Originally posted on my blog

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You is a beautiful title in search of a novel. Peter Cameron uses it as the jumping off point to tell the coming of age of an eighteen-year old named James Sveck.

The first few pages quickly illustrate James's contrary and cynical nature, as well as his increasing alienation from his family and his privileged upbringing. He has acted out enough to warrant compulsory meetings with a psychiatrist, whom he stonewalls at every opportunity. He spends the last of his summer vacation before college working part-time at his mom's art gallery. Slated to go to Brown University, he instead looks obsessively at real estate in the Midwest and plots his escape, all the while disdaining everybody in New York City, except for his grandmother and one of his mother's employees.

I have a very contentious relationship with stories about the children of privileged New York families acting like utter snots. I like them in their trashiest incarnations, as illustrated by the distressing number of aggregate hours I've spent watching Gossip Girl. I know more gossipy information about Anderson Cooper (who is not a snot) and his Vanderbilt relatives (who were) than is frankly healthy. On a less morally dubious note, I also love Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.

Despite all that, however, I have found that the novels I've read so far that feature sophisticated yet brittle families leave me cold. Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, The Nanny Diaries. I don't find the muted oppressiveness compelling, and neither do I muster much sympathy for the often unlikeable audience surrogate railing against the machine. I like drama that surround fictional royalty with much stricter sense of decorum and repression, but I don't know, it just doesn't tickle me in this particular setting.

I found Peter Cameron's novel particularly irksome because it echoes the Salinger novel in a way that insists upon itself. And while I don't identify with him, Holden Caulfield at least came from a time and place that truly pressed upon human beings the absolute necessity of conformity and limited critical thinking. James Sveck lives in a world that has been traumatized by the World Trade Center attacks that has seemed to send them in a suspended state between false cheer and despair, but it simply did not strike me that his disdain of this world warrants the long list of callous or inconsiderate actions that he takes in the novel.

Yes, I know it's ennui. Yes, I know it's about the paralyzing effect of modernity on an otherwise sensitive soul. Blah, blah, blah.

In one of the books dominant character arcs, James confronts (or refuses to confront) the idea that he may be attracted to men. He has feelings for John, an older man who works at his mom's gallery. James ends up stalking him online and finding out that the frequents a dating site for gay people. James then creates a false persona on the dating site and communicates with John this way, an impersonation that goes on for weeks. He then lets John in on the whole charade in a particularly unkind way.

The novel attempts to contextualize the objectionable parts of James's personality through his conversations with the resented therapist, as well as his deep love and loyalty to his grandmother. But while the scenes with the therapist leads to some insight about several of his traumas, the combative and painstaking way these often incomplete revelations were coaxed from him would leave me emotionally drained and frustrated as well. By the end of one session we find out that he essentially catfished the one guy he actually liked because he felt repressed about his sexuality and because... September 11? What?

The sequences at the end are particularly Caulfieldian in its ambiguity. He has several conversations with people that end up causing him emotional turmoil. There is a another significant trauma that happens, making the reader unsure if James would ever be able to pull himself through it. But for me, this final appeal to pathos comes at the end of a very vexing reading experience and left me not really caring what happens either way.

This is the challenge of all unlikeable narrator, to induce an initial, provoked alienation between you and the novel. The writer then spends the rest of books' pages trying to win you back in some way. This novel left me cold from the start, and I could never find it in me to warm up to young master James.

I also have to admit that a large part of my dislike is that I reaaaally love the Ovid quote where the title came from and believe that this book didn't deserve it. It was the reason I blind-bought this book in the first place. Petty in the extreme, I know.

(Trigger warnings for scenes of sexual assault and violence.)

Eliza Victoria is at her best when her stories unfold with an almost dispassionate reserve, the measured cadence of her sentences like a steady stride of a predator approaching. I like how this collection slowly coalesces into an examination of collective violence, delusion and hysteria, sometimes called folie a plusieurs. I was ambivalent about this theme when it emerged from the first story titled "Needle Rain," but slowly the notes started building upon themselves, reaching a satisfying crescendo of wtf.

This novel about the last game of a dying Go master was a gift to me by friends. They knew of my longstanding interest in Go and gave me this novel for my birthday. I've previously read a couple of Yasunari Kawabata's short stories in anthologies but I've always felt his writing to be at least one shade more oblique than is comfortable. This book, which is apparently more straightforward than a lot of his other novels, is quite difficult to parse as an emotional work. But I still end up contemplating its themes, turning them over in my head as one's fingers would fiddle a Go stone.

Yasunari Kawabata's The Master of Go is an example of the shishosetsu, a novel form that hinges upon the fictionalization of real events as experienced by the author. In this particular novel, the author is the newspaper correspondent covering the retirement game of the highly influential Go master Honinbo Shusai and the innovative younger player Otake (a thinly veiled fictionalization of eventual Go legend Minoru Kitani). Kawabata uses the actual game record in his storytelling, a recreation of which you can access here.

The novel opens with the news of Honinbo Shusai's death. He was the last hereditary heir to the tile of Honinbo, the dominant school of Go for the last 300 years. Shusai did not a name a successor--instead, he bequeathed the name Honinbo to the Japan Go Association. In many ways, Shusai's death was the end of Go as the genteel preoccupation of the shogun class, a break from the the imperial past. Interspersed with the story of his wake and the people traveling to pay their respects are scenes from the actual game, spanning six grueling months and several cities.

His competitor Otake has as much of his reputation on the line, if not more. He is one half of the two pillars of a new movement within the game called Shin Fuseki. I recognize the inherent nerdiness of calling board game moves "revolutionary," but believe me when I say that Shin Fuseki changed so much of game theory that it's now very difficult to apply the opening of games from the last century to current gameplay. Ask me in the comments and I'll try to elaborate in the wonkiest way I can.

You know that Hemingway exhortation about stories being icebergs where most of the mass is under the surface? Well, the Master of Go is basically an iceberg the size of a continent and the only visible part is one square yard of unadorned reportage. The novel works most overtly as an elegy, a mourning of the past by sensitive and artistic souls who are uncertain of a highly industrialized present. Though the game itself occurred in in 1938, Kawabata (who published it serially in 1951) transforms the story to encompass Japan's modernization, militarization and eventual loss in World War II. A significant percentage of his narrative is consumed by Shusai's ambivalence with the new, rigorous rules of Go, ostensible improvements that for him renders the game dehumanized.

Another, more subtle motif in the story is the idea of the game as a pure form, untouched by the outside world. One scene features a visibly angered Otake threatening to forfeit because the length of the game has forced him to be away from his family and school for extended periods, sometimes due to the caprice of the older Honinbo. His fatigue ends up showing in his performance. Another crucial plot point involves the use of the rules to get more thinking time in between sessions. On a more meta level, it also made me examine the idea of a "pure novel" that exists perfectly outside of all intertextuality. Because I found a lot of the themes opaque as I was reading the book, a lot of my subsequent pleasure comes mostly outside of it, from reading about historical context and studying commentary on the actual game. My opinion has also been colored by the knowledge that Shusai himself had been a highly divisive figure throughout his life, a discovery that tempers the idea of him as a figure of bodhisattvan temperance, enduring one last painful game to glorify posterity.

My experience with Kawabata is a circuitous road. As a teenager, I was very fascinated with the author Yukio Mishima, who wrote existentialist and dramatic set pieces that had made him one of the foremost Japanese modernists. In a Mishima biography written by John Nathan, he relates Mishima's admiration and respect for the older Kawabata, a sensei/kouhai relationship that struck many as ironic given the vast difference of their personalities. Mishima was bold and iconoclastic, while Kawabata was serene and seemingly removed from time. There was one particularly poignant anecdote about Mishima's conflicted feelings when Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968--Mishima (who actually nominated Kawabata to the Swedish academy) knew that the Nobel wouldn't be awarded to a Japanese author again within his lifetime. Two years later, Mishima would commit suicide through seppuku after participating in an attempted rightist coup.

My years have also tempered my fascination for these two writers, who seemed so preoccupied with the beauty in death and the mourning of a bygone era. For Kawabata in particular, the past is another country, and he is the perpetual exile.