Category: Reviews — Fiction

THE BODY ARTIST
By Don DeLillo

In a bold move to pre-empt any debate over who will write the worst novel of 2001, Don DeLillo has taken the prize home early. While there’s no way to predict what horrors are yet to come, it’s safe to say there won’t be anything as bad as The Body Artist published in the next ten months.

The sheer awfulness of The Body Artist is even more of a surprise given the talent involved. While Don DeLillo has always been a hit-and-miss author – for every White Noise there has been a Mao II – he has never gone off the tracks like this before.

What went wrong?

The fault is not in the story, though that is weak enough. In outline it deals with a body artist (think “performance piece”) named Lauren who is renting a house with her husband, a film director named Rey. Rey kills himself and Lauren goes on living alone in the house until a strange man shows up. He may be a homeless person, a ghost, or a figment of her imagination. In the fashion of the best high literary crossover into pulp romance (think The English Patient), they get involved.

So far, so bad, but what really makes the book a true disaster is the writing. Gone are the satiric wit, cultural engagement and kaleidoscope narrative of DeLillo’s last novel, Underworld. This time out he seems to be struggling under the influence of that greatest of all posh literary introverts, Virginia Woolf. Every small gesture in The Body Artist is presumed to carry Great Significance. Every subtle change in tense and tone is a profound mystery of meaning. Consciousness doesn’t flow in a stream so much as sit at the bottom of a well of self, listening to murky echoes and repetitions of itself thinking.

Lest you think I’m making any of this up, here are a couple of representative passages submitted as evidence:

She climbed the stairs, hearing the sound a person makes who is climbing stairs, and she touched the oak grain of the newel when she reached the landing.
It was okay. She wanted to be here and she’d be okay. All their marriage, all the time they’d lived together they’d lived right here.
Her body felt different to her in ways she did not understand. Tight, framed, she didn’t know exactly. Slightly foreign and unfamiliar. Different, thinner, didn’t matter.

That Lauren hears the sound of a person climbing stairs when she is, in fact, climbing the stairs, gives some indication of the level of self-absorption she has attained – a reverse Nirvana for the artsy set. Certainly her inability to understand what doesn’t matter anyway is a feeling many readers will share.

The second passage is an example of how the dialogue between Lauren and the stranger works:

“Then when it comes to me.”
“What?”
“A thing of the most. Days yes years.”
“Do you know what that means? A day. A year. Or did you hear me use these words?”
“Say some words.”
“Say some words.”
“In when it comes.”
“In when it comes. What?” she said
“Leave into leaving.”
“Who is leaving?”
“This is when you, yes, you said.”
“What did I say?”

It is possible to find some defence for what DeLillo is doing. Since Lauren’s body is her art it makes a kind of sense that she is so obsessive about herself, so trapped within her own interior world. But making her sensitive to the point of feeling “her aorta recoil to every blood surge” is simply ridiculous. And the constant dwelling upon the minutiae of daily existence becomes a crushing bore even in a book as short as this.

As for the dialogue, DeLillo tries to excuse it by suggesting that Lauren and the stranger communicate “outside language.” He deliberately fashions their conversation so that it has no rhythm, none of the tempo, inflections or intervals that make normal speech comprehensible. That this results in a lot of gibberish is, I think he would argue, his point.

But this does not explain the rest of the dialogue in the book. Here, for example, is Lauren talking to the man who owns the house she has been staying in:

“Has it been satisfactory then?”
“Mostly, I think, yes.”
“Because if there’s anything.”
“No, it’s fine, I think. Rooms.”
“Yes.”
“Rooms and rooms.”

What are we to make of this?

Scholars may find something to salvage from The Body Artist. In terms of its theme I assume it is meant as a response to DeLillo’s fascination with the way cultural products, and in particular the signals sent by mass commercial media, have colonized the subconscious. The only rebellion against the tyranny of the media thus becomes an obsessive inwardness that denies the external world entirely. As he says of Lauren, “the world was lost inside her.”

This is all well and good, at least for Lauren, but if this is DeLillo’s point then it is one that is lost in a dull, derivative paste of writing that is almost beyond parody:

He said, “The word for moonlight is moonlight.”
This made her happy. It was logically complex and oddly moving and circularly beautiful and true – or maybe not so circular but straight as straight can be.

My guess is most readers will find this baffling. I’m prepared to grant what the stranger says is “true,” but what is logically complex about it? Or moving? Or beautiful?

There is a poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Man on the Dump,” that reflects on a literature grown heavy with cliché, especially words stale with “beautiful and true” associations like “moonlight.” The moon creeps up on a pile of garbage that includes images of the moon itself, along with the wrapper from a can of pears, a cat in a paper bag, and books, one suspects, like The Body Artist.

Notes:
Review first published February 3, 2001.

ARMADILLO
By William Boyd

At a time when the competition is admittedly pretty weak, William Boyd has established a reputation as one of the bright lights of English comic fiction.

Armadillo, which refers here to a “little armed man” and not an edentate mammal, deals with the adventures of Lorimer Black (formerly Milomre Blocj), a loss adjuster for a London insurance company. The plot involves, in no particular order, a hanged man, a dream analysis clinic, an insurance scam, Lorimer’s pursuit of a married woman (Flavia Malinverno), and a comedy of manners starring an upper-class twit named Torquil Helvoir-Jayne. Along the way we are treated to selections from Lorimer’s Book of Transfiguration, a journal filled with quotations from Gerard de Nerval and digressions on the philosophy of insurance.

The silly names and overly complex plot indicate that Boyd belongs to the group of writers, sometimes called postmodern, who take a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the novel. The writing itself has its ups and downs. Boyd’s sense of place is surprisingly poor (his London is scarcely more than a city map), but his dialogue has the fast-paced wit typical of the best of his contemporary hipsters. A novel as light as this can be read in an afternoon, and most of the time it will be enjoyed.

Unfortunately, this is as far as it goes. Armadillo is funny, but its attempt to be something more falls flat. The characters, with the exception of Lorimer, are two-dimensional, the symbolism is forced, and nothing about the story is very compelling. Boyd’s talents, which are real, should have been put to a better use than this.

Notes:
Review first published May 30, 1998.

ANGRY YOUNG SPACEMAN
By Jim Munroe

Why is Jim Munroe angry? According to his bio he is only 27 years old, a former managing editor at the high-profile parody magazine Adbusters, and already has one successful novel under his belt (Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gas Mask). Things would seem to be going pretty well.

And yet Jim Munroe is a rebel. He has published Angry Young Spaceman under his own imprint, and urges others to do the same on a highly recommended Web-page (NoMediaKings.org) that he has turned into a platform for his crusade against media monopolies. His new novel is an extension of his political creed, being a critique of modern globalization and materialism in the form of a science-fiction comic romance.

The angry young hero is Sam Breen, an Earthling who goes to the liquid planet of Octavia to teach the indigenous squid population English. Octavia is a Third World kind of world, where the locals ape all of the latest Earth fashions right down to the hottest new boy band (Intergalactic Cool Youth). Needless to say, it isn’t long before Sam is fulminating against this one-galaxy monoculture and preparing to “go native” in a big way. “Earth has bullied everyone into being like it,” he complains. Teaching English is like spreading a disease, destroying native ways of life and replacing them with boring and meaningless alien traditions.

As an allegory of Western cultural imperialism all of this works quite well, and the writing itself is very good. The book’s real failure is its hero. Sam Breen, the intergalactic ambassador of sensitivity, white guilt and political correctness, was more than I could take.

What Sam is angry about is never clear. He wears an “aggrometer” on his wrist to warn him when he is going over into the red zone of rage, but the only time he really gets upset is when people are impolite.

Tolerance, acceptance and sensitivity are an obsession with Sam. He is, of course, an environmentalist and radical vegetarian, and even leads a campaign against eating the tiny shrimp-like creatures that live on Octavia. Relationships? Tolerant of difference of course (his mother is a lesbian and his girlfriend is one of the local squid), but also committed to building a responsible, long-term monogamous relationship. Violence? Certainly not the real kind. Even disciplining unruly students is a no-no (“institutionalized violence, always directed against the powerless for ‘their own good'” – sniff!).

Why then is Sam angry? Precisely because he has nothing to be angry about. Sam is a thirtieth-century rebel without a personally felt motive for his cause. Coming from a privileged background (his mother is some kind of corporate planet developer), and only associating with an elite minority while living on Octavia, his political posturing only makes him seem like an ideologically hip prig. He’s the guy who’s got it all, but doesn’t want it.

It is an attitude that’s hard to wear for a full-length novel. The best drama in any fiction comes from the conflict between characters and ideas. A novel without that conflict runs the risk of becoming sentimental or preachy, which is exactly what happens to Angry Young Spaceman. Near the end Sam makes one of his speeches about how bad a thing cultural hegemony is. As he concludes, the person he is talking to (or rather, as usual, talking at) only raises his eyebrows “in a kind of maybe you’re right way.” This leaves Sam feeling unsatisfied. “I’d have preferred he argued,” he decides.

So would we all.

Notes:
Review first published June 10, 2000. Munro’s next novel, Everyone In Silico, was much better.

AMSTERDAM
By Ian McEwan

I have always had reservations about the Booker Prize. Two years ago I had my doubts confirmed. In 1996 Graham Swift’s Last Orders (a very good novel) took the prize. Scandal followed when it was suggested that Swift had plagiarized William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

If that had been all there was to the charge, then it should have simply been ignored. Swift’s borrowing from Faulkner had, after all, been noticed by many contemporary reviewers, and to call it plagiarism was just absurd.

But then came the response. In a letter by A. N. Wilson, one of the five judges on the prize panel, it was suggested that the committee hadn’t even been aware of the connection between the two books – despite a relationship so patently obvious that any English Lit. undergrad would have recognized it after reading the dustjacket.

Even worse, Wilson confessed that the committee had actually wanted to give the award to Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace – not because it was a better book (it wasn’t), but because she was “a more distinguished writer.”

So much for the Booker Prize. Now on to this year’s winner.

Amsterdam is a short novel that plays at the fringes of what most of us expect a novel to be. Like most of McEwan’s work, it is a moral fable, which means it has to be approached in a slightly different spirit than realistic fiction. Things like the symmetry and improbability of the plot are a function of different conventions than we usually see on the best-seller lists.

The story deals, in perfect balance, with events in the lives of two men: Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday. Clive is the romantic, inner-directed half of the standard McEwan dichotomy – a composer who writes books on esthetics and goes hiking in the Lake District for inspiration. Vernon is his practical, real-world complement – a newspaper editor with few scruples about using his position to promote a personal vision of the public good.

We first meet Clive and Vernon standing off by themselves at the funeral of an ex-lover. Things are going well for both. Clive has been commissioned to write a “millennium symphony” and Vernon’s newspaper is beginning to show signs of a turnaround.

Then, as always in McEwan, there is a moment of crisis (or two moments, one for each). Put to the test, both Clive and Vernon make poor moral judgments that come back to haunt them. As a result of a strange pact, each becomes the other’s keeper, and learns at some cost to judge not lest ye be judged.

While it is instantly recognizable, it is not easy to define the McEwanesque. Although the writing is incredibly economical – there is a lot of plot in Amsterdam for such a short book – it can’t really be called minimalist. The descriptive writing throughout Clive’s hiking trip, for example, is quite fully imagined and developed. Instead, the word “clinical” comes to mind, describing both the choice of subject matter and the sharp-edged quality of the prose. His last novel (Enduring Love) ended with the presentation of a scientific case-study, and I have a feeling that is an association he would not resist.

Amsterdam is not McEwan’s best work (Enduring Love was more substantial), but it is a welcome change of pace and thoroughly well-crafted entertainment. Readers coming to McEwan for the first time will find it an enjoyable introduction, while longtime fans are in for an elegant surprise.

Notes:
Review first published December 12, 1998.

ALL TOMORROW’S PARTIES
By William Gibson

It’s not often that science-fiction novels get a major hardcover release. Like most other genre fiction, SF has paperback blood running in its veins. So even if you don’t follow SF all that closely, you might still suspect that this new book by Vancouver’s William Gibson is a big event.

Gibson, who first attracted a lot of notice with his 1984 novel Neuromancer, is already something of an SF legend. As the man who coined the phrase “cyberspace,” he is seen as the guru of a whole sub-genre of SF dealing with digital cowboys surfing visionary landscapes of data. And although cyberpunk itself may have run its course, Gibson’s fan base has remained secure.

While it can be read and enjoyed on its own, All Tomorrow’s Parties is meant to be the third part of a trilogy (or what Gibson has misleadingly called a “triptych”). Its cast will be familiar to those who have read the earlier novels Virtual Light and Idoru. The main characters are Colin Laney, the cyber-stalker living in a cardboard box in Tokyo; Rydell, the taciturn hero; and Chevette, Rydell’s feisty ex-girlfriend.

The time is the future, but one so close to our own as to be immediately recognizable. Most of the action takes place on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, which is now home to a Bohemian community of squatters. The bridge itself is a metaphor for the great shift in history that is about to take place and that only a select few are able to sense coming. Colin Laney and his nemesis Cody Harwood, a super-media magnate, are two such readers of the radiant gist. The stakes they are playing for are more than a little vague, but whatever is going on is big.

Overlaying all of this is a kind of techno-New Age spiritualism, the main ideas of which are common to a lot of contemporary SF. There is, for example, the notion that we are evolving into a potentially immortal human-technology hybrid form, and the presentation of cyberspace as a code for the mystical order behind the chaos of modern reality.

That may sound heavy, but it’s really just a backdrop for Gibson’s uncanny knack for projecting trends in consumer culture. It is in his preoccupation with the strange domestic details of the wired global mall that we find what is essentially Gibson. Rydell’s “absolutely authentic fake” jeans read like a signature: “the denim woven in Japan on ancient, lovingly maintained American looms and then finished in Tunisia to the specifications of a team of Dutch designers and garment historians.”

It’s clever stuff, but All Tomorrow’s Parties doesn’t measure up to Gibson’s earlier work. What made Neuromancer a great book was its adaptation of popular story-telling forms, especially classic American detective fiction, into an exciting, freshly imagined context. Unfortunately, this work has a far less compelling story to tell. The great node of history, which has something to do with a courier service between 7-11s, is anticlimactic to say the least. In addition there are a number of missteps in tone, including an unfortunate scene near the end that plays the villain for comic relief.

There are a lot of great SF novels that deserve the prestige that comes with a hardcover release and some of them have been written by William Gibson. But in the case of All Tomorrow’s Parties you might want to wait for the paperback.

Notes:
Review first published December 4, 1999.

AHMED’S REVENGE
By Richard Wiley

This past June saw the death of the prolific British adventure writer Hammond Innes. Innes was best known for his thrilling action novels set in ruggedly exotic locations. When I was a kid I thought they were the best thing going. They were pulp, but they were good pulp. I remember one of them, The Big Footprints, was about elephant poachers in Kenya.

Which brings us to Ahmed’s Revenge, a novel about a colonial Kenyan named Nora Grant and her attempt to uncover the mystery behind her husband’s involvement in an ivory smuggling scam, and his not-quite accidental death. I couldn’t help thinking that it was just the kind of story Hammond Innes might have come up with. And how he would have done a better job.

In the first place, Ahmed’s Revenge has what is known in film as an “idiot plot,” defined as any plot containing problems which would be solved instantly if all the characters were not idiots. Which is not to say they aren’t helped along by the improbabilities in the plot itself. There is, for example, a letter written by Nora’s husband before his death that explains pretty much everything that is going on. Unfortunately, when Nora’s father gives her the letter it blows away in a sudden gust of wind! And then the one page she can’t retrieve is the most important page! I just hate it when that happens!

Despite all this silliness, things do get interesting. For some odd reason, however, none of the characters are very involved. Time and again Nora appears on the verge of clearing everything up, only to decide that she has better things to do.

I can’t remember the last time I read a book with such a disengaged protagonist. Has her father just been kidnapped? Maybe so, but it’s late, so she has to go to bed. Should she dig up the mystery treasure buried in her yard? No, she might as well wait till morning. Will she stay at a bar where she has arranged to meet with the detective investigating her husband’s case? Not our Nora! She gets tired of waiting, so she goes for a walk instead. (Indeed, when the detective does show up Nora can no longer remember why she wanted to talk to him, and wishes he would go away!)

It gets worse. When the villain’s father offers to explain to Nora why his son is doing so many bad things to her, she tells him that she is no longer interested! (This despite the fact that she was the one who brought the subject up in the first place.) It then takes Nora most of the rest of the book to find out what it was she wasn’t interested in knowing.

Best of all is Nora’s response to the confessional letter from her husband explaining what is happening and what she needs to be doing about it. She sits down to read it, tormented by unanswered questions.

The torment is too much for her. She falls asleep, the letter unread.

All of this would be funny if it didn’t take itself so seriously. Unfortunately, Richard Wiley is a “real” writer, a past winner of the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award and a professor of “fiction writing.” He proves he is of the quality by dividing his drama into “Acts,” and indulging in literary stunts like beginning and ending the book with the same three sentences.

There are, in addition, the throwaway bits that let you know this is high-brow stuff. The first chapter is titled Jules et Jim (ah, yes) and the finale takes place at a performance of Madama Butterfly. None of this has any connection to what is going on, but that doesn’t really matter since it’s only there to remind you that you’re not reading a hack like Hammond Innes.

You only wish you were.

Notes:
Review first published July 25, 1998.