Far From Brooklyn

Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

The Los Angeles Times blurb on the front cover of my edition describes this book as “A story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction.”

Uh, if you say so…

I would have said this is a book to make me believe in watching TV, or taking the dog for a walk.  It certainly wasn’t a book that made me believe in the narrator, or his boring and simpleminded pan-religiosity, or in the “magical” story itself.

Here’s a handy rule of of thumb for you newbie readers: When a novelist spends a great deal of time describing (justifying) the dumbass name that has been given to a character, you are almost certainly reading a crappy time-sucking book and you would be better off doing the dishes or just staring listlessly at the wall.  Really anything is better than forcible whimsy.

“Life of Pi” takes five charmless pages to tell us the dandy story of how “Piscine” Patel got his name–it’s water, it’s swimming, it’s whimsical, goddamit.  It’s about a guy who floats in the ocean with a Tiger, so “Piscine” is ironic and funny and blah blah blah.  Listen, writers: If you wanna give your characters unusual names, go ahead, have some guts and do it.  Just don’t waste your time (and your readers’ time) telling us why you did it. Think of Lord Peter Wimsey – Dorothy Sayers just named him that and let us kind figure out if it was “whimsical” or “ironic” or whatever.

In any case, that five-page story of the name should have been my cue to get out, but I didn’t.  After, all this is a Man Booker Prize winner!  This is a story to make me believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction!  I need all the sustenance I can get.

But then came a long, boring, and worst of all, simpleminded, disquisition on the the major world religions.  Yes, Piscine Patel is a man who has squared the circle and made all religions one – gee, just like a Unitarian, I guess.

Why would any author subject us to this? It’s one thing if you are surpassingly brilliant – let’s say you are Susan Sontag or Milan Kundera.  You may allow yourself to playfully consider religion, or philosophy, or death, or the nature of love, before returning to the job at hand, which is telling a story.

But if you are not surpassingly brilliant – and honestly, isn’t this fairly obvious to you? – then stick to your story and you may succeed.

Alas, there is the question of the “story,” such as it is.  Suffice it to say that the cloying whimsy of Piscine Patel’s name is paralleled by the cloying whimsy of the novel’s setting in India (a zoo, Pondicherry, you know all the cute-ass stuff) and then the cloying and preposterous adventure story of the sea crossing (which we all know about already).  Basically, that sea story itself is not nearly sufficient to fill an entire novel, and so… whimsy galore for hundreds of pages.

So I’ll quote another adventure novel, loosely: Sucks to your whimsy!