Phillip Roth
The Humbling
Jonathan Cape, 2009
160 Pages
£12.99
ISBN 978-0224087933

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The premise of Philip Roth’s novel, so we discover in its opening pages, is the stuff of “universal nightmare”.

Once ranked amongst the best classical actors in America, Simon Axler, anti-hero of The Humbling, finds himself suddenly and inexplicably stripped of his talent. He is left exposed under the cruel glare of theatre lights and spectators, unable to inhabit the role of Shakespeare’s Macbeth without appearing ludicrous, haunted by the all-too prophetic negation of Prospero’s famous words: “Our revels now are ended. These our actors,/ As I foretold you, were all spirits and/ Are melted into air, into thin air”. Where does the actor go, who does he become, when he hasn’t a role to perform? Axler’s answer: nowhere and no-one—“I can’t act onstage and I can’t find a plot for myself to live offstage”. Instead, he slowly begins to disappear.

The latest of Roth’s recent explorations into human vulnerability, desire, and mortality, The Humbling discloses Axler’s fate—and man’s struggle against existential vacuity—with deft, agonizing clarity. Roth takes an uncommon approach to this modern theme, shrewdly disinterring the creative potential within even the darkest, most destructive of negations.

This excavation unfolds through the tension between Roth’s taut, muscular, urgent prose and his convoluted syntax. As Axler’s thoughts turn to suicide, he realises that even his depression feels like a bad case of ham-acting. Reality thins and substance—particularly the substance of self—is replaced by meaningless metatheatrics; Axler is “a man who wanted to live playing a man who wanted to die.” At such instances of self-cancellation, Roth’s prose disappears into its own expression. Negative, double negative, and even triple negative constructions emerge, removing matter from both Axler’s world and from the text itself. Consider the lines: “…nothing made him happier than making her look like she’d never looked before. And in time nothing seemed to make her happier.” The negation reduces and thins the emotion even as it expresses it.

This is not, however, to say that Roth’s novel is in any way lightweight. On the contrary, this “thinning” process works to dramatise the central crisis of modern subjectivity. In a 1984 interview with Hermione Lee, Roth explained: “all my heroes are in a state of vivid transformation or radical displacement. They are caught in the art, the act, of discovering ‘I am not what I am—I am, if anything, what I am not’”. Roth’s newest protagonist is particularly sensitive to the differences between the “am” and the “am not”. Having once made his living pretending to be the “am not”, Axler can neither return to the “am” nor reclaim the theatrical security—the comforting illusion—of the “am not”.

This crisis explains the solace Axler finds in Pegeen, the middle-aged lesbian with whom he conducts a controversial affair. It also explains why such solace is ultimately temporary and self-destructive. Pegeen functions as the most significant “double negative” of the work. In Axler’s attempts to transform a her into that which she is not—a straight woman with a keen sense of style—she becomes a sort of biological and sociological nought. Each new piece of clothing, feminine accessory, and cosmetic product that Axler provides works to emaciate, rather than embellish his lover’s existence. Pegeen, in turn, compounds this negation by channelling her repressed homosexual fantasies and desires into the imaginary erotic figure Lara, who “accompanies” Pegeen and Axler in all their sexual encounters: “everyone felt emboldened by Lara because there was no Lara there and so no consequences”, Axler explains. In his brief period of erotic and existential rejuvenation, then, the out-of-work actor is still a performer making-believe, a “nobody doing (in all senses of the word) nothing.”

These metatheatrics become more complex in the context of Roth’s interviews and criticism. Drawing frequent parallels between writing and acting, Roth insists that writing is a form of impersonation, for the “fundamental novelistic gift” is to “pass oneself off as what one is not.” The Humbling is a thus a book by a writer who impersonates for a living, impersonating an actor who also impersonates for a living, who has reached a point in his life where impersonation is both impossible and the only possible thing. Roth relishes the irony. Indeed, his penchant for this particular form of irony helps to explain his decision to abandon the first-person voice—so effective in Portnoy’s Complaint and My Life as a Man— for the comparative distance of the third-person in The Humbling. Navigating from afar, Roth uses the third-person both to delineate negation—at turns inspiring laughter, horror, blind fear—and to resist Axler’s all-consuming psychological black hole.

And yet, for all its remoteness, The Humbling’s greatest achievement is its ability to finally pull itself, its reader, its author, and perhaps—though Roth would no doubt disagree here—fiction back from the edge of annihilation. The breach between the “am” and the “am not” can certainly evacuate and destroy. But if approached judiciously, with awareness, humility, and a modicum of humour, this gap can also function as an important and liberating imaginative source, both for the self and for art.

At the end of their interview, Hermione Lee asked Roth to describe himself. His reply was brief and characteristically matter-of-fact: “I am like somebody who is trying vividly to transform himself out of himself and into his vividly transforming heroes. I am very much like somebody who spends all day writing.” This impression lingers at the close of The Humbling. Unlike his (anti)hero, Roth’s powers of transformation and impersonation are still at their height. The only thing we can be sure of, to utilise a Rothian triple negative, is that however much he might try to convince us otherwise, this novelist is never a “nobody doing nothing.”

Amy Waite is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford.

Roberto Bolaño
Amulet
Picador, 2009
192 Pages
£14.99
ISBN 978-0330510486

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Roberto Bolaño’s reason for writing Amulet is unclear. Perhaps he wrote this short novel for the challenge of turning slightness into surplus, a literary loaves-and-fishes trick. Perhaps he wrote it because both premise and prose were partly ready-made: entire pages are ripped wholesale from The Savage Detectives, as is the setting, the self-mythologizing Mexico City poetry scene of the 60s and 70s. Or perhaps Bolaño meant to toy with the well-worn notion that everyone is the main character of the drama of his or her own life. We’ll never know for sure; Bolaño died of liver failure in 2003.

The author’s conspicuous absence from the now-global discussion of his works oddly mirrors his novels’ motifs of elision, disappearance, and other gashes in life and narrative. Originally published in Spanish a year after the magnificent, polyphonic The Savage Detectives, Amulet tells the story of one of the most minor Detectives characters, Auxilio Lacouture. It is a novel about black holes, voids of incredible attraction where even time and space bend before the gravity of a gaping zero. Through the recurrent metaphors of hellmouth and abyss, Bolaño attempts to argue that the gaps in a story amplify, rather than diminish, its overall force.

This novel’s holes are numerous, beginning with Auxilio’s narration, which is unreliable to the point of effacing other characters’ perspectives. Auxilio is irritating and delusional, a parasitic groupie who considers herself “the mother of Mexican poetry” but lives off the charity of poets, crashing their parties, their homes, and sometimes their dates. Here Bolaño retreads familiar ground, exploring the transactions and presumptions at the margins of literary culture.

Auxilio’s untrustworthiness is at least partly involuntary, a symptom of psychological trauma. Over the course of the novel, we learn that she was a student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a school with theoretical autonomy from the surrounding city and nation (it has been compared to Vatican City) which was brutally occupied by police and the military in 1968. During the horror now known as the Tlatelolco Massacre, Auxilio hid in a bathroom stall for 12 days as government forces killed hundreds of students. Her narration in Amulet, years after the massacre, enumerates the memories that floated through her head during those delirious hours in her bathroom prison. We are thus reading memories of memories of perceptions that were perhaps inaccurate in the first place. Through this startling remoteness from objective fact, Bolaño constructs an unsettling metaphor for collective national and Latin American memory.

Aside from these few scenes in the university bathroom, the bulk of the military occupation is unseen, unheard, and undiscussed. Instead, we sense its force through the derailment of Auxilio’s mind. It is a black hole capable of warping time itself; Auxilio claims that during the occupation she could “remember” the future as well as the past, that “the year 1968 became the year 1964 and the year 1960 became the year 1956. But it also became the years 1970 and 1973 and the years 1975 and 1976. As if I had died and was viewing the years from an unaccustomed vantage point.”

This sort of retrospective self-consciousness menaces Auxilio’s story from the novel’s opening scene, in which she is wracked by hysterics at the sight of an empty vase:

I saw my hand move forward, away from my body, and rise and hover over the vase’s dark mouth, approaching its enameled lip, at which point a little voice inside me said: Hey, Auxilio, what are you doing, you crazy woman, and that was what saved me, I think, because straight away my arm froze and my hand hung limp, like a dead ballerina’s, a few inches from that Hellmouth… I started crying… I know my vision blurred at one point, anyway, and my legs began to give. And once seated, I was seized by a violent shaking, as if I was about to have some kind of attack…

A different hellmouth looms in her final hallucination, in which crowds of ghostly children swarm, singing into “a bottomless abyss.” The children, Auxilio tells us with irksome over-explication, are emblematic of the young poets and “a whole generation of Latin Americans led to sacrifice” who are “united only by their generosity and courage.” It would be a mistake to assume that such heavy-handed assertions, typical in Auxilio’s narration, are Bolaño’s as well. She speaks from a dark void of her own (she is, in fact, missing her four front teeth) and her interpretation is another lure toward conclusions that obscure rather than illuminate.

Forget, then, the singing innocents; the novel’s most interesting black hole is poetry itself. Amulet’s preoccupation with what happens to time, memory, and history at the brink of a powerful void is largely a way of coming to terms with a nagging structural issue in much of Bolaño’s work: whether (and how) fiction about poets can make sense without their poetry.

This might be an unfair question—after all, most readers of a novel about painters do not demand illustrations. But since poetry and prose share the same medium, Bolaño’s exclusion of nearly all traces of the poetry that constitutes his characters’ lives is noteworthy and bizarre. (The only poem featured after the first chapter of The Savage Detectives is a wordless diagram.) Ultimately, Auxilio’s flirtation with the void mimics Bolaño’s own attraction to riddled narrative structures.

After reaching for the vase at the start of the novel, Auxilio asks herself: “Do poets have any idea what lurks in the bottomless maws of their vases? And if they know, why don’t they take it upon themselves to destroy them?” The bottomless maws in poetry and fiction—the alluring instabilities that resist easy conclusion and continually open onto new argument—can be deep and enthralling indeed, and Auxilio is probably right that we gamble with our serenity and self-assurance as long as these maws remain undestroyed. But of course, they remain intact and attractive as ever.

Laura Kolbe received her MPhil in American Literature from Jesus College, Cambridge. She lives in New York.

J.M. Coetzee
Summertime
Harvill Secker, 2009
272 Pages
£17.99
ISBN 978-1846553189

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J.M. Coetzee’s third volume of “fictionalised memoir” holds a cracked mirror up to the man as artist. Summertime consists of research notes for a biography of the recently deceased novelist John Coetzee. The book presents a series of interviews with important figures from John’s life, most of them women he has disappointed in one way or another: there is the married woman with whom he has a dead-end affair, the cousin he disappoints through his fecklessness, and the imperious Brazilian he pursues with pathetic ineptitude. What emerges, in the eyes of one, is a portrait of the artist as an “unimportant little man”.

Though Summertime is autobiographical, it is not autobiography; its account is similar to—but, crucially, not identical with—the facts of Coetzee’s life. Instead, Coetzee constructs a person he might have been, and then brutally anatomizes him. As in his previous Diary of a Bad Year (2007), Coetzee abdicates the narrative voice of his earlier work, offering control of the story to others. The fictionalised John writes in propria persona only briefly at the beginning and end of the novel, in a series of journal entries from the period and then in sketches (ostensibly from just before his death) for a planned memoir. The reader is left to piece together narrative from these fragments and the recollections of others.

The most powerful voice belongs to Adriana, a Brazilian single mother who finds herself in South Africa after her husband falls into a coma. Female desire has always been a weakness of Coetzee’s characterization (he writes more or less desexualized women well, as in Foe and Waiting for the Barbarians), so Adriana is a particularly memorable creation. Her observations turn the tables on a male perspective that has often sympathized with women’s lack of power, but has rarely succeeded in representing female sexuality.

Adriana remembers Coetzee as her daughter’s English teacher, full of heady ideas about the role of the educator, which she interprets as inappropriate advances on her child. But it is the mother whom John really desires, and his pursuit is clumsy but tenacious: he writes letters and poems that she barely glances at, takes the family for a rainy day on the beach, and, as a last straw, shows up as a student in her dance classes, where his lack of rhythm becomes a disruption. Adriana’s recollections are hilarious and acute, usurping John’s powers of description to cut him down as dancer, lover, and writer:

This man was disembodied. He was divorced from his body. To him, the body was like one of those wooden puppets that you move with strings. You pull this string and the left arm moves, you pull that string and the right leg moves. And the real self sits up above, where you cannot see him, like the puppet-master pulling the strings.

Coetzee, puppet-master of his body and his characters, pulls the strings of life, but does not appear to live it. “How could this man of yours be a great man when he was not human?” The question hangs over the book as a lingering doubt about man and artist alike. That it comes from Coetzee himself only increases its unsettling power.

Still, there is a curious evasiveness about Summertime. The image of John is a distorted one, refracted both through the memories and personalities of the speakers and through the recording of the biographer, Mr. Vincent. We learn about Vincent only through responses to him: Adriana cautions him against idolizing his subject, while another interviewee complains that he has distorted her story; Vincent’s habit of jumping to conclusions annoys all of his interlocutors. In his final interview, Vincent lays his cards on the table:

There was an image of him in the public realm as a cold and supercilious intellectual, […] Now, I don’t believe that image does him justice. The conversations I have had with people who knew him well reveal a very different person – not necessarily a warmer person, but someone more uncertain of himself, more confused, more human, if I can use that word.

Certainly, this is the picture of John that Vincent’s interviews reveal. But is this image any truer than the “public” one? Coetzee constantly reminds us that multiple perspectives do not coalesce into a single biographical truth, but remain the fictions of an all-powerful puppet-master. The man recedes from view while the author beckons us to follow. The chase is maddening and exhilarating.

It is also melancholy, particularly in comparison with the earlier Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002), both clear-eyed but tender episodes from Coetzee’s (fictionalised) life. These short works offer precisely the kind of coherent narrative that Coetzee’s most recent novels—Diary, Slow Man (2005), and Elizabeth Costello (2003)—flaunt. In Slow Man and Costello, Coetzee introduces the novelist Elizabeth Costello as a surrogate for his own questioning. Her eccentricity, sadness, and extraordinary creative power focus attention, within a story, on the storyteller. Through Costello, Coetzee asks whether writing allows an individual to transcend his limitations, or merely to shift the burden to characters. Such deferred self-reflexivity is characteristic of his late style, with the result that Coetzee’s novels hesitate on the brink of narrative, unwilling—or unable—to cohere. Accordingly, Summertime’s final section reprints fragments of what would have been the third installment of memoir, left unfinished at Coetzee’s death. They offer tantalizing glimpses of the story he might have told, as the plurality of voices suggest the person he might have been.

The postscript to Elizabeth Costello, “Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon” underscores a crisis that has conditioned Coetzee’s writing from that work forward (and which begins, suggestively, around the time Summertime’s John dies). The letter in Costello complements Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s famous “Chandos Letter”, written a century before. In Coetzee’s revision, Chandos’s wife writes in despair of her husband’s overwhelming, self-destructive attempts to find transcendent meaning in the everyday: “We are not made for revelation, I want to cry out, nor I nor you, my Philip, revelation that sears the eye like staring into the sun.” The omnipotence of the creator—for Chandos, Costello, and Coetzee alike—is blinding.

In his recent works, Coetzee turns his eyes away from the sun, relinquishing the powers of language and narrative control. “Those abstract words […] fell apart in my mouth like mouldy mushrooms”, writes Lord Chandos in Hofmannsthal’s “Letter”. Like Chandos, prototype of the modernist crisis of speech, Coetzee claims to have given up language even as he continues to write. Coetzee’s crisis, though, is a postmodern one, not of speech but of the speaker. The problem is not that he cannot speak coherently, but that he can, and all too well; his authorial power has become too strong, shaping the world around him into a reflection of himself. And so in place of a single narrative, we have a plurality of voices, none of them claiming authority.

Ultimately, this is no less a construction than the omniscient narrators of Coetzee’s earlier works. The appearance of openness is deceptive, more subtly evasive than the totalizing narrators of his earlier novels. In Summertime, the small man and the great artist appear as mise-en-abîme, infinitely reflecting and infinitely obscuring one another. The result seduces, disturbs, and compels: puppet-master and puppet are one.

Joshua Billings is reading for a DPhil in Classics at Merton College, Oxford. He is a contributing editor of the Oxonian Review.

Alain de Botton
A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
Profile, 2009
112 Pages
£8.99
ISBN 978-1846683596

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When the Greek historian Herodotus visited the Great Pyramid of Giza in 450 BC, he set about writing what remains one of the most comprehensive records of the monument. At the time of his visit, the 2000-year-old pyramid was the largest building on Earth. It would remain so for nearly another two millennia. “Man fears time”, says the proverb, “time fears the pyramids.” It was England’s own Lincoln Cathedral which in 1311 finally outgrew Giza’s pinnacle, and by all accounts in fine form—the writer John Ruskin proclaimed the cathedral “out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles”.

Though England lost the title to Estonia’s St Olaf’s Church in the 16th century, Great Britain’s propensity for greatness has continued to express itself in dimensions other than height. In March 2008, some 26 years and £4.3 billion after its conception, Heathrow unveiled not the tallest but the largest building in the United Kingdom, Terminal 5. It’s difficult to convey just how ridiculously large the structure is, at least without the aid of obnoxious factoids: three Empire State Buildings could be laid end-to-end in its main hall; its steel roof weighs 18,000 tonnes, and in a serendipitous nod to its gargantuan forebear, Heathrow’s official website boasts that “T5″ is designed to handle “the equivalent of the population of Lincoln every day of the year”. Even the most hopeful of Lincoln’s vicars probably never ventured such a claim.

It seems only appropriate that those responsible for a feat of such magnitude should seek to have it recorded for posterity, or at least publicity. And so they have: earlier this year, Heathrow owners BAA commissioned author, presenter, and social commentator Alain de Botton to spend a week living within the generous confines of T5 as the airport’s writer-in-residence. The scale of BAA’s achievement stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the pyramids and the great cathedrals of Europe. Yet de Botton’s mandate, and so its result, A Week at the Airport, feels closer to the commissioning of Andy Warhol’s “32 Campbell’s Soup Cans” than the commentaries of Herodotus or Ruskin. The appeal and power of this short book lies, in large part, in its quiet striving to understand why.

If it seems dull, odd, or irritatingly postmodern to spend a week at the airport, then it is perhaps strange to reflect that an increasing number of us will have done just that by the time we’ve reached adulthood. Of course, unlike weeklong visits to the pyramids or among the cathedrals of Europe (a full week in Lincoln seems excessive), the time spent at airports is a means to more meaningful ends: waiting for the arrival of loved ones, a connecting flight to a holiday destination, the commencement of a new life in an as yet foreign city. And it is this which sets de Botton’s brief apart; that for all its size, the airport terminal will usually pass by unnoticed. We are no more engaged or concerned with its experiential or aesthetic properties than those of the offices, public bathrooms, bus shelters, waiting rooms, and elevators which collectively swallow up a great deal more than a week’s worth of our lives. These are places we pass through, rather than into. They are what A Week at the Airport’s blurb describes as “non-places”—places about which we feel, and think, as little as possible, for which we do not hold ourselves responsible, of which we are neither proud nor especially ashamed.

Nowhere is the glib disavowal inspired by non-places more remarkable than in the ritual of plane travel: we arrive, and promptly entrust our luggage to a mysterious rubber flap and our lives to an enormous metal container that attains heights and speeds we are mercifully incapable of grasping through processes most of us hardly understand. It is unsettling, then, that a non-place should become the biggest place in the country; that somewhere we instinctively feel amounts to so little should amount to as much in magnitude, manpower, and money as the most sacred and glorious sites of past civilisations, including our own.

For de Botton, such modern contradictions are familiar ground. His previous two offerings, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and The Architecture of Happiness, were also thoughtful contemplations of the everyday. This expertise is manifest throughout A Week at the Airport. Where a greener writer might have rushed to make something of the experience, to construct a grand unifying appraisal, de Botton’s approach is patient, modest, and conscientiously neutral. The opinions he does offer—on the absurdities of anti-terrorism and human resources management, the paradox of luxurious passenger lounges staffed by migrant workers, the rabid commercialism of the duty free strip—are cautious and self-deprecating, and for that, all the more persuasive. De Botton is intent on suspending judgment, putting the experience before himself, and finding in it only what is there.

Ultimately, this faith in his subject is well-placed—like the dimensions of the Pyramid at Giza, the vast machinations of T5 are sufficiently arresting and bizarre by their own lights: we are told of the parallel journeys taken by our suitcases across 17 kilometers of subterranean robot-supervised conveyor belts; nightly forages for jetsam on somber moonlit runways; the ritual of composing 80,000 identical, crumbed lamb fillets. Set against the landscape of this non-place are the faces of its non-people; the world-weary legion of cleaners, priests, cooks, and shoe shiners, the parting couples and the bickering families are chronicled with a good-natured wryness that seems to come naturally to the eavesdropping diarist.

If A Week at the Airport is inconclusive and non-polemical, it is perhaps because de Botton’s aims are satisfied just in the looking, in the challenge posed by the looking itself: to have us look—and so lay claim—to the world we have created, to whom and to what we actually amount. The picture that emerges in Week is one of human beings bewildered by the pace and scale of modernity, whose frailty and simplicity are movingly at odds with the flawless grandeur of their mechanical and material achievements. Insofar as he seeks to do no more and no less than show us to ourselves, de Botton is doing what our good artists and thinkers have always done. A Week at the Airport is time well spent.

John Maloney is reading for a BPhil in Philosophy at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

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Tehran—In a city of over 12 million people, considerable unemployment, and staggering inflation, space is at a premium.

Shopkeepers in Iran’s capital maximize their trade—and the aesthetic of their craft—by stacking their products in impressive visual displays.

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Kamyar Adl studied photography at Azad University in Tehran before completing his military service near the Iraq-Iran border. He currently lives in the UK and works as a rectifier at BMW Plant Oxford.

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