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Sleeper’s Wake

Max Ross — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:00:55 +0000

John Wraith’s penis is a neat literary device. It provides character depth and motivation, and is central to every plot twist in the book.

John Wraith is at war with an unlikely, but very worthy, adversary: his penis. In this battle he joins a number of notable literary anti-heroes—Alexander Portnoy and Humbert Humbert probably chief among them—whose dicks are divining rods for locating fleeting pleasure and lasting trouble.

At forty-six, Wraith is virile to a fault, his implacable horniness getting him into all manner of disaster. And it’s real disaster—the marriage-ruining, death-inducing, life-defining sort. So in Sleeper’s Wake, the first novel by the South African writer Alistair Morgan, Wraith’s penis is actually a pretty neat literary device. It provides character depth and motivation, is the jumping off point for learning about Wraith’s past, and is central to every plot twist in the book.

Though his list of published works is short—a few short stories and this novel—Morgan is quickly establishing himself as a terrific writer in general (in 2009 he won the Plimpton Prize, an O. Henry Prize, and was nominated for a National Magazine Award in fiction), and a master at sex writing specifically. But the sexual content is often perverse. “Icebergs,” published in The Paris Review’s Winter 2007 issue, features a tense and oddly intimate relationship between a father and daughter (“Melissa stripped down to her bikini and briefly endured the sharp Atlantic water,” her dad narrates. “For a minute, as she trotted back in her towel, she could have been her mother.” In the next paragraph, she takes off her top.) In another story, “Departure,” Morgan wrote what must be the greatest hypothetical sex scene of all time. Three adults sit around a table—an unhappy couple plus a woman—and while they make small talk Miles begins to daydream:

As Miles pretended to listen he removed Miranda’s blouse with his eyes. Underneath was a lacy white bra, which came off with surprising ease. While Miranda explained something about a long-term relationship fizzling out and her needing to get away from Cape Town, Miles began to kiss her breasts, which were ample in size… Living in a small town, Miranda was telling Anna, was a major adjustment after the city, but she was enjoying the work in the hospital, especially as she was one of only two doctors in the town. It must be difficult at times, said Anna, as Miles moved behind Miranda and gently pushed her facedown onto the table with one hand, while slapping her buttocks with the other.

Alistair Morgan

These vignettes are effective and surprising because Morgan’s narrative voice is fairly dry, bordering on boring. But there’s a methodical poetry to it, too. As readers, we feel like we’re getting pure fact, and there’s power in that.

Sleeper’s Wake has about as much impact as one of Morgan’s short stories, which is actually plenty to fuel a typical novel, but given the relative scale one can’t help but feel that his short fiction gives more bang for the buck. At the beginning of the novel, John Wraith wakes up from a coma to learn his wife and daughter have died in a car accident that was his fault on both conscious and subconscious levels. The only solace he finds is in contemplating his own imminent death and “the relief that greets the gradual decline of man’s mutinous libido.” He spends the rest of the novel recuperating in Nature’s Valley, a remote South African vacation town on the coast of the Indian Ocean. In effect, Wraith’s convalescence leads to the restoration of his libido.

Wraith is an honest, if selfish, guy. While he certainly laments the loss of his family—as his surname hints, for a long while he feels like a ghost in his own body—“it is also dawning on me that a disturbingly large portion of my grief and sorrow is aimed at myself, not at having lost my wife or my daughter, but at having lost my way of life.” He takes responsibility for the accident, and as the story progresses, he takes responsibility for all his wrongdoings, which include an extramarital affair and a bout of plagiarism that ended his career in journalism. Still, at some point the valiant effort of taking responsibility is trumped by the actions themselves. Remorse isn’t really part of Wraith’s emotional vocabulary, either. It’s more like he’s saying to himself, “Yes, I did this, yes it was wrong. Okay, I’m busted. Let’s move on.”

