This story is about a man whose 8th-grade daughter dies. The man's wife leaves, recognizing that the man is not willing to even pretend to try to think about anyone but himself. On his own he becomes addicted to drugs and alcohol, and he lets himself turn into a pathetic shadow of himself, while he spends his days hallucinating/dreaming about his daughter. I didn't like the guy when the story began, and I still didn't care about him at all by the end of the book. But, aside from the main character being so pathetic and pointless, the book was well-written, and might be a favorite for some people dealing with their own or a loved-one's grief after a death.
I did like that, just as in Tinkers, there is a bit about fixing clocks worked into this book. ( )

67. Enon by Paul Harding
OPD: 2013
format: 255-page paperback
acquired: April read: Nov 25 -Dec 3 time reading: 7:56, 1.9 mpp
b>rating: 4
genre/style: Contemporary Fiction theme: Booker 2023
locations: Massachusetts
about the author: American musician and author who grew up in Wenham, Massachusetts, north of Boston. Born 1967.

I really liked [Tinkers] when I read it back in 2010. Finally, I got Harding's second novel from 2013. I was motivated by his third and latest novel, [This Other Eden] making the 2023 Booker longlist (and shortlist). I've started that one.

In the opening section Charlie tells us of the death of Kate, his only daughter, at age 13 in an accident. And of his wife's leaving afterward. The rest of book is in this context. Charlie breaks down. His breakdown then goes on further and further, propelled by painkillers and then whatever drugs he can find. Despite awareness, he continues to pursue this. He almost seems to try to find a place between life and death, a halfway place to reach his daughter. And, well, where does this end? The prose is the draw of this book. And it's free to drift between reality and hallucination, which it does wonderfully, while digging deeper into Charlie and his grief.

This is a beautiful book. In some ways it's a little simple, the writer setting himself a context where his writing has free reign, without any threat to the book. That's actually a harsh, but hopefully nuanced criticism. I got into this, enjoyed the moods and textual games (as far as I got them), the ideas explored, the sentences going many different ways and doing many different things.

One extra thing. My edition had an interview at the end. Harding talked briefly about some of the philosophical ideas in the text, but then he added this: "Fiction works best when written and understood in terms of character, in terms of the human soul, the heart, and consciousness. To my thinking, everything else is a predicate of character—secondary, tertiary, even—must be given its proper weight relative to that he proper subject, this particular man. Any theoretical reading is bound to prove deficient, therefore, because it makes the man a predicate of some generalized ideal."

I would love to hear anyone's thoughts on that quote.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/354226#8315147 ( )

This novel is a portrait of a family and a town. Told in the smooth style that I enjoyed reading the author's novel Tinkers, I appreciated it once more. ( )

I should preface this review by saying that I have not read Paul Harding's novel Tinkers, a novel that was much praised and even earned him the Pulitzer Prize. Having read Harding's work back to front, then, as it were, I can only offer an opinion on Enon; while others below have situated the new novel in terms of his prior work—and most virtually unanimous in stating the follow-up is far inferior to his previous novel—I can only speak of Enon, and so of Enon I shall speak.

I am led to believe that Enon is an amalgamate New England town that served as the locale for Tinkers, just as it does in Enon; I am also led to believe that Harding has expanded on some of the characterizations and townsfolk in his second novel, focusing on Charles Crosby grandson of the clock repairman protagonist of Tinkers. In this way, one would expect a coherence to exist between the two novels, something akin to Faulkner—to whom Harding appears to be indebted, although his prose is not singular enough to have a style of its own with influences evident or surmised—where the town becomes the major character around which people, families, and lovers enact a kind of mise en abyme, the mirror reflecting outward from the text toward society at large.

Characters, in novels like these, tend toward the caricaturesque or allegorical; the town is the vehicle by which the author examines social and cultural questions, and, most importantly, how these affect the individuals living within them. As Crosby notes in the first-third of Enon:

There are certainly more citizens of Enon beneath its fifty-four hundred acres than there are above it. Just beneath our feet, on the other side of the surface of the earth, there is another, subterranean Enon, which conceals its secret business by conducting it too slowly for its purposes to be observed by the living.

And, since Crosby has just lost his thirteen-year-old daughter, Kate, he locates her in this "subterranean Enon" and positions himself as the storyteller who can uncover the "secret business" of this hidden terrain.

Perhaps it's unfair of me to judge a work based on preconceived notions of genre, or even conservative of me to assume that an author must adhere to the conventions within which his work appears to be operating, as Harding's does here. However, while my own reading tastes are far from the conventional, and while I very much admire authors who can utilize conventions to their own ends, bringing their own voice and style to bear on age-old themes in new ways, I don't feel that Enon offers anything new whatsoever.

There are numerous novels about love; there are numerous novels about death and dying. Should these topics and themes be thrown into the dustbin, rendered moot because they've been written to death? Of course not. These are major experiences that cause us to consider our lives and our interrelation with others; these are philosophical and phenomenological questions to which there will never be any answers.

With that said, if an author does choose to work with such trued-and-true themes, said author must inject something new: this can be by means of style, voice, point-of-view, or something entirely different. To return to Faulkner, whom I mentioned earlier, his examinations of cultural and national guilt, both at the civic level and at the level of intimacy, have been themes touched upon by writers such as Hawthorne, Flaubert, Kafka, James, et al. But Faulkner injects his own personal voice and style: his writing is the subject matter and his subject matter is the convention against which he is writing, making new forms fit older questions, creating new questions out of linguistic and stylistic innovations—run-on sentences and all.

To return to Harding's Enon, a catchy title for a town which, of course, a clever palindrome for "none," the very name itself is overvalued in the Lacanian sense: it requires a deeper interrogation of why this allegorical place is both somewhere and nowhere which never seems to occur. (It also carries with it biblical reverberations and allusions to baptism, again an interesting connection, but one that is not explored here in the depth it deserves, not even in a metaphorical sense.) True, Harding's traumatized and grieving narrator, Crosby, exists in this sort of liminal no-mans-land where life is at the same time something (in his memories of his daughter before her untimely death) and nothing (in his moments of despair, despondency, and drug-induced hallucinatory scenes which he relies upon as a coping mechanism).

Harding wants the town to be both allegorical and real, but he wants his characters to be real, and there is a problem with this, especially in Enon where Crosby's character is not fully fleshed out until toward the middle of the novel. If the reader is expected to empathize with this man who loses his daughter on the first page of the novel, the mishandled and haphazard use of allegory/realism inherent in Harding's structure—let me rephrase, lack of structure—cause the reader to instead loathe a narrator whose "likeability" is the very crux of the novel itself. Harding wants the reader to follow Crosby on his grief-stricken journey; Harding wants the reader to mourn the ephemeral nature of life along with Crosby. Instead, though, what happens is that a distance is erected right from the beginning between town/characters and reader due to the very issues which I have attempted to outline above.

To be sure, Harding's novel is very much in the mode of the memento mori, and many readers are appealed to these sorts of novels so that they might learn something about the dying or grieving process, or else so that they might instead act as a voyeur and watch someone else dying or grieving (the it's-not-me-today argument). It is worth noting that both of these reading perspectives are rooted in narcissism, but this is a drive that Enon rebukes continuously.

I began this novel with high hopes, largely due to the fact that friends of mine on here whose opinions I have long valued rated it highly; however, I think that I have discerned where the problem lies—or, I should say, where my problem lies. A bit of scouring, and it seems that those who rated Enon highly are those who also rated Marilynne Robinson Gilead highly, a novel that I loathed. And why did I loathe Gilead? For exactly the same reasons I have outlined in my review here. Coincidentally, Robinson was also Harding's teacher at Skidmore.

