Far From Brooklyn

I may have read “Tinkers,” by Paul Harding, some time in the past, or at least thought about reading it. In any case, I picked it up this winter largely because of its unusual publication history — published by a tiny alternative press, it unexpectedly found an audience among indie booksellers, built a following just by word of mouth, and snowballed when it, shockingly, won the Pulitzer.

That’s an inspiring story for someone like me, a novelist who just can’t seem to make a sale!

Anyway, “Tinkers” begins with a declarative, and slightly morbid, sentence: “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.”

That’s a tight starter! It sets a tone and establishes expectations for the reader. There is a kind of tension in it, a promise of a mystery to be solved — even if we know he will die, we don’t know why.

It’s a minor tension, though. We soon find out that he is dying, prosaically enough, of old age. He is in a rented hospital bed in his home, being watched over by various family members. We get a cursory sketch of his life — mechanical engineering, then teaching, then retirement, during which he finds a new vocation or at least avocation: clock repair.

The first dozen of so pages of this book are a gust of gorgeous writing, as George hallucinates that his life, his house and even the universe are falling on him – as if, like a dying star collapsing on itself, his mortal body has become a black hole, sucking everything into its center.

I loved the opening of this book.

Alas, after that, the book spins out — shifting back in time to tell the story of George’s father, Howard, who suffers from epilepsy and who scratches out a living as a traveling salesman, peddling notions in backwoods Maine. We even go back in time to hear about Howard’s father, a minister.

Every so often, a book that pushes back in generations to tell a tale in reverse order – Anne Tyler’s “A Spool of Blue Thread” comes to mind – manages to succeed despite the demands placed on the reader. (By “demands” I mean that the narrative comes to a halt and the reader is required to reorient and learn an entire new fictional world of characters, situations, and, often, setting. That’s a lot to ask of a reader.)

For me, the time-shifted story within the story of “Tinkers” doesn’t work. I didn’t want to go back to the previous generation, and I really didn’t want to go back the generation before that.

Meanwhile, the longer the narrative runs, the more the prose purples. The intense dark poetry of the first section of the book grows cloying and self-consciously poetic.

The tales of Howard’s life stretch credibility, to the point that the reader wonders if the narrative has somehow snuck into the realm of magical realism. A signed volume of Hawthorne turns up in the hands of a man who could not possibly be old enough to have known Hawthorne (the book states this outright) and yet, there it is, a personal note from Hawthorne to a woodsman who seems more yeti than human. Who knows, the narrative seems to be saying, maybe he really is 120 years old!

Another discordant note: Howard’s boss is a kind of small-town Werner Erhard, making messianic proclamations about Howard’s sales pitch. Howard is a guy who sells pins and needles and thread in rural Maine! He wouldn’t have had a boss, for god’s sakes, let alone a boss-cum-EST-trainer. None of Howard’s story makes much sense to me, and that’s bad considering that the writer has basically dragged me back in time when I had committed to reading what had been presented (quite stirringly) as the primary narrative, which is George’s life, not his father’s or his grandfather’s.

As the narrative traces these byways in increasingly ornate curlicues, you have the sense that all that is going on here is a writer following the whims of his own sentences, ever more poetically. It’s pretty and bland and, most of all, not credible. I read an interview with the author suggesting that the story/stories are based on family tales, i.e., “it really happened,” and if in fact that is mostly the case, well, it only goes to prove that “true” stories don’t always present as truth when they are written as fiction.

Having groused for several paragraphs now, I want to circle back to reiterate that the opening pages are really great and, for me at least, worth the price of the book despite the disappointment of the remainder.

I get why indie booksellers would go for this novel — it’s pretty and self-consciously well-written, and it obviously is straining for transcendence.

It works for a while and then it doesn’t.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

Like “Tinkers,” “The Stone Diaries” is a Pulitzer winner. (“Tinkers” won in 2010, “The Stone Diaries” in 1995.) There aren’t many parallels between the two novels other than the odd coincidence of being Pulitzer winners, and the fact that I picked them up had nothing to do with that, although I suppose I was aware of the titles because of the prizes. I had been meaning to read both of them for years.

