Never Let Me Go: Not really an option

Dara writes:

Kazuo Ishiguro's most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, arrived on bookstore shelves in 2005, but landed in my apartment only a few weeks ago, since I'm too cheap to buy books in hardcover. I'm cautious and cheap; I want to hear what people I trust say about a book before I spring for it.

People I trust seemed to like this one, and I'd already read Remains of the Day, and like others, admired the novelist's ability to communicate with understatement and grace his characters' inner lives. While that novel involves some of the obvious horrors of Europe in the Nazi years, Ishiguro describes events with great subtlety. He is an intimate writer in an age of broadcasters.

Never Let Me Go revolves around three young people, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy. Kathy tells the tale of their coming of age from the vantage point of a 31-year old "carer." We don't learn what that word means until quite some time later, but we do learn that as children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy lived in a boarding school called Hailsham.

But this boarding school is not Exeter. A typical course of study doesn't constitute the curriculum. Rather, the kids paint, draw, and write, and then these works of art are collected to be placed in the school head's "gallery" for later use. The kids never receive exposure to the outside world. We never hear about parents; indeed, they don't seem to have any. The teachers are called "guardians," and the kids don't have last names. Ishiguro crafts a bizarro world that is both familiar and hauntingly strange.

As in Remains, Ishiguro uses the plights of Kathy and her friends to meditate on serious subject matter, which I don't want to give away. While I don't feel the subject to be completely fresh, I do admire Ishiguro's method of discussing it. He doesn't present a single lesson or rant; rather, he suggests we ponder these young peoples' lives when weighing in on the larger subject he addresses.

As vague as that last sentence of mine was, that is sometimes how vague Ishiguro's scenes are. Other than that the novel takes place in "England, late 1990s," we read no place or time markers. The absence of details makes it hard to get into the novel. I had trouble staying with the book when I first picked it up, and I had trouble picking it up each time I set it down. I feel I was able to finish it primarily because I have time on my hands right now, and I think it's a deficit in the book that one needs an abundance of leisure to become attached to it.

Then again, Ishiguro's never been a warm and cuddly writer. His style is formal and distant. Yet, the formality that was so revealing in Remains is obtrusive here. For instance, instead of just plunging into a scene, he has the narrator Kathy say, "And now I should tell you about when we did X," or, "Before I tell you about Y, I should tell you about X." This technique slows further an already glacial pace.

Ishiguro is interested in repressed characters, people who are unable to come to grips with their emotions when an event happens, and only years later can understand what they were feeling. He is interested in love deferred and lost souls. He uses quite an experimental mode in revealing these inner lives in Never Let Me Go, a book I ultimately respect more than I love.

Kafkaesque

Dara writes:

The ending of Philip Roth's masterpiece, The Plot Against America, gave me chills. It strongly reminded me of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, in which, in a matter-of-fact tone, Gregor Samsa charts his transformation into a giant bug. While in English Samsa becomes a cockroach, in the original German, he changes into a huge insect. The lack of specificity in this phrase highlights its horror. The change is inchoate, literally incomprehensible. Language is at its limits when depicting the transformation.

I was reminded of this descriptive technique of Kafka's when finishing The Plot. Roth wrote this book a few years back as a cautionary "what if" tale. What if, he imagined, anti-Semitic and wildly popular aviation hero Charles Lindbergh had become president during World War II? What would be the consequences for America's Jews and for the country itself? Through the eyes of a respectable, hard-working Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, Roth exposes a dangerous turn of events that feels all too real. Jews are fired, involuntarily relocated, and, as in the case of Walter Winchell, assassinated.

Our narrator is "Philip Roth" himself, aged 8 and 9. The traumas of the times visit him literally in his bedroom, in the form of his cousin Alvin, who is maimed fighting the Nazis, and his hapless and orphaned downstairs neighbor, Seldon Wishnow. Young Philip loathes Wishnow for his helplessness. When Roth's family is doomed to be relocated to Kentucky, Philip tries to intervene with a well-positioned relative, and inadvertantly gets Seldon and his mother relocated as well. I don't want to give away more, but suffice it to say that Philip's efforts to rid himself of his weaker doppelganger just bring the boy closer. At story's end, Roth writes that Seldon replaces the stump for which Philip cared when his cousin Alvin shared his room. Now, he writes, "the boy himself was the stump, and...I was the prosthesis."

What is a prosthesis? In Greek it means an addition. In medical terms, it is a replacement for a missing body part. But the truth is that, like "insect," "prosthesis" can mean many different things. While we can't pin it down, we knows it incites in us revulsion and disgust.

Can we give a Jewish reading of the word? In the context of Roth's book, Jews are a kind of prosthesis in American culture, an unwanted addition, something gruesome, something deeply resented, as by an amputee, even if inevitable.

My favorite Roth books were the early ones. Portnoy's Complaint expedited by a few years my maturation process, since I read it at a tender age. I've kind of avoided American Pastoral and The Human Stain, because they seemed too misanthropic. Like Kafka, Roth seems to live with a lot of fear. And yet he can channel his dread into art, which is more than some of us can claim.

Heat Wave

Finishing Louise Gluck's newest book Averno outside in the sultry Manhattan July heat, even if it was the sultry and sophisticated Gramercy Park heat, made me hotter. Gluck's poetry is pitched at hysterical. Everything in her world, or, in this case, the underworld to which Persephone is consigned, is bleak and dire. Death is everywhere.

Gluck uses the myth of Persephone and places her book at Averno, in Southern Italy, which the Romans considered the entrance to the underworld, to meditate on how one should endure, given the inevitability of obliteration--and further, whether there is a soul to persist after perdition.

I guess I'm just not that deep; or, at least, that's how Ms. Gluck makes me feel. Consider these lines on what it's like to fall in love: "Guilt? Terror? The fear of love? / These things he couldn't imagine; / no lover ever imagines them." How forboding. As though love _always_ brings terror. This kind of desperation is so hot as to be cold, as to give one the chills (you know how a fever can do that?). And it made me consider the difference between cold and cool.

Ms. Gluck is a cold poet. Some say she speaks "the truth"--but that's if the truth is icily fearsome. I guess I prefer poets who believe in heat and a reality that's warmly welcoming. Oddly, I think of these as cool poets; that is, they use form and decorum to shelter themselves from the wounds of searing passion--they trust passion, they just like to prepare themselves and be prudent in the face of its heat. Merrill, Auden, Stevens, these are the folks of whom I'm thinking. Like Mozart, they use linguistic sleights to tango with passion. With Gluck, on the other hand, you get the sense she's fucked passion and man, it's gotten her bad and now she's dead.

There's that death word again. One can see why it crops up so much. If the only alternative to disaster is hysteria, no wonder she'd rather put everything on ice. Still, I do trust her language. I do know she's in command, and while reading Averno, while I might not have relished it, in fact, while it might have put me in a bit of a funk, I did know it was the real thing--or at least, _a_ real thing: one way of looking at our world.