The Reading Experience

Confusion and Turbulence

In an essay defending historical fiction, Allan Massie concludes that

There are essentially two sorts of novel, the open and the closed, even if many straddle the frontier that divides them. The closed novel is self-sufficient, free of the influence of public events. In the open novel, such events become characters in the action. The open novel is exposed to the winds of the world, its characters actors in history or victims of history. Given the difficulty of understanding the confusion and turbulence of the ever-changing present, it is natural that authors drawn to the open novel should turn to the past.

I am always skeptical of assertions that fiction is "essentially" this or that, and I am particularly skeptical of simple dichotomies such as this one.. Although Massie acknowledges that many novels "straddle" these oppositons, nevertheless the clear implication is that novelists are generally faced with an either/or choice: write novels that are open to the "winds of the world" or novels that are closed off, insular, neglectful of "public events." This particular kind of simple-minded classification is frequently used to dismiss overly aestheticized, formally adventurous fiction as insufficiently engaged with the real world, "merely literary," and it isn't any less obnoxious here because Massie finds the winds of the world blowing predominantly toward the past.

The notion that any fiction is "free of the influence of public events" is, of course, absurd, if by "public events" what is meant is "life," "experience," "reality." What work of fiction isn't influenced by "public events" because, ipso facto, the author is a human being drawing on his/her experience of the world? What text could be truly "self-sufficient" unless it generated itself, free of the writer's unavoidable immersion in "reality"? Perhaps my objection is too literal-minded, taking Massie's talk of self-sufficiency and "winds of the world" at face value as descriptions of our perception of certain kinds of novels rather than metaphorically, approximations of the reading experience--"it's as if this novel wanted to be self-sufficient, turned inward into language" or "it's as if this one is trying to take stock of historical circumstances." It is true, after all, that the closed novel is not really self-sufficient, nor is "history" or "the world" really to be found in the open novel. Both are verbal compositions, constructions of words, and Massie is just commenting on the effect some novels sometimes create.

But Massie certainly doesn't give the impression he's speaking metaphorically about the mission of historical fiction.

Why do novelists turn away from the present day to the past, and sometimes, like Harris, to the now far distant past? There is evidently no single reason. The writer may have become fascinated by some historical figure. . .Obsession with a particular period — the First World War, for instance — may suggest the theme for a novel. The author may wish to explore the past for its own sake, or to use it to point up the present.

The writer turns not to the printed page in an exercise of imagination but "from the present day to the past." Historical figures and periods, not language, is the root of his obsession, and he wants to "explore the past" not the possibilities of fiction. Massie seems to be describing someone whose primary interest indeed is in the "world," at least as this can be known historically, not in literary art. The latter is left to the narrower ministrations of those writers less committed to their creations as "actors in history."

It seems to me that Massie's historical novel is actually more "closed" than those stuck in the present and stuck with their author's commitment to art. "The past is more manageable and easier to grasp than the present," he writes. Further, it is "our present uncertainties" that account for "the attraction of the historical novel and the vogue it once again enjoys." That the present is full of "uncertainties" must surely be true, but then again it must have always been true, and it hardly seems appropriate to suggest that fiction's job should be to avoid those uncertainties. It may be that "the past is more manageable and easier to grasp," but since when has it been deemed that the art of the novel lies in seeking out that which is manageable and easy to grasp? The greatest fiction has always opened itself up to uncertainty and portrayed existence as something difficult to grasp indeed. By this measure historical fiction is a retreat not just into the past but away from what should be the fiction writer's most overriding responsibility. It cuts itself off from fiction's true subject.

Some historical fiction assuredly does open itself to uncertainty and doubt. Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones succeeds precisely because it subverts our confidence that we know what Nazis were, that we have adequate explanations for what motivated them. Thomas Pynchon's recent Inherent Vice was an attempt to "capture" the late 1960s in Los Angeles, but while it does surround the period in an idyllic (and marijuna-produced) haze, at the same it shows the idyll to be inherently unstable, setting the conditions of its own dispersement. It is a period that is far from "manageable" in our assessment of its rise and fall. Some novels are set in the past, but do not take the past itself as subject, do not take the re-creation of historical characters and events as a self-sufficient ambition.

But for me the vast majority of historical novels are just an effort at such re-creation, and, given that I am motivated to read fiction for the aesthetic experience it might provide and not to learn about history, they are therefore mostly irrelevant to the consideration of fiction as a literary art. Whether it is an attempt to "explore the past for its own sake" or to use the past "to point up the present," historical fiction is an effort to use the form for a purpose other than, or secondary to, creating an aesthetically credible work of art--ultimately the only purpose worthy of motivating us to designate writing as "literary" in the first place. It can be defended as such, but the reading experience it provides directs our attention toward extra-literary "content" rather than expanding our attention in the present as art is able to do.

