[.ca] Radiance (ISBN 0679313796)

Radiation Burns:
Here's a disagreement I've had too often with those who believe 'The Globe and Mail' is an excellent source for deciding what will, in the annals of time, be considered great accomplishments in literature. Do you notice that the book reviews in the G+M are enclosed in the 'Style' section? There's a hint for you. Also, note that most reviews in the G+M or 'Vancouver Sun' are written by novelists who, a lot of the time, publish in the same magazines/presses as the person they are reviewing. Do you notice that most 'reviews' these days sound like publicity? Exactly. It's not that 'Radiance' isn't a nice book. It is a nice book. Reviewed by nice people, who say nice things. Comparisons of Lambert to Tolstoy, such as the 'Vancouver Sun' made, seem a bit premature . . . but what the heck. Canadians are itching for something that rises above the medicore. Lambert is the latest creative writing grad who's supposed to bring us home a Nobel prize, but somehow her work -- like most -- gets forgotten very quickly. Now, this is a critical question the Canadian lit establishment needs to face up to . . . why can't we produce much beyond 'nice' books. 'Radiance' is a nice book. Well written, of course. Considering the tuition Lambert must have spent on her BFA, not to mention westside Vancouver rent, you'd hope that the investment would tailor her talents into something marketable. And the market machine is well behind this book, or at least it was. A few months after its publication, this novel has already enjoyed its run on the bookclub circuit and now occupies smelly second hand shops in Kitsilano. But why? After reading this nice, well-written book, I asked myself over and over. What's missing? What keeps this book, despite its pretenses to moral enquiry and historical probing, in the slow lane? First, a point about Hiroshima as a plot gimmick. Irene, the do-gooding service worker behind the Hiroshima Maiden Plastic Surgery Project, is portrayed as a manipulative gladhander, using Keiko as a prop for publicity and her own saintliness. On another level, Lambert is doing exactly the same thing in co-opting the Hiroshima story to give a moralistic edge to what is otherwise a novel that is not unlike a 'Desperate Housewives' episode. Surbuan ennui, domestic unfulfilment, neighbourly gossip, restrained inner selves. Ah, but we have the scarred little Japanese girl, coming to the West to be saved by our medicine. (See Ruth Ozeki's 'My Year of Meats' for the same ploy.) See, Hiroshima/Nagasaki literature has become a genre unto itself, in that the amount of material -- fictional and testimonial -- is extensive . . . and increasing ambivalent . . . about atomic warfare. On one hand, we have the famous Yasusada Poetry hoax, in which cut and pasted 'victim witness' lit, written by a Westerner, was accepted by literary mavins as the authentic voice of the silenced. It was a self-promotional hoax. And on the other hand we have James J. Orr's _Victim as Hero_, which describes nuclear lit as a vortex of mixed feelings . . . in goes guilt and horror, out goes culpability. We also had, as early as 2001, Dennis Bock's _Ash Garden_, whose success Lambert is clearly banking on. Lambert owes a rather large debt to witness testimony, such as Rodney Barkers "Hiroshima Maidens." And before Lambert, there was a bunraku play about the same topic. Try Kobayashi Yoshinori's manga on the aftermath of Hiroshima, the children who survived. I'll take visceral realism over polished, neutral prose any day. But why is the atomic bombing of Japan has become such a site of fancy for Western writers, whose knowledge of the occasion extends to little more than the packaged museums they visited on occasion? And is it worth feeling troubled that Lambert fixate on lithe, porcelaine female characters as their sacrificial lambs? Keiko is kokeshi doll cute -- haven't you seen the coquettish girl on this book's new softcover? Part geisha, part Hiroshima maiden! (It's actually quite unsetlling to see how often the female body is used as altar in Western Hiroshima fantasies . . .) What is Lambert trying to tell us about the moral checks and balances, of innocence and consequence, in the ways that the executioner tries to clean up its own mess? To be honest, I don't know. Lambert drags around a kind of aloof neutrality in the text . . . eager to avoid preaching, and lamely stumbing around in inconsequence. That to me was disappointing. The lack of vitality. I blame creative writing programmes, and the 'show don't tell' mantra that kills off anything that smacks of sentiment. Have to be aloof, coy, and observant -- don't let the documentors voice intrude. Be taut, pat, and careful. The result? A pantomine of suffering and third-person glances. Tova Reich's "My Holocaust", shocking as it is, had the anti-virtue of exponential satire to force us, as readers, to confront out own appropriation of the victim as a kind of snuff fixation. The moral fibre is weak. The psychology is cursory. The depiction of kokeshi Keiko is, bizarrely, verbose when it comes to her disfigurement, but glib when it comes to her memories.. The scar is everything in defining her. Makes sense -- the scar, described variously as a rhubarb or a jagged continent -- is the CENTRAL SYMBOL of the work. Public history, private lives, intersect in an irrepairable mark (or can it be 'fixed'?) The scar is a mash of green tea leaves to be interpreted by the observer! Ah, therein lies the dilemma! In Lambert's obsession with the Keiko, the warped kokeshi doll, I found neither emotional depth, historical critique, or profound contemplation. Keiko's memories of Japan -- gardens and spirit foxes -- is laughably orientalist. As hard as Lambert pushes to break stereotypes, she ends up perpetuating them none the less. This is exactly what Kitsilano thinks a 'Japanese maiden' is supposed to be. And Daisy (get the symbolism here?), who has miscarried twice (whoa, symbols!), do you think she might project a maternal instinct on to this wounded foundling. Spoiler alert: Daisy does project a maternal instinct on to this homestay waif! So what's the point of it all? I don't know. I appreciate the author doesn't want to 'preach', but having invoked so many 20th century traumas (race, atomic bombs, war, McCartheyism), you'd hope for a little verve in judgement. But this is what happens when Vancouverites pen stories about times and places they've never experienced. Imagination can only do so much. What does "Radiance" offer that Masuji Ibuse does not? The appropriation of Japaneseness, as site of enquiry, extends to Lambert as much as to Daisy. Miscarried voices turned into symbolism and cul-de-sac longings. Well written, lots of similes, but so ersatz. So ersatz. I know that's the part you don't want to hear. As a a review in a Australian paper poiinted out (which won't be published on the author's self-made fansite), the book clunks with historical and cultural inaccuracies. It sounds like nitpicking, but if you're going to fake an accent -- get the details right. "Radiance" is a strange, rather self-serving, wish-fulfilling footnote to the nuclear experience. I couldn't tell if it was an exercise in getting a creative writing grade, or a real attempt to get to the 'radiance' of compassion. I guess it does a bit, the roots and context are so frabricated that the whole experience feels very much like the clinical surgery performed on Keiko. With a scalpel, we can made anything write. It all comes down to Keiko, the GothicLolita postcard, the confiscated spirit to fill out a rather hollow shell of text. Without the Hiroshima backdrop, only a pedestrian tale of June Cleaver's bad day would remain. Just try to see what Japanese people had to say about the same subject. Please pick up Ota Yoko's _People of the Evening Calm_. It won't make it into the the Globe and Mail, but their perspective on the genbaku is so totally different from the Canadian ploy, which uses the hibakusha as a creative writing project and third-person thesis. Perhaps that's why this novel goes for style, rather than substance. The annoying beginning of the second chapter, in which Lambert orders us repeatedly to 'imagine' the scar according to a weird range of similes, is the height of such superficial bombast. Commune with the scar! Become the scar! If only the text could have become something more than its own ploy . . . could have had a real corker here.

