An Unthinkable Existence: David Leviathan’s “Every Day”

In writing, love is cruel. It is stitched together with “yes”s and “no”s and built from the bottom up with pieces that cannot not synchronize; bits that refuse to fit. For what is a love story without the classic struggle that puts obstacles between the two lovers in question?

Yet there has never been anything quite like the struggle in David Levithan’s ”Every Day.” It is a story that forces us all to consider what love really is and how we as human beings are truly capable of loving in the most basic, unconditional way.  That is what love must be for A, the unnamed protagonist.

A has no gender, no sex, no body. For A is a soul that flits from one body to the next, inhabiting the form of a new human-being his own age every 24 hours. His wanderings are limited to the nearest towns within a tri-state area, changing when his host is forced to cross state lines. He cannot stop the switch, the process that rips him from every fiber of his host at midnigh– like a Cinderella curse– and to resist is unparalleled pain. His only chance to escape the pain is reach sleep before that fateful moment.

Every day for A is the ceaseless mission to blend in and acclimate to a new life, a new body and go undetected for a full day. He struggles to seem as much as possible like the individual of whose body he has taken control. To leave as little impact on his host’s life as might be left by a transient soul. Until he wakes up in the body of sixteen year old Justin. Everything changes.  From within Justin, A can see every thing the boy fails to recognize in his girlfriend, Rhiannon:  a quiet prettiness watered down by Justin’s negativity and negligence, an “unnecessary sadness” and a hope, one that is so often held by girls who don’t want to let go of the good, and in doing so too often spare the bad. A falls for Rhiannon and in the space of  a moment makes the decision to change his plan for life.

“‘Where do you want to go?’ I ask again. ‘Tell me, truly, where you’d love to go.’

I don’t initially realize how much hinges on her answer. If she says, Let’s go to the mall, I will disconnect. If she says, Take

me back to your house, I will disconnect. If she says, Actually, I don’t want to miss sixth period, I will disconnect. And I should disconnect. I should not be doing this.

But she says, ‘I want to go to the ocean. I want you to take me to the ocean.’

And I feel myself connecting.”

His daily goal–once simply to pass in the skin of another–becomes a race to contact Rhiannon and be with her before the end of the day, though this task is far more complicated than simply the physical task of putting A’s host body within touching distance of Rhiannon. Depending on what body A awakens inside, it could take A as little as 15 minutes or as long as seven hours to reach her, and without a permanent self, A has no phone; the two must rely on email to communicate.  But once together, A’s struggle is two-fold: A must convince her that he is the same soul within a perpetually amorphous exterior, and prove to her that they are capable of being together despite A’s nature.

Levithan’s premise evokes not only an original take on the traditional love conflict, but also brings about questions of identity  as well. Through the daily scenes  of A’s life, each morning as A relearns his body and environment, Levithan reminds the reader something we as humans all too often forget about ourselves, something we take completely for granted. Our bodies are an inherent part of our identity. We define our gender based on our sex, or the sex we would like to be, we shape our attitudes and beliefs based on our gender and our position within society, and how others treat us is partially dependent on how we look, our gender and sexuality, how we hold ourselves and our general attitudes towards our bodies. A doesn’t have his own body. He has no gender and his sexuality is neutral because he has no preference one way or the other. And though the voice with which A speaks is distinct enough, A is colorless. There is a shadow of struggle in how Levithan builds A’s voice, a thickness that might be expected from the attempt to portray so seemingly transient a character.

“I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.”

A’s experiences have no length or depth, as all of his experiences must last only a day, and as one might expect, he also then has few described inclinations. Rather, A has a collection of perceptions based on the way his thousands of past hosts have enjoyed and personally experienced different sensations, for example, the individual differences in how three people might perceive the flavor of a strawberry based on their biological make up. A has no biology, and he has no choice but to base his preference for strawberries via his hosts.

Levithan boasts another message, implied heavily through the side stories strewn throughout: the dominance of the body over the soul, when the body’s needs outweigh and overcome the will of the individual inside. As A experiences the physical situations of a drug addict, unnamed and ruled by the chemical need exuded by the body, A struggles and suffers, fighting the body he has been forced to settle in and refusing to leave the host’s bedroom for fear of giving in to the body’s will. A experiences the situation of a girl struggling with depression and a desire for suicide, a haunting aura that drags on the host’s body .

Though these side stories are brief and generally give nothing to A’s goal of winning over Rhiannon, they speak for A’s character and how he understands the people he resides within. A is aware of the complexity of life in ways that one being in one body over the course of a lifetime can never understand completely. But the trade off for a life like A’s is cruel–A can never be in the same body for longer than one day; he cannot spend a night with the girl he loves and wake up next to her; he will never enjoy a marriage with children of his own or own a home or a career of his own making. And for A, something as intimate as sex, something too intimate to share with a host body, will never be added to his experiences.

As A pleads with Rhiannon to consider a new way of life, a relationship without Justin, he asks her to give up a chance at a normal life, one for which she is biologically suited and for which A is not; he is asking her to look beyond not just a trial of distance, but the small horror of never actually knowing what your partner looks like. Can we as humans be that unconditional in our love? How does one love as A asks Rhiannon to love him?

“People take love’s continuity for granted, just as they take their body’s continuity for granted. They don’t realize that the best thing about love is its regular presence. Once you can establish that, it’s an added foundation to your life.”

A’s desperation to finally experience love drives him to abandon his original method of subsistance: instead of focusing on the needs of the host, A steals each body for the day, if possible taking the most available vehicle and traveling whatever distance necessary to get to Rhiannon. In doing so, A gives up his anonymity, inspiring a secondary conflict that follows him through the length of his story. After failing to get his host safely to bed one night after hijacking his body to see Rhiannon at a party nearly two hours away, his host for the day, Nathan, becomes suspicious and alerts the media and whoever will listen that demonic possession is a real threat.