A Force of Nature

Until now the only Russell Banks novel I had resisted reading was Cloudsplitter--not because of its length (750 pages) but because it belongs to one of my least favorite genres--the historical novel--and because of all Banks's novels it seemed the most committed to simple realism as an aesthetic strategy.

However, Cloudsplitter turned out to be much more interesting than I thought it might be, even if my impression of John Brown, the novel's ostensible protagonist, didn't really change much through reading it. He seemed to me, considered as an historical figure, a pretty one-dimensional character obsessed with religion and what he considered the primary affront to religion in his time, chattel slavery. After reading the novel, he still seems to me a pretty one-dimensional character obsessed with religion, etc. His commtment to the abolition of slavery was all-encompassing, but it amounted to a monomania (certainly the John Brown that emerges from this novel could be described by such a term), and while monomaniacs can be powerful presences in works of fiction--Captain Ahab comes to mind--that power is what makes them memorable, not any complexities of character that might be revealed.

Fortunately, Banks adopts in Cloudsplitter a narrative strategy similar to that which Melville uses in Moby-Dick, a strategy that takes advantage of the overwhelming personality of John Brown to maintain the narrative's dramatic interest but otherwise focuses much of the novel's attention on the charged relationship between Brown and the narrator of Brown's story, his son Owen. As with Ahab and Ishmael, we encounter John Brown through the entranced observations of Owen, and, like Ishmael, Owen is essentially the last man standing (in Ishmael's case, swimming), surviving the raid on Harper's Ferry to, eventually, tell us the tale of what led up to this singular event. Like Moby-Dick, Cloudsplitter filters our perceptions of its main character by presenting us with an account composed by a witness to events, in Owen's case someone with intimate knowledge of the personage involved and himself an important influence on those events, but nevertheless an account the fraught nature of which itself provides at least as much dramatic tension as the actions taken by the character motivating the narrative.

As far as I can tell, not that much is really known about Owen Brown, especially the years he spent after the raid on Harpers Ferry (he died in 1889). This gives Banks the opportunity to in essence create a fictional character to both narrate the novel and play an important role in it, allowing some further latitude in the portrayal of John Brown himself. Banks stays faithful to the known facts about Brown and the public events for which he is known, but of course most of the details about his domestic life (especially that part of it spent in North Elba, New York, the relation of which takes up most of Cloudsplitter) cannot be known, and Banks focuses his view of Brown and his family on and around these domestic episodes or on the trips Owen takes with his father to Boston and to London. These are the sections of the novel in which we most fully get to know both Owen and John Brown, and they are the elements that most fully redeem the book as "fiction." In comparison, the guerilla campaign waged by the Brown clan in Kansas and the attack on Harpers Ferry seem almost tacked-on, the inherent dramatic action of both de-emphasized and deflected, as if the last 200 pages had to be appended in order to certify Cloudsplitter as a proper "historical" novel.

The result, it seems to me, is that Cloudsplitter, despite its taking as its main character a "real" person, is not finally much different from Affliction in its approach to character and narrative. In each instance, the protagonist makes a forceful impression on the reader, but the effect is due to the manner in which the narrator, in each instance a first-person narrator close to the protagonist, renders not just the actions taken by the protagonist but his own anguished efforts to come to terms with those actions and his part in influencing them. While Rolfe Whitehouse has to do more "research" in order to reconstruct the last days of his brother Wade, Owen has to re-engage his own memories in presenting a narrative of his father's life thirty or more years after the experiences related. Both make good-faith efforts to capture these figures as they "really were," but we can only take them, or should only take them, as projections of the narrators' subjective powers of discernment. This does not mean the depiction of such characters is less truthful; it means the truth that does emerge is the truth involved whenever one human being struggles to understand the motives and the acts of another.

In the case of Owen Brown, the truth is that he never really does understand his father, except in the trivial sense that, given John Brown's consistency of thought and belief, he can usually predict what his father might say or do. As Walter Kirn puts it, "To his children, who follow him through frontier America like a band of nomadic Israelites, John Brown is an unmoved mover. His authority is absolute, and sometimes absolutely maddening." John Brown is, for Owen, a force of nature, and, ultimately, there seems little point in doing other than follow him where he will lead (although it is actually Owen who finally convinces his father to begin inflicting violence on those who would oppose him). Kirn suggests that Owen lives in an "existential funk" that arises from the "chronic shame" of never living up to John Brown's ideals, but I'm not sure this is quite right. Owen isn't so much ashamed of his failure to live up to these ideals as he is baffled by his inability to resist the need to act on them despite the fact he doesn't himself fully share them--he doesn't share John Brown's religious convictions at all, in fact. It is Owen's open confession of his bafflement, and his honest account of the way in which it informed his involvement with John Brown's self-declared war on evil, that animates this novel and raises it well above mere documentary-style historical fiction.

Past Caring

In her Washington Post review of the book, Wendy Smith writes of Alan Cheuse's To Catch the Lightning:

The sketch of [its protagonist's] early adulthood at the turn of the 20th century is a skillful but standard portrait of an ambitious young man unsatisfied by his successful career and restless in domesticity. (His wife. . .is stereotyped as the spouse who Just Doesn't Understand.) When [Edward] Curtis takes one of his frequent walks along the beach to get away from the crowded Seattle household containing his mother, mother-in-law and sister-in-law as well as Clara and the kids, the ensuing epiphany also sounds familiar. He observes an Indian woman digging for clams and decides to take her photograph, a far cry from his professional, commercial portraits. "Their eyes met. Deep and deep and deeper -- he saw far into her foreign soul." The encounter with the Other is a fiction staple, and Cheuse follows a well-worn path in depicting a white man discovering a more authentic way of life in a nonwhite society.

While I would certainly agree with the reviewer's judgment of the novel--"standard," "stereotyped," and "familiar" are definitely terms I would use in characterizing it, although the word "ponderous" also seems appropriate as a way of describing its style and structure--I encounter very few "historical" novels that are not explicable in such terms. This one's a "true story" about Edward Curtis, a 19th century photographer whose chief claim to fame was his attempt to "document" the "fading way of life of the American Indian," as the book's jacket flap has it. Everything about it justifies Wendy Smith's conclusion that it trods a "well-worn path" in its depiction of a white man's sympathy for Indians, a feature of the novel that becomes obvious in just its first few pages and makes reading the whole of it (492 pages) laborious indeed.

In a review on this blog of Lilly Tuck's The News from Paraguay (which I found equally bland and banal), I professed uncertainty about "what the purpose of historical fiction is supposed to be. Merely to re-create the past? Why? It is, of course, interesting enough to discover what 'things were like' in the past, but what does reading a novel about the past--deliberately presented as 'about' the past--do for us that just reading well-researched history can't provide?" I'm no clearer now about the ultimate purpose of historical novels--at least about their literary purpose--than I was then, although fiction such as Rosalind Belben's Our Horses in Egypt (reviewed here) certainly does demonstrate that the historical past can be used for artistic purposes that have little to do with history per se, the attempt to pin down what "things were like" as an end in itself.

Like two of Cheuse's other novels, The Light Possessed, about Geogia O'Keefe, and The Bohemians, about John Reed, To Catch the Lightning focuses on a particular historical figure, so they could all perhaps be called biographical fictions rather than historical novels built around fictional characters. And to that point Cheuse himself has said of this work that he's doing a kind of history in reverse, that "historians usually work from the outside in, and novelists move in the other direction." But of course this is an absurd justification on the face of it. Historians work with materials actually at hand, are careful (usually) not to go beyond what the record can support. A novelist invents and supplements. Unless Cheuse has uncovered minutely detailed records of what the "characters" in his novel--at least those that aren't themselves mostly invented--really did say, think, feel, and do in all of the situations depicted, To Catch the Lightning can't really be compared to history writing at all, certainly not in the smug way in which Cheuse implies that his own moving "in the other direction" is in fact superior to the "outside in" approach of historians.

Yet a novel like this still unavoidably asks that it be taken as a contribution to historical discourse, an account of the life of Edward Curtis that goes beyond what mere history could provide and thus illuminates such an historical personage and his times even more fully. And, in a period when "serious" novelists are turning to historical fictions in what seems to me unprecedented numbers (all five of the 2008 National Book Award fiction nominees could arguably be called historical novels), recreating the historical past in this way has increasingly become a privileged strategy among both writers and critics, garnering many critical plaudits and prestigious prizes. It is apparently one of the most recognizably "novel-like" things a writer might attempt these days.

But this is so only because most historical novels, as To Catch the Lightning illustrates, invoke the most conventional, hidebound notions of what a "novel" is and does, reinforced by these novels' emphasis on story--enhanced by the broader arc of historical "story" that such novels want to expropriate--on "character" as embodied in "real people," on staged scenes dominated by "realistic" dialogue, all wrapped up in a transparent prose style occasionally colored by poetic flourishes and applications of "psychological realism." This approach threatens to recalcify fiction in its own historically contingent, now thoroughly reductive form. A "novel" becomes simply a narrative of events modeled on the writing of history, except that the characters can be made up and the story tweaked here and there. If the true purpose of the historical novel is to return us not just to the recounted days but also the literary assumptions of yore, then I guess its practicioners are to some extent succeeding.

Many of the fans of this earnest brand of historical fiction must no doubt discount "literary" values entirely, except in the simplistic sense I've discussed. One reviewer of To Catch the Lightning suggests it "will appeal to a wide audience interested in the history of the American West, Native American culture, and the origins of photography." What about readers interested in aesthetic experience, in provocative writing, in, well, literature? What would reading this novel add not to our understanding of "the origins of photography," information about which is available in countless nonfiction books and essays, but to our appreciation of the origins of fiction in literary art? It's not so much that such questions continue to go unanswered in the consideration of history-based novels; as far as I can tell, they are never asked.

Stories About People

Jim H. at his blog Wisdom of the West quite correctly takes issue with Jill Lepore's shallow comparisons of history and fiction:

Lepore, I believe, misunderstands fiction. She says: "Fiction, in other words, can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people." As she acknowledges, this view is a bit outdated because much current history is precisely the study of private life. But, her equation is at the level of story: history and fiction tell stories about people, great and small. This is a shallow view of fiction. Sure, history can tell stories about events—how they happened, why they happened, what their consequences were, etc. And fiction can tell similar stories, the only difference being that the fictional stories are putatively made up.

Unfortunately, he then reverts to the usual sort of explanation of what makes fiction unique:

However, as a historian, the writer cannot enter into the consciousness of his subject. The historian cannot say how richly succulent the juice from the veal loin Henry IV ate the night he learned of Richard II's death tasted as it dribbled down his chin. The historian cannot say how delicious Cleopatra's wet sex smelled to Marc Antony as their boat sailed down the gentle Nile on a warm summer evening. The historian cannot say how the point of the ice axe felt as it entered Trotsky's head. . . .

Actually. the fiction writer can no more "enter into the consciousness of his subject" than can the historian. There is neither a "consciousness" to enter nor a "subject" whose consciousnesss is revealed. There are words on a page. The skillful fiction writer might make us believe we are observing a "person," that we are exploring his/her "mind," but such explorations are hardly authoritative soundings of what the human mind is really like. They are a convention of fiction writing by which an illusion of intimacy is created, but they certainly cannot withstand scrutiny as an account of human consciousness.

Neither can the novelist, any more than the historian, "say how delicious Cleopatra's wet sex smelled to Marc Antony" (I'm pretty sure I don't want to know that, anyway). Or rather, both the historian and the novelist can say what this was like, but I don't see how the novelist has any more special access to such information than the historian. It's a convention of history-writing that the author doesn't ordinarily dwell on this sort of thing, and a convention of a certain kind of fiction ("psychological realism") that the author does, but finally the novelist has no more idea than anyone else what olfactory sensations Marc Antony might have experienced on his trip down the Nile. A writer might offer us a fictional "Marc Antony" whose sensory experiences are described for us, but this hardly gives the novelist an edge over the historian when writing about actual historical events.

Fiction does do more than tell stories about people, but it can also do more than pretend to "enter into the consciousness" of people. To believe this by now fairly standard technique of faux-psychological probing into the minds of characters is the only thing that separates fiction from history, or from film, is a rather impoverished view of the possibilities of fiction as a literary form. Indeed, the purely literary possibilities of the "interior" strategy were, it seems to me, pretty much exhausted in the fiction of Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner. Adventurous writers following on their achievement--Beckett, Burroughs, Barthelme, Sorrentino--discovered fresh ways of extending their experiments in form, of showing us how fiction can be different not just from history or film, but from previous versions of fiction as well. More such discoveries can be made.

Mirrors

As a response to some of the questions I posed in my recent review of Lily Tuck's The News from Paraguay, The Little Professor points to this essay by the historian and historical novelist Jeanne Reames-Zimmerman. Reames-Zimmerman does a very thorough job of elucidating what she takes to be the task of historical fiction, but for my purposes this passage seems particularly revealing:

I grew up with one foot in a culture that regards storytelling as teaching, not just entertainment. Both my grandfathers told stories, but one told stories that meant something. He never got beyond an 8th grade education while here I sit with a Ph.D, hoping that one day, I live to be as wise as he was. That's my tradition. My mother told stories, and so did her brother and another sister, and now, so do I. My niece tells stories in her art, and one of my cousins directs theater. We're a family of storytellers. It's sacred business. I even use stories in my classes -- which I think my students basically enjoy, but some aren't too sure what to do with because it's not standard Western pedagogy, especially when I don't then lay out the salient points in nice bullet-style format. I want them to string the beads themselves.

