Short Story: Over by Christmas by CE Morgan (2008)

Originally published on Christmas of 2008 in the New York Times, “Over by Christmas” gave readers a glimpse of what would come in her 2009 debut novel, All the Living.  “Over by Christmas” tells the story of Dean’s wife, who sets out to break a horse on Christmas day while Dean is fighting a war overseas.  The war is not named, though at one point her father references Vietnam while she is young, so it most likely one of the recent Gulf Wars.

From the opening we catch her cynicism. “Was it really the 25^th? An empty promise of homecoming.” This bends the title in irony. We’re also told “she was not a romantic.” In fact she’s very tough, like Aloma from All the Living, though with much more horse sense. She urges Dean on the phone to “protect yourself and that protects them.” When she talks to him once she hears a detonation; it’s not him but she still cries “tearlessly—only for a moment.”

Morgan shifts back and forth between the conversations and reflections about Dean’s war experience and his wife breaking the horse, gradually linking the two events. “The poverty of an empty house, and a wealth of too much information.”

Her war is fought, then, on two fronts: vicariously through Dean and at home, on this day, with the horse. “Can we be done today? she said to a swiveled ear.” And gradually she breaks him, though she slices her hand in the process.

As the story closes she finally gives into her emotions as the war and her battle at home merge. “Foolishly, sadly, she laid her head down on the halfwild animal and felt its terrified blood leaping against its flesh and her face, where her own blood colored her cheek. She whispered, You don’t know it yet, but this is a gift.”

The “this” initially refers to the falling snow and the promise of a white Christmas.  But in the context of the story it also speaks to the process of being broken, of having some hardness and wildness ridden out of you.  The war breaks her as she has broken the horse.

All the Living will come along and deal with a similar theme as Aloma seeks to break Orren, and vice versa, and Morgan explores the ways that we seek control in our lives. But this quick story speaks to the paradox of brokenness, that it is necessary for freedom, a Christmas message delivered in Morgan’s understated and devastating style.

 

Book Review: Why SuperFreakonomics has the answers for Eating Animals

I.

It’s probably not very useful to counter or dissect the claims made by Jonathan Safran Foer in his first work of non-fiction, Eating Animals.  Foer is a Romantic, a sentimental idealist. We saw this in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, his terrific novel that ached for a world before 9/11, cemented by the closing flip book that turned history backwards. While his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, was less Romantic in tone, it still espoused a certain kind of idealistic permanence (the past is always present).  So it’s no surprise that he comes off a little earnest in Eating Animals, in spite of making small attempts at self-deprecation and attempts at investigative journalism.  The prevailing tone of the book tries to capture the personal dilemma about why we eat as we do, sparked by the birth of Foer’s son and how he and his wife (author Nicole Krauss, whose novel The History of Love fits nicely between Foer’s in tone) will reconcile cultural and traditional aspects of meals with new ethical and moral concerns about the nature of factory farms.

Foer chronicles the landscape as he does in his fiction, from a variety of points of view blending a variety of structures.  In Eating Animals he rotates between personal narrative, third person accounts, an Ambrose Bierce-type dictionary, an interview, and traditional journalism research.  It is through this kaleidoscope that he reaches his answer: he cannot morally justify the eating of any meat. For those who do eat meat, he advocates family farms as the only acceptable option.

Part of the lynchpin of Foer’s approach is that “we are not merely animals that eat, but eating animals.”  The attempt is made by Foer and by those he interviews to level the species, sort of like Mark Twain’s essay “The Damned Human Race.” The trickiness here, of course, is that animals act on instinct and eat one another, which sets Foer and his crowed into a complex mental gymnastics routine trying to explain how we are like animals but really that animals are like us, etc.

More interesting are some of Foer’s literary moments, like his willingness to embrace the paradox that food creates for us.

Remembering and forgetting are part of the same mental process. To write down one detail of an event is to not write down another (unless you keep writing forever). To remember one thing is to let another slip from remembrance (unless you keep recalling forever). There is ethical as well as violent forgetting. We can’t hold onto everything we’ve known so far. So the question is not whether we forget, but what, or whom, we forget—not whether or diets change, but how.

