Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

Critics went gaga over this recent novel by Joseph O'Neill (who btw, is half-Turkish, my fellow half-Turks might be interested to know. He is also the author of a memoir about his split heritage, a copy of which I gave to my brother though I'm pretty sure he never read it just as I didn't read it but still hope to one day). Anyway the novel is good every which way--setting, characters, metaphors small and large, but I confess I never got beyond thinking it's good. Happy to read it once, unlikely to read it again. For a more loving view and a strong case for the value of an extended metaphor re: cricket see James Wood's take in the New Yorker.

Some reviews see the novel as a post-colonial Great Gatsby (I confess I also admire, but don’t worship, the feet of Fitzgerald). The narrator is Dutch, a finance guy living with his wife and child in Manhattan when 9/11 hits. His wife splits with the kid back to London and the narrator is left gutted, wandering, but still pretty rich. So he ends up hanging out with this cricket club made up of much poorer immigrants from Southeast Asia and the Caribbean and led by Chuck Ramkissoon, the would-be Gatsby, whose murder opens the novel. Chuck is possibly involved with the Russian mafia but definitely has big dreams, including opening a major cricket field in NY. The narrator is drawn to him despite misgivings, which makes this a sort of Gatsby in reverse—the Nick Carroway character is rich, the Gatsby character is poor. All of which I found intellectually interesting but not terribly emotionally rousing.

But still it’s a well written novel. And I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how characters are written, including the moment when characters are first introduced, the physical description, the use of their thoughts, the metaphoric descriptions attached to them… anything that shapes character. And I especially admired this description of Chuck which follows a dialogue in which he goes off on a long list: “Chuck wasn’t going to stop there. He believed in facts, in their momentousness and charm. He had no option, of course: who was going to listen to mere opinion from him?” What interests me is the way the narrator makes a broad comment about the character—taking the moment and using it to indicate a pattern of behavior and then expands that pattern out to a comment on the world in which we we live. Chuck is an immigrant and poor, not to be taken seriously unless he backs his opinions with facts. That moment of narrative "show and tell" makes Chuck feel real and deepens the scope of the novel.

Lately I’ve been thinking too about iconic characters, and what makes them iconic. Gatsby is, but in the end Chuck probably isn’t though he had the potential to be. He’s left a little too much of a mystery for me. He doesn’t actually feel quite as important to this novel as Gatsby does to his own (note to self: put character name in title should you wish iconic status).

The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso

I seem to be on a run lately of reading lyric, precise memoirs of illness, and this one is my favorite so far. Manguso's renders her illness--a rare blood disorder which at its worst leaves her so weak that she is unable to walk--in chapters that are more like individual prose poems and in paragraphs that are more like individual lines. One of my favorite lines comes on the last two pages: "But to pay attention is to love everything." The "but" follows two paragraphs about how suffering teaches you to pay attention because you might not know what's the important part (the lesson-giving part) of your suffering. But the way Manguso sets her paragraphs apart--with an extra space break between every single one--lets the line float on its own, both the completion of her idea and an idea of its own. To pay attention is to love everything. I'm not sure if the line/idea would have hit me so hard without the context of the whole book coming before it, but all the same: it's a mantra that works for me.

But back to Manguso's paragraph breaks. Any of you who teach at FAU have probably experienced the current bane of my existence--when students come to school to print, their documents are converted to the new Word 2008 on the university computers and suddenly there is an extra space break between every paragraph. It drives me nuts. And few students seem to have learned how to fix it. But here, Manguso shows how such a thing--used deliberately, that is--can be very powerful. It's not just that the white space between every paragraph, many of which are only one or two sentences long, creates a meditative pause for the reader (which it does), or that it emphasizes the line that came before the space break (which it does), but it forces you to emphasize the first sound of each paragraph in a way that you wouldn't otherwise. In other words, she's not using paragraph breaks so much as line breaks. And like a good poet she knows to sometimes use the sounds at the start of each line in combination. For example in one section (most of which are only two or three pages long) nearly every paragraph starts with "my" or "I." While in the abstract that may sound annoying, it actually creates a nice rhyme and rhythm (especially because she knows to interrupt it periodically) that lulls you as you read her sentences, which are mostly very clinical, fairly horrifying descriptions of what is happening to her body. It brings the poetry to the science.

Highly recommended.

The Pharmacist's Mate by Amy Fusselman

I quite admired this small sad memoir about the death of the author's father (paired with her fertility treatments and pregnancy struggles). Lately I seem to prefer my nonfiction really spare (I'm also reading the similarly spare Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso). And this seems the kind of book that small presses exist to do (it's put out by McSweeney's)--too many small presses simply pick up books that are what the big presses publish but not quite as good. Small presses seem most successful when instead they pick up books that big presses weren't willing to take a chance on not because they weren't quite good enough but because they didn't seem marketable enough. And this is a pretty depressing book that's less than a hundred pages long, is poetic in its voice, and blends in the writing of a non-professional (the dad). And for all those reasons probably seemed risky to big publishers (if they ever saw it, I don't know). But it's really lovely and, despite what might be a pregnancy at the end, properly mournful. Elegaic, I suppose the reviewers would say.

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