i read two books in the last week, and both of them featured plots to blow up the world or a significant portion thereof. the fact that i read them consecutively is a coincidence, but now i want to write about them as if it wasn’t.
beyond the plots to blow up the world, they have several other things in common that i can think of off the top of my head:
- the narrative voices of both novels attempt to sound old-timey
- they both utilize elements of detective fiction, particularly protagonists (in the sense of main characters) who function as investigators
- they both rely heavily on digression and what might be called absurdist plot twists
- they both take place in an unspecified era that blends elements of the present and past
that said, they use these aspects to drastically different ends and are otherwise very different novels. one is jesse ball’s samedi the deafness; the other is the shanghai gesture by gary indiana. i will post about the former now and the latter next time.
the first thing that struck me about samedi the deafness was the language. that sounds like a redundant thing to say about a novel, but it was particularly true of my experience with this book because, while everything i’d heard about it was positive, everything i’d heard about it was vague as well. in other words, i had no idea what the books was about, so i just followed the language.
as i mentioned, ball seems to be trying to employ a kind of high syntax to give the book an old-timey, or maybe timeless, feel. it works most of the time, but he has a tendency to insert prepositional phrases in odd places. this can be effective when done occasionally. it can be grating when done constantly. here are phrases from sentences in three consecutive paragraphs on the first page of the novel (italics mine):
“… the clouds that had gathered near and made of themselves rain all through the night…”
“James bought from him a newspaper …”
“… there was in James a small sadness …”
none of these is wrong, one of them is nice, but cumulatively and in such a tight space, they seem to indicate, not so much a style, but a stylistic tic, and i occasionally felt like i was reading something in translation (i understand ball was living in europe when he composed this). while i know it’s pointless to guess at an author’s intention, these phrasings didn’t feel intentional — the only mood they effectively set for me was mild annoyance, and there was no payoff for it in the plot.
i say the only mood they set for me, etc, but that’s not entirely true. you can get a different mood by disregarding the author’s intentions like so:
i have a friend who used to make fun of me for having gone to bard college by pronouncing it “bahd” and using a ridiculous “high” rhetoric that bore no resemblance to the way anyone has talked ever. if you read samedi the deafness in that voice, the mood might be funnier, but it wouldn’t match the book at all.
the other thing about the prose that jumped out at me often was a tendency toward vagueness which also leads to some howlers. for example: “Anyone who leaves their house deserves what they get.”
while i try to avoid using plural pronouns to indicate gender neutrality, i’m not a prescriptivist and i know there are places where it’s appropriate. whether it’s appropriate here or not, that sentence is a damn mess. to be consistent it would have to read “anyone who leaves their house deserves what they gets.” better just to start from scratch.
you could argue that that phrasing comes from the fact that the passage is written in a close third person, but no you couldn’t. james sim, the protagonist, a “mnemonist” (attention all authors: please no more quirky made up jobs), doesn’t seem to worry about gender neutrailty for the sake of political correctness. his love interest is frequently referred to as a “girl” and really, he seems more like the type to use “one” for gender neutrailty anyway.
but like i said, this contributes to a vagueness. here is another sentence that is all vagueness (and also mixes up pronouns):
“If she was the agent of someone else, and they in turn were working for someone, then who, ultimately, had given the order to follow him?”
this kind of enigma-wrapped-up-in-a-riddle-and-tied-with-a-mystery logic can have its charms, but the sentence itself seems to me emblematic of the book itself: when it misfires, it confuses abstraction and vagueness. abstraction is always fine (boiling things down to their essences without getting mired in the details); vagueness is abstraction’s perversion (murky, gives the impression that the author is aiming for abstraction because he or she doesn’t know the details him or herself).
here is a bulleted list of people who i can think of right now who do abstraction well over the course of a novel:
- samuel beckett
- thomas bernhard
- maurice blanchot
- franz kafka
- marie redonnet
is it a coincidence that they are/were all european? i don’t know.
fancy, man
now for the plot to blow up the world:
the novel picks up steam once james sim gets wrapped up in the plot, but, for me at least, the author seems more invested in the love story being played out at the same time, and i also was more interested in that. the plot itself is very teen angsty (to simplify: sometimes the world gets so fucked up you have to break shit), but the author seems so earnest it’s hard to tell where he stands in relation to it.
i think the problem here is that there is no control in the experiment. the behavior of the characters is defined neither by their situations nor by any internal consistency. take, for example, james sim. sometimes he’s a whiny coward, sometimes he’s a stoic intellectual, sometimes he’s callous, and sometimes he’s a chivalrous tough guy. very much like real people, yes. but we’re given access to his thoughts through the close third person technique, and still there doesn’t seem to be any method to it.
his attitudes are an afterthought, like, in order for this weird shit to happen, he has to respond this way right now. as opposed to, weird shit has happened, how would a guy like this react?
i’m assuming it’s not quite that cut and dry. my guess is that ball has some sort of meta-method he’s applying to the text, and i’m not against that. however, when the plot is based on the faultiness (or not) of memory and the human tendency to lie, i think you really do need an archimedian point inside the text, as opposed to one imposed from without.
one of the things you always hear when you hear about jesse ball is that he writes his books very quickly. it would be tempting to blame what i see as problems with the book on that. but i’m actually not tempted to do that at all (one of the things i’m always telling my writer friends is to get on with it; it’s never going to be the bible). i think it may actually boil down to the likelihood that ball and i are focused on very different things.
all that said, there’s definitely something here. ball is capable of writing very well, and some of the individual passages are quite beautiful. i particularly liked a section that included a description of a couple “trapped in a Studebaker beneath an overturned timber truck. They were speaking to each other very quietly, saying what they supposed were their last things.”
listen. did you read the way through doors yet? because it is shit tons more fun to read. an as far as i’m concerned, either my mind gets cracked wine open to possibilities not yet conceived by me (or possibilities i was not yet capable of conceiving until i read said book) or it somehow manages to give me permission to do things i was not sure i knew how to do (which probably has more to do with the first one so let’s wrap it up in that anyway) or the act of reading it feels me with such sheer mindboggling joy that i do not in any way ever want it to ever stop ever. anyway i’m saying the way through doors was like that and that i preferred it vastly to samedi, which was at times sort of stuffy maybe.
yeah, i considered that the way through doors might be more my style and i think i read somewhere that the decision to publish samedi… first was a market thing — like people might be able to handle it better?
anyway, yes, i’ll give it a try sooner or later. there were hints in samedi that he might be up to some stuff i’d like.
if i’d read samedi first i might have been less likely to be as excited about reading another book of his.
vera and linus is a lot of fun too.