Monthly Archives: January 2011

I enjoyed Tove Jansson’s novel The Summer Book very much and flipping it through it just now to prepare to write this post, I realized how much I would like to read it again. It’s a book that works quietly, and I think it’s easy to miss some of its effects on a first read. On a basic level the book is about a young girl Sophia and her grandmother, who live, along with Sophia’s father, on an isolated island in Finland. The fact that I noticed but didn’t ponder enough during the first reading is that Sophia’s mother has recently died. This is obviously hugely important, but the book is so quiet about it:

One time in April there was a full moon, and the sea was covered with ice. Sophia woke up and remembered that they had come back to the island and that she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead. The fire was still burning in the stove, and the flames flickered on the ceiling, where the boots were hung up to dry.

And that’s about all the book has to say on the subject, at least directly. But the signs of the mother’s death are everywhere. One of the first things Sophia says to her grandmother is “When are you going to die?” The grandmother says, “Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours.” Except that it is, because the grandmother is the most important figure in Sophia’s life. Her father lives with them doing some kind of work — the introduction to the book tells me it’s sculpture although I didn’t figure this out on my own — but he’s not much of a presence. A little later Sophia finds a skull, and she and her grandmother hang on to it until at the end of the day, they place it in the forest where the evening light catches it. Suddenly, Sophia starts screaming. There’s no explanation about why she does this, but something about the skull must finally have spoken to her about death.

The whole book works in this understated way. There are beautiful descriptions of the island and the ocean, but we learn about the characters almost solely through their words and actions. Sophia and her grandmother spend much of their days playing, and they take this very seriously. With Sophia, this is what one would expect, but the grandmother is just as serious. In one chapter, the grandmother starts carving animals out of driftwood, and Sophia is curious:

“What is it you’re doing?” Sophia asked.

“I’m playing,” Grandmother said.

Sophia crawled into the magic forest and saw everything her grandmother had done.

“Is it an exhibit?” she asked.

But Grandmother said it had nothing to do with sculpture, sculpture was another thing completely. They started gather bones together along the shore.

Later in the book Sophia and her grandmother explore a nearby island where someone has built a new house and posted a “No Trespassing” sign, an act the grandmother believes is rude and ill-bred. So the two of them trespass and end up getting caught: they flee into the woods behind the house but the owner’s dog finds them, and they are forced to show themselves. Fortunately for them, the owner never asks what they were doing there; instead they all behave as though nothing had happened.

It’s an odd scene, but the whole book is like that: it’s as though the family lives in another world entirely where things are slightly different than they are in this one. It’s not a fantasy world, though. The grandmother is aging and has trouble moving about, Sophia is sometimes bored and lonely, occasionally flying into rages, and the father seems the loneliest and most isolated of them all. When other people enter their world, it rarely goes well. Sophia invites a friend, Berenice, to visit the island, but she hates it there, and nobody is sorry when she leaves.

Nature becomes a character in its own right; the descriptions of landscape and plant life are beautiful, but nature can be threatening as well as scenic. There are swarming insects, dangerous gullies, droughts, and storms. One of the most dramatic chapters tells of the family getting stuck away from home during one of the worst storms anyone can remember. Sophia learns about her place in the world: she had asked for a storm and was pleased to have gotten it, until she realizes that people might die. Her grandmother tells her it’s not her fault, but she doesn’t do it in a reassuring way:

“God and you,” Grandmother repeated angrily. “Why should He listen to you, especially, when maybe ten other people prayed for nice weather? And they did, you can count on that.”

“But I prayed first,” Sophia said. “And you can see for yourself they didn’t get nice weather!”

“God,” Grandmother said. “God has so much to do, He doesn’t have time to listen …”

It’s this relationship I loved best about the book: Sophia and her grandmother obviously love each other, but in a way that is honest, real, and sometimes difficult. The grandmother never talks down to or patronizes Sophia, and Sophia uses her relationship with her grandmother to try to understand what has happened to her and to figure out her place in the world. This relationship and the sharp, clear, direct style of Jansson’s writing make the book memorable.

Becky mentioned a while back that she enjoyed Molly Fox’s Birthday by Dierdre Madden, so I picked it up from the library and gave it a try myself and found that I enjoyed it very much too. The novel has a structure that I like: it takes place over the course of one day, with frequent jumps back in time to describe scenes from the past. The title character, Molly Fox, doesn’t appear at all, except in a phone conversation. Instead, the novel is narrated by her friend, an unnamed woman who is a playwright. Molly is an actress, and the two met while preparing to stage a production of the narrator’s first play with Molly in the starring role. It’s a play that will make both their reputations and send them off into successful careers.

But all that happens far back in the novel’s past; in the present tense, the two women are a older (it’s Molly’s 40th birthday, or at least we presume so; she is secretive about her age, as she believes actresses need to be). The narrator is living temporarily in Molly’s house in Dublin while Molly is traveling, and she is trying to write her next play. Over the course of the day, she struggles with her writing, takes a walk into town, and unexpectedly meets an old friend for dinner. It seems like a quiet day on the outside, but all the drama is of the interior sort: the narrator spends her day thinking about her art and her friendships and also about how she and others have been shaped by their pasts.

The third main character is Andrew, the unexpected dinner guest, and a man the narrator has known since their university days when they used to take study breaks together. Andrew and Molly both have difficult relationships with their families. Andrew is passionately devoted to the arts but comes from a family indifferent to them, and his brother died a violent death at a young age. Molly’s mother abandoned her while Molly was still a child, and her brother has struggled with severe depression his entire life.

As the narrator tells these stories and thinks about her two friends, she wonders just how well she really knows them. Both of them can be secretive and reserved, but this doesn’t diminish her love or her sense of closeness to them. The book is very much about the mystery of friendship, how experience can bring people together in deeply loyal relationships, even when there is much about each other they don’t know, and also how friendships can arise unexpectedly. When Molly develops a close friendship with the narrator’s brother, Tom, the narrator has to reevaluate her understanding of both of them, as well as deal with feelings of jealousy.

The novel is also about art, its mystery and its transformative capability. The narrator spends a lot of time thinking about Molly’s acting; she is shy in regular life, but on stage, she becomes a different person entirely. There is something about the artificial quality of the theater that allows her to capture the feeling of reality, and something about the fleetingness of a play that makes seeing her act a particularly intense experience. And then there’s Andrew, whose entire life is shaped by art; he is an art historian who has begun to host successful television programs where he explains the meaning of art to his audience. There is something about his personality that works well in this medium; he is able to communicate a genuine passion for his subject. To the narrator, Andrew is all about artifice — he doesn’t seem to care about nature at all, and would prefer to look at paintings of a landscape than the landscape itself. But the “artificial” world of art is his world, and he lives comfortably in it. It’s sometimes unclear, the book argues, what is artifice and what’s real, but somehow they are inextricably combined.

This is, obviously, a thoughtful book, slow-paced but absorbing. If you like thinking about relationships and about the meaning of art, and if you like following the train of someone else’s thoughts as they try to sum up a life, then I think you will enjoy this book.

It’s been a while since I finished Bohumil Hrabal’s novel Too Loud a Solitude, but I want to write something about it because it was such an odd, wonderful little book (98 pages). It took me a while to warm up to it, actually; I wasn’t in the mood for something as spare and quirky as this book is, but it ended up winning me over.

It’s about a man, Hanta, who lives in Prague and works as a trash compactor, specifically a wastepaper compactor, and he rescues books from the trash to take home and read. He has towering stacks of books at home, and he sleeps in fear that they will fall and crush him. His education has been reading these books, and what an education it’s been: he finds all kinds of wonderful things, books by Seneca, Kant, Erasmus, Goethe, and Nietzsche, reproductions of Van Gogh and Gauguin paintings, and lots of other treasures.

Hanta is a quiet and isolated man; most of his time is spent at work, and he works overtime in order to make up for his slowness: he doesn’t hurry through his job, but instead takes his time to appreciate the books that come his way. He’s so absorbed in his work, in fact, that he dreams about retiring only to buy a paper crusher so he can do his work at home. He occasionally wanders the streets of Prague and he sometimes gets visitors, most often his boss who is forever furious at him for not working fast enough, but most of his time he spends in the dim, enclosed setting cooped up with his machine. Early on in his career, he would get upset when people threw away good books and was particularly furious over the destruction of the Royal Prussian Library after World War II, but as time goes on, he becomes resigned, or perhaps numb, to the destruction, and just does what he can to save as many books as possible.

The novel (or novella, really) is written in first person, and the voice is memorable. It’s simple and poetic; at times the voice makes you think Hanta is foolish and naive, and at other times, he surprises you with something beautiful and profound. He keeps repeating himself, almost in a sing-song way; many chapters open with the same words:

For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story. For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I’ve come to look like my encyclopedias — and a good three tons of them I’ve compacted over the years. I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to learn over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me.

Hanta’s absolute devotion to his work makes his visit to a new Socialist-run wastepaper compacting business utterly shocking. Here, instead of lovingly observing every book that comes through the machine and rescuing them when possible, the workers are perfectly efficient; not a movement or thought is wasted, and it doesn’t occur to any of the workers to care about a book. The workers there are turned into machines themselves, no more than extensions of the hydraulic press they operate. Hanta knows that his days are numbered; his method of working carefully, lovingly, and, yes, slowly, has never pleased his boss or made him a success, but now it might disappear entirely.

By the end of the novel, Hrabal made me care very much about this strange man so devoted to his work, but even more so to books and the pleasure and wisdom they bring.

I think Scarlett Thomas’s novel PopCo is deeply flawed, but I enjoyed it greatly nonetheless. I think it’s perfectly possible for that to be the case; while I occasionally shook my head at the book’s awkwardness, I stayed interested and engaged the whole time and found the ideas it takes up fascinating. Hobgoblin has told me many times how much he liked Thomas’s most recent novel Our Tragic Universe, and I’m looking forward to reading that one too.

Some of the awkwardness of PopCo is the kind of awkwardness that appeals to me: it spends too much time explaining too many things, it’s obsessed with ideas and technical details at the expense of narrative momentum, and it takes its sweet time getting the plot going. It lurches back and forth between background information and mini-lectures on the one hand and present action on the other.

But, fortunately for me, I found the background information and the mini-lectures interesting. They are about a lot of things, but chiefly about math, codes, and code-breaking. The main character is a youngish woman, Alice, who works for the company PopCo, which makes games and toys for children and teenagers. Alice’s job is to make kits for children on spying, detective work, and code-breaking. She has learned all about codes from her cryptanalyst grandfather, and she has a good grasp of math, gained from her mathematician grandmother. Codes aren’t purely cerebral puzzles for Alice, though; her grandfather gave her a necklace when she was young that contains a code her grandparents expect that will she one day crack.

The novel takes place during a company retreat, one of those team-building affairs intended to energize and inspire workers, although surely they more often do the opposite. Alice enjoys her job, but she doesn’t enjoy the intensity of being in such close contact with her colleagues; she has work friends and makes new ones during the course of the novel, but she’s always been a bit of an outsider. This outsider stance comes partly from her uncertainty about the purpose and value of the company; their marketing practices, in particular, seem suspicious to her. She wonders whether they are doing anything that has any value, and whether she is using her knowledge and creativity for a positive purpose. It’s not just her company she’s uncertain about; she wonders about a society that seems to care only for making money at the expense of honesty and integrity. She’s particularly disturbed by PopCo’s practice of making toys that they sell under a fake brand name, not connected with PopCo at all, to appeal to people wanting to be a little different and to buy from small companies, instead of supporting the big corporations all the time. People have no way of knowing the small company they think they are supporting is really just PopCo under another name.

The book takes us through the work retreat; things happen, but they happen slowly, and the narrative frequently jumps back in time to describe Alice’s childhood. It also stops to explain in depth about mathematical concepts, particularly prime numbers, and to describe various types of codes and how to crack them. I found all this interesting, being a bit of a math person myself, but if you’re not, this might be slow going. It’s the kind of book where characters explain things to each other in long stretches of completely unrealistic dialogue; as far as I know, people don’t really talk to each other that way. I have to say I found the ending pretty unrealistic and awkward as well.

But, I’m still fond of the book. Alice is a great character, and I liked the fact that she knows tons of cool stuff, not just about math and codes, but about a whole range of other things. She’s confident in her knowledge in a way that’s appealing. The book’s discussion of consumerism, marketing, and also the pervasiveness of technology, is interesting as well. At 500 pages, the book is too long for the story it has to tell, but still, they were a fun 500 pages.

I listened to Jennifer Egan’s novel The Keep a couple years ago, and didn’t like it much; I didn’t believe in the characters or the plot, and therefore the whole thing got irritating. I’m glad I gave Jennifer Egan another chance, though, because I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad. This time, I believed in both the characters and plot, and I loved the book’s structure and its narrative energy. It’s one of those books that both tells a good story and leaves you feeling like you understand the world just a bit better.

The story is fairly complicated, not because it has a complex plot, but because it tells the stories of a lot of different people. We start with one of the main characters, Sasha, in a therapy session where she discusses her habit of stealing things, and then the next chapter introduces us to Bennie, a music industry executive who is visiting a band to see if his company should still represent them. Sasha is Bennie’s assistant and has been for many years. At one point, Bennie makes a pass at Sasha, but she wisely turns him down, and their relationship stays close in the way you can be close to someone you work with without really knowing much about that person at all.

