→ August 28, 2012
→ By

The Golden Notebook.

I’ve got a piece up today previewing the top 30 prospects for the 2013 draft.

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Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, #48 on The Novel 100 and part of the TIME 100, is apparently a landmark in feminist literature as well as a rumination on the empty promises of communism, written by an author who had herself become disillusioned with both the philosophy and the British branch of the Party. Lessing attacks the novel’s traditional structure with a post-modern twist, weaving five narratives together across roughly 600 pages before the book culminates in one short story that attempts to reconcile fact with her protagonist’s own literary voice, a structure that challenges as it confuses.

That protagonist, Anna Wulf, is a divorced mother of a young daughter and a once-successful writer who has spent years unable to write a follow-up to her one novel, a wartime story that was commercially and critically successful and now spawns a series of comical attempts by English and American producers to film a bastardized version of it that takes its name but scarcely any of its plot. Anna and her best friend, Molly, are both little-c communists who have drifted out of the party and are gradually sliding into a passive socialism, which becomes a central conflict between Molly and her ex-husband, a successful financier, over their joint custody of their son, Tommy.

The golden notebook of the title doesn’t appear until the end of the novel, but we do read four other notebooks Anna has kept over the years, recounting her experiences with a group of white communist activists in Rhodesia, her time in the British Communist Party, an unfinished novel based on her own doomed love affair with a married man, and a more traditional journal where she records more mundane events as well as dreams and conversations with her therapist. The golden notebook represents her attempt to use fiction to bring together all four narratives as well as the more recent events of her life with Molly and a love/hate affair she has with an American communist who fled the blacklist and McCarthyist movement.

The one other distinguishing feature of The Golden Notebook is its unusually frank and graphic depictions of sex and biological functions, not unusual today but certainly so for the era in which it was published, particularly since its author is female. I imagine the novel was shocking in its time, although I was more surprised at how perfunctory the descriptions of sex were, not just anti-romantic, but clinical and sometimes even violent. The passage on menstruation is just as graphic, so while I saw it as an obvious metaphor for her own anger over societal prescriptions on gender roles, I also found it shocking to see a female writer write something so critical of her own female-ness, even if it was solely in a biological sense.

The narrative structure of the novel makes sense given where Lessing is taking us, but I found it incredibly confusing because of the shifts in time and the use of metafiction that is itself a thinly-veiled rendition of an actual life event belonging to the novel’s central character. It’s a hard book to put down for a day and return to without some thought as to who’s on the stage and in what time period the current scene is taking place. As someone who reads quickly, I found that offputting, even though Lessing’s efforts to converge all five narratives in that final bit of metafiction in the golden notebook are ultimately successful and likely part of why this novel remains a critical favorite.

I also found the metafictional Anna much more difficult to empathize with than the “real” Anna, who is herself flawed but more able to view her own decisions clearly, because the fictional version is the authoress of her own destruction within the book. The fact that her paramour is a lying cad can’t excuse her from failing to see that her involvement with a married man who has no intention of abandoning his wife – and whose wife is clearly suffering from her husband’s infidelities – or from the consequences when he inevitably flees from the affair as well.

The Golden Notebook fits in with many of the critically-acclaimed novels I read from these “greatest books” lists, an intelligent, thought-provoking, well-written book that deals with the larger (or largest) issues in life, but ultimately falls short on plot and character. I never felt driven to find out what was going to happen with the central characters, and the one Big Event within the book is dealt with swiftly enough that it becomes secondary to Anna’s journals. That all makes it a good book in terms of quality, but not one I’d be driven to read again.

Next up: I just finished Sergio de la Pava’s strange, often darkly funny debut novel A Naked Singularity (just $5.13 on Kindle) and have started Jonathan Lethem’s sci-fi hard-boiled detective novel Gun, with Occasional Music, the latter an old recommendation from one of you.

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→ July 22, 2011
→ By

One of Our Thursdays is Missing.

I’ve made no secret of my affinity for the novels of Jasper Fforde, whose primary series starring the literary detective Thursday Next taps Fforde’s boundless knowledge of classic literature and his talent for both high- and lowbrow humor. That series, which wrapped up a long story arc at the end of book four and started fresh in book five, reached its sixth book in a planned eight this spring with the release of One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, a slight departure from the first five books in the series in content and perspective.