A is alarmed. He is unnatural, but he is not evil, a fact he attempts to convince Nathan of over the course of several chapters. A reconsiders himself, reconsiders his identity throughout Nathan’s attacks. How can someone with neutral intentions be evil? But Nathan introduces A to a new possibility, a chilling but tempting chance to break the possession cycle, If A were willing to take the chance, there are those out there who would be willing to show A how to stay in the same body permanently–for as long as he wished–a possibility akin to murder. To take over the space that should be possessed by another soul, home to someone else, to whom the body rightfully belongs. It is what A has perhaps always desired, more so in light of his love for Rhiannon, but to take the body of another permanently would be self-lowering to the level of evil Nathan accuses of A at the start.

“Self-preservation isn’t worth it if you can’t live with the self you’re preserving”

Levithan’s account of a–truly–wandering soul raises not only the question of a perfectly unconditional love, but the question of identity, of self-knowledge, and how far one is willing to go in order to possess oneself fully and achieve a basic human life, and more, a love within that life. A can never have what the rest of us have, and to seek what once could rightfully have been his isn’t an option. Levithan rolls swiftly and deftly through A’s encounters, each day passing in a blur of desperation. His language, though neither dense nor airy, is clear enough for the voice of a running spirit and the action is fast-paced, a riveting adventure for the psychologically-curious.

 

Leviathan, David. Everyday. Random House, New York: 2012. Print.

Anthony Burgess’s “Little Wilson And Big God: Being The Frist Part Of The Confessions Of Anthony Burgess”

The author in a characteristically contemplative position, cigarette poised.

Few, if any, living writers could master the prodigious, mostly anecdotal memoirs that Anthony Burgess presents in his “Little Wilson and Big God.” The writer’s own life, which expired in 1993 but ends, with the ending of this first volume, in the autumn of 1960, presented here in a rollicking masterpiece, more jam-packed with stories and delights than his near-Booker Prize winning “Earthly Powers,” bears testament to his status as one of the most definitive storytellers of the twentieth century. It’s difficult to imagine any other writer with so dynamic a life as Burgess’s: the troubled Manchester childhood, the army, Malaysia, and a diagnosed brain tumor—and all of it in the first forty years.

What to me has always seemed to separate Burgess from other writers—his unimpeachable and singular devotion to language (through art)—is enlarged exponentially in “Little Wilson” as the driving force both behind the writer’s life and behind his memoirs. Like Joyce uses “The Odyssey” to brace, backbone, and connect his episodes in “Ulysses” to one another (or, as Burgess says, “his Homeric parallels were a mere bridge or marching his eighteen episodes over [and once across] the structure could be blown skyhigh”) Burgess’s life as shown is structured upon a devotion to art, the one thing that never diminishes even as jobs, his native language, his religion and his wife all vacate the stage. “One Man’s Chorus,” a collection of the author’s non-novelistic writings, says more about his life than it does his writing: Burgess’s life was the monologue of one man and one voice— his own.

John Anthony Burgess Wilson, born in 1917 in Manchester (a proud Mancunian) on February 25 (“the feast day of saints and martyrs not much regarded”) was the son of a shopping housewife and a theater pianist, who spent much, if not most of Burgess’s childhood in variable levels of drunkenness. His childhood is characterized more by his Irish ancestry than the patrician Britishness he has come to be associated with: pubs (and with them come precocious drinking and lovemaking) abound; death is commonplace and rears its head in the manner of an Irish tragicomedy or of the narrative in the song Finnegan’s Wake; Catholicism, which would tag alongside Burgess all his life like the Mark of Cain, is undramaticized and unromanticized—hardly the stuff of The Heart of the Matter or Sword of Honour—nevertheless chided with typical Burgessian irony: “I did not know what the Bible was, but evidently it was a dirty book. It was confirmed for me later that not only was it dirty, it was dangerous. It was the prime cause of people losing their Catholic faith.”

Nevertheless, Burgess holds to his Catholicism like a safety doughnut. Years later, once a lapsed Catholic, he turns back to the religion with what could be mistaken as objective contemplation but which sounds more like regret: “Catholicism is, in a paradox, a bigger thing than the faith. It is a kind of nationality one is stuck with for ever. Or, rather, a supranationality that makes one despise small patriotisms…” a statement capped of with—what else?— a reference to Joyce, “In Stephen Dedalus’s words, he has rejected a logical absurdity, and he can feel nothing but contempt for an illogical one.” Remark how easily Joyce slips into a religious digression; how, even in his early twenties, Burgess à la Joyce was already replacing his burnt-out God with the new religion of literature.

The writer at the keyboard: a failed composer made into a reluctant novelist, Burgess’s supreme passion was writing music, a hobby he carried on with “in the way that others might enjoy yachting or golf”

And perhaps, considering the semi-lapse of Burgess’s supranational Catholicism; considering that a rebellion of Catholicism was a rebellion of nation (more Ireland and less Britain), ancestry, and self—we can see how Burgess’s biographical style has developed. Let a few words be written about this curious style, first.

Burgess’s life, the first forty-three years, are an engrossing epic, even without the author’s embellishment which strings this life together, primarily with fragments of poetry or song of the author’s own composition, and with a prose style bearing musical rhythm: two exceptional and very Burgessian styles stand out to me. One of them is the frequent use of “punning lines” (a phrase Burgess used, I believe, in his Paris Review interview), that is a line that connects with the preceding line through shared word choice, usually to casually deliver a particularly debilitating punch to the reader, such as here: “We were, Lynne (Burgess’s first wife) said, to start on our travels./ We were about to travel to visit the man who loved her.” And here is Burgess’s second characteristic demonstrated, the ability to callously pop out a crippling, startling denouement, as (not subtly, but casually) inserted as an extra grace note: “…here I was, firing at the butts with Sten gun and Bren, getting a marksman’s score with the latter. This presumably qualified me to shoot up my wife’s lovers on leave,” ends, simply, with, “There was a lot of that going on.”

There are other styles I’ve neglected to mention: the frequent use of the passive voice plus infinitive: “we were to drink, I was to go, etc.” which, a Germanic characteristic more than anything, Burgess may enjoy using so much given, one, his love of the German language (and the desire he expresses to speak it better) and, two, his knowledge of English and its Germanic roots. Were one to talk language assimilation, however, “Earthly Powers” with its frequent use of German, Italian, and French language structure, is a more rewarding read.

What’s interesting about all this style is the fact that Burgess’s memoirs (rightfully dubbed “Confessions”) no matter how much they admit (infidelity, mostly) remain impersonally separate from the author. Indeed, the more he describes and the more knowledge he spills (administering, utterly without flair, details like they were printed on popsicle sticks: the wife slept with Dylan Thomas, Hamlet spoke glotted Northumbrian—a fact it took me a thirty-six part lecture series to learn) the less we learn about Burgess. The chorus of erudition—more knowledge than it seems any one man has a right to know—shows hardly a trace of a man, who, we suspect, would remain vague or choose restraint.

There is only one moment in “Little Wilson” where the author opts for silence. It is the book’s most telling moment—the only point that we realize Burgess— the phenomenon, the obsessive artistic devotee, the genius—was indeed a man. It is a single sentence, written to address an attack on Lynne by the GI deserters who beset the young woman during a blackout (the attack, if it is not already known, provided much inspiration for Alex’s senseless violence in “A Clockwork Orange”). The scene unfolds, clipped sentence by clipped sentence, coolly factual: “She was pregnant and she aborted. She was sick now with perpetual bleeding glossed as dysmenorrhea. If I had been concerned about not receiving letters from here, here was the reason.” And then comes the finale: “My response need not be described.”

Yes, there is a human who lurks beyond the art and the language. John Wilson does not want you to see him, and if he does, he wants it only after considerable time spent looking for him. “Little Wilson And Big God” I would argue worth reading just for this opportunity. Yet my recommendation comes with a caution: read Burgess, all of Burgess if you can, but avoid these memoirs if you yourself are an aspiring writer. For the breadth of this man’s scope, one man’s chorus, will astonish you into silence.

 Burgess, Anthony. Little Wilson and Big God. London: Penguin Books, 1987. Print. 

Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Luzhin Defence”

John Turturro starring as the eponymous hero in the 2000 film adaption

“The Luzhin Defense,” Vladimir Nabokov’s third novel, is a wild, energetic story about one man’s singular obsession with chess and how, in two hundred and fifty pages, it eats him from the inside.

“Being born in this world is hardly being borne,” Luzhin’s father, Luzhin senior, tells his son at one point in the novel. It serves eventually as the epigraph of both men but it is applied, firsthand, to Luzhin senior: a young adult novelist of no small ambition who is convinced and convinced utterly that his son is a genius. “An enigma…an enigma,” Luzhin senior thinks. The fact that his son shows no precocious talents befitting a Wunderkind does not bother the latter in the slightest: people who decry his normalcy simply do not understand him as his father does, and besides, Luzhin junior has all of his childhood to find the medium of his genius, which he does, eventually, in the game of chess.

“The secret for which he strove was simplicity, harmonious simplicity, which can amaze one far more than the most intricate magic,” Luzhin junior realizes at his tender age. It’s a subtle, camouflaged move placed by Nabokov (Luzhin junior attributes this thought to the practice of magic) that will come to illustrate the paradox of chess later: the simple binary of white versus black confused into a million million different combinations of offense and defense.

It’s also an apt illustration for the structure of the novel as a whole. “The Luzhin Defense” is a deceptive piece operating under the visages of simplicity. The first quarter of the novel is devoted towards the young Luzhin discovering and refining his abilities at chess. The structuring of these opening pages is done carefully—a small, simple cast of characters is introduced, a relationship between the Luzhins buds; a passion begins to grow; Luzhin becomes the prodigy he was promised to be.

And then, suddenly, we’re thrown a spectacular curveball—so subtle and adept that it’s easy to miss it on a first read. Three quarters through chapter five and Nabokov takes a staggering leap: the shady character Valentinov, “a man of undoubted talent, as he was characterized by those who were about to say something nasty about him” is introduced as a kind of mentor and considered, namely, by Luzhin senior, to be or not be an appropriate influence on his son. This consideration weighs upon both Luzhin senior’s mind and distracts the mind of the reader as Nabokov works in a subtle time shift: “now, a decade and a half later,” he writers, with everyone appearing to be where we last left them, only fifteen years and a revolution later. Summary narration is provided in two pages and suddenly Luzhin senior is dead with little pomp. We see Luzhin junior again; fat, unhappy, chain-smoking and inexorably driven by his passion for chess. It’s an astonishing change, the montage of minutia culminating into the moment that we see Luzhin for what’s he’s become, made all the more brilliant by the finesse of translucency used to age the picture.

“Everything will be spilled, that’s certain,” are Luzhin’s first lines in fifteen years, made to an unnamed “She” who will remain a mystery into it is revealed, midway through the novel, that this “She” is in fact Luzhin’s fiancée to be. A series of flashbacks narrates their coming-together while driving the story towards the premises of their rendezvous, that is, a decisive tournament Luzhin is to play in Berlin against the reigning chess champion, Turati.

