Reflections: Everything Matters!

Novels that reach into experimental territory require an author with a certain talent for persuasion. Readers become accustomed to the norms of fiction and can resent being pushed from their old ways, no matter how good the cause. When I began Everything Matters (2009), by Ron Currie Jr., I felt the narrative Luddite in me raise its head. Why are these paragraphs numbered? How effective is this omniscient narrator and why must he be so different from other omniscient narrators? Am I ready to be directed through a story by (my hypothesis) an alien? And then, the fundamental question, the bright line against which all experimental fiction should, in my view, be judged: will it all be worth it?

In the case of Everything Matters! the answer is a resounding yes. The story wins points for its inventive perspective and its believably fallible characters. The atypical narrative voice was required to make the story stick--to allow for the mixing of genres (post-modern domestic fiction and science fiction) without the final product being a malformed example of either one. When the genre of a novel cannot be determined but the story is compelling, there you have, in this reader's view, the height of the literary art. People like me read expressly to find these gems.

For those unwilling to be convinced to go out and request this book from their local library without a better sense of what it is about, read on. Everything Matters! poses the question, how would knowledge of an impending apocalypse shape a human's mind and development?  As a fetus, Junior Thibodeau receives advice and information from a mysterious source. When Junior makes his heavy way into the world, he learns that the trials of birth have been only the first of many challenges that are to come. Among the many bits of information conveyed to the infant is that the world will end in approximately 36 years. Saddled with this knowledge and an uncanny ability to know things beyond his years and experience, Junior must face the normal difficulties of growing up in America from the perspective of one who knows that nothing really matters. Or so he thinks. Things look a little different when the thirty six years have passed and he gets one last message from his communicative spirit.

Reflections: The Bee Season

At the core of Myla Goldberg's Bee Season is the principle that true enlightenment means making your own choices despite the will of others. Young Eliza Naumann is an example of a new generation of Jewish Americans, the product of a father who broke with his secular and wholly assimilated family to become a Torah scholar and cantor. Eliza has no such deep connection to her roots, and this is the source of the novel's central tension. She cannot look to the past to find strength, but has a parent whose only source of strength is in his nostalgic rehabilitation of genealogical and mythic history.

Over the course of the story Eliza, a would-be spelling bee champion, experiences two moments of enlightenment, one false and the other genuine. Her false enlightenment stems from a dependence upon her father and his religious training to shape her raw talent. When her father takes her talent in spelling and interprets it as a sign of a special connection to God, he leads her into an improperly motivated quest for Shefa, or enlightenment. Eliza enthusiastically goes along with his study plan because she is so starved for the love and attention he has been showering on her older brother for as long as she can remember. The desire to be special, to win the spelling bee and her father's love, leads her to compulsively practice the mystic lessons her father teaches her.

Her intense commitment to a project not her own leads Eliza to send herself into a spiritual fit with very real physical manifestations. Goldberg paints the outcome in this moment of terror and pain as a moment of rebirth. The pain she experiences is "the pain of creation, of life emerging from void, of vacuum birthing being" (270). The vacuum of her life under the influence of ancient Jewish texts gives rise to the "being" of the individual who will choose her own guiding texts and ideas. In her newborn state, Eliza throws her next spelling bee, removing herself from the competition and the smothering effects of her father's will. Given the opportunity to recant the misspelling, and, by extension, her choice to go her own way, Eliza reaffirms her choice with a nod. The final sentence of the novel underlines the message: "She is sure" (274). What Eliza is sure of is that the attachment to mythic Jewish roots that created her father's identity will only bring her to destruction. According to this text, cultural nostalgia no longer serves the needs of young Jewish Americans.

Reflections: In the Country of Last Things

Paul Auster's 1987 novella, In the Country of Last Things, shows the power that language can have to create whole new worlds for the reader to experience. Auster truly deserves the encomia heaped upon him, for he has mastered the art of prose fiction.

Our narrator, Anna Blume, has slipped across the border into an urban space that used to be like our own, but has experienced some inexplicable blight. Everything has broken down, from government services (except, tellingly, the daily collection of dead bodies) and protections to basic codes of civility, man's instinctual desire for survival, and even biological systems of individuals. The gruesome imagined world allows Auster to paint the latent selfishness we all carry with us, and how it rises to the surface in savage circumstances. In that respect, it shares its technique with  the most moving of novels about war and natural disaster. However, because the cause of this barbarism is unknown, the focus homes in not on the politics of societies but on the actions of individuals that contribute to the overall degradation.

Anna maintains her will to live, and her instincts to do so, by crafting temporary communities to which she can commit. She sacrifices her own safety to save an elderly woman on the street, and then makes that woman into a surrogate mother figure with whom she lives and to whom she dedicates her energies and resources. Once the woman dies, she spends her last funds on an extravagent act of mourning, and goes out to look for death or another community. Tracking Anna's mood and health to her ability to create a common  cause with others, Auster underscores that the sacrifices that we make in the development of relationships to be, finally, investments in our own endurance.

Within the context of Anna's life, writing is the other saving grace, and even this is social. Her narrative addresses an old friend from outside the country of last things, explaining to him the physical and social landscape in which she finds herself doomed to pass the rest of her days. As such, the story reminds us what dedicated readers sometimes fail to adequately consider: why we read. Communities, especially in the modern world, pop up in ways beyond the physical, and writing can be our greatest tool to draw people together for our collective survival.