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Henry Miller: Origins and Originality in Tropic of Cancer

May 26, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, I felt like I was returning to the source. There were so many things I recognized in it from other books and other writers that I wondered if Miller was their originator or if he too got them from someone else. From the “crazy little gesture” of the Polish-Irish-English con artist that smacks of Milan Kundera’s obsession with Agnes in Immortality to the phrase “apropos of nothing at all,” Miller left me wanting to consult some grand, comprehensive encyclopedia of intertextuality to see where these ideas were coming from and who else he had influenced and who had influenced him or how much of it had come out of the atmosphere of collective inspiration.

Miller’s stripped-down language and raw reportage made me feel like I was inside the story and experiencing it with him. After leaving Serge’s flophouse, the narrator describes being at a concert: “It’s as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards.” The narrator goes on like that for almost a page with everyday words twisted into this extraordinary description. As a reader I felt like I was an alien encountering my first concert and I loved it. It was strange but wholly evocative. Miller wasn’t writing about what happened at the concert but rather what it felt like to be at the concert. I wish I could do that.

Earlier in the novel Miller describes a dinner party at Tania’s and the effect is the same although his method is different. The paragraph contains no quotation marks but Miller is clearly capturing snippets of conversation: “Halitosis. Gaudy socks. And croutons in the pea soup, if you please. We always have pea soup Friday nights. Won’t you try a little red wine?” The paragraph goes on and on and continues with, “My next play will involve a pluralistic conception of the universe. Revolving drums with calcium lights.” Miller ties together all these short crisp sentences that are at once related to the scene but unrelated to one another so as a reader I felt like I was trapped inside a cocktail party where all the conversation was distilled and thrown at simultaneously. It is manic and dizzying and I loved it.

Miller also has a way of sketching a character with only a few short images. In reference to Olga he writes, “She weighs almost as much as a camel-backed locomotive; she drips with perspiration, has halitosis, and still wears her Circassian wig that looks like excelsior.” It’s incredible. He could have just said she was fat and had bad breath and an afro, but the way he wrote it engages the reader. The oddness of the Circassian reference threw me off balance a little and made me want to draw more of a mental image of this woman. I felt like I would recognize her anywhere.

Miller’s wild descriptions also mirror the wild bohemian lifestyle he was writing about. Even if he hadn’t written about drinking, I felt intoxicated reading these passages. There is a freedom and wildness in these descriptions that I envy. Miller manages to convey both the sense of what is going on and also the feeling of it all happening.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Tropic of Cancer from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Hisaye Yamamoto: Quiet in a Boiling Bath

May 26, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Family tension seethes under the surface of the title story of Hisaye Yamamoto’s story collection Seventeen Syllables. Mrs. Hayashi has given up her passions long ago for a life of quiet suffering. When she discovers an interest in and a talent for haiku, she adds heat to the simmering boil of her family life. And yet Yamamoto conveys the initial familial tension and ensuing boil over through the careful, almost quiet, use of displaced description and contrast.

Description of the family life and Mrs. Hayashi’s character do not take place how I expected. Poetry is Mrs. Hayashi’s one passionate outlet and she reaches out of her placid shell to introduce her daughter, Rosie, to this expression of her soul. When Rosie responds patronizingly to her poem and subsequent description of haiku, Mrs. Hayashi gives no facial expression-only a response which Rosie takes as either satisfaction or resignation. A different writer would fashion a blowup here and the character’s passions would bubble all over the page. By having Mrs. Hayashi retreat into herself, Yamamoto is conveying the depth of her habitual repression.

A similar thing occurs when the Hayashis are visiting the Hayano family. I could feel Mrs. Hayashi brighten when she talked about poetry and the depth of her passion was portrayed only through her distraction from her husband’s needs. I felt already fear for her that she was engaging with Mr. Hayano instead of his wife. Culturally, I expected her husband to bristle at this breach of etiquette. But Yamamoto does not provide a flashpoint here. Instead she shows a wife backpedalling because she knows she’s in trouble, “I’m sorry…You must be tired.” He says nothing and Yamamoto gives only the spare insight of Rosie who “felt a rush of hate for both – for her mother for begging, for her father for denying her mother.” The weight of his control needs no further description.

The sparseness of detail and lack of blowups forced me to read closely, and in reading closer I was able to see where Yamamoto alludes to Mrs. Hayashi’s tension by describing other events. When Rosie is in the bath after her encounter with Jesus, she sings so as not to think of him “the larger her volume, the less she would be able to hear herself think.” She pours on more and more hot water and then immerses herself slowly in the boiling bath “until the water no longer stung and she could move around at will.” Yamamoto is providing a parallel to how Mrs. Hayashi lives her life – she has tried to stop herself from thinking and immersed herself in this heated situation, but she got comfortable and started to move around. Given the controlling nature of her husband, she must at least subconsciously expect to have the heat on the water turned up. So did I. The tension increases, and because the violence of Mr. Hayashi has only vaguely been hinted at, my fear was even greater. Mrs. Hayashi and Rosie know what this man is capable of, but I didn’t and because Mrs. Hayashi is resigned to her fate, I was forced to worry for her.

Yamamoto uses the contrast of the giddy play of the young girls to heighten the effect of the silence of the older women. The girls, even shy Natsu, romp and play and show off Haru’s new coat to the point of barging in on the adults. Mrs. Hayashi shows she wants to be more than the silent, obedient Japanese wife when she engages in the girl’s play, asking to inherit the coat. Mrs. Hayano serves as a cautionary character who, though she spends most of the scene “motionless and unobtrusive,” continues to fulfill her wifely duties in bearing children and fixing tea. This one page explores the full range of female openness within their culture and illustrates how delicately Mrs. Hayashi teeters between childlike bursts of excitement and the expected sobriety of a Japanese wife and mother.

We see from other exchanges that Mrs. Hayashi has not lost all sense of decorum. When Mr. Kuroda comes to deliver her award, her speech is so perfectly written, I could hear the softness of her whispering and the extra syllables she would have added in Japanese to speak in the properly indirect and feminine manner. “It is I who should make some sign of my humble thanks for being permitted to contribute.” Though even here she breaks form by asking to open the package in his presence, a general taboo.

Yamamoto raises tension with the heat, literally. The heat of the day and the imminent tomato spoilage provide atmospheric clues to the coming climax. Everything is hinted at, much like real conversations in Japanese. A character in another story from the same collection explains the culture, “Like a Japanese – quiet.” Yamamoto is softly yelling for me to pay attention. We aren’t privy to the shameful scene in which Mr. Hayashi must surely have thrown Mr. Kuroda out and we aren’t privy to Mrs. Hayashi’s torment as she watches her Hiroshige burn, but we don’t need to be. In the quiet desperation that Yamamoto has built, Mrs. Hayashi’s story and her insistence, “Promise me you will never marry!” say it all. The fire is hotter than ever, but she will re-acclimate herself soon enough, and then she will swim free once more.

Quiet desperation is important in my own writing. My characters often cannot say what they feel most deeply and I struggle to convey the constraints of the world to the reader. I can learn from Yamamoto’s way of “throwing” her tension like a ventriloquist throws his voice. I can also learn from her use of contrast to show the tightness of the constraints.

Though I read this book long ago now, I continue to think about Yamamoto when I realize too late that I am in an untenable situation. I think about this steadily heating bath and how comfortable you can feel before you are boiling. I have a terrible memory for books, but sometimes, when the writing is as strong as Yamamoto’s and when the message is something I need to hear, I carry them with me forever.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Seventeen Syllables from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Dividing Identity and Point of View with Ondaatje’s Divisadero

May 25, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje uses an odd narrative point of view. Though Ondaatje shifts between passages in the first person points of view of Anna and of Lucien Segura and also third person omniscience, the novel can be read as a compilation of Anna’s reminiscences, extrapolations, and imagination.

The first chapter begins in the first person point of view of Anna as she reflects on growing up with her sister Claire and Cooper, a boy they were raised with. There are glimpses of omniscience in Anna’s voice: “[t]here is a broken path in both our memories toward this incident, even now.” What verges on omniscience here is that Anna is speaking for herself and for Claire as though they are still in touch, but so far as the narrative is concerned, Anna and Claire haven’t seen each other since they were sixteen and may never again.

Throughout the book, identity is confused, adopted, and changed and this mirrors the shifting quality of the point of view. When Cooper rescued Anna from the barn, he “called [Anna] ‘Claire.’ So that Claire herself became confused, uncertain for a moment as to who she was.” Anna refers to herself as “this person formerly known as Anna” and Cooper confuses Anna for Claire and later Claire for Anna. This quality of never quite knowing who is narrating made me want to understand how the different narrators fit together.

