On Borges and Me, Plus Some Thoughts on Autobiography and Biography

     With last year's Borges and Me, by Jay Parini, about a road trip through Scotland with the great Argentine writer, excitement soon turned into suspicion. Parini's book reads more like invention than memoir of a period, the narrative smooth, without any sign of faltering memory fifty years after the events described. Suspicion mounted as it began to resemble a biopic, a film genre I generally don't care for: a book that wasn't written for the page, a book designed to be adapted. Script material. Pausing to read the biographical paragraph on the flap, I found that one of Parini's books was adapted into a movie. And the Afterword would confirm that Borges and Me had in fact began as a film project. I didn't wish to see Borges reduced to a string of "Oscar" moments. I didn't want him to get the David Foster Wallace treatment, a passing encounter inflated into life-altering, middling drama. I winced at a trailer forming in my head. You must...believe!

But, even before Borges steps onto the stage, I got caught up, enough to get past the book's deficiencies: the whiff of artificiality (and in one case, which I'll get to, I do emphasize "whiff"), Parini's occasionally trite reflections, the somewhat perfunctory use of his backstory. The tension is real. A young writer is uncertain about his future, desperate to avoid the war in Vietnam, just as desperate to escape home and mother. His answer is to continue his education abroad, in Scotland, though without much direction, draft notices and mother's letters chasing him there. Without irony, Parini might say things like: "I wanted to believe I had said something fresh, added something, however small, to the stock of English poetry." But he's also chummy, inviting. And he has a good ear for dialogue. I sat up with more interest once his friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, appears. He is no stiff. Which is to say his is a distinct voice, with its own notes of self-assurance and mischief. He's an older poet, a former assistant to Robert Graves, who offers to read Parini's poems and give suggestions. He's a translator, too. One of the writers he's translated is Jorge Luis Borges, who arrives in Scotland to experience the country as an assiduous student of its literature and history and to meet an editor of Anglo-Saxon riddles. But there's an emergency. Reid must leave for London and it falls on Parini to chauffeur the blind writer in his absence.

Parini has no idea who he is, a promising comic situation that also, it turns out, doubles as an opportunity for the natural development of a bond between the two, largely free of the barrier of mystique, a bond between blind man and guide, old man and young man, master and novice, haunted lover and aspiring lover. The book is part introduction, providing an overview of Borges's life through the course of their conversations, the major events and obsessions, part glimpse of the man in person. He recites poetry in Scottish as the inspiration strikes, relishes a verbal technique in English unavailable to the writer deploying Spanish, confesses, probes, provokes, and casually dazzles, constantly drawing from a lifetime of reading that amounts to a massive library located at the fore of his thoughts. Parini begins to realize, without even having read his work, that an exemplary, sagacious literary mind is clutching his arm, urging him to use his nascent poetic skills to create Scotland in words, for his benefit but also Parini's. The boldest stroke of the book, the best evidence of Parini's ear for dialogue, is that he successfully presents Borges's voice directly through much of their time together, the voice of a man as deeply read as anyone who's ever lived and whose first language isn't English. (Listening to a radio interview with Parini, I wasn't taken aback that he does a sort of Borges impression.) 

"Tell me the truth about yourself," said Borges.

"I was unsure about my vocation. It's the only truth."

"How long have you been a priest?"

"Forty-two years and three months."

"So you persist! This is all we ask. You made a choice, and continued in the faith. Felicidades! The stream gabbles along. You are the burn, the blaze of water on the landscape, a blister of love. You remain true to the Word."

The priest shuddered, then smiled. "Thank you for saying this." 

Borges reached for him, and the priest dipped his head forward. With his hands on the forehead of Father Burns, Borges intoned, "Si quaesieritis eum, invenietur a vobis; si autem dereliqueritis eum, derelinquet vos." If you don't abandon the spirit, the spirit will not abandon you. Borges had given the priest a blessing.

Parini doesn't adopt a pious tone in hindsight. Initially, he finds this whole business of acting as a guide a bothersome distraction. To him, Borges is just some writer, in odd tie and musty suit, eating a lot of bacon, licking books in a public library, and periodically making trouble, like when he suddenly steps out of the car into the rain and tumbles to the ground, causing him an injury that forces him to spend the night in the hospital. Reader gets both legend and ordinary, elderly, eccentric man. 

That's the intent, anyway. However, reflecting on the book in the days after finishing, it occurred to me that a reader may think Parini, by repeatedly mentioning Borges's bathroom habits and making light of them, for instance, is indiscreet. A mental alarm belatedly went off: Parini, who's taken on the responsibility of portraying a real historical figure even if the book isn't strictly biography, may seem to display bad manners. Maybe he's even dirtying up his object of interest, a sweet man whose chief offense, based on the evidence here, is being a legendary writer. 

Overall, Parini is undoubtedly paying tribute to Borges, the man and the writer. If he insists on including unpleasant facts of their encounter for rude laphs, I wouldn't object so long as he's being truthful and he holds himself to the same standard (and, you know, they're funny). Borges, after all, pays for their meals and lodging and treats Parini as an equal, which is partly why the young writer is slow to recognize his stature. During one scene, Parini shares a poem of his. When he's finished, Borges notes a common sentiment in it. Wounded, Parini says what he thinks Borges means: it's a cliché. But Borges isn't dismissing him. He clarifies: He's written the exact same poem.

Parini, however, doesn't quite do the same, airing plenty about Borges's sometimes crude or inconvenient personal habits (again, he's blind and in his 70s) without much recording any comparable shortcomings of his own in what is, after all, a personal story, what he describes as a "novelistic memoir." In this sense, it's one-sided. Parini temporarily leaves Borges to visit another writer in Orkney, taking a boat ride with a woman he's just met to get there. The water is too rough for him, he gets nauseous and vomits on himself. And he has no change of clothes. Consequently, for the rest of the trip, he reeks. Now, this is a one-time occurrence under conditions that anyone who wasn't born on the sea would react unfavorably to, not a habit, so it doesn't come close to how he's depicted Borges in his less flattering moments. Then Parini stretches credulity: The woman who's accompanied him makes no reference to his accident and, without Parini showering or cleaning his clothes, shares her bed with him. I've never claimed to be an expert in romance, but I have a feeling if I polled a thousand women who are sexually attracted to men, few would say they'd enthusiastically have sex with a man who (a) they've recently seen vomit on himself (b) hasn't changed out of the clothes he vomited upon, some evidence presumably still visible (c) smells like he's been "rolling around in the shit," as Borges sagely observes after the ladies's man Parini has supposedly had sex (and been a "good fuck" his first time, no less). Yes, there's more novel than memoir at work here, methinks. Another imbalance. The reason I enjoyed reading the book anyway, I suppose, is because I thought of Sherlock Holmes, who's so good he demonstrates it sometimes in spite of Watson.

Not long afterward, I rewatched the Netflix documentary about Michael Jordan and the rise of the Chicago Bulls, The Last Dance. Though popular, it has since been the target of a twofold backlash. There are those, from critics to Ken Burns, who've fairly expressed doubts about how evenhanded the documentary is, given that Jordan's production company was involved in the making. Or point to glaring omissions, such as the absence of any direct mention of his life as a father and husband or an examination of the economics and politics of the game. Verdict: Doesn't go far enough. Really, can't go far enough with the subject as a participant in its creation. Then there are former teammates like Scottie Pippen who go so far as to say it's an embarrassing portrayal of Jordan. Verdict: Too far! 

The documentary falls short of greatness but I still find it impressive in its structure, handling a wealth of material, and highly entertaining through every one of its ten episodes, each nearly an hour. What's more, basketball fans are given the gift of a permanent joke about taking things personally. In the brief time I've spent delving deeper into the game, a lifelong fascination, I've already encountered some self-serving storytelling that bypasses anything awkward or questionable to preserve the brand and avoid "embarrassment" in a league that highly values "respect" - which makes for hardly a story at all. Michael Jordan could have approved the same kind of document. Instead, the filmmakers reveal something of the man. Several players admit that he was difficult to put up with. Steve Kerr tells a story about a time when Jordan, who was pushing him around during practice, finally punched him in the face. The skeptic might say: one of the most renowned sports figures ever, referred to as the "alpha-alpha," could too easily be forgiven or even applauded for being a bully. Then the bully, in the middle of addressing the accusation, pausing to absorb the uncomfortable thought that his teammates didn't much enjoy being on a team with him, nearly breaks down, turns his head from the camera. End of episode. Jordan doesn't embarrass himself in that moment, reacting emotionally to a touchy subject. He reveals, there and elsewhere, what should be common knowledge: He's human, not superhuman.

And that fallibility is precisely what some would prefer not to reveal.

Bolaño, living up to his own standard in The Savage Detectives, his celebrated total novel, what many consider one of his two masterworks, fictionalizes the "problems of a sexual nature" he once alluded to in an interview. Whether he's faithful to every particular doesn't matter. He knew very well how easy it is for someone, especially a writer, to self-mythologize and let people construct a monument. His choice is to knock it down by writing about a character named Belano who shares Bolaño's background and who once had a limp dick. (Borges to Parini on impotence: "I do not like this word.") Whether biography or autobiography, in fiction or outside it, an honest portrait inevitably includes embarrassing and shameful facts because they're indisputably part of any real life. To avoid them is to pretend they never happened and to sell a fantasy - an especially ignoble evasion if one reads about lives seeking the full scope and spends any time attacking and criticizing others. 

Conscientious reading and dirt-seeking are incompatible. I didn't read about Parini's Borges or watch Michael Jordan for the insights of the grocery store tabloid. Nor did I blush. It's because autobiography and biography done right can also prepare the reader to face their own lapses, failings, bodily imperfections, and blots and to reflect on what part they play in the whole story. 

Do not fear that I'm poised to conclude: Who am I to judge? Sounds so nice, so agreeable on the face of it. But I will judge a Capitol rioter. I will judge someone who blithely or irritably ignores the threat of the coronavirus and the measures taken to prevent its spread. I will judge a racist and a misogynist and an utter dope and many more accordingly. If these people refuse to be honest about who they are, I'll gladly remind them. In turn, I accept that I'll be judged for things I say and do. So we're absolutely clear: I advocate the cultivation of such discernment to keep evil at bay.

I will, however, conclude with Christopher Hitchens, whose estate, as of now, will not be cooperating with the writer of a biography and has discouraged others from doing so as well. I don't demand, of course, but I'd be among the first to read a scrupulous one should it ever come out, devouring a hundred pages per sitting. Knowing something of his feelings about the deeply personal aspect of biography, my sheer delight would probably induce him to heave a sigh. But he also didn't offer leniency and didn't expect it in return. In the meantime, I head to YouTube to enjoy a favorite Hitchens response, given near the end of his life, losing hair and weight as he was dying of cancer. It provides a clue for how he'd respond to an unscrupulous book on his life. A 60 Minutes interviewer reads him the words of a former friend: "self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic, cynical, contrarian." First Hitchens says: "Well, I don't know what's wrong with that." He came to regret the title of one of his books, Letters to a Young Contrarian, having acknowledged the rather obvious problems with contrarianism as a way of life. Yet here he is being the contrarian and cheerfully embracing it, momentarily perhaps. This part of his reply serves to communicate insouciance and helps mainly to buy time for the memorable second part: "Though he should see my ass now." If you're counting, that's a two-for-one, self-humor and swat.

A Recent Run of Bad Luck with Novels

     It isn't always my job or snow or guitar or nap or walk or movie or meditation or pushups or basketball highlights or internet browsing or Animal Crossing mayoral responsibilities or the waiting that's key to my artistic approach or this video of a professional musician in the middle of a performance sneezing into his trombone that prevents me from offering a few words. Sometimes it's the luck of the draw, a book I can't bring myself to write about, if I finished at all. Part of literature is chance. Usually if one book doesn't work out, I have another in reach ready to dispel the aftereffects. But lately I've gone from one unsatisfying novel to the next, leaving me feeling undernourished, lethargic, uneasy, mildly ill.

There's the novel that barely qualifies as fiction.

There's the novel that's barely more than political tract.

There's the novel that I had to put down once an animate future world gives way to inanimate characters.

There's the novel celebrated as a classic that I've started maybe four times through the years. I like it. Still not what I'm looking for.

There's the novel that's won a major award. It's twee and lacks rigor of form.

There's the best seller from a Nobel Prize winner. I'm not the kind of reader (or writer) who can't tolerate and see past a simple sentence. One of the few memorable pieces of writing advice I've heard comes from Raymond Carver: If it's quotable, cut it. Language as a vehicle for substance. Structure and force, comedy and weirdness are not dependent on style. It can liberate the writer who obsesses so much over word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence perfection that the elementary ability to unspool a thought is lost. Lichtenberg can be referring to the trap when he says one goes from the bad to the good to a kind of bad one thinks better than good. The problem with the best seller is that its language is a simple vehicle for paltry substance.

I've gained a better understanding of what I don't like. I try to keep this in mind. But the real cure for what ails me is to find the right book. It doesn't necessarily need to be a book worthy of claiming a permanent place on my shelves, either. At a minimum it must keep me reading til the last page, generate some heat, even if it is ostensibly cold. My luck will change, my condition will improve, so long as the search continues.

Sketch of New Jersey, February 2021 or A Winter Day's Odyssey for the Man from the West Coast

      A gray patch of playground slush in kindergarten. That's the closest I ever came to snow before settling here. As I got older, the East Bay grew dryer. There were times I stopped and counted on one or two hands how many days it'd rained in a year. Near the end of my California period there was a scramble to buy masks too, as the state government issued air quality warnings due to record-breaking wildfires. With one advancing toward us, trees in Castro Valley were cut down. Every season a fire season. From "climate change" to "climate collapse." So it's with the shock and pleasure of a former resident of a parched and burning state that I think of snow, of the earth being well fed, of powdered branches against a mauve sky. But it's not all cheerful visions of fertility and hitting my nephew with a snowball or two. I've gone from knowing nothing of snow to battling snow. And I've learned firsthand that there's no winning, only enduring. If one can.

A respite: snow piled everywhere but the sun out. With snow coming down, blanketing everything, and keeping customers away, I have a reason to stay home from the snakepit I call work. With the sun out and the roads clear, however, I figure I should obey my oath to the store and try to make it, despite the obstacles. Bloomingdale is not very friendly to the pedestrian on the most tranquil of spring days. When snowplows clear the roads, the snow is pushed onto what few walking paths and sidewalks there are, creating frangible walls to scale. The alternative is to walk or jog carefully in a two-lane road, trying to avoid ice, cars on your back that can't be counted on for patience.

Rounding a corner, a woman snug in her SUV seemed to be enjoying my situation. But I made it onto the less busy road uphill that I walk most of the way without a scratch. Traffic tends to come downhill. I walk on the other side of the road and switch as necessary. Once, I stepped onto a driveway to let a car pass and nearly slipped on ice, then nearly slipped stepping off. Further on, two cars came each way at the same time. I stepped onto a sturdier snow wall and waited. This leg of my trip was about typical. The trickiest came after, upon reaching the freeway in Riverdale. More lanes means more snow pushed onto the path, the wall looming over the waist-high steel barrier fixed along half of it. And it is a very sooty wall. The only choice I had other than spending ten minutes plowing neckdeep through bonechilling filth before work was to

And I got to work right on time, with no serious injuries. I stepped into an empty part of the parking lot to put on two masks and started for the entrance, tensing up.

Since I last mentioned the coronavirus, signs have appeared throughout the store informing everyone of how to properly wear a mask. It is a clear, if cartoonish and undemanding, visual, a gentle, infantilizing message to adults to please do the bare minimum to protect themselves and others from the contagious and potentially fatal illness that has killed scores of people, wrecked the economy, and upended life in our country and beyond for about a year. My day begins with an inessential coworker lumbering directly toward me wearing his mask incorrectly, as usual, in a narrow space. I turned around and waited in a safe corner for him to pass. 

Anything you have to say about taking it easy with this whole coronavirus thing is going to be idiotic. Not so long ago, I stood away from another coworker who can't be bothered to wear a mask properly or keep apart from others. Irritated, he asked me how long I was going to distance myself. I recited the latest numbers within the US alone: the millions infected, the hundreds of thousands dead. I added that it seemed like a problem worth taking seriously to me. He went on to air his view, with absolutely no encouragement from me, that what we ought to be doing is taking off our masks and infecting ourselves to build our immunity.

The vaccine has arrived long before the most optimistic predictions but the US has bungled the rollout too. What's more, it appears people who work at grocery stores, for instance, among the most exposed and underpaid for their trouble, are at the back of the line to receive it. Another reason to remain vigilant, the sensible person would conclude. What one gets instead are coworkers who share breakroom tables without wearing masks. Customers, meanwhile, are as much of a problem as ever. I may very well be the only person in the store at any given time that makes an effort to keep a distance, as frequently instructed.

Convincing explanations have been provided for such behavior but it's not likely to change any time soon. The point is that I never considered staying indoors for winter at work if I could help it, the most dangerous season for the spread of the virus. But my oasis is covered in snow. I tried to run up the steep hill on the edge of the parking lot to get there, promptly slipped, landed on all fours, and slid right back to where I started. A car honked. Every potential outdoor place to sit alone, in safety, is covered in snow. My solution: Guide a grocery cart to the side of the store, where there's a lone salted road used mainly for deliveries, overturn the cart and sit on it. I missed the quiet and solitude of the forest and kicked around the idea of bringing a shovel to work. Somehow in my relatively obscure winter spot, in a fifteen- to thirty-minute window, a few maskless strangers, customers apparently just wandering around the perimeter of the store, have appeared and come too close. And a truck passing through to spray salt sprayed me too. The driver looked to be on his cell phone.

After my shift, worn down from another day spent parrying as much as working, I escaped into the night. In hand was a box for laundry detergent in which I carried a box of disposable masks, a box of reuseable masks, and a box of mini Drum Sticks. My ride didn't arrive. "Cool," I said. The temperature would at least preserve my Drum Sticks on the long walk back home. Starting down the road, a car honked. It was not my brother.

I scaled the filthsnow wall. Not so bad at first. It'd melted and frozen and it maintained structural integrity initially. And it was too dark to be grossed out. Then, halfway across, as I came under a street lamp, illuminated and highly visible from the parking lot, a leg sank fully into the snow, followed by the other. I tried to stand and my arm sank. My box toppled and my glasses came off. I reached out and got poked grasping a prickly branch. Eventually I fought my way to a stable portion of the wall. I snatched off my masks, wiped down my glasses, and made sure my products were safe in my box. I thought of a good snowstorm scene in an Icelandic novel I otherwise didn't care for. Stranded, on an icy rock soon to come apart beneath my feet. If I ever wanted to get home, my only other choice was to 

And somehow I made it. That's what's important. Near the start of my downhill trek, in the dark, I had a runny nose. I didn't have a tissue so I blew my nose into the palm of my glove and wiped my face on the knuckles as best as I could. No one saw and yet I had another reason to get home: to feel less feral.

Back near the busy two-lane road, I scaled the wall, stepping where others had. All went okay until, under maximum illumination beneath the street lamp, as cars sped by, I slipped into the snow pathetically, with no resistance, just an ugh. Getting to my feet, slowly, I thought: Tired. Hungry. Sick? Home.

I balled up my gloves, hid them in my pocket, put on a mask, and walked in with my usual: "Yo." Civilized human once more. And alive.

The Soul of A Confederacy of Dunces

     I'm always eager to hear someone's take on a book that belongs to my personal canon, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, whether the writer enjoyed it or not. A recent piece in the New Yorker by Tom Bissell is the latest I've come across. On second reading, he still doesn't much like it. I write now because he's yet another reader of the novel who, in rendering his final verdict, disappoints me by missing what happens, mischaracterizing it as a mere barrage of gags leading nowhere. I'm looking for a discussion of the book's meaning, not another declaration that it has none. I intend to prove that it does in hopes that the next writer will start from there already.

Ignatius J. Reilly is a manchild content to live off his mother, a fact that, on its own, makes him nothing if not pathetic. That should be a universal rule. The horrendous injustice inflicted upon him is when he's forced by circumstances to get a job. Except he can't bring himself to work or tolerate others and thus can't hold down a job. His real work, he believes, consists of scattered notes in yellow legal pads, scribbled between masturbation sessions. But the novel's main source of comedy is his calamitous interactions with other people, the dunces. Ignatius can't get through a taxi cab ride without irritating the driver, deems his first boss, upon seeing him, a "blight." In return, everyone, almost without exception, scorns him. Having read all this, and having noted that the character had its origin in a person Toole knew and made fun of, Bissell refers unironically to Ignatius as Toole's "hero." Toole's hero is aggressively ridiculed from every single angle, down to his mammoth yellowed drawers, throughout the entire book. It is a satire and Ignatius is its prime target.

I've had to adjust to the pitch of a writer. For years I could only read about 300 pages of a Dickens novel before setting it aside. Harold Bloom describes his work as an endless festival - tantalizing promotion, fatiguing experience, for obvious reasons. As would be the case with any festival, no matter how deliriously fun, I had to leave. (I finally started small with Hard Times and worked my way up to Bleak House.) Though I allow that Toole's pitch might seem antic, I've never felt the same need to adjust with his novel, as the entertainment provides balance for what would otherwise be a grisly tale of a man on the verge of getting himself thrown into a mental asylum. If the jokes come rapidly, it's a measure of how dire the situation is, how necessary laughter is just to present it. Every joke on Ignatius is a cut.

George Orwell, in his analysis of Dickens, says that there's always an idea behind a joke. It took my own second reading for me to notice the few lines and passages in the book that explicitly reveal Toole's meaning. When I noticed, I thought I glimpsed the mark of a young writer or maybe the imperfection bound to be uncovered in any novel. To contradict Bissell once more, the idea behind Toole's jokes risks seeming too transparent. (But then I observe how often readers seem to miss it and wonder whether it was a deliberate imperfection, highlighting and underlining and circling that still isn't enough. The old story of the clown whose humor is assumed to be empty and lowbrow. And the book opens with a line from Swift, from which the title derives.) A Confederacy of Dunces can be likened to an addiction narrative: a succession of disasters that lead to "rock bottom," to the moment where a choice must be made either to climb out or be destroyed. One or the other. The jokes, the thousand cuts, approximate the granularity of the ordinary life of a noxious person who experiences and - Toole suggests - requires that much punishment to break through a barrier and reach a moment of clarity.

Ignatius gorges on cheap screen entertainments he claims to be appalled by in the manner I suspect many others do, as a distraction from his miserable life and his role in creating it. During a scene at the movie theater, the narrator mentions, in arguably clunky fashion, that he has no interest in watching a foreign film about a man who's lost his soul. There must have been many films Ignatius chose not to watch on one of his many trips to the theater. Why isolate this one? Then, nearing the end of the book, Ignatius and his mother have a dramatic, not comic, shouting match that spills out into the street. Again, that word: his mother accuses him of having no soul.

The book prompts me to ask a couple of questions that are always worth asking: What is a soul? And how is it lost?

If you sit there and consider your greatest fault, it is no abstraction. Adhering to it, if you dare to peer deeply enough, past your defenses, carefully constructed or not, would be the evidence against you, your least heroic moments. There may even be one rending moment in particular in which you couldn't escape the truth of who you are and what you've become. Ignatius has that moment. He's at a party, dressed as a pirate. As usual, he has turned everyone against him and is ostracized. Alone, he remembers a traumatic incident from back in high school, suppressed perhaps until then, when he pissed his pants. There are few more effective means in life at that age to be instantly shunned, to be treated with disgust and be forever branded as preposterous, than pissing your pants in front of your schoolmates, especially if it can't be blamed on alcohol. And Ignatius, recalling it as the crowd edges away from him once more, can't hide behind his defenses, rage and delusions of superiority, as he so often does, any more than if he tried to do so with piss-soaked pants. All he can do is stand there, unsure of what to do with himself, sadly swinging his plastic sword.

No, Ignatius isn't a hero - which makes Toole's last-minute display of compassion after the fusillade of ridicule and pain so remarkable, changing its nature. It's not limited to the act of Myrna Minkoff arriving to save him. It's that Ignatius recognizes that he's been saved. The book closes with him aware of his incredible fortune, grasping irony, expressing actual appreciation for someone, and prepared to venture into the world and its possibilities, thereby recovering his soul. Cormac McCarthy: "If it's not about life and death, it doesn't matter." Ignatius manages to stave off death and cling to life. Toole isn't, as Bissell concludes, simply portending the incel or rightwing troll. He certainly isn't valorizing him. He's not even just demolishing him, though there is that. The wag is a wise man with a message that can broadly apply to anyone who's become unmoored, loathed, and seemingly hopeless but particularly to the guy who today rots in front of a screen, overwhelmed by rage, the victim of a conspiracy, unable to fathom why women aren't intrigued and why the system doesn't conform to his angriest fantasies. Toole's great feat is to issue a comic warning that unites mordancy with humanity. Highly instructive.

Working Women of Today's South Korea

     If I Had Your Face (2020), Frances Cha's debut novel, is about modern South Korea as seen through the eyes of five women, four of them narrators. I can't remember the last time I walked around with a book this pink in my hands. And I'm not sure why I was expecting there to be a plot, there isn't one, yet my interest never waned. 200 pages in or so it struck me as odd. The reader enters the story at what begins to seem like an arbitrary point in their lives and sees how they unfold over a period of months. She could have added another month, another 100 pages, and it wouldn't have changed the book's architecture. Physical beauty and surgery play a significant part in their lives - as work, as a measure of a person's worth, as the promise of a better life - but not a central part of the book, as the title would suggest. Perhaps the lone dependent clause, for me, suggested mystery and desperation, and desperation a desperate act, a crime, and crime - a plot. Cha almost teases it with a sudden burst of violence or a scream. But the violence remains only a burst and the screamer turns out to be fine. On to the next day.

Borges, in a polemical introduction to his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares's debut novel The Invention of Morel, memorably defends the plot and imaginative invention and writes of how we unwittingly resign ourselves to Proust's realism, as we resign ourselves to the insipidity and the emptiness of the day. I've encountered books that forced me to repeat his observation, with a wounded moan. But Cha gets me caught up in her realism, which eschews the dulling method of meticulously recording objects and sensations, appearances and psychology. Five intersecting lives: though her voices aren't distinct, between work, relationships, personal history, and society, she covers much ground, tossing off frightening details, angering details, bitterly amusing details. Cha says in a recent interview that she didn't intend to write a condemnation but a character states clearly what's inescapable throughout the novel: someone is always looking down on someone else. Aside from physical appearance, a person's value is determined, upon being introduced, by school, job, family, connections, money. Provide unsatisfactory answers and find yourself treated coldly and barred. The protagonists are on the lower end of the hierarchy, living precariously. One woman works in a high-end room salon, a sort of club catering to rich men that's not strictly legal. She says, while under threat from a vengeful client, that if the police raid the establishment, it's not the managers and certainly not the owner, some "shadowy fuck," who face the consequences but the women. Otherwise they work to pay off debts to their employers, spend their days getting ogled and felt up and plied with alcohol, get used and thrown away by clients, can be assaulted to appease them if they're unhappy with the service. Her story is probably the most intense but all of them, a hairstylist, an artist, an office worker, get knocked around day after day and expect no less. Their world is an antagonist.

However, If I Had Your Face never steeps fully into the murk and its close isn't arbitrary. Another vein of detail: One woman is there to hold her friend's hand after a painful operation. Another woman prepares hangover food and washes her friend's soiled sheets. Two women, arm in arm, walk through the hallway laughing enticingly. A woman takes a chance and surprises her friend by scheduling her an interview for a better job.

The drawback of the novel is that its appeal is mostly journalistic. Cha doesn't exhaust her material and can handle scale, go on the attack (if not consciously then by faithfully rendering her status-obsessed, spirit-crushing world), and inhabit lives, plural. I wouldn't reread it but I'd be interested to see how she builds on what she's got.