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farfrombrooklyn · 4 months ago

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Reader's Log, May-June-July, 2024

After paying a small fortune to plant a bamboo border around our new garden in Southern California, I was disturbed to see that several of the plants had turned spindly and yellow. The owner of the nursery came to see them and diagnosed the issue as “transplant stress,” which he is now treating with nutrients and extra water.

I, meanwhile, am suffering from my own case of transplant stress, though I doubt that a dose of vitamins and minerals is going to do me much good.

Anyway, the stressors of moving have severely cut back my reading, though I don’t know why that should be. Mainly, the distractions of relocation seem to have affected my ability to concentrate and, even more so, my ability to stick with a book that isn’t grabbing me. I had pledged to try to finish every book I started this year, and did a pretty good job of it from January to April, but in May, in California, and in June and even now, in July, I find that my patience for fiction is limited, and books that I might have persevered with just a few months ago are now being discarded after 100 or so pages: Among the books that I’ve ditched without finishing, or simply skimmed through after reading the first quarter or half, are:

A Grain of Wheat, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, by James Hannaham

Hangman, by Maya Binyam

Under the Bright Lights, by Daniel Woodrell

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dungy

Man or Mango by Lucy Ellmann

And, last but not least, for at least the third time, I tried my hand at “My Brilliant Friend,” the Elena Ferrante novel that the New York Times recently dubbed the best novel of the 21st Century so far. And for at least the third time, I pitched the book aside without finishing it.

* * * *

But let’s set aside those books for the moment and consider two that I did finish, Soul by Andre Platanov and Collected Stories by Saul Bellow.

Traveling through the southwestern desert en route to Los Angeles in April brought to mind Bellow’s great story, “Leaving the Yellow House,” which I hadn’t read in at least 20 years, so once I was in California I picked up a copy of “Collected Stories.”

I started in the middle of the volume, with the story that had sparked my desire to re-read it: “Leaving the Yellow House.” It had been so long since I had read it that I didn’t recall much other than the general setup: A hard-living, difficult old woman struggles to remain, independent, in her ramshackle home in the desert.

It’s a deeply unusual story for Bellow, set not in a cosmopolitan metropolis but deep in the desert, with nary a Jew in sight, nor any stentorian academics riffing on sociology or philosophy or economics or what have you. It’s a searingly brilliant portrait of an old woman clinging to what’s left of her life in a remote, nearly worthless house that she inherited from a friend, a car that she can only periodically drive, and a bad drinking habit that is making her life even harder than it has to be.

Hattie, a cantankerous old woman with bottles stashed around her tumbledown house, is a brilliant creation, near death but full of life, crafty but incompetent, selfish but somehow not repellent.

I think the most unusual thing about this tale is the trouble that Bellow took to create the world of the story, a desert community with just a handful of “white people.” (Hey, it’s Bellow and it was written in the 1960s, so there’s bound to be some outdated stuff.) We get brief thumbnails of Hattie’s few neighbors, learn how they get by in the desert (dude ranchers, retirees, handymen) and how they interact with each other. I can’t think of another Bellow work, either short story or novel, that commits to so much world-building.

Like most Bellow, nothing much happens in “Leaving the Yellow House,” but Hattie’s various mishaps and missteps give it a sense of action, and her desperation to cling to life, to her house, to the desert, invest the story with tension.

Another aspect of the story that is decidedly not typical for Bellow is that it ends with a satisfying zing. Bellow, who is mainly interested in ideas, in language, in riffs, doesn’t give much of a damn for plot or event, which translates, often, into narratively indistinct endings that neither tie up loose ends nor signal some turn of events. Instead, the stories proceed something like a car barreling down the highway: You watch it approach; the engine whines louder and louder; and then—zzeeeeeoooooowwww—the car goes by. And that’s it!

Anyway, “Leaving the Yellow House” was the story I wanted to read most when I picked up the collection. I re-read it and I loved it. It is truly a masterpiece.

Other stories that I remembered loving on previous reads also stood up well: in particular “A Silver Dish,” which I first read in one of those “Best Stories of the Year” collections that were practically ubiquitous back in the 1980s, and “Him With His Foot in His Mouth.” The late novellas were a mixed bag — brilliantly written and observed, spiked with humor and zany characters, but often blobby and prone to endless digression.

