Revisionist Overload

This is the first of the novels that Emily left me that I won't give two thumbs up to Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund. (I guess I might as well admit it straight up, I have never read Moby Dick.) The conceit of this story is to portray Ahab's wife as leading a life as adventuresome as the Captain's.

Using Pamuk's theories of what a reader expects from fiction, although it is easy to envision Una's worlds, a rural farm in Kentucky, her early adolescence with her kin tending a light house, and her eventual life as a Nantucket widow, Naslund stretches the reader's willingness to suspend belief too far, incessantly playing American history six degrees of separation. How could one woman meet Maria Mitchell, Margaret Sanger, Emerson, Frederick Douglas, and Henry James. How could she, given her point in history, have become a runaway cabin boy on a whaler and survive a wreck by becoming a cannibal? How could she have a Little Eva type experience with a runaway slave and end up trusting her bounty hunter, a dwarf, to lead her out of Kentucky back to New England?

Despite the wifely title, this is not a love story or a story about passion. Una is "married" three times. The first time is to one of the two young men who had come to the light house to upgrade the mirrors who just happen to be serving on the same whaler as she. This time she is "married" to Kit by Captain Ahab. Kit eventually loses his sanity (his effects from eating human flesh) and runs off to the Indian frontier. Ahab then conveniently "unmarries" her and marries her all in one ceremony. Finally years after Moby Dick prevails, Una lives with, yes, you guessed it, Ishmael. If credibility has not yet been blown, add in homosexuality and the use of scrimshaw as a tool to relieve the sexual tensions of the captains' wives during the years they are off to sea.
Populated with such caricatures rather than characters, the novel becomes a garish exaggeration of pre-Civil War America.

Back to Pamuk's influence ... and I cannot yet, if ever, clarify in my mind what is the central focus of Naslund's story. Maybe she is trying to achieve equal time for feminine heroes, as thinkers, scientists, abolitionists and everyday women. But even the real heroines' successes read like fables when set in a world where all the happenings seem contrived.

Preoccupation and Indecisiveness

Books are finished; reviews are piling up in the draft hopper. As I sit to write about John Updike’s Marry Me, I want to compare it to a Philip Roth book I am only half finished and to overlay my analysis of it with the insight I gained from Pamuk’s Norton lectures. I will rely on his perspective even though, dear blog reader, it might be a day or so before that review gets on the site.

As is my habit, after finishing Marry Me, I went on Wiki to see what it had to say both about Updike and about this particular novel. Wouldn’t you know, this was one of the few without a hyperlink. Wiki’s write up of Updike summarizes him as the chronicler of suburban adultery, whose novels are populated with
characters who frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity. Well that succinctly summarizes the plot of Marry Me.

While not exactly Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, this tale deals with Jerry and Ruth (Jerry having the most Updike-like autobiographical characteristics such as being a frustrated cartoonist and married to a woman her met in art school) and Richard and Sally. Richard, a compulsive philanderer seduces Ruth but the affair fizzles out after a short fling. Jerry obsesses about Sally, for pages and pages and chapter upon chapter. He swears to Ruth that he will stop seeing her however being completely unable to do so.

Jerry and Ruth talk to much about his extramarital affair, not in heated passionate arguments, but as though they were watching Cousin/Cousine, and the damage would not affect them as a family. Ruth bides her time; Jerry waivers and cogitates. Ho hum.

The kicker of the novel comes in its last chapter, a quasi-epilogue, that has three concurrent scenarios playing out: Jerry taking Sally and her three children to Wyoming, Jerry taking Ruth and their three children to Nice, and Jerry going alone to St. Croix where he continues to fantasize about proposing to Sally. Now this device is what’s punchy and clever. Pamuk in his lectures describes why readers like reading novels: essentially, to be caught up in another familiar but somewhat unknown landscape of experiences, trying to figure out how all the details the author put into the book all fit together to bring the point of it into focus. He calls it the center of the story.

Now I disagree with Wiki that Marry Me is a tale of suburban adultery, riddled with Christian guilt. Updike seems to me to be writing about options and choices and the inability to decide. That theme is tricked out in the last chapter. Updike is playing with the reader, saying to him/her that no matter how you are trying to figure this out and tie Jerry’s life up neatly, the point of the story is Jerry can’t pick either woman and all three endings are equally real.

Besides having the opinion that no woman would be the happy winner, Jerry being no prize husband or lover, none of the three conclusions work for me. The religious compulsion is best expressed when Jerry thinks about whose face he wants to see above his as he lays dying. Neither Ruth nor Sally seem right to me; maybe a mirror to reflect his face back to him as someone checks to see if he is still breathing after yet another asthma attack.

Orhan Pamuk's Norton Lectures on "Centers"

Almost a week ago now, I finished reading Orhan Pamuk's novel, The Museum of Innocence but have not posted the review, trying to make it as perfect as his book and worthy of adding to a website dedicated to comments about it. In the meantime, I was curious to see how typical that story was of his Nobel Prize winning style but discovered most of his other books were either too political or historical for the lust list. So I found his most recent publication, The Naive and Sentimental Novelist, the collection of his Norton lectures at Harvard, and devoured it in one day.

Much like my delight in Llosa's The Perfect Orgy analysis of Madame Bovary and Octavio Paz' insight into lust in The Double Flame, I found Pamuk's book to be one that I would stock on my book shelves were I to be teaching a course in literary criticism of novels.

Once again, this review would be as long as the book if I cited all the quotes that I marked while reading it. I guess the concept that will last with me the longest is the idea of searching for this illusive, reader-based center of a novel, sort of the meta-story that proves universal human truths that all fiction readers crave. His lectures are a dance of how and why the writer writes and why the reader reads and who assumes what about the other.

Sex Straved Colleens

Maybe a subset of the lust list should be banned books. Written in the early 1960s, The Country Girls Triology by Edna O'Brien was summarily banned in Ireland, how dare a woman write about premarital sex with a married man, adultery, abortion, and other sins against the ten commandment.

Even more Irish than Summer and Love, TCGT follows the lives and lusts of two girls from early teen years until middle age, through all their attempts at love where love is used garner wealth and free them from their bucolic roots. Caitleen repeatedly is attracted to older married men, never realizing her need to find a father figure to replace her drunken, brutal, provincial father.

Only after realizing that her marriage to Eugene is over, Cait reacts: "She'd missed her chance ... She knew danger as she had never known it -- the danger of being out in the world alone, having lost the girlish appeal that might entice some other man to father her. It wasn't just her age; she was branded in a way that other men would spot a mile away, and though still young, she had not the energy to coax, and woo, and feed, and love, and stroke, and cosset another man, beginning from the very beginning again."

Bridget, Baba, is another of Cait's bad influences, the one provoking her to get expelled from high school where she is on scholarship and egging her on to flee to London. Although Baba eventually marries a striving contractor, her inclinations towards extramarital affairs never wanes.

Sure and the book is about lust, never passion or lust. Cait and Baba's sex drives are insatiable but differently motivated: Cait's a way to use attraction to gain security and Baba's entirely animalistic. Neither would be excused by an Irish Catholic country; Edna is the Anais Nin of her homeland.

Ramblings at Midnight

Something spooky happened as I was reading The End of the Story by Lydia Davis. I read the author blurb on the back cover flap and it said she lived with her husband in upstate New York. I still felt psychically edgy and punched her into Wiki and there she was, a professor of creative writing at SUNY Albany.

Not that any local color comes through in the story, which appears to take place somewhere around San Francisco and eventually looking back to the West Coast from a more northern climate, like Vermont or Minnesota. Everything is intentionally vague and circuitous in the story. Both lovers are unnamed and not physically described except for their age difference: she is twelve years older, a professor at the school he attends, or not. Their affair is brief, maybe lusty but not written with any voyeurism.

Davis writes about writing. She is stretching stream of consciousness into something like a river of forgetfulness. Paragraphs are Joycean in length and sentence complexity with all possible, if unlikely or unreal, outcomes are arrayed. Davis pokes holes in plot clarity and autobiographical sources in novels. Her main theme is never one like Proust’s where one sensual image recalls feelings with clarity and precision. She writes like a middle aged, pre-Alzheimer’s woman who cannot recall the details or sequence of what she has labeled as one of the more significant loves of her life. The only quote I marked illustrates this "whirlwind" pattern:

"What I remember may be wrong. I have been trying to tell the story as accurately as I can, but I may be mistaken about some of it, and I know I have left things out and added things, both deliberately and accidentally ... many parts of this story are wrong, not only the facts, but also my interpretations. But there was only what I saw ... There are some inconsistencies. I say he was open to me, and I say he was closed to me. I say he was silent with me, and that he was talkative. That he was modest, and arrogant. That I knew him well, and that I did not understand him ... Either all these things were true at different times or I remember them differently depending on my mood."

Her ambiguity makes both the male and female characters seem unattractive. Motives are discernible: he needs a place to crash at night and she, in a
pre-cougar time, likes him around but on a short leash, under her eye and control, and only on her terms.

Davis has also selected a “slightly off” title for the novel. Immediately, she writes of the break up, the end of her love story, but from there on, there is not chronological time line. If she writes all her stories this way, she would be that attention-deficit co-worker one avoids; if she used this as a structured device to seem unstructured, she is masterful. Unfortunately, my local library network only has collections of her short stories, no other novel. Maybe I should head over to the SUNY bookstore and see what’s in the stacks by her. Or maybe not.

Limited Hours to Visit the Museum

It is now months after I started writing this blog entry. I liked the book then as I hit on both a compulsive love and importance of place theme. As time goes by, I remember it more for an unrequited love with his city rather than his cousin. My original comments follow:

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk is one of the books I chose for my annual themed list of books, this year being great love stories, full of passion and lust,. And certainly, the happiest moment of Kemal’s life was when he was passionately making love to his much younger, distant poor relation Fusun. This story does not lack for physical cravings maturing into deeper, soul capturing feelings.

Other elements that I look for in an unforgettable love story are many of those characteristics itemized by Octavio Paz: a “forbidden” love that ruptures or violates the social order; a forced separation; a façade of resuming a “normal” life; and love as a victory over time. It is this last element that plays most forcefully in Orhan Pamuk’s tale. The entire premise of Kemal collecting mementos from his time with Fusun and ultimately setting up a museum to perpetuate his love for her is the motive by which he attempts to have time be transformed into space. Time is tracked by the growth of his collection instead of cycles or celebrations; clocks do not keep time. But while Parmuk is making this dimension tangible, he is also transforming his protagonist from a lover to a patriot.

Pamuk’s recreation of Istanbul in the 1970s and 1980s is accomplished through these contemporary relics of human lives and loves and through fleshing out the main characters with commentary from a city full of Zola inspired friends and citizens. What is striking is Kemal chooses to ignore the political turmoil of the times, making the repression evident in only as it impacts him – rushing home to meet curfew; knowing which officials to bribe for a driver’s license; and dealing with the industry of editors who rewrite plots to pass censorship.

The museum herein created is not an altar to a young woman; it is a time capsule of one’s youth, one’s comfort in family and pride in one’s home town. Our local newspaper recently asked long time residents to submit short memoirs about what best symbolizes their fond memories of growing up in town. People did not recall long term mayors or plane crashes. They remembered horse drawn bread delivery trucks, neighborhood cobblers and the opening of the first mall. So we collected stories, not pastry wrappers, receipts for shoes or store receipts. Even as he amasses such detritus, Kemal knows he has to write to answer the question: “What did these Europeans think about me … think about all of us (Turks)?”

So at the end of the novel, as Kemal blends into Orhan, the museum becomes a paean to an innocent Istanbul, one as yet untarnished by either Western commercialism or Muslim fanaticism. She is the long lost love driving the compulsion to reminiscence.

Occasional Sin

Again, I must admit that my education as an English major was completely lacking in American literature. So, I filled in another gap, earning a merit badge for reading John O’Hara’s A Rage to Live. The title alone made me think about the Legion of Decency and those movies and books it banned as unsuitable for Catholics. I can close my eyes and almost be convinced that his Butterfield Eight was displayed in a glowing red banner in the back of Saint Margaret Mary's. All those mortal sin movies merge together into one mass of “unfamiliarity,” so much so, I thought this book was made into a movie starring Susan Hayworth. Which one I am thinking of, obviously not this one. I even went to far as to check on Wiki to see who was the female lead in the movie version of ARTL – it was Suzanne Pleshette, a type-casted Grace Tate if ever there was one. (Sidney is sort of a Bob Newhart kind of guy, but that acting duo was years after Bradford Dillman as her husband.) However, this rendition, except for the names of the characters, bears little resemblance to O’Hara’s novel and it was never favorably received, either by the Church or movie critics.

Speaking about reviews, sort of like Gunter Grass and The Tin Drum, O’Hara’s novels were often reviled by his contemporaries on ad hominem basis. I guess O’Hara must have been a bit of an overbearing curmudgeon. His class warfare themes are plainly a personal grudge. Reading this book sixty plus years after its publication, it does have elements of a great American novel, if not a great love story.

Grace has been described as a nymphomaniac, a condition O’Hara attributed to her having been raped by a boy (who eventually grows up to be mayor of the capital of Pennsylvania) while her brother stood guard at her closed bedroom door. This incidence of teenage testosterone apparently marked her for life as susceptible to the slightest whim of phernomes. Once happily married, her lust arises more episodic than chronic, never lasting more than a few romps, and both she and her conquests go on their way to live in the same community, feeding rumors but otherwise leading normal lives.

O’Hara’s narration is a bit trite in that many key characters are killed off, Grace’s husband from polio, her first adulterous lover in a flaming car crash. What success O’Hara has, I believe, falls into two major areas. First, he is top notch in moving a story through dialogue rather than by using an all-knowing narrator with aloof observations or reading the main character's internalized thoughts. His regional and class based dialects delineate the town's social taboos and privileges. In populating such a broad canvas of minor and supporting characters, O’Hara also achieves a Zola or Dreisler like setting. The story could only exist in a small state capital in the first few decades of the twentieth century.

O’Hara wrote a book that pushed the standards of what could be written in America in the 1940s about sex, adultery, and lust. Yet by today’s standards, he is not only oblique when it comes to fornicating in a car, but he dances around those instances when people are attracted to the same sex. He contrives to use Grace’s under-education to have her confuse incest with incense and homosexuality with being overly macho, much like her youngest son confuses polio as infantry paralysis.

How to explain the title then when I expected Grace to be voracious when it came to lust? Guess even my major concentration and love of Alexander Pope were not enough to recognize it being taken from the poem Epistle to a Lady:

“Say, what can cause such impotence of mind?
A spark too fickle, or a Spouse too kind?
Wise wretch! with Pleasures too refin’d to please;
With too much Spirit to be e’er at ease;
With too much Quickness ever to be taught;
With too much thinking to have common Thought;
You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give,
And die of nothing but a Rage to live.”

And so in my heart, my sense of romance, and all my other senses, English poetry here once more betters American fiction.