the Buenos Aires Review » Reviews

The Internet as Novel

heather — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 23:07:59 +0000

On Carlos Labbé’s Piezas secretas contra el mundo (Periférica 2014)

Samuel Rutter

A recent interview in El País identified Carlos Labbé (Santiago de Chile, 1977) as a writer at the forefront of a generation returning to the complex relationship between avant-garde literature and political engagement. In keeping with this characterization, Labbé’s latest novel, Piezas secretas contra el mundo, published in March by Editorial Periférica is an ambitious declaration of principles for a new understanding of the novel in the twenty-first century.

Those familiar with Labbé’s growing and challenging body of work, beginning with the hypertext novel Pentagonal, will recognise in this latest novel some of the tropes the author continues to address. There is a particularly textual nature to the worlds Labbé creates, where the acts of reading and writing form an essential part of the fabric of reality in which his protagonists exist. The increasingly political edge to the author’s prose manifests itself in this novel through its ecological themes, which have come to include the status of indigenous cultures in Chile. Labbé’s prose, full of surprisingly juxtaposed registers and genres, matches its form to its content and embroils the reader in the fusion of these competing elements in order to construct a meaningful, overarching narrative.

Presented in the form of a “choose your own adventure” novel, it is the reader and not the author who actively constructs the narrative of Piezas secretas. There are obvious affinities here with Cortázar’s Rayuela, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year, but while Cortázar gave the reader a roadmap and left the ludic structure of his novel outside the narrative, Labbé’s work begins with a gnomic prologue that immediately involves the reader and layers the metafictional instructions inside the story, often providing the reader with several options for movement within its pages. As such, the experience of reading Piezas secretas is disruptive and alluring at the same time – as the reader constantly moves back and forth through the pages, it is impossible to know exactly how deep into the narrative one is at any given point. Considering the mechanics of Labbé’s prose is like pulling the case off a desktop computer and watching it tick—there is a constant hum of activity, with bulbs blinking in the darkness and a mass of plugs and wires leading in all directions, and just like the virtual memory of a computer, Labbé manages to give his narrative more scope than appears possible in a conventional 220 page novel.

In Piezas secretas, the reader is confronted by a seemingly endless array of plotlines. To name but a few, there is a report compiled by the pluriform author 1.323.326, a videogame written by a spurned lover, and the decay of thousands of salmon from the disastrous artificial farms in the south of Chile. There are references to Gabriela Mistral’s Poema de Chile, the literary preferences of Alonso de Quijano, Gregor Samsa, and Emma Bovary, as well as a thwarted claim for colonial compensation from the King of Spain by a hypothetical author named Carlos Labbé, who may or may not live in the state of New Jersey. The geographical setting of the novel is just as diverse. While much of the action revolves around the aptly named town of Albur in Chile—which the reader can choose to destroy in a literary inferno, much like Onetti’s Santa María—, downtown Santiago and the library of a university in Bergen, Norway could also play a prominent role, depending on the volition of the reader.

The achievement of Labbé’s novel, for all its peculiarities, is that it marries form and content in such a manner as to sustain itself as a narrative, while opening a dialogue about what the novel might come to mean in the digital world: if his earlier work Pentagonal is a narrative published on the Internet, this feels more like the Internet itself as a novel. Piezas secretas is plugged in to a hyperlinked reality where there is a symbiotic relationship between reader and writer, consumer and producer. Exactly where the intersection between literature, politics and ecology in the new millennium lies is a question at the heart of this novel whose structure hints at a possible answer—in many different places at once, just a few clicks away.

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Image: “Blinded” by Love Lundell. Curated by Marisa Espínola of Espacio en Blanco. (More)

Knocking on Keret’s Door

Melissa Kitson — Sun, 13 Jul 2014 09:10:16 +0000

Masha Kisel

In Etgar Keret’s Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (2010), thirty-five humorously unexpected plots develop with the predictable timing of knock-knock jokes. The book begins with the titular short story about a writer held hostage by an armed intruder who knocks on his door and demands a story. The “suddenness” promised in the title loses its quiddity by the third paragraph. The same sequence of events repeats itself when the narrative opening, “Suddenly, there is a knock on the door,” summons a Moroccan pollster with a gun, then a pizza delivery man with a cleaver. Keret does not shy away from using the social and political tensions between Jews and Arabs, as well as between Israelis and Russian newcomers in his native Israel throughout this collection. But, as the Keret-like protagonist explains in the opening story, Israel’s peculiar socio-political conflicts merely provide the backdrop to explore the “human condition.” The “human condition,” in Keret’s cosmology, is the state of being bound to others: to human and non-human others, to real and fictional others, and to past and even future versions of oneself. Although the narrative universes in each of these stories operate according to their own fantastical laws of cause and effect, their space-time continuums are similar karmic knots.

