On Beauty v. Beasts of No Nation
presented by
ROUND ONE
On Beauty
v. Beasts of No Nation
Judged by Karl Iagnemma
First, the positives.
Beauty: Wow, can Zadie Smith write. I was frankly amazed at how many voices she successfully inhabited in Beauty, all of them convincing and smart and funny (and verbose—more on this later). She lards (yes—lards) her prose with insights that perfectly capture a character’s mood at any given instant, and this moment-to-moment wisdom lifts many of Beauty’s scenes from mundane to mesmerizing. Zadie Smith writes domestic drama—family banter, party conversation, bedroom negotiation—better than anyone I have ever read in my life. (Full disclosure: I have not read all that many domestic drama-type novels.) The result of all this is that her characters read like smarter, more interesting versions of real people. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
Beasts: OK, so the prose is no Beauty. But the narrative voice is an amazing creation—childish yet insightful, lyrically descriptive without feeling strained, heartbreakingly (and sometimes excruciatingly) unflinching. It is very hard to write well about high-octane material like war and murder and rape—and Iweala writes it well. The book is a litany of misfortune, and yet the events are presented in a naïve, matter-of-fact way that makes them seem inevitable, without ever veering close to sentimentality. (Except maybe the ending—the ending was actually kind of sentimental.)
Now, the negatives.
Beauty: Here’s the thing: Even chocolate will make you puke if you eat enough of it. And I just ate 464 pages of Beauty. Why, I found myself wondering, is she telling me all this? This book’s blessing also seems to be its curse: The fluency of the voice and the interestingness of the characters leads to long, long exchanges, long descriptions, and long scenes. There are just so many…words. The effect is that it all begins to seem scattershot, even random, a shotgun blast of talented prose. I felt like I was on a cross-country road trip with an extremely smart but crushingly talkative acquaintance. I was ready to bail somewhere around Ohio—page 160, by my count—and I would have stopped reading were I not a “judge” for this tournament. I found myself wishing, truly wishing, for a bit of writerly remove. But British writers have never seemed all that fond of writerly remove.
I felt like I was on a cross-country road trip with an extremely smart but crushingly talkative acquaintance. I was ready to bail somewhere around Ohio.
Beasts: My problem with Beasts was a simple one: I did not, at times, believe it. I did not believe that what the author was telling me had actually happened, in a literal or fictional sense. My belief was unsuspended; the fictional dream was broken. (There was never a thought of bailing because Beasts is only 160 pages—a footnote compared to Beauty.) My skepticism was sharpened by the frequent instances in which the details simply weren’t good enough—they seemed somehow familiar, and I had a hard time accepting that a first-person description of war, told by a child soldier in Africa, could possibly seem familiar. Some of the scenes in Beasts felt like what I might come up with, had I sat down to write this novel. And unfortunately that just ain’t gonna cut it.
So, then: two novelistic mixed bags, two cases of readerly disappointment. A true toss-up, a stumper.
(Which brings me to my second, and fullest, disclosure: I have a weakness for underdogs.)
Sorry, Zadie.
Advancing:
Beasts of No Nation
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile
Say hey! Just when you thought the first round was going to pass without a major upset, Karl Iagnemma, a popular writer of robot erotica (I might be confused on that point), throws the bookies into a Black Friday panic by sending pre-tournament Final Four lock Zadie Smith packing on the QE II. It’s the first hair-dryer-in-the-tub shocker of the tournament, with one of the year’s most celebrated books falling to a graduate creative writing thesis project. To be sure, Beasts of No Nation is an acclaimed graduate creative writing thesis project, but—without engaging in hyperbole—this is comparable to Stephen Hawking losing a science fair blue ribbon to an eighth-grader’s corn still. It’s the kind of statistical anomaly that literally drove John Nash crazy. Or put another way, it’s as unlikely as the prissy Farrah Fawcett-haired sex robots in Westworld winning a street fight against the ass-kicking Deborah Harry-haired sex robots in Blade Runner.
Office pools everywhere have been thrown into mad disarray.