It is likely that, in the hands of a lesser novelist, the story might have been concluded with this match, or at least climaxed with it. And yet Nabokov, though still a young writer by the time of this novel, masters the scene and its aftermath with a poise that foreshadows well the genius of his future novels. The match is far from the novel’s climax: rather, it is the instigator, the first taste the reader has that Luzhin’s obsession with chess is manifesting itself harmfully into his life. Even so, the scene is a monumental achievement in nail-biting dramatization, like the game of bridge in Fleming’s “Moonraker,” or the scenes of baseball in Malamud’s “The Natural.” Much of it is worth quoting:

“At first it went softly, softly, like muted violins. The players occupied their positions cautiously, moving this and that up but doing it politely, without the slightest sign of a threat—and if there was any threat it was entirely conventional—more like a hint to one’s opponent that over there he would do well to build a cover, and the opponent would smile, as if all this were an insignificant joke, and strengthen the proper place and himself move forward a fraction. Then, without the least warning, a chord sang out tenderly. This was one of Turati’s forces occupying a diagonal line. But forthwith a trace of melody very softly manifested itself on Luzhin’s side also. For a moment mysterious possibilities were quivering, and then all was quiet again: Turati retreated, drew in…”

What were in the beginning of the novel craftily placed hints of single-mindedness: binary colours, a motif of a frosted window (reflecting both a square on a chess board and the means by which Luzhin will eventually commit suicide), attempt, after Luzhin plays the match, to overwhelm his world.

The remainder of the novel is a marvelous decompression. Luzhin staggers away from the world of the game, traumatized with his memories of his grandmaster days of chess nearly lost, and into reality; his rehabilitation provides the circumstances of the latter half of the novel. At any costs, chess must be avoided: in conversation, in newspapers, in film. It is inevitable that the silence will break, but Nabokov keeps his reader suspended in the tension for an aching hundred pages.

Amateur writers (indeed, all writers) would do well to read early Nabokov, if not to be astonished, than to learn the carefully placed, well-constructed rudiments of engaging fiction: the suspension of tension; the maintenance over characters (whom Nabokov called his “galley slaves”); the drama built from ground up; the nonlinear, though far from confusing, narrative arch. They are the elements of a master storyteller.

 Nabokov, Vladimir. The Luzhin Defense. 1964. Trans. Michael Scammel. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print. 

The Newest, Youngest, Bestest Novelists

A little less than two months ago, the British literary quarterly Granta put out the fourth edition of its Best of Young British Novelists series, a tradition dating back thirty years that is responsible for discovering writers Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, and Zadie Smith (appearing again in the latest issue), just to name a few.

 Given Granta’s sterling reputation for putting unknown and prodigious literary talent (British, American, and as of last December, Portuguese) on the map, it is likely tempting for the magazine to want to push the same talent—the one currently writing our literary bestsellers (literary, not the stuff you buy in the terminal before your flight)—and market the next Alan Hollinghurst instead of its no-names. Editor John Freeman however, makes it abundantly clear that the magazine has no intentions of doing this.

 “Our happiness as readers,” Freeman writes in the issue’s introduction, “ increased greatly when we stopped looking for the next Will Self, the next David Mitchell…these writers were original in their own way when they emerged.”

 And he’s right on the money, for the most part. Though I haven’t read enough of the novels from this latest batch of writers to feel comfortable forming and arguing a strong opinion, several of the stories (excerpts, for the most part) stood out more than others. Adam Thirwell (a 2003 Best Young British Novelist) builds tension with a watchmaker’s precision in the excerpt from his novel “Slow Motion”, which he then augments with a style embracing self-parody, discourses in morality, and an eye for a good simile: “Fate was all around me, like the crimping on a beer-bottle top.”

 Benjamin Markovits, who has published six novels, contributes an engaging excerpt form a new one, “You Don’t Have to Live Like This,” about a group of Yale friends, their business ambitions, their girlfriends, and a budding maturity which threatens to tear it all apart. Markovits, shown spinning a basketball in Nadav Kander’s excellent slideshow of the writers (you can find it in the New York Times Books archives) is a spirited writer with a young man’s talent for banter and ironic, convoluted interior monologue. At one point, his character reflects on the possibility of his own homosexuality, citing that his failure with a recent girlfriend might suggest his preference for the other team. The dilemma is resolved handedly: “I didn’t want to be gay, for several reasons. One of them being that I wanted to sleep with girls.”

 Try as I might, I couldn’t much get into Zadie Smith’s entry “Just Right”, though I assume the fault for my own lack of perseverance (this is the sort of magazine one should read at least twice). Naomi Alderman’s “Soon And In Our Days” and Ross Raisin’s “Submersion” are the only short stories and both, operating (and succeeding) under absurd premises: a visit from a Biblical prophet, and a father on a rocking chair lost in a flood, respectively, also provide welcome senses of closure, instead of the ambiguous cut-offs from most of the novel/novella excerpts. Stephen Hall’s “The End Of Endings” is an interesting read though, printed in two parts, one of them retrograde and on black paper, it gets to be a little gimmicky.

 Whatever complaints one may or may not have, it can nevertheless be agreed that if there’s one thing the current batch of Young British Novelists have, it’s vision. It’s variety. It’s hutzpah, if you wish it. And, fortunately or unfortunately, it’s a characteristic endemic of Granta, “The Magazine of New Writing (and Writers).” Most American top-tier journals can’t boast new writers.

 Not that this is a problem, exactly. The Paris Review, that sixty-year mogul of trending literature with a nifty app (relatively new) and a gorgeous daily blog that I’ve set as my homepage, deserves all the praise it gets (which will never be enough). I receive more than a dozen literary journals and magazines now, but The Paris Review was my first and still the first to which I’ll go to when I crave good reading.

 Even so, like a good husband, I love the review while recognizing virtues as well as faults. Young, upcoming writers are all but forcefully barred entry from any hopes of publication within its pages. The Paris Review is an old man’s game; it’s the cool kids’ club and the top-tier fraternity and a place that good looks, genius, a winning smile and a considerable amount of luck still won’t get you into. Like the New Yorker, another top journal, The Paris Review has its chosen darlings (Sam Savage is the first that comes to mind) to publish and republish—a condition shared by many of the best journals—and ambitious first comers are told to look elsewhere.