In the story “Lieland,” the creatively deceitful protagonist, Robbie, discovers a purgatorial place, or rather a non-place, where all of his lies have come to life. He encounters a run-over dog he had invented to explain why he was late for work, which “half-crawled forward, its two forelegs struggling to pull its paralyzed pelvis along” and realizes that suffering can be caused not only by actions, but by careless thoughts and words. In Keret’s stories even divine beings cannot escape ethical responsibility for their creations. In “Pick a Color,” a deity answers a Job-like doubter: “‘What do you think,’ the silvery god asked the yellow priest in frustration, ‘that I created all of you like this because it’s what I wanted? Because I am some kind of pervert or sadist who enjoys all this suffering? I created you like this because this is what I know. It’s the best I can do.’” Keret offers a twist on the Biblical version of the story; the silvery god issues an apology to the victims of his imagination.

Keret is at his best when he writes about parent-child relationships to show the real value of extending ethical responsibility into the ideal realm. In such stories as “Teamwork” and “Polite Little Boy,” Keret shows how vulnerable children are to the lack of care expressed by words and thoughts. In “Teamwork,” a little boy’s grandmother “babysits” him by leaving him locked in a room and ignores his cries. The nameless Polite Little Boy is dubbed polite because he pretends to not notice the bitter fighting of his parents. It is in these “realist” short stories that the reader sees the practical relevance of Keret’s playful transformations of the imaginary into the real. Those who most depend on us psychologically will not always come forward to complain about their mistreatment. We may operate under the illusion that our unexpressed malice or our neglect is harmless, unaware of the damage we are causing. Keret’s witty magical realism playfully invites his readers to become better citizens of all of the realms that they may inhabit.

Keret’s dead-pan delivery of existential absurdities has earned him comparisons to Gogol, Kafka and Vonnegut. He boasts numerous admirers amongst his contemporaries: Amos Oz, Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Safran-Foer, Gary Shteyngart, Miranda July and Ira Glass have all sung his praises. Accessible, yet elusively enigmatic, Keret easily crosses over from elite literary circles into popular culture. Suddenly, A Knock on the Door is his fourth collection of short stories, but his oeuvre also includes films and graphic novels. The American-made 2006 film Wristcutters: A Love Story, based on his short story about a romantic relationship forged in the afterlife, has become an indie cult classic. Although Keret writes in Hebrew, the English translations by Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston, and Nathan Englander, capture the author’s world-weary voice as well as his delight and surprise when new ideas knock at his door.

on Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously

heather — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 12:29:19 +0000

Corine Tachtiris

Men anpil, chay pa lou, says a Haitian Creole proverb, many hands make for a light load. As the only Haitian writer widely known to English-language readers, Edwidge Danticat has no one with whom to share the burden of serving as spokesperson for a nation, often “in 1500 words or less.” Her collection of essays, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, gives readers a sense of the incredible weight the author feels on her shoulders. The weight of indebtedness to her family’s sacrifices that enable her to write today in relative security. The weight of guilt that she has not lived through what others have. The weight of self-doubt and accusations that she might be misrepresenting her native land. The weight of feeling that her writing has to matter deeply. All this weight impels Danticat to create, in the phrase she borrows from Camus, dangerously:

So though we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears—though we are not risking torture, beatings, execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence—still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere. People are buried under rubble somewhere. Mass graves are being dug somewhere. Survivors are living in makeshift tent cities and refugee camps somewhere, shielding their heads from the rain, closing their eyes, covering their ears, to shut out the sounds of military “aid” helicopters. And still, many are reading, and writing, quietly, quietly.

The devastating January 2010 earthquake in Haiti referred to here has given Danticat immediate cause to create dangerously, and she dedicates her essay collection to the “two hundred thousand and more” estimated to have died in the catastrophe.

While Danticat declares that the earthquake has changed Haiti—as well as reading and writing about Haiti—irrevocably, more than half the essays that appear in Create Dangerously were actually written well before it happened, and only the first and last deal with it at any length. The author devotes many of the remaining essays to providing portraits of other Haitians who might serve as public figures for the country beyond its borders: assassinated radio journalist Jean Dominique (the subject of Jonathan Demme’s documentary The Agronomist); Alèrte Bélance, who was brutally mutilated by a paramilitary group during the 1991 coup d’état; writers Marie Chauvet and J.J. Dominique (Jean Dominique’s daughter); Jean-Michel Basquiat (whose father was born in Haiti) and vodou artist Hector Hippolyte; and photographer Daniel Morel. As with the essay on Chauvet and J.J. Dominique, some of the writing in Create Dangerously feels disjointed, and a look at the Acknowledgments indicates that some of the essays here have been stitched together, less than seamlessly, from separate pieces of work.

What comes forth in Danticat’s portrayals is a struggle between telling a true, compelling story and letting her subjects take shelter from the scrutiny of her writing and its readers. Some, like Bélance—who cannot speak or write English and who allowed Phil Donahue to wave her hacked-off stub of an arm as a silent testament to the horrors perpetrated by the junta—welcome the opportunity to have their stories told. Others do not wish to become a symbol for Haiti’s struggles, like Danticat’s own Tante Zi who asks her niece not to write about the death of her son, probably from AIDS. The weight of Danticat’s calling is heavier, however, than that of family obligations: “the immigrant artist, like all other artists, is a leech and I needed to latch on.” Even as Tante Zi makes her request, Danticat is already composing in her head the essay we are reading.

It is in these intimate moments that Danticat’s writing is at its most engaging, when her public mission becomes a private burden. Empathy for Danticat’s vulnerability makes the reader, too, vulnerable to being drawn into her literary world. Whereas fellow Haitian writer Dany Laferrière claims that readers expatriate authors—so that when someone in Japan reads his work, he becomes a Japanese writer—Danticat wonders if the opposite isn’t also true. “Today we are all Haitians,” declared the newspapers when the earthquake struck. But in the same intimate moments when Danticat invites us in, she also powerfully reminds us that we are not, in fact, Haitians. Her moving tribute to her cousin Maxo, who died in the earthquake, includes the backstory of his failed attempt to obtain asylum in the United States six years earlier for himself and his elderly father. Detained by Homeland Security, Danticat’s uncle was accused, “as he vomited both from his mouth and from a tracheotomy hole in his neck, of faking his illness.” He then died in custody, and Maxo was not granted asylum. In passages like this one, Danticat creates most dangerously, deftly gaining our sympathy and leaving us exposed to our own complicity and complacency, and so shifting some of the burden onto us.

208 pages. Vintage. 2011.

Image: “Claire of the Sea Light” by Josué Azor

Grace: Alexander Maksik’s A Marker to Measure Drift

Jennifer Croft — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 21:56:56 +0000

Jennifer Croft

I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace.

Albert Camus, The Stranger

Poetry knows that the political rests on forgetting the unforgettable.

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting

Alexander Maksik’s second novel portrays a young Liberian woman named Jacqueline who does little more than meander Santorini, an island in the Aegean that features beaches of lava pebbles and sand in red and black and white, and yet she astonishes, soothes, and horrifies us with perfect efficiency, making A Marker to Measure Drift a masterpiece.

There is the precision of the protagonist’s voice; there are the island’s elements, rendered palpable—its white hot light, in the beginning, and then its slow-encroaching chill. There is the sheer force of the novel’s rhythm, like a symphony that circles, hovers, comes crashing down as it swells relentlessly to its horrific and incomprehensible climax.

The book is neither a quest nor a journey, although she travels. It is not an investigation into a crime, although atrocities loom out of its pages. It is not the story of a young woman coming of age. It’s not about revenge, or repentance.

It is not these things because the logic that informs its structure is radically different from normal narrative thinking. Thus Maksik manages to accomplish in Marker something next to no one has managed to do, namely, to strip the world down to naked life, life in all its glory and all its agony and terror, and death.

Jacqueline is starving when the novel opens. We watch her watch with lupine greed tempered by good breeding as tourists eat and discard food, and we begin to starve with her. It is the sustained tension between animal need and human dignity that keeps Jacqueline alive. Her mother is her main interlocutor from the first page forward, and she admonishes her always to remember who she is: to wait until the family of tourists has fully left the premises before feeding upon their scraps; to eat them slowly, like a lady, no matter what she feels.

Jacqueline’s disciplined scavenging steadily gives way to a job of her own inventing that enables her to purchase what she needs without shame. Pretending to be a college student in America, she combs the beach for tourists who will pay her one euro to massage their feet for five minutes. With astonishing rapidity, Jacqueline has attained a stability that—far from being a relief—becomes a burden.

In the following passage, Maksik’s prose floats weightlessly and then falls like a fist on a table; this literary version of Muhammad Ali’s famous butterfly-bee dictum is as effective as its predecessor in boxing:

She has food and water and shelter. She has lined one side of the cave with flat stones to serve as shelves. Pedestals. The tube of Fresh Mint ChapStick she found in the sand stands upright like a bullet next to her toothbrush. There’s a neat stack of paper napkins she keeps beneath a small smooth rock. Her sandals side by side on their own stone. There’s a paper cup into which she deposits the money she brings home. Today it holds a single coin. She should go out, but she has no appetite. Hunger is no longer the burden. It is time. It is the new absence of need. The instinct is to protect yourself. To build and organize, to form your days, to apply patterns and repeat them. And she has done all of this without intention. She has built a home without meaning to. And now she wants to know what happens next.

She does not have the capacity to kill herself.

But the “new absence of need” is short-lived. Jacqueline is approached by male Africans she senses will harm her. She thinks back to Liberia, to a band of LURD soldiers threatening to kill her and their cologne, making them “like boys preparing for a dance.” The book’s tempo accelerates almost imperceptibly. Jacqueline’s mother helps to guide her up into the ruins of the island’s ancient amphitheater and agora.

Paul Ricoeur reads Arendt as suggesting that the only reason we can’t forgive ourselves is that we can’t see ourselves for what we are. “We are dependent upon others,” says Arendt, “to whom we appear in a distinctness which we ourselves are unable to perceive.”

Up in the ancient city, Jacqueline meets a tour guide by whom she fights to allow herself to be befriended. In her extended isolation, Jacqueline has forgotten the facial expressions for conversations, their usual cadences, how to pay attention and not get scared: “She held out a small plastic water bottle and crackled it to get Jacqueline’s attention. The noise was very loud.” Haunted by her memories of the cacophonously horrific events that occasioned her flight from Liberia, Jacqueline can barely bear present sounds. We learn from the tour guide that we are now in what was once the epicenter of thriving Minoan culture; Minoan culture, we are told, has vanished off the face of the earth, and everyone living here was killed by a massive volcanic eruption: “Can you imagine?” says the tour guide. “I was thinking of the sound,” says Jacqueline. But what sound could we possibly assign to death and destruction on such a scale?

As she runs out of provisions, Jacqueline allows herself to be talked into riding back down the mountain with the tour group. She frets as they approach their destination: “It was the prospect of noise that was the most daunting. The rush of cars and wind and voices. She was so grateful for the shelter of that bus. Its insulation and quiet.” Having floated for a little while in that quiet insulation, Jacqueline is ejected back again into the world.

Movement towards a goal necessitates the prior progression backwards of one’s mind. An objective is identified, and a sequence of steps is then issued that leads carefully back down to one’s current condition. Targeting is the application of retrospect to the future, its tense the future perfect: you will have graduated, you will have gotten a job, you will have had kids. You will have paid off your mortgage. And only then can the goal be attained, at which time, of course, it simply ceases to exist.

Jacqueline lacks the capacity to move back and forth in this way. Jacqueline is aimless. The novel is aimless. She takes us around and around its molten core.

Having goals is a way of dividing life into blacks and whites: one either successfully achieves one’s goals or one does not. Life is either successful or it is not.

Can there be meaning, however, without aim?

Charles Taylor, who ruled Liberia from 1997-2003, is widely held to be responsible for some of the worst atrocities in recent human history. In April of last year, Taylor was convicted in The Hague of aiding and abetting acts of terrorism, murder, rape, sexual slavery, “outrages upon personal dignity,” enslavement, pillage, and “conscripting or enlisting children under the age of 15 years into armed forces or groups, or using them to participate actively in hostilities,” among other counts.

Jacqueline’s father was Charles Taylor’s right-hand man. Jacqueline grew up in perfect privilege in a house poised high above Liberia’s fast-festering capital, Monrovia.

Then she escaped and came to Santorini.

What does all this make Jacqueline? “And when I die,” she tells her sister, before, “you’ll keep me in your memory, and that’s the only way there’s God.” Jacqueline is spared twice by opposition forces who charge her with conveying their message to the outside world, a mission she has not accepted when we meet her in the Aegean. Jacqueline is not a witness. She is more like living life support to the spirit of her family. She interacts with them constantly, unable to make room for her fellow living beings who surround her. She isolates herself out of fear, but also as the only way of giving herself over fully to the memories of her sister and her parents.

Who was Jacqueline’s father? What did he know of all that torture, murder, rape? How could he not have known?

He knew, of course. And her mother must have known, too. Jacqueline, who returned from her education in England to work for the Ministry of Tourism, where she would call foreign dignitaries and entreat them to come (“You’ve never seen such beaches. A secret paradise, sir.”), must have known. She imagines her boyfriend Bernard, an international aid worker, being unable to separate “her from them” once the scale of the atrocities has finally been revealed.

We can’t separate her from them. And that means we can’t separate them from us.

She tells us what Bernard tells her: that he’s seen children “rip out a man’s intestines and use them for rope. Rope for a checkpoint. Strung across a road, Jacqueline.” Jacqueline remembers conversations with her dad when she was a kid:

Tell me about school. Tell me about these boys your mother says are chasing you. Should I have them shot? I will have them shot tomorrow. Tell me the one you like the most and I’ll have him shot first. Or maybe we’ll cut his head off. Chop off his hands. Give him some long sleeves.

No one was funnier than he. No one more brilliant. No one more handsome. She laughed until she couldn’t breathe.

The same things all fathers say to their daughters, only that in that laughter there is already the slight snarl of an attack: maybe her father really did have those boys shot, decapitated, or mutilated later. Who knows?

Scenes of domestic bliss get darker: there are the four of them sitting around a radio, but the program they are listening just consists of announcements of encroaching opposition forces and the rape of girls “as young as eleven.” When the radio quits working, her parents plug it into her sister’s nostrils. Is this funny?

“We are not a permanent place,” says the ghost of Jacqueline’s mother. Like all of us, all the time, Jacqueline is complicit in cruelty. She has our unwavering sympathy as she narrowly escapes Liberia and as she roams these foreign shores, penniless, defenseless, devastated. “You’ll keep me in your memory,” she has told her sister, “and that’s the only way there’s God.” But what would happen to a person if there were no one there to remember them? Where would their God be?

Jacqueline searches:

Then she watched the sun disappear. She tried not to blink. She tried to imagine the earth moving. She tried to imagine riding its great back. She pressed her hands flat against the ground. She kept her eyes on the sun and swore she could feel the world taking her, hurtling away as the sky at the horizon burst and divided into orange and blue, pink and yellow, and then little by little everything went dark and Jacqueline began to cry.

She was thinking of the way she used to walk into parties.

The prose floats and crashes. Jacqueline submits to “the world taking her” only to feel rebellion welling up within her. No, she will not simply be taken by the world. What about the way she used to walk into parties?

Why does Jacqueline not go to the press? Why does she not seek asylum? Why does she not go to her friends from school in England? She could even go find Bernard in France—she thinks about him all the time, clearly loves him still.

