Helen Oyeyemi, Peaces, and Ali Smith, Hotel World: Unleashed Observation

Somehow this week I’m back in one of Helen Oyeyemi’s worlds. Like her other readers, I love her dazzling inventiveness, her brio, her fierceness and playfulness combined. Today I’m looking at Oyeyemi and Ali Smith, the wild movement of unleashed imaginations, leaping from phrase to thought to next idea in an exhilarating freefall. Today’s entry is more marvelous pages than marvelous paragraph, a way of following the “action” in both passages, which comes from one character (alive or dead) observing others in a key moment. But because of the voices of the books, the digressions, and the ways the authors use the movement of the mind at work trying to solve mysteries, the passages are anything but passive observation.

Helen Oyeyemi, Peaces

In Peaces, the story of an “unhoneymoon honeymoon” on a memory-haunted train, Oyeyemi writes about love and perception in a way that feels like a vacation. It’s her queerest, most celebratory novel, and perhaps the one least bound by any sense of obligation: for the first half of the book, it’s almost impossible to put the pieces together, and then when everything starts to come together, it’s both a otherworldly ride and a hall of mirrors. Otto, the narrator, is one of the two unhoneymooners, the only passengers (apart from their mongoose) on a train full of surreal compartments and on a mission that they discover slowly, over the course of the book.

One of the chief ways we get to know the characters is through memories, their own or others, which change as they’re revisited or seen from other angles. Sometimes they’re telling Otto the stories, sometimes he’s reading a document, sometimes he’s remembering a story someone has told him earlier. In a chapter where Otto is describing Xavier, his partner, he relates Xavier’s memory of another train ride, much earlier.

Here is a piece of that (it’s from a longish story that seems at first to be a self-contained tangent, but later turns out, like everything in this novel, to be strangely connected to the present-time story). Xavier is 11 and returning from boarding school to the criminal relatives he’s staying with in Paris, but he finds himself unable to get off the train at his stop even when he learns convicts may be on board.

He’s so paralyzed that he’s sitting and staring at his knees when two fellow passengers enter the car: “One of them sounded like a girlish Quebecois, and the other voice, much deeper, spoke with an accent that was harder to place. The conductor popped in to check their tickets, and when he’d left, the male voice addressed Xavier in a gruff and grandfatherly way: “Young man, are you in pain? Is there anything we can do for you?” Because the question is so direct, Xavier almost answers, but the girl says, “Let’s not bother him, Papa. He’s a thinker, thinking.”

“She’s right,” Xavier said into his trousers. “That’s what I’m doing. But thank you for asking; please enjoy your journey.” 

The girl’s delighted “Ha” sparked a haphazard wish for an older sister, someone at home who talked to and about him like this, mocking and affectionate in equal measure. She’d drive ev­eryone completely mad with her cynically idealistic remarks as they grew up—friends, other family members, would-be suitors, colleagues, everyone—and he, Xavier Shin, would be her most partisan associate. This sister of his would always be able to say, “Well, Xavier knows what I mean!” even if he didn’t. He listened as the other two arranged their board and discussed the order of play, the grandfatherly sounding father good humouredly fending off accusations of having plotted his own defeat in advance. Hear­ing them like each other aloud was almost as bad as the leg spasms. He drew such comfort from their company, from their existence, that he almost wished they’d leave. It had been better before they came. Before they’d swanned in, he had almost coaxed himself into thinking that this was what the train home was like for most people, and there was no good reason why things should be different for him. Most people feel themselves depart as they arrive at their station. We’d all like to keep the impressions we just gathered, keep the hope we had and the interest we took in our surroundings; we’d like to be like that all the time and every day, but by the time you get home, that’s all snuffed out. In you go, in you go, creature who dwells in the stationery box, in you go, clutching your withered posy... 

Xavier had a hunch that these two were somehow exempt. How had they managed it? They played their board game, and against the backdrop of sound they made (muffled exclamations, drawn out “hmms,” pebbles knocking wood), Xavier heard the name of his station announced. He watched and listened as pas­sengers boarded and disembarked. And as the train swept onward he also glimpsed the male Paris parent standing near the ticket barrier in animated conversation with a station guard, possibly being told a son wasn’t something you could ask about at the Lost Property counter. He emptied his lungs all the way out, then fully restocked. What did he do now that he’d missed his stop and his treacherous legs had very conveniently gone back to normal? Think, he had to think. There was every chance that his two carriage-mates would get off at the very next station, but he wished so much that they would stay awhile. Not for long. Just for, say, three more stops. Then he’d turn around and face the six weeks.

He can’t think, he knows he has to, but he doesn’t want to leave the father and daughter. Instead he gets caught up with them and a newcomer who enters the car. He can’t let go of the vision that another kind of family exists, and that it’s both better and worse to know this is possible.

Among so many other things, this book is a story of attempts to find home and identity in a world that keeps shifting, to reflect others and see oneself reflected and known. Xavier wants a different family than he’s ever had (it is his eventual nonhusband relating this story, after all, and they’re in the early days of a relationship they’re trying to construct according to their own rules). Xavier can imagine this father and daughter as living outside the prisons of what seems to him normal familial dislike. He’s imprisoned by his life, his emotions, but Oyeyemi doesn’t try to match his emotional state with her language.

