Phong Nguyen’s newest book, Bronze Drum, is a grand and lovely work, high-minded and beautifully realized. He fleshes out, in fiction, a myth of the Việt people that he first heard from his father, and, always intrigued by it, later researched. He introduces the story in the most inviting way. He explains the historical basis for the myth, and the evolving reverence for it, with the major characters raised to sainthood. Then, in a Prologue, Kha, himself a character in the battle, seems to step backward in time and call the audience to the unfolding of the great event, a “sublime moment,” as though it’s going to occur right now. It’s a stirring beginning and the story meets the the expectations raised. I love the book.
Here’s the situation: In 35 CE, The Lạc Việt people live under the increasingly restrictive and unjust rule of the Han conquerors who impose Confucian philosophy and order on their subjects, and who tax them unfairly. Under the Han, regional lord Trung and his wife have managed to raise their two young daughters in gracious comfort, and under their own traditions. They are from a matriarchal culture, the daughters are broadly educated, including martial arts. While required to be dutiful in meeting family expectations, the young women are free to express their own natures, and to take as lovers whom they will. When marriage is imposed and a burdensome tax levied, the sisters rebel. Though they differ greatly in personal nature, both desire freedom for themselves and for everyone. They gather and lead an army of women to overthrow the Han oppressors, with a brilliant strategy.
This is masterful storytelling, engaging on most levels. The characters aren’t endearing at first, though they become so as mythical characters do, through extreme traits that are strengths and also flaws, memorable excesses. They’re the kind of character one remembers—the impetuous Trung Nhi, the contemplative Trung Trǎc. The sisters first rebel against family and in their own quest encounter challenges and punishments that are vivid, poetic, and touching. Trung Nhi, for example, who has to be outdoors and active, is imprisoned and denied the sound of human voice; Trung Trǎc, who finds a “life of learning” a great gift, must scale a mountain and acquire survival prowess in search of the “heartbreak flower.” This is wonderful stuff. Many colorful characters people this work and exemplify a quality. Almost all, maybe all, embody a contradiction or conflict. Kha, for example, is guardsman. Whom should he guard? And Phùng Thi Chính the cook, mother to four sons, giving birth in battle, grabbing her shield and leaping into the fray. What a powerful symbol of motherhood and warrior, breaking taboo gloriously.
The plot is quick and straightforward. It moves from the palace, courtyard, town, to the mountain land, and then to battlefield. One reward in that movement is the unfolding of the physical reality of the country, the architecture, parks, gardens, food, animals (Tau the turtle has a minor role). This is Việtnam a thousand years ago, before our experience with it, our preconceptions and biases. We learn its beauty. The descriptions overall suggest order, airyness, harmony between the natural and civilized world—except for battle. The unfolding of the plot introduces the layers of the society, highlights differences in the lifestyles of those ruling and those being served. The difficulty of being fair and just, of freedom, expands. The story is a deep look at a society oppressed. And there’s nothing really new there. We see it all over the world, and in our own country. This is one effect of great literature. To set out what we should all say No to.
Every scene encourages scrutiny. An early passage involving the punishment of the beggar Duy, for something he didn’t do, offers different perspectives about what occurs. Ensuing scenes do the same probing. We’re urged to question. What kind of rule must one disobey? When is honor not a good reason to fight? How much can and will a person sacrifice to have order rather than chaos? That last is a question for all classes, the governed and the governing. It’s not that Bronze Drum provides definitive answers, but that it presents two sides at least, and suggests these problems are relative, eternal. They have to be decided over and over. As now, when borders are being breached, identities ridiculed, people impoverished. When oppression diminishes and smothers human lives, people must rebel.
A great point, made often, is that people, especially leaders, must learn the “other” way of thinking and being, at least to acknowledge it. The sisters earn this through suffering, and when they join powers are a formidable force. This point is made at length through Trung Trǎc’s two meetings with the Degar, the people of the mountain. They see no reason to join the rebellion since they aren’t affected by the Han oppression. Their ways are their own—primitive, harsh, physical. If they are to join the battle, there must be a reason to do so. They are Việt people but in their attitude are from a separate country. Painfully familiar.
