Three novels, fast.
I’ve been trying to think about how I felt about the ending of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, which I wrote about starting last week. I enjoyed the book a lot — it was breezy, well-paced, and Alam’s experiments with deeply focalized female narrative voice are very well-done. I also had a horrible reaction as I got closer to the end of the book, where I found myself speeding up, almost physically writhing on the bed as we see the development of the novel’s illness revealed on the page (god, the TEETH thing!!!). I was in bed because I was sick over the weekend (HOW!?), so the horror of the symptoms Alam lays out might have been more potent to me than they would otherwise be (I am sure there’s a lot to be said about writing about a horrifying pandemic only just before everyone who reads your novel endures a…horrifying pandemic). But I also was curious about that reaction — the reaction of speeding up to finish something because you’re discomfited — and what that says about the relationship between a book’s plot and (for lack of a better term) its writing. I love to linger over sentences, and I am often a very slow reader, so I felt a little bit annoyed with myself for speeding through the end of the novel because I felt so freaked out by the plotline! When I was in late elementary school, I worked my way through all of the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” anthologies in my school library primarily through a process of careful reading and anxious, rapid speed-reading. I do not know if I have the constitution for suspense.
I spent Friday finishing Alam’s novel and then read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye on Saturday and Sunday. Sunday, I started feeling better, but I began Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. You can tell I had to get back to childcare duties because I am still reading the Connell. But something in my reading united these three, though I have more to say about the last two in later postings.
I hadn’t read The Bluest Eye since my first reading (again, and in a different tenor: HOW?), when I was about sixteen. I had an astonishing high school English teacher, Cara Elmore, who taught us Black women’s fiction alongside Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter. How did I luck into this in a public school in North Carolina? It was the nineties. Ms. Elmore has long been someone I thought of and internally thanked when I read novels. She was perhaps the first English teacher I had who taught me how to unlock a book’s secrets — to use the dictionary properly, to think about character and voice — and our forays into Morrison were no different. We read Beloved in class, but I got hooked, and it was the year that Morrison won the Nobel, so she was everywhere. I picked up The Bluest Eye that same year, but my reading of it was partial. I was sixteen. The only thing I really recall about that reading is how wincingly I read the scene of Cholly’s rape of Pecola. How Morrison got those words on the paper, I do not know. I know I read it this time with both a wince and a clearer eye into what she is trying to describe there. Reading Cholly’s transgression is all the more unpleasant because we know the fact of the incestuous rape. We know it’s coming, which makes the narration of it in detail more appalling. Pecola has been trapped — washing dishes, unaware — by the narration, too.
The Bluest Eye is fascinating, to me, for how it adopts a modernist habit — shifting focalization rapidly within the same paragraph — to an American, and specifically a Black American—milieu. The zips between the present of the narration, which is already complicatedly nested in a retrospective frame (we already know about the incest plot from the novel’s opening, though the plotting of the novel takes its time unfolding that story) pop into and out of perspectives as we come to them, shifting from one time to another. In this reading, Morrison’s use of this technique was especially visible to me in the Pauline section, as she describes Pauline’s fastidiousness and anxiety.
My reading of these three novels made me realize that one of the strangest things about deeply focalized narration (all three of these books share this) is that when you pop out of one perspective and into another, you don’t always get a sense of whiplash. The Alam novel hinges on a kind of perspectival whiplash I associate with genre fiction (he uses this technique a lot to speed up the suspense and pacing in the second half of his novel — when something is happening within the Washingtons’ white brick house, he flips to a scene of horror in a subway car under New York, for example). I was left trying to figure out why the technique works as an engine of suspense in that novel, but as something introspective in both the Morrison and the Connell novels. Part of this has to do with generic framing, obviously, but I’m also wondering about whether or not the syntax itself is different in these novels. Another, half-lit thought I had, especially when working through the harrowing Cholly Breedlove section of The Bluest Eye, is that we often comment on male writers that get deeply inside female perspectives (I’d count both Alam and Connell in this category), but we don’t comment as warmly (or as vociferously) when women do it. Is this because male perspectives are expected? I don’t think it’s that simple (I’ve read the 18th century novel…), but there is something startling about reading a perspective you know to have been written by a man that feels (at least feels to me) close to an embodied (not just cerebral) female voice.
I have more to say about TBE and MB — especially about how Connell’s novel skirts (shirks?) the problem of embodiment through a characterization built on squeamishness, but I have to wait until I finish the novel! Hopefully soon.
Also this week, I responded to Rafael Walker’s essay on White Fragility and Uncle Tom’s Cabin for The Point.
