Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

I seem to be on a kick of reading historical novels this past month. I picked up two relatively new historical novels at the beginning of the month and I chose to read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet first because I knew nothing about the subject matter. Peter Carey’s Parrot & Olivier in America, on the other hand, was set in early 19th century America and “starred” a character loosely based on Alexis de Toqueville. Part of me thought it would be the more uninteresting read because I would already know the basic story.

Part of me also worried whether Carey could pull that off. Hillary Mantel pulled off writing yet another Tudor novel by choosing Cromwell, usually a villain, to be her hero. Carey does pull it off because he makes Olivier (who is based on Toqueville) more of an arrogant, snobbish twit than Toqueville was (or at least that the Toqueville who has come down to us was). He also introduces a completely fictional English character in John Larrit a/k/a Parrot who is forced to accompany Olivier to America as his servant and secretaire.

In general it works. Carey switches between the voices of Olivier and Parrot and we see the differing views on America and Democracy. Although, I should say that it takes Olivier and Parrot almost 150 pages to get to America. But the 150 pages are, I think, essential because they represent to the reader what the “old Europe” is like and offer a good comparison to the “new” America.

Carey’s purpose is to represent a funny, entertaining and, ultimately, enlightening argument about America. In the end we might say that both Parrot and Olivier are right. Olivier is disturbed (as was Toqueville) by the idea of the tyranny of the masses. Olivier is looking at society as a whole. Parrot is fascinated by the idea of what a man (or woman) might make of himself in America. Parrot is an individualist.

Olivier, thinking about the difference between France and America, says about what he has learned:

Yet all I had learned was that when the mob was allowed to rule a second mob sprang up to rule beneath them, and the difference between the Americans and the French is that Americans do not need to steal from their fellows when they can roam the countryside in bands, cutting trees and taking wealth. Anyone can claim a site for his chateau, whether he be a night soil man or a portraitist.

But although the subject matter is serious and historical, Carey is, of course, Carey and is very funny. He creates a Parrot who is the Figaro to Olivier’s Duke (if Figaro were twice the age of the Duke and eventually went to America with him). There is a great deal of humor at the expense of the French: “He exhibited such magnificent ugliness you might assume him to be French”.

But Carey mocks the Americans too. Olivier encounters over and over again the irritating type of American who cannot help but expound on its exceptionalism and perceived perfection. Here Olivier reacts to Mr. Peeks, a banker, who informs of his high regard for law, but not just any law, American law.

“An American law, sir,” he said steadily, and I saw he would no more query its justice than he would admit that the coast of Connecticut was the most shocking monument to avarice one could have ever witnessed, its ancient forests gone, smashed down and carted off for profit.

Unlike Toqueville, Olivier is not a willing traveller to America and writing any kind of book is not, initially, his own idea. His overprotective maman, who has lived through the revolution and whose father was guillotined, is worried that her son could end up target of the mob during one of France’s many uprisings:

“You wish me to flee to America like Chateaubriand”, I said while thinking, She is calling the doctor for me once again.

“”My dear Olivier, he did not flee. He went to write a book!”

And so Olivier is sent off to write a report: On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France (Toqueville also went to America to write about the prison system). But eventually Olivier decides to write an additional, broader treatise on America itself, an endeavor that Parrot is only slightly interested in.

Although Carey pulls off Olivier, it is Parrot who makes the novel come alive. Olivier is a brilliant observer (perhaps because Carey, by his own admission, pinched many of his observations from Toqueville) but Parrot is in the thick of things. In a series of flashbacks we learn of Parrot’s almost Dickensian (although years before Dickens) childhood as he is orphaned at a young age and that he spent years in the British penal colony in Australia. His benefactor, usually called “Monsieur” “rescued” him from Australia and made him a servant and a spy. But all his life Parrot wanted to be an artist and there is a certain poignancy to his discovery that, at the age of almost 50, he is surrounding himself with artists while he himself creates nothing and knows he has not the talent to truly be an artist. (Parrot has a mistress, Mathilde, who represents all the women artists over the ages who have been better than the men who take credit for much of their work. He also creates a character who produces James Audubon-style bird studies.)

In the end it is art that is the key to the argument in this novel. Parrot recognizes the commercial viability of the bird prints and is in love with Mathilde and her paintings. Olivier consistently refers to Mathilde’s work as mediocre and turns his nose up at the artistic venture. By the end Olivier tells Parrot that when he looks on Mathilde’s paintings hanging on the wall he sees “the awful tyranny of the majority” but as Parrot remembers, Olivier is near sighted and myopic. He thinks:

… I frankly loathed the certainty of his judgment. he might go away and write a book about this, but what could he know from so short a visit? The time it would take to make this nation would be put into centuries and it did not do to come prancing around in your embroidered vests and buckled shoes and even if the New York Sentinel reported what you said, it did not mean you knew.

