A Remarkable Debut
BOTTUM, J.
A Remarkable Debut By J. Bottum The first great, humbling confession that must be made by everyone who thinks about books is that we have no idea where books spring from. We may pretend from...
...Only the old samurai seems at last capable of acting, and in his actions lies the young apprentice’s only hope, if not to understand, then at least to survive the dangers gathered to wait out the snow...
...Everything in the novel is directed toward this brooding sense of ignorance...
...Drawn by the beauty of the acting troupe’s leading girl, the apprentice takes at first what seems to be the actors’ side—until his suspicions are raised against the girl and he freezes into the strange immobility of ignorance that gradually paralyzes almost everyone...
...There is no reason, of course, that a Washington lawyer shouldn’t produce this kind of book, but then there is no reason that he should...
...But the decision to return, in this final version, to an almost medieval Japanese setting was exactly the right one...
...No one in the inn is sure of the role played by anyone else...
...It may be a simple plot of murder and robbery, or it may involve international espionage and the highest levels of government...
...Matched with his apparently natural elegance and literary touch, he is a writer who can soar...
...The promotional material for the novel declares that Libby’s years as a speechwriter and policy analyst in Washington serve as a major influence upon his work...
...But the apprentice is on the outside of whatever is going on, a peasant closed off from the knowledge he needs and certain only that he has become entangled in affairs beyond his reach...
...The thought is a frightening one, for The Apprentice primarily tells the story of a little, unimportant man caught on the edges of a conspiracy no one will explain to him...
...This is why, though the particular effect varies widely, all first novels share a kind of flawed construction that marks them as books written by new authors, learning as they go...
...Even in this first novel, Lewis Libby somehow seems to know already what all creators have to know: how to let a story spread its unlikely wings and fly...
...There may be many things that writing schools can teach, but one thing they cannot teach is how to put an entire book together—for that is the kind of thing one learns only by doing...
...Set in northern Japan during the winter of 1903, as a smallpox epidemic spreads across the countryside and tensions with Russia build toward war, The Apprentice is an interesting mixture of historical novel, modern thriller, and oldfashioned existentialist description of the necessity for making choices in a world of incomplete knowledge...
...Though it is a fine and even elegant work, The Apprentice remains nonetheless a first novel, weakened by two first-novel sorts of flaws: a slight over-insistence by the author that his story conform to the form of a thriller, and a slight over-working that comes from holding on to a manuscript too long...
...When a late guest arrives at the inn, takes one look around at the other guests, and suddenly plunges back into the storm, the apprentice and one of the snowbound hunters race out to bring him back before he freezes...
...Like Lafcadio Hearn’s late-Victorian sketches of unfamiliar Japan, the sheer alien quality of the country and the characters’ motivations helps create for the reader a feeling for the young apprentice’s bewilderment and sense of a world that admits no explanation...
...Libby first composed his story as a novella in 1971, and he reports that in one of his intermediate drafts he moved the story’s setting from rural Japan at the beginning of the 20th century to contemporary America...
...The action in the story is just a little forced, as though Libby had spent too long in admiration of the ability of Brian Moore or Georges Simenon to move a delicate psychological study along by sudden bursts of violent activity...
...An elderly samurai nobleman, a group of hunters, an acting troupe, and an assortment of other chance travelers bed down on the inn’s floor and wait for trails to be cut through the heavy winter drifts...
...But The Apprentice also has that inexplicable quality of being a suddenly real creation—a new thing brought into the world...
...And the prose is sometimes just a little over-bright, as though Libby had gone through the manuscript—which he held, in one form or another, for nearly twenty-five years—and polished it like silver one too many times...
...We may pretend from time to time that we have a notion of the mechanisms of creation, but most literary criticism and biography are like a careful ornithological description of an eagle that never mentions that the bird can fly...
...Key remarks are interrupted, whispers trail off halfheard, references are left to dangle, and even at the book’s close the central mystery has been left unexplained...
...Bad, derivative art may have explicable origins (it’s bad art because it has explicable origins), but in the act of creating any real, substantial thing—from God’s Fiat Lux all the way down to the invention of a good advertising slogan—the one great inexplicability is that the created thing comes to exist at all...
...But when the apprentice finds the hunter murdered in the snow with a large sum of money in his pocket, he begins to realize that the storm has brought together in his inn several groups opposing one another in some unknown conspiracy...
...As the novel opens, a storm has closed the mountain passes leading out of the Japanese “Snow Country,” and unwilling guests begin to gather in a small country guest house managed (in the owner’s absence) by a young apprentice innkeeper named Setsuo...
...As each new guest stumbles in, the rumors of war and the fear of smallpox grow, and the apprentice finds himself drawn into a mysterious sequence of events in which an enormous but unspecified weight seems to rest on the choices he decides to make...
...And somehow, thanks to our conventional images of writers as brooding Byronic outsiders or New England spinsters, Libby’s background makes it seem even more inexplicable than usual to have while reading his elegant and delicate little book that sudden recognition of a real creation—like the shock of reality when the eagle suddenly spreads its wings...
...A small literary press in Minnesota has just brought out an extraordinarily literate first novel, The Apprentice (Graywolf, 248 pages, $22.95), by Lewis Libby, a 46-year-old lawyer and former official in the State and Defense departments under Presidents Reagan and Bush...
Vol. 2 • October 1996 • No. 4
