Bergen, David. The
Matter with Morris. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2012
Gibbons, Kaye. A
Virtuous Woman. New York: Vintage Books, 1989
Barry, Sebastian. The
Secret Scripture. London: Penguin Books, 2008
We used to talk in English 101 about character-driven as
opposed to plot-driven fiction. Granted, both are necessary but there are
novels where the dissection of a personality seems to be the primary driving
force. Take The Matter with Morris. Morris
Schutt is a post-modern man, a failing journalist with a weakness for mining
the follies and foibles of his family and friends for a regular syndicated
column. But when you write in judgment of the world and the people around you,
you’d better be careful that you personally stand on firm ground or the core of
your existence will crumble. This happens to Morris when his son is needlessly
killed in Afghanistan by a friend mishandling his rifle. It’s a tragedy made
more poignant by Morris’ having taunted his “wimpy” son into joining the army.
Morris
has been on a trajectory of estrangement from his wife and daughters for some
time; the son’s death is too much to handle gracefully and his wife breaks off
entirely and Morris moves out.
There’s
a concept in fiction writing known as verisimilitude. The basic idea is that a
writer creates a world; that world bears similarities to the real world but is
also unique, so that in writing, for instance, a Roadrunner episode, Wiley Coyote is not expected to act as real
world coyotes do, but must behave in a believable fashion for the character and
the setting the author has created. Characters “believability” hinges on the
author’s ability to submerge him/herself into the milieu of his creation and to
transmit faithfully to the reader verisimilitudinous
characters and actions.
The
matter with The Matter with Morris is
that Bergen fails to achieve verisimilitude. Morris does things that are both
bizarre in relation to his situation, but are pointless in the advancement of
the plot. Drawing out all his assets in cash and buying a safe to store the
$300,000 plus proceeds in his apartment is a case in point. This kind of plot
whimsy pales, however, in comparison to the behaviour of the minor characters
who are super nice for no apparent reason and super critical, also for no
apparent reason—and sometimes both at the same time. Then there’s the
prostitute he hires only to discover that she’s his son’s one-time friend and a
former guest in his home. Bizarre and irrelevant.
If
Bergen had written Hamlet, Ophelia would have been discovered not to have
drowned after all, would marry Hamlet after the disposing of Claudius and the reconciliation
of mother and son, Polonius would have recovered from the sword thrust to his
vitals and Denmark would have been launched on the road to greatness—with copious
apologies all ‘round and pledges to do better.
My
advice: give this one a miss.
Oprah’s
Book Club recommends A Virtuous Woman, but
I try not to let that stop me from reading a novel. Gibbons’ second novel, it’s
set in the south of the USA where landowners rent plots to rag-tag
sharecroppers and migrant workers survive by working the fields, sheltering in
shacks for night. The “virtuous woman” is the daughter of landowners. As a
teenager, she is seduced by a handsome ne’er-do-well who beats her, abuses her
psychologically and then abandons her. She’s subsequently “traded”; her father
strikes a deal with a migrant worker to give him a small property that he can
share crop if he’ll marry Ruby.
The
story is narrated by Ruby Pitt and her second husband, Blinking Jack Stokes
until the last chapter where a third person narrator completes it out of
necessity. Like Bergen with Morris, Gibbons’ task here is to make Ruby live for
the reader as a character deserving of our empathy. In general, she is much
more successful than is Bergen. My only reservation would be that motivation is
not as clearly drawn as it might be; Ruby’s descent into the madness of a
futile marriage is explained by her as something of an infatuation. At the same
time, she’s full of praise for the household she’s abandoning, parents who are
loving and dependable, a Nanny/housekeeper who is efficient and respected.
But then, pretty girls falling
for bad boys is new neither to reality nor fiction. Think Lorna Doone.
A pretty woman is the central
character in Barry Sebastian’s The Secret
Scripture as well. Like Ruby, her downfall comes at the hands of a
reprobate husband, not one that abuses her but one who succumbs to the pressure
of a tyrannical Catholic mother to annul his marriage to this child of
Presbyterians. Left pregnant and destitute in Sligo in Ireland, a series of
circumstances lands her in an institution and when we first meet her, she is a
very old woman in yet another institution painfully scratching out her life story
on sheets of paper she hides under the floorboards.
Like Gibbons, Barry uses the
technique of two narrators simultaneously telling the same story, one being the
hapless Roseanne McNulty and the other, a doctor in the nursing home charged
with assessing residents for relocation when the old building in which they
live will be demolished. Barry masterfully draws out these two characters as he
reveals the chasms between what is real and what is remembered by both.
The Secret Scripture requires some suspension of disbelief; it’s
hard to imagine a woman of the age and decrepitude of Old Roseanne writing what
she writes and how much she writes. This, however, is not much of a hurdle.
Verisimilitude: the characters are true to the milieu in which Barry has placed
them.
If you’re looking for your
next novel read, I’d highly recommend finding The Secret Scripture. Barry is a masterful storyteller and his
success as a playwright is evident in scene setting and in dialogue. I can’t
help but place him in a long line of superb Irish writers like James Joyce,
Dylan Thomas and T.S. O’Rourke to name a few.
I’d also recommend A Virtuous Woman, but with some
reservation. I think I should have read two other items first: her first, award
winning novel, Ellen Foster, and the
biographical notes at http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/11381306.html?refer=y.
Gibbons is purportedly an author whose novels are more autobiographical than
most.
David Bergen, of course, is
Canadian and his latest novel, The Age of
Hope made it to the top five in the Canada
Reads event on CBC and the web just concluded.