James Meek on James Kelman

"The real reason Kelman, despite his stature and reputation, remains something of a literary outsider is not, I suspect, so much that great, radical Modernist writers aren’t supposed to come from working-class Glasgow, as that great, radical Modernist writers are supposed to be dead."

For every David Foster Wallace, there are about three hundred Colm Toibins.

For a change...

...here is something more populist, or at least more current: Timothy Garton Ash's excellent appraisal of Wikileaks's impact.

Please read this

A stunning, stunning, stunning review of Garcia Marquez's Living to Tell the Tale, by Michael Wood.

Larkin's Deceptions

Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.
The sun's occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding.  All the unhurried day,
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.  Slums, years, have buried you.  I would not dare
Console you if I could.  What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfillment's desolate attic.

How to write a novel

1) Imagine the beginnings of a scene: The narrator, driving to another city with his half-sister; or maybe an artist at the cusp of her first encounter with Society and its machinery of Approval.

2) Meditate on the so-called "themes" that the scene will embody. Think of subtle ways to "mediate" them. Discard these ways for more bombastic ones. Remind yourself of James Wood, and his injunction that a theme not be too "legible", which is to say visible, and visibly awkward, to a critic of his stature. Then see that your closeness to your novel prevents your ever grasping exactly how "legible" your themes are. (Besides, isn't it better---especially for a tyro novelist---to be legible than obscure? Or is that too fraught a question to ask? Who the fuck knows?)

3) Return to the scene. Describe a perfunctory specific. "The rise and fall of her hair was inevitable; it was like dusk on the steady plateau of my ardor." Laugh at the florid sub-Nabokovian stupidity of what you have just written. Erase it. Affect sincerity. "Her hair. The slither and collapse of it. Its unashamed brownness. The way it slides, unsupervised, into the suggestive folds of her breasts." Allow yourself an outfaced smile at the epithet "unashamed". Wait for the querulous voice inside you that says: "But breasts are always suggestive. And haven't you heard that "slither and collapse" somewhere else before?" Panic. Flip to page 29 of The Folding Star, in which the object of the narrator's fantasy, Luc Altidore, is described thus: "Through the coming hour I would see that tumbling forelock dry from bronze to gold, and get to know the different ways he mastered it, the indolent sweep, the brainstorming grapple, the barely effectual toss, and how long the intervals were between forward slither and lustrous collapse." Tear your hair out. Spend the next few hours with your heart in your mouth, scrolling endlessly through lines you've already written, surveying them for other instances of unconscious plagiarism. Cringe at the odd hackneyed phrase. Sit back in your chair and look upwards in a conscious mime of someone who has a big problem.

4) Watch youtube videos of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3, 3rd Movement, until a time in the early am. Go to bed.

You can have a Bach fugue...

...this one, by Glenn Gould, comes to mind.

Note to myself

Nicholas Spice on Peter Carey's ventriloquism in Parrot and Olivier in America: "But the laws of fiction are harsh and you can’t sacrifice interest to characterisation."

It says a lot about the central voice in my novel that I have to keep reminding myself of this.

Michael Wood on Christopher Isherwood

"‘I am a camera.’ This statement is often taken as a simple assertion of a documentary impulse or desire. ‘I am a camera with its shutter open,’ the full sentence goes, ‘quite passive, recording, not thinking.’ But of course cameras don’t say ‘I’, and don’t tell us they are not thinking. Isherwood likes the complication lurking in such simple figures. The hero of his later novel, A Single Man (1964), says he is ‘like a book you have to read. A book can’t read itself to you. It doesn’t even know what it’s about’. Just before the statement about the camera and its passivity Isherwood had written this amazing paragraph (the opening of Goodbye to Berlin), where the unthinking apparatus takes interesting omissions of verbs, launches a generalisation and manages to turn a simile into a historical judgment:

'From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.'

Some camera. And yet of course the metaphor is not meaningless, or damaged by all this mental activity. It is an introduction to the Isherwood of the stories, a person whose self is in his observations, not his (fortunately rare) dips into introspection. The person who is a camera at the start of this book becomes a city at the end:

'Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.'"

Foreign countries

From page 257 of The Line of Beauty:

"[...] but it was only play-acting, the capable new persona that came with speaking in a foreign language."

Replace "language" with "accent", and you have the subject of my novel. I don't know whether to be disheartened; is it bad that the best novelist in the world can summarize my novel-in-progress in a single sentence? Does it mean that he has already explored the subject in countless unpublished novels, and found it an unrewarding one, about which nothing worthwhile can be said?

But surely this is too pessimistic. Maybe I can take it to mean, instead, that I am on the "right" track. It's almost as if Hollinghurst were my research advisor, and can only suggest research topics, i.e., subjects for my novel, by alluding obliquely to them in his own novels. I imagine us in an office together, sitting across the table from each other, he with his beard and the suggestive smile he wears on the dust flap of The Line of Beauty, me with a backpack, not bothering to conceal my lack of sleep. "Don't you think Wani 's saying 'Now there's a line of beauty for you!" is a little too legible? " I'll say. And he'll say "Don't quote bloody James Wood at me. "Legible"! Now don't let me see you until you've read my Bajazet translation."

Chopin's Ballade No. 1

Explained devastatingly by Rubinstein.

A note

From a novel I'm currently reading: "Six months later, when he was dead, I knew that life had been unfair to him.'' These lines were written in the eighties, but could have been written at any time in the past fifty years. They are the kind that make you want to say: what, you don't think that death can be the sole subject of a sentence? That the only way you can work in a (major) character's death is by referring to it in a sub-clause? The goal of such sentences is to avoid a certain sentimentality; but in doing so they lapse unavoidably into mannerism. Death is sentimental, and to pretend otherwise is to be a sophist, and a self-consciously literary one at that. Hollinghurst, as usual, is instructive when it comes to dealing with death:

It seemed Colin's car had gone out of control on the Brighton road; it was the six liter Craxton he'd had done up, he should have known the problem with it in the wet, with just a bit too much speed the tail swings round a bend, then you're spinning across the lanes; you might be lucky and cartwheel down a high bank and thwack to a halt in earth and grass; or you might five or six other cars light ruinous blows and come out shuddering and vomiting with terror but okay; or you might shimmer sideways, seem to hover for half a second alongside the blurred rain-sluicing roof-high tires of a twelve-wheeled juggernaut, then crumple under and be sliced to death.

[Later, at the funeral:]

I tried to sing, but was voiceless with tears, glancing forward to the awful box, which held what was left of my friend for the little while before we burnt him again.

The music teacher

The music teacher frowned. One of her students was looking outside the window and writing a novel. It was a long novel, and the music teacher waited patiently for her student to complete it. After a few minutes, she asked, If your majesty is done writing his novel, will he please hum the syllables Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni Sa? The student, who suspected he was a very poor novelist, said: That is MayamalavaGaula. Please, don't sing it in my presence. The music teacher said, What impudence! and hawked out a great gob of phlegm, which landed smack on the page on which the student was writing. The student said, Please don't hawk phlegm on my novel's pages. The ink tends to dissolve. At this, the music teacher was filled with remorse, and said: You are like my son, or at least, you are not unlike him. Yes, the student said. I am indeed not unlike your son. The student thought that `indeed' was an archaic word, and, wiping away the phlegm, made a mental note never to use it in any of his novels.

Who said?

When I was born, I was one-legged, and my father screamed at me. When I turned five, though, my father tore off his leg dramatically, in front of everyone. Here's my leg, he said. Use it well. I said, I don't want your charity, and threw the leg away. It landed near the fireplace; the maid servant, whose name is not important, used it to stoke the fire.

After that, I grew up. When I was sixteen I chose my first girlfriend, whom my father adored. He said, look after him well, he's my one-legged son. She dumped me then and there because she had thought that I'd had both my legs intact. See, my father said, this is what happens. Can I have your other leg now, father? He said, Perhaps.

Later, I became twenty-five. By then my father had already become thirty-six. He had only a year left to live. Father, I said. Now that you have only a year left to live, you will consider? No, who said? he asked, spittle trailing down the corner of his mouth. I have more than a year and three months to live. Besides, your stepsisters also need legs. What will become of them if I give you everything I have? Then, he wiped the rest of his spittle on my face and said, here, take this. I give you this.

I sold my body unsuccessfully for many days after that. No one would pay to sleep with me, because I was disfigured. Besides, I didn't have any money. One person was willing, then she asked me: Do you have any money? I said, no, I don't have money, I need money. She walked away in a hurry.

Unfortunately, I died before my father. It was a rainy day, and he had forgotten to dye his hair. He said, there goes a one-legged man. I wanted to say to him, you should have given me that last leg. But I didn't, alas, because I was dead.

"A certain aesthetic amazement"

It is a joyless, rather vacuous evening, and so I will quote Hollinghurst from memory.

I felt the poetry of the thing tonight, perched above the breakers and the dim phosphorescence of the returning foam. I knew nothing about this country; to me it was a dream-Belgium, it was Allemonde, a kingdom of ruins and vanished pleasures, miracles and martyrdoms, corners where the sun light never shone. Not many would recognise it but some would. I seemed to have lost Luc in it. It was his wildness that had brought me to him and now it had taken him from me away. I studied my situation with a certain aesthetic amazement.

This is late in the novel, when our protagonist, Edward, realizes he has lost Luc, the love of his life. Of course the scene is symbolic, but its symbolism is not subterranean, and does not wait to be unearthed by the prospecting hermeneut. Unlike Jhumpa Lahiri and her ilk, who leave a symbol to semaphore its meaning wildly but "naturally" in each of their stories (for example: Amit's marriage to Megan is Failing; Amit and Megan have to go to a party; Megan's dress is Torn; Megan asks Amit to stand close to her so the Rent Doesn't Show; towards the End of the Party, Amit and Megan begin to talk to Other People, and the Rent is Visible For All to See; therefore, The Rent in the Dress Symbolizes the Rent in their Marriage; but don't draw attention to it, please, keep it low, because it's natural, it could have actually happened, it functions on two levels, the realist and the "literary"), this one is appropriated by the narrator. Its function is not to reinforce a "theme" but to signal that the narrator understands his situation, and is thus more natural than the fake naturalness imposed by Lahiri's Creative Writing gyaan. (Deresiewicz on Lahiri: "The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted—no, machine-tooled—to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives; their writing-handbook devices—the inciting event, the governing symbol, the wry turn, the final epiphany—arrive one after another, exactly on time, with the subtlety of a pit bull and the spontaneity of a digital clock." )

Which is to say

Conurb, in the nighttime, through a fog-thwarted pair of glasses. The muffled thrusts of a matchstick old-fashionedly held to a cigarette. The melodramatic glower of a passing pedestrian. The thrill of a looming streetlamp. Its being only a streetlamp. Breasts not offered but triumphantly half-brandished. Leaping, then, across an incontinent gulch, knowing, then, a thwarted peace, finding, then, a poster for a camp skit campily played down, its campy actresses laid campily out in a matchstick line; watching, then, a fiend, splashing unconcernedly by. The filtered fakeness of a not-yet-dawn. The anxiety of a future only half-glimpsed. The pedantry of this. The pedantry of this. The strand of hair that remains clutched. The concrete. The oreo-cookie.

Supplemental

As a sort of belated counterpoint to all the ranting and ill-will that frequents this blog, here's a stunning excerpt from Manu Joseph's Serious Men, which I accidentally purchased for my Kindle not fifteen minutes ago:

Ayyan saw a young couple come down the steps. "All well?" he asked. The boy smiled shyly. He was holding a travel bag. Ayyan knew that the bag was empty. It was a sign of love. In some rooms here, over a dozen lived. So the newly-weds slept on the illegal wooden lofts with the unspoken assurance that the rest of the family down below would not look up. Every now and then, incontinent couples went to cheap lodges in Parel or Worli carrying empty bags to pass off as tourists. Some carried their wedding albums too, in case the cops raided. They spent a day in a bed that was entirely their own and returned with fond memories of room-service and love.

(The only mis-step in the above paragraph is the word "incontinent", which, among other things, calls to mind babies in cribs and the odd Alzheimer-ridden octogenarian.)

To write movingly and yet at an unsentimental, perhaps even ironic distance about poverty in urban India; this seems to be Joseph's goal. His approach, insofar as a generalization about it is possible after reading a few pages, seems to revolve around the deftly placed simile: (about young women walking on Bombay's beaches) "Solitary young women walked hastily, as if they were fleeing from the fate of looking like their mothers." (further on, in the same paragraph) "And their new jeans were so low that their meagre Indian buttocks peeped out as commas." (The novel's first sentence, about our protagonist): "Ayyan Mani's thick black hair was combed sideways and parted by a careless broken line, like the borders the British used to draw between two hostile neighbors." We delight in these riches while being simultaneously concerned about their running out too soon. And the colonial simile: is it placed there purely as an ornament, or does it have a deeper novelistic purpose? We shall see.

Amit Chaudhuri's nonsense

Amit Chaudhuri, reviewing Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey in the LRB, had this to say about "the" Indian character:

To walk down a crowded Colaba street on an afternoon is to come into contact with more people than one would in the course of a lifetime in Sweden. In the West, because of the climate, people get to know each other in rooms. Relationships form. So do characters. In India, the human face, being part of a river of faces, refuses to lend itself to characterisation, disappears, like a hint, soon after appearing, remains ghostly, without inwardness. This sense of humanity as at once endlessly replenishable and dispersed, Mistry powerfully suggests through his minor characters. Subject to the more occidental practice of ‘characterisation’, his protagonists tend to be unconvincing. Neither a minor nor a major figure, the pavement artist wanders intriguingly through the book, producing image after image, reminding me of Indian villagers who publish the pictures of their gods on the walls of their mud huts, decorating the fronts of their houses like the covers of books, each house containing a different story.

A London Parsi named A. Vakil wrote in to dissent:

According to him, the Indian face, as opposed to the Western face, ‘being part of a river of faces, refuses to lend itself to characterisation, disappears, like a hint, soon after appearing, remains ghostly, without inwardness’. Why is a sea of faces in Bombay any different from a sea of faces in Euston Station?

And Chaudhuri replied, evasively quoting Naipaul:

‘Why is a sea of faces in Bombay any different from a sea of faces in Euston Station?’ Mr Vakil asks. I am surprised he does not know why. Half of the population of a street in Bombay consists of beggars, idlers with transistor radios, hawkers who set up stalls during the day with a Crusoe-like ingenuity and fold these up at night and go to sleep on the pavement, all this being made possible by the climate. As Naipaul once said in an essay on London:

It is a matter of climate. In a warm country life is conducted out of doors. Windows are open, doors are open… It is easy for the visitor to get to know the country. He is continually catching people in off-duty positions. In England everything goes on behind closed doors. The man from the warm country leaves the door open behind him. The man from the cold country closes it: it has become a point of etiquette.

Chaudhuri's Bombay, personified by a "crowded Colaba street" is a populous place. So populous, indeed, that its human beings are like pigeons, or particles of air; indistinguishable as individual entities, and remarkable only by virtue of belonging to a large group. Whereas, of course, the vaunted West, with its year-round cold weather, its spacious, air-conditioned rooms, breeds a recognizable sort of human being, on whom it bestows a magical inwardness; an inwardness sadly unavailable to the roaming destitute of Colaba.

What could lead Chaudhuri to such an abjectly racist viewpoint? One could charitably interpret his unwillingness to credit the everyday Indian---the one in the crowd whose face he registers for the briefest of instants---with inwardness as a sort of creative empathy. He is trying, in his review, to excuse Mistry's spare, image-laden prose by reading it as a commentary on the kinds of communion available to the urban Indian, shouldering his way through the unwashed, anxious only to separate himself from the next appeal for a few rupees. Chaudhuri sides with Mistry only because he is a dutifully strenuous reader of his book; not because he is himself the jadedly-Westernized post-colonial.

But this is indeed too charitable. In his response to Vakil, he reverts tellingly to description: "Half of [a Bombay street's population] consists of beggars[…] hawkers who set up stalls with a Crusoe-like ingenuity. [Quote:] "In England everything goes on behind closed doors. The man from the warm country leaves the door open behind him."" To Chaudhuri, then, a person's setting determines the degree of his inwardness. There cannot be the Indian fictional character because there is no Indian "character". The condition of "Indianness" can be evoked only by "producing image after image". The Indian in India does not have a consciousness, and is thus unable to have a human relationship; in fact, his lexicon cannot contain a reference to a concept so "occidental" as "relationship". All he has in his mind are images of other people. (And the thought of where his next meal might come from.)

Chaudhuri believes in representational readings of fictions. For him, a character in a story is not just a character; he represents a particular typology of characters, all of whom are generated by the society which surrounds them, and due to which they are muffled representatives of their "true" selves. This aesthetic proves sufficient on the thin, piety-ridden scaffolds of, say, Vikram Chandra's worlds, where it can turn into a lambent interpretation of intent:

The second story, ‘Shakti’, which, with the third and fourth stories, is the core of this book’s achievement, and contains its best writing, is about social climbing, snobbery and class – constants of middle-class Indian life that have only rarely been an inspiration to Indian writers in English. Two families play their part in this story. The first consists of Sheila Bijlani and her entrepreneur husband; Sheila, ‘the daughter of a common chemist-type shopkeeper’, has married a man whose background is less than aristocratic – ‘USA-returned and all, but from some place called Utah’ – though with great skills at making money. The Bijlanis represent the energy and entrepreneurial creativity from which, at least partly, Mumbai originates. When they procure ‘an enormous flat on Malabar Hill’, they move into an area that has long been jealously aristocratic. The other couple in the story, the Boatwallas, represent inherited money and pedigree; they are old Bombay, and their status probably derives from colonial times. Aptly, they are Parsi – ‘Dolly Boatwalla was long and horsy-looking, she looked down an enormous nose’ – and one recalls that Bombay owes much of its development to the great Parsi industrialist J.R.D. Tata. Dolly Boatwalla cannot stand Sheila Bijlani, whom she considers an upstart; a long and diverting feud ensues. A lasting reconciliation is brought about not only because the Bijlanis almost buy out the Boatwallas during a financial crisis, but because the Bijlanis’ son and the Boatwallas’ daughter, Roxanne, fall improbably and delightfully in love. A telling bit-part is played by Ganga, the maidservant, who, like many such itinerant parttime maidservants in Bombay, works in both the Bijlanis’ and the Boatwallas’ houses. But the great force behind the story is of course Sheila Bijlani, with her intelligence and ambition; and this gives us a clue to the title of the story: for ‘Shakti’, in Sanskrit, not only means ‘power’ and ‘strength’, but, in Hindu mythology, ‘feminine power’. If Sheila represents both feminine power and the city of Mumbai, the conjunction is appropriate, given that Mumbai derives from the name of a goddess.

We applaud not Chandra, who we feel has discovered nothing much in this buffed take onKyoonki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, but Chaudhuri, who seems to be able to bring a great many middle-class concerns to bear on a story as stupor-inducing as this one. We are reminded of Helen Vendler's rhapsodic critic, who uses the text "as a base from which to depart." Chaudhuri's departure, in the case of Chandra's text, is more than welcome; it shows us what possibilities exist strictly outside its determinedly everyday realm.

But it is precisely such readings which also tend to mislead Chaudhuri. Of Ishiguro's TheUnconsoled, he says:

we’re not sure what the strange behaviour of Ishiguro’s porter represents.

and

it is a novel without any discernible cultural, social or historical determinants (surely fatal to any novel).

A book, then, cannot create its own history or culture, but has to be determined by the history and/or culture into which it was born. If such a determinant does not apparently exist, the book is a failure. Whether this vision of a novel as a limp marionette of culture is Oxbridge-induced, or whether it emerges from Chaudhuri's own ideological bent, one cannot say; but it is a peculiarly bereft critic who cannot attend, as in Frederic Jameson's injunction, to "the shape of the sentences", nor examine, at the textual level, the world which a novel is trying to conceive, as opposed to allegorically "represent". The process by which characters and settings in a novel are denied their own primacy so as to serve the greater political or historical need of allegory is necessarily an authoritarian one, and must only be adopted after the novel has been exhausted of its primary intentional content. I can call you a weed-smoking hippie only after I have taken into account the fact that you surreptitiously voted for Jeb Bush in '99. (In return, you will no doubt call me a fucking libertarian, at which I will profess ignorance at the very term itself.) Characters are more than just political or historical effluvia. Settings are more than just imperfect representations of actual locations. Themes are not just universal concerns.

All this is inconvenient for Chaudhuri's reading of Mistry, who is appropriated, as Ishiguro, for an unseemly, strangely cultural reading that cannot ring true because of its vapid generalities, its general air of knowingness, its eventually predictable mistakenness at every turn. An "affectionate" recollection of Parsis, misinterpreted by Vakil as a bigoted one, emerges as yet another tar of Chaudhuri's embarrassingly broad brush:

The Parsis of Bombay are pale, sometimes hunched, but always with long noses. They have a posthumous look which is contradicted by an earthiness that makes them use local expletives from a very early age; and a bad temper which one takes to be the result of the incestuous intermarriages of a small community.

Chaudhuri goes on to inform us that Mistry is an expatriate writer, and must be read in the light of his having left his home country:

He is a writer who sings of his land but has no mother tongue with which to sing of it, a kind of displaced but strangely native sensibility that could not have been created outside the unrepeatable and extraordinary Galapagos conditions of the colonial experience. Such a writer must always remain in-between, neither here nor there, alien whether in his own land or in London or in Canada. The post-colonial writer, like the test-tube baby, is a miracle of the 20th century, or, in a darker light, a curious effluent, an unwitting by-product of the great technological, industrial and economic projects of an age.

(Look, I have no mother tongue, look, I was told that English is a foreign language, look, please look.)

Later, he goes on to commit precisely those sentences we regarded in horror at the beginning of this post. But there is no need to be horrified. Chaudhuri is not a racist, merely a PhD. His prejudices are not ill-informed, but rather come from being well read. If he thinks of Parsis in stereotypes, no fear, for that is true of every person (group?) he thinks of. It is the Chaudhuris of this world who will save it from its bewildering olla podrida of specifics, who will save you from having to---God Forbid!---develop the notion of yourself as a complicated, moral being, oriented at an angle from your social world, perhaps fundamentally alone, perhaps fundamentally lost, because look: everyone else is exactly like you.

Philip Roth...

...is just a senile old man writing crap.

An experiment in extreme unreliability

I wrote this in April 2008, just after reading Hunger. I think it shows.

An image, from an early part of my life. Stopped me as I was shaving. Towelled myself off, didn't want to finish up anymore. Anyway the AA meeting is gonna, like, start right now. You don't want to be too late to these things, they think you're not being sincere. Phone rang too, right when I was about to leave. Tina, as usual being her crowdy self. I don't think I like her since she gave her second husband the shove. Today she wanted me to get back early from work so we could both go shopping. Reasonable, but the way she asked me so wasn't. Women. Always trying to get on top.

AA meeting? Didn't go so well. Got there late, partially shaven, badly dressed, collars turned this way and that. Looked drunk too I suppose, and the smell didn't help. Goddamn truck has so much junk in it since last Tuesday and the smells are just everywhere. The woman in charge was like take a seat in her most annoying subwhatever voice and resumed with a stern `Now where were we?', just to make me feel a little extra worse. It's not even like as if I were that late. They'd just barely begun with the Indian guy, the one who sits all by himself in the corner. He was giving us his usual speech about how he hadn't `planned on drinking' but `my friends forced me to', and how `it all began there'. Bullshit. Seriously, these Indians look so dim it seems like no one can ever force them to do anything. They could just sit there all day with their grocery stores and their hunched postures and no one would even know they existed. I would tell Mr. Apu to get out more, first thing.

