Yeah, sorry about the lack of bloggage of either the thinking or linking type. There is no huge pressing reason. A few little ones. I’m reading a lot more these days – back up to my old rate of 3 or 4 books a week. I’m thinking about those books and thinking about fiction, trying to be more meditative about the whole thing. I wrote 2400 words in two days last week, and in a previous incarnation (as in, about 6 months ago), I would have been ready to dust my hands and move on to the next chunk, but now I’m thinking differently, and am trying to move more slowly. Part of the previous rush was that, well, I had two other books to write in the spring, and those kinds of deadlines aren’t presently hanging over me. So no excuse except lack of talent and will, and if I make myself take more time this time, we’ll see if I have any excuse at all.
So let’s see what’s up. Start with the most recent book read:
The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud was on a number of “best of” lists in 2006, including the NYTimes. It was glowingly, lovingly, rapshodically reviewed everywhere……except by Amazon’s reader reviewers. Oh, there are a number of 5- and 4-star reviews at the book’s page, but a surprising number of 1- and 2-star reviews that were strong and definite. The one-star reviews all tend to the “it’s got big words!” and “it’s got long sentences!” variety, but the two and even three-star reviews are interesting and telling for the most part. It was that great divergence in opinion that got me interested enough in reading the book recently, long after a mild spate of interest when it came out that was soon forgotten under the weight of other things.
I was simply intrigued by the distance between the great reviews in the literary press, as well as various awards and nominations, and the reaction by, well, ordinary readers.
The book, set in 2001, is about a small set of friends, all graduated from Brown, who find themselves at 30 in various states of personal and professional disorder. Danielle is a maker of television documentaries, recently broken up with her boyfriend. Julius is a gay writer/reviewer, mostly for the Village Voice, and Marina is unemployed, but is supposedly occupied by a book she had contracted to write years earlier, a book about the cultural resonance of children’s clothing trends.
Going beyond these three, the major players are part of Marina’s family: her mother, Annabel, a public-interest lawyer, and her father, Murray Thwaite, a legendary liberal pundit, champion of all sorts of causes from the 60’s on. Also in the mix is a young cousin, Bootie, a college dropout of 19, determined to be self-taught, who shows up in New York City from his home in Watertown, asking to be taken in by the Thwaites as he finds his footing.
I’m not going to go into plot details, but suffice it to say that the novel’s title is derived from Marina’s book title, The Emperor’s Children Have No Clothes, and it (the novel) is essentially about the ties between parents and children, the directionlessness of the privileged, everyone’s self-deception, and, well, 9/11.
Boy, did it have big words! And the sentences! They were so long!
Oh, stop. Buy a dictionary.
I didn’t like it very much, from any perspective. Some readers complained that the characters were all so gosh-darned unlikeable, but that didn’t bother me. Literature is filled with unlikeable characters. In fact, in contemplating my favorite writers, I don’t remember many likeable characters at all. I mean, think “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Who do you like better, the Misfit or the Grandmother?
No, the problem was purely stylistic, and given that the book was long, that’s a huge problem. Messud has little wit or humor, everything is explained in great detail that serves no greater purpose, really, and the great majority of the book is written from the perspective of the interior lives of the characters. Not necessarily interior monologues (although there are a couple of these), but vast descriptive paragraphs and series of pages in which the characters ponder the past, present and the future, exchange a few words, and then get back to pondering and remembering and sorting things out in the privacy of their own heads.
In addition, the interiority was written in such an elevated fashion that it all evolved into something untethered from the way real people think. Here’s an example.
The character, Danielle is being driven to a train station by Julius’ boyfriend the morning after Marina’s wedding, and she is contrasting college life and the present (in her head, of course.)
“Danielle reflected that growing up, coupling, was a process of growing away from mirth, as if, like an amphibian, one ceased to breathe int he same way: laughter, once vital sustenance, protean relief and all that made isolationand struggle and fear bearable, was replaced by the stolid matter of stability: nominally content, resigned and unafraid,one grew to fear jokes and their capacity to unsettle. Where there had been laughter, there came a cold breeze.”
Now, I don’t question the observation, which I think is true, or the fact that she would be thinking along these lines as she’s driven to the train station by the dour fellow after a rather strained affair. But what I can’t get my head around is the language. I keep thinking, “Who, even brainy Brown grads, would be idly thinking in the car, the morning after her best friend’s wedding, of laughter as once ‘protean relief?'” I mean, I know I’m only a humble UT and Vandy grad, but come on.
It has prompted a great deal of thinking on my part, about a continual problem in my own efforts here, the issue of reality and artistry. Literature is more than a crude representation of reality, certainly, but when does the attempt to communicate the more and the greater through metaphor and a kind of knitting together the strands that we all know are out there but can’t articulate, simply cross over into overwritten, pompous exhibitionism?
It’s a puzzle.
The dependence on interior discourse also, as one Amazon reviewer pointed out, is rather lazy, and I think that is why I found this book ultimately unsatisfying. Aside from other problems – the central conflicts, real and potential, all fell flat – the more these characters’ inner lives revealed themselves to me, the less I felt I knew them. It’s not as simple as “Show, don’t tell,” but it’s close. It’s the difference between two people in a relationship each standing before you, individually explaining how they feel about each other and why and the way this all came about and what they hope for it and what their doubts are and simply watching these same to people talk, react to each other and against each other without explaining themselves. Which is more interesting and ultimately engaging?
So, no I wouldn’t recommend the book. Oh, not one star, since big words are not an issue for me, and there are points of interest and good writing, and you know, at times it was absorbing. Between two and three, I’d say. The uniformly high press reviews, though, I can’t explain, except for New York literati appreciating seeing their world memorialized on paper, no matter how dully. Or maybe they, you know, liked the book. Which is possible! Or the fact that Claire Messud is married to James Wood. Lord knows, James Wood (whom I always enjoy) is no Dale Peck, who wants to be on his bad side if one can help it?
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