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Home , 2019 Booker Prize, Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize, The Testaments

On the 2019 Merritt Moseley

Sewanee Review, Volume 128, Number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 151-164 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sew.2020.0013

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/745516

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] ON THE

MERRITT MOSELEY

he 2019 Booker Prize season was for women authors. At every stage of the selection, books by women domi- T nated; and when, on October 14, the final decision was announced, the judges had chosen and to share the prize for their novels ­ and Girl, Woman, Other respectively. The last shared Booker was awarded in 1992, after which split decisions were forbidden by rule. The 2019 jury flouted the regulations and did it anyway. This year’s other change was a new sponsor. Originally the Booker McConnell Prize, for eighteen years the Man Booker Prize, it is now simply the Booker Prize, which is what it has always been called anyway. With the Man Group withdrawing in summer of 2019, its new sponsor is the Crankstart Foundation, created by a billionaire venture capitalist, Sir Michael Moritz, and his wife. That the prize was not renamed the Crankstart Booker Prize must have relieved everyone. The first step in the process of awarding the 2019 Booker took place on July 23. It carried some pleasant surprises for those still

Review 152 on the 2019 booker prize vexed by the inclusion of Americans (two of whom have won the prize since their admission in 2014), for devotees of experimental and difficult fiction, and for second chances given to former win- ners. In the latter category were Margaret Atwood and . Rushdie took the prize in 1981 and was shortlisted in 1983, 1988, and 1995; Atwood won in 2000 and had been short- listed in 1986 — for The Handmaid’s Tale, to which this year’s The Testaments is a sequel — as well as 1989, 1996, and 2003. Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer, was the only debut novelist to make the cut. was America’s sole representative, and perhaps barely qualifies; US-born, she has lived in England her entire adult life. The criteria for eligibility were loosened beginning in 2014, from the historic “the best novel in the English language, written by a Commonwealth or Irish citizen, and published in the UK” to any long-form work in English published in the UK or . This change was usually taken as a concession to Americans; but the longlist this year included a work by Valeria Luiselli, from Mexico, and , from Turkey, now eligible under the new rules. If any non-UK literature dominated, it was that of Nigeria, with two Nigerian authors on the longlist in addition to Bernardine Evaristo, who is a British-born Anglo-Nigerian. There were eight women and five men on the longlist. On September 13, the thirteen-title longlist was pared to six which, along with Atwood and Evaristo, included Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport; ’s An Orchestra of Minorities; Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte; and Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. Obioma’s novel is his sophomore effort, while Ellmann, Evaristo, and Shafak have large bodies of work. For the first time, the list contained no white men. This winnowing, like the earlier one that began with 151 nomi- merritt moseley 153 nated books, was the work of a panel of judges consisting of , a former publisher; Xiaolu Guo, a novelist and filmmaker; , a writer and broadcaster; Joanna MacGregor, a musi- cian and composer; and, chairing, Peter Florence, who directs the , Britain’s major literary event outside . As usual, Britain’s bookmakers announced odds on the shortlist. According to William Hill, Rushdie’s Quichotte was the favorite at 11/12, followed by Obioma, Evaristo, Atwood, Shafak, and Ellmann, the outsider, at 10/1. Of the novels from the three most established authors, Atwood’s The Testaments was the most eagerly awaited; Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport is the most extraordinary; and Rushdie’s Quichotte is the most exasperating. Obioma is a young novelist, whose promising first book,The Fisherman, made the Booker shortlist in 2015. An Orchestra of Minorities tells the dark story of a poultry farmer, Chinonso, whose life is changed when, driving at night, he saves a young woman, Ndali, who is preparing to jump off a bridge. This act leads to a love affair. Ndali is rich, educated, and sophisticated; she plans to study in the UK to become a pharmacist; and the misalliance between the two drives the plot. Ndali may be using Chinonso as part of a rebellion against her family; on one occasion, she over- comes Chinonso’s reluctance to attend a grand party thrown by her father, a chief, where her brother humiliates him by making him change clothes and help with the catering and cleanup. Desperate to make something of himself so he can marry Ndali, Chinonso sells his property to go to Cyprus for university. Arriving there he finds himself the victim of a heartless fraud by one of his own old school friends. It is not long before he is falsely accused of attempted rape and imprisoned. Finally his accuser recants her testimony and he returns home, though the result is disastrous. Reviewers describe it as a retelling of The Odyssey, but the

Review 154 on the 2019 booker prize similarities are actually slight. Chinonso travels abroad and returns after many ordeals, but Ndali is no Penelope, Chinonso is no hero or king, and his motivations have nothing to do with homecoming. Perhaps the importance of the mythical realm suggests the analogy with Homer. As Obioma explains in his author’s note, the novel “is firmly rooted in Igbo cosmology,” and the book begins with a short guide to it. Helpful, since the novel is also narrated by a chi, or guardian spirit, who is timeless and all-seeing but can do very little to affect the course of events. The chi ’s account is addressed to the high god as a form of explanation for the fate of Chinonso, to whom he was assigned. This is an unusual authorial decision that does not justify itself and entails extensive machinery, including the many, many names of the creator god as well as some clumsy exposition: “As you know, you created us as creatures for whom sleep does not exist.” To Obioma’s credit, the chi has a colorful, aphoristic style, describing Chinonso’s return home on one occasion as like “a water- filled calabash sent off with an emissary to the land of a provoked enemy.” Unfortunately, the epic machinery does less to deepen the story Obioma has to tell than to inflate it. Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is a feminist exploration of women’s lives in modern Turkey. Its title, and governing conceit, are explained this way: “Researchers at var- ious world-renowned institutions had observed persistent brain activity in people who had just died; in some cases this had lasted for only a few minutes. In others, for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds.” The novel begins with a section called “The Mind,” in which a woman called Tequila Leila realizes that she is stuffed in a rubbish container in a bad part of Istanbul and that, in fact, her heart has stopped. The chapters that follow tell the story of how she reached this place and this condition, each one as a part of Leila’s ten and a half minutes of posthumous retrospection. merritt moseley 155

The second chapter, “One Minute,” goes back to her birth into a working-class family in the city of Van. Leila’s youth is a story of parental intolerance and mental ill- ness, early sexual initiation by an uncle, rebellion against wearing a headscarf and an arranged marriage, and finally escape to Istan- bul and a hard life as a prostitute. To her family, she has become nothing, and she is nothing to her clients or to the authorities; after death she thinks of those who do care for her, her five friends Sabotage Sinan, Nostalgia Nalan, Jameelah, Zaynab122, and Hol- lywood Humeyra, whose stories are interpolated into Leila’s. With them she forms an alternative society; as one of them thinks, in the second section called “The Body” where they are working together to give Leila a respectful burial, “maybe the five of them, just like the people in a miniature painting, were stronger and brighter, and far more alive, when they complemented each other.” Shafak’s novel gives a powerful account of powerlessness and the struggle to survive in a hostile world. Its picture of Istanbul is rich, to a western reader, exotic, and fairly depressing. The Guard- ian reviewer, who found it “a novel with a powerful premise, good intentions, and an ingenious framing device,” while also deploring it as gimmicky, reveals that because of Shafak’s concern for Turkish religious intolerance, violence against women, and persecution of minorities, she has been threatened with imprisonment and cannot return to Turkey. Much of the discussion of Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport is about its length: it comes in right at one thousand pages, not counting its twenty-page supplementary glossary of acronyms and an appendix of important quotations. After length, comment focuses on its nar- rative technique. It is for the most part the interior monologue of a middle-aged, middle-class Ohio woman, not without punctuation but without termination (except for a period on the final page).

Review 156 on the 2019 booker prize

Virginia Woolf ’s suggestion in “Modern Fiction” was for the writer to “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” Ellmann’s unnamed protagonist has a moderately ordinary mind; the novel covers more than one day, but most of her days are ordi- nary. Things do happen. A daughter runs away and comes back, the narrator has a tense experience with a flat tire during a blizzard, the family gets then loses a dog, there are shots fired and violence offered. But unlike the day Mrs. Dalloway lives through, in a novel to which Ellmann’s has been frequently compared (but a novel she says she has never read), almost defiant ordinariness is celebrated and, for this reader at least, becomes luminous. There is one other novelty the narrative deploys: from time to time the interior monologue is broken up by short accounts of the life and thoughts of a female mountain lion, whose story actually begins the book. Ellmann, who is a quirky interviewee, explained this decision by saying, “I’m sick of human-centered writing. Writ- ers often act as if animals don’t even exist, just because we don’t know precisely how they think. That’s really pretty lazy.” But more than simply giving an animal’s experience as relief from humanity or an imagined insight into feline thought processes, the lioness chapters function in two other ways: first, the lioness becomes a character in the story of the narrator’s family, and she is implicated in the most important theme of the novel, which is motherhood. The narrator thinks about many, many things — about every- thing, it is tempting to say. She worries about the environment, about guns, about intolerance and hatred, about Trump, about money. She’s especially anxious about her health: the cancer she’s suffered from and the hospital bills she’s incurred are damaging the family’s finances. She thinks about her first, feckless husband Frank, and her current, much-loved and much-loving husband Leo. She spends a lot of time pondering baking, since, having ceased to teach merritt moseley 157 history part-time at a college, she earns money by baking cakes and pies and cinnamon rolls. She contemplates the chickens she raises in the backyard. But mostly she reflects on her children and her mother. Bedev- iled by self-consciousness and damaged self-esteem, she is particu- larly fretful about her older daughter, the child of her first broken marriage, with whom she has a distant and hostile relationship, but also about her three younger children, and whether she is a bad mother. Almost as much, she incessantly ruminates on her relation- ship with her mother, who had an early stroke and died quite young. The narrator says repeatedly that this loss “broke” her, and that ever since she has been broken. (The lioness is a mother of three and spends much of the book caring for her cubs, then seeking them when they are taken away by “do-gooders”; she also thinks about her mother, also dead.) We obviously know more about the inner lives of many fictional characters than we do of the real people in our lives, and it is a deep satisfaction to get to know so well this ordinary woman. She is smart, despite her doubts; she knows a great deal about mov- ies; she shows an almost supernatural familiarity with the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. She is prim, curious, humane. She indulges in wordplay and, though she often reminds herself not to be unkind, has some funny, sarcastic touches. Her self-awareness includes her reflection on her use of “the fact that” — this phrase occurs very often; Ellmann calls it “a kind of chant and a steadying device, a raft for the reader to cling to” — “the fact that what is with this constant monologue in my head, the fact that why am I telling myself all this stuff, since I know it already.” Like most literary uses of , the interior monologue here moves from point to point via association of meaning or sound, intrusive memory (Mommy, old love Chuck), repeated leitmotivs like “the numbness

Review 158 on the 2019 booker prize of muted beings” and “I don’t know but they know,” and external stimuli (for instance, phone calls, the timing of pies, stepping on children’s toys). A typical passage:

the fact that I don’t go for bronze statues too much, like Käthe Kollwitz’s “Tower of the Mothers,” yeow, broken plastic giraffe, my ankle, what next, ouch, neon-blue yo-yo, Wo-He-Lo, Djibouti, aardvark, elephant, koala bear pencil ornament, Sarah Palin, the fact that McKinley never even went to Alaska his whole entire life, so why name that mountain after him

Ducks, Newburyport is not only a triumph but utterly convincing in its rich detail of an American life. Reading it at a thousand pages is a little hard on the wrists, but I would not have it any shorter. This wonderful novel would have been a surprising but brave and deserving winner. Sir Salman Rushdie is not just British aristocracy — knighted in 2007 — but Booker royalty, his Midnight’s Children having won not just the Booker prize but two retrospective “best of ” contests. When he publishes a new novel, people take notice. Quichotte was reviewed everywhere and at length; in the New York Times, Jeanette Win- terson wrote a long, affirmative notice; but that one, like Michael Wood’s in the London Review of Books, consisted mostly of sum- mary and paraphrase, a bit cagey about judging its quality. Wood did write that “faced with a world in which truth seems to be dead or dying, Rushdie like Cervantes raises the stakes, lets the imagina- tion loose as a form of inquiry, and refuses to simplify the question.” But other reviewers seemed (rightly) more jaded, with assessments like Ron Charles’s summary in , “Rushdie’s style once unfurled with hypnotic elegance, but here it’s become a fire merritt moseley 159 hose of brainy gags and literary allusions — tremendously clever but frequently tedious”; for Holly Williams in it was “bogged down by fatiguing accumulations of examples and explana- tions”; and Mark Athitakis, in USA Today, described it as “a bit of a mess.” I agree with all these judgments, though Parul Seghal in the New York Times was far too harsh when she said, “the novels are imaginative as ever, but they are also increasingly wobbly, bloated and mannered. He is a writer in free fall.” Quichotte is a revisiting of Don Quixote, the woeful knight here named Ismail Smile, an elderly Indian pharmaceutical salesman who travels the United States in a quest to be united with his great love, Salma R, a famous (also Indian) television star. As Don Quixote de la Mancha lost his wits by reading medieval romances, his modern counterpart has watched too much junk television, though to be fair, Rushdie does very little to show him as confused, and Quichotte’s delusions are largely forgotten except for his love for Salma R. He is accompanied by Sancho, a “son” whom he has imagined into existence: Pinocchio is often invoked, and there is a Jiminy Cricket character who speaks Italian. Among Quichotte’s adventures are several ugly encounters with American racism. This is the inner story; outside it is Sam duChamp, who is the author of the Quichotte narrative — an experienced but poorly esteemed spy novelist, he is changing his métier for literary respect. He parallels Cervantes’s Cide Hamete Benengeli. Among the themes Rushdie includes are the perennial (and literally Quixotic) one of reality versus imagination; brother-sister relationships broken by trauma; expatriation, particularly of Indians (all of them from Mumbai) in America; and the venality and men- ace of Trump’s United States. He has no hesitation in targeting the lowest-hanging fruit for his social and political satire. His miscel- laneous topics include the opioid crisis (Smile’s brother is a crooked

Review 160 on the 2019 booker prize doctor), a character called Evel Cent who is clearly Elon Musk, as well as the rip in the cosmos and a town full of living mastodons. What is most worrying is that the obsession with junk culture goes far beyond Ismail Smile; it is incorporated in the discourse of Sam duChamp and seems to originate from Rushdie’s own mental furniture. His intertexts are largely American television shows and other pop cultural phenomena; alongside Shakespeare, he cites Paul Simon (he names a female character The Human Trampoline) and alludes to Roy Orbison; there is much about Oprah, advertising jin- gles, Ren and Stimpy. When Sancho gets a chance to speak, Rushdie tries out his young-bro voice: “Even my birth, my personal origin story, had its roots in fantasy. Is that who I am? A close encounter of the what is it kind? Yeah, I know. Third. Where’s my mother ship?” My unease deepened with flabby passages like “An interjec- tion, kind reader, if you’ll allow one: [Do we have a choice?] It may be argued that stories should not sprawl in this way . . .” And the familiarity with pop culture is accompanied by some uneasiness with the other kind, as when he writes that Quichotte would be “to quote Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales — her verray, parfit, gentil knyght.” (Oh, those Canterbury Tales.) There’s no shortage of invention here: in fact, there’s a surplus, and its products are not marshaled into an artistic whole so much as trotted out. One reviewer suggested that disabling Rushdie’s access to Google would help, and that person was correct. A better retelling of a classic story, which made the longlist, is Jea- nette Winterson’s Frankissstein, which is shorter and less garrulous. Like David Szalay’s shortlisted novel All That Man Is from 2016, Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Girl, Woman, Other is composed of a series of chapters each focusing on a different person and linked loosely through plot. But her novel forgoes Szalay’s “ages of man” scheme for a panorama of twelve women in Britain today and yes- terday, most of them women of color. The novel begins with Amma merritt moseley 161

Bonsu, a middle-aged playwright and black lesbian radical feminist, on the day that her play The Last Amazon of Dahomey is to open at the National Theatre. Far from an overnight success, she has a long history of countercultural activities, poverty, and artistic struggle before making it. Her play is about women warriors of Dahomey in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, foregrounding the anti- patriarchal, lesbian, and sometimes separatist motives of many of Evaristo’s characters. Amma’s anticipation of the play introduces several of the other characters including Dominique, her old friend now in America, and Yazz, her daughter, and helps to link others. The ensuing chapters explore the meaning, and the difficulties, of being a woman — and particularly a black woman — in Britain by focusing on teachers, entrepreneurs, rebellious young women and bemused older ones; the challenges faced by transgender women; the newly possible discovery of African ancestry through DNA tests; and more in a sometimes melodramatic, sometimes a bit too overtly uplifting mixture. The range of stories and characters is impressive, like the successes and affirmations that sometimes gladden the often-difficult lives, and the style, a loose, semi-poetic prose, is unobtrusively appropriate and sometimes moving:

Carole knows what drives people to such despair, knows what it’s like to appear normal but to feel herself swaying just one leap away from the amassed crowds on the platforms who carry enough hope in their hearts to stay alive swaying just one leap away from eternal peace

Review 162 on the 2019 booker prize

The judges called Girl, Woman, Other “a must-read about mod- ern Britain and womanhood . . . passionate, razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humour. There is never a single moment of dull- ness in this book.” Though it does indeed have much to tell a reader about modern Britain, and women’s lives in it, I’m not sure about must-read. It’s a good, worthy novel. Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments is published almost thirty- five years afterThe Handmaid’s Tale, a novel continuingly exciting and premonitory, and newly returned to high visibility and cultural relevance by Hulu’s television series. The earlier novel told the story of the handmaid Offred, an unwilling concubine and regu- larly raped surrogate mother in the Republic of Gilead, a religious autocracy that had replaced most of the United States. Women had been removed from any position of agency and placed in one of four classes: Wives, Handmaids, Marthas (domestic servants), and Aunts, the latter given enough power to dominate other women and enforce the draconian rules of the society. The Aunts were compa- rable to prison guards, and one of the most vicious was Aunt Lydia. In The Testaments, set some fifteen years after the events ofThe Handmaid’s Tale, Lydia is one of those who testify, and her message is a surprising one. The novel is made of documents: Aunt Lydia’s is called “the Ardua Hall Holograph” and is a secret diary she writes and hides away. “Witness Testimony 369A” is an account provided by a teen- aged girl of “what it was like for me when I was growing up within Gilead.” And “Witness Testimony 369B” comes from another young woman living in . These three voices interweave, and the narrators’ lives eventually interweave as well. Lydia’s is the most informative, because she provides a retrospective story of the beginnings of Gilead and how she, who had been a judge before the coup, became a dreaded Aunt. The last document, or testament, is a merritt moseley 163

“partial transcript of the proceedings of the Thirteenth Symposium on Gileadean Studies” held in Maine in 2197. In contrast to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments is profuse in incident and suspense, almost a thriller. Secrets are revealed. Some of them are crowd-funded: readers, for instance, voted that Offred’s original name was June, and Atwood incorporates that detail; Nicole, a baby in the Handmaid’s Tale series, becomes an important character in the novel. Margaret Atwood is a great writer, a Canadian national trea- sure, who was frequently mentioned as a possible 2019 Nobel Prize winner. The Testaments is full of sharp observations and penetrating social commentary. Reviewers have been somewhat divided on it, though, in part because — unlike in such classic dystopias as Brave New World, 1984, or Zamyatin’s We — the internal rebel succeeds. The Testaments answers the question many asked after The Hand- maid’s Tale: Was hope possible? Maureen Corrigan put it best on NPR’s Fresh Air:

It’s a tribute to the greatness of The Handmaid’s Tale that I and so many other readers, particularly female readers, have been willing and eager to re-enter Atwood’s sinister dystopian republic of Birthmobiles and Prayvaganzas. If I sound mildly disappointed in The Testaments, it’s paradoxi- cally because the novel so kindly (and perhaps a little too easily) gives me what I most want: that is, the promise of an end to Gilead.

Other readers were more won over. , a fellow Booker Prize winner, wrote that “The Testaments is Atwood at her best, in its mixture of generosity, insight, and control. The prose is adroit, direct, beautifully turned. . . . To read this book is to feel the world

Review 164 on the 2019 booker prize turning.” The Booker chair praised it as “more politically urgent than ever before.” As for the split decision, chair Peter Florence said, “These are two books we started not wanting to give up and the more we talked about them the more we treasured both of them and wanted them both as winners. . . . We couldn’t separate them.” In fact, he later seemed to suggest that they would have even liked to split the prize six ways, which suggests that the point of being a judge might have been lost on them. It is hard to explain a tie vote from a five-person jury. One critic, Justine Jordan, wrote that “it has to be said that this feels like a fudge, weighing a huge event novel” — Atwood’s is already a major international best seller — “against a more obscure choice and trying to have it both ways.” Margaret Atwood was generous in her remarks, saying she was relieved not to have won it outright at her age and telling Evaristo, “what you have done is to make it possible for more black women to consider that writing is something they can do.” Not everything was unprecedented. Atwood joins three other two-time Booker winners, and 2019 was the third time the prize has been shared. But Atwood is the oldest Booker winner, Evaristo the first black female winner (and only the fourth black woman ever shortlisted), and from a less than stellar shortlist, the judges found books that are, in Peter Florence’s words, “fully engaged novels; they are both linguistically inventive, they are adventurous in all kinds of ways.”