Steve’s Bookers – Elizabeth Strout MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON (MNILB).
Sunday, 28 Aug 2016, 18:15
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I had intended not to read this out of pure prejudice – until
shocked out of those prejudices by the admiration of another reader. So read it
I did – although being of no more than a novella’s length, reading it turned
out to be not so taxing a demand anyway. And I am pleased to have done so. It
is not a novel I overly like or would choose to read for itself but it is
exceedingly well written and that is worth something. There is a concentration
and attention in the prose to the rhythms of speech (direct and indirect) that
is that of a prose master from the outset – a peculiar mastery of sentence
structure that attends to sense, music and mimetic effect all at once. Writing
of this QUALITY is unusual and beautiful. Yet, as I say, my admiration remains
at the level of the superb technical achievement that this represents for a
novelist.
Sometimes I feel that about Henry James and I certainly feel
the pressure of this model on Strout. It opens:
There was a time, and it was many
years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks.
This is, believe it or not, almost all of the plot in a
nutshell. Yet it is also an introduction to the writer’s focal technique. For
me the rhythm of the sentence balances on ‘There was a time’, in such a way
that the sheer triviality and ordinariness of its function is overbalanced by
the pause on ‘time’ a good reading of the sentence demands – such that time
itself and its quality becomes the real and true subject of the novel. ‘Time’, thus
focused upon and made significant, is the content and vehicle of reflection and
the internal somersaults of attitudinal approach time for reflection
facilitates. The novel becomes about (and again we sense Henry James) how we read
the meanings generated by our contexts – persons and places (even the Chrysler
building) – when the give and take of each other’s ‘time’ between persons is necessitated
and freely accepted by them.
Nothing much happens but that Lucy learns about the meaning
of her mother’s (and later her father’s) actions and mode of being in the world
by both unlearning attitudes that blocked receptivity in both and learning to listen and read human
situations (however apparently trivial) more carefully. This is and was the
requirement of the ‘great tradition’ of writing as conceived by F. R. Leavis. Hence
when this writer claims a desire to ‘report what happened one day’ (p. 105) we
can expect of ‘reportage’ of extremely subtle discrimination In which the
ethical nature of even very minor exchanges – about even more minor incidents
(a cat jumps on a table in the recollected event) – is fully exposed and
experienced by readers. The talk around that incident is itself about ‘coming
to the page without judgement’ – about the cooperation of reader and writer in
discerning the values inherent in all exchanges of communication – intended,
unintended and those midway between the continuum of levels of ‘intention’ in meanings
emergent as ‘understandings’ from an interaction.
And this writer knows that is what she is doing – like a
consummate master – and tells us:
…: Always that telling detail.
What I mean is, this is not just a woman’s story. It’s what happens to a lot of
us, if we are lucky enough to hear that detail and pay attention to it. (28)
Here a writer instructs about how to write and the only
means by which such writing is validated – the luck that ‘detail’ is picked up
and attended upon by a reader of equal capacity to the investment in the
writing. Hence, a rather trivial ‘story’ becomes instinct with released meaning
but only as the result of an interaction that is itself of some quality. Truly
great writers know this. They do not work by structures at the macro but at the
micro level of the story.
And then we see the larger meanings of the book in
understandings of the experience of oppression and prejudice – of those, for
instance, who have experienced AIDS, on one hand, and anti-Semitism on another.
And perhaps most telling, this is a novel about less examined vulnerabilities
but ones of great importance to democracies of people from the lowest social
strata of otherwise privileged groups – this is a novel about ‘white trash’ in
a way I have not seen explored so sensitively before. But it is primarily about
art, whether in a novella like this or the Metropolitan Museum of Art) as an
avenue to a specialised kind of human knowing (86f).
As I have aged, I have begun to see such views of a
transcendental function for art as suspect by virtue of the elitism they apply.
But I am not so sure that I am correct – now!
As for the Booker – well it should and may be a contender
but that hardly matters. This is so superbly ‘fine art’ that prizes hardly seem
to matter.
Steve’s Bookers – Elizabeth Strout MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON (MNILB).
I had intended not to read this out of pure prejudice – until shocked out of those prejudices by the admiration of another reader. So read it I did – although being of no more than a novella’s length, reading it turned out to be not so taxing a demand anyway. And I am pleased to have done so. It is not a novel I overly like or would choose to read for itself but it is exceedingly well written and that is worth something. There is a concentration and attention in the prose to the rhythms of speech (direct and indirect) that is that of a prose master from the outset – a peculiar mastery of sentence structure that attends to sense, music and mimetic effect all at once. Writing of this QUALITY is unusual and beautiful. Yet, as I say, my admiration remains at the level of the superb technical achievement that this represents for a novelist.
Sometimes I feel that about Henry James and I certainly feel the pressure of this model on Strout. It opens:
There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks.
This is, believe it or not, almost all of the plot in a nutshell. Yet it is also an introduction to the writer’s focal technique. For me the rhythm of the sentence balances on ‘There was a time’, in such a way that the sheer triviality and ordinariness of its function is overbalanced by the pause on ‘time’ a good reading of the sentence demands – such that time itself and its quality becomes the real and true subject of the novel. ‘Time’, thus focused upon and made significant, is the content and vehicle of reflection and the internal somersaults of attitudinal approach time for reflection facilitates. The novel becomes about (and again we sense Henry James) how we read the meanings generated by our contexts – persons and places (even the Chrysler building) – when the give and take of each other’s ‘time’ between persons is necessitated and freely accepted by them.
Nothing much happens but that Lucy learns about the meaning of her mother’s (and later her father’s) actions and mode of being in the world by both unlearning attitudes that blocked receptivity in both and learning to listen and read human situations (however apparently trivial) more carefully. This is and was the requirement of the ‘great tradition’ of writing as conceived by F. R. Leavis. Hence when this writer claims a desire to ‘report what happened one day’ (p. 105) we can expect of ‘reportage’ of extremely subtle discrimination In which the ethical nature of even very minor exchanges – about even more minor incidents (a cat jumps on a table in the recollected event) – is fully exposed and experienced by readers. The talk around that incident is itself about ‘coming to the page without judgement’ – about the cooperation of reader and writer in discerning the values inherent in all exchanges of communication – intended, unintended and those midway between the continuum of levels of ‘intention’ in meanings emergent as ‘understandings’ from an interaction.
And this writer knows that is what she is doing – like a consummate master – and tells us:
…: Always that telling detail. What I mean is, this is not just a woman’s story. It’s what happens to a lot of us, if we are lucky enough to hear that detail and pay attention to it. (28)
Here a writer instructs about how to write and the only means by which such writing is validated – the luck that ‘detail’ is picked up and attended upon by a reader of equal capacity to the investment in the writing. Hence, a rather trivial ‘story’ becomes instinct with released meaning but only as the result of an interaction that is itself of some quality. Truly great writers know this. They do not work by structures at the macro but at the micro level of the story.
And then we see the larger meanings of the book in understandings of the experience of oppression and prejudice – of those, for instance, who have experienced AIDS, on one hand, and anti-Semitism on another. And perhaps most telling, this is a novel about less examined vulnerabilities but ones of great importance to democracies of people from the lowest social strata of otherwise privileged groups – this is a novel about ‘white trash’ in a way I have not seen explored so sensitively before. But it is primarily about art, whether in a novella like this or the Metropolitan Museum of Art) as an avenue to a specialised kind of human knowing (86f).
As I have aged, I have begun to see such views of a transcendental function for art as suspect by virtue of the elitism they apply. But I am not so sure that I am correct – now!
As for the Booker – well it should and may be a contender but that hardly matters. This is so superbly ‘fine art’ that prizes hardly seem to matter.
All the best
Steve