In one of the four letters contained in About Writing (Wesleyan UP), Samuel Delany describes contrasting narrative styles or streams, “writing that is more efficiently ornamented than the norm,” like that of Joyce, Proust, or Woolf, and “writing that is more efficiently stripped down than the norm,” like that of “Stein, Hemingway, Beckett, or Carver.” He marks yet another stream as the “experimental work” of “a Ron Silliman, a Lyn Hejinian, a Christian Bok, or a John Keene.” Farewell Navigator (Open City), Leni Zumas’s 2008 collection of enigmatic short stories, flows somewhere between the experimental and stripped down streams. The strongest stories, namely “Heart Sockets,” “Farewell Navigator,” “Waste No Time If This Method Fails,” and “Leopard Arms” use slight yet meaningful temporal time shifts, idiosyncratic syntax and grammar, and eccentric narration. And, in stories like “Heart Sockets” and “Leopard Arms,” the author also veers into more speculative and fabulist narrative approaches.

Most of these stories are compact studies of paralysis, in the tradition of Beckett and Ionesco. These ciphers don’t so much act or react, but are usually quietly or loudly inert. Insignificance, ennui, insensitivity, and impotence all figure largely here. Sherwood Anderson could have been describing Zumas’s characters as they, too, are “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.” In “Farewell Navigator,” one character envies a group of blind schoolchildren having teachers “to pull them. Nobody expects them to know where to go.” And in “Leopard Arms”—a story told from the perspective of a gargoyle—a father fears…

of doing nothing they’ll remember him for. Not a single footprint—film, book, record, madcap stunt—to prove he was here. Am I actually here? he sometimes mutters into his hand. Significant fears to face, I would say: but these two do a bang-up job of not. Their evasion strategy is deftly honed.

Such characters are unmoored in an unforgiving world, bereft of hope for renewal or redemption.

Naming and defining are powerful motifs throughout the stories. Zumas’s characters sometimes come to us by their nicknames–Black, Blue, the fish-stick girl, Blotilla, Squinch, and Johnnycake–but more often they are simply pronouns, or even fragments or sketches. There is a seductive element to how these narratives unfold: a slow accretion of details, together with the use of fragmentation, absence, and space, achieves a confluence of associations, connections, and even some kind of understanding. In a world without much explicit exposition, any tiny elaboration of a thought, image, or perspective becomes magnified: the reader is drawn in to fill in the blanks.

Leni Zumas / photo by Anne Hall (from www.lenizumas.com/)

In “Farewell Navigator,” a teen’s physical blindness seems an insurmountable barrier both to maintaining trust and intimacy with his family and to establishing his independence and own sense of identity. And yet it is a psychological, spiritual darkness that proves to be the family’s greatest obstacle. This is a story of creating a life out of darkness–physically yes, but also emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. His mother has other blind spots: the story explodes when he discovers her brazenly seducing one of his friends.

Language is celebrated and played with throughout the stories. Characters invent words, usually through pun-filled mash-ups, but in “Heart Sockets” and “Leopard Arms,” Zumas develops unusual syntactical strategies to fit these otherwordy, otherworldly tales. A theme that runs across most of the stories is the discovery of new words. For instance, in “Dragons May Be the Way Forward,” while a mother wallows within television’s wasteland, her daughter revels in language. She tests her mother’s comprehension and patience by reading out loud from the dictionary.

In “Farewell Navigator,” the son learns the word “grubble” from a poem in English class. It means groping or feeling around in the dark. And this is just what we find him doing: trying to make sense of his mother’s senselessness and insensitivity, processing his father’s obliviousness, his own impotence, and reaching toward his own future’s light. This new word, grubble, is used in the story’s most radiant passage where, after the son destroys his father’s jars of plum jelly, his father responds by putting his

fingers to my cheeks, grubbling for tears. His eyes are closed but I see on the red-streaked lids, as if they were maps, how much he doesn’t care if my bloody snot glops down on his shirt. I see how he will hold my shoulders hard and fast for as long as it takes me to stop crying and how I can, if I want, stay bandaged in the soft heat of him for hours, leaking brine, tethered by giant arms to the beat under his ribs till night comes and we’re afloat on dark water, shivering together, hearing the cold get brighter and the waves slower, so slow they turn from liquid to ice—hushed meadows of frozen lather—and we are surrounded.

In this story about blindness, color becomes a powerful element. The son names his parents Black and Blue after what he perceives to be their eye colors. His father, oblivious to his wife’s reasons for being interested in her son’s friend’s green eyes, says, “green is the color of the hair on the ground.” And when the son catches his mother in the act, he runs and hits “the light. Yellow pours onto Blue, who is naked except for her underpants.” The way colors enter into this story is very powerful as is the symbolic message encoded in the parents’ names.

James Agee

In About Writing, Delany also writes about how language delights, startles, inspires. First, he describes a friend turning to a sentence in Joyce’s Ulysses. “Listen to this,” his friend says:

“On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.” Now I love this sentence. But why is it better to write that than, say, “Sunlight fell on him through the leaves?” Or even to omit it altogether and get on with the story, our day in Dublin?

Delany, in his inimitable style, answers his own question by offering several possible reasons, including this one:

The vividness comes from a kind of surprise, the surprise of meeting a series of words that, one by one, at first seem to have nothing to do with the topic—striding under a tree on a June day—but words that, at a certain point, astonish us with their economy, accuracy, and playful vitality. Again, some of it will work on one reader, whereas others will only find it affected.

Reading Farewell Navigator, we find many instances of this “economy, accuracy, and playful vitality.” In “Dragons May Be the Way Forward,” the daughter looks at her mother, “Folds of skin accordion at her neck,” and despairs that “James Agee could have described her better—would have done justice to my mother, her loggishness, her ghouliness, her secret gentleness…” But what a wonderful image she herself has created to describe her mother’s sagging, withered flesh. And then, bemoaning her own “not-bad shade of blue eyes,” she thinks that Agee would “have piled adjectives upon this blue, lavished it with taut slippery words until it was unrecognizable as a color and had become—a feeling.” This reminds me again of Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio: writing about a difficult thing, he despairs that his descriptions are not enough, that his technique is faulty. He writes, that what he wrote “is crudely stated. It needs the poet there.” But we have one in Zumas–one by way of Hemingway, Lorrie Moore, and Amy Hempel, with detours through industrial blight, tours of strip malls and stripper bars, layovers in drug-addled adolescence, and twenty-, thirty-, and forty-something unplanned obsolescence.

While the daughter in “Dragons May Be the Way Forward” plays games with strange words like “moxa,” “umbelliferous,” “flocculence,” and also making up the occasional word, other characters play with imagined etymologies, homonyms, textural associations, and mash-ups. More wordplay can be found in “Waste No Time If This Method Fails.” There’s a funny moment when an overanxious medical student questions one of the hospital inmates about

how he likes it here.
He says, Where—in this cage? and the medical student says, So the hospital feels like a cage to you?
He says. It isn’t a simile. Points at the window: barred. The other window: barred.
He senses the medical student’s disappointment, so he throws him a little bone of crazy. Hearts of oak, he cries, did you go down alive into the homes of death?

When Zumas hints at where these stories might be set, what rings through my head is Neil Young singing, “Everybody seems to wonder what it’s like down here. I gotta get away from this day-to-day running around. Everybody knows this is nowhere.”

In “Thieves and Mapmakers,” Zumas writes about the “Town”:

Although it looked clean on the surface, it was like a river that’s quit running, whose water languishes on the rocks, collecting germs. Because nothing in the Town ever changed shape, hidden viruses were allowed to grow. The rooms of my house stank of sameness…It wasn’t city, it wasn’t country, it was a way station of gray streets and brown storefronts and paralyzed faces.

She describes a similar place in “The Everything Hater”: “a town so tiny we were able to count its stoplights on two hands. This town is small but not quaint or friendly.”

As we bid farewell to the navigator, let us greet this new, compelling voice. I look forward to reading more of Zumas’s incisive prose, especially the more speculative elements of her work. In particular, I’d be interested to see the alternate/parallel/post-apocalyptic worlds of “Heart Sockets” and “Leopard Arms” developed further, perhaps even into novel-length narratives.

Further Reading

Leni Zumas (photo from Open City's website)

- Shopping for a copy of Farewell Navigator? Order from your local indie bookseller.

- Read Zumas’s story “Dragons May Be the Way Forward” on Open City’s website; you can also read “The Everything Hater” at Five Chapters; “Leopard Arms” at Harp & Altar; “Heart Sockets” at Quarterly West; and “Handfasting” in The Journal.

- On the author’s website, read more fiction by Zumas: “To Greenland,” “An Account of My Death in the Mountains,” and “Diligent Blows.”

- To whet your appetite, here’s a sampling of striking images from Farewell Navigator:
From the title story:

“He hurts himself, sure—blood in ribbons on the cutting board, ropy splashes on the ramekins…”
“I want to answer but my mouth refuses. It makes a little fist on my face.”

From “The Everything Hater”:

“Mom’s face was a punched-out cake.”

“We walk in the glittery cold to the center of town, where ribbons festoon the street lamps and plowed snow hardens on the curbs.”

From “Heart Sockets”:

“His face blown perfect like blue glass animals that cost a thousand dollars to make…”

“I have a talented mind for matching one feeling to another. A caught scarf on the bus seatback, for instance, is the hand on your neck of someone who knows you but when you turn around, nobody’s there.”

“I am leaking heavy onto my shirt, two sopping moons, the mild night a cold sleeve between wet skin and milk-drenched cotton.”

From “Thieves and Mapmakers”:

“Yet he possessed a quality more attractive—to me—than handsomeness: it was his sheer haggardness, the battered-ship’s hull look he wore, as if a lifetime of senseless routines had etched gulleys in his cheeks.”

“All four boys, I noticed, were twitching constantly, glancing around with fretful eyes. Their agitation made me feel closer to them. Their translucent skin, the dried sputum at the corners of their mouths, and the way their shrunken muscles hung as if ready to come off the bone meant they were nothing like the normal people I’d grown up with.”

“Her hair, a dimpled egg, was studded with tiny black bristles.”

“When the sun was up and burning and the guests had cleared away, we settled down on the carpets of the parlor. I dreamed of the Town, of its odors: the first cold day in fall, when all the lingering frowses of heat have left the air and the newly emptied chill is flecked with wood smoke, soft and bitter, the smell of anticipation; and springtime—bright, forgiving air with the hint of unannounced visitors, impending journeys. Of course no visitors ever showed and no journeys were ever taken and the smell would soon retreat, replaced by a dingy warmth. This was why the Town disappointed me so badly: it could never deliver on the promise of its scents.”

From “Waste No Time if This Method Fails”:

“He likes to watch salt dry in bronchial patterns.”

“…but she blinked in a way that reminded him of ocean arachnids who live so many fathoms down their eyes have not reason to grow.”

Stanger-Ross conceives her lonely seamstress masterfully and completely, down to the embarrassment Sima feels when caught staring at Timna’s perfect breasts. As Sima’s obsession with Timna’s lively presence in her life grows, so does the pathos of her longing. A rekindled yearning for motherhood carries Sima through emotions akin to romantic love: fascination, passion, jealousy and revelation. For Sima, Timna is the daughter she wished for, and the fulfillment of dreams she thought died long ago. When Timna comes to work at Sima’s Undergarments for Women, those dreams flourish anew. Sima plans conversations, jokes to tell, all the while storing up Timna’s smiles and intimacies like talismans against unhappiness. Early in Timna’s tenure at the shop, Sima cooks an elaborate Rosh Hashanah meal, and Lev teases her that she cooked for an army. Sima “pressed her nail into her hand to try to check her eagerness and hoped that, with the table so covered in food, it did not look bizarre, desperate.” The truth is, Sima is desperate, but it would be a challenge to find a human being anywhere who had not been there himself.

Ilana Stanger-Ross

One of the many pleasures of Sima’s Undergarments for Women is its intimate scope. In just over 300 pages, Stanger-Ross unfurls Sima’s entire adult life, from newlywed to matron of a successful underwear shop that provides a haven for the women and girls of Boro Park, a social hub of the community. There is boisterous Connie, Sima’s best friend since childhood, who cannot fathom the depth of her friend’s sadness at not being able to conceive. Connie’s husband Art practices law, and harbors secrets of his own. The bras, too, are described in loving detail: “a deep green bra with leaf-embroidered straps and an ivory tulle demi-cup popular with brides” which against Timna’s skin becomes “a lizard asleep on desert sand.” Sima is a master, and passages where she fits clients, or intuits their desires before they know them, hold all the delight of watching an artist at work. Much of the story takes place in the little basement shop, and one sees how rich and complex Sima’s life has been, in spite of her hidden grief.

Boro Park, Brooklyn (2007) / photo by MASCURAK, flickr cc

Timna becomes not only the object of Sima’s affection, but a lens that turns Sima inward, uncovering a secret that she’s concealed from everyone around her, even Lev. A lifetime of keeping her own counsel has stoked Sima’s fear of being left by those she loves. Looking at Timna, Sima longs to give advice: “Let me take care of you, she wanted to say, let me be there for you. The words burned the back of her throat, but she did not let them out.” The contrast between youth and age, between Timna’s life ahead of her, and Sima trundling up the stairs to Lev in his undershirt is one of the underpinnings of the novel. Sima marvels at this difference while still a young woman, riding the train back from another disheartening doctor’s appointment:

How strange she though, as she scanned the subway car, that each one here had once been cooed over, doted on: white ribbons carefully tied beneath their soft chins, scallop-trimmed cotton hats centered on wispy-haired scalps. Each had been a baby like the one she coveted, now grown to mediocrity: this one a mole on her chin with the obligatory curl jutting from it; another a pale belly not quite concealed by a gray oil-stained tee.

Sure, things fall apart, but as Tennyson’s Ulysses says, “something ere the end,/ Some work of noble note, may yet be done”. Sima may not fulfill all of her dreams through Timna, but the presence of the girl reminds the old woman what it is to dream, and what it feels like to tell the truth. Sima contemplates revealing her secret as a kind of warning to headstrong Timna, but fear constrains her.

As terrible as it was to admit her own flawed history, it would be worse still to observe its effect: the disbelief with which the long-ago stories of the old were inevitably met, the pain of watching Timna realize, so you were young once, too.

Sima may not be able to confess all to Timna, but through her love for this young woman, she may yet forgive herself and rebuild her own family.

Extras

Ilana Stanger-Ross signs copies of Sima / photo from Penguin Group (Canada) on flickr

- You can read an excerpt from Sima’s Undergarments for Women via the website She Knows.

- Listen to a podcast interview with Ilana Stanger-Ross at Single Women Rule.

- At the author’s website, read a Q&A with Ilana Stanger-Ross, as well as her blog on Judaism, writing, bras, midwifery, and more.

- View a slideshow of some of the inhabitants of Boro (Borough) Park, Brooklyn, where Sima’s story is set, on the New York Times website.

- Visit Indiebound to order Sima’s Undergarments for Women from any independent bookstore–or locate a local shop where you can pick up a copy.

