And that was just one little piece of my reading in recent months. I think I’ll be using the blog in the near future to review a good deal of this recent reading, returning to the original impulse under which I started blogging, which was to record a writer’s notes on his reading.

The machinery of the interlocking narratives is not terribly subtle, but this is hardly a fault in a philosophical novel, where, presumably, the emphasis is in the reality of ideas rather than the realism of the setting & plot. It is clear from the beginning that the two narrators, living in different worlds in the same Paris apartment building, must inevitably be brought together; the way they come together is, however, both surprising and appropriate to their personalities. I thought the story sagged a bit about two-thirds of the way along, but it recovers itself quickly and rushes on to a surprising and, as noted, paradoxical conclusion. I am perhaps less sanguine than the author about the possibilities for communication and friendship across the boundaries of class and culture, but surely we ought to aspire to such intellectual and spiritual freedoms as this novel celebrates.

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*In this, as in other ways, The Elegance of the Hedgehog reminds one of another European philosophical novel narrated in the voice of a precocious girl, Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder [NY Times Book Review, review of The Elegance of the Hedgehog  by Caryn James; review of Sophie's World by John Vernon]

The story involves a young woman kidnapped and used for sex by an anonymous man who keeps her locked in a garden shed behind his suburban house that he has converted into the self-contained Room of the novel’s title, which is in fact a very effective prison. The young woman is 19 when she is kidnapped and within a couple of years becomes pregnant and bears a son. The tricky and audacious thing about the novel is that it is told in the first-person point of view of this boy when he is five years old. There are plenty of novels in the voices of children, but five years old is pushing against the downward limit of verbal ability for a narrator; still, Donoghue manages the difficulties with a kind of intelligence and grace one wouldn’t think possible, given the narrative situation she has set up for herself.

The narrator’s name is Jack and he is surely a verbally gifted child, but not so gifted as to seem implausible even to a reader (such as me) skeptical of this particular technical choice. The story develops in such a way that Jack’s verbal gifts seem natural: he spends a great deal of time talking to his mother and reading his five books and they also play a game called Parrot in which they watch TV and then the mother hits the mute button, Jack’s task in this game being to parrot back the whole previous sentence he has just heard whether he understands the words or not. They then discuss the words and their meaning. This game is only mentioned once or twice, but in the huge silence that is their lives (the room is soundproofed) language takes on a nearly magical importance.

Because Jack has never seen the outside world except through television, he imagines that there is only one of each thing and that stories and TV are fantasies. He calls the bed Bed and the table Table, and so on for all the objects in Room. Each noun is a singular and proper noun. At night, when their captor — whom they call Old Nick — comes to rape his mother, Jack goes into a bed in the bottom of Wardrobe until Old Nick punches the numbers on the electronic lock and goes back to his house with its widescreen TV. The room is windowless except for a skylight high overhead and has chainlink fencing inside the walls, as Ma finds out long before she gives birth to Jack and acquires this name, also a proper and not a generic noun. The novel presents the reader with a space that is at once claustrophobic and entirely domestic. That claustrophobic environment begins to wear on the reader before long, but in one of the nifty technical sleights of hand Donoghue pulls off, the reader is also slowly let into Ma’s world through the device of having Jack report their conversations and actions.

Ma is clearly depressed and desperate but at the same time holding her sanity together for the sake of her son — and, too, with his innocent collaboration, Jack’s voice  coming to represent in the reader’s imagination both the limits and the power of radical innocence. He becomes her reason for survival and ultimately her mode of escape. Inevitably, about a third of the way into the narrative, Jack’s fascination but nevertheless limited voice begins to sound tedious, but just as that begins to happen the plot of the novel advances toward a plan for getting away from their captor. Ma had tried to get away a couple of times before Jack was born, once smashing Old Nick over the head with the toilet seat, but since his birth has put all her energy into protecting him, even to the extent of being “polite” to Old Nick. Because the simple plot of the first half of the novel relies on suspense, I’m not going to include any of the details in this review; I will note that I was taken in by a subtle red herring so that the actual method of escape surprised me.

