Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

The entire time I was reading Sag Harbor, I waited for a reason for Benji’s constant judgments. Why was I enduring such a lackluster bildungsroman? Which is what I have to call this book, a coming of age novel, because it tries so hard to be one. For as much as the narrator describes one summer that “changed” his life, not much could be observed as improvement until he gets his braces off 50 pages before the end.

Benji’s family is middle class and black. There are some wonderful references to the accomplishments of black Americans early in the story, “Booker T. came out to Sag Harbor once.” But much of that is forgotten by the time Benji and his 9 month younger brother decide to stop riding their bikes around town; the first day back in Sag Harbor Long Island. 

The premise: middle class black families with summer homes on the north shore. I could step up to my soapbox and wax racial for a minute, but this book doesn’t really deserve a long-winded review. It’s rambling enough. There are redeeming moments of realization: Benji finds a note his mother wrote itemizing the shortcomings of her husband, but these flickers of intrigue are never flushed out. It’s all about Benji trying to figure out his identity. Maybe I don’t get it because I don’t know who I am, or maybe I don’t get it because I’m white.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy.

A month or so ago, Randy posted a scathing review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and he and I (and Christopher) had a short discussion about it. You can read it in the comments for the post, but it boiled down, I think, to this: Randy felt like nothing that happened in the book was particularly interesting or significant. He felt like the events were interesting only to the extent the reader was invested in the character of Stephen Dedalus, the titular artist. I responded out of ignorance, not having read Portrait, but now, having finished it, I have to say, while I disagree with many of Randy’s conclusions, I do agree with one thing: Stephen is a difficult protagonist to really like.

The extent to which a character must be likable to be successful is variable; Ignatius Riley is an ignoble beast, but since A Confederacy of Dunces spends time pointing out his follies, he’s paradoxically easier to forgive. Stephen, on the other hand, seems to be presented as exactly the artist he believes himself to be. Reading Portrait, it’s difficult to determine the extent to which the reader is meant to like Stephen. On the one hand, it’s easy to cheer for his progression from mousy, guilt-ridden child to independent young artist; on the other, Stephen’s attitude changes from subservient and weak-kneed to almost unbearably arrogant and self-important.

Ok, so a quick summary for those who didn’t read the review linked above: Stephen Dedalus, a young man growing up in Dublin, Ireland around the turn of the 18^th century, grows up in a factitious family, headed by a once great father who now lives mostly in a whiskey-clouded past and a mother whose only identifiable characteristic is her passive love for her son. He attends Catholic school, hears a lengthy sermon about Hell, turns devout, gets cold feet when approached with the idea of the priesthood, turns agnostic, seeks to find his purpose in art rather than Catholicism, and finds it. The end.

The novel is structured around two Joycean epiphanies, mentioned above: first, Stephen’s venture into devout Catholicism, and second, his change of direction into the world of art. Portrait seems to present the second of these as the more legitimate, ending with a blissful, purposeful Stephen out to face the world with his newfound philosophy. Is Stephen a successful character? Well, that depends. Had I only read Portrait, I think I would feel that the story was unfinished and that Stephen, as a character, was a bit simple. However, having read Ulysses last year, my feelings about Artist are significantly more positive. Spoilers for Ulysses follow, such as they are.

While Ulysses doesn’t spend most of its time on Stephen, he does appear as the most important secondary character in the novel, and what we see of him shows us where his path will eventually lead. Education and art, far from being the void-filling purpose Stephen believed them to be in Portrait, have proven just as stifling as his pursuit of religion, leaving him a depressed, empty intellectual who garners little respect and still lingers in the shadow of his father. This, to me, seems rather in keeping with Stephen’s character: every epiphany satisfies, but only for a little while. There is, in Joyce’s world, no one solution to the human problem, and so there is none for Stephen’s either. End Ulysses Spoilers.

If I may leave Portrait behind for a moment, I’d like to say that, brilliant as his novels are, Joyce’s books make me feel sad. It’s sad to imagine that such a brilliant man spent his entire life trying to create art that would satisfy him, and, though he went blind and died nearly friendless in the pursuit, he, like Stephen, never achieved it. It’s hard to read Stephen as anything but a surrogate for Joyce, the artist as an old man who ended up exactly like I imagine Stephen will.

So, to return to the point: Is Stephen, and by association, Portrait, successful on its own terms? Stephen, with all of his ambiguities, is successful in portraying the sort of man he is. If the novel seems a bit empty to me, it’s only because, ultimately, it is, but in the best possible—and I think, intentional—way.

Read Nathan's much more coherent review

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

This is the third book by Haruki Murakami that I've read (the others being Kafka on the Shore and Pinball, 1973). I've noticed a positive correlation between how recently one of his books was published and how strange it is. While I prefer his more bizarre works - those that include old men who can speak cat and Colonel Sanders as a spirit guide - this was still an engaging and powerful book, and fits in perfectly on his upward trend of oddness.

Like Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood is a coming of age story, set in Japan in 1970. Toru Watanabe is an eighteen year-old, apathetic college student in Tokyo. A lot of Murakami's own passions are reflected in the character (jazz and classical music, American Literature). Slightly semi-autobiographical, the story is wrought with a series of tragic events that almost seem absurd in their regularity and predictability. Each one feels like another crushing blow to Toru Watanabe, whose broody musings can really be chilling at times.

Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white billiard balls on a table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

I lived through the following spring, at eighteen, with that knot of air in my chest, but I struggled all the while against becoming serious. Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching truth, I sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

It's a gripping, nostalgic story that left me feeling miserable. Poor Toru Watanabe is a brilliant kid whose hit with one horrible mishap after another, and left alone and floundering for anything of meaning and substance. This book is dark, at times depressing, and plenty erotic (though not as wildly or strangely erotic as Kafka on the Shore). Kafka on the Shore still stands as my favorite Murakami book, but I'd recommend this one too if you're not that into otherworldly stones or disappearing isolated mountain towns.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

There is a moment early on in David Mitchell's Black Swan Green that I found quite chilling: the protagonist, Jason Taylor, is skating alone--or so he thinks--on the frozen lake when he notices that another kid is following his orbit, staying just out of his line of sight. He calls out to the kid, but there is no answer until Jason guesses that the skater must be the ghost of Ralph Bredon, a boy who supposedly slipped through the ice and drowned years ago. "Is it cold?" Jason asks. You get used the cold, Ralph says. And then Jason asks Ralph what it is like--what it is like to be dead, one guesses--and then slam, takes a near-crippling spill on the ice.

It's a well-executed piece of near-fantasy that reminded me of the better portions of Mitchell's previous book, Cloud Atlas. But the unfortunate thing is that this episode, some twenty or thirty pages into the novel, was the high point of Black Swan Green for me, which never deigns to slip into that sort of is-it-real-or-is-it-not mysticism for the rest of its length.

It isn't that Black Swan Green is bereft of ideas; in fact, episode-by-episode Mitchell's inventiveness is frequently on display. It's impossible not to love scenes like the one in which Jason is inducted into his classmates' secret fraternity, the Spooks, by running across six backyards without getting caught, or the penultimate episode in which Jason works up the sac to crush a bully's calculator in a shop vise. But in spite of the conceit--which follows Jason for almost exactly one year--there is little cohesion to tie these episodes together. True life is messy, of course, and not at all focused, but Mitchell's richly symbolist writing works best when it's complimented by a strong sense of structure, like in Cloud Atlas. Mitchell attempts to give the novel the illusion of a plot arc by mapping Jason's experience onto the slow unraveling of his parents' marriage, but it is this facet of the book that is least interesting, the most lacking in pathos and insight.

Instead, Black Swan Green can't overcome how scattershot it is; the most interesting threads drop from the novel without warning. Some, like the introduction of a local band of gypsies, come so late in the novel that they seem shoe-horned in and lose whatever impact they might have had. The worst offender is the appearance of Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, and elderly foreigner who beings to tutor Jason after reading the poetry he's pseudonymously published in the church gazette. De Crommelynck is one of the most interesting characters from Cloud Atlas, and her presence here suggests the kind of big-picture orchestration that Cloud Atlas promised as a Mitchell hallmark. But two chapters into de Crommelynck's appearance, Jason comes to be tutored only to find her packed up and gone, deported. She's barely mentioned for the rest of the novel--so much for the epiphany, eh?

