Recently Reviewed Books…
How Fiction Works by James Wood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book, now in its tenth edition, is more a meditation on Fiction than a how-to, or a description of the form, or an analysis of it.
Written in dense and complex prose and rambling sometimes like a stream-of-consciousness literary novel, Woods covers many oldies of the form like Character, Dialogue, Plot, Irony, and Metaphor, while expanding on some rarely covered areas like Realism, Detail and Irrelevant Detail, Time Signatures, and Voice Registers, and renaming other conventions into new ones like Free-Indirect Style, Thisness, and Lifeness. I’ll expand on a few below.
Free-Indirect Style appears to be a renaming of Limited Third Person Point of View, with the added provision for author intrusion into the narration, which is otherwise delivered exclusively by the character, usually the protagonist. Subjective words in the narration, like “stupid,” imply the author’s voice, not the character’s, although I would have thought it the opposite. “Thisness” is an abstraction killed by palpability, and “Lifeness” is the verisimilitude to Life, which are both the hallmarks of Realism.
Woods spends a lot of time on Realism, which made its debut in the mid-19th century, was overpowered by Modernism and Post-modernism for most of the 20th century, when the two world wars distorted our sense of reality, but which has made a comeback as the dominant form in the 21st century. He claims that Realism renders all other styles into genre, is the most powerful brand of fiction, and will prevail even though conventions and methods within this style constantly evolve. He also claims that Realism is constantly vilified as bourgeois storytelling, only to be replaced by another form of realism – e.g. Karl Ove Knausgaard, who replaced Story with Voice and ended up not with a novel but with a string of memoirs, diaries, and essays.
Wood draws from the work of many famous writers – Flaubert, Joyce, Nabokov, Bellow, Dickens, Mann, Camus, Faulkner, Stendahl, Turgenev and Austen, to name a few – and attributes more hidden meanings in their texts than I think those writers were aware of while writing them. This is typical of the academic trying to elevate literary texts into art.
Nevertheless, as in all meditations on the art of fiction, I picked up some gems:
1. Iris Murdoch’s improbable, melodramatic, and feeble stories are indebted to 18th and 19th-century theatrics and are not adult enough to take the strain of her complex moral analysis.
2. “Plot is reading, form is literary criticism” – try figuring that one out!
3. Flaubert feared repetition, while Hemingway and Lawrence used it for a beautiful effect.
4. Flaubert again (known as the Father of Realism)– believed that Moliere and Cervantes had no technique.
5. D.H. Lawrence used that hated technique, mixed metaphor, to boldly convey unusual imagery.
And I really appreciated the explanation of how Philip Roth artfully mixed voice registers in his novel Sabbath’s Theatre, a book often dismissed as borderline porn.
This is not an easy book to read. Many positions that Wood takes need reflection. I agreed with some and held to my own beliefs in others. But the interesting thing about the book is that it makes you think and question past beliefs and assumptions. Read it, and be prepared for bewilderment.
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Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020 by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve always maintained that Rushdie is a better essayist than a novelist, and this book confirms my thinking. Until recently, I found his novels rather pompous and pretentious, but in his essays, we get a sense of his philosophy of life more easily.
This collection is broken into four parts: His philosophical peregrinations covering the classics such as Proteus, Heraclitus, and Shakespeare; critiques of other contemporary writers’ work (which I found the most interesting); his platform speeches in favour of the freedom of expression for artists (in particular, his speeches at PEN); and an assortment of reviews and tributes to lesser-known artists (his friends) that I did not find interesting. He concludes with his Covid 19 encounter in 2020 which was transformational and scary for this septuagenarian. Of course, this book ends before his near-fatal stabbing shortly thereafter.
His role as a migrant writer resonated with me. He posits that the four roots of self – place, community, custom, and language – are essential for a person’s equilibrium, and when you immigrate, all these are lost. The migrant writer creates a literature of precariousness and envies their deeply rooted peers (Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck et al) who can mine their areas of birth and domicile repeatedly for material. “We use stories to explain ourselves to ourselves,” he says. His cheeky humour intrudes in casual asides and in the ridiculous situations he encounters: imagine being a Muslim Indian boy newly-arrived in England singing Christmas Carols in Latin!
As an immigrant writer, he prefers the protean to realism and credits Shakespeare (who couldn’t spell his name and called himself Chakspaw) for enabling freedom of form and introducing cross-cultural themes; Hamlet is at once a ghost story, a romance, a revenge story, a political drama, and a murder story. Rushdie calls himself “a traveller in wonderlands” when alluding to his novels, and advises novice writers to “write what they don’t know.” With no permanent base to write from, Rushdie drifted into magic realism, fable, and essay; lately, he has dabbled in historical fiction (Victory City) and contemporary socio-political issues (The Golden House and Quichote).
About other writers, he has the following observations:
a. Reading Roth and Bellow and their liberal use of Yiddish expressions gave him permission to “chutnify” the English language.
b. Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same date but they were 11 days apart due to one using the Julian calendar and the other the Gregorian calendar.
c. He considers Becket a novelist more than a playwright. (Rushdie, obviously figured out Becket’s Molloy trilogy – I didn’t!).
d. Charles Dickens began the “cult of the writer” – before that the book mattered more than its writer.
e. He claims Slaughterhouse-Five is a great realist novel even though Vonnegut is a post-modernist writer.
He laments that readers crave more realism today, more “lived-experience,” even in fiction. Gone is the ability to let the imagination soar into the magical worlds of Haroun and Luca. “How autobiographical is it?” is a question he gets asked frequently. Thus, Roberto Bolano has usurped Gabriel Garcia Marquez with his auto-fiction novels. Yet, Rushdie admits that his most successful novel is Midnight’s Children, which is autobiographical, while his other autobiographical novel, Fury, bombed.
Rushdie’s philosophical and irreverent thoughts seep through the pages: he prefers story to language; memoir and autobiography are not art; adaptation (books into movies or theatre) should retain the spirit of the original; pantheistic gods are interesting and wicked types, while monotheistic gods are righteous and boring. He repeatedly returns to his vilified novel, The Satanic Verses, and the storm it caused, still unrepentant of the stand he took and urging writers everywhere to seek the truth in their writing.
This is a great collection, loaded with anecdotes, with frequent barbs aimed at those custodians who seek to muzzle artists in the name of religious and political correctness and who consider themselves gatekeepers to the truth.
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Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A primer on book reviewing, for money, by someone with no formal training in the craft. Hilary Mantel admits this in her opening, when, newly returned from Saudi Arabia, she tries her hand at book reviewing for the London Review of Books, a sideline that lasts for over 30 years. This book is a collection of her reviews over that period.
The challenge with book reviews is that you can’t give the plot away. Therefore, unlike essays, which have a beginning, middle, and end, and a coherent argument running throughout, a review is as mysterious as a whodunit, with obfuscations to entice, with no spoilers, and with the reviewer’s central argument being hard to decipher. Mantel approaches each subject as an opportunity for meditation. She will pick a singular aspect of the book under review, meditate, and chew on it like a dog with a bone. Then, she moves on to another bone. Thus, we are left with collages of impressions and epiphanies from each review. The reviews get longer as she matures on the job. Alongside the Mantel pieces are e-mails between her and editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, who was with her right through her writing career at LRB, and their correspondence sheds light on the trials and travails of the journey(wo)man writer.
The earlier essays are on the late 80s-90s newsworthy personalities: Madonna, Salman Rushdie and his fatwa, and John Osborne et al. Mantel is bold to call out Madonna as a “gender and sexually confused hellcat with no morals,” Osborne as an angry man who hated even his mother, and to remind the West that it did not take seriously the uproar over The Satanic Verses in the Moslem world. She even pokes under the veneer of colonial superiority when covering the Mohawk capture of a white girl, Eunice, who goes over to the other side and refuses to return to her kind – a rebuke to “conversions” that usually went the other way.
However, it is when Mantel retreats into periods like Henry VIII’s Tudor England and the French Revolution that she hits her stride. Reviews of books on Anne and Jane Boleyn, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, Danton, Charles Brandon (Henry VIII’s best friend), and Margaret Pole (last of the Plantagenet line) dig deep and transport you to those dastardly times when allegiances shifted daily, often at the whim of those in power, when royal women were relegated to mere breeders of heirs and spares, and when heads rolled freely.
