The Magician by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on September 7, 2021

The line between fiction and nonfiction becomes fuzzy when writers make characters out of real people. In some novels, such as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the character is modeled upon, but does not purport to tell the life of, a real person. Mann based his novel on the composer Arnold Schoenberg but gave the character a different name and attributed his musical creativity to a pact with the devil.

Colm Tóibín writes about Doctor Faustus and Schoenberg’s reaction to that novel in The Magician, Tóibín’s own blend of fiction and biographical fact. Tóibín does not disguise his subject; the story’s protagonist is Thomas Mann and the story hews closely to the details of Mann’s life.

Writers who essentially write a biography in the form of a novel run a couple of risks. First, they are constrained by historical fact, which limits the ability to let imagination take flight, as Mann did when he turned Schoenberg into someone other than Schoenberg. Second, if they choose a subject who is not particularly interesting, the novel is likely to be dull. R.J. Gadney stumbled across the first of those barriers to compelling fiction in Albert Einstein Speaking, turning Einstein’s life into a dry checklist of events without ever bringing Einstein to life. Mann is a literary icon but not an exciting one, creating the risk that a book about his life might be dull. Fortunately, Tóibín recognized and overcame that risk.

Given Mann’s reserved and scholarly nature, it would be difficult to make Mann’s the story of Mann's life lively. Tóibín defeated that problem by surrounding Mann with colorful people (including Mann’s children and their varied marital or sex partners), by giving the reader occasional glimpses of Mann’s attraction to young males, and by focusing on the political issues that played an unwelcome role in Mann’s life. Much of the story’s intrigue derives from Mann’s internal struggle with his early embrace of German nationalism and his later recognition that the nationalism embraced by the Nazi party was antithetical to his belief in freedom, democracy, and humanity. Tóibín suggests that Mann was often caught in the middle, between those (including his children) who criticized him for being insufficiently anti-fascist, and those (including the FBI) who regarded Mann and his children as dangerously liberal in their advocacy of anti-fascism. Mann did eventually speak out against Hitler and did so passionately, but for the most part he just wanted to be left alone so he can read and write.

Tóibín portrays Mann as a person whose nature, shaped by German culture, is circumspect and a bit ponderous, a man who has playful moments but prefers the solitude that allows him to think deeply about the human condition and to reveal his thoughts in novels rather than conversation. Although we learn the background to Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, Tóibín spends little time on the content of Mann’s works, focusing instead on the act of creation, the moments of inspiration, the mulling of artistic choices, and the hours spent committing words to paper.

Mann’s confidence in his art contrasts with (as Tóibín sees it) his insecurity as a public figure. Mann transformed his political thinking after the First World War, viewing German’s defeat as a lesson that the nation needed to internalize. He feared the direction Germany was taking as its population embraced Hitler, and then feared for himself and his family as he moved to other European countries and eventually to America. Yet at what point and to what degree he should speak out against Hitler was a question that troubled him, although not as much as it troubled his brother and children. Mann is Germany’s most celebrated writer during Hitler’s rise, just as Einstein (who makes a brief appearance in the story) is Germany’s most celebrated scientist. Both are men who could speak with intellectual and moral authority. Some in America advised Mann not to advocate for America’s participation in the war, lest he jeopardize his relationship with Roosevelt, while most of his family demanded that he make his opinions known. Tóibín’s depiction of Mann’s internal struggle is one of the novel’s highlights, as are the political machinations of the State Department and FBI in their fevered belief that intellectual freedom and nontraditional sexuality must be suppressed in the name of restraining communism and preserving crabbed American notions of morality. American hospitality turns out to be a fickle thing and Mann winds up in Switzerland after the war is over.

As envisioned by Tóibín, Mann is never quite happy with the person he has become. He “wished he were a different sort of writer, less concerned with the details of the world and more with larger, more eternal questions.” He isn’t certain whether his novels evoked emotion in same way that musical compositions express yearning. His own yearnings were confined to diaries (presumably a primary source that informed Tóibín’s understanding of Mann). For a time, Mann feared that his private writings would fall into the hands of Nazis who would use them to destroy his career. His emotions are so intensely private that they are only expressed in novels. Even his warm regard for his children is never spoken. By the novel’s end, when he decides it would be too painful to attend the funeral of his oldest son, he learns from a letter that the feelings of adulation expressed by the general public are not shared by his surviving children.

Tóibín is a meticulous researcher. I can only assume The Magician is grounded in fact, even if some of those facts are revealed in imagined conversations. Whether or not Tóibín’s interpretation of Mann is accurate, his skill at crafting characters in depth is fully displayed. The bottled-up Mann, who often responds to conflict with silence or a conspiratorial glance at his wife, is presented in credible detail as someone who can’t reconcile his emotional conflicts, who can only give full expression to his feelings by attributing them to characters in his novels. Mann is reticent but comfortable discussing matters of intellect; he is hopeless at discussing matters of the heart or loins. He is capable of revising his opinions — in some ways, he becomes a new person before the war, just as his post-war homeland becomes a new country — but he cannot change his deeply ingrained inability to express himself emotionally. He understands and regrets this flaw, but he seems incapable of addressing it. Instead of trying, he buries himself in his writing, the only task that gives him comfort.

I’ve always preferred the flights of imagination that inspire pure fiction, as opposed to the “based on a true story/actual person” brand of fiction. Writers who want to enhance a biography with fiction are constrained by the factual frame that contains their subject. Tóibín has written some true masterpieces of fiction. The Magician and The Master (a similar novel about Henry James) could be regarded as masterpieces of the subgenre of biographical fiction (or whatever it might be called). For my taste, The Magician doesn’t have the wow factor of Let the Great World Spin, but it is an impressive achievement.

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Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

Published by Doubleday on September 14, 2021

Harlem Shuffle is set in the 1950s and 60s. Raymond Carney owns a furniture store in Harlem. Carney’s father was disreputable. Carney raised himself after his mother died. He has a business degree from Queens College, a wife and kids, and dreams. He longs to move to a larger apartment in a nicer building, a dream he entertains as he walks the streets of Harlem, inspecting the buildings that he passes and imaging life inside their walls, a dream he defers whenever his savings shrink.

The Harlem atmosphere is as important to the novel as the plot. Harlem is changing. The World’s Fair promises a better future, but upward mobility for some results in misfortune for others. Through the course of the novel, Carney sees buildings that offer affordable housing torn down by developers while landmark businesses close. Some blame rioters for businesses that were destined to fail anyway, leading Carney to ask: “How long do you keep trying to save something that has been lost?” Carney keeps his business open, knowing the protests will pass and that protests won’t stop white cops from killing Harlem residents. The parallel between Harlem protests against police violence and similar BLM protests in recent years illustrates Colson Whitehead’s point: everything changes — “the textile warehouses and women’s hat stores and shoeshine stands, the greasy spoons” are reduced to rubble to make way for the World Trade Center — but nothing really changes, including police violence.

The plot follows several years in Carney’s life, years marked by upward mobility that is only partially attributable to his success selling high quality furniture, often on credit, some of which has been “gently used.” It’s not an easy business and Carney worries that his wife would leave him if she learned how he supplements his income.

Carney and his cousin Freddy ran together when they were young. Carney got his life together but Freddy’s life was “a haze of lost seasons” filled with aimless loafing, burglaries, running numbers, and a stretch of jail time. On occasion, Carney fences goods that Freddy steals, although Carney doesn’t ask whether they are stolen so he can imagine himself to be honest. And for the most part, he is. No worse, at least, than the cops to whom he pays protection money or the city workers he bribes for permits.

Freddy’s life takes another wrong turn when he joins a plan to rob the Hotel Theresa, a decision that brings “guns and hard men” into his life. Freddy proposes Carney as a fence for jewelry recovered from the hotel’s safe deposit boxes, but Carney refuses. Unfortunately for Carney, Freddy gets him involved anyway, connecting Carney to a hard man who becomes a source of grief while promoting Carney’s career as a middleman between jewelry thieves and a white midtown jeweler who gives Carney a fair deal on the stolen goods.

The story travels through peaks and valleys. Two peaks involve threats or acts of violence directed toward Carney or Freddy. Carney is not a violent man but he knows where to find a violent man when he needs help. Another peak involves a banker who took money from Carney in exchange for a favor the banker didn’t deliver. Carney executes a plan with several moving parts to take revenge against the banker.

Favors are the grease that lubricates all business in New York. Envelopes of cash assure that the police don’t bother Carney or buy their assistance when he needs to set his plan in motion. A cop talks about “a circulation, a movement of envelopes that keep the city running.” Carney later contemplates the chain of events that depend on an exchange of envelopes. “Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.”

After reading two Pulitzer Prize winners from Whitehead, I was surprised to read something that almost falls within the genre of crime fiction. But the “almost” is important. Harlem Shuffle reminded me of The 25th Hour, in that crime is the context that drives a deeper story. Harlem Shuffle is the story of a man divided, a man who (like many others, as he is surprised to learn) preserves an illusion of honesty while knowing that’s he a criminal, a man who struggles to draw a shifting line between crimes he is willing to commit — crimes that are no worse than those committed by a wealthy white family that drive the novel’s last act — and crimes that are far removed from his nature. The themes of change and personal struggle and the Harlem atmosphere transform a fairly ordinary crime story into something special.

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Happy Labor Day!

Yes, Labor Day was actually a few days ago, but the residents of Tzer Island celebrate holidays at their convenience. A new review will appear on Monday. Probably.

The Archer by Shruti Swamy

Published by  Algonquin Books on September 7, 2021

Like many stories set in India, The Archer is about contrasts of privilege. While the story involves (and is promoted as) a woman’s quest to improve herself as a dancer, it is more fundamentally a relationship drama involving a wealthy man who weds a poor woman over his family’s objections and imposes his family’s expectations upon her. That drama is set against the backdrop of Bombay in the 1960s and the social restraints imposed by Indian society upon women.

Vidya was raised in a chaali, a communal, gossipy group “where children were largely left to their own devices, with a distracted eye of some mother glancing out from time to time over each child, and come suppertime a child could be fed in any house it visited.” Vidya’s father traveled for work and was usually absent from the home. Her mother died (by means that Vidya’s memory has suppressed) when Vidya was young, leaving Vidya to be raised by her father and giving her the duty of raising a younger brother who becomes entirely dependent upon her. As a boy, Vidya’s brother is the family’s more important child. Vidya’s assigned role — a role she eventually rejects — is to take care of the home and to assure that her brother’s and father’s needs are met.

As a girl, Vidya wanted to play the tabla, a drum that only boys are allowed to play. Her mother told her, perhaps prophetically, that if she asks why she isn’t allowed to do something, she will always be unhappy. Vidya’s grandmother tells her that “sometimes god puts a soul in the wrong body” and that Vidya should have been a boy with her “restless” and “unsatisfied” nature. Boys can find an outlet for their restlessness but, as a girl, Vidya is fated to get married and live in her mother-in-law’s home. Vidya tells her grandmother that she will never get married. Fate, circumstances, social pressure, and even love all make it difficult for Vidya to keep that promise.

Vidya’s true calling, she believes, is to be a dancer. Much of the novel explores Vidya’s love of dance, her perseverance in dance lessons despite a strictness from her instructors that almost borders on cruelty, her relationships with those instructors and her occasional performances.

In her first-person narrative, Vidya also describes her decision to leave home and to attend college. Vidya’s only true friend is a student named Radha, another woman whose soul is in the wrong body. Vidya’s relationship with Radha illustrates another taboo that limits the choices both women are allowed to make.

Vidya narrates her eventual marriage to Rustom, a young man who comes from a prosperous family and who seems attentive and kind, a man whose values appear to be more western than traditional Indian in his regard of women as (almost) equal partners in a marriage. Since Rustom’s family holds Vidya in little regard (she doesn’t meet their standard for social class, refined manners, or skin color), their only real expectation is that she produce a male child that they fully intend to raise.

Like many stories from India, The Archer is notable for its depiction of the clash between ancient traditions that favor the upper classes and encroaching western notions of fairness and equality. Vidya’s defiance of her husband, father, in-laws, teachers, and society is commendable, but her defiance is at war with her feelings of inadequacy, promoted by a culture that views her gender and dark skin as liabilities. Only when she becomes lost in a dance does she feel at peace with her nature, allowing her to “move deeper into my body as the world became sharper.”

Vidya lives her life in conflict, proving the truth of her grandmother’s observation that she cannot reconcile herself. Vidya wants one thing and settles for another. Her plans to become an engineer, to never marry, and to always dance are at odds with the life she must live. At the end of the novel, Vidya makes a choice between dependence and independence. The choice is not one that will make her happy, at least not in the moment, but there may be no choice that will produce immediate happiness. She instead bases the choice on how she believes her conflicts can be reconciled for the best, and maybe that’s the long distance route to a happy life.

The novel’s title comes from a character in an epic story from ancient India, a gifted archer who sliced off his thumb so that he would never be better than his teacher. When a dance teacher explains the story’s relationship to dharma, Vidya doesn’t understand it. By the novel’s end, she understands how to relate the story to her own life. I can’t say I ever quite got the point, but Vidya is clearly smarter than I am.

The plot may seem be familiar to readers who have encountered similar stories. While the novel does not stand apart from other entries in the field, I appreciated Shruti Swamy’s unwillingness to force a happy ending upon Vidya. In the current century, Vidya might have more choices. In her time and place and given her circumstances, she needs to make choices that work for her, even if no choices will allow her to put her soul into a body that will allow her to live as she pleases.

Swamy’s prose captures the rhythms of dance, sometimes spinning, speeding up and slowing down, progressing and retreating. She is an observant writer, and while I could have done with fewer observations of red or yellow or blue saris, she captures the atmosphere of a Bombay that is divided between the cultured silence of the privileged and the chattering voices of the chaali. The Archer should capture the attention and perhaps the hearts of readers who appreciate honest stories of women who find a path to some form of independence, even if the best available path is not the one that fulfills their dreams.

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Late City by Robert Olen Butler

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on September 7, 2021

Robert Olen Butler’s new novel explores the harm caused by a parental or social insistence that “real men” must behave in a way that allows the world to witness and appreciate their manliness. More broadly, Butler suggests that harm is done whenever people of either gender are made to deny their true selves.

While the novel’s title may have more than one meaning, the obvious reference is to the late city edition of a newspaper — the edition that comes at the end of the news day, the one that reports all the day’s events, when it’s too late to add anything new. After 115 years, Samuel Cunningham is at the end of his life, looking back at key events as if they were a series of news stories, the late city edition that recounts all of the news of a life that’s worth reporting.

Sam recounts those stories from a nursing home bed, where he resides as the last living veteran of the First World War. He reviews significant episodes in his life because it is finally time to die. A gender-fluid God (“don’t concern yourself with pronouns,” God tells Sam) is in the room as Sam approaches death, forcing him to give an accounting of his life, to voice his regrets and admit his mistakes, to gain an understanding of his relationships with his parents, wife, and son before God determines Sam’s eternal fate. Since the story is told from Sam’s perspective, whether or not God is actually present or the manifestation of a dying delusion isn’t important. Real or imagined, God is a device that prompts Sam’s self-critical evaluation of his life.

On its surface, Sam has lived a fine life. He grew up in Louisiana, where his father taught him to hunt with a rifle. Seeing his father abuse his mother but being too afraid to intervene, Sam lies about his age and joins the Army as World War I begins, sneaking off in the night, saying goodbye only to his mother, protecting her with a postcard to make his father believe that she had no advance knowledge of his plan.

Using the hunting skills he learned from his father, Sam becomes a sniper. He kills more than a hundred men, envisioning one of them as his father, a vision that doesn’t stop him from pulling the trigger. Sam learns that war is about “millions of men being forced to become somebody who has to dig a hole in the ground and then go down in it or jump up out of it and die a ferocious, savaging death when you just want to be a farmer or a teacher or a sale clerk or a guy stoking coal in a tramp steamer.” People not being allowed to be who they want to be, and how that denial of self-determination harms society as much as the individual, is one of the novel’s key themes.

Sam befriends a man who gives comfort to wounded soldiers in the trenches, hugging them and even kissing them when they believe they are being held by their mothers. When it comes time for Sam to do the same for his friend, Sam needs to ask himself whether he is capable of that kind of intimacy.

At the war’s end, Sam moves to Chicago, a destination far from Loouisiana. He has long loved newspapers and has a talent for writing, his only talent apart from killing. He finds a room in the home of a war widow, earns a job as a cub reporter at a progressive newspaper by writing a sensitive piece about the city’s race riots, marries and has a son. In another key scene, when his son is eleven, Sam explains that being a man means having the courage to kill other men to protect a country. That discussion, a few years later, motivates Sam’s son to join the Navy just before the US enters World War II.

From the end of the war until Sam’s visit from God, shortly after Trump’s election, Sam lives with the consequences of how he shaped his son’s life. It is only at the end of Late City that Sam comes to understand the truth about his son, to understand the harm to which he has contributed by failing to love him unconditionally and with his whole heart. He has a similar revelation about his wife, about how his and society’s expectations shaped the woman she became.

Late City isn’t a story about toxic masculinity. Sam is a decent but misguided man, a product of his time who, by rejecting racism, is a better man than many of his peers. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He truly loves his wife, even if he gives more attention to his career than to her. He wants to observe the world and report it rather than being part of it. But Sam could have been more than decent. He could have been a helper, not just an observer. He could have been more open and accepting.

After Sam learns those lessons by considering his life in retrospect, the novel’s final pages give Sam a small opportunity for redemption. That's a sweet and touching moment.

The story concentrates on Sam’s life from the First to the Second World War. The years that follow feel rushed, although they do bring Sam’s wife and marriage into sharper focus.

I caught myself holding my breath during a few tense moments in Late City. At other points, I was genuinely moved by the story. I disagree with the New York Times reviewer who called the novel outrageously sentimental. It isn’t a literary sin for authors to make readers feel something. Obvious emotional manipulation for its own sake is a drag, but the emotional response that Butler induces comes from a place of honesty. I did not feel manipulated by forced sentiment. Rather, I empathized with Sam’s belated realizations that, at three or four times in his life, he was less of a man than he should have been, no matter how many enemy soldiers he managed to kill.

The novel’s honesty extends beyond Sam’s examination of his own life and becomes a commentary on a society that forces good people to lose their own identities by conforming to standards imposed by others. Perhaps readers who cling to antiquated standards will deny the truth or the beauty of Late City. Readers with open minds might appreciate this heartfelt story of the mistakes a decent man can make during a long life.

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