by A. S. Byatt (1967) Published by Vintage International. 286 pages.
Reviewed 20 April 2007
I’ve been carrying this book around for the last couple of weeks, and people keep asking me if it’s any relation to the David Fincher film starring Michael Douglas. The book and movie have no relation, except for their shared title, and for the fact that both works set out to expose elements of brutality embedded in what we see as the normal world.
This is an early work by Byatt, an author whose later books “Possession” and “Babel Tower” I've liked very much. I’m not sure if this is her first novel, but it reads very much like a first novel, ambitious, uneven, and with all the elements there to tell a good tale but lacking ultimately in vitality.
The story is about two sisters from Newcastle who developed an unusually elaborate game of pretend when they were children. The eldest sister, Cassandra, had a vivid and often violent imagination. The younger sister, Julia, developed on her sister’s ideas and expanded on them. Later in childhood she incorporated elements of the Game into a short story that won a prize. Later still, the sisters competed over a boy named Simon who had a passion for snakes. Now the time is 1963. Simon is in the Amazon rainforest, the subject of a series of BBC documentaries. Audiences think he’s quite sexy. Julia is a frustrated housewife who writes novels about frustrated housewives. And Cassandra is a professor at Oxford, lonely and spinsterish.
When Julia and Cassandra’s father die, they meet again for the first time in years. They're able to reach a truce in their estranged relationship, and Julia invites herself over for a visit to Oxford. There, a concerned friend of Cassandra suggests that the lonely Oxford don might be suffering from schizophrenia. The concept appeals to Julia, who can’t resist the temptation to build a new novel around this scenario. The novel is a huge success, but what will the consequences be for Cassandra and her precarious mental state?
Summed up like this, the plot sounds interesting, even a little lurid, and you could imagine a director like Fincher developing it into a dark, brooding film full of special effect tropes and suspenseful flashbacks. It would probably wind up hokey and lurid, but it would be better than the overly earnest mess that Byatt has served up here.
The worst flaw is that Byatt seems to have little confidence in the book's main plot. She goes out of her way to work in situations where characters might debate weighty issues, as if she is constantly trying to remind the reader that she is determined to write Serious Fiction. Therefore, we learn that Cassandra and Julia were raised as Quakers. Both have broken away from Quakerism, but Julia’s husband, Thor (!), is still quite dedicated to the Quaker ideals of humanitarian beneficence. As the novel goes on he becomes more and more of a pill. He sulks and pouts and throws around insults when Julia expresses reservations about moving, at the drop of a hat, to the Congo for a charitable project; while Julia’s away at Oxford, he invites a homeless family to live in their already crowded apartment; and finally, a woman Thor has been trying to help commits suicide, causing him to break out in a tantrum that seems both violent and contrived.
Why does Quakerism play such a big role in this novel? For all I know, Byatt herself comes from Quaker roots. But even then, it seems suspiciously as if Byatt has included the religion as a way to substitute a set of social issues (the will to improve the world through charity) for a believable character history. At heart, Thor is just your typical Bad Husband from your typical domestic romance novel, but Byatt seems to think that by giving him this philanthropic side, she’s creating an ethical dilemma for the readers. She’s not. Thor’s a complete asshole. It’s a no-brainer. He treats his without the slightest shade of respect. We’re not sad to see him go, we just wish he wouldn’t talk about it so much on his way out.
Byatt also treats Cassandra’s schizophrenia as an opportunity to make a point. What point's being made is never clear. Cassandra seems preoccupied with inanimate objects and feels that they’re somehow oppressing her. She’s sometimes unsure whether her own life is real or just a fiction. The passages dealing with her are absolutely unconvincing; she doesn’t have the sort of loss of mental control that you sense when talking to someone who really has a thought disorder. Her thoughts are actually more lucid than those of the other characters. So why does she have such a problem?
I suppose this is a really book where the young Byatt uses a story of two sisters to sort out two sides of her own style. Julia represents the more grounded part capable of human interest, and Cassandra represents the more abstract part, caught up in ideas.
But in the end we simply see that Julia’s life is too full of nasty people to be of much interest, and Cassandra’s conversations are too vague to seem like fiction at all; they’re an author’s attempt to work out a concept on the page.
Surprisingly, it's fun to see a young author work stuff out on the page, even when it fails. The novel implies that that passionate Julia and abstract Cassandra will never reconcile, and that any attempt to do so leads straight to tragedy. But Byatt’s later work is remarkable precisely because she’s so able to bring the abstract and the passionate side-by-side.
