On one level, W.D. Clarke's She Sang to Them, She Sang is a relatively simple story of a failed real estate deal, the circumstances of its genesis and its aftermath. A young married couple, Katie and Jason, are enticed into a proposed deal in which they will sell their current home and buy the home of the woman proposing the deal--Jo, a local realtor. Jo assigns an employee, Manny to assist in making the deal happen, although the likelihood that it will is dubious from the start. The deal falls through (partly through Manny's ineptitude, but not entirely), and shortly afterwards Manny is arrested on a fraud charge (not connected to his work on this deal), while Jo suffers a stroke, which apparently leaves her permanently incapacitated. Katie and Jason wind up buying Jo's house, after all.
The goals and motives influencing the behavior of each of these characters, are, of course, much more complicated. The novel is set in Orangefield, outside of Toronto, around the time of the '08 financial crisis. Jo's business is in trouble, her personal life's discouraging, and she's on the outs with her now-grown daughter. Manny has mother issues, and isn't exactly flourishing as a real estate agent. Katie is all aswoon over Jason, even though he doesn't really have a very dynamic personality and isn't a take-charge kind of guy, and it seems pretty obvious, to us if not to Katie, that something's going on between him and Susan, their tenant (the "downstairs girl"). The story is related to us in chapters alternating the perspectives of Katie, Jo, and Manny--Jason remains more of a background presence, as does Susan.
Even more complicated is the way in which these characters' perspective is conveyed to us. Very generally the novel's narrative point of view is what Henry James called 3rd-person "central consciousness," although these days it is more likely to be identified as the "free indirect" method--the character is not the narrator but the narration is closely inflected with the character's process of thinking and perceiving. We overhear the character's thoughts so that it is what the character makes of events or how events prompt other modes of reflection that are the objects of narrative interest, not the events themselves. In this novel, Clarke doesn't settle merely for one layer of "thought" but digs even deeper into the substrata of consciousness, at times interrupting its "stream" to follow tributary channels:
But yes, and uh-oh, the Kazans out there were now getting into their frickin' Mercedes, they were
(and ever after this incident he vowed to forswear all drivers of that-now- loathsome brand, no matter how dearly it cost him professionally
--that is to say, commercially---
for this was now a vendetta worthy of his forebears
--e.g. his grandmother Mariyam, his mother's tormentor and the grandchildren's champion, who never forgave a shopkeeper for shortchanging her or for selling her anything less than the choicest cuts of meat, the most unblemished produce, the etc., etc., etc.--)
and his feet were not only betraying him, their owner. those feet were also betraying the girl here, the renter, and betraying what she might possibly think him, Manny capable of!. . . .
This strategy ultimately converts what has traditionally been called a stream of consciousness into something closer to an excavation of consciousness. Clarke would seem to reject the metaphor of "stream" as an overly simplistic conception of the way introspection occurs, and in She Sang to Them, She Sang represents it as something more shifting and disjointed. This may indeed be a more plausible rendering of human thought in fiction than conventional indirect discourse, but the ambition still seems to be to present an essentially realistic depiction of characters thinking. Further, the novel's approach both seems fully to proceed from the assumption that the representation of characters thinking has manifest aesthetic value and reinforces the commonly held belief that the advantage fiction has over other narrative arts is its capacity to probe human thought.
Clarke does this with skill in She Sang to Them, She Sang, as well as with a sufficiently light touch that the effect of its narrative method is to produce a kind of humor--the novel is essentially a comedy, although a highly ironic sort of comedy--that more or less substitutes for the drama of plot. The discrepancies between the characters' ambitions and the fragilities and frustrations as revealed in their internal deliberations are the real subjects of interest in the novel's portrayal of the shadiness of modern real estate speculation. In Katie's case, they reveal a woman whose upbeat innocence is in fact quite sincere but also begets a naïve gullibility that potentially makes the reader feel not sympathy for her vulnerability but something closer to condescension or even contempt. In other words, Clarke creates some compelling characters through his use of a form of "psychological realism," even though the psychological account of what goes on in their minds may or may not be altogether plausible.
However much the method in this novel does attempt to register a greater complexity in the processes of human awareness than is usually portrayed in exercises of free indirect discourse, surely the emergence of thought as enacted in passages such as the one quoted above is not actually the way the conscious mind works. Just making an inventory of my own thought process in ordinary circumstances, I cannot recall any instances in which it unfolded like this. (I don't think my thoughts "unfold" at all.) Of course, W.D. Clarke himself may not believe that his digressive but still rhetorically coherent technique for representing mental activity is actually an accurate reproduction, just a useful illusion that signifies thinking but more importantly acts as a unifying device in his multiperspective narrative that otherwise has no strongly linear story.
If She Sang to Them, She Sang doesn't really give us an "authentic" rendering of the human mind in action, no other literary device would be able to, either--perhaps it's best to regard all such efforts at psychological realism to be a search for the serviceable means of suggesting human thought, but not an end in itself. (I don't think Clarke is presenting it as an end in itself.) As such, Clarke's strategy helps give the novel's satire of the casual corruption induced by capitalism as it intersects with middle class aspiration--which no doubt represents its dominant ambition--a greater continuity and cogency, but also works to keep attention on character, so that the satire does not merely disappear into plot or, by the end of the novel, melodrama. What the novel wants to "say" about the decadence of capitalism, while evident enough, does not overshadow an accompanying comedy of psychological confusion that is perhaps even more telling.
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