Reading "Kayak Morning"

When Roger Rosenblatt's thirty-eight-year-old daughter, Amy, a pediatrician, died unexpectedly of an undetected heart condition in 2007, he and his wife of nearly fifty years moved from their home in Quogue, on the southern shore of Long Island, down to their daughter's house in Bethesda, Maryland, to help their son-in-law, a hand surgeon, take care of their three small grandchildren, then ages six, five, and one. In his beautiful memoirMaking Toast, Rosenblatt chronicled how pulling together to create a hectic, multigenerational household saved them all. Despite its heartrending subject matter, Making Toast was ultimately a hopeful, heartwarming book.

Kayak Morning, which deals with the tenaciousness of grief, is a more melancholy read, less cathartic and reassuring. It is a bereaved father's meditation on unacceptable loss. What it has going for it is searing honesty, exquisitely expressed. Discussing his earlier volume, Rosenblatt writes, "In it, I tried to suggest that the best one can do in a situation such as ours is to get on with it. I believe that still. What I failed to calculate is the pain that increases even as one gets on with it." A therapist friend tells him, "Grief comes to you all at once, so you think it will be over all at once. But it is your guest for a lifetime." The challenge, Rosenblatt comes to understand, is to transform grief into a positive force.
Always a loner, Rosenblatt takes up kayaking two and a half years after Amy's death as an escape from his hectic household -- which gathers in Quogue during the summer. Affording rare moments of solitude, his time on the water is brooding time away from the brood. Kayak Morning opens just past dawn on June 27, 2010, a few months after the publication of Making Toast. While the rest of his family -- including his wife, two grown sons, and six grandchildren -- sleep, Rosenblatt slides his olive-green kayak into the water and paddles out to Penniman's Creek. Over the next seven hours (and 145 pages), he explores both his own life and that of the half-mile-long creek, letting his thoughts and boat meander, "bob[bing] along in solitary confinement" as the "tides rummage with the pebbles."
Rosenblatt's observations about his palindromic vessel, literature, and his own painful feelings are sometimes somber but always rich. He comments, "You can't always make your way in the world by moving up. Or down, for that matter. Boats move laterally on water, which levels everything. It is one of the two great levelers." Rosenblatt is practiced enough to know that his statement is far more powerful without spelling out the second leveler.
As Rosenblatt's reflections make clear, it wasn't as if he lived a life sheltered from painful realities before Amy's death. The author of fifteen books, including Children of War, Rosenblatt recollects grim assignments reporting on Cambodian girls in Thai refugee camps, patients in a Beirut mental hospital, and children of Hutus and surviving Tutsis staring out windows in a UN camp in Tanzania. He recalls the many U.S. presidents he has met, including an affable Ronald Reagan, about whom he wrote the "Man of the Year" story for Time magazine.
Amid his anger at God and disgust with his own weakness and self-absorption, his thoughts frequently turn to literature, including works about fathers and daughters (King Lear, Emma, Washington Square) and "crazy old men in boats: Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Hemingway's Old Man, Captains Ahab, Nemo, McWhirr, Wolf Larsen, Queeg, Bligh." Commenting that "Only literary jerks like me think of Moby-Dick in Starbucks," he adds, "Seeing the world through a book darkly. I'm not sure it's good for you."
In other words, all that intellectualizing and introspection may not be as effective a path to happiness as just doing what you have to do: "Too much is made of the value of plumbing the depths. The nice thing about kayaking is that you ride the surface, which is akin to dealing with the task at hand." Still, for certain people -- Rosenblatt among them -- plumbing the depths is inescapable. And writing, which, like kayaking, requires "precision and restraint," is what keeps him afloat, even if it is not as effective at making "sorrow endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable, and love possible" as he would wish.
Drifting on the water, he realizes that "Art does not make up a life. Experience does not make up a life. And death does not make up a life either." What does, then? Love. Kayak Morning, with this hopeful epiphany, leaves us looking forward to Rosenblatt's next update on how he and his extended family are getting on with the business of making "somewhere out of nowhere," triumphing over the devastations of abiding grief through enduring love.

The Man Within My Head Book Review

It's difficult for an American to read Graham Greene without feeling insufficiently skeptical of the world. Compared to his world-weary Brits, we're such Pollyannas! We keep believing, more or less, in our families and our friends and even, fitfully, our country. Almost as though we're constitutionally resistant to disenchantment, we're cheerfully undefended against the countless layers of darkness that were Greene's chosen realm to dwell in and write about.
That's why it's particularly enlightening, and only somewhat vexing, to read about Greene from a lifelong devotee whose background is both British and American. Pico Iyer, who has accumulated an increasingly complex and questioning body of writing himself, and who spent a good portion of his youth commuting between frigid boarding schools in England and the incessantly sunny climes of his Los Angeles-based parents, writes of the man in his head with the charged perception of a long-lost son. Could he have chosen a more self-contradictory, shadowy father figure?
As Iyer puts it, Greene is "the patron saint of the foreigner alone, drifting between certainties [whose] territory is the small apartment in the very foreign town, the passion that is temporary, the border crossing that seems the perfect home for the man who prays to a God he's not sure he believes in." Noir-ish descendant of Somerset Maugham and antecedent of John le Carré, Greene habitually sets his scenes in treacherous, morally murky circumstances. Men and women are usually at odds -- "they don't share the same anxieties" -- with "identities they change at every moment and no real friend or family to hold them to their word." Everyone is on the run, not least of all from themselves.
Quite a bloke Iyer has chosen to be obsessed with: tortured Catholic, fugitive husband and father, rumored spy, over-punctilious man of probing conscience who was capable of disloyalties of every stripe. Greene cannot write a page without conveying the ever-mutable doubleness of things, and Iyer's dual vantage, having grown up on both sides of the pond, positions him well to generate brilliant insights like the following three:
All Greene's work is about the conundrum of feeling someone else's position too acutely, to the point of not being able to hear, or act on, one's own. And that natural sympathy for the other's point of view is made more agonized…because one can have so little faith in oneself. Greene could write with harrowing compassion for every character except the one who might be taken as Graham Greene.
Greene could not bring himself to believe in God and so, by his own lights, he was cursed. But he could not entirely believe in himself or his own positions, including his arguments against God, and so there was always a small chink of hope.
Greene's great theme was always innocence, if only because he could never disguise how much he missed it…. None of the characters was entirely cynical, able to write off all belief, and yet none of them can be a simple believer, either. They're all trembling in the balance.
All of these observations, and a lot more besides, go a long way toward nailing down an elusive subject as precisely as anyone has -- a deep deconstruction of one of modern lit's most puzzling specimens. Where Iyer gets in trouble is when he over-identifies with his subject, veering a bit too far out of his way to underscore a (quasi-mystical?) connection between them. Even when some of the parallels do seem eerie -- both watched their homes burn down, both had chance encounters with bishops in southern Bolivia, and so forth -- ultimately these coincidences prove less nourishing for the reader than they seem to be for the author. Why force parallels when each life is more than riveting in its own right?
Certainly Iyer's is turning out to be. He has stockpiled enough color from forays in Bangkok, Bhutan, and Belgravia -- to choose just the second letter of the alphabet -- to never again need to mix it up with Greene. Of particular fascination is the material he draws upon from his early English boarding school years: "Every morning, at 6:45, a white-coated retainer of sorts, Mr. Gower, knocked on each door, and opened it a crack -- "Morn, sir!" -- and then we trudged down the icy stone spiral staircase to where a vat of tea and our copies of The Times awaited us." Reconciling this to life in a California that had "exiled history" and "didn't know what to do with the dark" gives the writer a privileged perspective on two worlds -- shuttling back and forth between "unquiet Englishmen who were often more compassionate than they let on and quiet Americans who were not quite so innocent as they liked to seem."
As long as the author keeps producing sentences of this caliber, it is entirely possible to imagine a younger writer thirty years hence writing a book about the man in his head -- one with the unlikely name of Pico Iyer. Let's hope it's half as smart and sharp as this one, and just a touch less over-identifying.

Did You Read The Book The Map and the Territory?

"You know," remarks a character in Michel Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory, "it's the journalists who've given me the reputation for being a drunk; what's curious is that none of them ever realized that if I was drinking a lot in their presence, it was simply in order to put up with them."

A passing familiarity with Houellebecq the media figure, a man described variously as an enfant terrible, an agent provocateur, an Islamophobe, a misogynist, a pornographer, an egomaniac, and a sad sack, will give away the surprise: The speaker is Houellebecq himself, in conversation with an enormously successful French photographer and painter named Jed Martin. Martin, the novel's true subject, has enlisted Houellebecq to write a catalogue essay. During their first meeting, Martin interrupts Houellebecq's desultory tangent about Thai brothels by saying, "I have the slight impression you're playing your own role." Houellebecq brightens. He couldn't, it turns out, agree more.
It is both a pleasure and a relief to find Houellebecq having such fun with himself and his public persona. The critics, and this one is no exception, have perhaps been too quick to see a pessimist or nihilist, whose inflammatory outburts and despairing outlook are as much an apparatus of self-promotion as they are symptoms of philosophical laziness. He is a wealthy tax exile and winner of the 2010 Prix Goncourt (for this novel), but in Public Enemies, a book of his correspondence with the gadfly Bernard Henri-Lévy, he gives voice to almost comical delusions of persecution. He is indeed well-disliked by many, but he brings it upon himself. Behind this puzzling self-caricature and calculated contempt is a mind hard at work.
The Map and the Territory is the first of Houellebecq's books to give serious treatment to characters not modeled on the author. Jed Martin's progress as an artist is traced from childhood, when his drawings of flowers meet the bemused approval of his babysitter: "Little boys draw bloodthirsty monsters, Nazi insignia, and fighter planes…rarely flowers." Just before his seventh birthday, his mother kills herself, a barbed parallel with Houellebecq's own abandonment by his mother, Lucie Ceccaldi. At the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Martin takes up photography, applying himself to the "systematic photography of the world's manufactured objects…. Suspension files, handguns, diaries, printer cartridges, forks…an exhaustive catalogue of the objects of human manufacturing in the Industrial Age."
Martin is a reader, and an avid student of Catholicism's influence on Western culture, while "his contemporaries generally knew more about the life of Spider-Man than of Jesus." Yet, as he tells a journalist late in life -- the narrative perspective here is something like an art-critical biography -- he wants "simply to give an account of the world." He has a monkish disregard for friendship or any other human connection. His only romantic relationship, with a beautiful Russian woman named Olga, begins by accident ("The image of the virile brute who is good in bed had been coming back in force lately…. Such a situation did not really put Jed at an advantage"). He has been making photographic enlargements of old Michelin maps, and she is a Michelin PR executive who has been tasked by the company with, for lack of a better phrase, co-opting his work.
The market's corrupting effect on human and, in particular, sexual relationships has long been Houellebecq's major theme. The story of Martin's rise to fame and fortune is, similarly, a satire of the art world and of the market's corrupting effect on the creative impulse and its fruits. In his late career, Martin returns to figurative painting, producing a celebrated series about professions, e.g., The Journalist Jean-Pierre Pernaut Chairing an Editorial Meeting; Claude Vorilhon, Bar-Tabac Manager (Vorilhon is the leader of the much-mocked Raëlian cult, which inspired Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island); Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology, and the unfinished Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market.
Yet, buried in this deft dissection of the artistic life is an unexpected, oblique meditation on death. One of Houellebecq's most affectingly drawn characters is Martin's dying father, a former architect with whom he takes Christmas dinner each year. Martin insists on cuisine à l'ancienne, a phrase and theme which recurs in unexpected places. We find him at a funeral à l'ancienne, one "which didn't attempt to dodge the reality of death." At other funerals, the artist had been "shocked that some of those present hadn't bothered to switch off their cell phones before the moment of the cremation."
Martin recalls a Malagasy burial practice he learned about from a former lover. "One week after the death, the corpse was dug up, the shroud was undone, and a meal was eaten in its presence…then it was buried again. This was repeated after a month, then after three…." Much later, when the character Houellebecq is gruesomely murdered (decapitated, in fact, as is his dog) and Martin is consulted by the police, an investigator recalls a time when, "feeling that he was beginning to have difficulty bearing crime scenes, he had gone to the Buddhist Center of Vincennes to ask them if it would be possible for him to practice asubha, the meditation on the corpse. The lama had at first tried to dissuade him: this meditation, he had opined, was difficult, and not adapted to the Western mentality…."
The investigator's bewilderment in the face of evil -- all crimes, he believes, come down to sex or money, and he is vindicated vis-à-vis the Houellebecq case -- has much in common with the author's disillusionment with and disappointment in human existence. But it is Martin's relationship with his father, whom cancer has forced to suffer the indignity of an artificial anus, that makes The Map and the Territory a great achievement. In a moment of moribund free-association, Martin's father, the subject of The Architect Jean-Pierre Martin Leaving the Management of His Business, breaks down recalling a nest he once built for some swallows: "They never wanted to use my nest. Never."
Martin interrupts: "Swallows never use a nest built by human hand…. If a man so much as touches their nest, they leave it to build a new one." It's a lie: He's made up this factoid off the top of his head to reassure the old man. "His father had just relived, for the last time, the hopes and failures that formed the story of his life. It doesn't amount to much, generally speaking, a human life." This is no sentimental or cynical power play on the author's part. Like Jed Martin, Houellebecq, for all his bad-boy trappings, has only ever wanted to depict life as he believes it is. This is not to say he never wanted it to be otherwise, and that has never been clearer than in The Map and the Territory. Indeed, he has arrived here at something like a pacific acceptance of mankind's -- to put it mildly -- imperfect lot. "There was in the voice of the author of The Elementary Particles something that Jed had never noticed before, that he'd never expected to find, and that he took some time to identify, because basically he hadn't found it in anyone, for many years: he seemed happy." Put another way: Houellbecq is dead -- long live Houellebecq.

The Winds Of Winter Book Love

Fantasy author George R. R. Martin partially appeased fans who are ravenous for Book No. 6 in his "A Song of Ice and Fire" series by posting an excerpt from his new novel on his website on Dec. 28.

The writer, who was recently selected by USA Today as their author of the year, allowed six years to go bybetween the release of Book No. 4 and Book No. 5 in the "Song of Ice and Fire" series. Book No. 5, “A Dance With Dragons,” came out this past July and is still number 23 on the New York Times fiction bestseller list, with four of Martin's other books appearing on the paperback mass-market fiction list. Fans, who have been eager for more of the fictional land of Westeros, also depicted in an HBO series based on Martin’s books, have been frustrated by the fact that Martin has not yet committed to a release date for Book No. 6, which is titled “The Winds of Winter.” Martin has said the series will consist of seven books.

The excerpt of “The Winds of Winter” is more than 6,000 words long and consists of a section of the story from the viewpoint of Theon Greyjoy, the former ward of protagonist Eddard Stark. According to Martin’swebsite on Livejournal, another new sample chapter from Book No. 6 will be included with the paperback version of “A Dance with Dragons,” scheduled to be released in July.

Martin said on his website that the sample chapter told from Theon’s point of view will be at the beginning of “The Winds of Winter” although the events it narrates take place before some of the events in “A Dance with Dragons.”

As of yet, there is no scheduled release date for “Winds.”