"Steer Toward Rock" by Fae Myenne Ng

At a horrific, life-changing moment, a Chinese immigrant in the United States under a false name and false pretenses thinks of some wisdom his mother had given him. He is about to be separated from his hand as two thugs drag him to a table saw, he remembers his mother’s aphorism: “Trust rock, she told him. Break fear upon rock. … Go toward fear. Trust fear. Steer toward rock.” She told him this as she was preparing to sell him to an illegal immigration ring in the U.S.

So the young man, who must make payments to his mob boss for the right to live, sustains himself at this ghastly moment. And Steer Toward Rock becomes the aphorism by which this novel’s characters must live if they want to find meaning, family, and happiness. Impressive for its sustained obliquity, Fae Myenne Ng’s book brought me into the Chinese culture in San Francisco’s Chinatown like no other book ever did. She stretches this culture taut across a frame of trans-Pacific exploitation and racketeering. We learn of the purchased boy from China whose name becomes Jack Moon Szeto, a multiple falsity rooted in a scheme to allow illegal entry to Chinese immigrants. Before confessing his status to the American authorities, he becomes another link in the illegal and oppressive chain. He must take a bogus bride purchased for him from China, but here he finds companionship and eventually fathers a fiery, headstrong daughter.

 

This entire history leads to the daughter. This is really her story – how she hasn’t steered toward the rock of honesty in her love life, but does free her father from the tangled, fear-ridden narrative of his past by shepherding him through the naturalization process.

I love the conversations between the Chinese men in San Francisco. They holler at each other, tease each other, voices seemingly raised at all times; they want to get each other’s goats. Through it all, though, there is honesty, good will, humor, and bemusement at life.(Jack himself exhibits wisdom unusual in one his age;  his almost every statement, every piece of advice for friends and family drips with ancient Chinese wisdom.) This banter, with its glimpse into Chinese culture, is a major delight here, and worth the price of admission all by itself. I could have wished for a more-closely-described San Francisco, but this may have been absent by authorial intent. She tells her story obliquely, until roughly the last quarter of the book, when the daughter’s character takes center stage and the narrative takes on greater concreteness. Until then, though, the story is told as though through a mist, becoming visible like Victorian homes on a foggy day in San Francisco.

It would be hard to top this book’s intent look at the San Francisco Chinese culture, or its treatment of the Hon Pak confession program, pursued in the 1950s by U.S. Immigration authorities as a sort of bait-and-switch tactic to get better records on Chinese and other immigrants. The family histories feel all too true, and the saga of exploitation all too consistent with the world’s ever-present greed.

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"Arcadia" by Lauren Groff

How does a well-meaning man, living the principles of an idyllic and idealistic upbringing, cope with the wrenching changes in his life? How does a visionary leader engender his ideals in his followers? Lauren Groff provides memorable answers to these questions in her knowing and compassionate second novel, Arcadia.  

A cult has grown up around Handy, a folk/rock singer reminiscent of Jerry Garcia. He and his followers realize their utopian dream when they come into 600 acres in Upstate New York, and in the late 1960s they found the commune Arcadia. Built on full egalitarian principles, Arcadia achieves self-sufficiency for a time, with acceptance for misfits, common-law marriages, and a hands-off policy toward drug use. Into this idyll is born Ridley Stone, a premature baby and diminutive child and adult, known universally as “Bit.” Through Bit’s eyes we witness the unique and inexorable events of this story: a community starts under the highest ideals, but human nature rears its head and jealousy, lust, covetousness, and anger creep in to spoil things. Bit suffers particularly on account of the women in his life: his mother Hannah suffers from seasonal affective disorder and barely stirs from bed for months at a stretch. Helle, the childhood chum who grows brightly beautiful by age thirteen turns out quite troubled – a heavy drug user and apparent thief. Eventually she becomes the mother to Bit’s daughter Grete, and at least in his daughter's case, Bit’s influence proves sufficient to inculcate responsibility and a sense of family.

We suffer as along with Bit. He’s a sympathetic character: caring, gentle, and wise, if a little timid. In this way he embodies the commune and its spirit. At the end of the story, his mother’s mortality grinds down Bit’s last nerve and physical reserves, but also provides a release from some overwhelming responsibilities, and an opportunity for love. Arcadia is the history of a noble experiment, an experiment that has hopeful beginnings, a golden age, and a tragic end. We hope Bit’s end will not be tragic, because he’s a highly sympathetic being who was schooled in principles by parents with high ideals.

And truly that is the story: Ms. Groff questions whether a commune like the one she describes can withstand the vagaries of human nature. The Arcadia of her story certainly can’t. Bit, however, is the community’s central figure, true to its ideals to the end. We wish his luck with the love of his life could have been better. This novel enjoys a much tighter focus than The Monsters of Templeton, and the result shows off the author’s great skill with the language and the depth of her treatment of the moral issues. The prose throughout makes this novel fairly glow – there’s almost no other way to describe it. This is a highly memorable read with fully-drawn characters, and a unified theme and concept carried forward very precisely by the characters. Ms. Groff’s skill is really very impressive, and I’ll frankly say it’s more than I hoped for after Monsters. She hits it out of the park! Take it up!

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“The Informers” by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

Juan Gabriel Vásquez makes his title plural, because the informers are everywhere in this interesting and self-reflective novel. The author plays himself, so to speak, in writing this book, and the narrative taking up the first three quarters poses as a book which has been published. However, there is very nearly nothing we can consider meta-fictional here; Sr. Vásquez plays this very straight. The result is entertaining, thought-provoking, and full of cautionary lessons.

Sr. Vásquez uses the voice of a Colombian journalist who has written a book about the life of Sara, his immigrant friend. Sara moved to Bogotá in 1938 from Germany with her prosperous Jewish family, and has lived there ever since. She became friends with Gabriel Santoro, prominent attorney and language professor. Santoro’s son, also called Gabriel, is our narrator-journalist. Santoro senior reads his son’s book and writes a prompt and excoriating review. We very gradually learn the reasons for the hostility, and they stem from the elder man’s guilt about something he apparently said about an acquaintance, an immigrant man from Germany, during World War II. He informed. The result is a blacklisting of the acquaintance-victim, Konrad Deresser, who is detained, imprisoned, loses his family and his business, and at war’s end, commits suicide.

This bit of character assassination starts the dominoes falling, and it takes more than fifty years for all the effects to be felt. 

The author takes up the immorality of calumny very effectively: the perpetrator destroys his victim, and lives with his guilt for decades. Even as he becomes a prominent professor and rhetorician, his words and his acquaintances betray him. Eventually we aren’t sure whether he’s killed himself or not. The moral territory is crystal clear and the language engaging and seamlessly translated. This book abounds in subtleties: the snitch becomes a jurist-rhetorician; the son becomes a truth-seeking journalist who inadvertently brings ruin to the father. Well-written and throught-provoking.

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"By the Lake" by John McGahern

Now I want to move to Ireland. After listening to the lilting, fluid conversational rhythms in John McGahern’s By the Lake, I can’t wait to pull up stakes and move to the Sacred Sod. It doesn’t hurt that the late Mr. McGahern set all these charming spoken words in the mortar of his own graceful narrative. The whole is more than agreeable, it’s enchanting. I’m sorry I finished, and that doesn’t happen for me that often.

And I do admire By the Lake, make no mistake. We witness the cycle of the agricultural year in a vaguely-identified region of the Republic of Ireland. It might be County Donegal, but it doesn’t matter. Joe Ruttledge and his wife Kate live next to a lake, raise sheep along with a few cattle, and are much admired and loved in the community, particularly by their lakeside neighbors, Jamesie and Mary Murphy. This is a quiet community, encompassing a small market town, and Jamesie is well known for his nosy nature and his innocent, innocuous ways. Other characters aren’t quite so sympathetic, but their discourse and their manners always adhere to a carefully respectful, even sunny, code. Events flow like a stream that never overruns its banks. The egotist remarries later in life, only to find a bride – and her entire family – reject him. Crops are brought in with neighbors’ help, livestock taken to market, construction projects proceed, folks pass away, and atheists and priests are on friendly terms. The conflicts all play out in confidential conversations, it seems. No one does anything rude or aggressive in By the Lake, but the strife of conflicting interests unwinds its tense energy below the surface nonetheless.

So what commends this book to our attention? Here’s what: the unceasing and beautiful description of nature in rural Ireland, and how it dictates these farmers’ agendas; the awe-inspiring and delightful diction of Irish conversation, here faithfully tendered; the glowing significance inhering to everyday objects and statements, given them by this lovely soup of emotion and honor. There is a lot of folk wisdom contained herein, and we can all take a lesson – or any number of lessons – from this novel’s poetically-spoken characters.

I recommend this joy of a novel to anyone interested in an ennobling narrative, set in the hearts and minds of some earthy – not simple – Irish country folk. Take and enjoy!

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"Bloodroot" by Amy Greene

Events in Amy Greene’s captivating, soulful Bloodroot swirl around Myra Lamb, a pretty girl from the hills of Appalachia. This is yet another stunning debut piece from an author with superior gifts. You will get a full, rich read here, as each of a selected handful of characters narrates a first-person segment of this saga. And “saga” captures the tone perfectly – the harrowing detail of these hard-luck stories of abuse, neglect, and dissipation, and the depth of emotion call the word “epic” to mind.

Myra, very much a free-spirited girl, loses her parents when but a tot, and Byrdie, her Granny, rears her.   Byrdie in her turn was also raised by her grandmother and great aunts, all of whom were blessed with some version of “the sight,” an occult ability to perceive, predict, or influence forces beyond the natural. Byrdie pursues a fairly relaxed regimen with Myra’s upbringing, having hated restrictions when she was young. She also believes Myra has the gift, but frets over the girl’s wild and willful ways.

Myra’s strong will does indeed get her into trouble. She meets the physically beautiful John Odom and must have him for herself. She even casts a spell to ensnare him, patterned after one her great-great grandmother used decades before.  John turns out abusive, oppressive, and shockingly violent, the same as the rest of his creepy family. Myra and John say they are bad for each other, but it’s hard to see what Myra might have done to deserve such suffering at the hands of her husband.

The author uses a very elegant structure to capture all of this story’s threads. I’ve seen it said that writers make their readers want to go to a certain place, but shouldn’t take them there. Ms. Greene does one better. She takes her entire novel to lead her readers to a certain conclusion, only to place a very oblique, almost wistful, version of it in the very last voice we expect. The diction and speech patterns come from Appalachian hill country, and strike the perfect note, with subtle differences from character to character.

Bloodroot is such exceptional storytelling – it’s organic, it flows as the blood-red sap of the plant of the title. Its force derives not only from the harrowing and inexcusable weaknesses of its characters, but also from the subtle and inexorable pull of family and kin, for better or for worse. Be prepared to accompany and suffer with Myra, a very memorable fiction in herself, and honor and acclaim the amazing arrival of a terrific new author.

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"The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti" by Annie Vanderbilt

With its clever structure and highly personal content, The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti captures the struggle of one woman to forgive herself for imagined transgressions in her past. Protagonist Lily recalls a continuing series of sensual encounters, some of which cause her guilt, and from which we are never very far. In fact, I recognize these as the best descriptions of a woman’s sensuality I have ever encountered. Author Annie Vanderbilt guides our tour very effectively, and I will always honor her for that. After a promising start, however, Madame Olivetti unfortunately bogs down from the weight of guilt, delusion, and the life lessons that come too late for the most deserving characters.

Through a series of highly effective erotic scenes, which are not explicit but just very well done, we understand a central feature of Lily’s nature. She bestows her men with love and shares her sensuality generously with them – and most of these episodes occur with her husband Paul as they try to build a family. Lily occupies Paul’s ancestral home in the south of France for a month each summer, and the summer after he dies suddenly of a heart attack, she sets herself the task of putting her guilt-ridden thoughts down on paper, using an aged manual Olivetti typewriter. Her local friends help her see that her guilt stems from a delusion: she thinks she conceived her daughter while having an affair in Mexico (some of the best, dreamiest sensual writing in the book), but an old photograph and a matriarch’s memory help her see the error of her ways.

Ms. Vanderbilt constructs a clever framework in which she allows Lily to tell her story, and interposes a current-events narrative in which her widowed heroine does the writing (while finding yet another partner for rewarding sex). The author slowly reveals Lily’s fraught emotional state to us, but then we find out it’s all a mistake, based on a series of graphically-told emotional losses and doubts. This book’s main reward lies in the effectiveness and clarity of Lily’s internal dialogue. It is constructed on a mistaken and damaging guilt in the main character that I had a hard time crediting, although the author gives it a very game try.

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"The Transit of Venus" by Shirley Hazzard

One can assume the characters in Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus have guiding principles in their lives, a moral framework by which to behave. After all, they lead exemplary outward lives for the most part. However, when Venus transits between them and their principles, when love gets in the way, everything turns to heartache and loss. For multiple characters, thoughts run toward suicide.

Some of what follows will make the reader think this is a dreary or depressing book, because people do suffer disappointment and yearning, sometimes for many years. But the experience of reading The Transit of Venus will redeem you; the author’s rich prose concoction not only intoxicates on an aesthetic level, but also stimulates reflection on the vagaries of human relationships.

This novel lives in several thematic neighborhoods. One thought Ms. Hazzard repetitively focuses on is the insurmountable gap between what people feel and what they say. She expresses this chasm in chopped-up, incomplete conversational sentences, in which trite and over-worn phrases are thought of, and not always even spoken. People speak or think in these fragments and the effect is extraordinary and blunting. People hide their emotions from everyone except themselves. Several times, while the author was carrying this off, I wanted to yell at the character, “Get real for once! Just say what’s on your mind.”

Morality is another lynchpin here. And by morality I mean scale which measures what people do or don’t do for each other – the balance of their motivation: does it tilt toward themselves or toward others? This book is replete with selfishness, particularly on the part of the male characters. Characters keep a running score of the ebb and flow of personal power in relationships (or Ms. Hazzard does it for them), and the tides of these skirmishes shift back and forth in single conversations. (That feature reminded me of Henry James, except it has a clear narrative flow.)

A tall, lovely woman named Caroline (“Caro”) Bell lives at the center of this narrative, and is thoroughly buffeted by its events. Her sister Grace is lovely too, with a strong resemblance to Caro, albeit more lightly complected. Because of a fatal accident on a Sydney Harbor ferry in which they lose both parents, the sisters grow up with a relation named Dora, who is stunningly selfish and self-dramatizing – always working for advantage through a combination of brow-beating and playing the martyr. The girls reach adulthood in Great Britain with grave misgivings about life and people, and barely have the wherewithal to support each other. The inclination is there, but the training, or custom, is not.

Enter the men: Paul Ivory is a handsome, fashionable playwright, at ease with others either singly or in large groups. It isn’t long before Caro falls in love with him. Ted Tice, an astronomer, falls in love with Caro at about the same time. Christian Thrale, son of a stuffy, distinguished scientist, opts for Grace early on, considering Caro a bit too rich for his blood. Relationships come and go – or let’s say the assignations are there for the plucking – and the men generally skirt around the consequences, playing havoc with the female populace. Caro’s Paul marries into nobility and money, but Caro eventually finds an American philanthropist, happiness and marriage, in New York.  Quite near the end of the book, the reason for the continual and unexplained emotional undercurrent – the hatred and recrimination displayed mostly by Ted and Paul – becomes clear. Suffice it to say, the final alignments are what they should be.

The stunning emotional depth of this novel – Ms. Hazzard catches with pinpoint precision the internal dialogs of love and pain and yearning – gives it its great gravitas. That, and the author’s clear moral stance. The emotions are obviously a great strength – this book plumbs even greater depths than her National Book Award-winning The Great Fire (2003) (a book I greatly treasure and honor). The diction, which ranges from stunted and halting to full, sophisticated and eloquent, provides an exact gauge for characters’ commitment or openness.

This review is running to excess. I would love to tackle main character Caro in more depth, but alas … Nevertheless, this book is another example of why I pick up books in the first place. It rewards, it impresses, it lets me live for a while with a strikingly brilliant writer and just … be taken along for the ride.

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