A Tale for the Time Being

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.

Right off, I was so intrigued -- I picked up A Tale for the Time Being because it's on the Man Booker Shortlist, and not having read any synopses, I didn't realise that "time being" is the subject; a person; all persons. Brilliant! I looked at the author bio then and my heart sank -- oh right, Ruth Ozeki. She wrote My Year of Meats; a book I picked up from a clearance table years ago, and though I don't remember much about the plot, I do remember hating it, mostly because of the anti-meat-eating-screed that lingers in the memory, and although I don't even eat mammals, I found the book to be overly political and didactic. Harrumph.

This was probably not the right mind frame to have approached this book with, but in the first Nao section, I couldn't help but be charmed by the teenage girl's frankness and quirkiness and sense of humour. Maybe A Tale for the Time Beingwas worthy of the hype after all…and then I got to the first Ruth section, and the next, and the next…and found those bits to be overly political and didactic. Harrumph!

Ruth is an author living on a coastal island of British Columbia, who after having some early success as a novelist, is struggling with her memoirs. It is said: An unfinished book, left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again. As the character has the same name as the author, and neither has published a book in ten years, I am assuming that Ruth Ozeki has been struggling to find a framework for her own memoirs and decided that the most interesting way to talk about herself would be to have "Ruth" discover and react to the mysterious contents of the "large scarred freezer bag". I found this interview:

AbeBooks: Ruth mentions her struggles with writing a memoir several times throughout the book. Is this story, in part, your memoir?

Ruth Ozeki: Yes. Exactly. I was thinking about writing a memoir and had been playing with this idea over the past decade, but had never quite committed to it. When I put Ruth in the book I was kind of amused by it, because how would a fiction writer fail to write a memoir? She would turn it into a fiction. Ruth's half of A Tale for the Time Being is her failed memoir. That's exactly what it is.

Okay, so it's only loosey-goosey memoirish (Ruth Ozeki and her husband Oliver do split their time between Cortes Island and Manhattan, her mother had Alzheimer's, they order lots of books, etc), but I honestly felt this half of the book ruined everything. The Nao sections had footnotes and appendices to explain unfamiliar topics (which I found totally organic -- I loved the idea that as Ruth was reading the diary, she was googling the bits she didn't understand and making notes along the way) but in Ruth's world, she was surrounded by people who needed to spell things out to her as if she (and we the readers) needed to become experts on trivialities.

"They're filter feeders," Callie said, about the barnacles. "But they're not very good at moving their cirri around, so they rely on vigorous movement of water to get their nutrition. That's why they prefer more exposed shorelines than ours."

"What's a cirri?" Ruth asked.

Yes, Professor Langdon, please explain to me the iconography in lesser known Da Vinci paintings. *eyeroll* And if the real Oliver is anything like the Oliver in the book, I'd not be amused to know him (and not least of all because he's always on his iPhone when Ruth is trying to talk to him). His character is used to make most of the political statements in A Tale for the Time Being. He explains and complains about the Pacific Garbage Patch, which everyone should know and be concerned about, but he also gives a dull lecture on gyres and drift. He snarkily refers to the Tar Sands in Alberta, which we in Canada know is shorthand for right-think. Being anti-car, he insists Ruth walk to pick up the mail, three miles each way, even in the rain, saying, "You need the exercise" -- and this is a particular pet peeve of mine: what's with people who live so far out in the hinterland, a two hour drive and ferry ride to the closest town, who claim to be more environmental and closer to nature than I am, when I'm a very short drive to the necessities? Oliver makes this blanket statement: "We live in a bully culture. Politicians, corporations, the banks, the military. All bullies and crooks." And even as an artist, his work is smug and preachy:

The NeoEocene site, where he was planting his climate change forest, had been clear-cut by a logging company and then placed under a covenant, which stipulated that any subsequent reforestation be limited to species that were native to the extant geoclimate zone…"The covenant holder wants me to stop planting, but I'm arguing that given the rapid onset of climate change, we need to radically redefine the term native and expand it to include formerly, and even prehistoric, native species."

So Oliver, smarter and more ethical than everyone around him, totally got on my nerves, but so did Ruth with the way she let him make her feel small and dumb. I was thoroughly annoyed by this bit:

" 'Who would pick up an old book called A la recherche do temps perdu?' " he continued, "That's what Nao wrote. So she's hiding her diary inside Proust, and (Haruki's) hiding his diary by writing in French. Secret French diaries seem to run in the family."

Secret French diaries run in the family. Of course. Why hadn't she made that connection?

Well, of course Ruth hadn't made the connection: she's dumb and the readers are probably also dumb, so Oliver better spell it out for all of us. Yet, even she had plenty of politically correct viewpoints that grated on me. In her research, Ruth found that the ancient Japanese believed that earthquakes were caused by giant catfish who lived under their islands. In the early 19th century: 

The World Rectifying Catfish targeted the business class, the 1 percent, whose rampant practises of price-fixing, hoarding, and graft had led to economic stagnation and political corruption. The angry catfish would cause an earthquake, wreaking havoc and destruction, and in order to rebuild, the wealthy would have to let go of their assets which would create jobs in salvage, rubble-clearing, and construction for the working classes.

