Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

A very funny novel about an office in decline narrated from what I always thought of as a collective first person (we) but turns out to be called first person plural. First person plural had a celebrated appearance twenty years ago (good grief) in Jeffrey Eugenides first novel The Virgin Suicides but I hadn't really seen it much since. It is a strange beast because a reader has to first figure out is this actually a single narrator who is talking about a tribe in which he is a member (much the way you might say, "We ate dinner" when talking about yourself and, you know, somebody else) or is this supposed to be somehow the voice of the group. Intellectually it seems in both this novel and Eugenides it's supposed to be the voice of the group but it's impossible to read it as anything other than a single individual speaking for the group. So every character who is a named member of the group is excluded as a potential narrator and you're left assuming the narrator is this observer who never actually does anything but is part of the group all the same. Eugenides avoids this problem by not naming the members of the group (or very few) and almost never identifying single actors--all actions are committed by "we". Eugenides got away with that because the novel is driven by the girls of the title who are indivualized, and do not have relationships with any of the narrators except in a collective way. But Ferris can't do that, he needs individual characters who are group members (the novel is as much about the group as it is about what the group observes)... all a long way of saying, I really read this as first person singular with the group as a subject observed by one unidentified member. So why then make it "we" and not "I"? Because if it had been "I", readers would most likely demand insight and knowledge into the narrator. First person narrators never really get to observe without identifying who they are and why the story matters to them. So Ferris avoids that by having us all pretend there is no first person narrator.

Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the novel tremendously and think the "we" was the right choice, but one choice I do quibble with is when two-thirds of the way through Ferris instead goes with third person limited for a section. It's to track a character who is outside the group but who is much speculated on by the group and who has secrets much speculated on by the group. So he follows her so that readers can know what the group can't. And it's the kind of point of view cheat that writers consider forbidden but tend to do anyway when they want to. But my issue is the only reason for the rule breaking is because Ferris wants us to have her story--which is less silly and more poignant than what the group can observe. So it's his only cheat. But it felt to me both unnecessary (much more interesting to leave us wondering as the group wonders and then have us find out what the group finds out) and a little too easy--I would have loved to have seen him find a way to make the character's story as poignant and compelling without violating the rules he set for the novel at the start.

Then again this is the kind of thing readers barely even notice. But I swear it bugs them without their being able to identify why.

Brevity

Check out my former student and FAU MFA graduate Kathrine Wright in the current issue of Brevity. Some of you will recognize her essay as the "Why I Write" assignment from the summer workshop a few seasons back.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

This is a pretty charming, mostly funny book of essays by a young woman who is a book publicist in Manhattan. Lots of what I enjoyed about it had to do with my occasional nostalgia for the publishing industry and for the bucketloads of fellow just-graduated English majors who I worked with back in the mid-nineties. But more objectively, a lot of Crosley's essays (which on the surface are about things like how men she dates always give her plastic ponies (there is an explanation), or how she locked herself out twice in one day at two different apartments) are quite interesting structurally. Her humor comes from the situations described and her voice, but the essays get their weight (which is not substantial but certainly on par or even deeper than humor-essayist-heavyweight David Sedaris) from the thread of ideas that she follows. Her essays are never about just one thing. I tend to think of the essay as being akin to the short story in that it typically ought to have a tight focus, but she makes a good case for thinking bigger. For example, an essay will start out on one subject, her parents' unholy fear of fire, but then moves (via candles) to the lax Judaism of her parents (Xmas tree decorators all the way) then on to her devotion to her Christian summer camp and then on to a spoiled girl she meets at summer camp and ending at her mother's reaction to her playing the role of Mary in the summer camp Christmas play after the spoiled girl, originally scheduled as Mary, breaks her toe when she slams into the dock while water-skiing. So one thing leads organically to the next, bringing in new ideas and experiences, and yet Crosley makes it all part of a larger, connected whole. All while making you laugh quite a bit.

Food and Wine

Check out my friends Melissa and Sashi:

http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/a-star-chefs-harvest-dinner

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

This short memoir was blinked out letter by letter by its author, the former editor in chief of French Elle, who could move only his left eyelid after suffering a massive stroke. The context of its writing is impossible to ignore--of course, his condition is also the subject of the memoir, but knowing how it was written shades how you read it--making it good evidence for how readers bring their own emotions to the table. You forgive the memoir its shortness, its gaps, its lack of total honesty (the movie version, a more artsy endeavor yet seemingly a little more true, makes the author less sympathetic and more suffering) because its creation seems so impossible.

On the one hand, if you are immobile in bed with a fully functioning brain, what else could you do but tell yourself stories, on the other, how badly must you want to communicate if you blink out every word letter by letter. But what's amazing is how crafted the sentences, paragraphs and sections are. These are no noun-verb straightforward constructions; they are rhythmic and long. And Bauby, who died shortly after the book's publication in France, would memorize each paragraph before dictating it.

But back to my point--as readers, we are often intended to place ourselves in the shoes of the protagonist or memoirist, but how often do we really do it? It's pretty easy to read from a semi-indifferent remove, but Bauby makes his extraordinary situation so real via detail (looking in the mirror, he writes: "Reflected in the glass I saw the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde. His mouth was twisted, his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear. One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled like the doomed eye of Cain. For a moment I stared at that dilated pupil before I realized it was mine.") and so interesting via reflection/metaphor/imagination, (the paragraph continues: "Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold.") that you actually want to imagine yourself there--and then gratefully return to your own reality. It would have been just as easy, I suppose, for Bauby to blink out a novel instead of a memoir, but it's telling that instead of choosing to spend his time escaping his own reality he decided to confront it head on, and write the inside story that nobody else has been able to tell before. It strikes me as just the kind of thing nonfiction can do best.

The Gathering by Anne Enright

If you love language and aren't too fussed about plot, then you ought to enjoy this Booker Prize-winning novel. I've been interested lately in novels that work more with narration (so called "telling") than with scene (so called "showing"), and this novel pulls that off so well I barely noticed the lack of scene until I was two-thirds of the way through. The center of the novel is a wake (we're in Ireland) for the narrator's brother who has committed suicide and the chapters are all spokes off that center--memories related to her brother, present moments related to the death, and imagined memories of the narrator's mother and other characters. And the shuffling between those times makes you feel like you're moving forward even though we're pretty static in the present moment. But it all works (for me, at least) because the narrator has a strong voice, interesting observations, and an emotional intensity that makes even the imagined memories feel high stakes. So I was happy to spend time with her--it's a case of wanting to get to know the narrator better rather than wanting to know what happened.

The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier

There are some books that I fall in love with because of character and voice (Owen Meany, The Giant's House, Harriet the Spy) but there are a handful of books that generate a different sort of love in me that runs even deeper. I think it's a more personal reaction to the feeling that the book creates--a sense that the world is big and strange and a little bit magic--the kind of feeling that one gets most often as a child. Franny and Zooey is that kind of book for me, as is Wind, Sand and Stars... and now so too is The Mystery Guest. Which is not to say that this short memoir by a vulnerable Frenchman who is invited to be the "mystery guest" at a famous artist's party by an ex-girlfriend who deserted him many years ago in a brutal way (that he seemed to deserve) is going to last as long as those books (who knows?) but that it generated a feeling of wonder in me that was really pleasing to find again. The book's strength is the author--a man who has taken to wearing turtlenecks all the time even though he hates men who wear turtlenecks--and his willingness to admit to how high the stakes are in seeing this ex-girlfriend again. And somehow in telling his own odd story he makes it okay to be human and frantic and a little bit weak--and in fact finds the beauty, the wondrousness, in those very qualities. Beginning writers often make the mistake of thinking a sense of universality comes from creating characters who are undefined (the better to fit your own shape into) but this book is a good example of how the exact opposite is true. I bear little resemblance to this author--not in life experience, not in philosophy, not in nationality, gender, etc etc--but he rendered his experience so clearly, so specifically, that it felt like my own. You want readers to recognize the truth in what you describe, not to have to insert their truth into it.