Joyce Carol Oates– My Sister, My Love
October 20, 2008
Sibling devilry
Stephen Amidon enjoys – and endures – a rigorous restaging of an infamous American murder
- The Guardian,
- Saturday October 18 2008
The unsolved 1996 murder of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey remains one of the most bizarre episodes in American crime. It is a mystery that has deepened with the recent death of JonBenet’s mother and DNA tests that exonerate the parents. Police incompetence, family secrets, a little girl dolled up to appear dangerously mature – the whole episode has always smacked more of fiction than the real world.
Joyce Carol Oates straddles this blurred line between reality and make-believe in her sprawling new novel. The eponymous hero, Skyler Rampike, is not, as you might expect, the murdered girl, but rather her nine-year-old brother. (JonBenet had a nine-year-old brother at the time of her death.) The book is Skyler’s memoir, told a decade after the crime, as he combats drug addiction and bad memories while living alone in a dingy New Jersey flat. Among a host of afflictions, he suffers from Repetitive Compulsion Syndrome, which manifests itself as “my helpless need to repeat, re-view, and re-vise certain episodes from my past/my sister’s past ad nauseum”.
The first half of the book comprises his account of the years leading up to his sister’s demise. In an upper middle-class family, Skyler is at first the apple of his mother Betsey’s socially ambitious eye. He is less pleasing to his macho father, Bix, especially after he settles upon gymnastics as his sport of choice. After a tumble leaves Skyler with a crippled leg, his sister, Edna Louise, displays a knack for figure skating. Her name is changed to Bliss, cosmetics are applied and coaches from the former Soviet Union are hired. Bliss becomes a mini-celebrity.
And then the unthinkable happens: her battered body is found in a sexually suggestive pose in the family basement. Suspicion first falls on a local paedophile, who confesses and commits suicide. But Skyler hints that the real culprit may be closer to home. “One day, Skyler has to reveal all he knows of his sister Bliss’s life/death. It is Skyler Rampike’s responsibility.”
Before that revelation comes, Oates provides a lavish, cynical portrait of family dysfunction in the money-and-celebrity-crazed 1990s. Bix and Betsey are simply monstrous. Her social ambition is so acute that she writes pyramidal lists targeting her affluent suburb’s most desirable “old” families for strategic friendship. After being rebuffed, she goes after them using her famous daughter, who she pushes to the point of physical and emotional collapse with training and performance-enhancing drugs. Betsey embodies one of the truths of contemporary American public life: fame trumps money, every time. Bix, who works, appropriately enough, in the pharmaceuticals industry, is little more than a rutting pig who hardly seems to notice he has children, especially when there’s a tart in sight. Though the couple provide eerie fascination when we first meet them, they soon wear out their welcome; Oates is guilty of overkill.
This leaves the children. While Bliss is a cipher – how could she be anything else? – the depiction of Skyler gives the book its considerable power. His voice is a memorable portrait of contemporary American jetsam – sly, wounded, unruly, but oddly credible. Shuffled among exclusive “prep schools” that are little more than dressed-up psychiatric hospitals, Skyler somehow manages to survive. He even undertakes a love affair with a fellow refugee from a celebrity crime family, a liaison Oates, brilliantly, has Skyler write in the form of a teen romance novel. While Skyler’s eventual naming of the guilty party provides narrative satisfaction, the novel’s real achievement is the narrator’s ability to salvage a remnant of his self from the wreckage that the American family can become.
• Stephen Amidon’s Human Capital is published by Penguin. To order My Sister, My Love for £11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
David Lodge – Deaf Sentence
October 5, 2008
New York Times
October 5, 2008
Say What?
By STEPHEN AMIDON
DEAF SENTENCE
By David Lodge
294 pp. Viking. $25.95.
“Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic.” So claims Desmond Bates, the retired professor of linguistics who narrates David Lodge’s 13th novel, “Deaf Sentence.” Bates certainly has the authority to make such an epigrammatic pronouncement — for the last 20 years, he has been inexorably slipping into a state of “high frequency deafness,” which causes him to miss (among other things) consonants as he listens to others speak. The result is that his life is becoming one long conversational pratfall, in which the simplest statement can embroil the somewhat pompous academic in low farce.
The biggest of these tumbles comes in the novel’s opening chapter as Bates attends an art exhibition in the northern English city where he lives. While there, he fails to catch most of what is said to him by Alex Loom, a charming but unstable young American woman who is researching her dissertation at Bates’s former university. After missing the appointment he never knew they’d made, Bates visits the attractive blonde’s apartment, where she asks him to supervise her work on the linguistics of suicide notes. As an inducement, she secretly slips a pair of her underpants into the prevaricating professor’s raincoat. Fortunately for Bates, he is able to hide their discovery from his wife, Fred (short for Winifred), an interior decorator who was once a student of Bates’s.
When he complains to Alex about her behavior, she offers to let him spank her. He refuses (though it’s a close call), whereupon she asks him to write a “pseudicide note,” or fake suicide note, which she can then combine with actual notes as a way of testing the public’s ability to identify the real thing. By the time Alex shows up unexpectedly at Fred’s Boxing Day party, the novel seems ready to turn into a full-blown tale of closed-captioned fatal attraction.
Lodge propels this story line along with writing that is consistently witty, reinforcing that earlier assertion about the comic potential of hearing impairment. “One thing we deafies can do at a party is give people a few laughs with our mistakes,” Bates maintains. He has a particular weakness for puns pertaining to his condition. “If only I had heard what she was saying when we first met it would never have started,” he laments about Alex. “Deaf and the maiden, a dangerous combination.” When he learns that she has defaced a library book with a turquoise highlighter, his spluttering outrage is unintentionally hilarious. “I’m afraid I could never trust someone who would make irremovable marks in a library book.”
Unfortunately, having brought the conflict between Bates and Alex to a simmer, Lodge never permits it to boil over. Instead, he abruptly exiles Alex from the story, turning his attention instead to Bates’s attempts to salvage his marriage with Fred. Their trip to an appalling holiday camp called Gladeworld is loaded with comic potential, but winds up being merely glum. The focus then turns to Bates’s relationship with his headstrong, increasingly senile father, a former jazz musician and character actor who refuses to abandon his longtime London home for the high-end assisted-living community where Bates wants to place him. By now, the farce Lodge promised early on has given way to bittersweet domestic drama.
The novel shifts even further into solemnity when Bates embarks on a lecture tour of Poland, where an impulsive trip to Auschwitz sets the stage for a disturbing revelation about the death of Bates’s first wife. Although these scenes can be quietly moving, it is hard not to wish that Lodge had listened to his hero’s dictum and explored the comic potential of his affliction to its bitter end.
Stephen Amidon’s new novel, “Security,” will be published in February.
John Le Carre
October 1, 2008
A most wanted man by John Le Carre – The Sunday Times review
His powerful new novel proves that his narrative power remains reassuringly intact
When the definitive history of the “war on terror “ is written, the complicity of European countries in America’s more extreme enterprises will be one of the sadder chapters. Illegal detention, “extraordinary rendition”, torture and perhaps even murder will headline the charges brought against nations that, until the Twin Towers fell, would have sworn they knew better.
John le Carré examines this toxic collusion in his powerful new novel, A Most Wanted Man. Set in Hamburg, where Mohamed Atta and several of his cohorts planned the 9/11 attacks, it opens with a common sight in “Old Europe” — the arrival of a gaunt, haunted refugee. His name is Issa Karpov, and he is the bastard son of a corrupt Russian colonel and the Chechen woman with whom he fell in love after he raped her (and who was subsequently murdered by her disgraced family).
But Issa is no penniless wretch looking for work at the bottom end of the service industry. The threadbare leather purse he wears around his neck contains the code to a secret bank account established by his now-dead father. Uncertain how to proceed, Issa contacts Annabel Richter, a young German lawyer who works for a foundation that aids displaced persons. She in turn approaches Tommy Brue, the 60-year-old Scottish director of the private bank where Colonel Karpov’s loot is stashed, looking not so much for access to the funds but rather for a benefactor who can help Issa recover from the torture he suffered in Turkish and Russian prisons.
Things get complicated when it emerges that Issa is implicated in attacks by radical Islamic groups. This puts him on the radar of the German security services, who place a grizzled veteran spy named Gunther Bachmann on his case. Bachmann, who adheres to the quaint view that espionage is about gathering information rather than crushing bones, soon suspects the young man’s confessions were simply a means of getting his jailers to loosen the thumbscrews. His superiors do not buy it. Eager to curry favour with their American masters, they see Issa and his new-found wealth as a means of entrapping Dr Abdullah, a charismatic fundraiser for Muslim charities who may be guilty of letting a few pennies of every pound he raises slip into the wrong hands.
As ever, le Carré builds his story’s considerable suspense on character, not fervid action. Issa is a particularly fine creation, a brilliant and promising boy whose mind has been damaged, but not broken, by his terrible past. Bachmann is also well portrayed, an ironic, world-weary survivor of battles both internal and external whose apparent amorality hides the book’s most principled soul.
Centre stage, however, belongs to Brue and Annabel, products of privileged backgrounds who find themselves powerfully drawn to Issa. Brue sees himself as a member of a “dying species . . . salt of the earth, good man on a dark night, no high flyer but all the better for it, first-rate wife, marvellous value at the dinner table, and plays a decent game of golf”.
But it’s a sham, his wealth founded partly on unholy alliances with Russian gangsters and British intelligence. In Annabel, he sees the chance to find some late-innings redemption. For her part, Annabel understands that Issa’s case exists in a netherworld beyond the law, where affidavits and motions are not worth the paper they are printed on. “I knew that this was where the system stops,” she claims, “that this was the unsavable life I must save.”
But in the never-ending war on terror, there is no room for the humanity of Brue and Annabel, of Bachmann and Issa. If the Germans and British don’t sink quite as low as the Americans in dealing with the refugee, it is simply a question of nerve, not principle. Some readers might feel that the bleakness on display in A Most Wanted Man is a long way from the nuanced world of Smiley and his circus. Perhaps, though, this is no criticism of le Carré, whose narrative power and abiding humanity remain intact as he nears his 80th birthday. It is, instead, an indictment of the governments we allow to act in our names.
