The Reading Experience

Furies

It seems to me that almost all of the reviewers who found fault with Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones--some of them quite harshly--failed to take sufficiently into account the effects and implications of its origin in the first-person narration of its protagonist. They made the mistake of imputing to the author, or to the author's "intentions," ideas that are properly confined to the discourse of the narrator.

The first step in a critically generous assessment of a work of fiction has to be to engage with the work on its own embodied terms, as far as those terms can be apprehended by the discerning critic. When a novel or story is presented as a first-person narrative--related either by the protagonist or some other subsidiary or observing character--this ought to be a sign that the account we are given is rooted in the perceptions, the language, and the assumptions of the narrator. All first-person narrators are to this degree "unreliable," although some third-person narrators might be unreliable as well (if such a narrator hews especially close to the perspective of the characters on whose behalf the narrator essentially speaks) and sometimes reliability is mostly irrelevant. Especially when a character is as self-involved, not to mention self-deceived, as Maximilien Aue, the true-believing Nazi SS officer who narrates his war experiences in The Kindly Ones, any critical commentary must acknowledge that "meaning" or "theme" (and even at times "style") are conditioned by the limits of the narrator's perspective.

One has to assume that in creating a narrator with such extreme limitations as Dr. Aue, Littell is fully aware of building in a space for ambiguity and uncertainty, of presenting us with a character whose every utterance has to be considered potentially compromised by context. One might assume further that Littell is posing to readers an explicit challenge precisely to scrutinize the text in this way, not to take it as the author's own account of Nazism or to judge it by standards inappropriate to the kind of work it is. Thus when Laila Lalami complains that the reader of The Kindly Ones is not "drawn into the narrative by the beauty of the language, a masterful use of point of view, or an intriguing personal life against which the monstrosity of the main character could be highlighted," she implies the novel would be less objectionable as a portrait of a "monster" if instead of its "plodding style" it employed beautiful language, unified the point of view so that the narrator seemed less dissociated, or made Aue's personal life more "intriguing" and less repellent. She is asking it to be something other than itself, something less troublesome.

For a text authored by an SS bureaucrat to exhibit "beautiful" language would defy belief even more considerably than does Aue's ability to show up at every important stage of the Final Solution, which Lalami describes as "unrealistic." If ever a novel justifies a "plodding style," The Kindly Ones is it, since it so accurately reflects Aue's bureaucratic soul. I confess I do not find this novel lacking "a single narrative consciousness" as Lalami sums up her problem with Littell's handling of point of view, although I agree that Aue's narration does modulate in tone. This seems to me, however, a consequence of the fact that Aue's "narrative consciousness" inherently veers from "confessional" to "argumentative," etc., not that this fragmentation is a flaw in the use of point of view. Narrative consciousness is finally unified by Aue's particular kind of fragmented consciousness, although even if we found only disunity in the expression of point of view, I'm not sure why that in itself should be regarded as an aesthetic failure. It could be argued that "unity" of consciousness in fiction is actually a false representation of actual human consciousness, which is likely much more disunifed than we want to think.

That Maximilien Aue's "personal life" is so distasteful as to make his story doubly monstrous was a common reaction among reviewers of The Kindly Ones. David Gates asserts in his New York Times Book Review assessment that "Aue is simply too much of a freak, and his supposed childhood trauma too specialized and contrived, for us to take him seriously," while Michiko Kakutani adds that "Aue is clearly a deranged creature, and his madness turns his story into a voyeuristic spectacle." Ruth Franklin scoffs that the novel's "utterly persuasive evocation of depravity" could be taken "as a sign of achievement." Franklin's review in particular evoked the critical queasiness stirred up by Littell's novel, with its widely quoted remark that "This is one of the most repugnant books I have ever read." She further contends that "there is something awry in this book's unremitting immersion in Aue's worldview, without any effort--direct or indirect, latent or manifest, philosophical or artistic--to balance or counteract it in any way." Melvin Jules Bukiet claims similarly that it is "not that a reader necessarily seeks a lesson, but fiction and nonfiction ought to approach the subject as more than an opportunity to wallow in the worst humankind has to offer," and these two comments most explicity reveal the incomprehension with which so many American reviewers of The Kindly Ones reacted to the narrative constructed by its protagonist.

Both Franklin and Bukiet implicitly testify here to the success with which Littell has given over the novel to his protagonist's Weltenschauung, a word Aue himself uses frequently, even if they also find that aesthetic act objectionable. In my opinion, a novel could do worse than engage in an "unremitting immersion" in its character's worldview, or, for that matter, "wallow in the worst humankind has to offer." That the critic found himself wallowing seems an indication that Littell has indeed created a compelling "narrative consciousness" that brings us uncomfortably close to an unsavory character with a repulsive worldview, not to mention overwhelming psychological problems.

Does an author have a responsibility to "balance" a character's unpleasant views or behavior with normative gestures, either "latent or manifest," indicating the author disapproves of the character's opinions and actions? Surely no reader believes that Littell does approve of his character's actions, so the perceived problem here must be that exposure to a character like Maximilien Aue will unduly soil the sensibilities of the reader. But surely no one expects readers to be converted to Nazism or sadomasochism through Aue's account of himself, either, so one must conclude that Franklin's and Bukiet's dislike of an "unremitting immersion in Aue's worldview" has been converted into a general critical requirement that bad people as depicted in fiction must be "counteracted" by a "philosophical or artistic " effort to meliorate their evil. One suspects that, despite his protestation that we don't necessarily need a "lesson" from such a novel as The Kindly Ones, Bukiet would prefer that its unmediated access to the point of view of a morally compromised protagonist be placed in a more didactically clear context as a corrective to "wallowing."

What is going to focus our attention on "the worst humankind has to offer" if not, at least occasionally, fiction? Is this a subject that ought to be ignored or forbidden? Why not write (or read) a novel that allows a Nazi SS man to speak of his experiences as witness to and participant in the attempted extermination of Jews and any other undesirable people? For such a novel to be successful it will almost necessarily offend and disturb some readers, but that is the consequence of attempting the work in the first place. Taking offense--or finding the novel "repugnant"--is not a credible aesthetic judgment, and in my opinion most of the negative reviews of The Kindly Ones lack credibility because they were either explicit expressions of distaste of this kind or thinly disguised versions of such distaste masquerading as critique of character and plot logic.

The major accomplishment of The Kindly Ones is the author's thoroughly successful ventriloquism of Dr. Aue, a performance that requires we abide this character in all of his true-believing, sadomasochistic, murderous horror or else the effort is subsumed into the usual safe moralizing provided by "balance." Balance would only produce a cop show-like view of evil, which is comfortably softened by the presence of reassuring outrage at human perfidy. It could be argued that this sort of easy portrayal of the conflict between decency and depravity is false to the actual content of evil, a sentimentalized response. It seems to me that, precisely to the extent Littell has avoided "balance," he has given us a more persuasive representation of evil, something that we must experience for ourselves in its half banality, half degeneracy through Aue's recitation. Only this "unremitting immersion" gets us anywhere near the reality of evil.

Some reviewers focused their criticism of The Kindly Ones more on its deficiencies of plot than on a moral repugnance toward its narrator. Lalami observes that "like Forrest Gump, [Aue] conveniently manages to be wherever the most significant events of the war take place, at the time in which they take place, and to interact with all the relevant figures of Nazism," a plot progression which Zak M. Salih describes as "a collection of the Nazi regime's greatest hits." Peter Kemp further complains of the "pitiless prolixity" with which Aue tells his story and doubts "Aue's prodigious capacity to recall in profuse, minute detail all that was done and said. . . ." That a fussy bureaucrat like Maximilien Aue would remember his actions in great detail--that he might even have records of them--doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, but the question of whether Aue knows too much brings us back to Aue's status as narrator. Perhaps he does too conveniently recall the details of his wartime experiences. As far as I know, no one has questioned the accuracy of the historical details in which Aue's fictionalized story is embedded, but of course there is no way to "verify" the details of the fictional story. Ultimately, it really makes no difference: these are the things that were "done and said" that Aue wants us to know, and the impression they leave about him is presumably the impression he wants to leave.

The same is true of the plot developments that place Aue at so many of the crucial events of the war's waning years. Perhaps Aue is manipulating the historical record in order to give himself a role in all of these events, but again it doesn't really matter. The self-portrayal that emerges is the one Aue must intend. That this portrayal is a damning one suggests either that Aue is (consciously or subconsciously) submitting himself for judgment or that his particular involvement in the Final Solution is to be taken at face value. The former is not impossible, especially given his willingness to reveal all of his psychosexual problems as well. However, accepting that Aue happened to be in a position to witness so much of Nazi Germany's dissolution, at least for the purposes of the novel his fictional existence makes possible, doesn't seem to me such a difficult concession. His presence at the decisive stages of this process could just be, in fact, the reason he decided to write his memoir, following up on the less comprehensive accounts of other ex-Nazi colleagues.

Whatever degree of artifice Littell has brought to the plot of The Kindly Ones--at least that part of the plot devoted to chronicling the extermination program as it leads Aue from the Ukraine to Hitler's bunker--I found it riveting. Unlike some commentators who concluded that through the recounting of these events with their frequent expressions of dismay with the program and its methods, Littell was attempting to "humanize" Dr. Aue, I found the portrait of SS officers manifesting a degree of struggle with the task they'd been assigned a compelling alternative to the usual image of Nazis as unambiguously malevolent. To this extent, a character like Aue is humanized, but this only makes his and his fellow officer's actions more appalling, since they arise from recognizable human beings rather than caricatures. Some of these actions, such as the Babi Yar massacre, are hard to take, but their depiction commands attention.

One element of the novel's narrative structure does threaten to become overly artificial. Overlain on the story of Aue's war journey is a parallel association with Aeschylus's Oresteia, featuring Aue as Orestes (a device similar to the "mythic method" of Joyce's Ulysses). Ultimately these parallels might be a little too neat. Daniel Mendelsohn does a good job of teasing out the implications of this strategy in his review of The Kindly Ones (the title being a direct reference to the "furies" of Aeschylus's play, who are transformed at the end of the play into "kindly ones"), and while I agree with Mendelsohn that Littell employs the strategy skillfully, I can't agree that the problem it causes is that, in portraying Aue as "a sex-crazed, incestuous, homosexual, matricidal coprophage," it works against the historical portrayal of Aue as a "human brother." I just don't perceive any effort on Littell's effort to affirm Aue as a "human brother," as opposed to simply a "human being," and it does not make him into something other than a human being to imply, metaphorically, that Aue is a man pursued by his own sort of "furies."

What makes me less enamored of the mythic method as employed in The Kindly Ones is precisely that it threatens to disrupt our "immersion" in Aue's fictional memoir, that it intrudes on the performance of Aue's narration a different kind of performance, one that makes us too conscious of the author--Jonathan Littell--as the puppeteer pulling Aue's strings. For an exercise in point of view like The Kindly Ones to work most efficaciously, it ought to commit itself fully to the discourse of the narrator, and in my opinion the narrative doubling introduced by the Orestes story detracts from that commitment.

Unless. In his review of the novel, Paul La Farge comments that "If it were only Aue making himself out to be Orestes, you’d dismiss the gesture as an unjustified but understandable bid for sympathy, but it’s Littell who puts Aue through Orestes’s paces, as if to give credence to Aue’s assertion that 'in this [life] I never had a choice,' that his free will was curtailed by 'the weight of fate.''' Of course it is finally Littell "who puts Aue through Orestes's paces" in that Aue is the narrator of the novel Littell has written. In this sense, Littell puts Aue through all of his "paces." But there's nothing really to prevent us from attributing most, if not all, of the allusions to the Oresteia to Aue himself, either through the many direct references he makes or through both the additions and omissions (such as the episode in which he kills his mother and her husband, which he subsequently can't remember) he brings to bear on the story he wants to tell. If Aue attempts a play on our sympathy through these allusions--"I never had a choice"--we can accept it as such without believing his resort to this grandiosity actually absolves him of blame.

I'm not really sure I fully embrace this interpretation. The heavy-handed allusiveness may just be an aesthetic mistake, a secondary flaw we have to countenance while otherwise acknowledging the narrative power of the novel as a whole. The Kindly Ones rather early on overwhelmed my own general disdain for history-based fiction not by "bringing history to life" but by bringing life to history.

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.

Optical Illusion

In a recent review of "two novels about Alzheimer's disease," LaVonne Neff comments that in one of them the author "convincingly sees through [the protagonist's] eyes, even though she tells his story in the third person." Here is a paragraph she quotes in illustration:

He looks around his car and tries to remember what make it is; he cannot. He opens the window to feel what month it is. It isn't a month. There aren't months. There are just happenings, a lack of signposts … . He pulls up at the side of the road, lifts his glasses, and rubs his eyes. He has been doing this journey to and from work every day for thirty-five years. He pores over the map.

There is actually very little here that could accurately be described as being conveyed "through the eyes" of this character. Sentence one reports on an action from the outside and then offers a brief report of what's "going on inside" the character's mind. Sentence two does likewise, although in this case we are given the puzzling report that  he wants to "feel what month it is," presumably a measure of his Alzheimer's-induced confusion. The next three sentences puport to be the character's thoughts, but as in most fiction using the free indirect method ("psychological realism") they're really just the narrator's coherent formulation of what might be happening, in a fleeting, incomplete sort of way as, in this case, the character looks out the car window. Certainly nothing like these articulated statements are really being fully-formed by the character himself.

The following sentence is again straight reporting: "He pulls up at the side of the road, lifts his glasses, and rubs his eyes." Indeed, this could just as easily be the perspective of someone peering in at the character through the car windows as of the character himself as he prepares to consult the map. The next sentence provides us with a piece of information that could be hovering in the back of his mind but again hardly seems to be the sort of thing the character would be thinking explicitly. It is the sort of thing the narrator would be offering as a way to fill out the scene, however. It's a summary statement, not a reflection of actual thought processes. The final sentence in this quoted passage returns to reporting what the character does.

