A Death in the Family Gets a New Draft

Looks like I was not the only one dissastisfied with Agee's posthumous publishing. Michael A. Lofaro has gone through Agee's manuscript and reordered it, leaving out some of the strange flashbacks that I too found jarring in the story and adding what sounds like a fair amount of material. I haven't read the book, but this essay provides a good overview of the scope and differences in the new work.

The Namesake

It seems that young writers these days are masters of short stories and never novels. After The Memory Keeper's Daughter, which started out so promisingly before wandering unfocused from character to character, I question the ideas that any successful short story writer can simply pick up and write a novel.

But The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri is certainly an exception. Or perhaps a new twist on the same old problems. The detail of the book is startling - so many scenes filled with vivid, telling details that I did not think Lahiri could sustain such a pace. And yet, the novel is filled with moment after moment, like a million tiny climaxes within a short story that never ends. The story spans four decades, yet the main characters always feel so deliberately drawn, so delicate and present in the exact moment of their life.

The difficulty is that the tone here is so lacking in emotion and reliant on detail that at times it seems as if the characters feel nothing at all. All grief is expressed in action, such as clearing out a dead father's apartment or shaving one's head as a sign of mourning. Love is rarely expressed. In this Bengali family built upon an arranged marriage, the two lovers of the book do not even speak each other's names. They are distant and only slowly become accustomed to each other, and never in the book do you see a declaration of love. Their love is meant to be apparent only in that they stay together and raise a family, but frankly this does not come across in the book. It is not until one has lost the other that you feel that they truly had a life together, instead of a life side-by-side.

The Other Boleyn Girl

The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory has been a delightful read from beginning to end. The fascination of the story lies in Gregory's ability to so clearly depict seduction and courtly flirtation. We are drawn into a world managed by wit, jest and compliments. Courtiers accept and decline proposals in the same loving language, always praising the person who complimented them, declaring their undying affection for them, using jests to parlay a conversation into personal gain. We see a court where women use sex and flirtation to achieve something that almost always benefits the men around them more than it benefits themselves.

The story is told by Mary Boleyn, sister to the famous Anne. She is the more conscientious but less clever sister, unable to manipulate the court and men as easily as her sister. Initially, I found myself hoping with her to achieve something in the court, to become the king's mistress and then queen. I hoped for her to succeed with King Henry. But as Mary gives birth to two children and comes to love pleasures that come without a price, such as raising her children and living in the country, I began to tire of the demands placed on her by her family. The constant work put in by the court in order to please the king is staggering, and when Mary calls the king and Anne "the two most selfish people alive," I had to agree. The work of pleasing a king seems like a very clever game until one begins to tire of it, and then it seems like a ridiculous thing, particularly to this Yankee rebel. We have been raised in a country where no one is unquestionable, and to watch two women circle each other just to keep the favor of one tyrant becomes increasingly difficult throughout the book. By the time Mary leaves court, I too was ready to be free of it.

Despite my enjoyment of the book, discussing the writing is a far more difficult thing to do. The characters are well-drawn, each presented with conflicting motives and passions which show why some, like Mary, find happiness and others, like Anne, find ruin. But once each character is drawn, the plot is set in motion. There is little physical description of England, or of the various palaces where much of the action takes place. There is much description of costume and dress, in part because the costumes worn by each character so frequently indicate their mood or desires. But this story is one that does not fuel itself on an elegant turn of phrase, but instead on the interactions of a multitude of ambitious people. Although I enjoyed the book and always looked forward to taking it up again, I cannot highlight any specific passage or quote the way I might for a book by, say, Michael Chabon or Somerset Maugham. Ultimately, the writing is humorous, well-characterized and driven. But there is no point where my breath caught in my throat at the beauty or aptness of some description. Only a general warmth and gratitude towards the characters for giving me such dramatic and gripping stuff to sink my teeth into.