The Modern Library (11 page)

Ada’s tale of her own heroism in managing a small farm and of the stubborn friendship she cements with her new helper, Ruby, is interspersed with Inman’s Odyssean voyage in which he saves the lives of two women, buries a child, is left for dead and is rescued by a slave, and fights off the Home Guard who are looking for deserters.

Frazier has captured the cadences and quotidian miseries of the time and his descriptions of the landscape fully echo the heroic nature of the tale. As the dual narratives converge, the suspense and tension increase along with Ada’s and Inman’s yearning for each other. They know they have both been changed by their circumstances and wonder if their love can still blossom. The climax is superbly handled and turns a potential saga into a genuine work of literature.

Readers wishing to enter the strange, dark, rich and difficult world of William Gaddis should probably start with the shortest of his four novels,
Carpenter’s Gothic
(1985), but
The Recognitions
is the real masterpiece and repays much rereading and close attention.

The central motif concerns the conflict between the genuine and the fake: one of the main characters is a forger, another character has written a play which may or may not be a forgery. Many of the conversations held at New York gatherings in the novel are also deeply false; religion and consumerism, too, are rendered
inauthentic
in the novel’s vast thousand-page panorama. But it is the texture of the writing which holds the novel together and makes it genuinely exciting: the sheer panache of the parody and satire, the sudden beginnings and endings, the quality of the jokes, the density of the narrative, the weirdness of the characters. Only in Scotland (Kelman, Gray, Welsh) and in the United States (Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo) has the true torch of modernism in fiction been carried.
The Recognitions
is one of the great novels of the century.

Mavis Gallant’s range is astonishing. It is hard to make any generalizations about her work because her stories – she has written altogether more than one hundred – are so different in tone and content. In her world people are distant from each other, and the closer they come – in families, in love – the more remote and fraught and strange their behaviour and the more exciting and funny and interesting her story. Her writing is impeccable. Sentences are often startling. In ‘The Remission’, one of her masterpieces of this collection, a family has moved to the Mediterranean so that Alec can die. His wife is puzzled by the locals: ‘Barbara expected them to be cunning and droll, which they were, and to steal from her, which they did, and to love her, which they seemed to.’ Alec, of course, doesn’t die, at least not for a long time, which gives Barbara the chance to find a new companion. In almost all of the stories, people live in exile. The Anglo-Saxons are bossy and half-impoverished, some of them are truly dreadful people. There is a marvellous story about a German boy who comes home late from the war; there is an extraordinary account of a Polish exile in Paris, and another of a Hungarian mother whose son lives in Scotland. And the last story, ‘Irina’, has a deeply unsettling version of an old woman (‘In loving and unloving families alike, the same problem arises after a death: What to do about the widow?’). In this volume, Gallant writes with wit and intelligence and a unique sort of sharpness.

The late twentieth century is Helen Garner’s stamping ground. Her novels, short stories and brilliant journalism are marked by an incisive intelligence and an exact command of language. Her writing is spare and sharp, like a sequence of photographs of sour city streets, her characters snatched in celluloid for just one second. In a line or two she captures intimately the habits of the young in the city, and the disorders of adult love. She is at her best in this mordant tale of urban family life in which her wit and singular dialogue are imbedded in an elegant threnody of Bach, Mozart, and a tangy mix of rock and soul.

Athena is married to Dexter, a man who wants to ‘live gloriously’ and who wears shirts that look like pyjama tops. They have two children, Arthur, and Billy, who is not quite right in the head and about whom Athena, at least, nurses no delusions. Elizabeth erupts from Dexter’s past, bringing with her Philip, the cool rock musician, and her younger sister Vicki. Matters and persons rearrange themselves, to the accompaniment of Philip’s rock rhythms, Dexter’s curly whistling and Vicki’s cacophony of vomiting after too much Campari and orange. But really this is the story of Athena’s search for her own music, for more than the city sounds, the burble of children and the distant chatter of neighbours. Through it all, Helen Garner’s offbeat humour adds wonderfully and
contrapuntally
to this story of the encounters, adjustments and confrontations of ordinary life.

(revised edition 1981)

The five stories in this book have different themes and settings, but there is something distinctive about the tone and the voice; Gass’s signature in these stories sets them apart. The style is poetic and at times gnarled. The sentences are worked on and sculpted. Gass is clearly as interested in language as he is in things; he gives the impression that the words he uses were cut out of stone. Yet he manages in the first long story, ‘The Pedersen Kid’, to give the reader a vivid sense of the fierce cold and the fierce distrust between the characters, to give a sense of danger and mystery to the journey the boy has to take across the freezing landscape with his father and the farm help. In another story, ‘Icicles’, the tone is more manic, close to William Gaddis perhaps, or even Virginia Woolf. And then the title story is a piece of pure, calm, poetic writing.

It is told in short sections. The narrator is alone in a small town in Indiana: he describes the town and the weather (Gass is brilliant on weather): ‘Sometimes I think the land is flat because the winds have levelled it, they blow so constantly.’ He writes about houses and neighbours and cats, the mood is meditative and oddly dislocated, as though this was a brilliant translation from the French. And all the time, in stray references, but stitched carefully into the fabric of the story, is an absence, a missing loved one, longed for, loathed (in one section), remembered, brought to mind.

‘I have never wished for comfort, but for thorns, for battle in the soul’s arena. I have had what I wished for.’ So speaks George Plumb, a stiff-necked New Zealand clergyman whose story begins in the 1890s and continues through the first half of this century.

Plumb’s fanaticism leads him by the nose from Presbyterianism to Unitarianism to pacifism until no religion is good enough for him. But he’s a worthy soul and a loving man, one of those men who are always right and like other such paragons considers constant impregnation of his slaving wife Edie ‘– in her weariness, in her pain, she praised: scouring pans, mopping floors’ – to be his Christian duty. And so the novel reaches out to trace the erosive effect of mindless righteousness on their ten children, centring most of all on the homosexual Alf. George’s
fundamentalism
, pinched and sour, placidly overshadows and shrivels all those in his care.

There is a tenderness and charm about Gee’s writing, and an understanding in his onslaught on the Puritan tradition – flourishing vigorously in New Zealand – which manages to be
compassionate
yet deadly. Redolent with the atmosphere of an antipodean world reconstructed with fidelity and warmth, this is a novel thoroughly satisfying in the traditional manner, engraved with the lore of family life.

There is music in the language of the American South. The sounds come from the words Southerners choose, the dialogue, the laying down of words in a particular order – the nearest to it, when listened to, is Irish.

Kaye Gibbons writes in the cadence of the South, which she puts into the voice of Ellen Foster, whose opening words, ‘When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy’, drop us into the company of a terrified little girl who knows too much about what’s going on. Daddy drinks, Mummy is sick to dying; Daddy likes to beat up both of them. Her only place of safety is the coloured house down the road with her friend Starletta, but how can she eat a coloured biscuit or walk down a coloured pathway? She can though, and more, as she is soon to learn.

Ellen has a way of getting through: she must love, and she sets out to find someone to do it with. Her story tells us more about race in the South than any social history, for as we listen to Ellen, we are told Starletta’s story too. Kaye Gibbons is a clever writer with an ear for the rhythm and beauty of language, and a way of conveying the fragility of life which is direct and fresh, keen-witted, always original.

The idea behind this novel should be fatal: it tells us that within us all, eagerly waiting to be let out, lie savages. But the power of the narrative and the characterization overcomes the crudity of the idea and forces the reader to become deeply involved in the story and the fate of the small English boys who have survived an air crash on a desert island. At first they are bewildered and find it easy to pick on a boy called Piggy. They talk in a mixture of school talk and attempted adult talk, but this changes as the novel goes on. The older boys take control. ‘Apart from food and sleep, [the smaller boys] found time for play, aimless and trivial, among the white sand by the bright water. They cried for their mothers much less often than might have been expected; they were very brown, and filthily dirty.’ They try to keep a fire lit, they eat fruit, attend meetings and hunt pigs. The pig-hunting scenes are particularly graphic and bloodthirsty. Leaders emerge, and slowly a war breaks out between them; two of the older boys get killed and they begin to hunt another, just as a ship arrives.

Golding has created the unbrave new world of these small boys so convincingly that when the first adult speaks at the end of the book, it seems like an odd intrusion.

Nadine Gordimer is known for her implacable opposition to the enduring apartheid regime in South Africa rather than her
extraordinary
talent as a stylist or as a novelist who writes better than any of her contemporaries about states of sexual longing and desire.
Burger’s Daughter
is the work in which her talent at dramatizing the conflict between public and private life, the individual and the family, history and destiny, escape and entrapment, is best displayed.