In no way can I read this passage as an attempt to make us "see" through the character's "eyes." (Or if it is such an attempt, it certainly fails.) This would require a loosening of linguistic and rhetorical logic (as opposed to the loss of "logic" being experienced by the character) that we just don't find here. It would require the suspension of our own expectations of what "seeing" entails. I have not read either of the novels Neff is reviewing, and I could certainly imagine using cognitive anomalies such as Alzheimer's and dementia in such a way that something genuinely innovative in the application of point of view could be achieved, but from the passages quoted in the review and from the reviewer's account of the novels as a whole, it doesn't appear as if they are anything other than conventional, third-person central-consciousness narratives that happen to take cognitive impairment as a subject.

It is Neff's review itself that is most telling in its own confusion about the effects of point of view. It reflects a more general lack of attentiveness in many general-interest fiction reviews whereby the work at hand is mischaracterized as "getting inside" the minds of its characters when at best what it provides is some combination of omniscient reporting and mild inflections of those characters' perspective through by now shopworn narrative notations and manipulations of sentence length and structure ("It isn't a month. There aren't months."). It mistakes these facile and perfunctory devices for genuine exploration in point of view. And it thus reinforces the notion that what distinguishes fiction from visual forms of storytelling is primarily its ablity to delve into consciousness and reveal what it's like to "see through the character's eyes." What distinguishes fiction from other narrative forms is its existence in language, in writing, and the writing quoted by LaVonne Neff is just the same old boilerplate.

They Hadn't Heard Us Calling

"Point of view" is an element of fiction that, it seems to me, is often invoked but seldom really appreciated. In our haste to get to the "story," or to ascertain what the work in question has "to say," we acknowledge that the narrative is presented in "third-person" or "first-person," but don't appropriately consider how both of these modes of presentation--as well as their many subtle if less recognized variations--affect the terms of our encounter with both the story told and what is said. This goes well beyond the usual distinctions made between "reliable" and "unreliable" narrators (although this distinction remains important), "omniscience" and "central consciousness," or stories told by the main character and those told by a secondary observer. My reading experiences convince me that point of view is not simply a flourish added to the underlying "content" of fiction, nor a way of establishing "voice," not just a way of providing stability while the story unfolds, but fundamentally conditions our perception of all of the other "elements" of fiction we otherwise might think take precedence: plot, character, setting, etc.

The centrality of point of view in determining the nature of the fictional "world" we are entering in a particular work of fiction became only more obvious to me while reading Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, a novel I had not previously read because I had assumed, mistakenly I must now say, it was written primarily to become a movie, as is the case with so much current "literary fiction." I both admired and enjoyed the novel, and mostly for the same reason. I admired the way in which Eugenides was able to maintain his experiment in first-person plural narration--"we" rather than "I" as the origin of the narrator's voice--and I enjoyed the collective invocation of the Lisbon sisters and the story of their early deaths that the narrative embodies. Much of what I enjoyed in the novel--the detached view of the sisters, the baffled way in which the stand-in narrator attempts to comprehend both the sisters' behavior and the love-trance induced in him and his confederates by their charms, the ultimate mystery of the sisters' decision to do themselves in--have been singled out by some reviewers and commentators as flaws, however, and it does seem to me that this results from an unwillingness to allow the novel's adopted point of view to create the sort of effects it is most naturally inclined to produce.

It is true that we don't ever really get very close to the Lisbon sisters, so that as characters, indeed, as the ostensible protagonists of the story, they don't quite come into focus as much as we might like. They remain wispy, uncertain figures in a novel that inevitably leads us to seek more definition, more certainty. We are just as bewildered by the Lisbon sisters, and just as unclear about what might be going on in that house across the street--the perspective we are forced to assume--as the narrator, but this is not a problem with "characterization." Since there is no satisfactory answer to the question "Why?"--not even the narrator's assiduous efforts to compile "evidence" and interview the Lisbon parents can provide such an answer--or since Eugenides wants to suggest that getting to "know" the Lisbon sisters by taking us inside their heads will leave us no more enlightened, their role as characters in this novel is necessarily limited to the external observations given. To complain about this is to deny the novel its enabling source of expression in the inquiring "we".

It is tempting to say that the narrator(s) become the main characters, but this isn't quite right either. Only occasionally does one of the boys emerge from behind the verbal curtain to assume an active role vis-a-vis one of the sisters--most notably "Trip Fontane," who attempts to court Lux Lisbon--and the narrator's role ultimately is really to testify to the enduring spell cast by the sisters, to give us access to them through a concerted act of memory from which they have never departed:

Our own knowledge of Cecilia kept growing after her death, too, with the same unnatural persistence. Though she had spoken only rarely and had had no real friends, everybody possessed his own vivid memories of Cecilia. Some of us had held her for five minutes as a baby while Mrs. Lisbon ran back into the house to get her purse. Some of us had played in the sandbox with her, fighting over a shovel, or had exposed ourselves to her behind the mulberry tree that grew like deformed flesh through the chain link fence. We had stood in line with her for smallpox vaccinations, had held polio sugar cubes under out tongues with her, had taught her to jump rope, to light snakes, had stopped her from picking her scabs on numerous occasions, and had cautioned her against touching her mouth to the drinking fountain at Three Mile Park. A few of us had fallen in love with her, but had kept it to ourselves, knowing that she was the weird sister.

The Virgin Suicides could thus be called a novel without conventional characters (the closest to a rounded, "sympathetic" character might be Mr. Lisbon, who almost becomes compelling in his cluelessness) and, since the sisters' fate is more or less known from the beginning, not much plot aside from the filling-in of details. If plot and character are what you must have, these no doubt must seem to be irremediable deficiencies, but the narrative method Eugenides employs invites us to cultivate a different relationship with the characters, one that emphasizes wonder over intimacy, and assume a more relaxed attitude toward plot, one that allows for meditation on what happened, not just a serial record of what did happen. The point of view in The Virgin Suicides works to shape a particular kind of fictional space, one that accentuates distance and concealment. Narrating it from some other perspective would have produced a wholly different, in my opinion much more ordinary novel.

Many readers and critics approach The Virgin Suicides for its thematic implications, its depiction of stifling suburbia, a morally unhinged middle class, the decline of the industrial Midwest, etc., but I think even these concerns gain the prominence they do because of the way the narrative is related to us. The near-mythic quality the story takes on, its rendition of decline-and-fall, the implication of the whole community in the unfolding of its collective trauma provide the tale of the Lisbon suicides a heightened drama that substitutes for the lesser drama of mere plot and gives the tale a kind of allegorical resonance. A less well-calibrated narrative strategy would not have accomplished the same effect.

