Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "english"

(Modern Library, 1994; 1st pub. 1934)

I owe my acquaintance with Isak Dinesen to Carmela Ciuraru’s Nom de Plume. This is how I found out that Dinesen is the pen name of Danish Baroness Blixen, who wrote in English and lived most of her life in Kenya (she is the author of the famous Out of Africa).

I haven’t read any other book by Dinesen, but Seven Gothic Tales is one of the most extraordinary collections of stories and novellas I have ever read. It is very rare for a writer to display such a masterful combination of skills: imagination, analytical powers and style.

Most of the stories take place in the early nineteenth-century, and are framed in the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, but their atmosphere is reminiscent of Poe, and the writer’s insights are in the best tradition of the psychological novel. Add to this Dinesen’t ability to make puns in three languages—English, French and German, and sometimes a combination of the above—plus her razor-sharp wit, and you will have an idea of her extreme originality. Even more impressive is her ability to take the stories in the most unexpected directions. Often, when we read fiction, we know more or less where the writer is going. With Dinesen it is impossible to predict how a story will end.

This review was first published in The American Book Review:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american...

Before reading Ben Miller’s River Bend Chronicle, I never thought a memoir about growing up in Iowa (I confess: I am a snob when it comes to geography!) would hold my attention for more than a few pages, never mind keep me spellbound for 457 pages. But great works of art have the magical power of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

This is not to say that the Millers are an “ordinary” family; in fact, they are as eccentric as it gets. While presenting an American family that epitomizes, through its rituals and habits, the American experience of the seventies, the author infuses the narrative fabric with a potion that elevates the ordinariness to the level of Myth—the Myth of a family that rises and falls (well, mostly falls and falls) like characters in a Greek tragedy, but without their nobility. The Millers make me think of the characters in Grant Wood’s "American Gothic," whose excessive Americanness pushes their “commonness” beyond any ordinary limits, making them veer into the grotesque. For the Millers, and in particular the Mother, who is one of the strongest literary characters I’ve come across in contemporary American literature, are grotesque. The Mother is described with a cruelty that reminds me of Céline (though the narrator’s pain and vulnerability, hidden behind his cruelty, are absent in Céline). What a woman: a feminist, a law school graduate who quotes great poets as she goes through her daily routine, who watches the most “capitalist” shows on TV (“The Price is Right”), dresses like a homeless person, treats her children to the greasiest fast-food diners in town, and shops at Target and Kmart, all the while ranting against American materialism. The Mother’s pilgrimages to various chain stores where she drinks several cups of free coffee and buys whatever is on sale make her into one of the saddest paradoxes of rebellion against what she, or any of us, could call American consumerism. What is the point of rebelling against consumerism if it turns you into the most abject beggar for its leftovers? And if it means taking your favorite offspring, Ben, to ritualistic trips to “Big Boy” for the most disgusting, high-calorie meals imaginable? The description of these trips is memorable in its morbidity:

The waist-high catacomb of the large orange booth culminating in the Plexiglas casket of the salad bar, lemon JELL-O halo and charnel bacon bits and aluminum soup kettle coated with black plastic. Husbands and wives stared at uneaten fries, unable to think of a civil word to say, or any word. […] Couple of all types, but mired in a similar swamp of surreal ordinariness.

A “surreal ordinariness”—this is the element that infuses much of the Millers’ world.

The Father, on the other hand, is closer to the image of the father many of us share: a man in a chair reading a newspaper. But he too has a darker, Millerian, side: a failed writer, author of several unpublished novels. Not only that: he is a practicing attorney, albeit an attorney with no clients and whose legal files are rotting in boxes kept outside. And this is where the narrative is hard to comprehend: both parents have law degrees and literary aspirations, but they live, and force their six children to live, like white trash in a trailer.

Of the six children, Ben is the oldest, followed by Elizabeth, Howard, Marianna, Nathan and Nanette. Elizabeth is the most ambitious, and up to a certain age the closest to her brother, with whom she makes an oath to become a writer. While Elizabeth’s ticket out of the Miller circle is her studies, Marianna uses her looks for the same purpose. She insinuates herself into the households of rich friends, spending as much time as she can away from her family, while her mother and Ben regularly attempt to “rescue” her. These “rescue” missions are tragicomic, as the Mother awaits in the car the return of the teenage son sent to talk to the hosts and convince the rebellious, prepubescent sister to return home. It is hard to come to terms with the image of the Mother reading poetry in the car, as the teenage son tries to play the adult.

Of all the images symbolizing the madness of the Millers, the junk stands out. The Millers are drowning in, and are surrounded by, junk (another irony of the Mother’s fight against materialism!), and when a neighbor asks Ben to pick up some of the litter heaped against their fence (“a dense moat of crap”), we get a glimpse of the apocalyptic landscape:

I found Pillsbury biscuits that had petrified Pompeii-style, […] the geology of a fruitcake, Totino’s pizza slices maggots considered inedible, freezer bags coated with tater tot crumbs, a Hefty bag containing the mildewed dregs from the snack mix that had been dinner for a week in April […].

The list goes on for several pages and includes, besides food and various boxes, “loads and loads of antique mail,” “three toilet seat covers,” documents from the father’s legal files, a plastic Pamper, postcards: “Can’t sit, might get buried alive by mother crap, father crap, brother crap, sister crap, uncle crap, aunt crap, grandpa crap, granny crap, and foulest of all—your own crap, reeking of ammonia and monosodium glutamate.”

Speaking of “your own crap,” the funniest anecdote in the book, a masterpiece of the tragicomic, involves shit. Again, I am reminded of Céline, whose narrator in Journey at the End of the Night, has his butt covered in crusts of dried shit. But Ben Miller is funnier. As a teenager, Ben plays the cello—though, in fact, he mostly pretends he plays—in the school orchestra. Once, he finds himself at a rehearsal in a dire situation: he absolutely needs to go to the bathroom but cannot, not only because it would mean interrupting the rehearsal, but also because in the very narrow space he would run the risk of denting some of the fine instruments around him. So he tries to “hold it:”

It was like I was going to do it, hold it, and avert. My gritted yellow teeth. My elbows pinned to my sides. My tennies braced against the linoleum. I could do it. I could hold it. But then a number of negative factors came into play […]. It happened. I dropped the Load in my corduroy pants in the practice room at Eisenhower Elementary School […]. Without so much as a stutter step, Bach blended with the waste of me and my waste with Bach’s artistry. It was turning cold and sticky and colder and stickier. I lifted my arms at wing angles to aid the drying process below the belt loops […]. It helped […]. It was my greatest performance ever […].

In this excerpt, as in many others, Ben Miller is as unsparing with himself as he is with his mother. This lack of self-pity and, more than anything, the style, which at times has Joycean echoes, make this memoir much more than a story of how to find the light at the end of the tunnel—though it is a story about light and darkness. At the beginning of the book, the way much of the darkness is conveyed is ambiguous: the Mother has the habit of caressing her favorite son, Ben, before he goes to sleep (nothing strange in that, though her stories of abduction and child abuse that accompany her caresses are a little odd); but when fourteen-year-old Ben decides to starve himself, and from a 215-pound boy he turns, in a few months, into a skeleton by eating 580 calories a day, the reader begins to suspect that the bedroom caresses might have been less innocent than initially suggested. The suspicion is confirmed at the end, where we find out that after Ben’s confrontation with his parents and a letter to his siblings, the Mother has stopped speaking to him.

Although the Mother is the most striking character in this book, the main character, besides the narrator, is probably Mr. Hickey. Mr. Hickey is the Millers’ neighbor, and nothing much can be said about him in a summary except that he was always there with a cup of tea and some cookies. And the sensitive boy who was his neighbor and who dreamed of becoming a writer needed desperately to have someone there for him. Another thing that can be said about Mr. Hickey is that he always wore a bowtie and carried a gun to protect himself from potential robbers. When Mr. Hickey died, Ben Miller inherited all his ties, and, if you do a Google search, you can see him reading in one of the (now immortal) bowties. You can look at him in his theatrical attire and speculate about the degree of irony that might (or might not) accompany his disguise. But you’ll never guess that behind that mask hides one of the best contemporary American writers.