Kevin Power's Blog, page 8

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

My review of Haruki Murakami’s new novel (Harvill Secker) appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. Here’s a short excerpt:

If Killing Commendatore is anything to go by, the faults of Murakami’s work are largely indissoluble from its virtues. Sure, his books are ludicrously padded: the English translation of Killing Commendatore (by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen) weighs in at 674 pages, and rare is the paragraph that couldn’t be purged of flab. Sure, his plots feel improvised: oh, look! The strange man who lives across the valley has a hidden story of thwarted love! Now they’re digging up a well to find the source of a mysterious ringing sound! And sure, he really, really likes describing women with small breasts (in the new book, this gets particularly odd: the unnamed narrator is attracted to small-breasted women because they remind him of his dead sister).

But most of these things are, somehow, of a piece with Murakami’s tremendous gifts as a storyteller. Padded writing, of the sort that Murakami indulges in, is easy to read (half a page about the narrator buying a used Toyota slips by almost without you noticing – all you have to do is skim the words and think, “buys car”). His plots may feel improvised, but they drag you along – especially because, at any moment, the general weirdness seems poised to turn truly crazy. And as for the recurrence of small-breasted women characters – well, it does have the unfortunate effect of making Murakami look like a bit of a perv. You can’t win them all.

Interview with Dermot Bolger

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I interviewed Dermot Bolger for the Sunday Business Post Magazine, and the piece appears today. The occasion is the arrival of Bolger’s new novel, An Ark of Light (New Island). Here’s a short excerpt from the interview:

In 1977, Dermot Bolger was a young poet in need of friendship and recognition. His mother had died of a cerebral haemorrhage when he was 10. His father, a merchant seaman, was often away in long voyages. Alone in his family’s house in Finglas, Bolger stayed awake until the small hours, banging out poems on a manual typewriter, using carbon paper when he couldn’t afford a fresh ribbon. He was 18 and unemployed. A literary career seemed scarcely possible.

Then a letter from a stranger arrived, inviting Bolger to stay the night in a caravan parked outside the village of Turlough, in Co. Mayo. The sender had seen Bolger’s name in the Irish Press. Packing up his poems, Bolger hitchhiked to Mayo and found his way to the caravan (which was known, he later learned, as the Ark). It was the home of Sheila Fitzgerald, who would become one of the most important figures in Bolger’s life. “How marvellous you’re here!” Sheila cried, as she opened the door. “Isn’t life exciting?”

Masterpieces

“All books ought to be masterpieces. The author may choose his genre, his subject, his characters, and everything else, but his book ought to be a masterpiece (major or minor) and failing that, it ought to be good, and failing that, it at least ought to show some sign that it was written by a human being.” -Joanna Russ, The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (2007).

Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart

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My review of Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Lake Success (Hamish Hamilton), appears in this month’s issue of Literary Review. Paywalled, I’m afraid, but here’s a short excerpt:

Lake Success is located very precisely in time. The action takes place during the last six months before the Presidential election of 2016. In other words, the America through which Barry spirals is the America of Donald Trump: a nation at the end of its tether. A note at the end informs us that this was also the period during which the novel was written. In his Acknowledgements, Shteyngart thanks Greyhound “for spiriting me from one coast of our troubled land to the other with a strange, almost melancholy competence.” So, Shteyngart has done his due diligence: he has travelled across Donald Trump’s America, and Lake Successis, in a sense, his report on that experience.

You might expect such a trip to give rise to a deeply pessimistic book – after all, Shteyngart (a Jewish Russian immigrant who teaches writing at Columbia) unquestionably represents the liberal elites for whom Trump’s supporters display such open contempt – and there are, indeed, several vividly conjured encounters with pro-Trump southerners that have the unmistakable tang of reportage. 

The Peripheral by William Gibson

This review first appeared in The Sunday Business Post in February 2015.

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Critics who don’t read much science fiction tend to call successful science fiction writers “prophets” – as if science fiction were a set of Tarot cards, or as if J.G. Ballard (say) were seriously warning us that the planet might one day turn into a giant maze of crystals. But SF has never been about prediction. Kingsley Amis came closest to articulating SF’s true purpose when he called his 1961 study of the genre New Maps of Hell.  SF, at its best, is the visionary literature of our time, charting the infernos that we have already made. Set alongside the retrograde medievalism of contemporary fantasy, SF starts to look like the most grown-up of popular genres.

If this is so, it’s largely thanks to William Gibson.  Gibson, of course, began as a science fiction writer – maybe the most important science fiction writer of the 1980s. He minted new words (“cyberspace,” “microsoft”) that sounded like they’d been around forever. More vitally, with his very first novel, Neuromancer (1984), he minted – or consolidated – a brand-new style: a noirish high-tech vision of the very near future. Critics at the time called it cyberpunk, a word that now comes wrapped in its own nimbus of fuzzy nostalgia. Cyberpunk mapped a very 1980s Hell, all matte-black hardware and corporate malfeasance. It didn’t seem like where we were going; it seemed like where we already were.

It was a high point. For much of the 1990s, Gibson seemed to be marking time. But with the advent of the new century his focus shifted: the SF Hell he was interested in charting now looked almost exactly like the contemporary world. The Blue Ant Trilogy – Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010) – gave us a new Gibson: mainstream heir to Pynchon and DeLillo, tech-savvy tracer of the shimmering horizons of our mediated globe.

Fredric Jameson has pointed out that in a postmodern age (evacuated of meaning, lacking in affect, deprived of motive), we can experience the world only as a series of self-conscious postures or styles. The Blue Ant Trilogy embodies this apercu with eerie grace: in these novels everything – character, setting, plot, theme, imagery – boils down to an encounter with style. Gibson’s protagonists are hyperalert to the material circumstances of their alienated worlds: they clock the matte-black limousines, the microfiber jackets, the bleeding edge computer tech. They observe things like “polymers” (in Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard notices that an empty refrigerator smells of “long-chain monomers”). They drift through Gibson’s weirdly suspenseless narratives like freelance style journalists (Hollis Henry, in Spook Country, is literally a freelance style journalist), taking the temperature of the contemporary, never seriously threatened by the buoyantly Pynchonian conspiracies in which they find themselves enmeshed.

Now, with The Peripheral, Gibson has returned to full-fledged science fiction. The new novel is set unequivocally in the future – in two futures, to be precise. For hardcore Gibson fanboys, this will be an exciting prospect. For the general reader, however, it will probably feel like a large step backwards.

The plot of The Peripheral is complicated without being particularly involving. There are two time zones: Near Future and Slightly Farther Future. In the Near Future, dropout Flynne Fisher’s army vet brother Burton beta-tests virtual reality games for shady operators. As the novel begins, Flynne finds herself covering for Burton. Piloting a drone in what she takes to be a boringly realistic game, she is drawn into an assassination. Meanwhile, in the Slightly Farther Future, international spook Wilf Netherton finds himself investigating, via an internet connection to the past, the assassination Flynne committed in what was (of course) not a virtual reality game. Got that? Me neither; and after 486 pages, I was scarcely the wiser.

At his best (as in the Blue Ant novels), Gibson’s pages audition image after fugitive image of our money-glazed, post-everything century. At his worst – as in The Peripheral – his sentences stumble over their own too-cool-for-school feet. “They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him.” “Netherton was fully as annoyed with the bohemian nonsense of Ash’s workspace as he would have expected to be.”

Gibson’s vaunted stylishness has always been a matter of carefully managed ellipsis: the know-it-all asides, the tough-guy imagist poetry. In the early novels this could engender moments of epigrammatic richness (Neuromancer: “In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it”). But in The Peripheral Gibson’s obliquity has become an obstacle to readerly pleasure. The prose is chequered with neologisms (“klept,” “polt,” “moby,” “patchers”) and obscurities (“haptics,” “thylacine”), and the syntax is riddled with needless conditionals. Simply put, it’s often hard to tell what’s going on. Worse, it’s even harder to care. The vision that gave rise to Gibson’s style has gone AWOL, leaving only the style behind – a very Gibsonian predicament.

I Will be Complete by Glen David Gold

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My review of Glen David Gold’s memoir, I Will be Complete (Sceptre), appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. This is, incidentally, my 300th published book review, which may or may not be a significant milestone, depending on how you look at things. Here’s an excerpt:

Most memoirs aren’t written in the epic mode, because life mostly isn’t an epic business. But Glen David Gold has written a memoir that feels as big as an epic. Partly this is a function of sheer size: I Will be Complete is, at 477 pages, a monster. But the epic feel of Gold’s book is also down to the fact that it’s the record of an obsession – the story of Gold’s lifelong attempt to understand his mother, who is also a sort of monster.

The first thing to say about I Will be Complete is that it’s a brave book. “I tell myself,” Gold writes, “that if what I say here is true, I will be complete.” If that sentence gives off more than a whiff of the analyst’s couch, that’s because Gold’s book is at least as much an act of self-therapy as it is a work of art. Driven by an instiable hunger for understanding, Gold pounds away at his subjects – his own misery, and the misery of his mother – with unrelieved intensity. Reading I Will be Complete often feels like paging through Gold’s diary, or eavesdropping on his conversations with his therapist – and this is, at points, literally what we’re doing.

Writing Advice

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This article, by Richard Skinner, seems to me so exhaustively wrong – and so essentially representative in its wrongness of the kind of bullshit that gets offered all the time as “writing advice” – that I though it was worth doing a brief point-by-point refutation, to wit:

“Writing is about claiming ownership of yourself in order to become the person you know you can be.”

Nope. Writing is a set of technical skills that it takes a very long time to master. We do not ask of people learning to play the piano that they must first “claim ownership of themselves.” We just tell them to practice until they get good.

“A novel is making your mark on the world. It is your cri de coeur.”

No it bloody well isn’t. A novel is a made object designed to evoke certain responses in the people who read it. If it does not evoke the responses you intended it to evoke, your novel is, I would suggest, a bad novel. To the extent that your novel is a cri de coeur, it is, I would suggest, of use only to you.

“Good writing isn’t about describing the world around you, it’s about creating something out of nothing.”

Or: good writing is almost entirely about describing the world around you, as in the works of, say, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Wharton, Faulkner, Bellow, Nabokov, and all other good writing ever written by anyone. You create something out of nothing every time you write your name on a cheque, for Christ’s sake.

“[W]riting your first novel is a very precious process.”

No again. Writing is a job. If you need your special fluffy pillow and absolute peace and quiet to write, you are being unprofessional. Don’t be precious. They’re just words.

“Try to write from your stomach, not your head or heart.”

This means: write from your feelings. This is exactly backwards. Your job, as a writer, is to think about the precise technical moves that will evoke the desired emotional or intellectual responses in your readers. Writing is about technique, not getting your emotions all over the page. Writers who shove their own emotions in your face are not artists but manipulators, and should be scorned.

“Your task isn’t to learn many techniques, but to learn the simplest techniques perfectly.”

Jesus. The body of existing literature – with which you should spend your entire life becoming familiar – is a repository of technique. You should learn as many aspects of fictional technique as you can, from the simplest to the most complex. I.e. you should know where to put a comma, and you should know how to create an unreliable narrator. Imagine saying to a pianist: “Your task isn’t to learn how to play Chopin, but to get really good at “Chopsticks.””

“I believe that all the novels you want to write are already written. They already exist inside you in a preverbal, rhythmic, motor place in your body. The trick is to find a way of tapping into them.”

This “trick” exists and is called technique.

The prevalence of articles like this one has to do, I think, with the popularisation of Romantic ideas about writing, cf. Keats’s “Poetry should come as naturally as leaves to a tree or it had better not come at all,” or Kerouac’s philistine “First thought, best thought.” We seem to have decided that writing is about self-knowledge or self-expression. But these are very minor and ancillary benefits of writing. Of course, this is the age of the self-as-project – the age of “wellness” and workouts, of TED talks and snake-oil detoxes. It’s probably inevitable that writing – which looks, after all, like the sort of thing that anyone can do – should be taken up by the self-improvement industry. It tells you everything you need to know that Skinner’s article appears under the Health & Fitness tab of the Guardian website, and is labelled “Self and wellbeing.” Writing shouldn’t be about either. But here we are.

Hope Never Dies by Andrew Shaffer

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My review of Andrew Shaffer’s Hope Never Dies: An Obama-Biden Mystery appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

As a cultural artefact, Shaffer’s book is slightly more interesting. The current President of the United States is unashamedly corrupt, incompetent, bellicose, illiterate, and crass. It is hardly surprising that America should start telling itself comforting stories about his predecessor, who was none of these things. Hope Never Dies gives us a superhero Barack Obama, working behind the scenes for justice. It’s a nice thought. But it is, alas, just a thought.

The real Obama popped up recently to deliver a speech on the centenary of Nelson Mandela’s birth. It sounded like an ode to democracy. But it was really a confession of bewilderment. The real Obama isn’t going to saunter in with a sawn-off shotgun and set the world to rights. The only thing animating Hope Never Diesis the heartbreaking hope that he might.

The Artist as Critic

“Though art is one of civilisation’s chief defenses, the hammer that tries to keep the trolls in their place, and though artists are by nature makers, not destroyers, the artist ought not to be too civilised – that is to say, too meekly tolerant – especially toward other artists, who may be trolls in disguise. The artist’s trade is essentially an unreasonable one, though he may reason about it. However reasonably he may talk, if the artist believes in what he’s doing he cannot help but feel strongly, at least some of the time, about what he believes to be fraudulent art. If he can stand to do so, he should speak out, especially now, when so much art is fake. He should defend – with dignity but as belligerently as necessary – the artists whose work he values and attack with equal belligerence all that he hates.” – John Gardner, On Moral Fiction (1978).

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

My review of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, Warlight (Jonathan Cape), appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

The world is full of bad writers: ideologues, cliché-merchants, axe-grinders. It therefore feels churlish to complain about the work of Michael Ondaatje, who writes lushly romantic historical tragedies in sober prose and who is not an ideologue, or a cliché-merchant, or an axe-grinder. But there’s  something mysteriously lifeless about Ondaatje’s novels. Like Laura Ashley curtains, they gratify a snobbish taste without taking any aesthetic risks. His books are so finely ground that they slip through the fingers like sand. […] Here is Ondaatje on a bit-part character: “I knew, as very few probably did, that under his white shirt were three or four deep scars on his stomach, a bevelled permanence on his white skin.” This sort of writing looks poetic, but isn’t. “Bevelled permanence” is a fancy phrase. But it doesn’t show us these particular scars, or the specific person who bears them. Instead, it shows us Ondaatje’s facility with ten-dollar words. And if we do peer beneath the poeticism, we find not a character but a cliché: the unassuming functionary who had a bad war but never talks about it.