Skunk Hour

Justin Courter's Skunk: A Love Story (Omnidawn Press) is a gimmicky novel whose gimmick almost works. To the extent that it makes the novel consistently enjoyable to read, in fact (it if is appropriate to call a narrative in which the main characer lives with skunks and drinks their musk "enjoyable"), it does work well enough. But ulimately the bizarre behavior that motivates the story recounted by the novel's first-person narrator seems designed to signal toward some broader thematic relevance I, for one, was unable to fully work out.

The narrator himself accounts for his attraction to skunk musk by connecting it to memories of his mother:

My mother drank quite a lot of beer when I was growing up. She always drank McDougal's--an imported brand that comes in a green bottle and has a slightly skunky aroma. This was the first scent to greet my nostrils in the morning and the last whiff I sniffed before falling asleep at night. I awoke each morning to the clanking of beer bottles as my mother opened and shut the door of the refrigerator to get out her first McDougal's before starting my breakfast. Then I heard more clinking of empty bottles, as she cleared the kitchen table, filled a large garbage bag with the previous day's bottles and carried them outside to put in a can by the street.

One day the narrator, Damien, brings home a dead skunk, thinking his mother will be able to brew her own beer using this "raw material out of which beer was made." Suffice it to say that his mother doesn't appreciate his gift, and it is only a few days after this incident that the mother is put into a mental hospital, where she eventually commits suicide. Out of this noxious mixture of childhood associations and ultimate trauma emerges, presumably, Damien's adult fixation on skunk musk.

The adult Damien is a loner and something of a misanthrope, although his misanthropy does not seem founded in an excessively high estimation of his own worth:

. . .My eyes are as dark as my hair and are extremely weak. For this reason I have worn thick glasses since I can remember. When I worked at Grund & Greene, I still had the same pair of black frames that had served me since high school, though my prescription had changed many times. Despite the fact that I am quite capable of making my way in the modern world, I know what a miserably inadequate creature, despite my efforts, I truly am. My constitution is so delicate and my eyes so weak that I would not have survived if I had dwelt in an earlier era of history, say, in the Stone Age. I would have been one of the casualties of natural selection--either killed by a wild boar during a hunt because I could not see it coming, or maimed by one of the bigger, stronger boys of the tribe before I reached the age where humans begin copulating--and thus would have been unlikely to pass my defective genes on to future generations. Hence, the race would have continued to grow stronger, as indeed it should. . . .

Still, Damien's inability to come to terms with the modern world, and all of its ways of reminding him he is "defective," is reminiscent of John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius J. Reilly, although Damien's later experiences with what can only be called musk-addiction (he eventually learns to "milk" his skunks and drinks the musk), read like a farcical turn on William S. Burroughs, and Courter's depiction of Damien's retreat to a rural area to become a farmer seems to draw strongly from T.C. Boyle. Ultimately, however, Damien's voice is distinctive, and it is to Courter's credit that this voice has a kind of compulsive power that keeps our curiosity alive despite the fact that Damien Youngquist is in many ways a pretty repulsive character.

Early in the novel Damien meets up with a woman named Pearl, a rogue marine biologist who has on obsession with fish similar to Damien's obsession with skunks. Thus able to tolerate each other's fetish, the two begin a sexually acrobatic love affair that is interrupted when Damien's skunk house is raided and the skunks killed, and when he encounters Pearl's self-described fiance and subsequently embarks on his rural adventure. Later Pearl returns, but she is unable to prevent Damien's apparent ruin: A latter-day hippie neighbor begins using Damien's skunk musk to create a new recreational drug and is busted; to get a lighter sentence for himself, he fingers Damien as the drug ring's mastermind. Damien is carted off to jail and later to a drug-treatment facility.

One of the reasons I liked this book is precisely its skillful use of first-person narration. I have more or less come to the conclusion that the only way an otherwise conventional narrative (and Skunk is, depite its unconventional subject and eccentric characters, essentially a narrative-driven novel, without much in the way of purely formal experimentation) can succeed, post-modernism and post-postmodernism, is through first-person narrative. The third-person central-consciousnes mode of narration (sometimes called the "free indirect style"), which has become the default mode of storytelling, providing us with both story and "pyschological realism," is now so worn out and tepid, at least for me, that only first-person narratives can poke through the narrative haze emitted by so many indifferently-related stories to capture my attention in the first place. Much can be done with first-person narrative, starting but not ending with the manipulation of the reader's trust in the story being told.

Thus, Skunk presents us with a first-person account by a character we have every reason to believe might not be clear-sighted, both literally--Damien's poor eyesight continues to deteriorate throughout the narrative, but whether this is a side-effect of the skunk musk or just a natural decline, given what we've been told about his poor vision, we really don't know--and figuratively. Might Damien, like his mother, be prone to mental illness? Might the skunk musk have exacerbated this problem? How much do we trust Damien's narrative as the accurate account of what "really" happened? For me, the existence of such potential amibiguity only deepens the novel's interest, creating layers of "meaning" that the third-person method necessarily excludes.

Unfortunately, as the novel nears its conclusion, the events become increasingly contrived and its portrayal of addiction heavy-handed. It seems as though Damien's story of addiction and recovery (as comical as it is) is being offered to us as containing some essential "truth" about addiction. Are we being told that the modern world has become so alienating that we are all led to our own addictions in order to cope with it? That, if so, we should be left alone to indulge them? That we ought to rise above them and find a way to live a productive life? These seem rather pat and familiar themes for a novel otherwise so unfamiliar in its style and its cast of characters.

Nonetheless, Justin Courter has admirably succeeded in taking a character so odd and behavior so potentially repugnant you might think nothing can be done with them and creating from them a surprisingly engaging novel. If it seems that Courter is daring you to read on after learning about his protagonist's habit, you should take the dare because you might find yourself hooked on Skunk.

"The Circuit I'd Been Following Up to Now"

For me, the most indispensable element in the aesthetic success of Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder is McCarthy's use of the novel's brain-damaged protagonist as its first-person narrator. Not only is this unnamed narrator's earnest but affectless voice crucial to the novel's cumulatively mesmerizing effect, but none of its other pleasures--its deadpan humor, its wide-eyed fixation on the details of mundane and seemingly trivial activities, its creation of "plot" out of the narrator's own incurable plotting--would be possible if this otherwise undistinguished man who happened to have been hit by "something falling from the sky" and is now trying to cope with the aftermath were not telling his own story.

One review of Remainder maintains that in reading this story we readers "remain firmly inside the narrator's head." Another has it that McCarthy's intention is to "understand how a traumatized mind might put its broken pieces back together again." But this emphasis on the narrator's "mind" is not quite right, although the seeming disorder of his mind (which, in my reading, at least, is actually an attempt to reassert order) is certainly pushed to the foreground of the novel he is (unwittingly) composing. We are not, as in most conventional "psychological realism," thrust "inside the narrator's head." We are thrust into his words, where we are, undeniably, caught up in the same obsessions and compulsions, the same damaged processing, that he is. But in dramatizing the way "a traumatized mind might put its broken pieces back together again," McCarthy is not ""exploring" his character's thoughts or attempting to track those thoughts in its "stream." He is personifying the character's state of mind through his words (often enough words whose import the narrator only dimly recognizes, if at all) and his seemingly deranged actions.

