Sigrid Nunez, The Friend, and Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World: The Slowly Emerging Story
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My neighbors have a new puppy, Gemma. I first learned about Gemma, though not in a way I could understand, from another long-time member of that family: Juliet, a friendly tabby who has a timeshare interest in the soft reading chairs on our back porch. She came running up to me, meowing wildly, as I was out for a walk. I petted her, but she continued complaining, looking over her shoulder, unable to calm down enough to roll on the sidewalk and allow me to stroke her ears. I said to her, “What is it, Juliet, are you sick, what’s the matter?” But of course she had no way of telling me what was really going on. After a few days of encountering Juliet in this agitated state, I finally met Gemma, an exuberant and tiny terrier mix, capable of leaping at least a couple of feet in the air in ecstatic greeting. She tied herself in wriggling knots, flinging herself at me and licking my hands, while my neighbor, holding her leash, both laughed and rolled her eyes.
That was just a few weeks ago, before everything changed. Now, when I see Gemma out with my neighbor, I wave warmly at them from six (or ten or twenty) feet away. And when Juliet comes to visit, I say, “Hello, weak vector, glad to see you,” and then wash my hands like mad after petting her, because who knows where else she’s going? Visiting the sick, I hope, and bringing comfort.
Meanwhile, my social media feeds fill with ever more puppy and kitten photographs: many of my friends have taken on new companions, and the algorithms know I will like, like, like any and all photographs of animals and babies. Bring on the fuzzy joy!
Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend is the least fuzzy-joy-ish dog book imaginable. The book is a kind of letter to an old, dear friend, briefly a lover, the story of a friendship that outlasted three of the friend’s marriages: the narrator calls her friend’s former wives Wife One, Wife Two, and Wife Three. They never get names, though they are characters in the novel, or at least occasions for musing. This lost friend, who died by suicide, as we know almost immediately, was an older white reprobate guy who could not move on from the world he had known, from his expectations of what was due to him as teacher and writer. It’s a highly sympathetic, though not idolatrous, portrait. In addition to a weight of grief, he has left the narrator his enormous Great Dane, Apollo, who could get her evicted. At first the dog is a great problem, later she falls fiercely in love with him, and we worry about what will happen to both of them. The book is a meditation on love, death, writing, teaching, suicide, and the love of dogs. Nunez, in interviews, has invited a mostly autobiographical reading of the novel.
Apollo is both a vivid character and an evocation of grief. Early on, while both woman and dog are suffering intense pain and loss and before they know each other well, he wakes her in a way that feels like an image from a bad dream. He has been collapsed in mourning, so we may be waiting to see what he will do, and so might the narrator, though she doesn’t give us her emotions:
When I wake it’s the middle of the night. The blinds are open, the moon is high, and by the ample streaming light I can make out his big bright eyes and juicy black plum of a nose. I lie still, on my back, in the pungent fog of his breath. What seems like a long time goes by. Every few seconds a drop from his tongue splashes my face. Finally he places one of his massive paws, the size of a man’s fist, in the center of my chest and lets it rest there: a heavy weight (think of a castle door knocker).
After this, we get her “appalling thought” that he could put his whole weight on her and kill her. We learn about how he snuffles all around her body and nudges her hard, then finally sneezes, gets onto the bed with her, and they both go to sleep. He investigates her like this every night for a while. She doesn’t know what it’s about, but she also doesn’t give us her emotions beyond the initial sense of how dangerous this weight could be. She tells us he must be able to feel her heart. She doesn’t reach out to pet him.
The waking in the middle of the night to a monstrous hound is an image straight out of Gothic fiction. But here both animal and human are held in stillness for the length of the paragraph. She stays where she is, breathing in “the pungent fog of his breath,” a phrase both beautifully written and painful to imagine. He’s drooling slowly on her face, a method of torture. She’s waiting, out of what may already be incipient love, or the need to comfort him, an urgency she doesn’t name. We can guess at what she’s feeling, or make up our own versions, but we don’t really know.
He is a mysterious task and responsibility that she has to encompass, and she’s unable or unwilling to move out from under the weight. It’s impossible not to see him functioning as an embodiment of the process of grief, but it also feels true.
The book circles through vivid moments and memories, questions that can’t be answered, the increasingly worrying question of whether “something bad” will happen to the dog. As for the readers, Nunez offers us this material for judgment and allows us to follow our own habits of where and how we judge love, despair, self-involvement, self-sacrifice. The narrator sets out anecdotes and thoughts and lets them hang in the air. The book seems, with the assistance of the reader, to be building itself in the spaces between the emerging story. And when I look at its paragraphs, it seems to me that the spaces exist within the vivid descriptions or memories as well as in the juxtapositions and jumps from one kind of thinking to another.
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
In fact, I picked this novel up to look at again because I was thinking of one of the great exemplars of ambiguous story-telling: Kazuo Ishiguro. I have taught his work and talked with other readers about him; people often love him fiercely or else react against him just as strongly. Every book of his sets up its own rules of the game, and the project of figuring out what game we’re playing in reading it seems to be a big part of what we do or don’t appreciate about his books.
In An Artist of the Floating World, artist Masuji Ono is at odds with the changes in post-World War II Japan. He muses philosophically about art, memory, duty, family, treachery. He became an artist against the wishes of his business-minded father, and one of the most memorable scenes here is the extended passage where Ono’s father interrogates him about having heard that he wanted to grow up to be a professional artist, and then apparently burns his paintings after sending him out of the room. The most dramatic moments happen off-stage, and that strangely increases their drama, or, at least drives it underground in a way that resists catharsis.
Like many Ishiguro narrators, Ono’s level of reliability seems doubtful, and we might find ourselves looking to the other characters to try to understand how to see him, how to see how he sees himself. His two daughters, Setsuko and Noriko, talk to him and about him, indirectly, with an undercurrent of hostility. And his grandson Ichiro constantly startles him with his words and actions, so different from the ways Ono himself behaved with older authority figures.
Even as he thinks and talks about his past, Ono remains somewhat elusive, hard to pin down. In response to a prospective husband for Noriko, who seems to be suggesting that those who made “mistakes on behalf of the whole country” should die in an apology, Ono says, “But those who fought and worked loyally for our country during the war cannot be called war criminals. I fear that’s an expression used too freely these days.” But in his thinking about the incident, he expresses some confusion about what this potential son-in-law said, versus what his actual son-in-law, Suichi, may have said, and in this confusion the accusation floats away.
To what extent is the book self-justification or yearning for what’s lost? Ono describes, with pride and yearning, the Migi-Hadari, a bar that he helped to make a center of patriotic life, aiming to prevent, as he proposed to “the authorities” on the bar-owner’s behalf, “the growth of another quarter characterized by the very sort of decadence we have been doing our best to combat and which we know so weakens the fiber of our culture.” In furthering the project of the Empire, he sacrifices his own painting, his reputation, and the other artists he’s enrolled, other “producers of work unflinchingly loyal to his Imperial Majesty the Emperor.”
In the present time of the novel, his role in the war has endangered his younger daughter’s marital prospects and alienated his family in ways he may or may not understand. A lot of the pleasure of this book comes from trying to fathom what he knows and won’t admit to either himself or the reader. And as he keeps returning to the past, whether recalling scenes from the Floating World or his own life as a painter, he calls his memories into question. In a scene where Mori, Ono’s old teacher, expresses reservations about his own early work, he suggests that he had trouble celebrating that world because he doubted its validity. Then Mori says that when he’s old and looks back over his life, he will know he devoted it to the task of capturing “the unique beauty of that world” and won’t believe he has wasted his time. He has an agenda here, in terms of guiding Ono, as everyone in the book has a subtextual message in all of their remarks, but it’s left open. Then Ono circles back, undercutting the memories he’s been musing over:
It is possible, of course, that Mori-san did not use those exact words. Indeed, on reflection, such phrases sound rather more like the thing I myself would declare to my own pupils after we had been drinking a little at the Migi-Hadari. “As the new generation of Japanese artists, you have a great responsibility towards the culture of this nation. I am proud to have the likes of you as my pupils. And while I may deserve only the smallest praise for my own paintings, when I come to look back over my life and remember I have nurtured and assisted the careers of all of you here, why then no man will make me believe I have wasted my time.” And whenever I made some such statement, all those young men congregated around the table would drown each other out in protest at the way I had dismissed my own paintings – which, they clamored to inform me, were without doubt great works assured of their place in posterity. But then again, as I have said, many phrases and expressions which came to be most characteristic of me I actually inherited from Mori-san, and so it is quite possible that those were my teacher’s exact words that night, instilled in me by the powerful impression they made on me at the time.
Ono, in telling his story, then moves on to an entirely different topic, leaving it to his readers to notice that though both he and his teacher disparage their own work, Ono suggests that his life’s meaning comes from his teaching. He does this in such a way, though, that it requires his students to reassure him, as he had tried to reassure his own teacher. A somewhat vampiric cycle, and, like so much else here, we are left to wonder what part of this may be our own interpretation, what kinds of distance exist between narrator and author in understanding. Ishiguro has multiple approaches to elision and understatement and a particularly sly sense of humor.
Ono seems to both doubt his memories and to authoritatively stand by his past decisions. But there’s a wistfulness in the ways he remembers the bars and streets of the pleasure district, a specificity of detail that disappears in his more self-justifying memories, as in the paragraph above with its formal and elaborate language, the sense of offering testimony, and the acknowledgment of a fault which has nothing to do with his real betrayals. The slowly emerging story in this book has to do with the difference between what Ono is responsible for and what he denies, as well as what he claims to value, possibly what he believes he values – art in service to duty – and what perhaps actually matters to him – art that is all about beauty and pleasure.
Without making too direct a comparison between two books that are after all very different, I find that at the end of looking at these paragraphs, I’m thinking about nostalgia for lost people and vanished worlds. That’s true, and it’s also, like any reading, highly influenced by the moment we’re living in, with its particular losses and denials, the choices we’re making, the stories we now tell ourselves about these choices, and the ways we’ll tell our stories in future years.