Fools of Fortune - William Trevor
The atrocity at the core of this novel is handled with skill. Initially the reader isn’t clear as to what happened, but slowly the facts emerge. More importantly, the human implications grow over time (especially in the way the mother is affected). An act of such destructiveness will never loosen its grip on the victims – it has a life of its own. Trevor is successful with the character of Willie, in a first person narration that makes up the bulk of the book and which covers Willie’s life from boy to young man. But the novel has an unwieldy construction (a common feature of Trevor’s work – one that may have discouraged many readers). Most confusing is that Willie addresses what he’s writing to a “you,” but it takes far too long before we know who “you” is. When she meant something to me I wanted to reread the sections where Willie talks directly to Marianne, but that would mean searching back through the pages. Also, it turns out that we’re reading a letter that was never sent, written by an old man. After the Willie section Marianne becomes the first person narrator. Maybe, in trying to make the voice of a young girl contrast with Willie’s, Trevor overcompensates; she comes across as a bit soppy. Next he presents their child, Imelda, in the third person. Imelda reconstructs the past in her imagination, using scraps of information, but this isn’t convincing; nor is her madness; nor is Willie’s lengthy exile; nor is the idyllic coming together of the lovers in old age. The book sags badly under the weight of too many false turns. I think Trevor felt strongly about this material, and at the end he tried to force his feelings on the reader. That never works.

Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness - Kenzaburo Oe (Japanese)
This book consists of four stories. I couldn’t read more than two pages of the first – it was experimental, very weird, and I hadn’t the energy or inclination to struggle through it. “Prize Stock” was readable and engrossing (and provocative in its depiction of the black airman as an animal – he’s the “prize stock”). It’s raw, gross, primal; when he’s working in this mode Oe hammers at the reader and pitches emotions almost to the point of hysteria (which is what many of his characters feel); but the stridency seemed unwarranted. Two of the other stories concern the event that came to dominate Oe’s life: the birth of his retarded son (call the boy autistic if you wish, but Oe uses much more blunt and cruel terms than “retarded”). Their bizarre premises and awkward plotting make them oddities. I think I’ve read Oe’s masterpiece – A Personal Matter – and I should give up on him.

The Stone Angel - Margaret Laurence
The clarity of the writing of The Stone Angel reinforces my belief that plot obfuscation and stylistic ornamentation are mostly just clutter. Laurence presents Hagar with such honesty and in such depth that she became someone I was emotionally involved with. The novel is framed so that we see an entire life unfold from the perspective of old age (Hagar is ninety). Her determination to be independent – something that she clung to willfully since she was a young girl – is eroded by infirmities; this she cannot abide. Old age is a loss of dignity, a loss of control, a disintegration of body and mind. The petty forms these losses take are shown to be of great importance. How we want to hold onto even our simplest powers! Hagar’s struggle has a nobility; that she loses this struggle is inevitable, but she fights to her last moment. And what of the life behind her? Hagar probably never said, to anyone,“I love you.” Not to her father, her husband, her sons. Much that she did and said was hurtful, critical, harsh. She’s to blame for all the missteps, lost opportunities, and disappointments littering her past. But I could understand her; in her father she had a bad role model, and early on we’re locked into a way of responding to others. During her final weeks she tries to express feelings of compassion (particularly to her beleaguered son), but her attempts are faltering, given grudgingly. She cannot do more, and that’s the tragedy of her life. *

The Silent Cry - Kenzaburo Oe (Japanese)

A huge letdown after A Personal Matter. Doubts set in at the halfway mark and were fully confirmed at the end. The book is over-populated, over-written, over-plotted. There’s much agonizing, and Oe constantly leads the reader to believe that profound revelations will be revealed. They never materialize. What we get is pretentious, awkward, false in its portrayal of human nature. And, worst of all, foolish.

Friend of My Youth - Alice Munro

Many of these stories meander around the emotions of women; they’re baggy, unfocused and too long. Munro experiments, goes through stages, and this was one of her stages. Despite being baggy and unfocused and long, “Wigtime” and “Differently” succeed in part because the characters and situations are engrossing; but it’s the muted mood of melancholy suffusing these stories that give them resonance. “Pictures of the Ice” is the most straightforward piece (which is the approach Munro should stick to). It begins with an enigmatic premise; the ending resolves the enigma perfectly. Three very good ones.

Warlock - Oakley Hall

Hall takes the stereotypes of the wild west – characters and situations we’re overly familiar with – and deepens them, gives them complexity. The real humans behind the stereotypes emerge. Hall is concerned with moral choices, difficult ones; the west of the 1800s provides an ideal backdrop to explore right and wrong. This is a long book, with many characters, many plot threads; it provokes thought and at times it surprises – but the changes people go through are convincing. At the novel’s core is Johnny Gannon, a man engaged in a lonely struggle with himself – a struggle that I became intimately involved in. *

 

Anthills of the Savannah - Chinua Achebe

Achebe wrote Anthills more than twenty years after his previous novel, and he had clearly lost it. Lost what? – his ability to write well or his desire to do so? The book is sloppy in both its construction and the prose; the characters are wooden and unconvincing. What pervades this undertaking is a sourness. The sourness is justified (Achebe was writing about the politics of Africa), but he presented his story artlessly. I stopped reading at the halfway point.

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel - George Meredith

A Victorian novel done in Meredith’s intricate style – his prose is crafted like delicate metal latticework. The author expects the reader to be as intelligent as he is, which can be demanding. Still, this is interesting as a psychological study. Did the impetuous, foolhardy pride Richard displayed as a boy compel him as a man to go through with a duel he could have avoided? The book has depth and ambiguity, and that’s good. The problem is that the main characters are almost feverish in their emotions (did people in Victorian times really carry on this way?). The minor players stay earthbound, and succeed very well there.

The Finishing School - Muriel Spark

This is a long short story packaged as a novel. The author, nearly ninety, doesn’t have the wicked bite of years ago; her attitude toward her flawed characters is one of mild amusement. Her subject is publishing and the relationships between writers, focusing on their machinations to achieve success. Though cynical (I liked her use of the word “crap” to describe the novel that has long been the mysterious center of attention), this is no New Grub Street. Still, I enjoyed my leisurely stroll with Dame Muriel.

A Personal Matter - Kenzaburo Oe (Japanese)

Dark, passionate, driven, this is a cathartic journey in which Oe succeeds in digging deep into a character (Bird) and at the same time giving us a dilemma worthy of the intensity. The novel moves the reader to turn the page but also compels him to go places emotionally. Oe presents his intimate story in a direct, easy to read style, though the matters he explores are densely tangled, almost too complex to deal with. There’s a lot of sex, much of it distasteful, but it’s an integral part of what Bird experiences. Nothing Oe does is gratuitous; he cared far too much. This novel is raw honesty, but raw honesty is very difficult to convey artfully. Problems with the book? The ending is too abrupt. Maybe Oe couldn’t do justice to the tangle he had created without another fifty pages, and he wasn’t up to that task. Himiko, an extremely appealing, well-drawn female character, is given the short shrift, which I kind of resented (because I cared about her). But I forgive Oe for these shortcomings. He wrote a great novel. *