I’m thrilled to have a book review on 4Columns, a new site for arts criticism at its best and liveliest. I wrote about “The Art of Waiting,” by Belle Boggs, an empathetic and brave memoir on mothering, fertility, and the politics of assisted reproduction. Read it now at 4columns.org.

One of the things my editor at Trouw and I have in common is that we’re both Plath-Hughes geeks. So when she asked me to review another book inspired by Ted Hughes—not another reworking of his life this time, but a kind of avian fan fiction—I naturally said yes.

I was nineteen when I first read ‘Crow’, and it probably marked me for life. Ted Hughes’s 1970 cycle of poems about a mythical, shamanic, monstrous creature was violent, cynical, despairing, and nasty, and therefore both troubling and deeply satisfying to my adolescent mind. The poems were life-affirming, too, and at times funny, the work of a person who had seen the worst and was determined to go on. Written in a period of sorrow and despair after Hughes’s wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, committed suicide, the poems tell the adventures of a mythical bird, a figure drawn partly from Celtic and Native American legend, eating trash, fighting with God, and shaking his fist against life.

A writer who takes inspiration from myth runs the risk of turning into one. Even during his lifetime Hughes was much written about, especially in his role as the—loving? unfaithful? both?—husband of Plath. Since his death in 1998, the books have continued: memoirs, biographies, novels. A selection of his letters, ‘Ik wil nooit vergeven worden’, was published in the Privé-domein series in 2013. Last year Connie Palmen published a novel, ‘Jij zegt het’, in which a first-person Hughes contemplates the mystery of the writing self. Then a British academic, Jonathan Bate, caused a small scandal with an unauthorized biography of the Poet Laureate. And now a young British bookseller and editor, Max Porter, has invited not Hughes but Crow himself into his slim, poetic first novel.

In ‘Grief Is the Thing with Feathers’ a woman dies suddenly, leaving behind a husband and two young sons. After the funeral, the three of them sit alone in a house that itself seems to be in “heavy mourning, every surface dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly, covered in a film of grief.” A knock is heard at the door and in walks a giant bird with a “sweet furry stink of just-beyond-edible food, and moss, and leather and yeast.” It picks the father up off the floor and says ominously, “I won’t leave until you don’t need me anymore.”

In the subsequent struggle with loss the father, the boys, and Crow himself take turns narrating, leaving the woman’s voice to be missed, imagined, forgotten. The father is stunned by what can no longer happen: “We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. (…) She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm). And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday.” The boys show their unhappiness by playing dangerous games in the woods.

At first Crow threatens to raid the nest and eat these two chicks, but as the book goes on he becomes philosophical, at times almost maternal. Grief, he observes, is “the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms. Such as? Oh, feathers. Turds? Waves? Honeycomb? String? Intestines? Bones?” Eventually the father goes back to his old work, writing a scholarly essay called ‘Ted Hughes’ Crow on the Couch: A Wild Analysis.’

In a terrific translation by Saskia van der Lingen, Porter’s novel is a magical reflection on family, sorrow, and the consolations of literature. Porter’s Crow is not the devouring, laughing animal that made my first contact with Hughes’s poems so exhilarating. Instead he’s a beast of a gentler, more domesticated pain. (In the Guardian, Porter said he drew on his memories of his father’s death when he was six.) Yet Porter’s lines have a beauty that is very much their own, making this a surprising and moving book, one that doesn’t linger in Hughes’s shadow but claims a place as a work of art in its own right.

Trouw, April 2, 2016. Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (London: Faber & Faber, 2015). Verdriet is het ding met veren (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2016).

In my first draft of this review I said ‘Fates and Furies’ was both brilliant and boring. My editor said, “If it’s a bad book we shouldn’t run a long piece on it.” I said, “It’s not bad. I didn’t say it was bad. It’s original and terrifically inventive. It’s just got slow patches and contrived bits mixed in.” In the end she asked me to put some of my objections into a box about boredom (see below). Rereading it now I think it sounds kind of obtuse—is writing about boredom inevitably boring? But after many years of reading books for review, I did think I was entitled to a sidebar’s worth of opinion on the subject.

There’s a lot to like about ‘Fates and Furies,’ the third novel by American writer Lauren Groff. It’s an ambitious, risk-taking book based on a bold idea: that a novel about a marriage doesn’t have to be subtle and intimate, that domestic life can also be the stuff of high drama. It challenges us to think differently about love as a literary subject, while gently mocking millennials’ smugness about matrimonial success. The book’s ingenious construction and exuberant style have won it critical praise, bestseller status, and a nomination for the National Book Award.

It certainly doesn’t lack energy, especially in the first half of the book, which told from the husband’s point of view. Lancelot, known as ‘Lotto,’ is a handsome, privileged, happy-go-lucky boy who embodies the ‘Fate’ of the title. He was born in the eye of a storm, we’re told, to a father who owned a Florida spring and got rich selling bottled water—in other words, he’s a Greek river god, translated to modern America. His wife, Mathilde, had a less fortunate upbringing. Her tale (‘Fury’), which takes up the second half of the book, provides a reality check on Lotto’s self-belief, as well as a look at the night side of a marriage that seems sunny enough by day.

Scattering allusions to Shakespeare and Classical drama, Groff writes in an exuberant, mock-heroic style that is well matched to her subjects’ self-regard. She seeks to capture our longing for personal drama—the way we’re inclined to see ourselves as the hero of our own story. The rich Manhattan couple that Lotto and Mathilde become is an exaggerated version of the lives that entitled New York twenty-somethings aspire to: gaining fame in the arts, living in a hip neighborhood, eating chic foods, and having lots of (married) sex in a variety of positions. The love scenes, written in tongue-in-cheek, Bad Sex Award-worthy detail, are part of Groff’s narrative of excess.

There are terrific passages in the book, such as a sequence in which the first years of Lotto and Mathilde’s marriage are illustrated as a series of parties, each segueing to the next as the couple and their friends grow up together from 22 to 30. Groff’s metaphors are original and lively: We see a falling girl, “her skirt uppetaling like a tulip.” People watch “the creamy unfurl of a contrail in the darkling sky.” Streetlights in winter are “lollipops of bright snow.” (The translators, Maaike Bijnsdorp and Lucie Schaap, have done an excellent job.)

Groff wants to change the novel itself, and says so, in the voice of Mathilde, who sighs that she’s “tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, sharper, something like a bomb going off.” But the book’s deliberate bombast is also its weakness. It goes on too long, in too much detail: every time Groff starts filling in the outlines of Lotto’s and Mathilde’s life together, her lively irony dulls. Long sections on Lotto’s stay in a writers’ colony, or Mathilde’s early life in the house of her sinister uncle, don’t give the novel more reality or power but only weigh it down.

Some critics, including me, have called for more ambition in contemporary fiction, especially from women writers. But ambition is not a matter of length: a novel can as easily dazzle at 100 pages as at 400. What ultimately carries the most weight is the ability to evoke a sense of place, or make us see from a new perspective, or to convey that quality that Marilynne Robinson, in her recent talk in Amsterdam, called “a sense of human consciousness and human inwardness.” You can get there by well-worn paths or new ones, understatement or overstatement. But if you can also overshoot your mark—especially if you don’t know when to stop.

The doorstop dilemma

To my anxious mind, long books seem to be everywhere, conquering the bestseller lists, reminding me at every turn that I can’t read fast enough to keep up. They come from all over the English-speaking world, from New York (Hallberg, Yanagihara) to New Zealand (Catton) to Jamaica (Marlon James). They’re being written in Norwegian (Knausgaard), Japanese (Murakami), Spanish (Bolaño).

I’m not against long books. But I find that my fellow readers and I have begun having conversations like this:

“‘The Goldfinch,’ oh, god, that section with the Ukrainian friend in Las Vegas went on forever!”

“‘Freedom’ is brilliant, you just have to skip the slow parts.”

“I liked ‘The Savage Detectives’ but I couldn’t get through it.”

I protest. I don’t want to spend my reading time being bored.

In a review, though, boredom is the great unsayable. It’s too harsh an accusation. The word is enough to torpedo a book, no matter how much I praise its other merits. And if I’m bored, am I sure it’s the book’s fault? Or have I failed to understand what the writer is trying to do? I certainly don’t want to give the impression that I want more plot; the solution to dullness is not adding prefab thrills. Besides, it’s more interesting to talk about a book’s themes and ideas. To address the issue of enjoyment in that context can come out sounding petty, like complaining about typos.

Boredom is often a problem of length: the extraneous scene, the unnecessary character, the superfluous subplot are curses of our literary age. Yet long novels seem to meet a need, too, to judge by the numbers of people who read them, or at any rate buy them. I’ve always thought their popularity was a question of status. The reader of long books believes herself to be acquiring extra merit, or simply wishes to be thought serious and literary-minded.

But in an essay called ‘Reading: The Struggle,’ British writer Tim Parks speculates that long books may be an antidote to our current state of constant distraction. The shattered attention span of the contemporary reader, he writes, may have led to books that are longer, more formulaic, and more repetitive, “to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable.”

His advice, as a veteran reader? Don’t feel like you have to read every page, or that you have to find out how the plot gets resolved. Even a book you enjoy, he argues in ‘Why Finish Books?,’ can be better if you put it down before the end.

Trouw, November 28, 2015. Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies (New York: Riverhead, 2015), Furie en fortuin (Amsterdam: Hollands Diep, 2015).

Melanie is fifteen, innocent, and full of romantic dreams. She pretends to be a girl in a film, a magazine, a painting.

She was too thin for a Titian or a Renoir but she contrived a pale, smug, Cranach Venus with a bit of net curtain wound round her head (…) She stuck moon-daisies in her long hair and looked at herself in her mirror as if she were a photograph in her own grown-up photograph album. (…) She said to the daisy girl with her big, brown eyes: “I will not have it plain. No. Fancy. It must be fancy.” She meant her future. A moon-daisy dropped to the floor, down from her hair, like a faintly derisive sign from heaven.

No good can come of this, of course, particularly not in a novel by the great English writer Angela Carter, who never trusts a romantic dream. One night Melanie puts on her mother’s wedding dress and accidentally tears it. The next day, a telegram arrives. Her parents are dead, and she must go to live with relatives in London.

In the house of her uncle, a tyrannical toymaker, and his unwilling apprentice, the vulpine young orphan Finn, Melanie’s sexual awakening ceases to be a romance and becomes a dark and dangerous fairy tale. In this new house there are no mirrors but there are eyes, judging Melanie for good or ill. When her uncle assigns her the title role in his marionette performance of Leda and the Swan, she realizes that to survive she must refuse this latest female role: that of puppet on his patriarchal stage.

‘The Magic Toyshop’ (1967), the best of Carter’s early work, is being published in the Netherlands as a ‘forgotten classic’, in a fine translation by Marijke Versluys. The appellation doesn’t do justice to Carter’s stature: in Britain she’s thoroughly established in the literary canon, while elsewhere in the English-speaking world she falls somewhere between canon and cult. But it’s true that she’s little known in the Netherlands. Though she’s a sharp-eyed observer of the condition humaine, Dutch readers tend to like their social criticism straight, or with an ironic twist, rather than the sophisticated literary cocktail Carter serves of sly comedy, eroticism, and Gothic dread, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Poe.

As her literary influence grows, however (see below), it might be time for readers in the Netherlands to take notice. In ‘The Magic Toyshop’ she was already exploring the themes that inform her later work, including Britain’s class divide, the tyranny of fathers, the cruel and innocent fantasies of teenage girls, the charged connection between power and desire. Along with mirrors, the theater recurs as a metaphor in her work. Melanie is one of Carter’s many women who learn to be themselves by playing a part—only to discover that the performance is dangerously real.

Youthful energy and imagination paper over the cracks in this early work, especially a disconcerting contrast between a surrealistic plot and a realistic narrative style. In ‘The Magic Toyshop’ Carter mixes ordinary details—cups of tea, inadequate plumbing, worn toothbrushes—with implausible events, such as a severed hand that turns up in the kitchen drawer. Carter must have borrowed the trick, without quite knowing how to work it, from films by Fellini and Buñuel.

In many ways this is a book of the 1960s. Carter was speaking for a postwar generation of long-haired kids who had claimed England as their decaying pleasure garden, the sacred images of Empire as their box of toys. The scene in which Melanie and Finn kiss in a neglected park, beside a fallen and defaced statue of Queen Victoria to which Finn has just affixed his wad of gum, gives a hint of Carter’s anti-establishment attitude.

Yet even this early work of Carter’s is layered and tricky, sexy and cerebral. Rereading it, I mainly notice how timeless and innovative it still feels, and how great Carter’s power still is to delight and surprise.

Trouw, January 28, 2015. Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop (1967), Het nichtje van de poppenspeler (Nieuw Amsterdam, 2016)

Imagination and influence

Angela Carter (1940-1992) is regarded as one of Britain’s most important and influential postwar writers. For much of her early career she worked on the margins of the literary establishment. Popular acclaim came late, not long enough before her death from lung cancer at 51. It was only afterward that her work was fully recognized for its fierce, unorthodox feminism, playful sensuality, intellect and imagination.

Carter grew up amid the “seedy respectability” of postwar South London, a place and time so unimaginative it left her with a lifelong craving for the exotic and the unexpected. At 18 she went to work for a local newspaper, following in the footsteps of her journalist father. She later studied at the University of Bristol and published her first novel at the age of 26.

Along with the intellectually brilliant feminist adventure yarn ‘Nights at the Circus’ (1984), her best-known book is ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (1979), a volume of sophisticated, erotic, feminist retellings of fairy tales. Folk tales, Carter argued, were full of sexual symbolism to begin with: think of Bluebeard with his murdered wives, or ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ In her story ‘The Company of Wolves’ (and in Neil Jordan’s 1984 film of the same name), human and animal merge and Red Riding Hood and the wolf go to bed together as equals. Carter was interested in sexual desire, how it can make women vulnerable or, if they choose to own it, become a source of their power.

In a 1985 interview with Marc Chavannes in NRC she admitted that some readers found her work “a bit much.”* But she never thought literature should be a difficult or depressing enterprise. “Pleasure has always had a bad press in Britain,” she once wrote. “I wish there was more of it around.”

Any number of contemporary writers acknowledge her influence. Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan were her protégés, Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon her friends, Kazuo Ishiguro and Pat Barker her students. Above all, she opened a door for English-language writers to slip out of realism and explore beyond it. Sarah Waters, David Mitchell, Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, and many more have taken their inspiration from her baroque mix of intellect and fantasy, her fearless eye and her passionate heart.

*Sommige mensen vinden het een beetje veel wat er op ze afkomt als ze mij lezen. “Some people find it a bit much, what comes at them when they read me.”

Timmi Duchamp at Aqueduct Press asked to write about my ‘year’s best’ books, which always makes me feel anxious and guilty (of not reading enough, of not having interesting taste). So instead I wrote about being alone for a few days, reading for ‘The Baby on the Fire Escape’ and discovering the unexpected. You can read it on the Aqueduct Press blog.

To read her new memoir M Train you would hardly know that Patti Smith is a rock star. She doesn’t let on that at sixty-eight she’s a hard-working performer, touring, lecturing, doing benefit concerts, going to parties with fashion designers, making appearances with the Dalai Lama. In her sequel to Just Kids, her magical 2010 memoir of youth and art, Smith prefers to present herself as a sort of intercontinental, frequent-flying, literary flâneuse in search of the perfect writers’ café.

The title comes from her idea of the book as a mental train journey, with the writer as conductor: where Just Kids told a story, M Train is a loose collection of sketches and observations from a musician and poet between tours. We see Smith in bed with a cat in her West Village townhouse, watching The Killing and reading Murakami. We spot her in Japan at the grave of the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa; in Mexico taking pictures in Frida Kahlo’s house; in her neighborhood café eating breakfast (brown toast, black coffee) and writing poetry. She even gives us an international list of her favorite coffee houses, including Coffeeshop Bluebird in Amsterdam.

“It’s not so easy writing about nothing,” is her opening sentence; later she laments, “I’m sure I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.” With this play on words she confesses the limits of the book: the something she has to tell, she’s not telling. In Just Kids she described her early romance with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, but in her new book she does not break her long-standing silence about the other great love of her life, the guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. After her marriage to Smith in 1980 she lived in semi-retirement in a Detroit suburb with him and their two children. A glimpse or two is all she’ll give away of her thirties. “An era of small pleasures,” she calls it, when she had a crib and a clothesline, got her coffee from 7-Eleven, did her best thinking in the lot behind the bait store, and was in a marriage she describes as a “clock with no hands,” “the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.”

She does tell us she and Fred began their relationship with a journey, visiting Suriname and French Guiana in homage to one of Patti’s heroes, Jean Genet. They also travelled in fantasy. When they bought an elegant vintage motorboat whose axle cost too much to repair, they put it in their yard and sat in it on summer evenings, Fred with beer, Patti with a thermos of coffee, listening to baseball games on the radio. Their happiness didn’t last. During a thunderstorm, a tree crushes their beloved boat; during another on Halloween 1994, Fred is taken to the hospital. He dies a few days later of heart failure, leaving Patti a grieving widow of forty-eight.

Her tone in these sketches is often melancholy, her theme often loss. She writes about the Arctic researcher Alfred Wegener, who disappeared on Greenland in 1930, and about her membership in the Continental Drift Club, a scientific society named for the theory Wegener proposed. Even a beloved, misplaced coat becomes a symbol of mortality. “Do our lost possessions mourn us? (…) Will my coat, riddled with holes, remember the rich hours of our companionship?”

Just Kids was full of people, the artists, writers, and musicians who influenced the young Patti and became her friends. M Train is full of ghosts. Many of the moody black-and-white Polaroids reproduced in the book are of gravestones, and her thoughts are often with Fred and other lost family and friends. Alone, she communes with the writers who speak to her in books. Through them she also recalls her younger self, the ambitious, starry-eyed poet in love with Rimbaud and Sylvia Plath.

The reader longs for more; but it’s not to be. Just Kids was a rich, full book about how to begin. This is a book about endings, about how to mourn and how to survive.

Trouw, October 17, 2015. Patti Smith, M Train (New York: Knopf, 2015), M-train (Breda: De Geus, 2015). Photo from the book via the New York Times.