Coffee and Irony

Cross-posted from my lit blog.

Finished Preeta Samarasan’s debut novel Evening is the Whole Day, and it was wonderful. After a shaky, meandering beginning, the novel became a delightful, riveting, well-crafted effort from a Malaysian writer who knows how to make a good story out of a simple family tale. The novel hums. It’s not quite brilliant, but very close, and for once in modern-day fiction, it tells a story.  After finishing it, I was comparing the deep sense of satisfaction I get from it with the ugly, adrift feeling I get from reading certain of Colm Toibin’s books, or from reading John Banville’s Booker-prize winning The Sea, which always feels to me like a self-indulgent, almost voyeuristic glance into the inner life of an unappetizing character. I am beginning to wonder if the reason that I find so much of modern western literature unappealing is because it is too inward-turning, too focused on the individual, one individual in particular and his/her inner psychological workings, too consumed with seeing the world through only one character’s eyes. I’ve always liked books which had a single strong protagonist which we can identify with and experience everything with – Jane Eyre springs to mind – but the difference is that with those books, I actually liked and respected the protagonist, so it was a delight to walk with them and perceive the world through their filtered experiences, emotions, and thoughts. It’s very rare for me to find a protagonist of any sort in modern western literature with whom I can truly identify, much less enjoy. It seems to me that modern writers have rebounded too much against the traditional story form of having clearly “good” protagonists, with the result that their protagonists are now not just judiciously or humanly flawed, but actually offputting – to the extent that reading their thoughts and minds is like an exercise in a particularly ugly form of mental voyeurism. It is alright to have flawed heroes/heroines, even anti-heroes, etc. But the world seen through their eyes, and only their eyes, becomes a particularly trivial, sordid, depressing thing, and worse, the novel as a whole becomes a claustrophobic and self-obsessive (often cyclical) experience. Which leads to me often really not caring about the protagonist, and when that all-important element fails, I have very little real story or plot to carry me through or fall back on, because what novels like these are most interested in is a sort of winding, spirally approach to the protagonist’s life and inner life, with the former much subordinated to the latter, and so what I get instead of a story is a psychological study of a single, often uninteresting or unappealing character.

But I digress. This is why I found Samarasan’s novel so appealing, and such a refreshing change – her novel is not focused on a single character, but covers each of the members of the Rajasekharan family in turn, though the heart and soul of the story is six-year old Aasha, and even more importantly her novel has an actual plot. It is not that she doesn’t rely on the elliptical narration, the jumping back-and-forth in time so popular among modern novelists, because she does, but rather that she uses a sure hand with these devices, and that the structures don’t overwhelm and seldom distract from the story itself, which is vibrant and strong enough to overcome all novelistic machinations.

… continue reading this entry.