Tuesday, 31 August 2021

Count the Ways

 

She turned her face to the racing water. Even now, in midsummer, it crashed over the rocks, but somewhere, a mile beyond this place, or three miles, or five — beyond the old people sitting in their cars listening to the radio, beyond the men with their fishing poles, conferring among themselves whether the Red Sox had a chance in the playoffs, and the young couples kissing or smoking weed, and the mothers nursing babies; beyond the teenagers daring each other to jump off the rocks, and the ones, like Eleanor and Cam, just standing there taking it all in — all those human beings, figuring out how to live their lives the best they knew; count the ways — the brook would keep on running. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but the water never stopped moving. It flowed all the way to the dam in town, and beyond to the river, which flowed to the ocean, which reached far as the horizon, and even farther than that.

If Count the Ways hadn’t been a book club selection, it would have been one of my very rare DNF’s: I found the writing to be clunky and amateurish at both the sentence level and at the overall plot level; and with unrelatable characters, aggravating repetitions, and no discernable deeper meaning, if I were author Joyce Maynard, I’d be taking my name off of this one (and asking for any editing fees to be returned). Just look at that quote I opened with — featuring the book’s title and, arguably, its essence — it is just so much bafflegab and annoying punctuation; I am rounding this up to two stars only because it is not the worst book I’ve ever read and will continue to reserve my only one star rating for that particular waste of time. But this was close.

In no other way that she could think of would Eleanor be called a superstitious person, but there had been a time when she could not round the final bend in the long, dead-end dirt road that led up to this place without saying the words out loud, “I’m home.” Maybe some part of her actually believed that if she ever failed to speak the words, something terrible might happen to one of them. How would she ever survive if it did?

Only, she had

As the book opens, Eleanor is returning to her former home in the country for her son’s wedding, and by the cool reception she gets from her two eldest children, it’s obvious that she hasn’t seen them for years. This opening bit includes the line, “Sometimes you leave a place because you don’t like being there. Sometimes you have to leave because you love it too much.” Although that is stated as some kind of truism, it made zero sense to me and I will acknowledge that I kept reading this overlong book, in part, just to see if Maynard could prove it to me. She did not. The basic premise: Eleanor’s parents died when she was sixteen, and despite her age and her family’s apparent wealth, she was left without guardians or an inheritance. Happily, she was a self-taught artist, and while finishing up boarding school, Eleanor sold a children’s book for a lot of money, and by the time she was twenty, she decided to buy herself a rundown farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. She marries a hot woodworker who never worries about money (because Eleanor pays all the bills), and when he ends their marriage ten years and three children later, she agrees to move off the farm and let him stay there? And when their children refuse to be taken away from the only home they’ve ever known, Eleanor agrees to let them live with their Dad? Knowing from the beginning that Eleanor must eventually do something that causes an irreparable rift with these children, I was mildly interested to learn what it could possibly have been — but the answer to that was incredibly annoying. Nothing of the plot or characterisations made any sense.

As for the writing: The storyline takes place over four decades, beginning in the mid-sixties, and Maynard makes countless annoying references to anchor her timeline. At one point she writes, There was a music festival going on somewhere in upstate New York that week. “Bunch of hippies,” Mr. Hallinan said. “Probably pals of that nutcase that murdered the movie star.” And that made me roll my eyes, but worse is a character (an old guy who was a neighbour of Eleanor’s) coming to her house and saying, “Remember those boys they had on Ed Sullivan a while back? The ones with the hair, that all the girls used to scream about? You know the one with the Japanese wife? Somebody shot him last night. Dead on the spot.” Maybe he would have reported it to his wife that way, but if he just heard that John Lennon was shot on the radio, no way would he have put it this way to a younger woman who had been a teenager in the sixties. Every anchoring event was reported like this — from the moon landing to Princess Di’s car crash — and every one of them made me twitch in annoyance.

As for the repetitions, at one point, about a third of the way in, I read:

Most of their best times took place right here on the farm — putting on plays, making valentines, building snow forts in winter, sailing their boats with their homemade cork people every spring...Three nights a week, in softball season, they headed to the ball field.

