#64: Within a Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust

I’ve just spent a little over 100 hours in the company of a young Frenchman in the years just before and after 1900. In other words, I’ve now reached the half-way point of In Search of Lost Time. For the most part, it’s a first-person account, so what we read is the unnamed narrator’s thoughts and experiences. What usually happens when you spend so much time looking over someone’s shoulder this way is that you slip into their skin to some extent. Literary transference. But that has not happened in this case—Proust is profoundly unlike me, to the extent that I am at various times bored, entertained, confused, and occasionally even a bit shocked by the way he sees the world. I was debating with myself whether this was necessarily a bad thing when I came upon the following quote from critic William Empson in a New York Review of Books article (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/26/empson-praise-ambiguity/):

The main purpose of reading imaginative literature is to grasp a wide variety of experience, imagining people with codes and customs very unlike our own.

Which makes sense, except that to some degree you also have to be able to connect with or empathize with a character if a book is to mean much of anything to you. It’s a balancing act for writer and reader. There has to be enough of a connection that your ego can stretch to cover the gap, but not so much that your imagination doesn’t have to work.

Marcel (as I’ll call the narrator, who is unnamed in the book) begins as a sickly child with a powerful imagination. He forms ideas about certain things—flowers, young girls, and aristocratic families—and then shares his impressions with us in great cumulonimbus paragraphs. You get the impression that he forms his view of the world from books and his own meditations, as many a literary child will, but to a greater extent than most. Here, for example, is what Marcel thinks as he observes two noble ladies—the Princesse de Guermantes and the Duchess de Guermantes (cousins by marriage)—at the theater. He is describing their clothing:

For my own part, I never doubted that their garments were peculiar to themselves, not merely in the sense in which the livery with red collar or blue facings had once belonged exclusively to the houses of Guermantes and Condé, but rather as for a bird its plumage which, as well as being a heightening of its beauty, is an extension of its body. The costumes of these two ladies seemed to me like the materialization, snow-white or patterned with colour, of their inner activity, and, like the gestures which I had seen the Princesse de Guermantes make and which, I had no doubt, corresponded to some latent idea, the plumes which swept down from her forehead and her cousin’s dazzling and spangled bodice seemed to have a special meaning, to be to each of these women an attribute which was hers, and hers alone, the significance of which I should have liked to know: the bird of paradise seemed inseparable from its wearer as her peacock is from Juno, and I did not believe that any other woman could usurp that spangled bodice, any more than the fringed and flashing shield of Minerva. And when I turned my eyes to their box, far more than on the ceiling of the theatre, painted with lifeless allegories, it was as though I had seen, thanks to a miraculous break in the customary clouds, the assembly of the Gods in the act of contemplating the spectacle of mankind, beneath a crimson canopy, in a clear lighted space, between two pillars of Heaven.

Nice outfits, apparently. Proust’s prose is the honeysuckle that ascends the trellis of the ladies’ haute couture. Both may be a bit overdone (sort of like that metaphor). This is about half of the full passage—it’s almost impossible to pull a succinct quote from Proust. Such rhapsodies make up a significant portion of In Search of Lost Time, and they can be strenuous.

After I had read dozens of pages devoted to Marcel’s fascination with one or another young girl, I would be a bit scandalized to discover that he eventually “falls out of love” with them at exactly the point when they begin to reveal themselves to him, despite not having passed through the expected intermediate phase of actually having a romantic relationship. I expected some interpenetration of consciousness, because that’s how I think about love. But the point at which women become real to Marcel is exactly the point at which his passion begins to recede.

He feels the collapse of his cloud castles as a kind of victory over his passions. Indeed we learn that this Marcel, so sickly and delicate, so likely to be overwhelmed by sensations, also becomes an habitué of brothels, though this information is related only in passing, for example to explain how he knows that the object of his friend’s obsession is in fact a prostitute.

Marcel’s love is a kind of visual stimulus that provokes an outpouring of elaborate prose, like the grain of sand that provokes the oyster. This extravagance seems a bit ridiculous in 2017, and I think it might have in 1900 as well, but maybe not in 1300, when knights in romances were going on quests to prove their worth to women they had only glimpsed from afar. And if there is irony or humor to be derived from the juxtaposition of stained glass windows and brothels, Proust doesn’t seem to be interested in exploiting it.

Each volume of In Search of Lost Time consists of a small number of extended episodes—in Within a Budding Grove there are two episodes: the first relates Marcel’s infatuation with a girl named Gilberte and his effort to become socially acquainted with her family. Really, he is as much infatuated with her parent as he is with her. They are Charles Swann and Odette (née de Crécy), whose love affair had made up the second half of the first volume, Swann’s Way. I was a bit surprised to learn that they are now married, since the earlier volume depicts the full course and eventual exhaustion of his infatuation with her. Proust leaves it to us to imagine how this transition was effected. The conception of a child may be relevant. Perhaps Odette had allowed herself to become pregnant for practical reasons.

