First Things RSS Feed - Franklin Freeman

A Review of Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo: State of England

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:01:00 -0500

I haven’t enjoyed a novel by Martin Amis so much since his 1995 work The Information . His newest book, Lionel Asbo: State of England , is as darkly comic as its predecessor with a similarly Odyssey-like plot. The protagonist has committed a crime”though in the case of the writer in The Information his crime was an ambiguously attempted infidelity and in Lionel Asbo , it is a real crime, or at least the breaking of a taboo”and then has to attempt to redeem himself. The novels also have in common a villain of epic proportions, a villain, in both cases, who is addicted to pornography and crime, and who was deprived of a decent childhood. And both books are also about the conception, birthing, raising, and protecting of children.

In The Information , the protagonist is a writer down on his luck in work and marriage. His two boys redeem his life in a way”at least he has had them!”and he saves them from being abducted at the end, which, he realizes, matters more than his writing or his marriage. It reminds me of the story about James Joyce, of how a friend of his was taken aback by Joyce’s delight in having another grandchild come into the world. When the friend protested that this was egotistical, Joyce said, “It’s the most important thing in the world.” The friend misunderstood Joyce as thinking it was important that another Joyce was in the world, but Joyce was talking about the begetting of children itself as more important than art”or anything else for that matter.

Amis revisits this theme in Lionel Asbo . Most of the novel is set in the fictional neighborhood of Diston, which is bursting with children, as no one seems to use, or know anything about, contraception, and not because they are devout Roman Catholics clutching copies of Humanae Vitae . Desmond Pepperdine, the novel’s protagonist, more often referred to as Des, is a mulatto whose grandmother Grace “was the mother of seven children by the age of nineteen.” Des commits the crime of letting himself be seduced at the age of fifteen by his thirty-nine-year-old, drunken grandmother. His own mother, Cilla, had died when he was twelve and he was taken in by his uncle Lionel since Des’s father, like almost all of the fathers in this novel, was never around. Once, Des and Cilla saw a black man passed out from drink on a park bench, and Cilla could not even get him to wake up. That was the only time that Des had seen his father.

Now Lionel, Grace’s youngest son, and Des’s uncle, is, as they say, a piece of work. “He was served his first restraining order when he was three,” the narrator tells us, and had his last name of Pepperdine changed to Asbo. The acronym “(as all the kingdom knew) stood for Anti-Social Behaviour Disorder.” Lionel tries to teach Des how to become a decent lawbreaking denizen of Diston and wonders why he doesn’t go out with the other boys to smash windows. “It’s not healthy,” Lionel laments; but Des has something else, or some one else on his mind:

Continue Reading »

A Review of Keith Donohue’s Centuries of June

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:01:00 -0400

Keith Donohue’s most recent novel is a chain of interlinking stories in the tradition of The Canterbury Tales , The Decameron , or, closer to our time, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories , with a dash of Flann O’Brien, Groucho Marx, and Tristram Shandy . It’s very funny, raucous, erotic, tender, tragic, and”gasp”entertaining.

On a June evening in the Washington, D.C. area, the narrator, Jack, stark naked, walks to the bathroom, and gets (he thinks) clobbered at the base of the neck. He then falls to the floor of the bathroom, his own blood “spreading across the cool ceramic tiles like an oil slick, too bright and theatrical to be real.” Just as he thinks he is dying, an old man who looks like Samuel Beckett shows up sitting on the edge of the bathtub. This man, who Jack initially thinks is his father, saves him from the seven women who seek to kill him throughout the rest of the book. You can see that the story immediately enters the surreal and marvelous.

What follows is the story of eight women, all connected to the narrator through the centuries of his existence. The stories are of women who have been wronged by him.

The first story is based on a Native American folktale about a woman who marries a bear, which seems to have similarities to the Cupid and Psyche legend. The second story is about a girl who disguises herself as a boy to serve on an English merchant vessel and for a gob of ambergris is clobbered by one of her lovers with an oar. There’s a story set in the midst of the Salem witch trials, and another in late eighteenth-century New Orleans. One follows the fortunes of a couple who make a fortune in gold only to lose it in silver during the earthquakes in San Francisco. The love of baseball is the theme of yet another, and the penultimate story is a film noir story, one in which the moral high ground for the woman is not quite so high as in the others. The final story is Jack’s own story. I won’t give away the ending, but it is the best story of the bunch and rises to heights of emotion and fine writing, meanwhile tying up the loose ends in a sublime manner.

The most impressive feature of the novel is how the style and tone of the stories change with the narrators of the tales. Donohue does a splendid job of assuming the vocabularies, tone, and slang of the women and their worlds. He is not only a very skillful ventriloquist but also a very funny writer.

However, sometimes the humor backfires. All of these women that Jack has wronged through the ages gather in the bathroom of the old colonial house Jack lives in”hence the epigram from Groucho Marx, “Is it my imagination or is it getting crowded in here?””and in between their stories, various escapades occur during which the ladies speak in twentieth-century slang. I would laugh at these moments, but it seemed that they should have stayed in character. And yet, overall, the humor, reminiscent of the Marx Brothers and other vaudeville type performers, works well enough.

The novel is also a sustained meditation on houses and homes, with Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space as the underlying ur-text, a book Jack was given by his Indian girlfriend, Sita. As Jack tries to figure out the meaning of the stories he is being told, with the help of the Samuel Beckett character, he is sent on various errands through his house. As he explores the house, Jack, an architect who has never fulfilled his aspirations (he is a man low on his firm’s totem pole) remembers what a house is, especially a house that becomes a home.

One of my favorite passages involves this theme. Sita is speaking, telling her story, the last of the women’s stories, which Jack has never heard till now:

Continue Reading »

A Review of 1Q84

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:01:00 -0400

What Haruki Murakami has given us in his latest novel, 1Q84 , is a loose baggy metaphysical monster of a fairy tale. The Japanese writer has said he wants to blend Dostoevsky and Raymond Chandler in his work, and he has done so in this novel with a triple portion: religious mysticism, murders and detective work, and the Little People.

The novel begins with a woman named Aomame, which means green pea in Japanese. She is stuck in a taxi on a jammed expressway in Tokyo in 1984. All we are told is Aomame is on a mission and has to get somewhere, no matter what, by a certain time. The driver tells her about an emergency ladder by which she can descend to street level and catch a subway train, which she does, but by so doing she has emerged into another world, almost exactly like our own except for certain historical differences and the two moons in the night sky. Using a Japanese pun between the numeral nine and the letter Q, she dubs this world 1Q84.

This novel is the story of how Aomame and a boy, Tengo, she once held hands with in elementary school, are eventually drawn back together, in the world of 1Q84, via the machinations of a religious cult called Sakigake, which has established a connection with the creepy Little People. Sakigake hires a private detective named Ushikawa, an incredibly ugly man with crooked teeth and a huge misshapen head, to track Aomame down, for reasons that can’t be divulged.

There are many themes in the book”how parental zealotry of any kind damages children; how cruel some men are to women; how a hunger for certainty and religious greed poisons groups; how art can be a way of salvation”but the passage that best sums up the novel is the following. It is Sakigake’s leader, aptly named Leader, who is speaking with Aomame:

Continue Reading »

Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:20:00 -0500

I have always wanted to like the novels of Iris Murdoch more than I have. Right up my alley, I’ve thought, preoccupied as she was (and I am) with literature, religion, and philosophy. But when I’ve read them, I’ve been disappointed, though entertained. The characters are usually alive and well-drawn, the settings beautifully described, but the situations and the plots have seemed contrived, brain-spun as Tolstoy would say.

Murdoch, in a letter to her then fiancé, David Hicks, judged her own work more severely than most of her critics: “My characters seem to me a lot of silly spoilt nervy pseudo-intellectuals without any real joy or any real Angst in them. What I hoped would be a rich enameled surface la Raymond Queneau or Samuel Beckett . . . looks a pretty facile tinselly sort of glitter to my coldly judging eye.”

This comes from a letter she wrote from Innsbruck, Austria, where she was working for the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Association (UNRRA) in 1946 helping displaced persons. This group of letters to Hicks, who fell in love with someone else and jilted her”you get a bad feeling as you read all her letters to him, imploring him to write now and reassuring herself that it must be the screwed-up postwar mail delivery system keeping his letters away”forms the third part of this book.

This first part of the book consists of a diary Murdoch kept when she was a part of a touring Oxford theater group, The Magpie Players, the last two weeks of August, 1939. War loomed over them, but the Magpie Players had to focus on putting on skits such as Tam Lin , and the players developed “double vision” to deal with it. And Murdoch’s own political naiveté, very apparent in her diary, must have helped her cope. Conradi, English Professor of Emeritus at Kingston University and Murdoch’s authorized biographer, writes,

Continue Reading »

Truth’s Divided Disciples

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

As I read David Lebedoff’s latest book, The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War , I began to think of George Orwell as a real-life Dr. Rieux, the hero of Camus’ The Plague , whose heroism suggests that it is possible to be a saint without believing in God. In support of this I can cite not only Orwell’s morally passionate life and works, but also the fact that Evelyn Waugh, having visited him on his deathbed, pronounced him “very near to God.”

Continue Reading »

The Complete—and Surprising—Flann O’Brien

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Once upon a time, and a very long time ago it was, Flann O’Brien (aka Myles na Gopaleen, aka Brian O’Nolan, his real name, sometimes gaelicized to Brian “ Nualláin) saw a woman hopping along the road in the Irish countryside. What was interesting about this woman was that she had only one leg.

Continue Reading »