The Lotus Eaters: Tatjana Soli's profound debut novel

 The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Lessons learned, vietnam war, meaning of

The Lotus Eaters

The Lotus Eaters is a woman’s coming of age story set in Vietnam during the American war there.  The civil war, and the war between Vietnamese culture and American culture becomes the intrapsychic battle that the hero, a person who thinks of herself as nondescript in her California home environment, explores as she becomes a war photographer.  She becomes a was photographer, on the one hand, in an overdetermined way: her father was a soldier, as was her beloved older brother and, when her older brother is killed in Vietnam, she is drawn like a moth to flame to the site of his death.  But she also becomes a war photographer in an almost whimsical way – "Oh, there is a war on, I’ll just go over and take some pictures as if I were a tourist going to Europe and, like that tourist, I might only last a week, but maybe I’ll like it there and decide to stay."  Like Odysseus men in the land of the Lotus Eaters, I may decide to stay because I like the flavor of the lotuses.

Frankly, as I started into this book I was much more reluctant to read it even than I am about my psychoanalytic identity.  This is a war, I thought, that is better forgotten.  I was creeped out by the descriptions of the jungle and leeches and the uncertainty of who might attack from which vantage point.  I felt on edge, uncomfortable, and, on another level, manipulated.  Why is the author choosing this space, I wondered.  Is there a point to the discomfort evoke by her writing, decades after the war is over, her first novel about a war she didn’t experience herself?  Why is she returning to this most embarrassing and misguided moment of ours?  Does she want to rub our noses in just how out of touch we were?  

Fortunately I managed to manage my concerns long enough to get over the hump and be pulled into the central dilemmas that are played out very intentionally against a backdrop that suits them and helps highlight how they are played out, in a hidden way, in our contemporary world.

In describing how a good photographer works, the author lets us know her intent.  The good photographer, she maintains, does not instruct us.  She tells the story, and, when we hear the story, we construct the intended meaning ourselves rather than having it given to us.  

The author of this story starts near the end of her story, telling us about the photographer’s experience on the day that the US pulls out of Vietnam.  In the process of doing this, we learn the outline of what will be told, in effect, as a flashback through the rest of the novel – the story of a love triangle between the hero and two others – an American and a Vietnamese.  The American we know will die in the war and the Vietnamese man will be the person the photographer manhandles onto a helicopter out of the country on that last weird day as she chooses, to her apparent surprise and our own, not to join him on that last helicopter ride out.

We spend the novel, then, with a question.  How do we get to that day that we think of as final? How do things work out so that the particular configuration the author has set up can be resolved and make sense?  Not to spoil things, when we get back to that moment, there is enough still unresolved that we realize that the story does not end where we imagined that it would, but just a bit more needs to be played out, and we are hungry for it.  We have been setting the stage, through this long and complicated novel, for an ending that will be both a resolution and an opening to new questions about how what we now know about this woman will play out in her life and, vicariously, in our own.

So, I will now violate the author’s rule and talk directly about what the book means rather than tell the story.  She has already told that story, and what follows is a reaction and my own interpretation and experience of the impact of the story.  I do not mean it to definitive.  I, like the author, was not in the Vietnam war.  I, unlike the author, am not a woman.  So, like the author, I will have to imagine myself into places that I cannot inhabit.

One reason that a woman might want to locate a woman’s coming of age story in the Vietnam war is that the patriarchal attitudes of men are perhaps never more clearly on display than in war – and this war is a particularly good canvas on which to paint those attitudes – neither the photographic core nor the military was meaningfully inhabited by both sexes.  Further, the cultural divide between the American and the Vietnamese cultures is starker during a time when we are occupying and, at least in theory, fighting on behalf of people we, on some other level, despise and devalue.

The point here is that in our current cultural space, where our political correctness would force us to whitewash the differences, she might be accused of imposing a latent sexism and racism rather than being able to describe them in their natural and naked shape before we knew enough to better hide and disguise them.  To put on my psychoanalytic hat, in so far as this woman is writing about contemporary issues, this woman chooses to do that where the defensive structure of the culture is not so well developed.  Because we, as Americans and as men, are able to unselfconsciouslessly assume that ours is the best way to operate, we can express that in undisguised fashion.  Discovering there are flaws in the assumptions underlying both of these aspects of ourselves, we don’t necessarily quit believing in this truth, but we hide our belief in it better than before.

So, the question for a woman coming of age in a man’s world – and especially in a Western man’s world, is how does she remain/become true to herself?  What is a feminine self?  What is required of a woman – or of this woman in particular?  How can she make use of the psychological and social landscape, one that is determined largely by American males, to become a woman?  And isn’t this a contemporary problem, one that is complicated by men who disown their beliefs and values – who hide behind being woke while still practicing a variant of a very old and deeply culturally engrained pattern of behaving?  So, let’s strip the curtain off and deal with what’s lying underneath.

There are a number of teachers in this novel – many of them are men.  The two main teachers include the first lover – the photographer who is driven to get the best picture and is the quintessential American male.  Comfortable in his bravado, married to a woman who represents a world that he disavows, and comfortable being sexual with women he does not care about.  While he is all of these things, he is also troubled enough by this construction of himself to desire the hero – to feel that she is a worthy compliment to him and someone he can both admire and connect with, something that he has not done before.

The second teacher is also the second lover, a Vietnamese man who embodies a very different culture and a very different form of masculinity.  Rather than wearing who he is on his sleeve, he is reserved.  His world is, if anything, richer and more emotionally alive than the first lover – a person he serves but with whom he also becomes friends – but access to this man's emotional world is not offered or even imposed in the ways that Americans engage with other people – it is earned.  His tight rein on himself is necessary – he needs to serve many masters while letting each know that he is caring for them in the best possible way – while he needs to remain true to himself, far from an easy task.

There are other teachers, but it is important that there is a female teacher – a French woman who is left over from the former occupation of the country – a woman who is in the fashion business and who is wise to the ways of men.  The hero and this woman form a friendship that helps sustain her as she navigates numerous treacherous waters.

I would like to focus on two central learnings this woman engages in.  The first thing that this woman learns about herself, much to her surprise, is that she is brave.  Much braver than she imagined herself to be.  This courage is not about standing up for herself, though.  In fact, it comes about in the process of losing herself – of becoming so focused on what she is doing that she is unaware of herself.  At this moment, she both does extraordinary work and she is supported by and accepted by men – for a variety of reasons.  Some of the men profit from her courage, some of them are moved by it, and some of them recognize that she needs to be protected because her courage leads her to not think of herself.  She is also, and this is implicit, protected by the mantel of being an American.  She has a particular kind of freedom to be brave and to survive that those around her do not.

The second thing this woman learns (I am writing as if this were linear when in fact both learnings are more parallel and intersecting and they are both learned and forgotten and learned again) is that she is not a tourist or a dilettante.  She is here with a purpose.  This is a complicated piece of learning – and one that has to be learned in different ways in a veritable kaleidoscope of situations.  On one level, the American occupation is the occupation of tourists.  They do not move in and join with the natives – they hold them at arm distance. 

