A few years ago, I read Per Petterson’s highly-regarded novel, Out Stealing Horses, and while certain scenes stayed with me, and the writing was not careless, the book as a whole seemed trivial. The central character, Trond Sander, has undergone some powerful, potentially meaningful experiences, but he floats in the existential limbo of his severely withdrawn life on the shores of a dead sea of memories. He exists, it seems, only as a vehicle for these memories, which we, as readers, will find more or less interesting, like photographs in an album or after-dinner anecdotes. He himself is not interesting at all. Not only that: he does not wish to be interesting. What is he doing at the center of a novel?

Since reading Out Stealing Horses, I have decided that I don’t want to spend my few remaining years in the company of such characters, and I have learned that I am far less likely to encounter them in the pages of novels written by women. This may be adventitious — it may simply be a matter of the women whose fiction I’ve been reading. But I’m very careful about picking up a novel written by an unfamiliar man, to the point of disinclination. 

I am very keen on the thoughts of critic James Wood, however, so I read his piece on the new Per Petterson novel, I Curse the River of Time, with close attention. Wood made it clear to me that I would not enjoy the book, but he gave me more than that. He gave me one of my crazy ideas.  

It is one of the most mysterious effects of these novels, which push the reader sideways, in the manner of an unexpectedly sourceless wind. Like Petterson’s sentences, his heroes are hard to hold on to and yet hard to let go of. Wherever and whenever they announce themselves, they are actually somewhere else, lost in dream. “I ate my lunch standing at the counter still asleep and cycled the whole way to the exchange with my body full of dreams,” the narrator of “To Siberia” says. It’s a characteristic Petterson sentence, beginning in solid realism and ending in lyrical suspension. A body full of dreams is not quite present, and not quite present to the reader. Thus it is that Petterson’s characters often seem to be living two lives, two versions of heroism: the actual and the ideal, the slightly fuzzy present and the sharply etched past.

“Heroes who are hold to hold on to and yet hard to let go of”: isn’t it odd, I asked myself yesterday, that male novelists create such heros. Although I’ve never read one, this sounds like the description of the dreamboat in a Harlequin romance. Aren’t men  supposed to go in for clear-cut action? Isn’t it the girls who are lost in dreams? I’m being vulgar, I know. But it occurred to me that the difference between popular and literary writers is that the latter swap gender-linked inclinations. Male literary writers explore what it is to be — and this is, naturally, tantamount to showing what it is to remember. Women, in contrast, downplay feeling in a display of doing.

I mean, think about Jennifer Egan. Think about Tessa Hadley.

There are certainly men who avoid the preoccupation with existential stasis. Jonathan Franzen, Colm Tóibín, Joseph O’Neill, Peter Cameron. (I have not read much fiction by David Foster Wallace, but I find that, when I do, I read it as journalism.) Alan Hollinghurst and Edward St Aubyn. Ian McEwan, of course. (But not Julian Barnes or Martin Amis.) Then there are the literary detectives, like Henning Mankell. (But I think that women are much better at this sort of thing: Ruth Rendell, Donna Leon. It’s not that they go about it differently, but rather that they play the genres better, and are lighter on their feet.) For the most part, though, men these days seem to go in either for “lyrical suspension” or for the style of an adolescent who tosses soiled clothes wherever he happens to be.

Dave Eggers: I’ve just read the first chapter of A Hologram for the King, and decided that it is worth a go. There’s a promising Egan tang to the opening.  

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In local news, I have cut a flap in the window-covering tarp in the bedroom. Yesterday’s weather was too pleasant not to breathe indoors. This morning, the gondola men stopped by to apply a sealant of some kind to the balcony floor. They swept first, and, thoughtfully, closed the bedroom window from outside. Unfortunately, they chattered incessantly while I was trying to write the foregoing. At one point, I broke down and called Kathleen in Arizona, even though it was only 7:30 out there. When she answered neither the room phone nor her cell, I was in a pretty state, I can tell you. But she called back almost at once, drugged by a very bad dream that she was grateful I’d roused her from. We spoke again an hour later. By then, the gondola had descended on its merry way.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2012 at 10:53 am.