In effect, McCarthy reverses the conventional approach to "Mind" in fiction as advocated by the likes of James Wood and others. For Wood, fiction itself exists to reveal Mind; this is its raison d'etre, its claim to superiority over other narrative arts that are not as supple in their ability to "get inside" the human head. Pyschology uses fiction to render itself more dramaticaly. McCarthy, on the other hand, uses Mind to render fiction more authentically. Remainder doesn't pretend to anatomize the human mind, translating its ineffable qualities into sensible prose, as so much middling psychological realism post-Joyce and post-Woolf generally settles for. It re-enacts the irresistable impulses and the skewed perspective the narrator's altered mental state is producing, just as the narrator himself re-enacts events that make him feel more at ease in his transformed world, that give him a sense of belonging in an environment that has otherwise become unacceptably alien.

Often the narrator's actions seem wholly devoted to materializing these impulses, although the narrator isn't fully aware of his submission to them:

I was heading down the hallway back towards the main room when I noticed a small room set off the circuit I'd been following up to now; I'd moved round the kitchen each time in a clockwise direction, and round the main room in an anti-clockwise one, door-sofa-window-door. With the short, narrow corridor between the two rooms, my circuit had the pattern of an eight. This extra room seemed to have just popped up beside it like the half had in my Settlement: offset, an extra. I stuck my head inside. It was a bathroom. I stepped in and locked the door behind me. Then it happened: the event that , the accident aside, was the most significant of my whole life.

It isn't so much that the narrator seems to have "lost" his mind. He has lost the part that made his actions seem natural, unpatterned, subservient to his own will, however much they were always already a product of the brain's mechanical operations. Now those operations have been laid bare, the clockwise motions and figure-eights of his damaged brain compelling his movements just as much as his undamaged brain had done, but without that "extra", naturalized patina that allows us to overlook our actual subservience to the brain's creation of patterns. He's lost the "remainder" that makes us feel at home in our reality.

The "event" that proves to be the "most significant" in the narrator's life thus ensues, his account of it typically (and hilariously) straight-faced:

. . .I'd used the toilet and was washing my hands in the sink, looking away from the mirror above it--because I don't like mirrors generally--at this crack that ran down the wall. David Simpson, or perhaps the last owner, had stripped the walls, so there was only plaster on them, plus some daubs of different types of paint where David had been experimenting to see how the room would look in various colors. I was standing by the sink looking at this crack in the plaster when I had a sudden sense of deja vu.

A memory from his pre-accident past has apparently emerged, complete with "a window directly above the taps just like there was in this room," outside of which "there'd been roofs with cats on them." "People had been packed into the building; neighbours beneath me and around me and on the floor above. The smell of liver cooking in a pan had been wafting to me from the floor below--the sound too, the spit and sizzle."

With the help of his large "Settlement" vis-a-vis the accident, the narrator goes about trying to re-create this scene. Much of the novel is devoted to this effort, and it makes for surprisingly compelling reading, the sheer audacity of it (both on the narrator's and McCarthy's part), as well as the unquestioning participation in it of those the narrator enlists to bring it all off, both strangely entertaining and just strange. Eventually other events are re-created as well, as the narrator increasingly becomes dependent on the "tingling" he feels whenever the recreations work especially well.

In her review (linked-to above), Margot Kaminsky asserts that Remainder is a "chillingly clever novel of patterns that fools you into thinking it's a novel about plot." Chilling it certainly is, but I'm not sure "clever" is exactly right. Relentless in its unfolding of the narrator's, and its own, inherent if scary logic is more like it. And I don't really think it's accurate to call it a "novel of patterns" rather than "a novel about plot." McCarthy isn't so much imposing a "pattern" as exposing our human preoccupation with pattern-making (which includes our need for "plot"--the narrator's reenactments are nothing if not precisely crafted stories in which he is the protagonist), a preoccupation that of course extends to and finds culmination in fiction itself, as well as art more generally. One could say that the only thing that really separates the artist from McCarthy's unnamed narrator is that the artist indulges his/her taste for pattern-making in works of imagination that merely echo life. Our narrator tries to make his life conform to patterns, to force it into order and meaning, climaxing in events that only confirm and disastrously reinforce the closed loop his life has become.

Readers who like to have an immediate, transparent "bond" with their first-person narrators may or may not find Remainder a comfortable read. It surely isn't easy at first to like, or even to understand, its narrator-protagonist, and his behavior only becomes more extreme as he figure-eights his way through his story. His narrative voice remains spookily matter-of-fact throughout. On the other hand, it is hard not to summon up some sympathy for this character, since we, too, if befallen by our own "accident," would likely find ourselves confronting a similarly alien world and might respond to it, almost certainly would respond to it, in the best way our addled brains could contrive. Our mental machinery would be exposed as similarly fragile. We would become our own remainder.

But even if you're not sure this kind of character would appeal, you should read Remainder nevertheless. It's not only the most impressive debut novel I've read in a very long time. It's one of the best novels I've read recently, period.

Telling Your Story

I've just re-read Jim Thompson's The Grifters, and the farther into it I got, the more apparent it became to me that Thompson's novels provide an especially useful illustration of the differences between third- and first-person narration in fiction. I still enjoyed The Grifters, which is narrated in the third person, but reading it a second time made me more aware of its limitations, as well as the virtues of the first-person narratives to be found in novels such as The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280, and After Dark, My Sweet.

Here are a few paragraphs near the beginning of After Dark, My Sweet. The story is being told by "Kid" Collins, the novel's protagonist, and he has stopped in at a roadhouse for a glass of beer:

The bartender slopped a beer down in front of me. He scooped up the change I'd laid on the counter, sat down on the stool again, and picked up a newspaper. I said something about it was sure a hot day. He grunted without looking up. I said it was a nice pleasant little place he had there and that he certainly knew how to keep his beer cold. He grunted again.

I looked down at my beer, feeling the short hairs rising on the back of my neck. I guessed--I knew--that I should never have come in here. I should never go in any place where people might not be nice and polite to me. That's all they have to do, you know. Just be as nice to me as I am to them. . . .

We then learn that Kid Collins has spent some time in "institutions" (eventually that he has just escaped from one), but we really don't need that information to know that something's not quite right with the Kid. His very need to elicit a response from the bartender and those short hairs rising tell us what we need to know. And we wouldn't know it in the same way if the Kid himself wasn't telling us. The novel immediately plunges us into the world of Kid Collins as he is able to articulate it, and most of its melodramatic punch comes from being jolted by the Kid's direct verbal flourishes. (And he is, it turns out, an ex-boxer.)

The Grifters starts out pretty well, too:

As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony. A hard blow in the guts can do that to a man, and Dillon had gotten a hard one. Now with a fist, which would have been bad enough, but from the butt-end of a heavy club.

