Peter Carey
publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
format
Hardcover
pages
380
Frank Delaney
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Margot Livesey
American Dervish
Ayad Akhtar
Time and Again
Jack Finney
Two-time Booker winner, Peter Carey, has a new novel, PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA, a wanderlusting novel that whips up Alexis de Tocqueville, the young Frenchman who sailed to the United States in 1831 and described this democratic experiment with more insight and prescience than anyone before or since.
Carey's most marvelous invention is de Tocqueville's traveling companion. In real life, the French commissioner toured America with his insightful young friend Gustave de Beaumont. But here Olivier, the alter ego of de Tocqueville, is accompanied by a 49 year old engraver-spy-servant named John Larrit, or Parrot, "the sort of narrow eyed and haughty character on whose account one might wisely cross the road."
The novel's real pleasure, though, is watching the development of this "most impossible of friendships" as these two men come to a grudging respect for each other. "I had grown very fond of him," Olivier finally realizes. " parrot could have no other name than Friend."
If you loved OSCAR AND LUCINDA, JACK MAGGS, and TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG, you'll flip for PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA.
From the Author's site:
Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943.
He claims his birthplace of Bacchus Marsh had a population of 4,000. This fact should probably be checked.
He was educated at the local state school until the age of eleven and then became a boarder at Geelong Grammar School. He was a student there between 1954 and 1960 - after Rupert Murdoch had graduated and before Prince Charles arrived.
In 1961 he studied science for a single unsuccessful year at Monash University. He was then employed by an advertising agency where he began to receive his literary education, meeting Faulkner, Joyce, Kerouac and other writers he had previously been unaware of. He was nineteen.
For the next thirteen years he wrote fiction at night and weekends, working in many advertising agencies in Melbourne, London and Sydney.
After four novels had been written and rejected The Fat Man in History - a short story collection - was published in 1974. This slim book made him an overnight success.
From 1976 Carey worked one week a month for Grey Advertising, then, in 1981 he established a small business where his generous partner required him to work only two afternoons a week. Thus between 1976 and 1990, he was able to pursue literature obsessively. It was during this period that he wrote War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda. Illywhacker was short listed for the Booker Prize. Oscar and Lucinda won it. Uncomfortable with this success he began work on The Tax Inspector.
In 1990 he moved to New York where he completed The Tax Inspector. He taught at NYU one night a week. Later he would have similar jobs at Princeton, The New School and Barnard College. During these years he wrote The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, and True History of the Kelly Gang for which he won his second Booker Prize.
In 2003 he joined Hunter College as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. In the years since he has written My Life as a Fake, Theft, and His Illegal Self.
He is at work on a new novel.
Beyond the book
NY TIMES REVIEW
April 18, 2010
Tocqueville: The Novel
By THOMAS MALLON
PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA
By Peter Carey 380 pp. Alfred A. Knopf
Peter Carey's 11th novel is announced by its publisher as "an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville," a figure perhaps a bit cerebral for one of this author's brass-band burlesques of literature and history. But "Parrot and Olivier in America" grabs its subject and marches down Main Street playing full out, provoking a reader's delighted applause and - as is often the case with this exuberant novelist - a small measure of exasperation.
Carey's Olivier de Garmont is born, like the author of "Democracy in America," into a family of Norman nobles in 1805. His grandfather - again, like the real Tocqueville's - has lost his head to the guillotine; Olivier's parents are lucky to have escaped it. The family makes a small comeback when the Bourbons are restored to the throne, but in 1831, a year after the July Revolution, Olivier, a rising young lawyer, decides to push off to America. He declares himself to be in an "impossible position" politically, since he's one of those "liberal modern men" who are nevertheless "nobles still" and thus blameworthy. Aside from all else, his mother thinks it's wise for him to leave the country. And so arrangements are made for him to conduct a study of America's penal system for the new French regime he so dislikes.
The real Tocqueville traveled to the United States for the same limited, original purpose, accompanied by Gustave de Beaumont, a social equal only three years older than himself. Olivier, by contrast, boards the Havre (Tocqueville's very ship) with an entirely different sort of companion. Parrot, his feisty English secretary, is almost 50 and has the kind of dizzying, Dickensian résumé that often qualifies a character for employment in one of Peter Carey's books.
To simplify things, vastly: Parrot is a former printer's devil who long ago learned engraving from the mysterious Mr. Watkins, who would seem to have perished at the fiery end of a forgery scheme involving Parrot's own father. At 12, Parrot passed into the control of the Marquis de Tilbot, a one-armed counter revolutionary Frenchman whom the boy saved from starvation on the English moors. (Tilbot is, it should be noted, the author's latest improvisation on Dickens's Abel Magwitch, whom Carey transformed into Jack Maggs, the eponymous hero of his crackerjack 1998 novel.) Tilbot carried young Parrot off to Australia and years later brought him back to re-royaled Paris, where he became the older man's servant and spy. It is in this capacity that Parrot goes off to America, to look after and report on Olivier for the young lawyer's mother, the Countess de Garmont, with whom Tilbot is in love.