She also debunks popular myths and poses her theories:
1. Henry VIII did not suffer from a venereal disease that rendered him infertile. He had a rare blood condition.
2. Henry didn’t have sex with his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, because he didn’t love her.
3. Royal body parts are valued – Diana’s legs, Anne Boleyn’s womb, and Henry’s handsome visage.
4. To be “Tudory,” you needed terror in the name of the church, torture in the name of the state, iconoclasm, poor sanitation, and cruelty to animals.
5. They botched Margaret Pole’s beheading, having to resort to other methods to finish the job. Yet Margaret remained loyal to Henry, the man responsible for her execution, to the end.
6. Robespierre, who executed hundreds, said, “My life’s task is to help the poor.”
A couple of personal pieces – a meeting with her stepfather and her recovery from a surgery that wouldn’t heal – were surprising detours and indicate that everything was not well with Mantel despite the fame she enjoyed as a writer. She declares that Virginia Woolf was a wuss for bemoaning her illnesses publicly. She also delves into the lives of saints by declaring Virgin Mary was elitist in her superiority to mortals and was a symbol used and abused by changing morals, politics, and society. In her article on two recent saints, Gemma Galgani and Therese of Lisieux, she posits that anorexia was a way of preserving the self to fight free of sexual and emotional entanglements.
There is a trove of insightful writing here, worth the read. Not bad, I say, for someone who had no formal training in the craft of reviewing, who did not tweet or blog, and who managed to move only from handwritten notes to e-mails over these last 30-plus years.
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The breadth of Bradbury’s imagination is on full display in this collection of eighteen stories. However, the strong conflict of “Us” vs. “Them,” i.e. Earthling vs. Alien (usually a Martian) dominates, with recurrent reminders of nuclear annihilation on Earth, intergalactic colonization, and the uncertainty of displacement.
The frame of this collection portrays the author meeting a circus performer who keeps getting fired from every job because the tattoos (illustrations) on his body move at night. The Illustrated Man demonstrates his tattoos to the author, and as he sleeps, his patchwork of images comes alive sequentially, each a story that makes up this collection. But this frame does not make much sense, because the stories go in different directions without a unifying theme, other than the ones I drew in the previous paragraph. Therefore, the eighteen stories could have stood alone without an Illustrated Man
.
About half a dozen stories, like “The Veldt,” “The Highway,” “The Last Night of the World,” “Marionettes Inc,” “Zero Hour,” and “The Rocket” are grounded on Earth, albeit at times ranging from the 1930s to an undetermined future, often with bizarre outcomes. Technological breakthroughs like time travel, sonics, and odorophonics are not the panaceas they claim to be, some are harmful to us as we have discovered nearly a hundred years after these stories were written. Some stories feature the travails of space travel, the accidents en route, the mental stress of isolation, and the danger of arriving on another planet where the reception is unexpected or hostile; another group of stories is about Earthlings living on distant planets after Earth has been decimated in nuclear war, and finding life, climate, and values different to those they had back on Earth. Some stories bring messianic personalities – the Christ-like second coming in “The Man,” and the image creator in “The Visitor.”
There are, however, a common set of events and a pattern to the stories:
1. Earth’s destruction by nuclear war, prompting mass migrations to foreign planets. This event takes place at different times in different stories. I noted the years 1965 (The Other Foot), 1969 (The Last Night of the World), 2020 (The Exiles), and 2155 (The Fox and the Forest) as the years in which this disaster occurred.
2. Humans migrate to distant planets—Mars being the most common–because of this catastrophe. Some, like American blacks in the story “The Other Foot” decide to go to Mars to reverse the discrimination they faced on Earth through slavery. Yet, when a rocket populated by white people arrives on Mars, twenty years after the disaster on Earth, the black Martians gang up on the new arrivals and history goes into reverse, before the lightbulb goes on to suggest that perhaps now the score is even.
3. Rocket technology is highly developed. Even extrapolating today’s rocket technology, we cannot get to where Bradbury has it.
4. Characters are cardboard ciphers to convey the plot, and the plot is a means to convey a philosophical or psychological point.
