#50: Notes from No Man’s Land, by Eula Biss

This is a collection of essays. The introductory essay is titled “Time and Distance Overcome,” and it begins with some historical notes about the invention of the telephone.

Biss makes the interesting point that it was as much the rapid deployment of infrastructure, in the form of poles and wires, as it was Bell’s actual invention that remade the world so quickly.

Bell's financial backers asked him not to work on his new invention anymore because it seemed too dubious an investment. The idea on which the telephone depended—the idea that every home in the country could be connected with a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart—seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through a wire.

In fact, for a brief period of time there was considerable resistance to the idea of putting up poles everywhere:

By 1889, the New York Times was reporting a “War on Telephone Poles.” Wherever telephone companies erected poles, homeowners and business owners were sawing them down, or defending their sidewalks with rifles. Property owners in Red Bank, New Jersey, threatened to tar and feather the workers putting up telephone poles. A judge found that a man who had cut down a pole because it was “obnoxious” was not guilty of malicious mischief. Telephone poles, newspaper editorials complained, were an urban blight. The poles carried a wire for each telephone— sometimes hundreds of wires. There were also telegraph wires, power lines, and trolley cables. The sky was netted with wires.

But the resistance was brief, if spirited. The price for overcoming time and distance was poles and wires everywhere.

In a note at the back of the book, Biss tells us how she came by her information about telephones and poles in the 1880s:

I began my research for this essay by searching for every instance of the phrase “telephone pole” in the New York Times from 1880 to 1920, which resulted in 370 articles.

So here we are embarked on an essay about how technology changed the world. That’s a familiar theme and one that’s easy to cozy up to. But then some of Biss’s short factual paragraphs begin to weave in a very different kind of theme:

In 1898, in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And in Holdenville, Oklahoma, where the hanged man was “riddled with bullets.” In Danville, Illinois, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole, cut down, burned, shot, and stoned with bricks. A black man was hung from a telephone pole in Belleville, Illinois, where a fire was set at the base of the pole and the man was cut down half alive, covered in coal oil, and burned. While his body was burning, the mob beat it with clubs and cut it to pieces.

A part of me thought: “Are we to be scolded now?” Was Biss deliberately ambushing unsuspecting readers by trying to make us feel guilty after such an innocent beginning? Turns out, in her search for articles about telephone poles she found an intersecting theme—lynching. Here is how the paragraph describing her research methodology continues:

I was planning to write an essay about telephone poles and telephones, not lynchings, but after reading an article headlined “Colored Scoundrel Lynched,” and then another headlined “Mississippi Negro Lynched” and then another headlined “Texas Negro Lynched,” I searched for every instance of the word “lynched” in the New York Times from 1880 to 1920, which resulted in 2,354 articles.

The connection is that telephone poles proved convenient for lynchings. Or maybe it’s just that the juxtaposition of technology and brutality is itself incongruous. The second time I read this essay, I knew what was coming, and I think I was able to see Biss’s point, or at least to appreciate the significance of the unexpected juxtaposition of “America the technological dynamo” with “America, the country that was routinely and blithely lynching its own citizens until a couple of generations ago.” In the standard history of our country we tend to like to keep such things separated.

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This essay, like many in No Man’s Land, is not a static argument or exposition, it is a device, an arrangement of words designed to recreate the evolution of the author’s thought, or to baffle and surprise the reader just enough to make him or her ask—“Why are these things together?” At first I wasn’t sure I liked Biss’s method. I liked her moral sensibility, but I wasn’t always sure mine was as finely tuned as her’s. Would her exquisite zen gardens of facts and meditations just look like a bunch of rocks to me?

= = = =

But I grew to appreciate Biss’s method, which is quite consistent across the essays in this book. She has a kind of recipe, a set of ingredients that she likes to mix in different ways. The first ingredient is her personal history—during the course of the book we learn that she grew up in the northeast, moved to New York City after college, then moved from there to San Diego, on to Iowa City, and finally to a suburb of Chicago. Along the way Biss tries on and eventually discards one potential life, one set of assumptions about herself and the world, after another.

The second ingredient is the details that Biss gives us about her somewhat unconventional family and upbringing:

My mother was thirty-four when she left her husband, who was the father of her four children. She moved into a duplex with a poet and was initiated into the Yoruba tradition, a West African religion. A few years later, she left the poet and moved to a farmhouse with an African drummer from the Bronx.

Race is a major theme for Biss, and her personal history—she also shared an apartment for a year with a first cousin who is half black—certainly gives her a personal investment in this theme. As Biss says,

What exactly it means to be white seems to elude no one as fully as it eludes those of us who are white.

So ingredient one is her personal experience, and ingredient two is her rather unconventional family and its contribution to her makeup. Ingredient three is the surprising things she is able to excavate about the history of the United States. One of my favorite essays in the book is titled “Back to Buxton.” In this essay, Biss describes moving to Iowa City (presumably because of the writing program) and thinking she had finally found a place where she felt like she belonged:

On the evening of my first day in Iowa, in a humid darkness full of the purring of cicadas, I finally went down to the river, where I had been waiting to go all day, ever since I first saw the water from the car as I drove into town that afternoon. When I stepped onto the bridge across the Iowa River and stood looking out across the water, I knew I was home. I was wrong about that, as it turns out.

Biss initially appreciates the anonymity her white skin confers in Iowa. But then she comes to realize, “[i]n the end I suffered not for lack of anonymity, but for lack of a community to which I belonged in some essential way.” She cites sources on the concept of community in America, how the necessary interdependence of pre-industrial communities planted across the continent gradually gave way to “joining things” in the form of clubs, churches, and societies in the late 19th century. Then she tells about Buxton, a company mining town in Iowa where blacks and whites managed to coexist harmoniously for a couple of decades.

Biss cites a report from the 1980s that investigated the “legend” of Buxton and determined that “yes, Buxton had been a utopia.” Buxton was a company mining town, but it was untypical because the company in question, Consolidated Coal, made no effort in this case to play one ethnic group off against another, standard protocol for keeping wage demands in check. They brought in white people, and they brought in black people. How and why it happened the way it did is not clear, but what might have seemed at the time quite normal to the residents of Buxton seems quite fantastic in retrospect:

Buxton was built in 1900, and it was a ghost town by 1920, but it continues on in books and songs and folklore and public-television documentaries as a myth and a specter and, as I came to see it, as a kind of promise.

In America, we take racial strife almost as a given, but Biss suggests that there is nothing spontaneous or inevitable about it. And yet, in America, nothing seems quite so elusive as a sense of community. More and more, we define ourselves in ways that separate us from other people. “Good fences make good neighbors,” said Robert Frost. But then he also said “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.”

= = = =

No Man’s Land is very much a young person’s book—very earnest and serious. But it is also an eloquent and honest book, written with art, skill, and intelligence.

#49 The Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante

Elena Greco is an Italian woman who was born in Naples in 1944. (“Neapolitan” means “of Naples.”) As a girl, she lives in a shabby tenement in an outlying district of the city. Families in her neighborhood are identified by their trade: the Greco’s are “the porter’s family”; the Cerullo’s are “the shoemaker’s family”; and the Peluso’s are “the carpenter’s family.” Children stay in school for as long as they distinguish themselves, which for most is only a few years. Then they take to the family trade (if they are boys) or marry (if they are girls). Elena Greco continues to distinguish herself and is allowed to attend high school and then to go away to college in Pisa. She becomes engaged to the scion of a family with academic and publishing credentials, writes and publishes a book, and becomes a success. She goes on to publish many more books, both fiction and nonfiction.

= = = =

Elena Ferrante is an Italian woman who was born in Naples, probably some time after 1944. We know little of her life except that she has published many books and become a success. The Neapolitan Novels is her magnum opus, and Elena Greco is her fictional creation. Elena Ferrante is provisionally real—she has chosen not to reveal her real name, and what little we know of her cannot be verified. So what we have here is an unknown author, who has created a provisionally real avatar named Elena Ferrante, also an author, who has written a series of books about a third author named Elena Greco.

If this is all starting to sound rather metafictional, there is nothing insubstantial or notional about the 1600 or so pages that make up the four Neapolitan novels. They present a set of lives lived that is as real seeming and as emotionally compelling as anything I’ve read in a long while. There are four volumes—My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child—but they are really one book.

I used to live in New York City, not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the edge of Central Park. Every so often I would skip work and walk over and spend a few hours in the museum. Once I went after a few inches of snow had fallen overnight, and the pure white light coming in the windows of the museum gave everything a kind of religious radiance. The thing about the Met is that it’s just too gigantic for anyone to take in during a single visit. There are galleries and there are wings, there are paintings and sculptures, and there are even entire buildings that have been crated up and then reassembled inside that museum. The Met will exhaust you, even if you spend only the minute or two in front of each painting that museum decorum requires.

I suppose it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that the wonders of The Neapolitan Novels rival those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but this is my way of letting you know that there is no way I can hope to catalog all the things that Elena Ferrante has done well in this mega-book. So I’m going to focus on two things that seemed especially significant to me.

= = = =

First is Ferrante’s psychological realism. There are two main characters in the story, Elena Greco and her childhood friend Rafaella Cerullo (called Lila), but there are several other prominent characters and then a whole gallery of lesser characters. This book is as populated as War and Peace, and in much the same way, with interlinking extended families. Elena Greco is the first-person narrator and her world is so detailed and intense that, as we’re reading, we become Elena. Her insecurities are our insecurities; her triumphs our triumphs. Never mind that she’s female and I’m male, I barely exist while I’m reading these books. It’s virtual reality in the most traditional sense possible. To take a random example: Elena marries Pietro Airota, the son of two distinguished academics who are well connected in the publishing world. Pietro becomes a university professor and is working on a book. He has intelligence, but he also has a kind of dull, mulish obstinacy, in contrast to his mercurial sister Mariarosa. He courts Elena shyly, without a great deal of heat. I was suspecting that he might turn out to be gay. They marry, and he gives her a solid, upper-middle-class respectability; they move to Florence, where he joins the faculty of the university, and they have two children, daughters. When Elena leaves Pietro after several years of marriage for another man we wonder what he will do—we don’t know at first, but as we continue reading we find out that he does exactly what such a character would inevitably do, which is to rant and rage for a while, make a dramatic scene, allude to suicide, but then finally accept his fate stoically. But the “inevitability” of this outcome is only apparent after the fact. As events unfold, our ability to predict what will happen is about as good as our ability to predict how people will react to such events in the real world. Ferrante depicts people and events as well as any author I’ve ever read. You simply can’t hold the idea in your head that what transpires is “made up.” Is this writer really skilled enough to create such an abundance of detail and incident out of her head? Or is it just because we can never know the extent to which she has borrowed from her own life that we are so conscious of the sheer weight of reality the book conveys?

Of course, as we ponder such things, it is quite entertaining to watch Elena throw a bomb (metaphorically speaking) into what had seemed a solid, prosperous existence. Nobody is spared and nothing is easy. The husband’s parents turn against her in their subtle, mandarin way, with the children as emotional hostages. The sister-in-law maintains her connection to Elena for while, but then becomes involved in her own struggles. The world changes around Ferrante’s characters, and they change too, except that they remain the same people. The daughters grow up through the next several hundred page and turn out to be people we could never have anticipated—just the way our friends’ children do. And yet they could not have turned out to be anybody other than who they are.

And I’m not even going to talk about Nino Sarratore, the Byronic cad that Elena leaves Pietro for. Ah, Nino, you scoundrel.

Book clubs will critique the decisions, qualities, and failings of the various characters. That’s how I assume most book clubs operate, and when authors fails to deliver on such expectations, people find books disappointing. I wouldn’t disdain the book club perspective—I could offer my own opinions about how various characters behave. In fact, I felt a little disoriented when I came to the end of the last volume and realized I’d have to part ways with this society.

So this book is like one of those large, intricate, and amazingly interesting paintings that you come across from time to time in a museum. You know that it’s artificial, but you appreciate that there is enough going on in a single square foot of the billboard-sized canvas to gaze at for hours. In the foreground are children dancing, or a dog hiding under a woman’s skirts; in the distance are mountains with chasms and waterfalls, and in between are roads and houses giving way to towns and fields. Off to one side is the ocean with an armada of ships fighting the wind. It’s an entire 17th century universe in a single picture. That kind of comprehensiveness is one of the pleasures of The Neapolitan Novels.

= = = =

But what I liked best about the book is the mystery of the two characters at its center: the narrator Elena and her lifelong friend Lila. We see less of Lila than of Elena, which makes sense because the book is Elena’s account of her own life. But Ferrante never lets the reader forget that Lila is not just a supporting character in a large cast. Reviewers acknowledge this by describing the book in terms such as “one of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship,” or “an intense, forensic exploration of the friendship between Lila and … Elena.” But that word—friendship—is so inadequate to describe the relationship at the core of this book. Lila is as much Elena's nemesis as she is her friend.

The first thing we learn about Lila in the first volume is the last thing that Elena knows about her—before Elena begins to tell us the story of their lives, she tells us that Lila has disappeared at the age of 66, vanished from her home in Naples after removing every trace of her existence from that home. Elena learns this from Lila’s son, Rino.

"It’s been at least three decades since she told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means. She never had in mind any sort of flight, a change in identity, the dream of making a new life somewhere else. And she never thought of suicide, repulsed by the idea that Rino would have anything to do with her body, and be forced to attend to the details. She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to not leave so much as a hair anywhere in this world."

Whatever creative impulse drives Elena Greco to unspool her world in words, there is a counterforce, personified by Lila, that wants to conceal or erase the details. She wants to un-write The Neapolitan Novels.

As a precocious child, Lila does actually write a bit of a story, a fable she calls “The Blue Fairy,” which to Elena demonstrates that Lila possesses a creative power that she can never hope to equal. But while Elena pursues her education and becomes a writer, Lila’s family will not allow her to continue past elementary school, and thereafter she becomes a kind of dark force, more significant for what she will not do (write), and for what she will not reveal about herself and what she knows. She is a fallen angel, an occult force. The word “occult” in fact is from a Latin word meaning to hide or conceal.

Elena and Lila are like a binary star system, where Elena shines brightly and Lila evolves over time into a kind of narrative black hole. As with such an astronomical pair, we only deduce the presence of the invisible one by its effect upon the visible one. The story is Elena’s but Lila is a catalyst, a refutation of the idea of narrative omniscience. Lila’s is the creative power of destruction. At one point she takes a blown-up photograph of her wedding day and enhances it by covering parts of it in black paper:

Then, with that expression of extreme concentration which enabled her to isolate herself from everything around her, she went back to the panel. Before our astonished and, in the cases of some, openly hostile eyes, she cut strips of black paper, with the manual precision she had always possessed, and pinned them here and there to the photograph, asking for my help with slight gestures or quick glances.

