The Zen Leaf

Okay, so now I’ve read Mr. Reiken’s debut novel. I was sort of borderline on his second (The Lost Legends of New Jersey), on whether or not I liked it. I was impressed with his realism and some of the imagery was striking, plus I liked his almost-experimental style. Having read both novels now, however, I’m less impressed. I felt like the second book was just a rehashing of this one, with a slightly different plot. As for plot, this is about a family who is torn apart when one of the five children walks off to go swimming one day and disappears. The book chronicles five years after the disappearance, told from the point of view of the fourth child, Philip. It discusses how the different family members deal with the disappearance over time. How they deal with a death that can’t be confirmed as a death, hope that can’t be realized, and that sort of thing.

So that’s not the same as a family of four being torn apart by divorce, right? Well, it takes place during the same years (late 70s to early 80s). In both books there is/are: kids learning constellations by cheap star charts, a character with two different colored eyes, a dead/missing brother and that brother’s diary, a living character continuing the journal in some fashion, a mother who goes crazy but who eventually gets better, a father who “goes back to his roots” as a coping mechanism, characters who vomit every time they get upset (as absolutely unrealistic as that is), and a confessional-style ending (“I’ve written this as I [insert action here] and it’s taken me X-years to write it”). Even some of the characters felt rehashed – the older sister Amy in this book, for example, seems to be a whole heck of a lot like the next door neighbor’s kid in Legends. So not the same plot, but for me, the books were just too similar to feel like more than different drafts of the same story.

Of the two books, even though this one had a more interesting plot, the second I think was better written. There was at least a certain amount of memory-like quality to it to make the memories seem somewhat nostalgic, like bits of a dream you remember years later. That one fact separates it a little bit from the hordes of modern literature out there. Modern lit bugs me, the same way modern commercial fiction does, only for different reasons. Modern lit has a tendency, in both novel and short story, to turn everything into absolute banality. Every event a person lives through becomes mundane, and then nothing means anything. Okay, I can see that as a concept, but frankly it makes the reading quite boring. Modern fiction has no depth; modern lit has no surface. Neither are generally great, in my opinion. Why would I bother to read something that is boring? I have my own life for mundane banality. Why would I bother to read something that doesn’t make me think? I could watch a movie for that.

And then, The Odd Sea seems to fall into other modern traps. It focuses, even more than Legends, on the sex lives of its characters. For some reason, in modern lit, you have to talk about sex, you have to talk about drugs, you have to swear in order to prove you’re contemporary. It’s so irritating! Like modern lit writers are all sheep that have to follow these conventions! Where is the originality in that? And then, what’s worse is that they have to write up sex scenes that are absolutely devoid of feeling, to make them even more banal and mundane than the rest of the book, thus proving that as authors, they aren’t ordinary fiction writers. It all feels so childish and immature to me. Sex happens, yes, but if you want to exploit it in your book, do you have to turn around and exploit yourself as well? Half of this book, to me, just felt like a perverse daydream written without feeling in order to hide that fact.

So all in all, I don’t think I will be reading any more of Reiken’s books. He’s got very good technique, and there’s no doubt that his writing – his actual words – are well done (beyond a few lines I’d be horribly embarrassed of if it were me, things like “This was not just cold air–it was the same arctic air that polar bears had farted in.”). It’s no surprise to me that he’s a professor. But unfortunately, the books, in the main, bored me.

I seem to be reading a lot of modern lit lately despite my propensity towards disliking them. Frederick Reiken recently had an article on a Glimmer Train bulletin, and in looking him up, I read descriptions of his two novels. Both looked interesting, so I ordered them from the library. His second novel came in first, so it’s the first one I read and am now reviewing. I do admit the first novel actually looked more interesting, and I’ll be reading it soon. Take it as a good sign that I still want to read it after finishing this one!

I did like this book. I wasn’t jumping out of my chair the way I was with The Jane Austen Book Club, but this wasn’t bad. It’s a character-based story about a 4-person family who has fallen apart in the late 70s: the husband, who cheats on his wife; the wife, who has some sort of undiagnosed psychological disorder and has spells of absolute insanity; the older sister, Dani – well, she’s not talked about a whole lot, actually, that was one of the points of the book I’d have liked to see more on; and the younger brother, Anthony, a hockey player struggling through adolescence (especially with regards to girls) and from whose pov the story is told (for the most part anyway). The story is set up, in the main, in a series of stories about events, told in a legend-ish format (hence the title). While this is mainly from Anthony’s pov, a lot of it is third person (as in ‘Anthony went to a hockey game’). It’s a little convoluted to actually discuss the setup of the book, because really the plot isn’t what’s important. What’s important is that each of the characters are having to come to terms with a whole lot that’s happening – with relationships, with their family, with friendships, etc. There were a couple things I didn’t like – not knowing more about Dani, for instance, or the number of times people started vomiting – but for the most part, it was captivating and well done.

Oddly, and completely coincidentally, this book actually has some bizarre parallels with the last book I read (The Eight). Unintentional, I’m sure, but for awhile I was reading both of these books together, one on one day, one the next, so the parallels were more obvious. Both had a lot of Jewish people in it – even some of the same Jewish slang was repeated. They each had a section about the same year in the 70s. Both books had a character with two different colored eyes. And so on. There were probably 10 or so parallels between them. I know this makes no difference to anything and it’s completely unrelated to any review of either book, but it was interesting enough that I thought I’d note it.

I would say this is a pretty good book if you like character books. There is nothing out of the ordinary. It’s about ordinary people trying to make sense of their lives, and maybe even give them meaning. In the end, I didn’t feel like I’d learned anything in particular that I haven’t already learned from life (though I think there are lessons to be learned, this just happened to touch on ones not relevant to my current life), and I’m not sure I will remember these characters in five years, because they really are very ordinary. (To me, this is what the definition of ‘realism’ should be.) But at the same time, I like this type of book, and it was nice to read, the same way that it’s nice to study people and their habits. A psychological study far more interesting than a non-fiction study. The mother in particular is fascinating, but abnormal psychology is my kind of thing. Reiken writes well, and I’m interested to see what his debut novel is like.

*Tacked on later: I was thinking about this later in the night and realized that it isn’t that I will probably forget the characters. It’s more like this book is written in a reminiscing way. The scenes and stories have a memory-type quality with a quiet sort of power. They don’t beat at the forefront of my brain like many book images do, but I have a feeling that for years they will periodically float before me in a haunting, dreamlike way. In twenty years I might suddenly think of the little anorexic boy with the bear claw over his hand in the hospital, or the empty syringes washing up on the beach, and I’ll remember it the same way I remember stories friends told me in my childhood, or maybe even the way I remember stories from my own childhood. I might try to focus on them and wonder who told them to me, or if I might have read about it on CNN.com once. They are so realistic and ordinary that they transcend the story-scene category. The characters could be people from your own life, and the events, too. I won’t remember the characters individually, but I will wonder, incorrectly, who I knew that once saw instruments in a landfill, or who I knew who played starfish wrestling with their friends. And I have to say, once I realized this fact, I became much more impressed by the book. I had to add this.

**Note: It did not take long for my positive opinion of this book to sour. Reading the debut book – which was basically just another version of this one – started the souring, and the fact that a few days later, I couldn’t even remember the book – that didn’t help. Now, even reading through the description here, I have absolutely no idea what this book was about. I literally remember one scene from the two books by Reiken that I read, and I don’t remember which book it was.