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“Noir” by Robert Coover

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

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To borrow the second person voice (“you”) that controls the narrative of Robert Coover’s new novel, “Noir”, let it be noted at the outset that you fall within one of three groups.

1 –   You are a Coover aficionado and have read most or all of his output to date. You will buy or borrow the newly released “Noir” and read its slim 192 pages in a feverish swoon, critics be damned. If, at some point, you find yourself reading reviews of “Noir”, it’s because you’ve finished the book and want to relive the experience or compare your reaction to others.  For you, there are comments further below.

Or:

2 –   You have read one or two Coover books (maybe as part of a post-modern lit course) and want to catch up with what the 78-year-old author is doing nowadays. Is he still in the game, you wonder?  The news is positive. You will find the pages of “Noir” spellbound by Coover’s signature mordant wit and claustrophobic worldview. Elsewhere you may have come across the much repeated statement by NY Times book critic Michiko Kakutani: “Of all the post-modernist writers, Robert Coover is probably the funniest and most malicious.” So, yes, you’ll find “Noir” fitfully laugh-inducing — especially if you’re in the mood for a relentless, demented, hallucinogenic parody of crime fiction. If at its end you are still ambivalent about the book, well, that it not uncommon with Coover. At its close you may place a hand on your belly and think to yourself, that was not so much a satisfying meal as a bitter entrée. Or, you may be so delighted by its denouement, incorporating street philosophy, word play, puns, double entendres and all-around cleverness, that you will forgive being dragged through some slow sections.

Or:

3 –   Coover is entirely new to you. If so, you are wondering how do you get a good sense of what “Noir” will mean to you as a reading experience? You’re finding most reviews of the book are frustratingly un-useful to a novice reader.  (There seems to be a jargon-loving Coover clique that luxuriates in the cryptic.) Well, you might consider first checking out a short interview in which Coover himself explains the style and themes of “Noir”. This is available online (use these three words in Google search: Coover bookslut interview). Consider also spending a few minutes watching Coover in action, as he reads an early scene (and arguably the best pages) from “Noir”.  The video is available using four terms in Google search: Coover Penn Reading Video.  (His reading from “Noir” occupies the final minutes of the QuickTime video).  If the interview and video generally pique your interest, and if you would not be put off by what is essentially a light entertainment somewhat burdened with down and dirty stretches of bleak pessimism and erotic haunting, then by all means read “Noir”. Or, consider one of the following alternatives to “Noir” as a better first experience of Coover: “Pricksongs and Descants”, his ground-breaking short story collection; or “The Origin of the Brunists”, a conventionally generous and very American tale of the spawning of a religious cult in a mining community; or, if you can find a used or library copy of  “A Political Fable: The Cat in the Hat for President” (unfairly, it is currently out-of-print).  “A Political Fable” may very well become your favorite piece of zaniness by any author ever.  It is mine.

Finally, here are a few stray perceptions of my own to share with Coover fans who have finished the book.

Coover is nothing if not quotable. Wherever you are in “Noir” you are not far from coming upon yet another comment on humankind’s bleak condition. Coover spins endless variations on an astringent melody whose lyrics tell of “your incorrigible weakness in a meaningless universe” (page 103), a ballad “meant to provoke reflections upon life’s brevity, and its thin sad beauty” (page 108). Other examples: “It’s not the story you’re trapped in but how you play it out … your style … steppin’ round the beat … How long does that matter? As long as you live, meaning, no time at all.” (page 52).  “What’s the connection? No idea. Connections [are] probably an illusion in such a fucked-up world as this. Why you’re down here. Illusory connections” (page 113). “The city was as bounded as a gameboard, no place to hide in it, no way but one to leave it, you alone defenseless in it, your moves not even your own” (page 175). Most Hobbesian of all is this: “The body has to eat and drink so it can stay healthy long enough to enjoy an agonizing death, and the mind, to help out, has to know where the provisions are and how to get them and who else is after them and how to kill them” (page 159). The novel’s close brings a softer tone: “You can’t escape the melody but you can make it your own.”

Especially at the novel’s climax, borrowings from films are abundant: the shifting cityscape of “Dark City” (page 163), the mirror room scene in “The Lady from Shanghai” (page 181), and the false-identity caper “Catch Me If You Can” (page 186).

