Those New York Novels

The Ramblers     Aidan Donnelley Rowley (2016)

(plus brief notes on novels by Adelle Waldman and Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney)

First, a sidebar.

Maybe I should stop reading these inbred New York City novels. Maybe only New Yorkers can sense where the satire starts. But I read a lot of fiction, and I’ve taught fiction to a lot of college students, so I should be able to discern satire, right? Even if I’m a Midwesterner?

I look back at a couple of other New York novels. I’m pretty certain that Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013) is sardonically mocking the callous, self-satisfied male New Yorkers who wreak havoc on the psyches of brilliant, sensitive female New Yorkers. Waldman’s view into this world is morbidly fascinating but morbid nonetheless.

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s The Nest (2016) is less clear on the satire front. Four siblings fight over their inheritance, which has been greatly depleted by a payout to cover up a crime by one of the brothers. Should I care about the quarrels of these disagreeable, money-grubbing characters, even if the plot is a tight one? Am I supposed to care, or am I supposed to recoil in horror?

This issue is not settled, but let’s move on to the main review.

The Ramblers, by Aidan Donnelley Rowley (2016), brings us three more New Yorkers who have too much money and too many drinks. Admittedly, Clio Marsh was born middle class, but she’s pulled herself up by the proverbial bootstraps to earn a PhD in ornithology. And she lives nearly rent-free as roommate to Smith Anderson, a daughter of the 1% who declutters the Manhattan apartments of her private clients. The third profiled character is Tate Pennington, who has accidentally made a fortune in the tech world and retired to New York to take street photographs and escape his estranged wife in California.

All three are in their mid-30s, yet they prate endlessly about their undergraduate days together at Yale and enter into petty squabbles about the relative advantages of Princeton. Really? So you’ve read Foucault. I’m not impressed, though I think that the author, herself a Yalie, expects her readers to be.

Because the three protagonists are in their mid-thirties, they all long to be in committed relationships. This is a standard feature of the modern New York novel, though it’s usually only the women or the gay men who crave a long-lasting, monogamous marriage. The entire plot of The Ramblers revolves around the achievement of perfect domestic partnerships, but I couldn’t feel much sympathy for these three privileged strivers. They’re stock characters in a flat drama. Clio worries that the revelation of her mother’s mental illness and suicide will derail her affair with a wealthy bachelor fifteen years her senior. Smith won’t distance herself from her malicious father, even though this creepy father browbeat her fiancé into breaking up with her. And Tate salves the wounds made by his unfaithful wife with excessive amounts of alcohol, but he still shoots stunning photos.

The dialogue of the thirty-something women in The Ramblers does have sparkle, but when I hit some scenes with older women or with men (older or not), I found myself stopped mid-page by the inaptness of tone and the cliché-ridden sentences. Wait, I thought, is the author satirizing this character? We’re back to that issue of inadvertent satire again.

If I’m so irritated by these self-aggrandizing characters and their $30 bottles of organic hair conditioner, why do I keep reading New York novels? Why did I ever get past page 50 of The Ramblers? Simple: I have a weakness for the New York part.

For instance, the title of The Ramblers refers to an area in Central Park called The Ramble, a semi-wild nature area in the middle of Manhattan, popular for those seeking outdoor gay sex, which has also become a favored site for birdwatchers. The character Clio leads public birding tours through The Ramble on Sunday mornings and gets written up in the local press. Tate, meanwhile, is a walking guide book to the poetic and architectural history of the city, seeking out the haunts of Stanley Kunitz and Dylan Thomas. Smith’s sister gets married in the cavernous, barrel-vaulted St. Bart’s Episcopal Church, with the reception at the ultra-glamorous Waldorf. The action of the novel takes place during the week of Thanksgiving, so the author can call up glorious late autumn days as well as the edge of silver-bell cheeriness for the upcoming Christmas season. In sum, the NYC of The Ramblers is more vividly portrayed than its inhabitants.

True, for heavy New York atmosphere, you can’t beat author Jay McInerney, and I’ve acknowledged this in a recent blog post reviewing his 2016 novel Bright, Precious Days. I detect satire in some of McInerney’s characters, but he fleshes them out so well and surrounds them with so much New York detail that I tumble right into their lives nonetheless.

And for a weekly dose of New York, I turn to the New Yorker. I can imagine myself at the openings of art exhibits and plays listed at the front and then settle in for some serious journalism, not necessarily about New York, by writers like Adam Gopnik, Joan Acocella, Jill Lepore, Hilton Als, Larissa MacFarquhar, Elizabeth Kolbert, Kalefa Sanneh, Jane Mayer, and Ryan Lizza. Gotta love it.

Tasting the Moon with Chabon

Moonglow     Michael Chabon     (2016)

With a review of a work by Michael Chabon, it’s difficult to avoid gushing out superlatives. Bare superlatives, however, don’t give the readers of the review a taste of the specific delicacies that are on offer in the writing. And Moonglow has many delicious bites.

It’s not a spoiler if you know that the Michael Chabon who is the narrator of Moonglow is fictional and is not the same as the Michael Chabon who is the author of the novel. And Moonglow is truly a novel, though it’s set up as an autobiographical and biographical memoir. Chabon-the-author is expert at inducing you to believe that the fiction he’s creating is really the reconstructed history of his family.

In recent interviews, Chabon-the-author has made it clear that he’s used only brief incidents from his family history as sites from which he has leapt into the fictional worlds of Moonglow. He prefaces the book with a tongue-in-cheek “Author’s Note” in which he disclaims veracity for the “facts” he presents. But as a reader of Moonglow you keep wanting to believe that Chabon-the-narrator is Chabon-the-author, against all this evidence.

The underlying premise of Moonglow is straightforward. In 1989, Chabon-the-narrator sat at the bedside of his dying grandfather as the grandfather spoke about events of his life. He was a daredevil kid in Philadelphia, an engineer with tremendous inventive capacity, an intelligence officer in Europe at the tail end of World War II, an inmate in a minimum security prison in New York State in the 1950s, a snake-hunting retiree in Florida. The grandfather (who never has any other name in the novel) was passionately in love with his wife, a Jewish French refugee ravaged by the Holocaust, whom he met in 1947. The story of this grandmother weaves in and out of the novel about the grandfather.

As with Chabon’s  Pulitzer-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), World War II hangs menacingly over the characters. Having wedged his grandfather in to the Allied mop-up operations in Germany in 1945, Chabon-the-author can explore alternate realities that never made it into the history books. What if, for example, a Jewish American officer with extensive knowledge of rocketry were to capture Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun? What if that officer were to uncover the trove of documents revealing the secrets of the V-2 rocket?

Speculative history is a specialty of Chabon-the-author, most notably executed, I think, in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007). In that novel, the alternate history is set up when Jews from around the world establish a homeland in Sitka, Alaska, in the 1940s, and the tale plays out for the next sixty years.

Jewish identity is a key theme for Chabon-the-author, but I see other themes also echoing through his writing: the malleability of fact, the raw beauty of the everyday, the strength of the human spirit in the face of evil (in other people or in the international order). A trademark stylistic device of his that I especially admire is what I call his “extended list,” in which he ranges through all the possibilities of a situation. Here he’s describing sleeping conditions for soldiers in war-torn Europe:

“My grandfather had shared all manner of billets: with dogfaces and officers, in misery and in comfort, in attack and in retreat, and pinned down by snow or German ordnance. He had bedded down under a bearskin in a schloss and in foxholes flecked pink with the tissue of previous occupants. If an hour’s sleep were to be had, he seized it, in the bedrooms or basements of elegant townhouses, in ravaged hotels, on clean straw and straw that crawled with vermin, on featherbeds and canvas webbing slung across the bed of a half-track, on mud, sandbags, and raw pine planks.”

Mimicking the discursive flow of reminiscence, Moonglow see-saws through the life of the grandfather, constantly shifting time and place, occasionally returning to the 1989 scene of the grandson feeding Jello to the dying man. Chabon-the-narrator does not set down his grandfather’s words verbatim but rather casts the episodes he recounts in third person. This technique allows Chabon-the-author to insert astonishing detail. One of my favorite scenes has the grandfather, who does not usually observe religious rites, stopping at a Reform temple on a Friday to pray the kaddish, the prayer of mourning. The congregation is housed in a building that was formerly an International House of Pancakes. As the service goes on, the grandfather feels distant from the other worshipers:

“They might have been strangers in a bus station, solo travelers bound for all points. They might have been separate parties at a pancake house, awash in the syrup emerging from a Wurlitzer organ, played by an old Jew with a Shinola-black pompadour, dressed in a curious tan coverall or jumpsuit and platform saddle shoes.”

Oh, that’s just a taste. You should savor the entire book.

McInerney's Manhattan Excess

Bright, Precious Days     Jay McInerney     (2016)

O, Russell! O, Corrine! O, pet ferret!  Bright, Precious Days, the third installment of the Russell-and-Corrine-story (readable as a standalone), finds them hitting age 50, with a TriBeCa loft that’s too expensive and too small for a family with school-age twins and a pet ferret. And note that TriBeCa always has those internal capital letters, so that you’re looking to the etymology and the map, knowing that Russell and Corrine, having consumed another absurdly extravagant and exotic restaurant meal, are heading home to the Triangle Below Canal Street.

The landmarks of Manhattan are as much characters in McInerney’s novels as the human actors. His New York City dazzles with all the expected urbanity and glitz and pop culture references. His descriptions of the turning of the seasons are particularly striking in their tropes of nostalgia. I’m there, at the top of the Empire State Building, wind in my hair, taking in the view.

I do need my regular dose of Manhattan hauteur and pomposity, if only to reassure myself that I’m content as a boring Midwesterner. McInerney delivers Manhattan full throttle: the wine snobs, the gourmands, the anorexics, the cab drivers, the gala attendees, the trophy wives, the crazed artists, the cocaine snorters. Good Lord, how do people ingest that much cocaine and live to tell the story? Well, some of them don’t live, that’s true.

From the beginning, the reader cringes with the knowledge that Russell’s publishing business is not thriving. Print books were in decline even in the mid-aughts, when the book opens, and although Russell may be the Max Perkins of the twenty-first century, his editing skills don’t translate to business savvy. The reader also has the advantage of knowing that the recession of 2008 is looming.

Corrine—who saw the light, sort of, after 9/11—has taken a job in the nonprofit sector, gleaning discarded vegetables to distribute to the poor, so she doesn’t contribute much income to the family. Corrine’s job does allow McInerney to give us a brief view of the 99% in New York City, with descriptions of the long lines of hungry people waiting to receive a dole of carrots or cabbages.

You don’t have to be an avid reader of mystery novels to guess how the storyline involving Russell’s business will play out in Bright Precious Days. The marital storyline is another matter. R-and-C have been married for twenty-five years, during which time they’ve both repeatedly cheated on and lied to each other. I want to shake them and tell them how selfish they are, how superficial and cliché-ridden their conversations are. I want to tell Corrine that to keep her weight down she should reduce her consumption of alcoholic beverages, not diet on lettuce and canned salmon. R-and-C live up to their surname, “Calloway,” in their adolescent ingenuousness and self-centeredness. The coincidences in the marital storyline strain belief, and the characters are on the edge of becoming caricatures. But I understand many of their flaws and want to know their next steps. I love to despise them.

And I love gazing on that Manhattan excess from afar. 

Proulx and the Forest

Barkskins     Annie Proulx     (2016)

In the year 1693, we meet the original “barkskins” of Annie Proulx’s gigantic novel.  René Sel and Charles Duquet are poor young Frenchmen who take their chances in agreeing to cross the Atlantic and serve for three years as loggers in return for a promise of land of their own. Arriving in the maritime regions of New France (now Canada), René and Charles are stunned by the brutal weather, the vicious mosquitoes, and the virgin forests of unimaginable magnitude.

The two axe-wielders take divergent paths in the wilderness. René Sel sticks with his backbreaking job, reluctantly marries a native Mi’kmaq woman, and dooms his descendants to lives of hard labor in the forests to which they are constantly drawn. The Sel family gets stuck in a racial borderland between European and indigenous cultures and never thrives.

Charles Duquet, however, quickly abandons the tree felling and makes his fortune, first in furs and then in lumber, changing his name to Duke along the way. Charles is the consummate shark, founding a dynasty and a business empire.

Over the three hundred years that Proulx follows these two fictional families, both the Dukes and the Sels exploit the forests—the Dukes through land deals and the Sels by actually chopping down tree after tree after tree. The branches of their families occasionally brush against each other. (The characters are so numerous that I needed to flip frequently to the genealogical charts at the back of the book.) Sometimes Proulx pauses and develops a character in depth. At other times she tosses out names and moves on with her plot.

In the end, the main character of Barkskins is the forest—that vast forest that stretches across much of the North American continent at the beginning of the book. Although the species vary as the barkskins and lumber barons move westward, clearing the land, I think Proulx sees all the trees of North America as part of one mystical body. She’s at her most eloquent in describing this character.

When the surveyors in her story get to what will become the state of Michigan, they find sugar maple, beech, yellow birch, oak, hickory, pine, hemlock, spruce, and fir in forests so dense that the paths of the Native Americans are almost impossible to follow. The huge diameters of the trees are a challenge to the technology of the period. I pored over the descriptions of my home state’s trees, in awe of Proulx’s rich language.

She is, in effect, writing a eulogy for the North American forest, which has become a victim of human depredation, part of a global destruction of the environment. As Proulx takes us through the centuries, we see the respect that native hunter-gatherer societies had for the natural world give way to the Europeans’ demands for tillable land and space for cities. Feeding and housing hordes of immigrants increasingly take priority. The forest sighs, weeps, groans, and dies.

The human toll exacted by the felling of those hundreds of millions of trees is not ignored by Proulx. Gruesome deaths, either directly or indirectly related to the timber industry, abound. I found these deaths difficult to stomach; picture the possibilities with axes, lumber mill saws, huge jams of logs rolling through river rapids, and the menacing branches of toppling trees.

This is a glorious but tragic novel, a moral statement about the failure of humans to be stewards of our planet’s abundance. Yes, Proulx’s ending is weak, her narrative seeming to dwindle like the forest itself. In 1693 no one could imagine that the North American forest would ever end. The tragedy that Proulx documents is not one cataclysmic event that's easily recognized. Rather, it’s the loss of one tree after another, until the forest is gone.

Conroy, a Poetic Prince

The Prince of Tides      Pat Conroy  (1986)

When Pat Conroy died in March 2016, I ran across many heartfelt tributes to his writing. I felt guilty. How had I missed reading an author so beloved by so many readers?

With a few clicks, I figured it out. Conroy wrote about the American South and about the experience of being a male Southerner who was subjected to brutality in both family and school environments. I find much fiction about the South painfully depressing. In high school, when Carson McCullers was assigned, I ate up The Heart is a Lonely Hunter but then had nightmares for weeks. Heretical as it sounds, I’ve never been enthralled by William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor.

I decided, however, to give the South another chance by reading Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. It took me several days, since this is a long—and longwinded—novel. I kept thinking how some of the lengthy dialogues could have been edited down considerably without diluting the power of the story. The narrative is complex, certainly, and I was willing to follow it to the end, but I was tempted to skip entire sections just to get on with the plot.

Briefly, that plot follows about forty years in the lives of the three Wingo siblings, who were born in the South Carolina sea islands during World War II. Their father is a successful shrimper who wastes all his earnings on get-rich-quick schemes. He flies into rages and beats his wife and children. That’s the least of the horrors that the Wingo kids endure. Slowly, very slowly, the reader gets the full picture as Tom Wingo, the first-person narrator, explains the family history to a psychiatrist who’s treating his suicidal sister, Savannah, in New York City in the early 1980s.

Despite the hundreds of scenes in this novel that feature Tom Wingo, I didn’t ever grasp his personality in full. Tom is a jokey guy, often spouting self-deprecating retorts and constantly whining about male Southerners with a grim fatalism. He reads widely and finds fulfillment in coaching adolescents in sports. But when he opens his mouth, ridiculous statements spew out.  I never figured out Tom’s mother, either. Is her repeated repression of trauma a form of abuse or of self-preservation or both? Does she exploit or regret her renowned beauty? Isn’t Conroy’s portrait of her as a young mother inconsistent with his portrait of her as an older woman? And Tom describes his brother, Luke, as a hero who’s much larger than life, which is perhaps Conroy’s way of showing how much Tom worshiped Luke.

All that aside, I found much to admire in The Prince of Tides. Conroy’s vocabulary is enormous, and his words are deployed to great effect in evoking the fragile glories of the semitropical saltwater marshes of the South Carolina coast. He tosses off striking metaphors with ease and moves actions forward with powerful verbs. He doesn’t use an ordinary noun when a fanciful one can be found; a song becomes a “canticle,” which will be the exactly right term for that sentence. The smells of the Low Country fishing industry often have metallic descriptors that succeed in recreating the place. The flora and fauna thriving in the thick, humid atmosphere are portrayed with particularity and reverence.

Conroy gives his character Savannah Wingo the vocation of poet, and he seems to envy the way Savannah can transform the stories of her troubled youth into paeans for a disappearing way of life. You can read The Prince of Tides if you want a sprawling Southern melodrama. I read The Prince of Tides for the poetry of the language.