Washington Post Book Reviews
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Thursday March 24, 2011
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THE ILLUMINATION
Kevin Brockmeier
Pantheon
ISBN 978-0375425318
257 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Keith Donohue, whose new novel, "Centuries of June," will be published in June
In a certain kind of story, life is altered by one degree: A man awakens one morning to find he has become an insect; everyone in a city suffers a plague of blindness; the perfect knight turns out to be an empty suit of armor. The fabulist changes one detail from our everyday existence as a way of looking at life anew. The magic is not there for its own sake, but to re-enchant our imaginations and illustrate part of the human condition in a fresh and unexpected way.
In his new novel, "The Illumination," Kevin Brockmeier proposes a world in which our wounds glow, our aches flame and our illnesses shine as though lit from within. Without explanation, suddenly on a Friday night, the secret of our sufferings is exposed. "No one could disguise his pain any more. You could hardly step out in public without noticing the white blaze of someone's impacted heel showing through her slingbacks; and over there, hailing a taxi, a woman with shimmering pressure marks where her pants cut into her gut; and behind her, beneath the awning of the flower shop, a man lit all over in a glory of leukemia." By providing such a novel way to sense pain, Brockmeier enables us to experience it anew.
Part of the allure of this premise lies in his language. The light that smolders from his characters becomes irresistible through wild metaphors and vivid descriptions that dot the story like constellations. Brockmeier is a dazzling stylist with a flair for creating alternate versions of familiar existence. In his previous novel, "The Brief History of the Dead," he created an afterlife where the dead reside and go about their daily business as long as there is someone here on Earth to remember them from when they were alive. The pain-illuminated world of his new novel is equally fantastic and plausible.
The plot is deceptively simple. A wife keeps a journal in which she has copied the notes her husband left her each morning of their years together. Every day he has told her some new way in which he loves her. "I love listening to you pick out a song you don't know on the piano. I love the way you'll try to point out a star to me over and over again sometimes." Thousands of these sentences are bound into seven volumes. On the day of the Illumination, the latest journal slips from her and into the hands of a stranger.
From that moment forward, we follow the journal as it moves from one person to the next. Six characters possess the book for a short while, just enough to have their lives changed by it. A data analyst crushed by the disappointment of her failed marriage is first to find the book and is filled with longing. Other recipients include a photographer whose life has been torn apart, a haunting and tormented child, a writer who mines the journal to create her own stories, and a homeless man. The lack of love in each character's life is juxtaposed by the love notes, and for each, the journal becomes a kind of illuminated manuscript for the soul.
Grief is the emotional core of the novel, and perhaps no journal recipient endures more existential misery than a missionary named Ryan. Some 30 years after he is given the book of love notes, he speculates on the significance of the Illumination. "For this was the hope that Ryan found himself nursing -- that God had merely gone to sleep for a while and was not paying attention, that the glass of Heaven was dark, and the curtains were drawn, and the suffering of humankind was like the sunlight that gradually suffused the sky in the morning."
Daybreak will awaken God, and the Earth will be restored. After a lifetime of seeing pain, his own and others, God's missionary hopes this is so. But this is just a prayer, for the Illumination has not changed humanity's empathy. Not nearly enough. Our pains, sadly, remain our own.
This elegiac tone pervades the book, and indeed, it is the mood of much of Brockmeier's work. He is a poet of grief and longing whose precision is reminiscent of Steven Millhauser's fiction. Brockmeier resists the easy resolution of allegory, and that makes the premise of this novel successful. "The Illumination" is a sad and beautiful novel, well worth the heartache evoked in its pages.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THREE STAGES OF AMAZEMENT
Carol Edgarian
Scribner
ISBN 978-1439198308
304 pages
$25
Reviewed by Wendy Smith, a contributing editor at the American Scholar
It's been 17 years since Carol Edgarian's best-selling, critically acclaimed first novel, "Rise the Euphrates," announced the arrival of a gifted and ambitious young writer. Yet that long pause feels right when you read "Three Stages of Amazement," her rueful, wholly adult second novel. It's not that Edgarian had to have three children and found an online literary magazine (Narrative) to understand the conflicts of a middle-aged couple in crisis -- a good fiction writer can imagine anything -- but the weight of lived experience gives a specific gravity to her account of a year that tests to the limit Lena Rusch and Charlie Pepper's comfortable assumptions about the world and their privileged place in it.