But sometimes Jacqueline’s placid person is brimmed over by violence. Sometimes Jacqueline erupts. She dreams of Bernard: “of making love, of him pressing down on her, and she dreamed of breaking his skull with a heavy rock.” As we are dragged further and further into a music that begins to turn to frenzy, Jacqueline attempts to make a friend, a waitress who takes pity on her and serves her breakfast for free one day. The two meet for a drink.

More crucial than anything else in this novel is this meeting. This connection, and this confession—because when she tells the waitress the story of what happened to her family in Liberia, it reads less like testimony than it does like confession.

Maksik portrays perfectly the precariousness of Jacqueline’s position. Talking to the waitress is like walking a tightrope strung over an abyss. She makes near-missteps; she realizes she sounds strange. She almost falls. When asked how her sister died, she knows that if she lets herself, she will scare her new friend off, and that if she does that, she will have lost everything. But try as she might, Jacqueline cannot operate on the level of the future perfect:

Jacqueline looks over at the girl. She looks back. She seems so young, so frightened. Jacqueline is drunk. She could crush Katarina. And she wants to. She wants to beat her with what she knows. She wants to scream at her. What I have to say, little girl. The things I have to say. She wants to deliver them with violence. But she waits for it to pass. She waits because she does not want to hurt this girl, her waitress, her nurse.

“No,” Jacqueline says. “She wasn’t sick.”

And then, as though in order not to fall herself, she crushes us. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee: A Marker to Measure Drift’s last few pages are so powerful as to be revolting, once our hearts have been rent.

I met Muhammad Ali once at the Tulsa International Airport, when I was ten or so. He signed autographs for my sister and me. We’d just flown in from Rochester, Minnesota, where my sister at the age of six had undergone her first brain surgery, and I was tired and inattentive. I do remember that he was kind, and that what I later learned was Parkinson’s syndrome made his voice quaver and his hands shake.

“We pay for our sins, for the sins of others,” says her mother on the novel’s first page. “Anyway, we can’t understand.”

Now in my turn-of-the-century apartment building in Buenos Aires, the slow-spiraling stone steps sag toward the center. I always think when I leave or return to my apartment of how many people must have climbed and descended them before me, to have trodden down stone.

In the beginning of A Marker to Measure Drift, Jacqueline eats the scraps of food left behind by a family. Sitting “in their depressions,” Jacqueline is released from the expectation of making her own mark. In her aimlessness, Jacqueline does not mean anything. She just means, intransitively, in the same inspiring way that a lightning bug glows.

Our heroine finishes her desperate, elegant meal:

There was nothing to see in the sun or the water. Maybe there was something in the boats, she thought. Maybe there was something there. She liked boats, though she knew nothing about them and had traveled on only a few in her life and most of those, recently. She found them exotic and mysterious in their simplicity. It was that a boat rested on the surface of the water. That was all. Just that it did that. It was not the traveling or the adventure or the freedom. She was not interested in sailors or fishermen. Just the objects and the way they floated. She watched a small yacht pass across the wide bay. Then she turned away.

240 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. 2013.

Image: “Monterey” (2013) by Julia Ng

Your Lying Cheater’s Heart

heather — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 10:51:07 +0000

Carmen María Machado

Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her as a Confessional Text

The confessional text—either an author baring his own soul, or a fictional character coming clean about his or her particular version of events—has a long history, from The Confessions of St. Augustine to Nabokov’s Lolita. In the spirit of this genre comes Junot Díaz’s second short story collection, This is How You Lose Her, a sequence of bright, tight stories revolving around love’s many complications—infidelity, pregnancy, dissolving marriages, wounded families, the fact that true love is rare and can be lost forever. The sun in this particular universe is Yunior (of Díaz’s previous collection, Drown), a geeky jackass whose two most consistent qualities are cheating on his girlfriends and an unflappable optimism that he can get away with anything. The first story begins with the obligatory confessor’s disclaimer.

I’m not a bad guy. I know how that sounds—defensive, unscrupulous—but it’s true. I’m like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.

And so Yunior sets out to prove this thesis to us. Each story, ordered emotionally rather than chronologically, documents some aspect of love in Yunior’s life—memories of his own girlfriends and lovers, recollections of his late brother’s wife, the deep chill of his first American winter and the neglect of his mother by his father, a story from the point of view of Yunior’s father’s mistress. The collection ends with a Proustian flourish: in the last paragraphs of the final story, “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” we realize that the entire book has been Yunior writing in response to the dissolution of his relationship with his fiancé. Not only have we been watching the evolution and creation of Yunior as a writer (and a philander, but we’ll get to that in a minute), we have just read one of his efforts.

