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On the back cover of T.C.Boyle’s ‘The Terranauts’, fellow American novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, observes: ‘Boyle is a writer who chooses a large canvas and fills it to the edges’. That is certainly true of this, his latest literary blockbuster, which kept reminding me of one those crowded jungle canvases by Henri Rousseau. This is Boyle’s fictional take on ‘Biosphere 2’, a closed system experiment from the 1990s in Arizona. In Boyle’s novel, eight ‘Terranauts’, four single women and four single men, are chosen for Ecosphere ll, locked into a theoretically self-sustaining environment complete with lake and jungle and grasslands for two years, to see whether it is possible for a community to live apart from earth.

This is ripe material for Boyle who delights in seeing us behave as evolved (or not so) primates beneath the hypocrisy of our various civilised veneers.  He has been savage with this type of thing in the past, most particularly in ‘Drop City’, for me the best of his novels I have read, where he transports a hippy community to Alaska, but he soft-pedals a bit here, probably mindful of avoiding a clichéd ‘Lord of the Flies’ scenario. It is a remarkably accomplished work technically, particularly in the completeness of what it presents. However I didn’t feel the psychological penetration was quite on par with the imaginative virtuosity of the setting.

If visually I was reminded of Rousseau, in a literary vein, Boyle’s scenario most brought to mind another Frenchman, eighteenth century playwright Pierre de Marivaux, particularly ‘La Dispute’ in which four orphans, two boys and two girls, are raised in isolation and then released into an enclosed Garden of Eden to determine whether man or woman is the more faithful. Marivaux is always placing individuals in controlled artificial environments to see how they react, and Boyle’s novel, away from all the hi-tech stuff, thematically has a very eighteenth century feel, a time when many writers were examining ‘nature versus nurture’, ‘science versus faith’, in any test tube situation that might reveal to us the true nature of humankind, since long-held religious explanations as such were proving increasingly inadequate.

Boyle’s novel progresses through repeated successive monologues of three of the characters, two women and a man. The man, Ramsay Roothoorp, is the most successfully realised, possibly because the character, suave, sardonic, but with a heart, is, we assume (perhaps falsely) close to that of the author. His eventual partner, Dawn Chapman, described on the inside flap as a ‘naïve beauty’, carries the burden of the narrative; her actions determine the course of the novel. However her two crucial decisions, particularly the latter, seem to me not sufficiently grounded in her psychology; I couldn’t see why it was essential for her to do these things, so we sense the thumb of the author on the scales. The third, Linda Ryu, is the least successful, except if we’re prepared to accept she’s unpredictable and contradictory even to herself. She’s outside the dome, serving largely as a foil and plot device.

Nevertheless, these things aside, ‘The Terranauts’ is brilliant, superbly written, cleverly paced, a great read. Boyle is strongest as a satirist, and this set-up gives this talent full reign. You may not weep, but you’ll certainly laugh; Boyle sends up everything possible about late twentieth century American middle-class consumerists, all the desires and fears and foibles, self-deceptions and  pretensions, it is a tour-de-force of observation and wit. And really, if we don’t quite have the depth here to match, there’s plenty of compensating enjoyments.

 

 

 

Alex Miller’s ‘Landscape of Farewell’ is the second in a loose trilogy of novels set in outback Queensland,  following ‘Journey to the Stone Country’ and preceding ‘Coal Creek’. The novel opens about as far from the outback you can get, in Hamburg, where a retired German Professor of medieval history, Max Otto, is planning suicide, largely through grief at the recent death of his wife. He has a last guest lecture to deliver on ‘The Persistence of the Phenomenon of Massacre’, an obviously fraught topic for a German citizen of the twentieth century. The lecture is a failure, we are not told why, and Max is challenged and saved by Vita (get it?) McLelland, a visiting aboriginal academic from Sydney University who takes him under her expansive wing and invites him to a reciprocal conference down under. She has plans for Max, again it is not clear why.

 

Vita, with all her exotic new world plumage, is a stereotype (‘fierce and uneasy lights flickered within the depths of her dark eyes’) and after playing her decisive plot role, gradually fades from the scene. To be replaced by her uncle Dougald, whom Max joins for a sabbatical up in Northern Queensland, where Miller himself worked as a jackaroo in his youth. The ‘difference’ for Max of this remote landscape is powerfully evoked.

 

Max is worried about what his father did during the war and his own persistent refusal to ask. Dougald needs a sympathetic scribe to memorialise the epic of his ancestor passed down through the male line, his great grandfather, the chief Gnapun, who prosecuted a massacre of white settlers. The two men from vastly different backgrounds, but with overlapping pre-occupations, connect beautifully: the subtle depiction of their maturing relationship is for me the highlight of the novel. Both, through one another, move towards a kind of closure to their life concerns; Max by articulating an empathetic formulation of a mass killing unconnected to his own background, and Dougald with Max’s emotional support being able to journey back to his ancestral lands and Gnapun’s grave.

 

But what does it all mean? Largely through Max, Miller continually links the Europe/Australia dichotomies. Max feels he needs to ‘face up to a denial in his own life concerning his country’s history’. Time and again he baldly states Miller’s thesis: ‘I know myself to be implicated in the guilt of both my species and my parents’. And this is only at page twenty.

 

A more thematic deployment of the issues is worked through a portrait of Max’s uncle with whom he spent a lonely farmhand apprenticeship during the war. Like Dougald, the uncle has a ‘blood relationship’ to his land. Unlike Dougald, he is a sinister figure, a loner, slightly mad and obsessed, a type that might well support an extreme nationalism such as Hitler’s.

 

The parallels continue to stack up: apology, denial, reparation, silence. The cumulative effect of all this is that after a while everything Max says explicitly or implicitly about World War Two we take as a given truth of white Australia’s relationship with black.

 

About two thirds of the way through, Miller presents the massacre as seen through Gnapun’s eyes in an extraordinary prose poem, which has an effect a bit like the slow movement of a classical concerto, a stretch of lyric beauty between much busyness, except the subject here is a horror. By inverting our customary idea of whites massacring blacks, it throws the moral ramifications of ‘tribal’ killing into a more objective relief. Embedded in a contemporary realistic narrative, the passage reads like a mini ‘epic’, Miller here, in a kind of literary reconciliation, employing sustained Biblical and Homeric rhetoric in the context of aboriginal folklore.

 

Epics, generally speaking, are not good on moral complexities, a lack abetting their solitary power. Presented in a modern novel, this heroic simplicity, entailing an elision over messy ethical issues, is for me party to a pervasive problem with Miller’s main narrative.

 

Can this massacre, which is basically a territorial dispute, seriously be compared with the Holocaust, and Europe’s long convoluted national and religious enmities? By so strongly linking these two very different scenarios Miller risks a moral reduction, simplification, perhaps even evasion of complex issues. And surely if we are to get any handle on these issues, perhaps move forward in resolving them, we need to be aware of their complexities and also their differences.

 

Max is a wonderfully realised character but I was unconvinced at the close of the novel that he had found through his Australian experience the solutions to his own national dilemmas. He certainly thinks he has, and good luck to him, but I feel the rest of us need more than simple moral ciphers, really platitudes, that here serve to undermine what is otherwise a moving story of personal reckoning.

 

 

 

 

Vladimir Nabokov’s Glory is a somewhat enigmatic piece and readers will take different things from it. Wikipedia tells me that the original Russian title, Podvig, means ‘feat’ or ‘exploit’, and this, in a literal way, matches the novel better that the English title, although Nabokov must have chosen ‘Glory’ when he translated the novel with the help of his son Dimitri in 1971. Glory’s story has much in common with the author’s, although unlike Nabokov’s other autobiographical Russian novel, The Gift, significantly, the hero here, Martin, has no outstanding talents or even any specific drive, and that is partly what the book is about. The central symbol, repeated in a number of guises, is a winding path disappearing into a deep forest.

Martin grows up in St. Petersburg, but flees the Revolution with his mother, firstly to the Crimea, then to Greece, where he is sexually initiated, on to Switzerland, where his mother remarries and settles, and then finally to study at Cambridge where the novel pauses. After Cambridge, south of France working with the peasants, onto Berlin etc. Gradually, through all this, Martin becomes obsessed by a desire or challenge to slip illegally over the Soviet border, although not himself politically engaged in any way.

Nabokov has significant range as a writer; his prismatic personality, his roving intellect, and the incredible trials life imposed upon him. But even in the early Russian novels we have the Kafkaesque Invitation to a Beheading, the cold amoral King Queen Knave, and this work, naturalistic and engaged. Quite a few of Nabokov’s leading characters we do not like, but we like Martin, and it is important for the impact of this work that we do, that we feel with Martin’s friends and relatives at his fate. Nabokov’s prose is at its descriptive burnished best in Glory, although I always find with his virtuosity the occasionally misplaced word, particularly slang or dialect, that like Joseph Conrad, mark him out as not entirely at ease with the language. Martin experiences the physical world with a ravishing intensity; raw, unmediated adolescence, we’re right back there. And despite everything being seen through Martin’s eyes, all of the secondary characters are rendered in considerable subtlety and depth. The effect of time and place on various developing personalities is particularly well realised.

The original working title for Glory, Romantichevsky vek, ‘Romantic Times’, gave me a cue for my take on this work. What I think Nabokov is doing in Glory is holding up to the light a particular type of Romantic figure. At first I was reminded of Werther, and indeed Goethe’s hapless hero, rock-star popular in the early 19^th century, would be a good example for Martin, but probably a better would be one of Werther’s literary descendants, Pechorin, from A Hero of our Times. My old Anchor paperback edition of this Russian classic is translated by Nabokov who, in his introduction, criticises the work as novelettish but admits a long fascination with it. All these men possess a rootlessness and restlessness alongside their personal charisma and intelligence. None of them can find a fit in the world. Who hasn’t known this at that age? Reading Glory, I immediately felt a strong backward identification with Martin. Nabokov is signalling here the powerful attraction of this type, but also that as a role model it is necessarily a dead end. We all must leave the Martin in us behind, let him fade, regretfully perhaps, if we are to move forward constructively with our lives.

Novels, generally, thrive on variety and contrast; but there are some, like poetry or short stories, where all elements are employed towards a single powerful effect. This latter is the case with Glory, although it is not apparent until the very end. Open ended, in fact, and as I say above, there is a wider stretch of valid interpretive response here than usual. The effect of that is to throw the reader back upon the character of Martin, to focus on his magnetism and desires, which together serve to illustrate for us a significant life lesson.

Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach is her hugely successful follow up to the Pulitzer Prize winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. She is presently one hot literary property that (amongst many others) I need to catch up on. This is my first read of Egan and her first historical novel. That she is a superbly equipped writer is beyond question, what she does with her skills is another matter. For here is one of those novels so beloved by publishers that ‘straddles the literary and popular’, or more bluntly, it is very well written melodrama.

The book is mostly set in 1940s New York and the cast could well have come from the Hollywood studios of the day. Basically we follow the trials and tribulations of gutsy gorgeous Anna Kerrigan along with: her father, Ed, a plucky Paddy with the wind behind him and the road rising up to meet him (phenomenally lucky here even for an Irishman); her profoundly disabled sister, Lydia, an angel not long for this fallen world and possessing perhaps the gift of second sight; Anna’s lover, Dexter Styles (fabulous name), a glamorous gangster with a warm core within his cold casing.  And so it goes with the deftly drawn supporting cast: molls with hearts, martinet bosses, working class salts-of-the-earth. Authenticity? Leave it to the schmucks in their ivory towers, the Bellows and the Malamuds. But you probably won’t be too worried about Egan working both sides of the street when you’re flicking the pages while the housework piles up, or snatching yet another chapter under the desk at work. For we have here the plot to match the characters, incredible, but for this reader, unputdownable.

It is an interesting experiment in its way. What happens when you take a story that is a mash up of noir and romantic (in the grand sense) and apply to it a high literary gloss? As I was reading I thought the technique might make the tale more believable. This didn’t happen, but what did happen was that the incredible story became incredibly vivid.

Like almost all American writers, Egan lives in Brooklyn and this is where events largely unfold, specifically, the vast Brooklyn shipyards during World War Two where Anna trains as a naval diver. Did I mention authenticity? Egan ballasts any lack of psychological complexity and motivation (dictated mostly by storyline) with a stunning display of historical data of all variety. Gene Kelly reputedly said that if an artist looks as if they’re working, then they’re not working hard enough. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I was particularly dazzled towards the end on a merchant ship cruising the Atlantic in convoy. Alistair MacLean and Nicholas Monsarrat territory. Who knows what all this hardware is? Whoever did? That’s the point: a glimpse into an entire world you’ll never understand or be part of (because you’re just a kid) but can thrill to.

And since this is a thriller I won’t outline the plot except to say that I’m confident you will enjoy it. There are some standout scenes―the opening is particularly good―and in fact many of these scenes and plot twists you will anticipate, which strangely only seems to make them more readable when they inevitably occur. To be fair to Egan, there is originality in having such a masculine world seen from a female perspective. For example, the dangers and difficulties of a woman having an independent sexual life in the 1940s is not something that tends to pop up in Alistair MacLean. Also, the powerful underlying concept that a major historical upheaval, such as WWll, even though not fought on American soil, will necessarily upend the known world in ways one cannot predict, and so remake that world.

Still, at the close of the novel, if you join the dots together, you come up with an overarching viewpoint that is so corrupt and paranoid it makes internet conspirators look like David Hume. So my advice is don’t join the dots. When you crack the spine of Manhattan Beach, place your brain in neutral, and just dive in like our heroine.

Seek my Face was John Updike’s fifty-fourth book and twentieth novel, and by this time (2002) the wunderkind of sixties American Lit had largely been sidelined, both by newer writers such as Don de Lillo, Paul Auster and Toni Morrison, and by the fierce shake-down he copped in the seventies from feminist critics for the sexism of much of his prose. Aside from sexism, his novelistic flaws at this distance seem obvious: weak structure, which was probably a disdain of structure, resulting in poor plotting and pacing; and far too much cluttering detail tied to an obsession, led on by the haughty example of Nabokov, to make every sentence a work of art. In regards to the latter, however, it must be said that virtually nobody can turn a phrase like Updike and I am one of many readers/writers who have fallen under the spell of what seemed miraculous sequences, before fatigue inevitably set in.