The real Tocqueville is described by his biographer Hugh Brogan as having been "cross-grained, refined, severely intellectual, private." Carey doubles the worst of these ingredients to create, in Olivier, a pompous, febrile, tantrum-prone twit, a master Parrot refers to as "Lord Migraine." Olivier is abstractly liberal but consumingly elitist; his servant boils with ambition and resentment. A socialist and unbeliever, Parrot imagines his own mind to be "a mighty garden wild with weeds," and himself a man "subject to the laws of Newton but not to those of kings." He is being cruelly transplanted to a new world whose democratic opportunities he cannot seize: "I read Tom Paine by candlelight, but for 18 hours a day I was a vassal." He is, however, able to bring along his volatile mistress, Mathilde, a portrait artist who hates the aristocrats she flatters in paint. Tormented by the hours of the voyage that Olivier spends sitting for her, Parrot tosses the resulting canvas over the Havre's starboard side.
Both men first discover America among their fellow passengers. The most confident of these is Mr. Peek, president of the Bank of New York, who urges Olivier to "play the democrat" and stop offending Yankee sensibilities by sending Parrot below deck. Peek also holds forth on the character and position of American lawyers - a matter Tocqueville looked into as well. (When it comes to such parallel observations, Carey acknowledges that scholars "will detect, squirreled away among the thatch of sentences, distinctive threads, necklaces of words that were clearly made by the great man himself.")
Even before disembarking in New York, Olivier has decided to expand his project beyond penology and write a book about all things American. He dictates a letter to his mother, through Parrot, telling her that "when the wave of democracy breaks over our heads, it will be best we know how to bend it to our ends rather than be broken by its weight." He sees Americans as "caterpillars" forever shedding one existence for another. Their snobbishness and democratic affectations, their wish to be admired, their enthusiasm for clubs and associations, and their tendency toward religious fervor all enter his gaze. Soon enough he is even using and italicizing their expressions: "I would leave for my vacation by stagecoach."
Tocqueville took an English wife, but Carey gives Olivier an American romance with Miss Amelia Godefroy. When she becomes his lens for looking at the New World, Olivier's findings - which can be as tart as the real-life judgments in Mrs. Trollope's "Domestic Manners of the Americans" - are beguiled into something more sympathetic. Parrot all but rolls his eyes over his employer's rhapsody to a Connecticut town meeting they attend with Amelia: "He was aglow, his cheeks red, wreathed in smiles. He wiped the corner of his eye. He declared, good grief, he had come home."
Like most of Carey's inventive, maximalist entertainments, "Parrot and Olivier" is replete with expressed feeling, if too wittily contrived for actual passion. The story is told in the alternating voices of its two main characters, and it's hard to say where the emotional focus finally lies. Master and servant bump along through fits of contempt and pity and occasional affection, without ever really fusing or fully breaking apart. Olivier's belief that Parrot has made him "the object of a strange and savage love" is an aristocrat's delusion. Parrot's teeming emotions are always finding someone and something else to spill onto, and the novel keeps throwing fresh excitement and frustration his way. No regular reader of Carey will be surprised when Mr. Watkins, the engraver last seen almost 40 years earlier while on fire, shows up in New York; or when Parrot begins helping him assemble and sell a collection of his work called "The Birds of America."
Sentence for sentence, Carey's writing remains matchlessly robust. Sailors cling "to the rigging like soft fruit in a storm," while inside a dark parlor old ladies sit "wetting their hairy chins with stout." But as the book's bravura paragraphs grow into chapters, the author seems unable to decide whether it's "Democracy in America" or "Martin Chuzzlewit" or, once more, "Great Expectations" he'd like to inflate and transform. The local units of invention rarely disappoint, but if Tocqueville were to survey the book's overall imaginative structure, he might recommend a stronger sort of federalism to the enormous literary talent presiding here.
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SUNDAY, APR 11, 2010
"Parrot and Olivier in America"
Peter Carey's delightful new novel asks whether democracy and art are incompatible
BY LAURA MILLER for SALON.COM
Although he's won the Booker Prize twice (for "Oscar and Lucinda" and "True History of the Kelly Gang"), Peter Carey doesn't quite match the American notion of a great novelist; for one thing, his books are too much fun. (Tellingly, the least comic products of his pen tend to be the most celebrated.) Shouldn't literature taste more medicinal — like, say, the works of that other double Booker winner, J.M. Coetzee? Also, Carey has mostly written about Australia (both the country and the state of mind), which Americans find perplexing. We regard Australia as too much like America to be interestingly foreign, so why harp on it? Why not just act as if you're already American? It works for half the movie stars in Hollywood, after all.
So while Carey has lived in New York for two decades, he still feels like a Commonwealth novelist, the kind of writer who consistently produces a satisfying, well-shaped, inventive and entertaining book every two or three years without excessive fuss or bother. This is not how we do it stateside. To read any novel more challenging than an airport thriller, Americans usually need to be persuaded that the book is epochal, the result of a heroic effort to define our times, undertaken by a stormy and (ideally) clinically depressed genius. We figure that if we have to exert ourselves to read it, we want a guaranteed pay-off in cultural capital.
Carey's latest novel not only is about America but even has "America" in its title. His publisher is calling it "ambitious," signaling a bid for greatness, American-style. But rest assured that "Parrot and Olivier in America" is still a Peter Carey novel, which means that it's amusing and wise and graceful to a degree that we almost don't deserve.
Characterized as an "improvisation" on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville (the author of "Democracy in America"), "Parrot and Olivier in America" describes the adventures of Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont, a snobbish, cosseted French aristocrat who is sent across the Atlantic by his relatives in 1830. He's supposed to be researching a report on American prisons, but in truth his imperious mother has had him kidnapped; France has become a dangerous place for young noblemen of Olivier's idealistic, if somewhat muddled, political sentiments. Sent along with him, unwillingly, is Parrot, an Englishman twice Olivier's age, the orphaned son of a radicalized journeyman printer and a man possessed of far more talents than meet Olivier's class-blinkered eyes.
The two men detest each other. Olivier, who can trace his ancestors back to King Clovis, objects to Parrot's impertinence. Parrot marvels over "the general thoughtlessness of aristocrats. They never imagine a man has a life of his own." In the U.S., they encounter all manner of typical American specimens, from a Jewish theatrical producer to a couple of sharpsters who've figured out how to use carrier pigeons to corner the stock market to a draper's son who has lovingly amassed a magnificent personal library. As must be expected from a man of his age and temperament, Olivier falls passionately in love, while Parrot, a frustrated artist, suffers a crisis of purpose. Gradually, they warm to each other and form what Parrot calls the "most impossible of friendships, perhaps the only example of its type the world had ever seen."
As this buddy-movie premise suggests, Carey is not above the occasional pop stratagem. And what is America, after all, but a place where people have the chance to prove that they are more than they appear to be, a place where character can deepen and evolve? Parrot comes to see that Olivier's childhood was as anxious and grief-haunted as his own. Olivier discovers that his "servant" is a man of honor and erudition.
Throughout, they argue the merits of democracy; several of Olivier's observations are lifted from the writings of Tocqueville, with whom he shares a few (though by no means all), biographical details. Like Tocqueville, for example, Olivier regards the rocking chair (supposedly invented by Benjamin Franklin) as an illustration of American restlessness and wonders why a purportedly anti-aristocratic society is so fond of emblazoning everything with bogus coats-of-arms.
At the heart of the dispute between Olivier and Parrot is what Olivier calls "the awful tyranny of the majority" and his conviction that "there can be no art in a democracy." An egalitarian society, he says, will support no "class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts. Without that class, art is produced to suit the tastes of the market, which is filled with its own doubt and self-importance and ignorance, its own ability to be tricked and titillated by every bauble." And while Parrot cannot accept this proposition, he also recognizes that, for all his "aristocratic imbecility," there is a radiant quality to Olivier that will fade from the earth with the eventual passing of his kind. Like Versailles or Notre Dame Cathedral, the ideal nobleman is the beautiful product of an unjust, obsolete system.
To add credibility to Olivier's argument, Carey also slips a soupçon of political prophecy into his mouth, having him tell Parrot, "You will follow fur traders and woodsmen as your presidents, and they will be as barbarians at the head of armies, ignorant of geography and science, the leaders of a mob daily educated by a perfidious press, which will make them so confident and ignorant that the only books on their shelves will be instruction manuals." Olivier may be unable to conceive of a figure like Abraham Lincoln, but he can foresee the advent of Sarah Palin just fine.
The debate between Olivier and Parrot is insoluble, but then fiction isn't in the business of offering solutions; its mission is to coax us into feeling the breadth and depth of the question as it's asked by human beings every day of their lives. Can Olivier (absurd yet endearing) survive in America, and can Parrot (embittered yet softening) thrive anywhere else? The trick of a great novel like this one lies in convincing you that you can't bear to part with either one.