Wild Houses: Not Sure What Oprah Was Thinking

 

 

 

Wild Houses (2024)

By Colin Barrett

Grove Press, 272 pages.

★

 

 By now you’ve probably heard that Samantha Harvey won this year’s Booker Prize for her superb novel Orbital. It was a good choice, though I might have given the nod to Percival Everett’s National Book Award-winning James. Wild Houses, the debut novel from Colin Barrett was longlisted for the Booker, but I’ll be hanged if I know why. It was praised for its beautiful sentences–by Oprah no less–and that too is baffling. It’s really just a caper novel and not a very interesting one.

 

Wild Houses takes place in Ballina, County Mayo, Ireland, a real place of about 11,000 people. You might see the phrase “proleptic” used to describe Barrett’s novel. It’s a fancy way of saying that he writes as if his action is happening in real time, though it will actually occur in the future. That’s not as hard to do as Barrett’s story unfolds over a single weekend with occasional deeper background material from the past. Cillian English is adrift, but gets by as a small fry drug dealer until a stroke of very bad luck occurs. He is holding about £30,000 worth of coke that belongs to a big dealer named Mulrooney. Cillian buried it in a field with some of his own stash, but what the Irish call a turlough occurs—a seasonal flood that creates an instant lake. The coke dissolves. There is no such thing as an accident insofar as Mulrooney is concerned, so he sends the strong-armed, weak-brained brothers Gabe and Sketch Ferdia to get his cash back. Of course, Cillian can’t pay.

 

Cillian has a younger brother Donal, nicknamed “Doll,” a slight young man with a foul mouth, which seems to be the norm in Ballina. Doll English has pretty much raised himself, but not all that well. (His ‘da Martin has worked in the shale oil fields near Calgary, Canada, for the past 5 years and his salty-tongued mother Sheila is nobody’s idea of a role model.) Doll idolizes Cillian, but the best thing he has going for him is his (somewhat) more mature girlfriend Nicky, who was raised by her older brother. Nicky, in turn, looks out for Doll to the degree a 17-year-old can. As you have no doubt surmised, Barrett’s Ballina is an epicenter of rootless people rooted in place, if such a contradictory statement can be the case.

 

Doll will become a pawn in Cillian’s troubles and is kidnapped, another terms that’s fraught with ambiguity as he knows the Ferdia brothers and the further up-the-scale Dev Hendrick to whose home he is taken. Were not drugs and thugs involved and Doll’s health imperiled, the entire tale could be something out of a Buster Keaton comedy. (It also put me in mind of the satirical 1969 Jimmy Breslin novel The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.)

 

Nicky and Sheila echo the Ferdia brothers in telling Cillian he has to pay for the mess into which he’s gotten Doll, but there’s no getting past the fact that Cillian doesn’t have £30,000. Will Gabe, Sketch, and Dev do in Doll? Will a magical solution occur? Ha! Ballina is miracle-impoverished. No matter how the issue resolves of fails to do so will certainly involve something underhanded. That is, if you stick around that long. I wouldn’t recommend that you do so. I have no idea why this novel was praised for its sentence structure unless someone really admires correct punctuation. There’s certainly nothing elegant about sentences that rely upon a string of curses followed by touches of florid filler. A reviewer in The Guardian complained that Wild Houses felt “airless” and “clinical.” I can but add, “To be sure, to be sure.”

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Afire is a Misfire

 

 

 

Afire

Directed by Christian Petzold

The Match Factory/Criterion, 103 mins. R (language, mild nudity, adult situations)

In German with subtitles

★★

 

Director Christian Petzold has announced his intention to make films on the elemental themes of water, fire, and earth. The first was Undine (2020); Afire is the second film. But what is it, exactly? A gay love film? A comedy? A drama? Call it all three, though one could say relationships of all manner are doomed. Plus, though I hate to be ethnically insensitive, Germans just don’t seem to do comedy very well. So much of it turns out sardonic rather than funny. (One can only hope detached irony is on its way out of fashion.)

 

Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Felix (Langston Uibel) are on their way to holiday home on the Baltic Sea, but gets a bad start when their car breaks down and delays their arrival. Leon, an author, is an egotistical bore who obsesses over his second novel, and Felix is working on his photography portfolio, though he’s lackadaisical and gives little indication of facility with a camera. They arrive just as Nadja (Paula Beer) is about to ride off on her bicyclical. Both are smitten, though they initially think she’s a caretaker rather than one of their housemates. Leon immediately falls into a workaholic routine that seems to consist mainly of fretting and pretending to be busier than he is. He is crestfallen to learn Nadja has a lifeguard boyfriend named Devid (Enno Trebs) and refuses every offer to engage in anything that reeks of jollity. He is so insular that he is initially fails to recognize the shifting terrain of sexual attractions. The unlikely quartet will later be joined by Helmut (Matthias Brandt), Leon’s older publisher, who will deliver the verdict we’ve long suspected: Leon’s manuscript stinks and is unpublishable.

 

If all this sounds too laconic to be dramatic and too petulant to be funny, you’re right. Paul Beer is the best thing in the film by far. Her Nadja is actually a brilliant doctoral candidate in literature capable of holding in-depth intellectual discussions with Helmut instead of worrying about her chops as a writer or researcher. A medical emergency and a dangerous forest fire provide a spark of dramatic tension and tragedy. Leon is shocked back to reality, but can he admit he’s in love with Nadja or change his ways? What do you think?

 

Aside from the talented Ms. Beer, the most interesting thing about Afire is trying to figure out how it got rated R in the United States. Given that F-bombs are more common than Disney characters these days, plus the fact that everyone is speaking German, it seems the real problem is shirtless men and a quick flash of bare buttocks. In other words, backdoor homophobia has reared its head. I could make more out of this, but it hardly matters. Though Afire won a Golden Bear—Germany’s equivalent of an Oscar—it went nowhere at anyone’s box office. I don’t think that had much to do with gay themes; I simply think Afire should be renamed Misfire.

 

Rob Weir  

Absolution: Vietnam as Innocence Lost

 

 

Absolution (2023)

By Alice McDermott

Thorndike/Gale, 336 pages

★★★★ ½

 

Kristin Hannah’s The Women has won kudos this year. I liked it, but if you’ve not read Absolution by Alice McDermott, hers is a superior look at women during the Vietnam War. McDermott has been hailed for interjecting Irish American Catholic values into her novels, but that’s not quite right; she’s a moralist, but doesn’t always hew approved church lines. She is, however, brilliant at observing small details that add up to something big.

 

Absolution is a front-to-back novel that takes us from 2023 to 1963 revealed in letters and memories between (Pa)Tricia” Kelly and Rainey, the adult daughter of Charlene Kent who Tricia knew in Vietnam. Tricia lands in Saigon in 1963 with her husband Peter, a lawyer and Naval officer who’s probably an intelligence agent. He is gung-ho in support for John F. Kennedy, the U.S. military mission, and South Vietnam’s Catholic president Ngo Dinh Diem.

 

From the standpoint of women,1963 Saigon is a potentially dangerous shopping excusion nearby the pristine grounds of the club where officers and their wives live in cloistered comfort. Among the details McDermott gets right are the expectations for women in a period in which feminism, Vatican II, and the counterculture haven’t yet happened. Tricia and her peers see themselves as “helpmeets” to their husbands. They obsess over makeup, hair, girdles, nylons, Betty Crocker cookbooks, and getting pregnant. Charlene is an exception; she delights in violating norms. Though she’s rich and entitled, she’s irreverent,  smokes, pops pills, and calls her maid Lilly, though her name is actually Ly.

 

Charlene is also forceful to the edge of bullying. Her latest idea is to draft Tricia in in a now-cringeworthy scheme of convincing officer wives to mass produce “Saigon Barbies,” dolls wearing a Vietnamese áo dài. They plan to enlist Vietnamese women to sew the clothing and then sell the Barbies to women in the States. Charlene reckons they will be in demand, and she’s right–as long as you overlook the cultural appropriation and labor exploitation involved. The money is used to buy toys, sweets, and trinkets for hospitalized children. Poor Tricia is so naïve that she’s never heard about napalm and wonders why so many youngsters have horrible burns.*

 

Tricia is desperate to have a child, but miscarries. In a bold stroke that violates Catholic doctrine, Charlene baptizes Tricia’s expelled fetus. Is she helping Tricia cast off soon-to-be archaic values, or does she just not see beyond her own views? When she takes Tricia to a leper colony outside the city to see Ly’s cousin, is it an act of charity or an inexcusably reckless action? You can imagine how Peter feels; he has already admonished Tricia not to give money to beggars or leave safe zones.  

 

Charlene precipitates an essential crisis for Tricia as her time in Vietnam grows short; she presents Tricia with a Vietnamese baby to take home with her! She assures Tricia that “Suzie” comes from a family with too many children, won’t be missed, and can be raised with advantages she’d never have otherwise. Talk about a moral dilemma!

 

At this point we have a novel that draws upon works such as The Ugly American and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Plus, it’s an indictment of American exceptionalism ideals, which purport that the United States is distinct and special in world history. Such a view easily mutates into a belief in moral superiority and a sense that all actions can be justified because American intentions are always good. Vietnam, of course, subsequently called this into question.

 

The last third of Absolution looks at life after Vietnam and Tricia’s eventual connection with Rainey and Dominic, a conscious objector whom she first met at the leper colony. Tricia has long since lost her innocence and naiveté, including her realization that the Vietnam War was  immoral. That’s just the tip of ways in which her life has changed. Personally, as well as McDermott writes, I think her themes of absolution are implied in her Vietnam sections; in essence, she could have written a novella. However, I can’t fault her for wanting to close the circle on her characters. I admired, though, her courage to leave it to the reader to define what absolution means, to whom, and whether it was achieved.    

 

Rob Weir

 

*Small detail error: Napalm was not used until 1965.