So Much for That - Lionel Shriver

A vastly important read despite its deficiencies.

Without a doubt, Lionel Shriver's power lies in her subject matter. She has a knack for alighting upon social concerns that are current yet, somehow, timeless. In her most famous novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, the issue she tackled was American high school shootings; in Big Brother, it was obesity and the relationship we have to our food. In So Much for That, a book which predates Big Brother but postdates Kevin, she critiques, through a fully formed narrative, the American healthcare system.

The question feeding the novel, as Shep Knacker postpones his plans to escape the daily grind by living abroad in order to care for his ailing wife, is: how much is one life worth? We see just how much Shep is willing to spend of his three-quarters-of-a-million dollar savings - and his lifelong dream - on medical costs.

What is stunning about this novel, though, is not that we see what havoc terminal illness can wreak on individuals and families, but that we also see the wounds it can heal, the way in which it can simplify one's life.

In a series of side-plots, we are put into contact with the resilience, or the reluctance, of families who must care for their loved ones in times of physical decay. Shriver's characters are hyperbolic, and this seems necessary to the way in which she bravely deconstructs human psychology during these struggling times. Often, her prose tends to lend itself equally to anthropology as to literature.

Interestingly, Shep's wife Glynis, thoroughly dislikable throughout the novel, is unchanged by her cancer diagnosis. She remains a rather rude pessimist, hating the intrusions of friends and family who come to 'make themselves feel better', paying their visit so that 'they don't have to feel guilty' if she were to die suddenly. Her attitude is about the only thing in the novel that doesn't change, which offers a welcome contrast to the stoic, born-again sufferer we have come to expect of people/characters with an incurable disease.

Now I slide over, somewhat jarringly, to mention the things I dislike about the novel, and there is one thing in particular - a big hoofing kick in the Shep Knackers - which utterly spoils this as a work of literature, though not (it's important to note) as an immensely important social critique. But we'll get to that.

It has been noted by various critics in the past that Shriver tends often to overload her dialogue with information. In this novel, the problem is worse than ever. Her characters, in a constant state of emotional, existential and physical crisis, are incomparably eloquent. Precise, detailed references to past events; medical information that both (or all) speaking parties are already privy to and so shouldn't need to be said; well-formed complex sentences with all the emphases and climactic build-up of  parliamentary speeches. That is how her characters talk to one another, and it is hard to read and maintain any sense of absorption in the reality of the fiction.

My main beef, however, with So Much for That, is in how it ends. And the more I think about the ending the more I dislike it, for it spoils what up until then was a thoroughly unsentimental journey through a person's terminal illness and through a healthcare system that in any self-respecting modern society should be illegal. Shriver's problem is not that she wades in the shallow end of cheap sentiment with her trousers folded up to her knees, but that she belly flops into the deep end, a triumphant war-cry banging off the tiled walls. From Chapter Eighteen to the end of the book, it seems as if Shriver has begun a victory lap to celebrate reaching the end of her latest novel. Yet the celebration is premature, because it is the very celebration that ruins it. The final eighty pages or so are a summing up, a tying up of all loose ends in an off-putting, sloppy and sickeningly predictable way. It is a process of smoothing over that is completely out of character with the rest of the book.

However, I am not going to spoil any of the plot, as I consider this a vastly important read despite its deficiencies, and wouldn't want to deprive anyone of a book that will stay with them for a very long time. Setting aside the ending, I know that whenever I come into contact with ill health, whether in family, friends or myself, my mind will flash on this novel, and in that way So Much for That will endure.

pp. 531.
Published: Borough Press, 2015 (originally published, 2010).

Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels

History lays its shadow over the present.


Reading Anne Michaels' prose is like experiencing a flood. You'll probably know what I mean only by reading her work, because if I say anything about packed metaphors, or if I use words like poetic, imagistic, intense, or unflinching, I will risk sounding trite. She is, anyway, one of those creatures whom we call Poet even when referring to her novels.



Fugitive Pieces is a poem. It is a lamentation concerned with no less than war, suffering, rescue, love, redemption. And what is the bold first line of such a poem? Time is a blind guide.

