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.

Blindness by José Saramago

“The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called.”

The opening lines of Blindness by José Saramago, as translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

Can one imagine anything more orderly and regular than the flow of traffic at a controlled intersection? Think of the time-lapsed films we’ve all seen, the metronomic stop-go, stop-go of the traffic even more evident when accelerated, pulsing regularly as the day and night advance around it. What better opening could there be for a novel about the breakdown of human organizations and systems?

The first light shown is amber—the caution light. As the novel will show, there will always be some people who will try to take advantage of these transitional periods; rather than exercise caution, rather than abide by the agreed-upon rules, they will rush ahead to try and “get theirs.” By constantly trying to push the limits for their own advantage, these selfish beings may overwhelm a system that is based on agreement and cooperation.

But here at the beginning, at least, the regulatory system is robust enough to handle the work required of it, and the pedestrians cross in their turn when the signal to do so appears. All these regulatory signals, by the by, being visual cues, so that when the titular blindness strikes a few moments later, the long breakdown of system and order will begin.

But first the novel pauses, as it will often do, for a brief aside about language, remarking the oddness of referring to crosswalks as “zebras,” but then simply declaring it part of the order of things and moving on, reminding us that in language everything is called what it is because “that is what it is called.” Language is the great and perhaps original example of an order imposed arbitrarily on the world by humans, functioning in a particular way simply because we all agree it will do so. Green means go, red means stop, and white stripes mark road crossings only because we all agree that it is so.

(And where does “zebra” come from, anyway? Is there any language or culture that truly refers to crosswalks as zebras? As an American, I am unfamiliar with the term. Is it a Portuguese thing? A European thing? Or did the author create it out of whole cloth?)

And then in the next paragraph, the long, slow unraveling of the social order begins.