An oddity of this collection, “Collected Stories,” is that it not complete, not by a long shot, which is somewhat frustrating, given Bellow’s relatively meager output of stories. In his lifetime he published only two collections, “Mosby’s Memoirs” and “Him With His Foot in His Mouth.” This volume, presumably curated by Bellow himself — it appeared several years before his death, and features a dedication from him to his editor at Penguin, Beena Kamlani — is essentially an amalgamation of those two collections, less two stories from “Mosby’s Memoirs.” Why? I’ll need to go out and find a copy of the original collection to see if I can tease out the reason. The collection also omits a handful of uncollected stories that appeared in the 1940s and 1950s. At this point, some twenty years after Bellow’s death, it is frustrating not to have the full shelf. I understand, of course, the desire of a writer to cull his output, especially early work. Still, a part of me wants it complete.

As a counterbalance to the omitted early work, Bellow did include “By the St. Lawrence,” his last published work of fiction (it appeared in Esquire in 1995, when he was 80 years old). A wordy, gray, digressive, mournful memory piece, “By the St. Lawrence” reads like an epitaph for an imagined alter ego, Robert Rexler. The story (not that there is any story, really) follows Rexler, a public intellectual of great repute, on a visit to his birthplace in Quebec, essentially a birth in reverse, a journey toward death. “He saw death as a magnetic field that every living thing must enter. He was ready for it.” On the trip, he recalls aspects of his childhood, the family members dead and gone, and after a brief visit to his childhood neighborhood, he prepares to resume his life, but without any appetite for it — he ceases reminiscing and turns his mind to a lecture that he is scheduled to deliver, although he has no interest in actually giving his talk. That part of his life — all of his life, essentially — is over.

Tellingly, Bellow positioned “By the St. Lawrence” at the head of the collection, essentially reminding the reader that he is not an American, never mind the thrilling first lines of “Augie March,” his breakthrough blockbuster: “I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.”

In “By the St. Lawrence,” we get a very different (fictional) origin story, much closer to the arc of Bellow’s life: “Because New York has been his base for half a century, it is assumed that [Rexler] comes from the East Side or Brooklyn. In fact he is a Canadian, born in Lachine, Quebec, an unlikely birthplace for a historian who has written so much about cosmopolitan Berlin, about nihilism, decadence, Marxism, national socialism…

Of course, Bellow is a Chicago guy, not New York, but the rest of that description fits pretty neatly. And like Rexler, Bellow is the son of Jewish immigrants.

Jewishness, American Jewishness, is the beating heart of Bellow’s writing, the cadence of his sentences, the base note of his characters’ complex overtones. And yet there is little or no Judaism, per se. Bellow was more interested in the ways Jews in America dealt with the world they had escaped to, how they clung to one another but also how they feuded. There is all kinds of scheming and skullduggery in Bellow’s world: small-time operators looking to score, hard-nosed chiselers pressing their advantage, brothers and sisters and cousins scrapping to make a living, or sometimes getting rich. Generally the feistiest, toughest operators, the ones who do get rich, don’t really betray their families and friends; it’s just that the families can’t quite bring themselves to trust someone who has managed to rise above them. Even fathers, as in “A Silver Dish,” sometimes take advantage of sons, if tough times require. Bellow came of age in the Depression. Fear of hunger, poverty and failure is a haunting force for many of his characters.

Martin Amis called this collection Bellow’s greatest work, and I can understand why he said so. It’s so lively and energetic, so charmingly written, so learned, so heartfelt, so very much about the world that we now think of as Bellow’s — those striving American Jews seeking success but also enlightenment and even transcendence of their flawed humanity.

In some ways, though, the collected stories are also a bit of a showcase for Bellow’s weaknesses: the plotlessness, the digressions, the endless discussions of history and economics and sociology, conversations that have zero narrative value and, at least as far as I know, very little substantive import, by which I mean, Saul Bellow never fundamentally contributed to the world’s understanding or interpretation of, say, Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire,” however learnedly his characters may speak about it. I think I’m more accepting of these kinds of digressions if they are part of a larger whole, i.e. a novel, but in a story they tend to feel like wasted space. There is also the lingering issue of Bellow’s sometimes tiresome portrayal of women, although it’s probably fair to say he was merely a man of his time, however much of a genius he was.

But in all this collection is a great work by a great writer, possibly America’s greatest ever, though he is going out of style.

* * *

Another book that I finished despite my transplant stress was “Soul,” by Andrey Platanov, a perplexing collection of stories written in the era of Soviet social realism. The title story is more novella or even novel than story, and it is as powerful (at least in parts) as it is odd. “Soul” is the story of Nazar Chagataev, a child born into unspeakable poverty in Central Asia, along the edges of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, a member of the dwindling Dzhan tribe. (Dzhan translates as “soul,” hence the title.) So poor is Chagataev that as a boy his mother essentially kicks him out of the house because she can no longer feed him — although her rejection of him is presented, in a cockeyed way, as a loving gesture: “Off you go, Nazar,” she says, as if shooing him out the door to play. Her only words of advice are to avoid the temptations of local bazaars and travel as far as he possibly can — until he only sees strangers. Somehow, he manages to do just that, ending up as student at a college in Moscow, studying economics, a thousand miles or more from his birthplace.

Upon graduation, Chagataev is dispatched back to the land of his birth, his assignment being to “make happiness in the hellish pit” of his childhood region. It’s such an absurd role that the reader (me!) Wonders if perhaps “Soul” is meant as satire. Chagataev has no skills or knowledge that would allow him to help his people, but he takes his assignment seriously, and he suffers unspeakable horrors in the desert as he gathers the last remaining fragments of his “tribe” and attempts to re-establish their township despite drought and poverty. No one else (in officialdom) offers any help; it’s just Chagataev earnestly stumbling along in the desert. He and his followers suffer from thirst and hunger so extreme that, time and again, animals are sacrificed mainly for the chance to drink their blood. Here is a decent example of the world that Chagataev has returned to: “Some of the Dzhan had gone their separate ways, living on their own so as to avoid the pain of another’s hunger when there was no food and so there would be no need to weep when someone close to them died.” The suffering of these people is described in horrifying detail; it’s pretty much the most complete portrait of hopeless poverty I’ve ever read, although it’s also mystifying, as there are sometimes interactions with other nearby people/peoples who are not, apparently, getting by on animal blood, nor chewing moist sand to slake their thirst. In other words, the suffering they experience seems imposed upon them, that is, it is a result of, in essence, the machinations and mismanagement of the Soviet regime.

I don’t know enough about life in Central Asia under Stalin, but I assume there are some parallels to the ravages visited on Ukraine in 1930s, when that country’s rich farmlands were confiscated under collectivization, which led to mass starvation. Perhaps something similar occurred in Uzbekistan. In any case, “Soul” was based on, or at least inspired by, a pair of trips Platonov took to the region as a Soviet writer, and he was, essentially, a loyal member of the party, so when he describes the suffering and misery of the Dzhan, he tends to see the people and their suffering as helplessness — these poor folk don’t seem to know any better how to care for themselves. He will show them the way, however ignorant of their life he actually is.

The text is peppered with rah-rah Sovietisms, like this: “Soviet power is always gathering up everyone unneeded and forgotten, like a widow who has so many children already that having one more mouth to feed doesn’t make any difference.”

Nothing in “Soul” seems quite real, not the glories of Soviet power nor the way people interact. Chagataev meets and falls in love with a young woman in the opening pages of the book, or at least that’s what the words say happened, but as presented the young man and woman are practically bloodless. Their connection is a mystery.

Similarly, the peoples of the desert opt to follow Chagataev despite his obvious ignorance; never have so many suffering people banded together for no apparent reason, only to suffer yet more under their new leader’s guidance. Chagataev is not a bad man, just a guy with no knowledge, experience or background, nothing but a remit from the authorities. It would be comical — “Hi, I have a degree in Marxist economics, I’m here to help you overcome drought and starvation in the desert.” — if the suffering described by Platonov weren’t so damn convincing. I don’t know what Platonov experienced on his field trips to Central Asia, but it seems he saw and possibly suffered harsh, even life-threatening conditions.

The sad irony of Platonov’s life and work is that, though he held up the Soviet experiment as ideal, he never won official approval. Much of his work was banned during his lifetime. His son was held as a political prisoner at a very young age and died of tuberculosis he contracted in the gulag — and Platonov himself expired of the same disease, possibly caught from his son.

* * *

Very briefly, about the books that I didn’t finish:

A Grain of Wheat, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, is a classic text of the Kenyan revolution and its aftermath, the story of Mugo, an everyman who faced a daunting challenge during the upheaval. That he could not live up to that challenge has been his secret, but a celebration of of the revolution threatens to expose him. As an American reader coming to this text some seventy years after the events in question, I had trouble “seeing” the world described in the novel — and that was a disappointment. I was interested in the background/history of the story, but that’s not why I was reading the book. It’s easier to pick up that kind of factual stuff in non-fiction. (And indeed, I kept having to do Google searches to clarify the narrative. What I wanted was a sense of what it was like to be there, in Kenya, during and after the so-called Emergency. I wanted psychological portraits. I wasn’t able to get that, really. That said, I didn’t read past maybe the first 150 pages. It might have been there if I had been more patient. Failure to finish this book was my fault, not the author’s.

Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, by James Hannaham is a high-energy narrative about a trans woman, Carlotta, who upon release from prison is thrust back into the arms of her generally unwelcoming family. She’s a spitfire and the writing refracts that, shifting back and forth from third to first person, an interesting but maybe not fully successful experiment. I’m not sure why but my interest flagged as Carlotta spitfires her way through Brooklyn. It was interesting to see Hannaham take on the world of Fort Greene which has gone through a tidal change over the last 25 years. When Carlotta left, it was mainly black; now it is mostly white. And yet as a fellow Brooklynite I didn’t necessarily get a new vantage point on the neighborhood. (In that regard it reminded me of Danzy Senna’s “New People,” also set in and around Fort Greene.) Fort Greene certainly seems like a promising setting for a novel; the neighborhood encompasses, or at least used to encompass, a vast swath of Black society, from the very poor to the new creative leaders of the age (Hannaham himself, as an example, or, more famously, Spike Lee). But there was something perfunctory about the portrait of change — it’s noted and then we move on. (Perhaps there’s nothing more to say, of course.) I’m not sure why I didn’t finish the book. It’s engaging. But I had had my fill after a certain point. I know that sounds incredibly dismissive; I don’t mean it to be. I’m an impatient reader and that’s just the way I consume books. Until this year I would say that I rarely completed more than 25% of what I started.

Man or Mango, by Lucy Ellmann. Well, I wasn’t sure what to expect from a book that a) was written by the genius author of “Ducks, Newburyport” and b) had one of the most unpoetic, unclear and non-evocative titles I have ever tumbled across. I mean, come on, “Man or Mango”? “Man or Mango”??? You’ve got to be kidding. The NYT blurb on the front cover said, “uproarious pitch-black comedy,” so I bought it in spite of the unpromising title, but I did not find it uproarious. Or pitch black, for that matter. There’s a few funny bits. There’s some cringe. But it mostly feels booky. (That’s my word for novels that sketch a reality that can only really exist in books, and specifically midlist fiction.)

The narrative structure of “Man or Mango” is the sort that I really don’t like — alternating chapters told from different characters’ viewpoints. These various characters, I assumed, would intersect at some point, but when page 100 ticked by I didn’t feel like sticking around to find out how or why. There was some humor to be had, but not much. I hate dissing Ellmann’s work. I loved “Ducks” so, so much. I’ll leave it at that.

Hangman, by Maya Binyam, is an intriguing narrative of a man who has been, for some unspecified reason, deported back to his home country, although the book would never use words like “deported” or “home country,” because the tale is (purposely) murky. We don’t really know where we are or where he came from, why he was forced to leave one country for another, or indeed why he emigrated from his home country in the first place. Of course, this has echoes of Samuel Beckett’s work (also Will Eno’s great play, “Title and Deed”) and those are damn good antecedents, but (as with Beckett, it should be noted) I grew tired of the digressive way the story, such as it was, moved forward. People step into the frame and tell their tales; news stories are spelled out at length as if they were subplots. To me, it felt like padding. The book might have worked better as a short story (or a play, a la Beckett and Eno!) But it did end with a very powerful (if Beckettian) passage that I admired a lot: “Everything was nothing, and that was how it was going to stay. I wanted to cry, but I could not cry. I had no eyes. I wanted to go home. I tried to go home—home was inside of me.”

