midcentury
For no particular reason, I decided to take a break from the China project and read two recent novels by, respectively, James Salter and Shirley Hazzard. Hazzard is Australian by birth and cosmopolitan by practice, so I don't know if she counts as an "American" writer, despite the NYC address and the National Book Award; I would otherwise introduce them as two American novels about the years after World War II and the uneasy transition from war to peace.
I rarely read contemporary fiction in English (except for Coetzee, whom I practically worship), and sometimes I feel like a real asshole for avoiding it, yet also expecting some audience for my own fiction to appear someday. I figured Cassada would at least hold my interest and not be too cheesy, and I was right on both counts: Salter is a very good, if not perfect, stylist, and there were only a few missteps into Hemingway territory, plus some sterling tragic scenes. The narrative is as eerily, hermetically sealed-off from history and context as the Air Force bases and fighter planes of its milieu, but that mirroring is used to good effect: it would be easy to pad the book out with oracular passages on history and the Fate of Mankind, but resisting that temptation is admirable. I admire it, even if I don't know if I can emulate it.
The Great Fire is a love story, like Hazzard's (superior) earlier novel, The Transit of Venus, but set in the Pacific— Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand— after WWII. The protagonist, Leith, is a war hero, son of a well-known British author, who has witnessed a great deal in China and Japan about which we are told almost nothing, and a great deal with various women in Europe about which we are told everything. Fatally, four or five of the main characters speak in voices indistinguishable from the narrator's— in one case, a sickly 20-year-old boy mimics the narrator's world-weary, endlessly judgmental tone, as here:
"Ben, was there ever a time when you felt close to your father?"
Benedict put the crumpled frame of his fingers together. "You see, my illness came on me early, but not enough to be convincing. My father thought, wanted to think, that I was malingering. There was threatening and shouting, and dragging; and on my part writhing, resisting, and screaming. He was set on my becoming a champion swimmer, took me to Balmoral Baths at sunrise, all seasons, and plunged me in. Derelict wooden piles slimed with green and cruelly barnacled. Fear, humiliation, agony in an ear. I shrieked, he shouted, once or twice it came to blows. Neighbours complained. Finally, mastoid trouble was discovered; there was an operation, also awful. By then, something was irrefutably wrong with me, and he couldn't bear our joint failure— my failure and his; we were saddled with it, one way or another."
"Your part was involuntary, given the circumstances."
"His too, given his nature."
"No. We owe ourselves more disbelief than that."
"The Australian male is not good at self-doubt. Someone else must always be to blame. Otherwise, Aldred, a nation on its knees."
Still, mannered prose isn't always a weakness, and the last hundred pages were a surprising improvement on the rest. I'm not sorry I read it, only disappointed, and perhaps overly harsh in my disappointment. Twenty years elapsed between The Transit of Venus and this book, which puts a happier ending on Hazzard's own youthful story of thwarted love in Hong Kong. It would be terrible if she'd never written another novel; but can she really have spent those twenty years isolated from the speech patterns of anyone under 65?Then there was fascism, at Florence in vilest forms. [...] Crindle told him, "Mussolini is as bad as Hitler, and has taught Hitler a lot. You're just in time, here, for the onset of the Racial Laws."
"We've had racial laws in Australia for generations."
Crindle looked astonished; but said, "By now, nothing surprises me."
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