This year’s Village Voice pick. I’d already written about the Le Guin collected stories and Chabon’s “Telegraph Avenue,” so I chose Jeanette Winterson’s memoir “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” I heard her read the other day and was moved by her account of writing her way out of depression. Depression was like being in a haunted house, she said, “and what’s haunting you is you.”

She also said that art can help you understand the way the past and present live alongside each other in the psyche: “Art helps us to live in a more complete sense of

Read more at
https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/12/19/our-favorite-books-of-2012/

“Telegraph Avenue” is unquestionably a Great American Novel, but at first glance you might not recognize it as such. Michael Chabon braids plot twists, extraneous details, and references to such low-culture manifestations as comic books and kung fu movies into his stories with an almost adolescent abandon. In America a new Chabon book is a major event, but outside the English-speaking world, his verbal extravagance and fond embrace of popular culture have tended to undermine his credibility. Compared to contemporaries like Jonathan Franzen, he doesn’t always look as important as he is.

The central character in “Telegraph Avenue” is described, on his first appearance, thus:

Moonfaced, mountainous, moderately stoned, Archy Stallings manned the front counter of Brokeland Records, holding a random baby, wearing a tan corduroy suit over a pumpkin-bright turtleneck that reinforced his noted but not disadvantageous resemblance to Gamera, the giant mutant flying tortoise of Japanese cinema. He had the kid tucked up under his left arm as, with his free right hand, he worked through the eighth of fifteen crates from the Benezra estate, the records in crate number 8 favoring, like Archy, the belly meat of jazz, salty and well marbled with funk.

Archy is one of Chabon’s typical men, well-meaning but indecisive and ill-prepared for life. He might seem like a cousin to Rob Fleming in “High Fidelity” if it weren’t for the orange turtleneck and the baby, which he has borrowed in an attempt to prepare for his own approaching fatherhood. (And by the way, he’s black.) Chabon’s adjectival tsunami places Archy in the midst of his life and at the same time shows how hard it is, in the contemporary flood of images and choices, for him to hold his own.

To Chabon, being passionate about jazz or Japanese cinema is just another way of being serious. “Telegraph Avenue” takes place on the continent’s geographic fringe, but it deals with themes at the heart of American culture: the legacy of the social changes of the 1970s, the possibility and fragility of black-white friendships, the importance of meaningful work, the modern and eternal question of fatherhood. On the famous street in Berkeley, California, with its countercultural past and its multicultural present, he’s searching for signs of America’s future.

The large cast of “Telegraph Avenue” includes Archy’s best friend and the other owner of Brokeland Records, white, Jewish, crabby Nat Jaffe, with his “relentless, nettlesome, ecstatic, inspiring” passion for music. There’s Nat’s fourteen-year-old son Julie, plunging recklessly into the adult world of heartbreak by falling in love with his new best friend, Titus Joyner. There’s Nat’s wife Aviva and Archy’s wife Gwen, two veteran midwives fighting the medical establishment for the right to go on doing home births. There’s Archy’s father, the down-and-out former blaxploitation star Luther Stallings. And there’s Gibson Goode, “the fifth richest black man in America,” whose Dogpile media merchandising empire is about to put Brokeland out of business.

Chabon inhabits all these characters, black and white, convincingly and sympathetically. At the center is Archy, struggling not only with the prospect of the new baby—and with the appearance of Titus, his earlier, unacknowledged son—but with the legacy of his own no-good progenitor. Fathers, in his experience, are useless; how can he, Archy, be any different? Fatherhood is a favorite theme for Chabon—of all his literary contemporaries he’s the most committed family man—but he’s never explored it as deeply as here.

Meanwhile, Archy’s wife Gwen is 36 weeks pregnant and going through her own series of crises. First she catches Archy with another woman; then she nearly loses a patient; then she entirely loses her most valuable possession, her self-control. She’s so sick of forgiving Archy for all his lapses of fidelity that her sigh of marital disappointment goes off like a jihadi bomb, packed with “shards of irony, nails of bitterness, jagged chips of bleak wonder.”

Apology and forgiveness are among the book’s themes, not only the daily offerings of remorse that hold marriages together, but the deeper contrition and exoneration that will be needed if America is ever to come to terms with its history of racial and economic injustice. Gwen in particular refuses to apologize, instead cherishing her anger, “feeding on it like a sun, using it to power her engines, to fund her stake in the American dream.” Yet when it comes right down to it, she balks at the thought of passing her rage on to the next generation.

Music isn’t the answer, but it offers a ground where the characters can come together, at least for a while. Archy thinks of Brokeland Records as an oasis where traders and tribes of all races mix, where they sit around telling stories, listening to each other’s sound, “spreading the collective wisdom back and forth.” The Internet, Chabon suggests, may form a new oasis, with Nat and Archy selling their records online to Japanese collectors while Titus and Julie reshuffle race and gender in the disembodied world of games.

Chabon isn’t for everyone: the rolls and twists of his prose give some readers motion sickness, and his tics and gimmicks (the cute Tarantino references, the single sentence that goes on for 12 pages) can be too much. But beneath the show-offishness lie a rare openness and compassion, and you can track Chabon’s crooked prose a long way into the wilderness of the human heart.

The Eccentricity Plot

Is the American ideal of self-realization a false promise? Along with other American writers just turning fifty—Jonathan Franzen (1959) in “Freedom,” Jennifer Egan (1962) in “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” Jeffrey Eugenides (1960) in “The Marriage Plot”—Michael Chabon (1963) takes as one of his central themes the risks and limits of Americans’ cherished individuality. Though “Telegraph Avenue” is an optimistic, even cheerful book, Chabon shares the view that to become fully oneself is no guarantee of happiness.

Like Egan and Franzen, Chabon writes in “Telegraph Avenue” about the moment in midlife when unsuspecting pursuers of happiness lose their way in a dark forest, or at any rate a nasty patch of weeds. For Franzen, the problem lies in too many options and too few limits. His characters free themselves from partners, family, friendships, place of origin, only to discover they can’t construct an identity out of nothing.

Novelists who were young in the early 1980s still seem to be sorting out that confusing time. Eugenides’s three students leave college in 1982 barely knowing themselves—in sharp contrast to the contemporary students in Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding.” (Harbach’s kids have their sexual orientation and their career goals all figured out. They suffer from fear of failure, but not from not knowing what they want.) Egan’s characters look for identity in music until even that is co-opted by “the music industry.”

Chabon is an optimist, though not a naïve one. “Telegraph Avenue,” which is set in 2004, features a cameo appearance by Barack Obama. After watching Nat and Archy’s band play jazz covers at a political fundraiser, the future president (think “hope”) remarks that the important thing is to have work you love, even if it looks useless to someone else.

“Telegraph Avenue” calls his statement into question. Single-minded dedication to the work they love is part of what brings the book’s characters into conflict with each other: Gwen with Aviva, Archy with Nat, Nat with the world. Still, Chabon is more reluctant than Franzen to criticize the dream of individuality, and more wary of drawing conclusions about society as a whole. To Franzen, too much individuality makes people difficult, unhappy, and out of touch with reality. To Chabon there’s no going back. Individuals, in all our “useless” eccentricity, is who we are.
Trouw, Sept. 15, 2012. Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue (New York: Harper 2012; Amsterdam: Anthos, 2012).

In nearly every story in “The Beautiful Indifference,” Sarah Hall achieves a fine balance of language and subject matter. Sometimes the sentences are introverted and brooding, the setting ominous. Sometimes the words are as stubborn and glowering as the characters they describe. Hall finds beauty in unlikely places: in a sudden outburst of rage, or in “the smoke off the pyres and the pools on the abattoir floor.”

In “Butcher’s Perfume,” the powerful opening story of this collection, her mix of dialect words unknown to my dictionary (“gannan pride,” a “kessen moon”) and the crude language of modern youth lends power to her rural setting. You can hear that the people she describes, inhabitants of the remote north of England, are governed by their own rules: even their language refuses to toe the line.

Sarah Hall (Carlisle, 1974) grew up in Cumbria and likes to set her fiction there. It’s a place where the wild beauty of the Lake District, beloved of the Romantic poets, combines with a fierceness in the local character. On the embattled border with Scotland a history of violence lingers on the land. “This was where the raiders met, coming south or north. This was burnt-farm, red-river, raping territory. A landscape of torn skirts and hacked throats, where roofs were oiled and fired, and haylofts were used to kipper children.”

In “Butcher’s Perfume” Hall gives us a portrait of a family called the Slessors, a rich, rough, superstitious, horse-taming, gypsy-descended clan, “forged from the old rage of the north.” Their youngest daughter, Manda, is as fierce as any of them, with “eyes that got set off easily, like a dog (…) prone to attack for no other reason than that it catches you looking its way.” And yet her belligerence makes her beautiful: “it suited her, and she was lit up, the way someone plain looks better when they sing, when suddenly it seems they have bright colours under a dull wing.” The teenage narrator, Kathleen, is befriended by Manda, gets to know the Slessors, and watches as they punish cruelty to horses with their own harsh justice.

Hall likes to pick at the rough knot of people’s feelings for each other, unraveling strands of brutishness and grace. Animals play an important role in these stories, often serving to symbolize humans’ animal nature. In “Bees,” a woman emotionally stripped bare by a divorce moves from the north to London. The moment she arrives, her psyche “a red, essential thing,” seems to leave her: “It happened as you were getting off the train in Euston station (…) There was a sudden internal event, like cramp or a stroke, like waters breaking. Something rose up inside your chest. It split you open. It tugged itself through the walls of muscle, slid to the floor and moved off into the crowd.” Later she spots a fox slipping through the back gardens of London, embodying the easy self-assurance she hopes one day again to feel.

In the title story, the sight of a runaway horse shifts the balance of a romantic weekend. A woman has arranged a rendezvous in a northern town with her younger lover. Her women friends think she is using this impermanent affair to avoid commitment. But for her the “beautiful indifference” she feels in their casual relationship seems to be enough—until the sight of the wild, spooked beast causes her to acknowledge the frustration she harbors beneath her apparent detachment.

The book’s themes come together most obviously—almost too obviously—in “She Murdered Mortal He,” a ghost story set in a resort in an unnamed African country. An English couple come for a vacation but break up unexpectedly. The woman walks into the jungle, where her bewilderment and anger at her lover’s rejection seem to appear in animal form and take revenge. The story is atmospheric but the resolution unsurprising.

The same goes for “The Agency,” a tale of a fortyish professor’s wife who makes use of a male prostitution service. Although the story centers on the woman’s initial hesitation and we see nothing of what happens inside the “agency,” the story reads more like a sexual fantasy than a credible story.

Still, Hall is excellent at this length, and her writing seems more powerful than ever. In her earlier work she leaned on her literary predecessors. “The Electric Michelangelo” (2004), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, owes a debt to Sarah Waters’s “Tipping the Velvet.” “The Carhullan Army” (2007) flirts unsuccessfully with science fiction. But this new book is entirely her own—as is her sensuous, truculent northern voice.

Trouw, July 7, 2012. Sarah Hall: The Beautiful Indifference (London: Faber, 2011). De prachtige onverschilligheid (Amsterdam: Anthos, 2012).

When twenty-year-old beatnik Patti Smith first moved to New York with Rimbaud’s Illuminations in her pocket, she fell in love with a boy named Robert Mapplethorpe. Later she would become a rock star, he a provocative photographer who aestheticized the gay male body. But in the summer of 1967 he was an art student in hippie love beads, she a college dropout hoping to become a poet.

Two penniless seekers arrive in the city, meet, and vow to devote their lives to beauty. “Just Kids” is not a rock memoir so much as it is an irresistible story of bohemian partnership. The enormous appeal of Smith’s book—which in America was both a bestseller and a literary success, winning the National Book Award—lies in how it abandons all celebrity cynicism and takes us to the place where art begins.

They became famous separately, not together. Patti Smith (1946) released her first album, Horses, in 1975. It and her three subsequent albums were extremely influential, as much for their message and her persona as for the music. “Outside of society, that’s where I want to be,” she sang, and she wore ripped T-shirts and projected a wild, almost mystical charisma. In 1979 she abruptly left the stage and settled down in Detroit with musician Fred “Sonic” Smith, with whom she had two children. She returned to performing after his death in 1994.

Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) is best known for his portraits, his stylized, black-and-white male and female nudes, and his graphic pictures of the gay S&M scene. In his self-portraits he played with gay imagery, portraying himself as a sailor, a leather boy, or a pretty androgyne. In 1990 some of his photographs, labeled “obscene,” touched off a public controversy.

But when Mapplethorpe and Smith first moved in together, they were so poor they often couldn’t afford a whole meal: at Coney Island, he got the hotdog, she ate the sauerkraut. And they had other troubles, too. Smith was mourning the baby she had just given up for adoption. (She swears by Joan of Arc and her newborn child that she will make amends by “making something of herself.”) And Mapplethorpe was gay, though he wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge it.

Still, Smith writes, “One cannot imagine the mutual happiness we felt when we sat and drew together. We would get lost for hours. His ability to concentrate for long periods infected me, and I learned by his example, working side by side.”

Mapplethorpe loved in Smith the dreaminess, tomboyishness, and intelligence that the other kids had hated during her southern New Jersey childhood. He served as the first listener for her poetry and encouraged her to read it to an audience—the beginning of her performing career. It’s still rare for a woman artist to find a man who will support her and acknowledge her as his equal. To watch them performing the magical act of drawing out each other’s creative powers is deeply moving. Their love couldn’t last, but that didn’t matter. “I knew that one day I would stop and he would keep on going, but until then, nothing could tear us apart.”

When the two moved into the Chelsea Hotel, at the center of New York’s bohemian scene, in 1969, they were still a couple, although by then they both knew about Mapplethorpe’s sexuality. At the Chelsea, Smith got to know artists and performers from Janis Joplin to William Burroughs; Allen Ginsberg tried to pick her up, thinking she was a good-looking boy. Singer and producer Bobby Neuwirth, playwright Sam Shepard, and punk poet Jim Carroll were among Smith’s many lovers, friends and allies.

She and Mapplethorpe slept their way up, and so did everyone else, in a time and place where looks, love affairs, talent, and artistic persona were all inextricably mixed. It was part of what they had to do to create themselves—selves they could use in their art. In her performance and his self-portraits, they showed the way to new and necessary ways of being. She was a female Keith Richards in a man’s shirt and uncombed hair, he a gay man full of artistic machismo.

Smith ends the book in 1975, when her career was just getting started and Mapplethorpe, not a lover now but still a close friend, took the famous cover photo for Horses. Their paths had already begun to diverge. She always loved his work but was shocked by his S&M photos: “I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality….At times he seemed to be driving himself into a darker, more dangerous place.” An epilogue brings them back together just before Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS at the age of forty-two.

Smith has said before in interviews that her friend’s essence lay not in the life of sexual excess that he wound up leading, but in his artistic calling. “What does it mean to be called?…What kind of life does one have being called?” It’s this she’s tried to capture in “Just Kids,” and it’s here that she most brilliantly succeeds. In the process, she gives us a Patti Smith—passionate lover of poetry, acute observer of life—who’s more appealing, and more necessary, than ever.

Trouw, April 7, 2012

Fertility without end in the rain forest? Female sexuality as a swamp? It’s an old metaphor in male writing about women: the female body that traps men like quicksand. But it’s also one that women writers have begun using for their own experience. German writer Charlotte Roche called them “wetlands”: the sites of a fecundity and desire that women themselves must learn to navigate. In “State of Wonder,” Ann Patchett’s latest novel, and in “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell, we see women losing and finding themselves in the murky waterways of their own desires.

Ann Patchett’s Amazon adventure story clearly echoes “Heart of Darkness,” Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novel in which the Englishman Marlow sails up the Congo River in search of a mad white trader, Mr. Kurtz. But this is not your father’s jungle. For Conrad, the wilderness stands for fear of the other and awareness of one’s own inhumanity. When Patchett makes the two main figures female and the object of their quest a fertility pill, she shifts the story’s ground: “Womb of Darkness,” if you will.

Marina Singh is a mild-mannered medical researcher working for a drug company in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. She is 42, stubborn, solitary, devoted to her profession. Although her father was from India, she grew up in the American Midwest, her mother’s country, and has no desire to leave. In fact, she has “a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth.”

Then, in the middle of a snowstorm, Marina’s boss—an older man with whom she is having a rather colorless affair—comes to her lab to tell her that her research partner is dead. Anders Eckman had traveled to the Amazon rain forest to search for the brilliant, eccentric scientist Dr. Annick Swenson. Now a brief letter from Swenson reports that Eckman has succumbed to a mysterious fever.

Everyone who reads knows what comes next: Marina, who never wanted to go into the rain forest, gets on a plane and heads for Brazil. There she will go on a psychological journey and settle a score with a figure from her past.

Patchett likes to create a slightly magical air in her books, and “State of Wonder,” like her earlier “Bel Canto,” weaves improbable events into a story of compelling beauty. But where “Bel Canto” was a meditation on the power of art, here Patchett uses her cool, elegant sentences to take us on a nightmarish exploration of flesh and the physical world.

The lost researcher in the rain forest, Annick Swenson, was Marina’s mentor in medical school until Marina made the gruesome mistake that ended her promising career as a gynecologist. Now Dr. Swenson is holed up in a village somewhere in Brazil, where she is doing research on a revolutionary medicine. She claims to have found a fountain of youth for female ovaries: a drug that will block or reverse menopause and allow pregnancy at any age.

On the surface, Patchett’s book is about the intense relationship between mentor and student, and for a long time the echoes of Conrad are only distant ones. As Marina works her way slowly from Minnesota to Manaus, we are introduced to a large cast of characters, about whom we learn a great deal—in some cases too much. They include various researchers, a deaf native child who attaches himself to Marina, and two Australian hippies who take her to the Manaus opera house in an homage to Werner Herzog’s film “Fitzcarraldo.” At last, in the heart of the rain forest, Marina encounters Swenson, the novel’s most fascinating creation. She is a complex and arrogant authority figure, both rational scientist and Ur-mother, and in the best mad-scientist tradition she is testing her new medicine on herself.

The further upriver Marina goes, the more she slips the noose of white, masculine, corporate authority. A satellite phone given to her by her boss vanishes along with the rest of her luggage. She discards her antimalarial pills because they give her screaming nightmares of losing her father. By the time she has penetrated the mystery of the Amazonian ovaries she has lost even her clothes and, clad in a native woman’s shift, can pass for a member of the local tribe. Here Patchett seems to be borrowing from “Tarzan” or “Avatar” the idea that “going native” gives the hero special powers.

By the climax, Marina is killing giant snakes and chewing on hallucinogenic tree bark, and “State of Wonder” has stopped being a well-constructed and well-behaved thriller and turned into something more wild altogether. Patchett asks questions about the ethics of science and the nature of power, but there are other interesting images lurking in this book—ones that Patchett, alas, is too nice, or too embarrassed, to address. Childbirth as a horror story, mothers and non-mothers as aliens to one another? These are real nightmares, and they deserve a more thoroughly nightmarish treatment than “State of Wonder,” with its polished sentences and its surprise happy ending, is willing to give them.

Karen Russell, on the other hand, has no fear of the themes she raises. In “Swamplandia!,” the unmapped islands of the Florida Everglades are the site of a teenage girl’s sexual awakening. But this girl has lived all her life in the swamp, and though the territory can be dank and hostile, it feels to her like home.

The Bigtree family live on an island off the coast of Southwest Florida, where they own and operate Swamplandia!, “the Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café in the area.” It’s a second-rate tourist trap with one star attraction: champion alligator wrestler Hilola Bigtree.

Hilola runs the park along with Sam, known as the Chief; and their three teenage children, Kiwi, Osceola, and Ava, who help feed the alligators and train to join their mother in the show. The Bigtrees are fake Indians marketing the swamp experience, but 13-year-old Ava feels far more real than the “drylanders” who visit Swamplandia! “We stayed on the island past dusk; we waited until the moon rode up over the swamp and the only faces in the windows were our own,” she thinks. “I would vanish on the mainland, dry up in that crush of cars and strangers.” To her, the alligators are “creatures of the same mud we had grown up in, (…) our snouty cousins.”

But when Hilola dies of cancer, the park and the family fall apart. Kiwi flees to the mainland, where he takes a job with the rival attraction, a hell-themed amusement park called World of Darkness. Osceola starts believing she can communicate with the dead. And when Osceola disappears, 13-year-old Ava, the narrator of the story, undertakes a mysterious and frightening journey deep into the swamp in hopes of bringing her sister back from the underworld.

For Russell, the swamp serves as the outward representation of all Ava’s tumultuous teenage emotions. But unlike Patchett, she never makes the Everglades an alien place. Instead she shows it for what it is: a landscape of muddy, overgrown islands and twisting channels that is beautiful, inhospitable, and damaged by human intervention. Familiarity and strangeness are many-layered concepts in “Swamplandia!,” and Ava can find her way only by learning to distinguish reality from illusion.

Where Patchett’s novel is stylish in its writing and serious in its ethical concerns, Russell’s feels slight and rough around the edges. But “Swamplandia!” has a few things “State of Wonder” doesn’t: youthful energy, originality, humor (which holds up well in a fine translation by Theo Scholten), and a willingness to confront the dark side of sexuality. What to Patchett is both fascinating and repulsive is to the younger, more optimistic Russell something to wrestle with and win.

Field trip to the Everglades
Ann Patchett (1963) is the author of six novels, most recently “Run” (2007). She won the Orange Prize for “Bel Canto” (2001), about a group of South American terrorists who take an opera singer hostage. While writing “State of Wonder” Patchett spent ten days in the Peruvian jungle, which http://www.npr.org/2011/06/05/136863550/ann-patchett-journeys-to-the-amazon-with-wonder” target=”_blank”>she found both “gorgeous” and “oppressive.” She has no children.

Karen Russell (1981) took her inspiration for “Swamplandia!,” her first novel, in part from field trips she took to the Everglades when she was growing up in Miami. The history of the Everglades—including the 1928 hurricane that killed some 2,500 migrant farm workers, most of them black—also plays a role. The New York Times named “Swamplandia!” one of the ten best books of 2011.

Revised version of review in Trouw, Feb. 25, 2012. Ann Patchett, “State of Wonder” (New York: Harper, 2011). “Staat van verwondering” (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij,. 2012). Karen Russell, “Swamplandia!” (New York: Knopf, 2011; Amsterdam: Atlas Contact, 2012).

“There but for the” was my best book of the year for the Voice. It was a novel I not only admired but enjoyed and read with pleasure–a surprisingly rare combination. It had no boring bits in the middle.

https://www.villagevoice.com/2011/12/21/the-best-books-of-2011/

Madeleine Hanna loves books. On the very first page of “The Marriage Plot,” Jeffrey Eugenides shows us her bookshelves, full of old-fashioned authors—Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Dickens, Henry James—whose works are meant to mark her as both a serious reader and an “incurable romantic.” On the next few pages, we discover that Madeleine has just woken up in last night’s clothes, with a terrible hangover and a mysterious stain on her dress, on the morning of her college graduation. For the reader, it’s a promising begin.

In the less than promising year 1982, Madeleine is getting ready to leave the hothouse of an American university, with no job prospects in sight. To make things complicated, she’s in love with Leonard, a tall, dark, and handsome biologist, while Mitchell, a self-doubting student of philosophy, has his heart set on Madeleine.

Books ought to help Madeleine here, but she’s been learning in her English courses that the love story has lost its meaning. Her professor teaches her that the great subject of the 19^th-century novel, courtship and marriage, is dead. “What would it matter whom [Austen’s] Emma married if she could file for separation later?”

Besides, the novel itself is dying. Madeleine’s classmates are busy reading literary theorists like Derrida and Eco, who claim that fiction has nothing left to say. Contemporary writers can never express an original emotion, they argue, because it will always come out like a line in an earlier book. “Books aren’t about ‘real life,’” a black-clad fellow student explains. “Books are about other books.”

So you have the 19^th-century novel, with its tidy endings, and 20^th-century literary theory, which encourages distrust for fiction’s illusion of order. Having juxtaposed the two, Eugenides then takes a third road. “The Marriage Plot” is a triangular love story with an open conclusion that takes place in a world of irony and no commitment.

Eugenides is an exuberant, inventive writer. His previous two books were “The Virgin Suicides,” a dark, moody coming-of-age novel, and “Middlesex,” a big, colorful, energetic saga about the American immigrant experience, forbidden and impossible loves, and youthful gender confusion. “The Marriage Plot” is equally concerned with young people on the brink of adulthood. It’s less fantastic than “Middlesex” and more intimate, but no less ambitious: Eugenides is out to defy the professors and philosophers by showing that the novel itself still matters.

“The Marriage Plot” follows its characters through college and into the first year afterward, as they try to make sense of their sexuality and begin their adult lives. Over her parents’ objections, Madeleine moves in with Leonard, drawn to his magnetic intensity. But Leonard suffers from manic depression, swinging drastically between charismatic brilliance and depressions that “colonized every cell of his body, a concentrate of anguish seemingly secreted, drip by drip, into his veins.” Through this character, apparently based in part on the late writer David Foster Wallace, Eugenides gives a harrowing depiction of bipolar illness.

Mitchell tries to find himself through travel. In Paris he clashes with Claire, a beautiful, furry-legged, Kristeva-reading feminist who criticizes him for opening a book by the “misogynist… murderer of wild animals” Ernest Hemingway. (Of all the book’s characters, Claire was to me the most endearingly, and embarrassingly, familiar.) In Calcutta, he meets other seekers for spiritual enlightenment but fails to find it for himself.

Scene by scene, the book is never less than appealing, but as a whole it feels a little flat. Madeleine in particular is a problem. She’s popular, conventional, “a positive, privileged, sheltered, exemplary person.” Aside from love, there’s nothing she wants. And other than feeling sorry for Leonard, she has no moral depth; when she mistreats Mitchell she feels not a single pang of conscience.

In other words, she pales in comparison with the emotionally complex and subtly rebellious heroines of the books she studies. In fact, she’s the type of self-satisfied, pretty young woman that Austen and Eliot couldn’t stand: Elizabeth Bennet would have eaten her for breakfast. I suspect she started out her literary existence, not as a well-rounded character, but as an unattainable love object. To write a novel in which the love object, instead of the pining lover, is the main character is an interesting twist, but Eugenides doesn’t make it work.

Even the narrative feels as twitchy as a college kid strung out on reading and ego. It’s full of flashbacks and shifts in tone from serious to ironic, as if the author still can’t make up his mind what to think of his callow protagonists. Eugenides raises interesting questions about the uses of literature, religion, romance, and irony—not to mention the value of a college education. Then he shrugs his shoulders and lets the questions go unanswered. Ultimately “The Marriage Plot” is as charming and as trivial as its characters, these bright kids who believe they can live “real life” in quotation marks—but who secretly want to drop their ironic pose and fall in love.

Happily married

Jeffrey Eugenides (Detroit, 1960) has written only two previous novels, “The Virgin Suicides” (1993) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Middlesex” (2001). In “The Marriage Plot” he takes a turn toward autobiography: the book is set at Brown University, the Ivy League college from which Eugenides graduated in 1982. Eugenides, like his character Mitchell, went to Calcutta to volunteer at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying, with disappointing results. Unlike Mitchell, however, the author is happily married, has a daughter and lives and teaches in Princeton, New Jersey.

Trouw, November 30, 2011. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (New York: FSG, 2011).

At an unsuccessful dinner party in an expensive house in Greenwich, London, a man named Miles excuses himself just before dessert, goes upstairs, and locks himself into the spare bedroom. When his hosts, a materialistic couple called Genevieve and Eric, discover him there, he declines to come out. He pushes a note through the crack: “Fine for water but will need food soon. Vegetarian, as you know. Thank you for your patience.” The hosts want to evict him but can’t bring themselves to break down their 18^th century door.

The couple, Genevieve and Eric (Gen & Eric, “generic”), try to get Miles to leave by slipping packages of ham under the door. “You have no idea how awful this is for us,” Gen wails. “There is lovely, lovely furniture in there.” Nothing works. Eventually, Miles’s fame spreads. A crowd stations itself permanently outside the back window, acclaiming him as a sort of modern anchorite, a saint walled into his cell. Gen, making the best of a bad situation, starts selling souvenirs.

Postmodern literature, of the Jonathan Safran Foer/“Dog in the Night-Time” variety, is often characterized by gimmicks and tricks. In “There but for the” Ali Smith throws in the whole bag. She packs her narrative with puns and wordplay. (Each section, for instance, begins with one of the four words from the title.) She weaves in obscure knowledge about astronomy, English history, musicals of the 1930s, Dutch winners of the Eurovision Song Contest (“Ding-a-Dong,” 1975). She writes dialogue without quotation marks. Filling her story with facts and fragments, she takes the risk of driving her readers crazy.

Yet the result isn’t madness. Instead, Smith’s new book is sparkling, magical, and full of warmth and heart. If she plays intellectual games, it’s not to disrupt or deconstruct the narrative, but to help her get at emotional truths. She breaks the story into fragments to reflect our fragmented age, but between the pieces she slips in simple, powerful thoughts about decency, kindness, and connection.

Over the course of the novel, Smith shows us the enigmatic Miles through the eyes of four near strangers whose life he changes. (Another postmodernist trick: telling the story from several different points of view.) Anna remembers him as a 17-year-old boy who was kind to her on a school trip. She is now a single woman in her forties who has left her work at a “refugee processing centre” after her boss told her she had “just the right absent presence” for the job. Miles’s situation reminds her of illegal aliens hidden in trucks. But she also thinks “Knock-knock. Who’s there?” then considers it as an existential question. Who is she? What would it mean to be “there”?

The other narrators are Mark, a gay man in his sixties; May, an elderly housewife; and Brooke, Gen and Eric’s neighbor, an extremely precocious and talkative nine-year-old girl. (Yet another postmodern device: a narrator who is mentally peculiar.) At one time or another, Miles has eased their loneliness and shown them how to see things in a new light.

The story takes place in Greenwich and the Greenwich Observatory plays a role, letting the characters think about clocks, distance, boundaries, “the thin lines between here and gone, then and now, here and there.” A local church dedicated to St. Alfege, an 11^th-century martyr who was imprisoned by the Vikings and learned wisdom in his cell, lets Smith bring in themes of monasticism, spirituality and historical distance.

