Compassion, Tolerance, Book Reviews, Weirdness

Not quite what I thought I would be writing this morning. The weekend has been pretty much a bust. Friday, I did accomplish what I set out to do - mostly - but it cost me much in pain and weariness. Yesterday, I was as angry as I have been in ages, and that was all due to poor communications (Why when do I tell people to call, they read this as a reason to text? Why, when asking if a text has been received, do you not call when there is no response). I only calmed down when I got out of the car and spent time buying groceries. It does not solve my problem of lost time. Even this morning, I woke too early and find myself, again, disappointed, by a CC failing to live up to her promises. Still, compassion came to the forefront of my mind while reading book reviews from The Guardian. Oh, the oddities of our minds!

 Do we really need more male novelists? (The Guardian)

‘Where have all the literary blokes gone?” is a question that has popped up in bookish discussions and op-eds from time to time in recent years. Who are this generation’s hotshot young male novelists, the modern incarnations of the Amis/McEwan/Rushdie crew of the 80s?

The question flared again this week as writer Jude Cook launched a new press, Conduit Books, which plans to focus, at least initially, on publishing male authors.

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Another female agent said that class may be a “bigger issue than gender when it comes to what’s being published”. Lacking racial representation also continues to be a problem: just one person of colour appeared on each of the Top 10 fiction and nonfiction hardback bestseller lists last week, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for fiction and Roxie Nafousi for nonfiction

Luke Brown, the author of My Biggest Lie and Theft, said he knows “so many working-class men from my generation who got into reading fiction through Irvine Welsh, for example, because it spoke to a world they recognised”.

Welsh himself says that “men need to start reading before they start writing. My take is that men are becoming stupider because they over-rely on the internet and women are becoming smarter because they read more books.”

And speaking of male novelists, Edward St Aubyn is back. Another who I have read much of and wish to read: Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn review – troubled minds and family mysteries (The Guardian)

Edward St Aubyn’s previous novel, 2021’s Double Blind, was something of a challenge even for his devotees. Leaving aside the usual gripe that he is never quite as compelling without the shield of his authorial alter ego Patrick Melrose, the obsessive nature of the book’s inquiry into bioethics, narcosis, psychotherapy, oncology, venture capitalism and inheritance made too heady a cocktail to be more than sipped, a few pages at a time. I struggled with it until the very last scene, a charity bash where a schizophrenic young man takes his first terrified steps in employment as a waiter and happens upon a woman who, unknown to both, is intimately related to him. Their chance encounter was intensely moving and tautly suspenseful – you felt an immediate longing to know what would befall them.

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From suicide observation room to cutting-edge art installation, Parallel Lines plots quite the journey. Can a young man be saved from the abyss of self-extinction and then face the disconcerting appearance of a family he never knew he had? When brother and sister visit Kenwood House in north London and look at a Rembrandt self-portrait, Olivia observes that the painter’s gaze is “vulnerable but strong”, which seems to encapsulate this novel’s philosophical vision. In a lesser writer the temptations of sentimentality would get the upper hand, but St Aubyn is clear-sighted and humane on the basic requirement of life: “Compassion is just love in the face of suffering and love does not run out with use – it grows stronger.”

Compassion... When I was depressed, actively depressed, I am not so sure if I thought of compassion. Or that I had too much. From what I have read of St Aubyn, his characters make compassion, even likeability, possible. With all the terrible things humans do to one another, how do we continue to live? Ambition to do good falters and becomes a belief that no good can be had. That living makes one complicit in all the ugliness. And if no good exists, if success is mired in corruption, then why not join in the ugliness? Unfortunately, one's escape does not succeed, life does go on, and one needs a way to survive. The first step for me was to realize that I needed to look at my own life and the decisions I had come to about life, the universe, and all that stuff. My first idea was that whenever I had a made an important choice in my life, I had made the wrong choice. The second idea was to do opposite what I would have done. One item was compassion without any chance of affecting what wrongs ignited my sense of compassion. My solution has been to not give up on compassion, but to know the limits of my responsibilities and my powers. There is nothing I can do about the genocide in Sudan; there is nothing I can do what Putin wants done to Ukraine. That is nothing except to stand against those things; not to allow them to pass, as if I favor the evil things we do to one another. There is no guilt in acknowledging the limits of one's power to effect change, to make a better world; the guilt lies with standing with those who could effect a positive change and do not. An even greater guilt is not to extend compassion to those less fortunate than ourselves who we meet every day, those caught in more quotidian struggles than in Darfur. We have to start at the basics like building a brick house, knowing it may be finished, we can only keep adding bricks without hope of seeing the house. This is what I have learned from the Orthodox Christian writers.

And we need compassion to let other people live their lives as their consciences demand. I do understand the impetus some feel to be trans, but I understand the need for people to feel human. It is the anti-trans people who bother me: they wish to impose their views of how people should live on those whose consciences dictate otherwise. That is a fascist mindset. People are weird, democratic thinking means we need to let each other be weird - up to the point of harming others. I think Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata review – a future without sex (The Guardian) nails this point.

In Murata’s fiction, ordinary activities – drinking tea, wearing clothes, making love – seem very strange. Reading Vanishing World, I felt the profound oddness of the heterosexual family unit, with its legal, sexual and child-rearing rituals. Dissatisfied with their domestic arrangement, Amane and her husband are seduced by the promise of the “Paradise-Eden System” set up in a place called “Experiment City”, where sex does not exist, both men and women are artificially inseminated, and parenthood is a collective responsibility. But the reality of Paradise-Eden freaks Amane out. She is unsettled by the identical outfits, haircuts and smiles of the children raised in the Centre, doted on “as though they were pets”.

Murata dispenses with conventional world-building and incidental detail, focusing on the points where character and society come into conflict. Her writing is compulsive, and she has an uncanny gift for intimate observations that get under the skin. It doesn’t matter that I can’t tell you how Experiment City looks and feels; I won’t forget the description of Amane’s husband’s pregnant belly as a distended “testicle” with the outline of a baby inside. At the same time, there is something strangely reassuring about the way this fiction boils down the bewilderingly complex prohibitions and obligations of ordinary social life to clear choices between resistance and assimilation.

Maybe even more so, is Sister Europe by Nell Zink review – all the ideas Trump deems most dangerous (The Guardian). Certainly, the review makes the novel sound like more than its headline.

Over the course of the evening, Zink’s characters vocalise their desires, fears and prejudices. Nothing, including narrating from the consciousness of an economically privileged 15-year-old trans girl who tries her hand at streetwalking, is off limits. The most working-class character in the book is an Israel-loving antisemitic German cop who takes bribes from pimps but also delivers an exacting critique of the decriminalisation of prostitution under the Social Democratic-Green German government in 2002.

In this way, Zink endows each of her characters with both moral high grounds and glaring blind spots. In Sister Europe, as in life, who is the oppressed and who is the oppressor is not fixed. The ever-shifting flow of social and sexual power between the characters is nerve-racking and tantalising: there are no saints and no demons.

Neither saint nor demon, that is humanity. This is why we need tolerance of our weirdness, and can give no quarter to intolerance.

Tubi has the movie Hostiles. It is making some of the same points, I am making here.

Jimi Hendrix has a few interesting things to say about tolerance.

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