An interesting novel worth reader attention

Part of the pleasure Dinatia Smith’s novel The Prince offers is comparing her work with Henry James’s The Golden Bowl to see where it resembles the original and where Smith has diverged. I suspect James lovers will malign the book because follows the original so closely.

According to her agent, Smith is the author of four earlier novels, The Hard Rain, Remember This, The Illusionist, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and most recently, The Honeymoon. “Her stories have appeared in numerous publications, including The Hudson Review. She has won a number of awards for her writing, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Until recently, Smith was a cultural correspondent for the New York Times, specializing in literature and the arts.  She has taught at Columbia University and New York University.”

In The Prince, Smith has changed the names, moved the action from London to New York and a private island off the coast of Long Island, and changed the date from 1904 to the (pre-Covid) present. Otherwise, the story is the same.

Obscenely rich Emily Woodford has fallen in love with virtually penniless Prince Federico Pallavicino. A year before meeting Emily, Federico had enjoyed intimate relations with virtually penniless Christina who broke with him because he would not marry her. Coincidentally, Christina is an old, close childhood friend of Emily.

Federico and Emily marry and have a child. Emily, who has been close—perhaps too close—to Henry her 61-year-old, widowed father, encourages him to marry Christina, who like Emily is in her late twenties. Henry does marry Christina and you just know there’s trouble ahead.

Alone together in Henry’s mansion on the East Side, cannot resist one another. Besotted to the degree they will have sex against a Central Park tree, they resume their affair midway through the book. They are able to maintain their secret for a time, but events conspire against them.

Prince Federico is not malicious. He finds his title almost an embarrassment. He has no realistic career ambitions; he and friends formed an unsuccessful rock band in Italy. He was happiest coaching a soccer team of Roman street urchins—and seeing him do so was a reason Emily was attracted to him.

His father-in-law found him a position in a New York bank where his title was used to impress potential clients. “In the intervals between meetings, he sat in his office staring at the rooftops, or tried to teach himself about the stock market, but he’d never know enough to be of real use to Ricardo [his immediate boss]. He watched Italian soccer on his computer, quickly switching to another screen when the secretary came in. Sometimes, he’d fall asleep, then force himself awake and there would be a bitter taste in his mouth.”

Emily has been sheltered, although Smith writes, “Anyone would have been charmed by Emily’s natural beauty, her radiance, her bright, eager manner. Everything about the young woman belied her wealth. She seemed entirely unaware of her beauty and there wasn’t a hint of snobbery in her.” Federico meets her and her father at a Rome dinner party. The next night, he invites her to dinner. The third night he takes her back to his place and they make love. I don’t think that’s the way it happens in Henry James.

Christina has a hippy mother and no money. She is trying to finish her degree, working in a vintage clothing store. “Christina observed her mother coolly, pragmatically, and didn’t complain about her except to remark ruefully on her latest escapades. Christina had an utter lack of self-pity, a cool self-confidence . . . She never complained, and went about her day with energy and forcefulness.”

In some ways, Henry is the most admirable and interesting character in the novel. The family’s money is old money, so old and so immense Henry does not have to demonstrate how rich he is. He trained as a lawyer and spent his years working pro bono for worthy clients who could not have afforded him. The first chapter in The Prince is a scene in which Federico is signing a generous pre-nuptial agreement, one Henry had offered, one that will leave the prince a very rich man should the marriage fail. 

The family money came out of the coal mines, railroads, and blast furnaces that built a West Virginia town that now, with the steel industry gone to Asia and the coal played out, is polluted and decaying. Henry plans to revive the town with an art museum built around his personal collection.

All the family’s wealth, of course, will not protect them from their histories and their characters. And while Henry James may persuade readers of the situation’s plausibility (Colm Tóibin called The Golden Bowl James’s best work), it’s much more difficult for Smith. I do not see what Emily sees in Federico; he seems shallow and aimless.

 I’m not convinced, given what we know about Henry, that he would marry a girl forty years his junior. I know it happens, but not between Henry and Christina. 

Finally, that Federico and Christina would risk the economic wrath of the family and Federico risk losing contact with the daughter he adores by resuming sexual relations seems to this prudent reader virtually unhinged. But that may be the point.

Nevertheless, The Prince an interesting novel and well worth reader attention. If nothing else, it may send readers to the original, the way a movie adaptation will send views to the book. Not a bad result.

Delightful stories that evoke a Japanese neighborhood

The twenty-six stories this slim paperback (159 pages) are all short, most no more than four or at most five printed pages. The jacket describes them as “palm-of-the-hand” stories, “fictions small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand and brief enough to allow for dipping in and out.”

Perhaps the most famous author of palm-of-the-hand stories is Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize, and who first experimented with the form in 1923, and included thirty-five of the stories in his first book.

The difference between a palm-of-the-hand story and flash fiction is not clear to me. According to my extensive research (two minutes on the web) flash fiction is a story of less than 1000 words that emphasizes plot. It not a vignette or reflection but a story. So what’s a story?

According to E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel, a story “can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story” but it has no plot. “A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”

I still cannot tell whether the short works in Kawabata’s wonderful Palm-of-the-Hand Stories (translated by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman) or Hiromi Kawakami’s People from My Neighborhood (translated by Ted Goossen) are vignettes, plotless stories, or flash fiction. I don’t think it matters. Both books are chockablock with brief small gems.

Kawakami’s stories all involve—what else?—people in the narrator’s neighborhood. (The English title is a literal translation of the Japanese, or “people from around here.”) Some of the stories are fairly straightforward and take place in a recognizable if curious reality:

In “The Office” child sits most days in a gazebo in the park that he calls his office; he says only three things: “Shall I sign here?” “Final balance, please,” and “It’s raining hard today.” 

In “Brains,” the older sister of a friend shows the narrator a box of doll brains. “Doll brains looked dark and somehow unclean around the edges—they weren’t pure white at all.”

In “Sports Day,” a bank takes over sponsorship and events would include “competitions for best loan evaluation, best anti-fraud strategy for direct deposits, best marketing of financial products, best check-clearance procedure, and best cartoon for their bank ads.”

But the neighborhood is not all sports days and playmates. There are mysteries and uncanny events.

In “The Secret,” the narrator discovers a child under a white cloth that was lying at the foot of a zelkova tree. The child, who may be a boy or a girl claims to live under the cloth, but one day follows the narrator home and moves in with her. Thirty years later he has not changed, and “I’ve come to realize that he can’t be human after all.” 

“The Tenement” is the home of an old cab driver. He still has a cab which he takes out for a drive around the local district but does not apparently pick up fares. He disappears at night, and one time when asked where he goes, he replies, “I go driving with the girls”—three women who lived in the tenement and who all died before the Meiji Restoration in 1868. 

Characters in one story appear in another, but People from My Neighborhood is not a novel of linked stories. As I indicated above, I’m not sure what to call the book, only that the stories are delightful and evoke a Japanese neighborhood I am willing to be convinced exists even with the touches of the mysterious and the supernatural.

Does art have a purpose other than occupying artists?

It feels as if Rachel Cusk continues to push the boundaries of what one can do in a contemporary novel. Best known for her Outline trilogy—Kudos, Transit, Outline—but as also the author of seven earlier novels and four books of nonfiction, including the wonderful essays in Coventry.

Her newest work is Second Place reminds me of an I-novel, one of the key literary movements in twentieth century Japan. As the name implies, it’s essentially autobiographical (semi-, if not totally), confessional and, in the genre’s later works, exposes the author’s dark side. Second Place reads like a confession, and some of the elements reflect what is publicly known about Cusk’s life. (But then, doesn’t every novel contain elements that reflect the author’s life?)

In a November 2018 interview in The New Yorker, Cusk said, “all of my thoughts about writing come through living—through observing how I live. Mainly, that’s because I am the person that I know myself to be, but also because I know how other people are living. In the end, my determination is to really get to the bottom of that in writing.”

The unnamed narrator in Second Place—she’s eventually identified as M (Mabel? Margaret? Mary?)—chronicles the book’s events for Jeffers. It’s not clear whether this is a letter; it is too polished to be a transcribed monologue. We learn little about Jeffers (he’s a novelist, a moralist), but the device is a way for Cusk to tell the story without addressing the reader directly. Rather we overhear M tell Jeffers the story.

M and her husband Tony live on a tidal marsh, “a place of great but subtle beauty” where twice a day “the sea rises over the marsh and fills its creeks and crevices.” They have built a second place (thus the title) on a parcel of wasteland that bordered their land “to prevent it from being misused,” which I assume means developed by someone else. They have been inviting artists and writers to stay in this second place as guests “sometimes for days and sometimes for months.” The summer is the best time.

Much the way Mabel Dudge Luhan invited D.H. Lawrence come stay with her in Taos, New Mexico, M invites L, a famous painter to come share their solitude, and after some backing and forthing, L eventually agrees. 

His acceptance means that M’s twenty-nine-year-old unemployed daughter Justine and her boyfriend Kurt have to move out of the second  place and into the main house, but better that than M and Tony share their digs with L. When L shows up, he is accompanied by Britt, a lovely young woman in her early thirties, that is, twenty years or more younger than L.

M had first seen L’s paintings years earlier when she was in a bad place after an ugly divorce, cut off from Justine, alone in Paris. The paintings had a powerful effect on her. “There is no particular reason, on the surface, why L’s work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman—but least of all, surely, a young mother on the brink of rebellion whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallized in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his painting emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke.”

M had hoped L would use the beauty of the local landscape, marsh and copse and sea, as inspiration for his art. After his early, prodigious success L’s recent work has not attracted critical praise or collector dollars. In fact, he is almost broke, living off the grudging charity of his few remaining friends and admirers. And he’s not interested in painting the local scenery.

In a relatively thin book—180 pages—Cusk is able to engage the reader thoroughly in the lives and relationships between M and Tony, M and Justine, Tony and Kurt, M and L, L and Britt, who apparently has joined L for the summer on the marsh on a whim. She is the daughter of a wealthy family that owns residences around the world; she can always stay in one in which her father is not living. 

While Second Place has a plot—an interesting plot no less—what makes Cusk’s writing appealing (to me at least) are her sentences and what they reveal about her intelligence. “I was naïve to expect that other people would merely allow me to change when those changes directly interfered with their own interests, and the revelation that my whole life, which appeared to be built on love and freedom of choice, was in fact a façade that concealed the most craven selfishness was deeply shocking to me.”

One more example: “For the first time, Jeffers, I considered the possibility that art—not just L’s art but the whole notion of art—might itself be a serpent, whispering in our ears, sapping away all our satisfaction and our belief in the things of this world with the idea that there was something higher and better within us which could never be equalled by what was right in front of us.”

One of the conflicts (disagreements? differences?) between M and her husband is that Tony doesn’t believe in art; “he believed in people, their goodness and their badness, and he believed in nature.” It is this sort of throwaway speculation and discussion that makes Cusk’s books so solid. 

Readers who are interested in art, women’s lives, male privilege, and human relationships will thoroughly enjoy Second Place. As did I. 

A Florida author writes brilliant stories set in . . . Florida

I picked up Lauren Groff’s 2018 story collection Florida because I was dazzled by piece of hers in the Summer 2021 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review, “Craft and Inspiration, or Serious Play and Moral Ferocity.”

She begins the piece, a slightly modified lecture, by acknowledging the premise is a fallacy, “that in building any kind of creative work, inspiration and craft do not exist in some imaginary oppositional binary, but are rather muddled and confounded into a great inextricable knot, aspects of the same tentative and exploratory and wildly thrilling process.” I was so inspired, I saved the essay and plan to reread it whenever I begin to wonder just what I think I’m doing.

Once I was sensitive to Groff’s name of course I began seeing it elsewhere. She published a new novel, Matrix, last fall. I caught her review of hers in The New York Review of Books and a story in The New Yorker. She’s been around the block a couple times. Her website lists her prizes: The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne. She is s a three-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction (Florida was one of them) and twice for the Kirkus Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

As the quote above hints, she writes scintillating sentences and has the intellectual chops to provide more than surface glitter. Not every one of the eleven stories in Florida is equally brilliant (how could they be?), but even the ones that do not reach the standard of the best are better much of the short fiction to which I am exposed. Consider the first sentence/paragraph of the first story:

“I have somehow become a woman who yells, and because I do not want to be a woman who yells, whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces, I have taken to lacing on my running shoes after dinner and going out into the twilit streets for a walk, leaving the undressing and sluicing and reading and singing and tucking in of the boys to my husband, a man who does not yell.” That one sentence contains an entire novel and—trust me—it gets better. 

Groff tells four of the stories in the first person, and they all star young, or youngish, women. Most are set in Florida; two of the strongest, “Salvador” and “Yport,” are set in Brazil and France where the character has to negotiate only partially successfully the foreign setting and her own perceptions and assumptions.

Not surprisingly for a writer who lives in Florida, Groff is particularly good at conveying really, really bad weather. “The house sucked in a shuddery breath, and the plywood groaned as the windows drew inward. Darkness fell over the world outside. Rain unleashed itself. It was neither freight train nor jet engine nor cataract crashing around me but, rather, everything. The roof roared with water, the window blurred. When the storm cleared, I saw a branch the size of a locomotive cracking off the heritage oak by the lake and falling languorously down, the wet moss floating outstretched like useless dark wings.”

First, I am generally unsympathetic to the pathetic fallacy—“The house sucked a breath . . . rain unleashed itself.” Yet it works. (It works all the way through the book although I was so caught up in the stories, I was not looking for nits to pick.) Second, Groff’s adjectives are just right: “shuddery,” “languorously.” And the final metaphor is wonderful.

I’ve spent time talking about Groff’s writing because I don’t know how to convey the impact of the stories as complete works, and a story’s effect may be entirely individual anyway. (A copout, but there you are.) For the most part I sympathize with the main characters as they negotiate relationships, families, life. More than enjoying their company, they and their author have taught me a few things. (If only don’t be afraid of the pathetic fallacy.)