REVIEW: The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt

Patrick deWitt’s noir Western The Sisters Brothers has been the talk of the literary town for the past year. I first heard about it myself just over a year ago, in an interview with Allison Saltzman, the art director at Ecco (an imprint of HarperCollins), over at the Caustic Cover Critic. As these things often go, the first thing that caught my attention was therefore the cover, because the book wasn’t even out yet. In fact, in the interview, Saltzman mentions that the book’s stunning cover, designed by Dan Stiles, did just that: it gave the novel attention that the publishers hadn’t expected. If the cover did help set The Sisters Brothers on its way to glory—shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and The Morning News Tournament of Books—then we should be thankful that it did, because this one’s a real treat.

The novel follows the ups and downs—both in their relationship and their encounters with the wild world—of the Sisters Brothers, a duo of hired guns, who are on a job to find and kill an elusive man called Hermann Kermit Warm. The stage is the American Western frontier: Oregon and California. The time is 1951: right in the middle of the Gold Rush, while the novel basks in the kind of explosive madness which it resulted in. The city of San Francisco, for example, grew in a few short years from a small settlement into a bustling city. In The Sisters Brothers, it’s a shady place, where men can get whatever they want—except the influx of money from the gold rush has made prices soar to four times what they are anywhere else. deWitt writes that, in the port, men abandoned the ships in order to go work the rivers: “The harbor, at first sight, I did not understand it. There were so many ships at anchor that their masts looked to be tangled impossibly; hundreds of them packed together so densely as to give the appearance of a vast, limbless forest rolling on the tides.”

What makes The Sisters Brothers a fantastic read is, first and foremost, deWitt’s careful crafting of narrative voice. The narrator in question is Eli, one of the two brothers, who speaks to the reader lucidly, clearly, and with a touch of deliciously dark humor. I was reminded of Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, where I found another picaresque story told in a remarkably distinctive tone. deWitt overcomes the particular difficulty of achieving a mid-19th century american feel to his narrator by reducing his use of contractions to a minimum, which gives the text just the right pitch of antiquatedness. And the other thing you’ll find in The Sisters Brothers is a good old story, which will make you want to keep reading just for the sake of knowing what happens next. I mean actual story here, not plot, because in fact the deWitt’s plot stretches a little too much, at times, to get a proper hold of every single element. Yet the use of a weaker plot devices—such as a diary left-behind in a hotel room for the protagonists to read, and even a supernatural gold-prospecting twist that most reviewers seem to overlook—is pardonable because this is no whodunit; it’s a western, a quest from point A to point B. It’s about who shoots who. Escapism and action at its purest form, then, which is nice to have once in a while in a book that’s also well-written (I once read someone call David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet “well-written pulp”— the same thing operates here, and I’m still note sure it’s a bad thing).

But don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all guns and plot holes with a few flourishes of language. The Sisters Brothers is also fascinating, thematically, for its exploration of doubles, beginning with the two brothers of the title. Eli (the narrator) is podgy, hesitant, prone to bursts of anger, and takes pity on whomever they encounter. His brother Charlie is slim, calculating, ruthless, and likes to drink himself into a stupor. But they are brothers, and there is therefore a similar core within them that they cannot ignore; Eli says: “Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.” The entire novel plays out a struggle of power between them: Charlie is the dominant brother, the boss, but he needs Eli, because together they form an impressive team. Even Eli’s persona is split into two: the inevitable result of being a natural-born killer who also feels remorse. Thus, as the novel progresses, Eli doubt his life as a criminal increasingly, and learns to deal with this second self, the one that expands out of his center when there is violence, turns him into an animal. In the end, the brothers are able to establish a new order between them as the novel draws to its conclusion. They shed the hard life of the gunman (and lose a limb, newfound allies, and a boss in the process) and make themselves anew. It’s a question of life and death. 

PROFILE: Ian McEwan

Photo credits: Randolph Quan.

If you’d asked me, a few years ago, who my favourite living writer was, I would’ve answered without hesitation: Ian McEwan. Circa 2007, McEwan was at the summit of his art and eminence as a novelist: Atonement, probably his best book, had just been turned into a brilliant movie (directed by Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy), Saturday, his novel about post-9/11 Britain, had been published in 2003 and  confirmed his skill in dealing with contemporary state-of-the-nation feelings, and he had just published a beautiful novella, On Chesil Beach, which was shortlisted for the Booker. Moreover, McEwan had managed to bridge the tricky gap between literary and commercial fiction; his books were on university reading lists and bestseller lists alike.

I read McEwan for the first time that year after seeing the film version of Atonement around Christmas. The truth is, I was probably seeking for a film adaptation of book to fall in love with; the previous Spring I had read and thoroughly enjoyed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, only to be severely disappointed by the film version, which I’d had so many hopes for. Then came Atonement: beautifully directed, it had important things to say about art, contained big themes like love and war, and its ending was heart wrenching without being melodramatic. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, recommended it to everyone around me, and read the book over Christmas. The novel provided me with a literary mirror for the film. I found it just as great; it had everything I looked for in a book: compelling story, complex characters, beautiful writing. Most importantly, it felt literary (I’d been careful to buy the original paperback with the indignantly bored little girl on the cover, not the movie tie-in edition), which was essential to me at a time when I as trying to define myself as a reader of real literature, but still liked my books to be compelling. I was hooked on McEwan.

When school finished that Spring I read through Saturday, a strange novel that follows its neuro-surgeon protagonist, Dr. Perone, through an ordinary weekend day that turns out to be extremely unordinary. Saturday is a tour-de-force in its ability to manipulate the reader: at the beginning, I thought the story advanced very slowly, with lots of flashbacks and filler material and very little going on, but halfway through the novel I realized how attached I’d become to Perone and his family. By the end, when this family is threatened, the novel turns into a page turner because the McEwan has successfully built an emotional attachment between the reader and his characters. Then, in the fall, I read On Chesil Beach in a couple of days, and the same trick operated: very little actually happens for pages, except you get so close to the characters that by the time the story reaches its climax—a conversation on the beach between two newly-weds who misunderstand each other on the deepest level—I was sitting on the edge of my chair, breathless, whispering words of encouragement and disappointment, depending on what was being said. Again, I was thrilled with the beauty and efficiency of the language, and at how much complexity and characterization McEwan could concentrate in so few pages.

McEwan is a realist. He said so himself at a recent lecture he gave at Harvard (unfortunately, I couldn’t attend—my invitation got lost in the mail), entitled “The Lever: Where Novelists Stand to Move the World.” He’s very careful in his descriptions of places and things and events in order to recreate the right setting for his novels, be it modern-day London or Dunkirk in 1940. Of course, the precepts of realism requires that you describe the real world as faithfully as you can, down to the right constellation, the right brand of cigarette. It’s true that McEwan does this; some passages in his work are almost frustrating in their attention to detail, their desire to describe everything in detail. But where he is truly remarkable is in his ability to stretch reality to its limits, by placing his characters at the edge of normality, in situations that throw them completely off-balance. Sometimes, as in Atonement, where a little girl’s lie threatens to destroy the lives of two lovers, the results are stunning. Other times, as with the two loony lawbreakers in Saturday, coincidences seem a little bit exaggerated and the plot, like dough stretched too tightly between two hands, becomes torn. Yet as Alice Munro once said of another author, the writer always wins in the end. This is especially true of McEwan: even when he carefully walks you through a plot that seems implausible, he usually catches you with the elegance, restraint, and creativity of his writing. Usually. 

There are still those who argue in favor of early McEwan (see the hilarious book trailer for Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story), but I have a feeling that, in some time, when McEwan will have passed away (although I wish him long life!) and critics look back on his work, the three novels of his I first discovered—Atonement, Saturday, On Chesil Beach—will be considered his best. Here’s a writer at the top of his form, perfectly in control of his art, but still discovering things about writing, experimenting with voice and form and plot. Previously, McEwan had written a lot of books—just under a dozen, by my count—including two collections of short stories. Among these were Enduring Love, which still ranks among some of his best work (I haven’t read it yet so I can’t say), The Innocent (a kind of emotional spy-novel, set in Berlin during the Cold War), and his booker-winning Amsterdam, which frankly is not great by any standard (the conclusion seems to be that 1998 was a very bad year for fiction in English). McEwan’s early work earned him the nickname “macabre,” because of his unrestrained descriptions of gore. In The Innocent, for example, the main character needs to get rid of the body of someone he’s accidentally killed; a very long description of how to cut up a corpse into pieces and carry these pieces out of an ensues (a scene, as it turns out, that he now regrets). McEwan became relatively well-known in the 90s, but this was nothing like the stellar reputation he would gain in the early 2000s with the three books I mentioned above.

Then he published a new novel, Solar, in 2010, which I looked forward to and took a break from school readings to enjoy. Except I was disappointed. McEwan knew what he was doing in this novel—which is a kind of satire about climate change, featuring a ruthless, obese, nobel-prize winning physicist—but he knew it too well. The writing is too polished and self-conscious, the plot seems stretched, and the humor falls flat. The novel is so neat it feels dead. McEwan will be publishing a new novel this summer, Sweeth Tooth, a return to the spy genre he’d flirted with in The Innocent. An excerpt, entitled “Hand on the Shoulder,” about a young woman’s recruitment into MI5 by professor and lover in Cambridge in the 1970s, was published this week in The New Yorker. It provides usual McEwan fare: light irony, play with memory, importance of authenticity, interesting descriptions of food and sex… But again, I felt a little short-changed when I read. In an effort to make everything seem logical, plausible, McEwan describes emotions in too much detail; plot points are sold paragraphs in advance, so all you’re left to wallow in as a reader are feelings. And feelings only go so far. Am I evolving as a reader? or is McEwan really regressing as a writer? If the answer to the latter question is yes, then McEwan’s writer’s career fits into what Rick Gekoski has recently described as a usual curve of ascent into maturity and descent until death. Most author’s, Gekoski argues, rarely publish their best work last. But there are exceptions—Philip Roth, Henry James—and perhaps McEwan will count among them. Only time will tell. 

Barnes Gets his Booker

 

 

 

 

And the winner is... Photo courtesy of telegraph.co.uk

The first few weeks of October are always an exciting time because of two very important announcements, which are made around this time every year: the laureate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the winner of the Man Booker Prize. While these two announcements are a big deal in the book world, and generate a lot of critical and journalistic content, there really is little reason for me to get that excited. Every year, I feel increasingly bored by the Booker’s shortlist, and while I’ve read a handful of past winners (sometimes, almost exclusively because they had won), I just don’t feel as compelled as I once did to read them, or even to go out and buy the most recent winner. It seems to me a lot of Booker-winning books end up loosing some resonance after some years. I mean, we still talk about some of the past winners like Margaret Atwood, John Banville, and Yann Martel; but what about Vernon God Little’s 2003-winner DBC Pierre (the shortlist that year included Oryx and Crake and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane) or Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995)? Not to mention the winners in the 70s and 80s, almost all of which I’ve never heard of. As for the Nobel, well, ever since I started getting excited for that prize, circa 2007, I’d never heard of the writers who won it before the announcement itself — and only after Doris Lessing’s victory did I go out and buy one of her books (it was The Cleft, I wasn’t disappointed). That says a lot either about the Swedish academy’s knack for picking obscure geniuses, or else my own ignorance of writers outside the popular circuits. Either way, it’s a known fact that there’s a disconnect between what authors people are reading and talking about (at least in the English-speaking world), and what authors the Swedish academy are reading and talking about — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This year, the winner is the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, on the grounds that “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” On the Nobel Prize’s website, they have house poll that asks you if you’ve read him or not. 82% of the people who answered the poll haven’t. Still, I’m quite happy with the win, especially because it’s apparently been expected for a long time. Every year journalists would go to Tranströmer’s apartment building on the morning of the announcement in case he won the Nobel the world’s biggest literary prize. The poet’s wife would bring them tea and biscuits. Every year, they left disappointed; someone else won the Nobel. This year, there efforts — and, more importantly, Tranströmer’s efforts — were rewarded. 

But back to the Booker, which is our main subject today. It’s become quite controversial this year, and it’s even spurred the creation of a new (as yet unfunded and unnamed) prize, in order to fill the gap left behind by the Booker’s interest in “readability,” the most loaded term in the book world these days, and the one this year’s panel has decided to put at the forefront of their judging criteria. The debate between literary and commercial fiction is hot stuff these days, but it must be remembered that the Booker Prize has always sought to recompense books somewhere between the high and mid-brow.

In this context, Julian Barnes’ victory for his short novel (more of a novella, really) The Sense of an Ending surprised and pleased many. Barnes — white, male, sixty-something, of the McEwan-Amis-Rushdie generation — represents the establishment in British letters, but also a bit of a black sheep on the grounds of his experimentalism with form and his continental outlook. Moreover, this was his fourth Booker in nomination, and critics seem to agree that his book was by far the best on the shortlist. So the literary seems to have won over readability in the end, whatever that means. 

An added bonus: I think The Sense of an Ending also has the most beautiful cover out of all the books on the Booker shortlist.

Although I’ve — shamefully — never read anything by Barnes myself, I must say I’m quite pleased with his victory. I’ve been interested in him from afar for some time, and I think he really is an important and extremely intelligent writer. His short story “Sleeping with John Updike”, published in The Guardian a couple of years ago, is very well done, and his 2000 Art of Fiction interview with The Paris Review, which has a lot to do with France and French Literature (Barnes is an inveterate francophile and one of the most popular British writers in France). I was also very much impressed by a masterful review Barnes wrote last year for Lydia Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary (a book Barnes admires, and calls “the first great shopping and fucking novel”), in which he shows of his shrewdness as critic, translator, and essayist: 

So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its author, and who sympathises with its heroine; a woman, perhaps, to help us better navigate the sexual politics of the time; someone with excellent French and better English, perhaps with a little experience of translating in the opposite direction as well. Then we make a key decision: should this translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours? After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the time, then might we not reasonably imagine the author helping her? Let’s push it further: the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French. They might work side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push it to the limit: the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk.

Barnes, obviously, is an astute thinker, a skillful writer, and a witty person. His Booker is well-deserved, and The Sense of an Ending will certainly end up with my name on it under the Christmas tree this year. Hopefully by then I’ll have picked up some of his other books. 

MULTIPLE SOLITUDES Part 2: Genre & LitFic

China Miéville: Redefining genre fiction. Or maybe just writing damn good stories.

There was an excellent interview with China Miéville, the cult fantasy writer,  in The Guardian couple of weeks ago. The article made quite a big deal of important prejudices against genre fiction, as well as the dangers of genres remaining too insular. I’ve become increasingly aware of this issue in the last few years, partly because I don’t read much so-called genre fiction myself, and also since great things must be happening there too. And there are great things going on, there’s no doubt about it — but are there enough people aware of that? For instance, why did Granta mention Miéville in its 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue, but not include some of his work? Why do the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books never review or mention fantasy or sci-fi books that are just as good as (and, I’m guessing, often better than)  ”mainstream” literary fiction? As Ursula K. Le Guin, the empress of fantasy and sci-fi, would have it: “When he [Miéville] wins the Booker, the whole silly hierarchy will collapse, and literature will be much the better for it.”

But why do genre authors need this kind of recognition? They have their own journals, they have their own prizes (the Nebula, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the Hugo… Miéville has won all of them) Doesn’t that suffice? Are the members of the high brow literati rejecting genre writers on purpose, or are they just trying to cater for another kind of audience? Miéville and other “weird” fiction writers are trying to bring the genre in which they operate somewhere else, in an effort to remove themselves from the cliché of classic orcs-and-goblins fantasy fiction of Tolkien fame. They’re bringing fantasy fiction out of the box, but seeing the criticism the Man Booker Prize has been receiving and the kinds of books that have won it in the past few years, I’m not sure it’s a good thing for these writers to be swimming towards that particular literary establishment. They’re better off letting themselves drift off to more hospitable shores.

Is it useful at all, then, to have genres? Wouldn’t we better off having a giant “fiction” section, encompassing everything from inter-galactic monsters to bodice-ripping highlanders? Let the readers decide among them, so they won’t shy away from books with dragons or cyborgs that they might actually enjoy. The “Literary” sections of bookstores already encompass so many different kinds of books, would it be that much of a stretch? Let’s remember that Margaret Atwood controversially refuses to label her “futuristic” novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, and more recently Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Floor, as science-fiction. She prefers the term “speculative fiction”, because according to her, science-fiction entails “monsters and spaceships” whereas her stories “could really happen.” I wonder: would Oryx and Crake have been shortlisted for the Booker, had it been tagged as Science Fiction? I certainly hope so, but, alarmingly, I’m not a hundred per cent sure. But then, authors are also able to reinvent themselves and skip between genres. Think of Dan Simmons, who has melded poetry and extremely literary content with science fiction elements in his Hyperion Cantos and Ilium series, but has recently delved in the realm of literary horror with novels like The Terror (the story of the Franklin expedition, with a monster), and Drood (a retelling of Dicken’s last years).

The Miéville interview also raises the concept of Literary fiction as an increasingly problematic idea. LitFic, apparently, can be defined as a genre as well, with its own conventions (think Ian McEwan). The problem, according to Miéville, is that LitFic won’t admit to being a genre, and yet asserts its superiority over all other genres. There’s also a massive irony in LitFic being placed above fantasy writing, since the oldest forms of fiction, from Gilgamesh to Beowulf, all have fantastical elements. These kinds of stories are the origins of Western literature, but they’ve recently been relegated to the fringes of fiction. Similarly, the majority of young adult fiction published today combines elements of science-fiction, fantasy, and dystopias. Think Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, or The Hunger Games. But genre is something we grow out of, for some reason — according to Miéville, fantasy writers (and, I suppose, readers) just never do. Or maybe they just don’t get influenced into thinking less of it. The obsession with realism is a fallacy that has remained at the forefront of literary criticism for some time, but it is clearly obsolete as a standard to judge works of fiction.

Last year, Bill Morris wrote a convincing retrospective of Miéville’s work in The Millions. He talks about his own literary education as a reader of “High Brow Rot”, with very few “mainstream” or “genre” books slipping through the literary cracks. Then, Miéville came into Morris’ life, and with his mix of energetic story telling, vivid writing, and engaging worlds, he opened his eyes to whole new worlds. Morris writes: “By the time I finished reading Miéville’s novels I had come to understand that what matters most about fiction is not somebody else’s idea of what’s great, what’s good or, worse yet, what’s good for you. What matters is a writer’s ability to create a world that comes alive through its specifics and then leads us to universal truths. Miéville engages me with his writing because he is brilliant and because he cares about me as a reader, and this, I’ve come to see, is far more precious than a book’s classification, its author’s reputation, or the size of its audience.”

Reviewing all of these statements and what they tell us about the current literary landscape, the only conclusion I can come to is that writers should be praised and rewarded on the basis of good writing, not what they write about — be it time traveling aliens or realistic suburban women.