When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually toward you. "A memoir is the last inheritance" you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believe something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.
Michael Ondaatje, Warlight, page 135.
It is rather odd to be writing a post about a book I read over a month ago, books actually, as more than one book is haunting my memory cache. But there are advantages to distance as well, one being the inability to provide a proper review of the book, as my memory is just not up to the task. Instead what you will get is a mishmash of remembered ideas and themes, almost like fragments of conversations that have haunted my thoughts.
It should not surprise you that I loved Warlight. I love Ondaatje's poetic prose, and the way his books always seem somewhat shrouded and circular, revealing themselves slowly, as though through a mist or a fog. In that sense this novel is typical: the prose is lyrical, the characterizations complex, but like the plot, everything is non-linear and somewhat difficult to suss out. Nothing is easily revealed. But then nothing is easily revealed in life either. We make snap judgements, seek easy answers, but they often lead us down false paths. So too Ondaatje's characters.
Actually Warlight, the title itself, is a foreshadowing and a metaphor for much of what is explored in the novel itself. The term of course refers to the dimmed light from World War II, but it also refers to memory and the way we are shaped by our experiences, but not just our experiences alone, but by the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences. "What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here." (p. 274). Nathanial has defined himself as an abandoned child. That it happens to be true, or at least technically partially true, is not the point; the point is how the experience shapes his life, how what he choses to remember, and what he choses to forget, shape the person he becomes.
Warlight is a fascinating novel, and I'm sure I've missed the gist of most of it here, but my in my thoughts certain themes swirl together with other themes and other books. Perhaps these thoughts are complicated because I interrupted Warlight in the middle to read another book, a book that happened to land in my pile from the library at precisely that moment. The second book was The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin. And here I am, writing about two books that are nothing alike in the same paragraph.
Or are they really all that different after all? Certainly The Immortalists is not as poetic as Warlight. But The Immortalists may appeal to those who want a little more story, a little more action, a little less navel grazing. And yet the stories are related. Both begin in the childhood of their protagonists; in both, a childhood incident becomes a focal point in defining the person each will become. Nathaniel is a man afraid of making connections. In The Immortalists, the bored quest of a summer afternoon seemingly alters the course of lifetimes. Or does it? That is one of the questions asked by this fascinating novel. Four children visit a fortune teller; four children are told the day of their death. Three of them die on their assigned date. But was the date a chain or a key? The children are shaped by their family, by their culture, by so many things, and the fortune-teller is just the pivot point.
Benjamin uses the story as a starting point in an exploration of time, place, culture, families and relationships. And it is a tale simultaneously evocative, endearing, maddening. We move from The Lower East Side of New York in the 70's to San Francisco in the 1980s, to the Hudson Valley and back to California. The youngest, Simon, is the first to die. But was the proffered date a gift or a curse? Even at a tender age he feels different from his family, a child torn between self and environment. Did the fortune-teller see the future, or is she simply intuitive, seeing something of the essential nature of each child and offering them a tool? There are no easy answers here, and the children, as well as their mother, eventually must question their own motives, their strengths and failings, as well as the burdens of love, hope, guilt. Ondaatje and Benjamin are examining similar questions in very different ways, with different, and yet related, revelations to be mined.
All this brings me to yet another novel, Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. Ng's novel is the easiest read of the novels discussed here, but it is not necessarily lightweight and I think there are depths under its glassy surface. I think it perfectly captured its milieu and its intention. I would even say that the broad characterizations, stereotypes almost, actually served the point rather well here. Ng is weighing the promise of success, the promise of the "ideal" life, of the bubble we have created around aspirational class American life, and finding it somewhat wanting. It is a life of surfaces. This novel is more direct in placing blame, in revealing flaws in the surface.
One of the deepest fault lines in Little Fires Everywhere revolved around Mrs, Richardson (Elena) and her youngest daughter, Izzy. I found the portrayal of this relationship both shocking and also sensitive precisely because of its obliqueness. And it is this relationship exactly that ties this novel to the other two in this post. Nathanial has self-identified as abandoned. The children in the Immortalist both absorb and strike out against the expectations of their parents, parents who are trying to rise above their own stations in the world, with sometimes tragic results. All three novels present the needs of children at odds with their parent's own needs and expectations. And Izzy? Poor Izzy. I felt sorry for Izzy from the very beginning. She is the identified patient of the story, and we initially meet her in absentia, through the eyes of her family and her assigned role in that family. But then, as the novel progresses we see glimpses of the true Izzy, and Ng is clever here, slowly revealing that the stereotypical "bad child" is rarely what she is made out to be. Izzy is the child that never fit her mother's mold, and whom the mother has singled out from the beginning; confrontation becomes her only option.
I have known mothers like Elena Robinson. I know their children. I think Ng successfully tried to portray something that is more common than we would like to believe in a sympathetic way. She did not make Izzy the evil child. She did not even make Elena the evil mom, although it is evident that most of Elena's identity as the warm, loving, caring, generous mom is mostly about her perception of her role than it is about any actual benefit to her children. We see Izzy gaining confidence. We see Elena unraveling. Izzy may have been the match that lit the fires, but the fires were built by Elena. The match did not strike itself. For one brief moment, Mia, the creative mom, and the dangerous interloper, incites the other children to work with Izzy, to act with her rather than against her. We can only hope it is enough. Ng gives subtle hints of the future, but no easy answers here.
Do these books all run together in my mind because they were read in close proximity to each other? Or do they feed some natural bent in my own imagination? It is probably a combination of both, proximity and my own interpretations of experience. But words, like children in a small way, take on lives of their own, form their own relationships with readers. I am interested in how reading changes us, whether or not it affects our own understandings and relationships.
Have you read any of these novels? If so, what thoughts have stuck with you? They do not need to mirror mine. They should not mirror mine. I see only what is reflected in my own mirror, but without other angles, other views from other mirrors, there is no insight, no enlightenment, no growth.
