Words Are My Matter

Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writer's Week

Ursula K. Le Guin

• Publisher: Small Beer Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781618731340
• eBook ISBN: 9781618731210
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

• Le Guin is having an incredible few years and is going to be celebrated with new editions of backlist titles from the Library of America and Simon & Schuster.
  
• Le Guin will be interviewed on local and national radio.
  
• Heavy online, radio, and print coverage and reviews.

Book Reviews

Many of these pieces differ in some details from their original publication, having been edited slightly when I was preparing them for this book. The only one I changed substantially (mostly to update it) is the review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Dorset Stories.

I dithered between chronological and alphabetical order for these reviews, and settled for the alphabet so that readers could easily find an author they might be looking for. The original published versions of most of the reviews can be found on my website, and the publications in which they first appeared are listed in the acknowledgments.

I like book reviewing, and in order to keep doing it have taken a good many chances on books I didn’t know anything about till I read them. It’s sad when the advance reading copy that arrives in a dense cloud of blurbs all declaring it a supreme masterpiece of gut-wrenching lyricism turns out to be a dud. But mostly I’ve been lucky in being asked to review a book by an author I’m already interested in, or a book that won me over even though I didn’t much expect to like it.

Most of the reviews were published in the Manchester Guardian, to whose editors I am grateful for many opportunities to review good books, for wonderfully flexible, intelligent editing, and for being eight thousand miles away. The New York/East Coast literary scene is so inward-looking and provincial that I’ve always been glad not to be part of it; but when I lived in London I was positively terrified by the intensity of British literary cliques, the viciousness of competition, the degree of savagery permitted. That bloodymindedness may have lessened somewhat, but still, whenever I review a British book for the Guardian, I’m glad I live in Oregon.

But then, I always am, except when I’m homesick for California.

Margaret Atwood: Moral Disorder

2006

Most collections of short stories by a single author are grab bags, but some approach or achieve real unity; it is a different unity from that of the novel, and deserves some attention. The gaps between stories, the lack of obvious continuity, preclude the supporting structures of conventional plot. If the stories tell a story, it must be read in glimpses and through the gaps—a risky gambit, but one which offers singular freedom of movement and ironic opportunity.

In such episodic narratives character, place, and/or theme replace plot as unifying elements. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs are both about a single town and a few strong characters. Each book seems to have begun as a “local color” story or two written for periodicals, the success of which led the author to further explorations of Cranford or Dunnets Landing, and to the realisation that she was in fact writing a work of considerable length and scope. Freed from the tyrannies of Victorian plotting, both these lovely books develop locality and character with a lightness and subtlety that was rare then, and is still rare now.

Though it seems to me a genuine form, this kind of book has no accepted name, perhaps because it’s an exception rather than a rule. Many collections that pretend to unity merely fake it. That does have a name: a fix-up—a collection of short stories stuck together with some kind of expository word-glue invented after the fact, or merely arranged in hope that recurrences or similarites of place, person, or theme will hold the pieces together. Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles is an example: inter-story glosses patch over contradictions and anachronisms, but the stories don’t really tell a coherent history, and parts remain far more memorable than the whole. Yet fix-up seems an unnecessarily disdainful name for that lovable book, and it absolutely won’t do for Cranford. We need a name for a book that is truly a story told in stories. Could we call it a story suite?

Moral Disorder consists of eleven short stories. Is it a collection, a fix-up, or a suite? A suite, I think. Place, perhaps the commonest cement of the story suite, is not very important, but the stories have a single protagonist, a central character—or I think they do. She is variable, elusive, even a bit slippery. This is, after all, a book by Margaret Atwood.

Seven of the stories are told by an “I” who remains nameless, four from the third-person point of view of “Nell.” It’s easy to project Nell into all the stories, because they run in chronological order from childhood to age, the central figure is always female, and there are definite clues that Nell is the protagonist even when not named. Such clues are needed, for there isn’t very much in the first-person stories of childhood and adolescence to connect the girl to the woman Nell—no strong sense of character or destiny, no overriding reason to think this is, or isn’t, the same person. The last two stories concern a woman’s experience with her father entering dementia, her mother in extreme old age. The daughter may well be Nell, the parents may be the parents of the child in the earlier stories, but I had no feeling of recognition, of rejoining the same people at a later stage of life. The book did not quite form a whole for me, an architecture, a life story however episodic. The glimpses are brilliant, but the gaps are wide.

Things happen to Nell; she accepts what happens; this is not a portrait of a powerful character, perhaps rather an intimation of experience shared by many women. So character is not a strong bond, locality ties only a few of the stories together, and if the stories are connected by theme, I haven’t found what it is yet. What they have in common is a clear eye, a fine wit, and a command of language so complete it’s invisible except when it’s dazzling.

One story is dramatically and effectively out of place. Starting with the second story, we follow Nell through the years from her childhood with sister and parents, through the vicissitudes of semi-marriage—does Tig in fact ever divorce that ghastly wife and marry her?—the trials of amateur farming and late parenthood, and at last to her middle age, the daughter of parents at the edge of death. But the first story in the book is chronologically the last, a portrait of Nell and Tig in their own old age, when they are the parents on the edge of death. Why this reversal works so well I don’t know; perhaps because “The Bad News” is a stunning opener, electric with wit, energy, Atwood’s achingly keen sense of fear and pain. She has never been sharper, dryer, funnier, sadder. And there was wisdom in not putting this story last, because the last two are about dying, the end, and this one isn’t, quite—not yet.

Not yet is aspirated, like the h in honour. It’s the silent not yet. We don’t say it out loud.

These are the tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we’ve only recently come to think of as still, and really it’s no smaller than anyone else’s window.

The uncomplaining, absolute accuracy of this is most admirable. “The Bad News” really has some news for its readers.

None of the other stories entirely escape conventionality, not a word I’d expect to use about Atwood. The subjects are familiar tropes of the current short story: miseries and confusions of childhood, city people learning life on a subsistence farm, dysfunctional family members, Alzheimer’s. They are not quite predictable, but near it, though there is a patience, a kindness in the tone which is not common. Atwood doesn’t pull any of the surprises, the narrative flights and dodges she’s so good at, except in that first story. There the old Canadian couple morph quietly into an old Roman couple in a small Gallic town called Glanum, which Nell and Tig once visited as tourists. Breakfast is good whether in Toronto or Glanum, but the world is not in good shape. Terrorism, barbarians threatening the empire. The news is all bad—the news is always the same and always bad, and what are two old people supposed to do about it? This gentle, plausible slide into a fantasy that deepens reality is Atwood at her slyest and sweetest. There really is nobody like her.

Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood

2009

To my mind, The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near future that’s half prediction, half satire. But Margaret Atwood doesn’t want any of her books called science fiction. In her recent, brilliant essay collection, Moving Targets, she says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can’t be science fiction, which is “fiction in which things happen that are not possible today.” This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers, and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.

Who can blame her? I feel obliged to respect her wish, although it forces me, too, into a false position. I could talk about her new book more freely, more truly, if I could talk about it as what it is, using t...

Table of contents

• Nonfiction Works by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Words Are My Matter
• Copyright Information
• The Mind Is Still
• Foreword
• Talks, Essays, and Occasional Pieces
• Book Introductions and Notes on Writers
• Book Reviews
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author