To add to the strange quality of the point of view, there is one section narrated in first person plural. In this scene, we are looking at pictures of people who have lived in or near Lucien Segura’s house and Ondaatje writes about the second of two photographs “[w]e are much closer to the subject in this picture. Photography has moved in from the middle distance as the century progressed.” Anna is referred to in the third person, as “[t]he woman” and “[t]his person who is barely Anna,” so it feels as though Anna is not the narrator, but Ondaatje is also giving a clue here. This section in with its odd point of view and passages about shifting distance was my key to unlocking the point of view. I started to understand what I had sensed earlier, that Ondaatje had created a world where the reader is seeing things from both inside and outside of Anna, but the narrator is always Anna.

It is easy to understand how Anna could have constructed a first person narrative for Lucien Segura. She is living in his home and she is studying him and his papers. It feels somehow natural for her to fall into his voice and Ondaatje reinforces this scholar-subject interaction in the last section of the novel, Say Your Goodbyes. Here the reader is gently lifted step by step out of Segura’s world by the third person narrator as Segura’s actions are less and less dramatized and more and more reported on as the narrator, who I have assumed is Anna, begins to analyze Segura’s life and his works and his life is wrapped neatly up. The book ends with Anna narrating in the first person.

Entire portions of the novel are told in a third person point of view that Anna could not have the information to relate. She so much as says: “I would never see Coop again.” If Anna is the narrator, only a few things could account for her omniscience about Claire and Cooper. Anna could have gained her power through some supernatural means, or, more likely, Anna has invented narratives for Claire and Cooper using her intimate knowledge of them from before just as she constructed a narrative for Lucien Segura based on his papers and her encounters with Rafael.

In the section titled The Person Formerly Known as Anna, the first-person Anna alludes to her inhabiting of Claire: “[i]n my work I sometimes borrow Claire’s nature as well as her careful focus on the world” and “I feel I can imagine most things about Claire accurately. I know her.” She goes on to say “[b]ut Coop I know only in one distinct way–as the twenty-year-old I fell in love with,” and it is true, Cooper’s narrative of becoming a lonely cardsharp and then being tempted into danger by a woman could easily be extrapolated from the loner lifestyle he led within Anna’s family and the risks he took to be with her. Claire’s rescue of Cooper and the love that develops between them as he calls her Anna seems like something Anna could have invented to assuage her guilt over leaving these two people she loved deeply behind while at the same time ultimately triumphing over Claire because Cooper is still in love with Anna, not Claire. It is as though Anna brought Cooper and Claire together in a mocking atonement for the moment in the barn where Cooper rescued Anna instead of Claire.

The point of view in this book was difficult for me to get a handle on. I sensed that Anna was narrating, but when portions of her life were recounted in the third person, I kept flipping back to see if I had misread the first section. I’m not sure yet that I completely understand whether there was something I missed in the mixing of Claire and Anna. Ondaatje managed to convey Anna’s disembodiment through his complicated construction of point of view and I’m not sure it could have been captured as well in any other way. I enjoyed mulling over the book and reading passages over and over, but at times I was also frustrated by not being to accurately place all of the pieces on my chess board. I couldn’t tell whether the narrator was reliable, because I didn’t know who it was and I kept looking for someone other than Anna to turn up as the third person narrator. That said, I like some aspects of the complexity of the narration.

In my own work, I am still grappling with point of view. At one time I wanted to construct Polska, 1994 from a series of narrators who were all observing Magda so that she would be drawn entirely from the observations of others until the rape when she decides to embody herself. In the long run, I found that I wanted to inhabit her more than that, but I still ache to create a richer world than I can totally create through the eyes of a girl of seventeen.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Divisadero from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Sherman Alexie and Microaggressions in Indian Killer

May 23, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I have spent the last several days riveted by Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and it has challenged me every step of the way.

I grew up in Idaho—arguably the whitest state in the nation. Yes, you know it for its white supremacists (who I’m told have moved to Montana, but I really wouldn’t know). My small town once made The New York Times when an Arab student was found “lynched” in the woods (the death was later ruled a suicide). I had an African American friend and a few Asian friends (the university did bring some diversity to town), but the culture was pretty homogenous and my experience with race was limited.

