The Quiet Game
Penn Cage, a former prosecutor and now a successful author, has recently lost his wife. To find himself again, he decides to spend some time with his parents in his hometown, a small town in Mississippi. It is like finding oneself > on the thin boundary of a universe of vibrant life and mysterious death, of hidden secrets and glittering facades, and of races inextricably bound by blood and tears, geography and religion, and above all time . In the town, long gripped by severe economic decline, silence and complicity prevail, for both Black and white residents wish to be left in peace, to “keep things quiet, lovely, and easy” so as to attract new investments to the area. By chance, Penn finds himself entangled in a crime that occurred twenty years earlier (a Black man was mysteriously murdered), at the very moment a powerful local figure, Judge Marston, accused his father—a respected family doctor—of having committed grave malpractice in the exercise of his profession. Sensing a link between Marston and the murder, Penn resolves to investigate the bloodshed out of a desire for vengeance against Marston’s accusations—false, as it turns out—against his father. In reality, he still feels guilty about what transpired all those years ago: he had had an affair with Marston’s daughter, the alluring Livy, and remains convinced that the judge sought to punish his father because of their relationship. Can the past be undone? > Who among us, if offered the opportunity, would not want to relive the day or the hour when we first tasted love, or made a choice that forever altered our future, denying a life we might have had? But this sentiment is a trap, because Penn > realizes with muffled surprise (that) intimacy with Livy is not a new experience. It is like walking through a checkpoint into a country I visited long ago and to which I return, older and, I hope, wiser . Indeed, as he presses forward with an investigation rife with plot twists and bloodshed, Penn uncovers that the murder of a poor Black man was entangled in national conspiracies (the machinations of the FBI's then-powerful director and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.), and that Marston’s motives were far more prosaic than he had imagined: the eternal lust for money. Above all, he must face the reality that Livy is a hollow, selfish figure, irrevocably trapped in her squalid past. Shattering the quiet of his childhood town allows Penn to unburden himself of the weight and suffering of memory, reclaiming life not by retreating into the past, but by looking toward the future. The novel’s greatest strengths lie in its setting and its style, polished and meticulous in its prose. As an illustration of this writing, one need only note the sweetness, distinctly Southern and rural, of the townscape described by the author: > the tree-lined road is dotted with trailers and small houses, but as I approach the two-hundred-year-old Episcopal church that defines the settlement, the trees recede, and the grounds flanked by splendid plantations stretch out on either side of the road. Beyond the moss-draped cedars and white fences, swans drift majestically across the ponds, so much so that it feels like being in England . The trouble is that this literary refinement comes at the expense of narrative architecture, which is frequently sluggish and weighed down by episodes tangential to the central plot. The progression toward the denouement is so drawn out that it borders on tedium. Why read it? It is engaging, elegant, and compelling in its evocation of place.
Quichotte
> For as I live this poor life of mine, I seem to brush past another as in sleep; and that that sleep is my present life (Camillo Sbarbaro). In a shattering world, is it possible to save oneself through fantasy, by conjuring up another reality? And in so doing, to elude death? Rushdie attempts to answer this question with a grand fresco: at its center lie the sources of our era's illusions, those that lead us to believe that "anything can happen"—television, cinema, new media, and so forth; then there is the tale of a modest thriller writer: an elderly pharmaceutical salesman peddling opioids is a modern Don Quixote, bearing the evocative name Quichotte, who sets off across the highways of America to win the heart of a television star; next comes the Author, an Anglo-Indian writer as chance would have it, who, as he constructs the story, realizes that Quichotte, > the lonely seeker of love, the loser nobody who believed himself capable, unaided, of winning the heart of a queen, had been with him all his life, a shadow of himself, glimpsed sometimes out of the corner of his eye, whom he had lacked the courage to confront ; and finally Rushdie himself, who seeks to detach himself from the present, so unsettling and ambiguous, in order to bind past and future and thereby conquer death. In the outer frame of this fresco of concentric circles, the "Great Partition"—a dominant theme of the Indian author—is renewed: climate change ravages the earth and imperils survival, populism advances triumphant with its easy panaceas, racism and violence spread, Great Britain is fracturing, cities once open and tolerant like London turn inward with rancor and mistrust, the anchors of an exile like Rushdie dissolve: > the world no longer has an end except that you must finish your book. When you have done so, the stars will begin to fade . This vast fresco, a sort of testament, could not but come at the expense of the narrative: it splinters into a thousand tributaries, loses itself in parenthetical—even philosophical—asides, weighed down by a verbosity typical of Rushdie, yet here unsupported by dazzling prose. The most intriguing narrative thread is the one centered on Quichotte. As he journeys along the roads of America, he is joined by the son he always wished for, Sancho—at first incorporeal, then acquiring flesh and blood through the intervention of the Blue Fairy and the Talking Cricket. A modern Pinocchio, Sancho possesses an individuality of his own but must forge a conscience; unwilling to do so, he will vanish into nothingness: that is, only ethics confers true life. Meanwhile, an eccentric billionaire pitches on television a "door" to another dimension to escape climate catastrophe. Quichotte thus has a purpose: to lead his beloved into another world, to save her. But is any of this real, even within fiction, or merely the byproduct of the opioids that now pervade our society? Most likely they are hallucinations through which one believes survival is possible, that one can do nothing while hurtling toward catastrophe. Together with his beloved, Quichotte bravely throws himself through the door, only to find himself in the Author's reality-unreality—a reality destined to disappear with the end of the book, as happens with all tales of fantasy. > The microscopic man, the creature of the Author's imagination, had brilliantly done the impossible and had joined the two worlds, had crossed from the fantasy world into the Author's real world (...) Stop, cried the Author, knowing what would happen next, the thing he could not stop, because he had already written it; it had already happened, so he could not prevent it from happening. His heart pounded, as if it might tear away from his chest. Everything was coming to an end. Rushdie > could not prevent the end of the world, nor the death of the Author, nor the end of two precious, if small, human lives . How many subjects the great Indian writer seeks to tackle! It is as though his entire life were before him and he wished to retrace it through a staggering tale: the great literature that inspired him, the vicissitudes of his family and homeland, the anguish of existence, the pleasure of fiction—even television fiction. It is as if he wanted to tear away a veil and, through the real-unreal, confront us with our destiny: the extinction of the human species, individual death. To be sure, we are gripped by nostalgia for what the narrative failed to deliver, the incredible story of the modern Don Quixote: how many of us would wish to possess the courage of this eccentric old man, television-addicted and yet wise, to plunge headlong into an improbable romance with a star! If anything can happen.... We have grown accustomed to a baroque, D'Annunzian, sweeping prose; instead, we are confronted with a flat style, easily readable but prosaic and banal, like that of ordinary writers. At times, the great Rushdie resurfaces. Faced with the prospect raised by Sancho that his beloved might not want an elderly bachelor, Quichotte indignantly cries out: > What kind of question is that? (...) It is the question of an ignoramus. It is the inquiry of a baboon trying to speak English. It is the spitting of a fish out of water. It is the dance of an amoeba that thinks it is a human being. It is an insult to the greatness of my quest...