Black Swan Green isn't a novel that parades its experimentation, the way you could maybe say Portrait does, but that doesn't mean there is none. Mitchell will occasionally throw in really surreal scenes, like the ghost on the lake in "january man," which come out of nowhere to break up an otherwise very realistic, almost mundane story about a normal kid in rural England. The effect is to make those rare moments seem just as ordinary as all the rest of it. All we get is Jason's reaction, and he pretty much takes everything equally. As tied up as he is in his own internal problems, there doesn't seem to be much difference between getting trapped in a house with a weird old magic woman and overhearing his mother talk about a potential affair. The normal adult world is just as confusing to him as any of the strange moments which his own mind (possibly) invents, and so events from both realities read the same way. It feels natural that they're there.
Another piece of seamless experimentation is Jason's occasional shift from past to present tense. Although the novel seems to be narrated by a near-future (maybe 14 years old?) version of Jason, he will occasionally throw in a sentence or paragraph talking about how something makes him feel, in a way that's clearly supposed to give us his reactions as they really happened. This especially happens in moments where Jason is very emotional, almost like remembering how strongly he felt at the time brings him back to it as a narrator. For example, from the latest chapter, "bridle path:" "For breakfast I ate McVitie's Jamaican Ginger Cake and a cocktail of milk, Coke, and Ovaltine. Not bad. Oh, better than not bad! Every single hour of today is a Black Magic chocolate, waiting in its box for me. I retuned the kitchen radio from Radio 4 to Radio 1." But this time shift also in very negative moments, for example when Jason vomits after his first cigarette: "I washed my puke-stained hand in the lake, then wiped away the tears from my puke-teared eyes. I'm so ashamed. Hugo's trying to teach me how to be a kid like him, but I can't even smoke a single cigarette." This one actually goes on much longer in the present tense, ending with "My cousin's sobbing with laughter," which might imply that it's a moment of particularly strong emotion.
Although this shift in tenses was jarring for me at first, by now it feels like a totally natural part of the novel. Not only does it read fine once you get used to it, it also feels like it has a good reason to be there. By mixing up the reactions of "present" Jason with those of "past" Jason, it both emphasizes how strongly felt and long-lasting childhood emotions can be, and makes us question just which version of Jason is narrating the story. Is it actually a present-tense "diary" type story, or is it all being written down at once shortly after the end of the novel, or is it being written by a fully adult Jason, who just makes a big deal out of inhabiting his past? It's too early to tell, which might actually be a good thing; by mixing up the timeline of Jason's progression as a person and a narrator, it makes it feel very true that he remains the same essential person throughout his entire process of development. That's something that doesn't always feel true in coming-of-age novels; sometimes the distance between the narrator and the character, or even the character in the beginning and end, feels so great that "coming-of-age" feels more like a set of checkpoints than a steady growth, which is probably more accurate to how we actually experience it. There's a line from the newest Noah Baumbach movie where one of the (middle-aged) main characters says something like "I finally feel like more than just a child pretending to be an adult," and his wife says "You feel that way too?" David Mitchell seems to really be in tune with the idea that adults are just bigger children, and so far I've been really impressed with the way he subverts my expectations of what it means to "grow" from your past.
Friday, April 10, 2015
Monday, April 6, 2015
Branches
Ruth's young life is defined by the people who leave her. She opens the novel by identifying herself, and then by describing her succession of caretakers. That list begins with her grandmother, she who "eschewed awakening," and fails to mention the loss that starts the process in the first place, that of Ruth's mother. From there we get the story of Ruth's grandfather: how his desire to live up in the mountains took him from a "grave" sunk in the ground to a town named after a bone, and how the success of his career ended in a "spectacular derailment" as he flew into the lake which defines his home. His body is never found, and we're aware of it staring out the lake for the rest of the novel.
Ruth's grandfather is an archetypal "dreamer," who lives his life following his romantic ambitions, shirking "success" as a painter or husband to express an individual vision. His death is felt by his wife as the last in a long line of disappointments -- he "walks off" into the lake, leaving his daughters to be raised by a single parent. Ruth's fascination with this story, however, expresses more than disappointment. She gives it a sense of romantic beauty, with the old man's slip into drowning seeming peaceful in its isolation. There's no sound to hear and no crash to see; it's black one moment and black the next. The idea that at one moment he's above water and at another he's below is just an abstraction, with no relation to how the fall is actually experienced. Trying to imagine how Edmund feels in his last moments is impossible, because Ruth makes it seem like there is nothing to feel. We never get his reaction to dying, only his thoughts on life. His wife's complaints about being left behind come off as trivial in comparison.
That peaceful view of death is dangerous, because it brings Ruth herself narrowly close to the water's edge. The way Edmund's violent derailment is presented makes it seem preferable to dealing with the responsibilities of this world. We see Ruth's own desire to shut off and ignore everything around her when she sleeps by the lake. The blackness she describes there calms her because it denies that anything is really changing when the animals move around outside, just like it doesn't matter to Sylvie if the plates she puts away in the darkness are sitting on top of dozens of others; as far as she can tell everything she puts away is the only thing that's put away. There's no such thing as "mess" if your things can't visually collect. What Ruth views so romantically in her grandfather and Sylvie, however, is harder to accept in Helen, whose suicide more directly affects Ruth. Helen's death feels to Ruth much like Edmund's death feels to Sylvia: like a shirking of responsibility and a leaving her behind. We can see this with her description of the "maternal" washing machine with which Helen leaves her, and when she says that she worries Sylvie will run away "because she looked like our mother." It's impossible to know what Helen was thinking when she drove into the lake, but it seems plausible to imagine that her views on darkness were similar to Ruth's.
An idea that is stated explicitly later in the novel, but which is present throughout, is that Ruth belongs to one of two branches of her family. On one side are Sylvia, Lily, Nona, and Lucille, and on the other are the "dreamers," Edmund, Sylvie, Helen, and Ruth. The split between these two branches and their lifestyles and philosophies is the major conflict of Housekeeping, because the two sides are presented as incompatible; the two sides can live with each other for a while, but sooner or later someone has to move. Usually it's the person in the vein of Edmund, but not necessarily; Lucille is the transient in Sylvie's household. The impression we get is that maybe Ruth and her kind are not necessarily transient, it's just that they disagree with the "common persuasion," and so therefore are forced to move to escape it. When allowed to make a life for themselves, as odd and idiosyncratic as Sylvie's household may seem, they seem to be able to find comfort. At the very least, we get the sense that they can be comfortable in who they're with. Ruth certainly doesn't show many signs of getting tired of Sylvie by the end of the novel. In Ruth's side of the family, once you've found your people, you don't want to leave them -- if anything, you just want to leave everyone else.
Ruth's grandfather is an archetypal "dreamer," who lives his life following his romantic ambitions, shirking "success" as a painter or husband to express an individual vision. His death is felt by his wife as the last in a long line of disappointments -- he "walks off" into the lake, leaving his daughters to be raised by a single parent. Ruth's fascination with this story, however, expresses more than disappointment. She gives it a sense of romantic beauty, with the old man's slip into drowning seeming peaceful in its isolation. There's no sound to hear and no crash to see; it's black one moment and black the next. The idea that at one moment he's above water and at another he's below is just an abstraction, with no relation to how the fall is actually experienced. Trying to imagine how Edmund feels in his last moments is impossible, because Ruth makes it seem like there is nothing to feel. We never get his reaction to dying, only his thoughts on life. His wife's complaints about being left behind come off as trivial in comparison.
That peaceful view of death is dangerous, because it brings Ruth herself narrowly close to the water's edge. The way Edmund's violent derailment is presented makes it seem preferable to dealing with the responsibilities of this world. We see Ruth's own desire to shut off and ignore everything around her when she sleeps by the lake. The blackness she describes there calms her because it denies that anything is really changing when the animals move around outside, just like it doesn't matter to Sylvie if the plates she puts away in the darkness are sitting on top of dozens of others; as far as she can tell everything she puts away is the only thing that's put away. There's no such thing as "mess" if your things can't visually collect. What Ruth views so romantically in her grandfather and Sylvie, however, is harder to accept in Helen, whose suicide more directly affects Ruth. Helen's death feels to Ruth much like Edmund's death feels to Sylvia: like a shirking of responsibility and a leaving her behind. We can see this with her description of the "maternal" washing machine with which Helen leaves her, and when she says that she worries Sylvie will run away "because she looked like our mother." It's impossible to know what Helen was thinking when she drove into the lake, but it seems plausible to imagine that her views on darkness were similar to Ruth's.
An idea that is stated explicitly later in the novel, but which is present throughout, is that Ruth belongs to one of two branches of her family. On one side are Sylvia, Lily, Nona, and Lucille, and on the other are the "dreamers," Edmund, Sylvie, Helen, and Ruth. The split between these two branches and their lifestyles and philosophies is the major conflict of Housekeeping, because the two sides are presented as incompatible; the two sides can live with each other for a while, but sooner or later someone has to move. Usually it's the person in the vein of Edmund, but not necessarily; Lucille is the transient in Sylvie's household. The impression we get is that maybe Ruth and her kind are not necessarily transient, it's just that they disagree with the "common persuasion," and so therefore are forced to move to escape it. When allowed to make a life for themselves, as odd and idiosyncratic as Sylvie's household may seem, they seem to be able to find comfort. At the very least, we get the sense that they can be comfortable in who they're with. Ruth certainly doesn't show many signs of getting tired of Sylvie by the end of the novel. In Ruth's side of the family, once you've found your people, you don't want to leave them -- if anything, you just want to leave everyone else.
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