A Note

This was originally published elsewhere.

I’m curious as to whether or not we’re experiencing an as-yet-undefined ‘returning home’ of the tourist-as-narrator when we look at the works of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. (Or perhaps we’re seeing the potential emergence of a narrator who is rendered a tourist in their own lives by virtue of how the economy has shown its hand over the past forty years.)

Consider: in Little Fires …, a character is challenged to stand up for their friend for the first time, a mother finds value in reporting on an untraditional ‘story’ for the first time, a couple seeking to adopt a child drop the child’s original name (where we’re told “It had not occurred to them, then or at any point until now, to regret the loss of her old name”), a daughter doesn’t realize how “unusually self-possessed her mother” is, two friends are suddenly described as being ‘as if they really were sisters,’ and a mother realizes that two interviewees were ‘unexpectedly easy subjects’ when we were given to indication as to why the mother thought that the people she was seeking to interview might be difficult, amongst others.

These are quick, broad strokes — and it doesn’t acknowledge the question that seems to linger somewhere near the heart of the novel; that is, ‘What does it mean to be a passionate mother in a ‘flat’ place?’ — but it doesn’t change the glint of the opening we see in these lines either, the sense that this narrator sometimes seems to be ‘dropping by’ in a way that borders on the casual.

We can see a little bit of that at work in the opening chunk of A Little Life as well. Consider this comparison between math and the law —

“What about something like Fermat’s last theorem?” asked Julia.

“That’s a perfect example of a non-beautiful proof. Because while it was important that it was solved, it was, for a lot of people — like my adviser — a disappointment. The proof went on for hundreds of pages, and drew from so many disparage fields of mathematics, and was so — tortured, jigsawed, really, in its execution, that there are still many people at work trying to prove it in more elegant terms … A beautiful proof is succinct, like a beautiful ruling.”

[…]

“Are you joking?” said Laurence. “Jude, I think that was the first truly revelatory conversation I’ve had in Harold’s house in probably the last decade or more ...”

For those of us who understand mathematics or the law, this comparison is not new, revelatory, or interesting. It’s a dud of an idea that receives no further engagement from the character or the narrator. To suggest that characters in this scene in Harvard Square would find the conversation new, revelatory, or interesting — and would do so un-ironically, without a nod in the direction of class — gives the impression that the narrator is a tourist of some kind. Serious academics in Cambridge wouldn’t engage this idea to that point only to declare victory and leave it at that. That analogy is the beginning of the conversation, not the end, which means that the narrator is someone who is clearly passing through.

I say this knowing how Garth Greenwell reviewed the novel. Garth is an excellent reader, and I find little reason to argue against how he reviewed the work. If anything, all I’m trying to do here — he hopes, he wishes, he longs for — is write towards an idea I feel is within reach.

One other place in which these two novels particularly overlap is in how they describe art being made by artists. Both do so in unusually lacklustre ways, as if the mere experience of telling us art is being made within art is enough to leave us with the feeling of art.

Consider Little Fires —

“ … Mia had taken various pieces of her hosts’ furniture apart and arranged the components — bolts as thick as her finger, unvarnished crossbeams, disembodied feet — into animals. A bulky secretary desk from the nineteenth century transformed into a bull, the sides of the disassembled drawers forming muscled legs, the cast-iron knobs of its drawer pulls serving as the bull’s nose and eyes and glinting balls … The series of photos that emerged from this project were both intriguing and unsettling, the animals incredibly intricate and lifelike, and then you looked closer and realized what they had been made of.”

— and compare it with A Little Life —

“Henry made what he called deconstructed sculptures, strange and elaborate ikebana arrangements of flowers and branches fashioned from various kinds of silk. After he’d finish a piece, though, he’d remove its chicken-wire buttressing, so that the sculpture fell to the ground as a flat object and appeared as an abstract puddle of colors …”

Where is the ghost of Robert Hughes when we need him? Or Almodovar making a movie within a movie? I don’t mind lines like “the cast-iron knobs of its drawer pulls serving as the bull’s nose,” but art has resonance. To tell us that that resonance is simply ‘unsettling’ or that sculptures become ‘an abstract puddle of colors’ before we have a chance to experience the resonance of these three-dimensional arrangements of flowers and branches takes the air out of the balloon of what art means. And it can mean so much more.