A transforming Radiance:
Radiance is a daring, exciting novel that richly rewards re-reading. With strong characters and subtle symbolism, Shaena Lambert's book is a living treatise on the art and power of story telling: stories true and stories false. Examples of both abound. Dr. Carney's tale of Keiko's face is a false story, and Daisy, like Keiko, often tells herself false stories, is trapped by false stories; and yet, in the end, stories--grandfather's stories, Walter's stories, Keiko's stories, Daisy's stories--help us to survive, help us understand each other, however dimly, and give us hope for the future. Keiko's scar is very much in the tradition of Hawthorne's " The Birthmark," and her surgery had me thinking of American foreign policy and the current situation in Iraq, among other things. The more the Bush administration tries to carve its problems away, the more the problems keep bubbling back up. While I may be reading more into the scar than Lambert intended, I think her control of the story is strong enough to allow for such thoughts. I said Radiance was daring because I think symbolism can easily become mechanical and prescriptive, as it sometimes did in Hawthorne. Lambert's treatment avoids that, and achieves a fine fusion between Mansfield and Conrad. Overall, the book works wonderfully well. There is no let down or falseness in it, and it is marvellously open ended, "able to break into opposites." Among other things, Lambert constantly encourages the reader to "look at it one way, then surprise it, turning swiftly, to see a new visage on its changeable face." Looked at one way, Radiance and Keiko's story can be read as bleak. Nihilistic almost. The story hints at the futility of words and a possible hollowness in the protean shiftiness of story. If the face of the bakemono, the spirit fox, is truly wiped featureless, anything can be imposed on it; and you have to face the horror of moral relativity. Even if there is good and evil, words and stories and an awareness of history do not prevent Iraq following on Vietnam following on Hiroshima. Looked at another way, Radiance is a story of redemption. While the last paragraph is yet another story in a long succession of stories, a story as seemingly false and shifty as many that preceded it, it is a story that transcends its telling. This transcendence is not just a function of its intense lyricism. If it were merely that, we could simply dismiss it as yet another example of Daisy's hysteria, of her neurotic self-deceptions, an example of Daisy yet again projecting her own needs and desires onto Keiko. What could be more misguided and ironic, after all, than Daisy's vision of herself as a Christ figure, a Jesus of the Sacred Heart, carrying Keiko in the furnace of her heart! What redeems this last story is our realization that Daisy saved herself through it. The story predates the ending and it survives to serve as ending only because it helped Daisy to survive. If stories can mislead and betray, they can also save and transform. One final thought. Radiance lingers in the mind and effects unforeseen changes. When I re-read "The Birthmark" on-line, several weeks after reading Radiance, I found far more than the cautionary Frankenstein story I remembered. Right now, Radiance also has me re-reading and reinterpreting The Reader, Bernhard Schlink's exploration of Holocaust guilt and the ways in which the scars of the past can torment and distort the face of the present.

Radiance:
I couldn't agree more with the reviewers who call this book a brilliant novel; I found it beautifully written and entirely original. I love the way the author both resolved and didn't resolve the ending. Her portrayal of the characters was so interesting; just when one might think the characters could tip over into stereotypes, they never once did. It's an astonishing book, really. No wonder it got such outstanding reviews in the Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun etc. I will recommend it to all my reader friends.

This is an excellent book:
The Globe and Mail review this past Saturday, March 10th said it much better than I could -- this is a fantastic novel. Google it and you will see glowing reviews from across the country. Radiance is gripping and poignant. I highly recommend it.