The Descendants: Bourgeois Self-Congratulation
Posted on | January 29, 2012 | 4 Comments
Sigh. The Descendants. The reviews from places like Rolling Stone and the New York Times call it a “nearly perfect” movie. While Dana Stevens over at Slate, did take on the thinness of the story, and the underwritten nature of the George Clooney character, no one that I’ve seen (in my cursory Google search) seems to be noting that this movie just reinforces the notion that what counts as a story is the trials and tribulations of the white upper classes.
I’ve written about this before — it was my chief complaint about Freedom and the critical canonization of Jonathan Franzen. There is a certain cultural object that seems specifically designed not only to reassure wealthy white people that their story is central to the culture, but to flatter them that they are the right kind of wealthy white person, and The Descendants is as perfectly-formed an example of this as anything I’ve seen in a while. (The Help did it too, with race relations more than gradations of class, but so ham-handedly that it’s hardly worth parsing.) Matt King has inherited enormous wealth, but, the voice-over is careful to explain to us that his refusal to spend his capital is a moral decision for which we should admire him. He chooses to live solely on the proceeds of his property law practice, a practice that is, by the looks of the office space, pretty lucrative. Matt’s aristocratic self-restraint renders him superior to his wife, whose attitude is characterized by greed and unnecessary risk-taking (hence the coma, and her subsequent death). Oh and she cuckolded him. (A mistake the movie emphasizes by having her cuckold George Clooney with the guy who played Scooby Doo. In case we might miss the point about how foolish she is.) Elizabeth is the wrong kind of wealthy person, one who wants expensive things, who likes shopping and spas and flashy risky sports. Matt’s cousins too, are characterized by their greed, even as the ever-present voice over informs us that most of them didn’t inherit the kind of capital that can be disdained, and that they really need the money that the land sale would generate. Matt is the sole trustee of a family land trust, and although the cousins have all voted, and have lined up a buyer with a plan for developing this admittedly gorgeous chunk of Hawaiian land, at the last minute Matt refuses to sign the papers to dissolve the trust. He gives a pretty speech about how their ancestors have entrusted him with this land, and the movie portrays this as a brave moment of standing up to his family. But the effect is to demonstrate once again that Matt, played by the always-charming George Clooney is the right kind of rich person. This allows the viewer, who has by this time come to identify with Clooney because he’s well, Clooney, to reassure themselves that they are not like all those crass rich people, they are (or would be) the sort of correct rich person who would never have sold off that gorgeous piece of property, even to help support their cousins who actually need the money.
There are many charming aspects of the movie, chief among them Clooney’s warm performance as a baffled father, and although reviews refer to the daughters as terrible brats, they seemed pretty normal to me (I know a now-12 year old who would have worn her older sister’s underwear in just that mocking manner). And I get the legacy issue — I too come from one of those families where there are a lot of photos of successful and fabulous ancestors who did astonishing things. It’s not that these are not suitable subjects for novels or movies (see Edith Wharton, Henry James) but it’s the utter lack of self-awareness that soured this movie for me. The characters are so black and white, the wife so bad, George Clooney so good, the cousins so bad, George Clooney so good, that one can’t help but get a whiff of that same sort of white-guy-self-congratulation that inflated the reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s quite good novel into the next Great American Novel. When you’ve got reviews in all the major media outlets doing the same for this movie (to say nothing of the Oscar nomination and whatever it’s garnering at the SAG and Golden Globe awards), it seems to me that we’re looking at another case of bourgeois self-congratulation. And it seems to me that everyone involved should be just a little smarter than that.
Resolved: The Year of Writing Letters
Posted on | January 9, 2012 | No Comments
Stephen Elliot over at The Rumpus got me thinking about letters again. He’s started a new subscription service called “Letters in the Mail” where for $5 a month, he’ll ask writers to write an actual letter on paper, and send it to the subscribers. It’s a cool idea, and although I haven’t signed up yet, I’m thinking about it.
But in the meantime, I’ve resolved to write more letters this year. I have a long one started to my oldest writing friend, the one for whom I’ve got a whole folder, down in the basement filing cabinet, stuffed with the letters we wrote one another. Our friendship was made through the mail, since we’ve never, in the 20 years we’ve known one another, lived in the same place. Somehow though, the quality of our email correspondence has never matched up to the quality of the letters we used to write one another. It could be because our lives have both changed, in many many ways, but I think, somehow, the medium is also involved.
