Extreme and Disorienting Experiences
(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)
That The Unmapped Country, a selection of “stories and fragments” by the English writer Ann Quin not previously published in book form, is likely to give this writer a higher profile than she has until now enjoyed will unquestionably make its publication a worthwhile effort. Especially since postwar British experimental fiction is not exactly a celebrated phenomenon — many might express surprise that it is even a “thing” at all — to remind readers and critics that not only was Ann Quin during the 1960s and 1970s an avowedly experimental writer but that she was also, as Jennifer Hodgson points out in her editor’s introduction, part of a contingent of British writers defying conventional practice that also included B.S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, and others, surely provides a literary service, both to current readers previously unacquainted with either Quin or the movement to which she belonged, and to the legacy of these writers as it informs our understanding of postwar British literary history.
Whether this book enhances or alters Ann Quin’s pre-existing reputation as a writer of unconventional, adventurous fiction is not as conclusive. The book is a miscellany, including works of nonfiction and collaborative prose pieces, rather than a collection of short fiction per se, and while several of the stories that are included evoke subjects and strategies found in Quin’s novels (one was later transformed into a novel), readers unfamiliar with the novels will probably find them less compelling absent the context of their specific associations with the phases of Quin’s all-too-brief career, which ended with the writer’s suicide less than 10 years after the publication of her first novel, Berg. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t provide much editorial guidance that could help us place the included short works in such context (although this omission was most likely prompted by the publisher, lest the book become too “academic”), and thus to a large extent we are left with a series of discrete prose works that vary enough in tone and approach to make their chronological presentation seem more haphazard than sequential, the reader’s experience of the collection as a whole oddly disconnected, without some broader perspective on the writer’s assumptions and ambitions.
Jennifer Hodgson in her introduction does offer a useful signpost to Quin’s characteristic thematic emphasis when she observes that “Quin is often drawn to experiences of difference, extremity, and disorientation,” but this doesn’t finally encompass the way in which the extreme and disorienting experiences are represented in Quin’s fiction, which are as stylistically and formally extreme as the situations themselves. Berg is perhaps the most conventional of her four published novels, which is not to say that ultimately it is very conventional, as both its language and its use of point of view require an especially attentive reader to appreciate their more subtle effects. Indeed, a reader expecting the familiar expository and narrative devices found in most novels — even the most “serious” — would no doubt be disoriented by the general disregard in Quin’s work for not just conventional character or plot development, but the usual rules of consistency and continuity, the discursive rules that produce transparent prose, clearly delineated sequences of events or activities, as well as lines of dialogue clearly demarcated among the characters.
Three, the immediate successor to Berg, coheres as an account of a failing marriage during and after the married couple’s encounter with a third woman, who lives with the couple for a time before she ultimately commits suicide. But the story is told in an oblique way through alternating sections that focus on the couple in the present attempting to cope with the aftermath of the younger woman’s death (and of their experience during her stay), and that present selections from the woman’s diary, as well as tape recordings she left behind. Quin provides no expository passages allowing us to locate the story in its full context, and we are obliged to assimilate it in the sheer immediacy of its presentation. Passages does something similar, but in this third novel the connections are even more elusive, the ostensibly underlying story — a woman and man traveling in an unnamed Mediterranean country while the woman looks for her missing brother — even more opaque, although no doubt deliberately so. But the substance of Ann Quin’s novels are not to be found in their stories but in the ways in which Quin displaces the story without ever quite abandoning it, in favor of patterned language, abrupt juxtapositions, and a fluid treatment of perspective and point of view.
These qualities are perhaps most conspicuously evident in Quin’s final novel, Tripticks. Although ostensibly the story of a man being followed by an ex-wife and her new lover, the situation is otherwise the pretext for a phantasmagoric collage of surreal imagery, freely associated memories, and brief narrative episodes relating not so much the protagonist’s life as his hallucinatory perception of it. Presented as a first-person narrative, the novel uses the narrator’s point of view as a way of transgressing the boundaries imposed by the conventional novel while also giving this novel a more recognizable unity—the dislocations of plot, setting, and character (at times the characters almost seem to blend into each other) can be integrated as the metaphorical expression of the narrator’s experience of his life. Paradoxically, what at first seems Quin’s most radically disjunctive work may be her most cogent, and it inevitably as well prompts us to consider the extent to which it might also be the metaphorical representation of the author’s own increasingly displaced mental state.
In this way, Tripticks may be her most audacious novel, even if it could also be described as in part a recognizable sort of satire (it is Quin’s most explicitly comic work) lampooning modern American culture (the novel is based on Quin’s experience in the United States after winning a writing fellowship). But the absurdities of life in America are staged in what critic Philip Stevick in his essay on Quin’s work calls her invocation of the “theater of mind,” and in Tripticks the performance is especially frenetic, freed of inhibiting restraint. The novel’s underlying formal organization as a kind of road novel allows it to retain a fundamental coherence, however. Quin is able to summon the surreal imagery and fracture the perspective and chronology yet still maintain an inherent aesthetic unity, something that she seemed less concerned to pursue in her previous novels, where collage and fragmentation were adequate formal devices in themselves.
Perhaps because we cannot exactly know what Quin might have subsequently done to further extend her aesthetic reach, it is tempting to read The Unmapped Country in order to identify tendencies that might have been pursued into new forms or subjects. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t really offer many clues. “Tripticks” is the story that served as the seed for the subsequent novel, but the other stories published at around the same time finally seem relatively uninspired. “Never Trust a Man Who Bathes with His Fingernails” is composed in free verse, but the story it tells is a familiar enough (for Quin) study of tangled relationships and doesn’t really justify the formal device. ”Eyes that Watch Behind the Wind” is reminiscent of Passages in its focus on a couple traveling in a foreign country (Mexico). “Motherlogue” is a one-sided telephone conversation providing the mother’s side of a dialogue with her daughter that ultimately proves rather slight. Of these completed stories, only “Ghostworn” seems to share with Tripticks and Quin’s unfinished novel the shift to a more direct enactment of the manifestations of mental disorder. In this story, a woman engages in dialogue with the ghostly presence of her dead lover, apparently emanating from the container of his ashes in her possession. The story does not explicitly suggest the woman is hallucinating, but of course it is hard not to think the author could be drawing on an experience of this phenomenon.
In “The Unmapped Country,” the extant fragment of the novel Quin was working on at the time of her death, mental illness has apparently become the explicit subject. The first section of the novel follows “Sandra” through her day in a mental hospital. Paradoxically perhaps, this scene taking mental instability as its directly represented theme is the most conventionally rendered work Quin produced. A more or less traditional third-person narrator recounts Sandra’s interactions with the staff and her fellow patients at the hospital. A second section flashes back to a previous period in Sandra’s life, in this case narrated by Sandra herself. Presumably this alternation would have continued in the rest of the novel, although of course we cannot know for sure.
It is equally inconclusive just how satisfying this more formally familiar approach might have proven to be. Certainly this fragment promises more implicit drama and immediate character identification than we find in the published novels (save perhaps for Berg). This might have made the completed work more “readerly” in the conventional sense, but whether that would have been taken as a necessary step for Quin or a betrayal of the experimental purity of the post-Berg novels is no doubt an inescapable if now mostly superfluous question.
Configurations of Precious Data
(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)
Tom McCarthy’s fiction quite palpably poses a challenge to entrenched reading habits and subverts conventional literary practice, but its rebellious spirit is usually categorized as modernist rather than postmodernist. Even though most of the qualities found in McCarthy’s work that suggest the influence of modernism equally suggest the influence of postmodernism, and even though specifically the mark of such postmodern writers as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon is readily apparent, discussion of his work has largely focused on McCarthy as a kind of neomodernist.
The most obvious explanation for the way McCarthy’s books have been received, at least in Great Britain, is that British fiction largely skipped over the phase in 20th century fiction generally labeled “postmodern,” instead renewing after World War II the British tradition of social and psychological realism (the latter supplementing the former as the only really lasting legacy of modernism). With a few notable exceptions — B.S. Johnson, arguably the early Ian McEwan, most recently Gabriel Josipovici — postwar British fiction has offered little in the way of “experimental” or “innovative” fiction of the sort associated with postmodernism in the United States (or, in a different way, continental Europe). This fact is what made Zadie Smith’s well-known essay, “Two Paths for the Novel,” seem rather curious. In it she praises Tom McCarthy for showing an alternative way forward for contemporary fiction, but her account holds McCarthy up as a singular figure, an experimental writer, almost as if a previous generation of undeniably experimental writers in the U.S. and Europe had not illuminated this path already, going back almost 50 years.
A more charitable reading of Smith’s essay would have it addressing primarily a British audience and proposing to writers and critics that British fiction should move closer to American and continental fiction in becoming more adventurous. Tom McCarthy’s fiction contests reigning assumptions both about the adequacy of realism and about the conventions of storytelling, but the real issue is whether it validates the premise sustaining experimental fiction (modernist or postmodernist) — that the art of fiction must remain open to change and replenishment — and extends the possibilities of literary innovation as least as persuasively as the previous efforts to affirm the spirit of modernism prior to McCarthy’s. I think it does, but it is more appropriate to think of McCarthy as continuing on a path made visible by his postmodern predecessors than blazing a new one on ground never before uncovered. McCarthy’s fiction has much to offer readers receptive to unorthodox methods and a different kind of reading experience, although its achievement is only enhanced and clarified if considered not in isolation, as a reemergence of modernism, but as a distinctive contribution to what can now only be called a tradition of adventurous practices by writers trying continually to renew the vitality of fiction as a literary form.
Remainder, the book that first brought attention to McCarthy as a novelist, certainly seemed more European than British, although the influence of DeLillo also seems especially strong in the extremity of the novel’s subject and the deadpan detachment of its style. Like most of DeLillo’s fiction, Remainder does not so far depart from recognizable reality as to completely strain credulity, edging into the surrealistic or fantastic, but the narrative pushes on the plausibly real hard enough that it takes on the atmosphere of the uncanny. Remainder’s protagonist is in such an extreme state of consciousness that he must reiterate “ordinary” experience obsessively in order to be convinced of its authenticity. He arranges for “reenactments” of that experience, so precisely and insistently detailed that they might embody the real exactly enough (more exactly than reality itself) to satisfy his brain-altered need for order (a malady brought on when, before the present narrative begins, he is struck in the head by an object “falling from the sky”). Although the plot of Remainder could be described as simply the working-out of the narrator-protagonist’s repetition-compulsion, the urgency and determination with which he carries out this compulsion nevertheless makes for fascinating reading.
The protagonist of McCarthy’s new novel, Satin Island, does not initially show signs of sharing such a compulsion, although as a “corporate anthropologist” he is someone who is trained to observe closely and discern patterns and hidden meaning. Calling himself “U,” he seems to be functioning well enough in his role as member of a team working on “the Project,” identified by name as “Koob-Sassen,” the ultimate details of which remain murky, even if its ambitions are clearly far-reaching and possibly sinister. Yet we also can’t help but note U’s descriptive rigor when recording his observations of the environments he traverses. Upon entering his employer’s offices he finds
Separated from each other by floor-to-ceiling glass partitions on which lower-case letters in the Company’s own distinctive font were stenciled, these compartments ran on one into the next, creating an expansive vista in which, sketches, diagrams, and other such configurations of precious data, lying face-up on curved tabletops, pinned to walls or drawn on whiteboards, or, occasionally (and this made the data seem all the more valuable, fragile even), on the glass itself, seemed to dialogue with one another in a rich and esoteric language, the scene conveying (deliberately, of course) the impression that this was not only a place of business, but, beyond that, a hermetic zone, a zone of alchemy, a crucible in which whole worlds were in the mix. . . .
This perception of reality in its “configurations,” interpreting these configurations as if they expressed a “rich and esoteric language,” is a trait U holds in common with Remainder’s protagonist, although he continues to act more as a dispassionate observer than a fully engaged participant in the active creation of the patterns and relationships that form his experience of the world.
U as well works for a company that itself seeks to assert itself by exploiting patterns and relationships, hence its need for someone like U to study structures and systems, “identifying these, prising them out and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light,” assisting the Company in its ability “to contextualize and nuance,” to advise its clients, both private and public, “how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies.” Koob-Sassen “involved many hook-ups, interfaces, transpositions . . . It was a project formed of many other projects, linked to many other projects — which renders it well-nigh impossible to say where it began and ended, to discover its ‘content,’ bulk, or outline.” Nevertheless, “there’s probably not a single area of your daily life that it hasn’t, in some way or other, touched on, penetrated, changed; although you probably don’t know this.” Satin Island thus differs from Remainder in embedding the story of U’s preoccupation with patterns, grids, and networks in the context of global capitalism and the control of information.
While a critique of neoliberalism and the hegemony of transnational capitalism is certainly implicit in Satin Island, the novel mostly keeps the Company and its workings in the background, aside from the occasional appearances of the “boss,” Peyman, the Company’s “public face and poster boy,” whose aphorisms act as the clearest indication of what Koob-Sassen likely entails: “What are objects? Bundles of relations.” “The end point to which [design] strives is a state in which the world is one hundred percent synthetic, made by man for man, according to his desires.” The realities of the new capitalist world order are graphically illustrated in the story U’s current lover tells of the abuse she suffered while participating in a protest at a G-8 summit, although this episode ultimately seems rather heavy-handed, too transparently a departure from the portrayal of the Company as an ominously mysterious entity whose tentacles reach everywhere but whose body remains in the shadows. This portrayal might be derivative of Pynchon and DeLillo, but even granting that the woman’s account is chilling enough, that account sacrifices the subtlety and provocative indeterminacy employed by these writers, making too explicit what might stay implicit in U’s process of self-examination.
While ostensibly U is narrating his attempt to write the “Great Report,” a text that will explain everything about the present era, his story eventually becomes the narrative of U’s disillusionment, not just with the prospect of writing this book, not just the very idea that such a book is actually possible to write, but with his own role in the larger Project, which he comes to see as anti-human. This process comes to its culmination after U has a dream in which he is flying in a helicopter over a gigantic complex that turns out to be a massive trash dump, a “glowing ooze, which hinted at a deeper, almost infinite reserve of yet-more-glowing ooze inside the trash mountain’s main body.” This is Satin Island. Realizing that the name must surely be a dream-filtered reference to New York’s Staten Island, when he finds himself in New York City for a symposium, U ventures to the Staten Island Ferry terminal, where he envisions traveling over to Staten Island, imagining it as “some other place where everything, even our crimes, has been composted down, mulched over, transformed into moss, pasture, and wetland for the ducks and coots to build their nests in. Maybe I could somehow nest there too. . . .” He does not get on the ferry, suddenly realizing that to do so would be “profoundly meaningless,” although not going “was, of course, profoundly meaningless as well.”
Finally Satin Island could be called the story of its protagonist’s psychological shift, from an initial state of reluctance to examine his commitment to “meaning” as a coherent concept whose fulfillment is possible to a willing acknowledgement of the essential meaninglessness of human activity, no matter how many patterns, connections, and orderly arrangements we think we see. It might be called a story about the loss of innocence, and as such the novel is finally not very formally adventurous. But McCarthy’s innovations are not at the level of narrative structure (events in his novels happen sequentially, however bizarre they might appear to be at times), but instead in the way he represents interior states not through conventional strategies of psychological realism (free indirect discourse, stream-of-consciousness) but by in effect exteriorizing state of mind in his first-person narrators’ preoccupation with spatial constructs and sensory configurations, as if they are projecting onto the world their irresistible need for perceptible reality to cohere, for things to add up.
This preoccupation is registered directly in the narrators’ language, their minute observations and often intricate descriptions. McCarthy’s prose style may be his most original achievement, its expository and descriptive powers compelling attention while also challenging common notions of “poetic” prose:
Staten Island was no longer grey, and it had grown: the sun was right behind it now, haloing it, transmuting it into a brilliant orange pool that spread across the harbour like a second mass of water, ones set on a slightly different plane that spilled across the first one when the two planes intersected. This pool of light was spreading right towards the ferry, swallowing it up, dismantling it, pixel by orange pixel. Its haze spread even further, past the boat’s still-discernible stern, turning the ferry’s wake, and those of other vessels, a metallic, silvery shade. There were scores of wakes, crossing each other in irregular and tangled patterns.
The essentially geometric figurations in U’s evocation of New York Harbor as he prepares to leave the terminal — superimposed planes, intersecting patterns — captures U’s way of apprehending the world while also providing us with an alternative perspective on what could be just another lyrically rendered scene. At the same time, immediately following U’s notation of the “irregular and tangled patterns,” he adds further: “Networks of kinship: the phrase flashed across my mind; I snorted in derision.” That the patterns now appear irregular and tangled, that he now dismisses his previous belief in “networks,” suggests that U has had a revelation of sorts, even if it is the revelation that the overarching explanation he seeks will not be revealed. In this way, the protagonist of Satin Island, unlike the protagonist of Remainder, is allowed to abandon his illusions. Whether this represents an advance in McCarthy’s art or a retreat to a more familiar sort of narrative device perhaps remains to be seen.
A Well-Worn Path
In 2008, Zadie Smith somewhat unexpectedly seemed to declare herself partial to the experimental impulse in fiction (as represented by Tom McCarthy), as opposed to "traditional" realism ("Two Paths for the Novel"). This was unexpected because, while some critics had mistakenly identified White Teeth, Smith's first novel, as somehow "postmodern," both it and Smith's two subsequent novels, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, were quite obviously themselves in the realist tradition, even recalling the very early stage of that tradition in 19th century novelists such as Dickens. Smith in her essay acknowledges her work's commitment to realism, affirming that it belongs to the version she calls "lyrical realism."
Nevertheless, readers might reasonably have expected Smith's fiction subsequent to this essay to show the influence of her new thinking (if that is what it is) about both the present and the future of fiction. And, indeed, it would be hard to call her recent novel, NW, a work of lyrical realism. At the same time, it could hardly be called "experimental," if genuinely experimental fiction should be expected to do more than simply imitate a mode of fiction that was at one time experimental, as NW in fact does in assuming the form of the modernist psychological novel, at times invoking specifically the stream-of-consciousness method associated with Joyce and Woolf. 90 years ago, this was indeed a new approach to the art of fiction, especially when applied as radically (and effectively) as we find it in Joyce and Woolf, but it hardly counts today as an innovation, however much it might show Zadie Smith moving from the surface realism and loosely structured Dickensian narrative of her first three books to the more tightly controlled interior monologues dominating NW.
