Two strange and beautiful novels

Two novels I read recently have gotten me thinking about strangeness.  Both Shine Shine Shine, by Lydia Netzer, and The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, are appealingly strange.

Shine Shine Shine tells the story of bald Sunny, at home in her old house in Norfolk, VA, and her husband Maxon, an Aspergian genius robot-maker and astronaut, who's off in a rocket, on a possibly doomed mission to the moon.  And their autistic son Bubber, who's about to get kicked out of preschool.  And Sunny's sick mother Emma, who is still trying to mother her daughter.

The novel's narration feels Asperger-ish at times, the way it describes events in tiny chunks, as if the story's readers might be from outer space themselves.  The backstory zooms around a range of vivid settings: post-colonial Burma, rural western Pennsylvania, outer space.  By contrast, the main story's setting, Norfolk, is limited, almost neglected.

At times Shine Shine Shine feels like a mash-up of a French novel with lots of philosophical asides, or maybe something Kundera-ish, with a commercial women's novel, along with a dollop of science fiction -- strange!  Yet Sunny and Maxon emerge out of this strange, sad narration as vivid, yearning, desperate characters.  It's a compelling love story.

The Night Circus likewise crosses genres too -- it's part historical fiction, part fantasy, part romance.  Made out of magic, the Night Circus, the Circus of Dreams, travels from town to town, in both Europe and the U.S., opening only at night, drawing people in and mesmerizing them.  This Circus of Dreams is nothing like the usual circus, but instead contains seemingly endless tents full of wonders and delights.  The story is set in the late nineteenth century, but with only vague time markers.  The narration gives vivid attention to dress, costume, fabrics, little details of London and other cities, and old-fashioned dialogue.  And of course, the rooms of the circus.  At times these details are just beautifully visual.

Like Shine Shine Shine, The Night Circus is at its heart a love story, with two characters who are bound together in a kind of desperate magic competition.  But perhaps because the beautiful, mystical circus is such a strong character here, Celia and Marco, the two doomed lovers, never come as alive as I wanted them to.

These two novels really have little in common with one another, but for me their strangeness -- unusual narration styles, unpin-downable genre, strange subject matter, and an underlying sadness -- made for beautiful writing.  I'm glad both writers persevered.

New story

My short story "Time Lapse" is in the July 2012 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine.  It's online, too, though the online version doesn't include the beautiful art that the print version does.

Rereading old favorites

Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler

I recently returned to Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons, wanting to see what affected me so much the first time I read it (1988, a seeming lifetime ago).  Breathing Lessons tells the story of a middle-aged Baltimore couple, Maggie and Ira Moran.  It takes place in one day, the day of an out-of-town funeral that Maggie and Ira drive to and return from, which is also the day before their younger child, Daisy, leaves for college. 

We stay mostly in Maggie’s point of view, harum-scarum, interfering Maggie, but occasionally dip into quiet, implacable Ira’s perspective.  Maggie’s continual missteps and interferences – trying to rekindle their slacker son’s marriage, trying to punish a bad driver by yelling at him that his wheel’s about to fall off – along with her seeming mismatchedness with passive Ira, lead to many comic scenes.  But underneath and between those comic scenes, Maggie and Ira muse on the passage of time, and on all the disappointments and discouragements they’ve suffered, and on marriage and family.  Tyler has a wonderful way of balancing darkness – the understanding that life is short and sometimes not so beautiful – with humor, lightness, and nostalgia for this couple’s youth, in mid-1950s Baltimore.  And she evokes such sympathy for Maggie and Ira; Maggie’s observations about midlife struck me when I first read this novel in my early twenties, and were even more striking the second time around, now that I’m getting close to Maggie’s age.

Tyler also handles time beautifully, moving seamlessly back and forth from the novel’s present time (mid-1980s) to the recent past, and to the past of thirty years ago (mid-1950s), going from scene to long flashback to scene.  Her use of time reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which has a similar structure to Breathing Lessons.

This time around, I also noticed what Tyler chose to leave out.  The underlying pressure of the novel is that this couple is about to let go of their youngest child, Daisy.  Maggie and Ira will drive Daisy to Princeton, a place that’s entirely out of their orbit of understanding, in the tomorrow of the novel.  But that’s not the story; the impending trip stays mostly in the background, and Daisy herself shows up only in occasional flashback and for a moment at the end of the novel. 

Here's a link to The Independent's (UK) review of Tyler's latest novel, The Beginner's Goodbye.

Quote of the day

On slow writing

“It takes me a long time, usually years, to finish something, even a short story.  I worked on the story “Bringing Belle Home” from American Salvage off and on for over twenty years …. I have a lot of friends who have kids or who work long hours, people who struggle to find time to write, and I tell them: if you finish one good story or a couple of poems a year, you can be a part of the literary scene.” 

-- Bonnie Jo Campbell, interviewed by Heather Sappenfield in The Writer’s Chronicle, May/Summer 2012

Books I missed the first time around

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson, 1980

Speaking of the Pulitzers, Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and Gilead, her second novel, won the Pulitzer in 2005, while Home, her third, won the Orange Prize and other awards. I loved both Gilead and Home, but had never read Housekeeping.

“My name is Ruth,” the story begins. “I grew up under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher. Through all these generations of elders we lived in one house, my grandmother’s house, built for her by her husband, Edmund Foster, an employee of the railroad, who escaped this world years before I entered it. It was he who put us down in this unlikely place.” The story covers Ruth’s and her sister Lucille’s growing-up years in their strange little house in the tiny far-West town of Fingerbone, ID, with a kind of first-person omniscient narrative. The house, the town, and especially the vast, forbidding glacial lake at the edge of town feel like characters themselves. Ruthie’s narration can be microscopically observant. Here, she remembers the effect of spring weather on the impractical shoes Aunt Sylvie bought them:

“Though the mud in the road still stood inches high and gleamed like aspic on either side where tires passed through the ruts, I had liked the slippers well enough. The tingling seep of water through the (slippers’) seams was pleasant on a spring day, when even in broad sun the slightest breeze raised the hairs on our arms.”

The novel is dense with strange, beautiful images, especially of the lake. Catastrophic flooding, suicide, and death are recurring themes, as is abandonment – the two young sisters are repeatedly abandoned, by their father, mother, grandmother, great aunts, and possibly by their aunt Sylvie’s unbalancedness. It’s dark, with a few funny moments – anyone with a small-town Midwestern or Western background will recognize the self-justifying dialogue of the two great-aunts, which made me laugh out loud. The novel’s ending includes a scene of destruction, though not what I’d expected, and a daring escape. Housekeeping feels both innovative and old-fashioned (Faulknerian, maybe?), both dense and slight – at a little over 200 pages, it’s much shorter than Robinson’s two later novels. It’s a beautiful, strange story, worth a read and then a re-read.

Click here for a great interview with Robinson in The Guardian, post-Orange Prize.

The ReviewReview

I have another literary-magazine review in TheReviewReview.  This time, I reviewed the online journal Prime Number.