One Of Marquez's Heirs

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

To the world, Gabriel Garcia Marquez still remains Latin America’s best-known writer, One Hundred Years of Solitude his best-known work, and magic realism his best-known style. Since that novel appeared, however, a new generation of authors has sprung up, one that has forsaken fabulist narratives but is as uncompromising in the search to tell stories that capture their region’s history.

One of the best examples is that of fellow-Colombian Juan Gabriel Vasquez. In an earlier novel, he mischievously has the narrator tell us: “This is not one of those books where the dead speak or where beautiful women ascend to the sky, or priests rise above the ground after drinking a steaming potion”. Clearly, despite the author’s stated admiration for One Hundred Years of Solitude -- one of the books that he says made him want to become an author – a new approach was necessary.

Vasquez’s recent The Sound of Things Falling, translated by Anne McLean and the third of his books to be available in English, is a perfect illustration of his concerns and technique. “No one who lives long enough can be surprised to find that their life has been moulded by distant events, by other people’s wills, with little or no participation from their own decisions,” thinks the narrator of The Sound of Things Falling, and the novelist sets out to unpack this statement in the context of his country’s recent history.

The narrator, a law professor in Bogota, tells of his encounters with one Ricardo Laverde at a billiards parlour, and of how these chance meetings lead to an event that will transform him. We learn bits and pieces of his own life – romance, marriage, fatherhood – and this deftly segues into the heart of the book, a reconstruction of the life of Ricardo himself, revealed as an aspiring, morally compromised pilot taking advantage of his country’s dubious opportunities; and of his wife Elena, an impressionable Peace Corps worker from the United States sucked into the vortex of current events. All of them fall prey to “the violence whose actors are collectives and written with capital letters: the State, the Cartel, the Army.”

A presence that pervades the novel – as it does Colombia’s recent past – is that of Pablo Escobar and the continuing havoc that his actions have wrought. To drive home the point, The Sound of Things Falling opens with an escaped hippo from Escobar’s private zoo in Hacienda Napoles, a place that the narrator and Maya, Laverde’s daughter, re-visit near the end. At one point, the latter wryly says: “We have an abnormal relationship to Bogota. Being there through the 80s will do that to you.”  Later, the narrator himself observes: “One day I’d like to find out how many of them were born as Maya and I were at the beginning of the 1970s, how many like Maya or me had a calm or protected or at least unperturbed childhood, how many traversed their teenage years and fearfully became adults while the city around them sank into fear and the sound of gunshots and bombs without anyone having declared any war, or at least not a conventional war, if such a thing exists.”

Vasquez also grounds his narrative in other historical events that have scarred his country: the 1938 aircraft accident during a ceremony to mark the founding of Bogota is one such, cross-matched by another air disaster, that of the American Airlines flight in 1995. Other temporal markers are provided by, among others, conversations about Nixon, Ho Chi Minh and the Sea of Tranquility.

In a Washington Post interview, Vasquez has said, “I realized that the fact that I didn’t understand my country was the best reason to write about it — that fiction, for me, is a way of asking questions. I think of it as the Joseph Conrad approach: You write because there’s a dark corner, and you believe that fiction is a way to shed some light.” This is exactly what he– thrillingly, arrestingly – has done in his new novel.

This Land Is Our Land

This appeared in today's Sunday Guardian.

The members of a dysfunctional family come together to celebrate an event. Old bonds are renewed, old wounds re-opened, old secrets spilled. Upon their departure, they are driven to make changes in their circumstances. Some are sadder, some wiser, some both.

That’s a familiar scenario in many novels and films, and it is this that Prajwal Parajuly employs in his debut novel, Land Where I Flee. Many of the novel’s aspects will be recognisable to readers of his earlier short story collection, The Gurkha’s Daughter: among others, the fast-changing cities of the North-East; the psyche of Nepalese immigrants in the United States, feisty domestic workers; political manoeuvring for Gorkhaland; and divisions of caste and class.

