Christopher's Top Ten of 2024!

Famously, a year has 525,600 minutes, but you hardly ever count them up as you go. Reading a lot, and keeping track of what you read, has a way of bringing time into measurement in a way that's sobering. I read 115 books this year. If I wanted to, I could count out the number of books I might have left to read, if I'm able to keep up this particular clip, and if I am blessed to live an average life. I don't think I want to do that just now. But as large the number 115 might seem--and it is a lot, more than I've ever been able to read in a year before--it seems to me quite a paltry measurement to capture a whole year of life. Perhaps this is just another way that reading good literature forces one to confront the limitations that life imposes.

Maybe I'm in a morbid mood this New Year's season, or maybe just a contemplative one. Let me be more celebratory. I read some really wonderful books this year, and as always, going back over them for this list allowed me to appreciate them anew. Few people read these reviews, I know, but they do so much for me, both in the writing and in the revisiting, when I get to, in some sense, read them a second time. (I always think that you can't really judge a book's greatness immediately after finishing it; the really great ones have a way of living on in memory.) 

This year, I read 58 books by women and 57 books by men. I read books from twelve new countries: Malaysia, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Guyana, Egypt, Bulgaria, Palestine, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Cote d'Ivoire, and Greenland. I got to visit with some old favorites, like Vollmann and Munro, Greene and Green, Joy Williams and Patrick White. I reread a few books that are dear to me, by Spark, Welty, and Cather. You know what they say, some books are silver and some are gold, etc., etc. Here's what I really loved this year.

Honorable Mentions:

Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick
Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson
S. S. Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Rabbit Boss by Thomas Sanchez
Minor Detail by Adani Shibli
Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker
The Heartsong of Charging Elk by James Welch

Top Ten:

10. Blu's Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka - Yamanaka's Moloka'i is a side of Hawaii not seen by tourists: a run-down jungle of rusting scrap and stray cats, where children live on the knife-edge of poverty, hunger, and exploitation. The story promises cloying heartwarmishness--young Ivah is forced to act as a mother for her little brother, Blu, after the death of her mother--but sex and death here are real, and the childish fantasies of young Blu, who nearly hangs himself imitating what he's seen in TV westerns, are just as dangerous. I was really moved by the way, with a late reveal, Yamanaka links the hardship and resilience of Blu's family to the island's longtime use as a colony to isolate those who suffer from leprosy. When I went to Hawaii in July, I often felt that it was hard to see the real place behind the false images for sale in the gift shops. But you can see that Blu's Hanging captures the real Hawaii, because only a real place could be so full of life.

9. Divorcing by Susan Taubes - Ever read a novel narrated by a dead woman? A few pages into Divorcing, the narrator, Sophie Blind, is hit by a car, and she narrates the rest of the novel inside her coffin. It's the kind of authorial move that makes you sit up and pay attention. And you do need to pay attention, because Taubes is taking you on a kind of modernist amusement park ride, through various loops and falls. What's more, you have to do the whole thing backwards: Memento-like, Divorcing moves backward in time through Sophie's divorce and marriage back to the psychotherapeutic sessions of her childhood with her therapist father. By the time you realize the book is mimicking the shape of psychotherapy by plumbing the deaths of Sophie's past, regressing to the infant state, you've forgotten it's already too late for her life to change--she's already dead.

8. The Dog of the South by Charles Portis - It's as great as they say. More importantly, it's as funny as they say. The Dog of the South is a road novel with no destination, a shaggy dog novel that's all shag and no dog. On the surface, it's about Ray's journey through Mexico to Belize to find his wife, who's run off with the no-good Dupree, as well as his car and his credit cards. But The Dog of the South is really about what happens between the stops: the clowns, the broken-down bus, the Belizean child grifters, the self-help pamphlets. The Dog of the South never gets to the point, it's all distraction and digression, but maybe that's what life is, anyway: one long, entertaining digression on the way to the same place everyone else is going.

7. Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu - Of all the books I read this year, the image that will probably stick with me the most is the narrator of Solenoid becoming a Jesus figure to the world of the mites: communicating through stomach waves and spells, crucified in a way that only a mite could be crucified, trying to reproduce Christ's message of love and redemption in a world that is utter alien to us. It's a freshened version of an old thought, that we can analogize God's difference from us by contemplating our own difference from that of the world's lowliest creatures. But never before has the thought experiment felt so poignant as it does here, and somehow this strange digression becomes part of a larger whole with the rest of Solenoid's batshit images: the giant robot that stomps people, the boat-shaped house where you sleep while floating in the air, the man who takes a hammer to his own teeth. Solenoid is a phantasmagoria of a size and scope I've never encountered before, and yet its ultimate vision of mankind railing fruitlessly against the strictures of existence is filed down, like a point, into the simplest phrase: Help! Help! Help!

6. In the Eye of the Wild by Natassja Martin - In 2015, Natassja Martin was attacked by a bear in Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, losing a piece of her jaw and much of her face. To the Indigenous people she studies, this makes her a medka--a kind of bear in human form. In the Eye of the Wild suggests that this is not merely a piece of local superstition, but that Martin left with the piece of the bear in her just as the bear quite literally walked away with a hunk of her jaw. In the Eye of the Wild is non-fiction, memoir, but these words pale against the experience, and there is the suggestion that their methods cannot encompass what has happened, nor can the kind of anthropological writing that is Martin's professional arena. What Martin writes is much more like poetry, in the oldest sense of the word, something primal and pre-literary. Such an encounter demands new language, even as it eludes language perforce. This is a book that understands when barriers are broken down--between animal and man, between fact and myth--blood comes out.

5. Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann - This book made me think about the purpose San Francisco serves in our national conversation about drugs, homelessness, and crime. You always hear people with nefarious agendas talking about San Francisco as a city ruined by liberal policies, but the focus of these harangues--the Tenderloin District--has always been a containment zone for those sifted out of respectable society. Whores for Gloria comes out of the experience Vollmann had "embedded" with the prostitutes of the Tenderloin in the 80's, and it's a moving portrait of a place where passions, even love, have not yet been killed. The protagonist, Jimmy, is a torched-out Vietnam vet who channels all of his ardor for the various prostitutes, both cis and trans, into an imaginary love named Gloria. He borrows their personalities, their stories, and even their hair, fashioning it into an ideal that can not disappoint or fail; the way Gloria becomes an avatar for all the dream-loves we'll never acquire--because they are dreams--is among the most moving things in all of Vollmann's fiction.

4. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson - The five stories in The Largesse of the Sea Maiden seem to speak from beyond the grave. At times, I felt sure that Johnson, when writing them, knew that he would not live to see them published; in the nested stories of dying men in "Triumph Over the Grave" (such a bitter title) there is a sense that we are venturing into the writer's own death-consciousness, which is underlined with a final line that stopped me cold and made tears come to my eyes. There are other, showier stories here, like "Doppelganger, Poltergeist," which manages to be both and Elvis story and a 9/11 story, but "Triumph" is the one that I've carried with me. I'll carry with me, too, the wildly optimistic sentiment of the title story, which ends with the narrator leaving his house to hunt down the magic of a fairytale. That, too, was Johnson's bread and butter--the misery, but also the magic.

3. White by Marie Darrieussecq - OK, here are the top three, any of which I think might justifiably take the top spot. Ever year has its discoveries, and I hope that Darrieussecq will be this year's--though I think you can't really say until you read at least a second book by any particular author. I loved the strangeness of White, a strangeness that begins with the concept--a pair of loners fall in love at a remote Antarctic science station--and reaches down to the sentences themselves, the very words. I have a thing for the Arctic/Antarctic, and Darrieussecq is one of the few who captures something fundamental about the blankness, whiteness, of these landscapes, that quality that makes them both frightening and alluring. Did I mention it's a science fiction book, set at the same moment as man's first arrival on Mars? Did I mention it's narrated by ghosts? Being so balls-to-the-wall ambitious is a virtue on its own, but here it works, because it all adds up to a book that is about wrenching meaning from mystery--and from abject failure. No joke, I can't wait for next year because I can't to see if Darrieussecq's other books live up to this one.

2. The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras - Duras was my "discovery" of a couple years ago. I loved The Lover, and then I was underwhelmed by L'Amante Anglaise. I can't even really explain why The Sea Wall hit me so squarely. Maybe it's because it's something I didn't really expect a Duras book to be: it's funny. It follows a French colonial family whose poor luck and poor planning--the failure of the titular sea wall, which inundates the meager crops--lowers them to the level of the indignities suffered on a daily basis by the (much more resilient) Vietnamese locals. Duras wrings great humor and great drama out of this, a French colonial who thinks they ought to deserve better, and whose catastrophism infects their entirely family: the cynical, feral son; the beautiful, teasing, farmer's daughter-type daughter. There's nothing better than a comic novel that is just the right amount of mean-spirited. And this on eof the best I've ever read.

1. Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon - I think this is the first time ever my #1 book of the year has not been a book of fiction. William Least Heat-Moon's travelogue, Blue Highways, scratched a very specific itch I'd been having for a long time. For a long time, I had yearned for a travelogue written with a fiction writer's spirit, by someone who understands something of the magic of the traveling, a magic that is not merely the accumulation of abiding knowledge or the happenstance of the random moment, but which lies somewhere between, at the intersection of these. Perhaps it affected me strongly in part because the kind of journey Heat-Moon took in 1978 is no longer sensible, if perhaps not even possible: sticking to the "blue roads" on the map, avoiding highways in exchange for discovering the tiny, unseen places where visitors don't go. Can you even do such a thing, in the age of Google Maps? Or perhaps it's that Heat-Moon knows that traveling is not just about a line on the map, or a landscape, but about people: few writers, fictional or non-fictional, are so adept at capturing the small details that bring a person to life. I loved seeing the American landscape anew through Heat-Moon's eyes. And I will forever live with this image: Heat-Moon, coming upon a reservoir that has covered the grave of a long-ago relative, bending down to drink: "In my splashing, I broke the starlight. And then I too drank from the grave."

Happy new year, everybody. Time to turn the page.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov

I have endeavoured to form a coherent picture of what I saw of my half-brother in those childhood days of mine, between say 1910 (my first year of consciousness) and 1919 (the year he left for England). But the task eludes me. Sebastian's image does not appear as part of my boyhood, thus subject to endless selection and development, nor does it appear as a succession of familiar visions, but it comes to me in a few bright patches, as if he were not a constant member of our family, but some erratic visitor passing across a lighted room and then for a long interval fading into the night.

Sebastian Knight, the critically acclaimed but aloof writer, has died. His brother, the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, dreams of writing a biography of Sebastian, one that will counterbalance a recently published hatchet job by his former agent full of falsehoods and misinterpretations. The problem is that the two brothers have never been close; they are only half-brothers, sharing the same father--killed in a duel defending his first wife, Sebastian's mother, while married to the second--and as they grew up they rarely saw each other. The narrator becomes especially fixated on recovering a blank period of Sebastian's life while he was at a Swiss sanitarium, where he seems to have met a mysterious woman whose identity the narrator struggles to reveal.

Sebastian Knight is awfully straightforward for a Nabokov novel. Seeing that Sebastian's spurned lover is named Clare Bishop, I considered for a second the possibility that we're supposed to read the whole novel as a kind of allegory for a game of chess: pawn to queen four, and all that. But I think, in the end, it's only a little joke, the kind of situational rhyming that Nabokov loved so much. Rather, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight struck me as a surprisingly realistic attempt at dealing with the modernist themes of writing and fashioning that made up so much of Nabokov's career. That is to say that the problem that confronts the narrator, V.--whether a true life can be cobbled together out of written words, or if writing itself is actually primarily and by its nature made up of gaps, misprisions--is one that confronted Nabokov, too, but it seems to confront him here less than it does his narrator.

It must be observed that this was Nabokov's first book written originally in English. The confidence of his style is already here, fully formed; that he could become one of the 20th century's leading stylists in two different languages is a marvel so fully explored it hardly seems worth mentioning. But it interested me that Nabokov made his writer-protagonist a native Russian who becomes an English language writer. Sebastian's novels sound like Nabokov's novels, though I think there are moments where Nabokov cheekily has V. (Vladimir?) outshine the passages quoted from Sebastian. Sebastian's letters were burned after his death (shades here of Nabokov's own unheeded demand that his unfinished novel be burned), so V. must turn to the novels for an indication of Sebastian's experiences and feelings. He claims that Sebastian had an uncanny ability to write his own feelings into his characters, even critically: "The light of personal truth is hard to perceive in the shimmer of an imaginary nature, but what is still harder to understand is the amazing fact that a man writing of things which he really felt at the time of writing, could have had the power to create simultaneously--and out of the very things which distressed his mind--a fictitious and faintly absurd character." Is this Nabokov writing about Nabokov writing about Nabokov?

