Running in the Family by Michael OndaatjeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to write memoir, and I like to think I have a range of approaches that work for me. Central to any of them, though, is the idea of a contract with the reader. When you write memoir – as I think about it – you agree to share your experience, insight, and regret with the rest of us.
Michael Ondaatje is a world-class writer; it’s enough to say The English Patient and leave it at that. He’s also had a striking personal history in the way he grew up in Sri Lanka as part of an upper-class, multi-generational family.
As he writes this, though, he does something that initially irritates and then frustrates me. That is, he seems to talk to himself more than to us. We get characters not so much introduced as referred to. I’ve seen that work well – it seems to me that Proust does it, for one – but here it feels as if it’s implying that we should know what he’s trying to share with us.
I get the idea at a theoretical level: if Ondaatje is telling his story with a presumption of the centrality of his Sri Lankan experience, then he is battling a perceived Western bias.
At least I think I get it. The more I read, though, the less I felt invested in the people I was meeting. I found it more and more difficult to care about the central figures here – his alcoholic grandfather and his Bohemian-styled grandmother.
And they should be interesting characters!
It’s just that too much of this in my experience is solipsistic. It reads almost like a journal in which Ondaatje is recalling details he lost.
I’m still in for his fiction, and I recognize that some people very much admire this, but it doesn’t work for me.
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