In Murat Isik’s overcrowded novel, the connection remains rather mysterious

The picture is finished in his head. Student Metin Mutlu is going on an exchange to San Francisco for a year. In addition to law subjects, he will also take a ‘creative writing’ course and thus follow in the footsteps of great writers. Although his first ambition is more modest: he at least wants to escape from that character of his that is getting in his way. Away with that learned longing for silent compliance, invisibility, as a migrant child from the Bijlmer. Here he is no longer that Metin, the boy we know from Be invisible (2017), with which Murat Isik won the Libris Literature Prize. He is now a tough guy from that free and wild city of Amsterdam.

Murat Isik: In the mist of Golden Gate Park. Ambo Anthos, 667 pages. €34.95

‘I could already imagine it,’ writes the first-person narrator Metin, ‘that I would ask out an exchange student from Sweden – in my daydream her name was Annika – and we would be close by, like real Americans, first at the sixties diner Mel’s Drive-In would eat a classic cheeseburger with a vanilla milkshake and then move us to The Coronet Theater where I would order a large bowl of sweet popcorn for Annika’, and so on, up to ‘suck each other’s sweet fingertips’ and ‘ endless love […] companies’. You can feel him thinking: oh, if only I were that cliché!

As a reader you immediately wish for him more. That he doesn’t pursue clichés, for example. That he lets go of that ideal image and develops beyond the cliché castles in the air, into someone with individuality, into a real person.

At the same time, you can harbor hope: those writing lessons could help Metin to free him from clichés in that area as well. Because from the sentences that Murat Isik (1977) puts into the mouth of his narrator, you initially get the strong impression that Metin does not yet have much feeling for idiosyncratic or compelling telling of his stories. It is neat and stiff prose, full of formulations that sound forced and stiff coming from a 24-year-old. He introduces the passage about the Swedish exchange student by noting that he was ‘rejoicing […] on the possibilities that this renowned film theater offered’. Sometimes you get the urge to put on an ironic Polygoon news voice with the solemn written language: ‘Because of all the impressions of the day I couldn’t sleep.’ And you soon start to fear the worst for a man who is being beaten up on the street, when Metin calls an ambulance and ponders whether I should say something to urge him to hurry so that his life will not be permanently destroyed a few meters away from us. was kicked out of the beggar’.

Tell without hesitation

Metin seems to think that’s really how you should write. So there is work to be done at writing classes in San Francisco. And from that development into a flexible and inspired writer In the mist of Golden Gate Park or be the reflection?

What presents itself is above all a riotous storytelling: when Metin takes his place at his keyboard, ‘an urge to prove himself is released’, he knows: ‘See me. Read me. Admire me.’ Fellow students whom he bombards with reports sometimes say ‘that I was acting out and sending far too long emails’, but he cannot be stopped. The reader is in the same boat, whether it concerns the exaggerated travel guide stories about ‘the famous Fisherman’s Wharf’ or ‘the famous Café de la Presse’, or Metin’s awkward steps into student life, with the girls (‘ladies’) and ‘the pint night, which as far as I was concerned was allowed to last until well after midnight to give me the opportunity to finally let loose and show a more frivolous side of myself’. Yes, if only it were true.

There is no line, a compelling story (such as Be invisible) it doesn’t happen, although the novel is full of suggestions for that. There’s the mist creeping through the cracks in his drafty room, with ghostly potential and a possible mystery surrounding the deceased previous tenant – but little comes of that. On the morning of September 11, 2001, there is that sight on TV of ‘something I clearly recognized from films and TV series: the famous World Trade Center in New York’, and his mother calling him from Amsterdam to tell him to be careful, because after those attacks people will think he is an Arab. Well, Metin trims his beard – and that ends the storyline. However, there is room for a page-long game of amateur football in a park (‘fine ball handling’, ‘light-footed step’, ‘Our honor was almost crumbled’), which in Fast Jelle wouldn’t be out of place.

But especially there is fellow student Joan Springfield. She presents herself as the manic pixie dream girl with whom Metin falls unstoppably in love, but also has the potential to add some depth to the story, because she struggles with anxiety and depression after the death of her brother. If they have to write an essay about her personal book Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, they embark on a literary adventure together. There the novel takes an unexpected turn: Metin and Joan visit David Foster Wallace, which turns into an interesting conversation about literature.

Against loneliness

Wallace reads “so as not to be lonely,” he says. And if reading requires effort, as with his (famous) novel, ‘the reward is many times greater than with film’, thanks to ‘the mental connection you have made’. Metin thinks that sounds ‘convincing’ in itself, but above all he thinks that ‘a profound friendship’ works against loneliness. When something then seems to spark between Wallace and Joan and the conversation goes in a direction that Metin does not want, he cuts it off – with the envious argument that he does not trust Wallace with vulnerable women. It causes a rift between Metin and Joan, which is only repaired after a few weeks, but without them saying another word about it. What actually happened? They chat about whales, but Metin walks miles away from the elephant in the room. He shows no interest in what Joan is doing and her mental problems. So much for ‘mental connection’ and ‘deep friendship’.

This makes this entire Wallace episode the most strange in the novel, and the most telling, because it shows Metin’s weakness – but also that of Isik’s novel. What does he actually want to say? Here, and again and again, the potentially meaningful is passed over innocently. With his prejudices and egocentrism, Metin thinks he knows exactly what is going on, and he does what is in his interest, without being interested in anything other than his own truth, while (self-)insight is more or less there for the taking. The same already applied to his long e-mails, the same threatens to happen again later in the novel, when his divorced parents try to get closer to each other again. It results in Metin’s unwavering distrust.

But maybe he’s wrong? As a reader you would like to shout out: take a look at yourself, and grow up! But Metin does not come to any realization of his own self-righteousness. And in the storyline that guides the denouement, about his parents, Isik seems to agree with his protagonist: Metin really cannot get rid of his origins. There is tragedy in that, but a tragic novella, without the baggage of all the loose lines and side issues that this novel is full of. In the mist of Golden Gate Park first requires too much goodwill from the reader, who is presented with a lengthy book full of saltless prose (even at the end – that illusion also shatters), and then does not live up to that expectation of development. You keep reading endlessly about someone with a plate in front of his head.

Share Email the editor