Another Sunday Story Society session is coming around, and this time we have a piece by Viriconium author M. John Harrison up for discussion. The story in question is “Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring”, which you can read here at Infinity Plus. Then join me here on Sunday, when I’ll have a discussion post up.
Author: David Hebblethwaite
Still: ‘From the Archive’ by James Miller
The photograph: the main seat in Hornsey Town Hall’s council chamber, with three globe-shaped lights hanging above, and a clock behind. The edges of the photographic slide are visible in the image.
The story: This piece treats Bakker’s photograph as an archive document from the distant past. Much of its effect comes from seeing how Miller’s unidentified future writer has misinterpreted the image, and how knowledge of history and culture have become mangled over time. It’s amusing to read, but also leaves one with the nagging thought of just how easily that sort of thing could happen…
Link: James Miller’s website / interview with Miller on his story
This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.
Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods (2011)
Lightning Rods is a satire on American corporate culture and social mores, which traps its readers and characters alike in mazes of rhetoric. Helen DeWitt’s protagonist is Joe, a salesman who failed at selling encyclopedias and vacuum cleaners, but has his brightest idea when hope seems dim. Retreating into his private fantasies, Joe theorises that sexual harassment in the workplace could be dealt with if men had a legitimate outlet for their desires. He devises a system whereby a select group of male employees (the ones a company wouldn’t want to lose if they were accused of harassment) can, discreetly and anonymously, satisfy their urges through a hole in the wall of the disabled toilet. The women on the other side of that hole are the ‘lightning rods’ – staff supplied by Joe to perform normal office functions most of the time, and additional duties as required. Complete secrecy is assured: what could go wrong?
This is hardly the most appealing premise for a novel, granted; but the way DeWitt uses it is not tawdry, and she has serious points to make. Perhaps one of the key points is how easily we can delude ourselves and others with words. For example, in his first successful sale, Joe is quick to pounce on the company boss’s comment that they provide a disabled toilet, though they have no disabled employees:
There’s absolutely no reason why this space should not be put to use to promote the well-being of employees actually on the staff [says Joe]…I think it’s up to those of us who are more fortunate not to put any unnecessary obstacles in [disabled people’s] way. At the same time, when all’s said and done, I think it’s possible to go too far the other way (p. 65).
The boss, Steve, promptly agrees (‘It’s not that I’m unsympathetic, but this kind of PC crap really gets my goat’), and allows Joe to outline his plans for the space – at which point, the salesman changes his tune:
‘You know, I really gotta hand it to you,’ he said, surveying the cubicle. ‘You really provide a first-class facility. You may not know this, but not all disabled toilets provide a sink at the right level’ (pp. 65-6)
The disabled stalls are a waste of space, until Joe opens up a new possibility for their use; at which point they become something of which Steve should be proud. So Joe creates and manipulates ideas to make his sales – and he does it throughout the novel, modifying not so much his product as the rhetoric around his product.
But this is more than sales patter: the whole of Lightning Rods is peppered with Joe’s cliché-ridden business-speak – this is how he thinks. And it’s not empty: this rhetoric has power, creates different and damaging ways of thinking. For instance, it takes some mental contortions for one to start considering high-flying executives to be ‘socially deprived’, but Joe manages it, and convinces his customers – and the needs and feelings of people outside that ‘deprived’ group are soon forgotten. In sales, ‘you’ve got to deal with people the way they are. Not how you’d like them to be’ is a common refrain of DeWitt’s novel – but Joe discovers how easily he can make people be as he would like them to be.
In his review, John Self identifies language as the main subject of Lightning Rods; as you’ll surmise from this post, I would agree that it’s important. But I wouldn’t go quite so far as to relegate the satire to second place; I think the social commentary and language of DeWitt’s novel are too intertwined for that. The characters who get ahead the most in Joe’s world are marked out by their own command of rhetoric; but they’re also ambitious and see ways to profit from circumstance. The deadening tone of DeWitt’s prose/Joe’s thinking turns an intimate act between two people into something cold and clinical; but other factors feed into that, and there are social phenomena to consider even if you disregard Joe’s words. The language and satire of Lightning Rods are aspects of the same thing.
The whole edifice of Joe’s success in Lightning Rods is fragile; all that it would take to destroy it is for people to stop and think, and they’d see how absurd the idea was. But Joe’s trick is never to give people the time to do that. It’s not until the last chapter that DeWitt lets the narrative tone lapse, which allows us to ask, ‘But what about..?’ without receiving a pat answer. It’s jarring when this happens, and it shows what complete mastery of tone the author has in this novel. You will look at the world differently after reading Lightning Rods – and you can’t really ask for more from a novel than that.
Elsewhere
Helen DeWitt’s website
Interview with DeWitt at Boing Boing
The publishers: And Other Stories / New Directions
Some other reviews of Lightning Rods: Words of Mercury; Alex in Leeds; Jenny Turner for the Guardian.
Still: ‘The Blind Man’ by Nicholas Royle
The photograph: a box of crumpled strong-room bags, with numbered labels attached.
The story: Royle’s narrator tells how he became interested in buses as a boy, and stole some destination blinds and bus Fleetbooks. There’s a great rhythm to this piece, helped along by the short lists of bus destinations that punctuate it. And Royle tops it off with a dark twist at the end.
Link: Nicholas Royle’s website / interview with Royle on his story
This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.
Still: ‘Switchgirls’ by Tania Hershman
The photograph: four old-fashioned light switches arranged in a square, each with a label bearing a woman’s name.
The story: a monologue by a narrator whose identity is ambiguous, perhaps a female robot lamenting the loss of her sisters. Details of ‘real’ life are heightened through their transformation into Hershman’s science-fiction idiom, and the ending is especially poignant.
Link: Tania Hershman’s website / interview with Hershman on her story
This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.
Still: ‘A Rose for Raha’ by Ava Homa
The photograph: a dried yellow rose lying on top of what looks like a document folder of some sort. A sticker with someone’s name can be seen next to the rose.
The story: Raha and Farzad are young sisters; their father, a refugee, is unable to find work, and faces jail if he can’t pay the rent. The two girls play as their parents argue; Homa portrays this effectively, underscoring the family’s difficulties whilst maintaining the distance that comes with writing from Raha’s viewpoint. The titular rose acts a symbol of the family’s hope – something to keep growing in the garden, and not to remove, for fear of angering the landlord.
Link: Ava Homa’s website
This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.
Book notes: Hélène Grémillon and Gavin Weston
Hélène Grémillon, The Confidant (2010/2)
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson
Hélène Grémillon’s first novel begins in Paris of 1975, where Camille Werner is sorting through the letters of condolence she has received on the death of her mother. One of the letters stands out: an account from someone named Louis of his childhood attraction to Annie, a girl from his village. Not knowing anyone named Louis or Annie, Camille thinks no more of this – until she starts receiving regular letters from Louis, telling more of his story.
Camille learns that Annie became friends with one Madame M., a rich young woman who came to the village with her husband, eventually (as Annie told Louis when they met again a few years later, during the war) agreeing to act as a surrogate mother for the infertile Madame M. Events would subsequently take a tragic turn, and prove to be far more relevant to Camille than she had thought.
The full story of The Confidant takes shape only gradually, as we view the past from the perspectives of different characters. Madame M. kept Alice indoors during her pregnancy, and didn’t tell her about the Nazi invasion of France – but we’re forced to re-evaluate what we think of these individuals when we read Madame M.’s testimony. The final revelations come as Grémillon’s novel turns to poetry, as though prose is no longer sufficient (or can no longer be trusted) to tell this story. All in all, The Confidant is an intriguing piece of work.
Gavin Weston, Harmattan (2012)
The Harmattan is a trade wind that carries dust from the Sahara across West Africa; an analogous harshness and suffocation blows into the life of Gavin Weston’s protagonist, Haoua Boureima. Young Haoua lives in Watada, a village in the Republic of Niger, and dreams of becoming a teacher. But her family life is disrupted when her beloved soldier brother Abdelkrim visits and argues with their father over the latter’s gambling habit. Then Haoua’s mother is taken to hospital in the capital, and diagnosed with AIDS – and the girl’s world begins to fall apart, culminating in the marriage in which we see her (aged twelve) in the prologue.
Haoua’s tale is interspersed with the correspondence between her and the Boyds, the Irish family who sponsor her. Weston uses this device effectively: the naïve, childlike tone of the letters masks the difficulties of Haoua’s life; and the tribulations faced by the Boyd family are shown to be, not insignificant, but remote from Haoua’s concerns. A variation on the same technique works superbly towards novel’s end, as the Boyds’ father is thwarted in his search for news on Haoua.
Harmattan is a bleak book, there’s no denying that – it’s structured as a narrative of loss and possibilities closing off, rather than of escape and flourishing. But it also has a strong sense of forward motion that drives the narrative inexorably on towards its sombre conclusion.
Still: ‘Pa-dang’ by Jan van Mersbergen
The photograph: the handle of a door that’s been left ajar. A patch of the door’s green paint, next to the handle, has worn or been scratched away to reveal white underneath.
The story: this is the first English-language story by Jan van Mersbergen, the author of Tomorrow Pamplona. Told mainly in dialogue, it concerns a young man named Anton being taken home to see his family for his twenty-third birthday. It’s clear from the start that all is not well with Anton, and the choppy rhythms of van Mersbergen’s prose underline the sense of unease, up to a rather chilling end.
This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.
Still: ‘The Staircase Treatment’ by Myriam Frey
The photograph: a staircase viewed as it curves around into a new flight. We can’t see where the stairs lead, only that they are shabby and dusty.
The story: after our narrator gave birth, she developed memory problems. Thinking of different words as she climbed stairs helped her recover – but she lost touch with her son as an adult. Now she goes to visit him for the first time in years. There’s a neat reversal in this story, and I like Frey’s use of the staircase as an image and venue.
Link: Myriam Frey’s website / interview with Frey on her story
This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.
Still: ‘Corridor’ by Evie Wyld
The photograph: the end of a wood-panelled corridor. Light streams in through the windows in a door to the left; but the dark wood and the solid wall ahead make the overall feeling oppressive.
The story: a very short piece whose narrator describes how her childhood self tried to keep bad dreams at bay by imagining a corridor as a neutral space. Wyld keeps the atmosphere suitably unsettling, and any hope she offers comes with its own nagging doubt.
Link: Evie Wyld’s website
This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.
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