i'm a very very complex person

I've had a busy morning, with lots of errands and running around, but now it is five o'clock and I'm home. I'm sitting in the sun at my kitchen table, there's a batch of strawberry-ginger ice cream churning on the counter, and I'm going to spend a little time writing about books.

I finished Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn at the end of last week. The novel tells the story of Eilis Lacey, a young woman who emigrates from the town of Enniscorthy in Wexford (the same town that serves as the setting for Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship) to Brooklyn in the 1950s. Tóibín spends a little bit of time establishing Eilis's life with her mother and sister in Ireland, but the majority of the book is devoted to her immigrant experience. Eilis comes to America 100 years after the tremendous waves of famine immigrants, yet her experience is in some ways similar: she moves into an entirely Irish enclave, where everyone attends the same church and knows which county everyone else comes from. Tóibín gives us wonderfully detailed sketches of Eilis's landlady and the other Irish girls in the boarding house, describes Eilis's job in a clothing store and the bookkeeping classes she takes at Brooklyn College, and then brings in the drama: Eilis falls in love in America, then is called back to Ireland by a sudden tragedy, and must decide where her future lies.

There was much that I loved about Brooklyn. I loved Tóibín's sentences, his willingness to linger on details, the seemingly effortless and perfect way he renders dialogue. I loved Eilis as a character, reserved and thoughtful and awkward, but with a core of steel and rare flashes of brilliance. I loved the way Tóibín captured the split experience of the immigrant: the way that each place seems like home when you're there, yet recedes into dream-like unreality when you're away. And I am still quite fond of my theory that Tóibín writes the fiction of shyness. But for all that, I couldn't quite love the book as a whole. When I put it down, I was left wondering why this story? What about this story made it overwhelmingly compelling for Tóibín? Whatever it was, I couldn't feel it myself.

I had a somewhat lighter reading load last week due to the fact that my Indian fiction class spent the whole week on class presentations (apparently presentations are quite the done thing around here—I’ve done one on Italo Calvino, one on R.K. Narayan and the history of India, one on Henry Spencer Ashbee, the great cataloguer of Victorian pornography, and one on Henry James’s ambiguous relationships with men. I don’t know whether this is a Penn State thing or whether presentations are some sort of academic fad that has caught on since I was last in school, but to the best of my recollection, I have now done as many presentations in one semester as I did in my entire undergraduate career.)

One of the things that I did read last week was The Master, Colm Tóibín’s novel about the life of Henry James. This was a re-read for me, and some of you may remember how much I loved it the first time around. Sadly, it suffered in the rereading, not because it no longer seems to be as good a book as it did at first, but because I was forced to read it quickly. The first time I read The Master, I spread it out over two or three weeks; that is the kind of treatment that this book needs. One of the things I like most about the book is the way Tóibín’s story is unpinned from chronology, the way you can float back and forth through the events of Henry’s life as if being gently rocked by a warm sea. Hasty reading and pressure to finish prevented this lovely effect from developing. Sad. But even when read hurriedly, it’s evident that this book is a masterpiece. The beauty of Tóibín’s sentences, the utter complexity of his characterization of Henry James—these are the kind of accomplishments that shine through any set of circumstances. I haven’t read anything else of Tóibín’s, although I keep meaning to. I think perhaps I’m putting it off because I’m afraid that none of his other work will live up to this book. The Master seems like the kind of novel that only comes once in a career.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention that prior to reading The Master, I read some of Henry James’s own work: “Daisy Miller,” “The Aspern Papers,” and “The Real Thing.” My only previous exposure to James was The Ambassadors, which I found ponderous, needlessly convoluted, and aggravating. These shorter works from earlier in his career were a revelation. The prose was so light, the plots so sprightly! I liked “The Aspern Papers” best (not least because of the way it resonated with The Master and the issues of privacy, legacy, the destruction of correspondence, etc), and was impressed by the way James built the story from the simplest of all narrative principles: someone wanting something that he doesn’t have. I doubt that James will ever become my favorite writer, but I’m interested in reading more of his work now, something I decidedly did not want to do after The Ambassadors.

Not all of my recent reading has revolved around Henry James, however. I also read After the Quake, a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. The book contains six stories, all loosely connected to the earthquake in Kobe in 1995. My only prior experiences with Murakami were with isolated stories in the New Yorker which never managed to add up to a meaningful impression of Murakami as a writer. After reading this collection, I’m still not sure that I’ve got any sense of him as a writer. The collection is very uneven as a whole, with two real knockout stories, a few middling stories that I suspect I’ll forget in a matter of days, and couple of absolute clunkers. The worse of the stories was “All God’s Children Can Dance”: boring, misogynistic, and essentially empty. The best was “Thailand,” a quietly unsettling story that displays a careful control of tone and wonderfully strategic use of image. I feel like I should read more of Murakami, but I don’t know where to go next. Anybody have any suggestions?

From The Master:

As the tea was served and the conversation began, Henry felt as though he had been dipped in something; what had happened lingered as an obsession importunate to all his sense; it lived now in every moment and in every object; it made everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless. It came to him so powerfully as he drank his tea and listened to his cousins that he had to remind himself that it was not still in progress, and a new day had begun with a new day's duties.

And:

He did not realize then and did not, in fact, grasp for many years how these few weeks in North Conway--the endlessly conversing group of them gathered under the rustling pines--would be enough for him, would be, in effect, all he needed to know in his life. In all his years as a writer he was to draw on the scenes he lived and witnessed at that time...

Ah, I'm really loving The Master so far. I like the way Toibin is not afraid to allow his story to develop very slowly, valuing the depth of psychological understanding over the demands of plot. I like the way he lets his lengthy sentences unfurl slowly and carefully--they're long but perfectly punctuated so you never get lost in them. Most of all, I like Henry James. As Colm Toibin has imagined him, Henry James is another of these men, these repressed and yearning men, who never fail to break my heart. He's right in line with Sammy Clay, Woodrow Call, Rivers and Sassoon, John Grady Cole... I wonder why it always seems to be the men that I fall in love with. I suppose it's because what I truly love is the sense of self-denial, the intense, suppressed longing, and it tends to be men who embody that. I don't know why.