From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Old Europe Is Worth Reading
Three cheers for "un-American" fiction.
How many people read serious new American novels--by which I mean not "The King of Torts" but the sort of book known in the trade as "literary fiction"? The answer, I suspect, is not very many, not very often. In fact, it's common to run across "well-read" people who no longer read any new literary fiction at all, American or otherwise. I don't, and neither do many of the professional writers I know. Like most Americans, we go to the movies instead.
So when a friend of mine sent me a copy of Sándor Márai's "Embers" (Vintage, $12, translated by Carol Brown Janeway) and told me I absolutely had to read it, I balked. Why make an exception for a book by a writer I'd never heard of? It was only because she pestered me ruthlessly that I gave in. As I settled into my seat on the Metroliner to Washington one morning, I pulled "Embers" out of my shoulder bag, grudgingly opened it to the first page . . . and didn't stop reading until the train pulled into Union Station three hours later.
Yet "Embers" isn't a page-turner in any conventional sense of the word. It is the tale of two old soldiers who once quarreled over a woman and, 41 years later, have come together again for a final encounter with the past--an encounter that takes place in Hungary in 1940, as the nightmarish present threatens to engulf them both. Reflective and reminiscent, it is full of passing observations that pull you up short: "One can only dominate another human soul if one knows, understands, and with the utmost tact despises the person one is subjugating."
Now, "Embers" is neither new nor American. It was originally published in Hungary in 1942, and its author (who died by his own hand in San Diego in 1989) was all but unknown in the U.S. until Knopf began reissuing his work two years ago. And therein lies its appeal: It is wholly unlike most present-day American literary fiction. "Embers" is modest in length, unassumingly elegant in style and written with the deceptive simplicity of a fable. Though deeply serious, it never succumbs to the heavy earnestness of the self-consciously "serious" writer.
While our novelists produce such books from time to time--Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood" and Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" come immediately to mind--American literary fiction seems as a rule to run along other lines. Our "major" writers tend to be chronically verbose, stylistically ostentatious and agonizingly earnest (though the flippant Irony Lite of Generation X now appears to have replaced earnestness as the style du jour). Such books are unreadable, and so nobody reads them, save under academic duress. But "Embers," as I discovered on the train from New York to Washington, is irresistibly readable--and it is not a fluke.
A few weeks after I read "Embers," I was sent a copy of Andreï Makine's "Music of a Life" (Arcade, $19.95, translated by Geoffrey Strachan), a new novel about a Russian pianist who abandons his career and enlists in the Soviet army to stay out of the clutches of the KGB. Like "Embers," it is concise, fable-like, light-textured yet morally serious in the highest degree, and I read it with delight and astonishment.
"Music of a Life" and "Embers" have something else in common. They are the work, so to speak, of old Europeans, though not the kind that Donald Rumsfeld disdains. We lucky Americans were mostly spared the horrors of the 20th century. Not so Makine and Márai. They drank the bloody chalice of modernity to the dregs, an experience that gave them something more important to write about than their own quirks and obsessions. Instead, they write as survivors of a lost world, and in their books that world comes to life in all its terrible splendor.
For this reason, my recent encounters with European literary fiction have not filled me with a burning desire to sit down with, say, Alice Sebold's best-selling "The Lovely Bones," in which a 14-year-old murderee tells us all about life in heaven, or the ultrafashionable Dave Eggers' ultraironic "You Shall Know Our Velocity." Instead, I've been working my way through the novels of V.S. Naipaul and Isaac Bashevis Singer, two other writers whose work is, to coin a phrase, un-American. And as I read, I hope--I pray--that my native land will be spared the intimate knowledge of the horrors of modernity that lends to the work of all these men a moral gravity rarely to be found in the contemporary American novel. Like every other New Yorker who now looks up nervously whenever he hears a low-flying plane, I'd rather read about such things than survive them.
Mr. Teachout is the music critic of Commentary and the author of "The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken" (HarperCollins). He last wrote for the Journal about "Matisse Picasso."