At one point Philip Noir tries to recall who once likened an odd juxtaposition to “a pearl onion on a banana split.” This is a line used by Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe. When another character advises, “Plant you now, dig you later, man” (page 111) , this is a twofer or maybe a three-way: its source is the jazz world of the 1920’s/30’s, but the phrase also was used as a title of song in “Pal Joey” and later as the title of a “Gilligan’s Island” episode — facts surely not lost on pop culture maven Coover. Other more careful readers (with or without benefit of Google search) will best me in this endless game of spot-the-allusion, but final mention should be made of one “high culture” reference I spotted, a reference that informs the musical ambiance of the book. Philip Noir notices a few words carved into the wooden tabletop at a jazz joint: “You are the music while the music lasts.” This is a line from “The Dry Salvages”, the third section of “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot.

I wonder whether the sympathetic character of Michiko (“she’s a work of art”) is Coover’s homage to the sympathetic critic of his work, Michiko Kakutani. But, given the fate Coover confers on the fictitious Michiko, I’m thinking maybe this is best left unexplored. As the author himself cautions:

“It’s all quite simple. But sometimes not knowing is better. It’s more interesting.”

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One final observation (to be filed under “Annoyances, Petty”):  The covers of both the American and French editions of the novel sport photos that are at odds with the story. Both photos are of daytime scenes of a walker in a city. But the perambulations of Philip Noir take place entirely at night. Does the discrepancy matter? Probably not, but wouldn’t it be nice if the photographer, or the editors who selected the final images, had actually read the book?

(A version of this review appears on Amazon.com, here.)

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Measuring Spring

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

Yesterday, the snowpack was in retreat, revealing hidden activity in the front gardens on my block.

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In one of his poems e.e. cummings mocks the inventor who builds “an instrument to measure spring with.” His description of the inventor — “some oneyed son for a bitch”– brings to mind a camera.

Hands off my camera, e.e.

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“Solar” by Ian McEwan

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

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“Solar” is something of a departure for McEwan.  It is also something of a disappointment.

The novel traces a decade in the life of Michael Beard, a British Nobel laureate in physics. The book begins in the year 2000 as the 52-year-old scientist’s fifth marriage is dissolving (through every fault of his own), and it ends in 2009 as Beard is about to open a cutting-edge renewable energy facility in New Mexico (with personal disaster imminent).

Readers of McEwan’s earliest books (dark psychological explorations; morbid, perverse, violent) and his most recent novels (grandly serious, elegantly crafted) may be taken aback by this new work. “Solar” is being touted by its publisher and editor, Nan A. Talese, as a “comedy” — a book, she promises, you’ll find filled with “comedic antics”.

I agree with the emerging consensus among readers who’ve had access to an advance reading copy: this is not among McEwan’s best efforts.

In the best of his recent novels McEwan provides readers with the supreme pleasure of a plot and characters that fully seize your consciousness. He composes passages with such fine craft that the reader forgets the act of reading and loses awareness of the author’s hand. There are moments when you find yourself being pulled along by a frictionless, seemingly unmediated flow of story and emotion. The opening of “Enduring Love” and parts of “Saturday” achieve this magical state. Many readers, myself included, experienced this phenomenon most fully in the sweep of “Atonement”.

So a caution is in order: if you pick up “Solar”, do not expect to enjoy anything similar.

The Humor Deficiency

Why is there no magic this time? One answer is that “Solar” is, ostensibly, a “comedy”. Whether the demands of comedy are compatible with McEwan’s strengths as a writer is debatable, and there are few subjects more subjective than the question of what’s funny. Then, too, developing a sustainable comic voice is a matter of practice, of paying dues; no one should expect mastery on a first outing. I join with those who find “Solar” lacking in the art of comedy.

The first 50 pages or so are especially dispiriting: filled with lame humor, sub-Neil-Simon one-liners, and flat-footed stabs at wit. Soon thereafter comes an otherwise well-written episode set in the Arctic Circle, featuring a group of artists on an environmental tour. But when McEwan launches his jokes, there’s precious little originality. Even granting allowances for the piratical practice of comedy, you may be struck by how the best laughs are borrowed ones.

[Spoiler alert] For example, you’ve  laughed  many times at the dilemma of a child straight-jacketed by winter clothing (a staple of kid-centered comic strips, sitcoms, and movies), and so you’ll laugh again as McEwan spends page after page detailing the helplessness of a childish, roly-poly guy, preparing for a sub-zero trek, donning layers and layers of clothes including multiple gloves — who discovers he cannot then put on his boots, or answer a call of nature. You might squirm with delight (as you’ve done before) when the same guy is afflicted by a variation on the gag in the film, “There’s Something About Mary”, getting his genitals caught by a pants zipper.  You may be familiar with the caption written by Robert Mankoff back in 1993 for his oft-reprinted cartoon in The New Yorker (the one in which an executive, trying to avoid agreeing to a meeting, rebuffs the supplicant by saying: “No, Thursday’s out. How about never — is never good for you?”). If that cartoon is part of your memory bank, you will smile when reading the flash-back scene in “Solar”, set in the 1960’s, when a coed parries young Michael Beard’s request for a date by replying: “How about never? Can you make never?” [End of Spoiler Alert]

The funny business eases off in the remainder of the book, as if McEwan grew bored with the assignment. Yes, the author can construct solid episodes of mirth, and there are bits of bright irony and satiric commentary throughout “Solar”. But McEwan falls short of nailing the tricky task of sustaining a course of original comedy for the book’s length.

The Character Deficiency

If you are a reader who prefers strong main characters and an engaging story arc, “Solar” may disappoint. It does not help matters that, for his choice of a protagonist — the figure who will be the sole thread of continuity among the vignettes that jump around in time and geography — McEwan has conjured up, in the character of Michael Beard, a thoroughly despicable man. Beard is, by his own estimation, “neither observant nor sensitive.” Worse still, he is an inveterate liar and thief, a criminal in the making, and morally bankrupt to boot (“But why should he feel guilt? Someone please tell him why.”) Being in his company is a chore — certainly so for his five discarded wives and the professional colleagues he mistreats. Perhaps for the reader too.

Do not expect any new perspective on adultery or failed relationships.  At one point, when Beard is trapped by the prospect of his two current lovers bumping into each other, he sighs: “Someone, or everyone, would be disappointed. Nothing new there.” I expect at least one unhappy critic will grab onto those words for use in her or his indictment of the entire book. (Click here to read one online reviewer’s lengthy analysis, headlined with a four-word verdict: “A flabby character-portrait”). But I can’t agree with those who are totally dismissive of the work.

Extenuating Circumstances

However shaky its humor and however repulsive its protagonist’s antics, “Solar” still offers redemptive qualities and content. This is, after all, Ian McEwan, one of our best writers, and the bones of his talent cannot be disguised even in this ill-fitting raiment.

McEwan is a master analyst of decaying relationships, of psychological gamesmanship, of battles for personal supremacy. Beard’s failed marital relationships and his disputes with associates provide opportunities for the author to rehearse those tensions.

McEwan seeks to explore nested worlds: Beard’s personal circumstances; the larger sphere of the scientific community of which he is a prominent member; the enveloping social and political order (rapidly descending into disorder); and finally, the natural order of the planet (also under threat). McEwan is a terrific observer of the interrelationship of these spheres.

I was charmed by McEwan’s take on America, where he sets the final third of the book. This British author is evidently fond of our country. At one point he mentions “the plenitude and strangeness of America as represented by its television.” Beard’s American physician “could be counted on to deliver a clinical judgment with the proper neutrality, without the moral undertones, the hint of blame or poorly suppressed outrage Beard had come to expect from his [British doctors].” McEwan approvingly observes “the intimate politeness at which Americans excel.” He notices the way “Americans good-naturedly declare a class affiliation” — citing, by way of example, a woman  who chews gum remorselessly. Here is how Beard’s female companion in New Mexico is described: “She was so merry, so hopelessly optimistic and well-disposed. So American.” And, of course, the weather is better here:

“Always a delicious moment to be savoured, and never to be had in the British Isles, when, showered and perfumed and wearing fresh clothes, one steps out from the air-conditioning into the smooth, invincible warmth of a southern evening.”

Among the themes McEwan briefly explores in “Solar” is the trendy academic movement that would define all areas of knowledge as “socially constructed” – even the hard sciences. The malleability of memory is a recurrent motif, as is the related phenomenon of our all too human capacity for woeful misunderstanding, leading to catastrophe. There is lively (but, again, abbreviated) attention paid to the Two Cultures debate: science versus the humanities (or, more particularly, in the case of Beard’s first marriage, physics versus poetry; Beard’s scientific way of “knowing the world” locks him out of an appreciation of “other ways” of knowing the world.).

Final Observations

In an effort to propel “Solar” forward, McEwan employs the same device used by John Irving in his most recent novel, “Last Night in Twisted River”. Each subsequent section of the book leaps ahead several years, and, after the reader is duly situated into the new period, the author uses flashbacks to fill in the gap. This technique, which might annoy some as desultory, actually does the work of keeping the reader engaged.

The book’s second most important character — a young post-doctorate member of the team of scientists at the British Centre for Renewable Energy — hides a clue to the novel. His name is Tom Aldous. That name, I believe, is a conflation of the names of two real persons, from two previous centuries. McEwen, whose 21st century novel features the dominant science story of our day (climate change) as its “background hum“, has decided to invoke Thomas Henry Huxley, the 19th century scientist who championed the world-altering scientific development of his era, Darwinism. “Tom” Huxley is linked to his grandson, Aldous Huxley, the 20th century author of the enduring utopian novel, “Brave New World”. Aldous was also a writer of satiric novels, some of which featured a topical scientific twist. There may be a humbling lesson in the fact that those satiric novels have long since been forgotten.

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Addendum: A Weird Coincidence (a/k/a, the Bacon Bookmark)

On page 167 of “Solar”, McEwan illustrates Michael Beard’s disorderly habits with the story of the time his third wife, while cleaning their home, “discovered in the pages of a valuable first edition an ancient rasher of his breakfast bacon doubling as a bookmark.” A day after I read that passage — cringe-inducing if you’re a book lover — I happened to be watching Stephen Colbert’s interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, author of “Eating Animals”. At the end of the segment, Colbert uses a strip of bacon to mark his place in his copy of Foer’s book. Check out the video, here; Colbert brings out the bacon at 4:45.

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“Monsieur Pain” by Roberto Bolano

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

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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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The tremendous strength of America

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

A personal essay by David Owen (“The Dime Store Floor”) graces the Jan. 25, 2010 edition of The New Yorker magazine. Throughout the piece Owen’s narrative is intermittently brilliant, as he riffs on a theme posed as a question: What did childhood smell like? I think Owen should try his hand at writing a novel. At one point he describes a recent bike ride near his home, as he came upon members of a girls’ high-school cross-country team running in tight formation:

“As I passed the girls I rode through the invisible trailing cloud of their mingled shampoo fragrances, and suddenly I felt a sort of dumbbell patriotism. My thought was something like this: This is the tremendous strength of America — our vigorous, optimistic young people and their clean, clean hair.”

Dumbbell patriotism. I like that formulation. As an expression of aw-shucks awe at this, our country, and what this country hosts, it captures what I feel each time I come across some vibrant display of the nation’s life-blood.

I’m especially moved to thanks-giving by instances of everyday, nonchalant tolerance. In concept America is defined by freedom and diversity of thought in the public sphere. Happily, there are still a visible examples of that in practice. Consider the advertisement I spotted this week on the rear end of a public bus chugging along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

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British novelist Ian McEwan, in conversation with Richard Dawkins, is less sanguine about the durability of America’s greatness in this regard. Video here. Dawkins mentions what he sees as an America “rapidly degenerating into a theocracy.” McEwan agrees, and says this development is “one of the most extraordinary reversals in history, isn’t it? You have this extraordinary social experiment: America, an immigrant state, founded in reaction to the religious absolutisms of Old Europe. And then, fast-forward a couple of hundred years, you have at least in Western Europe, more or less entirely, a set of secular governments, and political conversations conducted without any reference to God, while the United States is a place where you cannot hold high office without invoking this Deity.”

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Connecting the dots

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

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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kitchen debate

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Here comes a decade-long, Big Five-O party

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

A collective shrug of “Uh, who cares?” greeted the recent spate of 40th anniversary celebrations. Woodstock? Yawn. The moon landing? Snooze. The birth (arguably) of the Internet?  Feh.

But while these fortieth birthday parties fizzled, that won’t stop promoters exploiting all of the upcoming big Five-O shindigs.

In just a few weeks the calendar will flip to the year 2010.  As with any year, 2010 is an abstraction. Right now 2010 is content-free, sans emotional resonance, non-seductive. Yet our culture is at the mercy of a base-10 numbering system. The media, needing to fill time and space, will grab at mathematics: 2,010 is the sum of 1,960 plus the very marketable, “Hey, it’s been 50 years, so let’s get a party on!”  With box cutter knives in hand, the whole exploitive band of writers, commentators, filmmakers, sordid hangers-on, are all poised to attack the packed  boxes labeled “the ’60s.” Unpacked, their contents will be spilled across every available screen.

If I were asked to set the agenda for this non-stop orgy of baby-boomer nostalgia, I’d first remind my staff that the distinction of the 1960s was not so much its general calamities amidst general progress. That can be said of every decade in recent world history. What the ’60s was more “about” was something in the realm of feeling: a relentless pow! pow! pow! of special tragedies and triumphs of an intensely personal kind. To set up this theme, I suggest the festival begin on January 4 with a somber program devoted to Albert Camus. An odd choice? Perhaps; but hear me out:  It was on January 4, 1960, that the 46-year-old Camus, then at the height of his creative powers, a man immersed in the struggle for individual freedom in an absurd universe, met a violent death in a car crash. Surely this was a lesson for us, a warning to prepare for a decade-long reminder of an inescapable truth: Everything that grows holds in perfection but a little moment.

Which, on a happier note, will also set the stage for a 2017 program devoted to Twiggy.

