Never Let Me Go v. The Greatest Man in Cedar Hole
presented by
ROUND ONE
Never Let Me Go
v. The Greatest Man in Cedar Hole
Judged by Georgie Lewis
I will begin by saying I was wary from the outset of pitting these two books against each other. I read Never Let Me Go before it was released last year and knew it was one of the best books I had read in close to a decade. To my mind, Ishiguro is flawless, and I felt sorry for any book that I had to judge next to it. Never Let Me Go is a devastating story told in immaculate prose. Ishiguro’s subtle and refined style perfectly suits an overwhelming, profound subject matter and leaves you pondering the idea of what it means to be human.
It is a matter of taste, of course, and Ishiguro is definitely to my taste. His prose style is elegant, Japanese minimalism combined with that stoic and repressed voice that you find in E.M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh, yet imbued with modernist elements all of his own. The story of Never Let Me Go is that of Kathy, a “carer” in her early 30s. “This was all a long time ago so I might have some of it wrong,” Kath disclaims at the start of the second chapter, and thus commences a series of flashbacks about her life growing up at Halisham (which appears to be an exclusive boarding school), and her relationship with two close friends, Tommy and Ruth. The purpose of Halisham, and the children under its care, becomes ominously clearer as Kath peels away the layers of her story like that of an onion skin. The emotional impact of this book cannot be overstated. It is tremendous.
And so it is with hesitation I must compare this tremendous work with Stephanie Doyon’s The Greatest Man in Cedar Hole, which I am sure has found loving readers, albeit readers with a different taste than mine. That said, I wasn’t quite prepared for how much The Greatest Man in Cedar Hole would irritate me. The setting is a small town and the characters are a disparate mix (though admittedly, to my mind, thoroughly unlikable for the most part) whom we follow over a period of roughly 30 years. Characters come and go, relationships between them grow or break apart, and yet I felt their emotional motivations were either cartoonishly simplistic or simply left unexplained.
Doyon’s voice is enthusiastic and quirky—I’m reminded of that quirkiness that makes John Irving’s books so popular—and yet her attention to detail is markedly erratic. Some of her characters had elaborate back stories yet were given only a minor role, while other characters were largely undeveloped yet went on to play rather significant roles (at least one I understood as supposedly being significant, although that is hard to be sure of with so many characters to keep track of). The storyline is erratic, also, and I found myself having to reread parts to ascertain what was going on. I think a better editor might have rid it of some of its inconsistencies, but these—admittedly minor—jolts would interrupt the flow of narrative for me, as did the huge leaps in time. The story suddenly jumps 10 years or so, and yet this leap is accompanied with a flashback, making for a really bumpy journey for the reader.
But to reiterate, these two books probably should not be compared. I feel bad for criticizing Doyon’s work, for it is spirited. What it isn’t, is art. And Ishiguro is an artist of the highest caliber.
Advancing:
Never Let Me Go
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile
Several people have pointed out to me, usually with a finger-poking “gotcha!” that as TOB commissioner, I failed to disclose the fact that I share a publisher with two of the books in this tourney—Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. I’d like to confront this accusation head on. First of all, Alfred A. Knopf publishes dozens of acclaimed books every year and the real scandal would be if they didn’t have at least two books in this year’s competition. Secondly, it’s not like Knopf has a holiday party at Bungalow 8 where Bill Clinton and Gabriel García Márquez goose model/actresses in elf costumes while Joyce Carol Oates licks tequila off John Updike’s surprisingly taut belly. Or if they do, I’ve never been invited, in which case why would I be doing secret favors for a company that doesn’t even invite me to its awesome holiday party? The real reason I didn’t mention it was because I thought it would be shameless and inappropriate to use my position as commissioner to promote my own work. This tournament should be about the 16 outstanding novels in competition; it is most certainly not about Cast of Shadows, which Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times called “gripping” and the Chicago Tribune called one of the best books of 2005. I hope that clears things up.
As for this match-up, The Greatest Man in Cedar Hole really didn’t have a chance, did it? When we randomly assigned the pairings to judges, we didn’t know about the fainting-couch crush Georgie has on Ishiguro. Let’s call this one an officiating error, like the 1998 Thanksgiving Day game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Detroit Lions, when Jerome Bettis clearly called heads before the sudden death overtime coin flip but the referee heard tails and three minutes later the Lions kicked a game-winning field goal. The Steel City feels your pain, Stephanie, but there’s little we can do for either of you now.