William Deresiewicz's Your Face Tomorrow Pan

I’m abroad right now and don’t really ahve the resources to properly respond to William Deresiewicz’s negative review of Your Face Tomorrow in The Nation. This is the crux of it:

Now all this is interesting to think about and talk about: fact and fiction, action and contemplation, the past and the present, and so on and so forth. There is one problem, however, and like the novel itself, it is not a small one. For all its intellect and erudition, and despite its occasional flashes of feeling, Your Face Tomorrow is an incredibly boring book. A crushingly, demoralizingly boring book. My overwhelming emotion, as I read it, was one of an immense, hopeless, enraged sadness, at what the author was putting me through. The first two volumes were largely a heavy slog from one oasis of incident or interest to the next, through deserts of Deza’s interminable reflection. The final one was a death march to the finish. Marias’s meditative, melancholy, digressive style may work in his earlier books, none of which are a great deal longer than 300 pages, but Your Face Tomorrow is more than 1,250, for God’s sake. Imagine War and Peace if those philosophical excursions, where Tolstoy drones on about historical process, were expanded to fill the bulk of the book.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with a reflective, analytic style. James and Proust produced exquisite versions, and Marias is frequently and predictably compared to both. What’s wrong with his style is that it doesn’t go anywhere, neither forward on its own terms nor deeper into the story. Like an old woman telling her beads, Deza simply riffles through the same ideas and images and allusions over and over and over again, often in exactly the same language. Lovers betray us, people are blind, words are dangerous, time is the only truth, etc., etc., etc. Most of his perceptions are fresh and compelling the first time we hear them. But the second? The fifth? The fifteenth? Whatever one can say about these repetitions in thematic terms — that they embody Deza’s inability to escape from his obsessions, or history’s to break free of the past — on the page they are utterly numbing.

As off-base as this critique is, I do have to vie Deresiewicz credit. His review of the series shows that he “gets” most of YFT, even if his analysis doesn’t go beyond the basic points Marias is getting at. In other words, it’s a fairly basic reading of YFT, but it’s on-point enough that it would be wrong to accuse Deresiewicz of simply being out to lunch.

For now, I would like to suggest that in the group read of Your Face Tomorrow, there was more than enough evidence to contradict Deresiewicz’s judgment of YFT, in particular his idea that Deza’s many “commentar[ies] on the story” aren’t “essential to the story” (e.g. plot, character, etc). If you look at the group read, it’s fairly clear that Deza’s philosophical digressions are important constituents of both plot and character.

Also, if you look through our discussion of YFT, you’ll see that Deza’s obsessions are hardly repetitive, as Deresiewicz seems to believe. Quite the opposite, as we concluded as a group that Deza’s thoughts on the book’s main themes continue to shift in interesting ways as the book progresses. Yes, it’s true that Marias can be repetitive in YFT, and some of us did register a little annoyance at this repetition at various points in the book, but It’s simply false to assert, as Deresiewicz does, that Deza’s use of key metaphors and words doesn’t shift and deepen as the novel progresses.

Finally, Deresiewicz is correct in his assertion that Marias’ sentences are grammatically simple compared to those of Proust and James (at least in YFT), but it does not follow from this that “his prose is thin because the life it represents is thin.” As with Thomas Bernhard, who also tended to use relatively simple sentences, Marias’ makes Deza a complex character because of the sweep and the many twists to the story. Deza is not built on a syntactic level, as with Proust’s characters, so much on a the level of plot. This is, of course, no less valid of a way of building up a character over the course of a long novel, even if Deresiewicz fails to notice that.

Here’s Andrew Seal, from a YFT group read guest post, on Bernhard’s use of repetition vis a vis Marias:

The difference that I see here (and maybe it’s not fair just picking one Bernhardian sentence to illustrate it) is that the repetition of a phrase like “so-called” pulls the sentence in tighter to itself (mostly through the irony of the phrase); as it repeats, the sentence condenses. So too with the numerous mentions of time—the phrase “not for the end of October, as the doctors urged, but for early in October, as I insisted,” does not just tell us about the cantankerousness of the character, but herds the sentence into itself, quickly gathering back in the stray thoughts of the speaker as soon as they begin rushing away from him. Bernhard’s sentences are miserly; even at their most repetitive or most digressive, they are never allowed true expansion. (I like this style, by the way—that’s not a critique.)

Marías, on the other hand, has a truly profligate attitude toward repetition. Repetition occurs in his novels not just for patterning, but for redundancy’s sake. To some extent, it seems like Marías repeats and over-elaborates on his ideas because he wants to make sure that you’ll catch on even if you missed or forgot an earlier iteration of the word or the scene or the theme; if you were napping (and, let’s be honest, even James Wood nods) and didn’t perk up the first time you heard “fever” or “spear” or “face,” you’re going to be covered because it will certainly come around again.

Yet he is also caught up in a world that puts unusual pressure on this skill set, a world that is, if you’ve read John Le Carré or really any spy novel other than James Bond, also about redundancy, about creating repetitions that overlap and embed themselves within one another—games within games, wheels within wheels. Spymasters in these novels always have multiple plans in place—not just contingency plans, but ancillary plans, schemes that are deployed within other schemes to ensure that if one fails, something will still be gained. (James Bond is very different; if James Bond fails, everything fails, buttons are pushed, continents die.) In the game of espionage, everyone is being watched twice or thrice over, not just by opposing sides, but twice or thrice by the same side. Wheels within wheels—this is what Marías’s writing does. It says things “just in case” you missed or didn’t quite grasp what was said before, much as, in the anecdote Deza tells about the U.S. customs officials asking the question “have you any intention of making an attempt on the life of the President” to any traveler (187-188), bureaucracy (and particularly intelligence bureaus) do many things “just in case.”

Links mentioned in this post

William Deresiewicz’s Your Face Tomorrow Pan

Your Face Tomorrow Group Read

Andrew Seal’s guest post on repetition in Bernhard and Marias

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