Henry James, _The Other House_

MY MAJOR JAMES phase was roughly 1981-84; I read most of the novels and a lot of the tales while working through Leon Edel's five-volume biography. I did not read this one, though. At this remove in time, I'm no longer sure whether I skipped it because it wasn't in print at the time (thank you again, NYRB Classics) or because Edel had a low opinion of it ("one of his most unpleasant novels," "an outburst of primitive rage").

This was James's return to the novel after his switch to writing plays foundered so badly with Guy Domville. Having just reacquainted myself with that crucial episode thanks to David Lodge's Author, Author!  and having purchased The Other House a few years ago thinking I would have time for it eventually, the moment seemed propitious.

Edel had a point; things get unpleasant here. I can think of other fictions by James in which a child dies in a way for which some adult may be indirectly responsible ("The Turn of the Screw," "The Pupil"), and I can think of many examples in which characters perform actions that are selfish, cruel, unethical, or immoral, but this is the first one I've read in which someone is actually murdered.

More interesting (to me) than that, though, was how plainly the novel revealed its origins as a scenario for a play. I'm not sure how receptive the London stage circa 1896 would have been to a play in which a child is murdered, but James is obviously following his plan for a play closely. The novel is organized into three "books" that would work just as well as three acts; each "book" represents a continuous action in a single setting, as if trying to conform to the Aristotelian unities.

Almost all the action, furthermore, is dialogue. No character's point of view organizes the presentation, and all the characters get around to saying more or less exactly what is on their minds--enough by itself to cast the novel as utterly un-Jamesian.  An unfortunate effect of this approach is that the famous James interiority--precisely what made him so key a precursor for the 20th century novel--is all but entirely absent. There isn't a whiff here of What Maisie Knew, which lay only a couple of years ahead.

There are spots in "Book Third"--especially its final chapter--where James hints at what one character is trying to convey wordlessly to another. One can imagine how hard a time he would have had explaining to an actor (or a director) what had to be conveyed, and one can imagine the actor or director telling others how mistaken a conception of the theater Mr. James had. But in these spots we feel fiction writing is reclaiming James, that he is about to take fuller advantage of his mastery of its form than he ever did before.

Murasaki Shikibu, _The Tale of Genji_, translated by Royall Tyler

I READ THIS in the Edward Seidensticker translation back in 1987, in a kind of headlong rush; the school year had just ended, my grades were in, and I decided I was going to read Genji and nothing but Genji until I finished. I read about a hundred pages a day and finished in less than two weeks--a very satisfactory way to read this book; some books work well in short dips, but others call for immersion, and this is one of the latter.

Much as I loved the novel, I never expected to re-read it. As it happened, though, a student wanted to do an independent study around the novel, which I agreed to supervise. I had expected to get by without re-reading the novel, but that expectation quickly revealed itself as fallacious, what with my not having looked at the book for thirty years. Once I had started in with my second pass through Seidensticker, though, I learned there was a newer and (many thought) better translation--this one. So, I went with this one.

I'm in no position to say whether it is more accurate; I did notice that Tyler tends to be more faithful than Seidensticker to Murasaki's practice of referring to characters by designations or offices rather than by what we would consider a name. This fidelity could potentially create problems for the reader, since a character who gets a promotion to a new title will have a different "name" in (say) chapter 22 than he had in chapter 21.  Tyler has provided an unusually helpful apparatus, though, not only providing an index but also introducing each chapter with a who's-who prefatory note.  So, even when "the Counselor" begins being referred to without warning as "the Right Commander," one can stay on track.

My impression, though, was that the Seidensticker made for a smoother, more transparent read. This may have a lot to do, though, with the immersion factor I mentioned above,

As any great book should when read at an interval of thirty years, Genji was a different experience this time. I was less able at 33 than I am now to appreciate Murasaki's handling of the life cycle, to give us a subtly changing Genji, to show, without ever being explicit, how his experiences are changing him. My being older also probably had a lot to do with my being much more attuned to the autumnal tone of the final chapters, which are about young men--Genji has passed on--but young as they are, Kaoru and Niou somehow seem to carrying the weight of years.

Frank Bidart, _Metaphysical Dog_

FROM 2013, AND his best yet, I think, which makes it all the more frustrating that I cannot get Bidart's most recent poems in book form unless I pony tip for the new collected poems and (in effect) re-purchase some six or seven books I already own. Which I would rather not do, even in the car elf a poet I admire.

Back in the day, I got annoyed at bands who included on a "greatest hits" album a track or two that had never before appeared on an album, thus gouging their most loyal fans.

(For example, the Rolling Stones' Through the Past Darkly was, when it appeared, the only album on which one would find "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Honky Tonk Women," which were obviously must-haves, but to have them you had to buy "Let's Spend the Nigh Together" and "Ruby Tuesday" for the third time, if you had already purchased [as I had] Between the Buttons and Flowers.)

(Or Dylan. The only way you could get "Positively 4th Street" was to buy the first greatest hits, but of course you already had all the other hits.)

I could check the new Bidart collected poems out from the library, I suppose. Itch scratched. But I would rather support the poets I'm interested in by an actual purchase. It's just that...

...well, rant rant rant. Sigh.

"Writing 'Ellen West'" is like a 21st century "Circus Animals' Desertion," and the whole volume has a late-Yeats aura for me, the shedding of disguises, the directness, the relative spareness without sacrificing lyrical essence, the honesty, the owning-up. Harriet Smithson is back, and we also have a poem on Obama's first inauguration that still works and a poem ("Queer") that should go up on a wall in every counselor's office in every middle and high school in the United States right now.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, _The Refugees_

THE NARRATOR'S CIRCUMSTANCES in The Sympathizer are so peculiar that one hesitates to classify it as an immigrant novel. True, a lot of it is set in the United States, and there is a brilliant wedding banquet scene, but it seems more a novel about the war than one about learning to live in a new country.

This collection of short stories (mainly written before the novel, apparently), is about more typical examples of the people who came to the USA, by choice or by necessity, after the war. The trauma of getting here (especially in the first story, "Black-Eyed Women"), the conflict between needing to remember and needing to forget (especially in "War Years"), inter-generational struggles, the church, the ironies of making it, the difficult relationship to the homeland--all the classic themes come up.

Somewhat short of the intellectual punch of The Sympathiser, but more affecting and more tender, certainly. There are glimpses of forgiveness and renewal here, and there is little of either in The Sympathizer.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, _The Sympathizer_ (3): PMLA

THE NOVEL GOT a platform-full of prizes, including the Pulitzer, but what tipped me over into finally picking it up was the ten (10!) essays on it (and on Nguyen's other fiction and non-fiction) in the March 2018 issue of PMLA (Publications of the Modern Languages Association). I can't remember PMLA ever before giving this kind of endorsement to any contemporary literary work.

I cannot remember any novel getting so swift an elevation to the canon since Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). Not even Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) was picked up this fast.

What's going on?

Let's begin by conceding that The Sympathizer and Beloved are excellent novels. But a great many excellent contemporary novels do not get fifty pages in PMLA, so we have reason to look at other factors.

Beloved was squarely in the center of a very hot intersection in academic literary studies (feminism, race, magic realism, re-casting the historical novel) and made a great classroom read (pace Stanley Crouch). It matched its moment, and there we were, instant classic. I taught it several times in the late 80s and early 90s, and it always profoundly affected the students.

It may have made a difference that Morrison was an academic insider and knew exactly where the maximum intellectual energy was circulating in the mid-eighties; given the strength of the book, we'd have to admit that she directed that energy as well as detecting it, had a lot to do with where that energy went.

Is this also true of The Sympathizer? Like Invisible Man, it's an extremely sophisticated take on identity; it is also sophisticated on boundaries, on cultural imperialism, on power, on degrees of complicity. Another hot intersection. That it is a powerful match for its moment is the theme that subtends the whole section in PMLA, though the authors there engage different aspects of the novel and the pieces are...well...not of equal interest.

It all depends, I'd say, on how many syllabuses The Sympathizer lands on. It's a bit longer then Beloved, but at the same time a bit easier to read. There are no leading female characters and relatively little about gender, which diminishes its chances, but there is quite a bit about rape (real and represented) as an instrument of terror and power, which would enhance its classroom impact. There is also, undeniably, a certain beach-read juiciness (guys getting whacked)--higher score on that front than Beloved has, actually--and that can't hurt.

At the same time, the moral ambivalence á la Conrad, Nabokov, and Ellison may be a problem. We like a Strong Clear Message these days.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, _The Sympathizer_ (2)

ANOTHER LIKENESS TO Ellison's Invisible Man is the unmappability of the novel's take on the historical topic it addresses. On the question of the African-American in the U.S., the novel suggests, everyone--the Communist Party, the "race men," Tuskegee, obviously the whites--is wrong. (Petey Wheatstraw perhaps excepted.) So with the war in Viet Nam in The Sympathizer.

The French, whose main representative in the novel is the multiply-transgressing priest who is the narrator's father, were wrong.

The Americans, especially the intellectuals concocting the ideology behind the intervention, are wrong, as are their efforts to understand or represent the war, such as the film for which the narrator serves as a consultant, The Hamlet (which, by the way, does not seem all that much like Apocalypse Now, to me).  

The South Vietnamese, especially the corrupt general to whose staff the narrator is attached, seem obviously wrong, wrong in their loyalty to the French and then to the Americans, wrong in the corruption by which they enriched themselves, wrong in their brutality towards their own citizens, wrong in their clinging to fantasies of resuming power.

But the victorious Communist Vietnamese--it seems to me--also seem wrong. Do they have the right to subject the narrator to the interrogation and humiliation he undergoes in the novel's closing episodes? I don't know. Call me a liberal wuss unaware of how omelets are made by breaking eggs, but these pages were too reminiscent of Koestler-Solzhenitsyn-Kundera et al. for the new Viet Nam to seem like a victory for the people (cf. Novel Without a Name by Duong Thu Huong and The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh).

The authorities that break down the narrator are the same authorities, after all, whom Nguyen's parents felt they had to get away from, and presumably he grew up in a community for whom the Communists were the despised enemy. In "War Years," one of the most intriguing stories in The Refugees, we meet Mrs. Hoa, who seems at first to be a bullying, opportunistic scam artist, but by story's end seems a genuine, though obsessed, patriotic loyalist, for whom the cause is still not yet lost. She's wrong, too, but more sympathetic than the interrogators who grill The Sympathizer's narrator.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, _The Sympathizer_ (1)

THIS BEING A novel about Viet Nam and spies, Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke are the inevitable comparisons, but I found myself thinking of Jennifer Egan's Look at Me, because that novel too managed to present itself convincingly  as literary fiction while delivering some of the juiciness of genre fiction. Look at Me juggled a variety of points of view   and raised sophisticated questions about identity, but it also had a terrorist, a glimpse of the high fashion world, and mystery and suspense elements. The Sympathizer incorporates a wealth of allusions to American lit (Asian-American in particular) and rigorous thinking about empire and representation, but it also has assassinations, ghosts, and Chandleresque metaphorical flights. Like Look at Me, it's an intellectual ride you can take to the beach.

A similar doubleness haunts the narrator. He is a trusted insider in the South Vietnamese government, but he is really working for the North. He is American-educated, mistakable for a native speaker of English over the phone, but thought of as an alien by the Americans he lives with (the novel begins with the fall of Saigon, and for most of it the narrator is living in Southern California). But the Vietnamese exiles do not see him as Vietnamese; his mother was Vietnamese, but his father was a French priest, and the exiled general whom he serves (and spies on) berates him for his interest in the general's daughter--he's a bastard and a métis, after all. Like Ellison's Invisible Man, to whom the novel's opening alludes, the narrator both is and is not what he seems to be.

A reader might also recall Humbert Humbert, for the (unnamed) narrator's text is a confession written in captivity--but perhaps he is really more like Rubashev in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, for he is writing his confession because ordered to by his fellow-revolutionaries, who have imprisoned him. He joined (still as a double agent) a commando group of South Vietnamese veterans who have landed in Laos to launch the counter-revolution, and when they are captured after a brief interlude of nearly comic ineptitude, the narrator, rather than being feted as an undercover hero, has to submit to the rigors of re-education--hence his confession. Like Rubashev, he has to understand, or pretend to understand, how he, a revolutionary, has failed the revolution.

Here too was a doubleness. Is Nguyen depicting another case of a revolution devouring its children? Is the interrogation and discipline the new Communist government subjects the narrator to totalitarian persecution or justice?