Though Wraith doesn’t make excuses for what he’s done, he does speak at length about the human capacity for evil, a subject he came across while writing a never-to-be-finished book about genocide. “We are all capable of surprising cruelty,” he says. “It is something that makes us human.” The book takes its name from a scientific study on “sleepers”—aggressive personality traits that remain latent until awoken by particular conditions. Everyone, Wraith asserts, is susceptible to these, and one wonders if this is a feeble attempt to justify his errant nature with weak philosophy. (Sleeper’s Wake is also part of a Bach cantata, but with no overt connection to Morgan’s novel.)

But what is Morgan telling us when he suggests that the two impulses humans are incapable of resisting are sex and evil? Is sex then a mini-manifestation of our latent evil urges? The aggressiveness with which Morgan’s characters pursue satisfaction is a little alarming. And yet, it’s convincing. In all his writing, Morgan seems to be tackling sex head-on as a subject that’s not merely a preoccupation—the way Philip Roth might be said to tackle it—but as something integral to human life, something unavoidable, like sadness or death or the passing of time.

Philip Roth, originator of Alexander Portnoy

In Nature’s Valley, Wraith meets a family—Roelf and his children, Jackie and Simon—that’s also come to recuperate. One night in Johannesburg, a group of hooded robbers broke into Roelf’s home and beat his wife to death. Also, they attempted to rape Jackie, his seventeen-year-old daughter. To cope, Roelf has wrapped himself in a “religious Elastoplast”; Simon’s willed his iPod headphones to become anatomical extensions; and Jackie has become a sexual delinquent.

She makes advances on Wraith. At first Wraith is reluctant, but then, being himself, he submits. Several episodes consist of Wraith philosophizing about why he should or shouldn’t fuck Jackie, sometimes while she’s standing naked in front of him.

Once Jackie gets folded into the plot—once she becomes the plot—Wraith seems to forget completely about his car accident. There is no cohesion, no layering of the two stories. Rather, Wraith’s previous life seems merely an excuse to get him to Nature’s Valley, where the real action is.

Except that real action is unimportant—it’s something Wraith is caught in, but nothing that defines him or changes him. And therefore, it’s nothing that really changes the reader. Whether he sleeps with Jackie or not seems about as important as whether he gets ice cream after dinner—sure, he’d prefer it, but it’s not going to make or break his meal. Because it’s the only drama around, and it leads to other minor dramas: Jackie’s brother, father, and potential fiancée all come close to catching them in the act, and unfortunate consequences ensue, all of which Wraith would prefer not to happen, but which he deals with in his typically detached manner.

Sleeper’s Wake is still transfixing; Morgan is a talented writer and doesn’t flinch when it comes to awkward or awful moments. But the novel’s many intense subplots never end up fueling anything larger, and never converge into a whole. In the end, we’re left to assume that Wraith has indeed gotten over his loss, but it’s the literary equivalent of a wet dream: We’ve come to the conclusion, but we’re not quite sure how.

The Political is the Personal

Max Ross — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:00:18 +0000

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s new memoir about life in the Socialist Workers Party shows the effects of political idealism on a child’s upbringing

Politics are kind of like life. In fact, it’s really easy to confuse the two. How many of us got caught up in Obamamania, blurring the line between the candidate’s success or failure and our own personal joy or shame? Maybe it’s because politics can affect things like money and education and health care and law, all those public affairs that impact our daily lives. Ultimately, though, politics fails to address those messier, private things that make us human: emotions.

“The ideological,” says the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, “was merely a superfluous veil for the real concerns of life.” If such is the case, then Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh and Martha Harris—the central figures in Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free—aren’t just wearing veils, but full-length polyurethane bodysuits.

Skateboards is a memoir about growing up within the American faction of the Socialist Workers Party. Though they separated when he was an infant, both of Sayrafiezadeh’s parents remained loyal to the cause, reliable mouthpieces for the party’s creeds and ideals. When the party told them to vote for Clifton DeBerry in the 1964 presidential election, they voted for Clifton DeBerry. When a boycott of grapes was called for due to unfair labor practices, the Sayrafiezadehs stopped eating grapes.

For people like Sayrafiezadeh’s parents, alignment with a political party is tantamount to inventing an identity. One can erase the past and say, “This is what I stand for. This defines me.” Through the party, they transformed themselves from students at the University of Minnesota into political operatives, pawning their family histories for the Cause. But that transformation had devastating consequences for Saïd, who spent much of his childhood living in a state of unnecessary deprivation:

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

“The difference between us and the other poor families… was that our poverty was intentional and self-inflicted. A choice chased after, as opposed to a reality that could not be avoided… My mother actively, consciously, chose not only for us to be poor, but to remain poor, and the two of us suffered greatly for it. Because to suffer and to suffer greatly was the point.”

There aren’t many nuggets of self-revelation in Skateboards; nor does Sayrafiezadeh weigh in on the ways in which his family’s experience might be indicative of American life. But his narration is measured, steady and fearless. Here is the scene where Saïd is abandoned by his father. Here is the scene where Saïd is raped by a party member crashing in their apartment. Here is the scene during the Iran hostage crisis where his schoolmates ridicule him for being Iranian. Proper attention is administered to each vignette, but with an equanimity that avoids sensationalism or self-exploitation.

What emerges of Sayrafiezadeh’s character emerges slowly: a boy (and man) who desperately wants to be normal and who, despite what he endures, has a keen sense of what normal is. Nine-year-old Saïd longs to have two parents and to be included in the neighborhood pick-up baseball games; the adult Saïd wants a stable relationship with his co-worker, Karen. But these are unlikely, nearly impossible, dreams.

His parents’ belief in the socialist cause is mostly sincere, but the party itself is so inconsequential that, in Sayrafiezadeh’s narration, it comes off as a crock. Sayrafiezadeh shows readers the stark discrepancy between dream and reality, between believing in ideals and believing an imminent revolution will make those ideals actually matter. We are meant to smirk when we read, “President Clinton had just begun a four-day bombing of Iraq… and in response the Socialist Workers Party called an emergency meeting to map out a strategy on how the working class should best respond.”

Of course, the party’s absurdity isn’t the point of Skateboards, but rather its relationship to Sayrafiezadeh’s life. What dominates the book is Sayrafiezadeh’s father, or more accurately, his father’s absence. Mahmoud left home when Saïd was nine months old, “to fight for a world socialist revolution.” The author seizes upon his father’s infrequent semi-affection, the sporadic letters and telegrams and appearances at political rallies. His filial pride is, amazingly, never lost. Even when Mahmoud implicitly disowns his son, referring so him as “Saïd Harris”—his mother’s last name—Saïd feels no betrayal. Their relationship is awkward, tacit, disharmonious, and beautifully rendered. “His phone calls grew increasingly infrequent until they ceased altogether,” says Sayrafiezadeh, “and our joyful reunions became more like occasional punctuation marks in long paragraphs of silence.”

Likewise, Sayrafiezadeh’s mother, Martha, seems unable to rid herself of her love for Mahmoud. She agrees to remain married to him after he leaves her so that he can continue to live legally in the United States, even after he takes another wife in Iran. Though she is the lone parent raising Saïd, their household is greatly influenced by the absent Mahmoud, whose exploits—including an unsuccessful run for president of Iran—are sometimes chronicled in the socialist newspaper The Militant. Gradually, her ties to the party weaken—here she lets Saïd eat a single forbidden grape, here she refuses to take a mandated job as a manual laborer—but her suffering never eases.

Sayrafiezadeh describes his mother as “a victim of the world, at the mercy of those more powerful than she.” Her suicide attempt is yet another ordeal the young Saïd must endure. It starts to become clear that Martha uses the socialist party as a shield, diverting her emotional energy into its causes to distract herself from her own shortcomings. Unfortunately for her, the party is itself dysfunctional, just as fallible as the humans that support it.