I loved After and was less enthusiastic about Goldengrove, so when Harper offered to send me an advance copy of the new novel by Francine Prose, I said yes, send me My New American Life. And the verdict? While I'm never sorry to have read anything by Francine Prose, because she's a good writer and a smart person, this one doesn't address national issues as well as I hoped it would, and as well as I thought After did.
The novel tells the story of Lula, an Albanian girl who came to New York City on a tourist visa and has been spinning tales about her native land as part of her effort to find a way into the American Dream. For the suburban New Jersey dad she calls Mr. Stanley who hires her to watch over his son Zach, a high school senior, she tells folk tales and goes along with the assumption that she is a war refugee. For Zach she tells stories about rebellious teenagers. For the Albanians she sees in New Jersey, Lula tries to tell a tale of her American success, but since none of them believe that success comes without some kind of sinister price tag, they see no real opportunity to capture that elusive American Dream, no house in the suburbs that isn't haunted by the failures of its former occupants.
The darkness and emptiness that are so integral to this story make the story itself feel underpopulated and flat. Here's Prose reading a one-minute segment from her novel. You can see that she believes in its satiric potential, but I don't see that the satiric moments ever coalesce into a meaningful whole.
The moments are interesting and amusing enough to sustain a reader, however. Especially early on in the novel, Lula's "teaching moments" with Zach are wonderful, like this one:
Last night, like every weeknight, Lula and Zeke had eaten dinner in front of the TV. Lula made them watch the evening news, educational for them both. The president had come on the air to warn the American people about the threat of bird flu. The word avian was hard for him. His forehead stitched each time he said it, and his eyelids fluttered, as if he'd been instructed to think of birds as a memory prompt.
'At home,' Lula marveled, 'that man is a god.'
'You say that every night,' Zeke said.
'I'm reminding myself,' she'd said. Her country's love affair with America had begun with Woodrow Wilson, and Clinton and Bush had sealed the deal by bombing the Serbs and rescuing the Kosovar Albanians from Milosevic's death squads. Even at home she'd had her doubts about the streets paved with gold, but when she finally got to New York and started working at La Changita, the waitstaff had quickly straightened her out about the so-called land of opportunity. And yet for all the mixed feelings shared by waiters and busboys alike, the strongest emotion everyone felt was the desire to stay here. Well, fine. In Lula's opinion, ambivalence was a sign of maturity.
Yesterday night, as always, she'd felt sorry for the president, so like a dim little boy who'd told a lie that had set off a war, and then he'd let all those innocent people die in New Orleans, and now he was anxiously waiting to see what worse trouble he was about to get into. He seemed especially scared of the vice president, who scared Lula too, with his cold little eyes not blinking when he lied, like an Eastern Bloc dictator minus the poufy hair.
'There is no bird flu,' Lula had told Zeke. 'A war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, sure. Maybe one chicken in China with a sore throat and a fever.'
But by then the city police chief had appeared on the screen to announce that the alert level had been raised to code orange because of a credible terrorist threat against the New York subway system.
Lula said 'There is no threat.'
'How do you know everything?' Zeke asked. 'Not that I don't agree it's all bullshit.'
She'd been about to tell Zeke--again!--about having grown up in the most extreme and crazy Communist society in Europe, ruled for decades by the psycho dictator Enver Hoxha, who died when Lula was a child, but not without leaving his mark. The nation was a monument to him, as were the seventy thousand mushroomlike concrete bunkers he'd had built in a country smaller than New Jersey. But before she even had a chance to repeat herself, she'd been distracted by an advertisement for the new season of ER.
'Look, Zeke,' she'd said, 'see that gurney rushing in and doors flying open and all the nurses throwing themselves on the patient? Other countries, no one rushes. No one even looks at you till you figure out who to pay off.'
It seems to me that the delights of the satire in that passage are offset by the childishness of the caricature of the president, and so like all partisan political rants, the novel is going to end up preaching--to the extent that it succeeds in preaching at all--to the choir. Lula becomes less of an interesting character, and more of a liberal mouthpiece.
