Book Review: 1Q84, Haruki Murakami

This article was first published at Blogcritics

1Q84, Haruki Murakami's oft praised and just as often panned epic, is now available in a three volume paperback set from Vintage Press.  To be clear from the start, I come not to praise; I come not to pan. I come to do both. 1Q84 is the kind of book that must inevitably generate controversy. But before taking a look at what the book is about, let's discuss length.

Back in the day, a professor of mine suggested a simple rule of thumb with regard to making critical judgments about extra long works of literature: is the reward the reader gets, worth the time and effort the reader has to put in to read it. He was talking about James Joyce's Ulysses, a book he felt clearly offered riches worth not only hours of reading but hours of study as well. Murakami's three volumes run to 1,157 pages in this new edition. It creates a fictional world that can be fascinating at times. It tells a story that can catch readers up in its tentacles and even get them turning pages to see what happens next. It has a resolution that will satisfy some, and leave others scratching their heads. Clearly whether it was worth the time and effort will vary with the individual reader.  Be warned before you embark; 1Q84 is no Ulysses.

The narrative in the first two volumes follows the fortunes of two characters seemingly unconnected.  Aomame is a 30 year old woman who works as a fitness instructor and personal trainer.  She is involved with a safe house for battered women run by a rich dowager and her personal security aide.  Tengo is a 30 year old math teacher and writer who gets himself involved in ghost writing a story originally written by a 17 year old girl who has run off from a religious cult.  In the third volume, a third narrative point of view is added, that of an older agent the cult, a somewhat shady character who had been introduced in the second volume. Chapters alternate between Aomame and Tengo in the first two volumes, and between the three in the last.

The novel begins in the fall of 1984 when Aomame, in a taxi rushing to an important appointment gets caught in a traffic jam on a highway.  The driver tells her about an emergency stairway she can use to get off the road while making some cryptic remarks about the nature of reality, remarks that turn out to be central to the metaphysics of the novel.  Aomame descends the staircase and eventually discovers she is in a world that seems like real world, but is not.  She is sure about it when she discovers that in this world there are two moons. The 'Q' in the novel's title means questionable.  It is no longer 1984; it is a new world, a questionable replica.  The rest of the novel takes place in this replica. The significance of this particular year with its allusion to the George Orwell novel suggests the dystopian nature of the questionable world.

Part fantasy science fiction, part noir crime story—the novel deals with religious cults, murder, and little people with magical powers that emerge from the mouth of a dead goat. It is a story told with intriguing simplicity.  Murakami manages to spin off some weird scenarios with enough verisimilitude and emotional investment in the characters to keep readers happy.  Add to the complexities of plot a bit of mystical speculation about the nature of reality and you have a tale that many will find enthralling. If nothing else he can tell a story.

Somewhere in the middle of the novel, Tengo picks up a book of stories to read while traveling on a train.  He reads a story about a city of cats.  A man gets off a train and finds an empty town. Intrigued, he begins to explore as the train leaves.  No other train due until the next day, he continues to explore.  When night comes, the town begins to fill with cats, cats that seem to act the way ordinary human inhabitants would.  Morning approaches and they disappear. The narrator stays around for a few days and then when he decides to leave, he discovers he's stuck there. Once Tengo reads the story, the city of cats becomes a theme that runs through the rest of the novel. In a sense it is a metaphor for 1Q84, just as they narrator in the story is stuck in the city of cats, Aomame and Tengo, it seems, are stuck in IQ84.

If like me, you are able to accept the strange world that Alice enters when she falls into the rabbit hole, more than likely you'll find the journey through Murakami's three volumes more than worth your time.  Although you may find yourself less enthusiastic about the journey's end. If speculative fantasy turns you off, don't bother with 1Q84, you'd probably do better with some other three volume tome.

Book Review: The Instructions, by Adam Levin

Article first published as Book Review: The Instructions by Adam Levin on Blogcritics.

I guess the first thing to be considered, for many perhaps the only thing to be considered with regard to Adam Levin's massive novel The Instructions is length. Although not quite matching James Joyce who needed 760 odd pages to chronicle the events of one day in Dublin, since his 1,000 plus tome covers four days in Chicago and environs, Levin has produced one hell of a long book. Of course you could argue that since Joyce deals with two characters, not counting Molly, and Levin deals with only one, it is necessary to divide the pages in Ulysses by two and those of The Instructions by four in order to get a more accurate comparison. Then of course why not count Molly? In which case, the numbers are closer. Then again it may well be necessary, for accuracy's sake, to think about words on the page. After all Ulysses in the Modern Library edition hasn't quite the page size of the Canongate edition of The Instructions. It doesn't come close in bulk either: simply holding Levin's book to turn the pages is something of a chore. Suffice it to say this is one long book.

