Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser

My adaptation class recently read Millhauser's short story "Eisenheim the Illusionist" and that prompted me to finally read this Pulitzer prize-winning novel. I'm a big fan of Millhauser's first novel Edwin Mullhouse and of his recent short story collection that I'm suddenly forgetting the name of, but I knew my feelings wouldn't be so strong for this novel which I had started in the past and never finished. Yet I admired it in the end.

Two interesting things: first, the novel has a subtitle (as does Edwin Mullhouse), in this case, "The Tale of an American Dreamer" and that does a lot to point the reader to an interpretation of the novel that goes beyond the character-plot stuff on the surface and second, it starts off as a very realistic piece of historical fiction but turns into a more speculative piece of alternative history. And the turn works partly because it's a Millhauser novel and so anybody who's read his work before is comfortable with his inventive imaginings and because the style from the start of the novel always feels a little unreal, fable-ish. Readers of "Eisenheim the Illusionist" will recognize a similar thing at play--he creates a very real sense of history through known facts and convincing detail, but simultaneously creates a sense of fantasy through style, metaphor, and a near absence of direct dialogue (so that the characters feel a little unreal). So when he wants to move away from history to his own alternative, it doesn't feel out of nowhere--the shift still feels of his world.

While what makes Millhauser unusual is his ability to invent really original stuff, I think what I admire most is his use of imagery. Whether describing something real or something imagined his ability to create an atmospheric photograph (it's often a frozen moment) is really top notch. It's what makes both the historical and the speculative storylines believable. And it's a good reminder that realism and fantasy require the same attention to detail to be effective.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

I always love a good Big House novel and especially a good British Big House novel with a little Comedy and a little Romance thrown in. And this novel from the 40s fits that bill. Eccentric family living in poverty in a run-down castle (no I didn't mean a jailhouse, I meant an enormous house), all narrated from the point of view of the clever sixteen year old daughter. I can kind of see how it fell out of print--eccentric Brits living in diminished circumstances is not an unheard tale--but I also see why it came back. It's compulsively readable. And what I noticed was the basic structure--we start with one family and another family moves in nearby. The various members of the two families intersect in a variety of changing relationships. And so a novel structure is born. By bringing two whole sets of characters together enough complications ensue to cover hundreds of pages.

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen by Marilyn Chin

I was really excited to discover this story collection which a colleague recommended. I confess lately fiction about children of immigrants has started to blend for me into one big story of one big generation gap. But these stories are a new take, both fresh content and a fresh style, and--added bonus--they are really funny. The collection, largely centered on twin Chinese sisters, Moonie and Mei Ling, and their feisty ninja grandmother, uses folk tales, fables, manja, Buddhist parables and all kinds of other forms as its stylistic base, but what makes it feel so fresh to me is the way both the older generation and the younger generation have become this mix of old and new ways.

Another fresh aspect: Chin doesn't ignore the bawdiness of folk tales the way most contemporary re-writers of the form do--she really embraces it (Let's just say Hello Kitty has some new connotations) and lets the twins, or at least one of them, be odd sexual adventurers, ultimately creating female characters who are unabashedly strange and audacious not just in their sexual behavior but all around.

I'm not really conveying the spirit of the collection which moves quickly from episode to episode and style to style...but it's funny and fun while being political and sophisticated. The tone is antic but there's a lot under the surface. Probably the most original story collection I've read since George Saunders came on the scene. (though admittedly I haven't been reading that many story collections in the past few years)(I'm happy to hear any recommendations).

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk (trans. Maureen Freely)

I'll say up front that a lot of my interest in this novel came from its Turkishness, and there are aspects of it that I forgave because of that. My colleague who lent it to me was perhaps less forgiving, so you can take this with a grain of salt.

The novel is about a man who has an affair with a younger woman while he's engaged. Both the affair and the engagement end badly, and the man spends the rest of his life obsessed with the younger woman. Now having just read, about a month ago, the Ottoman tale of Leyla and Mejnun, I was both quick and proud to recognize this novel is in many ways a rewriting of that tale. And so I was also quick to forgive or at least believe in much of the ridiculous behavior that the narrator engages in. Because he's following in the steps of Mejnun there isn't the same need to justify his actions. Except maybe there is... not just because as a Nobel Prize winner Pamuk has many Western readers who won't get the reference, but because shouldn't a fiction always stand on its own? Well, maybe not. I'm on the fence. Pamuk makes the reference pretty clear, so maybe he is fairly saying if you want to get the most out of my novel you need to understand the literature it has grown out of and if you don't, well, that's your own fault. Or maybe he's not even thinking of his Western readers--after all, you wouldn't worry too much about making sure your rewrite of Little Red Riding Hood would stand alone, would you?

