The Street Sweeper

…to produce a written account of the destruction of European Jewry down to the last detail and to bury it in the hope that it would survive…This was what kept them going—the need to tell what would otherwise have been unimaginable. Elliot Perlman

I usually find a character or situation that mirrors to some degree my life in the novels that mean most to me. That is one of the reasons I found Elliot Perlman’s latest novel, The Street Sweeper, such an engrossing work of fiction.

I can only touch on one or two of the several themes coursing in and out of this novel—the nature of history, memory, and racism in America, the Holocaust, friendship, and the importance of communication. And chance. Chance is what brings the two main characters together and is the source of each of these themes.

A chance encounter between two individuals is not a totally random event. Rather it is the intersection of their separate, fully determined paths that is fortuitous. Had the chance encounter not occurred, their lives would have taken entirely different paths. And Lamont Williams and Adam Zignelik would have never met on the pages of The Street Sweeper.

Lamont Williams is an African-American ex-con, having been imprisoned for a robbery he never committed but in which by chance he became involved. Lamont has a probationary “Building Services” job at a New York Hospital and while making his rounds one day fortuitously befriends, Henryk Mandelbrot, a Holocaust survivor. It is Henryk who tells Lamont everything he experienced while he was in Auschwitz. He wants him to remember all of it.

“Tell everyone what happened here. Tell everyone what happened here.” This sentence is repeated over and over again throughout this sprawling narrative.

Adam Zignelik is a Jewish about-to-be ex-history professor at Columbia as a result of his meager publication record. As he is searching for a new direction to his career, he learns about a professor in Illinois, Henry Border, who interviewed Holocaust survivors in displaced person camps and, like Mandelbrot, conveyed detailed accounts of the horrors they experienced.

This discovery takes Adam on a series of weekend commutes to Chicago where he begins listening to the recordings made by Border. Meanwhile, Lamont begins listening to Mandelbort’s accounts of his unbearable Sonderkommando “job” in Auschwitz.

“I had no choice if I was to keep living. None of us had a choice. It was live in this hell, a world like no human being had every known before, or not live at all.”

And later Lamont asks Mandelbrot: “You wanted to survive to get the story out.” He replies: “Yes, for what other reasons was there to live.”

After Mandelbrot has unfolded his tale of survival to Lamont, one that is perhaps the most painful “fictional” account of Auschwitz I have ever read, and Adam has grasped the equally unbearable tales revealed in Border’s recordings, their paths ultimately intersect.

This occurs as a result of Adam’s role in the overturning of an injustice done to Lamont while working at the hospital. In this way, the novel weaves together the parallel situations of blacks in America and the Jews throughout Europe during the Holocaust.

The first sentence of The Street Sweeper is: “Memory is a willful dog. It won’t be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule all its own that you can never know.”

The theme is repeated on the last pages of the novel: “What is memory? It is the storage, the retention and the recall of the constituents, gross and nuanced of information. How is it called upon? A certain protein in the brain, an enzyme, acts upon one neuron after another in rapid sequence as if to light them up…each neuron holds some pixel, some datum and if even one is lost, the sequence is interrupted. Then you have started to forget.”

Perlman does not want us to forget these events, they need to be passed on from one generation to another in all the ways this is possible.

The last sentence of this thoroughly absorbing novel, one that I have only been able to mention of a fraction of, is: “Tell everyone what happened here.”

On Book Reviewing

If you can’t say something nice, skip the nonsense about not saying anything and pursue a career in book reviews. Frank Santo

A person has written a review of the book I’m currently reading. His review is published is the august New York Times Sunday Book Review. He considers the book simple-minded, amateurish, silly, repetitious, and, as a novel, “deadly frivolous.” Meanwhile, I am enjoying it tremendously.

Am I going to stop reading it? Do I feel the least bit regretful about purchasing the book, a not-inexpensive hardbound version of over 600 pages? After reading the review, is the book any less appealing? In answer to all three questions, a clear No.

I ask myself what then is the purpose of a book review. Is it important for the reviewer to speak ill of a book that isn’t liked, praise it if it is liked, or quite simply try to describe what the book is about so a potential reader can determine if it is one they wish to read?

The book is The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman. Why did I buy it? I greatly enjoyed Perlman’s previous novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity. In fact I thought it was of the best books I have read recently. I have also enjoyed some of his short stories. I am always hungry for a novel that means something to me and so I had good reasons for believing Perlman’s new novel would be one of those. It is.

I write about some of the books I’m reading and it is rare that I finish a book that I don’t like. In reviewing those I finish, I am always looking for what it has done right, for what keeps me reading it, and why I felt I wanted to write about it. I avoid writing about books I didn’t like, for a know full well that those that bore me to death will inevitably move others to relish.

Recently Phillip Roth commented that he doesn’t read fiction these days, saying he has “wised up.” While I seriously doubt that’s true and that Roth, as is his manner, is having fun with the interviewer, I do know more and more commentators are expressing doubts about the value of reading and writing fiction any more.

In his essay, “Why Write Novels at All” in the Times a few weeks ago, Garth Hallberg points to Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot as offering a widely voiced answer. In describing the heroine’s pleasure in reading Barthes’s Lover’s Discourse. Eugenides writes:

“It wasn’t only this writing that seemed beautiful…What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place….Here was a sign that she wasn’t alone.”

How often we have heard that before--we read novels and perhaps, also writers write them, because they makes us feel less lonely. Is that why you read fiction?

Does reading in fact reduce loneliness? I know of no evidence that it does. While I cherish a fine novel and while it often moves me greatly, it has absolutely no effect on whatever sense of loneliness I may be feeling at the time.

What I am seeking in reading fiction and what I hope writers are trying to impart to readers is a deeper understanding of contemporary issues, those truths that only fiction seems able to provide, and a humane description of the thoughts and emotions of other people as they meet the dilemmas that confront them.

This is a rich order, one that only the finest novels achieve. And I confess that The Street Sweeper comes close to meeting, in spite of its complexity and lengthy digressions, and the comments of a displeased Times reviewer.

Marvellous Stuff

After enjoying Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity so much, I was interested to learn what the reviewers had to say about it. One critic described it as “fat, pretentious” and an “embarrassment.” Another described Perlman’s “talent for sharp satire,” and noted that portions of the book were “marvelous stuff.” Still another vacillated between “distinctly odd” and an “exciting gamble of a novel.”

What can a reader make of these differences, especially for someone who hasn’t read the novel? To read it or not to read it? There is only one way to answer this question. Forget about what the critics say and give the book a try. I did. And I thought it was a reading experience at its best.

As usual, I noticed the way the reviewers were silent about the effects the novel had on them personally. Instead they went about evaluating the text or Perlman’s writing skill or lack thereof. I suppose that is the customary practice. Critics don’t talk much about how a book affects them personally. I have never understood quite why.

What did they think about Simon? What kind of experience did they have in reading about him? Did his life and dilemmas reflect anything about their own life or contemporary life in general? Are these fair questions? They seem so to me. That should be clear from what I wrote yesterday.

Readers read so differently. The same text can mean something different for each reader and something different to them at another time in their life. One person's literary truth is another person's banal cliché. I think of books, a good book, at least, as a cornucopia of meanings that vary widely between readers. Perhaps that’s why reading is such a remarkable experience.

In reviewing Seven Types of Ambiguity, Keith Gessen wrote “I can’t believe this book was published.” Gessen is one of the reigning contemporary American novelists and a highly regarded literary critic. Who am I to question his appraisal? And yet, I thought the novel was “marvelous stuff” and while it was perhaps a bit lengthy, it nevertheless brought a lot of pleasure to me.

Am I to question my taste, consider it nothing but the mark of a mediocre reader? I read a great deal and I do write a bit about the books I enjoy, although it is true, I remain an amateur at this. Should I dismiss the pleasure Perlman’s novel gave me?

No, I think it is simply because we differ in our preferences. And there are many reasons for that, probably having far less to do with literary acumen than they do with experience and background. Phyllis Rose expresses a similar view in her recent book The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time,

…but what I looked forward to most in reading Proust were revelations about myself. The best moments had been those in which I descended most deeply into myself…so I achieved a sudden clarify of vision….Proust understood that every reader, in reading, reads himself. Far from minding this, he saw it as the writer’s task to facilitate it. Thus the writer’s word is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is proof of its veracity.

Here Rose suggests that the power of literature lies in confirming those truths of experience that are unique to each individual. These truths are not to be found in generalities but rather in the specific conditions of our own lives. Since no one’s life is the same as any other, we are bound to differ in the way the reading experience affects us.

Seven Types of Ambiguity

In my view Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is a terrific novel. Perlman, an Australian writer, tells the story of 32-year-old Simon Heywood, a brilliant, widely read teacher who is also a little bit too obsessed with his former lover, Anna. The 600 plus page story is narrated from seven different points of view, including Simon himself, Anna, Alex, his psychiatrist and Angelique his “hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold girl friend.”

I found Simon an immensely likeable person whose plight I understood quite well and who I grew to care about. His life bears a certain similarity to my own, distant to be sure but close enough. In one way or another this is true of most of my fictional friends. Perlman writes: “…readers usually identify with one or other of the characters in a story…That is why most of them read fiction in the first place.”

Simon never fit in, he never found a world that accepted his quirky views or made the most of his versatile mind. Simon says of himself, “I was just not cut out for the business of living at a time like this, a time when wondering, caring, dreaming…they were just not selling, they were uncool, unhip, not sexy, past their expiration date…Some other time maybe.”

Simon read poetry at a time when not many others did. He really had no one to talk with about the poems, the music, the movies, the history and politics that meant something to him. But he longed for such a connection. Perlman writes, “Most people are alone. To not be alone somebody has to connect with you and you have to connect with them. I mean really connect. I mean that somebody has to make the emotional and intellectual effort to come with you as you ride the relentless waves of fear and hope, of pain and pleasure, of doubt and certainty, that inhabit the sea of human experience.”

Not even Anna, his one and only Anna, the Anna who had rejected him in spite of or perhaps because of his deep love for her. She says: “I wasn’t any longer feeling augmented by him but diminished.” I doubt I would have felt so diminished. Instead, I know I would have enjoyed talking with Simon about the arts, culture, and ideas that he was drawn to. But then I am not Anna.

But then Simon did something stupid. He “abducted” or so it was claimed, Anna’s son, Sam, who he had previously unbeknownst to Anna and her husband, saved from drowning in their pool. You help a friend in need. I would have liked to have helped Simon get through the consequences of what he admits was an irrational and futile act.

To my way of thinking Simon was a very bright, beguiling young man, full of ideas, many of them seemingly crazy but on analysis ever so sensible who was thoroughly misunderstood by just about everyone, even his therapist who often seemed utterly befuddled by what Simon did and thought.

I never thought Simon was depressed as others did, at least, in its clinical form. Rather I thought he was simply a little melancholic, not without justification in my view and he was unhappy, sometimes very much so, just like everyone else. As Alex, his therapist notes “Simon has always been, other than for short periods, too involved in things to be clinically depressed.”

There wasn’t any pretense to Simon; he was totally honest and up front about everything. That surely doomed him to anything approaching a normal life. Simon also knew as well as anybody else who he was and why his life was drifting aimlessly. In describing himself, he says,

“I was a man of more than average intelligence seasoned by years of wide and considered reading, a man of not unpleasing visage and of some awareness of the mighty winds and faint breezes that move the world, a man sensitive both to the plight of the many and to that of the man in his shirt sleeves ambling through the leaves in the city park during his lunch hour, desperately trying to keep his own tepid inconsequence at bay…”

He knew his best and he knew his worst, knew how perfectly rational he could be at one time and then at another fall into a web of destructive obsession. Aren’t we all a mixture of two or more selves? And so it was not difficult to admire Simon, to want to read every one of the 600 odd pages of Seven Types of Ambiguity to learn how things worked out for him. For a very long time Simon was a literary friend of mine and at times a shadowy reflection of the person I am as well. If you have already read the novel, perhaps you felt somewhat the same way; if you haven’t perhaps you will.