A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Pynchon’s Crazy Voice in The Crying of Lot 49

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In the The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon weaves together a series of unlikely events using the voice of a compelling narrator to form the story of a postal conspiracy. From the first sentence of the novel as the narrator takes the protagonist Oedipa from Tupperware party to being the executrix of the estate of a real estate mogul, the novel is full of wild and unexpected turns. These turns might be difficult for a reader to navigate if it weren’t for the extraordinary voice of the narrator.

The voice is whimsical and often strays off topic. For example, just after Oedipa hears about her role in the Inverarity will, the narrator muses:

[s]he tried to think back to whether anything unusual had happened around then. Through the rest of the afternoon, through her trip to the market in downtown Kinneret-Among-The-Pines to buy ricotta and listen to Muzak (today she came through the bead-curtained entrance around bar 4 of the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble’s variorium recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist); then through the sunned gathering of her marjoram and sweet basil from the herb garden” (10).

The reader is given all sorts of extraneous details, but because the details are so interesting and unusual and because the narration always loops back to the topic at hand (in this case, Oedipa thinking about whether anything unusual had happened), I was interested in learning more and was not lost in the narration. I was however carried away by it. The voice of the narrator was like someone telling a story who has so much detail they want to pack in but they are trying to keep in mind the forward thrust of the story. Because the novel becomes a sort of mystery, I wanted to re-read portions of the novel and see if this extraneous information was in fact pertinent or led somewhere. The voice of the narrator was interesting enough to make me think everything he said had meaning and import.

I have read breathless narrators before, the type who are trying to keep up with the pace of the story and the effect is “and then, and then, and then…”, but this narrator was in control of the story and was going to let it unfold at his pace. The effect was intoxicating. Despite the odd character names and the implausibility of the events, I was willing to follow this story through orgiastic sex scenes and nights spent following a bum just to see where on Earth he was going with the story.

It’s an interesting effect to have a narrator who is so in control of what’s happening. Control may be the wrong word, because it doesn’t seem as though he is orchestrating it. Rather it seems as though he alone knows what is going on. This novel would have been a mess with a less omniscient narrator because Oedipa has no idea what is going on. The reader would be immersed in her confusion and would have difficulty following the threads of the mystery. In fact, it is the juxtaposition of this compelling, competent narrator with Oedipa’s confusion that gives the reader the freedom to follow the narrative. It could and does go anywhere, but the coolness of the narrator gives the novel a semblance of order and perhaps even predestination. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the narrator in this novel is God, although narrators can take on a certain deific quality, but the narrator does provide order to the universe of this novel.

I did not use an omniscient narrator in Polska, 1994, but I can see from this novel how important it is for the voice that is doing the storytelling to be compelling. I considered using a cooler retrospective voice for the part of my novel where Magda is leading up to her regrets and then transitioning to in-the-moment narration for the remainder of the book. By starting with the cooler voice, I would like to keep a reader’s confusion to a minimum as she comes to understand the world the way Magda sees it. The retrospective voice would have allowed Magda to draw some conclusions about her life and her experience and to let the reader understand her life through those conclusions. I ended up going with something that was more raw and immediate—something that spoke to her post-rape turmoil.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Crying of Lot 49 from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Jonathan Lethem and the Space of Time in The Fortress of Solitude

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In The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem explores the world of Gowanus (aka Boerum Hill) in Brooklyn through the eyes of Dylan Ebdus as he grows from a small boy to a middle-aged man. Throughout Dylan’s life, he has a relationship with Mingus, Arthur, and Robert, kids and then men from his neighborhood. Lethem crafts Dylan as both a neighborhood insider and an outsider and uses this dual status as a means to examine his friends from up close and from afar.

In the beginning of the novel, Dylan is a young white boy in a predominantly ethnic and not yet gentrified neighborhood. He plays with all of the kids from the street and is a part of the neighborhood. This allows Dylan to remark on the way the neighborhood works from the inside. The reader learns about the declining economic fortunes of the neighborhood while Dylan and the kids on the street bounce “spaldeens” off of the abandoned house—about racial tension as Dylan is repeatedly “yoked” of his pocket change by black kids, one of whom is Robert.