The reason for the family re-union in Gangtok is the chaurasi – or 84th birthday – of the materfamilias, the formidable textile factory owning, beedi-smoking Chitralekha. Three of her grandchildren arrive from overseas: the disgraced Bhagwati, married into a lower caste and working as a dishwasher in a Colorado diner; the tentative Agastya, a New York oncologist who has to keep his gay side hidden; and the embittered Manasa, an erstwhile financial consultant in London who spends her time caring for a paraplegic father-in-law. Their parents died in a car crash when they were young and all of them have complicated, not to mention fractious, relationships with their grandmother.

Rounding up the cast of characters is the spirited eunuch Prasanti, Chitralekha’s long-time servant-cum-confidant, and another grandson, the cocksure writer Ruthwa. He’s carrying a double burden of ignominy: his first novel laid bare secrets the family would rather have withheld, and the second gained notoriety because of charges of plagiarism. (Ruthwa’s family would no doubt have agreed with Czesław Miłosz, who once said: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”)

Most of the time, Parajuly does justice to this collection of disparate individuals as he cross-cuts between points of view, keeping the narrative moving through an artful release of information. He deftly makes them negotiate identities: those from the past, those in the present and those that are emerging. As one of them thinks, "How complicated adulthood was. It had so many dangerous curves, so many restricted areas that, if trespassed, the adults would find themselves squashed in. Had they been children, they'd have probably called each other names, fought and made up a dozen times throughout their journey to Gangtok. As adults, they could barely muster up enough courage to ask the questions that mattered.” As the novel proceeds, their interactions and arguments continue in the family house under the gaze of Mount Kanchendzonga.

The fleshing out of the character of Ruthwa, however, is disappointing given the central part he plays in bringing the narrative to a close. Some sections are his first person account, incorporating chapters and articles he’s written on the story of Prasanti as well as the Gorkhaland agitation, and these come across as inorganic, a departure from the quiet, convincing realism of the rest. His actions as a writer of repute are somewhat unpersuasive, and his departure is anti-climactic.Every once in a while, though, Parajuly has fun in sending up Ruthwa’s public image, such as the time when he thinks: “Of course you must stick to pigeonholes in your writing; otherwise, there's all that talk about inauthenticity”.

At one point in Land Where I Flee, Ruthwa thinks: “This reunion was strange, but I wasn't expecting anything different. There'd be big, uncomfortable silences, I had conjectured. There were. Awkwardness. There was. Reminiscences. There were. The revisiting of past follies and passions. There was. Vindictiveness. There was. Vindication. There was.” All of this is to be found in Parajuly’s novel as it depicts the shifting intersections between past and present,individual and collective, and freedom and responsibility.

Reading's Serious Pleasure

Today's Sunday Guardian column.

Now that Jaipur's "largest free literary festival on earth” has come to a close, it’s time to return to the quiet, private activity that makes all such festivals possible. Reading. As Anna Quindlen observes in How Reading Changed My Life, “Of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.”

Her own love of reading is what Wendy Lesser, founding editor of the Threepenny Review, unpacks in her new book, Why I Read. Why does she read? “To pass the time. To savor the existence of time.To escape from myself into someone else’s world.To find myself in someone else’s words.To exercise my critical capacities. To flee from the need for rational explanations.” In short, as the book’s subtitle has it, reading yields serious pleasure.

Lesser goes on make clear where she finds such pleasure, and in this, she reveals herself to be more conservative than catholic. Nineteenth century literary realism is her touchstone, and Henry James her exemplar. Authors bare their prejudices and partialities in the books they write; readers do so with the ones they read.

Many of Lesser’s opinions – and some can be incisive – arise from a dissection of her favoured tradition. On plot and character, for example, she writes, “it doesn’t make sense to think in terms of plot versus character: plot modifies character and character modifies plot…we know what people are only by seeing what they do when confronted with what happens to them”.

It’s not that Lesser only focuses on so-called literary fiction: happily, murder mysteries and detective stories come in for praise, too. “A novel like A Coffin for Dimitrios or Ripley Under Ground is as good as almost any book written during that time, and I venture to say we will be reading these novels for as long as people read John Updike or Toni Morrison.”