- Learn more about indie publisher Overlook Press, who published the novel in hardcover. The paperback edition is forthcoming this June from Penguin.

Like a well-written song, the novel evokes a powerful atmosphere. Foster’s vivid descriptions bring the charming town of Avening, a magical haven in the Pacific Northwest, to life. And the story captures our attention from the first note, when we meet the title character. Autumn is a member of the Jaen, “an ancient order of women who dedicate their lives to the service of others.” For years, she has guided the people of Avening, a town whose steady undercurrent of magic has attracted a unique citizenry. It is easy to like the community’s quirky denizens, who, for all their magical leanings, struggle with issues common to us all: love, friendship, marriage, family, sickness, death. In the first chapter, Autumn learns she is being reassigned. She must leave Avening–but first she must choose her successor from a list of townswomen provided by the oracle of the Jaen.

Amy S. Foster / photo from http://amysfoster.com

The subsequent chapters are presented as stories told from the points of view of many women on Autumn’s list. We meet Ellie Penhaligan, an insecure young woman who comes down with an unusual affliction on the night of the winter solstice; Piper, a mother battling cancer; Ana, a married woman who has fallen in love with another man; among others. If the novel has a flaw, it’s that some characters don’t get nearly enough page time. Several early chapters feel almost entirely self-contained–like short stories–and the characters who inhabited them felt fully realized; but in later chapters, the stories were so complex that I wished I could have read entire books devoted to their characters, entire books describing their situations and magical abilities. One of the central characters is hardly described at all, which leaves the conclusion of the tale feeling weaker than it might have been. However, such restraint may have been intentional on Foster’s part: according to her website, this book is just the first installment in the Jaen Saga.

When Autumn Leaves is a strong and exciting first novel, and readers will close its cover looking forward to further adventures of the magical women of Avening.

Extras

- For readers curious to compare the author’s vision of the town with their own imaginings, Foster has laid out a map of Avening’s main street on her website.

- Here are some recent interviews with Foster: Canada AM Top Picks (video); 680 News Radio (audio); AM Talk 1410 (audio).

- If you’re shopping for a copy of this novel, remember your local indie bookstore.

- Writer-knitters, check out Amy S. Foster’s craft blog, Amy’s Desk.

When we read novels, particularly from such a national icon as Pamuk, it’s common to expect the country and culture to express their conflict in the individual characters. Kemal, while embodied–and embroiled–within the double standards and hypocrisies of a semi-Westernized Turkey, is engaging enough to avoid the status of a ’70s-era Turkish Everyman. There’s something eccentric about him from the beginning: even while speaking of his youth, he has the quality of an old man who wants to show you the odds and ends he carries in his pockets. Kemal may just be the moodiest, most depressed young playboy in all of Istanbul’s ruling class.

Given the affluence he’s born into, it’s fitting that Kemal finds consolation in the material; from the very beginning, his life is choked with things. From the spare apartment, home to his affair with the younger Füsun, and used by Kemal’s mother as a storage unit, to Kemal’s opulent engagement party at the Istanbul Hilton, to the designer boutiques–real and counterfeit–the characters define themselves through what they wear, what they drink, and what they scorn. Full of skirts and earrings and champagne and scent, the book is a veritable bazaar of women and their possessions. The only exhaustible commodity seems to be virginity, and Kemal has disburdened two women of that weighty possession: on one hand, his fiancee, Sibel’s, and on the other, eighteen-year-old Füsun’s.

Orhan Pamuk / Photo from http://www.orhanpamuk.net/ Iletisim Publishing

Kemal escalates the affair while drifting along in his public obligations toward Sibel, his approved match and his equal in social stature. At this point in Turkish history, upper-class women can call themselves “modern” for sleeping with their fiances once the men have been sufficiently cornered into making a public engagement. Sibel has been openly “living together” with Kemal, and he’s all but bought the cow when his affair with his distant relation Füsun begins. Füsun gives up her virginity to him with little fanfare, so much so that Kemal is incredulous that she was a virgin at all. Her enjoyment of their shared sexuality is unselfconscious and full-bodied but, hidden as their affair is, Kemal has no means or intention of repaying her “gift” to him. The socially endorsed Sibel, like a Western woman, sleeps with him out of love; Füsun is “modern and courageous,” a daredevil whom he promises nothing but the adventure of the affair.

We’re never quite sure what it is about Füsun that makes her so unforgettable–yes, she’s young and beautiful, but she flatters aging socialites all day at the Sanzelize boutique, fails her university entrance exams, and ultimately becomes a chain-smoking, though still beautiful, housewife. A potential answer might be found in an anecdote Kemal shares with us about himself as a youth with his distant cousin Füsun, twelve years younger, when they go out together, by chance, on an errand. They watch a lamb being sacrificed, and Kemal engages his driver in a discussion of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. On the way back, the three find their discussion interrupted by a grisly car accident. Amid the blood and entrails of this scene, perhaps we are to understand that “little Füsun” internalized something of sacrifice and its workings: the yielding of something dear to a beloved, simply because he or she wishes it.

In tracing Füsun from her earliest appearance as a bump on her seamstress mother’s stomach, Kemal seems almost to be reproaching himself for the faint imprint she has had on his life to date. Once their affair begins, he focuses on her to the exclusion of almost all else, even at his own engagement party. Füsun eventually gives up and goes missing and, deprived of his honest, uncomplicated love, Kemal falls into a depression and loses Sibel and, ultimately, many of his friends. Bereft of its object, his obsession intensifies, and Kemal recedes from his visible, mappable life in Nisantasi to track Füsun, with some difficulty, to her family’s ramshackle, serpentine street in Çukurcuma.

Here, we are reminded of another anecdote: this time Kemal’s father’s. Having described his very young, very beautiful mistress, the older man describes how he “kept her dangling for years” only to find, after she broke off the affair, that she had died of cancer. He presents Kemal with a pair of pearl earrings that he had intended to give his mistress, urging him to give them to Sibel. He presents them to Füsun instead, who refuses them. In this action, we see her unknowing attempt to reject the fate of the kept woman before her. Throughout the novel, there are several such anecdotes of “kept” women: from Belkis, the notorious mistress-to-the-wealthy who dies alone, to the Turkish film stars who are “ruined” in the course of their work. We aren’t privy to much of Füsun’s inner life, but these stories must have been very much a part of her consciousness.

As Çukurcuma sweeps like a beaded curtain over his old life, Kemal finds that the real business of living occurs far from Istanbul’s landmarks and brand name-stamped thoroughfares. From Füsun’s family, he learns the homely pleasure of “sitting together” after dinner, allowing the television to wash over them and bond them with its flickering glow. Ironically, as Kemal retreats from the glitzy materialism of his own class, he becomes ever more attached to objects embodying the guileless love he shared with Füsun. From under her parents’–and philistine husband’s–noses, he filches lipstick kisses on tissues, almanac pages, hairpins, and cigarette butts, all with the fanaticism of the fetishist or frotteur.

When rekindling the affair becomes impossible, Kemal travels to Paris, which he had dreamed of visiting with Füsun. He loses himself “not in the Louvre or the Beaubourg, or the other crowded, ostentatious museums of that ilk,” but in the small, eclectic museums off the beaten path, on streets similar, perhaps, to the ones he traveled to get to Füsun’s family home. Perhaps finding a quiet community in the obsessions of other collectors, he visits private museums throughout the world, and is inspired to create his own monument to the love he shared with Füsun. As he supplements his collection with the objects that surrounded the brief era of their affair, he meets ever-more-introverted collectors devoted slavishly to one object or another. It is a testament to the souls of objects how ticket stubs, tin cans, restaurant menus, and ad circulars can resurrect for Kemal this lost era. Items that Kemal never noticed during the affair take on a deep significance for composing the background of his weeks of happiness–and for their encoding of the cultural referents that contained and shaped the affair itself. What better object than a Meltem soda ad featuring the German model Inge to illustrate Turkey’s attitude toward its own women?

