Big Wars and Small Ones

"Zone Rouge," "Grand Rapids," and "Perfection"

There is only so much time in the week and for the last few years I, subconsciously or otherwise, have done away with reading contemporary fiction in favor of going through the back catalogs of postmodern authors and the stack of nonfiction that informs my own work as a journalist. I tried to change that slowly this year, both out of curiosity and to see what sort of competition I’m dealing with. The result has been a mixed bag. Much of the buzzier fiction I read this year seemed like it was written by authors with one eye on a Netflix deal or, maybe, by authors who have simply watched too much Netflix. (See: “Come and Get It¹.”) The books are riddled with the modern plague of exposition, as if there is an expectation that someone will be reading a book at the same time they’re scrolling Instagram. Who knows, maybe they are.

That being said, there are a trio of novels I’ve read the last six weeks that escaped that mode with varying degrees of success. (I also read David Szalay’s “Flesh” of which much has already been written by much smarter and more adept critics, so I’ll spare you my thoughts other than the main one which is that you should be reading “Flesh.”)

“Zone Rouge” by Michael Jerome Plunkett

I know I just said that a lot of authors are treating their books like TV shows and how that’s bad but I think Plunkett has done something very clever with his debut novel and inserted both a sitcom and a prestige drama into a book that is about the big and small wars we wage. “Zone Rouge” is about a crew of French démineurs working to clear the countryside around Verdun of the millions of undetonated ordnance from World War I. The work is dangerous drudgery. Bombs filled with explosives or shrapnel or mustard gas or chlorine stick out of the mud like metal mushrooms, and the démineurs extract them, very carefully, by hand before safely detonating them. Deaths are infrequent, but the specter of being turned to “pink mist” is always whispering in their ears as they clean the mud and moss from the undetonated duds.

Plunkett makes wide use of the lexicon that démineurs have for their “iron harvest;” they call the unexploded shells petit crapaud (little toad), foetus avorté (aborted fetus), and bébé chauve maléfique (evil bald baby). The safe-detonation complex is called the “bomb garden.” By turning the synthetic into the organic, Plunkett makes a war that ended 100-years ago into a living, breathing thing and encases the minor skirmishes that the characters face into minor battles that exist in its shadow. Even the bombs become flesh; men cradle them like babies and, in a brutally remarkable, visceral opening to the novel, cows chew them like poison cud.

But about those TV shows. Hugo LeFleur, the bumbling, philandering mayor of an uninhabited town near Verdun—the position is somewhat honorary, since the area around the village is so riddled with bombs no one is allowed to live there—is like a horny used car salesman, the kind that would make for a great supporting character in some ambitious comedy. He has ideas—about salvaging beetle-ravaged wood, about the discovery of near-intact skeleton from the war, about run clubs and how to use to pick up women—but it’s clear that he’s a contemptuous figure, one that residents would rather avoid like the buried munitions that surround the town. You can imagine a series when everyone moans the minute LeFleur appears onscreen.

Conversely, the démineur Ferrand Martin is something of a stoic who carries his memories around like a curse. The bombs have had their way with Martin in more ways than one, and there are times when it seems like Plunkett is giving Martin the Tony Soprano treatment in psychoanalyzing Martin beyond saturation. Still, you get the sense that Plunkett sympathizes deeply with the characters that inhabit Zone Rouge, that they are not metal baubles to be examined but figures shaped by the dark hand of incomprehensibility. We cannot ever know one another fully even as the bombs fall overhead.

“Grand Rapids” by Natasha Stagg

Novels that depend on very young protagonists can often get sucked into turning characters into comically capable caricatures. I chalk this impulse up to the theory that authors feel as though they’re being kind to their adolescent selves by trying to cram 20 years of therapy into a 19 year-old’s brain.

“Grand Rapids” has no such issue, and is a major reason why I enjoyed it so much. The story is a novel-length flashback, where Tess recalls a teenage summer from a decade before. The layered narration creates both a closeness and a detachment; imagine how you talk about your own memories from 10 years ago and you’ll get a sense of what I mean.

The lack of totalizing context is also a refreshing, realist departure from how much of contemporary fiction is explaining every little detail of a character’s thinking. There is never the sense that Tess is leaving something out, but she toggles between haziness and lucidity in the way that young minds do and captures that teenage feeling of the world being full of muted significance. There is none of the overwrought descriptions of youthful ennui that can turn soak these sorts of novels in treacle, either. It could be that Tess isn’t that far, spiritually or geographically, from her 15 year-old self and therefore doesn’t have any grand narrative to unveil, any victories to crow about. It is a a little life, but a life all the same.

“Perfection” by Vincenzo Latronico

One of the best pieces of advice on criticism I’ve ever received is to be curious about why you dislike something. It’s not that I disliked “Perfection” exactly. It’s wonderfully written and a remarkably well-detailed portrait of the creative class doldrums, something that I can immediately identify with right down to the stint living in Berlin and going to Berghain and Renate and Tresor as if that was the answer to something. But something didn’t sit right with me, even as I finished the slim book in a single day which isn’t a terrible common thing for me to do.

I did consider for a moment that my irritation came from the mirror being too close to my face. Latronico’s partnered subjects, Anna and Tom, could very well be any of a dozen couples I know that work in creative services, surrounded by plants and Danish furniture and exhaustion. I myself have looked for the exit ramp from my professional and personal lethargy in other locales, as if I could run away from myself. It felt a bit like reading “Airspace: The Novel,” where we’re meant to take some moral lesson from culture and aesthetics being flattened instead of it being part of modern life.

But where I was expecting some biting critique of the global neoliberal elite, I found an odd sort of bitterness. Latronico’s detached description of two intertwined lives rumbles like a disdain machine: Look at these losers who do all the same things as everyone else in their circle, aren’t they useless little automatons? In one section, Anna and Tom volunteer to try and help newly arrived Syrian refugees. They create meticulously-designed German-Arabic phrasebooks, and use their apartment as a collection drop point for donations of blankets and clothing. I get the impression that Latronico is trying to skewer liberal impulses through showing how useless these gestures are. At one point, Anna sees that the phrasebooks have been discarded and trampled over in the refugee camp.

It’s funny to watch good intentions get punctured by the real world, but I also wondered if the cynical alternative would have been more admirable, or if Latronico was making less of a judgement than an observation. My friend Peter C. Baker said that I should read “Perfection” as a “depressive” work rather than a critical one, which I think is actually a better way of understanding the book and why I flipped between enjoying the work and being totally bored by it. Perhaps it’s not that Anna and Tom’s lives are useless specifically, but that life itself is.

1. I say this as someone who enjoyed “Such a Fun Age.”