There's something anachronistically comfortable about the richly detailed, character-driven novel, and Zoe Heller pulls it off perfectly in THE BELIEVERS. Centered around the Litvinoffs (husband and wife Joel and Audrey, two daughters, Rosa and Karla, and adopted son Lenny, as well as numerous spouses, roommates, hangers-on, and friends) the novel cannily chooses to forsake plot for a multi-faceted exploration of issues, ranging from, of course, belief, to feminism, marriage, varying forms of anglophone culture, and race. With every viewpoint given a character to side with and a character to hate, the explorations of THE BELIEVERS are enjoyable rather than pedantic, and carried out in sparkly witty, if acerbic, dialogue.
The novel suffers slightly from having no strong male characters for the group of women to play off of (Joel is felled by a stroke in the novel's first few pages; Lenny is a resolute fuck-up and a manipulative drug addict who I still do not believe as a thirty-four-year-old; the various husbands and dates are, to a man, blase). The most charming and interesting scenes, from the point of view of pure story, show Joel as a father, making French toast for his children's breakfast while explaining the necessity of armed struggle. Another interesting exploration for the novel: how revolutionaries deal with the quotidian aspects of day-to-day life, marriage, and child-rearing. The novel wants to answer a broad and flip "not well" but where it gives us detail, it is insightful and clever.
In an interview with Heller, conducted shortly after the novel's release, she stressed her desire to make Rosa's conversion to orthodox Judaism believable. Although the state of her push-me-pull-you conversion is left ambiguous even at the novel's end (she is seen wearing a headscarf at her father's funeral, but never shied away from embracing some aspects of tradition while rejecting others) I have to say that Rosa's interest never fully came clear for me. There's the moment of divine revelation in the synagogue, when Rosa feels a deep inner sense of belonging, and comes to tears at the end of a service; there's the admiration of tradition and the desire to fully adhere to a set of strictures in order to prove her seriousness to the world; there's the convenient aspect of Rosa's self-denial of physical pleasures, and the inverse pleasure she takes in that denial. And yet. The rabbi who guides Rosa's conversion immediately jumps into the tough stuff: rejection of Darwinian evolution, subservient roles for women, adhering strictly to the Sabbath. It's never quite explained why Rosa goes straight for Orthodox Judaism rather than easing into it through one of the other flavors of Judaic belief; perhaps it's her family's nature that half measures will not do, and the most extreme point of view must be the line taken, but many of the difficulties Rosa has with the more inexplicable aspects of Orthodox belief would be easily taken care of by following a less commanding version of the religion. Rosa's response to the rabbi's nonsensical argument that evolution may not be true because the Hebrew word translated in the bible as god's "six days" may refer to any period of time is met by Rosa's equivocal thoughts that there may be something in that theory. Really? Someone as needy as Rosa when it comes to being seen as worthy by the world will have invested much more of herself in her intelligence than we see. Her rejection of scientific principles should bear a higher cost to her self-worth than it seems to.
But there's always that one character to hate. Heller has been criticized for providing no purely "relatable" characters in this novel (as though the heroine of NOTES ON A SCANDAL were relatable?) but that's simply one of the joys of the character-driven novel: seeing real people, hearing intimate conversations, and never having to meet Audrey and her family in real life. Here's to the Litvinoffs.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
AWAIT YOUR REPLY - Dan Chaon - Fiction
(Admittedly, it is hard to top the title of Chaon's previous novel, YOU REMIND ME OF ME.)
The August 2008 issue of the New Yorker ran a fascinating article about a man who calls himself the Chameleon, a Frenchman in his thirties who has impersonated teenage boys, from American runaways to Spanish orphans, for years. At its most literal definition, what the Chameleon does could be considered identity theft: though he doesn't try to extract money from the bank accounts of his identities, or falsify their passports, he does in a baser sense assert their identity as his own. The article details how for over a yeear he fooled--or perhaps didn't--an American family looking for a missing son.
Dan Chaon's novel is also concerned with identity theft, both the computer-scam and bank-account variety, and the more subtle theft of identity by a disease (schizophrenia, Hayden's diagnosis) and by circumstance: many characters are orphans, like Lucy, and one, Ryan, was given up at birth to his father's sister, and has been lied to about his real parents ever since. But Lucy and Ryan are just kids, really, enthralled by promises of restarting their lives, and rebuilding them in the image of something better. Their stories are plumbed for hidden emotional depths, but don't have much to give up: Ryan was failing out of college, after being pushed into academic success by his overbearing mother; Lucy had fallen short of her ivy league dreams, and needed to escape the small town that suffocated her. Both are essentially naive, and plunge into their sometimes immature fantasies of jet-setting and high-stakes thievery. The eventual deflation of these hopes is obvious to the reader, but realized painfully slowly by Lucy and Ryan.