(To digress for a moment: if the kind of Talmudic analysis merely hinted at in this opening paragraph is not your cup of tea, if you think of it as nit picking, you probably aren't going to care much for The Instructions. A good many of the 1,000 plus pages are taken up with precisely this kind of analysis of what characters say, what they write, what they do. Hardly anything—whether a wink, a nod, or a casual remark—goes unanalyzed. End of digression.)

Length doesn't particularly bother me. When I finish one book, I start another. It really makes no difference how long a book is. Still, if you are going to spend the time on a book of this length, might you not be better off with War and Peace or Don Quixote? Back many years ago, a professor of mine once suggested a standard by which to test a work of literature. Ask yourself, he said, does the value you get from it justify the work you have to put into it. He wasn't necessarily talking about length only, he was talking about all the effort necessary to read a work and understand it. While this is a fine standard to measure a work's value, it is necessary to read the book and do all the work before making your judgment. If that judgment is that it wasn't worth the effort, you've in effect wasted all that time that might have been put to better use. On the other hand, as a critic, if I have done all that work and discovered that it was worth the effort for me, how can I know that all readers will end up with similar results?

(Digression: Talmudic analysis seems to be catchy.)

Now that you know that this is a long book and that length isn't necessarily a drawback as far as I am concerned, let me tell you a little bit about what is a book, for better or worse, like few others you may have come across. The Instructions is the story a charismatic 10 year old Talmudic scholar, Gurion Maccabee, who has managed to get himself expelled from a number of Jewish schools for fighting and encouraging others to engage in violence. Moreover, he suspects he may be the messiah and through his magnetic personality, his brilliant reasoning, and his physical abilities he has been able to get others to believe in him as well. As the novel begins, he has been placed in a special program for students with behavioral disorders in a public junior high school. The other students in the program are all older than him, but here too he manages to become their leader in a fight against what they feel are the unfair regulations imposed on them by unreasonable authorities.

This struggle becomes entwined with the need for Jews to defend themselves from anti-Semitism and fight for righteousness. Gurion distinguishes between Jews and Israelites. Jews are those who accept their situation, and either through fear or complacency, refuse to fight for righteousness. Israelites are those who commit to the struggle. Indeed, it seems that you don't even have to be Jewish to be an Israelite. The novel goes on to describe the "Gurionic War," the revolution of the Israelites against the perversions of justice, perhaps fulfilling the prophecy, "and a little child shall lead them."

The novel itself is presented as scripture in the voice of the ten year old Gurion, and herein lies a problem. Rarely, if ever, does he sound like a ten year old. Whether he is speaking to a teacher or one of his fellow students, he always speaks with a maturity beyond his years even if his ideas aren't always as mature as his voice. The book even calls this to the reader's attention by including a faux letter from Philip Roth, one of Gurion's favorite writers, saying that he doesn't care for what he thinks is the elder Gurion putting his ideas in the mouth of the young boy. The trouble is the faux Roth is wrong. This is indeed the boy speaking, and the reader needs to accept his wisdom beyond his years. In a sense, it is this incongruency that underlies what some have seen as the comic element of the novel.

In the end there is much that is entertaining in this novel and there is much that is annoying. There are laugh out loud moments, clever word play, and brain teasing logical labyrinths. Then there are the times when enough is enough, when another page and a half analysis of the meaning of a touch on the arm or a ten page justification of the failure of one friend to help another is simply redundant. There will be those who find the entertaining parts worth putting up with the rest, but I suspect they will be a limited group of readers with a specialized tastes. Think of all those readers who never managed to finish Infinite Jest.

Book Review: Oblivion, David Foster Wallace

This article was first published at The Compulsive Reader.

Let me begin by saying that readers of David Foster Wallace’s short fiction, the short fiction collected in his volume entitled “Oblivion,” stories numbering eight precisely, who (the readers) come to his work for the first time would do well to prepare themselves for that author’s (Foster Wallace’s) stylistic mannerisms, that some less tolerant of such authorial idiosyncracy, might well call stylistic excess and others less generous even, stylistic flaws: his penchant almost a fetish for, not to suggest anything sexual, digressions as his characters, ten year old daydreamers or thirty something advertising executives, to name but two, freely free [Wallace also being fond of word repetition (that that or is is for example) (and parentheses and brackets as well for that matter)] associate, as though in a session with some putative therapist,analyist annalist, or even, to stretch a point, some father confessor, their way through their stories; his almost complete, although certainly not completely complete, as characters do in fact speak to one another in at least two of the eight stories, rejection of dialogue, so that often page of unindented prose follows page of unindented prose, long paragraphs another element of the author’s bravura style, to say nothing of his fondness for long–the longer the better-sentences.

Wallace is a virtuoso of the long sentence.

Reading him reminded me of my first acquaintance with the Victorian poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne (“Faustina,” “The Hymn to Proserpina,”). You would begin reading a sentence in one of his poems and by the time you got to the verb, you had forgotten the subject and had to go back an re-read the sentence or push on hoping that things would clear up eventually: a phenomenon often repeated in reading these shot stories.

Indeed Wallace’s mannerisms put me in mind of other literary precursors. His digressions, while never quite as extensive, these after all are short stories, echo Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. His free associating monologues bring to mind the streams of consciousness of the like of Stephen Dedalaus in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His long paragraphs and intensive analysis of the subtleties of character behavior suggest nothing so much as later Henry James, The Ambassadors, for example.

Not bad company, to say the least, but all, it should be pointed out (I must stop mimicking Mr. Wallace) not exactly the most facile of reads. They, like David Foster Wallace and the blind epicist (really I will stop) of Paradise Lost, write for the “fit though few.”

One more generalization about overall style: Wallace also likes to play games with narrative voice. He creates characters to tell his stories, but it is not always easy to pin this characters down. For example “Mister Squishy,” the first story in the book seems to be coming from the point of view of a focus group facilitator named Schmidt, but at times we get information from members of the group and people outside the group as well. The ten year old daydreamer of “The Soul is Not a Smithy” is at times sitting in a school civics class imagining a comic strip story in the panes of a window and at times the grown man talking about the boy imagining the comic strip–something like those Russian nesting dolls. Narrative point of view in these stories is fluid and changeable, something to be manipulated for the effect of the story.

As to the stories themselves, they are densely layered with subtle detail that
very often camouflages the real point. It is almost as if the characters cannot really deal with the truth of their lives head on, must come at by way of a wide circle of hints and suggestions. The narrator in “The Soul is Not a Smithy” is ostensibly telling the story of how his childhood daydreaming in class left him oblivious to a truly frightening experience, the mental breakdown of a substitute civics teacher during a lesson on the Constitution. He is so caught up in his daydream that he does not realize what is happening until the rest of his classmates panic and run out of the room.

On the other hand, what really seems to be bothering the older version of the narrator telling of this experience is the stultifying life his father led and which still haunts him in nightmarish dreams. Dreaming in one form or another becomes a major motif in the story, both as a form of escape and a means for creation.

“Good Old Neon” describes a “Richard Cory” kind of man who seems happy and well adjusted, but who feels that he is a fraud. He analyzes everything he does with the intensity of a J. Alfred Prufrock and he concludes that everything he does is to make the right impression on others, rather than a true expression of his own desires. But in the end it seems that the story may not really be about “Goods Old Neon” at all. Another character appears from nowhere, a character called David Wallace, who may or may not be identified with the author depending on your own critical persuasion, and explains his own jealousies about Old Neon whom he had known in high school.

“Oblivion” a story about a husband who is obsessed with what he believes are his wife’s hallucinations that he is snoring when he is positive that he has not even been asleep is underneath the story of a love that is drying up with age.

Wallace’s fiction forces the reader to look beneath the surface. His characters, like most human beings find it difficult to communicate directly. More often than not what they are really concerned with must be parsed out through indirection, as though they are avoiding issues that are too painful to confront head on.

Of all the stories in the book–all impressive in their virtuosity–the one that impressed most was the last, “The Suffering Channel.” On one level it is a comic piece about a popular magazine’s attempts to deal with a story about a man who in the process of defecating produces turd sculptures. One of their writers has come across this excremental artist in the mid west and wants editorial approval for an article. His pitch travels up the editorial ladder by way of bright young female interns aggressively in pursuit of glamorous careers. They dress in the latest fashions, eat at the “right” restaurants, come to work in cross trainers and work out at lunch. They see themselves as the potential movers and shakers of the publishing industry; they have everything to look forward to. It is July of 2001. They are working on the issue of their magazine that will come out on September 10. Their offices are in the World Trade Center.

