From the author of the number one New York Times bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie comes this long-awaited follow-up, an enchanting, beautifully crafted novel that explores a mystery only heaven can unfold.Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. As the park has changed over the years -- from the Loop-the-Loop to the Pipeline Plunge -- so, too, has Eddie changed, from optimistic youth to embittered old age.
His days are a dull routine of work, loneliness, and regret.Then, on his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic accident, trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hands in his -- and then nothing.
He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it.
These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever.One by one, Eddie's five people illuminate the unseen connections of his earthly life. As the story builds to its stunning conclusion, Eddie desperately seeks redemption in the still-unknown last act of his life: Was it a heroic success or a devastating failure? The answer, which comes from the most unlikely of sources, is as inspirational as a glimpse of heaven itself.In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom gives us an astoundingly original story that will change everything you've ever thought about the afterlife -- and the meaning of our lives here on earth. With a timeless tale, appealing to all, this is a book that readers of fine fiction, and those who loved Tuesdays with Morrie, will treasure.
1. At the start of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Albom says that "all endings are also beginnings." In general, what does this mean? How does it relate to this story in particular? Share something in your life that has begun as another thing ended, and the events that followed.
2. What initially grabs your attention in The Five People You Meet in Heaven? What holds it?
3. How does counting down the final minutes of Eddie's life affect you as a reader? Why does Albom do this? Other storytelling devices Albom uses include moving from past to present by weaving Eddie's birthdays throughout the story. How do these techniques help inform the story? What information do you learn by moving around in time? How effective is Albom's style for this story in particular?
4. What does Eddie look like and what kind of guy is he? Look at and discuss some of the details and descriptions that paint a picture of Eddie and his place of business. What is it about an amusement park that makes it a good backdrop for this story?
5. Consider the idea that "no story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river." How does this statement relate to The Five People You Meet in Heaven?
6. How does Albom build tension around the amusement park ride accident? What is the significance of Eddie finding himself in the amusement park again after he dies? What is your reaction when Eddie realizes he's spent his entire life trying to get away from Ruby Pier and he is back there immediately after death? Do you think this is important? Why?
7. Describe what Albom's heaven is like. If it differs from what you imagined, share those differences. Who are the five people Eddie meets? Why them? What are their relationships to Eddie? What are the characteristics and qualities that make them the five people for Eddie?
8. Share your reactions and thoughts about the Blue Man's story, his relationship with his father, and his taking silver nitrate. What, if anything, does this have to do with Eddie? Why does he say to Eddie, "This is not your heaven, it's mine"?
9. How does the Blue Man die? What affect does it have on you when you look at the same story from two different points of view -– his and Eddie's? Can you share any events that you have been involved in that can be viewed entirely differently, from another's point of view? How aware are we of other's experiences of events that happen simultaneously to us and to them? Why?
10. Discuss what it means that "That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind." Even though Eddie hasn't been reincarnated, consider karma in Eddie's life (where Eddie's actions would affect his reincarnation). If it isn't karma, what is Albom telling us about life, and death?
11. Think about Eddie's war experiences and discuss your reactions to Albom's evocation of war. What did Eddie learn by being in war? How did he "come home a different man"? Why did the captain shoot Eddie? Explore what it means when the captain tells Eddie, "I took your leg to save your life." Why does the captain tell Eddie that sacrifice is not really a loss, but a gain? Examine whether or not Eddie understands this, and the significance of this lesson.
12. Discuss what you might say to Eddie when he asks "why would heaven make you relive your own decay?".
13. Examine whether or not you agree with the old woman when she tells Eddie, "You have peace when you make it with yourself," and why. Consider what she means when she says, "things that happen before you are born still affect you. And people who come before your time affect you as well." How does this relate to Eddie's life? Who are some who have come before you that have affected your own life?
14. What is Eddie's father's response each time Eddie decides to make an independent move, away from working at the pier? Examine how Eddie's father's choices and decisions actually shape Eddie's life. Why does Eddie cover for his father at the pier when his father becomes ill? What happens then? Share your own experience of a decision your own parents made that affected your life, for better or for worse.
15. Who tells Eddie that "we think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do we do to ourselves"? What is the significance of this particular person in Eddie's life? Why is this important for Eddie to understand? Is it important for all of us to understand? Why? Discuss whether or not you agree that, "all parents damage their children. It cannot be helped." How was Eddie damaged?
16. Why does Marguerite want to be in a place where there are only weddings? How does this relate to her own life, and to her relationship and life with Eddie?
17. Discuss why Eddie is angry at his wife for dying so young. Examine what Marguerite means when she says, "Lost love is still love. It takes a different form. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around on the dance floor. But when these senses waken, another heightens. . . . Life has an end. Love doesn't." Why does she say this to Eddie? Do you think he gets it? Discuss whether or not you agree with her, and why.
18. Why does Eddie come upon the children in the river? What does Tala mean when she says "you make good for me"? Discuss whether or not Eddie's life is a penance, and why. What is the significance of Tala pulling Eddie to safety after he dies? Why is it Tala that pulls him to heaven and not one of the other four?
19. What would you say to Eddie when he laments that he accomplished nothing with his life? Discuss what has he accomplished.
20. Briefly recall the five lessons Eddie learns. How might these be important for all of us? Share which five people might meet you in heaven, and what additional or different lessons might be important to your life. Discuss how Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven has provided you with a different perspective of your life.
"Sincere. . . . A book with the genuine power to stir and comfort its readers."
—Janet Maslin, The New York Times"Simply told, sentimental, and profoundly true, this is an contemporary American fable that will be cherished by a vast readership."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Fans of Tuesdays with Morrie will be delighted with this novel."
—People magazine"Transcendent. . . . Albom has aimed high here, and there's a whiff of paradise as a result."
—Atlanta Journal Constitution"Albom has a gift for tapping into readers' sincerely sentimental spots, and he will undoubtedly connect again here."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer"Albom has the ability to make you cry in spite of yourself."
—The Boston Globe"Albom has done a masterful job."
—Oakland Press"There's much wisdom here . . . An earnest meditation on the intrinsic value of human life."
—Los Angeles Times"This is the fable you will devour when you fall in love. This is the tale you will keep by your side when you are lost. This is the story you will turn to again and again, because it possesses the rare magic to let you see yourself and the world anew. This book is a gift to the soul."
—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter's Daughter"Anyone who loved Tuesdays with Morrie should delight in reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Mitch Albom has populated his larger-than-life tale with memorable characters and filled it with the abundant warmth and wisdom that we've come to expect from this gifted storyteller."
—John Burnham Schwartz, author of Claire Marvel"This is a lovely book, sweet, entertaining and wise. What a gutsy, surprising follow-up to Morrie."
—Anne Lamott, author of Traveling Mercies and Blue Shoe"Deep, profound, superbly imaginative, written with the quiet eloquence of a storyteller who dares to leap into the most magical of places. This poetic book is full of lessons and hope."
—James McBride, author of The Color of Water and Miracle at St. Anna"A moving flight of fantasy come to teach us that Heaven is where we finally learn what our life was about."
—Harold S. Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People"In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom lifts us to a new level. You'll find here echoes of the classics -- The Odyssey, for one -- and that puts Albom's book in the best of company."
—Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes and 'Tis"One of the best books I've read. Very well written. Touching and very comforting. Makes you stop and think of how people affect each others lives under the simplest circumstances, and no matter who and what you are in life, you can always make a difference."
—Maria Linsangan, book buyer, The News Group, Sacramento"I was changed by this book. It has that wonderful ring of truth that stories have which affirm the value of the individual."
—Donna Cressman, Maxwell Books, DeSoto TX"A books that you find yourself thinking about days...even weeks later, reading favorite sections to others and thinking about how your own actions and choices ripple through life and affect those around you."
—Julie Smith, Auntie's Bookstore, Spokane WA
Monday, February 23, 2009
The Five People you meet in Heaven......
THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN
Mitch Albom
Hyperion PressFictionISBN: 1401308589
• Read an Excerpt-->• Reading Group Guide
When I finished the last page of Mitch Albom's TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE, I knew I had to share the book with as many people as I could. I proceeded to buy 41 copies, inscribe them all to my friends and family members, hand them out, mail them --- whatever I had to do to spread the word. The book was that moving, in my opinion. So I was eagerly looking forward to THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN and I am happy to report that Albom did not disappoint me. He is a first-rate storyteller, and THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN is an imaginative, creative tale in the tradition of the best fairy tales or folklore.Eddie is a maintenance man who keeps the rides safe at the Ruby Pier amusement park. His 83rd birthday seems like any other day --- he inspects the rides, watches the people, makes pipe cleaner animals for the children. However on this day he dies unexpectedly, trying to rescue a young girl in harm's way.Eddie wakes up in heaven --- but not to the "paradise garden, a place where (we) can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains," not the idyllic place that heaven has been described as throughout time. Eddie awakens to a series of introductions --- or reintroductions --- to five people whom he had met during his life, either in passing or at length. They each carry answers to the whys and hows of Eddie's life. With each meeting he relives in part that time of his life, but now the gaps are filled in. For maybe the first time he sees what REALLY happened. "There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man, Eddie's first encounter, explains. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth."All five are of course deceased, and they all impart knowledge of Eddie's life and life in general. For instance, the Blue Man asks, "Why do people gather when others die," and his explanation is at the very core of the meaning of Albom's book: "It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed lives are changed." It is insights like these that leave the reader asking, "What does Mitch Albom know that we don't?"What he knows is that we all seek answers. We look for meaning behind the experiences in our lives. More often than not, we never get the answers but we continue --- we plod on, happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, pain-free or in pain. We live. Albom doesn't pretend to offer us the answers, but he does offer us an almost Taoist interpretation of life. It is. It just is. The answers may never be revealed. And do they need to be?THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN is a beautiful story. Eddie is human and likable for his foibles, fears and faults. The writing is often lyrical and fable-like. And though the book is fiction, behind it lies Albom's lifelong love of his uncle, which lends a tenderness and intimacy to the tale on par with TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE. You'll want to share this with your friends, family, acquaintances, and even those nameless people you pass on the street who may have played a larger role in your life than you ever could have imagined. --- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.Click here to get the audiobook from Audible.com.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Mitch Albom
Hyperion PressFictionISBN: 1401308589
• Read an Excerpt-->• Reading Group Guide
When I finished the last page of Mitch Albom's TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE, I knew I had to share the book with as many people as I could. I proceeded to buy 41 copies, inscribe them all to my friends and family members, hand them out, mail them --- whatever I had to do to spread the word. The book was that moving, in my opinion. So I was eagerly looking forward to THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN and I am happy to report that Albom did not disappoint me. He is a first-rate storyteller, and THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN is an imaginative, creative tale in the tradition of the best fairy tales or folklore.Eddie is a maintenance man who keeps the rides safe at the Ruby Pier amusement park. His 83rd birthday seems like any other day --- he inspects the rides, watches the people, makes pipe cleaner animals for the children. However on this day he dies unexpectedly, trying to rescue a young girl in harm's way.Eddie wakes up in heaven --- but not to the "paradise garden, a place where (we) can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains," not the idyllic place that heaven has been described as throughout time. Eddie awakens to a series of introductions --- or reintroductions --- to five people whom he had met during his life, either in passing or at length. They each carry answers to the whys and hows of Eddie's life. With each meeting he relives in part that time of his life, but now the gaps are filled in. For maybe the first time he sees what REALLY happened. "There are five people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man, Eddie's first encounter, explains. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth."All five are of course deceased, and they all impart knowledge of Eddie's life and life in general. For instance, the Blue Man asks, "Why do people gather when others die," and his explanation is at the very core of the meaning of Albom's book: "It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed lives are changed." It is insights like these that leave the reader asking, "What does Mitch Albom know that we don't?"What he knows is that we all seek answers. We look for meaning behind the experiences in our lives. More often than not, we never get the answers but we continue --- we plod on, happy or unhappy, fulfilled or unfulfilled, pain-free or in pain. We live. Albom doesn't pretend to offer us the answers, but he does offer us an almost Taoist interpretation of life. It is. It just is. The answers may never be revealed. And do they need to be?THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN is a beautiful story. Eddie is human and likable for his foibles, fears and faults. The writing is often lyrical and fable-like. And though the book is fiction, behind it lies Albom's lifelong love of his uncle, which lends a tenderness and intimacy to the tale on par with TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE. You'll want to share this with your friends, family, acquaintances, and even those nameless people you pass on the street who may have played a larger role in your life than you ever could have imagined. --- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.Click here to get the audiobook from Audible.com.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
An Approach to...... Snow Falling on Cedars......
Snow Falling On Cedars
by David Guterson
0-679-76402-X
480 pages
$12.00
About the Book
About this guide........
The discussion topics, author biography, historical material, and bibliography that follow are meant to enhance your group's reading of David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars.
We hope that they will provide you with new ways of looking at--and talking about--a novel that has been widely praised for its eloquent dramatization of themes of love, justice, racism, community, and conscience. These ideas arise organically from the book's suspenseful story of a murder trial, its evocation of a lost love, and its brooding, poetically nuanced portraits of character and place.
The place is the fictional island of San Piedro off the coast of Washington, a community of "five thousand damp souls" [p. 5] who support themselves through salmon fishing and berry farming. The time is 1954, eight years after the end of World War II, in which some of San Piedro's young men lost their lives and many others were irreparably injured, physically as well as emotionally.
Now one of those survivors--a gill-netter named Carl Heine--has drowned under mysterious circumstances and another fisherman is on trial for his murder. The fact that the accused, Kabuo Miyamoto, is a first-generation Japanese American is not mere coincidence. To the local coroner, Heine's injuries suggested that the sheriff look for "a Jap with a bloody gun butt" [p. 59]. And among San Piedro's Anglos, hostility against Japanese still runs high, even if, like Kabuo, those Japanese were born and raised on the island and fought for the United States during the war. Kabuo's trial, in a sense, is a continuation of the white community's quarrel with its Asian neighbors.
But the Japanese--and particularly Kabuo and his wife, Hatsue--have their own grounds for resentment, stemming from years of bigotry that culminated during World War II, when thousands of Japanese Americans were interned in government relocation camps and Kabuo was effectively robbed of land that his father had worked and paid for. Even as the state presents its case against Kabuo Miyamoto, the reader is compelled to recognize the Miyamotos' case against their white neighbors, the best of whom stood by as an entire community was driven into exile. Their case never receives a public hearing: it can only be prosecuted in the courtrooms of memory and conscience.
It is not only the Japanese who remember. Among the trial's observers is Ishmael Chambers, the embittered war veteran who runs the San Piedro Review. Ishmael is not an objective witness. He grew up with Carl and Kabuo. He lost an arm on Tarawa to Japanese machinegun fire. Most important, Hatsue was Ishmael's boyhood love and he has never come to terms with losing her. In the course of the trial he will find himself torn between rancor and conscience, loath to forgive Hatsue yet unable to condemn her husband. To a large extent, Snow Falling on Cedars is about the ways in which Ishmael, Kabuo, and Hatsue at last acknowledge their respective losses and recognize the sense of mutual indebtedness and need that may survive even the gravest injuries and betrayals--the way in which loss itself may become a kind of kinship. In a place as isolated as San Piedro, "identity was geography instead of blood" [p. 206] and people make enemies reluctantly, knowing that "an enemy on an island is an enemy forever" [p. 439]. The snow that falls on David Guterson's hauntingly imagined world falls on everyone who lives in it.
Historical Background...........
Between 1901 and 1907, almost 110,000 Japanese immigrated to the United States. They were drawn by promises of ready work--American railroads actually sent recruiters to Japanese port cities, offering laborers three to five times their customary wages--and by worsening economic conditions in their homeland, which was undergoing social upheaval in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration. Although many originally came as dekaseginin--temporary sojourners--work was plentiful, not only on the railroads, but in the lumber camps, salmon fisheries, and fruit orchards of Oregon and Washington. Increasingly, the newcomers stayed on. Many purchased their own farms. In time, these issei--first-generation Japanese--started families.
The Japanese government actively encouraged emigration, and although the Gentleman's Agreement of 1908 curbed the flow of Japanese men, it allowed unrestricted entry to their wives and children. Many women were "picture brides," who came to join husbands they knew only through photographs and letters and whom they had "married" by proxy in ceremonies in their native villages.
Very quickly the newcomers encountered antagonism. Although Japanese constituted less than two percent of all immigrants to the U.S., newspapers trumpeted an "invasion." The mayor of San Francisco proclaimed that "the Japanese are not the stuff of which American citizens can be made." The Sacramento Bee warned that "the Japs...will increase like rats" if allowed to settle down. The Asiatic Exclusion League agitated for legislation to halt all Japanese immigration. Politicians ran for office on anti-Japanese platforms. In 1923, the state of Oregon prohibited issei from legally buying land. A year later, Congress passed the National Origins Act, which banned all immigration from Japan.
In spite of this, the newcomers thrived. They found ways of getting around some laws (under Oregon's Alien Land Law, first-generation Japanese could legalize their land purchases by registering them in the names of their American-born-or nisei-children). They tolerated other laws. Meanwhile, the immigrants preserved the ceremonies and values of Japan even as they encouraged their children to acculturate and, particularly, to educate themselves. "You must outperform your detractors," one issei counseled his children. Typically, the nisei grew up thinking of themselves as Americans, yet were reminded of their difference every time they encountered the taunts and ostracism of their white neighbors.
Following the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, hostility turned into paranoia--and paranoia became law. Japanese who had lived in America for thirty years were accused of spying for their native land. The day after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Treasury Department ordered all Japanese-owned businesses closed and all issei bank accounts frozen. The U.S. government had already compiled lists of Japanese whose loyalties might be suspect, and more than 1,000 businessmen, community leaders, priests, and educators were arrested up and down the West Coast.
