Voices in Fiction

Voices in Fiction

SO MANY NOVELS CLAMORING FOR ATTENTION, and this partial roundup is devoted almost entirely to old hands. But first, a first book of stories by a talented young writer.1 In an interview, Nalini Jones numbers among her heroes Chekhov, in whose fiction, she remarks, "just when we imagine all is setded and concluded, he suddenly makes a narrative or descriptive gesture outward"-which gesture moves the story's terrain "toward the unknown, the undiscovered." The most notable thing about her nine stories is that invariably a reader's attempt to predict how any one will come out is doomed. Most of them take place in Santa Clara, an imagined neighborhood in India's Mumbai (Bombay) similar in many respects to one in which Jones's mother grew up. Some of the same characters show up in different stories, at different stages of their lives. In the opening one, "In the Garden," ten-year-old Marian Almeida comes home early from a piano lesson to find an empty house and decides to try on one of her mother's saris. By the story's end she has been rescued from a poisonous tree viper by her father and in die process moved into hitherto undiscovered country. In a later story, now married and living in America, she prepares to visit India with a friend; in another one, "I Think of You Every Day," she is again a schoolgirl in India, writing to her slightly older brother Simon who has been sent away to a Catholic pre-seminary school and is desperately lonely. Marian's mother, fiercely committed to the education she wants for her son, withholds details of his unhappiness from the family until Marian discovers a letter in which Simon's grief is manifest. Just when you begin to think it will be a story of the mother's comeuppance when the truth comes out, things turn away as suddenly we move ahead four years with Simon now a hardened school veteran who comes home to visit. Now the main focus is on his younger brother Jude, on the verge of losing his first tooth. Simon persuades Jude to use the string-tied-todoorknob technique of extraction, slams the door, but the tooth doesn't come out, much to Jude's pain and fright. Then the story ends with Marian, listening to the sounds of her mother comforting Jude and feeling "the current of some greater violence running through her family," as she thinks back to the letter from Simon she read and destroyed. The movement in each of these stories is tricky, wayward, unpredictable. Like Alice Munro's stories, Jones's need to be reread, an indication of the satisfying complication her view of life, and of writing, exhibits.

One of the writers Nalini Jones mentions as an "influence" is Graham Swift, and Swift's seventh novel shows all of his expected professionalism and expertise.2 Tomorrow, narrated throughout by a first-person voice, a woman awake in bed next to her sleeping husband, begins this way as she addresses their two children:

You're asleep, my angels, I assume. So, to my amazement and relief, is your father, like a man finding it in him to sleep on the eve of his execution. He'll need all he can muster tomorrow. I'm the only one awake in this house on this night before the day that will change all of our lives.

Wondering what the big deal is? We find out about halfway dirough the book (so I can reveal it) that they're not splitting up, nor does he have terminal cancer, nor was he caught robbing a bank. No, all he had was a sperm deficiency, which caused him ("Mikey") and his wife Paula to go the route of artificial insemination. Wakeful and worried Paula takes die opportunity to give the children a full-scale rehearsal of how she and Mikey met, what their respective parents were like, how they married and failed to conceive, got a cat named Otis instead, how Otis disappeared one night but came back . . . etc. etc. The book ends, naturally, before tomorrow dawns, but I suspect the kids (they're both teenagers) will take this news in a mature way and get on with their lives, as they say in the soap operas. Aside from a sometimes cloying (supposed to be motherly?) habit of Paula referring in a brave way to "My darlings," "My dears," "My angels," Tomorrow is, like Swift's other novels ( The Light of Day, Ever After), a handsomely voiced narrative, also one I suspect will disappear from the reader's mind as easily as it went in. Swift is a fine fabricator, even if often we're too aware of the fabrication.

Andrew O'Hagan's third novel has been extraordinarily well-received in this country-"superb" and "astonishingly assured" were used by reviewers in prominent places.3 It's certainly darkly modulated, this grim story about David Anderton, a priest who finds himself in a nowhere parish on the west coast of Scotland (O'Hagan is Glasgow raised), disliked both because he's English-although actually born in Scodand-and because of his permissive attitudes toward some of the dubious young adults under his supervision. Much of the narrative consists of conversations with his housekeeper, Mrs. Poole, and flashbacks to his undergraduate days at Oxford where he fell in love with "Conor," who died young. David's befriending two of the local teen crowd, Mark and Lisa (especially Mark), leads to an evening of drinking and drugs, during which the priest kisses Mark. Mark tells his father, and from there on it's the Town Without Pity against the hapless priest. And hapless does seem the word for the protagonist who deliberately wills his own destruction and seems eager to assist tilings along in any illthought-out way he can. The titular allusion to Tennyson's In Memoriam ("Be near me when my light is low, / When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick / And tingle; and the heart is sick") serves up the muted drama of suffering to come, portentously and without alleviating humor. I was reminded of Matthew Arnold's reasons for omitting Empedocles on Etna from a subsequent edition of his poetry, claiming that however accurate its representation, "no poetic enjoyment" could be derived from it, since "the suffering finds no vent in action" and "a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance, in which everything is to be endured, nothing to be done." Arnold called such representations "morbid," a word I would apply to O'Hagan's novel. I thought also of D. H. Lawrence's insistence that "tragedy should be a great kick at misery." Such a kick isn't provided by the style of Be Near Me, however well-crafted it has been judged to be.