Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi

There’s a scene in Ghana Must Go where Olu Sai is asking his girlfriend’s father for her hand in marriage. Dr. Wei doesn’t say no exactly; rather, he begins a speech on what he views to be the downfall of the African male:

“The fathers don’t honor their children or wives,” he says. “I’m assuming – and it is just as an assumption, I acknowledge – that your father left your mother to raise you alone?” 

It’s an unfortunate truth that Dr. Wei is correct in his latter assumption, but Olu stands his ground wonderfully. He doesn’t defend his father or try to provide explanation, instead he turns the tables on Dr. Wei, pointing out that despite his insistence that children follow their father’s example, Dr. Wei’s children, in their very choice of mates, are not.

It’s a fabulous moment. For a second you’re thinking, what a horrible man… but wait, he’s hit the nail on the head there – and then: but that’s got nothing to do with Olu… and then Olu steps up to the plate and takes back the power. Ghana Must Go is full of moments like this, Taiye Selasi weaving in and out with her characters, twisting and turning, all in exceptional prose and – it may seem strange to say it – just brilliant, brilliant use of punctuation. I’m a bit of a stickler for punctuation, and there are lots of perfectly enjoyable writers who don’t really understand it. Not Taiye Selasi; it’s like she has some sort of symbiotic relationship with punctuation, breathing it into her writing to create wonderful, unusual, thoughtful sentences that were just a pleasure to read and pick apart and consider. Taiye Selasi is a writer’s writer.

Told in three parts – Gone, Going, and Go – Ghana Must Go is the fictional biography of the Sai family. Their father, Kweku Sai, is Ghanaian; their mother, Folasade, is Nigerian; the four children, Olu, twins Kehinde and Taiwo, and the late surprise Sadie, are American. As we enter the story, Kweku stands in the garden of his house, alone, dying, but remembering. Remembering the construction of this house, the construction of his family, and then the simple, single act that tore them apart.

As Selasi takes us into the minds, thoughts and memories of each of the family members, we see the ripple effect of this event, how the Sai family have spread apart from one another, physically, emotionally, just the most tentative of threads keeping them together over the distance: the bond of being a family. This thread is stronger between some of them than it is between others; an elastic thread, stretched to almost breaking point, yet primed to bounce back into it’s centre point if only it’s given a hint of slack. And as the news of Kweku’s death reverberates along it, it’s given a chance, a contraction, an opportunity, not for the past to be rewritten, but for a new future to be sketched out. Can these grown children, like Olu does in his confrontation with Dr. Wei, confront their personal terrors, grieve for their father, and then take back their power?

Chosen as a Waterstones Eleven title in 2013, and a Waterstones Book of the Month in 2014, Ghana Must Go is a story of love almost gone wrong, of people making choices in the belief that it’s the best thing for everyone involved. The trouble is that climbing out of this trap is a lot harder and slower than falling in, but it’s worth it in the end. “Ghana Must Go” is a phrase coined in Nigeria in the 1980s after millions of Ghanaian refugees flocked across their borders to escape from political unrest; I’m not sure why Selasi chose this for her title, but I think perhaps – other than the obvious Ghanaian/Nigerian connection - it’s because it’s sentiment represents how difficult it is to do undo a thing once done. What you won’t want to do undo is your reading of this story, though you might want to check your pocket for a packet of tissues as you near the final pages.

The Universe Versus Alex Woods, by Gavin Extence

The Universe Versus Alex Woods starts at the end of the story: Alex, seventeen years old, finds himself stopped at Dover’s customs as he re-enters the UK, suffering some sort of seizure, with a large quantity of cash, a large quantity of marijuana, and an urn of ashes on the seat next to him. Why are the border authorities looking for him? What, exactly, are his perfectly reasonable explanations for the goods he is carrying? Where has he been and how did he wind up here?

As author Gavin Extence rewinds back to the beginning of the story, we follow Alex from the age of ten and a freak accident that seemingly sets things in motion, through his teenage years and up to present day. It’s probable that, accident or not, he would still have been bullied when he made it to secondary school, but whether he would still have been chased down the lanes of his country village on the particular day and in the particular direction that he was is more questionable. Without that particular day, would he have met Mr. Peterson? And without Mr. Peterson, he certainly wouldn’t be sitting in this particular police station right now.

There are many different things discussed in the pages of this book - things to make you philosophical, things to make you irate, things to make you think. It’s quite a philosophical book overall, actually, although it takes a while to get where it’s ultimately going - for instance, there is really no indication at all during much of the book of the big question Extence really wants to ask. In fact, with this thought in mind, perhaps Extence didn’t set out to ask his Big Question at all; perhaps that is just where the story took him. I think not, though; I think he knew where he was going, and he just took his sweet time to get there. It didn’t drag as such; I simply couldn’t see where it was going, which made me doubt the coherence of the story - but about two thirds of the way through I had that ‘aha!’ moment and everything began to fall into place. And with this in mind, I can see now that The Universe Versus Alex Woods is as brave a story as it’s protagonist is (and that’s pretty brave - Alex always sticks to his guns).

There are meteors and meteorites, neurological details and astrophysical discussions, a visit to The Natural History Museum, a visit to CERN, strange girls and strange mothers, and a rather unusual bookclub. I have to wonder what sort of school experience Extence himself had - or suffered - as Alex philosophises on the ignorance of his school’s practices, not least the way in which they teach only what is necessary to pass his exams, and how he is the one punished following a particularly nasty bullying incident - a punishment that results purely from the fact that Alex decides enough is enough and stands up for himself. The swear word he uses during this ‘showdown’ sparks a debate across several pages: which side will you be on? Alex’s or everyone else’s?

And it’s rather cleverly written because everything that occurs in these earlier chapters are a foreshadowing of what will happen later: the school is a small version of the law that Alex will have to face at the end of his story; the gossiping village is a small version of the media; the incident with Mr. Peterson’s dog is a small version of the Big Question Alex will ultimately have to face. This is a subtle and well-considered type of storytelling often seen in films: introduce the big idea in a small way so when the main story comes to the fore it’s easier for the viewer/reader to accept. Excellently done on Extence’s part.

And when the s**t hits the fan, it’s impossible not to be on Alex’s side, even though it’s nearly as hard not to question some of his responses to the things the Universe throws at him. The people around him made me feel irate and impassioned, and the media furore resulting from his actions - how they twist everything around, take all the facts and make them into something else - reminds me of the recent Hilary Mantel/Duchess of Cambridge ‘scandal’ as well as an idea I recently read of in another book, Ask the Passengers by A S King, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In this, Socrates describes a group of people who lived all their lives chained facing the blank wall of a cave; the wall has shadows cast from a fire they can’t see. As they guess at what the shadows are, the shadows become their entire reality - they know only their interpretation of the shadows, and would not recognise or understand what actually causes the shadows, or even the concept of something being a shadow in the first place. Deep stuff.

So is this what Alex Woods is all about? Well, yes and no. I guess, the Big Question aside, it’s about questioning your reality and not accepting what other people lay down for you - sometimes you have to, sure, but sometimes it’s just as important to understand that, often, there’s more to reality than what meets the eye.

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

Bizarrely, and completely unintentionally, two of the books I recently read were overflowing with references to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The connections between this classic and the first book are pretty obvious: Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn follows the author’s sea-bound adventures on the trail of 28,800 plastic bath toys that were lost overboard one stormy night on a routine trip across the ocean*. The link between Melville and the second book I read, though, were more unexpected.

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is, essentially, a coming-of-age novel. Set in small-town, fairly privileged America, it follows five members of Westfield College through baseball season. The baseball team in question is called The Harpooners, a reference to the college director, Guert Affenlight, who, as a teenager, discovered that Herman Melville once visited and lectured at Westfield.

This is Harbach’s debut, a Waterstones 11 and Waterstones bookclub selection, and has been widely hailed as one of the best books of the year, with Harbach suffering comparisons to Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. The truth is, I never really understood the term ‘great American novel’ before reading Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. I’ve never read Franzen, or Foster Wallace (or Moby-Dick, for that matter), but now it’s as if a little light has come on in my head; its almost as if the term was coined for this book. I can’t quite pinpoint what makes it great, what makes it American - other than the obvious, of course: the setting, the subject. It just oozes something inherently American-like that I can only assume comes simply as a result of the writer being a citizen of the country.

As much as I can’t define its American-ness, I also can’t quite define the actual content, suffice to say it’s good. Very good. It follows each of its five key characters as each goes through normal life type stuff: growing up, the search for happiness, for love; dealing with change. What happens when your dreams change? When everything that always came naturally, that you always believed in, gets flipped on its head? How do you cope with that, how does it change you, and how do you change it? These are the questions our characters are facing, and they face them head-on with, generally, aplomb.

One of the most interesting things I found about this book was Harbach’s approach to his story. It unfolds through the different characters’ eyes - Henry, the prodigal baseball player, who is suffering from a crisis of confidence; Schwartz, the team captain, with a troubled childhood and an uncertain future; Pella, President Affenlight’s lost daughter returned from an unhappy marriage, trying to find out who she is and where she belongs; and Affenlight himself, sixty and in love not only for the first time, but with a student. But then there is Owen.

Owen is as much a part of the book as any of the others, but we never see things from his perspective; all we know about him is what the others tell us. Beautiful, smart, popular, gay; from Owen much of the rest of the book unfolds. Was this a conscious choice on Harbach’s part, to not write Owen’s side of the story, to leave me wondering where he really fitted in, what he thought about the events surrounding him - or did Harbach not feel confident to write from Owen’s perspective (given, perhaps, Owen sexual orientation)? From a storytelling perspective, it’s intriguing because the reader never really gets to see Owen the way they see the other characters; I can never really discern his true feelings and motivations, particularly when it comes to his relationship with Guert - is Owen leading him on, is it just a fling or a bit of a game to take advantage of Guert’s obvious interest, or does he have genuine interest in Guert himself? Although I felt like I knew Owen, when I stopped to think about it, I realised that he’s actually a bit of an unknown quantity.

And Moby-Dick? Well, as I said, I’ve never read that one, so I don’t know whether it infuses The Art of Fielding in more ways than one. Despite never selling through the original print-run in Melville’s lifetime, the whale is now considered to be ‘a great American novel’. Is The Art of Fielding in the same league? Well, some of the storylines do work out rather conveniently, perhaps more so than such things would do if experienced in ‘real’ life, but that’s no different to a thousand other good books, and I almost certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much had that not been the case. A satisfying ending, where all the strings come together is, after all, part of the joy of reading. Aristotle’s emotional carthasis and all that. Plus, I’m pretty sure that at this point its sold a chunk more than its first print-run, and made Harbach a few bob more than Moby-Dick made Melville.

To sum up The Art of Fielding, life-affirming is the word that springs to mind. Chad Harbach is definitely worth the hype.

(* I reviewed Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck briefly on my other blog, The Plastic Diaries, so won’t repeat that here)