The restrictions escalated. Japanese homes were searched for contraband. Telephone service was cut off. One newspaper columnist wrote: "I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior....Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room in the badlands...let 'em be pinched, hurt, and hungry." In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which empowered the government to remove "any and all" persons of Japanese ancestry from sensitive military areas in four western states. Japanese residents had only days in which to evacuate. They were compelled to sell their land and businesses for a fraction of their value, or to lease them to neighbors who would later refuse to pay their rent. All told, some 110,000 Japanese Americans were deported from their homes to hastily built camps such as Tule Lake and Manzanar, where they lived behind barbed wire for the duration of the war.
Neither Germans nor Italians living in this country were subject to similar restrictions, and recently declassified documents reveal that the Japanese population was never considered a serious threat to American security. In all of World War II, no person of Japanese ancestry living in the United States, Alaska, or Hawaii was ever charged with any act of espionage or sabotage. As one nisei later wrote, the victims of Executive Order 9066 were people whose "only crime was their face."
In 1988, the U.S. government formally apologized to Japanese citizens who had been deprived of their civil liberties during World War II.
This information was gathered from Lauren Kessler, Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese-American Family. New York, Random House, 1993.
For discussion.........
Snow Falling on Cedars opens in the middle of Kabuo Miyamoto's trial. It will be pages before we learn the crime of which he has been accused or the nature of the evidence against him. What effect does the author create by withholding this information and introducing it in the form of flashbacks? Where else in the narrative are critical revelations postponed? How is this novel's past related to its fictional present?
The trial functions both as this novel's narrative frame and as its governing metaphor. As we follow it, we are compelled to ask larger questions about the nature of truth, guilt, and responsibility. How does the author interweave these two functions? Which characters are aware that what is at stake is more than one man's guilt?
When the trial begins, San Piedro is in the midst of a snowstorm, which continues throughout its course. What role does snow play--both literally and metaphorically--in the book? Pay particular attention to the way in which snow blurs, freezes, isolates, and immobilizes, even as it holds out the promise of an "impossible winter purity" [p. 8].
How does nature shape this novel?
Guterson divides his island setting into four zones: the town of Amity Harbor; the sea; the strawberry fields; and the cedar forest. What actions take place in these different zones? Which characters are associated with them? How does the author establish a different mood for each setting?
In his first description of Carl Heine [pp. 14-16], Guterson imparts a fair amount of what is seemingly background information: We learn about his mother's sale of the family strawberry farm; about Carl's naval service in World War II; and about his reticence. We learn that Carl is considered "a good man." How do these facts become crucial later on, as mechanisms of plot, as revelations of the dead man's character, and as clues to San Piedro's collective mores? Where else does the author impart critical information in a casual manner, often "camouflaging" it amid material that will turn out to have no further significance? What does this method suggest about the novel's sense of the meaningful--about the value it assigns to things that might be considered random or irrelevant?
When Carl's body is dredged from the water, the sheriff has to remind himself that what he is seeing is a human being. While performing the autopsy, however, Horace Whaley forces himself to think of Carl as "the deceased...a bag of guts, a sack of parts" [p. 54]. Where else in Snow Falling on Cedars are people depersonalized--detached from their identities--either deliberately or inadvertently? What role does depersonalization play within the novel's larger scheme?
What material evidence does the prosecution produce in arguing Kabuo's guilt? Did these bits of information immediately provoke the investigators' suspicions, or only reinforce their preexisting misgivings about Carl's death? Why might they have been so quick to attribute Carl's death to foul play? How does the entire notion of a murder trial--in which facts are interpreted differently by opposing attorneys--fit into this book's thematic structure?
Ishmael suffers from feelings of ambivalence about his home and a cold-blooded detachment from his neighbors. Are we meant to attribute these to the loss of his arm or to other events in his past? How is Ishmael's sense of estrangement mirrored in Hatsue, who as a teenager rebels against her mother's values and at one point declares, "I don't want to be Japanese" [p. 201]? To what extent do Kabuo and Carl suffer from similar feelings? How does this condition of transcendental homelessness serve both to unite and to isolate the novel's characters?
What significance do you ascribe to Ishmael's name? What does Guterson's protagonist have in common with the narrator of Moby-Dick, another story of the sea?
What role has the San Piedro Review played in the life and times of its community? How has Ishmael's stewardship of the paper differed from his father's? In what ways does he resemble his father--of whom his widow says, "He loved humankind dearly and with all his heart, but he disliked most human beings" [p. 36]? What actions of Ishmael's may be said to parallel the older man's?
Ishmael's experience in World War II has cost him an arm. In that same war Horace Whaley, the county coroner, lost his sense of effectiveness, when so many of the men he was supposed to care for died. How has the war affected other characters in this book, both those who served and those who stayed home?
Guterson tells us that "on San Piedro the silent-toiling, autonomous gill-netter became the collective image of the good man" [p. 38]. Thus, Carl's death comes to signify the death of the island's ideal citizen: he represents a delayed casualty of the war in which so many other fine young men were killed. Yet how productive does the ideal of silent individualism turn out to be? To what extent is Carl a casualty of his self-sufficiency? What other characters in this novel adhere to a code of solitude?
Kabuo and Hatsue also possess--and are at times driven by--certain values. As a young girl, Hatsue is taught the importance of cultivating stillness and composure in order "to seek union with the Greater Life" [p. 83]. Kabuo's father imparts to him the martial codes of his ancestors. How do these values determine their behavior, and particularly their responses to internment, war, and imprisonment? How do they clash with the values of the Anglo community, even as they sometimes resemble them?
Racism is a persistent theme in this novel. It is responsible for the internment of Kabuo, Hatsue, and their families, for Kabuo's loss of his land, and perhaps for his indictment for murder. In what ways do the book's Japanese characters respond to the hostility of their white neighbors? How does bigotry manifest itself in the thoughts and behavior of characters like Etta Heine--whose racism is keenly ironic in view of her German origins--Art Moran, and Ishmael himself? Are we meant to see these characters as typical of their place and time?
Although almost all the novel's white characters are guilty of racism, only one of them--Etta Heine--emerges unsympathetically. How do her values and motives differ from those of other San Piedrans? How is her hostility to the Japanese related to her distaste for farming? To what extent are Guterson's characters defined by their feelings for their natural environment?
Ishmael's adolescent romance with Hatsue has been the defining fact of his life, its loss even more wounding than the loss of his arm. Yet when Hatsue first remembers Ishmael, it is only as a "boy" [p. 86] and her recollection of their first kiss is immediately supplanted by the memory of her wedding night with Kabuo. How else does Guterson contrast Hatsue's feelings for these two men? (Note that Hatsue's feelings for both Ishmael and her husband become clear in the course of making love.) What does the disparity between Hatsue's memories and Ishmael's suggest about the nature of love? Where else in this novel do different characters perceive the same events in radically different ways--and with what consequences?
In choosing Kabuo, Hatsue acknowledges "the truth of her private nature" [p. 89]. That choice implies a paradox. For, if Kabuo is a fellow nisei, he is also rooted in the American earth of San Piedro's strawberry fields. How is this doubleness--between Japanese and American--expressed elsewhere in Snow Falling on Cedars?
Ishmael's attraction to Hatsue is closely connected to a yearning for transcendence, as indicated by their early conversation about the ocean. Ishmael says, "It goes forever," while Hatsue insists, "It ends somewhere" [p. 97]. Typically, it is Ishmael who wishes to dissolve boundaries, Hatsue who keeps reasserting them, as when she gently withholds the embrace that Ishmael so desperately wants. What limits might Ishmael wish to transcend, even as a boy? Does he ever manage to do so? Does Snow Falling on Cedars hold the promise of transcendence for its characters or at best offer them a reconciliation with their limits?
One way that Guterson interweaves his novel's multiple narrative strands is through the use of parallelism: Ishmael spies on Hatsue; so does Kabuo. The two men are similarly haunted by memories of the war. Both Kabuo and Carl Heine turn out to be dissatisfied fishermen who yearn to return to farming. Where else in this novel does the author employ this method, and to what effect?
What is the significance of the novel's last sentence: "Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart"?
Suggestions for further readingFiction: Walter Abish, How German Is It; Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939; Günter Grass, Dog Years; Ursula Hegi, Stones From the River; James Jones, From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line; Ivan Klíma, Judge on Trial; Joy Kogawa, Obasan; Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead; Shirley Nelson, The Last Year of the War; Howard Norman, The Bird Artist; E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News.
Nonfiction: John Armor and Peter Wright, Manzanar; Timothy Egan, The Good Rain; Hazel Heckman, Island in the Sound; Lauren Kessler, Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese-American Family; Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore; Studs Terkel, The Good War; Joe Upton, Alaska Blues.
Also by David Guterson, available from Vintage Contemporaries:
The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Different Approaches to & Reviews of CHESIL BEACH.......
Review Consensus: Not quite a consensus, but the majority are impressed
From the Reviews:
"This is a small novel, 160 pages, but a very concentrated one; a miniature aware of the world beyond it. So when the powerful ending comes (and two years later we could have witnessed a completely different outcome), there's a lot behind it. Some might find the summing up a bit too neat; I didn't. It's the necessary step back, the distancing effect that puts one rotten hour into historical perspective." - Steven Carroll, The Age
"McEwan, a '60s child if ever there was one, comes to remind us that there were losers, all right, and that there still are. It would be less interesting to term this a generational achievement than a national one. Only Philip Larkin has ever decribed sex more bleakly than McEwan does here. No fumble, miscue, or calamity is omitted." - Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly
"Mr McEwan's prose is, as always, intense and visually descriptive, but in this elegantly crafted novel his skill lies in his illumination of an evening taut with emotional paralysis and in his portrayal of missed opportunity. As events move forward to the book's dénouement, On Chesil Beach becomes much more than a simple story of emotions held in check by convention. It is a memorable exposé of how terrible wounds can be inflicted and the entire course of a life changed -- by doing nothing." - The Economist
"To reveal what lies in store would lessen the pleasure of reading this small masterpiece, though it's hard to imagine that anything could spoil it." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
"Yet it would be wrong to see this novella as showing the liberated, therapeutically enabled present triumphing unambiguously over the past's stifling repressions and conventions. For, paradoxically, the fullness with which Edward and Florence's inner lives are explored depends wholly on their reticence and embarrassment, on their inability to talk to each other. Indeed, the power of the narrative as a whole derives from the painful seriousness with which they brood, from their antithetical perspectives, on the moment when, as Edward imagines it, "the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman". The book's poignant final pages evince an almost wistful nostalgia for the years before." - Mark Ford, Financial Times
"Kühl und mit einer Präzision, die ans Bösartige grenzt, verfolgt McEwan in dieser genialen Tragödie der Verkennungen, wie zwei Liebende einander immer wieder verfehlen, um Millimeter nur und am Ende endgültig." - Hubert Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"These currents of excitement and dread are following such different directions that it is hardly surprising that by the end of the novel, which comes quite quickly, just a few hours and about 150 pages later, the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach has become the backdrop to solitude rather than communion. This plot may sound inconsequential -- bad sex in English hotel shock! -- but McEwan manages to give it almost tragic impact. This is partly because we come to sympathise so intensely with Florence and Edward's idealistic expectations of intimacy (…..) No, what matters is whether the novel works as fiction. And it does. Some of the prose in the passages away from the bedroom is more workaday than we have come to expect from McEwan, and lacks the panache of his recent work. The exploration of Florence's love of music, particularly, never quite flares into life. Yet within the bedroom this couple's hesitant attempts at intimacy are nuanced and delicately realised." - Natasha Walter, The Guardian
"The unease in this book is mostly sexual. The young couple are hopelessly mismatched sexually (…..) (I)t is a fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret. In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowering to devastating effect." - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday
"On Chesil Beach, however, is full of odd echoes and has elements of folk tale, which make the pleasures of reading it rather greater than the joys of knowing what happened in the end. (…) The style of the book may seem plain: there is no recourse to the use of cadence for effect, and there are no elaborate sentences or pyrotechnics of any sort. We are, after all, in England, where words mean what they say. So numerous are the images of stability and continuity in these years of peace and prosperity, that the reader takes them for granted. The sheer skill in holding tone, and playing with it, is hidden much of the time. The novel is a pure comedy, but it is told from the point of view of the two protagonists who do not think it is funny at all, and this is managed without making either of them seem tedious." - Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books
"On Chesil Beach is a linguistic balancing act, each sentence delicately positioning itself both by historical co-ordinates -- an early-Sixties world of Austin 35s and wireless news bulletins -- and by more private reference points -- the separate anxieties and assumptions of the young bride and groom. McEwan, as Atonement demonstrated, is at his best with this finely tuned historical pastiche. The period detail allows him some virtuosic touches (…..) McEwan's forensic account of the warring couple's partialities (…) is perfectly constructed, but fails to throw off the feel of a private technical exercise. In a novel so reliant on bias and conviction, a little more authorly engagement would be welcome." - Rachel Aspden, New Statesman
"(A) small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses none of those earlier books’ emotional wisdom, narrative scope or lovely specificity of detail. (…) (H)e’s given us a smarmy portrait of two incomprehensible and unlikable people." - Michiko Kautani, The New York Times
"The situation is miniature and enormous, dire and pathetic, tender and irrevocable. McEwan treats it with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan’s written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls "the secret affair between disgust and joy. " (…) If On Chesil Beach is a horror novel, it is also as fundamentally a comedy, one with virtual Monty Python overtones" - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review
"There is a fairy-tale quality to the book, in that everything that follows seems inevitable. The minute currents of tension that change a conversation and a life are so crucial to McEwan's method that it would be unfair to give away every last turn in his narrative. Towards the end, when fates have been sealed, it seems to Edward 'that an explanation of his existence would take up a minute, less than half a page'. Such is the deft compression of McEwan's art here that, in his hands, such a formulation does not seem far from the truth." - Tim Adams, The Observer
"Communication failure is at the center of his tale, and he evokes it with heartbreaking eloquence." - Kyle Smith, People
"But after On Chesil Beach climaxes, the masterfully modulated denouement fast-forwards through the decades to come to our present day -- and prods us to consider what this book really is." - Ed Park, Salon
"Every detail in On Chesil Beach tells the reader that the new age has not yet dawned (…..) Some may call this book a novella, because it is a mere 30,000 words long, but it is in fact a fully realized novel, more than worthy of the grander appellation. Not only is it full of meaningful, organically significant details, but its narrative ebbs and flows in a way that demonstrates the most masterly narrative control. The story unfolds in a perfect manner, withholding now and then for effect, even omitting sometimes, with the result that On Chesil Beach is not only a wonderful read but also perhaps that rarest of things: a perfect novel." - Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle
"The finest passages in On Chesil Beach are the tremulous vacillations experienced by the couple, a sad mixture of stage-fright, clumsy slapstick and tender awkwardness. In the bleak aftermath, the emotional pendulum swings between pity and fury, embarrassment and apology, with each partner's self-doubts and aggrieved resentments interlocking and interchanging. It might, in a way, have been a rather good short story. On Chesil Beach, however, manages to feel too thin and too long simultaneously. (...) The concentration on the consequences of their unfortunate first night seems bizarrely disproportionate, a feeling exacerbated by McEwan's sometimes slapdash plotting elsewhere. (...)On Chesil Beach leaves the reader, like its two confused, disgusted and recriminating characters, utterly unfulfilled." - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
"As it turns out, McEwan’s concern for his characters’ individual humanity and his interest in the larger historical movement end up being somewhat at odds; they refuse, in the end, to embody sociological analysis. Liberation, in this novel, happens somewhere else. But that can only be to the benefit of the humanity of this small but interesting novel. I like it much more than McEwan’s last six novels, at least. (…) The novel is saved by an honest familiarity with individual psychology, and by the fact that it is, really, all about sex, which McEwan certainly does understand. The larger movements of history, however, enter into these lives in ways which are all too much like the novel that Professor Peter Hennessy might write about the period." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator
"Clean of sprawl and clutter -- not a word, incident or image seems slackly placed -- the book never hardens into the schematic. Where McEwan’s earliest handlings of one of his dominant themes -- attempts to attain and sustain loving partnerships -- often seemed diagrams of male and female stereotypes, everything here is alive with human complexity. (…) Subtle, witty, rueful and sometimes heartrending, On Chesil Beach coalesces these perceptions into a novel that is a master feat of concentration in both senses of the word." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
"McEwan exposes the rationalisations and self-deceptions we all succumb to in situations of great emotional uncertainty, the shifts in perception that show what changeable and unpredictable beings we can be to ourselves, let alone one another. In doing so, the book takes us deeper into two people's lives, counter-pointing the tensions of the present with the great backwash of their past and the surging of a future neither can fully see." - Mark Mordue, Sydney Morning Herald
"Writing in the third person, McEwan gives the reader access to both characters' thoughts with his usual skill, and the comedy of embarrassment, or of the kind of erotic misunderstanding that Milan Kundera used to specialise in, quickly disappears as the marital bed begins to seem more and more ominous. (…) It's a pleasure to watch McEwan fleshing out his characters, expertly shifting chronology and point of view around as he prepares for the coming bedroom scene and its aftermath. (…) Part of the problem might be that McEwan's use of suspense makes you forget that startling revelations aren't the point, that his writing is strongest in its texture and detail and masterly narrative set-pieces." - Christopher Tayler, The Telegraph
"Because this is a slight book, it would be unfair to detail the unfolding of this evening any further. Suffice it to say that the tiny tragedy of one wedding night -- which has large-scale implications -- is heartbreaking, understandable from both parties' perspectives, and sickeningly unnecessary." - Lionel Shriver, The Telegraph
"For the reader, the ending of On Chesil Beach comes too soon. Its devastating concluding passage, in which we glimpse the future that flows from the events of the honeymoon night, feels almost like the sketch of a larger novel of which this is merely the first section. Still, the experience of finishing a novel with regret is not so frequent that one should complain of it. Better to say with gratitude that McEwan’s latest fiction is full of richness: of serious thought about the nature of love and human relationships, informed by a poetic sensibility and expressed in prose whose lyricism never errs on the side of self-indulgence." - Jane Shilling, The Times
"A new book by him has long been an event. This new book, though, On Chesil Beach, is more than an event. It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly. (…) The novel has felicities which ensure, rather than embellish, the humanity of its treatment of the lovers' predicament. (…) Ian McEwan is serious, but not solemn, in his unfolding of this predicament, and of surrounding disorders." - Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement
"This slim novel -- a novella, really -- works as a parable of failed empathy. (…) This backward-looking stance, this assumption that the couple may have prospered had they been born a few years later, risks a charge of smugness. It carries more than a whiff of author knows best. The chapters detailing their respective childhoods and schooling sometimes have the same tone, a too-assured intimation that their pasts neatly account for their present difficulties. But such criticisms fall away when McEwan returns to the wedding night itself, scrupulously describing the mordant, melancholy comedy of it, the tragedy it gives rise to." - Alexis Soloski, The Village Voice
"(B)reathtaking (…..) (I)t is in no important sense a miniature. Instead, it takes on subjects of universal interest -- innocence and naiveté, self-delusion, desire and repression, opportunity lost or rejected -- and creates a small but complete universe around them. McEwan's prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"So reich der schmale Roman an Beobachtungen, an Geschichten, an Beschreibungen gerade der immer wieder abstoppenden sexuellen Begegnungen der beiden ist (selten wurde ein Zungenkuss derart zum Abgewöhnen ausgenüchtert geschildert), so eng sind sie geführt. Wenn man diesem Schachtelalbtraum von einer Geschichte etwas vorwerfen kann, dann ist es -- neben der Kleinigkeit, dass McEwan sich im Epilog auf den psychologisch uninteressanteren Edward konzentriert -- ausgerechnet seine Meisterschaft: dass bis ins letzte Bild alles stimmt, dass noch die kleinste Subgeschichte ein Ziel hat, dass kaum Dunkelheiten bleiben. Wie ein wiedergefundenes Meisterwerk des Fin de siècle liest sich Am Strand" - Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt
"In seinem neuen Roman Am Strand nun überkreuzen sich diese sonst so genau kalkulierten Pläne, es geraten Literatur und Zeitdiagnose ordentlich durcheinander -- was vielleicht der Grund ist für das seltsam leblose und, schlimmer noch bei dem Thema, lustlose Scheitern dieses Sexromans vor dem Zeitalter des Sex." - Georg Dietz, Die Zeit
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
On Chesil Beach centres around the wedding night of Edward and Florence, and McEwan gets right to the point in his opening line:
They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. McEwan describes that wedding night in painful, exacting detail, from the meal they have in their room all the way through to the bitter end on the beach. He pulls back to fill in background -- their families and upbringing, their circumstances, their relationship -- but then always zooms back in to the wedding night. And you just know it's not going to go well. The time is 1962, and Edward and Florence are perhaps even worse equipped than most to deal with sexual difficulty than most of their contemporaries. They're deeply in love, but the physical has proved problematic during their courtship. Over the months Edward made some headway, but it never came easy, and Florence doesn't really take to much physical intimacy -- his tongue in her mouth when they, kiss for example. She has vague ideas of what to expect now, and she's dreading it:
Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust; her whole being was in revolt against a prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated.
Indeed:
being touched "down there" by someone else, even someone she loved, was as repulsive as, say, a surgical procedure on the eye. Yes, Florence's attitude is pathological; worse yet, she hasn't made it entirely clear to Edward how she feels about this act they're supposed to engage in. Edward has some sense of Florence's qualms, but he's so over-excited about finally getting this far that he doesn't pay enough attention. The exquisitely awkward dance they do as Florence tries to maneuver herself around the inevitable is wonderfully captured by McEwan, from both their vantage points. Marvellously, it comes even worse than expected, as Edward contributes to the mess with his own sexual difficulties (let's just say that his decision to lay off gratifying himself in the days before the wedding looks like it left him more precariously bottled-up than is healthy). Instead of awkward consummation what we get is sexual disaster.
McEwan doesn't let it end there; indeed, what's decisive is how they handle this mess they've gotten themselves into. That's what what interests McEwan, and that's where their real failure lies. They finally get some of the words out into the open, as they finally try discuss sex, but they're not very good at that either -- hardly surprising, given that they've never had a go at talking about it to anyone, on top of the terrible pas-de-deux they were just part of. Both partners' pasts contribute to the situation. Edward is used to living if not a lie then at least a very warped truth, having been brought up to treat his mother as if everything she did was normal when, in fact, little is, as she's been unhinged since an accident that left her in a coma for a week when he was a young boy. His father finally tells him about the accident that left her brain-damaged when he is fourteen, news that's not really news but still changes everything. "What I've said changes absolutely nothing", his father insists -- but then that's part of the problem. As before: "the fantasy could be sustained only if it was not discussed", and that's pretty much how they go on.
As for Florence, being a late bloomer is hardly explanation enough for her pathological feelings about sex. McEwan doesn't come right out and say it, but there are strong hints that a childhood trauma involving her father is at the root of it. Certainly, there's something off about that father-daughter relationship; even dense Edward notices that. (It's almost a shame that McEwan had to go that far; surely the unsettling weirdness of sex to a sheltered child of the times might have been enough to get him nearly as far.)
On Chesil Beach is a period-piece, McEwan focussing very hard on that time before the so-called sexual-revolution. It's not nostalgic, but he is trying to capture an era and he's very explicit about it, constantly reminding the reader of this different time (down to noting that: "This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine" when discussing their meal). It's not just the sexual mores and understanding that he wants to highlight, either: it's also very much a novel about family circumstances, opportunities, and, ultimately, class. Edward is the exception among his classmates in going on to university -- choosing London over Oxford, too, in a minor rebellion. Florence's parents are an academic (her mother) and a successful businessman; complicating the picture is the fact that Edward is hired by her father, his first real job.
Florence is a gifted and ambitious violinist, torn between the different opportunities she has; Edward has little understanding (or true appreciation) of what she does, her classical music remaining all Greek to him. They're very different people, yet McEwan convincingly presents them as in love -- the one constant, that, however, becomes yet another complicating factor.
After the wedding night McEwan also offers an extended coda, of afterwards. He focusses almost entirely on Edward here, describing the changes he undergoes and what becomes of him. It allows McEwan to make his final points -- of realising that a bit of patience, a bit of dialogue, and the power of their love would have been enough, that awkward moments can be handled if they're tackled head-on -- but leaves too much open about Florence (including the question of whether she ever got over her sex-problems).
There's been some discussion of whether On Chesil Beach is a novel or a novella. The small American edition stretches the book out to just over 200 pages -- and has A Novel printed on the cover -- but it's less a matter of length than scope, and On Chesil Beach's failing is that it remains a mere novella even while McEwan suggests (but doesn't follow through on) much larger ambitions. McEwan packs events and character-description into it, but he doesn't dare really move beyond the small story of the wedding night. It's like the notes are here for a larger novel, but everything is like the coda, background to the essential tale, but so much of it that it constantly suggests there should be more.
Successful in large part, the book nevertheless falls short of its larger ambitions, as McEwan chose a middle-ground that isn't entirely satisfying. Neither a compact novella nor a full-blown novel
On Chesil Beach is a very good book, but not entirely satisfying. Still, well worth reading.
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Links: On Chesil Beach:
From the Reviews:
"This is a small novel, 160 pages, but a very concentrated one; a miniature aware of the world beyond it. So when the powerful ending comes (and two years later we could have witnessed a completely different outcome), there's a lot behind it. Some might find the summing up a bit too neat; I didn't. It's the necessary step back, the distancing effect that puts one rotten hour into historical perspective." - Steven Carroll, The Age
"McEwan, a '60s child if ever there was one, comes to remind us that there were losers, all right, and that there still are. It would be less interesting to term this a generational achievement than a national one. Only Philip Larkin has ever decribed sex more bleakly than McEwan does here. No fumble, miscue, or calamity is omitted." - Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly
"Mr McEwan's prose is, as always, intense and visually descriptive, but in this elegantly crafted novel his skill lies in his illumination of an evening taut with emotional paralysis and in his portrayal of missed opportunity. As events move forward to the book's dénouement, On Chesil Beach becomes much more than a simple story of emotions held in check by convention. It is a memorable exposé of how terrible wounds can be inflicted and the entire course of a life changed -- by doing nothing." - The Economist
"To reveal what lies in store would lessen the pleasure of reading this small masterpiece, though it's hard to imagine that anything could spoil it." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
"Yet it would be wrong to see this novella as showing the liberated, therapeutically enabled present triumphing unambiguously over the past's stifling repressions and conventions. For, paradoxically, the fullness with which Edward and Florence's inner lives are explored depends wholly on their reticence and embarrassment, on their inability to talk to each other. Indeed, the power of the narrative as a whole derives from the painful seriousness with which they brood, from their antithetical perspectives, on the moment when, as Edward imagines it, "the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman". The book's poignant final pages evince an almost wistful nostalgia for the years before." - Mark Ford, Financial Times
"Kühl und mit einer Präzision, die ans Bösartige grenzt, verfolgt McEwan in dieser genialen Tragödie der Verkennungen, wie zwei Liebende einander immer wieder verfehlen, um Millimeter nur und am Ende endgültig." - Hubert Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"These currents of excitement and dread are following such different directions that it is hardly surprising that by the end of the novel, which comes quite quickly, just a few hours and about 150 pages later, the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach has become the backdrop to solitude rather than communion. This plot may sound inconsequential -- bad sex in English hotel shock! -- but McEwan manages to give it almost tragic impact. This is partly because we come to sympathise so intensely with Florence and Edward's idealistic expectations of intimacy (…..) No, what matters is whether the novel works as fiction. And it does. Some of the prose in the passages away from the bedroom is more workaday than we have come to expect from McEwan, and lacks the panache of his recent work. The exploration of Florence's love of music, particularly, never quite flares into life. Yet within the bedroom this couple's hesitant attempts at intimacy are nuanced and delicately realised." - Natasha Walter, The Guardian
"The unease in this book is mostly sexual. The young couple are hopelessly mismatched sexually (…..) (I)t is a fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret. In On Chesil Beach McEwan has combined the intensity of his narrowly focused early work with his more expansive later flowering to devastating effect." - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday
"On Chesil Beach, however, is full of odd echoes and has elements of folk tale, which make the pleasures of reading it rather greater than the joys of knowing what happened in the end. (…) The style of the book may seem plain: there is no recourse to the use of cadence for effect, and there are no elaborate sentences or pyrotechnics of any sort. We are, after all, in England, where words mean what they say. So numerous are the images of stability and continuity in these years of peace and prosperity, that the reader takes them for granted. The sheer skill in holding tone, and playing with it, is hidden much of the time. The novel is a pure comedy, but it is told from the point of view of the two protagonists who do not think it is funny at all, and this is managed without making either of them seem tedious." - Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books
"On Chesil Beach is a linguistic balancing act, each sentence delicately positioning itself both by historical co-ordinates -- an early-Sixties world of Austin 35s and wireless news bulletins -- and by more private reference points -- the separate anxieties and assumptions of the young bride and groom. McEwan, as Atonement demonstrated, is at his best with this finely tuned historical pastiche. The period detail allows him some virtuosic touches (…..) McEwan's forensic account of the warring couple's partialities (…) is perfectly constructed, but fails to throw off the feel of a private technical exercise. In a novel so reliant on bias and conviction, a little more authorly engagement would be welcome." - Rachel Aspden, New Statesman
"(A) small, sullen, unsatisfying story that possesses none of those earlier books’ emotional wisdom, narrative scope or lovely specificity of detail. (…) (H)e’s given us a smarmy portrait of two incomprehensible and unlikable people." - Michiko Kautani, The New York Times
"The situation is miniature and enormous, dire and pathetic, tender and irrevocable. McEwan treats it with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan’s written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls "the secret affair between disgust and joy. " (…) If On Chesil Beach is a horror novel, it is also as fundamentally a comedy, one with virtual Monty Python overtones" - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review
"There is a fairy-tale quality to the book, in that everything that follows seems inevitable. The minute currents of tension that change a conversation and a life are so crucial to McEwan's method that it would be unfair to give away every last turn in his narrative. Towards the end, when fates have been sealed, it seems to Edward 'that an explanation of his existence would take up a minute, less than half a page'. Such is the deft compression of McEwan's art here that, in his hands, such a formulation does not seem far from the truth." - Tim Adams, The Observer
"Communication failure is at the center of his tale, and he evokes it with heartbreaking eloquence." - Kyle Smith, People
"But after On Chesil Beach climaxes, the masterfully modulated denouement fast-forwards through the decades to come to our present day -- and prods us to consider what this book really is." - Ed Park, Salon
"Every detail in On Chesil Beach tells the reader that the new age has not yet dawned (…..) Some may call this book a novella, because it is a mere 30,000 words long, but it is in fact a fully realized novel, more than worthy of the grander appellation. Not only is it full of meaningful, organically significant details, but its narrative ebbs and flows in a way that demonstrates the most masterly narrative control. The story unfolds in a perfect manner, withholding now and then for effect, even omitting sometimes, with the result that On Chesil Beach is not only a wonderful read but also perhaps that rarest of things: a perfect novel." - Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle
"The finest passages in On Chesil Beach are the tremulous vacillations experienced by the couple, a sad mixture of stage-fright, clumsy slapstick and tender awkwardness. In the bleak aftermath, the emotional pendulum swings between pity and fury, embarrassment and apology, with each partner's self-doubts and aggrieved resentments interlocking and interchanging. It might, in a way, have been a rather good short story. On Chesil Beach, however, manages to feel too thin and too long simultaneously. (...) The concentration on the consequences of their unfortunate first night seems bizarrely disproportionate, a feeling exacerbated by McEwan's sometimes slapdash plotting elsewhere. (...)On Chesil Beach leaves the reader, like its two confused, disgusted and recriminating characters, utterly unfulfilled." - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
"As it turns out, McEwan’s concern for his characters’ individual humanity and his interest in the larger historical movement end up being somewhat at odds; they refuse, in the end, to embody sociological analysis. Liberation, in this novel, happens somewhere else. But that can only be to the benefit of the humanity of this small but interesting novel. I like it much more than McEwan’s last six novels, at least. (…) The novel is saved by an honest familiarity with individual psychology, and by the fact that it is, really, all about sex, which McEwan certainly does understand. The larger movements of history, however, enter into these lives in ways which are all too much like the novel that Professor Peter Hennessy might write about the period." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator
"Clean of sprawl and clutter -- not a word, incident or image seems slackly placed -- the book never hardens into the schematic. Where McEwan’s earliest handlings of one of his dominant themes -- attempts to attain and sustain loving partnerships -- often seemed diagrams of male and female stereotypes, everything here is alive with human complexity. (…) Subtle, witty, rueful and sometimes heartrending, On Chesil Beach coalesces these perceptions into a novel that is a master feat of concentration in both senses of the word." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
"McEwan exposes the rationalisations and self-deceptions we all succumb to in situations of great emotional uncertainty, the shifts in perception that show what changeable and unpredictable beings we can be to ourselves, let alone one another. In doing so, the book takes us deeper into two people's lives, counter-pointing the tensions of the present with the great backwash of their past and the surging of a future neither can fully see." - Mark Mordue, Sydney Morning Herald
"Writing in the third person, McEwan gives the reader access to both characters' thoughts with his usual skill, and the comedy of embarrassment, or of the kind of erotic misunderstanding that Milan Kundera used to specialise in, quickly disappears as the marital bed begins to seem more and more ominous. (…) It's a pleasure to watch McEwan fleshing out his characters, expertly shifting chronology and point of view around as he prepares for the coming bedroom scene and its aftermath. (…) Part of the problem might be that McEwan's use of suspense makes you forget that startling revelations aren't the point, that his writing is strongest in its texture and detail and masterly narrative set-pieces." - Christopher Tayler, The Telegraph
"Because this is a slight book, it would be unfair to detail the unfolding of this evening any further. Suffice it to say that the tiny tragedy of one wedding night -- which has large-scale implications -- is heartbreaking, understandable from both parties' perspectives, and sickeningly unnecessary." - Lionel Shriver, The Telegraph
"For the reader, the ending of On Chesil Beach comes too soon. Its devastating concluding passage, in which we glimpse the future that flows from the events of the honeymoon night, feels almost like the sketch of a larger novel of which this is merely the first section. Still, the experience of finishing a novel with regret is not so frequent that one should complain of it. Better to say with gratitude that McEwan’s latest fiction is full of richness: of serious thought about the nature of love and human relationships, informed by a poetic sensibility and expressed in prose whose lyricism never errs on the side of self-indulgence." - Jane Shilling, The Times
"A new book by him has long been an event. This new book, though, On Chesil Beach, is more than an event. It is a masterpiece. The very idea that informs it, fascinating and unfamiliar, is masterly. (…) The novel has felicities which ensure, rather than embellish, the humanity of its treatment of the lovers' predicament. (…) Ian McEwan is serious, but not solemn, in his unfolding of this predicament, and of surrounding disorders." - Karl Miller, Times Literary Supplement
"This slim novel -- a novella, really -- works as a parable of failed empathy. (…) This backward-looking stance, this assumption that the couple may have prospered had they been born a few years later, risks a charge of smugness. It carries more than a whiff of author knows best. The chapters detailing their respective childhoods and schooling sometimes have the same tone, a too-assured intimation that their pasts neatly account for their present difficulties. But such criticisms fall away when McEwan returns to the wedding night itself, scrupulously describing the mordant, melancholy comedy of it, the tragedy it gives rise to." - Alexis Soloski, The Village Voice
"(B)reathtaking (…..) (I)t is in no important sense a miniature. Instead, it takes on subjects of universal interest -- innocence and naiveté, self-delusion, desire and repression, opportunity lost or rejected -- and creates a small but complete universe around them. McEwan's prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"So reich der schmale Roman an Beobachtungen, an Geschichten, an Beschreibungen gerade der immer wieder abstoppenden sexuellen Begegnungen der beiden ist (selten wurde ein Zungenkuss derart zum Abgewöhnen ausgenüchtert geschildert), so eng sind sie geführt. Wenn man diesem Schachtelalbtraum von einer Geschichte etwas vorwerfen kann, dann ist es -- neben der Kleinigkeit, dass McEwan sich im Epilog auf den psychologisch uninteressanteren Edward konzentriert -- ausgerechnet seine Meisterschaft: dass bis ins letzte Bild alles stimmt, dass noch die kleinste Subgeschichte ein Ziel hat, dass kaum Dunkelheiten bleiben. Wie ein wiedergefundenes Meisterwerk des Fin de siècle liest sich Am Strand" - Elmar Krekeler, Die Welt
"In seinem neuen Roman Am Strand nun überkreuzen sich diese sonst so genau kalkulierten Pläne, es geraten Literatur und Zeitdiagnose ordentlich durcheinander -- was vielleicht der Grund ist für das seltsam leblose und, schlimmer noch bei dem Thema, lustlose Scheitern dieses Sexromans vor dem Zeitalter des Sex." - Georg Dietz, Die Zeit
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
On Chesil Beach centres around the wedding night of Edward and Florence, and McEwan gets right to the point in his opening line:
They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. McEwan describes that wedding night in painful, exacting detail, from the meal they have in their room all the way through to the bitter end on the beach. He pulls back to fill in background -- their families and upbringing, their circumstances, their relationship -- but then always zooms back in to the wedding night. And you just know it's not going to go well. The time is 1962, and Edward and Florence are perhaps even worse equipped than most to deal with sexual difficulty than most of their contemporaries. They're deeply in love, but the physical has proved problematic during their courtship. Over the months Edward made some headway, but it never came easy, and Florence doesn't really take to much physical intimacy -- his tongue in her mouth when they, kiss for example. She has vague ideas of what to expect now, and she's dreading it:
Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust; her whole being was in revolt against a prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated.
Indeed:
being touched "down there" by someone else, even someone she loved, was as repulsive as, say, a surgical procedure on the eye. Yes, Florence's attitude is pathological; worse yet, she hasn't made it entirely clear to Edward how she feels about this act they're supposed to engage in. Edward has some sense of Florence's qualms, but he's so over-excited about finally getting this far that he doesn't pay enough attention. The exquisitely awkward dance they do as Florence tries to maneuver herself around the inevitable is wonderfully captured by McEwan, from both their vantage points. Marvellously, it comes even worse than expected, as Edward contributes to the mess with his own sexual difficulties (let's just say that his decision to lay off gratifying himself in the days before the wedding looks like it left him more precariously bottled-up than is healthy). Instead of awkward consummation what we get is sexual disaster.
McEwan doesn't let it end there; indeed, what's decisive is how they handle this mess they've gotten themselves into. That's what what interests McEwan, and that's where their real failure lies. They finally get some of the words out into the open, as they finally try discuss sex, but they're not very good at that either -- hardly surprising, given that they've never had a go at talking about it to anyone, on top of the terrible pas-de-deux they were just part of. Both partners' pasts contribute to the situation. Edward is used to living if not a lie then at least a very warped truth, having been brought up to treat his mother as if everything she did was normal when, in fact, little is, as she's been unhinged since an accident that left her in a coma for a week when he was a young boy. His father finally tells him about the accident that left her brain-damaged when he is fourteen, news that's not really news but still changes everything. "What I've said changes absolutely nothing", his father insists -- but then that's part of the problem. As before: "the fantasy could be sustained only if it was not discussed", and that's pretty much how they go on.
As for Florence, being a late bloomer is hardly explanation enough for her pathological feelings about sex. McEwan doesn't come right out and say it, but there are strong hints that a childhood trauma involving her father is at the root of it. Certainly, there's something off about that father-daughter relationship; even dense Edward notices that. (It's almost a shame that McEwan had to go that far; surely the unsettling weirdness of sex to a sheltered child of the times might have been enough to get him nearly as far.)
On Chesil Beach is a period-piece, McEwan focussing very hard on that time before the so-called sexual-revolution. It's not nostalgic, but he is trying to capture an era and he's very explicit about it, constantly reminding the reader of this different time (down to noting that: "This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine" when discussing their meal). It's not just the sexual mores and understanding that he wants to highlight, either: it's also very much a novel about family circumstances, opportunities, and, ultimately, class. Edward is the exception among his classmates in going on to university -- choosing London over Oxford, too, in a minor rebellion. Florence's parents are an academic (her mother) and a successful businessman; complicating the picture is the fact that Edward is hired by her father, his first real job.
Florence is a gifted and ambitious violinist, torn between the different opportunities she has; Edward has little understanding (or true appreciation) of what she does, her classical music remaining all Greek to him. They're very different people, yet McEwan convincingly presents them as in love -- the one constant, that, however, becomes yet another complicating factor.
After the wedding night McEwan also offers an extended coda, of afterwards. He focusses almost entirely on Edward here, describing the changes he undergoes and what becomes of him. It allows McEwan to make his final points -- of realising that a bit of patience, a bit of dialogue, and the power of their love would have been enough, that awkward moments can be handled if they're tackled head-on -- but leaves too much open about Florence (including the question of whether she ever got over her sex-problems).
There's been some discussion of whether On Chesil Beach is a novel or a novella. The small American edition stretches the book out to just over 200 pages -- and has A Novel printed on the cover -- but it's less a matter of length than scope, and On Chesil Beach's failing is that it remains a mere novella even while McEwan suggests (but doesn't follow through on) much larger ambitions. McEwan packs events and character-description into it, but he doesn't dare really move beyond the small story of the wedding night. It's like the notes are here for a larger novel, but everything is like the coda, background to the essential tale, but so much of it that it constantly suggests there should be more.
Successful in large part, the book nevertheless falls short of its larger ambitions, as McEwan chose a middle-ground that isn't entirely satisfying. Neither a compact novella nor a full-blown novel
On Chesil Beach is a very good book, but not entirely satisfying. Still, well worth reading.
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Links: On Chesil Beach:
Sunday, February 1, 2009
John Updike has died this week.....
John Updike: The sultan of suburbia
By Joel Yanofsky, The GazetteJanuary 30, 2009
Things just got worse for the middle class. For the moment, never mind plummeting house prices and rising unemployment. Last Tuesday, the middle class lost its most eloquent champion. John Updike died.
Updike’s accomplishments were myriad and, for once, the word fits. He wrote some 60 books – 24 novels – and received just about every literary prize and honour around, except for the one he deserved: the Nobel.
His most acclaimed work – like his exquisite short stories and his quartet of irrepressible Rabbit novels – never strayed very far from his own experience. But he also enjoyed veering off in unlikely directions. Just to show he could.
And it turned out there wasn’t anything he didn’t or, for that matter, couldn’t write about – from an African dictator in The Coup to a blocked Jewish writer in the Henry Bech stories. Updike, Jewish? Blocked?
His essays and reviews – most of them appearing first in The New Yorker and then collected every decade or so in door-stopping volumes – showed off the range of his intelligence and the depth of his curiosity. Whether he was writing about modern art or religion, golf or infidelity, there was a greediness, an insatiability, in his prose. He took in everything and made the most of it.
Who else would think to turn his clumsiness on the dance floor into a meditation on marriage and mortality? Just Updike: “What do women want? They want, evidently, to dance…. (M)y dancing days are stumbling down to a precious few. This is a sadness to my wife, who took ballet as a tiny girl and loved her Connecticut cotillions. Well, I tell her, life is more than a two-step. But in my heart I fear it is not; we are born (step one) and then we die (step two), and between-times the drumbeat of the pulse demands that we act out its rhythm.”
Updike’s genius, a friend said after his death, was that he thought faster and noticed more than other people. This sounds about right. Other tributes and appreciations, however, seem to have missed the point.
Yes, as the obituaries say, he made his mark chronicling middle-class peccadilloes. Only not in the way you’d think, not subversively, as I heard another eulogizer suggest, and never cynically. His love for his characters may have been ambivalent but that’s because ambivalent love, as he said, was the only kind worth writing about.
