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263 pages, Hardcover
First published March 21, 2017
Why wouldn't anyone admit that a life is not a life but a deathward existence?Helen, in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patrick Cottrell
Just as Altensam was alien to him, so he must have seemed a foreign element to his family, they had in the end worn each other up on chronic mutual recriminations, primordial recriminations, Roithamer wrote, that is, he, Roithamer , on the one side and Roithamer's family on the other, were wearing each other out in the most inhuman way, a way least worthy of human beings, in this process of sheer mutual exhaustion. His natural bent for studying ie for studying everything, however, had enabled him quite early in life, by studying Altensam, to see through Altensam and thereby to see through himself and to achieve insight and to take action and thanks to these constant ongoing lifelong studies he'd always had to do as he ended up doing, all his life, though he'd rather call it his existence, or better still, his deathwards existence, everything he'd ever done had been based on nothing but this habit of studying which he'd never been able to shake off, where other people get ahead easily and often quite rapidly, he'd never gotten ahead easily or rapidly, obsessed as he was with the habit of always studying, all of him, his organism, his mind, and everything he did, determined by his habit of studying.Roithamer in Correction, Thomas Bernhard tr. Sophie Wilkins.
I'm sorry to disrupt the peace was my stock apology: I used it all the time at my workplace, it was a good apology because it could mean so many different things to people. It could mean, I'm sorry, I made a mistake. It could mean, I'm sorry, I'll ruin you.The novel opens with the 32 year-old Helen in New York, barely scraping together a living, where she receives the news that her adoptive brother (as she consistently refers to him) has committed suicide.
At the time of his death I was a thirty-two-year-old woman, single, childless, irregularly menstruating, college-educated, and partially employed. If I looked in the mirror, I saw something upright and plain. Or perhaps hunched over and plain, it depended. Long, long ago I made peace with my plainness. I made peace with piano lessons that went nowhere because I had no natural talent or aptitude for music. I made peace with the coarse black hair that grows out of my head and hangs down stiffly to my shoulders. One day I even made peace with my uterus.Helen is in reality subject to a disciplinary investigations at work – perhaps related to her purloining of the toilet supplies or her sourcing of marijuana as her personal therapeutic device her ‘troubled young people’ (another constant refrain), amongst other failings. An email to her supervisor excusing her absence is entitled "A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (NOT THE BOOK)", a nicely Knausgaardian nod, and she signs off "Sister Reliability" ("even though he refused to call me Sister Reliability, the troubled young people certainly did").
Living in New York City for five years, I had discovered the easiest way to distinguish oneself was to have a conscience or a sense of morality, since most people in Manhattan were extraordinary thieves of various standing, some of them multi-billionaires. Over time, I became a genius at being ethical, I discovered that it was my true calling. I made little to no money as a part-time after-school supervisor of troubled young people, with the side work of ordering paper products for the toilets. After my first week, the troubled people gave me a nickname.
Hey, Sister Reliability, what’s up? Bum me a cigarette. Suck my dick. They never stopped smoking or saying disgusting things to me, those troubled young people living and dying in Manhattan, sewer of the earth! I was living and dying right next to them all the while attempting to maintain an ethical stance as their supervisor, although some days I will admit it was difficult to tell who was supervising whom.
I shouted things to the passers-by on the crummy sidewalks below. I can be a very helpful person! I screamed. A woman pushing a double-wide stroller looked up at me with concern. At your service, bitches! I shouted. I saluted the pigeons and the rats. I said to no one, What you are doing, Helen, is not only very ethical, it is what is required.Her ‘adoptive parents’ (again she always refers to them that way) are none to please to see her – regarding her, realistically, as more likely to be a burden than a help: she puts flowers sent for the funeral into a bucket, which proves to be filled with diluted breach and eats the cake intended for the reception afterwards. But she nevertheless embarks on her own investigation into the causes of her brother’s death, an investigation which, unsurprisingly given her personality, is as much about discovering the causes of her own unhappiness as her brother's.
[...]
I would envelop them in warmth of my charity and my supportive beam of light. I am a helpfulness virtuoso and it is time to take my talents to my childhood home.
The autobiographical details that overlap with the book—they’re very emotional, I was writing from a place of emotion. But I wasn’t hoping to create confusion between me and Helen. If people want to read the details of my life into the events in Helen’s, that choice has nothing to do with me. That’s the reader’s response, which is private and subjective. I’m aware I need to hold space for all different types of responses, and I’m hopeful I can do that.Source: Paris Review interview
Interior books are the books I prefer to spend my time with. I would venture that Thomas Bernhard is the master of interior prose. I remember sitting with Jesse Ball, who is a genius, at The School of the Art Institute in 2010 and he had Correction on the table. That moment of reading Correction and then going on to The Loser, Extinction, Concrete, Woodcutters, Frost, Gargoyles, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, all of those books changed things for me. In the opening 20 pages or so in The Loser, the narrator is standing in a doorway or in the process of entering an inn. There’s no description of his physical movement, it’s simply stated, which was exciting to me.Source: LA Review of Books
I admire Thomas Bernhard and the writers he has inspired, W. G. Sebald and Javier Marías for example. The rhythm of Bernhard’s sentences is something I want to study for the rest of my life. His narrators are repellent and misogynistic, and yet, there’s very little artifice or decoration, and in that way, they seem really pure. I dislike artificial books, books that have nice manners, books that are designed to show off the writer’s ease with developing characters, settings, et cetera. Those books work well as doorstoppers, I think, or you can use them to press flowers or whatever. I have a list of voice-driven novels that I turn to when I forget how to write. Some of the books on that list: Nobody is Ever Missing, By Night in Chile, Fra Keeler, The Face of Another, The Rings of Saturn. My favorite interior novels are written from a feeling of desperation and urgency.
