In search of lost time

Less intensely interested in characters’ innermost thoughts, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan’s most famous work for winning the Pulitzer Prize, is as a result less of a hit with me compared to her other novels.

Like Girl, Woman, Other (perhaps inspired by this book?), it’s structured in chapters that are each from a different character’s perspective, to cover 13 perspectives in total. The characters are loosely connected through chance encounters, work or personal relationships; the chapters give us a window into different times of their lives, which flit back and forth across past and future, and add to the small deposits of understanding we have of each of them. The effect being while we get only one brief section in any character’s own voice, the pieces of their lives from different periods and other characters’ feelings towards them are given for us to form a composite portrait.

Contrasting characters’ youths and middle age, there’s a strong sense from the characters of the unstemmable tide of time — that the impulses driving their youth have left them at some point washed up on a run-down shore, bewildered and bereft of purpose. Bennie and Sasha are the two more central characters who tie the network together; we start with Sasha’s kleptomaniac inclinations and Bennie’s marital and professional breakdown, swing to their nostalgic wilder pasts through their old friends and families’ takes, and settle on a sort of personal reconciliation as Sasha forms a family with an ex-boyfriend and Bennie orchestrates a comeback both for his music-producer career and his old band mate.

For every chapter, Egan anchors it on a striking event or character quirk that becomes the momentum generator for the chapter; each makes a kind of core you recognise in a brilliant short story — effective, with the propensity to stick in your mind. Strung together in a novel however, there’s a sense of lurching from one dazzling anecdote to another, with the result that I increasingly could not connect to each new voice and cared less for them, becoming confused with the huge cast.

It’s well-written, to be sure. There’s just an empty feeling I was left with at the end of the book, that can be attributed to the sense of not satisfyingly knowing any of the characters — or perhaps that I didn’t think any of the characters really achieved a greater understanding and hence catharsis from the tension of confused youth; merely resignation.

Rating: 4/5

— A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan, 2011)

Design is important, duh

It’s perhaps a testament to this book’s influence (and a hearty dose of success enjoyed by Apple), that, outside of a few gems of examples, what ends up being said sounds like common-sensical platitudes for the most part, and yawningly repetitive at that.

The Design of Everyday Things seeks to cast a new light on the way we see even the most ordinary and functional objects we use in our day-to-day routines. I first heard about this book from a game design professor, who showed us Norman’s insights on doors — doors! — and how such an ubiquitous piece of furniture still gives us so much trouble to this day because of bad design: why don’t we ever know whether to push or pull, where to do that, or whether we even need to do either at all? If designed well — plates to push, handles to pull — we would never need signs. I remember being awe-struck, loving that it brought an item so entrenched in my auto-pilot routines back out into my conscious attention.

And it is at these moments that the book shines for me: when it illustrates spatial mapping through stove controls and burners; when it uses negative examples of how some refrigerator controls continue to be designed, despite giving a completely misleading impression of how the specific refrigerator works (these models have separate controls for temperature for the refrigerator and freezer, when actually the clearer way would have been a control for temperature, and a control for a valve that determines how much cold air goes to each compartment).

I particularly enjoyed too the framing of design as a means of communication through the product, and affordances as the relationship between an object and the operating personnel. It is worth iterating time and again that the failure to operate equipment, play a game, navigate a website, drive a plane, run a nuclear power factory, shouldn’t be the fault of the users. As product-makers, we should always remember not to design only for the way the product is meant to be used, but to safeguard against the many distractions, environmental factors, and the very human psychology that come into play when our babies go out into the wild.

But did we need so many of the same reminders? Did paragraphs have to be as long as they were, when they were covering the same sentiment? It’s rather ironic that I was reading a book on good design, when the text was so lengthy the messages got lost somewhere in the word ooze.

What I wanted was a deeper dive into examples — a company’s specific process in making a product, their pivots and reasoning, the merciless decision-making in simplification, their final product. A product’s design history with pictures, say that of a car cockpit, and why it became the way it is now. We did get a couple of airplane disasters that were vaguely attributed to the similarity of control knobs, but there were really a lot more sentences on how every team from marketing to design plays A Different But Important Role And We Should All Respect Each Other’s Input.

To be fair, the book was first published in 1988, when there was a greater need to defend the importance of good design, which even now tends to get sidelined by short-sighted managers and engineers. That these platitudes still need to be said is more an indictment of our enduring disparaging attitudes towards so-called softer skills than anything else.

Rating: 3.5/5

— The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman, 1988, expanded edition of 2013)

Slavery and magical realism: it was all so promising!

I liked this book less than I wanted, really.

Set in antebellum Virginia, The Water Dancer follows Hiram (known as Hi), a mixed-blood slave born from the union of a Virginia plantation owner and a slave woman, who has impeccable memory and yet encounters an inexplicable block when it comes to remembering his mother and the circumstances surrounding her disappearance. As the land wears out from over-usage and the wealth of the white gentry diminishes, Hi sees the numbers of his kinfolk thin when they get sold, with no regard to individual wishes or familial bonds. Following the death of his half brother and heir to the estate, Hi makes the decision to bolt with the woman he’s in love with, despite the intense risks of being caught by slave-hunters on constant lookout for escaped slaves.

The book has been touted for its magical realism elements, which I was keenly looking forward to because I am a huge fan of the genre. When done well, it creates a more profound ache than completely realistic or fantastical narratives that things could have been different, because impossible things happen in a world so recognisably ours. It’s a wish sprung from deep trauma that wants to alter the fabric of reality. The Water Dancer did contain magic, but in a more muted fashion than I desired, focusing on one singular ability that Hi discovers he possesses after his escape attempt.

That’s fine, except the book really doesn’t go anywhere new once it unveils Hi’s supernatural skill, which, following a time-honoured tradition in fantasy, isn’t usable until it is unlocked — unsurprisingly, like countless other series, with the power of memory. It’s set up too obviously from the start: we know the quest of the book is to learn about Hiram’s mother, so-named a water dancer because of her skill of dancing with a water jug on her head that stays stationary regardless of her movements. And that would have been fine as well if we had been given more to work with, with her character and her relationship with Hi and others, a richer emotional arc in line with the theme of memory. Instead, the reader is treated to repetitions of the same images — Hi’s mother dancing with her sister by fire light, spliced with vague recollections of her smell or protectiveness.

Failing that, a revelation deserving of the complete repression Hi submitted the memories of his mother to would have been par for the course, but the event when unveiled contained no element of surprise as yet unexperienced in the world. It was underwhelming, in a word.

The novel wants to explore Hi’s discovery of familial bonds, having hardened his heart for survival and in the face of betrayal. Yet the other characters ultimately stay stale and predictable, never lifting off the page for us to believe in the redemptive power of love between them. Coates’s elegant language doesn’t make up for the flagging plot after Hi’s escape and the unsatisfying characterisation.

Rating: 3.5/5

— The Water Dancer (Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2019)

Loneliness in desensitisation

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely brings us on a stream of musings upon the nature of loneliness in modern American civilisation. I like its free-spirited presentation — it’s structured in short segments, each focusing on a different event or thought, and liberally sprinkled with images — affecting at a clear-eyed, guileless sharing of vulnerability. The content though doesn’t quite hit home for me.

Loneliness for Rankine is intimately connected to death, radiating outwards from the personal to the political sphere, and infused with helplessness. She watches loved ones wither away from terminal illnesses, or other loved ones receive news of their families’ deaths; witnesses society’s apathy to racial hate crimes and paranoia in reaction to terrorism. She’s torn between the silliness of being affected by the news of yet another senseless death, and not being affected enough — not caring enough — a guilt collectively shouldered by society.

Spliced between anecdotes of friends and current affairs are her attempts to numb the sadness, with television and drugs for depression: images of a static-filled television, fragments of television episodes, trips to the doctor, and, invariably, absurdities that arise when indifferent trappings — insurance, expiry dates, commercials for above-mentioned drugs — brush up against the deeply personal. This is a society-wide phenomenon, Rankine seems to drive at; these are the instruments of anesthesia we resort to as we look away from suffering.

Yet the bluntness of her methods — the way she gives me obviously sad stories of friends and crimes — doesn’t quite succeed with me. Past a certain point, I even started to distrust her enumeration of deaths involving her friends and family. It could be that she was affecting personas, or it could even be real; packed together however, it started to take on an unrealistic hue. Perhaps it was the sameness of the harrowing nature of events or an inadequate variation in tone. From this book I learned about some horrific crimes in America, but I just didn’t feel like there was anything new that was being said.

Rating: 3.5/5

— Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Claudia Rankine, 2004)