While the genre of the memento mori, albeit stretched in both cases, has existed ad infinitum, neither novel lends anything new. Instead, both are structurally built around a flimsy premise: the dying man remembering everything so that his son can remember him; the living man who remembers his life and his town and his family because his daughter has died so suddenly and so very young. Death is not flimsy, of course, but as a plot conceit it is in both cases: it is merely the vehicle that allows each respective narrator to meander in what attempts to be stream-of-consciousness, as, in "precious" prose they recall their lives, family members, exploits, losses, and so on. As such, death is not the topic while both authors appear to be claiming that it is: it is simply the launching pad.

Bad reviews are often the lengthiest and hardest ones to write, in order to foreground and demonstrate why a novel doesn't work, what is flawed about it, how it fails to deliver, etc. But what is often longer are works like Enon which should have perhaps been relegated to a short story rather than a full-fledged novel. As I began with Faulkner, perhaps it's fitting that I close with him: his brand of stream-of-consciousness is just that, an attempt to suss out how a mind works in relation to external circumstances. Some reviews of Enon below have touched on Harding's apparent use of stream-of-consciousness, but, for this fan of Proust and nearly all the modernists, I failed to see these as anything by run-on sentences—which, to be fair, have their use (the final section of Joyce's Ulysses is the most devastating piece of writing of the last one-hundred-and-fifty years).

But read the following example of Harding's "stream-of-consciousness" (plucked at random, Crosby recalling spending time with Kate while she was alive), and answer for yourself if this indicates a stylistically innovation way of approaching the subject matter or if Harding was merely in need of some rounds of editing with which his publishers failed to provide him:

We'd sit and recline next to each other and the shadows would advance over our heads like a canopy and clouds would spread out over the sky from the west and Kate would braid stalks of grass and I'd watch the sky and point out the evening star and the crescent moon as it arced up from behind the dark firs and the bats would begin fluttering after insects and we'd each take one last sip of the last of the water in the canteen, tepid and metallic, holding some of the day's earlier heat in it, and we'd cool off and rest a little beneath the wide pavilion of night before setting out for home.

Your decision to the above question should, in all truth, let you know straightaway whether Enon is for you or whether it is simply a waste of your time. ( )

If you are looking for a read that is full of plot twists and turns, feel good characters and a happy ending, then you would be well advised to give this tragic book a miss. If you are prepared to dive into its pages, you may be surprised at the emotions it evokes in you.

Without revealing spoilers, this novel is a journey into hell via the grief and anguish of one man. We see how this duo enables his year-long addiction to alcohol and drugs, alienates those he loves and are trying to support him, and generally takes him on a downward spiral few of us could imagine going on. This novel takes the reader to the brink of the character’s madness, as we are trapped inside his head during his periods of hallucinations and flashbacks while he struggles unsuccessfully to come to grips with the destroying loss he has suffered.

To pull no punches, this is a grim and almost depressing book, but the Author has written it beautifully and with great assurance; bringing to the page something that needs to be read to understand that we, although of the same species, do not cope with grief in the same way. The book is written in the first person narrative, and this style is very effective in making this novel believable as we drift with the main protagonist further from his hold on reality.

I did find in some places that the book was a little disjointed and rambling, whether or not this was intentional on the part of the Author to play into the whole mind of the main character I don’t know, but it was a little distracting at times and pulled away some of my enjoyment in this read. Also, not being a voyeur, I found this book to give me an uncomfortable feeling as if I were intruding in a place I really should not have been, and this again detracted from my enjoyment. The unending flow of misery and isolation really began to pull me down in the end, and I was relieved when I finally turned the last page and was able to set this aside.

Although the book was definitely not for me, I gave it a three thumbs rating because of the way in which it is written. It is rich in prose and the visual landscapes of settings and emotions the reader encounters as they ‘journey’ through the book, were written in such a way as to demonstrate the command of the pen this Author appears to have.

If you enjoy reading about another’s pain, be it self-induced or inflicted on them by forces beyond their control, this is probably a read you would enjoy, other than those in this area I really couldn’t recommend this novel to readers of any one particular genre.

Originally reviewed on: http://catesbooknuthut.com/2013/09/14/review-enon-paul-harding/




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