5. Old technology and customs (circa 1930s/40s, when these stories were written) are extrapolated as the prevailing ones of the future (even into the 22nd century) – e.g. cinemas, radio, telephones.
Some stories lived in my head long long after I ended the book. In “Kaleidoscope,” a rocket ship blows up, spewing its crew into space, each heading off in different orbits and bound to end up as debris or be sucked into and burned up in a nearby planet’s gravity field. As the astronauts begin losing radio contact with each other, they contemplate how to make a final contribution that will see them go out on a high. In “Fire Balloons,” a group of priests go to convert the Martians, only to discover that the latter is a more evolved species and that they would be better off saving the Earthlings who have arrived and are going berserk on the red planet. “Zero Hour” shows a smug Earth feeling safe that it has secured itself from any possible alien attack with superior technology, only to discover that the aliens have enlisted a Fifth Column of least-suspected humans to carry out their invasion.
Bradbury has served up a smorgasbord of stories from his fertile imagination that even rivals The Martian Chronicles for the depth and breadth of its reach.
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Erasure by Percival Everett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A cautionary tale of the consequences for a not-so-famous author who hides behind a pseudonym to parody his industry and his race, and becomes famous as a result. How does he live it down? Does he have to? Or should he enjoy the ride for as long as it lasts, and for wherever it takes him, and damn the torpedoes?
Monk Ellisson is a literary writer and university professor who comes from a black family of respected doctors. He is the black sheep, but the one his suicide-father admired the most. He is unmarried and has no luck with women. His half-a-dozen novels are forgettable highbrow gobbledygook that no-one understands (there is an extract of one of his essays inside the novel, and I was lost). He envies a young black writer whose debut novel, We’s Lives in da Ghetto, has hit best-sellerdom overnight; it is commercial and trashy, plays to the black stereotype, and sells like hotcakes to a mostly white audience.
In desperation, Monk writes a noir gangster novel, titled My Pafology, under the pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh, with an unforgettable character named Van Go Jenkins. Van Go is the most misogynistic, lazy, irresponsible, and dumb a-hole you can encounter. He has four children by four different women while looking out for more conquests; he does not support any of his progeny or wives, lives off his mother, gets fired from his job, plays pool with his buddies during working hours, and brags about his talents. His dream is to earn enough to buy a gun and rob the Korean convenience store owner down the street. However, Van Go meets his match when he gets a job at the wealthy Dalton mansion and meets the mercurial Penelope.
Monk sends this hastily-written novel in desperation to his agent, and the book takes off – a $600K advance and $3million for movie rights for starters, and lots of offers for “more of the same.” In his private life, Monk needs the money, for his sister has died tragically and his mother is losing the battle with dementia, while his only other sibling, gay brother Bill, has his own woes and cannot help. Monk hates the Frankenstein monster he has created and is yet captive to its lure.
What follows is a battle in Monk’s mind to play the role of Stagg R. Leigh (an ex-con, as he’s been made out to be) in public and on the talk show circuit, and watch with horror as his book makes the climb not only in the monetary stakes but also in the literary prize game, while his mother slips away.
The style of the book is splotchy with chapter fragments slipping back and forward in time, often drifting down unidentifiable sideroads, and which include extracts from the author’s notebook about other possible story ideas. He even lists Monk’s resume in one section. This fragmentation takes away from the otherwise non-stop readability of this book. That said, the novel-within-the-novel (it’s more a novella-within-a-novel), My Pafology, is outstanding for its ribald humour and is a non-stop read, and I understand why it was a hit even in the fictional world of Erasure.
However, Percival Everett surfaces a serious dilemma facing writers: does one perpetuate the poor, dumb black gangsta’ stereotype and be accepted, even become famous; or does one go against the grain by sticking to the role of the intellectual black writer that one is and face obscurity? (Although some black intellectuals like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison broke that ceiling). Everett attempts not to take sides in this debate, for the book ends on a pregnant note and the reader is left to fill in the blanks. (Note: the movie version, American Fiction, attempts several endings to give us a prompt, but that left me even more confused).
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Shane actively reads and reviews books by other authors. Below are his most recent reviews.