And I thought to myself: If I have to read about making valentines and cork people and going to softball one more time… And then two pages later, in the same chapter:

There was a rhythm to their lives now, marked by the seasons in part...In winter, they stoked the woodstove and shoveled the car out, made valentines, stayed in their pyjamas all day with a stack of library books. At the first sign of spring they made cork people. Then came softball season.


How about simply illogical writing:

He loved showing them artifacts from the natural world: he’d put his hand in his pocket and, when it emerged, set down a strange, mysterious pellet that turned out to be animal scat — coyote, possibly, or fox, or moose even — that, when you picked it apart, contained small pieces of bones and fur from whatever the animal whose scat it was had eaten for dinner the night before.

Again, that’s more than a bit clunky, but why “moose even”; why not “bear even” or some other carnivore if the point is looking for fur and bones in the scat?

Or weirdly unspecific writing (and this, coming at a moment of high drama):

None of them had any sense of time as it was happening, but Cam probably kept pumping Toby’s chest for many minutes.

“Probably” for “many” minutes, eh? Glad you noted that. There are way too many moments of high drama (including rape, underground abortion, infidelity, domestic abuse, murder-suicide, drunk driving causing death, a hypocritical Republican with an eye on the White House, a dog shot dead by the Sheriff for chasing deer during hunting season) and I felt vaguely uncomfortable about the way that Maynard approached a gender transition — I don’t think that she really captured the struggle (everything is reported from the outside and off the page) but I guess I applaud her for trying to include the experience as just another part of a domestic drama — but I was definitely made uncomfortable by a scene with Eleanor meeting two little boys, one of whom had “mild” cerebral palsy. When they meet, the older brother explains, “His umbilical cord was tangled up around his neck when he was born. That’s why he walks a little funny. He’s not retarded or anything.” And from Eleanor’s POV we then watch as, With that odd, slightly spastic gait of his, he was clearing a space in the middle of the living room now, his floppy puppet arms flailing. Nope, didn’t like that. Also didn’t like that Eleanor knew at a glance that she would never again spend time with these eager little boys and their sad, slope-shouldered — but totally decent — father.

I didn’t understand any of the decisions Eleanor made and I certainly didn’t understand why Maynard wrote her that way. Clunky beginning to cringey ending, hard pass.



Monday, 23 August 2021

Hao: Stories

 


When her husband, Gaoyuan, arrives at the hospital, with one of his jacket collars tugged under the neckline, all she can say is one word, 
hao. The mellow-voiced doctor asks how she feels, she answers hao; asks her to name pictures of dogs, dolphins, and roses, she replies hao. Good, yes, okay. The most common word in Chinese, which must have been so imprinted in her memory it alone has escaped the calamity. She says hao even when she is shaking her head and slapping her hand on the threadbare sheet of the hospital bed.Stars

 


The twelve short stories in Ye Chun’s debut collection, Hao: Stories, mostly center on the lives of Chinese women (with a couple of male perspectives thrown in and the final story, Signs, telling the story of Cangjie; the Imperial record keeper who devised the ideogrammic method of Chinese writing in the third millennium B.C.), and while these tales each capture interesting and broad-ranging slices of life, they don’t have that crackling mental provocation of what I consider to be the experience of really well-written short fiction. Ye’s writing is polished and evocative, I was interested in what she had to tell me about the experience of these women, and I am happy that I read this collection, I just like short stories that go beyond “slices of life”. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Soon, a woman with big feet and clipped hair comes to the village, her army uniform cinched at the waist with a buckled belt. In the center of the village square, she announces that women are free now. No more bound feet, no more arranged marriage, no more slavery at in-laws’ house, no more discrimination against baby girls. Women, she announces, are equal as men, can hold up half of the sky.

She goes home on her small feet that she knows cannot be stretched back to their natural size.
 ~ A Drawer

Other than the final story (with Cangjie inventing writing at the dawn of recorded history), these stories are set from the 1870s (with a Chinese woman regretting her arranged marriage and immigration to America in the face of racism and the anti-Chinese San Francisco Riot) to the present (with more than one modern Chinese woman regretting her decision to immigrate to America in the face of racism and limited opportunities). Along the way, there are several stories set in China — sketching out the evolution of women’s experiences from footbound village wives, to Party members separated from their husbands during the Cultural Revolution, to modern day lonely hearts; learning English and joining international dating sites — and throughout, women are trying to find their voices (drawing pictures in the sand when they have not been taught writing), desperately wanting children (even if they can’t feed them, even if they only have baby girls), and looking for meaning in their work (even if it’s caring for the mother-in-law who despises you). Many motifs carry across stories (and especially the word “hao” itself, which we are ultimately told was based on a sketch of Cangjie’s own kneeling mother holding him as an infant), and throughout, the experience of Chinese women does not seem a happy one.

She is thinking of words that do not signify the natural elements, the rudimental, everlasting things that will outlive this upturned world. The word 好, for example, the polar opposite of the word 坏 that is on the cardboard she carries every day. The most common word in Chinese, a ubiquitous syllable people utter and hear all the time, which is supposed to mean good. But what is hao in this world, where good books are burned, good people condemned, meanness considered a good trait, violence good conduct? People say hao when their eyes are marred with suspicion and dread. They say hao when they are tattered inside.Hao

Again, if you’re interested in a dozen vignettes of (mostly) Chinese women’s experiences — and I was interested in everything I read here — then this might be a great read for you. As for me, I look for a particular frisson from short stories that wasn’t present here and can only rate it middling against collections that worked better for my own tastes.



Wednesday, 18 August 2021

The Four Humors

 


The four humors that pump through my body determine my character, temperament, mood. Blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler. The excess or lack of these bodily fluids designates how a person should be. I don’t know what 
choler means, and when I google it, the internet leads me to a link asking whether choler is a Scrabble word.

 


I thought that The Four Humors started with a really strong premise — a twenty-year-old Turkish-American woman makes her annual visit to Istanbul to visit family, this year with her blond American boyfriend in tow — and as this Sibel tries to apply the ancient “humor theory” of illness to her new, chronic headaches, there was a very interesting picture beginning to develop about this young woman who straddles two worlds, feeling more at home in the land (and medicine) of her ancestors. Everything between Sibel and Cooper was interesting and relatable and served to explore the culture divide, but about halfway through, Cooper takes a back seat and the story becomes about Sibel’s family secrets, with long stretches about the history of Turkish politics and student activism, and at that point the narrative lost the human touch for me. I understand that much of this story is based on debut author Mina Seçkin’s own experiences (born in Brooklyn, sent to Istanbul every summer to stay with the grandma who would eventually develop Parkinson’s, the mysterious year-long headache that Mina suffered), and the writing at the sentence level was interesting and strong, but the whole didn’t completely gel for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

They don’t say anything about the new fat on my hips, my arms, even my nose, which can bulb up with flesh, because this year the cause for weight is obvious.They’re afraid of me, and the shape my grief has taken. Blood, you’re lean and shaped as if made from stone. Phlegm, you’re fat. Because humors had to do with passions, temperament, and behavior, of course people had a lot of moralistic ideas about willpower and control. Moral health, which does not interest me.

Grief-stricken after the recent, sudden death of her father, Sibel is sent to Istanbul to study for her MCATs and supposedly to take care of her grandmother — but even with tremors and unsteady legs, Sibel’s grandma is happy to do all the caregiving while Sibel reads ancient texts for clues about the cause of her nagging headache. Her boyfriend, Cooper, is also intending to go to med school, and in between shifts working at the local eye hospital, he is slowly learning Turkish, winning grandma’s heart, and developing a sincere interest in the fate of the Syrian refugees he meets in the streets. As the pair walk along the Bosphorus together, shopping in the markets and eating with family in kebap restaurants, Seçkin paints a vivid picture of modern day Istanbul:

There is the Turkish word hüzün, which cannot be translated into English. Instead of meaning a simple sadness or suffering it denotes a collective, Istanbul-wide phenomenon that some call spiritual, some call nostalgic, but the one thing we know for sure is that the word exists because it is pridefully shared with others. The ideal is not to escape this suffering, but to carry this suffering. It is possessing the weight of the city as you wade through its past and present and, by doing so, you dissolve among many. I am pretty certain — as Ibn Sina was certain, too — that those with an excess of black bile like me are prone to feel this weight. Istanbul is a humor. The lubricant, oily and thick, black humor that begins to leak from my spleen. Istanbul is black bile, melancholy, only disguised as a city.

This was all very interesting to me until, as I said above, the storyline moves to the revelation of family secrets — which seem to come out of nowhere and which don’t really serve the premise — and I began to lose interest. I suppose there is some irony in Sibel and her grandma constantly watching melodramatic Russian soap operas, which Sibel’s mother hates, right up until their own family is revealed to be little more than a soap opera itself:

The women in my family love television. The Turkish shows are about family, culture, and inheritance. My mother, who likes American sci-fi and fantasy story lines, says that we, Turks, are simply not creative enough to produce television that strays from common, overused storylines populated with the same characters: a doting and controlling mother obsessed with her handsome son who falls in love with the wrong woman, all under the purview of an angry father.

The four humors angle was interesting (if maybe a little overused by Sibel) and it occurred to me afterwards that the four parts of this novel may feel disjointed because they are meant to each focus on a different humor (when Cooper is present at the beginning, the prevailing humor is blood [optimistic and sensual]; as Sibel’s headaches worsen and she can’t bring herself to visit her father’s grave, it feels like an excess of phlegm [passive and sensitive]; and as the story then shifts to the love lives of Sibel’s grandparents’ generation, it’s black bile [melancholy and irrational behaviour]; and finally to the youthful activism of Sibel’s parents’ generation, it is choler [excitable and prone to anger]). I can see how this works as a literary framework but it threw me off as an experience (and I could totally be reading something into the disjointedness that isn’t there).

I’m seeing now that I’m full of all four humors, and my excess — any excess is not dangerous or fatal.

Again, this is a very interesting view into the Turkish-American experience and if the storyline had stayed focussed on Sibel — instead of backloading in decades worth of history and politics at the end — I think I would have appreciated it even better. Still, there was much to like in this.



Sunday, 15 August 2021

Burntcoat

 


The name is inexplicable in the deeds — some eponymous merchant’s, an incendiary event. I admit, it was the name that made me want the building, as well as the proportions. Such things shouldn’t be meaningful, but they are. Even renovated, Burntcoat is ugly by most standards, a utilitarian warehouse, but it stands beside the river’s lambency — a hag in a bright mirror.

 


Sarah Hall apparently began writing Burntcoat on the first day of the UK’s COVID-related lockdown in March of 2020 (finding time to work in the early hours before homeschooling her daughter) and everything about this novel struck me as a perfect literary response to what Hall (and the rest of us) lived through over the last year. I have appreciated other recent novels that serve to record some of the specific details of the living-through-a-pandemic experience, but Burntcoat is the first I’ve read that puts that experience through the crucible of artistic sensibility and turns the details into art. This novel engaged me on every level, the language provoked and delighted me, and I think it’s as near a perfect response to these crazy times as we are likely to get. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages recorded may not be in their final forms.)

People say timing is everything, and it’s true. You arrived just as that brilliant, ill star was annunciating. I imagine you as a messenger. You were the last one here before I closed the door of Burntcoat, before we all shut our doors.

Opening upon a scene a couple of decades in the future, 59-year old Edith Harkness — world famous sculptor; master of the Japanese Shou Sugi Ban technique of burning wood to seal it against decomposition — discovers that the AG3 novavirus, which had lain dormant in her since surviving a devastating pandemic as a young woman, has reactivated, giving her only days to live. As Edith puts the finishing touches on what is to be her final commission (a memorial piece to the millions lost to AG3, her own name already inscribed there), her memory floats over the major events of her life: a childhood with a mother left brain-damaged from a stroke (an event which caused her father to abandon them); Edith’s early years as a student and an artist; the first public commissions that gave her the small fortune to buy the industrial building “Burntcoat” (which she turned into a massive studio with a small apartment above); but especially, the intense relationship that she had started with a local restaurateur just before the lockdown began. As the streets teemed with food riots and racist attacks, and the government and health care system seemed on the brink of collapse, Edith and Halit retreated to her fortress-like building to wait out the storm. There are many graphic sex scenes (between Edith and Halit and in memories of her former lovers) but they never felt gratuitous or cheap; being thrown together as a pandemic rages outside the walls of Burntcoat is a baptism by fire and this relationship burned intensely. (It seems particularly appropriate that Halit is a Muslim immigrant from Turkey [by way of his family’s expulsion from Bulgaria], and as he is isolated from his family back home, his relationship with the white Englishwoman prods at the cultural differences between them while underscoring their meaninglessness.)

Is it possible to work with a material so long and still not understand its condition? We are figures briefly drawn in space; given temporary form in exchange for consciousness, sense, a chance. We are ready-mades, disposables. How do we live every last moment as this — savant dust?

Finding the meaning in life through art — and especially as women fighting for space in male-dominated fields — is a recurring theme here. Edith’s mother was a popular novelist before her stroke (and it isn’t until the future scenes that her books will be reassessed as “works of merit”, the “Gothic label stripped off like cheap varnish”; a dismissive term that had been “used for women whose work the establishment enjoys but doesn’t respect” as only “men are the existentialists”.) In Edith’s art school, she was the only woman interested in metal-working (and she was mocked for it), it was considered transgressive when she later wanted to learn the art of Shou Sugi Ban (women obviously have trouble controlling fire), and when her first public commission was revealed (the massive Scotch Witch rising triumphantly out of the gorse at a highway junction island, complete with provocative gashes at the mouth and crotch), male revulsion must be quelled by the female patron who funded the project who quips that it’s the perfect response to millenia of marble statues with their little white penises. The theme seems to relate to Hall herself, carving out those few hours to write every morning before domestic demands called her away from her work; and creating incisive meaning from the chaos of our times is exactly what she achieves here — the specifics don’t relate to me and my life, but every bit of it spoke to me deeply.

I’m still a halfling on the moors, finding berries, cupping from the underground river, making things out of reeds and thorns. The world exists through recreation, how it is perceived. You were a tear in all that, a gift of sudden truth. Because of you I could say, with certainty, I believe in it, all.

I love the words and the sentences and the story they add up to; I was moved emotionally and intellectually; provoked and challenged. I loved every bit of this.



Thursday, 12 August 2021

Great Circle



If you were to put a blade through any sphere and divide it into two perfect halves, the circumference of the cut side of each half would be a great circle: that is, the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere. The equator is a great circle. So is every line of longitude. On the surface of a sphere such as the earth, the shortest distance between any two points will follow an arc that is a segment of a great circle. Points directly opposite each other, like the North and South Poles, are intersected by an infinite number of great circles.

I didn’t love Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, although I might have enjoyed it more were the novel shorter by half. We follow two storylines — each feeling like they were written in turn by Kate Quinn and Taylor Jenkins Reid — the primary one of which concerns the extraordinary life of a pioneering female pilot (starting with her parents and their backstories), and intertwined, the story of a modern day movie star and her efforts to reinvent herself as a serious actor by portraying the pilot in an indy film. The novel is stuffed with interesting historical details — the sinking of a Lusitania-type ship at the brink of WWI, rum-running during Prohibition, the RAF’s use of female pilots to move planes around Britain during WWII — but it went on far too long for me, gave too much space to secondary characters (the pilot didn’t need to have a twin brother and I didn’t need to know everything about his life), and took so long to reach the crescendo of the plot that my flagging interest was hard to re-engage. There was much I liked in the pilot’s story, little I cared about in the Hollywood thread, but I appreciate that the chiming between the two storylines — that infinity of great circles that intersected their unrelated lives — was rather the point; there was, unfortunately, no payoff in this reading experience (emotionally or intellectually) that rewarded me for what felt like an overlong engagement. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave. Some birds fly until they die. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won’t be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge — a dive with intent, aimed at something deep in the sea.

Marian Graves (and her twin brother, Jamie) were raised by their uncle — an alcoholic artist who allowed the children to pretty much run wild — outside of Missoula, Montana. After being bewitched by a husband-and-wife barnstorming team as a child, Marian was determined to become a pilot herself; and as we know from the opening chapters that Marian will eventually go missing while attempting to circumnavigate the globe around the Poles, the majority of the book recounts her entire life up to that fateful trip. We visit a small town brothel, an Alaskan bush camp, a Seattle mansion, a Vancouver flophouse, a London Red Cross Club, a Hawaiin ranch, a New Zealand sheep farm; there are prostitutes, gangsters, the WPA; rape and incest and abortion; gender and sexual fluidity; the fog of war and the call of the wild. There is just. so. much. And through it all, Marian is restless and itchy and unfulfilled; there’s a persistent feeling of agitation that rubbed off on me as I read.

After my utter failure to fly a plane, I’d only become more determined to be Marian. I needed the relief of being someone who wasn’t afraid. It helped that she wasn’t completely alien, that we were both products of vanishment and orphanhood and negligence and airplanes and uncles. She was like me but wasn’t. She was uncanny, unknowable except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky.

Hadley Baxter was raised by her uncle — a drug-abusing actor-director who introduced his niece to the business as a child and otherwise allowed her to run wild — and after starring in a Hannah Montana-type show as a tween and recently playing the female lead in a Fantasy-Romance-Thriller (The Hunger Games meets Twilight?) franchise, the Hollywood It Girl desperately wants to reinvent herself as someone more respectable (an effort not helped by a series of public sex scandals). Hadley had read about the famous Marian Graves when she was young — her own parents were lost when their Cessna crashed into Lake Superior when Hadley was two — and the fact that there are so many parallels between Hadley’s and Marian’s stories doesn’t feel a credibility-straining coincidence; it is because Hadley already had this sympathetic connection to the long lost Marian that she makes the perfect actor to portray her in a quirky biopic. Her story takes place in the Hollywood Hills, a soundstage in Alaska, a Las Vegas nerd convention; and between power lunches, paparazzi, and PR agents, I had a hard time thinking of Hadley as a real, relatable person.

I think that Maggie Shipstead is a fine writer and much is quotable here:

• Some of these women have had so much work done their words come out all mushy because they can’t move their lips. With their spooky round eyes and stubby little snouts, they look like cats transformed into humans by an incompetent wizard.

• She was at an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage.

• She’s starting to have work done. In twenty years she’ll be a skin balloon with eyeholes.

• Trout’s smile hangs between his ears like a ragged hammock.

(But I also think it says something about Hadley’s character that the two best lines in her sections were about overdone plastic surgery; and it probably says more about my character that they amused me equally and I decided to share both.)

Art is distortion but a form of distortion that has the possibility of offering clarification, like a corrective lens.

There is a lot of discussion around art in Great Circle: Not only was Marian’s uncle a painter (who would become famous and collectable after his death) but her brother Jamie also became a painter (from portraitist to war artist); and because we get many bits from his POV, we are treated to the artistic process and the struggle to capture the infinite in the finite. This discussion is picked up later by a sculptor, by art collectors, by authors and filmmakers, by Hadley as she attempts to capture the essence of Marian, and by Marian herself as she tries to overcome the pull of the infinite as it threatens to suck her into the void. I guess it required 600+ pages to fit all of this in, but it was ultimately too long and of uneven interest to me to keep my attention; distortion without the corrective lens.




2021 Man Booker Prize Nominees



The Shortlist (In my order of preference):

A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam

The Promise, Damon Galgut * The Winner

No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood

The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed

Bewilderment, Richard Powers

Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead

 

And the rest:

Second Place, Rachel Cusk

China Room, Sunjeev Sahota

An Island, Karen Jennings

The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson

Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford

Monday, 9 August 2021

China Room

 


They live in the china room, which sits at a slight remove from the house and is named for the old willow-pattern plates that lean on a high stone shelf, a set of six that arrived with Mai years ago as part of her wedding dowry. Far beneath the shelf, at waist level, runs a concrete slab that the women use for preparing food, and under this is a little mud-oven. The end of the room widens enough for a pair of charpoys to be laid perpendicular to each other and across these two string beds all three women are made to sleep.

China Room really shouldn’t have worked for me — it’s kind of a sentimental historical drama, dripping with desire and forbidden love — but it touched me. I cared about the characters, was fascinated by the customs, and appreciated the long view that author Sunjeev Sahota provides by splitting the storyline between two members of a Punjabi Sikh family, three generations and seventy years apart. This is unlike Sahota’s last Man Booker nominated novel (The Year of the Runaways, which I loved), and although it feels less deep, it worked for me. Rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

One hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred, he counts, barely working his lips and standing unmoving in the yard, in the moon. The sun in the moon. He looks about him, from the quiet of the barn to the charpoys stowed upright under the veranda, their long round legs like rifles, all the way across to the china room, shuttered in silence. He’d skipped over the double-doors at the rear of the porch. Now, he walks towards them, applies his hand to the flaking paint and steals inside, to where Mehar has been instructed to wait for her husband.

I have no idea how commonplace a practise the basic premise is: It is 1929 in the Punjab and a nasty matriarch has, over the lives of her three sons, arranged marriages for them with girls from distant villages, and in order to save money, she decides that all three ceremonies will happen on the same day. Three young women (from fourteen to nineteen) — always veiled in public with a material that only allows them to see their own feet and hands as they walk and work — move into the “china room” off the main house on their wedding day; and although they can peek through the slats of the blinds when the men are in the courtyard, none of brides have any clue which of the brothers is her own husband. Even when one of the brothers gets permission from his mother for a conjugal visit — for grandsons are wanted to work the family farm — the room that they couple in is so dark that none of the women can figure out which brother was hers; and it would apparently be bold and impious to ask. The most daring (and youngest) of the women, Mehar, decides to risk everything to make a deeper connection with her spouse.

Men have their needs. But for her life would be over. She can see herself now: head shaved, breasts exposed, the iron pigring around her neck and the coarse rope parading her through the village. She can hear the crowds calling her a dirty whore and feel the rocks cutting her flesh as she lurches to the well and jumps to her drowning end. Yes, for those reasons she will go. But, lying on her bed, her back to Harbans’ back, she recognises another note, a lighter, brighter music behind the crashing deathcymbals. She listens to it, and hears it for what it is: desire, her own, amplifying. She closes her eyes and whispers, out loud but so only she can hear it –‘I want you, too’– and then she reopens them, and for a long time she stares at the muddy apples spilled across the stone ledge of the window.

In a second storyline, it is 1999 and Mehar’s eighteen-year-old great-grandson returns to the Punjab from where he was raised in rural England, wanting to kick his heroin habit before starting university. When his sickly presence proves too upsetting for his uncle’s sour wife, the boy moves out to the old farm, eventually fixing up the homestead and unwittingly choosing the china room as his own sleeping quarters. Through the hard work and the company of some locals, the unnamed character regains his health and hears stories about the customs that still thwart people’s desires. Looking around at what seems to him like a fine place to live, and recalling instances of the racism and back-breaking work that his parents suffered through in order to give him a better life, he has to wonder if their sacrifices were really worth it.

‘You know what the best thing is about falling out of love? It sets you free. Because when you’re in love it is everything, it is imprisoning, it is all there is, and you’d do anything, anything, to keep that love. But when it withers you can suddenly see the rest of the world again, everything else floods back into the places that love had monopolised.’

Apparently roughly based on Sahota’s own family history (there is a photo at the end of a very old woman holding a baby; is that Mehar with her great-grandson, the author?), China Room has the feeling of truth to it; the plot didn’t go the way I expected, but such is life. This novel doesn’t employ sophisticated literary tricks, and I could even call it lightweight, but it weighed on me all the same. Call me pleasantly surprised.




2021 Man Booker Prize Nominees



The Shortlist (In my order of preference):

A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam

The Promise, Damon Galgut * The Winner

No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood

The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed

Bewilderment, Richard Powers

Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead

 

And the rest:

Second Place, Rachel Cusk

China Room, Sunjeev Sahota

An Island, Karen Jennings

The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson

Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford

Sunday, 8 August 2021

Bewilderment

 


On Saturday, the President declared the entire election invalid. He ordered a repeat, claiming it would require at least three more months to secure and implement. Half the electorate revolted against the plan. The other half was gung-ho for a retry. Where suspicion was total and facts were settled with the like button, there was no other way forward but to do over. I wondered how I might explain the crisis to an anthropologist from Promixa Centauri. In this place, with such a species, trapped in such technologies, even a simple head count grew impossible. Only pure bewilderment kept us from civil war.

This is the third novel that I’ve read by Richard Powers, the third to have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, and I’d rank Bewilderment at the bottom of the three. Powers’ last novel, The Overstory, was a high-level piece of Ecofiction; a love letter to trees and forests that went on too long and eventually felt too baggy and pedantic to really wow me (on the other hand, I found the earlier Orfeo to be sublime). As a follow-up to The OverstoryBewilderment (another Ecofiction effort) is much more accessible, with a family drama at its heart that would appeal to your average book club — and maybe that’s the point. Maybe Powers decided to bring his — undeniably important — ecowarnings to the mainstream; but if The Overstory muddled the power of its message by being too dense, Bewilderment felt lightweight and predictable, full of narrative choices that eventually grated on me. I’m all for bringing the core message of this book (that the health of the Earth and all of its inhabitants is more important than economics) to the fore, and while it would be impossible for an author to please every reader, this book did not really please me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist, balancing his search for extraterrestrial life with parenting a special needs child after the recent death of his wife in a car accident. The eight-year-old boy, Robin, has had various diagnoses (from OCD and ADD to “something on the spectrum”), and with high anxiety, learning challenges, and violent outbursts against his bullies, Robin’s school is keen to see the boy medicated into submission. Theo resists the idea of “psychoactive drugs'' for his child, and when he remembers the work that a Neuroscientist on his university campus was doing with “Decoded Neurofeedback” — essentially mapping the brains of neurotypical subjects with an fMRI and then training those with psychiatric disorders to better respond to emotional cues by mimicking these “healthy” brains — Theo is able to get Robin enrolled in the program. As Robin responds incredibly well to this therapy (which is explained as more of an exercise in learning empathy than anything else), he grows from a little boy who is uncontrollably anxious about species-at-risk (Robin’s dead mother was an animal rights advocate and the boy honours her loss by attempting to take on her responsibilities) to becoming really Zen about ecology; his “everyone is in everything” message eventually making him a viral internet meme. But as the nightly news tolls warning after warning in the background — crops are failing, rivers are dying, some scary virus has made the jump from Texas cattle feedlots to humans — the unnamed President of the United States (he’s totally Trump) goes from outlawing public criticism of his administration, to attempting to rig the next election, to cutting the funding to both the deep space telescope program that is essential to Theo’s research and also the Neuroscientist’s “DecNef” program.

So far as the plot goes, that’s a strong storyline, but here’s what didn’t work for me: Theo’s research is interesting — having read “two thousand sci-fi paperbacks”, he has a good idea of the diversity of life that could be out in the universe, and he has assembled what his fellow astrobiologists refer to as the Byrne Allen Field Guide; the best guess for what kind of lifeforms could account for the spectographic readings for various distant planetary atmospheres. But what this means practically is that Theo tells Robin the story of an imaginary planet every night and it’s written as though the two of them are out exploring them — they discover together that planet Dvau is unstable for life because it doesn’t have a moon, the planet Pelagos is one huge ocean (and no fire means no technology for its inhabitants) — and a few of these might have been charming, but it happens ad nauseum. It bothered me that once Robin has his emotions under control through therapy, everyone reacts to him as though he’s the cutest, smartest, most interesting kid in the world; everyone remembers Theo’s dead wife the same way. And it really bothered me that Powers set his story in our recognisable world but wouldn’t name any of the real people in it: What is obviously Trump is an unnamed president, people participate in “COG” instead of TEDtalks, and the following character stands in for Greta Thunberg:

In one go, Inga Alder opened my son’s feedbackprimed mind to a truth I myself never quite grasped: the world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.

There’s some unfortunate timing for this book: It’s maybe hard to get worked up with Theo as he goes to Washington to fight for tens of billions of dollars for space exploration when the internet has spent the summer mocking today’s billionaires playing Rocketman when they could be using that money to make things better here on Earth (and even in the novel no one notices the irony of Theo lobbying for a fortune in government-funded telescopes while Robin sells his paintings at a Farmer’s Market for animal-focussed charities). But what bothered me the most: Early on, Theo and Robin listen to an audiobook of Flowers for Algernon, and as one might imagine, that’s a significant (verging on melodramatic) choice.

Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.

I can see this being Powers’ most popular novel, and this essential message deserves to be widely read and pondered (I did like when Robin sees a bunch of people looking at their phones in agitation and remarks that they seem to be rewiring their brains just like he does in therapy; we may all be training our responses to the devices we focus on and that may be the deeper meaning of the title even though the word “bewilderment” only occurs in the book in my opening quote). But while all of this might be important, the writing, to me, obscured the message.




2021 Man Booker Prize Nominees



The Shortlist (In my order of preference):

A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam

The Promise, Damon Galgut * The Winner

No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood

The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed

Bewilderment, Richard Powers

Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead

 

And the rest:

Second Place, Rachel Cusk

China Room, Sunjeev Sahota

An Island, Karen Jennings

The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson

Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford