american fiction Archives -

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

A bizarre tale of income inequality and spontaneous human combustion, NOTHING TO SEE HERE is so good it kind of depressed me.

It tells the story of a young girl, Lillian, from a poor background who works very hard to get a scholarship to a fancy boarding school:

I didn’t know the school was just some ribbon rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. . . . . I wasn’t destined for greatness, I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

This is in the first few pages. Already at this stage I had a sinking feeling in my stomach about how magically good this one was going to be.

At this school, she really, really likes her roommate. Here is part of one of their early conversations:

“. . I want to be so important that if I fuck up, I’ll never get punished.” She looked psychotic as she said this; I wanted to make out with her.
. . .“I think we’ll be friends,” she said. “I hope so, at least.”
“God,” I said, trying to keep my whole body from convulsing. “I hope so, too.”

Years later, when Lillian has lost her way and spends most of her time smoking pot in her mother’s attic, this friend asks her to nanny two children who have behaviour issues. The behaviour issues are they burst into flames when they are upset. The friend is married to a Senator, Jasper Roberts, and is fabulously wealthy. Here he is on TV:

Jasper was on C-SPAN, smiling, listening thoughtfully, nodding, so much nodding, like he understood every fucking thing that had ever happened in the entire world. They would cut to different senators who were on the committee and it was like a practical joke because they all looked exactly the same.

Part of the weird power of this book is the dreadful acceptance of how the world is; that is, that the rich are rich and will always be rich, and the poor are staying poor. Eventually Lillian comes to love the children, and there is a degree of redemption in this. Here is her fantasy of reunion with her mother that never happened:

. . . And she would hug me and it wouldn’t be weird. It would be like the way somebody hugs another person. And the entirety of my life, everything that had come before, would disappear. And things would be so much better.

In the end though it’s really a sort of bleak novel. Lillian find some sort of hopefulness, but it’s a narrow, conditional thing, in the middle of world that is totally unfair and will stay that way

THE SADDEST STORY by Ford Maddox Ford

THE GOOD SOLDIER tells the story of two unhappy marriages. The narrator, an American named John is married to Florence, a heart patient. Except, as it emerges, Florence does not really have a weak heart – she has made it up so as to avoid having sex with her husband. (Obviously, this being an Edwardian novel, it isn’t put quite like that) Florence then meets someone she does want to have sex with: Edward Ashburnham, an English soldier, who is unhappily married to a strict Catholic, Leonora.

There is all sorts of misery and melodrama, crowned by Florence killing herself. Edward then falls in love with his ward, the nineteen year old Nancy, who he has bought up since she was thirteen. He manages to restrain himself, which is according to Ford a big achievement. Nancy is sent away to India, and Edward kills himself in despair. I mean, honestly, get a grip. Nancy then learns of his death in a newspaper, and – get this – goes mad.

I don’t know if I’m unfeeling, or what, but I just found it all totally ridiculous from beginning to end. The novel’s begins: “This is the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” which suggests to me Ford led a fairly sheltered life, and should have spent more time reading the news.

This thought clearly occurred to the publishers too. Hilariously, the novel’s original title was THE SADDEST STORY, but once the First World War began the publishers wrote to him to insist the title be changed. After the first million people died at Verdun, a new definition of saddest clearly had to be contemplated.

AMERICAN PASTORAL by Philip Roth

I was fascinated and horrified in about equal measure by Philip Roth’s PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT which is, oddly, a bit like my current relationship with KOURTNEY AND KIM TAKE NEW YORK. I thus had high hopes for AMERICAN PASTORAL.

Where Roth’s early works, including PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, were largely comic novels about Jewish American life, AMERICAN PASTORAL is clearly a work by a mature, much celebrated writer, who knows he is a mature much celebrated writer, and feels a need to write a novel as such.

So it starts off with a man named Nathan, clearly a proxy for the author (this is already what I as an experienced reader know to be a DANGER SIGN), who is attending his high school reunion. There is lots of agonising over the passage of time, which I could have gotten into, but then there is also lots of philosophizing about his generation, wich I found almost unbearably irritating. He writes about it as if the experience of Americans are the experiences of everyone. As if he can define an era. It’s sort of revoltingly insular. The pages just dripped with self-importance. I couldn’t handle it.

Then we go into how the one guy at their high school, nicknamed the Swede, went on to have this perfect life, till his daughter blew up a post office in protest at the Vietnam war. So then it becomes sort of state of the nation novel. Then I gave up on it. Sorry Mr Roth.

