To celebrate the life of the novelist Javier Marías, who died this week at the age of 70, I am posting a review of The Infatuations I wrote for the inaugural Los Angeles Review of Books print quarterly in 2013, which has never been published online. It’s one of my earliest publications and I won’t defend my juvenile style, but hopefully it’s a worthwhile look of the sentence-level habits of a great writer, including a few I have not elsewhere seen extolled. R.I.P.
Flatland: On Javier Marías’s The Infatuations
I come in praise of flatness, to suggest that “flat” is the word for the novels of Javier Marías, though it’s one deployed by critics almost always to diminish rather than acclaim. E.M. Forster warns against peopling a story with too many “flat characters” and behind him stands an army of critics who have used the word alongside its equivalents—“two-dimensional,” “one-note” —to describe any piece of writing that, like a Coke abandoned in the rain, lacks sufficient fizz.
Not all flatnesses are created equal, nor are they defined equally well. Suffice to say the word is never meant as compliment. At best, one finds John Gardner suggesting in The Art of Fiction that stylistic flatness “may be a virtue” in the limited case of “New Yorker ‘super-realist’ fiction” (whatever that is). Forgetting for a moment the special case of flat characters—a concept Forster contrasts to their rounded counterparts, both of which he believed were required for a successful novel—it is not always clear whether the critic has defined for himself the flaw of flatness. What does Henry James find flat in Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart”? Is it the same quality that Philip Pullman criticizes in Dan Brown’s “flat, stunted and ugly prose”? A provisional list of flatnesses might include language choices that fail to strike the ear or eye, sensory descriptions that encourage skimming, charmless dialogue, rote exposition, dryness, even a lack of emotional vibrancy. All of these flatnesses seem to be manifestations of the same phenomenon: a failure of the writer’s words to leap from the page and into the reader’s memory—a failure, in other words, to distinguish one line (or sentence, or scene…) from the next.
Marías’s novels began appearing in English over two decades ago. His writing is often described as “maximalist” and “digressive,” “philosophical” and “flowery.” It may be only now, with the publication of The Infatuations, his thirteenth novel, that he achieves the sort of mainstream success in the U.S. that he has long enjoyed in Europe. If he does, it will be thanks to another trait: his uncelebrated flatness, through which he manages to create worlds as rich, subtle, and hypnotic as our own. Marías’s work exemplifies the potentialities of that ostensible failure of the writer to startle or impress.
Consider a typical Marías paragraph. This opening of an early chapter of The Infatuations finds the narrator, an editorial assistant named María Dolz, at the apartment of a bereaved widow whom she barely knows but has often observed from afar, and who moments ago was lamenting the loss of her husband:
She fell silent and looked over at the adjoining room where the children were. The television was on in the background, so it seemed that everything was fine. From what I’d seen of them, they were well-brought-up kids, far more so than children usually are nowadays. Curiously, I didn’t find it surprising or embarrassing that Luisa should speak to me so openly, as if I were a friend. Perhaps she couldn’t talk about anything else, and in the intervening months since Deverne’s death, she had exhausted all those closest to her with her shock and anxieties, or she felt awkward about going on and on at them, always harping on about the same thing, and was taking advantage of the novelty of my presence there to vent her feelings. Perhaps it didn’t matter who I was, it was enough that I was there, an as yet unused interlocutor, with whom she could start afresh. That’s another of the problems when one suffers a misfortune: the effects on the victim far outlast the patience of those prepared to listen and accompany her, unconditional support never lasts very long once it has become tinged with monotony. And so, sooner or later, the grieving person is left alone when she has still not finished grieving or when she’s no longer allowed to talk about what remains her only world, because other people find that grief unbearable, repellant. She understands that for them sadness has a social expiry date, that no one is capable of contemplating another’s sorrow, that such a spectacle is tolerable only for a brief period, for as long as the shock and pain last and there is still some role for those who are watching, who then feel necessary, salvatory, useful. But on discovering that nothing changes and that the affected person neither progresses nor emerges from her grief, they feel humiliated and superfluous, they find it almost offensive and stand aside: ‘Aren’t I enough for you? Why can’t you climb out of that pit with me by your side? Why are you still grieving when time has passed and I’ve been here all the while to console and distract you? If you can’t climb out, then sink or disappear.’ And the grieving person does just that, she retreats, removes herself, hides. Perhaps Luisa clung to me that afternoon because with me she could be what she still was, with no need for subterfuge: the inconsolable widow, to use the usual phrase. Obsessed, boring, grief-stricken.
