Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

‘Finding good in grief,’ The Age, Life & Style (11 May 2013) 25.

Death has been on Julian Barnes’ mind lately. In 2008, he published Nothing to be Frightened of, a book that approached the subject from the perspective of an non-believer. As the centre of his recent Man Booker Prize winner The Sense of an Ending (2011) is a suicide and the novel is, in part, a reflection on the inscrutable questions raised by the act of rejecting life itself. His new book, Levels of Life, a slim volume as elegant as anything he has written, gets to what is surely the heart of his recent preoccupation: it is a mediation on his personal grief following the death in 2008 of the dedicatee of his books and his wife of nearly 30 years, Pat Kavanagh.
   
Kavanagh’s death was sudden. Barnes records that she had a mere 37 days between the diagnosis of her terminal illness and her final moments. Five years after the fact, his dismay at the swiftness of her demise is evident in the last of the three sections of Levels of Life, in which he sets out with a kind of savage clarity the upending consequences of her absence.
   
It is an absence that defines the book in interesting ways. Though Kavanagh appears on the dustjacket beside her husband, almost as if she were his co-author, her name does not appear in the text. Rather than enter into the details of their life together, Barnes dissects the way in which the experience of grief makes interactions with the world difficult and painful. No one seems able to strike the right note of condolence. He bristles when people use coy euphemisms like ‘passed’. When friends try to sympathise, it only reinforces his sense of loss; but when they try the opposite tack and behave with faux-cheerfulness, or try to pass over the sensitive issue in silence, he feels affronted.
   
He reveals that he contemplated suicide and nominates his preferred method (the same one used by Adrian Finn in The Sense of an Ending: a hot bath and a blade across the wrists). More importantly, he explains why decided against it. He notes that even now, despite the passing of time, he is still capable of being blindsided by an innocent remark or a sudden recollection, but he suggests that there is a sense in which it is only right and proper that grief should endure. The death of a loved one creates a need to remember, to hold on to the traces of their existence: the sense of loss can never, and should never, be entirely overcome.
   
Barnes is an Englishman, not someone given to overt displays of emotion, and as a memoir of grieving Levels of Life is rather unusual. His heartfelt tribute to his wife comes only after he has devoted two thirds if his book to a charming semi-fictionalised historical essay about ballooning, photography, the efforts of a Frenchman named Felix Tournachon to become the first man to capture an image of the Earth from the air, and a love affair between the celebrated nineteenth century actress Sarah Bernhardt and an English aeronaut named Fred Burnaby.
   
As a preamble to the book’s personal material, this makes more sense than first appears. It works as an objectifying and, in a sense, distancing gesture that contextualises the problems evoked by Barnes’ experience of loss. Levels of Life asks to be understood, retrospectively, as a secular encounter with the reality of death, but as Barnes points out we have ‘lost the old metaphors, and we must find new ones’. It is as metaphors, as well as ‘emblems of modernity’, that he invites us to consider photography and flight. The book’s encompassing ambition is to suggest that the demystifying forces of the modern world, though they have rendered untenable the old mythical understandings, might yet provide ways to speak of the meaning of life and death. It inverts the structure of the Divine Comedy, which ascends from hell through purgatory to heaven, proceeding instead from ‘the sin of height’ to being ‘on the level’ before it arrives at its final ‘loss of depth’, and in its deft examination of the complexities and ambiguities of these commonplace notions, and what they might signify to us now, Levels of Life acquires an unlikely coherence.
   
Capturing a profound sense of sadness in writing without slipping into sentimentality or self-pity is a difficult thing to do. In Levels of Life Barnes has not only negotiated the apparent incongruity of his material, he has created a distinctive and ultimately very affecting hybrid work that balances reflection and analysis with great skill. As an essay, Levels of Life is a deeply thoughtful work; as a piece of historical fiction, it is quite charming; and as a memoir, it is perfectly judged.

Levels of Life
Julian Barnes
(Jonathan Cape)

J.M. Coetzee: A life in writing by J.C. Kannemeyer

‘I refuse to Rock and Roll,’ The Sydney Review of Books (19 March 2013).

J.M. Coetzee’s 2001 essay collection Stranger Shores begins with the text of a lecture he gave a decade earlier in Graz, Austria. Its title – ‘What is a Classic?’ – alludes to T.S. Eliot’s 1944 lecture of the same name, in which Eliot considers Virgil as an example of a poet whose writing has transcended its historical moment.

In Eliot’s account, a classic is more than just a work that has endured; it has an importance that is at once literary and historical. Virgil is thus a classic in a way that no English writer, not even Shakespeare, can claim to be – indeed, he is ‘the classic of all Europe’ – because his poetry is the mature expression of a mature civilisation. He is ‘the consciousness of Rome and the supreme voice of her language’: a pivotal figure whose work reaches back to the pagan civilisation of ancient Greece and whose influence flows into the Christian era that succeeded his own. He qualifies as a classic because he wrote in one of the two languages – Latin and Greek – that Eliot describes as the ‘blood stream of European literature’, and because his work achieves the twin virtues of comprehensiveness and universality. For Eliot, the Aeneid is an exemplary manifestation of the ‘common heritage of thought’ that informs his ideal of European civilisation – a civilisation whose underlying unity he holds as an article of faith. It establishes a ‘criterion’ against which other works might be assessed, but more importantly, its cultural centrality resists the chaos of disunity and acts as a corrective to provincialism.

[Click here to read the full review]

J.M. Coetzee: A life in writing

J.C. Kannemeyer

Translated by Michiel Heyns

(Scribe)

The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee

‘A restless questing,’ The Age, Life & Style (2 March 2013) 22-23.

At the end of J.M. Coetzee’s 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, his eponymous heroine finds herself in a strange purgatorial landscape reminiscent of a remote colonial outpost. She is before a gate, through which she wishes to pass for reasons that are never made explicit, but is refused permission until she provides the local authorities with a satisfactory statement of her beliefs.
   
As the culmination of the novel’s disquisitions about the travails of authorship, about the competing claims of literature and philosophy, about animal rights and evil and desire (and much else besides), the scene is an odd contrivance, but it works brilliantly. It shifts the moral questioning and soul-searching into a different fictional register, uncoupling the action from the naturalistic order of the preceding chapters. In doing so, it draws together an apparently contingent work, a rickety lean-to of a novel built from scraps of old essays, with the suggestion that its coherence might be found in its restlessly questing spirit. Behind the novel’s unresolved arguments and its self-reflexive premise is Costello’s awareness of her state of metaphysical suspension, in which the confronting fact of her own mortality awakens a desire for meaning so deeply personal it seems to defy articulation.
   
Each of Coetzee’s novels establishes its own generic identity, but this wrestle with idealism is one of the unifying features of his work. It is one of the things that makes books as formally distinct as Foe (1986), Disgrace (1999) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007) all seem recognisably Coetzeean. His protagonists tend to be Quixotes rather than Hamlets. While not necessarily deluded, they are preoccupied with their ideals, which they project into the world, only to find that impure reality tends to be rather stubborn.
   
The Childhood of Jesus is deeply concerned with this conflict between abstraction and brute fact, although in a formal sense it is unlike anything Coetzee has written before. Though it has something of the allegorical gloss of his early fiction, and there are shades of Elizabeth Costello’s reckoning in its peculiar atmosphere and its homespun philosophising, it arrives as a surprising late contender for the title of the strangest book in his catalogue.
   
It begins with its two main characters, a man named Simón and his five-year-old companion David, arriving in the town of Novilla in an unidentified Spanish-speaking country. They pass through several gates in a symbolic transition that alienates them from their past. Simón has only the dimmest recollection of his previous life and little notion of how or why he came to be in Novilla; the boy has been separated from his parents and the letter that ‘might have explained everything’ has been lost.
   
The early chapters are taken up with Simón’s quest to find the boy’s mother. He does not know her name or what she looks like, yet he claims he will recognise her when he sees her. He soon finds someone whom he insists is David’s real mother, even though no one else seems to think so. Weirdly, the privileged young woman goes along with his quixotic conviction, agreeing to live in a seedy housing estate and become a mother to the boy.
   
The Childhood of Jesus is not a novel in which conventional ideas about characters’ motivations have much traction. Nothing happens that is unworldly enough to warrant the label fabulism, but the absence of the kinds of explanations and rationalisations we expect from a narrative creates an air of unreality that is extraordinarily evocative. Concrete details start to seem loaded with implications, while the characters – and this is a novel in which even the stevedores who labour on the docks beside Simón are philosophy students – conduct stylised conversations that wander into profound questions of life and death.
   
This overt questioning, so characteristic of Coetzee’s late fiction, drives the novel. Its dramatic structure is episodic, but significant sections are devoted to the elementary philosophical discussions that ensue when David asks childish questions about the world. Simón’s protective instincts make him anxious the boy receive an education, but his attempts at instruction prove halting and unreliable. He dissembles when David wants to know about sex and death; he cloaks his explanations in quasi-religious or mystical terms. Some of his answers are just plain wrong. Yet the salient feature of these exchanges is less Simón’s unreliability than David’s frequent refusal to accept his assertions.
   
These exchanges evoke a dualism that runs throughout Coetzee’s work. Simón informs David of humankind’s double nature, telling him that we are material beings subject to material laws, yet have access to the abstract realm of ideas. Like many of Coetzee’s protagonists, however, he is apt to confuse the two realms. He is quite prepared to argue, as David Lurie does in Disgrace, that the biological urges he experiences in the presence of an attractive woman are the expression of a higher principle. (She is not fooled.)
   
One of David’s roles is to show up the problematic nature of this dualism. Simón is an adult: he has learned how to ignore his contradictions and to accept certain basic truths. David, having absorbed the lesson that there are two ways to see things, frustrates his mentor by consistently choosing the wrong one. He insists he can speak a language only he can understand; he takes metaphors literally; he refuses to accept that numbers proceed in a specific order. When Simón reads to him from Don Quixote, David is on Quixote’s side: those were giants, not windmills.
   
The name ‘Jesus’ appears nowhere in the novel. The provocative title would seem to imply that in the boy’s flighty rejection of the tyranny of logic is the first stirring of a world-changing moral vision. The underlying idea is perhaps that if one holds to one’s convictions with enough force, however strange they seem, it eventually becomes possible to sway others and thus make the world a different place. It’s a beard-scratcher, though. The novel’s elegant formality of style and the childish orientation of its arguments walk a fine line between profound simplicity and mere simple-mindedness, though there is no question of simple-mindedness with regard to the work as a whole. The Childhood of Jesus is so intricately layered with allusions, symbols, archetypal resonances and teasing echoes of Coetzee’s earlier work that it is quite likely to baffle as many readers as it intrigues; it will have critics chasing their tails for many years to come. 

 The Childhood of Jesus

J.M. Coetzee

(Text Publishing)

Thought for the day*

‘… a News-writer is a man without virtue, who writes lies at home for his own profit. To these compositions is required neither genius nor knowledge, neither industry nor sprightliness, but contempt of shame and indifference to truth are absolutely necessary.’
 

Samuel Johnson, The Idler, no.30 (11 November 1758).

*May also be applicable on other days.

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

‘No joke,’ Australian Book Review, no.347 (December 2012-January 2013) 18.

In the opening pages of The Casual Vacancy, a man named Barry Fairbrother collapses and dies in the car park of the Pagford Golf Club. For the next seven chapters, news of his premature demise spreads through the small English town. Reactions vary.

‘Fairbrother’s dead? … Good God … He wasn’t much past forty was he?’
   
‘Gavin was only playing squash with him on Thursday.’
   
‘Good God. Just goes to show you, doesn’t it? Just goes to show. Hang on. Mum wants a word.’
   
‘Christ, it puts everything in perspective, though, doesn’t it, eh?’
   
‘He’ll have had a massive cerebral haemmorhage. His poor, poor wife … she’s absolutely devastated.’
   
‘Bloody hell … What was he, forty? … Goes to show, doesn’t it? … Got to watch yourself.’
   
‘Do you think I should put something on the website?’
   
‘He’s … fuck, he’s dead! … Jesus Christ! Jesus fucking Christ! … I play squash with him. He’s only forty-four! Jesus Christ! … I can’t believe it. We only played squash on Thursday. I can’t ⎯ Jesus.’
   
‘Oh yeah, I heard.’
   
‘Mr Barry Fairbrother, who has coached our extremely socksess … success … successful girls’ rowing team for the past two years, has died … died … last night ... Who laughed? … Who laughed?’
   
‘I DI’N DO NOTHIN’, YOU PRICK!’
   
‘No!  How?’
   
‘Is this a joke?’

   
It is no joke: Barry Fairbrother is dead, all right. Yet there is a tincture of grim humour in The Casual Vacancy’s rather awkward and repetitive overture. As she introduces her cast of characters, J.K. Rowling establishes the social dynamic of her novel. Their differing responses ⎯ banal, stilted, platitudinous, shocked, indifferent ⎯ hint at the small-mindedness and egotism that is at the core of its vision. For this novel beginning with the death of a man named Fairbrother is concerned with the loss of fraternity. Pagford is presented, with a wryness that gradually gives way to a steely disapproval, as a microcosm of a society that has abandoned any notion of fairness: a society that is stratified, selfish, and riven by petty rivalries. Most of the adult characters are plotting to claim Fairbrother’s vacated seat on the Parish Council before his body is cold. The council is divided by the issue of a grimy housing estate known as the Fields, which one faction, led by the fat and sleazy Howard Mollison, wants to exclude from the town. In the absence of the socially conscious Fairbrother, a respected man who had rallied the opposing faction, the political dispute becomes increasingly personal. Each counsellor comes to be driven more by the desire to see his or her enemies fail than by a desire to realise any positive objectives.
   
A wag has already dubbed The Casual Vacancy ‘Mugglemarch’ ⎯ an allusion to some books Rowling wrote for younger readers that were apparently quite successful. The joke proves to be surprisingly apposite. Rowling is no George Eliot (no shame there), but she does establish herself as a canny moralist whose summations have a kind of blunt perspicacity. The sourly discontented Samantha Mollison thinks ‘her crass, uninhibited way of talking, especially when drunk, constituted trenchant humour’; the dim-witted bully Simon Price is ‘a contented prisoner of his own contempt for other people’; while the insipid, neurotic Colin Wall is ‘perennially appalled by the threadbare state of other people’s morals’. At the culmination of one of the novel’s more effective scenes ⎯ that staple of social realism, a dinner party that descends into a row ⎯ Rowling observes that Samantha’s smug husband Michael’s ‘inner certainties had been no more rearranged by Kay’s arguments than a breeze can move a boulder’.
   
That Rowling’s troubled teenage characters are more sympathetically drawn than her blinkered adults is of thematic significance. Indeed, the novel’s social conscience is evident its depiction of two parallel worlds, the adult and the adolescent, between which there is interaction but no genuine communication. While the adults are always alert to their own interests and vigilant when it comes to their perceived enemies, they remain ignorant of their children’s travails and frequently behave in ways that are neglectful or belittling. The intrigue that grips the council in the second half of the novel and the events that lead to its tragic denouement are both the result of this generational divide. There is a savage comment implicit in the fact that the catalyst for the latter is an ill-fated union between the socially disadvantaged Krystal Weedon ⎯ who is well on her way to inheriting the wretched life of her drug-addicted mother, yet retains a flickering sense of responsibility ⎯ and ‘Fats’ Wall, a teenage rebel and an individualist of a Nietzchean stripe, whose selfishness mirrors that of the adults he affects to despise.
   
The Casual Vacancy is fuelled by an palpable dismay at the state of British society. It means to kick against the prevailing ideology of self-interest and indifference that leads to the entrenchment of disadvantage. On one level, it is cautionary tale offered in the hope that its readers might take stock of the kind of society they have created and ask why they allow its injustices to persist. It is, in other words, the kind of novel that one might easily scoff at. (Won’t someone think of the children?) And, on one level, it is not a great book. As a stylist, Rowling is strictly meat and potatoes. When she tries to elevate her tone, she stumbles. Yet her dramatic instincts are often sound and, more importantly, her characters are drawn with enough grit and insight to make The Casual Vacancy into a credible piece of socially engaged fiction, and even at times an astute one.

The Casual Vacancy

J.K. Rowling

(Little, Brown)

Republics of Letters edited by Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon

'There's no escaping the view from here,' The Weekend Australian, Review (19 January 2013).

