Living in a Fictional World: What I've Read Lately

My life is full of space. There are gaps, lacunae, holes; physical, spiritual, mental, and especially temporal. It's been a long time since I've written in here. Not that anyone reads it. But it is a record. I'm aware that time is passing much too quickly and in strange, unordered chunks of varying speed. Days will go by in a flash, then weeks, months, and years. Lately, the only way I can mark time is by what I'm reading. And, as always, I'm reading a lot. I often think about how I spend more time in fictional worlds—in reading and listening, and in watching—than I do in the real world. Is that a bad thing?

There's no sense or pattern to my reading. Any kind of pattern I can devise will be artificial but, for what it's worth, allow me to pair some books together, as if they are inherently comparable. Let's start with two books that take off from fictional universes that were not of their own creation, Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead and John Banville's Mrs. Osmond. Kingsolver's book takes as its frame Dickens'

David Copperfield. But instead of setting Dickens's story of his main characters rise through poverty to become a published and respected author in mid-century England, Kingsolver sets us in poverty-stricken and opioid-soaked Appalachia. Kingsolver masterfully takes the characters that inhabit David Copperfield and updates them for modern times, retaining their essential qualities, renaming them (e.g., the notorious smarmy villain Uriah Heep becomes Ryan "U-Haul" Pyles; Murdstone the cruel stepfather becomes Murrel Stone; The Micawbers become the McCobbs, etc.). What remains is a deeply disturbing book which clearly outlines the troubles of a whole section of the country, preyed upon by the medical industry. It's a brilliant, sad book in many ways and the use of Dickens's fictional frame enhances the reader's experience.

Less successful is Banville's Mrs. Osmond. Unlike Kingsolver, Banville reuses the exact same characters from Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, giving them all postscripts and new directions and explanations. Whereas Kingsolver revels in the speech patterns of West Virginia in imitation of Dickens's English, Banville imitates James's style, with long sentences full of unfamiliar words (please define or correctly use "inspissatedly", "prelapsarian", or "hebetudinous"—anyone? anyone?). Moreover, the direction he takes Isabel Archer is perhaps not where James intended and it left me wondering what the original author would have thought about Banville messing about with his characters.

What I enjoyed about Kingsolver is that she took on the world (or, at least, a portion of it) and tried to describe it, give you a feel for the flavor of it, the problems people were facing and thinking about. Two other books I've read recently do a similar kind of thing. I've been reading a lot of Louise Erdrich lately. I find her novels tough-going, not because they're difficult to read but because there's nothing easy in what she writes about. She often highlights unsolvable conflicts of culture and history. Such is the case with The Master Butchers Singing Club. Set in a small midwestern town after the first world war, it deals with immigration, war, small-town life, death, poverty, spiritualism, and ownership. This is not a story told outside of history, but one that is about history and the long-term effects of decisions and actions made long before. 

And, as long as I'm mentioning Erdrich, I also finished her wonderfully strange and timely Covid-era novel The Sentence, which came out in 2021. There are many delightful things about this book, but I was especially taken with the main character, an Ojibwa woman named Tookie. She was/is a piece of work as they say. Stern and funny, her life in all its comic oddness really drew me in. One thing I loved about this novel is how the title meant so many things: it's literally the name of a book that a character has died reading; it also refers to Tookie's prison sentence; and it also points to particular sentences and meanings throughout. In an interview, Erdrich said: "I gathered extraordinary sentences. healing sentences, sentences that were so beautiful that they brought people solace and comfort, also sentences for incarcerated people. " 

To top everything off, Tookie works in a Minneapolis bookstore (owned by a novelist named Louise) and makes wonderful, idiosyncratic book suggestions, like her list of "short perfect novels":

• Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel
• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
• Sula by Toni Morrison
• The Shadow-Line by Joseph Conrad
• The All of It by Jeannette Haien
• Winter in the Blood by James Welch
• Swimmer in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle
• The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
• First Love by Ivan Turgenev
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
• Fire on the Mountain by Anita Desai

Reading the title of a book you've loved or read is like a little whisper to the readers, a "come, join my club" kind of feeling. Interspersed throughout The Sentence are memorable characters, like Flora, the hated/beloved customer who dies and haunts the bookstore; Pollux, the cop who arrested her for her Keystone Cops-esque crime, and who eventually became her partner; and Hetta, Tookie's sort-of step-daughter, and her son Jarvis. In addition to Covid, how could a book set in Minneapolis not deal with George Floyd and the protests afterwards? There are so many themes and moods in this novel, and it feels locked in history at this particular time. It was bewildering and sad, funny and smart. Parts of it gave me the same kind of feeling when you have a sore or a paper cut: the way you stroke it, probe it, feel and re-feel the pain. 

Lessons by Ian McEwan looks at the twists and turns of one man's life as told through the lens of the last 80 years or so. Roland's mediocre, unfocused life probably rests on the fulcrum of one event (or more?) from his childhood, his sexual relationship with his piano teacher when he was a young teenager. As he reflects on his past, he wonders if things would have (or could have) been different had he made a different choice. Not a new idea, but interlaced with Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Brexit, 9/11, Covid, and, well, you name it, everything that has happened in my lifetime, this novel explores the tipping points in all of our lives, and the sacrifices we have too make. In many ways, the book is deeply depressing, but it also looks to the importance of connection and of truth-telling and living truthfully. I was incredibly moved by this haunting big book—big, not for length (though it is over 400 pages), but for the bigness of the ideas and of the palette. I could say more about how my life paralleled Roland's life at points but I think I shall leave that for another time.