The commentary I’ve read on Room understandably focuses on the central characters’ captivity, but nearly half the novel is devoted to what happens after their escape and I’d argue that this part of the narrative is the emotional and imaginative heart of the novel. It is the central function of literature to allow us to imagine what cannot be directly said. We might revise Wittgenstein’s dictum that “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” to What we cannot speak about we must find a way to imagine. Literature — by which I mean language that aspires to the status of art — serves that necessity. To this end, what seemed at the beginning a technical liability in Room — a five-year-old’s point of view — turns out to be a strength: Jack is too young to philosophize or explain; Jack’s voice reports what happens to him and his mother and in doing so brings the reader into an imaginative connection with these characters and their situation that might otherwise be destroyed by sentimentality.

When I teach Lit and creative writing, I am often surprised by the vehemence with which some students defend specific examples of sentimentality and sentimentality itself as an appropriate expression of emotion, even after we have talked about the distortions of feeling it involves & the superficiality of emotion and psychological falsity that result from sentimental language. I have the sense that there is a connection between this defense of the sentimental and a parallel bit of unfocused belief — that only “direct experience” is completely real and that such experience is somehow unmediated by things like books or movies or songs, i.e., objects and processes of culture. The cultural, necessarily conceived narrowly, then becomes ontologically second rate. (Of course all experience is mediated by culture, but this is largely invisible.) As a consequence, the intellectual and emotional experiences we have as readers are demoted to entertainment and escapism, modes in which the sentimental is thought to be valid.

A novel like Room, though, demands to be read imaginatively, by which I mean that the reader takes his or her experiences inside the world of the novel as real, as ontologically equivalent to “direct experience.” There may be differences between one’s experience “out in the world” and experience “inside” the world of a novel, but they are phenomenological not ontological. It is much easier, of course, to relegate the imaginative to secondary status, for the imaginary makes rigorous demands upon the reader — demands that can be safely ignored only by treating the imagination as what Coleridge would call “fancy.” (Fantasy as a genre strikes me as the apotheosis of a broken and irresponsible conception of imagination.) A novel like Donoghue’s Room demands from the reader the same kind of attention demanded by friends, family, students, colleagues; that is, the reader who wishes to be a reader has an inescapable responsibility to the text that cannot be lightly put aside. A novel like Room reminds us that all texts are available to imaginative /theoretical reading, whether they are naive or self-conscious about their own demands upon imagination.

Silver’s novel demonstrates what can be accomplished with the basic materials of realist narrative and style. The story is recounted by Ares, now an adult but recalling events that occurred when he was twelve. The plot is rigorously chronological and the prose limpid and without a hint of authorial narcissism. Ares and his younger half-brother Malcolm, who is severely autistic, live with their single mother in a trailer in Bombay Beach, on the Salton Sea. Laurel, the boys’ mother, has fled the pieties and restraints of a Midwestern childhood and come to rest in the desolation of Imperial County. The novel’s plot is too delicate a machine to summarize, but from the opening pages it is apparent that some terrible event will divide the characters’ lives into a stark before and an after. If the heroes of the Greek theater were doomed by the capricious but implacable decrees of the Gods, the ordinary people in this story are propelled toward their fates by the implacability of mere chance. But Ares, the god of war, discovers comes to rest in the strength bestowed by integrity — his mother’s, his brother’s, and his own.

Pornography is ubiquitous and prostitution is legal or semi-legal in Atwood’s ugly future; the presence of porn and prostitution allows Atwood to develop themes surrounding the roles of women in culture and society, but her feminism is subtle and sophisticated, especially in The Year of the Flood. For Atwood, a feminist perspective is not an add-on, but a fundamental assumption about the world. It’s in her artistic DNA and is particularly striking in the way she develops the female characters in this second novel. The Year of the Flood is not a sequel in the sense that it’s action follows that of Oryx & Crake; the action of the two stories take place during the same time frame, though in proximate locales separated by the infrastructureal and technological occasioned by a world-wide plague. Several of the characters believe — at least for part of the narrative — that they are the only survivors on the planet.