Our hero learns the Vietnamese language and eats their pho.  She connects with them individually – sometimes as a tourist – she spends a day weeding a rice patty, but goes back to being a tourist the next day - but who these people are begins to seep into her bones.  Some of the military guys have “gone native”, but this seems like an extreme version – one that is not authentic.  She goes to tourist sites, she photographs the Ho Chi Minh trail, but his is hardly a guided day trip.  And she doesn't go native in some faux macho way, nor faux femme way, but as herself, as an American female in a foreign and intriguing land.

More centrally, though, she wrestles with the urge to be a tourist – to see the best sight and go home and show the slides to her friends as a kind of trophy of her visit – and she wrestles with the urge to be not just any tourist, but the best tourist – to have the most compelling slide show not just to show the horror of war (while she is simultaneously drawn to it), but to beat out the other tourists at being the best tourist and, in the process, she intermittently loses sight of the fact that this is a war in which human beings are dying in gruesome, awful ways.

How can she – how can we – live lives of authenticity when we are surrounded by sights and experiences that we need to protect ourselves from?  I suppose this second learning is a subset of the first – how can we learn to have the courage to face the things that are terrifying and to engage with them rather than turn away?  How can we develop the wish to be connected, deeply and powerfully, to a transient and deeply flawed world without losing our capacity to be awestruck by it?

As I’ve written about these two things that she learns as she grows up, I realize that these are not static teachings, but ones that come and go.  They are “known” to a different extent at different moments.  I am struck that this book reflects an organic principle of a good psychoanalytic therapeutic encounter, it is periodical and self-contradictory.  The integrity of this story, one of the reasons that it works for me, is that the hero does not move from not-knowing to knowing, but rather moves in and out of knowing, forgetting and learning anew and in new ways as she moves forward.  She is both cannier and more naïve as she develops, and this feels true to me – or at least true to my own development.  She is, at no place in this novel, and certainly not at the end, done.

And perhaps that would be the third thing, then, that she learns – and the author teaches us in the well-crafted ending – that she is able to live in a world that is complex and internally inconsistent.  Things are not as they seem – the story that we thought we were being told at the beginning is not the story that we end up hearing at the end, and yet it is.  As we become savvier, we might not have to become more cynical – we might become capable of withstanding the intensely contradictory nature of life without having to resort so frequently to blotting that life out.  We might be able to live – to return to contemporary life – with men, including myself, who deny patriarchal values while simultaneously practicing them.  We might be able to extract from flawed models useful means of moving forward.

As I was reading the novel, it felt like the Vietnamese lover was set up as the desired and more virtuous model, and I think he was.  This is, after all, called the Lotus Eaters.  The hero will want to stay in the land of the lotuses.  But the Vietnamese lover was not a perfect model.  I found myself uncomfortably aware of how hiding the richness of his inner life, especially from the hero, left her cruelly isolated from him – or reliant on a kind of knowing that invites, I think, a kind of fantasy that can lead to delusional distance from connection.  If the writer intended a less complicated version of the world than I think she delivered to us, I would encourage us not to be satisfied by that version – not to be satisfied by the idea that there is a solution, but instead to join our hero in what I believe to be the position she attains, that we can, indeed must, live in a world that is deeply flawed and yet deeply, achingly beautiful – and we can trust ourselves to navigate and improve it as we work towards a better version of it, while simultaneously careening perilous close to destroying it and ourselves.

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Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; The Game is Rigged

 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; Gabrielle Zevin; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; fantasy; Sadie Sam characters; Play; Gaming's limits

How weird to be reading a book about gaming (something that I do very little of) while learning about playing games at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual meeting from a neuroscientist, Mark Solms.  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow takes its title from Banquo’s cry of lament after losing his wife in MacBeth.  The speech – and therefore the book – is a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life – its brevity, but also our unwillingness to admit that.  Indeed, the criticisms of online games at the conference were two; one that the interactions are not real (more on that in a moment) and two that gamers never die truly die, they just restart the game – there is always another tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

In the magical land of Harry Potter, where seemingly anything can happen, Rowling put in one absolute boundary; death.  Once someone has died, they are dead and no magic can revive them.  This parameter would, from Mark Solms’ perspective, make the books “real” rather than a game.  In a game everything is imaginary – and it is when the real intrudes – when a player in a football game actually dies – that the game quits being a game and becomes reality. 

So, computer games – including first person shooter games, but also games in which virtual worlds are made or a script is followed – are not real because you never die – unless, perhaps, you reach the highest level and solve the problem.  But even then, apparently, you can play the game again to try to do it more efficiently or effectively.  I once had a friend who didn’t like the character that he had constructed in Dungeons and Dragons (a game I have never played), so he set about to kill himself so that he could be assigned a new avatar.  It took him forever to die.

Games, according to Solms, are fun to play precisely because we don’t die.  We play them again and again, but only if we can “win” somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent of the time – or maybe, if we stretch it, between 30 and 70 per cent of the time.  We find it “fun” when there is a chance that we will win, but also a chance that we will lose.  Computer games capitalize on that by having us do better than we did before – winning, if you will, often.

But they don’t have the same kind of interactional capacities that real life games – the rough and tumble games of wrestling or the interactive games of skill that are played between real people rather than with avatars include figuring out, for instance, how to make the teams fair enough that either can win.  So, the psychoanalytic concern is that children growing up with avatar driven games don’t learn how to interact with people in the real world – they don’t learn how to read when the other has had enough and won’t play anymore unless you let them take the lead role for a while.  They won’t learn the subtleties of relational dynamics (and intrapsychic defenses) that are essential to becoming equipped to play in the very real and rough and tumble world of adulting.

I think this book is also written as a game rather than a novel.  One example of how it imports game architecture into its structure it the way it uses time.  We are constantly going back in time to discover the backstory of the characters. The way this works in gaming is illustrated by the protagonist, Sadie playing a game that she played as a child where she learned that she has to pick up a screwdriver rather than the more satisfying cudgel to bash in the brains of zombies because, she knows, the screwdriver will later be necessary later to fix the elevator.  It is only possible, then, to know in retrospect what we should have done in the game, and it is only in retrospect that we discover in this book what some of the most important elements of the story are.  Psychoanalysts use the term “apres coup” to articulate this sense of wishing to know then what I know now, or only being able to figure out “after the fact” that something is important. 

We, then, are playing a game when Zevin gives us those necessary details in retrospect.  We know that the other central player, Sam, has a broken foot which is a central dynamic in the plot, but we don’t know for a very long time how it was broken nor do we know the full impact on his character of the broken foot until that point and we find ourselves rethinking the role of the foot in Sam's life.  We need to pick up the pieces, carry them along on the journey, but also to assemble them once we have the tools to do that. 

This is both a book about gaming, then, and it is centrally a game about three people that are brought together by games and who end up making games together.  The book is highly structured – it is written as if it were a multi-level game that we, the readers, are playing.  If it were truly a game, the object of the game would be to help the two characters (Sadie and Sam) who are destined to come together accomplish that.  This premise (and the consummate story telling) make it hard to put down - will they get together?  How will they get together? - so I was confused that I was finding it vaguely unsatisfying until I figured out why. 

The author brings us into the book in the same way that a designer brings us into a game, she has us identify with the characters in the story.  To do this, she spells them out in broad strokes – they feel like fantasy figures, rather than real humans.  I want more detail from her, more grit, more character, but I think she is expecting that we, the readers, will bring that to the characters, just as I have noted in other posts that actors bring their lived experience (and their imagination filtered through that lived experience) to the characters that they play and this helps flesh those characters out.  Banquo comes to life because of the felt grief of the actor who plays him, not because the lines, by themselves, lead us to feel sorrow. 

A play or a movie is a collaboration between the writer, the director and the actor (as well as the set designer, the make up artist, the cameraperson, and certainly the other actors) to bring a relatively flat script to life.  This book, despite its length, reads more like a script than like a novel.  The ending feels inevitable from early on and we are invited to figure out how it will be accomplished.  Ultimately, though, the collaboration has to be with the reader, and this reader, while he admired the architecture of the game, and he kept turning the pages with joy, was ultimately not satisfied because the characters were not given the kind of detail that allowed not just the scripted, plot driven ending to occur, but that allowed the psychological ending to hold true.

I went back and looked at my critique of Zevin’s previous book, The storied Life of A.J. Fikry, and the complaint was the same.  The characters weren’t complex there either.  This woman is very good at creating worlds, at building a suspenseful plot, and at putting the players in position.  Weirdly, these characters were interesting.  I cared about them.  But they didn’t end up feeling real.  In particular, Sam, the character who is matched with Sadie and it seems that they are destined to come together is not, I don’t think, ultimately believable.  He is a fantasy character.  Someone whose desire to connect with others, so apparent throughout his life and his pursuit of Sadie, is imagined by this author to be satisfied by becoming her play partner rather than her lover.  And Sadie's remoteness - her comfort with this compromise solution - is not, to me, adequately communicated as a lived component of her character rather than simply being a fact about her.  I don't feel the pain or the conflict or the even just the mistrust that makes her remote.

On some level, I get that a play partner is a better connection than a lover.  As grandparents say about their grandkids, we can play together and then they go home.  The domestic, and all its squabbles, gets separated from the messiness of the real.  Sadie saves Sam early in the book, then Sam saves Sadie. They also deeply disappoint each other.  This is the stuff of real play.  Then, towards the end of the book, Sam saves Sadie again, and he does this by creating a space where they can be together virtually and she can both know and not know that she is interacting with Sam.  He works to rebuild her trust.

In psychoanalytic psychotherapy we call this progression rupture and repair.  In the virtual space, they marry, something Sadie in a real space is deathly opposed to.  I wrote that last sentence and then deleted it.  Deathly seemed too strong.  But maybe it isn’t.  Maybe for Sadie (And perhaps for Zevin) marriage feels like a death sentence.  Mark Twain wrote that it made no sense to write about the life of a married man because he had no life.  And for women in our culture, many have commented that this has been even more the case.  I can get that on a sociological level, but I read novels to get the particulars of how that plays out for this person.

Sadie remains unknown to me.  This is frustrating.  She is remote - from her early lover who is a cad, from the man at the other end of the triangle and from Sam.  All of that is fine.  But her being remote from the reader - and leaving it to the reader to connect with her remoteness out of her own is, apparently successful - the book is selling very well - but it leaves this reader at a loss.

I’m tempted to take the easy path and say that Zevin’s a grown up a gamer and has learned about life from video games, not from playing games on the playground.  That would, I’m sure, be incredibly reductive.  But I do wonder if she spent more time gaming than reading and playing with friends.  I was also surprised to learn that she has been in a relationship for the last twenty years and that she is has been writing for that long as well.  I had thought that her writing would get more complicated as she matures, but I’m now thinking that she is letting us know that this is her version of a well lived life. It does not surprise me that she is also a very successful writer for a young reader audience. 

I think this book may best be understood as fantasy and a version of an online game and enjoyed as such.  The danger, of course, is that if this book is imitating life, the fears that the analyst's have about gaming feeding the need to play without providing the nourishment that play does may be realized when we turn to entertainment in our books that is as thin as that provided in our consoles.

Postscript:  I have been thinking about this since I posted and I don't think that I articulated the concern about the lack of character.  When Zevin goes back to fill in the backstory on one of the characters, it is frequently to relate an event - often a traumatic event.  This event is supposed, I think, to explain something about the "current" functioning of the character.  It does "explain", in the sense of filling in a back story, but she fails to explain how the incident impacted the character.  

As an example: the character in the first game that Sam and Sadie create is Ichigo.  Ichigo, the lead character, loses his parents when he is preverbal and has to figure out how to fend for himself.  This terrible thing happens - it impacts him - and his development is going to be completely different from every other human, but his avatar is nondescript.  I am referring to him in the masculine, but the avatar has a indiscriminate form.  The characters in the novel are not as nondescript, but they are on that continuum.  We are not just the sum of what happens to us, we are what we have done with what has happened to us, and I want to the author to more clearly articulate how that has occurred in her characters. 

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The Lying Life of Adults on Netflix: Movies can bring life to books.

 

The Lying Life of Adults; Elena Ferrante; Video; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Bracelet; Beauty

I read The Lying Lives of Adults a few years ago and posted on it.  It is a tremendous coming of age book set in Naples and Milan in the 1980s.  It is also a complicated book with manifold complex characters interacting in intriguing ways.  It was a difficult read for me – not just because of the complexities, but because, I think, of the crossed cultures, and the crossed genders (mine and the lead character’s) in interaction with the cultures.

When my post on the book The Lying Lives of Adults suddenly started getting hits, seemingly out of the blue, I knew something must be going on.  Well, it turned out that the Italian film had dropped as a six-episode series on Netflix.  Thank you internet for this wake up call! 

The Reluctant Wife and I finished watching the series last night, and what a satisfying watch it was.  Despite one possible elaboration, the fidelity to the book went beyond being technically on target, it brought the spirit of the book to life in ways that my Midwestern US male imagination wasn’t quite able to construct from the page.  So, I will take a second whack at describing the impact of the book as interpreted by the film…

Twelve year-old Giovanna (Giordana Marengo) begins to awaken when she overhears her father Andre (Alessandro Preziosi) saying that she is as ugly as his sister, her Aunt Vittoria (Valeria Golino).  Vittoria is the sister that her father (Andreas in the book) left in the gutter when he ascended to the heights of Naples, rising out of the ghetto by virtue of his education and marrying well.  

Giovanna responds to the broadside from her father by seeking out the shunned and ignored Vittoria who becomes the family truth teller – calling things out as she sees them, helping Giovanna see through the lies of everyone around her.  Vittoria has the grit and clear vision of the ghetto perspective.  But, it turns out, she has been lying about herself.  Giovanna asks why she has been lying about her own life, and Vittoria responds, “Because the lie is more beautiful than the truth.”

