Alan Davis • 218-236-4681 • Email
The following article appeared in Hudson Review Spring 2001
Bio: Alan Davis is the author, most recently, of Alone with the Owl, a collection of stories. He directs the MFA program at Minnesota State University in Moorhead.
Not Responsible for Items Forgotten or Lost (© Alan Davis)
Shed Ten Years in Ten Weeks. Gary Null's Ultimate Anti-Aging Program. 8 Weeks to Optimum Health. Before The Hudson Review sent me this latest batch of fiction to read, I found myself one fine Sunday afternoon in the local Barnes & Noble, killing time in the "How To Live Longer" section of the store, in part because I'm a hopeless hypochondriac, but mostly because it was the section from which I could most easily keep an eye on the parking lot as I waited for my ride. It had been many years since I had last read a Doris Lessing book, and so I wondered - it was a British kind of day outside, and Lessing herself has always seemed ageless to me - what she was about in these times.
I shortly thereafter received Ben in the World, her 37th book by my count. [1] It's a short, astonishing one, a kind of fable that's written as a sequel to The Fifth Child, where we first meet Ben Lovatt, a Neanderthal throwback who fits in nowhere. In this sequel, he has left behind the family that could never understand him and he is loose in the world; the book is mostly about the people who look after him, and what they do to him. For Lessing, Ben is certainly not incidental, but is the perfect mirror of a cynical society that uses whatever it can grasp; he is also emblematic to her of the human condition. More importantly, he is a fully realized and sympathetic character whose hunger is sometimes quite literal. "It was not an easy hunger: the thin taste of a bread or a bun could not satisfy it. It was a need for meat, and he smelled the rawness of blood, the reek of it: yet this hunger was dangerous to him." His primordial nature thus drives him; his literary bloodline could be traced back to Frankenstein except that he is no experiment. When a kindly woman who has taken him in dies, he finds a prostitute, Rita, and her pimp, Johnston. Rita enjoys him and then comes to befriend him, but Johnston dresses him up and sends him as a bagman to the south of France with a false identity as an actor - Ben has rugged good looks. (Throwbacks in the right circumstances have a certain commercial value.) Once Ben has served his purpose and is abandoned in France - though, it should be said, in a swanky hotel with a limited but decent bankroll - a dilettante filmmaker discovers him and takes him to South America, where he becomes a part of a group of expatriates who perhaps are making a movie, though, like certain writing students, they seem more enamored with the idea of movie making, discussed over flasks of booze and bowls of dope, than with the task itself. Teresa, a native member of this group who has survived adolescence in the school of hard knocks, befriends Ben, but soon enough a doctor from a scientific institute discovers him and locks him away like an ape for study. Teresa and some others rescue him and trek into the Andes, the authorities close on their heels, to a gallery of rock pictures depicting an extinct race of people who are clearly kin to Ben. Ben understands somehow that he will never find a place in the modern world, and the next fine morning he throws himself over the precipice. Teresa, poignantly, understands that "... we are pleased that he is dead and we don't have to think about him."
It seems to me that Lessing, never one for humor, has managed to avoid the pitfalls of this kind of book - overbroad Huxleyan satire or shrill Lawrentian polemic. A throwback herself to the pre-Jamesian days when visionary storytelling could be everything and craft was often an afterthought, she can still get inside my head in the way that her better earlier novels once managed to do. She also never forgets that as readers we are as interested in the multifarious world as we are in the permutations of consciousness that too exclusively sometimes take the attention of contemporary writers.
Michael Ondaatje, a transplanted Sri Lankan who settled in Canada and won the Booker Prize for The English Patient, is almost a magical realist, but not quite. In his best novels, which include the Booker Prize book and In the Skin of a Lion, Ondaatje, who has published many volumes of poetry and a couple of hybrid narratives that combine poetry and prose, interweaves passages that are very technical with sequences that are almost religiously lyrical. The permutations of consciousness grappling with a world that is puzzling at best, but also very real, is his forte. His latest, Anil's Ghost, returns to Sri Lanka, [2] the setting of an earlier memoir, Running in the Family, that is surreal and vivid. Because I so admire his recent prose, which seems to me to evoke with an almost pitch perfect voice the problematic fate of the romantic imagination in a world of machinery and violence, I expected a great deal from this one, which is about a Sri Lankan woman trained as a forensic anthropologist in England and America who returns to her native land at the behest of an international human rights group. Once in Sri Lanka, she becomes compelled, in the company of an archaeologist (who might or might not be working at cross-purposes with her) to discover the identity of a skeleton, a victim of violence, that she nicknames "Sailor." What she learns, instead, is that nothing she finds out will be allowed to surface officially if it threatens the regime in power.
Alas: the book has its distinct pleasures and lyrical fevers, quite a few of them actually, and is mostly a stylistic delight, but too often Ondaatje seems to be paying a debt rather than writing a novel. That is, he understands that his native country is in trouble, that murders have taken place and that political violence is rife, that too many Sri Lankans of all ideological stripes have disappeared, and he feels an obligation to dramatize the Sri Lankan troubles for the best of motives. So far, so good: that's the kind of fiction I like, because it plunges into the world without deserting the psychic reality of its characters. Two themes struggle for prominence, though, and the return of the prodigal daughter, a classic story, gives way too often to the weight of exposition and historical summary. Fictional polemic has never been Ondaatje's forte; he is best at teasing out nuances of character. In the following passage, for example, which describes Gamini, a doctor whose life intersects with Anil's, he puts it best himself:
We evolve deviously. Gamini grew up not knowing half the things he thought he was supposed to know - he was to make and discover unusual connections because he had not known the usual routes. He was for most of his life a boy spinning in a chair. And just as things had been kept away from him, he too became a container of secrets.
Those secrets are the ones Ondaatje knows better than any other writer now working in English. This novel is extensively researched, but the burden of witness overwhelms it except at those intersections of character where the personal becomes political by ignoring the novel's agenda and leaving us with luminous moments (an impression of life, as they used to say, a phrase that now sounds quaint) that are unforgettable. There is a wonderful sequence of flashbacks set in Arizona, for example, about Anil's passionate friendship with a woman named Leaf, who introduces Anil to "the finer arts of ten-pin bowling, raucous hooting in bars, and high-speed driving in the desert, swerving back and forth in the night." The two women place a television set outside beside a yucca tree in the yard of Leaf's rented house and watch videotapes "curled up beside each other in the double hammock." Anil lives for such moments and, as readers, so do we.
Ha Jin is Chinese, though he came to the United States in 1985 and now teaches at Emory University. He won the National Book Award for his second novel, Waiting. His latest collection of stories, (The Bridegroom), - the parentheses are part of the title - is set in Muji, the same province as the NBA winner, and it is achingly comic. [3] Its twelve stories chronicle the fates of ordinary Chinese caught up in the whirlwinds of Kafkaesque bureaucracy or beset by disasters not usually of their own making. Fate has in store for Ha Jin's people odd little twists of the sorts we might find in a folktale, but they manage also to be relentlessly literary and realistic. Plot works on character like a steel trap on the leg of a captured wolf; such an animal can escape, but only by chewing off its own leg.
In the title story, the narrator, who is decent but officious and heads up the Security Section in a factory, manages to marry off a homely young woman that he cared for after the death of her father, who had been his good friend. Though he is quite pleased with himself, his complacency is shattered when the husband, Baowen, is arrested for the bourgeois crime of homosexuality after police raid a "men's club" to which he belonged. The ensuing narrative is a textbook study of hypocrisy run amok. Thanks to the narrator's status (and to a few bribes), Baowen is sent to a mental hospital instead of to prison. In the hospital, he endures (willingly, convinced of his sickness) a series of "electric baths." A kindly doctor finally tells the narrator that Baowen will never be cured, because "Homosexuality isn't an illness, so how can it have a cure?" Officially, however, he says otherwise. The narrator too hides this information, because "the factory leaders would be mad at me if they knew there was no cure....” This narrator, in over his head like the narrator of "Bartleby," finally delivers an ultimatum to Beina, the wife: "divorce him or don't come to see me again." Beina refuses; she will wait steadfastly for her husband. Her small misunderstood act of loyalty and honor (and perhaps love?) gives the fiction an exact and touching completion.
The story, its innards a well-oiled machine, critiques social and cultural hypocrisy without bluster or polemic. In other stories, though, characters, outraged at their treatment, sometimes take secretive but radical revenge. In "Saboteur," for example, Mr. Chiu, with his bride, is having lunch at an outdoor square when he is harassed, arrested and held in a cell without cause, where his hepatitis becomes worse, until, seemingly defeated and having witnessed the local cops beat up his lawyer, he agrees to sign a false confession. He does so, and then, with the lawyer goes from restaurant to restaurant, eating a bit of food in each establishment, a routine that baffles the lawyer. "If only I could kill all the bastards!" Mr. Chiu keeps saying through his teeth. Ha Jin then concludes his story with a chilling afterward:
"Within a month over eight hundred people contracted acute hepatitis in Muji. Six died of the disease, including two children. Nobody knew how the epidemic had started." Ha Jin's stew of fiction, folk tale, and Chinese cultural circumstance is quite dazzling, as is his mixture of situational humor and poignant realistic detail. The fact that he is able to write intimately about a culture little-known to many of us gives this collection, and much of his other fiction besides, an advantage over similar fiction set in the United States. We are learning something that we did not already know about the world.
Kazuo Ishiguro, who, like Ondaatje, jumped into the literary elite with his own Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day has now written an odd novel, When We Were Orphans, set mostly in Shanghai. It never quite works for me, despite its charms. [4] Its narrator, Christopher Banks, becomes an orphan at age nine when his parents both disappear under suspicious circumstances. Sent to England, he becomes a renowned detective (or so he tells us - we see little evidence of it) and decides to return to Shanghai more than twenty years later during the Sino-Japanese war to solve the primal mystery and to find his mother, whom he is certain is still alive.
The novel, until late in the game, feels contrived and thin to me, a 336 page finger exercise. In The Remains of the Day, the butler's willful blindness to fascism and to his own deepest needs is strongly rendered and moving. Here, too many scenes feel labored, and the narrator's dialogue often reads like a set piece:
"Ladies and gentleman, I can well see the situation here has grown rather trying. And I have no with to raise false expectations at such a time. But let me say that I would not be here now if I were not optimistic ...."
It goes on. The story picks up when Banks decides that he will run off with Sarah, a sort of femme fatale who married a rich older man and who just happens to be in Shanghai with her gambling fool of a husband at the same time as Banks conducts his investigation there. His decision, though foiled, sets off a series of discoveries and epiphanies that are surreal because they take place in the middle of a confusing house-to-house ground war and because the narrator's self-delusion becomes palpable and touching.
Ishiguro's rendering of class-conscious England is nuanced and precise, and I don't mean to suggest to his fans, or to some of you who might not know his work, that he is not a good read, one that is infinitely preferable to any age-defying self-improvement manual. I do suggest, however, that you read his other novels first.
The High Flyer, by Susan Howatch, is a very different sort of English novel. [5] Even though it weighs in at 500 pages, it's a fast read. Howatch is a prolific writer and this, her nineteenth book, is actually about self-improvement (if not age-defying nutrition), though with an esoteric component that makes finally for a classic sort of battle between good and evil. Despite some glibness, the book's tone is sufficiently ironic to save it from patches of popular fiction prose.
Carter Graham, a thirty-something lawyer, is a woman (and a rationalist) on the make, content and smug in her materialism until she sees that her new sexy husband Kim might have some sort of family connection to the Nazis and is secretly involved with an occult group headed by the charismatic Mrs. Mayfield. The novel, among other things, is a crash course in the conflict between logical positivism and mystical apprehension, but mostly it's a fast-paced hoot, a clever concoction and a good read. Kim turns out to be a charlatan of the first order, and a kind of conspiracy at the center of the marriage slowly reveals itself, resulting in deception, betrayal, chicanery and finally murder. Carter, faced with matters she can't or won't understand, maintains her peppiness for a few hundred pages, but finally, desperate, seeks assistance at St. Benet's Healing Centre from a cadre of priests and lay workers. Because Howatch wants entire worldviews smuggled piecemeal into the book, there are times when exposition, usually couched in dialogue, is tedious and seemingly endless. Sections of this novel beg to be skimmed, but, paradoxically, the pace remains almost frantic even when the burden of exposition is heaviest. Howatch, as her readers will recognize, makes use of much that she knows about Church history, theology and natural science. For readers unfamiliar with her agenda, she provides explicit guidance with chapter epigraphs drawn from books with titles like The Shape of Living and Making Sense, ones written by a former Archbishop of York (Lord Habgood) and a current Professor of Divinity at Cambridge (David F. Ford).
So we come full circle, from those bookshelves gleaming with the outside sun at Barnes and Noble that promise longevity (to those of us wise enough to purchase the latest manual written, no doubt between patients, by writers whose "Ph.D." is featured prominently on the dust jacket) to The Best of Jackson Payne, [6] a book drenched in workaday gritty detail. Jack Fuller, who is president of the Tribune Publishing Company in Chicago, has written a fictional biography of a fictional jazz musician, Jackson Payne. As a frame, Fuller creates Charles Quinlan, a musicologist, a man obsessed with finding out everything about Payne, and this book is his, so to speak, though Fuller is like a jazz musician himself when it comes to point of view, improvising at times, riffing with counterpoint and syncopation at others. The result is a bountiful performance whereby Jackson Payne's life becomes enmeshed with Quinlan as the musicologist travels far and wide to speak with everyone who knew, or might have known, Payne.
Payne returns from service in Korea and for twenty years makes bop on tenor saxophone his lifeblood before drugs, underworld malevolence, and psychic turbulence destroy him. Quinlan tracks down women, musicians addicted to bop and dope, and former transcripts in the Korean War. Fuller, clearly a jazz freak, takes us into the clubs where Payne played and finds a way to cross racial boundaries in a fashion that is always distanced and shaped but is also credible and inspired. Fuller opens up the intricacies of the form to us even as he stays with his subject. Payne spends a stint in Bellevue ("which took a certain pride in being an asylum to the arts"), where he is treated repeatedly with electric shock, and where, later, a doctor tells Quinlan: "You see, the mind of an artist embraces both the impulse to organize and to shatter." Later, Payne, in and out of musical and spiritual lucidity and of addiction, becomes a snitch, spends time in Europe and Tijuana, does jail time, makes a comeback, deteriorates physically, takes acid in the Flower Child Era and discovers God and a good woman before a final collapse as he attempts to keep his junkie daughter supplied with dope.
Fuller's finish is a virtuoso one, and this novel deserves a wider reading than it will probably receive, despite superb blurbs from the likes of Scott Turow and Robert Olen Butler. I recommend it highly to anyone interested in jazz or in the convergence of jazz and literature; it is also one of those books that tells us something new by investigating the multifarious world - or, in this instance, the underbelly of that world - while also penetrating into the psyche of its characters. It's a book that should age well. With the right vitamins, some yoga now and then, and a little (or a good deal) of luck, I hope to read it again, ten or fifteen or twenty years from now, and maybe rediscover it, for myself and for those of you who might not have the time to plunge into it in this particular season. That's okay; I'll catch you with it next time. Catch me too, will you?
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[1]BEN IN THE WORLD, by Doris Lessing. Harper Collins. $23.00.
[2]ANIL'S GHOST, by Michael Ondaatje. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00.
[3](THE BRIDEGROOM), by Ha Jin. Pantheon Books. $22.00.
[4]WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Alfred A Knopf. $25.00.
[5]THE HIGH FLYER, by Susan Howatch. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.00.
[6]THE BEST OF JACKSON PAYNE, by Jack Fuller. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00.
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