i’m half-way through this, and i would like to reprise some of the points mike and michael made in the extremely loud thread.
i wonder if one can talk about tragedies one has been a part of in any other ways than in personal terms. you discuss your reaction to the pain. the reaction can be simple or immensely complicated, depending on the depth of your intellect. that’s fine by me. the global can be a part of it, but the global, too, if you are writing a novel, is personal. novels need characters. you like kalfus, mike, because a disorder peculiar to the country confounds these boundaries. but it does so by making the characters into metaphors. are they alive? i don’t remember. they are certainly not likeable. we don’t identify with them.
we may have had this conversation before in the film blog. identification of some kind seems essential to me to the enjoyment of fiction and maybe of all texts. you resist this. i don’t believe you.
i just read black swan green and for a bit i couldn’t do anything with it, because there is very little an english schoolboy growing up in the 80s and i have in common. even the stuttering, which we both share, wasn’t enough to make me identify with the character. then jason taylor, the boy, brings in the falklands, thatcher, the first iraq war (he does, right? i suddenly feel insecure about the last). the moment he mentioned the falklands he got me. i can relate to a narrative that opens up to global tragedy. i noticed a dramatic click in me (dramatic because it was almost physical, like a double take of the inner eye). suddenly, i cared about jason taylor. i cared about him a lot. the book got funny and alive for me. i ended up loving it.
this is a very psychological way of approaching the act of reading, but i believe we all read this way, to some extent. you’ve got to care.
what i find dissatisfying in extremely loud is not that it is about a family’s personal reaction to tragedy, but that this reaction is not very deep. all the characters are wrapped up in pain. a book-long description of pain is not interesting. pain must be a conduit to deeper understanding. that’s what writing is about: using pain as a conduit to deeper understanding.
i don’t think that today’s literature is more self-involved, more concerned with the personal, than literature of the past, generally speaking. in the novel, the point of entry is always the individual. but american books about 9/11 are dealing with the painful fact that american culture is itself very self-involved. what to do when you write from within a culture (and use the distribution mechanism of a culture) that cares only about itself? either you write a self-involved book, or you step back and dissolve the self altogether, making it a metaphor for something else. it’s a very difficult position for american writers. i notice them struggling with this.
i just read the part in the reluctant fundamentalist in which changez says that he was pleased by the falling of the towers in 9/11. i wonder how many people, not only outside the world, but also in america, felt the same way. when i read that passage i shivered. saying something like this is like farting in church. it’s desecration. this is what i like to see in a 9/11 book. desecration. while the event is still sacred, there is nowhere to go for the critical and creative imagination.
teaching my 9/11 class was an amazing experience for me from many points of view, but i think we were all dancing around how much desecration we could allow ourselves. lots of disclaimers all the time. it was interesting but also painful.
i am writing from a place of confusion myself because i have just become an american citizen and this simple bureacratical fact seems to have plunged me in a sort of identity crisis. hamid lives in england. could he have written this book if he had lived here? (maybe he was, when he was writing the book. i don’t know).
i am passionate about books written by bi-cultural americans like me (desai, hamid, who else?). this is a vere difficult place in which to live. i’m scared just about all the time.
(y’all should read lynne sharon schwartz the writing on the wall. even john leonard thinks it’s the best of the 9/11 novels).
Great post. I need to chew on it.
You’re right in some ways: I do enjoy identification, but am as pleased with texts that confound or screw with my identification, dare me to keep trying to read that way. Changez’ reaction to 9/11 *is* by far the best part of the novel, the most revealing–what I like about it is that it pushes on what we do NOT say about ourselves and our reactions to events. I mean more than its political edge, which is also quite sharp; I mean that it resists our attempts to make easy identifications and to wallow in the pain of the 9/11-novels’ characters’ experiences.
I did read Schwartz, and I’ll agree: I was probably moved by this novel as much as any other I’ve read, barring Kalfus’…. and, yeah, you may not have liked those characters, but I did identify with them. Their assholishness, their relentless self-obsession–I see all too much of my self in them, and could empathize. (Again, we’ve talked about this on the film blog, but I find it ridiculously easy to see in the most vicious and vile character some aspect of myself. I find my desires to see myself in the audience-friendly pained smart witty protagonist–like young precocious absurdly-perfect Oskar–something I want to resist.
DeLillo would be an interesting choice for us to discuss. While so many people find him chilly, I’m intensely moved by his characters and their often bleakly reduced personalites (their obsessions and sets of tics). I would love to talk about how to compare DeLillo’s use of children responding to 9/11 to Foer’s, and to compare his attention to New Yorkers’ obsessions to others’ (the more obnoxious versions in McInerney or perhaps Messud, or the more likable [?] versions in Schwartz).
And there you go, a long response even though I feel like I’ve not even scratched at what you wrote. More later–good post, Gio.
hey mike,
thanks, as always, for your generous attention. i really liked a disorder, you know. i thought it was great. i even liked the crazy parts that seemed to have nothing to do with anything, like the protagonist’s (don’t remember his name) getting involved in that sex party. it all worked for me. simon was perplexed, but it all seemed to fit perfectly well in my imagination.
and i’m not even sure that i believe that the book’s characters are simply metaphors. it’s been a while and this book is receding into the fogs on my memory, so i can’t tell for sure, but i don’t think i perceived them this way when i read. i just put the suggestion out, because it seemed to fit with something you were saying in that other thread, and because it works well with the whole “dissolution of the self” motif.
but no, i didn’t identify with the characters. clearly, according to my theory, i must have identified with something, though, because i enjoyed the book very much. the implied author? i think that’s it. his critique of the way 9/11 was (is?) seen as a pretext for endless war is very close to my (angry) heart. but i know that there is this dark and mean part of your soul which you enjoy seeing reflected in dark and mean movies and books. go for it, mike!
based on your and jeff’s reviews, i wasn’t going to read messud’s book. i haven’t read mcinerney, either. and schwartz, oh, poor schwartz, she is well ensconced in the fogs of my mind, never to emerge again (unless i reread the book)! that’s partly why i write long, painstaking reviews of the books i like: to fix my response to them and not lose it. the writing on the wall belongs to pre-book-blog times, and it’s gone gone gone.
but yes, quick-and-ready identifications, a la oskar, make me recoil too, like movie scenes with violins in the soundtrack.
the comment i just wrote had disappeared and i was cussing wordpress to the sky when i thought: check the spam section. and ta dah! wordpress thinks that gio = spam! who can blame it, really?
next time a comment you write disappears, check into the spam holding tank. if you can’t, let me know and i will. to think of all the bile i had to eat… what an idiot. fuck wordpress.