I’ve been reading voraciously lately, hungry for the kind of craft that makes me sink into a book, that I can steal and learn from for my own. This binge put me eight books ahead on my reading goal for the year, but it wasn’t going to be satisfied until I found something really worth chewing on. Enter Warlight and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, two excellent books that helped me lean deeper into the book I am working on.
Retrospective Voice in Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
I was reading an issue of Brick, a Canadian literary magazine that always stretches me and yet always feels like home, when I realized that Michael Ondaatje (a writer who is featured in nearly every issue and whose work I once loved deeply) is someone I needed to return to. I picked up his first novel Coming Through Slaughter but couldn’t connect to the disjointed narrative the way I had with The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Then I opened Warlight and it was just where I needed to be.
“There are times these years later, as I write this all down, when I feel as if I do so by candlelight. As if I cannot see what is taking place in the dark beyond the movement of this pencil. These feel like moments without context.” Michael Ondaatje, Warlight
The story centers on two children who are left by their parents in post-war Britain in the care of a mysterious man. The dealings around them are shady and the life tenuous, but they are also held tight by a bevy of strangers. It’s a gorgeous book on the sentence level and the characters are fascinating, but what captured me and piqued my writerly senses was the way Ondaatje uses the retrospective voice. He uses it for the same reasons that I am in my next book, because children and teenagers do not have a complete view on their experiences and interjections of a later, older narrator (even if it’s the protagonist at a later stage in life) allow the reader to view a book from a second angle that enriches the story (and allows the author more control over how the book is interpreted). Ondaatje tells us exactly what he’s doing, too:
“You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing. Unless of course you wish, like my sister, to damn and enact revenge on the whole pack of them.” – Michael Ondaatje, Warlight
Without that second perspective, Warlight would be a book about an abandoned boy who falls for the lover of a man who visits their strange house that dark people flit in and out of. A boy who takes risks like ferrying unknown cargo up the Thames with a man he really doesn’t know. With the retrospective voice, and the way Ondaatje lays out the sections of his book, we can see why the children were abandoned, what was really happening in the world around them, and what was on that boat (and why). There’s a completeness in this, and even if it doesn’t bring joy, it brings satiety.
In my own book, the retrospective voice also allows me to reinterpret some cultural norms in the lens of today. If I have a raft of teenage girls running around trying to find their value through their relationships to men, that is one perspective born from the world they grow up in. If the narrator can see what they are missing, the reader gets the benefit of both views. It’s something that doesn’t always need to be spelled out, but I worry sometimes when our world is tenuous what happens if it isn’t spelled out.
This is something I struggled with in The House of Eve where the (richly drawn) characters were so trapped in their own worldviews on topics like a woman being wholly responsible for a pregnancy that I worried about audiences who wouldn’t see that the author is trying to point out the flaw in that logic. Women so beat down by the patriarchy that those words would reinforce their worldviews rather than lift them up. I like that Sadeqa Johnson trusted her audience enough to make that leap, but as someone who developed a lot of wrongheaded notions from my own early reading, I am warier.
Second Person Viewpoint in The Reluctant Fundamentalist
I know everyone else read The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid ages ago when it was still new. I’d watched the movie and liked it enough that I wanted it to sit before I encountered the book. I’m glad I did because the feeling of both is much the same and the distance allowed me to encounter this beautifully-written book from a craft perspective.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is framed around a conversation between two people in a café in Lahore, Pakistan. The narrator addresses us (ostensibly the second person) as he tells us the story of his life of leaving Pakistan, attending Princeton, getting a prestigious job, and how 9/11 changed him.
This “let me tell you a story” framework is something Henry James used in The Turn of the Screw, though without the implication of the second person address. I say implication because the audience for this book is likely American and Changez is telling us all the reasons he fell out of love with America. Hamid uses the second person very effectively from the initial warming us up with his bright-eyed adoration of the U.S., through his souring, to the very last sentence where who we the audience is and what we’ve been up to all this time is painfully clear.
