June 10 & 17, 2019 Issue

This week’s issue (“The Fiction Issue: Border Crossings”) has an interesting section called “Another Country” comprising five pieces: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “Hereafter, Faraway”; Orhan Pamuk’s “Geneva, 1959”; Min Jin Lee’s “Stonehenge”; Jennifer Egan’s “Hard Seat”; and Dinaw Mengestu’s “Poorly Mapped.” Each piece is an account of an experience that the writer had while living or traveling in a foreign place. All are terrific. Here are a few samples:

In the photos, I look like the son I will have forty years later. We are walking between two rows of rubber trees, their monumental trunks and canopies forming a natural cathedral. They tower over my mother as my mother towers over me. We are unaware that within a year or so, fleeing the Communist invasion, we will be walking again, this time for hundreds of kilometres, with thousands of others. I will become a refugee for the first time, my mother for the second. [“Hereafter, Faraway”]

It had been a happy time for me since I’d learned to read and write, the year before. I’d read aloud every advertisement and piece of graffiti that my eyes landed on. I had kept this up in Geneva, reciting any agglomeration of letters I came across: MARTINI, PICON, ESSO, HELVETIA. Words like these, and numbers, had been the foundation of my mother’s French lessons that summer. But I was having trouble now picking any of them out from the language that was spoken in the classroom. At home, every word had been like a strange and unique bird. But at school the words seemed to swoop across the sky like a flock, no single bird distinguishable from the whole. [“Geneva, 1959”]

It can’t be true that the whole class had light-colored eyes, but, as I remember it, a dozen pairs of lovely blue, green, and hazel eyes looked at me with surprise and pity because I hadn’t heard of the prehistoric stone configuration. They didn’t mean to be unkind. I’m sure of that. But, in their attractive, polished faces, I saw that Stonehenge was as familiar to them as having a gun held to my face was to me. [“Stonehenge”]

Ah, the hubris of the young English speaker whose knowledge of Chinese consisted, in my case, of being able to count to ten. Not a word, or even a letter, much less a brand name, in English was to be seen in Guangzhou. To buy train tickets to Kunming, we had to ask someone at our hotel to write “Kunming” in Chinese on a slip of paper, which we slid through a mousehole-shaped opening to a ticket seller, along with some yuan, in exchange for tickets whose multiple pages evinced an ominous complexity. [“Hard Seat”]

The guards made me delete the photos I had travelled seven thousand miles to take. They shooed the crowd and me away and then disappeared behind the palace gates. Rather than turn toward home, I followed the man who had come to my aid down a long, winding road. I had no idea where I was going and was soon lost in an intricate network of unnamed streets, alleyways, and footpaths that my map would never have been able to account for. When I finally reached home, long after the sun had set, my aunt wasn’t angry so much as amused by my misadventure. “I told you,” she said, “not to leave alone.” [“Poorly Mapped”]

Another absorbing piece in this week’s issue is Han Ong’s short story "Javi." It’s about a fourteen-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant who persuades a famous eighty-two-year-old painter living alone in New Mexico to hire him as a helper. He soon becomes her companion. The painter is identified only as “the painter,” but she’s a dead ringer for Agnes Martin. Ong’s conjuring of the painter's thinking, talking, and painting is transfixing. He puts us squarely there in the studio with her and Javi. Here’s his description of her painting:

She is following some internal prompt that comes out as stacked lines, equidistant from one another, all the way from the top to the bottom of the canvas. You’d think, given the narrow range of her material and motifs, that the paintings would look like the same thing over and over, but it’s striking how much variation can be wrung out of a subtle shift in color, or a different spacing between the parallel lines, or even the thickness of the lines. Sometimes, drawing these lines, she becomes so mesmerized that her tongue hangs out like a dog’s, and her eyes glaze over, as if some inner spirit had become dominant.

That “She is following some internal prompt that comes out as stacked lines, equidistant from one another, all the way from the top to the bottom of the canvas” is brilliant. The whole piece is brilliant, blending life and art, or, as Ong says, "life-life" and "art-life." 

In Praise of John Updike's Criticism (Contra James Wood)

John Updike (Illustration by Tom Bachtell)

James Wood, in his recent interview with Isaac Chotiner (Slate, August 18, 2015), makes explicit what I’ve always suspected – his distaste for John Updike’s criticism. Chotiner says to him, “And yet, I never liked, say, John Updike’s criticism, just because I felt like he was always just sort of going through the motions of telling me what the book was about.” Wood replies,

I know, I never liked it either. The redescription in Updike’s criticism is obviously of a high order, and [of] a certain kind of generosity, too—that’s to say, he was a very patient and hospitable quoter of other people’s texts. But I always felt that there was a certain kind of ungenerousness in Updike’s work, too. The maddening equilibrium of his critical voice—never getting too upset or too excited—enacted, I always felt, a kind of strategy of containment, whereby everything could be diplomatically sorted through, and somehow equalized and neutralized, and put onto the same shelf—and always one rung below Updike himself. That’s perhaps unfair. But I think his fiction worked in the same way, too, despite the passionate attention of his prose: It existed to clothe the world in superb words, to contain it, somehow.

Well, there’s no accounting for taste. The great literary critic of my life is Updike. His reviews are like no others; they show how criticism can be a breathtaking art in itself.  

As an offset against Wood’s sour remarks, I want to quote a passage from Orhan Pamuk’s "Updike at Rest" (New York Times Sunday Book Review, April 17, 2014), a review of Adam Begley’s Updike:

In 1985, on my first visit to America, I found a copy of Updike’s recently published “Hugging the Shore” in a secondhand-book shop. In this collection of book reviews (written in large part for The New Yorker), I discovered an Updike who had been invisible from Istanbul: Updike the essayist. For years thereafter, I bought The New Yorker just in case it might contain one of his reviews. As his admirer Julian Barnes once wrote, it may be difficult to find anyone who has read all of Updike’s books. But I may well have read all of his essays, as collected in “Picked-Up Pieces,” “Hugging the Shore,” “Odd Jobs,” “More Matter,” “Due Considerations” and the posthumously published “Higher Gossip.” These book reviews and, later, his art reviews collected in “Just Looking,” “Still Looking” and the posthumously published “Always Looking,” have given me as much pleasure as his novels, and in fact reading Updike’s invariably sensitive, fair and entertaining essays has changed the way I read his fiction, armed with the knowledge that those novels and stories have been written by perhaps one of the world’s most distinguished men of letters.

These words make me smile; I totally identify with them. Updike’s critical writings have been a tremendous source of pleasure in my life, too. From the wonderful Updike collections that Pamuk mentions, here are a dozen of my favorite lines:

In the interminable rain of his prose, I felt goodness. [“Remembrance of Things Past Remembered,” in Picked-Up Pieces]

He slices up ordinary experience into paper-thin transparencies and feeds it back in poetic printout. [“Layers of Ambiguity,” in Hugging the Shore]

Mind permeates Bellow’s renderings; permeability is the essence of his fluid, nervous, colorful mimetic art. [“Draping Radiance with a Worn Veil,” in Hugging the Shore]

And what is a cop kebap? The prose tells us, and something of present-day, real-life Istanbul springs into being. [“Dutchmen and Turks,” in Odd Jobs]

Beauty lives, surely, in a harmonious excitement of particulars. [“Logic Is Beautiful,” in Still Looking]

The will to describe, the willingness to be transported by details of the humble actual, is a novelist’s requisite [“Worlds and Worlds,” in Hugging the Shore]

His lavish, rippling notations of persons, furniture, habiliments, and vistas awaken us to what is truly there. [“Toppling Towers Seen by a Whirling Soul,” in Hugging the Shore]

Love of language might be an answer – language as a semi-opaque medium whose colors and connotations can be worked into a supernatural, supermimetic bliss. [“The Doctor’s Son,” in Hugging the Shore]

Her details – which include the lyrics of the songs her characters overhear on the radio and the recipes of the rather junky food they eat – calmly accrue; her dialogue trails down the pages with an uncanny fidelity to the low-level heartbreaks behind the banal; her resolutely unmetaphorical style builds around us a maze of familiar truths that nevertheless has something airy, eerie, and in the end lovely about it. [“Stalled Starters,” in Hugging The Shore]

That nasal squeak like fingernails on silk shows an avid realism. [“Fairy Tales and Paradigms,” in Due Considerations]

They live, in short, and like all living feed on air, on the invisible; the spaces between the words are warm, and the strangeness is mysteriously exact, the strangeness of the vital. [“An Introduction to Three Novels by Henry Green,” in Hugging the Shore]

He lived for art, its appreciation as well as its creation. [“Imperishable Maxwell,” in Higher Gossip]