Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (158 page)

My life was over; my life had just begun.
From
Lucky

There’s no scale by which to measure the distance between lived life and written fiction. According to Charles Bukowksi, 93 per cent of his fiction is fact. The pseudo-precision is, of course, a joke. Sometimes, however, fiction and life are so inter-meshed, that they collapse on each other, creating a genre for which we have, as yet, no handy term.

Alice Sebold was born in Wisconsin in 1963, and brought up in Philadelphia, where her father, Russell P. Sebold, was a distinguished professor of Romance languages at ‘Penn’, one of the Ivy League colleges. Her mother, a journalist, was, as her daughter recalls, an unhappy, eventually alcoholic woman. Sebold later suspected her mother was a frustrated writer. The marriage was solid, but emotionally frigid. By her own account, Alice was a difficult child. She was precocious, fat and ‘too loud’. Nor was she – unlike her elder sister – dutifully academic. ‘I wanted,’ she said, ‘to be the moron of the family.’ She ‘ended up going to Syracuse because I didn’t get into the University of Pennsylvania, which is where my father taught. It looked like I was a shoo-in, a faculty kid – and I got rejected.’

She went to less demanding Syracuse University, in New York State. It was in her first semester, walking through the tunnel of the campus amphitheatre on the way back to her dorm, that Sebold was raped. It was a defining event: one which she would describe (reliving it? exorcising it?) in memoir, fiction and interviews. She was beaten up. Her plaintive protests that she was a virgin were ignored, she was multiply penetrated, and – final indignity – urinated on. Her attacker was black – a source of some embarrassment with interlocutors in later publicity interviews. In the same tunnel, the police later informed her, another girl had been raped, killed, and dismembered. She was ‘lucky’. She was taken home where her father asked her if she needed food. She had spirit enough to reply, ‘that would be nice, considering the only thing I’ve had in my mouth in the last 24 hours is a cracker and a cock’. She went on to reassure him, ‘I’m still me, Dad’ – but what kind of me? She would not know until she had written it up. As she tells it in her memoir, a few months later she met her rapist (‘Gregory Madison’) in the street. He greeted her with a cheery but puzzled, ‘Hey, girl, don’t I know you from somewhere?’ She certainly knew him, picked him out from a line-up, gave evidence at two trials – batting off hostile cross-examination, and saw him given a maximum sentence. It was the early 1980s.

On graduation from Syracuse she went far away to Houston, Texas, to do an MA in writing, but dropped out. She returned to New York, working part-time as
an instructor at Hunter College, but effectively ‘drifting’. Everyone in New York, she later said, ‘thinks they’re a literary genius’. She wrote poetry – much of it about her traumatic experience in the tunnel. By her own account Sebold went off the rails in her twenties; doing drugs and living a promiscuous life. It was two decades too late for dropping out to be glamorous.

In her early thirties she moved to Southern California (where, as she completes her wisecrack, ‘everyone thinks they’re famous’). She was, by now, writing more seriously and had drafted parts of a novel provisionally called ‘Monsters’ about a fourteen-year-old rape victim. She enrolled in a writing course at the University of California, Irvine, in 1995. On her first day of class she met the man she would later marry, Glen David Gold. They were both, Gold later said, ‘weirdos’ – made for each other. It must have been a strong intake that year at Irvine. Gold too would produce a bestselling novel,
Carter Beats the Devil
(2001), a few months before his wife’s bestselling
The Lovely Bones
.

Her first published work had been, in point of fact, not the novel, but a memoir (later seen as a pioneer of the so-called ‘misery memoir’),
Lucky
, an ironic echo of the cop’s sublimely tactless consolatory remark all those years ago.
Lucky
was published in 1999 and generally ignored. It, and what she learned at UCI, helped her pull ‘Monsters’ into shape and a friend, the writer Wilton Barnhardt, forwarded it to his agent.

After much editing, ‘Monsters’ was published in 2002 as
The Lovely Bones
. The publisher, Little Brown, expected no great things from a first novel, on an extremely uncomfortable subject, by an unknown novelist but – as was later surmised – 9/11 had shaken things up and fiction about coping with gross trauma was in demand. The book generated powerful word of mouth and sold in the millions. Over the years Sebold had worked out an ingenious scenario. The narrative opens:

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn’t happen.

Over the subsequent years, from a strangely drab heaven (a bit like a never-ending junior high school), Susie observes her family fall apart and studies, with minute attention, her rapist-killer, the banal bachelor neighbour, Mr Harvey. Things eventually work out more or less well for the Salmons – less well for the rat next door.

In the novel’s wake,
Lucky
was brought back from oblivion. The two narratives of rape were read side by side, along with interviews which stressed the inspirational
trauma which inspired the works. Fictional and factual merged: both books became prescribed reading on ‘Victimology’ in American colleges. Now rich (Gold’s novel, a fantasy about magicians and pacts with the devil, had also done well), the married authors retired to San Francisco. No more eating chickpeas straight out of the can, as Sebold wryly observed.

Never one to rush into print, it was five years until she produced her second novel,
The Almost Moon
(2007). It, like its two predecessors, had the now trademark wham-bang Sebold opening: ‘When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.’ The middle-aged heroine, Helen, murders her demented eighty-eight-year-old mother – the novel reconstructs the lives that led up to the act.
The Almost Moon
fell very flat. Reviewers were universally critical. Was Sebold a one-novel novelist? If so, that one novel had life left in it. The film of
The Lovely Bones
, which came out in 2010, was a huge success and jumped the book back into the bestseller lists.

Paradoxically, the more the world becomes interwoven the less it seems possible to tell a single, representative story of it … yet the connections are real and lived. So how do you narrate this?

I have chosen to end this very selective biographical run through the novel in English with Dasgupta – though not with any sense that I am anointing him as anything other than an interesting variety of the novelist of the future. ‘Symptomatic’, in a word and, it can be claimed, potentially distinguished. Rana Dasgupta is described as a ‘British-Indian novelist’. The term does him ethnic injustice. He was born in Canterbury, grew up in Cambridge, took his first degree at Balliol College, Oxford, did postgraduate work at the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worked for some years in New York, in marketing, before moving to Delhi – his current (if that word means anything in the Dasgupta progress) residence. His first novel was published when he was thirty-four. His second novel was published first in Australia, then in India, finally in the UK and US.

Does travel broaden the mind? J. R. R. Tolkien never left England (rarely Oxford
and rarely even his own college) other than for a brief excursion, on Norse-scholar business, to Scandinavia. But, as other ‘two-inches of ivory’ novelists attest, novelists that do not go far can, none the less, mine very deep. Dasgupta’s first novel,
Tokyo Cancelled
(2005), was an updated
Canterbury Tales
(homage to his birthplace) in which stranded airline travellers swapped stories about different cities of the world. Thirteen passengers (fateful number) on route to Tokyo find themselves stranded – ‘socked in’ by snow – at a nameless nowhere airport. They tell each other tales to pass the time in that most vacant of places, the terminal concourse. There is no termination, no concurrence in that misnamed location. The stories are surreal – one, for example, features Robert De Niro’s misbegotten, half-Chinese son, who has mastered the transubstantiation of matter. A Japanese businessman becomes infatuated, to the point of self-destruction, with a sex-doll. In another, human minds are evacuated of memory, which is stored safely on CDs. The world becomes historyless, as – with jet travel – it has become placeless. What is the difference between an international airport in Los Angeles (LAX) or Heathrow (LHR)?

Walter Benjamin famously declared that the novel was the end of story-telling and a symptom of the end of community. In a fragile, accidental, way Dasgupta fantasises its being momentarily restored:

The book is not
only
the stories; the book is a reflection on story telling. Now I think that story telling is rather rare in our culture – it’s disappearing. We don’t meet people who tell stories anymore. We feel a lot of that. We feel that there is something good when we sit around our grandmothers and listen to their stories, because there is wisdom in them. So I wanted to say, okay, here are 13 middle class modern travelers, who decide to tell stories, and they can.

If there is one word that attaches itself to Dasgupta’s fiction, it is ‘global’. But
Solo
(2009), his second novel, is, on the face of it, more local than its predecessor – at least, for its first 168 pages. The novel is set in Bulgaria, a country which, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, is far away and of which we know little, and care even less. The hero is Ulrich, whom we first meet aged 100 years, in 2005. Bulgaria itself is scarcely older. It was invented, as a European constitutional monarchy, out of the Balkan cauldron in 1878. Ulrich is blind. Like Sophocles’s Tiresias, this means he can see his country’s history, and destiny, more clearly than those of his compatriots with eyes.

Ulrich’s father was a visionary railway engineer, who dreamed of shining steel rails which would connect Baghdad, Sofia and Paris, and drag Bulgaria ‘out of Asia’. When young Ulrich shows early stirrings of musical talent, he is encouraged
by his mother but savagely suppressed by his father, who smashes his son’s violin and throws it in the fire, with the words:

‘You won’t do this, my son! I won’t have you waste your life. Musicians, artists, criminals, opium addicts … You’ll end up poor and disgraced. I won’t have it.’

Ulrich is sent to Berlin where his study of chemistry is cut short by European hyperinflation. He returns to his native country to work in a shoe factory, then as a lowly lab-rat in a chemical products firm. He marries but the marriage fails. His father is mutilated, and his dreams shattered, in the First World War. Bulgaria fights on the German side, as it does in the Second World War. Big mistakes. Thereafter, the country came under the Kremlin’s heel and Moscow’s dullest stooge, Todor Zhivkov. Uncorking a vial of sulphuric acid, Ulrich accidentally blinds himself. Like everything in the novel it is described unexcitedly. These things happen. Ulrich’s mother is hauled off, for no reason, to a Bulgarian gulag and returns a madwoman. Rich in natural resources Bulgaria, Ulrich’s mother-country, is plundered and polluted by its Communist masters so that women’s nylons dissolve at the first touch of Sofia’s polluted air. Ulrich spends his last days, alone, in a shabby room by the bus-station, going nowhere.

Why did he choose Bulgaria? Dasgupta is asked – as God might be asked why he chose the Jews, or Mallory why he climbed Everest. ‘I refuse to be categorised,’ he blandly replies. But he does concede that
Solo
’s theme is music – the ways in which, out of group harmony, single voices can emerge. If there is hope in the world, it lies not in the European Union, but in that shattered violin, and the dream it represented for Ulrich. We recognise the theme. It is that of Salman Rushdie’s
The Ground Beneath her Feet
. In that novel, set in Bombay, London and New York, it is the Orphic lyre alone – art – which can bring the world together. Like Rushdie, Dasgupta is a fragmented man whose fiction seeks, desperately and ingeniously, for cohesion. A man, one might say, without biographical base. These, one fears, are the novelists of the twenty-first century, as the author of
The Waste Land
was the poet of the twentieth. But where does Dasgupta go from here? Lots of places, one expects – resting nowhere.