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July
2011
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada
John
chose this book because of the huge attention it has received since
the English translation appeared in 2009. Originally published in
Germany immediately after the war, with the encouragement of the
new Soviet authorities, and based on a real-life case, it concerns
an act of resistance by an ordinary working-class and middle-aged
couple under the Nazi regime, the writing and dropping of anonymous
postcards attacking Hitler and the war. The book is promoted by
the English-language publishers, Penguin, as having been 'lost',
although James Buchan informs us that it has in fact enjoyed a certain
continuing life in Germany with television and film adaptations.
It has however only now been translated into English.
By the time of the meeting I had managed to read only fifty or so
pages, and some time has passed since, so my memory of the discussion
is sketchy, but I'll do my best.
Written in twenty-six days or so by a man weakened and dying after
a tortured and dissolute life (Hans Fallada was the pen-name Rudolf
Ditzen's father persuaded him to adopt after his first, youthful
involvement in scandal), the book is a miraculously exuberant 600-pager,
if somewhat baggy and at times florid. The discussion, however,
did not initially touch on the novelistic qualities of the book,
as people were so taken with the story itself, and the revelations
in the book about society under the Nazi regime. Fallada was uniquely
qualified to portray this last, having taken the decision, unusual
for a writer, to stay in the country for the duration of the war,
and, it seems, at times bowing as a writer to Nazi pressures. What
emerges is a vivid and horrifying depiction of economic hardship
and squalor bringing out the worst and most bestial in citizens,
and a culture of fear permeating from the lowest members of society
to the highest-ranking Nazis themselves, with people daily shopping
each other to save their own skins, and, contrary to what we are
often told, a general paralysing awareness of the concentration
camps and the murders that took place there. There is no doubt for
the resisting couple, Otto and Anna Quangel, that they will be executed
if they are uncovered, and their act is all the more remarkable
for the fact that before the event that triggers their action, the
death of their soldier son, they are entirely unpoliticised - as
John said, it seems a deliberate authorial choice that they are
the most ordinary of couples. Neither is there any guarantee that
their action will have the desired effect - and indeed it leads
to trouble for others and at least one death - but it is the shining
focus of a good moral choice in a situation where good moral choices
have become practically impossible.
John had found the book very important and Trevor had really liked
it. Ann found it of great historical interest. I asked them what
they thought of it as a novel and they all instantly said, Not much.
Mainly they found the prose pretty primitive and thought there were
too many characters - although I have to say that when I came to
read the whole thing I didn't agree about the latter: in terms of
plot, as the book progresses everything including the characters
is pulled together. There is constant seemingly uncontrolled slippage
of tenses, and some repetition, but apparently much of the book
is written in dialect German, and I did relish Michael Hofmann's
rough-and-ready idiomatic translation. Doug said that he thought
the book was atrociously written and he just hadn't liked it at
all, but had thought it worth reading for the political content.
They all agreed that the characters weren't at all well developed
- though I have to say I subsequently found the insight into the
psychology of the Gestapo detective Escherich, for instance, quite
sophisticated. However, it's true that often the prose and especially
the dialogue, most notably that between the Quangels, is stilted
and naive. On the whole I'd say that the book suffers from unevenness
- which is perhaps unsurprising, given the speed with which it was
written and the fact that Fallada died before publication - and
I'd agree that despite its aesthetic faults, for political reasons
it's a must-read.
August
2011
In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
Once
again I have left it so long to write up a report that my memory
of the discussion is unlikely to be comprehensive, but here goes.
Jenny chose this book because, she said beforehand, her daughter
is teaching it in Toronto. At the meeting she said that what attracted
her to it also, and the reason she liked it when she came to read
it, is that it is indeed set in Toronto, which she knows very well,
and she always likes books set in named places she knows, with street
names and landscape she can identify. This is interesting to me
as a writer, since however closely my settings are based on real-life
ones, I often don't name them in an attempt to universalize: I have
the sense that if readers aren't familiar with the real-life places,
pinning them down with names can create an effect of alienation,
a jarring injection of reality which can potentially destroy the
spell of story.