The most beautiful passages in Bronze Drum are about love. Love. The right to love whom and as one wishes is central to the rebellion. Both sisters fall in love with a person below their social status, but it’s the kind of love between Trung Trǎc and Thi Sách, her tutor, that is developed deeply, at length. The attraction of minds precedes physical attraction and the blend completes a different world for the couple. It’s an idealized love, gracefully developed, and believable—romantic in the best sense. One thinks, let this last. Such intense love between individuals, which may happen rarely but should never be denied, is like a chalice to all humans.
Beguiling language is a great pleasure in this book. Nguyen risks overstatement, but that suits the legendary nature of Bronze Drum. One has to attend the language. The tone and the slightly elevated and formal narrative create a distance from our vernacular. That distance remains through shifts of point of view, in different domains. There’s individuality, but nothing really common. Many, many lines tug the heart or mind, or both. “Guilt ruptured and rent him.” “ Their memories arrayed themselves like an audience to this moment.” “Closing her eyes from a transport of joy.” “’The mind assigns personality to everything . . . even the void.” “[He] may be a ghost and a memory, but I am now his tooth and claw in this world.” The language is simply rich, always saying more than the words, creating this other world, but real. It’s a comfortable and consistent storytelling that one can give into, that guides, simultaneously authoritative and pleasing.
Nguyen is the author of two collections of short fiction, and two other novels. He has proven his great talent in capturing dialect and multiple sensibilities, in innovation, and especially in dealing with ideals, our best. His works are bold and ethical. Bronze Drum is the most powerful to date.
Bronze Drum
Grand Central Publishing
August 2020
ISBN: 1538753707
404 pages
We’re All in the Race: Ann Patchett’s Run
Any book that leads me to recognize my biases and expectations is valuable to me, and Ann Patchett’ s Run is one of those. A rare book, too, given the topics she deals with. She constructs a small mixed family whose members’ status and interactions raise questions on complex issues, particularly race, heritage, legacy, duty, honor, and love. She does so while engaging the reader in a family’s plight over an injured person and her child. It’s a book of many small mysteries and connections that create a very contemporary, important story, and could lead to a personal revelation as well. It’s a bold, beautifully crafted book.
Patchett prepares the reader for the work’s complexity by underlaying the present circumstances with a family legend. A statue of Bernadette, an early ancestor, has for four generations been passed to the female descendant who bears the closest resemblance—fair, redheaded, rather ethereal, in pose and expression like the virgin Mary. The legend contains the truth—a lie about who the statue represented and its origin. The dominant legacy, though, is that the similarity of surface features entitles one descendant to the statue and all it represents. The family now in possession of the statue includes no mother—she died years ago—no daughter, but three sons, one white and two black, both adopted. Who most closely represents the statue and thus will inherit it? The story that follows eradicates wonderfully the surface identity of characters and brings the reader into each character’s nature, never predictable by skin color. Actually, not predictable at all. And there lies the beauty and the power of this book. Some readers may be surprised at the difference between what they expect and what they find.
Though the beginning of present time is a bit slow, an unexpected event occurs that snaps the story into action and focuses sharply on family and divisions within it. While walking to a party to meet with Jesse Jackson, one of the brothers is saved from a wayward vehicle by a black woman who thrusts him out of danger and is herself injured. She is accompanied by a young girl. Why would she save him? Are they related? The ensuing hours will reveal who she is, why she and her daughter were nearby. And, increasingly important, how injured she is. Will she live? Priorities change as they must and should. The more long-term conflicts and estrangements become clear, too.
