In Ten Days in the Hills, the yoga adept and holy man Paul assures the others of the illusory nature of the world, and Elena, pondering her lover’s impotence, hypothesizes that he can love her “only if who she was was not so potent and concentrated as to irradiate him with the full intensity of her fears.” Of these many characters, Smiley most fully inhabits Elena, but she seems to approve most fully of Zoe, who emerges in the novel’s last pages as its heroine. Zoe, an indifferent mother and a fickle lover, at the age of forty-three still dominates any room she enters, and is possessed of a sublime carelessness. Stoney observes:
Deep in her heart … she didn’t care about men and her effect on them, or else she didn’t care about her effect on anyone, men or women.… While Zoe was talking vivaciously, being friendly and affectionate and entertaining, and even seductive, Stoney saw that it meant nothing.… There was nothing she wanted even from her mother.
(Zoe and her non-attached guru are a good match, and their bodies know it. She and Max, for all their glamour, weren’t: “Their bodies didn’t get along. Where his eye was, there was her elbow. When he was awake, she was asleep. When she was awake, he was snoring.… They could not walk in step, and often didn’t hear what each other said, even though they both had resonant voices.”) Zoe’s uncanny indifference helps her in negotiations: “They think they have to make her care, and of course they think the way to do that is money and perks and points and stuff. But she doesn’t really seem to care about that, either, so they offer more.” In the novel’s last pages, when she has returned to her own home, we learn that “what she really liked, in the end, was a little stage in a little club, with Tony at the piano and good acoustics.” She cares about singing, and, moved by hearing her singing in her room, the Russian staff in Mike’s house has smuggled into the trunk of her car a painting that looks as serene and tender as a Vermeer but is more likely by “a woman of the period named Judith Leyster.” In it, a young girl looks up from playing the recorder, about to smile, happy “in spite of deaths, in spite of the plagues and the fires and the massacres and the genocides and the clashes of armies and civilizations.”
Smiley’s raunchy survey of the human condition comes down to an endorsement of art and the relatively selfless, guileless artist. Her own art often warms itself at other works: in A Thousand Acres, she needed King Lear to get at all she knew about Iowa and farm life; Ten Days in the Hills not only channels The Decameron but holds an odd ghost of what is passingly alluded to as “the siege of Troy.” Elena/Helen, mated with Max/Menelaus, is abducted, spiritually speaking, by Paul/Paris; the tenuous parallel helps explain the two peripheral women, Cassie and Delphine, who, like Cassandra and the Delphic oracle, can do little but offer ignored wisdom. Even if this ghost of a myth exists only in the critic’s eye, two books discussed in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel—Taras Bulba and Uncle Tom’s Cabin—do figure in our Hollywood talkfest, and our hostess is herself a writer: Elena is composing, amid the mess of human imprecision, a tome with the schoolmarmish title Here’s How: To Do EVERYTHING Correctly! In such an oblique self-parody, one can see the author smile.
A Boston Fable
RUN, by Ann Patchett. 295 pp. HarperCollins, 2007.
Ann Patchett has not rushed to follow up her breakthrough novel, Bel Canto (2001), which promoted her from private to major in the embattled ranks of literary novelists. Before Bel Canto, she had been admired but obscure, a veteran of academic postings and the grant wars. Her arresting, elegant thriller cast a hostage crisis in a nameless Latin American capital as an operatic illustration of the well-known truism that captives and captors tend, as the days of mutual exposure draw on, to develop solidarity with one another. Patchett’s customarily benign view of human nature took on global import within the besieged mansion of a Peru-like nation’s Vice-President. A lavish party—designed by the government to court the Japanese industrialist Mr. Hosokawa, with a special performance by the internationally esteemed lyric soprano Roxane Coss, whom he has long loved from afar—is invaded by a tiny army of terrorists, consisting of three revolutionary “generals” and fifteen youthful recruits from the impoverished countryside. Their hope is to kidnap the President, but he does not attend. The coup thus fails at the outset; negotiations drag on while government forces tunnel beneath the mansion and, in the barricaded cohabitation of hostages and hostage-takers, the ill-educated young rebels, exposed to the international array of refined party guests, reveal great talents for singing, chess, and romance. Two of the peasant soldiers turn out to be female, and a Mozartean weave of amorous attraction, lessons in literacy, and companionable soccer games unfurls before the tragic dénouement. One revolutionary ends thus: “A pain exploded up high in her chest and spit her out of this terrible world.”
But this terrible world also holds art and love; of the book’s many rave reviews, one called Bel Canto “the most romantic novel in years” and another promised readers that they would experience “a strange yearning to be kidnapped.” The sole complaint about the saga that this reader heard was a protest, from a rigorous Jewish critic, that terrorists weren’t really so nice. But Patchett’s point, not only in this novel but in her well-regarded earlier three, seems to be that everybody is nice, given half a chance. In the pessimistic halls of literary fiction, she speaks up, gently but firmly, for human potential. Bel Canto sold moderately in hardcover, but hearty paperback sales and a sprinkling of prizes, including the PEN/Faulkner, put a conspicuous shine on a rare achievement, a captivating blend of political drama and aesthetic passion.
She followed it not with another novel but with a curiously loving memoir, Truth & Beauty (2004), describing her enduring relationship with a friend made in college and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Lucy Grealy. Grealy had lost much of her jaw to childhood cancer and endured chemotherapy, radiation, and reconstructive surgery that still left her facially deformed. The success won by her first book, Autobiography of a Face, was dissipated in pills, drink, promiscuity, a funked novel contract, and, finally, heroin addiction, before her death, in 2002, at the age of thirty-nine. “I’m such a fuckup,” she whispered in Patchett’s ear at one of her many low points. The author achieved, silhouetted against this brightly lit portrait of a heedless life, a self-portrait, that of a tenderhearted, even-tempered, calmly dedicated artist who, as Grealy put it, is “always going to be fine.” This somewhat dismissive reassurance (“It’s your blessing and your curse”) is offered when Patchett tries to interrupt the other woman’s spectacular litany of misfortunes with some of her own troubles. Grealy, in the course of her self-destruction, diagnoses Patchett’s tenacious attachment to her: “At least I can make you feel like a saint. That’s what you’ve always wanted.” Stung, Patchett retorts, “That’s a terrible thing to say,” but her works, habitually trafficking in the numinous and the magical, do show a loyalty to her Catholic upbringing. Her masterly first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), tells of a pregnant young woman who flees her harmless husband and finds refuge in a Catholic home for unwed mothers, and her latest, Run, begins and ends with a holy statue, a painted rosewood carving of a red-haired Mary stolen from an Irish church in the mid-nineteenth century and brought to Boston by the descendants of the thief and his wife, who strikingly resembled the sacred image.
Compared with Bel Canto, as it must be, Run is a tricky and flimsy work, a stylized fable of families, of parenting and vocations and race, set in a Boston and a Cambridge that, though accurately enough mapped by a former fellow at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute, do not feel as solid underfoot, as welcoming to the roots of imagination, as, say, the Kentucky of The Patron Saint of Liars or the Los Angeles of The Magician’s Assistant (1997). Primed for commercial success, the book seems overdesigned, sprinkled with ornamental snowflakes and lowercase headings, and the novel feels overplotted. The plot, indeed, is so dense, artfully leading us from one point of suspense to the next, that the reviewer can scarcely venture a summary without betraying some of its carefully ho
arded and deployed mysteries.
It all takes place in twenty-four hours, during a New England snowstorm and its chilly, sunny aftermath, except for a last chapter in Baltimore five years later. Bernard Doyle, a Boston lawyer, politician, and former mayor, and his late wife, Bernadette, conceived one son, Sullivan, and, failing to produce another, adopted two black boys, Tip and Teddy, who are twenty-one and twenty at the time of the snowstorm. While, in this blinding storm, after the three Doyles have attended a talk in Cambridge by Jesse Jackson, the widower and Tip are arguing about the young man’s lack of interest in politics and his obsessive interest in the million-plus dead fish preserved in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Tip steps off a curb and an unknown black woman pushes him out of the path of an oncoming SUV that he has failed to notice. He gets away with a sprained ankle and a slight fracture of the fibula; the woman takes the brunt of the hit and sustains a broken hip, wrist, and rib, a concussion, and other injuries. Her eleven-year-old daughter, Kenya, gathers up her mother’s possessions in the snow, accompanies her and the Doyles to Mount Auburn Hospital, and, though she wants to stay there with her mother, is persuaded to spend the night with the Doyles in their home in Boston’s South End. Arriving, they discover that Sullivan has unexpectedly returned from Africa, where he has been for years, distributing antiretroviral drugs to the HIV-positive.
Even so brief a summary reveals a certain playfully schematic quality to the author’s design: Tip and Teddy carry the names of New England’s most popular recent politicians; Kenya bears one geographical name, and her mother, it turns out, is called Tennessee Moser; Sullivan, a scoffer, shares his name with his mother’s uncle, Father John Sullivan, who, in his infirm last days in the old priests’ home Regina Cleri, is besieged by ailing persons who believe, not entirely wrongly, that his touch has miraculous healing powers. Like Sister Evangeline in The Patron Saint of Liars, he is one of Patchett’s holy clairvoyants;3 though his appearances in Run are few, he is among the novel’s more entertaining and persuasive characters. The kinship panorama, in a text that even with generous leading comes to fewer than three hundred pages, spreads itself thin: Teddy and Tip, physically hard to distinguish, are built around rather abstract traits—a religious, do-gooding streak and a categorizing scientific bent, respectively. Sullivan, whose bad behavior somehow cost his father his political career, behaves, as the reader sees him, with a spontaneous warmth and relational ability that make his black brothers look shy and stiff. Confined to a day’s crowded comings and goings by foot and taxi in the snowbound streets, the novel relies heavily on retrospect and reminiscence—a lot of telling in proportion to the showing. Its willfully controlled mysteries keep us reading—what is the grudge between Sullivan and his father? what happened in Africa? who was the black woman who saved Tip’s life? why were she and her child out so late in Cambridge? who is the other black woman she talks to in her delirium, also named Tennessee?—but even the most pliant reader can get to feeling manipulated. To be sure, no narrative divulges its facts all at once, but this one seems more of a tease than its earnest themes warrant.
Race—race in greater Boston, the birthplace of abolitionism yet within memory the site of some ugly anti-integration scuffles—is a muted issue in Run. Its live nerve is touched only in a stray sentence or two. Tip, at the Jesse Jackson speech, observes that the audience holds a majority of blacks: he, a black male raised with white advantages, “would have said it made no difference to him, when in fact that alertness he always carried in his neck, the alertness that stayed with him so consistently he never even noticed it anymore, temporarily released its grip and disappeared.” The theme of political engagement, so natural an undercurrent in Bel Canto, here intrudes awkwardly in the form of fragments of famous speeches, from Eugene Debs to Martin Luther King; Doyle, obsessed with politics, had demanded that Tip and Teddy memorize them.
The theme dearest to Patchett, of vocation or, in religious terms, calling, is somewhat precariously carried by the central figure of Kenya, an eleven-year-old slightly too good to be true. She has the wit to gather up her mother’s wide-flung possessions in a snowstorm; when Tip, walking too far on crutches, comes down with hypothermia, she successfully applies her Girl Scout lessons in its treatment; and in her budding relations with the Doyles she shows a preternatural poise, lucidity, and courage. Her vocation is to run—hence the novel’s stark title. She speeds around Harvard’s Gordon Track, not only outracing the few others on it but stopping them dead: “All the other runners on the track had stopped now, the way dancers will stop when the soloist steps forward to dominate the floor.” She is running, Patchett tells us, to outrun “the sight of her mother being hit by the car … and the girl at the front desk intimating that Kenya was not a person to be on this track.” She outruns even her own niceness, meditating, “Nobody who was very, very nice would ever work this hard to take something they wanted only for themselves. Nice girls did not demand that everyone stop what they were doing and look at them but that was exactly what she asked for and what she got.”
Yet the liberal, brotherly, quickly loving environment in which she finds herself offers not much more resistance to her running than air. Even at the outset of her ordeal of transformation, she finds that “people treat you nicely when you come to the emergency room in a police car.” The people Kenya encounters in this novel are generally nice, and become nicer. Perhaps, in the diversity-positive twenty-first century, an African-American child encounters less resistance to her progress than used to be common; or perhaps Ann Patchett in her own niceness gives us the world as it should be, rather than as the dirty, abrasive place it is. As realism, her novel is pale; but as a metaphoric representation of growth it transcends its sentimentality. When Kenya awakes for the first time on the sunstruck top floor of the Doyle house, the waves of imagery express not just one eleven-year-old’s arrival in a brighter, more affluent place but the civilized enlightenment whose glories should be available to all:
She could do nothing but take in the light. It had never occurred to her before that all the places she had slept in her life had been dark, that her own apartment had never seen a minute of this kind of sun. Even in the middle of the day, every corner hung tight to its shadows and spread a dimness over the ceiling and walls.… But in the light that soaked this room a girl could read the spines of the books on the very top shelf. “The Double Helix,” she said aloud. “A Separate Peace.” She stretched her arms down the comforter and admired them. She spread her fingers wide apart and took her fingernails under consideration. Every bit of her was straight and strong and beautiful in this light. She glowed.
Nan, American Man
A FREE LIFE, by Ha Jin. 660 pp. Pantheon, 2007.
A critic cannot but be impressed by the courage and intellect of the Chinese-American writer Ha Jin. Born in 1956 of parents who were both military doctors, he volunteered for the People’s Liberation Army at the age of fourteen and served five and a half years, near the northeast border with Russia. He began to take a keen interest in reading in his late teens, by which time the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) had closed down China’s educational institutions and made any books but Mao’s “little red book” suspect. In 1977, Heilongjiang University, in Harbin, admitted Ha Jin but assigned him to study English, even though it was his last choice on a list of preferences. After receiving a master’s degree in American literature from Shandong University, in 1984, he came to the United States to do graduate work at Brandeis University. His plans to return to China as a teacher or a translator were changed by the Tiananmen Square massacre, in 1989: he decided to stay in America and to try to become a writer in English. A year later, he published his first book of poems, Between Silences; during the 1990s, he published five more volumes in English, including two collections of short stories, one of which, Ocean of Words (1996), won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the other, Under the Red Flag (1997), received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His busy decade—in the cou
rse of which he was hired, in 1993, by Emory University, in Atlanta, as an instructor in poetry—was capped by a first novel, Waiting, which received the 1999 National Book Award and the 2000 PEN/Faulkner. His prize-winning command of English has a few precedents, notably Conrad and Nabokov, but neither made the leap out of a language as remote from the Indo-European group, in grammar and vocabulary, in scriptural practice and literary tradition, as Mandarin.
Waiting is impeccably written, in a sober prose that does nothing to call attention to itself and yet capably delivers images, characters, sensations, feelings, and even, in a basically oppressive and static situation, bits of comedy and glimpses of natural beauty. The very modesty of the tone strengthens the reader’s belief that this is how private lives were conducted amid the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution, as ancient customs worked with a fear-ridden Communist bureaucracy to stifle normal human appetites. Every simple, bleak detail has the fascination of the hitherto unknown; not a word of Ha Jin’s hard-won English seems out of place or wasted. And the first-person, rather documentary prose of a subsequent prize-winning novel, War Trash (2004), flows as smoothly.
His new novel, A Free Life, is a relatively lumpy and uncomfortable work, of which a first draft, he confides in a brief afterword, was completed in the year 2000. In an interview that same year, with Bookreporter.com, he declared, “I plan to write at least two books about the American immigrant experience, but not my own story.” However, his dedication to A Free Life reads, “To Lisha and Wen, who lived this book”; Lisha and Wen are the names of Ha Jin’s wife and son. Nan Wu, the hero of A Free Life, also has a wife and son, Pingping and Taotao, and shares with Lin Kong, the protagonist of Waiting, a cautious, bookish nature and a nagging indecision in regard to a basic emotional choice. Lin, a military doctor, vacillates between a homely wife, chosen by his parents, back in his village, and a nurse in the hospital where he is posted; Nan, a graduate student adrift in America, cannot stop longing for an adored early love, Beina, who spurned him. Ha Jin, not an author averse to flat statement, spells out on an early page the dilemmas facing his hero, as he welcomes his six-year-old son to the United States: