What accounts for this trend? A slew of recently-released books written by and about women feature on their covers images of women turning aside and away from us. Four examples:
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The play of emotions and themes with which Michael Cunningham is most adroit — love, loss, desire, despair, mortality — are again engaged in his new novel set in present day Manhattan. But take note: To launch the reader into the world of “By Nightfall” Cunningham has chosen for the book’s epigraph a line from Rilke’s Duino Elegies: “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” In full text, Rilke’s message is even more chilling: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.” This, Cunningham signals, will be his novel’s all-encompassing theme: the pursuit, use, and misuse of beauty.
Now, this is not the stuff to entice a broad readership. Many previously attracted by the cross-over appeal of Cunningham’s break-through novel, “The Hours,” will be disappointed to discover that “By Nightfall” is not a comparably rewarding experience. This is, to be frank, a novel for a few. But still it is a very good novel that I hope will find its audience.
The principal characters in “By Nightfall” are Peter Harris, a 44-year-old contemporary art dealer, and his wife Rebecca, an editor of an arts and culture magazine. The plot, modestly scaled, is set in motion by the appearance of Rebecca’s much younger brother Ethan (age 23), a beautiful, flawed and directionless young man interested in doing “Something in the Arts.” Ethan’s short stay in the couple’s spacious SoHo loft will upend all three lives.
A Slave to Beauty
Here is how Peter remembers his first immersion in beauty, an epiphany he experienced as a teenager at a summer lake as he watched the swim-suited girlfriend of his older brother enter the water:
“It’s not lust, not precisely lust, though it has lust in it. It’s a pure, thrilling, and slightly terrifying apprehension of what he will later call beauty, though the word is insufficient. It’s a tingling sense of divine presence, of the unspeakable perfection of everything that exists now and will exist in the future.”
As a art gallery owner, Peter’s occupation is that of a “servant of beauty.” His role is to judge who among artists is worthy of exceptional recognition and to enable those persons to flourish. In this endeavor he is suffering a crisis of confidence, seeing himself as a mere “winner of various second prizes,” a person unlikely to rise to the level of taste-maker enjoyed by owners of “first rank” galleries. He exhibits a post-9/11 existential dread: “[a] conviction, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that some terrible, blinding beauty is about to descend and, like the wrath of God, suck [the world] all away, orphan us, deliver us, leave us wondering how exactly we’re going to start it all over again.”
The Book’s Weaknesses
“By Nightfall” is written in a combination of “voices”: at times there is a third person omniscient narrator, sometimes a second person interlocutor, but principally we are caught within Peter’s own ruminations. The lasting effect is a story told through Peter’s eyes. While this brings a unity to the novel, it also can be a handicap. When events, ideas and emotions come to us filtered through Peter’s fears and exquisite sensibilities, the narrative sometimes falls into a rut, trapped by the insular sound of Peter conducting a hothouse conversation with himself. The reader yearns for more self-sufficiency on the part of other characters — persons we are meant to, and want to, care about. Happily, Cunningham is terrific with dialog, and the frequent conversational segments — animated, stylish, and verbally agile (these are New Yorkers, after all) — oxygenate the narrative.
One of the reasons “By Nightfall” suffers in a direct comparison with “The Hours” is that the earlier novel gained strength by its focus on the lives of three women (although their lives, too, were mostly “interior” lives). In following one flawed male exclusively, the new novel is hampered with what I think is weaker stuff. Consider the following sentiment from the mind of Peter, a view, I suspect, shared by the author:
“We — we men — are the frightened ones, the blundering and nervous ones; if we act the skeptic or the bully sometimes it’s because we suspect we’re wrong in some deep incalculable way that women are not. Our impersonations are failing us and our vices and habits are ludicrous and when we present ourselves at the gates of heaven the enormous black woman who guards them will laugh at us not only because we aren’t innocent but because we have no idea about anything that actually matters.”
Notwithstanding the insight and humor of the author (as evident in the above quotation), the fact is that by situating his exploration of the mysteries of beauty and desire in a precious, privileged environment, Cunningham risks the ire of those same readers now loudly railing against the educated, liberal, upper-middle-class insularity of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” (another study of an unstable love triangle set in the present day). They scream: “Who cares about characters who are not like me?”
The Book’s Strengths
And yet to dismiss the book’s atmosphere as claustrophobic or its world view as irrelevant is, I think, a fraudulent stance. Yes, the setting and tone is a highly literary one. That’s what you expect from Michael Cunningham. He writes principally for other voracious, educated readers. Yes, it helps to recognize Cunningham’s allusions to a high culture sources — Joyce’s “Ulysses” and his short story, “The Dead”; Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”; Mann’s “Death in Venice”; and the real-life doomed affair of Rimbaud and Verlaine. But what is also remarkable is the broad range of topics Cunningham manages to cover in what is one of his shortest novels.
Among those elements is an insider’s look at the cutthroat and compromised world of contemporary art. And let’s give thanks, that, unlike so many other authors who populate their novels with fictional novelists, Cunningham is willing to explore the paths of creativity through non-writer characters. Aside from references to actual artists (Brueghel, Rodin, Damien Hirst), Cunningham convincingly creates a bevy of working artists, devising for each an interesting aesthetic and conjuring up a room full of their works for exhibition. Also of interest is the well described minutiae and daily grind of office life in what is, essentially, just another small business operation. Cunningham has fun with the fact that an art gallery must engage in the soul-sapping compromise of stocking what will sell.
As in previous novels, Cunningham is quite skillful at getting us to feel the connections within families that endure even long after childhood (Peter and Rebecca’s family histories are examined in flaskbacks). He is best with younger characters, especially sibling relationships that take on a love/hate dynamic, and he well captures the pangs of growth beyond adolescence. Fears of growing old and dying are also featured prominently in the new novel and are sensitively evoked.
Of course no one can gainsay the beauty of Cunningham’s writing (filled with perfect details), his intelligence, his empathy. Other reviewers will doubtless cite their own favorite passages, but for me one that stands out is a terrific set piece in the middle of “By Nightfall” which tracks the steps of an insomniac Peter who, in the wee hours of the night, leaves his loft for a meandering nocturnal walk through the irregular streets of lower Manhattan — it is an unexpected, charmed sequence.
Rilke, Flaubert, Cunningham
To return, then, to the Rilke epigraph that presages the theme of “By Nightfall,” how is it, one asks, that “beauty disdains to annihilate us”? I think the answer is found in Cunningham’s obvious devotion to Flaubert. He shares with the French author a despairing sense of the ultimate inadequacy of language. In the final pages of “By Nightfall” Cunningham quotes not once, not twice, but three times from the following lament expressed in “Madame Bovary” (here in Gerald Hopkins’ translation):
“After all, no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, of his thoughts or his sorrows. Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.”
Here is another translation of that passage, more beautiful and less faithful to the original, by Francis Steegmuller:
“For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
Coming late, but coming, to self-knowledge
Peter’s dilemma is the common fate of men: “What do you do when you’re no longer the hero of your own story?” In Peter there’s more than a little of T.S. Eliot’s aging Prufrock (“No! I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord . . . glad to be of use, politic, cautious and meticulous, full of high sentence”). Peter expresses his fate as a resignation to “live on as a solid second-stringer, respected but not feared [and settled into] a career of semi-defeat, a champion of the overlooked and the almost-but-not-quite.”
A re-balancing is in order. Peter, who’s life is the world of art — the representation of a thing or emotion or idea — comes to realize the falsity of his pursuit. At the close of the book he understands it is, rather, “flesh, the true and living thing, [that] trumps every effort at representation.” Confessing his mistakes and transgressions to his wife (a confession that will continue beyond the final page of the book), he sees he has “failed in the most base and human of ways” — for he has “not imagined the lives of others.” Cunningham’s prescription, his choice as a bulwark against annihilation, is this:
“To love, to forgive, to abide.”
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A condensed version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.
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It’s not easy to convey in the space of a short review a sense of the experience of reading Daniel Kehlmann’s “Fame.” In part this is because the author has packed into its 173 pages an ambitious set of themes and variations. Reviews appearing in magazines and newspapers that I read in recent weeks made me apprehensive about picking up a book described as “formally experimental” and “a post-modernist exercise.” What were the chances, I wondered, that this would turn out to be a pleasure?
High, I discovered.
Kehlmann has talent to burn. Even more important, he has an unselfish desire to communicate clearly with readers. In this, his sixth book, he brings together nine “episodes” that capture the feel of life in contemporary society. At the same time, Kehlmann offers canny reflections on the increasingly blurry boundaries between reality and fiction, truth and falsehood, the real and the unreal. He handles these subjects deftly, self-mockingly, and, by book’s end, poignantly.
In a nod to post-modernist “metafiction” fashion, a few of the book’s tales place front and center the slippery relationship between the author and his characters. In one story, for example, a character begs the author not to plot her demise. In another episode a young woman (an assistant to a famous writer) fears ending up as a mere character in one of his stories. This interplay of real and unreal is not new territory: consider Pirandello’s drama, “Six Characters in Search of an Author” and, in a different creative medium, the Hollywood movies “The Truman Show” (1998) and “Stranger Than Fiction” (2006). It’s a captivating device that remains fresh in the hands of Kehlmann.
There is a debate buzzing around “Fame” about whether it is a true novel, or a set of short stories, or something in between. If you are uncertain, as I was, about Kehlmann’s decision to construct a “novel” with no protagonist and with only weak threads connecting its nine tales, my advice is to remember that a similar structure undergirds the films “Short Cuts” (1993), “Pulp Fiction” (1994), “Amores Perros” (2000) and “Babel” (2006). If disjunctions and flights of philosophy of this sort leave you cold, then by all means avoid “Fame.” But if you found one or more of those movies great experiences, and if you are comfortable with the narrative methods of such authors as Paul Auster, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover, then “Fame” will provide a sure platform for your enjoyment.
“Fame” is much more than just a literary experiment. I was pleasantly surprised by how varied and yet how conventional are its strengths. The stories are full of humor and pathos. In one, the course of an adulterous affair (an oft-told tale) is updated to include the intrusions of email, cell phones and instant messaging. The first minutes of awkward seduction are described thus: “I said we could go and find a drink somewhere, the old well-worn formula, and she, as if she didn’t understand or as if I didn’t know she understood perfectly well, or as if she didn’t know I knew, said yes, let’s.” Three of the book’s characters are authors, and this allows Kehlmann to knowingly track the shifting role of the writer in contemporary society. The vicissitudes of fame and the enigma of identity theft are explored. Keen insights abound: This is now “the age of the image, of the sounds of rhythms and a mystical dissolution into the eternal present–a religious ideal become reality through the power of technology.”
Appearing not once but twice is the Devil himself, and on both occasions he brings to the proceedings a jolt of guilty pleasure. Spying a mobile phone, the Devil notes: “Life is over so quickly — that’s what these little phones are for, that’s why we have all that electrical gadgetry in our pockets.” Yet technology has also meant dislocation:
“How strange that technology has brought us into a world where there are no fixed places anymore. You speak out of nowhere, you can be anywhere, and because nothing can be checked, anything you choose to imagine is, at bottom, true. If no one can prove to me where I am, if I myself am not absolutely certain, where is the court that can adjudicate these things? Real places anchored in space existed before we have little walkie-talkies and wrote letters that arrived in the same second they were dispatched.”
The soul-sapping environment of today’s corporate offices and off-site conferences is sharply rendered: “People cannot work together without hating one another”. In most of the tales, disappointment and bitterness break to the surface, yet one story ends, magically and lyrically, with a sweet salvation.
A character named Leo Richter, a writer, is my candidate for hero of the book. Undoubtedly meant to serve as Kehlmann’s alter ego, Richter appears in the second, third, seventh and ninth episodes. He’s a terrific creation: funny, ruminative, mesmerized by the creative process, wise, and able to rise to the occasion. The reader is not shown much of Richter’s writing and so we are hard pressed to judge its quality, but I suspect it’s like Kehlmann’s, which is very fine indeed.
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An abbreviated version of this book review appears on Amanzon.com, here.
Below is the French edition of “Fame”. It features on its cover a typically strange portrait (“Rachel in Fur,” 2002) by the contemporary American painter John Currin .
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Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) wrote “Monsieur Pain” in 1981-82, at the start of a brief but productive career as an imaginative writer of fiction. The Chilean-born Bolaño is best known for his dazzling breakthrough novel, “The Savage Detectives,” and the posthumously published “2666”. (For an excellent summary of Bolano’s main themes and motifs, see Henry Hitchings review of the “summative” novel “2666” here.)
“Monsieur Pain” is a short (134-page) work, and two audiences may find pleasure in spending a few hours in its spell:
Happy veterans — readers who have been entranced by one or more of Bolaño’s celebrated later works and who want to trace the origin of his mature themes, his obsessions, and his methods, back to the time of their youthful first expression, will find revelations in “Monsieur Pain”.
Wary novices — new readers who are intrigued by, yet also skeptical of, the Bolaño phenomenon. A Washington Post critic, reflecting on Bolaño’s death in 2003, declared: “Bolano has joined the immortals” — and this kind of passionate celebration, echoed many times over by the mainstream critical establishment, garners attention and maybe distrust among general reader population. Some potential readers are, understandably, daunted by the weight of his final writings. They may also be confused by negative reactions to the author, as voiced in the two dozen one- and two-star complaints among the customer reviews of “2666” on Amazon.com. For those wary readers I recommend this novel as good investment of your time.
Another reviewer described Bolaño’s worldview as “strange and marvelous and impossibly funny, bursting with melancholy and horror.” By Bolaño’s own reckoning, his formative literary influences were all over the map. In the case of “Monsieur Pain” Bolaño turned to Edgar Allan Poe as the animating force for his narrative. This is not hidden. Between the Dedication Page and a Preliminary Note, on what is sometimes referred to as an Inspiration Page, Bolaño placed a dialog excerpt from Poe’s short story of 1844, “Mesmeric Revelation.” That tale is told as a conversation between a hypnotist and an invalid, a man on the cusp of death, who is placed under hypnosis in an experiment to see whether it will afford him a glimpse of the after-life. At one point the hypnotized patient confides: “the mesmeric condition is so near death as to content me.”
“Monsieur Pain” combines elements of a mystery and a detective story, the latter a genre Poe pioneered. But it is much more than that; the novel genuinely defies categorization. It is narrated by Monsieur Pierre Pain, a veteran survivor of the battle of Verdun, where he was gassed. Two decades later, he is a pensioner living, poorly, in the Paris demimonde. He has studied mesmerism. Pain is called upon to apply his mesmeric skills to save the life of a hospitalized poet. Not long after his initial visit to the Clinic, events begin to assume a surrealist bent. Blended with a free-floating paranoia, this surreal atmosphere holds sway over the remainder of the novel. Time and space bend: time, at one point, is described as running faster than a clock; the Clinic morphs into a prison, its corridors a labyrinth.
Try as he might, Pain cannot shake off a pair of Spanish assassins, one of whom, when given the chance, attempts to escape, Oswald-like, by ducking into a movie theater. (Whether Bolaño, who would have been 10 1/2 at the time, followed the news of the JFK assassination, is unknown.) Pain is amused by an odd pair of young artists, genuine twins, ensconced in a bizarre cafe whose every fixture and surface is painted a shade of green. These brothers construct miniature disaster scenes (car crashes, train wrecks) inside fish-tanks. (The novelty of this art eerily anticipates Jeff Koons’ likewise surreal basketballs-in-a-fish-tank constructions?) Pain learns about a conspiracy that may involve radiation experiments; he’s made privy to a rumored love affair involving Madame Curie’s daughter. Pain encounters a former friend who has since become a torturer for Franco’s forces.
Which brings us to the political. The dread hanging over Paris in the year 1938 is the specter of totalitarianism. For Bolaño, who considered himself primarily a poet, the personal sorrows of a young Keats (half in love with easeful death) are distant indulgences, supplanted in the modern era by men powerfully in love with half death. Poe would not have been surprised by this turn of events. The question of the poet’s response to fascism, hinted at in “Monsieur Pain,” will take on greater urgency in Bolano’s subsequent novels.
By the mid-point of “Monsieur Pain,” the narrator has fallen sway to paranoia, he is captive to waking dreams. (Those many dreams had a real effect on me: I went to sleep immediately after finishing the book, and that night had more vivid dreams than I’d had in a long time.) Encounters with labyrinths, real and metaphorical, multiply. No matter where you are, you never really find the way out of the labyrinth. The novel ends with an Epilogue for Voices that reveals the main characters’ fates.
Some readers will find all of this a weird, indigestible brew, a fun-house ride not worth taking. If the prospect of Poe meets Borges meets Paul Auster meets Thomas Pynchon is off-putting, best stay away. But if you stick with it, you will appreciate how economically Bolaño sketches scene after scene, how he manages to maintain a fast pace throughout, disorienting the reader yet maintaining equilibrium. For me, the reading experience was similar to watching a film noir with an experimental bent. From time to time I was reminded of Hitchcock, especially in the way Bolaño “edits” a sequence for the reader’s consumption, and the way he uses physical surroundings to reveal psychological space, and vice versa. There is a cleverly unfurled scene in a movie house in which Bolaño’s piecemeal description of the plot of the film being screened serves as counterpoint to the stories exchanged by two former friends catching up in the audience. True, the book offers no big pay-off; it never soars. Instead, its rewards are modest. Yet you are sure to come away respecting how Bolaño, the poet, can access beauty through sensitive description. You will learn how touching he can be.
Despite or maybe because of the book’s incoherence I wound up liking it; another short novel of his, “By Night in Chile,” is on my near-term reading list.
[Update (01-30-2010): An abridged version of this essay is published as a book review on Amazon.com, here.]
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You Are What You Buy . . .
America’s embrace of this belief is a major cause of the nation’s current economic, social and political predicament. When did we first adopt this way of life? The answer is there was no single moment; the seduction was gradual. Yet if you were to go searching for markers along the path to our present baleful state, one way station might be the event mentioned by Deborah Solomon in her review of two books about Pop artists Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, in today’s NY Times:
“It is probably relevant that in July 1959, the so-called kitchen debate was held between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon. Staged in Moscow, in a faux suburban house constructed expressly for the occasion, the encounter offered Vice President Nixon the chance to demonstrate the everyday comforts and conveniences of American life, from Pepsi-Cola and Betty Crocker cake mixes to Cadillacs and G.E. dishwashers. The debate was seen around the world and redefined America virtually overnight as a consumerist utopia where the goods you stored in your kitchen cabinets were as much a symbol of cherished values as the bald eagle and the flag.”
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This week I raked leaves in front of the house. While cleaning out the tree box near the curb I found, amongst brown oak leaves blown there from up the block and around the corner, a crumpled piece of paper. Unfolded, it revealed a drawing done with colored pencils. The artist’s use of line and color suggests it is from the hand of the same child artist responsible for the sidewalk chalk-drawing of a Mouse Musketeer I came upon last summer. (That earlier work is reproduced here.)
On the 9″ by 6″ sheet are two figures: a reindeer and snowman. The snowman sports a two-tiered hat, a classic carrot-orange nose, a lopsided mouth like Dick Cheney’s — and a rarely seen pair of legs and feet.
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The relational displacement of the snowman’s eyes, nose and mouth recall the portrait innovation Picasso developed in the 1930s — a style that led many exasperated viewers to blurt out, “My kid could do that!”:
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I recently acquired at auction this abstract sculpture. Four views:
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Just 16″ tall, this is an early work in forged steel by the contemporary sculptor, Herb Babcock. Babcock was born in Bloomdale, Ohio in 1946. In 1967 he attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, then received his BFA in sculpture from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1969 and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1973. He currently serves as Chairman of the Glass Department at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, where he has been a professor since 1974. Babcock lives in Oxford, Michigan. His website is here; a curriculum vitae, which unfortunately stops at the year 2000, is found here. An example of his work in glass is this beautiful vessel. Today Babcock may be known best for his public commissions, often of a monumental size, that combine glass, steel, and stone.
UPDATE (04-02-2011)
On March 12 I received the following email message from the sculptor, Herb Babcock, along with three photos. His title for this 1967 piece is “Balanced Forms”:
Mr. Ettner,
Can’t remember if I sent you these images of when this sculpture was new. It was a purchase prize award at the Cleveland Institute of Art Spring Student Show, 1967, where I was in my 3 year working on a BFA in sculpture. The piece was made up of forged and cut steel. The interiors of the steel forms were polished metal. The outside areas were finished with a patina of burnt in linseed oil. It looks like the piece has not been cleaned for quite a while.
Best regards,
Herb
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I remember emerging from a New York City art museum some years ago after spending an hour looking at paintings in a Richard Estes exhibition. Estes is a photo-realist painter known for his meticulously detailed canvasses of urban environments. As I hit the sidewalk and walked to Penn Station, I noticed that the avenues, vehicles, buildings, sky — the entire city — looked different. I was seeing the world with more sharply focused vision, a carry-over from time spent immersed in Estes’ art. The most striking effect was my heightened awareness of the unique light that fills the streets of Manhattan. It was a luxurious effect.
The same feeling comes over me whenever I finish a new novel by Anne Tyler. There is one difference, though. Tyler’s art engenders not only new perceptions of the everyday physical environment, but also a more generous understanding of human interactions, of personal relationships.
“Noah’s Compass” is relatively short, just 277 pages in the British edition that I read (published by Chatto & Windus; Knopf will release the American edition on January 5, 2010). There are critics who disparage Tyler as a play-it-safe miniaturist. They say she avoids grappling with the Big Themes of existence and death; she’s stuck in the quotidian. Yet Liam Pennywell, the protagonist of “Noah’s Compass,” at one point observes how “we live such tangled, fraught lives . . . but in the end we die like all the other animals and we’re buried in the ground and after a few more years we might as well not have existed.” Could this passage be a bone Tyler is throwing to the nay-sayers? Perhaps. I think the critics are tiresome. What I am more sure of, and more interested in, is that “Noah’s Compass” finds the author in full command of her craft. Tyler shares with the Big Theme guys (authors such as Tolstoy, Joyce, Mann, Camus) a rare power to convey what it feels like to be alive.
One of the book’s pleasures is how its hold on the reader gains strength page after page. It starts in familiar Tyler territory, introducing a main character who’s living half a life. The story unfolds in comedia dell’arte fashion, as Liam is beset by the women in his life, who intrude upon and occupy his present as well as his remembrances. Incidents range from tiny to grand, from equivocal to harrowing. Some leave wounds. Complications blend the farcical and tragic. Inveterate Tyler readers will sense from the opening pages that Liam may — or may not — find himself in a different external state by the close of the tale. But he himself will be different, and we too. The book’s final chapter takes us to a pre-school for three-year-olds. Could there be a more suitable stage upon which to close out the narrative with a modest summing up?
There are no solutions to the mysteries of why people are the way they are. Life offers no answers. Yet there are, in Tyler’s universe, lessons to be had, more things for Liam to learn:
“It came as news to [Liam] that small children maintained such a firm social structure. They played consistent roles in their dealings with each other; they held fierce notions of justice; they formed alliances and ad hoc committees and little vigilante groups. Lunches were parodies of grownups’ dinner parties, just with different conversational topics. Danny held forth at length on spaghetti’s resemblance to earthworms, and some of the little girls said, “Eww!” and pushed their plates away, but then Hannah — first clearing her throat importantly — delivered a discourse on a chocolate-covered ant she’d once eaten, while shy little Jake watched everybody admiringly from the sidelines.”
