Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Review: First Person

First Person First Person by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve figured out this much about Richard Flanagan on the basis of this one and The Narrow Road to the Deep North: first, he’s drawn to complicated narratives that focus on intense experiences – there a group of Australian prisoners of war building a railroad for the Japanese, and here a young writer attempting the confessional memoir of an inveterate con-man and liar – that he concludes with a rapid decades later what-eventually-happened-to wrap-up.

Second, he can write like few people in the world. Give me another novel or two to be certain, but he may be my new candidate (after Philip Roth) for the Nobel Prize. Yeah. He’s that good, a world-class writer who’s both accessible and deeply ethical in his insistence on probing his characters in all their dimensions.

The premise here alone is enough to get me singing its praises. We have a young writer protagonist who senses the potential of his own voice but can’t find it. He’s writing as a Tasmanian, as an Aussie equivalent of someone from North Dakota or maybe even my own small-town Ohio world. He doesn’t have the connections or the benefit of a mentor, but he knows he sees the world in a distinct way. He’s lived his adolescence Aussie hard, going on daredevil outdoor adventures with his best friend and future muscle for our con-man/gangster, and now he’s determined to finish his novel with the patient support of his pregnant wife. He’s prepared to put all their lives on hold to find that voice, and we get the impression it might be inside him. There’s no guarantee he’s the next Roth or Updike or name your own late 1970s or early 1980s literary giant, but the odds seem a little better for him than for most.

Then comes the golden handcuffs offer to write the memoirs of Siegfried, a self-reinventing swindler, gangster, international con-man, and possible sleeper CIA asset. It’s $10,000 for six weeks of work. He wants to say no – his old friend warns him against it – but he finally gives into what feels like the inevitable.

The catch is that Siegfried simply refuses to tell his story. His reticence means no book, which means no money, which means financial disaster, so Kif has to begin to fill in the blanks. The story of this man becomes increasingly his own story.

That’s brilliant on a narrative level, but Flanagan does even more, turning the writing project into a harrowing self-examination. Kif discovers his own selfishness, his own distance from the people he loves. He discovers that, while he hasn’t committed the same crimes as Siegfried, he has some of the same yawning moral void, the potential for the same sociopathology.

Part of the brilliance here is the subtlety of Flanagan’s unveiling. Kif comes slowly to mistrust himself, then eventually to find his literary voice muted, and finally to sell out from the literary ambition that motivated him. [SPOILER] As the end reveals, he even gives up on the family that has motivated him, giving into the selfishness that his acquaintance with Siegfried made all too clear.

There’s even more, though. [BIGGER SPOILER] We eventually discover that Kif is an unreliable narrator. He’s withheld from us perhaps the climactic detail of his time with Siegfried – he has, as he effectively confesses, killed Siegfried. It’s supposedly at Siegfried’s request, but we have only Kif’s word for it. Flanagan never tells us, but he peels back enough of the blinders to reveal the ugly likelihood: since Siegfried has refused to sign a crucial waiver, Kif’s killing him has meant the $10,000.

In place of a confession, though, we get a quieter kind of self-recrimination. Kif has gone on to a high-profile and lucrative career as a TV writer, finally as an impresario of reality TV. He is, in other words, showing us a “real world” that’s as sanitized and manipulated as the memoir he wrote for Siegfried.

Again, though, Flanagan’s ultimate mastery here comes in the way he only suggests such darkness. It’s possible Kif isn’t as guilty as he seems. It’s possible that his contamination from Siegfried is merely from proximity rather than his own unspoken guilt. Even if that’s the truth we’re supposed to take from this narrative, though, there’s a dull horror in knowing that our once ambitious and largely innocent Kif has lived a more or less comfortable life in the shadow of such potential amorality. He’s lost his voice and he’s lost his decency and he’s abandoned his young family, but he’s found all the trappings he thinks he wanted.

This one is brand new. Look for it to get a Man-Booker nomination, and don’t be surprised if it wins.


View all my reviews

No comments:

Post a Comment