Me on Books & Things

The Sense of an Ending

I saw a copy of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending lying around at a friend’s house. Not having read anything by the author previously, I knew of the book only as last year’s Man Booker Prize winner. I borrowed it and read through it in two sessions over two days.

Told in first person by an aging narrator, The Sense of an Ending is a series of recollections and reflections of a life that seems, initially, unremarkably lived. The warmth of the novel comes from the familiarity with which its is events are portrayed—its narrator Tony Webster doesn’t come off like a diarist or a witness giving testimony, but rather like a close friend working through a lifetime of memories aloud.

Webster is affable and eloquent in the recounting, and Barnes’ skill is evident from the very first pages. It is exquisitely plotted and economical, allowing its loose structure and unhurried prose to beautifully evoke how we remember our lives: subjectively, and in fragments. Although he is well into his 60s, a disproportionate number of Tony’s strongest memories come from adolescence, centering around his friend Adrian Finn. Finn is one of those unknowables we feel we must know, more substantial than the rest of us, prompting us to wonder if we may be side characters in someone else’s story rather than the stars of our own.

Tony is an unreliable narrator, and he knows it, but not in the diabolical sense. He is an unreliable narrator in the way we are all unreliable when it comes to telling our own stories. And as the story progresses, an event is revealed—first in general terms, and later in crushing, painful detail—that explains why he is second-guessing his own assumptions about his life.

As painful personal episodes in our lives recede into the past, we often make ourselves out to be less at fault than perhaps we were. As we recount those tales to our friends and family we become, more and more, not just the central character but a protagonist, deservedly relatable and sympathetic.

This is almost certainly for the best. We all have things we wish we could take back, and the malleable nature of memory allows us to, for the most part, continue on with our lives nonetheless. But sometimes there is hard evidence of such mistakes that unlike human memory is not subject to this gentle erosion, and we cannot help but confront it regularly.

At one point, Tony asks, “What if you can prove you weren’t the bad guy she took you for, and she is willing to accept your proof?”

God, if only.

We are egocentric by nature, and often see others as mere characters, not as fully-fleshed humans with interior lives as full and complex as our own. Just look at political coverage or internet arguments. Even many of those we love or respect can be reduced to a set of inherently limiting characteristics and memories.

A great novel reveals something about what it is to be human, and bolsters our capacity for empathy. The Sense of an Ending reminds us how stubborn our preconceptions of others can be, about miscommunication by way of misjudgment of character, and about the painful, lasting regret that can be borne of a leap to conclusions.

The Vault

Having never before read one of Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford novels, my only context for The Vault was as a sequel to the excellent non-Wexford novel A Sight for Sore Eyes. That novel, while billed as crime fiction, was a gripping psychological examination of generations of British families spanning class boundaries, threaded together with a series of meticulously plotted crimes. I would recommend it fully.

Rendell wrote and set The Vault (released this year) ten years after its predecessor, bringing Wexford out of retirement to investigate the crimes of the previous novel, whose perpetrator was known to the reader but not to any of the book’s characters—at least, none left alive.

It makes for a far more conventional, and far less interesting, piece of detective fiction. Presumably beholden to the behavior and likeability of Wexford as established in dozens of previous works, Rendell plods along, mired in a plot whose generalities the reader has already experienced and whose particulars feel gratingly like Greatest Hits prose for longtime fans.

It doesn’t improve my literary reservations about series that span many books, and to some extent of genre fiction itself, which so often seem beholden to clichés and restrictions both self-imposed and external.

Having read a non-Wexford novel of Rendell’s immediately before this makes it plain to me that Rendell is capable of amazing feats of observation and human insight when her primary responsibility is to truth and illumination, and not serialization. I intend to seek out more of such work from her. Of course, it’s always possible old Wexford was just having an off day.

The Prague Cemetery

Umberto Eco’s new novel The Prague Cemetery is a fascinating fictional throughline applied to a fastidiously researched historical context. Amazingly, its protagonist, the venomous Simone Simonini, is its only major character who is a fictional creation.

(I consulted Wikipedia countless times over the course of the novel and was surprised time and time again to see the unlikely events of the story corroborated.)

Simonini, a man full of hatred and an inveterate opportunist, navigates with ease throughout 19th century Europe, offering his skills as a forger and a pseudo-spy to nearly any group with an agenda—the Freemasons and the Jesuits, monarchists and republicans of pre-unification Italy—often expertly pitting these factions against one another for considerable personal gain.

The one ideal that Simonini maintains is his lifelong hatred of the Jews, first introduced early in the novel by way of a litany of pan-European racial bile that is the continental equivalent of Edward Norton’s famous monologue from 25th Hour. Eco uses his fictional character as a guide to the foundations of modern anti-Semitism and the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols, ostensibly evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to enslave the world, have been demonstrated time and time again as utterly illegitimate, but have wielded considerable influence nonetheless.

The Prague Cemetery explores why this is. As Eco said in a recent talk in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while his novel Baudolino used nonfiction to tell a fictional story, his latest work uses fiction to tell a true story.

The Prague Cemetery is told in a series of duelling diary entries between two men who might share a body, refereed by a nameless narrator attempting to make sense of the journal he has found. The story thus deals with questions of memory and self-identity that Eco has been increasingly exploring in his novels, most notably The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. With these themes spanning numerous works, it’s hard not to see a bit of Eco himself in his protagonists—even one as repulsive as Simonini. One gets the feeling someone as staggeringly literate as Eco, especially with his esoteric repertoire, must struggle to keep his enormous volume of thoughts in his head.

Like several previous Eco novels, the dedication to historical recounting can detract from the pace of the work as fiction, but it also makes the subject matter all the more remarkable, since many of its entirely real events and characters would be completely believable as fictional creations. It reminds us that conspiracy theories themselves can be cynical conspiracies—approaching territory covered by Eco’s earlier Foucault’s Pendulum from a different, and darker, angle. And also like Foucault’s Pendulum, The Prague Cemetery picks up steam slowly, climaxes in breathless delirium, and falls gracefully.

While Mortals Sleep

Since Kurt Vonnegut’s death, there have been three volumes of previously unpublished Vonnegut short fiction. I didn’t bother with them initially, because I don’t gravitate to short stories to begin with, and on top of that I figured the posthumously published leftovers probably weren’t the cream of the crop.

But recently it struck me that we won’t be getting any more genuinely new Vonnegut material ever (not the first time that realization has come to me as if it were a new discovery), so when I saw a hardcover edition of While Mortals Sleep in my local bookstore, I picked it up.

While Mortals Sleep is the third and latest of these attempts to scrounge any more material out of the Vonnegut name, so it is essentially the leftovers of the leftovers.

As David Eggers explains in a foreword that is itself a worthwhile read, the material is drawn from early in Vonnegut’s career, before he came to real acclaim (though stories aren’t individually dated). It is surprisingly blunt—nearly every piece wraps up with a neat lesson, often a reproach of unrestrained capitalistic greed, an exaltation of individualism, or a reminder of the value of compassion and companionship.

Vonnegut never bothered to disguise his worldview. But while his great novels were always moral, they were rarely had a moral like these stories do. In that sense, reading through this collection was instructive. Before Vonnegut really became the Vonnegut we know, before he could weave his ideals into his structure-defying, often sci-fi-tinged and dystopian works, he hammered them out in these brief allegories. (Only one story, “Jenny,” about a feminine robot built into a refrigerator—yes—really shares the sci-fi-abusing tendencies of many of Vonnegut’s novels.)

There’s plenty of his characteristic easy prose, the unfussy eloquence that defines Vonnegut’s style throughout his career. And this early work gives a wonderful perspective on what followed. Unfortunately, while several of the stories are great, the majority of them are essentially simple morality plays, and at times I found it difficult to feel any real sense of real edification. As Eggers points out, Vonnegut was really writing for the 1950s magazine editors he hoped would accept his submissions, so the tone is understandable, even if it can’t stand the test of time like his great works.

The standout exception for me in that regard—the monumental, wonderful exception—is the final inclusion, “The Humbugs.” It tells the story of two working artists whose studios face each other across the street.

One is an aging and commercially successful painter of lush but soulless pastoral landscapes, an impressive literary prediction of Thomas Kinkade; he receives no recognition from the critical community, and he holds a secret contempt for his own creative bankruptcy.

The other is a young, dynamic abstractionist, whose paintings the public finds uncomfortable and alienating, who is on the constant brink of financial ruin despite critical adoration of his work’s emotional breadth; he harbors a deep insecurity about his inability to depict the world the way the human eye perceives it.

A confrontation ensues between the two, making for one of the most wonderful portrayals of creative self-doubt and triumph I have encountered. It was a daring move to require readers to get through an entire book’s worth of material before reaching what is clearly the strongest piece, but what an ending.

(Before publishing this post I did a quick Google search for “While Mortals Sleep” and discovered that Amazon has nonsensically categorized the book as “Science Fiction & Fantasy”—a label Vonnegut spent a lifetime trying to escape. The guy just can’t catch a break.)