Creatures, I return! Has it really been a month since your friendly snorting Dragon rampaged through the village streets? Well, this week you’ll get two posts, since I’m doing my year-end roundup on Friday. Is this more than you wanted? Too bad!
In this post, two book notes. But first, reader James Heaney kindly posts his syllabus for a class on the Black mystery novel (!!). Read, consider, add your own comments.
Also, my partner and I finished watching Gentleman Jack. I have one actual million thoughts about it; the short version is that I loved it, even though the closing chapters of the second season lose a lot of the show’s complexity, especially its moral complexity. One aspect I’d like to highlight is what it’s like to watch Anne Lister’s startlingly traditional ritual of vowed friendship, while planning a somewhat similar ceremony with my own partner. I don’t pretend that Lister understood what she was doing the same way we do, but it was still sort of amazing to see this scene, which I’d never seen in art before. So if you know a venue or an editor who might want something like that, do drop me a line. And let me see if I can sell you on the show: It’s a sumptuous Regency-style romance of property in which the brooding hero is a lesbian; it’s a show with a lot of moral and psychological insight into how people seek personal liberation through abuse of power; its flaws are mostly because it was canceled before its time. And if you have seen it, feel free to unburden yourself of your thoughts, below or in my inbox!
Every Man Is an Island. (It’s Called Atlantis.)
I just finished Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, tr. Margaret Mitsutani, in which Japan has vanished. Maybe sunk beneath the waves due to a rich man’s obsessive terraforming. Maybe just kind of gone? The novel follows a woman who was off the islands when they disappeared, and who therefore wanders the remaining earth with a steadily-growing band of companions as she searches for another native speaker in a world where everybody tells her that sushi is Finnish.
(Hiruko, trying to explain why a sushi restaurant might have a Moomin out front if sushi isn’t Finnish: “moomin to my country as exile came.”)
There are a lot of images of images in this novel: ruins maintained for tourists, half-remembered fables; assumed names and non-native speakers. Claude Monet imagines one sea while painting another, and the whole scene takes place in a TV re-enactment. What is the difference between being something, and being an image of that thing? Is a non-native speaker really less, in some way, than a native one? We disagree not only about who we are, but about what we need to do to become who we are. One character muses: “I am now actually changing into a woman, not only in dress. But as I don’t want an operation or the hormones Western doctors love to prescribe, I am making the transition gradually, through many different methods—diet, meditation, exercise, breathing techniques, and chanting or copying the sutras.”
There’s a lot about what it’s like to bear other people’s assumptions about you because of some identity you carry in their eyes—and also some sharp moments depicting the pleasures to be found in being that kind of projection screen. Even after the death of the author, we still want to be read!
Monet apparently collected over two hundred ukiyo-e prints. Though this had nothing to do with me, I kept hearing a voice whisper from a forest somewhere in a corner of my brain, “Oh yes it does, yes it does.”
The Existence of the Florida Keys Implies the Existence of a Florida Door
I also read Stephen King’s 2008 Duma Key. A man survives a horrific workplace accident, which makes him prone to fits of rage which destroy his marriage; he heads to the Florida Keys, ostensibly to heal but really to wait long enough that when he kills himself the insurance investigators might believe that it was an accident. He already knows that his traumatic brain injury left him with some kind of unsettling psychic ability. On Duma Key, isolated and underdeveloped due to a convoluted estate dispute, he begins to paint—and a door opens, just a crack at first….
King truly is a master of suspense and a master of character. Almost everything I loved in this novel came from those two aspects: the slow-building dread of the shells talking under the house, and the edge-of-your-seat suspense of struggling to do a tiny task that would have been easy under any other circumstances; the central character, Edgar Fremantle, and his friendships with an elderly woman losing her memory and her rough-hewn caretaker.
I’ve seen a bit of discussion online about how our idea of mental illness is distorted if we think only about depression and anxiety, not e.g. schizophrenia. Lol I think this discussion itself is a bit weird, since it tends to position depression and anxiety as the ailments that don’t make you act horribly to others and that is not always true! But I really appreciated King’s portrayal of a man who genuinely had no control over his descent into violence—and whose recovery involved acknowledging that lack of control over the injuries doesn’t confer lack of responsibility for the things you do in their grip. This felt to me like an addiction-recovery novel. You probably know King is a master of the addiction novel, but the recovery novel is a somewhat different beast, and in that regard Duma Key felt like a subtler brother of Doctor Sleep.
I thought of my situation. I was a man who had choked his own wife and then forgot about it. A man who now slept with a doll in the other half of the bed. I decided to keep my opinions to myself.
(Apparently some readers thought the ex-wife was one-note and unfair, but to me, King portrayed her as defensive for extremely understandable reasons. I could feel her aching to soften up a little, beneath a thick layer of terror at what might happen if she did.)
And King is a master of depicting pain. Rachel Manija Brown had this fascinating post (don’t miss the comments) about techniques for writing pain, an experience we suppress as soon as we’re through it. King gives you descriptions you can feel: “a dull, low sparkle, vaguely hot.” “A zigzag of pain corkscrewed up my bad [leg].”
Duma Key worked a lot less well for me overall than I wanted it to, for a few reasons. You may disagree, but I felt like we were constantly being told that the paintings were disturbing, when they mostly just sounded slightly surreal. Creepy elements are raised and then dropped (Reba!) and the climax is convoluted and exposition-heavy. This is a novel about the history of Florida in which a Black maid and a plaster lawn jockey play major roles, and yet King never touches the moral/political keys on the piano. What was Florida like for Black people in the 1920s?
Still… I love love love how Edgar both saves and destroys himself through painting (aka writing, storytelling). After I finished the book I realized that, what with the huge role a ship plays in the plot, there’s a “craft” pun here. I respect that King didn’t go there.
icymi
I wrote about 1982’s sublime children’s film, The Last Unicorn; why there are so few movies about monks and friars, and what the good ones are; and a bunch of films, of which the standout was the “Invisible Man by way of the Coen Brothers” tale Chameleon Street.
Now Playing
Nina Simone, “Pirate Jenny”
Tanya Hart’s “Ghost Ship” via Wikimedia Commons