The use of such monologues is not, of course, really a departure from "realism" at all. Although the modernists' use of this technique was certainly disruptive enough when books like Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses appeared, these novels were at least as much an effort to enhance realism by adding the subjective perception of reality (analogous to our own experience of it) as an important factor in convincingly representing the world in works of fiction. It is in fact this brand of realism that is the favored mode of a critic such as James Wood, for whom the capturing of "Mind" is the supreme ambition both of fiction and of literature itself. Indeed, it is telling that Wood included NW as one of his "books of the year," finding that it reveals a "steady, clear, realistic genius" that made him read it "with mounting excitement." Of course, Wood had previously (and infamously) labeled Zadie Smith's work as a prominent example of "hysterical realism," a designation Wood based on the perception that the kind of realism to be found in her earlier books was undisciplined and directed toward external actions and appearances. His newfound enthusiasm for her fiction can only now be based on an altered perception that the realism of NW has gone inward, validating the triumph of the "free indirect style" pioneered by Joyce and Woolf (and earlier Henry James) that Wood believes is the supreme expression of fiction's potential as a literary form.
It seems to me that NW is not an effort to integrate new thinking about experimentation in fiction but to gain the approval of James Wood, to escape his declaration of her work as exhibit one in the case against hysterical realism. Among the criticisms Wood made of this purported practice as exemplified in Smith's fiction (specifically White Teeth) was that it valued a superficial "liveliness" over psychological depth. If indeed Smith wanted to address this criticism by removing all such liveliness from NW, she has certainly succeeded. I have not recently read a less lively book. Although it incorporates a few equally superficial formal flourishes (alterations in font size, dialogue without quotation marks, irregular indentation, captioned fragments in the novel's longest section), they are entirely random and do nothing to compensate for the slow slog we must make through the perfunctory passages of free indirect discourse, as well as for the unengaging characters and uninspired narrative structure. If NW does represent an attempt on Zadie Smith's part to be more "experimental," it's the sort of experiment that ultimately gives experimentation in fiction a bad name by being so utterly boring.
I would myself resist James Wood's critique of hysterical realism in Smith's earlier work because I don't find those books to be particularly "lively," either. NW shares with White Teeth and The Autograph Man its setting in the northwest of London, the comprehensive portrayal of which is clearly an important part of Smith's literary project. Like those two books, NW focuses in particular on the multicultural diversity of this section of London, and as a consequence Zadie Smith has been celebrated as a kind of urban-based local colorist bringing attention to London's multicultural character (especially for American readers). While it certainly makes sense that if one of your primary goals as a writer is to make visible a cultural group or environment previously neglected in fiction, realism, hysterical or otherwise, would be your strategy of choice, but both "Two Paths for the Novel" and NW itself would seem to indicate that Smith takes interest as well in the aesthetics of fiction, in the formal/stylistic choices that confront the writer. NW attempts to embody different choices (more stylistically restrained, formally tighter) than those informing the first three books, but finally these choices provide mere surface variation on the same underlying objective to represent multicultural London with authenticity and on the same themes of identity and assimilation.
There are those, of course, who believe that this objective and these themes are worthy, wholly sufficient goals, that they indeed describe what has become one of the most important developments in contemporary fiction--what could be called multicultural realism. By this measure, simply by presenting her characters and her setting with convincing authenticity Zadie Smith is credited with an aesthetic achievement that is also a contribution to social progress. "Two Paths for the Novel" is a clear enough indication that Smith herself probably would not accept this as an adequate criterion for judging a work of fiction (certainly not as the sole criterion). She is not, of course, responsible for readings of her work that apply spurious standards or appropriate it for agendas that are at best tangential to the creation of literary art. Still, however much Smith wants her novels to be taken seriously as literary art, she has yet to write one that connects form to subject in such a way that the former becomes more than the well-worn path to recognizing the latter.
Even if one were to concede Zadie Smith her strategies of choice, despite a lingering impatience with those strategies, her realization of them in the four published novels does little to redeem their possibilities. Contrary to Wood's classification of White Teeth as hysterical realism, I actually found this novel a pretty drab affair, its gestures toward a Dickensian amplitude in the characters falling completely flat. The Autograph Man is even more listless in its characterization, the characters so uninteresting in their supposed eccentricities as to make the novel almost unreadable. On Beauty is more reader-friendly, and is the best of the books Smith has so far produced. (Coincidentally or not, it is also the only one not set in northwest London.) It tells a rather familiar story of academic rivalry, but the characters are not exactly of the sort we usually find in an academic novel and do add some interest to the story of scholarly warfare and its effects on the families of the combatants. NW, in returning to the setting of the first two novels, also returns to the prevailing tedium that unfortunately accompanies it.
That On Beauty, alone among Smith's four novels, manages to hold the reader's attention with relative consistency hardly seems to merit the critical approbation this fiction has generally received. I can think of few writers whose work has created a larger gap between the praise it has accumulated and what I am able to determine to be its actual quality than Zadie Smith.
Formally Restless
(This review originally appeared in Full Stop.)
In her 2015 New York Times review of Joanna Walsh’s Vertigo, Heidi Julavits complained that the stories in the book “do not cut downward or inward, instead they move laterally until the energy simply dissipates.” On the one hand, this seems to signal an impatience with the stories’ resistance to the perceived need of psychological depth (“downward and inward”), reinforced by Julavits’s further charge that Walsh’s prose is “like a series of rocks expertly skipped across a body of water that maintains its surface tension,” but it also reinforces what is clearly a broader intolerance on the reviewer’s part of Walsh’s more unorthodox and adventurous narrative practices: “When does the reader feel vaguely ashamed for wanting more guidance” from the author?” Julavits asks near the beginning of her review, which pairs Vertigo with Walsh’s previous nonfiction book, Hotel. “Walsh’s formally restless approach,” Julavits avers, eventually “begins to seem less an inventive way to convey her story (and her mind) and more a fashionable evasion tactic — one that is intimidating and disorienting, so that common desires for sense, order, or the accrual of meaning are deemed moot, even foolish.”
While Julavits’s lament is a common enough expression of protest against formally or stylistically adventurous fiction, usually such full-throated objections are reserved for more grandly ambitious, conspicuously “experimental” works, not the kind of slender volume comprised of foreshortened stories offered by Joanna Walsh, which now include her new collection of stories, Worlds from the Word’s End. Julavits further charges Walsh with an emotional aridity: her books have “no platform for intimacy,” and her narrators use their discourse “to keep emotion at bay.” (Only one story in Vertigo manages to evade “Walsh’s emotional laws” of non-expression.) Is Joanna Walsh’s departure from accustomed practice judged to be even more unacceptable because she is a woman writer? If she must approach her subject — which to some extent could be described in terms that suggests a concern with women’s experiences and circumstances — from an oblique angle and a less expressly “intimate” style, should she not at least provide the sort of emotional resonance we might expect? To be sure, many reviewers of both Hotel and Vertigo responded much more favorably to these books, registering their ambiguities, their stylistic brittleness, and their distancing effects precisely as strengths of Walsh’s writing, not as manifestations of authorial bad faith.
Still, the sort of reaction exemplified by Julavits’s takedown in the New York Times Book Review remains as an illustration of the dissatisfaction that continues to be expressed among the keepers of common knowledge in the entrenched literary class with the questioning of that knowledge by writers apparently indifferent to it — perhaps in particular women writers who stray too far from the consensus about how a woman’s perspective ought to be represented in a work of fiction. One mode of anti-realist fiction has become favored by some more adventurous writers, what could be categorized as “fabulation,” of either the surrealist variety popularized by a writer like Aimee Bender, or the magic realist variety practiced by Kelly Link, and this mode has mostly received the endorsement of the literary establishment — at least insofar as these writers have achieved a significant degree of success, and other writers adopting that strategy continue to appear. However, although some of Walsh’s fictions might be characterized as reveries or fantasies of a sort, most of them nominally stay within the realm of a loosely conceived realism. Walsh’s challenges to expectation and convention can be seen more clearly in her fiction’s general avoidance of direct narrative. Even when narrative is ostensibly present, she offers an elliptical structure in which what is not disclosed is emphasized, and a prose style that abstains from the familiar sort of figurative language — “fine writing” — found in most mainstream literary fiction, instead frequently relying on devices such as repetition or the deliberate use of clichés.
To an extent, these strategies work to provide a kind of structural and tonal unity in Vertigo, as they reinforce the book’s perspective: all of the stories are narrated by a character who is unnamed but clearly enough the source of the experiences related throughout the book. The narrator largely observes and reflects, frequently alluding to her marital difficulties and attempting to come to terms with her feelings for her husband (from whom she eventually becomes estranged) and adapt to the conditions of a marriage’s dissolution. One could say that she finds herself in a perpetual state of vertigo under the circumstances she confronts, although in the particular story with that title the narrator indeed suffers from the physical symptoms of vertigo. This story is otherwise quite representative of the stories to be found in Vertigo, as well as some of those in Worlds from the Word’s End. The narrator is on holiday — a common setting in the book — in this case with her family. The story is highly fragmented, presenting the narrator’s brief observations of the activity around her, tinged with the awareness of her husband’s infidelities, at other times pursuing her observations into direct meditation on her circumstances or falling into a kind of internal dialogue. Near the end of the story, the point of view begins to alternate between the first-person and the third-person, as if her subjective processing has experienced overload and she must escape the confines of the internal perspective to gain more clarity.
But this escape from emotion, the attempt to impose distance on those emotions, a distance on herself through the disposition of language, is precisely what Heidi Julavits perceived as the weakness of Walsh’s writing. In a story like “Vertigo,” however, the delineation of this state of self-alienation is surely one of the writer’s goals. To admonish her for actually accomplishing this goal seems an odd critical judgment, to say the least. In Walsh’s stories, the reader is asked not to passively receive the account her narrators provide, not to “identify” with characters in the superficial sense we usually give the term in reflecting on the experience of reading fiction, but to inhabit the characters’ experience ourselves. By thus requiring us to occupy the narrator’s perspective, the stories paradoxically bring us closer to the character than a more conventional style or more casual treatment of point of view would be able to do. Clearly some readers resist assuming the perspective of characters whose response to their condition is an ambiguous mixture of stoicism and icily suppressed rage, who perhaps at times convey the impression that their doubts and disappointments are the opportunity to invoke and order language in unusual ways rather than to grapple with them openly. But while such readers may find themselves impatient with or judgmental of the behavior and attitudes of Walsh’s narrators — especially considered as a kind of composite narrator likely incorporating the author’s own experiences — this is an objection to the kind of character portrayed, not to the truthfulness of the portrayal.
Worlds from the Word’s End, unlike Vertigo, is not focused so exclusively on stories featuring a narrator we might directly connect to the author in this way. It is more formally varied, and could be called more recognizably experimental. Stories such as “Femme Maison” and the title story to an extent return us to the context explored in Vertigo — the dissolution of a long-term relationship — but each of them extend the subject beyond the still essentially realistic premise underlying its treatment in Vertigo. The former concerns the efforts of its female protagonist to adjust to living in her home alone, but, in a move that simultaneously imposes greater distance between author and character even as it elicits identification between character and reader, the story is related in the second-person. “Worlds from the Word’s End” begins in a familiar situation — a man and a woman with “communication” problems — but in this case the failure to communicate becomes part of a worldwide phenomenon in which communication more generally goes “out of fashion” and then disappears entirely.
Other stories depart from the paradigmatic approach of Vertigo altogether, introducing different sorts of characters and telling different kinds of stories, seemingly more purely invented. In the book’s first story, “Two,” an unnamed woman stands on the side of a road, offering two items to passersby. These items are never identified — they variously seem to be children, animals, and inanimate objects. “Travelling Light” tracks the progress of a “shipment,” the contents of which are never identified, in the form of a report by its shipping agent. Both of these stories seem to offer the possibility of allegorical meaning, but finally they appeal more as parodies of allegorical narratives, their “meaning” deliberately obscured. In the book’s final story, “Hauptbahnhof,” a woman has apparently taken up residence in a German train station and describes her activities waiting for a “you” who “may be in Edinburgh” but otherwise remains elusive. In stories such as these, Walsh relies more heavily on continuous narrative than in Vertigo, but still underscores what is not revealed, what acquires meaning only when unspoken. These narratives straddle the line between conventional storytelling in a realist mode (their details seem ordinary, recognizable) and a more suggestive kind of fabulation. If they seem slightly surreal, it is because ordinary reality has been made to seem incomplete, not distorted beyond recognition.
“Enzo Panza” achieves more with less through a radically expanded timescale, essentially the story of a life, executed via a compressed narrative (fewer than ten pages), while the story itself is not so much elliptical as straight-out surreal. “I was still a small girl when I decided to kidnap Enzo Panza,” the narrator announces, and the remainder of the story relates Enzo’s life in a kind of captivity, although he continues to live in the girl’s home even after she herself has left and married (and is there when the girl returns after her divorce). Not even the girl seems to know the meaning of her actions, or Enzo’s:
What has he spared me, this Enzo Panza? What, with his constant presence, has he prevented happening in my life, and what, if anything, has he caused to happen? Does he care for me, my mother, my children? Is he escaping something, or is he just biding his time? Why, when I invited him into my life, did he agree to stay?
While this is otherwise the story perhaps most dissimilar to what we might have expected from the author of Vertigo, the narrator’s words here could certainly also have been uttered by the narrator of the earlier book in her brooding on the direction her own life had taken. However much the stories in Worlds from the Word’s End are more formally disparate, the disabused narrative voice in most of them remains distinctively the voice both Hotel and Vertigo prepared us to expect, Walsh’s writing creating its “surface tension” that, Heidi Julavits to the contrary, is precisely the kind of tension such “formally restless” works require.
Still, in Worlds from the Word’s End Joanna Walsh doesn’t simply repeat the approach taken in Vertigo but develops the adventurous aesthetic sensibility revealed in the earlier book in ways that are arguably both more orthodox — more emphasis on narrative, less intense focus on a single character’s perception — and more experimental — a looser attachment to realism, more audacious use of narrative elision and indirection. The stories in both of these books are fully-realized creations, but they also leave us anticipating what the author might do next.
Illusions of Order
(This review originally appeared in 22.)
In its way, Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child is a compelling read. Some readers expecting a conventionally linear narrative might certainly find that this book consistently defies expectations of sequential continuity and character development, but this does not mean it provides no story (it may provide too much) and no characters (there might be too many to keep track of). If we were to abandon the notion that plots must be unilinear and that the reader’s relationship to the plot must be mediated by “well-rounded” characters, one of whom serves as a protagonist with whom we may “identify,” we might perhaps come to appreciate the different kind of structure and more dispersed focus on multiple characters Ridgway employs in Hawthorn and Child.
The reader puzzled by this strategy might usefully regard it as the explicit reversal of the conventional expectations of what a novel will offer us. The effect is heightened by the fact that the book is initially presented to us as a crime novel or detective novel, a genre that especially relies on the kind of story that progresses, that answers the questions it implicitly poses. The first chapter of Hawthorn and Child introduces us to the title characters, a pair of London detectives, who are on a case in which a man has been shot but doesn’t really know where the shot came from, although he believes it was fired from a “vintage car.” Hawthorn begins to investigate, looking further into the victim’s background and attempting to identify the car, leaving us the impression as the chapter closes that this investigation (as well as Hawthorn’s state of mind, which, it is suggested, might be precarious) will be the focus of the novel.
As it turns out, however, we learn nothing more about this case. Hawthorn and Child themselves fade from view in subsequent chapters, appearing only as secondary or peripheral characters in episodes featuring new characters from the north London area where Hawthorn and Child work. These include a pickpocket turned driver for a local gangster, who eventually must run for his life when he fears the gangster has discovered he has become a police informant; a possibly psychopathic book editor in possession of a strange manuscript; an art-loving young girl (who also happens to be the daughter of Hawthorn and Child’s boss); a paranoiac who believes he suffers from an infection transmitted to him by Tony Blair; and a religious lunatic on the loose. Hawthorn and Child return in the final chapter, investigating a woman’s death that may or may not be a suicide.
Readers accustomed to the usual progression of the detective novel would understandably be disconcerted by a book that first seems to promise the pleasures offered by a crime story plot but then so thoroughly withholds those pleasures. But surely Ridgway wants such readers to be disconcerted, to reconsider what they require of fiction beyond the repeated iterations of this sort of plot. Even so, however, Hawthorn and Child fulfills many of the goals traditionally assumed by crime fiction. As in many crime novels, Hawthorn and Child conveys a strong sense of place, the questionable activities and behavior it depicts arising from local circumstances, while also allowing a perspective on the local setting that a focus on more conventional behavior would not provide. If the book does not feature a clearly delineated protagonist and antagonist, we are initially encouraged to take Hawthorn as the protagonist, and many of the other characters make a vivid enough impression on us as well. And while ultimately this novel does not focus on one particular “crime” carried through to its solution, it is still possible to regard the interlocked episodes as forming a crime narrative of sorts, at least if we allow that such a narrative is as much a mode of representation as it is a specific kind of plot.
Crime narratives work to portray the reality that is in a sense masked by “ordinary” reality, a reality where deviation from norms is the norm, a reality that reveals the disorder lurking beneath the thin veneer of order society attempts to apply in order to ignore it. If usually the plot’s resolution seems to restore a fragile order, the threat to its preservation remains, ready to take a slightly different form in the next story. Hawthorn and Child certainly offers us a perspective on this parallel reality, even though it doesn’t do so through the expected plot devices. There are criminals and other shady characters, but the focus on other sorts of marginal people collectively evokes the milieu that in this part of north London sustains the parallel reality, nourishing the problematic behaviors that arise from it. Hawthorn and Child don’t “uncover” the circumstances behind any one transgression of public order and civic peace, but the novel itself uncovers the ultimately illusory nature of such order and the always provisional status of that peace.
Furthermore, it is possible to read Hawthorn and Child not as a novel (as which it has nevertheless generally been described), but as a collection of stories with a common setting and with the title figures as recurring characters but not necessarily the exclusive focus of interest. This would mitigate our need for linear development, while the book would still provide the depiction of the urban underside I have described. Although the book’s first story would also still have tricked us into expecting a fully developed crime story with Hawthorn as the somewhat unstable protagonist, knowing that the ensuing chapters are meant to be read as formally discreet works that do reverberate nicely with each other but are not otherwise continuous would surely ease our frustration with its apparent lack of continuity. Yet to view the book this way is finally only to underscore that Hawthorn and Child is a fundamentally conventional work of fiction, with arguably the imposed tension between reading it as a novel and reading it a series of short stories the sole adventurous feature. And that the book in fact could be successfully read in both ways doesn’t so much mark it as original or innovative as indicate the extent to which it manages to incorporate enough of the familiar, in-common elements of both the novel and the short story to be accessible as either.
A few of the “chapters” would no doubt work less well than others if considered as stand-alone stories. “How to Have Fun With a Fat Man” focuses on Hawthorn, although it alternates between a memory from Hawthorn’s early days as a police officer when he was part of police line during a demonstration, a get-together with the rest of the Hawthorn family, and Hawthorn’s participation in group sex at a gay sauna. This piece mostly contributes to the portrayal of Hawthorn, giving us further insight into the troubled state of mind in which we find him in the opening chapter. Thus it gives support to the conclusion that this book ought to be judged as a novel, Hawthorne its unheroic hero. Ridgway does not depict his protagonist as a “gay detective,” although he is clearly enough struggling with his sense of himself as both. His sexuality seems just another unexpected twist on the conventions of the detective novel.
Hawthorn and Child is probably best appreciated as an extended twist on the detective novel, one with enough twists to maintain the reader’s curiosity and written crisply enough to move dubious readers past their doubts. Overturning or manipulating genre conventions is by now a rather familiar tactic, however, and I don’t think the book transforms this tactic into something sufficiently fresh that it fully escapes the specific genre conventions it parodies. It succeeds as an unorthodox version of a crime novel, but its interest doesn’t go much beyond that.
The Telling and the Tale
(This review originally appeared in Splice.)
Since its publication in the UK in 2018, its capture of the Booker Prize, and its subsequent publication in the United States, Anna Burns’ Milkman has provoked sharply divergent responses. It has received numerous highly laudatory reviews, but also several high-profile negative reviews, most notably in The Times and the New York Times Book Review, the latter of which is negative indeed, accusing the novel of trying the reader’s patience with its needlessly diffuse and circuitous narration. Although this “problem” in Burns’ novel is framed by such critics as one of excessive “difficulty,” the criticism finally seems centred less on the formal and stylistic features of Milkman and directed more at the novel’s perceived failure to render its presumably weighty subjects — the Troubles in Northern Ireland, male dominance — in a suitably sober and straightforward way.
Milkman ultimately tells a story that is both cogent and eventful (although many of the events take place outside the narrator’s immediate awareness), but it is no doubt the narrator’s discursive manner of storytelling, full of circumlocutions and digressions, that most provokes these critics. Burns herself has speculated that some readers may have been bothered by the narrator’s practice of avoiding proper names, including her own — it is only as “Middle Sister” that we come to know her. But really this rhetorical habit seems reflective of the narrator’s more general wariness of immersing herself in her environment, which is not only inherently dangerous but characterised by the social pathologies to which such surroundings almost unavoidably give rise. This wariness is perhaps most obviously manifested in Middle Sister’s proclivity for reading while walking on the streets (only nineteenth century books, to take her even farther away from her immediate surroundings), although paradoxically this quirk makes her ultimately more vulnerable to these pathologies. Both her actions and her verbal strategies for representing those actions thus emphasise avoidance and indirection, qualities some critics clearly have not been able to appreciate.
However, readers familiar with Anna Burns’ first two novels, No Bones (2001) and Little Constructions (2007), would likely recognise that Milkman shares with them a foregrounding of verbal structure, an emphasis on telling as much as or more than tale, although this does not produce stories that lack a cumulative narrative power. No Bones especially acquires considerable dramatic impact over the course of its sequential chronicle of the Troubles and their influence on a particular Belfast neighbourhood. The formal structure of the novel is episodic, focusing on the maturation of its protagonist, Amelia, but its stark delineation of the damage done to Amelia, her family, and her neighbourhood registers with ever-intensifying force. The episodes are narrated from a variety of points of view and perspectives, although a majority are related in the third-person from Amelia’s gradually widening but ultimately benumbed viewpoint (literally benumbed, as she also becomes severely alcoholic). The final effect is created less through narrative tension (the novel tells a number of stories) than through a kind of chronological intensification of experiences (some incorporating moments of violence) that together create a compelling account of Amelia’s predicament.
Little Constructions is even more committed to an approach whereby the manner of the telling conditions the reader’s perception of the tale to such an extent that its mode of narration is almost as much the subject of the novel as the narrative itself. At first we are led to assume that the story is being told to us (in a very circuitous fashion) by a third-person narrator. Eventually, though, it seems that this narrator is either a citizen of the novel’s fictional town, Tiptoe Floorboard, who happens to be a bystander at most of the key moments portrayed (at the least an assiduous monitor of the community grapevine), or is a sort of composite character representing the town, a collective narrator as in Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’ (1930). Whatever the narrator’s ontological status, the narrative is related in an extremely recursive, elongated process that persistently calls attention to the act of representation itself, the narrator breaking the “fourth wall” to let us in on her narrative decisions:
Did you ever notice how people blend into the wallpaper? And drainpipes? Or how they hang, in anticipation — usually horrified — from twelve-storey buildings by the tips of their fingers? And just to be on the safe side, they do this from sometime around midnight up until midday the next day or more? That’s the sort of thing I notice. That girl was amazing. It must be a skill of many years standing to be able to mix yourself into all sorts of immiscible substances. I’d like to go on about Julie and her powers of disappearance but I think we should return, for it seemed Judas [Doe] had things relatively under control.
The novel chronicles the story of the Doe family, but it is a discontinuous chronicle to be sure, hardly a linear depiction of notable Doe deeds — or, more precisely, misdeeds. While the predominant focus is on John Doe, a career criminal, the narrator also follows many other members of the Doe family (all with “J” names — Judas, Jetty, Johnjoe, etc.), as well as a gun shop owner named Tom, ultimately depicting the undoing of the Doe family in a tale that is twisted in more ways than one. The narrative stops and starts, moves back and forth, seeming to progress according to the narrator’s associative habits of thought. It would not be altogether accurate to call Little Constructions a metafiction, but certainly the “constructions” of the title could include the narrator’s conspicuous construction of the narrative she is in the process of assembling.
Thus it is no surprise that in Milkman the narration calls attention to itself in a way that might distract from the narrative for readers expecting a more straightforwardly dramatic rendering of the Troubles and their immediate impact on the novel’s youthful protagonist (although she appears to be narrating the story from a longer perspective at some indefinite point after the events she describes). Burns’ novels surely demonstrate a deep-seated concern to reckon with the effects and repercussions of the Troubles for those survivors now attempting to live a semblance of a normal life, but, notwithstanding moments of brutality and other forms of dehumanising behaviour, she registers their difficulties not through direct depictions of violence or episodes of sectarian conflict, which can descend into melodrama and paradoxically impart a kind of overwrought sentimentality. Instead, Burns depicts her characters as people who do have lives, however warped by their stifling circumstances, and however horrifying the circumstances might seem to readers who have never borne them.
Middle Sister is somewhat more successful at achieving some integrity in her life than Amelia of No Bones, who ultimately succumbs to an extreme case of alcoholism and addiction bordering on psychosis after relocating to London in an attempt to escape her environment. She manages to maintain a relationship with “Almost Boyfriend” (together they have an agreement to not yet fully declare themselves to be boyfriend and girlfriend), who has successfully kept his distance from the sectarians on his “side” by obsessively involving himself in automobile repair and restoration. This relationship does come undone by the end of the novel, but not because either Middle Sister or Almost Boyfriend is drawn further into nationalist militancy or paramilitary violence: rather, Middle Sister discovers that Almost Boyfriend is gay. Middle Sister also has a closer connection to her family than does Amelia (whose family essentially disintegrates over the course of No Bones), even if she has a contentious relationship with her mother, who expects her to get married and raise a family in accustomed Irish fashion and bitterly rails against what Ma perceives as her daughter’s deliberate subversion of these wishes.
The primary object of Ma’s frustration is Middle Sister’s reported love affair with the titular Milkman — although, as it turns out, there are two men answering to the name. The one with whom Middle Sister is accused of consorting, nicknamed Milkman, is in fact a high-level IRA operative who does indeed take a fancy to Middle Sister but whose interest she does not return. The other is an actual milkman, a schoolmate of Ma’s, who will not defer to the authority of the “renouncers of the state” (the closest Middle Sister comes to naming the Provisional IRA) and suffers for it. To the extent that Milkman features a plot, it concerns Middle Sister’s attempts to forestall the moment she will have to either confront the former and spurn his intention to take her as his mistress — and face the unpleasant, perhaps deadly, consequences — or capitulate to him as an irresistible force. When ultimately she appears to have no alternative except to concede, it seems not a case of a strong-willed woman (which Middle Sister has certainly shown herself to be) losing her resolve, but an illustration of the way such oppressive social circumstances finally dissolve even a strong-willed woman’s self-possession and determination in the acid of the pervasive threat of mayhem and bloodshed.
Perhaps we can see Middle Sister’s narrative decisions — to stick with generic naming and to refrain from giving particular details about setting — as attempts to render her experience at this broader, more allegorical level as well, to avoid making her story too specifically about Northern Ireland’s anguish. (No Bones offers the specifics.) While of course few readers would fail to recognise the setting of Milkman as Belfast during the Troubles, the lack of particularised markers of both character and place lends the novel a more elemental quality, to an extent universalising Middle Sister’s story to one exposing the distorting pressures afflicting any distressed community. Similarly, the language practices exhibited by Middle Sister as narrator seem to impose a distance between her and the events related, but surely this could be both reflective of the real distance the actual narrator (an older Middle Sister) now has on the events herself, as well as her attempt to force some distance on readers all too willing to accept a sensationalised story of a young damsel in distress menaced by violent thugs.