THE JOY LUCK CLUB by Amy Tan

This is a famous best seller which I have been ignoring for years fearing it was going to be a bit of a let-me-milk-my-heritage cheesy Americana. It’s not quite that bad, but I’m afraid that yes, that’s the general area.

The story revolves around four Chinese immigrant women in San Francisco who meet to play Mah Jong. Their daughters join them. We flash back in time to the mothers’ lives in China so we can all be in touch with our heritage. Yes, it’s a cheese fest.

There are some interesting stories, and some sweet bits – here’s a description of a little boy who’s just been disciplined:

So Bing wandered down the beach, walking stiffly like an ousted emperor, picking up shards of rock and chunks of driftwood

But then there are some dire bits. Here’s some quality believable dialogue, which shows how people talk in China:

Thank you Little Queen. Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not you hope. How to laugh forever.

Eventually one of the daughters travels to China, and to her horror, her mother’s home of Guangzhou “looks like a major American city.” Worse yet, in her hotel “There’s a colour television with remote-control panels built into the lamp table between the twin beds.” What a betrayal. But then luckily she takes a shower: “The hotel has provided little packets of shampoo which upon opening, I discover is the consistency of colour of hoisin sauce. This is more like it, I think. This is China.”

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by JD Salinger

This famous American novel of adolescent angst follows the story of a young man named Holden Caufield.

Holden is on the verge of being expelled from his expensive boarding school when, on impulse, after a fist fight, he decides to leave the school a couple of days early. The novel follows that couple of days, during which Holden wanders around New York and struggles with his many and various issues.

Holden is a seriously unhappy young man, but the book is often very funny. Here he is describing one of his old teachers:

He started going into this nodding routine. You never saw anybody nod as much in your life as old Spencer did. You never knew if he was nodding a lot because he was thinking and all, or just because he was a nice old guy that didn’t know his ass from his elbow.

Or here’s school boy talk:

He was always telling us about a lot of creepy guys that go around having affairs with sheep, and guys that go around with girl’s pant sewed into the lining of their hats and all. And flits and Lesibans.

Or here’s a movie review:

All I can say is, don’t see it if you don’t want to puke all over yourself.

A model of the sort of journalistic excellence to which this blog aspires.

What is so difficult about Holden’s situation, and perhaps what has made it so pertinent to generations of young people in particular, is that Holden can’t say why he is so unhappy. His is an amorphous, nebulous alienation.

The closest he can get to describing his feelings is to calling everyone and everything ‘phony.’ Thus, for example, on the movie:

The part that got me was, there was this lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You’d have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn’t. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn’t take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddamn wolf You take somebody that cries their goddamn eye out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart. I’m not kidding.

He also finds it phony when people, to be polite, tell him the coffee’s almost ready. It’s also phony when ex-girfriends are polite to him. And ninety percent of what’s on television, also phony.

Undoubtedly, these things are phony. And Holden’s revolt against all that, I found admirable, and indeed logically coherent. But I think its a very young person’s revolt. When you get a little older, you maybe start to think that we all need to make concessions, and compromises, just to be able to keep on sliding by. Most people’s lives are sort of incoherent. ‘Marriage is compromise,’ an elderly Indian man at a wedding told me recently; and then he added, with awkward but total sincerity: ‘life is compromise.’

Poor Holden.

THE MAPLES STORIES by John Updike

THE MAPLES STORIES is an unusual format, being a string of short stories following one long marriage, of Mrs Maple to Mr Maple.

Updike is an immensely accomplished author. Try this wonderful description of a cabbage:

. . . the pure sphericity, the shy cellar odor, the cannonball heft. He chose, not the largest cabbage, but the roundest, the most ideal, and carried it naked in his hand to the checkout counter . . .

Note how he describes the cabbage as naked. I have never thought of any vegetable as naked, but these are the kind of lines along which Updike’s mind runs. He is well obsessed with sex, as we observed last year on reading RUN RABBIT RUN.

It is Saturday; the formless erotic suspense of the afternoon – the tennis games, the cartoon matinees – has passed.

The erotic suspense of cartoon matinees?

Anyway, the Maples have a very depressing suburban midcentury American marriage. They are constantly going to suburban cocktail parties and having affairs with their suburban friends. It is all very repressed and alcoholic and dramatic. I had to say: get a divorce. Or at least take make every third drink a soft one. Beautifully written, deeply felt, I just found it all very difficult to relate to.

