Customer Reviews

Waxwings

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you fell for the hype of Franzen's "The Corrections" and were disappointed, if you thought "Bonfire of the Vanities" covered interesting territory but read like a screenplay instead of a novel, if you appreciated Roth's "American Pastoral," and admired Hamilton's "Map of the World" but couldn't handle the heartbreak -- then by all means read Waxwings. It is a masterpiece.

This is the first book I've read by Mr. Raban, and on the basis of a few of the lukewarm reviews posted here, I can only assume that he previously wrote for a different type of audience.

Waxwings is great literature: a fascinating incarnation of "the great American novel" and a more appropriate recipient of all the buzz The Corrections received. The story is engaging and unpredictable; the writing flawless, elegant, acrobatic, funny, and well worth studying.

I bow at your feet, Mr. Raban: I'd like to send you a dozen roses. (Every page is a wonder, but I was particularly moved by the interaction of the very true-to-life boy and his goofy dog. It reminded me of the snippets of inspired dialogue in Mill on the Floss.)

Is the beginning slow? I'll come clean. I didn't warm to the heavy boat talk in the first eight pages, but after that I couldn't put the book down.

Having read most of Raban's non-fiction I was curious about his skill as a novelist. Waxwings for the most part succeeds. It has some terrific (sometimes piercingly funny) writing and all the elements of a classic English novel (a little bit of Thomas Hardy, a little bit of Dickens...). The characters are interesting and believable when they need to be, and just enough over the top to create some truly funny moments (the GetAShack.com subplot is riotously funny... been there, seen that) in the midst of what is really a rather sobering tale.

And it is a serious story: by the latter half of the story we are fully engaged and understand the kind of humiliation and anger that Tom, the protagonist, must be going through.

But I will say that I found the first half to be drifting somewhat; the book doesn't really find its compass until page 129, when Tom first encounters the scrappy immigrant Chick on his front porch. Prior to that, I found a lot to be distracted by in the frequent invoking of Seattle Insider references. I'm a lifelong resident of the place but even for me there is little (if any) mental image I get from names like The Painted Table or Terrafazione. What do these place or product names tell the reader, if anything, about this particular story? For someone not fluent in the local vocabulary they say nothing, and for those of us who live here these place names invoke their own stories, which may be quite unrelated to the story in which they now appear. (For example I have my own quite vivid impressions of Waldo's Tavern... which simply add to my sense of distraction and confusion when Tom somehow arrives there, quite far off course, at the end of his self-absorbed hike on the Sammamish Trail.)

As a result, rather than enjoy the book as the good story it is I found myself asking, at least at the start, whether the goal had been to write a satirical book about the competitive, brand-aware era of Seattle's fleeting dot-com fortune and whether perhaps the slowly unfolding story was an afterthought. This turned out to be a wrong initial impression - this is a serious novel with serious themes - but it took rather long to get to get past the distractions of the first few chapters. During these early sections it seems as though Tom, and to a lesser extent his estranged wife, are being defined not so much through their actions or thoughts but instead through the places and things that they encounter every day: Tom is an NPR commentator; he reads the P-I; he teaches in the MFA program at the UW and he drives a Volkswagen (but of course) in contrast to his wife's new Audi. Their irresponsible babysitter is named Courtney (but of course). This is a small criticism, but when I'm given that many labels (or product placements, if you'll accept the term) I start to feel edgy.

But those are small nits, really. Perhaps Raban really is striving for satire, in a Babbit sort of way. Anyway, after Page 129 the book really comes alive as a novel; it's a good read and I had trouble putting it down.

If you've read some of the earlier reviews, I can attest that several of the criticisms have a point: he is at times overly preachy, the book does have a slow beginning, and he does occasionally drop too many brand or local names. That's the bad and it isn't much in comparison to what I found to be a wonderfully paced and peopled novel.
To begin with, while I can see how some might call the opening slow or drifting, I found its pace more pleasingly meditative rather than annoyingly slow. And as for its place in the novel, it may not seem to make much sense as you're reading it in terms of what the bookjacket or a review led you to think the novel is about, but once you've gotten into the heart of the novel, those opening pages read much differently. Their characters may have disappeared, but their tone and their content and their thematic underpinnings remain like a haunting echo. An echo which is nicely and playfully emphasized by a literary mini-seminar given by the main character with regards to a similar opening in a better known work.
As for the preachiness, yes, at times Raban could have hit us a little more lightly or a little less frequently with the absurdity of the dot-com bubble, but it makes for such a rich and tempting target that it's easy to see how he could fall into that trap. And since almost all his hits are smack on target and funny as well, I'll give him the over-indulgence. The same holds true for the brand-name dropping.
So much for the book's weaknesses. As for the strengths, they are plentiful. The major character, Tom, is a Hungarian-born, British expat who has found himself at the start of the book in a surprisingly happy life--he loves both his wife and small son, enjoys both the responsibilities and lack of responsibilities his job as a college professor bring, and is in love with both the larger setting of Seattle and the smaller one of his old home with his wide-girth timber shoring up the foundations (it gives nothing away to say the house isn't quite as solid as it seems on the surface).
One by one the facets of his life which he has so taken for granted are either taken from him and changed--his wife leaves him, his relationship with his son changes, his house betrays him, his employer dumps him "temporarily" until the small matter of a major crime he may or may not be a suspect in is resolved. Through it all, start to finish, Tom is painted in rich, believable detail--from his tightly-written humorous pieces for NPR to his Mister Wicked bedtime stories to his tendency to develop a heavy Hungarian accent when he speaks to his mother on the phone to his obliviousness to what is happening around him (and even to his oblivousness of what things to change when he decides he does need to start making a change).
The other character, Chick, is drawn more starkly but just as sharply. Where Tom lends himself to meandering eloquence, Chick, a Chinese illegal immigrant who survived over a week in a cargo container where two of the dozen-plus men died, is all business. Illegal underground economy business, but all business. His dialogue is short and sharp and his language is stripped of all of Tom's pretensions and floweriness. In contrast to Tom's slow, passive, dimly-felt fall, Chick is all lift and action and aspiration. He moves steadily and forcefully up the ranks of the underground economy so that by the time he and Tom meet, he is more master of the situation than Tom. What brings them together is Tom's house, which Tom agrees to have Chick "and his Mexicans" fix up (and as we've seen, sometimes a house is more than a house).
These two are the focus of the vast majority of the novel. Tom's wife suffers somewhat in comparison in terms of depth of character; at times she is painted too easily in broad dot-com strokes, but just when you think she might be falling into two-dimensions Raban rescues her with a beautiful scene or moment. The same is less true of her boss, but he is such a minor character that it doesn't matter much. Another secondary character, a fellow Brit-writer, is as richly drawn though in far less space and adds a good sense of comic relief at appropriate times.
Plot is another strength. As already mentioned, the book opens in a somewhat odd way and the book continues to take pleasingly strange twists and turns. It's a domestic novel. No, it's a coming-of-age (though very, very late) novel. No, it's a mystery. Tone is constantly shifting throughout and Raban handles it all effortlessly, shifting humorous gears, for instance, from gently reflectively funny to observationally funny to biting satire to "why did the chicken cross the playground?"
Thematically, the book's richness starts on page one and continues all the way to the waxwings image which closes the book. Imagery, symbol, metaphor, parallel characters or events, all of these are the tools employed by Raban in conveying his themes and though as earlier mentioned some may seem a bit obvious, other are not quite so and overall the effect is that of a multi-layered, carefully wrought piece of intelligent literature, one that settles about the reader slowly, like a flock of birds or motes of asbestos dust. As far as that ending, I personally don't find it to be quite the neat resolution that some have said, or quite the obvious message as others have mentioned. Like much of what came before, I found it a pleasant surprise.
After reading about five or six books in a row, all of which were disappointingly mediocre at best, simply bad at worst, Waxwings felt like a rejuventating bath in the luxury of literature. Highly recommended.

I don't usually go for the 'literary' type novels, caring more for story than for prose, but I decided to give this a go anyway. Having chosen it at random, I had no previous expectations, and was pleasantly surprised to find it well-set in one of my favorite cities. Tom, the protagonist, is richly drawn and sympathetic. His wife Beth, less well drawn, seems to be there mostly to provide Tom with conflict.
The story wanders through the first half of the book, and the plot goes here or there without any guide map. Is it about Tom's relationship with the Chinese roofer? Is it about his relationship issues? Is it about the fateful walk he takes? The reviewers didn't seem to know either, and I don't blame him. At the end of the book, I didn't know what it was about, and couldn't easily explain what had happened.
Does it matter? No. Tom felt real to me, and Raban didn't let his beautiful prose get in the way of the story. After a hundred pages, I knew I wanted to read it to the end, and at the end, I felt happy with the ride. What else do we expect from a novel?

Like a few other reviewers on this site, I was drawn in by the fact that Waxwings takes place in my hometown. Raban is on a bit of a roll. Waxwings has sold well, and even appeared briefly on stage here at the Book-It Repertory Theatre.

Waxwings kept me engaged for four evenings of reading. It's fast, enjoyable, and I kept turning the pages to see how the lives of Tom, Beth, Chick and the rest were coming along. It's interesting, pleasant, and kept me largely away from the TV set. For that it gets 3 stars.

Where the book falls down is as anything other than a pleasant light read. Tom is the only character in the book with any depth to speak of. Everyone else seems two-dimensional. Likewise, late-90s Seattle, which seems to be Raban's overarching focus, is hit with too much unnecessary detail, and too little to fill in the lay of the land to anyone who isn't intimately familiar with our fair burg. Where is Queen Anne? Who lives there? Is Torrefazzione a beloved former haunt of Raban's, or just a Starbucks with a funny Italian name? Even the University of Washington, where Raban spends a fair amount of the novels time and no small quantity of barbs seems barely fleshed out.

James Joyce said famously that if Dublin burned down, the city could be reconstructed from his books. In Waxwings, only Tom Janeway's rotting Victorian snaps into focus. The rest seems fuzzy and undefined.

Waxwings by Jonathan Raban succeeds at every level. It's one of the best novels I have ever read. Its apparent simplicity continually reveals and interprets the complex, nuanced relationships we have with identity, individuality, family and aspiration. It's how we manage our inescapable selfishness that seems to count.

The principal characters are not Mr and Mrs Average. Tom is a university literature specialist who does regular radio talks. He's also overseeing an unlikely creative writing project for a man with money who is always in the air. Beth, Tom's wife, is a high flier in high tech. She works for a Seattle start-up dot com that's trying to bring navigable reality to an increasingly virtual world. She's the type that gets paid in options, optionally, despite working every minute of her life. Their little boy, Finn, named in recognition of Irish links, survives the careering whirlwind of the parental environment extremely well. It's easy to imagine the organised chaos of their old-style house, no doubt deliberately chosen for something Tom and Beth agreed to label character.

Chick is Chinese. At the book's start, he has successfully stowed away in a trans-Pacific container aboard a ship being piloted into dock. Others in the black interior have died en route, the rest captured by immigration officials. But Chick is resourceful and motivated. He survives, a keen if illegal immigrant, prepared to make a life for himself. His pithy existence admits no free time. His devotion to self-advancement is tunnel-vision complete, even if it means occasionally eating out of trash cans.

And then there's the apparently peripheral figures - the employer that happily watches his Sino-Mexican gang strip asbestos, the failed English hack who profitably reinvents himself as something hip, the college colleagues intent on asserting status, the dot com employees out for show. They are all superbly portrayed, perhaps with both sympathy and derision. Functional they may be, but they are never less than credible and suggest that each may be worthy of their own novel.

Almost as you would expect, Tom and Beth's marriage disintegrates. It kind of flakes at the edges until the centre cannot hold. She buys a new condo, perhaps thus revealing her enduring but unexpressed and suppressed distaste of the old house. She soon has a new nest mate or two. Finn reacts as children do and his sharing out between the less than estranged partners complicates.

Tom, of course, falls apart, except in public, as does publicly the house he continues to inhabit. He drinks, takes up smoking, but never seems to miss a meal, especially when Fin is around. He hires Chick, the Chinese immigrant, who is now doing roofing jobs with his own Mexican gang. As a relief from the grind, Tom takes a long, self-absorbed, creative walk, an act that might just have changed everything. We meet a policeman with his own scores to settle with life. The richness of Waxwings' canvas is staggering and thoroughly enriching.

But the masterstroke comes at the end and, for the ornithologist, it was there from the start. It relates to the habits of Waxwings. In their own way, all of these characters are passing migrants in the place that sustains them. Beth is part Irish, hence Finn. Tom is English, his family Hungarian refugees. Chick is Chinese. And everyone, individually is bent on stripping as many of life's berries off the tree as they can reach. It's a great study of the self.

This is an unnecessarily complicated story. Its primary appeal to me was because it takes place where I live, although it tries a little too hard on that score as well (describes taking streets/routes that are not possible). If I didn't live here, I doubt the story could have held my attention.

I see that most of Waxwing's reviewers were Seattleites. As an ex-Seattleite, I loved the nostalgia the book presented.

But that ending? The (bird) waxwings devour all the berries off the bush outside the main character's window. No previous mention of waxwings in the book (except, of course, for that title!) So what was the significance? I realize it's symbolic, but symbolic of what? The main character's life had dipped into shambles, but by the ending he is recovering very nicely, thank you very much. Those other reviews seemed to gloss over the ending, but I have to confess, I do not understand it. Help!

But, in spite of that, I enjoyed it a lot.

"Waxwings" was on the best seller lists for months, it was set in Seattle, and it got rave reviews, especially in the papers here. While I read all kinds of books, I admit it's always fun to read about the city I live in, so I gave this one a try. It WAS fun to read about the city I live in. But "Waxwings" certainly did not live up to its reviews or my expectations. Folks, it does not rain all the time here! Every city our size on the East Coast gets more rain than we do--look it up in your almanac. And pines are not the native evergreens here--those are native to Eastern Washington. Our dominant native evergreen is the douglas fir. But my real objection was not that Raban didn't get the local details right, even though most of the others were correct. It was that his characters, with one exception, were either boring or unbelievable. And the plot didn't go anywhere interesting.

Tom was only interesting in the classroom, and then he was functioning on automatic pilot, doing something he had done a million times. He was a failed writer. The only thing he had ever succeeded at was marrying Beth and fathering Finn. Clearly he is not real to her, or to his mother back in England, since he lies to his mother. His head is in his books, not in the here and now. Sometimes this can be an adorable feature in a character. In Tom, it is an escape from a world he cannot face. His deep love for his son is his only redeeming and interesting feature. He is not a fully realized character.

Beth isn't interested in Tom, and apparently hasn't been for some time. Her work, which she doesn't understand, is all that interests her. Does she talk to Tom about their relationship, in a Seattle when the only thing of more interest than tech was relationships? No. She just ups and leaves. Not for another man, just for her job and an apartment full of light and boxes full of Ikea furniture. At least she has a motive--she's never had a place to live before that she herself picked out. But she too is deeply devoted to Finn, which is her only redeeming and interesting feature. She is not a fully realized character.

Finn, now, is a very redeeming and interesting character. He longs for connection, with his parents, with anyone, with his "friend" Spencer at Treetops preeschool--which has descended into a basement without losing its cachet. He even fights Spencer, who repeats something he doesn't understand his parents saying at home, to prove his loyalty to his father. He immediately loves the obnoxious and ugly puppy that Chick so cynically buys him. Finn, at four and three-quarters, is a wonderful and fully realized character, and funny to boot.

Which brings us to Chick, the other major character. The most interesting part of the plot was his escape from the container and the ship which unwittingly brought him from China. It was fascinating to see America through the eyes of someone who had only Chinese perceptions and only the barest of English words to guide him as he tried to find his way. He was obviously smart, and knew to head for Chinatown where he could blend in with others who looked like him and didn't know English. Unfortunately for him, he ended up not in Chinatown (where things might have been just as bad), but in a shipyard where an ugly American ran a crew of illegal Mexicans taking asbestos out of the hold of an old ship. This scene alone is worth the price of checking the book out of the library, something out of Dante's "Inferno," as the reader knows things Chick, still called Chink, does not. The boss notices Chick working hard, and they end up forging a precarious relationship. Chick notices the manipulative way the boss now cajoles, now threatens, to get his crew to work. He decides to steal the crew, to make money himself, and treats them the same way. Whoever he was before he came to America, he has transformed himself into the worst kind of American entrepreneur. He was a partially realized but repellent character, an uncomfortable mirror to the American dream.

When he shows up in Tom's life, we are led by the book jacket to believe some important relationship will develop. But it never does. Chick picks him for an easy mark, because Tom's old house needs repair. Tom proves he's right, and then Chick moves on to other easy marks, after surreptitiously living in Tom's basement for a time. When Chick shows up with the puppy, Tom's naivete leads him to believe that the three of them--Tom, Finn, and Chick--now constitute some kind of "chosen" family. But the reader knows that Chick will be off again, until he can find another excuse to do something to Tom's house.

I found the book to be a real downer. Why did I finish it? Because it was about my home town, and because I kept looking for something redeeming about it. But I never found it. The waxwing image doesn't cut it, if only because Raban has apparently never seen them in rows on the telephone wire, passing berries along the line and sharing. That doesn't seem to be the point he got from these admittedly lovely and elusive birds.

I read in some of the reviews that this is the first of four in a series. I think I'll pass on the others.

I just finished Waxwings - the wrong time to write a review, but I'll do it anyway.

This was the first of Raban's novels I've read, and while I didn't enjoy it quite as much as Richard Russo's Empire Falls, it was a white-collar version of Russo's blue-collar ethos; sympathetic (if not quite as deep and subtlely drawn) characters (with a great portrayal of a child and his interaction with his parents), interesting interwoven stories which were consistent enough to not have offputting surprises two-thirds of the way through, and a great tone carrying through. I found myself thinking about both the book and the characters in the car, wanted to finish it every night, etc. Definitely a keeper.

I'm a Seattleite, so while I appreciated all of the shout-outs to my neighborhood and the environs, I don't know if it would seem either provincial or overly foreign to a non-local. I don't think of Seattle as sufficiently strange to merit the depth of description and the concept of a "Seattle novelist," but perhaps I'm too used to the rain.

The last page or so was wooden. It had a typical novelist's opening or closing lyrical tendency that felt dramatically out of place.