Waxwings | Jonathan Raban | Waxwings? Why waxwings?

Waxwings | Jonathan Raban | A pleasant weekend read? Yes. High lit? Nope.

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Waxwings

	Waxwings Jonathan Raban Vintage, 2004 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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Jonathan Raban?s powerful novel is set in Seattle in 1999, at the height of its infatuation with the virtual. It?s a place that attracts immigrants. One of these is Tom Janeway, a bookish Hungarian-born Englishman who makes his living commenting on American mores on NPR. Another, who calls himself Chick, is a frenetically industrious illegal alien from China who makes his living any way he can.

Through a series of extraordinary but chillingly plausible events, the paths of these newcomers converge. Tom is uprooted from his marriage and must learn to father his endearing eight-year old son part-time. Chick claws his way up from exploited to exploiter. Meanwhile Seattle is troubled by rioting anarchists, vanishing children, and the discovery of an al-Qaeda operative; it is a city on the brink. Savage and tender, visionary and addictively entertaining, Waxwings is a major achievement.

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Waxwings? Why waxwings?

I see that most of Waxwing's reviewers were Seattleites. As an ex-Seattleite, I loved the nostalgia the book presented.

But that ending? The (bird) waxwings devour all the berries off the bush outside the main character's window. No previous mention of waxwings in the book (except, of course, for that title!) So what was the significance? I realize it's symbolic, but symbolic of what? The main character's life had dipped into shambles, but by the ending he is recovering very nicely, thank you very much. Those other reviews seemed to gloss over the ending, but I have to confess, I do not understand it. Help!

But, in spite of that, I enjoyed it a lot.

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A pleasant weekend read? Yes. High lit? Nope.

Like a few other reviewers on this site, I was drawn in by the fact that Waxwings takes place in my hometown. Raban is on a bit of a roll. Waxwings has sold well, and even appeared briefly on stage here at the Book-It Repertory Theatre.

Waxwings kept me engaged for four evenings of reading. It's fast, enjoyable, and I kept turning the pages to see how the lives of Tom, Beth, Chick and the rest were coming along. It's interesting, pleasant, and kept me largely away from the TV set. For that it gets 3 stars.

Where the book falls down is as anything other than a pleasant light read. Tom is the only character in the book with any depth to speak of. Everyone else seems two-dimensional. Likewise, late-90s Seattle, which seems to be Raban's overarching focus, is hit with too much unnecessary detail, and too little to fill in the lay of the land to anyone who isn't intimately familiar with our fair burg. Where is Queen Anne? Who lives there? Is Torrefazzione a beloved former haunt of Raban's, or just a Starbucks with a funny Italian name? Even the University of Washington, where Raban spends a fair amount of the novels time and no small quantity of barbs seems barely fleshed out.

James Joyce said famously that if Dublin burned down, the city could be reconstructed from his books. In Waxwings, only Tom Janeway's rotting Victorian snaps into focus. The rest seems fuzzy and undefined.

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Meandering and Literary, but engaging

I don't usually go for the 'literary' type novels, caring more for story than for prose, but I decided to give this a go anyway. Having chosen it at random, I had no previous expectations, and was pleasantly surprised to find it well-set in one of my favorite cities. Tom, the protagonist, is richly drawn and sympathetic. His wife Beth, less well drawn, seems to be there mostly to provide Tom with conflict.
The story wanders through the first half of the book, and the plot goes here or there without any guide map. Is it about Tom's relationship with the Chinese roofer? Is it about his relationship issues? Is it about the fateful walk he takes? The reviewers didn't seem to know either, and I don't blame him. At the end of the book, I didn't know what it was about, and couldn't easily explain what had happened.
Does it matter? No. Tom felt real to me, and Raban didn't let his beautiful prose get in the way of the story. After a hundred pages, I knew I wanted to read it to the end, and at the end, I felt happy with the ride. What else do we expect from a novel?

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Flying on Waxwings Too Close to the Sun?

Great fiction writers make stuff up. And they concoct a fictive world in which this made-up stuff seamlessly combines and blends with "real" stuff they also bring to their books: Seattle demography, for example, or dotcom economics or marine navigation or ornithology or the decomposition of house timbers in damp climates.

Non-fiction writers (for the most part) leave out all the made-up parts.

And in between you get some very good writers who just aren't great fiction writers. They just can't do the blending. Jonathan Raban's Waxwings shows him to be one of this species.

The book is peopled well. Waxwings has true, powerfully-realized characters (except for perhaps the most off-key Chinese immigrant you'll ever hear, though you'll root for him). The book's plot is also for the most part well-constructed. And the writing itself is always fine, sometimes very fine indeed.

But somehow it clunks as a novel. And for me, that clunking sound comes whenever Raban reels out a set of his non-fiction Real Facts and crams them in alongside his fiction. So here come some Real Facts about how a ship is navigated into harbor, here are some Real Facts about the dotcom boom and bust, even some final Real Facts about the feeding habits of waxwings (Um, apparently they're birds. Well, I didn't know.)

I like his writing and I like his characters. I'm just not sure Jonathan Raban is a real fiction writer. He knows how to make stuff up but (at least on the strength of Waxwings) he doesn't know how to hide the facts.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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