The first person is seductive. It feels, for many, like the most natural way to tell a story. We are all first person narrators of our own lives, after all, and surely it is the easiest thing in the world to translate personal experience to the page. That way there is no need to fuss with the peculiar questions that arise when a mysterious and sometimes too-knowing third person narrator appears on the scene.

But the first person is in fact more difficult than the third. As we approach the first person narrator we may discover that it is essentially unlocateable, rather like the electron in orbit around the atomic nucleus. We can approach it, but we cannot actually put our finger on its nature precisely. This has to do with the recursive properties of consciousness, probably, but also with the unavoidable fact that the presence of any teller prompts us to ask how trustworthy the teller is. We never trust anyone telling us anything.

Of course when we write first-person narrators, we must in fact not only locate but convincingly inhabit our speakers, trustworthy or not. If we don’t, our work suffers. We discover there is a subtle but crucial difference between something like “reporting from the scene of a consciousness” and “reporting from within a consciousness.” The former is weak and unconvincing, while the latter feels like life. One finds the difference in how deeply the writer has managed to seat the perspective of the narrator—how firmly we embed the reader in the narrator’s point of view.

A few techniques can be brought to bear to increase the reader’s sense of embeddedness.

Jeffrey Eugenides’s  prose is typically lax and underpowered (which accounts for the bagginess and unproductive length of a work like Middlesex). Over and over in that flabby, overwritten novel he can be observed struggling to seat the point of view in Calliope’s head. In the following passage, insufficiencies such as “the next thing I knew” point to a narrator who has not yet arrived on the page, as do such infelicities as “I let it keep burning my lungs because I wanted to distract myself from the pain in my heart.” But amid the wreckage here there are some successes. Our narrator is at a party with some other teens:

The Object’s green eyes were watering. But she took the joint and inserted it between her lips. She leaned toward Rex Reese, who opened his own mouth wide.

When they were finished, Jerome took the joint from his sister. “Let me see if I can master the technical difficulties here,” he said. The next thing I knew, his face was close to mine. So finally I did it, too. Leaned forward, closed my eyes, parted my lips, and let Jerome shotgun into my mouth a long, dirty plume of smoke.

Smoke filled my lungs, which began to burn. I coughed and let it out. When I opened my eyes again, Rex had his arm around the Object’s shoulder. She was trying to act casual about it. Rex finished his beer….

“I can’t see my feet,” I said. “It’s dark in here.

[Jerome] passed me the joint again and I took it. I inhaled and held the smoke in. I let it keep burning my lungs because I wanted to distract myself from the pain in my heart. Rex and the Object were still kissing. I looked away, out the dark, grimy window.

“Everything looks really blue,” I said. “Did you notice that?”

“Oh yeah,” said Jerome. “All kinds of strange epiphenomena.”

The Oracle of Delphi had been a girl about my same age. All day long she sat over a hole in the ground, the omphalos, the navel of the earth, breathing petrochemical fumes escaping from underneath. A teenage virgin, the Oracle told the future, speaking the first metered verse in history….

One of the telltale signals of a first person not yet completely inhabited is often the overuse of simple subject-verb constructions: “I looked,” “I wanted,” “I thought about,” “I remembered,” “I imagined,” “I felt,” and so on. These constructions of consciousness are defensible in early drafts but should be substantially controlled in later ones. They originate from a positive and necessary impulse — to attach what is happening to the experiences of the point of view character — but they are not rendered from within the narrator’s actual experience. Rather, they are reported from a safe distance.

This seems a small point but it is a crucial one, really the crucial one when considering the first person narrator. In life, we do not engage in anything so controlled or constructed as an act that can be described as, for example, “remembering.” In fact, we simply have images and thoughts occur to us, immediately and all at once. There is no process of remembering, only a moment before we have remembered something and the moment after which we have remembered it.

Similarly, we do not really “look” at things. Rather, visual stimuli enter our eyes and brains and make an effectively immediate impression upon us. The things we see are before us at once, unmediated by any agency of consciousness. They are simply there. The verb “look” is, when considered this way, inadequate to describe the speed and immediacy with which images arrive in our awareness. There is no action of “looking” per se. As with remembering, visual stimuli are not there in one moment, and are there the next. Eugenides’s mistake is to describe an activity rather than recreating, through other means, the subjective experience of actually engaging in the activity. After all, it is only someone else who may be said to “look” at something. What we do, in our own minds, is simply experience the result of looking.

But there are two (two and a half, maybe) successful moments in this passage: 1) “She was trying to act casual about it” and 2) “The Oracle of Delphi had been a girl about my same age.”

“She was trying to act casual about it” works because the awareness of the narrator is for once unfiltered. How does Calliope know that The Obscure Object “was trying to act casual about it”? Calliope’s process of information gathering and processing is undescribed. But speaking literally, she has engaged in a long series of complicated mental calculations based on the visual stimuli she has received. She has received visual and aural information about The Object’s stance, facial expression, tone of voice, and she has from these bits of evidence concluded something like a fact about the Object. Whether this “fact” is true is unknowable, as it should be, because this is Calliope’s truth unfiltered. This is a successfully embedded point of view.

In the second example, Eugenides spares us the awkwardness of anything like “At that moment I remembered that the Oracle of Delphi had been…” Instead, he delivers the thought unmediated. In this way the memory arrives on the page in the same way memories arrive to us in life — all at once and unaccompanied by anything like intention. As in life, this thought about the Oracle simply arises. At the instant it is occurring to Calliope it also occurs for us, and in the same fashion.

A small success might also be noted in the first half of the sentence Leaned forward, closed my eyes, parted my lips, and let Jerome shotgun into my mouth a long, dirty plume of smoke. Eliminating the pronoun “I” is a shortcut and a cheat, and Eugenides is likely doing it here mostly to achieve some rhythmic and aural variation (perhaps tired of the “I [verbed]” construction himself). But eliminating the pronoun does work to short-circuit our sense of an action being reported from outside the reporter. It is not much, but it is something, and if we are getting tired, this is okay. But Eugenides undoes his accomplishment in the second half of the sentence: “a long, dirty plume of smoke” would be invisible to Calliope.

We can contrast Eugenides’s struggle with Michael Chabon’s customary effortlessness. The florid, exuberantly demonstrative first-person narration of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh provides a fine example of a point of view deeply embedded in its purported perspective. The novel opens:

At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business. We’d just come to the end of a period of silence and ill will—a year I’d spent in love with and in the same apartment as an odd, fragile girl whom he had loathed, on sight, with a frankness and a fury that were not at all like him. But Claire had moved out the month before. Neither my father nor I knew what to do with our new freedom.

“I saw Lenny Stern this morning,” he said. “He asked after you. You remember your Uncle Lenny.”

“Sure,” I said, and I thought for a second about Uncle Lenny, juggling three sandwich halves in the back room of his five-and-dime in the Hill District a million years ago.

I was nervous and drank more than I ate; my father carefully dispatched his steak. Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some strong emotion or other I said, more or less: It’s the beginning of the summer and I’m standing in the lobby of a thousand-story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds. On the way to the shining needle at the top I will wear a lot of neckties, I will buy five or six works of genius on 45 rpm, and perhaps too many times I will find myself looking at the snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink. I said, “I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.”

The unparalleled excellence of the writing is a joy: “carefully dispatched” is visually and characterologically exact (we can see Art’s father, vested and buttoned, methodically working away at his tidy plate, leaving only the parsley garnish), and “snapped spine of a lemon wedge” shows us what we have not bothered to notice until now, the segmented and organic nature of that unconsidered thing in our glass, and by saying not “glass” but “drink” Chabon also gives us the ice cubes and perhaps the swizzle stick, as well as the shape, size and weight of the glass, the table on which it sits, and some qualities pertaining to the space in which that table stands. These excellences function as keys to the mind of the speaker, arriving as they do unmediated into Art’s consciousness: it’s not “it occurred to me that my father was carefully dispatching his steak” or “I looked at the lemon wedge…”

On a deeper level, note that we can usefully distinguish, on the one hand, between the Chabonian constructions “I had lunch with my father” and “I was nervous and drank more than I ate” and, on the other hand, the Eugenidean “I coughed and let it out” and “when I opened my eyes again.” Eugenides’ efforts to track Calliope’s consciousness moment by moment fail because they do not reflect what it really feels like in a subjective sense to cough or to open one’s eyes. By contrast, Chabon mostly uses the pronoun “I” to report on larger-scale occurrences — things that are happening over a longer span of time — and so avoids this pitfall. Having lunch with one’s father is not an immediate or all-at-once experience. Nor is being nervous and drinking more than one eats. Our experience of these events differs fundamentally from our experience of coughing, seeing, hearing, thinking, and speaking, in that they are events that, with their complicated social and behavioral aspects, must be understood with several sets of mental instruments, including those having to do with family history, taste, manners, and so forth. Most importantly, having dinner is not one experience but a set of extended experiences which can really only be described or apprehended in synthetic terms, while sensual experiences are discrete and immediate. The Chabonian “I” in this sense is a more complicated device, albeit a slightly more removed one, than the Eugenidean.

Notice, too, that when Chabon does use simple subject-verb constructions they are often in some fashion filtered through Art. Even the usually deadly “I thought” is here first improved by “for a second”, which at least acknowledges the fleeting nature of any thought; then “I thought” is redeemed entirely by the thought having nothing to do with anything that has come before, such that even this usually worrisome construction, once successfully moderated in this way, manages to suggest the impinging influences of an unstructured brain. Why is Lenny jugging three sandwich halves? How do they stay together in the air? Why three halves? Where is the fourth? Eaten, perhaps, by Uncle Lenny. But who is Uncle Lenny? We don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know. And then Lenny is gone.

Notice, too, that there is an important distance between “I said” and “I said, more or less”, and there is a very great gulf indeed between a character declaring “I will wear a lot of neckties” in a strictly literal sense and saying “I will wear a lot of neckties” in a fit of metaphorical brio. The passage is so fanciful, in fact, and by its end has so separated itself from any claim to strict literality, that we may reasonably suspect its concluding line of dialog (“I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray”) is not what is actually said aloud, and that in fact what is said aloud is something else entirely that just sounds or feels like “I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray” to Art’s subjective consciousness. There are very few constructed elements to Art’s thinking, and those that are to be found are intentionally undermined, such that the effect (and purpose) of this passage is both to convey the impression of what it is like to be Art and to suggest that our best reading of Art should include not only what he says, but what he appears to mean.

On the other end of the spectrum from Chabon are first-person narrators who might be described as reticent or formal. Reticence and formality can have powerful effects, and often this kind of voice is deployed in the service of hiding some otherwise unmanageable emotion on the part of the speaker. In such a case the habits of the voice itself often become part of the narrative machinery of the story, and the developments in the voice mirror, oppose, or otherwise assist the events on the page. For instance, a voice may work to undermine itself, or will seek to hold off powerful emotion by refusing to attach to what is being reported. Other effects are possible; often a formal or unforthcoming voice is used to depict the mind of someone working to maintain sanity, to prevail over trauma, or to rationalize an otherwise inexcusable act or set of behaviors, as in Jane Smiley’s “The Age of Grief.”

Ethan Canin has deployed many different kinds of restrained voice over his long career. In his early work his narrators were often models of delicate understatement, as is the case with the narrator of “The Year of Getting to Know Us”:

I’m an only child, and I grew up in a big wood-frame house on Huron Avenue in Pasadena, California. The house had three empty bedrooms and in the back yard a section of grass that had been stripped and leveled, then seeded and mowed like a putting green. Twice a week a Mexican gardener came to trim it, wearing special moccasins my father had bought him. They had soft hide soles that left no imprints.

My father was in love with golf. He played seven times every week and talked about the game as if it were a science that he was about to figure out. “Cut through the outer rim for a high iron,” he used to say at dinner, looking out the window into the yard while my mother passed him the carved-wood salad bowl, or “In hot weather hit a high compression ball.” When conversations paused, he made little putting motions with his hands. He was a top amateur and in another situation might have been a pro. When I was sixteen, the year I was arrested, he let me caddie for the first time. Before that all I knew about golf was his clubs – the Spalding made-to-measure woods and irons, Dynamiter sand wedge, St. Andrews putter – which he kept in an Abercrombie & Fitch bag in the trunk of his Lincoln, and the white leather shoes with long tongues and screw-in spikes, which he stored upside down in the hall closet. When he wasn’t playing, he covered the club heads with socks that had little yellow dingo balls on the ends.

At first glance the work here, while very good, appears uncomplicated. But as detail accumulates, something happens. A tone emerges: measured, even distant. One source of this tone is the lack of the speaker’s summarizing judgment. Nowhere does the narrator describe what thoughts or feelings these facts produce in him. He is simply reporting the facts. There is a taffy-like motion here, as the longer the passage continues without the narrator’s summarizing presence in it, the more we feel him pulling away. Apart from the carefully deployed exception (”the year I was arrested”), the speaker is effectively absent. It is the opposite of Chabon’s wildly interpreting Art, who, at the gentlest prompting, erupts in gouts of hyper-responsive feeling. The restraint on display in “The Year of Getting to Know Us” is elegant; Canin achieves this effect through an absence, a difficult feat that accounts for much of this story’s wistful tone.

In the later example of “The Accountant,” Canin’s customarily restrained and semiformal style has hardened into habit and lost some of its nuance. But there is still something to be taken from him. The novella opens:

I am an accountant, that calling of exactitude and scruple, and my crime was small. I have worked diligently, and I do not mind saying that in the conscientious embrace of the ledger I have done well for myself over the years, yet now I must also say that due to a flaw in my character I have allowed one small trespass against my honor. I try to forget it. Although now I do little more than try to forget it, I find myself considering and reconsidering this flaw, and then this trespass, although in truth if I am to look at them both, this flaw is so large that it cannot properly be called a flaw but my character itself, and this trespass was devious. I have a wife and three children. My name is Abba Roth.

This voice, a much less subtle instrument than the one at work in “The Year of Getting to Know Us,” might be said to occupy two zones: 1) the highly built formal zone in which the sentences are long and polyclausal, and 2) the unbuilt, demotic zone in which the sentences are simple and declarative. By occupying both zones in one paragraph, Canin proposes a consciousness that has one half of itself in one zone and the other half in the second. Half of its energy is deployed in constructing a presentable truth, and the other half, like a muttering chorus, relates those facts that can be delivered without polish or interpretation – the real truth, as it were. The voice that propels the short sentences ” I try to forget it” “I have a wife and three children” and “My name is Abba Roth” will be the voice of the flawed, criminal Abba. The other is a mask.

The Retrospective Eye

Several techniques create a first-person eye that, even from a future vantage, create vivid action. Alice Munro provides a subtle, canny example in the opening of “Walker Brothers Cowboy”:

After supper my father says, “Want to go down and see if the Lake’s still there?” We leave my mother sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for me against the opening of school. She has ripped up for this purpose an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly and also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful. We leave my brother in bed in the little screened porch at the end of the front verandah, and sometimes he kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and calls mournfully, “Bring me an ice cream cone!” but I call back, “You will be asleep,” and do not even turn my head.

While there is a great deal in play in this paragraph it is the word “ungrateful” that allows us to see this action as being observed from the future. In any retrospective narration, the first-person narrator sees with two pairs of eyes, one occupying the occasion of telling and the other the moment in which the event occurred. The immediate eye relates the details: the “dining-room light,” the “old plaid wool dress,” the lines of dialog, and so forth. The eye that sees from the future is mostly content for the event-eye to do the seeing. The girl whose mother is making her a dress notices, in the moment, that her mother “has to cut and match very cleverly” and she will naturally complain because her mother will “also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool.” But it is the eye from the future that can declare her past self “ungrateful.” The girl in the past may feel ingratitude, but she will likely be unable to articulate such a thing; surely she will be unable to confess it. It is the work of the future narrator to see that she was in fact ungrateful, and to note it, and thereby to hold that earlier version of herself to account.

We writers gravitate towards a few particular points of view: we love the first person singular, the ultra-personal “I”; we adore the third-person limited and its inside-outside-blurring stance; we even use the omniscient and look down on our characters as if we were gods.  Now and then, we’ll try the second person to switch it up—we’ve all read Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help and thought about it, haven’t we?

But what about the first person plural?  Why haven’t we, as writers, embraced this viewpoint and its potential?  A few of us—Jeffrey Eugenides, Steven Millhauser—have tackled it, but most of us just shrug our shoulders and turn to our old tried-and-trues.

First Person Plural, in Harlem, is looking to change all that with a series of readings, each of which contains pieces written in (yup) the first person plural. Why? Their site offers us several reasons, starting with:

“We” in literature is strange, it makes a claim that might make us uncomfortable: who is this “we,” how can a plural voice speak, think, or act? In some contexts the implications of “we” might be cultural or political, in others, they might be spookier, more existential. “We” is the limbic brain and the neighborhood, the family tree and the Gallup poll. “We” could be the voice of the future, the populated past, or the unparsed present. “We” seems impossible, like it’s just a second away from disappearing into an “I” or a “they.” And impossible seems like a good place to start.

Color us intrigued. Their next event is April 23.

• Ali Smith explores many variations on the first person (and the second person, and the third) in her collection The First Person
• In the Atlantic, Paul Bloom explores the idea that each of us has multiple selves vying for control of the body and mind they inhabit.
• And in this FWR interview, Allan Gurganus argues for a mental third-person-plural state: that ALL writers should wait to write until they have “some vision that includes not just you as first person singular, but “we.” That’s the movement of human life—from the singular to the plural.”

In Lauren Groff’s second novel, Arcadia (Voice/Hyperion, 2012), the community of this same name is a utopia within our actual world—a flock of hippies, vegans, pacifists, and dreamers settling in upstate New York in the late 1960s. The Arcadians live off the land, eschewing commercialism, capitalism, and even pets (keeping them is considered slavery). But to keep the outside world at bay, members must corrupt their own systems. Among themselves, they exchange no money, but they must sell crops, music, and drugs to feed their growing population; their mission is equality for all, but established members occupy a mansion while new arrivals squat in muddy tents; all are supposedly welcome, but as the circle widens, fewer members are interested in the community’s original vision. Such hypocrisies (and law enforcement’s growing interest in its pot plots) increasingly threaten Arcadia’s survival.

We watch the rise, fall, and memory of Arcadia through the sensitive eyes of Bit Stone, one of the commune’s first children. His story divides the novel into four sets of episodic snapshots: childhood, teenage years, young fatherhood, middle age. When he tastes his first forbidden candy bar from “outside,” young Bit cringes at its sweetness—what, we wonder, will this child make of the rest of our world?

Groff’s prose is lush and lovely throughout, as idealistic as her Arcadians’ vision. The close, close, close-third person, as rendered here in the present tense, casts Bit’s childhood in a sensual fog. While all of his imaginings and perceptions are gorgeously written, some scenes almost yearn for more breathing room—distance, perspective—between narrator and character. But this is a small and only occasional complaint. More often, Groff uses this too-close angle to great (and conscious) effect, and near the book’s end, Bit admires the opposite quality in his daughter: “Already, she watches life from a good distance.”

One of Arcadia’s richest scenes unfolds during Bit’s teen years: late at night, he joins other teens in the Dormitory while the smaller children sleep; they strew moss and acorns about, sprinkle glitter on the kidlets’ pillows, and wedge a dozen butterfly wings beneath the windows…a prank: the fairies were here! The fairies were crushed?! The teens, who anticipated delight in disillusioning, are left deeply unsettled:

Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.

Even decades after Arcadia’s demise, Bit observes his community’s life-long influence—the “dull, small pain”; the gift of seeing the world differently—on the people who grew up within it. The adult Bit, living in Manhattan, teaching photography, has a less exotic life than his younger self, but he is interesting to read about because of the distance he has achieved, the things and people he has lost. As narrator-observer, he gains strength in perspective, in watching, recording, and remembering through his photographs.

In a surprise turn, the book’s final section reveals a dystopic future—extreme climate change, a bird flu pandemic—alarmingly set in 2018. As in, just a few years from now. Groff permits no comfortable distance between the reader’s world and this future; again, she takes us too close for comfort, and now the effect is nothing short of powerful. We have to wonder: If more people had lived like Arcadians, would things be better? And are Arcadia’s former inhabitants better suited, or less so, to carve out a future in a world of diminishing resources?

Near the novel’s end, Bit and his daughter, Grete, encounter Glory, an Amish woman who once watched the Arcadian experiment from her own would-be-utopic community. Glory views the world as either/or:

Freedom or community. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.

Why can’t you have both? says Grete, frowning. I think you could have both.

You want both, Glory says, you are destined to fail.

Yet Groff’s characters—and arguably, her readers—survive precisely by needing both, by striving to get the balance right. It’s why we’re drawn to books about ideal societies and their opposite, why we vote, why we have children, why we love other human beings. Arcadia may tell the story of a failed social experiment, but it’s about so much more—the seeds of what remains, of what succeeds: the fruits and consequences and necessary questions of living consciously.

Further Links and Resources

• Courtesy of NPR, read an excerpt from Arcadia.
• Here is Stephen King’s interview with Lauren Groff.
• In this podcast, Groff reads Alice Munro’s story “Axis” and discusses it with Deborah Treisman.
• Indulge in what Anne argues is one of the best short stories ever written, Groff’s “L. Debard and Aliette,” in the Atlantic Monthly. It also appears in Groff’s collection, Delicate, Edible Birds.

That’s the whole point, really, of the book, following as it does the last twenty minutes of Vada’s life—as he finishes mowing the lawn, eats cookie dough for lunch, and suffocates under the weight of his friend Wyatt’s stuffed trophy bear. It’s a joke wrapped in a pun inside a pratfall, the gags and absurdities layering and corkscrewing until you don’t know which way is up.

But Griffith’s novel is more than a series of jokes or comic set pieces. The narrator both claims that Vada is telling the story—he attributes specific words to Vada, claims Vada lied in the previous chapter, etc.—and refers consistently to Vada in the third person, which together make the novel seem less about a (mostly!) pathetic character dying and more about the pieces of each of us which come across as pitiful, unsuccessful, unrealized, incomplete. Vada describes himself as “a hard case, only not in the unreformable-criminal way…but for crimes of excessive interiority and fear.” It’s Social Anxiety Disorder as a metaphysical state, and Griffith deftly connects this human moment to the acts of writing and reading and also, more universally, to our relationship with mortality. Griffith’s fearless narrative gearshifting and his funny, nuanced portrait of grief give the book a degree of subtlety which makes Vada’s story moving and satisfying in ways that less ambitious comic novels can’t hope to achieve.

Extras

• Steve Almond recently interviewed Griffith for the Nervous Breakdown, and here’s another interview from Cincinnati’s City Beat.
• On the NEA’s website, read an excerpt from Bibliophilia, one of Griffith’s previous novels.
  ]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-trophy-by-michael-griffith/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/carry-the-one-by-carol-anshaw http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/carry-the-one-by-carol-anshaw#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:00:55 +0000 Jennifer Taylor http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=33922 Carry the One, a “compelling psychological examination of lives altered by a tragic accident.”]]> How do you remember the 80s? Depending on your age (and I’m not asking), it might have been a rite of passage filled with brooding music and unfortunate clothing choices. Or maybe it was a time of perceived invincibility fueled by drug experimentation, as it is for the characters in Carol Anshaw’s latest, Carry the One (Simon & Schuster). The novel provides a compelling psychological examination of lives altered by a tragic accident.

  The story begins in 1983, at an unpretentious Wisconsin farmhouse wedding. Carmen Kenney, the pregnant bride, waits impatiently for her guests to leave, sobered by the disconcerting realization she doesn’t really know her husband, Matt. She wearily says goodbye to a car filled with passengers: her sister Alice; her new sister-in-law Maude; Tom, an acquaintance; her brother Nick and his girlfriend, Olivia, the driver.

  Carmen asks Olivia if she’s all right to drive. Olivia, who has spent the day ingesting various drugs says yes. And maybe she means it. In the backseat, Alice pays more attention to Maude’s advances than to Olivia’s capabilities as a driver. So Alice doesn’t notice what’s happened and sees the child only when their eyes briefly meet as the girl flies over the car’s hood.

  She looked to be about nine or ten, although she had the adult features of kids from rougher places. She was quite beautiful, with a mop of hair bleached white by half a summer, green eyes staring at absolutely nothing.

  The death of the child, Casey Redman, and what it means to those left behind forms the foundation of Anshaw’s perceptive novel.  The protagonists struggle with personal dilemmas, both of their own making and driven by their environment as they grapple with guilt and residual damage. Anshaw shows the reader occasional glimpses before the accident, but the majority of the novel focuses on its aftermath: this trauma proves to be the defining moment of their lives.

  While Alice and Maude’s relationship flickers on and off—testing the sustainability of romance borne of tragedy—Alice seeks to add another element to Casey’s short life. Through art, she creates tangible proof that Casey existed in a series of paintings about the child. Alice’s struggle with the accident feels at times enviable and brave, and at others like a painful loop she cannot escape.

  Alice was beginning to see the terms of these paintings. She would wait for them to arrive and then paint them, like the clicking of a shutter, making snapshots out of oil and canvas. This was the central point of her art now, to record the girl’s unlived life.

  

  In this regard, Alice submerges her own life in that liminal moment when Casey’s ended.

  Before the accident, Nick had thought he would only casually date Olivia, yet the tragedy forges a defining link. They mark time together, united in a painful shared past. Carmen hides her remorse, but wonders if the child’s death cast a pall over her entire marriage, “played out under a long stretch of shadow it couldn’t outrun.” Even her son, Gabriel, born after Casey’s death, reminds the reader that fate denied the Redmans the pleasure of watching their daughter grow up.

  The novel also casts the siblings as children, living in the pall of parental dysfunction. Even in adulthood, Alice, Carmen, and Nick must remain united against their parents—Horace the bully and Loretta the accomplice. Anshaw adroitly explores the relationship between the Kenneys’ familial background and who they become in the wake of trauma. Their ingrained roles, likely formed before they reached Casey’s age, remain a strong force in the novel, even though the moment that defines them—the accident—occurs during adulthood. Among the three siblings, one craves parental affection, one shuns it, and one has created a hell so complete that Mom and Dad don’t factor into the equation.

  Anshaw dips into the minds of Alice, Carmen, and Nick as they attempt to make sense of what happened and comprehend their roles. In a novel so concerned with the internal fault lines of guilt and grief, this omniscience feels perfect. The relatively long expanse of time covered by Carry the One gives Anshaw space to fully explore her characters’ lives and their complex adaptations to enduring pain. The story unfolds over twenty-five years, including societal touchstones from the tenth anniversary of John Lennon’s death to the horrors of 9/11. The world carries on, even if the Kenneys remain shackled to the past.

  Throughout the book, Alice and Carmen keep a wary watch over Nick, who lapses into the shadowy world of addiction. His penance of choice might be different from theirs, but he pays all the same. The sisters continue to reach out to their brother as he medicates his demons with an unwavering dedication. Scenes where Alice and Carmen try to pull Nick out of himself will resonate for anyone with an addict in the family.

  Carol Anshaw’s Carry the One renders lives forever altered in the aftermath of one fateful day. The past declares itself, but the Kenney siblings prove time and again that a single event may be refracted in ways as diverse and unaccountable as the individuals it touches. Against the changing landscape of time and memory, they may falter under the weight of Casey Redman, but carry on they must.

  

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  Further Links and Resources

  
  • At Simon & Schuster’s author page, watch a video interview with Carol Anshaw and read an excerpt from Carry the One.
  • Follow Anshaw on Twitter: @carolanshaw
  • This NPR story about dog books features Anshaw’s Lucky in the Corner. Learn more about her other previous novels, Seven Moves and Aquamarine, on her website.
  • The author is also a painter; here are samples of Anshaw’s artwork, together with information about her Vita Sackville-West project.
  ]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/carry-the-one-by-carol-anshaw/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/a-meaning-for-wife-by-mark-yakich http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/a-meaning-for-wife-by-mark-yakich#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:00:31 +0000 Erika Dreifus http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=32470 A Meaning for Wife. Yet poet Mark Yakich's debut novel is narrated--quite successfully--in the controversial second-person.]]> “There are people who talk about themselves in the first person, people who talk about themselves in the third person, and people who don’t talk about themselves at all,” one character tells the narrator of Mark Yakich’s first novel, A Meaning for Wife (Ig Publishing, 2011). “Naturally,” she continues, “you’re in that last category.”

  It is a flawed argument. As the narrator makes clear for just under 200 pages, there are also people who talk about themselves in the second person. The character shares a number of qualities with his creator: a last name that rhymes with “jock itch”; a son named Owen; residence in New Orleans. One cannot help but wonder to what extent Yakich is using the second person to talk about himself as well.

  That potential juxtaposition is wrenching, since the narrator of A Meaning for Wife is a recent widower, whose wife’s unexpected death hovers over nearly every page of this book, set during the weekend of the narrator’s twentieth high-school reunion (class of ’88). Bringing his toddler back to his parents’ home for the occasion, the narrator faces plenty of demons from his past, including his father’s schizophrenia. But somehow, Yakich infuses this story with humor.

  Readers can have strong reactions—not always positive—to the second-person point of view. Most of us can think of a handful of highly successful short stories that rely on this narrative technique; successful novels with second-person narrators, however, seem fewer. Since I’m continuing to experiment with second-person storytelling in my own writing, I wanted to see how Yakich managed to sustain his narrator’s voice for the length of an entire book. I discovered that at least two writerly tools helped him: dialogue, and plenty of narration that comes from but is not necessarily about the narrator.

  A brief, intriguing mention in the December 2011/January 2012 issue of Shelf Unbound magazine led me to this novel from Ig Publishing, which also brought us Jacob Paul’s excellent Sarah/Sara. That Yakich’s primary literary reputation is as a poet also drew me as I recently read another debut novel from a poet—Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. It turned out to be one of the most impressive books I read last year. A Meaning for Wife sets a high bar for 2012, too.

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  Further Links and Resources

  
  • Read an interview with Mark Yakich about A Meaning for Wife, second-person narration, and more.
  • Learn more about Ig on the publisher’s website.
  • Here are some samples of Yakich’s poetry. His collections include The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross, and The Making of Collateral Beauty.
  • With Loyola University-New Orleans colleague Christopher Schaberg, Yakich has co-founded Airplane Reading, a site that was started “to treat ‘airplane reading’ seriously.” Yakich and Schaberg have also recently published Checking In/Checking Out, a nonfiction book that reflects their individual experiences with and attitudes toward air travel.
  ]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/a-meaning-for-wife-by-mark-yakich/feed 2 http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-the-buddha-in-the-attic-by-julie-otsuka http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-the-buddha-in-the-attic-by-julie-otsuka#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:00:28 +0000 Anne Barnhill http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=32216 The Buddha in the Attic pushes the bounds of narrative form with a collective narrator and a resistance to fixed fates. By inviting the reader to consider what could have happened, instead of what did, Otsuka makes her complicit in the fate of the story's mail-order-brides.]]> A finalist for the National Book Award this year, Julie Otsuka’s beautifully poetic second novel, The Buddha In The Attic, seems to question the very nature of narrative.  Told in eight sections, the story shares the lives of a group of women who come to the United States as mail-order brides in the 1920’s.  Marginalized by the dominant society, Otsuka further obscures their identities by both keeping them nameless, and, in a post-modern ploy, using the ‘we’ narrator.  She then lists all the possible outcomes for the women.  By doing so, she forces the reader to bear witness to their victimization again and again. To refuse to give the women names seems a continuation of their separateness, keeping them at a distance even from the reader:

  On the boat, we were mostly virgins.  We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves.  Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came for the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years – faded hand-me-downs form our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times.

  As an introduction, this style of narration intrigues. As the mode for the entire book, will such artifice lose its charm?  I began to long for one character, one story, one plot I could hold onto.  Instead, I got a “list” novel.  Lists have long been employed, and with great effect, in poetry.  However, in a novel, merely listing what might happen to each ‘we’ in a narrative burdens the reader, and makes her complicit in the outcomes, no matter how beautifully the sentences string together.

  Do we still need the Aristotelian notion of protagonist and antagonist?  Must one create rising tension?  Is a Greek chorus still drama?  How far can the bounds of narrative be stretched and still provide satisfaction?  Perhaps satisfaction is not Otsuka’s goal. The Buddha in the Attic puts forth a collective unconscious in which individuality, our particular stories, are rendered null and void.  These stories wind down many paths, as though Otsuka has thrown down the gauntlet: will the reader follow a story that explores each road, including those not taken?

  

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  Extra

  Click the streaming audio below to hear Julie Otsuka interviewed on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show:
  

  ]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/reviewlet-the-buddha-in-the-attic-by-julie-otsuka/feed 3 http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/agaat-by-marlene-van-niekerk-trans-michiel-heyns http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/agaat-by-marlene-van-niekerk-trans-michiel-heyns#comments Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:00:53 +0000 Preeta Samarasan http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=21619 Agaat to be transformative. The story of an Afrikaner woman and the black servant who has worked for her for most of both their lives, Agaat examines relationships of race and power between the two women by employing a stunning combination of structural intricacy, stylistic range, and daring allegory.]]> Once in a great while, you read a novel that transforms you so completely you are sure the change must be obvious to all who know you. Like a trauma survivor, you are astonished when life continues all around you, oblivious to what you have just been through, absorbed in its old trivialities. Given my obsessions—race and racial politics; the delicate balance of power between servants and even the most benevolent employers—it is hard to imagine a novel more guaranteed to affect me than Marlene van Niekerk’s masterpiece, Agaat (trans. Michiel Heyns, Tin House Books, 2010; published in the UK as The Way of The Women, Jonathan Ball, 2006). The novel opens during the last days of apartheid and tells the story of an Afrikaner woman and the black servant who has worked for her for most of both their lives. But Agaat is a stunning feat for reasons that have nothing to do with my own particular background: structural intricacy, stylistic range, the daring and devastating allegory that underlies the narrative without overwhelming it. It may be unfashionable and imprudent to make such declarations in a review, but Agaat is, without a doubt, one of the five finest novels I have ever read, and one I will return to repeatedly, knowing that I will find new marvels within its pages on each reading.

