Gene writes in with this question:I currently teach a high school English course called 21st Century Literature, and I’ve hit a bit of a block these last few weeks in trying to put together this year’s syllabus. We currently read Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao along with essays from the likes of David Foster Wallace (“E Unibus Pluram”) to Chuck Klosterman (“The Real World”). We also look at some popular TV shows, music, and films in an attempt to get the students to examine the world in which they live with something of a more “critical” eye.So. I’m trying to replace Fortress for this year’s class, partly because I update the syllabus every year and partly because it was the one last year’s students voted out. My problem, though, is that I haven’t read anything this year that has really blown me away. And so I turn to you, Millions, for some guidance. I’m currently considering Bock’s Beautiful Children, Ferris’ Then We Came To The End, Clarke’s An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, or possibly the new collection of essays State by State. My students are really intelligent, and so just about anything is fair game. What, then, would you add to the class to be read right after Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work?Five of our contributors weighed in.Edan: What a terrific course! Can I take it? Your syllabus thus far sounds pretty damn spectacular as is, so I’ve tried my best to come up with texts that fulfill a role that the other books haven’t. Of the four you’re considering teaching, I think State by State is the best, since it showcases so many great writers. While I enjoyed Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, I think a workplace narrative would be lost on most teenagers. Here are my suggestions:Willful Creatures: Stories by Aimee Bender or Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link: It might be fun to add some short fiction to the syllabus, and to improve the male-to-female author ratio. Of the many writers I introduced to my Oberlin students, Bender and Link were the biggest hits, perhaps for the magic and fantasy they inject into their odd and beautiful stories. Both writers provide excellent discussion fodder about the construction of reality, and about notions of genre in contemporary fiction.The Known World by Edward P. Jones: Still one of my favorite novels of all time, this is a historical novel about black slave owners in antebellum Virginia. It’s told in a sprawling omniscient voice, not a common point of view in these fragmented, solipsistic times. It might be interesting to compare this perspective to the more intimate first person narratives on the syllabus. Also, since your other texts take place in the time they’re written, it might be interesting to see how a contemporary writer depicts and manipulates the past.Look at Me by Jennifer Egan Published a few days before September 11th, this novel feels strangely prophetic. It also articulates, well before its time, the strange and complicated nature of online social networks like Facebook, certainly a topic of interest among high school students. The book tells two parallel narratives: one about a model whose face is unrecognizable after a car accident, and another about a teenage girl living in a long-dead industrial town in the Midwest. It’s equal parts beautiful, entertaining, satirical, and sad. This novel could inspire many fruitful discussions about identity, media, beauty, and representations of self.Andrew: Rawi Hage’s DeNiro’s Game is a tightly-written haunting jagged rush through the streets of war-torn Beirut in the 1980s. Now calling Montreal his home, Rawi Hage lived through the endless Lebanese civil war and writes this tale as a survival story, not a political polemic. The protagonists are ordinary young Lebanese guys – where ordinary means bombed-out homes, militias, snipers and rubble. No longer children, but not quite adults, Bassam and George flex their muscles amid the smoke and dust of a city that has been prodded and beaten by any group with a big enough stick.Winner of the 2008 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and short-listed for countless major awards up here in Canada, Hage’s debut novel throws the reader into a part of the world in the not-so-distant past that he likely has only seen from news images, and he gives these images human dimensions. This is a harrowing story of brutal youth.Emily: Although I wouldn’t say it blew me away, I submit Keith Gessen’s All The Sad Young Literary Men as a possible addition to your 21st century lit syllabus – not least because I think I would have found such a book personally useful had something like it been recommended it to me in high school. Its depiction of the social and intellectual chaos and disappointments of college and the post-college decade for three bright, ambitious, politically serious young men manages – oh, as I feared it might (for so many sad young literary men do) – not to take itself or its characters too seriously. Not that Gessen trivializes or denies the pains of his three protagonists, but he is exquisitely aware of the absurdities idealism and ambition sometimes fall into – particularly among the young. The character Sam is my favorite example of this: he aspires to write to great Zionist epic and has managed to get an advance from a publisher toward this end, but he does not speak Hebrew, has never been to Israel, and is a little bit fuzzy on Israeli history and politics. His best claim to the project is his extensive collection of fiery Jewish girlfriends. Like his fellow protagonists, Keith and Mark, Sam seems more delighted by the idea of literary accomplishment for himself than able to sit down and produce the stunning epic of the Jewish people that he imagines and more hungry for fame than to write his book (“Fame – fame was the anti-death. But it seemed to slither from his grasp, seemed to giggle and retreat, seemed to hide behind a huge oak tree and make fake farting sounds with its hands.”).Gessen has a particularly deft touch with juxtaposition – almost zeugma perhaps? – in his plotting and narration. The personal and the political – the sublime and the ridiculous – are cheek by jowl and often confused: Keith’s desire to sleep with the vice president’s daughter (who is in his class at Harvard and dating his roommate) is bound up with his desire for the vice president himself (Gore) to win the presidential election; For Sam, his intellectual work and his personal life are strangely aligned such that “refreshed by his summation of the Holocaust, Sam decided to put the rest of his life in order” and instead of wrestling with his genuine artistic problem (his inability to write his epic), he becomes crazily obsessed, instead, with his shrinking Google. I suspect that we will see better work from Gessen in the years to come, but for its humor, its pathos, and its willness to depict (and deftness in depicting) the humiliations and vagueries of early adulthood, I think it’s an excellent choice (particularly since among your students there are, I imagine, some present and future sad young literary men).Garth: This is sounds like a great class. I wish I’d had you as a teacher! One of the implicit challenges of answering the question is the tension between the need to appeal to high schoolers and the search for formal innovation. These two are not mutually exclusive; I vividly remember falling in love with Infinite Jest as a high-schooler. Still, some of the aesthetic strategies that separate contemporary writers from the hoary old 1900s (which are so last century) come at the cost of emotional immediacy. some of my favorite works of 21st Century fiction – Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai; Kathryn Davis’ The Thin Place; Lydia Davis’ Varieties of Disturbance; Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno – may be a little too cerebral for high schoolers.I thought of several adventurous novels which are less formally pluperfect (in my opinion), but which might make a stronger appeal to this age group. Chief among them are Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital, Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.Though I didn’t care for Beautiful Children, and suspect teenagers would see through its outdated assessment of youth culture, Then We Came to the End has an appealing warmth and good humor, as well as a fascinating first-person-plural voice. Ultimately, though, the two “21st Century” books I can most imagine teaching to high-schoolers are George Saunders’ Pastoralia (2000) and Paul Beatty’s The White-Boy Shuffle (1996).Max: Sounds like putting together the syllabus is a fun job. It’s interesting that the students didn’t like Fortress as much. I think I would agree with them on that. Though it was certainly an ambitious and at times entertaining book, I think it falls apart in the second half. I haven’t read Motherless Brooklyn, but I know it seems to have many more fans than Fortress.Thinking about short story collections, you could hardly go wrong with Edward P. Jones’s two collections – Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children – Jones’s stories are terrific and offer a perspective that is quite different from Chabon, Lethem, and the rest of the Brooklyn crowd. Also, Jones’s The Known World is to my mind maybe the best novel of the last 20 years. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and Atonement by Ian McEwan also strike me as solid candidates, with the latter offering a unique and satisfying “reveal” at the end that changes how the reader thinks about the books structure (assuming your students haven’t already seen the film which, anyway, does the book a disservice in trying to render a purely literary twist via the language of Hollywood.)Gene, thanks for the question and please let us know what you select. Millions readers, please offer your suggestions in the comments below.
If you have your heart set on Murakami, I recommend you start with Norwegian Wood, the bittersweet love story that propelled him to superstardom. It lacks the fantastic elements of much of Murakami’s more popular work, but it contains perhaps the best depiction of modern Japanese life that Murakami has ever written.
If you really want to learn more about what it means to be Japanese, you might consider picking up a copy of Kokoro, by Natsume Soseki. Kokoro is a, perhaps the, great modern Japanese novel (at least most Japanese would tell you that) in much the same way that The Great Gatsby Is a great American novel. Kokoro trades Gatsby’s wit and panache for a solemn melancholy that I, frankly, find off-putting, but it’s unquestionably one of the most “important” Japanese novels, and a great introduction to the soul of modern Japan.
On the non-fiction front, I highly recommend Ian Buruma’s Inventing Japan, which provides an excellent, entertaining encapsulation of Japan’s modern history. At a mere 174 pages, you can read it on the plane ride over, and still have time for two terrible movies. For a bleaker take on modern history, you might consider Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons, a dystopic look at Japanese bureaucracy and the country’s appalling environmental legacy. It can be a bit of a downer, but it provides an insightful behind-the-scenes look at what makes the country run.
I would also recommend anything by Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, particularly “Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids” and “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness.”
Thanks a lot Ben! Any recommendations on historical fiction? I’m usually a sucker for those. Kokoro sounds intriguing, too.
But can’t Murakami’s obsession with the West be seen as the crux of post-war Japan? The US occupation force-fed consumerism to the Japanese and I have always read Murakami as the standard bearer of that incredibly complex legacy. If the anxiety and conflict present in Yukio Mishima novels wrestle with how to cope with the loss of certain cultural traditions, the way Murakami’s characters embrace Western tastes speaks to how Japan has changed during the intervening years. Yes, Murakami’s characters love American music and films but their crises of self, as I see it, reflect many aspects of contemporary Japan, especially among the young urban set.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima is a wonderful historical fiction based on the true story of a monk who sets fire to a Kyoto temple.
The Housekeeper and the Professor (novel) and The Diving Pool (3 novellas) by Yoko Ogawa. I had to wait months to get the novel from my library despite there being 8 copies and a short book–really special book.
I’m going to have to agree with Buzz; you can learn a lot about Japan from Murakami. I’ve both lived there, and lived with Japanese friends in America and Murakami was a way towards mutual understanding for sure.
I’d second his recommendation of Mishima, though I’d maybe give a heartier recommendation to The Sound of the Waves
I’d also recommend (and I’ve mentioned it here before) The Road to Sata by Alan Booth. It’s a travel book by a Brit who lived in Japan for most all of his adult life and he really gets at all different aspects of Japanese culture.
And why not read the first Nobel prize winner, Kawabata. Snow Country or The Old Capitol is a good place to start with him.
Kawabata is good… but maybe The Master of Go? Semi-sort-of-non-fiction-fiction about a single Go match which took place just before WWII, stressing both the differing styles and the physical and mental vulnerabilities of the players.
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, perhaps? The Makioka Sisters is wonderful (and is sort of historical fiction in that it deals with Japan’s changing culture post-westernisation through the differing actions and reactions of the sisters), but you might get a lot from his essay In Praise of Shadows, which is short and deals illuminatingly and concisely with the differences between western and traditional Japanese aesthetics.
I strongly recommend Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short stories, particularly ‘In A Grove’ and ‘Spinning Gears’.
If you wanted to look at something older, you could take a crack at The Tale of Genji, the sweeping and psychologically fascinating eleventh-century novel by Murasaki Shikibu. That’s rather a long read, though, so maybe instead try the Penguin selections from the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, which is a sort of diary, a collection of her funny and insightful remarks on the characters and quirks of the Heian court of which she was part.
I was actually in this exact situation a few months ago–visiting Japan for the first time, never having read any Japanese literature, and polling my friends as to which books I should bring. I decided to read “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” for my first experience with Murakami, because the back cover described it “as an attempt to stuff all of modern Japan into one book,” or something like that. While I agree that for long stretches of the book the characters don’t seem “Japanese” (they could be the alienated inhabitants of any large city), some of the best writing in this novel is an attempt to reckon with Japan’s militaristic legacy and the atrocities of WWII. I recommend it and am looking forward to trying more Murakami soon.
I was interested in also reading something by a female author, and a friend suggested Banana Yoshimoto–unfortunately, I cannot recommend her. I tried her novella “N.P.” and it was terrible–flat writing in a bad translation.
And to supplement things with a foreigner’s perspective on some aspects of Japanese culture, I enjoyed “Fear and Trembling” by Amélie Nothomb, a young Belgian woman’s memoir/novella of working at a big Japanese corporation.
And another friend suggested reading the Pillow Book in conjunction with the “Hagakure” or samurai tales, to get an idea of what life was like for aristocratic men and women in feudal Japan.
Marissa, before you dismiss the Banana altogether pls try KITCHEN. NP I agree is fairly weak. It’s been years at this point, but I remember KITCHEN, particularly the last novella, as being fairly transcendent. I feel a lot of affection for that book.