O PIONEERS! by Willa Cather

Fourteen days, ten flights, four continents, seven countries. The beginning of January gave me lots of time to read, and also to regret poor scheduling choices.

Let’s have WHITE WHALE’S only annual airline awards!

BEST UNIFORM
Usually a cinch for KLM, I have to go with Indigo, a small Indian airline with these super cute retro outfits. The narrow belt is killing me.

MOST PAINFUL CHECK IN
Kenya Airways is a shoo-in here, with a two and half hour queue. Other airlines can only gape at this impressive level of incompetence. I certainly hope none can compete.

MOST LIPSTICK
Ethiopian Airlines usually has this one in the bag, hot pink being very big with their cabin crew. However, this time it also goes to Indigo! One hostess was wearing so much red lipstick I didn’t know if she wanted to eat me or nurse me. Revolting and yet titillating.

And now let us turn abruptly to Willa Cather’s masterpiece of nineteenth century American life, O PIONEERS! Some people will suggest this is Cather’s best work, but all this shows is what a real afflication crack smoking must be among readers of early American fiction. MY ANTONIA is much better.

This is not to say I did not enjoy O PIONEERS! I particularly like it’s musical theatre title. It is set in the early days of immigration to Nebraska, and follows one particularly bright young woman as she builds a healthy farm. She however is unlucky in love, with her brothers chasing her only suitor away.

Her suitor, poor man, leaves rural Nebraska for the big city of Chicago, hoping to hit the big time as an engraver. Sadly for him, photography is invented. Here’s his heartbreaking, and very modern, account of his time in the city:

Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to ay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.

YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY by Dave Eggers

I was excited about this book, because I love Dave Eggers. I love his first book, the more-or-less memoir, A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS, and his account of a real life in Sudan, WHAT IS THE WHAT. And oh, how I love his website, MCSWEENEYS. If you have never heard of that last, and if you have a dull desk job, you must most assuredly click on it. It has saved me from many a temping hellhole.

YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY is Eggers first novel, and god it shows. A good novel is in here somewhere, and is just screaming to be let out. The book tells the story of a pair of friends who decide to travel around the world, in just a week, personally disbursing a large sum of money to the poor. The reasons for this are mysterious, and I am afraid will remain so, as I gave up long, long, before the end.

There were some funny bits, as here, where they are struggling to get a connection from Senegal to Greenland.

I’d always assumed, vaguely, that the rest of the world was even better connected than the US, that passage between all countries outside of America was constant and easy – that all other nations were huddled together, trading information and commiserating, like smokers outside a building.

However, overall, this faux naif evocation of international travel was annoying, as were the attempts to ‘help’ the poor. The mystery about their reasons was at first engaging and then just irritating. In addition, it was all madly overwritten. Try this description of an ordinary glass of water:

The sunlight over the clerk’s shoulder was white and planed, and when he poured us glasses of water it was clearer than any water I’d ever seen. It was the unadulterated soul of the world.

THE ART OF FIELDING by Chad Harbach

I finished THE MARRIAGE PLOT in the middle of Tsavo National Park, the biggest natural preserve in Kenya. I was staying at a beautiful lodge, the view of which was 360, as you see.

You will note a distinct absence of book stores in that photograph. I almost panicked. Some people would say: relax! Enjoy the view! Etc! These people have reserves of inner peace quite unknown to me. Thank god for the internet. I looked at the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2011, and on seeing THE ART OF FIELDING described as Franzen-like, like a cat to catnip, downloaded that shit. The Kindle is, frankly, sweet.

Franzen-like is a bit strong, but THE ART OF FIELDING is certainly a big, contemporary American novel, and I enjoyed it. It tells the story of a young man called Henry who has an immense natural talent as a baseball player. He is given a scholarship to a university, Westish, and the novel follows the various characters he meets there: his gay roommate, his university’s president, the university president’s flaky daughter, etc etc. the stories are engaging and nicely observed.

Some of it I found very funny, possibly because it recreates an American college experience I remember vividly. Here is one Henry Schwartz on his back hair:

“I hearken back to a simpler time. A time when a hairy back meant something. . . . Warmth, survival. Evolutionary advantage. Back then, a man’s wife and children could burrow into his back hair and wait out the winter. Nymphs would braid it and praise it in song. God’s wrath waxed hot against the hairless tribes. Now all thats forgotten. But ill tell you one thing: when the next age comes, the Schwartzes will besitting pretty. Real pretty.

Occasionally, Westish is however like no college I’ve ever heard of. For example, everyone is totally not homophobic, and fine with the roomate who is an athlete being gay (?) and the chef of the college kitchen is really talented (?). Also, sadly, the novel did rather drown in baseball towards the end. Let me give you a taste of a typically incomprehensible paragraph:

Starblind walked, Sooty Kim bunted him to second, Henry roped a single past the pitcher’s ear. Schwartz crushed a moon shot into left-centre field.

Excellent, excellent, good to know. I skipped the entire climactic National Championship chapter, as it was all in this mysterious vein. Also mysterious, to me at least, was the male bonding and male catharsis that went with all this sporting effort:

He dented the metal, bloodied his knuckles. ”Anyone who thinks otherwise, anyone who’d rather go paly for McKinnon . . .Can clear the hell out. I’m winning a regional title, and then I’m winning a national championship. And guess what? You motherfuckers are along for the ride!”

The above is all written, as far as I can tell, in total seriousness, and all the characters take it that way. People need to work on being less stupid.

Fear not, readers. I did not of course spend all my time reading at Tsavo. I drank lots of wine and looked a the view, and went on lots of drives. I saw a hyena out hunting baby impala, and, one night, a tiny baby scrub hare. Jambo, little man, jambo, said our sweet, very Christian guide, quietly. I really only read THE ART OF FIELDING in bed.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT by Jeffrey Eugenides

This book was four hundred pages long, and I only wish it was four hundred pages longer. This is because it is fabulous.

It is a classic boy-meets-girl-who-then-meets-this-other-boy story. It is however also very much concerned with what it means to write such a ‘classic’ story.

Our girl is Madeleine, who is attending a good university in the US, where she is studying Victorian literature under a certain Professor Saunders.

In Professor Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later?

Eugenides attempts to answer this question by charting our contemporary Emma’s path through love and marriage. She has always been considered pretty and popular, and thus it is a shock to her when her first college boyfriend, Dabney, is better looking than she is:

Underneath this pleasure . . . was a fierce need to enfold Dabney and siphon off his strength and beauty. It was all very primitive and evolutionary and felt fantastic. The problem was that she hadn’t been able to allow herself to enjoy Dabney or even to exploit him a little, but had had to go and be a total girl about it and convince herself that she was in love with him. Madeleine required emotion, apparently. She disapproved of the idea of meaningless, extremely satisfying sex.

She meets a boy named Mitchell, who falls madly in love with her. One night she comes and sits on his bed, hoping he will make a move, and when he is too frightened too, is rather hurt, and decides to keep him at arm’s length. Some time later, after one very flirtatious night, she picks a fight with him.

She’d been on the verge of calling Mitchell to apologize when she’d received a letter from him, a highly detailed, cogently argued, psychologically astute, quietly hostile four-page letter, in which he called her a ‘cocktease’ and claimed that her behaviour that night had been ‘the erotic equivalent of bread and circus, with just the circus’

They stop speaking (poor Mitchell! We return to the night she sat on his bed multiple times, with multiple other endings) and Madeline falls in love with the mysterious Leonard. He has serious manic depression, but SPOILER ALERT! she marries him on one of his upswings, immediately after graduation, and then has to live with him through his downswings. He eventually leaves her. Mitchell returns on the scene and – you’ll just have to read the book to find out what happens then.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT is a wonderful, old-school, Victorian novel, which just happens to have been written by someone alive today. I found it very accurate both about awkward modern condom conversations and traditional old heartbreak.

What blows my mind in particular is how well Madeline is drawn – how female she feels – given that Eugenides is a man. It is wildly successful imagining of another gender. The book is also very funny. Here he is, for example, on Madeline’s mother, Phyllida:

Phyllida’s hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.

On bad dish soap in Paris:

European dish soap was either eco-friendly or tariff-protected

One more, which is painfully true:

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

Oh alright, since you are begging, one last little bit, that is not funny, but is I think just lovely, accomplished writing. This is when Madeline’s high school girlfriends are visiting her:

Then the Lawrenceville girls left and Madeleine became intelligent again, as lonely, misfortunate, and inward as a governess. She rejoined Mitchell on the porch, where the sun-warmed paperbacks and iced coffee awaited her.

That’s so good that for some reason it actually makes me feel kind of bad.