I joined in with the devotion that I had felt ever since we were children. Those moments were thrilling, it was a pleasure to be beside her, slipping inside her intentions, to the point of anticipating her. I felt that she was seeing something that wasn't there, and that she was struggling to make us see it, too. I was suddenly happy, feeling the intensity that invested her, that flowed through her fingers as they grasped the scissors, as they pinned the black paper.

Lila adds by subtracting, reveals by concealing. It is a thing great artists must master, but one that Elena Greco could never manage on her own.

The reader learns to pay attention to anything Elena Ferrante has to say about Lila, because much of what she says is meaningful on both a narrative and a metaphysical level. Lila’s life is harder and stranger than Elena Greco’s. She is bitter and often rude, yet she has a mysterious power over many of the characters in the book. Elena says:

I felt all the fascination of the way Lila governed the imagination of others or set it free, at will, with just a few words: that speaking, stopping, letting images and emotions go without adding anything else. I’m wrong, I said to myself in confusion, to write as I’ve done until now, recording everything I know. I should write the way she speaks, leave abysses, construct bridges and not finish them, force the reader to establish the flow…

But if Elena Greco cannot write like that, Elena Ferrante can. There is so much more that could be said about how Lila and Elena together, like deities or demiurges in some unknown religion, bring the universe of The Neapolitan Novels into existence. The triumph of this book is that these metaphysical elements never slow or deflect the story, never make it seem like an allegory or a fable. Even Lila, the presumptive avatar of non-existence, leads a full life, marrying young, then embarking on a disastrous affair, having two children, working in a factory, and ultimately becoming a successful businesswoman. But somehow she accepts the need to exist only provisionally. Life is a contract she has signed by having children, and once she has made good on the terms of this contract to the best of her abilities, she disappears, and the story ends.

#48: Herzog, by Saul Bellow

You never know with Saul Bellow. His book are about agitated, distracted people and when you read them, it sometimes puts you into an agitated, distracted state. That’s what they do to me, anyway. I didn’t much care for Mr. Sammler, of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, nor for Henderson of Henderson, the Rain King. (I’m just noticing how typical it is for Bellow to put his main characters’ names in the titles of his books.) Their struggles didn’t really engage my imagination. But The Adventures of Augie March had a kind of wild music, and Humboldt’s Gift was just amazing. The latter is a fictionalized account of the life of poet Delmore Schwartz, and it led me to James Atlas’s biography of Schwartz. It took me months to get Schwartz’s ghost out of my head.

Herzog is the quintessential Bellow book. Its main character has the requisite distraction and self-absorption, yet he also has Augie March’s antic humor and energy. We are alternately annoyed and amused by Herzog as he struggles to hold on to his sanity after some rather significant personal setbacks.

Specifically, Herzog’s wife, Madeline, has thrown him out and has taken up with his erstwhile best friend, Valentine Gersbach. I should back up a bit: Moses E. Herzog is a writer and academic who had some early success but has since stalled. Herzog seems to enjoy a greater level of fame and affluence than you might expect from such a resumè—a level more in line with, say, a successful novelist.

Madeline is a spoiled high-strung beauty with “issues.” They move to a remote area in the Western Massachusetts Berkshires, where their only friends are a local radio host, the aforementioned Valentine Gersbach, and his wife. As the Herzogs’ relationship begins to fray, Gersbach becomes a kind of go-between, offering solace to both partners. The entire entourage eventually moves to Chicago, where matters come to a head when Madeline tells Herzog that the marriage is over and he needs to get out immediately. A few weeks later a friend informs Herzog that Gersbach is Madeline’s new lover.

So that’s the emotional trauma that has put Herzog out of alignment. Whatever Herzog was before, he is now the hero of a Saul Bellow book, which is to say that he has locked eye contact on himself in the rear-view mirror to the extent that he fails to avoid the traffic in front of him. That’s a rather unwieldy metaphor, but in fact Herzog does manage to have such an auto accident in the course of his adventures. Herzog fears he is losing his mind. He doesn’t make scenes or see people who aren’t there—about the craziest thing he does is accept an invitation to spend a weekend with a friend on Martha’s Vineyard, and then escape out the back way and head back to New York a half hour after arriving. But we accept, for sake of argument, that Herzog is not his usual self.

Over the course of 350 pages Herzog makes the abortive journey to the Vineyard, spends an evening with his latest girlfriend, the ridiculously obliging Ramona, flies to Chicago where he gets in a certain amount of trouble, and finally returns to his house in the Berkshires. But the real action is in Herzog’s head, where he is mentally composing letters to just about everybody he has ever know, along with a few politicians, and even a couple of historical figures. Maybe this epistolary focus is supposed to demonstrate Herzog’s derangement, but this particular habit of mind seems very normal to me. I have on occasion tried to explain myself to myself by imagining that I am having a conversation with somebody. In fact, my real-life conversations cannot hold a candle to the ones that happen in my imagination.

Herzog is generally addressing serious intellectual issues in his mental missives, and your opinion of this book might hinge on whether you think his ruminations are pretentious twaddle, a la Woody Allen, or genuinely profound and even charming. Here he is composing a mental letter to one Dr. Vinoba Bhave, whom Wikipedia tells me was “an Indian advocate of nonviolence and human rights.” In the following the italicized words are part of the letter, and the non-italicized parts Herzog’s thoughts as he composes the letter.

Dear Dr. Bhave, he began again, I read of your work in the Observer and at the time thought I'd like to join your movement. I've always wanted very much to lead a moral, useful, and active life. I never knew where to begin. One can't become Utopian. It only makes it harder to discover where your duty really lies. Persuading the owners of large estates to give up some land to impoverished peasants, however ... These dark men going on foot through India. In his vision Herzog saw their shining eyes, and the light of spirit within them. You must start with injustices that are obvious to everybody, not with big historical perspectives. Recently, I saw Pather Panchali. I assume you know it, since the subject is rural India. Two things affected me greatly - the old crone scooping the mush with her fingers and later going into the weeds to die; and the death of the young girl in the rains. Herzog, almost alone in the Fifth Avenue Playhouse, cried with the child's mother when the hysterical death music started. Some musician with a native brass horn, imitating sobs, playing a death noise. It was raining also in New York, as in rural India. His heart was aching. He too had a daughter, and his mother too had been a poor woman. He had slept on sheets made of flour sacks. The best type for the purpose was Ceresota.

There is pride, naivete, and a kind of silly sentimentality in this, but there is also compassion and wit. It’s hard not to be on the side of a guy who ends his interior monologue by noting the best type of flour sack for improvised bedding. In fact, amid all the tumult, it can be hard to realize just how funny Bellow can be:

Old women from Eastern Europe with dyed hair and senseless cameo brooches had easy access to his affections.

If I knew more about Saul Bellow’s politics and life I’m sure I’d find plenty not to like. But I think one of the reasons people write novels is to salvage some essential part of themselves. Every novel is a kind of suicide note.

#47: Shantytown, by Cesar Aira

Cesar Aira is an Argentinian writer know for writing short, strange novels. And writing lots of them. He has his fans, including Patti Smith in the New York Times and Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books. (Both links are to reviews of Aira’s short story collection, The Musical Brain and Other Stories.)

I picked up Shantytown, which was the longest Aira novel I could find at 160 pages.

Surprise! It’s a short, strange novel. It’s set in Buenos Aires—I found some of the streets on a map—but it doesn’t really feel like it takes place anywhere on this planet. Aira’s main character, a large rather diffident man named Maxi, roams the city streets in the afternoons, helping various homeless families move their overloaded shopping carts along. Maxi never feels quite real, we perceive him the way we might perceive the main character in a superhero movie. He’s unassuming, disconnected, unreflective—a physical presence with minimal affect.

Other characters come along. A web of mystery and intrigue is established. The plot is precise, intricate. The characters are all just a tad outlandish, exaggerated, unreal. They all seem to be from the Uncanny Valley. Again, the effect is like a superhero movie. The book is garish, yet flat. That’s not meant to be disparaging—I’m pretty sure it’s an intended effect.

As I was reading Shantytown the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico came to mind—those flat yet fantastic city landscapes. It was startling, then, to find the painter’s name in O’Brien’s review of Aira’s story collection: “He has been likened to a remarkably wide range of writers—Sebald, Kafka, Bolaño, Calvino, Nabokov, Murakami. Duchamp and De Chirico have likewise been invoked, and Aira himself has mentioned Roussel and Borges…”. Quite the name-check.

I think it would be best to read Aira in bulk—maybe two or three novels over the course of a week. Or maybe that story collection would be the thing. I remember how much I enjoyed reading Alvaro Mutis’s seven short novels about Maqroll the Gaviero in a single volume. What would it have been like to read just one of those works on its own? I don't know whether it's me, or certain writers, but sometimes a small dose just isn't sufficient.

#46 My Struggle, Book 3, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

(See earlier posts on Book 1 and Book 2.)

In Book 3 we read about the author’s childhood on the island of Tromøy, in southern Norway. He lived there from the age of six until the age of 13. The book reads like a straightforward memoir and there is none of the time shifting between the recent past and the more distant past that we find in the first two volumes. Perhaps as a consequence, there is also none of the grown author’s anguish and intense self-reflection. Which isn’t to say that there is no anguish or self-reflection, just that they are the recreated emotions of the young Karl Ove, and not the more immediate emotions of the man writing the book.

It’s hard not to be aware of how great the discrepancy is between the minute and detailed account of day-to-day activities we find in this book and what any 40-year-old man can actually remember about any given day from his childhood. It’s a recreation and not a factual account—like a dinosaur skeleton recreated from various bits and pieces dug out of the ground. Ninety percent of it must be conjecture.