Jenny then went on to describe Toronto to us, its great canyon dividing
the city and its various immigrant communties - the book very much
concerns an immigrant community - and a discussion started up, mainly
between Jenny and Trevor, about how quickly immigrant societies
become assimilated in various cities, and whether or not the geography
of Toronto has slowed the process down.
Feeling vindicated in my view, I said, But what about the book?
A concern with facts was leading us right away from it,
a book with indeed an atmosphere closer to myth or dream than the
factual accounts of history or geography.
Jenny said she thought it was a book about identity, which seemed
to me an astute assessment. Set in the 1920s around the building
of the Bloor Street Viaduct which will bridge the city, it is essentially
the story of Patrick, who, like the moths he watched flinging themselves
against the lighted windows in his isolated country childhood, comes
to Toronto 'searching', for a home, or an identity, or maybe a narrative
of his own, but drawn with the logic and coincidence of dream into
the stories of others, and in particular the immigrant Macedonian
community. As Trevor said, the blurb on his edition bills the book
as a love story, but it's not really, or rather it's more complicated
than that. As in dreams, and as in Ondaatje's better-known sequel
The English Patient, love stories become displaced from
the centre, are left hanging or morph: a nun falls from the bridge
and is caught by the worker Nicholas, an incident that hangs over
the rest of the story like an iconic miracle, bonding the two souls
together, yet later we will learn that Nicholas has married another.
Indeed, as in dreams, characters central to the The English Patient
appear on the edges here, waiting in the wings with the centrality
of their own narratives. The language too is dream-like, and there
are constant references to dreams - The bridge goes up in a
dream - and, as in The English Patient there is the
ache of loss and longing that characterises the most affecting dreams.
Right from the start we are clear that the whole thing is couched
in the dream of narrative:
This is a story a young girl gathers - note that word 'gathers':
like daydreams? - in a car in the early hours of the
morning... She listens and asks questions as the vehicle
travels through darkness. The man who is driving could say, 'In
that field is a castle', and it would be possible for her
to believe him. (My bolds.)
Trevor said with a big grin that this was the most romantic book
he had ever read, with all its coincidences and miracles, in fact
quite frankly it was a load of bollocks, but that wasn't a criticism,
he had really loved it. Doug, and especially Ann said they had found
it frustrating with its shifts of focus and unbelievable coincidences.
Some people didn't even agree with me that what they thought of
as two characters were the same woman (I won't plot-spoil here),
the coincidence would be too forced.
All of this seemed to me too literal a reading of a book not intended
to be so read, but I did have to agree that while for me The English
Patient succeeds by drawing me into its dream, I too often had the
sense here of being on the outside observing the author's dream,
a problem compounded by the fact that the characters are constantly
having their own affecting dreams.
John told Jenny that he had been absolutely sure that she would
hate this book with its psychological dimension and poetic prose,
since what she likes best is a good clear story. Jenny grinned and
agreed that that last is true, but she still really liked this book.
September
2011
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Trevor
suggested this book on which the Stanley Kubrick film of the same
name was based, a film Kubrick famously withdrew after accusations
that it had provoked copycat acts of violence.
Published in 1962 and set in a projected time when the cult of youth
has turned the world into a place where gangs of teenagers rule
the streets with drugs and violence and theft, and adults cower
away from them behind closed doors, the novel is narrated in a hermetic
teen-speak by ultra-violent fifteen-year-old Alex. Alex considers
himself the leader of his gang or 'droogs' but is ultimately betrayed
by them and ends up plucked from prison to be the guinea-pig in
a government-run aversion therapy scheme to turn criminals against
violence.
Trevor was unfortunately unable to make the meeting, and was surprised
to hear afterwards that the book had not in fact stimulated a particularly
heated discussion. As far as I remember, Doug opened things by commenting
that he had found the book far superior to the film. Firstly, there
was the interest of the teen vocabulary, based largely on Russian
and rhyming slag, which caught so well the exclusivity of the teenage
cult. The first-person narrative voice makes you complicit with
it, and thus with Alex's psychology, in a way the film doesn't.
Clare said she had found the vocabulary quite hard to follow, though,
but others disagreed, saying that Burgess cleverly provides context
for the words so that their meanings are soon clear. Clare clearly
hadn't been that engaged, however, as she now said that she thought
Alex was a pretty horrid character and she simply didn't like reading
the book as a result. Jenny didn't agree with her: she said that
she thought he was amoral rather than immoral. He wasn't evil, he
was just having a laugh in the way teenagers do, with no thought
for the consequences for others. I think the rest of us needed to
think about this, as the point was left hanging. Jenny went on to
say that she wondered why Burgess had made Alex love classical music
rather than the popular music espoused by all the other teenagers.
Ann and I said that the point Burgess was making was that art doesn't
civilize. Alex himself makes the point: 'I had to have a smeck,
though, thinking of what I'd viddied once in one of these like articles
on Modern Youth about how ... Great Music ... and Great Poetry would
... make Modern Youth more civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.'
In fact, classical music induces particularly violent fantasies
in him. Jenny said, But what was the significance of the fact that
it was played during the aversion therapy so that Alex then began
to feel ill not only at the sight and thought of violence but the
sound of his previously beloved music? This was another point that
people needed to ponder and was left hanging. What's clear, however,
is that the doctors' choice of music is arbitrary, and they are
surprised and interested to learn that Alex loves classical music
and is distressed to have been made physically averse to it. Later,
however, and in consequence, the aversion will be employed by another
faction deliberately and cruelly to use Alex, so that classical
music, already disconnected from morality, becomes even an instrument
of torture.
People noted that the main point of the novel, expressed by the
prison chaplain, is that there is no point in making people behave
morally simply through fear (or aversion): no one is truly moral
unless they are so by choice; without moral choice Alex is simply
a 'clockwork orange'. Inevitably, as the circumstances change, Alex
regains his enjoyment in both classical music and violence. People
said that they found very interesting the way that most of the victims
in the book became vengeful and some of them formed a faction that
was just as manipulative and callous as the government that had
imposed the aversion therapy. It's a very cynical book, with a very
cynical view of human nature, they all agreed, and this seemed generally
to be considered a drawback of the book.
I said but what about the final chapter, which was left out of both
the American edition and the film, in which Alex does start to grow
up and finally lose his taste for violence - although I did think
it was a bit too pat, and was inclined to agree with the choice
of Kubrick and the American publisher. Everyone immediately said
that it was more more than a bit pat! Where did that come
from: suddenly, out of the blue, Alex starts feeling different,
and it's just because he's growing up? Such authorial cynicism up
till that moment and then suddenly so sentimental! I said that there
is that bit where Alex says he knows however that his own son will
behave as he did, and his sons after him: that's pretty hopeless
and cynical. However, I did think it was rather pasted in, and I
couldn't help sensing a kind of authorial struggle here. I felt
that the logic of the story had led Burgess to a place he wasn't
comfortable with: he had painted himself into a cynical corner and
the more upbeat ending was his attempt to pick his way out.
Finally, Doug said once again that he had found the book profoundly
better than the film. The film had inevitably depicted the violence
objectively and graphically and made one a voyeur, but the book,
mediating everything through the narrative voice and Alex's psyche,
was extremely thought-provoking, and he was really glad he had read
it.
October
2011
The Spare Room by Helen Garner
Ann
chose this book as she had watched a TV Review Show in which it
received unusually unanimous praise. It is related in the first-person
narrative voice of a character who shares the author's name - 'Hel'
- and charts the period during which she has a friend to stay, she
expects for just three weeks - Nicola, who is suffering from cancer
and visiting a nearby alternative cancer clinic. As soon as Nicola
arrives it is clear that she is a dying woman, and Hel ends up caring
intensively for her and having to deal psychologically with Nicola's
denial of the truth and of the quackery of the clinic, and with
the prospect of having Nicola to stay indefinitely and possibly
to die.