I’ve lived in Seattle for a decade and a half, but despite the greater diversity of communities here, I never got over my inability to talk about race. I try sometimes, but I mostly fumble awkwardly and throw in some words I learned in Sociology. I am not an unworldly person, I have lived abroad and I think managed not to be the ugly American. But when it comes to race at home, I’m still flummoxed, despite good intentions. And here I am still beating around the bush.

A friend has introduced me to the idea of microaggressions, defined by Chester Pierce as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of other races.” Alexie does a fantastic job of presenting these when the narrator muses about how a Native American student’s teacher interacts with him, “If John happened to be a little fragile, well, that was perfectly understandable, considering his people’s history. All that alcoholism and poverty, the lack of God in their lives.” Those two sentences, early in this book, rocked my world. I saw how “well meaning” can be hurtful when we are looking through our stereotypes instead of at people directly.

Indian Killers introduced me to a wide array of Native American experiences. Set in Seattle, the characters are homeless, housed, drunk, and sober. They are mixed race and not and they represent a number of tribes and degrees of identification with race. The Native American characters in the book are in themselves diverse and their experiences with Caucasians are equally diverse. All the characters are round (read universally flawed) and I learned from their strengths and foibles. I learned from their friction points and their biases.

I loved this book. I’m still a failure when it comes to talking naturally about race, but I am learning to open up and at least try to have the conversation and to look at people for who they are without the shortcut of skin color or nationality. Plus Indian Killers is a great mystery and flat out well-written.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Indian Killer from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

James Ellroy and Sexual Violence

May 22, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Watching L.A. Confidential again last night, I started to reflect on my long history with James Ellroy. I was young when I first started reading him—maybe eleven or twelve—and The Black Dahlia was not my first of his books. When I started with Clandestine or Brown’s Requiem, the noir voice had me, a girl who had grown up on the movie The Big Sleep but never read Raymond Chandler, hooked. The Black Dahlia was the second book of his that I read and as a burgeoning woman, I wanted to be as beautiful and as desired as Betty Short. I was young enough and immortal enough that the extreme violence committed against her didn’t even phase me. Even after reading L.A. Confidential and several other books, I didn’t key into it or how it might be affecting me.

If you know anything about Ellroy, you know that his mother was brutally murdered and that his books, especially those early ones, are places where he is dealing with that trauma. Elizabeth Short’s death was not dissimilar to his mother’s and there is often at least one Bud White in each early James Ellroy novel trying to save the girl—any girl—from harm. I believe that the resulting works show a respect for women, even if it borders on unhealthy worship.

I was still very young and unsettled when I watched the premiere of L.A. Confidential in 1997 at SIFF. I still wanted to be one of the women that the foul-mouthed writer would worship, and I still thought murder, even brutal serial killer style murder, was interesting enough to take Bob Keppel’s class on Ted Bundy.

In the last few years, maybe as I’ve begun to see myself more as a mortal person not merely a sexual object, I’ve started to wonder about the sexual violence against women we expose ourselves to through various media. I used to enjoy Criminal Minds, but now I realize that (despite some smart detectives) the stories are populated with women as victims and the violence is often heinous and sexual. The last few years, the torture rape filled horror movies have ruined for me one of my favorite film genres. The only conversations I can have about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are about whether the sexual violence is for titillation and I’m still not convinced it isn’t.

Violence happens. I’m headed to Croatia soon and one of the things I can’t get out of my mind is the rape camps of the Bosnian War and that we can barely talk about it still. Humans are animals and at times that is far too evident. I don’t think we should ignore it, but I also don’t think we should normalize it. At the same time, it can be interesting to learn about those uncontrolled parts of ourselves.

I try not to read about rape (no more Stieg Larsson for me and I’ll skip The Kite Runner, thank you). I did write about rape in Polska, 1994 because I wanted to try to understand it. I’m glad I did, because through writing about Magda’s victimization, I was able to see myself as a whole person (rather than a victim) with power in my actions. My fear is that for many people scenes of sexual violence and torture are becoming sources of excitement rather than cautionary and we are teaching our children that women are victims not people. Even James Ellroy saw women as victim-objects to be saved.

I don’t have any answers, but the long-lasting effects of the victimization of women in media is something I will continue to think about.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of L.A. Confidential from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.