Jonathan Crimmins brings another post of his thoughts on Divisadero.–TM
Here’s an analogy–
The Polyphonic Spree is to Riverdance as Miranda July is to Michael Ondaatje.
The first half of the analogy means that the Polyphonic Spree, in their white robes and elaborate orchestration, is Riverdance for the Indie set. Simple enough. What is less simple is how the one term, Riverdance, taints the other three, suggesting that they all, in different ways, are peddling showmanship.
In the strange light of the Riverdance Effect, it is possible to see much of Ondaatje’s work as that hybrid of virtuosity and romantic nostalgia that in Riverdance seems astonishing at first and so quickly turns cloying. Think of the way Ondaatje mystifies and mythologizes his characters–the men as quiet, simple, mechanically skilled, and dangerous, and his women as nursemaids with an unfathomable core.
Early on he had it both ways, he employed a hyper-romanticism that was self-aware, using lyrical effects and then emphasizing the fictionality of those effects. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid combines America’s primary myth–the cowboy on the frontier between anarchy and everyday law–with the romantic genius figure in order to explore how such a myth can be both subversive and hegemonic at the same time. The penny adventure inserted near the end slyly suggests that his novel employed a grown-up version of some of the same pandering. Coming Through Slaughter plays the same game, taking its genius figure from that other mythologized domain, jazz.
With his next two books he attempted a Middlemarchian murder of the romantic hero, interjecting into the vacancy an elaborate web of small heroisms. In The Skin of the Lion and The English Patient, history appears in the standard mode of realism, no longer as inexorable Fate, but now as the cummulative inertia of a myriad of miniscule effects. Ondaatje chooses to end The English Patient with the ultimate example of inertia, the American holocaust of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. At that moment, Ondaatje’s use of a bomb as a metaphor for the heart and its desires breaks down. The gesture is a familiar one for Ondaatje, to end his novels by exposing its lie. And yet, whereas before he undermined the myth to intimate an unrecoverable area of reality that is the source of the myth, which in effect further mystifies the real, his use of the atomic bomb alludes to an event of such scale that it destroy the not only the romantic myth but also the romanticism of the real which is called realism. Thus when he has Kip ride off on a motorcycle pondering the destruction, the narrative method feels puerile. It is not Kip’s guilt or his horror that are the misstep; it’s the motorcycle, and the way that it draws attention to the narrative at exactly the moment he has asked his readers to imagine the simultaneous extinction of so many real human beings. The absolute dissonance between the narrative and the real destroys the aesthetics of the novel.
This first misstep seems to precipitate another. Kip (whose full name is Kirpal) is sitting at the dinner table many years later with his young family. He is thinking of Hana and he imagines her letting her hair down and knocking a glass of the table. Ondaatje chooses these as the last words of the novel: “And so Hana moves and her face turns and in a regret she lowers hair. Her shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges. Kirpal’s left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.” Cloaking the familiar domestic with such ethereal lyricism, Ondaatje pushes his technique into falsity. I mention this because one drawback of Divisadero is that much of it centers on the familiar, which is where Ondaatje is the weakest.
Next will be my last post on Divisadero. There, I’ll give specific examples. I’m eager, as Tyler Meier says, to kick some dust about the MFA! As a preliminary punt, I’d like to suggest the underappreciated Wings song “Let ???Em In” as my vote for the AWP theme song.
Jonathan Crimmins lives in Seattle. You can find his stories published in The Laurel Review and Harpur Palate.