Lewis Libby is not a pornographer, and his 1996 literary novel, The Apprentice, is not pornography. It is a mistake to dismiss the book on such narrow grounds. To do so, in fact, is to ignore the insight it offers into the mind of its ambitious author.
I blame The New Yorker's Lauren Collins for starting this nonsense. Her Talk of the Town piece, posted just three days after Libby's indictment in October 2005, quoted the novel's (purportedly) scandalous passages without considering their particular Japanese context. Collins, recycling a trope from a 1988 Spy Magazine article, assigned Libby to the pantheon of 'dirty' Republican novelists who have penned steamy fictional passages. Making far too much of a few salacious lines, Collins relegated Libby's intricate puzzle plot to the 'bearest' of outlines.
The Apprentice was subsequently mocked, and even condemned, by people who never read it. I am fascinated by the book, however, and suggest it deserves another kind of attention and scrutiny. If you don't mind the plot spoiler (the plot of The Apprentice matters, in fact), join me after the jump...
To assume Libby is a pornographer is to underestimate him. It is to assume that the unlikely Japanese setting of The Apprentice, for example, is a mere perverted fetish, when in fact it is nothing of the sort. Libby set the story in mid-winter of 1903, on rural Northern Honshu island, because the plot of the novel...
LIBBY: ...fall[s] between the Sino-Japanese War and the Russian-Japanese War of 1905, and it seemed like a very interesting time to set this book, which is set up in the northwest part of Japan, snow country, right up near Russia.
(Diane Rehm interview, February 26, 2002. 3:20 min mark. Boldface mine.)
Forget altogether the notion that The Apprentice is an erotic novel. Think of it instead as an historical fantasy, a novel in which characters invented by Libby find themselves shaping real historic events (without knowing it). So why is Libby, who lived in Japan for several years, so fascinated with this particular time and place?
For Libby, the year 1903 marks a pivotal moment in Japanese history. The Empire of Japan was poised to test its imperialist ambitions against the Russian Empire; decisive Japanese campaigns were soon to be fought in Manchuria and Korea. But the Russian-Japanese War of 1905 was just the beginning of a broader trend. Japan's imperial ambitions would, over the coming decades, extend across the Asian continent (leading ultimately to the Rape of Nanjing and the horrors of World War II). In other words, 1903 is a moment in history filled with potential; at this point, things could still go either way.
Did I mention that The Apprentice is also a spy novel? That the plot of The Apprentice turns on the title character unwittingly obtaining top-secret information, which he unwittingly then passes along? Did I mention that the fate of Japan — and indeed, of the entire 20th century — turns on the lowly apprentice’s actions?
But I am getting ahead of myself...all will be explained. For now, let’s have Libby himself set the modest opening scene. "The apprentice is an apprentice innkeeper", he tells us—
He is a kid from a nearby village in this very rural, peasant part of Japan. And he is in charge of the inn at a time when a major blizzard strikes and strands a number of travelers at the inn. Sort of a classic fiction setting, but the novel then takes...unexpected turns for most people who are familiar with that genre.
(Rehm, 4:00 min mark.)
By "classic fiction setting," Libby is referring rather broadly to the well-constructed plots of late 19th century authors, such as the Russian Anton Chekhov, whom Libby cites as a specific inspiration:
I wanted to bring together the compression of a short story into the novel form. Chekhov writes that if you see a gun on the wall in the beginning of a short story, it should go off by the end of the short story. And I’ve always wondered, why can’t people bring that same tightness into the art form of a novel? And so I sought to do that as well — there are no guns in the book, but I did try to make anything else that hung on the wall part of the story and the action.
(Rehm, 16:00 min mark.)
There are no guns, smoking or otherwise, in The Apprentice. (And for the record, there are no aspens in the book, either.) But as Libby hints, this is a novel where every character and element matters, where every bit of stage business has been carefully considered for its implications upon the larger plot. Having read the book three times, I confess that it actually improves with each reading as various narrative dimensions are revealed.
(I'll add that Libby is obviously a fan some great Japanese novelists, like Kawabata, and has acknowledged his Russian literary precedents as well. This stylistic hybridization seems a deliberate choice for the book, and an interesting one. To my eye, the fleeting 'pornography' in The Apprentice is appropriate to a specific Japanese storytelling context. The book's most notorious passage, as it turns out — the story told in the inn by the performer/samurai about the female musician when she was a young girl, and her supposed sexual training with a bear — may have been a ruse. The samurai is in fact a spy, a member of a secret society. He later demonstrates a motive for having dissembled about his companion's past.)
Libby continues:
Among the travelers that come to the inn are trappers of lac, and carpenters... But there’s also a troupe of traveling performers which includes a beautiful young woman, who is a musician in this group, and he [the apprentice] is attracted to her. And as the guests are sort of sitting around this fireplace – it’s this smoky, dingy, poor inn — and they start exchanging rumors that they’ve heard in their travels. And some of those rumors include that there has been assassinations in the capital, troops are moving north, some people say, no, they’re moving south. And there are people in the forests and in the villages around this remote inn that they talk about.
(Rehm, 4:50 min mark.)
That "troupe of traveling performers" is in fact a claque of spies, led by the samurai, and we can fairly assume at the end of the novel that the "beautiful young woman" was enlisted to seduce the apprentice. (The apprentice, for his part, never catches on — he pines after her until the last lines of the book, never realizing that his infatuation turned the course of world history.) It's significant that Libby lists among the basic components of this tightly-plotted novel the "rumors" and "assassinations" and the troop movements, as well as the "people in the forests." Because a casual reader of The Apprentice might well miss their special significance, and not realize that they are among the few indications of a wider geopolitical context to the plot:
In the middle of this, through a series of events, the apprentice discovers a corpse. And that plunges him into a vortex of events... First he is sexually attracted to the girl, then he is also hunted by some people who think he may have done in this corpse that he found, and there is this larger conspiracy that is swirling around them.
(Rehm, 5:30 min mark.)
"Larger conspiracy." Well there you have it — Libby said it, not me.
In fact, the dimensions of that "larger conspiracy" are never revealed, and that's one of the curiosities of this novel — the reader has to figure out what's happening here, and you can easily miss that anything larger that the immediate plot is happening at all. To summarize: early on, the apprentice stumbles upon a body in a snowstorm and steals the corpse's purse, not realizing there is more to it than just a fortune in coins. After lots of stage business and melodrama — which I won't detail here — the apprentice loses the secret plans (whatever they were) as well as the woman.
At the end of the novel the apprentice asks an actor, a companion of the samurai (and therefore a spy), "What was it all about?":
"It seems it was all about a girl."
The youth looked down toward the track once again.
"What great truth would you know?" the actor asked. "What would make a difference for you? At stake were the plans for war with the Russe or the Emperor's secret goals in Manchuria. There was a list of conspirators that threatened the lords of the land, or a list of the lords of the land who are conspirators. You helped us keep from others the lay of our defenses. Or our offenses. They are all nothing to you."
(The Apprentice, Lewis Libby. Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1996, p. 230.)
I'm not suggesting The Apprentice is a great novel; far from it. To my mind, something seems contrived in comparing the apprentice's emotional life to the tectonic forces shaping Japan's future. No matter how understated, the plot takes the butterfly effect to an abusive end. (But don't Hollywood movies often make this same mistake? Don't we all want to believe our small lives are relevant to the wider world? Movies like the current "Babel", and books like The Apprentice, flatter our wish. Personally, I have a relatively low tolerance for films suffering from what I call the "Indochine Syndrome", named for the 1992 Oscar-winning French epic which showed that the love affairs of Catherine Deneuve were as tumultuous as the wars in Vietnam. But many other people identify with and enjoy such epics, despite their obvious fallacy. So who am I to say?)
Hidden behind this "butterfly effect" conceit is another obsession — Libby's genuine concern for the legitimacy of concealed knowledge. It's a concern I find quite telling: Libby repeatedly makes a point of defending the common man's ignorance. Although ordinary individuals move history forward and play a critical role in it, Libby seems to say they do not know their own roles; moreover, they need not know the are being manipulated even as they play their roles:
"Did you love the girl?" the old man said at last.
The youth was not sure how he should respond. It struck him as odd that he had not put this question to himself before. Then, too, in the past he had imagined love differently. He had thought it to be clear and certain, while his feelings now did not seem so easy to define.
"Did she love you? Or use you?" the actor asked after a moment. He seemed amused.
(The Apprentice, p. 230.)
Are we all being used, and could that be the point?
Libby dedicated The Apprentice "For my family". I find it a slightly odd formulation, because "To my family" would have been more idiomatic, I think, in talking about his wife and two children. "For my family" covers a wider base, and could suggest that Libby was writing for a coterie of readers who were capable of deciphering the textual layers.
But who am I to say? All I know is the book isn't pornography — at least pornography as it's usually practiced. The jury should still be out as to any other purpose The Apprentice may serve.