The Changeling By Kenzaburō Ōe. Translated by Deborah Boliver Boehm. Grove Press, 468 pages, $26.00.

I wasn’t feeling entirely qualified to review the newest novel from Japanese Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe, “The Changeling.” It’s the first of his novels I’ve read, and also intensely autobiographical. Just a few weeks ago, I cited autobiographical interest as the main selling point of Coetzee’s most recent novel, Summertime. In order to avoid missing out on the more intimate aspects of Ōe’s book, I decided to do what any diligent critic would do in such a situation: I looked him up on Wikipedia.

What I found there—a description of an author both intellectual and accessible, so dedicated to his political philosophy that he remains the only person in history to refuse Japan’s Order of Culture—convinced me that I owe it to myself to read more of Ōe’s work.

It also made “The Changeling” come as something of a surprise, because the book had the opposite effect on me. It’s a long, discursive, and ultimately unsatisfying novel which, from the little I know of Ōe’s history, doesn’t do justice to his oeuvre.

The story concerns a fictional stand-in for Ōe, named Kogito after Descartes’ famous epiphanic statement: cogito ergo sum. Kogito is trying to come to terms with the suicide of his brother-in-law, the filmmaker Goro. Goro also has a real-life counterpart, the director Juzo Itami, who killed himself for the same reasons as Goro: a journalist was about to reveal information proving he’d cheated on his wife with a much younger woman.

Goro leaves a number of pre-recorded audiotapes behind him, and “The Changeling” opens with Kogito having odd, obsessive conversations with the Goro on these tapes.

The monologic tapes temporarily obfuscate one of the major weaknesses of Ōe’s writing (and Deborah Boliver Boehm’s translation): his dialogue. I’ve often found something stilted in English translations of Japanese dialogue, but this book takes that awkwardness to a whole new level. Most conversations sound like two people reading to each other from prepared statements:

You’ve had a lot of direct experience with the terrible specificities of yazuka violence, and the fact that you haven’t even touched on that topic in this conversation just makes me feel more acutely aware of its terrible menace.

Aside from the repetition of “terrible,” notice the odd commentary “in this conversation,” the writerly adverb “acutely”, the implausibly formal “terrible menace”. Seldom does the reader feel like human beings with real emotions are actually speaking to each other; they are simply making verbal presentations.

But it isn’t just the dialogue that proves problematic. What possible explanation is there for faux-poetry like “the way the moon glittered fiercely on the surface of the river below, which was like the bottom of a deep abyss…”. How can the glittering surface of a river be anything like the bottom of a deep abyss? Ask translator Boehm, who must take the bulk of the responsibility for these inconsistencies.

Ōe isn’t off the hook either, however. Perhaps for fear of being too obtusely self-involved, he’s constantly forcing his characters to tell each other things they already know, like in this passage where Goro relates to Kogito the story of Kogito’s courtship of Goro’s sister: “You did manage to find a copy of “The House at Pooh Corner,” as I recall, and you sent it to Ashiya. The correspondence that ensued was the beginning of your relationship with Chikashi.” Oh, is that how I met my wife? I’d forgotten!

The story bounces around in time and space, often using Goro’s recorded tapes to evoke moments in their shared history. The book is at its best when it dwells on the odd intricacy of their relationship, which is equal parts love, jealousy, and sexual tension. As the novel progresses, we discover that Goro and Kogito shared some kind of traumatic event in their past, and it seems inevitable that we will eventually hear about it.

Unfortunately, we don’t learn about this trauma organically, but through the kind of cheap and embarrassing authorial invasion common to works of genre fiction written by high school English students. For the first 350 pages of the book, Ōe keeps referring to something called “THAT” (the traumatic event), but refuses to describe it. Apparently, no one ever told him that it doesn’t count as dramatic tension when you tell your reader you have a secret, but you won’t reveal it unless he wades through 6 hours of narcissistic rambling.

When we finally learn what the THAT is, Ōe fails utterly in evoking it as any kind of critical juncture. The last part of his novel inhabits the head of Kogito’s (Ōe’s) wife, who finds in Sendak’s picturebook “Outside, Over There” a metaphor for her relationship with her brother.

Apparently, she believes that Goro returned from THAT a changed man, an idea that gives the novel its name. But while these musings may be of some interest to a Japanese audience that has followed the tabloid story of Itami’s suicide, they meant almost nothing to this American.

The one saving grace here is that Ōe at least has a sense of humor about what he’s done in “The Changeling”. At one point, Kogito’s wife takes him to task for his “insufferable propensity for self-reference,” inserting himself into all his novels “under some contrived pseudonym”. But there is a darkness to this self-deprecation. On one of his tapes, Goro tells Kogito what he thinks of their artistic careers in severe terms:

“When you think about people who do the kind of work we do—selling the ‘new flowers’ of kitsch and the ‘new stars’ of kitsch by the yard, as it were—we don’t have that much time left, and we need to come to terms with that fact and ask forgiveness for having lived on lies.”

There is a noble naivete in taking honesty to mean autobiography, but Reality TV is not inherently more genuine than a sitcom, and the digressive relation of experience isn’t enough to float a novel. I have faith that Ōe can do much better than this, but maybe that’s just a bit of credulity on my part. I believe everything I read on Wikipedia.

1)     Tweet. Get this out of the way first. It’s only 140 characters, for God’s sake, and people need to know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what to Twitter about, consider starting a Twitter novel about someone writing a Twitter novel, because that wouldn’t be annoying at all.

2)     Emails. How many people have written to you since you started writing that Tweet I told you to write? Probably a dozen. You’re a writer, after all, and everybody loves getting emails from a writer. So get to it! Tell your mother that you only need $500 this month. Tell your ex that you’ll stop calling her five times a day when she starts loving you again. And tell those people offering to make your penis bigger to stop emailing you and send the samples already.

3)     Personal blog. After the emotional turmoil of writing to your ex, it’s time to pen a lengthy journal entry for the entire world to see. It’s not enough to know that you cried; the world wants to know how long you cried for, whether you were curled up in the fetal position while doing it, and what you thought of last night’s episode of 30 Rock. Don’t leave them hanging. You haven’t twittered for, like, an hour now.

4) Tweet again.

5)     Obscure and almost funny blog you started a few years ago when you first heard the word “blog”. Maybe it’s twee Photoshop collages you create using old Degas prints and pixellated pictures of adult film stars. Maybe it’s the place you log every use of the word “bazoombas” you can find on the internet. Maybe it’s just an old-fashioned collection of videos featuring kittens meowing at the camera. But remember, your six fans have been waiting for days for the newest entry, and it’s your responsibility to satisfy them. Odds are if you leave them without fresh content for much longer, they’ll kill themselves, for pretty obvious reasons.

6)     Facebook/Buzz/Flickr/MySpace Comments and Comment Responses. Don’t be stingy with your words, fellow writer. Remember that everyone out there is just as creative as you. And if you don’t weigh in on their various postings–be they photographs of how drunk they got last night or their response to that TalkingPointsMemo piece responding to that Huffington Post piece responding to that New York Times piece on the history of Bejeweled–you’ll earn yourself a reputation as a one-way street. Don’t expect anybody to bend over backwards for you if you won’t have the decency to bend over for them.

7)     That book you’re writing. Alright. The time has finally come to open up that Word document and…

8)     Shit. Database Entries. Okay. Sometimes your boss is going to come in. When that happens, just minimize all the other windows as fast as you can and say something distracting like, “Wow. This project sure is a lot harder than you made it out to be. I’ve barely gotten anywhere!” Hopefully he won’t look at your screen until you’ve got that admin portal open.

9)     Tweet again. You almost just got fired! People need to know!

10)   That book you’re writing. Okay. Now that everything else is out of the way, now that you’ve finished at your job, eaten some dinner, gone out and had a few drinks, watched those TV shows you Tivo’d last weekend, had another couple of drinks, and passed out, you’re finally ready to start working. It’s four in the morning, and that pounding in your sinuses isn’t just a hangover, it’s the creative juices waiting to burst out of you!

11)  Well that’s what happens when you drink too much. It doesn’t need to slow you down. Get to work!

12)  Outline. Well, you can’t just dive into these things without planning (if you could, you wouldn’t need this list, would you?). Spend some time thinking about your plot, your characters, your setting. Maybe a nice walk around the apartment would help. No, keep away from the couch. The bed, too. No, don’t call anybody. Put that cell phone away. I know it technically has a keyboard, but you’re not going to use it to write your novel. No, you’re not.

13)  Texting. See? I told you you wouldn’t. That’s not a novel. That’s a drunk text that you’re sending to your ex-girlfriend. No. Don’t you dare send the same message to more than one person. Don’t hit send. Oh God.

14)  Poetry. Yes, that’s a very lovely poem about your loneliness. Rhyme is definitely overrated, as is spelling and not separating each word with a semicolon. On the plus side, the fact that all of those girls chose not to take you up on the whimsically pornographic offer you made in that text message means you finally have time to work. Let’s get to it! Yes, the coffee shop next door does have nice wooden tables, liberally spaced electrical outlets, free wi-fi, and a marginally attractive barrista. You’ll certainly be able to concentrate there!

15)  To-do List. You’re absolutely right. Time to be realistic and chalk today up as a loss. Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow, you’re not just going to work on your novel, but also on that half-finished play you started last year, that musical about Nikola Tesla, those short stories, that other novel (the sci-fi one you’ll only publish under a pseudonym), and your interconnected series of avant-garde films about toast. Nothing ensures efficiency more than a to-do list.

16)  Tweet your resolve.

[This is the blog I write regularly for the literary website Untitled Books.]

So here’s the kind of thing I think about: if and when I publish my first novel, it will be placed on bookstore shelves between the works of David Foster Wallace and those of Jeanette Walls. Of course, I’m making a couple of assumptions here. First, that my book actually ends up on the shelves, rather than the discount racks or the discount tables or next to Tech Stock Investing for Dummies and that year’s National Book Award semi-finalists in a pulping facility. Second, that neither Mr. Wallace nor Ms. Walls’ undergo some James Frey-like fall from grace, and their books remain in print. But if we take these two tiny details for granted (along with my getting published in the first place) I can count on the two of them serving as my bookends for years to come.

I think this is a pretty lucky break. Jeanette–I’m going to go with first names, seeing as we’re neighbours now–had a massive bestseller with The Glass Castle (technically a memoir, but her newest book is fiction). And David’s Infinite Jest is one of the biggest novels to be found anywhere in the bookstore–a definite eye-catcher. Of course, Walls’ memoir is partially about her father’s alcoholism, and Wallace suffered from a depression so severe he eventually killed himself. What if the dark themes of my shelfmates have some on effect on me? I never stood much of a chance of avoiding an addiction to booze or Zoloft by the time I managed to publish a novel in the first place, but the proximity of David and Jeanette certainly won’t help. Maybe I should change my name.

Tommy Amenorhhea, perfectly positioned between Martin Amis and Jonathan Ames, would be lumped in with them as a brilliant social satirist. Tommy Sondheim would write heavy novels about imprisonment and death and illness (as metaphor) from between the bars of Solzhenitsyn and Sontag. Tommy Bombeolachimbomba would definitely become the next Hispanic superstar author, with his prime location between Bolaño and Borges. A year ago, Tommy Nackered could’ve nabbed a killer spot between Nabokov and Naipaul; then Ralph Nader wrote a novel. (Is there anything that man can’t ruin?). Tommy Coekelicot could put some much deserved distance between the subtle genius of J.M. Coetzee and the hackneyed self-helpiness of Paolo Coelho. Tommy Wolfe would only further confuse fans of Look Homeward, Angel and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Or I could go for broke, change my name to Damien Brontë, and finally get between those smug sisters.

Do other would-be authors think about stuff like this, during those two to three hour lulls in which we sit at the computer doubting we’re any more creative than an ATM (and confident we’re far less useful to the world)? I’ve read enough memoirs to know that envy, self-doubt, narcissism, competitiveness, and hubris are to authors as homosexual impulses are to conservative congressmen. But a preoccupation with one’s possible alphabetical companions on bookstore shelves? Is that just me?

I never attended an MFA program in Creative Writing, which has nothing to do with the fact that many of them rejected me. Seriously. I mean it. Anyway, the point is that I don’t have anybody to ask about stuff like this. Every day, I go out to a coffee shop (Tully’s in San Francisco’s Cole Valley today) and put in my hours. Most mornings, the offer of a free mini-cup of peppermint caramel gingerbread mocha is the most I can hope for in the way of human interaction. I’ve got plenty of friends, and a great part-time job as a GMAT instructor, but I very seldom communicate with other writers, which is a shame, because writing is already one of the most isolating professions out there, short of lighthouse keeping and being Ralph Nader.

I conceived of this blog as a way of reaching out, in the hopes that other people might find some consolation in the similarities between my experience and theirs. I imagine the majority of people that come to book-related sites are would-be writers like myself, well-acquainted with submission guidelines, Glimmer Train contests, query letters, reading fees, agencies, contracts, payment in copies of the magazine, writing workshops, and, of course, rejections. Rejections that come like a slap in the face and rejections that come like a kick in the crotch. Boilerplate rejections and personalized rejections. Rejections with detailed explanations and rejections full of mystery and euphemism. More than anything else, I believe it is rejection that bind us all together. These rejections are the reason we need a community, people willing to listen to what we have to say (even if they won’t pay us for it).

As for my credentials, I’ve yet to publish a novel, though I’ve written five of the damn things. I’ve loved and lost two agents, and my shorter work has appeared in places like McSweeney’s and Tin House. But more important than this, I write every day. I sift through literary magazines and get annoyed at the ubiquity of Joyce Carol Oates. I submit stories and then immediately re-read them, only to realize they needed at least twelve more drafts, and now I’ve alienated the editor with my supreme tectonic badness and she’s going to spend the rest of the day telling all the other editors and publishers she knows what a twat I am. In other words, I’m in the same boat as thousands of other struggling writers–fanatical with self-doubt, fantastically pessimistic, and perpetually polishing my Nobel acceptance speech.

I hope to update this blog every week, with a riff on whatever aspect of the writerly life has struck me with particular force that week. I’ll do my best to keep it up as long as my MacBook can retain a charge, or until I take my place between David and Jeanette on a bookstore shelf near you. If anything I write about in the posts to come strikes a chord with you, please leave a comment. It may be the only communication that I have with the outside world that day.

In closing, thanks so much for your time, and for your submission. Unfortunately, we’re going to pass. This is a tough marketplace, and we can only take on projects that we’re particularly excited about. Writing is a highly subjective field, however, and we feel confident another editor may feel differently. Really. Good luck with that.

Tommy

As God Commands by Niccolò Ammaniti, Translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt. Grove Atlantic/Black Cat, 400 pp, $14. 95.

Crime and Punishment

In 2001, Niccoló Ammaniti’s novel Io non ho paura (“I’m Not Scared”) was published to great acclaim in Italy. The novel takes place in Tuscany during the so-called “Years of Lead, ” when both right and left-wing paramilitary groups carried out numerous acts of terrorism across the country. In 1978 alone, more than 600 kidnappings took place in Italy, mostly of Northerners transported and held for ransom in the South. “I’m Not Scared” tells the story of Michele, a nine year-old boy who, while out playing with his friends one afternoon, happens upon one of these kidnapped children in a giant hole dug near an abandoned farmhouse. It isn’t long before Michele realizes that nearly all of the adults in his small town, including his own parents, are in on the crime.

The cinematic adaptation of “I’m Not Scared” was one of my favorite films of 2004, and when I went back to read the novel, it proved equally compelling. Many books take on the disillusioning moment when a young boy first sees his father’s flaws, but Michele’s coming-of-age was particularly poignant. His parents had committed an unforgivable crime, and Michele’s struggle to reconcile his love for them with that fact lent the novel both an exterior and an interior drama.

Michele’s eventual attempt to save the kidnapped boy became at once an act of selfless bravery and of traditional rebellion, and the kidnapping was recast as yet another manifestation of the inscrutability of the actions of adults when one is young. In this way, Ammaniti seemed to me less like another Mario Puzo than an Italian David Mamet, creating a realistic criminal universe without any of the grandstanding or glorifying that gave us Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano.

His new novel, “As God Commands”, revisits much of the territory covered in “I’m Not Scared”. Again, there is a crime at the heart of the book, as well as a young protagonist. Christiano Zena is thirteen, the son of a neo-Nazi skinhead named Rino. The complexity of the father-son relationship emerges slowly and gracefully. In the first scene, Rino, in a drunken rage, wakes his son in the middle of the night and orders him to kill a neighbor’s dog with a handgun. But only a few chapters later, father and son are cleaning the house and baking together in order to convince their social worker of the healthiness of their domestic situation. The lengths to which Christiano eventually goes to protect his father leave no doubt in the reader’s mind that a strong bond of love exists between them.

In addition to Christiano and Rino, “As God Commands” features a sizable ensemble. There’s Beppe Trecca, the social worker mentioned above, who embarks on an affair with his best friend’s wife, Ida. Then there’s Danilo Aprea, whose plan to rob an ATM sets the tragedy of the novel in motion. Most disturbing of all is Quatro Formaggi (meaning “four cheese,” as in pizza, in Italian), the victim of an accidental electrocution that left him physically disabled and mentally deranged, who spends his days building a model village out of action figures and toys from fast food restaurant kids’ meals.

The action of the novel takes place over the course of six days, divided into three sections: Before, The Night, and After. While the middle section is ostensibly dedicated to the night of the heist, it quickly becomes something far more terrible. Just like Michele’s family in “I’m Not Scared,” the characters here are already well on their way to perdition by the time the novel starts, and their punishments come with a Biblical swiftness. While a subplot lifted almost whole cloth from Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair” unfolds somewhat mechanically, the overall narrative carries the same tragic weight as that author’s best works.

In addition to the expanded cast, “As God Commands” differs from Amminiti’s earlier novel in that it is set in the present day. Though this robs the book of any historical resonance, it gives Ammaniti the opportunity to pepper his prose with pop culture references. Considering the tribulations of his young life, Christiano finds comfort in “the notion that great men have always had to struggle through shit on their own. Just think of Eminem or Hitler or Christian Vieri.” During the funeral of a girl who is raped and murdered sometime during the fateful evening at the center of the book, her schoolfriends can’t help but take photos and video on their phones: “In the dim light of the church the screens of the cell phones lit up like funeral candles.” Far from distracting, Ammaniti’s nods towards youth culture always ring true, deepenning the reality of his world.

“As God Commands” falters only when the plot threatens to overwhelm the subtle development of the characters. In the course of one evening, we get rape, murder, a coma-inducing aneurysm, a billboard somehow cutting a trailer in half as if it were a tin can (and exposing two adulterous lovers into the bargain), a hit and run, and a possibly miraculous recovery from said hit and run. While many novels revolve around a single fraught evening (“The Ice Storm”, “Atonement”, and “Mystic River” come to mind), it’s still a lot to take in at once. If novels had volume knobs, these would be turned up to eleven.

Still, “As God Commands” is far more stimulating than your average page-turner. Once again, Ammaniti has succeeded in telling a captivating story while developing convincing characters and relationships. Though this novel may lack the sharpness of “I’m Not Scared,” it makes up for it in scope. If the older book can be read as Ammaniti’s “American Buffalo,” this one is his “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Would it be crass of me to say I can’t wait for the movie to come out?

I’ve included the text of the review below the screenshot, or you can click here to read it on the site proper. Sweet!

Sept. 11, 2009 | Muriel Barbery’s last book, “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” was a massive bestseller both in France and in America. But while the story of a depressed concierge and an angsty teen girl had moments of lyricism, I found its near-constant literary and philosophical allusions pretentious, and its characters unlikable. Thankfully, Barbery’s new book (or old book, technically, as it was written first), “Gourmet Rhapsody,” manages to transform these weaknesses into strengths.

"Gourmet Rhapsody" by Muriel Barbery

“Rhapsody” is the tale of the masterly food critic Pierre Arthens, who lies on his deathbed struggling to remember the one flavor that he believes has defined his life. Every other chapter is narrated by Arthens and centers around a single food item, such as “Toast” or “Mayonnaise,” moving in the manner of a detective story toward the mystery flavor. The other chapters each feature a different narrator who has known Arthens in some capacity. Everyone from his granddaughter to his cat to the statuette of Venus in his study gets a chance to weigh in.

Barbery is at her best in the Arthens chapters, writing with all the gusto of a true gastronome. A tomato is “crimson in its taut silken finery, undulating with the occasional more tender hollow.” An octopus is “loath to divulge its secret liaisons to one’s bite,” a poeticization of “chewy.” Arthens’ evocative descriptions are balanced with passages of painful pomposity, such as when the act of watching another person eat is described as a moment “exempt from the infinite vanishing line of our own memories and projects.” However, the pretension that was so problematic in “Hedgehog” is forgivable, even enjoyable, here, because we’re allowed to dislike the protagonist.

Arthens is a man who cheats on his wife, describes his children as “monstrous excrescences,” and is effectively blind to everything but food. But it is that very single-mindedness that makes his deathbed confession such a joy to read. As his eventual revelation makes clear, Arthens has lived his life worshiping a false idol. But all monomanias are pure, and so the critic becomes a kind of tragic hero. Barbery’s triumph is in managing to tell his story while simultaneously conveying his passion. Like any good work of food writing, one puts it down a little bit hungry.

According to their website: “Untitled Books is a discerning new literary service and online bookshop that combines an authoritative selection of book recommendations with continually updated, exclusive editorial content.

The online magazine, features articles, author recommendations and interviews with big names such as Julian Barnes, Philip Gourevitch and James Frey, and champions the writers producing the most exciting work at the moment. You will also find articles, Q&As and new short fiction published on the site each month. Authors recommend their favourite books, what inspires them and who to watch out for. Untitled Books also aims to find, support and promote the work of up and coming and new authors. Every featured author’s work can be bought via the site, making Untitled Books an essential destination for readers and book lovers.”

My story is about the Milgram Experiment, has been sitting on my hard drive for many years. I’m so glad that it’s finally found a home, especially on a cool English site. Much thanks to Viola Fort and Untitled Books!

Here’s an excerpt:

Milgram
by Tommy Wallach

In the summer of 1961, Henrietta Ramsey took part in her first ever scientific experiment. It was advertised in The New Haven Register, and offered four dollars for an hour of the respondent’s time, plus fifty cents for bus fare.

Henrietta had never before considered volunteering for such a thing, though not because she had anything against the pursuit of knowledge or the process of scientific inquiry. On the contrary, all forms of progress appealed to her; she was a member of the ACLU, the NAACP, and would be instrumental in the eventual foundation of a Greater New Haven chapter of NOW. The very term ‘progress’ made her feel a shiver of pride, like when her husband, Victor, touched her back possessively in front of some business associate’s younger, prettier wife. No, the only reason Henrietta had not responded to the advertisement when it had first appeared a year earlier was because she was typically a very busy woman. A year earlier, she would not have had the time to involve herself in the pursuit of knowledge, or the process of scientific inquiry.

The summer of 1961 was different. For Henrietta, a personal solstice had set in; the days stretched out to unheard of lengths. Torpid lifetimes passed in the hours between breakfast and lunch, civilizations rose and melted into hazy histories during the afternoons and by the time dinner rolled around, the morning seemed as distant a past as childhood itself. For other women, perhaps this would have been tolerable. But Henrietta had reached forty-five without ever having experienced what was commonly known as ‘free time.’ (What was free about it? she wondered. Time always cost something; it took its bite out of the purse or the flesh, whichever was more vulnerable.) During her childhood in Madison, Wisconsin, she’d worked every summer, first for her family and then for a local restaurant that sponsored the most popular fish fry in the state. She’d studied hard in high school, and worked in a bookstore throughout her four years at the University. After graduation, she taught seventh grade English for a few years, until Victor came along and the two of them moved to Connecticut. Even after Catharine was born, Henrietta insisted on finding herself a part-time job. “Raising a child simply isn’t enough,” she would confide to other working women she knew, “God put me on Earth to help people.”

Read on…