Far From Brooklyn

After reading the New York Times’s great Top 100 book list, I created a list of my own, and then set about reading some of the titles on the NYT ranking that I hadn’t picked up before, or that I had picked up and abandoned, starting with Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” (which I once again failed to finish, although at least I made it more than halfway through.)

In August, I picked up three more NYT listees, but, alas, only finished one of the three.

The one I finished was damn good, though!

“The Known World,” by Edward P. Jones, is most likely the best novel I have ever read about slavery in the United States. It’s a web of narratives centering on a small farm in Virginia owned by Henry and Caldonia Townsend. The Townsends are black, and are slaveholders. That fact seems a bit gimmicky at the outset, and in the early pages the novel seems to struggle with the weight of it, but Jones is such an assured writer, and he has so many stories to tell, that pretty quickly I set aside my inclination to think about the symbolism and strangeness of black slaveholders in the antibellum American South and just read about the lives of the characters. And there are a lot of characters in this book. But Jones manages to render them all in remarkable detail. (This was a novel that benefitted from reading as an ebook, because it allowed me to occasionally scan back to remind myself who was who.) 

Like Faulkner with his Yoknapatawpha County, Jones has invented an entire world, in this case Manchester County, a remote corner of Virginia. It feels fully imagined and, for black and white resident alike, it can be both a comforting home and hellacious trap, where the cruelest slaveholder might ache to be free of the tensions of the South, and the angriest slave might find happiness as a father and a husband. These are not simple portraits; Manchester Country is not a simple place.

Deeply rooted as the story may be, Jones occasionally follows characters outside the county, trailing them as far as Texas, in one case. Not only that, he sometimes spins forward a hundred years or more, noting the lives of characters’ descendants. 

Without coming off as didactic, Jones sketches an enormous range of attitudes about and effects of slavery — black and white. In an interview with the New York Times, Jones claims to have done virtually no research for the book. Still, it feels extremely well researched (not merely well imagined). The daily life of farmers, artisans, homemakers, lawmen and others seemed credible and realistic. On that point, though, in one of very few missteps in the book, Jones quotes a historian from the 1940s whose commentary seemed so tone-deaf that I had to look her up, only to discover that she was a fictional creation. That led me to occasionally look away from the book to look up other historical factoids, wondering about their historicity, (and generally finding that, each time, they were well-rooted in reality.) After a while, I stopped fact-checking and just followed the story where it led. It all seemed true and real. It wasn’t until after the fact that I read the NYT interview and learned that Jones had, essentially, willed the world of Manchester County to life, without consulting any history experts. Pretty impressive.

There is a temptation, when writing about as cruel an institution as American slavery, to wallow in the horror of it — see, for instance, Tarantino’s “Django.” But Jones is restrained. He doesn’t pull any punches—there is some atrocious behavior by slaveholders, black and white, and by slave-traders and the quasi-official lawmen of the county—but he doesn’t have to focus entirely on violent behavior to make clear that violence is the controlling factor in this world.

* * *

I picked up two other novels that made the Times list, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin, and “Detransition, Baby,” by Torrey Peters. The former is the story of a pair of video game developers, Sam and Sadie, who meet as tweens in Los Angeles and then end up as near neighbors in college, at MIT and Harvard.  The latter is basically the story of building a family, told through the lens of modern-day gender scrambling.

Zevin was featured in one of those NYT “By the Book” interviews, and she comes off as smart and very nice, and also as a reader somewhat like me—that is, someone who doesn’t feel that she must read books all the way through.“I frequently don’t finish books,” she said. “I like to dip in and out of things. It isn’t necessarily the book’s fault. That said, I will never criticize publicly a book that I didn’t finish. It’s part of my moral code.” 

That’s a decent rule. I’ve broken it a lot of times but it’s still a decent rule. I didn’t finish “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” for whatever reason. As Zevin notes, it isn’t necessarily the book’s fault. It just didn’t particularly hit me. The same is true of “Detransition, Baby.” I set aside both of these books about a third of the way through.

Not on the NYT, but on my personal to-read list, was the author Dinaw Mengestu. I picked up a copy of “All Our Names,” and as with the Zevin and Peters books, I set it aside before I was done.

***

Something that kept ping-ponging around in my head while reading the Zevin, Peters and Mengestu books was the question of appropriation: Who gets to tell the stories about people racially or otherwise different from themselves? Who may “speak” for black people, brown people, immigrants, gay people, trans people, etc. etc.?

For myself, I still hold to the old-fashioned, or outdated, presumption that an artist may create whatever he or she wishes, and if it works it works, and if it doesn’t let the author be prepared to be called out for it. On the other hand, I can’t really think of too many books where authors successfully get inside the heads of characters radically different from themselves. (Edward P. Jones really pulls this off with “The Known World,” rendering three-dimensional characters both black and white, slave owner and enslaved, sympathetic and non-. I suppose it might be easier to do this in a historical novel, but maybe not.) 

I wondered, though, to what extent, if any, the Zevin, Peters and Mengestu books might be, at some level, considered appropriation.

To begin with Peter’s book: It is, famously, a tale involving two trans women, one of whom has detransitioned to presenting as a man. Peters is, as she states in an author’s note, a cis white woman, and although she does include a cis white woman as one the three main characters in the book, she is not the main story — the focus is the struggles of two non-heteronormative people to create a place for themselves in the world.  For me, the characters didn’t come off as “real” — not because of their genders or presentation, but just because it seemed to me that they didn’t behave the way people behave. Obviously I’m out of step in this regard because the book has sold a zillion copies and even ranked on the Times’s list of best books of the century. But, for me anyway, this book just didn’t feature characters who would credibly do the things they did. That said, the credibility didn’t really have a lot to do with the characters’ gender identity. In any case, Peters has not, as far as I know, gotten flamed for presuming to tell a trans person’s story. 

In Zevin’s book, meanwhile, the back story of one of the two main characters seems to hew closely to the outlines of the author’s life. One of the two protagonists, Sam, like Zevin, comes from a mixed racial background, specifically half Korean and half white. But, in an interesting editorial decision, Zevin partially deracinates Sam by creating a home life centered on his Korean grandparents, who run a pizzeria in LA’s K-town, and whose speech patterns have the malaproprismical tang of first generation immigrants. Sam’s father is just a rich white dude (a dimwit) from the suburbs of LA, and therefore, it seems, beneath interest. I don’t want to include spoilers so I’ll just say his mother is out of the picture. So Sam’s family is his grandparents. Now, for all I know, Zevin’s multiracial childhood was very much like that of Sam, although I doubt it. Rather, I think she made the editorial choice to emphasize non-whiteness, non-suburbia, and non-wealth, presumably because it seemed bigger, bolder, and just plain more interesting.

The Mengestu novel poses parallel questions. Mengestu is the son of Ethiopian immigrants, and was himself born in Ethiopia. His family fled the country in the chaos that followed the ouster of Haile Selassie. His father, an airline executive, presumably was a ripe target for the Marxist violence of that time. In the US, per Wikipedia, the senior Mengestu worked first as a laborer and later as an executive. His life, at least in outline, sounds extraordinarily difficult but also a triumph over adversity—and his son (himself a first-generation immigrant, too) went on to attend Georgetown and Columbia. There are echoes of that story, but also many contrasts to it, in “All Our Names,” in which the protagonist is a poor young man who sets off across Africa to attend college in Kampala, which is in the midst of turmoil presumably akin to the turmoil Mengestu’s family experienced in Ethiopia. The narrator is so poor that not only has he never ridden in a taxi, he has never even presumed to try to do so. (The scene where that tidbit is expressed was, I thought, a very nice touch by the author, by the way.) Later, the character comes to study in the U.S.

It’s striking that Mengestu opts to focus on a desperately poor character, rather than someone (like say, his father or himself) with a more complex, less black-and-white backstory. Like Zevin, he creates a specifically impoverished character to carry the weight of his narrative.

I get it, of course. All writers make choices like this. Poverty is more compelling than wealth, and it’s way more interesting than bland middle class comfort. Challenges fuel plot. Roiling immigrant households are more energetic and generally more endearing than settled nth-generation homes. And exploring edge cases of sexual expression feels meatier than, say, missionary position heterosexuality. 

 That’s why so many books feature orphans or, on the other side of the scale, parents who have lost children. Where’s the drama in the story of someone who has grown up in a two-parent household where there was always enough to eat? 

Anyway, I had the sense that each of these books involved invention that, to one extent or another, built on an underlying reality of the authors’ lives, but shaded to the more dramatic—poorer or more colorful or simply more unusual. And I wonder where appropriation begins or ends? Or can we just make peace with artists inventing lives that not their own, and judge them on the results? 

I’ll go with the latter option!

* * *

It’s ironic that I started off by noting, with approval, Zevin’s stated rule of never criticizing a book she hadn’t finished. Honestly, though, why not just take it a step further? Why not just avoid criticizing a book at all and let your silence do the talking?

I was reminded of this by a scathing review of a new novel, “The Divorce,” by Swedish novelist and editor Moa Herngren, in the New York Times. In fact, the review was so harsh that I went out and bought a copy at my local bookstore. What could be so freaking terrible about a book that it deserved such contumely? I had to find out, and I was not the only one who felt that way: the bookstore cashier mentioned that someone else had bought a copy, too, and for the same reason. In other words, the bad review actually drove at least two sales. And I’m betting those weren’t the only two.

Anyway, I’d have to say that I mostly agreed with the reviewer, Jennifer Croft (who happens to be a well-known translator, and who took pains to laud the translation of “The Divorce” in the very first sentence of her review, haha!) This isn’t a good book. I’m not sure why the Times went to the trouble of reviewing it — maybe Herngren is well-enough known internationally that a book by her demands to be reviewed. (I myself had never heard of her but some people may be familiar with a Swedish TV show she co-created, which runs on Netflix.) It seems cruel for such a giant cultural arbiter (the NYT, I mean) to excoriate a work that would otherwise sink unnoticed in our glutted book market. On the other hand, I bought the book, and so did someone else who shops in the same bookstore. Maybe the bad review will propel “The Divorce” on to the bestseller list!

* * * 

A final note: I didn’t finish “The Divorce,” so of the five books I began in August, I did not finish four. I read somewhere between 100 and 250 pages of each.