American Pastoral

By Philip Roth

My first Roth.

When Zuckerman (Roth’s alter id in a number of his books) goes to a high school re-union, he remembers the Swede, Seymour Levov, a local hero among the Jews of Newark. The Swede is big, blonde and handsome, is a star basketball, football and baseball player…and in the wake of the World War, epitomizes ‘fitting into Americana’ to the Jewish neighbourhood. His father is of a generation of Jewish men, tough, slum-born “for whom there is a right way and a wrong way, and nothing in between…”, “limited men with limitless energy…who keep going despite everything.” His father’s indomitable will drives the Swede to join the family glove making business, foregoing his athletic abilities. He marries a Catholic beauty queen, has a beautiful daughter when Zuckerman meets him decades later, he cannot see any disruption or flaws in the perfectly lucky, happy American life as envisioned by the World War generation. But Zuckerman is wrong.

The seemingly ordinary life has a shadow – and what a shadow! At his high school re-union he meets The Swede’s brother Jerry, a successful surgeon who somewhere along the way gets to be the exact opposite of the Swede – 3 divorces and an acerbic temperament. It is there that he learns of the Swede’s death and it is Jerry who gives him a glimpse into the calamity that blights the Swede’s life.

With just that glimpse, Zuckerman the writer, fashions an American tragedy. The reader does not know how the story really ends for the Swede, but Zuckerman’s vision is of a crumbling of the idyll. When Merry, the 16 year old stuttering sullen daughter of the Swede and the beauty queen indulges in a crazy act of political vendetta that kills a man and makes her a hunted terrorist, Levov’s life comes crashing down. And when he sees her years later renouncing his world, everything his beautiful dream of a world stood for, to turn into a cant-spouting Jain (!!!), he can feel himself coming apart.

It is this coming apart that Zuckerman details out ever so slowly, almost deliciously. The tone of the language swings from a clinical cynicism to passionate rage to a romanticizing of the idyllic; and all along it holds your attention, even when it is not telling a story, when it is just describing – the inhumanity of a leather tannery, the sheer beauty of the Old Rimrock hamlet, the vacuous-ness of the Miss America pageant.

American Pastoral is best described in the 3 section headings of the book – Paradise Remembered, The Fall, Paradise Lost. It reminds me of a Sam Mendes movie – beautiful lovely Americana coming crumbling down, underlying “the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things.” The Jewish angle was an interesting one for me – this identity has obviously been an important one in post World War America.

All in all, left me hungry for more Roth.

100 words or so

I used to think Colleen Khan in the Pond’s talc ad was me in some conceptual sense. And that I was Imran Khan’s soul mate. That dark could never truly be beautiful. I used to believe I could never flunk an exam. That sex before and outside marriage wasn’t something good girls did. I knew for sure that communists were noble. That there was no way a woman could fall in love with someone younger than her or someone not at least 6 inches taller. I used to think 40 was very old. It’s funny what changes and what remains the same.

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You were an old tired man, the kindest man I have ever known. I was this bored young girl in a never-ending summer. My refuge was your tiny little room lined with old books and Hollywood magazines where I first encountered Hilton’s Shangri La and Carole Lombard and Clark Gable and Bette Davis and Spencer Tracy. And there was your exquisite classical music on the veena and those songs you sang to put my young cousins to sleep. You had so much to offer and I was always running away. A stupid girl too dimwitted to recognize a treasure in the backyard.

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I see them play in the weak sunshine – the white, blonde couple with their 3 white, blonde kids in a simple game of frisbee during a short break between ferries. The blue of the sky complements the blue of the ocean that complements the bright blue of the woman’s t-shirt. It is a perfect scene, the tall, fit, healthy bodies moving with an effortless grace, the bright yellow hair glossy and shining in the sunlight. For that short time, there is nothing discordant, nothing at variance with the universe. God’s in his heaven and all’s well with a perfect world.

Quick Bites

Frost/ Nixon:

A riveting watch. The Watergate affair and Richard Nixon obviously have a hold on public imagination more than 30 years after the actual event. 28 hours of what must have been in reality quite a boring interview has been cut down into 2 hours of suspenseful grilling. Frost is the light-weight British talk show host who gets to interrogate Nixon, 3 years after he resigned from the post of American President. Frost is seeking to make his reputation in American television and Nixon is looking for some form of redemption in the public eye (and a whole load of money in the bargain). It is a verbal duel between a playboy charmer and a dour stonewalling ex-president. Frost, and it seems the whole of America, is looking for some admission of guilt from a man who escaped impeachment by resigning. Nixon is bent on not caving in. The first few parts of the interview go Nixon’s way – Frost comes across as the insubstantial TV personality, unable to get through to a seasoned politician who looks like he is exonerating himself in the public eye. The turning point is a drunken call at night from the President before the final session. It gives Frost the impetus to do some more digging and get to Nixon at the last port, eliciting from him some form of admission of guilt, not too significant an admission, but certainly more than anything he had given before or since. It is an excellent script, there is a superb sense of drama and timing and great acting. Michael Sheen (he played Blair in The Queen) as Frost and Frank Langella as Nixon are both excellent. There are apparently historical inaccuracies (the phone call apparently did not happen and the last interview was carefully scripted by Nixon’s team, says his biographer), but as a piece of cinema, I found it enthralling.

Revolutionary Road:

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio re-unite after Titanic in a Sam Mendes movie about angst in suburban America. Immortal lovers in their first film together, Kate and Leo now encounter a marriage, kids and an everyday life that saps illusions, dreams and even love. Sam Mendes revisits his American Beauty milieu, this time in ‘50s America.

Frank and April Wheeler meet in a bar, fall in love, get married, have kids and move to a nice suburban house on Revolutionary Road. April had dreams of becoming an actress, dreams that are pretty much thrown out of the window after a disastrous local theatre performance. Frank works at a job he does not like very much at Knox Business Machines. The Wheelers know this life is not what they want, a mundane existence where a house in the suburbs, a car and kids is the American dream. They have not bought into it. They decide to get out of the rut by moving to Paris, where April would work to support Frank as he discovers what it is he wants to do. It is to be their brave move, the move that makes them different from everyone else, that establishes their specialness. But of course it is not to be. As they see their lives descend into the routine of thwarted ambitions, adultery and a third kid on the way, they know there is going to be no Paris, no out.

The slow disintegration of their marriage and their lives and their inability to retain what is inherently special about them is heart breaking. The last breakfast scene where April serves Frank with a smile that has all her shattered dreams behind it, takes something out of you. This film is as emotionally wrenching as American Beauty was. I definitely need to read Yates’ book now.

On a related topic, here is David Foster Wallace’s inspiring commencement speech at Kenyon College.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html

He talks about finding meaning in mundane existences (the lot of most of us). It is a different matter of course, that Wallace later killed himself.

Stranger to History

Aatish Taseer

Taseer is the son of Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and a Pakistani businessman-cum-politician Salman Taseer. He grows up in Delhi with his Sikh mother and her family after his father abandons her mother and his infant self in London, studies in a boarding school down south, goes to college in America and works as a reporter in London with Time, before embarking on a quite ambitious book at the age of 27.

Stranger to History is an account of Taseer’s travels through the Islamic world in a quest to dig deeper into his Muslim heritage. This journey is the consequence of a harsh critical letter from his father accusing him of betraying his Islamic legacy when he writes an article about radical Islam in Britain. The book is a record of his impressions as an outsider (with an insider’s name and background – Islam considers him Muslim because his father is) of a world that is quite the ‘other’ for the rest of us. Taseer fuses this record of a journey with glimpses into his personal story – his on-off relationship with his father and his Pakistani family, growing up in a Sikh family with an absent Muslim father. The result is a book tasting of searing and brave honesty.

Taseer’s first stop in the book is Turkey. Having just finished Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul, Taseer’s Turkey seems familiar. It is a unique country in the Islamic world – a Muslim country whose founding hero bans the veil and where today Muslims live ‘in a Muslim country with a sense of persecution’, where ‘the link to the great Islamic past and the cultural threads to the larger Muslim are proscribed and broken’, where its ‘secularism was dogmatic, almost like a separate religion.’ He meets radical Muslims here, like Abdullah, who are hoping to revive the glorious Islamic past (the Caliphate which Ataturk destroyed) in a country that is so desperately trying for acceptance in the liberal western world. In a way, Turkey is the reverse of the rest of the Islamic world Taseer visits – elsewhere, the glorious Islamic past is the only history remaining.

Syria, under the closed, autocratic regime of Assad provides Taseer a look at a society where a mosque is the only place for people to congregate and discuss politics. He describes the foreigners flocking to Abu Nour, the Islamic university and mosque drawing people from all over the world, from Norway to Mali to Indonesia. Here, he masquerades as a Pakistani and learns how to pray. When the Danish embassy is attacked following the publication of the cartoons depicting the Prophet, Taseer learns how it feels to be in the midst of a crowd ready to kill and be killed for a cartoon published in a faraway country. He writes “The offensive cartoons could not have been understood Islamically. The democratic rights and interlocking institutions that protected them were outside the faith’s compass… the cartoons came from places that considered it an achievement for religion to be able to take a joke.”

And as Taseer travels through Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan, it is this point he keeps discovering. A literal Islam could not explain a modern day world – of democracy, of religion as personal and not political, of human rights and gender equality. And a cultural Islam (a more local, hybridized form, taking into account variations of culture) that could be a bridge is more and more in retreat; as Islam becomes more global, more homogenous. Yet he finds traces of this in the unlikeliest of places – in Iran, where Khomeini’s revolution wiped out a glorious pre-Islamic history and where today, he finds people resurrecting that awareness, voicing that sense of loss. Iran is a bit of a revelation – he meets a Hare Rama Hare Krishna follower, women who defy the cultural edicts, a rising undercurrent of rebellion. The Islamists are no longer the revolutionaries overthrowing a corrupt Shah; instead they are the establishment. But he is forced to leave Iran in a hurry, hounded out in his attempts to get below the surface of dissent.

Pakistan is almost a homecoming for Taseer, as he makes his way to his father and his current family. He discovers the family and a new country, yet neither his father nor his new country can make him feel as if he belonged. He finds a country whose basis is more the rejection of India than the assertion of Pakistan. The absence of a middle class was really the difference between the two countries, Taseer comments. And here again, he sees a rejection of a cultural Islam that could have bound the two nations and an assertion of a bare-bones Islamic tradition. That really then is Taseer’s discovery in all his travels. That cultural Islam is giving way to a narrower, literal religion, out of sync with the rest of the world. That this narrowing also comes with a miraculous “transfiguration of one’s culture and history, by either a profession of faith, or an inherited profession of faith.” And “what would it take to believe in a history like that?” he asks. It is clear what Taseer’s views are. Of his own roots, he says “..it meant the possibility of a different education, of embracing the three-tier history of India whole, perhaps an intellectual troika of Sanskrit, Urdu and English. These mismatches were the lot of people with garbled histories, but I preferred them to violent purities. The world is richer in its hybrids.”

The unsatisfactory parts of the book are his excursions into his personal story – that of trying to find an absent father and not connecting with him when he does. At these points, you want to tell him to move on, to continue his observations of the world around him and discard the autobiography. The writing is average. It is what Taseer has to say rather than how he says it that makes this book a really fascinating read.

If I Knew Then What I Know Now

A letter to my teenaged self

• I know you are currently facing one of the biggest crises of your life. Your father is in intensive care – and you don’t know what will happen. You travel for the first time alone on public transport; you are scared and you feel terribly alone. But you never think your father will go away forever. Maybe because you are foolish and don’t think too much. Or maybe because you are at heart a happy, positive soul. Looking back, I prefer to think it’s the latter. And my advice to you then (and to me, today) is…hold on to that optimism. Your father will be well… and there will be other crises you will weather together.
• Not too much will change in the intrinsic you. It’s a sad thing and a good thing.
• Deep down, you are and will be timid. Which means you will miss opportunities, and greatness will evade you. You let the currents carry you; never fighting them, never adding your force to them. You take the easy way out most times. If there is one thing you should try and change, it is this.
• Your love of books will last. Your biggest regret will be that you have not taken this love and made something more of it.
• Put pen to paper. Continue writing that diary. Buy more notebooks and fill it with the nonsense of youth. I cannot tell you what precious raw material that can be in the future.
• You will be a dreamer for life. A lot of those dreams will come true. Even if they don’t, they will provide you some very pleasurable moments.
• But once in a while, get out of that day dreaming mind of yours and look around. Be curious. Take notice. Take a different route to the hospital. Be a little late getting back home because you stopped to talk to a stranger. When your mother tells you to smile at your neighbours, this is what she means.
• You have a deep core of selfishness. I cannot see it changing – you will continue to take the people closest to you for granted. Try not to.
• You will know love. And passion. But you can put a little more effort in chasing it – you never know, it could make your life just a bit more interesting.
• You will never be thinner that you are now.
• Friends will disappear. It will take a long time for you to re-discover them. And then you would have lost lifetimes of sharing. So take down those phone numbers and addresses.
• Never do anything out of spite. Or embarrassment. You have already lost one school because of it. Don’t lose more important things.
• You don’t know what you truly want to do in life. But you have a vague idea. 23 years down the line, the idea still will remain vague. So dig deeper. Your 40 year old self will thank you if are able to crystallize it better.
You are beautiful. You are loved. You are lucky. Today is not the best day of your life. There will be better. A few will be worse. But you will never be 17 again. So set out to do something today that you will remember for the rest of your life.

My response to Ammani's blog post about Stephen Fry's letter to himself.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

By Paul Theroux

This book has been a good introduction for me to Theroux’s travel writing. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is about Theroux’s journey to the East, as far as Japan, from London. It is one he has been on 33 years before, and the book that came out of that particular journey was The Great Railway Bazaar, Theroux’s first international best seller. He reprises it as an older man, a happier man, traveling like a ghost, seeing places he had seen before with new and different eyes (“It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay”). The one big change is the way he gets to Asia from Europe – he cannot get a visa this time to Iran (the last time he traveled, the Shah was in power in Iran) and Afghanistan is for all purposes closed to travel, so he gets to Delhi through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. He travels alone, by train mostly, eschews luxury for the common class and lets himself stop and stare when he feels like it. It is a fascinating travelogue peppered with often harsh judgements on entire countries and peoples, heart-warming anecdotes about chance encounters, meetings with famous literary figures in the countries he travels through (Orhan Pamuk in Turkey, Murakami and Pico Iyer in Japan, Arthur C Clarke in Sri Lanka) and references to other writers and their travels (Greene, Orwell, Conrad, Woolfe, Twain – none of whom has ever gone back to the same places again, according to Theroux). All along, there is a parallel earlier journey as reference point; and because I have not read The Great Railway Bazaar, some of the references are lost to me.

One of the more quotable chapters is the first one – where Theroux dissects what he likes about travel (“Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel’s slow tempo”) and what he dislikes about travel books (“Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous…little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics…”). Well, he himself does jump to a hell of a lot of conclusions, is infuriatingly self-indulgent at times, can be intermittently curmudgeonly; yet there is little dullness, a lot of erudition (his references to literary journeys past are quite awe-inspiring) and he does manage to provoke reaction.

I found the pieces on Turkey (he goes into Istanbul expecting a shabby Asiatic city and instead finds “a grand and re-imagined city of laughing children and beautiful women and swaggering men which had been ignored by Europe and sneered at by Islamic republics”), Vietnam (the war might have been forgiven, but there is little forgetting for a guilt-induced American here) and Central Asia were the most fascinating for me – there are many interesting stories here, throwing light on otherwise dark places.

India disgusts him at some level – its crowds, the anarchy, the free-for-all attitude, the “unfeedable, unhousable, uncontainable 1.3 billion people”. “The Indian miracle” to him is a bad joke – fed on people working for a dollar a day – and there is little that has changed in 33 years in real material terms. The biggest change to him is in the attitude – in the new found confidence of a resurgent middle class that talks progress and praises India’s economy. There are incidents that will happen to gullible white men – paying a bribe for a railway ticket (get on the Indian Railways website I want to tell this Luddite; and get to know what a world-class web ticketing system can do for you!), experiencing a buzz while facing royalty (be it the Rajputs in Jodhpur or Prince Charles on a visit). All in all, the sense one got in his last book set in India ‘The Elephanta Suite’ is the same sense a reader gets here – of a man unable to deal with the chaos and deception that a vast multitudinous country like India can dish out to a visitor.

Sri Lanka is idyllic, Burma and Cambodia are tragedies couched in beauty, Thailand is sweet, nice, orderly, filled with pretty willing women, is proud of their king and the fact that they have never been colonized (the fact that the kingdom was long a protectorate holds no significance). Singapore has a special viciousness reserved for it – “No one was fat. No one was poor. No one was badly dressed. But many Singaporeans had…the half-devil, half-child look of having been infantilized and overprotected by their unstoppably manipulative government” and “Singaporeans are encouraged to spy on each other; rats are rewarded”. Lee Kwan Yew, the benign autocrat is articulate but incoherent, is meddlesome and fiddles with people’s lives, is a cold and single-minded control freak and Singapore’s citizens take after him. China is dismissed in a few nasty lines – “Ugly and soulless, China represented the horror of answered prayers, a peasant’s greedy dream of development”. Well, one can only be glad Theroux’s countrymen are less dismissive of this giant. Japanese society confuses him – it is alienating, conformist, “Manga and the graphic novel seemed to represent a dumb, defiant anti-intellectualism”, there is something perverse about the Japanese obsession with school girls and the whole of Japanese culture is ‘sculpted and controlled’.

Theroux’s last leg on the trans-Siberian Express is the culmination of all that is good in his book. In a coming together of literature and travel, he takes us on a journey redolent with Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov. And when he concludes his Russian leg by saying that 33 years later, Russia was essentially the same – “a pretentious empire with a cruel government that was helpless without secret police”, one can hardly disagree.

There are many parts of the book that get your back up – especially when he describes places you know intimately, India and Singapore and Sri Lanka and Thailand. At times he comes across as a Westerner sneering at Eastern progress, almost as if he misses the idyllic village that the East once was, almost as if he is romanticizing poverty. Theroux is provocative, confrontational and many a time offensive. But he is hardly ever uninteresting. And even at places where you most disagree with him, you have to admit that there could be a kernel of truth in his point of view.