Egobating

I was having trouble putting my finger on what was so disappointing about Hanif Kureishi's bildungsroman The Black Album until I read oursin's latest entry. That's exactly it: all the other characters are props in in the protagonist's morality play, which is a deeply familiar one about the struggle between Freedom (artistic and personal notions conflated in order to dignify the latter) and Responsibility. Kureishi creates structural variation by providing a third pole, so instead of just being Family vs Fun (in the form of a free-spirited female, natch), there's also a cadre of true believers championing the race representing Politics.

But, c'mon, what are the chances a literary author is going to write a semi-autobiographical novel where the protagonist says "no" to artistic fulfillment in favour of either becoming a religious fanatic or going back to work in the family business? Without a convincing central dilemma to provide tension, what's left is a lot of incident padded out with plenty of adolescent agony. Well, I guess there is the question of "Will he get the girl?" but since she didn't register as a fully-fleshed character, I found it difficult to care. Fully half the novel takes place inside the main character's head, and it's just not that interesting a place.

As an aside, for a work that's so clearly set in a particular place and time (i.e. London during the Second Summer of Love), there's some odd vagueness about some of the background events. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie is a turning point, but the bombing of Victoria Station sounds incredibly like the one which happened two years to the day later in 1991. The narrator talks abstractedly about the group responsible as if there were any number of terrorist groups setting bombs in tube stations at the time as opposed to basically one. But I suppose it adds more menace to an amateurish cadre of book-burning Islamists to suggest some real capability for murder and mayhem.

In trying to figure out what I need to do to break this recent string of disappointing novels, I've been considering to what degree I'm making the same mistakes while hoping for different results. Sensation was such a bracing change of pace, I've been wondering if I should try more "genre" novels. But then Kawamata's Death sentences was more of a slog than Kureishi. Maybe I need to steer clear of NYT bestsellers and other "worthy" books? But Wolf Hall was terrific. I've been making an effort to avoid middle-aged white male authors, but that hasn't helped much. There's just no escaping a lot of trial and error, is there?

So now I've pulled out Mai Jia's 《解密》 (translated by Olivia Milburn as Decoded) and Yan Jianke's 《丁庄夢》 (Dream of Ding Village in Cindy Carter's translation). The former was reviewed favourably by the Economist and got a low pass from monshu; the first couple chapters didn't grab me, but they're all backstory anyhow. Yan caught my attention right off the back with a dead child narrator, but it remains to be seen if he's as deft at crafting rural family drama as Mo Yan or Su Tong.