No-one except the scholars are going to read fifty-four books by one writer, so I am here to tell you that this book, pretty much lost in Updike’s opus, is a gem, containing all of his qualities and few of his failings. It is a roman à clef, an interview between a young arts journalist and an elderly painter, whose responses and inward reminiscences tell a lightly fictionalised history of post-war American art.  The painter is Hope Chafetz, really Lee Krasner, and the guts of the book is her tempestuous recall of first husband Zack McCoy, Jackson Pollock. After his death she marries Guy Holloway, a mishmash of pop artists but mostly Andy Warhol, who would be spinning in his grave like a Rolling Stones’ 45rpm at being both straight and up-for-it. No matter. Any sexism is muted by this being a conversation between two women, although interviewer Kathryn does display a keen Updikean interest in Hope’s erotic history, and Updike’s characteristic virtuosic verbosity is constrained by his decision to adhere to Aristotelean unities of time and place: the interview is conducted over a single day.

Updike had originally envisioned a career as an artist, a cartoonist of all things, and spent a student year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. Much of his prose is painterly; when reading the ‘Rabbit’ books, perhaps his outstanding literary legacy, I remember entertaining a theory that perhaps the writer felt that if he described the surface of the world with enough completeness, it would inadvertently reveal its depths. Anyway, Updike certainly has a great feeling for and understanding of art; the passion that Hope expresses is clearly his own, and being near the end of her life, she is a stand-in not only for his enthusiasms, but also his doubts and fears. Who will care about his creative work when he has gone? What does it amount to in the scheme of the cosmos, if there is such a thing?

The major interest for me in this book is Updike’s focus on Pollock, an artist who is antithetical in method and approach to him in every way, save one significant particular. McCoy/Pollock is described as an instinctual artist, one who plunges into the creative moment and trusts to his talent. No aforethought, no plan, just action and result. Because he is a genius, the result can occasion great art. I believe Updike was intrigued, and perhaps a little jealous, himself being so pre-meditated and deliberate, so cerebral. In Pollock, what would formally appear to be an unruly mess turns out to be a superb unity, whereas as it happens, formal unity is notably lacking in most of Updike’s oeuvre (there are other compensating virtues). I imagine the elderly writer standing before one of those sprawling mesmerising canvases at MOMA, scratching his white head, wondering how one might achieve this by losing control rather than exercising it.

And the significant particular? It’s Updike’s personal view but he makes a persuasive case in the novel, particularly towards the close, of all artistic endeavour being an attempt to reach the divine, in essence, a form of prayer. Seek my Face. Pollock is a drunkard, a boor, a caveman, violent and selfish, and yet, like Updike, the civilized and urbane man of letters, he is embarked on the same quest, possessed in like manner for like purpose. Perhaps Updike chose Pollock deliberately to make this point. Or to separate the man from the product. Pollock behaved badly in life, but then so did Updike. Is the art compensation? Is it anything at all? What is it? Whatever, it is no accident that Chafetz’s given name is Hope.

Joan Didion’s classic, Play is as it Lays, published in 1970, is a spare, closely written satire/exposé of Hollywood film life in the late sixties. The story is filtered through the biography of Maria Wyeth, one time model, actress and party girl. Maria is well and truly over it (the novel opens in a psychiatric rest home), and as her grit and glam tale unrolls, first person and third, it’s not difficult to see why: alcoholism, drugs, marital violence, promiscuity, coerced abortions. On the other hand, you might start to find yourself wearying or questioning such an excess of ennui, or perhaps consider it a little first world to be young, talented, good-looking, rich, and unable to find any structure or meaning in life.

Much of the novel is dialogue―Didion and her husband were both successful screen writers, in fact wrote the screenplay to the movie of the novel―and despite the apparent casualness of presentation, every word is cleverly weighted. This was a novel I enjoyed more for its craft than its content; beyond an attractive façade of jaded sophistication, one struggles to care for these people and their ‘stage’ tragedies. I was reminded of Brett Easton Ellis’ breakout novel Less than Zero, much the same subject matter set a decade or so later. Ellis’ novel is more sensational, in fact totally overcooked, whereas Didion’s characters’ actions and reactions always remain believable.

So the novel came across at the end for me a bit like an anthropological study. Just what were these people like in L.A. at that time? Didion knows, Didion shows, and you do get the genuine slice-of-life experience here, but it’s a slice you digest rather rapidly.