Porter Shreve

This fall I did eighteen events around the country for the September publication of When the White House Was Ours. Highlights included Square Books and my first visit to the literary mecca of Oxford, MS; the Happy Ending Reading Series in New York; and some great events hosted by my family in Washington, DC. I also reviewed new novels by Bart Schneider and Doris Lessing for the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe, and did a number of interviews, guest blogs, radio appearances, and some morning TV where no amount of caffeine could make me perky enough.

By Porter Shreve

A year ago Harvey Blume interviewed Doris Lessing for the Globe's Ideas section, and in hindsight two parts stand out as ironic. When asked why she thought she hadn't won a Nobel Prize, Lessing said that "a little gray chap" from the Nobel Committee had once told her she didn't stand a chance: "I've never found out why they don't like me." Two months later she was named, at 87, the oldest literature laureate ever. Blume also quoted Lessing as saying that past the age of 60, "you float away from the personal. You have received the great gift of getting older - detachment, impersonality."

But Lessing's first book after capturing the Nobel is one of the most personal of her more than 50 volumes, and far from letting go of the past she grapples directly with her fraught relationship with her parents and their troubled bond with each other. Lessing is a famously close-to-the-bone writer, author of two autobiographies, "Under My Skin" and "Walking in the Shade," and of the five-volume "Children of Violence" series, featuring the autobiographical heroine Martha Quest. In Lessing's classic "Golden Notebook," the protagonist, Anna Wulf, is a writer in the midst of a breakdown who resolves her crisis by fusing her disparate roles - woman, artist, companion, activist - into one unified self.

Like "The Golden Notebook," "Alfred and Emily" explores the boundary where reality and imagination meet, through the use of a formally innovative structure. The first half of the book is fiction as alternate history: the lives Lessing's parents might have led if World War I had never taken place. The second half is memoir and tells the story of what really happened to her mother and father. Both sections are wonderfully evocative, though the task of telling two life stories in two separate genres, all in fewer than 300 pages, does make the narrative episodic at times. But in several key places, particularly where the book transitions to memoir, Lessing shows how she extrapolated from photographs and family stories to imagine whom her parents might have become. These glimpses into the creative process of one of the world's most gifted and socially engaged writers make "Alfred and Emily" a valuable addition to the Lessing oeuvre.

In real life, her father, Alfred Tayler, was a spirited and athletic man who lost his leg to a shrapnel wound. During his recovery he missed the Battle of Passchendaele, in which his entire company was killed, and for the rest of his days he suffered physical complications from his injury and deep, pervasive survivor guilt. "Even as a child I knew his obsessive talking about the Trenches was a way of ridding himself of the horrors," Lessing writes. "So I had the full force of the Trenches, tanks, star-shells, shrapnel, howitzers - the lot - through my childhood, and felt as if the black cloud he talked about was there, pressing down on me."

This same cloud weighed even more heavily on Lessing's mother. Emily McVeagh was a headstrong nurse at the Royal Free Hospital in London when she met Alfred and helped him through his convalescence. The couple enjoyed some good years of marriage in Persia, but at the Southern Rhodesia stall of the Empire Exhibition Alfred saw an advertisement - "Get rich on maize" - and cast his family's lot on the African bush, where their dream died quickly. They found themselves living in a thatched-roof mud hut, fighting off insects and malaria, and enduring year after year of failed crops, racial and social unrest, and the inescapable legacy of the Great War.

Lessing saves the memoir part of her story for the second half of the book and presents the fiction first. This decision might seem counterintuitive, but it underscores how she resists the happy ending in favor of a happy beginning. In fiction, Alfred is physically and emotionally whole because there is no World War I. He fulfills his dream of working the land but in fertile England, not arid Africa; he's a gentleman farmer who plays cricket on the weekends and marries a probationer from Emily's ward.

The fictional Emily is a nurse in London, but instead of meeting a haunted invalid she marries a successful cardiologist and gives up her job. Though it seems for a time as if she might become like the real Emily McVeagh and so many Lessing heroines, "women who should have been working, should have worked, should have interests in their lives," her husband has a heart attack at 50 and leaves Emily a fortune. She sets up a trust to help the poor of the East End, and her philanthropy extends to opening more than a dozen successful schools. She does harbor some regret at never having children and never remarrying, but it can't be denied that she's had a fulfilling life.

So why does Lessing begin with a sunny fiction and end with a bitter truth? Because youth fades and dreams wither, because beginnings are a long horizon and endings a narrowing corridor. And one can fantasize about a world without war and its consequences, but in the end the weight of history is too profound to avoid.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

August 30, 2008

By Porter Shreve

During the week of the Democratic National Convention, the literary website Five Chapters serialized an excerpt from When the White House Was Ours. Here's the beginning:

Our landlord, Bailey Dornan, lived in the largest house I'd ever seen. It had balustraded porches, balconies under the windows, and four flagpoles flying the American, Irish, District of Columbia, and one other flag that I couldn't identify: black, red and green with a shield-and-spear coat of arms. My father said it was the Kenyan flag, and that Bailey had told him he'd bought the place from the Republic of Kenya three years before, when a sub-Saharan drought had devastated the country and forced its diplomats to move to a humble residence on R Street.

We were surprised Bailey invited all of us to his election party. He'd given money to Republican causes and had seen the Carter/Mondale signs on our lawn. My mother had said we shouldn't go, but my father insisted. After all, Bailey was his long-lost friend from the University of Wisconsin baseball team, and he had let us have a few rent-free months in a huge scruffy house he owned on 16th, where my parents, my mother's brother and a couple of my uncle's hippie friends were trying to launch an alternative school called Our House.

We'd moved to D.C. in July after my father had been fired from yet another teaching job, this time in Illinois, but thus far we'd had little luck recruiting students for the new school. We'd signed up a novice guitarist and a black kid named Quinn whom I'd met at the Mount Pleasant library. Quinn and I were both thirteen, gangly and bookish. I was obsessed with presidential history and he was into airships. My father was bringing us to the party to show us off, hoping our precocity might win over parents of school age kids. I knew he was getting desperate, with two months to go before our proposed first day of classes. "This was your crazy idea," my mother had kept telling him. She might as well have said, "You have one last chance."

Read more here.

This summer I covered the Indiana Democratic Primary and its aftermath for the New York Times Op-Ed page, and reviewed new novels by Tony Earley, Jonathan Miles, and Jack O'Connell for the Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune. In the fall, with the publication of When the White House Was Ours, I'll be touring more than a dozen states, most of them battlegrounds.

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Yesterday brought more bad news for American newspapers, specifically the Chicago Tribune. The cuts, anticipated for weeks now, mark the fourth round of layoffs at the paper since 2005, and the word here is that further reductions are on the way. My favorite section is the book review, of course. I write occasional reviews for the Trib, and was concerned on Saturday when I saw this note at the top of the online edition:

Change is afoot here at the Tribune, and now, more than ever, we want to know what you think. So, tell us: What do you love about the Books section? What's missing? Do you want to see fewer author profiles and more reviews? Fewer reviews and more essays? What about the crossword puzzle? The best-seller lists? Or maybe you want something completely different. Whatever your opinion--now's the time to make it known.

You can fill out a suggestion box here, as I did, to show support for the Tribune Books section. It's one of the best, most fair-minded and reliable reviews in the country, and to see it reduced in the way of other newspaper book pages would be devastating. Critical Mass, the excellent blog of the National Book Critics Circle, makes a strong argument for why book sections matter — and forgive the boosterism, but Chicago has produced some of the century's finest poets and writers, from Carl Sandburg to Gwendolyn Brooks to Charles Simic; Theodore Dreiser to Papa Hemingway to Richard Wright to Saul Bellow to Sandra Cisneros. More American Nobel prize winners in literature have come out of the Midwest than anywhere else in the country, and just as great cities need libraries and museums, Chicago needs a substantive Tribune review, which has played such a vital role in American book culture.

May 17, 2008

By Porter Shreve 

Flight of Fancy: In Jonathan Miles' funny 1st novel, a passenger stranded at O'Hare gives an airline a piece of his rambling mind

Porter Shreve is the author of the forthcoming novel “When the White House Was Ours.”
 