Fforde steps a little out of the box in One of Our Thursdays is Missing by switching protagonists on us from the real Thursday Next to the written Thursday Next – that is, the fictional character of Thursday who appears in the Thursday Next novels that exist within the Thursday Next novels. If you’ve read anything in the series, you probably know what that means. If not: Within the Fforde universe, there is the physical plane and there is BookWorld, the plane of existence populated by the characters (and settings) of books, where Edward Rochester and Miss Havisham and Harry Potter are real (if not quite physical) characters who are merely playing the parts written for them by authors in our plane. It’s much less confusing if you read the Thursday Next series in sequence, though.

The change in protagonists necessitates something of a change in style from Fforde, with a plot that loosely parodies mysteries (including a fairly obvious sendup of Agatha Christie and her imitators towards the end) and conspiracy thrillers as the written Thursday traverses Fiction Island to try to figure out where the real Thursday is – and whether Racy Novel and its leader, Speedy Muffler, are trying to thwart the peace talks with Comedy and Women’s Fiction. This structure, essentially a meta-novel without the regular novel as a wrapper, gives Fforde copious opportunities to mock the cliches of various genres and even delve into matters literary, such as the way authors must warp reality to make it compact and readable, or philosophical, such as the BookWorld’s questions about its own creation and the reasons for its existence. He’s also relying more heavily than ever on puns, many provided by Mrs. Malaprop herself, and extends his satirical weaponry to cover more and more current fiction, with Potter and “Urban Vampires” getting their due alongside the classics of the western canon. (Example: the island of “Books Only Students Read,” which is where Pamela and Tristram Shandy reside.)

Fforde is one of a short list of authors who craft settings that are real enough to let me get lost in their books (something that quite literally happens to Thursday in book two, Lost in a Good Book), which is the main reason why I can’t seem to put his books down. They are funny and the plots are always interesting, but the main appeal I find in his books is how effortlessly he creates setting after setting, first devising BookWorld and then building it out from book to book. In One of Our Thursdays is Missing, he’s forced by his own story to build it out more than ever, discussing transportation (including a dubious taxi service) and even going more into BookWorld’s social structure. The disconnect from the real world is the book’s one drawback, although the written Thursday does get a quick sojourn into reality, with the book seeming less substantial because we are, in the end, dealing with characters who’ve been flattened twice by writing. But Fforde’s wit and imagination are still on full display from start to finish, including a brilliant play on the twist ending.

If you’re intrigued by my description of the series but have never read Fforde, I’ll offer two suggestions. You can start the Thursday Next series with book one, The Eyre Affair, but before delving into that you should at least familiarize yourself with the plot of Jane Eyre (you can watch the movie or just read a summary of the story), or else the key event in Fforde’s book won’t make much sense. Or, if you just want a taste of his writing style, check out The Big Over Easy the first of his two Nursery Crimes books, set in another part of BookWorld populated by characters from children’s books and, of course, nursery rhymes, where detectives Jack Spratt and Mary Mary attempt to answer the question of whether Humpty Dumpty fell … or was pushed.

Next up: John Le Carré’s The Russia House.

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→ March 1, 2009
→ By

American Pastoral.

Before I get to the book, I’ve got two new draft blog entries up, one on Purke, Coffey, and Grichuk, the other on Graham, Cole, Wilson, and Berry. And, of course, Jason Churchill continues to churn out daily updates on top picks’ performances.

Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory the superpower of superpowers, the force that overwhelms all. Put your money on it, bet on it, worship it – bow down in submission not to Karl Marx, my stuttering, angry, idiot child, not to Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-Tung – bow down to the great god Loneliness!

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral – winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, #99 on the Guardian 100, and part of the TIME 100 – tells the story of Seymour “Swede” Levov, a star high school athlete whose perfect, seemingly worry-free life is shattered when his daughter and only child, the ironically-named Merry, commits an act of domestic terrorism that takes a life and slowly tears Swede’s world apart. American Pastoral is one of Roth’s “Zuckerman novels,” featuring his alter ego, grumpy author Nathan Zuckerman, although it is a blessing that Zuckerman disappears as an active character after about 75 pages. The novel then shifts to of metafiction – it is not Swede’s actual story, but Zuckerman’s reimagining of Swede’s story based on a handful of details he got from Swede and later from Swede’s brother Jerry. This aspect is particularly unsatisfying; unlike, say, McEwan’s bait-and-switch novel Atonement*, we’re in on the gag all along, but the question of whether we’re reading Swede’s “actual” story or what Roth wants (consciously or subconsciously) Swede’s story to be hangs over the entire work.