V. eventually identifies a woman named Helene as Sebastian's likely lover. Calling on her, he finds her out, but her friend, Nina Lecerf, promises to arrange an audience between them, and in the meantime spills all she knows about the stormy relationship between Sebastian and Helene. It's only later, in the wake of his own confused attraction to Nina, that V. realizes that Nina really is Helene; everything she has been divulging has been from behind the safer veil of another identity. It's possible, the ending of the book suggests, that V. really "is" Sebastian in the same way that Nina really is Helene. Although The Real Life of Sebastian Knight isn't the most accomplished of Nabokov's books, Nina is one of the small characters and moments I'll remember, like the kindly German private eye who refuses payment, or the moment when, having rushed to his brother's sickbed, he accidentally spends the night outside the wrong man's room, Sebastian having died the day before. Perhaps he is Sebastian, too, this man, Nabokov suggests: "any soul may be yours," V. writes, "if you find it and follow its undulations."

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

They talk about their futures. John says that he wants to do something important, something with weight and consequence, something that will leave a mark. Asia can have no such hopes, but she is excited to think that someone might read the book about father. In her own small way, she wishes to add esteem to the Booth name. John is not so interest in that. "No," he says, "I want to be known for something more than simply being father's son."

You know, when you think about it, the fact that John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln is pretty crazy. It's like if Luke Hemsworth, or maybe Stephen Baldwin, killed Joe Biden: the lesser-known scion of a great acting family. Credit where credit is due, Booth's actions did the unthinkable, in that they were so momentous that they entirely eclipsed one of the most famous family names in all of America. Although many might be able to tell you that Booth was an actor, few might be able to remember that his father, Junius Booth, was one of the most famous actors of his generation, and that his brother Edwin, following in Junius' footsteps, is considered one of the country's greatest stage actors of all time. John Wilkes Booth was an actor, but not, we're told, anything like his brother. Yet it's John we all remember.

Karen Joy Fowler's book Booth starts from a simple observation: though the assassination of Abraham Lincoln has hidden the Booth family from the sight of history, they were all pretty interesting in their own right. Booth tells the story of the Booth family from its early days until just after the assassination; John, though lurking darkly throughout the book, can't be said to be the novel's center. I had never heard the story that dominates the early part of the novel, about how Junius Booth turned out to be a bigamist, living in America with what turned out to be his second family, while a wife and son still wait for him in England. Fowler's version of Junius Booth is a true actor, a drunk and a rapscallion whose antics put his family constantly on edge. Edwin inherits all his talent, but it seems to be John that inherits his instability, his megalomania, and his flair for the dramatic. The story of the bigamy--which ends with the legitimate British son wresting much of Junius' property away from Edwin, John, and their siblings--also calls into question what gets passed down, and to whom. Edwin, John, and their actor brother June all want to step into their father's shoes, though they are each in their own way to imitate him.

There are a pair of sisters, too, the beautiful and ambitious Asia, and Rosalie, whose sickly and malformed physical nature keep her more or less at home. Asia seems like the most normal of the siblings, seeking middle-class stability while her brothers live the peripatetic and inconsistent lives of actors. But the times in which the Booths lived are not normal times, and the steady march toward the Civil War is always present. Interestingly, Fowler makes much of the fact that the Booths were a Maryland family, right on the border of the conflict, and so it makes sense somehow that while the more respectable siblings are supporters of the Union cause, the unstable John becomes an ardent defender of the confederacy.

Booth has that flaw that most historical fiction has, a dedication to the truth. The story of the Booth family is complicated and strange, and I enjoyed reading about it, but I couldn't always shake the feeling that I was reading thinly-disguised non-fiction, which might have served the material better. Yet, I also would say that, despite a kind of book clubbish present tense that got on my nerves, Fowler is better at pulling out the threads of history than many who do similar things, and effectively manages to write those threads into a convincing "arc" for each of the Booth siblings. Mostly, the impression I was left with was foreboding. In this John Wilkes Booth--his cynicism, his machismo, his delusion, his yearning for a greatness that we see outpaces both his skill and his understanding--I see a familiar avatar for our own political landscape. I think there are many out there who would like to take history into their own hands, and like Booth, some of them may just succeed.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre by William Shakespeare

PERICLES:

O Helicanus, strike me, honour'd sir;
Give me a gash, put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness. O, come hither,
Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget;
Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tarsus,
And found at sea again! O Helicanus,
Down on thy knees, thank the holy gods as loud
As thunder threatens us: this is Marina.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre is in that grab-bag of lesser Shakespeare plays, rarely performed, rarely read, except among the real Bard-heads. It's easy to see why: it's largely unsatisfying, an unfocused series of episodic melodramas that never quite seems to add up to a real play. It was one of the firt of Shakespeare's plays to be considered a collaboration (in this case, with John Fletcher), and it shows. And yet, it's easy to imagine its strangeness working on the stage, where costumes and sets might play up its oddities, and the exotic ports that the Prince of Tyre calls upon might come alive.

The story goes something like this: Pericles attempts to win the hand of a princess by solving a riddle; when he realizes that the princess is in an incestuous relationship with her father, he is forced to flee the king's vengeance. In a port of refuge, he joins a tournament for the hand of another princess, which he wins, securing the hand of the beautiful Thaisa. But when Thaisa dies in childbirth at sea, he has her tearfully buried overboard and his daughter Marina put in safekeeping with (yes, another) king Cleon. Cleon and his jealous wife try to kill Marina, but she is kidnapped by pirates and sold into a brothel, where her virtue converts her customers to chastity--much to the chagrin of her bawd. Cleon tells Pericles that Marina has died, and he gets really upset, until he finds Marina again, where she has been rescued by the local governor. Then, in a dream, Diana tells him to go to her temple, where he finds Thaisa, having been resurrected by a sorcerer and made a priestess. It's really quite a happy ending.

Pericles is among those plays that seem unclassifiable--are they a history? a tragedy? a comedy?--but to me, it clearly forms a trio with Timon of Athens and Titus Andronicus, a trio of plays that use the characters and settings of ancient literature to create a kind of elevated reality or fantasy world. When Pericles joins the contest for the hand of Thaisa, he is reminiscent of Odysseus, playing games and contests in foreign lands for favor of foreign kings. There are other similarities: the shape of Pericles is dictated by the Wheel of Fortune, the rapid rise and fall of luck and disaster, and this structure, to me, seems to share a lot with the forms of ancient literature. And of course, the happy ending--perhaps the happiest ending in all of Shakespeare's play--is reminiscent of Odysseus' return to Penelope.

One of the things I liked best about Pericles was actually the part that Shakespeare likely didn't write: the creepy opening where Pericles solves the riddle of king Antiochus's incest. Antiochus stresses to Pericles that all who have tried to solve the riddle have failed, and the punishment for failure is death. Pericles--invoking another Greek story, Oedipus and the Sphinx--is smitten and courageous enough to try anyway, but as soon as he reads it--like, instantly--he realizes that Antiochus has hidden his dirty secret inside the riddle, more or less in plain sight:

I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother's flesh which did me breed.
I sought a husband, in which labour
I found that kindness in a father:
He's father, son, and husband mild;
I mother, wife, and yet his child.
How they may be, and yet in two,
As you will live, resolve it you.

I thought this was one of the more interesting scenes in the play, the way Antiochus both reveals and does not reveal his deed. There's something here about the fragile justifications we set up around ourselves, not exactly denying what we are unable to deny, but couching it in such a way that we soothe our own conscience and hide it from others. Of course, it's all very stupid; he should have just made a riddle about something else. It also, especially in the hands of a brave director, brings unsettling layers to the recognition scene, in which Pericles and his daughter Marina have their reunion. After all, Marina has been plucked from the brothel from the governor, who came first as a customer, and is now perhaps not entirely reformed by her virtue; he offers her to the distraught Pericles because he thinks their experiences will draw them together. It's not un-erotic, is all I'm saying.

So, Pericles is not my favorite. And yet, I think if someone were to stage it, I'd go see it, and with more excitement than even some of the plays which I like better. 

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

It seemed to Shelley all at once as if the whole room should protest, as if alarm and protest should be the nature of the body. Life was too easily holy, too easily not. It could change in a moment. Life was not ever inviolate. Dabney, poor sister and bride, shed tears this morning (though belatedly) because she had broken the Fairchild night light that the aunts had given her; it seemed so unavoidable to Dabney, that was why she cried, as if she had felt it was part of her being married that this cherished little bit of other peoples' lives should be shattered now. Dabney at the moment cutting a lemon for the aunts' tea brought the tears to Shelly's eyes; could the lemon feel the knife? Perhaps it suffered; not that vague vegetable pain lost in the generality and the pain of the world, but the pain of the very moment. Yet in the room no one said "Stop." They all lay back in flowered chairs and ate busily, and with a greedy delight anticipated what was ahead for Dabney...

I felt compelled to revisit Eudora Welty this month, one of my favorite authors who has been absent from my life for some time because I have finished everything she's written. In that she joins Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, who live in the back of the mind like old friends you never see. I wanted to re-read Delta Wedding specifically because I remember it both as something incredible and as a kind of challenge, a book that drops you in a Jim Crow plantation world that's so rich, so intricately peopled, you can easily get lost. The titular wedding is between young Dabney Fairchild (of Fairchilds, Mississippi, if that tells you something) and the plantation overseer, Troy Flavin. The wedding has brought together dozens of Fairchilds and their spouses and children, who arrive at the plantation Shellmound and thicken the scene with their histories and characters.

What do I notice now, re-reading it? Well, despite the fact of the large cast and the whirlwind way that Welty jumps between points-of-view (look how effortlessly she skips from Shelley to Dabney and back again in the paragraph above--they're thinking similar things without knowing it!), there are actually only a small handful of characters whose perspective is explored in a sustained way. There's Laura, the little cousin who arrives at Shellmound having recently lost her mother; Dabney, the bride; Ellen, Dabney's mother; and for a little while, Robbie Reid, the outsider who has married George. The Fairchilds are brutal to outsiders, who have trouble penetrating the family's bonhomie. At the beginning of the book, Robbie has left George because of a convoluted scene in which he puts himself in front of a moving train to save Maureen, a mentally handicapped cousin. What Robbie really objects to, it seems, is the feeling that George would not do the same for her; that she is permanently on the outside. And yet, she's not the only one: Ellen is a Virginian who has had to bend and adapt to the ways of the Delta. And of course, there's Troy, who is of a different class than the Fairchilds, but seems too stupid to feel like an outsider. By contrast, those who are deepest inside are almost inaccessible, like the dreamy George, who is the most beloved of all the Fairchilds, or Denis, the long-dead cousin who was the most beloved before him. (The way George blends into Denis in the book is really fascinating.)

This time, I paid more attention to the Black characters of the book. Shellmound is populated by servants whose labor make the wedding possible. Many of these characters are well-drawn, and come alive through Welty's keen eye for the characters of the Mississippi world in which she grew up, characters like the loyal Partheny or Aunt Studney, who carries a sack on her back everywhere that no one knows what's inside, and whose name seems to come from her suspicious refrain: "Ain't studyin' you." But these characters are undoubtedly at the margin, and a modern reader, if they're like me, quickly becomes uncomfortable with just how marginal they really are. Is Welty as blind as her characters to this invisible labor?

There's a moment I'd forgotten about, though: Shelley comes upon Troy, in his capacity as overseer, pointing a gun at a couple of Black fieldhands. There seems to have been some kind of conflict; what it was, we never know, but we see Troy--who moments ago has been all idiot chuckling--shoot the fingers off one of them. Shelley, who is older than Dabney and has been jealous of her marrying, suddenly sees "the reason why Dabney's wedding should be prevented. Nobody could marry a man with blood on his door... But even as she saw the reason, Shelley knew it would not avail. She would jump as Troy told her, and never tell anybody, for what was going to happen was going to happen." Welty never possesses the undercurrent of rage possessed by McCullers, whose books look squarely at injustice as if to say, "Why isn't anyone doing anything about this?" But Welty is no fool, and this moment gives us, I think, a momentary glimpse into the dark machinery that keeps the charmed life of the Fairchilds going. How can we go back to the room of the flowered chairs, the wedding cake, the bridesmaids with their shepherd's crook staffs, after seeing this? Of course, like Shelley we know it's meaningless; everyone knows what happens in the fields and they choose not to see. This time around, I wondered what it meant to have someone like Troy incorporated whole into the body of the Fairchilds. Perhaps once they kept that kind of necessary violence at arm's length, but now they have brought it to their heart and embraced it.

I have a high opinion of Welty. I think she does things no one else could even attempt. There are times when reading Delta Wedding that I think she is among the two or three best writers the 20th century United States produced, and I mean that without hyperbole. Perhaps, as she recedes back into that "old friend" corner of my mind, I'll feel differently. But returning to these books leaves me with awe.

I is Another by Jon Fosse

...I go into the main room and over there on the easel I see the bad painting with the two lines that cross in the middle, no, I can't look at it, I can't even take the picture down from the easel and put it in the pile with the other paintings I'm not totally done with yet, that I'm not totally satisfied with, I just can't, I think and I look at the easel and I think that when I look at the easel now, isn't it like, the thought comes into my head, like God is looking out at me from the easel? I think, and now I just have to not go crazy, I think, because it's like God is looking at me from every single thing, I think and look around and it's like God is in everything around me, I think, and like he's looking at me from every single thing, I think and I think isn't the round table clearly saying with its silence that God is nearby? and the two chairs? and the one Ales always sat in, especially clearly, God is so clearly looking at me from that chair, I think, and I think that it's when I'm most alone, in my darkness, my loneliness, because it really is lonely, to tell the truth, and when I'm quiet as I can be, that God is closest, in his distance...

The second part of Jon Fosse's Septology picks up where the first has left off: the narrator, Asle, has dropped his friend, also named Asle, off at a hospital in Bjorgvin where his addictions are close to claiming his life. He has gone home with the other Asle's dog, to confront there the loneliness of the Christmas season without his wife Ales, who has died, and his friend Asleik, who is demanding one of Asle's best paintings this year as a gift for his sister. The stark, wintery landscape of Norway's fjords is full of memory for the narrator Asle, about Ales and about his childhood, his experience getting into Norwegian art school and leaving his family. We finally see the moment where the two Asles meet, introduced by a mutual friend, both as prospective art students. The other Asle is called here "The Namesake."

Is it sloppy reading on my part, or an essential trick on Fosse's part, that the Asle I thought he was talking about for 200 pages was the Asle in the hospital, and not himself? I think the latter, though perhaps an eagle-eyed reader might have figured it out all before. The narrator's memories come sudden and swift, introduced with a simple transition like "I see Asle..." I see Asle with his sister, who died young; I see Asle, having a panic attack over the thought of reading in class; I see Asle, moving away from his parents for the first time to pursue his dreams of art school; I see Asle, giving up on the kind of realistic paintings of Norwegian domestic landscapes that made him popular, etc., etc. And all the time I was trying to find an answer to that essential question--if these Asles are the same, even perhaps to the point of being the same person, or avatars of one another, where do they diverge? Why is one Asle a success and the other a failure? I thought I was finding it, perhaps, in the death of his sister. But with one quick movement, Fosse reminds us that this is the narrator Asle remembering his own life.

Ultimately, I don't think Septology has an idea of why people end up the way they do. On the question of nature vs. nurture, it's agnostic to the point of disinterest. It sets up for the reader a kind of fool's game, forces you to search for the differences and divergences, when really the thrust seems to be that human personality remains a kind of inexplicable mystery. The elision between the two Asles is maybe the most bravura thing about Septology, a project of great skill and subtlety that justifies and illuminates the pale featurelessness of the story and the prose.

And reading this time, I was struck by the novel's interest in grief and the possibility of the divine: the narrator Asle has painted this painting of two lines crossing, one purple, one brown, that he alternately considers the worst painting he's ever done and the best. But the painting is where God enters the scene, and in studying it--pointedly, a cross--Asle begins to see the presence of God everywhere. Perhaps, I began to think while reading I is Another, God is another name for that power of chance or providence that turns a life in one direction and another in another, just as God is the name for what takes away one's wife before her time.

Olav Audunsson: Providence by Sigrid Undset

But he couldn't escape from the childhood memories that arose--including the once secure knowledge that he and Ingunn belonged to each other and would always stay together. The very notion that something might come between them had never entered their minds, and for that reason being together had never stirred their hearts either to joy or astonishment. They had simply taken it for granted. That was how it would always be, precisely as it had been decided for them. Until the summer, that is, when, wrapped in each other's arms, they had tumbled out of their childhood and innocent state, frightened yet also giddy with joy at the new sweetness they had discovered in each other--regardless of whether it was right or wrong for them to surrender it. Even after Olav had roused himself to defy and fear everything and everyone who tried to intervene in their fate, he had been convinced that in the end they would win their case. Such memories would suddenly come upon Olav, and the pain burned like the stab of a knife.

Vows, the first book in Sigrid Undset's tetralogy about the live of Olav Audunsson, ends with Olav killing Teit, the Icelander who impregnated his wife Ingunn, and burning down the shack in which his body lay. I wrote that Olav had left his ornate ancestral axe within the shack, thinking that this would turn out to be the clue that led to Olav's downfall--but this turned out to be incorrect, as a kind reader pointed out: it was just an ordinary axe that Olav left. And I should have known better. This being Undset, author of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, I should have understood that Olav's sin would not be revealed by simple detective work, that it would gnaw at Olav's heart until he was forced to reveal it himself.

