The Seattle Times, WA
March 14, 2008 Friday
Fourth Edition

A tough subject, a tougher read;
Author appearance

by Irene Wanner, Special to The Seattle Times

Micheline Aharonian Marcom has published two acclaimed novels, "Three
Apples Fell from Heaven" and "The Daydreaming Boy." Both focused on
the 1915-1917 Armenian genocide. Born in Saudi Arabia to an American
father and Armenian-Lebanese mother, Marcom moved with her family to
the United States in 1968, but she never forgot her painful heritage.
Now she turns in her writing to an American setting: Los Angeles,
where she grew up.

Sadly, "Draining the Sea" (Riverhead, 335 pp., $26.95), which
completes her trilogy about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath,
is an impossibly convoluted, repetitious and confusing
stream-of-consciousness novel.

Its narrator, for instance. Who is he? A "fat white lonely American
("half-Armenian") boy." Several times, he claims he was married. His
son died in utero, and after the fetus was removed, the narrator’s
wife divorced him. Or did she? Was there a wife and baby?

"This too could be a fiction: the wife the green armchair the house
on Hollyline Av," he claims. "Reader, how will you decide?"

At night, the nameless narrator drives Los Angeles’ freeways
collecting dead dogs, which he buries in his garden. He is writing an
essay, apparently, to someone named Marta, a Guatemalan prostitute
who was tortured and murdered. Was the narrator a soldier? Did he
love and/or kill her? Is he making her up? She is his confessor,
someone he desires sexually. Someone whose fate during the United
States’ 1982-83 incursions he can’t stop imagining. Or is he actually
remembering?

"What," he wonders, "am I then? corpse-collector; essayist; motorist
… a once-husband and a half-father; half-Armenian; and a
businessman on most Gregorian calendar days, a buyer on all the days,
and I have not liked my meals in courses, but piled on my plate, and
meat at night and for lunch every afternoon the business and the
leisure, the Shows and the shirts made of fine cottons and wools: I
have been stricken; I have been stiff and my bones, as if made of
wood in the mornings before I travel the highways to the office, over
the hills of Santa Monica and down the canyon, which is the 405, to
work; on the days when there is no business, no TO DO’s, no wife or
meeting or dinners! or games: then I am stricken, then I am wooden
and quiet, alone in my green and padded armchair in the San Fernando
Valley."

Well, what to make of Marcom’s intensely felt, utterly bewildering
work?

To complete this assignment, I divided the number of pages in the
book by the number of days until deadline, then got up each day
dreading the task of making sense of the novel. I’m not a poet, and
thought the fault was mine, that such previously highly praised
poetic prose was over my head.

But I kept returning to a long-ago day at Port Townsend’s Centrum
summer program, when I visited a fiction-writing class that Raymond
Carver led. One story was so compressed, so opaque, that Carver’s
usual gentle approach seemed uncharacteristically harsh. He told the
writer, "You’re making this too hard."

Day by day, as I slogged through my appointed pages, I became
increasingly frustrated. How could Marcom indulge herself with such
language? She had received several of the writing world’s juiciest
plums a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a PEN USA Literary Award for
Fiction, a Whiting Writers’ Award yet this book circled on and on and
on … to what purpose? How had her poor editor, copy editor and
proofreader ever managed? And readers, not paid to cope with this
narrator’s fixations on sex, masturbation, defecation, urination,
torture, war … what would hold them?

I recalled another piece of writing: Carolyn Forché’s prose poem,
"The Colonel," about atrocities in El Salvador. In a spare couple of
hundred words, vivid horrors balanced pointed understatements. Forché
had a clear agenda, too, but her message was far too important to
obscure. Unlike Forché, Marcom has made this too hard.

Author appearance
Micheline Aharonian Marcom reads from "Draining the Sea," 7:30 p.m.
today, Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle; free
(206-624-6600 or )