Category: Pop

Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press, 352 pages)

Celeste Ng’s latest novel is a depressing dive into a dystopian society, but I had high hopes for it when I found a handwritten note tucked inside the copy I picked up from the library that said, “It is so, so, so good!” I have to wonder if I would have liked it more if that note hadn’t been there, messing with my expectations.

In Our Missing Hearts, the government has passed PACT, the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act, which has resulted in the banning of anything that might promote anti-Americanism and forces children of parents who don’t fully support the act to live with state-approved foster families. PACT targets Asians, particularly the Chinese; the American government blames the decade-old “Crisis” — an economic downturn marked by unemployment and poverty — on Chinese manipulation.

The story follows 12-year-old Bird, whose mother, Chinese-American poet Margaret Miu, left him and his father three years prior, after the line from her poem “Our Missing Hearts” was adopted as a slogan for anti-PACT activists. Worried that the government would take Bird away because she was perceived as a traitor, Margaret left first.

While the idea is good, its execution drags the story down. Ng (author of the adapted-for-Hulu novel Little Fires Everywhere) made some interesting writing choices in Our Missing Hearts. My biggest pet peeve is that she doesn’t use quotation marks at all, anywhere, even though the characters have dialogues. The decision struck me as somewhat arrogant, serving no purpose other than showing that Ng has become well-known enough as an author to take such liberties. But I realized I wasn’t being fair and should find out if there was a good reason for it, so, naturally, I asked Google. An article on BuzzFeed gave me the answer; Ng was asked about her style choices, specifically the lack of quotation marks. Her response:

“When I started writing the novel, I found that I was instinctively writing without quotation marks … but I had to think about why. (I’ll be honest, I usually hate when there are no quotation marks.) … I wanted the novel to feel slightly folkloric, almost dreamlike; for Bird, the events feel a little bit like stepping into a fairytale, one of the stories his mother told him when he was young. When you think of a story being told out loud, the way folktales often are … there’s a blurring between the person narrating, and the words of the story, and the things the characters say. So, removing the quotation marks helped create that effect for the reader.”

Maybe someone who is less of a stickler about grammatical rules would appreciate that artistic perspective, but strong dialogue can really move a plot along and give the characters personality, and this didn’t have any of that. In fact, my main issue with the novel is that I didn’t really care about the characters; they were flat, dull and one-dimensional. Ng switches perspective about halfway through the novel, from Bird’s point of view to Margaret’s, and while it helps explain her reasons for leaving more clearly, that emotion still isn’t there. A mother who has to leave her child should be devastated; what we see is her focusing instead on her anti-PACT mission. It’s noble, of course, but she seems almost robotic.

The character I actually liked the most was Sadie, who was removed from her home because her parents were working against PACT. At first we get to know from Bird’s memories of her; later he meets up with her on his journey to find his mother — which he seems to do only because she sent him a cryptic letter that he thinks is a request for him to find her, and not because he has a strong emotional desire to see her. He might, but the story focuses more on how he works through the clues his mother gave him to find her.

Dystopian novels are often bleak, but Our Missing Hearts was both bleak and boring. At times I didn’t even want to finish it, but it’s pretty short, and I promised to write a book review about it, so here we are.

While the concept was good, it might have been better as a short story, where the lack of character development would be less noticeable. As a novel, Our Missing Hearts is missing, well, heart. Maybe that’s the point. But the story would have been more powerful if there were more feeling behind it. C+

Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami; translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen (Knopf, 224 pages)

The career of Haruki Murakami is one of the more mystifying legends in the literary world. He’s told the story many times: how, sitting in the stands at a baseball game, he suddenly had the thought that he could write a novel, despite not having written anything much more substantive than college papers. It was, as he calls it, an epiphany. The next day, he bought a fountain pen and paper and started writing a novel at his kitchen table after he got home from work in the evening. It took six months.

That was 35 years and 25 books ago.

Everyone now trying to do the same thing (or something similar) during November for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) should know, however, that even Murakami didn’t think much of that first book, Hear the Wind Sing, of which he now writes, “What I had written seemed to fulfill the formal requirements of a novel” yet “was rather boring, and as a whole, left me cold.”

But possessed of the idea that writing a novel was his destiny, Murakami did not stay discouraged even though he wasn’t satisfied with the first draft. As he tells in his new memoir Novelist as a Vocation, he swapped the pen and paper for a typewriter and started again in English instead of his native Japanese. That limited the vocabulary available to him and forced him to write more precisely — to create, as he says, “a creative rhythm distinctly my own.”

Ultimately he rewrote the entire novel in this style and found that writing “filled the spiritual void that had loomed with the approach of my thirtieth birthday.” A year later, the book was short-listed for a prize for new writers, which he won. And Murakami Inc. was off and running, despite the disdain of some of Japan’s literary elites, one of whom has called him a “con man.”

Novelist as a Vocation recounts many of the stories that Murakami has already told, including how he got started and why he became a long-distance runner who runs every day (and a marathon every year). It also explains, in some ways, the Murakami phenomenon — why he has enjoyed enduring popular success despite a writing style that is often plain-spoken. Along the way, he offers advice to aspiring novelists, although he doesn’t seem to have a high opinion of them as a species, writing, “The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well suited to writing novels.”

He also says, “There are exceptions, of course, but from what I have seen, most novelists aren’t what one would call amiable and fair-minded. Neither are they what would normally be considered good role models: their dispositions tend to be idiosyncratic and their lifestyles and general behavior frankly odd.” He tells the story of the 1912 meeting of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, who barely spoke to each other at a dinner party in Paris. “Writers are basically an egoistic breed, proud and highly competitive. Put two of them in the same room and the results, more likely than not, will be a disappointment.” A certain arrogance also helps novelists who succeed, he suggests.

What novelists are, besides dogged, is accommodating. They are tolerant of other novelists because, as Murakami puts it, there’s always more room in the ring. Many people write one or two novels; few do what he does: churn them out consistently. Not that even Murakami makes his sole living from writing novels — he also has done English-to-Japanese translations for 30 years.

I have always been something of a Murakami skeptic. Even his celebrated memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I’ve read twice, seems flat to me, its sentences as matter-of-fact as a grocery list. So it was interesting to read that the author himself does not pay heed to too much of his press. “… I am, when all is said and done, a very ordinary person,” he writes. “ … Not the type to stand out when I stroll around town, the type who’s always shown to the worst table at restaurants. I doubt that if I didn’t write novels anyone would ever have noticed me.”

Also, he writes of being removed from the literary elites, having failed to win a couple of other prizes that he was shortlisted for early in his career. This has made him question the value of any prize, “from the Oscars to the Nobel.” The most important thing to have is good readers, not the acclaim of one’s peers, he says. (It’s worth noting, though, that Murakami also acknowledges that his career as a novelist might have fizzled if he hadn’t won the Gunzo Prize for his first effort.)

In short essays about his life and the craft, he goes on to muse about the importance of originality (and the difficulty of having an original style be accepted, whether in writing, painting or music); the mechanics of writing (he doesn’t work on novels unless “the desire to write is overwhelming” and instead does more mundane tasks, like translation, until that occurs); and why a scene from the movie E.T. is an apt metaphor for novelists who don’t have a lot of life experience. (Short version, you have to assemble a transmitter with an odd assortment of junk stored in the garage.)

Murakami estimates that 5 percent “of all people are active readers of literature” but those 5 percent are ardent, he says. “As long as one in twenty is like us, I refuse to get overly worried about the future of the novel and the written word.”

Perhaps the most fascinating line in Novelist as a Vocation is this: “I don’t make promises, so I don’t have deadlines. As a result, writer’s block and I are strangers to each other.” So many writers convince themselves that they need deadlines to motivate them to work, but Murakami suggests that creativity flows best without this pressure. He also doesn’t seem to put a lot of pressure on himself as far as output goes, writing only about 1,600 words a day when he’s working on a novel, with a hard stop after 10 pages, even if he wants to write more.

Interestingly, this memoir was released in Japan in 2015 and took seven years and two translators to make it to the U.S., just in time to help NaNoWriMo participants who need a jolt of adrenaline to power through. It serves that purpose well, and is also a surprisingly pleasurable read for anyone trying to understand the magic of Murakami more broadly. B+

Mad Honey, by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, Ballantine, 450 pages

The new novel by Jodi Picoult, co-written with Jennifer Finney Boylan, is too much about bees. Its protagonist, a divorced New Hampshire mother whose profession is apiarist — beekeeper — describes her work this way: “Like firefighters, we willingly put ourselves in situations that are the stuff of others’ nightmares.”

That includes schlepping out to rescue bees in the cold and dark after a bear has broken into their hive, a first-world problem for sure, but also an old-world problem; beekeeping is the second-oldest profession. And also: informing the bees when their beekeeper has died and formally requesting that they accept the replacement. “In New Hampshire, the custom is to sing, and the news has to rhyme.”

And you thought your job was tough.

This custom is so fanciful that it seems made up, especially being told by two master storytellers. But a quick search of Google confirms that “telling the bees” is actually a thing — not just of deaths, but births, marriages and other momentous events. Mad Honey indeed.

The novel could have been subtitled “more than you ever wanted to know about bees,” and the constant presentation of bee facts at times makes Mad Honey seem like it has a third co-author named Wikipedia. But there is, in fact, a good story here to justify the bee trivia.

Olivia McAfee lives in Adams, New Hampshire, with her son Asher, having moved there from Boston after her marriage to an abusive surgeon blew up. Their lives intersect explosively with a young woman named Lily, who takes turns narrating the novel with Olivia. The narrative conceit is that Olivia tells her side of the story going forward, while Lily tells her side looking back.

Lily moved to Adams seven years ago after her forest-ranger mother found a job that would enable them to escape a bad situation in Seattle. (In one funny moment, when Lily’s mother is telling her about the move, she says she has one question: Where are the White Mountains?)

Asher and Lily are dating and are finding in each other kindred souls, as both are being raised by single mothers and have fraught relationships with their fathers. (Asher meets his dad surreptitiously once a month at a Chili’s in Massachusetts.) They reach the point in their volatile but passionate relationship where they are confiding their deepest secrets and on the verge of becoming intimate.

Soon after, Lily is found dead, and when police arrive, Asher is standing by her body. Despite his insistence that he wasn’t responsible, Asher is charged with first-degree murder. As we work our way to the apex of the trial, we learn more and more about both families’ backgrounds — the difficulties of both the mothers and their children.

Aside from the occasional stilted recitation of bee facts, Mad Honey is skillfully plotted, and Picoult and Boylan have created deeply sympathetic characters who are intelligent and interesting; it’s impossible not to care about them. They authors are, however, a bit slow getting to the point; it’s as if when divvying up the writing tasks, they dispensed with the pesky business of editing and decided they would both write the equivalent of a full book, readers be damned.

But Mad Honey also has an underlying purpose, which is to pull back the curtain on a certain divisive social issue and give readers a glimpse into the humanity at the center of it. I can’t say any more without spoilers. Of course, the biggest spoiler of all is that we know Lily dies at the start, and so there’s no happy ending to be had. But it is not an unhopeful novel, nor depressing; it is saturated more with love than with cruelty. And the ending is as perfect as it can get under the circumstances.

How this book came to be is a story in itself. As Boylan tells in the authors’ notes, she dreamed the basic plot of this book, and that she had co-written it with Picoult. Then she tweeted about her dream, and Picoult reached out, asked what the book was about, then said, “Let’s do it.” (The two had read each other’s work, but never communicated before.) So it’s hard to be too critical of a book that seems to have sprung fully formed from the universe; it was clearly a book meant to be. Picoult says she expects to get hate mail about it, but it won’t be from beekeepers clearly. And for those who just can’t get enough of the sweetness, there are a handful of character-connected recipes at the end of the book. For those of you who like this sort of thing, you’ll love it. For those who don’t, wait for the movie. B+