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.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
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I am reading this in light of the recent beatification of the anti-Christ heretofore known as JP2. Apparently his Nazi sidekick thinks the most saintly thing ol' JP2 did was suffer. Heaven knows between the two of them, they have done an excellent job of imposing and extending suffering on people in so many ways.
ReplyDeleteThose two keep trying to impose endings on the suffering story to draw parallels with Christ's suffering and to invite Christians to join in the suffering.
What I remember from Theology classes 1000 years ago is that "suffering" can be translated as "enduring." It's all you can do, isn't it? Just endure? Not fight, not conquer. Just endure. And silence is not a requirement?
The way I understand it, it's not that we're invited to join Christ's suffering because the Church loves for us to suffer. It's that, since we're going to suffer anyway (such is life), Christ came here to suffer with us and thus make life more endurable. But how that's supposed to work, I dunno. (NB: I'm no longer Christian.)
ReplyDeleteSometimes all you can do is endure, whether it's physical pain or mental. Sometimes there is simply nothing else you can do and fighting, conquering, yelling isn't an option and changes nothing. Successfully or not, religion tries to give us a way to deal with that.