The Underpants
by Carl Sternheim, adapted by Steve Martin
Reviewed 14 April 2007
This is a really fun little play with a good dose of pain mixed in. The story is set around an unhappy marriage between a hearty but passionless German beauraucrat and a wife who’s ready for something far more romantic. When the wife Louise stands on her tiptoes to see the King passing by in a parade, her panties fall down, which wins her a lot of admiring suitors. The characters are all stereotypes from the stage plays of the late 19th and early 20th century plays—the sexy old maid living upstairs, the overblown romantic who’s too worked up trying to write about beauty to actually be able to make love. I’m curious what exactly Steve Martin did to adapt this play. I imagine that he’s partly responsible for making the dialogue so snappy. It move along at a terrific pace. And I also guess that he may have fleshed out the character of Ben Cohen from an anti-Semitic humbug charicature of a neurotic Jewish barber to a complex and ultimately sympathetic guy who helps our heroine reach a moment of independence similar to that in Ibsen’s “Doll’s House.” I wonder if it wasn’t also Martin’s choice to end the play on this emancipatory note?
Reviewed 14 April 2007
This is a really fun little play with a good dose of pain mixed in. The story is set around an unhappy marriage between a hearty but passionless German beauraucrat and a wife who’s ready for something far more romantic. When the wife Louise stands on her tiptoes to see the King passing by in a parade, her panties fall down, which wins her a lot of admiring suitors. The characters are all stereotypes from the stage plays of the late 19th and early 20th century plays—the sexy old maid living upstairs, the overblown romantic who’s too worked up trying to write about beauty to actually be able to make love. I’m curious what exactly Steve Martin did to adapt this play. I imagine that he’s partly responsible for making the dialogue so snappy. It move along at a terrific pace. And I also guess that he may have fleshed out the character of Ben Cohen from an anti-Semitic humbug charicature of a neurotic Jewish barber to a complex and ultimately sympathetic guy who helps our heroine reach a moment of independence similar to that in Ibsen’s “Doll’s House.” I wonder if it wasn’t also Martin’s choice to end the play on this emancipatory note?
The Areas of My Expertise
(2005) by John Hodgman. Published by EP Dutton. 229 pages.
Reviewed 4 April 2007
I’m a member of that pitiful subset of human beings who has lost romantic partners because of a sense of humor that’s often too obscure. I just can’t help it. If I’m in mixed company and the urge strikes me, I’m just going to make up a story about how Judd Nelson actually starred in a three-movie biopic of the life of Grover Cleveland, or the fact that the expression “No Way, José” is actually a quote from “Don Quixote.” I can understand why this sort of joke bothers some people, who feel they’ve been taken in by a deadpan delivery or they’ve somehow made a fool of themselves by not spotting the joke right away. The truth is, the impetus of this sort of joke is not at all to try and put other people down or take the piss out of anyone’s gullibility. Rather it’s a pure creative instinct; it’s rooted in the yearning for a world that’s more anarchic and interesting. Or perhaps (I like this theory better) it’s an edifying attempt to open people’s eyes to the fact that the world actually IS far more anarchic and interesting than we all tend to assume, that in fact it’s only our backward desire to only discuss the 100% truth (especially as it applies to the all important topics of Judd Nelson’s filmography and the depiction of President Cleveland on the silver screen) that makes the world seem so dull and predictable.
Still, after a few dozen regrettable breakups, you learn to sort of keep this kind of humor reserved for those who’ll appreciate it.
And when you find someone who shares it, it’s a happy day indeed. Eddie Izzard’s early stand-up comedy is an example (consider his routine about the end of the Trojan War in “Glorious”), but Izzard is such a master of maintaining a rapport with the audience that he often cuts short his exegeses into surrealist territory. The all-time masterpiece in this sort of performance is the Firesign Theater’s “Dear Friends,” a collection of radio sketches that includes a used car ad as presented by Aleister Crowley; a cheerful Mexican children book about racism in the Los Angeles Police Department; an interview with a man who breaks bricks with his head; and an infomercial about mutated blue chinchillas.
And then this week a friend introduced me to John Hodgman, and I laughed so hard it’s a sin. Hodgman (who appears as the PC in a popular series of ads for Apple computers) has concocted the best collection of shameless poppycock I’ve ever seen in print. He presents the book as an almanac, but he’s not satirizing almanacs so much as he is poking fun at the very idea of serious information. The topics are not ripe for satire; this isn’t a wacky spoof about George W. Bush or a topical riff on the rise of the Internet. This is a spoof about facts. Facts about the United States (Alaska’s nickname is “Land of Moustaches”; Jackie Kennedy used to hunt voles on a single speed bicycle; for a while in the early 20th century the US Senate was taken over by a cannibalistic raven disguised as a German) facts about submarines (the favorite food aboard a submarine is cocktail onions, but sub-mariners call them “cockions” in order to conserve oxygen) and facts about crime (a common con routine involves convincing the mark that you need money to sponsor a team for a Lenny & Squiggy impersonation contest).
