Waxwings (novel)

Infobox Book
author=Jonathan Raban
name=Waxwings
publisher=Pantheon Books
isbn= ISBN 0-375-41008-2
release_date=September 30 2003

"Waxwings" 2003 is the second novel by Jonathan Raban(written eighteen years after his first). It is a canticle for the late 1990s told through the intertwined lives of several Seattlites. In the novel, Seattle becomes a microcosm of America at the turn of the millennium, and Raban's characters - all in some way tragic "tourists" in the world - are rendered with a compassion that redeems their personal failings.

Plot summary

The novel's protagonist, Thomas Janeway, was born Tom Szany in Hungary. His parents emigrated to England when he was a young boy, and he regards himself as an Englishman, having been educated and become a successful novelist there. On a book tour around the US, he met his future wife, Beth, in Seattle, and with the help of her contacts landed a job as professor of Victorian literature at the University of Washington. He marries Beth and they have a son, Finn, and Seattle becomes his new home.

The novel begins eight years later and Janeaway's life is slowly unravelling in his adopted home. He deeply loves his four-year-old son - now at a pre-school center called Treetops - but his wife is caught up in the dot-com explosion and the couple have grown apart, primarily because Janeaway has devoted all his energies to his books and literature rather than to his immediate family. As Seattle erupts in the WTO riots and terrorist plots, Beth leaves him to move into a brand new condo apartment to start her new life. Also, while walking one day along the paved trail beside a slough, a six-year-old girl called Hayley Topolski is abducted nearby and Janeaway sees a ghastly photo-fit of his own face on the news that evening. Even though he doesn't remember seeing her, others remember seeing him smoking cigarettes, a habit he has taken up again after his separation, and muttering to himself, something he explains away later to Nagel, the detective who interviews him, as his thinking over a new novel. Nagel bluntly informs him he is a 'person of interest' in the abduction and possible murder of the girl, and Janeaway's situation worsens when he is put on leave with pay from UW and loses his popular NPR radio commentaries.

Parallel to Tom's story is the one for Jin Peng, a Korean who has come to America on board a container ship in search of a better life. He is both intelligent and resourceful and soon finds a false identity, Charles Ong Lee, a job, and a new nickname, Chick. He gets a foot up on the financial ladder stripping asbestos off an old hulk for Mr Don, a Seattlite wheeler and deeler, and then starts hiring Don's illegal Mexican immigrants for his contractor business. His first job is reconstruction on Janeaway's large old house on Queen Anne Street which is in a serious state of dilapidation, and he is caught by Thomas sleeping in its basement. Janeaway allows him to stay but eventually has to turf him out fearing even more trouble from the police over his hiring an illegal, so the house becomes a shambles of half-completed reconstruction, reflecting its owner's own disordered state of mind.

Beth, too, is starting out with a new life and home. She throws in her old job as a journalist for a new internet start-up, GetaShack.com, the brain child of its charismatic founder, Steve Litvinof. With a new job, car, and new-found friend, Debra, she starts to achieve the sort of materialistic lifestyle she has always wanted. She and Janeaway share custody over Finn, who is desperately missed by his father, and, caught up in the parental tug of war, he is expelled for a time from Treetops for fighting with another boy as he tries to clear his father's name.

Despite their problems, all the characters in the novel try to move forward with their lives, and even Janeway 'the suspect' finds sympathetic allies in surprising places, such as strong support from Bernard, his formerly despised homosexual Head of Department at UW. One narrative infuses another, lending the novel a Dickensian universality and together these disparate voices perfectly capture the particulars of Seattle at a unique moment in American history.

Ideas for the novel

Raban muses over the idea for a Seattle-based novel near the end of his American road trip in "Hunting Mister Heartbreak". Whilst sailing on Lake Union, he portrays himself as a fictional writer called Rainbird who, in toying with the idea for a novel, invents a character called Woon Soo Rhee. Woon Soo Rhee materializes as Chick in "Waxwings":

'Rainbird was keen on Woon Soo. His face would be a reef-knot of bunched muscle. His furious hands would fill the gaps of his fractured, F.O.B. American English. His body would be like the kind of steel spring that tough guys use to strengthen their hands. Woon Soo would be a creature of tragic aggression.' (p.361)

The title

Jonathan Raban's title refers to a type of bird.

Waxwings are sleek, gregarious birds that migrate all around Europe and North America, living on insects in summer and berries in winter. Their only appearance in this book comes at the very end, when the sudden descent of a flock into his garden greatly excites Tom Janeway. He even calls his young son Finn to come and see. Finn is unimpressed. "Can I go get a cookie now?" he asks, while his father reaches for a bird book. When the scene closes, so does the novel.

Raban himself speaks about the title and its relevance to his theme in an interview:

“ ... the book was actually named for the birds ... They're fascinating to watch. They descend, in a huge flock, on a berry tree and gorge themselves until the tree is stripped bare. Some of them get so drunk on the berries that they fall out of the trees, too heavy to fly. You see them lying on their backs, sozzled out of their tiny minds with their feet waving in the air. Then suddenly the flock recomposes and moves on to pillage the next tree. This, I thought, is the settlement of the West in miniature ... it seemed perfect as an analogy for what people were doing with Seattle during the dot-com movement: these birds, as it were, migrating from gold rush to gold rush, getting high, falling out of the tree, waving their feet around, getting up, moving on.”

Unfortunately, these ideas don't fully translate themselves to the reader and the end of Waxwing's proves rather unsatisfactory, leaving the reader in mid-air wondering about the fate of its characters.

Source

"Waxwings", Jonathan Raban, ISBN 0-375-41008-2

References

*cite web|url=http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1027719,00.html |title=Humane geography |publisher=The Guardian |author=Anon. |date=August 23, 2003 |accessdate=2007-05-04

*cite web|url=http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/waxwings/review/ |title=Strangers in a Strange Land |publisher=Reviewofbooks.com |author=W. R. Greer |date=2003 |accessdate=2007-05-04

*cite web|url=http://www.post-gazette.com/books/reviews/20031102raban1102fnp5.asp |title=Seattle serves as backdrop for "Waxwings," a tale of rising, falling fortunes |publisher=post-gazette.com |author=John Schulman |date=November 02, 2003 |accessdate=2007-05-04

*cite web|url=http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2003/08/jonathan_raban.html |title=Jonathan Raban at London Review bookshop |publisher=City of Sound |author=Dan Hill |date=August 28, 2003 |accessdate=2007-05-04

*cite web|url=http://evalu8.org/staticpage?page=review&siteid=5145 |title=Jonathan Raban: A stranger in Seattle |publisher=evalu8.org |author=Alexandra Gill |date=November 17, 2003 |accessdate=2007-05-04