Hot authors write hot novels – generally

The days shuffled by like bland schoolgirls.
-- Marisha Pessl; Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Marisha Pessl is hot (fit; I’m practising my English slang). Proof:



Do hot (fit) authors tend to produce hot (fit?) novels? This is an ancient metaphysical (and indeed, existential) question pondered by all philosophers from the pre-Socratics to the post-postmodernists (popomos) (see Introduction, Philosophy: the Basics, Warburton, 2004, p. 1).

Let us use the inductive principle to tackle this problem. In the first case, Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics seems to confirm the above statement.

An extraordinarily erudite novel – Pessl references most of the Western canon in literature and history, plenty of Hitchcock and film noir, and makes up some funny references too – Special Topics amazingly doesn’t collapse under the staggering weight of its erudition. If you have mentioned 38 author’s or playwrights’ names in the contents page alone, you need to make sure that the ensuing novel has enough steam to not sink under the heavy weight of association. Pessl hardly falters in her 500-page novel, and makes proud Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Kafka, and Ovid, as well as introducing something of her own to modern fiction.

The characterization is superb: Gareth van Meer is a brilliant political science professor who knows a lot more than a little bit about everything. He and his daughter, Blue, live at a different university town every semester. They drive around America from one town to the next reciting poetry and learning philosophy: “Driving with Dad wasn’t cathartic, mind-freeing driving (see On the Road, Kerouac, 1957). It was mind-taxing driving. It was Sonnet-a-thons. It was One Hundred Miles of Solitude: Attempting to Memorize The Waste Land.” Gareth so impresses his daughter that Special Topics, presented as Blue’s autobiography, contains witty (to the reader) aphorisms of Dad (Dad with the capital D) such as “a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it” and “[Americans] know God – many of them attest to daily chats with the man. And the idea that none of us can truly know anything at all […] is a though they’d rather be shot in the arm with their own semi-automatic rifle than face head on. Personally, I think there’s something terrific about not knowing, relinquishing man’s feeble attempt to control. When you throw up your hands and say, ‘Who knows?’ you can get on with the sheer gift of being alive”. Although Blue is certainly a character in her own light, her character is inescapably molded by Gareth’s own exuberant one. That Gareth himself is only seen through Blue’s own words firmly situates the novel in the realm of postmodernism. (Curiously enough, I never read the word postmodern in Special Topics. Choice vocabulary from Pessl includes: “outré”, “obsequious”, and “nuts”.)

Pessl’s writing style is superb (see “Why Use One Metaphor When You Can Use Two, Three, or Even Fifteen?”, The Basic Elements of Style, Drummer, 2001, p. 133). At times the 500 pages can get tedious – I found the couple of chapters on the Nightwatchmen rather boring – and a few of Pessl’s turns of phrase spice up the narrative. For example, Zach Soderberg’s voice is “stiff as new shoes” and the days trudged by like “bland schoolgirls”. Another pleasing aspect of Special Topics is that it doesn’t answer the text’s most pressing questions (we never know who killed Hannah Schneider and what happened to Gareth); it instead uses an unreliable narrator who herself does not know what has happened. So although the novel has “the sort of ellipsis ending most American audiences would rather undergo a root canal than be left with” (so says Dad on Michelangelo Antonioni’s black-and-white film L’Avventura), Special Topics is ultimately more pleasurable on a more sophisticated, higher plane.

(But personally, I found the last chapter, “Final Exam” to be a bit of a letdown. [What does that say about me … ?] Gareth says that the semester course structure provides “order”; yes it does, but there is no romantic orgasmic climax to end the novel at its zenith.)

We thus have one case of one hot author writing a hot novel. Let us consider another author, Emily Brontë:



She’s not hot. And her only novel, Wuthering Heights, sucks (badly too). So the general case does not hold, I think ... ?

Juvenile comedy

It is necessary at some point for every family with a son to acquire a daughter-in-law. […] She should be fair-complexioned, but if she is dark the dowry should include at least one of the following items: a television set, a refrigerator, a Godrej steel cupboard and maybe even a scooter. […] This girl should have passed all her examinations in the first division but will listen respectfully when her prospective in-laws lecture her on various subjects they themselves failed in secondary school. […] Her mother should urge: ‘Eat something. Eat a laddoo. My daughter made these with her own hands.’ And these laddoos must not be recognizable as coming from the sweetmeat shop down the road.
-- Kiran Desai; Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard

Kiran Desai’s awareness to the intricacies and eccentricities of Indian people speaking English is remarkable. Her attention to detail in her dialogue (for example, “Arre” and the wonderfully onomatopoeic “Aiii, sir”) makes Hullabaloo worth reading for its Indianised English alone.

But I did not like Desai’s debut novel, and would not recommend it to any serious reader over the age of fourteen. While Desai’s dialogue is amazingly well-crafted, and there are some fine turns of phrase in her descriptions (for example, Sampath’s family “vibrated like giants” when they slept), Hullabaloo is undone by its childish and juvenile plot.

Sampath, a wayward youth, cannot hold a good job and is dissatisfied with his domestic life, so he climbs up a guava tree and stays there for almost one year. Various people attempt to get Sampath down, but to no avail. Suddenly, Sampath starts revealing the people’s innermost secrets, and the mob starts believing that he is a saint. (The truth is more mundane: Sampath used to work at the post office and used to read everyone’s mail.) He delivers The Sermon in the Guava Tree, which includes gems such as “Add lemons to milk and it will grow sour” and “Once my uncle had a rooster and an insect laid its eggs in the flesh of its rear end. It knew the young ones would have a warm place to live and plenty to eat”. Sampath’s father Mr. Chawla makes a healthy profit charging the devotees for seeing and offering blessings to the Monkey Baba. He is so called because of the band of monkeys that hang around in his guava tree.

The monkeys complicate Mr. Chawla’s business by stealing liquor, getting drunk and causing chaos. The Brigadier, the Chief Medical Officer, the Superintendent of Police, and the District Collector, and Mr. Verma each hatch their own plans to contain the crisis of the monkeys, and an apparently hilarious scene occurs when they all fail miserably. At the end of the novel the monkeys disappear into the forest at the edge of the orchard, and Sampath seemingly leaves with them.

Kiran Desai intends laugh-out-loud comedy, but the situation of the Cinema Monkey and his troupe drunk is merely juvenile. She means to portray the Chawla family as slightly unhinged, but her attempts go awry, especially when Kulfi plans to cook a monkey and when Pinky bites the Hungry Hop boy’s ear off. I cannot possibly relate to the actions of any of the characters, and Desai does not succeed in bridging the gap and making the characters less alienated. Furthermore Hullabaloo’s ending is unfulfilling, and it pretends to be deep and thought-provoking when in reality the novel as a whole is not.

To be, or not to be, oneself

No one in this country can ever be himself. To live in an oppressed, defeated country is to be someone else. I am someone else, therefore I am! But what if this person I want to become is himself someone else? This is the crux, the heart of the deception!
-- Orhan Pamuk; The Black Book

How can a man be himself in Istanbul, a traditionally Eastern city in traditionally Eastern Turkey, after Atatürk’s modernising (read: Westernising) regime in 1923? How can a man be himself when the “garden of [his] memory” has been shorn and foreign plants have been implanted instead? How does an individual be himself when all those around him expect him to be someone else, and he almost is this person but not quite? These questions concerning identity are central to our existence, and Pamuk discusses answers in a very different type of mystery.

The plot is simple: Galip’s wife Rüya disappears, and for Galip this disappearance is linked inextricably with the disappearance of Celâl, his uncle and a famous journalist; Galip thus tries to find both the missing people. But we are told early in the novel that The Black Book is not your typical whodunit: “Galip had once told Rüya that the only detective book he’d ever want to read would be the one in which not even the author knew the murder’s identity. Instead […] the author would be forced to come to grips with his characters and his subject, and his characters would have a chance to become people in a book instead of just figments of their author’s imagination.” In other words Galip’s quest for Rüya (the word means dream in Turkish) and Celâl is the Sufi quest for “‘absolute union with God’ (or dissolving into the absolute)”.