So,
Ann said, what did she think of it? The main thing she found in
this book, she said, was a huge and searing anger, and there was
a general nodding of agreement. She said she had found it very easy
to read, and there was agreement here too: people put in that the
prose had great energy which gave it, John noted, an amazingly light
touch for such dark subject matter. Ann said, however, that she
felt that the book was somehow too easy to read for the subject
matter. I commented that I suspected that that was why it had had
such generally good reviews: people tend not to want to confront
painful issues, and a book that is easy to read keeps a certain
distance from the pain, while leaving readers able to congratulate
themselves that they have in fact confronted it. Ann said to agreement
that the book was very vivid and that it had a very strong ring
of autobiography. However, she had to say that she hadn't liked
either of the two characters, Hel with her anger or Nicola with
her imperiousness and denials and demands.
Now there was disagreement. Doug strongly disagreed about Nicola.
She was a wonderful character, he thought: so characterful and strong
in the face of her predicament, and wouldn't you, if you were suffering
from a terminal illness, be tempted to deny it? Jo pointed out that
when people are dying they are necessarily demanding. Trevor talked
about his own denial when his mother was dying. I talked about my
own experience of the stress of keeping up the fantasy for a dying
person when they are in denial about it, and the focus of the discussion
turned to Hel. People noted that the particular thing about Hel
was that, eventually at any rate, she refuses to keep up the fantasy
and works to force Nicola to face the reality. I think this was
felt by some to be what was unlikeable about her: her anger, and
her consequent insistence on the truth, seemed to be as much on
behalf of herself - tricked into looking after Nicola, already worn
out and with the prospect of the situation going on indefinitely
- as on behalf of Nicola. I said, but doesn't this make the book
a telling comment on a society where this kind of caring is left
up to individuals (usually women) and it was agreed that that was
so.
Up to this moment Jenny had said nothing and Clare asked her what
she thought. She said she hadn't liked the book at all: she didn't
like Hel's attitude as it came over in the narrative voice.
I said I felt that the problem was that there's a whiff of martyrdom,
which I had particularly noticed in a passage near the beginning.
Hel's daughter Eva lives next door and at the point that Nicola
comes to stay Eva's whole family come down with bad colds so that
they must stay away from Nicola with her depressed immune system,
and therefore of course from Hel. After cancelling her work for
the day, taking Nicola to the clinic and returning and laundering
Nicola's drenched bed linen, Hel sees the suffering Eva in the garden
with her ill child lying listlessly over her shoulder:
I drove, I bought, I paid [It's that not being able to
resist telling us that she paid]. I delivered to Eva's doorstep
cardboard cartons overflowing [overflowing!] with organic
foodstuffs [organic!]. She wouldn't even open the screen
door till I had closed their front gate behind me.
It is true that Garner ends the section with self-irony: How
competent I was! I would get a reputation for competence. In
retrospect one can thus read the whole section as self-ironic,
but in the first instance the paragraph doesn't strike like that,
and I don't find the irony sustained. Everyone now agreed, especially
Doug who thought strongly that there was indeed a whiff of martyrdom
about the whole book. People had commented that it was odd that
Eva doesn't once appear to help out although she lives next door.
John said he felt that giving Eva and her family a cold so that
she had to stay away and thus intensify Hel's aloneness with the
situation seemed like a narrative device, which contributed to the
air of narratorial /authorial martyrdom - especially as Eva still
doesn't appear even when she and her family are free of the cold,
which people in the group thought very strange indeed.
Jenny noted that on the whole, though, we kept talking about the
characters rather than the book. I said I thought it was
because there was no distinction between a narrative and an authorial
voice, which in turn was an aspect of the probably autobiographical
nature of the book. The narrative voice (to which Jenny objected)
was both the voice of the character and the voice of the author.
(There was now a brief objection to assumptions of autobiography
until Clare, who had the hardback edition, read out a section of
blurb which implied that the book was indeed based on the author's
experience.) Someone said that it wasn't possible to make that distance
in a first-person narrative, but someone else pointed out that you
could do it with satire (a discussion I am sure we've had before!)
and someone else said that if it were done with satire, though,
that would take away the anger. I didn't say this at the time, but
I'm not sure I agree with that last: satire is a very elegant way
of communicating distilled anger. In fact in this book there are
some fine moments of ironic commentary, but on the whole I feel
the anger is raw, undistilled, and there was comment that perhaps
the book was written too closely in time to the author's experience.
Jenny then did make a point of talking about the book as opposed
to the characters. She said that it runs along the surface of the
experience and doesn't really confront it. She compared it with
Simone de Beauvoir's account of her mother's dying which really
takes you into the heart of the pain of the experience. Clare said
that when she has worked all day with people undergoing similar
experiences (as she does), she doesn't want to go through it all
again via a book, and she is very grateful to have a reading experience
which gives her some distance from it all. Ironically, the conversation
slid immediately back towards the characters: someone said, Hel
did love Nicola, though, didn't she? but others said, But did she?
Someone answered, Well, why else would she end up doing that for
Nicola? Someone else said it was odd that she did: after all, others
of Nicola's friends have known her for a lot longer than Hel. Someone
else pointed out that Nicola only comes to stay because Hel lives
near the clinic: she's simply using her. Jenny said, This is the
point: we just can't tell. Hel tells us she loves Nicola, but that's
all. This was what Jenny meant by the book skipping over the surface:
we are told things but they are never really proved in a way that
convinces. Every so often there's a hint of something in the past
that brought these two women to be in this situation together but
they are never developed: we never find out. For this reason, Jenny
felt there was a dishonesty at the heart of the book.
I said I thought the book was a commentary on the way that ex-hippy
types like Hel and Nicola rejected in youth the notion of traditional
family, and turned instead to friendship groups, but that the latter
don't sustain you into the frailties of old age.
John said he found the symbolism at the start of the book (but soon
abandoned) heavy-handed - the mirror that crashes and breaks in
the spare room the night before Nicola arrives, the gourd which
when cut into turns out to be empty, the overripe banana left lying
around and which Nicola eventually eats - but others said they hadn't
even noticed that these things were symbolic.
I said I liked the way that the end of the book leaps forward via
hindsight to Nicola's care by others and death (I think that, formally,
this highlights beautifully the intensity of the three weeks she
is at Hel's house and the relief when she is gone), but everyone
else hated that, and the way that structurally (and consequently
emotionally) it dismissed Nicola, contributing to their suspicions
of self-centredness in the narrative.
All in all, I'd say, at the end of the discussion people were more
negative about the book than when we began.
November
2011
Homer and Langley by E L Doctorow
This
book, Clare's suggestion, is the story of two brothers, Homer and
Langley Collyer, sons of a bourgeois doctor - one of whom, Homer,
is blind; the other, Langley, suffering shell shock - and who, after
their parents' death in 1918, hole themselves up in their upper
Fifth Avenue brownstone, stuffing it with junk that Langley compulsively
amasses, while the greater part of the twentienth century washes
up against their doors.
It
is based on the case of a real-life pair of brothers of the same
names, who were found dead amongst their piles of collected detritus
in 1947, Langley having barricaded them in and falling into one
of the many traps he set for intruders. Doctorow takes some fictive
liberties with their story, including that of reversing their ages
and extending the brothers' lives into the late 1970s or early 1980s.
Unfortunately
Clare was unwell and didn't attend, so Mark introduced the book
in her place. He said he was an admirer of Doctorow: he really liked
his way of taking individuals and placing them within the great
events of the twentieth century. However, compared to Ragtime,
where Doctorow does this brilliantly, this book, Mark felt, was
not so successful. Several people agreed that the characters somehow
weren't truly related to the events of the twentieth century, although
most of those events touched their life in one way or another. The
trouble was, they were only touched by them, since
the point was that they were largely shut away from them. Yet at
the same time most people felt that the characters themselves didn't
really come alive - though Jo was astonished: she thought they were
wonderfully rich characters, touchingly portrayed.
I said
I agreed that they were touchingly portrayed: blind Homer, who narrates
the story with nicely wry economy, has a touching affection for
the increasingly mad brother who - in turn touchingly - cares for
him, with his all-too sane insights into American society. Mark
particularly liked Homer's account of Langley's assessment of the
moon landings:
Can you imagine the crassness of it, hitting golf balls on the
moon? he said. And that other one, reading the Bible to the universe
as he circled around out there? The entire class of blasphemies
is in those two acts, he said. The one stupidly irreverent, the
other stupidly presumptuous.
However, like the others, I still found that there was something
about the brothers that didn't really engage me on the deepest level.
We tried to work out why that was. Ann wondered if the lack of a
sense of real connection between the brothers on the one hand and
the events of the twentieth century on the other was something to
do with the fact that this was a real-life story, that this last
fact had somehow hobbled the author. Mark said he thought that the
fact that the characters were such eccentrics rather than Everymen
contributed to the sense of things not gelling - they just weren't
representative so couldn't take the weight of it all (though once
again Jo cried out in disagreement). But now some people began to
point out that the brothers were more touched by the events in the
outside world than we had been saying: what about the fact that
they hold tea dances during Prohibition and get raided; what about
the fact that their house is used as a refuge by gangsters on the
run from the police? What about the fact that hippies come to live
with them for a while? John pointed out that surely the brothers
were representative, exaggerated examples of certain twentieth-century
and American political traits, compulsive acquisition and isolationism
- with which Doug readily agreed. It's all rooted in Langley's shell-shock
after the First World War, John said: he's representative of the
damage inflicted by wars; and the barricading and hoarding starts
after the tea dances, when the police invade their home, ie the
state invades the private domain (there's an argument in court as
to whether they were holding public meetings or private parties),
and they react by creating an exaggerated separation of their private
world and the public one.
Still, we felt dissatisfied, but failed to come to any real conclusion
as to why. Trevor reminded us about Langley's scheme to create a
single-edition generic newspaper that would be useful for all time,
based on his Theory of Replacement (everything, including news items,
becomes replicated in the end simply in a new form) and for which
he collects the stacks of newspapers which will jam the house and
eventually topple over and kill him. Trevor thought this was great,
and in theory it seems like a central metaphor in the book, but
it was interesting that we had failed to mention it, and we couldn't
at that moment see the artistic point of it. Finally, Jenny more
or less ended the discussion by saying that she had found the book
extremely upsetting, as it had made her think about what can happen
to you in old age.
In retrospect it seems to me that the problem is that, while the
brothers do come into collision with the outside world, they are
essentially unchanged by those collisions: their fate is determined
right from the moment when Langley begins the hoarding, and nothing
that happens to them changes that trajectory (or lack of it) - which
to some extent is determined, as Ann hinted, by the real-life story.
They fulfil the static conditions of Langley's Theory of Replacement.
Although I have been known in the past to rail against the tyranny
of the conventional 'narrative arc', I find the lack of one detrimental
here. While the twentieth-century follows its narrative arc (although
Langley would deny that it does), the brothers themselves are simply
static points at its centre, or rather edge, with no narrative arc
of their own beyond a slow disintegration, and in spite of the wit
and the lightness of the prose, there is a hermetic, stifled feel
to the novel and ultimtely a lack of tension (though I'm sure that
Jo would disagree).
January
2012
The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
Warning:
plot spoiler. In order to report our discussion, I've had to reveal
the ending of this book.
Doug suggested this book, a departure from Paul Auster's usual more
high-wire postmodern storytelling mode. It concerns narrator Nathan
Glass who, after a divorce and in remission from lung cancer, returns
to his birthplace Brooklyn, he says 'to die', and his nephew Tom
whom he unexpectedly finds there working in a second-hand bookshop,
dropped out from a brilliantly promising academic career and also
in retreat from life. However, the two soon find themselves embroiled
together in the lives of colourful others - among them the eccentric
bookshop owner Harry Brightman with his dubious past, and the nine-year-old
daughter of Tom's lost sister, who turns up on his doorstep out
of the blue, strangely mute. Before they know it, Nathan and Tom
are engaged on quests to save others from various fates, and en
route to their own personal redemption.
