Anita Desai is a wonderfully subtle writer who achieves her powerful and poignant effects by stealth rather than by direct action. Her latest novel, “Fasting, Feasting,” a finalist for last year’s Booker Prize, tells the apparently spare story of one Indian family and the varying fates of its two daughters and single son; it is only on the novel’s final, quiet page that Desai’s intricate structure becomes clear and the complexity of her emotional insight makes itself felt.
She opens her story with a busy domestic scene, as the parents — who have such a fused authority that they are often referred to simply as MamaPapa — fussily ask whether daughter Uma has given orders to the cook and prepared a package for son Arun, who is studying in America. In the novel’s present tense, Uma is a gray-haired spinster living under MamaPapa’s demanding rule. In flashbacks scattered through the novel’s first part, we gradually see how Uma arrived at this imprisoned state.
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Uma is an eager, thwarted character of genuine pathos: Clumsy, nearsighted, slow, she is treated with neglectful impatience by her parents and with some condescension by her smart and pretty younger sister, Aruna. Her greatest happinesses occur in moments of near oblivion, as when she succumbs to a fit in an ashram to which her pious Aunt Mira-Masi has taken her (the fit is interpreted as possession by the Lord), or when she nearly drowns in the Ganges during a religious ritual but is saved, much to her dismay, by scolding relatives.
Uma resembles the good, frustrated woman in a Victorian novel, which is unsurprising given this family’s traditional structure. When Arun is born, the family’s resources are poured into his physical and intellectual nourishment. For the girls, the sole future is marriage. The arranged marriages produce their own painful comedy when Uma proves difficult to pair off: “Mama worked hard at trying to dispose of Uma, sent her photograph around to everyone who advertised … but it was always returned with the comment ‘We are looking for someone taller/fairer/more educated, for Sanju/Pinku/Dimpu.’” Twice the family is duped into handing over a dowry as part of an unsuccessful engagement — a shame that clings to Uma forever after, though she is blameless in both situations. Inevitably, Aruna’s marriage is a glamorous triumph, taking her off to a new metropolitan life in Bombay.
Although perpetually cheated of opportunities — a benign doctor’s attempt to give Uma a simple job is swiftly quashed by MamaPapa — Uma is not jealous of her siblings, exactly. When Arun receives his longed-for acceptance from an American university, Uma notices her brother’s blank joylessness: “All the years of scholarly toil had worn down any distinguishing features Arun’s face might once have had.” With a deft touch, Desai shows us that MamaPapa’s ambitions for Arun are as stifling as their lack of ambition for Uma, and that Uma’s brief spiritual ecstasies have given her moments of self-expression that Arun has yet to enjoy.
Two-thirds of the way through “Fasting, Feasting,” the narrative abruptly shifts to present-tense Boston, where gloomy Arun is spending his own captive summer lodging with an American family, the Pattons. Though Desai knows Boston (she lives in Cambridge), her footing here does not seem as firm. The Pattons speak an oddly anachronistic American (“India — gee!”) and exist largely to flesh out the metaphors of surfeit and want that are at the heart of Desai’s careful creation. Thus, the Pattons represent excess: The father barbecues great slabs of meat, the mother overfills vast shopping carts and the miserable daughter binges on endless candy bars. Arun is comically appalled by these physical and emotional hungers; if the contrast with India seems overschematized, his wistful, belated appreciation of home comforts is real and vivid.
“Fasting, Feasting” is a novel not of plot but of comparison. In beautifully detailed prose Desai draws the foods and textures of an Indian small town and of an American suburb. In both, she suggests, family life is a complex mixture of generosity and meanness, license and restriction: The novel’s subtle revelation is in the unlikely similarities. In one dark moment, Arun recognizes in the Pattons’ bulimic daughter a version of his own unhappy sister Uma, and the shock provokes a reflection on these two frustrated women: “But what is plenty? What is not? Can one tell the difference?” Desai’s novel is a moving, eloquent exploration of that question.
Recently, the BBC — known in Britain as “Auntie” because of its reputation as an upright, and uptight, authority figure — came under criticism by the Blair government for its reporting on Kosovo, which was thought to be over-critical of NATO. Auntie’s new recalcitrance marked an interesting distance from its famous heroism during the Second World War, when its radio news broadcasts were a crucial morale-boosting fixture.
Penelope Fitzgerald’s wonderfully subtle comic novel “Human Voices” (just out in the States but originally published in the U.K. in 1988) records life behind the scenes at the wartime BBC. With an acuity that comes from her own work there, Fitzgerald describes the corporation as “a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn’t too sure where next week’s money was coming from.” In the busy corridors of Broadcasting House, where “the air seemed alive with urgency and worry,” the perfectionism of obsessive sound engineers comes up against the improvisations that war-depleted resources necessitate, producing humorous tensions, occasional tantrums and a quietly noble, distinctively British solidarity.