It takes some work to read David Foster Wallace. It is worth it.

Book Review: Bullfighting, by Roddy Doyle

Article first published as Book Review: Bullfighting: Stories by Roddy Doyle on Blogcritics.

Perhaps it's unfair, but for many readers it is nigh on to impossible to read a collection of short stories about Ireland by an Irish author without comparing it to what has to be the emblematic collection of Irish stories, James Joyce's Dubliners. Happily the stories in Roddy Doyle's new collection Bullfighting doesn't suffer from the comparison. These are thirteen stories that can hold their own with the best that Ireland has to offer, and that's no mean feat. If there's one thing the Irish can do, it's tell stories. Doyle is no exception; he does them proud. He writes with humor and pathos. He has a justly acclaimed ear for the Irish voice. He has keen insights into the Ireland of the twenty first century and keener insights into the men and women who inhabit it.

The stories in Bullfighting, eight of which had been first published in The New Yorker, all focus on aging men trying to cope with the problems of getting old. They are no longer working, or they are getting ready to retire. Their bodies are falling apart. Their children have grown old and left the nest. The passion has gone from their marriages. They reflect on a past when they felt useful and needed. "Recuperation," the first of the stories in the collection, sets the theme. Hanahoe, the protagonist, is out walking for his daily exercise as recommended by his doctors. As he walks he reflects on both his past and his present. He sees the changes in the city: a kickboxing sign on a local school, Africans selling the Herald, McDonalds, women in trainers who walk faster than him. He thinks back to things that were and things that might have been. In some respects it is a very depressing story, but then at the end when he huddles into a bus shelter, he meets a friendly little girl waiting for her mother. She talks to him and this little bit of human contact renews him: "The rain is gone. It's bright again." While there's life there's hope.

That is the key to most of these stories; no matter how depressing things seem to get, the rain goes and skies brighten. In "Animals," the aging out of work father counts his life, not in coffee spoons, but his children's pets, the fish, the birds, the rabbits. He thinks back to the time he accidently backed the car over their dog and then lied to the family about it. When he tells his son about it, the son reassures him: "We all knew we had a great da." "The Dog" is about a couple that drifts apart, held together for awhile by their pet. In "The Photograph" a photo of an old friend at 25 placed on his coffin provides a kind of epiphany (to borrow a term associated with Joyce) for the protagonist. "Sad," he muses, "and good had become the same thing."
Some of the stories connect aging with changes in behavior. "Blood," a comic story about a middle aged man, who suddenly develops an inexplicable taste for blood dripping raw meat, is certainly the weirdest of these. But then there's "Funerals" where a man begins to take pleasure in ferrying his elderly parents around to the funerals of their relatives, friends and acquaintances, and "Teaching" where the protagonist has to balance his teaching and his drinking as he finds himself meeting the children of his old students in his classes.

"Bullfighting," the title story, takes a quartet of middle aged men to Spain for what seems like a fairly depressing vacation. They are staying in a shoddy house owned by one of the men's brothers. The town, although people seem to be awake at all hours, is described as quiet and boring. There is a bullfighting arena, but even that is described as boring. They drink, they swim, they read. When they are ready to leave, the protagonist in an almost drunken stupor wanders into the bull ring as a bull is being unloaded from a truck. While the bull never comes near him, it is as though the experience has in some way liberated him from the aging process. He goes back to the house and vomits in the pool, but that's alright. "This was living, he thought. This was happiness."

Other than "Blood" perhaps, these are stories that deal with the ordinary events in the lives of ordinary people. In most of them nothing significant seems to happen. Men take walks, alone or with dogs. Men have problems with wives. A man finds a dead rat in his kitchen and it seems to upset the order of his universe. A man watches his sleeping wife and thinks back to when they were young. These are stories in which little happens, but what does happen is everything. They are the stuff of lives lived. It is the gift of Roddy Doyle that he is equally at home writing about movie making and the IRA—check out his Henry Smart trilogy—as he is about an ordinary guy rushing off to the hospital with kidney stones. And he can make you care about both.