Just by labelling the 19th century Japanese business class as "the 1 per cent", Ozeki is identifying with the Occupy Wall Street crowd and I don't know how fair a comparison that would be for a pre-Capitalist society. For someone who says she loves New York, Ruth has some strange perspective on 9/11. There is a chapter about the terrorist attacks immediately after this story about Nao's fighter pilot great uncle from WWII:

"Your uncle Haruki Number One was brave. He didn't want to fight in a war but when the time came, he faced his fate...He was a kamikaze pilot, only his suicide was totally different. He wasn't a coward. He flew his plane into the enemy's battleship to protect his homeland. You should be more like him!"

I was offended by the apparent moral equivalency until it is revealed later that Haruki flew his plane into the sea to avoid casualties other than his inevitable own. It can't be a coincidence though that the planes fly into the World Trade Center towers immediately following this scene. And then after a non-flattering portrait of the President (as though his only response to the attack was, "Dead or alive. Smoke 'em out of their caves. Git 'em running so we can git 'em."), Ruth finally gets through to someone on Cortes Island to check on her mother, the next day, and the person had no idea what had happened in New York. (Everyone on the island immediately knows about Ruth finding the Hello Kitty lunchbox, but apparently 9/11 wasn't newsworthy enough to get the locals talking? I may be in a more urban area of Canada, but the attack on New York City felt like an attack on the entire free world, and no one was talking about anything else.) And not only does Ozeki immediately have a Viet Nam veteran talking conspiracy theory, but Nao's father's reaction irked me:

"When 9/11 happened, it was clear that war was inevitable. They'd been preparing for it all along. A generation of young American pilots would use my interfaces to hunt and kill Afghani people and Iraqi people, too. This would be my fault. I felt so sorry for those Arab people and their families, and I knew the American pilots would suffer, too."

Yes, a lot of the politics in the Ruth sections got on my nerves, in the same way that the anti-carnivore stance got on my nerves in My Year of Meats, but I could tolerate it because the Nao sections were so interesting and so well written. I do get the irony of posting the following to my blog:

If I thought the world would want to know about old Jiko, I'd post her stories on a blog, but actually I stopped doing that a while ago. It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody else out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when nobody really gives a shit. And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they're all so busy writing and posting, it kind of broke my heart.

Anti-bullying efforts are the big focus in the schools around here, and it's hard to imagine being as powerless as Nao was to prevent the pinches and scissor cuts, the kicks and punches -- and eventually much more sinister behaviour -- that she was subjected to at school. That her "loser sensei" would get a thrill by participating in the bullying, that indeed the bully culture is so pervasive in Japan that the various forms of torture have names and rules, speaks volumes about her experience. Add to that the seeming suicide culture (everyone has heard of hari-kari and kamikazes, but suicide is a valid option, apparently, for failed businessmen and students, too) and her death wish appears reasonable -- yet I still wanted to protect Nao as the young girl that she is. The confessional and familiar tone of the diary entries, the introduction to unfamiliar aspects of Japanese culture, the portrait of her failing family life -- these bits were worth reading the book for. And then we get to meet Nao's great-grandmother Jiko -- the ancient Buddhist nun, former author, anarchist, matriarch of a dying clan -- and I was in love. When Nao sends her a text asking when a person reaches adulthood, not just in body but in mind, the 104 year old replies: 105 years. 

Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.

I haven't read a lot of Japanese and Japan-set books, but I could totally visualise Jiko's temple from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (and other David Mitchells) and the notion of alternate and overlapping universes is familiar from all of the Haruki Murakami I've read and loved (and it can't be a coincidence that two characters in this book are named Haruki). The cruelty of the Japanese soldiers during WWII to their American POWs is described in the nonfiction Unbroken. I note these books just to say that I was not totally outside my frame of reference here. I am a huge fan of the quantum mystical and should have been delighted by passages such as this:

To study the self is to forget the self. Maybe if you sat enough zazen, your sense of being a solid, singular self would dissolve and you could forget about it. What a relief. You could hang out happily as part of an open-ended quantum array…Had Dogen figured all this out? He'd written those words many centuries before quantum mechanics, before Schrödinger put his enigmatic cat into his metaphorical box .

But as much as I have long been fascinated with the intuitive vs deductive routes to the same conclusions of mystics vs physicists, this scene was once again ruined by Oliver drily explaining the concept of Schrödinger's cat to Ruth -- for heaven's sake, their cat is named Schrödinger, even if they affectionately call it Pest -- have they never gone over the concept before? And I was intrigued by the notion of agency between writers and readers, and most especially enjoyed Nao's frequent wondering if anyone was even reading her words, but here's where everything was ruined for me: When the final pages of the diary were suddenly blank and Ruth needed to propel Nao's story through interacting with her father in a dream -- oooh, quantum mystery, who's creating whom -- and then the pages reappear and everyone lives happily ever after…Harrumph. 

This may be my longest review, where I am indulging in listing all the way in which I hated this book, but I should restate that the parts set in Japan were lovely and interesting. Unfortunately, the memoiry bits, the hamfisted ways in which Ozeki tries to state her superior liberal politics, the fatal flaw listed above -- these all leave me hoping that the Man Booker jury overlooks A Tale for the Time Being.