FICTION: Jayne Anne Phillips'snew novel, Lark and Termite maximises the minimal in celebrating the little heroes of a little community, ÉILÍS NÍ DHUIBHNEreviews the book for The Irish Times
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS’S work is categorised as a typical example of “lower-middle-class minimalism” in a study of creative writing in the US I have recently read (and will be reviewing shortly in this newspaper). I hadn’t encountered the category before, maybe because I am not as well up in literary criticism as I should be. It refers to writing by authors whose background is lower middle class, even if their later lives are not, and whose work tends to focus on that past. The classification fits this latest novel of Jayne Anne Phillips like a kid glove.
The novel is set during two days at the end of July 1950, in South Korea, and during a five-day period exactly nine years later in Winfield, the tellingly named nondescript town in West Virginia. The main characters are Bobbie Leavitt, army corporal, his son Termite, and Lark, Termite’s half-sister. (Characters in Phillips’s novels have irritating names, like Sarah Palin’s children. They are, however, meaningful in the fictional context.) The children’s mother, Lola, commits suicide soon after the death of her beloved husband in Korea. Lark and Termite are cared for by her sister, Nonie.
Termite, aged about eight, is severely disabled, unable to walk or communicate except by making musical sounds, and with his eyes. He is, however, extraordinarily sensitive, and appears to understand more about people and the natural world than less afflicted people. Lark is 17, bright and pragmatic, and completely devoted to Termite. She looks after him during the day, saving him from an institution which she knows he would hate. At night she takes a typing course, in Miss Barker’s secretarial college “over the Five and Ten”. She is top of the class and her aunt has high hopes for her (“Barker’s girls can even be legal secretaries if they go all three years”).
MOST OF THE novel focuses on a great storm in Winfield. Just before it breaks, a Christ-like figure, who could be interpreted as the ghost of the departed Leavitt (with whom he shares the name Robert, and blond hair) visits Lark and Termite in the form of an enlightened social worker. He reminds me of Cinderella’s fairy godmother – but also of a similar ghostly figure who appears before a storm in the last novel by Alice McDermott — another exponent of lower-middle-class minimalism. I am unsympathetic to ghosts who pop in to disturb the realistic waters of minimalism, but in Phillips’s mesmeric world, of sounds and sights and textures mediated through the highly charged consciousnesses of her characters, he does not jar.
Not much.
The storyline in this novel is much less important than its language and psychology. Indeed, while the plot is sturdy enough, it is subsumed into the complex patterning of the book – so that, for instance, a revelation about Lark’s paternity is much less dramatic than it might be in a less artistically ambitious novel. Indeed, we experience the novel quietly, as if we are sitting in the inner ears of the four characters who narrate the story – sound, tone, as well as image, are at least as significant as narrative in this peaceful reading experience. And character is what is most important.
This perhaps explains why, although the novel is absolutely peppered with huge tragic events – war, bombs, suicide, disability, poverty, floods, orphans – its overall effect is calming, and also cheering.
Phillips paints an optimistic picture of human nature. Her main protagonists share various qualities but particularly this one: goodness. How these people love one another, and what an unusual state of affairs in fiction! In the place they inhabit, which is poor, threadbare, and very dangerous, ties of blood and neighbourliness imbue life with meaning and happiness. Unsupported by the structures or rules of formal religion, people are, mostly, virtuous and unselfish. Even in the chaotic theatre of war, Leavitt is killed while trying to help a small Korean family escape from American bombs.
IT IS NINE years since Jayne Anne Phillips wrote her last novel. On a first reading, I could not have said that this was worth waiting for. It is anything but striking, initially. Although it deals with the Korean war, which brings to mind the more recent American war, it presents no big statements about war or peace, or terrorism, or the US. In the context of contemporary fiction, it seems far too low-key to matter much one way or the other. And although the prose is perfect, there are no verbal pyrotechnics, no showing off.
But quiet waters run deep. For all its apparent focus on style and technique, Lark and Termiteis a book of ideas, a thoughtful contemplation on the nature of human goodness. Phillips celebrates the little heroes of the little community. She is describing the sort of kindness – love actually – which transcends bleak circumstances and acute misfortune, to illuminate the most ordinary of lives. Her heroes are the ignored, the unimportant. The lower middle class, if you will, or in the words of one of our own writers, the trusting and the maimed.
This is the sort of society which Raymond Carver describes with compassion, but also, often, with a strong streak of contempt. In Phillips’s book, however, these people, as invisible as termites in the wall, sing like larks at the very gate of Heaven. Their town looks boring as hell to me. But it is the opposite. Not for nothing does she call it Winfield, in an act of nomenclature which cunningly maximises the minimal.
And it is this revelation of extraordinary virtue, secreted in the heart of the book and in the heart of horrible Winfield, and even on the battlefields of Korea, which marks Lark and Termite as remarkable. It is a strange and joyous book which will yield much to the patient reader.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a fiction writer. She is currently teaching on the MA course in creative writing at UCD
Lark and TermiteBy Jayne Anne Phillips Cape, 254pp. £15.99