The novel opens with Lise Bernard, one of the young Recorded Program Assistants, whose job is in large part to tend the temperamental director. Both Lise and her friend Vi are often thinking of their soldier boyfriends when not bantering with their co-workers, girl-mad Teddy and idealistic Willie. Lise, who can’t get on with the director, is eventually replaced by the late-appearing Annie, a stalwart 17-year-old who finds her employer rather more engaging — so much so that she falls for him.
As always, Fitzgerald is a master of the detail. She delights in reproducing the complex code world of initialed departments; the two main bosses, who have an intricate interdependency, are generally referred to as RPD (the Recorded Program Director) and DPP (the Director of Program Planning). Fitzgerald has a keen memory of the sense of deprivation — of street light on a London night walk, of the sweet taste of unobtainable oranges. (An American broadcaster brings some to the RPAs as a gift.) She vividly describes the ways buildings were transformed to accommodate new situations: A concert hall is converted to a coed dormitory for those working late shifts, a place where “newcomers clambered and felt about in search of an empty corner, swarming across the others like late returns to a graveyard before cockcrow.”
Fitzgerald is one of the finest living English writers, and readers acquainted only with her prize-winning historical novel of Germany, “The Blue Flower,” will relish encountering her on her home territory. Her beautifully economic fictions are always alive with meticulous, surprising phrases, whether she’s conveying the expectant dread in England in 1940, when invasion seemed imminent, or writing about something more pragmatic, such as workers carrying on “with the exalted remorselessness characteristic of anyone who starts moving furniture.” She includes comic episodes that reveal the occasional tensions that arose between the dutiful BBC and the wartime government. But the aim of this artful novel is above all to record the noble work and restless play of those whose admirable goal was “scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe.”
“I am a person who has no faith. I’m over. That’s that,” announces Mrs.
Brindle of Glasgow to cybernetics professor Edward E. Gluck. The two are
the central characters in the funny, affecting new novel by acclaimed
Scottish writer A.L. Kennedy. Mrs. Brindle’s God has abandoned her for no
reason, and the loss has left her distraught, up nights watching
educational television in order to distract herself from the empty night —
and from the sinister, violent attentions of Mr. Brindle.
It is on television that Mrs. Brindle first sees Gluck, chatting
in a friendly way about masturbation and a form of EST-like personal
improvement called the Process. Struck by his theories, Mrs. Brindle
travels to Stuttgart to waylay him at a conference and seek his help. Gluck
offers her a few lines of self-help wisdom, and that might have been that,
if it weren’t for the odd spark that lights between these two stray souls,
who find in each other someone who recognizes the experience of being
“numb; absent but functioning.”
It is only after Mrs. Brindle — Helen, eventually — comes to trust Edward
as a spiritual friend that she learns the distressing source of the
professor’s numbness: He is severely addicted to hardcore pornography.
Though it fills him with self-disgust, he has to interrupt his busy lecture
schedule frequently to jerk off to violent videos and magazines. His
confession of this to Helen horrifies her, and she returns to Glasgow from
their chaste Stuttgart encounters determined to remain faithful to the
terrible Mr. Brindle, who not only hits her but also mocks her for her
questions of faith.
How Edward and Helen lead each other out of their differently painful
plights forms the narrative of this risky, moving fiction. Helen is wary of
her feelings for Edward, realizing “that damaged people often sought each
other out and fell in love with their mutual diseases, to the detriment or
destruction of their hopes and personalities.” From early on, however, the
reader has faith that Edward and Helen are meant for each other; if there’s
a weakness to the novel, it’s that this conviction comes perhaps too
easily, and that Edward’s transition from porn addict to gentle, patient
savior has an improbable glow about it.
But these are small qualms about a book that is alive with an edgy,
original language and dark comedy. (“Changing guards and ravens and the
homelessly mad — that was the capital,” is Helen’s summary of a brief
spell she spends in London.) Kennedy has a beautiful way with the lonely
and the bereft, and a keen sense of the pleasurable strangenesses of
sexuality. She writes with a vivid synesthesia: The whites of Edward’s eyes
“blare loudly”; Helen experiences “a pale, metallic sensation in her
limbs.” Kennedy’s rare gifts have been evident in her four earlier
prize-winning fictions, and her publication in the United States is long overdue.
Along with her peers Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner, she is part of a group
of writers who suggest that Scotland is, these days, home of the literary
brave.
It was the bookies, rather than the book commentators, who were right about the Booker this year. The man who sets the odds for William Hill, the licensed betting office, thought from the start that Ian McEwan had the best chance of winning Britain’s most prestigious literary prize for “Amsterdam,” a short political fable. Interviewed on television last night on his way into the Booker awards dinner at London’s Guild Hall, the bookmaker explained how the U.K.’s critics had gotten squarely behind Beryl Bainbridge for her Crimean War novel, “Master Georgie,” thus edging Bainbridge into the position of favorite.
