booklit

Arthur Miller is better known to me, as I’m sure he is to many students in classrooms today, as the dramatist responsible for such plays as Death Of A Salesman and The Crucible, both of which I have a fond love/hate memory of studying. Love because they were enjoyable, hate because the school made us read them. I suppose that’s the way with much literature discovered (or at least studied) in school. And only recently I discovered that he also wrote fiction, so I thought I’d see how he makes the leap from plays to prose.

So, having been married to Marilyn Monroe for a few years you’d wonder why Miller would want to waste his time writing about a plain girl. But that’s just what he did in his novella, Plain Girl (1992) (Homely Girl in the United States) about the life of Janice Sessions, the daughter of a Russian immigrant to New York, who, with plain features and lack of attention, fears that she’s missing out on all that’s good in life.

At parties she had many a time noticed how men coming up behind her were surprised when she turned to face them. But she had learned to shake out the straight silky light brown hair and flck the ironic defensive grin, silent pardon for their inevitable fade.

Janice’s mother always told her never to marry a handsome man “which [she] had taken as a barely disguised jab not only at beautiful Papa’s vanity but at her own looks” an, taking this advice to heart, she marries “unhandsome” Sam Fink, a man with a different beauty: “a certain reverent and selfless social vision, and an absolute devotion to her.” But Sam’s interests lie fanatically with the Communist Party and he’s too busy there to appreciate his wife:

There was something monkish in his pretence of not noticing - when she leaned back resting on her elbows, one lef tucked under and her skirt midway up her thigh - that she was asking to be taken there on the floor. Seeing him flush and shift to some explication of the day’s news she despaired for herself. Still, with the so-called democracies unquestionably flirting with Fascism she could hardly ask him to set her greedy desire ahead of serious things.

Spurred on by worldwide affairs Sam enlists with the army and the time the couple spend apart allows them to grow apart also until, when they are brought together again, they are very different people, living very different lives. It’s only over the following years that Janice, after meeting a blind musician, learns to find her place in the world and to shine with a confidence that lets her live her life uninhibited by how she looks.

Miller’s prose isn’t lyrical, it’s observant and what interested was that it blew my preconception away, as I thought that, being primarily a playwright, Plain Girl would be mostly dialogue with some description to paint the scene. But he gets into the scene, leaving speech to those moments when its absolutely necessary, preferring to focus on Janice’s inner thoughts and concerns. And while the redemptive ending is perhaps to be expected, the way in which Miller delivers it is both beautiful and inspiring, making this plain girl worth a second look.

After the Great War there were a number of literary figures from America given over to, to some degree, the expatriate life in Europe, notably Paris. Names such as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. John Dos Passos, too. But, amongst all these heavyweights, what of the lesser known figures of this time? Glenway Wescott was one, having mixed with the aforementioned, and his legacy seems slight in comparison. In all he only wrote three novels, publishing only essays and journals for the rest of his life, which spanned a further forty years.

The Pilgrim Hawk (1940), then, is the second of Wescott’s novels and bears the subtitle of A Love Story. Yet the love within is not as simple as man loves woman, woman loves man, with a happy ending, but features a more interesting triangle, something which is obviously significant - and memorable - for our narrator, Alwyn Tower, as he is still musing over it years later, given how small a slice of his life it was:

…the twenties were very different from the thirties, and now the forties have begun. In the twenties it was not unusual to meet foreigners in some country as foreign to them as to you, your peregrination just crossing theirs; and you did your best to know them in an afternoon or so; and perhaps you called that little lightning knowledge, friendship.

This “little lightning knowledge” applies to the Cullens, an Irish man with an English wife, who Tower describes as “self-absorbed, coldly gregarious, mere passers of time.” And passing time seems to be what they do best, since they are just stopping off at Tower’s friend Alexandra’s house, in Paris, on their way to Hungary. But with them, bizarrely, is Mrs Cullen’s peregrine falcon, Lucy, captured in Scotland to satisfying her latest whim of falconry. The bird looms large throughout the story, well observed by Tower, with every detail of its plummage recounted, none of its actions passing without note - although the better passages are when its closeness to humanity is considered:

…her chief beauty was that of expression. It was like a little flame; it caught and compelled your attention like that, although it did not flicker and there was nothing bright about it nor any warmth in it. It is a look that men sometimes have; men of great energy, whose appetite or vocation has kept them absorbed every instant all their lives. They may be good men but they are often mistaken for evil men, and vice versa. In Lucy’s case it appeared chiefly in her eyes, not black but funereally brown, and extravagantly large, set deep in her flattened head.

As the afternoon progresses at Alexandra’s, it becomes clear that Lucy is the third player in the Cullens’ marriage and as the drinks start pouring, tongues loosen, and pleasantries slip by the wayside. In addition to the drama going on amongst the upper classes, there’s action off the set, too, as the Cullen’s chauffeur mingles with the house staff and love amongst the lower classes is also explored.

It’s easy to see Lucy as a symbol, especially given how much the nature of her species is talked about: through freedom to dependence, of fertility and fecklessness. That she’s not a recurring motif but one of the novel’s major players that comes to represent all those around her makes The Pilgrim Hawk special and a shrewd piece of writing. At one level the hood she wears to keep her calm and docile highlights the upper class’s ignorance-is-bliss mentality is thumpingly obvious; yet, more subtly done, is the way each of her characteristics comes to embody one or other of the players, including Tower, unlucky in love, even in the inervening years:

Life goes on and on after one’s luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young. Love-life goes on indefinitely, with less and less likelihood of being loved, less and less ability to love, and the stomach-ache of love still as sharp as ever. The old bachelor is like an old hawk.

That the novel occurs over such a short period it’s a wonder that Wescott has managed to stretch it out to just over one hundred pages, but the voice he gives to Tower ensures a lazy, measured tone, never hurrying past a scene and recounting it in all its beauty; at times philosophical but always, like a hawk, observant. One can’t help wonder if with Tower’s feeling of being a failed novelist, Tower is Wescott, and perhaps the further novel after The Pilgrim Hawk is an embodiment of that fear, leading to Wescott’s giving up of fiction. But either way, I think we can consider this erstwhile member of the lost generation well and truly found again.

Don DeLillo is an author I’ve been wanting to read for some time but have never got round to, for two reasons. The first, stupidly, is that his novel Underworld sticks in my mind as too large to entice me to read him just yet, despite there being plenty of other novels to choose from. And the second? Well, he’s considered heavyweight in the world of American letters, past and present, so - like Saul Bellow, who I never get far with - I considered myself not yet ready for him.

Not so, it seems, although I did choose a novella as my entry point. The Body Artist (2001), on reading internet scraps, is not typical of DeLillo’s work in that its canvas isn’t wide reaching but, instead, contained. Minimal, even. And, in keeping things minimal, the plot is fairly thin on the ground, too, preferring to tell the story of Lauren Hartke, a performance artist; and doing so with a fine display of writing that charts her grief, mixing in a thread of metaphysical intrigue.

The Body Artist begins with a wonderful scene where Lauren and her husband, the thrice married film director, Rey Robles, have breakfast in their rented coastal home. Over the course of this meal, described in intimate detail, they concern themselves with mundane things, such as shaking the orange juice to loosen the pulp, studying the newspaper, and turning the radio on and off…and on and off. And through all this there are stuttered conversations as they half-hear each other because they are struggle to break away from their own thoughts:

She took a bite of cereal and looked at another story. She tended lately to place herself, to insert herself into certain stories in the newspaper. Some kind of daydream variation. She did it and then became aware she was doing it and then sometimes did it again a few minutes later with the same or a different story and then became aware again.

But what Lauren doesn’t realise is this is the last she’ll see of Rey as, as the obituary following this opening chapter states, he dies of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head in the apartment of his first wife. The rest of the novel investigates Lauren’s grief, taking us deep inside her head where it seems she’s most comfortable.

With the story being this thin, DeLillo needs to generate interest somehow and he does so by having Lauren discover a young man holed up in a little used room of the house. As to who he is, she doesn’t know, and any attempt to address this is complicated by his speech being out of time, flitting from mimicked snatches of conversations between her and Rey to the words she has yet to speak in a voice that is “reedy and thin and trapped in tenses and inflections, in singsong conjugations”.

Where The Body Artist starts off as a delight it soon slides to a steady stream of Lauren’s mind working away at the nature of time and reality and, to be honest, I was lost. Bored and lost, yet this is probably the author’s intention as, in a journalist’s take on Lauren’s latest performance, I feel like part of her audience:

The piece, called Body Time, sneaked into town for three nights, unadvertised except by word of mouth, and drew eager audiences whose intensity did not always maintain itself for the duration of the show. Hartke clearly wanted her audience to feel time go by, viscerally, even painfully. This is what happened, causing walkouts among the less committed.

They missed the best stuff.

Thankfully, I was committed despite not truly “getting” The Body Artist, perhaps because I never felt it was well concluded and my mind would wander from all the philosophical content at crucial moments. The best stuff was the prose, which certainly wasn’t missed, even if I didn’t know what the hell it was all saying. But despite all the temporal discussion, I still think I enjoyed this novella and believe that I may yet get something from it. With the benefit of time, of course.

On the back of André Brink’s The Blue Door there’s a quote from Nadine Gordimer referring to it as a novel but, at 122 pages, it has even less of a claim to novelhood than Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Not that concerns about size should shadow content, but it’s also a book capable of fitting into a small pocket and, at £10.99, one can’t help feel it it’s way overpriced for what it is. But that cover, with its simple blue door, just begs to be opened, if only to find out what lies beyond. Because a peek through the keyhole would never do.

The Blue Door bills itself as that age old staple of storytelling: the ‘what if..?’ And here, the what if concerns the life of our narrator, David le Roux, a teacher turned artist. One day he’s married to Lydia sans children and then the next he’s married to a black woman called Sarah and has two loving children. It is, as he puts it, “the kind of moment that once turned the life of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa upside down.”

The reference to Kafka is a knowing one, as his influence is certainly here. David’s attempts to chase up his life with Lydia find him lost and confused in a disorientating world where buildings change - and disappear! - and men age visibly in a matter of minutes. In fact, the novel begins with a dream where David, Lydia, and three imagined daughters are moving house but, when he goes to fetch water for them, he is left behind. And from here on what’s dream (or delusion) and what’s real is very much a mystery. But one can’t help feel that David isn’t all too bothered about solving it and is, instead, resigned to his predicament:

In the morning, I think, I shall return to her. And take my time. To inspect everything that makes her. Her eyes and mouth and ears. Her shoulders, her arms and hands, each finger separately. Her nipples. Down to her toes. Everything. Everything. I must know who she is. I must find out what it means to say; “Sarah”.

While the situation springs from Kafka, the treatment is reminiscent of Kundera. David fusses over realistic questions about his new life - how do you enter the bed of your wife of nine years when you’ve only just met her? - while making some sort of sense of his new world. Brink explores the questions one might have when put in such a predicament, questioning the understanding of those in relationships and finding the point in which a person ends and who they think they are begins.

The Blue Door, at about an hour’s read, is packed with detail that swings between the realistic and in pursuit of metaphor. Colours, objects, people - all these are ripe for symbolism, although I didn’t quite get them all. But for all its texture, I didn’t experience the depth I had hoped for and felt that Brink had left too many loose ends for it to be ultimately satisfying. Perhaps its questions are designed to linger long after reading The Blue Door but I’m more inclined to lock it up and throw away the key.

After the announcement of the Booker longlist, Gifted by Nikita Lalwani was the first of the thirteen that I picked up in my eagerness to find out what the chosen few were about. Had it not made the longlist I have no doubts that I would never have picked it up. The cover, you see, is rather ugly. If I were to hazard a guess at what it’s supposed to be then it’s a silhouette of a girl coupled with some stylized cumin, formed from numbers and other mathematical symbols. Gifted, it seems, does not extend to the minds behind this artistic faux pas.

But, as the old adage goes, one must not judge a book by its cover so it was between the pages of this, Lalwani’s debut novel, that I went. At first I wondered if this may have been a chicklit novel, but then, I’ve never read chicklit, so I have no way of knowing. But, beyond such notions, there’s a powerful story half-heartedly trying to get out.

Rumi Vasi is a child prodigy who, from an early age, has shown an aptitude for numbers, something which her father, Mahesh, is only too keen to progress. Originally from India, having taken a university position in Cardiff, he views Rumi’s success in their new country with great importance. To him, it’s about making an impact on society. So it goes that Rumi’s studies are manipulated by her overbearing father to the point where she has no friends and even spends Saturday nights practicing arithmetic.

Gifted follows the Vasi family over the following nine years as Rumi grows up wanting to be like another other kid but being controlled by the strict rules of her Indian household. Eventually, as was her father’s aim, she attains a bit of celebrity by entering Oxford University at a young age. But the seeds sown by Mahesh come back to haunt him when he realises that trying to protect someone from outside influences can lead to them being damaged by smothering love.