 But luckily for the young author, America enjoys a far greater number of literary journals for first publications than in Europe or Great Britain. Many universities (including this one) publish quarterlies or bi-annuals looking to promote new writing. It’s a good route for the future novelist to take: there’s the experience of submission (and, let’s face it, rejection), the possibility of an acceptance and a resume builder, the hope after acceptance of building a name for oneself. It’s a path, one that is broadening every day with new journals and growing readerships, and one that wasn’t available thirty years ago.

 And yet the path into the literary limelight offered by your average college journal sort of looks like stepping-stones to the young writer when compared to the six-lane highways of the established moguls. Carving a name out of yourself, university by university, in order to advance a literary career can take decades: it can take a lifetime. Small journals simply haven’t been around long enough, haven’t had the opportunities to publish the Great Novelists, to enjoy the prestige of the top-tiers.

 All this is meant less to serve the purpose of outlining the woes of the writer than it is meant to praise the publications, such as Granta, that use their prestige for the purposes of discovering the Next Great Authors, instead of reiterating the ones already there. Granta is perhaps the most forward-thinking literary publication there is, one that, instead of shying away from the writer-without-a-name, embraces the writer as a name-that-can-be. We need the big magazines to keep the current names current—a writer out of print is a dead writer—but in the dog-eat-dog world of publishing, a magazine that chooses as its combatants not its aged warriors but its greenhorns, is an anomaly. Read and reread this issue of the Best of Young British Novelists. It is right to celebrate them. 

Karl Ove Knausgård’s “My Struggle: Book One”

Much has been made of Karl Ove Knausgård’s autobiographical “My Struggle,” which made its English debut about a year ago, to clamorous positive reviews. There have been comparisons to Ibsen, suggestions of a Norwegian Proust, promotions using words like “harrowing” and “startling”, and a few lawsuits made against the author for libel.

 This is all more or less to say that Knausgård’s autobiography, the first volume at any rate, is very much unlike many other biographies you’ve ever read. There is little to no pandering to readers, by which I mean that Knausgård isn’t so much concerned with presenting insights about his life as he is wrestling with it, searching through his memories piecemeal until they give up their meaning. For the most part, he succeeds, though only after he has worked his way, painstakingly, through each one of his scenes. The result is like a math assignment in which the credit is given for showing work and not necessarily for finding the correct sum.

 It goes without saying that this has an interesting appearance on the page. Knausgård’s biography, for all its detail, doesn’t meander; you get the feeling that, while the author may not be fully aware of where the scenes are headed when he begins to write them, he knows their destination and has an idea of how to achieve it. “After eating I went up to my room, switched on the amplifier, plugged in the guitar, and sat down to play a little. I loved the smell the amplifier gave off when it got warm, I could play for that reason alone, almost. I also loved the accessories guitar-playing involved, the fuzz box, the chorus pedal, the leads, the plugs, the plectrums, and the small packet of strings…” the author writes, pulling the scene out delicately as if it were a wad of chewed gum stuck underneath a desk.

 But there’s a purpose to such scenes, and in the case of the first volume of “My Struggle” (the second of six volumes was released at the beginning of May), all roads lead to Knausgård’s father and more specifically, to his death. Which is why Knausgård gives us his life in segments, the first half of the book devoted towards his childhood and such scenes as the one of the author playing in a band with his chums or hanging out with his girlfriend, and the latter half fixated on the days following his father’s death with occasional asides of the present day.

 Here is the author in 2003, “I unscrewed the lid of the coffee tin, put two spoonfuls in my cup, and poured in the water, which rose up the sides, black and steaming, then I got dressed.” One is tempted to wonder why we need this minutia, the explanation of making coffee and the routine of the morning are surely things that the reader doesn’t need explained to her, but you’re interested in the facts enough to keep reading. “Before going out I stood in such a way that I could see [a] face in the wooden flooring. And it really was Christ. The face half-averted, as though in pain, eyes downcast, the crown of thorns on his head. The remarkable thing was not that the face should be visible here, nor that I had once seen a face in the sea in the mid-seventies, the remarkable thing was that I had forgotten it and now remembered.” It stands to the author’s credit that he is able to inspire something near-revelatory in the same paragraph devoted to two spoonfuls of coffee and getting dressed, but this is the power of Knausgård’s writing: the idea that if you just keep going you’ll eventually find something.

 There’s something biological about this, as though the world and the living are both in a constant state of expansion undulating in rhythm with the author’s observations. At other times, Knausgård seems desperate to take ahold of that life and wrestle the meaning out of it himself, which leads the author to some of his most compelling discourse. “That night I couldn’t sleep,” one passage begins, “Usually I fell asleep within minutes, regardless of how tumultuous the day had been.” Such are the necessary verbal calisthenics, which give way to tentative development, “After the age of twenty I had hardly ever dreamed about anything that had a bearing on my life. It was as though in dreams I had not grown up, I was still a child surrounded by the same people and placed I had been surrounded by in childhood. And even though the events that occurred there were new every night, the feeling they left me with was always the same. The constant feeling of humiliation.” And finally, the sweeping insight: “What does anyone in their twenties really get out of a longing for their childhood years? For their own youth? It’s like an illness.”

 What’s remarkable about Knausgård’s biography isn’t just the ingenuity of the sentences, but the revelations the author is able to pull from them and his memories. His life hardly seems the stuff of literary genius that the book’s reviews have suggested—in his childhood the author does not display the usual precocity or depth of insight that has traditionally separated artists from the run-of-the mill: he gets drunk, listens to music, has a girlfriend. What’s more, Knausgård’s first novel appeared when the author was 30. It’s tempting then to label “My Struggle” as another celebration of life: another project to extol the beauty of the every day.

 This it is not. Knausgård doesn’t glorify life so much as he tries to come to terms with death. It would not spoil the work to say that, in the end, he fails. Life, death, humanity, the world are more dense and complex than we can fathom. Make your insights and support them with all the detail and evidence you can, Knausgård’s book suggests, but understand the impossible margin of doubt. 

“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Sexy Woman”: Rachel Kushner’s “The Flamethrowers”

“The Flamethrowers”: Kushner’s second novel

Let us consider, briefly, the world built by the mid 20^th century philosophers of post-structuralism (better known today under the banner of ‘post-modernism’).

 Modernism, with all its emphasis on the evils of imperialism and the disillusionment of ideology, was dead or in a process of dying. Writers like Eliot and Woolf had seen to that but by now they too were dead or dying, and their inheritance—their prophecies of doom—were being left to a new generation, one whose upbringing (as well as history itself) had taught them the vital message that society could not be trusted. The logical question to then follow was who, or what, could be trusted?

 Perhaps their childhood, spent in disenchantment of the ‘civilized’ world, was what first gave the oracles of post-modernism the attitude that nothing, not language, reality, and certainly not the state apparatus, could be taken on faith alone. Everything was left to question.

 Enter Jacques Lacan, that enigmatic French theorist with sandpaper skin and a penchant for slamming his hands on his desk while declaring that we as well as our very mental development, are all slaves to language, the true creator of the world. God was dead and with him had died the concept of mastery. We were no longer the owners of our own conscious representation, this was a myth, a truth heralded by Freud and the unconscious and reiterated by Lacan with a smack on the table for good measure. And so began the systematic killings of all delusional components of mastery: Roland Barthes killing the Author (“Death of the Author”) a mere decade after Lacan killed the master; Jean Baudrillard killing reality fourteen years after that (“Simulacra and Simulation”); Jacques Derrida killing the idea of perception (“Differance”), and, to cap it all off, Lee Edelman killing the future little more than ten years ago (“No Future”). We, of course, are left with nothing. Very tidy work in less than half a century.

 Under this backdrop enters Rachel Kushner’s new novel (it should be called a masterpiece) “The Flamethrowers.” The year is 1976. Philosophy has already disposed of the notions of reality and mastery and, with the novel’s opening scene from 1917 of a young Italian soldier braining a German with his motorbike headlamp, it was soon to make quick work of the grim future. Kushner’s unnamed first-person protagonist makes her appearance on the Salt Flats of Nevada. Twenty-two, an amateur filmmaker and sexy dirty blonde (or, dirty sexy blonde), riding her motorcycle over a hundred miles an hour on the empty roads, she realizes she has something to prove, a stake to make in this “slag-heap world of the West” that involves burning her vehicle at precarious speeds. Her destination is the Bonneville Salt Flats where her land speed racer heroes chase their own death wishes at constant acceleration.  

 The romanticism of the lone rider careening down roads, as if in the search of an elusive ideal, is a distinctively American image, yet any sense of the romantic in this protagonist is fleeting. Her goal is not “Spiritual America” as the chapter’s title would suggest, but the “need for risk;” not the forging of a path across the continent, but erasing it, “going as fast as you possibly could…drawing in a fast and almost traceless way.” As it is with most of Kushner’s writing, this comment has a double meaning, a reference not only to the perpetual reshaping of American culture but also to the protagonist’s own mentality, which rides upon a balance of wanting to create and wanting to erase; needing to remain passive, to wait, in order to “become an artist” and needing to actively pursue it.

Whichever the choice, passivity or pursuit, both end abruptly when a gust of wind topples narrator and motorcycle, going 120 miles per hour, and sends them skidding and tumbling across the flats. The lights go out. There’s a sense that the sudden crash by a chance burst of wind is a portentous symbol for the flimsiness of the American Dream of freedom, but the story ducks away from the scene and drops the narrator in New York City, one year beforehand.

 The contrast in scene is immediate and shocking. Kushner’s Nevada Salt Flats are ugly and violent but they are visually alive; her prose ripples with such descriptions of clouds with bottom edges “melting on a hot griddle.” There are details of “afterimages” and mirages and “objects in contrast,” which give the feeling that reality as we know it is nothing more than utter bareness, a desert of the real, to borrow from Baudrillard.

 From the desert of the real then comes the realm of hyperreality: New York City, looming monstrous and threatening like a giant, glassy face of Moloch. For the artist fresh out of college, it’s the natural destination: a Mecca for young creators trying to harness and control an artistic energy from a collective without sacrificing their autonomy. “The energy of the young seeped out of the ground;” rising like miasma.

 Kushner’s New York, far from serving the hopes and aspirations of her young protagonist, is a synthetic nightmare, a “plaster death mask” where there is no pure creation but an obsessive performance art. The playing’s the thing, runs the maxim of the protagonist’s friends, the first of which is the desperately lonely Giddle who ‘plays the part’ of a waitress, chasing the performance-of-life-as-art until she at last achieves her perverse victory, when the “performed life grew roots” and “became authentic.” Playacting to achieve authenticity? And it only grows more absurd as the story goes on.

 There is Thurman and Nadine who shoot one another with pistol blanks, denigrating death into a drunken play act with no consequences. Ronnie, who invents nearly everything he says, including a trip to prison and a ‘biography’ fourteen pages long about how he once got amnesia and wound up sailing around the world, sleeping naked in the bed of his commodore and wife, gives the protagonist her nickname Reno (the one in Nevada) before expressing his goal of photographing every person in the world: a brilliant feat regardless of whether it was never and can never be accomplished. Words like “metonymy” and names like “Bubalev” are dropped in bar conversation, passively, with a sense that no one is really paying any attention, for no one knows if anyone else is telling the truth, whether it be about names or histories. Each fiction is as arbitrary as each truth.

 Two neo-Lacanians invite Reno to a dinner party where one of them plays a reel of his own voice, giving monologues about the importance of choosing words. “We should torture language to tell the truth,” he confides in Reno when the tapes have been played. It’s like something out of Paul Auster’s “City of Glass,” words commanded to yield their treasure through any means necessary (especially the ones where someone gets to punch something and punch it repeatedly).  

 Kushner’s balance of theme and content is masterful. Her aim is not for a philosophy but against it, giving readers the City as an intellectual death drive that renders thinking impotent. The story and not its truth is what’s really key, we are reminded with each new digression. Because, for all their depth, each theory drilled home by one of Kushner’s characters is a command falling on deaf ears: everyone talks and nobody moves. The growth of the City becomes stunted by its own intellectualism; post-structuralism itself, flushed with knowledge, can arrive at no agreement other than that nothing, no one or anywhere, means anything. It is also, at the same time, quite hilarious.

 Of course, Reno has a saving grace. Sandro Valera, the middle-aged son of an Italian automaker (who once brained a Nazi with his motorbike headlamp, and then created the Valera Company) enters the set, promising not the simulated play performances of Reno’s friends, but a sense of real creation. Reno clings to Sandro because he offers her a destination, amplification to match her speed. Their stay in New York is brief, a year, before Reno finds herself on the Bonneville Salt Flats, her Moto Valera lying in pulverized shambles having been crashed while going 120 miles per hour.

Rachel Kushner, the authoress

 We are left a little startled when we realize how long the tension of the crash’s aftermath has been held since the beginning of the novel, and how expertly Kushner has played the scene out, but before anything can be said the scene picks up right where it left off. Reno has a sprained limb but recovers quickly, staying at the Salt Flats where, in the meantime, she watches the racer Didi Bombonato break the land speed record at over 500 miles per hour in his cruising vessel, the Spirit of Italy. Reno is approached afterwards by several of his officials, who ask her if she’d like to break the women’s land speed record. She does and becomes, “improbably, the fastest woman in the world.”

 There follows another deft scene change, to Rome this time, where Reno is invited for a gig with Bombonato and the Spirit of Italy. Sandro takes her so that she can meet his family but what follows is calamity and betrayal. Reno abandons Sandro and finds herself in the seedy back alleys of Italian revolutionaries: a bastard child of the New York she has only just managed to escape. But there’s more. The danger of New York: a plaything, a gun filled with blanks, is an all too-present reality in Italy. Bombonato is kidnapped. Reno is teargased. There are riots and looting. Sandro’s brother Roberto is kidnapped and (later) executed. The events begin to read like a Universal Studios thrill ride without the simulation. Reno goes back to New York, but she regrets the decision immediately. There’s nothing left for her but a haunting promise of Ronnie’s to “show [her] the uselessness of the truth.” Italy may be dangerous but at it’s real, it drives at a sense of purpose rather than repeat the platitude of meaninglessness. She goes back to her revolutionaries. She skis. She achieves speed, and she waits to become something.

 “Fac Ut Ardeat” are the first words you’ll read in “The Flamethrowers.” It’s a strange epigraph both for Kushner’s novel, which has little to do with burning and whose flamethrower motif is a mystery for most of the book, and for the Sandro Valera’s home where in the novel it is first displayed, like the word “Unashamed” in Shaw’s “Major Barbara,” as a kind of celebrated dare to the world. But neither the strangeness nor the irony of the words (they are taken from the Catholic “Sabat Mater” hymn to the Virgin Mary) is lost on Kushner, for the words are both an anthem and a promise to the reader: let it burn: we will let it.

 That “it” is troublesome. “It” could be the world itself, having long suffered under the friction of so many different thoughts that it finally sparked and immolated. Or, “it” is a reference for Kushner’s prose, much of it so powerful and dazzling it could be mistaken for masculine, which it can be on occasion, such as when two men contemplate a future where everything is whittled down to bare essentiality, arriving at the idea of a ‘pocket vulva’, “ideal for battle, for a light infantryman…transportable, backpackable, and silent”, or when Reno gives a rough sketch of her mother: “she was a switchboard operator, and if her past included something akin to noir, it was only the gritty part, the part about being female, poor, and alone, which in a film was enough of a circumstance to bring in the intrigue, but in her life it attracted only my father.”

And yet the prose also has the power to abstain from the punch line, to withhold, crackle, smolder, while making the reader burn with anticipation. For example, there is the death of Flip Farmer, Reno’s land speed hero, (and a fiction so masterfully rendered that, like the Valeras and the Valera Company, it will doubtlessly be mistaken by most readers for historical fact) given in four gorgeous pages, each one of them prolonging Flip’s drive with the weight of precise detail, gradually slowing the rate of frames, bringing the action within closer and closer intimacy: Flip burns out the breaks, Flip’s car goes past the finish line, Flip’s car goes over a hill, Flip’s car lands into a lake, Flip tears off his oxygen mask, Flip snags his suit on the fire escape, and so on.

 “The Flamethrowers” is perhaps one of the finest American Novels of the decade. Kushner’s inventiveness is unparalleled; each one of her characters is replete with a bevy of stories and anecdotes so flavorful you’ll end up quoting them like they were your own invention. How she has managed to conjure so much depth out of the worldly ruins of which post-structuralism has made us aware—taking Lacan, Baudrillard, Derrida into a blender and churning out narrative (one of Kushner’s character goes so far as to quote, like it was a delightful tabloid, a situational hypothesis about bathrooms and attendees made by Lacan in his thesis from 1957, “The Instance of the Letter”)—remains a mystery and one that I’m happy to leave undetected. Kushner’s novel may occasionally resemble an Auster New York detective piece but it is far more; a meeting-grounds for the all great postwar American artists, from Ginsberg to Warhol, with the silhouette of Hunter S. Thompson lurking somewhere beyond the shadow cast by the American Dream, and glimmers of Sylvia Plath in the prose (Kushner’s own being vigorous yet strangely yielding, so much so that it forsakes its own narrative style midway through the novel and transforms its paragraphs into a series of vignettes: flashes of scene, like pictures taken from a polaroid camera).

