No Oomph Behind Solar

Ian McEwan's new novel, Solar, reads more like Rebecca Goldstein's latest, than Ian McEwan's. McEwan typically probes human psychology. The strength of his writing on a sentence by sentence basis allows us to get into the head of his characters, most of whom do gruesome things. In The Cement Garden, one of his earlier novels, three children pack their mother's body in cement, and keep the block of cement in their basement. This lurid concept is made palatable as we come to understand the children's decisions. At the moment of their mother's death, they don't want to be removed to foster care, and happen to have a bag of cement handy, so --why not? McEwan's short 2007 novel, On Chesil Beach, explores the lead up to a virgin couple's wedding night, its ultimate letdown, and the aftermath of the couple's life. One can hardly imagine any other novelist describe at length the couple's humiliation. But McEwan does a thorough job, first showing the husband's embarrassed outraged, followed by the wife's quiet, but unapologetic attempts to soothe him. She proposes a compromise, which he is too proud to accept, cleaving their married lives the moment it starts. McEwan spends the second half of the novel explaining what the next forty years entails for each of them. While he summarizes their lives in a short amount of space, he has so successfully up their lives with his in-depth examination of their wedding night that readers completely understand the motivations behind each of the characters' actions.

Solar, in contrast, lacks the psychological depth of McEwan's previous works. Nearly a week after reading it, I'm still struggling to pinpoint McEwan's main point. On the surface, it seems to comment on some of society's current obsessions: global warming, the petty politics of science funding, organizations like the Aspen Institute, and philandering husbands. The academic satiric is akin to the recent 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Like Goldstein's novel, McEwan's focuses on a scientist whose main successes in life seem to have been achieved by accident. Michael Beard is a Nobel winning physicist whose main ideas happened to occur at the right time to be recognized. But in contrast to Goldstein's Cass Seltzer, Beard is an ornery, almost detestable man who thinks he is better than everyone else. The novel's opener sums up Beard's self-love: "He belonged to that class of men -- vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever--who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so."

The novel opens in 2000. For the next nine years, Beard participates in exactly the type of behavior that you'd expect someone who fit the above description to practice. He cheats on his long-term girlfriends; he steals an idea from a student and markets it as his own. One farcical event even involves Beard covering up an accidental crime. Throughout, he takes no responsibility for anything that happens. As a result, throughout, it seems like McEwan is getting at the idea that we live in such a ridiculous world where the selfish get everything. Throughout, Beard also gets fatter, as if McEwan is providing us with a literal manifestation of Beard's greed. But just when we think Beard cannot be redeemed, he is faced with an actually stumbling block. Except this happens at the very end of the novel, with no clear resolution. The reader is left wondering if Beard will take the opportunity to redeem himself or continuehis old ways.

Unfortunately, all this plot seems to have left McEwan very little room to do what he does best: dwelling on very specific, small actions to reveal profound psychological truths about his characters. Instead, McEwan spends much time describing the absurdity of certain farcical set pieces. In one instance, Beard incompetently outfits himself for a snowmobile trip and gets his penis frozen to a tree when he urinates. Funny, yes, but also better done by a number of other British writers (Barnes, Amis even).What I want to know is why Beard is so shallow.

What makes Solar ultimately disappointing is that by avoiding much psychological probing, the novel is also bereft of McEwan's lyrical writing. Instead, it's sentence of plot after sentence of plot. Beautifully written free-indirect style thoughts are rare. Perhaps Solar was an experiment, and all writers are entitled to that. I just hope McEwan goes back to his forte in his next endeavor.

Two Paths of the Short Story

Last year, Zadie Smith wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books that pointed to the two paths that the novel could head toward today. The first path, that followed by Joseph O’Neill, is that of lyric Realism. The main tool is the sentence. The main goal is to create a believable world using believable characters. The sentence must strike the right tone and mimic what a real person would observe and think. The second path, that followed by Tom McCarthy, is wholly postmodern. The main tool is the unreliable narrator. The main goal is to cause the reader to question what he’s reading. If O’Neill and McCarthy represent these two modes in the novel world, then their counterparts in the short story world could be David Vann and Miranda July.

David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide is a collection of five stories and a novella that won him the Grace Paley Prize. Based on his father’s suicide at the age of forty, the six tales are loosely connected around a father, Jim, a son, Roy, Roy’s mother, and Jim’s second wife, Rhoda. Vann’s stories are mostly told from the perspective of the young Roy. Since he’s a child, many of these stories are impressionistic. They are entirely believable and are meant for us to get inside Roy’s head. Each of his stories have a psychological oomph to it. In one, a grown-up Roy goes to visit the woman with whom his father once had an affair. Roy finds the woman and the woman’s husband and invites them to dinner. We see him deflate as the woman confounds his initial expectations; instead of being a cheap whore, she seems to be extremely intellectual. We also see Roy gain a new respect for his father for being attracted to such a cultured woman.
The opus of the collection is a 100 page novella about Roy and his father living on Sukkwan Island, off of Alaska for a year. An old-fashioned story of redemption, the descriptions evoke Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. While the course of events seems somewhat too perfect to be believable, Vann’s story is grounded in the tradition of legend, or myth that Melville followed. When the series of events concludes, we understand it’s about a father losing his son, and how he then tries to reclaim him.

No One Belongs here More than You by Miranda July strikes an entirely different chord. Many of July’s characters reveal ulterior motivations that make us question their reliability. For example, the narrator of one story prefaces it by saying that she is telling her ex-boyfriend in an attempt to impress him, but it happened long ago so she doesn’t really remember the details. Then she goes on to narrate a short tale about teaching elderly people to swim in her kitchen. She would make them lie down on the floor with their faces in a bucket of water to mimic a pool. Highly skeptical. Through this technique, July asks us to put aside our biases toward reality to search for a higher meaning beyond the literal interpretation of what happens on the page. For instance, another story called “The Sister” is about the protagonist’s constant inability to meet his co-worker’s sister. With each thwarted attempt, the protagonist’s fantasies become more acute. He ultimately finds out that the co-worker is gay and was merely trying to lure him into a relationship. The two men then sleep with each other. Instead of being creeped out, I like to see this as July’s attempt to force her readers to think of how genuine their own relationships are, and what our expectations are of each other.

Both Vann and July excel in their crafts. Though I prefer lyric Realism, July’s darkness and creativity are still worth reading.

For Bach, National Cathedral > Kennedy Center

Since three of my friends joined the National Cathedral Choral Society, I've been more proactive about attending choral events. First I saw Verdi's Requiem at the National Cathedral in October, followed by Bach's St. Matthew Passion in the same location in February. Then this past Friday, my singer friend Michelle and I saw Bach's Mass in B Minor at the Kennedy Center. This last experience taught me that venue may play an important role in enjoyability, at least when it comes to Bach.

Typically, I love live choral music because the power of the choir simply cannot be replicated on a recording. Even though I had terrible seats for Verdi's Requiem, the moment the horns started for the second movement, Dies Iraes (Day of Wrath), chills ran down my spine. The several dozen voices seem to mirror the terror of the day of wrath.

In contrast, the St. Matthew Passion is a less emotive piece. Like an operetta, it features many soloists playing the roles of Narrator, Jesus, Judas, etc to tell the story of Jesus betrayal, crucifixion, and resurrection. Despite its lack of loud movements, and its heavy dependence on soloists, the chorale verses still emitted chills. Though the Passion didn't evoke the lushness of Verdi's Requiem, I recognized that this was mostly due to the less lush instrumentation of the Baroque period in contrast to Verdi's Romantic inclinations. In addition, a play that tells is story is not simply there to overwhelm the listener, but to narrate events in a nuanced fashion.

Despite knowing that Bach is not Verdi (or Brahms, or Orff), I was still surprised by the National Symphony Orchestra's production of the Mass in B Minor at the Kennedy Center. This "authentic" production used both a small choir of around 30 voices, and a reduced orchestra. While this may have been truer to how a 17th Century German would have enjoyed Bach, it was not the best staging for contemporary audiences at the Kennedy Center. The Kennedy Center's Concert Hall is fairly tall, with four tiers of seating. I was in the second tier towards stage right. Though I had a good view of the performers, they sounded extremely distant, as if I were listening to a recording. This made it difficult to stay engaged. Unable to see the soloists' expressions clearly, it was difficult to tell what mood the concert was supposed to evoke.

After nearly falling asleep, I wondered why the Mass was simply not speaking to me the way I had come to expect of choral pieces. Part of this was the nature of the piece and the minimalist staging, but part of it was most certainly the venue. The National Cathedral Choral Society's concert series is subtitled, "Glorious Music in a Glorious Setting." Glorious the Kennedy Center's concert hall is not. The mauve colored creaky seats screamed seventies. It was more difficult to let oneself go. Though I appreciated Ivan Fischer and his orchestra's technique, I won't hesitate to choose the National Cathedral over the Kennedy Center for choral events in the future.

The Complacency of Lorrie Moore

The first thing you notice about Lorrie Moore’s stories is that the characters speak in puns. The second thing you notice is that these puns are the characters’ attempt to distance themselves from their situations. In the opening story of her first collection Self-Help, “How to Be Another Woman,” Charlene finds herself dating a married man. Patricia, he tells Charlene, is an attorney. So in her own spare time, waiting for her boyfriend, Charlene ends up making to do lists: “CLIENTS TO SEE- Birthday Snapshots, Scotch Tape, Letters to TD and Mom.” Every time her boyfriend calls after several days of silence, Charlene rejoinders with a joke over the phone when she really wants to tell him how much she cares.

Indeed, the theme of each of Moore’s collections, Self-Help, Like Life, and Birds of America touches on the idea of the distance between oneself and one’s life. Self-Help is mostly told in second person. With titles such as “How,” and “To Fill,” it tells the stories of a mysterious “you” as she goes through events, as if telling you, the reader, how to behave in those events. For example, “How to Be Another Woman” opens with the narrator saying you should wait in front of Florsheim’s department store in a raincoat, and meet a stranger with whom you flirt. You later get depressed and find out he is not only cheating with you on his wife, but also on the woman he lives with. This second-person tactic distances whoever the narrator is from the events that are happening.

Like Life collects stories of women and some men who find themselves living the kind of lives like they once envisioned for themselves, but not quite getting it right. There’s the flameout playwright whose doctor girlfriend finally leaves him. There’s the poetess Zoe who finds herself out of place and too snooty for teaching at a Midwestern liberal arts college. There’s the New Jersey homemaker turned conservationist whose son is in jail and daughter never visits. Of course, each of these characters uses humor to cope with themselves. They would be pathetic if it weren’t for the fact that they also recognize the flaws that keep them from what they want. Zoe, for instance, knows she is too picky, especially when it comes to men, to acclimate herself to a happy, Midwestern existence. Moore’s stories document the journeys of discovering these flaws.

Moore fully fleshes out this idea of helplessness in her last collection, Birds of America. While the title doesn’t make any direct appearances in the book, I like to think of it as a reference to the characters’ flightiness. Nearly all the stories center around characters who want to escape their current situations, but feel stuck. Unfortunately, they don’t really know what they need either. Illness often appears as a metaphor for helplessness. In one of the most memorable stories, “People Like Them Are the Only People Here,” a writer copes with her baby’s cancer. Moore documents the writer’s initial disbelief which grows into a final acceptance. The only agency the writer has is to document her baby’s progress, and her family’s experience living in and out of the hospital. “Real Estate” tells about a middle-aged empty nester with terminal cancer. She convinces her husband to move into a new house. Since the house turns out to be a lemon with bats living in the attic, she learns that a simple move can’t solve her problems. Even when the protagonist’s gun lessons culminates in a cathartic, surprising moment, she immediately goes back to her old self.

On one level, Moore’s stories can be seen as demoralizing. After all, America is built on the idea of self improvement. But on the other hand, Moore placates us by showing that self improvement is overrated. It’s key to enjoy our lives in the present instead daydreaming about what could have been.

What Precious and An Education Have in Common

Precious and An Education, two tales of 16 year old girls growing up, are also wonderfully thought provoking films on the subject of female agency and the role of education.

Precious, the more infamous of the two, is about an obese black girl (Gabourey Sidibe) growing up in Harlem in the 1980's. Her mother, played by Mo'nique, abuses her on a regular basis, treating her like a indentured servant who needs to cook to earn her keep. We immediately learn that Precious has also been consistently abused by her father, with whom she is now pregnant for the second time. After getting kicked out of her public middle school, where she is still a student at the age of 16, she enrolls in an alternative school and lands in the caring hands of Ms. Blu Rain. What teeters on the brink of cliche (teacher saves student; student transcends her situation with literacy) is saved by the constant barrage of bleakness in Precious' life. We learn that her oldest daughter has Down's Syndrome, and witness another terrible fight between Precious and her mother.

Most intriguing are Precious's seamlessly integrated fantasy scenes. While her mother force-feeds her while watching an old movie, Precious projects herself into the film and imagines a more caring dialogue between the two women. These fantasies are the only space where Precious is in charge of her life. Her mother is no more free. We learn that the reason she hates Precious is because her boyfriend (Precious's father) showed more affection for Precious than her mother from the moment she was born. Precious shows the limited agency of poor black women since both women's lives are controlled by the father, who is barely even in the film. The only characters who have some agency are the educated teacher, Ms. Rain, and the social worker played by Mariah Carey.

An Education is also based on a sordid, if more palatable, premise. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is studying for her O levels on her way to Oxford when she meets David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), an older man. David quickly impresses her and her parents with his sophisticated pursuits (art, classical music, fancy restaurants, traveling), and starts to date Jenny for real. Though Jenny learns of David's sketchy real estate business, she still enjoys the worldly education he offers her via trips to Oxford, Paris, and the auction house. Soon, Jenny is faced with a critical decision: David or Oxford.

This decision is made more complicated as Jenny questions the point of going to Oxford. When she broaches the idea of getting married to her father (Alfred Molina), he tells her she'll be taken care of and doesn't "need" an education anymore. This is 1961after all, and even educated women seemed to have few options. Jenny's one teacher who went to Cambridge seems to be a lonely spinster who grades horrible essays all day long. Here's where the story gets interesting as the viewer ponders how women can gain agency through education.

Though Precious and An Education are set 26 years apart in different countries and across different socio-economic lines, they send important messages about education. Book learning might not be enough, but it is a start.