To be human

This pressure gets exerted downward, with agents informing their authors of the Facts of Life: if they want the kind of attention and healthy advances that were common a decade ago, during the boom years, they had better make sure their work is pitched broadly. More and more authors alter their approach to fit into a stream that grows ever narrower. And more and more readers find themselves baffled by books that don’t seem to know what they are trying to do, and turn away to more forthrightly literary or commercial work.

With all this talk basically asserting that the literary novel is in a crisis I have come to the conclusion that what the form offers that few if any forms of art can is 'intimacy'. I have gravitated in recent years to books like Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe trilogy partly because, like the main character, I am a middle-aged man experiencing middle-age-manhood. But more because Ford is a master at creating a bubble of intimacy between writer and reader. Reading these books one has the sense that we have entered the protagonist's authentic world, the inner-sanctum of his selfhood. In a world in which the celebrity-driven media is all-intrusive, a world in which basic human interaction is so heavily mediated by technology, the screen, the phone, and so forth, the literary novel can exist as a counterbalance. It has to do with the quality of the medium and mode of consumption ('curling up with a good book') which may be characterized as 'quiet' and 'revealing' in nature. There are a lot of experiences that were once the purview of books that films can now, and will in the future, do as well if not better than books in the realm of bombast and spectacle; generate thrills, suspense and horror, carry us to distant or imagined lands, fabricate alternative realities etc. But because it is fundamentally a flattening medium, film does not (and will never) convey the subtle complexities and depth of what it means (in thought, feeling and spirit) to be another person. The question for the future of the novel will ultimately rest on how much we value achieving that level of genuine personal human connection.

Richard Ford explains himself, sort of.

This is why I love Richard Ford's novels. (Thanks Mark)

Impeccably crafted lines like this about his protagonist Frank Bascombe: And I can certainly imagine that a millennial standard-bearer might be worth having; a sort of generalisable, meditative, desk-top embodiment of our otherwise unapplauded selves - one who's not so accurately drawn as to cause discomfort, but still recognisable enough to make us feel a bit more visible to ourselves and possibly re-certify us as persuasive characters in our own daily dramas.

He certainly says it better than I did.

'The Lay of the Land' by Richard Ford

My friend the Montreal writer David Hamburg once had the privilege of having dinner with John Irving. Over the course of conversation David mentioned that when he started reading a novel he always had to finish it come hell or high water, even if he was hating it. Irving reponded that that was moronic (I paraphrase). He operated on a 20 page rule (I think it was 20, though it may have been 40, it was surely less than 50), meaning the number of pages he gave a book before he dumped it if he hadn't been completely captivated. Life is too short and there are too many good books out there to waste your time on something you don't like, was his explanation. I tend to agree. However, until a couple of years ago I was, like David, a masochist must-finish reader (or in a more positive light an eternal-optimist reader.) I was also a one-book-at-a-time reader. Nowadays I have at least two or three novels going at the same time. So how to explain the fact that I stuck with Richard Ford's 'The Lay of the Land' for over a year? It was a novel that I had started last summer, read half, put it down over the winter and then picked it up again to finish this summer. We're not talking about a 1000-pager like 'Infinite Jest' (my traditional limit for a novel is 350 pages max). The novel is a dozen or so pages shy of 500, though it reads like 1000. Yes, I am a slow reader, but this is a slow-reading book, and I mean this in the best possible sense. I followed the Irving rule and within the first ten pages I was enthralled: every sentence, every paragraph and page is so carefully crafted, so rich in detail and sharply-worded that to be properly appreciated (like a gourmet meal accompanied by a vintage wine) it requires time for savouring and proper digestion. When I returned to the novel after an eight month hiatus it was as if I'd never put it down. The main character, ex-writer and now-realtor Frank Bascombe had entered my bloodstream and was still circulating through my body. Picking the novel up again was like bumping into a friend, not an 'old' friend, but someone I'd met last summer (in a bar, if I went to bars, or on vacation down south) and who'd left an enduring impression. There was an attachment, as if we'd become memorably and intimately acquainted in a short span of time before regretfully having to go our separate ways. On my second go with Frank this summer, the moment I turned the last page of the novel and shut the cover I instantly felt a vacancy. So maybe I took so long to read it because I wanted to make it last as long as possible.

The term that keeps repeating itself in my mind to describe the achievement of this novel is 'monument'. It marks a life lived; Frank is facing his own mortality having been diagnosed with prostate cancer. But it also memorializes (and solemnizes to a certain extent) a particular time-period and landscape, namely, millennial America during the weeks of suspended animation ("suspended aggravation") between the 2000 Presidential election and the US Supreme Court decision to award George Bush Florida's Electoral College votes that handed him the Presidency. The setting is the New Jersey Shore where Frank works as a realtor and the novel takes places over a few days leading up to the American Thanksgiving holiday. Frank is bringing the remnants of his shattered family together (for a holiday dinner catered by Eat No Evil), daughter Clarissa who is back with a man after a stint of lesbianism, and no-goodnik son Paul who works for Hallmark in Kansas City, and is shlepping with him a timecapsule to bury in the sand. Frank's also dealing with the fact that his second wife, who has brought him as close as he's likely to be to true happiness, has recently run off to England to be with her first husband who suddenly showed up after being presumed dead for two decades. And there is the everpresent memory of his deceased son Ralph - the most moving passages in the novel deal with Frank still trying to come to terms with this loss.

Ford's greatest quality as a writer, one that puts him in the category of the very best, like Updike and Bellow, is the way he turns his protagonists into emblems of their time and place (think Rabbit Angstrom or Moses Herzog). And though Updike and Bellow were two of the great figures of 20th century American fiction, Ford's distinction is that his creation is undeniably a transitional figure to the 21st century, making the author perhaps the first great American novelist of the new century, and TLOTL perhaps its first classic. It is a quintessentially American novel, and unCanadian, in the way that the mundane is utterly inseparable from the grandiose. The 'important' themes of death, sacrifice, memory, love, and loss that are at the core of Frank's story (indeed, the human journey) are not trumpeted front and center as they tend to be in Canadian novels. Rather they are woven in seamlessly into Frank's quotidian concerns, his business dealings, his friendships and family relationships. Frank is, in so many respects an American everyman and what makes him such a genuine and charming host is that he's experienced too much and for too long to take himself seriously. Yet, the underlying seriousness of Ford's narrative is never in doubt. As the filter through which we experience millennial (and get a foretaste of post-millenial) America, Frank is the ideal guide to the 'state of the disunion' as he takes us along for a drive up and down the New Jersey shore, with a copy of Shore Buyer's Guide rolled up next to us on the front seat. There are stops to witness a hotel demolition (complete with grandstands and souvenir sellers), and to have a few drinks in an after-hours lesbian bar among others, on Thanksgiving eve. There will be dissertations written about this novel, but suffice to say that it is simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny, head-shakingly witty and heartbreakingly wise. As unforgettable as Frank is. And if this is your first Ford novel, as it was mine, you will likely be as impatient as I am to dig into the first two installments of this trilogy.

My summer reading

It's been an odd summer, and not just weatherwise. My reading has been as sporadic as appearances of the sun. I started with one goal. To finish Richard Ford's 'The Lay of the Land,' a novel I'd started last summer, read half and let it sit on my bedside table all year. I haven't succeeded yet. Ford's novel is a curious reading experience. It's over 500 pages long but reads like 1000. After leaving it to stew for about nine months, I had no trouble picking it up again and remembering exactly where I had left off. It's a rare book, more monument than novel; a character study so detailed, inseparable from a landscape and zeitgeist so richly imagined and uncannily authentic, it seems to transcend the normal boundaries of time and narrative. That having been said, it's also not an easy read and is completely uninterested in plot. It's about loss and a 'Permanent Period,' a stage of life reached in which regrets are few and mortality comes knocking. It's tough going, but so rich and rewarding, with a voice that's so pitch perfect and fully-formed, it's like getting to know an old friend intimately again. In short, it's a novel that demands finishing. I suppose I'll have more to say once that's done.

Instead, of working on Ford, I spent most of the summer getting distracted. I'm almost done with Rawi Hage's latest 'Cockroach' (stay tuned for a review coming soon) but in the interim I picked up a book of short stories by Bruce Jay Friedman called 'Black Angel' that I can't put down. This little gem cost me fifty cents from the charity table at Hanniford's grocery store in the strip mall beside the highway in Saint Albans, Vermont. I've had some luck with that table in the past. Picked up a copy of Elyse Friedman's extremely enjoyable debut novel 'Then Again' last summer from that table. (There appears to be some connection between being an author named Friedman and turning up on the charity table at the Saint Albans Hanniford's). I was curious about Bruce Jay after reading a whatever-happened-to piece about him on Nextbook.com. Apparently he's still writing, though his name has been established less from literary fiction than screenplays. For a while there he was on the fast track to literary stardom, published in the New Yorker, a critically lauded novel called 'Stern'. Now he's perhaps best known as the guy who wrote the screenplay to the movies Splash and The Heartbreak Kid.