The whole beginning of the letter to my friend Deb is an examination of how odd it is, after the immediacy of email, to write a letter I know she won’t see until sometime next week. I like the roominess of that. I like that there’s space in a letter to explore something that’s bothering you, or interesting you, or compelling you right now but without the expectation that someone is going to respond this afternoon. You’re not writing it to get a response, to get an immediate answer, but rather, trying to get a sense of the contours of the country, and then sending that impression to someone you love for safekeeping.
In my 20s, from a ferry travelling between France and Ireland, two friends and I put a note in the wine bottle we’d just emptied and threw it overboard. We made up a story about being taken hostage by pirates, and months later, we all got postcards from an Englishwoman, who found our bottle, and who hoped we’d secured our freedom by then. It was charming.
That’s how the mail seems these days. The internet used to feel like putting a message in a bottle, but the internet now is so busy and popular and full of traffic and Twitter and Blogs and noise that it no longer seems that way. The mail though. No one is sending things through the mail. Perhaps it’s picking up some lost cachet …
We’ll see how it goes. I have a short list of people to whom I plan to start writing letters again. The Post Office is in trouble, so maybe we should all start sending one another letters, and postcards again. Who doesn’t like to get real mail from an actual person?
Franzen, Suicide and the Real
Posted on | April 21, 2011 | 9 Comments
I was pretty clear last fall that I thought the whole kertuffle over Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was, in essence, a big circle jerk by well-educated publishing industry types who got all excited to see their own little slice of American experience fêted as The Way We Live Now. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t like the novel. The book’s satire was actually sort of brilliant, the characters were interesting and alive and often heartbreaking, but at the end, I just couldn’t help but feel that Franzen was having it both ways. He was getting away with crafting exactly the sort of book that would appeal to the vanity of the people he was satirizing. Which was also sort of brilliant, if in a dark hopeless kind of way.
Franzen’s piece in the April 18 issue of the New Yorker has been nagging at me all week. There’s a lot going on in this article — Franzen runs off to a mostly-deserted island off of Chile where he hopes to detach himself from the “addiction to stimulation” that he feels is the bane of our time; to see a rare songbird, the raydito; to somehow reconnect with what he feels is a lost authentic individualistic narrative represented by Robinson Crusoe (the island is in the archipelago in which Alexander Selkirk was marooned whose story served as Defoe’s inspiration) and finally, he means to scatter a matchbook’s worth of his friend David Foster Wallace’s ashes while he’s there.
For me, the heart of the essay is not the camping misadventures, or the long digressions about Robinson Crusoe and the history of the novel or What Fiction Means Today, but Franzen’s struggle to come to terms with Wallace’s suicide. The digressions are interesting, and serve to illustrate how far Franzen is willing to go to avoid dealing with the loss he’s been running from for two years, but as a fellow traveller who has been down that long road of trying to figure out why someone you loved would do that to you, this was where I found myself actually touched by the article.
Franzen describes sitting with Wallace the summer before he died. Franzen can’t keep his eyes off the hummingbirds flitting around his house and he can’t even get Wallace to see them. He realizes that “the difference between his unmanageable misery and my manageable discontents to be that I could escape myself in the joy of birds and he could not.”
If you’ve ever been around someone who is seriously depressed, you’ll recognize the gulf. There’s a weird sense when you’re sitting with someone who is depressed like that that your own enjoyment of the hummingbirds is a betrayal. “Look!” you say, and they turn away with a big “so what.” A big “so what” that feels like personal rejection. A big “so what” that makes you wonder if the birds are really so great, makes you wonder if maybe you’re just an overenthusiastic ridiculous idiot. “Dancing Bear” I call that part of my personality. The one that tries too hard to engage. I grew up with a depressive mother, and I lost my younger brother in 2003 to a single-car auto accident after a long period of depression. I spent most of my life trying to engage depressed people. That I failed with the one I loved the most is the hole in the world with which I live every day.
My depressed person, Patrick was just coming out of a dark dark six week stretch. We called the look he had during that time “alligator eyes above the swamp.” That he managed most days to get out of bed, to drive to my house to pick the dog up for a walk was a major accomplishment. That night, he’d seemed to be coming out of it. He’d seemed happy. In hindsight, it looks like mania, but that’s hindsight. So it was after a night of rather manic drinking at the last of our monthly Art Walks here in town, he drove an acquaintance to his house ten miles outside of town. Coming back down the gravel road he drove off an embankment at, as the coroners told me ” a high rate of speed.” He was very drunk.
