The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris (2010)

I've been thinking a lot about this one. This book has been widely reviewed, so you probably know the plot: Tim, a successful lawyer, is smitten with a mysterious disease that compels him to take long walks, immediately and no matter where he is. He falls into a kind of trance on these walks, and finally falls asleep with exhaustion, wherever his legs lead him.

The first half is brilliant in its exploration of what it's like to have a chronic, mysterious disease. Tim's dilemma reminded me immediately of my own, much less extreme, experience with epilepsy, the sickening feeling after a seizure of it's back, I had another one. (And after I thought that, I find Ferris explicitly making the comparison.) Ferris perfectly evokes the gerbil-wheel frustrations of doctor visits, tests that show nothing, medication that doesn't work, and especially, the cruelty of disappointed hope.

Because Tim's condition has no cure. It's a great virtue in our society to never give up, and that expectation can be just a heavy a burden as the original disease--the idea that one must keep fighting no matter what. Ferris gets this so well, how when hopes have been crushed over and over, hopes are worse than having none.

Ferris makes Tim's condition extreme, I think, in order to explore the suffering we all experience because we're human and have bodies, needs, we can't escape from. Wherever you go--or however far you walk--there you are. Even Tim's literal at times mortification of the flesh can't separate soul from body. Anyone with a serious illness knows this in a way the healthy can't.

Because Ferris wants to explore this honestly, without false hopes or easy answers or God, he gets himself into a bind. I think that's why the second half of the novel is so unfocused, as aimless as Tim's wanderings. Every episode or ending that occurs to Ferris--Tim returns to his dying wife, Tim gets answers on an old client, Tim reconnects with his daughter, Tim for some reason reaches out to a security guard from his law building--fades away into nothing much. No epiphanies. No miracle cures.

Ferris's bind arises because he wants to be honest, and good storytelling is inherently dishonest in how it imposes a meaningful pattern. That's what we love stories for. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and each leads to the other and makes sense of the whole. But suffering doesn't make sense. It just is.

What Ferris says is true (the way I read it) but the problem is, noble truths like Buddha's "life is suffering--get over it" (loose translation) aren't very dramatic.

But I was amazed by this book. The word that kept coming to mind was "perceptive." I can't believe how well a young writer can understand middle age and its indignities. I was even more impressed by Ferris's earlier novel Then We Came to the End, and I'll certainly be watching for his next one.

A literary tidbit

I was looking for something to read and picked up a book lying around, an old Robert Silverberg, The Man in the Maze. OMG no. But I thought this was worth sharing:

She unhinged her breast-binders and revealed two firm upthrust white globes tipped with dots of flame. They were high and close together, as though no gravity worked on them, and the valley between them was six inches deep and a sixteenth of an inch in breadth.

The only thing sexxxier would have been in metric.

The Love Hunter by Jon Hassler (1996)

Hated it. 

I could give several reasons, but here's the most important one:

Chris (the main character) is telling Rachel, his best friend's wife, about his feelings for her and how her wonderfulness has given him life and hope. He's been empty inside and cynical since his own divorce.

He gives an example: After his ex-wife Karen and kids move to California, he still must walk Karen's dog, Ms. Rover. Along the roadside, they encounter a pulled-over work truck whose radio or CB is broadcasting dispatchers and such. One voice sounds just like Karen's, and Ms. Rover pulls eagerly, happily toward it, thinking it's her mistress, whom she loves and misses.

After they cross the road, Ms. Rover is still pulling towards the voice. Even though there's traffic, Chris lets go of the leash, and watches as Ms. Rover runs happily toward the voice, and is promptly run over by a delivery truck.

If someone told this to me my response would not be "You poor man. You must have been very unhappy." It would be "You disgust me. You're a piece of shit. Never talk to me again."

And now that's kind of my feeling about Hassler.

Room by Emma Donoghue

Room is narrated by 5-year-old Jack. Seven years ago, his mother was kidnapped and imprisoned in a soundproof room. Or Room, to Jack. He knows every bit of his tiny world by name, from Rug to Meltedy Spoon. His Ma has endless strategies for varying their routines, inventing games, and so on.

We end up admiring both writer and Ma for the creativity with which they respond to their limitations. Donoghue's choice of a child narrator helps avoid the emotional, potentially melodramatic distractions of such a powerful situation. Jack's narration also provides an interesting twist, since he loves his womb-like world, the only one he's ever known. His problems start when they leave it, and this too Donogue handles with her rich, compassionate imagination.

Two inconsequential but noticeable problems: First, Room is set in the United States, but Dublin-born Donoghue sometimes slips into UK/Irish turns of phrase: "slowcoach" where we'd say "slowpoke," "good-o" instead of "goody," and "what d'you fancy." There's also the "Will we [do this or that]?" usage where Americans say "Do you want to" or "Let's." I'm surprised that not one of her three editors caught this.

Second, Donoghue has done an amazing job of fully imagining life in Room, but I'd love to know how menstruation was handled and how her captor got hold of so many birth-control pills without a prescription.

A few short novels

Watchman by Ian Rankin (first published 1988; reissued 2003). This book didn't make much splash when first published, and probably wouldn't have been reissued without Rankin's best-selling Rebus novels. Watchman represents Rankin's foray into the spy novel, a route he didn't pursue after his success writing mysteries. Watchman is a bit of a time capsule, a spy world minus cell phones, GPS,or easy access even to word processors. Miles Flint is a spy in the Watcher service who must throw off his passivity when his superiors want to make him the fall guy. I thought it was a good fun read, and the tech limitations actually make it a much more understandable world.

Nell Gwynne's Scarlet Spy, a novella followed by short story "The Bohemian Astrobleme," by Kage Baker (2010). As far as I know, this is the last work from Baker's hand we'll ever have, since she died in January 2010.

The Gentlemen's Speculative Society, an early incarnation of the Company (familiar to Baker readers), has a sister organization: Nell Gwynne's, an exclusive brothel where the whores have secret identities as spies. Lady Beatrice undergoes tragedy with no course left but to become a prostitute, and is glad to be recruited from the streets into such a fine, and fascinating, establishment.

Lady Beatrice's spy adventures are highly entertaining, and involve what I guess could be called steampunk, such as an early Victorian contraption called the Ascending Room--an elevator. As usual, Kage is funny, empathic, and compulsively readable.

The short story is a further adventure connected with the doings of the Society and the brothel, taking place in far Bohemia, and as with the longer story, the reader only wishes there were more of it.

I'm still so sad about Baker's death. She was only 57. Dammit, dammit, dammit.