The stars of the novel are Hayden and his twin brother Miles. Raised by a hypnotist/clown father and a manipulative, unforgiving mother, Miles dawdles toward obscurity while Hayden, buoyed by his rich fantasy life, escapes into his delusions and the avenues of excitement awarded him by his cunning. Described as a genius, Hayden is able to take on any identity and run any scheme--though his master plans, incuding posing as a graduate student in mathematics, embezzling from top Wall Street firms, and planting evidence that destroys the career of a hated Yale professor, are never explained, much to this reader's dismay. During the course of his impersonations, he picks up hangers-on and romantic attachments, as well as an ersatz son, who seems to fulfill a deep inner need for family and dependency, but we are not shown his most daring and improbable feats, nor are we ever allowed inside his head, to glimpse his motivations, despite being shown the intriguing detritus of his obsessions. Some are tabloid-worthy and others hint to the secrecies of successful capitalism, but Hayden's personal narrative is never explains, which hampers the flow of the overall narrative: Miles is chasing Hayden, and has been chasing him all his life, but never gets to meet him face to face. Hayden warns Miles against many things, and implies that some of his past crimes are catching up with him, but these are never confirmed, including his suspicions against the Matalov family, who run a novelty shop patronized by the boys' father. (This, one of the novels most interesting sub-plots, has a run-down Miles returning to his boyhood town, and, somewhat improbably, finding work with the Matalovs, while becoming infatuated with Mrs. Matalov's granddaughter. Hayden believes that the family wishes them harm, but aside from a possible connection to Hayden's repressed childhood memories, which Miles strongly believes to be fictional, the supposed Matalov threat is left hanging, despite vivid personal descriptions of the Matalovs and their storefront.)
Ultimately, crime does not pay. In the end of the novel's temporally-last narrative thread, Hayden-as-George Orson is apprehended in the Cote d'Ivoire, and, presumably, killed, though his traveling companion only provides us enough detail for us to understand that two Russian goons, seen throughout the novel, are inside his hotel room, and are presumably more effective than the betrayed cyber-hackers who confront Hayden-as-Jay but only end up injuring Ryan. For a genius criminal mastermind, what we see of Hayden is remarkably uncertain, nervous, and messy, perhaps even amateur. Due to a narrative interlude at the end of the novel's first section, there is a slight insinuation that perhaps Hayden has even fallen for a spam email phishing scam, although in the world of the novel, there is equal evidence for his having stolen millions of dollars from JP Morgan Chase, leading us to wonder whether Hayden is just lucky, and exactly how much skill he has at the crimes he attempts. He seems to rely overmuch on the confidence of others, while never letting Miles, seemingly his ideal business partner, catch up to him. Somewhat incomprehensibly, he also sticks to the midwest, never attempting to lose himself in a city, although the small towns he ends up in do invariably draw him attention as an outsider.
Hayden could be a genius or a kook. He could be a schizophrenic or a kid with a strange sense of humor. He could be a lost boy yearning for personal relationships without the baggage of his family history, or he could be the ultimate manipulative deviant, feigning love to gain an accomplice. He could be a successful criminal, hunted by governments and corporations, or her could be a small-time internet hacker, ultimately drawn in by the same schemes he attempts to carry out himself. Hayden seems to fall prey to identity theft, in an ironic twist that means the end of his life with Ryan, but confusingly doesn't seem to know what to do about it. He unplugs his computer, as though that will solve the problem. It seems that seeing Hayden and Miles together would reconcile the mystery, as our understanding of Hayden depends on seeing Miles, our part-time narrator, as sane, although even this is called into question in certain passages. Though the events of the novel require great suspension of disbelief, on the part of government officials, Lucy, Ryan, and Hayden's business contacts, the novel asks us to suspend our disbelief about its very conceits--and I'd like a few more details, please.
The August 2008 issue of the New Yorker ran a fascinating article about a man who calls himself the Chameleon, a Frenchman in his thirties who has impersonated teenage boys, from American runaways to Spanish orphans, for years. At its most literal definition, what the Chameleon does could be considered identity theft: though he doesn't try to extract money from the bank accounts of his identities, or falsify their passports, he does in a baser sense assert their identity as his own. The article details how for over a yeear he fooled--or perhaps didn't--an American family looking for a missing son.
