Arcadia v. How Should a Person Be?
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MARCH 18, 2013 • OPENING ROUND
Arcadia
v. How Should a Person Be?
Judged by D.T. Max
Jack Hitt writes for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. He is also a contributor to public radio’s This American Life. His most recent book, Bunch of Amateurs, is coming out in paperback this May. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “None.”
In Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler, he tells a stunning anecdote about the noted director of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann, trying to silence an Auschwitz survivor who would be speaking about Hitler. Lanzmann, who once gave a talk called “The Obscenity of Understanding,” believed that any attempt to explain pure evil was to belittle its horror.
It’s a thought-provoking idea, sort of the opposite of the rabbinical acknowledgement that even thinking the name of God is an act of arrogance, and so always spelling Y*HW*H without all the letters. Describing evil, Lanzmann was saying, required a comparably dangerous kind of hubris.
You can feel that hesitation in every sentence of Laurent Binet’s novel, HHhH. The plot tells the story of the successful effort by two parachutists in the Czech resistance in World War II to assassinate the Third Reich’s most efficiently lethal functionary, the much-nicknamed man known as the “Young Evil God of Death,” the bureaucrat in charge of the Final Solution—Himmler’s right hand man, Reinhard Heydrich. Binet’s title is a German abbreviation of this latter claim.
The basic outline of the story has all the elements of a true-life thriller and, when it happened early on in the war, in 1942, the assassination became the first great blow against the Nazi war with the world. The book is described as historical fiction, although from the very beginning, there’s a clear sense that the narrator (who may or may not be Binet) is struggling to get past the facts of history, which are scattered throughout the book like so many term-paper index cards, constantly being held up for the reader to regard as possibly true. Or not.
For instance, the assassins manage to get a grenade to blow up the side door of the Mercedes, causing the shrapnel wounds that will eventually kill Heydrich. There are several riffs in the book devoted to whether the Mercedes was black or green. There is a photo, the manic narrator tells us, but it’s in black and white. And the replica found in a Czech museum is black but there are rumors that it could have been a dark green. Binet’s narrator worries mightily about this, finally resolving nothing and adding, “Anyway, I’m probably attaching too much importance to what is, at the end of the day, just a background detail. I know that. In fact it’s a classic symptom of neurosis. I must be anal-retentive. Let’s move on…”
The tone of the narrator’s offstage whispers comes off, eventually, as stiffly posed, and can range from querulous to snarking to twee. They are like those imitators of David Foster Wallace who riddle their story with sardonic footnotes, full of winking ironies; after a while, it just seems like a whole lot of winking. Sometimes the narrator can sound like a sophomore in a lit class: “Sometimes I feel like a character in a Borges story.”
Even the weedy issues of how to tell the story persistently emerge amid its shards. At one point, the narrator reads a novel related to his story and marvels at a blunt transition sentence that reads, “1920 had just begun.” The narrator adds, “I think that’s brilliant.” A few pages later, a riff on Heydrich’s early life ends, “It is November 9, 1918.”
Whether the narrator can attain the momentum to get past the Lanzmann caution and tell us a story is more often the source of suspense in HHhH than the covert op to kill the Butcher of Prague.
I know, I know, these little squalls of uncertainty are postmodern meta-cris de coeur, pulling back the veil of historical fiction and revealing the grubby con game that lies at the heart of nonfiction, which ultimately is meant to make us do the work of constructing the historical fiction in our own heads. We become the authors, in a sense, of the historical novel. Yeah, I get that.
But in the guts of this story is a breathtaking thriller and we never get to be simply seized by the details of it. The ferocious Nazi known as the “Blond Beast” is driving to work one June morning in an open-air Mercedes sedan because Heydrich thought he was invincible and that the Czech people loved him. His driver comes to a hairpin curve and is forced to slow down. At which point, two resistance fighters, one Slovak and one Czech, who had parachuted in weeks earlier from London, leap out at the car. Let’s name these men: Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. One jumps out and begins firing a machine gun right at Heydrich, but the machine gun jams. Not a single bullet fires. Heydrich and his driver draw their weapons and begin firing. Meanwhile, the other parachutist tosses a bomb and blows bits of the Mercedes into Heydrich, such that later surgeons will be removing horsehair upholstery from his Nazi flesh (a series of procedures that ultimately fail), and, septic, the man known as The Hangman dies. Meanwhile, the two parachutists miraculously escape, and Hitler, enraged, suspects the village of Lidice of complicity. In a single day, the men of Lidice are exterminated and the others deported to camps (including four pregnant women who are forced to have abortions and then sent on). The village is burned to the ground. Lidice becomes a shibboleth for the rest of the world, the single word that first served as the vessel of all Nazi evil. The two escapees are eventually found hiding in a church crypt. Trapped, they kill themselves.
It’s as close to a true heroic epic as there ever could be, and yet the snarky rhetorical apostrophes about history are, finally, frustrating, because some part of any reader yearns to be seduced by story. Early on in the novel, you begin to feel like you’ve crawled in bed with a beautiful but chatty mistress who is constantly asking about your needs and what do you like and is this good for you, so that you just want to tell her to “shut up and fuck me already.”
In this way, Hilary Mantel is Mae West. With Bring Up the Bodies, she’s luring you in from the first sentence: “His children are falling from the sky.” Soon enough, we learn that these children are the battling, wounded falcons belonging to the regal minister, Thomas Cromwell. “All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying…” The images of predators, bloodied from conflict, coming home to roost, transports us, with its spell, back to 1535 and Henry VIII’s court when the king is beheading wives, slaughtering Catholics, overbooking the Tower of London, founding a church, and planning some future wars. It’s a time when Henry was obsessed with his own (non-existent) children and with the many things that would soon plunge to the ground like falcons in a helpless stoop. The mise en scene is historically familiar and turns on the life of this other, efficient bureaucrat, Henry’s evil hatchet man: Cromwell.
Also like Binet, Mantel obsesses on the details of history, but who can care if she’s accurate in the strict journalistic sense when she can shape a sentence like this one, a description of Anne’s father: “He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself”? Ooooh, baby, baby, what a sentence. As Binet would say, “I think that’s brilliant”—and that’s not just my meta-anal retention talking.
At one point, Cromwell is speaking to Anne’s brother, whom he will be maneuvering into a charge of incest and ultimately dooming to death. Cromwell can’t help but notice how nice all his clothes look. Mantel indulges in some easy symbolism, having Cromwell observe that Boleyn “wears white velvet over red silk, scarlet rippling from each gash.” Nice, but Mantel lets the image bloom in your head, a time-lapse of layered metaphor. Suddenly, Cromwell recalls the image of a “saint being flayed alive” that he once saw. “The skin of the man’s calves was folded neatly over his ankles, like soft boots…”
Did Cromwell really think this way? Did men of standing actually wear velvet fringe in the 16th century? Is there really a martyr flayed in this way? It’s hard to ask those questions when Mantel seduces you into a moment like that one. With any piece of historical fiction, one is always living both inside and outside the details that are left to us by official chronicles, handed-down memories, the detritus of the time, and oral legends—struggling to balance this and that and the other thing and then to write.
When Cromwell is musing on the ambitious bishop of Winchester, Mantel writes, “When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him. Chairs scuttle backwards. Joint-stools flatten themselves like pissing bitches.”
Marry me.
Advancing:
Bring Up the Bodies
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin: OK, I’m going to confess something. I just didn’t get How Should a Person Be?
You and I discuss books a lot during the year, but we haven’t talked about this one for some reason. Maybe we should have. There’s a lot of overlap in our tastes (with frequent differences in degrees of appreciation) but Heti’s novel strikes me as more of a John book than a Kevin book.
I read the novel without knowing much at all about it, and my impression was—and here’s where I agree with Judge Max—that it was frequently funny, and often insightful. But I just didn’t buy it enough to really care. It felt so mannered and artificial. None of these characters seemed like real people. None of them had jobs that could sustain them, or even hobbies occupy them. Everything the characters did (Go to Miami! Go to New York! I’m going to tape you!) seemed to be motivated by the whim of the author alone.
I’m not always against artifice. The characters in May We Be Forgiven don’t feel real the way my neighbors do, but early on Homes got me to buy into her world and the odd people who inhabit it.
I never felt that with this novel. The dialogue doesn’t sound like people talking. Nothing much happens, and yet the characters spend page after page explaining it all to each other. They speak with a self-awareness that is beyond the grasp of any actual people I know, yet they act as if they have no self-awareness at all.
Like this part, where Sheila and Margaux are discussing their Miami hotel:
“Well, you went to the bathroom, and you saw this daddy longlegs there. And I was like, Do you want me to throw it out the window? But you said, No, let’s keep it. Spiders are good. I would have thrown it out, but you said let’s not, so we agreed that we just didn’t want it to wind up in our bed. We would keep our bathroom door closed the entire time. That way, the spider would stay in the bathroom and not crawl into our bed, which would be really disgusting.
“Anyway,” she went on, “pretty soon you started to like it. You developed feelings for it. Like, whenever you went to the bathroom, you would look for it, and when you spotted it you’d speak to it. Sometimes it was in the tub, sometimes it was on the ceiling sometimes it was sitting on the shower curtain. Then, after leaving the bathroom, you would say good-bye and close the door. You ended up becoming pretty affectionate with it.”
“It became like a pet,” I offered. “I remember that.”
“Not something you could control, but something you could love. But if it had left the bathroom and invaded the bedroom, you probably wouldn’t have liked it so much. But keeping it in the bathroom allowed you to love it. Keeping it in there was a sign that you loved it.”
“Right.”
“Then, on our last night there, we forgot to close the bathroom door—we were so drunk—and in the morning you woke up and it was beside your leg, and without even thinking, you smashed it under your hand.”
“I remember,” I said, uneasy.
“Well, that’s like you buying the same dress as me. I’m doing a lot, what with letting you tape me, but—boundaries, Sheila. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.”
I am going to give a pass to the fact that two grown women apparently are unaware that a daddy longlegs can crawl under a door if it wants. Harder for me to forgive is that this conversation takes place at all. People just do not describe in great detail to one other shared experiences from their recent past. Because the other would always say, I was there, dude, get to the point. That conversation (as well as many others) occurs not for Sheila-the-character’s, benefit, but for the reader’s. These characters felt like puppets to me, and I could always see the author’s lips moving.
(Not to workshop the novel, but to Heti’s credit I think this would have been a moving scene if it didn’t happen in dialogue. If the spider thing just happened, and nobody explained what it meant immediately afterward, I would have felt like I was actually being shown something about one of the characters, rather than just being told something about her.)
Still, Heti’s been publishing novels (and acclaimed ones at that) longer than I have, and I can tell from her prose that she knows what she’s doing, so I know I’m missing something, right? Looking for a guide, I sought out some very positive reviews, and I discovered many of the characters in this book are actual friends of the real Sheila Heti. And that the dialogue is supposed to be based on real conversations they had. And that the book (subtitled “A Novel From Life”) was apparently a product of Heti’s having tired of writing novels where things are made up.
I would like to do the right thing and judge this book on Heti’s terms, not mine. In yesterday’s match I said I hate knocking an author for writing a different book than the one I wanted her to write. But on Heti’s terms, this book makes even less sense to me. The more I read about it, the more confused I became about what she was trying to do.
I didn’t find it lifelike (to use Judge Max’s word) in the least. What’s wrong with me, John? Is Toronto so exotic? Could my experience with other human beings be so unlike Heti’s that her real experiences seem phony to me?
John: I came at this book from the other end of the spectrum, in that I knew far too much about it before I started reading, and what I’d heard made me think I wouldn’t care for it. I knew that a lot of it was based on the actual conversations of actual artist friends of Sheila Heti, and that didn’t sound good to me. I like writers and artists fine, and I’m a big fan of writing and art, but I prefer my writing and art, and the talking about writing and art, to be two separate things.
But you know what? I really enjoyed the book, whatever it is. I think it’s funny and also raw, and I swallowed it down in a couple of large gulps. I don’t even know why, since there’s no plot, the contest over who can create the ugliest painting being the only real tension looming over the entire narrative.
At The New Republic, Adam Kirsch lumps Heti in with other writers he labels the “new essayists” (David Sedaris, Sloane Crosley, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and our semifinal judge Davy Rothbart). He says that “the new essay is exclusively about the self, with the world serving only as a foil and an accessory, as a mere staging ground for the projection of the self.”
That seems about right to me. Even the title of How Should a Person Be? suggests a view where life is a kind of performance. The Sheila Heti of the novel is undergoing a search for a kind of genuine self, but she seems to want other people to recognize her for it, as though our selves are something we wear outside our bodies and project into the world.
It seems to be the kind of book that reflects the influence of reality television or social media. Who you are is who you appear to be to other people. How Should a Person Be? is about a Sheila Heti who lives her life in a world governed by the observer-expectancy effect.
It makes for an interesting read, though I don’t think I want to read a ton of books like it. It also seems like living life this way would be absolutely exhausting. It’s a funny book, but this gives it plenty of dark undertones.
I wonder if Heti’s method is what David Shields has in mind when he says we should ditch conventional novels and turn to these sorts of hybrid remixes.
Kevin: That actually helps. This is a case where my expectations were in a battle with the text, right? I was starting from a place where it was really difficult to put this novel in any kind of context, and I was led even further astray by the reviews I read of it. I was trying to follow directions on a GPS device that had the wrong coordinates for my car. If you look at Heti’s book as an attempt to take real people and conversations and then stylize them in a fictional (or meta-fictional, I suppose) way, I can get on board with that effort. It doesn’t get me to a point where I can say I love the book, but I think I can understand it from here.
John: I looked at How Should a Person Be? as the longest of shots, but here it gets past a beautifully written, very traditional work of literary fiction.
I chose Arcadia as this year’s entrant that I’d try to experience via audiobook. I’ve written in past years how I’m generally ill-suited to audiobooks, apparently being dreamy-headed when listening to someone else’s stories and lapsing into thinking about my own. (Maybe this is the remixing Shields is talking about.)
But I’ve found two activities that lend themselves to audiobook listening: jogging and vacuuming. Unfortunately, I don’t do either as often as I should, so after a month of listening I’m just under halfway done with Arcadia, and a good 12 pounds still above my goal weight.
I think it was a good choice for audio in that Groff’s writing is deeply sensual. She’s constantly telling me how things smell, taste, and feel. On the other hand, at least thus far, the novel seems to lack incident. I’ve experienced it as a series of beautiful little vignettes, with some small bits of story piling up. Whenever it’s time to go back, I’m pleased to be recast into Groff’s world, but it’s not pulling me by the collar down into the narrative.
I’m wondering how much of this is the audio format. I’m guessing that I’ve listened to about 150 pages’ worth, something I would’ve done in a couple of days under normal circumstances. The lack of incident may simply be a function of being forced to take the story in at the pace dictated by the narrator.
Even though it’s eliminated, and feels like a longshot for the Zombie, I’ll be listening to Arcadia until the end.
Kevin: I’ll admit my opinion about How Should a Person Be? was likely colored by my affection for Arcadia, and I’ll confess that even this opinion is not entirely objective. Lauren Groff grew up down the street from me. She is probably a decade younger, so it would have been Wes Anderson-movie weird if we had hung out back then, but I think I understand her the way any two people who grew up on the same street in the same small town do.
I enjoyed Lauren’s first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, a lot—it took place, after all, virtually in my parents’ front yard. But Arcadia seems like a big step forward from that earlier book. Her trippy, dreamlike prose perfectly captures the nostalgia we’re supposed to have for this imperfect utopia. You’re still listening, so I won’t ruin the bootlegger turn it makes at the end, but it was unexpected and, for me, just right. As a reader, I’m sorry to see it out.
But as a commentarian, it is exciting to see (what is for me) an upset in a tourney that has so far gone pretty much according to form. (I’m not really counting a victory by the über-popular John Green, even if he was a four-seed going up against a National Book Award winner.)
We have a little bit of business as the opening round comes to a close and we get ready for tomorrow’s quarterfinal match between The Fault in Our Stars and The Orphan Master’s Son: Today we get our first peek at the Zombie results.
For those who are new to this, several weeks ago we asked TMN readers and ToB fans to tell us what book was their favorite among the 18 novels on the shortlist. Those votes were counted, and once we narrow the field down to a pair, the two reader favorites from among those books eliminated in the tourney will rise again to take on the undefeated novels. The winners of those two matches will move on to the championship.
If the Zombie Round were held today, the two books that would fight their way back into the running—that is, the two most popular novels from those eliminated so far—would be Lauren Groff’s Arcadia and Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (in no particular order). That could change, of course, as more books get bounced from the bracket, and we will revisit those standings every day from here on out.
And before we wrap up the opening round entirely, John and I would like to invite ToB co-founder (and author/TMN editor) Rosecrans Baldwin to announce a fun contest.
Rosecrans: Hi everyone. Here’s the deal. We’ve got a one-day contest, with two prizes. To enter, leave a note in the comments below before 9 a.m. Eastern tomorrow, March 19, 2013, that contains:
Which two (2) titles you think will make the Championship
The winner and the final vote tally (out of 17)
So an entry could look like this: “Contest entry: In the Championship, Title One by Jane Doe v. Title Two by John Doe. Title 1 is the winner, 12-5.”
Only one entry per person. John and Kevin will announce the winner in the booth on the final day of the Tournament, March 29, 2013. If more than one person predicts correctly, we’ll choose randomly from that group. The winner will receive a brand-freaking-new NOOK HD+ e-reader from The Morning News. Whoever comes in second, we’ll send you a $25 gift card to Barnes & Noble.
Good luck. Long live the Rooster.
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