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» If you want to write about North Korea, it’s not hard to find pictures of the monuments and colossal boulevards of Pyongyang, the capital city, because these are the images sanctioned and disseminated by the government, and all that any visitor allowed into North Korea is allowed to see of it. But if you are interested in the rest of the country — at least if you are a writer who wants to put characters on the ground there — the obvious problem becomes: How to render what these characters see? How to describe the topography of the landscape? In essence, how to breach the misanthropy of a country just for getting its street names right? Enter Google Earth. Enter Google Maps.

Fiona Maazel, in the New York Times Book Review; interesting, especially because her North Korea was one of the things I liked least about the novel, and that now I like more after this piece. 

April 12, 2013, 11:00am  Comments

“There’s a reason most people never see anything of North Korea but Pyongyang. It’s because the rest of the country is squalid beyond all imagining, and this to spite the homogeneity of its design: single-story homes in a grid, whitewashed timber or stucco walls, the rooftops an orange clay tile, and every plot squared in with a brindled picket fence. There is no cement to pave the roads and no shoes to walk the cement, so mostly people are barefoot, even in the snow. The filth seems meticulous and prolific in its outreach — even the soap can’t stay clean — which makes sense of the delimited color scheme of people’s clothes: black, gray, black, brown. No one stands out unless you know what to look for… . I spent the first day in a janitor’s closet at the train station. Fuel being scarce, the schedule was a joke. A train came when it came. By the tracks: people asleep on the ice, in wheelbarrows, playing cards, trading nylon for corn, which cost a lot of corn. Faces wan and tapered, and everyone’s hair falling out. Amazing how hair and dust always find each other; the stuff blew across the tracks like briar.”

But I’m afraid it’s here, in the North Korea section, that the style finally fails, when distanced, crafted irony becomes insufficient or even inadequate. North Korea is hard to write about for a bunch of reasons — its isolation, its slow-moving humanitarian catastrophe — and its unknowability makes portraying that country a relatively high-stakes fictional game. But setting this against something like The Orphan Master’s Son, which also worked with misery and absurdity and the questions of fiction against North Korea, shows the limits of distance and craft.

April 12, 2013, 6:39am   Comments

“My parents were part of the middling salariat that votes right but acts left. Men who tout family values while dropping a load at Tart’s Bigbar. Women who abort their kids in secret. They were Reaganites who imposed an old-fashioned aesthetic on the scheduling of our lives, so that we seemed to meet only at dinners, which were opportunities to know each other that we never took. Our family congress was more like antecedent to purdah among friends…”

I feel like Woke Up Lonely suffers from a mis-fit, between the ambitions of its scale and themes and its execution, and between the complexity of its language and the simple absurdity of its plot. And style, here, is a symptom, a clue: ironic and distanced and very highly wrought, but working in broad strokes that wind up seeming nebulous. The backdrop of the story — which involves a mass-movement cult, and government surveillance, and North Korea — is a big canvas; in the middle of that canvas is a set of Rube Goldberg mechanisms that resolve into a reluctant hostage crisis. But the stuff that works well in Lonely are individual stories, single-character vignettes, while the big stuff — the cult and its ambitions, especially — remain frustratingly amorphous. So you wind up with formulations like “antecedent to purdah among friends” that clearly mean something, without quite knowing what.

Graywolf 04.02.13

April 11, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“This was real. This was human. Not the high philosophies of America-Five, not their computer programs, not their counts, not their cube-shaped sleeprooms and suffocating enclosures, not the mercy she had always believed in. No, she was done with that fakery. From this moment on, she would believe that other voice inside her The one that loved the core things, like earth and fire and sky and hunger and desire and grief and the want to live.”

But against that setting Djanikian’s story focuses on Natasha, a 22-year-old adolescent who works in the Office of Mercy — which is responsible for monitoring and exterminating the tribes, ending their existence to prevent their future suffering — as she yearns to go outside the colony, and begins to question its ethics once she has. If Natasha’s a little difficult to sympathize with, it’s the fault of her role in the narrative, of her coming of age: she’s often ridiculously credulous, with the uncontrolled emotions of a teenager, and the plot puts her through a bunch of well-telegraphed reversals and betrayals that become frustrating. But Djanikian’s ending is good, mechanical but satisfying, and she complicates the background of her genre with odd little questions of incest and adoption, and a strong inside / outside dichotomy, that are often more interesting than the stuff going on on the surface.

April 11, 2013, 6:37am   Comments

“But no human society before the Alphas ever structured itself in stark opposition to the absolutes the way we have. Dared to look them in the eye. It’s what defines us. It’s what makes this the modern age. And it has — this recognition — it’s what allowed us to make such leaps in medical technology and ethics… . Only by feeling the full force of suffering and death were we able to usher in this world of peace and life. It’s astounding.”

This is the questioning Jeffrey of the previous, now toeing the party line — which uses a version of utilitarianism to enforce separation and isolation, restricting and suppressing empathy to justify separation from the aboveground outside world, and to justify exterminating the primitive “tribes” left behind by the apocalyptic “Storm.” Mercy’s utopians live within a system that has excised hunger, desire, fear of death, but only for those within close walls.

April 10, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“Unlike most people in the settlement, he did not consider the doctrines of the Ethical Code glaringly self-evident. He believed in them, of course, and lived by their word. But he also felt (and had told Natasha as much) that questioning and analyzing one’s own ethical feelings were essential practices for understanding. Every great ethical thinker, he had told her once, has struggled with or even doubted the laws that the settlement holds most dear. Besides all this, Natasha simply felt good after talking to Jeffrey, and she was desperate for his reassurance now.”

One of the great pleasures of genre fiction is the way it encourages play with established convention; putting aside the literary-fiction-is-just-another-genre argument, which is a worthwhile argument to have, genre fiction exists much more as thought experiment, an artificial working-out of ideas enabled by a given formal framework, rather than an attempt to examine contemporary life through mimesis. And Djanikian is working here in a recent, if well-trod, path: post-apocalyptic coming-of-age science fiction, set against the much older strain of utopian science fiction. So it’s not a knock to say that her setting, the underground utopia of America-5, is artificial — it’s also effectively limited and circumscribed, a well-imagined small canvas for her characters to work out large questions.

Viking 02.25.13

April 09, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“But guys smiled or winked at him, and Joey had to assume they felt he had somehow cheated his way to perfection. They did not honor good grades — on the contrary — but they prized chicanery, and any successful dodge, so long as it didn’t threaten the curve, and Miss Gyer had no curves. She was a tall woman made entirely of posture. The y in her name was her best feature.

Skizzen is not the only one who overworks his words; this isn’t an important moment in the book, but it is a very good example of Gass’s language, as he plays off of the pun on “curve” to emphasize Skizzen’s haplessness between the society of corner-cutting boys and the inflexibility of Miss Gyer: there’s a great deal of information coded into Gass’s language in this very short space, and it’s very poised and witty and intentional. And this is a minor moment, not anything complex, in a book that concerns itself with complex ideas; Gass’s prose tends to ornate, long, late-style sentences, each one of which bears the mark of the same kind of pressure on its language, each one of which does precisely what it’s author wants it to do. It’s instructive, and it’s exhausting.

April 07, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“As a music critic — a musicologist — as a philosopher of music — he was used to working with words; they held no terrors for him; he thought of them simply as tools; they were not instruments like those in an orchestra, because he did not think of his books and essays as performances. His ideas, of course, needed them, but he didn’t dress up his thoughts like toffs or tarts and parade them about on the avenues.”

The thing at issue is a single sentence, reworked over and over at points through the book, which starts out as ‘The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.’ Joseph Skizzen, Gass’s protagonist, trots through endless recombinations and reworkings of that single sentence over the course of the book, using it as a springboard to work out his biography, to work out ideas about music and identity.

Knopf 03.12.13

April 06, 2013, 10:23am   Comments