The book and the movie, then, can be understood as working from an aesthetic perspective to ask questions about life and love and how to live.  Is a beautiful life a well-lived life?  And who is to determine what is beautiful?  Should we deceive ourselves (and those around us) to create the illusion of beauty?  How would we live a genuinely beautiful life?  These questions are especially relevant in a world that is, in so many respects, ugly.

I think that the film allowed me to more viscerally experience many aspects of the ugliness of Giovanna’s life than I could imagine them on the page.  Most immediately, the boorish behavior of men – the constant objectification of women – is somehow clearer when depicted on the screen than when seen on the page, at least for me.  Also, the particular aesthetic of both Naples's industrial core and its bourgeois high rises is hard to imagine from a different continent.

It is also clearer on the screen that Giovanna, who is deftly portrayed by a woman in what appears to be her first screen appearance, wants to be appreciated not as an object by others, but to have her subjectivity be beautiful.  She wants to be appreciated by the powerful men in a world where they value each other based on the beauty of their words.  She wants to be appreciated as one of them.

This does not mean that she is unaware of her physical beauty or the beauty of those around her.   She is afraid, after all, that her father no longer finds her beautiful at the beginning of the film.  It means, I think, that she comes to lose faith in physical beauty, works to be appreciated for her words, and is exploring, as adolescents do, what the meaning of the physical contact that proceeds from either to provide evidence of love really means.

The most immediate cause of her confusion about the meaning of love is not her own explorations but the dissolution of her parent’s marriage.  Vittoria encourages her to closely observe that marriage – and she can see it falling apart, perhaps before her parents can.  Vittoria then sees evidence of the fractures that Giovanna wouldn’t understand – and pushes the marriage over a cliff.  She notes that a family heirloom – an indication of love, has been given by Andre not to Giovanna, as Vittoria thought would happen, nor to Giovanna’s mother, Andre’s wife, but to another woman (The details of who this woman is are available in the post on the book, here I am going to avoid the complications of describing the manifold players).

Giovanna is crushed by her father’s infidelity and shuns him.  He, given a chance to be with her, complains that SHE is not empathic enough with HIM.  It is suddenly clear that this man she has always admired and modelled herself after is much less mature than he appears – perhaps less mature, and certainly less able to manage his emotions, than she is.  And, to stay true to the central theme of this post, his immaturity and weakness make him ugly.  In a word, his pursuit of beauty has made him ugly.

Vittoria acts as a helpful corrective here – she acknowledges that Andre’s raising Giovanna – his ability to have instilled in her an ability to appreciate beauty – is a testament to his own aesthetic value.  He must be beautiful to have brought such beauty into the world.  (Not an argument that the #METOO movement – in terms, for instance, of the value of the aesthetic products of boors - puts much store in!).

Vittoria’s unexpected support of Andre comes at a moment in the film after Giovanna has demonstrated a fidelity that Vittoria predicted she would not able to manage, and I think Giovanna also surprised herself at having done this, and she was a little undone at having done this.  And this is the turning point in the series, one that is predicted in the opening sequence that takes place before the opening credits.  In that scene, Giovanna swims to the bottom of the sea, searching for the bracelet.  She finds it after much searching, but then she leaves it behind as she swims back to the surface.

The bracelet signifies, among other things, the false loves that we seek out, the false loves that express, in a word, the lying life of adults.  The bracelet was originally stolen from Vittoria’s lover’s mother-in-law to be given to Vittoria – a testament to her lover's extramarital love for her.  It made him feel good to show off his admiration for Vittoria, even though it caused pain for his wife and children.  And Vittoria’s lie is that his love for her was true love – a love that she has remained faithful to, despite her lover’s death.  A beautiful lie, but a lie.

The question that we are left with at the end of the film (and the book) is whether Giovanna can construct a beautiful life not on a lie, but on some other foundation.  In order to do this, she must become an adult, and she concretely arranges to do this in a way that will be painful, brief, and weirdly reparative.

In her exploration of her attractiveness to men, she flirted with and then avoided a repulsive but insistent man whom she cruelly ridiculed for a physical feature – and she purposely repaired that rupture in the relationship with him when she used him to cross over into becoming an adult.  This interaction was clearly not an act of love in the conventional sense, but at its heart there was affection and concern – something that Giovanna expressed throughout her two-year journey of questioning the lives of adults.

 The beautiful life that Giovanna would pursue would, then, include genuine interactions, but these would be founded in the kind of brutal honesty that Vittoria demonstrated when she came clean about lying.  What form might this take?

We get snapshots of this.  Her father’s communistic and leftist views are exposed as hypocritical by his bourgeois striving.  The glowing, deeply spiritual character’s Christian values are exposed as hypocritical by the looseness of his sexual mores.  Giovanna demonstrates Communist and Christian values while staying appropriately critical of both institutions.

At the end of the book and film, Giovanna leaves on a trip, perhaps to a new life, with Ida, the younger sister of her close friend – a writer.  I speculated before that this might be Ferrante. Giovanna has been appreciating her writing, she loves it, and this friend has been writing about a beautiful world.  Giovanna has appreciated her ability to articulate beauty, even while they are both struggling to survive the deceit of the adults they have relied on.

Lies are, I think, essential to human life.  We lie first and foremost to ourselves.  We do this because we live in a harsh world.  Telling ourselves little falsehoods, mirrored perhaps on the loving falsehoods that our parents tell us, help us navigate the world.  Giovanna's father's lie that she was beautiful - and his lie that she is ugly - are the wellsprings of the tension in this film.  The actress playing Giovanna vacillates smoothly between moments of physical and spiritual beauty and ugliness.  The truth is that we are constantly moving along a variety of spectra - we are neither this nor that.  Any attempt to pin us down, to encircle us, the way a bracelet encircles the wrist, through a precise representation is a lie, because it is a static description of a dynamic being that, at best, captures a facet of who it is that we are.

Recently, in writing about the White Lotus, I commented on the psychology of the lies of omission – the things that we don’t tell people because they might hurt them.  The lies that are told here – many of them are lies of omission, but many of them are lies of creation; creating or implying beauty where there is none - do not, in fact, create beauty.  I think that Giovanna’s lie to the repulsive man is a lie to create a false but healing moment.  She has learned how to lie – and to do that charitably, but I hope that she will be using lies as infrequently as possible – working instead to be that rare thing, an adult who can be reasonably truthful and beautiful.

In the spirit of not lying, I have to admit to unsettled feelings about the depictions of nudity in this film.  At the beginning and end Giovanna is depicted in the nude.  It would be a lie to say that 16 year olds don’t have sex and aren’t sexual.  And I think my interest in response to these images may be part of what is driving my discomfort.  I don’t know how old the actress is.  But I am concerned that a movie that is championing female sexuality and power as up to the task of fighting with masculinity shouldn’t have to pander to the male gaze quite so frankly.  On the other hand, perhaps my discomfort is the director's intentional use of my own male gaze to help me realize that I am not so different from the men depicted in this movie. 

 

    

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A Midsummer Night's Dream - Love, Sex, and Fairies

 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Folger Theater, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Sex, Love

 

We were in Washington, DC, on a work/mini-vacation trip, and we went to see one of the less visited museums – the museum of buildings.  It is in the judicial district and a very large brick structure.  When it was built, it was the largest brick building in the world.  It was built as a pension building for civil war veterans and it has an incredible open atrium – five stories tall – in the middle of it.  It is a particularly fitting building to be the museum of buildings because the columns that support the brick walls surrounding the atrium are in all three classical styles – with Ionic columns holding up Doric columns, and massive Corinthian columns dominating the space – as if to teach us about the development of classic architecture.  On the day we visited, this space was filled with – a pop-up stage.

Apparently, the Folger Shakespeare Library is closed for renovations, and their stage is, too, so they are using various other stages around town to mount their productions.  The last time we saw Midsummer Night’s Dream, it was on an outdoor stage in Door County, Wisconsin, and the stage at the Museum of Buildings (we were able to get tickets to come back to see the performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream) felt – because of the space above us – almost like we were outside again.  And, of course, even if it is a bit past the solstice, it doesn’t hurt to see this play in the middle of summer.

The play is, as this Playbill pointed out, a comedy; not because the two (or three, depending on how you count it) couples are able to successfully get together at the end of it, but because the ragtag players who are in it are able to mount a successful production at the end of it.  The dream is, as it were, the creation of a play – the mounting of it – and successfully inviting the audience to engage in it, to feel it, to experience it, as they would a dream.  And so, the measure of success of the play is the measure of the experience of the audience member – the ability of the audience member to experience the play as a dream, as their own dream.

This production was quite conscious and public about their intention to engage the audience – to ensnare them or collaborate with them in the dream production.  They encouraged audience participation at the beginning of it, made frequent allusions to pop music, encouraged clapping along to much of the singing and dancing that they did.  They more successfully captured the Reluctant Wife, because she is more familiar with the pop vernacular, but I think they missed the mark with deeply enthralling each of us – ironically because of the strength of the individual actors.

The play involves three largely unrelated sets of people who are functioning in parallel but apparently without any actual overlap – much the way that our dream life functions in parallel to our lived life with overlap that is only apparent on inspection or, dare I say it, analysis…  The first characters we are introduced to are the Members of the Court of Athens.  Hippolyta is the Queen of the Amazons and she is betrothed to Theseus, the Duke of Athens.  Was Theseus a Duke?  Did the Amazons have a Queen?  Does it matter when they are played by African Americans as contemporary African Americans?  Hermia, a young girl who is in love with Lysander, has been promised by her father, Egeus a member of the Athenian court, to Demetrius, who is desperately in love with her.  Meanwhile Demetrius is spurning Helena who is in love with him.  Just so there is some balance somewhere, Lysander, at least initially, is in love with Hermia.

Meanwhile, Theseus has commissioned Peter Quince to produce a play on the day of his wedding.  Quince has an inept band of players, led by Bottom, to do this.  Meanwhile, in a shadow world, The King and Queen of the Fairies are fighting with each other and Titania, the Queen, uses an assistant Fairy, Puck, to transform Bottom into an Ass and then, in a reversal of Shakespeare’s writing, casts a spell so that Oberon, the King, foolishly falls in love with the Ass, which will allow the Queen, she hopes, the ability to take from the King the changeling – a young human that the fairies have stolen.

In my own reading of this comedy, unlike in tragedy, which focuses on the character and travails of a hero, here we are confronted with a group of people.  All of them are flawed in obvious and ordinary ways.  And the loves that they experience here are fickle and complicated.  Unlike the single minded lovers of tragedy – and here we could take Romeo and Juliet – lovers who may be star crossed by virtue of the social boundaries they dare not cross, but who are true and constant with each other.  Ironically – certainly intentionally, Shakespeare does take the star-crossed lovers and makes fun of them.  The play that the troupe performs on the triple wedding day at the end of the play is a vastly shortened caricatured and funny version of Romeo and Juliet.  It is absurd and awful, it is poorly acted, and it allows the couples who are getting married – who are entering into a sacred covenant, making sacred vows, laugh.  And we laugh, too, exiting the theater with a light-hearted step.

What does that say about us?  Are we fickle, too?  Of course we are.  What are we to do, then, with Romeo and Juliet?  Weren’t we deeply moved by that?  Where do we stand on the comic and fickle to tragic and serious continuum?

I, for one, was raised to be serious.  Love – and the necessary compliment – marriage – was serious business.  When I fell in love, it was to be forever.  And it was to be a deep and lasting opening up of an intimate relationship across a shared lifetime.  And I took it upon myself to mold my character to be worthy of such an undertaking.  (I know this sounds pretentious and crazy, but it is true…)

At the same time, I was driven to be interested in a variety of people – to be drawn to them, to flirt with them and, especially as I grew older, to explore being close to not just one, but a series of people.  Ultimately, when I married the first time, that marriage did not last.  Was my wife fickle? Was I fickle?  Did the fairies interfere in our loving relationship?  Did we not understand each other enough – though we were older and, as my brother-in-law who performed the marriage ceremony pointed out to us when he opted not to offer pre-marital counseling – we were both psychologists.   Shouldn’t we have known what we were getting into?

I was struck, in thinking about the structure of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that the book Hamnet, which portrays a version of Shakespeare as married in Stratford and a man about town in London, captures something of the tension between Shakespeare’s vision of love in Romeo and Juliet (a deep and abiding love for a wife in Stratford), and the temptations, perhaps especially as imagined by that wife, of a man who spent much of his life away from her (The man about town in London).

Love is both serious business and light-hearted play.  Peter Fonagy, a psychoanalyst in London who is very interested in how we develop from children into adults, proposed that one of the reasons sexual intimacy is so delightful is that our sexual selves have not been supported and nurtured throughout our lives – they have mostly been ignored.  This means that they are relatively immature – meaning that we can more easily engage in spontaneous play from our sexual selves than perhaps from any other part of ourselves.  I believe this can also get us into trouble.  We can play – and be drawn into a relationship – and not realize – not have the wherewithal to realize that we are in over our heads and that the other person is, perhaps, not the right person for us.  Shakespeare nicely sends this idea up by having Egeus not understand that his daughter Hermia’s love for Lysander is true and constant, though he also has the fairies demonstrate that Lysander could become directed to love someone else.  Fortunately for Lysander, and the play, Hermia hangs onto her attachment – she knows what love is – and she wins Lysander back.

If Shakespeare did, as Harold Bloom proposed, invent The Human, he did so in all of the splendid variety that we as a group – but also that we as individuals are.  Not only are the characters different from each other, they are different from themselves based on the vagaries of fairies and of chance, and we are able to be made a fool of by love – even falling in love with an ass…  Even if I did not resonate with the beat of this performance – even if the strength of individual performances was so great that the play did not coalesce into a deep and strong dream, but felt rather like one of those dreams that barely holds together and barely keeps us asleep, there is something about the structure of this play and its tension with the other plays in the oeuvre that, like the columns in the building where it was performed, can teach us something about the structure of the human experience – its variety and constancy – and all the while we just think that we are being entertained. 

 

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Hamnet: Maggie O’Farrell’s Novel of Shakespeare's Female Sensibilities

 Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Femininity

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet focuses on the process of grieving.  She does this by imagining Hamnet as a twin – both of his sister, but also, I propose, of his father.  O’Farrell most completely imagines the grief of Hamnet, though, through the eyes of his mother, Agnes.  Agnes does not overtly, I don’t think, imagine him to be her twin, but mostly to be her child.

Hamnet is, of course, a version of the name Hamlet, and O’Farrell is writing about Shakespeare of Stratford's son, a child named Hamnet who she imagines to be the model for his Hamlet (That said, O’Farrell never calls Shakespeare by name.  To treat Shakespeare as a character in one of her novels felt profane to her.  I will refer to him by that name to avoid confusion but also to articulate the ways that the absent Shakespeare deeply affects the arc of the novel).  O’Farrell imagines Hamnet to have been felled (mild spoiler alert) by the plague.  She imagines this because Shakespeare, apparently, never once mentions the plague in any of his plays – which just doesn’t make sense. 

The plague was rampant not just in England but throughout Europe.  It was the hallmark of the Renaissance; a symptom of the improved trade routes that the Renaissance afforded, and (from a very current perspective) perhaps nature’s way of trying to limit the expansion of the European version of humankind that would, one day, so perilously endanger her.  Be that as it may, I do wonder about how the plague and its concomitant losses may have strangely fueled the artistic blossoming of the Renaissance, and that is part and parcel of O’Farrell musings about this boy.     

I don’t think Shakespeare came from Stratford: I am an Oxfordian.  But I do think that the idea that Shakespeare came from a small town has spawned a great deal of very interesting thinking about him and about creativity.  Maggie O’Farrell’s vision is less of Shakespeare and more of Anne Hathaway (whom she considers by the name Agnes – for there is some evidence that was the name of the name of the woman married to the man whom some take to be Shakespeare).  This book turns out to be incidentally, but crucially about Shakespeare while it is primarily about Agnes and the ways of women.

Agnes is, in O’Farrell’s imagining, a witch.  She is a seer.   When she first meets the boy Shakespeare, who is the loser son of a shady glove maker in a small town coming to her family’s house in the country to tutor her brothers in Latin, she takes his hand in hers, as she does with many people, and reads, by pressing between thumb and first finger, him.  She discovers within him vast vistas; distant horizons, and she seduces him, becomes pregnant, marries him, and they ultimately have three children; an elder daughter and then twins – a boy and a girl.  Having three children confuses her because she sees herself in the future with only two children.

Agnes is an herbalist.  She grows her own herbs and harvests wild ones.  She dries them and makes tinctures with them (something that is still practiced by women: see the book Educated).  She then dispenses them to the people in the town, to the consternation of the physicians, whose competence at neither treatment nor comfort is as great as hers.  She does not accept payment for her cures and treatments, but instead appreciates gifts that come from the labors of those she serves.

In this she is different from her Shakespeare and from her oldest daughter Susanna.  The two of them are shrewd business people with heads for figures.  They amass broad holdings that Agnes inhabits but doesn’t value.  Agnes, like the younger twin, Judith, is, in these matters of the world, simple.

Just as in a Shakespearean play (we saw this in Midsummer Night’s Dream just last night), there is both a symmetrical relationship between the characters and then something that throws that off.  Here, Shakespeare and Susanna are “twins” (alike in their having urban and urbane sensibilities) and Agnes and Judith are “twins” (alike in being creatures of the earth – organically rather than transactionally attuned to others).  The twins at the heart of the story – Hamnet and Judith - are deeply organically entwined with each other, but Hamnet is deeply grieved by both Agnes and Shakespeare.  Oddly, Agnes accuses herself of having been out of touch with Hamnet when he needed her most (against her character) and Shakespeare, too, imagined and feared that Judith, not Hamnet, would be lost.  Agnes imagines that Shakespeare does not feel the loss of his son, but ultimately they are, of course, united by their grief.

The death of a child is unimaginable.  When my son was born, I could not watch TV for a year.  The death of a character (which happens more frequently than I ever knew) was the death of somebody’s child.  When asked at Julliard to write about what terrified him, the author of Rabbit Hole said, “I got nothing.”  And then his child was born. 

O’Farrell has had to live with the reality of her one her three children being consistently on the verge of death.  When O’Farrell was taught that the death of Hamnet was not a significant event for Shakespeare, she recoiled from this idea.  She reimagines Shakespeare as being; yes, a creature of the theater and of London, and therefore urbane, but also as someone who is tied to the earth, as someone who is resonant with flowers and winds and water, and she imagined his domestic life – and his marriage to Agnes – as the conduit for this.  And out of this imagining she conjured what became, for me, a spellbinding tale.

Freud noted the importance of doubling to the sense of the uncanny.  He was describing what causes us shivers when we hear ghost stories, but also when we recognize something as true.  We feel something Heimlich (Homelike or canny), something familiar, in something novel.  This might be a version of the link that Aristotle was pointing to when talking about tragedy – we connect with the hero and feel a sense of catharsis because of an identification with them.  For Freud, the sense of identification and the sense of canniness are both linked with a sense of a double – a person in the present who is very much like a person in the past.

Kohut, a psychoanalytic thinker whose writings in the 1970s and 80s opened entirely new ways of thinking about people and analysis, noted what he called a twin transference.  I am imagining the twin transference, in this moment, as a doubling, as it were, of the self.  Seeing in someone else not a version of a familiar other, but seeing in them a version of ourselves.  There is an uncanny sense that I am not alone (the way that I generally feel), but that I am connected with someone who gets me not because they have some kind of concept of me, but because they are shaped like me.  They get me because they are living within a bone structure that is the same as my own.         

O’Farrell’s really good story telling becomes movingly, powerfully excellent when Hamnet offers himself to Death, who is walking around the room as Judith is dying of the plague.  He trades himself for her.  As he and Judith are lying, entangled in her sheets as she is fighting with the plague, “He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side of him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut.”  Perhaps those of us who are not twins imagine this connection more powerfully than those who have lived as twins and sense the yawning differences between each other as well as the similarities – and I have no evidence that O’Farrell herself is a twin – so perhaps this is the wish, the hoped-for twin transference rather than the thing itself, but it is a convincing rendition of the sense of not being alone that the yearning for another or the feeling of connection with them can bring.

And I think this is an important part of the intense love that is part and parcel of becoming a parent.  There is the sense of this other creature – a creature that is dependent on me in a way that no other creature ever has been; a creature that is deeply connected to me – and yet is an autonomous being – and there is a sense of caring for this creature in a way that is unlike any caring that we have experienced before.  We would, as Hamnet does for Judith, offer ourselves up to death so that this creature could go on living.  When God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, there is no greater sacrifice that can be asked – and part of the power of the Christian narrative is God’s sacrifice, in turn, of his only son.

In O’Farrell’s imagination, this loss is so great that it drives Shakespeare away, he cannot bear to be in the presence of the reminders of his lost son, but Agnes is therefore left to suffer her grief alone – losing her connection to Shakespeare in the process.  She then imagines him as unaffected, and we imagine him (in our psychoanalytically informed minds) powerfully defending against this immense loss.  Agnes can sense the hands of other women on Shakespeare when he returns home, and we don’t doubt those hands to have been there.  But we also glimpse his care for her – his concern – including the way that it is expressed in his careful wooing to win her back.   We also see his transactional care as he directs Susanna to acquire more and more things for them in his home of Stratford - only at the end of the novel do we appreciate that London has never become his home, despite the time that he has spent there.

It is the play; however, that stands as his testament of love to a child he could not have known – a boy, eleven at his death, who had not become a man. O’Farrell provides an interesting portal into that play.  She posits that Shakespeare imagined his son having grown.  She imagines (I think – this is not explicit) that the father has imagined that he has been able to sacrifice himself so the son can live.  He returns then, in the play, as a ghost.  A ghost who is able to direct his son, perhaps as he could not have done in a real life cut short.

OK, now I am going to play a bit with the play itself in a way that O’Farrell does not.  Shakespeare, imagining a child whom he did not see to manhood, imagines him as a fatherless child – one who did not benefit from having known his father.  As such, he is uncertain.  Visited by his father’s Ghost, he does not trust the ghost, nor himself.  He does not know how to proceed; he does not know how to manage the powerful feelings that are moved inside him by the machinations of his uncle and the treachery of his mother.

To mix a bit more of O’Farrell’s backstory into the play, Shakespeare’s betrayal of Agnes (falling into the arms, though apparently not the hearts, of other women in the wake of Hamnet’s death) is reversed.  He distances himself from his own philandering by accusing her – Hamlet/Hamnet’s mother - of betraying him with the uncle.  He absolves himself of the sin, while preserving the feeling of the necessity of it. 

How can two parents who, together, created this child not be reminded of that child whenever they are intimately in contact with each other?  Must they not distance themselves from each other in order to manage the intensity of the feeling of loss?  But doesn’t this seem like a further betrayal?  An additional loss heaped on top of an already unbearable loss?

Is Shakespeare also imagining himself into the role of Polonius, the foolish father of Ophelia and Laertes, who, despite his foolishness offers some of the sagest advice ever, including “To thine own self be true” and “Never a borrower nor a lender be”?  Might this be the longed-for advice that Shakespeare would have liked to have given Hamnet? 

Is Shakespeare mocking himself when he characterizes Polonius as someone who cares only about appearances (Polonius states, “Clothes make the man”), as O’Farrell imagines Shakespeare is mocked by Agnes for putting on the airs of the city and is Shakespeare mourning having run off to London when Polonius pines for his earlier life ("Old friends are the best friends")?  And as Shakespeare, the writer, is finally able, after a period of intense but distant mourning, to re-inhabit the mind of his son, does he experience himself as spying on him the way that Polonius spies on Laertes and, ultimately fatally, on Hamlet himself?

I offer these O’Farrell inspired musings not to substantiate her particular take on Shakespeare (and Agnes), but to acknowledge that they fit into a tapestry of mystery that surrounds the transition that Shakespeare marked, the transition that the Renaissance promoted in the arts more broadly of taking the individual as an article of study – to know more about what it means, in its particulars, to be an individual human; and to value that perspective. 

I remain an Oxfordian, but I am appreciative of the ways in which O’Farrell clarifies that Shakespeare’s voice can be better understood by wrestling with the ways that it is influenced by his feminine identity – the self that I am viewing O’Farrell as having embodied and split off from him in the person of Agnes. 

O’Farrell portrays the young Shakespeare as ignorant, even stupid about plants.  Who taught him?  Did a woman?  A witch?  Is his appreciation for the subtleties of the human condition informed by the desires of women, not just of men?  Was he, as a passive observer of the human condition, twinning with a woman?  With his own feminine perspective?  Isn’t the world of hearth and home, the world of deeply felt connection, the world of women?  How did women shape the mind of the man who allowed humans to think so differently about themselves?  This book offers interesting and arresting ideas about this while telling a poignant and evocative tale that would stand well on its own. 

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Homeland Elegies: Grief is the difficult pathway to healing...

 Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Loss, Foreign Life, Trumpism

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

If you are looking for a page turner, keep looking, this book is not it.  But if you are willing to put up with bad writing by a good author in order to understand something essential about American culture and where it is heading and why, and, as a bonus, to understand something essential about the complications of having a Moslem heritage in the U.S., this book, told from the perspective of a very self-revealing (without necessarily being insightful) first generation Pakistani- American, might be just the ticket for you.

This book, not quite a memoir – perhaps a Roman a Clef?  - shares some characteristics with other books told by outsiders from clans that don’t allow for divulging anything to outsiders – Hillbilly Elegy comes immediately to mind, but so does Bill Clinton’s autobiography (I did not write about this – I was not posting when I read this book).  All three books have very intelligent authors; good raconteurs each, who fail to deliver. 

All three figures fail to deliver in a similar way for similar reasons.  Akhtar, J.D. Vance, and Clinton overshare.  They focus on the details of what happened and they tell the story as if they could get it absolutely accurately.  It is as if they don’t want the reader to be thinking and imagining along with them.  When an author is on his game, he doesn’t worry about whether the story is accurate – he or she is more concerned with the experience of the audience and getting the story to make sense in their minds – as they construct it - than caring about getting the facts absolutely straight.  The author is confident that what they are relating is what happened because this is the story that will make sense to the actively involved reader.

These three authors do not have the confidence of knowing that their readers will believe them.  Or perhaps they fear that they readers will believe them – or both.  When you come from a place of discomfort with who it is that you are – for Vance, the Hillbilly ethic strongly supports him as long as he keeps what he has to say inside the family – similarly for Clinton – a Southern child of divorced parents playing at belonging with the rich and powerful – and Akhtar cites the example of Salmon Rushdie and his Satanic Verses as a means helping us empathize with his discomfort in articulating the secrets that he is telling.   

 In contrast, Lisa Halliday, in Asymmetry, also a book, like each of these three, about power differential, is able to comment on the dominant culture without losing her ability to write smoothly, elegantly and powerfully.  But it is a book by a woman writer exposing another writer – a powerful man – to the world.  She is not violating the rules of her feminist/protestant dominant culture community when she uses the power of her writing to empower herself by describing her part in the complicated dance of the relationship with the other author.  Perhaps more to the point, Tara Westover, in Educated, eloquently exposes men and her own highly valued Church of Latter Day Saints  community to scrutiny.  These two women’s membership in the Oprah Openness club, or perhaps just their status as women in a male dominated culture, seems to protect their writing from the clunky flaw of needing to control it.

All five authors, though, share the vantage point of being the outsider to the dominant culture.  And the outsider has a privileged position from which to view the foreign culture.  Like de Tocqueville in his take on America, or Freud’s (or any of a host of other male authors) on the minds of women, these five author’s positions as outsiders provide a unique view of our culture.  Unlike de Tocqueville and Freud, though, each of them is also a member of the culture that they are critiquing.

American exceptionalism has necessarily afforded us significant blind spots.  Any narcissistic position, indeed perhaps any position that allows us to take pride in our accomplishments, has the potential to induce in us the wish to occlude our failings.  All five of these authors bend over backwards to expose their own foibles – and the foibles of their own cultures in pointing out the foibles of those who are the primary focus, and it is interesting that, in this small sample, it is the men who seem most clumsy about doing this.

This book begins with the dislocation of the protagonist.  We are lead through the election of 2016.  It returns, to me at least, like a bad dream.  The absurdity of the idea of Trump as president.  That simply couldn’t happen, could it?  And yet the protagonist’s father imagines that it will – indeed he hopes for it.  And this makes no sense to the protagonist.  How could a foreigner like his father, from a Moslem country, be in favor of a man who directs hate towards men like them?  We begin this book, like the protagonist, and presumably the author, off balance.

Akhtar is perhaps most clumsy in his description of enjoying pleasures that are valued in our culture and forbidden in his own.  He is better at describing his experiences with alcohol, mostly offered by fellow Moslems, than he is at talking about sex.  Here his openness is clumsy in part because it seems that he is feigning comfort with it.  In our culture, I imagine we are embarrassingly straightforward about sex to the Moslem sensibility.  So when he talks about his sexual experiences, as he identifies with the dominant culture, having rejected his birth culture, the experiences are related as if he doesn’t feel any shame – I think because he doesn’t resonate with our own discomfort about it; he doesn’t realize that the public openness about sexuality is at odds with our private, and still strongly held Puritan, Catholic, but also just plain personal feelings about how private and uncomfortable sexuality is.  He doesn’t realize how rare and powerful for us, in our culture, his experience of pure lust and its consummation is for us – his writing suggests, instead, that he is bringing coals to Newcastle - we feels, as he would like to - comfortable with our sexuality.

He is not bringing coals to Newcastle: he has genuine insights to offer.  His analysis of our economic system – he portrays capitalism and its essential corporate configuration of capital – as inconceivable in a Moslem system based on the ethical need to divide assets among a man’s wives and children at his death.  He might be surprised to find Benjamin Franklin was an ally, believing that assets should revert to the state to prevent the kinds of accumulations that led to the ruling classes in Europe.  What Akhtar appreciates, that Franklin did not, is that the capitalistic system, with all of its inherent ills, has also been instrumental in the ascendancy of the Christian wealth and technology over Moslem, and this is both a source of pride (in his identification with the U.S.) and shame (to his Moslem shape).

Perhaps it is the protagonist’s ambivalence about his adoptive homeland – embodied in the conflict between his mother, who is openly disdainful of it, and his father who is not only enamored of it in general – but particularly of Trump and the Trumpian version of it.  Through his mother, he is able to get in touch with his pride in the fall of the towers on 9/11.  It took me at least a year to appreciate the elegance of the attack; before then, the closeness, shock, and terror of it was too visceral to be able to get the distance to appreciate it.  For Akhtar, too.  His description of the discovery of the cross that he wore in the days following 9/11 to avoid New Yorker's racist response to him is poignant, as is the bravery it took to give voice to his mother’s pride in his play, but all of that is portrayed as clumsily as I am portraying it here…

Part of the difficulty of integrating his mother’s and father’s positions is Akhtar’s ambivalence towards his father.  I would call the following a spoiler alert, but because there is not a consistent narrative here, it feels more like putting a random pair of jigsaw puzzle pieces together than spoiling a narrative arc.  His father has a secret affair, and Akhtar has an unknown half-sister, with whom he himself almost has an affair before seeing the picture of his father in her home.  Somehow it doesn’t seem shocking that Akhtar’s deeply moral father would have an affair with a woman who is native to the country he loves – nor that he would become enamored of Trump based on a brief professional encounter in which he experiences Trump as someone who is not the terrible person others accuse him of being.

I am realizing that as I write this, the narrative that is based on the life of the protagonist in the novel does not organize the novel’s material in a way that we might have hope for.  The character at the center of it is torn in ways that are metabolized neither by him nor by his alter ego, the author.  This effect is not necessarily problematic; in the same way that September 11^th viscerally communicated something about the feelings of many members of the Islamic world towards the U.S., Akhtar’s unintegrated understandings of his clashing cultural identifications sits undigested in the reader’s gut, poking at us, not yet organized enough to direct us, but uncomfortable enough for us to wonder if it is possible to reconcile these competing aspects of what becomes our shared concern.  We can no more discard aspects of our increasingly shared competing identities than we can voluntarily lop off a limb.  Despite failing to bring us smoothly into his world, he has deposited it, and all the messy aspects that are part of it, in our laps.  He says to us, in effect, “Here, this is what I’ve got.  You deal with it.”

Part of the riddle of this author’s clumsiness may reside in his method.  He is, first and foremost, a playwright.  His method is to live his life, and then to record it.  He spends two hours or more each day reconstructing what occurred during the day by writing about it.  He is trying to get it right.  And his ear is tuned to the things that a playwright’s ear should be tuned to.  He is listening to the rhythms of the dialogue.  He is trying to get how we present ourselves to each other.  He works primarily from the outside - the novel is a form that is intended to allow the writer to work from the inside.

At the same time, he has a muse – a writing teacher he refers to at the beginning and end of the book.  She is a lesbian – and I think her sexuality is an important part of the meaning of her identity for him.  She tells him to record and work to understand his dreams.  And she has a description of the unconscious, based on the OED, which feels liberating and real.  She points out that the OED catalogues over 290,000 words, but most of us have a working knowledge of only 20,000 words.  “The unconscious, she suggested, was like the mass of words you didn’t [know].  Those unknown words and meanings – rhizomes of sound, radicles of signification - were like a body of forgotten roots still drawing sustenance from the dead matter of the lost languages buried in the living one we heard and spoke and wrote (p. 104).”  I think, when he is working from within, he hears the overtones, but doesn't quite know what to do with them - he passes them on to us, hoping we will be able to make sense of them.

This work is an elegy – a poem of grief.  It is also presented as a piece of music, with a finishing coda.  Like a symphony, it evokes powerful feelings, and like a play or a poem, it also evokes thoughts.  If I play with the masculine voice of the author and contrast it with the feminine voices that are able to articulate loss seamlessly, perhaps men often realize later in their development that the world they are confronted with is not the one they had imagined it would be.  They are unprepared to integrate the foreignness into their experience because it is new.  Our dislocation is unexpected rather than part and parcel of our identity as foreigners in our own land.

The grief in this novel is real.  The losses are real.  The protagonist loses his mother.  His father is now trapped back in his homeland, Pakistan, and the protagonist can no longer safely travel there as he is labeled an enemy of the state.  But this is an elegy of a greater loss, one that we can, if we are strong enough, uncomfortably resonate with, especially if we are men.  It is the elegy of living in a homeland that is not our own, a place that has become unfamiliar.  Perhaps whether we are fans of Trump, and see him as a path to recovering what we had, or we are opposed to that vision, we can recognize that we are all feeling broken.  Could an opera that would express our shared grief unite us in a common purpose?  Can we, especially we, as men, withstand the knowledge that we, too, are destined to live in a foreign world?

Similar themes are evident in the current film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

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