The Marriage Plot

 The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is a great read. I was reminded of Philip Roth, Chad Harbach, and Zadie Smith. The novel traces a love triangle--two men in love with the same woman, all graduating an Ivy League school--with the explicit weight and implications of its title. The characterization was among the best I've ever read: each person felt believable, sympathetic, and wrought with problems. Each perspective was told in close third person with smart, overlapping narratives. As the threads tangled and departed, The Marriage Plot dove luxuriously into topics as diverse as literary criticism, religious devotion, mental illness, travel, sexuality, and class conflicts. Eugenides is a master craftsman. No part of the novel lagged, and he was able to balance the thorough ruminations with brisk dialogue and surprising set pieces. I am strongly motivated to read The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, Eugenides's more famous novels, after this one.

The only thing that gave me pause is the thing I can't describe: the ending. The Marriage Plot, in fact, has a plot. There is rising action, a climax, a resolution. My inclination and temperament drives me to weirdo meandering Euro novels by people like Knausgaard and Cusk, stories with no clear direction, on purpose. Broadly speaking, I appreciate a resolution only if it's tragic. This novel, on the other hand, had an ending that was strangely morally satisfying, like a Zadie Smith novel or a Wes Anderson movie. But it was even more constructed than both of those. So I wasn't disappointed, really. Nor did I disbelieve the conclusion. But it was the one place where there seemed to be a hint of artifice. Eugenides is a genius, and part of me wonders if this was a deliberate nod to earlier, 19th-century texts that the book references in places. I don't know. I finished The Marriage Plot yesterday, and I'm turning it over in my mind. 

Sometimes a Great Notion

 Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey is the Great Oregon Novel. It's a triumph of craft and form; it accurately captures the coastal Oregon landscape; its drama is big and mythic and deeply felt. I'd read Sometimes a Great Notion about 15 years ago, and I was driven back to it by the nagging lack of logger voices in Richard Powers's The Overstory*. Boy, it holds up. It's hard to read any scene with the character Hank Stamper without clenching your fists in defiant, vitriolic cussedness. I've never read a novel that plays with point-of-view as much: in the same paragraph the perspective might change seven times over four different narrative voices. And the plot builds and builds and builds and ends, well, exactly where it should end. A terrific book.

There's too much to go over in a space this small. The history, the meditations on politics/spirituality/gender/family/vengeance/free will/race/et al., the brawling conflict, the characterization . . . each could be a dissertation. I'll just focus on the setting. Kesey absolutely nails the depiction of the Coast Range. His account is that of a native son. Not only is it expertly described in its physical detail, but the amorphous spiritual effects of climate on the characters is perfect. The town and river in the novel are fictional, but they could be anywhere from Tillamook down to about Bandon. Read in 2022, the attitude is shocking. Kesey, in his accurate endemic telling, avoids the hippie sentimentalizing that most later Oregon writers (and imitators) attach to the land. His Oregon isn't a nurturing mother, it's a combative alien. You aren't welcome here. Hank Stamper understood this early--in a heartbreaking flashback--and he raised his fist against the coastal river throughout. It wasn't enough. As the loggers raged against the forest, the river rose and rose and swallowed the characters, the house, the family conflict, the whole narrative. 

*Mentioned on this very blog . . .

Edisto

 Edisto by Padgett Powell is a short, strange coming-of-age novel from the American South. It is immediately singular and disorienting, and the reader is forced to accept each sentence, each paragraph, one after another until a hazy picture begins to emerge. It never fully does. That's a strength, overall. Powell is a writer's writer: my edition boasts cover blurbs from Donald Barthelme, Walker Percy, and even Saul Bellow. Trying to make sense of it, I was reminded of Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead, in that the narrator and characters existed in a weird backwater of rural customs and bizarre syntax. 

Even with some distance from reading it, I don't know what to make of Edisto. It was funny, often. The events rarely made sense. I think I liked the book . . . and I haven't hurried to read more Padgett Powell. To enter that world again will require a rare, mysterious inclination. Maybe in a decade or two.