From there, the chapters skip around in time and shift focus on to the people important in Sasha’s and Bennie’s lives. The two main characters never disappear, but they are sometimes on the sidelines as we learn about, say, the people Bennie went to high school with, Bennie’s wife and her life story, the story of the woman Bennie’s wife worked for, the story of the man Bennie’s high school friend ran away with, the story of a man Sasha had a brief fling with, and others. The point of view shifts from chapter to chapter, sometimes in third person, sometimes in first, and once in second. One chapter consists of a article draft written by one of the characters, and one long chapter consists of a journal created by one of the characters using PowerPoint.

If you had asked me before reading this book what I thought about the fictional possibilities of PowerPoint, I would have laughed in your face (politely, of course!). But Egan pulls it off, and this is one of the book’s most moving sections. There’s something about the small number of words on each page and the way those words are strategically arranged that makes some of the pages feel poetic and causes the emotions expressed to come through powerfully.

What it all adds up to is a picture of interlocking worlds, that of the music business in New York City, teenage life in California, suburban enclaves in Westchester, a safari in Africa, teenage prostitutes in Naples, Italy, all connected by people who know each other or have affected each other’s lives in some way. There is a lot going on in the book, but Egan keeps control of the material, partly through the connections amongst all the characters, but also through the energy and insight of the book as a whole. The moods of the different sections vary — there is humor, absurdity, darkness, hope, sadness — but there is a compassion for the characters and an excitement about life that runs through the whole. Egan manages to strike the right notes right up until the end.

I’m not sure what I think about the book’s title, though. We find out in the book that “the goon squad” refers to time, as in “time’s a goon,” which makes sense and fits the book exactly right. But I didn’t know what “goon squad” meant until I read the book, and up until that point I thought it was pretty silly. I hope the title doesn’t push anybody away from reading what really is a great book.

A while ago I read and enjoyed a collection of essays on fiction by Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House, so when the publisher offered me a copy of his latest collection of short stories, Gryphon, I was happy to say yes. I don’t remember a whole lot about the essay collection, except that Baxter argued against the kind of short story that ends in an epiphany where the main character learns a lesson or changes dramatically. He wanted stories that were more true to life and to the way things actually happen to real people. The stories in Gryphon are good examples of what Baxter was calling for; they are quiet stories about people you or I might know who are in familiar situations and go through recognizable experiences. The characters experience change, and perhaps they learn something, if only because something new has happened to them, but the changes are small. The stories capture a quiet kind of reality, which is matched by Baxter’s calmly straightforward, carefully detailed writing.

The stories cover a lot of emotional territory, describing, for example, a woman visiting her husband in a nursing home on their fifty-second anniversary, a man driving drunk through a snow storm to rescue his estranged fiancée when her car breaks down, a Swedish man visiting Detroit and learning the hard way what to expect from dangerous American cities. Other stories tell about a substitute teacher surprising her class with her very strange lesson plans (the title story), a man finding a drawing of a building with the caption “The next building I plan to bomb,” and a boy who follows his brother and his brother’s girlfriend out onto a frozen lake to see the car in the water under the clear ice.

The characters, situations, and experiences are varied, but in each case, Baxter captures the thoughts and feelings of the characters perfectly. His portraits of his characters are so accurate and convincing that he creates the sense of a world much larger than the one contained in the story. It’s like he describes one small slice of his fictional world so well that we can strongly sense the presence of the rest. The narrative voice is consistently understanding and compassionate throughout; there is no sense of anyone judging the characters who are frequently, although not always, troubled, uncertain, and confused. Baxter seems to want to help us understand these characters in order to understand humanity a little better.

These are “new and selected stories,” which means they date from the publication of Baxter’s first story collection in 1984 up to the present. Remarkably, the narrative voice remains much the same over that span of time, and that is the book’s major weakness: the collection contains 23 stories, and by the time I finished all of them, I was longing for something a little different. I would have welcomed a little more drama or a punchier narrative voice. The final story starts to head into different territory; here, a man travels to the wilds of northern Minnesota to interview a wealthy businessman and, feeling alienated and angry in the vast mansion, acts out in interesting ways. But this story comes a little too late to vary the mood of the book much.

Still, the stories need not be read all at once, and, taken in isolation, each one is a pleasure to read.