Joyce Carol Oates: The Man Without a Shadow

“She meets him, she falls in love. He forgets her.”

     These are opening words of the latest novel of Joyce Carol Oates (heaven knows how many previous ones there have been).

     The line is repeated twice more, and the paragraph ends as follows:

“At last she says goodbye to him, thirty-one years after they’ve first met. On his deathbed, he has forgotten her.”

     ‘He’ is Elihu Hoopes, scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family, who lost his ability to remember anything for more than a minute or so at the age of thirty-seven as a result of an attack of encephalitis. He retains, however, his ability to remember events prior to his illness.

     ‘She’ is Margot Sharpe, who is a newly arrived graduate student in neuropsychology laboratory.—the prestigious ‘memory’ lab, led by the famous Professor Milton Ferris. And her career from graduate student to fully tenured professor, author of article after article on memory and amnesia, and winner of numerous high honors, centers her whole life on Elihu Hoopes, "E.H." as he is referred to in all the experiments and studies of his amnesia that she conducts. And, yes, she falls desperately in love with him, to the point of near-madness.

     The focus is on the two of them (with a small cast of walk-on parts). Margot Sharpe pursuing her career and her deep attachment to E.H., who drifts back into his past over and over again, as if searching to solve the mystery of a traumatic event.

     And the underlying question throughout the book is what makes us who we are: and what is the role that memory plays in forming who we are. Clearly, the author has done a great deal of research on the subject before writing the book.

    The writing is terrific—you are completely drawn in to the narrative and to the inner lives of the two main characters, although there is certain sense of repetition--sometimes a feeling, as you read, ‘surely we’ve gone over all this before?’ Maybe an editor is too scared to try to get J.C. Oates to think of whittling the book down a bit…

     This a quote from a reviewer called  Ryan Vastelica:

“The Man Without A Shadow is the kind of work that can inspire endless analysis and discussion, because the question it probes is really at the heart of the human experience: who are we, really? It is said you never really know another person, and this is doubly true if the other person is literally unable to know himself. Many times Sharpe is caught off guard by how stubbornly insistent Hoopes’ condition remains, her emotions easily trumping her scientific mind. Oates is canny and devastating in how she unveils a universal experience from the unique dynamic of her leads."

     Another review was critical of the sub-plot in which Hoopes is looking back to childhood and trying to unravel his traumatic experience, and I would agree that this does not really add much to the central relationship between Margot Sharpe and E.H., although the reader is intrigued and wants the mystery to be unraveled.

     Thoroughly recommended.

'Mr. Mac and Me' by Esther Freud

     This is an absorbing book, set in Walberswick on the Suffolk coast, where the author has a bungalow looking out over the sea. The central character is Thomas Maggs, a young boy with a limp who befriends a stranger and his wife who come to live in the village just before the outbreak of World War One. The stranger is Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the architect who designed the famous Glasgow School of Art, and his wife is the artist Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. They befriend the boy, Thomas, who has artistic talent, and whose parents own and run the pub, The Blue Anchor. Charles Mackintosh has found it difficult to get commissions for more architectural work, and he and his wife move to the Suffolk coast, spending much of his time painting watercolors of plants and flowers. Insights into his life are provided to Thomas Maggs by his letters, which--in a rather unlikely narrative ploy--are steamed open by Thomas and his sister after Mackintosh has given them to Thomas to post (or mail as one would say in the U.S.)
     Mackintosh and his wife did live on the coast during this period, and--with his constant wandering around with his binoculars--he was suspected of being a German spy. This is a concern of Thomas, and Mackintosh is briefly arrested as a spy.
     The 'point of view' is that of Thomas, his fears and concerns for his mother, his sister, and even for his drunken father, and as the motif of the novel the relationship with Mr. Mac. All of which is set against the way the coastal community is shaped by the World War, a subject the author has clearly researched.
     I was lucky to get the book: it was given to us by a friend whose late husband--an architect--was a devotee of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
     There is a long interview of Esther Freud in the New York Times, to be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/garden/esther-freud-on-mr-mac-and-me-and-the-cottage-that-inspired-it.html

"Dept. Of Speculation" by Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill “Dept. Of  Speculation”

       A little gem of a novel, and I use the word “little” deliberately, as the dimensions of the book are 4 ½ inches by 7 ½ inches, and there are only 177 pages, with widely spaced text, which is broken up into passages of various lengths—from two lines to a page or two. One page is completely filled with the repeated phrase soscaredsoscaredsoscaredsoscared.

     Others are long streams of consciousness.

     Often the snippets are quotes from poets—John Berryman, Rilke—and from various philosophers.

       I’ll quote a few phrases from the blurbs on the cover, and I agree with them all:

       Michael Cunningham: “…resembles no book I’ve read before.”

       Dana Spiotta: “..deep, funny, and beautifully written…perfectly captures the absurdities and ironies of our moment.”

       Sam Lipsyte:  “…gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art.”

       Lydia Millet: “…sad, funny, philosophical, and at once deeply poetic and deeply engaging.”

       

       And what is it about? Life, marriage, motherhood, love, bedbugs in New York, children at school and their parents, marital breakdown, heartache, juggling a career, 'ghosting' a book for an astronaut…I could go on.  Sometimes the narrator is first person: sometimes ‘the wife.’ The husband is always just ‘the husband,’ the long-time gay friend is 'the philosopher,' and her sister is just that—'her sister.”

       I must try to find a copy of  Jenny Offill’s first novel “Last Things,” which was noted as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.

Catching Up...

 We have been away in Australia from early-January until the second half of February and during that time--although I have done a lot of reading--I have not made notes on the books and how I felt about them. I have even had to do a bit of research to get some of the titles right before sitting down to do the blog. In fact, I thought I could cut and paste a few succinct sentences from reviews and save myself the trouble of summarizing  and composing my own reviews, but this proved an unrewarding way to proceed.

Let's start with a book I can thoroughly recommend.  Hilary Mantel, of Wolf Hall fame, recently published a book of very compelling short stories, with the title "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher," and that is one of the best in the collection. The review in the New York Times was very extensive and praiseworthy, but had nothing directly apposite that I could lazily quote, so I will have to content myself with:

"Over the past decade or two, Mantel has made a name for herself — no other way to put it — as one of the indispensable writers of fiction in English...Likewise, Mantel has assumed an esteemed place in what might be called a great tradition of modern British female storytelling, an ardor-filled, bluestocking lineage..." And the reviewer goes on to a long list starting with Virginia Woolf, wandering through name after name, and ending with Ali Smith.

Another book I recommend is Jess Walter's "The Financial Lives of the Poets." The narrator is Matt, who has lost his job as a journalist, tried without success to start a blog combining poetry and financial advice, is losing his house to the finance company, concerned his wife is having an affair--and unsure of where to go until, after a chance encounter late at night at a Seven Eleven, he meets a number of kids who lead him into a drug scene and he decides to rescue his financial situation by becoming a drug dealer...

And the story is very funny, very well written, off-beat in an engaging way, and certainly worth reading. And here I will crib from a review:

  "The Financial Lives of the Poets” is less memorable for its title than for the success with which it captures fiscal panic and frustration. Matt ambles though this book delivering blistering wisecracks about the factors that contributed to his family’s fall. Mixing financial advice with poetry is a terrible idea. But combining the elements of tragedy with a sitcom sensibility is a good one. And it’s what Jess Walter continues to do best."

I have to admit that I had never heard of Ivan Doig, who apparently wrote a series of well-received novels, mostly set in Montana and the West. Joan stumbled on a review of "Last Bus to Wisdom," and I down-loaded it from the Library, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Here is an excerpt from a praiseworthy review, and the first paragraph is relevant as Doig died recently:  "Circumstance led me to approach “Last Bus” with trepidation. If a recently mourned author’s final book is bad, there’s no use pretending it’s not. But spitting on a fresh-sodded grave isn’t my idea of a good time. Fortunately, “Last Bus to Wisdom” is more than not bad. It’s one of Doig’s best novels, an enchanting 1950s road-trip tale that swaps Kerouac’s Sal Paradise for a plucky 11-year-old named Donal ­Cameron. Donal, raised by his grandmother on a Montana ranch, finds himself packed off to relatives in Manitowoc, Wis., when Gram takes ill. The boy sets out the old-fashioned way: “And here I was,” he recalls, “stepping up into what I thought of as the real bus, with GREYHOUND — THE FLEET WAY TO TRAVEL in red letters on its side and, to prove it, the silver streamlined dog of the breed emblematically running flat-out as if it couldn’t wait to get there.”

Problems arise in Manitowoc, and another bus journey begins....and as a reader you will follow both journeys--and the stops in various places--with great pleasure.

If you want a biography, try Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, which I read with fascination and a deal of skipping; the book is very long. It not only deals with the career of a very peculiar (repellent almost) but enormously successful individual, but it is also a historical trip through the development of the whole range of electronic devices we all use today.

Lastly, I was introduced to another writer that I had not heard of--Colum McCaan, who has written several novels and garnished great praise. And my acquaintance with him makes it clear that he is a terrific writer. His latest book is called "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel" and it has been well reviewed. When I tried to find it in the library, it was unavailable and I picked up another of his novels, set in New York in the 1970's, called "Let The Great World Spin" It introduces a large cast of characters, from a monk living in poverty and letting whores use his bathroom to the tight-rope walker 

Petit, who sets up his wire between the Twin Towers and spends half an hour performing while the crowds below hold their collective breath.

I am in two minds what to say about this book, because I gave up half way through when we shifted to the vernacular of a black prostitute describing how her daughter had grown up and started turning tricks.

But the later book, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel," was very well reviewed, and I am still trying to find it at the Library.

I have started Mary Gaitskill's "The Mare," and so far I have been impressed by it; but unfortunately my fascination with Jobs meant that the Gaitskill book was retrieved by the Library before I had got more than half-way through. So I am now number seven in a "Holds" queue to get it back and continue reading.