highway One. But Cussler's got nothing on the omniprevalence of James Patterson's writing corporation. I didn't even need to make the one sentence test with Patterson Inc. Here's a cut-out on the inside jacket of his Cradle and All: "And in cities all around the world, medical authorities are overwhelmed by epidemics, droughts, famines, floods, and worse. It all feels like a sign that something awful is coming." (Bolding mine.) Unfair, I know. So let's open the book. P 71: "The sprawling festival of people stared upward with open mouths and widening eyes." Need another? P. 219: " "Believe me, Kathleen, evil is all around us right now. I know this to be true."//"You're scaring me badly," she said, "and I'm already so scared. I can't bear it. I can't listen anymore." ".
So you can imagine my trepidation when picking up Whiskey Sour. The first sentence: "There were four black and whites at the 7-eleven when I arrived." Short. To the point. A decent hook. Gathering action. All good. In fact, much of the book is economical yet propulsive, what I would take to be the perfect style for crime fiction in general. Characterisation is sacrificed to plot, as it must be, but Konrath's characters, while lacking many dimensions, nevertheless are believable as types. There is much humour in the book! And it fits pretty seamlessly. In any genre, and especially in the often portentous lit world, this is welcome. The only quibbles I had were the choice of police Lieutenant Daniels as woman (I kept picturing the ballsy heroine as a man with maxi dress in block heels), and the ridiculously implausible climax. But it ain't supposed to be Zola, and doesn't pretend to be.
If I can get by the one sentence test again, I might even read more crime fiction.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Anis Shivani's Anatolia and Other Stories
For two reasons, I always have a soft spot in my iron heart for reviewers who also write short stories/poems/novels. First, I agree with Martin Amis and Gore Vidal that a lively literary society means that creators also critically comment upon (not just advertise and ass-kiss) what's happening in the wide community; they called it a duty to do so. Second, a curiosity to find out how a creative piece by a critic matches his own standards and predilections is natural.
This is the second in a series of reviews regarding reviewer-critics/artists. I've admired Anis Shivani's criticism of (usually) American authors, and picked up his 2009 Anatolia and Other Stories, a collection of eleven short stories which criss-cross the United States, but which also makes for India, Tehran, Turkey (Ottoman Empire), and Dubai. The on-the-ground complexities and outcomes of multiculturism is the obvious theme stitching the disparate narratives together. An undocumented worker in Dubai who gets a lucky break only to meet up with the inevitable bureaucratic hammer of lead; an aging Japanese man in a California internment camp; an Indian businessman fighting the new marketing schemes of his brothers and their families; an aspiring playwright from the Deep South his first time at an elite (and expensive) annual writers' conference: these and other stories graph the intersection between benign expectation and silent coercion. Shivani writes with great insight and depth, remarkable for the convincing and numerous angles he allows between characters. The final story, in particular, "Tehran", is a gem, more dramatically insistent than the somewhat understated, casual pace of the other stories. And he's not afraid of making bold statements (no surprise, there) as linked social criticism, within an appropriate narrative thematic. Here's an example of the latter, from "Conservation", set in Boston:
"Nothing in any of the classics seemed alterable, not a brush stroke, not a pigment shade. He would almost stop breathing, so immersed did he become in the sublime grandeur of the works that seemed to have been created out of time, out of place.
Then morning came, and the busy bee workers returned, their lab coats and business uniforms spruce and spry. The women had become more like men, and the men more like women. They spoke of similar concerns, in similar tones, in similar vocabulary. All the races pulled together now, all were agreed on the moral values worth holding"
What those "values" are is made plain even in this short snippet, and it needs emphasizing that the paltry race-squawking from all sides during our politically correct humourless negotiations is quite beside the point when values and distinctions themselves often crumble into an art-hating conformist swamp. (I don't like the redundant "sublime grandeur", and other verbal indiscretions appear in various places, but Shivani's narrative powers of character endurance, social compromise, sexual politics, political vicissitudes, and universal scope makes these occasional constructions fairly easy to forgive.)