Gifted’s prose has a personality to it, leaping from a series of paragrahs into sections of lists then back to straight prose. Through this Lalwani gives us the character of Rumi, initially excited about mathematics, although there are hints that this enthusiasm is never going to last:

Under the burning tube lights, she attacked the numbers with speed and ferocity, as though she were playing Space Invaders, devouring the figures with the hunger in her belly and spitting out the remains. She worked feverishly, chewing pen tops down to sharp points. Then she had looked up - looked at the bored librarian at her desk, at the old man reading the paper - seen the thin tall rectangle of black sky through the doors and trembled with loneliness.

The problem I had is that Rumi is probably the least interesting character in the book. As she sits down to some calculus or rebels against it, her passage to Oxford has an air of artificiality about it. I’m even surprised that she got into such an establishment as her father’s guidance was limited to mathematics and there’s scant mention of her ability in other disciplines, such as English and history:

She felt stupid, devoid as she was of vocabulary for history - architecture, epic battles, eras, wars, kings and queens - none of it understood.

The conflict between Rumi’s parents, Mahesh and Shreene, provide the interesting parts of the novel although when the focus finally switches to them it’s a case of too little, too late. While Mahesh want’s nothing more than Rumi’s success in their adopted country, her mother judges her actions against the customs of the India she loves. It’s a sad affair that Mahesh is portrayed as the stern, father of few words, when in his daughter’s company and it’s only when the device of Whitefoot, a Scottish contemporary of Mahesh, is brought into the story that we get him waxing lyrical and sharing his opinions.

As a debut Gifted introduces Lalwani to us as a writer of promise but certainly not the finished article. While this novel approaches an interesting topic in heavy handed parenting it is full of characters uncomfortably dropped into the restrictions of a predetermined storyline. I doubt this will feature in the eventual shortlist but if it does I’m ready to eat humble pi.

While most of the Booker debate regarding Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach seems to be about its length and whether it qualifies as a novel, I say it doesn’t actually matter since, back in 1980, J.L. Carr’s A Month In The Country was much shorter yet made the shortlist. The other charge of course is that it’s an Amsterdam, an inferior novel being pushed to rewards while the better stuff goes unrecognised. Well I quite liked Amsterdam, so I was looking forward to On Chesil Beach. And it didn’t disappoint. Not entirely, anyway.

Florence and Edward are newlyweds - and virgins, this being 1962 when “a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible”. After their wedding they have taken themselves off to their honeymoon suite facing onto Chesil Beach. Here they have a meal they have little appetite for before moving to the bedroom to consummate their marriage. It’s this latter event that provides much of the novel’s (or is that novella’s?) tension, for while Edward has waited and waited to make love to his wife (”though his fear of failure was great, his eagerness - for rapture, for resolution - was far greater”), Florence has been dreading the day:

Florence suspected that there was something profoundly wrong with her, that she had always been different, and that at last she was about to be exposed. Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust; her whole being was in revolt against a prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated. She simply did not want to be ‘entered’ or ‘penetrated’. Sex with Edward could not be the summation of her joy, but was the price she must pay for it.

The way in which McEwan tells the story of this couple works well, dipping between their thoughts and anxieties. One page has us seeing Edward’s happiness to have his new wife, yet worrying over whether, when they go to bed, he will, as the euphemism goes, “arrive too soon”. Then it’s a trip into Florence’s head as she gripes about how she dislikes kissing (and all other contact, really) and how she can’t be a good wife if she can’t even contemplate fulfilling what she believes are her duties as a wife. But, interspersed with these wedding day worries, are sections of pure exposition that head back into their lives prior to current events. Sure, it gives them a background, but it feels all so unnecessary, taking the reader out of the moment (which is truly interesting) and giving a family history lesson that we could do without.

Even where the structure is a let down, the prose remains a joy. McEwan’s choice of words demonstrates his particular talent at painting, with a few measured strokes, a whole scene. And when he gets into the mind of his characters he truly explores them to the point that we know that beyond the page their lives still go on. But On Chesil Beach does suffer by the time the end comes round. What had started as a slowly lapping wash of narrative becomes, in its closing pages, a tsunami of events flashing forward into the future, explaining the relationship.

Without the lengthy flashbacks explaining the newlyweds, On Chesil Beach would certainly be in novella country, and perhaps that’s where it should have stayed. The study of two people whose love for each other is frustrated by lack of communication is a wonderful tale to be told and here it’s done so well - the rest is just padding. It’s a strong narrative but McEwan-lite. Let’s hope he has something more substantial landing on our shores soon.