Although I've been preoccupied with my fascination with Aldous Huxley, I've also been keeping up with my reading for my Men's Book Club. The last two selections have been Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) and George Saunders's, Tenth of December: Stories (2013). Two more different works of fiction can hardly be imagined, but I found both entertaining and well crafted, although along very different narrative lines.
Atonement was not a book I expected to like, and I ended with some unresolved feelings of disappointment, but to reveal the sources would be to spoil the book, so I won't go into all of them here. The main problem for me, and some of my book club friends, was that the book leaves much of the story unresolved, and depending as it does on the central concern with point of view, the matter of the narrator's reliability is crucial. Nevertheless, the book raises many interesting questions, and our discussion was one of the best we've ever had, certainly in the time I've been attending, but others with longer experience of the group agreed. Among our most interesting debates was that over the very possibility of writing a book or telling a story being any sort of genuine act of atonement, or whether that was even an issue in this case. I recall seeing the movie some time after it came out 2007, and I thought that would be enough for me, but now that I've finally read the book, it has been too long for me to remember how faithful the movie actually was. In any case, it's an interesting idea: an adolescent girl's willful misunderstanding destroys two lives and leads to all sorts of complications. Is there some way for her to atone for that, especially after so many years?
George Saunders's Tenth of December: Stories is, as I said, completely different. His stories are often very brief, and his writing is frequently terse and unadorned almost beyond any point of recognizable literary quality. But these assaults on style and narrative grow naturally out of the identities of his well imagined characters, who are often very ordinary or limited people, constrained by their circumstances or situations in life, expressing themselves as directly and honestly as they know how. This was my first encounter with Saunders, a well established master of short narrative, so I wasn't prepared for the power of his writing. To say it grows on you seems about right. Once I surrendered to his particular view of the world, which isn't as it happens all that far from my own, I began to see the artistry in his manipulation of language to give life to his characters and their surroundings. Some of the stories veer off into fantasy or science fiction, but they are never very far from the homely concerns of what I would call modern humans. Many of his characters seem challenged, financially or intellectually, but they all have compelling stories, and Saunders gets at them in a way that makes you care about their dreams and anxieties and the outcomes of their struggles with life.
These were great diversions for me, but my study of Huxley continues. At the moment I'm about midway through Time Must Have a Stop (1944), which feels a bit like a return to his earlier style such as Those Barren Leaves (1925), although that may be because both make use of an Italian setting. More on Huxley later. When I've finished this one I will have read or re-read all of his novels, and my impressions have grown more positive as I've gone along. I'm almost sad to be coming to an end.
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