Among The Jumbled Heap

Two Reviews of Chinese Writers

“My story begins on January 1, 1950…”

So begins Mo Yan’s Life and Death are Wearing Me Out. The narrator is the landlord Ximen Nao, and on this first day of January 1950, Ximen Nao is executed as a bad element, an impediment to the revolution, a bourgeois blackguard. How can Ximen’s story begin with his execution? Here is where Mo Yan’s wit first exerts itself, for the story is not about Ximen Nao the man, but it is about the reincarnated Ximen Nao. We watch as he becomes Ximen Donkey, Ximen Ox, Ximen Pig,, Ximen Dog, and Ximen Monkey, until finally he is reborn as a “a big-headed child,” and as Ximen processes through these lives, we see the rapid progression of contemporary China.

With such a fanciful and ambitious premise, the story runs perilously close to becoming kitschy. Lesser writers have gone that direction (and they probably sold more books. Dan Brown comes immediately to mind). Yet Mo Yan is able to walk this precipice between art and kitsch with aplomb. He uses Ximen’s various incarnations to illustrate and elucidate the last fifty-eight years of Chinese history. In Life and Death one sees the agrarian disaster of the Great Leap Forward, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the period of opening up and corruption, and the tragedy of the many loveless marriages that resulted from the revolutionary spirit.

Life and Death is a story that is thoroughly Chinese, and it would be a marvelous, light-hearted history lesson for anyone with an interest in contemporary China. But Mo Yan is more than a pedantic jester, he is a poet of the human spirit. In the final assessment, Mo is concerned for the plight of his characters–be they donkey, pig, ox, dog or human. His story is alive, and history is merely the air the characters breathe. Mo’s compassion for his characters and willingness to poke fun at himself as the narrator are what keep this story on the high road of art.

By contrast, Ha Jin’s collection of short stories Ocean of Words takes a less fanciful look at one point in Chinese history. All the stories in Ocean take place in the far North of China during the early 1970’s–that period of time when border tensions with the former Soviet Union were such that both sides felt invasion was imminent.

Each story presents the plight of the soldier as they suffer through that peculiar brand of military idiocy that is the People’s Army. Ha Jin loves these men. He paints verbal pictures to draw in the reader. He is a deft writer. Yet, the broader impression from these stories is less impressive.

Ha Jin is educated in the tradition of American realism. He lives and teaches in the U.S. and , unlike Mo Yan, Ha writes primarily in English. His prose resonates with the likes of an Updike or Cheever, but though his style is smooth and his narrative voice engaging, Ha’s stories do not rise to the same emotional level as Mo Yan, and one wonders if his status as an affluent expatriot robs him of the ennui that infuses a writer like Mo. With Ha I feel as if I’m looking at Chinese history from a distance; with Mo I live that same history.

I respect them both, but I’m drawn to Mo Yan.

Joan Didion is like my older, sarcastic, world-weary sister.

Reading The Year of Magical Thinking is reading the diary of my sister. I see the workings of her mind; I hear the depth of her words, her feelings on the loss of my brother-in-law, her spouse of 40 years. These are things Joan never says at the family reunion. These are the thoughts she ruminates on while sitting in the corner of our grandparents living room, smiling while the family small talks.

When reading the work of a sibling, one tends to either extremes of praise or criticism. Sometimes both. The praise stems from the fact that this is your blood, your kin, and you are proud. Similarly, the criticism arises out of that same impulse. Literature is written by other people not MY sister. You remember scenes from family life, words un-fittly spoken, all the embarrassing incidents of childhood. Of course you also remember how Joan always had a way with words, but this does not necessarily improve your view of her writing.

