How a novel should be?

Review: How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

This book is definitely not going to be to everyone's taste, but then Sheila Heti would be the first person to acknowledge that. For, as Heti says on page one, "you can admire anyone for being themselves", and that is really what this book is about; although more importantly it is the way that this book is concerned with this topic that makes it so monumental and has resulted in it receiving so much praise (although apparently not on Amazon).

"How Should a Person Be?" is not concerned with living up to traditional expectations of what a novel should be, it is concerned only with saying what it wants to say, and saying it in the best way the author can find to say it. It is a memoir-cum-novel-cum play about a female writer (also called Sheila) trying to write a play and failing, trying to hold together a friendship and partially failing, and trying to understand how a person should be, and finally understanding it (sort of) through her failings. By stripping away many of the pretences of traditional fiction, Heti finds a way of drawing the reader into her world, taking the reader along with her, through her failings and her despair and her sufferings and out the other side. And it is this highly personal, self-flagellating method of story-telling that helps to get across the book's message: "A life without failure, suffering or doubt [is] empty of those things that make a human life meaningful." A person should be someone who is happy to fail, who is prepared to keep on failing, to face up to their failings (as Heti is doing with this book, which is not the play she set out to write), and to learn from their failings; rather than someone who keeps running away from their failings in the hope of finding a place where they never fail, suffer or doubt themselves, because that place doesn’t exist.

The book is about more than this, although this is its key message. But as I said above, a lot of what the book is about is connected to the way the book is constructed, in fragmentary chunks, in acts like a play (Sheila's failure to write a play is her success; because she has a five act book here, so isn't that a play, even if it isn't the kind of play she set out to write, or the kind of thing normally called 'a play'?), with events and its protagonist sprawling itinerantly across North America in the same way as Sheila's mind sprawls itinerantly across the plains of life.

A traditional novel shows us a rounded image of a "traditional" person (a 19th century image of a person, living a sort of "monotrack" life), embedded in one place, living an apparently linear life. Heti understands that real people and real life are not like that anymore. With the internet, with the ease of moving around from place to place, with our atomised society, few of us really live lives that fan out into a kind of linear narrative. Rather we live, as David Shields puts it in his book "How Literature Saved My Life", a sort of collage life, taking all these myriad things that happen to us and trying to fit them together in the best way that we can.

If "How Should a Person Be?" doesn't sound like the kind of book for you, that's ok. And if it sounds like the kind of thing you might hate, that is perhaps even better. For as Heti says towards the end of this book: "The only way to go somewhere new is to do the thing I most fear." So go on, give this book a try. It might scare you, and you might despise it, but it is guaranteed to take you somewhere new.

The picture for this review, which may appear to make little sense, is a reference to the final chapter of the book

Humankind's happy misery: Review (The Silence of Animals, by John Gray)

This book develops the ideas from John Gray's 2002 book Straw Dogs, although there is no need to have read the earlier book in order to understand or appreciate this book.

In Straw Dogs, Gray set out the notion that human beings differ only from other animals in that they convince themselves that they are superior beings destined to conquer the earth and rule over all other life forms. In The Silence of Animals, he delves behind this conviction, looking at the myth of human progress that supports our false hopes for ourselves - the hope of reaching some kind of utopian salvation. A key thread in the book is the religious nature of all movements and philosophies, with humanists coming in for a particularly heavy going over - "humanists believe that humanity improves along with the growth of knowledge, but the belief that the increase of knowledge goes with advances in civilization is an act of faith" - and atheists being asked to ask a much bigger question of themselves than those they ask of belivers: if God does not exist, why do so many people feel a need to have a faith in one? It is this idea of faith that Gray is really interested in, and he brands humanism and atheism as "secular faiths" that take humankind as their God, with the myths of progress as their testament.

The idea that we need a faith to soothe us through the thorny discomforts of life is nothing new - Marx said in 1843 that religion is the opium of the people - but what elevates this book to another plane is that Gray dissects why human beings are so reliant on myths in order to give their lives meaning - effectively reaching a conclusion that "a life without myths is itself the stuff of myth" - and why we feel the need to give our lives meaning at all. He quotes a plethora of poets, memoirists and thinkers along the way (most commonly Wallace Stevens, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche - although strangely Albert Camus does not get a mention, despite his The Myth of Sisyphus treading ground very close to that which Gray passes over here), as he pushes toward the idea that people "find meaning in the suffering that the struggle for happiness brings", that we are "attached to nothing so much as this state of happy misery". 

From this idea he picks up Freud, asking why we need to pursue an idea of happiness - fundamentally reaching the conclusion that we do so in order to distract ourselves from our lives ("from the internal monologue that is the dubious privilege of human self-awareness") - and then asking why we cannot simply be happy to exist and experience life.

The book then moves into its final part, where Gray joins hands with Samuel Beckett to question the use of language (how it gets in the way of our simply existing and experiencing life) and J.A. Baker, whose book The Peregrine saw him attempt to understand the silent existence of a peregrine falcon. While animals appear content simply to exist, the human's problem is the constant quest to give meaning to existence - a meaning universally underpinned by the myth of progress.

Gray asks us to essentially take a step back from existence, to stop interfering with the world, to stop building false constructs within it and our minds, to "look with eyes that are not covered with a film of thought". It is thought, the one thing we think we have that makes us superior to animals, that is in fact our undoing - we think ourselves to death, or at least out of life.

Gray comes close to reaching the same conclusion in this book ("Contemplation can be understood as an activity that aims not to change the world or to understand it, but simply to let it be") as he did in Straw Dogs ("Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?"), but he adds a final kicker in this book: "There is no redemption from being human. But no redemption is needed."

In the context of the book, this rings an optimistic note - that humans can reach this point of not feeling the need for redemption - but the more realistic conclusion seems to be reached 10 pages before the end: “Man, much more than baboon or wolf, is an animal formed for conflict; his life seems meaningless to him without it.” After all, we attached to nothing so much as this state of happy misery.

Review: The Middlesteins, by Jami Attenberg

As Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina: "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".

In Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins, every member of the eponymous unhappy family is unhappy in his or her own way. The book revolves around Edie, the chronically obese grandmother who simply can't stop eating. Orbiting around her are Richard, her ex-husband hunting down new love in his 60s, her son Benny, who hides from the world through his nightly spliff (much as his mother finds solace in food), her daughter-in-law Rachelle, whose life is controlled by the need to appear the perfect Jewish mother and to stay as slim as possible, and her daughter Robin, drifting between places, drifting between childhood and adulthood, unsure of who she is and where she belongs.

The book declares towards its end that life is "full of layers and nuances, coloured all shades of gray", but unfortunately for this novel those shades of gray weren't quite nuanced enough. While there is some grayness about Edie - her family might want her to lose weight, but she doesn't seem particularly interested in doing so, and shouldn't she be left free to eat herself into the grave if she wishes? - the rest of the characters and plot feel very one-dimensional. Rachelle is almost a parody of the good Jewish wife, and even Richard (probably the second main character) doesn't feel like he has much depth to him, other than half a chapter on his arrival from Ukraine and establishment of his pharmacy store (seemingly pulled from the pages of a book - The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Theethnic history of Chicago) - read for research and mentioned in the acknowledgements).

I enjoyed reading The Middlesteins, although I felt that I came away from it with very little, other than the "morals" that family is the most important thing in life, at the centre of everything, a source of sometimes unlikely bonds between two individuals with little else in common; and that people find solace from life in all sorts of things - food, drink, drugs, organising b'nai mitzvahs - and just because one person's way of dealing with life is more socially acceptable than another's, it doesn't make them a better person.

The book is a very easy and very quick read, which might make it nice to flick thorough on a commute, but the reader's eyes glide across the words in the same way that the author glides across the surface of a lot of big issues - at no point does she let you fall into the gaps between the words and the characters' actions and find the difficult meanings, the nuanced grays, hidden in between.