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.

POEMS: NEW AND SELECTED by Ron Rash

This is that time of year where the nights become longer and early afternoon sun seems to linger in the sky longer than ever; where leaves coat the pavement in red-and-orange fractal patterns. It's a great time of year for poetry, especially poems by North Carolina native Ron Rash, who focuses on quiet moments, the short distance between life and death, the impact that landscapes have on the human heart.

Ron Rash

Here's the opening to one of the best poems in the book, "Under Jocassee":

One summer morning when
the sky is blue and deep
as the middle of the lake,
rent a boat and shadow
Jocassee's western shoreline
until you reach the cove that
once was the Horsepasture River.
Now bow your head and soon
you'll see as through a mirror
not a river but a road
flowing underneath you.

It's an eerie image--a road far beneath the water, hinting at a submerged past. This is one the most important aspects of Rash's writing--the past is still there, lurking slightly under the surface, not at all hard to find.

In other poem, "Black-Eyed Susan", we meet an elderly farmer who lives next to a cemetery, and one day finds a Black-Eyed Susan with an attached note that has blown onto his property:

Always was all that is said,
which said enough for I knew
what grave that note belonged to,
and knew as well who wrote it,
he and her married three months
when he died, now always young,
always their love in the first bloom,
too new to life to know life
was no honeymoon. Instead,
she learned that lesson with me

His wife has left the note on her former lover's grave, and he's constantly that a part of her heart still yearns for another. After his wife passes away, the farmer makes a visit to the graveyard:

I'll cross the pasture, make sure
her stone's not starting to lean,
if it's early summer bring
black-eyed susans for her grave,
leave a few on his as well,
for soon enough we'll all be
sleeping together

Those last lines are funny and bleak in equal measure. Rash loves to tell us a sentimental story that ends on a bittersweet note. In "In the Barn", the narrator and his cousin sneak into a barn to escape a storm:

We settled as well, let straw
pillow our heads as rain tucked
its loud hush tighter around us.
My cousin lay on his back,
eyes closed, hands on chest as though
already getting ready
for a wake eight years away,

Perhaps the strongest section of the book is "Eureka Mill", which focuses on the lives of workers in a Carolina mill town, farmers who fled their dying land to make a living in unforgiving factories. In "Mill Village", one worker buys a painting to hang on his ramshackle wall:

Sometimes at night if I was feeling low,
I'd stuff my ears with cotton. Then I'd stare
up at that picture like it was a window,
and I was back home listening to the farm.

Another, "Accident", sadly needs no introduction:

But her baby had been sick, kept her awake
three nights in a row. She was so tired
she barely kept her head up. When she didn't
those flyers grabbed her hair, would not let go
until her scalp came too. I guess she screamed
though who could hear her over the machines.

These mill workers wreck their bodies, their relationships, and their spirit for measly paydays. In "Black and White", we see Colonel Springs and his family posing for a Christmas photo, dressed up as workers as a gag:

The Colonel placed himself behind a cart
filled up with bobbins, arms taut, brow creased.
His wife stood behind him, her hair tied back
to authenticate the blank look on her face.
The children too pretended they were working,
leaned their lean bodies against a machine.

However, even the slimy mill owner is given a shade of humanity by Rash, in "Plane Crash", although even the Colonel's grief is a posture:

The next day he was back at work
and never showed his son has died,
so we said nothing, let him pass,
glad he understood the need
for him to act like even death
could never make him one of us.

In 166 pages of poems we get what feels like a complete overview of Carolina mountain country; the occasional joy and frequent despair of its residents, the unforgiving landscape that isolates them from the rest of the world. Rash ends his collection with a few new poems, my favorite of which is "Direction", about a late night traveler on an unfamiliar road:

but what opens the heart's need
wide as this night are the rooms
lit as if someone waits up
to give directions should you
lose your way on this bypass
back to your knowable life.

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.

The Only Story by Julian Barnes

THE ONLY STORY

JULIAN BARNES

Pages (hardcover): 272

Date: 2018

“Most of us only have one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.”

Julian Barnes

On the very first page Barnes suggests (via his latest novel's narrator, Paul Casey) that The Only Story will be an emotionally heavy read, a book that deals with life's most important moments. The premise is simple enough—Paul's nineteen at the start of the novel, a restless young man bored with the stilted, mannered life of the London suburbs in the 1960s. However, the Paul telling us his story is an elderly man looking back on his entire life, not wistfully but with gritted teeth, which gives the entire book an air of nostalgia and melancholy.

Artwork based on The Only Story, made by Cat O'Neil for the Financial Times

Paul is impatient with ceremony and cultural formalities. When he meets Susan, a woman nearly thirty years his senior with a similar distaste for the tedious, he falls in love head-first; he's impulsive and, intriguingly, proud of his impulsiveness. Paul sees his college friends finding similarly-aged mates and he can't help but notice that, comparatively, his love affair seems riskier, bolder.

And it is an affair. Paul learns early on that Susan is married with two daughters, yet she doesn't seem happy with her comfortable life. Her husband Gordon (who spends most of his days eating spring onions, planting cabbages and solving crossword puzzles) is a bore both in the living and bed rooms, if you follow my meaning. They stumble into a semi-secretive romance, and it's this aspect that gives The Only Story the ring of truth. Gordon is aware of their relationship from the beginning and does nothing to stop their meetings, content to putter around his garden.

As their love deepened, I hoped that we were reading about the sort of relationship halted not by a dimming of passion but rather practical matters; after all, it was quite difficult for a women to obtain a divorce in the 1960s. Even when the ever-docile Gordon suddenly becomes physically abusive (though Paul learns later that he had been emotionally abusing Susan for years) and knocks out Susan's front teeth, Paul realizes that she will never tell the police, or even her dentist, the real story.

The Only Story is split into three sections, and the first section concerns itself entirely with their courtship, their love, and the revelations about Gordon. In the second section Paul wisely convinces Susan to run away from her abusive husband and live with him. Few approve—not his parents, nor Susan's children, though Gordon surprises by becoming contrite, ashamed that he has ruined their marriage. Paul isn't particularly concerned about the supposed sanctity of matrimony; he loves Susan, her quirks and her pet sayings (calling him “Casey Paul”, or looking at him out of the blue and asking “Where have you been all my life?”)

The second section may be the hardest to get through—Paul understands, too late, that Susan's occasional drinking has slid into full-blown alcoholism, and that realization changes the entire tenor of their relationship; he's still in college, yet quickly becomes her caretaker, making excuses for friends and marking bottles to “monitor” her intake. Their idyllic life together becomes bleaker and bleaker. Paul (like the reader) is keenly aware that in a sense this is his fault—he broke Susan away from her mundane life. Paul saw himself as a savior, but soon learns that his love is not a cure and that, worse, she seems more miserable than before. Is she still reeling from Gordon's abuse? Is she embarrassed that she's broken up her family? As in life, it's hard to pinpoint the exact cause, but the effect is obvious—Susan is ruining her mind with drink.

One of my favorite aspects of The Only Story is Barnes' startling decision to switch point of view; most of the book is written in the first person, but sometimes he switches to a wise second person point of view, or an even more removed and remote third person point of view. The bits that cover Paul's guilt-ridden decision to leave Susan, after a number of failed hospital visits and therapy sessions, are mostly written in third person; it's not hard to assume that Paul, even after so many decades, is reluctant to directly write “I left her”; living with that fact is difficult enough.

The third section is the most introspective. Paul has gone from telling us tales from decades past to his more recent life. He has tried to move from Susan, which he finds utterly impossible. He takes on jobs that move him across the globe; he checks in with his former lover from time to time and is pained to see that booze has blasted away her memory of their life together. He has relationships that don't last, friendships that end when he moves to the next job.

By the end, we realize that the most painful part of their love isn't that he left her or that they couldn't share their lives together. It's that, because of their age difference and her alcoholism, she fades so thoroughly and completely, from both her own life and his. After moving back to England and setting up a bland, if comfortable, life for himself, Paul goes to visit her one last time at a mental health facility. Though never specified, it seems that by this point Paul is in his sixties, meaning Susan is nearing ninety. By now, Paul admits that a lot of the finer points of their love life together are harder to summon up, and that the woman in the hospital contains no real trace of the Susan he knew. He tries to conjure concrete memories of her, but that part of his life is falling out of view..

It's important to note that this is one of the first books written since the sudden death of his long-time wife, and agent, Pat Kavanagh. Barnes discussed his grief brilliantly in Levels of Life, again using a distancing mechanism (in this case, a section on the history of ballooning, then a section about a balloon operator falling in love with an actress, then, almost reluctantly, Barnes' very personal story of loss) that underlies just how difficult it is to directly face losing the love of your life.

The Only Story is a bleak book; Paul can be wickedly funny, but his tale isn't a happy one. I love the respect that Barnes shows his readers. I don't want the candy-coated version, I want the honest story...the only story.

Introduction/Room to Dream

Welcome to my new blog! The premise is simple--I love books and have assembled quite a few. My to-read pile has, more and more, begun to look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. So I'll be sharing my thoughts on books I've read. I love contemporary literary fiction, but I'll be reading the occasional non-fiction book (like this week!), old Vintage Contemporaries titles from the 1980s, and even the occasional horror book--whatever else ends up on the aforementioned stack.

Today I want to talk about “Room to Dream”, a quaint memoir about a Depression-era orphan who survived America's uncaring foster system to become a patent attorney in Omaha.

Okay, okay, I'm kidding. but seriously, look at that cover; the cute childhood photo and the title's sketchy, childish font all scream “earnest book club memoir”. I passed it by completely until I saw this guy on the back...

“Room to Dream” is an exhaustive memoir/biography about David Lynch, the cult filmmaker/painter/singer/dead animal fetishist. He made Twin Peaks, one of my favorite shows, and unforgettable movies like Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead, so I knew I had to crack that spine. The book, as with so many things involving Lynch, is odd since it's split into two very different sections. The first is a straight-ahead, chronological retelling of Lynch's life by journalist Kristine McKenna. She spent decades interviewing Lynch's family, friends, lovers, actors and assistants about how a funny, exuberant Midwest kid (he was born in Montana but spent most of his formative years in Boise, Idaho) became a renowned artist known for disturbing and unsettling his audiences. The other sections of the book, nestled in-between McKenna's chapters, are ostensibly written by Lynch himself (they read more like long form interviews) and feature his reactions to what McKenna has written about his life. Sometimes he corrects her reportage, but usually they're in agreement.

McKenna's sections were perfect for readers like me; I've watched dozens of interviews with Lynch, but never thought much about his upbringing. Room to Dream starts by exploring the Midwest in the 1950s, fulll of immaculate picket fences, clean sidewalks, glistening buildings free of graffitti; a time when neighborhood kids roamed the street until dinnertime. This is Lynch's world—he clearly pines for those long-lost days of innocence. Some of his favorite memories including watching friends build rockets in their backyards and spending time with his grandfather just before he died. However, there are darker shades to these early recollections—Lynch also remembers seeing a bloodied, naked woman walking down the street at night when he was just a child, an image that troubled him for years.

The back-and-forth nature of the book takes some getting used to, but I think it's the best balance. McKenna's writing is thorough, walking us through his turbulent adolencense, his myramid of high school crushes, and a chance encounter with a classmate's dad that showed him that people could be painters and live “the art life”. She leaves no stone unturned, but after a while the blow-by-blow accounts becomes bland; that's when Lynch comes in to spice up the narrative. Unsurprisingly, he remembers the little things—the texture of the wallpaper in the first home he purchased, the bizarre earthen displays he built on his kitchen table, the mural he painted on his apartment ceiling. McKenna's sections are the body, and Lynch's sections are the blood pumping through its veins.

Your mileage with this book will vary. If you only know Lynch from Twin Peaks, buckle up—the show isn't mentioned until page 239. However, the book does cover all his projects, from short films like “The Cowboy and the Frenchman” to even...lesser work (sorry hardcore Lynchians!) like his astoundingly awful album Crazy Klown Time. The book also covers his fascination with Transcendental Meditation; personally, it reminded me of a less-aggressive Scientology, with actors getting gigs only after meditating with him at TM facilities and former lovers being eased out of his life after showing no interest in the practice. Lynch is a creative genius, but seems naive about how the group uses his name and money for their own purposes.

Personally, I was hoping for a little more insights about the years between Eraserhead's completion and his wider fame; Lynch's first wife states that their life in California was a literal “rags to riches” story, but it feels like McKenna skipped a beat. On one page Lynch is a broke man living in a lousy apartment with a young daughter, but within a few pages he's shooting The Elephant Man in London with name actors and living what seems to be a comfortable life. Perhaps that's how quickly it happened in reality, but the transition was too jarring after spending so long reading about a Lynch who seemed allergic to pursuing mainstream success.

That said, Room to Dream is essential reading for any serious Lynch fan. If you've ever wondered how he shoots so many videos and records so much music out of his own house (a truckload of assistants) or how much he misses the late, great Harry Dean Stanton (a lot), it's all in there.

Sweet dreams.