Even Smith’s silliest word games have metaphorical overtones, like the knock-knock jokes and the one about the man who invented the door knocker and was awarded the No-bell Prize. The translators can’t have had an easy job. (The Dutch text, by Irving Pardoen and Meindert Burger, is remarkably lively and readable under the circumstances, though not free from the usual sloppy mistakes.) Even the English title, “There but for the,” is a riddle, the first half of a saying: in full it’s the compassionate observation “There but for the grace of God go I.” For Smith, I think it translates to a moral imperative to look outside yourself—and to open your heart.

The connections between all these ideas can feel a little contrived at times, and Smith’s satire of two-earner complacency a bit heavy-handed. She makes up for it with an impressive control of her themes, and especially with a great gift for creating lovable characters with complex human hearts. That’s one difference between this new book and her 2005 novel “The Accidental.” That book was also about a stranger arriving in a household, as seen by the four members of the family who take her in. But those characters were unhappy, secretive people living false lives, while the characters in the new book are appealingly open to the world.

At the end, Miles explains to Brooke, the too-bright nine-year-old, that intelligence is a good thing. “But there’s no point in just having it. You have to know how to use it. […] Instead of being the cleverest, the thing to do is become a cleverist.” In her call for a wise use of all our resources, especially our brains, Smith has written a book that is profound, whimsical, and irresistible.

Trouw, Nov 5, 2011. Ali Smith, “There but for the” (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011). “Als niet dan zou” (Amsterdam, Mouria, 2011).

Lydia Davis writes in straightforward, elegant sentences about people whose thoughts are not straightforward at all. With gentle yet penetrating insight, she illuminates characters who are worried, puzzled about how to live their lives, not sure what to believe. They are drawn in by false notions, imagine nonexistent dangers, read philosophy but fail to understand it. The combination of their imperfect thinking and Davis’s flawless prose is touching; it can also be extremely funny.

Most of the stories in “Bezoek aan haar man” are very short: a few pages long, or a paragraph, or one sentence. Although they seldom have an actual plot, they are often concerned with stories and storytelling: she is interested in the effect that narratives have on people’s lives.

In “The Professor,” a woman who teaches English sees a romantic movie and starts wishing she could marry a cowboy. “I was tired of thinking, which was what I did most in those days. […] I might feel something, but I would think about what I was feeling at the same time. […] I imagined that maybe a cowboy would help me stop thinking so much.” She daydreams about running a motel in the desert and falling in love with the cowboy when he comes to stay. “I had that strange confidence, born of watching a good movie, that I could be something different from what I was, and I started listening to country-western music on the car radio, though I knew it wasn’t written for me.”

In “The Bone” a woman describes an incident that happened years before: she served her husband fish for dinner and a bone got caught in his throat. He and she went together to the hospital, where a doctor took it out. Later they divorced. On the rare occasions when they see each other, they still bring up the night of the fishbone. The story itself has become stuck in their throats, a small, tickly scrap of a marriage long ago consumed.

Lydia Davis’s own first husband was Paul Auster, a fact that stimulates curiosity. They were together for 13 years, collaborated on French translations, and have a son. Was he the model for the man with the fishbone? Or for the man in the title story, who meets his wife to discuss their divorce? Like Auster, Davis is a minimalist with a distinctive style. But where Auster is mysterious and abstract, Davis often looks for meaning in domestic detail: sounds from outside an apartment window, the furniture in a room. As a result, her stories are calm even when the people in them are desperate.

In “What Was Interesting,” a writer is trying to describe a moment in which her boyfriend was rude to her. Although she is furious, she can’t seem to make the event sound important, and she wonders why. The result is both an account of deep emotional pain and a subtle inquiry into how love stories create their effect. Likewise, “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre” examines the building blocks of stories. Here, Davis takes words from an elementary French lesson—le poulet, le fermier, la femme—and uses them to construct a mysterious crime thriller.

It took a while for Davis’s star to rise. She is the author of one novel, “The End of the Story” (1995), and the winner of various lesser-known literary prizes, but it has only been in the past ten years, and especially after her “Collected Stories” were published in 2009, that she won widespread critical recognition. (“Bezoek aan haar man,” her first Dutch publication, contains the first half of that collection, in an excellent translation by Peter Bergsma.) She has also translated some 30 books from French to English, including Sartre and Simenon (together with Auster), and more recently Proust and “Madame Bovary.”

Although she’s an experimental writer, she’s not an intimidating one; her brief observations are both intellectual and gently self-mocking. It’s easy to recognize oneself in a story like “A Few Things Wrong with Me,” in which a man calls a woman to end their relationship. When she asks him why, he tells her that there are things about her that bothered him from the beginning. Inevitably, she can’t stop wondering what they are, “a useless question, really, since I’m not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that.” Seeing that the human condition is absurd, she can only conclude that thinking—and writing—are symptoms, or possibly even causes of the disease.

In “Foucault and Pencil” the narrator describes a failed attempt to read the abstruse philosopher Michel Foucault in French. “Short sentences easier to understand than long ones. Certain long ones understandable part by part, but so long, forgot beginning before reaching end.” It’s comforting to know that one is not the only reader daunted by difficult writing—but Davis is also showing off her own clear thinking. In some ways her stories insist that life can’t be understood, and yet her own power of insight offers hope that it can.

Besides, the idea that uncomfortable experiences—the moments when we realize we are not equal to the demands of life—can also be literature is an encouraging one. In another story, under the heading “I have learned what art really is,” she writes, “Art is not in some far-off place.” Literature is here, in the scraps and bones of life—and in the telling.

Trouw, May 21, 2011. Lydia Davis, Bezoek aan haar man (Amsterdam: Atlas, 2011), Collected Stories (New York: FSG, 2009).

In her nine novels, the American writer Lionel Shriver has never been afraid to show her characters’ dark side. Grimly, and sometimes comically, she explores marriage and family life as sources of powerful, unsettling emotion. In 2005, she won the Orange Prize for “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” told from the point of view of the parent of a teenage school killer. In flashbacks, she shows us a tyrannical son and a mother who never loved him, leaving unresolved the question of which of the two is the monster.

Shriver’s maternal horror story touched a nerve and went on to sell about a million copies worldwide. In her next book she retreated from dark subjects: “The Post-Birthday World” was a romance, though a calculating one, about a woman choosing between a reliable and an attractive man.

In her new book, Shriver again takes the lid off domestic life, writing about the family, not with the delicate eye for marital discontent of a Rachel Cusk, but with the satirical flair of a Martin Amis. “So Much for That” is the story of Shepherd Knacker, a man in his late forties who has spent his life saving money. What he wants to buy with it, he says, is himself: he wants to relocate to a tropical paradise where he can live on almost nothing. He calls this plan the Afterlife—which is ironic, because just when he finally buys tickets for himself and his family to an island off the coast of Tanzania, his wife Glynis comes home and tells him she has cancer.

Glynis, an artist, is insured through Shep’s work—and in America’s market economy, Shep’s employer can choose to give him only partial coverage. Her illness is about to wipe out his life savings, and along with them his dream of the Afterlife.

This is the start of a wickedly brilliant book, especially in how it talks about money. We don’t like to think of the family as being part of the economic system, or of family ties as more financial than emotional. Barbara Ehrenreich once called the household the last socialist institution, because it’s the one place where people are still willing to share their toaster and their refrigerator. We like to see money as an instrument, not the essence of ourselves.

But Shriver shows us how monetary exchange can make its way into even the most intimate situations. Every person in this novel has a cash value, from a call girl to a woman dying of cancer. And everyone is defined by their relationship to money. Are they givers of money or takers of it? Do they feel more secure when they’re paying or when they’re being paid for?

If even life and death have become fiscal transactions, maybe it’s no surprise that American rebellion focuses on taxes. Shep’s best friend, Jackson, adds political commentary with his cranky assaults on various aspects of the System, claiming that the world is divided into “Patsies and Parasites, Saps and Spongers, Mugs and Moochers.” Then there’s Shep’s whiny sister, a critically successful but chronically broke documentary filmmaker who is “starting to look less like a gifted woman sacrificing for her work, and more like a failure.” (The character, Shriver says, is based on herself before she achieved commercial success.)

The book never quite becomes sentimental, partly because the characters are all so stubbornly opinionated. Glynis refuses to become less difficult as she suffers. When her sister remarks cautiously that illness doesn’t always bring out the best in people, she replies, “But maybe the best in me, for me, isn’t the best in me for you. Maybe the best in me, for me, is that I’m spiteful and vindictive and wish deadly diseases on everyone.”

During a reading in Amsterdam, Shriver said that she began the book after one of her best friends died of cancer. The treatment cost $2 million and extended her friend’s life perhaps three months. (The courageous and optimistic “battle against cancer” is another American commonplace that Shriver tears to shreds.) Then she read in the paper that the most common cause of personal bankruptcy in the US was not the mortgage crisis, but hospital bills.

By the end, Shriver afflicts her characters with not one but three different deadly diseases, plus personal bankruptcy and a penis enlargement operation gone wrong. Meanwhile, the book that begins as a critique of American health care has become something much more. Ultimately, it’s a moving exploration of big themes, from the eternal—death and taxes—to the existential: the purpose of work; the bonds of families; the power of married love, the way we cope, or fail to cope, with death. Shriver doesn’t like to say what you expect. Instead, her powerful intellect and her sensitivity show on every page, from the ominous start to the surprisingly redemptive ending.

Moral discomfort
Minister’s daughter Lionel Shriver (North Carolina, USA, 1957) has been described as “ferociously intelligent, uncompromising, independent, contrary, passionate, and scorchingly funny.” Born Margaret Ann, she felt “alienated” from her name and switched to Lionel at 15. Her novels deal with politics, morality, and the problem of taking the clean knife of ethics to the soup of everyday life. “I like to craft characters who are hard to love,” she says. “I use my characters to examine aspects of myself of which I’m suspicious, or with which I’m not terribly comfortable.” Thus she wrote her best-known book, “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” when she herself was wondering if she should try to have a child: what if she had one she didn’t like? Though her books are often set in America, Shriver spent 12 years reporting from Belfast and now lives with her husband in London.

Trouw, December 18, 2010. So Much for That by Lionel Shriver (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).