Say Something NiceI am revisiting the trauma of thinking about The Kite Runner. This trying exercise was precipitated by having to decline invitations to book clubs because the next selection for each was The Kite Runner. Though I have some nice things to say, my feelings are too hostile for my first book club meetings. But not for this blog.
What Should Have Bombed
When America becomes embroiled in one of its intractable Wars, some Americans become curious about the society they have forever altered. The timing of this novel could not have been better: it hit the shelves soon after our troops started looking for cover in Kabul. Critical of the Taliban (which is a bit like being critical of murder), The Kite Runner portrayed an impoverished society wrecked by its infatuation with violence.
What a relief. There was nothing for America to mess up. Newspapers succumbed to the national catharsis and held this tome up to the sun, pronouncing it the Key to Understanding. What, I thought, is freedom of press worth in the absence of freedom of thought? But Americans wanted reassurance, not second thoughts. A New York Times reviewer said it best: "This powerful first novel . . . tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love." Ah, yes, sometimes to love is to be cruel. We love you, Afghanistan, even as we destroy you.
Teenage Wasteland
Teenagers live in a world of guaranteed disappointment: the imagined prom night, city lights and a perfect kiss during the perfect song, is replaced by a limo driven by your uncle and a shaving mishap that won't stop bleeding. America's view of overseas adventures is similarly adolescent: visions of rolling over an inferior opposition is soon replaced by guerilla tactics, monsoons, sand storms, faulty equipment, redeployments, two-faced border states, and unclear enemy targets.
This book, too, suffers from adolescent ideation: it is not so much written in the first person, but the fantasy person. Characters are character traits - they could carry names like the dwarfs in Snow White - Honorable, Proud, Severe, Empathetic, Savage. The journey of the ceaselessly grating main character, I would name him Seeking Approval, becomes farcical as coincidences pile up. In the end, we turned to a novel unmoored from any sense of reality to learn about Afghanistan. What we got was escapism. And maybe that was exactly what was wanted.
Hitting Me over the Head
If the author wanted to convey clear lines of good and evil, he did better than any War President could. The future of the Taliban was embodied by a teenage bully who terrorized the neighborhood with brass knuckles and said things like, "Hitler. Now, there was a leader. A great leader." But wait. He not only grew up to be a Taliban leader, but also a sodomizing pedophile. Well, Houston, we have our antagonist.
Don't Throw Rocks in Glass Houses
Stripped of historical-political-religious-exotic-socio context, this novel sucks. The quality of writing ranges from poor to destitute. It's the narrator who identifies the virus:
A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: "Avoid them like the plague." Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on.
The narrator goes on to contend that there was no better way to explain a meeting with a friend, except to say that, "there was an elephant in the room." I disagree that referring to an elephant is the best way to show how two characters might avoid saying what needs to be said. But the author drops signposts like breadcrumbs as we follow a path that is not written so much as described. I also disagree that this was the first time he broke the rule against using clichés. The man had already been dropping clichés like a horse in a parade.
This reliance on colloquialism is a poor substitute for acute observation. And as the writer becomes lazy, so does the reader. At one moment in the novel, "sunlight washed over [the narrator's] face" just as he felt his father's glare on him "like the heat of a blistering sun." The only reason, I could think, that the editor didn't cast sunlight on this dribble is because he or she had been lulled into submission. Or realized this book was so riddled with cancer it was inoperable.
An Abridged Compendium of What Annoyed Me
"People," observes the narrator, "say that eyes are windows to the soul." Is this Chicken Soup for the Soul or a fucking novel? In this story, sunlight twinkles, trucks lumber, summer days are lazy, achievements are crowning, horses are fleet-footed, kites fall like shooting stars, and beggars are lame and wear rags, and not nice rags, but "tattered rages." The snoring of the narrator's father sounds like a "growling truck engine." Later, we discover his father's laughter is "a sound not unlike a truck engine revving up." Understandably, the publishers nixed the first proposed title, My Life with Someone who Sounds like a Truck.
In winter, snow has "nudged its way into every crack and gutter." Later on, spring showers had "nudged their way into summer." "Snow-burdened cypress trees" are "peppered among flat-topped clay houses." In early summer, the grass was "peppered with tangles of wildflowers." At one point, the narrator "breathed bricks," whereas at some point he detected a dank smell that "bludgeoned" his nostrils. I am considering, at this point in the novel, to bludgeon myself.
The Day After
Have you ever been captivated and moved by someone down and out, and, after you had given him or her five dollars and thought about his or her story a bit, felt betrayed and used? I felt that way here. Except it wasn't five dollars, but $14.95. The Kite Runner is a gripping novel that gripped the American public. We are not better for it.
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