Dan Chaon's novel is also concerned with identity theft, both the computer-scam and bank-account variety, and the more subtle theft of identity by a disease (schizophrenia, Hayden's diagnosis) and by circumstance: many characters are orphans, like Lucy, and one, Ryan, was given up at birth to his father's sister, and has been lied to about his real parents ever since. But Lucy and Ryan are just kids, really, enthralled by promises of restarting their lives, and rebuilding them in the image of something better. Their stories are plumbed for hidden emotional depths, but don't have much to give up: Ryan was failing out of college, after being pushed into academic success by his overbearing mother; Lucy had fallen short of her ivy league dreams, and needed to escape the small town that suffocated her. Both are essentially naive, and plunge into their sometimes immature fantasies of jet-setting and high-stakes thievery. The eventual deflation of these hopes is obvious to the reader, but realized painfully slowly by Lucy and Ryan.
The stars of the novel are Hayden and his twin brother Miles. Raised by a hypnotist/clown father and a manipulative, unforgiving mother, Miles dawdles toward obscurity while Hayden, buoyed by his rich fantasy life, escapes into his delusions and the avenues of excitement awarded him by his cunning. Described as a genius, Hayden is able to take on any identity and run any scheme--though his master plans, incuding posing as a graduate student in mathematics, embezzling from top Wall Street firms, and planting evidence that destroys the career of a hated Yale professor, are never explained, much to this reader's dismay. During the course of his impersonations, he picks up hangers-on and romantic attachments, as well as an ersatz son, who seems to fulfill a deep inner need for family and dependency, but we are not shown his most daring and improbable feats, nor are we ever allowed inside his head, to glimpse his motivations, despite being shown the intriguing detritus of his obsessions. Some are tabloid-worthy and others hint to the secrecies of successful capitalism, but Hayden's personal narrative is never explains, which hampers the flow of the overall narrative: Miles is chasing Hayden, and has been chasing him all his life, but never gets to meet him face to face. Hayden warns Miles against many things, and implies that some of his past crimes are catching up with him, but these are never confirmed, including his suspicions against the Matalov family, who run a novelty shop patronized by the boys' father. (This, one of the novels most interesting sub-plots, has a run-down Miles returning to his boyhood town, and, somewhat improbably, finding work with the Matalovs, while becoming infatuated with Mrs. Matalov's granddaughter. Hayden believes that the family wishes them harm, but aside from a possible connection to Hayden's repressed childhood memories, which Miles strongly believes to be fictional, the supposed Matalov threat is left hanging, despite vivid personal descriptions of the Matalovs and their storefront.)
Ultimately, crime does not pay. In the end of the novel's temporally-last narrative thread, Hayden-as-George Orson is apprehended in the Cote d'Ivoire, and, presumably, killed, though his traveling companion only provides us enough detail for us to understand that two Russian goons, seen throughout the novel, are inside his hotel room, and are presumably more effective than the betrayed cyber-hackers who confront Hayden-as-Jay but only end up injuring Ryan. For a genius criminal mastermind, what we see of Hayden is remarkably uncertain, nervous, and messy, perhaps even amateur. Due to a narrative interlude at the end of the novel's first section, there is a slight insinuation that perhaps Hayden has even fallen for a spam email phishing scam, although in the world of the novel, there is equal evidence for his having stolen millions of dollars from JP Morgan Chase, leading us to wonder whether Hayden is just lucky, and exactly how much skill he has at the crimes he attempts. He seems to rely overmuch on the confidence of others, while never letting Miles, seemingly his ideal business partner, catch up to him. Somewhat incomprehensibly, he also sticks to the midwest, never attempting to lose himself in a city, although the small towns he ends up in do invariably draw him attention as an outsider.
Hayden could be a genius or a kook. He could be a schizophrenic or a kid with a strange sense of humor. He could be a lost boy yearning for personal relationships without the baggage of his family history, or he could be the ultimate manipulative deviant, feigning love to gain an accomplice. He could be a successful criminal, hunted by governments and corporations, or her could be a small-time internet hacker, ultimately drawn in by the same schemes he attempts to carry out himself. Hayden seems to fall prey to identity theft, in an ironic twist that means the end of his life with Ryan, but confusingly doesn't seem to know what to do about it. He unplugs his computer, as though that will solve the problem. It seems that seeing Hayden and Miles together would reconcile the mystery, as our understanding of Hayden depends on seeing Miles, our part-time narrator, as sane, although even this is called into question in certain passages. Though the events of the novel require great suspension of disbelief, on the part of government officials, Lucy, Ryan, and Hayden's business contacts, the novel asks us to suspend our disbelief about its very conceits--and I'd like a few more details, please.
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