Many Voices

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2003 by Wilhelmus, Tom

THINK OF IT AS THE TRIUMPH OF POLYPHONY over the requirement that books speak through one center of consciousness and with one point of view. What surprised me most about the books that follow was their desire to bring alternate voices and viewpoints sometimes jarringly into the story. For me the word "voice" retains a quality of insistent, even selfish, materiality. It is different from the word "character," which suggests placement within an ethical or a compositional scheme or plan. Voices suggest real presences.

In Andrew Miller's Oxygen,1 for example, the whole issue of whether voices are provisionally real is a central part of the question. An English family gathers at the bedside of their mother, who is dying of cancer. Meanwhile a Hungarian playwright is living fashionably in Paris. Do these lives have anything in common? Alternatively, will they have any effect on one another?

In England, Alice Valentine and her sons are intensely self-absorbed. Larry, who has been living in California, has recently lost his job playing a British doctor on an American soap opera. One of his options is to remake his doctor's role in a pornographic version for South American audiences. His story is hip and humorous, especially the part about his visit to a Southern California porno ranch. Alec, a depressed scriptwriter and translator, occasionally flirts with suicide. His story lends itself to colorings that are mordant and sad. Alice withdraws more and more each day into her pain, her medications, and her vague memories of the past. Her home in rural England is charming, and the memories, for the most part, nostalgic. In Paris, a gun goes off at one of Laszlo Lazar's dinner parties. He receives an approach from Balkan revolutionaries.

The point seems to be that there is no connection. The inner lives of the ironically-named Valentines are so different from one another that any relationship seems only accidental. Each of their narratives has its own logic, even its own style. A romantic character in a romantic setting, Lazar must, it seems, flirt with la vie dangereuse. His story must take on the trappings of a thriller. Only the thinnest thread exists: Alec is translating a play, Oxygen, which Lazar has written. The play is about some trapped miners, about the struggle for space and for oxygen. And while I suppose they all are struggling for breath, none of these characters has much more in common. Oxygen, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, remains first and foremost a drama of disconnection.

Not so in City,2 a recently translated novel by Italian writer Alessandro Baricco, which contains a wild mixture of characters including a thirteen-year-old bed-wetting genius, his governess, and a variety of other characters both real and imaginary in a narrative of many narratives including, among other things, possibly the best boxing story and one of the best cowboy narratives recently written. Here the strategy is to insist that we are all part of the same narrative, all part of the same rich soup of humanity struggling to survive. Again the obligation for logical coherence is abandoned and the flirtation with popular fiction exalted, but satire connects all. City also contains one the most devastating critiques of academic politics I've read.

Formally City is a modern-day picaresque in which an innocent, victimized, but resilient hero survives, in a series of disjointed episodes, manifold threats to his health and well-being. Abandoned by his parents and sent to the university where he is in training for the Nobel Prize, Gould seeks out the most eccentric professors he can find. He also invents a mute and a giant, Poomerang and Diesel, he can turn to for help. He adopts Shatzy Shell, who is equally damaged, as his governess because she treats him like an equal. Gould and Shatzy share a talent for telling stories, another coping mechanism for externalizing their fears. He invents a story about an underdog boxer and his manager. She is creating a Western, one she has been tape-recording in bits since she was six years old.

Within this structure, City contains a riotous number of voices clamoring to be heard-including Poomerang, the mute, whose voice is nonetheless unstoppable. Here, too, Prof. Mondrian Kilroy speaks in painful imitation of the absurdity of scholarly conventions. He has a complex and sophisticated but ultimately pointless theory regarding Monet's Waterlilies. He also vomits violently whenever he runs into other professors, particularly those who betray their fundamental insights as they advance their academic careers. The clamor is threatening and ridiculous. It is also wildly entertaining.

If novels are good at recording voices waiting to be heard, some have also traditionally been good at giving voices to people without one. This is the central conceit of Jamaica Kincaid's new novel Mr. Potter,3 in which a young, deracinated woman, Elaine Cynthia Potter, from Antigua tells the story of her illiterate father who has recently died. Uncharacteristically, her motives for this project are neither positive nor generous. Just one of dozens of her father's children (all of whom have the same noses) by a number of women, she and her mother were abandoned by him shortly after she was born. Her great accomplishment, her literacy -the ability to write her own life and the life of her parent-she thinks of as "a dagger," directed at Mr. Potter, for ignoring her existence.