Hold on.
“Bookmaker interviewed on television on the way into a literary awards dinner”? Try parsing that sentence in American terms — betting? on a book prize? that’s televised? — and it makes no sense at all. To understand it you have to realize that in Britain books are glamorous, television is high culture and gambling has a fond, permanent place in the national heart. (BBC Radio’s highbrow morning news program gives a racing tip daily to its listeners. I am waiting for this broadcasting scandal to be exposed.) The pages of newsprint devoted to the “horse race” that is Britain’s Booker Prize give prominent place to the bookies’ odds, right up to the day of decision.
It is fair to say that the Booker Prize has a prominence in London’s cultural calendar akin to that of the Oscars in Los Angeles. On the weekend before the prize, literary editors at many newspapers speculated rather pointlessly about the preferences of the judges, the way people do about the Academy: who might get the sympathy vote (that would be four times-shortlisted Beryl Bainbridge, who has never won); who might be the dark horse (first novelist Magnus Mills, who has been tagged “the bus driver novelist,” though “The Restraint of Beasts” has nothing to do with buses); or whether Ian McEwan might win on the Al Pacino “Scent of a Woman” model, for a novel generally agreed to be less than his best, but in recognition of the fact that he should have won for “The Godfather.” I mean: for “Black Dogs” or “The Comfort of Strangers,” both of which made earlier shortlists.
And if the ceremony is not watched by millions around the globe, as the Oscars are, it is watched by devotees of Channel Four, which this year offered hours of Booker coverage and a roundtable discussion on the eve of the prize in addition to the live broadcast of the ceremonies themselves. Both were chaired by benevolent pouffy-haired arts programmer Melvyn Bragg — a good leftie recently awarded a peerage by the Blair government. The preview program featured Germaine Greer scoffing at the Booker Prize as merely a successful marketing ploy, and Edmund White making a polite argument for the prize to be opened up to Americans, who are the single English-speaking group not eligible for the prize.
The show on the night itself is an uneasy bit of cultural theater. What could be less televisual than a literary dinner? It’s not as though the camera can scan the audience, looking for stars; so instead we have Melvyn and a panel discussing the shortlisted books one by one, intercut with occasional shots of the Guild Hall, where 400 literati in black tie are “sawing away at their duck,” as one commentator put it. “From the floor” we have occasional interviews with, for instance, Tim Waterstone, owner of Britain’s most successful bookstore chain, who revels cheerfully in the fact that Booker winners’ sales increase by five- or sixfold; or with Chris Smith, Blair’s minister of culture (why don’t we have one of those?), who says with a politician’s enthusiasm, “I hope this prize will encourage more people to get out and read!” — a curiously active formulation.
Around the table, the commentators were merciless. If in America our anxiety is about “dumbing down,” in Britain there is a legitimate concern about what might be called “smartening up”: critics who so delight in their knack for the putdown that they find little joy in praising anything. When commentator Robert Harris, author of “Fatherland,” gamely tried to defend Martin Booth’s “The Industry of Souls,” an uplifting story about the gulags (all right, it did sound fairly dodgy), he was all but sneered off the screen, causing him to protest, “Oh, you’re all so metropolitan!” Savage satirist Will Self, who has never himself been shortlisted for the prize, took pleasure in dismissing Julian Barnes’ “England, England” as suffering from the “terrible English problem of whimsy and niceness,” and McEwan’s “Amsterdam,” which, he growled, was too short to be a novel and should be called “a screenel” or “a novplay.” Self and Harris proceeded to get into a comical tussle over the transvestite narrator of Irishman Patrick McCabe’s “Breakfast on Pluto” (“After ‘The Crying Game,’ the tranny Troubles story could be considered a genre of its own,” Self said.) But all, including Melvyn, agreed that Beryl — lyrical, witty, economical Beryl — really ought to win.
Poor Beryl. “Always the bridesmaid …” as more than a few headlines had it when she lost. But as the chairman of this year’s Booker judges, former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd (picture James Baker handing over the Pulitzer and you have an idea of the strangeness of it) announced that McEwan had won the prize, “a gasp” went up in the Guild Hall, according to today’s scandalized papers, and another Booker legend was born.
It happens every year. Regardless of the outcome — whether the winner is populist Roddy Doyle or obscure literary craftsman James Kelman — someone is outraged, someone has been disappointed. The ritual is in the handwringing. McEwan’s “Amsterdam,” which received very good reviews just weeks ago (novelist Alain de Botton described it as “a pitiless study of the darker aspects of male psychology”), is suddenly bemoaned as thin and unworthy. McEwan himself was graceful in success, as Bainbridge was in defeat: The two exchanged an affectionate hug, and McEwan described her as having “a great heart.” Will Self was not so gracious. “The decision stinks,” he said bluntly. “It’s a shabby compromise.” But that’s the English for you: afraid to tell you what they really think.
