EXIT WEST and all the stories that have lately revived my hope

Mohsin Hamid's new novel, Exit West, holds the whole of our world on its blue (star-specked) palm. The story of hard-fisted regimes and near apocalypse, escapees and plundered landscapes, dark doors and possibilities, Exit West is the story, too, of People as illuminated by two particular people: the young lovers Nadia and Saeed. They meet at a time of crumbling infrastructures, raging drones, ID searches, random violence. They take up the journey (through these dark, mysterious, escape-hatch doors) together. They live among other immigrants in foreign lands in subsistence circumstances, and they try (they both do try) to retain the feelings they believe they have for one another throughout the raw rub of it all.

Global and intense and palpable, sprinkled with this necessary, never-intrusive magic, Exit West is hard-hitting and heart-hurting, but never, for an instant, cruel.

I will never look at another image of a dislocated refugee and not see Nadia or Saeed or their fellow travelers. I hope every American reads this book, every European, too, and that we all have the same response. That we act on it.

Over and over and over again, Hamid smashes the conundrum of love and life, home and homelessness with long, binary sentences and short words. He writes philosophy into action and within action he posits tenderness. He makes powerful use of the conjunction and the multiple, the crowded and the stop:

That night a rumor spread that over two hundred migrants had been incinerated when the cinema burned down, children and women and men, but especially children, so many children, and whether or not this was true, or any of the other rumors, of a bloodbath in Hyde Park, or in Earl's Court, or near the Shepherd's Bush roundabout, migrants dying in their scores, whatever it was that had happened, something seemed to have happened, for there was a pause, and the soldiers and police officers and volunteers, who had advanced into the outer edges of the ghetto pulled back, and there was no more shooting that night.

Two pages later, returning his focus to the two characters that shoulder his novel, Hamid writes:

Saeed for his part wished he could do something for Nadia, could protect her from what would come, even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you. He thought she deserved better than this, but he could see no way out, for they had decided not to run, not to play roulette with yet another departure. To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while.

How lucky I have been to spend the last few weeks reading and re-reading books that teach me. Books that have forced me to ask myself what it is I think I am doing with my writing life...and what I should be doing. Paul Lisicky's The Narrow Door (unspool time to find the truth). Dana Spiotta's Innocents and Others (the novel as document, the document as story). George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo (be unafraid to do the things that will, inevitably, be questioned). Paulette Jiles's News of the World (make history now, make details crackle). Claire Fuller's Swimming Lessons (there are always many sides to one story). Debbie Levy's Soldier Song (picture books, the best of them, are as smart and as well-researched as anything on the adult table). Vivian Gornick's The Odd Woman and the City (memoir is as much about what you've thought as about what you've done). Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow (nothing wrong, nothing at all, with a good, old-fashioned hero set down inside a good, old-fashioned, finely told story).

Don't despair, my friends. Great art is still among us.

Today I creep back into my own writing life. Edits are arriving on a book due out next summer. Having been emptied and defeated for so long by the news, I am bolstered, ready, hopeful, again, about the power of story.

Read more...

George Saunders, Paulette Jiles: excellence prevails (and what it teaches me about writing)

This is spring break week at Penn. My students are off doing their mighty things and I miss them—their questions, their engagement, their enthusiasm, their appreciation for the fine writers they are reading and for the work their classmates present.

"What will you be doing during break?" asked Emily (one of my Emilys), as we were concluding our day with the great memoirist Paul Lisicky. (Words about what Paul taught us, and a video of his fabulous reading, here.)

"I think I might be writing," I said.

And I have. If you can call lifting, bricking, and gluing writing. I have (again) deconstructed and reconstructed a novel that has plagued and delighted me for three long years. Here is proof of how imprecise this writing process is: This particular novel began in first-person past tense, moved to an omniscient third person, was rearranged from flashback intensive to chronologically told, was written again as first person, was then written in a present-tense free indirect, and now, friends, yes: It is a first-person present-tense chronological telling. Wasted time? Not really. With every rendition, with every read, I came to know my characters more. I discovered the dark and light in their hearts.

We writers. We do persist.

But, Emily, beautiful Emily, I'm not just writing during our time apart. I'm reading. The two go hand-in-hand. I'm reading the best of the best because that's how I learn, because we teachers are always teaching ourselves. We're bowing down to those who have done what we imagine we ourselves could never do, and we ask ourselves: How did they do that?

How, for example, did George Saunders write the profound Lincoln in the Bardo? Willie Lincoln has died, President Lincoln has come to the grave to visit, and the ghosts are all astir. Can we call them ghosts? Not really. They are those who have died and who have paused on their way to the next and final stop. They watch the president arrive. They mass together, float together, skim-walk. They have regrets about the ways they lived, about the things they'll never do. They wonder whether it is fair to have been condemned to be the people that they were. Are?

Reading Lincoln in the Bardo is like sitting on a stage in a theater in the round and having the actors perform in the seats around you. Reading Lincoln is like standing in for a hologram. It's bawdy, gorgeous, kind, tender, funny. It is supremely beautiful, pressing in from all sides. It is a story that took Saunders several years to write, yet a story that feels so at ease with itself that a reader can't imagine any struggle at all. Here's a passage, a bit of Bardo conversation by the grave. These characters would like a life do-over. Wouldn't we all?

Did I murder Elmer? the woman said.

You did, said the Brit.

I did, said the woman. Was I born with just those predispositions and desires that would lead me, after my whole preceding life (during which I had killed exactly no one), to do just that thing? I was. Was that my doing? Was that fair? Did I ask to be born licentious, greedy, slightly misanthropic, and to find Elmer so irritating? I did not. But there I was.

And here you are, said the Brit.

Here I am, quite right, she said.

Goodness, that's fine stuff. It's proof, like the work of Dana Spiotta (whose new Innocents and Others I celebrate here), that you can write way the heck out of expected forms and still land on the most humane story of all. That's not just a lesson for novelists, my friends. That's a lesson for memoirists. That's a lesson for people in general.

Now I turn to News of the World by Paulette Jiles, a National Book Award finalist, a worthy one. In a recent Guardian essay, "What Writers Really Do When They Write," Saunders wrote of the power of successive edits, the incremental discovery of a story and its heroes through the act of changing this imprecise word for that better word, for adding this found detail into a sort-of-nothing spot. Jiles, in this fabulous historical novel, offers example upon example of the right word, found:

The girl still didn't move. It takes a lot of strength to sit that still for that long. She sat upright on the bale of Army shirts which were wrapped in burlap, marked in stencil for Fort Belknap. Around her were wooden boxes of enamel washbasins and nails and smoked deer tongues packed in fat, a sewing machine in a crate, fifty-pound sacks of sugar. Her round face was flat in the light of the lamp and without shadows, or softness. She seemed carved.

I have more to share. I'm on a roll. I'll soon be reading Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow, and after that some Vivian Gornick and after that Tim Winton, and I won't be done. We can't be done. Not with this.

Reading to write. Reading to live. That's what I'm doing, dear Emily.

Read more...