Waxwings : A novel

Rating:
Summary: A Dreary Seattle Novel
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: Visions of my hometown...
Review: (This review posted originally on NadaMucho.com, dedicated to bringing you modern fiction from independent - and well- established - publishers.)

A common misperception of Seattle is that everyone who lives there is from somewhere else. While it's true that there are certain periods of mass migration, the facts prove otherwise: the majority of people who live in the Seattle area were born there.

That's all part of the Seattle mythos, though. As one of the youngest metropolitan areas in the United States, if not all the "first world" countries, Seattle is an isolated beacon for those who dream of reinventing themselves. Talking to recent immigrants, you often get the feeling that they moved to Seattle simply because it was the furthest distance they could drive from their old lives without leaving the country.

Jonathan Raban tackles this mythos in "Waxwings", a novel set in turn-of-the-millennium Seattle, the most recent - although not likely the last - "Gold Rush" era in the city's young history. The book focuses on polar-opposite immigrants: one a Chinese refugee who arrives inside of a freight container, the other a well-established British author who is clearly a thinly disguised version of Raban himself.

Jonathan Raban is noted mostly for his vast catalog of nonfiction ("Waxwings" is his first novel in 18 years), and his eye for detail weighs heavy on the novel. Anyone living in the city during the period will recognize not only the myriad of location references ("Dude, I've totally bought beer at the 7-Eleven on Nickerson before!") but also many of the events described (the capture of a suspected terrorist at the border crossing in Port Angeles, the WTO riots, etc.) - you can almost visualize the box of newspaper clippings Raban must have amassed before sitting down to write the novel.

His methodology results in a story where the characters are overshadowed by the very city they live in, or rather the Idea of Seattle. It's a risky proposition for sure, considering that the city is chock full of immigrant college grads who consider their social observations a matter of certain pride. This is where the book succeeds though, examining not what the inhabitants of the city do, but rather why they do it.

The plot, as it is, revolves around the predictable crossed paths of the two immigrants as they struggle in their own respective ways to realize the American Dream. A lack of tension saddles the story (we never doubt that "Chick", the Chinese immigrant, is going to make it; the divorce of British author Tom Janeway and his subsequent case of mistaken identity lack urgency), but whether or not this is a weakness on the author's part or simply a purposeful reflection of temperate Seattle is a matter of interpretation.

"Waxwings" then is as mild and reflective as a rainy Seattle afternoon. For outsiders, the book provides a glimpse into the psychology of the city (and will no doubt inspire more than a few dreamers to load up their cars and head out to our quirky burg). However, if you're a Seattleite who prefers your nostalgia fresh, the book will take you back to those heady, terror-free days of stock options and low unemployment. It's an accurate, if not exactly enlightening, portrayal of life on the rainy frontier.

Rating:
Summary: Nice work by Raban
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Meandering and Literary, but engaging
Review: 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?

Rating:
Summary: Rich and interesting - to anyone else?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Move over Jonathan Franzen
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: rich in character and theme
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A pleasant weekend read? Yes. High lit? Nope.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Meandering, inconclusive, and depressing
Review: The prospect of reading a novel by Jonathan Raban, after enjoying his very satisfying "Bad Land" was exciting, and the fact that it was focused on late '90's Seattle was icing on the cake. However, this fell far short of those raised expectations. Perhaps because it appears Rabin never decided whether to produce a lampoon on Seattle in the 1990s or substantive work of fiction.

"Waxwings" reads as a Brit's caustic social review of Seattle society and culture. While there is ample ammunition provided for a valid skewering of the dot.com culture in the area, his hardly veiled trashing of the University of Washington (and American higher education period) comes across as shallow, snide, far from accurate, and simply jealous. While knowing Raban is a British immigrant I am reading a good deal in here, he enabled this plausible interpretation by making his central character a British professor. If you are going to ridicule, you need to employ rapier wit and sharp, apt observations to pull it off; "Waxwings" doesn't.

The characters are shallow, mostly unsympathetic, and depressing. While I understand the intended metamorphosis, the most sympathetic character -- an illegal Chinese immigrant simply becomes grim and ugly, with insufficient development of the basis of this transformation. The plot seems to meander, and when the ending finally comes, it is somewhat inconclusive and your find yourself looking to see whether there is a final chapter, or afterword that you missed.

"Waxwings" is okay, but also a tremendous disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: Things happen....Life Goes On
Review: Waxwings by Jonathan Raban

Things happen.... life goes on for forty-somethings living in Seattle at the turn of this century. Jonathan Raban's well-written prose describes America from an insider's view...well sort of.

The main character, an English creative writing professor, Tom, lives in Seattle with his American multi-tasking computer-boom, upwardly catapulting wife, Beth. Their child, Finn, is four and three quarters years of age.

Things aren't going that well for the couple. Not only are they no longer seeing eye to eye, they are not really seeing each other any more.

Beth: "It was his unplaceablity-or as she saw it now, his existential vagueness- that had so attracted her when they first met. He was like no-one she had ever known. The trouble was that after eight years Beth still had days when she didn't quite know who Tom was."

Tom: "It was an encounter blessedly without consequence. The woman was married; and even if she hadn't been, her unsettling likeness to Beth would have put her safely out of bounds. But the uncomplicated airiness of their exchange gave him an inkling, a glimmer, of a life still hidden from his view."

The book's descriptive flourish drives the story, and the internal machinations of the characters help the reader along. The cast of diverse characters saves this timely but occasionally shallow recounting of the contemporary atmosphere. The characters become our familiars, our friends. Serendipitously, they meet (or almost meet) each other, at various points in the story. Their interactions with each other retained my interest with good, believable dialogue

The contrast of these folks, with their diverging thoughts, compulsions, emotions and actions breathes life into the story. Meet Chick, an Asian, illegally working in construction while learning the lay of the land. Shake hands with the hard-boiled cop/screenwriter, Paul Nagel. Get a load of the crew at the dot com office when it's spiraling upward. Thankfully, the characters keep the somewhat implausible subplot of Tom becoming a suspect in child abduction from miring this novel in the mud.

Jonathan Raban's previous readers are guaranteed delight. Readers new to this English author residing in America will see why he keeps writing, and why we keep reading him.