The New Yorker’s take on Ondaatje
In The New Yorker, Louis Menand takes a look at Ondaatje’s Divisadero, which leads him to investigate – and question, at least in part – Ondaatje’s approach to writing fiction.
There is a method of story writing that involves stripping the tale of every extraneous detail plus one, so that the nonextraneous bit becomes, in the reader’s imagination, the piece that might explain everything. It’s a formula for ambiguity. Kipling was expert at this; so was Hemingway. But ambiguity is virtually integral to literary expression—ambiguity, uncertainty, indeterminacy are ways that fictional texts mean what they mean. Ondaatje is doing something else. He is trying to change the medium.
[…]
The sacrifice of plot is tolerable, and, despite the willful digressions, traces of plot and even suspense are usually there in Ondaatje’s fiction. What is damaging is the sacrifice of character. His characters are ciphers. We have no affective connection with them. Their stories are too spare, and most of them are impossibly wan figures who seem to be floating outside of time—even in The English Patient, which treats the Second World War simply as the occasion for bringing exotic people together in threatening circumstances. The threat is there only to charge the atmosphere. But the strongest, the most entertaining part of The English Patient is, in fact, the conventional love story of Katharine and Almásy, just as the strongest part of Anil’s Ghost is the conventional mystery story of Anil and the twice-buried corpse.
(Read Q&Q’s review of Divisadero here.)
What a weak article. Is there something wrong with a novel that treats the stories of lives touched by war, without centralising the trench, without polemic? Who is ‘we’? I know I am not alone in having a tremendous affective connection with Ondaatje’s characters.
Menand was only born in 1952 - reading this review confirms how much the nature of ‘the responder’ has changed in the space of a few decades. Menand sounds like he has actually struggled to see into Ondaatje’s stories. The method of storytelling has debarred him from recognising the characters as human beings, and their stories as human lives. “The mode of composition becomes the meaning of the book” FOR MENAND, because he has been unable to see past the mode of composition. I cannot imagine audiences who grew up with the jump cut having the same problem.