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

May 11, 2008

By Porter Shreve

Juggling genres, plots, assorted organs

A writer with a growing cult of fans, Worcester's Jack O'Connell has set all four of his previous books in the same decaying fictional city of Quinsigamond, Mass., and combined a variety of genre elements - noir thriller, science fiction, adventure, horror, and fantasy. His latest is perhaps his strangest book yet, nearly impossible to classify, even difficult to describe, and highlights the imaginative feats and inherent challenges in the recent trend of genre-blending fiction.

A series of intersecting narratives drives "The Resurrectionist." Sweeney used to be a successful Cleveland druggist until his 6-year-old son, Danny, suffered severe head trauma in an accident and fell into a coma; six months later Sweeney's wife committed suicide, and now he has moved Danny to the outskirts of Quinsigamond, to the gothic, mausoleum-like Peck Clinic, known around the world for providing the best long-term care for patients in comas or persistent vegetative states. Though the clinic has successfully aroused only two "sleepers" in its history, Sweeney keeps a daily bedside vigil on the remote chance that his son might recover. Ever wavering between panic and rage from the trauma in his life, he takes a job on the third shift dispensing meds from the clinic's pharmacy, a.k.a. "the vault," and one of the many tensions in the novel is when and how Sweeney, a ticking time bomb, will explode.

Several candidates seem likely to set him off, chief among them the clinic's own Dr. Frankenstein, W. Micah Peck, a mad genius who has successfully removed and replanted the brain parts of thousands of reptiles and mammals and written some of the most highly controversial papers in the emerging field of neuro-transplantation. Secretly, he has been collecting aborted fetuses on the black market and plans to harvest their cells for his experiments. You can almost hear the pipe organ playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor as Peck zeroes in on his next research subject, none other than the clinic's newest arrival, Danny.

Dr. Peck has two assistants in the task. His lovely daughter, Alice, with whom he shares a creepy, borderline-incestuous relationship, serves as his apologist and gal Friday until she finds herself falling for Sweeney. And outside, on the blighted margins of Quinsigamond, roams the doctor's fetus supplier, a violent, impetuous biker named Spider, who lives in an abandoned prosthetics factory. O'Connell's gift for building tension within a scene is equaled by his ability to create wonderfully dark and elaborate stage sets upon which to play out his dramas. The Peck Clinic with its "maze of cavernous rooms and bad lighting and narrow, vertigo-inducing corridors" is mirrored by the former factory, whose "layout followed the logic of the human body itself: feet and legs were manufactured on the first floor; testicles and hips on the second; hands, arms, elbows and shoulders on the third," and on up to the top of the skull.

"The Resurrectionist" is a novel about the body and the extent to which science, the modern-day magic, can or should correct the body's shortcomings and failures. Interspersed with Sweeney's, Dr. Peck's, and Spider's stories is a fourth narrative, presented in the form of a serialized comic book called "Limbo" that Sweeney reads to his comatose son. Danny had once been a great fan of "Limbo" and its cast of traveling circus freaks of old Bohemia: the fat lady, the human skeleton, the Siamese twins, the hermaphrodite, and especially Bruno, the patriarchal strongman, and Chick, the boy with the beaked mouth and coat of feathers. Chick's only escape from earthly oppression is into "Limbo," where "all the rules and logic . . . were thrown out and replaced by a realm that was even more surreal and difficult to follow."

At times this novel can feel too much like Limbo: not quite a father-son story about loss and recovery and expiation of guilt, nor a gothic thriller about a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein out to push boundaries of medical ethics, nor the Great American Biker Novel or serial comic about circus freaks in exile. Genre blending has become more in vogue thanks partly to the rise of graphic novels and the championing of genre by influential writers such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, but O'Connell is wilder, edgier, more far-ranging and extravagant than his fellow genre-jumpers. In "The Resurrectionist" the worlds do eventually come together. How much as a reader you're satisfied with the results depends on how you like your genres: separate and distinct or fused together like Frankenstein's monster.

Porter Shreve is the author of the forthcoming novel “When the White House Was Ours.”

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.