Booklog for Charlotte

Light Years by James Salter

I picked up this 1975 novel because the author kept turning up on my radar screen and I saw the book had been acclaimed as a great one. 

It is the story of a family in the late 60s and 70s set in that stylish world of a New York City architect whose family has the perfect life in a lovely old house outside the city. It is told in an appealingly episodic way: Nedra and Viri know how to create a beautiful setting for dinner parties, cook perfect food, make up stories for the children on the spot, spend languid summers at the beach, and more. Their friends are colorful and talented (or not) and adore the family. 

Of course things are not as they seem; Viri has an affair and is shown to be pitifully needy. But he can turn in a flash from his longing to creating a wonderfully inventive world for his children. We also see that a family friend is having an affair with Nedra; when she breaks it off, among his complaints are that he loves the children and will miss them. 

Nedra and Viri's veneer begins to wear thin as Viri worries about his lack of success and Nedra begins to be less beautiful. Viri believes success only exists if there is fame and Nedra thinks she will be happy if she leaves him. She leaves him in the house and after a time in Europe, lives in New York. Viri eventually sells the house. The episodic nature of the novel does not fully spell out how things happen in a way that makes sense of the characters' choices. Occasionally I wondered why the author recounted some of the characters' actions or thoughts and found them mystifying: did the author consider them ridiculous? Some of the choices seemed related to the times; Nedra looking for a more fulfilling life just as many women were questioning their possibilities and her effort to attach herself to a cult-like theatre group.

While I found the book in many ways a pleasing read, it was troubling too. I was made uneasy by Nedra's apparent ability to live on thin air; she never seemed to have a need to support herself, but didn't seem to have access to real money. Viri seemed undone by his lack of comfort in his own skin; without fame, his accomplishments were nothing. Most importantly I couldn't tell how the author saw the characters and they didn't seem coherent to me.

When I finished the book, I read this New Yorker article from 2013 and found that it explained much about the novel. The most salient bit of information is that when it was published, close friends of the Salter family discovered their lives paralleled characters in the book and details of their lives recounted in the book, down to dinner party conversations. In a more uncomfortable turn of events, the Rosenthals were later divorced as if their lives were foreshadowed by the book. The book also takes much from the Salters' lives as well, and yes, they too were divorced. The article details Salter's own desire for greater acclaim which shows up in his character Viri.

James Salter, Light Years, Random House, 1975, 308 pages. Available in the UVa and public libraries, and from Amazon.

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

This story is told by a housekeeper, a Japanese single mother, who works for an agency that sends her to various households. Her latest assignment is the professor, who has a very high turnover in housekeepers. He's problematic because while he had been a brilliant mathematician, an accident left him with a short-term memory that lasts only 80 minutes. He has an excellent memory for anything that happened before 1975. He lives in a cottage on the estate of his widowed sister-in-law whose main rule for the housekeeper is that she is never to seek help from the sister-in-law.

The professor is unkempt with notes fluttering from his jacket to remind him of the most important facts. Each day the housekeeper arrives, he asks her birthdate, shoe size, and other similar questions and makes pronouncements about those numbers. She learns about the beauty of prime numbers and many other mathematical matters. It is the love of numbers that keeps the professor going.

When the professor learns she has a son, he is enthusiastic and insists the son come each day after school and helps him with math homework. The housekeeper tells us about her work in the professor's household, which involves cooking and cleaning for him, as well as an occasional outing to the barber, a major undertaking. She observed that the professor does not like carrots, so she works to get them into his diet surreptitiously, putting grated carrots in his hamburgers, for instance. 

The professor had never been to a baseball game, but had always loved the game for its abundance of numbers. He was especially fond of the pitcher Enatsu who wore that wonderful number, 28. Because the professor's memory ended in 1975, he assumes Enatsu is still on the team and the housekeeper and her son work to keep that fiction alive for the professor.

Their time together is appealing; it recounted with no huge revelations or changes in their situations. The housekeeper and her son remain loyal to the professor whose memory eventually shrinks to nothing. They continue to visit him when he is in an institution and the son has grown and become a teacher of mathematics.

Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Picador, 2009, 192 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

It took some time for me to be prepared to read this Man Booker Prize winning book that someone said was the best book that will ever ruin your weekend. I was both slow to pick it up and slow to make my way through the searing parts. First I will say that the book was worth enduring the sections about the Japanese slave labor that built the railroad across Thailand to Burma. I came away filled with admiration for Richard Flanagan.

Dorrigo Evans is shown to be a child fated for success when against all odds, he scrambles to the top of the heap to grab the football. He becomes a doctor and is successful socially; the war comes along and while he is stationed in Adelaide, he has a brief encounter with a young woman that neither is able to forget. Later he finds she is the wife of his uncle and that does not deter them from having an intense affair. At some point he ships out and after he is captured by the Japanese, he becomes the leader of a thousand prisoners of war who are worked to death on the railway. He acts heroically to protect them and heal them. He never regards himself as virtuous or heroic and feels trapped into behaving as he did by the expectations of the prisoners; he considers himself a flawed human. And after the war, his personal life is less than exemplery.

While this is surely his story, that a man heroic in some situations is ordinary or worse in others, another facet of this book was to look at the other side of the coin. As head of the labor camp, the speed-addicted Major Nakamura is dispicable. He believes that whatever he does that helps create the railway is justified because it is for the glory of the Emperor and the spirit of Japan. During a visit by Colonel Kota, an even more horrifying war criminal, the two discuss their shared love of Japanese poetry:

They grew sentimental as they talked of the earthy wisdom of Issa's haiku, the greatness of Buson, the wonder of Basho's great haibun, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which, Colonel Kota said, summed up in one book the genius of the Japanese spirit.

