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.

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.

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?

Extra

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

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

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:

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

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

Writers of historical fiction have a particular challenge, as readers may already presume familiarity with the world on which a story is based. The fractured settings of the Civil War are particularly vivid in the minds of Americans, thanks to everyone from Stephen Crane to Ken Burns to Doris Kearns Goodwin. Why all this attention? Perhaps what Abraham Lincoln described in the Gettysburg Address as the “testing” of a nation vulnerably predicated on equality between men is closer to the anxiously oppositional minds of Americans than we care to admit.

Photo Credit: Fred Milkie Jr. / Via author's website

From debut novelist Robin Oliveira, My Name is Mary Sutter (Viking, 2010) is the gutsy tale of a youthful Albany, New York, midwife who becomes a nurse to soldiers of the Union Army—men who were more likely to die from now-preventable infections than they were from gunshots. Above all, Mary is hell-bent on becoming a surgeon at a time when no woman in this country had been admitted to a medical school.

The story begins with Mary’s thwarted attempt to apprentice herself to James Blevens, a surgeon in Albany; on the heels of that rejection, she must also flee from her twin sister Jenny’s marriage to the young man Mary loves. Mary’s service as a volunteer nurse in the nation’s capital is nothing if not wholehearted. Her ferocious desire to learn the art of surgery drives the plot, even as it charms the widower Dr. William Stipp, who runs the unstaffed and decrepit hotel-cum-hospital to which she attaches herself.

A civil war doctor's kit. Image via Flickr.

Mary’s choices, echoed by Oliveira’s accounting of the high-risk guesswork of Civil War medicine, form the novel’s moral center. As a subplot, the author takes on the president’s struggle with military strategy. The ripple effects of war move relentlessly through Mary’s family, while the tragic outcome of her relationship with Jenny reveals the ambiguity at the heart of Mary’s idealism.

While the novel is told mostly from Mary’s point of view, Oliveira zooms confidently between cinematic observation—often used to provide background for a new chapter or record the progress of the war—and her characters’ detailed thoughts. This larger picture and the use of an omniscient narrator are appropriate since Mary’s individual story was shaped by a particular historical context. “Nearly 20 women became surgeons after their experience nursing in the Civil War,” Oliveira tells us in the preface. One of her goals is to humanize that achievement through her heroine.

Barn used as a civil war hospital. Image via Flickr.

For the most part, the point of view shifts work seamlessly. The author is unafraid to reinterpret the sacred space inhabited by President Lincoln, though she does so sparingly, keeping the story focused on Mary Sutter. Oliveira unpacks the President’s inner conflict as, in despair over his son Willie’s death and the protraction of the war, he climbs a spiral stair to a parapet on the roof of his house and gathers the resolve to issue the Emancipation Proclamation: “It had not been his intention to liberate, but now? Now it was.”

Image via NMAH

The overarching point of view succeeds especially well in depicting the struggle between stolid Mary, at twenty already a dedicated and expert midwife, and her pretty twin Jenny, the ingénue. The conflict simmers through the first seven chapters, and bleeds into Mary’s motivation for becoming a war nurse. As the story opens, Jenny is engaged to their next-door neighbor Thomas Fall, the bland young man who initially showed interest in Mary. While Mary’s attachment to the conventional Thomas is somewhat unconvincing—Mary “could never bring herself to care about ordinary things…like whose husband she might covet should the opportunity arise”—we feel the push-pull in each sister as they try to make nice, despite their antipathy: “’Help me, Jenny,’” Mary appeals as she tries to convince their mother to let her leave home.

But Jenny hoped the war would never begin…to her great relief nothing terrible had yet occurred. ‘They will be home very soon. And you will have exhausted yourself for nothing,’ she said. Mary perceived the caution, but also the abandonment.”

Ultimately, it is Mary—pulled away by her desire to learn surgery, and kept away by the horrific need she encounters among the devastated Union army— who abandons Jenny.

Both battles and scenes of ordinary life are cinematic, illuminated by Oliveira’s high-wattage research. Gothic detail abounds in this version of the 1860s. At times the details even overwhelm the story, raising the question of the author’s intention. Having done the research, is Oliveira loath to omit anything? Is she striving to represent a world by filling it with as much stuff as possible? Is she suggesting that the Civil War belonged to an epoch of such foment that, in the words of nurse Walt Whitman, a single mind might “contain multitudes”?

Through the course of the book, we encounter icicle-hung cemetery vaults, thronging war-zealous crowds, and acrid, anthracite-smelling canal barges in Albany, Mary’s hometown; the “wailing of street denizens,” mud-leaking tenement walls, and Irish singers of “Danny Boy” in Manhattan City; in Washington City, we are given an insider’s view of the “tattered rugs” and “dingy walls” of President Lincoln’s shabby house (as well as his clothing), near which a canal reeks with odors of sewage produced by the recent influx of 75,000 unskilled volunteer soldiers into the capital.

Lincoln's home. Image via Flickr.

The first glimpse inside the Sutter home is from the point of view of James Blevens, who does not expect to find wealth. He and Mary are bringing in a young woman who has just given birth. In the process of settling the mother in bed, he encounters about a dozen telling details that reveal the family’s economic status. There is nothing wrong with visual detail—it makes the house interior vivid, and naming the titles of three of Mary’s medical books highlights her passion for medicine—but the impression of a wealthy, comfortable home could be created with far fewer images.

It may be that in order to achieve the all-important verisimilitude that will keep readers engaged, recreating the familiar world of the Civil War requires an increasing investment in detail on the part of novelists. Maybe it’s not enough to describe the streets of Albany, New York, in 1861—you have to name them as well. But more isn’t always better. The accretion of detail contributes to an unrelenting intensity that begins on page one with a dramatic birth scene, continues at a gallop through fifty-three chapters, and does not let up until the epilogue, where we see Mary established in her post-war career, her hair “gloriously silver.”

Oliveira uses the verb “extortion” to describe Mary’s relationship with the New York physician-widower Dr. William Stipp, who becomes her mentor in medicine. Yes, it’s true that without incredible tenacity, no woman would have succeeded in becoming a surgeon in this era. However, Oliveira guns for intensity on every page, even in her use of metaphor, where she pushes lyrical language into a hyper-romanticism that will alienate some readers. Unless your main character is as memorable as Hamlet, it seems overreaching to evoke Shakespeare’s lines about the “wand’ring stars” standing like “wonder-wounded hearers” above the tragedy of Denmark. More than once, as the action unfolds on earth, Oliveira calls for an emotional response on the part of the heavens. Amid the stress of war and at the height of her family crisis, Mary refuses to leave the work and Dr. Stipp. “The stars grew pale and reserved, as if in judgment,” as she tells Stipp, ‘You’ll regret everything that happens between us.’”

Image via historicaldigression.com

Why he would regret their relationship, we actually never find out. The truth is, Stipp can’t do his job without Mary’s help, she relieves his loneliness, and they never argue except about her insistence on overworking. Mary wins every time, and his admiration for her only increases. There are no negative consequences to Stipp’s career when he finally agrees to teach her surgery. Mary’s dire warning about their relationship suggests that in this novel, some romantic tension is torqued up mostly for effect.

In fact, the plot—the growing suspense of how the war affects Mary and her family, and the choices she and others make in response—is at times submerged by language chosen to keep events at fever pitch. During a tense dinner scene with Blevens, Mary interrupts her younger brother’s cheerfully expressed desire to enlist in the army by announcing, “’Dr. Blevens is going to the war, too’…It was as if someone had declared war in the dining room.” Later her mother Amelia observes to Blevens that “[My daughter] speaks [to you] as though our accomplishments were daggers.” After all this, Mary’s secret departure from home feels anticlimactic.

Re-enactment image via Flickr.

The wealth of detail is most effective in Oliveira’s descriptions of sometimes brutal medical procedures in both childbirth and battlefield. Precise detail is the best way to convey to a modern reader just how far medicine has come since Mary Sutter’s day. The author is herself a nurse, and Mary’s compassion for—rather, her obsession with—the vulnerable human body is channeled through some of the book’s loveliest prose.

During a difficult birth, “Mary slipped her hand into the warm glove of Bonnie’s body and began to probe.” Tending to her sister’s wounded husband, “Mary was bending close to him, but her face was blurring and a sweet, thick perfume was falling through the air, filling him with such fatigue. She whispered and the words were strung out, stretched on a bed of sleep.” Even a grisly amputation scene reveals tenderness:

The saw teeth bounced over the shiny, hard surface…[Mary] slipped into that place deep inside her that was more prayer than thought. Again, she drew the saw over the bone…And then, suddenly, the bone separated and the weight of the leg fell away. No baby to manage, Mary was stunned, uncertain what to do next.

Civil war era medical tools. Image via Flickr.

Historical fiction is inevitably an interpretation. It succeeds to the extent that it allows readers to inhabit the lives of characters whose culture, mores, and daily experiences may differ radically from our own. In Civil War novels, we see not only where we have been, we experience the unfolding of a great test of American democracy, the shape of which is still being formed and in which we ourselves are characters. My Name is Mary Sutter is a tribute to medical pioneers who endured grinding hardships as they strove to develop humane medical care. They also stood their ground regarding the rights of women and enslaved Americans. Mary herself is a symbol of what women have historically brought to the American experiment, showing incredible tenacity in the face of injustice and patient nurture in the aftermath of violence. Although she is fictional, she deserves our praise.

Albany, NY cemetery. Image via Flickr.

Further Links and Resources

In an FWR interview from late last year, Michael Byers discusses research in his historical novel Percival’s Planet.

Image via Flickr

Philipp Meyer’s novel opens sharply with an early hook, a homicide triggered by failed jock, Billy Poe, though committed by quiet intellectual Isaac English. Despite their mutual responsibility for the murder, they are not sympathetic culprits. At one time, each of the men embodied the hopes of their decaying steel town: Isaac could have gone to Yale, and Poe aspired to football stardom at Colgate College. Despite much-emphasized class differences, their friendship is a firm one; when Isaac skips town, Poe prepares to take the full fall.

Although the story begins with Isaac and Poe, the novel spirals early on into multiple points-of-view: six, all told. It moves in short, sometimes staccato, bursts from Poe’s mother to the town sheriff to Isaac’s sister, the pace and shift in perspectives mimicking the murder’s epidemic effect. In rapid succession, Isaac becomes a runaway delinquent, Poe’s mother kicks her husband out, and the town sheriff tampers with the evidence. Everyone, it seems, starts out short; the entire town and novel sit upon on a shared precipice.

Image Credit: Flickr

Beneath the swift-moving plot, Meyer’s stoic prose provides a counterweight to the action. Each point-of-view is written in tight third-person, and the characters’ voices, while individual, all use the same sentence-fragment construction that creates a sense of intimacy and tension. For instance, here Grace worries about her son: “She felt sick to her stomach thinking about it. She had done this to herself, to Billy. Deep breath. Of course it wasn’t fair. Your entire life’s work, that child.” The self-instruction to take a deep breath is a quintessential Meyer sentence –– action is often folded into thought in this manner. As in Mrs. Dalloway, we have a sense that we are following every tic of Grace’s mind.

In the other (male) points-of-view, Meyer heightens this same construction by eliding punctuation in a more exaggerated manner. Take Poe’s self-remonstration: “Look at you he thought you are not thinking right you should not even be here with her.” With Isaac, bum genius, Meyer keeps the structure but complicates the texture with unusual verbs and hints of Isaac’s abstract erudition:

Sleeping or awake, no difference. Gray area between them. Dull blue light from the porthole and the view of the car behind you. Noise of the train, vibration, you’re a part of it, rattling. Meat tenderizing. Forgive us our daily softness.

The effect here is ultimately reminiscent of a steel-working Frank O’Hara, if he kept to five to ten-word sentences. Cormac McCarthy also comes to mind, though here the spare prose evokes fields of steel more than dry desert, and the characters seem more resigned than McCarthy’s defiants.

Topically, there’s an eerie timeliness to American Rust. “The real problem is that the average citizen does not have a job he can be good at,” a former police chief declares midway, and this aphorism steps well outside the novel into an uncomfortable, contemporary truth. And Rust Belt America, absolutely, is its own character here. Even when Isaac journeys on a railcar out to Detroit, he sees more steel works (though, he notes, more modern); he sees fried chicken shacks, laundromats that advertise their hot water. In this way, Isaac’s trip across America functions less as a plot point, and more as a way for Meyer to stretch the novel beyond the narrow world of one ghost town into many. Isaac is very much a Huckleberry Finn, watching the industrial waste float by from his railcar.

Image Credit: Flickr

Despite American Rust’s rough-and-tumble masculinity – the murder, hunting, robberies, prison, and a notable failure of the Bechdel Test – a surprising softness prevails. As befits the book’s epic nature, there are several love affairs, all delightfully complex. Love complicates Poe especially, whose dalliance with Isaac’s brilliant sister lets him seem good enough for an intellectual, and lets her make some welcome mistakes. Furthermore, much of the plot ultimately hinges on romance: the sheriff’s old flame for Poe’s mother makes his power to hurt or help Poe a dramatic subplot. And perhaps more importantly, the romances allow for a qualified, foolish hope.

Although American Rust takes place over just a few weeks, it leaves behind a sense of half a century. There are no heroes here, and there are mistakes aplenty. But it’s pleasingly hard to place blame – the Achilles’ heel of these characters is, most of all, the misfortunes of their time and place.

Image Credit: Flickr

Further Links and Resources

via author website

This week we’re featuring Damon Galgut’s novel In a Strange Room. Though this title came out in the U.K. from Atlantic Books last year, it’s only recently been released in the States, published here by EuropaEditions. In September the book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (his second nomination–an earlier novel,The Good Doctor, was also shortlisted in 2003). And in her August review of the novel for FWR, contributor Natalie Bakopoulos praised the author’s work for its exploration of narrative voice and point of view. She writes:

Whether “I is someone else,” or perhaps the more recognizable “J’est un autre” in the original French, the statement disorients with its dissonant, playful play on the subject-verb agreement. Damon Galgut, in his superb novel In a Strange Room––better perhaps described as a collection of three linked novellas­­––similarly distorts the I as both first person and third. The storytelling alternates between these two perspectives, often in the same paragraph and sometimes in the same sentence. Soon, in the same way we become accustomed to a new locale when traveling, this point of view choice asserts itself not simply as artistic quirk but as part of the story itself. The protagonist, a young South African man also named Damon, reflects upon his younger self: “Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene that he was. But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching.”

If you’d like to be eligible for this week’s drawing (and all future ones), please visit our Facebook Page and “like” us. As we did last week, we’ll be giving away three copies of this title. To everyone who’s already a fan, thanks again! What we want to do is not only find ways to expand our readership, but also to put books we love in the hands of readers.

So please help us spread the word!

Watson questions the customary boundaries between sanity and madness, community and isolation. He creates worlds that are strangely distorted, in which dreams and reality are blurred. For example, in the title novella, two teenagers from East Mississippi elope to a town not far from where they grew up. There, they move into a dingy apartment next to a mental hospital. But other than this oddity, and a singular occurrence (Will returns home to find two hospital patients in his living room, and they share a strange conversation about the child he and his girlfriend, Olivia, are expecting) life seems fairly normal at first. Will finds good work as a carpenter. Olivia takes well to motherhood after the birth of their son, Leo. They are happy.

Yet soon enough, the stability of their lives begins to shift. An old teacher of Will’s from grade school shows up on their porch, and the reader discovers that Will’s happiness—his whole life, in fact—is an illusion. Not just metaphorically, but literally. In the subsequent paragraph we are yanked back in time to when Olivia is still pregnant and about to give birth. The doctor is telling Will that his perceived life has been a dream; stranger still, the doctor even recapitulates the dream. From here, the descent is quick and sudden: the child is given up for adoption, Olivia’s parents take her away to live with out-of-state relatives, and Will finds himself alone. As his life further unravels—at one point he’s admitted to the same hospital they once lived next to—he struggles to remember his wife and child, pondering what might have been if things could have turned out like they had in his dream.

Brad Watson / Photo by Lindsay Beamish

Though it might seem like a spoiler to give away such a dramatic plot twist here, what’s most interesting to Watson and to us as readers is not the delusion itself but how we all craft and shape different versions of ourselves and reality. Watson’s narrators are unreliable, their memories often foggy. They either cannot or will not create meaningful bonds with others. Some have always lived on the fringes and never had a chance to be happy. Some lose their way as they grow older, then look back at their youth with angst and regret. Regardless of circumstance, however, nearly all of them have somehow detached from the world—sometimes because of alarming outside forces or traumatic events, other times because of self-delusions. Yet we follow them because, for the most part, they feel like real people, people with whom we can strangely empathize, despite the fact their problems are usually much vaster in scope than our own. This is part of Watson’s design—to create disturbingly real characters who the reader is nevertheless surprisingly moved by.

In “Water Dog God,” the narrator, an older man, finds that a young girl named Maeve has wandered into his yard after a tornado, following the stray dogs onto his property. We learn that a pregnant Maeve has fled from her abusive and incestuous father. “Not even seventeen and small, but she looked old somehow. She’d seen so very little of the world, and what she’d seen was scarcely human.” The old man tries to give his own life meaning and purpose by caring for the girl—he feeds and bathes her and tries to protect her. Though she remains distant and unresponsive, the girl stays and doesn’t run off. So we empathize with both characters as they try to rehabilitate their lives and each other.

Imagination also functions not just as a tool for delusion, but for getting at the unseen. “Fallen Nellie” concerns a woman found dead on a beach. Though only in her thirties or forties, she wears a skimpy bikini that shows her weather-worn skin. The narrator imagines how this woman got to this point, briefly sketching the possible arc of her life: a daring girl going wild with boys, booze and drugs, leaving home for the gulf coast, living with her boyfriend who later moves out, surviving a hurricane, and then finding herself getting older, trying to recapture her youth with a variety of men. It’s only seven pages, but by the end I had a vivid and accurate image of her.

Watson’s use of a third person subjective point of view in many of these stories allows him to shift the narrative distance so that we feel intimate with the psychology of his characters while retaining the objectivity necessary to understand what they are unable to about their lives. By moving fluidly from what his narrators see or think to a broad panoramic view of their situation, he not only achieves this important sense of perspective but also harnesses the language needed to elicit our sympathy for these characters. Consider the end of “Fallen Nellie,” as he describes the final years of the dead woman’s life:

At twenty-four she could feel herself aging in increments as small but distinct as the ticks of a clock. She could feel the fluid swirl in each tiny cell, microscopic planets bound by a body, an infinitesimal universe speeding away from all others. She had a vision of this and was stricken with fear that woke her at two, three in the morning parched and dizzy. She grasped at others to decrease her speed… and at this speed they had no faces, no names. In this manner she tumbled through time all the way to the very end of it. Doesn’t matter which one did it to her…it was done.

The obvious danger, of course, when writing about characters we would describe as “grotesques” (to borrow a term from Sherwood Anderson) due to either the calamities of their situations or their interior lives, is that of caricature. Watson occasionally distorts his characters so that they become “types” more than individuals. In “Vacuum,” Watson’s narrators are three young brothers, unnamed and close in age so that they blend into one collective voice. The author describes them like a pack of young dogs:

The boys were sitting there and staring at her as if they were not only mute but deaf, or like dogs being spoken to and unsure of what the tone of the person’s words meant, that clap-mouthed momentary attentive interim between daydreaming and the next distraction.

Similarly, his characters are sometimes so sad and ineffectual that they risk failing to elicit the reader’s sympathy. After all, it’s sometimes difficult to muster emotions for intelligent people who are well aware of their depression or emotional problems, yet who seem content to wallow in their own despair. Loomis, the narrator in “Visitation,” is a gloomy pessimist separated from his wife. He has seen therapists and taken pills, but long ago he stopped fighting and has accepted that his life and his nature are hopeless. He flies to California to visit his son, but once there, Loomis makes little effort to engage or bond with him. And, as such, his struggle might have the tendency to be dismissed. Especially in comparison to the other characters in this collection who do have disproportionate struggles in their lives.

Yet Watson’s skill as an author is to create characters who walk that razor-thin line between eliciting our compassion or our dismissal. For example, as Loomis drinks his second beer at a crowded restaurant near a southern California beach, the author writes:

…he felt indicted by all the other people in this teeming place: by the parents and their smug happiness, by the old surfer dudes who had the courage of their lack of conviction, and by the young lovers, who were convinced they’d never be part of either of these groups, not the obnoxious parents, not the grizzled losers clinging to their youth like tough, crusty barnacles.

Likewise, we find that we had been judging Loomis. Further, it provokes us to ask: “How would I judge these same people, and how would they judge me?”

Again, this is part of the overall theme of isolation and alienation that permeates the book: judgment and being judged separate us from one another, as well as ourselves. Likewise, by setting most of the stories in the Baptist Belt of eastern Mississippi (Watson himself is a Meridian native), as well as in the South of the 1960s and 1970s—not the “Old South” of Faulkner, but old enough that the cultural and regional differences were still quite large—Watson heightens our awareness of the ideas of “belonging” and “difference.” In this way, geography and history lend themselves well to his work by allowing him to not only bring together those displaced people whose secrets—and secret, interior lives—are revealed through the collision of small encounters and random events, but also to help him illuminate how time and place shape us.

