Dianne Warren: Cool Water

Well, now that it is officially 2012, I find myself back in Montreal having read the 2010 Man Booker (The Finkler Question) and Governor General Award for Fiction (Cool Water), as well as the 2011 Pulitzer Prize (A Visit From the Goon Squad). This is mostly because of when the awards are announced (the Pulitzer, early, the other two, late in the year). So now I will do a little inversion, starting on the 2011 Gov. Gen., The Sisters Brothers, which I received from Santa over the break, followed by the Man Booker 2011, Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, before I finally move on to the 2010 Pulitzer, Paul Harding’s Tinkers. This continued reading project will be facilitated by two great technological leaps forward. The first of which was a present from my parents, currently disguising itself as its paginated ancestors.

my new Kobo e-reader (thanks Mom and Dad!):

The second is really more a present from myself, and it should make this whole blogging thing a lot easier and a lot more portable.

I defer to the immortal Ferris Bueller to express my sentiments:

But enough of technology, and on to literature! I read the last 100 pages or so of Dianne Warren’s Cool Water last night, and I have to say, it has been by far my favorite novel among the award-winners I have read so far. Set in the small town of Juliet, Saskatchewan, the novel follows the interweaving story-lines of a dozen or so of its citizens on a single summer day. Naturally this feature appealed to my Aristotelian sentiments (“Tragedy endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun.” Poetics V), not that the book is tragic in Aristotle’s terms, though it is a book about loss, particularly the loss of a sense of place. In many ways the central theme of the book is the characters’ love for, and gradual alienation from, the land that surrounds them. The town of Juliet sits on the border of a Saskatchewan desert, which looms threateningly against the fragile pasture that supports the husbandry of the town. But for many of the residents making a hard-scrabble living in the town, the desert is a metonymy for other anxieties: debt, infidelity, disease, loneliness. Yet Warren eloquently highlights the simple beauties of her characters lives, and the uplifting moments in her story are that much sweeter for their precariousness.

Warning! Frequent Bible Reading Can Turn You Liberal

A recent study confirms suspicions that Jesus was a hippie pinko. You can tell by his long hair.

2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, A Visit From the Goon Squad

I want to begin this post with a little advice (to myself) from John Updike. His five/six rules for reviewing books (from Picked-up Pieces-1975):

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Sage advice I think, especially for newspaper film reviewers, who seem to make a business out of the “fuzzy precis” (more on that in another post). So let me try my best to do an Updikian review of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. The book revolves around two main figures, Bennie Salazar, “an aging former punk rocker and record executive”(back cover), and Sasha, a talented young kleptomaniac Bennie employs. The description of Bennie as “aging”, though, is a bit misleading, as the novel jumps back and forth through time and setting, with a wide variety of narrative voices, usually limited omniscient, but occasionally in other registers. Many of the chapters only include Bennie and Sasha in a peripheral way, and it is really quite fascinating to build your knowledge of the characters obliquely. It is this kind of structural play, I think, that accounts for the Pulitzer, as Egan is truly adept at using postmodern narrative models without turning her work into a Faulknerian labyrinth (i.e. see my friend Will’s travails with The Sound and the Fury).

The Essay

 

“A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short. It is from reading, even before writing, that I became part of a community – the community of literature – which includes more dead than living writers. Reading, and having standards, are then relations with the past and with what is other.”

-Susan Sontag, The World as India

 

 

One of the things that has become apparent to me working as a teaching assistant and as a writing tutor is the strange discrepancy between the number of essays students write and the number of essays they read. It is deeply surprising to many of them that there are even good essays out there to read. In many ways our highschools are to blame for this. The reading material of the English curriculum is made up almost entirely of novels, with the mandatory Shakespeare thrown in, as well as the odd poem. Despite this, the standard form of output required of students is the essay. Few third and fourth year undergrads, and almost no highschool students, have ever read an essay all the way through, and if they have, they have only done so under the rubric of a course or as research for one of their own papers. It is no surprise to me, then, that students constantly produce tepid, uninspired prose; they have no models for emulation. I went to a highschool that prides itself on academic rigour, and yet I can only recall reading one essay in any of my five years English classes. It was Emerson’s Self Reliance, and only in my senior year. I remember, though, that it was a revelation. Up until that point I had been taught that the best essay was one that followed a predictably dry structure (introduction, including thesis, followed by three main paragraphs each pointing out one piece of evidence supporting that thesis, culminating in a conclusion that restates the thesis), never used the first person, and actively sought to render any interesting subject into the monotonous regurgitation of rote formulae. Emerson, surprisingly, had never been taught this, and wrote as if one might do so for pleasure (God forbid). It is this active opposition to all joy that not only stifles students’ prose, but also turns them against literature, since it teaches students that the appropriate response to literature is formulation. Imagine if, instead of bombarding them with abstract structural models, we introduced students to the essay by example, say this passage from Montaigne’s Of Friendship (prehaps the best essay ever written):

Two Poems

I recently encountered the work of poet and Renaissance scholar Kimberly Johnson. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop (where Marilynne Robinson teaches), she is also the editor of the online database of John Donne’s sermons. Here is a poem of her’s allusively related to my favorite Donne Poem.

Easter, Looking Westward

by Kimberly Johnson

1.

The stars! the stars have fled the sky!—
Scratch that—the stars have skyed the flood, the sea
glimmering in pale beneath a starless black. . .

2.

No, scratch that too. I’m all exotic
metaphor, inkhorn snarls, never content
with the unelaborated thing;

always the forced apotheosis,
every least sparrow a visible sign,
strong-arming water to wine. So tenderly

I love this world’s profane loveliness,
its small, scarce loveliness, like a puritan
I batter magnitude out of homespun.

3.

Faithless my zeal, for the puritan’s faith
imputes us all with a roughhouse grace, most
lovely in our brokenness, bruised and bent

to glory. Scratch that—to sufficiency.
Start again: The stars are black with storms
blown shoreward; the dinoflagellates

smacked on the shoals leak light from shattered cells;
they phosphoresce the breakers in their roister.
Let me sing, then, the beauty of creatures

microscopic, who make the vastness gleam
in smithereens.

4.

                                        See: starlike, after all.

 

Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward

by John Donne

 

LET man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th’ intelligence that moves, devotion is ;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl’d by it.
Hence is’t, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul’s form bends to the East.
There I should see a Sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget.
But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die ;
What a death were it then to see God die ?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.
Could I behold those hands, which span the poles
And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes ?
Could I behold that endless height, which is
Zenith to us and our antipodes,
Humbled below us ? or that blood, which is
The seat of all our soul’s, if not of His,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God for His apparel, ragg’d and torn ?
If on these things I durst not look, durst I
On His distressed Mother cast mine eye,
Who was God’s partner here, and furnish’d thus
Half of that sacrifice which ransom’d us ?
Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,
They’re present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them ; and Thou look’st towards me,
O Saviour, as Thou hang’st upon the tree.
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.
O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rust, and my deformity ;
Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,
That Thou mayst know me, and I’ll turn my face.

On the Idea of the Sermon

Like almost anyone who grew up in a church, I have listened to a lot of sermons, or at least, I have listened to a lot of people speak in a way that structurally resembles a sermon. The tendency of these (usually) Sunday performances to slip into tedium or oversimplified moralization has earned the word “sermon,” and its operative verb, “preach,” a rather pejorative set of connotations. Ironically, the long history of bad sermons, in all church traditions, has defined this form of communication by its lack of moral compunction. As the reflection of sanctimonious hypocrisy or  humdrum moral challenges basically unchanged since Sunday school, the sermon struggles to become something other than a tirade of a despot or the impotent musing of a sycophant. I have suffered more from the later, I don’t know if it’s worse. Fortunately, I don’t think the medium is to blame; in fact, I’d suggest, it’s preachers’ poor understanding of the power of their medium that often accounts for their underwhelming elocution. Testament to this fact is Alain de Botton’s recently founded School of Life in London, which models itself after a church (including a weekly parish newsletter), but targets a secular audience. Here’s A de B’s description of the place:

“In the old days most of us looked to religion for direction on how to live. Now we flick through the Sunday papers or surf the net, finding little by way of good counsel.

At The School of Life we’re curious about what values we should live by today. So we’ve asked maverick cultural figures to tell us what they see as the virtues to cling to and the vices to be wary of.

From kindness and humility, to envy and adultery, they deliver persuasive polemics with peculiar passion. Expect hellfire preaching, an alternative parish newsletter, hymns, sticky buns, conversations with fellow ‘parishioners’ and the possible appearance of the Devil himself.”

One of the things that stuck out to me about this project is that, while church preachers have often tended to tone down the rhetorical demands of the sermon, making it less about challenging the audience to a moral reorientation (dare I say, repentance?), de Botton is clearly attracted to exactly this power:

“A sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information. I think we need to go back to that tradition of sermon in education.”

Because a sermon has this moral claim on its audience, it has a creative freedom that no lecture could (lest anyone think I am suggesting that preachers should merely “stick to the text”). I have in mind, when I say this, the likes of John Donne, one of the great English sermonists, who, sick and sensing imminent death, wrapped himself up in a burial shroud as he delivered what would be his final sermon. I remember an atheist professor of mine reading aloud a particularly moving excerpt from just this sermon and exclaiming, “Now, I would go to church if I could hear that on a Sunday!”

One of the reasons that I have been attracted to liturgical church traditions is my own cynical mistrust of sermons. I’ve often said, evangelizing those friends of mine from Baptist and other “low church” backgrounds, “In my church, even if the sermon sucks, at least you can count on the Common Book and the creeds.” Of course, the centrality of the sermon in Protestant services is a legacy of the Reformation, during which, particularly among puritans, the hearing of sermons replaced the eucharist as the primary mark of religious devotion. The pejorative phrase, “gadding to sermons,” was used to describe the practice of puritan women who travelled miles on foot to nearby towns in order to hear a second or third daily sermon. In this culture of sermons, it is no wonder that the best, even now, half a millennium later, still strike a chord. Among the strength of these 16th and 17th century sermons is what you might call a refusal to alleviate the tension of spiritual and scriptural problems too early; they avoid looking always for consolation. In a world where churches are desperate to fill, or even partially populate pews, preachers often employ an opiate rhetoric, hoping to make the church a place of comfort, not realizing that the church has already lost this battle to television. The best early modern preachers did not seek primarily to give comfort, but to express the anxious tension of the life of faith corporately, to give authorized voice to the fear and trembling of the assembled faithful. Consider this opening passage from the 1621 Easter sermon of Lancelot Andrewes (on John 20):

The Finkler Question

 

I knew setting out on my ridiculous quest to read the Man Bookers, Pulitzers, and Governor General Award novels I would eventually encounter fiction that I simply did not like. I did not expect it to happen so quickly. Unfortunately, this was the case with The Finkler Question. “Finkler,” after an eponymous character in the novel, is a name applied by the novel’s resident gentile, Julian Treslove, as a metonymy for “Jew.” In a novel which reflects the morbid humour of this title, Howard Jacobson builds his story around the relationship between three men: Julian Treslove, a former BBC  late night producer, Sam Finkler, a popular philosopher, who is Jewish but fervently anti-Zionist, and Libor Sevcik, a Czech widower and retired celebrity interviewer. Much of the book is about Julian’s feelings of ostracism among his two friends whom he feels are specially connected by a Jewishness that he cannot quite define. After being mugged by a woman whom Treslove believes has mistakenly targeted him for an antisemitic attack, the gentile “protagonist” shacks up with one of Libor’s young Jewish relatives and attempts a kind of conversion.

This novel sets out trying to navigate the difficult question of secular Jewish identity in Britain. At its best moments, the conversations between post-conversion Treslove and Libor towards the end of the book, it begins to ask some interesting questions that actually held my attention. The rest of the book, however, I found exceedingly difficult to get through simply because of its profoundly cynical humour. I would venture to suggest that this book, or at least the characters within it, is British in all the worst ways: sarcastic, smug, dispassionate. For a book with so much sex it is startlingly un-erotic, mostly because all the intercourse that happens is competitive scorekeeping between Treslove and Finkler.

In an effort to see what I was missing, I listened to an interview (see the question @ 2:12) with Jacobson about the book. Here he claimed that the book is basically about the unstated rivalry and jealousy that inhabits all male friendships. It was then that I understood what I disliked so much about this book. Jacobson was, for many years, an academic, and the blurb at the back of his book proudly announces that he studied under F.R. Leavis. Finkler, in the book, is himself a succesful academic. In short, Jacobson’s ideas of male friendship seem to be based on those most insipid relationships between careerist academics, always cheering in public, but secretly resentful in private. While these kind of friendships certainly do exist, I’m not sure what I am supposed to enjoy, or even get from them.  Put another way, the satire in this book seems inseparable from what is being satirized.

So, while I would hardly endorse this book, I have learned from it. It’s always jarring to encounter something that others love and then not have the taste for it. In novels, as in food, this is always an opportunity to challenge and refine one’s taste. Review of A Visit From the Goon Squad coming soon.