The Thin Place, part three

Part one is here, and part two is here.

It's possible that Davis would say that I'm missing the point, that she intends to point out how our very real individuality pales beside our underlying commonality and interconnectedness, similar to how--to adapt images that the narrator uses--the rapid and dramatic changes of everyday life are both undergirded by and rendered minuscule next to the creeping accretions and alterations of geologic and galactic time. And there is undoubtedly a certain poignancy--even pathos--in the sense one gets that despite all this furious buzzing of mental and emotional activity in the town, each being is still trapped inside its own head, untouched and untouchable. There is tremendous power in that idea, the sort that can make a book so emotionally wrenching as to be painful to read--Woolf's To the Lighthouse and The Waves are that way. But Davis, it seems, hasn't fully imagined her characters, hasn't pressed hard enough on the thoughts that incited their creation--or, if she has, she's simply not been able to turn them loose and allow them to become separate from the overarching voice that organizes and pervades the book.

As my regular readers know, I don't write that often about books I don't like. I put enough effort into the process of selecting books that I don't end up even reading many that I don't like; when I do, I often will pass over them in silence, or with a brief post, simply because bad books frequently aren't worth writing about. The fact that I've devoted so many words to The Thin Place should make clear that I think it has value. It's a failure (though you shouldn't forget that the weight of critical opinion is solidly against me on this one), but it's an ambitious failure, admirable and generous in both its intentions and its view of the world. When I was about a hundred pages into it, I told Stacey it was becoming one of a very difficult and rare class of book for me: I was frustrated enough with it that I didn't want to keep reading, but I was interested enough that I didn't want to put it down. For all my criticisms in this post, I know that those are the sorts of books that stay with me, nagging at my understanding for years.

I will keep Kathryn Davis in mind; I may try one of her other books. I may even, someday, revise my opinion of this one, because reading, too, moves on two timescales, wedding the immediate and the long-term. Seeds that seem to have fallen on fallow ground sometimes, years later, produce a surprising harvest; you grow and change, and an old book, revisited, is made new and better.

The Thin Place, part two

Part one is here.

Which leaves the real, insurmountable problem I had with The Thin Place. I should start by saying that I like the idea of this book tremendously: In an effort to present a holistic picture of a whole town, Davis dips her narration into the minds of more than a dozen characters--and she doesn't limit herself to humans, presenting the perspectives of dogs, cats, beavers, bears, and even lichen. She is clearly fascinated with the way we live as part of a natural world while we most of the time pretend otherwise, and her quest to present all aspects of that numinous world is admirable and interesting. Her ambition to present so many perspectives in one brief novel, and to let peoples' thoughts be what they are rather than shaping them into standard narration, is what causes her to be compared to Woolf and James.

Where she falls down is in the execution; ultimately, though she moves from consciousness to consciousness, there is a sameness to all her characters' minds that, sadly, undercuts her ambitious aims. Here, for example, are the thoughts of a woman named Chloe:

When she first came back to Varennes, Chloe Brock told herself it would be temporary. It had been hard enough to get away to begin with, hard enough to yank loose the roots ,and then, having done so, to accept the fact and stop feeling like a thinned seedling shriveling in the compost pile. She'd waited to come back until her parents didn't live there anymore. They broke her heart--especially her father, who also made her furious, since the more someone broke her heart, meaning the more obvious their weakness was, the more infuriating Chloe found them.

And here is Chloe's boyfriend thinking about her:

He wanted to get back into bed. He wanted Chloe to wrap her arms and legs around him like a bear climbing a tree. He wanted to forget how frightening she had looked, standing there in the doorway, and the closer she was to him, the easier it would be to do that. Though you'd never mistake what he wanted for intimacy.

Davis's characters' thoughts tend to fall into nature metaphors--much like the narrative voice itself when it pops up--and they also, as the next passage will show when compared to the previous pair, frequently follow a pattern in which a string of thought is capped by a pointed, unexpected, or shocking statement:

If Billie were pretty would Henry's expressions be different? Even her late husband, Dougie, had often failed to find her interesting, though he'd loved her dearly. She'd never doubted that for a minute, even though everything else about Dougie had turned out to be a lie. He wasn't even named Doug.