But just so you know, Mejnun is famously crazy. He falls for Leyla, goes mad, runs off into the desert, and eventually enters a love so deep that he's one with the universe and therefore one with Leyla and doesn't even really want her anymore (in the physical sense) because he's got her (she's part of him spiritually). And Pamuk's narrator is a version of Mejnun. But what's interesting about the narrator (except that he's only kind of the narrator--a gimmicky thing I won't even bother to explain) is he doesn't sound in the least bit crazy. It's pretty common to write madmen stories in which they rant or speak in heightened voices or say things that are obviously off. But the narrator here sounds at all times quite rational and calm--his actions are not at all rational, but he hasn't lost his ability to have a conversation, to explain his own thinking--it all feels much closer to mental illness as I've witnessed it--and makes for a more sophisticated character (not an over-the-top, hair-tearing lunatic).

Also, Pamuk makes good use of first person here--writers are always aware that there are limitations to what a first person narrator can know but usually it's just a matter of making sure you don't violate the rules. But in this case, the fact that the reader can't know what Fusun (the young woman) is thinking makes a huge difference. It's not just that the narrator doesn't know what she's thinking, it's that we can't tell if his interpretations of her thoughts/actions are rational or crazy. She might still be in love with him; she might not be.

And lastly, the title comes from a museum the narrator sets up in honor of his lost love. It's small stuff like her hair pins and cigarette stubs, but it's a museum modelled after the small museums of the world--like the homes of authors which then put on display their typewriters and old cans of uneaten food. It's an addition to the novel that has nothing to do with the plot--I mean it's easily dropped--but it's the kind fo thing that declares this as a more ambitious, literary novel than most. It's sort of Kundera-ish in the way that it adds a layer to the narrative by commenting not just on the characters but on the ways of the world, the things we treasure, and the ways we store our memories. It was probably my favorite aspect of the novel. And while it's not the kind of thing you can add to say a realist novel (probably), it's worth considering: what if you took your imagining one step further into the unexpected...

Taking Chance

Congrats to my old high school pal Ross Katz for his three Emmy nominations for writing, directing, and producing the HBO film Taking Chance, about the return home of a US soldier killed in Iraq. You can check the film out on DVD. It makes a good case for the power of quietness in storytelling.

Go Fords!

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

There's an MFA canon that runs parallel to but only occasionally overlaps (Hemingway, O'Connor, Welty...) the literature canon. It includes people like Alice Munro, George Saunders, Donald Barthelme...people who are always taught in workshops and loved by many many writers...and Lorrie Moore just might be the queen of that canon. Her story "How to be an Other Woman" was one of the most personally important stories I encountered as an undergraduate--it made writing seem both pleasurable and possible. So the truth is I probably wanted to love this novel too much--I set us all up for disappointment.

The first half--funny and sincere and believable--is everything I wanted. But then Moore gets REALLY big in her plot. I mean these people suffer. And you know what--I just didn't believe it. Normally I only blog about books I recommend, but I figure Moore--one of my writing heroes--can take a little criticism. Actually if I had read this book back in the early nineties when I read the rest of Moore's work and found it so influential, I probably would have liked it more. So maybe it's just my tastes have changed and the stage of my writing life that I'm in requires different influences.

But her sentences are so good--it may be worth the read anyway. What I struggled with were the four major dramatic events that happen in proximity to the narrator--one related to a boyfriend, one to her employers, one to her roommate, and one to her brother. I'm not going to spoil the plot, but let's just say these are BIG events. Each the kind of thing with the potential to change or end a life. And our narrator has four of them in one year. And none of them are caused by her but rather happen to people close to her. So not only did I struggle to believe what was happening (there is no such thing as "suspension of disbelief," people--you have to earn my belief with every sentence) but I wasn't superinvested because the narrator had nearly no way to interact with these events. All she could really do was grieve them.

Still it made me want to go back to Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? both of which I haven't read in a long time...

Big Machine by Victor LaValle

An enjoyable enough novel by the author of The Ecstatic, which I admit I preferred. LaValle is very very good at generating suspense to start (it was the plot in the middle where I kind of flagged)... he uses a classic mystery set-up and places a number of strangers in a remote location all gathered by some strange man with a plan. Because LaValle is so good with voice you'll happily go for chapters not knowing what's up because you like the narrator so much and so he can withhold information for quite awhile. Not to mention, about fifty pages in you meet a new character who has no connection to the narrator whatsoever until he describes her as"my future wife." So you can't help but read on to find out how on earth they go from the position they're in to being married in two hundred pages.

But what I wanted to mention is for a long chapter in the last third of the novel the point of view switches from first person to third person and relates the past history of the wife character. It's set up so that you understand she has told the narrator this story--but it's not told to the reader via his first person or hers. It's just set apart--given a title of its own--and dropped in. Which made me think you can get away with this kind of thing if you own up to what you're doing. Just switching without announcing the switch would have bugged me more. But this seemed okay. In my adaptation class we've been talking about handling flashbacks and I have a similar theory about them--they work best when the film acknowledges the change and doesn't try to make that flash seamless. In a number of ways LaValle is up front about writing a comic book in the form of a novel, and I suspect this third person section--a side adventure for a secondary character--may have also been under the influence of comics.