Pratik : Pratik WINTER ISSUE HIGHLIGHT : ROBERT SCOTTO ON 'Novels in the year of Covid'

ROBERT SCOTTO

Novels in the year of Covid

Every year a sizable number of new novels are published in English, some by laureates, some by veterans, some by sophomores and some by neophytes. Despite COVID, 2021 was no different, writers, after all, keeping to their own calendars and working, despite lockdowns, in the privacy of their own rooms. Rather than try to summarize an enormous number of books, or even give a sense of trends, I will concentrate instead on fiction from writers with established credentials, several of whom are among my personal favorites. I strongly recommend, therefore, the following, an admittedly selective and idiosyncratic group, in alphabetical order:

RACHEL CUSK

Second Place

Ms. Cusk moves beyond her award winning Outline trilogy with a work so understated that it took me some time to realize how profound it was. Not until the afterword do we get a hint about place and time, but that information is unnecessary when it finally appears because the novel is more an enigmatic parable than a realistic recreation of experience. The narrator, a woman who is married to a man who adores her, is looking for something beyond her life at the edge of a marsh, so the couple construct an outbuilding, a second place, to serve as a kind of miniature artist’s colony. A nameless, famous painter in the twilight of his career whom she has admired is invited and the sexual tension mounts as his attempt to paint her in the nude becomes both exotic and troublesome. I won’t try to untangle the mysteries because they are the essence of the book: the unknown Jeffers she addresses her reminisces to, the magical painting the artist produces before he leaves and becomes famous once more before his death, the nature of the relationship between husband and wife: Cusk creates a magical alternate universe that you experience rather than explain.

ANTHONY DOERR CLOUD

Cuckoo Land

I thought Mr. Doerr’s first novel, All the Light We Cannot See , a bit over written for its plot, but he has certainly shown with this, his second, that his sentences have range and power, evoking three quite different time periods peopled by five carefully realized main characters and many interesting minor ones. The central historical events are, roughly, the fall of Byzantium to the Turks, the Korean War and a futuristic and incredibly detailed rendering of a colony star ship that ultimately proves to be earthbound for decades. Two young people from different backgrounds, she Greek Christian, he Balkan Moslem, through a serious of extraordinary events that take place during the siege and capitulation of Constantinople in 1443, find each other and overcome the obstacles of linguistic, religious and cultural differences to settle into a lifelong relationship. Two men, one elderly, a veteran of the Korean War, and the other, young, disturbed and brilliant, come together in present day Idaho during an act of protest that goes awry. The two story lines 600 years apart are tied together by the translation by the veteran of an ancient text, which gives the novel its title, and which had been saved and preserved by the couple in Byzantium. The third narrative thread seems at first unrelated to the other two, taking place in the future, but the Latin book plays a part in revealing the lie the inhabitants are living in their false spaceship. Although the plot seems, when deconstructed, utterly enigmatic, the 700 plus pages of the novel are consistently interesting and evocative. The central mystery is the book from the distant past that touches every character deeply.

KAZUO ISHIGURO

Klara and the Sun

The only Nobel laureate on the list, Mr. Ishiguro continues to surprise me with his adventurous sorties into speculative fiction, anchored in prose of unremitting realism and precision. The typical Ishiguro sentence renders a scene in such detail that we suspend our disbelief in the strange story involving an android built to be a companion for a child. Unfortunately for Klara, once her charge reaches maturity she is no longer needed, so, powered by sunlight, she is permitted to waste away. As in his previous foray into what was once called hard science fiction, Never Let Me Go, no other writer I am aware of invests his protagonists, who are, after all, machines or surrogates bred to furnish organs for a more privileged class, with such empathy. As Klara fades in the dying daylight, taking in her last rays of energy, this reader feels as if he were watching a living, breathing entity lose her soul.

