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Brilliant Sri Lankan Novelists, Go Home
May 10, 2002
by John Bloom
NEW YORK, May 10 -- Did you ever notice that the books
in the airport reading rack--the books that everyone actually reads--are never the books that are reviewed in the big Sunday
book sections?
If they're even mentioned, like the occasional piece on
Danielle Steele or Stephen King, it's always with a little bit of
a sneer, with words like "potboiler," "formula fiction," "genre
fiction" or, the ultimate insult, "best-seller."
They don't do this in any other section of the paper. The
movie critic seems perfectly capable of praising "Spiderman"
without thinking that it somehow demeans his critical reputation
and makes him unfit for reviewing the next Merchant-Ivory saga
about old ladies in India. In fact, when a "Spiderman" or a Bruce
Willis thriller or a George Lucas popular epic arrives, the
critics celebrate it, hype it, promote it, interview all the
principals, treat it like a huge national event.
Compare that to the release of a John Grisham or a Tom
Clancy book. "Here's the latest Grisham." "Here's the latest
Clancy." That's about all you're going to get. And you can forget
entirely the guys at the next level, the mid-list mystery and
thriller authors who sometimes have one book out of ten reviewed
by a major newspaper.
Instead, what have we got in the book review sections? Sri
Lankan coming-of-age novels. Slice-of-life multi-generational
family sagas about the Idaho back country. Painfully personal
memoirs about single motherhood. Last week I read a review of a
book called "Notes from the Hyena's Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood"
by Nega Mezlekia. It had everything a book review editor wants--
exotic to the point of obscurity, internationalist, multi-
cultural (by virtue of the translation), with the promise of
making us all Better People by condescending to understand the
agonies of a Third World situation that we don't really know
diddly squat about.
But is it a good story? You'll never find out by reading The
New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book Review, or
any of the other Sunday supplements. Some of the reviews don't
even bother to describe the book, much less tell us why we would
want to read it in the first place. Instead they go on about "new
voices in East African fiction." My question is, "I don't really
care that much about East African fiction. It's not high on my
list of priorities. Will I like this book in spite of that?"
Over time I've learned the secret code words of book
reviewers who don't really want you to know what they're talking
about. "Coming of age," for example, means "self-involved young
person agonizes over sophomoric minutiae." "Internal odyssey"
means nothing happens. "Introspective" means psychobabble.
"Delicate" means you're going to have entire paragraphs
describing the dew in the rose garden. The dreaded "Austenesque"
means blabbermouth women are going to sit around the kitchen
playing matchmaker. "Echoes of history" means you should run
screaming out of Starbucks because somebody's going to tell you
about his ancestors.
The strangest term the reviewers use is "unassuming prose."
They say it in a good way, as though the best prose is
unassuming. So how come they never review a book with assuming prose? I don't like my books unassuming. I want them to
assume something. I want the prose standing on its head like a Chinese
acrobat and doing back flips.
But there's a very special place in the Ninth Circle of Hell
for one kind of book in particular, the book I'll call "My 16th
Century Farmhouse in Provence." This is a genre that flourished
in the nineties--I think the first one was called "Under the
Tuscan Sun"--and it's universally praised by book reviewers
everywhere. It's usually a first-person narrative of going to
Europe and finding a) an old house on the Scottish moors, b) a
rundown apartment in the Marais neighborhood of Paris, c) an
Alpine villa in shambles, and then fixing it up. End of story. That's
it. The rest of the book is just sappy musings about "the
clash of the modern and the traditional," "the rhythm of
provincial life," the color of the native vegetables, and the
local peasant legends that no one quite remembers anymore because
there are no longer any peasants.
Here's my question about these books. Why is it always
Americans going to Europe? Why couldn't you write the same book
about going to, say, the Catskills and remodeling a summer camp
for Jewish teenagers? Why does a Frenchman never move to West
Texas and fix up a pig ranch? And all of those picturesquely
colorful local guys who hang around the public market in Grasse?
We have those in Salina, Kansas, too. They're called Old Farts.
Of course, sometimes my code system fails me entirely, as in
a recent New York Times review of a Portuguese novel called "The
Return of the Caravels" by Antonio Lobo Antunes. Describing the
author, the reviewer said, "He is profoundly Portuguese." I was
on-line with Barnes & Noble within the hour, grateful to have
finally found a writer who wasn't lying about his birthplace.