And later:

In this way, thought Nakamura, the Japanese spirit is now itself the railway, and the railway the Japanese spirit, our narrow road to the deep north, helping to take the beauty and wisdom of Basho to the larger world.

After the war he does what he must to avoid exposure as a war criminal and eventually falls in love, marries, and has children to whom he is endlessly kind and loving. His beliefs are shaken when his gentle friend Sato reveals that it was true -- not false propaganda -- that Japanese doctors carried out horrifying experiments on American patients. Still, he is able to see the necessity of those experiments.

Nakamura felt in the deepest part of his being that he, like the Japanese people, was an honourable, good man falsely accused. A victim, yes -- him, Ikuko, his executed comrades, Japan itself. This sentiment explained to him all that had befallen him, even lent a certain grandeur to his miserable life of secrets and evasions, of false identities and growing distance from other people. But he felt excited by Sato's story. A distant prospect of some divine liberation seemed to exist within it.

Both Dorrigo Evans and Tenji Nakamura are in some way trapped into their very different acts; Evans despises the notion of virtue but was impelled by those who needed him to act as he did. Nakamura was trapped by the idea of the Japanese spirit and the Emperor. 

Another facet of the book is Dorrigo and Amy's story of lost love. While he is in service, we learn that there was an explosion in the old hotel where Amy and her husband lived and worked. The message of their intense affair is spelled out in this conversation Dorrigo had with the widow of a fellow prisoner of war when she asked him if he believed in love. As he was thinking of Amy and their time together, she says,

I don't, she said. No, I don't. It's too small a word, don't you think, Mr. Evans? I have a friend in Fern Tree who teaches piano. Very musical, she is. I'm tone-deaf myself. But one day she was telling me how every room has a note. You just have to find it. She started warbling away, up and down. And suddenly one note came back to us, just bounced back off the walls and rose from the floor and filled the place with this perfect hum. This beautiful sound. Like you've thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you....Do you think that's what we mean by love, Mr. Evans? The note that comes back to you. That finds you even when you don't want to be found? That one day you find someone, and everything they are comes back to you in a strange way that hums?

Some 20 years after the war's end, Dorrigo has an eventful few days that bring some remarkable revelations. Without spelling them out clearly, I will say they involve a visit to his much older brother in Sydney where he learns more about a fellow prisoner of war, Darky Gardiner, and a takes a walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Shortly after that, he spectacularly rescues his wife and three children from a bush fire.

I have wondered whether this book would be as powerful without the extended section of prisoner of war horror; I think it could well have been. Richard Flanagan's writing is that powerful.

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Knopf, 2014, 352 pages (I read the kindle version). Available at the public and UVa libraries, as well as through Amazon. 

Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings by Jonathan Raban

This 1999 book came onto my radar around the time of our trip to Alaska in August. As fine a book as it is, it's just as well I didn't rush to read it before the trip as it only glances upon Alaska. It is about the boats, the water, the 1792 exploration of the area, the death of a parent, the end of a relationship, and very little of that occurs in Alaska. Raban says

I had a boat, most of a spring and summer, a cargo of books, and the kind of dream of self-enrichment that spurs everyone who sails north from Seattle. Forget the herring and the salmon: I meant to go fishing for reflections, and come back with a glittering haul. Other people's reflections, as I thought then. I wasn't prepared for the catch I eventually made.

One of his reflections I liked came shortly after leaving Ballard Locks in Seattle. It turns out that the bottom falls away dramatically, so he was quickly in 600 hundred feet of water. To reach that depth from the New York harbor, you would have to travel 100 miles of ocean. The implication is that the suburban life is lived on the edge of the abyss. Here, he says,

The giant octopus searchs the silt for prey with arms fifteen feet long. It has huge bedroom eyes, the great domed brainpan of a comicbook Martian, and a pert little parrot beak with a poisonous bite; an unfussy carnivore, it would polish off a human cadaver in no time at all....If I lived in that Richmond Beach bungalow, I'd keep a close eye on the dog.

As he notes, seeing a hunk of bloated tentacle washed up might make you less dismissive of a Tlingit story of an octopus that destroyed a fishing village near Wrangell, Alaska.

He also reminds us that areas where trees have been replanted are not "wilderness." 

Having come from a country logged out completely by the mid-sixteenth century, I realized I'd been living under a considerable misapprehension myself. By the new standards I was trying to master, England had no nature at all....The countryside I had mistaken for nature was in fact so managed and cultived as to amount to nothing more than a sprawling allotment or pea-patch.

In Ketchikan he heads, unwisely, as it turns out, for the Potlatch Bar. While waiting to order, he listened to the man next to him telling a friend about buying a truck. 

Swapping the word "truck" for "fuck," and vice versa, the story went roughly as follows: He'd got the trucking fuck from a truck way the truck up a trucking mountain; but the trucking transmission was trucked--he'd put the trucker in trucking third trucking gear, and truck!...he'd trucking gone back to trucking kill that mothertrucker for trucking with him. Etcetera.

Later he says the bartender finally noticed him: "I got a trucking beer out of her, drank the trucker, and got the truck out of the trucking place. This was, after all, trucking Alaska."

I could go on plucking out interesting quotes, but I should stop now. This gives you a taste of the book and will serve to remind me of a few of the bits I especially liked. I must say that at a few points I wearied of the boat business, as there occasionally were paragraphs with few words I could define. But my advice is to soldier on; the whole is truly worth it. I read his 2003 novel Waxwings and was favorably impressed.

Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau, Vintage, 1999, 448 pages (I read the Kindle version). Available at the UVa and public libraries, and from Amazon.