BOOK REVIEW:
Title: Iris
Author: Weike Wang
Type: Fiction, novel
Publisher: Riverhead Books, New York, 2027
Copyright: 2027 by Weike Wang
Star Rating: 7 out of 5 stars
The extramarital affair always lays open the interstitial space between the romantic and the realist. In this there is a no-man’s-land of despair. Or the despair of having no country to call home. You might call it the chiasmus of life where reality is turned on its head, but in either form of speech it forms the great conundrum or irony that charges us with energy (and many words) in the first case, while in the second afflicts us with ennui of spirit.
The thing about it that’s germane to Iris (the character who’s suffering writer’s block, marital boredom, and a complete loss of her sense of place both as a writer and a wife) is that her despair is the very thing that opens a path to the vastness of her heart.
But that isn’t what I found to be most worthy of my interest as a reader/writer. What I see here is that someone has done what I thought was impossible: to actually recreate that no-man’s-land of the extramarital affair and make it live on paper in a way, I think, that will open up that world so that it may be experienced by someone who has never lived it, as Remarque did when he wrote of the war of the trenches. Yes, there were certainly people who read it and remembered; but there were a lot more who could not have known of it, but who read it and felt it and heard it and saw it only in the book…probably quite enough to get the point. Which is the futility of it.
How do you write the affair? That’s been tried and tried again. But has anyone yet written it from inside the space between its polar opposites–from that space between rapture and wreckage? Weike Wang seems to have done that. She gets five stars for that all by itself.
I’d give her one more star for all her literary references that bend my brain into knots. William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Flaubert; and for sentences like, “Trees with roots like piano hands.” I wish I had written that one! Speaking of which, throw in another star for her musical references. James Michener would love this book!
Okay. So let’s calm down. This won’t be an easy read for most. Call it The Yellow Wallpaper on steroids. Psychologists will analyze Iris, or will yearn to have patients like her. This is the kind of writing writers do at six-week writing conferences, where, apparently, they meet up for affairs and drink a lot of wine, which is why I would never attend one. It’s the kind of writing that invokes interest from a purely literary perspective…until you wade into it and press on and press on and press on; then you begin to understand how utterly rich is the writing and what this thing is you’re reading and just how difficult the experience is to put between two covers of a book.
Nevertheless, it didn’t really bring me any readerly pleasure. I don’t think The Yellow Wallpaper brought me any pleasure, although writers find it interesting just like artists (and connoisseurs) can stand all day and stare at Guernica drinking wine. I don’t recommend drinking wine or smoking anything while writing or not. But if you’re reading this book, it might help to have at least some residual effect from the drug of extramarital love. Yes, if you had fought in a trench you’d really love Remarque; and if you once suffered the ennui of a less-than-fresh marriage (coupled with the depression that follows a miscarriage), and then with meeting someone somewhere and walking with them in Central Park to find yourself wanting to step in all the puddles, then I’ll just bet you’ll love Weike Wang.
You might say seven stars is overly generous to go all those words that stream through the labyrinth of Iris’s mind without pleasure; but what would you pay Remarque for bringing your heart to a place of truth and reconning by way of earthen corridors of mud?
–H. R. Novelton
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