Gravel Heart

Gravel Heart by Abdurazak Gurnah is hypnotic. The novel follows Salim, a citizen of Zanzibar, who moves to London in his early adulthood and begins to make sense of his family's troubled past. Gurnah, a Nobel Prize winner, writes in a calm, restrained, often beautiful voice. He meanders around, taking several pages for minor characters or subplots. Salim's college days in London felt so real--so messy and weird and awkward--that the effect was more like reading a memoir than a novel. That made Gravel Heart's final quarter that much more devastating, as the reason for the characters' impotence and dislocation seemed to be happening to real people. It was like learning something terrible about a neighbor, or old friend. 

Gravel Heart is a fine postcolonial novel. Like Things Fall Apart, it is complex and murky. There's a great aside midway through the book when Salim is bewildered by the naïve certainty of student activism in his London college. Some of his roommates experienced firsthand social ills like child soldiers or apartheid. They didn't talk about it, though, because, as Salim reflects, "questions simplify what is only comprehensible though intimacy and experience. Nor are people's lives free from blame and guilt and wrong-doing, and what might be intended as simple curiosity may feel like a demand for a confession. You don't know what you might release by asking a stupid question. It was best to leave people to their silences. That was how it seemed to me but it was not how it seemed to my fellow students." I am certainly in the "fellow student" category here, and reading thoughtful novels like Gravel Heart allows me to develop, if only in a small way, a level of "intimacy and experience."

Aftermath

Aftermath by Scott Nadelson is a haunting collection of short stories. Nadelson, a proud Oregon State grad, covered familiar ground in each story. All of them had a sense of lapsed Judaism, a romantic relationship ending, and a vague threat of physical danger. They all took place in New Jersey. Most explored a post-college ennui. Reading Aftermath felt repetitive, then, as though the collection were a dreamlike record caught in the same loop. This was not unwelcome, though. While the themes and motifs (and setting, and characters) were often similar throughout these stories, the writing was alive and poetic, and unexpected events kept the stories from being formulaic. The protagonists often made bad decisions, and the dread of watching them unfold was both jarring and unsettling. Often, collections of short stories aim for more varied styles and themes, with wide ranges of quality. Aftermath is a strong collection by a writer that knows what he wants to write about, and each story was written with the same high standard.

Everybody Behaves Badly

 Everybody Behaves Badly by Lesley M. M. Blume recounts the backstory behind Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I teach that novel, and for several years I've had my students listen to an NPR interview with Blume to learn the real-life inspiration. But, in part because I've attempted some bad reads about literature I like, I had never actually read Blume's book until now. I was wrong to ignore it. It's in depth, fast paced, fascinating, and engaging. 

There are many interesting facts and connections with The Sun Also Rises and other great works of Modern fiction. There's also a lot to be gleaned about post-war Europe and the expat community, as well as early 20th-Century publishing. But the largest theme that emerges in Everybody Behaves Badly is the personal cost of great literature. Hemingway detonated his social and familial circles to write his first novel. He was sociopathic about revealing his friends' secrets and personalities, and he ignored his long-suffering wife. On a purely artistic level, it worked. He absolutely accomplished what he set out to achieve. Blume is a personable, often funny writer, but she wisely doesn't moralize about this choice, nor does she need to. Everybody Behaves Badly, despite the clarity of the title, allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about the Lost Generation.