The second episode is about Marcel’s season at the (fictional) beach resort of Balbec in Normandy, where he stays in a hotel with his grandmother. Here Marcel builds up his circle of acquaintance, meeting many of the characters who will populate the rest of the novel. There is Robert de Saint-Loup, the dashing military officer who doesn’t realize that his mistress is actually a prostitute. Robert pedigree is immaculate—at least on a par with the crowned heads of Europe. If Marcel’s notions of romance seem anachronistic, so too is his reverence for bloodlines:

But in Saint-Loup, when all was said, however the faults of his parents had combined to create a new blend of qualities, there reigned the most charming openness of mind and heart. And whenever (it must be allowed to the undying glory of France) these qualities are found in a man who is purely French, whether he belongs to the aristocracy or the people, they flower—flourish would be too strong a word, for moderation persists in this field, as well as restriction—with a grace which the foreigner, however estimable he may be, does not present to us.

The passage, with its Jamesian qualifications and elaborations, gets stranger and stranger:

Of these intellectual and moral qualities others undoubtedly have their share, and, if we have first to overcome what repels us and what makes us smile, they remain no less precious. But it is all the same a pleasant thing, and one which is perhaps exclusively French, that what is fine in all equity of judgment, what is admirable to the mind and the heart, should be first of all attractive to the eyes, pleasingly coloured, consummately chiselled, should express as well in substance as in form an inner perfection. I looked at Saint-Loup, and I said to myself that it is a thing to be glad of when there is no lack of physical grace to serve as vestibule to the graces within, and when the curves of the nostrils are as delicate and as perfectly designed as the wings of the little butterflies that hover over the field-flowers round Combray; and that the true opus francigenum, the secret of which was not lost in the thirteen century, and would not perish with our churches, consists not so much in the stone angels of Saint-Andre-des Champs as in the young sons of France, noble, bourgeois or peasant, whose faces are carved with that delicacy and boldness which have remained as traditional as on the famous porch, but are creative still.

This passage captures many of the weird crosscurrents the modern reader experiences in reading Proust. First of all it is as ornate and extravagant as a mediaeval cathedral. Secondly it is truly weird and rather homoerotic, though I’m pretty sure I could find similar passages describing female beauty. Thirdly it celebrates racial purity, though in the most discrete and indirect way. Many characters express anti-Semitic sentiments in In Search of Lost Time, typically in terms of taking sides in the Dreyfus affair. Marcel himself would seem to be a Dreyfusard—that is, in the not anti-Semitic camp—and Proust himself certainly was, but the currents of the novel flow both ways: to the extent that Marcel is under the spell of some count or princess, he partakes of their perspective, but as he begins to be disillusioned, he might undermine their pretensions, more by letting them ramble on idiotically than by commenting directly.

The third volume, The Guermantes Way, gives us Marcel’s obsession with the Duchess of Guermantes. His family has come to live in the “Hôtel de Guermantes—a hôtel in Paris is a sort of in-town chateau, large enough that various apartments can be rented out. But his family does not officially “know” the duke and duchess, so he is reduced, in order to be able to see her, to contriving to pass her on the street every morning as if by accident. This habit provides some potential for comedy that Proust doesn’t completely waste.

For a time Marcel is distracted from his infatuation by visiting Robert Saint-Loup at his military barracks outside Paris. Then he describes Saint-Loup’s peculiar relationship with his mistress, Rachel. This episode mirrors Swann’s infatuation with Odette in the first volume and also to some extent Marcel’s own various infatuations. The implication is that a woman is what you make of her and love is a kind of enchantment that blinds the lover to reality. Finally, there is a set piece on the illness and death of Marcel’s beloved grandmother, an episode rendered as finely as an extended death scene out of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

But by page 500 or so we are back in the company of the Duchess of Guermantes. Marcel has gradually made his way up the ladder of Paris society, one drawing room at a time. He goes from encountering the duchess at the homes of others to eventually receiving an invitation to her own salon. He never tells us what sort of social capital enables him to become a regular at the very best gatherings, even as he assures us that no ordinary mortal without the requisite pedigree could possibly do so. Marcel exists in a very peculiar state—he is equal parts omniscient narrator and character, having characteristics of both roles but fully inhabiting neither. Thus we take his access to the highest levels of society for granted, without asking to see his credentials.

Of course, once Marcel is able to observe the duchess up close and converse with her, he no longer sees her as a goddess out of mythology. Instead he sees a woman with the skills and instincts (not to mention the pedigree) to position herself at the pinnacle of society. She is very well read with a good sense of humor, but also vain and insincere. Her husband the duke (first name: Basin) has long since devoted the majority of his attention to a string of mistresses, but he is still a connoisseur of his wife’s witticisms, and he feeds his prize show pony the requisite straight lines and takes care to explain the jokes for the benefit of anyone who might have missed the point. It’s as important for the duchess to be able to deliver an apposite quite from literature as it is for her to reject an invitation from the wrong person. Perhaps her greatest joy, though, is doing everything in her power to assure that one of her servants is prevented from having a few hours off to visit his girlfriend.

So that’s the world of Marcel, or at least the first 2400-odd pages or so. At this point I think it’s appropriate to take a break and consult some secondary sources—perhaps Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life. I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed Proust to a certain extent, but I’m pretty sure I’d have enjoyed the half dozen or so books I could have read instead in the same time at least as much. To this point, I’ve been strict about experiencing the text without consulting other sources, but I am sure that I will learn much—and be further entertained—when I dip into the ocean of content that has been created around Lost Time. There are works of literature, such as Don Quixote or Ulysses, that are best read in the light of what other skilled readers—critics, historians, philosophers—have learned and thought about them through the years. Interesting commentaries don’t just tell you what you did not or could not know about the original author’s mental universe, they can be creative works on their own terms, using the original text as a foundation to build upon. They are like 200-level courses, with the original text serving as the 100-level prerequisite. I’m ready to find out what I’ve been missing. Considering how bewildered I am much of the time as I read Proust, I'm sure to learn quite a bit.