The real joke here is the way we’re taught to deal with facts. We’re taught to either get very wonky with them—to take them in total earnest—or to decide that they’re not worth a fig. The dichotomy between expertise and apathy is an ugly and (I believe) unnecessary divide in our culture. That’s why it can be so much fun and so liberating to sit and read someone like Hodgman, who spends 229 pages gleefully being wrong about everything.
You can really pick up this book at any point and find something funny within a few lines, but the “point” is maybe best encapsulated in the way he summarizes the plot of “The Muppet Movie”: “This is a movie about puppets who go to Hollywood to become stars. . . .When they reach Hollywood, they begin making a movie about the movie the viewer has just been watching. The puppets build plywood simulacra of props that, earlier in the film, were presented as real. Then the roof of the soundstage smashes in and a powerful rainbow shines down and obliterates everything, including a plywood imitation of the fake rainbow that had appeared in the first scene. . . . the puppets then look directly into the camera and instruct the viewer that ‘life’s like a movie: write your own ending.’”
Reviewed 4 April 2007
I’m a member of that pitiful subset of human beings who has lost romantic partners because of a sense of humor that’s often too obscure. I just can’t help it. If I’m in mixed company and the urge strikes me, I’m just going to make up a story about how Judd Nelson actually starred in a three-movie biopic of the life of Grover Cleveland, or the fact that the expression “No Way, José” is actually a quote from “Don Quixote.” I can understand why this sort of joke bothers some people, who feel they’ve been taken in by a deadpan delivery or they’ve somehow made a fool of themselves by not spotting the joke right away. The truth is, the impetus of this sort of joke is not at all to try and put other people down or take the piss out of anyone’s gullibility. Rather it’s a pure creative instinct; it’s rooted in the yearning for a world that’s more anarchic and interesting. Or perhaps (I like this theory better) it’s an edifying attempt to open people’s eyes to the fact that the world actually IS far more anarchic and interesting than we all tend to assume, that in fact it’s only our backward desire to only discuss the 100% truth (especially as it applies to the all important topics of Judd Nelson’s filmography and the depiction of President Cleveland on the silver screen) that makes the world seem so dull and predictable.
Still, after a few dozen regrettable breakups, you learn to sort of keep this kind of humor reserved for those who’ll appreciate it.
And when you find someone who shares it, it’s a happy day indeed. Eddie Izzard’s early stand-up comedy is an example (consider his routine about the end of the Trojan War in “Glorious”), but Izzard is such a master of maintaining a rapport with the audience that he often cuts short his exegeses into surrealist territory. The all-time masterpiece in this sort of performance is the Firesign Theater’s “Dear Friends,” a collection of radio sketches that includes a used car ad as presented by Aleister Crowley; a cheerful Mexican children book about racism in the Los Angeles Police Department; an interview with a man who breaks bricks with his head; and an infomercial about mutated blue chinchillas.
And then this week a friend introduced me to John Hodgman, and I laughed so hard it’s a sin. Hodgman (who appears as the PC in a popular series of ads for Apple computers) has concocted the best collection of shameless poppycock I’ve ever seen in print. He presents the book as an almanac, but he’s not satirizing almanacs so much as he is poking fun at the very idea of serious information. The topics are not ripe for satire; this isn’t a wacky spoof about George W. Bush or a topical riff on the rise of the Internet. This is a spoof about facts. Facts about the United States (Alaska’s nickname is “Land of Moustaches”; Jackie Kennedy used to hunt voles on a single speed bicycle; for a while in the early 20th century the US Senate was taken over by a cannibalistic raven disguised as a German) facts about submarines (the favorite food aboard a submarine is cocktail onions, but sub-mariners call them “cockions” in order to conserve oxygen) and facts about crime (a common con routine involves convincing the mark that you need money to sponsor a team for a Lenny & Squiggy impersonation contest).
The real joke here is the way we’re taught to deal with facts. We’re taught to either get very wonky with them—to take them in total earnest—or to decide that they’re not worth a fig. The dichotomy between expertise and apathy is an ugly and (I believe) unnecessary divide in our culture. That’s why it can be so much fun and so liberating to sit and read someone like Hodgman, who spends 229 pages gleefully being wrong about everything.
You can really pick up this book at any point and find something funny within a few lines, but the “point” is maybe best encapsulated in the way he summarizes the plot of “The Muppet Movie”: “This is a movie about puppets who go to Hollywood to become stars. . . .When they reach Hollywood, they begin making a movie about the movie the viewer has just been watching. The puppets build plywood simulacra of props that, earlier in the film, were presented as real. Then the roof of the soundstage smashes in and a powerful rainbow shines down and obliterates everything, including a plywood imitation of the fake rainbow that had appeared in the first scene. . . . the puppets then look directly into the camera and instruct the viewer that ‘life’s like a movie: write your own ending.’”
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