Cambridge Café Culture: André Aciman's Harvard Square

Harvard Square

by André Aciman

W. W. Norton

304 pages

Dallas Morning News

4 May 2013   

André Aciman’s new novel, Harvard Square, opens with a prologue in which a father recounts traveling with his son to their final stop in a series of campus tours searching for the teenager’s potential undergraduate university. 

Leading his son around his alma mater, Harvard, the father points out old haunts and various former addresses attempting to inculcate in the son a love for Cambridge, MA. The father’s touring becomes a trek through his memories of graduate school in the late 1970s.

The unnamed narrator’s nostalgic storytelling brings to life the friendship he developed with a rapid-fire café raconteur and dragueur (a man continually on the make for new women) named Kalaj, a shortened version of his nickname, Kalashnikov. Making his living as a cab driver, Kalaj keeps his banter tuned to “revolutionary” and opposes the American style, anything “jumbo-ersatz.”

Harvard Square, like Aciman’s other novels, Call Me By Your Name (2007) and Eight White Nights (2010), is an exploration of how our intimacies with others develop from nostalgic or sentimental memories of relationships with other people and places. The narrator’s memoir is filled with documenting and describing how he, an Egyptian Jew, and Kalaj, a Tunisian Muslim, build their tenuous connection.

Though they’re opposites in many ways, Aciman’s main characters build friendship by constructing together an imaginary, immigrant-filled, postcolonial Paris from the various bars and restaurants they frequent around Cambridge. Using the Middle Eastern-styled Café Algiers (an actual Cambridge coffee house) as their general meeting spot, Kalaj schools all comers about the vagaries the “ersatz-American” experience, on creating a liberated life, and how to pick up women.

Ground down by his graduate studies, the narrator attempts to balance his solitary scholarly study of 18th-century European literature and his desires for a liberated, diverse sex life. This balancing is also a demonstration of his ambivalence toward both his Harvard life and his friendship with Kalaj: The narrator can’t choose between the upward mobility Harvard affords him and the scruffy pleasures of faux-Paris.

Aciman’s prose is witty and smooth; his American English is spiced nicely with Franco-Arabic intonations. But the writing seems rushed in many places, and his set-up, which is appealing early on, becomes pocked with problems as the novel proceeds. Where their interactions ought to detail how he and Kalaj forge intimate friendship, the narrator, instead, cites their connections — listing or telling them, as it were, rather than showing them. More worrisome is how the story descends into a hetero-masculine mythology about easily conquerable, sexually available international women in and around Cambridge.

It’s possible that Aciman means for his narrator’s storytelling be read as ironic misremembering given that several scenes with these thinly characterized women are hollow and false.  

At its best, when focused on the narrator and Kalaj, the novel can be moving and funny. But Aciman lets the story wander from its strengths too often, and readers will find it hard to develop their own intimacy with the work.

Walton Muyumba

Essays on The Ghost Called God: Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
By Christian Wiman
FSG
192 pages

NPR Books
11 April 2013

Christian Wiman has “a cancer that is as rare as it is unpredictable.”  A poet and the former editor of Poetry, Wiman has found himself, when overwhelmed by the painful disease and pain-inducing treatments, praying not to God or for language to express his condition, but to the pain itself: “That it ease up ever so little, that it let me breathe.  That it not -- but I know it will -- get worse.”  

Wiman's new essay collection, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, is an exploration of his faith and life in extreme crisis.  Noting how cancer's ever-presence has challenged his faith in Christianity, Western philosophy, and lyric poetry, Wiman has chosen to plumb his ambivalence (his bright abyss) about all three rather than simply cementing his beliefs.  

Though Wiman’s written a book for readers “as confused and certain about the source of life and consciousness” as he is, his meditations are compelling because he doesn’t proselytize, evangelize, or encourage conversion.  In fact, instead of writing poetry, philosophy or theology -- precision-driven forms -- the writer has produced essays in order to dwell on his doubts, celebrating and holding at arm’s-length simultaneously his literary and theological inclinations.  This is a fascinating and difficult collection.

Wiman’s ambivalence finds its form and style in the title piece, “My Bright Abyss.”  Stitching individual journal entries together into a whole, positioning each to either extend or oppose neighboring passages, he explains:

It is not that I am tired of poetic truth, or that I feel it to be somehow weaker or less than reason.  The opposite is the case.  Inspiration is to thought what grace is to faith: intrusive, transcendent, transformative, but also evanescent and, all too often anomalous . . . To experience grace is one thing; to integrate it into your life is quite another. What I crave now is that integration, some speech that is true to the transcendent nature of grace yet adequate to the hard reality in which daily faith operates.  I crave, I suppose, the poetry and the prose of knowing.

But check out some of Wiman’s other titles: “Sorrow’s Flower”; “Dear Oblivion”; “God Is Not Beyond”; “Mortify Our Wolves.”  No doubt, the author’s intense questioning and dense resolutions are challenging.  He amplifies the daunting subject matter with his toggling among quotations from poets, theologians, novelists, and philosophers in search of intelligence that will arouse readers (and himself) out of their habitual thinking on love, partnership, faith, feeling, language and “the ghost called God.”

In several spots, the author’s movements seem too swift and may leave readers stumbling in pursuit.  Take “Hive of Nerves,” where the author shifts rapidly along a chain of quotations from James Joyce's Ulysses to Osip Mandelstam's poem “Tristia” to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age to his own poem “Commute I” as if demonstrating how our “collective ADHD,” as he calls it, works.  Wiman’s attempting to explain that attaining consciousness requires simultaneously relaxation into and resistance to the anxieties that speedy contemporary life produces.  Though he claims that, “such effort deepens and complicates our initial response [to God and religion],” grasping the author’s insight requires perusing these sentences many times.  

Yes, the collection demands close attention and rereading, but, thankfully, the essays offer generous rewards too.  For example, “Varieties of Quiet” calls Christians to revolutionize their worship by introducing poetry as liturgy, meditation in “focused and extended silences, learning from other religious traditions and rituals,” and incorporating language that both negates and asserts God, which may be, Wiman explains, “not simply the only ‘proper’ means of addressing or invoking God, but the only efficacious one as well.”  

Addressing his young twin daughters near the collection’s close, Wiman writes, “My loves, I will be with you, even if I am not with you.”  His faith in afterlife connection foreshadows twinned claims finalizing his meditations: “We cannot get beyond our lives until we eliminate all notions and expectations of a ‘beyond’” and “In the end the very things that have led us to God are the things that we must sacrifice.”  These are, the author suggests, the beneficial revelations that readers gain in their struggling with his complex, paradoxical interpretations.  As well, the theological, philosophical and poetic quotations placed throughout the collection, like the one from the late Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, direct readers toward these realizations.  

In her poem, “God Works In A Mysterious Way,” Brooks calls on God to “Step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves, / Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.”  Taking up My Bright Abyss, we assume a sovereignty ourselves, relaxing into and resisting Wiman’s vision, savoring it and arguing with it, in thought and feeling.


Walton Muyumba

Sweet Decay: Jamaica Kincaid's See Now Then

See Now Then
Jamaica Kincaid FSG 183 pages
Dallas Morning News
8 February 2013
Meet Mr. and Mrs. Sweet. The Sweets live with their two children, “the beautiful Persephone” and “the young Heracles,” in Vermont, in the house that Shirley Jackson once owned. 

Their marital decay is the story of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel, See Now Then. A middling classical composer, Mr. Sweet is prideful, selfishness, and loathes family life. While he maintains affection for Persephone, he rejects Heracles, who loves toy warriors and sports heroes, but not classical music. Eventually Mr. Sweet rejects his wife and children for another woman, a different life.

Mr. Sweet is Hades to Mrs. Sweet’s Demeter. Kincaid’s referencing the Persephone/Demeter myth is apt: Mixing Jackson and Greek mythology makes See Now Then a cold tragicomedy of American domesticity.