Thus, I'm a big believer in narrative instruction. Stories touch the capacity of the heart, move us in ways visceral as much as intellectual. They inspire us to good or to evil. They're powerful things -- strong medicine -- and should be treated with due respect. They move us so deeply precisely because we don't live amputated at the neck. The best stories evoke our compassion.

Perhaps this is why, by and large, I've never much enjoyed historical fiction. I said in my review that I didn't quite understand the purpose of historical fiction, but Reames-Zimmerman spells out quite explicitly what must be the purpose of a great deal of such fiction: to teach us about the past, or help us draw some moral lesson from it, to make history (and thus fiction as well) have "meaning" and evoke "compassion." I have explained in a number of previous posts why I don't have much patience for this view of both storytelling and the art of fiction, so I won't go on further about it here, except to say I am dubious that fiction can have the kind of instructional value Reames-Zimmerman so urgently wants it to have. And it my opinion it really does no service to the aesthetic possibilities of narrative to so firmly tie it to its putative ability to teach. Taken to its extreme, this approach takes all the joy out of storytelling indeed.

But Reames-Zimmerman makes another point that is well worth heeding:

Historical fiction is never really about who any given historical figure actually was, but with who we are now and what it's possible for us to become -- or what we might want to avoid at all costs. And in truth, don't we study the past in order to understand where we're going now, too . . . and what we might want to avoid at all costs? Pursuing the details can be fun -- I'm one of those nutty people who actually enjoys spending hours in a big research library chasing down epigraphical evidence for the origin of a name -- but it's never purely an antiquarian pursuit for me. I find myself asking, 'What's the POINT of this? What do we learn about ourselves in the process?'

This may sound like amplification of the underlying argument about the pedagogical value of historical fiction, but to the extent that Reames-Zimmerman is suggesting that "history" really isn't the point of historical fiction, that it is just another way of approaching the present, as well as the ongoing dilemmas human beings continue to face, I think she goes some way toward justifying historical fiction as a form of literary art.

Although we would also have to accept the further distinction she makes between two kinds of historical fiction:

. . .To my mind, the primary division is between historical fiction and historical allegory. While as I said above, historical fiction is never really about who any given historical figure was, the sleight-of-hand is less evident. The mark of good historical fiction lies in the quality of research as well as how effectively the author draws the reader into the world of the story.

Historical allegory, however, succeeds or fails by the strength of the symbolic hermaneutic between the past and the present. The veil between past and present is mighty sheer -- and should be. One of the best examples of historical allegory that I've found in ATG fiction is Indo-Irishman Aubrey Menen's wickedly funny A Conspiracy of Women. Ostensibly, the book is about the final years of Alexander's reign, his time in India, and the mass weddings that followed. But it's really about the British in India and the clash of an imperialistic nation with a Traditional one. It holds up a mirror so we can see ourselves more clearly.

I will accept this argument if it also means that among the things to which a mirror can be held is history itself. If, as I said in my discussion of The News From Paraquay, the fiction writer might view his/her approach to history as one of "interrogating it, forcing it to testify, as it were, to the veracity of accepted representations of it, to the hidden truths behind these representations that have been hidden so well their revelation seems as surprising as any unexpected plot twist in a skillfully told tale. For these writers, 'history' becomes just more material for the novelist's imagination to transform, at times simply offering itself up as the inspiration to the novelist's own powers of invention."

TEV vs. TRE

I'm very happy to say that Mark Sarvas (TEV) has agreed to join me in reviewing Lily Tuck's National Book Award-winning novel, The News from Paraguay. This is the first of a series of reviews of all the NBA-nominated books that will appear on this site over the next weeks. Perhaps this endeavor will add some perspective and some insight on the books that otherwise are perhaps mostly known as the source of a controversy that arose over the NBA nominating process.

The News from Paraguay

By Mark Sarvas

1.

More than half of Paraguay's population was wiped out in the War of the Triple Alliance. During the six years of the ill-advised conflict (1864-1870), in which the dictator Francisco Solano Lopez invaded neighboring Brazil (which subsequently brought Argentina and Uruguay down on his head), the country's numbers fell from 525,000 to 221,000.

The impulse for this catastrophic military adventure is traced by some to his 1853 trip to Europe, during which time he was deeply impressed by two things in particular: the imperial grandeur of the French Empire, and a beautiful Irishwoman named Ella Lynch.

From these under-traveled historical backwaters, Lily Tuck delivers The News from Paraguay, winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction. Any consideration of this novel after the fact must address this controversial distinction that engendered a number of pitched battles of its own. But more on that shortly. First, the book on its own terms.

Tuck propels the story fast and furiously from the first chapter, in which we learn at the outset:

At age ten, Eliza Alicia Lynch had left Ireland; at fifteen, Elisa Alice Lynch married a French army officer; at nineteen, divorced and living with a handsome but impecunious Russian count, Ella Lynch needed to reinvent herself.

Despite a nice of bit of business with the evolving names of Ella Lynch, we feel at the outset like we're in something that's dismaying like a literary treatment of a Harlequin romance. And despite Tuck's fine, restrained prose style, that sensation never fully departs as Ella progresses from her poverty in Paris, to mistress of the heir apparent, to mother of the children of the president (bastard children though they may be), to her final poverty back in Paris. It's the familiar arc of many a bodice-ripper, in which the plucky, self-assured, stylish heroine faces the dangers of the wild. It all reaches an unintentionally hilarious apotheosis in which Ella, protecting her children from rebels, wields sword and dispatches a blackguard.

Ella looked up and saw two Brazilian infantrymen with bayonets running toward them through the woods. From where he was sitting on his horse, Colonel von Wisner fired at one; in his haste, Colonel von Wisner fired too close to his horse's head and the horse reared and bolted. Left alone, Ella picked up Lazaro's sword, which lay next to him on the ground, and standing up, she faced the other infantryman. The man was black, a slave probably, and startled to see a woman, he did not fire right away. Ella saw him frown then open his mouth to say something but he was too late. Before the man could shut his mouth or move to defend himself, Ella pursued her next advantage, that of a left-handed fencer, and lunged forward with the sword. She cut him in the neck.

The narrative beats that comprise The News From Paraguay more or less conform to the romantic archetype. Beautiful woman down on her luck catches the eye of powerful man. Abandoning the comforts of the known, an arduous journey is undertaken. Headstrong heroine arrives intact in foreign land, is established in comfort by her lover, provides offspring. Withstands the slings and arrows of jealous backbiters and schemers, pines for home, is susceptible to the advances of lovers. Enemies begin to coalesce and collaborate. The center cannot hold, things begin to fall apart and inner reserves of pluck are summoned. In the end, tragedy envelopes all. There's even a pair of fat, evil sisters. Can a glass slipper be far behind?

This summary is, perhaps, a bit glib. It's clear that Tuck has stumbled onto an episode of history whose players and events have captured her imagination. And amid these machinations, we're treated to remarkably detailed and vivid glimpses of Paraguayan life. Although it's a short book, Tuck introduces many characters, travels over a wide and diverse landscape, and is a trustworthy and diligent tour guide. She manages to render the supporting players vividly and memorably, and they subsequently linger in memory. But Tuck herself concedes a central difficulty in her Afterword: " … the need to explain and the need to dramatize are often at odds." And in the end, The News from Paraguay feels more like a history lesson than a novel.

This may be partially attributable to Tuck's choice to use a coolly omniscient third person voice. Although there is a taut, spare elegance to her prose, an absence of flourish, this leanness creates a distancing effect that extends to her treatment of her central characters who remain frustratingly opaque. One is unsure what to make of Ella, who fiddles as Rome burns. Neither her letters to a friend in Paris detailing her newfound life nor her journal entries--the news from Paraguay--mention the brutalities of the Lopez regime. As the population is being slaughtered, Ella's thoughts are primarily for her beloved horse Mathilde. In the end, Ella seems irretrievably vain, shallow and selfish. Clearly, Tuck has chosen to lay these events before us at from a distance and allow us our own conclusion. But as the self-destruction of the Lopez administration reaches its climax, the depiction of unrelenting cruelty, violence and paranoia, though no doubt accurate, becomes tedious and numbing, particularly with no real sense of Ella's reaction to the madness that surrounds her.

Tuck can also be surprisingly heavy-handed at moments. When the arrival of a new opera is mentioned, it is none other that La Forza del Destino--historically accurate, no doubt, but decidedly portentous. Elsewhere, during a fencing lesson, Ella is taught the technique of fléching, "a very difficult position because the fencer cannot protect himself and he cannot stop halfway. It's a total commitment to attack." It's one of several oddly on the nose moments for so skilled a writer. Similarly, motifs and symbols are dutifully deployed throughout in what begin to feel like a workshop exercise – pairs, particularly brothers and sisters, dot The News from Paraguay, as do miscarriages and cigars. The color blue is frequently deployed to tie together the elements of this canvas. (Although Ella's eyes are gray, they are mistaken for blue.) And then there are the parrots.

Ella and Lopez first meet when a (blue) parrot feather falls from Ella's hat, and parrots figure prominently throughout. Lopez advises his son (too late) that it's "Bad luck to kill a parrot," and the sickening of the birds in an aviary suggests the imminent disintegration and collapse of the country. And perhaps Ella – with her superficial dispatches to Paris – is the ultimate of parrots, as she increasingly adopts Lopez' positions in her letters home. In the end, la forza del destino is unavoidable and parrots die, Mathilde the horse dies, loved ones die and, of course, hundreds of thousands of Paraguayans die, the result of Lopez' ill-fated fléching.

The final toll is tragically high but The News from Paraguay only occasionally rises above the ploddingly solid – an earnest if minor work.

2.

It's a mistake to assume one can know what informed the deliberations of the National Book Award folks. Still, one cannot fully consider this book without looking at it in light of its selection. Is The News from Paraguay the best that contemporary fiction has to offer? Surely not. (Despite 2004's having been, by common consent, a weak year for American fiction, even my own admittedly spotty reading would put The Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Plot Against America above it.) It may be a solid, respectable if somewhat staid effort, but one presumes the NBA is not an award for good intentions or near misses. Since one must take at face value Moody's assertions that no deeper agenda was at work, perhaps the more interesting questions are does the NBA undermine its own credibility with such choices? And does it really matter to a book? The questions are separate but intertwined.

If I may be permitted leave by my host to touch on an area that I know is a hot-button for him, the clearest measure of whether the NBA matters can be examined by its impact on book sales. An admittedly unscientific measure is to examine Amazon's rankings. The day prior to the National Book Award announcement, The News from Paraguay sat at 3,462. The award shot it up to 44, and it stayed in double digits for – precisely two days. It spent a month in the triple digits before settling back to 2,583, where it sits today. Compare that to Cynthia Ozick's Heir to the Glimmering World–- not nominated for anything --which is ranked at 3,297. Furthermore, last year's winner, Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire is nearby at 4,029 and Three Junes, Julia Glass' 2003 winner, is ranked 2,525 – a few points above this year's winner. (Only The Great Fire made it onto any bestseller list, and even that one was from the notably independent BookSense.)

What does this brief and imprecise examination suggest? Well for one thing, if Rick Moody's unstated mission was to elevate hitherto unacknowledged fiction, he appears to have flunked – the sales of The News from Paraguay are more or less indistinguishable from winners from prior years as well as from writers not even nominated. But perhaps the larger conclusion to be drawn is that the NBA doesn't particularly matter, at least from the vantage point of sales. It might succeed at pointing out a title to an audience already predisposed to following literary fiction but, unlike the Oscars, whose Best Picture award generally translates into significant box office impact, the NBA would appear to be relatively toothless. And if it fails to move books, what's the point?

Well, clearly, the point is to acknowledge the best that this country has to offer. And that seems, at least to me, like a worthwhile goal in and of itself, but on that score the NBA, at least recently, appears to have an uneven record at best. The 90s saw titles like Sabbath's Theatre and The Shipping News share space with the likes of Cold Mountain. And for all its ambition, The Corrections was a disappointing mess that probably claimed the award on momentum.

Which brings us back to The News from Paraguay. Setting aside for the time being post-modern notions of "best" or "better" (no doubt legions of MFAs are spitting out their Ticonderoga No. 2s in apoplexy), it seems reasonably clear that it isn't the best American book of the year, not by quite a bit. Can an award survive and stay relevant with such oddly hermetic tastes? Time will tell. The NBA isn't going anywhere, at least not soon. But it appears headed toward mattering less and less.

Old News

By Daniel Green

I've never been sure what the purpose of historical fiction is supposed to be. Merely to re-create the past? Why? It is, of course, interesting enough to discover what "things were like" in the past, but what does reading a novel about the past--deliberately presented as "about" the past--do for us that just reading well-researched history can't provide? A fuller sense of character? The pleasures of narrative? So much so-called popular history is written as if the unfolding narrative and its cast of characters was indeed a novel that it's hard to see how a narrative about history that calls itself "fiction" really differs much from nonfiction history, except that the author considers him/herself more at liberty to alter minor details to suit dramatic convenience.

Some historical novels try to burrow beneath the received wisdom about history, or to illuminate some of its blurrier quarters, and while this is a praiseworthy endeavor, it's still hard to see how such an effort ought to be considered "literary" rather than a useful adjunct to history-writing. If the idea is still to re-create the past so we might consider it as the past, I'm still not clear how such work really advances the cause of fiction-writing.

Other ostensibly historical fiction, such as Robert Coover's The Public Burning or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, aren't really concerned with reproducing history but rather with interrogating it, forcing it to testify, as it were, to the veracity of accepted representations of it, to the hidden truths behind these representations that have been hidden so well their revelation seems as surprising as any unexpected plot twist in a skillfully told tale. For these writers, "history" becomes just more material for the novelist's imagination to transform, at times simply offering itself up as the inspiration to the novelist's own powers of invention. (Other novels that belong to this category: DeLillo's Underworld, Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, T.C. Boyle's Worlds End, Pynchon's later Mason and Dixon.) Such writers approach history not as the ersatz historian hoping to recount the past but as literary artists for whom the past can be turned to use for present purposes. Is this the best approach for the novelist (or reader) interested in events from the past as subjects for fiction?

Lilly Tuck's The News from Paraquay again raises all of these issues for me as a reader of fiction, but unfortunately it doesn't much clarify them, except to suggest that the Coover/Pynchon approach finally does seem the more interesting. I don't think it's a bad book, but neither can I see why it really needed to be written in the first place. My awareness of Paraquay and it history is increased slightly (although, sadly, it would seem its past isn't substantially different than its present, both entirely representative of Latin America's troubled political history), but I probably could have learned as much, probably more, from reading a straightforward historical account of mid-19th century Paraguay. Moreover, the Paraguayan dictator depicted in the novel seems as predictably brutal and self-obsessed (with a dollop of superficial charm) as any other dictator, coming across as little more than a stereotype, and his mistress, on whom the novel ostensibly focuses, isn't really made to seem any more distinctive as a literary character. She's mostly quite unsympathetic in her indifference to what's going on around her, and it's difficult to tell whether this is the response from the reader Tuck was attempting to invoke, or whether Ella Lynch is meant to be some sort of proto-feminist in her assertions of self and her ability to survive. I have to confess that finally I myself didn't really have a strong reaction to her one way or the other, largely because I couldn't engage with her as anything other than a "historical figure" being put through her paces in a novel of mere historical re-creation. She remains rather ghostly.

The novel's episodic structure works reasonably well, and some of the individual episodes are affecting enough. Those scenes toward the end of the book depicting the ghastly consequences of the dictator Francisco Lopez's insane decision to go to war with Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina are particularly well-rendered. In general, the novel's account of the living conditions of 19th century Paraquay--the oppressive heat, the diseases, the primitive tools available for enduring such conditions--seems authoritative, and is in some ways the feature of this novel that one remembers most after reading it. But, again, this is the sort of thing one could discover by reading actual histories of the country and the period, and I, for one, don't really very often look to novels as an alternative way of gaining such information.

The writing in The News from Paraguay is never less than capable, at times rising to a kind of restrained lyricism that nevertheless avoids any obviously "poetic" language. Most often it gives the impression of aspiring to an accuracy of detail that would give the story being told the requisite degree of plausibility, as in the descriptions of Ella's ocean-crossing from Paris to Paraguay:

The sea was black, the waves, large arching ones, were veined and capped with foam. The booms swinging, the spars cracking, the ship bucked its way through the heavy sea: first landing heavily in a trough, as if to rest for a moment, before another wave broke over its bow, sending water rushing and swirling on the deck and forcing the passengers down below; then pitching up again.

On the one hand, such a style seems perfectly appropriate for a novel that seeks to capture the feel of life as it's lived for characters otherwise relegated to the past, to the superficial features of their already completed "life story." Certainly a historical novel of this kind needs first of all to seem credible. But finally that's really all this novel manages to be. I kept waiting for Tuck to draw on the novelist's most precious resources--stye, imagination--and transform the story of Ella Lynch and Franco Lopez into something more surprising or strange (beyond the "exotic" setting), frankly into something more interesting as a purely literary creation. But she never really does.

I do like the way in which the novel is fragmented into often brief accounts of relatively self-contained moments and sometimes veers off to give us glimpses of the lives of characters other than Ella and Franco. In particular, the stories of the women surrounding and waiting on Ella can be quietly moving, perhaps even more so than Ella's own story. (Although in the end this is probably a liability; is Ella meant to be such a cipher that all of the color is drawn off onto the other characters?) Among the fragments are passages from Ella's letters and diary, which do their part in forward the plot, but again even hearing about these events in Ella's own voice doesn't ultimately accomplish much toward making her a compelling character.

Fans of historical fiction, fiction that slices off a piece of the past and presents it to us as "drama," that converts figures from the past into reasonably convincing characters that seem to approximate what these figures might have been like, would probably enjoy The News From Paraguay well enough. If you really want to know what a place like Paraguay might have been like 150 years ago, this novel might be worth your time. However, had it not won the National Book Award, and had I not set myself the task of reviewing it for that reason, I probably would have stopped reading it after the first 50 pages or so. It seems to me a competent, but finally rather perfunctory novel that neither illuminates the past in any particularly discerning way nor reimagines history so that its bearing on the present becomes any more urgently apparent.