Franzen’s description of Wallace’s boredom, his indifference, his inability to see the birds, I get that. Franzen’s descriptions of how boredom, and it’s attendant imitation of being a living human being fuel Wallace’s fiction is incredibly astute. The difference between my brother Patrick and me was, in large part, that I can find real joy in the actual things of the world — in my garden for instance, or in the experience of hiking in the mountains that surround Livingston, in the dogs, in watching my friend Nina’s kids grow and change. Actual joy in something outside my own head. Patrick, like most depressed people, especially when he was in the hole, couldn’t. He wanted to, and he often tried to imitate someone who cared, but he couldn’t actually make that experiential leap where the world outside his own pain was interesting enough to perhaps provide him a lifeline back to the world.
When someone you love kills himself, whether accidentally like Patrick did or deliberately like Wallace (although the survivors of both are left wondering, was it deliberate? was it an impulsive accident? and neither of us will ever know), the anger is overwhelming. Franzen claims its in large part what drove him to an island off the coast of Chile: “my current state of flight from myself had begun two years earlier. At the time, I’d made a decision not to deal with the hideous death of someone I’d loved so much but instead take refuge in anger and work. Now that work was done …” When someone you love kills himself, you’re left in a welter of narrative: everyone argues over the truth of a story that can never be determined. Mostly though you’re left in the bewildering position of wondering how someone who you know loved you could do that to you. It’s the kind of pain that you never get over, the one that lodges deep down inside. What kind of terrible person must you be if the person who loved you most in this world couldn’t even be bothered to stay alive?
Here’s where I’m deeply grateful to Jonathan Franzen — he goes there, into the head of the fucked up depressed person, and parses the fucked up logic in a way that finally makes some kind of sense.
To deserve the death sentence he’d passed on himself, the execution of the sentence had to be deeply injurious to someone. To prove once and for all that he truly didn’t deserve to be loved, it was necessary to betray as hideously as possible those who loved him best, by killing himself at home and making them firsthand witnesses to his act.
That’s the first thing I’ve found (and believe me, I spent two years reading everything I could find on depression and suicide, often to the consternation of my friends) that makes sense. By killing oneself the depressed person can “cure” you of the mistake of loving them, prove to you that you should never have loved someone so unworthy in the first place. They’ll free you from your mistaken love.
When I was in grad school, one of the reasons that my professors were spectacularly disinterested in my novel was that I wasn’t experimenting with the idea that we’re all somehow hollow, with the idea that “the Real” is an unobtainable fiction. I wrote a novel about the realest thing I could think of, parents trying to find their lost child in an actual physical landscape. I wrote about death, and not as a metaphor. Perhaps one of the reasons I could never read Wallace is that what he’s describing is the inside of the head of the sorts of depressed and narcissistic people who raised me. That fictive universe feels like the one I chewed my own arm off to escape, and one reason I escaped into outdoor sports is because that was a world where it was easy to determine what was Real and what was unimportant. Keeping warm enough in bad weather not to die of hypothermia: Real. What you looked like while doing it: Not Real. Not panicking when you encounter a bear standing on his hind legs and woofing at you on a trail you’ve hiked with your dogs a million times: Real. Even in the garden where the stakes are lower, cause and effect is pretty clear: enough water and sunshine and you get tomatoes and lettuces. You don’t get interpretations of tomatoes and lettuces.
Which is not to say that birding or gardening or hiking would have saved any of the people we loved. Depression is a real live mental illness with biological components and we don’t really know how to treat it or cure it or save the people we love. And while I’m still not going to start writing dense, footnoted prose about our alienation from ourselves, while, in fact, I’m writing about the ongoing idea that we can actually know ourselves and our loved ones in some fundamental way, I will always be grateful to Jonathan Franzen for doing the hard work of parsing the fucked up logic of the suicidal.
(Although for his own good, I would like to encourage him to learn some real outdoor skills the next time he wants to go off and play Robinson Crusoe. Our search and rescue teams are good, but still.)
Movies: What do we want?
Posted on | March 1, 2011 | 3 Comments
So, Oscar weekend has come and gone and to no one’s surprise, the venerable academy crowned The King’s Speech . I know people who just loved that movie, and I can’t figure out why. It was fine — lovely performances, a dash of wit from Helena Bonham Carter, who I adore, but who was, frankly, phoning it in in another posh role. I mean, she must be able to do those in her sleep by now. The problem with this movie was that there wasn’t a single surprise in it. The Duke of York/King was straight from the Poor Little Rich Boy store, while his brother was right out of the Central Casting Cad box. Adversity was triumphed over, the clothes were lovely, the wall treatments more so, and disaster was averted at the coronation and by extension, England Was Saved. It was like watching a movie tick off the boxes. Every expectation was met. Every preconceived notion was confirmed.
There is a certain pleasure in this, but for me, that pleasure is deeply cut by frustration. I chafed at this movie the whole way through. It was very well made. It was very well acted. It was not unwatchable. But nothing happened that I didn’t expect to happen.
Which was in real contrast to an older movie that washed up on the shores of my Netflix list this weekend: Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give. This movie did actually overturn my expectations for it — I was expecting a movie that pandered to the expectations of the arty upper classes, and I got a surprisingly human movie in which characters changed and grew in some interesting and tiny little ways. No one Triumphed over Adversity in this movie, but characters did move in some rather fundamental ways — Catherine Keener’s character learned to stop wallowing in self-indulgent guilt and actually kind of enjoy selling things (especially when fleecing unpleasant people), the daughter survived a glimpse of some really alarming adult behavior, the father behaved badly for a little bit and got over it without destroying his family in the process. Like I said, this is a movie of incremental changes, which is what I liked about it. The tropes didn’t play out in the way that we expect them to, and yet, it was, for me, a much more satisfying movie than The King’s Speech. Even the bourgeois trappings didn’t annoy me as much as they usually do in these sorts of movies, and I’m not sure why. Because we see the characters going to work? At actual jobs we can understand? I still haven’t figured that one out, except that the lifestyles of the characters seemed grounded in a reality that is usually lacking in the movies (think of Diane Keaton’s shelter-porn house in Something’s Got to Give for an example of the sort of unconscious expression in movies that “this is just the way nice people live”).
At any rate, it made an interesting contrast and made me think about what it is that people want from movies. I suppose what we learned this year was that academy voters, as usual, preferred the staid comforts of a movie like The King’s Speech even to the still pretty conventional tale of hustling (if sometimes unpleasant) internet entrepreneurs in The Social Network. While The Social Network was hardly ground-breaking filmmaking, at least it was not a movie we have seen a million times before. It was really quite a good movie about something you wouldn’t immediately think would make a good movie, and Jesse Eisenberg turned in the kind of performance that makes one think of him in a whole new light. There were actually a few surprises in that movie.
Is it just that times are frightening? Is this why people want the movie equivalent of warm mashed potatoes? Or is that just what people have always wanted out of movies? Then why, this year, does it feel so much more egregious than usual?
Caribou Island
Posted on | February 16, 2011 | No Comments
One of the things that fascinated me when I was in graduate school was the way that landscape functioned in fiction, and in particular, the ways that wildness and wilderness were portrayed. In part this was because I was trying both to discover and to portray what it was about landscape that kept me in the West after I’d sort of accidentally arrived here.
I spent a lot of time during those years I was writing Place Last Seen working against the idea that setting and place in fiction have value only as they magnify or reflect the human action of the story. What I was interested in was a fiction in which the natural world, and in particular, the natural world of the American West, functions not as myth, not as some refraction of the human perception, but as a place that exists in its own right. What I fell in love with when I moved West, was a landscape in which the weather can kill you, but where that’s just one of the facts of life. It isn’t Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw,” it isn’t a world that is out to get human beings, it’s simply a world in which human beings are embedded along with all sorts of other creatures and trees and animals.
And yet, there is a long long tradition of mythologizing the landscape of the American West as either a force against which human beings (usually men) go forth to test their manhood, or as a sort of mythological space into which human beings venture in order to discover their “true” nature. In this version of the American fictional mythos, the landscapes of the west can never simply be, they must always exist as a mythos.
It’s enough to drive a person a little bit crazy when you’ve lived here for a while. Yes, I live in the midst of several astonishing mountain ranges, and in proximity to wilderness areas where bears and wolves and coyotes and elk and moose and deer and all sorts of smaller woodland creatures live. Mushroom hunting here involves keeping an eye out for grizzly bears, which is interesting, and forces one to keep ones wits about them. But it’s just where we live. It’s not a mythic journey.
I have one friend, an artist who raises sheep and does carpentry. He’s an extremely well-read guy whose wife is a librarian, and nothing sets him off like those fiction writers who turn the West into a site of mythos. Gretel Ehrlich makes him apoplectic — her work reads to him as a false romanticization of the life he knows, like someone smearing their personality all over a landscape that should be allowed to stand for itself. Despite my personal fondness for Gretel, who was encouraging to me at a time when I really needed it, I can see his point.
Because he had lived in Alaska as a child, and had spent much of his life in California, I had really high hopes that David Vann’s Caribou Island was not going to be a book about the mythology of the west, but rather, a book about how people actually live out here. For much of the book those hopes were sustained and I was relieved to find myself in a fictional Alaska that seemed a lot like anyplace else in America, but with much better scenery and weather that could kill you. A place where people have regular jobs like being a dentist, or a veterinary assistant, or a retired preschool teacher. Sure, there are tourists like Monique, the bored and beautiful trustfunder who wrecks some havoc early in the novel, but she’s a pretty well-known type out here, and so even that felt like we were still in a world in which the West is just a place, not a myth.
But Vann seems to want to have it both ways. On the one hand he seems eager to show the West that is a sort of ordinary place, a place where, for instance, boats and helicopters and planes are perhaps more normal than in other places, but where people want pretty much what they want other places: sex, love, marriage, meals in restaurants, destination weddings, and to get high. But then the book takes a turn into that country of “myth” that always seems to infect a certain kind of Western novel.
While it’s tempting to say the landscape takes over the character, I think it’s actually the other way around, the characters fall in love with their own myths about the landscape, and set out to live them. Which happens. I’m not saying it doesn’t, I just wish it didn’t feel so much like some other story took over this novel during the second half. That Gary is determined to build a cabin on an island in the lake, and that he pressures his wife Irene to join him in this quest despite the mysterious and debilitating headaches she’s suffering seems willful and bullheaded, but understandable. What’s less understandable is the sheer lack of common sense Gary shows. He’s lived in Alaska for decades. Apparently, he built much of his own house, which the novel describes as comfortable and pleasant. But when it comes to this cabin, he seems to be making it up as he goes along, and with very few skills. He’s supposed to be driven to build this cabin in the woods out of some irresistable urge to finally take part in the kind of medieval epic the study of which he abandoned decades before to move to Alaska in the first place. He resents Irene, she’s furious at him, and yet, together, they continue their improbable project, started way too late in the season (after decades in Alaska they’re still unclear on the implacability of weather?) and Vann drives this part of the story to a relentless end. This, which was supposed to be the driving heart of the novel, the mythos of the place, of marriage, of “modern” life rang so hollow to me that I found myself infuriated in some of the same ways that my sheep rancher friend is infuriated by The Solace of Open Spaces.
This part of the book (the part that’s garnering great reviews for exactly the mythological aspect I’m objecting to) felt inauthentic to the same extent that the rest of the book felt authentic. It felt like the kind of story you tell when you’re back East to show off. From my little valley, these stories tend to involve our local cult members, many of whom tend to own a lot of weaponry and some of whom believe that the government has no “sovereignty” over them. It’s the kind of story that people who don’t live here want to hear about the West. About how the landscape drives people to extremes. About how different the place is. About how it is not like where they live.
Yes, we are myth-addled out here (just run a profile on Match.com and see how many responses you get from guys whose profile names are some variation of “mountain man.”) Yes, the landscapes are dramatic and the weather will kill you if you don’t pay attention. Yes, people are few and far between, which for most of us was the point of moving here in the first place. And yes, people do go off on the sort of late-life tangents like the one Vann describes. I suppose what I found so disappointing here was the shift in tone. I was so delighted by the portrait of ordinary 21st century life that I found the deep-dive into mythos at the end to be a mismatch. Perhaps that was his point, that they mythos of these places is a specific danger, like the weather.
It’s a type, the person who comes West seeking to smear his or her own inner dramas all over the landscape, and I found myself annoyed with Gary and Irene for the same reasons I found Chris McCandless and Timothy Treadway’s stories infuriating. The drama in each of these cases was generated by the total lack of common sense that the characters display, and that lack of common sense is cast as some sort of Romantic Quest. It is the most annoying of Western stereotypes, that one can, simply through the purity of one’s desire, strike out to “live deep and suck the marrow from life.” (Remember, when Thoreau wrote that he was describing life a mile from town, a town he more often than not walked home to for lunch.) And hence my disappointment, that a book that showed such promise as a clever, witty sendup of the ordinariness of life in Alaska, couldn’t resist a bathetic dive into the big myth of the West.
At the Rumpus: The Last Book I Loved
Posted on | February 10, 2011 | No Comments
Over at The Rumpus.net, I take on the Last Book I Loved (which is a book I “love” about once every year or two), The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen.
Go take a look (and if you’re not reading The Rumpus on a regular basis, you should be).
Trip to Chicago: Vivian Maier Exhibit
Posted on | January 20, 2011 | No Comments
Vivian Maier, Florida 1950s
Last week I went to Chicago, where I grew up, to visit my grandmother for her 100th birthday. I had some free time and had seen the links posted in the last few weeks to the story of Vivian Maier, so I decided to go downtown and check out the exhibition. Although I love living in Montana, exhibitions like this are something I really miss about cities.
Vivian Maier worked for most of her life as a nanny, and much of that time she spent on the North Shore, near the suburb in which I mostly grew up. I both had nannies and was one in my twenties, and it was fascinating to me to read about the way in which working as a nanny, a job that usually provides housing, seems to have provided a platform for this remarkable woman to pursue her art. On her days off she’d go into the city and take photos, and at least once she took a year off and went around the world — there are photos from Egypt, Thailand, and Morocco in the collection. She also seems to have spent a considerable  amount of time in New York and France (she grew up in France). The guy who bought these negatives at a foreclosure sale on a storage area is keeping a blog about them at Vivian Maier– Her Discovered Work.
The photos are quite astonishing, and when I was there, mid-day on a wintry Friday afternoon, the gallery was full. In fact, one of the guards was kvetching that he “must have had 200 people at least” asking where this one gallery was. They also have her cameras and some of her personal effects on display. It felt like one of those exhibitions that a person is going to be glad to say later that “I was there.” If you’re in the Chicago Area, it’s at the Chicago Cultural Center (also known as the old Library) until April 3 and it’s well worth stopping by (especially as admission is free).
CookbookSlut vs. the Economy
Posted on | January 4, 2011 | No Comments
My new CookBookSlut column is up over at Bookslut — I take on cooking and urban homesteading as one approach to the continuing implosion of the economy and the unabating high unemployment rate. I mean, if we’re not going to have jobs anymore, we’d better learn to grow our own and cook our own and take care of our own. (Rant alert, btw.)
Here’s a list of the terrific books I discuss this month:
- A Householder’s Guide to the Universe: A Calendar of Basics for the Home and Beyond
- Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables
- This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader
- Forgotten Skills of Cooking: The Time-Honored Ways are the Best – Over 700 Recipes Show You Why
Hare with the Amber Eyes
Posted on | January 2, 2011 | No Comments
This year, after many years shying away from such things, I subscribed to a lot of literary magazines including the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. Maybe it’s just that they all sent me seductive introductory offers, maybe it’s that I now have a partner who doesn’t think I’m being a showoff if I look up from a review publication to discuss whatever it is that’s caught my eye, but when I got to the pile of year-end issues, one book kept popping up in everyone’s capsule descriptions of what they’d loved reading: Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss.
A ceramicist by trade, de Waal inherits a set of 264 netsuke from his great-uncle Iggie, and sets out to explore what they are, how they came into the family, and how they survived the cataclysm of both world wars, wars that destroyed the fortune and palatial home of the Austrian branch of his family. For de Waal is descended from the Ephrussi family, one of the great 19th and early-20th century Jewish banking families who emerged from the Ukraine after making a fortune in grain and oil, and his story follows the contours not only of aesthetic history, but also history of the more tragic kind.
It’s a mesmerizing read that seems to shift seamlessly from discussion of the rise of the great Jewish merchant banks, to the aesthetic fashions of 1870s Paris, to his great-uncle Iggie’s settled life in Japan with his younger boyfriend, to the story of Iggie and de Waal’s grandmother growing up in Vienna, to his own journeys in search of these stories. I’ll admit part of my fascination is that I have any number of talismans of my own vanished family wealth, wealth that emerged from the gears and grain capitol that was Chicago in the 1870s: a diamond ring I was given by my grandmother “because you’re the only one who cares about the story,” a set of silverware engraved with the initials of the great-grandmother after whom I was named, various bits and bobs of china that survived the century since that fortune went down with my great-great grandfather on the Lusitania.
But there was something more to this book than just a simple memoir, de Waal’s writing about the netsuke, enacts the same sort of pleasure as the one he describes as being at the core of the enduring appeal of the nestuke. He writes like a man turning small treasures over and over in his hand, treasures he’s happy to describe and to share. Describing the netsuke in their first home, the home of Charles Ephrussi (one of Proust’s models for Swann), de Waal also describes what is so seductive about his own book:
“But the vitrine — as opposed to the museum’s case — is for opening. And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric.
A good story is also both seductive and electric in this way, and this is the effect of de Waal’s prose. It is as though he brings out a series of objects and shows them to one, tells their stories, not parsing their meanings in a reductive way that closes off meaning, but discussing them in the best discursive manner, in a way that leaves meaning open and continuous. Like any objects that have survived cataclysm, the stories attached to them are not always pleasant, but the experience of hearing these stories, of turning them over and over in ones’ mind, this is an experience not to be missed.
New Year, New Blog
Posted on | January 1, 2011 | No Comments
Although I don’t anticipate the demise of LivingSmall any time soon, for some time now, I’ve been finding that venue confining. While sustainability will continue to be an ongoing concern, it’s only part of a larger discussion I’d like to begin about how we can interrogate the conventional narratives that are driving our political and artistic thinking.
It’s not that I’m interested in contrarianism for it’s own sake, but what I am interested in is writing more posts like Franzen and “The Great American Novel”. That post felt to me like the beginning of a larger conversation I’d have liked to have had, but for which LivingSmall was not quite the right home. I’m sure it hardly matters to my twelve devoted readers, but because I have a sort of internal compass after all these years about what a LivingSmall post is, I find myself not writing about topics I’m interested in because they don’t seem right for that venue. I’ll continue to write about food and gardening and wild nature and dogs over there, while I anticipate doing more cultural commentary, writing about books and movies and politics over here.
And so, here we are … a blog under my own name, in which I’m going to work to articulate what I both want to write and want to read, as well as to identify those aspects of our current culture that drive me crazy, and why. I anticipate that there will be political rants, since one can hardly write about literature and culture without taking on the influence corporatism has on all aspects of our personal and political life. Just to get it out of the way, I believe now, as I have since the Reagan era, that the “free market” ideology of the Chicago school and all their ilk are flat out wrong, and that it is blind allegiance to that ideology that has allowed the finance industry to steal our jobs and our money and to nearly bankrupt the nation. Just in case you wondered where I stand on that front.
The internet has changed radically since I started LivingSmall in 2003, so I imagine a substantial portion of the conversation will take place in the twitter feed to the right (a feed which might change appearance as I try out different widgets). While Twitter can be glib, it’s a great way to point folks to interesting topics. If the constant flow of small bits annoys you, you might take a look at my paper.li aggregator, The Charlotte Freeman Daily, which updates once every 24 hours with interesting items posted by people I follow on Twitter. And while you’re free to “friend” me on Facebook, I find that that has become the place where I keep up with personal friends, while Twitter is the place I keep up with folks whose work or views I find interesting in the larger world.
It took getting laid off in 2009 to shock me back into working at becoming a writer again, and while I’m a long way from supporting myself at it, 2010 was a year that saw me edging back into the world of publication. I published my first short story ever, Robert Redford Speaking French, which ran in the Spring/Summer 2010 issue of Big Sky Journal. Bookslut has kindly given me the CookBookSlut column, a larger venue than LivingSmall in which to write about cookbooks and sustainability, while Culinate published my short essays about food and cooking. It was Culinate who sent my essay My Inner Child: A Christmas to Remember for inclusion in the Best Food Writing 2010. The email telling me the essay was to appear was perhaps the nicest surprise of my year.
So here’s to 2011, may it be filled with many interesting conversations about books and politics and sustainability and all the other important things that fuel our days. Here too is to a finished novel manuscript after all these years. It’s been a long go in between books, in part because I lost faith in my voice and my project, so it’s my hope that this effort will feed that one.
Charlotte McGuinn Freeman » Blog
- The Descendants: Bourgeois Self-Congratulation January 30, 2012
- Resolved: The Year of Writing Letters January 9, 2012
- Franzen, Suicide and the Real April 21, 2011
- Movies: What do we want? March 1, 2011
- Caribou Island February 16, 2011
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