One similarity: Both books are multigenerational tales. But “The Stone Diaries” begins, in essence, at the beginning, and ends at the end, where as “Tinkers” begins at the end and works its way backwards, as I have huffily noted above.

“The Stone Diaries” is the life story of Daisy Goodwill Flett, the only child of a poor stonecutter and his beloved, food-besotted orphan wife, who live in a small town in Manitoba, Canada. Tragedy strikes the family and Daisy is subsequently raised by an elderly neighbor and her adult son. From there Daisy moves to the American midwest, where she comes of age, marries, and so on and so on. (I’m not looking to give away the plot – a pleasure of the book is learning how Daisy’s life unfolds.)

Speaking of unfolding, “The Stone Diaries” has a weirdly herky-jerky way of proceeding through the years, jaggedly jumping forward without much warning or, it seems in the moment, attention to the development of plot and character. It works in spite of itself, I think.

Similarly, the book has no coherent voice or style. Sometimes it’s told in the first person, mostly in third person, and in one section (a very effective one, I would add) the narrative progresses through the eyes of various friends and acquaintances and family members, all of them opining about Daisy’s sudden descent into depression and what may have caused it. It’s a really good piece of writing and it manages to surprise the reader with its outcome.

This novel is a pleasant read, for certain. It has an antic tone (some of it anyway) and is having fun with the narrative – it’s not Dickensian but certainly the trials and tribulations of of Daisy Goodwill Flett are many, and the story of her life takes plenty of twists and turns.

On the other hand, it doesn’t strike me as a terribly weighty book – it’s fun, it’s fluffy, it scuds along through the 20th Century with very little grappling with the issues of the day. Characters transform for the good of the narrative, and I for one never really had any sense of reality of any of the characters or situations: As an example, Daisy’s father, at the outset, is a poor, tongue-tied stonecutter; later, he reappears as a loquacious, self-confident and self-satisfied businessman. Meanwhile, he engages in what might be called obsessive behaviors involving stone-cutting and monument-building. It’s all more than a little bit non-credible, or what I would call “booky,” i.e. constructed in the way that only seems to occur in midlist fiction.

But so what? The novel is funny and for the most part fun. It seems a bit lightweight for a Pulitzer Prize, but glancing at a list of books published the same year, I don’t see anything that I would say obviously trumped this one as an award winner – a second-tier Updike book; a Jonathan Lethem novel that wasn’t “Fortress of Solitude”; a lesser-known William Gaddis work; etc. etc. 1994 was the year that James Kelman published “How Late It Was, How Late,” which I would say was a masterpiece, but he’s Scottish so he wouldn’t be competing with Shields for a Pulitzer.

One last note about “The Stone Diaries”: It skips back and forth across the U.S./Canada border in a way that I can’t remember reading before. It seems to me that American writers basically have nothing to say about Canada, and Canadian writers don’t often move characters to the U.S. (Margaret Atwood? Alice Munro? Robertson Davies? I can’t recall any of them doing that.) I suppose that cross-border mindset came naturally to Shields, who was born in the U.S. but married a Canadian and lived the rest of her life there.

Slave Play by Jeremy Harris

Whoosh! It’s hard to know what to think of a play that begins with an apparent scene of an overseer raping an enslaved woman – and that’s a relatively gentle coupling compared with the sexual acts that occur later in the same first act. I’ll admit that, as I read the play (which I had heard about when it was first produced a few years ago) I was rolling my eyes, thinking, “Yeah, you’re pushing my buttons, I get it, but so what?” Also: “This is shocking and repulsive, but so what?”

In short, for much of the play, I kept thinking, “Yes, but so what?”

