Fiction Flirting with Reality

War & Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans.  Vintage.  286 pp.  $16.95. *****

How Should a Person Be? By Sheila Heti.  Picador.  306 pp.  $17.00. ***

War & Turpentine is an absolutely stupendous novel which I can’t recommend highly enough; it had me rapt the whole time I was reading it, and I would happily have gone on reading it for days.  Stefan Hertmans is a marvelous stylist (I say that even though I’m reading in translation) and an intelligent sensitive writer, who includes just the right amount of detail.  I hadn’t heard of him until my friend Sally alerted me to this novel.  She remains my most reliable book recommender, because she knows what I tend to like, but rarely does she just write and say Read this novel, as she did with this one.  I bought it immediately.

It seems to be a rumination on some notebooks Hertman’s grandfather left behind; the man fought in World War I and subsequently devoted his life to painting, hence the title (which strikes me as awkward, perhaps the only wrong note in the whole project).  The author actually includes some reproductions and some photos.  The whole project has the air of being a leisurely memoir rather than a novel.

But then in the middle Hertmans recreates his grandfather’s war experience.  I’ve read various accounts of war (to mention just the famous ones, War and Peace, A Farewell to Arms, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad) and have always felt that any true account of war becomes an anti-war screed; we can’t understand why humans would treat each other this way.[1]  But I can’t remember ever reading a more harrowing account of war than this one.  I’ve always heard of World War I as being particularly brutal and senseless, and this account seems to confirm that, men living and fighting in trenches that were only a stone’s throw from the enemy, never really advancing or capturing land at all, sometimes occupying the same trench for weeks or months.  I couldn’t believe how many times Hertman’s grandfather was wounded and kept having to return to the front.  The older men running the war seemed unfeeling in the extreme.

All of that was especially heart-breaking because it was surrounded by the wonderfully civilized and cultured life the man led after the war, though he wound up not with the woman he loved, but with her chaste and repressed sister.  This book reads like a quiet memoir which opens in the middle to a vision of hell, then closes around it again.  The beauty of this larger story—just the idea of a man ruminating this way on his grandfather’s life—leaves me hoping it’s as based on fact as it seems to be.

How Should a Person Be? is a different kind of book altogether.  I picked it up because it was on a list in the Times of fifteen recent important books by women.  The Times wasn’t saying these were the best recent books by women, just that they are in some way important.  (I mention that because I just read my first Donna Tartt, who is a much more accomplished writer than Heti, and she didn’t make the list.)  I suspect the importance of this book has to do with the way it flips back and forth between fiction and reality.

Early in the book, for instance, our narrator buys a small tape recorder, and she subsequently tapes a number of conversations with her best friend, sometimes concerning a play that the narrator is trying to finish but is stuck in the middle of.  I suspect that these are actual recorded conversations, perhaps slightly edited.  They have the offhanded and sometimes senseless air of real conversation.

Of course, no piece of writing captures reality.  Even if you make every effort to write down exactly what happened, you can never capture it, and if you record conversations you’re not including the facial expressions of the people who speak, or what was happening around them.  All those things are a part of the experience.

Heti includes these random recorded conversations in the book, along with various e-mails, and there is an offhanded quality to her prose as well.  Take these two paragraphs from early in the book.

“We are all specks of dirt, all on this earth at the same time.  I look at all the people who are alive today and think, These are my contemporaries.  These are my fucking contemporaries!  We live in an age of some really great blow job artists.  Every era has its art form.  The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel.

“I just do what I can not to gag too much.  I know boyfriends get really excited when they can touch the soft flesh at the back of your throat.  At these times, I just try to breathe through my nose and not throw up on their cock.  I did vomit a little the other day, but I kept right on sucking.  Soon, the vomit was gone, and then my boyfriend pulled me up to kiss me.”

I have to admit that I was startled by the sudden segue into blow jobs, even more startled by the further details (more than I actually wanted).  We have to give Sheila Heti high marks for honesty, but I was surprised throughout the book that the man she seems most attracted to, almost unbearably attracted to, treats her terribly, more or less like a porn star.[2]  (When she finally gets off her knees, and lies beside him on the bed, he’s not able to do anything.  He wasn’t interested in her as a person, just that one act, in that particular way.)

I also, frankly, don’t understand the idea of someone spending years and years writing a play that she’s having trouble with.  Ten years, is the amount of time I seem to remember.  Time to move on to something you can do, even if it was just ten days, rather than ten years.  Someone had apparently commissioned this work.  Why, when the author didn’t seem interested in doing it?

I’m tempted to answer, to the question that this title asks: Not like this.  At one point these women believe their creativity is enhanced by going out night after night and getting plastered, taking cocaine, hanging out with strangers.  They seem to find that their heads are clearer for work the next day.

Even if that’s true, it’s not how a person should be.  Don’t ask the question unless you want an answer.

[1] I should mention one more book, not so famous.  A Tale for the Time Being includes a hair-raising account of various episodes from World War II.  Great book.

[2] And she doesn’t get no $130,000 neither.