Atwood is a realist in the tradition of 19th novelists like George Elliot and Thomas Hardy; modernist stylistic innovations have affected her work very little. Atwood’s novels tend to focus on characters and situations and social / political contexts, which is quite enough to fully engage her imagination — and ours. [Useful hints and gists regarding realism from this Washington St. Univ. American Lit. website.] Atwood’s realism can have a satirical edge — she is tough on scientists despite coming from a family of scientists — but her main interest is in the way characters react to circumstances both personal and political. In both of these novels, all the central characters must come to terms with the end of Western, scientific, capitalist civilization as currently constituted; the various ways in which the characters react to the cataclysm in which they are caught up is the main subject of both books. These are novels about human agency.

Human agency, of course, cuts both ways. It does not imply human morality, a point that Oryx & Crake makes very powerfully. The Year of the Flood is concerned with how we poor humans might learn to join our human agency to morality, which is also human and therefore frail. To this end, Atwood invents a Luddite / Green religion that names itself The Gardeners. The Gardeners accept science, including evolution, but they believe that God doesn’t want people messing around with the genomes of his creations, so they have withdrawn from the mainstream of society, living in abandoned buildings in the pleeblands, where they grow rooftop gardens and create caches of food called Ararats in preparation for what their founder Adam One calls “the waterless flood.” (The leaders of the group all take then name Adam or Eve, affixing a number that represents the order seniority.) They conceive of themselves as preparing for a new Eden when the old society is swept away, which in fact it is, the waterless flood being a bioengineered plague developed by a renegade scientist working under the umbrella of one of the corporations. The Gardeners are vegetarians and don’t believe in writing things down. Their children use slates in school, which can be wiped clean. The Gardeners’ scriptures consist of orally transmitted stories and hymns and they have many saints: St. Farley Mowat, St. Dian Fossey, St. Peter Matthiessen, St. David Suzuki, and so on.

The action of both novels spans the period before and after the release of the plague. In the pre-plague chapters of both stories, Atwood focuses on the causes — cultural, technological, and economic — that lead inevitably toward catastrophe. Both novels move around in time, shifting back and forth between the pre-plague and post-plague worlds and, interestingly, it is only after the plague that her protagonists come into their own. This is particularly true of Toby in the second novel. Because Oryx & Crake is organized around the character of Jimmy / Snowman (his before and after the plague names), it moves easily back and forth in time and holds together structurally. The Year of the Flood presents more problems in this regard. In the second novel, Atwood introduces a number of characters and presents them at different points along the same arc of time that is covered by Oryx & Crake. Initially, this is somewhat confusing and until Toby and Ren are brought together in a Gardeners community, the story seems diffuse. For a reader of the first novel, it’s clear that Atwood is constructing a machine that will bring these characters together with Snowman by tale’s end. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Toby’s chapters are narrated in the third person and Ren’s in the first person.  I found all this authorial maneuvering somewhat offputting, but about a third of the way through the novel, the pieces fall together and the parts work more effectively together.

Why, though, have Ren narrate her own story while the rest of the book is written in the neutral voice of a mostly objective narrator? There are enough loose ends left untied at the end of The Year of the Flood to make me suspect there will be a third novel in the series, perhaps in Ren’s voice. That story will almost certainly move forward in time as the survivors begin to create a new life for themselves. And Ren and Jimmy will almost certainly wind up together. After all, they are both incurable romantics — and they dated in high school. It will be interesting, if I am right, to see how Atwood constructs her new society — how she balances the good and evil powers of human agency.

I’ve just been reading Ellen Bryant Voigt’s delightful little book, The Art of Syntax – another in Graywolf’s really excellent The Art of series* — in which she makes explicit the patterns and variations in several poems serving as exempla.After all these years of writing poetry, Voigt’s little book excites me about what originally excited me — making shapes with words. With James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line, Voigt’s book would serve the intermediate student of poetry as a fine introduction to the art.

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*Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext, another entry in this series, is a rich source of insight about the textures of literary fiction.

Reading: I read The Idiot in Hanoi and I’m trying to write an essay about it that works with the idea of being beside one’s self. When I got home and had the bad cold, I plunged into the last three novels in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubury-Maturin series, which I’ve now completed over the last three summers, though I think maybe I missed one volume somewhere in the middle. I’ll probably read through the series again at some point, but not for a while. I read O’Brian’s books the way Carole watches certain kinds of HBO shows, because they are respectable, intelligent entertainment that still don’t demand complete concentration. Then — and this is weird — last night — without even realizing that today would be Bloomsday — I picked up Ulysses and began to read it for perhaps the fifth or sixth time. I’ve never gotten more than 100 pages into it, but I think this time I’ve caught the music. Stephen’s symbol for Irish art, “the cracked looking glass of a servent,” strikes me as an appropriate metaphor for modernist art in general, including Dostoevsky’s novel. The image in the glass is doubled and displaced; that it belongs to a servent might at first seem to devalue it, but we know that servents are often more free of illusion that their masters.

Update: There was a good short essay by Colum McCann about Ulysses in yesterday’s NY Times.

1. Idealism is a terrible basis for foreign policy (and probably for life in general);
2. It is possible to engage with countries and cultures with whom we have fundamental disagreements.

Neither of these is particularly profound seperately, but taken together in the context of Vietnam’s relationship to our current wars, they constitute an effective analytical blade. If the US could use this pair of ideas to rationalize complete withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, it is entirely possible that in twenty or thirty years we could have relationships with those countries similar to the one we have with now with Vietnam. But that would require leaving off the conventional and deeply ingrained belief in American exceptionalism — a form of idealism — and taking up a kind of realism that lacks immediate emotional punch but that would pay off in the long run. And if we’re going to exit in two years or six or ten, why not now? Like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are going to have to set their own political, social, and cultural parameters: the hard truth is that there is little or nothing the US can do to influence those choices.

I’m trying to gather material impressions while I’m here in Vietnam that I’ll be able to turn into poems and stories — the story ideas I’ve had so far each take on the political situation of the sympathetic foreigner encountering the people and places and institutions of Vietnam. Nothing has gelled, but then I haven’t taken time to sit down and fill out my brief notes, which is how things usually begin for me.

The Story Behind the Story – Andrea Barrett & Peter Turchi: This is a good anthology of short stories by many of the usual suspects in many of the usual modes. It includes fairly brief statements by each author describing the genesis of the story. These statements tend toward the personal rather than the technical, so, while they are interesting, they remain idiosyncratic and not terribly useful to the student, except insofar as a student needs to see what sorts of  experiences (ulikely or ordinary) can generate a story. (Judith Grossman’s brief explanation of her story, “I’m Not Through” goes right to the heart of the fiction writer’s problem, however.)

12 Short Stories and their Making — Paul Mandelbaum: This anthology is similar in conception to the Barrett & Turchi book above, except that each author is interviewed by the editor and the interview appears after the story. Because Mandelbaum is interested in technical as well as personal matters, he pushes the writers to explain their methods, which the attentive student will find useful. Because Mandelbaum asks his various authors similar kinds of questions (while allowing the interview to find its own shape), there is much more consistency of response than in The Story Behind the Story.

Narrative Design – Madison Smart Bell: This is the most theoretical and narrowly focused of the books under discussion here, with the fewest stories. Bell divides narrative structures into “linear” and “modular” and provides several examples of each, with extensive analysis that includes an almost line by line set of notes for each story. His general discussion of each story is clear and useful; personally, I get bogged down in the detail of the notes, but others may find these useful. Again speaking personally, I liked the “linear” stories Bell selected much more than the “modular” ones, with the exception of a piece by Miriam Kuznets, “Signs of Life.”

The Half-known World: On Writing Fiction – Robert Boswell: This is a collection of essays dealing with specific issues and drawing on particular works of fiction with which the reader will need to be familiar. Not really a beginner’s book, it’s probably going to be most useful to those who have read a good deal and already written some fiction. One of the most useful things Boswell emphasizes is that in literary fiction, the writer only knows the half of things, that his / her characters and plot emerge from the unknown and must remain partly mysterious even for the reader. This was a great relief to me as a beginner, since that is how I find things in my stories.

Modern Library Writer’s Workshop – Stephen Koch: This book takes the attitude of a coach, addressing specific problems the writer will face in trying to get a story on the page. It covers the basics in a friendly and direct way, referring to many works of (mostly short) fiction to illustrate its points. It also quotes many writers — too many, sometimes — on various subjects related to the craft of fiction. Along with LaPlante’s book (see my earlier post), this is a sensible and encouraging guide.