"The Things We Never Say" by Elizabeth Strout

 

Elizabeth Strout’s latest jewel, The Things We Never Say, comes to us this year loaded with the same realism, sympathetic characters, and emotional clout we have come to depend on from this splendid author. She does not disappoint. No, far from it. This book’s charms will stay with you long after you finish.

This time Strout introduces us to Artie Dam, a high school history teacher, and onetime Massachusetts Teacher of the Year award winner, who has reached a crossroads in his life on the job and away from it. Unfortunate events and a willful silence surrounding them have conspired to sink Artie into a depressive mire in the second half of his 50s. As he navigates his life and career from his seaside home, a series of wrenching revelations will affect him profoundly.

A time of polarized national politics weighs on him (and the other characters) too. He is forced into changing his method of teaching the American Civil War, but this is mere background to his immediate challenges. At the outset of the book, he is deeply unhappy, but successful at hiding it from his students. He understands that his wife, a family therapist, has her despondent moments, too. Very little of this is communicated between the two of them, which I found surprising, given their professions.

But this is Artie’s story. In a pivotal moment, he has an accident, losing his footing trying to climb into his small sailboat from the little dinghy he rowed out to it. He slips and falls, his boots fill with water, and every handhold he tries for, on either vessel, moves just beyond his reach. He understands this is the end and suddenly realizes he doesn’t want it to be the end. The episode spooks his wife and his son Rob, who wonder if it really was an accident; they have understood at some level how unhappy he’s been.

He returns to his life after his lucky rescue, and finds it surprising that others have guessed his heartache. His students remain engaged, and become even more so. (Classroom scenes are special, exceedingly well done.) His influence over his students, and the long-lasting change he engenders in them, form the hallmarks of his worth; he and his son reaffirm their love in spite of a shocking secret they share. 

I’ve spent enough time on the plot. These characters are sympathetic, the zeitgeist of the political moment is spot-on, and a driving suspense plays out and maintains our interest. Pick this up and enjoy yet another entry in Elizabeth Strout’s parade of deserving hits. 

 

 

Read more »

"Vertigo" by W.G. Sebald

Translated from the German by Michael Hulse. 

 

W.G. Sebald plays highly erudite hopscotch with the human capacity for memory in his 1990 novel/memoir Vertigo. (Michael Hulse’s translation from the German was copyrighted in 1999.) Consisting of travels by a first person narrator born in the closing days of the Second World War, this book succeeds as a patchwork of recollections carried along by a restless author who combines erudition with a tone that skirts the edges of fatalism.

He opens the novel with the recollections of a foot soldier crossing a treacherous pass in the Alps in Napoleon’s army in 1800. This march is part of a daring and successful bid to defeat Austrian forces at the battle of Marengo. He identifies the foot soldier as 17 year-old Marie Henri Beyle, who would go on to renown as Stendhal, the pioneering French novelist of realism.

The discussion about this soldier’s sketchy recollections of the well-known military event lead directly into a treatment of the unreliability of memory. The vicissitudes start right away and never stop: the 53 year-old Stendhal returns to the scenes of triumph to try to retrace his steps and those of the army with whom he fought. His memory is a blank for much of the period and the things that seem crystal clear to him he learns are utterly false. Thus do we encounter Sebald’s theme. 

He carries this theme in his travels, which take us, among many other places, to the village where the narrator grew up. Much has changed at the house which was his boyhood home: it has become a wayside inn and public event space. He stops in to see an acquaintance from his youth. The narrator relates a visit to this man’s attic to illustrate the tricks memory plays on us; Sebald includes the following passage (p. 223-224—see ISBN 9780811214858 (alk paper) for page references) in which the first person narrator finds
 

tokens of the slow disintegration of all material forms in the complete silence of this attic. And yet the silence was not to be trusted. Out of trunks, chests, and wardrobes, some of their lids, drawers, and doors half open, all conceivable kinds of utensils and garments bursting forth. It was easy to imagine that this entire assemblage of the most diverse objects had been moving, in some sort of secret evolution, until the moment we entered, and it was only because of our presence that these things now held their breath as if nothing had happened.

Such are the author’s speculations and asides on the subject. I’m struck by the thought that the unreliability of memory, this explosion of our attempts at recollection into splinters and obscurity, has something to do with the collective German memory of World War II. As a particular exhibit supporting this thesis, I’m offering this passage from the same visit the narrator has with his boyhood neighbor (p. 212):
 

He particularly agreed when I said that over the years I had puzzled out a good deal in my own mind, but in spite of that, far from becoming clearer, things now appeared to me more incomprehensible than ever. The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.

Read Vertigo for its striking journey through consciousness, particularly as it mulls over the past. Read it for the stunning honesty of the narrator’s worries and confusion. Read it because it’s a grand gift to the discerning reader, anyone who wishes to experience modern literary fiction and a singular example a groundbreaking achievement. 

 

 

Read more »

"Transcription" by Ben Lerner

This year, author Ben Lerner published Transcription, a remarkable brief book about modern professional elites and their relationship to a dying world-renowned expert on art and history. The author challenges his readers with the story of central trio of articulate but troubled men: the older, world-famous artist/historian/mentor, his son Max, and Max’s friend, the acolyte/narrator. This dense little book unsettles, as its pivotal event is a eulogy for the passing of the artist/philosopher. The acolyte/narrator has delivered it, but finds himself taken to task, reproached for it after the fact, for what he has said. One of those in attendance has found it shocking and unsettling that the narrator can have misled the extremely distinguished interviewee the way he did.

The acolyte has traveled to Providence to interview the older man, the famous expert and teacher, but finds the ninety year-old conflating him with his son. Meanwhile, he is distraught about having damaged his smart phone so that he cannot use it. He’d planned to  record his talk with the world-famous man, and now cannot. The actual conversation they have is almost comic: they speak at cross purposes, the narrator becoming confused by some references of the old man’s. He subsequently goes along with the older man’s conversation in an attempt to get enough material to write up the interview. He spends the doomed interlude fretting about the video call he promised his troubled daughter—his smart phone is hors de combat.

The above recaps the anxious-and-failed interview, which constitutes the first section of the book. The surprising negative reaction to his eulogy/address constitutes the brief central section; it unsettles us while confirming the narrator’s issues of doubt about his own honesty and adequacy. The remarkable third section is a long conversation—or, rather, monologue—by Michael’s son Max. In it, we find the startling, even eerie, similarities between Max and the narrator. Both have been worried sick about their only children, their daughters; they both have deep, affecting issues with Michael, the father and father-figure; these issues have given both men turbulent emotional issues throughout their lives.

The novel holds up a mirror to our modern dependence on our internet connection, the baggage parents saddle their offspring with, through multiple generations, and modern approaches to neuroses in general. It is a novel for the third decade of the 21st Century through and through. It’s challenging, reverberative, spooky, and at times rather funny in spite of it all. Its satiric properties rise to the top. I’m recommending this novel for the expertise of the author, Ben Lerner, who brings his focus and powerful ability with prose to our modern double-dip of folly and hyper-concern.

 

Read more »