A clever use of lists to tell a tale
Guy Browning tells a coherent, funny, and poignant story of life from age 10 to 50, using only lists.
“1. I started writing these lists when I was 10.
2. Just after we’d studied the Ten Commandments at school.
3. I thought if God can say it all in 10 points so can I.
4. My mother always badgered me to keep a diary.
5. Because she always wished she’d kept a diary.
6. My dad preferred To Do lists because he was an engineer.
7. These lists were a kind of compromise.
8. I suppose these are my private To Do lists.
9. Except they are about what actually got done.
10. Let’s call them my What Actually Happened lists.”
Thus, begins My Life In Lists, author Guy Browning’s charming and touching debut novel.
As the title suggests, the entire novel is written in list form, and each list has 10 items. Collectively, the 10-item lists tell a coherent, funny, and poignant tale of the nameless protagonist’s life from age 10 to 50.
Following on from the introduction,
By OLIVIA HO
WHEN American author Jennifer Egan realised that a character in her novel was going to go out to sea on a ship, she felt “crushed”.
Up to that point, her fifth novel, Manhattan Beach, had already demanded an immense amount of research.
In order to write authentically about 1940s New York, she had already had to research the waterfront, the mob, the cars people drove, the cigarettes they smoked, and so much more.
“To add shipping on top of that felt impossible,” says the 55-yearold over the telephone from her home in New York City.
“I thought, I cannot do that, I cannot go to sea, I don’t have the ability to accumulate the knowledge I’m going to need to write persuasively about this.
“But I couldn’t seem to head it off. It just had to happen.”
Manhattan Beach is a sprawling novel set in Depression-era and wartime New York that moves from the Brooklyn Naval Yard to the city’s criminal underworld to a merchant ship crossing the Atlantic.
It is an unusually straightforward historical novel for Egan, who has made a name for herself as a highly experimental writer.
Her 2010 book, AVisitFromThe Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and US National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction), comprises 13 connected stories that play with form. One chapter presents a young girl’s perspective in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.
In 2012, Egan published Black Box, a science-fiction short story that was serialised in tweets on The New Yorker’s Twitter account over nine days.
Egan says she did try experimenting with making Manhattan Beach a self-conscious take on the historical novel, but this produced results that were “flat and kind of annoying”.
“The book was most alive when I readers are drawn right into the protagonist’s “What Actually Happened” lists, with the first of his life-long entries at age 10.
The early entries reflect the issues most, if not all, primary school boys face: having a best friend (Steve Baker) to hang out with, making other friends (of differing importance) in Mr Bennett’s class, the euphoria of first being secretly in love with fellow classmate Emma Standish and later fancying a girl named Hyacinth, what his parents argue about (the way his father plants potato seeds, evolution, the Rolling Stones, the Labour Party), his being an accident according to his older twin sisters.
As he gets older, the list entries reflect the issues that teenagers face, such as having a first proper date with a girl, having sex for the first time, how he views the world after having sex for the first time, the pressures of exams, gaining entry into university (and spending his last day at home before he becomes a student), and going to university to study engineering, like his dad.
Like life, the list entries change – as does his priorities – as the protagonist let the illusion of being in the past remain unbroken,” she says.
She spent 13 years researching Manhattan Beach, which was longlisted for the US National Book Awards in the United States (the award eventually went to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing).
Since the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept 11, 2001, Egan has found herself contemplating the trajectory of American power in the world.
“It led me to think about what led my country to have this inordinate power in the world,” she says, “what it felt like to be in the middle of this country when that power was coalescing for the first time.”
And that time, she believes, was when America entered World War II in 1942.
In the course of her research, Egan interviewed close to 50 people who had lived through the war: women who had worked in the graduates from university, enters the work force, ekes out a living as an engineer, starts thinking about adult issues: owning a home (which comes with a mortgage), marriage, parenthood and beyond.
As the novel progresses, so does the protagonist, which lends an air of realism to Browning’s creation. Naval Yard, former mariners she met on a voyage aboard the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, one of the last functioning Liberty ships built during that war, and deep-sea divers.
She got to know a club of veteran army divers and attended their yearly reunion, where they dressed her in a Mark V diving suit and had her walk around in it.
“It was so painful,” says Egan, who has never actually gone diving. “Wearing 200 pounds (90kg) is no joke. It was hard to walk – I just shuffled.”
At the reunion, an octogenarian diver who had helped to bring up bodies when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour revealed to Egan that he had once met a female diver in the Russian army.
“That was so thrilling for me to hear,” says Egan, who went on to use that as inspiration for her heroine Anna Kerrigan, a young Naval Yard worker determined to become
While the list entries are humorous, there is an undertow of sadness to them as the protagonist ages, particularly when his marriage starts to fail, when he has a professional breakdown, and when he wakes up divorced and single at 50, having to start life – both socially and professionally – all over again, which is not always easy or Manhattan Beach, the Yard’s first female diver, despite the gruelling and dangerous conditions and the opposition of her commanding officer.
Egan, aware her earlier books have been somewhat skewed towards the male perspective, wanted this time to write about female power.
“There was this striking moment during the war when men disappeared and women were strongly encouraged to do all kinds of work they had never been able to do before,” she says.
“Yet, that was all taken away from them once the war was over.”
She interviewed a woman who was a first-class welder during the war, but was fired afterwards from the Naval Yard along with the rest of the women to free up jobs for the returning men.
“She went around to all the mechanic shops in town to try to get work as a welder and the men straight forward.
Despite the less-than-sparkling outcome of the marriage, kudos to Browning – a humourist whose nonfiction work includes a satirical take on the British constitution, guidelines on leading a normal-ish life, and tips on surviving the work place – for not allowing his character to mope and dwell on the negatives too much, and for keeping his sense of humour intact.
In short, Browning insists his protagonist (and possibly his audience) have a laugh and not take everything so seriously when all else fails.
The language Browning uses is simple and unpretentious, which reflects the thoughts of his protagonist, who can be seen as Every Man/Every Woman.
Through the lists over the years, readers are given a glimpse of the life of Every Man (or Woman), which can mirror the lives of both Browning and the reader.
My Life In Lists is funny, poignant, wry, totally readable and relatable, and clever in using lists to tell a story and to uncover a life lived mid-way.
In summary, My Life In Lists is worth putting on the must-read list.
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just laughed at her.”
Egan, who is married with two teenage sons, began writing due to panic attacks she experienced while backpacking alone through Europe aged 18.
She wrote constantly in her journal, narrating her own panic. While this did not stop the bouts of terror, it helped to anchor her through them and later inspired her to become a writer.
She has a longstanding obsession with water, which holds the numerous threads of Manhattan Beach together, from the corrupt gang-infested waterfront to the limitless expanse of the ocean.
“New York exists as a city because it is a port,” she says. “Everything came and went through the water. It has that inkling of the eternal about it.”
Now that her 13-year jaunt into historical fiction is over, she feels ready to return to experimental writing – although she notes that the 19th-century novel, which she used as a model for Manhattan Beach, also constituted cutting-edge experimentation back in the day.
“It’s exciting to think about the time when the novel was the pre-eminent form of cultural escapism,” she says. “Of course, fiction has been tremendously marginalised by screens in all the years since then, but I am often struck by the breadth and gutsiness of 19th-century fiction, how it had no hesitancy on approaching anything.”
She hopes to write a companion volume to Goon Squad, which will follow more peripheral characters around in other directions.
“I was pretty tired of experimentation and myself not doing it with a whole heart,” she says. “But now I’m curious again and ready to start doing some kooky stuff.” – The Straits Times/Asia News Network