The paragraph is of standard length for Marías — if anything, it’s on the short side — and showcases many of the flattening features that appear on almost every page of his work: scant sensory detail, essayistic rhetoric, an analytical and emotionless voice, smooth transitions from scene into deadpan psychological analysis and back again. Marías rarely uses a paragraph break to signal a move into the narrator’s mind. (Another writer might do so just before “Curiously, I…”.) Such rhythms are instead accomplished by his unusual application of the comma splice, used to mark moments of toggling between scenic and ruminative modes, or between divergent variations on an observed or imagined event. We follow the narrator, comma by comma, as she circles around and revises her position, often by adding clauses (“they feel humiliated and superfluous, they find it almost offensive”) or by multiplying a description with clarifying alternatives to a chosen word (“other people find that grief unbearable, repellant”; “necessary, salvatory, useful”; “Obsessed, boring, grief-stricken”). Yet because the comma may be performing one of several functions, we can never predict whether a sentence is about to veer back into scene or else continue to accumulate modal possibilities.
The paragraph is also typical for its inclusion of an imagined mini-scene, complete with invented dialogue (“‘Aren’t I enough for you?’”), so that the reader is made to accompany Dolz’s full train of thought as she appears to zone out in the middle of Luisa’s living room to an undisclosed, half-realized daydream sequence. (But is she really zoning out, or does the paragraph take place instantaneously, or in just a few microseconds? Time itself is always implicitly distorted in Marías’s writing and its passage almost never directly remarked upon.) It’s impossible to skim these paragraphs looking for action in part because you will confuse what takes place in the narrator’s mental sandbox with what is taking place in the book’s reality—after all, the two may differ only nominally, and may be separated by nothing more than a comma—yet unlike other digressive and essayistic stylists, Thomas Bernhard among them, scenes do move forward in conventional ways, through dialogue and action, rather than circling forever around the narrator’s obsessions. Marías’s blurring between modal and actual realities might even be his most verisimilitudinous feature, one that feels psychologically true to the experience of an analytical mind in the same way that Bernhard’s writing feels true to an insane or monomaniacal one. Who hasn’t, during the private post mortem of a cocktail party or sexual encounter, imputed to a person what we merely feared or hoped they might say? In such scenarios, Marías’s characters dramatize even the “normal” mind’s tendency to confuse the real and the counterfactual.
For Marías, scenes behave like fantasies, thoughts like dialogue, reflection like action. The usual effects that writers employ against flatness, which also serve to demarcate the internal from the external worlds of a novel, are absent here. The rhythms of conventional scene are stripped away. Like a novelty rest-stop penny, the variegations of different narrative modes are flattened under the pressure of the protagonist’s attentions until each resembles the other. The resulting distortion is a depiction of the improvisatory life of the mind and its blurred, mediated relationship to the world: an effect accomplished by the suppression of stylistic and dramatic markers that, in typical novelistic narration, make clear the distance between world and dream.
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The Infatuations is Marías’s first novel to be narrated by a woman (an experiment that, in his 2006 interview with The Paris Review, he claimed he would never try) but otherwise follows in the mold of many of his previous books, setting an inscrutable, educated loner inside a pulpy and violent premise. On the first page of his breakout novel A Heart So White (1992), a young newlywed excuses herself from lunch, enters a bathroom, and shoots herself in the chest. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (1994) opens as a would-be adulterous wife dies unexpectedly in her would-be lover’s arms, forcing him to improvise a quick escape. The novella Bad Nature: Or With Elvis in Mexico (2010) commences with the raving monologue of a hunted man, and in the three-volume epic Your Face Tomorrow (2002-2007), a taciturn spy is drawn into progressively bloodier escapades, each of which receives the usual exhaustive commentary.
The Infatuations inhabits this same universe of analysis and intrigue, and even revisits some of the names and recurring characters his readers have come to expect. New to the world is genial voyeur María Dolz, the editorial assistant, who every morning before work watches a married couple, Miguel and Luisa Desvern, eating in a Madrid café. Most of Marías’s protagonists are unabashed people-watchers, and Dolz hardly needs to defend her hobby, although of course she does, at length: “It comforted me to breathe the same air and to be a part — albeit unnoticed — of their morning landscape, before they went their separate ways.”
The plot itself can be dispensed with in a few lines. First, Dolz learns that Miguel has been brutally murdered by a lunatic, in what the newspapers describe as a random assault. Soon enough, she works up the courage to approach Luisa, and their brief conversation leads to an invitation to the couple’s apartment, where Dolz meets and falls for the family friend who has taken it upon himself to care for the bereaved family.
Because this is Marías, we know right away that Miguel’s murder cannot be a random occurrence; his novels involve so few events that each must be positioned to withstand several successive theories and counter-theories, the internal composition of which forms the bulk of the text. It’s no surprise, then, that Dolz’s tenuous romance leads to her discovery of facts that complicate and disturb her picture of the Desverns’ relationship, and especially the circumstances surrounding the husband’s death. The surprises in Marías are never what or how, but why.
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Psychological acuity is one function of the peculiar flatness of Marías’s prose. Another is market positioning. The exaggerated and even grotesque flatness of his books distinguishes his universe from those of the supermarket thrillers his plots superficially resemble. Those books are flat in the fizzless sense—an unintentional flatness born of inattention or lack of talent. By applying the habits of those mass market paperbacks with ruthless and intentional exaggeration, Marías proves his awareness of and supremacy over them.
One form of mass-market flatness takes the form of a cinematic fallacy; pulp books are written like action movies, with little interiority, and an obsession with unlikely plot momentum. Here, too, Marías has inverted a genre weakness, turning it into a curiosity that marks his style, branding virtually all of his fiction. He literalizes this filmic obsession by appropriating the signifiers of mid-century thrillers and noir films, often to a semi-parodic extent: femmes fatale, spy tradework, misidentifications and double crossings. Like Murakami’s jazz records and whiskies, Marías’s attentions are nostalgic, imported from a 1960s childhood, and The Infatuations in particular reads as though Henry James had been commissioned to write the novelization of a lost Hitchcock film. As so often in Hitchcock (Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and The Man Who Knew Too Much all come to mind), Dolz becomes embroiled, through a combination of curiosity and kindness, in a sinister plot over which she has no control. She is driven into the Desvern’s lives because she is entranced by their apparent bliss, yet it is her feelings of pity for Luisa that cause her to approach the widow, and that later motivate her investigation into Miguel’s murder. And as with Hitchcock’s heroes, Dolz sees and hears too much.
James is one of the subjects of Marías’s charming biographical essay collection Written Lives, and the influence is clear. Throughout The Infatuations, the suspense of wondering whether Dolz will escape a scenario unharmed is regularly superseded by the Jamesian suspense of wondering when and how a particularly labyrinthine sentence will end. Marías also shares James’ interest in exploring the many faces of a single personality flaw, manifested differently in each of the main characters: in The Infatuations, that flaw is envy, the definition of which Luisa at one point reads to Dolz out of an old dictionary. Marías even resembles his predecessor in his willingness to embrace “un-literary” genres: for James, horror; for Marías, suspense.
Yet The Infatuations wears its suspense lightly and remains more concerned with thoughts on mortality and intimacy than with the thrills of physical danger, even if Dolz’s snooping leads her into a handful of threatening set pieces. (At one point, she contrives to walk half-naked into a room where two murderers are talking, so as to indicate to them that she was not eavesdropping on their conversation or even aware of their presence.) In these situations Marías’s flattening style serves a third purpose: building suspense. This is not a lesser effect than the others. It may be significant that few remember the novel and short story on which Vertigo and Rear Window are respectively based. Prolonging tension in a scene is at least as difficult to achieve in fiction as it is in film. Marías has mastered it with Hitchcockian confidence.
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The Infatuations shouldn’t really succeed. For a thriller, there are few surprises or plot twists, and the failed romance of the book’s second half feels contrived to reveal the circumstances of Desvern’s death. For a work of literature, the plot is pulpy, the motives soap operatic. Most of the characters are broad types whose innermost thoughts we feel we know immediately, or else, in the case of the narrator, inscrutable objects who remain inscrutable to the very end. Worst of all, these faults are typical of the Marías-verse: none of his books should succeed. They ought to plod along, excruciatingly slow and measured, unbelievable, as flat as packed dirt.
James Wood has praised the novel form as “the great virtuoso of exceptionalism”; it always wriggles out of the constraints critics invent in their quest to define and limit the Good. More so than any living writer, Marías has wriggled out of the received truths about monotony and repetition. It may be that when critics warn against flatness they are in fact decrying something else entirely, which often—but not always—accompanies flatness, and that renders our experience of the writing as reductive or dull. The thing may simply be dullness. Presumably this connotation is why Clancy Martin, in his recent review of Tao Lin’s Taipei for the New York Times, describes that book’s prose as “simple, but never flat.” Clearly, he means to say “simple, but never dull.”
Yet Marías’s flatness has nothing to do with simplicity. The flatness of his fiction — specifically, the way his narrative modes lie flush up against one another — permits hidden complexities to emerge from the slightest of plots. Marías has turned the “flaw” of flatness into a device that allows his characters to envision the world as an expanse of possibilities, counterfactuals, and anticipations. The result is a multivalent reading experience. On finishing The Infatuations, one feels part of a gemlike formation composed of surfaces both the writer’s and one’s own by some improbable act of literary crystallography: each flatness reflecting another, culminating in sharpness, brilliance, depth.
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xo
Ben