Website of Aiden O'Reilly

I understand the premise is to have an unspecified European country, an unspecified war. I love the idea in fact. But the way Donovan implements it doesn’t grab me. There is too much artifical vagueness. The author is not taking his subject seriously enough. The idea that ordinary people can be implicated in mass murder fascinates him, but doesn’t bother him unduly. Ideas and situations from history are introduced, but it’s all lacking in passion.

Both are educated men (the Baker an autodidact) and willing to take on theatrical roles. They create mini-dramas, news reports from history, an engmatic fairy tale. It’s not very plausible, but it could be claimed the novel is straying far from realistic fiction. Every 40 pages or so there is another hint of impending violence to keep up the tension.

Philosophers are mentioned, but there is nothing which might suggest that there are things beyond the comprehension of the reader. It’s all easily digestible. The chapters too are often one or two pages. The titles are quirkily cryptic: What The Baker Knows. The Evidence According to John Locke. Types of Wind and their Effects on the Human Condition. There is great consideration of the reader’s limited intelligence in this work, while skillfully giving the impression that he/she is encountering big thoughts. I don’t blame the author for this. It’s what has to be done to get by the barrier and get it published.

The work is unusual and ambitious enough to make it a worthwhile read. It’s courageous enough to veer far from realism. I think of all the agents’ readers: “What, he mentions Hume and Schopenhauer? Too pretentious!”

I would like to like it more. Perhaps the tricks and contrivances to give it tension and make it palatable are too obvious. Maybe the blurbs have had a contrasuggestible effect on me.

This story would work best the same length as one of Kafka’s tales, not as a 300 page novel.

This state may continue for many years. Then comes the fall. It may be initiated by success in getting published. His view of himself as a writer shifts fundamentally. Writing must be for other people, not a narcissistic emanantion. There must be real characters (not transparant copies of the writer), plot, development. He begins to see his stacks of juvenilia as trails left from his thought-flow. A useful practice, an exercise in expressing oneself. But something to be embarrassed about if it should get out. Time to turn to the work of telling a story, close obversation, the arts of evoking particular feelings in the reader. Those who persist in believing that they have something to say are deluded. Their self-importance is laughable. All that ‘what you say’ is encompassed in how you say it.

“You will have to take my word for it that I believed the world would never be the same,” Saroyan writes of his first book. Most of the stories in this book purport to be directly autobiographical. “I am a young man in an old city. It is morning and I am in a small room.” Another story is a complete synopsis of a film starring Tom Garner, from the viewpoint of Saroyan’s seat in the movie theatre.

Now that I have been sullied by trying to get published, I find it hard to look at writing in the same way. Questions intrude: What type of man is this? How did he come to be? How did this get published? How does it fit in to other writing of that decade? What strands of the zeitgeist does he weave together?

And I always remember, I am reading this not because Saroyan wrote it, but because it was published. And no matter how much it may have the appearance of a diary, it is an act of communication. The confidence is there. His voice is worth listening to. Where did he get his self-image from, one young man walking through a city of millions? He doesn’t tell us in his writings. “I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language things they already know.”

The final story Angel of Mercy tells the tales of two nurses, one born forty years earlier than the other. What connects them is that they worked in the same neuropsychiatric ward, though the one was long dead before the younger started employment in 1998. The title refers to how the older nurse saw herself as she administered mercy to the terminallly ill patients. Joyce paints the physical and mental degradation of a slow death. This will be disturbing reading for anyone with an elderly relative. Doctors are able to keep their distance, But the nurse is there alongside the patients for months. “Always I had their best interests at heart not like the doctors keeping them alive like vegetable for the $,” she writes in her secret diary, which was only discovered after her suicide. Through her whole life her ‘mission’ remained undetected.

The younger nurse knows next to nothing of the “Angel of Death”. But she becomes affected by the atmosphere of the ward the other nurses jokingly call “The City of the Damned”. She starts out as a pretty peroxide blonde, but over the course of ten years she gives up the idea of boyfriends and marriage. “Now she knew too much, there could be no more romance of the body. All that was behind her, disdained.” And so, this entirely different person goes down the same path to become deliver her own sort of mercy.

The story is uncompromising – the issues of euthanasia it raises, the way in which modern medicine prolongs death to absurd lengths.

From an article on the mercy-killing nurse Cullen:

we might also note that a nurse who ends terminal patients’ lives because of a belief that the patients are experiencing unnecessary pain may differ in some respects from a “serial killer” who simply stalks and kills healthy individuals. Without condoning illegal or unethical conduct, and recognizing that no health care worker has the right to make life-ending decisions based solely on her own sense of morality, we hope that the press will in such cases bring to light all potentially relevant factors.

The bio mentions she was picked for an Oprah book and reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, ‘the first time any of her books reached the spot, though most have been critically acclaimed.’

I have some editions of JCO’s early works. By the North Gate and With Shuddering Fall. The blurbs are:

JCO is a fine writer … powerful examples of what the short story can be in the hands of a good writer … she uncovers the universal core within a unique happening … superb fiction by a national book award winner …

rich poetic hard and tender … A masterpiece … a rich and burgeoning talent …

Compare with the blurbs in 2006: “JCO is a genius.” “One of the female front runners for the title of Great American Novelist” “JCO can sweep the reader away” and the subtitle Tales of Mystery and Suspense. The word ‘genius’ has come to mean ‘witty, clever, and accessible to all’.

In fact there were perceptive newspapers reviews of Female of the Species. But they are not chosen to be blurbs. And the promotional website finds it preferable to menion Oprah (Oprah Winfrey, as every reader will know) and the bestseller list.

True, DeLillo’s main ideas are not new. But Myers is wrong to think there are no real people like this. The shopping mall and television are the environment in which whole swathes of people spend their lives. I have seen them. They are real. The opening of a new shopping center in this city was headline news for weeks. The new IKEA centre is attracting similar attention. It frightens me. For many of the people on reality/talent shows, seeing themselves on television is a magic so powerful their lives can never be the same again. For better or for worse.

Maybe this phase will pass soon, but at the moment it seems every irony is overtaken by reality.

The novel shows signs of being quickly-written, poorly-edited and aimed at the mass market. If DeLillo thinks a particular verbal trick is good, he’ll have no problem with repeating it, even three times. So who is it trying to persuade Myers this is great literature? Why is he getting on his box like he’s seen through the emperor’s clothes?

The problem may be this: the college-educated critic reads a novel he likes. He wants to praise it, yet all he can talk about is “the writing”. This is not the 19th century – he cannot talk about the truth expressed in the novel, or ennobling insights, or the artistic soul. So the novel gets misdirected praise for its prose and “craft”.

This novel is great not because of the prose, but because the sensors are on maximum receptivity and taking in what’s all around.

When Jack meets his fellow-academic Murray, one grips the other by the elbow and they walk across the campus “like a pair of European senior citizens, heads bowed in conversation”. It’s a throwaway comparison, but implications ooze from it.

It’s so good he repeats it a chapter later.