In fact, Updike was ahead of his time in being behind it. While his contemporaries – from Jack Kerouac to Norman Mailer – did their best to disparage ordinary life, Updike celebrated it.
Even now, it’s instructive to watch TV series like Mad Men, with its mocking take on 1960s suburbia, or the new movie Revolutionary Road – based on a 1962 novel by Richard Yates, another Updike contemporary – to see what Updike was up against.
Just observe poor, pretty Kate Winslet and even prettier Leonardo DiCaprio moping about the soul-killing conformity of their mundane lives in suburbia and you get an idea of how mischievous and brave Updike was in choosing to go against the grain. How he knew, from the start, that someone had “to give the mundane its beautiful due” and that someone might as well be him.
This took some doing at times. But Updike, born in 1932, a child of the depression and the Protestant work ethic, was no slacker.
* * *
With Updike gone, the United States has also lost an ardent champion. He loved his country; so much so it seemed to embarrass him.
When I interviewed him in 1989, he confessed, somewhat sheepishly, that he was the most fortunate of fortunate creatures: a white American male living in the second half of the 20th century. (What a shame that there will be no Updike essay on Obama.)
In 1990, when Updike’s fourth, final, and best Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, appeared, his fictional alter ego, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, expressed a similarly ambiguous patriotism. Describing America, Harry says: “God’s country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.”
The Rabbit series began in 1960 with Updike’s breakthrough book Rabbit Run. As Updike said later, his second novel would announce him as more than “a New Yorker bunny,” but someone with “some teeth and fire.” The series continued in 10-year intervals until 2000, concluding with a novella, Rabbit Remembered, about Harry’s kids.
These books, taken as a whole, are an encyclopedia of the unfamous U.S.A: the extraordinarily ordinary life – or vice versa – of one man, one family, one nation. Everything’s in them: race and class, sex and love, divorce and decline, and, finally, death.
* * *
I still have a sense memory of what meeting Updike was like. I mean I still shudder at the thought. Updike was polite and easygoing; I was a wreck.
Why? Probably because when I first started daydreaming about becoming a writer it was Updike’s stories about a suburb much like my own that had me thinking two contradictory thoughts. You could, indeed, write impressively about this seemingly unimpressive world. And there was no point. You’d never do it as well as Updike.
Interviewing him reinforced the second notion. It was like teeing up next to Tiger Woods.
I was not alone in feeling this way. The novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a wacky, wonderful memoir, U & I, all about his obsession with Updike’s prose style. The British critic Wilfrid Sheed once compared Updike’s classy career to Fred Astaire’s. “It’s just nice,” Sheed said, “to know somebody lives like that.”
After Updike’s death, a kind of impromptu tribute began to gather momentum on the New Yorker’s website.
Famous writers, in particular, felt compelled to blog. E.L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Julian Barnes and many others shared their memories and praise.
“When a writer dies, a vote comes in,” novelist Jeffrey Eugenides says in his message. “It usually takes a while, but not in this case. Updike’s death has revealed how many people, how many different kinds of people, felt a strong connection to his work. He was our great American writer. There won’t be another like him.”
But there will be more books. Diagnosed with lung cancer, Updike was still doing publicity for his new novel, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, last December. His final New Yorker review appeared in November. (He slammed Toni Morrison.) A new collection of short stories is due out in the spring; a book of poems in the fall.
Early in his career, Updike said: “To be in print is to be saved.” It was an explanation, maybe an apology, for being so ridiculously prolific.
Still, at the time, it must have sounded, even to him, like wishful thinking. It doesn’t any more.
By Joel Yanofsky, The GazetteJanuary 30, 2009
Things just got worse for the middle class. For the moment, never mind plummeting house prices and rising unemployment. Last Tuesday, the middle class lost its most eloquent champion. John Updike died.
Updike’s accomplishments were myriad and, for once, the word fits. He wrote some 60 books – 24 novels – and received just about every literary prize and honour around, except for the one he deserved: the Nobel.
His most acclaimed work – like his exquisite short stories and his quartet of irrepressible Rabbit novels – never strayed very far from his own experience. But he also enjoyed veering off in unlikely directions. Just to show he could.
And it turned out there wasn’t anything he didn’t or, for that matter, couldn’t write about – from an African dictator in The Coup to a blocked Jewish writer in the Henry Bech stories. Updike, Jewish? Blocked?
His essays and reviews – most of them appearing first in The New Yorker and then collected every decade or so in door-stopping volumes – showed off the range of his intelligence and the depth of his curiosity. Whether he was writing about modern art or religion, golf or infidelity, there was a greediness, an insatiability, in his prose. He took in everything and made the most of it.
Who else would think to turn his clumsiness on the dance floor into a meditation on marriage and mortality? Just Updike: “What do women want? They want, evidently, to dance…. (M)y dancing days are stumbling down to a precious few. This is a sadness to my wife, who took ballet as a tiny girl and loved her Connecticut cotillions. Well, I tell her, life is more than a two-step. But in my heart I fear it is not; we are born (step one) and then we die (step two), and between-times the drumbeat of the pulse demands that we act out its rhythm.”
Updike’s genius, a friend said after his death, was that he thought faster and noticed more than other people. This sounds about right. Other tributes and appreciations, however, seem to have missed the point.
Yes, as the obituaries say, he made his mark chronicling middle-class peccadilloes. Only not in the way you’d think, not subversively, as I heard another eulogizer suggest, and never cynically. His love for his characters may have been ambivalent but that’s because ambivalent love, as he said, was the only kind worth writing about.
In fact, Updike was ahead of his time in being behind it. While his contemporaries – from Jack Kerouac to Norman Mailer – did their best to disparage ordinary life, Updike celebrated it.
Even now, it’s instructive to watch TV series like Mad Men, with its mocking take on 1960s suburbia, or the new movie Revolutionary Road – based on a 1962 novel by Richard Yates, another Updike contemporary – to see what Updike was up against.
Just observe poor, pretty Kate Winslet and even prettier Leonardo DiCaprio moping about the soul-killing conformity of their mundane lives in suburbia and you get an idea of how mischievous and brave Updike was in choosing to go against the grain. How he knew, from the start, that someone had “to give the mundane its beautiful due” and that someone might as well be him.
This took some doing at times. But Updike, born in 1932, a child of the depression and the Protestant work ethic, was no slacker.
* * *
With Updike gone, the United States has also lost an ardent champion. He loved his country; so much so it seemed to embarrass him.
When I interviewed him in 1989, he confessed, somewhat sheepishly, that he was the most fortunate of fortunate creatures: a white American male living in the second half of the 20th century. (What a shame that there will be no Updike essay on Obama.)
In 1990, when Updike’s fourth, final, and best Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, appeared, his fictional alter ego, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, expressed a similarly ambiguous patriotism. Describing America, Harry says: “God’s country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.”
The Rabbit series began in 1960 with Updike’s breakthrough book Rabbit Run. As Updike said later, his second novel would announce him as more than “a New Yorker bunny,” but someone with “some teeth and fire.” The series continued in 10-year intervals until 2000, concluding with a novella, Rabbit Remembered, about Harry’s kids.
These books, taken as a whole, are an encyclopedia of the unfamous U.S.A: the extraordinarily ordinary life – or vice versa – of one man, one family, one nation. Everything’s in them: race and class, sex and love, divorce and decline, and, finally, death.
* * *
I still have a sense memory of what meeting Updike was like. I mean I still shudder at the thought. Updike was polite and easygoing; I was a wreck.
Why? Probably because when I first started daydreaming about becoming a writer it was Updike’s stories about a suburb much like my own that had me thinking two contradictory thoughts. You could, indeed, write impressively about this seemingly unimpressive world. And there was no point. You’d never do it as well as Updike.
Interviewing him reinforced the second notion. It was like teeing up next to Tiger Woods.
I was not alone in feeling this way. The novelist Nicholson Baker wrote a wacky, wonderful memoir, U & I, all about his obsession with Updike’s prose style. The British critic Wilfrid Sheed once compared Updike’s classy career to Fred Astaire’s. “It’s just nice,” Sheed said, “to know somebody lives like that.”
After Updike’s death, a kind of impromptu tribute began to gather momentum on the New Yorker’s website.
Famous writers, in particular, felt compelled to blog. E.L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Julian Barnes and many others shared their memories and praise.
“When a writer dies, a vote comes in,” novelist Jeffrey Eugenides says in his message. “It usually takes a while, but not in this case. Updike’s death has revealed how many people, how many different kinds of people, felt a strong connection to his work. He was our great American writer. There won’t be another like him.”
But there will be more books. Diagnosed with lung cancer, Updike was still doing publicity for his new novel, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, last December. His final New Yorker review appeared in November. (He slammed Toni Morrison.) A new collection of short stories is due out in the spring; a book of poems in the fall.
Early in his career, Updike said: “To be in print is to be saved.” It was an explanation, maybe an apology, for being so ridiculously prolific.
Still, at the time, it must have sounded, even to him, like wishful thinking. It doesn’t any more.
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