Reading 1Q84: The Case for Fiction in a Busy Life

Essays
November 14, 2011 | 2 books mentioned 27 6 min read

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coverWhen I was assigned to review 1Q84 for The Christian Science Monitor it had been four months since I’d read a page of anything. That last book I’d tried to read had also been by Haruki Murakami — The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — and my bookmark was right where I’d left it, on page 52, the day my wife had gone into labor with our second son.

Raising young children poses two challenges for reading fiction. The first is time, and not having much of it. The second, which I find harder to overcome, is that raising kids and reading fiction require somewhat different mindsets: fiction opens you to new possibilities, but once you’ve embarked on an all-consuming activity like raising kids you don’t want to think too much about other possibilities; you just need to put your head down and do it.

I started 1Q84 at 9pm at the end of a long day that had featured a 103 degree fever (my youngest son Wally, age 4 months) and several bathroom accidents (his older brother Jay, age 2 years). As I slumped on the couch with a cup of peppermint tea and my large yellow review copy of 1Q84, I found myself grasping to justify why, outside of the assignment I’d been given, it made sense to spend my only free time of the day reading fiction.

But I did read the book, that night and every night after for a month, and I found that as I read 1Q84 and got deeper into Tengo’s and Aomame’s stories, I stopped questioning the purpose of fiction and instead began to see reading 1Q84 as one of the few necessary things I did all day. The reasons for the change of heart had to do with wonder, with love, and with the way literature provides for the best parts of who we are.

1Q84 is long (nearly 1,000 pages) and wildly imaginative, but at heart it’s a simple love story. Tengo and Aomame, both 30 years old, shared a singular, intense moment as children, disappeared from each other’s lives, and have been trying to recapture that kind of intimacy ever since. As 1Q84 opens they fall into an alternate world which is sinister and illogical, but which gives them the chance to find each other again.

Aomame calls this world 1Q84 (in which the “Q” stands for “question”) and it is most clearly distinguished by the fact that two moons hang in the sky — the familiar moon and, alongside it, a smaller moon, “slightly warped in shape, and green.” The moons preside over Aomame’s “sex feasts,” several murders, Tengo’s surreal trips to see his dying father, and one of the most transfixing nocturnal dream scenes I’ve ever read. The moons are a tangible reminder of the warning delivered to Aomame by her cab driver, just before she steps out of a taxi on a gridlocked Tokyo expressway and inadvertently into the world of 1Q84: “Please remember: things are not what they seem.”

A few days after I started reading 1Q84 I was standing in my Michigan backyard, talking on the phone with my brother, when the unusual brightness of the night caused me to look up at the moon — nearly full, unobstructed by clouds — for the first time in as long as I could remember. For a moment I was so taken by the view that I lost track of my brother, who was continuing to tell me about his weekend.

Afterwards I called Caroline out to the backyard. If it had been a while since I’d looked at the moon, it had been even longer since we’d looked at it together. We don’t have much time to stare up at the sky, and even if we did, the moon is outside our realm of concern. I have to care for my kids, earn a living, be a good husband. What difference is it to me if the moon is waxing or waning, full or crescent? For a few quiet minutes we looked up at it together before retreating inside from the cold.

Several of the most important scenes in 1Q84 take place in a playground atop a slide, where one at a time Aomame and Tengo (and a third character, the surprisingly heartbreaking private investigator Ushikawa) stare up at the sky.

The first time Tengo sits on the slide and notices the moons he thinks to himself, “No matter what happens to me in the future, this view with two moons hanging up there side by side will never — ever — seem ordinary and obvious to me.” The unordinary sight of the moons sets Tengo to wondering. He wonders, “What is going to happen to me from now on?” He also wonders about Aomame. “Someone is after Aomame,” he understands. “She’s hiding like a wounded Cat. I don’t have much time to find her.”

Reading about Tengo and seeing the moon in my backyard, it occurred to me that wonder gives us height, makes us consider new possibilities, motivates us not to linger where we are.

And it seems that reading 1Q84 pollinated my life with wonder in three ways. The first is that when Tengo wondered, I wondered alongside him. “What is going to happen to me from now on?” In a quiet house at night with two boys sleeping it feels like time stands still. Yet of course the drum keeps beating; somehow we move on.

1Q84 also inspires wonder through its beauty. “Her little pink ear pressed against his chest,” Murakami writes. “She was hearing everything that went on in his heart, like a person who can trace a map with his fingertip and conjure up vivid, living scenery.” Many nights I closed 1Q84 feeling hungry to go out and create something beautiful myself.

The last way that 1Q84 inspires wonder is the way that all great art inspires wonder: it mirrors life from a fresh angle. Murakami uses the world of 1Q84 to jog Aomame and Tengo into seeing their lives in a new light, and his novel had the same effect on me. One night, about halfway through 1Q84, my wife and I said goodnight to each other and turned to go to sleep. But before closing my eyes I propped myself back up on my elbow and looked intently at her face lying sideways on her pillow. There she was, old familiar Caroline. But for a moment she appeared as strange and wondrous as two moons in the sky.

1Q84 is not a book about wonder, though. It’s a book about love. For the three weeks I was reading it and all the days since, I’ve found myself thinking more consciously than usual about the importance of love — not as a fact that exists between two people — but as a feeling that puts a floor beneath our feet.

As Aomame and Tengo try to make their way towards each other and out of the world of 1Q84 what they’re really straining for is feeling. In their accustomed world of 1984 they might have gone on with their lonely lives but in the forbidding world of 1Q84, events and changes in their own hearts make stasis untenable.

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life,” Aomame tells her friend Ayumi. And in one particularly riveting scene (that would surely feature prominently in a 1Q84 trailer should the book be made into a movie) Aomame concludes that such encompassing love is not possible for her, so she takes to the side of the highway and puts the barrel of a pistol in her mouth.

1Q84 never drove to me to such depths, but it did help me recognize the difference between feeling and not feeling. The night after I finished the book I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. Over the course of a month 1Q84 had become a part of my routine and the activities that had previously occupied my evening hours seemed unappealing in comparison.

So instead of mucking around on the Internet or folding laundry, I went upstairs to my two-year-old son Jay’s room and sat in a chair beside his crib. He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life. As I watched him breath in and out, all the cells in my body flooded with a feeling so grand that it crowded out all possibility of thought.

Later, after I’d left Jay’s room, I realized that while being a parent is tiring and sometimes boring, it also means that all I have to do is walk upstairs to experience a feeling that, like Aomame said, is akin to salvation. I also thought about all the hours I’d spent reading 1Q84, and suddenly it seemed clear why it had been a worthwhile way to spend my time: When life wears us down, great fiction gives us back our human shape.

, a staff writer for The Millions, writes the Brainiac ideas column for the Boston Globe and blogs about fatherhood and family life at growingsideways.wordpress.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @kshartnett.

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Essays

Say Goodbye to the Play-by-Play Book Review

Essays
April 29, 2013 | 2 books mentioned 9 7 min read
1. I’d like you to do me a small favor. I’d like you to find a copy of your local daily newspaper and read an account of a ballgame in the sports section. You probably don’t read a printed newspaper anymore, but they do still circulate in most cities and you can find one in one of those brightly colored sidewalk news boxes you walk by every day. So, go buy a paper – it won’t cost you much – and find an account of a sports game played last night. The details of game itself don’t much concern us here. What I’d like you to look at is how the reporter has chosen to tell the story. If the sport is relatively obscure or if the game wasn’t on TV or radio, the story will most likely open with a hard-news lead: the final score, who scored the go-ahead goal, how the decisive play of the game came about, and so on. If, on the other hand, the sport is popular enough to have been televised, chances are the story will open with a classic feature lead: some inside dope from the clubhouse, an analysis of a crafty move by the team’s manager, a human-interest tale of a scrappy veteran who overcame injury to make an important play. This is because the reporter knows that anyone who cares about the game watched it the night before or at the very least caught the highlights on ESPN. The outcome of the game has ceased to be news, and to stave off irrelevance, the sportswriter has shifted the focus from what happened to why it happened and what it means. What you are seeing is the natural evolution of news reporting in the face of technological innovation, and it’s nothing new. For nearly two centuries now, a relentless cycle of innovation, from the steam-operated printing press, to radio, to television, and now the Web, has brought news consumers closer in time and sensual proximity to the information that interests them, and at each step along the way, reporters and editors have had to change how they report the news to accommodate this new reality. This has been true for almost every category of news coverage, with the glaring exception of book reviews, which all too often are written as if the digital revolution of the last twenty years never happened. You know the kind of book reviews I mean. They are between 800 and 1200 words long, include some basic information about the author and the premise of the book, and offer an opinion on whether the book is worth reading. These sorts of reviews are an artifact of a time before the Internet browser when solid information about the latest books being published was hard to come by. But those days are long gone. Today, anyone trying to decide whether to plunk down $26 for, say, George Saunders’s Tenth of December can log onto Amazon and read nearly 400 reviews of the story collection, helpfully sorted into categories from the wildly positive (five stars) to the extremely negative (one star). If that’s not enough information, a reader can switch over to GoodReads, newly acquired by Amazon, and read dozens more reviews and enter into online discussions with other readers about the book. Those wishing to escape the Amazon plantation can go to the publisher’s website to learn what the book is about and click around the blogosphere to read any one of dozens of reviews of Saunders’s book. If all that information fails to arouse interest, the reader can bounce back to Amazon or GoodReads or Apple’s iTunes store and let their recommendation engines help point the way to other books that might appeal to a Saunders fan. None of these sites is without its flaws, of course, but the point is that readers have more information at their fingertips about the content and relative quality of the books they want to read than at any time in history. No wonder standard book reviews are disappearing from newspaper culture pages. Newspapers are designed to deliver news, which by definition means things that their readers don’t already know, and in a world where the contents and quality of a given book have been debated endlessly online, a standard book review that tells readers what a book is about and whether it is any good just isn’t news anymore. Intelligent literary criticism still matters, and there will always be a place for old-fashioned book reviews, especially when a critic stumbles upon a gem of a book published by a small press that can’t muscle its way into the public consciousness. In those cases, when a book has been unjustly ignored or passed over, a positive review is news. But as the machinery that has enabled what used to be known as “word of mouth” to go online steadily improves and grows, those of us who review books need to stop thinking of ourselves as reporters delivering news and start thinking of ourselves as analysts helping readers make sense of the vast stream of information available about the books our readers want to read. 2. For those who aren’t news junkies, perhaps the easiest way to understand the difference between hard-news and feature reporting is to think of the two announcers most television and radio stations use to broadcast a game. One of them, Joe Buck, for instance, will do play-by-play, telling you what’s happening on the field. That’s hard news. The other guy, Tim McCarver, say, is the color commentator, offering analysis of strategy and context on the personalities of the players to help you make sense of what you’re seeing. That’s feature reporting, and in an increasingly digital world, literary critics need to become less like Joe Buck and more like Tim McCarver. That doesn’t mean critics should become pedantic know-it-alls lecturing their readers on the history of the modern novel and spouting a lot of French critical theory. It also doesn’t mean reviewers should start dishing publishing-industry gossip, most of which is trivial, anyway, and has little to do with what’s on the page. It means that we all, those of us who care about books and want to share them with others, need to think more deeply about what we can add to the conversation beyond the premise of the book under review and whether we thought it worked. We need to stop merely dispensing facts and opinions, and start telling stories. The word “conversation” is key here because in an age of instant information, that is what anyone writing about books is doing: entering an ongoing conversation. I wrote for newspapers once upon a time, and as small-time as those papers were, I wrote in the knowledge that I was the only one talking. My readers couldn’t talk back, nor could my sources. That one-way street is history, and I write now knowing that what I say, when it isn’t simply ignored, can be swept up instantly into a global conversation taking place on far-flung Facebook pages and Twitter feeds over which I have no control and often never even hear about. It is deeply odd to click a link and find your prose translated, badly, into Russian or Portuguese, but it forever changes the way you write. In the old dead-tree days, a newspaper circulated in a town and people read whatever landed on their doorstep. They had no choice – it was that or the back of the cereal box. Today, everyone writing online has a potentially global platform, but no one is guaranteed an audience, which means that if you are going to be read, you have to offer something no one else has. That can mean eye-catching “charticles” and breathless lists of the “Ten Steamiest Sex Scenes in American Literature” sumptuously illustrated with pictures of pretty young things in various states of undress, but it doesn’t have to. It can mean saying something smart and original that makes people think about a book in a new way. Every reviewer will tackle the challenges of writing about books in the Internet era in his or her own way, but at the very least anyone hoping to be heard above the digital din needs to approach each review not as an exercise in personal taste – I liked/didn’t like this book, and here’s why – but as a mini-essay using the book under review as the focal point of a larger, more interesting story. In a great many cases, this will mean reviewers having the sense to shut up when they have an opinion about a book but have nothing to add to the conversation beyond whether they liked or didn’t like it. This might be called The Thumper Rule of Literary Criticism: “If you can’t say something interesting – Shh! Say nothing!” When critics do wade into the conversation, they should be thinking how they can bring a special talent or experience they possess to the table. This can be as simple as having an unusually good eye for how narrative and language works, like James Wood of The New Yorker, whose reviews are worth reading even if you don’t agree with him or intend to read the book he’s talking about. Other times it can entail bringing a deeper knowledge of a subject to bear on a review, such as was the case in Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker’s legendary 2009 front-page evisceration of Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw in the Times’ Book Review. But you don’t have to be a celebrated Harvard prof to have something interesting to say. Maybe you're a new parent, or a teacher of at-risk kids, or an aficionado of 1950s-era sci-fi, or maybe you're like my Millions colleague Janet Potter who has set out to read biographies of all the American presidents. All of us has something we know and care about, and when we take on a book, we have to use that insight and passion to provide context – color commentary, if you will – to the reviews we write. However critics rise to the challenge of the information overload facing readers today, rise we must, because as much information there is on sites like Amazon and GoodReads and the rest, there is too often precious little real intelligence. This is the paradox of the information age: the proliferation of data points makes smart criticism more relevant, not less. We are all swimming in information, not just about books but about sports teams and political parties and cooking tips, and what we need are smart, thoughtful commentators to sift through all that data and make it mean something. Image via Wikimedia Commons
Essays
| 2 books mentioned 9 7 min read
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Essays

We Dance On: On Reading Roethke

Essays
August 19, 2015 | 2 books mentioned 4 14 min read
I read Roethke during a rough time, in a dark time, during a disorder I couldn’t quite comprehend. I read Roethke when I doubted whether going on living was worthwhile. I read him when it seemed like my life could blink out, to no purpose.
Essays
| 2 books mentioned 4 14 min read

27 comments:

  1. Pingback: Reading fiction, raising kids | Growing Sideways

  2. Lovely reminder. Fiction feeds us. Your reflection reminds me of Agatha Christie’s lament that “if I sit down and read a novel after breakfast I have a feeling of guilt.” But your essay says go ahead. Read a novel after breakfast. Or late at night. Or whenever. The main thing? Read. Thank you.

  3. You’ve captured this beautifully. I’m about 1/3 of the way through 1Q84, reading it in small doses each night as the house settles down and goes quiet, and, for the first time in a long while, feel as if I’m as on the trail of something BIG as Tengo and Aomame…

  4. Thank you for this beautiful review, this is how Murakami makes me feel too. My husband bought me a copy of IQ84, knowing I love the writer and it has sat expectantly on by bedside waiting to be read for a couple of weeks now while life keeps me busy… After your review, I am determined to settle in with it as soon as I get home tonight.

  5. I haven´t read this Murakami´s book yet, but reading your essay filled me with such a joy… I fully get your point – you have expressed the feeling of a passionate reader when reading a great book – thank you for that.

  6. Pingback: On how great fiction makes us more human « wish i were somewhere else

  7. Have been reading the book (Traditional Chinese translation) since more than half a year ago but the thirst to know what would actually happen kept me reading on. 1/3 more to go and I shall finish it before 2011 does! Murakami never fails to trigger the reader to think about what is racing through the minds of the characters he portrayed, offering new perspectives to us at the same time. 1Q84 really pushed this limit to the maximum with the somewhat bizzare storyline.

  8. Pingback: Review: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami « Roaming Olivia

  9. Kevin, this piece of writing is gorgeous, with fantastic insights into the book, and fiction-reading generally.

    I finished 1Q84 4 days ago. I was deflated after reading Janet Maslin’s review of it in the New York Times. It seemed to me she was sneering at bits and pieces of the book she found confounding, and made no attempt to understand that the beauty of the book is its theme of love’s power to shift one’s world right off its axis. You capture Tengo and Aomame’s world-shifting love very well. So, thanks and admiration. Are you on Twitter?!

    And by the way, no spoilers but I found the end of the book VERY satisfying, which after 925 pages, I was grateful for!

  10. Thank you so much, Barbara, and all the other commenters for the kind words! And I am on Twitter (@kshartnett).

  11. Thank you for the beautiful review and the evocation of that intense and mysterious experience of being-in-a-book.

  12. “He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life.”

    This is absolutely beautiful. In these two sentences, I get a real glimpse of what parenthood must be like.

    And, overall, a great essay! I never quite understand why I spend so much time reading fiction until I do it and realize that it’s the most important thing in the world.

  13. very lovely article, sir. i am so glad you shared with us your feeling about reading the book and the connection it brought out between you and your family.

  14. This is a wonderful essay, which brought back fond memories of what it was like to be engulfed and swept away by John Williams’ “Stoner” after reading a review (I think the New York Times) declaring it was a “perfect novel” (and pretty much agreeing with that sentiment). The best books truly allow you to live in and be alive inside them … and once read, they live inside of you. But as the father of a 2-and-a-half year old … well, do I need to say more?

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  19. Really inspiring review. I’ve read a number of1Q84 reviews and this review really hits the spot in terms of what the reader comes away with during, and after the read. Many readers don’t want to read a blow by blow plot summary. I appreciate understanding the complexity of the yearnings of the heart, empathy (as well as the existential ‘atlas shrugged’ nature of mankind) and all the lessons one takes away from having experienced a piece of fiction as part of their own lives.

  20. Literature is an island of sanity. We can’t be who we really are without it.

    103 is a temperature to weep over. Hope the baby is having a happy day today.

  21. You make a great case for fiction and argue its necessity so eloquently. 1Q84 is a tome and no small feat (not unlike Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which I have bookmarked 10 pages from the end). However, the hardcover is gorgeously designed and that alone makes me want to purchase a copy. I’m not a fan of Murakami, but your review encourages me to take a second look and grab a copy of 1Q84. Who can resist a love story, after all? Especially one with such day-to-day resonance!

  22. Pingback: Monday Snax « Little Stories

  23. “He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life.”

    “Then he farted”

    If your life is anything like mine, which I suspect it isn’t.

    Seriously though, what a lovely review. Many thanks.

  25. Pingback: reading to fulfill « Book of The Sacred Rung

  26. I have just finished the book and your essay perfectly captures the feeling I felt while reading it. This was my first Murakami novel so although I expected the fantastical elements I hadn’t expected how he uses them to highlight human emotion and most of all, love. My favourite quote:

    “It’s like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn’t move.”

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Essays

Clothes in Books and Ways to go Wrong

Essays
August 15, 2016 | 2 books mentioned 15 9 min read
I took Purity in one long gallop, reading it over four days at my friend’s house. Sarah had already read it, and was desperate for me to hurry up and finish so we could talk about it. The minute I put it down, I went to go find her. She was wearing clean white shorts and a miraculously uncreased blue linen shirt. I was wearing a regretted purchase from H&M -- a white cotton dress with little roses on it that looked fine in the shop, but depressing on me. I told Sarah that I’d finished and she said, “Have you noticed,” she asked, “the clothes thing?” Yes, the clothes thing. The whole point of Jonathan Franzen is the richness of his description, his eye for a telling detail. Where are all the clothes, then? Why are there almost no descriptions of what anyone is wearing? It seems like the most amazing oversight. How is it possible that two characters can have an extremely detailed conversation about a third character being “jealous of the internet”, or that we are subjected to a long and over-vivid description of Pip’s boring job, or the smells of different kinds of soil, and yet we are given almost nothing in the way of clothing? They all might as well be walking around naked. The only detailed description of an outfit in the first section, for instance, is the following: “she saw Stephen sitting on the front steps, wearing his little-boy clothes, his secondhand Keds and secondhand seersucker shirt.” The word “seersucker” is latched onto and used twice more (“she whispered into the seersucker of his shirt”; “she said, nuzzling the seersucker”). It gets slightly better as the novel progresses, but not by much. The first time Pip sees Andreas Wolf, for instance, his “glow of charged fame particles” are vividly described, but his clothes? No. Even Tom’s mother’s significant sundress is described only as being “of Western cut.” It’s unsettling. I know this to be a petty criticism, but there are all kinds of nerds who write long, aggrieved blog posts about how some novelist got a car wrong, or misdated the death of an actress. Clothes have always been important to me, and while their fictional depiction might be beneath some people’s notice, it is always one of the first things I see. Clothes aren’t just something one puts on a character to stop her from being naked. Done right, clothes are everything -- a way of describing class, affluence, taste, self-presentation, mental health, body image. Clothes matter. Besides all that, clothes are fun. Descriptions of dresses got me through War and Peace. I think about Dolores Haze’s outfits on a near-daily basis (“check weaves, bright cottons, frills, puffed-out short sleeves, snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts!”) I think about her cotton pyjamas in the popular butcher-boy style. Holden Caulfield’s hounds-tooth jacket, and Franny Glass’s coat, the lapel of which is kissed by Lane as a perfectly desirable extension of herself. Sara Crewe’s black velvet dress in A Little Princess, and the matching one made for her favourite doll. The green dress in Atonement (“dark green bias-cut backless evening gown with a halter neck.”) Anna Karenina’s entire wardrobe, obviously, but also Nicola Six’s clothes in London Fields. Nicola Six’s clothes are fantastic. Aviva Rossner’s angora sweaters and “socks with little pom-poms at the heels” in The Virgins. Pnin’s “sloppy socks of scarlet wool with lilac lozenges”, his “conservative black Oxfords [which] had cost him about as much as all the rest of his clothing (flamboyant goon tie included).” May Welland at the August meeting of the Newport Archery Club, in her white dress with the pale green ribbon. I quite often get dressed with Maria Wyeth from Play It As It Lays in mind (“cotton skirt, a jersey, sandals she could kick off when she wanted the touch of the accelerator”). I think about unfortunate clothes, as well. I think about Zora’s terrible party dress in On Beauty, and about how badly she wanted it to be right. The meanest thing Kingsley Amis ever did to a woman was to put Margaret Peele in that green paisley dress and “quasi-velvet” shoes in Lucky Jim. Vanity Fair’s Jos Sedley in his buckskins and Hessian boots, his “several immense neckcloths” and “apple green coat with steel buttons almost as large as crown pieces.” This list changes all the time, but my current favorite fictional clothes are the ones in A Good Man is Hard to Find. There is no one quite like Flannery O’Connor for creeping out the reader via dress. Bailey’s “yellow sport shirt with bright blue parrots designed on it” contrasts in the most sinister way with the The Misfit’s too tight blue jeans, the fact that he “didn’t have on any shirt or undershirt.” I’d also like to make a plug for one of The Misfit’s companions, “a fat boy in black trousers and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it.” Any Flannery O’Connor story will contain something similar, because she used clothes as exposition, as dialogue, as mood. Anyone to who clothes matter will have their own highlight reel, and will argue strenuously for the inclusion of Topaz’s dresses in I Capture the Castle, or Gatsby’s shirts, or Dorothea Brooke’s ugly crepe dress. They will point out, for instance, that I have neglected to mention Donna Tartt, top five fluent speaker of the language of dress. What of Judge Holden’s kid boots, in Blood Meridian? What about Ayn Rand, who, as Mallory Ortberg has noted, is just about unparalleled? The point is, we do not lack for excellent and illuminating descriptions of clothes in literature. Given such riches, it is perhaps churlish to object to the times when people get it wrong. Haven’t we been given enough? Apparently not. Just as I can think of hundreds of times when a writer knocked it out of the park, attire-wise, (Phlox’s stupid clothes in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, all those layers and scarves and hideous cuffs), I can just as easily recall the failures. There are a variety of ways for an author to get clothes wrong, but I will stick to just two categories of offense here. 1. Outfits that don’t sound real Purity again, and Andreas’s “good narrow jeans and a close-fitting polo shirt.” This is wrong. Andreas is a charismatic weirdo, a maniac, and I struggle to believe that he would be slinking around in such tight, nerdy clothes. Another jarring example is Princess Margaret’s dress, in Edward St. Aubyn’s Some Hope: “the ambassador raised his fork with such an extravagant gesture of appreciation that he flicked glistening brown globules over the front of the Princess’s blue tulle dress.” The Princess here is supposed to be in her sixties. Would a post-menopausal aristocrat really be wearing a blue tulle dress? Is the whole thing made out of tulle? Wouldn’t that make it more the kind of thing a small girl at a ballet recital would choose? St. Aubyn’s novels are largely autobiographical, and he has mentioned in interviews that he met the allegedly blue-tulle-dress-wearing Princess on a number of occasions. Maybe that really is what she was wearing. It doesn’t sound right, though, or not to me. One last example, from The Rings of Saturn:  “One of them, a bridal gown made of hundreds of scraps of silk embroidered with silken thread, or rather woven over cobweb-fashion, which hung on a headless tailor’s dummy, was a work of art so colourful and of such intricacy and perfection that it seemed almost to have come to life, and at the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.” One believes the narrator, when he says that he cannot trust his memory, because this actually doesn’t sound like a dress, or not a very nice one. It sounds like a dress a person might buy from a stall at a psytrance party. The word “colourful” here is a dead giveaway that the narrator does not necessarily have a particular dress in mind: what kind of colours, exactly? “Intricate” is also no good -- it seeks to give the impression of specificity, but is in fact very vague. 2. Outfits that make too much of a point Many people are suspicious of fashion. They do not trust it or like it, and, while they see that it serves a purpose, they wish it was somehow enforceable to make everyone wear a uniform at all times. Deep down, they also believe that anyone who does take pleasure in it is lying to themselves, or doing it for the wrong reasons. I argue with such people in my head all the time, because this is not what clothes are about for me, at all. I argue with the books they have written as well. To be fair to Jeffrey Eugenides, he is mostly excellent on the subject of dress. The Lisbon girls’ prom dresses and the Obscure Object’s High Wasp style are in my own personal highlight reel. The Marriage Plot is different, though. It is deeply cynical on the subject of dress. Clothes in that novel are always an affectation or a disguise, a way for a character to control the way others see her. Here is Madeline, getting Leonard back “Madeleine ... put on her first spring dress: an apple-green baby-doll dress with a bib collar and a high hem.” Here is Madeline, trying to seem like the kind of girl who is at home in a semiotics class:  “She took out her diamond studs, leaving her ears bare. She stood in front of the mirror wondering if her Annie Hall glasses might possibly project a New Wave look...She unearthed a pair of Beatle boots ... She put up her collar, and wore more black.” And here is Madeline, failed Bohemian, despondent semiotician, after she has gone back to reading novels: “The next Thursday, “Madeleine came to class wearing a Norwegian sweater with a snowflake design.” After college, she realizes that she can dress the way she has always, in her haute-bourgeois heart, wanted to dress: like a Kennedy girlfriend on holiday. Another costume, for a girl who doesn’t know who she really is. The problem with these clothes is not that they don’t sound real, or that they are badly described. It’s that Madeline only ever wears clothes to make a point, to manipulate or to persuade her audience that she is someone other than she really is. Worse, there is the implication that she has no real identity outside from what she projects. It’s exact opposite approach to O’Connor’s wardrobe choices in A Good Man is Hard to Find. The guy in the red sweat shirt, with the silver stallion? He is not wearing those clothes for anyone but himself. Same with The Misfit and his frightening jeans. Those who are suspicious of fashion tend to believe that people (especially women) only ever wear clothes as a form of armor, a costume, and never because they get pleasure out of it. Madeline, in other words, doesn’t wear clothes because she likes them, but because she likes what they do. I find this line of thinking very depressing. There are other categories (clothes that I think sound ugly, clothes in over-researched historical novels where the writer takes too much relish in describing jerkins and the smell of wet leather etc.), but these two stand out. I’m not asking for anything too excessive -- just a few more details, a bit more effort when getting a character dressed. Clothes matter, to some of us, and we need to see them done right. Image: John Singer Sargent, Wikipedia
Essays
| 2 books mentioned 15 9 min read
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