The Lesson by Jesse Ball
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is a weird little read. it’s 138 pages long, so it falls somewhere between a novel and a novella, and its contents are equally tricky to define or summarize. i’m not sure what the reader is meant to be left with after reading it, apart from a vague feeling of melancholy and a ton of questions.
as a reader, i think i may have outgrown surrealism. i do still enjoy magical realism, but i’m no longer intrigued by the unusual for its own sake, if there’s no resolution towards which that unusual is driving.
i’m not sure i’m feeling anything at all about this story.
i requested this from netgalley because i had enjoyed two of jesse ball’s books before—March Book, which is poetry, and Vera & Linus, which is a beautifully-designed book of linked dreamlike vignettes. i’ve been meaning to read one of his novel-novels, but you know how it is when there are so many books in the world, so when i saw this one i figured it would be a good place to finally revisit him.
and it starts out fine, with an intriguing premise of possible reincarnation: five years after the death of ezra, her husband of forty-five years, loring is hired to develop the talents of a five-year-old chess prodigy named stan. she comes to believe stan is channelling or containing some version of ezra who seems to be trying to communicate with her behind stan’s own self. loring and stan form a friendship based around chess, loneliness, and a mysterious box ezra left to be opened after his death, but which loring has never touched.
it’s a compact little story of grief and hope, magic and delusion which puts loring and the reader into the same position; assuming a willingness from both parties to believe that the impossible is actually happening, of wishing making it so.
but about halfway through it starts to lose focus and stray into an episodic series of seemingly unconnected image-heavy chapters no longer concentrated in the main drag of the storyline, involving hot air balloon jubilees and circus performers and strange encounters in the cemetery with people of blurred relations and if any of this is symbolism, it’s opaque to me.
this story is supposedly “Channeling the chess masterpieces of Nabokov and Stefan Zweig,” both of whom are authors i have read and enjoyed without having read either of their chess novels, so if this is meant to be an homage, it is equally lost on me.
it’s not unenjoyable—the writing is lovely, especially when it focuses on the grieving process, specifically how the death of a loved one messes with our sense of self:
…she was the same person, and in the same way, as though he were still beholding her and keeping her to the idea of her that he had always had.
and the characters are sad and flawed in a really appealing way.
it’s just a little frustrating to have so much unresolved. i don’t mind ambiguity in general, but considering there are passages like this one where the potential for misunderstanding is intentionally suppressed:
So, she sat there awhile in the night until she was too tired to sit, and then she lay down, and soon fell asleep. When she woke it was the morning, and at least ten birds were in the tree above her head.
They were doing that bird thing that involves sleeping with the head under one wing. Another way of writing the above sentence would be, when she woke it was the morning, and ten headless birds were draped throughout the tree above her head. Of course, that would be misleading in the extreme, as when she woke, they woke too, and one after another beheld the glittering day.
it’s just a little disappointing to not have some of the larger questions equally addressed, and it feels insubstantial at the end of it all.
so, yeah—i’m not sure what this is, or why, but it hasn’t turned me off of the plan to read more of his books, because i still don’t feel as though i have.
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