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UPDATE (11-23-2009): Today, the New York Times reports that, to mark the 50th anniversary of Camus’ death, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to transfer the writer’s remains to the Pantheon in Paris, one of the most hallowed burial places in France.

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“Noah’s Compass” by Anne Tyler

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

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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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anne_tyler


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John Irving Meets His Readers

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

Many readers of fiction have an intense relationship with the authors they love. Eugenio Bolongaro describes this phenomenon as an “emotional closeness, a willingness to make oneself not only listen to the language of the author but also be hospitable to it.”  In his 1947 book-length essay, What is Literature, Jean-Paul Sartre observed how reading involves “a pact of generosity between author and reader.”

On Saturday I visited the 2009 National Book Festival.  This annual outdoor event is sponsored by the Library of Congress and is held on the grounds of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a space sometimes referred to as “America’s front lawn.” It is a grand public platform for the display of emotional bonds between readers and authors.

Among the seventy or so writers signing books at this year’s Festival was the novelist John Irving.  I brought with me a copy of the The World According to Garp — the very same copy I read in April, 1979, when the book first came out in paperback.  Reading Garp back then struck me like a punch to the solar plexus.  (My apologies to Irving acolytes for using a boxing simile when describing a book infused with the sport of wrestling.) Garp is one of the few novels I’ve read twice. John Irving is one of the few authors whose new books I eagerly await.

Hundreds of ardent readers were in line hoping for an audience, however brief, with the author.  Aside from Garp, the book I spied most often in people’s hands was A Prayer for Owen Meany. I was struck by how worn (meaning, well-read) most of these books were. People were not here to get a valuable signature added to a mint condition book — something they could then sell on eBay. No, these readers had come with purer desires: to place a cherished object into the hands of its begetter; to ask for that object to be recognized and certified by its creator; and to retrieve the now-blessed book for renewed cherishing.

Author and reader are typically separated by time and space, but on this day those forces collapsed into a moment of connection.

As I joined the bright-faced, well-behaved crowd, I recalled a political opinion (this is Washington, D.C., after all) expressed by William F. Buckley, Jr., who said, “I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” What I was thinking was this: if I were allowed to introduce a third choice, I select a government led by National Book Festival attendees. Yes, that might make me one of the governors. (No system is flawless.)

The hour from noon until 1:00 was given over to John Irving’s book signing event.  Time expired, leaving the back half of the line, me included, unrequited.  But a few minutes before Irving departed (he kept at his task an extra 15 minutes) I was able to maneuver my way to a vantage point close to where he was greeting the last lucky cohort of book-clutching readers.  Where I planted my feet turned out to be a charmed perspective from which to capture a remarkable sight.  I had come to the Festival this day expecting to leave with an inked name on a yellowing page.  What I brought back, instead, is a video record of the aftermath of those final moments of connection between author and reader.

Watch as each reader, spontaneously, in his or her own fashion, expresses joy:

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Chasing the Horizon

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I became enamored of the poetry of Stephen Crane back in junior high school.  Gnomic, ironic, and all too brief, Crane’s free verse has a special appeal to the adolescent sensibility.  Here’s a poem I memorized:

          I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
          Round and round they sped.
          I was disturbed at this;
          I accosted the man.
          “It is futile,” I said,
          “You can never — “

          “You lie,” he cried,
          And ran on.

As a teenager I sympathized with that small man pursuing the horizon.  All honor was due to Sisyphus and his lesser brethren.  Decades later I’m inclined to see the fellow as mad, a denier of fact, a fool. 

I was reminded of this today when reading a provocative post on The Daily Dish, written by guest-blogger Jim Manzi.  His essay (yes, the post is substantial enough to deserve that label) is entitled “The Socialism Implicit in the Social Cost of Carbon.”   Manzi argues, convincingly I think, that calculating a social cost of burning carbon — toting up its heavy negative externalities — is a fool’s errand.  It represents a blinkered approach to the goal of optimizing human welfare over the long term.  There is every reason to believe we will misquantify the costs, and no reason to believe the costs of this one activity are more egregious than those of any other social activity pursued in our interconnected world.  Man-made climate change is real, yet the seeds of Armageddon are hidden in a myriad of human actions (our pride and prejudice was clear before it went nuclear).  Somehow the role of global bad guy, most horrible among horribles, has been dealt exclusively to carbon, forgiving other worthy applicants.  We unthinkingly set about pursuing curtailment of fossil fuel burning, even when curtailment efforts may harm us more than the harm of inaction. 

Manzi refers to our current fixation on carbon’s cost as chasing an endlessly receding horizon of zero risk.

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