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3 meh metafictions (City of Glass, Ghosts, The Melancholy of Untold History)
By accident, I've read three metafictional books this year inspired by Jorge Luis Borges: Paul Auster's City of Glass and Ghosts, both from the 80s, and last year's The Melancholy of Untold History by Minsoo Kang. I love Borges' stories and I wish there were more things like them, so I was hopeful; alas, all of them disappointed me to greater or lesser degree, though in different ways between Auster and Kang. Re. Kang and Melancholy, I think I had my first sinking feeling when I saw that Cloud Atlas was one of its jacket comp titles. I also love Cloud Atlas, but unlike with Borges, I'm automatically wary when I see something comped to it: it has somehow produced a rash of really uninteresting multi-time-period literary sci-fi in its wake.
I read Auster a month or two ago and mostly forgot about him until I picked up Melancholy, read it, got increasingly annoyed, and was like "huh, this is like with those Auster books... why does this keep happening to me?" No more postmodern metafiction this year. Maybe. Admittedly I do have a book out from the library I haven't tried yet called Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, but, uh, maybe it is something different. (I've also read some good slipstream stuff I liked a lot this year, including Theodora Goss' collection In the Forest of Forgetting, but this whole postmodern Borges curse thing is haunting me now.)
Anyway, the books:
Auster's City of Glass and Ghosts aren't really books per se: they're novellas that are part of a sequence called the New York Trilogy, which I got from the library bound into a single volume along with the third novella, The Locked Room, which I didn't finish. They're really more like a postmodern novel in three parts. In City of Glass, a bored and lonely crime writer finds himself taking a strange job after being mistaken over the phone for a private detective; in Ghosts, a bored private detective takes a strange and dull job surveilling an odd man over the course of years. They're all like that because they're all surrealist send-ups on crime and mystery fiction: sparsely and generically named characters, empty flats, minimal lives, for symbolic and allegorical reasons.
I admit, I had no idea of this going in. I knew there was something called Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and I vaguely recalled reading something short by him that I liked, and saw praise for these as "really great detective stories." This is a cutesy bait-and-switch on the reviewers' part, IMO; they are not detective stories, not even meta ones, they're meta stories that use the trappings of detective fiction to explore questions of knowledge and knowability.
This isn't a bad thing--on paper, it's a good thing by my standards, as I usually like postmodernism more than I like detective fiction. But I dislike the whole "it's a great detective story" thing re. something that is not even slightly a mystery; it feels too clever by half, and a way for the critic or other speaker to claim worldliness without having to dip a toe into genre and all its weirdness and lowbrow stink. However, I was excited. I was like, whoa, surprise, this is about a weird ritualistic attempt to recreate the Tower of Babel in a philosophical way! Psych! Awesome! ... And then I got less excited by the end, and then in Ghosts, and then gave up midway through The Locked Room.
I think what Auster's novellas and The Melancholy of Untold History have in common is that they are technically interested in big, imaginative concerns--but there isn't much there there. There is no danger of ever having to see the Tower of Babel in completion, or make a thesis that is bold or strange; in Auster's case, he just leaves off before anything can be carried out or extrapolated, and in Melancholy's case it just becomes a pretty straightforward and precious thing about Narrative and Breaking Free of Narrative and The Stories We, and Nations, Tell Ourselves that bit off a lot of historiographical and narratological material to chew--or namedropped and referenced it, anyway--and just doesn't really do much with it.
The Melancholy of Untold History is a more developed and full-length novel than Auster's novellas. Melancholy is, more or less, about a recursive and overlapping set of narratives involving the different stories of one Asian Ruritania-ish fictional nation / a depressed middle-aged historian studying and deconstructing them (and having, genuinely, a sad affair with a sympathetic and beautiful young colleague--yes, really) / a reverberating myth cycle involving four quarreling gods, who may be the externalized allegories of quarreling nations or rulers or may be reincarnated as them / a frame tale involving a storyteller conscripted into a creepy, wondrous dystopian project by an emperor.
If that sounds cool, or at least the nationbuilding narratives and the myth cycle do, I agree. It does sound cool. The problem I had with Melancholy is like... so, I've been picking my way through a well-recommended writing craft book that brings up the description of a good story as something that "resists paraphrase," meaning that any decent bit of narrative is more than a description of itself: you can't just literally describe the events and the themes and get a takeaway, there's something indescribable about it, at least on some level. e.g. "I guess you had to be there." I agree with that; I don't think it's limited to conscious ambiguity or literary fiction, either--a lot of the more disappointing books any genre I've read recently were ones that, cheerfully and with proud moral conviction, did not remotely resist paraphrase.
With Melancholy, the pleasure is pretty much entirely in the concept. The sentence-level writing is straightforward to the point of having a tin ear; there's neither any really great challenging stuff thematically (unless you count "nations are sometimes founded on lies" and "what is truth and what is fiction, really") nor anything really beautiful, striking, or charming that comes out in the stories themselves. The closest thing for me was the frame tale of the doomed storyteller, but even that ends up in a really mawkish place where storyteller and modern historian reach out to one another across the ages to "rewrite the story." Where Auster's stories are kind of hazy and noncommittal, Melancholy is, well, pat.
Both authorial voices came off as pretty defensive to me; City of Glass and Ghosts more in the vein of "does it have to have an answer? Maybe your desire for answers as a reader is a sign that--" and Melancholy has stuff like... the gods in the epilogue having a was-it-all-a-dream revelation and remarking on how the reader must think a dream revelation is a copout, haha, but actually this has a place in Eastern narrative that is different so pay attention. When you are already scolding your imagined annoyed reader, IMO, something has gone wrong. Between the two, I thought City of Glass in particular was more readable on a sentence level and had a certain self-assured (slightly stupid, but self-assured) charm for a bit, and Melancholy was more leaden and inert as a piece of writing, but cleverer.
One element both authors have in common is a cringey, unexamined macho sensibility about women. I already mentioned the whole "graced by the sexual mercy of a compassionate young female colleague" thing re. the professor in Melancholy. Normally I think of "novels written by professors about sad professors having affairs with sexy younger women" as sort of an anti-intellectual canard for people who don't read litfic to needlessly explain why they don't; alas, apparently they are not extinct. But that's not really the limit of the problem: it's sort of dull to describe, in the way a lot of sexist tropes in fiction are--it's the beauty and sexual availability of the women (both Auster and Kang do this), the pedestalization of a few virtuous women (again, both novelists), the selfconscious attempt at commentary on this / "subversion" with a... different pedestalized woman (Kang, particularly), the total void of female subjectivity or like, mediocrity or humanity. It's almost not worth describing. It's exactly what you'd expect. I roll my eyes at this from the 80s; I'm slightly surprised it still flies in the 2020s. But alas.
I read Auster a month or two ago and mostly forgot about him until I picked up Melancholy, read it, got increasingly annoyed, and was like "huh, this is like with those Auster books... why does this keep happening to me?" No more postmodern metafiction this year. Maybe. Admittedly I do have a book out from the library I haven't tried yet called Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, but, uh, maybe it is something different. (I've also read some good slipstream stuff I liked a lot this year, including Theodora Goss' collection In the Forest of Forgetting, but this whole postmodern Borges curse thing is haunting me now.)
Anyway, the books:
Auster's City of Glass and Ghosts aren't really books per se: they're novellas that are part of a sequence called the New York Trilogy, which I got from the library bound into a single volume along with the third novella, The Locked Room, which I didn't finish. They're really more like a postmodern novel in three parts. In City of Glass, a bored and lonely crime writer finds himself taking a strange job after being mistaken over the phone for a private detective; in Ghosts, a bored private detective takes a strange and dull job surveilling an odd man over the course of years. They're all like that because they're all surrealist send-ups on crime and mystery fiction: sparsely and generically named characters, empty flats, minimal lives, for symbolic and allegorical reasons.
I admit, I had no idea of this going in. I knew there was something called Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and I vaguely recalled reading something short by him that I liked, and saw praise for these as "really great detective stories." This is a cutesy bait-and-switch on the reviewers' part, IMO; they are not detective stories, not even meta ones, they're meta stories that use the trappings of detective fiction to explore questions of knowledge and knowability.
This isn't a bad thing--on paper, it's a good thing by my standards, as I usually like postmodernism more than I like detective fiction. But I dislike the whole "it's a great detective story" thing re. something that is not even slightly a mystery; it feels too clever by half, and a way for the critic or other speaker to claim worldliness without having to dip a toe into genre and all its weirdness and lowbrow stink. However, I was excited. I was like, whoa, surprise, this is about a weird ritualistic attempt to recreate the Tower of Babel in a philosophical way! Psych! Awesome! ... And then I got less excited by the end, and then in Ghosts, and then gave up midway through The Locked Room.
I think what Auster's novellas and The Melancholy of Untold History have in common is that they are technically interested in big, imaginative concerns--but there isn't much there there. There is no danger of ever having to see the Tower of Babel in completion, or make a thesis that is bold or strange; in Auster's case, he just leaves off before anything can be carried out or extrapolated, and in Melancholy's case it just becomes a pretty straightforward and precious thing about Narrative and Breaking Free of Narrative and The Stories We, and Nations, Tell Ourselves that bit off a lot of historiographical and narratological material to chew--or namedropped and referenced it, anyway--and just doesn't really do much with it.
The Melancholy of Untold History is a more developed and full-length novel than Auster's novellas. Melancholy is, more or less, about a recursive and overlapping set of narratives involving the different stories of one Asian Ruritania-ish fictional nation / a depressed middle-aged historian studying and deconstructing them (and having, genuinely, a sad affair with a sympathetic and beautiful young colleague--yes, really) / a reverberating myth cycle involving four quarreling gods, who may be the externalized allegories of quarreling nations or rulers or may be reincarnated as them / a frame tale involving a storyteller conscripted into a creepy, wondrous dystopian project by an emperor.
If that sounds cool, or at least the nationbuilding narratives and the myth cycle do, I agree. It does sound cool. The problem I had with Melancholy is like... so, I've been picking my way through a well-recommended writing craft book that brings up the description of a good story as something that "resists paraphrase," meaning that any decent bit of narrative is more than a description of itself: you can't just literally describe the events and the themes and get a takeaway, there's something indescribable about it, at least on some level. e.g. "I guess you had to be there." I agree with that; I don't think it's limited to conscious ambiguity or literary fiction, either--a lot of the more disappointing books any genre I've read recently were ones that, cheerfully and with proud moral conviction, did not remotely resist paraphrase.
With Melancholy, the pleasure is pretty much entirely in the concept. The sentence-level writing is straightforward to the point of having a tin ear; there's neither any really great challenging stuff thematically (unless you count "nations are sometimes founded on lies" and "what is truth and what is fiction, really") nor anything really beautiful, striking, or charming that comes out in the stories themselves. The closest thing for me was the frame tale of the doomed storyteller, but even that ends up in a really mawkish place where storyteller and modern historian reach out to one another across the ages to "rewrite the story." Where Auster's stories are kind of hazy and noncommittal, Melancholy is, well, pat.
Both authorial voices came off as pretty defensive to me; City of Glass and Ghosts more in the vein of "does it have to have an answer? Maybe your desire for answers as a reader is a sign that--" and Melancholy has stuff like... the gods in the epilogue having a was-it-all-a-dream revelation and remarking on how the reader must think a dream revelation is a copout, haha, but actually this has a place in Eastern narrative that is different so pay attention. When you are already scolding your imagined annoyed reader, IMO, something has gone wrong. Between the two, I thought City of Glass in particular was more readable on a sentence level and had a certain self-assured (slightly stupid, but self-assured) charm for a bit, and Melancholy was more leaden and inert as a piece of writing, but cleverer.
One element both authors have in common is a cringey, unexamined macho sensibility about women. I already mentioned the whole "graced by the sexual mercy of a compassionate young female colleague" thing re. the professor in Melancholy. Normally I think of "novels written by professors about sad professors having affairs with sexy younger women" as sort of an anti-intellectual canard for people who don't read litfic to needlessly explain why they don't; alas, apparently they are not extinct. But that's not really the limit of the problem: it's sort of dull to describe, in the way a lot of sexist tropes in fiction are--it's the beauty and sexual availability of the women (both Auster and Kang do this), the pedestalization of a few virtuous women (again, both novelists), the selfconscious attempt at commentary on this / "subversion" with a... different pedestalized woman (Kang, particularly), the total void of female subjectivity or like, mediocrity or humanity. It's almost not worth describing. It's exactly what you'd expect. I roll my eyes at this from the 80s; I'm slightly surprised it still flies in the 2020s. But alas.