The novel begins on Dec. 31, 2008, "the last day of the lousiest year of their lives," Lena thinks as she prepares a New Year's Eve dinner. Eighteen months ago, she and Charlie quit their jobs in Boston -- his as a star surgeon at Mass General, hers as a senior producer at WGBH -- and moved to San Francisco so Charlie could work full time on producing Nimbus, a simple, inexpensive surgical robot that could be used in Third World hospitals like the Ugandan clinic where he worked while Lena was making a documentary on the global AIDS crisis. They planned to do good and make a lot of money, too. Meanwhile, why not make a baby sister for their son, Theo?
"They were as ordinary as any two people wanting more," Edgarian writes. A calm, omniscient narrator hovers over Lena and Charlie, articulating their dilemmas in a polished weave of metaphors that might seem overly studied if the emotional content weren't so strong. After the move, Lena gave birth prematurely to twin girls. One died immediately; the other, Willa, now 10 months old, has been hospitalized a dozen times: "The doctors talked gravely of cognitive delays, and worse."
Lena is coping with this desperate situation virtually alone. Charlie is consumed by the struggle to keep Nimbus alive in the wake of the economic meltdown. The only person willing to finance him is venture capitalist Cal Rusch, but Charlie doesn't dare tell Lena about this offer from her detested uncle. When they moved west, she made Charlie promise that the one person he would never take money from was Cal Rusch. What choice does he have? "Nimbus had a few months of capital left, and then the lights went out."
Edgarian brilliantly evokes the grim daily grind of her overwhelmed protagonists, doggedly putting one foot in front of the other as they move from one immediately pressing demand to the next, their separate trajectories increasing their sense of loneliness and estrangement. It's Lena in particular who needs to grow up, as Charlie savagely tells her in the scene that marks the breakdown of their marriage. She's always dreaded being ordinary -- she wants to do "amazing" things. Swamped by her children's needs, furious with her too-often-absent husband, she revises but doesn't fundamentally alter what she expects: "There must be something heroic about getting through the day with a bit of grace." Edgarian expertly rings changes on key words like "amazement," "grace" and "heart" to delineate Lena's education in reality. The most emotionally fluent and self-conscious character in a novel full of hyper-articulate, hyper-aware people, she nonetheless has blind spots that link her to Cal by personality as well as blood. Both need to master their hunger for something better, something perfect that must be just around the corner.
But will they? Edgarian, very much the old-fashioned, godlike novelist in this superbly crafted, skillfully plotted text, doles out retribution and rewards not entirely on the basis of merit. She chastens her characters but doesn't judge them. Instead, "Three Stages of Amazement" savors the rich complexity of human beings and the world they negotiate. Lena and Charlie get a second chance; what they will make of it is not at all certain. There are no final happy endings, only "life, this crazy life, and if you didn't laugh it broke you. It broke you anyway, but it was better if you laughed."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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PYM
Mat Johnson
Spiegel & Grau
ISBN 978-0812981582
322 pages
$24
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday. Visit his online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
Hats off, please, to Mat Johnson, author of this wonderful, black-humored novel -- part social satire, part meditation on race in America, part metafiction and, just as important, a rollicking fantasy adventure. "Pym" is outrageously entertaining, a book that brilliantly re-imagines and extends Edgar Allan Poe's enigmatic and unsettling "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket."
In that novel, the only one he ever wrote, Poe describes how young Arthur Pym stows away on the Jane Guy, survives a mutiny of the ship's "Negroes," is reduced to cannibalism after being cast adrift and eventually makes landfall on a tropical island paradise, located somewhere in the Antarctic. Surprisingly, everything on Tsalal is black -- not just the people and animals but even the water. Eventually, Pym and his "half-breed" companion, Dirk Peters, flee Tsalal in a small boat and find themselves drawn ever southward, as if by a magnet, into a world of white: White, ashy material falls from the sky; all the birds are white; an icy landscape looms. Then, in the last sentences of the narrative, the two men suddenly glimpse "a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow." End of book.
Disorienting throughout, Poe's novel isn't just a meditation on whiteness and blackness, but also a genuinely eerie story. Because of its lack of closure, though, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" inevitably encouraged continuations and explanations of its mysteries, most notably Jules Verne's "The Sphinx of the Ice Fields" and H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness." Mat Johnson's "Pym" is imaginatively worthy of their company.
Our story begins when Chris Jaynes, professor of African-American literature at a "historically white" college in Upstate New York, is denied tenure. The only black male professor on campus, he has refused to join the Diversity Committee, attracts almost no students to his course "Dancing With the Darkies: Whiteness in the Literary Mind" and admits that he is mainly drawn to the work of Edgar Allan Poe. His replacement is, almost inevitably, a hip-hop theorist, who dresses "in carefully selected baggy jeans" and "other matching oversize pop culture juvenilia."
Understandingly depressed, Jaynes looks for comfort from an old childhood friend, Garth Frierson, a Detroit bus driver who has been recently laid off and now lives mainly on snack cakes. Aside from Little Debbies, Garth has only one other passion in life: collecting the art of Thomas Karvel, the syrupy-sweet Master of Light. Of one landscape of the Catskills, the fat man remarks, "Don't it make you all peaceful just looking into that world?"
Jaynes, however, is a serious collector, mainly of early slave narratives and rare works of 19th-century literature. His goal is "to understand Whiteness, as a pathology and a mindset." Poe's work, he believes, offers particular insight into "the primal American subconscious, the foundation on which all our visible systems and structures were built." Thus, when a favorite antiquarian book dealer offers Jaynes an otherwise unknown "Negro Servant's Memoir, dated 1837," he is excited, but this is nothing compared with his reaction when he sees its actual title: "The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters. Coloured Man. As Written by Himself." Jaynes immediately realizes that this is "the greatest discovery in the brief history of American letters." "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" wasn't fiction, it was fact.
"There truly had been something living down in Antarctica. Something large and humanoid in nature. Maybe it was a lost strain of Neanderthal." More important to Jaynes, it also means "that Tsalal, the great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland, might still be out there, uncorrupted by Whiteness." And, with luck, he just might find it.
So, the now-obsessed former professor outfits an all-black expedition to Antarctica. The crew is headed by his cousin, Capt. Booker Jaynes, the "world's only civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver." In vain, the captain warns his academic cousin that "life is too short to be reading more books by white people." The team also includes a gay couple, one of whom constantly films the action, and a woman who happens to be Jaynes' great lost love.
In Antarctica, the expedition uses as its cover an ice-mining operation, the captain figuring that stupid rich people will pay big bucks for bottles of ancient polar melt. One day, however, some valuable drilling machinery falls partway down into a huge crevasse. Our academic hero descends in a harness to try to retrieve the equipment from its precarious perch. When Jaynes peers farther below, he makes out a kind of underground cavern, full of snow and "chunks of ice the size of coffins." It was, he remarks, "already an impressive sight before one of the large spears of ice started to fall forward, giving movement to the static scene." He looks closer. "Except it wasn't falling forward, it was walking. Walking forward, arms swinging, along the crater floor. And then it was looking up to me." It was "in fact a shawled figure, one whose cloth now rippled with movement as the beast hustled forward."
I'll say no more of the plot of "Pym," except to underscore that Johnson manages to mix aspects of Poe's novel with Verne's and Lovecraft's, and that Little Debbies and Thomas Karvel are key elements in the extraordinary story. Further thickening the narrative are explanatory footnotes, an overview of critical theories about the abrupt ending to Poe's novel and mini-essays on slavery and black identity. Moreover, the reader gradually realizes that "Pym" is set in a near future: Detroit, Houston and Washington, D.C., have suffered terrorist attacks; and the wealthy are building biodomes to escape from possible Armageddon. There are even hints that the old theory that Earth is hollow might be true.
Above all, "Pym" is exuberantly comic, sometimes with buddy-film antics, but often with head-shaking incredulity over the insane ways of human beings. Jaynes first meets his cousin Booker in a bar in Lower Manhattan. "He sat in the back of the room staring intently at the front door, Malcolm X style, which considering we were in an organic juice bar was a little heavy for the scene." While the novel's second half grows as exciting as an Indiana Jones movie, it also continues to raise serious questions about race, ethnic prejudice and genocide: "Why are albino mice deemed worthy to be kept as pampered personal pets while their nearly identical darker brothers are viewed completely as pests?" Reminiscent of Philip Roth in its seemingly effortless blend of the serious, comic and fantastic, Johnson's "Pym" really shouldn't be missed.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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DREAM OF DING VILLAGE
Yan Lianke. Translated from the Chinese by Cindy Carter
Grove
ISBN 978-0802119322
341 pages
$24
Reviewed by Lionel Shriver, whose most recent novel is "So Much for That," a 2010 National Book Award finalist
Formerly a poor peasant from Henan province, Yan Lianke is a widely translated author based in Beijing and the winner of major Chinese literary awards. Yet two previous novels of his, "Xia Riluo" and "Serve the People!," have been banned by the Communist Party. Yan claims that he deliberately played down his implicit criticism of the upper echelons in "Dream of Ding Village," but when the novel was first published in Hong Kong in 2006, his efforts to slip past the censors proved to be in vain, and this book was also banned.
"Dream of Ding Village" is now available in the United States in an agreeably readable translation by Cindy Carter. Unfortunately, the nonfiction story that inspired it beats this novel hands down. Yan's intentions are laudable. He based the book on a scandal in his home province, where villagers were urged to sell their blood, unaware that the plasma with which they were injected to prevent anemia was contaminated with HIV. Ten years on, whole villages were wiped out.
The novel focuses on one village, where the son of its leading family, Ding Hui, champions the sale of blood as an easy path to prosperity, pocketing a share of the proceeds for himself. This first section is successfully ghoulish, as villagers bleed themselves dizzy in order to afford larger houses and electrical appliances: "Throughout the village, blood-filled plastic tubing hung like vines, and bottles of plasma like plump red grapes."
But then the villagers begin to come down with "the fever": "If you hadn't seen someone in the village for weeks, you didn't ask where he or she had gone. You just assumed they were dead." The schoolhouse, run by Ding Hui's father, is soon converted to a hospice. Yet widespread mortality provides another commercial opportunity for the enterprising Ding Hui, who makes more money selling the villagers fancy government coffins. Indeed, coffins are in such demand that soon the countryside is denuded of trees. Finally, Ding Hui makes more money still as a matchmaker for the dead, marrying the younger AIDS victims posthumously to one another so they won't be lonely in the afterlife.
What's wrong with this picture? Somehow, it is not sufficient to sustain the novel. Though multiple subplots fill out the book, they feel like padding.
The "Lovely Bones" approach of telling the story in the first person -- from the perspective of Ding Hui's dead 12-year-old son -- does not pay off. No back story emerges to justify the device, which thus seems arbitrary, decorative and sentimental.
Literary tastes vary from culture to culture. Nevertheless, for a Western sensibility, much of Yan's imagery is overwrought, his language too juiced up; given the subject matter, the sun should shine like "a blood-red ball" only once. Indeed, the text is littered with so many metaphors that they feel compulsive. Here are three consecutive lines: "Genzhu's words had hit him like a rock to the side of the head, leaving him dazed and speechless. He felt like the young man had asked to touch his cheek, then slapped him across the face. Grandpa's face was pale as a late-December moon, his mind as empty as the schoolyard, as barren as the plain."
This "like"- and "as"-riddled prose is strangely exhausting -- and clunky when the metaphors don't work: "the bridge of her nose as straight and tall as a chopstick standing at attention." (When does a chopstick stand at attention?) More painful still: "She rose to his desire, embracing his lust like the tender young grass on the plain welcomes the warmth of spring." Or, "Genzhu's smile grew as thick as tree bark. It seemed too heavy for his face, like it might peel away at any moment."
Worst of all, there are no real characters in the rounded Western sense of that term. Ding Hui is a stick figure of avarice; Grandpa is a totem of the old ways, a mere vehicle for dismay. The larger real-life story may be tragic, but the reader feels little when these fictional characters die.
Yan is clearly making a statement about the personal and spiritual prices paid for China's runaway development. Yet he undermines one of his better allegorical images -- a coffin lavishly decorated with grand Chinese cityscapes as well as washers, dryers and refrigerators -- by repeating the same engravings on another coffin later in the book. More broadly, the author's trademark absurdity suffers from the real story's grand-scale ghastliness. There's too little space between the would-be outsize plot and what actually happened.
You're bound to read elsewhere that this is a good book. Outraged by Chinese censorship, many Western critics are likely to cut Yan all manner of stylistic slack. But this is a good book only in the sense that it's virtuous. Its overarching problem is that of form: "Dream of Ding Village" is a parable, and parables should be brief. The same core plot would have made a cracking short story. Or, since Yan spent three years researching AIDS villages in Henan, it might have made a devastating work of nonfiction. But as a novel, it's repetitive, heavy-handed and flat.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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