Doug said he really liked the wry, urbane narrative voice of Nathan
who, while purporting to be curmudgeonly, is in fact touchingly
humane and generous. He did, however, feel that the second half
of the book was less satisfying with its plot twists, or rather
its sudden changes of plot - one story thread being dropped for
another - and that here it rather fell apart. Trevor and Ann agreed
with him on this latter point, and Trevor said he thought the ending
fizzled out.
I said, But don't all the threads come together in the end? and
they agreed they did, but still seemed unsatisfied by the way they
diverged along the way. I said that Auster was making the point
that all stories are contingent to other stories and each story
(and each life) is as important as another - this structure, postmodern
after all in spite of the seeming greater conventionality, was the
author's conscious way of making this point, rather than a failure
in storytelling. As for the ending: Nathan relates that, with people
saved and all the threads apparently tied up, and newly happy himself
in a relationship, he puts his new partner on the subway on her
way to work 'only forty-six minutes before the first plane crashed
into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.' Surely that clinches
the point, and also makes a point about the precariousness of happiness,
and the fact that you therefore have to grab it while you can.
They seemed to feel they couldn't argue with this, but they were
still unsatisfied by the book. John suggested that maybe Auster
had been commissioned to write a 9/11 book, as most prominent American
writers probably had, and that that explained what he suggested
was a tacked-on 9/11 ending. Others however now said that the ending
had in fact been signalled, mainly with references to dates and
the political background of the time, 'the right-wing takeover of
America' and the election of Bush. I said I thought the book was
a conscious and deliberate reminder of the innocence and optimism
of the pre-9/11 world and its contrast with our fearful and suspicious
post-9/11 world, and above all a reminder of what we had lost in
terms of our humanity and generosity towards others. Ann said that
what made the book a 9/11 book was indeed the fact that it was about
tolerance, the tolerance that characterises Nathan and Tom with
their acceptance of everyone and their foibles, and the melting-pot
setting of Brooklyn.
Clare and I agreed at this juncture that this sense of generosity
and acceptance was the thing we really liked about the book, and
new member Chris felt the same. But Trevor now said he didn't buy
it. There was an inconsistency, he said: right at the start Nathan
admits to being a curmudgeonly old sod, and it simply doesn't fit
with the way he turns out to be so generous and humane. I said that
that was one of the book's jokes - right at the start Nathan is
being an unreliable narrator, indeed he is making fun of himself,
and the humour of the book was another thing I really liked about
it. Chris had already commented appreciatively on the verbal humour
- he particularly liked Harry's instruction 'Keep your nose job
out' - and Doug nodded in agreement. However, Trevor was unconvinced,
and Jenny now said that though she had liked the book she hadn't
found it funny.
Mark, who had been quiet so far, now spoke up. He said that he hadn't
appreciated the humour, either. He found a joke of Tom's - Tom calls
greasy cheeseburgers 'cheesy greaseburgers', if I recall correctly
- simply puerile, rather than, as I do, amusing and heart-lifting
evidence of Tom's ability to move from gloomy academically-couched
existential angst to simple life-affirming humour. In fact, Mark,
said, he hadn't liked the book at all. He said he had to admit that
this was largely because as an admirer of Auster's previous style,
he was disappointed by the change, but also he thought it sentimental.
He didn't, as most of us did, find the book touching. He didn't
think the nine-year-old niece's mutism credible - though he also
announced that he hadn't found the book worth finishing, so he would
have missed the explanation provided at the end. He said he strongly
agreed with John's suggestion that this book had been written cynically
to commission as a 9/11 book and had failed.
At this things got heated, with everyone talking over everyone else,
and Doug and I found it quite hilarious that Mark, a fatherly primary
school teacher with young children of his own, was sitting there
being such a curmudgeon, and in effect doing a pretty good impression
of Nathan.
This whole discussion was altogether far more unruly than my account
has rendered it, and when at the end someone asked new member Chris
what he had thought of the group, he said, in a phrase Tom and Nathan
would have appreciated: 'It's like a honky-tonk lagoon!'
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