There’s so much inviting speculation that artifice seems heavier than story, but that’s only for a very brief while and possibly just my own take. Prominent politicians are mentioned, squarly placing the family on the Democratic side. The sons seem to represent religion, politics, and science. Names are clues. The young girl is Kenya and her mother is Tennessee. These and many more engaging hooks are not adequate to what the characters truly represent and how individual they become. They work wonderfully as little mysteries that, being followed, provide more important details. Who is the mother? Which child belongs to whom? Who was the father? Does it matter which child was adopted first? What was the original name? Are the characters who love Shubert related? Patchett can turn a view around, which encourages looking at the other side, and then questioning that, too. Sullivan quotes to Teddy part of a Martin Luther King’s speech but then remarks that “the white brother part doesn’t work exactly. It should be our black brothers. ‘We have sometimes given our black brothers the feeling that we like the way we were being treated.’” But Teddy, who is the artist at remembering speeches, thinks that if the next paragraph had been remembered his own “entire enterprise would have been sunk.” The passage has personal and positive meaning between the two men, and our immediate understanding is not the final one. Some of the signs are misleading, and our speculation about them is telling. This small community is our larger one, the view made palatable, not strongly emotional or even dramatic. Rather low and gentle.
Central is that the people love each other. They try to work together for one common goal. Sullivan and his father, Doyle, try to find one thing they can agree upon, because they are divided in many ways. They agree on Kenya, the young girl, on helping her. Of course. They agree on a person, not a cause. The cause is the unity and the unity is helping. How wonderful. The whole work suggests this. A similar suggestion is to be courteous and kind by pretending to feel if you can’t feel. That brings to mind the old adage (I forget the source, which may be Shakespeare, Aristotle, or some other wise person) to pretend a virtue if you have it not. In pretending, you may develop the virtue. Maybe you just need the opportunity. The pretense can always be dropped. One son does this, adopts a career as a duty, and relinquishes it when he feels the duty has been met. There’s no rule about such responsibility in Patchett’s work. It’s one of the possibilities for an individual. One of life’s vicissitudes.
Patchett expands the concept of mothering and disallows harsh judgment against women who give up their children. A woman can relinquish a child because of great love for the child or for another person. Most of the biological mothers here are missing, which of course matters to the child, as we learn through Tip’s later thoughts. But the absence in Patchett’s view is never abandonment, neither emotional nor physical. Love is the cause. And mothering is a genderless activity, a choice, an experience. It is nurturing and caring. As is fathering. Many characters here are mothering, including the twelve-year old Kenya, who wishes only briefly not to have the role. Perhaps the greatest is Sullivan. He is named after a priest and family member. He furthers the cause of protecting, evident as a dominant admirable trait of any person, male or female. Sullivan has the physical traits of his mother and, though his father thinks Sullivan doesn’t have any of his mother Bernadette’s traits, he definitely does. Sullivan loves children and knows how to love them, to comfort them. That’s his calling.
No character is left knowable only through surface details. In Patchett’s graceful, precise prose their thoughts and feeling reveal each more fully, different from outsider’s perception. This occurs with every character, but more strikingly, and possibly the most difficult for Patchett to achieve, with the two characters named Tennessee. The injured woman, Tennessee, hallucinates with (or truly talks with) her deceased friend. Thoughts and feelings are clearly separate, except when, briefly, they’re not. It’s an extreme example of the fluidity among characters and issues that makes the book profound and beautiful. While the shifting point of view in this passage answers questions that might otherwise go unanswered, it doesn’t seem an artifice as much as it does the realistic mental and emotional journey of the injured mother in remembering her friend. Only she could share this. The depth of individual emotion warms the passage and raises it above artifice.
Without giving away any details, let me say the ending is a positive and comforting view.
What rich and intricate messages this story contains. A mixture we are. Yes. And all of us heirs to a human nature and human rights, despite surface details. The original question, about who gets the statue, is answered. It’s a mild reward compared to all the answers Patchett has presented about the true nature of family, which includes all of us as individuals, flawed, but deeply concerned about life and desires and deeply loving someone, and paying some cost to serve others. All valuable.
Share this:
Like this: