Cancer Ward - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

It had been a long time since I last read Cancer Ward, and my memory of it was impressionistic, a few images and vignettes to brief to be properly called scenes. It is the sort of book where the plot is difficult to hold in your memory because there’s so little of it. There isn’t much of a narrative arc and no overt conflict. The story, such as it is, merely follows the lives of several patients undergoing treatment for cancer at a clinic in Soviet Uzbekistan.

While an ensemble piece, Oleg Filimonovich Kostoglotov sticks out as the main character. A former soldier undergoing permanent exile as part of the Stalinist purge, Kostoglotov is a stand-in for Solzhenitsyn himself. His reckoning with his disease, his status in life, and his feelings for two nurses form the closest thing to a narrative thread the novel offers. There are other characters as well, the most notable in my opinion being Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a mid-tier Communist official who adheres rigidly to the party line, and denounced a roommate in order to acquire his half of a shared apartment. Rusanov serves as a foil to Kostoglotov, as the two have diametrically opposed views on the Soviet Union. Rusanov demonstrates the mental contortions the good Soviet citizen must undertake to thrive in that culture without succumbing to guilt or despair, while Kostloglotov’s honesty makes it impossible to function under communism’s yoke.

While light on action, cancer Ward demonstrates Solzhenitsyn’s gift for observing fine details of human behaviour, and characterizing people through small gestures. His work is an indictment of communism that showcases power through its plainspokenness. There is no climax or denouement, merely a continuation of existence. Like the cancer the characters suffer, there is remission but no cure.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion

Joan Didion was one of those names that cropped up for me during six years of University English courses, without being clearly moored to anything. I knew she was a writer, and that her work (or rather, her most significant work) occured somewhere in the middleo f the 20th century, but that was about it. Something goaded me to finally look her up and request her most celebrated book from the library, but I can’t remember what exactly it was.

In any case, it was fortuitous, since Slouching Towards Bethlehem is an intriguing piece of work, a collection of essays written over a period of several years and capturing, among much else, the sour notes of the Summer of Love that would burst into promenance after the Manson Murders. Her gaze is incisive but not uncharitable, and she treats her subjects humanely without coddling them. There are some more reflective pieces itself, such as On Morality and much of the latter section, Seven Places of the Mind, which includes meditations on different locales where Didion spent some time. I didn’t agree with all of her conclusions, though I enjoyed reading them.

Didion’s prose is excellent, sleek and beguiling, filled with rich imagery without getting bogged down in itself. The grouping of pieces may be somewhat arbitrary, decided I’d guess more with what she thought was her best work rather than for any deeply held thematic ocnstant, but I think that works fine. It was nice to bounce around between subjects and styles, to get a sampling of her work rather than a one-note treatment. I’ll be interested to seek out some of her lesser known work in the future.

Outer Dark - Cormac McCarthy

Is there a more singular author than Cormac McCarthy? If so, I struggle to think who they might be.

Outer Dark is McCarthy’s second novel, but if you didn’t know that going in it wouldn’t be all that easy to place. His style seems to have emerged fully-formed and unmistakable, and has fluctuated little even as he drifts from dark parables to picaresque and Appalachia to Apocalypse (though apocalypse in one form or another is never that far away in a Cormac McCarthy novel). It was a style I tried to ape for awhile before setting it aside, chafing from its poor fit and embarrassed by my own lack of originality, but it tantalizes me still. A surreal brew of long commaless sentences, archaisms, inverted syntax, and quasi-biblical grandeur, and an almost complete lack of access to the character’s interior.

I can’t think of another author who tells you less about what his characters are thinking, or their motivations for their actions. For a medium so perfectly designed for psychological free-diving, McCarthy’s refusal to show any cards seems on paper like an insurmountable handicap, but it lends a rich other-worldliness to his prose that is hard to match.

But what about Outer Dark specifically? It might be the most quintessentially “McCarthyan” (McCarthyesque?) of his novels that I’ve read (there’s at least 2 I haven’t got to yet). More so even than his masterpiece Blood Meridian, since despite the popular assumption McCarthy isn’t really a Western writer (though he wears the genre well). The through-line to his work is hard-bitten outcast heroes and devilish, almost supernatural villains, and Outer Dark holds plenty of both.

For the heroes, you have Culla and Rinthy Holmes, a brother and sister who together have a child. Culla leaves it for dead in the woods, Rinthy finds out and goes hunting for it. The villains are a largely nameless trio of outlaws acting according to their own dark nature. They are less philosophically precise than Judge Holden or Anton Chirgurh, and indeed much of their activity occurs in dense asides between the main chapters. They reminded me, in their sudden and violent appearances, of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit.

I finished the book unsure of the finer points of some events, but with McCarthy you need to take that as a given. He makes me want to be braver in my own storytelling, less inclined to hold the reader’s hand through every plot point and character decision. Even if I can’t cop his style, I think that’s a lesson worth learning.