The Known World feels like a book that took a long time to write. The writing proceeds at a slow but churning pace. Jones meticulously ties each character to one another, to the land, to the curious circumstances of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. We are taught in school that slavery was a black and white affair, but Jones takes great pains to describe a human landscape where such distinctions are blurry: the most powerful man in Manchester County, William Robbins, dotes upon the two children he has fathered with his slave, Philomena; Oden, the Indian, exaggerates his cruelty towards blacks to maintain his tenuous superiority; and Henry Townsend, the gifted young black man at the center of this novel, acquires a plantation full of slaves from which discord flows, imperceptibly at first. The lesson is the messiness of slavery made real by the vivid lives of each character. Over the course of the novel, Jones sketches out each character, from birth to death, using deft flashbacks and flash-forwards that are scattered throughout like crumbs and give the book a marvelous depth. In this sense, the book reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book ends before the Civil War begins, and so the triumph of good over evil is not allowed to mitigate the brutal picture of slavery that Jones paints. Perhaps because it was so assiduously researched, this novel feels like history and it feels like life. Here’s hoping that Jones’ next one doesn’t take ten years to write.
Review: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Mad, Mad World: Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test
The Sea and the Mirror: Reflections and Refractions from a Voyage by Ship in Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table
Unchecked Complacency and Privilege: On Prayaag Akbar’s ‘Leila’
To Jobs that Pay the Rent: Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar
“What do you do?”
Of course, the question isn’t “What do you like to do?” It isn’t even “Who are you?” that grandest and most open-ended of personal inquiries. It’s the suggestion that we are, as productive human beings, always in a place where we should be doing something, and that what we do with our time is an essential expression of who we are and who we hope to be. Of course, anyone that’s worked a temp job, a data entry job, a telemarketing job, a retail job, a janitorial job, might not say that the way they make money is really who they are. Or they might feel a deep affinity with the clerking, the shoveling, the building, the frying, and declare themselves proudly for it. Because the answer to the doing question is almost always answered with an “I am” statement. I am working. I am busy. I am needed, somewhere.
The multitudes of working life are beautifully chronicled in Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work, an anthology of short stories edited by Richard Ford. Ford, the next best thing to the late great John Updike when it comes to stories of the middle-class American wage earner, dedicates the anthology to Raymond Carver, no small irony since one of his stories, “Elephant,” was not permitted to be included in the collection, due to the Carver estate withholding permission. Nevertheless, Ford, in his blue-collar brilliance, has collected 32 stories that swirl around examining exactly what it is we do—for a living, for a life, lived long-term or day-to-day. In his introduction, Ford notes that, as he watched his father working as a traveling salesman in the 1940s and 50s, the symbolic value of work was as significant as its monetary ends. “Work—having a job, being employed, making a living—became virtually synonymous with its gifts, and as such became a virtue in itself.” If who you are is how you assert your right to participate in the world, suggests Ford, then the work and careers we pursue represent our individual quests to find purpose, to find our place. “Work is near the heart of human things,” Ford says, and in the stories included in this collection, we see work for pay and work for promise constantly confused.
Certain jobs must be dispassionately communicated—Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Great Experiment” is less about the work of accounting and more about what a man does to squeeze every last (illegally) obtained drop of profit from it. Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies,” the classic story that launched her into the literary world, could make anyone with an interest in character studies run out and start a tour guide-for-hire business. And James Alan McPherson’s “A Solo Song: For Doc” delves deep into the details of waiting tables—the authority of those masters of the form, who can “take the shit without getting hot.”
But then there are the jobs that make for revelations. Edward P. Jones’s inclusion, “The Store” turns a teenage boy’s first job in a grocery store into a lesson in the consequences of adulthood. Z.Z. Packer’s “Geese”, a tale of twenty-somethings in Japan, dwells so long on what food means to the near-starving that you savor each bite with them, lingering on “the warm disk of banana from side to side in his mouth until . . . it had grown so soft that he swallowed it like liquid.” Stories of employment—and unemployment—often become experiments in how long you are willing to go without doing something—without stealing, without lying, without prostituting yourself or your deepest held beliefs. Annie Proulx’s “Job History” follows a lifetime of career choices, watching a progression from scraping together funds as insurance for a good life to unavoidable, unanticipated tragedies. And no degree of care can prevent late-breaking disasters, and no career is idiot proof, despite what Lewis Robinson’s “Officer Friendly” might suggest.
The best stories, and the ones that stay with you the longest, are the ones in which the details of the work drive the tiny moments of character development. Donald Barthelme’s hilarious “Me and Miss Mandible” explores the student-teacher relationship as a problem of interoffice romance (in which one can be studying fractions and functioning as a claims adjuster at the same time.) Barthelme’s hero notes, “I return again and again to the problem of my future.” The same is true for Richard Bausch’s sheriff facing accusations of sexual harassment, the professional disgrace seeping into his home life as poisonous as a nest of yellow jackets hidden in an unreachable perch. Though the melodrama that encircles the story isn’t completely earned, the festering rage of the accusations drive every other reaction towards an inevitable implosion. But a career is also character-building in an imaginative sense, letting you play at an identity before committing to it. Ann Beattie’s “The Working Girl” makes the case that the work you do is only as valuable as the impression you make. And yet Beattie teases out the possibilities within the “working girl” designation by imagining all the different narratives futures that career choice might portend.
We know how this story will end.
How will it end?
It will end badly—which means predictably—because either the beautiful wife will triumph, and then it will be just another such story, or the wife will turn out to be not so interesting after all, and by default the working girl will win.
When is the last time you heard of a working girl triumphing?
The most haunting inclusion in this anthology is Elizabeth Strout’s “Pharmacy,” which chronicles the sad longing-filled friendship of a pharmacist and his young assistant. Through Henry’s eyes, we come to fall in love with the day-to-day of the workplace. “The ritual was pleasing, as though the old store—with its shelves of toothpaste, vitamins, cosmetics, hair adornments, even sewing needles and greeting cards, as well as red rubber hot water bottles, enema pumps—was a person altogether steady and steadfast.” His desire to keep the world in balance by way of running his store, and his inability to rescue his assistant Denise from her troubled life, turns his workplace into more than just a place of business—instead, “a healthy autonomic nervous system in a workable, quiet state.” The business becomes the place of redemption, and the graveyard of missed opportunities.
When the job becomes important enough, it becomes its own story. And no story may be so appealing or maddening as that of the story of writing, the daily grind of creative production, as much a desk job as a vocation or a calling. John Cheever’s classic story “The World of Apples” represents the mandatory inclusion in this volume, as a poet finds it impossible to escape from his writing impulses even when in retirement and on vacation in Rome. “Two admirers—a young married couple—came at five to praise him. They had met on a train, each of them carrying a copy of his Apples. They had fallen in love along the lines of the pure and ardent love he described. Thinking of his day’s work, Bascomb hung his head.” The same story emerges at the opposite end of the spectrum, the experience of the young writer just hitting his stride, in Nicholas Delbanco’s “The Writers Trade.” This story reads like the Wall Street of foreboding tales of the creative process, as a young writer, with all the glittering arrival of a career in its nascence. “All this was bounty, a gift.” And later, the melancholy realization: “Between self-pity and aggrandizement, there is little room to maneuver.”
Such is the case in any profession, and in every piece in this sparkling collection, we negotiate the hazy space between what we do and what we think we can do. As Andre Dubus’ newspaper boy makes his way down a quiet street, as Eudora Welty’s traveling salesmen panics when he has to shack up with strangers, as the editorial assistant and the line cook and the bus driver wonder what, if anything, comes next, we examine stories of work as maps, for new highways to travel on, or upcoming dead ends. And we fear asking ourselves the question of Cheever’s too-accomplished poet, “Had the world, as well as he, lost its way?”
Strong Language: Kyle Thomas Smith’s 85A
Black Berets Unite: In Praise of Pretentiousness
Nabokov’s Scraps: The Original of Laura
I planned to review The Original of Laura back when it first came out last year, but I found that I didn’t have much to say. The book was marketed as the final unfinished novel of Vladimir Nabokov, and as a “masterwork that was nearly destroyed.” Really, though, it’s just a jumble of disconnected fragments, in such rough form that they can’t be evaluated.
Still, some reviewers have been extraordinarily hostile to The Original of Laura, and have given Nabokov absurdly harsh treatment for this batch of handwritten index cards that he specifically insisted should never be published. It seems only decent to remind everyone that this isn’t the volume to use as proof of much of anything about Nabokov’s writing. The Original of Laura doesn’t show a falling-off in Nabokov’s powers as a novelist. It shows little except that he died before he could put the novel on paper in anything even hazily resembling publishable form.
Reading some of the reviews, you can come away with a sense that the text is far closer to completion than it actually is. Not a single sustained sequence, not a single fully developed character, not a single clear line of narrative emerges from these short, disjointed scraps of writing. Nabokov is one of the least straightforward novelists in history, and his books can’t really be understood in isolated or incomplete pieces. Imagine evaluating Pale Fire on the basis of, say, early drafts of Nabokov’s handwritten index cards from thirty or forty pages of the least revealing parts of Kinbote’s commentary, without even a single index card from the main poem.
The fragments of The Original of Laura have something to do with someone named Flora and someone named Wild, and something to do with some book called My Laura, and something to do with Wild’s notion of mentally dismembering his body as a form of death-by-willpower. Yet since this is Nabokov, it’s not only possible but probable that the relationships among these elements are far from obvious. Even the most seemingly clear aspects of the fragments are part of larger patterns that we will simply never recover, and that it’s irresponsible for us to pretend we can examine.
I understand why some of the reviews have been so nasty. The book has been brought out in an expensive, ornate edition, accompanied by a lot of off-putting pre-publication hype. Yet Nabokov isn’t responsible for that hype, and his son Dmitri Nabokov has acted with integrity by insisting that the book appear in a form where its incompleteness can be seen and instantly grasped.
Indeed, Dmitri Nabokov has taken some weirdly disproportionate hits for the aspect of the book that deserves the greatest praise. He hasn’t hidden the unpolished, provisional state of the text. Instead, he has heightened it, reproducing the handwritten index cards so we can inspect for ourselves just how far the book is from being done. Critics who have attacked him for his textual decisions should lighten up (and should keep in mind that he’s a first-rate translator who has earned his place as the protector of his father’s legacy). Besides, would we really be happier with an edition of the novel where a team of editors had quietly cleaned up the prose and attempted to pull everything together into a falsely unified story?
Whether the fragments should have been published at all is a harder question. I think Nabokov’s last wishes should have trumped our curiosity, even if the writing had been in a more nearly finished form and had amounted to a great final work. Again, though, Dmitri Nabokov has been savaged for his open, decades-long struggle with a decision that many other literary estates have made much more secretively, often ignoring or downplaying the author’s desires in an attempt to avoid criticism. Outsiders might not agree with Dmitri Nabokov’s decision to publish, but it was his choice to make, and he had the courage to make it without trying to minimize the difficulties of his position. It seems to me he’s being punished mainly for his honesty, for doing in a straightforward and honorable manner what many literary estates do with cynical, calculating furtiveness.
This isn’t a minor point. With the publishing world’s old standards and traditions dissolving all around us, why should we go out of our way to rip into people who make a special effort to take their literary duties seriously? Dmitri Nabokov is, after all, responsible for bringing out, among many other books, The Enchanter and The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov—two valuable posthumous Nabokov works where the son’s editing and translating are exemplary. Indeed, Dmitri Nabokov’s lifelong dedication to his father’s writing deserves a far more appreciative assessment than it has lately generated. This will be corrected in the long run, but why not just go ahead and correct it today? Vladimir Nabokov has every reason to be grateful for his son’s devotion.
Anyway, The Original of Laura is out now, and we can see that Nabokov was right to believe his final fragments weren’t yet ready for publication. This knowledge should remind us how high Nabokov’s standards were for his craft. It should also free us to turn back to the books that he actually saw into print. From The Eye to Lolita and Pnin, from Glory and Laughter in the Dark to Speak, Memory and Pale Fire, Nabokov’s best writing will last long after The Original of Laura is properly forgotten.