#63: The Visiting Privilege, by Joy Williams

Writing stories like this must be like being able to fly. If you know how to do it, there’s nothing to explain. And if you don’t, well, there’s still nothing to explain.

Again and again I was amazed at Joy Williams's ability to hit the ground running—to establish characters, a setting, and a tone with just a couple of sentences. The effect is to dispel the sense that she is making stuff up and replace it with the sense that she is observing. It’s sort of the opposite of starting a story with “Once upon a time…”. One story, “The Little Winter,” begins this way:

She was in the airport, waiting for her flight to be called, when a woman came to a phone near her chair. The woman stood there, dialing, and after a while began talking in a flat, aggrieved voice. Gloria couldn’t hear everything by any means, but she did hear her say, “If anything happens to this place, I hope you’ll be satisfied.”

Having set a story in motion, Williams almost immediately begins introducing details that seem to erupt into the tale, almost as though there was a second author trying to wrest control from the first. As we’re learning about Gloria, Williams gives us this, at the beginning of the story’s second paragraph:

The plane pushed through the sky and the drink made her think of how, as a child, she had enjoyed chewing on the collars of her dresses.

I could cite a similar pair of passages from many if not most of the stories in The Visiting Privilege that accomplish this one-two trick. Not “trick” in the sense of gimmick, but rather in the sense of doing something that is both simple and astonishing. Here is how the story “White” starts:

Bliss and Joan were giving a farewell party for the Episcopal priest and his family, who had been called by God to the state of Michigan.

And then, in the second paragraph:

Joan was a fourth-generation Floridian who missed the garish sunsets and the sound of armadillos crashing through the palmetto scrub.

Crashing armadillos, chewed collars—these details do not necessarily move the story forward, rather they make the entire enterprise seem less deliberate, give us the impression that Williams is observing the action rather than creating it. They’re a kind of narrative ventriloquism, they displace the animating spirit right into the story. It occurs to me that Joy Williams must be a very good liar.

The Visiting Privilege is subtitled “New and Collected Stories,” so I take it this is sort of the culmination of her writing career, which stretches back to the 70s. The stories are arranged more or less chronologically, I think, and become stranger and more entertaining as you go along.

I read somewhere recently about a woman who takes “micro doses” of LSD to combat depression. I find this notion very appealing, though I suppose it’s a serious business and not all fun and games. Joy Williams’s stories contain micro doses of something like fictional LSD. They dart and wheel dependably, but never go completely off the rails. The typical Williams story features a first-person narrator, usually female, who is either herself a bit nutty or is interacting with person or persons who are a bit nutty. Sometimes they’re all a bit nutty, but in an earnest, unassuming way. The nuttiness is manifested by a tendency to free associate.

I fixed clocks in the garage for a while but then I stopped serving the public, who were never, ever satisfied. So it’s just a personal hobby, taking apart clocks and watches and putting them back together again. There was a Frenchman centuries ago, a watchmaker, who created a life-size mechanical duck. It could move its head, flap its wings, even eat from a bowl of grain. Then it could even shit out the compacted grain. It was all gears and springs. More than four hundred parts moved each wing. They call things like that automatons.

That selection is from a story that is a seemingly random series of recollections and meditations about characters identified as “Mother” and “the boy.” Along with the narrator, they are a family, but it takes us a while to establish that the narrator is the boy’s father and that “Mother” is (probably) the narrator’s wife. They go to New York and help a blind lady across the street. They discuss Rimbaud. They get a dog. But then:

It was around eleven in the morning. A beautiful desert day. You forget how pretty the sky can still be. Mother was over at the park fixing a sprinkler system for the fortieth time. I think they break them deliberate so they’ll have something to do. I’m in my shop thinking like I frequently do that the third cup of coffee tastes funny and then all hell breaks loose. People banging on the door and screaming and shouting and I even hear a helicopter overhead. And I say, “Stay, Amy, stay, stay,” and walk out of the garage and there’s law officers out there screaming, “sumabitch, sumabitch” and “the congresswoman” and “sumabitch” again, even the women, all of them in uniform and with guns, and I think whatever I was thinking a minute ago is the last peaceful thought I will ever have. Though sometimes now I try to pretend he’s still in the house, in his room with the door closed. I pretend he’s still living with us and eating with us and getting by with us. But of course he’s not and he isn’t.

No, we were never afraid of him. Afraid of Jared?

So “the boy” turns out to be Jared Loughner, perpetrator of the 2011 massacre in Tucson, Arizona that severely injured U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. What’s strange is that everything leading up to this surprising conclusion seems like a completely typical Joy Williams story—there is no sense of impending violence. In fact, several of the stories feature violent episodes, but there is always also this sense of disassociation, people floating along, remembering snatches of conversation, relating arcane facts, describing the vegetation.

Of course, Jared Loughner did a horrible thing, but if you didn’t know about him I do not think you could infer the monstrous nature of his act from this story. It’s a surprising and unique synapse, a spark that leaps from the fictional universe to the real one. Joy Williams’s stories may say something about the lightly medicated sense of reality in 21st century America, but you would have to be a more sensitive instrument than I am to feel a strong moral current running through them.