It sounds straight out of Everything is Illuminated (“We are writing we are writing we are writing”).  He later ties this idea of what we remember to Thanksgiving.  “The Thanksgiving turkey is the flesh of competing instincts—of remembering and forgetting.”  We remember the culture and the family and the pomp of the holiday; we forget and turn a blind eye to the immoral practices that brought us the bird.

The other aspect of the book that lets Foer’s prose sing a little is when he touches on his own family, when he is most personal.  When he describes the nature of the changes at family tables because of Time, he says, “As if the musical chairs I played at birthday parties were preparation for all of this ending and beginning.”

II.

Perhaps the solution to Foer’s frustration with the public’s choices over food can be found in Steven Levitt’s new look at microeconomics, SuperFreakonomics.  Levitt continues to discuss incentives, but focuses a good chunk of the book on externalities and the challenges of changing human behavior, whether it is getting doctor’s to wash their hands or the government to make more  cost-effective decisions.

Levitt relies on Gary Becker’s (1992 Nobel winner) definition of “the economic approach”: “a method of analysis, not an assumption about particular motivations.”  Foer clearly has motivations, though not necessarily political, and assumptions, though some of his assumptions are actually the obstacles to achieving his goal of a meat-free diet.  What Foer lacks is a method of analysis.  It is at times anecdotal, at times research-based, and at times personal narrative.  Levitt would surely scoff at Foer’s method, though he might admire the section linking influenza to chicken consumption.  Levitt says, “…the economic approach aims… to address a given topic with neither fear nor favor, letting numbers speak the truth. We don’t take sides…The economic approach isn’t meant to describe the world as any one of us might want it to be, or fear that it is, or pray that it becomes—but rather to explain what it actually is.”

Some of Foer’s suggestions (labeling certain types of fish with how many other animals were killed as bycatch) sound very similar to the methods that Levitt describes were attempted with doctors who weren’t washing hands. They were given free gift cards, lectures, etc. but it wasn’t until the bacteria from their hands was put on their screen savers that doctor’s actually changed their behavior.  In other words, it takes more than intellectual and moral knowledge when other externalities are at play. This is what is happening in the realm of food. Like doctors who simply found it more expedient to not wash hands (even though they knew the deadly stats), so, too, are those of us who find it more expedient to grill up some Tyson chicken from Kroger even though the horrors of factory farms have been well-documented.

Foer frustratingly challenges whether that’s “as far as our moral imaginations can stretch.” His earnestness blinds him to the externalities that SuperFreakonomics describes and prevents him from really leaving the realm of moral imagination and entering the world of practical solutions.

For example, in wondering about why we value dogs over fish, Foer questions whether “nearness and distance are even relevant…If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”  It would be unfair to cite this an example of all of Foer’s logic, but it is fairly representative of the first third of the book.

III.

In looking at Foer’s writing, readers will be familiar with his willingness to maximize the structure, typography, and other Post-Modern artifacts to tell his story.  We have a list of definitions, a letter, first person accounts, and pseudo-journalism mixed with pseudo-history.  It’s a blending of genre and style that suits Foer well.

What doesn’t suit him as well is the limitation of non-fiction.  Where the earnestness of Oskar Schell is heartbreaking, the earnestness of Foer trying to sneak into an unfed chicken coop feels, well, fishy.

In fact, the most poignant sections of this book are when Foer describes his own family, especially his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who once hoarded 60 pounds of flour.  As he describes the role of food in his family’s Jewish faith and the decisions he has to make in translating that to his son and how that is held in tension against his ethical beliefs about animals, Foer is winsome.  He is, after all, a novelist, who once confessed in a Morning News interview that it’s the little things the novelist deals with:

When you write a book, you are able to concentrate on very, very specific things. Individuals doing very specific acts. Orhan Pamuk once said that every book, at the end of the day is about showing how similar people are to one another. And how different they are from one another. And you do that by showing how somebody pours coffee and drinks it.

