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Excerpts from Hick by Andrea Portes, copyright 2007 by Unbridled Books and reprinted by permission of Unbridled Books and the author. What is it that attracts us to fiction, to novels? In The Art of Fiction David Lodge suggests that, in spite of the various earthquakes and tsunamis that French Theory caused in Anglo Saxon intellectual life once upon a time, most of us still read novels for the light that they shed on human motivation - that is, we still read according to the tenets of Liberal Humanism, which Theory is/was a reaction against. I would have to say that, in my experience - with both readers and novelists - this is mostly true. This is not to say that I think Theory doesn't have much to contribute. In fact, I'm going to be discussing a passage from Roland Barthes in a moment. The main problem that I have with -isms and schools of Theory is that the critic works with preconcieved notions and ideas, trying to force the novel through the telescope of whatever -ism dogma the critic already worships. In other words, scholarship becomes propaganda. Mikita Brontmann's witty, funny polemic about reading 'great literature' The Solitary Vice: Against Reading makes much the same point that David Lodge does. I'll leave it to others to discuss Brontmann's central theses about books and reading, but towards the end of her book she states what it is that she believes literature can do that nothing else can: it "hits us", she says, in ways that make us achieve a better understanding of what it means to be a human being. She quotes from a letter that Kafka once sent to Max Brod: "If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?" I think there's great truth in this. I don't think anyone reads a novel in order to achieve a theory of semiotics. In looking at the novel Hick by Andrea Portes I want to begin by trying to marry the spirit of these ideas of Kafka, Lodge and Brontmann with something of a quite different mood and feel, something Roland Barthes articulated in Writing Degree Zero: The spreading influence of political and social facts into the literary field of consciousness has produced a new type of scriptor, halfway between the party member and the writer, deriving from the former an ideal image of committed man, and from the latter the notion that a written work is an act. I'll endeavor to show that Portes' novel is an excellent example of a concept I'm going to call the novelscape. Of course, the quote from Barthes above anticipated the politicization of everything in American life by many years, but it applies very exactly. What is it that attracts any given reader to any given work of fiction? The possible answers to this question are infinite in number; many of them would make a purist sick. As an example, I can say without qualification that the cover art on the original hardcover edition of Seven Loves, by Valerie Trueblood, is what made me want to read it. We might want to read a book because it is assigned for a class, or because it was the source material for a movie we liked, or because a highly trusted friend suggests it - whatever. As I say, the possibilities are endless. For me, in the case of Hick, the desire to read actually grew out of meeting Portes in a place rich in literary lore, the bar at the Algonquin Hotel. In the course of a conversation with me there she happened to mention a seemingly trivial occurrence that, for whatever reason, still stuck out in my mind days later. When I then started reading her novel the observational acuity on the pages harkened back to her observational acuity in real life conversation, and so I was intrigued. Experience has taught me that the novelist themself is all over their novel(s) like raindrops on a leaf, or like a hologram. I knew the book would hook me. The second chapter of Hick is brutal. Almost unbearably sad, it is very difficult to read without choking up a little. To make a long story short, a couple has a very sick newborn child. They cannot afford the medical care it requires, and it dies in three days in an incubator. Nothing of a political or sociological nature is referenced at all - the novel is narrated by a thirteen year old girl in skaz that can rival that of The Catcher in the Rye. The pain, hurt, shame and torment are all kept at the personal, metaphysical level - this is a low scope crisis, a horror among the four or five members of a family. Edward Said once wrote an essay about Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (it is included in his collection Culture and Imperialism) in which he convincingly demonstrated that a lot of things that were not "there," that is, on the actual pages, in the actual words of Austen's novel, nevertheless had to be "there" in the world of the novel for the simple reason that the story is set in a realistic manner in a time and place in history during which we know that certain things of a s social, economic, and political nature were going on. I will plead guilty to gross oversimplification here, but in Said's view we know that Bertram in Mansfield Park is a slaveholder and director of a colonial plantation in spite of the fact that Jane Austen never writes a single word about any of these things. In a similar way, I'd like to suggest that Hick takes place against the background of a very specific time and place and that in that time and place very specific social and political issues were being swatted around with great zest by various politicians. This background comprises the novelscape. First, though, I have to detour for a moment to discuss the real world time period during which the novel takes place. It's hard to say exactly when the story occurs - most of it reads as if it could equally be 1957 or 2007. There are one or two references to real world things and people that are more specific - in fact, the first sentence of the book is the spoken sentence, "You know why you keep losing, cause, guess what, you're a fucking loser." It took me about six readings to finally get that this sentence is being spoken about Tom Osborne, the legendary Nebraska Corhuskers football coach, which pins down the time frame somewhat. Osborne coached until 1997, so I think we can plausibly posit that the story takes place during the 1990s. It is obviously not my intention to lurch off here into some kind of full blown New Historicist essay, but as will become clear, reading the second chapter of Hick while simultaneously holding in one's mind the image of Bill Clinton brandishing his would-be National Health Insurance Card before Congress in one of his early State of the Union speeches is an irresistible temptation. I'm extremely hesitant to get into politics and political discussions in my writing - that is, I want at all costs to avoid becoming the kind of author described in the Barthes quote above, which is one of the reasons I quoted it - because I find that too much of the political discourse among Americans simply disintegrates into shrill shouting matches between left wing moonbats and right wing wingnuts, and I'm not interested in that at all. But the larger point is something like what's expressed in the quote from Brontmann above. As I said, the second chapter of Portes' novel is excruciating. Again, a couple has a very sick newborn boy. The only hope of keeping him alive involves getting him to the hospital in Omaha - the closest place that has the necessary medical technology available - as quickly as possible, but they can't afford to do so and the child dies. The pitilessly exact characterization of the father (who will soon run away, abandoning his family (opening up another topical social issue of the times, that of the deadbeat dad) that Portes gives is as follows: "You see, it's one thing to pretend you're James Dean and pump gas in the summer and make the girls blush before heading back to your double-wide. It's one thing to pack mules in the fall and live in a log cabin and dip your hat down before riding off into the setting sun. But when not being able to scrape two dimes together makes it so your baby boy, born the color of the night sky, has to stay put in that glowing tin-cup incubator instead of up with the experts in Omaha, well, then, there's nothing so glamorous about that, now, is there?" ESSAY TO BE CONTINUED SOON |