“These people are not the same as the people you distrust in France,. they will be educated.”

“Oh dear,” he said, and held his head in his hands and i could not tell if this was because he thought it a very bad idea or if he considered education impossible and expected our people would all grow up ignorant and their children after them.

“From what will they get their culture?” he cried, “the newspapers? God help you all.”

As a reader, we cannot see Mathilde’s paintings so we cannot judge Olivier’s artistic judgment but his warnings ring true (as do Toqueville’s). I won’t quote the end of the novel in which Olivier warns of the kind of country that many people today still worry the United States is or will become. Nor will I quote from Parrot’s counterargument in the “Dedication” that he is wrong. You can see the same debates among political pundits today, although the language of Parrot and Olivier is finer.

On the whole I enjoyed this novel. I was disappointed that Carey chose not to travel the trail of Toqueville through Wisconsin and up to Montreal. I wondered if he intended to but then deleted those portions since many of Olivier’s warnings were that the country would be run by not only “woodsmen” but also by “fur traders” and yet he met no fur traders in the novel. But that is a minor disappointment.

A Sense of Place

I’m from St. Louis and, although I’ve never lived in the near-suburb of Webster Groves, I  know Webster Groves.  I spent a great part of my life in Webster Groves.  My mom’s family lived in Webster Groves when she was in high school.  I have always had family who lived in Webster Groves. I went to a high school in Webster Groves. I attend the theater in Webster Groves.   I have lots of friends who have lived, and some who still live, in Webster Groves. My favorite independent book store is in Webster Groves.  I live close enough that I could walk to Webster Groves if I had to.  It would be a long walk (2-3 miles) but I could do it.  So, I feel qualified to say that I know Webster Groves. 

If I had to describe it I would say it blends a friendly small town atmosphere with the benefit of living in an inner suburb with an easy commute to downtown and other places where people work.  It’s a good place to raise a family.  If I was raising a family I’d probably be living in Webster Groves.  When I was younger and sometimes imagined myself grown up and married with children and dogs, I imagined myself living in a house in Webster Groves.  When I dreamed big I dreamed of one of the big old three story frame houses with a wrap-around porch. When one of my friends got married and bought a home in Webster Groves, I walked in the front door and said “You are living my dream!”

Apparently a lot of people who have never set foot in Webster Groves feel that they know it too because of a CBS documentary aired in the 1966 called 16 in Webster Groves.  I’ve never seen it, although I’ve seen snippets.  It didn’t seem to describe the Webster Groves that I know, it made it seem snobby.  But I’ve never thought too much about it.  It aired in 1966 and when I was a child that might as well have been 1866.  I was all of 6 years old at the time.  By the time I was hanging at the McDonalds in Webster Groves after work, or going to the Imo’s to pick up a pizza to bring back to school, or walking past Music Folk looking at the guitars in the window, it was ten years later.  I had no interest in ancient television programs. Neither did my friends.  Or their parents.

But I have had conversations with out-of-towners about it.  Which always confused me.  If people my age who live here haven’t watched it or cared about it, why do other people my age or younger from out of town give a rat’s ass about it?  And why on earth do they think that they can judge whether a depiction of a place in 1966 was accurate at the time?  I’m from her and I couldn’t.  Not when I was 6 years old at the time.  And why do they think it would be accurate today?   The whole thing just seemed weird to me.

So I was interested to read this blog post in the LA Times by Sam Tanenhaus entitled Franzen in Webster Groves.  Author Jonathan Franzen is from Webster Groves and he is just about my age.  It occurred to me that we were teenagers hanging out in Webster Groves at about the same time.  But as far as i know, we never met. 

According to this blog post, 16 in Webster Groves was used during the 70’s and 80’s in sociology curricula and that’s why so many people my age or younger have seen it.  Well, that explains it. 

The rest of the post was strangely annoying.  As I said, I don’t know Jonathan Franzen.  I’ve never read his books (or, at least, I’ve never finished one of his books. I started one once but put it aside to read at a later time.)  I don’t have any inherent sympathy for Franzen.  But I was annoyed on his behalf by this blog post.  Which was supposed to be about him but was, in fact, about a television show that aired when he was seven years old.

Franzen must get tired of being asked about it.  He gamely talks about it but it must get old for him.  But Tanenhaus doesn’t seem to catch on to that.  Tanenhaus’ attitude seems to be that since Franzen is from Webster Groves that television show MUST be discussed. He even goes so far to say that Franzen may be “the only major novelist whose idea of the East-Midwest divide was shaped profoundly by a single television program”. 

Wow.  I thought.  Franzen’s idea of the East-West divide was shaped by what was in this show?   I’m the same age as Franzen and the television program wasn’t even part of my consciousness growing up.  Not in any real way.  And we were both little kids when it aired.  Franzen and I must be really different.

But, if you read what Franzen is actually saying, you will find that Tanenhaus misses the point.  Franzen says that people who have seen the TV show always try to explain to him the type of community he comes from.  But, as he says, all of them collectively, have spent less than 20 minutes in Webster Groves. He says he tries to “explain that the Webster Groves depicted in [the television show] bears minimal resemblance to the friendly, unpretentious town I knew when I was growing up. But it’s useless to contradict TV; people look at me with suspicion, hostility or pity.”  (emphasis mine)

Hmmm maybe Franzen and I really do see things the same way.  The chasm between East and West?  How about the chasm between people who are shaped by television and people who are shaped by reality? 

And the mere fact that Tanenhaus insists on writing an entire blog post that ends by comparing people’s negative perception of Franzen to people’s negative perception of Webster Groves as it might or might not have existed in 1966 indicates to me that he falls in the first category. 

More on Fur, Fortune and Empire

Just a couple more thoughts on Fur, Fortune and Empire.  After writing my previous post and before returning the book to my dad I decided to take a careful read of the footnotes.  I had skipped back to them while reading the book when something caught my attention but I wanted to give them a thorough read. 

Sometimes the footnotes can be more interesting than the actual book or, at least, can provide separate items of interest.  This was the case here. 

As I said before, the scope of this book was different than I expected.  I would have preferred to have read about the actual trading itself but this was really a history of Americans.  In the footnotes he points out the following, which I think is very true:

“One of the difficulties in writing about the American fur trade, especially during the colonial era, is that almost all the historical documents were written by the white people who interacted with the Indians rather than the Indians themselves.  Thus it is nearly impossible to say with certainty what the Indians thought about their participation in the trade, and how they perceived the people with whom they were trading.  Still some documents do exist, and historians have used them, and have also carefully analyzed the broader contemporary literature written by whites, to create portraits of the fur trade, and in particular Indian involvement, that are as accurate and balanced as possible.” (p. 328 fn. 18).

Unfortunately he doesn’t give any specific examples of those historians in that citation.  But I think he’s correct.  They say that history is written by the victors and that’s true. But it’s also true that history tends to be written by those who can write.  The oral tradition of the Indians doesn’t make their histories any less valid than the written histories of the whites with whom they traded but it does make them more difficult to access. 

One of the best quotes in Dolan’s footnotes, though, is from Professor Jennifer Brown, of the University of Winnepeg:  “European records made a big thing of how impressed the Indians were with their trade goods; Indian oral tradition tells the reverse – how impressed the Europeans were with the furs that the Indians didn’t value particularly highly.”  (p. 328 fn 20).

And this sounds true.  It especially sounds true when you know exactly what the colonial traders were trading for. Dolan had some very good sections about the anatomy of the beaver and how beaver skins are used in the making of hats.  The beaver has two types of fur – long coarse outer hairs covering the soft warm inner fur.  Plucking out the outer hairs was time consuming but necessary to get to the fur they wanted.   The most profitable furs were, therefore, furs for which this process had already taken place.  Indians tended to create robes with the fur on the inside and as they wore them the outer hairs would wear away leaving only the soft inner fur.  Fur traders valued these “worn” garments more highly than new unused furs.  I’ve always thought the Indians must have thought the Europeans were slightly crazy to want to buy what the Indians saw (quite rightly) as their smelly used clothes. 

In return for their old clothes and some animal skins, the Indians got mettle goods like kettles. In a later footnote, Dolan quotes historian Ian K. Steele:  “Historians have been irrationally embarrassed by Amerindian economic interests evident in the fur trade of the north and the deerskin trade of the south.  Earlier portrayals of naive Amerindian victims of underpriced furs and overpriced European goods have righty been superseded by more plausible accounts of discerning Amerindian customers able to demand exactly the kind of kettles, blankets, knives, or guns they wanted.” (p. 330 fn. 31).

All of this is to say that some of the things I may have complained about in my post yesterday as lacking were not lacking because Dolan was unaware of them.  Clearly he had his own viewpoint that he was trying to get across and these things were outside the scope of what he was trying to accomplish.  But the footnotes make it clear that he was well aware of these other issues. 

It also is a way of leading up to a quote that he gives in the footnotes from an interview/discussion between Richard White and William Cronan on why the Indians valued kettles:  “Indians wanted kettles partly because you can put them on a fire and boil water and they won’t break.  That’s nice.  But many of those kettles didn’t stay kettles for long.  They got cut up and turned into arrowheads that were then used in the hunt.  Or they got turned into high-status jewelry.  Indians valued kettles because they were such an extraordinarily flexible resource.” 

It’s a great quote but he also gave a a web address for the citation to the quote which took me to an interesting article:  http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1986/5/1986_5_18.shtml

This article is a discussion between Richard White and William Cronan that took place before White published his seminal work The Middle Ground.  In it they talk about the Indian’s use of animals and I was very much reminded of the discussion that took place when I read and blogged about Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

R[ichard] W[hite]: What’s hardest for us to understand, I think, is the Indians’ different way of making sense of species and the natural world in general. I’m currently writing about the Indians of the Great Lakes region. Most of them thought of animals as a species of persons. Until you grasp that fact, you can’t really understand the way they treated animals. This is easy to romanticize—it’s easy to turn it into a “my brother the buffalo” sort of thing. But it wasn’t. The Indians killed animals. They often overhunted animals. But when they overhunted, they did so within the context of a moral universe that both they and the animals inhabited. They conceived of animals as having, not rights—that’s the wrong word—but powers. To kill an animal was to be involved in a social relationship with the animal. One thing that has impressed me about Indians I’ve known is their realization that this is a harsh planet, that they survive by the deaths of other creatures. There’s no attempt to gloss over that or romanticize it.

W[illiam C[ronan] There’s a kind of debt implied by killing animals.

RW Yes. You incur an obligation. And even more than the obligation is your sense that those animals have somehow surrendered themselves to you.

WC There’s a gift relationship implied …

RW … which is also a social relationship. This is where it becomes almost impossible to compare Indian environmentalism and modern white environmentalism. You cannot take an American forester or an American wildlife manager and expect him to think that he has a special social relationship with the species he’s working on.

WC Or that he owes the forest some kind of gift in return for the gift of wood he’s taking from it.

RW Exactly. And it seems to me hopeless to try to impose that attitude onto Western culture. We distort Indian reality when we say Indians were conservationists—that’s not what conservation means. We don’t give them full credit for their view, and so we falsify history.

It’s a very interesting interview all around and I encourage everyone to read it.  And as Richard White says: “We can’t copy Indian ways of understanding nature, we’re too different. But studying them throws our own assumptions into starker relief and suggests shortcomings in our relationships with nature that could cost us dearly in the long run.”

Fur, Fortune and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America, by Eric Jay Dolin

The problem is, I interpreted the title wrong. I thought it was an epic history of the fur trade in America. Yes, I know it says that. But I thought it meant North America. Or at least that it meant the fur trade in parts of North America that later became the United States of America But it really was an epic history of the fur trade in the United States of America with occasional asides about the rest of the fur trade in North America, including parts that later became the United States of America. And, unfortunately, that means that the most fun part of the history of the fur trade in North America was off stage for most of this book.

I knew I was in trouble when it began with the Pilgrims. And while I understand that he was trying to show how the fur trade was an important part of the history of Plymouth Colony, the plain fact of the matter is that Plymouth Colony's fur trade failed fairly quickly (relatively speaking). In fact, most of this book is about the failed history of the American fur trade – at least until old John Jacob Astor decided to buy the entire trade and wipe out the animal population of the west. Which, if you think about it from an environmental perspective, is also a failure.

If you are looking for a thorough history of how the United States and its territorial expansion was affected by the fur trade this is a good place to start. If you are looking for a good history of the North American fur trade, reading this is like wanting to learn about Jazz and starting with a history of Jazz in France. Of necessity a little of the overall history has to be thrown in, but the picture is skewed.

And what is really odd is that the actual mechanics of the trade itself – with the Indians – seem glossed over. I was actually a bit excited that he spent some time talking about the evolution of New Amsterdam because I don’t know as much about New Amsterdam and the Albany trade as I’d like. But then I was disappointed that there wasn’t really much about actual Dutch people trading with actual Indians in it. Just a lot about Dutch people and English and Swedish people fighting over boundaries. The story of the Dutch as they actually traded and their relations with the Five Nations must have been more interesting than as portrayed in this book. Unlike the English in New England, the Dutch were relatively successful in their trade. But they failed as a colony. Reading this book reminded me that history is written by the victors.

And I know the French story was far more interesting than he portrayed it. And although the period I focus on is predominantly the 18th century and not the 19th century, I know that the story of the men involved in John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company was much more interesting than he made it. David Lavender’s biography of Ramsay Crooks, The Fist in the Wilderness, made them come alive for me. I highly recommend that book to anyone who really wants a picture of the trade in the 19th century to see if they are interested in learning more.

The truth is that he tried to put so much into this book that he ended up making it rather dry. The details seem accurate but it tends to plod along. And looking at the footnotes and the bibliography he seems to have relied quite a bit on secondary sources rather than primary sources, which is understandable given the breadth of the topic. But this lacks the spark that quotations from primary sources give.

