Review: The Round House

The Round House by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I probably read this one a bit too quickly to get everything out of it, but I was fortunate to be guided by the criticism of my student. (Thanks Emily.) As part of a senior honors project, she’s reviewing the book as a potential contemporary work that she could share with her future students.

Emily’s thesis is that this is ultimately a novel about justice, and I’m glad to find my experience of the book confirming that. Joe is a boy, only 13, who has to grapple with how to find justice for his mother, his father and himself after a man rapes his mother. On the one hand, it ought to fall to the American courts to do that. On the other, because there is a gap between that court justice and the power of tribal law, the rapist escapes.

That fundamental clash is exacerbated by the fact that Joe’s father is a Native-American judge. He ought to be able to see justice done, but he’s growing old as the novel moves along, and he finds the law is powerless before a sociopath who’s plotted his crimes carefully. Meanwhile, Joe’s old grandfather tells him stories of Indian justice, of the way tribes dealt with “windigos” who threatened it.

In a [SPOILER] Joe eventually kills the rapist with the help of a friend, also 13. They succeed and recognize the justness of their actions, but there’s a final, troubling moment: the other boy, who’s fired the fatal shot, is killed in a car accident that pertains to a sub-plot around his love for a girl who’s moved away. It’s as if, in the end, we see a third strand of justice, a cosmic, karmic sort.

I’ll leave it to Emily to decide how appropriate this is for her intended audience. There’s perhaps more YA intent to it than I especially love in my own readings, but I think – as Emily shows – there’s also some abiding substance to it.

It’s been years since I got to Love Medicine. Maybe it’s time to get back to that.


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Review: Jerusalem

Jerusalem by Alan Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Members of the Vernall family have been charged – more accurately “named” – by heaven to tend to the “edges of creation.” And, in this massive, visions-of-the -holy-saturated, occasional masterpiece, Alan Moore shows us several generations of the clan as they spend their lives tending to the possible holiness of the Boroughs, a working class neighborhood of Northampton.

And that’s only book one. The subsequent two books – equally large – expand that same story into a kind of heaven that exists above and below the Boroughs and then into what it means to attempt art that examines the intersection of the holy and eternal with the everyday world we know.

In all, this is exhausting, but that’s not a bad thing. It has moments of real inspiration, brilliance perhaps, and it’s ambitious in ways hard to imagine from someone who has spent so much time in the world of commercial comic books – even if he did write the revolutionary Watchmen. There are certainly portions that could be cut; some are redundant and some demystify stronger parts. But the sheer weight of this is part of its excellence. Don’t pick this up unless you’re willing to risk weeks’ worth of obligation. Do pick it up if you’re willing to get lost in a book that’s trying to marry poetic madness to our seemingly ordinary contemporary world.

Moore takes the name of his book, one on which he is reported to have spent most of the last decade (and this at a time when, had he chosen, he could no doubt have continued in the far more lucrative work of creating graphic novels that Hollywood was lined up to film), from William Blake’s epic illuminated poem. Like Blake, his overarching goal is to trace the residue of the deep holy as it manifests itself in the world around him. Like Blake, Moore is attempting to write about the potential of vision – “four-fold vision” as Blake put it and as Moore quotes it in chapter 9 and elsewhere. The central idea of both Moore’s and Blake’s conception is the claim that our world isn’t fallen, that England or “Albion” isn’t mere ordinariness but one edge of heaven.

Blake looked at London and Moore at Northampton, but the point is the same. Each suggests that if we can push ourselves past a thick crust of contemporary culture – for Blake it was the rigidity of the scientific revolution, what he called “Newton’s night” and for Moore it’s the sheen of consumerism – we can see that Jerusalem herself, that emanation of heaven, sits on top of the streets and fallen people we walk past every day.

The first book is simply stunning. He takes one character after another, spins his or her life forward and back, and culminates in a moment of vision. There’s beauty in the ordinariness of the spurs to the visionary moment. One man sees “angles” in the upper reaches of a church. Another goes temporarily mad in the middle of his foundry work. Another sees a painting begin to speak. Another is moved by the beauty of an infant being pushed in a stroller by her mother. And one simply chokes on a throat lozenge.

There’s a structure to the method, but Moore is gifted enough that it, in the first book, it doesn’t become predictable. He brings each of his separate characters to life, only very slowly showing how their lives intersect, not simply in their moment but across the generations. We learn eventually that ghosts walk everywhere among us and that, to them, time is no more bewildering than distance or height. If we could see properly, we would understand that nothing ever ends. Or, to quote Blake again, we would realize that “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”

The bulk of the second book turns on the mystical experience of three-year-old Mick Warren who, having choked on his throat lozenge and been pronounced dead, spends several chapters traipsing about a kind of heaven as part of a group of urchins calling themselves the Dead Dead Gang. In the course of his adventures, Mick sees the world from above and below, and as it was and will be. He experiences a series of visions that stamp him as a Vernall – as he indeed is from his mother’s side – and give him access to a mysticism the rest of us can only imagine.

