By John Boyt
It’s generally comforting to me to have a President who read books. It’s also been rewarding as it turns out he has good taste. Over the years, I have been turning to books that Barack Obama has recommended. One such selection, Téa Obreht’s Inland (Random House, 2019), proved a challenging piece of fiction. The challenge is worth it and here are some tips for enjoying this book:
Keep a list of the characters. There are two story threads here and characters come and go. In the thread that features a family, there are a number of members some of whom are not actually members of the family. There are also plenty of absent characters in both threads and then there are a few ghosts as well. It’s not daunting if you have a post-it to keep track, especially as you get started.
Read it on a regular basis. This is not the kind of fiction that one can read once a week. I had to read a little four or five days a week to not lose touch with the world Obreht created.
Be comfortable with ambiguity. You are led to wonder who is talking and who is talking to whom and why this isn’t clearer.
Plow through it and be ready to let some things go.
I stopped about half way through and went back and started over.
At this point you might wonder why you’d ever want to read a book like Inland. Obreht’s writing is lovely and original. It feels like she is doing something new with fiction. She has sentences that are beautiful and funny. (Look for the moustache described as ambulatory.) While I didn’t enjoy having to start it over, it was worth it. My wife reminded me that I had had a similar problem with (Arundhati Roy’s) The God of Small Things. I would not say the book shares the stream of consciousness that book was noted for, but it does require the reader to let go of the need for plot points and embrace more frequent ambiguity. It requires a bit of trust in the author and Obreht – not unlike a previous President – is worth your trust.
John Boyt is an English teacher at Johnson High School on Saint Paul’s East Side.