Of course, the formal and stylistic qualities Burns has given her novel finally ask the reader to acknowledge that Milkman is first of all a literary work, not a disguised memoir or historical narrative, not a political thriller. It seems to me in fact that Milkman (as well as Burns’ previous novels) is an admirable model for writers who might attempt to treat an inescapably political subject — in this case one that transcends ordinary political differences — while refusing to sacrifice the potential aesthetic value of fiction. Few readers could finish Milkman without believing their appreciation of the fraught situation obtaining in Northern Ireland in the 1970s has been greatly enhanced, but at the same time the novel provides a memorable aesthetic experience: a formally intricate narrative that may seem rhetorically diffuse, yet whose discursive qualities both produce the mosaic-like formal structure and play the largest role in making Middle Sister a dynamic and compelling character.
One might wonder whether it is precisely Middle Sister’s dynamism and independence which, in the same way that they alienate many inhabitants of her own neighbourhood, also irritate some readers who want to see her as essentially a stand-in for the author, and Milkman itself as a book about the author’s experiences as a young woman in Belfast. Such a book ought to be direct in its emotional content and transparent in the language used to communicate it — oughtn’t it? But in the novels of Anna Burns emotional directness and rhetorical transparency would not be true to the way each of her characters understands their situation. To fully appreciate their predicament is to heed their perception and articulation of it, in all of their particularities, including the circumlocutions and digressions. In Milkman, Middle Sister responds to her situation not just by manifesting a degree of fearlessness — she persists in her habit of reading in the open, as if shutting out the world, even though she knows it makes others think her daft — but also by providing an account of her experiences on her own terms, in her own chosen voice. To reject that voice is literally to silence her,
The Language of the Spirit
The most immediately visible characteristics that frequently seem to prompt both readers and critics to label a work of fiction “experimental” or “unconventional” (or perhaps just “quirky”) are the appearance of irregular sentence patterns, an apparent disregard for the expectations of realism (in literary fiction, at least) and a formal arrangement that can’t be described as simply identical with the narrative movement the work offers. By this measure, Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones can be called experimental, although any reader who gives the novel a chance to validate its strategies is likely to affirm relatively quickly that these more adventurous qualities of the novel — adventurous, but not conspicuously “difficult” — do not ultimately make it inaccessible except to the most passive kind of reading.
It is certainly the case that the prose of Solar Bones — ostensibly the narrative voice of the novel’s protagonist Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer from the west of Ireland — seems from the beginning especially fluid and open-ended, but eventually we become aware that it is composed of an unbroken, continuous sentence, an unfolding series of clauses (and the occasional list) loosely linked by simple conjunctions as time markers. Still, the sentence flow is modulated enough that the reader’s negotiation of their recognizable rhythms is really not radically different from assimilating a more rhetorically digressive style that nevertheless continues to observe the usual rules of punctuation. Likewise, the narrator’s account is mostly organized in something like conventional paragraphs, and while in this case the resulting units function almost more like stanzas and reflect the narrator’s heightened state of consciousness (for reasons made clear at the novel’s conclusion), they provide the reader with a largely unobstructed path through the narrative Marcus Conway relates, however meandering it does at times become.
Although Solar Bones is quite meticulously realistic in its treatment of character and setting (an effect that is only amplified by our retrospective discovery of the origin of the telling), its uninterrupted prose might seem the sort of nonconventional practice that suggests a rejection of realist narrative, except that a moment’s reflection on realism as a literary effect should prompt us to question any such association of fidelity between writing that adheres to standard syntax and life as lived, the evocation of its local circumstances. To think that ordinary prose is the appropriate way to portray ordinary life is merely to commit a version of what the poet-critic Yvor Winters identified as the imitative fallacy, since there is no plausibly coherent connection between a “plain” style and enhanced realism. Indeed, given our ultimate discovery that our narrator is not exactly Marcus Conway but his recently disembodied spirit (following a heart attack), wandering his empty house and recalling his life, it is manifestly the case in Solar Bones that McCormack’s continuous prose is well-suited as the narrator’s mode of expression; it doesn’t merely “reflect” but in this case actually embodies the character’s condition as a being whose existence has been literally transformed into a phenomenon of language, a being who subsists purely as a narrative voice.
Thus as well the novel’s kaleidoscopic formal arrangement finally seems the entirely natural result of the (supernatural) circumstances in which the narrator finds himself, not so much rehearsing the events in his life in their chronological sequence (as if assembling an historical record), but describing them as they appear now to his newly spectral consciousness. If Marcus Conway’s life is flashing before his (and our) eyes, it does so in discrete images and episodes, connected not by the narrator’s effort to reveal their meaning as whole, a composed narration, but by the narrator’s need to put them all together for himself, to come to some understanding of the situation in which he finds himself. In this way, the novel becomes a mystery narrative of sorts, although it is a mystery for the narrator himself to resolve, as the reader may not even be aware that there is a mystery to be resolved in the first place (no doubt many readers will suspect that there is more to the narrative situation than at first we are led to believe). Even so, the confirmation of Marcus Conway’s death at the novel’s conclusion doesn’t really bring clarity to a mystery story so much as retrospectively affirm the novel’s formal integrity.
To point out the ways in which Solar Bones might be described as effectively unorthodox but not radically divergent in its formal or narrative strategies (readers looking for a “good read” can find it in this book if they are willing to accept some initial uncertainty and indirection) is not to say that this novel is finally too conventional after all, or that readers who actually do welcome experimental fiction (without necessarily applying a narrow definition of what “experimental” must entail) would find Solar Bones too timid. Indeed, perhaps the novel’s greatest value is in demonstrating that unorthodox writing strategies need not make a literary work difficult for a patient reader, while also still engaging the attention of more adventurous readers, who might also appreciate that, in the long run, writers whose efforts help make the designation “experimental” less intimidating have made a worthy contribution. Presumably not all readers and critics who resist experimental fiction do so because of an unshakeable attachment to linear narrative and plain prose. Presumably they seek in a work of fiction a satisfying and rewarding reading experience, which finally can be found in most adventurous fiction as well, but the reader must be willing to find it in a less routinized way than that offered by most conventional literary fiction.
Readers looking for a character with whom to “identify,” however, could certainly find such in Marcus Conway. All of the novel’s stylistic and formal devices ultimately help to portray Marcus even more sharply, working to evoke his state of mind (or spirit, as the case may be) while also allowing us to consider his interactions with the other characters recorded in his account, often in conjunction with his work as a local government engineer. However ethereal we might have to judge Marcus Conway’s actual narrative presence to be, the encounters with politicians and crooked contractors are related quite materially through long stretches of dialogue that ring true to the talk of provincial officials and bureaucrats (although perhaps at times they become somewhat overextended) and that make Marcus’s presence in his daily encounters palpable indeed. His similarly corporeal talks with his son on Skype (the son is in Australia) reveal an apparently fraught relationship between father and son, while scenes depicting Marcus with his wife — including an extended episode in which he cares for her during a terrible illness — shows their relationship to be a strong but settled one, no romance for the ages but a successful and enduring marriage. Certainly Marcus Conway is not a heroic or “colorful” character. In fact, McCormack seems to be interested in him precisely as a more or less ordinary man whose life, and whose way of reflecting on it, is for that very reason worthy of consideration.
If Solar Bones is primarily a novel of character, it is also very much a novel focused on place as well. The setting in the west of Ireland — generally the setting in McCormack’s previous books also — is not mere backdrop but the enabling environment making these characters who they are. And because it is an environment whose presence always looms, all of the characters are inescapably aware of it, although Marcus Conway seems perpetually alive to it, often breaking out in rapturous descriptions:
with the sun high in the sky as the road ahead ploughed through the blue air, disappearing into the day’s depth along the lower slopes of Croagh Patrick on my right and the green sea to the left, such a vivid wash of light off the mountains that I recognised it immediately as one of those startling days when the beauty of this whole area is new again, the harmony and coherence of all its shades and colours washing down to the sea which was laid out like a mirror all the way across the bay to Achill Island and Mulranny, one of those days which makes you wonder how we could ever be forgetful of it because that is what happens, driving this coast road so often from Louisburgh to Westport, my morning route to work with its mountains falling through a chroma of blues and greens into the shallow, glaciated inlet of Clew Bay . . .
Solar Bones seems a consummation of sorts, a satisfying synthesis of the themes, settings, character types, and adventurous inclinations found in McCormack’s previous books, which include the novel Notes from a Coma (2005) and the short story collection Forensic Songs (2012). Those books are certainly worth reading (especially the pleasingly weird Notes from a Coma), but Solar Bones is now the work that might plausibly put McCormack in the company of his great innovative Irish predecessors such as Joyce and Flann O’Brien. If McCormack’s novel is more a consolidation, a reaffirmation, of the tradition of Irish experiment than a wholly original extension of it, nevertheless readers open to a different but not formidable kind of reading experience should find it entirely rewarding.
Our Smiles Are Grimaces
(This review originally appeared in Splice.)
Although David Hayden’s Darker With the Lights On includes twenty stories, featuring a variety of character types and settings (albeit certainly associatively linked through recurring images, motifs, and tone), the book’s title seems especially well-chosen in suggesting to the reader that this trope might work to integrate a collection of stories that otherwise almost defies thematic coherence and formal stability. The phrase itself does not appear in the text until relatively late, in the very brief story, ‘Lights’. Brief as it is, however, the story is entirely representative of Hayden’s approach throughout the book. An old couple are in a “lower room”, apparently attempting to move a large crate out the door. Enjoying limited success at the task, the couple find themselves on top of the crate, where they start to dance “the moves that were old when our parents were young.” The crate breaks apart, “and there is our saggy old sofa, there are our children as they were in the long ago late evening: immaculate, content, watching cartoons in grey and white, a bowl of popcorn between them.”
In some of the stories we are immediately presented with bizarre or extreme situations — “My name is Leckerdam and this is how my children killed me” begins ‘Leckerdam of the Golden Hand’ — but ‘Lights’ begins with a believable enough premise, even if one could wonder exactly why May and Michael are so keen to get the crate outside the door (and couldn’t a neighbour come over and help?). Nevertheless, the story becomes decidedly stranger when they begin to dance, and of course turns fully surreal when the sides of the box fall away to reveal the childhood scene that seems to provide the story its climactic moment: Michael reaches to switch off the lights and May tells him, “It’s darker with the lights on” in the brief denouement — and it is one that surely invites an allegorical reading. Is this a story about the passage of time, the melancholy of remembering as this couple nears death, invoked though dreamlike distortion? Such an interpretation seems to fit, but what does that final line contribute to it?
Most immediately it would seem that Michael wishes to bring on the “darkness” in response to the distress caused by the scene confronting them but is prevented by May, who sardonically observes that the sight itself retains its own sort of darkness. Yet there seems to be a calmness about May — who, Michael tells us, “put her hand on mine, gentle, warm” — that belies the assumption that “darkness” is something to be avoided, as if she in fact wants the light to “see” the darkness. But perhaps approaching the story effectually requires that we ponder the various connotations of “darkness” in this context. If Michael is seeking the solace of darkness when the light reveals too much, May encourages him to face the darkness as the true locus of reality. And if it is indeed darker with the lights on, then darkness itself must have its own kind of light, unless the distinction between the two simply collapses and darkness subsists within the light, erasing all differences in a general scattering of meaning.
Which may, in fact, be the effect Hayden ultimately hopes to achieve: the paradox remains a paradox, the moment one to puzzle over but not to resolve in a conclusive interpretation that reduces the story to a fable-like allegory (however brief) that has discernible “sense” to be made of it. Clearly enough the story evokes a ruefulness about ageing and the loss of potential, but to go beyond the story’s way of evoking it — its formal and stylistic attributes — in order to subsume what the work does to what it means is to deliberately overlook the manifest qualities of the work itself, substituting some available paraphrasable point. But perhaps it could be said that the story in effect lures us into making this move, subsequently thwarting our attempt to find the “right” formulation of that meaning — and provoking us to consider why we are so eager to resort to this interpretive tactic in the first place.
It seems to me that the presuppositions animating ‘Lights’ are the presuppositions at work in the book as a whole, which more than anything else brings aesthetic unity to its various parts. Not all of the stories proceed exactly as does ‘Lights’, which in its scenic compression is especially effective in creating a kind of ersatz allegory. But all of the stories do seem to exist in an in-between state that, though askew from what we would consider ordinary reality, still seems to bear on that reality (many of the settings — trains, restaurants, dinner parties, the beach — are ordinary indeed) in an indirect way which might still be brought to a kind of sense. We might preliminarily call this atmospheric quality “dreamlike”, but while many of the stories do exhibit the associative logic and allusive distortion of dreams, to settle for this characterisation in accounting for Hayden’s effects is to be imprecise in describing their structure and their mode of representation, as well as rather nebulous about how a narrative modelled after dream imagery would in fact actually work. The same is true of the invocation of the “unconscious” as the possible source of the stories’ underlying method of representation. In each case, Darker With the Lights On evokes a filtering and transmutation of everyday reality, but these stories are at once both more purposeful and less insistently symbolic than dreams, more cogent than the Freudian unconscious, but less determinedly elemental.
The first story in the book, ‘Egress’, well illustrates both why such fiction might be called “dreamlike” and why this is an inadequate description of the approach at work in this story and, by extension, the other stories as well. The story’s first line certainly signals immediately that we are operating under a suspension of reality: “Many years have passed since I stepped off the ledge.” Our narrator-protagonist has walked off the ledge of his high-rise office building, but instead of plummeting to the ground (presumably to his death) as we would expect, he remains floating in the air, taking note of all that happens around and below him:
I began to observe the office building as if for the first time: the honey-coloured glittering skin of stone, the terracotta panels, smooth and grooved; the sheets of clean glass. My eye and mind moved with delight from the detail to the great mass of the building and back again. I felt joy to be outside forever.
The unbothered, even ecstatic, tone of the protagonist’s narration only heightens the story’s aura of unreality, which originates in a literal flight of fancy but subsequently sustains the fancy in a way that is quite deliberate in its effect.
The “jumper” at first seems surprised that he is not falling towards the ground — or at least falling faster: “I could see that the ground was farther away from me than I could have expected it to be and, what is more, seemed to be receding faster than the rate at which I was falling.” Night soon arrives, and the next morning our floating man begins to adjust to the situation (with no choice but to do his toilet business where he floats). He appears to enter into a timeless zone of sorts, as the scene below him seems to proceed through all four seasons in a single day. Time quickens further, its manifestation below suggesting perhaps a cataclysmic event, and the protagonist experiences an accelerated descent — “I find that I have dropped many floors and that the ground is coming up fast” — as the story concludes.
Perhaps we could say that ‘Egress’ invokes an elemental fear of falling, but it turns this potential nightmare into a seemingly whimsical fantasy more likely to disarm than to distress, only to reassert at the end the anxiety that the story has partially defused. Like the protagonist, we are left “hanging” at the end of the story, but the repetition in the final short paragraph of the lines with which the story began gives ‘Egress’ a kind of aesthetic symmetry that takes it beyond the act of mimicking a dream. The sort of irreality inherent to dreams is used as the fictive means to question our preconceptions about the logic and purchase of dreams, while instead incorporating the irreal in an entirely aesthetic strategy that doesn’t attempt to reinforce their ambient symbolism.
This aesthetic strategy is perhaps most radically expressed in ‘Golding’. This story certainly at first reads like its narrator’s account of a dream — in fact an almost endless procession of them, each morphing into the next from the perspective of a narrator without identity or even a stable gender. But, the narrator tells us, “There were no dreams. All happened. Senses came from nature but not sense, cause but not action, time but not story. There was only this voice. This, her telling.” The story is indeed strong on sensory detail — often taken from nature — but less concerned that those details add up to ultimate sense. It is extended to sufficient length that a series of actions do seem to take place, but they certainly do not connect in a way that could be called a story — the actions are resolutely linear, but seem only momentarily related, and could hardly be said to rise or fall. “Voice”, the uninterrupted telling, is certainly what leaves in ‘Golding’ the deepest impression. The transformations the narrator chronicles spin out imagery to be assimilated for their immediate, dynamic expression, not for their ultimate integration in an achieved unity of effect.
Numerous stories in Darker With the Lights On proceed in the way that ‘Golding’ notably exemplifies. ‘Memory House’ extends its initial conceit that the narrator’s “memory house is my mind” by doing a kind of inventory of the household items stored there, effectively blurring the distinction between “house” and “mind” as the dodgy qualities of the latter distort the former. ‘Remains of the Dead World’ depicts an old man named “Dada” speaking to a crow (and sounding more like a child than an old man) “in a dark declivity at the heart of a wood.” The story’s absurdist, fabular premise seems to draw on both the surrealist movement for whom perhaps the old man is named and Native American folk tales, although it is a fable that actively denies a “moral”. As the story nears its conclusion the old man asks what will happen next, to which the crow replies: “The seasons go on for ever and ever until the sun dies.” ‘Limbed’ follows a man as he travels to what in effect turns out to be his own execution by means of a gigantic axe (apparently autonomous) tearing everyone in the vicinity limb from limb.
Other stories in the book are less purely surreal, more recognisable in scene and situation (if still plenty weird). ‘Hay’ concerns a man named Andy, who is hired to stop the workers in a mine from flooding the works with their tears. He manages to mitigate the effects, but does not ultimately succeed in stopping the miners from crying. ‘Cosy’ is the closest thing in the book to realism, telling the story of a day in the life of George, who performs all of the ordinary actions of such a day (eating breakfast, napping), but suddenly at the end of the story says to Edith, who has just arrived: “I long for the suffering to end.” Immediately after, “laughter streams out into the close air,” but we don’t know whose.
Several of the stories seem to be, to a greater or lesser degree, if not exactly metafictional, certainly concerned to suggest connections between the notions voiced by the characters and the artistic approach taken in Darker With the Lights On. ‘How to Read a Picture Book’ depicts “Sorry the Squirrel” as he performs before a group of children, contrasting pictures and words: “A picture of an elephant means an elephant. … Words are just mute smudges until you know what they mean, and when you put them together they can tell all manner of things. You can fall through words down into a seething belly world of billions of objects and notions all shrieking and hiding.” ‘Play’ features a lecture by a professor who stresses the importance of play but who insists: “Play is not fun. It’s about what we must do to live. … Our smiles are grimaces.” In ‘Reading’, one of the characters proposes the theory that the human afterlife consists of waking up in the book we are reading before death. Whether this is something to be anticipated or avoided is not finally determined.
That Darker With the Lights On is itself both playful and grim, adept in language yet also at times seemingly tumbling through a “seething belly world”, perhaps helps to explain why the book hasn’t received as much attention in the United States since its publication in 2018 as it had previously in the UK. There are in fact numerous current American writers employing versions of fabulation and surrealism, but few of them are as relentless as Hayden in following out the logic of the surreal in order to in effect achieve its own undoing as a distinctive “strategy” pursuing definable ends. Hayden’s stories evoke situations that might promise whimsy, or a “quirky” social satire, but consistently prove elusive in their resistance to interpretation, refusing if not negating the expectation that a work of fiction will ultimately yield up its exegetical secrets, however obliquely.
Grotesque Physicalities
(This review originally appeared in Splice.)
The publisher of Hugh Fulham-McQuillan’s Notes on Jackson and His Dead (Dalkey Archive) cites Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, and Edgar Allan Poe as touchstones in considering the influences on the stories collected in the book. But while Borges and Poe are plausible candidates, Barthelme doesn’t seem quite right. There are elements of the fantastic and uncanny in some of Fulham-McQuillan’s stories, yet they don’t have the casual surrealism of Barthelme’s fiction, nor his stylistic lightness of touch and colloquial directness. The prose is more ruminative, almost scholarly, and in this way indeed more reminiscent of Poe’s first-person narrators.
This cerebral quality of several stories — with numerous direct references to other writers and texts — also bears comparison with Borges. Stories such as ‘An Urgent Letter to the Reader Regarding a Moment from the Life of Fyodor Dostoevsky’, a metafictional meditation on that writer’s survival of the death sentence pronounced on him as a young radical, and ‘Gesualdo’, about its narrator’s wish to assume the identity of Carlo Gesualdo, the Renaissance prince and composer infamous for murdering his wife and her lover, seem perhaps the most Borgesian, with their quasi-learned (yet also unstable) narrators and their molding of a kind of fabular history. But, then, many of the narrators in the eighteen stories collected in Notes on Jackson and His Dead exhibit similar attributes. Seemingly self-possessed, well-read (and unafraid to show it), and at first expressing a strong enough sense of purpose, ultimately they reveal that their purchase on prevailing circumstances may be somewhat precarious.
In ‘Spiral Mysterious’, a detective is investigating a case in which an actor in an Irish soap opera is a victim of an attempted murder, which has been captured on video. The footage is juxtaposed with another video depicting a similar scene from the show, in which the actor played the killer. The detective finds himself racked with guilt in considering the first video, as if watching it has implicated him in the crime, and at the story’s conclusion (the crime is never solved) he realises that “this guilt… was borne not of the first-person views of these two scenes, not of all the killings I have witnessed in my life, but of my desire to witness the fulfillment of the murder in each of the videos. … The resolution was what I desired.” In ‘Entrance to the Underworld’, a narrator staying in a hotel (“for reasons I would prefer not to mention”) is subtly undone listening to a woman who is searching for her missing brother as she tells of his obsession with sinkholes and her belief that he has dug a “bottomless pit” and disappeared into it, not to be seen again. The narrator, much like the detective in ‘Spiral Mysterious’, wishes for resolution in the woman’s story, “to get to the bottom of this bottomless pit,” but concludes that reaching it “is an impossible task.”
In ‘The Art of Photography’, the narrator, drinking in a bar attached to a theatre, quite literally loses touch with reality while considering the photographs along the bar’s walls. Other stories cross the line into the outright uncanny, into Poe territory; at least three could perhaps be described as ghost stories. ‘Whiteroom’ is narrated by a man whose wife has died through means that remain mysterious (mysterious for the reader, at least), though her spirit lingers on and directs the husband to make white everything in the room from which the narrator speaks — right down to the couple’s books, the pages of which are painted over to hide the black print. In ‘The Fog’, the narrator’s house is overrun by fog which begins to induce eerie phenomena (the narrator senses unknown presences and phantom sounds), so he sells the house, only to return later, but by now the inhabitants of the house may be ghosts — as is, perhaps, the narrator himself. ‘A Tourist’ depicts a man ostensibly camping out in a valley holding a “ruin”, but he is actually “visiting the grief of his past.” He is haunted by his own memories, as well as others who remain invisible but visit his campsite nevertheless.
The title story (the first in the book) goes beyond mere suggestions of the supernatural to engage in a form of surrealism, as does a later story, ‘Relic’. ‘Notes on Jackson and His Dead’ is narrated by a filmmaker who is making a documentary about Jackson, a former orchestra conductor who sheds selves “like old skin, leaving dead versions of himself behind”. The situation, of course, delights the filmmaker:
We caught marvelous images of his anger. From high enough all those dead copies become little dark blotches — you can really understand the pattern of his mind without having to see the grotesque physicality that is its manifestation. There are aspects of cubism there, the geometricity, the distortion — he could be an outsider modernist. I could make him that. With this strange man and his forever-shedding selves as my paint. I could do that.
‘Relic’, meanwhile, tells us of “a vault deep beneath the Vatican”, where is kept the sacred relic of the title: a fragment of skin putatively belonging to the first pope. It is not only a piece of dead skin, however: it grows, apparently quite expansively, and thus the Vatican employs a cadre of workers to “manage” the growth, including the story’s narrator. One job measuring the growth of the skin is particularly dangerous, involving suspension from the vault’s ceiling, and at the story’s conclusion we learn that our narrator has been given this task.
‘Notes on Jackson and His Dead’ shares with ‘Spiral Mysterious’ and ‘The Art of Photography’ a focus on the ubiquity and influence of mediated images. Perhaps the most extended treatment of this theme appears in ‘Detachment’ (the longest story in the book), in which a peeping Tom (called “the voyeur” throughout) becomes appalled at the prospect of being peeped-on himself when he comes to understand the pervasiveness of surveillance technology. Whereas, in practising his own voyeurism, he at least “did not hide”, honouring a kind of contract with his victims that he would assume the risk of being caught: “The presence of these cameras on every street in the city in every public building — the thought made him dizzy, fragile with anxiety. … There was no fairness in that indiscriminate recording.” The voyeur becomes obsessed with surveillance cameras, acquiring an app that allows him to patch into closed-circuit systems, and as he begins to watch himself on the screen, he becomes dissociated from the image of himself that he sees, eventually splitting into two selves, the watcher and the watched. Finally the “real” self dies (he’s actually given a funeral), leaving the camera-created simulacrum to live on.
Here Fulham-McQuillan has drawn on both Poe (‘William Wilson’) and Dostoevsky (The Double) to fashion a paranormal fable that updates the earlier writers’ stories of psychological breakdown for the modern era of omnipresent technology and its threats to the cohesion of identity. These stories of the malign influence of current visual media might be the most effective in the book, employing their fantasy devices to create an atmosphere of disquiet, if not incipient terror, in a context in which terror might indeed be the appropriate response to the underlying conditions from which their themes arise. Such stories as ‘Detachment’ and ‘Notes on Jackson and His Dead’ don’t merely evoke the practices of previous writers of metaphysical or supernatural fiction but revise these practices to suit present circumstances. This does not reduce the other stories in the book to pastiche or simple homage; these depictions of the dominion of visual culture serve to show more distinctly that the practices associated with Poe (or Borges) continue to be a renewable resource for skillful fiction writers to draw on.
Not all of Fulham-McQuillan’s stories rely on the direct inspiration of tales of the uncanny or supernatural. One of the more quietly affecting is ‘Skin’, the narrator of which tells of an incident from his childhood, a trip to the circus, where he encountered a “freak” act, a man with skin so attenuated that “I could see veins crawl through his smiling face, his neck, his arms.” The experience has a traumatic effect on the child, a trauma that the narrator continues to revisit: “I am haunted by this man. I constantly relive his act, stretching what can only have lasted a few minutes into a horribly misshapen thing that has bridged all these years. These moments live inside me and refuse my understanding, and so I live with them.” In this story, the horror lies within — in the child’s and, later, the man’s inability to fully accept the reality of human imperfection, which the narrator can only regard as grotesque, even though this is a word he cannot utter.
A collection of eighteen stories without explicit sequential connections or in-common settings could certainly seem overly various, too disparate in subjects or strategies. But Fulham-McQuillan provides enough balance between an unobtrusive commonality of approach and a variety of narrative content that the book both hangs together conceptually and provides sufficient diversification. Commonalities of image and theme also emerge (sometimes through direct juxtaposition), but the book’s sequencing does not insist on them so strenuously that the reader can’t alertly discover them, making for a more active and satisfying reading experience. Ultimately, Notes on Jackson and His Dead doesn’t quite fit readily into prevailing dichotomous categories — conventional vs. experimental, realist vs. fabulist — but this is a strength, as the book pushes against convention by reinvigorating aesthetic strategies that remain recognisable.
If the stories in this collection do at times falter, it is due to a highly allusive and parenthetical expository prose style that also relies predominantly on abstraction. (There are few passages devoted to sensory description or other specific details, and most of the stories contain little, if any, dialogue.) Such a style is to an extent appropriate for the sorts of narrators we encounter in the book — especially the more cerebral and self-conscious — but the density of their recitals can at times be somewhat laborious to read. Surely, however, this problem is partly an artifact of the assembly of the stories into a published volume, as no doubt they were not written to be read in exactly this order or in a collection of precisely this scope. Regarded individually, most of the stories in Notes on Jackson and His Dead are intriguing in their inspiration and persuasive in their execution.
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