  The allegorical aspect is unsurprisingly the first to grab the reader’s attention, and so audacious is it, that one can scarcely outline it without making it seem ridiculous. It seems unlikely that any serious novelist could pull this off, and yet van Niekerk does: Milla, the Afrikaner woman and the novel’s narrator, is paralyzed and dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, so that, as the apartheid era draws to its close around them, she must depend on her servant, Agaat, for all her needs. Agaat—whose right arm and hand are deformed, but who is adroit and capable despite this handicap—must wipe Milla’s backside, scratch her itches, massage spoonfuls of porridge down her throat, and guess her whims: her dying wish, for example, to look at the maps of her her farm, Grootmoedersdrift. Milla thinks:

  I want to see the distances recorded and certified between the main road and the foot-hills, from the stables to the old orchard, I want to hook my eye to the little blue vein with the red bracket that marks the crossing, the bridge over the drift, the little arrow where the water of the drift wells up, the branchings of the river.

  She wants, in short, to take stock one last time, to take ownership even briefly, even symbolically.

  

  But Agaat had put away the maps of Grootmoedersdrift, along with various other documents and decorations, when Milla became bedridden and the back room of the farmhouse had to be cleared out for her. And now Agaat can only play twenty questions in response to Milla’s desperate eye signals:

  Shall I draw the curtain a bit? Do you want to listen to the morning service? A tape? Wine women and song? The pan for number one? The pan for number two? Too cold? Too hot? Sit up straighter? Lie down flatter? Eat a bit more porridge? Fruit pulp? There is cold melon? With a bit of salt? Water? Tea with honey and lemon?

  Whether she cannot or will not guess what Milla really wants, we ourselves must wonder, adjusting our perceptions through the course of the novel as the mystery of Agaat unfolds before us. For of course Agaat is wiser, and crueler, and more powerful than we have guessed at first, and though she never speaks for herself in the novel—we hear her words and see her actions only through Milla—we cannot help but share Milla’s suspicion that Agaat revels in her complete control over Milla’s body. She is the perfect nurse, following the doctor’s orders to the letter, foisting the prescribed exercises upon Milla’s unresisting limbs, studying her urine with a magnifying glass, meticulously recording “the motions of my entrances and my exits.” Will she eventually bring the maps out for Milla? This is the question that drives the third of the novel that takes place in the 1990s, and it is yet another choice to which summary cannot do justice: it seems an unlikely source of momentum until you actually find yourself turning the pages with bated breath, wondering how long Agaat will hold out, in what other ways she will misunderstand (or pretend to misunderstand) Milla’s longing before she yields.

  

  The twenty chapters of Agaat are structured identically: each opens with Milla at Agaat’s mercy on her deathbed in the 1990s, then goes on to an extended flashback in the second person, then a dense stream-of-consciousness prose poem, and finally a entry or a series of entries from Milla’s diaries. But where this structure might have seemed arbitrary or contrived in the hands of a lesser writer, here it emerges organically from the novel’s context: the diary entries, for example, are there because Agaat is reading Milla’s diaries aloud to her to keep her entertained, and what an act of both devotion and defiance this is: against Milla’s wishes, Agaat has kept the diaries, and now, at the end of Milla’s life—when Milla can no longer speak for herself to question or to defend those earlier versions of herself—she has brought them out to share. What she herself thinks of the events and opinions revealed in the diaries we must piece together bit by bit as we learn more about her own place and history in the household.

  As for the flashbacks, it seems natural, even necessary, for Milla to reminisce on her life as a farmer, beginning in 1946 when she becomes engaged to Jak de Wet and encompassing all the challenges and sorrows she endured in order to make a living off the land. After all, she has nothing but her mind, her memories. These flashbacks hint at the entire history of South Africa while gradually revealing the knotty secrets of Milla and Jak’s marriage and raising questions about Agaat’s complex role in the household: somewhere between friend and servant to Milla, despised and distrusted “woolly” to her embittered husband Jak, second mother to their son Jakkie. And while one might well expect to learn a great deal about farming—the symptoms of and treatments for botulism in cattle, the causes of pig measles, how to dose a poisoned bull—in these sections, there is also much unexpected beauty in the language and the imagery.

  Van Niekerk has written two critically acclaimed novels so far, but she was first a poet, and in the prose poems that trace the progression of Milla’s illness from the initial appearance of symptoms to the moments before her death, she gives her poetic impulse free reign. The results are breathtaking, and not just because it is rare to encounter such prodigious gifts in a work of fiction:

  …i clamp myself gather my waters my water-retaining clods my loam my shale i am fallow field but not decided by me who will gently plow me on contour plough in my stubbles and my devils’s thorn fertilise me with green manure and with straw to stiffen the wilt that this wilderness has brought on this bosom and brain? who blow into my nostrils with with breath of dark humus? who sow in me the strains of wheat named for daybreak or for hope? how will my belated harvest reflect and in what water? who will harvest who shear who share my fell my fleece my sheaf my small white pips? who will chew me until I bind for i have done as was done unto me the sickness belongs to us two.

  What saves the novel from being an incoherent showcase of the author’s skills are the many brilliant resonances between the different sections: the subtle glint in one of the prose poems of an image we will later encounter in a flashback section, the spinning out in a diary entry of an event alluded to in a flashback, a small detail in a deathbed scene picked up in a flashback and turned into an answer to a question we didn’t know we had.

  A concrete example to illustrate these abstractions: in a series of diary entries from 1960, we see Milla supervise Agaat’s first sheep-butchering lesson. Agaat is at the time twelve or thirteen, and it’s clear to us that some unspoken emotion simmers beneath her surface: perhaps disgust, perhaps just the fluctuating resentments of a girl that age. In the process of butchering the sheep, Agaat bloodies her dragging right sleeve. (Her clothes are all made with a longer right sleeve to conceal, by her own choice, the deformed arm.) When the butchering is over, Milla tells Agaat to wash up and orders another servant: “…go and fetch my old red jersey in the bedroom she can’t walk around any longer in that blood-stained thing.” But Agaat refuses to put on Milla’s red jersey. Milla reports Agaat’s response in her diary: “I have another jersey like this one she says where’s my jersey I want my own jersey it has the right sleeve.”

  

  It is just another domestic detail in a long record of domestic details: Milla’s diaries abound with lists, plans, projects undertaken and unfinished. Easy enough to overlook or forget the red jersey, or to accept Agaat’s explanation for her refusal, for it is true that Milla’s red jersey does not have one longer sleeve. But the moment stuck, for some reason, in my mind—and sure enough, hundreds of pages later, the red jersey appears again, and the mystery of Agaat’s reluctance is solved for us, as are dozens of other little mysteries planted here and there (the silver bell Agaat brings Milla in her sickbed even though Milla is incapable of ringing it to summon her; the letterbox-style flap in the door of Agaat’s erstwhile bedroom) including many I am sure I overlooked on this first reading.

  Any attentive reader will notice that the novel’s ingenious plotting relies on its architecture, its maze of secret passages and hidden entrances. (Though, at almost 600 pages, perhaps it is best compared to a doll’s house the size of a cathedral.) But as a writer—and one with a special interest in retrograde narration—I was floored by what van Niekerk does with these diary entries. The first ones we see are from 1960, and from there they continue chronologically until 1979, when Milla abandons her diary-keeping because her son is grown up and has left home to join the army; apparently she feels on some level that her primary domestic role has come to an end, and with it, the need to keep a record of it. Here—more than halfway through the book—Agaat begins to read out the packet of diaries that she has saved for last, but that in fact record the earliest events, beginning with her own arrival in the household in 1953 and her early relationship with Milla.

  The purpose of telling a story backwards is of course that the reader already knows the ending, so that every event leading back from it is imbued with the weight of that ending: thus a glowing, hopeful beginning becomes a heartbreaking one if we already know that hope to be naïve or misplaced. This is abundantly true in Agaat; it is hard to imagine a more devastating ending than the beginning of Milla and Agaat’s journey together. But here this structure is not just an authorial imposition; it reveals Agaat’s own stake in the diary-reading, telling us that it is at least as painful for her to revisit the beginning of her life at Grootmoedersdrift as it is for Milla. When, at least, that beginning is laid out before us, it is not just the facts of it that take our breath away—although the final pieces of the puzzle we have been putting together for six hundred pages are immensely satisfying—but also our understanding of what it must mean for Agaat to read aloud the beginning and for Milla to hear it.

  

  There are dissertations waiting to be written about Agaat, countless term papers on elements I will have to leave out in the interest of space here. Agaat’s white cap alone, that crowning symbol of her servanthood, deserves hours of analysis, as does the theme of embroidery in the novel, so effectively highlighted on the cover of the Tin House edition (the foreword to an Afrikaner embroidery handbook from the 1960s is, after all, one of the epigraphs to the novel).

  But I cannot conclude this review without a word on the outstanding translation by Michiel Heyns. No, I don’t read Afrikaans, but one does not need to to recognise almost immediately that this translation is the work of a master. In his note, Heyns tells us: “Agaat is a highly allusive text, permeated, at times almost subliminally, with traces of Afrikaans cultural goods: songs, children’s rhymes, children’s games, hymns, idiomatic expressions, farming lore.” That he somehow manages to convey the spirit and the meaning of these allusions while preserving the foreign reader’s sense of being a stranger in a strange land is his genius. I could recognize the moments that would mean something different to a reader familiar with Afrikaner culture than they did to me, but what I felt was not exclusion, or frustration, or even resignation; Heyns’s windows into this text are made of glass. You put your fingers to them, feel that dry South African heat, and know that you are invited to look for as long you need to, to ponder and to make your own meaning. I now look forward to reading not only everything van Niekerk has written, but Heyns’s own work too, to experience more directly the powerful intelligence and sensitivity behind the English edition of Agaat. But first I must give my heart time to mend. I may have cried myself to sleep the night I finished Agaat, but I’m convinced I woke up already better and stronger. The best novels shatter your heart, but, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, they also gather up the pieces of you and give them back to you in all the right order.

  Further Links and Resources

  

  Marlene van Niekerk

• Marlene van Niekerk is also a poet. You can listen to her read poems at the 2010 Pen World Voices Festival.
• van Niekerk’s first novel, Triomf, has been made into an award-winning movie.
• You can buy Agaat at your local indie bookseller or directly from the Tin House Books website.
• Watch Toni Morrison in conversation with Marlene van Niekerk, moderated by K. Anthony Appiah.
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/agaat-by-marlene-van-niekerk-trans-michiel-heyns/feed 2 http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/an-interview-with-deanna-fei http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/an-interview-with-deanna-fei#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 13:00:28 +0000 Kate Levin http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=19192 A Thread of Sky, rescued Kate Levin from a giant post-MFA funk. In this conversation with Levin, Fei discusses the role cultural identity plays in a writer's persona and work, the value of unknowability, the secret to writing great sex scenes, the reason she watches Jersey Shore—and more.]]> I discovered Deanna Fei’s A Thread of Sky (Penguin) last year, in the middle of a giant funk. It was late April; blue-skied, short-sleeved spring had just begun, but all I could think about were endings. My MFA program was over, and with it my break from the working world (or at least, from the working world in which one has to wear nice pants). My cohort—the ready-made social group of the last couple of years—was disbanding. My desire to write had evaporated, too. I put my thesis manuscript away, because just spotting it out of the corner of my eye induced in me the same allergic reaction I have to stumbling upon reruns of Friends: a mix of familiarity and discomfort. In short, I was scared. It’s easy to feel like a writer when you’re in a graduate writing program. But in April, stripped of the pressures—really, reassurances—of deadlines and workshops, I felt like a pretender, a loser with a laptop.

And speaking of that laptop—I spent a lot of time on it during this funk. It’s amazing how much web-surfing can look and even feel like writing—fingers on the keyboard! typing!—if one’s denial is deep enough. It was during one of these Internet binges that I made my way to the book section of the New York Times, where a debut novelist named Deanna Fei was being reviewed. Her name rang a bell. I typed it into Facebook, only to discover that we had a couple of friends in common—we’d gone to the same college, graduating a few years apart. I checked out Deanna’s author page, which led me to her blog. The first entry I read revisited some quotes on writing—from Sylvia Plath, D.H. Lawrence, and others—that Deanna had compiled in college, when her dream was to “be a writer.” She reflected:

Some of these statements don’t seem quite as profound to me now as they might have back then, and if I redid this exercise today, I’d probably revise the list substantially. But every one of them still speaks to me, very clearly, in at least one way: They’re about writing. Not about “being a writer,” but about writing. And—it’s not always easy to remember—writing is what it’s all about. Nothing else.

I’d been told this before, but I needed to hear it again just then. It helped. I went out and bought Deanna’s novel, A Thread of Sky, and was reminded further of all the wonderful things you can do with words if you let yourself get them down on paper, and give yourself time to rework them and test them against your meaning. There is a moment in A Thread of Sky—the story of six women, family members, who take a package tour of China—in which one of the characters finally confronts her grief over her dead husband, by way of a very mundane act. I’ll resist saying anything more about it; I don’t want to rob other readers of the experience of having their breath taken away by the deep sadness and utter simplicity of the moment. The same passage that knocked the wind out of me also knocked some sense into me. This is what writing is about, I remember thinking: illuminating emotional truths, exploring interesting questions about people and the world—above all, forging a connection with your reader. This is the work that makes those anxieties about “being a writer,” however inevitable, seem beside the point. Nobody ever moved anybody by being a writer. Only by putting words on the page that ring true.

Originally from Queens, New York, Deanna attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and received a Fulbright grant to research A Thread of Sky in China. In the Huffington Post, The Millions, and other venues, she’s written with insight and humor on the writing life, literature, identity, family, and reality TV. She shared her thoughts with me on these and other subjects over email in February.

INTERVIEW


Kate Levin: This may be a strange place to begin, but I was overjoyed to learn recently that you sometimes dive into celebrity gossip sites while warming up to write. As someone with a bad UsWeekly.com habit (the need to know what Lindsay Lohan’s up to always seems to strike just as I’m sitting down to work), I wanted to ask if you’d share some of your favorite pre-writing gossip sites?

Deanna Fei: I don’t think any of these sites need my endorsement, but my usual stops are HuffPost, TMZ, and E!. I like a mix of narrative, eye candy, and plain tawdriness.

You noted in an earlier interview that celebrity gossip sites are rich in stories. You make a similar observation in a piece for the Huffington Post, “Why Every Writer Should Watch Jersey Shore.” Thanks to blogs and Facebook and the million reality shows on TV, it seems like a story-hungry mind has more windows than ever into the lives of other people. It seems, too, that all of these narratives, all this information, could really impinge on the mental quiet needed to write. How do you cultivate the concentration it takes to work on a novel?

It’s true that I honestly believe my gossip habit serves as a little warm-up for writing, a way to step out of my own life and into the lives of others. But you’re right: writing doesn’t happen without that final phase, the whiting-out of everything but the one story before you. And sometimes that takes a lot of tricks. I have two laptops—one that’s so old that it crashes if I do more than word processing and maybe looking up a few references on Wikipedia, and one that I use for everything else. When it’s time to write, I put my other laptop in another room and close the door. I turn my phone to silent mode and put on noise-canceling headphones. And I don’t let anyone interrupt me. Maybe it seems self-indulgent, but writing is creating a whole universe for your characters and your readers, and you have to protect the process.

The idea for A Thread of Sky grew out of a package tour of mainland China that you took with your own sisters, mom, aunt, and grandmother. In your acknowledgments, you write: “…while this book was, in part, inspired by them, it is not about them; it does not depict their histories or their personalities. I offer them my apologies for potential misunderstandings, and my lifelong admiration.” Did it complicate things that the story was rooted in a recognizably real family experience? Or did it feel like the work of creating any fictional characters?



Fei reads at B&N in Park Slope, April 2010 / credit: from author's website

There was a part of me that deeply regretted the fact that my story had a recognizably autobiographical basis, because I couldn’t help worrying about the assumptions readers might make about my family and the ways that my family might feel exposed. In terms of my writing process, the main complication was always making sure that nothing remained in the novel simply because it had happened in real life—one of the worst justifications to write anything.

But in general, I think that whatever the inspiration for fictional characters, the challenge of making them spring to life is much the same. And the truth is that people will assume autobiographical elements in your writing no matter what, especially with a first novel. You can’t let that stop you. You simply have to write what moves you.

You went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and worked on A Thread of Sky while you were there. I imagine it’s very different to put up portions of an embryonic novel for critique than complete short story drafts. What was it like trying to draft a novel while simultaneously receiving feedback from other writers?

For me, one of the hardest parts of writing my first novel was getting up the nerve to start. So that novel workshop was most crucial in making the stakes seem manageable. I could tell myself I was simply drafting sixty pages so that I could get into this class with Elizabeth McCracken, as opposed to starting my first novel.

In terms of the actual workshops, it’s true that my novel was too embryonic back then for the feedback to be very useful in itself, especially when we were so accustomed to thinking of plot and structure and language on the granular scale of the short story. But the encouragement and sense of fellowship were invaluable. So was simply witnessing how the process was terrifying and bewildering for everyone, whether it was their first novel or their third.



Since I left the workshop, I’ve mostly reverted to working in isolation for long periods of time, and recognizing when I need to turn to my trusted readers and editors. But those two years at Iowa were such an intense, immersive experience that hardly a day goes by when I don’t hear some of those voices: Frank Conroy’s exhortations to inspect every sentence for “meaning, sense, and clarity”; Ethan Canin’s edict that you write to explore, not explain; Elizabeth McCracken’s passion for research; and on and on.

This is from your thoughtful and funny essay in The Millions, “A Different Species: A Chinese American Writer in China,” about moving to China on a Fulbright to work on your novel:

I moved into a studio apartment in a traditional alley where my neighbors’ vigilance in watching me seemed matched only their vigilance in not speaking to me. The locals I met seemed less interested in getting acquainted than in handing out their business cards—according to which, no one ranked below Managing Director.

One of the things I found so interesting about your essay is that I tend to think of research-for-writing as a way to feel at home in a subject or setting, to “get it”—but it seems like the alienation that you felt in China was really productive for your work. I was wondering if you could talk about that a bit.



The Great Wall / credit: from the author's website

You raise a really interesting question. To me, it’s both: you need to feel at home with your subject, but you also want to let it retain a sense of mystery, a smidgen of unknowability. I think it’s crucial to immerse yourself in the world of your characters through research, imagination, and/or literally moving to the place where their story takes place, as I did. But a writer is most crucially an observer, someone who stands just a little bit apart. You never want to feel too comfortable; you need a little distance to see clearly.

More broadly, the feeling that you have to “get it” completely can be deadening in fiction—and, I think, can even verge on hubris. In the same way that a traveler eventually has to look past that urge to fully digest a foreign country, a writer has to embrace the fact that your subject will always remain just slightly beyond your grasp, in the same way that your characters will never behave exactly how you anticipated and your novel will never be exactly what you set out to write. To me, that’s proof that you’re really writing, when the story is a living thing.

Now, to dig into the novel itself: the point of view rotates by chapter among the six women in the book—three sisters, born and raised in NYC; their mother and aunt, who emigrated from Taiwan to the US as students; and their grandmother, a former Chinese revolutionary now living in LA. The setting shifts, too, as we travel along the “must-sees” offered up by the package tour. How did you know which of your characters’ eyes to lend the reader at any given spot along the tour?

It’s a funny thing: I just knew. I always had a sense of which character had the most at stake in each setting, and that dictated the choice of narrator. Sometimes it was obvious—for example, that the grandmother would narrate the historical capital of Nanjing because the city would evoke her memories of life under the Japanese occupation, as a nationalist activist, as a permanent exile. And sometimes it was more abstract—for instance, that the romantic gardens of Suzhou would force Nora to face the fact of her heartbreak. But there always seemed to be an organic and fundamental relationship between the point of view and the setting.



Suzhou Lingering Garden

All of your characters are given equal voice in the novel, but Irene is the only one who has to play the role of both mother and daughter on the tour, and the story begins and ends with her. Do you see her as the heart of the book?

Yes, though I didn’t fully realize that until I was well into the revision. My original intention was to give equal weight to all six women, but I came to see that Irene’s emotional journey was, in many ways, the heart of all of their journeys. She is the center of this family, in bridging the generations between her mother and her daughters and in providing the impetus for this reunion. While the other characters are, each for her own reasons, deeply ambivalent about embarking on this tour, Irene desperately wants to reconnect with her family and her ancestral home. Her hopes, her sense of deep disillusionment, and her eventual coming to terms helped form the overall arc of the novel.

These six women are all faced with very different (often secret) dilemmas, which is part of what gives this tour its crackle of tension. One thing they all seem to be wrestling with, though, is the complicated and ever-changing nature of home—whether it’s an ancestral home, a physical home, or even a person’s own body. Did “home” become a concern for all of your characters because it was a larger concern of the novel, or did it work the opposite way?

The latter—it was a theme that emerged from the characters, which is how I think themes should almost always originate. Otherwise you run the risk of stilting your story for the sake of an idea. It’s funny: the one line that seems to most explicitly contain the heart of the novel—”Jia—family, house, home. In Chinese, it was all one word”—is one that I wrote on my final pass-through of the manuscript.

Your younger characters, Nora, Kay, and Sophie, are especially aware of other people’s ideas of who they’re supposed to be as Asian American women. Their range of responses to stereotyping—variously ignoring it, making fun of it, confronting it through political activism, defining themselves against it, telling someone to fuck off, not telling someone to fuck off—seems to echo a theme of A Thread of Sky about resisting oversimplification and generalization in favor of complexity, multiple ways of being. I was also thinking about this in light of “I Called Amy Tan A Dirty Word—And Then She Friended Me,” your piece about coming up against other people’ assumptions about what your book is. Could you say a little about the struggle for your book to have its own identity, to be read on its own terms?



Amy Tan, photo by David Sifry

There were times I struggled with how my novel seemed to be instantly categorized in ways that didn’t ring true to me. Of course, that’s just part of how books get packaged and digested—you know, “If you liked this, try that!”—and there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. But for writers of color, it can be particularly disheartening for the work to be categorized sociologically, which takes something away from our individuality and our art. In my case, I got a lot of Amy Tan comparisons, some of which were complimentary and some of which were dismissive. And in terms of the novel being set in China, there were times that I felt like I’d wandered into a preexisting shouting match between “pro-China” and “anti-China” camps. But there’s only so much that a writer can control. I find that anytime I hear from people who’ve actually read the novel, they always seem to have a highly individual sense of my story and my characters on their own terms, and that’s more important to me than anything else.

Now, to shift topics just a bit—to sex scenes. There are a couple of them in the novel, but I’m thinking mostly of the very climactic (sorry) scene in which one of your characters loses her virginity. Do you have any advice for those of us who have trouble writing sex scenes?



Ah, I love that you ask! I think sex scenes are some of the hardest to write—and they can also be the most essential. They should never be obligatory or gratuitous, of course—but too often, writers just let the moment pass in a line break. That seems like such a wasted opportunity to me. A good sex scene is a good action scene, a high point of tension and conflict, a moment when your characters are (in more ways than one) laid bare. As the writer, just try not to lose your nerve. It’s your duty to see your characters through the moment.

In addition to writing, you teach. What drew you to teaching—and specifically, to the kind of work that you do, teaching in public schools in NYC?



Public education has always been my passion, along with writing. I can’t help wondering why more of us writers—along with journalists, musicians, dancers, artists—don’t seem to connect the problems in our schools with the problem we’re always lamenting: the shrinking audience for our art. When we continue to fail so many of our students, where can we expect the next generation of audiences to come from?

On a more personal level, I find teaching nourishes me as a person and as a writer. I rely on my students to challenge my thinking, and very often, I’m inspired by their toughness and their wisdom. I find schools, and adolescent groups in particular, to be such fascinating microcosms of society. Writing requires a lot of isolation and contemplation, and teaching gets me away from my computer and out of my head; it keeps me from slipping into solipsism. You have to write what moves you, but you also have to write stories that matter.

You do other community-oriented, NYC-focused work in the form of your writing for Open City. Could you tell us about that project?

Open City is an interdisciplinary neighborhood blog and community project coordinated by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. I’m one of five writers documenting the rapidly changing neighborhoods of Manhattan’s Chinatown, Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, and Flushing, Queens, through essays, photos, interviews, oral histories, poetry, and anything else that inspires us. I was born and raised in Flushing, where my parents still live, and it’s been fascinating to revisit the neighborhood through this new lens.



Click here to learn more about AAWW and the 2011 Asian American Short Story Contest

As we wrap up, is there anything you know now about novel-writing that you wish you’d known when you were working on A Thread of Sky?

There are so many things I wish I’d known. When I was writing my early drafts of A Thread of Sky, I spent way too much time polishing pages and pages that will never see the light of day. I like to think that it was all part of the process, but part of me knows that a lot of it was a waste of time. More importantly, it led me to get too attached to various lines and scenes; it distracted me from the bigger picture. Writing a novel requires momentum. Especially when you’re transitioning from writing short stories, you might feel like you’re sacrificing beauty and precision—but you have to trust that can come later. Also, the force of a novel depends on huge stakes, overarching questions, a sense of expansion—and I think that, in this way, the craft is more akin to film than short stories. I’ve actually gained some of my most treasured lessons about plot and structure from books on screenwriting.

Finally, I know that you’re a fan of Jersey Shore. Any thoughts about Snooki’s forthcoming novel? Should writers of Serious Literary Fiction roll their eyes and grumble about her giant advance, or is it better to take a more generous, big-tent philosophy?

I have to confess, I didn’t know anything about Snooki’s book deal until now. In my world, writing is art, but books are commodities, and these realities have to coexist. None of us can help grumbling every now and then, but the only thing we can control is our own work. And maybe Snooki’s earnings will enable her publisher to discover an unknown writer or two.

Or maybe Snooki has a great story to tell. You never know.