She's a canny operator at all times:
"She wanted to give him a consoling pat on the shoulder, but she never touched Mister Stanley, and she didn't want to start now, both of them weakened in body and spirit, both perhaps seeking relief from the damage that alcohol had inflicted on their bodies. Mister Stanley wasn't the type of guy to hit on the nanny, but every guy was a hangover away from being that type of guy. Even a friendly shoulder squeeze was a door best left unopened."
After enough passages like that, it gets harder for me to work up much sympathy for what Lula wants, and cheer for her to get it--she's looking out for herself, and she doesn't need anybody else.
As she gets more sarcastic, she gets funnier, but seems more two-dimensional, so that passages like this one--which should hit me right where I live (and work)--bounce off without much effect except a wry smile:
"It was darling, the way Americans put so much faith in going to college, the way American parents bought their baby birds a dovecote in which to roost for four years before their maiden flight out into the world."
By the time Lula and Mister Stanley take Zeke to visit a fictional college called Alice Ames, the satire has stopped working. Lula's musings, at this point, are the ravings of someone who is becoming unhinged by months of boredom and disappointment:
"It had tickled her to see Americans taken in by the sort of scam people thought happened only in Eastern Europe. If she had a dollar for every La Changita customer who told her about not being allowed to drive his rental car to Prague because it might get stolen, she wouldn't have had to work there. But now that she'd come to care about Zeke and Mister Stanley, she'd lost the ironic remove from which she watched Americans get conned, and she hoped that Alice Adams was not a dirty trick cynically named after some grifter's favorite hooker."
Satire requires a delicate hand, and Francine Prose is almost good enough to do it well. So even though this isn't the satire about what has happened to The American Dream that I might have been hoping for, it's as close as anyone else has come since Miss Saigon, another "see ourselves as others see us" kind of satire, and it makes an interesting companion volume to Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom. My New American Life will be available--in bookstores--on Tuesday, April 26.
Showing posts with label Francine Prose. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Francine Prose. Show all posts
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Goldengrove
After yesterday's musings on the idea that one of the purposes of fiction is to help you see things from a point of view that is not your own, I got to thinking about Martin Luther King, Jr's "Loving Your Enemies," and how he believes that agape, God's love for mankind--and by extension, the fellow-feeling of one human for another--will help people find a way to love their enemies. His assumption, as he reveals late in the sermon, is that we can all be moved by agape, that we all have some empathy for our fellow human beings.
How do we develop our sense of empathy? Certainly most of us who are interested in books do it by reading about people so different from us that we couldn't even have imagined them, before. Many of us do it by modeling our behavior on the behavior of someone we admire. Children learn empathy from caring for animals, creatures who are smaller and even-less-listened-to than themselves.
So where's the line, for a reader, between having empathy for a grieving character, and wallowing in a tear-jerker of a novel? I ask this question because I just finished reading Francine Prose's new novel Goldengrove, and I didn't like it. I thought I would--I knew the basics of the plot, that the narrator's older sister, Margaret, dies and the family has to learn to come to terms with her death--and I love the Hopkins poem (Spring and Fall) from which the title is derived. But I didn't like the novel, because it seems to me that there is no change in the narrator, Nico. The world changes around her, and she grows physically, but it is almost as if the sister's death freezes her mental processes. Even in the brief epilogue, as an adult, Nico almost believes she can enter into a painting, as she believed it as a child, before her sister's death.
Most of the novel is taken up with Nico's relationship with her dead sister's boyfriend and her superstitious attempts to be open to communication from beyond the grave:
"Margaret's room was sweltering. I walked over to the closet. The glitter comet winked at me. Margaret wanted me to find it.
I said 'I know you're not angry. I know you understand.' Nothing stirred. Not a breeze. I said, 'I'll take that as a yes.'"
