by ELG Gray

American Pastoral

Page turner: 6/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought provoker: 9/10
Overall: 4 stars

You know the expression, ‘so good it hurts’? Well, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is sort-of the inverse of that. It hurts so much … it’s good. The story is so gut-wrenching. So over-the-top human, you get sucked in and hurt along with the main character’s hurt. It definitely isn’t a happy book, but it is compelling and thought provoking.

In American Pastoral, the narrator is Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish man living in the 1990s (now in his 60s) recounting not only his own life, but the life of his childhood local hero – Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov. Needless to say, the Swede’s charmed existence of being the realisation of the American Dream in the heavily Jewish New Jersey of the mid-century doesn’t last him through his entire life, though it takes Nathan some digging to uncover what happened. Precisely what *does* happen, and how the Swede himself feels about it is never entirely clear, but Roth does a phenomenal job of showing us our options for interpretation, and getting me to ponder imponderable questions about social upheaval and personal trauma.

The focus of the work (there are lots of intricacies, and don’t want to over-indulge details) is Nathan uncovering the fact that in the 60s/70s the Swede’s daughter is somehow involved in a local Vietnam war protest which involves blowing up a pharmacy. It kills an innocent pharmacist. How can a ‘together’, charming, good-looking man have produced such a child? Who is this teenage horror? Are her beliefs justified? Did she do it, anyway? And how does this effect his relationship with his own parents, brother, and wife?

As we read more and more about the back-story and the ‘present’ day (the book does a lot of flashing back, reconstructing, and surmising) it becomes teeth-suckingly painful. I wanted to read more, but had to pace myself simply because of the intensity.

Like Roth’s other book I’ve reviewed, Portnoy’s Complaint, the title character certainly has the tendency to ramble and rant, but here it is more targeted, more focused. And I developed a real sense of empathy for a few of the main characters which I lacked in Portnoy. To be honest, I didn’t at all expect the drama/trauma of what I subsequently experienced in reading American Pastoral, but it was well worth it. A definite must-read.

06.22.14

by ELG Gray

The Sea, The Sea

Page turner: 5/10
Heart tugger: 3/10
Thought provoker: 6/10
Overall: 2 stars

The strongest single word I can think of to describe Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea is:

Insufferable.

I realize that normally the word is applied to a single character, rather than an entire book (of them), but it still fits.

At first I found The Sea to be a bit quaint … sweet. A retired theatre-man by the name of Charles Arrowby turns out to have some hidden depths! He likes a more ‘basic’ life by the ocean, he starts to write his own memoirs/diary/autobiography. He has a way with words, and not too bad a means of doing ‘character sketches’ of the many people that have passed through his life. Sure, he’s a bit arrogant and self centred, but, so what?

But then the book keeps going, and not only does his own self-absorption become more apparent, so too does that of ALL the other characters. They all seem to be caricatures of themselves. Those whom Charles loves, we (the readers) quickly cannot stand. Don’t even get me STARTED on Hartley. Yes, he finds his ‘one lost love’. I don’t even feel bad telling you that. She’s … gross. Get over it.

Now, much of the point of the book is to really dig deep into the motivation of people – how love affects (and disaffects) us all, in so many ways. But do at the main characters need to be so insufferable to tell such a story? And did Murdoch need to throw in a few gratuitous hallucinations of dragon/Loch Ness style monsters and ‘Orientalism’ in the form of super-natural rescues? I really don’t think so. Maybe it was meant to be a nod to magical realism or some such. I just found it a bit peculiar, particularly in the context of this narrative.

So, clearly, not a winner for me. I read it. I’m OK with having read it. I liked BITS of it – there are moments of drama and of quiet smiles. But overall? Nah.

Nifty cover, though.

The Sea, The Sea

01.12.14

by ELG Gray

A Passage to India

Page-turner: 7/10
Heart-tugger: 7/10
Thought-provoker: 8/10
Overall: 4 stars

Reading A Passage to India has been a bit like watching the tide come in, on a dark summer night. There is an inevitable slowness to it that builds strongly and beautifully but never (can’t) break out of its own rhythms. And at the end I feel quite washed away by it.

I am speaking in metaphors, but can’t quite stop myself as I only put the book down a few minutes ago. It is a beautiful and powerful book. Just not a ‘loud’ or ‘obvious’ one. The plot is very, very simple; the book is interesting purely because of its characters. They are developed to be thoroughly and completely human. They are flawed, irrational, thoughtful and mean but compassionate and totally a product of their own cultures. Discourse – between Indians and Ango-Englishmen, Indians and Indians, or Englishmen with the Anglo-English – always contains subtext, emotion, and misunderstanding. It’s incredibly frustrating. But all the more ‘real’ for it. I Believe in the book.

First published in 1924, A Passage to India is ranked 25th on the Modern Library’s top 100 books of the 20th Century. And, I agree it should be on that list (though don’t feel particularly entitled to put it in a ranked order). It takes place at about the time it was published in Imperial India. And the book is the story – a study – in how the ruling race and the indigenous one manage to cohabitate a continent in a way that neither fully understands. There is some talk of love, though it isn’t a love story, and politics though it is by no means a polemic. It’s just a story about people – prejudices – and how they clash.

The subtly with which Forster develops the main characters is stunning : aptly named Miss Quested whose own quest causes disaster for all around her, school master Mr Fielding, and ‘Oriental’ Dr Aziz. Forster’s Oriental imbues an Otherness that would likely irk a modern anthropologist, but I think it is more of a trope than a truism. He makes Aziz’s preference towards the emotional and dramatic to be a product of a different human culture, rather than innately irrational and primitive.

It is fair to say that not a huge amount Happens in the book, but that doesn’t really matter. And coming from someone who generally believes that a good book is just a very good story – that’s pretty impressive. Its beauty and slowness and repetition is engrossing. The heat is languid. You just can’t expect that much to happen when it is so hot. And even when it does, there is a distance to it that makes the book have something of a surreal quality. The chant of ‘Esmiss Esmoor’ is still echoing in my brain. I won’t spoil why that’s important, but I will say that the character it refers to clearly my hero of the book. The one who understands it all the best. And it is nice for an old woman to be ‘right’ and pseudo-heroic where others are silly and small and wrong.

Certainly read this book. It isn’t a Wow book, but it is a deep one. I am impressed by it. It also made an impression on me. I also (bizarrely) think reading this first might have made me a bit more compassionate towards some of the characters in Midnight’s Children – though at the same time reiterate to me how much more palatable a book is to me if it takes time to be crafted, controlled, and made human.