Even the animals sound like one another--and like the humans, too, if a bit more abrupt. Here's the cat, Gigi:

He did seem a little like a mouse. Pointy nose, dark beady eyes. Too big to hunt down, toy with, kill. Snap off the head and remove the liver and entrails, deposit them near the Girl's shoes, where she couldn't fail to find them. She wouldn't be pleased.

The result of all this is that the many characters remain far too similar to one another, sharing a tone and feeling like greater or lesser variations on the narrative voice, which in an interview at the back of the book Davis admits is her own. Despite the specific content of each character's thoughts, the individuals remain amorphous--and thus even thoughts, emotions, and actions of great moment are stripped of power, seeming ultimately inconsequential.

The Thin Place, part one

I wanted to like Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place (2006). The reviews it received when it came out made it sound like something truly original and strange; in Harper's, John Leonard, whom I always appreciate even when I disagree with him, compared her to Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Thoreau. The book's title, too, made it sound promising, a thin place being, in myth and religion, a place where the walls between the physical and spiritual worlds are unusually thin, to the point of being permeable. And the book opens with reasonable promise:

There were three girlfriends and they were walking down a trail that led to a lake. One small and plump, one pretty and medium-sized, one not so pretty and tall. This was in the early years of the twenty-first century, the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they'd seen, what they'd done or failed to do. The dead souls no longer wore gowns. They'd gotten loose, broadcasting their immense soundless chord through the precincts of the living.

There's no doubt that this is the sort of paragraph that will make a person keep reading: the fairytale description of the girls sets a tone, and while the lines about the unspeakable might not hold up to close scrutiny, they're at least unexpected, a statement right up front that this book will be governed by a strongly expressed sensibility.

But there is also, already in that first paragraph and getting worse as the book progresses, a forced combination of weightiness and casualness to the prose, driven by a pretense of bouncing quickly from thought to thought, unconcerned, as minds are, with underlying structure. But this forces Davis's sentences into an oddly mannered slackness, where clarity (along with, at times, grammatical structure) is sacrificed. Meaning becomes unclear, odd constructions trip up the reader, and the flow of the telling is disrupted. Take this paragraph, for example, which follows a page or so written from the perspective of a pet dog, then a paragraph that seems to be in the voice of the omniscient narrator:

Poor beavers. So shiny and sleek--no wonder women wanted to put that fur on their bodies. Of course they didn't love the fur the way they loved the beloved--they didn't want to slip into the beaver's fur the way they wanted to slip into the beloved's coat or vest. They didn't want to be thought of as beavers. They just wanted to be admired. Also they wanted to stay warm.

It's unclear to me whether these are the narrator's thoughts--in which case, "beloved" could mean the men in the women's lives, and the women really do want to slip into those men's coats--or the dog's thoughts, perhaps--which, though less likely, would make the odd note of the word "beloved," and the idea of nuzzling into a vest, make more sense. The final sentence, meanwhile, seems to be so affected as to be in a sort of limbo, neither a tossed-off joke nor an actual observation.

I understand that passages like the above may not really be a serious problem; they may only grate on me with particular force because I do a lot of editing and therefore spend a lot of time thinking about structure and clarity. It's possible that most readers could pass over them without trouble. And the passages that tripped me up are intermingled with sharply written lines like these:

"It was only seven-thirty, and the study was like an oven, his hair like an animal sitting on his head."
and
"Outside in the parking lot, the air was hot and humid and as swarming with bugs as a brain is with ideas."
and
"'Time's up,' Piet said, trying to tip [the cat] Gigi off the pillow, like a ball or shoe, something without claws."

The effectiveness of such compact, clear images goes a long way towards mitigating my irritation with Davis's cloudier efforts.

Part two tomorrow.