Cary Fagan, Master of Minimalism
A Throwback Thursday Fiction Review by Michael Greenstein
Cary Fagan’s novel, The Student (2019), is billed as “a portrait of a life in two snapshots,” yet its two parts reveal far more than two snapshots. The first part introduces protagonist Miriam Moscowitz in 1957 when she is a student at the University of Toronto, while the second part portrays her life as a mother in 2005. Each part is subdivided into many sections that offer snapshots of her life through a minimalist lens that is polished in its clarity and precision. Fagan’s eye for telling details is matched by his sense of timing, which paces the narrative with the same precision. We follow Miriam through the life of literature and the coming of age of Toronto’s Jewish community.
“Fagan’s eye for telling details is matched by his sense of timing, which paces the narrative with the same precision.”
Towards the end of the first section, Miriam is in the lobby of a cheap hotel in Detroit where the young clerk describes a book he is reading about three men who get off a train in Texas: “it’s a way of showing all the life and the secrets of the town.” Miriam reacts to his long-winded description: “He didn’t know, she thought, how to abbreviate a story.” Fagan abbreviates his student’s story: not for nothing is she named Minnie in the novel’s minimalist snapshots.
The opening oscillates between photography and cinematic atmosphere: “She walked dreamily along the curve of Queen’s Park, the afternoon air heavy (not ‘brooding,’ she thought) and took notice of the broad leaves overhead, chestnut cases rattling.” Miriam’s gait is captured in the balancing parenthesis – a rhythm of body, mind, and spirit of the student’s rattling dream of broad brooding. That balance carries through to the next sentence where she presses her books to her sweater, stops to look at a pigeon standing on the head of an equestrian statue, and offers a hint of postmodern, postcolonial commentary: “surely it was a literally hollow symbol of adventurism, colonialism, the glory of war and all the rest.” The et cetera of “all the rest” fills in the picture of the brooding pigeon atop the statue. The narrator colours in details of fraternity boys painting the horse’s sex parts blue one year, red another. Miriam’s approach is in part nostalgic, and in part hard-nosed. A flaneuse whose father is a chiropodist, she walks through Toronto’s arcades of history.
She pauses in the arch under Hart House’s tower to read the names of the dead soldiers, for Minnie is poised between a nostalgic past and a vision of the future after graduation. She proceeds to University College and makes the distinction between griffin and gargoyle in the building’s exquisite carvings. Among her books are T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Henry James’s The Ambassadors, part of modernism’s great tradition. Indeed, James’s novel accompanies her on the bus ride from Toronto to Detroit. The novel recurs almost fifty years later when we learn that Miriam hadn’t finished reading it until she lived in Paris. “Almost every page was marked up, the margins filled, words underlined and circled, questions spelled out in block letters.” Yet James’s prolix sentences are diametrically opposed to Fagan’s minimalism.
Miriam’s notes and queries form a palimpsest over her copy of The Ambassadors, a single student challenging James’s plural, and a postmodern pigeon on top of the master’s narrative. “Just the first three words of the novel – ‘Strether’s first question’ – had instigated a page of commentary on the facing blank.” This first question finds its answer in Fagan’s pages and Minnie’s feminist reading.
By the end of the novel, Miriam composes on the first blank page: “What is interesting to me is the question of whether a person can know one’s earlier self or if becoming a strangers to one’s own past experience is just a small, inevitable tragedy.” Miriam’s question overtakes James’s, as The Student presents its own palimpsest of the present superimposed on the past, both for the individual and for society. The question continues: “We have memories, we think we know who we once were, but do we really?” Her jottings conclude: “And I’ll let Henry James make the introduction in his beautiful and exasperating style. Miriam, you must meet Minnie. And now you two can have a good talk and get to the heart of things.” Fagan introduces Minnie and Miriam in his own minimalist style that gets to the heart of matters.
This final snapshot of a split protagonist finds her crossing out the words in a self-effacing and erasing “I’ll probably make a fool of myself.” Miriam’s wisdom shines on every page. Ambassador derives from the word for servant, and we are reminded of her service to herself and her family. Walker, thinker, teacher, writer – Minnie-Miriam is an ambassador for each of the characters in the novel. Thinking of the softness of her father’s voice, she performs her final gesture: “She went down the steps, not holding the banister.” Supporting herself and others, she marches through her own Bildungsroman with Mozart in her earbuds. She draws on French and Russian ideas to form her own Jewish-Canadian persona.
About the Author
Cary Fagan is the author of six novels and three story collections for adults, as well as many award-winning books for children. His books include A Bird's Eye (finalist for the Rogers Trust Fiction Prize, an Amazon.ca Best Book of the Year), My Life Among the Apes (longlisted for the Giller Prize, Amazon.ca Best 100 Books of 2013), and The Student (shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and the Toronto Book Award). Cary was born and raised in Toronto, where he lives with his family.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : Freehand Books (May 4 2019)
Language : English
Paperback : 184 pages
ISBN-10 : 198829844X
ISBN-13 : 978-1988298443