What I found especially compelling about the way Hamid frames this book is that he keeps surfacing back to that conversation we are ostensibly having at the café. Unlike James, who (if I recall correctly) drops us unto a narrative and doesn’t return to the fireside until the end, Hamid consistently reminds us throughout the book that we are in conversation with him. Maybe this is why the feeling of implication works so well.
“If you have ever, sir, been through the breakup of a romantic relationship that involved great love, you will perhaps understand what I experienced. There is in such situations usually a moment of passion during which the unthinkable is said; this is followed by a sense of euphoria at finally being liberated; the world seems fresh, as if seen for the first time; then comes the inevitable period of doubt, the desperate and doomed backpedaling of regret; and only later, once emotions have receded, is one able to view with equanimity the journey through which one has passed.” – Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The other thing Hamid does exquisitely in this book is metaphor where the description perfectly matches something Changez was going through (above, his feelings about losing Erica) but he is very much also talking about something else. It’s masterful and you realize as you read this book that Changez (or Hamid) was very much in complete control of the conversation from the very beginning.
I’ve been experimenting with this “let me tell you a story” framework within my own novel, but just on the first page. The Reluctant Fundamentalist made me question why I’m using it if I never return to it, if there is a craft justification or if it’s just an easier way for me as a writer to slip in and it’s become something I need to edit out. Time will tell, though if I could use it even half as effectively as Hamid, I’d be very proud.
Reading All the Social Justice Books
There’s one more thing I wanted to touch on, and that’s the fact that it’s never a bad time to pick up and actually read all those social justice books you bought during the pandemic or at the height of #BlackLivesMatter. Two that have really touched me on that front lately: The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life by Simran Jeet Singh and Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong. Singh’s book was front of mind as I was reading about Changez’s experience in post-9/11 New York, when being a brown man with a beard was a challenge at best. Singh lived that experience and his compassion and humanity is something we can all learn from. While the book touches on many, many things I think have the potential to heal us, the lesson I’m carrying forward with me every day is to look for the divine in every other human, even when their choices are something I disagree with. It’s a really beautiful, thoughtful book and one I wish I could make everyone read.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning is a blend of memoir and cultural criticism that really hit home for me. Like me, Hong “was the beneficiary of a mid-to-late-nineties college education, when multiculturalism was having its swan song” and I hadn’t realized until reading this book how much optimism for a better world that worldview had filled me with—and how much I have failed to reconcile with what our country became after 9/11. I appreciated the depth and foresight in Hong’s writing, especially in passages like this:
“The rise of white nationalism has led to many nonwhites defending their identities with rage and pride as well as demanding reparative action to compensate for centuries of whites’ plundering from non-Western cultures. But a side effect of this justified rage has been a ‘stay in your lane’ politics in which artists and writers are asked to speak only from their personal ethnic experiences. Such a politics not only assumes racial identity is pure—while ignoring the messy lived realities in which racial groups overlap—but reduces racial identity to intellectual property.” – Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings
She writes, “The soul of innovation thrives on cross-cultural inspiration. If we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die.” Make no mistake, this book is a rebuke of how we relate to race in America. And it is a very good and important read, one that pushed me to think harder about some important things.
I started writing this hours ago when Biden was still in the U.S. presidential race. He was not my candidate (I wanted someone who could say the world “abortion” out loud and who would fight louder for many of the things I believe in) but he was the candidate I was going to vote for. I am not pleased that he or the Democratic Party let this linger so long. We should have had a real primary, because there is strength in testing ourselves, in finding where we are weak and in trying to grow. We have the chance now to pick someone who will challenge us to a better future. They must beat Trump, but that should be only the baseline of our expectations. What if we allowed ourselves to dream again of being the country that is stronger because of our diversity not in spite of it? What if we embrace our changing demographics and try to care for all our citizens? I don’t know who the right person is, but I hope we go forward bravely and try to really find out. Life is short and the time for change is now.
In the meantime, I’m still reading too fast; maybe it’s the already waning days of summer or the tenuousness of the past few weeks (politically), but I’m also writing and editing and that is good. I’m also returning to books that help me explore the values I want to live by. What book has stopped you in your tracks lately?
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