Finally! My turn. I told them everything, from getting laid off to getting laid. Heh. The squeamish could have stayed at home (or in their grocery stores too, come to think of it). When I was narrating I made sure I looked carefully at everyone in the audience, looked them in the eye. Ms. Uptight up there on the pulpit was also looking at me, I could tell, trying hard not to wince. Though I bet there was a part of her that liked it too. Oh, yeah, she'll be running to her third husband tonight and telling him the `horrible story about this disgusting man at the AA meeting.' And they'll both agree about how bad it was, how bad the world has become. How much better they are than everyone else, and praise the Lord Jesus for that. Yes, Mr and Mrs. Pulpit are gonna get it on tonight. And all thanks to me.

I must have taken at least a half-hour to finish, because she began to look at me as though it was my fault somehow. She's pretty hot, actually, if you ignore her nose. And her irritating voice, sounds like one of our Groundhogs at work on hard clay. Maybe that's an AA thing; be as imposing as possible without sounding like you're coming from a different planet. They'd have told her in boot camp to be firm but nice, something like that. And she, being the subwhatever she is, would have agreed immediately, probably said `Yes sir', too. I bet she has a psychology degree.

`Hey, my name is Gary,' I tell her, at the bruncheon after the speeches.

`Well, hello, Gary. Pleased to meet you.' Her name, as it turns out, is Becky. She told me other things too, like how she hoped the weekly meetings were helping, and how they were in it to help us. Or did she say `help you'?

`So what do you do, Becky?'

`I'm part of the staff at the university. I --,'

`Staff, huh? So you push pieces of paper around?'

Uncertain laugh from Rebecca. `You...could say that, yes. It's mostly --,'

`Do you like it better here? Listening in to other people's lives?'

`Well, actually, yes. It gives me an opportunity to... meet people.'

`So you can psychologically analyze them?'

`Well, kinda... It's more about -- '

I knew it! She had to be one of those shrink types. Who else would want a job like this anyway? It's like one of those schools for the retarded. It's like we're all not mentally, but -- socially retarded. Exactly! It's like being a social retard!

`-- and I've always loved teaching, so --'

`But aren't we all,' pause for effect, `socially retarded?'

`Um...excuse me,' she says. Turns around, begins to walk away.

I follow her. `Do you want to meet up maybe tomorrow? I know this coffee shop near my place.'

Later I meet Mr. Apu.

`Hi, I'm Gary. I don't believe we've met.'

`Oh, hello. I'm --'

There's a mole on his cheek the size of a quarter. Is it a mole? It's definitely soft, and seems to pulse. Like an eggplant. In boiling water.

`--beneficial too?'

`Oh, yes! I really like it here. The people are so nice. And... wanna know something?' I point my forefinger sideways, tick-tocking it.

`Yes?'

`I worked at a grocery store too! A couple of years ago. I learnt a lot there. There was this guy, my manager, his name was Earl? He had this huge thing for Karen, worked down by the Frozen Foods section? And Karen, you know, she's a nice girl, wouldn't respond to Earl, who was a bit of an asshole? And Earl would never give up, you know? One day he gave her flowers that he just snatched from someone's grocery cart. Never even paid for them himself, you know? Earl was always doing things like that.'

`I see,' Mr. Apu says. He seems pleased. I continue.

`Karen finally quit,' Apu's eyebrows are raised. `What, you're surprised? You don't know Earl. He was this ugly guy -- had a huge mole on his face, the size of a quarter. And quite obnoxious too. He would ask people really personal questions, like...like their weight, or their age, or whether they were gay. I know, I know -- you're thinking -- how did this guy become manager? Well, ' here I chuckle, `don't worry. I'm not making this up or anything. It's like this -- sometimes people are just dumb. That's what I've learnt. Especially grocery store managers. So anyway, Karen quit, and it was all downhill from there. Earl kept weirding people out with his interview questions, and we never could hire anyone else worth a damn. I quit too. It wasn't worth it, after that. I mean, you know how it is, right? How can you work at a place where you get no respect? You know?'

He's nodding his head knowingly.

Don't read widely!

A month and a half, and my novel's only two hundred words thicker.

I've been experimenting, actually; not with my novel, which I dare not touch except in the most conscious of moods, but with my reading: The Language Instinct, American Pastoral, Freedom, some terrible New Yorker stories---the much touted twenty under forty, each of whom are more execrable, more obviously sentimental, more cooperatively continent, than the one before---, some terrible novels by twenty-something American soi-disant talents. My unconscious is full of references to Little League baseball, to pot and cocaine addiction at university, to bombs going off in hushed suburbs, to "creative writing", to the importance of word "Freedom", to, in other words, the world of American letters, replete with its preference for the symbolic to the pithy, its vacant valuing of "simplicity" and "brevity" in "expression", its unashamedly trite imaginings of ethnicity. I have nothing left in me, it seems, for what I have always regarded as belonging to the numinous: what McEwan, through one of his belletrists in Atonement, calls the "crystalline present".

From the further side of the square a lane led on to a still bleaker area. The street lamps flickered into pink as I approached, but nothing else responded. The buildings were grandiose, like cinemas gone dark, the lower windows boarded up and plastered with the posters for rock groups and the dud grins of politicians in the previous year's elections. The names of newspapers, printing works, engineering firms, in forward looking Deco script, could still be read above the padlocked entrance grilles. There was a sense that cacophonous all-night business had been done here, and the city, with a certain unflustered malevolence, had chosen its moment, and stilled it, and reasserted its own dead calm. At the street's end was the long vulgar front of a hotel, the Pilgrimage and Commercial, still with its brass entrance rail and the red and blue badges of motoring clubs. I climbed the steps, among the ghost-throng of arrivals, and peered through the splendid glass doors on to a shadowy half-acre of mud and rubble.

(These, of course, are lines from Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star, a novel which has, over my nearly twenty readings of it, reminded me of everything a work of art might aspire to do.)

Returning to a passage like this after weeks and weeks of American literature is difficult; my mind seems in the interim to have developed a new aesthetic, one that seems to like smaller sentences that say very little or nothing, and which promotes factual rather than moral information. My own style has begun, like Hollinghurst's, to look densely alien, like that of a much older person; my efforts at sentential rhythm archaic; my approach laughably detailed. I'm reminded of, and react reflexively against, Zadie Smith's injunction to mix up one's reading when one is writing a novel:

My writing desk is covered in open novels [...] If your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on David Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying about Nabokov and pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.

This is perhaps good advice to writers who think, as she does, that writing should be like "a balanced diet"; but for people like me it is very nearly fatal. As such, American literature is probably good "roughage", but too much of it, and you might not be able to return to your own voice, the one you abandoned a month and a half ago to ill-advisedly become more widely read.

Chimamanda Adichie...

...speaks here of cultural authenticity.

She tells the story of one of her American professors who, on reading a draft of her first novel, remarked that her Africans were not "authentic"; they weren't poor or dying of starvation or under siege from ethnic militants, but, on the contrary, were well-adjusted, middle-class Africans who drove cars and got divorces in middle-age. Adichie deplores this behavior, ascribing it to the poverty of a single conception of a Nigerian or African reality, and is out in her fiction to set the record on Nigeria straight. Nigerians, she may say* through her characters, are more like you than you might think. If they suffer from poverty, they also suffer from iPod tinnitus. If some of their women are bare-breasted in public, others proudly display their cleavage. If some shake fruits from trees, others prefer to shop at WalMart. Implicit to her point of view is the contention that she, a Nigerian woman brought up in Nigeria, is more qualified to speak for her "people"; which is to say, more qualified to invent fictions about them through which she can explore her uniquely Nigerian themes.

This is all bollocks, of course. The current American fictional monolith, fraught as it is with an excess of White American, is obsessed with the question of cultural authenticity; it treats the non-White as a sort of journalist whose material for fictional reportage lies in his repressed past. MFA programs encourage in such writers a mining of lived experience, leading to a number of "stories" which are more-or-less autobiographical and more-or-less thematically transparent. The "best" fictional magazines---The New Yorker, Tin House, Paris Review--- are, almost by definition, ones in which your uniquely cultural background, heralded by your deliciously unusual name (Bezmozgis; Adichie; Scibona; Mueenuddin), will afford you the sort of treatment that would beggar any writer of the previous generation. Your success as an ethnic writer is largely governed by how well you evoke your own cultural past; conversely, if your past is not as culturally interesting as it can be, your fiction is ignored.

This anxiety for authenticity subscribes to the writing-workshop edict: "Write what you know!". It is the anxiety of a Developed Society in which the boundaries between lived and second-hand experience are vanishing. For most middle-class Americans, it is easier today to watch a documentary about Lagos than to walk a mile to the nearest convenience store; easier to understand the plight of slum-dwellers in Lucknow than to attend Mass on Sunday; easier to survey Lowe's employment figures than to drive to its nearest outlet. The writer who values lived experience will be confronted by how little of it abounds in his own life, and will thus be drawn to those of his colleagues who seem to possess more of it; drawn to his ethnic counterparts, who are more authentic simply because more of what is "natural" has been available to them.

Is lived experience more authentic? To ask this question is itself to subvert a great deal of contemporary fiction. There is no doubt that there is a certain frisson about someone's saying "It really happened", or about the jauntily sombre "Based on a true story" labels that underscore today's movie titles. But is there something fundamental that prevents me---an Indian brought up in a very Indian household---from creating a fiction about a Slav zookeeper or a Malagasy mother of seven? Something that renders me unable to understand their cultural concerns as well as I'm supposed to my own? Or, and more importantly, is my origin the final sign of my cultural authority? Is there something that disqualifies a Karaite Jew from writing about my recent out-of-caste wedding and its impact on my orthodox family?

These are important questions, and there is no sign, in its spate of celebrations of ethnic writers in the past few decades, that the American literary firmament has an eye on their fictional explorations; no sign indeed that the people at its helm know what such an exploration might look like, or whether they will not reject an example of it---even a rather deficient one---out of hand. In fact, people like Adichie, who "know" that the only true fiction is one that is about their "people", have begun to make modern literature seem like some benignant inversion of the United Nations, in which the most marginalized, by virtue of their experience, assume the greatest primacy. It's safe to say that no good can come of this.

*Disclaimer: I have read none of Adichie's writing.

And also...

Adultery seems still to be a primary American (sub)urban concern, the kind of thing that can fuel a 576-page tome without seeming to lose any of its originality, as fresh as it was when Updike, in 1960, first made his claim on its uniquely voyeuristic territory.

Audiobooks suck...

... or, at least, they suck in the following ways:

1) You can't make notes and/or underline text,

2) You can't skip the elaborate description of a tea-cosy* midway through the first part of the book, a description which the author has specifically chosen to illustrate the theme, in his novel, of the way individual freedoms are negated by the lack of energy and creativity required to make them worthwhile,

3) Most importantly, you can't circle, in red or black ink, the weightless, crabwise, inordinately long sentence, which begins, as it must, in the ostensible present, in the female protagonist's capitalistically oriented thoughts, and continues, as it only can, into a "brilliant" explication of her consciousness in the third person, an explication such as can only have originated, incongruously enough, from the author's literal-minded private-college-educated meditative mind, and not---as perhaps would have been more appropriate---from the character herself.

PS: Reading the audiobook version of Franzen's Freedom.

*Disclaimer: In Franzen's novel, no such tea-cosy actually exists.

