I went on quite the Fiction bout this week, devouring two novels in just three days. Both came at the recommendation of a respected friend, and both were excellent, even though they left a little something to be desired.
The first was Adelle Waldman's The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which chronicles a series of relationships between Brooklyn literary type and Harvard educated Nathaniel Piven and various women who are also part of that scene. Much of the novel felt like an extremely accurate portrait of a certain Brooklyn milieu: my favorite part was when Nathaniel went grocery shopping and bought two boxes of cereal, one healthy and one Lucky Charms (he would have the Lucky Charms as his breakfast 'dessert'). It was a book very tightly calibrated to social class distinctions and nuances, between different types of university educations (there was a hilarious conversation at a dinner party about how Lindsays seemed to populate NYU, but not Harvard or Yale), and within different Universities (gradations of coolness/connectedness at Harvard).
There's also a feminist bent to the book. Nathaniel P. claims he is sensitive to a lot of the issues brought up by modern feminism (claiming he was raised in a post-feminist household) and is definitely less outwardly misogynistic than many of his male friends, but still perpetuates plenty of sexism, most noticeably when he constantly thinks about women's appearances, even when they are engaging him in intellectual conversation. Nate definitely isn't a sexist caricature, he's a real character who shows many thoughts that conform with widely-held cultural standards. That Nate's creator is a woman should not take away from this characterization. She's writing a real human being.
What I didn't like about the book as much were its comments on the continuing gentrification of Brooklyn. That the characters rarely interacted with people of color made sense, but the constant references to decreasing numbers of white people on the subway as it went deeper into Brooklyn, to the latest new farm-to-table restaurant, to the gentrified cafe, felt kind of stale, and did not offer any fresh takes on gentrification, that hopefully an intellectual Harvard snob like Nate might actually possess. It's a minor gripe, but instead of taking me to new territory (as it did with its sharp commentary on relationships) it was mostly rehash of stuff I could read on any old Brooklyn blog.
The second book I read, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which also came at the recommendation of my friend's Goodreads page, has one of the most interesting premises for a book I've read in a while. A massive pandemic has wiped out most of the world's population and 20 years after the fact a group of travelling actors and musicians perform Shakespeare plays around the territory near Lakes Michigan and Huron. Their slogan is "Survival is Insufficient" (taken from Star Trek), which is a theme throughout the book.
It's about the power of art to transform and elevate, even in the most dire of circumstances. That might be a little cliched, but it feels fresh here. This is not an ugly dystopian novel where the default is that people are all cruel and murderous; no, people in this world care about each other, care about art, care about objects, care about self-affirmation just as much (if not more so) than people before the crisis.
The book operates with a series of time jumps before, during, and after the pandemic, kind of similar to A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It's a literary device that kept me hook. I wanted to keep reading to find out how each character was related to one another. Which ones survived the pandemic? Would they eventually reconnect? How did they come to care about the same thing/person/idea so much? Mandel really has woven together a beautiful plot. Her imagery is just as beautiful: fake snow falling on a stage, a candlelit traveling stage in rural Michigan, unoccupied planes lined up on a runway. There are more disturbing images as well: abandoned skeletons and the like, but for a post-apocalyptic novel, it is very pretty (not a bad thing!).
The one weakness here is the thinly drawn character of "The Prophet". After first hearing about him it's pretty obvious who the prophet actually is (though there isn't an official reveal until much later in the book). His is a back story we only get bits and pieces of before he becomes a cartoon villain. I understand why we only get hints at his story (to put us in the same place as his father, who didn't really know his son before he died) but then I'd rather have him be a more thickly drawn villain.
Anyway, it's a minor gripe with what was otherwise a very moving book.
No comments:
Post a Comment