She is acerbic, however, when it comes to those who fall outside her preferred purview: “There is a certain kind of writer who seems to feel that unless he is breaking apart everything that came before him, composing something that in his own view is astonishingly new, he is not writing great literature.” She makes the point that style and structure should be at the service of overall intent and not merely ornamental, but strangely, scorns those who have done so. Franz Kafka’s “strongest works are almost unbearable because of the airlessness of their self-enclosure” and Joyce’s Ulysses “is a novel that has always gotten on my nerves”. The past, as always, has the answers, with Cervantes and Swift held up as successful innovators. (To be fair, there's also praise for Murakami and Bolano as well as -- oddly enough -- Norman Mailer.)

Other Modernists are hardly mentioned, and she also disdains the unreliable narrator, “that foolish, pathetic guy who thinks he’s telling us the whole story when we and the author are obviously meant, at least eventually, to see around him”. Anyone who’s read Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, to take just one example, would find that hard to digest.

Lesser’s slightly more accommodating of e-books. Preferring the physical object for its spatial orientation, among other things, she nonetheless is a fan of Project Gutenberg and rightly points out that those "who have grown up reading bound books will miss them if they disappear, not because printed books are objectively preferable, but because we will feel deprived of something we care about".

Such devotion to reading in an age of electronic distraction is admirable, but Lesser's insistence on preferred texts makes her book overly prescriptive. Then again, her title does have a personal pronoun. For a different point of view, one has to turn to another logophile, Alberto Manguel, who, echoing Kafka, once wrote: “I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?"

To Be Read In Bed

A slightly condensed version of this appeared in today's Sunday Guardian.

I spent most of last weekend in a horizontal position, something I can heartily recommend to anyone seeking a break from the city’s hustle and bustle. One’s needs become simple: a comfortable bed, some food and, of course, wi-fi access. My bed, however, pales in comparison to the one designed for Maharaja Sadiq Muhammad Khan Abbasi IV of Bahawalpur in the 1880s. Built in Paris, it weighed more than a ton, including 290 kilograms of silver, and featured statues of buxom females at each corner. When the Maharaja stretched out, music began to play and the arms of the figures moved, creating a soothing breeze at the head of the bed and keeping flies away from the royal feet. History does not record whether this was conducive to sleep.

The story of the kingly bedstead is among the many recounted in The Art of Lying Down, a delightful little volume by Bernd Brunner, recently translated from German by Lori Lantz. Brunner defines himself as working at “the intersections of cultural history and the history of science” and has, in the past, written about subjects as diverse as the history of Christmas trees, aquariums and the moon. In his “guide to horizontal living”, Brunner makes a persuasive case that choosing to lie down can be “a calculated move to escape the ever-present pressure to be fast and efficient”. Such surrender to gravity is not an act of laziness but one of resistance: to turn one’s back on the modern world, one keeps the back in bed. It’s a move that doesn’t call for defensiveness; as G.K. Chesterton wrote, “If a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man.” Tellingly, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt have also pointed out that the “three great acts of life” are “birth, coitus, and death,” all of which usually involve lying down.

Brunner then branches out into other aspects of his subject. He’s no votary of lying down in the great outdoors for prolonged periods, but Turkish hamams meet with his approval, as do divans. He also notes that the Greeks and Romans were known to eat and drink while lying down. This, of course, calls to mind traditional Indian habits of reclining during music and dance performances, as well as such representations of Ganesha, Vishnu and Buddha, among others, not to mention Mughal miniatures of lounging lords.

The Art of Lying Down also goes into details of how mattresses and recliners have evolved (Brunner waxes eloquent over the invention of the coiled spring) as well as the ways and poistions in which people have wooed sleep. Examples of the latter include the classic Spoon, the Tandem Cyclists, the Zipper and the extreme Bread and Spread, “in which one partner lies directly on top of the other (who somehow manages to avoid being crushed or suffocated)”.

Writers are among those who have long known the worth of lying down; it’s almost a professional perk. Mark Twain and Proust are perennial examples. Edith Wharton, according to Brunner, celebrated her eightieth birthday in bed with a candle-covered cake that caught on fire. (A nice anecdote, but one wonders at its veracity because Wharton died when she was 75.) As for Flaubert, it’s said of him that he “would have liked to travel, if he could, stretched out on a sofa and not stirring, watching cities, ruins, and landscapes pass before him like the screen of a panorama.”  And Truman Capote was characteristically unambiguous: “I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch.”

Lying down can also be a form of activism and Brunner mentions John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous 1969 bed-in to protest the Vietnam War. He could have also cast his eye on the numerous horizontal demonstrations over the years – there was one just two months ago, when thousands of cyclists lay across a London street to agitate against dangerous traffic conditions. A case of lying down to take a stand.

Clearly, the art of lying down doesn’t exist just for its own sake. Brunner affirms that “it is inextricably linked to other art forms: the art of doing nothing, of being content with little, of enjoyment and relaxation and, of course, the proverbial art of love”. He even suggests that “human culture can be viewed as a side effect of our ancestors’ efforts to get a good night’s sleep”. Such efforts continue; meanwhile, one takes solace from the epigraph by Groucho Marx: “A thing that can’t be done in bed isn’t worth doing at all”.

My Favourite Unread Books Of The Year

This appeared in today's Sunday Guardian.

What a year it's been for not reading. From translated novels to Indian debuts to American bestsellers to British award-winners, they skulk on my Kindle and lurk on my shelves, each one a priceless memory of time spent doing anything other than reading. Few pleasures come close. Here, then, are my favourite unread books of the year, in no particular order of merit.

To begin with, there were the big novels -- big in terms of size, big in terms of accolades. The sheer heft of these volumes, containing intricate interactions between characters spread all over the globe, was so impressive that I had to spend a whole morning squeezing out space on the shelves to accommodate them. This is why, alas, I only had time to read the just the first few pages of one of them before being pulled away to save the brave explorer in a new version of Temple Run. (Priorities, people, priorities. Not to mention marauding monkeys.)

Then, there were the works of non-fiction that spoke of the rise of India, the decline of the West, the resurgence of China and the diversity of Bora-Bora. What insights, what analyses, what weaving together of personal anecdotes and public observations! I put one of them down for a minute to ponder over the writer’s interpretations, only to find a little later that as I had lightly dozed off, I was unable to pick it up again. I will soon, of course.

From Europe came the novellas, little existential depth charges that spoke of mankind’s helplessness in the face of a malign universe as well as in the plate of stale croissants for breakfast. These were beautifully translated and packaged; I could look at the cover art for hours. In fact, that’s exactly what I’ve done so far. Each one is etched into my brain.

Next, the novel from America that everyone was talking about, the one that was ecstatically seized upon by the cognoscenti, the one that you simply had to have an opinion on if you were to be Among Those Who Count, the one that spoke of high philosophical ideas in the guise of an unvarnished tale about the pleasures of obtaining fresh croissants for breakfast. Immediately after purchasing this, I came across so many perceptive Facebook posts touting its charms that I felt I knew it intimately without having to read a word of it.

History and biography, too, played a large role in my year of not reading. After all, who wouldn’t want to enrich one’s knowledge of the present by learning about the long shadow of past events and the deeds of men who define our age? I do need a few uninterrupted hours to really get into these books, however: I wouldn’t want to do the authors’ labours a disservice by simply skimming. Until I find such time, though, I’ll just have to make do with checking out the Wikipedia entries on their subjects. They’re quite informative, too.

As always, Indian writers didn’t disappoint this year. In particular, there was the much-heralded debut about love in a small town that was called “lyrical”, “incisive” and even “luminous” by the reviewers. I must confess that I read so many of the reviews that all the details of plot and characters were revealed to me. I spent time sending congratulatory tweets to all the critics instead, and am now eagerly awaiting the author’s follow-up.

Books aside, there was also the joy of collecting the year-end issues of magazines, with their lyrical, incisive and luminous articles on the highlights of the year gone by, not to mention the lists of the year’s favourites. I have a shiny stack of them next to my bed, which I’m going to turn to as soon as I clear the backlog of other such issues. Right now, I’ve reached 1977, and Saturday Night Fever is sweeping the nation. I can’t wait to find out whether they made a sequel.

In Defence Of Eloquence

This appeared in today's Sunday Guardian.

Apart from the larger issues that have come to the fore during the Tehelka imbroglio, the many e-mails in public have thrown light on our reactions to the way words are used. Tejpal's style in these exchanges – “penance that lacerates”, “adamantine feminist-principle insistence”, “light-hearted banter” -- has been much mocked and seen as an attempt to obfuscate, not illuminate. In contrast, the woman journalist's responses have been clear and consistent, not to mention courageous.

Such suspicion of high-flown language isn't new. Plato was famously skeptical of sophistry and rhetoric, with Aristotle defining the latter as a set of skills that would enable one to persuade people of a given argument. From the Puritans on, the land of the free and home of the brave has favoured a plain style with succinct, declarative sentences, something upheld and championed by the influential Strunk and White. In England, George Orwell was one of many over the years who called for short words and unadorned diction; as he put it, “good prose is like a window pane”. Many contemporary writers, from Naipaul to Hemingway to Carver have followed suit, though in their own distinctive manner. (This is not to suggest that writing clear prose is a simple matter; arranging words to make them mean exactly what you want them to mean can be fiendishly difficult, whatever the style.)

In e-mails, official correspondence and other such communication, it's unarguable that the simpler the better, without the pollution of jargon and unnecessary legalese. With other forms of writing -- fiction and verse, for example -- it's not as obvious. While one clearly isn't advocating mendacity, if we all switch to such straightforwardness, we lose much of the beauty that language is capable of.

In his recent The Elements of Eloquence, Mark Forsyth joins those who have pointed out how Shakespeare used the art of rhetoric to give his plays so much of their power. Calling him “the master of the memorable line” Forsyth goes on to demonstrate this by many examples. To mention just a few, there’s alliteration (“Full fathom five thy father lies”), pleonasm (“To be or not to be, that is the question”) and aposiopesis ("No, you unnatural hags/I will have such revenge on you both/That all the world shall…”).

Forsyth also illustrates how “the techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the wording” have helped many other writers (not to mention songwriters and copywriters). Oscar Wilde was a master of antitheses, for example: “The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves”. P.G. Wodehouse was known for his transferred epithets: “His eyes widened and an astonished piece of toast fell from his grasp”. T.S. Eliot did the same thing: “In a mere three lines of ‘Prufrock’ retreats mutter, nights are restless, hotels are one-night”. Moreover, “in Dickens' strange mind, mists were lazy, houses crazy, and snowflakes went into mourning and wore black".

Forsyth’s engaging examples to do with rhetoric apart, the firmament of contemporary fiction -- as I've written earlier -- is studded with literary stars for whom plain and simple just wasn’t enough. Nabokov is one of the more distinctive prose stylists, and his heirs are many, from Martin Amis to Will Self. Most Irish writers are possessed of the same sensibility: John Banville for one. Another John, John Updike, once described his style as "an attempt to give the mundane its beautiful due".

 As Forsyth says towards the end of his book, by using more than one rhetorical figure: “I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.” That may be carrying things too far, but the writers who view the elements of language as musical notes that make sentences dance are well worth paying attention to. On that point, I'm adamantine.

A Portuguese Sends A Postcard Home

My Sunday Guardian column.

Those who continually claim that the novel is dead are simply those who have closed their eyes to its potential. It remains unmatched as a form to, among other things, ask questions that have no neat answers and explore how we react to changes. Importantly it’s also a vessel for linguistic experiment. Alas, too few novelists nowadays attempt to take advantage of these possibilities.

The Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares isn't among them, as his four-novel Kingdom cycle amply reveals. These novels are loosely linked by overlapping characters, themes and a prose style that depends on defamiliarisation – almost as though a Martian was sending a postcard home from Earth, to borrow from Craig Raine. Such boldness and versatility has earned the young writer a clutch of awards as well as encomiums from other novelists. After he won the Jose Saramago Prize for writers under 35, the author after whom the prize is named commented, “In thirty years’ time, if not before, Tavares will win the Nobel Prize, and I’m sure my prediction will come true... Tavares has no right to be writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him.”

The punch delivered by one of the novels in the Kingdom series, Joseph Walser’s Machine, is a good example of Tavares’s style, which has been called that of "alienated recognition" by one critic. Set in an unnamed European city, the novel follows the fortunes of Joseph Walser, an unassuming factory worker. Tavares delves into the symbiotic relationship between Walser and his shopfloor machine, riffing on the differences between the human and the mechanical and “the swiftness with which [machines] transform causes and necessities into beneficial effects”. Chaplin’s Modern Times was a comment on the mechanization of labour; Tavares takes this a step further to expose our double-edged dependence on means of production, making a distinction between things crafted by the hand and those created by the mind.

The novel now starts to fill in more details of its protagonist’s life and world. His wife is having an affair with his philosophical and garrulous factory overseer, and this personal invasion is matched by an invasion of the city itself: a war is underway and citizens live under occupation. These events too, as translator Rhett McNeill points out in his introduction, are described “as if they were occurring for the first time, divorced from both their historical resonances and their usual linguistic milieus”. This leads to several penetrating observations. “To be a patriot in peacetime is to be a coward, because it’s too easy,” writes Tavares, and then again, in a statement that echoes the rhythms of his prose: “Every man in time of war, individually, on his own, founded, as it were, a Ministry of Normality, which established, essentially, repetitions. Because only repetitions…allowed each individual to wake up to find themselves human the next day.” People make history, but history also makes people.

For a novel that’s so short, there’s a lot that Tavares manages to pack in, and this without making the whole appear inordinately rushed.  Allied to the Janus-faced nature of machines and the citizen’s experience in times of war is the role and nature of unpredictability and choice. This is brought out in scenes where Walser engages in games of dice with his friends who are later to rage against the war machine. “There were six numbers stuck to the die and they weren’t going anywhere,” Walser thinks. “It was this precision that excited him, this precision that was well-defined by immutable limits that, nonetheless, allowed room for his peculiar decisions.”

 History and morality, unpredictability and determinism, people and objects: these, then, are the axes around which Joseph Walser’s Machine swiftly rotates. Large themes indeed, but Tavares demonstrates the skill and insight to do justice to them. One of his earlier novels is entitled Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique – and that’s not a bad way to think of this one, too.

Novels, Screens And Reality

This fortnight's Sunday Guardian column.

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In an interview some years ago, Zadie Smith remarked that one of the challenges facing a novelist today was that of how to capture the reality of a person’s life at a time when he or she spent hours daily gazing into computer or phone screens and communicating via e-mail and text messages. In a hard-hitting piece in Slate this week, Daniel Sarewitz called this dependence “a problem we are powerless to resolve”; it’s time to acknowledge that “the moment you and your date finish ordering dinner you pull out your smartphones and start texting so you don’t have to face the possibility of silence; that you have come to believe that you more-or-less actually have read War and Peace because you read the plot summary on Wikipedia; that you find out what your kid is up to not by talking to her but by monitoring her Facebook page; that at work you simply cannot go more than 10 minutes without surreptitiously checking email no matter how much else you have to do”. Quite so.

Given that fiction is supposed to have the advantage of being able to create and map interiority -- our mental lives -- how does it do so convincingly at a time when so much of this interiority is informed and shaped by digital communication?

Some writers, mirroring the epistolary novels of the past, have simply incorporated e-mails wholesale – such as Matthew Beaumont’s e. Others have inserted e-mail messages into their narratives, as with David Gilbert’s recent & Sons. Such efforts seem forced – too obvious attempts to mirror new ways of communication. The problem is that such forms are so rooted in their own contexts that it’s hard, if not impossible, to knit them seamlessly into longer narratives. This is especially marked when you look at instances when text messages appear in novels – Gilbert’s & Sons again being one such. Then again, a new story by Jeffrey Eugenides in the latest New Yorker has a character playing Words with Friends on his phone, and this is more efficiently done, possibly because describing it is like recounting a game of Scrabble.  

One way out would be to take a leaf from the way we write reported speech – to write, for example, that a text message informed a character that he would be late, or that her Facebook status indicated that she was depressed -- instead of actually replicating content. But this, obviously, would create distance and lack the immediacy of direct dialogue.  Perhaps someone needs to come up with the equivalent of quotation marks for all digital communication.

It's an issue that can't be side-stepped, because it's going to come across as increasingly quaint to have novels of contemporary life peopled by characters who aren't engaged in periodic bouts of exchanging notes and gleaning information via screens. (Those writing historical novels must be heaving sighs of relief.) Movies, of course, face the same issue, and they're also going to have to deal with it in ways that fit into that medium -- one can't have, for example, a modern-day romantic comedy in which the protagonists don't exchange text messages or check Facebook pages obsessively. The next Richard Curtis film could well be titled Four Weddings, a Funeral and Several Tweets.

As for an allied issue, that of being unable to sustain attention because of digital distraction, there seems to be a mystifying rearguard action by novelists of simply writing longer works. After Richard House’s The Kills, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, to mention just three, comes the news that Knopf has paid close to $2 million for City on Fire, a debut novel by Garth Risk Hallberg that’s 900 pages long. One hopes it’s a worthwhile investment. As for me, I’ve found succour from such distractions in the pages of crime novels. So if you’ll excuse me, I need to return to the squares of Venice and the continuing exploits of the valiant Commissario Brunetti.

Meditation And Narration

This week's Sunday Guardian column.

In a blog post for the New York Review of Books last week, Tim Parks voiced a concern that many, in various ways, have recently expressed. Speaking of conventional, character-driven novels, he asks whether “the whole exercise has become largely irrelevant”.  “More and more,” he goes on, “I wonder if it is possible for a novel not to give me the immediate impression of being manipulated toward goals that are predictable and unquestioned”, referring to the typical structure and intent of such works, with their dilemmas, crises and portrayals of overcoming suffering. Despite digital distractions however, as he writes, such novels are clearly still preferred by many, perhaps because they create the illusion that life can be given a definite and reassuring shape.

Dissatisfied with such “reinforcement of a fictional selfhood”, he holds up the work of Bernhard, Beckett and even Lydia Davis as an astringent counterpoint. For his own part, he’s tried to express a different vision of self and narrative in his new novel, Sex is Forbidden. (That, at least is the title of the paperback; originally, it was the rather more sedate and appropriate The Server.) So, how well does Parks succeed in his aim?

The novel, written in the first person, deals with ten days in the life of Beth Marriot, a young woman at the Dasgupta Institute, a mindfulness meditation centre. (Much of the observed detail seems to be drawn from Parks’s own experiences, written about earlier in his memoir, Teach Us to Sit Still.) “Most people’s worries are about the future,” feels Beth, “but the longer I stay at the Dasgupta Institute the less certain I am about what happened before.” Parks makes her feel this way because, of course, the point of such vipassana practice is to stay focused on and aware of the present moment’s thoughts, sensations and emotions. And because human beings are story-telling machines – our minds join the dots and create causation – to lift ourselves out of such habituated ways is easier said than done. (One could almost say that the Buddha taught that one must transcend stories by becoming aware of them.)

This, then, is a disingenuous stream of consciousness narrative in which the present is continually being interrupted by the past and future. Beth has spent close to ten months at the retreat as “a server”, one who attends to cooking, cleaning and other chores, trying to forget her past life as a singer in a band, her devoted band-mate and her affair with an older painter, ending in a tragic accident. As she puts it, “I gave up everything for the band and I gave up the band for nothing”. Such thoughts continue to intrude no matter how much she tries to stay present: “The breath crossing the lip. The in-breath. The out-breath. Right effort. Right concentration. Right understanding.”

She finds further distraction when she appropriates and reads the diary of a fellow meditator; both of them are bending the rules, which do not allow reading and writing during the retreat. (“One thing leads to another when you think and write your thoughts down. False empty fantasies, painful formations of the mind, sankharas.”) The diarist, a publisher with a troubled personal and professional life, sometimes seems to echo Parks’s own thoughts: “What do stories do but glamorize pain?...all the pretentious sagas…They glamorize suffering.”  