Somehow, he got back to his car and managed to slide into the seat. But that was all he could manage. He moaned as the change in posture cramped his stomach muscles; then, with a strangled gasp, he leaned out the window.

Several cars passed as he spewed vomit into the street, their occupants grinning, frowning sympathetically, or averting their eyes in disgust. . . .

This also steeps us immediately into the world as experienced by Roy Dillon, but in The Grifters he shares our narrative attention with his mother Lilly and his girlfriend, Moira Langry, and so the story involving the three of them will have to be told by a third-person narrator who has access to their thoughts and emotions but filters them through his own more distanced narrative voice. It's not quite full-blown "pyschological realism," but Thompson nevertheless can achieve his signature hard-boiled, scary/depraved effects only by fishing around in the characters' minds for their perceptions of and reactions to the inevitably untoward situations they encounter. The verbally-constructed "voice" of a character like Kid Collins is lost, and we have to pick our way through such vague verbiage as "incredible agony" and be satisfied that just "somehow" Roy Dillon returned to his car.

Thus, while the novel commences with a typical Thompsonesque bang, it's not long before we get a little bogged down in passages like this:

. . .He had looked around extensively and carefully before choosing Los Angeles as a permanent base of operations, and his capital was now reduced to less than a thousand dollars.

That was a lot of money, of course. Unlike the big-con operator, whose elaborate scene-setting may involve as much as a hundred thousand dollars, the short-con grifter can run on peanuts. But Roy Dillon, while remaining loyal to the short con, was abandoning the normal scheme of things.

At twenty-one, he was weary of the hit-and-get. He knew that the constant "getting"--jumpring from one town to another before the heat got too hot--could absorb most of the hits, even of a thrifty man. So that he might work as hard and often as he safely could, and still wind up with the wolf nipping at the seat of his threadbare pants. . . .

In my view, we're being given way too much "information" in a passage like this, information that is perhaps important for us to have but that would be less intrusive if it were parceled out gradually by a first-person narrator or if it was at least provided to us dramatically--through showing rather than telling. It would be better, for example, if we saw Roy Dillon "abandoning the normal scheme of things" rather than being told this was the case through an awkward inventory of the contents of Roy's mind. A secondary effect of this third-person technique is the fuzzy, flabby language: "He had looked around extensively"; "can run on peanuts"; "the wolf nipping at the seat of his threadbare pants". Not only does such writing lean heavily on cliche--which again might be more tolerable if it were issuing from a first-person narrator--but it helps to make passages like this themselves seem like just so much perfunctory "scene-setting."

Perhaps this is why I actually prefer the Stephen Frears movie made from The Grifters to the novel, something I would not say of the film adapted from After Dark, My Sweet. Frears's film is able to dispense with the third-person narrator and focus on the characters and their overlapping stories in a direct, unmediated way. We get Thompson's lowlife plot without his narrator's sometimes laborious attempts to move it along. It is also probably why I think Thompson's best novels are those related to us by his sublimely scuzzy first-person narrators. It's impossible to reproduce these novels on screen because their narrators are so inseparably a part of their appeal. Such is undoubtedly true of most well-devised first-person narrators, which is one reason I believe this method of storytelling is almost always more promising as a way of creating distinctive, aesthetically pleasing works of fiction than the kind of close-in third-person narration that has in most literary fiction become more or less the only available alternative (and that is probably often used precisely because it does lend itself more easily to screen adaptation.)

Mindsets

In explaining why he did not finish Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, Patrick at Litblog.com (no permalink available; scroll down to Jan. 18) writes of Powers's "inability to sympathetically portray characters whose mindsets are very different from his own." He cites the following passage from the novel:

As next of kin, she qualified for the shelter house a block from the hospital, a hostel subsidized with the pocket change of the world’s largest global fast-food cartel. The Clown House, she and Mark called it, back when their father was dying of fatal insomnia four years before.

and then comments:

Actually, the Ronald McDonald House is about the last thing that Powers, in his smug inability to think outside of his own limited imaginative box, should have attacked in such an off-hand manner. The cheap shot is the mark of the cheap artist.

He concludes that passages such as the one quoted represent "the pronouncement of our omniscient narrator-in-chief."

I have already posted on my own disappointment with The Echo Maker, but I have to say I think Patrick is badly misunderstanding what Powers is up to in this novel. Far from employing an "ominiscient narrator" (which arguably he does use in some of his previous novels), Powers in The Echo Maker is deliberately reporting on the "mindsets" of his three main characters, resulting in a form of narration that could be called, after Henry James, "central consciousness," the most intensive form of "pyschological realism" short of pure stream-of counsciousness (as in Joyce or Woolf). Powers himself says of his approach that his "technique was what some scholars of narrative have called double voicing. Every section of the book (until a few passages at the end) is so closely focalized through Mark, Karin, or Weber that even the narration of material event is voiced entirely through their cognitive process." The reference to the "Clown House," is precisely Karin's language, the name for the Ronald McDonald House that emerges from her own "cognitive process." It is not "Richard Powers" taking a "cheap shot."

This is not quite like assuming that when Satan in Paradise Lost declares "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n" he's speaking for Milton, but it's not that far removed. A character's words don't literally need to be enclosed in quotation marks for them to be taken as such. Milton isn't advocating rebellion against God, and Richard Powers isn't mocking good works.

I have to think that Patrick's response to Powers's mode of narration flows from one of two unexamined assumptions about third-person narrators. One is that such narrators are always ominiscient, "point of view" per se being restricted to portrayed characters who also act as narrators. If the narrative voice doesn't belong to such a character, the temptation is to attribute the voice to the author, but of course sometimes this voice is merely tracking the characters' own perceptions. A true omniscient narrator in effect becomes a character in the story he/she is relating (as in the novels of Dickens or Henry Fielding); the third-person restricted or central-consciousness narrator is attempting to substitute for the character's voice, sinking into the "sensibility" of the character (as Powers also puts it) and attempting, at least, to erase his/her own traces.

The other assumptions is that in depicting the "consciousness" of characters, the narrator (as the author's stand-in) is projecting the consciousness of the writer, the characters becoming merely convenient excuses for the writer to engage in commentary and speculation about a whole range of "ideas." (This seems to be Patrick's major complaint about Powers, that he is unable to conjure up a "mindset" separate from his own.) Such a misapprehension is perhaps especially acute when the character in question is presumed to be more or less autobiographical, but even characters not immediately associated with the writer him/herself are, if Zadie Smith is to be believed, mostly an opportunity for the author to indulge in "the attempted revelation of [an] elusive, multifaceted self"--that is, his or her own "selfhood," the "development" of which is central to the act of writing. Thus, in third-person narratives, it becomes easier to take the characters as either mouthpieces for the author's rhetoric or the "expression" of the author's inmost being.

In either case, the aesthetic rationale for the development of modernist-era "psychological realism"--to extend realism to the reality of consciousness, to explore the way perception of reality shapes our understanding of it--essentially drops out. The merging of narration with consciousness has become invisible, now just the default approach of any narrative not related in the first-person, just the currently established strategy allowing the author/narrator to "say something." In my opinion, Richard Powers in The Echo Maker is attempting to retain something of the experimentation of modernist psychological realism--or at least its goal--but as I indicated in my post on the novel, its lackluster execution in this book is for me another signal that the technique has become increasingly shopworn.