Nobel winner JM Coetzee was able to successfully do this in Disgrace, a 1999 novel where professor David Lurie ends up working at a South African animal shelter.  Here he “finds the punishment and salvation that Lurie finds at Bev’s animal shelter.”  Through Lurie’s eyes Coetzee is able to create sympathy and even empathy for animals in a way that non-fiction simply cannot.  Which is not to say that Coetzee’s efforts at the same topic in Elisabeth Costello and The Slow Man were anywhere near as effective as Disgrace was.  But it’s a topic that perhaps links Coetzee and Foer, and I think Coetzee’s approach is, in the long run, more effective.

Foer scores biggest on the personal level.  When he delves into stats, definitions, and describing the big picture of the animal industry, you can only get the feeling that there are probably more definitive researchers out there.

But when he gives us his grandmother’s truth, that “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save,” the writing comes alive. He mentions that he will one day tell her story. Here’s hoping that she’s his next non-fiction topic.

IV.

• Levitt on The Daily Show
• Foer on Martha Stewart (under Fall Casserole) and Ellen
• Positive review of Eating Animals in The Millions
• Salon interview with Foer

 

Book Review: What Zadie Smith’s new essay collection tells us about the art of story-telling

I.

Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith is sort of like when Columbia Records packages a mix of Bob Dylan demos, previously unreleased songs, covers from concerts, or songs from soundtracks and/or benefit albums.  You end up buying it (or illegally downloading it) because you’re a completist, but the demos are so-so and it really just makes you wish he’d go ahead and make another album.

These essays are good, though scattered from topics that range from Liberia to Grizzly Man, from David Foster Wallace to Audrey Hepburn. She is dead serious when contrasting Netherland with Remainder, and lethally comic when dismantling Date Movie (“it’s the laughter of monkeys as they fall out of trees”).

Scattered throughout are her observations about what makes good art, and in particular good story-telling, whether in the novels she reviews in section one or the movies in section three or in the stories she tells about her family.  Always she’s able to cross the line, though, and pull out truths from real life stories and made-up stories, to show us which works of art, like bootlegged Dylan shows, are worth checking out.

In her assessment of EM Forster’s radio show transcripts, she explains two camps of fiction. “Realists defend realism and experimentalists defend experimentalism; those who write simple sentences defend concision, and those who are fond of their adjectives claim the lyrical as the highest value in literature.”  Later she knocks Netherland for its faux realism in a heady essay that favors Remainder’s reality, but she consistently bashes adjectives in several of her essays. It’s worth noting that she liked Forster’s approach: “he could sit in his own literary corner without claiming its superiority to any other.”

Smith has this quality. She writes simply but swerves into weighty critical analysis and meta-narrative as it suits her.

II.

There is the travel essay “One Week in Liberia”, where she tells a country’s troubled history freshly and concisely, and more importantly, with movement and urgency (her histories of Hebpurn, Garbo, and her father’s war experience are similar).  She connects past and present through the essay’s structure and through her story-telling.

Then she gives a more metaphorical travel essay “Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend.” Here she brings Hollywood to life and the dreams it promises and the things a place and certain (intentionally) un-named people come to represent. It’s an essay that winks, while the Liberia essay brings tears.

III.

For my money the film reviews are the real gold here, the “Red River Shore” from Dylan’s Tell-Tale Signs.  Here she lays waste to bad film-making, from heavy-handed producing to poor ethnic casting, from dead dialogue to heartless story-telling. Smith is a fair judge, admitting changes in her perceptions of films and acknowledging adolescent-like awe though her mind tells her she shouldn’t.  The writing is crisp and funny, much looser than so much of her more academically-inclined efforts.  There is more David Foster Wallace here—a toughness in language and a mischievousness that eludes some of the essays (including her own analysis of Wallace, despite her attempts to emulate his footnote wizardry).

The most dour portions of the book are actually when she describes her own writing, specifically in “That Crafty Feeling.”  She confesses to having never read White Teeth, her first book many consider a masterpiece.  She read ten sentences “before I was overwhelmed with nausea.” After reading two-thirds of On Beauty, she felt “the nausea; as usual, the feeling of fraudulence; and the too-late desire to wield the red pen all over the place.”  It’s tough to hear someone like Smith complain about her own writing. It’s like when someone with a two million dollar home says things like, “My house is just a mess.”

It would be easy to go backwards and critique Smith’s own fiction based on some of what she writes in these essays, but that’s sort of like using Dylan’s memoir Chronicles to understand Blood on the Tracks (referenced in “Smith Family Christmas”).  She’s doing something different here, something uncollected that gives a good taste of her writing style and of her critical leanings. And like Dylan, she rewards with repeated listening.

Texts of Zadie Smith essays in Changing My Mind

• Dead Man Laughing text
• EM Forster, Middle Manager text
• Speaking in Tongues text
• Two Directions for the Novel text

Reviews of Changing My Mind

• NPR
• Guardian
• Village Voice
• LA Times
• NYT
• Slate
• Newsweek
• Boston Globe
• Entertainment Weekly

 

Between the Assassinations Day 7: Salt Market Village

In “Salt Market Village” Adiga takes the Biblical story of Ruth and Boaz as a starting point in the life of Murali (Boaz), Sulochana (Ruth), and the old woman (Naomi). But where Ruth illustrated an undying devotion, this story inverts the narrative and shows what the outcome would be in a place like Kittur.  Instead of Ruth promising to go everywhere with Boaz and showing gratitude for his intervention in her life, Sulochana and her mother take the money and run.

Murali is a purist, in search of the political party to accommodate his views.  And he is in charge of helping families who have lost loved ones recoup money owed them.  As he interrogates a widow whose husband killed himself after accumulating debt to a moneylender, he learns she has a daughter she wishes to marry off named Sulochana.  He comes to visit and finds her working in the fields and determines that he could possibly marry the daughter which would save them all. “If she came into his life everything could be different.” It gives him hope. “But things would change; he felt a great hope.” But in all Adiga stories, hope is short-lived.

When Murali goes to find them and tell them his plan he meets a mysterious character, “the matchmaker”, “an old, half-blind man sitting in a chair smoking a hookah.”  He tells Murali that the two are gone. Once they received the government money that Murali had procured for them they took off.

“You’ve been fooled.” Indeed, Murali has been fooled by politics (some complicated nuance about communism), dreams of writing (his stories fail because he’s told the characters “want absolutely nothing”), and finally by love.  Like the journalist Gururaj Kamath in “Angel Talkies”, Murali’s eyes are opened but the knowledge only costs him. His knowledge: “The greatest fallacy: that you can hide from others what you want from them.”  He learned the lesson fiction has teach about human nature and its self-interest.  It’s the lesson of Kittur that Adiga weaves through all 14 stories.

Reviews of each story from the Between the Assassinations:

• Day 1: The Railway Station | Text
• Day 1 (the afternoon): The Bunder
• Day 2: Lighthouse Hill | Text
• Day 2 (afternoon): St. Alfonso’s Boys’ High School and Junior College
• Day 2 (evening): Lighthouse Hill (the foot of the hill)
• Day 2 (evening): Market and Maidan
• Day 3: Angel Talkies
• Day 4: Umbrella Street | Text (originally published under the title “The Elephant”)
• Day 4 (afternoon): The Cool Water Well Junction
• Day 5: Valencia (to the First Crossroads)
• Day 5 (evening): The Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia
• Day 6: The Sultan’s Battery | Text
• Day 6 (evening): Bajpe
• Day 7: Salt Market Village | Text

 

Between the Assassinations Day 6 (evening): Bajpe

“Bajpe” feels like a different Kittur. Set at the end of Bishop Street “right on the forest’s edge, the house had the look of a fugitive from the civilized world, ready to spring into the wilderness at a moment’s notice.”  Here lives Giridhar Rao and Kamini, a childless couple called “the hidden treasures of Kittur” because they “kept alive the all-but-dead art of Brahmin hospitality.”

It is the world of a dinner party with elevated discourse and etiquette and manners and all of the things missing from the tough street stories that precede this one.  The guests are referred to as the intimates, and the come to gradually question Giridhar Rao’s lack of ambition. He could have accepted career advancements and moved away, but he seems content in his world. “You are the perfect Hindu man,” a guest tells him. “Which is to say you are almost completely contented with your fate on earth.” It is an insult, of course. It is also one of the themes of this book, how caste creates apathy and hopelessness, but Giridhar transcends it.

This is partly because of a secret lake he found in town where he spends time in solitude watching the night sky. “It pleased him to think that the elements of our world were not cast about at random. Something stood behind them: an order.” Like Thoreau he sees nature as a symbol and as a refuge. For Giridhar it confirms that his fate is not something to struggle against.  His “private beach” centers him (there’s probably some type of Eastern meditation language happening here) and frees him from the fears of those like the old lady who erupts in the final scene with fears about her eternal destiny because of sin and judgement.  Giridhar escapes the judgement of his fellow Indians about his lack of ambition and it seems that in this story that Adiga rejects the judgement of a potential future life (as he did in “Valencia (To the First Crossroads)”).

• Back to the Between the Assassinations beginning

 

Between the Assassinations Day 6: The Sultan’s Battery

This story was originally published in The Guardian and I wrote about it here.  Ratna is a huckster who sniffs out another con—a boy trying to wed his daughter. Through their conversations Ratna eventually admits that he, too, is a fraud. As Ratna tries to get the ailing boy help at the end, they encounter a blue-saronged prophet who says, “Everything’s falling apart…we’re not meant to be masters of our own fate.” 

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Between the Assassinations Day 5 (evening): The Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia

It sounds like a fairy tale: “the mosquito man had caught himself a princess.” But people don’t live happily ever after in Adiga’s Kittur, so George D’Souza goes through the hopeless cycle that so many characters in Between the Assassinations have.

Through hard work and honesty George earned his way into Mrs. Gomes’ house and gradually replaced her servants. But he over-reaches and gets his sister a job as cook (which cost the old cook her job) and then he began to think of himself as more than a servant.  It is surely no crime given the way Mrs. Gomes encourages him, but Adiga shows that class and caste are very real boundaries in India and no amount of idealism can topple them.

George’s friend Guru foreshadows this for George, “You know what the biggest difference is between being rich and being like us? The rich can make mistakes again and again. We make only one mistake, and that’s it for us.”

And it is only one mistake that costs George his princess and his castle.

George initially believes and has hope (as many of Adiga’s charcters do—see Jayamma in “Valencia” or Sumya in “Cool Water Well Junction”) that “this rich woman really is different from other rich people.”

But they grow close as they talk and occasionally have tea together.

In a poignant line George laments that “it’s just not fair” that rich people like Mrs. Gomes “have it all and we people have nothing. He says, “You even have a washing machine that you never use.” It’s true that she has a washing machine she does not use and this symbol comes to show us the difference in their lives.

For all of the big socioeconomic problems and injustices facing George, Adiga doesn’t let him off the hook. “It seemed to him, when he looked back on it, that his life consisted of things that had not said yes to him, and things that he could not say no to.” He is his true problem.

So he decides to quit drinking to prove to his princess that “he had the power now to live any way he wanted.”

His confidence in himself grows and his confidence in his status with Mrs. Gomes grows, so he outsources his job as mosquito man. She balks and it hurts him.

“Oh, these rich people are all the same…we’re just trash to them. A rich woman can never see a poor man as a man. Just as a servant.” His belief and optimism have been dashed.

In the closing scene he enters the house, and though he does not take anything, he has clearly trespassed. As he stands outside pounding on her door, he realizes “Madam’s reputation was at stake.”

He is forced to return to work on “the unfinished cathedral,” which the story’s preface tells us has been covered in scaffolding “almost continuously since 1981.” It’s the perfect symbol of what Adiga is showing through George and Mrs. Gomes—there is hope for crossing some of the class divisions, but it’s still very much a process under construction.  It is, as yet, incomplete and fragile, brought down by one breach of etiquette.

• Back to the Between the Assassinations beginning

 

Between the Assassinations Day 5: Valencia (to the First Crossroads)

Jayamma dreams of leaving “the advocate’s house,” but it is her hated-enemy (only hated because she is so similar) Shaila, the “lower-caste servant girl”, who gets to leave through a marriage arrangement.

Jayamma is tormented by the fact that she can’t leave and control her own life, and as she prays to her Baby Krishna she finds herself envying her neighbor, “the thick-lipped Christian,” Rosie. “How carefree those Christians were—eating whatever they wanted, marrying and divorcing whenever they felt like it.” Though it goes against her religious nature, her human nature admires the freedom she has been denied.

Jayamma even feels tormented by two demons and comes around the fatalism that Adiga repeatedly shows as poison: “Nothing will ever change for me till I die.”

But she is released to her brother’s, and asks Karthik to let her take a small blue ball back with her for her little Brijju. He rejects her simple request. So she steals it because she feels it is owed to her because of her years of dedicated service, but she also feels that the act has condemned her future reincarnations. “What would the gods do to her, she wondered…what would she be in the next life? A cockroach, a silverfish that lived in old books, an earthworm, a maggot in a pile of cow shit, or something even filthier.”  Then she imagines the lowest thing possible she could be sent back as: a Christian.

But after her time with the advocate and Karthik, this is suddenly appealing and “made her feel light-headed with joy.”

It’s an interesting end, because like Huck Finn, she believes she is condemning her inherited cultural system. In reality, she is just opening herself up to the possibility of forgiveness instead of punishment.  It would be an over-reach to say Adiga has something religious up his sleeve here. He’s using religion and the tensions in the region as a way to get at Jayamma’s character and to show change here.  But I also think he is offering some indictment of a faith that perpetuates a cycle of injustice throughout time.  Christianity offers a break from that with its promises of new starts and so it fits here.

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Between the Assassinations Day 4 (afternoon): The Cool Water Well Junction

This story is one of Adiga’s bleakest, which is saying something. Two kids, Soumya and Raju, are sent on a mission by their father. They are to give their Daddy’s friend ten rupees and he will “give us something Daddy really needs.” Only he gives them no money and they are cast into Kittur alone to find their way. It’s not a fool’s errand, but the fear that Adiga creates through their impending meeting is real. 

They see a man with no arms and legs who curses them, lepers, they are forced to beg, and it is insinuated that Soumya performs a sexual act to get the money they need after she and Raju are briefly separated while begging.

Eventually they find what Daddy “really needs”: white powder that gets rolled in cigarette paper.  Soumya says to herself, “She would show Dady what she had brought for him from so far away. ‘Sweetie,’ he would say—the way he used to say it—and hold her in a frenzy of affection, and the two would go mad with their love for each other.”

These are heart-breaking lines—the simplicity of her hope and its innocence contrasted with the reader’s knowledge about what a Cretin the father is.  Adiga peels back any illusions about the hope of people here.

But it’s not enough. Adiga follows her home and lets her fantasy continue. When she gives him the sought-after drug, she believes the moment has arrived. “She knew it was coming now: his caress.”

Instead, “his fingers cut into her flesh” and he demands the extra money that Raju says she got from the white man. He is heartless and devastates her dream. She goes to sleep silent, Raju goes to sleep hungry, and Adiga has tried to wake up readers though this tragic story.  Given the nature of his other stories, it’s not hard to imagine that Raju will one day grow into the same kind of selfishness as his father and the cycle will go on.

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Between the Assassinations Day 4: Umbrella Street

This story was originally published in The New Yorker as “The Elephant” and I wrote about it here.  It is the strongest story in Adiga’s collection, made memorable by the meeting with the elephant but also by the passage of Chenayya pedaling, gradually “unmaking himself.”

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