Further Links and Resources



The hardcover edition

• Here’s the New York Times review that sparked Kate Levin’s interest in A Thread of Sky. Shopping for a copy of the novel? Consider ordering yours from a local indie bookseller.
• You can read an excerpt from the novel on Deanna Fei’s website. While there, visit the author’s photo album of “must-see” locations featured in A Thread of Sky.
• At Five Chapters, read Fei’s short story “Born Again.”
• Read “Finding Serenity in Flushing”, a piece by Fei on Open City’s website, and learn more about the mission of Open City: Blogging Urban Change (not to be confused with Open City, the lit journal).
• You can read Fei’s essay “My Grandmother, the Chinese Censor” at The Millions.
• In this Fulbright Alumni Testimonial video, Fei talks about how her experiences in China informed and inspired her novel.
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/an-interview-with-deanna-fei/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/bound-by-antonya-nelson http://fictionwritersreview.com/reviews/bound-by-antonya-nelson#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:00:09 +0000 Jackie Reitzes http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=18413 Bound, Jackie Retizes examines the role of serial killers as literary signifiers, how Nelson navigates multiple points of view, and why the author succeeds (when many less expert writers don't) in favoring ambiguity over conclusions, "offering delicate moments of attachment in a book that is less about permanence than it is about restoration." ]]> Serial killers make for curious metaphors in literature. If contemporary writers are all beneficiaries of Chekhov’s loaded gun, you sort of expect a fictional serial killer to, well, show up and kill people. Such characters are introduced so they may wreak consequences. Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit springs to mind as the kind of indelible force whose streak of (un)Godly offings haunt lonely Georgia highways before rolling off the page and into legend.

In Antonya Nelson’s newest novel, Bound (Bloomsbury USA, 2010), we learn of another infamously monikered killer. This one calls himself BTK (Blind, Torture, Kill), and he operates in Kansas, no less—home to mythical flying cows. So, ammunition ready. We are expecting shots fired. As the novel states early on: “There would always be bad guys; evil was one of the rules.”

But for married couple Catherine and Oliver Desplaines, the crime scene is a more subtle domestic one; the violence, emotional rather than physical, not even always perceptible, and the ties that bind are of the memory-lane variety. Into this household enters young Cattie, the daughter of Catherine’s former high school friend Misty, who dies in a car crash in the book’s opening chapter.



photo credit: Marion Ettlinger / photo from vermontstudiocenter.org

The BTK exists on the margins of their lives as an ominous threat, but his presence does not inspire fear in any of the characters, who have been following his notorious acts for decades. In this way the BTK goes from character to signifier. He lurks throughout the narrative as a kind of jumping off point. A conversation starter. A trigger to one’s past. The plot points of a map on a driving tour of victims’ houses.

So, then, taken as a metaphor, what, does it mean to be bound? Surprisingly, the connotations are much softer than you’d expect:

It was not legally binding. The expression itself interested Catherine. Legally. Binding.

One trademark of the serial killer’s methods was binding. Drawstrings, extension cords, scarves, panty hose—whatever, it seemed was at hand. Catherine lay in bed letting her thoughts circle and knot (neckties, jump ropes, leashes…) while Oliver prepared for his work day.

Here, and later, it is the thoughts, not the killer, doing the twisting, and this image repeats: “For Catherine, Wichita was a big bag of loose yarn, ensnared connections that knotted together the past and the present without clear cause and effect or pattern. Cattie couldn’t make sense of it yet, but she was good at listening, patient at untangling.”



And later still: “Cattie had begun braiding together the city as Catherine recalled it, one curious strand at a time, today aided by the icy blur the windshield view provided her.”

In the absence of horror flick-esque plot twists, then, what makes Bound eminently readable are Nelson’s powerful characterizations. Catherine and Oliver and those surrounding them are all interestingly flawed but not unlikable. The point of view shifts with each chapter, allowing intimate observations from more than one perspective, and, as a result, it is hard to say exactly whose story Bound is. Usually it is the same character’s vantage point for the duration of a chapter, but sometimes this changes with an authorial sleight of hand. Suddenly and smoothly, the reader is in someone else’s head, and the transition is always a physical shift (eye contact in a mirror, or the phone conversation hangs with up with someone different than who dialed).



The structure of the story is seamless—four sections, each named for a season. The internal rhythms are equally consistent: the prose clean, crisp; longish paragraphs, a layered description of clause upon clause—and then the variance with shorter lines to round it out:

Houston was not at all what Catherine had expected, although she couldn’t quite pin down what she had expected. Astronauts? Oil rigs? Ten-gallon hats? It was moist, filled with trees, houses that reminded her of ones in Wichita. When she’d arrived, she’d parked in Misty Mueller’s bungalow driveway and studied the front porch. Yellow brick, cream-colored trim, a flower bed and porch swing. Frogs, crickets, birds: the rhythmic noise of creatures and nature, the atmosphere pleasantly sodden.



Antonya Nelson’s landscapes (something else we are often bound to) are noteworthy for the beauty she finds in the boring. Kansas. Colorado. Vermont. Houston, briefly, but this is not a big-city narrative. Rather, it seems to be exploring the unsettling mysteries that swirl around seemingly quiet outposts, a topographical subconscious. Here, the book seems to say, this small town, this personal history: Rocks left unturned.

Bound is also about seasons (can you be bound to the seasons?)—seasons of life as one ages, and how seasonal shifts affect the mood of a landscape, interior and exterior:

There had been an ice storm in Kansas, a snow that turned to rain, then back to snow, and then, whimsically, finally, to sleet…Overhead, the trees were laden. They creaked ominously. Eventually, when the sun emerged, everything began to snap. All over town the branches crashed down—on cars, on houses on power lines. Giant boughs. Devastating breaks. The streets were filled with broken limbs, electricity went out, wind-shields were shattered. What remained was a forest of strange topless trees, their severed appendages imploring the sky. Everyone stayed at home, built fires, used flashlights, listened to the radio.



What makes this scene particularly interesting is the tension between exterior and interior landscapes. The characters are all happy to take a snow day as the trees self-destruct around them. Contradictions such as this pop up throughout Bound. In the case of young Cattie, the death of her mother gives way to unexpectedly forged connections with Catherine (who she was named for) and Oliver. Catherine’s nursing home-bound mother’s loss of speech yields to a wordless language more poignant than what she spoke before. As with the snow storm, the physical wreckage does not necessarily lead to emotional ruin. The unexpected connections (between mother and son-in-law, for example, or between a teenage girl and a scary runaway who lives in the attic) are the most exciting kind.

At the end of this novel, many of its threads are not tied up. We do not know how marriages or familial relationships will turn out any more than we did at the beginning. Life’s mysteries, Nelson implies, are supposed to remain nebulous. And the constructions of a narrative (such as a killer expected to kill) do not necessarily mean that answers are given or futures revealed. Only an assured writer of Nelson’s stature can achieve this permeating ambiguity successfully. Instead of conclusions, we have delicate moments of attachment that portend to future feelings of security. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that is a lot to be grateful for.



Indeed, Bound feels less about permanence or being trapped than it is about restoration. How things are rebuilt after catastrophe strikes. Solidity where before there was vapor. How you shift into the realization of new spaces rather than insisting on what’s come before. A celebration of the protean rather than the mourning of what can’t be brought back.

As Oliver notes, in justifying an affair with a woman twenty years younger than his third wife:

How was it that anybody could be satisfied with only one story? With the surface, and nothing beneath it? With the familiar and repetitive, routine equaling the death of any plausible adventure?

In Bound, it is in the surfacing of these many stories—the news-grabbing and the quotidian, the notable and the everyday, studied and subterranean—that provides the kind of plausible adventures we as readers are lucky enough to find.



Further Links and Resources

• Here are some interviews with Nelson: in the Missouri Review; in the Atlantic (2002); as part of the Mothers Write series at Writers Write (2004); and
  at the Nervous Breakdown, where the author recently interviewed herself (2010). Also: Definitely worth reading (if you can track down a print copy) is Andrew Scott’s 2009 interview with Nelson in the Cincinnati Review; he offers an excerpt (on the ways in which novels are “satisfying”) in the Andrew’s Book Club archives.
• In this On the Fly: Writers on Writing interview, Nelson talks about authenticity in fiction, writers she admires (including William Trevor), and more.
• Via NPR, read an excerpt from Bound. Shopping for a copy of the novel? Consider buying yours from a local indie bookseller.
• Browse inside Nelson’s collection Some Fun at Simon & Schuster’s website. This excerpt from the book was also featured in the New York Times. Powell’s offers an excerpt from Nobody’s Girl.
• At the American Scholar, read Nelson’s story “Snow White,” and at Triquarterly Online, read “The Village.”
• The author reads from her story “Or Else.”

  Antonya Nelson in Berkeley from Al Martinez on Vimeo.

• After John Updike’s death in 2009, Nelson joined other writers in contributing a moving tribute to the author for the New Yorker; in this piece, she recommends and discusses Updike’s story “Deaths of Distant Friends.”
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