We, the Dysfunctional and Divine.

I managed to do nothing productive yesterday. Just kind of lazed around in bed, reading most of (the rest of) Rabih Alameddine's I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters.

Alameddine's narrator, Sarah Nour El-Din, is writing her memoir; this is the novel's conceit. The attempt to capture a whole life. How to and where to begin. How any one chapter can shape and slant your whole life in such a way that it could be cast as The Defining Moment--the moment around which all of your stories are spun, around which your whole self comes to revolve. The way we all revise our own stories, retell them, recast them. The act of revision/re-vision. Life as collage. Life as the many possible points of view and points of entry.

It's a clever notion--but just plain clever would fade once the novelty/sheer freshness of invention wore off. But luckily, there is more. There is the stunning resolution of the last chapter of the novel (the last first chapter of the memoir, if you will), which does a beautiful job of finding an exit point for the narrative without closing it off--leaving it to resonate and echo. This, despite the fact that this chapter would not have made a very good start for the proposed memoir. That last first chapter changes everything about the read, gives it explicit meaning, reveals depth and focus to a tale that, at times, seemed horizontal and so wide as to be panoramic, impossible to fit into a single lens view.

And what the last chapter provides--and what it becomes clear many of the chapters in the second half of the novel are also, more slyly, doing--is shifting focus. Instead of I, the Divine, it is now We, the Dysfunctional and Divine. As Sarah revises, she keeps trying to write about herself, but the other characters in her life intrude. So she starts over, begins somewhere else. Finally she comes to see that she cannot tell her story without those other voices: "Who am I if not where I fit in the world, where I fit in the lives of the people dear to me" (308). Essentially, without the others, there is no self.

I read that and thought, YES! What are we but wholes made up of so many parts. We are, each of us, equations, and the only way to puzzle us out is to write it all out, longhand, on a chalkboard. Relationships are messy. They're complicated. They involve multiple variables and require strange and complex graphs and charts to reveal how--and, indeed, that--everything is connected. Sometimes they venture into invention and the imaginary. Sometimes things are more or less complicated than they first seem. Sometimes there are remainders and bits that don't fit. Sometimes you've been working at a problem for so long you fail to realize that you've forgotten a variable, a value, you've forgotten what you're solving for. Sometimes you have to start over again. And again. ... And again.

One last thing about the novel: two chapters are narrated completely in French.

Now the thing you need to know is that I can't understand a lick of the language beyond hello, goodbye, love, Eiffel Tower, and croissant, so on my first read of the novel, I was utterly roadblocked when I encountered that first French chapter. I was stumped. I could guess at--using six years of high school Latin--the meaning of a word here or there but could not comprehend the elegant string of them all together. They were veiled in mystery. Entire plot points and nuances lost to me, forever! I mourned. I became frustrated. I got angry. I even tried to Google my way toward an answer. I suppose, had I been determined enough, I could have painstakingly retyped the bits into Babelfish or some such program, but I gave up. I was utterly stumped, and mad, and disappointed, and excluded by the narrative.

So I stopped reading the novel.

I almost let the library book go overdue in my care.

Then for no good reason except a sense of loyalty and trust in Phil Graham's excellent literary tastes (he recommends the novel here), as well as no small amount of stubborn OCDness in finishing what's been started, I renewed and began to read the novel again.

When I encountered that first French chapter for the second time, I gave it a longing last glance, flipped the page, and continued, undaunted.

It struck me as ... somewhat wonderful this time around. Ballsy. The kind of bold choice only a confident writer makes. It took me back to my graduating lecture I gave at VCFA ("Jabberwocky and the Asshole: On the Aesthetic Viscosity of Vernacular in Fiction"); for wasn't I arguing for the exact same kind of license but doing so from the place of privilege? The place of possessing the knowledge and deciding what could and would be revealed to different readers? Wasn't I suggesting--and wasn't Alameddine in a way proving--that more important than 100% comprehension to all readers was the artistic integrity of the work itself (not its author, the work)?

By the time I reached the second chapter in French, I was unfazed. I was fascinated by what I was missing and yet utterly unconcerned by it. It seemed to me another elegant metaphor was being formed--something about the unintelligibility of parts of a life, that there's always the possibility that something will get omitted or lost in translation. For how true it is that it's near impossible to know every intimate nuance of someone else's life--even those closest to us; even, I might venture, I might whisper, even our own.

In closing, GOD how I loved this novel. I may have to buy it so that I can bear returning this copy to the library.