Compared to the rest of the novel, this section is the least inspired. It’s disappointing – by comparison at least – to see the attempt at serious visionary work suddenly filtered through the eyes of a child. The opaque quality of revelation gives way to something more primary-colored. We even get a somewhat condescending exposition from the devil Asmodeus giving too much clarity to what the first book largely implies.

The third book turns mostly on the run-up to an art exhibit of work by Alma Warren, Mick’s sister, who has heard his stories from the mystical world. He forgot but briefly recalled them after an industrial accident. Her paintings chronicle them in some fashion.

I enjoyed the first book of the novel the most and appreciated but was glad to be finished with the second, but I find myself thinking about the third one most of all. In some ways, whether the novel is a success depends on how effective Alma’s work comes across. At one point in the final chapter, Alma explicitly worries that she might have failed, that she might – rather than capture a genuine mystical vision – have managed only a grand act of nostalgia. Blake may be the central inspiration here, but, striking as his work is, there is a sometimes conventional quality to its composition. As the character Handsome John puts it at one point when he is admiring one of Blake’s painting, “He drew like a baby.” Alma, working in papier mache and capturing a child’s adventures, risks some of the same.

Perhaps more broadly, an even greater indictment is that chapter after chapter is filtered through a single consciousness. Each is a distinct and limited focus even as the individual in question typically wins a visionary moment. It’s inspiring to see those different consciousnesses radiate out in the different chapters of the first book. By the third, the question is whether they knit together in full.

There are glances in what Alma accomplishes that gives a sense she has succeeded. As she proposes at one point, “Art saves things from time.” She suggests her project is “a glorious mythology of loss” and that she is attempting to understand, “The development of English as a visionary language” that has served the likes of John Bunyan, John Clare, William Blake, and James Joyce.

In one inspired passage that feeds into her work, we see the world from the point of view of the Builders, cosmic architects of human fate who use snooker cues as their tools. Two Builders get into a fight over the fate of young Mick and that explains how he dies temporarily and then later recovers his memories. When they fight at the start of the third book, one Builder reflects on his struggle with the other, “We know everything. He blacks my eye, and China’s great leap forward plunges it into an economic abyss. I collapse his nose, and Castro comes to power in Cuba. From my split lip dribbles structuralism, rock and roll and hovercrafts. We pick the golden clots before they are ready, and the Belgian Congo blooms with severed heads. Of course we stride among you, thigh deep in your politics and your mythology. We wade through the pink, map-scrap pebbles of your disintegrating Commonwealth. We march in a black tide on Washington. We juggle satellites and Francis Bacon. We are Builders”

A bit later from the same section, we get one of the boldest claims for the nature of art and its reflection of life: “We bomb Guernica just to create that painting.” That sort of visionary claim, in the very end, is the hope of the power in Alma’s work. She’s an artist who risks the nostalgic and the conventional, but she’s also someone who wants to play in the very furnace of creation.

The jury remains out on whether this is a satisfying culmination of the novel’s early promise. As I reflect on it, though, I think that uncertainty may be part of Moore’s ultimate goal. Some of this work remains as straightforward as the comic books of his childhood and early career. Some of it nevertheless aspires to be a 21st century Blake. As Alma says to the poet John Clare when she encounters him in a vision near the end, “We’re either all of us saints or none of us are.” There’s a good case for either of these, and that’s a central joy of this work that tries, and maybe succeeds, in seeing beyond the world we see every day.


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Review: In the Skin of a Lion

In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I think of Ondaatje’s work – and all I’ve read before this is the marvelous The English Patient – I think of internal experience. I think of narrators who are trapped in a bed or confined to an abandoned hospital, or recuperating from amputated thumbs. I think, that is, of characters in the midst of reflection.

As I look at his method of narration, though, it’s actually steeped in the external. As he writes, he pans across landscapes. He gives us lush descriptions that become almost cinematic. In this book in particular, I often found myself lost in the larger story, but I never felt bored. I was always confident I was in the hands of someone who knew how to make words bring scenes (and, implicitly, characters) to life.

It’s a challenging method. Part of the inspiration of The English Patient is that it’s claustrophobic. Characters recall experiences of vast spaces and of epic love, but they don’t get to leave the scene of the hospital for the setting of the story’s present tense. That novel, tangled as is it, has a clear and tight focus. Everything points to the experience of our nurse and patient who, without quite knowing it, sit as the culmination of a number of great emotional arcs.

Skin of a Lion, though even shorter, is expansive in its scenery and in its setting. We go from the wilds of Canada in the days of timber empire, to the building of Toronto’s sewer system, to the birth of a radical workers’ movement in the years before World War I. It doesn’t have the same inspired focus of The English Patient. It’s never boring and always reflective of great passion, but it spins in different directions.

As an elevator pitch, this is an inspired plot: a young man who learns dynamiting from his father goes to Toronto, contributes to the great physical work of building the city, becomes radicalized through a betrayed love and from seeing the greed of the city’s capitalists, and determines to assassinate his arch enemy by swimming through the very sewer tunnels he helped build.

Given Ondaatje’s method, though, I rarely saw that plot as it unfolded. (In fact, I have to acknowledge various on-line sources as helping me sort out how one scene connected to another.) I loved the reading experience of being caught in the lush exterior reflections of the characters, but I was generally confused about how they combined. I respect the ambition behind all this – as a scholar of American multi-ethnic literature, I admire Ondaatje’s seeming goal to celebrate the mix of immigrant labor that made the city, and I recognize the philosophical claim that, when dismantling the master’s house, one cannot use the master’s tools. That is, I think I understand that he’s challenging conventional chronological narrative as a means of critiquing our received history. Still, he’s asking a lot of us. He writes brilliantly but here, in what turns out to be a prequel to The English Patient, he never lets his story cohere.

I’m all in for more Ondaatje, and I do recommend this one, but be prepared for a challenging ride once you begin.


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Review: Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Reading this makes me think of those times when I see a hip-hop star invited on some TV show to sing in a traditional manner, maybe, for instance, for the national anthem. Some of them are good at it; we get to hear someone best known for rapping come out with a passable Nat “King” Cole. In general, though, it’s disappointing. These are people talented in a particular way – they’ve found ways to work with rhythm that transform “ordinary” song – but they seem more or less ordinary when they sing in a conventional, traditional way.

In A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan played with rhythm in memorable ways. I suppose I liked the novel a little less than many people – in the end I preferred what Colum McCann, Rachel Kushner, and Joan Silber are doing in the same vein – but I still thought it was memorable and impressive. She found a way to interrogate a moment, to trace the spider-web of linkages among people who aren’t entirely aware of one another. (My name for it the “rhizomatic novel.”) It was good stuff and cutting edge. It was to the conventional novel, to complete the metaphor, like hip-hop is to Motown.

Manhattan Beach, though, turns out to be Motown. You’re not going to find more people inclined toward the material of this novel – it’s all about gangsters and night clubs in the 1930s and then the 1950s – but it’s conventional in a way that I can’t help but find disappointing. Egan is not without talent, but this is not where her talent shines best. She’s good at disrupting the rhythm of narrative. While there are some impressive moments of chronological suturing here, it’s ultimately a novel bound by its own sequence and limited by characters defined by events rather than interiority.

I guess I have to reveal some SPOILERS to get any more specific. Anna is a dynamic little girl whose father, a charismatic man who’s risen in the longshoreman’s union as a bagman – a position he took because he needed money to care for his other physically and mentally challenged daughter – and come increasingly under the spell of gangster Dexter Styles. There’s a dash of Gatsby to it all, but the heart of the novel takes place half a generation later when Anna is a young adult and insists she can crack the all-male cohort of WWII home-front divers involved in repairing various ships for the military.

SPOILER CONTINUED: The actual story is larded with melodrama. Anna overcomes male chauvinism as she becomes a diver. Her father has disappeared, apparently murdered by Dexter. She starts an affair with Dexter and, on getting pregnant, finds sisterly support from a handful of differently emancipated women. And, then – ULTIMATE SPOILER – we learn her beloved father isn’t dead but that he fled years before because of the conflicting pressures of the gangster world and caring for his disabled daughter.

That’s a plot worthy of a Victorian novel, meaning that this is, if you allow for a change in context and time, a novel in conventional form. Unlike A Visit from the Good Squad, this one takes its power from what happens rather than from the thoughtful and creative way it’s organized. This is a novel that depends on its characters and their growth – in a traditional fashion – and, bottom line, that convention keeps it from turning into anything so memorable.

I can well imagine why Egan chose to write this as she did. It’s ambitious and sprawling. It’s likely the sort of novel she imagined writing when she was – as so many of us were – that adolescent curled up with a fat book and imagining her name on its spine.

As this has emerged, though, it seems both too safe and too self-contained to be that memorable or, really, that good. I’ll give Egan’s next one a chance, but I hope she finds her way back to what first brought her attention. She’s belongs to literature’s hip-hop age more than to its classical one.


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