Childhood as actually lived is made up of wonder, fear, boredom, shame, and excitement. I don’t know what the percentages are for any given person, but for Karl Ove there was no lack of fear and shame. The main cause of Karl Ove’s fear was his father, and here we encounter what might be called the agenda for volume 3, if not for the entire series. If Knausgaard senior—he is the only character who is never referred to by name—was half the prick that his son makes him out to be then it is perhaps fitting that his cruelty is now exposed to the world. Here is Karl Ove “helping” his father cut some wood in the wintertime;

I paced backward and forward, backward and forward.

"Stop doing that," Dad said.

"OK, but I'm freezing cold!" I said.

He sent me an icy stare.

"Oh, you're fweezing, are you?" he said.

My eyes filled with tears again.

"Stop parroting me," I said.

"Oh, so I can't pawwot you now?"

"NO!" I yelled.

He stiffened. Dropped the ax and came toward me. Grabbed my ear and twisted it round.

"Are you talking back to me?" he said.

"No," I said, looking down at the ground.

He twisted harder.

"Look at me when I'm talking to you!"

I raised my head.

"Do not talk back to me! Have you got that?"

"Yes," I said.

He let go, turned, and put another log on the block. I was crying so much I could barely breathe. Dad ignored me and kept on chopping.

Later that evening, “Dad” is incensed when Karl Ove refuses to come down and watch the soccer match on TV and eat candy—a special family occasion. Dad forces him to come down and then:

He had bought a bag of glacier mints and a bag of English chocolate toffees. The toffees were my favorite, but the glacier mints were good as well. As usual, he had the bags next to him on the table. Now and then he threw one to me and Yngve [Karl Ove's older brother]. Today he did the same. But I wouldn't eat them; I left them untouched in front of me. In the end, he reacted.

"Eat your candy," he said.

"I don't feel like them," I said.

He stood up.

"Now you eat your candy," he said.

"No," I said, and started crying again. "I don't want to. I don't want to."

"Now you EAT them!" he said. He grabbed my arm and squeezed.

"I-don't-want-any … candy," I gasped.

He seized the back of my head and pressed it forward, almost down to the table.

"There they are," he said. "Can you see them? Eat them. Now."

"OK," I said, and he let go. Stood over me until I had unwrapped a chocolate-coated toffee and put it in my mouth.

It’s funny and sad at the same time. The father has looked forward to sharing a joyful experience with his son, perhaps to make up in part for his earlier cruelty. But the son’s childish insistence on denying his father that joyful experience leads to additional cruelty.

Knausgaard’s uncle and other relatives on this father’s side have not been silent about their indignation, not so much about this volume as about volume one, which depicts his father’s squalid and early death from alcoholism. (The alcoholism was not a factor during the time frame of volume three.) There may be some viable defense for the man. Maybe the son’s accounts are not entirely unbiased. But I had no trouble siding with the son, perhaps because of some similarities in our childhood circumstances.

Just about everything else in the book—Tromøy and its residents, Knausgaard’s childhood friends and their parents, and the rest of his family—is depicted with considerable warmth and in loving detail. As for himself, Knausgaard taps easily into his own childish self regard, but also shrewdly shows the vain, conceited boy his schoolmates knew. Young Karl Ove is repeatedly outraged that he is not more popular, considering that he gets the best grades in his class—well, in some subjects, anyway. In one episode, thirteen-year-old Karl Ove is favored by one of the prettiest girls on the island, a triumph he quickly squanders by springing on her his ambition to break the “longest kiss” record recently set by an acquaintance. Fifteen minutes of locked lips take their toll. Karl Ove gets the record, but loses the girl.

Anyway, three volumes down, three to go. I read somewhere that Knausgaard toned down his “take no prisoners” approach to autobiography after the public reaction to volumes one and two. Only in volume six, which is more than twice as long as any of the others, does he once again remove all the filters. I look forward to volume six, but if volume three is any indication, I will enjoy volumes four and five as well. Knausgaard also recently published an interesting article on the recent mass killing in Norway (and other mass killings by disaffected young men) in the New Yorker. You can find it here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-inexplicable.

#45: War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

Yes, War and Peace. Not so much a book to most people as much as a trope for something too ponderous to bother with. An anvil made of words. I’d devoured it as a teenager and then read it again in my 20s. This time it sort of underwhelmed me.

I’m always amused to read negative reviews of great classic on amazon.com. Joyce, Bellow, Faulkner—there’s always a few shrewd customers who “see through” the pretentious incomprehensible drivel that all the professors and pretenders have fallen for. These folks have nothing to learn from anybody about anything. Am I joining the club?

I don't think I'm saying I no longer like War and Peace—just that it’s apparently not the kind of thing that’s clicking for me right now. Looking back through this blog I seem to have a bit of a problem with 19th century novels in general. I think I must be a bit too infatuated at the moment by more recent themes. Or maybe I’m just more of a philistine than I used to be.

But one thing that has always irked me about this book is Tolstoy’s obsession with his theory of history. Tolstoy states and then restates this theory throughout the book, and then devotes the final 40 pages to a kind of extended essay on the theme. His point is that history is not the result of the actions of “great men,” but the sum of the historical forces acting on an event, including the myriad thoughts, emotions, and actions of everyone present. In the case of Napoleon’s invasion of Russian in the summer of 1812, Napoleon’s army was like a fire that consumed all of its fuel; the ensuing winter was like a steady drizzle that extinguished what was left of the fire. Strategy, courage, and firepower had very little to do with it. The Russian general, Kutuzov, had the simple insight to just let these things happen.

War and Peace almost functions as a museum of the 19th century novel, with a duel at dawn here, an innocent heiress seduced by a rake there, and then over there a young soldier swindled at cards. It is the Ikea of novels, and we walk its circuitous path gazing at tableau after tableau. It tells the story of a group of wealthy Russian families in the time of the Napoleonic wars, between 1805 and 1820. In each of these families there are one or two people who are central to the narrative: Natasha and Nikolai Rostov (sister and brother), Marya and Andrei Bolkonsky (also sister and brother), and Pierre Bezukov. All of these people are rich, but in War and Peace rich is normal. They also all have titles, like Prince or Countess. But they are not particularly spoiled or decadent for the most part, they just happen to have estates and servants. We mostly see them working and praying and striving. They are earnest and never condescending—at least not consciously so.

These central characters are all trying to discover how they should live their lives. They have their various talents and flaws, and they all struggle for love and fulfillment, and all run up against shocks and disappointments. For Tolstoy, the individual is always striving toward some kind of transcendence and in War and Peace when a character is wounded or witnesses death it is often the shock required to annul his (or her) fear and anxiety and to see life as a beautiful but perhaps meaningless spectacle that somehow inspires selfless love.

When later authors write about war they typically depict it more savagely. The confusion and the smoke are still there, but now there is also blood and shit and stench, a wasteland of destruction where things either blow up or fester. Not much opportunity for transcendence.

So then, Count Leo, tell me how can war be random and meaningless at a historical level, but so effective a means to insight and even transcendence for individuals? And you call yourself a great novelist. And then there’s Isaac Newton—optics, very nice, gravity, well done, but alchemy? C’mon Isaac. From where I sit, it’s all so obvious.

#44: Preparation for the Next Life, by Atticus Lish

Welcome to America in the 21st century; more specifically, to the community of Flushing, Queens, near the eastern border of New York City. In Flushing, three lives intersect.

Zou Lei is a young illegal immigrant from western China; she is half Han Chinese and half Muslim Uighur. We don’t know the full details of her journey, but she has crossed over from Mexico and made her way to the I-95 corridor, where she will work 15-hour days in motels and restaurants for way less than minimum wage, living in flops provided by her employers and traveling to and from work in vans. Early in the book Zou Lei is arrested in an immigration sweep and spends several months in jail before she is, by some whim of fate, released. Zou Lei is the dust beneath your feet, the lowest of the low, a slave for whom no master is responsible, working as hard as she possibly can just to stay alive. But by any measure she is the most fortunate, healthy, and successful of the book’s three major characters.

Brad Skinner has just returned from three tours of duty in Iraq, where he has just barely managed to avoid being blown up on multiple occasions; his only close friend has not been so lucky. He has seen and done things that trouble him greatly. He has no friends, no place to go, and his most significant possessions are a loaded pistol and a duffel bag full of prescription medications. Skinner (as he is called) can barely negotiate the purchase of a meal, let alone a job. He has a few thousand dollars left from his army pay. Is there any way for such a person to survive?

In the early part of the book we watch Zou Lei and Skinner alternately, careening through the international bazaar that Flushing has become. I recognized all the street names because I grew up in Flushing 50 years ago. Back then it was a lower-middle class neighborhood of Italian, Irish, and Jewish families. Today it is the crossroads of the earth, the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the most ethnically diverse county in the United States. I would no more feel at home in the Flushing of today than Ben Franklin would in the Philadelphia of today.

When Zou Lei and Skinner connect, they feel a joy that neither they, nor we, could have expected.

They were surrounded in neon and headlights, striding through the darkness, going in and out of darkness and light among the Chinese signs and lights, Skinner almost shouting. Asians went around them. Zou Lei was marching with her arms crossed across her chest and her hair blowing around her face and she was laughing.

It’s funny story!

I’m like, no, dude!

This animal.

I’m like, do not do it! I’m like, think again!

Their combined momentum moved people out of the way. Or people didn’t move and Zou Lei and Skinner went around them and rejoined on the other side, Skinner saying:

I’m like, take a breath!

— continuing to talk through the silhouettes of people like paper targets who got between them.

I like it when Zou Lei says "This animal"; I'm not sure exactly what she means, but clearly she shares Skinner's exhilaration and is doing her best to adopt his tone. Will they be able to maintain this connection? The odds are steep. Skinner is like an abused animal; his mind is locked in the past and he is barely aware of his circumstances. He can’t really function--it’s a miracle that he has been able to make this human connection.

It’s only on rare occasions that Skinner can rouse himself to even be aware of Zou Lei's presence, usually after she has jolted him back to the present by provoking him in some way. They talk of marrying. But then the third major character makes his presence felt—Jimmy, the son of Skinner’s landlord, who returns from prison. Jimmy’s not a wholesome guy, and as his path skirts and crosses those of the other two, we know where the story is headed just as we know what will happen in that scene from The Birds where the man is standing next to his car at the gas station, lighting his cigarette, and getting ready to drop his match as a puddle of gas grows around his feet.

So there you have a plot summary of sorts. It’s a powerful story, and I think it gives us a true and not very encouraging picture of what “disadvantaged in America” is like. But Preparation for the Next Life has a lot more going for it besides this grimly realistic depiction, and that is the commitment, power, and intensity of the writing. To start with, there is a kind of furious intensity evident in the book’s every sentence. Lish’s Flushing is as specific and detailed as Joyce’s Dublin:

The man who gave her the DVDs took care to avoid arrest. He would not give her his name, so she couldn’t rat him out if she got caught. All she knew about him was that he was from Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province and people from Wenzhou knew how to survive. On the phone, he would say to meet him in the doorway and she would go to the place he meant. He would drive up in an Expedition, his ball cap on sideways, and give her the goods. He looked like a manager from a Chinese factory in wintertime — all dark clothes, down vest, fingerless gloves, smoking Mild Seven cigarettes. His face was lopsided, the result of ingesting pesticide as a child, which gave him the knowing look of someone who wasn’t going to be fooled again.

Not just a manager from a Chinese factory—a manager from a Chinese factory in wintertime. We get the make of the car, the brand of the cigarettes. We even learn about an incident from this man’s childhood. This man who is merely walking through the book for a single paragraph.

There are scenes, incidents, and itineraries that we just know must have been recorded by the author as he walked the streets of Flushing, because no one could ever just sit at a desk and imagine the world in such documentary detail. We get an inventory of the streets and the people who occupy them. I can open this book to just about any page and find a passage like this one:

After she had showered, dressed, and brushed her wet hair, he took her to Fratelli's for pizza. While they ate, he reached across the orange table, trying to reach for something of hers. It felt like a particularly dark night. He settled for her elbow. She was using both hands to hold up the triangular pizza slice, which kept buckling in the middle, like a corpse being carried to a helicopter. He held her elbow, watched her chest move as she performed the functions of life - breathing, eating.

It's just the pills.

I know. You are a young strong man.

Today everything was weird.

The sweet sharp pain that foreshadows weeping visited him again in the throat and eyes. He put his head down, glanced sideways at his reflection in the vertical mirrored strips that covered the wall of the pizza parlor. His eyes looked like someone had sprayed roach spray in them, an allergic response. He thought of chafed, reddened mucous membranes after the friction of sex.

Pizza buckling like a corpse being carried to a helicopter.

The book is relentless throughout, but towards the end almost every chapter seems like an epic in minature that I would read in a state of rapt agitation. In one, Zou Lei, having escaped from a rape attempt and unable to find Skinner, takes the subway to somewhere in south Queens and then starts walking. She has escaped without her shoes so she begs a pair of flip flops from a merchant. She walks into the evening and then into the night. We see everything that she sees, including street names and landmarks, so I could follow her on a map, up through St Albans and Jamaica all the way to Great Neck, which is where she is when the sun comes up. Fifteen hours, thirty miles. The flips flops disintegrate along the way. Why is she walking? Because she has physical energy, but nowhere to go.

I remember a couple of ill-advised hitchhiking trips from my youth, and the notion of being alone on a road at four in the morning resonates with me. But Lish is as indefatigable as his character and the scene unspools before our eyes:

For some time thereafter, she walked in a state of half-awakeness past things she half-perceived. Francis Lewis Boulevard. The Belle Aire playground. A black woman thin as an African with dyed blond hair prowling on a traffic island. A sprinkler was whisking in the grass. The public restroom door was open and you could see the sink and stall. Two cars drove by booming rap. She passed the on-ramp for the Grand Central Parkway. She passed the Satya Sanatan Dharma Mandir, a place of worship. A spiked iron fence. The Creedmoor Psychiatric Facility — the buildings set at random angles, an iron gate left open. She could see weeds in the asphalt like rice paddy squares. It looked abandoned. Ambulances parked in a fleet. A section of the fence hit by a car. Beneath the mercury lights, she saw a shadow that didn’t belong to her and looked around to see who was following her, but there was no one there.

I don’t read enough current fiction to know if this book is as exceptional as it seemed to me. I’ve refrained from looking at published reviews until I could finish this post—the exception was the New York Review of Books review, by Cathleen Schine, from which I learned about the existence of Preparation for the Next Life. Looking back at that review now, I see that I have adopted its tone:

The book has the boundless, epic exhilaration you expect to find only in a writer as mighty as, say, Walt Whitman. It is a love story, a war story, a tale of New York City in which familiar streets become exotic, mysterious, portentous, foul, magnificent. Some of it reads like poetry. All of it moves with a breathless momentum.

So, that’s two votes in favor.