my review of the new Colum McCann book from last week's Weekend Australian.
Colum McCann’s new book contains one long
novella and three short stories; the novella is called ‘Thirteen Ways of
Looking’ and is a murder mystery of sorts set in New York.
Peter
Mendelssohn is a retired Jewish judge in his eighties who lives in a well to do
building on the Upper East Side. His Irish wife Eileen has only recently died
and in the first chapters of ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking’ we learn about Peter’s
childhood in Vilnius, his family’s flight from the Nazis, first to Paris and
then to Dublin (where Eileen was his neighbour), and then finally to Brooklyn.
Eileen
joins Peter in America, they marry, prosper and have two children: a do-gooding
daughter living in Israel and a creepy son Elliot who wants to ride his
father’s coat-tails into a political career. The day of the murder begins
typically for Mr Mendelssohn. He deals with the indignities of night-time incontinence,
he charms his Trinidadian home-help Sally and he reminiscences about his wife’s
affection for Irish literature and the autographs he got for her from Seamus
Heaney and Paul Muldoon.
It’s
snowing but Mendelssohn decides to have lunch at his favourite Italian
restaurant where he is joined by a distracted Elliot. On the way home from
lunch he is the victim of a one-punch killing.
Each chapter of
the novella begins with a verse out of sequence from Wallace Stevens’ famous
poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird’ and like that poem, each chapter
is told from a slightly different emotional and lyrical perspective. Parts of
the novella are from Mendelssohn’s stream of consciousness and at other times
we get the point of view of the detectives investigating the murder. The most
fascinating aspects of the story are when McCann gives us an impersonal look at
Mendelssohn’s last day as seen through the city’s silent security cameras. This
reminded me of the great Eoin McNamee story – also a murder mystery – ‘Corpse
Flowers’ which is almost entirely unpacked through descriptions of CCTV footage.
Peter
Mendelssohn is a fairly convincing character, similar in outlook to Saul
Bellow’s Artur Sammler, but perhaps there’s a little too much of Colum McCann
in him; Mendelssohn is well versed in Irish poetry but doesn’t name-drop any
Jewish writers and for a Litvak doctor’s son is oddly reticent with the Yiddishisms.
In an afterword
to Thirteen Ways of Looking McCann
explains that he was half-way through the writing process of the book when he
himself was mugged and badly beaten in Connecticut. Going back to his work in
progress became part of the healing process. Jorge Luis Borges, in his
influential essay ‘On Blindness’, states that “whatever happens [to a writer]
including embarrassments and misfortunes, all have been given like clay, like material
for our art.” McCann similarly mines his own misfortune and the book is a more
powerful, poetic and melancholy one because of the rude incursion of real life
into art. The murder mystery is solved agreeably and I don’t think many readers
will begrudge McCann his rejection of the Law
& Order ending regarding the verdict.
There are three
other stories in Thirteen Ways Of Looking
that appear to be more or less just tacked on at the of the book end and have
little in common with the themes of the opening novella. In McCann’s two most
recent story collections TransAtlantic
and Let The Great World Spin – all
the stories resonated, interlinked, bounced off and informed one another in
artistically satisfying ways. Not so here, alas, where the links, such as they
are, seem forced.
‘Treaty’ is the
story of an Irish nun who was raped in South America by a terrorist now
claiming to be a man of peace. She encounters her rapist in a London café and
uncovers the truth about his supposed transformation. (This may be an allegory
for Gerry Adams whose arrest and release for a cold case murder was very much
in the New York media during the story’s composition.)
‘Sh’khol’ is
about a Jewish-Irish woman whose deaf adopted son goes missing on a swimming
trip in Galway. She’s a translator looking for an English equivalent of the
Hebrew word Sh’kol (a parent who has lost his or her child). For her son to
actually have drowned would be bathos worthy of O’Henry so there’s no real
tension in this tale and I wasn’t entirely convinced by the characters or the
situation - since when do Galway hookers have white sails?
The most
interesting story of the three is ‘What Time Is It Now Where You Are?’ about a
female US Marine in Afghanistan about to call her girlfriend back in South
Carolina on New Year’s Eve. This story is rather brilliantly written as a
meta-narrative in which Colum McCann races against a deadline to write a New
Year’s eve story building the characters, the setting and the themes in his
mind as the story progresses. It’s the most original and daring part of the
entire book and it’s a shame that it’s so short.
Thirteen
Ways of Looking
proves that Colum McCann is a fine miniaturist but I’d like to see him delve
deep into a single subject again like he did with Dancer, a novel about the
life of Rudolf Nureyev, a book that was lyrical, well researched and profound,
and which remains his masterpiece.
