After the Storm

Five years ago, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast and claimed about 1,800 lives. President Obama has astutely pointed out that the disaster was both natural (a storm, duh) and man-made (a combination of poor planning and even poorer engineering). The BBC--my usual news source, I know--has done a pleasant write up of this anniversary.

But it's important to remember that this isn't only a natural or a political disaster; it's a conflict that tears at human life, that generates a tempest of emotions and troubles, and it's this element that makes the remembrance worthwhile. Although we mourn those who are lost and the districts of New Orleans that suffered, we celebrate because, out of the driftwood and wreckage, an existence gets hammered together. But it's also an opportunity for us to delve into the soul of America and see exactly how this country relates to itself.

So how do we keep those sentiments relevant while performing this investigation? You guessed it--literature.

Unfortunately, the body of Hurricane Katrina fiction (and I hate that I'm actually posting this link) is meager, and admittedly, I've read almost none of it--perhaps because the Hurricane Katrina stories don't get the hype that the burgeoning genre of the 9/11 novel gets. 9/11 appears to have been the seminal event of the current generation--America brought to its knees and its hegemony threatened--but Hurricane Katrina actually offers a more poignant portal into American self-discoveries. Instead of just the crashing of the American dream, Hurricane Katrina provides an opportunity to explore how the gears of our society grate against one another and if it's possible to make this great machine move forward again on a personal as opposed to a nationalist level.

The worst of the Katrina novels would be like the worst of the 9/11 novels: focusing only on stasis and inability to cope. But this isn't the reality, as some novelists (and here I have to praise my mentor, Porochista Khakpour, and her novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects), have cleverly observed: Regardless of the extent of catastrophe, life continues, one step at a time. And as Porochista's novel shows us, tragedy--large scale or not--is always personal, and it's an opportunity to recast notions of identity. Disaster is a porthole for discovery.

There's another thing a Katrina novel could do: explore the race relations in American urban centers. Most of the Katrina stuff I've read (most notably, Katie Ford's poetry collection Colosseum, which I suggest you pick up) studies how life is going to pick up again afterward the crisis. The past has been destroyed, now we rebuild.

Though Ford's collection gets the whole bit about tragedy being personal (her poems are somewhat confessional in that they conjure images from her own experiences in New Orleans during Katrina) this rebuilding idea remains far too facile. It's practically preemptive nostalgia. Perhaps soon we'll get a Katrina narrative that's focusing on the spirit of the Katrina recovery--but also on the spirit of America and the souls of those people who have lived through the crisis.

Notes from a Reading

Originally, I expected to be spending most of this week in Albuquerque, where I was to be giving a talk on E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and presenting an ecocritical reading of the landscape used throughout the novel. But as I’m sure you’re aware (unless you’ve been snowed and frozen in a cave for the past few days), the entire eastern seaboard got canceled this week--including my flight out of Harrisburg.

So, I ended up being in Lewisburg for the week, which gave me the opportunity to hear Christine Schutt read from her novel All Souls yesterday evening. Schutt is the author of four books: the novels Florida and All Souls, and the short story collections Nightwork and A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer.

After an introduction from Porochista Khakpour at Bucknell Hall, Christine Schutt took to the podium and gave a few introductory remarks about All Souls. She noted that she wrote the novel while she had a fellowship in California and was 3,000 miles away from the sorts of New York parochial schools, where she has taught for many years and that inspired the characters and situations of the novel. Schutt said, “It figures: You go 3,000 miles to get away from a place and you can’t think of anything else.”

It was that time in California that gave Schutt the distance from the private, all-girls schools described in her novel, which thereby enabled her to write the book.

I’ve written about Schutt previously here on The Penguin in the Machine, and attending her reading last night reaffirms my opinions on her prose. Schutt’s style is at once minimalist and expansive, an exercise in creative atomic physics: Although her prose is sparse, spare, and powerfully compacted, the words press against each other and explode into images that are evocative, reeling, nuclear--the sensations of her prose leave readers emotionally charged, glowing and warm, for hours after reading Schutt’s prose or hearing her clear voice.

Schutt manages details expertly, positioning them to stand against each other and cast shadows and reflect glows, as depicted in All Souls when Carlotta goes to visit her friend Astra, suffering from a rare disease, in the hospital: “By the time Car got to the hospital, visiting hours were almost over, but Astra was awake, and when the girls saw each other, they cried. Astra was hooked to machinery and fenced off behind a castered table, so that Car stood aloof and cried….And what had she brought to show Astra? Old photos, the colors too bright; the beach, a hurtful white against the blue of everything else. Astra in a tented costume and Car in a bathing suit, and both of them laughing at Car’s father, who had taken pictures then.”

Schutt is a fantastic writer--a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist--and yet I hadn’t heard of her work until December 2009. If you haven’t read any of Schutt’s work, I recommend doing so; hers is a voice that shows that there is still experimentation, edginess, and beauty in American prose.

Identity Crisis

On 1 December, the trial of John Demjanjuk began in Germany. If it doesn’t sound familiar, it should--but I wouldn’t be surprised if this sounds like news, because most American news agencies that I frequently look at (NYTimes, LATimes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, CNN) have been relegating this to their international news pages, a few clicks away from plain sight. This is why I have the BBC as one of my start-up pages on Firefox; I can actually learn what the news is, as opposed to learning that yeah, we still don’t have an exit strategy for Afghanistan. That’s nothing new.

But then again, neither are trials for John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk has spent the better part of the last three decades embroiled in legal controversy. He first immigrated to the United States and obtained citizenship in 1952, at which point he got married and started the American dream life--work in a car factory in Cleveland, Ohio; have kids; et cetera. In 1977, he was first charged with war crimes, for being “Ivan the Terrible,” a notorious concentration camp guard responsible for the deaths of more than 27,000 Jews. The United States revoked his citizenship in 1981 and extradited him to Israel five years later, where he was charged and convicted for the murders--a ruling that Israel’s Supreme Court overturned for lack of evidence explicitly connecting Demjanjuk to “Ivan the Terrible.”

In 2002, however, problems arose again, with Demjanjuk once again losing his American citizenship when an American judge ruled that there was information linking Demjanjuk to “Ivan the Terrible,” most specifically a wartime ID that American prosecutors have used to place him as a guard at the Nazi death camps. Now, after being extradited and without any citizenship, 89-year-old John Demjanjuk is standing trial for the murders of nearly 30,000 people.

The greatest question amidst all of this is: Who is John Demjanjuk? Murderer? American laborer? Father? Husband? Racist prig? It’s a question that Philip Roth explored in his 1993 PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel Operation Shylock. In the novel, Roth--who has his own identity issues, as he’s being stalked and has had his identity stolen by another man whose name appears to be “Philip Roth” (the sort of blatant narcissism/self-ego-boosting typical when Roth makes himself a character in his books)--watches the trial of Demjanjuk in Israel during a chapter entitled “Forgery, Paranoia, Disinformation, Lies.” He listens to an English translation of the proceedings through a headset. Lots of mirroring ensues--Roth mulls over the legal history of the Demjanjuk proceedings, of his own doppelganger (the reason for his stay in Israel in the first place), and also the position of John Demjanjuk, Jr. watching Demjanjuk, Sr. being tried.

Roth writes, “Admittedly, the story of my double was difficult to accept at face value. The story of anyone’s double would be” before later commenting “Not everybody is crazy. Resolute is not crazy. Deluded is not crazy. To be thwarted, vengeful, terrified, treacherous--this is not to be crazy.” In this line of questioning, Roth wants us to consider two things: Who is Philip Roth? (Another version of this first question—Who am I?) And who is John Demjanjuk? What terrifies Roth in Operation Shylock is precisely this sense of doubling--that maybe out there, somewhere, there’s an identical stranger (who may or may not be me) for whom I’ll have to take the fall.

Read more about the Demjanjuk trial at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8388334.stm

Roth, Philip. Operation Shylock. Paperback. Vintage-Random House. 398 pp., $14.00.

Cultural Literacy

I spent Saturday afternoon in a coffeehouse, where I went back and forth between bloodying one of my current manuscripts and regaining some sanity by reading a real [read as, published and without my red pencil marks all over its pages] novel. Folks were coming in for a coffee or brunch after hitting the shops on Market Street for some holiday purchases. Seldom are there better opportunities for writers—who, if you haven’t figured this out yet, are just naughty little voyeurs with a penchant for making their eavesdropping sound pretty—to listen to the maddening crowds and pick up a few bits of gossip, a few new turns of phrase, or a good character concept.

My tea had gone tepid and lukewarm when a group of girls wearing leggings and sweater dresses sat at the table cattycorner to mine, effectively blocking me in my seat for the next fortyish minutes. Teen Girl Squad chatted in a register that only dogs could hear, but—after a few minutes of their squabbling—I finally deciphered a few words. One of the girls said, “I just don’t read books.” Her friends asked her why, and she gave a fantastic [I’m using that adjective facetiously] reply: “I dunno, I mean, there are just so many words in there. Why do we even have words?”

There’s a power in words, a power in narrative, and I should have corrected Cheerleader, should have advised her to protect her ability to read and to process words, thoughts, feelings. The novel I happened to be reading between bits of editing was Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, which is the story of the handmaid Offred, basically a woman meant only for breeding purposes in Atwood’s futuristic, über-religious dystopia. Early on in the novel, the reader joins Offred and her companion Ofglen on a shopping trip, where we discover that store signs have only images—and not words. Atwood writes, “[T]hey decided that even the names of shops were too much temptation for us. Now places are known by their signs alone.”

Names show ownership, and words provide power in a hierarchical system. These handmaids have names attaching them to their Commanders, the men for whom they work. Offred, then, is figuratively “of Fred,” and as she narrates the novel she is careful to never reveal her actual name to her listener. In this dystopia, where women are enslaved and erased, where reading has become dangerous for its ability to empower women, keeping her name hidden is her final show of power.

As the minutes passed, Teen Girl Squad moved from books to other conversations, largely boys and television shows, though with a few mentions of the People magazine’s “Sexiest Man of the Year” featuring Johnny Depp. (Well, I guess I’ll have my chance next year, right?) But what they didn’t realize is that all of this is closely tied to their ability to read. All of this talk, girls? That’s right. It’s words. It’s your culture, so learn how to read it, and make sure nobody stops you.

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Paperback. Anchor-Random House. 311 p., $14.95.