In Providence, the second book in the series, Olav finds himself trapped by this secret. He vows to expiate his guilt by bringing Eirik, the child of Ingunn and Teit, back to his manor of Hestviken and pretend that he is his biological son. This presents several problems: for one, Eirik is really annoying. He turns out to be a very fanciful and imaginative child--we are reminded of the playful, reckless Teit--who has trouble distinguishing the real from fantasy. And he talks too much. Secondly, by raising Eirik to the heir of Hestviken, he has disinherited any legitimate son he might have with Ingunn. This is, perhaps, why Ingunn goes through several miscarriages; the one time she manages to birth a son, he withers and dies quickly. Ingunn withers, too; over the course of the novel she is struck by a terrible sickness that seems to emerge from her guilt and the frailty of her soul. It takes from her her sons, and then it takes her ability to walk. Olav keeps the secret for her sake, and yet keeping the secret gives the pair no happiness or joy.

Olav Audunsson, or the first two novels at least, is a much bleaker series than even Kristin Lavransdatter, which is also about living through the consequences of the choices of one's youth. Kristin is rewarded for her unfaithfulness to her father and her fiancee with a marriage to the romantic Erlend, and though it causes her much pain, and they even separate for a time, they are both rewarded with a kind of fiery love that is shared between them. When one reads about the chilly relationship between Olav and Ingunn, how they cling to one another out of duty and obligation but without joy or affection, one wonders, what was it all worth? When--spoiler alert--Ingunn dies at the novel's conclusion, we are left with the bitter sense that all the wreckage and faithlessness of their lives has had very little in the way of recompense.

Like Kristin Lavransdatter, Olav Audunsson is in some respect an apology for the Catholic model of confession and repentance. Olav knows that he would be doing his duty to God by confessing his sins and taking the appropriate consequences, but the possibility of cleansing is closed off to him. And for good reasons--his obligations toward Ingunn and toward Eirik, who is innocent of his own making--but these are worldly reasons, and not God's, and like Kristin, Olav suffers because he is too frail to trust in God's ideas of what constitute one's highest obligations. At the end of Part II, Olav finds himself without a wife and someone else's son. In a moment of weakness, he impregnates Torhild, the steadfast handmaiden of the household, and though he provides for her and her--his--son, it's not too hard to see that the next two parts of the tetralogy may set up a conflict between these two sons, innocent both of their circumstances, and yet neither of whom quite "deserves" to become the inheritor of Olav's estate. I'm looking forward to reading those, but it'll be next December, when another cold and chilly season rolls around--perfect for Undset's Norway, but also for the the themes of suffering and contrition that are at the heart of these incredible books.

The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul

I had lived with the idea of change, had seen it as a constant, had seen a world in flux, had seen human life as a series of cycles that sometimes ran together. But philosophy failed me now. Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memoires. And this end of a cycle, and in the life of a manor, mixed up with the feeling of age which my illness was forcing on me, caused me grief.

For many years, V. S. Naipaul lived in (some kind of) caretaker's cottage on the grounds of a large manor in Salisbury, England, not far from Stonehenge. It was, as Naipaul describes it, a kind of permanence and stability after years of uncertainty and moving around; among other things The Enigma of Arrival describes in touching detail what it was like for a young man from Trinidad to move to England for the first time, a place which was represented in his imagination by the works of classic English literature, and also by the pictures of green fields dotted by dairy cows that appear on the cartons of milk children drank in Trinidad. That experience captures much of what Naipaul wrote about, the anxiety of Empire, of being unable to see either the colonized homeland or the imperial center well because one has been so trained in seeing the myths that regulate the relationship between them. Naipaul struggles, writes, moves back and forth between England, Trinidad, the U.S., and Canada. The manor in Salisbury, coming alongside literary success, gives the man an anchor in the world.

Much of what The Enigma of Arrival has to say, I think, is that such stability is essentially an illusion. The essays collected here are mostly in the pastoral mode, describing the life of the gardens, the fields, the hills, the woods of the manor and its environment. Naipaul is deeply interested in the lives of the lower- and middle-class workers who keep the manor going: caretaker Jack, the Phillipses, the gardener Pitton, the driver Bray. He learns that where he sees stability and continuity there is also change; few of these people have been at the manor any longer than he has and have little claim to its magisterial aesthetic or history. Some are sacked, some die--there is a strangely incommensurate story of an affair that leads to murder--and the sands of the manor shift beneath Naipaul. He, too, grows ill, and must face his own aging and the possible end of his life at the manor. Perhaps this is the enigma of arrival--that it keeps going on, keeps changing, that arrival as such never really comes.

I enjoyed this--Naipaul can really write. In this setting, his English inspirations are worn very openly. But I also found it difficult to penetrate the specific milieu of the English countryside he clearly loves; something about it seems too private, to personally experience, to really resonate. I liked most those images of the young Trinidadian seeing the world the first time from the air.