Sunday, December 31, 2017

new fiction already dun, year's end 2017

Finishing a couple more books of fiction this year, it seemed as good a time as any to mention those, and the others done, and a few additional items that have worked their way to the top of the various piles roundabout. The only way out is through. This blog continues so very slowly, ponderously. The dispatches seem random or misplaced. But this too paralells the times: falling backward into the future. A manufactured past, born of some pined-over, wished-for narrative. No matter how perfectly imagined, fantastic, dangerous or absurd, is no guarantor of a more certain modernity. The message seems to be again and again: "Just don't go out."

For one thing it is terminally cold. Right now it is the coldest it has been all year here. At year's end and beginning. The furnace here won't come on automatically, so the oven and stovetop become the primary heatsource. A secondary ground level space heater barely registers when kept in proximity of outstreched legs. Additional layers about the shoulders, and a single bulb lit above completes this wan, brief picture.

Unlike earlier this year, these last two books I'm finishing today end with the imposition of gunshots. The reader was warned with plenty of foreshadowing and circumstance. Plenty of projected possibilities on who and what, but not why. Or rather, the motives are expertly set up and lain out but then, the location, the actors, the scene are disrupted. Old ghosts of memory play tricks and pure chance grabs scene-stealing thunder. The authors are prize-winning modernists of very different genres, but I can't escape the conclusion the endings feel pat. The gunshots. The someones who always fall and who least deserve it. After so much literate beauty or elegance, the racing zing of strophaic plot suspension, usually for memory-bound exposition, in the end, these solutions, for me, lack sublimity. Maybe it's the weather and my mental mood instead.

Which is too bad because the writing in the great bulk of both of these is fantastic, immersive, thoughtful, adventurous. Zadie Smith's bestselling, award-winning White Teeth (2000) has immense characterization of entire families over several generations and continents. The narrative style crams so much street patois and interjects so many cultural monikers, deftly, quickly, and then, passed up for more heaping ladles of steaming post-modern, stomach-clutching laughter, one has to look again to see if there wasn't something you missed. It's thoughtful and real by turn, penetrating with its talk of genetics, and appearance and, sequestered longing. A part or apart?

Most of the characters live out of the baggage they alone carry in memory. Not just their baggage, their interpretation of the baggage. They all have different understandings of how they got here and what it means, how to carry on. What to do about their condition. But they manage not to be really heard except by strangers and that's always fleeting. But main characters do learn and grow, a little, somewhat.

This is the case in Robert Olen Butler's Perfume River (2016) which I happened to read in an uncorrected proof. The style here is spare, simple, straightforward. Almost all of it moves in those interior spaces between thought and emotion, and mostly before these are expressed verbally. This is handled with an almost austere delicacy and the subject matter deserves it. There are a pair of brothers whose father fought under Patton in WWII. One brother goes to Viet Nam, the other to Canada. The father wants his boys to be like him. Neither are. One pretends all his life as if he is, the other could not care less.

The silences between all the characters here takes up as much space in this book as would adding five or six additional agonists. The silences between them are part of the narratives that drive these characters along. What to say or not to say, the habitual reply, the muted surprise, the weighted pause, all veil long-guarded interior fields of barren shrubbery or, desolate warehouses. These are counterpoised by a third rail that never gets to go live, a character whose wheel never hums. But the same could be said for the secondary characters here in this edition as well. Mother and son grow by book's end. But the spouses of all these, at this stage are cardboard cutout with muted color transfers. They neither sing nor turn. But, those intermittent distances between bright memory and dull present are so carefully handled by Butler, we so easily slip in and out of them, it's as if he writes with map at hand. It may be this uncorrected proof was his map and the later wide-release edition fleshes these out more fully.

No comments: