Foregone by Russell Banks

 This is a new novel by an elderly writer who knows he is coming to the end of a successful career.

  It’s about a successful left-wing Canadian documentary filmmaker in his late 70s dying, and quite soon, of cancer. But Leo Fife is now involved with one last project. Other documentarians are filming him for one last interview. They are former students of his. They want to talk about his career and the details of production of certain of his films, but he has another plan, a sort of confession that he wants his wife to hear.
 
We are told throughout that Leo is on heavy medication for his cancer. Also that he was somewhat of a heavy drinker. Both of these things make his testimony unreliable. His wife insists that some of the stories he is coming up with are actually her story.
We have no real reason to believe that any of this is “true”. Yet the novel has an authentic feeling of a human life as it flashes by, from and returning to oblivion. 

He doesn't want to talk about his filmmaking or his Candian life at all, just events from his earliest years. In this USA youth of his he dwells on stories of how he abandoned people in the past. Clearly he is feeling guilt and shame for this and wants to set the record straight so that Emma, his wife will know who he truly is rather than who he has become as the successful American draft resister who fled to Canada to start a new life.

His story is totally different from that. It is an episodic tale of at least two different life and family trajectories he was on and how he abandoned those lives and people almost on a wim.

The novel has a unique style. There is a lot of supposed dialogue, but no quotation marks are used. Where other writers may have done this, or tried it, Banks makes it all perfectly clear, with no question of, ”Wait! Who is talking here?” It’s really well crafted. The heart of it is easy to access because the mechanics do not call attention to themselves. Stylistically it is a very smooth presentation that goes down easily.

The reader is presented with a certain amount of life and death contemplation. These things concern what is likely to happen next, after death. Leo, the character, is of a secular orientation, so he is facing the nothingness next, or the everythingness. It is all viewed as a sort of return to the sourse without memory of this existence.

The Winter of Our Discontent

By John Steinbeck

This final novel by the Nobel Prize winner. It was written before he got that renowned dynamite and armement award.
This is a very strange novel. It is set in smalltown Long Island, a place where whaling was once a big industry supplying oil for lamps and such. The time is contemporary to when the novel was written, 1960.
Ethan Allen Hawley is the main character. Most of the novel is written in his first person voice. The Hawley’s were once a big family in town owning a whaling ship and a lot of prime real estate. Now Ethan only has the Hawley family house and works as a clerk, an employee, in the grocery store he once owned. He works for a “wop” and Italian immigrant. He is polite but two-faced bitter. He is a family man with a wife and two teen children, a boy and a girl.
His scheme is to win, get over by appearing totally honest, to sneak up and strike when no one is looking.

The novel has a tone of a good old America Our Town and while it keeps up that tone throughout, mostly by the voice of this jacular amiable Ethan, there is a rottenness that is permeating the whole place and this Ethen character. The rotten corruption becomes more obvious as the story moves on. Ethan’s schemes include heartlessly ratting out someone and perhaps giving enough rope to his alcoholic childhood best friend.

The reader is left with a bitter taste with no characters to really pull for other than perhaps the only sketched out women. Mary, Ethan's wife, seems nice enough and perhaps wouldn’t resort to the underhanded manipulations of her husband to get ahead. She doesn’t WANT to know the business, refuses to be told, and therefore maintains a facade of ignorant innocence.
Margie the town tramp with a heart of desperation is more interesting and somewhat likable, but she is plotting too, searching for some kind of security. Yet the novel doesn’t appear to want us to stretch our empathy to the extent of actually “liking” any of these poor people trapped in corrupt decaying USA. It is as if they made it that way themselves and maybe they have since they go along with continuing to perpetrate it.

Maybe the point of the novel is to illustrate that the USA is a soft nightmare of anti-social individualist insecurity. A fitting place to get an esteemed award from a dead armaments mogul.   

The White Rose: a novel by B Traven

After reading this I have only one Traven novel yet to read. Actually two, but his final novel that came some years after the others is not yet translated to English and I don’t read German. I clearly really like his stuff.

The White Rose is a study in contrasting worldviews. The main players, symbols of their classes, are an indigenous man who through family tradition holds the title to a large Mexican hacienda. This is presented as more of a long standing commune rather than a feudal set up. It’s as if the egalitarian, sharing, roots from hunter-gatherer times have somehow survived in this instance into a stable, and atypically fair, agricultural system. Things are shared and it is taken as a given that the title holding family has a duty to the other families as caretakers of the property. They are not seen as winners entitled to profit from this ownership of things that everyone shares. All the people are very close to the land.
They are of the land, the human creatures who emerge from the land, live by it, and return to it in constant cycles of renewal.

The contrasting entity is a USA businessman who has maneuvered himself into a position of enormous power heading an international oil company. He is portrayed in a way that highlights his need for status among his peers. Part of his aura involves his outside women and their needs. The fact that he has outside of marriage women is seen as a positive status symbol among the board members of his corporation. He has to procure symbols of wealth for his main lover. She wants a nice car, but then it needs a garage, but the garage must be attached to a house and not an ordinary house, a mansion. So our oil man has to go through a lot of money for this stuff. I also want to mention that the woman is shown as being more intelligent, and better educated than her lover. She is not a dumb airhead floozy like we see often in movies about this sort of situation, like in Citizen Kane. The big time businessman is not at all involved in the land, other people take care of all that. He is a modern North American. Except he needs land for drilling oil.

And he needs the hacienda, Rosa Blanca, The White Rose.

There is the contrast and the conflict of the novel.

The industrialist is driven by emotions: Fear, Greed, how others see him.
The indian is contained in love for the land and the people and things from it and the wish to see it go on for the sake of the people of the past who took care of it for the people of the present. They must care for it to assure the survival of those to come.

In The White Rose Traven approaches storytelling devices of mystery and suspense, the day just might be saved. It was good to hope that the miserable inevitable might somehow, through law, caring people, not occur.

Although it is clear where Traven’s heart lies in the conflict, his style is not particularly agitprop. He is not rallying comrades behind a particular banner. He is rather coolly showing the situation from various sides. There is no feeling of soft peddling the issues. He describes in detail what is going on rather matter of factly no matter how horrible, cruel, unjust, or plain nasty, that might be.

I like this tone. I feel I am asked to go along and look through his eyes rather than be verbally rhetorically persuaded. I read him with a recurring sarcastic edge that I think he intended.

B Traven was an outsider. The man who only wanted to be known for the work was not a Mexican and although distorting whatever his real biography was with USA root claims, he was not an American. Perhaps witnessing first hand events in German in the early part of the 20th Century and then landing in Mexico in the mid 1920s and absorbing that world, doesn’t put one in a mind that “if just this or that happened all would finally be well”.

He presents people who have lived a certain way for many years being suddenly confronted and challenged by international modernity, the machine that rode the rails that conquered Norte was on the next little  stop in it’s global voyage, and gathering endless momentum.

The book is from 1929. Surely I would look upon it as quaint and a period piece, if he offered me an easy solution to the complicated intricacies of modern global life that dazzles us with wonders and the endless brutalities that come with it.

We are in uncharted extremely complicated territory and anyone who is offering an answer to making things better, like the old days, or some glowing vision, ought to be viewed with suspicion.
Nobody knows what to do.