A Far Country
By Daniel Mason
Knopf, 268 pages, $24
Lazy Eye
By Donna Daley-Clarke
MacAdam/Cage, 256 pages, $23
In past decades, as the American melting pot has become a salad bowl, thoughtful people have looked to multicultural fiction for insights on what life in other countries and the immigrant experience is really like. Such books have exposed arrogant or sentimental notions about the American Dream and the “rightness” of Western thought, while giving us a window onto cultures that fascinate us with their difference. (Two that leap to mind are Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Interpreter of Maladies” and Junot Diaz’s “Drown.”) Authenticity is the bottom line for these books, and it is widely accepted that in order to write well about another culture, the author must be from that culture.
While this may be a logical outgrowth of the write-what-you-know rule, it’s an odd requirement in some ways. For one thing, it casts doubt on a writer’s ability to conceive of an experience other than his or her own. More importantly, maybe, it denies the possibility that Western prejudices can ever be righted to such a degree that a Westerner could truthfully perceive a person from another culture.
In light of all this, Daniel Mason (an American living in California) takes on his project of revealing the lives of the poor in a Third World country with both boldness and circumspection. The main subject of “A Far Country” is Isabel, a girl prone to silence, open to “spirits” and endowed with a sort of ESP, especially when it comes to her beloved brother, Isaias. Her family is from a small village called St. Michael, a place with a single pay phone in the town square, plagued by drought and surrounded by thorn trees. They live in dirt-floored huts, sleep on hammocks and pray to miniature saints that sit on the shelves. When there is rain, people cut sugar cane and raise zebu cattle; when there is none, they subsist, just barely, on ground cassava, cactus and whatever else they can forage.
We’re able to deduce that “A Far Country” takes place somewhere in South or Central America, but Mason never tells us this. He doesn’t wish his story to be grounded in local identity, but in a more widespread, and largely anonymous, state — that of the severe, intractable poverty that exists on every continent.
The novel’s strength lies in its spareness. Mason writes in stripped-down prose that strives toward a sort of meditative lucidity and seems to imitate Isabel’s quietness and the arid land from which she sprang. Often, it is a perspective clarified by hunger:
“They began to flavor the rice and cornmeal with stringy meat from birds and armadillos. Isabel was ashamed when she saw how little meat came from a hummingbird, but for the first time she could remember, she was hungry all the time. With her front teeth, she scraped the meat from the gleaming breastbones and crushed the wings with her molars. They caught lizards and bull toads fleeing the dry creek beds in search of water.”
It’s an interesting choice — to write out of a consciousness that is, by nature, inclined against speech — but, given Mason’s larger project of giving voice to anonymity, it’s an astute one. It allows him to experience Isabel’s world as a place more spiritual than actual, an environment reduced to its elements. It also excuses Mason from any embarrassing attempt at trying to talk the local talk; there is little dialogue, and there’s no crossover into native language or dialect. The liability to this approach is that it requires a heavy reliance on facts, and sometimes descriptive passages acquire the researched feel of a reference book; we never quite taste the distinctive flavor of this place. There’s something appropriate about this, though, as Isabel’s own being seems to instinctively resist any type of worldliness.
There is little plot in “A Far Country.” The central conflict is Isabel’s move south, to the big city, a filthy metropolis surrounded by shantytowns populated by immigrants like Isabel, who have fled the drought in the north. There she moves in with her cousin Manuela, gets a job with the local political party waving a flag on a traffic median and grows obsessively worried about her brother, who seems to have disappeared. Her clumsy searches for him hardly constitute intrigue or heroism. Yet, in her single-mindedness, Isabel maintains her dignity, which is, in the end, its own sort of victory, and which the book itself shares. While “A Far Country” doesn’t boast of any pyrotechnic feats of storytelling, it is a beautifully contained narrative that illuminates a singular life.
It is curious to read Donna Daley-Clarke’s “Lazy Eye” next to “A Far Country.” The premises of these two novels are, at first glance, so similar that one wonders whether Daley-Clarke and Mason attended the same brainstorming session to come up with them. Yet their authors treat their material so differently that one can’t help thinking of them in opposition.
Daley-Clarke was born to Montserratian parents, and therefore “Lazy Eye” provides an insider’s view of the experience of immigration and poverty. It is chock-full of lively, deeply felt material, and Daley-Clarke has a keen ear for dialogue and an eye for local color, all of which would seem, at least on the surface, to make for a better, more authentic novel.
Indeed, “Lazy Eye” is a self-consciously authentic book. It takes place during the racial upheavals of the 1970s in the grim, urban council flats of South London, to which the Johnson family has emigrated from the West Indies. Sonny Johnson is one of England’s first black soccer players, a distinction that offers little comfort for the humiliation and hardship it brings. During his last match he is pelted with banana skins and racial slurs, and he retires from the game a broken man, consigned to his bitterness and to a job — inappropriately enough — making sweets at a pastry factory. There’s never any doubt that leaving Sonny to simmer is a recipe for disaster, and it’s no time at all before his frustration explodes into an act of violence that lands him in prison.
Most of the story is told by Sonny’s son, Geoffhurst, the one with the lazy eye, which he claims allows him to see things others don’t. As with Isabel, it’s Geoffhurst’s job to guide us through the wreckage of the adult world into which he has been delivered. With his street-smart lingo, his pop-culture references, his capers of petty crime and his identification with the Incredible Hulk (and despite his supposedly prescient eye), Geoffhurst is a pretty typical urban preteen of the ’70s.
While Daley-Clarke has worked hard to re-create this era, and the narrative often pops with the hipness of a storyteller who has “been there,” the manic cataloging of details can be distracting. Geoffhurst gives us a crystalline view of his rather callow world, but he rarely sees through it. A more mature perspective is offered by Aunt Harriet, the shorter, chunkier, darker-skinned twin to Hindy, Geoffhurst’s siren of a mother. Schooled on the island in the arts of voodoo, Harriet represents the wisdom and the stubbornness of the old ways, and she serves as a foil to her dangerously beautiful sister.
The racial tension that crackles at the edges of Harriet’s story, as well as the lush, mythical backdrop out of which she has emerged, are rich with possibility. Yet the novel’s plot, and the lurid murder that’s at its center, repeatedly draw us away from these deeper concerns. Moreover, the structure of “Lazy Eye” presents problems its authenticity can’t solve. The main narrative — told twice, first in the voice of Geoffhurst, then Harriet — takes place in the years before Sonny goes to prison. These sections are bookended by chapters narrated by Geoffhurst at 19, and are interspersed with letters that Sonny has been sending from prison (but which, until now, have been hidden). On top of all this confusing fast-forwarding and rewinding, chapters are decorated with dictionary definitions and the occasional drawing or document facsimile. This may add a sort of postmodern flair, but it feels oddly gimmicky amidst the book’s more dire dramas.
Ultimately, the biggest difference between these novels is not their points of view but their concepts of how to tell a story. Mason favors clarity and cohesion, while Daley-Clarke favors unpredictability and sprawl. Which you prefer will depend on how you like your chaos: contained or unloosed. This time, at least, I’ll take mine the way Mason serves it up.
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Danielle Chapman is a poet and critic in Chicago.