The title of Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia echoes that of Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters, which appeared in English translation in 2004 and has become one of the most widely discussed works of literary theory of the past decade. Casanova proposes, in essence, that modern literature is best understood as a transnational phenomenon. It has created for itself a conceptual space governed by its own hierarchies of value and authority. These are not explicable in terms of worldly power, but are nevertheless concentrated around particular cosmopolitan centres. The theory is exemplified for Casanaova in the city of Paris, whose rich literary history, in which cross-cultural influences have so often converged, generates and justifies its disproportionate cultural clout.
   
As Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon point out, Casanova’s theory has attracted some strong criticism but has provided a focal point for a range of contemporary approaches to literature with a common interest in the role of institutions and intermediaries in the process of literary creation. The essays they have collected in Republics of Letters ⎯ the fruits of an interdisciplinary symposium held at the University of Sydney in 2011 ⎯ often take issue with Casanova’s work, but they generally share her concern to address the complex issues of cultural authority that swirl around literature without recourse to the familar critical standbys of individual genius or narrow notions of literary nationalism. The volume’s focus on sociability, the editors explain, is intended to ‘shift the attention from individual writers and great books to examine various forms of community that facilitate and sustain writing and reading, and also the kinds of communal identities that are formed by the practices of writing and reading.’
   
Community is a potentially slippery word. In the opening essay, American cultural historian Joan Shelley Rubin (the only contributor not based in Australia) cites Raymond Williams’ observation that it seems never to be used in a negative sense, before sounding a note of caution that its informality can make it ‘coercive or arbitrary as well as liberating and life-enriching.’ It raises issues that are clearly relevant to the creation and dissemination of literary works, yet would seem to resist quantification. How does one measure such intangible factors as influence, the importance of social support networks in creating new work, or the extent to which the solitary act of reading can be said to connect a person to the wider culture?
   
One of the significant aspects of Republic of Letters is its demonstration of the various ways these issues can be made tangible. It contains essays that analyse library borrowing records and track citations in order to build up a picture of the way in which ideas can ripple through the public consciousness. There are considerations of historical institutions and literary publications, such as the Australasian Home Reading Union, which began in Tasmania in the 1890s, and the curious case of The Muses Magazine, which was founded in Brisbane in the 1920s with the Matthew Arnold-inspired mission of quelling outbreaks of civil unrest. (The fascinating aspect of Patrick Buckridge’s essay is his cautious suggestion that, in its own small way, when considered in conjunction with the simultaneous appearance of a number of other cultural societies, the magazine may indeed have had something of the desired ameliorative effect.)
   
Even informal collectives can make their mark, as D’Arcy Randall argues in her account of seven Canberra-based writers ⎯ Marion Halligan, Susan Dowse and Marian Eldridge among them ⎯ who met regularly throughout the 1980s to discuss their work. Drawing on the writers’ reminiscences, Randall shows how their mutual support and the interaction of their differing sensibilities established a fruitful hub of creativity at a remove from the centres of literary influence.
   
One would not expect a volume that brings together the work of 23 scholars to offer a coherent thesis and Republics of Letters is ultimately a diffuse collection in which the quality of individual contributions is inconsistent. But the best of them are certainly worthwhile. Two of the strongest inclusions ⎯ Jane Grant’s account of the life and work of novelist Cynthia Reed, and Susan Sheridan’s examination of the ‘women’s magazine’ journalism of Kylie Tennant and Charmaine Clift ⎯ fashion interesting research into engaging essays. And if the organising theme leads many contributors toward some form of historical or sociological analysis, the volume also boasts some astute pieces of literary criticism. The contributions of the editors, in particular, are stimulating exercises in reading against the grain of received wisdom: Kirkpatrick considering the nativist poetry movement of the Jindyworobaks as a form of avant-gardism; Dixon arguing cleverly that Joseph Furphy’s monument of irreverent parochialism Such is Life is a cosmopolitan work, while the novels of the supposedly cosmopolitan Henry Handel Richardson are shot through with parochialism.
   
There is a paradoxical aspect to Republics of Letters’ attempt to engage with an internationalist theory of literature from a predominantly Australian perspective. But it is a paradox the editors have embraced to make the point that Casanova’s distinction between national and international literature is less clear-cut than she asserts. In a sense, the paradox is encoded in the theoretical framework itself. As Philip Mead points out in his essay on the work of Kim Scott and John Kinsella, Casanova’s declared interest in ‘the question of how literary universality is manufactured’ is contradictory: the manufactured quality seems to negate the idea of universality. In encouraging a deeper appreciation of the embeddedness of literary meaning and the many different contexts and factors that can influence the manner in which works are created and received, Republics of Letters has the virtue of drawing us back to this defining tension of literature: that it can lay claim to a general significance only through its embrace of the specific and its acknowledgement of the fact that, no matter how cosmopolitan one affects to be, there is no such thing as a view from nowhere.

Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia
Edited by Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon
(Sydney University Press)

Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels by Gregory D. Sumner

‘Saving laugh on the road to ruin,’ The Weekend Australian, Review (12 January 2013).

All lives have their definitive experiences, but some are more definitive than others. Kurt Vonnegut was a 22-year-old private in the US Army when he was captured by German forces at the Battle of the Bulge and transported to Dresden as a prisoner of war. He was there when the British bombed the city in February 1945. Before the raid, Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners were herded into an underground meat locker. They emerged after the firestorm to discover the picturesque city had been transformed into a scorched wasteland. The prisoners were put to work recovering the bodies of civilian casualties while survivors pelted them with rocks. But the task proved overwhelming and, in a ghastly coda to the devastation, flamethrowers were brought in to dispose of the corpses. ‘The end of the world is not an idea to Vonnegut,’ observed John Updike, ‘it is a reality he experienced.’

There is a sense in which all of Vonnegut’s work, even when it does not address the subject of war, is looking over its shoulder at the destruction he witnessed at Dresden. The bombing is at the centre of his most successful novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), but is alluded to throughout his early fiction. While paying his dues as a hack short story writer and cult novelist, he was searching for a form that might allow him to confront his traumatic memories. He returned to the subject of Dresden obsessively. He would often declare it off-limits in interviews, then talk about it anyway. The major themes that run through his writing ⎯ his obsession with the destructive consequences of technological advancement, his fatalism, his hatred of rapaciousness and exploitation, his emphasis on the fundamental importance of common decency ⎯ are shadowed by his palpable awareness that the human race, a foolish and pitiful species peculiar for its ability to become enslaved to systems of its own devising, is perfectly capable of annihilating itself.

Vonnegut’s fourteen novels are as notable for their patchiness as the quirky originality of their comic vision, but they stand as one of the singular achievements of postwar American fiction. As Gregory D. Sumner establishes in Unstuck in Time, their distinctive quality is the result of a convergence of biographical influences. They are shaped not only by Vonnegut’s wartime experiences, but his Depression-era upbringing and his training in anthropology, which provided him with one of his favourite satirical techniques: his defamiliarising habit of explaining ordinary human behaviour as if to someone who had just arrived from outer space.
   
His life also contained its share of personal anguish. His mother committed suicide in 1944 and his sister succumbed to cancer in 1958 at the age of 41. These unhappy events, whose reverberations can be felt in his writing, informed his tragicomic view of life’s painful difficulty and the arbitrary cruelty of the universe.
   
Yet Vonnegut is a paradoxical pessimist. Indeed, at the very heart of his work, argues Sumner, is a patriotic sentiment. His novels contain evidence of ‘a profound engagement with the national story, the rags-to-riches American Dream.’ Though his satirical stance clearly rejects what Sumner characterises as the ‘harsh social Darwinist’ interpretation of the national myth that celebrates materialistic excess, glorifies selfishness and power, and divides people into winners and losers, he remains devoted to a humane alternative version. For Sumner, Vonnegut exemplifies Michael Walzer’s concept of ‘connected criticism’: he is ‘a lover of his country even as he rails against its shortcomings and anguishes about its failed promises.’ As Vonnegut pointed out, his apparently idiosyncratic humanism was solidly grounded in the values he learned as a boy in civics class.
   
Sumner’s thesis has the virtue of being somewhat against the grain of the common view of his subject. Vonnegut’s disgust at the military adventures of the second Bush administration did prompt him to call to his last book A Man Without a Country (2005), but Sumner reminds us that Vonnegut, though a man of the left, was not necessarily in step with the counterculture of the 1960s that embraced him. The view of him as someone whose work expresses conviction born of a frustrated idealism positions him as a quintessentially American writer and suggests something of the fruitful sense of conflict that animates his best work, a conflict that his son, Mark Vonnegut (whom he named after his literary hero Mark Twain), traced back to the contradictions of his character: ‘He was like an extrovert who wanted to be an introvert, a very social guy who wanted to be a loner, a lucky person who would have preferred to be unlucky. An optimist posing as a pessimist, hoping people will take heed.’
   
This promising thesis never really gets off the ground. Sumner is not a literary critic or a biographer, but a historian. He writes as an admirer of Vonnegut’s work. As a result, Unstuck in Time is light on critical analysis, despite its thoroughness. Sumner examines each novel in turn, but is not an adept reader of fiction. His criticism lacks the symbolic awareness and concerted formal engagement that would allow him to explain how the novels function as independent structures of meaning. His chapters tend to devolve into extended plot summaries, so that Unstuck in Time often seems less like an interpretation of Vonnegut’s fiction than a retelling of it, an impression reinforced by Sumner’s habit, contrary to critical convention, of reporting novelistic details in the past tense.
   
Sumner describes Vonnegut as a ‘master storyteller’. But much of Vonnegut’s originality derives from the fact that plot is not his strong suit. His most conventional novel is his first, Player Piano (1952). Over the course of his career he developed a signature literary mode that his biographer Charles J. Shields called ‘comic-didactic’. His novels became grab-bags of fragmented musings and folksy wisdom, leavened with comic turns, jokes, crudely drawn cartoons, and (Sumner’s neat phrase) the ‘hobo’s satchel of disposable sci-fi parables’ credited to Vonnegut’s fictional alter ego and foil, Kilgore Trout.
   
The glue that holds them together is, as Sumner intimates, the charm of the authorial persona they project. Vonnegut’s real mastery lies in his ability to use humour to create a collusive sense of intimacy. ‘I can have oodles of charm when I want to,’ boasts the Vonnegut-like narrator of Breakfast of Champions (1973), one of his patchier efforts. The seductive appeal of his world-weary, plain-spoken voice makes even an obviously flimsy work, such as his final novel Timequake (1997), enjoyable to read. As Shields remarks, the film versions of Vonnegut’s novels have all been unsuccessful because they are all one character short.
   
Vonnegut observed in an interview that the comical sci-fi episodes in Slaughterhouse-Five serve a purpose similar to the clowns in Shakespeare: they provide respite from the novel’s traumatic material. As Vonnegut was doubtless aware, Shakespeare’s clowns are not mere diversions; their position grants them licence to address uncomfortable truths. This is the insight around which Vonnegut based his career: the ability to laugh is at once the redeeming feature of existence and the means by which we might confront the reality of our condition. The idea was the source of his greatest work and, ultimately, exposed his limitations as a writer, as he gradually became a prisoner of his own schtick.     
   
‘I saw the destruction of Dresden,’ he wrote in A Man Without a Country, the slender volume of essays that gathered the dying embers of his spent talent (though even it has its charms). ‘I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that’s the soul seeking some relief.’

Unstuck in Time: 

A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels

Gregory D. Sumner

(Hunter)

Canada by Richard Ford

‘Swallowing the jigsaw,’ Australian Book Review, no.343 (July-August 2012) 45-6.

Richard Ford, whose career is now well into its fourth decade, has earned a place among the most venerable practitioners of a durable brand of American realism. His fiction draws strength from its stolid traditionalism: its faith in the idea that formal conservatism, respectful attention to the lives of ordinary people, and a line-by-line dedication to the craft of writing are the surest paths to literary significance. His aesthetic, broadly speaking, is that of a writer who reveres Anton Chekhov and John Cheever, thinks everything James Joyce wrote after The Dead is a mistake, and believes with Ernest Hemingway that the only eloquence manly enough to deserve respect is a plain-spoken eloquence.
   
Ford’s tenth book, Canada, is in many ways a credit to his no-nonsense approach. It is a deeply considered piece of work, notable for the tasteful restraint and clarity of its prose. Yet it is also a novel that is often slow and whose uniformity of expression comes to seem limiting. Its meditative first-person narration locks it into a confessional mode that tends toward literalism and the over-explicitness of hindsight. As a consequence, there is a monological quality to the novel that not even Ford’s astute delineations and deftness of touch can overcome.
   
Canada is set in 1960, the year its narrator, Dell Parsons, turns 15. Dell lives with his parents and twin sister in the small Montana town of Great Falls. The early chapters sketch their family history and paint a picture of their relatively contented domestic existence. Shadowing Dell’s reflections is the fact, announced in the opening paragraph, that the course of his life is about to be determined by two serious crimes. The first half of the novel leads us through Dell’s recollections of how it came about that his parents, as the end result of a series of poor decisions by his father, decided to rob a bank. The second crime, the details of which are only revealed near the end of the novel, is a double murder.
   
That Ford announces these decisive plot points from the outset suggests something of his underlying purpose. Canada is not a novel with any interest in the generic contrivances of crime fiction; it makes no attempt to milk the sensational aspects of its story for suspense or dramatic effect, nor does it flirt with the inverted glamour of outlawry. When Dell thinks of the exploits of Bonnie and Clyde, it only serves to reinforce the stubbornly unromantic quality of his mismatched parents’ relationship and the almost endearing ineptness of their misguided attempt to free themselves from their financial woes.
   
Canada’s interest is the way in which a quotidian existence might lead a person to the kind of breach of normality that the robbery represents. It is concerned with the repercussions and the enduring significance of such a radically disruptive act. Throughout the first half of the novel, Dell often wonders at the closeness of bad events to the surface of everyday life. The incremental process by which his mild-mannered parents become bank robbers does not lessen the peculiarity of their crime, or the decisiveness of their crossing of the border into North Dakota to carry out their half-baked plan. For Dell, the robbery suggests that life is shaped by contingency. ‘Bad things can just happen to you,’ his father confirms. ‘And you live on through them.’
   
The irony of this observation is that Dell’s father brings ruin on himself and his family as a direct consequence of his own foolish choices. But the focus of the novel as a whole is on the statement’s unironic truth. Dell bears no personal responsibility for his parents’ crime, but must live with the consequences nonetheless. This is underscored by the novel’s geographical symbolism, its explicit concern with the crossing of borders, literal and figurative, and its overt narrative symmetry. Canada is divided evenly between Dell’s account of his time in Great Falls and his attempt to reorient his life after his parents have been imprisoned and his sister has run away, spooked by the prospect of being taken into state care. In the second half of the novel, Dell is driven across the border into Canada, where he is placed under the supervision of a surrogate father-figure, in the form of a disreputable character named Arthur Remlinger, an expatriated American with a murky past. This sudden upending of his existence places Dell in an ambiguous position. He is forced to reassess his identity, to make sense of the events that have displaced him, and to consider the extent to which the border crossing represents a clean break with the past.
   
The notion that Canada gravitates toward is that life is less mysterious than it sometimes appears. ‘I have the habit of only seeing things the way they’re presented to me,’ Dell’s rueful mother tells him from her jail cell. ‘I’d like you to turn out different. It’s a weakness of mine.’ And Dell does turn out different. He comes to realise that the truth is not necessarily as others present it to him and that events become comprehensible on a personal level when one learns to live with the world’s underlying disorder. He overthrows his youthful habit of mystification, the ‘reverse thinking’ that leads him to imagine significance where there is none and to misjudge other people. In the brief coda that brings the novel to a close, we encounter Dell as an old man. He has built a respectable life in Canada, becoming a high school English teacher who advises his students ‘not to hunt too hard for hidden or opposite meanings ⎯ even in the books we read ⎯ but to look as much as possible straight at the things you see in broad daylight. In the process of articulating to yourself the things you see, you’ll always pretty well make sense and learn to accept the world.’
   
It is a sober, secularised vision, and even a somewhat moralistic one in the distinction the novel comes to draw, via Remlinger, between the honest and dishonest life. It evokes the American myth of self-invention, but at the same time resists it, utilising the northern expanse of Canada as a symbolic counterweight. Ultimately, Dell does not deny his past, nor does he let it define him. ‘Impersonation and deception,’ he reflects, ‘are the great themes of American literature. But in Canada not so much.’
   