By contrast, Black Swan Green is at its best in chapters like "The Bridle Path," which follows Jason on a spur-of-the-moment journey down an old decrepit bridle path to find the legendary secret tunnel on the other side in the Malvern Hills, only to be beset on all sides by the agents of cruelty and lust. The result is Homeric in tone, as one suspects Mitchell desired of the novel as a whole, but Mitchell seems to forget that at the heart of The Odyssey is a sense of physical movement. Black Swan Green is too static, too unfocused to really succeed.

I know Brent loved this book, and I liked it too, but I thought I'd go for the dissenting voice in this case. I will say that it hasn't dampened my interest in reading Mitchell's earlier work, Ghostwritten and number9dream.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex tells the story of Cal(lie) Stephanides and his family, several generations of it. Cal is a hermaphrodite, a person with both male and female sexual characteristics, and the book traces the gene that made him what he is.

From his grandparents' unusual courtship and exodus from Greece in the wake of Turkish Invasion, to his parents' taboo pairing, I found the stories of Cal's family very interesting, and it's a good thing too, since Cal's actual story only takes up about one-third of the book's nearly 530 pages. A lot of the reviews I read complained about this, but it didn't bother me, probably partly because I knew nothing about the book before starting it except that I liked the cover and Eugenide's previous book, The Virgin Suicides.

As you might expect, there's some pretty hosed-up stuff in the book, from some horrific violence during the escape from Greece to the dryly medical explanation of Cal's condition. His first sexual encounter, the growing sense of dread that someone will eventually learn his secret, the anticipation of when Cal himself will realize he's different—all of these combine to make the book compulsively readable.

The ending is very well done and quite affecting, and I think Middlesex probably ranks as one of the best modern novels I've read this year. If you're not too bothered by disturbing imagery and you don't mind sprawling narratives, check it out.

Edit: I'm finally caught up. Take that, Nathan.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

This book is largely autobiographical, and Joyce invents Stephen Dedalus, whose name I love, to play the role of himself. The name comes from the Catholic Saint Stephen and the pagan legend Dedalus. This juxtaposition perfectly characterizes, and foreshadows, a lot of the internal struggle that Dedalus goes through in the novel. He alternatively devotes himself to and draws away from what he ultimately comes to view as the narrow-mindedness of Irish-Catholicism. Though it isn’t stream of consciousness, like I’d been told, the novel mostly follows Stephen’s internal musings (in the third person), and the occasional dialogue with another, very minor, character. Stephen is the only character that really gets any room to grow in the book, and others come and go without fanfare whenever they prove useful to some point in his development.

The story follows Dedalus from birth to age 22, usually skipping a few years between each episode. He grows up, over about 300 pages, from a schoolboy in rural Ireland to a university student in Dublin. I can relate completely to the narrative of his personal growth: he grows up Catholic, slowly rejects his beliefs, has a brief, dramatic reunion with the church, and then, once again, lets his beliefs slide away and educates himself through what he calls the snares of this world. I know what it’s like to have an estranged relationship with family over the same issues he does. I could even relate to the embarrassing pseudo-intellectualism, the secular humanism and the wanderlust that he passes through between ages 16 and 22. At some points of the book his sense of superiority and literary name-dropping turned him into a less likeable character, but he always redeemed himself with some epiphany as to the futility of whatever he was involved in. At one point he wanders along the oceanfront all night, inspired, by way of an epiphany, to re-create himself through dwelling on his namesake:

What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?

Dedalus struggles against Irish culture at a time when Irish nationalism was gaining popularity. He’s initially embarrassed by his people’s history, their language and their religion, which is another thing that he slowly comes to terms with. Joyce left a lot of pieces of the story to be filled in by the reader; a lot of important events in Stephen’s life are only vaguely alluded to in the narration of his train of thought. Also the reader is subjected to a miserable thirty pages of fire and brimstone sermon, and, later, another equally miserable thirty pages of philosophical discourse on the aesthetic. There’s a lot to dig through, but there’s also a lot to say about personal growth, and “finding yourself.” I’ll bet it spoke volumes to the Irish in the early 1900’s. I, unfortunately, cannot identify myself as such, but thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Note: I’d recommend this version (pictured at the top of this review), published by Penguin, with a black cover and a picture of Joyce, for its great introduction and tremendously helpful notes in the back. I, regrettably, bought the shittier version, and had to borrow a friend’s to find out what doing something “for a cod” meant (it does not mean doing something in order to get a fish, as I had previously assumed).