A side-by-side comparison of my work to the world of Connell and Darger showed certain similar technical flourishes and extensions, and although it was easy to see am unabashed and perhaps uncritical admiration, my found texts and assemblages were not exact copies, my intention had been to participate in the conversation, not to reproduce what had already been produced.The writing in this first-person account has a similar approach, drawing heavily on the patterns of other authors, notably Thomas Bernhard but also Kafka and Lispector, sometimes appropriating their turns-of-phrase directly as in the quote that opens the review (Cottrell provides the references at the back that Helen omits).
I pictured the funeral, that great spectacle of mourning. I saw strangers standing around taking part in a superficial grief performance ostensibly to both celebrate and mourn a dead person they never bothered to know when he was alive.Or, as Helen travels from the airport to her childhood home, in the evening gloom, her fond recall of her childhood home is typically bleak:
I saw in my head the nunnery where all the nuns died and the priests took over, the pharmacy that houses a child pornography ring, the bird sanctuary where a governmental agency collects the geese to feed to wolves.One striking theme is Helen and her brother’s situation. As I write the review today the English newspapers headlines relate in typically scandalised tones the story of a English girl fostered by a devout Muslim family (“Christian girl, 5, is forced into foster care with Burka-wearing Muslim carers who 'took away her crucifix and stopped her eating bacon”, Daily Mail) – but I suspect the same papers would praise Helen’s adoptive parents for making her integrate:
When [my adoptive father] played Mozart or Schubert the house filled up with white male European culture. We were expected to worship it, which we did for a while, but once I went to college, I stopped. There is a world and history of non white culture, I wrote to them once in a furious letter. And you kept us in the dark our entire childhood! The two white people raised their Asian children to think Asian art was decorative: Oriental jugs and vases! Jade elephants! Enamel chopsticks!The final straw for her is her first communion ("stupid white bitches getting married to God!") although she has no interest in finding her real mother, unlike her adoptive brother. Indeed when her ‘investigation’ is abruptly resolved by finding a suicide note of sorts left by her brother explaining everything, a note her parents were aware of had she but have asked them rather than pursue her own course, his search for his own roots proves to have played a key role.
I was fine with genitalia in my face and blow jobs and spitting out their sperm, I was fine with rimming, I made my peace with it, and I was so angry. Underneath my peace there was an anger, an ugly anger, the force of it was formidable, and I was the one who had to live with it. Everything was bitter.Helen is living in Manhattan when she finds out her adoptive brother has committed suicide. (Helen is also adopted, and she and her brother are both Korean by birth, though not biologically related.) She has such a bad relationship with her adoptive parents that she hears the news not from them, but from an uncle she barely knows; nevertheless, she immediately decides to go home to Milwaukee to 'support' them. There, she starts what she calls a metaphysical investigation into what happened to her brother, following clues found in his room and interviewing his friends.
I've always identified with the victims, I identified with the underdogs, the colonised, the beggars and peasants, the bacteria in the sponge, the mosquitoes and the ants. I would get my revenge one day. Revenge on whom? someone might ask. I'll show you, I said to no one.
I have always preferred to be in the background, an extra in the movie of my own life, but if people had to look at me at the funeral ceremony, at least I would be wearing a black turtleneck, which would convey a sense of mystery of the abyss.As with many eccentric characters, we learn as much about Helen from the things she inadvertently lets slip and from others' reactions to her – often either horrified or concerned – as we do from her own words. When she bumps into the parents of one of her brother's friends, the father says It's not good to talk like this. You're upsetting her. Look at yourself, and it isn't clear whether he's talking to his wife or to Helen. When her own parents respond to her behaviour, there often seems to be a dissonance that points to Helen's unreliability, her warped perception. It works the other way, too: Helen's many eccentricities make it close to unbelievable that she's ever managed to hold down a job and live with a roommate.
Why wouldn't anyone admit that a life is not a life but a deathward existence?So central is Helen's voice to this novel that I kept forgetting to care about the supposed plot, the 'mystery' of her brother's suicide. That was going to be my main criticism. But this thread is beautifully tied up in the last few chapters, as the veil of Helen's quirks is finally lifted to properly explore her grief and her brother's depression in a uniquely sensitive treatment of suicide.
At the time of his death, I was a thirty-two-year old woman, single, childless, irregularly menstruating …… If I looked in the mirror, I saw something upright and plain. Or perhaps hunched over and plain …………. Over time, I became a genius at being ethical, I discovered that was my true calling
I was chewing the apple thoughtfully when I bit into something soft with a very fine granular texture. I spat it out into my hand: pieces of black worm. Of course the apples in my adoptive parent’s refrigarator would be mealy and filled up with worms .. it made perfect sense for this disgusting house
Thomas looked down to the floor. He no longer looked sad and allergic, in fact, he looked upset, and I recognize immediately a face of disgust ……..
Is something bothering you? I said.
Well its just I don’t understand why you had to tell me all of that. What did any of that have to do with …….. anything?
Wait a second. I’m not done. I didn’t even get to the good part, there’s more
I should get going. I don’t feel very well
My room seemed to be situated so one could hear everything going on below in the house, and even though the house was so expansive and empty, from the cozy perch of my childhood bedroom, all alone, the house itself felt very small and cheerful. Listening to the voices from below brought me back to that time and how beautiful it was to be alone in first grade. To sit on my bed alone with a book like 'The Secret of the Wooden Lady,' and to hear human voices, and to know and truly feel that there were people below, and at the same time to not feel compelled to join them. It was a luxurious feeling to cherish, because the exact texture of that feeling happened so few times in my life.