On the other hand if you need a reference book on the fur trade that goes into a lot of really great detail about the animals being hunted, I think this is an excellent book.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell

I must confess that this is the first David Mitchell novel I’ve ever read and I picked it up, not because it was a David Mitchell novel, but because it was historical fiction and had received good reviews and was now on the Booker longlist.  I like good historical fiction. 

On the other hand I’ve never really been much interested in historical fiction about Japan.  I never could get into Shogun back in the day.  So I was a little apprehensive.  I shouldn’t have been.   It became clear as the novel progressed that Mitchell’s intent was not to create for the reader the Japan of 1800 in detail but to give the reader little glimpses of Japan such as one of the rare visitors of Japan in 1800 would have seen.  Japan was a closed society, visitors were discouraged and the study of Japanese society or even its language was not allowed.  The few visitors who were allowed to visit were closely watched and could not fully interpret what they saw.  As a reader, that is how we experience much of the Japan that we see in this novel.

This novel is not, then about Japan in 1800.  And even though much of the action takes place among members of the Dutch East India Company, it is also not a novel that is principally intended to tell us what it was like to be a member of that company.  Through long months out of the year, the men stationed in Japan did nothing but maintain a Dutch presence.  It is not, in fact, a traditional historical novel.  It doesn’t have a traditional love story.  It doesn’t have a traditional ending.

I think Mitchell was more interested in exploring an idea than in telling a story.  I think Mitchell was exploring the concept of imprisonment.  And while he explores it he tells a pretty good story.  

Jacob de Zoet is a clerk with the Dutch East Indies Company.  He has joined the company for a limited five year stint with the intention of making his fortune so that he can return home and marry Anna, the woman he is in love with.  He hopes to have freedom of movement within the Company by being indispensible to the new chief of the Japanese trading post whose stated desire is to root out the corruption of the previous post administrator.  De Zoet cleans up the records and identifies the wrongdoings, which makes him no friends at the post, but his honesty becomes a liability when the head of the post himself wants to engage in shenanigans.  And so rather than be allowed to return to Java (Jakarta) de Zoet is left behind in Japan as a lower clerk. 

But he is not truly in Japan, he is on the man-made island of Dejima which is walled and has only two entrances:  the sea gate that is opened only when a Dutch ship is in port and the land gate that gives access to the city of Nagasaki over a bridge.  It is, essentially, a large but fairly comfortable prison for the men who live there throughout the year.  A Dutch vessel arrives only once a year if they are lucky.  If they are unlucky it is lost at sea and multiple years can go by with no contact with Europe.   No European is allowed across the bridge to Nagasaki without the permission of the Japanese who are deeply suspicious of the foreigners.  No escape from the island is possible because the  Europeans could not blend into the Japanese population.  The Dutch do not think of themselves as prisoners but they have limited freedom of movement and they are subject to roll calls by their Japanese watchers.

The men on Dejima have, however, varying levels of freedom.  The company doctor, Doctor Marinus, is the most free.  He has no desire to return to Europe.  He has botanical studies that he is interested in and he has allies in Nagasaki through whom he is able to travel more regularly to and fro from the Japanese mainland.  The least free are the slaves of the Dutch traders.  They have no freedom of movement.  In one chapter Mitchell gives us the story from the point of view of a slave who makes clear to us that the Dutch may be able to control his body but they cannot control his thoughts.  Some of the other men are not slaves but are there because they were “pressed” onto ships and sent east, so they are little better than the slaves who were captured from their homeland.   All of the men (except Doctor Marinus) dream of leaving Dejima and returning to their own homes and the people they love.

De Zoet makes friends with one of the Japanese/Dutch interpreters who has access to Dejima, Ogawa Uzeiman, who is interested in European culture.  Japan is a closed society.  It does not welcome foreigners and it does not allow any of its people to leave Japan, not even to study.  Uzeiman would have liked to have travelled and brought back information that would be useful for Japan, but he is not allowed.  There is “no precedent”.  In that sense, the entire Island of Japan can be seen as a prison.

Jacob De Zoet also makes the acquaintance of one Japanese woman, Miss Aibagawa, a midwife and the daughter of a Samurai, who is very intelligent but whose face was badly scarred as a child.  In the opening chapter of the book, Miss Aibagawa unexpectedly saves the life of the newborn child of the highest official in Nagasaki and he is so grateful that she is granted her wish to join the group of Japanese men who are studying on Dejima with Doctor Marinus.  This unexpected freedom of movement does not last, however, and soon Miss Aibagawa is sent against her will to a cloistered nunnery attached to a monastery where she is to live for 20 years.  De Zoet, who has come to believe he is in love with her, believes he will never see her again.  Uzeiman, who is in love with her but who has been forced to marry someone else, is distraught at her absence and a key part of the novel is his breaking with all traditions in an attempt to break her out.

There are prisons within prisons in this novel both literally (the monastery within Japan) and figuratively (the marriage of Ogawa and his wife) and some prisoners are more free than others (Doctor Marinus and the slaves come to mind but also Miss Aibagawa and the other “nuns” are treated differently).  And all of the characters are limited by their literal limited ability to communicate due to the language difference.  But as the slave on Dejima knows, real freedom is the freedom of the mind.

Not much of the action of the novel takes place on the Japanese mainland and sometimes when the scene shifts to Nagasaki we see it through the uncomprehending eyes of the European men who are allowed to visit.  In only a few scenes are we allowed a glimpse of Nagasaki through the eyes of Japanese characters and Mitchell doesn’t waste a lot of time in those scenes with superfluous description.  He moves the plot along.  There is one large section of the novel that takes place in the Japanese monastery but Mitchell’s point is clearly not to paint an accurate picture of a Japanese monastery for us since this one turns out to be an aberration that horrifies even the Japanese who discover its secrets.

How each of these characters deal with the limits on their freedom is the principal stuff of the novel.  It is very well written and I seldom found my attention flagging. When the land gate that separates Dejima from Nagasaki is closed at the end of Part One and the “well oiled bolt” slides home we are aware of the fact that de Zoet is now imprisoned on the island but we are also aware that Miss Aibagawa is locked out.  She has been trying to get onto the island because she believes that being imprisoned as the concubine of Jacob de Zoet would be better than being imprisoned in the Monastery. But she is not allowed to choose her prison.  Later, though, Miss Aibagawa is in a position to escape from the Monastery but turns back at the last minute because she will not abandon a friend.  Jacob de Zoet could, at one point, escape his life on Dejima by going along with the plan of an English Sea Captain but doing so would endanger the life of one of the other men on Dejima and so de Zoet refuses. 

In general I enjoyed this novel.  I have no idea, however, if the picture I got of Japan is at all accurate and I did not feel compelled, when I was finished, to do any research about that.  Late in the novel, Japan is referred to as The Land of the Thousand Autumns and the name of the novel became clearer to me.  The Japan that I was seeing was the Japan of Jacob de Zoet, not the Japan of the Japanese.  In terms of historical accuracy, I will point out that at one point a character states that the American sea captain has told him that Indians were “being cleared west of Louisiana” and he thought he might go take part.  I only point out that in 1799 no Indians were being cleared anywhere “west” of Louisiana by any Americans and the Louisiana purchase wasn’t even a gleam in Thomas Jefferson’s eye yet.  

But that’s a minor flaw.  The main flaw with the novel, in my opinion, was that the ending was anticlimactic.  But perhaps that was intended.  When a man is released from long years in prison and returns home, he often just wants to pick up the pieces of his life and return to “normalcy”.  That makes sense.  It just doesn’t make for a good end of a novel.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

My first thought on finishing The Slap was:  “This is going to be a popular book club book but a terrible choice as a book club book, and both for the same reason.”

The premise of The Slap is very simple and is set out in the first chapter.  Hector and Aisha, an Australian couple in their early forties with two children, are having a barbeque. Hector is Greek-Australian and Aisha is Indian-Australian.   It is their one big party of the year where they pay back all the hospitality of their family and friends and they invite lots of people who don’t know each other well and all of their children.  There is a lot of food.  The guests are diverse.  They invite Aisha’s friend Anouk, a childless unmarried Jewish woman who wants to quit her job as a television writer and write a novel.  They invite Aisha and Anouk’s friend Rosie, a former surfer party girl who now lives with her alcoholic, going nowhere husband Gary and their four year old child Hugo who Rosie is still breast-feeding.   To say that Hugo is undisciplined is an understatement.  Also invited are Hector’s Greek immigrant parents, Manolis and Koula, as well as Hector’s cousin Harry with his wife Sandi and son Rocco.  At some point Hugo throws (another) temper tantrum while swinging around a cricket bat in the direction of Rocco and Harry slaps him. Rosie is furious, files a police report and brings charges against the slapper.  Everyone in the novel has an opinion about the slap and Rosie’s reaction.

The reason that this will be popular with book clubs is that people who never bother to read the assigned book can show up and participate.  As long as they know the above premise they can participate in the discussion.  Everyone in the reading group will inevitably express their opinion about the slap and the prosecution and that will inevitably lead to long discussions about upbringing (their own and their children’s and other people’s children’s). Someone who has read the book will say “oh you’re just like [fill in the name of a character].”  This won’t be one of those gatherings where the book is talked about for ten minutes – I predict that the discussion will go on for hours. Arguments will ensue.  Some of them might be vehement.  Friendships could be at stake.   But in the end the book club group will pat itself on the back and say “look!  we talked about the book all night!”

And that is why it will be a terrible book club book.  Because no one will really be talking about the book, they will be talking about themselves.  So, really, why bother to read the book?   The host could just distribute the above as a hypothetical and discussion could ensue. 

But.   Anyway.

This isn’t a great book but it is a good book.  Tsiolkas creates a set of very believable characters.  They are complex.  Tsiolkas isn’t interested in black and white characters, he goes for the shades of gray.  His characters are dislikeable but no one is really evil although some are worse than others. It is interesting how he achieves the shade of gray.  The novel is divided into eight chapters each of which is told from the point of view of one of the people at the party.  The first chapter is told from the point of view of Hector, the host, and it details the events of the party.  The other chapters are not intended to give us the other characters’ alternate views of what happened.  Everyone agrees about what happened.  Harry, Hector’s cousin, slapped Hugo, the son of Rosie who is one of Aisha’s best friends.  Life goes on, including all the repurcussions from the incident, but the narrative constantly shifts viewpoint. Those who are fans of Maeve Binchy will recognize this structure  but Binchy never created such dislikeable characters.

And they are dislikeable not necessarily because of what they do as much as for how they are.  Here is where Tsiolkas is superb; he is omniscient with the character from whose viewpoint we are seeing the narrative and he shows us the secret thoughts of the character.  But he doesn’t tell us those secret thoughts in an aside.  He creates dueling dialogs.  There is the dialog in the head of the character, what the character wants to say, and there is the actual dialog, what the character actually says.  We see the rage and the exasperation and the ugliness that is hidden behind the veneer of what polite society expects. Thus, in the chapter called “Harry” we see the continuing narrative from the point of view of Harry and we are omniscient with respect to Harry’s thoughts but nobody else’s.   Here, Hector is talking to Harry about what happened.

Harry’s fists were clenched.  He felt the heat of the sun, the stretch of the sky, they were heavy weights descending onto him.  There was a hammer at his chest.  He felt his cousin’s hand on his shoulder.  he shrugged it off.

‘Harry, listen to me.  You’re a good man.  You don’t deserve this.’

‘But?’

‘But you shouldn’t have hit him.’

He wanted to cry.  Take back that moment, fix that moment, change that moment, so that he had never hit that child.  That fucking cunt of a child, that fucking animal of a child.  Panagia, he whispered to his God, I want that child dead.  He was back on the sand, the warm sun on the back of his neck.  He could hear Rocco’s laugh.  Rocco brought him back as he always did.

‘Okay.  Sure.  I’ll go and apologise to them.  Can you organize it?’

But it is not only what the various characters think about Hugo that is hidden by the social veneer.  It is the racial tensions and the sexual tensions and the socio-economic tensions that are also hidden.  Eventually this gap is unsustainable and characters begin to blurt out what they really feel.  Part of this novel is about how people hide their true selves.   People who like to read about likeable people shouldn’t read this novel.  People who are shocked by the above language shouldn’t read this novel.  There is no redemption for any of the characters in this novel. On the other hand, each character is driven by his or her own demons that are revealed to the reader slowly and they make the characters seem very real.  I felt that I had met people like this in real life.  They weren’t people I necessarily liked or wanted to spend time around, but they were real. 

Tsiolkas creates enough of a plot to make the reader keep turning the page but the plot is not the driving force. The court case is, in fact, resolved long before the end of the novel.  This is a character driven novel, and a study of Australian society.  Tsiolkas is, obviously, Greek and he does a very good job in creating the Greek community of Hector’s family and their friends.  One chapter is told from the point of view of Hector’s father Manolis and I felt that an entire novel could have been built around him.  The way that immigrants deal with a culture that surrounds them but that they aren’t quite embracing, the reality of aging and death, the exasperation with the younger generation, Tsolkias captures it all in that chapter.

This is an Australian novel and is some ways it seems very Australian but in others it transcends place.  Five of the eight chapters are from the point of view of characters who either are immigrants or the children of immigrants.  Hector and his family, including his father Manolis and his cousin Harry, are part of the Greek immigrant community.  Aisha is from an Indian immigrant family.  Connie, a teenager who works in Aisha’s office, was born in England.   The non-immigrant Australians are mostly minorities.  Anouk is Jewish.   Connie’s friend Richie is a gay teenager.  Hector’s friend Bilal is an aborigine who has converted to Islam, making him a double minority.  Rosie and Gary are among the few white Australians in the novel, and they are also at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, living just above the poverty level.  Gary is an alcoholic and Rosie is the daughter of an alcoholic who will not leave Gary.  If this were America, they would be overtly called white trash.  And yet Rosie, Aisha and Anouk are friends from their teens and at the beginning of the novel, at least, they still maintain the illusion that they have things in common and they care about what happens to each other. 

This novel is a reminder that Australia is as much of a “melting pot” as other parts of the world and, just as in our part of the world, the melting pot doesn’t really melt anything it mostly just results in a stew.

And that’s really what this novel is about.  Not the slap of a child, but the tensions of a multicultural, multi-ethnic world.  It is about the pull of family and the pull of friendship.   It is about the stress of being old and the stress of being young.   It is about transcending or not transcending your own upbringing.    It is about what makes a marriage happy (or at least tolerable).  It is about the importance or lack of importance of children in your life. 

And that is only scratching the surface.

It is not an entirely successful novel.  Some of the female characters seem to react to men not in the way that women react to men but in the way that men react to women (very visually).    Hector and Harry seem far more obsessed with their own bodies (diet and exercise) than most 40-something heterosexual men that I know.  I think the author meant to end the novel on a positive note with Connie and Richie and their friends looking forward to the future, but watching a teenager partying with his graduating highschool friends using parentally sanctioned drugs and hearing him declare it was the “best day of” his life didn’t really do it for me.  Probably the greatest flaw was that, although Tsiolkas tries to explain it,  I truly didn’t understand why Rosie was letting her child grow up to be so dislikeable.  (I give credit to Tsoilkas that he is able to portray Hugo as an absolute brat but also show that the blame for that is not his but his parents. The next time I’m tempted to slap a child in Starbucks I’ll instead imagine slapping his mother or father.) 

Finally, this book will probably offend people who are easily offended by bad language and obnoxious characters.    But anyone who has plowed through the writings of The Great White Men of the 20th century will not find this novel hard going. 

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

I’m back from vacationing in the cool climes of the Great North Woods, which felt even better this year than usual after the very hot summer we have had.  I saw no bears in hammocks.  I saw no bears at all, actually.  In fact, I haven’t seen a bear in a few years.  Which is a shame.  Now it is back to reality and back to the ungodly heat.

With temperatures topping 100 degrees here in the Midwest, I went to my favorite local independent bookseller to stock up on a few paperbacks that would entertain me while stuck inside in the air conditioning.   One thing I’ve discovered about summer is that publishers think readers are looking for fluff beach reads during the summer months but that’s not what I want in the summer.  I’m in Missouri – we don’t have a beach.  We have pools but they are surrounded by concrete and are hot when the temperatures are hot. 

When I’m stuck inside I want to feel like I’m reading something worthwhile.  So after conversations about the vampire craze in novels and about satirical novels and how I sometimes don’t get them when they are set in New York, she picked up a yellow paperback and said “The Anthologist is out in paperback.  I learned more about poetry while  reading this novel than I think I learned in any poetry class”  I thought, that’s the one.   And it was.

Written in the first person in a conversational style it isn’t a difficult read and yet it is packed through with discussions about poetry and meter.  In a way it reminded me of a book version of a Christopher Guest mockumentary.  We follow the principal character, Paul Chowder, around as he procrastinates and provides us with a running commentary on his life and his thoughts about poetry, especially the difference between free verse and “rhyming” poetry.  Paul, a poet who writes free verse, is in love with rhyming poetry and has finished compiling an anthology of such poetry.  But now he is procrastinating about writing the introduction to the anthology.  His girlfriend, Roz, has moved out and he wanders around thinking about poetry, Roz,the conference he is going to in Switzerland, the mouse in his kitchen, and whatever else pops into his mind. 

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought.  There is lots left in the world to read.

For days I had a dissatisfied feeling.  I couldn’t focus.  I was nervous about Switzerland.  I’m going to be in a panel discussion there on “The Meters of Love”, with Renee Parker Task, who’s a hotshot among young formalists.  Just the kind of thing I’m bad at.  Being empanelled.  All yesterday afternoon I thought about timed backups, and search results, and mermaids, and women wearing clothes, and women not wearing clothes, and I felt unlyrical. And then I got in bed and I read a short biography of Nathalia Crane in an old textbook, and I read a poem by Sara Teasdale, and I thought about turtles. And then in the back of Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume I, I wrote, “Suddenly there is lots to read.” I also wrote:  “Mary Oliver is saving my life.”

One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you’re at a beginning. If I open a biography, or a memoir, or a novel, when I open it in the middle, which is what I usually do, I’m really in the middle. What I want is to be as much as possible at the beginning.  And that’s what poetry gives me.  Many many beginnings. That feeling of setting forth.

This isn’t a long novel, only about 240 wide spaced pages, and I flew through it in one sitting.  But I might go back and read it again because it is just crammed with good things to think about.