This tremendous opener gives a sense of Michaels' subject. She is concerned with time, with history and how history lays it shadow over the present. Her protagonist, Jakob Beer, 'bog-boy', surfaces from the mud during an archaeological dig in Nazi-occupied Poland, after witnessing the deaths of his mother and father. Athos Roussos, the man who discovers the boy, smuggles him home to a Greek island and guides Jakob in the world of learning. Through this new world obsessed with the discoveries of Greek geology and the metaphysical excavations of poetry, Jakob begins to dig up and study his own history, filled as it is with horror and suffering.

The author's most devastating gift is for ripping open the mundane to reveal the historical immensity beneath. In admiring the appearance of his lover Michaela, Jakob sees in her face 'the loyalty of generations ... the devotion of a hundred Kievan women for a hundred faithful husbands, countless evenings in close rooms under the sheets, discussing family problems ... In Michaela's eyes, ten generations of history, in her hair the scents of fields and pines, her cold, smooth arms carrying water from springs'; and the converse to this, a way Jakob is able to protect himself from the crush of personal history: by writing about his past in English, 'a language foreign to their happening.' He feels that 'English could protect me; an alphabet without memory.'

In this sense, Michaels' prose itself is a kind of excavation, bringing up clumps of the past that are difficult to remove from the creases of one's hands, the underside of one's nails. History adheres to the cracks and lines of the present in this way, filling it out the way memory fills out the mind.

In the second part of the novel the perspective shifts to Ben, the child of concentration camp survivors, who begins a search for Jakob's journals after the latter's death. This part continues in a similar vein, snatches of memory interweaved with Ben's search in the house Jakob shared with his wife Michaela. The weight of history squeezing the present day almost out of all recognition.

But it is difficult differentiating Jakob from Ben. They narrate with identical poetic language, similar references. In fact, for a long time I wasn't even aware that a perspective change had taken place at all. The sameness between characters is disappointing.

This novelistic stumble should not, though, be given great attention. Her novel is a poem, to me, before it is a novel. And while I feel that the prose trembles on the edge of sensationalism at times, and find myself wishing that one of the characters might at least crack a joke once in a while, the profundity of Michaels' subject lends itself beautifully to her form of expression here. For instance, I was shocked on numerous occasions by some of the acts she describes as taking place during the Second World War: German soldiers throwing babies out of windows so that the soldiers below can catch them on their bayonets, or tearing them from their mothers' arms and throwing them in the air to be shot clay-pigeon style. Such difficult material requires a touch of gravitas, one feels - a tone of elevated seriousness.

In Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels searches for redemption in war and its aftermath. She certainly finds a poetic beauty there, and an astounding purity of expression.

pp.294.
Published: Bloomsbury, 1997.

Albert Angelo - B.S. Johnson

I will never understand its almost infamous reputation as the book with holes cut into its pages.


A long time ago, B.S. Johnson was recommended to me by a friend. As often happens (life getting in the way, is what people like to call it), I forgot about the recommendation, but then recently stumbled upon a collection of three of Johnson's novels in the university library. These are: Trawl, Alberto Angelo, and House Mother Normal. I decided to first read the novel which my friend had praised all those months ago.

And isn't it an unprecedented little corker of a novel. One thing that struck me instantly is that Johnson is amongst that category of writers to whom writing is such  a natural form of expression. I can't quite put my finger on what it is about the writing that makes me feel this way (perhaps it's to do with the syntactical/grammatical imperfections that allude to a genuine unedited (or minimally edited) creativity), but there is an unstudied, uncalculated feel to the prose. I'm thinking Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Kerouac, Foster Wallace, just in terms of the naturalness, the way the words sit. They seem sprung onto the page with little effort, yet his sentences cohere into some really fine writing, funny too:

          'When Jenny left me, betrayed me for a cripple whom she imagined to need her more, my mother said never mind, perhaps he would die and then I could have her back again.'

Being experimental, post-modernist, Albert Angelo shakes the eiderdown of conventionality from its shoulders and shadow-boxes its own reflection. We find ourselves being skipped along like a smooth stone between tenses, perspectives, even form. There is drama, prose and poetry; first-person, second-person, and third-; simple linear prose and this system of two columns, one following the action, the other following Albert's thoughts simultaneously; there is also a series of short notes written by Albert's pupils (he is a cover schoolteacher), replete with spelling mistakes and colloquialisms, outlining the things they hate about their teacher. It is a wild sort of freedom the author has on the page, which allows the story almost to tell itself through a fragmented rush of impressions.

Yet Johnson never loses us. Never tries to lose us. It's not an academic thing, this mad jolting of structure, but a very functional approach to the novel. I can't remember reading a livelier book. And yet Johnson's most important gift is for using his humour, his ability to experiment successfully with form and structure, to hit the mark in a much deeper sense than any surface trickery. His man, Albert, is looking for distraction to help him deal with a break-up that happened four years ago with which he is still struggling. He and a friend, Terry, cruise around in the evenings looking for lively bars and places to drive, and they 'talk, talk, talk, talk, talk,' about their shared heartbreaks, 'as though it could make some difference.' Thus is created a niggling sadness that runs through the narrative, being chipped away at slowly, burrowing into the reader's consciousness and three-dimensionalising Albert, who we come to realise is filled with an intense, obsessive cycle of suffering.

Ultimately, the novel is about identity, about truth and appearance. There is a point in the third chapter (titled 'Development') where Johnson himself jumps onto the page with an impatient cry of 'OH, F---- ALL THIS LYING!' From there the novel proceeds into the phase called 'Disintegration', in which Johnson pulls apart the facade he has created, bemoaning the inability of literature to reflect real life in an exact, uncompromising sense. Here the true identities of all of his characters are exposed in an aggressive tirade against fiction, also known as 'lying', and his fictional world is obliterated.

A great, great piece of meta-fiction that I cannot recommend highly enough, though I will never understand its almost infamous reputation as the book with holes cut into its pages. Only at one point in the book does this occur, through two pages, and the outcome seems more of a small joke than a revelation of future events, as Johnson tricks the reader into assuming they have had a glimpse into what is about to happen. The novel is so much more than gimmickry. Johnson saw himself as more of a modernist torchbearer descended from the likes of Joyce and Beckett. To me that seems a little misguided, though not by much. B.S. Johnson is perhaps the English answer to those two clever Irish fellows.


pp.180.
Published: Picador, 2004 (originally published 1964 by New Directions Books).

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

Burning a hole in my bookshelf 

pp. 150.
Published: Vintage Books, 2012 (originally published 2011).

This book has been burning a hole in my bookshelf for months. And with its cool blue trim, like ink smudged down the outside edge of its pages, it has looked quite sexy there, laid flat and untidily on a pile of other yet-to-reads. I almost didn't want to take it down and spoil the aesthetics I had going. But I am grateful I did, finally, take it down. It is one of those books so impressive that one feels certain it has changed one, as a reader and as a writer, too.

It is a novel about time and memory. But more pressingly than that it is about the kind of person we think we are, the kind of person we remember ourselves to be, and how that person differs from the person we actually are. How our inconsistent and inaccurate memories can suffocate the truth of who we are, of what we have done in the course of our lives.

Tony Webster is the narrator with the unreliable memory. Part One takes us through his Sixth Form days, his relationship with Veronica, and then, briefly, his marriage to and divorce from Margret. Yet in Part Two, Veronica is brought back into Tony's life unexpectedly, Tony who has become an old man now. He is forced into a trip (if that's what you want to call it, though it's anything but wistful) down memory lane, in which he discovers past events to have taken on a different edge, and in which he finds memories lurking that he didn't know he had.

It is interesting to observe how your perception of events and characters changes as the things you had taken for granted are revised. How, for example, when Tony stays with Veronica's family for the first time, on first impressions we get a sense of an unassailable social class divide between Tony and his girlfriend's family, who seem to hold themselves apart from him, even to be making fun of him. Yet later on in life Tony is struck by specific memories of the weekend, of Veronica seeming less distant than initially portrayed, taking him by the hand one evening to show him upstairs and kiss him goodnight.

In another memory, Tony and a group of fellow students are gathered to see the Severn Bore, a tidal surge in which a wave of water travels upstream against the current. Later on, we find out that 'Veronica had been alongside me. My brain must have erased it from the record, but now I knew it for a fact. She was there with me.' How her presence alters the symbolic meaning of that bore - which crops up later as Tony contemplates the sensation of time going in reverse as his memories are altered - is immense, though not immediately identifiable as such.

Alongside these issues of memory and historical accuracy ('History is the lies of the victors', the young Tony quips in a History lesson), the philosophical musings and overt intellectualism of youth are exposed as a false facade against the trappings of life. As Tony gets older, suffering directly the blows of life, his sardonic youth seems more and more painfully misguided. The competition between him and his mates for the mantle of 'philosopher' becomes a flimsy shield against the prosaic battering that concrete experience gives them.

This is a bit of a coming-of-age novel but with a difference, and with a much greater maturity and complexity than those kinds of novels usually deliver. The book is tightly structured, and its narrator scrutinises everything to such a pathologically self-denigrating extent I occasionally felt I was reading one of J.M. Coetzee's pseudo-memoirs. However, it is difficult - nigh on impossible - to find a novel so well-organised in terms of plot that also carries such an intense philosophical interrogation of life, memory, history, the self, and longing. Readers and writers take note of this book. It sets the standard nauseatingly high.

 

Black Vodka - Deborah Levy

...vacating the room when her reader is mid-step...

pp.125
Publisher: And Other Stories, 2013.

'Only some of this is true, but you should know that this does not scare me as much as the promise of love.' So reads the last line of the title story in Black Vodka, and it's a line that really cuts to the heart of what love means in this handful of stories by Booker-shortlisted author of Swimming Home Deborah Levy.

Here, love is a loaded thing, something to be feared - Gordian in perplexity, devastating in impact. It is certainly not portrayed in a flattering light. In 'Vienna', a man realises that his mistress, who 'is dead inside', doesn't need him. In 'Cave Girl', a boy falls in love with his sister who has undergone surgery to drastically alter her appearance. In 'Placing a Call', the narrator's spouse has passed away and in the resulting disorientation she tries to piece together the details of her everyday life.

There is a sense of fracture caused by love (or longing), and it is this fracture that Levy twists into a collection of original, obscure stories.

All of the stories are curiously difficult to approach. They maintain a mysterious distance, and I am not sure whether this is a result of the pared-down, affectless style reminiscent of someone like DeLillo, or whether it is the stories themselves in the way they pause on the threshold of meaning ... and never quite take the next step, the one the reader yearns for.

This way Levy has of vacating the room when her reader is mid-step is her most tremendous gift. To say it leaves one craving more is an understatement, but the main thing it achieves is much more important than that. Take 'Placing a Call', for instance. The three page story is a maddening jumble of impressions:

'We are standing in the garden and it's autumn and there's a bird in the tree that imitates a telephone when it sings. Your hair is silver but you are not old. Under your soft silver hair is your skull with your central nervous system inside it. It is dusk and it has started to rain.'

How should we approach such prose? Is it that we are to select the most significant impressions and make a story of those alone? Or is it more complex than that? Perhaps, more than anything, it is the inconsequential impressions that are most significant. Perhaps the story is imitating the prosaic suffering of grief. The senseless jumble that life can become following a death.

Thus the onus is on us to exhume (and I'm talking about the entire collection now) a more tangible and well-formed meaning out of a series of very astute and highly crafted impressions. It would be so easy for Levy to lay answers at our feet. Instead, her skill lies in ellipsis, in taking out the superfluous and leaving these bare yet bursting stories, delicate in their need for logical expression.

The power, ultimately, is given to us. Our first impression of helplessness in the face of these mysterious stories is actually a misconstrued position of power. Levy gives her readers power on a scale unlike most other authors.

Particular highlights include: 'Black Vodka' (the title story), about a modern day hunchback who works at an advertising agency and finds himself faced with a skewed sort of love; 'Shining a Light', which deals excellently with displacement, wartime immigration and loss; 'Simon Tegala's Heart in 12 Parts', a very funny encapsulation of all of Levy's themes throughout the collection (loss, change, the physical body, desire vs. love).  

Foe - J.M. Coetzee

A post-modernist allegory where ... answers will probably forever remain illusive.

pp. 157
Published: Secker and Warburg, 1986.  

A retelling of Robinson Crusoe from a female perspective, Coetzee's fifth novel performs an intelligent dance around notions of authorship, storytelling, and truth versus fiction.

The book opens with a straightforward rendering of the protagonist's, Susan Barton's, castaway period on a desert island, where she spends years with Robinson Cruso and his mute slave Friday. She discovers that Cruso, as master, has built a two-man society based on industry and order. It is a spare existence, resistant to the outside interference of Susan, who attempts on numerous occasions to improve life on the island (by making shoes, by planning to recover tools from a wrecked ship submerged just off the coast). Yet the pattern of days falls into mere tedium, and deeper concerns such as law-making, the recording of history, and how Friday came to lose his tongue, are left unanswered.