Otto’s way of telling this story has so much intimacy: he knows everything about this scene and inserts philosophical reflections that would have been far beyond the young Xavier—people in some ways know others better than they know themselves, even when they appear to be strangers. And the movement of the prose has so much freedom that it feels freeing to read, even as Xavier gets caught in a bind.

Most writers have a book that made us, released us, more than any other, though we might choose different books on different days and probably a whole list of names produces a truer image. Still, certain books unlock the doors for us. In a profile of Oyeyemi for Vulture, Helen Shaw writes,

The first story the world told about Helen Oyeyemi was that she was a prodigy. A South London girl who had emigrated from Nigeria at the age of 4, she was inward-keeping, sometimes bullied, often desperately sad. As a teen, she endured bouts of clinical depression that she countered with books from the library, episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and, eventually, writing. When she was about 15, she read a perfect book. “I stayed home from school,” she told me. “I was ‘off sick’ for three days in bed reading Ali Smith’s Hotel World and just being like, This is allowed? I can’t believe this. I immediately wanted to try it.” Reading was an intense, isolated, even isolating experience. “That’s what made it feel like it was my lifeblood or my own heartbeat,” she said. “It just couldn’t be discussed.”

Oyeyemi took that sense of being unleashed in an entirely different direction, but it makes complete sense that she was inspired by Ali Smith. I always remember reading Doris Lessing writing that a writer must write first of all to please herself and not give a damn about anyone else. Helen Oyeyemi would have been extraordinary whether she read Smith or not. But how glorious it feels to read a work and think “This is allowed? I can’t believe this.”

Ali Smith, Hotel World

In Hotel World, a novel in the form of five interconnected stories set in and around a hotel, Ali Smith offers all kinds of freedom, permission, and rushing delight. These show up in the unsentimental ways she creates the dead and living characters and in the wild maneuvers of her sentences. The novel’s voices, first person and close third, tell the stories of characters connected to the hotel, mostly living, though the first piece is in the voice of a young woman, a diver, who died in a hotel accident (she climbed into a dumbwaiter, which broke, and her death is pivotal to the book as it unfolds). Her ghost reenacts her final fall over and over, swooping through the world after her death, before she starts to disappear. These paragraphs come a few pages into the book:

Here's the story. When I hit the basement whoo I was broke apart, flaked away off the top of me like the points of flame flake off the top of a fire. I went to the funeral to see who I'd been. It was a bit gloomy. It was a cold day in June; the people had coats on. Actually it is very nice, where they buried her. Birds sing in its trees, and the sound of far-away traffic; I could hear the full range of sounds then. Now the birds are far away, and there is almost no traffic noise. I visit quite often. It's winter now. They've put up a stone with her name and her dates and an oval photograph on it. It hasn't faded yet. It will, in time; it gets the late afternoon sun. Other stones have this too, the same kind of photograph, and the rain gets in and as the seasons move round the stones, heating them up and cooling them down, condensation comes and goes inside the glass over the pictures. That small boy with the school cap on, way across the moundy grass; that elderly lady, beloved wife; that young man in his best suit twenty-five years out of fashion; all still breathing behind their glass. I hope ours will do that breathing thing too. Hers.

Under the ground, in the cold, in the rich small smells of soil and wood and dampening varnish, so many exciting things are happening to her now. Maybe the earnest ticklish mouths of worms; anything. We were a girl, we died young; the opposite of old, we died it. We had a name and nineteen summers; it says as much on the stone. Hers/mine. She/I. Knock knock. Wooo-

hoooo's there? Me. You wooo-

hoooo? You-hoo yourself. Someone has cut the photograph of her so it will fit in. I can see the tremor of careful scissors round the edge of her head. A girl's head, dark hair to the shoulders. Closed and smiling mouth. Bright and shy, the things she saw with. They once were greenish blue. The head in the glass oval is the same one in the frames in the different rooms of the house, one in the front room, one in the parents' room, one in the hall. I chose the saddest people and I followed them to see where we'd lived. They seemed vaguely familiar. They sat at the front in the church. I couldn't be sure. I had to guess. I thought they were ours, the people, and I was right. After the funeral we went home. The house is small; it has no upstairs, no place for a good fall. A chair in that house can take up almost one whole wall. A couch and two chairs fill a room so there is hardly any place for the legs of the people sitting.

Having broken out of the paragraph-or-two mode, I just want to keep going. But here it is, even in these few paragraphs: the freedom of the ghost, an irreverent curiosity about the living, without any attachment, sentiment, or ability to grieve with them. She’s breaking apart as she tells the story, trying to hang onto the details of life, longing to be part of it all in any way she can, even as a photograph “breathing” through condensation. We don’t know yet (we will, as the book goes on) too much about how her death came about, what it means to anyone else, where we’re going.  

We’re flying with Oyeyemi and Smith, two writers in love with language and the invisible and tangible worlds, going anywhere they please, telling the stories of people telling stories with some urgency but also some detachment. These narrators observe from unexpected angles, turn it all over, shake it, poke the events inside and out. How strange it is, and how intense, to be alive in the world right at this very moment.