The structure of Pamuk’s novel is fascinating. One chapter advances the plot and the next is one of Celâl’s columns from the newspaper Milliyet; The Black Book continues in this fashion alternating between the two. Galip thinks that in order to find Celâl’s whereabouts, he must try to understand the man. He does this by immersing himself in Celâl’s writings, and actually becoming his uncle. He gets the notion in the middle of the book that he can only be himself by becoming Celâl, and gradually begins to write his columns for him. At the beginning of the novel, the plot remains distinct from the columns, but as the text progresses the line blurs between them because the reader can no longer clearly distinguish between Galip and Celâl. The last column is especially enigmatic: we don’t know if Celâl wrote it or Galip did in his place; Pamuk leaves the point unanswered to show that the two are the same. Thus Pamuk’s use of structure complements the central theme of Galip’s identity.

Films are an important motif in The Black Book. Turkish people go into the cinema to watch actors act as other people, and the viewers get sucked into the story and feel as if they are actually the characters on the screen. In one memorable passage, a hyperbole of a socialist explains that this is an imperialist conspiracy. The issue of national identity is left hanging open as the novel ends with the death of Celâl (and Rüya too, tragically) and a vague notion of a bloody coup to follow. Furthermore, Celâl has influenced Turkey for over 30 years and the notion of his column left out in the Milliyet is a frightening prospect.

Personal identity is not solved either, but there is a moment of hope as Galip cries, “Yes, yes, I am myself!” Firstly Pamuk suggests that a man is himself only because he yearns to emulate another person. At the end the story of the Crown Prince shows that a man is himself only when he finds his own voice and tells stories. There is no easy answer to the complex issue of identity, Pamuk holds.

Some faults of The Black Book: there are too many middle pages, where the story drags and could have been condensed; some of the references in Celâl’s columns are too opaque for the Western reader; and some readers will undoubtedly be put off by the stories in stories in stories. But Pamuk always comes back with a twist even after a few boring pages (like that horrible six-pages long paragraph of Mehmet’s), and above all his style of writing (postmodern yet distinctively and mystically Eastern) makes The Black Book as one of the best books I’ve read ever.

The Man-eater of Malgudi

Every demon appears in the world with a special boon of indestructibility. Yet the universe has survived all the rakshasas that were ever born. Every demon carries within him, unknown to himself, a tiny seed of self-destruction, and goes up in thin air at the most unexpected moment. Otherwise what is to happen to humanity?
-- R. K. Narayan, The Man-eater of Malgudi

Good does not necessarily overcome evil, but it seems that way because evil always self-destructs in the end. Narayan’s novel echoes the story of the demon Bhasmasura, whose fingers scorched everything they touched. Bhasmasura made humanity suffer, but was tricked by God Vishnu (incarnated as the beautiful dancer Mohini) to touch his own temple and was at that moment reduced to ashes. The philosophical Sastri tells the protagonist Nataraj, “Every man can think that he is great and well live for ever, but no one can guess from which quarter his doom will come.”

Although Narayan’s work is not solely allegorical, Malgudi’s version of Bhasmasura is the tyrant Vasu. Vasu, a strongman-turned-taxidermist, arrives in Malgudi and takes possession of Nataraj’s attic. Poor Nataraj, a printer who can never “say ‘no’ to anyone”, succumbs to Vasu’s bullying and rents him the attic (for which he never pays a single paisa). Vasu makes Nataraj’s life hell: he sues Nataraj for attempting to evict him “illegally”, he stinks up Nataraj’s printing shop with carcasses of tigers, hyenas, and raccoons, and brings an assortment of women of disrepute, such as Rangi the lower-caste dancer, to the dignified Market Road shop. Vasu is bully physically – he can pulverise metal with his bare hands – and mentally – when he acts as a money-gatherer for Nataraj people say, “One will have to sell the vessels in the kitchen to find the money, just to be rid of him! What a specimen!” – and this earns him the metaphor of “man-eater”. Although my mind thinks that Vasu is not that detestable a character – for example I admire his strong mind and firm attitude as an antidote to India’s meekness – Narayan’s gift is in persuading my heart otherwise.

Man-eater contains a whole host of instantly likeable characters – Sastri, nominally Nataraj’s employee but in reality his master; the poet who speaks only in monosyllables (“Girls with girls did dance in trance”); the journalist Sen who rails against Congress and Nehru at every opportunity (“The journalist was frankly dumbfounded when he realised that there was no aspect of this particular problem which he could blame directly at the government”); Kumar, the lovable elephant; and Nataraj himself – who are themselves flawed, but the reader is forced to take their side against the asura Vasu. Sen comically rants against Nehru’s third Five-Year Plan, but when Vasu insults him with heavy sarcasm, the reader instantly sympathises with the former. When we hear of Vasu’s plan to shoot the elephant, Narayan creates knots in our stomachs; his characterisation makes us empathise with even an animal.

The climax of the novel is masterfully done. Neither is it a violent clash à la a Bollywood film, nor is it merely a subtle change in Vasu’s character. Rather, it is somewhere in the middle of these two: Nataraj creeps in Vasu’s bedroom, where the latter is sleeping, to take his gun to stop him shooting Kumar. Nataraj hears the alarm bell ring and in fright drops the gun and scrambles out of the door, fearing for his own life. There ends the chapter, with the tension at its zenith. The first words of the next chapter are wonderfully anticlimactic: “Life resumed its normal pace on the Market Road next morning”. We find that Vasu is dead: attempting to kill two mosquitoes on his head he strikes them with all his might and thus ends his own life too.

Narayan’s writing style is no less impressive than his content and plot. Although the novel is written in the English language, the vocabulary, syntax, and tone are very Indian. This gives an authenticity to the setting that is not found in other novels about India (I am thinking here of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India). Furthermore, the human comedy in Man-eater is delightfully understated and sly; the sentences, “My wife, every Deepavali, gave herself a new silk sari, glittering with lace, not to mention the ones she bought for no particular reason at other times”, and “There was some vague movement of response [… and] I knew Sastri would not pay any attention to my call unless I called him again”, are prime examples. Reading this novel has given me a new meaning for the word wit.

Wuthering Heights sucks

That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time, only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from the case – I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.
-- Heathcliff; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

I am Heathcliff!
-- Catherine; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

The most evil character in literature is Shakespeare’s Iago; in history it is Karl Marx. The hype surrounding Wuthering Heights is that Heathcliff’s character approaches the evil of these two figures. The first quotation above shows that, at the end of the novel, Heathcliff wishes no longer to ensure the destruction of Cathy and Hareton because he cannot be bothered. Apparently, the tone of his dialogue is supposed to indicate his twisted nature, speaking as he is so casually about wrecking the lives of his enemies. But to me Heathcliff seems neither evil nor twisted; he is just boring.

Emily Brontë probably thought that her descriptions of Heathcliff were chilling and made him an extraordinarily twisted character. In fact, the strongest pejorative that I could find against Heathcliff was Isabella calling him a “devil”. Yes, in her letter to Nelly she writes that he tortures her inhumanely and has a cruel plan to get possession of Thrushcross Grange, but none of this is adds to Heathcliff’s characterisation as a symbol of evil.

Brontë’s readers would have been disgusted at Heathcliff exhuming Catherine’s corpse, but to me it just shows his lunacy. In fact, the whole plot of Wuthering Heights is illogical and boring because Heathcliff is not sufficiently evil, and the rest of the characters too morose to act.

In Victorian fiction, characterisation was deemed to be the most important part of the novel, and it is clear that Brontë failed in this respect. Why is the elder Catherine so obstinate in her supposed love for Heathcliff? (Don’t give me that nonsense about her psyche being as free as the moors and identical with Heathcliff’s soul – the second quotation sounds good perhaps but doesn’t give a proper motive for Catherine’s actions.) Why can’t Isabella Linton just run away? Why can’t Linton Heathcliff stop being such a pussy (for lack of other appropriate vocabulary) and face up to Heathcliff? And finally, why does Heathcliff just drop dead one day?

Critics have praised the presence of the thinly veiled ‘Gothic’ supernatural in Wuthering Heights, but all this does is to cover up Emily Brontë’s pathetic lack of skill. I need Heathcliff to drop dead now. But that doesn’t make sense. No matter, I shall write that he saw Catherine’s ghost. Aha yes! Everybody will buy that! Furthermore, the structure of the novel is annoying. Reading a novel requires the reader to suspend some belief, yes, but the manner in which the story comes to the reader third- or fourth-hand makes it seem completely implausible. But the fact remains that a simple third-person narrative wouldn’t work either, because the author presents so many fantastical stories. Thus the plot is ridiculous, and there is no good way to write it.

Wuthering Heights should never have been written.

My Name is Red

Before the art of illumination there was blackness and afterward there will also be blackness. Through our colors, paints, art and love, we remember that Allah has commanded us to “See”! To know is to remember that you’ve seen. To see is to know without remembering. Thus, painting is remembering the blackness [… and] the act of seeking out Allah’s memories and seeing the world as He sees the world.
-- Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

In Western art, what makes a particular piece of artwork unique and appealing is the distinctive style of the artist. For example, we like Claude Monet’s impressionistic works because they show the essence of the subject rather than its details, emphasised by the visible brushstrokes. We like Pablo Picasso’s works because of his distinctive cubist style. In Islamic art, the word style is an anathema, synonymous with imperfection. This stems from the idea that human beings perceive the world imperfectly (that is, not as how Allah perceives it) and that when an artist adds his own perception to his art, it becomes flawed. Thus “‘signature’ and ‘style’ are but means of being brazenly and stupidly self-congratulatory about flawed work.”

This relates to the ancient philosophical view (derived from Plato, I believe) that all knowledge is ultimately innate, and that knowing simply means remembering. Islamic artists believe that the artist knows innately how Allah perceives the world, and that the artist’s mission is to depict this ‘view from blackness’ on paper. Any attempt to introduce individual style corrupts the perfect image, and is thus forbidden.

Perspective is another Western notion that is at loggerheads with Islamic art. Given that the task of the Islamic artist is to depict the world in colour as Allah sees it from His blackness, the only perspective that can be used is that of Allah’s. In Western art, a fly can be rendered the same size as a mosque if the mosque is far in the background of the painting. But clearly in Allah’s mind the mosque’s size far outstrips the fly’s; and therefore it is sacrilegious for the artist to depict the world from his own perspective and not that of Allah’s, thus usurping Allah’s claim to be the universe’s sole Creator.

For this reason portraiture is forbidden in Islamic art. To place a mere human being at the centre of a canvas is to confer upon him an importance and significance that is not rightly his. To paint a person with such realism that a viewer can pick the subject out of a crowd of 100 people is wrong because eventually the painting will achieve an idol-like status; idols are, of course, forbidden in Islam.

Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red is a brilliant symposium on the philosophy of Islamic art, and the author’s craft perfectly complements the weighty subject matter. The central irony of the novel is that each chapter is written from a different perspective (for example, one chapter is from the perspective of the protagonist Black, another is from the perspective of his lover Shekure, and another is from the viewpoint of red ink!) when in fact perspective is banned in Islamic art. Another source of irony is that Pamuk’s novel chronicles the importance of miniaturist painting to accompany manuscripts, when his own writing is so descriptive and evocative that it needs no painting to enhance its effect.

My Name is Red gave me an interest in miniature painting, and I went to Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, India to see real examples of 16th century miniature painting. I wanted to see a tree that was “meant to provide shade for Mejnun disguised as a shepherd as he visited Leyla in her tent” or “fading into the night, representing the darkness in the soul of a wretched and hopeless man” or “complementing the happiness of two lovers who fled from the whole world, traversing oceans to find solace on an island rich with birds and fruit or “shading Alexander during the final moments of his life” or “symbolising the strength and wisdom of a father offering advice on love and life to his son”. I never did see such trees at the museum, but that only shows that Pamuk’s writing is of far superior quality than his subject.