Milkman

Brilliant novel. I loved the narrator's askew view and ironic comic attitude describing her life in what was a warped culture under tremendous pressure at the time from the "political problems" often given the side-eyed glance. Her decision to use depersonalized monikers like "second sister" or "third brother-in-law" or that "country over the water" instead of proper names I quickly got used to and appreciated, as it reflects her efforts to hold the entire twentieth century at ten-foot-pole's length.

This convoluted, stream-of-consciousness narrative is no easy read, but it rewards the effort made to get under its skin. An eighteen year old woman living somewhere in (it has to be, though never said) in Northern Ireland during the 1970s, attempts escape from the convoluted realities of loyalties, honour, family, tribalism, rumour by reading 19th century novels, attending French classes. There is no escape from the attentions of The Milkman, a married man who all-but stalks her. There's her maybe-boyfriend, her wee sisters, her mother's attempts to marry her off, her family to contend with, and all this is described in multi-layers of language, which simultaneously illuminate and confuse. The inability simply to be, to get on with show more life without meaning being imposed by others on the simplest routines is described in all its confusing power by Burns' use of language - adjective piled on adjective, metaphor on metaphor. It's suffocatingly powerful, and quite honestly, I was glad to finish it. Though very glad to have read it. show less

How plot can derail a novel

This is an untimely review in several respects. It's about a book that won the Man Booker prize in 2018, so I imagine almost no one is reading it now. And what I have to say runs against what Kwame Anthony Appiah said, speaking for the judges:

"None of us has ever read anything like this before... Set in a society divided against itself, Milkman explores the insidious forms oppression can take in everyday life."

This isn't wrong, but it orients a reader's response in the wrong way. Burns takes pains to keep everything generic. Northern Ireland isn't mentioned, and neither is England (it is "the flag" or "the country over the water") or even Belfast, and people are "maybe-boyfriend," "longest friend," "third show more sister," and so on. The utility of that for this novel is clear: it permits Burns to give voice to the way her main character isolates herself from the politics of her community: she experiences people as signs of different types of permitted, preferred, and problematic relationships. The precedent for this studied anonymity is existential literature, especially Kafka and Beckett but also the Coetzee of "Waiting for the Barbarians" or Buzzati's "Tartar Steppe," and there are hints of Calvino and others in the same lineage.

I don't read novels to find out about the world, but inevitably many things in Milkman present themselves a found facts from Burns's upbringing. She couldn't have invented, for example, the idea that in a neighborhood opposed to the "state" (England), and full of "renouncers" and paramilitaries, people didn't want to go to the hospital because they'd be reported to "the flag" and "the army" or "the police" might try either to turn them into spies or spread the word that they were spies. In the course of Milkman I learned a number of probable facts like that. But I didn't read it to experience Belfast in the 1970s, and those realizations were intrusive.

As a novel, it is a study in "brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance," as Appiah also says, and it achieves its effect line by line. The precedent for Burns's blank, affectless, but curiously tortured prose is Gertude Stein, and Stein is also the source of some overly wrought passages, like the final clause in this sentence:

"And he experimented with food, thinking all the time he was an average guy, with no average guy, not even his mates, who did like him, thinking him this also." (32)

Milkman is exceptionally tightly crafted. It reads at an unchanging slow pace from the first page to the last, again like Stein. The anomalies are therefore all the more obtrusive. One is the main character's own reading, which is 18th and 19th c. European literature: Gogol (20), "The Brothers Karamazov, Tristram Shandy, Vanity Fair, or Madame Bovary" (17) and so on. These are just tokens of the narrator's dangerous detachment from her politicized surroundings--they're a 20th c. version of Madame Bovary's gothic novels. They're also obtrusive because they refer too directly, too specifically, to Burns's own teenage years, and they are too distant from Burns's own literary references.

The mostly tightly woven prose helps make the book claustrophobic, helps convey its stifled fear and anger, helps express the narrator's ostrich-in-the-sand survival strategy. It's a really unusual accomplishment, and it is at its strongest when Burns gives us 2- or 3-page essays on different social dilemmas and particular constructions of lies and self-deception.

As in the early modern "novel-essays" studied by Roberto Ercolino, Sianne Ngai, and others, and like Kafka's parables and Beckett's dramas, things that actually happen are either muffled by rumor or ineffective at changing the narrator's life. Plot is inimical to this kind of novel because it presents easy solutions to problems that the author has demonstrated, over many pages of careful prose, to be either insoluble or so easily renewed that there is no point in trying to solve them.

That is why the last two chapters of Milkman, beginning around p. 260, should be seen as disappointing. If they aren't, that's because readers expect a certain kind of plot, one with resolutions, justice, and especially an escape for the beleaguered heroine. In the last hundred pages the narrator's mother finally connects with her true love after an agonizing mismatched marriage; the narrator witnesses one of her brothers belatedly connecting with the woman he loves, who has been poisoned and is nearly blind; the narrator has a delicious revenge against one of her sisters; she herself is poisoned and nearly dies; the man who has been following her around is killed; another man who has been harrassing her is beaten; her "maybe-boyfriend" turns out to be bisexual and more in love with his male partner; and she realizes at last that it's been useless to try to ignore the place she lives in and bury herself in 19th c. novels.