At other times, the reviewer seems to be daring you to
endure as much psychic pain as possible, as in the review from
Newsday that said, "This first novel treats family ties, erotic
longing, small children and prolonged deaths from AIDS and cancer
with a subtlety that grows from scrupulous unsentimentality."
Well, doesn't that sound like something to take to the beach this
summer.
Did you know that there's a whole genre now called
"pregnancy narratives"? (Just go ahead and ram bamboo sticks
under my fingernails. I'll enjoy it more.) Did you know, in fact,
that there are entire libraries of titles that should be
subtitled "Males Go Away"? Take this blurb from "Crow Lake" by
Mary Lawson: "Set against the wild terrain of northern Ontario,
CROW LAKE is a triumphant story of a young woman coming to terms
with her past, and the strength of family love." Can I just wait
for the Lifetime movie? At least we'll have a scene with Treat
Williams as the creepy boyfriend who beats her up.
But why punish yourself? Just keep the following definitions
in mind and you, too, will be able to avoid long hours of mind-
numbing brain-deadening torpor:
A book of "literary snapshots" means nothing happens.
"A lyrical small-town reminiscence" means nothing happens.
"Full of wry insight" means nothing happens.
A "rumination," a "pastiche," a "twinkling little jewel of a
novel," "a quiet catharsis," "a journey through memory" or a
"poetic elegy" all mean nothing ever happens.
Beware of the "auspicious debut," the "promising first
novel" and the "dazzling maiden performance." This means we're
waiting for the second novel to see if this turkey can write. Has
there ever been a book reviewer in history who has said "Let's
hope this person doesn't ever write again--once was enough"?
What's the deal with the "freebie" first-novel review? We don't
cut any slack for filmmakers when they bomb right out of the box.
And what's with all the verbiage from India? The next time I
see a work of fiction described as "an inquiry into the
consequences of colonialism" invoking the "rich spiritual
traditions of a mysterious sub-continent" with a "postmodern
sensibility" I'm going to personally seek out the Berkeley
apartment building where all these writers-in-residence sponge
off the Rockefeller Foundation and assault it with a sound truck
blaring Nine Inch Nails at 3 a.m. Please make a pilgrimage to
Delhi in search of a plot, people.
Anything called a "three-generation family saga" will have a
scene in which the bastard child of a ruthless entrepreneur is
delivered by a midwife in a slave cabin.
Anything that "deftly evokes"--take your pick: turn-of-the-
century Scotland, medieval Bavaria, Paris in the twenties--means
the author read a book on period costumes and invented some
adorably quirky dialects.
Anything involving "a woman's search"--take your pick: for
the love she never had, for the source of her emotional identity,
for the ghosts that lurk in her past, for the meaning behind her
grandmother's poems found in a dusty attic--is going to include a lot
of spontaneous weeping.
Beware of the word "anomie." The book will undoubtedly
"resonate" with it. Even more ominous, it will probably be
"Chekhovian."
Anything a professor does--returning to his rural home,
facing his mortality, suffering from "ennui," enduring a middle-
age crisis--should be banned by Constitutional Amendment.
Images will always "leap off the page" (usually in an
attempt to escape). Families will always be "unconventional."
Expatriates will always be "disillusioned with their homeland."
Tenderness will always be found amid the devastation of war.
"Emotional transactions" will always be "genuine." And the
"strange internal logic" of a narrative will always "take on a
life of its own."
Collections of short stories, which nobody reads, will
always display "a remarkable range." (News alert! All the stories
are about different things.) Poetry collections, which have press
runs of a thousand copies, will always be "evocative" of
something or other. (Yep, they don't call it poetry for nothing,
do they?) And collections of correspondence will always reveal "a
remarkable mind, grappling with everything from the ephemera of
day-to-day life to the mysteries of the universe." (Come on, it's
a bunch of letters.)
Where is the book reviewing school where they learn all this
stuff? Wherever it is, I'm sure it's a poignant and wise place,
blending fact, memory and imagination in highly literary ways, so
that the intensity of emotion can be revealed in finely crafted
prose that resounds with a welter of imagery, affirming that our
only true subject--yes!--is the earth itself.
Then again, some books are just bad.
© Copyright 2002
United Press International and John Bloom