SAUL AUERBACH, THE great fictional photographer at the heart of Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative, is more meticulous than most. The unhurried processes and careful results of his photography, work made on the streets and in the homes of the people of Johannesburg, provide the calm pulse of the novel. Photography is a fast art now, except for those who are too old-fashioned to shoot digital. But for most of the art’s history—until about fifteen years ago—most photographers had no choice but to be slow. Film had to be loaded into a camera, the shot had to be taken with some awareness of the cost of materials, the negative had to be developed, and the print had to be enlarged. A certain meticulousness was necessary for photographs, a certain irreducible calmness of temperament.
The narrator of Double Negative is Neville Lister, Nev to his friends and family, a smart young college dropout when we first meet him. He is anything but calm. Nev’s life story, detailed in a discontinuous narrative from his youth to his middle age, is the main material of the novel, but it unfurls to the steady rhythm of Auerbach’s photographs: Nev anticipating the photographs, witnessing the places and persons involved in their making, remembering the images years later, and remembering them years later still. Like every worthwhile first-person narrator, Nev has a suggestive and imprecise identification with his author. Meanwhile, the fictional Saul Auerbach has a real-life cognate in David Goldblatt, the celebrated photographer of ordinary life in South Africa during the last three decades of apartheid and the first two decades since its end. The temptation is to think that Nev and Auerbach are a pair of photographic positives printed from Vladislavić and his sometime collaborator Goldblatt. But this is a book that is obsessed with imperfect doublings, and it comes with its own caveat emptor: “Stratagems banged around the truth like moths around an oil lamp.” Things are not what they seem, and this is not a roman à clef, though it has been expertly rigged to look like one.
With a language as fine-grained as a silver gelatin print, Vladislavić delivers something rarer and subtler than a novelization of experience: he gives us, in this soft, sly novel, “the seductive mysteries of things as they are.” At heart, the novel is about an encounter between two intellects in an evil time. It is an account of a sentimental education, though there’s a quickness to the narrative that allows it to elude such categorical confinement. The skeptical, hot-blooded, and quick-tongued younger man and the reticent, unsentimental, and deceptively stolid veteran navigate their way through a brutal time in a brutal place. Neither of them is politically certain—that rawness of response is outsourced in part to a visiting British journalist who goes on a shoot with them—but both are ethically engaged, and both realize how deeply perverse their present order (South Africa in the 1980s) is. “It could not be improved upon,” Nev says of that time, looking back; “it had to be overthrown.” This young Nev is direct but unsteady on his feet. We are reminded, subtly, that he is, as his name tells us, a Lister. He pitches forward. “I felt that I was swaying slightly, the way you do after a long journey when the bubble in an internal spirit level keeps rocking even though your body has come to rest.” Vladislavić’s prose is vibrant: it is alert to vibrations, movement, and feints, as though it were fitted with a secret accelerometer.
Double Negative is in three parts, dealing respectively with youth, a return from exile, and maturity. The plot is light: through the drift of vaguely connected incident, all set down as though remembered, Vladislavić draws the reader into a notion that this is a memoir. But these are invented stories about an invented self interacting with other invented persons. It is not recollection—but it is also not not recollection. It is a double negative. What sustains this enterprise, magnificently, is Vladislavić’s narrative intelligence, which is nowhere more visible than in his language-work itself. We enter incidents in medias res—as though they were piano études—and exit them before we have overstayed our welcome.
Above all, there is in Double Negative, as in all Vladislavić’s writing, an impressive facility with metaphor. Metaphors are the observational scaffolding on which the story is set. They also occasion much of Vladislavić’s finest writing in this finely written book: someone has “three wooden clothes pegs with their teeth in the fabric of her dress and they moved with her like a shoal of fish”; “a window display of spectacles looked on like a faceless crowd”; barbershop clients “reclined with their necks in slotted basins like aristocrats on the scaffold”; somebody “faded into the background like a song on the radio”; and, impishly signaling his own technique, lenses on a pair of black-rimmed glasses are “as thick as metaphors.”
In the 1980s, the scholars George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued that metaphor is pervasive in the English language and that our penchant for metaphorical speech creates the structures of social interaction. But in Vladislavić’s hands, the metaphor goes well beyond this quotidian utility and, refreshed, reconstructed, and revived, does a great deal more: it becomes a ferry for the uncanny, a deployment of images so exact that the ordinary becomes strange and the strange becomes familiar. Metaphors are at home in South Africa’s strange and sad history, where many things are like many other things, but nothing is quite the same as anything else.
A metaphor is semantic. A double negative, on the other hand, is syntactical: two negations in their right places in a sentence usually lead to an affirmation (in the wrong places, they could be merely an intensified negation). A double negative, in the sense of two wrongs making a right, is a form of strategic long-windedness. To use two terms of negation, to say, for instance, that something is “not unlike” something else, is not the same as to say it is like that thing. Double negatives register instances of self-canceling misdirection. They are about doubt, the productive and counterproductive aspects of doubt, the pitching ground, the listing figure, and the little gap between intention and effect.
Beyond the grammatical sense of “double negative,” Vladislavić wants us to think also of the photographic negative, upside down, its colors flipped, its habitation of the dark. Its double, the printed photograph, is the right side up, with a system of colors and shadows that resembles our world, and a form that invites viewing in the light. “A photograph is an odd little memorial that owes a lot to chance and intuition,” Auerbach says. But a photograph is also a little machine of ironies that contains within it a number of oppositions: light and dark, memory and forgetting, ethics and injustice, permanence and evanescence.
Late in the novel, a grown-up Nev Lister talks to his wife, Leora, about someone who recently interviewed him:
“She was being ironic, obviously,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And so are you.”
“I guess.”
“The whole thing is ironic.”
“Including the ironies.”
“Maybe they cancel one another out then,” Leora said. “Like a double negative.”