Other People’s Problems
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis, review published in Consequence
“This hate is sacred.” (Bob Shacochis, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul)
“You’re a good hater…” (Graham Greene, The End of the Affair)
Recently I saw 12 Years A Slave, Steve McQueen’s film portraying the experience of Solomon Northup, a free man abducted into slavery. Like most people I find images of violence disturbing so I felt antsy when buying the tickets despite the excellence of the film’s reviews. Had I chosen to go to the cinema because I wanted to, or because I felt morally obligated? I was reminded of these mixed emotions after finishing The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, Bob Shacochis’s monumental and terrific novel dramatizing the truism that there is indeed, sadly, absolutely nothing one human being will not do to another.
In an article in the October 2013 issue of The Atlantic entitled “Should Literature be Personal or Political?” Shacochis mused on E.L. Doctorow’s assertion that the ultimate responsibility of the writer is to bear witness. “This duty presents us with a question, not an answer,” wrote Shacochis. “What is it exactly that the writer is obligated to witness?” To which we could add: What is it exactly that the movie viewer is obligated to view? What is it exactly that the reader is obligated to read? Many would argue (referencing our vigorous defense of freedom) that we are not obligated to read anything at all, not obligated to bear witness to what one character in The Woman Who Lost Her Soul terms “Other People’s Problems,” though I would argue as citizens we have a responsibility to pay attention to what our government does in our name. Nevertheless an obligation does lie heavily with the artist: to hook us, to hold our gaze, to (dare I even write it) entertain.
During his good-natured spat with David Shields in The Normal School (Spring 2010) about the merits of factual versus imaginative genres, Shacochis wrote “the exquisite paradox of fiction is that it provides us with a venue where we can be seduced by what’s true while at the same time remaining indifferent to what’s real.” There is no finer non-fiction account of American meddling in Haiti than Shacochis’s The Immaculate Invasion (1999), but those of us who have been blessed with the good fortune not to have endured first hand foreign occupation, ethnic cleansing, sexual degradation, or slavery, might still prefer some sugar to help our medicine go down. I went to see 12 Years A Slave because I was intrigued by the plight of a particular man, and although history texts could teach me about atrocities in the Balkans at the end of the Second World War, it takes Shacochis’s exceptional imaginative empathy to intuit that the smell of a human head burning in a fireplace might make an emaciated boy feel not only horrified but hungry. That addictive sweetener in our medicine is story. Our desire to know what happens next turns Other People’s Problems into ours.
An internationalist novel like The Woman Who Lost Her Soul has “an uncertain place in modern letters” wrote Tom Bissell in Harper’s Magazine (October 2013) and “much of this, surely, is due to the rise of so-called narrative non-fiction.” Furthermore, Shacochis in The Atlantic also noted that what he terms “the Literature of Domestic Experience” is more prevalent in contemporary American letters than “the Literature of Political Experience,” which compounds this “uncertain space.” He implies that some American writers of literary fiction may be embarrassed, conflicted, or even indifferent to the effects of our government’s actions inside and outside our nation—those Other People’s Problems. Therefore they ignore wider socio-political contexts, (just as many modern British writers avoid addressing the repercussions of the former British Empire), and produce fiction containing characters who bob unanchored from, and oblivious to, any religious, economic, or political shore, cast adrift from newspapers and TV. Popular mass-market authors often fill the creative vacuum left in the geopolitical arena when literary writers scarper to duck and cover, yet again abandoning Shacochis in that uncertain space. The publishing industry likes to pigeonhole genres and many critics have already described his new novel as first and foremost a political thriller. Come award season it is possible that The Woman Who Lost Her Soul will be overlooked, despite its intellectual and moral rigorousness, due to the nonsensical fallacy that because it is so breathtakingly entertaining it cannot possibly be Art.
Shacochis referenced Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina as one example of each of the literatures of political and domestic experience but these need not represent a dichotomy but flank a spectrum: Tolstoy placed the political in the foreground of the former and in the background of the latter, zooming in and out between the two as his narratives demanded. “In the work of all of our writers who engage with the political,” Shacochis argues, we still find “the boy, the girl, the laughter, the intimacy…. only the stakes have been rendered monumental.” Through a feat of similar authorial control, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul sits slap bang in the centre of this spectrum. Strip away its exterior geopolitical maelstrom—“the soldiers, the journos, the diplomats, the spooks, the analysts and lawmakers and civil servants, the aid workers, the deal-makers, the pimps of the spectacle,”—and you will reach the heart of the matter, a domestic tragedy between one man and his daughter. These exterior and interior notes play in metaphorical counterpoint “the father, the state, they are the same organism… they perceive threats through the same pair of eyes.”
Shacochis is a journalist, war correspondent, essayist, and teacher, and his story collection, Easy in the Islands, won a National Book Award (1985). The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, his second novel and fourth work of fiction, offers readers a humdinger of a prelude to the tragedy of 9/11. Split into five ‘books’ spanning four continents, (the central book set appropriately in former Byzantium, pivot point of the three faiths), it unfolds between 1944 and the turn of the twenty-first century, while orbiting a single, enigmatic woman whom, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll call Dorothy.
Actually this summary tells you damn all, therefore let me toss together some additional, random book-bait: Two years after the exodus of American troops from Haiti a woman dies on the “Highway to Hell,” leaving behind a husband charged with murder and a human rights lawyer roiling with frustration and guilt. A mother and son run the gauntlet of a lawless Croatia, which binds them together in “an umbilical cord of vengeance.” A father battles a squall in the Sea of Marmara, “like a deranged prophet,” risking the life of his child. A Special Ops soldier with a tender heart and a bruised patriotism finds himself caddying for the Friends of Golf, “a tribunal of raptor-eyed old berserkers,” who believe themselves divinely chosen to fund, steer, and smash “headlong through the bureaucratic clog into the wall of illusions and cowardice otherwise known as diplomacy.” A young woman, as mysterious, steely, alluring, and vulnerable as Rita Hayworth in the classic film noir Gilda navigates a masculine netherworld of spooks and duplicity, while fearing she has lost her soul, unaware it has been stolen by “the enemies of love.” The plot is a Gordian knot. I read it twice. Did a chart. Took notes. Compiled a list of characters. I urge you to read it and untie it on your own.
We all have a crazy friend. You know the one I mean: the one who talks the rest of us into skinny-dipping despite the scummy pond, the one who equates trekking alone in the jungle with a wee stretch of the legs, the one who is fast-talking and dry and grabs life by the balls. In terms of style and voice, Shacochis is that friend. He has never met an adjective he doesn’t like but that’s OK because he likes nouns and verbs too and knows how to use all of them. You don’t read his sentences; you chew them. You chew through the southwest wind “known to gather in its gust-blown skirts plum-colored clusters of malignant squalls,” and you chomp through men like wary dogs “shoveling gray porridge into sour-looking mouths, munching links of burned sausage, their weathered skin boasting an array of new scars and old scabs and dusted with grit and soot,” all the while clinging to the tail of a narrative thrashing ahead of you like a riled snake through tall grass. His style intoxicates because, like his characters, he takes enormous risks and you are never sure how far he’s prepared to go. The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is a perfect match of voice to story to form, and given this voice, this story, and this form, it could not be anything other than this length.
The events depicted won’t have you rolling in the aisles but there is some consoling irony. I chuckled grimly, like a crone straddling an abyss, when one woman remarks in the rubble of 1945 that what we need now “is another war,” while a Colonel predicts that “this is how peace would begin…. one beating at a time,” a gem of perverted reasoning which has proven so potent from Nanking to Belfast to Mostar to Kandahar and back. Between harrowing events Shacochis is not afraid to slow the pace and wax coloratura lyrical, not afraid to go way “out into the farmscape of old plantations where America first practiced being America, the moonlit antebellum mansions now timeworn anomalies between the more regular intervals of less-old sharecroppers’ shacks and lesser old trailer homes and featureless brick houses, the big estates parceled among the many, this field of new corn and this field of cotton and this field of tobacco and this pasture fallow, overgrown with abandonment or dispute, the land sandy and honeysuckled, wrapped in kudzu and flat as a lake encompassing a vast archipelago of pines, stray covens of fog along the bottoms where the sluggish rivers and creeks lay like serpents.” Anything less in terms of descriptive specificity and cultural mythology on a canvas this size would feel…paltry.
I am Hamlet the Dane,
Skull-handler, parablist,
Smeller of rot
in the state, infused
with its poisons…
… hoarders of grudges and gains.
“Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces” by Seamus Heaney
T
he Woman Who Lost Her Soul is rich with literary allusions, not least to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear, plays in which dysfunctional families and paranoid men scupper and pervert affairs of state. I live in Ireland where an end to those other people’s ‘troubles’ in the North has yet to be achieved due to what Seamus Heaney has termed the “tribe’s complicity,” that obstinate fealty to turn a blind eye when an eye is taken for an eye. In Shacochis’s novel powerful men, too, delude themselves that they are manipulating affairs of state for spiritual or patriotic reasons while their hearts, minds, and souls are marbled with hubris and a poisonous desire for revenge. I am reminded of the conclusion of “Lost Ground,” William Trevor’s shocking story about sectarianism, where parents stand at their son’s graveside having colluded in his death yet convinced “that was the way things were, the way things had to be: that was their single consolation. Lost ground had been regained.”
Moby Dick, Things Fall Apart, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—The Woman Who Lost Her Soul converses with many other fine books, and Shacochis’s literary lineage winds back through le Carré to Hemingway and Conrad. Perhaps he is most indebted to Graham Greene with whom he shares a fascination with the role of religion (and Catholicism in particular) in the subversion of power. When I considered Greene’s works in relation to this novel, however, I didn’t scurry to my bookshelf to pluck down The Power and the Glory or The Quiet American but The End of the Affair, that more intimate study of hate, lust, and revenge. “You didn’t own her all those years: I owned her,” insists its protagonist. “All those years you were mine not His.” Underneath his ‘political thriller’ Shacochis has given us a similarly gripping and nasty triangle between a man and a woman and God.
At one point the antagonist of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul—who, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll call Dorothy’s Dad—crawls like “a ranting penitent” to the House of the Virgin Mary near Ephesus in Turkey. He is a man who “could not separate the bigger things in life that sorely needed separation: patriotism and hatred, love and violence, ideology and facts, judgment and passion, intellect and emotion, duty and zealotry, hope and certainty, confidence and hubris, power and fury, God and retribution.” I paused while he was there—on his knees in 1986, surrounded by tourists and pilgrims—to pick up the novella, The Testament of Mary, sensing that Colm Toíbín’s stubborn Virgin had probably met the likes of Dorothy’s Dad before. And, sure enough, here she is talking to one of the disciples who had come to visit her at Ephesus during her enforced retreat following the crucifixion: “(My son) gathered around him a group of misfits… or men without fathers, or men who could not look a woman in the eye… Not one of you was normal.” Truthfully, the kindest thing that could be said about Dorothy’s Dad is that he is not normal. A justified sinner, perverted narcissist, and bespoke-suited Jehovah, he cannot conceive of his daughter as anything other than a scythe at the end of his arm, and his arm as anything other than the arm of the Lord. He is the first of many men in this novel who circle the beautiful Dorothy—with the critical exception of one—seeking to either seduce, groom, or control her, and if she refuses to meet their needs their reactions range from petulance to violence—through fear, inadequacy or rage they put “the Blame on Mame, boy.” Dorothy, together with some of the other women in this book, might echo Mary’s verdict on those biblical spooks, the disciples, who were so desperate to usurp her testimony or silence her voice: “There is something hungry and rough in them, a brutality boiling in their blood, which I have seen before and can smell as an animal being hunted can smell.”
I was struck when flicking through other reviews (which were predominantly glowing and written by critics of both genders) that, despite some oblique references to the desirability of Dorothy and her often inappropriate behavior, very few remarked on this specific aspect of the novel. Is it because the subject makes us uncomfortable? So it should: the majority of physical and sexual violence against women (and children) in war (and in peace) is, after all, perpetrated by men. Shacochis, via his male characters, gutsily enters the darkness at the heart of this irrefutable statistic, which makes (to me at least if to no-one else) the confluence of sex with subjugation, of desire with hate, this novel’s great white whale.
In order to adopt a persona for non-fiction or create believable and complex fictional characters, writers must be willing to role-play during the creative process. There were times, Shacochis remarked in The Normal School, when, for the sake of an authentic narrative, “I really needed Bob the Asshole to step forward here and take the bullet for me.” This suggests that David Shields’s passionate manifesto to torch fiction entirely in favor of “reality” might be just so much hot air given that some critics and readers often can’t tell the two apart. Shacochis should be commended for picking up a harpoon and chasing down this particular taboo and for giving us a hero who understood that his responsibility was to protect “every girl or woman from the man that he might be without an imagination,” but he must have known that by doing so, and in the manner he chose, he would risk accusations of condoning misogyny.
Amy Wilentz, writing in The New York Times (September 20, 2013) accused him of just that, making the amateurish error of mistaking the point of view of an author with that of his or her protagonists. A similar kind of criticism has been leveled against the film director Steve McQueen, who has been accused by a minority of critics of peddling torture porn because he had the audacity to visualize the term flayed. Some readers and critics are more horrified by what they see or read rather than by what it means, and seek retribution for their discomfort by shooting the messenger. Yet Shacochis’s pursuit of this leviathan is hardly Quixotic given that since I’ve been writing this review a woman has been gang-raped in India on the orders of a village elder, a Japanese media executive has defended the use of comfort women, the BBC reels from new revelations of systemic child abuse by television personalities, and a tech company has just released a plastic surgery app marketed at little girls. Given that I am a woman with two daughters, these are not Other People’s Problems, these are mine. Shacochis’s willingness to attempt to parse apart the gradations of behavior between natural physical attraction and using rape as a weapon of war, between a neutral male gaze and enforced patriarchy, required him to show the world as it is, not as we would want it to be. This is why the novel’s central love affair is so crucial to his moral intent. It counterbalances the range of experiences endured by Dorothy (and other characters) by unshackling sex from objectification or abuse and restoring it to its rightful place as a transcendent and tender conduit for love.
Wilentz in her review also bemoaned the novel’s lack of a tidy ending, likening it to an endless war without peace. “Resolution,” she wrote, “which makes a narrative complete, is not part of this story.” I would not presume to guess the existence or type of Shacochis’s spiritual affiliations (whereas Tolstoy’s are well-known), but until human nature learns to distinguish justice from revenge then war will continue to beget war, endlessly, and, if we truly believe that form should arise organically from content (something on which both Shields and Shacochis do agree) then a novel like The Woman Who Lost Her Soul could not, and should not, achieve narrative resolution. Surely that is the point?
Tyrants try to eradicate artists, writers, and poets. As Jeanette Winterson argued so eloquently about the power of art (“The secret life of us,” The Guardian, November 25, 2002), the reason behind such action is terror: terror that there is another way to live. No doubt as I write this the next hoarder of grudges and gain slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, against whom art must provide the final bulwark, declaring “we are…. even as their pages were being torn out,” and so we slot this novel amongst the other books up there on Czeslaw Milosz’s shelves, “derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.” All we have is the opportunity—no, the obligation—as individuals, to cleave as closely as we can to human empathy, to step outside our tribe’s complicity, sever the umbilical cord of vengeance, and celebrate that boy and that girl, that laughter, that intimacy, without losing sight of stakes that are always monumental. “Give me credit for being decent,” pleads Shacochis’s soldier-hero. “Or trying.”
