Category: fiction

Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi’s Savage Tongues Goes Back to Where It Happened and Finds the Self

Jen Penkethman2 Comments

The longer you live, the more you understand the importance of The Place Where It Happened, whether it’s the best thing that ever happened to you, or the worst. I started staging my own re-visitings young, even as an eleven-year-old child, looking back at my elementary school playground with a world-weariness more appropriate to someone in middle age. Over the years, I’ve re-visited the sites of breakups, apartments and rooms where many emotional growing pains occurred, or just the park I was sitting in when I talked to someone important for the first time. It all happened right there, I would think to myself, as though the very physical matter of the place held a special charge.

It’s a particular sort of attachment we have as humans, one which is explored with great sensitivity and intelligence in Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi’s novel, Savage Tongues. Whether it’s us doing the attaching, or the place attaching to us, is in some ways the novel’s central question. Can the narrator, who was in an abusive relationship at the young age of seventeen, free herself from the snares of memory and reclaim The Place Where It Happened? Using a simple, straightforward travel narrative as its base, the beautifully nuanced novel traces Arezu’s journey back to the infamous apartment in Spain, where she stays for several weeks with her best friend as moral support. This narrative structure proves to be an excellent scaffolding for the onslaught of sensations and memory that assault (pun intended) Arezu as she travels forward in place but backward in time.

It’s a thrill to read a narrator so viscerally and electrically connected to her own feelings and thoughts; the inner drama which unfolds is as vast as it is filled-in with images, recalled lines of dialogue, and perhaps most importantly, sense-memory. The physical sensations involved in this re-visiting and remembering constitute a narrative in themselves, and Van Der Vliet Oloomi pays them the dutiful attention of an investigative journalist, exposing the nature of trauma and the multi-dimensionality of relationships.

What this novel reveals is that the narrative of place and trauma is one of revisiting and re-envisioning.

There are multiple steps involved in the re-visiting process. The memory of the first time we were there, when we originally went through the event, creates the first layer, upon which years of experience have sedimented. This first-layer memory, like many first impressions, already contains a whole system of components and distorting factors. As Arezu explains:

“It had taken me twenty years to understand that the lens through which Omar had seen me was so wretched, so disgraceful, so disenfranchising, it had robbed me of my ability to see in return: I had lost the power to look. And because I had lost my ability to look, I had lost the ability to see myself clearly. Where then would I speak from? How would I retell my story? I had lost my descriptive capacities. He had reshaped my identity in his image, with his gaze.” (6)

Arezu must re-envision her experience of the event, this time without the abuser’s gaze dominating. Omar’s gaze is still present for the older Arezu, of course, but it has been folded into the mix of time and memory. Meanwhile, to acknowledge even more complexity, the idea of Omar’s gaze has become a new wrinkle in the new re-envisioning, a concept which Arezu could not be conscious of the first time she experienced the event.

While the seventeen-year-old may have been at least partly a blank slate onto which Omar was able to project his perspectives and emotions, the thirty-something Arezu is not. The older self catches up to the younger self in time, each adjusting in order to come to some sort of fundamental agreement. The guilt or complicity of the seventeen-year-old Arezu comes into question, as the nuanced vision of an older woman gives dimensions to the simpler, younger perspective. The novel creates this multiplicity of selves with effective use of imagery and symbolism (most memorably involving a young pig which was killed carelessly by Omar).

In this way, the sensation of moving forward and backward in time results: not only is one’s current self reaching back in time, but the past self is brought forward, into the current emotional moment. This effect highlights exactly how, when it comes to The Place Where It Happened, the sense of place warps time, in multiple directions. This constantly shifting field of events and places and the various perspectives they create calling to each other across time could be argued to constitute the real self, which, if we are aware of it, might give us some tiny modicum of choice over how we exist as selves. To return to the Place Where It Happened, to see with your own eyes, layering the previous perspectives with the current one: this is the defense, as Arezu says, against the self-obliterating effect of the world and its language.

George Saunders’ Story Machines

Jen PenkethmanLeave a comment

When I was in college, I took a class on Chekhov’s short stories. The model of this class was very much in the “reading like a writer” school: we read the works of this Russian master, and tried to absorb osmotically what he had done. Chekhov, like pretty much all writers I studied in college, was a genius of a very mysterious sort; the stories worked, but I wasn’t really privy to how. Each story seemed to be one indissoluble whole, a monolith dropped from space, glowing and impenetrable. The class was like touring a church in order to praise the results of its magnificent construction, and be humbled by its grandness. I developed a sense of what felt “Chekhovian”: namely, forlorn peasants lamenting their little, unexciting lives, constantly wanting “to live, only to live!” and falling victim to absurd setbacks. My sense of the Chekhovian was strong enough to write an imitation story, which was fun, though of course it was only superficially similar; I had no ability to imitate the intricacies of his mechanics.

That’s fine; it was an undergraduate class, and I was still a freshman. But as my education progressed, the technique of simply observing the masters didn’t seem to vary. It became more and more apparent to me that this technique of aspirational osmosis was the only one that would be used, and I wondered exactly how far it would take me. I wanted to dig in and find what stories were really made of, but I didn’t have the tools. I was like a biology student unable dissect the dead frog on the table, because I had no scalpel; all I could do was marvel at it from a short distance.

George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Random House, 2021

George Saunders dissects seven classic, Russian short stories, including three by Chekhov, in his newest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and gives us our own sharp scalpels for future use. My impression of Saunders, as a writer and as a person I’ve met a couple of times, is that he is unflaggingly generous. In essence, this book is a written version of a graduate writing course, which is a huge boon to the hundreds of us who wanted to work with him as MFA students but didn’t get into the program. The structure of the book, which offers the text of the short story and accompanying analysis (sometimes interspersed with the story text), is a brilliant way to ground the analysis, which might otherwise drift off into the abstract, like so many works of literary theory. We always have Saunders’ kind, encouraging, funny, curious voice to return to. The book felt, for me, like a gift. I only wish it had been around when I was an undergraduate, anxiously circling the temple of fiction but unable to get in.

Saunders’ basic approach is less “reading like a writer” and more, perhaps, writing like a reader. That is, Saunders takes a mindfulness-oriented approach toward these Russian masters, and diligently tracks in great detail what happens in his mind (and his students’) during the process of reading them. With the story as the anchor, Saunders shows just how far you can extrapolate with basic observation, which turns out to be amazingly far. He uses these Russian short stories to dig as deep as possible into what a story actually is: an “organic whole [which]…responds alertly to itself” (29); a “system for the transfer of energy” (35); a “limited set of elements that we read against one another” (48); a “set of incremental pulses” (60). It’s quite the same as the biology student using the particular frog carcass to extrapolate what the frog form is in general, and yet, for some reason, throughout my education it seemed like professors shied away from this sort of thing. There is still plenty of remaining belief that art ought to remain mysterious and unexplained. But the short stories Saunders dissects here still have plenty left to admire after the dissection is over; the little systems created within them do their job well enough that they point outward, to the overall strangeness of existence.

The most interesting thing I noted about Saunders’ pronouncements was the metaphor of energy which popped up over and over. It reminded me of Viktor Shklovsky’s explanation of the “energy of delusion”, a fascinating if somewhat nebulous idea. Saunders tends to view a story as a machine or as a phenomenon of physics (including the metaphor he’s used in a previous work, of a story as a little Hot Wheels track), filled with dynamic movement. The funny thing about this is that, in my Chekhov class, I saw his stories as mostly plot-less; they felt like people just doing a lot of traveling and talking (which, to be clear, was a plus for me). Saunders shows just how much movement there is in every beat of a Chekhov story, and I’m grateful for his incisive instruction.

There is still a division between literary fiction and popular storytelling; the latter operates on rules which are pretty recognizable if you care to look. The basic rhythm of set-up and payoff has become so familiar that we instantly sense when an ending is unsatisfying, or the TV show we’ve watched leaves too many “loose ends.” This setup/payoff dynamic is the dominant principle of story writing as we experience it in our daily lives, as consumers of mass media. Saunders’ analysis mostly hews to this, but adds more complexity, particularly in the chapters on Gogol’s “The Nose” and Chekhov’s “Gooseberries”. This marriage of more “basic” storytelling technique with explanations of more complex phenomena like omission and non-realism shows how compatible the two areas really are. There is no need, in my opinion, to exclude elementary concepts like setup/payoff from academic literary analysis. They are quite modifiable and expandable.

There were a couple of times I found myself twitching while reading, particularly in Saunders’ analysis of Tolstoy, which hinges around the unfortunate concept of “truth.” Saunders presents the idea that part of the appeal of a short story is whether it seems to reflect reality in some “true” fashion to the reader. However, when Saunders references Nabokov’s quote about Tolstoy’s “accuracy of perception” (219), I had to cringe. As Saunders himself points out, Tolstoy was notoriously terrible in his treatment of his wife, overly admiring of meekly suffering peasants, and kind of a jerk in general. But this isn’t just a minor personality flaw – he can be argued to be, according to our modern understanding, classist and misogynist. Saunders addresses this when he explains that problems in a story that appear to be about sexism can be rendered as “neutral, more workable technical observations” (246) – but why? I’m not sure why one would want or need to do this. Why can’t the study of fiction writing include observations about the sociological biases present? Why are these separated out of the discussion? It feels like a cop-out.

I’m not suggesting canceling Tolstoy; I’m suggesting we take these dusty old concepts of “truth” and “greatness” down from the pedestals they’ve been on. At one point, Milan Kundera is quoted speaking about “every true novelist” (220) – what exactly is a “true” novelist? I worry that this term is presented as something vague and ambiguous (like obscenity, you “know it when you see it”), but actually refers to something quite specific: “truth” comes from educated, European-descended men. Tolstoy’s “truth” might feel noble and right to him, but I squirm when it is presented as some kind of collective truth, unearthed by a “great” mind. These discussions of “truth” and “greatness,” as general qualities of good art should, I think, be thrown out the window.

There is another squishy concept sloshing around in the book, which is the “feel” a writer uses to decide what moves to make in a story. Saunders writes: “My experience is that, late in the game, finishing a story, we’re in such deep relation to it that we’re making decisions we’re not even aware we’re making, for reasons too fine to articulate…We’re operating in an intuitive zone, deciding quickly, without much deliberation” (109). There is certainly something to be said for this, because no matter how much you describe even the most minute patterns of your mind, there is always a massive remainder of material that you cannot possibly be conscious of, simply because there is too much. The quantity of single thoughts in every instant of human consciousness is staggering, producing a constant zone of neural activity that must remain semi-conscious or even totally unconscious, which becomes “intuition.” Certain artists like David Lynch take great advantage of this, while others try to assign more familiar structure to their work. But no artist, no human, is capable of minding every single thought he has. Which is good, because it dispels the fear of over-explaining fiction, like the fear of ruining a good joke by pulling it apart.

My anxiety about this vague concept of a writer’s “feel” is essentially the same as the one I have about “truth” – that it’s a specific, contingent set of ideas meant to be presented as universal. The discussion of storytelling as an art would ideally include analysis of who gets to tell stories and who doesn’t, which stories are typically put forth as great or noble, and which stories are usually derided or criticized. Saunders has offered us so much in this book that it feels a little unfair to assign this task to him as well. The conversation has already been greatly advanced, in my opinion, by this truly excellent book on craft; the next step may be to find a way to address these problems of supposed universality as embodied by stale concepts like “greatness”.* Speaking personally, and going back to my memories of being a curious but unfulfilled undergrad, I know how damaging they can be to the young and easily-influenced. In general, though, Saunders has done more here to debunk the idea of mysterious, untouchable “genius” than most, showing us a set of comprehensible principles that can be adapted and manipulated. Though I wish this book had been around twenty years ago, I’m more than happy to have it now.

* In fact, writers like Matthew Salesses and Felicia Rose Chavez have already taken on the task of addressing cultural context within the teaching of writing, and I intend to write about them in future blog posts.

A Children’s Bible, Leave the World Behind, and inter-generational responsibility

Jen Penkethman1 Comment

Just by total coincidence, the last two novels I read have been about the end of society. Or maybe it’s not so remarkable a coincidence, given that this particular eventuality has loomed larger in most of our minds lately. The timing seems serendipitous to us, the readers, but both of these books were composed pre-pandemic, of course. So their writers benefited from a synchronicity of world events and publication dates. That, or there are no real coincidences.


In Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, the societal collapse takes the form of environmental catastrophe, the massive storm near the beginning setting into motion a chain of events in which modern human systems break down, and older, tribal survival modes return. Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind is more of a literary thriller which earns its suspense by mostly withholding the exact nature of the disaster, but it appears to be at the same level of epoch-ending chaos. In both stories, families are holed up in rented vacation homes as the apocalypse descends around them. (I swear I did not choose these together on purpose!)


A Children’s Bible gave me everything I could hope for in a novel. Smart, pithy sentences (the book is narrated by a very world-wise teenager named Eve), well-paced action, interesting characters with fun dialogue, all the rest. But the book reaches deeper even beyond these considerable strengths to form a rich, resonant root system of allegory and fable.


There’s Eve’s name, of course, and her younger brother Jack, who reads a children’s version of the Bible obsessively as the world around him falls apart. Jack’s ardent dedication to saving animals from the human-created environmental disaster takes its place in the larger allegory between climate change and the story of the flood. But Millet is too smart to simply bang us over the head with this parallel. Not only is the parallel pointed out already by the characters in the book, signifying that Millet considers it not so precious that it must be kept from the reader, but the story of A Children’s Bible goes on much longer than Noah’s, into other Bible stories (there are amusing allusions to Cain and Abel and the burning bush), and even beyond them. Throughout, there is enough room between the two worlds of story that they can both share the allegorical ground, and allow the reader to fill in the rest of the space themselves.

The real dilemma of A Children’s Bible is that there is no divine presence or wise figure to lead the children through disaster. There’s only a group of parents who do little more than down cocktails and offer vague, grossly inadequate solutions to the mounting problems. It’s clear pretty much from the beginning that the children are essentially on their own. They even have a game of keeping it secret whose parents are whose, denying their connection to them.


The generational conflict is the fulcrum of the story; the enemy is not so much the destruction of Earth, but the parents’ inability to do anything. Because who caused the destruction in the first place? The same people who now sit in the middle of the mess they wrought, scheduling their days around drinking times, worried the catastrophe means they might run out of Bulleit bourbon.

Millet’s use of the collective first-person and collective group identity in general is extremely skillful. Each group is an archetype: the Old and the New. The division underpins the allegorical dimension of the novel; individuals are defined largely by their group, yet maintain distinct personalities.


Leave the World Behind doesn’t emphasize generational conflict as much, but it’s certainly present. There are only two sets of parents holed up in a vacation house during the apocalypse, instead of a large group, but these parents could easily fit in with the parents in A Children’s Bible. They drink a lot (never have two books given me such an awareness of the widespread use of alcohol as a marker of emotional immaturity), and generally don’t seem to know very much.


In Leave the World Behind, the point seems to be that, if and when disaster strikes, the vast majority of us (or at least adults) will have no idea what to do. Unnerved by news of a widespread power outage, the father in the story drives from his secluded vacation spot in the middle of nowhere to find some answers, and immediately gets lost. Like, immediately. His character is so unsympathetic that I almost got annoyed; it seemed too easy to dismiss him. The wife, similarly, is narcissistic and insecure, and seems incapable of anything except the most basic functions of parenting (or maybe not, if the story runs its course). Alam’s story seems to imply that the children might turn out the same way, but there is a possibility that they will avoid this fate (and that’s all I’ll say, to avoid spoiling anything).


In A Children’s Bible, the parents are dismissed – by the stand-in for the reader, Eve, and the rest of the young people. Their contempt for their parents is palpable on nearly every page. In one conversation they explicitly ask the parents: why didn’t you do anything? It’s the exact same thing Greta Thunberg angrily demands on the world stage. In the novel, the moment feels almost too on-the-nose, descending from the heights of symbolism into literal representation; it makes me wonder if other young people are asking their parents this question so directly, or whether they just don’t bother. The young people in A Children’s Bible alternate between dismissing the parents and feeling angry or disappointed in them.


I have spent a non-negligible amount of time considering these questions myself. What does the older generation owe the younger generation? What is reasonable to expect from our parents? By the end of A Children’s Bible, Eve ends up concluding the same thing I did: you cannot blame the parents for behaving in the ways they were adapted for. “They’d functioned passably in a limited domain. Specifically adapted to life in their own small niches,” says Eve. “When their habitats collapsed they had no familiar terrain. No map. No equipment. No tools.” This is the same picture of reality that I came to myself, though not nearly at such a young age as Eve. It reminded me of the song “Going Nowhere,” which was sung so memorably by Lena Zavaroni and written by Neil Sedaka, with the lyrics:


And they’re asked to hold the world together
Make it happen
Give it children
Who in turn are turning on to going nowhere
And all the strength they’d ever need to help them
Has been wasted
Remains hidden
In the confusion of going nowhere


The parents’ generation learned to thrive in a consumerist environment, and taught their children how to adapt to a middle-class existence based on the idea of wealth as worth (Millet’s characters fret about money at the most inappropriate, ridiculous times). This “nowhere” of the ideal materialistic life took all their energy to accomplish, and still it results mostly in confusion and need for escape.


But these days, I find it increasingly nonsensical to blame anyone, even a large group of people with so much of the political power, for our current predicament. Humans adapt to the circumstances we were raised in. The fact is that the current change in circumstances might be faster than what our species can adapt to. Is that anyone’s fault? It feels less stressful for me, anyway, to view it as something that is simply happening, like every other natural process.


The dangers and problems of thousands of generations were the same: get enough to eat, gather wealth to ensure survival, avoid disease and poverty, etc. Those were challenge enough for us for the vast majority of our history. In the last few decades, the demands of the environment have shifted to require us to think globally, as a species, not as tribes. We find ourselves having to strategize on the macro level, having to understand massive, inter-connected chains of cause-and-effect, and having to adapt our behavior to these large, nearly incomprehensible systems. This means we have to share knowledge, think about indirect effects of our actions, and even consider impacts several places down the chain of cause-and-effect. How can we transition to this kind of thinking in the space of one generation? It’s a huge order. It’s not impossible, and certainly there were people in the previous generations who were ready for it, but apparently extremely unlikely for a species to adapt this quickly.


If the parents were able to defend themselves, they might argue that you can’t set down the rules of the game for a generation of people and then, after they’ve been following them for fifty or sixty years, suddenly say that they should have been doing this other thing the whole time. I’m not saying this is good, or bodes well for our species, but it just seems to be the fact staring us in the face. Ultimately, all the adults in A Children’s Bible fail to function in the new world left after environmental catastrophe. They learned to serve their function in the post-war consumer boom, and now that that world has fallen apart, there’s simply nothing for them to do, no way to develop themselves in this new world order.


All of this is wrapped up in A Children’s Bible as part of the story, organically you might say; there is no repetitive, critical preaching, as I felt there was in Leave the World Behind. It does seem fairly obvious to me, at this point, to show that most of us would be high and dry if all-out disaster befell us; haven’t we learned that well enough by the end of 2020? Certainly, it’s worth pointing out past failures to avoid repeating them, but dwelling on blame and anger begins a cycle of self-serving contempt that saps our energy.
If we can accept without judgment that humans adapt to certain systems and don’t do well when those systems break down, we can start to rethink those systems together. We see this beginning to happen at the end of A Children’s Bible, which moves on from its judgment of the previous generation to the problems at hand in the present, and the future.