Intermezzo

            Sally Rooney has a large number of readers who enjoy and admire her work and an equally large (or perhaps larger) number of readers who dismiss her out of hand as a niche writer catering to GenXrs ("the Salinger of the Snapchat generation") by mirroring their romantic preoccupations. In his NY Times review of her latest novel, Intermezzo, Dwight Garner leads with an acknowledgment of the "Rooney backlash" before mounting a strong defense of the book. And so I find myself in the unusual position of siding with Dwight Garner, no stranger to snarky dismissiveness himself, in his assessment. Because Intermezzo, in my opinion, isn't just a good book, it's a terrific book, in pretty much every respect. It centers largely on five characters. Ivan is a 22-year-old chess prodigy. His brother Peter, ten years older, is a successful lawyer. They are both in mourning for the recent death of their father, and, from early on in the novel, they are both involved in complicated but utterly convincing relationships. Ivan falls deeply for Margaret, a woman in her mid-thirties. Peter has a close relationship with Sylvia, an ex-lover his own age with whom he still keeps in touch, but he is also involved with Naomi,  a younger woman who seems to be using him for her own purposes at the same that he uses her for his. In the process they manage, without necessarily intending to do so, to create something that feels very much—first to the reader, and then to the characters themselves—like love. Peter and Ivan have a different kind of complicated (and convincing) relationship, elements of fondness and love warring against elements of resentment and dismissiveness as they try to find their way toward one another.

 

            A summary of this kind perhaps makes it all sound like some kind of hipster soap opera. What saves it from being so is Rooney's uncanny ability to render the events of the story from inside the heads of each of her characters. I don't recall having read a book which so strongly conveys what it's like to be torn in three directions at once as one attempts to decide what to do in a particular situation. Here's an example in which Margaret, who has just met Ivan at a chess match at a venue where she was the hostess, offers to give him a ride back to his room. They are both aware that there is something in the air between them, but neither of them is possessed of the sophisticated social skills that more experienced (and perhaps more jaded) proto-lovers would use to gloss over the awkwardness. The paragraph serves the very straightforward narrative purpose of getting Ivan from point A to point B. But Rooney follows Margaret's thoughts very carefully as Margaret considers not only her own feelings in the moment, but Ivan's as well:

 

Outside, the car park is glowing with the skeletal orange light of the streetlamps, the paved surfaces dappled and glistening. She turns on her wipers and they click and scrape rhythmically over the windscreen. It happens all the time that she drives someone home like this, or drops them to the station, and they sit in the car together this way, chatting about something. It’s just work. And if Ivan doesn’t want to chat, if he wants to sit there looking at his hands and then looking at her and back at his hands again, that’s okay — he’s only twenty-two, and very gifted at one particular kind of board game, and after all there’s no formal etiquette for the situation. Finding yourself in the car of an older woman after a presumably strenuous public event, being driven to your accommodation with your little black suitcase, no one ever teaches you how to behave under such circumstances. If he wants to sit in silence, looking at his bitten fingernails, that’s alright, no problem. She, too, of course, is sitting in silence, and has nothing to say. They come off the main road and down onto the small lane to the holiday cottages, the gravel crunching noisily under the tyres of Margaret’s car. She has done nothing wrong, has done nothing at all, in fact, beyond what is required for the purpose of driving Ivan from the bar to the holiday village. If she made a little error in the conversation earlier, if she used one little dubious word or phrase, asking him what he was passionate about, that was excusable, even in a sense deniable, because subjective. She pulls up outside one of the houses, a white bungalow with peeling paint and darkened windows.

 

Later, as another example, we are inside Peter's head as he is driving to court and adjusting to the pharmaceuticals he has ingested. I love the way the scattershot syntax and time dislocations convey what he has done, what he is doing, what he is seeing, what he is thinking, and how it all plays out:

 

In the morning, hiss of the iron, buttered bread roll, milligram of alprazolam, blue tie or green. Stands at the dining table rearranging his papers while the coffee cools, thoughts running rapid with broken phrases, details of argument, streams diverging and recrossing, hands clammy touching the pages. The point of law. To raise the question of. His briefcase then, bitter aftertaste, overcoat, and outside the chill wind of October moves through the leaves of trees. Wide grey streets around the Green, buses slowing to a stop, wheel and cry of gulls overhead. Leaves rustle over the park gates. Barred windows of Ship Street then and the vans reversing. Blue clearing in the white clouds, rain-washed cobbles. River dissected by the glitter of sunlight, Grattan Bridge. Copper stepped saucer dome over Portland stone balustraded parapet, dirty green cap in daylight, the Four Courts. Feels the effects by the time he’s inside, dressing: slow serene feeling beginning in the hands and feet. Breathing settles. Thoughts grow orderly and sequential, facts arranged in place, stately procession of claims and counter-claims. That’s not actually recreational, Naomi told him once. Like, you can get a prescription if that’s what you’re using it for. Along the corridor, scent of cleaning fluid, overheard voices. Even medicated he feels it: the white light of his own righteousness. Clear luminous certainty. In the courtroom, flow of speech unhurried, precise, inexorable. Admitting no contradiction. Familiar command almost perfect, yes, and pleasurable even, and then over.

 

Yes, this is writing that places demands on you as a reader. But it offers extraordinary rewards as well. I felt, and feel, like I got to know these characters as well as I have ever gotten to know most any of the flesh-and-blood humans beings I have met in my life. And that's because when you are with an actual person, you can never know for sure what they are really thinking. But with Rooney, due to her extraordinary psychological insight and writerly control, you can. 

The complexities in a story like this inevitably make you wonder whether the plot will be plausibly satisfyingly resolved, and whether or not the trip will have been worth it. The answer to both questions is a resounding "Yes!" Rooney is no longer occupying the wing in my personal house of literature  associated with interesting contemporary writers. She's in the larger room at the back having tea with Jane Austen and George Eliot.

 

 

 

The Deluge

 

 I spent a significant amount of time over the last few weeks reading the novel The Deluge, by Stephen Markley. I'll say right here at the start that The Deluge is not for the faint of heart. For one thing, it comes in at just under 900 pages. And those aren't pages with large print and big margins, either, more like nine-point type and half-inch margins. So to work through it requires a sobering investment of time and energy. And the story it has to tell is no walk in the park either. One of Markley's primary goals is to examine the likely consequences of climate change over the next twenty years. That in itself is sobering, in that many of the prognosticators currently wringing their hands and crying out loud about coming existential disasters talk about what is likely to be happening in 2050 or 2100. Markley's time frame is much more compressed. The sequence of events described in the book starts in 2013 and ends in 2039. Nothing of what is described is remotely implausible, or remotely encouraging. Markley describes in unflinching detail multiple scenarios which people across the globe are already experiencing and can expect to experience in the not-too-far-distant future: heat waves, fires, water shortages, dust storms, and decimated crops on the one hand; floods, storms, and sea-level rise decimating coastal cities across the world on the other. Those events will likely result in the displacement of literally billions of people who will find themselves homeless and on the move without resources.

So yes, it's a dystopian novel based on the impact of climate change. But one of the things which makes it such a gripping read is that it is also a character-based novel that depicts, again in utterly convincing detail, the interactions of an enormous cast of characters, the most central of whom are intelligent, well-meaning, and socially engaged, and trying to fight, each in their own way, against what they correctly perceive to be an existential threat to human life on earth.

There are 41 chapters in the book. Some are narrated in conventional fashion by major characters. They include a scientist, a charismatic social activist (one of the most memorable characters I've ever encountered on the page), the leader of an eco-terrorist group, an ad rep for a company helping industry give the appearance of supporting climate change activism while working frantically behind the scenes to forestall any change in the status quo. There are also chapters presented as primary-source documents: news articles, magazine articles, and most notably, position papers authored by a fiercely intelligent autistic savant who is tasked by various government agencies with trying to come up with coherent and intelligible delineation of the fearsomely complex issues which need to be dealt with through legislation. (The book would be worth reading if only for the depth and clarity of those position papers.) Each of these characters comes alive as a fully realized human being embedded in a network of family and friends, all of whom have their own stories and challenges as the world careens toward disaster.

What became clear, at least to me, as the story moves from year to year and crisis to crisis, is that the scientific and technical challenges having to do with dealing with climate change, vexing as they are, will amount to nothing next to the human challenges. Any single proposal for dealing with climate change, much less a coherent program of necessary initiatives, will necessarily be met with a torrent of indignation, outrage, obfuscation, disinformation, and denial. Some of that pushback is overt and explicit; a larger quantity is covert and maliciously duplicitous. None of which should be surprising to anyone who pays attention to our current political environment, which is exactly and predominantly that way, and getting worse every day.

I've read I don't know how many thousands of novels in my lifetime. I don't think I've ever read one more ambitious, or more successful in realizing its ambitions, than The Deluge. It's gripping. It's frightening. It's extraordinarily well-imagined and well-written throughout. It's certainly understandable that most of us would prefer to pretend that the threats we are facing are less immediate and less pressing than they actually are. Al Gore was attempting to call everyone's attention to "An Inconvenient Truth" sixteen years ago. What has changed in the meantime? Diddly squat, that's what. Markley's principled mission is to ask that we consider, individually and collectively, the human consequences of that sort of lassitude.

Since finishing the book, I find that as I scan the news each day I see the harbingers everywhere of the world as he imagines it in this book. Just this week the New York Times had a lead article entitled "Earth Is Nearing The Tipping Point For A Hot Future," another "last chance" reminder about the just-released UN report on climate change. What has been the response of our congress, of our president, of our global leadership? Radio silence. Big surprise. Maybe Stephen Markley can help tip the scales, at least for those willing to invest the time and effort into reading The Deluge. I strongly recommend that you be one of them.



 

64 x 35 (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)

I just finished A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. It's a book that somehow transcends whatever might be said by way of paraphrase or analysis. It's relentlessly detailed about the horrors of village life in wartime Chechnya and yet compassionate and lyrical about the lives of the people who have had to endure those horrors, and builds to a moving and affirmative conclusion. Good book.