Stephen Marche, _Shining at the Bottom of the Sea_

If by chance you picked up a copy of this novel without its dust cover, you would assume it was an anthology of short fiction from Sanjania, a small island nation in the North Atlantic.  Everything about the volume, from the introduction to the "biographical notes" and "acknowledgements" on  the final pages, maintains this illusion, and "illusion" we have to call it, because Stephen Marche invented Sanjania, its history, and all of its extant literature, and the authors, scholars, and critics of that literature are his inventions, too.  

Nabokovian in its ingenuity -- Sanjania as Nova Zembla, 19 different John Shades, eight or so Kinbotes -- but with a tablespoon of Deleuze and Guattari on minor literatures, inflected with reminiscences of the literary histories of Australia, the Caribbean, Ireland, and Anglophone Africa.

There is the early popular vernacular literature, the dawn of realism, the ambition to follow the lead of great literary innovators of more powerful countries, the nationalist struggle, the attempt to reclaim with pride the vernacular for its associations with the oppressed, the attempts to evade the censorship imposed  first by the colonial masters and then by the dictators spawned by independence ("Caesar Little"... a little Caesar, clever touch!), exile, faculty positions at Bard College...

It began to bother me that Marche's skillful writerly gamesmanship takes for granted that the literary histories of post-colonial societies have, as it were, an isolatable and mappable cultural DNA that can be, as it were, cloned.  That the suffering and struggles of small, subaltern cultures can be reduced to quintessential episodes and personalities, their literatures persuasively mimicked...it began to feel condescending, in a way.  What about the writers in Australia, or Trinidad, or Kenya who actually had to wrestle with whether to write for a national or international audience, or who wound up imprisoned for what they wrote, or who had to endure exile?  Can it be OK to whip up a frothy literary fantasia based on all this actual pain?

About the time I was formulating these questions, I read a selection purportedly by Leonard King, purportedly the living lion of Sanjanian literature, purportedly nominated multiple times for the Nobel Prize, etc.  Titled "Histories of Aenea by Various Things," it's a tribute to his late wife, organized around various objects, places, and moments in their shared life.  It was deeply moving -- unforgettable, in fact.  Yet -- there is no Leonard King, no Aenea King, the island they inhabit is imaginary, so for whose loss, by whose grief was I moved?  Nobody's.  It was all the astonishingly powerful sleight of hand of fiction.  

But would I say Marche's story is somehow parasitical on the real grief of real widowers?  I would never say that.  I mean -- that would be to decry all fiction in general.  So was I not equally off-base to get my knickers in a twist because the whole of Marche's novel is parasitical on the real oppression faced by real subaltern cultures?  I was, I think.  

Can one be frothily literary and yet honestly address real pain?  Well -- Nabokov did.  Marche is not in that class yet, but he's someone to watch.