Burnt Shadows v. That Old Cape Magic
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OPENING ROUND
Burnt Shadows
v. That Old Cape Magic
Judged by Nic Brown
Nic Brown’s short story collection, Floodmarkers, was published in 2009 and selected as an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review. His first novel, Doubles, will be published in July 2010. His fiction has appeared in the Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, and Epoch, among other publications. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I shouldn’t be involved in Wells’s book.”
Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows is insanely ambitious. It starts with a love scene between a German man and a Japanese woman in Nagasaki on the day of the dropping of the atomic bomb, then somehow ends in Guantanamo Bay, but not until Shamsie first takes on the Partition between India and Pakistan, the end of British colonialism, American C.I.A. agents working in Afghanistan, several iterations of cross-cultural love, and some serious homoerotic tension between British lawyers and their Indian clerks. Much of it is too convenient and unbelievable to work, especially as the book progresses, and as for the end, I can’t really say for certain if it’s set in Guantanamo Bay or not, because I haven’t finished it yet (I have a 17-month-old with a cold, a day job, and a new book to edit—cut me some slack). But it doesn’t really matter. By the end of the first chapter I knew it was going to win.
Let me explain. Shamsie’s prose is often beautiful, and she’s dealing with Big Ideas here. Of course, therein lie many of the problems in this novel, especially as the dialogue becomes increasing didactic (“Because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb,” for example), but I admire what she’s trying to accomplish. And I read this book second, so I knew as soon as I encountered her beautiful descriptions (“An old man walks past with skin so brittle Hiroko thinks of a paper lantern with the figure of a man drawn onto it”) that it was my favorite.
Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic is very readable, and filled with moments of irresistible narrative momentum. He opens with his narrator driving around Cape Cod with the ashes of his father in the trunk of his car, soon to be joined by those of his mother. Thing is, he can’t bring himself to dispose of either until he works out some problems with his marriage, most of which stem from parental issues. The symbolism here—the guy can’t let go of his parents and it’s affecting his family—is less than subtle, but the real issue I had with the book is that the parents are the most interesting characters in the book, and—they’re dead! Could the stakes be lower? The only people we care about have been incinerated. If characters can’t stop speaking even when dead (and yes, there are many conversations with the ashes here), I would argue that the author might want to consider writing the book with those characters alive.
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But Russo tries to wring as much dramatic potential as he can out of this somewhat light fare. I have to give him that. Let me cite slapstick: A wedding party gathers to retrieve the narrator’s father-in-law from the limbs of a small tree (don’t ask), and the ramp on which they’re standing collapses. Madness ensues. Punches are thrown. And let me cite romance: The narrator leaves his wife for much of the book, but returns to her in a touching ending that I must say was rather satisfying. But if all this already sounds like a movie, it basically is. Not because the urn-in-the-truck trope has probably appeared a few dozen times already on TBS this week (starting with Mark Harmon’s 1988 masterpiece Stealing Home), but because the narrator is a screenwriter, and when things get dicey, the prose suddenly begins to appear as a screenplay. Literally. Weird thing is, that part works, but still underscores the feeling I had that things were a bit thin here.
In any case, I did read the whole book. That said, Russo just can’t match Shamsie when it comes to scope and prose. My vote is Burnt Shadows.
Advancing:
Burnt Shadows
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin: Once again, I’ve read only one of the two books in this match, and once again that book has lost. I’m going to have even fewer intelligent things to say as this tourney goes on unless I get some serious help in the Zombie Round.
John: Don’t despair, my friend. There was a time, not too long ago, where we had no trouble filling our commentary quota despite being in states of total ignorance regarding the books at hand. Knowing something about what you’re talking about hardly matters in this day and age. Sherri Shepherd had her contract for The View extended and Liz Cheney is thinking about a Senate run.
Kevin: The college professor is to the literary novel what the serial killer is to the crime novel—a character archetype that most adult readers encounter far less frequently in real life than they do in fiction. And while I can provide a good argument for the utility of the serial killer in the context of a suspense novel—he provides both the instigating event (a gruesome murder) and the threat the hero must stop (lots more gruesome murders)—the only reason college professors exist in literary fiction is that college professors write so much of it. And once you have chosen a college professor as your main character, there would seem to be limits (outside the Indiana Jones/Robert Langdon multiverse anyway) on the number of very interesting things you can make him do, which is why a college professor in a literary novel will almost invariably start cheating on his or her spouse. I’m not sure about real life, but college professors get more side action in novels than Tiger Woods’s avatar (“Tag Heuer,” cha-ching!) in a Second Life disco.
This is nothing against Russo, whom I like, and whose work has always been sort of semi-autobiographical. I’m not suggesting he should stop writing about college professors any more than John Sandford should stop writing about serial killers. My point—and Judge Brown does a nice job of setting this argument up—is that we (and by we I mean bookstores) often divide books into two categories: literary fiction and genre fiction. But literary fiction is subdivided into hundreds of little genres that have their own crutches and clichés the same way crime novels do. For me, the best novels of any sort are the ones that are self aware. Their authors recognize the tradition in which they are writing and seek to subvert the readers’ own expectations in order to surprise them.
John: As the Twilight series is to 14- to 45-year-old girls, the “campus novel” is to me, which is to say, if the choice is Team Jacob or Team Edward, I choose Team Russo. That Old Cape Magic is actually Russo’s second book with a college professor protagonist, the first being Straight Man, which is a much more traditional campus satire in the vein of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. (That Old Cape Magic spends almost all of its time off campus.) Straight Man is a better book, in my opinion, mostly because it spends most of its time lampooning the various types one might find in an English department, but I enjoyed That Old Cape Magic quite a bit. But then when I look at some of my favorite books of all time, the list is studded with books with writers and/or academics as protagonists. In addition to the aforementioned Lucky Jim and Straight Man, there’s James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, and John Irving’s The Water-Method Man, and The World According to Garp on the list. Throw in A Fan’s Notes and The Sportswriter for good measure, (though they may be a stretch), and you’re looking at something like 30 percent of my top 20 falling into this particular genre.
I’ve just started reading Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, and it’s set at a “mediocre university” in New York, and I’ve already woken up my wife by laughing too hard while reading in bed. It’s headed for the list for sure.
Not surprising, really. I’m a nearing-middle-aged college teacher and writer. I’m a white guy 10 pounds heavier than I’d wish. This is my tribe. When I see them on the page, I think, I know them, and in return, I imagine that they know me.
Kevin: I realize now that in my haste to make a probably obvious point about the casual ways in which we classify and prejudge books, I neglected to mention that I really liked That Old Cape Magic. Russo’s writing is effortless, as you’d expect, and contains a great deal of humor and truth. By calling it genre I certainly didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t good. My own first novel was about a doctor who clones his daughter’s unknown killer, and my second involves a civil war fought among the modern-day disciples of a religious cult founded by Pythagoras. I almost named my first son “Genre.” Even now I’m imaging a section of shelves in Barnes & Noble labeled “Campus Novels” with all of those great books you mentioned on it. It’s right next to the shelf labeled, “First Novels by New Yorkers About New Yorkers Writing First Novels (And Looking for Love).”
John: Maybe Nic Brown is right and Kamila Shamsie deserves the nod because of Burnt Shadows’s “scope and prose,” but I had a different reaction, which is that it’s the only book of the tourney that was an outright turkey. The entire plot is preposterous, somehow managing to shoehorn several generations of a truly international family into pivotal historical events that also happen to reflect themes of colonialism and white privilege. It’s not that a young Japanese survivor of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki couldn’t make her way to colonial India, where she meets and falls in love with the native servant of a privileged British couple, it’s just that there’s nothing on the page that made me believe these two somehow fell in love for any reason except that the author needed these two characters to intertwine to later be able to make some kind of political point. I’m sympathetic to the message of the book, but I would’ve preferred it in essay format, rather than something masquerading as a novel.
And for all that nice prose, that didactic dialog made me want to throw the book out the window, which would have been expensive, because I was reading it on my Kindle. The marionette strings extending from author to characters are thick as rope. At one point one character actually says to the other, “Dammit man, you should have known better than to stand watching a woman while she undresses.”
This character was not Leonard “Bones” McCoy and he was not saying it to James T. Kirk.
So, yeah, That Old Cape Magic doesn’t do a heck of a lot to revivify some of the well-worn tropes of its genre, and a book covering the midlife crisis of a privileged white male is about as original as writing about vampires and werewolves with six-pack abs, but at least no one said, “dammit man.”
Kevin: Once again, we both called this one wrong. We each had That Old Cape Magic ranked above Burnt Shadows, but I had Burnt Shadows finishing higher than you did. In our two-man confidence pool, my lead increases just a bit, to 37-29.
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