#62: Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust

This is volume one, of six, of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, formerly known as Remembrance of Things Past. In Search of Lost Time is regarded as one of the major literary accomplishments of the 20th century, right up there with Ulysses or The Waste Land. If you’re the bookish sort, you might hope to read it some day the way a traveler might wish to visit the Great Wall of China. It’s as extravagant a reading project as I can envision, on a par with reading all of Shakespeare at a go, or plunging into Greek and Roman literature.

So here’s my first postcard from the farthest reaches of the literary outback. What’s it like? It’s difficult. More difficult than I had anticipated. The vast majority of books that I read assume a sort of contract with the reader. They propose to amuse me with wit, or entice me with suspense, or amaze me with insight. For Proust, the objective seems to be to render his perceptions and emotions in as complete and precise a way as possible. If I’m interested in his undertaking, fine; if not, he makes no concession.

Proust will elaborate and qualify his thoughts until he feels he has done them justice. His sentences descend on you like tsunamis. Some of the sentences are a page long and when you encounter a pronoun somewhere towards the end of one of them you practically have to send a search party out to find the antecedent. Here is an example. The author is recalling an occasion from his childhood when he encountered a Mademoiselle Gilberte Swann, who has held a place in his affections for no very clear reason—something to do with his fascination with her parents. He had seen her just once before, in the country; now he encounters her in Paris.

While I waited for [my nanny] I was pacing the broad lawn of meager, close-cropped, sun-baked grass, dominated, at its far end, by a statue rising from a fountain, in front of which a little girl with reddish hair was playing battledore and shuttlecock, when from the path another little girl, who was putting on her coat and covering up her racquet, called out sharply: “Good-bye Gilberte, I’m going home now; don’t forget we’re coming to you this evening, after dinner.”

A longish sentence, for sure, but it’s the next one that’s the tsunami:

The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully the girl whom it labeled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of someone in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the proximity of its target—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impressions concerning her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called it out, everything that, as she uttered the words, she recalled, or at least possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let it brush past me without my being able to penetrate it, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry—wafting through the air the exquisite emanation which it had distilled, by touching them with the utmost precision, from certain invisible points in Mlle Swann’s life, from the evening to come, just as it would be, after dinner, at her home—forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, delicately coloured, resembling one of those clouds that, billowing over a Poussin landscape, reflect minutely, like a cloud in the opera teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods—casting, finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot where it was at one and the same time a scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair battledore player (who continued to launch and retrieve her shuttlecock until a governess with a blue feather in her hat had called her away) a marvellous little band of light, the colour of heliotrope, impalpable as a reflection and superimposed like a carpet on which I could not help but drag my lingering, nostalgic and desecrating feet, while Francoise shouted: “Come on, do up your coat and let’s clear off!” and I remarked for the first time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather in her hat.

This sentence tells you no more about Mlle Gilberte than a pearl necklace tells you about an oyster. I’ve underlined the word “them” in the middle of this sentence. It comes after a stretch in which there are three instances of the pronoun “it.” So the reader is expected to be holding at least two nouns in his head, one singular, one plural. Perhaps there are others? To which noun does this “them” refer? Perhaps it is “words,” six lines up, or maybe “impressions,” eight lines up. You may have a different candidate, perhaps even a better one. The point is that the syntax parsers in our brains will occasionally overheat and seize up as we read Proust. And if you’re the least bit tired or distracted, forget about getting anywhere with this book. You’ll wander off the path and into the trees, until you run smack into one of them and a large pinecone falls on your head.

But having read that long, long sentence a few times, and now having typed it, I have to admire what a fantastic Rube Goldberg-Chinese Dragon of a sentence it is. Our emotions are strange things: when we hear of a colleague’s good fortune, for example, we feel a vicarious pleasure at their success, some jealousy and resentment because they were able to achieve what we perhaps would have wished to achieve instead of them, shame at our recognition of the selfishness of this resentment, and perhaps three or four other subordinate emotion all at the same time. We watch ourselves watching ourselves watch ourselves. Proust has the absurd and impossible project of wanting to capture all such echoes and reverberations of the moment (as indeed it is a child’s cry that has set this all in motion); perhaps it is not so much a tsunami as a tornado, up into which various bits of the physical scene (blue feathers, dry grass, shuttlecock), extended metaphors (the Poussin landscape, the operatic clouds), events recently passed and soon to come, and various other perceptions and sensations have been whirled. I find myself writing longer and stranger sentences even just in thinking about Proust; he’s like a jazz musician, doing with words and thoughts what Charlie Parker might do with a Richard Rodgers show tune.

I’m so tempted to put Proust aside now that I’ve finished volume one and to take up a book that connects to what’s happening around me here in the United States in 2017. It’s a strange and disturbing time and it calls to me, insists that I put aside such a dilettantish, unworldly undertaking and read something with IMPACT, something that will feed into discussions, something that show me a reflection of myself in the modern world. Because whatever else I am, I’m not much like the protagonist of Proust’s novel, and so the narcissistic impulse that fuels much of my reading is an itch that isn’t getting scratched at present. As Billy Joel once wrote, “I don’t want clever conversation/I never want to work that hard.” It doesn't sound as if Billy would like Proust.

But I will press on for at least one more volume: Within a Budding Grove. Seven hundred and thirty pages. Full speed ahead.

#61: The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus

I read this book and didn’t like it—it wasn’t really close. But it’s a strange and unique book and I feel on shaky ground telling you why I didn’t like it, because if I read it again in five or ten years I might discover that the things I disliked were superficial and that the enduring strangeness of this book and the sheer commitment of its author had somehow managed to get under my skin. The author clearly knows what he’s doing and goes about his task with intensity and intelligence. But there was little or no payoff for me as a reader.

The back cover of this book gives us the setup: “The sound of children’s speech has become lethal. In the park, adults wither beneath the powerful screams of their offspring. For young parents Sam and Clair, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther.” Interesting premise. But that summary doesn’t really even begin to convey the weird logic that rules the universe of The Flame Alphabet.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon imagines an hallucinogenic drug he names oneirine. An oneirine trip is called a “haunting”:

Oneirine hauntings show a definite narrative continuity, as clearly as, say, the average Reader’s Digest article. Often they are so ordinary, so conventional—Jeaach calls them ‘the dullest hallucinations known to psychopharmacology’—that they are only recognized as hauntings through some radical though plausible violation of possibility: the presence of the dead, journeys by the same route and means where one person will set out later but arrive earlier, a printed diagram which no amount of light will make readable.

Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is something like an oneirine trip. The single detail that cannot be reconciled is given to us in the first line: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” Every other detail of Gregor Samsa’s universe is pretty much as it was before his transformation. Nobody else turns into a bug. And that’s what makes the story so perfect.

Sam and Clair in The Flame Alphabet live in upstate New York, and that stray prosaic fact stayed with me because it was almost like the opposite of the oneirine trip’s single plausible violation. It’s the rare (if not single) detail that relates their universe to ours. Because we learn pretty quickly that we’re not in Kansas anymore, much less upstate New York. As the book progresses, it isn’t just children’s speech that makes people ill—all and any language, including written language, becomes thoroughly poisonous. Of course, this is a novel, made of language, so in a sense we are consuming a poison that Marcus has concocted for us.

Sam eventually ends up working for an organization that is trying to discover a form of language that isn’t toxic. We get endless pages about his inevitably hopeless endeavors, in this vein:

Of course I tried codes. In modern Roman letters I encrypted a suicide note, some gentleman’s last words, with the Caesar cipher. From there I recreated what I could remember from historical texts—the Gettysburg Address was one—and fed them into simple substitution ciphers, homophonic coding, and a modified Vigenère cipher. If this worked, it would mean that our own scripts were too obvious and needed to be concealed, encrypted. But it didn’t work.

He knows it didn’t work because these efforts are then sent down to a courtyard to be presented to test subjects, who promptly expire. Are we to equate the act of writing with the crimes of Josef Mengele? Marcus is nothing if not provocative.

Sam’s efforts become ever more bizarre. It wasn’t always possible to understand his strategy and objectives:

From my drawer I retrieved the Hebrew balloon shrapnel. The deflated letters had dried and curled over the last few days. Some of them stank of the sea. On a stretching board I revived the pieces, ladled oil into their skin until they were slick, pulled others too long until they tore, and with my molder I formed a new set of dense cubes, like square rubber erasers, with which to build, perhaps, a Hebrew letter heretofore unseen.

It’s obscure, and also a little disgusting. Sam is the narrator of The Flame Alphabet, and is forever explaining, elaborating, testifying to the reality of his experience. Alot of that experience takes place in various holes, ditches, and tunnels. Damp, dark, smelly places. Indeed, there is a relentless dreariness that pervades The Flame Alphabet. I’m pretty sure Marcus is counting on provoking a certain repugnance in his readers. I’m just hard pressed to know why—my best guess is that it’s a very dark kind of comedy, which is why I wonder if I might not be better prepared to get the “joke” on a second reading. I had a similarly negative reaction the first time I saw David Lynch’s first film: Eraserhead. There are interesting similarities: in The Flame Alphabet language is toxic; in Eraserhead, it’s febrile, meaningless. Both works are mildly disgusting, each in its own unique and charming way. The second time I saw Eraserhead I thought it was brilliant—and funny. But Eraserhead is a relatively short and simple movie—it’s like a dream. Similar to The Metamorphosis in this regard. It should really be the first thing they teach you in Surrealism 101: If you’re going strange, be brief.

But now that I think of it, not all dreams are simple. Sometimes you wake up and you remember a whole series of vaguely related episodes. For a few minutes you hold enough in your memory that you can imagine scribbling for hours to get it all down on paper. No doubt 98% of it would evaporate off the surface of your consciousness before you even sat down to get started. Maybe The Flame Alphabet is like that kind of dream. The kind that you might ponder for a few minutes, thinking “Did all that really come out of my brain?”

It’s not that the notion of “language as virus” isn’t both shocking and profound. We believe language is as essential to us as, say, our hands. But other creature walk, crawl, and swim the earth without language; what’s more, they have not come up to the point of destroying the planet. If there really was a “Great Designer,” he or she might be just at the point of backing this “feature” out right now. “No, no, that speeds things up too much and only leads to trouble.” But Marcus isn’t working this angle—he’s not asking “What if language is a virus?” He’s taking that as a given. It may be that he’s not giving us an idea, the product of his thinking, but a postulate, a starting point for our own ideas. But meanwhile, there’s a lot to slog through.