Back in London, with Friday as her silent companion and witness, Susan seeks out Daniel Foe, the author whom she wishes to write their story. However, Foe believes that the island portion of Susan's life to be merely the middle of a much larger story, a story about the search for her kidnapped daughter (which resulted in her sailing for Brazil and ultimately being cast away during a mutiny onboard), and the eventual reunion with her. The novel descends from here into a post-modernist allegory where even Susan becomes doubtful of whether she is a real person or a character. She asks 'Who is speaking me? Am I a phantom too? To what order do I belong?'

Friday, and the question of whether his tongue was cut out by Cruso or by a slave-trader when he was a boy, offers the most telling contribution to the novel. Because of his silence, he is easily manipulated. As Susan says, he 'has no command of words and therefore no defence against being re-shaped day by day in conformity with the desires of others. I say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes a laundryman.' Dumb and changeable as Michael K. in Coetzee's previous novel, he is the character of whomever decides to tell his story.

First of all, on the island, he is Cruso's character. Cruso tells Susan he is a cannibal, therefore that is what he is. In London, he is Susan's character, though she is less certain of what she wishes to make of him (cannibal or laundryman or victim of the slave trade). Yet her attempts to understand him better, as when she learns to play the same rudimentary tune he plays infernally on his flute, trying to take him further, into different notes and a different song, prove to be fruitless. He resists interpretation, remains steadfastly ambiguous, to be altered at will.

Foe is a difficult novel, engaging as it does obliquely and from many angles the issues around storytelling. How can we call our individual perception of something the truth of that something? As a consequence, is everything fiction? Yet does fiction, once believed to be the truth, become truth? These are some of the questions posed but not answered by Coetzee. Answers will probably forever remain illusive in a fable so coiled within itself and its very own nature.

This brilliantly executed novel forces readers into an intellectual spiral where they will never be able to look at life, at what is supposedly real, in the same way ever again.  

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

There is compassion, empathy and pity in its pages.

pp.109
Published: Triad/Panther Books, 1976 (1952)

We all know about Hemingway’s style, anyway, so I won‘t dwell. This is no major exception from his other work in that sense. It is shorter than his novels, reading more like one of his longer short stories, but the simple sentence structures and straightforward narrative are all recognizable as stalwart features of Hemingway. So too is the ostentatious courage and ‘hard-man’ quality of the protagonist, the eponymous ‘old man’, who really lacks any complex characterization, Hemingway preferring to create simple, ‘elementary’ characters, as the NY Times put it in the ‘50s, who symbolize a particular belief or way of thinking or way of life.
 
The immense feat of physical endurance is all predictable Hemingway, as our old man attempts to pull in the biggest fish of his life after eighty-four fruitless days of fishing in his little humble skiff. The matter-of-fact violence of the fish’s death and of the subsequent shark attacks on the boat are Hemingway through and through.

But the deviation in style is perhaps the reason for this novel’s mention by the Nobel Prize Committee two years later when Hemingway received the award. For there is compassion, empathy and pity in its pages. There is a meditative feeling, despite all the violence and physical exertion, that all things in the natural world are one. The old man talks to his fish, even as it swims metres below the surface of the ocean attached to his fishing line. He croons ‘Come on, fish,’ and ‘Don‘t jump’. There is a brotherhood between hunter and hunted. ‘I have killed this fish which is my brother’, says the old man, certain of the divine comradeship.

He is similarly enamoured of the bond he feels with the sharks, even though they follow the scent of his long-fought-for catch and they mean to eat it, to take his prize, and indeed his pride, from him. They are ‘beautiful and noble and know no fear of anything.’ He is impressed by their courage, which he shares, and by the courage of the fish, which had put up such a gallant fight in the first place. In other words, he empathises with their struggle, with their courage in the face of death, which is what life is all about.
 
Empathy is what propels this novella above much of Hemingway’s work, or, in Faulkner’s terms, it is the fact that Hemingway found a God, a creator who ‘made them all [the characters] and loved them all and pitied them all’. It is beautiful in its understanding attitude, and despite the artificiality of the old man, who speaks often in worn clichés and with a lack of affect, it excels on numerous levels. It is atmospheric, vast, and potent as an allegory of the human condition. This is the Hemingway we know and love, yet a Hemingway distilled and refined, as much as is possible, into a necessary work of a length that suit’s the man’s writing.