We the Animals/Justin Torres: Reflections

I'm not quite sure what it was that made me decide (spur of the moment, really) to buy We the Animals, the slender debut novel by the widely acclaimed writer Justin Torres.  I'd heard some humming about the book.  I'd seen the ad.  I'd read what Marilynne Robinson had to say: "Brilliant, poised and pure." I'd read the words of Paul Harding:  "It is an indelible and essential work of art."  It was an impulse purchase, a little easy finger work, and there it was, on my iPad, waiting to be read.

From start to finish, without once leaving the couch, I just read.

We the Animals is the third book that I've encountered in the space of a little more than a week that builds through plurals. There was the rhythmic they, they, they of Colleen Mondor's remarkable debut memoir, The Map of My Dead Pilots.  There was the haunting, concentrating we of Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic.

And now here comes Torres with his story about brothers growing up within the chaotic fist of a poor, troubled family.  "We wanted more," this book begins.  "We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry.  We wanted more volume, more riots.  We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men."

Truly, I am tempted to just keep on quoting.  Because look at that.  Listen to it.  Justin Torres is carving out the sound of a song.

These boys are wild.  Their mom was a teen when all three were born.  Their father is a big, muscular, knotted man—a charmer and a rogue, a man who can purple up his wife with his fists and, just as powerfully, bathe a son. The kids are bound to each other and they're plastering each other—with hands, with words, with wants.  Each scene is a distillation, a moment.  Time moves warily forward.  The boys are in for hurt, and they do some hurting themselves, and sometimes it all grows so unbearably tense that I had to close my eyes and summon my psychic strength to keep on reading.

Readers can never change the fate of the characters they meet.  They can only hope for them.  They can only fear for them.  In reading We the Animals, I did both.  I succumbed to Torres's tale.  I honor his literary powers.   

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The Buddha in the Attic/Julie Otsuka: Reflections

Hurricane Irene has now become a pelting force.  I have been reading Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic in its dark and fearsome shadow.  I'm not entirely sure how long I will have power, and there is much I'd like to say.  But for now, and briefly, I want to share this with those of you in the still-electrified regions of our country:  Julie Otsuka (the author of the contemporary classic (and one of my favorite books) When the Emperor was Divine) writes important books.  Deeply penetrating, remarkably researched, wholly intimate miniature novels that aren't novels at all, perhaps, but something else—urgent evocations, perhaps, or searing incantations.

Otsuka's focus, in Buddha, is on the young Japanese women who arrived by boat shortly after World War I to meet the men they had agreed to marry and to begin lives that would never be the lives that they'd imagined.  They are taken, many of them roughly, to bed.  They are put to work in farms or in the houses of the rich.  They bear children and they lose children and they have favorites among their children, and their children will grow up with an American sound and smell, with attitude and shame.  When the next war begins, these lives will be savaged once again by the American paranoia that led to the building of the Japanese intern camps.

I keep saying "they" and "these" because this is a story told in the third-person plural.  A we came, we did, we loved, we lost, we hoped, we were taken from tale. That may sound like a peculiar story-telling choice, and indeed, it does, in places, box Otsuka in, forcing a sameness of sentence superstructure, as well as a sameness of variation from that superstructure.  "On the boat we were mostly virgins," she begins, continuing: 

We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall.  Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves.

Can you sustain a book with a third-person plural?  Can you make it matter?  In this slender book, Otsuka does by offering a suite of detail-saturated, devastating chapters with titles like "Come, Japanese!," "First Night," "Whites," "Babies," and "Traitors."  Only the last chapter, "A Disappearance," gives voice to the Americans who wonder, in the wake of the Japanese evictions, where their neighbors, school mates, grocery store clerks, maids have gone. 

The rain is a sleeting as I type this.  The news warns of apocalyptic floods, of communities remade, of evacuations; it tells of children already lost to the thunder crash of trees.  I read Buddha against this backdrop.  I was moved toward a deep sadness for lives long ago lost. 

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