HENRY, HIMSELF by Stewart O'Nan

HENRY, HIMSELF

STEWART O'NAN






How do you capture a character's entire life in a novel? Do you write a grand, sweeping doorstop that details every important moment of the character's time on Earth chronologically? You can. However, in his seventeenth (!) novel Stewart O'Nan narrows the focus, concentrating on just a single year in the life of his protagonist, Henry Maxwell.





Henry's seventy-five, a man who's lived his entire life in Pittsburgh; he worked as an engineer, even working on rocket programs, but these days his life is much simpler. He's what comes to mind when you think of a typical father and grandfather; Henry spends most of his free time at his workbench, fussing with household projects, endlessly fiddling and tinkering; in social gatherings he's reserved, usually letting his charismatic wife Emily carry conversations, and he's tried to take a neutral approach when it comes to dealing with the problems of his children. But in Henry, Himself we learn that there's a lot boiling underneath Henry's placid surface; hearing classical music reminds him of his first great crush. She was his childhood piano teacher, a captivating German woman who, after a year, moves back to her home country and (Henry assumes) dies during World War Two. Emily's gentle teasing about his love of leftovers reminds him of desperately eating a horse he and his troop found in a flattened French barn. Planting flowers brings him bittersweet memories of his white-hot romance with Sloan, a socialite with whom he had an affair after the war, a secret he's never revealed to Emily.




This isn't the first time O'Nan's written about Henry. Wish You Were Here follows the Maxwell family at their summer cottage a year after Henry's death. Emily, Alone picks up eight years later and gives us deep insights into Emily, a country girl who transformed herself into a city woman, hard to please and full of passion, someone who still misses her husband greatly. Each time the reader gets the feeling that O'Nan is returning to these characters because he has more to say, which makes perfect sense with this book; in both of the previous Maxwell novels Henry's always been a (metaphorical) ghost hovering just out of frame, recollected when Emily throws away her old luggage or finally trades in Henry's ancient station wagon.

In Henry, Himself we learn that Henry, who always seemed to absolve himself of family drama, is in fact intensely curious, eavesdropping on his children when they visit, trying to figure out their lives from afar. He's the kind of man who organizes his receipts in reverse chronological order and hesitates to call professionals to clean the gutters even with it's raining heavily outside. His stubbornness is both a positive and, as his body begins to betray him, a curse; more and more he has to rely on his son Kenny to do laborious projects at their cabin in Chautauqua. He putters around the house, waiting for the mail, and there's even a (surprisingly funny) chapter in which Henry literally watches the grass grow, determined to make his lawn green once again after years of urinary assaults by his dog Rufus.




He worries about his daughter Margaret, an alcoholic who can never seem to get a handle on her finances, and is concerned that Emily will die before him, leaving him alone. Readers of the other Maxwell books know the sad truth: Henry doesn't have much time left, and Emily will live on for at least a decade without him.

The great gift of Henry, Himself is that O'Nan gives us a chance to spend some intimate time with a man fiction lovers have been hearing about from time to time since 2002; we get to watch him stealthily sneak candy bars out of the freezer and pay his taxes and walk Rufus and struggle to make gravy. Even after reading 370 pages we wish that Henry was still here.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Enlarged to show texture

You haven't even finished restocking the cooler when you notice three customers standing in front of the register, your coworker is late again, and the store's front doors refuse to open. Each of those incidents isn't a massive issue for a retail worker, but piled together they create a frustrating frenzy—in the white-collar world there are layers and layers of bosses, but in retail every single person you meet is your boss and can treat you as they please.

Keiko Furukura, the main character of Convenience Store Woman, thrives in this environment. She's in her mid-thirties and has been working at the same Tokyo store part-time since opening day. An oddball since childhood (she once tried to attack a classmate with a shovel, and considered frying up a dead bird in a park for yakitori) Keiko doesn't know how to operate in the adult world and chose a dead-end job as a way to find her bearings. That was eighteen years ago—her friends have moved away, raised children, become career women. Yet she has stayed in the exact same place, clocking in and out at the same times, eagerly taking on extra shifts. She lives in a tiny, roach-infested apartment and, perhaps most alarmingly, sleeps in her closet.

Should we pity Keiko? Perhaps not, because she knows the needs of her Smile Mart store better than she knows herself—the store speaks to her. When Keiko closes her eyes at night she imagines the staff cooking frankfurters and creating new displays of rice balls. When she's inside the store, even on her days off, it whispers in her ear, telling her exactly what it needs to reach retail perfection.

This novel drives home the differing views Japanese and Americans have on work; I couldn't help comparing Murata's gentle prose about convenience stores, full of eager-to-please employees, to Kevin Smith's sneering Gen-X take on retail, Clerks:

Sass and flannel 

Of course I'm biased as a lifelong American, but I can't help but prefer the more honest “this job blows but I need it” attitude so many U.S. retail workers wear on their sleeve. Japan's world-renowned obsession with creating excellent customer service, with impeccable stores and Stepford Wife-robotic staff, has a downsides—employees work overtime knowing they'll never be compensated, and workers are expected to be cloyingly upbeat (Smile Mart has a morning staff pep rally reminiscent of Wal-Mart). Keiko muses at one point that “When morning comes, once again I'm a convenience store worker, a cog in society. This is the only way I can be a normal person.”

The worst pressures in Keiko's life exist outside the store—because of her age and lack of a “real” job, her relatives and friends find every opportunity to match her with a husband and a real career. Keiko has excuses she's stockpiled over the years to explain away her life choices, but more and more she realizes that she is nothing without the Smile Mart: “'More than a person, I'm a convenience store worker. Even if that means I'm abnormal and can't make a living and drop down dead, I can't escape that fact. My very cells exist for the convenience store'.”

Convenience Store Woman is a skinny book, which is good; I think novels that are speaking directly to working men and women should be sized with employee lockers in mind. Some of the social awkwardness that Keiko feels about fitting in seems almost too quaint sometimes but, then again, societal pressure to find a husband and a domestic life is more intense in Japan than in this country.

Interestingly, as of this novel's publication in America (it was published in Japan in 2016) Murata is still working at a convenience store part-time, despite the book's massive international success. Maybe the store is whispering in her ear, too.

BEFORE THE WIND by Jim Lynch

BEFORE THE WIND

JIM LYNCH

Publisher: Knopf

Year: 2016

Hardcover...cover. Chip Kidd kicks ass.

I've never gone out of my way to read a novel about sailing. I live in a seaside town that attracts a fair share of nautically-inclined tourists each year, and you can spot them a mile away—the over-starched polo shirts, the alarmingly tight  blue shorts. As any local could tell you, a certain country-club snottiness hovers around these men like bad aftershave: your hometown is, to them, a glorified playground. So I picked up Before the Wind with some hesitation; would I be subjected to romantic blathering about fancy yachts and the daffy one-percenters who foolishly pour their bank accounts into them?

My worries were misplaced, because early on Joshua Johannssen, our protagonist, makes it clear that he's not among the yachting class; he's a modest boat repair man, eking out a living in Olympia, Washington, near Seattle. He's got tales to tell: “Consider the new owner of that gutted twenty-one foot speedboat against the fence there. He rammed the gas dock so hard last week that he tore a hole in the bow because he couldn't find the brake.” However, Joshua isn't just a blue-collar wise-ass, he's descended from sailing royalty. The Johannsssens owned the seas of Washington for decades, his father so skilled at carving through the waves that he won an Olympic silver medal. Through flashbacks we learn that Joshua's gifted sister Ruby nearly made the Olympics herself before dramatically throwing it all away, wanting a different life for herself. And Joshua's brother Bernard, a rebel since childhood, has fled to the South Pacific after becoming a fugitive.

The paperback cover, a real gem.

Joshua, compared to his speedboat siblings, is a dependable tugboat. He helps his neighbors with their boats (he, naturally, lives on a houseboat) and tries to find the perfect match through the wonders of online dating...which never goes well. Let's just say that he ends up dressed like a turtle in a parade at one point. He's watched his entire family explode and go off in different directions, most of them adrift.

This is what I loved most about Before the Wind—most other writers would have written about the early, triumphant days of the Johannssens, a tight unit that lived happily in a rambling shack lovingly called the Teardown, watching Mary Tyler Moore re-runs and coming up with creative ways to win the next race. However, Lynch firmly places the action in the present; like Joshua, we miss the eccentric, bombastic family with all their faults and personal weaknesses.

That's when Ruby comes back into everyone's lives to talk them into having one more race; she lives in Canada, and no one really knows where Bernard is month-to-month, but Joshua knows that he can bring them all together. There's so much to discover in this book: the mystery of Ruby, who seems to literally levitate as she sails; Bernard's shady smuggling; and Joshua's coworker at the repair shop, Noah, who is haunted by his father's end-of-days prophecies (he's even erected a billboard in town proclaiming that the END IS NEAR that torments Noah as he works). Joshua has a personality of his own—shy, reserved, yet razor sharp in his analysis—but the greatest gifts of this book are the boatload of wacky folks that bob in and out of the story like Grady, another one of Joshua's boat mates who lives in a rotting yacht that he (foolishly, romantically) wants to restore to its former glory, complete with a baby grand piano. 

Lynch always reminds us there's an end on the horizon as the final race gets closer and closer, but he's not afraid to stop and breathe in the sea air, like with this passage: “For a full hour I had the planet to myself, my wake fanning out some mysterious message across the glassy inlet, the sky and trees more vivid in reflection than in reality.” And he can't resist muddying all that beauty with the bitter truth: “Then, so swiftly, the mirror faded, and the harsh sun illuminated the humdrum of yet another day, I-5 droning in the background.”

I'd argue that's the main thrust of the book. Joshua's dad is an aggressive romantic who is convinced that any problem or setback can be solved with verbal swagger and bullying (he even makes deckhands jump overboard if they carry too much wait). He's desperate for relive his past victory, the glory of being validated by the sailing world once again, on the other side of greatness. Joshua, however, can see that there's more to life than sailing; the bad dates and frustrating boat repairs and family arguments make life that much richer. Lynch is like a boxer, never letting the novel become too sentimental, adding a cold splash of setback anytime Joshua thinks he has it all figured out.

I'm thrilled to see that Lynch has written three more novels; I'm skeptical they'll all me as genuinely moving and funny as Before the Wind, but I'm filling to wade into the deep end to find out.