The Elegant Variation: MORNING WOOD

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July 01, 2010

MORNING WOOD

James Wood reviews David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

The jacket copy of “Cloud Atlas” mentions Nabokov and Umberto Eco, and calls Mitchell a “postmodern visionary.” This is true enough, but one is struck by the gestural nature of Mitchell’s postmodernism. You could remove all the literary self-consciousness without smothering the novel’s ontology, or coarsening its intricacy. It is not exactly that Mitchell’s heart isn’t in his authorial games; to put it positively, the persuasive vitality of his stories is strong enough to frighten off their own alienation. The novellas have a life of their own, and will not be easily burgled—which is to say that they function like all successful fictions. The revelation that, say, Adam Ewing’s journal might have been fabricated by his son, or that Luisa Rey’s journalistic crusade in California might just be a thriller written by someone with the nom de plume of Hilary V. Hush, actually strengthens the autonomous reality of these fictions. This is the opposite of the weak postmodernism of a writer like Paul Auster, whose moments of metafictional self-consciousness—“Look, it’s all made up!”—are weightless, because the fictions themselves have failed to achieve substance: a diet going on a diet. In this respect, Mitchell is more like Nabokov (or José Saramago, or the Roth of “The Counterlife”) than like the feebler novelistic creator Umberto Eco. Of course, the paradox whereby the exposure of fiction’s fictionality only buttresses its reality is at least as old as the second part of “Don Quixote,” and reminds us of the ancestral postmodernism of the novel form.

Posted at 12:04 PM in Reviews | Permalink

Comments

I'm totaly with Wood on this one. He clearly shows how Mitchell's post-modernism differs from that of so many others. I still haven't recovered from "The Cloud Atlas".

Posted by: Niall | July 01, 2010 at 08:42 PM

I respect Wood and all, but when he says things like "The persuasive vitality of his stories is strong enough to frighten off their own alienation" he tends to lose me.

Posted by: GG Gaynor | July 02, 2010 at 05:46 AM

GG - You're right, that's very awkwardly expressed. But his general point is still interesting: That Mitchell's story telling ability makes his modernism less distancing than it is in other authors. Which I think is a valid point. Wood just needs a better editor.

Posted by: Niall | July 02, 2010 at 08:34 AM

I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that, I just think Wood is a little too stuffy for his own good now and then.

I will admit I might be the only person on the planet who gave up on Cloud Atlas at about the 2/3 point.

Black Swan Green, though, that was a nice little bildungsroman right there.

Posted by: GG Gaynor | July 02, 2010 at 12:10 PM

GG: Slusha's Crossing was the worst part of the novel, which is where most people who give up on it give up.

Posted by: Niall | July 03, 2010 at 02:54 PM

GG: Honestly, "too stuffy for his own good" does not cover it for me. This review borders on literary masturbation for me. I enjoyed the book, but not this review.

Posted by: Kathleen | July 03, 2010 at 07:16 PM

Whatever happens David Mitchell's new novel of interlinked narratives, Cloud Atlas, takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride And you won't want to get off. No more debate

Posted by: happy | July 07, 2010 at 08:56 PM

I don't get the fascination with self-consciousness.

Enjoyed the review a lot, though.

Posted by: Shelley | July 13, 2010 at 01:44 PM

Everything OK with Mark?

Posted by: Drew | July 16, 2010 at 06:57 PM

Has this blog gone dark?

Posted by: Alistair | July 20, 2010 at 11:42 AM

just want to say that i am tired of james wood sticking it to paul auster. did auster steal his girlfriend in college or something? it's relentless!

Posted by: peter carman | August 06, 2010 at 05:34 PM

GG, you aren't alone. I made it through "Cloud Atlas" but found it more slog than pleasure, more clever than heart, more post-modern than just plain good.

I think my issue with Mitchell is that his earlier works, especially "number9dream," feel like Haruki Murakami light. All the surreal magic, not so much of the depth underneath.

That said, in his recent Paris Review interview, that I did find very interesting, Mitchell admits he did once have a big crush on Japan's most famous living author and made it sound like something he has gotten over. In light of this (the getting over Murakami - a thing I have yet to do, by a long shot - and the interesting interview he gave) I think I'm gonna give his new work a shot. Cause even when his work hasn't quite bowled me over, it's still managed to stay with me.

Posted by: Jonathan Mendelsohn | August 23, 2010 at 07:33 PM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen

This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it.
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Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

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Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee

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The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt

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The Paris Review Interviews, I by The Paris Review and Philip Gourevitch

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The Dead Fish Museum: Stories by Charles D'Ambrosio

The best short story collection we've read since ... well, certainly since we've started this blog. And we might even say "ever" if Dubliners didn't cast such a long shadow. The short story is not our preferred form but D'Ambrosio's eight brilliant stories are almost enough to convert us. Defy the conventional wisdom that short story collections don't sell and treat yourself to this marvel. (We're especially partial, naturally, to "Screenwriter".)
The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier
*Now in Paperback*

What would you do if the woman who’d left you high and dry ten years ago called out of the blue to invite you to a party without any further explanation? If you’re French, you’d probably spend a lot of time pondering the Deeper Significance Of It All, which is exactly what Grégoire Bouillier does for the 120 hilarious pages of The Mystery Guest. This slim, witty memoir follows Bouillier through the party from hell, and is a case study in Gallic self-abasement. Before it’s all done, you’ll set fire to any turtleneck hanging in your closet and think twice before buying an expensive Bordeaux as a gift. But fear not – just when it seems that all is, indeed, random and pointless and there is no Deeper Significance, salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf, and the tale ends on a note of unforced optimism. Parfait.
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Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

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In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.

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SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
The Rider by Tim Krabbe

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
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July 01, 2010

MORNING WOOD

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

July 01, 2010

MORNING WOOD

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism