By Dan White.
Christine Lai, Landscapes (Two Dollar Radio, 2023)
To define art is to misunderstand it — this seems apodeictic. The beauty of art, we are told by the critics and the patrons (the artists themselves are often unconcerned), is in its subjectivity, the freedom one has to interpret and prefer at will. In keeping with the convoluted relationship between fiction and fine art — creative writing programs are housed in English departments, which doesn’t seem strange until one realizes that the study of art history and the practice of painting are rarely considered to be the same pursuit — this license to (dis)like is curtailed some when considering a novel. All those vexatious book reviewers, insisting on neat conclusions. Perhaps because virtually everyone writes every day, in some capacity (while few among us regularly paint, sculpt, or architect), there is a reflexivity to pronouncing a novel as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ that is absent from the general discourse around other forms of art. Jealous novelists have long been interested in fine art, and a contemporary tradition of books about artists (usually but not always painters) has flourished. Into this lineage comes Christine Lai’s Landscapes, an imaginative and bright debut, although one that betrays an uneven composition.
Penelope is something of an archivist, working in the English countryside and cataloguing an estimable if endangered collection of art, a clear literary descendant of, among others, the protagonists found in Ayşegül Savaş’ White on White and Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ The Exhibition of Persephone Q. Penelope keeps a diary, and it this vehicle by which we access the majority of the narrative, an uncomplicated technique that causes a few issues as the book carries on. Lai is concerned with making a statement about the importance of art in an age that continually devalues it, setting her novel against a sharp and haunting England and in a near-future that allows for even greater ecological and environmental urgency than found in our present. In this way Landscapes is an important and thoughtful work, calling for the preservation of more than that which will merely allow us to exist.
Lai is at her best in physical description and conveying her heroine’s introspective nature, and several poignant moments can be found throughout. Penelope navigates the memories of her difficult history with Julian, the brother of her current partner Aidan, whose return looms over the fictive present:
The intimacy that I shared with Aidan, which began in fits and starts, fraught with my recollection of pain, gradually developed into a space in which we could both recuperate at the end of a day. But it is astonishing how long it has taken me to find this harbor.
My first real glimpse of human desire was on one of the botanical trips I took with Dad, when I was around fourteen. We traveled to Cambridge to visit the Botanic Garden of the university. In the late afternoon, Dad went out for drinks with friends and instructed me to stay in the hotel. But as soon as he left the room, I disobeyed and snuck out to wander around the town. I ended up in the Fellows’ Garden of Clare College, which had an inner garden with a pond of floating lilies, accessible by two small openings in the tall hedges that surrounded it.
I lay down on the riverbank. Students were relaxing on the opposite bank; punts glided by on the water. It was early evening in spring, and the garden was empty. Above, the first stars were becoming visible.
Like the stories of the artifacts and artwork she hopes to save, Penelope’s past haunts her present, giving Landscapes the reflective mood and contemplative intent that strengthens its overall approach. Lai’s skills in these moments of vulnerability and honesty on the part of her protagonist, exploring the price of intimacy and memory, are considerable and will resonate with many readers.
On balance, however, the book is something of a mixed effort, especially with regards to the narration. While Lai’s sentence-level abilities, as seen above, can carry much of the book, the structure and approach to composition present challenges. Landscape remains largely epistolary throughout, weaving in inventories of items, ‘photographs’, ‘books’, ‘objects’ and the like, that Penelope finds. The apparently-associated decision to render the narration in the present tense is, as is so often the case in contemporary fiction, an odd choice, only partly explicable given the epistolary bent of the novel, and one that alienates the reader from the narrative context typically generated organically via temporal distance from the act and the telling. This last symptom is partially remedied by a brief prologue, but a more sensible approach — take note, we implore you, young writers — may very well have been past.
Another, more pernicious, attempt at rectifying this wholly avoidable flaw in the book’s narrative design is our narrator’s over reliance on exposition. From the second page we’re given backstory and contextual information that reads as unnatural in a diary format — ironically, the exact type of world building information that a first person past tense narrator can supply with ease:
September 3
I left my childhood home and came here to Mornington Hall twenty-two years ago, at the start of my research fellowship. But now, in less than a year, this house, too, will be gone. The Long
Gallery with its view of the park; the Conservatory with its surviving plants; the Library with its white columns — all these are to be demolished in about seven months.
Mornington, in its old age, has endured countless cycles of change and reinvention. It was once an aristocratic estate, a school, a hospital, and for a period of time after the Second World War, a cow shed and pigeon coop. When Aidan’s family purchased the estate decades ago, they restored it to its former self as a symbol of long-lost refinement.
Given as we are to understand that our narrator is writing ‘to’ no one — as a diary tends to be more therapeutic device than communicative document — to whom exactly is this history aimed? Clearly it is the reader, a figure that within the narrative world of the book does not exist.
While such criticism may strike some as pedantic (there again, the poor novel suffering an unfair gaze), this narrative approach is what keeps Landscapes from joining the ranks of the masterfully realized works — White on White or the Outline series — to which is has been compared (to invoke the work of Rachel Cusk, especially, is to commit a far more serious misunderstanding, one that foregrounds the latter’s thematic concerns over her singular accomplishments in narrative mode). A novel is not simply a story told to entertain and inform, it is a crafted piece of art with formal and aesthetic considerations at its core. This is why we rightly praise evocative prose and poignant descriptions — the type of writing often found in Landscapes — as elements of fiction that transform a mere imagined plot into a profound and illustrative gesture towards the human condition. Narrative mode and overall composition are essential aspects to the design and execution of a novel, and can often prevent a good idea and compelling book from becoming a transcendent work of art, as is the case here.
One reviewer’s fixation on point of view does not a negative read make, however, and all this is not to say that there is not much to admire in Lai’s debut. The sense of place and past, two powerful fictive elements, are strong, and the comments Landscapes makes about the importance of memory, history, and preservation are both timely and astute. Art is a physical manifestation of humanity, and as such becomes all the more important at the times when it is most neglected. These ideas are understood and presented by this novel, and for that there is much to admire. While it may, in at least this critic’s opinion, falter over the finer points of narration and structure, even that perhaps underscores the point — beauty, after all, is in the eye of the beholder.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. A graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and Stony Brook University’s BookEnds Fellowship, he serves as Founding Editor for L’Esprit Literary Review and Fiction Editor for West Trade Review. His writing appears in Florida Review, The Rupture, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among several other publications. A Chicago expat, he now lives in Long Beach, California, where he frequents the beach to hide from writer’s block.