#60: Counternarratives, by John Keene

The title suggests an academic exercise, the work of a tenured PhD who’s in the habit of referring to a book or story as a narrative. But this is a book of “stories and novellas,” not a work of literary criticism. So perhaps then it’s fiction with a critical agenda? It’s more a cultural agenda. Keene is writing from the perspective of the non-white people invariably assigned to supporting roles in the standard histories—or cut out entirely. In his stories, he looks through the eyes and speaks through the mouths of the people who have been muted by the ethnic biases of five hundred years of American history. (And not just North American history—some of Keene’s stories are set in South American and the Carribean.) He doesn’t just bring these people into the picture—he puts them at the center, gives them agency (another word from the academic lexicon), the power to frame and control their narratives.

The most obvious example of this agenda is a tale narrated by Jim, Huck Finn’s black companion from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I would guess that most people reviewing Counternarratives would mention this story, titled “Rivers,” in the first paragraph or two because it’s such a perfect example of what Keene means by a counternarrative. Jim meets up with Huck twice in the years after they ride down the river together. The first time Huck is with Tom Sawyer, somewhere in Illinois in the years just before the Civil War. Huck is cordial enough, but Tom is more a man of his time:

“When did you get yourself down this way?” Sawyer said, his razor lips cutting me a smile. “Cause I reckon soon as you knew you had got your freedom we all woke up to find you gone.”

I’m not sure Mark Twain would acknowledge this Tom as his own. But that’s kind of the point.

The second encounter is down in Texas toward the close of the Civil War. Jim is now in a black Union regiment. He spies Huck on the Confederate side as the opposing forces close for battle:

I looked up and he still had not seen me, this face he could have drawn in his sleep, these eyes that had watched his and watched over his, this elder who had been like a brother, a keeper, a second father as he wondered why this child was taking him deeper and deeper into the heart of the terror, why south instead of straight east to liberation, credit his and my youth or ignorance or inexperience, for which I forgive him and myself but I came so close to ending up in a far worse place than I ever was, and I heard Anderson or someone call out in the distance, and raised my gun, bringing it to my eye, the target his hands which were moving quickly with his own gun leaned against his shoulder, over his heart, and I steadied the barrel, my finger on the trigger, which is when our gazes finally met, I am going to tell the reporter, and then we can discuss that whole story of the trip down the river with that boy, his gun aimed at me now, other faces behind his now, all of them assuming the contours, the lean, determined hardness of his face, that face, there were a hundred of that face, those faces, burnt, determined, hard and thinking only of their own disappearing universe, not ours, which was when the cry broke across the rippling grass, and the gun, the guns, went off.

“Rivers” is a fine story, but it almost feels obligatory. If Counternarrives were a movie, you know that “Rivers” would make up the bulk of the trailer. The best stories in the book, to my mind, are the two longest ones—the novellas—where the reversal of perspective is just one element in the mix. These tales have a delicious element of the macabre in them. They remind me a bit of Isak Dinesen’s gothic tales. One is titled “A Letter on the Trials of the Counterreformation in New Lisbon.” Keene uses his knowledge of languages and history to frame his stories as documents from earlier centuries and cultures.

The story is in the form of a letter, from one Jesuit priest in 16th century Brazil to another. It is a report on what happens when a young priest, one Dom Joaquim D’Azevedo, is assigned to manage a small mission at the edge of a small settlement that is itself on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. The priest finds the mission in a rundown condition, and the three other clergymen somewhat lacking in zeal. The employees of the mission are natives and African slaves who have been converted to Christianity—or at least given Christian names. D’Azevedo does his best to bring order and a sense of purpose to the mission, even establishing a religious school for the Portuguese children of the settlement. But there are strange things happening—especially at night:

As he closed the door he [D’Azevedo] could again hear the drumming, faint but now accompanied, he perceived, by a low wail, like an animal caught in the crevice of a deep shaft, or wire upon wire. […] It was as he was opening the door to go back indoors that he again heard drumbeats and, our of the corner of his eye, he spied a shape, a shadow, moving along the rear wall, and he turned to spot something, someone, its hair fanning over its shoulders, gliding over the stone barrier.

Native drumming at night—is Keene teasing us with this classic cliché from the heart of darkness? The story is a first rate spooky tale, but when you add Keene’s particular theme of inverted history, it flips in a fantastic and unexpected way: nobody is who they seemed, not even our central character, Dom Joaquim D’Azevedo. There are occult elements, but when the story flips what had seemed sacred becomes superstitious and what had seemed superstition becomes sacred. And those converted natives? Not so much.

The other long story bears the rather intimidating title “Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790 – 1825; Or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows.” Three paragraphs into this pseudo-document we are directed to a footnote, and that footnote then comprises the remainder of this 100-page novella. It’s the story of a young Haitian woman who lives as a slave on a Haitian plantation. As a revolt sweeps the countryside the landowning white family escapes to Maryland, taking the young woman, called Carmel, as a companion for their daughter, Eugénie. But Eugénie is possessed of an “innate rebelliousness” and exhibits a “libertine attitude,” and so she and Carmel are dispatched to the western frontier of the young republic:

In the late summer of 1806 Eugénie de L’Ècart entered the Academy of the Sisters of the Most Precious Charity of our Lady of the Sorrows, near the village of Hurttstown, Kentucky. The small and elite order had originated in southern Wallonia in the waning years of the Counter-Reformation. It was known for its industry and thrift, as well as for its effectiveness at spiritually molding young women of means.

All this brochure-like prose notwithstanding, the school is little more than a prison for Carmel who is thrice-subjugated: she is a black girl in a slave territory, a Catholic (at least by association) in a land that sees Catholics with suspicion and hostility, and most immediately, the victim of an unscrupulous and sometimes cruel companion in Eugénie.

Keene outdoes himself in this story, trying out a whole range of effects. As Carmel is oppressed and enclosed and muted by her circumstances, so the telling of her story is constrained and occluded. For several pages, Keene gives us her diary entries:

V hot today men loadd up wagons we put in preservs sev trunks of cloaths also got much merchdse from east mlle E up and abt she doesnt eat look ill but face flush I combd her hair some fall out she big as a calabash v quiet stared at me but say noth when wagons & men leave PH and I hid und the stairs so we cd talk I gave her dr hid it in my hair & she sd your power is in here & touches my brow later mlle E sd where was you dont lie to me then she wd not talk again tryd a night visit no luck latin sentences & 2 rosaries

Lots of things are going on. Eugénie is carrying on with a man from the town and becomes pregnant. A flood devastates the town and the townspeople hold the Catholics in the school accountable. We know that Carmel is the daughter of a sorceress, but if she has occult powers, what are they and how can they help her as things come to a head? Once again there are goings on at night—whispered conversations on dark staircases and the like. The ending is suitably apocalyptic.

After this mad ride, the remaining stories in Counternarratives seemed anticlimactic. Not that they aren’t interesting and imaginative, but sometimes they felt a bit self-conscious and contrived. I hope that in future writings John Keene journeys as far into the dark country of his mind as he does in the two longer stories in this book.

#59: The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

This book has an awful lot going for it—it’s enough to give other books an inferiority complex. For starters, it won the 2013 Man Booker prize, the UK’s top literary prize. Add to that that it’s a beautiful object—a thick, handsome paperback with a beautiful cover and superb design throughout. Reading it on a plane, I was especially pleased to find that it would lay open on my tray without the aid of any additional weight. A flexible spine is a wonderful thing, for people or for books.

Of course, literary prizes and bindings are not intrinsic to The Luminaries as a work of fiction—you could order an electronic copy of the book and never be aware of such things. But even reduced to its chapters, paragraphs, and sentences, you would quickly understand that The Luminaries is a work of rare quality.

You are no doubt wondering if all this indirect praise is heartfelt, or whether I am about to attempt to take this book down a few notches. I want to have it both ways—to give The Luminaries its considerable due, but also to take issue with its somewhat airtight unimpeachable perfection.

The Luminaries is a complicated, original story well told. One of the blurbs on the cover describes it as “a lively parody of a nineteenth-century novel”; another describes it as “a twenty-first century Victorian novel.” And while it’s obvious that The Luminaries shares various characteristics with classic nineteenth century novels—its heft, its large cast of characters, its omniscient narrator and its elegant prose, for example—I never had the sense that it was commenting on or in any way seeking to separate itself from earlier work with which it shared those characteristics. It is most emphatically not a parody.

It’s also obvious from the start that The Luminaries is something more than just a complicated, original story well told—it goes places that Dickens and Eliot never went. This is made clear by the “Character Chart” at the front which presents the 18 major characters in groups such as “Stellar,” “Planetary,” and “Terra Firma” and also gives the first 12 a “Related House” and the other six a “Related Influence.”

Though the Character Chart page does not contain any terminology specific to the zodiac, each section begins with a chart. At the left are two examples

I’ve never been much for astrology, so I was hoping my lack of expertise on that subject would not put me at a disadvantage in reading The Luminaries. There are other indications that Catton is holding a few tarot cards up her sleeve. For one thing, the chapters and sections in the book grow progressively shorter. The first section is 360 pages long, the second 160 pages, the third 104 pages, and so on; the last is just two pages. I am not sure how this foreshortening effect connects to the zodiacal theme—if indeed it does. For me, such curious elements are reminiscent of the various mythological and symbolic overlays in James Joyce’s Ulysses and other modernist novels. The Luminaries could stand without them, but even though I didn’t pay very much attention to them, I think they probably heightened my sense of the intricacy and artificiality of the book. This was not a bad thing. I knew to be on my toes and to be willing to regard any and every detail as significant.

Perhaps I should mention what The Luminaries is about? It’s set on the west coast of the southern island of New Zealand, a damp and cool place not unlike the northwest coast of the US. The time frame is 1865-66. This is about 10 or 15 years after English settlers first arrived in New Zealand. There had been an earlier gold rush on the east coast of the island some years before, and now there is a second rush on the west coast where the town of Hokitika has sprung up. This is a real town, by the way, and so I assume that most of the historical setting is also authentic. Twelve men of the town, each corresponding to a sign of the zodiac, make up its civic structure. There is a banker, a chemist (that is, a pharmacist), a chaplain, a shipping agent, and so on. Two of the twelve are Chinese prospectors, and one, Te Rau Tauwhare, is Maori and “a greenstone hunter” who is after a different mineral than the others. These twelve are relatively static—the end of the book finds them much as they were at the beginning. There is a single exception—one of the twelve is killed.