Those are all spoilers, but they shouldn't be, because until p. 260 or so this is not the kind of novel that can be spoiled by plot points. There are no spoilers in Kafka, Beckett, or others, because there is no sense that a dramatic turn of events could solve or resolve anything. Plot, from that perspective, is fantasy. Nothing in my reading of the first 260 pages is diminished by knowing the things I have mentioned: those are dense pages, written with an exceptional degree of control, and it's just too bad, in retrospect, and Burns felt she needed a sudden string of revenges, epiphanies, morals ("how terrifying it was not to be numb," p. 294), and happy endings to wrap up her novel. Beckett, Kafka, and even Stein could have told her she didn't. show less

Anna Burns’ Milkman, the 2018 winner of the Man Booker prize, hooked me at first with its language: stilted and formal, hinting at a post-apocalyptic near future reminiscent of 1984, where everyone checks for bugs in their phones and is not surprised to be photographed while jogging in the park. Most characters are stripped of names and are known only by epithets, such as “the man who didn't love anybody” or “Somebody McSomebody” or “maybe-boyfriend.”

Middle sister, our nameless narrator, is being approached by the milkman. But he’s not really a milkman, he’s a renouncer of the state, and quite high up in the paramilitary pecking order. Anna Burns’ great achievement is recreating the psychological tension of the show more unwanted attention that without words or violence still constitutes harassment. See the progression in this string of quotes I highlighted from early in the book to almost the end:

“I couldn’t be rude because he wasn’t being rude … Why was he presuming I didn’t mind him beside me when I did mind him beside me? ... I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near … So shiny was bad, and ‘too sad’ was bad, and ‘too joyous’ was bad, which meant you had to go around not being anything … I came to understand how much I’d been closed down, how much I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man.”

The sad parallel that Burns draws is between the one-on-one intimidation of a woman by a man, and the similar constant harrying of a terrorist state (presumably Ireland in the 1970s), in which the citizens become used to unspoken rules, constant surveillance, and an ever-present threat of violence.

The comparison, and its conveyance through nameless characters in absurd situations, is brilliant. Nonetheless, the plot started to lag about halfway through, and I had to push through to the end.

Now I have read every single Man Booker prize winner since its inception fifty years ago in 1968. My future goal is to read the winner every year, and perhaps the shortlisted books as well. Next post: my personal Booker favorites.

Follow my adventures in reading at www.methodtohermadness.com show less

I picked this up somewhat warily after it won the Man Booker because I had understood it wasn’t an easy read. It’s true that it has fewer paragraph and chapter breaks than I generally prefer, but it’s such a strong read that it’s hard to complain. It’s a historical novel that is urgent and contemporary. It is a story about the Troubles that is both disturbing and properly funny. Funnier than The Sellout or any other novel I can think of recently that was marketed as a hilarious satire. It may be the confirmation bias talking, but this was a fine and worthy book.

From the first page I was filled with rage and fear and contempt. Then about halfway through things started shifting, there were some unexpected turns, I was still afraid but the rage was less and the contempt was near gone. By the last page I was addicted, swooning, riding that what-an-awesome-book high.

Burns's bizarre, lunatic prose and bizarre, arguably (depending on your point of view) lunatic narrator are ideally adapted for writing about a bizarre, lunatic world — IRA turf in 70's Belfast. Novels that withhold names from their characters invariably boil my piss, but I think it works here, in a place where names, like what kind of butter you get or TV show you watch or hobbies you have, come coated in layers of perverse, indelible, sectarian significance. If the loopings and tic-like repetitions of Middle Sister's voice are frustrating to read, they're also strangely lifelike as well as evoking the everyday frustrations of the setting, and of the narrator's futile efforts to assert control over her own narrative, or at least to show more ignore the false narrative being erected around her. I like how the first-person voice intrudes into reported speech, littering it with dusty old book words Middle Sis has picked up in her pre-20th century perusals. There are also two or three strands of humour running through the book (the narrator's irony, the farce of the community goings-on, the cast of crackpots), which I think is necessary/inevitable but could easily have fallen flat.

Going back to the "no names" thing. I think the reason this trick usually chafes me so bad is that — Saramago's Blindness for example — it's obviously a gimmick and/or an attempt to distract from those characters' lack of personality. But there are half a dozen characters in Milkman who ring extremely true. I guess names are no more necessary to characters in a novel than detailed physical descriptions.

I guess too there's still hope for literary fiction, hooray! Although Burns is 63. Feels like just a couple years ago this book won prizes, but it's seven. show less