Rajorshi Chakraborti
False River by Paula Morris (Penguin Random House, 2017), 288 pp., $35
Among the many delights, for me, of reading Paula Morris’s wonderful, unclassifiable prose collection, False River, was the recurrent sensation of being reminded of other incredible writers, of feeling Roberto Bolaño suddenly close by, or Patricia Highsmith, or Joyce, or the names behind the great fairy tales, or Mansfield (although that story explicitly sets out to play with ‘The Garden Party’, and does so with delicious humour), and once, even Raymond Chandler in this memorable simile: ‘He kissed me like his mother had bribed him with five dollars when he really needed fifty.’ (81)
Of course, this is a subjective list. Other readers will hear different echoes, and it’s quite likely most of these people weren’t on Morris’s mind at all, but, for example, one personal highlight was the way in which the story ‘The Third Snow’ transitions from a blackly comic ringside glimpse of one couple’s marital hell (this is the part that evoked Highsmith for me, and also something of Muriel Spark, in, say, ‘The Twins’) into – stunningly, and entirely unexpectedly – a state of mind very close to that of Gabriel Conroy near the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Here are two moments less than four pages apart, and in between there is so much storm:
‘No it isn’t,’ said Martin. He wanted to grab a handful of Craig’s mangy hair and pull it out of his stupid thick head. ‘You’ve said it to wind Terri up and now you can’t back down. Even though it’s spiteful and stupid, and it’s dragging the two of us into your crap.’ (106–07)
Everything was in the past now. It couldn’t be resurrected. Things were lost to him, and people, and places. He wanted Leonora, but he’d never been able to hold on to anything, not even the letters of his name. (110)
I recalled Bolaño in the repeated and relaxed way Morris makes real an astonishing range of places and their people in her work. Here, from ‘Isn’t It’, is a pitch-perfect piece of present-day Auckland prejudice:
That was what Lorenzo heard in the first delirious phone calls from his mother: Uncle Jack had been mown down, and it was a brutal, heartless and sadistic act, no doubt perpetrated by someone twenty-one and Chinese in a brand-new car with a learner’s licence and no insurance. (111)
Which is immediately followed by:
In fact, Uncle Jack had just collapsed while crossing the streets and died from a heart attack. This was explained in the second wave of phone calls. Cigarettes killed him, and cream on his porridge, and old age. He was eighty-six, and on his way to buy a Lotto ticket. (111)
Alongside, consider this evocation, in the title story, of a family home in New Orleans followed by the narrator recalling old friends, during a brief return to his native city:
Our old house in New Orleans was porous, cockroaches popping up between the floorboards, flying termites slipping in where the cracked wood of the window frame didn’t quite meet the peeling sill. Dirt from the schoolyard across the road washed up underneath the front door and gritted up the Turkish rug. Even with the side shutters permanently closed, lines of light, cloudy with dust, pointed spindly, accusing fingers at the living room floor. (11–12)
Last time I heard, Jimmy was living in Alexandria, for no particular reason, selling coffee at the concession in Books-A-Million. Before that he’d sold coffee at Albertsons, further along the same stretch of highway […] Michael, Jimmy’s brother, was a lawyer now, but still lived in Marksville, representing the aggrieved of Avoyelles Parish at the old courthouse in the square. (16)
Just as much as we do with Auckland, we feel the extent to which New Orleans is another of the writer’s homes, which she can draw upon for narrative equally readily, deeply and convincingly. Bolaño dazzles us frequently with this particular skill in his stories and novels, and Morris takes on this challenge too, bringing to life – besides Kiwis and Louisianans – the histories and idiosyncrasies of characters who are New Yorkers, Latvians, Midwesterners, Brits (and, perhaps comparably, several very believable male protagonists as well). She voices them sometimes from the inside, sometimes through free indirect style, occasionally in reportage, but these are achievements of immersion and engagement as much as they are of technique. The versatility of the writer feels inseparable from, impossible without, the openness and attention of the person that must have come before.
And for me, reacting to this collection as both a reader and a fellow writer (full disclosure: Paula Morris and I share the same publisher), it was this coexistence throughout that became its most rewarding aspect: the generosity with which the author shares some of her profoundest personal experiences, including the illnesses and passing of both her parents, alongside the exhilarating diversity of forms she finds for her array of material. I was as frequently moved by the power of what I was reading as I was excited by the unbounded freedom of Morris’s forms. There are stories in this collection, essays that were stories before, as well as non-fiction that weaves together reportage, personal memoir, the discoveries of archival research as well as childhood reading, travel narrative, biographical sketches, and photographs so lyrical it can be a while before you realise their subject is also the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina. This, for example, is Morris recalling (non-fictionally) the moment she received the news of her father’s death:
My niece rang us, crying. ‘Grandad’s died,’ she said, and a noise came out of me that I’ve never heard before, an animal noise I didn’t believe I could make. Anguish is a sound, I know now, as well as a feeling. (258–59)
And in the very next essay, she offers us glimpses of another devastation she suffered, and witnessed, first-hand – that of large parts of New Orleans by Katrina:
Before they evacuated, people had left cars along the neutral ground (the New Orleans way of saying median strip); a funeral home had parked its hearses there. All these vehicles had been underwater for weeks. Now their bleached carcasses sat at strange angles, along with children’s bikes that had floated out there, and tree branches, and toppled street signs. Windows were blown out of the businesses that lined the street; the wind had stripped away the sides of some buildings, leaving them open to the air, like dollhouses. I started to cry and Tom told me to stop. (276)
But here too is Morris the writer reflecting on her debt to her late mother’s irrepressible interest in sharing, and learning, other people’s stories:
I wished that I’d spoken up and joined the conversation instead of pretending to read or look out the window. […] My mother would have joined in. She would have listened, as well, taking it all in, not talking too much at all. (171)
The dialogue in one scene in my second novel […] was overheard in a restaurant in Shanghai. I almost fell sideways out of my chair straining to hear that conversation. More recently I got some good material during a bus ride […] that I might be able to use some day, an argument about whether South America is a continent. (173)
The word above all that comes to mind when I try to consider the range of Morris’s achievements in this collection is ‘generosity’ – the generosity with which she has given of her own history, her homes and relationships, some of her most formative and affecting experiences (often without the masks or disguises afforded by fiction), her range of intellectual interests. And there are gifts held out in her forms as well, in Morris’s great dexterity, for other writers to be inspired by, or anyone interested in all that literature can be, or even thinking – the wonderfully enlivening touch by which everything of significance that one has known, thought about, visited or read can be transformed into narrative, as long as there is life and interest to be drawn out of it. The most disparate things can be linked and juxtaposed, and flow together in one unbounded river of truths.
As a final example, consider this extraordinary outward spiral of actual happenings, that leads from a children’s story written in London in 1872 to a murder in Antwerp in 2008:
Without ‘A Dog of Flanders’, Jan Corteel would have never travelled to Japan, would have never grown obsessed with it. He would not have married a Japanese woman. He would not have become a murderer. (147–48)
To find out how this came to be, and also how such leaps and links might become part of your own storytelling, or ways of seeing, read this book.
RAJORSHI CHAKRABORTI is the author of five novels and a collection of short fiction. He grew up in India and now lives in Wellington. His latest novel, The Man Who Would Not See, is published by Penguin Random House (NZ). You can find out more at www.rajorshichakraborti.com
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