This is the second in a series of reviews regarding reviewer-critics/artists. I've admired Anis Shivani's criticism of (usually) American authors, and picked up his 2009 Anatolia and Other Stories, a collection of eleven short stories which criss-cross the United States, but which also makes for India, Tehran, Turkey (Ottoman Empire), and Dubai. The on-the-ground complexities and outcomes of multiculturism is the obvious theme stitching the disparate narratives together. An undocumented worker in Dubai who gets a lucky break only to meet up with the inevitable bureaucratic hammer of lead; an aging Japanese man in a California internment camp; an Indian businessman fighting the new marketing schemes of his brothers and their families; an aspiring playwright from the Deep South his first time at an elite (and expensive) annual writers' conference: these and other stories graph the intersection between benign expectation and silent coercion. Shivani writes with great insight and depth, remarkable for the convincing and numerous angles he allows between characters. The final story, in particular, "Tehran", is a gem, more dramatically insistent than the somewhat understated, casual pace of the other stories. And he's not afraid of making bold statements (no surprise, there) as linked social criticism, within an appropriate narrative thematic. Here's an example of the latter, from "Conservation", set in Boston:
"Nothing in any of the classics seemed alterable, not a brush stroke, not a pigment shade. He would almost stop breathing, so immersed did he become in the sublime grandeur of the works that seemed to have been created out of time, out of place.
Then morning came, and the busy bee workers returned, their lab coats and business uniforms spruce and spry. The women had become more like men, and the men more like women. They spoke of similar concerns, in similar tones, in similar vocabulary. All the races pulled together now, all were agreed on the moral values worth holding"
What those "values" are is made plain even in this short snippet, and it needs emphasizing that the paltry race-squawking from all sides during our politically correct humourless negotiations is quite beside the point when values and distinctions themselves often crumble into an art-hating conformist swamp. (I don't like the redundant "sublime grandeur", and other verbal indiscretions appear in various places, but Shivani's narrative powers of character endurance, social compromise, sexual politics, political vicissitudes, and universal scope makes these occasional constructions fairly easy to forgive.)
Monday, March 19, 2012
Mark Sampson's Off Book
It's one thing for your publisher to go out of business just after your first novel comes out. It's quite another for them to screw up the production so much it grievously mars the work itself. I'm not sure how much of the former had to do with the many problems of the latter -- the repeating words, the missing paragraph separations, the typos, the indent adventures, the text packed like plasticine in a matchbox -- and how much had to do with an endemic lack of care which led to their demise, but the result must have had the author spitting and fuming.
Mark Sampson's Off Book (2007) tells a familiar story: boy grows up with artistic aspirations (playwright), learns of his own naivety through university, gets first job where he learns how many businesses conduct themselves (computer programmer facilitating advertising horseshit for a boss living the high life of nepotism and mid-day golf), and eventual plot (with the only worker on his side) to thwart the aspirations of the business.
What makes Sampson's book stand out from many of those growing-up narratives is the attention to character. The protagonist (Cameron), co-worker Pauline, first girlfriend Eve, and mentor-playwright Richard are all thoughtfully and idiosyncratically drawn, and that makes the reader not only care about their unpredictable journey, but invest in the dialogue with a focussed edge. And this is the biggest problem (aside from the publisher's, that is): Sampson's facility for character motivation and colour doesn't need so much of the extraneous internal justification and repetition. The hoary "show, don't tell" is, in this case, appropriate. As a first-time novelist, I assume this is perhaps a common tactic, the feeling that one must finish every cross-seam for the reader.
But, again, the prevailing negative here is the publisher's ineptitude. Unfortunately and perversely, it gets worse during the novel's climactic scene, culminating, during the penultimate, dramatic conversation, with the dialogue tag, "Cameroon said". Apparently, an African country slipped into the testy, closed-room meeting at the eleventh hour.
I understand Sampson has another novel finished, and is looking for another publisher. Perhaps the situation should be reversed: a lot of publishers should be out of work, sending out their ads for years trying to get a single prospective author to bite.
Mark Sampson's Off Book (2007) tells a familiar story: boy grows up with artistic aspirations (playwright), learns of his own naivety through university, gets first job where he learns how many businesses conduct themselves (computer programmer facilitating advertising horseshit for a boss living the high life of nepotism and mid-day golf), and eventual plot (with the only worker on his side) to thwart the aspirations of the business.
What makes Sampson's book stand out from many of those growing-up narratives is the attention to character. The protagonist (Cameron), co-worker Pauline, first girlfriend Eve, and mentor-playwright Richard are all thoughtfully and idiosyncratically drawn, and that makes the reader not only care about their unpredictable journey, but invest in the dialogue with a focussed edge. And this is the biggest problem (aside from the publisher's, that is): Sampson's facility for character motivation and colour doesn't need so much of the extraneous internal justification and repetition. The hoary "show, don't tell" is, in this case, appropriate. As a first-time novelist, I assume this is perhaps a common tactic, the feeling that one must finish every cross-seam for the reader.
But, again, the prevailing negative here is the publisher's ineptitude. Unfortunately and perversely, it gets worse during the novel's climactic scene, culminating, during the penultimate, dramatic conversation, with the dialogue tag, "Cameroon said". Apparently, an African country slipped into the testy, closed-room meeting at the eleventh hour.
I understand Sampson has another novel finished, and is looking for another publisher. Perhaps the situation should be reversed: a lot of publishers should be out of work, sending out their ads for years trying to get a single prospective author to bite.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Haiku For The Season
"the haiku just feels too predictable to me with a lot of poems about the moon or the river; the use of season words feels cliché to me; inevitably a carp appears. a bell rings. there are clouds & butterflies. sunlight shines through leaves. ho fucking hum. I need poems with an edge. otherwise I don't get poem shiver. plenty of excellent poets love the form though. hell, what do I know, I love anchovies, pornography & sports movies." -- Amanda Earl, from her blog
http://www.amandaearl.blogspot.ca/2012/03/poetry-talk-with-amanda-earl.html
"legs ninety wide, moons, to a man --
duh! -- gives hard edge, a woman,"
he wouldn't carp, "butterflies belled out"
http://www.amandaearl.blogspot.ca/2012/03/poetry-talk-with-amanda-earl.html
"legs ninety wide, moons, to a man --
duh! -- gives hard edge, a woman,"
he wouldn't carp, "butterflies belled out"
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
People Say Some Silly Things During Commemoratives
Quite a few people have been weighing in on Irving Layton lately. But for every sensitive and intelligent piece (Kenneth Sherman's in the National Post), there are just as many uninformed and downright idiotic ones , as well. Matthew Wright's piece, in the same NaPo, on Noah Zacharin's thoughts on Layton is an example of the unfortunate variety.
" "I love crows because they are highly advanced and misunderstood," says Zacharin. "Kind of like poets." "
Perhaps Zacharin loves crows because he sees himself in them. Not just himself, but all his literary heroes, including Canadian poet Irving Layton." -- Wright.
Layton, in a confessional poem, complained of crows waking him up with their "matutinal puking noises."
" " Layton believed that the herd mentality would never produce something of lasting value or integrity," Zacharin says.
He added that Layton's story is one common to most Canadian poets and admirers -- it is the feeling of not fitting in, of being cast out by society for thinking differently, "just like the crow"."--Wright
Most of those poets and poetry readers are part of the .0000000000000001 per cent of all courageous individuals Layton praised above the philistines?
"But the poets with their obscene posturings
-cats covering their shit with kitty litter-
are even more duplicitous. Except for the savage
few" -- Irving Layton, from "Freud With All His Knowledge"
I haven't been able to attend any of the Layton celebrations, but I hope most aren't being used as an excuse to champion the poet's role (in a necessary emotional obliquity, the poets, in their confraternities, themselves).
" "I love crows because they are highly advanced and misunderstood," says Zacharin. "Kind of like poets." "
Perhaps Zacharin loves crows because he sees himself in them. Not just himself, but all his literary heroes, including Canadian poet Irving Layton." -- Wright.
Layton, in a confessional poem, complained of crows waking him up with their "matutinal puking noises."
" " Layton believed that the herd mentality would never produce something of lasting value or integrity," Zacharin says.
He added that Layton's story is one common to most Canadian poets and admirers -- it is the feeling of not fitting in, of being cast out by society for thinking differently, "just like the crow"."--Wright
Most of those poets and poetry readers are part of the .0000000000000001 per cent of all courageous individuals Layton praised above the philistines?
"But the poets with their obscene posturings
-cats covering their shit with kitty litter-
are even more duplicitous. Except for the savage
few" -- Irving Layton, from "Freud With All His Knowledge"
I haven't been able to attend any of the Layton celebrations, but I hope most aren't being used as an excuse to champion the poet's role (in a necessary emotional obliquity, the poets, in their confraternities, themselves).
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