To post-modernism, it is Kushner’s answer: a triumphant assertion of narrative, a booming joke that dips in and out of history with a master’s poise. Edelman may have killed the future, but he couldn’t have been writing about Kushner’s. 

 

Honoré de Balzac’s “Ursule Mirouët”

This rather small novel, regarded by Balzac himself to be his masterpiece when it was published in 1841 as apart of his La Comédie humaine (specifically, one of the two novels that made up the canon’s Scènes de la vie de province—“Scenes from provincial life”), poses a difficult problem for readers, as the novel’s critics have been apt to point out.

 The plot is simple enough: Monsieur Minoret, an aged doctor, has an enormous fortune, which has been accumulated through a lifetime of miserly living and several shrewd investments. When he moves to the small French town of Nemours, his relatives (the Massins, the Crémières, and the Minoret-Levraults) are quick to realize that, given the doctor’s enfeebled age, they will soon be inheriting a colossal sum of francs (half the doctor’s total)—French monetary law was a subject in which Balzac, once a man of the law and a man of the bank, was well versed.

 It is at the doctor’s move to Nemours that the eponymous heroine makes her appearance. By modern standards, Ursule, obsessively pious (she entertains the idea, at one point, of joining a convent), utterly romantic, and given to frequent, passionate swoons, would be regarded as a flighty and rather two-dimensional. Nevertheless it is upon her pure character that the novel is balanced, for she, the doctor’s niece and goddaughter, wins over the affections of the rational doctor—winning his affections with genuine love, and eventually causing the old doctor, a devout atheist, to attend his first mass.

 This causes a hubbub in the town and is the first cause of what will be many squalors to issue amongst the inheritors-to-be. However, it is not immediately clear why the doctor’s family is suddenly so concerned. The author suggests that the danger to the inheritors lies in the fact that the doctor, should he undergo a miraculous conversion and become a Christian after a year of strict rationality, may choose instead to will his fortune to the Church, and yet according to French law at the time of the novel (1829-1836), the doctor would be unable to forego bequeathing half of his estate to his relatives, even should he wish to give the money to charity.

 Even so, the doctor’s eventual conversion becomes a notable topic throughout the novel, and a chance for the author to indulge his lifelong fascinations with Christian occultism (particularly that of Emmanuel Swedenborg, who is given lengthy digression in Balzac’s “Seraphita”). A chapter entitled “A Brief Digression on Magnetism” outlines the purported 19^th century miracle of a sort of paranormal hypnosis: an anomaly which dictates that a certain ethereal medium exists between animate beings through which one may become privy to another’s private knowledge. A man learned enough to travel through this medium could, for example, experience the sights and sensations of his friend, or a complete stranger, or a cricket.

 With the aid of his good friend the Abbé Chaperon, the doctor goes through this medium and sees, in one of the novel’s prime moments, his goddaughter both pining for a previously unknown lover and lamenting the doctor’s atheism, which in turn prompts his conversion.

 It is crucial for the author to establish this theosophist connection, between the esoteric and the real, for the sake of the novel’s proceeding events, and yet the inclusion of the occult is, at best, a haphazard fit. Forced approximately a quarter into the piece under dubious plot points (the doctor’s friends, a group of learned, old figures who serve as a minor intellectual backdrop, only ever introduce the concept of magnetism because it was a trending subject at the time—like a political gossip column in the New Yorker), the digression on magnetism is treated with gravity for several pages before it is given a hasty throwaway, only to be resurrected for the sole purpose of providing the novel’s denouement.

 What occupies the space in-between are the financial affairs of the respective families, which the author does not shy away from extracting in exact details. Thus, the reader is presented with various numbers of royalties and their interests, government positions and their earnings, estates and their value. The doctor slowly dies, Ursule begins a love affair, but the francs never cease to mount.

 And yet, why all of these details for a plot that takes as its center a magnificent inheritance and a possibility of spurned inheritors? There are several reasons. First, the author’s theme of the spiritual trumping of the physical world carries an important gravity. The reader knows that the doctor’s inheritors are the villains because they are motivated to regard the old man by their own greed; likewise, Ursule is the heroine because she cares about the doctor’s internal soul. Grounded in monetary minutia, the novel presents itself as realist fiction while surreptitiously drawing the reader towards a conclusion in which devout spiritualism ultimately triumphs. This emphasis naturally, also deprives the novel its realism. Following the death of the doctor and his inheritor’s mad scrambling to place their claim on everything in the his estate, a supplementary will is found by Monsieur Minoret-Levrault, dictating that more than half (52%) of the fortune should go to Ursule. Motivated by a profound greed (this other will’s contents were never to go to the inheritors in the first place), Minoret quickly burns the will and steals the money, thus sealing his (and his family’s) spiritual doom, which occurs by none other than the hand of God himself. The concept of magnetism is brought up again to accomplish this, despite more than an hundred pages of silence, when Ursule receives a divine dream revealing Minoret’s guilt.

 And then there is the concept of parody: a parody of the economically obsessed modern France (which, at the time of Balzac’s writing, was undergoing its industrial revolution) and its frantic struggle to hoard as much wealth as possible while humanity itself went neglected.

 One may attempt to read “Ursule Mirouët” for its story and yet there is a central problem with attempting two-dimensionality: namely, that the theme of spiritual transcendence is the nexus upon which the work operates. Without magnetism, without an interfering God, there is ultimately no justice.

 Critics have applied the term ‘Manichaeism’ to the work, not necessarily as a disparagement, but perhaps as a warning for readers seeking fine realism: God is living and dynamic, evil is evil, and good is good. If you’re comfortable reading the novel under these rules, then ““Ursule Mirouët” will be sure to provide pleasure.

Balzac, Honoré de. Ursule Mirouët. Trans. Donald Adamson. England: Penguin Group, 1976. Print.