Füsun is not a feminist icon, but she is a casualty of the Turkish femininity of her era. Seeking the fabled “loose women” who sleep with men for fun, Kemal’s friends visit brothels, while lower-class scoundrels cruise the streets harassing young girls. Some married upper-class men lose respect for their wives for “giving in” during the engagement. Kemal himself, presented with two deflowered women, chooses the one to whom he is publicly obligated and spends a lifetime regretting his choice. Ironically, his “Museum of Innocence” is a monument to his own culpability: the objects, so copious in number and so meticulously arranged, don’t add up to what he has lost through his own passivity.

More linear than Pamuk’s novels My Name Is Red or Snow, The Museum of Innocence is more personal, as well as more lyrical. Perhaps because the plot engages in fewer gymnastics, the characters’ feelings of entrapment and loss are more potent. Though the sheer amount of research that must have gone into a book of this depth deserves respect in itself, this volume is not merely interesting as a relic of a bygone Turkey. In fact, it is Pamuk’s historic and cultural specificity that demonstrates to us that, whatever our historical moment, there will always be circumstances that make one choice easier than another. Just as Kemal both follows the path of least resistance in proceeding with his engagement to Sibel while continuing his affair with Füsun, we resent the forked path, sometimes denying that any action is necessary at all.

Despite the sea of botched affairs and ruined women, Pamuk displays no contempt for his subjects. It’s human, after all, to want to preserve our options for as long as possible: perhaps Kemal imagined a future where Füsun would somehow content herself with meeting him on the sly while he went through the motions in his marriage to Sibel. For as long as both possibilities existed, Kemal remained committed to inertia, more than to either woman. Like Schrodinger’s cat, he hoped to keep all of his potential futures alive for as long as he could maintain his uncertainty. We can’t admire Kemal for choosing inertia over action, but we can relate: who isn’t seduced by the untouched, open-ended future? Who wants to open the box and find that the cat is dead?

Extras

- Via UC Television/YouTube, An Evening with Orhan Pamuk at UC-Santa Barbara:

- At BarnesandNoble.com, read an excerpt from The Museum of Innocence. Here’s another excerpt via Magnificent Octopus.

- If you’re shopping for a copy of The Museum of Innocence, click here to buy from your favorite indie bookstore.

- In 2006, Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Learn more about his other books at Pamuk’s website, which also features a gallery of terrific author photos and links to many interviews with him and reviews of his work.

- The Museum of Innocence was translated into English by Maureen Freely, whose own impressive debut novel, Enlightenment, was previously reviewed by Natalie on FWR. In this Washington Post article and audio interview, Freely discusses the art of translating and interpreting Pamuk’s fiction.

“Now he was the one smiling. He knew they were all around the table, he could feel their eyes on him—The One With The Flat Face, The One With The Big Ones, The One With The Worried Face, The Gringo With The Ugly Finger, The One With The White Pants, The One With The Net On His Head—staring at him and waiting for his next move.”

The One Who Wants To Leave

There is so much more to Don Fidencio Rosales, the ninety-one year-old protagonist of Oscar Casares’s comedic and heartening first novel, Amigoland (Little, Brown 2009), than simply his age. First and foremost, there’s his obsessive fascination with his family’s tragic past. As he sits in his nursing home, Don Fidencio often recounts to himself the mythic tale of how his grandfather had “come to this country with the Indians. Yes, real Indians! Indians on horses! Indians with bows and arrows!” A daydreamer when it comes to stories from his family’s past, Don Fidencio is also keen about the world of the present, even as his memory fails him and his body slows down. He maintains a tough attitude, taking many of aging’s indignities in stride. He’s also very much alive, the kind of guy who will let you know if you’re beating around the bush and demand you say it to him straight.

But in the interest of fairness to Oscar Casares’s impressive and comedic characterizations, it must also be said that Don Fidencio is a grump, a first-rate crank, doggedly insistent when it comes to having things done his way. Bad behavior at Amigoland, the nursing home in which he resides in Brownsville, Texas—also the site of the short stories in Casares’s debut collection, Brownsville—has given Don Fidencio something of an iconoclast’s reputation. Among the measures of resistance he has tried: smoking cigarettes, walking without his walker, skipping lunch, and refusing the compulsory bib during dinner. Casares spends much time early on in the novel creating the social milieu of Amigoland, but he captures its essence vividly.

Casares’s novel also follows the story of Don Celestino, Don Fidencio’s estranged younger brother, who lives close to the border in Brownsville as well. Don Celestino, a retired hairstylist, is currently dating his housekeeper–the virtuous, family-oriented divorcee, Socorro. Following Socorro’s urgings, the two brothers soon reunite and, over time, re-form a bond that eventually culminates in Don Celestino helping Don Fidencio break free from Amigoland’s throttlehold. What follows is a fast-paced, exciting road-trip novel involving the two brothers and the force that brought them together, Socorro. Their journey serves as a kind of self-examination for each character; and also reminds us of the evanescence of family stories, considering that the Rosales family mythologies will die with these two brothers.

Casares’s skillful narration, unified in its shifting attention between each character, tells the tale of growth for each of the two brothers, and it does so without overstating the tragedy or comedy inherent in their lives. Casares seems very much at home in the world of his characters, melding the past with the subdued “Odd Couple” act on the road. The portrait of the brothers acts as a nice work in contrasts: on one hand, we have the aging postman, worried about getting the facts of history right, and on the other, his brother the hairstylist, concerned with appearances and being well liked. The brothers are also markedly different in their attitudes toward the story of their grandfather’s abduction by a band of Native Americans. Don Celestino believes that the incident rings of historical myth, while Don Fidencio seeks in the story a key to understanding himself. The family stories he carries close to his belt—and the idea of a past he shares with others—possess the power to give him salvation from the lonesomeness that ails him. Don Fidencio’s departure from Amigoland, the place where, ironically, he had been marooned without a friend in the world, forces him to play an active part in continually unfolding history. Overall, Casares keeps this thread of the novel from being too showy or dry by making the story a layered one that comes back in fragments to Don Fidencio.

The journey these characters take is, for the most part, not a tragic one. But tragedy is not the name of this game: Casares constructs an uplifting tale rather than one that is desperately melancholic. We do get glimpses and snapshots of little indignities, but the author protects Don Fidencio from appearing in a starkly pathetic light to the reader. One is left with the feeling that Casares could have upped the gravitas factor while still retaining the novel’s atmosphere. The novel also could have afforded to build even more on its earnest interweaving of past, present, and future by delving further into the brothers’ lives before the journey, in order to see the trip as true deliverance, one that rescues them both from their former lives.

Oscar Casares / photograph by Marsha Miller

Don Fidencio’s grievances run deeper than the shame he feels about living in the nursing home. His greatest fear is not a fear of death, but rather a fear of dying in Amigoland. Don Fidencio longs for a chance to uncover more of the mystery behind his grandfather’s tales, which have begun to lose their firm place in his memory. The names of all of the folks at Amigoland have also left Don Fidencio, who has adapted by developing nicknames based on people’s most repetitive acts or particularly distinguishing characteristics. Part memory aid, part angst-ridden decisiveness, and part survival technique, all people appear to Don Fidencio as some version of “The one with…” For instance, we meet an Amigoland resident who continually talks about his days working for Pan Am (“The Gringo With The Ugly Finger”) and another resident who remains too sick to leave his room (“The One Who Cries Like A Dying Calf”).

Casares’s tremendous talent and attention toward characterization and action prevent this novel from becoming a solemn meditation on mortality. Despite what one may expect from its initial scenes, the book is not solely about decay; in fact, its plot follows a pattern more clearly reflected in the bildungsroman. The institutional life of the nursing home eventually, and almost miraculously, forces Don Fidencio back into the world again. As in a classic coming-of-age tale, this character sets off on a journey that tests his own beliefs and resiliencies. In the concluding chapters of Amigoland, Don Fidencio finds a new place in society. It’s an ending that, much like the rest of the novel, is satisfying–told with feeling and composure.

Extras

- Read excerpts from Amigoland on the author’s website and as first published in Texas Monthly. Here (via Mostly Fiction) is an excerpt from Brownsville, Casares’s debut story collection. If you’re shopping for either book, consider ordering from your favorite independent bookstore.

- On the author’s website, you can read two of his essays: “In the Year 1974″ and “Ready for some Futbol?”

- Here are some interviews with Casares: in SF Gate (2009); Latino Books Examiner (2009); at Art&Seek on Think TV (video); and on Bookslut (2003).

- This news profile (via YouTube) of the author aired last summer:

In “Come Rain or Come Shine,” the second story in Nocturnes, we meet Raymond, a connoisseur of American Broadway tunes whose long-term ‘friends’ think that, except for his impeccable taste in music, he’s a colossal loser. “We were especially pleased,” Raymond says of the less-than-devoted Emily, “when we found a recording—like Ray Charles singing ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’—where the words themselves were happy, but the interpretation was pure heartbreak.” When Raymond discovers Emily’s disdain, his reaction is small–but its consequences are extravagant! His attempts to pin his mistake on an errant dog let loose in Charlie and Emily’s apartment hints at authorial field research:

So I got down on all fours, and lowering my head towards the…magazine, sank my teeth into the pages. The taste was perfumy, and not at all unpleasant…The ideal technique, I began to gather, was not unlike the one needed in those fairground games where you try to bite apples bobbing in water…a light, chewing motion…would cause the pages to ruffle and crease nicely.

Did Ishiguro try this out on the Times Literary Supplement?

The hilarity-cum-slapstick of “Come Rain or Come Shine” and of the title story makes the underlying sorrow in each all the more poignant. “Nocturne” chronicles the madcap, nighttime spree of two mummy-bandaged plastic surgery patients through a Beverly Hills hotel. As they attempt to return a stolen music award, tension mounts over their unequal talent as performers–and the industry’s self-congratulating tendency to ignore truly gifted musicians. Ishiguro’s humor gives exuberant context to a theme that feels classically his: in the interests of career advancement, both performers have chosen to obliterate their original faces. (Not to mention, it’s a cause for celebration when a writer of haute-literary fiction has the chutzpah to deliver a line like “Those cops may not have thought to look inside the turkey.”)

Throughout these five stories, Ishiguro explores variations on temptations performers face: to deny their own humanity for the sake of art–and in “Crooner,” “Malvern Hills,” and “Nocturne,” for the sake of career advancement. Yet Nocturnes is no primer on the shallowness of fame. The final story, “Cellists,” complicates the question by taking it away from marketing and into the churchlike arena of High Art. “Cellists” will resonate with readers familiar with Ishiguro’s ability to highlight the creepy, almost invisible light surrounding apparently mundane things and people. His Eloise McCormack would be right at home in the clone-breeding England of Never Let Me Go. Her weird abdication of music is the conceptual extension of the soul-destroying action Tony Gardner takes in an effort to revive his fading career in “Crooner,” the first tale in the collection.

Music is an art of immersion. Like water–which can be experienced only through drinking it or actually getting wet–the suggestion of music ripples only in the mind. Writing (or reading) about music puts us outside the place where we experience it, in the same way that a watcher of rivers stands on the shore. Ishiguro, like a consummate outsider, lures his first-person narrators onto a deceptively quiet bank, the better to confront them with the whirlpool at the center of each story. Whether it’s the journeyman guitar player of “Crooner” who must pass as Italian; the classically-trained but commercially-resigned saxophonist of “Cellists,” who tells the story of another musician’s artistic yearnings; or the young singer-songwriter in “Malvern Hills,” who remains devoted to his craft, each narrator is an outsider who happens upon the story’s central drama.

In deceptively ordinary prose, Ishiguro explores the lagoons of musical obsession. In “Malvern Hills,” the repressed drama plays out between a husband and wife team whose long musical career has been predicated on ignoring its tragic personal cost. Ishiguro does not indicate whether the self-absorbed, youthful narrator of this story will ever come to recognize the couple’s towering denial, a theme that the writer explored to devastating effect in his Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day. In “Cellists,” an unnamed saxophonist-for-hire tells the story of the classically trained but impoverished cellist Tibor, torn between “playing the Godfather theme in squares and cafes” of Europe, and the musical “’garden I’d not yet entered,’” a vision of the same tantalizingly out-of-reach “transport” that has forced his surreal mentor, Eloise McCormack, into perpetual silence.

Hovering over all these stories is the awareness of encroaching night, of aging and impermanence. At the end of “Cellists” a disturbing question remains: Does music’s reach for immortality justify every sacrifice?

Extras

- Browse and read an excerpt from Nocturnes on Random House’s website.

- If you’re shopping for a copy of this collection, order from your favorite indie bookstore.

-Via The Guardian, watch the short film by George Wu that was inspired by Nocturnes.

- Here are some interviews with Ishiguro: with The Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead in 2009; in The Paris Review in 2008; with Bookbrowse in 2005; with NPR in 2005; with January Magazine in 2000; with Don Swaim of Wired for Books in 1990.

- Listen to Ray Charles sing “Come Rain or Come Shine”:

It’s no spoiler to confess that Winterson throws her lot in with another famous Brit, Captain Cook himself, who is quoted in the book’s central section: “[mankind] wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.”

Destroy himself mankind certainly does in Winterson’s trinity of thematically linked eco-parables, each of which is comprised of replicated central characters and strikingly similar plots points. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—these overlaps, each represents its own distinct facet of dystopia. Likewise, the book reads more like a novel than, say, a collection of novellas due to the fact that each of the sections inform one another, albeit across huge swathes of history. As a whole, the novel spans a few thousand years, orbiting humanity’s endless search for a second chance. It also grapples with sacrifice, particularly the sacrifices an individual might be prepared to make for both her lover and her ideals.

The first section, set a long, long time ago in an alternate world, pits Billie, the lesbian protagonist, against increasingly hostile government martinets who’ve issued her so many trumped-up parking tickets that she’s about to lose her treasured farm, which serves as a biological “message in a bottle” on the edge of an increasingly over-processed, monopolized society. The farm is Billie’s personal protest against a society’s treatment of their own planet—they’ve “fucked it to death and kicked it when it wouldn’t get up.”

Jeanette Winterson. Photo Credit: The Author's Website

And because of this environmental mess that the pesky humans have made of their home, they need to find a new one. The next best option seems to be Planet Blue, a lush world promising a brave new start. The catch: inhospitable dinosaurs. Sexy Robo Sapien Spike (who will become Billie’s lover) has just conducted a reconnaissance mission there, and now is starting to show curiosity about what it means to be human, and to have feelings. But that’s not really in her programming. And, in fact, she’s slated to have her data extracted and her memory wiped—the Robo Sapien equivalent of death. Her last request: to be interviewed by Billie. Billie is her chance to “be human.” Billie is her chance to love.