In memoriam

It's hard for me to say anything coherent about Frank Kermode, who passed away a couple of weeks ago. His articles are brilliant, of course, but it is far beyond my ability to evaluate that brilliance, or to place it in context. As Michael Wood, himself a veteran critic, says, ``Kermode is too multifarious a writer to have something as dogged as a `theme' for his critical work,'' which may be one way of admitting an awed critical defeat.

I first came to Kermode through his article, in the London Review of Books, on Zadie Smith's On Beauty. At the time, I was going through a I-hate-Zadie-Smith period---which in retrospect had more to do with my envy of her fame---and Kermode's (nearly) unqualified praise of her irritated me. Surely Kermode wasn't blinded by her as well? Surely he knew better than to say, "I should explain that I delight in all three [of her books] and do not believe that this book is [...] a recovery from a post-White Teeth slump"? Surely he knew how wannabe Jewish, how "creative", Autograph was? Apparently not; he even compared Smith to Forster, her exemplar, in a shocking final sentence: "[Kiki] [the metaphysically enormous black woman about whom the novel revolves] is the measure of Zadie Smith's powers at 30, Forster's age when he published Howard's End."

Novelists such as myself, callow, unpublished, twenty-six, are like adolescents: they preen, they jeer at perceived rivals, they choose their idols with care, preferring the dead over the alive, the aging over the contemporary. Their reaction to an esteemed critic celebrating one of their younger bete-noires is likely to be one of a) A pause, a deep breath, and a resumption of jeering, the object of which is now not only the novelist but also the critic who saw fit to praise him, or b) A frantic inquiry into how seriously they're supposed to take this critic. In my case, I found that Kermode was one of only two literary critics ever to have been knighted (the other, William Empson, is Kermode's Kermode; his Seven Types of Ambiguity the densest, most rewarding piece of literature, non-fictional or otherwise, I have ever tried to read), that he had been writing for the LRB, which I already revered to impossible extents, since its inception, that his works on Shakespeare have become part of the critical canon. I grudgingly told myself to read more of his articles, keeping, at the same time, as open a mind as possible about the Smiths of the world.

In the eighteen months since then, Kermode has tried to show me what it means to be a literary critic. A deft eye, an ability to understand what a novel is trying to do, a willingness to chase that intention down into the depths of the fiction: these are indispensable, to be sure, but in a sense also beside the point. The most important element of all is sympathy, which can only be cultivated, I know now, over decades of suppressing that strident interior voice without stilling it. In his hundreds of reviews, Kermode comes very close to this ideal of criticism.

Here's a link to one of his best articles, a close reading of T.S. Eliot's poetry in relationship to the word "shudder", written a few months ago, when he was ninety and a half.

On the death of an engineer

I haven't written here in a while, but it is not for lack of things to say. Beginning last summer, when I spent three undisturbed months reading reams of literary criticism, stepping out of the apartment for only the occasional burrito at Chipotle; through last fall, when I alternated between writing my novel and writing a nine thousand word report on `Protein flexibility modeling: a hypothesis'; and into the spring, during which the plans for my wedding, the unveiling of its subversive, caste-unconscious details, the numb reception and subsequent prompt rejection of its proposal, and the astounding, hardly credible, mid-April reversal of its primary antagonist's viewpoint, each took place in a chain of events that one might ascribe to the contrived plot-line of an otherwise distinguished `humanist' film; the past year has been eventful. But I'm not one to capitalize on the contingent nature of my existence (as some who know me might already know); I don't number among those who think that writing about one's experiences, as interesting as these may prove to be, could somehow serve to illuminate one's `self'. The self, alas, does not incandesce so easily; it is more like the gleam in a corner of one's vision that disappears when gazed at directly, than like some cave into which one can stroll with nothing but a lantern, held high, and a hesitant song on the lips.

Last Sunday, an IIT alumnus, Mahesh Mahadevan, committed suicide. I did not know Mahesh, though I may have known of him; I remember several of my IIT friends referring to a certain Dog, which seems to have been Mahesh's concise IIT moniker. But there was a bleak horror in reading of the circumstances that surrounded his death. No one in his friends circle was aware of any reigning unhappiness; he had none of the visitations of denial that plague the average Indian graduate student in America, lost, unhappy, far from home, a stranger to sex and love. No, he seemed content enough, in a recognizable, post-IIT way, with the vague pride of the dilettante that is the unique consolation of every socially successful IIT graduate: he was, by turns, Dumb Charades and quizzing champ, habitual punster, promising actor, professional joker, master of psychological analysis, linguistic pedant, sartorial genius, rap talent, skateboarder, Blackadder aficionado, irrepressible raconteur, and (of course) brilliant student. There was no doubt about his eventual success in whatever he chose to do. The news of his suicide, by plastic-bag-induced asphyxiation, a few hours before (or after?) his twenty-fourth birthday, came as an understandable shock to everyone. Why did he do it? A fund, to help transfer his remains to India, was instituted immediately; the page reveals, if nothing else, the sheer strength of a typical IITan's social network. A few blogposts were written, to which a few tens of commenters responded. There has been a silence, too, from people who have on the whole more to feel than to say; this is the silence that the majority of his friends, scattered as they now are among the continents, might still maintain when they come to confront the fact of his death. For some, it may be the politic silence such as that encountered at a funeral; for others it is of course the more personal silence of true, postponed grief. People in between may find themselves considering a third kind of silence, one whose breaking would out all kinds of horrific truths, voyeuristic truths, hateful truths, truths that are finally too individual to reveal.

I have thought of suicide in the past. What serious writer has not? In a culture increasingly given over to an overall numbness of feeling, the taking of one's life---or at least its serious, feeling consideration---begins to feel almost a necessary part of one's everyday. It has little to do with unhappiness; in fact, I could not be happier than I have been in the past few years. One suspects, instead, that suicide---in the abstract, at least----is a kind of referee to whom we can appeal, and in so doing feel better about ourselves. At least things are not so bad, we can say, that we have to end it all. It is at this moment that the devilish ``Or are they?'' might assert itself, timidly at first, like an arrogant schoolteacher deliberately lowering her tone so as to spite her noisy class. The ghastly but somehow romantic details of suicide come into focus---the rope, the knife, the failed sanguinary attempt by the bathtub---and even the most stoic of us are cowed. Of course we didn't mean *suicide*. For a writer, this process must go a few steps further, towards the imagining of a person who may be in such a despairing position, but the more one writes (and reads), the more one realizes that suicide is a duff, shiftless literary subject, with hardly a feature to recommend it to anyone below the calibre of a Graham Greene. There is very little that can be said about suicide, at least in literary terms, that has not already been said; it has the same trodden-upon quality as adultery, that other great suburban affliction. What squeezes, from the common man, a great deal of emotion, may nevertheless be unsuited for the purposes of art. Drama may well become melodrama.

But suicide also has an original appeal, one that stretches beyond its nebulous artistic merits. Recently a friend was telling me how, as a child, on train journeys, she would stand at the the perpetually open door of her bogie and, hypnotized by the immediacy of the ground moving past her, think of jumping off; only the tiniest of internal voices prevented her from actually taking the step. Or, consider this story, told to me by one of my IIT friends: There was once a Tambram surgeon, a man whose provenance, from a wealthy and educated family, seemed in retrospect to guarantee the sort of success that he was eventually to experience: a beautiful wife, doting children, a flourishing practice, a worshipful community of patients. He was about to buy, with his massive inheritance, the hospital at which he worked; he spoke of this takeover to his wife every evening, before bedtime, with an air of reverence. One evening, a few weeks before the momentous purchase, he finds himself yearning for the cool air and solitude of the nearby beach. He drives there, anxious not to miss the sunset, but is disappointed to see that it is high tide, and he can go no further than a few feet into the rinse. He moves forward anyway, captivated by the sun in the horizon, feeling the cold, swirling water rising higher and higher, to his knees, his waist, his chin. He takes one last, deep breath, and goes under.

Seen this way, suicide comes less to seem the last recourse of the depressed or disaffected. Neither the girl watching the landscape rush past beneath her feet, nor the man too much at peace with himself to balk at being taken over by water, could be said, in any sense, to be unhappy. One was curious, the other simply unprotesting. Both had much to live for, and, if interrupted from their reveries, both would have snapped back into shocked awareness. To each the thought of suicide, in all its cultural glitter, did not intercede in what was an affecting personal experience; they were, in some primal sense, unconscious of the consequences of their actions. It was as though each moment gently, incontestably, led them on to the next one, until they reached a point from which jumping off, or drowning, seemed not only reasonable but inevitable. They were victims of the coercive present, people who had spent all their lives being who they were, characters with hopes and motivations, bearing no more or less than the average person's crosses, but whose journey into a particular point in time had proven irrevocable. Their deaths---one real, the other imagined---were not so much the culmination of a steady accumulation of despair as the result of a single, heedless idea, executed with abandon.

Mahesh's family and friends, in the wake of his suicide, might ask themselves: did we then know him so little? Was he frustrated by something in his life, maybe a girl? Who was she? Was it something else, his studies? (But he was doing so well.) Why didn't he tell us? These terrible questions carry with them the equally terrible implication that Mahesh was cordoned off even from those who were the closest to him; a secret loner, with a private life that remained wholly disjoint from the public. Mahesh's last blog post, written just before the incident, encourages such conjecture; a story can be built around it. It was a girl after all, someone he had known for years, and to whom he sprung the question, only to find out that she was already committed. Devastated by the rejection, coming as it did just before his birthday, and having no one to talk to, he took the drastic final step.

In our bereavement, we can excuse ourselves the air of compromise in such explanations, which involve an effect by which successive conclusions are reached on the basis of head-nodding at something culturally familiar but otherwise questionable. Would a twenty-four year old graduate student, however sexually and emotionally lonely, be led to suicide at a girl's rejecting him? Wouldn't such an event, to most well-adjusted young men, lead instead to a doleful few days spent in wistful and self-conscious mediation, with only the rarest of images of self-pity leading to thoughts such as ''what if I were dead? That'd show her''? Maybe he wasn't a well-adjusted man, then. No, no, that can't be, maybe there was some foul play. We cannot ask ourselves these questions because, as pertinent as they are, they do not participate in our grief. They are more like the equable private detective at the scene of the crime, glaring at the `facts' presented to him in suspicion, than like the uncle who silently unhooks the phone after the first condoling phone calls. By expressing doubt at what happened, and how it happened, they defer acceptance of the fact of the terrible happening, and, inexcusably, proffer the existence of an alternative world in which grief is indefinitely suspended in the service of a putatively greater, logical purpose. It is no wonder that the funding page warns us: ``communications that seek to investigate the ``case" will be summarily rejected. Please do not waste our time.'' The value of an investigator at such a difficult time is dubious.

At the heart of all questions---raised or left alone---that follow unexplained suicides is: did we know him at all? What does it even mean to know someone? There is a hint of a shimmering self, unknown and perhaps unknowable, that lies just beyond the grasp of things that can be spoken of. We may have seen him every day for the past three years, but in some important way he was not only distant, but schooled in concealing that distance; we thought we knew him better than we actually did. If only he had shown himself! It would have taken only an instant of admission, an incongruous sigh or a shake of the head. We would then have crowded around him, and his secret, terrible by virtue of its concealment, would have begun to seem harmless, would have disappeared in the bright light of our sympathy. We may or may not have succeeded in bringing him out of his misery, but at least he wouldn't have gone as far as he did. Surely not.

Thoughts like these are a way in which the mind, grieving as it is, prods itself into a sensitive examination of its own workings. Questions about another are bound in the end to questions about one's own self; an (im)pertinent look at the facts is supplanted by an anguished survey of the internal. We become emotional investigators, hunched and driven on by questions whose answers must resonate rather than explicate. We learn to wait in silence... the gleam caught in a corner of the eye grows brighter, not through external decree, but by its own agency.