The Reading Experience

Content Without Form: Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper

(This is the first of a series of shorter reviews I plan to start posting on The Reading Experience. I hope they will allow me to cover more new (or relatively recent) and noteworthy books and increase the frequency of the posts on this blog.)

 

In her review of Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper, Lionel Shriver judges that the novel exists in a kind of narrative void so that "when all is said and done, you’re pretty much left with a strong voice and snappy one-liners. There’s an arbitrary quality. . .a sense that one thing could happen or something else altogether and it wouldn’t matter." Despite Zink's stylistic skills, the narrative lacks "a story that really rolls."

There is certainly a great deal of drift in the account of her life given by the novel's protagonist, Tiffany, even to the point that episodes follow each other almost randomly, but I am inclined to agree with Daniel Davis Wood, who interprets Tiffany's continual recourse to the "snappy one-liners" as "a strange sort of stylistic coping strategy" in the face of the essentially traumatic experiences she recounts. This perspective on the plotlessness of The Wallcreeper helps us to perceive a certain kind of compensating unity in the novel--a unity of voice and style--but Shriver's complaint that it meanders sufficiently to at times verge on the aimless does identify a quality of the novel that often threatens to induce lethargy even in readers otherwise willing to acknowledge the narrator's stylistic charms.

Ultimately, however, it is not really plot or story that this novel lacks, but an attention to form, the creation of an aesthetic order that engages the reader's interest as a substitute for conventionally developed plot. Even in mainstream literary fiction (perhaps especially in mainstream literary fiction), "form" is too often conceived as identical to plot, but in the most interesting fiction, the former transcends the latter, converging with voice and style to provide a work with its aesthetic identity, to fashion the "art" of the art of fiction. In The Wallcreeper, it is as if Zink gave all of her effort to creating a distinctive voice (at which she succeeds), one that leans heavily on witticisms and arresting expressions, while leaving form to take care of itself--which unfortunately it ultimately fails to do. If Tiffany's narration is intended as a kind of experiment with formlessness, the actual effect is paradoxically to put even more emphasis on character and, if not story of the well-made variety, on what happens.

This is not an auspicious context for an appreciation of The Wallcreeper. Aside from Tiffany, none of the characters in the novel are very interesting (although perhaps it is Tiffany's egocentric account that prevents her husband, Stephen, from becoming an interesting character, since finally we know so little about him it is difficult to apprehend him fully), and Tiffany herself through most of the novel is surely not a very likeable character. This finally does not prevent her from being a compelling character in her own way (compelling perhaps in her determination not to be a likeable character), but eventually her exasperating behavior palls from repetition, and the "snappy one-liners" are not enough to sustain any consistent concern for what she does. She spends a good deal of time relating her adulterous affairs, but again their sameness eventually becomes wearisome rather than salacious.

Eventually Tiffany becomes involved in a quasi-radical kind of environmentalism (quasi because it is related in such an affectless way, just something else she's gotten involved in), but most of these episodes seem designed principally to provide us with "information" about European environmental issues and EU bureaucracy. They are the most tedious parts of the book, but in their gratuitous way help to highlight for us the novel's more serious flaw. Without a sense of how these interludes contribute to the realization of the novel's formal ambitions--largely because it doesn't seem to have any such ambitions--the reader must conclude they have been included for no particular reason at all. 

The Past Week's Reading

Some of the interesting criticism I read this week:

 

Wyatt Mason on Pierre Michon:

"Many writers have produced fictions inspired by history. What is notable about Michon’s use of history is how wholly he has managed to make it submit to his larger concern: how a particular kind of violence, a uniformly male violence, an animal sexual urge to seize the world and have it submit to its will, is the source of both human cruelty and artistic creativity.". . .

 

Kevin Pickard on the use of topical references in fiction:

"Wallace is right in asserting that sometimes the author wants to place a novel squarely in 2016 (just as an author sometimes wants to place the novel in 1976). The debate shouldn’t be about creating timeless fiction, because that endeavor is nonsense. The debate should be about the story’s setting. Sometimes it is necessary to place the novel in a specific, historical present.". . .

 

Kevin Hart's Poetry and Revelation, reviewed by Christopher Watkin:

"Drawing consistently on [phenomenology] in his discussion of revelation, Hart urges his readers to bracket not only Edmund Husserl’s 'natural attitude,' but what he calls the 'supernatural attitude' that understands the propositional, creedal truths of religion 'as though they referred to states and situations of the same modal status as states and situations in the natural world.' The bracketing of the supernatural attitude does not amount to doubting (or believing, or denying) the existence of God or the supernatural order; the question of existence is bracketed in favor of a phenomenological “attentive response to what is given.”. . .

 

Jonathan Foltz on Twin Peaks: The Return:

"To be sure, the scope of Twin Peaks has grown larger with the new season. But it also sometimes feels like a show disintegrating before our eyes, a once-whole fictional world cracking to bits. Lynch, like the practitioner of late style that Adorno describes, does not seek to bring about a “harmonious synthesis.” Drawing instead upon 'the power of dissociation, he tears [both the subjective and objective elements of the artwork] apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal.'”. . .

 

Eric Lyon on Elliott Carter:

"Carter’s concern for high culture doesn’t seem very possible in the early 21st century. Instead, this is an era of hybridity. Jeffery Mumford’s shared influences of Carter’s music and disco is emblematic of 21st century classical music. The composer who also has a band (even if that band is a new music ensemble) is more the rule than the exception today. . .The enforcement of a distinction between high art music and vernacular music, which was essentially a prerequisite for Carter’s music to develop as it did, no longer holds much credibility. Although Carter’s ideas can continue to propagate in the internet space of hybridity, the space for single-strain incubation of high-art projects is severely diminished, compared to that of the 20th century.". . .

 

Justin Desmangles on the Beat-era poet Bob Kaufman:

 "As with the mythical 'Jes’ Grew' from Ishmael Reed’s masterpiece Mumbo Jumbo, for Kaufman the sound of jazz and the message that it brings animate the body into ritual action. The word is made flesh, or rather the meaning contained in the sound of the word, the consciousness expressed by its vibration, becomes physical veracity and free movement. This principle is central to African religion as it is understood in the New World. Attempts to remove it from respectful commentary on the origins of the New World have been frequent and have no doubt contributed to Kaufman’s conspicuous absence from the canon of American literature."