Canada is, in many respects, a conventional bildungsroman. And its conventionality, the steadiness of its march toward mature realisation, often makes one conscious of its element of overdetermination. I lost count of the number of times Dell made a point of mentioning his youthful ignorance of the world’s machinations. The most effective parts of the novel are those in which Ford manages to draw out the idiosyncrasies of his characters (his depiction of Dell’s unhappy parents is particularly memorable), to deploy his symbolism in intimate and subtle ways,  and to wrest his tale free from its weighty geography. There is a incident late in the first half of the novel when Dell’s father is distracting himself with a jigsaw of Niagara Falls. In an attempt to amuse his son, he swallows a piece, rendering the puzzle forever unsolvable. The symbolic implications are numerous and more or less obvious when the incident is understood in light of Dell’s eventual fate, the relationship he comes to have with his past, and his suspension between his American and Canadian identities. The ability to invest such an obviously symbolic gesture with complex resonances suggest that implication, rather than explication, remains Ford’s greatest strength as a writer. In Canada, one wishes there was more of it.

Canada

Richard Ford

(Bloomsbury)

Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace & Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max

‘One man’s finite jests,’ The Age, Life & Style (27 October 2012); ‘A genius revealed,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum (27 October 2012).

Among the odds and ends collected in Both Flesh and Not is an article in which David Foster Wallace proposes that literary biography is a compromised genre. He argues that a biography, in order to justify itself, must ‘make the writer’s personal life and psychic travails seem vital to the work.’ This means that biographers are, to varying degrees, perpetuators of what literary critics used to call the ‘intentional fallacy’: their focus on the circumstances under which a work has been composed inclines them toward interpretations that are simplistic or dishonest.
   
Scepticism about the relevance of biography is common among fiction writers, who well understand that there is no straightforward correspondence between inspiration and  imaginative realisation. The issue is not only that some writers are more expressionistic than others, or even that they invariably distort their raw materials to suit their purposes; it is that the act of objectifying an experience and shaping it into a coherent structure grants it an independent existence, so that the meaning of the work cannot be understood as a mere function of its origins.
   
The issue takes on a particular delicacy in Wallace’s case. No one is likely to begin reading D.T. Max’s biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story without knowing in advance how it ends. When Wallace hanged himself in his California home in September 2008 at the age of 46, he acquired the dark glamour that enshrouds gifted artists who die before their time, behind which lurks a neo-romantic belief in the authenticity of art that has its wellspring in personal suffering.
   
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story confirms that Wallace experienced no shortage of psychic travails. Over the course of his life he became intimately acquainted with the subjects of addiction, depression and suicidal despair. He shared many of his characters’ frailties and indulged in many of their vices. Indeed, his great literary breakthrough occurred only after he had taken what Max describes as ‘the key step of universalising his neurosis.’
   
The observation is crucial to Max’s depiction of Wallace as a person and an influential literary figure. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story is scrupulous in its depiction of Wallace’s problems and character flaws. It hurries past his childhood, its account beginning in earnest in the early-1980s when he left his family home in Illinois to attend college in Massachusetts. His academic parents  had instilled in him a great respect for language and learning, and he proved to be a stellar student. As he would later admit, he was also a bit of a jerk. He was intellectually brilliant, hyper-competitive and inclined to be arrogant about his abilities.
   
The first major turning point in his life came when he suffered a mental breakdown and returned home, humiliated and chastened. From this period of convalescence came his first serious attempts at writing fiction. This embrace of literature was, as Max establishes, the beginning of an extraordinary outpouring of creativity that, over the next six years, produced his first two books, The Broom of the System (1987) and The Girl with Curious Hair (1989), and several aborted attempts at writing what would eventually become his greatest novel, Infinite Jest (1996). Work from this remarkably fertile period was still appearing as late as Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999).
   
Wallace’s reckless drug and alcohol consumption eventually drove him, at the age of 28, to another breakdown. He wound up in a halfway house for recovering addicts. The experience, which he fictionalised with comic gusto in Infinite Jest, was the catalyst for his mature work. The most valuable feature of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story is its explanation of the convergence of factors that crystallised Wallace’s thinking at this time. His personal humbling provided him with a way to dramatise his philosophical and cultural ideas in intimately human terms. It generated the reflective moralism of his later writing. Laura Miller, who interviewed Wallace shortly after the publication of Infinite Jest, described him as exhibiting ‘the careful modesty of a recovering smart-aleck,’ an astute observation that hints at the empathetic direction of his mature work.
   
Revealing though it is, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story does sometimes lapse into simplistic interpretations. It notes the similarity between Wallace’s mother, from whom he was estranged for many years, and the ‘militant grammarian’ Avril Incandenza in Infinite Jest. But it does so without acknowledging that the depiction of Avril reflects the novel’s governing comic principle, which dictates that almost every character displays some form of compulsive or neurotic behaviour. And in noting the resemblance, Max inadvertently points to an interesting lacuna: the biography reveals almost nothing about Wallace’s relationship with his father, even though fraught father-son relationships recur throughout his fiction. 
   

Max also describes one of Wallace’s most intense short stories, ‘The Depressed Person,’ as a piece of ‘revenge fiction’ aimed at an ex-girlfriend, consigning to an endnote the observation that it also admits of a more sympathetic reading. This crude characterisation overlooks its literary significance: the way its concentrated technique anticipates the best of Wallace’s late fiction in Oblivion (2004) and The Pale King (2011).
   
Max seems at times to be carried away by the cultural significance of his subject. When Infinite Jest appeared, one magazine burbled that it was ‘The Great American Grunge Novel’ ⎯ a gormless description Max endorses, going on to compare Wallace to Kurt Cobain. (Aside from the irrelevance of the comparison, Wallace seems, alarmingly, to have preferred the music of Alanis Morrisette.) It is also an overstatement to claim that the mature Wallace became ‘a full-fledged apostle of sincerity.’ The trouble with this common characterisation, which is based on some of his public remarks, is that it is belied by the structural complexity of his late fiction, which depicts all communication as mediated and often unhappily occluded.
   
With a few exceptions, the non-fiction writings gathered in Both Flesh and Not are minor works, but they reflect the range of Wallace’s interests: literature, mathematics, film, philosophy, tennis (the title essay is an encomium to the physical grace of Roger Federer) and language itself. Its previously unpublished material includes a selection of the charming mini-essays on points of grammar and usage he would give to his writing students and some of the obscure word definitions he contributed to the American Heritage Dictionary.
   
But the book’s two indispensable inclusions suggest why Wallace has become a pivotal figure in American literature. ‘Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young’ and ‘The Empty Plenum,’ both written in his twenties, are slightly bumptious essays. They reveal that Wallace did not immediately master the garrulous style that became his trademark. Yet they are essential reading if one wants to understand the development of his thought. In his ambitious attempt to realise the literary project sketched out in these early essays ⎯ to reconcile head and heart, to transcend the perceived limitations of his own time ⎯ he was to create the extraordinary body of work that he has left us.

Both Flesh and Not 

David Foster Wallace

(Hamish Hamilton)

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: 

A Life of David Foster Wallace

D.T. Max

(Granta)

Like a House on Fire by Cate Kennedy

‘Home fires too close for comfort,’ The Weekend Australian, Review (13 October 2012) 22.

Cate Kennedy has published a novel, a travel memoir and several volumes of poetry, but she has established a reputation as something of a short story specialist. Like a House on Fire is her second collection and it is, in many ways, a credit to her proficiency. Its fifteen tales are crafted with the ease and authority of an adept, so much so that their confident handling of the genre’s received gestures can start to seem like its own form of limitation.
   
Kennedy’s stories belong to a tradition of understated realism that extends from Anton Chekhov to Alice Munro. They stake out a fictional territory that is intimate, quotidian and frequently domestic. Moments of sympathy and connection are evident in Like a House on Fire, but Kennedy is more often drawn to life’s frustrations and the emotional complexities they expose. She is particularly shrewd in her depiction of family relationships, recognising that they create obligations that can be stressful and boring at the same time. Her protagonists often experience the petty feelings of irritation that are born of over-familiarity.
   
Rather than dramatise moments of direct confrontation, many of the stories in Like a House on Fire prefer to burrow their way into their characters’ underlying sense of dissatisfaction. In several, tensions are heightened when someone suffers an injury or illness. The opening story, ‘Flexion’, begins with a farmer being crushed in a tractor accident, before it traces his unhappy wife’s grudging efforts to help him through his rehabilitation, his atrophied limbs becoming a symbol of their atrophied marriage. Others feature a back injury, cancer, and a woman dealing with the physical ravages of childbirth. In each case, the physical condition brings into focus an element of estrangement that has crept into the characters’ personal lives. Even when there is no such overt catalyst, the stories almost invariably come to revolve around a tangible symbol (usually indicated by the title) that crystallises their intangible concerns.
   
Each of the stories in Like a House on Fire is a sturdy independent construction, and they are often effective. It is when they are placed end-to-end that one becomes conscious of their similarity of pace and tone. The collection features stories written in the first- and third-person, and Kennedy also experiments (to no great purpose and not all that effectively) with narration in the second-person and third-person-plural, but the level of action remains essentially the same and her cheerily unpretentious prose is usually content to ride the same easygoing groove. The cumulative effect is not an amplification or enrichment of her thematic preoccupations, but a collective diminution. The problem with domestic tales of frustration and emotional disquiet, such as ‘Cake’ and ‘Tender’, is not any failure of technique, or even that they ring false, but the nagging sense that Kennedy could have written them standing on her ear. They are models of sensitivity; their pathos is cut with an appropriate measure of gentle humour. But there is no edge, no bite. There is no sense that the language and the imagery has been worked to a pitch of intensity, or that the narratives have been pared back to an essential core. Everything falls into place a bit too neatly.
   
The issue is partly formal, in the sense that the contemporary realist writer must face the problem of how to shape her material in a meaningful way without compromising its fidelity. The kind of story at which Kennedy excels is also one whose techniques have become very familiar over the past hundred years or so. Modern realism is always in danger of appearing formulaic (take an ordinary person, add half a cup of complicating factors and a tablespoon of emotional confusion, stir gently until he or she arrives at a moment of realisation, pour the contents into a symbolic bowl and sprinkle with tasteful imagery).
   
Kennedy’s stories are usually nimble enough to avoid becoming crushed in the cogs of their own mechanics. Yet is its also the case that several of the collection’s more engaging stories are lighter, looser and, in certain respects, slighter than its consciously weighty inclusions. ‘Cross-country’, about a misadventure in cyber-stalking, and ‘White Spirit’, whose droll commentary on multiculturalism is notable for looking beyond the collection’s intimate focus to address a social issue, are appealing in part because Kennedy allows a little more of her humour to shine through and seems less hidebound by the structural impositions of her narratives.
   
The formal tension is noticeable in the collection’s last story ‘Seventy-two Derwents,’ which affects to be a journal belonging to a young girl named Tyler, who begins writing about her home life for a school assignment. The act of ventriloquism is not flawless; Tyler does not always sound like the schoolgirl she is supposed to be. And despite having the collection’s most dramatic ending, the story ultimately surrenders to the warm embrace of a comfortable symbolism. But it is nevertheless the work of a writer who is willing to try different registers and test the boundaries of her form, albeit in a tentative fashion. It is not the most accomplished story in Like a House on Fire, but it is one of the more memorable, in large part because an adventurous but flawed work will always be more interesting than a predictably competent one. 

Like a House on Fire

Cate Kennedy

(Scribe)