Though Kincaid riffs on Jackson’s unflinching, Life Among the Savages, Jackson’s more significant influence is on See Now Then’s atmosphere, which is damned, haunted, and psychological. This effect plays out in Mrs. Sweet’s mind and her third-person storytelling as she weaves her way into her family members’ points-of-view. Readers meet Mrs. Sweet in her writing room, adjacent to her kitchen, contemplating her family’s disintegration and mining her experiential memory for details of how “then and now” intermingle to become one thing. Kincaid’s heady fiction doesn’t unfold dramatically, but her prose does, vining and clinging to readers’ ears, blooming into a tri-tone musical theory -- see-now-then. Mrs. Sweet thinks of “now, knowing that it would most certainly become a Then even as it was a Now, for the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then, and that the past and the present and the future has no permanent present tense, has no certainty in regard to right now." Churning through the tenses, Mrs. Sweet’s stream-of-consciousness creates the narrative’s form; form being an aesthetic rendering of how time, memory, and consciousness create the fabric of being; one only knows herself, Kincaid’s suggests here, through the subjective, elliptical narrative she develops from seeing then (past and future) now, seeing now as a product of then, and understanding now and then as the continual present.

Narrating her marriage’s ending, Mrs. Sweet recalls “looking into an abyss, but that would be literature; for she was now looking in the shallow depths, a structural depression, but that would be geology; and at the bottom of this metaphor or just a true representation lay her life, the remains of it, the facts of it, the substance of it the summation of it, the finality of it, the good-bye for now and see you later maybe of it, the in the beginning of it, and Mrs. Sweet wept, for she had loved her life so much and this was a surprise to her, that she had loved her life so much.” In her earlier novels, misaligned family relations produce the potential for human failure. Yet, Kincaid’s female protagonist/narrators triumph against those circumstances through literary intelligence and their abilities to generation narrative art. But Mrs. Sweet’s grappling with time is beautiful because it acknowledges that our failures sometimes deny surmounting and, instead, resonate across memory into presence and heart-rending permanence. Walton Muyumba

The Fun Stuff: James Wood's Narrow Realism

The Fun Stuff and Other Essays
James Wood
FSG
352 pages

Dallas Morning News
2 December 2012

James Wood is an excellent writer, as The Fun Stuff and Other Essays demonstrates. In the fascinating eponymous essay, “The Fun Stuff: Homage to Keith Moon,” Wood writes of his British adolescence when he tried balancing his evangelical Anglican upbringing with a secret love of rock ’n’ roll drumming. Wood appreciates Moon, the Who’s former drummer, because his banging style resembles the ideal literary sentence — “a long passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy . . . careful and lawless.”  Though now an atheist, Wood confides, he still doesn’t feel liberated or confident enough to produce such percussive prose.

Wood’s revelations explain both his particular taste for literary realism and his admiration of idiosyncratic, dynamic stylists like W.G. Sebald, Cormac McCarthy, V.S. Naipaul, Alan Hollinghurst, Aleksandar Hemon and Ben Lerner. His main interest in these writers, and predecessors like Edmund Wilson, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy and George Orwell, is detailing analytically how their sentences make readers “notice something previously neglected” about urban spaces, social arrangements and human thinking. Wood’s sentences are often exhibitions of elegant noticing and thinking.

Yet the author and New Yorker staff writer’s criticism sounds, at times, ecclesiastical, treating some writers as saintly, their works as totemic. Wood’s skillful examinations have even persuaded some readers to place him in the literary priesthood. No wonder: As his exceptional piece, “Robert Alter and the King James Bible,” attests, Wood is great when he’s thinking literarily and theologically simultaneously. But Wood is best as an authoritative conversationalist, not an autocratic cultural priest. This new collection is worthy of serious reading; however, it should be argued with — not revered.

Containing a large swath of Wood’s work for The London Review of Books, The New Republic and The New Yorker from 2004 to 2011, The Fun Stuff illustrates that Wood’s attention here is limited, referentially and narrowly, to European, British and American realist male novelists. When Wood acknowledges postmodern fiction’s existence, he’s pointing out, as the title argues, “Paul Auster’s Shallowness.” He discusses only two female writers, Marilynne Robinson and Lydia Davis, and only two nonwhite writers, Kazuo Ishiguro and Naipaul, very British writers of Asian descent. Wood mentions the African novel in his essay on Norman Rush and names Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland the quintessential postcolonial novel, but does both without referring critically to any black African, Caribbean, Asian or Latin American contemporary novelists.

Only willful disregard allows Wood, as intelligent a writer-critic working now, to represent a singular literary mode, realism, as the most tellingly human or himself as mainly interested in white male writers of European descent. But, then again, as Wood suggests offhandedly in the book’s final personal essay, “Packing My Father-In-Law’s Library,” “the critic conducts his education in public.”


Walton Muyumba

Victor LaValle's Silver-Suited Devil

The Devil in Silver
Victor LaValle

Spiegel & Grau
432 pages

2 September 2012

In Victor LaValle’s new novel, The Devil in Silver, Queens, New York,  is the most ethnically diverse region on earth. It’s where “you will find Korean kids who sound like black kids. Italians who sound like Puerto Ricans. Puerto Ricans who sound like Italians. Third-generation Irish who sound like old Jews. That’s Queens. Not a melting pot, not even a tossed salad, but an all you-can-eat, mix-and-match buffet.”

LaValle’s gastro-metaphor celebrates the mixed nuts populating his Queens-set fiction. Thus far his most important nut has been Anthony James, the schizophrenic narrator/protagonist of The Ecstatic, LaValle’s first novel.  A 300-pound Ivy-Leaguer, James first appeared in LaValle’s story collection, Slapboxing With Jesus.  Now, LaValle has added New Hyde Hospital’s mental patients, the wackadoos, as the narrator of The Devil in Silver names them.

Readers meet LaValle’s new protagonist, Pepper, as the police forcibly admit him into New Hyde — an easier task than actual police procedure and paperwork since New York City ain’t paying cops for overtime! Does Pepper, a burly, short-fused, Quixotic, 6-foot-3, 42-year-old furniture mover, actually require mental health treatment? Depends on how “mental,” “health” and “treatment” are defined.

LaValle plays these gray definitional matters humorously, animating this bizzaro-world with a multi-ethnic, inter-generational, international crew of singularly voiced, specially named minor characters like Still Waters and Japanese Freddie Mercury.  Pepper’s cohort -- Loochie, a brazen, acerbic teenage girl; Coffee, a conspiracy-theorizing Ugandan bent on securing his release with the help of the Big Boss (President Obama); and Dorry, the white-haired mother-hen, a lifer in New Hyde’s Northwest sector -- make up a loony-bin Fantastic Four.

LaValle draws the ward as a cognate for Queens and beyond. He’s reminding us Western civilized citizens that we only know ourselves as sane because we institutionalize -- incarcerate -- wackadoos. Yet the civilized and the mad organize themselves through disciplined social ordering, punishing severely those who disrupt it. There’s a thin line between madness and civilization.  

To maintain order in the asylum, the Devil has been installed on a dormant wing, off-limits behind a silver door. Even Queens’ craziest shun the Devil. Blank-eyed and heavy-hoofed, The Bison-headed beast night-raids unsuspecting patients, snuffing them out ferociously. But Pepper places no faith in myths. He breaches the boundary, attempting to open the silver door. Quickly, Pepper finds himself drug-addled with restraints pinning him in bed. And then the Devil visits him.

LaValle’s title underlines our colloquial understanding of infernal madness: It’s the silver-tongued Devil inciting our bad behavior and bribing us into Judasian disloyalty. With noxious breath, he hard-boils our brains into delusional imagining. Does the Devil exist? After the Devil dances on his chest, Pepper gets religion, and with his teammates, plots to release the Devil, thrash him, and, during the chaos, break free from New Hyde.

Cross breeding popular, literary, and horror fictional styles, LaValle delivers incisive social critique through funny, brilliantly framed set-pieces.  Unfortunately, LaValle’s novel didn’t frighten me.

The devil’s in LaValle’s ambitious referencing: Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest and Benchley’s Jaws; old, conservative black men and incessant conservative television punditry; Manifest Destiny and precious-metal mining; Van Gogh and T. J. Eckleberg; (purposefully) corrupt computer software and (purposefully) failing health care systems; Iron Maiden and Jay-Z. Exciting, this post-impressionist whirl of connections, but it doesn’t make The Devil in Silver scary, just fat and jittery at times. But this may be purposeful: Imagine Anthony James as the novel’s interior creator.

The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway calls the burned, sulfurous center of Queens, New York “the valley of ashes.” The crazy Queens LaValle renders in his hyper-intelligent The Devil in Silver refuses ashy death; it’s an enlivened demon-busting, human mélange.

Walton Muyumba