Metacriticism and Ondaatje's "Divisadero"

Forgive the title of this entry, which sounds like an undergraduate's term paper, but on the National Book Critics Circle's blog, Critical Mass, critic Molly McQuade has just finished a three-part essay on book reviewing, for which she read some twenty reviews of Michael Ondaatje's recently published novel Divisadero. I read McQuade's essay -- which you can find here, here and here -- with some trepidation. I had reviewed Divisadero myself. Would I get zinged?

Turns out I'm safe. Several other reviewers were not so lucky -- she has some pretty corrosive things to say about their prose and their approaches to the book. But maybe she didn't read mine.

In any case, her essay provides a somewhat insidery look at the reviewing game, worth reading if you're a reviewer because the critiques of the critics make you ask, "Do I do that?" But it's also worth reading if you're just a reader of reviews, because of what she has to say about the state of reviewing today. (It ain't good.) Not to criticize the critique of criticism -- which would be to commit metametacriticism, I guess -- but I found some of the essay a bit waffling and inconclusive. But these are inconclusive times.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's my own review of Divisadero, which appeared in the Mercury News.

DIVISADERO
By Michael Ondaatje
Knopf, 273 pp., $25

Divisadero is one of those San Francisco streets on which you climb to a summit and are suddenly plunged toward the bay. One of the characters in Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, which bears its name, explicates: “Divisadero, from the Spanish word for ‘division,’ the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning ‘to gaze at something from a distance.’ ”

“Divisadero” is really something like two novellas bound together by some slender narrative threads and images. (A blue table plays a role in both stories.) And just as you do on the eponymous street, you reach the climax of one story only to be plunged suddenly into the other.

The first story has to do with three young people raised by a man on a farm in Sonoma County near Petaluma. His wife died giving birth to Anna, and when another woman also died in childbirth at the same hospital, he adopted that baby too, naming her Claire. Earlier, he and his wife had also taken in a 4-year-old boy named Cooper, whose family had been murdered by their hired hand.

So Anna, Claire and Coop, unrelated by blood, grew up together. And when Anna was 16 the novelistically inevitable happened: She and Coop became lovers. When their father learned of it, he beat Coop senseless and drove off with Anna – “as if distance would dilute whatever existed between Coop and me,” she tells us in one of the sections she narrates. But somewhere south of San Jose, she escaped from him and hitched a ride with a truck driver, vanishing from the lives of her family. Claire nursed Coop’s wounds, but he too fled from their father’s anger, leaving her alone with the old man when he returned.

The years pass. Coop becomes a professional gambler, Claire a researcher in the San Francisco public defender’s office, and Anna a writer who is living in France while she researches the life of a poet named Lucien Segura. Anna has an affair with a part-Gipsy musician named Rafael who, when he was a boy, had known Segura. Meanwhile, chance and calamity reunite Claire and Coop.

And there that story hangs as we plunge into the life of Segura, which is similarly a story of separations and thwarted love. Segura’s boyhood infatuation with Marie-Neige, a young married woman almost his age, blossoms into a lifelong obsession. His mother teaches the illiterate Marie-Neige to read, and Segura reads aloud to her from novels: “They had both grown up far from the intrigue of cities, and now they fell upon Dumas as a guide into those cities that were always in peril and where the sight of an emerald on a neck could betray a family dynasty.”

Later, Segura would write a series of adventure romances in the Dumas mode, published pseudonymously. “The books hardly seemed the work of a well-regarded poet, or the author of the bitter jeremiad on the recent and already forgotten war,” but they were the outpouring of Segura’s sense of loss – of Marie-Neige and of a romanticized idyllic past.

Ondaatje is one of the most romantic of contemporary “literary” novelists, and his flights of passion, even in his Booker prize-winning “The English Patient,” turn some readers off. Coop and Rafael are the kind of Byronic bad-boy loners who make romance readers’ hearts go a-flutter, and Ondaatje even resorts to the soapiest of psychological phenomena: a case of amnesia. Realists will also niggle that no team of paramedics is going to leave a man who’s been beaten unconscious to be looked after by a non-professional. In these days of high liability insurance premiums, they’d haul him in for at least a CAT scan.

Moreover, readers who insist on fictional closure had best stay away from “Divisadero.” Anna, Claire and Coop are left suspended up there on that summit. “Divisadero” is a book for a reader who can go with its flow, who is mindful of small details, who relishes its author’s almost D.H. Lawrencian attentiveness to nature, who hears its sonata-like entwining of themes, and who’s happy to reflect upon and reread a novel rather than shelve it and move along to the next. For this is a novel by a poet – Ondaatje has published at least 13 volumes of verse – who’s more fascinated by the texture of life at given moments, and the way those moments can be captured in words, than he is at tracing lives from beginning through middle through end.

It’s also probably the best California novel – the action of the first part of it ranges from Sonoma to Santa Barbara to Bakersfield to Tahoe -- ever written by a Canadian born in Sri Lanka.

Anybody Got a Stake?

Mindblowingly hilarious: The Republican presidential hopefuls as "Buffy" villains.

Almost Persuaded

"Masterpiece Theatre" -- which I guess is now calling itself just "Masterpiece" for some reason -- did a new version of Jane Austen's Persuasion last night, and it was, like, three-fourths successful. The Anne Elliot (Sally Hawkins) was suitably faded and the Captain Wentworth (Rupert Penry-Jones) suitably stalwart (though I prefer the performances by Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds in the 1995 version). And it was fun to see Anthony Head (Giles from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") as Sir William Elliot -- he gave the part an oddly more menacing edge than one expects.

But it was only three-fourths successful because although it did a fine job of capturing the first three-fourths of the book, at that point everyone involved seemed to get bored. The denouement, in which all the hidden truths are revealed and Anne and Wentworth decide they love each other, was summed up in a frantic race around Bath in which characters darted up, gabbled some exposition, and then hurried on. Clench, kiss, music up and out.

Here's the trailer for the original British series of Austen novels that PBS will be running. Pretty mushy stuff.

Awards Season

The National Book Critics Circle, of which I'm a member, just announced the nominees for its annual book awards. And as usual, I'm embarrassed by how many I haven't read or reviewed.

Here they are:

Autobiography
Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone, Free Press
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying, Knopf
Joyce Carol Oates, The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982, Ecco
Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence, Verso
Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia, Random House

Nonfiction
Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism, Farrar, Straus
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848, Oxford University Press
Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Doubleday
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Doubleday
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s

Fiction
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games, HarperCollins
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Riverhead
Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men. Dial Press
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger's Daughter. HarperCollins
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher, Simon & Schuster.

Biography
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, Yale University Press
Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, Knopf
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison. Knopf
John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932, Knopf
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, Penguin Press

Poetry
Mary Jo Bang, Elegy, Graywolf
Matthea Harvey, Modern Life, Graywolf
Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking, Flood
Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan, Flood
Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Archipelago

Criticism
Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, Pantheon
Julia Alvarez. Once Upon a Quniceanera, Viking
Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream, Metropolitan/Holt
Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Farrar, Straus
Alex Ross. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Farrar, Straus

Actually, I only reviewed one of them. Here's my review, which appeared in the Mercury News and the Houston Chronicle:

RALPH ELLISON: A Biography
By Arnold Rampersad
Knopf, 688 pp., $35

Confronted with something as messy and complicated as a human life, a biographer can too easily fall into the trap of simplification, seizing on one prominent aspect of the subject’s character and history, the way a caricaturist turns a potato nose or jug ears into the dominant feature in a cartoon. On the other hand, if the life surveyed is long enough and complex enough, the biographer may be tempted just to report the incidents and events and let the reader do the hard work of shaping them into a coherent image.

What makes Stanford professor Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ralph Ellison so immensely engaging, so satisfying, is that he steers deftly between these extremes.

The temptations are certainly there. Ellison was caricatured during his life as a "one-book wonder" and as an "Uncle Tom." And his life spanned most of the 20th century – he was born in 1913 and died in 1994 – in which black Americans moved from Jim Crow, through the civil rights struggle and Black Power, and into the era of "benign neglect."

In his lifetime, Ellison gave us the indelibly powerful novel "Invisible Man" and two volumes of incisive, penetrating essays. He was richly rewarded with fellowships and lectureships and memberships in hitherto whites-only organizations, as well as with a great deal of money. He dined at the White House and counted among his friends some of the most eminent writers and intellectuals.

But he also remained aloof from the community of black writers, many of whom might never have found print or voice if it hadn’t been for his pioneering work. As a member of the exclusive Century Club in Manhattan, he made no effort to recruit other black members (and strongly opposed the admission of women to the club). He steadily refused to provide blurbs for the books of younger black writers. When he was appointed to a tenured professorship at New York University, he insisted on teaching American literature, not black literature, even at a time when universities were responding to pressure to introduce black studies courses and departments. (His attitude may have sparked a backlash in black studies courses elsewhere. When the novelist-to-be Charles Johnson asked a librarian in the black studies program at Southern Illinois University for a copy of "Invisible Man," he was told that "Ralph Ellison is not a black writer.")

Ellison defied the temper of the times, even resisting linguistic change when "Negro" gave way to "black." He explained, "I’m pretty close to black, but I’m pretty close to brown, too. In a cultural sense, the term 'Negro' tells me something about the mixture of African, European, and native-American styles which define me. … Black, in America, connotes a certain ideological stance. In that sense, I am not black. I am a Negro-American writer. I emphasize Negro because it refers specifically to an American cultural phenomenon."

The resistance to ideology is central to Ellison’s approach to the world and his art. He had flirted with communism as a young man, though he never joined the Communist Party, and the experience left him soured. In Ellison’s view of things, after the initial successes of the civil rights struggle, the movement for equality and justice for black people had turned ideological. He remained radically individualistic – he opposed affirmative action programs, for example. In our current polarized political climate, he would probably be labeled a conservative. Although Ellison strongly opposed the cutback in federal social programs that began with the Reagan presidency, as Rampersad observes, "He blamed excessive liberalism for the rise of conservatism under Reagan."

But Rampersad is not one to apply labels to Ellison, even the perhaps more stinging one of "one-book wonder." "Invisible Man" appeared in 1952, and for the next 42 years of his life, Ellison was pained by his inability to produce a second great novel and by the public’s curiosity about his work in progress. In 1967, he lost some manuscript pages of this second novel in a fire that destroyed his summer home. At first he downplayed the loss, saying that he had copies of what he'd done. But later, when he was asked about his slowness in producing the book, he began to blame the fire, and sometimes upped the estimate of pages lost to 365 or even 500. At his death, he left some 2,000 pages of manuscript, which were whittled down by his literary executor, John F. Callahan, into the 400-page novel "Juneteenth," published in 1999.

His failure to produce elicited scathing comments from some younger writers. The poet Nikki Giovanni said, "as a writer Ellison is so much hot air, because he hasn’t had the guts to go on writing." But Rampersad suggests that Ellison suffered not so much from writer’s block as from an inability to focus, and often from the difficulty of keeping his material contemporary. "Invisible Man" was written out of the experience of a black man in Jim Crow America. But as the role of black citizens in the social and political dynamic of the United States changed in the 1950s and ’60s, reality often outpaced the imagination. At one time, the second novel was to hinge on a political assassination, but the assassinations of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. eclipsed Ellison’s fiction.

It’s possible that Ellison was not really cut out to be a novelist. One pregnant observation came from Ernest Gaines, who found "Invisible Man" "a cold book. It’s more a collection of essays than a novel." And that may in fact be the problem that Ellison never really comprehended: that he was, like his namesake Ralph Waldo Emerson, essentially an essayist and not a novelist.

Rampersad lauds Ellison for his "brave refusal of coarse, destructive forms of militancy, his eloquent embrace of a studied moderation, and his complex patriotism." But he also portrays him as a conflicted man, whose outward elegance – once he could afford it he was always expensively, conservatively dressed – concealed private demons. In his own encounter with Ellison, an interview conducted when Rampersad was working on his biography of Langston Hughes, Rampersad found him "chilly." "James Baldwin called him the angriest man he knew," Rampersad tells us. And after his death, Toni Morrison wrote that Ellison "saw himself as a black literary patrician, but at some level this was a delusion. It was simply his solution to that persistent problem black writers are confronted with: art and, or versus, identity. I don’t see tragedy in his predicament. I see a kind of sadness instead."

In Rampersad’s hands, Ellison’s life emerges as one of the essential literary lives of the 20th century, as reflective of the times in which he lived as, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s was of the 1920s. Like Fitzgerald’s landmark novel, “The Great Gatsby,” Ellison’s “Invisible Man” is a product of a particular time. "Gatsby" epitomizes the 1920s just as "Invisible Man" is a document of the struggle against Jim Crow, but both are also works that are enduringly transcendent of time and place. Rampersad’s exemplary biography, written with a blend of deep sympathy and cool detachment, splendidly achieves the one true task of literary biography: It illuminates the life so that we may better understand what it produced.

Do You Secretly Hate Hillary?

How much do you really like the candidate you say you're voting for? Here's a test that's supposed to tell you whether you're lying to yourself. Or something.

New on the Bookshelves

I receive maybe a dozen books a week from publishers wanting a review. A leaning tower of January titles stands precariously across the room from me. Well, I can't review or even read most of them, but I figure what I can do, now that I've got this blog thingie, is to list the books I've been sent that are coming out in the week ahead.

This doesn't mean, of course, that these are the only new books coming out. Just the ones that I've been sent. So here's what you'll find in the bookstores this coming week.

Bang Crunch: Stories, by Neil Smith (Vintage; January 8)

The Christian World: A Global History, by Martin E. Marty (Modern Library; January 8)

Day: A Novel, by A.L. Kennedy (Knopf; January 8)

Homecoming: A Novel, by Bernhard Schlink (Pantheon; January 8)

The Painter of Battles: A Novel, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Random House; January 8)

Vienna Blood: A Novel, by Frank Tallis (Mortalis/Random House; January 8)

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust (Knopf; January 10)

The Senator’s Wife: A Novel, by Sue Miller (Knopf; January 11)

I’m Looking Through You – Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir, by Jennifer Finney Boylan (Broadway; January 15)

Kyra: A Novel, by Carol Gilligan (Random House; January 15)

Gambling With My Vote

In addition to dithering over Obama vs. Clinton (or maybe Edwards), I've also been procrastinating on filling out my ballot because of the state initiatives. Those of you not in California don't need to read the rest of this entry, but like most people who live here, I dread studying the ballot initiatives. And like a lot of people, I tend to vote no if I don't understand what's at stake. Also, as Kevin Drum often argues, voting no is a way of telling the legislature to do its job and stop passing the buck to the voters.

But now it turns out that voting no is exactly what the proponents of Propositions 94, 95, 96 and 97, which have to do with Indian gaming, want you to do. Patty Fisher, the Mercury News columnist, explains why in an excellent column.

Tricky bastards.

Taking Nothing for Granite

After all the premature obituaries for Hillary Clinton's campaign, it was nice to see her in a too-close-to-call race in New Hampshire. Especially after all of the nonsense about her "crying" yesterday. I thought it was one of the few really humanizing moments I've seen from her, but of course the punditry had to ascribe it either to weakness or to sheer fakery. I hate the media, even if I am one.

Our absentee ballots have arrived. (Californians, at least in this county, are being urged to vote by mail because of the secretary of state's ruling that electronic machines are unreliable.) My daughter has already filled hers out -- she voted for Clinton. I'm waffling again, after having decided that I would vote for Obama.

At least Hillary's strong showing may curb some of Andrew Sullivan's gloating.

Department of Redundancy Department: It's Always Better When It's Free

Headline in today's Mercury News:

Free gift coming for Xbox 360 owners

Chris-crossed

I admit it: Whenever I'm in a bookstore, I check to see if I've been blurbed. That is, if I've been quoted on the cover of the paperback edition of a book I've reviewed. It's nice to see one's own words live on, even if the quote has been lifted from context, and one is identified only as "San Jose Mercury News" or "San Francisco Chronicle" or whatever paper published the review.

Occasionally they even mention your name. And sometimes they get it wrong. On the jacket of Gregory Curtis's excellent book about prehistoric artists, The Cave Painters, I found this quote from my review of his earlier book, Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo:

"Absorbing ... Enormously entertaining ... Curtis is a writer of generous wit, who packs his book with delicious portraits of scholars, writers, artists, and politicians who contributed to the mythologizing of the Venus de Milo."

All very nice, and a good sampling of my opinion of the book. Except that the quote was attributed to:

--Chris Matthews, San Jose Mercury News

I mean, I don't usually mind when people get my name wrong. I gently inform them that it's Charles, not Charlie or Chuck. (I even used to let myself be known as Chuck, until my wife told me the nickname always made her think of hamburger meat.)

But Chris Matthews? Of all the bloviating newstalkers I think he's the one I least want to be identified with. Well, no, I wouldn't prefer to be confused with Limbaugh or O'Reilly or Hannity, but that's because their politics are so foul. Chris Matthews irks me because he's such an addle-brained sexist, who can't get over the fact that Hillary Clinton is a -- gasp! -- woman, and who has embarrassing man-crushes on macho men like McCain and Fred Thompson and -- at least around the time of "Mission Accomplished" -- George W. And I hate watching Keith Olbermann grit his teeth when he's forced to share an anchor desk with Chris M.

I e-mailed Knopf about the mistake, and a very contrite publicist said that the editor who messed it up sent her apologies. Apology accepted.