Turns Out We Can't Really Know Anything

Title: What We Can Know

Author: Ian McEwan

 

First, a brief summary from the publisher:

 

"2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.

"2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. 

 

"When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

 

"What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost."

 

Insights and Opinions

 

(A caveat: The writer of this post had not read the book, so writing a description of the discussion is a bit like watching people through a window, trying to read their lips, and then stitching things together as well as possible. Reminds me of trying to write a paper about something I didn't know anything about, relying on Cliff's Notes and hunches).

 

+ As voracious readers, our group is not new to McEwan's work, so the discussion opened with the inevitable comparison to his other novels. Chris opened by admitting this one was "torture" for her until the last fifty pages. Lois countered: "It is a bit of a slog. I love his books, but I always wait about 50 pages to get past the slog part. I love his writing, but he's always slow at getting you into the story." Linda had ust finished Amsterdam and loved Atonement, finding similarities between What We Can Know and Atonement. "It is a bit like Atonement in that the story being told turns out not to be true." Steve found it slow going at first, but did take satisfaction at Blundy being taken down a peg for his grammatical choices. "I kept vacillating between feeling humbled to be in McEwan's company and being put off by it. But I did get into the characters and the mystery."

 

+ Shirley pointed out McEwan's unconventional use of grammar, his sometimes run-on sentences, and unusual use of capitalization. Steve feels McEwan has a foot in old, formal English, and that the diction is in perfect keeping with the type of language he uses to compare the two centuries.

 

+ At the core of the book is the lost corona poem, so the group needed to spend some time talking about if any of us had ever heard of that poem format (no) or read one (no, but Margy listened to one and promised to send a link later.) "I'd never heard of a corona. I'd never heard of this poet. It was really long. Not being able to read and having to listen to it instead put me into the minds of the people at the dinner party. You can't really focus. It's really long and you drift in and out. This was just one of the things about this book that captured my imagination." Chris pointed out that each person at the dinner had consumed a bottle and a half of wine. "I mean, what corona?"

 

+ To Margy, looking at the lost art form of corona poetry brought up the question: what is the importance of any art when the seas have inundated the land? What is the role of art in the future? What followed was a thoughtful discussion that was less about the book than it was about the future of the humanities and the importance thereof in preparing people to engage in creative problem-solving.

 

+ One of Linda's colleagues referred to this novel as a wonderful academic satire. Of course he was bribed by an oil company not to publish a poem. "I mean, wouldn't it be wonderful if a poem could be worth a million dollars? The critics I read claim this book is over-stuffed and could have been four novels. It cheered me to think of parts of it as academic satire."  She continued: "Some parts of it are quite wonderful, such as thoughts about memory as a sponge soaking up material over time and then leaking it all over things later."

 

+ Steve found it particularly satisfying that it wasn't the corona poem that would tell the story of Vivien's life, but Vivien's own, subsequent telling of her story. And that she decides to lie in her journal so if anyone found the journal later, they would believe her telling was the truth.

 

+ Per Margy: "So, you come to the end, and what can we know? We can't really know anything. You can't trust the people, you can't trust the documents, and you can't believe the archives because they can be sabotaged." Wonderful and horrifying at the same time.

 

+ While reading, Linda realized she was spending a lot of time with people she didn't like. "But then getting into Vivien's portion and what we can know and what people in the future will think of or know of us provided much to think about." 

 

+ Chris saw Vivien not as a feminist, but as a self-interested character with no interest in women's rights. Her interest was selfish, in telling her story in her way. Lois pointed out that, for many feminists, it does come down to self-interest. 

 

What We Will Read Next

For April, we will focus on poetry. Here are the rules:

1. Shirley will choose for us one Shakespeare sonnet and let us all know ahead of time so we can read it. 
2. For the meeting, each of us will bring a favorite poem to read aloud as well as hard copies of this favored poem.
3. Chris will host. 

 

Shirley and Chris

The rest of us via Zoom due to heavy snow.

 

 

 

 

Picking Up the Pieces of One's Own Mistakes

Title: Buckeye

Author: Patrick Ryan

 

First, a brief description of this weighty novel from the publisher:

 

"In the jubilant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, shares a single, life-altering moment with Margaret Salt, a woman determined to outrun her past. Cal is married to Becky, whose spiritual gifts help the living speak to the dead, while Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving at sea, believed to be safe—until a telegram suggests otherwise.

What begins as a fleeting transgression becomes a complex secret that irrevocably binds all four of them in unexpected ways. As their small Ohio town remakes itself in the postwar boom, the Salt and Jenkins families remain in each other’s orbit, and the consequences of choices made long ago begin to emerge, reshaping their lives in ways that will forever impact the next generation.

Sweeping yet intimate, resplendent with moments of deep emotion and unforgettable characters, Buckeye is a transportive story of love, loyalty, sacrifice, and forgiveness."

 

Insights and Opinions

This is one of those novels that breaks through the clutter of modern life and is suddenly seen and talked about everywhere. A Read with Jenna book club pick touted as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, People, the Minnesota Star Tribune, and the Chicago Public Library, it quickly rose to a prime spot on the New York Times Bestseller List. And of course any author who can wrangle advance-praise blurbs for their book jacket from the likes of Alice McDermott, Richard Russo, Ann Napolitano, and Ann Patchett is twenty-six steps ahead of the game before the game has even begun.

 

Cal Jenkins is a man whose club foot keeps him from joining the armed forces during World War II, diminishing his sense of himself as a man. His wife Becky has a gift for communicating with the dead, a gift her husband Cal doesn't understand. Margaret Salt is blessed with great beauty and cursed by a childhood abandonment that leaves a deep, unhealed wound. Her husband Felix values his wife but craves the love of a man who dies too soon. Each of these couples has a son and these sons will find one another and form an unbreakable bond.

 

+ Still reeling from the grievous harm done to our community by the lawless tactics deployed by ICE and still underway, we were grateful to spend time in each other's company talking about something other than The Thing. What is it about this book that has swept the nation? What makes it special?

 

+ Lois, who grew up in a small town, related to the culture. "This novel takes you into the interior life of people you would never know or would never know about if you lived in a small town. It gives you a sense of 'otherness' that you would never see growing up in a small town. We never knew anyone who was gay. We didn't even know what that was. In a small town, one's inner life has to be guarded carefully because if one person knows, everybody knows." 

 

+ Margy loved the sweep of the novel and Linda agreed, saying "This is an old-fashioned American novel. Characters are developed. You follow a cast of characters through their entire lives -- birth, loves, marriage, death -- you see them and know them through the decades." Liz agreed. "This is not a constipated, interior novel like so many modern literary works are."

 

" To Lois, Ryan's work makes the reader feel as if you are living through it yourself. 

 

+ Liz pointed out that it's a novel of a particular time as well as place. At that time, a man like Felix could not afford to be gay. And the lives of husbands and wives were so much more separated than they are now. Cal is aware of Becky's clients coming and going, taking advantage of her services as a medium, but he doesn't get it. He allows it but doesn't support it. When a saddened Becky seeks comfort from her mother, her mother says "Oh, pumpkin. You'll find a squirrel who can sing 'Mairzy Doats' before you find a man who takes you seriously."

 

+ To Margy, it is Cal who centers the book. "He is the heart of the novel, both literally and metaphorically. Think about the name of the town. It's Bonhomie, which is French for "good man," and Cal is that good man."

 

+ The character of Margaret was tough to love. Per Liz: "She was such a hard person and you don't relate to her, even at the end." Margy, on the other hand, loved that Margaret was an artist. "She would buy paintings. She'd find a Norman Rockwell, and note how he always found a perfect moment, and then put it under a microscope to find only the cute parts."  

 

+ Jocey (who submitted this question ahead of time since she couldn't be with us) wondered if Margaret did the right thing in telling her son about his brother. Lois thinks yes. The author, most likely, thinks no. We leave that up to the reader to decide. 

 

+ In the final pages of the book, Cal ponders the wisdom that comes from age, needling him because "it brought the clarity of hindsight without the means to change anything.."   "This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought. We aren't living in the past. The past is living in us. And it's talking." This is what great writers do. They find the nugget of truth and present it to the reader in the perfect combination of words.

 

+ In many ways, this is an anti-war novel. The town is populated by people who've been traumatized by one war or another -- Cal's father by WWI and the rest of the town by WWII. People who've experienced war don't forget and are marked by it permanently. Chris pointed out that "I feel like we, too, have been invaded. Unless people experience that, they can't understand." This led us out of the book and into a closing conversation about Minneapolis under attack, where to find solid commentary, and how to keep calm and carry on.

 

Our Next Read

For March, we will be reading:

 

Title: What We Can Know

Author: Ian McEwan

Location: Shirley's place 

 

Lois and Linda

 

 

Margy from afar

 

 

Some of Liz's tiny protest art, shared with the group