Without giving anything away, I will simply say that these quasi-shocking scenes of sexual violence (only quasi-shocking because they seem designed to shock, which of course dulls the shock value) turn out to be play-acting (supposedly for the characters’ benefit). The remainder of the play is a kind of therapy session as the characters work through their feelings about having participated in such troubling behavior.

I’m not exactly sure what the playwright is lampooning here – white racism, black colorism, touchy-feely therapy talk, academia… I guess Harris is poking at it all. Like I said, I entered the world of this play skeptically; the point of it all seemed to be to shock the conscience of the reader/audience, but what audience would attend or read such a play unless they were, essentially, already in the artist’s corner? What I mean is that there are very few people in the world who would knowingly go to a play that displays a black man being anally raped by a white woman with a large dildo. There’s just a small world of people willing to sit through that. (I certainly didn’t want to attend the play when I read about it, and came to this work as a reader, rather than as an audience member, because I just thought the whole thing sounded so PC/transgressive/gross, it might be better to experience it in print, as opposed to in the theater.) In any case, it’s gross, but there’s a kind of tee-hee thing going on, “look what I can get away with,” that irritated me.

In short, I wonder if this isn’t just a transgressive minister preaching to the choir.

That said, in the end, the play did actually make me think about the question of race in our most intimate relationships – about multiracial couples and the convolutions and confusions and tensions that must exist in most of them. And by extension, I suppose, the same might be said for black/white relations of any sort. America’s crippling history of racism, and its present day racism, and the fact that everyone is, no matter what, occupying some kind of racial category, still casts a shadow over our interactions. The sexual depredations of a slave-based society, the fear of other in white America, all of our gross, racially-based attitudes, however much we have struggled to free ourselves from them, must occasionally worm their way into any black/white couple… and every person in our whole society, whenever we interact.

And so I left this text feeling a mix of disgust, irritation, and ambivalence, but also some level of enlightenment. Reviewers of the play (writers that I admire, as it happens) note that it’s both funny and sexy. I didn’t laugh while I was reading but I could imagine nervously laughing in a theater. I didn’t think it was sexy, either, but, again, maybe I would have felt it in the theater. (Speaking of which, I can’t really imagine how they staged the very, very, very explicit sexual scenes.)

In any case, I came away from the play feeling, to my surprise, quite impressed.

Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

I am still trying to make sense of my response to this novel.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite so perplexed by an author’s reputation. Lispector is an absolute goddess of Brazilian lit. She practically reinvented Portuguese, to hear her readers tell it.

For me, though, getting through her brief volumes (this is the second Lispector I have read, having hacked through “An Apprenticeship” a couple years ago) is nettlesome and dull.

It’s tempting to take a cynical view of her: She was, apparently, so extraordinarily beautiful and (my own assumption) so charismatic that a cult grew up around her and the reflective halo of her persona gilded her writing. I am not sure there is a single reference to her writing that doesn’t also allude to her beauty. Her otherwise sober biographer, Benjamin Moser, can’t seem to help bringing up her physical appearance, referring to her as “proud, beautiful Clarice” in the very first page of the biography. According to the translator Gregory Rabassa, Lispector looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf. And the poet Ledo Ivo, recalling the day he met her, reported: “The least I can say is she was stunning.”

But of course it isn’t that simple; it can’t be that simple! Can it???

“Near to the Wild Heart” is a series of fragments, or shards, relating to the life of one Joana, a headstrong girl who grows up to be a headstrong and possibly amoral woman. As a child, she steals and refuses to see it as wrong. As a woman she has an affair with a stranger without compunction; she seeks out Lidia, a woman her husband, Otavio, is having an affair with (and Lidia is carrying Otavio’s child) and vows that she, Joana, will cede Otavio to Lidia, but only once she has been impregnated with Otavio’s child as well. (WTF? If nothing else, Lispector’s attitudes about women did not exactly transcend their time and place, in this case, 1940s Brazil.)

In between, there are fragmentary passages in which Joana debates with herself about the nature of existence, reality vs. dreams, mortality, and so on. Joana falls into depressions, she busies herself with errands. The narration stabs away at whatever her conscious/subsconscious mind grabs hold of.

Oddly, about halfway through, the narration shifts away from Joana and occupies the mind of her husband Otavio, a lawyer and, it seems, a wannabe philosopher, who fusses with the papers on his desk and attempts to write something meaningful, for instance, “Determinism isn’t the determinism of ends, but a narrow determinism of causes.”

Possibly this passage and others are meant to suggest that Otavio is pedantic, a pedestrian thinker compared to the fiery Joana? (Just guesswork on my part. As far as I was concerned, Joana’s own philosophical musings are no more coherent or meaningful than Otavio’s.)

One rather interesting thing about the book is that it closes with Joana falling into a furious prayer: “Close my eyes and feel inspiration roll like a white cascade. De profundis. My God I wait for thee.”

It’s not a structured or ecclesiastical prayer; it’s just a whirl of raw beseeching language. I suppose it’s a prayer for some kind of clarity.

I mention this because it reminds me of the end of Jon Fosse’s “Septology,” also stream of consciousness, although in the case of Fosse, the narrator, Asle, is fervently Catholic, and his prayers are specific to his faith.

Also, incidentally, I have read some pretty grand claims about Fosse as a revolutionary writer; same goes for Lispector.

I don’t know if there is anything profound in this comparison. It strikes me that, by the end of these two books, both of the characters, Joanna of “Near to the Wild Heart” and Asle of “Septology,” have essentially thought all that they have to think. There is nothing left. And yet there is an incompleteness to their creation, and the writers are left with prayer.

One of the really striking things about the reaction to Lispector (in Brazil) was the sense that she had somehow broken new ground, that no one had written in Portuguese like her before. There were frequent comparisons to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, which she claimed to be irritated by, saying that she hadn’t read them (or at least she hadn’t read Joyce) when composing “Near to the Wild Heart,” her first book. It’s certainly possible that was true – after all, she was only 22 or 23 when she wrote the book, and she was studying to be a lawyer, not a professor of literature, not to mention that she was working for a newspaper as well. It’s not like she had scads of time available to dig through Joyce. And as far as I can tell, a Portuguese translation of Ulysses didn’t even exist until 1946!

I suppose it’s also possible that no Brazilian author had yet attempted a stream-of-consciousness narrative before the 1940s – although it seems somewhat unlikely. But who knows? Brazil, in many ways, is a world unto itself, an island of Portuguese in a South American sea of Spanish, a nation so much larger than any of its neighbors that, like the US, there is a certain chauvinistic attitude, a sensibility of “if it’s not from here, we don’t need it.”

So it’s possible that Brazil’s writers were more likely to look back – rather than outward – for inspiration, and for whatever reason the cataclysms of Modernism that were jolting much of the rest of the world had less of an impact in Brazil. So when Lispector came along, with her spiky stream of consciousness, her casual carnality, her apparent disregard for traditional religiosity, it was like a sudden storm. And in fact a contemporary writer in Brazil did refer to her as “Hurricane Clarice.”

Another thing that, apparently, set Lispector’s writing apart: It is not rooted in Brazil. There’s really nothing Brazilian about this book. It’s not about anything but Joana and the few people she interacts with. Perhaps that alone was enough to make “Near to the Wild Heart” stand out from the rest of Brazilian literature, which was often engaged in the question of “What is a Brazilian?”

Having said all that, I’m not sure I have a single coherent or illuminating thought about this novel. I don’t understand what made this book so beguiling, so striking, to its first readers. (Actually, Lispector herself didn’t know what to make of it; “When I reread what I’ve written,” she said to the writer Lucio Cardoso, “I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.” Cardoso disagreed, urged her to publish it, and even came up with the title for her, a quote from Joyce.)

Well, who knows? I might try to read one or two of Lispector’s better-known works, but I’m not sure I can rev up the patience for them if they too closely resemble this one.