What Book to Read?

At first I thought this book wasn’t worth writing about. But then I read a favourable review in the Australian literary magazine Meanjin, which made me reconsider my response. I still don’t like it much, but concede that this may say more about me than it says about the book.

The story is told in seven chapters, one for each of the main characters.  Overall, these build a picture of the stages in a family’s life, including the breakup of a marriage, teenage angst, sibling relationships, dealing with a difficult adolescent, having a young child, getting old and dying. But each chapter could be read as a short story. This is partly because they are all set at different times over a period of more than thirty years. It is also because they are discontinuous; what happens in several of them isn’t reflected in the other chapters. This has a stop-start effect; a chapter may build interest and tension, but it is dissipated at the end of the chapter. Amsterdam offers few social markers by which to place the family; they live in an indeterminate landscape, and their lives seem bland. There’s nothing wrong with not specifying a social setting; it’s a tactic that can focus attention on individual feelings and personal relationships. But I don’t think as described here, feelings and personal relationships can carry the weight. Amsterdam writes well, but not that well.

The main character, in so far as there is one, is Alec, who plays a part in all the stories, his own coming at the end. Alec has magic powers, or perhaps rather he has the power to make other people discover powers in themselves – like becoming invisible, or flying. His aim in conferring these powers is to give his family what it needs – a chance of fulfilment. ‘Right now,’ he says, ‘we’re in the wrong version of our lives. Too much security, too little freedom … All we have to do is pick a different story, one where we get what we want.’ Really? It’s not clear that the rest of the family are necessarily better off – or better – because of their powers, which, incidentally, only seem to operate in their own chapter. Ruth, for example, feels she had ‘evidently endured some sort of accident in her brain’ when she finds she can read other people’s thoughts. Alec realises that he has to be careful about altering reality: ‘One ripple rushed into another. Without ever intending it, there could be waves, curling larger and larger, pulling all of them far from solid land.’ But this doesn’t seem to stop him.

I don’t mind stories where characters have magic powers, or where we get first one then another outcome because of some minor change in circumstances – see for example my review of Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson. But here, I just found it irritating. What is the point of these magic powers? You can’t just ‘pick a different story’ – that’s the whole point of the web of relationships that make up a family. But I don’t think this is the point that Amsterdam is making. In fact I’m not sure what point he is making.

And this is where I wonder if I’m not looking for something that other readers might not find necessary, or even desirable – for some sort of rational outcome beyond the quirky view of the world offered by magic realism. The writer in Meanjin says that the central premise of the novel is that ‘sometimes it takes extraordinary power to survive the everyday’. And maybe Amsterdam is showing this by bestowing eccentric powers like flying and materialising through walls on his characters. Perhaps the absence of much colour in the lives of the family members when the magic isn’t operating is a deliberate way of contrasting the mundane with the extraordinary. Other readers might find this delightful, and not at all irritating. The Meanjin writer also says that in Amsterdam’s work, ‘as much meaning exists in what is unsaid as in the stories themselves, and bestows us with the power to fill in the blanks.’ Perhaps I’m just not good at reading what’s left unsaid.

Steven Amsterdam is an American who now lives and writes in Melbourne. He sounds like a really nice bloke. You can read more about him here. This is his second novel. His first, Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009) won The Age Book of the Year (fiction), and this one, which was published in 2011, was short listed for this, and short or long listed for several other literary prizes. So critical opinion is against me.  It’s an easy read – try it for yourself.