This is How You Lose Her is Díaz’s third book—his first collection, Drown, came out in the mid-nineties, and his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. I have heard more than one speculative writer talk about Díaz as if he is a sleeper agent on behalf of genre writers—sneaking in there, winning a Pulitzer, and about to drop a science-fiction novel, Monstro, on everyone’s heads. Like the author, Yunior is a sci-fi nerd—by the end of This is How You Lose Her he has moved on from being a teenager breathlessly consuming apocalypse movies and having end-of-the-world dreams to writing an apocalypse novel as an adult—but the genre that Díaz seems to be more interested in here is the confessional. And nestled inside of it, an antihero straight out of noir—the loveable rogue who acts helpless against a storm that is self-created; a character who tries to do the right thing occasionally but fails so badly you can’t help but wonder if he was really trying. He even describes some women as you’d expect from a half-drunk, hardboiled detective—except, instead of a dame in a red dress, she’s got “super-long hair, like those Pentecostal girls, and a chest you wouldn’t believe,” or she has “a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans,” or she’s a “chick” with “tons of eighties free-style hair.” Some of these women are rounded, humanized. Others are flat on the page, an amalgamation of significant body parts, sex acts, and nagging, sulking, or rage.

There is a great deal of complexity to Yunior, however. His tendency to decenter his own suffering is the symptom of a childhood of terrible pain. His brother is a physically abusive monster who nonetheless occupies almost all of Yunior’s mother’s attention until his death. His father undoes the family with infidelity and coldness (making “Otravida, Otravez,” from the point of view of the mistress, a particularly poignant piece for Yunior to write). In “Miss Lora,” the titular, much-older woman seduces Yunior while he dates a smart, ambitious girl who refuses to put out, and marks the evolution of a complicated string of infidelities and Yunior’s relationship to them.

Both your father and your brother were sucios. Shit, your father used to take you on his pussy runs, leave you in the car while he ran up into cribs to bone his girlfriends. Your brother was no better, boning girls in the bed next to yours. Sucios of the worst kind and now it’s official: you are one, too. You had hopes the gene missed you, skipped a generation, but clearly you were kidding yourself.

The sadness of this moment is that, along what you might call Yunior’s infidelity arc, this act of cheating is the one that is the most tragic, and the least in his control. While Yunior ostensibly enjoys sex with Miss Lora, his increasingly fevered and brutal apocalyptic dreams betray a kind of trauma that he cannot otherwise articulate, and the reader can see it clearly: Miss Lora is a sexual predator, and what is happening is far more complicated than mere unfaithfulness.

But past this point in time, Yunior’s most charming and most despicable characteristics emerge: once he is firmly in control of his own life, very much an adult, he reveals himself to be a terrible narcissist. As we move chronologically through the collection, Yunior cheats on every woman with whom he is in a relationship. As each one falls apart in turn, he reacts in different ways—annoyance, exasperation, denial, declarations of “real love” that feel increasingly cheap. By the time we get to the final story, “A Cheater’s Guide to Love,” Yunior cheats on his fiancé with fifty different women. After he is caught (and it is easy—he has, as with his other transgressions, documented everything very thoroughly), he responds with desperation and wild blame to his heartbroken fiancé.

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda. You compose a mass e-mail disowning all your sucias. You block their e-mails. You change your phone number. You stop drinking. You stop smoking. You claim you’re a sex addict and start attending meetings. You blame your father. You blame your mother. You blame the patriarchy. You blame Santo Domingo. You find a therapist. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. You start taking salsa classes like you always said you would so that the two of you could dance together. You claim that you were sick, you claim that you were weak—It was the book! It was the pressure!—and every hour like clockwork you say that you’re so, so sorry.

There is something deeply pathological about his actions—even with the person that he wants in his hands, he feels the compulsive need to run the relationship off the rails in the most dangerous, cruel way possible, and often to excess. (Fifty women. Fifty.) And at every turn, he is writing—journaling, composing letters and emails, and at the end, the very text of This Is the Way You Lose Her—in a way that verges on ritualistic.

Recently, at a public forum in Iowa, Díaz was asked about how it felt to write a character who exhibited such “borderline-sociopathic disregard” for his many girlfriends and lovers. He balked at the description, insisting that the final act of Yunior writing down all of his crimes—confessing to them, if you will, alongside the other acts of sorrow that have studded his life—demonstrated a kind of empathy for those women. If he cared so little, Diaz said, then “why does he obsessively bear witness to everything that he does wrong in relationships?”

He’s right that Yunior does “obsessively bear witness” throughout. After all, alongside its many other themes—infidelity, the Dominican diaspora, masculinity—we are shown the evolution of a writer, a diary-keeper-turned-novelist. Every act of writing is acknowledging what he’s done. But is it enough to bear witness in the midst of repeated wrongs? Isn’t true atonement half-confession, half-action?

His final act of writing, the construction of the book itself, is clouded with ambiguity regarding his ability, or desire, to change the way that he lives his life.

In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

And so the act of writing for an audience—the most grandiose of confessions, the most public—becomes what Yunior hopes will be grace. That he can be absolved of his reflexive mistreatment of all who have had sex with him by the people who read his words. A reader, I think, would happily settle for This Is How You Lose Her as a portrait of a complicated and ultimately troublesome character—a noir-style antihero who you feel comfortable liking but uncomfortable condoning—but it is a curious thing that the author considers the act of Yunior constructing the book, without plans to change, as inherent redemption, especially when the tone of the final sentence is that these acts of choice are somehow built into his body, and that he will probably only ever have “starts” for the rest of his life. It is with a serial cheater’s signature arrogance that Yunior seems to think that the mere act of being able to articulately and beautifully confess to his crimes constitutes an atonement, and it seems as if Díaz thinks so, too.

What is the point of writing a confessional book? Is it to save others from making your same mistakes, like St. Augustine? Is it to condemn a world gone mad, like Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis? Or is some third, less succinct instinct? A Hail Mary, an act of desperation, a deep-seated belief that you can rise above your own wretchedness not with self-control or goodness or true penitence, but with the sheer force of your own perceived brilliance and an audience to lay it on.

Yunior’s infidelity exists alongside his life’s other tragedies, instead of just being the natural evolution of those tragedies. Because of this, there is no excusing his behavior—again, not a single lapse of judgment, or a one-time human failing, but repeated disrespect—but the reader does see him from every possible angle. The funny thing is, Yunior rises above his faults because we see him from the beginning—his childhood self swimming the soup of tragic circumstance and other’s people’s faults—and so it isn’t the act of writing that redeems Yunior from condemnation for his actions, but rather the generous heart of the reader, willing to grant him pardon. They may even, against their instincts to feel implacable as woman after woman forcibly ejects Yunior from their lives, feel a deep twinge of sorrow, even pity, because his fate seems so sealed, even in the ultimate but comparatively paltry epiphany that marks the book’s final pages.

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THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER
Junot Díaz
224 pages. Riverhead. 2012.

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Image: “Zebra Fell Apart” (2009) by Rachelle Agundes

Zadie Smith’s NW

Maxine Swann — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 02:33:59 +0000

Maxine Swann

Two riveting scenes frame Zadie Smith’s exciting and unsettling new novel NW, recently shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. In the first, Leah, a thirty-five-year-old Londoner of Irish descent, opens her door to a desperate woman—tiny, grubby, shaking. There’s something familiar about the woman’s face, but Leah’s not sure why. Is it just one of those street faces you recognize? The woman, Shar, tells Leah that her mother is in the hospital. She needs money to take a cab there. She’s been asking up and down the street and no one has helped her. Leah, a charity worker by profession, rises to the occasion, trying to determine what hospital it is, calling a cab, making tea despite the summer heat. Shar’s the one who realizes it: they went to the same high school. As they muddle around a bit in the past, Leah sees that there’s something wrong with Shar’s face; Shar reveals that an abusive husband “broke” it. Leah finds herself telling Shar that she’s pregnant. She’s just discovered it this morning, Shar’s the first person she’s told. Shar, who has a drug problem and will end up taking Leah’s money and running, “grins satanically. Around each tooth the gum is black. She walks back to Leah and presses her hands flat against Leah’s stomach,” determining that it’s a girl and “the kind who runs away.” “Her face glazed over once more with boredom… All things are equal. Leah or tea or rape or bedroom or heart attack or school or who had a baby.”

In the penultimate scene of the book, Leah’s best friend from childhood, the smart, ambitious, focused Natalie, second-generation immigrant of Caribbean parentage, who has always done everything right and is now a barrister married to a banker with whom she has two children, walks out of the family house in her slippers and a ratty T-shirt after her husband finds a series of compromising emails on her computer, and keeps walking as darkness falls, encountering on her way a former classmate, Nathan, now a doped-up pimp, with whom she shares the rest of the night, getting higher than she’s ever gotten in her life, talking, but above all walking and walking: “Walking was what she did now, walking was what she was.”

It’s not surprising that NW has made some reviewers nervous. There is something intrepid about the territory Smith is treading into here, as if she, too, like Natalie, is taking this walk, leaving a brilliant, comfortable past behind in search of something else.

The setting is Willesden, a neighborhood in northwestern London (thus the “NW”), and, in the same way that Smith gets closer to her characters here than she has in any other book, waiting and listening and standing by as they come to life, she bestows patient attention on the city, approaching it from multiple angles, using varying narrative strategies—interior monologue, prose poetry, directions from destinations A to B that appear to have been downloaded from the internet, the sudden eruption of disembodied voices—to get its pulse on the page. As this portrait of the city emerges, the boundaries between the people who live in houses, have stable jobs and relationships and those who live on the streets, drug addicts, pimps, whores, are revealed to be much more permeable than we might have thought. And not only that, but the world of the dispossessed exerts its pull.

At the end of Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies, one of the female protagonists says to the other: “I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years.” Leah, who has had female loves in the past, finds herself haunted by the woman who came to her door. She runs into her on the street, on a hilltop. When she goes to pick up photographs taken at a party with a disposable camera, she’s handed the wrong envelope and they’re of Shar. Like the good charity worker she is, she takes rehab literature by Shar’s house, pushing it through the mail slot, a moment which returns to her in a fantasy later as she sits out in her yard: “and so the door opening at the moment that she stands there, her hand full of leaflets, and Shar saying: put those down, take my hand. Shall we run? Are you ready? Leave all this! Let’s be outlaws! Sleeping in hedgerows. Following the railway line till it reaches the sea. Waking up with that long black hair in her eyes, in her mouth.” Leah’s secret desire for Shar is also a desire for another kind of existence, one more like Shar’s, that—far from her everyday life “with its admin and rent and husband and work”—implies abandon. But it’s fitting that Leah, whom time seems to pool around rather than propel in a straight line forwards, isn’t the one who takes to the streets. It is Natalie, mistress of masks (“Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag.”) who finally runs away.

Meanwhile, what are the men doing? Nathan Bogle lives on the street. Natalie’s husband, Frank, born of a chance meeting in a park between a Trinidad train guard and a stylish Milanese woman, is a banker, and Leah’s husband, Michel, is a hairdresser of West African extraction who does some private investing on the side. A third part of the book is devoted solely to Felix, former denizen of the same housing project Leah and Natalie grew up in, a drug dealer and user, who is now moving in the opposite direction, coming clean. We follow him through his day, to buy an antique car, visit his father, Lloyd, a quintessential 70s dude whose girlfriend has just jumped ship, stop in on an old lover, Annie, an aristocratic addict in her forties and, finally, after a passing, tense encounter on a bus when he urges a guy to reposition his feet to make room for a pregnant woman to sit down, we witness him get mugged and killed by that disgruntled passenger and his friend. Felix is touching, especially in the scene with his charming, impossible father, but he’s still held at arm’s length or at least at a distance that allows us to observe him comfortably in the way that most, if not all, of the characters in Smith’s previous novels have been observable. They’re interesting, entertaining, but we don’t feel implicated, close to the bone, the way we do with the female characters here.

We’re more comfortable with our men on the streets than our women. Nathan and Felix don’t disturb us the way Shar does. And we’re certainly more comfortable with our men engaging in online sex hook-ups. This is what precipitates Natalie’s fall, her husband’s discovery of the private email account that she uses to arrange threesomes with people of varying genders looking for a black woman between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. And Smith does falter here. These encounters lack the realism, which includes the playful interest and humor, that Smith as such a vivid realist might have lent them.

Realist and master scene-maker. The scene where Leah and Michel go over to Natalie and Frank’s for dinner is delightful in its richness, the awkwardness of this encounter between friends from childhood who have not only taken different paths in life but also have partners from vastly different worlds in tow. There is the struggle to find a common language, the embarrassment of the clash of classes. Smith captures the complexity of all the different currents, her attention is everywhere. And using other tools, Smith delivers a study of a marriage in under two pages—Leah’s thoughts that are mainly sensory impressions and take the form on the page of an apple tree as she sits with her husband out in their shared London yard accompanied by Michel’s monologue: “We’re all just trying to take that next, that next, next, step. Climbing that ladder. Brent Housing Partnership. I don’t want to have this written on the front of a place where I am living. I walk past it. I feel like oof – it’s humiliating to me…This grass it’s not my grass! This tree is not my tree! We scattered your father around this tree we don’t own even. Poor Mr. Hanwell. It breaks my heart. This was your father! This is why I’m on the laptop every night.”

In other ways, though, the book resists delivering classic novelistic satisfactions. Leah’s character doesn’t evolve as expected, or even really at all. In the final scene, when Natalie could finally come through for her friend, a change seeming all the more likely given the limit experience she herself has just been through, she doesn’t: “If candor were a thing in the world that a person could hold and retain, if it were an object, maybe Natalie Blake would have seen that the perfect gift at this moment was an honest account of her own difficulties and ambivalences, clearly stated, without disguise, embellishment or prettification. But Natalie Blake’s instinct for self-defense, for self-preservation, was simply too strong.” As usual, she plays it safe.

But Smith doesn’t. It would be interesting to see how the spirited exuberance that buoyed up Smith’s earlier novels, sometimes to the point of light-headedness, but is missing here, would play out at these newfound depths. But that would also make for a very different book. In a discussion of the TV series Girls, Emily Nussbaum evokes “the dictate that women, both fictional and real, not make anyone uncomfortable.” What is so threatening about a woman falling apart? First of all, a woman on the street is much more vulnerable to physical harm than her male counterpart. But, above all, the question that comes to our minds when we see a woman who has abandoned herself is: where are the children? In other words, who is taking care of them?

Besides Shar, who claims to have three children we never see, two other figures in the book operate as specters of self-abandonment: Annie, the posh junkie who jokes about her childlessness, and Felix’s mother, who has deserted her children, showing up occasionally to steal from them. Our central characters, Natalie and Leah, are also ambivalent about motherhood. “Natalie Blake and Leah Hanwell were of the belief that people were willing them to reproduce. Relatives, strangers on the street, people on television…” Leah, it turns out, really doesn’t want children but, while Annie can say that, she can’t. Instead, while going through the motions of trying to get pregnant, she has an abortion on the sly without telling her husband. The ultimate deceit, not only towards her husband but towards society. Smith here is walking right into the heart of our nightmare.

“But I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf,” Bowles’ character continues. By this point, both Bowles’ characters, upper class women stifled by their milieu, have descended into debauchery. No longer keeping up appearances, they have dropped off the grid. But Leah and Natalie are of a different ilk. They want “both this life and another.” Their desires contradict. Though we all may know women in the world who struggle with the same conflicts and concerns they do, their type rarely makes it to the page. The really unsettling part is that Leah and Natalie are “normal” women with good jobs and husbands who love them and treat them well, women we can identify with and with whom we are identifying until, oops, they start expressing or enacting desires that unnerve us, all the more so when these desires strike a chord.

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Image: Marisela LaGrave