Near the end of “Visitation,” Loomis and his son encounter a woman outside their motel room. She tells them to “watch out for gypsies.” When his son asks what gypsies are, Loomis explains that they are wandering people known for stealing children. Later, when Loomis is alone, he sees the woman again and asks if she’s a gypsy herself. She says no, but she can read his future. After examining Loomis’s palm, she flatly calls him a “creature of disappointment.” By the end it’s clear that Loomis is the true gypsy, wandering though his middle years, trying to steal back his son.

At times I asked myself, how human are these characters? Are they alive, or are they perhaps dead spirits wandering in search of their past lives? Whatever the answer, and despite their often hopeless plights, I cared about these characters and was moved by them. I attribute this to Watson’s great skill as a writer; his voice in each of theirs carried me seamlessly through this collection.

Further Links and Resources

- Preview Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives and read excerpts from the collection on the publisher’s website.

- Read the story “Visitation” (from Aliens) in the New Yorker, where it was published in 2009.

- Learn more about the author’s previous books, the novel The Heaven of Mercury (2002) and the story collection Last Days of the Dog Men (1996).

- Look for an interview with Brad Watson later this week on Fiction Writers Review!

With an economy on the rocks and limited disposable income among music buyers, there’s good reason to favor individual brilliance in quick flashes over an album’s collective crescendo. In a generation of “Pointers,” the relationship between and among songs on an album—its narrative—is all but lost in favor of hit single after single.

But in Jennifer Egan’s latest book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, an array of stories mix into a cohesive novel, each chapter self-contained yet fluid as the grooves of an LP. Structurally, the book flashes forward in one section only to skip back in the next, shifting the protagonist’s point of view in each chapter. And yet, unlike the fragmented, seemingly unconnected world of the Shuffle, where randomization is celebrated over construction, A Visit from the Goon Squad reads as a whole, as tight as the pickup on a single-coil Fender, locked and loaded.

from Flickr

Most of the characters in these stories cross paths at one point or another with Bennie Salazar, whom we meet in the first chapter, “The Gold Cure.” Casting him as a fading music exec at first encounter, the narrative then rewinds to catch him as a young idealist through the eyes of a teenage female friend. As she views him, “Bennie has light brown skin and excellent eyes, and he irons his hair in a Mohawk as shiny black as a virgin record.”

In subsequent chapters, we also inhabit the points of view of Bennie’s ex-wife, publicist, friend, mentor, assistant, employee, and the musicians themselves, whose careers interlock with his. Taken together, Bennie’s narrative personifies the rise and fall of rock’s industrial commodification, its glory days and highway to hell.

At the novel’s heart is the role of music as both an agent and subject of nostalgia. Rock acts as a bygone era and the conduit on which we may resurrect what has been lost:

He sensed Sasha listening closely and toyed with the idea that he was confessing to her his disillusionment—his hatred for the industry he’d given life to. He began weighing each musical choice, drawing out his argument through the songs themselves—Patti Smith’s ragged poetry (but why did she quit?), the jock hardcore of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks giving way to alternative, that great compromise, down down down to the singles he’d just today been petitioning radio stations to add, husks of music, lifeless and cold as the squares of office neon cutting the blue twilight.

Jennifer Egan / photo credit: Pieter M. Van Hattem/Vistalux

The struggle to recover some past ideal permeates the story lines of multiple characters, this need to recapture anything and everything; from the national consciousness before 9/11 to the name of a lover who has disappeared. Beauty, fame, fortune, family, physical health—these are the obsessions of protagonists desperately trying to retrieve something they hadn’t known they needed the first time around. A journalist replays his transgressions with a 19-year-old movie star from the confines of his prison cell. An ousted socialite scrambles for relevance at the risk of endangering her young daughter. A father takes his children and new girlfriend on a Safari in hopes of achieving previous nuclear harmony. An uncle sets out to find his missing niece and instead mines the museums of Naples for reflections of his estranged wife.

Each of these characters is poised for a reckoning, at the crossroads of something devilish. At times it is unclear whether music (and its hard-knock underworld) is at the price of or the ticket to the soul. Is music-as-a-kind-of-religion the spiritual destination, or the catalyst of decline? One middle-aged character wonders about the disintegration of wilder times into growing despondency: “Had they somehow brought it on?”

Egan raises these questions through sparkling wit and lyrical prose. As important as music becomes to the characters and the narrative, language itself (and music as language and language as music), emerges as the real main character. One particularly moving chapter, told in the voice of 12-year-old Alison Blake about her older brother Lincoln, is written entirely in power-point slides with Venn diagrams, flow charts, triangle graphs, etc.—effectively communicating how family members misinterpret each other, the cruel opacity of subtext. This type of writing through symbols might, in lesser hands, have become gimmicky, but in Egan’s case, there’s a frisson in piecing out her emotional geometries.

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Lincoln is obsessed with Great Rock and Roll Pauses, or the seconds of rests within songs, little breathers, four beats, two beats, and where in the song they occur. These musical rests also mirror literary silences—white spaces, page divides, chapter breaks, section groupings— what goes unsaid. In a poignant irony, Lincoln’s cataloguing of these musical absences is actually the fullest expression of feeling he can convey. So that “Hey, Dad, there’s a partial silence at the end of ‘Fly Like an Eagle,’ with a sort of rushing sound in the background that I think is supposed to be the wind or maybe time rushing past!” actually is Lincoln’s attempt at “I love you, Dad” after seven layers of filtration.

While Alison feels compelled to chart the spouting of her brother’s pause-trivia, Rebecca–the academic wife of a freelance buzz-creator in the music biz–undertakes a project of her own, studying the words that are suppose to carry meaning, and have, like so much else in her book, lost their impact:

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Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words – “friend,” and “real” and “surge” and “change,” words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some like “identity” “search” and “space” had clearly been drained of their life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

Egan’s prose never suffers from casings, and that’s a testament to her acute ear and keen perception, the cadence of how to make words sing.

Time plays as “a goon” in these stories, a dark angel, the algebraic unknown; how you get from a to b, xs and os. Proust’s epigraph highlights all the suggestiveness of the physical, sensual, and associative cues, and this canonical morsel echoes throughout the novel.

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T.S. Eliot once observed, “you are the music while the music lasts.” The characters in A Visit From the Goon Squad, each in his or her own way, are trying to extend the melody, to shore off the fragments of an increasingly silent and tone-deaf world.

Throughout the book there persists a tension between wanting and not wanting to know what’s real—between wanting not to care, and wanting to get back that sense of caring too much. Of wanting to be an adult when you’re a kid, and a kid when you’re an adult. Similarly, in readers and listeners alike there resonates a certain desire for telepathy, to be at one with something larger.

Like a concert, a good book can draw you in and sweep you to a different place. And after it’s over, ears ringing, lyrics rolling through your mind on the way home, remembering the way the light poured out over the stage, you can say it—you were there.

Metallica at Rock Werchter 2009 / photo credit: www.christianholmer.com

Further Reading

photo credit: Pieter M. Van Hattem/Vistalux

- While exploring Egan’s inventively designed website, you can read an excerpt from Chapter 12 of A Visit from the Goon Squad. Look inside the book via Random House; the publisher’s site also offers a guide for readers.

- Then read about the story behind Egan’s website–including its “Gallery of a Writer’s Impulses”–on the New York Times Papercuts blog.

- Here are some recent interviews with Egan–at Mary: A Literary Quarterly; on Hits Daily Double; on NPR’s The Takeaway; on NPR’s Morning Edition; from the Paris Review Daily blog; and in Guernica–and here’s a profile of the author by Edan Lepucki at The Millions. Bonus: This Rumpus interview brings PowerPoint savvy into the game.

- Learn more about Egan’s previous novels: The Keep; Look at Me; and The Invisible Circus; and her collection, Emerald City and Other Stories.

- On 9/27/2001, Egan wrote this essay (for Slate) reflecting on the eerie experience–and aftermath–of writing a terrorist character in Look at Me, of “imagining the unthinkable.”

- Via the author’s website, read “The Bipolar Puzzle,” her cover story from the Sept. 14, 2008 issue of the New York Times Magazine.

- This video highlights Egan’s oral history project-in-progress about women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during WWII, via WORKS IN PROGRESS, a new TV series in development from creator Ina Howard-Parker:

WORKS IN PROGRESS: Jennifer Egan from Ina Howard-Parker on Vimeo.

- Watch and listen to Egan read at UPenn’s Kelly Writers House in 2006: