A Calm Place to Think: On Reading the Classics

Essays
January 17, 2013 | 5 books mentioned 22 7 min read

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covercovercoverLike many recovering English majors before me, I have a longstanding infatuation with heavy Russian novels. So on one level, a new edition of Dead Souls seems like a no-brainer: an excuse to return to a story that has endured for nearly two centuries.

Nikolai Gogol’s masterpiece centers on a con man named Chichikov who is literally buying dead souls — or more accurately, serfs who have died but are still counted on official tax rolls. His journey sweeps through a swath of 19th-century Russian life, as he glides from landowner to landowner, trying to charm and flatter them in an effort to buy as many deceased serfs as possible. The book is smart and funny; it deftly unpacks the social structure of 19th-century Russian life. It says something profound about the dehumanizing effects of buying and selling everything. And it’s the first of the great Russian novels — predating War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and all the rest of those weighty tomes that pretentious undergraduates lug around to coffee houses. And that gives it mystique.

covercovercoverBut as I sat down to read Donald Rayfield’s new translation of the book, I felt a sensation I didn’t expect — guilt. I got to thinking about my reading over the past few months, as I’ve hopped from The Radetzky March to Jude the Obscure to Demons to Chekhov’s plays. All of them brilliant, and all of them properly vetted by the relevant authorities. And I realized I don’t want to get in the habit of “checklist reading” — paging through an old book for no other reason than to say I’ve read it. Ultimately, we live in a consumer society, and it is really easy to let the habits of consumption, the habits of a collector, seep into everything. Even our reading choices.

As Dwight Macdonald pointed out decades ago in his (now ironically canonical) essay “Masscult and Midcult,” “The chief negative aspect is that so far our Renaissance, unlike the original one, has been passive, a matter of consuming rather than creating, a catching up on our reading on a continental scale… We have, in short, become skilled at consuming High Culture when it has been stamped by the proper authorities.” And that’s why I can’t manage to love the classics without reservation. I am afraid that it is far too easy to read them passively — to get so caught up in their mystique that the words don’t matter. And I fear it would be very easy to get stuck in the books of the past, and miss out on newer ones that might relate more directly to the world as I experience the rest of the day.

coverFor example, David Shields’s Reality Hunger, while nowhere near as brilliant as Dead Souls, made a profound impact on how I think about contemporary media. Shields’s book-length essay, which came out about two years ago, is downright dismissive of the traditional novel, announcing, “To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.” But, more importantly, it backs up its iconoclasm with a fragmentary style that genuinely captures something about the way people read today. A literary collage that collects fragments (mostly) taken from preexisting works by other writers and then weaves them into a single “manifesto,” it is a genuinely unique work, one that captures something very real about our — or at least my — current reading habits.

Engaging with Reality Hunger’s bits of text made me more attuned to the way much of my reading — on Twitter, or just surfing online — consists of gliding between small bursts of words. Instead of presenting a clean, straightforward argument, Shields makes his case for collage-style writing through accumulation. His fragments build and build, until the reader is able to piece together the argument is his or her own mind. I do the same thing online every day. I read tweets and status updates and blog posts one after another, and eventually, I piece them together in my head to form a coherent view of the world. Shields’s book finally made me aware of something I had done unconsciously for years. This is what literature is supposed to do — call our attention to the way society or technology or history has shaped us.

Reading matters because of its relationship to thinking. What I love most about books is the way they force the reader to get involved. Unlike other leisure activities, a reader needs to actually participate in the experience. You don’t just turn a book on and enjoy it — you need to actively engage with the material, not only sorting out the words, but imagining what they describe. The scenes, the characters, the voices: all of it needs to be created inside the reader’s mind. In that way, reading itself is an imaginative act.

I’ve always seen a minor parallel between a reader and a concert musician — a pianist for example — just in the sense that both are taking notations written by someone else and bringing them to life. In both cases, the work of art as it exists on paper is mediated by someone else. A reader may follow the cues of the author, she may give every word her full attention, her emotions may stir in exactly the way they were intended to — but the images and voice she creates in her mind are hers. But they are not only hers — they are a collaboration between her and the writer. Alone among the arts, reading/writing involves mingling the thoughts of the artist and the audience. In a way, reading is itself a performance.

When a critic like B.R. Myers sniffs at contemporary writing by declaring, “Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread,” I immediately worry that an entire reading life spent rehashing books approved by the proper authorities risks turning a reader (like me) into a perpetual student, someone who treats literature as a way to check off titles on an imaginary syllabus. Someone passive. I worry those images in my head will be subsumed by what I think they’re supposed to be; what a well-known Gogol critic like Vladimir Nabokov thinks they should look like. I worry Dead Souls belongs to so many people, it might never belong to me the way a book really need to. I worry my performance as a reader will borrow to heavy on the performances of others.

And yet I want Gogol’s novel in my head. It remains a profoundly inventive book, with a narrator who comments on the story as it goes along, even to the point of upbraiding the audience:

I apologize. It would seem that a phrase picked up on the streets has slipped from our hero’s lips. What can one do? That’s the situation a writer in Russia finds himself in. Though, if a street word finds its way into a book, it’s not the writer’s fault, it’s the readers’, above all readers in high society: they’re the last people you will hear a decent Russian word from…

Harold Bloom has used the term “canonical strangeness,” and it is precisely an inherent weirdness that makes Dead Souls so hard to give up. Think of a symphony, where a certain movement may repeat in a slightly different key — the subtle repetitions built into Gogol’s text help build the absurdity, the humor, and the emotional force of his tale. It isn’t very realistic — life is not so well constructed — but that’s okay. It gives us an opportunity — if only an opportunity — to stand outside our regular way of looking at the world, and perhaps notice something we have been taking for granted.

The strangeness of Dead Souls, its alien subject matter and its realistic-but-not-lifelike narrative structure actually aid a reader’s performance precisely because, when taken on their own terms, they draw attention away from the process of reading the book. They demand so much energy to really follow, to navigate on their own terms, that the reader’s performance becomes, if not unconscious, at least less self-conscious. As soon as I realized that, my guilt about spending so much time immersed in old books began to melt away.

The way to avoid passive reading is to pay attention to what is on the page and engage it as best you can. This matters because reading offers us something quite rare — a quiet, solitary activity that allows us to clear a little space in our minds. This feels especially true in the context of my own daily habits, which involve spending an extraordinary amount of time online, a decidedly noisy, un-solitary environment that encourages the reader to respond — through retweeting, commenting, or “liking” — as opposed to reflecting.

Reality Hunger sticks with me because it made me more sensitive to the noisy media landscape I inhabit almost continuously. The book forced me to read actively by calling attention to just how I was looking at text. Its fragments made the fragments in my head all too obvious. Dead Souls does the opposite. It is quiet and strange and in some respects inaccessible; it uses a plot that doesn’t dwell too much on the rambling pointlessness of daily life; it is set in a past I don’t understand as much as I pretend to. It is the opposite of the tailored, easy-to-digest world of social media. With the right attitude, the right approach, its contrast with today’s fragmentary reading environment can be every bit as valuable as Shields’s effort to engage it.

The key is to take both together — to avoid getting trapped only reading classics, like Macdonald’s “catch-up” reader, or only reading fragments or bits of text online. The point is not to set up a dichotomy between old and new — and certainly not between “good” and “bad” approaches to writing or reading. What both Shields, with his contempt for traditional narratives, and Myers, in his contempt for everything else, both miss is that each kind of text — those grounded in the technology of the present and those insulated from it — is equally valuable, because it offers the reader a chance to perform (to think) in very different ways. Both matter because a good performer — good reader — is one with a lot of range, and the only way to develop that range is to perform as many different kinds of stories as possible.

In conversation, I’m fond of telling people that the difference between a work of art and a mere product is that art ultimately aspires to contemplation, while a product aspires only to consumption. I suppose my anxiety about turning the classics into a checklist stems from my realization that “art” exists only through collaboration between the artist/creator/writer and an audience; that it’s not the work that should aspire to contemplation, but myself. And that, as a reader, that means I need to be willing to work hard. To approach the performance of reading with every bit as much seriousness and effort as I expect the writer to approach the performance of writing. Art can’t exist without an audience to take it seriously.

The wonder of a book like Dead Souls comes from its silence, the way it offers us a calm place to think. But that place is only as valuable as the reader makes it. A calm place to think is only worthwhile if the reader seizes the opportunity to do some thinking. Perhaps it’s not really guilt I fell about the classics but trepidation — because at the end of the day the classics need to earned. So now, it’s up to me to put in the effort to earn them.

is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in Bookslut, The Brooklyn Rail, and Venus, among others. You can follow him on Twitter @GuysLibrary.

Essays

Drizzly November in My Soul

Essays
November 5, 2021 | 5 books mentioned 13 min read
For those with a brain chemistry that doesn't incline towards darkness, depression might seem an issue of will power, something to be fixed with a multivitamin and treadmill. Reading Burton reminds us that depression isn't a personal failing.
Essays
| 5 books mentioned 13 min read
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Essays

Don’t Call It a Novel (It’s Been Here for Years)

Essays
October 6, 2016 | 5 books mentioned 9 9 min read

There’s a wonderful short story collection out now called Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. It’s something of a linked collection, in that the longer stories that make up the bulk of the book all seem to be narrated by the same unnamed woman, formerly of England but now living in a cottage in the west of Ireland, doing not much more than letting her mind wander as she probes the confines of her modest home. These stories do not build upon one another in the sense of creating a continuous plot. Rather, they offer separate investigations into the life of this woman, self-contained and comprehensible in any order.  What’s more, between these longer stories sit pieces that might be described as “micro” or “flash” fictions, which are not set in the cottage and are not clearly narrated by the same woman. These shorter pieces are aesthetically linked to the longer stories — the entire book is written in the same distinctive style of prose — but are otherwise unrelated. The reading experience is unusual and illuminating, and upon completion I thought to myself, “Wow, what a lovely little collection of stories.”

I was flummoxed, then, to discover that there is some confusion as to the book’s genre. Meghan O’Rourke’s review of Pond in The New York Times Book Review appears under the headline “A Debut Novel Traces a Woman’s Life in Solitude.” Novels appear to be O’Rourke’s only points of reference for Bennett’s work. She writes that Pond reminds her of “the kind of old-fashioned British children’s books I read growing up,” and “David Markson’s avant-garde novel ‘Wittgenstein’s Mistress’…” In another review for The Times, Dwight Garner acknowledges the short story-ness of Bennett’s book even as he insists that the work is a novel: “‘Pond’ is a slim novel, told in chapters of varying lengths that resemble short stories. There’s little in the way of conventional plot.” Hmm. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Garner was describing a short story collection.

This phenomenon of misidentifying a story collection as a novel is surprisingly common, both in book reviewing and in polite conversation. A number of people seem to use the term “novel” as a synonym for “book,” and because of this I sometimes see even works of nonfiction referred to as novels. (I won’t call anyone out on this point, since it’s really quite embarrassing.) More often, the word “novel” is applied to collections when all of the stories within feel strongly of a piece (and consequently are favorites of the creative writing workshop). The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is one example. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson is another. The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald is a third. To be fair, these works frequently fail to identify themselves with the word “stories” on their book jackets (as does Pond). But a reader with the most basic sense of literary genre should be able to see them for what they are.

A novel and a short story collection are very different forms. A novel tells one long narrative. It cannot be divided without surrendering its functionality. Sometimes it is segmented into chapters or sections, but these cannot (at least not all of them) stand alone as shorter independent works. They rely on each other for coherence of plot and theme. A collection, on the other hand, is composed of several shorter, discrete narratives that can stand independently of each other without forsaking their coherence. The order in which you read them is not essential to understanding them, nor would it matter if you read three at random and never looked at the rest. In the hands of a skilled author, it is sometimes true that a group of these stories may become more than the sum of its parts. The stories may act as vignettes in the life of a person or a community, and in so doing produce a sense of immersion somewhat reminiscent of a novel. We call these “linked collections” or “story cycles.” But they are not novels, nor are they attempting to be novels. (A “novel-in-stories,” as you’ve probably suspected, is purely a marketing trick.)

When reviewing a linked collection, a reviewer will sometimes (bafflingly) simulate confusion as to whether the book is a collection or a novel or something in between. (Ian Maleney, in his review of Pond for The Millions, says that the book, “rests with no little charm somewhere between collection and novel without ever settling on one or the other.” Nice try, Maleney.) These reviewers often like to pretend that the author has somehow invented a third genre. But you and I aren’t so easily fooled, reader. We know that there is nothing new under the sun. As James Nagel points out in his 2001 book The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle, the form has been with us for a century at least. Works like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time presented a cohesion of intent that, at the time of their publication, tempted reviewers to insist that they must be more than simple collections of stories. (In Our Time even contains interstitial shorts between longer stories, just like Pond.) Nagel writes:
[T]he fact of the matter is that the short-story cycle is a rich genre with origins decidedly antecedent to the novel, with roots in the most ancient of narrative traditions. The historical meaning of “cycle” is a collection of verse or narratives centering around some outstanding event or character. The term seems to have been first applied to a series of poems, written by a group of Greek writers known as the Cyclic Poets, that supplement Homer’s account of the Trojan war. In the second century B.C., the Greek writer Aristides wrote a series of tales about his hometown, Miletus, in a collection entitled Milesiaka. Many other early classics also used linked tales, Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Arabian A Thousand and One Nights among them…Throughout these early works two ideas became clear in the concept of a cycle: that each contributing unit of the work be an independent narrative episode, and that there be some principle of unification that gives structure, movement, and thematic development to the whole.
Perhaps because the average reader prefers novels, encountering few story collections (or none at all), a linked collection is enough to give him pause. But a linked collection is still a collection and not a novel, just as a tall man is still a man and not an ogre. Our most prestigious American literary prize, the Pulitzer, recognizes this fact. Known for its first three decades of existence as the Pulitzer Prize for a Novel, it was renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948 so that it could be awarded to a debut author named James A. Michener for his Tales of the South Pacific. That book is a linked story collection, though the Pulitzer jury might have gotten away with pretending it was novel if Michener hadn’t conspicuously placed the word “Tales” right in its title. Since then, short story collections have been eligible for the award, though to date only six others have won it. (For the sake of comparison, there have been seven years since 1948 when no prize for fiction was awarded at all.)

It may seem defensive or pedantic to insist on these designations. Why does it matter? I hear you ask, reader. Books are just books. No one is saying one form is better than another. All things being equal, perhaps that would be that case, and a book’s genre would be so nonessential as to not require specification. But things, of course, are never equal. It is far easier to publish a novel these days than a collection of short stories, so much so that many pragmatic writers have essentially abandoned the form. Fantastic short story writers end up spending their careers producing middling novels, and our literature is poorer for it. So in those rare cases when a short story collection does manage to be published (and reviewed, and sold, and read by a large number of people), to deny that collection its genre — to call it a novel, as though the world really needs another novel — is to rob the medium of short fiction of a hard-earned victory.

Even more nefarious is when publishers themselves mislabel collections as novels. Printing the word “novel” on a book cover makes it very difficult for malcontents like me to argue that the book is anything otherwise. Tom Rachman’s excellent 2010 book The Imperfectionists is a collection of 11 self-contained stories following various employees of an international newspaper based in Rome. Only the thinnest of interstitials about the history of the newspaper (again, like In Our Time) provided cause for Dial Press to term the book “a novel.” Also published in 2010 was Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which Knopf called “a novel” but which I like to call “the most recent short story collection to win a Pulitzer Prize.” The book’s shifts in point of view, style, tense, and time period caused reviewers to marvel at what a unique and unusual novel it was, though such shifts are common in the genre of the short story collection. Egan almost certainly benefitted from the book being called a novel, but now that the dust has settled and the prize money has been spent, it’s probably in Egan’s best interest that posterity regard the book for what it actually is. Goon Squad is a bad novel, but it’s a phenomenal short story collection, one that perfectly embodies Nagel’s notion of “independent narrative episode[s]” linked by “some principle of unification.” (Plus, thinking of the book as a collection is the only way to make that 70-page Power Point section look like a fun narrative experiment instead of a saccharine bit of self-indulgence. Take that, Egan!)

Both The Imperfectionists and A Visit from the Goon Squad were bestsellers, and I certainly don’t begrudge Rachman or Egan their success. What is painful is the notion that the audiences of these books did not realize that they were enjoying story collections. The publishing industry is constantly telling short story writers that their work can’t sell, but instances like these seem to suggest that the publishing industry is not particularly interested in fostering an appetite for short story collections among its readership. If you liked Goon Squad, then you like short fiction, but you may be unaware of that fact because you think that you read novel. It’s refreshing, then, when an author resists the urge to have his work mislabelled as a novel, as Junot Díaz did in the case of This Is How You Lose Her. In an interview with Gina Frangello at The Rumpus, he explains:
[T]here’s little question that short stories, like poetry, don’t get the respect they deserve in the culture — but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change. And yes, I have no doubt this book could have been easily called a novel — novel status has certainly been granted to less tightly-related collections of stories. By not calling this book a novel or a short story collection, I guess I was trying to keep the door open to readers recognizing and enjoying a third form caught somewhere between the traditional novel and the standard story anthology. A form wherein we can enjoy simultaneously what is best in both the novel and the short story form. My plan was to create a book that affords readers some of the novel’s long-form pleasures but that also contains the short story’s ability to capture what is so difficult about being human — the brevity of our moments, their cruel irrevocability.
I disagree with Díaz’s premise that the book represents a new, third form (This Is How You Lose Her is a simply another linked story collection, in the proud tradition of the many linked story collections that have come before it), but you get the point. A linked collection does things that a novel does not, things that are worthy and vital and capable of standing on their own merit. A collection replicates the chaotic, fragmentary messiness of life in a way that a novel can’t: life, which doesn’t follow one large narrative but seems to be the aggregate of many smaller ones. A day is not a chapter. A day is a story, with its own peculiar conflicts, themes, motifs, and epiphanies.

There has been much in the past few years to inspire confidence in the idea that the short fiction collection might finally attain the readership it deserves as a indispensable American art form. This Is How You Lose Her was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. In 2013, George Saunders’s Tenth of December repeated both feats. The 2014 National Book Award was given to Phil Klay’s collection Redeployment. In 2015, it went to Adam Johnson’s collection Fortune Smiles. Collections by Nathan Englander and Kelly Link have been finalists for Pulitzers in recent years (though both failed to attain the lofty heights of Michener’s and Egan’s). Alice Munro’s 2013 Nobel Prize felt, for many writers of short fiction, like a long overdue nod to a worthy form and its incorrigible practitioners.

And yet short fiction collections remain incredibly difficult to sell. They remain under-published, under-reviewed, and under-read. Aspiring authors are encouraged to set aside their stories and get to work on something longer, lest they be condemned to the periphery of publishing, out in the brambles with the poets and their chapbooks. Even George Saunders, the story writer who famously does not write novels, is writing novels now. Perhaps Claire-Louise Bennett is glad to have Pond called a novel, and I should stop making trouble where trouble needn’t be made. But if the best hope for a short story writer is that reviewers and readers mistake her work for a novel, than fiction has reached a truly dispiriting place. Perhaps novelists will soon be hoping their work is mistaken for memoir, and fiction as a concept will disappear entirely.

I guess we’ll see. In the meantime, I encourage you, dear reader, to go to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of Pond, or any other short story collection, and free yourself from the tyranny of sustained narrative. You’ll enjoy the experience. Trust me.

And maybe, while you’re in there, you can hide a couple novels behind the cookbooks.

Essays
| 5 books mentioned 9 9 min read
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Essays

Composition Lessons: Learning About Your Own Book From Other People’s Paintings

Essays
April 22, 2013 | 5 books mentioned 5 10 min read


1.
I wonder if it makes me stupid that when I am working on a book I often do not understand it very well until I see works by other artists who have embarked on similar projects. By other artists, here, I mean musicians, sometimes, or filmmakers, or sculptors, but usually I mean painters.

During the writing process — during the months and sometimes years it takes to compose a book — I keep my head down and try to shut out similar wavelengths that might serve to distract me. Then comes the moment when I can work no more, when the novel or collection of short stories or book-length essay is as done as it’ll ever be. At that point, I go looking for works of art that match it tonally. It’s not an organized search. It’s a random, rapid, catch-as-catch-can process. I listen to music with an acquisitive ear. I watch pieces of movies whose titles intrigue me. And, most of all, I scan through dozens of websites that collect images by contemporary artists. When I find a harmonizing work, I know it at once. There is recognition like looking in a mirror or into a face that is looking back at me. When that happens, I try to study those paintings so that I have a better sense of my own project. And then I try to solidify the relationship by using those works as my cover art.

This has been happening for years. For Superbad, my first book, I was pointed in the direction of Mark Tansey’s work, either by my publisher or a friend, and I ended up going to ask him for an image for the cover. Both that book and his work were about strange assemblages, irrational contrasts, and the deeper truths they revealed. I picked a painting that imagined Picasso and Braque as the Wright brothers, getting Cubism off the ground at Kitty Hawk.

A few years ago, for a collection of short stories about loneliness and letter-writing, I ended up using a painting by Alyssa Monks, who now primarily prints photorealistic self-portraits of herself in the shower. The work I picked was an earlier painting of a woman in a hotel room, looking away from the viewer, looking forlorn. Using it as a book cover halved the image, or at least relegated the left section of it to the back cover — it showed a man reaching into the inside pocket of his suit coat. The whole thing was intimate and eerie and more than a little sad, a portrait of debauchery with consequences.

When that book came out, I invited Alyssa to my launch party, and talked to her a bit about the differences and similarities between our works: not just thematically, but compositionally and philosophically. What are the limits of a painting, and how are they similar to or different than the limits of a short story? Why does a shadow, which is almost always symbolic in a work of fiction, sometimes just function visually in a painting? Significance is placed and displaced differently. A kind of empty space that works against the writer may in fact aid the painter. We agreed that similar projects could come to vastly different ends.

2.
My new novel, The Slippage, struck me as strange, even as I was writing it. It’s a story about the suburbs, where I grew up, and about marriage, where I grew up again. As I wrote the book, I noticed the absence of several of the pleasures that I had become accustomed to seeing in my work. There wasn’t much humor, or much kinetic energy. There weren’t upjuts of surprise. It was, from start to stop, an altogether quieter affair whose argument was made subtly and whose outlook was bleak in a way that people might consider tiring. I wanted to put a stake in or at least near the heart of the culture that had made everyone dependent upon communication and attention; along the way, I had some close readers I had to retrain, including myself.

When I went looking for visual matches, I thought it would be easy. One of my characters was a chart artist. He was originally the main character, but as the book developed, he slid out toward the edge of the narrative. He made charts and graphs that were themselves about the way that charts and graphs failed to accurately represent experience or even data. The book originally included these charts as chapter openers, but they were squeezed out as that character became more marginal and the book became more centrally about marriage. It occurred to me that I find works that were similar to the charts: works that burlesqued the idea of objectivity and rational processing of experience. I looked at dozens of artists who seemed to be doing exactly that, though, and there was more disjunction than harmony. Another week went by, and then another. The book was done and I hadn’t found anything that seemed to share the same tone.

And then I came upon the paintings of Amy Bennett. Bennett paints scenes of oddly quiet suburban neighborhoods. They are spacious and spooky. People figure in them notionally. Here are some.

I liked her images at once, and I liked them more the longer I looked at them. They were narrative, certainly, though their plots and character studies operated primarily by implication. They had a limited palette, which rewarded close study and made the minor variations from it more noteworthy. They seemed, somehow, to have a downward pull, to drain out of the bottom of the canvas; I liked this for its pessimism and its clarity. I bundled up a bunch of images and sent them along to my publisher.

A few months later, the publisher sent back a set of covers for me to consider. The four that I liked best used Bennett’s paintings. I took credit for forwarding them, but as it turned out, no one was certain that my initial suggestion was what had led the publisher to the work. An art director may have found them independently. That only confirmed my initial suspicion that her paintings were a kind of mirror of my book, that they addressed the same concerns, with some of the same methods.

I wrote Amy, who I did not know, and thanked her for allowing her painting to be used as my book cover. That was standard procedure and as a result she was happy to hear from me. Then I asked her if she would be willing to discuss the strange process by which works in different media become spiritually congruent. That seemed more taxing to her because it was. She was happy to talk, she said, but she was in the middle of a project and as a result couldn’t promise that she could focus on it to any great degree. As it turned it, she could. We corresponded back and forth and the invisible lines that connected her paintings to my book rose into view.

I grew up in the suburbs and assumed that she had, too, or at the very least that she had lived there for much of her life. In fact, she grew up in Maine, in a rural area near a small town. People there, she said, kept to themselves. Then she moved to Brooklyn, to a large apartment building, where people were close to one another but where they also kept to themselves. “I really enjoyed the anonymity of the city,” she wrote. As I said, when I contacted her, she said that she was in the middle of a project. The project, as it turned out, was specifically related to place and identity. She was in the process of moving out of the city, to a town upstate. “This,” she wrote, “will be my first real suburban experience.”

That was a surprise to me, that she had never really lived in the suburbs. It made me think that her paintings were about an unreal place — or rather, a place that cross-bred the two places she had lived into a third imagined but real place. Even more surprising were her ideas about what the relocation might involve: “I’m looking forward to having a little more space and small yard and even bought a car for the first time, but I have mixed feelings about moving into such a small, close-knit community.” This anticipation of her move also anticipated some of the themes of the novel. The unnamed town in “The Slippage” is relatively small and relatively close-knit, though there is not any strong sense that this creates real knowledge about others or about the self.

I was most interested by her thematic take on her own artwork. Ask an artist about the things they make, and you’ll get the strangest answers. They are the closest to that work and sometimes, as a result, the furthest from it as well. They are not objective observers and so they do not always have reason, but they have hope and that is reason enough to ask them. When I grew up in the suburbs in the seventies, life seemed largely meaningless, a succession of artificial tasks subjected to artificial approval or disapproval, and it was exactly that meaninglessness that compelled me to start reading and then, a little later, to start writing. Her paintings, to me, were about this same problem: facades and the secret hope that they concealed something more meaningful. I asked her that, in a way: “Does meaningless produce meaning?” Her reply was cautious: “That’s quite a question, and maybe one that my paintings ask in some way, but I’m not sure that I have an answer apart from I hope so. Somehow I find meaning in work and filling my role in the cycle of life. As an agnostic with a whole lot of doubt I find it hard to keep my chin up if all of this meaninglessness doesn’t amount to anything.” There it was again, more than once: hope.

There was a second issue, which was one of preparation and control. Whenever I created fictional characters, I liked to set them in detailed worlds: not real worlds, necessarily, but worlds that could in theory be real. That’s why I had created a hundred charts for my fictional chart artist, and why, for a novel about a funk-rock star a few years earlier, I had written two albums’ worth of lyrics. Amy, her website explained, painted from models: she built the tiny houses before she painted their portrait. I wondered why she did this, why she gave additional reality to scenes that were, in the end, oddly unreal. “Building models for my paintings serves a few purposes at once,” she wrote. “The most obvious is the model becomes a still life for me to observe natural light hitting an actual object, even though it’s depicting a scene from my imagination. I paint differently when I work straight from my imagination versus from observation. It lends an air of credibility to a phony scene. Perhaps more importantly, making a model forces me to fully realize something that might otherwise be a little fuzzy in my mind or memory.”

This made good sense. Modeling things — whether theories or plots or imaginary houses — forces us to make the parts fit together, or to foreground the fact that they do not. But there was another dimension to her model-making that hit even closer to home. Amy, as it turned out, recycled the pieces of her houses. “I pull apart the model and reuse bits for future models,” she wrote. “So the biggest difference between the models and the paintings, is that the models are kind of junky looking, whereas (hopefully) the paintings are not. The models are made of cheap materials that I use over and over again — cardboard, glue, wire, foam, plastic, etc. and they look like a toy. I hope the paintings transcend a faithful rendering of a toy and become an alternate, fictional world.” I had, three days earlier, done an email interview with a woman who asked whether I ever reuse parts of my books for other books. “All the time,” I said. “In fact, the new book is just an old book with the words in different order.” I was joking, but only to conceal a truth. My books have been, on their faces, very different from one another. I have written experimental short fiction, traditional short stories, a funk-rock novel, a humor book that used Chekhov’s stories as its basis. But in my mind, they have all been the same book, rearranged and recycled. This new one, even though it’s superficially quite different from any that has come before, has some of the same guts as the others. And I don’t just mean that they address the same themes of creative paternity and disconnection from the broader world. I mean that there are recycled parts: I reuse characters and places sometimes, or even snippets of dialogue or entire sentences. I am suspicious of authors who create fictional world that aren’t, in some way, connected to their other fictional worlds. We make neighborhoods that we then inhabit. If you write something that you think is unprecedented, look through your old work. You’ll find a piece of it. Amy’s method — building a model and then using it as a chop-shop for future models — seemed like an excellent metaphor. And what was the result? “I want the scenes to look possible, but for unsettling clues like shifts of scale to signal to the viewer that these images are just playing at reality,” she wrote. “I think the paintings are most interesting when they are straddling fake and realistic worlds.” In my book, I created a street grid for my fake suburb, and then violated it whenever possible — streets that are identified as parallel early in the book turn out to be perpendicular later. None of the violations are consequential for the plot, but they begin, over time, to create a slight sense of unreality. Her answers were getting closer and closer to the things I liked to tell myself about my own work.

Many of Amy’s paintings made sense to me as extensions of my novel—or maybe it was my novel that was an extension of her paintings — but one struck me as particularly appropriate. It was a vertical painting in which a house, seen from overhead, seemed stuck precariously to its foundation, as if it might slip away at any moment. This worked as a pun, and also as a thematic echo. She identified the perspective as literary and even a bit self-deceiving: “The bird’s eye view is one I keep coming back to. In fact, I think my next series will be mostly done from that perspective. To me it’s like an omniscient narrator. It gives all of the information with a somewhat detached coolness, as if it is undisputed fact.” A little later on, she made another observation about her own work that also seemed to directly address mine: “Often it is the relationship between characters, rather than individual characters, that I am interested in depicting.” I had just finished making this case to a friend of mine who had read my book and had a quarrel with the way I had portrayed one of the main characters. He kept talking about her in isolation, as if she had a true personality that the book was withholding, and I kept explaining back to him that she only existed within her interactions with others. I started to forward Amy’s message to him, with that sentence highlighted, but I stopped before I sent it. It didn’t seem right to have her fight my battles for me. I should be able to explain my work without borrowing someone else’s insights into their work. And yet, here we are, two thousand words into the opposite.

3.
So what does it mean for a novel and a painting to share the same interests? They exist in different kinds of spaces. They are perceived (and possessed) differently by audiences. They are forced to jump through different kinds of hoops to attain critical notice. Can they truly be fraternal twins? I had been building a case, but I started to doubt my own motives. Maybe I was trying to anchor my work in another artist’s work to keep it from disappearing — from slipping away. And yet, in the end, my time with Amy’s work, which followed close upon the heels of my time with my own, had done exactly what I hoped for: it had returned me to some of the basic questions that I had set out to explore, and then shown me that it was not possible to spend too much time inside the inquiry without bumping into another explorer. It’s not fellowship, exactly, but a strong sense of being alone together, which seems like a good way of describing the creative impulse.

The painting of Amy’s that I picked for my cover is called “Salute to Water Bodies.” It opens this piece, though it is defaced by my name and the novel’s title. In honor of the painting, and of the work it has done – within me, and I assume, within other viewers — I will end by showing it again, this time without my nonsense on it.

Essays
| 5 books mentioned 5 10 min read
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22 comments:

  1. Very thoughtful piece with a lot going on.

    I can’t speak to all of it, but let me speak to a speck of it.

    The first thing that jumped out at me is that there’s actually a new translation of “Dead Souls,” and by Donald Rayfield, who really knows his Russians. He wrote a great biography of Anton Chekhov that came out sometime in the late 1990s. Somewhat like you, I’ve obsessed over the Gogol novel a great deal, a by-product of my fascination with Nabokov.

    You write: “I worry those images in my head will be subsumed by what I think they’re supposed to be; what a well-known Gogol critic like Vladimir Nabokov thinks they should look like.”

    It’s a familiar worry. I loved “Dead Souls” enough that I read it in several translations, yet I never quite got the impression that I was enjoying the book that Nabokov enjoyed. He appreciated it on an almost mystical plane which, to me, never quite came across in English, which is why I bounced from translation to translation.

    To me, it was a very funny book, and one where the humor expanded into comic genius — a social parody about a con artist making money on nothing, on serfs that do not exist, which came to mind when I read “Catch-22” — particularly Major Major’s father, a farmer who supports himself with the money he gets from the government for not growing anything. And it made me think of Wall Street, too, of investments made based on imaginary projections that didn’t project or, in the case of Enron, purely fictitious entities

    But Nabokov — for him, it was all about “poshlost,” that untranslatable Russian word that is sort of like kitsch or camp, and which basically means the kind of illusory bad taste that pseudo-intellects ascribe to — not obvious trash, but trash that has this very sneaky appearance of being tasteful or refined.

    Supposedly Chichikov is a veritable avatar of poshlost, although when I read the book in my own crude non-Nabokovian way, I did’t really see it. I suppose I could see it if I squinted my eyes and I tried. But anyway, it’s not what I appreciate about the book.

    I once talked about all this on-line to a scholar of both Russian and Nabokov, and she was very helpful. She said that one thing you have to remember with Gogol is that his sentences tend to defy most translators, that he wrote these great swirling Russian sentences, and that these tend to get mangled in translation, even chopped up into shorter sentences.

    I think to appreciate Gogol the way Nabokov did you have to be Russian. Probably doesn’t hurt to be Nabokov either.

    I thought maybe the translation Nabokov swore by, the one by Guerney, might be the key, but to me it didn’t come across as any finer than the others I read. I liked all of them. They were equally funny and equally genius.

    Anyway, the thought of a new translation suggests that maybe I could revisit this old obsession.

    As for what you describe as “checklist reading” — “paging through an old book for no other reason than to say I’ve read it” — I can’t say I have much use for it, as I don’t know anyone who cares what I read one way or the other. I do love reading sometimes impenetrable classics of literature, though, and find that life isn’t as pleasurable or interesting without them, a fact that surfaces after I’ve spent too much time with books that are up to date and of the moment.

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  3. Pingback: Morning Bites: Wolcott on Styron’s Letters, Gogol Thoughts, Marie-Helene Bertino, Oxford Novels, and More | Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  4. Why not read the “classics”? Most of the masters, and masterpieces, of the 20th Century did not spring out of a vacuum. These writers were very much aware of the books and writers who came before them. It really helps to understand the context these writers were working with, or against. Even these texts we now call “classics” sprang from a context, reading past masters. I can certainly see the influence of Sterne and Cervantes on Gogol. Now, I can appreciate Gogol without knowing his predecessors, but it helps knowing these writers as well. The classic example for me is Connell’s Bridge novels. I love his comic creations, but it helps to know the other unheroic, baffled, comic heroes of the past. This passage for example, from Mrs. Bridge:

    “Suddenly, in total quiet, the room was illuminated by lightning. Mr. Bridge lifted his head, only that and nothing more, but within Mrs. Bridge something stirred. She looked at her husband intently.

    ” “Did the clock strike?” he asked.

    ” “No, I don’t believe so,” she answered, waiting.

    “He cleared his throat. He adjusted his glasses. He continued reading.”

    Now, as much as I appreciate this passage by itself, I hear echoes of Sterne, and Mrs. Shandy asking her husband, at a most inopportune moment, whether he had remember to wind up the clock. I don’t know if Connell was aware of this passage when he wrote Mrs. Bridge (I wouldn’t be a bit surprised), but prior reading of Tristram Shandy made me appreciate this passage even more. Feel guilty about reading the past masters? Not for a minute.

  5. I think the problem is that its hard to find any good contemporary novel today when the masterpieces are stuck in the middle of a sea of endless mediocrity, you don’t want to spend time on a book unless you have the consensus that it is good, and you can’t completely trust the mainstream either. The classics are those books that have weathered time and have reached us today.

    Its probably a problem for every generation, during the time of creation we have no idea whether a piece of work is a masterpiece or not, not until the books are still alive 10 or a hundred years later.

  6. If you enjoy a fragmentary style + dead Russians + brilliant thoughts!, check out Energy of Delusion, if you haven’t already.

    As to the article, I don’t think that reading something because it’s received as a classic necessarily amounts to checklist-bragging-rights reading. Literature is so referential that I think this in itself is some justification for reading classics. I find this especially true with Russian lit – if you’ve read Nabokov’s Life of Sebastian Knight – you know what I mean like the bit where his meeting with his mother is actually cribbed from Anna K. And in his Despair, all the Dostoevsky and Pushkin. But it’s not just Nabokov, it’s also Kharms, Bitov, Chekhov, Tertz, Babel, Bunin, Olesha- everyone… all of them seem to, at times, shoutout to Pushkin-Tolstoy-Dostoevsky-Lermontov and you are missing out if you don’t get these layers.

    Also I realize that ‘realistic but not lifelike’ was a passing description, but Gogol is not intended to be realistic or lifelike, and I was once told by a professor that I should only use the words realistic and Gogol in the same sentence if I was discussing how Soviet critics attempted to pervert Gogol’s works, hah.

  7. Perhaps part of the value of “classics” and the checklist phenomenon is that they/it put you in a place to cultivate that type of relationship with the text. Because other folks have validated the experience as worthwhile, one way or another, one’s mental focus going in to such an undertaking is resolute and focused. I don’t know about others, but I for one am more apt to sit and stew with a book if I know that it has lasted for a while.

  8. Just a note: The quote by Shields that you reference is actually a quote from another dead Russian: Prokofiev, and he was talking about ‘writing’ music.

  9. After I read Anna K and The Idiot pretty recently I realized that one reason I love these ‘weighty Russian tomes’ is that for some unknown reason they are like the literary equivalent of “comfort food.”

  10. A very thought provoking essay, Mr. Cunningham and serious readers know the conundrum well. Ultimately choices need to made. And a large percentage of my reading is the “classics” precisely because I expect them to contain food for thought. Lovers of the printed word need to be discriminate as reading, obviously, (unlike other Art forms) is very time consuming. Some classics have worn better than others and that’s where you , Mr. Cunningham the critic, come in.

  11. This good essay verifies that social media steals a person’s ability to read. As a published writer, I need to read the classics to know how language develops. As for David Shields, he lies in the shadow of the late and great writer Evan Connell who wrote two classics in that form decades ago–Points of a Compass Rose and Notes Found in a Bottle on the Beach at Big Sur, both suddenly back in print because of his recent death. It has all been done before and you must go there to learn before social media destroys everything.

  12. This is a brilliant essay, it brings together a lot of jumbled thoughts I’ve had myself since I graduated from a literature BA three years ago. I still find myself fighting the twin demons of a desire to read and, like you say, “make mine” The Classics, while trying actively to avoid the pitfalls of checklist reading.

  13. Alas, I wish there still really were “pretentious undergraduates” lugging classics to coffee houses.

    That’s the scary thing–we may have read these books to try to be classy, but now there’s not even that shaky reason for reading them.

    Besides, they’re “hard.”

    I fear for their future.

  14. Pingback: “A Calm Place to Think: On Reading the Classics”. | Who Killed Lemmy Caution?
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  20. “I do the same thing online every day. I read tweets and status updates and blog posts one after another, and eventually, I piece them together in my head to form a coherent view of the world.”

    — reminds me of what Joan Didion wrote in ‘The White Album’:

    “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. . . . We interpret what we see,
    select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially
    if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate
    images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting
    phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

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Essays

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mutt: On Patrick Modiano

Essays
September 21, 2015 | 5 books mentioned 1 9 min read

1.
I remember when I began to hate Patrick Modiano. It was in November, 1978. Lingering at the newsstand next to the old Arts Cinema in Cambridge, England, waiting to catch a matinée and leafing through the latest copy of the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, I came across a photo that soured my entire day.

I’d begun to teach myself French some six months earlier, having had a useless three years of it in high school, and another wasted two semesters in college. I’d learned nothing. Rien. So looking through French news magazines was a bit of an ego boost. The articles and captions were as simple to follow as Monsieur le Président Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s very slow and deliberate delivery before he faded into obscurity.

There Modiano is, smiling at me, gloating over his newly-crowned Prix Goncourt novel Rue des Boutiques Obscures (Missing Person), seeming to say, “Mon ami, you are a loser,” while a bank of excited press photographers crouches to capture his image. He had good hair, he was young, I had good hair, I was young, but my career as a published author was still a few very long years away. I had travelled 3,000 miles to make a career for myself, and here I was, looking at the face of success. And so, privately, without any basis in reality, without having read a single word by him, I turned my wrath upon Patrick Modiano. What is it Gore Vidal used to say? Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies. I’d reached the stage in which total strangers were flaying me alive.

The damage wasn’t permanent. Having lingered far too long over Voltaire and Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet’s incredibly tedious Tartarin de Tarascon, I needed something contemporary to challenge me. At the time I’d been doing a good deal of research into the German Occupation of Paris for a novel that in fact became my first to see the light of publication, and Modiano’s work, being set during that period, was suddenly back on my radar screen. I picked up a copy of his first novel, La Place de l’Étoile, set during the Occupation of Paris and published when this wunderkind was barely into his 20s. It has just been issued in English in what the publisher calls The Occupation Trilogy: three titles, three different translators, each set during the time of the German Occupation: the ground zero of Modiano’s body of work, the foundation for everything that will come after, though after these three titles the Occupation will stand always at an angle to his novels, a shadow cast over the succeeding volumes of what is, even by his own estimation, really a single, long work. When he faces the Occupation head-on once again, it’s with Dora Bruder, his masterful nonfiction (and to some extent autobiographical) story of a missing Jewish girl and the author’s attempts to understand her fate and give her a second life.

2.
Unlike Marcel Proust’s great novel, and unlike the romans fleuves of the last century, such as Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, Modiano’s work, including his most recent novel, Pour Que Tu Ne Te Perdes Pas Dans Le Quartier (So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood), released in France just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, is more a series of incremental epiphanies on the past, on lost opportunities, on lost people, on the small gaps in memory that leave his narrators and protagonists in a world from which they are one step removed. The language in the later books is uncomplicated, and what the author leaves out is as important as what he puts on the page.

What readers find most audacious about La Place de l’Étoile is how intimate the writing is. To deal with a period in which one never lived, to make a leap of imagination and bring the voice of the past vividly and credibly to life, is very much a part of what being a novelist is. But the difference between the historical novelist — who, in adding facts and details and color in hoping to contextualize the fiction, inevitably distances the readers — and what Modiano does in this trilogy is to lend an immediacy and an intimacy to the muddy tide of those years, catching the language, the flow, the Zeitgeist of the period without once having to step back to situate us in the narrative. Since La Place de l’Étoile I haven’t stopped following Modiano, reading each new volume as it’s released, and celebrating his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. My apologies, monsieur. My rancor was entirely misplaced.

3.
The title, La Place de l’Étoile, the epigraph informs us, comes from a Jewish story:
In June 1942, a German officer approaches a young man and says, “Excuse me, monsieur, where is the Place de l’Étoile?” The young man gestures to the left side of his chest.
The Place de l’Étoile is both a famous square in central Paris and the place on the body where Jews under the German Occupation were required to wear the Yellow Star, the word juif sewn inside it, over their heart. Modiano had begun writing this in the summer of 1966, when he was 21, and the manuscript was handed to the redoubtable French publisher Gallimard by the great Raymond Queneau, who had been a friend of both the young author and his mother, the Belgian-born actress Louisa Colpeyn. (All autobiographical details are drawn from Denis Cosnard’s indispensable Dans la Peau de Patrick Modiano, published by Fayard in 2010 and not yet available in English translation.)

It was eventually published in 1968, when Modiano was 23 (though everyone believed he was only 21; for several years, out of homage to his late brother Rudy, he had claimed his year of birth as 1947) and it made of him an instant literary phenomenon. As with his second novel, Night Watch, the main character exists in the slippery surreal space of Occupied Paris, where identities shift with one’s loyalties, often vanishing behind several aliases. Modiano makes vividly clear what the German Occupation meant to the French: it was never an unambiguous us-versus-them situation; some openly collaborated with the Nazis, others courageously resisted. And then there was that cloudy intermediate no man’s land occupied by those who played both sides: serving their French masters one day, placating their German ones the next, and that’s where Modiano’s novel is situated. It’s an audacious, ambitious, risky work, especially for a young, first-time novelist, for he was writing in the voice of a Jew who is working with the French Gestapo. This is an author who launched a career by decidedly not playing safe.

Modiano did not come unprepared when he set out to write that first novel. It was in his genes from the start. As he relates in his sort-of-life (to borrow Graham Greene’s title), Pedigree, translated by Mark Polizzotti and just out from Yale University Press, his father, of Italian-Jewish parentage, had been enmeshed in the two worlds that Paris became after 1940, and because, like a virus, the Occupation and its hazy aftereffects had remained long after the last German had left the city, the young Patrick had been drawn into a life filled with colorfully disreputable characters who lingered on into postwar France: real people who drift in and out of his novels (from Night Watch: “I have invented nothing. All the people I have mentioned really existed”): phantoms from a lost world, the displaced many who had done their worst during the war only to find themselves surviving in a self-imposed purgatory, swinging between doomed love affairs, petty crime, the company of faded movie stars, smarmy bands of South-of-France gigolos, and the melancholic regret of Russian émigrés; the comforting oases of rose-tinted, cognac-softened memory. Like them, Modiano’s father had played both sides: dealing with the gangsters of the French Gestapo, endlessly cutting deals on the black market, and refusing to wear the yellow star required by German law. Albert Modiano was neither here nor there, neither one thing or another, a creature of the night forever on the make, a man of such intense self-regard that he could simply cast away his children like so many business deals gone sour.

Albert, aka Aldo, Modiano

As he describes it in Pedigree, Modiano was essentially abandoned by both his parents, “like a mutt with no pedigree,” as he puts it: his mother was consumed with her life as an actress and treated her eldest child like an accessory, a thing that could be left wherever to be looked after by others, and his father showed him more or less open disdain. It was what bonded him to his brother Rudy, who died at 10 of leukemia, and of whose death he heard as a kind of casual aside: “On the road to Paris, my Uncle Ralph, who was driving, pulled over and stepped out of the car, leaving me alone with my father. In the car, my father told me my brother had died. I had spent the afternoon with him the previous Sunday in our room on Quai de Conti. We had worked on our stamp collection.” As he also writes in Pedigree, “Apart from my brother, Rudy, his death, I don’t believe that anything I’ll relate here truly matters to me.”

4.
La Place de l’Étoile (translated by Frank Wynne) is as much a novel about language as it is about the narrator, a kind of EveryJew named Raphaël Schlemielovitch, “the Indispensable Jew,” “the official Jew of the Third Reich,” as he calls himself, who is identified with all the famous Jewish authors who preceded him, most notably the half-Jewish Marcel Proust. It’s a Céline-esque spew of a narrative, full of pastiche and alive with the bile and dark wit of a man who has sold his soul to the worst of his generation. It’s a journey to the end of a nightmare set in a time when trust becomes an item to be retailed, along with names and reputations, to the highest bidder, almost always someone with solid friends in the Occupationist hierarchy. It’s a world in which once-loyal French men and women are sucked into the gravitational pull of the collaborationist universe, like the young Lucien in Louis Malle’s film Lacombe, Lucien, with a script by Modiano, where the temptations of power and the ratatat of automatic weaponry are eerily close to what is happening today with young Westerners being drawn to the barbarism of ISIS.

This dreamlike narrative allows notorious anti-Semitic writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline to be identified as Jews, where Sigmund Freud gets to quote Jean-Paul Sartre, and Franz Kafka is the elder brother of Charlie Chaplin. At one point the narrator relates a little side story that is also firmly based in family lore:

His own father had also encountered Gérard the Gestapo. He had mentioned him during their time in Bordeaux. On 16 July 1942 Gérard had bundled Schlemilovitch père into a black truck: ‘What do you say to an identity check at the rue Lauriston and a little spell in Drancy?’ Schlemilovitch fils no longer remembered by what miracle Schlemilovitch père escaped the clutches of this good man.

In Pedigree the author writes of his father telling him about his arrests during the Occupation, and his sheer good fortune in escaping deportation to Auschwitz:

And he told me of a second arrest, in the winter of 1943, after “someone” had denounced him. He had been brought to the Depot, from where “someone” had freed him…He said only that the Black Marias had made the rounds of the police stations before reaching the lockup. At one of the stops, a young girl had got on and sat across from him. Much later, I tried, in vain, to pick up her trace, not knowing whether it was in the evening of 1942 or in 1943.

The “young girl” in question was Dora Bruder, the subject of one his most celebrated works. Albert Modiano managed to escape; her future was, of course, much more horrible.

La Place de l’Étoile is a journey into the mind of a man firmly screwed into the darkest period of 20th-century French history as told by the Marx Brothers. But it’s also a way for the author to attempt to come to grips with what his father did during those very dark times. Without some knowledge of the leading lights of collaborationist Paris some references will seem obscure, and the footnotes are either unhelpfully sketchy or simply wrong: the banker and embezzler Alexandre Stavisky, appears here as “Stavinsky.”

These three novels gathered into a single volume constitute the primal stew of all of Modiano’s books. Shifting loyalties, hidden identities, and missing people regularly appear in a body of work that is so remarkably consistent that, taken as a whole, they seem to be one long novel.

The narrator in Ring Roads, the third of this so-called trilogy — published in Caroline Hillier’s translation, but newly “revised” by Wynne — a hack writer named Serge Alexandre, is caught up in what he calls a “hopeless enterprise” in trying to track down his father. In doing so he has to descend into the dregs of society: “Pornographer, gigolo, confidant to an alcoholic and to a blackmailer…Would I have to sink even lower to drag you out of your cesspit?”

This novel sets the central theme of all of Modiano’s work: the search. In Ring Roads it’s for his father; for the amnesiac protagonist of the Goncourt-prize winning Rue des Boutiques Obscure (available in translation as Missing Person) it’s for himself; and this search, so different from that of Proust’s great novel, establishes the groundwork for all of the work that follows, though stylistically we won’t see another like La Place de l’Étoile again. After this, and the second title in the volume, Night Watch, to a degree an early version of his screenplay Lacombe, Lucien, his work grows increasingly more spare, achieving what the French call Modiano’s petite musique, this allusive, elusive approach to writing that has not only marked his novels, but also his speech. Watching filmed interviews with him (most notably with Bernard Pivot, host of Apostrophes), one hears him respond with maybe a few words, frequent ellipses, and sentences that simply trail off without conclusion. The unsayable is as powerful as the words surrounding it.

Though after Ring Roads the Occupation remains in the background, what follows are works of short fiction that examine not just the themes of loyalty and deception, but also the temperament of a series of young narrators who could be thought of as Modiano himself. Taken as a whole, and as a work-in-progress, his body of work is about perception, deception, disappointment, and discovery, borrowing from the conventions of the detective genre.

For those coming anew to Modiano, reading Pedigree first might be a wise choice. His life, such as he tells it here, is as extraordinary and as bizarre as the situations of his fiction. The fact that Pedigree was published 37 years after the publication of La Place de l’Étoile says much about Modiano’s famous reticence about his family and background, on which, until then, he had been notably elliptical. His childhood had been a remarkable one, and by today’s standards it would have been considered borderline abusive. The lack of parental involvement and even interest in Patrick’s well-being is astonishing, and his bitterness is understandable. But it also goes a long way to show what made him a writer.

As the writer Jenny Diski wrote in a recent essay for the London Review of Books, a memoir is “a form that in my mind plays hide and seek with the truth.” Such is the universe of Patrick Modiano.

Essays
| 5 books mentioned 1 9 min read
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