Jim Grimsley

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, the book clocks in at 1500 pages and begins with an epigram that says, “The secret of being a bore is to say everything.” If you choose to read a book that’s this big, you should give way to the fact that it expands on everything, lolls about, repeats itself, and eventually includes to do lists and ballot counts from a district of Bengal and bouquets of rhyming couplets. This book expects to have its say and does. I have read fantasy written at this length that suffered from a similar pattern that, for me, this book falls into: the pool of characters broadens to the point that the reader flinches at the mention of every new name because, well, they all have a story. The moment of meeting a new figure in the story introduces increasing levels of fatigue. Characters are reduced to mannerisms for the most part, with significant exceptions like Maan, who lives big and charms everyone and rages with emotion; he is a big, messy, complicated person. Lata, who is the female character occupying the foreground, is equally weighty but so eminently sensible; she falls in love in a sensible but passionate way, emerges from her unsuitable love without more pain than is reasonable, and sees that this is a kind of love that she would prefer to do without. The messy passion of Kabir is less helpful and happy than the steady affection of Hanesh. I took up this novel after seeing the mini-series, which actually does the book justice in most ways. The stories Seth is telling are not so complex that they require the room he allows them so that the book condenses quite well. But the novel in all its breadth is quite worth the time, if you are a fan of enormous thick books. It attempts to be a look at the whole of life as it was lived in this imaginary city over the course of a year or so, to tell the story of its neighborhoods, religious conflicts, politics, government, court decisions, social upheaval, shoemaking, business in general, everything – and it does in fact do this with impressive thoroughness. But the stories go on so long and undergo so many permutations that in the end they no longer feel shaped, and at the end of the book one wonders why it doesn’t in fact go on forever. Because one has long since given up on any notion that it will end.

The thing about saying you think a race war is coming or this group or that group wants to start a race war is the sheer ignorance of people not knowing there has been a race war in this country for four hundred years already and if you are not white you already know it and have been fighting it all your life because you don’t find any other choice. The comfortable white folks like me talking about a race war are admitting to a blindness that should be impossible to comprehend except that for us it is just everyday. We long ago learned not to see the effect of our ideas of our superiority on our own minds. We can stare at a lynched body and see justice and hold a community picnic at its feet. We can watch a white policeman kneel on the neck of a black man and see a thug being brought to discipline by the rule of law. For us justice is us. Along with anyone we can co-opt to act like us, to believe us, to join us. Justice is whatever we need it to be in order to maintain a system in which we are always the cream that rises to the top. The great peace we imagine we are about to interrupt in order to fight a war among the races is a peace only we were ever meant to enjoy. What we are really seeing is that finally, after all these centuries, we white people are losing the race war and we are going to have to kill a lot of folks in order to turn the tide. Only we are not so sure we can win even then. Because the tide has already turned. Because remember that blindness. We still have it. We still can’t see the real world. So many enemies out there now. Turns out there are just too many. Somebody has been whispering in our ear about us and we are confused about what’s true and what’s not. Crazy what kind of savior you can believe in when you can’t really believe anything you see or hear or read or what you learned in books or school or what your preacher tells you. Just crazy.

The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My first impressions of this novel were that the writing had a stiff, unpracticed quality at the sentence level, and that the method of the narrative was abrupt. The first section of the book, about an interaction between the protagonist and a man who wants her to describe objects he purloined from the possessions of a dead woman, felt pushed in terms of the dialog. Conversations played out in a flatfooted way. But the episode was based on an intriguing idea. In the subsequent sections of the book many of the problems I saw in the writing went away, the author becoming more practiced and losing herself in the writing. The final episode was a gem, and I would have wished it were the entire novel, expanded on and left to do the work of exploring the shifting self on its own – but that’s me trying to write someone else’s novel. What the writer has done is strong work in her own manner and on her terms. But I cannot overcome the feeling that the episodes stand too separate from one another and do not act with one another as well as they could, and that harms the novel. The activities of the first section of the book vanish completely and never arise again. The presence of her lover (soon former lover) Stephen does cross over sections of the book but without much effect. And the final section of the book contains all the other episodes within its scope but still stands separate from them. This can be read as commentary on the function of the self, but it can also be read as weakness in structure. Nevertheless, I admired the last part of the book enough that I am glad to have encountered this book.

Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

It’s difficult to discuss this book, given that I was so enthralled by Invisible Man. I had heard that Ellison struggled for many years with a second novel and bought this some years back when it was published, but then heard that it was very uneven in quality and so it languished in my reading pile for a long time. I am glad that I did finally read it but wonder how Ellison would feel about its publication. He could certainly have allowed its release in his lifetime if he wished. But he didn’t. The book has episodes that make the reading worthwhile – the birth of Bliss, the Juneteenth episode, the Sister Georgia chapter. In terms of its parts this is very fine work. But there is a static quality to the whole, brought about by its design as a discourse between Hickman and Bliss/Sunraider. Whatever energy the narrative gathers is nullified by the static moment of the present, when Hickman watches over the Senator in the hospital, and when they talk about the past, about history, about all the ideas that concern them. It is easy to assert that Ellison never brought this fragment of his second novel into clarity – easy because that is what decades of gossip about him have said – but there is something missing in this book. Or perhaps there was something so transcendent and present about Invisible Man that one can’t help wishing this second book was more like that first one.

There are only a few days in life, speaking relatively, when one places a book for publication, no matter how prolific one might be. Also there are the long winters to consider. There is a December in which one’s whole family succumbs to the pandemic after having avoided it for a long series of severe months. And there is age, retirement, which, if one is honest, was easy to underestimate, especially in a year in which the world was reeling from sickness, change, realization of past sins and disasters, and one’s own life, one’s own head space, felt unimportant unless it was contemplating the great problems of all mankind. This is all sounding very British. It was a hard year in life, in other words, and a long time since I had felt like a writer, other than through sheer force of will. The daily act of setting words in a line, line after line. This is necessary, of course, because there are periods when a person must persevere through force of will alone. But, being older now, and no longer having the fact of teaching to give my life a shape and to reinforce my idea of myself as a writer, which was one of the purposes teaching served. There is no finish to that sentence that feels necessary. Being older now, that’s the point. Other factors that I won’t go into except to say that publishers are fickle by their nature and publishing undergoes one revolution after another and this was a year when anyone could smell the fear in publishing at large. A lot of good things happened. Some better justice was understood. The fact of racism came to the fore in ways that, let’s face it, were entirely foreseeable and right and everything shook itself into new alignments and such. At times of revolution it is reasonable to fear you might the be one who falls by the wayside. (And those other factors now that I won’t go into, but be mindful, there are those.) The books you have written, the sweat and blood of it, hearing that they are not the thing anymore, that they are out of another era, that time has passed you by. Then dawns that morning. That it comes so close to Christmas is the best gift. Answered prayer. Someone rings, you hear the sound of it and know you ought to answer, and there is that dear voice of your agent that has given you bad news often enough these past years. But this time there is the sweetness of yes. The new editor has loved what I did. I have survived to publish another book. Never mind about the details right now. All that despair of old age and irrelevance flows out of the head. This book that I have loved for such a long time will be a physical thing. The winter suddenly becomes more friendly. After all, my family has faced the pandemic and survived, and there’s Christmas almost here. I am still working. So the doubt can step away from me for a while. And I publish a book again.