Sarah Hannah

I never heard of Sarah Hannah until I read her obituary. She committed suicide last week, at 40. Her poems are wonderful.

The Post-Birthday World

I wish I hadn't read anything about The Post-Birthday World before I read the book. I don't even want to check before I write this, but I'm quite sure Jenny loved it (when I got to the pie scenes, I remembered her quoting them), and I'm fairly certain that the Times review (was it the Times? must have been, as I only read one review, and that would be the most likely candidate) was not so enthusiastic. But at any rate, my ability to respond instinctively was somewhat hampered by my knowledge that someone liked it and someone didn't, although you could also say that if I had a powerful instinctive response, whether positive or negative, it would have overcome the reactions of others. And, indeed, I have to say that my response to the book was fairly intellectual, which suggests that it did not bowl me over like, say, Lionel Shriver's last novel, or, most recently, The Last of Her Kind.

So this is the book in which Irina goes out to dinner with her husband's friend/friend's (ex) husband on his birthday and either kisses him, or doesn't. The novel then unfolds, in alternating chapters, two narratives: the one in which she kisses him (choosing passion over stability, and reaping both the benefits and the painful consequences) and the one in which she doesn't kiss him (choosing stability over passion and reaping both the benefits and the painful consequences). And that's the thing: The Post-Birthday World is clearly a work of virtuouso fiction, but it is profoundly schematic, and in its meticulous schematism, it profoundly irked me. If there is a win in one narrative, it is countered by a loss in another. If there is a dinner party in one narrative, there is a contrapuntal dinner party in another. If Irina's rival is fat in one narrative, she is thin in the other, but both her fatness and her thinness--or perhaps it is the dialectic between fatness and thinness--are so contrived that they never let you forget you are in a work of fiction, under the power of a meticulous author who never lets you--or the text, or the characters--out of her control. My success as a reader, then, came in learning to read Shriver's patterns skillfully enough that by the last third of the book I always knew what was going to happen, and while that may be success, of a sort, it is not my preferred form of pleasure.

The place of 9/11 in the novel is perhaps the best example of what I am describing. In 1997, Irina's partner Lawrence, searching for a foreign policy specialty, settles upon terrorism, which nobody else cares about. You know where this is going, don't you? Terrorism becomes a minor motif, there's the occasional suicide bomber simile, and there is a line repeated in each narrative (can't find the exact words) about falling through the sky from a tall building. When Irina goes to New York for an awards dinner, there has been one brief mention that it is 2001 and another, many pages later, that it is September. OK, OK, I get it. But was I supposed to figure it out (I did), or were these references meant to subtly shape my reading experience without me even being aware of it (they didn't)?*

Ultimately, I think, the issue at stake is realism, and I'm not quite sure I've worked out these ideas, but I'm going to try them out. Realism is one of those things you know when you see it, which means that of course untold numbers of words have been expended on pinning it down. But, basically, realism is about the representation of everyday life, complex ethical frameworks, and an illusion of coincidence and randomness that is in fact meticulously shaped by the author and feeds directly into those ethical frameworks. Think George Eliot; think Flaubert. Think, too, The Post-Birthday World, which has everything in the previous sentence--except for one word: "illusion." For the bargain the realist author makes with the reader, and the reader makes with the author, is that the fiction will in fact occlude the author's controlling hand. We know it is there, but we all agree to forget it and believe, as we read, that we are in the real, not the realist. Shriver eschews that occlusion: her hand is everywhere. So, we can read the novel as a critique of realism's illusions which, I'll be the first to agree, is a noble intellectual project. But I am the reader who derives profound pleasure from realism and has no problem with the bargain it insists upon, even as I know its terms. I'll take my realism magical if I must, and I'm fine with experimental fiction of some sorts (though I'd argue, perhaps iconoclastically, but maybe not, that modernism, of the Joyce/Woolf variety, is in fact realism taken to its extreme, as is minimalism), but I want my realism, I want to uphold my end of the bargain, and I'm just irked by an author who doesn't uphold hers, even if I know it's for a good intellectual cause.



*I am starting to think that at this historical moment, the only viable 9/11 fiction must take 9/11 as its premise and then explore its effects (this is why I'm so eager to read Falling Man) or touch upon it obliquely--gently?--in the course of a larger fictional agenda. Perhaps someday readers who have forgotten the details will be able to read a novel that begins in 1999, or mentions a perfect bright blue September day, without knowing exactly what is to come, and thus the fiction will be able to stand on its own, but The Post-Birthday World is, like The Whole World Over and The Emperor's Children, too portentous for 2007 (hmm, looks like I liked the 9/11 part of The Emperor's Children better than I remember, but it was still way too overdetermined, plotwise--I must say that the few pages where Shriver does describe 9/11 are really good, so again it's not the representation of the actual events, but their framing and foreshadowing which is just too much).

Buzz, Not

I had no idea about the bees. The headline ("the sudden death of the nation's bees") is a bit alarmist compared to the text ("Last fall, the nation's beekeepers watched in horror as more than a quarter of their 2.4 million colonies collapsed"), and perhaps it's just a fluke and the bees will return, better and buzzier than ever, but still, this is the kind of article that makes one shiver and think perhaps it is better not to know and then feel really bad for thinking that.

Wherefore Art Thou, Thomas Hardy

Jude the Obscure in real life. Truly ghastly either way.