In various ways, we see how Beth’s relationships with those at the institute mirror those that she’s left behind. She hasn’t escaped her stories, just changed the context. Parks’s narrative, then, doesn’t become an anti-novel or anything like it, being constrained by the strictures of the form. This is something he himself ruefully confesses in his NYRB piece: “the tale’s literary nature, its very presentation of itself as a novel…inevitably dragged it back toward the old familiar ploys, the little climaxes, the obligatory ironies.” For a novel that resists narrative, we’ll have to turn again to Beckett and a different sort of meditation, that of Murphy in his armchair.

Father, Sons And Everything In Between

My Sunday Guardian column.

“Fathers start as gods and end as myths and in between whatever human form they take can be calamitous for their sons.” That’s a sentiment explored in many works of fiction, from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons to Hemingway’s short story of the same title down to Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return – to mention just a handful from an ocean of stories. This is the theme that David Gilbert also takes up in & Sons, his ingenious new novel from which the quotation at the start of this paragraph is taken.

The father in question is A.N. Dyer, a Salinger-like novelist who, now that he’s approaching 80, calls his sons home for a reunion. There’s Richard, a drug counsellor and aspiring scriptwriter in Los Angeles; Jamie, a maverick filmmaker in Vermont; and Andy, who’s much the youngest at 17, being born when his father was in his early sixties. A.N. Dyer’s first novel, Ampersand (yes, Gilbert’s title is very clever), was a critical and commercial success: “It seems to me,” a character says,  “you have Catcher in the Rye people and you have Ampersand people…To me Salinger is a stray dog you want to adopt, but A.N. Dyer is a different beast altogether”. The beast in question went on to write more than a dozen other novels, the last published ten years ago; now, shaken by the death of his childhood friend Charles Henry Topping, he tells his sons: “You should know my goal as a father – and I swear this is true – my goal was positively Hippocratic, to do no harm, and look where that got me. You could sue for malpractice. I am a reckless scalpel.”

This makes the novel sound like a study of writing and the family – but it’s a lot more. Too much more, in fact.  It begins and ends with a funeral, and is narrated by one of Topping’s sons, a character who, we soon realise, is making up much of the actions and thoughts of the rest. Throughout, first person swoops into third and then back again, in a wily feat of legerdemain. Gilbert's capacious act of imagination, then, is itself structured as an act of imagination. "I have always had an unfortunate tendency to spin myself into alternate universes," the narrator says, later spelling it out: “Maybe I was imagining myself as a ghost, invisible in this world, trying to understand the family I would haunt for the rest of my life.”

Then, there’s much space devoted to sending up different cultures – aspiring moviemakers on the West Coast and the shenanigans of high society in NYC's Upper East Side, for example, or the glittering set piece revolving around a high-profile book launch party, peppered with metaphors drawn from the solar system. (There’s an abundance of metaphors in the book, some delightfully apt, others stretched too far.) Further, Dyer’s revelation about the birth of his youngest son halfway through the novel is quite at odds with the rest: “How could anyone believe this nonsense?” the narrator confesses. “It seemed something concocted by Pynchon doing his best impersonation of Barthelme.”

To further gild the lily, Gilbert includes text messages, extracts from novels, e-mails and letters. Various tonalities blend together, sometimes uneasily, to create a work that sprawls more than it should.

Fortunately, there are rewards for persevering with & Sons. Gilbert’s prose is, for the most part, a worthy handmaid of his ambition, and can be supple and sinuous, mimicking the registers of thought. It can also sometimes capture characters in a sentence; here, for example, is Topping on his father: "He grew up shy, then aloof, then distant, his feelings best relinquished from the palm of his hand – a firm grope, a pat on the back, a semi-ironic salute."

Inside every fat person, it's nastily been said, is a thin one struggling to get out. You could say the same of many novels, and Gilbert's & Sons, with all its meretricious charms, would have been the better for being slimmer.