This month, I read three American novels, two from the heartland and the other from the heart of modern Brooklyn, and two European works, one a novel from the early 20th Century and the other a memoir published roughly 100 years later.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
I wish I didn’t dislike this book. Really, I do. It’s a much beloved novel by a much beloved American novelist, the fictional musings of an Iowa minister who lived an uneventful life in a small town. It’s very well written, or at least very carefully crafted, and the author clearly took great pains to find just the right words, and went to no small amount of trouble to map out a deep (like, 75 years) backstory for the novel. So, yes, I do wish I could say I thought more of it, but for me it just sat there like a dead fish.
The story: Dying of some unspecified condition, an elderly minister, John Ames, composes a series of letters to his seven-year-old son in which he recalls his grandfather, a fiery abolitionist who participated in the pre-Civil War skirmishes in Kansas, and his father, a strict pacifist. In addition, he relates the details of his first marriage, which ended when his wife died in childbirth, and his second marriage, very late in life, which is why he, Ames, has such a young son even though he is well into his 70s.
“Gilead” appeared in 2004, and it’s hard to describe how deeply anticipated it was. Robinson had published just one novel before that: “Housekeeping,” an eerie and sometimes funny story about a pair of orphaned sisters and the increasingly eccentric family members who care for them. That book was published way back in 1980 and it found a devoted audience. Readers who loved “Housekeeping,” and there were lots of them, were practically slathering for this new book from Robinson. They had to wait nearly a quarter century for “Gilead.”
Twenty-four years is a long time to fuss over a piece of fiction, especially a relatively brief one – my paperback copy is less than 250 pages. And the resulting book is exceedingly fussy. The narrator, John Ames, is cautious about making declarative sentences, cautious about speaking ill of anyone (with one exception, who I’ll get to) and, of course, has lived a cautious life, ministering in the very town he grew up in.
Not only is he cautious, he also is just so dang nice! He is kind and patient. He delights in the adventures of children. He reveres the natural world around him (at length). Why, he even decides it would be nice get up and dance, and so he does, gosh darn it, twirling around in his study, never mind the fact that he is supposedly dying at any moment now.
The only unkind words ever to leave his lips have to do with the son of his old friend, his namesake, John Ames Boughton, who was feckless (and even, dare I say it, evil) as a young man. The sins of John Ames Boughton are related at some length. (Like everything else in this book, the only “action” seems to have taken place far in the past, or far away from the town of Gilead.) As a young man, John Ames Boughton got a country girl pregnant and (it seems) didn’t step up to care for the child or the young woman who was its mother. We learn of the disgustingly backward and impoverished lives of the girl’s rough country kin, who are so fractious and backward and unclean that they refuse any assistance from the guilt-ridden Boughton family. And in fact the bumpkins are so filthy and irresponsible, the baby up and dies after a few years.
We learn all this because Boughton has returned to town, years after bringing shame on his family and by extension on the man who he was named for, our staunch, upright, kindly hero John Ames. The two Johns, one now middle aged and the other now elderly, engage in bland conversations about the nature of God, forgiveness, and determinism, which the elder Ames seems to think are practically spitfire battles pitting good and evil, whereas I found the conversation to be about as interesting as someone asking for the salt at the dinner table.
At some point we learn that young John has cleaned up his act, and has been living the life of a good, decent, hardworking man, with a common-law wife and child, but alas that wife is black, and therefore the union is illegal. Not only that, but her family doesn’t approve of the relationship, and in the end the couple is separated. Hence John Ames Boughton’s return to the town of Gilead, where he had once brought shame on his family and earned the enmity of old John Ames. And, I would add, hence the sense of utter contrivance hanging over the whole book. To me, it reads as if Robinson had spent 20-odd years working out complex backstories for all her characters, and having, at last, figured out every blessed detail, she brings them together, marionette-like, for a boring Punch and Judy demonstration, with side helpings of Biblical exegeses. None of it feels truly true; every detail seems manufactured to fit into the puzzle that Robinson erected. She was clearly interested in the battles for free Kansas and specifically in a historical Iowa figure, a minister who was involved in the violence leading up to the Civil War. Meanwhile, she also clearly wanted to echo that story with the challenges of segregation and integration (which were coming to a head in 1956, when the novel is set), and so from there she needed to find a way to extend the family history practically to the breaking point – how else would you have a father with so young a son but also a grandfather who was involved in the Kansas border wars. It’s all just terribly contrived, IMHO, and I should immediately say that I am probably a sole voice crying “Boo!” amidst a standing ovation.
Yes, I know I must be one of the very few people in the world who disliked this book. I wanted to like it. But the narrator is pedagogical to the the point of pedantry, and his niceness and the niceness of everyone around him just turns into a kind of brown hum of boredom. It’s very prettily written, but it’s just too booky* for me.
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
While slogging through “Gilead,” I happened to hear the host of the “Political Gabfest,” David Plotz, recommend Kent Haruf’s novel, “Plainsong,” and I thought it might be an interesting bookend to “Gilead,” set as they both are in the heartland – “Gilead” in western Iowa, “Plainsong” in eastern Colorado.
But “Plainsong” is a decidedly different kind of novel. The action takes place in real time, not narrated at a distance of recollection, and the story is full of lousy people doing lousy things – bullies, drunks, cowards, ignoramuses, etc. Instead of aging gracefully and wisely, the way the folks do in “Gilead,” people in “Plainsong” bog down in depression, or sag into senility, or just kind of expire in loneliness. There are some generally “nice” people but they aren’t exclusively nice – they cheat on one another, or they run away from people who don’t deserve to be run away from, or they peer at people having sex even though they know they shouldn’t.
Speaking of sex, there’s a lot of it going on in the dusty little town of Holt – violent sex, tender sex, nonconsensual sex. You name it, they’re doing it in Holt. In that regard, “Plainsong” reminded me of Larry McMurtry’s gem, “The Last Picture Show,” in which the entire population of one tiny town in Texas seemed to be going at it with one another.
“Plainsong” maybe isn’t quite as good a book as the McMurtry novel, probably because there aren’t quite so many vivid characters. Still, it’s an involving tale, or really a group of interwoven tales: a high school girl who is taken in by a pair of elderly bachelor farmers; a high school teacher who refuses to let a star athlete skate by without doing the work; the teacher’s sons, who are struggling to understand a world in which their mother has abandoned them.
The writing is Hemingway-simple, and stays mostly on the surface. In fact I might say it’s a little too self-consciously Hemingway-esque, but OK, it’s a style and he sticks with it. The stories of the various characters are compelling and the pages race by. The only cavil I might raise is that a couple characters are just a wee bit cloyingly nice, but overall Haruf creates a landscape that is a realistic and satisfying mix of lightness and darkness. The small town of Holt is neither midwestern Eden nor small-town Hell. It’s small enough for neighborliness and caring; but not so much that there isn’t pettiness and downright nastiness.
I had read Haruf’s last book, “Our Souls at Night,” which was a surprisingly affecting portrait of two older people falling in love. “Plainsong” is a harsher book, and better for it. And I would certainly recommend it over “Gilead.” I’ll take my midwest nice with a serving of harsh reality, thanks very much
Drifts by Kate Zambreno
From the midwest to the middle of Brooklyn, we join literary darling Kate Zambreno for an autofictional journey of the mind. “Drifts” is the story, if that’s not putting it too strongly, of a writer trying to write, and while trying to write, thinking about what other writers have written about trying to write, so it’s a kind of quasi-fictional ouroboros, or maybe it’s more like an Escher drawing where the stairs lead up and down without actually going up or down.
I would probably find this intolerable but it must be said that Zambreno is exceptionally smart and a very good writer and deeply well-read. Indeed, I can’t think of a book that has dropped more literary references than “Drifts.” I was irritated at first by the all the name dropping, and started folding the lower corners of the pages to mark them, but pretty soon the entire lower corner of the book was folded up, and I became less irritated and more impressed by the sheer volume and, I don’t know, the audaciousness of being so referential. There are any number of writers Zambreno cites, but the three most common seemed to be Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Walser, and May Sarton. That’s definitely not a grouping that makes any logical sense; they’re just in the mix because Zambreno appreciates them, and I have to appreciate her, in turn, for that.
On the other hand, the amount of navel gazing is kind of excruciating, and the whole act of, in essence, whining about the difficulties of writing (and teaching writing) is pretty irritating. At one point, the narrator, presumably Zambreno herself, although she is never actually named, leaves her quiet home in a suburban corner of Brooklyn (presumably Ditmas Park?), and for some reason takes a subway to the Lower East Side, where she bitches about the fact that she can’t find a quiet place to get work done. Yes, seriously!
Also autofictively irritating are Zambreno’s lengthy disquisitions about her small dog. I just don’t really care about other people’s pets.
I did not, I have to admit, finish the book, which goes against my ambition, this year, of finishing the books that I start, but I felt justified in this case – the point of “Drifts” is not to get anywhere particularly, and after 150 or so pages I felt like I wasn’t going to go anywhere startlingly different than I where I had already been with her. Zambreno is impressively smart and tosses off abstruse literary references with apparent ease (well, except for the difficulty of being, you know, a writer and writing teacher!) but I’d had enough, and I set the book aside about halfway through. I’ll likely go back and read more of her work, though; supposedly this is her only work of autofiction – the other stuff sounds like it’s quite a bit different.
One note: At one point, Zambreno (er, the narrator) spends so much time masturbating that she injures her hand, which she then says is the same thing that happened to Robert Walser. (Dogear that page!) It seems to me that this was actually an anecdote about Balzac. I mean it’s possible that Walser was a crazed onanist but I can’t help but think she meant Balzac.
Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser
Hehehe, and speaking of Robert Walser…
Having read, and been mystified by, a collection of Walser’s short writings last month, I returned to the man one month later, mainly because of Zambreno’s regular references to him in “Drifts.”
This time, at least, I was able to understand why Walser has been compared to Beckett and Kafka. “Jakob von Gunten” takes place in a somewhat Kafkaesque setting, a school for servants where the headmaster seems to steal pupil’s money, where nothing seems to be taught, and where there is no discernible progress from day to day, or, more to the point, from enrollment to graduation.
And there are parallels to Beckett in the casual cruelties inflicted on the narrator by people in authority, and also in the tee-hee treatment of the narrator’s visits to prostitutes.
I can’t say that this book showed me how or why Walser is a glowing literary genius – only that I understand, to a point, why writers compare him to two of the 20th Century’s greatest writers. There is a certain quality to the writing that manages to be both ultra-real but surreal at the same time – no small trick. And it may be that Beckett was building off of the work that Walser did, although I’m not aware of him being aware of Walser. (Not saying he didn’t read Walser–I really don’t know if he knew Walser’s work.)
In the end, Walser strikes me as a kind of minor character in the development of the modern novel – more of a footnote than a chapter. But perhaps I am still not well-enough familiar with the entirety of his work to say that.
The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier
I have read this very short memoir several times since I discovered in back in 2010. I picked it up and read it again this month.
Looking back in the archives of this very blog, I see that on my first reading I referred to “The Mystery Guest” as a novella, which in fact it is not. No, it is, as the subtitle puts it, “an account,” and as far as I can tell it is a completely factual account of an incident in Bouillier’s life, sparked by an invitation he received from an ex-girlfriend to attend the birthday party of a conceptual artist, Sophie Calle. Each year, Calle would have birthday party and one of her friends was tasked with inviting someone Calle did not know. This invitee would be the “mystery guest.”
Adding spice to this tale is the fact that Bouillier’s girlfriend had not merely broken up with him but had broken his heart. The breakup was still nagging at him years later, when she called out of the blue to ask him to be the mystery guest at the party. And so Bouillier came to view the invitation, and the looming party, as a sort of mystical test of his own pride and strength, a chance to set the past in the past, or perhaps (even) for his girlfriend to admit that she had made a terrible mistake by breaking up with him. Much of the book is devoted to his obsessive anticipation of the party, as he turns over the various explanations for why his girlfriend would have called him, of all the people she might have invited, and further obsessive consideration of the timing of the call, coming as it did on the date of the death of Bouillier’s intellectual godfather, Michael Leiris, who, though little known in the US, was a titanic figure in 20th Century French intellectual/artistic history. And among Leiris’s various theories (if I understand it correctly, and it’s highly possible that I don’t) was the idea that we create a kind of personal mythology based on the patterns of the events of our lives. So to receive a call from an ex-girlfriend on the day that Leiris died was, to Bouillier, not merely a coincidence but a kind of cosmic reckoning.
Not evident in the preceding, long paragraph, is the fact that “The Mystery Guest” is a charming and often very funny book. After all, the story involves a stock figure in comic novels, the “average guy thrown for a loop when his girlfriend leaves him,” which is the setup for dozens of rom-coms such as “High Fidelity,” to name just one. Bouillier (the character and presumably the actual person as well) is alternately prideful and pathetically self-conscious. Among many other tangents, Bouillier discusses at length his longstanding aversion to turtleneck shirts, which, after his girlfriend left him, he took to wearing on a daily basis – kind of a hair shirt, it might be said.
“The Mystery Guest” is one of those books that, as I understand it, has been quietly passed from hand to hand by its devotees for the last 15 or so years, but which is still not generally very well known. Later this year, McNally Editions – the publishing arm of the great McNally Jackson bookstores here in NYC – will be bringing out what looks like a very pretty new paperback edition, which is great. (After re-reading this book in my existing Kindle edition this month, I went online and bought myself a used hardcover copy, yay!) I would be glad to see the book become better known, although I enjoy knowing about and loving a relatively obscure little title – generally I just don’t read very esoteric or unusual stuff, and when I do I tend not to like it much. But “The Mystery Guest” is just a great pleasure to read – so well written, so unusual in the way it obsessively burrows down into Bouillier’s scars and resentments. It’s a book that I enjoy recommending, knowing that it manages to be both playful and thought-provoking at the same time, and which has yet to be known by anyone I suggest it to.
One more thing: “The Mystery Guest” has a fascinating real-world afterstory that I won’t go into, because I don’t want to add any spoilers here. Suffice it to say, once you have finished the book, you should do some Googling to see what happened next.
*booky – characteristic of mid-list American fiction from the later half of the 20th Century and on into the 21st Century, wherein literary artistry is deployed so expertly that it renders the creation non-credible.
Photo Credit: Old church in graveyard on Monroeville-Irondale Road in Brush Creek Township, Jefferson County, Ohio
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chestnut_Grove_Cemetery,_Brush_Creek_Township.JPG
Far From Brooklyn 
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