Waxwings: A novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Jonathan Raban's Waxwings is a canticle for the late 1990s told through the intertwined lives of several Seattlites. In the novel, the city becomes a microcosm of America at the turn of the millennium, and Raban's characters--all in some way tragic "tourists" in the world--are rendered with a compassion that redeems their personal failings.

Thomas Janeway is a British novelist and professor of literature at the University of Washington whose life is coming apart in his adopted home. He deeply loves his four-year-old son, Finn, but his wife, Beth, is caught up in the dot-com explosion, and the couple has grown apart. As Seattle erupts in the WTO riots and terrorist plots, Janeway's life crumbles around him. His wife leaves him, his house becomes a shambles of half-completed reconstruction, and his son is caught fighting in school. When he becomes a "person of interest" in the abduction and possible murder of a local girl, he is put on leave with pay from the university. Yet, Raban does not let Janeway--or any of his characters--wallow in self-pity. They all try to move forward with life, and even Janeway "the suspect" finds sympathetic allies in surprising places.

At one point in the novel, Janeway lectures his students on the "generosity" of V.S. Pritchett, saying that the writer believed "in a general redistribution of verbal wealth, in taking good lines from the haves, and giving them to the have-nots." This "liberal realism" also characterizes Raban's work. Raban treats all of his characters, from Janeway to Finn, with patience and balance. He fully inhabits each and tells fragments of the story from the perspective of Beth, Tom, Finn, and even Tom's illegal-immigrant contractor, Chick. One narrative infuses another, lending the novel a Dickensian universality. Together the disparate voices perfectly capture the particulars of a place, Seattle, at a unique moment in American history. --Patrick O'Kelley

From Publishers Weekly

A Hungarian-born British expatriate settled in dot-com-frenzied Seattle is the bemused protagonist of this inspired jumble of a novel, travel writer Raban's first since 1985's Foreign Land. Tom Janeway is a professor of writing, a novelist and a public radio commentator; his wife, Beth, works for GetaShack.com, a startup providing virtual neighborhood tours for prospective house buyers. They have a four-year-old son named Finn, and they appear content. Behind the happy facade, though, Beth has grown deeply unhappy with her self-absorbed husband, his immersion in books and his pretentious radio voice ("his fucking rolled r's")-she hankers after expensive cars, a bright new condo and honest attention. Unfolding in counterpoint to Raban's chronicle of the rather civilized collapse of their marriage is the story of a shady Chinese immigrant called Chick; he survives a horrific journey to America and becomes an off-the-books contractor who bullies Tom into employing him to renovate their gloomy old house after Beth moves out. Beneath the surface, larger currents are swirling, and Tom is suddenly swept up in them when he goes for a walk on a local nature trail and is misidentified as a suspect in a series of child murders. Chick's unpredictable antics sharpen the sense of menace, while a subplot about an egotistical British novelist who is considering a residency at Tom's college provides effective comic relief. Raban's caustic, affectionate commentary on the manic gyrations of millennial America unites these disparate plot lines, making his novel a wry paean to the cluttered, freewheeling lives led by the motley residents of an immigrant nation.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First American Edition edition (September 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375410082
• ISBN-13: 978-0375410086
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,294,320 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Move over Jonathan Franzen, January 30, 2004

By	Anonyma (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

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.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice work by Raban, October 16, 2003

By	David P (Kirkland, WA USA) - See all my reviews

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.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars rich in character and theme, November 13, 2003

By	B. Capossere (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.