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Kenneth Champeon

FictionHistorical Fiction

Philipp Meyer’s brilliant and raw epic of the American West

Review by Kenneth Champeon

A novel about terse men with guns will inevitably summon comparisons to Hemingway. One set in the South will likewise invoke Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. The Son by Philipp Meyer has its Hemingway-esque motifs; scenes of scalpings and general rapine do recall McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Meanwhile, Meyer’s decision to write using different voices riffs on Faulkner’s stylistic experiments.

At times Meyer does seem to be aping these predecessors, but his latest book is no mere homage. This talented young writer—one of the New Yorker’s “20 under 40”—has his own voice, and it owes as much perhaps to Virginia Woolf as to the male American canon.

The Son concerns several generations of Texans: Eli McCullough, his son Peter and Peter’s granddaughter Jeanne Anne. Eli’s tale, told in straight narrative, is set before and during the Civil War. Peter’s, told in diary form, centers on the Great War. J.A.’s, told in interior monologue, spans the latter 20th century.

The most compelling of these characters is Eli, who watches Comanches murder his family and then is taken captive by them. Years pass, and he becomes accustomed to their independent ways, so that even after his so-called liberation, Eli pines for his adoptive people.

Peter’s main struggle is with the Mexicans who once owned the Lone Star State. He witnesses Mexicans being massacred, and when one survivor calls him to account, he must choose between his love for her and his duty to a family who scorns the “wetbacks.”

For J.A., the problem is how to carry on the family name in a completely masculinized culture (women, Eli had said, “had no common sense”). She also struggles with her Texan pride, given that her nation, rather than being grateful for the state’s once indispensable oil production (“life as they knew it did not exist without Texas”), treats her kind with chilly Yankee superiority. On top of that, J.A. is a McCullough, and her ancestors’ enemies remember.

Meyer writes with grace, if not economy, and always with great sympathy, only occasionally careening into the saccharine. His knowledge of Comanche folkways is admirable, and, unlike Hemingway, he can write convincing women.

The novel’s epigraph is from Gibbon, and so its overarching theme is ephemerality—the decline of families shadowed by the decline of empires—a theme evident as well in the title of Meyer’s previous work, American Rust. The Son is a shining second step in a promising career.

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Read a Q&A with Philipp Meyer for The Son.

A novel about terse men with guns will inevitably summon comparisons to Hemingway. One set in the South will likewise invoke Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. The Son by Philipp Meyer has its Hemingway-esque motifs; scenes of scalpings and general rapine do recall McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Meanwhile, Meyer’s decision to write using different voices riffs on […]
FictionWorld Fiction

Trading lives, trading worlds

Review by Kenneth Champeon

If you could guarantee your child a rich life in exchange for forfeiting your right to see her, would you do it? The question informs the engrossing new novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, whose surprise international bestseller, The Kite Runner, so enchanted readers 10 years ago.

The child in question is Pari, whose long-suffering father arranges her adoption by a well-to-do Afghan and his half-French wife, Nila. Pari’s brother Abdullah stays behind, and their fates diverge in predictable ways: Pari becomes a professor of mathematics while Abdullah ends up selling kabobs.

The novel jumps backward and forward in time, with settings as diverse as Monterey, Paris, Kabul and Athens. The relationships between the far-flung cast members—including Idris, an Afghan-American physician, modeled probably on Hosseini himself; a Greek plastic surgeon and adventure photographer; a former Afghan jihadi and his iPod-toting son—are sometimes obscure. But the female characters steal the show, most notably Nila, who gleefully explodes the stereotype of the downtrodden Afghan woman. An acclaimed poet, as fond of men as she is enslaved to Chardonnay, she evokes a time when Kabul was downright chic.

Then there’s the flip side of the book’s opening dilemma. Having escaped, what obligation does one have to the motherland? Can an expat enjoy success when his or her country so desperately needs help? “For the price of that home theater,” Idris muses, “we could have built a school in Afghanistan.” After a trip back, he experiences worse culture shock upon returning to America, a situation familiar to anyone with experience in both countries. Ultimately Idris decides that Afghanistan was “something best forgotten.” But his story also suggests that life in America, with its stresses and mass distractions, is no Elysium either.

Do Pari and Abdullah reunite? Hosseini certainly isn’t given to facile resolutions. To the distances of space the novel adds the ravages of age. Ultimately, And the Mountains Echoed is about the human endeavor to transcend differences.

If you could guarantee your child a rich life in exchange for forfeiting your right to see her, would you do it? The question informs the engrossing new novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, whose surprise international bestseller, The Kite Runner, so enchanted readers 10 years ago. The child in question is Pari, whose long-suffering […]
FictionWorld FictionDebut Fiction

Hope perches in the soul

Review by Kenneth Champeon

April Fool's Day, the debut novel by acclaimed Croatian-American writer Josip Novakovich, recounts the life of Ivan Dolinar, a Croat born into Tito's Yugoslavia on April Fool's Day, 1948. His aspiration to become a doctor is derailed when he is condemned to break rocks in a labor camp for allegedly desiring Tito's assassination. Later he is conscripted into the Serbian army to kill Croats. The word absurd does not even begin to describe his fate: Ivan becomes a murderer, a cuckold, an adulterer, a rapist, a thief. But his actions have so little enthusiasm that he is less a monster than a marionette, tugged by historical forces while the moral void of war yawns below.

The author's depiction of a disintegrating Yugoslavia is bleak indeed, and its people seem alive only when under the influence of slivovitz (a Slavic brandy), jealousy or ethnic hatred. Violence is spontaneous and gratuitous, as is sex, while officialdom can always be counted on to lower the moral common denominator. Hope, meanwhile, takes curious if not perverse forms: Ivan trying to raise his daughter according to the principles of American textbooks, or his brother Bruno escaping to Germany for a life as lucrative as it is stultifying.

Novakovich conveys a sense that, despite everything, one should soldier on. Though Ivan never attains anything approaching religious clarity, the novel's conclusion turns upon the idea found also in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which the novel resembles in some ways that death's inevitability should be cause for levity, not gloom. Novakovich's prose is rich without being ostentatious, with humor occasionally so dry that it crackles. April Fool's Day fulfills that basic criterion of good art: it elevates the undeniable sloppiness of life to something like grandeur. And it further confirms that the best literature often arises out of humanity's darkest times.

April Fool's Day, the debut novel by acclaimed Croatian-American writer Josip Novakovich, recounts the life of Ivan Dolinar, a Croat born into Tito's Yugoslavia on April Fool's Day, 1948.
FictionWorld FictionDebut Fiction

Identity crisis

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Japan may possess the world's greatest disparity between public decorum and private perversity. This darker side of Japanese life is explored in Country of Origin, the first novel by Ploughshares editor Don Lee.

The plot centers around the disappearance of Lisa Countryman, a young American who finds herself working in dodgy Tokyo establishments catering to the peccadilloes of Japanese businessmen. Or those who pass for Japanese like one David Saito, an American spook whose wife is having an affair with Tom Hurley, a U.S. embassy official charged with investigating Lisa's case. Also on Lisa's trail is Kenzo Ota, a neurotic cop entangled in the corruption marking Japan's elephantine bureaucracy. Empty the closets of these various characters and the skeletons would fill a graveyard.

Speaking of closed doors, behind Japan's lurks a vast array of bizarre sexual entertainments, in which men pay to grope women on subway mock-ups, or pay "splash girls" for cocktails and fellatio. But as the novel's title implies, Lee's main concern is with the interplay between identity, ethnicity and nationality. Lisa believes herself to be the orphaned offspring of a black man and a Korean woman, but through some genetic alchemy she passes for white. Tom Hurley tells people he's Hawaiian to avoid confusion over his own pedigree. And the son of Kenzo's ex-wife has been raised in America, thereby shedding Japanese manners and gaining American pounds. Lee concludes the novel with a celebration of America as the true home of "outcasts" and "orphans," but Lisa's fate suggests that the labels are not necessarily desirable ones.

Lee's prose is precise and inventive, and he's not a bad storyteller either. But his worldview is cynical, even Darwinist, and with the exception of the bumbling Kenzo none of his characters is likable. Perhaps that's the novel's point: when no one knows who he or she is, no one knows whom to trust. In the global village, no one is kin.

 

Kenneth Champeon writes from Thailand.

Japan may possess the world's greatest disparity between public decorum and private perversity. This darker side of Japanese life is explored in Country of Origin, the first novel by Ploughshares editor Don Lee. The plot centers around the disappearance of Lisa Countryman, a young American who finds herself working in dodgy Tokyo establishments catering to […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

A fine Ceylon blend

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Simply put, The Hamilton Case by Sri Lankan author Michelle de Kretser is one of the most extraordinary novels I have ever read. Set in 1930s Sri Lanka—then called Ceylon and a colony of Britain—de Krester's second novel is captivating, intelligent, erudite and devilishly funny. It is not in the poetic style of fellow Sri Lankan Michael Ondaatje. Nor, despite the claim on the book's back cover, does it resemble Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, which displays more sweep but less virtuosity. De Kretser wastes not a word, and her wit is rapier sharp.

The novel's title would suggest that it is a detective story, and it is, in part, as details come to light about the murder scandal that haunts the once wealthy and influential Obeysekere family. But the novel focuses largely on the evolution of that family. Sam, the lawyer son. Maud, the dissolute mother. Claudia, sister to Sam and wife of Sam's main adversary, Jaya. In later life, Jaya takes up the dubious cause of reserving Sri Lanka for the Sinhalese against the recently arrived Tamils. The author compares such tactics to the divide et impera program of the British Empire.

Sri Lanka is a melting pot due to its role in trade between Europe and the Far East. Sam even suggests that "there's not a Ceylonese without mongrel blood in his veins." But the island is fraught with ethnic tension. Like the case in Forster's A Passage to India, the Hamilton case is complicated by issues of racial inequality. Meanwhile the novel's native characters are generally more English than the English.

One of the novel's more pleasing diversions is the waging of what Martin Amis has called "the war against cliché." Both Maud and a Tamil named Shivanathan are guilty of composing hackneyed phrases and images. De Kretser spears them mercilessly, while displaying her skill in producing fresh analogies ("he had the air of an aggrieved rodent"). Indeed, perhaps the most impressive thing about The Hamilton Case is simply how beautifully it makes the English language sing.

 

Kenneth Champeon writes from Thailand.

Simply put, The Hamilton Case by Sri Lankan author Michelle de Kretser is one of the most extraordinary novels I have ever read. Set in 1930s Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon and a colony of Britain, de Krester's second novel is captivating, intelligent, erudite and devilishly funny.
Fiction

The Kite Runner

Review by Kenneth Champeon

After September 11th, as it became apparent that the United States would bomb Afghanistan, an open letter written by an Afghan appeared on the Internet. It pleaded with Americans to realize that Afghanistan was already a devastated country. It needed food, not vengeance; sympathy, not hate. The Kite Runner, a novel by Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini, takes this clarification one step further. The first novel to be written in English by an Afghan, it spans the period from before the 1979 Soviet invasion until the reconstruction following the fall of the odious Taliban.

The novel portrays the Afghans as an independent and proud people who for decades have defended their country against one invader after another. But the narrator wonders if his people will ever transcend the tribalism that continues to threaten Afghanistan's integrity. "Maybe," he thinks, "it was a hopeless place." As a boy, Amir cravenly betrays his servant and best friend, the Hazara boy Hassan.

When the Russians come, Amir and his father move to California, where Amir becomes a successful writer. He embraces America because it "had no ghosts, no memories, and no sins." But when Amir learns that a childhood mentor is ailing back home, he returns to discover that his relationship to Hassan had been deeper than he realized. This leads him on a hazardous journey to rescue and adopt Hassan's son, whose father the Taliban had executed.

The novel derives its name from the Afghan custom of doing battle with kites. Although the book can sometimes be melodramatic and garrulous, it provides an extraordinary perspective on the struggles of a country that, until that doleful September day, had been for too long ignored or misunderstood. And despite its grimmer episodes, the novel ends with a note of optimism about Afghanistan's future, an optimism that the whole world would prefer to see unspoiled. Inshallah, as Afghans say: God willing.

Kenneth Champeon is a writer based in Thailand.

 

After September 11th, as it became apparent that the United States would bomb Afghanistan, an open letter written by an Afghan appeared on the Internet. It pleaded with Americans to realize that Afghanistan was already a devastated country. It needed food, not vengeance; sympathy, not hate. The Kite Runner, a novel by Afghan-American writer Khaled […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

A chef’s slice of life in Paris

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Monique Truong's debut novel, The Book of Salt, is narrated by a Vietnamese man named Binh who serves as the personal cook for those sapphic luminaries Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The primary setting is Paris; the time, the 1930s, when things began to go seriously awry.

In an elegant if rambling style somewhat reminiscent of Stein herself, Truong relates Binh's rise from obscurity to semi-obscurity. The son of a hateful, alcoholic, but devoutly Catholic father and a long-suffering, devoted mother, Binh begins his culinary career in the Governor-General's mansion in Saigon. Later, as a lost soul in the Paris of the Lost Generation, he answers an ad placed by "Two American ladies," whom Binh addresses as GertrudeStein (a one-word appellation) and Miss Toklas. What follows is a truly mouth-watering cascade of food preparations and displays.

In its celebration of gustatory delights and their use as metaphors for human life, Truong's novel belongs in the company of such books as Joanne Harris' Chocolat. Compared to a soufflé, says Binh, "A tart is better, uncomplicated, in the wrong hands even a bit rough. Like an American boy, I would imagine."

Despite Leo Stein's tenable appraisal of his sister's prose as "nothing more than babble," the two women inhabit a world of extreme aestheticism and popularity. In contrast, Binh lives on the fringes as an asiatique, and gay to boot. Indeed, and perhaps implausibly, Binh has a brief encounter with no less than the future Ho Chi Minh. He drinks excessively and wanders around Paris so much that he memorizes its arrondissements. And when the Steins eventually return to America, they leave Binh as well as their two dogs, Pépé and Basket behind.

Born in Saigon and now a New Yorker, Truong capably evokes Binh's disparate worlds, and her depiction of the eccentric, punctilious and almost intolerably narcissistic American ladies rings true. Somewhat less convincing is her ambitious persona as a gay man: one often hears Truong, not Binh, when the writing soars into sentimentality or sensuality. And for a man of such reticence, Binh's inner life is almost incredibly elaborate.

But there is perhaps no place so romantic as colonial Indochina or antebellum Paris, and by the end of The Book of Salt one hungers desperately for both. And perhaps even more, one hungers for one of Binh's extraordinary repasts.

Kenneth Champeon, a writer living in Thailand, is a regular contributor to ThingsAsian.com.

Monique Truong's debut novel, The Book of Salt, is narrated by a Vietnamese man named Binh who serves as the personal cook for those sapphic luminaries Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. The primary setting is Paris; the time, the 1930s, when things began to go seriously awry. In an elegant if rambling style somewhat […]

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