After going about seven weeks without reading a book, aargh, in the aftermath of two cataract surgeries, I finally got my new glasses last week. Why in the world the book I chose for my first book after this awful drought was one guaranteed to get my dander up is a mystery. Or not: I never learn. Yes, I fell, once again, for the word of the establishment reviewers and the big-money literary awarders. And was once again disappointed. But I was an even bigger dolt than usual because the topic should have warned me off.
It's the story of Lev, a Russian immigrant to London, his struggles and travails as he tries to survive and to send money home to support his aging mother and young daughter. The novel is Rose Tremain's The Road Home, which won the 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
As a general rule, I stay away from novels about life in Soviet or post-Soviet Russia, especially novels that win critical praise in the mainstream press let alone big-money prizes. I know they'll always slander the USSR. At the same time, though, as I noted in an earlier post, I'm really pretty, well, liberal in my fiction reading, I have pretty modest requirements politically since otherwise it would be very hard to find anything to read. So I've managed to read a novel or two peopled by residents of or emigrants from post-Soviet Russia, novels in which various characters have various views about the former system; if they're well written and if they at least include some characters who lament the demise of any attempt at equality of wealth and rights and some truths about the sad reality of current conditions, I'm game. Which is why I gave this one a shot.
Until about halfway through I was content. Tremain's writing, as noted all around, is lovely. The main as well as the secondary characters are well drawn and fully dimensional. And there did seem to be some recognition that all is not well in present-day dog-eat-dog Russia, as well as that many Russians supported the soviet system and rue its passing. So far so good. Alas, not for long. The plot begins to inexorably take shape, and what seemed at the start to be developing as a gritty, realistic portrayal of the life of a migrant laborer devolves into a petit-bourgeois fable.
From the point when I realized that Lev was going to tumble into a series of deeply unlikely coincidences, happy connection after happy connection every one of which would bring him a fast flush of cash, quickly filling his pockets so he could return home a hero saving the day for his family and friends by becoming a small business owner in the new happy capitalist Russia, I lost faith in Tremain's truthfulness and so lost interest in her fairy-tale of a story. This novel, it turns out, is simply a slightly more artful version of the deeply dishonest narrative that in this country they call the "American dream."
The way to achieve happiness and personal fulfillment (the road home of this novel's title) is through financial prosperity via business ownership. This goal is attainable by anyone. All you have to do is work very very hard and believe in yourself and you too can become a capitalist, initially of the petty scale but hey who knows eventually millions may come your way.
Dream this, this fantasy's purveyors urge workers and poor people, those born here and those who've migrated in search of survival -- dream this instead of organizing unions, instead of fighting for your rights, instead of demanding decent pay and benefits for everyone -- dream this, your beautiful dream of individual wealth and autonomy, instead of joining together with the millions and billions who create all wealth but own nothing. Dream this, please. That way nothing will change.
As to The Road Home, with its stunningly silly portrait of private ownership as panacea to the problems of immigrant workers, it seems to me, pretty sentences aside, to fail any test of art that would claim, as apparently this book does, to be engaged with the real world. In the real world, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European workers who've been set adrift to fend for themselves since the overthrow of the workers' states endure horrible conditions, crappy jobs, terrible treatment when they migrate west looking for work -- especially the tens of thousands of inhumanly exploited girls and women who've been swept up into the traffic in women. In the real world, millions of African, Caribbean and Latin American, Arab, South Asian and East Asian workers cross continents and oceans desperate to feed themselves and their families and find vicious racism, brutal treatment, backbreaking labor at despicably low wages, all of it topped off with scapegoating and violence.
Will each, will most, will any of these millions have a story that in any way resembles Lev's? Simply meet a kind soul here, a generous business owner there, pocket a few thousand dollars or pounds or euros and in a matter of a year or two return home flush with capital and settle down into solid petty-bourgeois respectability. Yeah, right.
That's not just unrealistic. The story doesn't merely fail to ring true, doesn't merely raise false hope. The fable of a petit-bourgeois solution to the problems facing the working class provides no hope at all. For hope doesn't reside in changing classes to join the exploiters. Hope is in the struggle against the exploiting class, the struggle, eventually, to do away with it.
I'm looking for fiction that doesn't blur the distinction.