When a new kid, Mingus, moves onto the block and befriends Dylan, Dylan is initiated into a new world. Mingus is black and more street smart than Dylan and this friendship helps Dylan see deeper into a world he doesn’t fully understand. He begins to understand the nature of being yoked, although he is never able to avoid it fully throughout his life. Lethem has positioned Dylan so as to have access to Mingus’s world, and by making Mingus’s father a cokehead, Lethem creates Dylan’s first conscious interaction with the world of drugs. Lethem is initiating the reader into this world at the same time.

The structure and interactions Lethem has created for Dylan’s life continue to strike this balance between insider and outsider as Dylan is the only white kid in his school and then ends up helping the new white kid, Arthur, meet Mingus which leads to Arthur becoming more a part of the neighborhood fabric than Dylan.

Then Lethem removes Dylan from the neighborhood by first making him a Fresh Air Fund kid who spends the summer in Vermont and then having him attend Stuyvesant in Manhattan. Suddenly Dylan is no longer teetering on the verge of being a part of the neighborhood; he is removed and is in the position of observer. This allows Lethem to look through Dylan at the kids from Gowanus from the outside even though he still lives there. When Dylan’s new and old worlds cross in a drug buy where Robert appears with a gun, Dylan gains a new perspective on his associates. Although his relationship with Robert was always difficult, the sight of Dylan’s date running in fear after having wet her pants forces him to see how truly scary Robert and Robert’s lifestyle are from the outside. At this point the reader is also forced to reassess the normalcy of Dylan’s life. Structurally, Lethem has been indoctrinating the reader and Dylan into the norms of Gowanus, but at this point he is splashing the reader and Dylan with cold water and forcing them to reassess all of their assumptions.

Dylan continues to separate from his friends and is accepted at a college in Vermont. While working his summer job to pay for school, he runs into Arthur again. Because the story had shifted to Dylan’s school life in Manhattan, the reader is able to view Arthur from a new distance as Dylan does: “Arthur Lomb had gained his height at last….His eyes were red and small and wrinkled like those of some fetal animal, a blind mole rate or cauled calf.” The formerly bookish Arthur who encouraged Dylan to try for Stuyvesant had become a drug fiend who could barely graduate high school and is now collecting the funds to purchase a kilo of cocaine for resale. Not only are Dylan and the reader looking at a shift that happened while Dylan was busy in Manhattan, but we are also looking at a cautionary tale and Dylan’s alter ego. The danger seems more evident and I was relieved Dylan was off to college.

Of course, Dylan is not able to brush off his past as easily as that and when he encounters Mingus, Robert, and Arthur later in life, Mingus and Robert are in prison and Arthur owns several businesses in Boerum Hill, but rather than being a successful entrepreneur, it seems like Arthur is a boy who couldn’t get away from the neighborhood, even when the neighborhood got away from him.

I like the way Jonathan Lethem started these boys out at a young age and brought them together in a time and place when they couldn’t question their fate—they were just living. As I was reading Dylan’s encounters and re-encounters with his cohort, I was thinking about my character Magda and the skaters in Polska, 1994. Magda meets up with the skaters and becomes a part of their group before she even knows what she is doing, but she has a natural in into the group—Olek. I wanted her to sort of fall into the group the way that Dylan fell in with his, although the age is different. Then she pulls away and starts dating Jacek and this is when she can gain perspective on the skaters. After Jacek, she falls into the group again but less because of Olek this time and more because she is forgetting herself. As she steps away from the group and finds herself, I she sees them in a different light as she seeks her truth and her strength. Lethem’s structure of pulling these people apart across time and space and then putting them back together allows for the reinterpretation that is so interesting.

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

Henry Miller: Origins and Originality in Tropic of Cancer

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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

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seventeen syllables - hisaye yamamotoFamily 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

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divisadero - michael ondaatjeIn 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.