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Seattlest Pix 09Nov25
Can't Miss It: Thanksgiving Eve
Jonathan Raban's Surveillance is the first book in Seattlest's Book Club. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't forget to ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount at Santoro's Books in Greenwood and Bailey-Coy Books on Capitol Hill.
Last week, we brought up the issue of plot. Literary reviewers contend that Raban "isn't interested" in it. Amazon reviewers just call it "rambling and pointless" (caution: spoilers at that link).
Raban himself, on the other hand, insisted last week that "I'm intensely interested in plot. But the question Surveillance raises is whether the world it describes is amenable to the conventional plot mechanism of questions and problems spawned in the first two thirds of the arc, then logically, satisfyingly resolved in the last third."
Which hints at what the Amazon reviewers are really bitching about: not so much plot as the ending. Or perceived lack thereof. We're not going to spoil the ending (though again, if you read the Amazon reader reviews you'll find out how the book ends), but we'll ask the question more baldly this week: how important is plot? How important are endings?
"Story" has been a popular meme -- well, for millennia, but it's been bandied about lately. And when we talk about "story" -- good interviewees tell a story about themselves, successful pitches to This American Life tell a story, great companies tell stories about themselves -- we always mean beginning, middle, end. Situation arises, complications ensue, threads wrap up, lessons are learned.
But Raban's own admission (complete with page assignments: "See eleven-year-old Alida's take on this on pages 96-98, and, much later, her mother's ruminations on it on pages 241-243") is that a traditional story structure may not work in a surveillance-laden society.
Is it enough to tell a story that draws that conclusion, or must an author attempt to embody that storylessness in his very narrative? We want to know what you think about that -- or anything else. And who knows? Raban himself may have a reply -- or at least a correction to the way we've been interpreting his comments.
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I haven't gotten to the end yet, but I'm finding it a pretty gripping read. (I made myself stop so as not to read it all in one sitting.) That to me is more indicative of good storytelling is how engrossed you are in the narrative while it's going on. The various threads all clearly have to do with surveillance (information-gathering and its discontents), and what's been interesting for me is the interplay between the kinds of surveillance, rather than needing a particular thread tied up. At least in that sense, it wouldn't be realistic to try: the genie has exited the bottle.
Our comment software is being unkind to Mr. Raban, who writes:
Raban adds, rising to our shameless paraphrasing of one guy's opinion last week:
Mea culpa.Here's a candid confession. Writing the second half of the book, I worried that it might read too fast. Not that I write fast, I write at the speed of a handicapped tortoise. But I feared the reader might too easily skim over the succession of events, and thereby miss the (as I think of it) architectural subtlety of the book. My impression is that a number of readers have approached it as they would a thriller (perhaps encouraged by its thrillerish jacket image), flicking through it rather than properly reading it, and being disappointed in the process because a thriller it is most certainly not. In retrospect, I think it might have helped to deliberately slow the narrative speed of the book, and to go for a more obviously "literary fiction" jacket.
I definitely read it in one sitting, as is my wont with novels. And I noticed the foreshadowing of the ending in the narrative, but it still came as rather a shock--which I'd imagine was intended. My immediate take on it was the same as Shacochis'--it's a well-taken reminder that, however high we perceive the stakes to be of our personal dramas, the pale in the (in this case very real) shadow of disaster.
With that, there's sort of a repudiation of the Tad's anti-Bush/anti-war obsession (an obsession I personally also find very annoying)...but I can't help thinking that, to the people of Iraq, the war is sort of its own form of unpredictable disaster--this one with very human actors. Would a nation full of paranoid Tads have prevented it?
A bit late, but...
I read it in two sittings -- the first where I got through the first chapter or so and then straight through -- I simply couldn't put it down. I wasn't hung up on the plot, but I think I may have missed the architectural subtleties Mr. Raban is referring to. I didn't approach it like a thriller--it felt more like a social novel to me--almost a novel of manners.
I suppose it must sound a bit autistic/naive for an educated adult not to have thought deeply about how we all are watchers "by nature," but I hadn't. This book spurred that thinking in me and, like a learning a new word, it has been popping up in everything I see. Last night I was re-reading Gans' The War Against The Poor and right there at the beginning of Chapter 1 I read:
It made me think some more about the character of Mr. Lee. And it made me wonder why I didn't give the notion of surveillance a second thought when I'd read Gans' book the first time 10 years ago.
Extraordinary book; one of Raban's best. I raced through it in an evening and was left a little giddy and a little freaked. As if Raban haf been privy to my hard drive. And my hippocampus.
Lots to ponder; I'm eager to read it again. (If you haven't read it yet, avoid reviews. You don't want someone else's highlighter shoving your eyes around and telling you what to feel. )
Ironically, the "autographed" sticker on my book is a fraud. Given Lucy's evaluation of Augie's signed first edition, this made me wonder if Raban, assigned another hundred books to scribble in, said "oh, screw 'em."
J. Whitehorn: an autographed "sticker"? I'm baffled. So far as I can remember, I've signed no stickers for "Surveillance", but have signed a few hundred copies--always in the same place, just below my printed name on the main title page. I wonder where you bought it?
Delighted to hear that you liked the book, though. If you do reread it, you'll notice how circular it is. In my beginning is my end...
My apologies, Mr. Raban, I should have worded that differently. I purchased your book from QA Books (their last copy, from the window). The jacket has a sticker that says "autographed copy" but your signature has vanished. Maybe I'll run into you at Ken's and you can restore it.
"Like" is an understatement, I adored Surveillance. I'm not your ideal reader, though: just a middle-aged, underemployed English-major mom who fell in love with your characters, google-imaged "chiton," and made mental notes of new bands and dishes to try. Deep thoughts, of which you served plenty, got plunked on my back burner. I'll leave those to the pros.
Let me just say that Lucy is a triumph (why is Tad getting all the attention?). She is a driven, self-doubting, complex and compelling every-woman-of-a-certain-age. And funny! Her scenes on the beach, in the kitchen, at the Pilates studio, and with Mr. Lee made me ROTFL.
Please bring her back in your next novel. And give her some resident elvis? She deserves it.