Reading Book Reviews and Getting Ideas For All My Troubles

 Rachel Cusk intrigues me, for all I think she is not my cup of tea. When I started working on fiction again, I realized there was more to the novel than what I had realized when I was young (yeah, I was pretty dim for all of having read The Sound and The Fury, The Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, Raintree County and Slaughterhouse Five before I graduated high school; only Faulkner and Vonnegut had been required by a class.) Cusk seems to be the darling of the cutting edge. So, I read her reviews and think I should read her and yet I am not sure if I am too old, too set on what I want to say for her to teach me anything.

Parade by Rachel Cusk review – cold visions of chaos

In the last section, the narrative “I” multiplies to “we”, in vigil at their mother’s deathbed. This “we” could be a mad and fractured self, it could be inclusive, universal – it could be both. The narrator notes that people expect “a storyteller to demonstrate his mastery and control by resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality, not deepening it”. This deepening of chaos is Cusk’s artistic project here, and she delivers it coldly. No doubt she’s pausing now to observe our pain.

Not that  A scream heard behind the glass: The logical terminus of Rachel Cusk’s journey in selfhood by Nat Segnit does not reinforce my doubts.

And yet the power of Parade resides less in these gestures at affectlessness than in their incomplete realization, in the tension between the efforts by the authorial voice to rid itself of affect and its inability (or reluctance) to do so. At its best, the prose has a quality of muted intensity to it, like a scream heard behind glass. Much as the recently bereaved, plural narrator of the closing chapter persists in confessing to their indifference – “at the news of her death we felt nothing, and understood that to have felt nothing was the greatest tragedy that could have befallen us, for its effect on us could only be to reveal greater depths and breadths of non-feeling” – it is a peculiarly emotive indifference. The “we” has recognized the impossibility of reconciliation now the unloving parent is dead. “What we were grieving was the fact that nothing had changed or been resolved, and that there was no longer the chance to resolve it. We were full of a dark knowledge that had briefly surfaced and over which the waters of time were closing again.” There is a sense in these pages of the novel finally confronting itself, or its real stakes: an acknowledgement of depersonalization or unfeeling rendered, despite itself, with great feeling.

Kurt Vonnegut got me to read Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and I think it was a good idea. Not that I have anything like his experiences, but he does not hide the ugliness of life with false pieties. That he was a reprehensible person is a drawback. ”The Moral Delusions of Patriotism: On Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “War” By Charlie Taylor explains the good and the bad in a review of a new book by Céline, and maybe this paragraph will explain why Céline should be read:

In one passage, as he is being moved by train to a military hospital, the corpses of Ferdinand’s comrades materialize around him, and he finds himself speaking to them. But “their eyes were closed. They were reproaching me. In short they’d come to keep watch over me,” he speculates. “They said nothing at first, and finally it was Cambelech, who’d gone behind me, who spoke. I wasn’t expecting him: his face was all split in two, his lower jaw was hanging in disgusting shreds.” Using his hands to make his mouth work, Cambelech tells Ferdinand, “We’re not happy, no we’re not, that’s not the kind of story we need.”

I read Kevin Barry's Night Boat to Tangier and thought this was a guy to watch. He has a new book and here is a review, The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry review – fast and loose on the frontiers of America.

Tom and Polly hatch a plan involving arson, theft of a chunk of cash, and an escape out west, and the main action of the novel is under way. And as the lines quoted here suggest, this is a book where everything springs alive from the page, so you need to take it slowly. Doing so gives the short atmospheric scenes time to marinate in the mind and adds an epic feel despite the novel’s brevity; the style, peppered with run-on sentences and hardly any commas, has a dash of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis to it.

***

But Barry doesn’t write according to the rules. The fun of the romp recedes and the closing chapters offer a different, satisfying register in a minor key, a break from the pace but with new depth. It’s a risk, but that is what Barry’s writing is all about, after all. He has made it pay off before, and he does it again here. 

Risk. That appeals to me, even in my new reformed life. The differences between 2009 and 2024 are many, but a big one is now I do not mind taking risks that will create rather than be self-indulgent self-destructiveness.

I close with another bit of controversy, James Campbell's Best Western? A controversial novel of the American frontier. 

To begin with the assertion that Angle of Repose is a great novel of the American frontier is to go looking for trouble. Wallace Stegner’s story, set largely on the last unsettled territories of the West, was first published in 1971. It moves forwards by way of two parallel narratives, one taking place around the time of the novel’s composition, the other a century earlier – not unlike the plan John Fowles devised for The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1969.

I read Angle of Repose while in prison, before learning of the controversy about plagiarism, and I would read it again.

sch 6/17