It's more than menopausal malaise

I picked up Wayward because it was a New York Times Notable Book in 2021 and I want to know what’s notable in the world of books. I’d heard of Dana Spiotta because I read reviews all the time and mentally filed her name away as an author I ought to look up. 

She’s well-credentialled. Her book Innocents and Others was winner of the St. Francis College Literary Prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Stone Arabia was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Eat the Document was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Foundation Award. And Lightning Field was another New York Times Notable Book in 2001. 

Other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, the Premio Pivano, a Creative Capital Award, and the John Updike Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University Creative Writing program.

Wayward’s point-of-view-character Sam Raymond, short for Samantha (and that she has a male name is not an accident), is a 53-year-old woman who lives in a Syracuse suburb; the wife of Matt, an affluent lawyer; the mother of 16-year-old Ally; the daughter of an aging Lily who lives an hour and a half away from Syracuse. Sam works part time as a docent in the Clara Loomis House, which Spiotta based on the Fayetteville museum home of Matilda Joslyn Gage, a 19^th century abolitionist and suffragist. 

Sam is unhappy and on page 12 she buys a run-down (but incredibly charming) house in a depressed neighborhood without telling her husband who she’s decided to leave. I was not sympathetic. 

I’m sure other readers can identify with Sam’s angst, but I had trouble with a white, upper-middle-class, wife and mother just chucking her husband and daughter and having the resources to buy a house as easily as buying a pair of sensible shoes. Unfortunately for me, Spiotta writes so well and invents characters and situations so engaging that I stuck with the book and finished it envious of her talent.

The Trump election of 2016 was the final straw for Sam. Her mother is ill but will not say what ails her. Ally is increasingly remote, and Sam finds herself staring into "the Mids"--that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation.

Rather than have an affair, Sam falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house, buys it, and abandons suburban life--and her family to grapple with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that feels as if it is coming apart at the seams.

If it were only the malaise of one woman, I would have given up halfway through. But Wayward is much more than Sam’s angst. Spiotta has three chapters from Ally’s point of view. Ally begins having sex with a 29-year-old developer, one of her father’s legal clients. 

He gives Ally Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as her intellectual mentor and she drafts a college application essay that is almost worth the price of the book. Libertarians, she writes, “describe themselves as believing in ultimate equality without condescending ‘nanny-state’ interference.” They tend to believe that a person is homeless because he made “poor choices.” But, Ally asks, “how much of our choices are shaped by things we didn’t choose?”

She points out that libertarians “might take federal, state, and county tax breaks in shitty desperate cities that will do anything for development. But how is that the unfettered marketplace?” And what about “the things people need to do collectively like fire departments and utilities and the post office and schools? . . . Also, protection of private property requires police and prisons and copyrights. So libertarians like rules in some cases. Maybe they are not for total liberty, but for protecting their own liberty at the expense of others’.”

I found the subplot interesting because while the relationship is inappropriate and, I believe, illegal, neither Ally nor the guy suffer any obvious consequences. Ally sends him nude pictures of herself, but, as far as we know, he never shares them or passes them on. By the end of the book, Ally is older and wiser in the ways of men (certain men) but unharmed.

Wayward is indeed, as the publisher says, a stunning novel about aging, about the female body, and about female difficulty--female complexity--in the age of Trump. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird, off-kilter America, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins.

Time for me to look up Spiotta’s earlier books. 

How do you live without short-term memory?

I believe that when this was published in Japan in 2003, the trope of the character who cannot remember anything for longer than eighty minutes was new. That’s the elderly professor of this short novel’s title. 

The housekeeper is—what else?—the professor’s housekeeper. We never learn his name, her name, or the name of her ten-year-old son called “Root” because with his flat-top haircut he resembles, to the professor, the sign for square root. She narrates the story.

The professor lost his memory in an automobile accident. He had been a world-class mathematician, specializing in number theory and the novel offers a few, understandable examples of the kinds of problems he was working with. He can still do some mathematics and one diversion is solving problems in a mathematical journal.

He cannot, however, recall anything else, anything new for more than eighty minutes. Every day when the housekeeper arrives, she has to introduce herself anew. He compensates slightly by writing notes to himself and pinning them to his suit.

Given the strain of keeping house for such a client, the agency has had a problem providing a reliable person who can cook lunch, clean the house, shop, make dinner, and not be flustered by the professor’s condition. The narrator, who is an unmarried woman in her late twenties, needs the work and has essentially been keeping house for her unmarried mother for years. 

When the professor learns that his housekeeper has a ten-year-old son—a latch-key child—he insists that the boy come to the house rather than returning to the empty apartment. They form a kind of family: Grandfather, mother, son. She writes:

“Root had never enjoyed dinner as much as he did when we ate with the Professor. He answered the Professors questions and let him fill his plate to overflowing, and whenever he could, he looked curiously around the room or stole a glance at the notes on the Professor’s suit.” The idyll cannot last, but by this point in the book we are invested in the characters.

According to an interview in the UK’s Independent Ogawa wrote for herself growing up. She married a steel company engineer, quit her job as a medical university secretary, and wrote. She didn’t intentionally keep it secret, but her husband learned about her writing only when her debut novel, The Breaking of the Butterfly, received a literary prize. “I wasn’t telling anyone in a big voice, ‘I’m writing a novel,’” she says. “But I always thought, no matter how my life changes, I want to have a life of writing. Whether I could make any money off it, I did not know.”

She had a son, and her novella Pregnancy Diary won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and she continued to write. “I would change a diaper and then write a sentence. Then I’d make a meal and write a sentence. Now that my son has grown, I feel like I was at my happiest when I was writing while raising my child. Now that I can write as much as I want 24 hours a day, it’s not as if I produce any greater work now than I did in the past.” Ogawa achieved bestseller status and a film adaptation with The Professor and the Housekeeper.

Her translator Stephen Snyder who is a professor of Japanese studies at Middlebury College, says Ogawa’s novels relate to Japanese culture in “ancillary ways.” Though she raises socially relevant themes, he says, she is never doctrinaire. “There is a naturalness to what she writes so it never feels forced. Her narrative seems to be flowing from a source that’s hard to identify.”

The Professor and the Housekeeper is an interesting depiction of three lives. (I almost wrote “of three Japanese lives” but it is more universal than that) and ultimately moving.

A cautionary tale for potential adulterers

Ema and Paul, married to other people, work in the same labor court outside of Paris, and they begin falling in love in Paul’s car which the author describes in some detail, indeed in more detail than she describes the appearance of Ema or Paul, their spouses, or their children. Thus the title Geography of an Adultery, Agnès Riva’s slim first novel.

According to the note on the author in the book, Riva lives in the suburbs of Paris “where she draws inspiration from its urban landscape.” Geography of an Adultery was short listed for a Discovery Grant from the Prince Pierre de Monaco Foundation and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt and Grand Prix RTL-Lire. John Cullen translated books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian. He died shortly after he delivered this translation to the publisher.

The affair begins in Paul’s car, moves to a corner of the kitchen in Ema’s house, to an empty chapel on the outskirts of town, to Paul’s house briefly (they live within walking distance of each other), and is finally consummated in an apartment hotel.

Agnès Riva tells the story entirely from Ema’s point of view. He never learn what Paul is thinking, only what he says to her: “You have to compartmentalize,” he tells her, and we understand even if Ema doesn’t know how to keep the parts of her life separate, that’s how Paul manages his life. “Don’t let your personal feeling affect judgments that must remain rational.” Ema finds this schoolmasterish advice aggravating and sexually arousing.

Paul clearly finds Ema sexually desirable. “I don’t think we’ll ever be more excited than this,” he murmurs in her ear during heavy petting in her kitchen. He says it “as if he wants her to take the next step but has no intention of forcing her.” Reaching that step takes another ninety pages. 

One of the things that makes this slim debut novel so interesting is Riva’s evocation of Ema’s internal life, her feelings, the tension between abandonment—her desire for excitement, adventure, passion—and the fear of getting caught. 

“Her attempts to establish routines that can be counted on, like her offer of her house as a place where they can see each other outside of work, have ended in failure, for Paul’s visits remain as irregular as always. Between one encounter and the next, it seems to her, the man quite simply forgets her; he moves on to something else.”

Another thing that makes the story ring so true is the author’s ability to convey the contrast between Ema’s expectations and Paul’s. Because it is an affair and not a romance between two single people that can lead to marriage or a stable union, they cannot easily work out their differences.

Riva writes, “In principle, Paul wouldn’t be against finding a place, an apartment, for example, that they could rent for their romantic encounters.” [They can afford one? And hide the expense from their spouses? Never mind.] 

“But when they envision the passion they will know in their proposed love nest, what each sees differs a little from the other’s version. Paul pictures a place where desire can be ‘contained,’ shielded from prying eyes for as long as their romance lasts,” [He’s already assuming the romance has a time limit.] “whereas Ema, by contrast, hopes it will allow their sensitivities a new freedom of expression.” In any case, while Paul talks about renting a place, he makes no effort to do so.

Without preaching or proselytizing, the novel makes a solid case against adultery. It should be no spoiler to read that when Ema and Paul finally do create the conditions in which they can make love, the experience not that great.

“The young woman has often imagined this moment, and now that it’s here, she feels something like indifference, like absence from the unfolding scene. Her head is clear, and on the one hand she can visualize all the elaborate fantasies she’s built up around her desire, and on the other, she can see Paul and herself, here on the bed, but she can’t, despite her efforts, manage to connect the two sights.”

Readers who have committed adultery can compare and contrast their thoughts and experiences to Ema’s. Readers who have ever toyed with the idea of an affair should read this as a cautionary tale and be prepared to be disappointed. Reality is almost never as stimulating as fantasy.

Haruki Murakami has a lot to answer for

This is another slim, provocative novel by the author of The Factory. I think Haruki Murakami has a lot to answer for. This is another Japanese work that starts as a realistic picture of contemporary Japanese life and then—suddenly without warning—slips into an alternate universe.

Asa Matsumura’s husband is being transferred to an office in the country. His parents live not far from the new office and, providentially, own the house next door, which is about to be vacated. The childless young couple can live there rent-free. What could go wrong?

Asa has to quit her job. The new house, much bigger than their city apartment, is much too distant from her company for a daily commute. Besides, she’s not a permanent employee. Her winter bonus is only ¥30,000 while permanent employees receive between ¥600,000 and ¥700,000 (($5,171 - $6,033).

Neither her husband nor her in-laws pay much attention to her. Her husband barely looks up from his cell phone screen. Her mother-in-law works and her father-in-law works and plays golf. Asa begins her new life, one without a car or anyone to talk to. A bus passes once an hour. Her husband’s grandfather waters the garden next door rain or shine; he does not respond to Asa’s greetings.

There is a river not far from the property and one summer day Asa spots a big, black animal, not a weasel or a raccoon. “It had wide shoulders, slender and muscular thighs, but from the knees down, its legs were as thin as sticks. The animal was covered in black fur and had a long tail and rounded ears.”

She follows the animal, which almost seems to be guiding her. “I saw the animal’s tail slip through the grass, and I leapt after it, but there was nothing there to catch me.” She has fallen into a four- or five-foot deep hole, and the animal has vanished soundlessly. It is the beginning of her adventures.

A mysterious woman helps her out of the hole. A scruffy man tells her he is her husband’s older brother, someone her husband has never mentioned. This “brother-in-law” talks about the animal and its propensity to dig holes.  But he does not know what kind of animal it is. 

He points out the animal is trapped in an old well that is covered by a grate. “You can’t get it off unless you put a finger in there and lift, but this guy’s a smart one. He can push it open with his fangs . . . If you’re wonder why I bother putting the cover on when he’s only going to get out again, I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer for you.”

In addition to Haruki Murakami, Lewis Carroll also has a lot to answer for. Asa does not fall completely underground like Alice, but her adventures are also remarkable and mysterious. And at one point a character tells Asa he’s white rabbit Alice followed underground. But who is this person who claims to be her husband’s brother? Doe he even exist?  What is the animal? Possibly Asa’s own unconscious? Do the holes represent emptiness’s in Asa’s heart? Does anything mean anything? And should we care?

The Hole is interesting because it does provoke such questions. On one level the novel is a realistic description of a trash-filled rural landscape and polluted marshland and river. On another level, we have mysterious creatures and inexplicable happenings. Are they symbolic or simply Asa’s delusions?

As the book’s narrator, Asa asks some hard questions: “Can you really hide your brother’s existence from you spouse? Is it even possible? And more importantly—why would anyone do it? Were they worried about the world finding out that the family had a shut-in? Or was there more to it than that?” 

Good questions Asa, and you’re living with someone who can answer. But no: “How could I ever as my husband about any of this? So—you have an older brother? How could I say anything to his mother? So—you have another son?” So, she doesn’t.

Other readers may find The Hole more rewarding than I did. Laura Van Den Berg (author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears and other works) says that “Hiroko Oyamada is brilliant on work, families, and the sacrifices women are so often asked to make. The Hole is a haunting and transformative work of fiction: as Asa begins to see the world in new ways so do we.”

I have two complaints about the publishing company. A convention to make scenes with dialogue easy to read is to make each separate speaker’s words a new paragraph. The Hole does not do that, so the reader has great blocks of type filled with quotation marks. That the Japanese original is the same does not in my mind justify the English typography.

Also, why isn’t the translator’s name on the cover? David Boyd, who’s done a skillful job of turning Oyamada’s fantasy in the English, gets a line on the back cover; he’s assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Good job, David. Shame on New Directions.

How poetry can change a life

We never learn exactly why Edwardo lost his driver’s license and was sentenced to a year of community service (there was an accident) but thanks to his sister’s confessor who knew the mayor personally he was assigned to reading books to the elderly and the infirm in their homes rather than scrubbing toilets in some hospital or prison.

Eduardo, unmarried, in his early thirties, lives with his dying father in Cuernavaca, the “City of Eternal Spring,” fifty miles south of Mexico City. His has mother died seven years earlier, and Celeste, a faithful caregiver, an important character in the novel, is the only person who can communicate with Papá.

Edwardo’s family has owned and operates a small furniture store with one employee, so Edwardo is free to drink coffee in the middle of the work day. The story pay protection money to an ex-employee, Güero, picks up the cash while a more senior member of the gang stays watches guard outside. The criminality sounds so pervasive and established in the society that going to the police would mean only that your business would be burned out.

Edwardo is required to read for an hour a week to a rich cast of characters: a retired Colonel who loves the readings, even though he’s only awake for a few pages; a deaf family who reads Edwardo’s lips not realizing their children can hear; a pair of brothers who pull bizarre pranks; and a stunning, wheelchair-bound opera singer with an aggressively flirty housekeeper.

The book jacket tells us that the author, Fabio Morábito is a writer, translator, and professor. He was born in Egypt, grew up in Italy, and relocated to Mexico when he was fifteen. He has published four books of poetry, four short-story collections, a book of essays, and two novels. He has translated into Spanish the work of many great Italian poets of the twentieth century, including Eugenio Montale and Patrizia Cavalli. Morábito has been awarded numerous prizes including Mexico’s highest literary award, the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, for Home Reading Service. He lives in Mexico City.

The translator, Curtis Bauer, is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. He teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University. The translation here is smooth and engaging and I was particularly taken by Bauer’s translation of a poem by Isabel Fraire, a Mexican poet who died in 2015, a poem that plays a key role in Edwardo’s growth.

Although he reads great (or not so great) literature to the elderly and the disabled, Edwardo does not listen to a word he reads. But when he comes across a Fraire poem that his father, now dying of cancer, had once copied out, it affects him as no literature has affected him before: “Your skin, like sheets of sand, and sheets of water swirling/your skin, with its louring mandolin brilliance . . .” (The book includes the Spanish original as an appendix.) In sharing the poem, Edwardo is astonished at what the words are capable of bringing out in others.

Complications ensue. Edwardo, a man who’s spent most of his thirty-four-plus years on earth simply allowing things to happen to him, has to cope with a dying father, a dying retail furniture business, and the demands of the people to whom he must read for an hour a week or find himself scrubbing toilets. And, of course, there’s the “protection” he’s paying and the gangsters behind it.

Home Reading Service is a fascinating picture of contemporary middle-class (?) Mexican life. Without knowing better, I accept Morábito’s picture of how things work. That a man can be sentenced to a year of community service and that the service be to read for an hour a week to a variety of shut-ins. Moreover, that the act of reading and being read to can change your life. An interesting and satisfying book. 

Stories set in pre-Tokugawa Japan

I picked up this 1983 collection of Japanese short stories because Charles Johnson recommended it in his book The Way of the Writer, making a special point of discussing John Gardner’s introduction, “Meditational Fiction.”

Gardner points out that most Western fiction offers a causally related series of events with a beginning, middle, and end. Or it did until recently as more books are being published as “fiction” are more like life with coincidences, accidents, and the inexplicable.

What makes Kikuo Itaya interesting, Gardner wrote, is his use of “storytelling as a façade: the deeper impulse of the fiction is what I shall call meditational.” As readers are lured into Itaya’s stories by the graceful surface—"the apparently coherent but sometimes puzzling line of action”—we gradually realize that nearly everything is symbolic.

The symbolism, however, is not Western symbolism where a rabbit in a medieval painting symbolizes fecundity and a book symbolized learning. “In Eastern symbolism the distinction between vehicle and tenor—the thing said and the thing meant, or the temporal instance and the eternal principle—is illusory. To see only the temporal instance (this character in this story or life-situation) is to be unenlightened.”

The symbolism in a Itaya story may look like traditional Western symbolism, Gardner wrote, “but it is no more the same thing than wings are to, respectively, a butterfly and a bird. The two are products of distinct evolutionary lines.”

Kikuo Itaya was born in November 1898. His father became a nationally famous ceramist and Kikuo began following his father’s craft. In his early twenties he decided to enter Waseda University to study Japanese literature and gave up ceramics. When he graduated from Waseda after almost dying of pulmonary tuberculosis he began teaching at a prestigious Tokyo boys school. He published only one story, “Tengu Child,” during his fifty-four years of teaching. He did however continue to write and polish the stories that make up the book, however.

The tengu images I’ve seen have red faces and giant noses. In Japanese folklore, they are supernatural creatures that inhabit mountains and forests and are found in both Buddhist and Shinto traditions. They are goblins with a human body and wings, carry a feather fan, and able to fly and perform miracles. 

In the title story, boy named Tengu Doji—"Bird-creature child”—lives in a village with his carpenter father who maintains a small shop that sold canes and straw sandals to the travelers who passed through the village on the way to Kyoto. One day, the child’s father finds an unusual stone beside the house. It has fine shape, a beautiful crack, and beautiful blue moss. When an itinerant monk passes through, the villagers ask him about the stone. 

It is no ordinary stone, he announces. “This is a sacred treasure called a Tengu stone, which the great noble Tengu living high up in Mt. Kurayama lets fall occasionally.” The monk uses the magical powers of the stone to cure a woman’s headaches and a man’s aching hip. He tells villagers to build a shrine as a sanctuary for the stone and he will perform further religious rites on his return trip.

The carpenter builds the shrine beside his house having risen to the rank of a priest at one bound. His son however grows more and despondent and finally admits that one day while he was in the great persimmon tree beside the house he saw passing armed monks pass. The halberd of one “struck the eves of our house with great force, and one of the stones on the roof fell off to the ground”—the Tengu stone.

Everything turns out well. The boy is forgiven, the carpenter is reconciled to being a carpenter, and the villagers laugh at the monk on his return. “The incident of the Tengu stone shook the lives of the commoners’ district for only a short time and then was gone. Nothing in particular was gained, though perhaps it could be said that after this incident the hears of the people seemed more united, somewhat warmer. The child’s mind, however, was swinging and swaying in a complex thought. The grown-up world seemed to him empty, ridiculous, and shameful. He was weary of having to live in such a twisted world.” The story concludes with the Tengu child at the top of the persimmon tree.

The fifteen stories in Tengu Child all take place in the Heian era (794 to 1185) or during the Warring States period (1467 to 1615). Many read like folktales and have elements of the supernatural. For example, a fox becomes a human woman to become the wife of “a soldier in the Right Division of the Imperial Guards,” the men responsible for protecting the Emperor and his family in Kyoto. It does not end well.

Although I did not enjoy all the stories equally—a few seemed hardly more than anecdotes or shaggy-dog stories—the Gardner introduction and several of the stories are both fascinating and informative. 

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.)