*Oddly enough, the TIME 100 includes at least four works of metafiction – the two I’ve mentioned, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Only the last one was a fully-realized and satisfying work of fiction, which may be because it didn’t take its interior novel very seriously – the line between reality and fiction was deliberately blurred and the work is more farce than Serious Novel.

If Roth succeeded at anything, it was creating a deeply disturbing work of fiction. Other than the thought of one’s death, nothing hits at one’s emotional core as much as a thought of the destruction, gradual or acute, of one’s family. Merry appears to be just another angry teenager until she throws a bomb, and even in hindsight there was no clear warning to her parents that she was even capable of such an act of abject violence. Swede’s idyll is destroyed in between the time he goes to sleep one night and wakes up the next, and the devastation is compounded by the fact that Merry disappears immediately after the bombing. One thing that you can’t fully understand until you have a child is just how completely your emotions are wrapped up in that child. No matter what Merry did, Swede can not sever himself emotionally from her. She is his daughter, and his only child at that, and even if reuniting with her meant she would have to go to jail, he is emotionally determined to find her and, metaphorically and physically, bring her home.

Unfortunately, Swede’s emotional determination is an isolated character trait, as, for whatever reason, Zuckerman (Roth) did not imbue him with decisiveness. Swede confronts a couple of inflection points in the novel, simple and I would say obvious choices, and time and again he chooses inaction. There’s one scene towards the novel’s end where Swede has his best chance to piece something of his life back together – like a torn labrum, it will never be the same again, but it can be partially repaired – and, channeling Bill James on Jeff Bagwell, he passes. I found this not only maddening but beyond belief: There’s no way. I could not put myself into Swede’s shoes in that situation and choose “none of the above.” And I doubt many fathers, if any, would choose it either.

Swede’s failure to take any of the “right” choices means that the story lacks closure. We know from early on what has happened to Swede, and we have a pretty good idea of what ultimately happened to Merry (although whether Swede was telling the literal truth there may be open to debate). What we don’t get is the interim – Zuckerman focuses on the five or six years between the bombing and the start of the breakdown of Swede’s marriage, but doesn’t tell us what happened to Merry, who on earth Rita Cohen was, how exactly Swede’s marriage broke apart (did we see the triggering event? Did they hang on and fake it for a few more years), how he ended up with his second wife and three sons and whether or not that gave him any peace or happiness or proved inadequate to fill the gaping void left by the departure of his daughter from his life … we get none of these answers. I’m not saying every question needs a firm resolution, but Roth leaves us with more frayed ends than an overwashed head of hair.

The decision to focus on Swede over Merry is part plot contrivance, since Zuckerman knows Swede but never met Merry, but when Merry has a chance to say her piece, Zucker-Roth shifts to summary mode. We get pages upon pages of description of the manufacturing of ladies’ gloves and the history of the manufacturing of ladies’ gloves – was Roth momentarily possessed by the spirit of Herman Melville? – but of Merry’s life on the run we get a few paragraphs. The autobiography of Merry Levov could be – would be – a hell of a book. But I sure learned a lot about gloves, or the attitude of early 1970s couples towards Deep Throat, or the history of Bill Orcutt’s family.

I don’t know if Roth has ever addressed this, but in many ways Swede Levov resembles Rabbit Angstrom. He’s not an agent of his own destruction the way that Rabbit is, but they have similar backstories – star high school athletes who never quite live down that early fame and promise but who carry their sports-related nicknames through life, who marry against the wishes of their domineering fathers, and whose family lives come apart at the seams as we watch and as they fail to take basic steps to preserve them. Rabbit runs, while Swede stammers. In the end, it’s kind of the same thing.

Had Roth not wasted the first 75-odd pages on that annoying little Zucker – thus sparing us his self-centered Donnie Downer act – and rounded out the Swede story a little more, it would have been a clear Klaw 100 entry. Once the narration shifted, the pace picked up dramatically around the handful of tangents into glove manufacturing and Orcutt family genealogy, and he created one very compelling (if flawed – but is the flaw Roth’s, Zuckerman’s, or Swede’s?) character in whom most readers, particularly parents, should find some sympathetic or familiar trait. If anything, the book ended 75 pages too soon, and I wish Roth had expended the energy he blew on Zuckerman’s prostate on filling in some of the blank spots on the Levov family canvas.

Apropos of nothing other than its presence in the book, I did learn one unusual new word: uxorious, meaning excessively fond of or submissive to a wife. I’ll have a hard time working that into a Draft Blog entry.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,