What inevitably happens when reading the best of Tyler’s novels happened, this time, when I was half-way through the book. Tyler aficionados know what I’m talking about. You come upon a magical passage; read a perfect description of a person or place or encounter; listen to a precisely-pitched stretch of dialog; absorb a paragraph that expresses a sentiment often thought “but ne’er so well expressed” — and at those moments you think to yourself, How the hell did she do that? Let me read that again. Let me mark these spots. But then you find yourself marking up every page. The exercise turns futile, redundant: the entire book is of a piece.
I love the Baltimore dialect (“let me skootch this footstool around”), the apt similes (“the marble treads were worn down in the middle like old soap bars”), and the Updike-like attention to detail. Here is Tyler describing a working-class neighborhood of 1940s-vintage cottages:
“There was an abundance of lawn ornaments — plaster gnomes and fawns and families of ducks, birdbaths, windmills, reflective aluminum gazing globes, wooden cutouts of girls in sunbonnets bending over the flower beds with their wooden watering cans. Liam’s father’s yard had a miniature pony cart planted with red geraniums and hitched to a plaster pony.”
Rhymes, echos, and recurrences abound, usually in service to Tyler’s ever-wise examination of human psychology. Virtually everything has metaphorical significance. The tension of yes and no, true and false, is non-stop. This is life. On his first encounter with Eunice (who will become a love interest) Liam considers her behavior: “Either she was admirably at ease anywhere or she suffered from a total lack of discrimination.” Eunice’s habit of repeatedly calling new acquaintances by their first name is later echoed by another character, and as a reader you wonder, did one person influence the other, or was this something they shared in common from the start, and if the latter, doesn’t that suggest these two are better off remaining paired, not separated?
At points things veer toward the heavy lot of Job, as when a troubled Liam asks himself, “How had things reached such a state? But it wasn’t his fault. He honestly didn’t think he should be shouldering the blame for this.” This brings to mind the famous opening sentence of a famous Big Theme book: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.” In Tyler’s hands, the serious is leavened with the comical; Liam comes across as a bit of a schlemiel. I was interested in Tyler’s handling of religion (one of Liam’s daughters is a born-again Christian). On the evidence of this book, I suspect Tyler herself is a skeptic. Although she loves her characters and watches admiringly over them from the sidelines, Tyler lets no one off lightly. No one escapes unscathed.
Let me add, the final sentence of “Noah’s Compass” is perfect.
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[UPDATE (01-09-2010): A revised version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.]
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Note: The book cover of the British edition is above. Below is the cover of the American edition. Neither image will make sense to the reader of the novel. Although Liam Pennywell has a grandson, no mention is made of the two of them going to the beach. Neither do I recall any episode in which a character, swaddled in a plaid blanket, reads from an old illustrated volume. Oh, well; both are pleasing covers.
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From an article in The Wilson Quarterly, online here, comes this observation by Tyler Cowen:
“The measure of cultural literacy today is not whether you can ‘read’ all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whether you can operate an iPhone or other web-related technologies.”
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In recent days this blog has received a spate of comments from spammers fronting for online “pharmacies” (if you know what I mean). Each message begins by recounting a joke (to lower your defenses?). I thought one of the jokes was good enough to repeat here. It’s in the child-pleasing Q&A format and goes like this:
“What happens to illegally parked frogs?”
“They get toad away.”
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While walking the dog this morning I came across a cute bit of sidewalk art:
I wonder how the child artist knew to place the cavalier’s sword in what would be the mouse’s right hand? If the artist himself (let’s assume it’s a boy) was right handed, wouldn’t he be inclined to place the sword on the right side of the figure as we see it, since that’s how the young artist sees his own reflection in a mirror, and his own shadow on the sidewalk? Or has he, after watching many a cartoon about cavalier adventures, formed an image of the sword naturally fitted to that side? (Notice too the bent left arm, hiding the left hand behind the back, lending the figure a distinquished air.)