RICHARD POWERS

Bewilderment

I am bewildered that Mr. Powers has somehow traveled under the radar of the glitterati even though he produces one stunningly original novel after another. His latest is no exception: the root word of bewilderment is wild, something Powers always is, however much he creates credible people living in the places and through the strange circumstances they encounter. Here we see themes we associate with his other novels braided with a tighter focus and economy: the environmental crisis, scientific exploration that edges into the mystical, a child disturbed by the loss of his mother in an accident as well as what is happening to the natural world, and an astrobiologist father trying to navigate the intensely personal and speculative arrangements that life offers; these include invented exoplanets and decoded neurofeedback experiments (and Powers makes these complex thought experiments comprehensible) as he attempts to normalize the boy’s life. Bewilderment is shorter and more intense than The Overstory, his foray into extreme environmentalism, but so packed with information and family tragedy that it seems to be longer.

GARY SHTEYNGART

Our Country Friends

The only real COVID novel of any merit I have encountered, Mr. Shteyngart’s reimagining of Boccaccio’s Decameron is both funny, as all of his previous efforts have been, and in its own way profound, a microcosm that covers more social intricacies and shibboleths than most contemporary fiction. Seven adults and one child escape plague ridden New York for the dacha to the north owned by a Russian writer and his wife, a psychiatrist. Their daughter, adopted from a northern Chinese orphanage, is clearly gifted if also clearly on the spectrum. Their friends, all but one of Asian origin, frolic, recollect, and fall in and out of love as the world they left behind goes to the dogs. The comedy ends with one of them dying, from the virus they tried to avoid, in an extended fugue which touchingly blends past, present and the dreams that could have been but never were.

I recommend, with some reservation, these:

T. C. BOYLE

Talk to Me

Mr. Boyle does not write boring books, and his gift for comedy as well as his penchant for daring to explore subjects and people most writers avoid can both be found in this evisceration of a failed scientific experiment to raise a chimpanzee as a human child. Much of the action involves the stupidity and greed of Nim Chimsky’s handlers, who use the creature as a career boosting pawn, and the young woman who really mothers and teaches him and ultimately tries, unsuccessfully, to rescue him from the horrible fate of being turned over to a biotechnical institute as an experimental test case. The surface is so dazzling that we suspend out credibility at times simply to enjoy the depictions of inter species interaction and we forgive the cartoonish characterization of the exploiters because we come to believe, like Aimee Vuillard, the heroine, that the chimp is a conscious presence who should be saved.

JONATHAN FRANZEN

Crossroads

Mr. Franzen has been over praised and under appreciated because he has dared to write novels that are fully accessible, non- experimental and comfortably earthbound and yet that aspire to be what he called early in his career “art fiction”. Crossroads is the first volume of a projected trilogy which, when completed, might be close to 2000 pages, a domestic study of a minister and his family over the course of a couple of years in the early 1970s in suburban Chicago, with extended flashbacks. You have to give him credit for evoking a complex social scene with religion at the thematic center and replete with a good deal of sex, a dangerous intersection experienced by the characters as well as the reader. He pulls it off with grace and clarity even if several of the protagonists in the nuclear family are not fully realized and their stories not always galvanizing. Perhaps the consequent volumes will not only fill in gaps but also, by bringing us up to the present day, enrich the barely touched upon political and social issues of the times.

Interestingly, the two British novels are relatively short and written in an unadorned prose while the American novels are longer, fuller, funnier and more variegated, several running to over 600 pages. I am not quite sure why this is so and I do not want to fall into the cliché trap. But the focus of Cusk and Ishiguro is very different from the multi-plotted efforts of Doerr, Franzen and Shteyngart, where various characters occupy the narrative at various times, while the sometimes feverish prose of Boyle and Powers operates at different levels of realism, even though, like Ishiguro, they are speculative rather than naturalistic in intent. Whether you prefer understatement or elaborate artifice, realism or imaginative invention, these seven novels should satisfy your search for novelty as well as charm your aesthetic sensibilities.

Former professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, until his retirement, Robert Scotto’s previous publications include a Critical Edition of Catch-22, a book on the contemporary American novel and essays on Walter Pater, James Joyce and other major and minor nineteenth and twentieth century writers. The first edition of his biography, Moondog, won the 2008 ARSC Award for Best Research in Recorded Classical Music and the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2008 bronze medal for biography. He has published two poetry collections, most recent being, Imagined Secrets (Nirala, 2019).

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