It seems to me that the nearest Nico comes to change is when she says, near the end of the novel:
"I no longer expected Margaret to contact me from the beyond, and I stopped trying to analyze each new stage of my relationship with her ghost. It was hard, letting go. But if I'd learned anything that summer, it was how essential it was to hold on to the here and now, the one thing after the next."
So maybe my perception that she doesn't change is some kind of misunderstanding over what seems to me to be passive acceptance, but what she would call holding on to the here and now. Maybe I can't empathize enough with Nico. Maybe, because I've been lucky enough so far in my life, I'm not equipped with enough empathy to understand this character, or like this novel.
If you're equipped with that kind of empathy, I'd be interested to hear what you think about Goldengrove. But if you're like me, it's just a tear-jerker, and I avoid those.
How do we develop our sense of empathy? Certainly most of us who are interested in books do it by reading about people so different from us that we couldn't even have imagined them, before. Many of us do it by modeling our behavior on the behavior of someone we admire. Children learn empathy from caring for animals, creatures who are smaller and even-less-listened-to than themselves.
So where's the line, for a reader, between having empathy for a grieving character, and wallowing in a tear-jerker of a novel? I ask this question because I just finished reading Francine Prose's new novel Goldengrove, and I didn't like it. I thought I would--I knew the basics of the plot, that the narrator's older sister, Margaret, dies and the family has to learn to come to terms with her death--and I love the Hopkins poem (Spring and Fall) from which the title is derived. But I didn't like the novel, because it seems to me that there is no change in the narrator, Nico. The world changes around her, and she grows physically, but it is almost as if the sister's death freezes her mental processes. Even in the brief epilogue, as an adult, Nico almost believes she can enter into a painting, as she believed it as a child, before her sister's death.
Most of the novel is taken up with Nico's relationship with her dead sister's boyfriend and her superstitious attempts to be open to communication from beyond the grave:
"Margaret's room was sweltering. I walked over to the closet. The glitter comet winked at me. Margaret wanted me to find it.
I said 'I know you're not angry. I know you understand.' Nothing stirred. Not a breeze. I said, 'I'll take that as a yes.'"
It seems to me that the nearest Nico comes to change is when she says, near the end of the novel:
"I no longer expected Margaret to contact me from the beyond, and I stopped trying to analyze each new stage of my relationship with her ghost. It was hard, letting go. But if I'd learned anything that summer, it was how essential it was to hold on to the here and now, the one thing after the next."
So maybe my perception that she doesn't change is some kind of misunderstanding over what seems to me to be passive acceptance, but what she would call holding on to the here and now. Maybe I can't empathize enough with Nico. Maybe, because I've been lucky enough so far in my life, I'm not equipped with enough empathy to understand this character, or like this novel.
If you're equipped with that kind of empathy, I'd be interested to hear what you think about Goldengrove. But if you're like me, it's just a tear-jerker, and I avoid those.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Don't Trust Anyone
In Cory Doctorow's novel Little Brother, the kids who are fighting the modern-day version of Big Brother say "Don't trust anyone over 25," having modified the former hippie (yippie) creed. But one of the messages of the novel is simply don't trust anyone. Encrypt your files and your e-mail, not because you have anything to hide, but because some things should be private. Go to http://www.instructables.com/member/w1n5t0n/rss.xml?show=instructable for specific instructions on how to maximize your electronic privacy. This is a website that grew out of the novel--people wanted to know how to do some of the technical things that the protagonist, Marcus, does in order to stand up for his rights.
Little Brother is not just a wonderful novel; it's an important novel, and it's addressed to the right age group ("young adult"). Doctorow's exaggeration of the role of the Department of Homeland Security in our everyday lives in the wake of another terrorist attack on American soil shows young adults exactly why the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights are worth preserving. The inclusion of history lessons (woven in seamlessly, since the protagonists of the novel are still in high school) doesn't slow the pace. From the beginning, this novel is relentless in the way it shows readers what can happen when Americans get to a point where safety is considered more important than freedom.
The dangers that Marcus, a San Francisco native, faces are explicitly laid out for him, and he's smart enough to be able to articulate what the problems are in the kind of thinking demanded of him. When the DHS agent wants the password for his phone, Marcus "submitted to her will," but he thinks about why, even though he has nothing to hide, it's a bad idea to be forced to give up such information:
"There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?
Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body--and how manhy of us can say that?--you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.
It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something private. It's about your life belonging to you."
That's a pretty good paean to human dignity, especially coming from a 17-year-old. I don't know about your town, but in my town and many nearby, anyone still in high school has fewer Constitutional rights than the rest of us. They're subject to random backpack and locker searches. Earlier this year, my daughter came home from school and told me a story about the bravery of one of her classmates. The math teacher claimed he heard a cell phone in the classroom and demanded that the student hand it to him, as cell phones are completely banned from the high school. According to my daughter, he must have heard something in the hall. At any rate, one student finally got up and gave him her cell phone, which she was carrying, as almost every student carries one--turned off and put away in her backpack. She was a hero to the rest of the class, because she'd saved them from having their backpacks searched.
Marcus' history teacher, Mrs. Galvez, who eventually loses her job for teaching too much history and too little pro-DHS propaganda, reminds me of the history teacher in Francine Prose's novel After, who loses her job (and probably her life, in that novel) for similar reasons. Here's Mrs. Galvez' explanation of the purpose of some of the sixties protest movements:
"Yippies were like very political hippies, but they weren't serious the way we think of politics these days. They were very playful. Pranksters. They threw money into the New York Stock Exchange. They circled the Pentagon with hundreds of protestors and said a magic spell that was supposed to levitate it. They invented a fictional kind of LSD that you could spray onto people with squirt guns and shot each other with it and pretended to be stoned. They were funny and they made great TV--one Yippie, a clown called Wavy Gravy, used to get hundreds of protestors to dress up like Santa Claus so that the cameras would show police officers arresting and dragging away Santa on the news that night--and they mobilized a lot of people.
Their big moment was the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where they called for demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. Thousands of demonstrators poured into Chicago, slept in the parks, and picketed every day....The police and the demonstrators fought in the streets--they'd done that many times before, but the Chicago cops didn't have the smarts to leave the reporters alone. They beat up the reporters, and the reporters retaliated by finally showing what really went on at these demonstrations, so the whole country watched their kids being really savagely beaten down by the Chicago police. They called it a 'police riot.'
The Yippies loved to say, 'Never trust anyone over thirty.' They meant that people who were born before a certain time, when America had been fighting enemies like the Nazis, could never understand what it meant to love your country enough to refuse to fight the Vietnamese. They thought that by the time you hit thirty, your attitudes would be frozen and you couldn't ever understand why the kids of the day were taking to the streets, dropping out, freaking out.
San Francisco was ground zero for this. Revolutionary armies were founded here. Some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for their cause. A lot of those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while others ended up in jail. Some of the university dropouts did amazing things--for example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple Computers and invented the PC."
I was really getting into this. I knew a little of it, but I'd never heard it told like this. Or maybe it had never mattered as much as it did now."
Cory Doctorow's genius consists of the way he makes history matter in his fictional world, and the way he makes abstract issues feel very specific and pressing. The teacher who replaces Mrs. Galvez sketches a scary picture of a society in which the federal government can suspend the Bill of Rights. Room 101 has nothing on the room Marcus eventually ends up in on a waterboard. The image of Big Brother has nothing on the idea of the government recording everything you have to say, both public and private. (See that little camera on your computer? Look deeply into its eye.)
Read this book. Don't trust me to tell you enough about it. Give it to your friends and your children, and your childrens' friends. It's available online at
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
Little Brother is not just a wonderful novel; it's an important novel, and it's addressed to the right age group ("young adult"). Doctorow's exaggeration of the role of the Department of Homeland Security in our everyday lives in the wake of another terrorist attack on American soil shows young adults exactly why the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights are worth preserving. The inclusion of history lessons (woven in seamlessly, since the protagonists of the novel are still in high school) doesn't slow the pace. From the beginning, this novel is relentless in the way it shows readers what can happen when Americans get to a point where safety is considered more important than freedom.
The dangers that Marcus, a San Francisco native, faces are explicitly laid out for him, and he's smart enough to be able to articulate what the problems are in the kind of thinking demanded of him. When the DHS agent wants the password for his phone, Marcus "submitted to her will," but he thinks about why, even though he has nothing to hide, it's a bad idea to be forced to give up such information:
"There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?
Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body--and how manhy of us can say that?--you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.
It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something private. It's about your life belonging to you."
That's a pretty good paean to human dignity, especially coming from a 17-year-old. I don't know about your town, but in my town and many nearby, anyone still in high school has fewer Constitutional rights than the rest of us. They're subject to random backpack and locker searches. Earlier this year, my daughter came home from school and told me a story about the bravery of one of her classmates. The math teacher claimed he heard a cell phone in the classroom and demanded that the student hand it to him, as cell phones are completely banned from the high school. According to my daughter, he must have heard something in the hall. At any rate, one student finally got up and gave him her cell phone, which she was carrying, as almost every student carries one--turned off and put away in her backpack. She was a hero to the rest of the class, because she'd saved them from having their backpacks searched.
Marcus' history teacher, Mrs. Galvez, who eventually loses her job for teaching too much history and too little pro-DHS propaganda, reminds me of the history teacher in Francine Prose's novel After, who loses her job (and probably her life, in that novel) for similar reasons. Here's Mrs. Galvez' explanation of the purpose of some of the sixties protest movements:
"Yippies were like very political hippies, but they weren't serious the way we think of politics these days. They were very playful. Pranksters. They threw money into the New York Stock Exchange. They circled the Pentagon with hundreds of protestors and said a magic spell that was supposed to levitate it. They invented a fictional kind of LSD that you could spray onto people with squirt guns and shot each other with it and pretended to be stoned. They were funny and they made great TV--one Yippie, a clown called Wavy Gravy, used to get hundreds of protestors to dress up like Santa Claus so that the cameras would show police officers arresting and dragging away Santa on the news that night--and they mobilized a lot of people.
Their big moment was the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where they called for demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. Thousands of demonstrators poured into Chicago, slept in the parks, and picketed every day....The police and the demonstrators fought in the streets--they'd done that many times before, but the Chicago cops didn't have the smarts to leave the reporters alone. They beat up the reporters, and the reporters retaliated by finally showing what really went on at these demonstrations, so the whole country watched their kids being really savagely beaten down by the Chicago police. They called it a 'police riot.'
The Yippies loved to say, 'Never trust anyone over thirty.' They meant that people who were born before a certain time, when America had been fighting enemies like the Nazis, could never understand what it meant to love your country enough to refuse to fight the Vietnamese. They thought that by the time you hit thirty, your attitudes would be frozen and you couldn't ever understand why the kids of the day were taking to the streets, dropping out, freaking out.
San Francisco was ground zero for this. Revolutionary armies were founded here. Some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for their cause. A lot of those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while others ended up in jail. Some of the university dropouts did amazing things--for example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple Computers and invented the PC."
I was really getting into this. I knew a little of it, but I'd never heard it told like this. Or maybe it had never mattered as much as it did now."
Cory Doctorow's genius consists of the way he makes history matter in his fictional world, and the way he makes abstract issues feel very specific and pressing. The teacher who replaces Mrs. Galvez sketches a scary picture of a society in which the federal government can suspend the Bill of Rights. Room 101 has nothing on the room Marcus eventually ends up in on a waterboard. The image of Big Brother has nothing on the idea of the government recording everything you have to say, both public and private. (See that little camera on your computer? Look deeply into its eye.)
Read this book. Don't trust me to tell you enough about it. Give it to your friends and your children, and your childrens' friends. It's available online at
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
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