Under the Bright Lights, by Daniel Woodrell. This is a mystery/thriller/noir novel by the author of “Winter’s Bone,” which was made into an excellent movie about 15 years ago. (I think it pretty much launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career.) I have lost my taste for most noir and mysteries in general, so the fact that I started and then didn’t finish this book serves me right, I guess. Every once in a while I’ll come across a [mystery, thriller, noir, what is the right way to describe these kinds of books?] that really grabs me, but these days it’s pretty rare. I read it for a while and one evening I just didn’t bother picking it up again.

The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dungy. Okay, I’ll bite — why was this book, the tale of a young American woman’s adventures in Paris in the late Fifties, re-released? (The novel is part of the NYRB’s reissue series.) Surely it’s too dated to find a 21st Century audience? Surely no one wants to hear about an American pixie girl falling in love with a pompous douchebag her own age who calls her “kid?” Surely this is not funny anymore? I was hoping for charming and funny, but no. I’m not sure I even got through 50 pages before setting it aside. This book has aged just about exactly as well as “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” which, if you go back and look at it, has not aged well at all, not at all.

*.* *

And at last we come to “My Brilliant Friend,” by Elena Ferrante, yes, the anointed champ of the 21st Century, per the NYT.

All I can say is, whaaaaaaaaat?????

I had poked at this book twice before, the first time before it had developed such a devoted following. I had previously read another Ferrante novel, “The Days of Abandonment,” a searing portrait of a forsaken woman, so I picked up “My Brilliant Friend” with some high expectations. What I found (and I can’t understand why other people haven’t had this reaction as well) was a sloppy, slapdash piece of work.

Here’s a sentence that caught me dead in my tracks every time I read it: “One night he came out of the house as usual and died, perhaps murdered, perhaps of weariness.”

Come on. Really? Perhaps murdered? Or else perhaps of weariness? What does that even mean?

The first time I read that sentence it stopped me dead in my tracks. I wrote an angry note in the margin and set the novel down. On my second time trying the novel, I gritted my teeth and read past the offending sentence only to learn that the death of the character was actually an important plot point for the rest of the book. I gave it up again. The third time, I just willed myself to go past it, but the sheer nonsense of it nagged at me for hundreds of pages.

For me, that one terrible sentence is emblematic of the whole book. The writing is lumpy and imprecise and littered with bad metaphors. “That year it seemed to me that I expanded like pizza dough,” the narrator writes. “I became fuller in the chest, the thighs, the rear.”

Or this: “She was laughing, jumping on the bed, and pulling up her skirt, displaying her fleshless thighs…”

Some thighs!

After my first two attempts at this book, I asked a well-read friend for her opinion as to why the book seemed to strike such a nerve with so many readers, and she said she thought that it was because female friendship is so rarely the center of a narrative. That seems possible. It’s a kind of an extension of the Bechdel test (does a work feature a conversation between two women about something other than a man?)

On the other hand, are there many (or any) good books exploring long-term friendships, be they male or female or intersex??? It doesn’t necessarily strike me as fertile ground for fiction. I’m having a hard time coming up with any good examples. I mean, is “A Separate Peace,” just to take one possible example, a story about friendship? Obviously, yes, but not really; the story itself centers on a betrayal, not the friendship.

On this, my third run at “My Brilliant Friend,” I will say that I did find the portrait of late 1950s Naples interesting — the violence, the misogyny, the feuding families, the limited opportunities for girls (and for most of the boys), the incredible narrowness of the world they lived in — most of the characters never venture beyond the borders of their little neighborhood.

I’m not sure that’s enough of a payoff for a book I had to read three times to even get halfway through, but that’s what I got.

#books #Saul Bellow #Elena Ferrante #Andre Platonov

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