Among other things, the reflexive use of the central consciousness narrator has made it more difficult to cultivate and identify style in the writing of fiction. Powers is still a sufficiently distinctive stylist that he is able to overcome to some extent the limitations of the strategy, but even in The Echo Maker the signature Powers style with its alliterations and startling figures and achieved rhythms is more restrained than usual. And in most ordinary literary fiction the strategy has become simply mind-numbing. (For a more thorough discussion of this problem, see this post.)

Although he is increasingly reviled these days for his purported stylistic preciosity, John Updike remains a writer I am able to read with pleasure because he successfully avoids inflicting such damage. Most of his novels are conventionally related in the third-person, but his language typically exeeds that which his characters are capable of summoning, as in this passage from Villages (2004):

After Owen had left it behind, his original village seemed an innocent, precious place, but it did not strike him as that while he lived there. It was the world, with a fathomless past and boundaries that were over the horizon. There were snakes in the grass and in piles of rocks warmed by the sun. Sex and religion had distinct, ancient odors, familes perched like shaky nests on tangled twigs of previous history; and death could pounce in the middle of the night. . . .

Regular readers of Updike's work would no doubt find this recognizably Updikean. It draws on Owen's mental storehouse of memories and images, but does not dwell in his immediate awareness. It creates writing out of that storehouse. It moves in and out of Owen's awareness, weaving a style out of the character's thought processes plus a something else the writer brings in addition to plumbing those processes. A way with words that is a more worthy focus of our attention than what the writer allegedly thinks of the Ronald McDonald House.

A Raging Storm

I share Scott Esposito's enthusiasm for Heather McGowan's The Duchess of Nothing, although I don't exactly agree with his analysis of the novel's narrative strategy:

The premise of Heather McGowan's "Duchess of Nothing" seemingly is not the most promising material for a novel, yet McGowan has fashioned an engrossing, entertaining book. She accomplishes this not through plot but instead through a stream-of-consciousness narration that beautifully characterizes her unnamed protagonist in in a voice that is by turns tragic, farcical, pathetic, poignant and hilarious.

Later in his review Scott echoes this claim about "stream-of-consciousness narration," suggesting that McGowan presents us with an "unadorned reality filtered through an unstable mind." But The Duchess of Nothing is not really a "stream-of-consciousness" novel, at least not as the term has been used in the critical discussion of this technique that has accumulated since its introduction by novelists such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson. In the work of these writers, stream-of-consciousness is a variant on, an intensification of, third-person narration. It is more or less the culmination of the movement toward psychological realism in fiction, which might be said to have begun--at least in English language fiction--with Henry James's use of the third-person "central consciousness" approach. James's fiction helped to bring about the transformation of the omniscient narrator--knows all, sees all--into the much more limited narrator essentially restricted to the vantage point of the character whose experience is being related. But the narrator is still of the third-person variety, originating from outside that experience and telling us the story on the characters' behalf.

Stream-of-consciousness takes this a step farther and attempts to provide a window of sorts on a character's experiences as they are being processed through that character's mind. Such narration is frequently fragmentary and discontinuous, in an attempt to mimic the way such processing actually occurs, or at least to mimic it as closely as written language is able to do so--it is, like everything else in fiction, ultimately an illusion created through prose. If reality ultimately exists in the mind of the beholder, then the stream-of-consciousness method is an effort to have fiction reflect what is really real.

The Duchess of Nothing is a first-person narrative, so, however much we are made to view the world through the constructions of its protagonist, it can't really be said to consist of her stream of consciousness. While I certainly agree that McGowan portrays this character through "a voice that is by turns tragic, farcical, pathetic, poignant and hilarious," it is a voice, a garrulous and idiosyncratic one, in fact, a voice that in many ways works in a manner that precisely reverses the effect created by the stream-of-consciousness strategy:

Across the cafe Toby stands at the coffee machine gazing into a silver jug. His lips move, to some terrifying soliloquy, I imagine. Behind him well-dressed citizens sip their coffees, quietly content being Italian. If you could understand the strength it takes to sit here quietly, I tell the boy, If I had the power to describe how it feels to do exactly the opposite of what I'd like. I wish you could see the storm that rages beneath my surface. I was never meant to sit quietly, I tell the boy, This sitting quietly was never my idea. I flick my skirt idly, exposing my knee. It stares up at me, a hilly rebuke. I want to leave everything behind as soon as it is a minute past new. Every night after supper I'd like to drop the plate I'm washing, turn, never see any of it again. And yet I remain. I swallow my coffee, I remain.

Although it is Toby who is described as engaged in "some terrifying soliloquy," The Duchess of Nothing itself is an extended soliloquy, its narrator's overflowing monologue interrupted only occasionally by a word or two from "the boy" (her sole companion through most of the book). The narrator may feel there is a storm "raging" inside her, but it's really the storm of words she releases that manifests her inability to "sit quietly," her desire to "leave everything behind as soon as it is a minute past new." Whereas stream-of-consciousness tries to direct our attention to the internal drama unfolding in human consciousness, the narrative strategy in this novel externalizes everything, articulates explicitly in the narrator's own language what in s-o-c would remain half-formed and implicit. It's as if the narrator literally can't resist translating into comprehensible speech every thought that comes into her head.

In his review of the novel, Richard Eder accurately notes the protagonist's "grandiloquent self-proclamation," but I cannot agree with Eder that she is an example of an "unreliable narrator." Eder believes that her reticence in fully disclosing the particulars of her past (or even of her present arrangement with "Edmund," brother of "the boy") creates an incompleteness of context that suggests willful manipulation on the narrator's part. While it is true that the novel is somewhat short on expository detail, I would argue that this is simply the consequence of the narrative method McGowan has chosen and to which she remains faithful: no "infodumps" if that would make the narrative voice ring false. I would argue further that it is this method that otherwise invokes the somewhat misshapen world and off-kilter perspective that, to me, are a large part of this novel's appeal. For the narrator to be "unreliable," we would have to believe she is deliberately presenting us with a false account of herself, her actions, and her background (and that we would be able to tell, ultimately, that the account is false), but that she is in effect working out as she goes what she thinks about her situation does not, in my view, make her unreliable. It makes her, as Scott puts it, "by turns tragic, farcical, pathetic, poignant and hilarious."

Eder is ultimately rather contemptuous of "the woman," as he chooses to call her. She is "pitiable," guilty of "track-covering, the shame that flickers beneath the arrogance." She has a "skewed and inflated vision of herself and her life." She is "cold." And indeed the narrator does seem frustrated with her situation, unable to square her sense of her own worth with the increasingly desperate circumstances in which she finds herself. She is certainly impulsive. More than anything, however, she is instinctively unconventional and incapable of settling for "normality"--confronting the possibility of accepting a normal life at the novel's conclusion, she instead lights out for the territory: "Then I go out once more, slamming the door behind me. I like the sound so much, I open the door and slam it shut several times." I suppose one could feel contempt for a woman who doesn't behave as she ought, who turns her back so decisively on domestic bliss, but I just find her a very interesting character quite unlike most protagonists of most literary fiction. Both she and The Duchess of Nothing itself are much more convincingly "transgressive" of established norms--of female behavior and of conventional "psychological realism"--than other novels sometimes accorded that label. In short: Anyone interested in a refreshingly different kind of reading experience should read this book.

Many Families Like the Ziskinds

Dara Horn's The World to Come begins with these two paragraphs:

There used to be many families like the Ziskinds, families where each person always knew that his life was more than his alone. Families like that still exist, but because there are so few of them, they have become insular, isolated, their sentiment that the family is the center of the universe broadened to imply that nothing outside the family is worth anything. If you are from one of these families, you believe this, and you always will.

Lately it had begun to seem to Benjamin Ziskind that the entire world was dead, that he was a citizen of a necropolis. While his parents were living, Ben had thought about them only when it made sense to think about them, when he was talking to them, or talking about them, or planning something involving them. But now they were always here, reminding him of their presence at every moment. He saw them in the streets, always from behind, or turning a corner, his father sitting in the bright yellow taxi next to hs, shifting in his seat as the cab screeched away in the opposite direction, his mother--dead six months now, thought it felt like one long night--hurrying along the sidewalk on a Sunday morning, turning into a store just when Ben had come close enough to see her face. It was a relief that Ben could close his office door.

No doubt this seems thoroughly unexceptional to most readers of fiction (which is actually one of the problems with Horn's novel), an expository passage that begins to acquaint us with the themes the book will explore and introduces us to the character whose present actions and experiences provide the hinge by which the rest of the novel moves. But that we have become accustomed to this kind of discourse, all but take it for granted, suggests it has hardened into a convention we simply accept as the strategy appropiate for a certain type of third-person narrative, which itself has become more or less a default setting for our sense of what narrative discourse should be like. I would submit that this strategy has outlived its usefulness and often inhibits the discovery of fresh, genre-expanding aesthetic approaches to fiction, even approaches to the representation of consciousness, which in a novel like The World to Come is carried out in such a perfunctory way that it becomes harder to appreciate some of the novel's other virtues.

Although the reader's attention is first of all directed by the Tolstoy-like opening to what presumably will be the novel's overarching theme, the encompassing context within which the story (as it turns out, multiple and intertwining stories) will proceed. To me, the real work being done by this paragraph is in the way it settles the reader into the novel's discursively shaped world, begins to evoke a particular kind of relationship between narrator and character. Are these generalizations about "family" being offered by a hovering, all-knowing narrator, or have they been filtered through the consciousness and specific experiences of Benjamin Ziskind? The second paragraph confirms that it is the latter, and we are thereafter comfortably placed as readers inside Benjamin's awareness (and, later, several other characters' awareness) and way of thinking about things.

I say "comfortably" because by now this mode of psychological realism, by which the depicted world in a work of fiction comes to us not through omniscient description but through the perception of that fiction's characters ("Lately it had begun to seem to Benjamin Ziskind that the entire world was dead"), has become so thoroughly familiar that it acts as a kind of narrative machine, spinning out sundry versions of what Henry James called third-person "central consciousness" stories in what has admittedly become a very efficient manner. In order to provide a little variety in what is otherwise a rather uniform approach, one can include multiple or alternating centers of consciousness, as Horn does in The World to Come, but even here readers are ultimately encouraged to regard the storytelling as more or less transparent, if anchored in a particular character's version of reality, and the style as unintrusive, if sometimes decorated with a suitable figurative flourish. It is precisley the expecation that the reader will be satisfied with this mechanical, mass-produced variety of storytelling that makes me unable to read a book like The World to Come with much enthusiasm, even though I can acknowledge that Dara Horn does have some narrative imagination and that the novel weaves together its various strands--which include both invented characters and real historical figures, occurences in the present interlaced with episodes from the past--with admirable skill.

In his Editor's Note to the latest issue of Agni, Sven Birkerts describes the mindset with which he approaches the submissions the magazine receives:

Basically—short version—a work of prose (or poetry) can no longer assume continuity, not as it could in former times. It cannot begin, or unfold, in a way that assumes a basic condition of business as usual. The world is no longer everything we thought was the case, and the writing needs to embody this—through sentence rhythm, tone, camera placement, or some other strategic move that signals that no tired assumptions remain in place. This writing must, in effect, create its own world and terms from the threshold, coming at us from a full creative effort of imagination and not by using the old world as a prop. Now, this last is a tricky assertion and it will be very hard to make clear, not to mention binding. I don’t mean for a moment that the world as we know it cannot be invoked, or used, or dissected. Of course it can. But it cannot be taken simply on faith, as unproblematic, treated as a natural signifier; nor can it be cashed in as if it were a treasury bond from the literature of a former era.

I agree entirely with Birkerts, and if I were an editor beginning to read The World to Come for potential publication, I would almost immediately conclude that it "assumes a basic condition of business as usual," that numerous "tired assumptions remain in place," that while the novel does attempt to "create its own world," this attempt comes not from the "threshold," but from a place where fiction is regarded as a set of fixed assumptions and techniques from which is chosen the one that will most efficaciously carry the narrative burden to be placed on it. In this case, Horn doesn't so much lean on the "literature of a former era" (she actually takes this as part of her subject, and her examination of Jewish artistic/literary traditions is one of the more compelling aspects of the novel) as on this set of presently-established conventions, themselves a product of "modern" storytelling practices but, as I have been contending, now urgently in need of reexamination. In invoking the "world to come," Horn's novel is, of course, endeavoring to capture something essential about this world, about our longings and frustrations, but it is impossible to read such passages as the one quoted above without thinking that this is at odds with its very prosaic language and method of character creation, which do depend on customary "props."

As if the author herself recognizes that this method lacks dynamism, especially when confined to a single character over the course of an entire narrative, she presents us with multiple characters and their interconnecting stories and makes of the larger narrative of which these are a part a kind of mystery tale embedded in recent history. These are Dara Horn's efforts to embody a "full creative effort of imagination." The result is entertaining enough, at least when I am able to ignore the listless "sentence rhythms" created by Horn's adherence to the central consciousness-style of narrative exposition. (And all too many other novels require that I similarly put aside any expectation of stylistic vigor, narrative innovation, or formal invention, novels that aren't even going to manifest to me the intelligence and skill with which Dara Horn shuffles around the conventional elements she has chosen to use, or won't manifest anything more than such skill with the conventional.) But, ultimately, I don't want to put these things aside, and I'm increasingly uncertain why so many writers--especially among "emerging writers"--think its appropriate to ask me to do it. There are far too few original stories and arrestingly portrayed characters around to justify losing interest in new ways of telling them and uncommon means of summoning them up.