Six other characters move through the book and move through space, for that matter, in a more dynamic manner, and even as I’m typing this, I’m congratulating myself for identifying them as the six "classical" planets known to the zodiac! Score for me! (OK, I see now that the Character Chart does classify these six characters as "Planetary," but I swear I just noticed that.)

The Maguffin of the story is a fortune in gold that changes ownership and form as we read (that is, it’s gold dust at one point, small ingots at another, and stamped bars at a third). Chronologically, the telling of the story starts in the middle (January 1866), runs forward as far as April 1866, then goes to May 1865 before finishing back in January 1866. So we join the action in the middle, see it through to its conclusion, and then circle back to see how it first got set in motion. This is all in proper mystery novel style, and indeed on a certain level The Luminaries is very much a whodunit, except that there is no single “it” that got done. I wasn’t quite sharp enough to figure out every detail—for example, I wasn’t sure who murdered one of the characters until I consulted the internet. But I definitely got most of it, and Catton is quite skillful in spinning us around blindfold at the beginning and gradually giving us just enough information to connect all the dots (to mix metaphors).

All in all, a worthy entertainment, like a well-made summer blockbuster movie. There is a sufficiency of interesting characters and dramatic scenes, and the setting is interesting, though there is very little about the Maori, unfortunately. Were they really marginalized so quickly?

I’m trying to avoid the self-imposed trap here of having to render either a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” on The Luminaries. Though it’s a (mostly) realistic novel, it reminds me of The Lord of the Rings in some ways: it’s a clockwork universe with its own logic, limits, and rules. Set in New Zealand, no less. It’s more about the interactions and intersections of the characters than it is about anything going on within their heads. I’ve never seen the Lord of the Rings movies (not all the way through, anyway), but I have read the books. Like The Luminaries, I would recommend them for long flights. To New Zealand, say.

#58: Supreme City – How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, by Donald L. Miller

I grew up in New York City in the 1960s and 70s—not in Manhattan, but in the outer reaches of Queens, where there were backyards and squirrels and lawns to be mowed. When I was about 14 I first rode the number 7 line train into Manhattan—Times Square is where the 7 went, and the city I surfaced into was not in its prime—porn theatres, pawn shops, crazed people in filthy clothes. One transfer away was Greenwich Village, then home to about 500 “head shops” selling glass pipes and black light posters. This was more like it, because my friends and I were aspiring hippies.

Though I was fascinated by the crowds and the intensity and the giant buildings of Manhattan, I was also hypervigilant and a bit terrified by it all. The idea was to keep moving and not make eye contact. Manhattan offered no repose. After college, I lived in Manhattan for several years. I got to know Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, the museums, the parks. I never learned to love New York, but it’s imprinted on me, somehow—its 22 square miles seemed as vast and varied as a continent. There were the fountains and plazas of the opulent districts, the avenues you could walk for miles, the mountains of garbage bags at 2:00 in the morning.

Anyway, here’s a book about how Manhattan got to be the Manhattan that I know. It answers the questions I never thought to ask: How and when did Park Avenue become the place where the richest people lived? Why are the most exclusive department stores all on Fifth Avenue? I accepted Manhattan as a given, an outgrowth of the bedrock, like Australia or Yellowstone, but it only really became the place I knew a few short decades earlier—in the 1920s.

Donald Miller, focusing on the 1920s, devotes chapters to the builders and the sellers, the broadcasters and the publishers, people whose names I had heard but whose stories I did not know. Miller’s book is about a small army of Horatio Algers, mostly Jewish, who helped turn Edith Warton’s Manhattan of wooden mansions and horse carriages into Metropolis.

David Sarnoff founded NBC and William Paley founded CBS, enterprises that grew from nothing into essential American institutions in just a few short years. Walter Chrysler built not only a major automobile company but also the tallest (briefly) and most lavish skyscraper in the world. The car company retains his name, but the skyscraper is his monument; it could almost have been his tomb:

The completed lobby is a masterwork of dramatic design. Indirectly lit, its walls are of red, richly veined Moroccan marble. The floor is Sienna Travertine carved into patterns that point the way to the elevators. There are thirty-two of them, in four groups, each car with a different design and color, and each operator dressed—originally—in a different uniform ‘for each of the four seasons.’ The interior of the cabs are finished in exotic inlaid woods: Japanese ash and Oriental walnut, among them.

And so on and so forth. Later we get to read about Chrysler’s “three-story Cloud Club, a male-only redoubt for the three hundred or so of the city’s power brokers.” This was during prohibition: “Members were allocated wooden lockers to store their bottles; each locker had carved hydrographic symbols on its doors to prevent federal agents from identifying its millionaire lawbreaker.”

Park and Fifth Avenues only became possible after the massive engineering project that created Grand Central Station also buried the rail infrastructure going north along the East Side underground. Where the rich now live was once a several hundred foot wide corridor of tracks, mud, and shanties.

Miller also includes star athletes like Babe Ruth, the gangsters from Hell’s Kitchen in the West 40s—George Raft and Mae West emerged from this demimonde—and even the competing founders of cosmetics empires—Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden—who had competing salons at either end of Fifth Avenue’s miracle mile.

Money was water and fertilizer to the stone gardens of Manhattan, and money still flows freely. But the stone gardens have become a bit rank and overgrown, and it seems unlikely that there can ever be a flowering like the one that took place 90 years ago. Which is an overly ostentatious way of saying that the real action might now be happening somewhere else.