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The book: Pauls Toutonghi's novel Red Weather.
The deal: Shop Bailey Coy Books on Capitol Hill, or Santoro's Books in Greenwood, and ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount. Or if you live in some other neighborhood, head on over to your local bookstore, or Amazon.
The critics: Seattlest James vs. Seattlest Matt. (Last week's go-round.)
James:
Toutonghi gave himself a difficult task: write a novel centering around a character who is, in some ways, the least interesting member of his own family. Not that Yuri is uninteresting -- but he's not a character in the larger-than-life (and embarrassing) sense that his father is, or in the dynamic personality his cousin Eriks is. He is, as his father declares, a pudding, soft and shapeless.
How does he solve it? By staying true to the concept. Yuri, the pudding, has to set. There are no grand gestures that will infuse him with backbone or a strong sense of purpose. But while the process is deliberate, Toutonghi's tone is light and he moves things along briskly. His plot may be wispy, but that also means it's light on its feet.
For the most part, he sidesteps the easy narrative cliches that threaten to hijack the story -- the first love, the foreign relatives, even the grand gesture of adolescent rebellion. None of those plot strands ties up neatly, or the way a lazy plotter would expect them to, but they're satisfying in their messiness.
Toutonghi's biggest success, I think, is the tension between Yuri's sense of himself as a really odd kid -- weird immigrant parents, bookish temperament, unattractive -- and the fact that he's not all that unusual. I'm a fourth- or fifth-generation American -- in the country long enough that no one keeps count -- but Yuri's frustrations felt familiar to me.
Matt, care to shoot some wounded?
Matt:
I guess I agree with you that the plot doesn't offer much to chew on, but I don't agree that the story moves along all that briskly. My reading kept stopping dead in its tracks every time I hit one ponderous, over-described incidental detail after another, which seemed to happen on every page. For example, I lost count of how many times we get treated to pointless CSI-style close ups of Yuri's shag carpeting in his living room. I'll admit I haven't finished reading the book yet so I guess there's still a chance that the shag carpeting might get bitten by a radio active Soviet, and then become a sentient shag carpet and rise up to form a pro-life group or something, thereby earning its keep in the story, but that probably won't happen in the last fifty pages. I wish it would.
The preponderance of vivid, superfluous incidentals is part of the reason why I assumed earlier that our narrator was still in his teens and had only experienced his story last week because without the distance of age he couldn't find a way to weed out all the extraneous background noise and just focus on the meat of his narrative, such as it is. I guess another reason why I assumed he was so young was how unconsidered the story telling priorities seem.
But as we explored last week, and as the author confirmed in the comments, our narrator is in fact a man in his 30s, which raises some tedious problems. On page 131, we're treated to the author's absurdly vivid recollection of a breakfast he had nearly twenty years ago, which involves a microscopic focus on the mechanics of chewing cereal: "I chewed at my Count Chocula with precision. Sugary residue accumulated on the roof of my mouth. It was a chocolate-flavored paste – and it made my tongue uncomfortable." I anticipated Yuri following this narrative thread logically, as the Count Chocula morsels, once chewed, then proceed to break down in the gastric acids and then travel through Yuri's colon, splashing down in to the over described depths of the toilet and blah blah blah. But surprisingly, Yuri left those essentials out of the narrative.
Why does Yuri – from a distance of more than 15 years – choose to walk us through the process of eating his breakfast, while choosing to short shrift potentially more interesting material? On page 144, the story seems to be chugging along fine: his displaced immigrant mother understandably pines for lost cultural camaraderie with the dearth of Latvian immigrants. But the narrative flow comes to a screeching halt when Yuri says to us: "This seemed to make her sad, for some reason." I had to stop reading at this point and put the book down. What the hell does he mean "for some reason?" What part of his mother's explicitly stated loneliness wasn't self-evident? Told from the perspective of an impudent teenage character, I'd be willing to let the callous "for some reason" dismissal slide as part of some considered voice or character trait or whatever, but in this case our narrator is in his… 30s? Really? Is he allowed outside without his helmet?
The incurious "for some reason" device appears again when Yuri tries to describe his crush object, Hannah, "…She was beautiful and, for some reason, this mattered" (page 156). Wow, that's so romantic I think I'm going to start crying, for some reason.
I'll try to find more stuff to complain about next week. Stay tuned.
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I guess it seemed obvious to me that the 30-ish Yuri is getting into the head of his 15-year-old self, sometimes for ironic effect.
Your example about his mother's being lonely "for some reason" is a case in point -- it's obvious to anyone who isn't a 15-year-old Yuri why his mother's sad. That includes the 30-year-old Yuri. The "for some reason," I think, is intended to convey how self-absorbed his adolescent self was, not that he doesn't get it now.
On the other hand, the factual errors that we mentioned last week don't work for me in the same way. They're not obvious or enlightening enough to feel deliberate -- that was a thought that had occurred to me, but there didn't seem to be a payoff.
I sense that you're not seeing much payoff even with the ironic distance.
(I'll state again that the factual errors, whatever their origin, don't bother me in this context -- it's a first-person novel, not a history book.)
This is interesting. I find myself entertaining James's "pudding" metaphor, while also agreeing with Matt that the narrator's voice just isn't solidly here (30-something) or there (teen-aged). In fact, the reason I say "entertain" is because while pudding does set, no one who has ever watched it do so (to my knowledge) has declared it a fascinating experience to watch. For me, the book never decides whether it's a fictional memoir (which can include the things that read like journal excerpts, so long as they're spiced with reflection) or a more plot-driven narrative about immigrant father/native son conflict.
A memoir can take you down all sorts of roads that don't pay off, necessarily -- you just go for the trip and maybe some lessons learned. But plot deals with actions and consequences, and ruminations on the taste of Count Chocula need a reason for inclusion.
I wouldn't call the life passages James lists narrative cliches as such; it's really the formulation of them that would be cliche (or not). Here, while Toutonghi sets them up with nice attention to the particulars, that incuriosity that Matt mentions derails how they play out. Luckily, there's always a new event that comes along, but you know, this is not a rigorous Proustian examination of adolescence.
To me, the single most successful piece was Yuri's portrayal of home life and his retelling of his relationship with his father as a way of getting a new look at the man who raised him--and maybe finding a way out of his shadow.
I got a late start and am only on page 70, but I agree, to a point, with much of what's been said already. There are definitely moments of overzealous and unnecessary description and places where the teenage/man-in-his-30s reflective device is awkward, but I think I'm much more forgiving about it. Chalk it up to first-novel mistakes, I say.
As for what MVB said about Yuri's portrayal of home-life and his relationship with his parents, I completely agree. This has been the most satisfying aspect to the story for me. Aside from the occasional narrative drifting off course, Toutonghi does a great job capturing the self-centered teenager just trying to get through the day without too many disasters.
Also, the father's dialogue is hilarious -- well crafted on Toutonghi's part. "...Finland would buy pigs from us... Sexy pigs, only. We would send sexy Latvian pigs to Finland to mate with the Finnish girl pigs."
Silvie enjoys hating things, for some reason.
I find this all extremely tedious. In a 200 page novel, there are going to be some moments that just don't work. Duh.
If you stuck around till page 144, the author is obviously doing something right.
Somebody wasn't an English major...