Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

“Two tires fly. Two wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs.

. . . is the best that Corporal Bobby Shaftoe can do on short notice—he’s standing on the running board, gripping his Springfield with one hand and the rearview mirror with the other, so counting the syllables on his fingers is out of the question. Is ‘tires’ one syllable or two? How about ‘wail?’ The truck finally makes up its mind not to tip over, and thuds back onto four wheels. The wail—and the moment—are lost.”

The opening lines of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

I loved the disorientation this opening produced when I first read this book. I tend to think of haiku as a quiet sort of poetry, contemplative and focused on the natural world and the inner self. The juxtaposition of the haiku with the military figure, clinging to a jeep that is careering along, made for a delicious contrast, one so strong and unexpected that it took me time just to figure out what was going on. The haiku itself also runs counter to my expectations, with its modern, manufactured tires and its cacophony (wailing; warring songs); and even if the presence of the bamboo grove promises something more appropriate to the form, it turns out the grove has been chopped down.

But the disruption of the settled order that this unusual haiku suggests is perfectly appropriate for wartime, which, is turns out, is the setting for the action of the scene.

In the end, it’s just a great image: the soldier, clutching his gun and in the midst of, if not battle, at least chaotic and frenetic activity, and yet making art on the fly and worrying about his syllable count.

Gun Ball Hill by Ellen Cooney

“They wanted a pilot to steer them up the Kennebec, stopping at forts along the way. They weren’t novices, but they knew what they were in for if they tried it on their own, without a local. So they came out of the woods and threw a coat on his head.

“This was fourteen years ago. They had lumber, furs, rum, corn, guns, dried cod, taken from Maine and bound for English troops in Canada. The war against the French was looking like it wouldn’t be over soon. The Mowlans held on to the illusion that it did not concern them.”

The opening lines from Gun Ball Hill by Ellen Cooney.

At first, the reader may expect that some sort of commercial transaction is being set up, that the mysterious “they” will be hiring someone to act as their pilot. Then the potential business deal suddenly becomes a kidnapping, a shock that foreshadows a larger shock to come at the end of this tour de force opening chapter.

The reference to the Kennebec sets the location in Maine; the references to Maine, Canada, and the French evoke the French and Indian Wars; the references to supplying the troops suggest that “they” are also British soldiers. And the use of “taken from” – as opposed to “bought in” or “shipped through” – does not bode well for the colonists who these soldiers are supposed to be defending. Nor does their abduction of one of those colonists, apparently named Mowlan.

We are told that the incident referred to occurred fourteen years before the present action of the novel, a span of time that will bring us to a period of even worse relations between colonists and soldiers, the eve of the War of Independence.

But Cooney has not jumped those fourteen years for good: she circles back and gradually gives us the full scene of the kidnapping and its effect on Lavinia Mowlan, the abductee’s wife. Cooney tells it in a calm, detached manner, interspersing background information about the Mowlans and their life together, so that the slow revelation of the event itself is terrible and chilling and suggestive of the long, slow, cold anger that Lavinia is left with.

The husband, William, does return, and Cooney suggests the scars that each bears in the aftermath of the incident, bringing their lives and attitudes up to the period of the novel’s main action, and showing how some colonists, at least, could be brought to the brink of revolution.

It’s a terrific book, and the opening chapter is powerful and tragic.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

“On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones. Even now that there is barely space inside her, it is the one thing she craves. Tasting from a cupped palm, she frowns; as usual, there’s something missing.”

The opening lines of The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.

In many ways, these lines represent the things I liked best about this novel: the specificity of the ingredients; the collision of cultures as Ashima seeks to replicate the Indian dish with American brands; memory’s evocative detail of the newspaper cones; and the suggestion of the larger issues troubling the character, for whom, “as usual, there’s something missing.” Though Ashima, it turns out, is not the central character of the novel; rather, it is the about-to-be born child that she is carrying. And that choice strikes me as less than ideal, and perhaps symptomatic of the novel’s problems. I don’t mean to suggest that every novel must open with its principal character in the very first sentence, but I do wonder if this one would have been better off doing so. The fact that it does not, despite its bildungsroman nature, suggests (at least in retrospect) the lack of narrative focus that characterizes the book.

The book’s larger problems aside, I think this opening is lovely. I like the way in which the immigrant Ashima is seeking to recover an aspect of her homeland, making use of her expertise in cooking to creatively bridge the gap between past and present. And I like how her ingenuity is inevitably thwarted, at least in a small degree, by the lack of necessary ingredients. I especially like the fact that her “concoction” is a “humble approximation” of the original; one would think that a cheap snack sold on the streets and railway platforms would be pretty humble already. The fact that this imitation is even more humble speaks both to the evocative power of the original for Ashima, for whom it is undoubtedly bound up with all kinds of other memories, and also to the character’s own natural humility (for I read that “humble” as an expression of the character’s own judgment of her efforts).

I find it especially satisfying that, after the descriptive care lavished on the snack, it is never named. Perhaps this is another indication of the degree to which it is a humble approximation, but it is also entirely appropriate to the novel, which will be very concerned with names, lack of names, and the differing roles that names play in the old culture and the new. One almost begins to sense the overwhelming nature of American consumer culture when the brands which are the constituent parts are prominently named but the resulting concoction, which presumably has only an Indian name with no American equivalent, is not. The name’s absence seems to anticipate the loss of the baby’s Indian name, selected by his grandmother back in India, but lost in the mails on its way to America.

To my mind, though, this book has a forest-and-trees problem. While the writing and observational detail are frequently wonderful, there’s insufficient control of the larger narrative; the story meanders and, for me, fails to cohere into a unified work. It seems to me that the whole is rather less than the sum of the parts.

The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball

“—Young man, let me look at you.

“The room was broad, and lit from behind by massive windows that lined the dark mahogany-paneled wall. Light came through in a vague haze, sifted just beyond the glass by the leaves of the oaks from the street. A large man, my uncle, came around the desk towards me.”

The opening lines of The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball.

I haven’t enjoyed a book this much since Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. And the opening, with its brief bit of dialog (and perhaps its use of dashes rather than quotation marks to signal speech) for some reason reminds me of the opening of JR by William Gaddis, another novel that blew me away. But it was the review from The New Yorker that pushed me over the line to read this when it advised, “think Steven Millhauser on acid.”

Many books are described as dream-like, but few achieve (or aspire to) the degree of associative narrative flow that this story offers. The flexibility of its logic is signaled early on, in the scene introduced by the lines above: the narrator’s uncle resumes his seat behind his desk “with the air of a man who has often sat down in the presence of others who remain standing”; a few lines later, when the uncle chides the narrator, Selah Morse, for his pamphleteering efforts, Morse says, “I sat up straight”; and a few lines after that, another character enters the room and Morse says, “He looked at me as I stood there, book in hand.”

This uncertainty of Morse’s posture reflects the mutability of the narrative itself as stories morph into different stories, circle back on themselves, trail off, repeat with variations, or strike off in new directions. Both commanding and avuncular, the opening line places the reader in a passive position via the narrative, and this seems appropriate as narrative here feels like something that happens to the reader. The best way to enjoy the book, it seems to me, is to go with the flow.

Well, but the reader is perhaps not passive, exactly – receptive, say. Though even “receptive” gives short shrift to the reader’s work. The reader is forced to stay in the moment with this book because the narrative is too likely to veer off into some unexpected direction. One doesn’t want to anticipate narrative developments because those expectations will almost certainly be frustrated – or perhaps ignored. I see this statement seems to presuppose a “standard” style of reading which is more anticipatory and in which the reader is always trying to second-guess the narrative; in such cases, the pleasure of the reading lies in the degree to which expectations are, perhaps, resisted and satisfied simultaneously.

Here, the pleasure lies in the ability of the narrative to demand full engagement from the reader at all times.

Since I’m already making comparisons, this book also reminded me of Mark Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale, with its fantastical version of New York, and for me, it offered much the same sort of enchantment and narrative satisfaction.

An aside on reviews:

It’s seldom that I can point to single review (as here, to The New Yorker), or even a single factor, that convinces me to read a particular book, though when it happens, it always turns out to be a book I enjoy a great deal. It was a single review in the New York Times that got me to read The Chess Garden by Brooks Hansen, and reviews in the Washington Post convinced me to read American Falls by John Calvin Batchelor and Baltasar and Blimunda by José Saramago – in the latter case, more than a decade after I read the review. But generally my decision to read a given book or author is the result of an accretion of experiences – reviews, recommendations, glances through a book in the store – and I think the same is probably true for many readers. Even in this case, before The New Yorker there was a review on NPR by Alan Cheuse that first got me curious. People in publishing spend a lot time speculating about the effects of reviews on sales; I believe they are important, but seldom is the line from review to sale so direct as in these instances.

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black

“It was not the dead that seemed to Quirke uncanny but the living. When he walked into the morgue long after midnight and saw Malachy Griffin there he felt a shiver along his spin that was to prove prophetic, a tremor of troubles to come.”

Not quite the opening lines of Christine Falls by Benjamin Black, though the first after the prologue.

The line – and paragraph – introduce the pathologist Quirke, the novel’s protagonist, and his preference for the living over the dead is not the least of his quirks. The scene that follows is an economical introduction to the important aspects of the character.

First of all, he’s drunk, as he will be, to varying degrees, through much of the novel. But his inebriation notwithstanding, he is also closely observant; he notes that Mal is writing “with peculiar awkwardness” in a file, and on the next page that Mal puts “his forearm quickly over the file to hide it.” But though he observes, and draws conclusions from his observations, Quirke characteristically keeps his own counsel, and he does not mention the file in the ensuing conversation.

And finally, in the first paragraph, we see Quirke as a person shaped by, perhaps obsessed with, his past. The first thing we learn about Mal is that he is in Quirke’s office, sitting at Quirke’s desk, an interloper. But even within the same paragraph, Quirke flashes to a memory of “their school days together,” revealing immediately that the two have a long shared history. This knowledge resonates through the tension of the conversation that follows.

Christine Falls is famously (perhaps infamously) John Banville’s pseudonymous take on the mystery novel, but it is this rich sense of the characters’ histories that, for me, distinguishes it from most works in the genre. I don’t say that other mystery novelists fail to provide backstories for their characters, or do not imagine crimes that are rooted in the shared histories of suspects and victim, but the nature of the form inevitably places a great deal of focus on the present action of the investigation. While Christine Falls is also shaped by an investigation, Banville’s skill in creating a living context for the characters and their relationships is one of the things that, for me, distinguishes the book.