Reflections: The Learners

I was recently reminded just how many ways there are to enjoy fiction. I am a person who holds strong beliefs about what makes a novel a pleasant and worthwhile read. Judged by my code, Chip Kidd's The Learners would not have been at the top of the class. And yet.

I have rarely laughed so hard and so loud in my adult life--and in public too. No social inhibitions could forestall the audible glee of consuming the verbal set pieces and well-written, in-character word play which spill off these pages. To give you just a taste, here is a conversation that introduces to the reader a washed out senior copywriter with whom the narrator works at a New Haven advertising agency:

"Sketch, in a private moment once at Saluzo's after work and feeling a couple thrown back, was..succinct: 'I've always thought of him as a well-wiped asshole.' I had to agree--he certainly was hygienic. Whatever the shambles of his life, there wasn't a hair out of place. Tip even claimed he once caught him in the men's room of the Quinnipiac Club combing his head with a salad fork after a high wind on the croquet lawn blew his comb over to the wrong side. Square of jaw and high of forehead, he looked like an amalgam of Dag Hammarskjold and an Easter Island monolith" (43).

The use of the word 'asshole' as a visual rather than characterological descriptor strikes me as genius. We don't do that. Once the reader had conquered this first dissonance, she must then immediately face another: now that we've turned insult to image, our mental picture must be unmoored from its standard associations--waste, dirtiness. In its place we are asked to understand the clean asshole as somehow cleaner than, say, a freshly cleaned suit.The narrator insists that you follow his lead in morphing the signified, but then, to reward you for good work, he leaves you to the enjoyment of an uncomplicated slapstick moment. We recline on this juvenile humor just long enough to remind ourselves how the pleasure is only superficial and then, wham, to a brain teasing (and absurd) mental image that requires good historical memory (or access to research resources); the Swedish diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize recipient collides with Moai. It's like a hip hop class for your brain.

The above is a small sample of the level of vivid and cheeky description that simultaneously conveys what something looks like and how the narrator feels about it. Perhaps the most artful aspect of this style is its inconsistency: if the whole novel read like this the individual gems would be lost without contrast among their peers. Kidd husbands his comic moments so that each one really zings.

And yet. The novel does leave something to desire; it could almost be described by that great insult of cruisers everywhere: all show, no go. The plot is minimal, the angst that should inhabit that plot somehow mismanaged, and there are ineffective meta-literary insertions that don't add much to the experience--although the last one really carries a significant narrative burden. The Learners has a privileged place on the shelf notwithstanding. Call it beach reading for the unself-consciously geeky.

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.