And none too soon. Billie herself is under government pressure to be less rebellious, to give up her treasured bio-farm, and to stop causing trouble by being a little too curious and thoughtful and odd. She’s also had her share of difficulties finding the right person to love—it’s hard enough for her just to hang onto her principles. The solution—half planned on the fly and half thrust upon them by the government—involves a return to Planet Blue, carrying Spike along as informant, on a last-ditch rescue effort to save themselves and prep the planet for occupation by getting rid of all those dinosaurs.  En-route, drifting through space, Billie begins to hash out the theory that humanity may just be doomed to repeat itself, burning through entire worlds, loves, and lives, taking second chances for granted. But on the other hand, she muses, “we’re alive, we’re the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.”

This philosophical tension—whether history is a march towards suicide or a record of developmental triumph—plays out as Billie and Spike attempt to weather the harrowing apocalypse they bring to Planet Blue after they touch down in a possibly misguided attempt to force an asteroid to crash into the planet, creating a dust storm to choke the dinosaurs. It all quickly goes awry though, and the planet slides into a dark, deadly ice age.

Hunkered in an ice cave as blood and bionics wind down, Billie marvels, ‘I know that it is impossible to accept one’s own death before it happens, but standing here, it seemed meaningless—not that I should die but that it should matter to me.’ Spike answers, in one their last dialogues:

‘But you’ll hold on to life till the very last second, because life never believes it will end.’
‘Self-delusion, I suppose.’
‘Or perhaps the truth. This is one state—there will be another.’

Reinforcing that theory, different iterations of the Spike/Billie duo crop up several more times in the other sections–once as strained lovers watching horrific forestry practices pit Eastern Islanders against one another, and once more as more pared-down versions of their former selves, inhabiting a future planet sadly lacking Planet Blue’s promise. There doesn’t seem to be a “correct” interpretation of who Billie and Spike really are—merely different versions playing in the same basic story of destruction. There is no core “truth,” in other words, about these characters, more the impression these archetypes symbolize Winterson’s greater concerns (and her lesser concern regarding plot and specifics.)

Part of the book’s delight lies in unraveling the linkages between the three sections, and the way they juggle the philosophical concerns that seem to captivate Winterson. Namely: Is the continuation of life inevitable, or must one cling to the only moments one has? How much can love and personal sacrifice achieve? Are we doomed to be a wasteful, greedy species undermining the ground we live on, or will we take heed in time?

The different iterations of Billie and Spike are like kaleidoscope fragments that let Winterson constantly shift her focus. Each of the three stories overlap a little—some readers will most likely enjoy unraveling the referential threads, though other readers may find themselves feeling as though they are re-reading certain sections. It pays off to watch the details here, though Winterson paints the main concerns with a broad brush.

The main questions at hand seem to be whether or not we continue our consciousnesses past our own destruction, whether we survive ourselves, and if love is perhaps a way of doing so. In other words, nothing less than the main concerns of most weighty literature.

But Winterson has given herself a lot to tackle. The strategy of encapsulating versions of “the same” story in three different sections shows a true Wintersonian love of eschewing conventional story-telling. However, it also runs certain risks. The brevity allows little space for character development, or anything more than clipped, often explanatory dialogue that can seem somewhat wooden. And the plot is so twisted and compressed that it’s forced to rely on coincidences that creak. Perhaps it’s a toss-up, setting the stage for debate on form versus function.

I’m reminded of another Brit, C.S. Lewis, who tackled many of the same themes in his own science fiction trilogy. Parallels arise in the second book, Perelandra, in which the protagonist, Ransom, visits Venus in a sort of recreation of the Eden story. Here, Ransom, as Adam, is coming from an older, corrupted world, trying to explain to Venus’s Eve what death truly means, and what choices lie in front of her: “You could never understand, Lady… in our world not all events are pleasing or welcome. There may be such a thing that you would cut off both your arms and your legs to prevent it happening—and yet it happens with us.”

It is Ransom’s task to stop his rival, another space-traveler, from tempting Venus’s Lady to compromise herself ideologically. When the weight of this duty becomes apparent to Ransom, it also reveals innumerable possibilities—it would be possible, he concludes, for the Garden of Eden to have unspooled a different way, and it is possible for his own story in Venus to play out any number of ways. Repetition is not fore-ordained or fated, in other words. He struggles with this, his rival’s contention:

[That mankind] having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite—the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, every where and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species—a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant.

Clearly Lewis and Winterson share more than a few concerns. With Lewis, great, bold, chunky bricks of dialogue do much of the heavy lifting, and the story unfolds slowly, with a wealth of descriptive texture and clarity. By the end of the book, you may not agree with his overtly Christian theology, but you do know his characters. You comprehend what they care about; you witness the vivid reality of their world; you might even say the psychological bedrock that grounds Lewis’s philosophical wrestling matches is firm.

Winterson’s narrative vehicle is less traditional, and her writing more spare. She establishes a rhythmic shorthand that utilizes spurts and repeated poetic phrases as a way of conveying her ideas, and relies on artful language her long-time readers will appreciate. Is this enough?

Of course, science fiction by genre is tasked with the enormous tri-fold duty of entertaining, explaining enormously unfamiliar environments, and perhaps even conveying symbolic or metaphorical meanings that apply to our own environment. It’s no surprise that both Lewis and Winterson struggle at times with their own created realities—Lewis simply renames many familiar things and occasionally sacrifices plot to message; Winterson crafts crisp details, but allows her characters’ emotional arcs to become blunt and overwrought.

Despite the occasional lurid quality, Winterson does carry her narrative through to its logical conclusion. The fact that neither Spike nor Billie can salvage events underscores the seriousness of our own culpability—there is no Bruce Willis or Terminator waiting in the wings, no Will Smith or Neo who will deliver last-minute, microwaved salvation. Not even much chance of spiritual redemption, as in Perelandra.

There is only love, or the echo, or futile longing for love. We, according to Winterson, seem to be in on the wry joke that Spike, in a Spock-like gesture, offers Billie toward the end of the end:

‘I’ll miss you.’
‘That’s limbic.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘That’s limbic too.’

Spike, like all of us, has slowly been learning what it means to think humanly; she even masters how to give cunnilingus and cry like a human. In some ways, through Spike and Billie, Winterson seems to be arguing that to be human is an enviable, emotional, meangingful endeavor, despite that fact that the history of the species is a doomed, repetitive slog. Perhaps, in the end, she thinks we all feel a little like Billie does when she confesses ‘I am human. I am thirty. I am alone.’

For Further Reading:

Jeanette Winterson. Photo Credit: The Author's Website

For more information on Jeanette Winterson’s work, upcoming events, or interviews, please visit the author’s website.

Here is a December 2009 Q&A with Jeanette Winterson from The Guardian.

You can also read a profile of Winterson written by Nicolette Jones for The Independent, published in November of 2009.

Or read Philip Womack’s profile of the author in The Telegraph, which was also published in November 2009.

For a look back at an earlier interview, here is a 1997 conversation from Salon.

As a young, married couple, Jake and his wife, Helen, left London in the early 1960s for the desolate countryside of Jake’s childhood. The novel explores Jake’s relationship with his mother, Sara; his career as an idealistic, if impractical architect; his marriage to the devoutly Christian Helen; his enigmatic children, Henry and Alice; and his infidelities. Because of Jake’s condition and the book’s narration in limited third person, past and present collide in the novel, not only against each other but also against Jake’s imagination and his dreams. (Halfway through the novel, Jake even dreams that he is recounting a dream to his daughter.) As a result, the reader is sometimes left unsteady, unsure of what has actually happened and what Jake has merely imagined. The overlap of time and place and real and imagined events can be jarring, but the result is a complex, sometimes cerebral story that at least one writer, Carolyn See, writing for The Washington Post, has compared to Virginia Woolf’s “meditative novels.”

Portrait of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) photographed in 1902 by George Charles Beresford

The comparison seems apt. Like Woolf, Harvey is a lyrical writer invested in the psychology of her characters, what they want, why they want it and the winding paths their lives take.  At the end of his plane ride over the moors, Jake “heaves a sigh of relief, recognizing in the slow-down of the engine, the lengthening of its chugs, a familiar creeping desire to be getting home.” Themes and big ideas, including that desire to “get home,” literally and metaphorically, drive the novel. Jake and Helen trade London for the moors. Jake, whose mother is Jewish, explores Zionism after the Six-Day War. Helen, graceful and religious, demands a proper physical home of Jake, who dreams of an arresting glass house atop the moors. Helen spends her life steeped in the Bible, searching, often to Jake’s bewilderment, for a kind of spiritual home.

Indeed, the underlying tension in the novel involves how the desire for home (safety, security, order, etc.) is complicated by Jake’s fascination with the concept of entropy, “the theory that says everything loses, rather than gains order.” Harvey holds an M.A. in philosophy, and she seems to have structured her novel around these competing idea—the desire for order and the theory that order is somehow against nature. At the end of chapter nine, for instance, Jake remembers his mother and her lover, Rook, drowning. When chapter ten begins, that memory is contradicted. “Your mother and Rook didn’t drown,” says Eleanor, Jake’s late-life lover and caretaker. “Where did you get that idea from?”

While the competing concepts make for interesting discussion, in practical terms the back-and-forth technique is risky because it makes for a sometimes-challenging reading experience. As a point of view character, Jake presses the limits of readers’ patience for unreliable narration (especially in a story told in third person). Considering Harvey’s stylistic choices, it’s hard not to compare The Wilderness to other fictional works centered on a character with Alzheimer’s, including Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” In telling her story, Munro relies on Grant, whose memory is intact, as her point of view character, instead of Fiona, who has Alzheimer’s. The story is poignant and the storyline is clear. Harvey certainly had similar opportunities for objective narration. Having played a prominent role in Jake’s life for decades, Eleanor, for instance, could have answered many of the fundamental questions Harvey leaves unanswered, including what happens to Jake’s children, Henry and Alice. Instead, Harvey chooses to weave ordered stories in one chapter, only to pull a thread and have the work come loose in the next chapter. It took me some time to decide that those unanswered questions and loose ends are part of the pleasure of The Wilderness, and part of Harvey’s point. In Munro’s story, I felt the heartbreak of losing a spouse to Alzheimer’s. In The Wilderness, I moved uncomfortably close to understanding something that once seemed ineffable—what it would be like to lose myself to the disease.

Yet we are never lost ourselves in this novel because Harvey keeps the dream of The Wilderness “vivid and continuous,” as John Gardner said, by tying the narrative together with objects. These items bring the heart of the novel (not philosophy, but the thrills and disappointments of an ordinary man) into focus. Harvey’s careful repetition of both wild and mundane objects—a human skin bible, gold-rimmed teacups, a miniskirt, a cherry tree—help readers navigate the story. Unlike Jake, the objects don’t change. They age and deteriorate, but a cup is always a cup, a miniskirt stays a miniskirt.  Toward the end of the novel, Jake cannot recognize his wife in a family photo but when Eleanor points to Helen’s “famous miniskirt,” readers remember the half scenes and memories involving that skirt, not to mention the arguments and misunderstandings that made up Jake and Helen’s marriage. More than that, when Eleanor points to the skirt, readers know for certain that the skirt is a true memory, not a figment of Jake’s imagination. In a story that shifts so frequently between the past and present, and the real and the imagined, this grounding is critical. As objects such as the skirt reoccur, they take on more weight, becoming the “proof of himself” Jake is looking for, even if he can’t realize it, and the proof of reality readers need. We may not be able to trust Jake’s faltering memory, but we can trust the physical objects that connect past with present, and these objects act as lampposts to guide readers inside Jake’s memories, through his dreams.

Deciding to organize a novel in such a way seems like a difficult task, yet Harvey does it gracefully. Lacking the clear order of chronology, the author must trust that her choices will resonate with a reader. More importantly, that they will serve as both the engine of the novel to propel the narrative forward, and also vessels to gather and carry meaning. In the March/April 2009 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, Michael Byers analyzed the significant role that objects can play in grounding a piece of fiction. “Optimally deployed,” he writes, “[objects] produce a grave, subterranean vibration, so deep as to be beyond the range of human hearing; and from this arises, as though in our bones, a mystical feeling that, yes, the story is correct, that it is saying something perfectly true about the world – that, indeed, the world is speaking to us in the only way it can, through the many silent things that make it up.”  [Author’s Note: italics are Byers’s, not mine.]

The heartbreak of The Wilderness, of course, is that Jake is fast becoming a “silent thing” in his own world. After a former colleague solicits advice, Jake, the once-fiery architect, cannot remember the word for blueprint. Even more poignant are scenes between Jake and his therapist, “the fox-haired woman” whose routine questions and tests perplex and worry Jake. In a moment of lucidity, Jake demands a detailed explanation of his deterioration and then explains his condition back to the therapist, using the metaphor of a felled tree and a sensitivity she cannot match.

“It makes me think the brain is marked up when it is old and no longer any use,” he tells her. ”I’m no more than a tree. I’ve been marked up. I’ve been selected.“ He continues: “The brain is finite, this is what you mean to say. I understand exactly what you mean to say.”

The wonderful mystery of The Wilderness is this simple fact: Readers might get lost occasionally in Jake’s convoluted story, but, by the end of it, we understand exactly what it was he meant to say, and that, more than anything else, is proof of his existence.

For Further Reading:

Photo from the Author's Website

For more information on Samantha Harvey’s work, upcoming events, or possible reading group discussions topics, please visit the author’s website.

Or read an excerpt from the novel here.

You can also read an interview with Samantha Harvey on the Man Booker Prize website. The Wilderness was longlisted for the prize this year.

And if you missed it the first time, be sure to read Michael Byers’s  essay on  Chekhov and his story “Lady with a Pet Dog,” entitled “The Copernican Author: On Point of View, Ptolemaic Characters, and Useful Unknowing,” which FWR published in July 2009.

Which brings me to Maile Meloy’s stories in Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It—stories whose endings provide no comfortable resolution, stories that often leave their characters in apparent limbo. But this is ambiguity as it should be done: Meloy is neither wishy-washy nor lazy; she is perfectly in control. The stories in this brilliant collection deliberately hold the reader in uncertainty, mining it for meaning. They are anything but punts.

Each of Meloy’s characters is pulled in two different directions. In “Travis, B.,” a young Montana ranch hand falls in love with his teacher—a lawyer who is herself split between two jobs on opposite sides of the state. In “The Girlfriend,” a father is caught between wanting to know the painful truth about his daughter’s death and the equally painful state of not knowing. And in “Lovely Rita,” Steven is torn when the titular Rita comes up with a desperate scheme to earn money and leave town:

Rita called him three days later and said, “I want you to help me hold a raffle.”
“A raffle for what?”
“For me,” she said. “I want to charge five dollars a ticket.”
“What’s the prize?” he asked.
“Me,” she said. “I said that. For a night.”

Steven wants to stop her, but he also wants, desperately, to have Rita himself. For these characters, both ways is the only way they want it. They don’t want to choose, and their conflicting longings drive these stories.

Those same conflicted longings also push the stories towards their ambiguous endings. At the end of “Two-Step,” for instance, Naomi waits in her lover’s car while he is inside with his pregnant wife. We never learn if he comes outside or stays in, because that’s not the point. The story is in the elaborate dance beforehand, the complicated relationship that slowly unfolds as the woman, her lover, and his wife—the woman’s friend—meet in the kitchen. In “Spy vs. Spy,” long-simmering resentment boils over between two brothers on a skiing trip. But even as the brothers tumble down the mountainside, fighting, there is no reconciliation or resolution. Nothing really changes:

“It won’t kill me,” George said.
And it was true, nothing would. The knowledge broke over Aaron in a wave, through his oxygenated good mood. They were bound like two dogs with their tails tied together, unable to move without having some opposite effect on the other, unable to live a single restful minute without feeling the inevitable tug.

Ambiguous, appropriately enough, has two possible meanings. The first is the way my students use it: “undecided” or “unclear.” But the second is “capable of being understood in more than one way.” In a bad ambiguous story, the story is actually unclear: the reader doesn’t know what to make of it, or what happened. It’s as if he or she doesn’t have enough light to see. But in a good ambiguous story, like those in Both Ways, the reader has a kind of dizzying double vision: he or she understands the story in more than one way. We understand both how much Steven wants to win Rita and how much he also wants to save her from her own plan; we understand both that Naomi sees her lover’s shortcomings and why she will stay with him anyway. In these stories, nothing is resolved in the traditional sense, but the moments of uncertainty themselves become meaningful. For Meloy’s characters, the situation may not change, but at the end of the story, they are at last seeing clearly, even if what they see is complicated and contradictory.

Amy Hempel once described a story as “when two equally appealing forces, or characters, or ideas try to occupy the same place at the same time, and they’re both right.” That definition applies perfectly to Both Ways. There are no clear lines here, no obvious right answers. Meloy’s characters are caught between two choices that are both right—or both wrong—and that’s what makes their decisions so difficult, and makes these stories so compelling. In reading them, you feel, as Meloy puts it, “both the threat of disorder and the steady, thrumming promise of having everything [you] wanted, all at once.”

For Further Reading

- Don’t miss Joshua Bodwell’s interview with Malie Meloy here on FWR.

- If you’re shopping for one of Malie Meloy’s books, click here to buy from a local independent bookseller.

Each story plays with this tension between a traveler’s joy at discovery and the distance she feels from her adopted home or partner. We see this theme first in “Envy,” with Toby, a young engineer sent in the late 1960s to Vietnam to find out why many of his company’s planes are going down. While in Bangkok, he falls deeply in love with the Thai nurse who dresses his leg wounds. After they marry, he soon realizes that her family expects more financial support than he can provide. In the second story, “Independence,” Toby’s high school girlfriend, Kit, moves with her young daughter to San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, to broaden her horizons. But even as she adopts local dress in an attempt to get closer to “something worth knowing,” she observes that the locals ridicule the earnest expats’ naïve desire to blend in. In “The Other Side of the World,” the final and most powerful story, a former tin prospector in Thailand returns to the U.S. a lonely man. Unable to commit to any woman, and unable to forget his lover in Thailand, he pays for long-term “relationships” with a succession of Asian prostitutes.

Every one of these six stories could stand on its own, but Silber’s arrangement enhances their impact. The narrators’ lives often overlap, as do their realizations about place and self. We are more invested in Annunziata’s story in “Loyalty” because we have already met her daughter from Mike’s point of view in “Allegiance.” And we feel a small pleasure upon realizing that Corinna’s husband was Kit and Toby’s high school science teacher. While not a novel in the expected sense, the book feels novelistic. In place of a typical arc, we have the satisfying—if sometimes tentative—connections between characters and the recurring theme of displacement and love. And there’s more: Toby’s story introduces a sliver of a larger narrative thread—the mystery of the planes’ failure in Vietnam. While the thread does not appear in each story, the solution to the mystery in Owen’s telling of “The Other Side of the World,” provides the kind of resolution many readers expect from a novel.

the hardcover edition

The stories, too, are novelistic. Each one spans decades in a character’s lifetime, and we follow these expansive arcs fluidly, even cinematically. In “Paradise,” we watch Corinna, a dreamy teenage flapper, move from hurricane-stricken 1920s Florida to humid, lush Thailand—then called Siam. Liberated and eager, she joins her tin-prospecting brother, Owen, in her absolute love of the place and people. Ultimately, she returns to the United States, and Silber takes us gently into the character’s later years, her deep homesickness for Thailand and for the man there who has become, in Owen’s words, “a metaphor for the attachment she couldn’t fix to a whole country.” Corinna maintains her nostalgic distance: “We had loved Siam, but we were pretending to a higher level of Siameseness than we had. The pretending was a great joy to us.”

Each of Silber’s six narrators does his or her share of pretending. But they do so with the best intentions. They pretend because they can’t help themselves; they want to belong to the places and the people they have set their sights on. Like E.M. Forster’s George, in A Room with a View, each character tries to “choose a place where [they] won’t do very much harm.” They have a progressive awareness about their impact when abroad, a sensibility that seems particularly relevant and desirable given the U.S.’s role during the years when this book was written. While in Vietnam, Toby develops an uncomfortable awareness of his place in the country: “Why was I there if I was only going to walk along in my towering foreign fatness, my oblivious overfed height?” Even when they begin their journeys as naïve or even willfully ignorant, these characters eventually learn to look beyond themselves and their desires.

This sort of moral insight is both a strength of the book and its one significant failing. We like these characters; they are intelligent and conscientious, the kind of travelers we would hope to be. The opposite of the ugly American stereotype, they make us feel good about ourselves and humanity. And yet except for Owen–the tin prospector who can only commit to prostitutes–they become too uniformly good, too equally concerned and self-aware, lacking complex views about race and culture and America’s role in foreign affairs. The result is a flattening of tone, a sort of implausible wish-fulfillment journey. Even Owen is disarmingly aware of his flaws. In his final years, he discovers his and his company’s role in the planes’ failure, and, taking the high road, he reveals the reason. After he is fired, Owen begins a slow, redeeming descent into poverty. In his old age, he makes something of a real relationship with Pearl, a prostitute he has been seeing for years.

But even with their uniformly—and sometimes frustratingly—good intentions, the characters of The Size of the World manage to enchant. Silber’s stories beguile; the world opens outward in each. Her prose is crystalline, and her art is pleasingly buried in the simplicity of the sentences. When Annunziata travels to Thailand to care for her estranged daughter in a Bangkok hospital, she realizes her husband’s and her own former destructive xenophobia in one clear sentence: listening to the sounds of the city beyond the hospital walls, she notes, “It humbled me, this noise that had nothing to do with us.” Reading, we are humbled, too. And we experience that bit of magic that one feels in a new and mesmerizing bit of earth, the same sensation Toby experiences as he begins to fall in love with his future wife: “I had the traveler’s idea that something fleeting was blessing me.”

Further Resources

Joan Silber / photo from http://nationalbookawards.org/

- At Largehearted Boy, Silber devises a playlist to complement the characters’ lives in The Size of the World.

- Read a short story by Silber: “The High Road” (from the Fall 2002 issue of Ploughshares).

- In this interview for Publisher’s Weekly, Silber talks about how she supported herself before her first publication and between books. Here are more conversations with Silber: at The Millions, at B&N.com, with Otium, and as a guest on Charlie Rose.

- Scroll down on the North Country Public Radio (Canton, NY) site to listen to this audio interview on North Country Public Radio (Canton, NY).

- If you’re looking for a copy of The Size of the World (for yourself, or to wrap in holiday paper), shop your local indie bookseller.