The mere fact that I feel a kinship with Didion proves the power of her writing. Didion strikes a pose with her words that burns the mind like a brand. Her personal history as laid out in the essays and novels takes on the shape of memory. I read in Magical Thinking about her and John sharing moments throughout their day, and I think of her essay “The White Album” and the years of disassociative thinking, depression. How difficult their marriage at times?! I think of Quintana as a girl in CA while her mother associates with the hippies of Haight-Ashbury gathering material for “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” I remember the characters of “A Book of Common Prayer” and wonder what John and Quintana were doing while their wife and mother entered this narrative world. How did she draw inspiration, where did she get the raw material for these destructive relationships? From John? Quintana?

Didion encourages this line of thinking in Magical Thinking by often quoting from her own work, situating her writing in the story of her life with John. She reveals where she was when she wrote a particular book and how and where John and she lived at that time. She picks a refrain from her novel Common Prayer and repeats it several times throughout Magical Thinking. Thus, Didion’s own words come back to her with new significance and, like a good sibling, I think, “Joan certainly doesn’t lack confidence in her own abilities as a writer.”

Yet, Didion provides a glimpse into her own insecurity as writer and how John helped her overcome this insecurity:

The book from which he [John] read was a novel of my own, A Book of Common Prayer, which he happened to have in the living room because he was reading it to see how something worked technically…’Goddamn,’ John said to me when he closed the book. ‘Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write. That’s my birthday present to you. (p166)

The passage is revealing not only because it illustrates Didion’s feelings of inadequacy about her own writing, but because it reveals John’s character to the us more fully. He was an encourager, and, perhaps more revealing, he believed in those intangible gifts of the spirit. He had given this moment forethought, “That’s my birthday present to you.”

Didion’s world often seems far from my own. She moves in higher circles. She lives in California, Hawaii, and New York City. She and John fly to Paris for Thanksgiving. She has friends all over the globe who offer the use of their beach house or chateaus. She has flown on more private charters than I have on commercial airlines. This distance between our worlds only enhances this feeling of familial connection. Siblings often follow different life trajectories. “My older sister moves among the literary jetset of NYC and LA.” I can hear myself say with both pride, envy, and disdain.

Critics chide Didion for cultivating this highbrow literary persona. Deservingly so, I feel. But her writing fills a niche, a need that is larger than the elite. Again, i think of those early essays, a young Joan trying to make sense out of the turmoil of her times. She grew, and her readers watched her grow. As the sixties faded, she wrote more novels, politically charged novels about women, much like herself, struggling to make meaning out of their time. In those early novels, Didion focused her attention on the politics of the ’80s bleeding into the the ’90s. She was uniquely positioned to offer insight.

Political Fictions is the fruit of Didion’s maturity as a writer. She writes not as historian or pundit but as citizen, a unique citizen, to be sure. She is a person who has not lived as the rest of us. She is a person with special access and privilege, one who has lived life across the country and the globe. She has enough leisure to read the Times and to discuss the times. She has no prescriptions only observations. Her thoughts are sometimes jumbled, often poignant, and ultimately revelatory. She lifts American politics and culture up to the light, and lets the many colors reflect in the readers’ minds.

Magical Thinking is the denouement of the Didion corpus. This book represents the end of Didion’s career as she has known it, for this book marks the end of her marriage and her career has been intimately connected to her marriage. What comes next must be something different.

At the end of Magical Thinking, Didion describes her experience of trying to write a new piece now that John is dead.

It was the first piece I had written since 1963 that he did not read in draft form and tell me what was wrong, what was needed, how to bring it up here, take it down there….I realized at some point that I was unwilling to finish it because there was no one to read it. I kept telling myself that I had a deadline, that John and I never missed deadlines. Whatever I finally did to finish this piece was as close as I have ever come to imagining a message from him. The message was simple: ‘You’re a professional. Finish the piece.’

Magical Thinking is ultimately a testament of the power of others in the writer’s life. It is the story behind the book dedication. In Didion’s case, it is the story behind the forty plus years of her life as a writer. The book is a powerful and personal testimony of a grief observed. This much is true.

But true to her work as a whole, Didion once again gives us her life as an example of the whole of life. Throughout my readings of Didion (and I think I can say I’ve read every scrap now), it is her humanity and her vulnerability that most impress. I see this most at work in the essays, where that close first person talks to me like a sister. Her novels are convoluted flights of fancy that bore, but those essays sing.

So as my sister Joan moves on, I wait to see what’s next. I wait with that same mixture of pride, envy, and disdain that permeates all my reading of Joan’s writing.

Fury: a novel © 2001 by Salman Rusdie

Fury is my first Rusdie novel, and my only excuse for having spent twenty years now as a reader of contemporary fiction without once reading Rushdie is: “I don’t like the guy.” Nothing to do with his writing, about which I knew nothing, everything to do with the man. A plump toad of a man who hacked out novels simply because he had time, money, and access to a keyboard. A man with a trophy wife. A man whose fame, it seemed to me, rested on one book he was fortunate to have written that inflamed one quarter of the world’s population.

So I thought.

Now I know.

Rushdie is a wordsmith. His prose flows like a swill of fine scotch, thick and smooth with a slight bite, and you can almost taste the way the words aged in that graying cask of a brain.

Fury is that classic story of contemporary Western literature: the middle-aged man breaking down. Other writer’s have certainly told the tale better, with a better grasp of the plot (Updike’s Rabbit, and nearly every thing Bellow wrote), but what Rushdie brings to the tale is his turn of a phrase. The first line proves the point:

Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible doll maker, and since his recent fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in golden age.

This is the Rushdie charm. In one eloquent sentence, he has elucidated th character of Malik Solanka and drawn the reader in with curiosity. “A doll maker? Ohhhh, celibate?! Much criticized, but why? A golden age?” Yet Rushdie’s words are writing checks he can’t cash.

The story disintegrates, the character’s dissolve into a mass of half-formed themes and plot twists. In only 239 pages there is: not one but two (morally twisted) spring-winter romances; a murder mystery, crisis of fatherly duty; numerous attempts to tie the whole damned thing into contemporary culture, and a hapless stumbling onto the stage of geo-political conflict. Ambitious, to say the least, but ultimately unsatisfying.

But now I’ve read Rushdie. I understand his charm. I have been told , and I believe, that Fury is not the best example of his work, but reading it has expiated my hatred for the fellow.

I’m still glad that Padma left him, though.

Fingersmith is the type of literary novel that’s not being written much these days, a style that fits more with the age of Queen Victoria than the age of Global Terrorism, and therein lies its beauty.

Set in nineteenth century England, Fingersmith narrates the intersecting stories of two young women in seemingly disparate circumstances. Sarah Trindle is a fingersmith, a thief, living in a house of thieves and raised by Mrs. Sucksby, who dotes on the girl as if she were her own daughter, even though Mrs. Sucksby’s business is that of selling unwanted babies.

Susan’s birth mother was hanged as a murdress when Sue was an infant, and Sue grows up feeling that ‘bad blood’ within her. She learns the thieving arts, but is kept from the worst of it by Mrs. Sucksby, who insists that one day Sue would bring them all a “great fortune.”

Susan is seventeen when a friend of her family of thieves arrives on a dark and stormy night–when else?–with a plot to make them all rich, a plot that can only be carried through with Susan’s help. The man is Gentleman, a name he got because he is supposed to be the disinherited scion of a wealthy family.

Gentleman’s plan is simple. There is a wealthy heiress who lives alone with her scholar uncle in a dilapidated mansion outside London. This is Maud Lilly, the other heroine of the story. Maud is seemingly innocent, an ingenue living a cloistered life of servitude to her uncle who longs for love and freedom. She has a guarantee of a great inheritance from her dead mother, but she can only receive the money after her marriage. Gentleman pruposes to seduce Maud, marry her, and have her committed to the madhouse, thus securing her fortune for himself. To carry off his plan, he needs someone on the inside, a young lady to act as Maud’s maid, speak well of him, and gently guide Maud’s heart to him. Sue, he says, is the perfect accomplice.

Thus, the plan is hatched.

Fingersmith is an exhilarating read, a handsomely crafted historical romance. Sue’s roughspeak, her Borough talk, suck the reader deeper into her life. One feels her cares, sees her qualms and feels the her hesitation as the plot clicks into place like the tumbler’s of a lock.

Then comes page 160. Everything changes. Those first 159 pages have been a pleasant character study. The reader has gazed into the life of our young would-be charlatan and glimpsed her soul, on par with Crime and Punishment.

But Sarah Waters is most often compared to Dickens not Dostoevsky, and it is at page 160 that one sees why. It is not the Victorian setting or the depictions of seedy, thieving London. It is the intensity of her plot.

When I was about the age of Pip, I found myself at play in the fields of Dickens for the first time. I was reading Great Expectations, and Dickens sucked me into that ever turning plot. He led me on wtih speculation. Was Mrs. Haversham Pip’s benefactor? My favorite scene is when Pip dines with the solicitor who serves as his liaison to the unnamed benefactor. The solicitor begins to stir his drink with a metal file?! Ahhhh, the criminal in the marsh? Could it be? What will be next?

I experienced this same sense of the pleasure of discovery while reading Fingersmith. Everything that follows page 160 electrifies. There are more twists here than the halls of the Vatican, and around each corner a new revelation. To use the cliche that I couldn’t put the book down is to insult Water’s irresistible prose. This book was epoxied to my hands, and I have not felt so attached to a story in years.

Are you the Key Holder or the Gate Master?
–Wilson in Be Kind Rewind

Critics of Be Kind Rewind range from tepid to hostile. Those critics who enjoy the film label it as “cute,”"goofy and endearing,” or “a heart-warming story.” Those who hate it scream “undeveloped,” “ameteurish,” or “a thick stew of awful” (see Rotten Tomatoes).

Many of the critics—-both pro and con—-refer to the story as “fairy tale.” The far-fetched narrative, the flat, nearly caricatured, characters, the simple and quick progression of the story, these things give Be Kind this fairy-tale allure, and they also provide fodder for the critics. Perhaps what most entices me about Be Kind is the way the story never takes the HollyWood turn (that moment in most movies of this genre when the story is absolute and predictable). Alma and Mike don’t fall in love. The potential love triangle that would pit Jerry against Mike with Alma in the middle never develops. Danny Glover’s character Mr. Fletcher does not have a sweet old-person fling with Miss Falewicz, and most surprisingly, despite the positive and uplifting conclusion, the movie does not end with the video shop being save from the wrecking ball.

This cinematic move away from the expected may disappoint the viewer, but it also refocuses the story on what is really happening, namely, a community of people is waking up to its own creative potential. The conflict of the movie is not about love or relationship but between communal creativity and corporate control. As such, Be Kind is a morality play of the Open Source Movement and more precisely of the idea of a Creative Commons.

When Jerry and Mike Swede a film, they enter that gray area of copyright law known as derivative works. Is the Sweded Driving Miss Daisy the same film as the original? Are they plagiarizing? Is the Sweeded Miss Daisy to the original what Disney’s Steam Boat Willie was to Steam Boat Bill Jr, viz. a parody and a stand-alone work of art? Does a community have the right to exercise their creative power in this way? Are they taking money out of the pockets of the actors, directors, and movie personnel (think of those anti-piracy ads featuring the poor, deprived pyrotechnics expert)?

With copyright law as it is today, Sweeding is, in fact, illegal. Even Disney could not get away with a Steamboat Willie, as Lawrence Lessig makes clear in his book Free Culture (a book, btw, that you can download for free). Be Kind puts the lessons of Lawrence Lessig into a visual narrative. The movie shows us what the world, and more specifically what our communities, could be if we were not only unafraid to let our creativity flow but unhindered from doing so.

For a synopsis of the movie visit IMDB.