The Sense of an Ending

By Julian Barnes, 2011

I picked this book up last week, shortly after hearing it had won the Booker prize. I didn’t have terribly high hopes for it, but I figured that, having won a major prize, it would at least provide an enjoyable break from the other book I’m working on right now, Ulysses, which is fun to read, but also thoroughly exhausting. And at only about 150 pages, Barnes’s novel is short enough to be gulped down whole, even by a hopelessly slow reader like myself.

Of the novel’s many concerns, memory is by far the most prominent. How does it work? When and why does it undermine or contradict itself? How does the process of weaving a story distort what little sense of objectivity there can be in memory? This last question, of course, points to the narrator’s motive in asking such questions in the first place: He is a knowingly unreliable storyteller contemplating his own duplicity. Yet, despite this elaboration on a classic device, we may be tempted to think that the unreliable narrator has been played out. From Ford’s narrator in The Good Soldier to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, we seem to have seen every possible variation of the deceitful, nostalgic, or revisionist narrator. But what we have—until now—lacked, and what Barnes provides in Tony Webster, is a narrator who really, truly understands the nuances and shortcomings inherent in the act of retrospectively spinning fragments into narrative.

I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s necessary to give a rough outline of the plot if I’m to continue talking about the rich intellectual fabric of this novel. Consciously or not, it takes its basic layout from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: there are two larger sections that expand and zoom in on relatively short periods of time, separated by a much shorter, compressed section in which a great amount of time passes. In The Sense of an Ending, the first of these sections gives us the story of Webster’s youth, the story of that time when, as he puts it “we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives.” In university, he gets a girlfriend, breaks up with her, and has sex with her (in that order). She starts seeing a close friend of his who’s always seemed just a little more intelligent and mature, and of course, he becomes delightfully melodramatic, writing a particularly nasty letter addressed to both of them. Webster then glosses over his entire adulthood—all 40 years of it, including an unsuccessful marriage, a child, and a grandchild—in a single page. In the final section of the novel, he writes about the process of making amends with his old friends, and coming to terms with his own nastiness.

In the first section (my favorite), Barnes achieves a tone that impresses me for both its exactness and its self-awareness. His technique, the way he knowingly and purposefully exaggerates the distorting effect of his narrator’s attempts to wrestle bald events into narrative, reminds me of the way an impressionist paints: not as an exact, uncompromising reproduction or mirror, but in a way that respects the facts while knowingly departing from them. The result is an elegant, sustained paraphrase of youth. But beyond any of this, the real reason this section is my favorite is that it’s the most angst-y and melodramatic—qualities that, at 23, I revel in.

The final section conceals and its last pages half-reveal a HUGE secret. If you’re clever enough and you’ve been paying enough attention, you’ll figure it out (eventually) and it will BLOW YOUR MIND. But until you do, it really is the most frustrating thing ever. Throughout this section, a character who I find extremely annoying and vindictive continually taunts Webster (and us) for just not getting it. “You still don’t get it. You never have and you never will. So stop even trying.” You really can’t help but feel her words are directed at you as well, making her all the more unlikable. But there’s nothing like a good challenge, and after thinking about it a few minutes, and maybe rereading a few passages, the secret tying this whole novel together becomes apparent.

SOOO much traveling

It was recently pointed out to me that I have travelled every weekend for the last three weeks, and that I’m very likely going to travel next weekend. I’m doing this mostly to avoid the depressing reality that is my daily life in Seattle, but I’m not going to embarrass myself and bore you by describing it here. Instead, I’ll talk about the only interesting part of my life as of late: the travels!

1. Weekend before last, I took the GRE Literature in English Subject Exam in Walla Walla (where I went to undergrad, if you didn’t know). In case you were wondering, it is not correct to call this test the “English Literature Subject Exam.” A very kind and socially well-adjusted ETS representative told me this recently on the phone, when I called to ask about my scores, which STILL will not be available for several weeks. As much as this guy annoyed me it actually does make sense — their exam tests lots of world literature, but obviously doesn’t make you read it in a language other than English. Anyway, I had a wonderful time in Walla Walla. I stayed with my dear friends Gillian and Alex, went to The Green, and saw lots of old friends.
2. Last weekend, I flew to Vegas to see TFA friends. A couple of the guys down there (including my old roommate, Jack) were having a joint birthday party at The Cosmopolitan, which was amazing. They rented out a ridiculously nice suite with a balcony that looked out over the Bellagio fountain. I also hosted a dinner party of sorts the night before at a friend’s apartment. It was fun to catch up!
3. This weekend, I drove down to Eugene, Oregon, to hang out with my friend Margaux and see what real hippies look like. Eugene did not disappoint. We went to a grocery store that makes Whole Foods and PCC look like evil, artificial-ingredient-using corporations, walked around the UO campus, and bought a $3.00 copy of Absalom, Absalom! from a crazy cool used books store. The last night I stayed there, we went to a bar in a garage where performers played toy piano and accordion.
4.  Finally, next weekend, I’m going to drive down to Portland and spend what will be my fourth consecutive Saturday on the road attending my friend Mimi’s birthday party. She’s quite a cook, and I believe it will be a dinner party, so I’m excited to see what she comes up with.

Everything is Illuminated

By Jonathan Safran Foer, 2002

This is a book that I’ve been meaning to read for a long, long time. Everyone says it’s awesome, but college kind of dominated my reading selections for, like, four years, and then I forgot about it until about a month ago. I’ve been waiting awhile since then to write about it because I felt I needed to properly digest it and remove myself from the experience of reading it.

I think one element of this novel that often distracts people from its real contributions is the bizarre, thesaurus-powered language of one of the main characters, Alex. One of the glowing recommendations on the back cover even compares this language to A Clockwork Orange‘s subversive patois, nadsat. I think that’s going a bit far. Burgess’s made-up language does so many other interesting things that make it more worth examining, and I think Foer’s delightful misuse of the English language is mainly a comedic device.

As is usually the case with remarkable novels, Everything is Illuminated is impressive both in its form, and in the complex, nuanced ideas it develops through that form. Maybe that’s how I’ll structure the rest of this post: I’ll talk about form first, then content. Here we go:

1. Form

Yes, there’s the whole funny, “going-way-too-far-with-a-thesaurus” language. It’s cool, but I’m over it. What impresses me about this novel is that Foer manages to appropriate (and make good use of) kaleidoscopic effects that have — since Joyce — only been practical for filmmakers. People throw around the descriptor “virtuosic” all the time, but I think this novel really deserves it. What makes a performer or an artist virtuosic, I think, is an aptitude for improvisation — a knack for choosing strategies, arrangements, and devices that are appropriate to the situation in real time, and putting them to work at the precise moment they are needed. Foer’s ability to do this is exceptional. The novel shifts (as if it ain’t no thang) from letter to myth to traditional narration to folk story to invented encyclopedia to (at times) a bizarre script-like form that reminds me of the Aeolus chapter from Joyce’s Ulysses. And each of these modes of storytelling is so perfectly suited to what it’s describing that you’re left wondering HOW THE HELL DID HE THINK OF THAT? Always a sign of good writing.

2. Content

The parts of the book that interest me most are the bits of the novel within a novel that the character, Jonathan Safran Foer, is writing and sending to his friend, Alex. These loosely connected stories (which all center around his grandfather and the small village where he grew up) are so effortlessly allegorical, mythological even, that they remind me of Jorge Luis Borges’s fables. Of particular interest to me are the stories that describe the multi-volume “Book of Antecedents,” a collection of all knowledge, which was “once annually updated” and then became “continually updated.” When I read that, I was like, “WHOAAAA, 2002′s when Wikipedia started becoming popular, DAAAMN.” I also thought about Borges’s 1:1 map and about how things like Facebook and Twitter bring about a dialogue between actual events as they happen, and the reporting of those things on the internet. At one point, Foer quotes the “Book of Antecedents” for almost two whole pages as it repeats over and over again the self-affirmative phrase of encyclopedists everywhere, “We are writing … We are writing … We are writing.” When I read that, I was like, “DAAAMN, that’s exactly what everyone writes on Twitter!” (This reminds me of an SNL skit).

I won’t even try to talk about this intellectually (because, as Zizek says of violence, we cannot truly examine it “academically” without becoming implicated in it through our necessarily emotional response) but, this novel contains some of the most powerful depictions of the Holocaust I have ever seen. Somehow, it’s way more than just a depiction of violence that elicits an emotional response. Somehow, Foer captures both the scope and magnitude of this enormous act of violence through the specifics of it. Somehow, this incredibly abstract novel gives a more precise account of the Holocaust than any history book I’ve ever read. Pretty amazing stuff. I’m definitely getting his second novel.