Diastole slow reader reviews

Thomas Pynchon's schlmiels

2009-10-19T08:32:00.000-07:00

The first Thomas Pynchon book I read was V. Benny Profane became my hero because he was clumsy, becausehe was clumsy, but his clumsiness was explained by such a brilliant convention: he was clumsy because he was a schlemiel, and schlemiels were at war with the world of inanimate objects. I was an ungainly guy, and all my life I’d struggled to be able to do the physical activities that came naturally to other kids.

Profane was just the first in a line of schlmiel heroes of Pynchons, heroes who, I think, are self-portraits. Not every book has one, but most do. Tyrone Slothrop of Gravity’s Rainbow; Zoyd Wheeler of Vineland; and now Doc Sportello of Inherent Vice.

Pynchon’s relationship with these characters has evolved. Tyrone Slothrop, especially, seemed to be the butt of all the world’s jokes. The narrator of GR kept reminding us that Slothrop’s main flaw was that he just didn’t feel much, didn’t have many emotions. Sportello is also pretty cut off from his emotions, lustful at times, lonely, frightened that his world of surfers and hippies is going to be stolen away by the new Ronald Regan mindset; but never really subject to moments of passion. But whereas Slothrop’s emotional neutrality always seemed to be a character flaw, Sportello’s character is just a given circumstance of the book. There’s a sense that it’s too late to change it, and maybe it doesn’t need to be changed.

Inherent Vice

2009-10-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

by Thomas Pynchon

Oct 17

I'm in Connecticut right now, visiting my grandfather, looking around the little city of Wallingford, on vacation, dipping into the dozen or so books that I'm curious about, including one about the city of San Francisco, about the way it represents the concept of Manifest Destiny, the idea that America's westward expansion is both an advance of a Christian nation into a Western Hemisphere Land of Canaan and the rebirth of the Roman Empire. The visual part of my mind is still nibbling away on the feast the new environment here offers me, sights you just can't see in Anchorage Alaska, all these old buildings, cemeteries, thick trunked trees, churches with roof-tiles like reptile scales on their spires--and I'm thinking of all the effort that must go into preserving these traces of old New England culture, Yankee culture, a culture that's at once inspiring and offensive, a culture which is linked to those founding fathers we're all supposed to admire and which also seems especially to embrace all the ugly, elitist, exclusionary traits of America.

My mind's a jumble of ideas. It's usually a jumble of ideas.

To me, Thomas Pynchon represents a sort of salvation, a messy, rummage sale of a mind that's able to take the chaos of life and order it, but that chooses instead to rearrange it into a different sort of jumble.

This new novel of his is a delight, and it touches on the politics of arranging and rearranging American space, the political forces that lie behind the sudden destruction of neighborhoods, the big monies that invest in new casinos, the monetary carrots that are dangled in front of metropolitan police departments and that therefore help determine how the law is enforced and that therefore determine who is effectively a criminal and who is not, and that therefore...and that therefore...and that therefore...

All these threads of logic that weave themselves into a tapestry that we don't have time to look at exactly...Nor time to summarize in full...

Who reads Thomas Pynchon? Sadly, I've met almost nobody who does. Two people in college, but after that, nobody. Maybe the Internet will help bring me to someone who does. I always daydream that if I were to meet a woman who shares my passion for this guy and his writing, I'll have found my wife. We'll see. In the meantime, I feel like it's time to use this book as an excuse for organizing and disorganizing some of my thoughts on this old fogy who has defined how it is I see the world, maybe more than any friend, lover or teacher ever has.

Top Headline September 10, 2009

2009-09-06T20:16:00.000-07:00

Congress Unanimously Passes the New “Obama is a Nazi with Gay Cooties” Health Care Reform Plan

“It’s been a long and difficult road, as I predicted it would be,” said President Barack Obama as he signed the new comprehensive health care reform plan into law today after its being unanimously approved by both houses of Congress.
Critics on the left suggest that in the process of seeking support from Republicans, the bill may have been “watered down too much.” Specifically, some left wing pundits have expressed concern that nowhere in the bill is the issue of health care actually addressed. But moderate Democrats in Congress welcomed the bill.
“From the beginning, I expressed my doubts that the health care reform bill should not be too radical for the American people,” said Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), “And Obama listened to our concerns.”
Alaska’s Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski agrees, showing evidence of the surprising amount of across-the-aisle success that the bill has received since Mr Obama repackaged it in his speech on Wednesday, September 9.
“During the month of August, I repeatedly came out with vague warnings that we must not attempt to solve too many problems all at once,” said Murkowski. “And the President listened and came forward with a bill that does not solve any problems at all. This is the sort of bill that I'm proud to support, because it’s consistent with the sort of policy I’ve worked for since being appointed to office by my daddy in 2002.”
National Public Radio’s political analyst Ken Rudin noted in his Political Junkie column that this legislation was groundbreaking. “For a while there we thought Obama might not be able to do it. We were afraid that this would be exactly the same scenario as the 1993 attempt at health care reform, about which I’ve written extensively. But Obama surprised us by coming out with the only piece of legislation that I can remember that not only does nothing at all about the issue that it’s supposed to solve, but it’s also the first law that’s composed almost entirely of derogatory insults from start to finish.”
Some of those so-called insults, such as “We hereby resolve that Barack Obama is a big fat Kenyan atheist,” “Barack Obama is a two-timing skanky adulterous semi-human with Nazi rabies and nasty socks he doesn’t wash” and “There’s just something icky about that Obama guy,” were key in winning the enthusiastic support of the Tea Bagger Protest movement, which once seemed an unwinnable constituency.
In addition, Obama was able to win the approval of those who'd previously questioned the high price of the bill.
“Originally, we were worried that a trillion dollars spent over ten years to help make our health system more equitable and effective would be like just throwing money away,” said Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. “However, the current bill includes precisely zero dollars be spent in improving the health care system. Instead, the bill calls for a mere 5 trillion dollars to be spent in the next two months in giveaways to wall street bankers who have pledged to make America safer by building robots that will more efficiently kill Afghan civilians. If that's not a solid investment in our future, I don't know what is.”
During the signing ceremony held in the Oval Office, Obama discussed his efforts to court these and other parts of the American public.
“As early as my State of the Union Speech, I called on the American people to step forward and start a serious discussion of the health care issues that face our nation, issues such as the spiraling cost of health care, the large number of uninsured, and the difficulty that small businesses have providing coverage to their employees. I asked you for ideas about these and other important questions, and you, the American people, responded not with serious debate, but with the sort of irrational conspiracy theories, fear mongering, and bizarre distortions of simple truth which are guaranteed to distract and confuse, to frustrate the honest, bewilder the sensible, and ultimately crush and destroy the well meaning spirit of the hopeful. And I listened. I listened to our national news media as they focused relentlessly on the sort of trash talk and hate speech that you, the American people, are most interested in regurgitating and obsessing upon. And, with the help of my unique network of grass roots volunteers, I helped craft a piece of legislation that proves that I am not only the president of those who voted for me last year hoping for a serious shift toward a more civilized and humane union; nor only of the equally serious fiscal conservatives who worry about the financial soundness of our nation; but especially for those are scared to talk or even think about serious issues, but do enjoy seeing people get in shouting fights and hissy fits on cable television. You see, this was never about me; it’s about you. It’s about how loud you can shout, how much you can shock, and the incredible tenacity of American wing nuts in believing that the best way to confront frightening problems is by retreating into a bizarre, violent and disturbingly childish fantasy world.”
The bill gained strong support from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who lauded it’s provision legalizing the use of so-called “death-panels” to hunt down and kill the “stinking gay pinko Nazi ACLU swine who voted for that nasty Obama guy who isn’t even an American citizen anyway.”
“Death panels were my idea from the start,” said Palin, “And nothing makes me happier than to see them turned against some, some, of the people in this great land of plenty and teeming along the road of character and responsibility, and job losses, and a lot of the people I’ve talked to are afraid. But I think that’s okay, because deep down there are people who honor the idea of that American soldier who’s out there dyin’ for stuff that I think I believe in and I’ll betchya you probably believe in, too. To sum up, it’s all about the future, and about jobs, and responsibility, and forward funding education which are not all, but just some of the great things that you’re just not going to be able to get if, ya know, journalists just keep makin’ stuff up.”
Palin made no comment on rumors that she was planning to run the position of Divine Empress of the Galaxy in 2012.
Asked to comment on the health care bill, Organizing for America political strategist David Plouffe said, “Of course, some of the volunteers who came out and knocked on doors and made phone calls are probably feeling a little disappointed. They were hoping to get some protection for those hard working Americans who find themselves at the mercy of big insurance companies, for those Americans who are just one illness away from going bankrupt. They were hoping for a bill with a strong public option and instead they’re being hunted down by homeland security agents carrying submachine guns. But the important thing to remember is that progress doesn’t happen overnight. The small, incremental, nearly nonexistent victories we achieve today are almost sure to lead down a possibly inevitable path to hope and change which will be achieved sometime in the unspecified future.”
Plouffe appeared to want to say more, but was force to duck for cover to avoid being hit by sniper fire deployed by incoming Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary Scott Roeder.

Dog Sees God

2009-09-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to throw in a quick plug for this excellent show now being performed at Out North theater here in Anchorage. It features some of our best young actors in town handling some really challenging material, and the results are incredible. I especially like the way that the script develops characters and ideas from the beloved Peanuts comic strip about philosophizing school kids. We're living in an era of official remakes, where Dr Seuss and JRR Tolkein and King Kong and Batman and the Dukes of Hazzard all have to be restarted again and again every few years in what resembles a sort of weird devotional cult behavior, returning again and again to the sources of past entertainment, leaving at their our virginal young audiences drugged into a stupor by the freshest flowers of our exotic garden of computer graphics. Some people may complain that Dog Sees God violates the sanctity of its beloved characters by showing them as high school kids who swear and and have sex and beat each other up, but to me it lends itself to exactly the sort of real, thoughtful creative exploration that made these characters interesting in the first place. If you have the opportunity, please see this show.

Grocery List

2009-09-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

Good news! My play, Grocery List, has been accepted in the 4th Annual Chaos Theater Festival, which will take place in Chicago in November of this year! Grocery LIst had it's first public reading at this year's Last Frontier Theatre Conference Play Slam in Valdez at Prince William Sound Community College. Please stay tuned to this site for more information about the performances!

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind

2009-09-04T14:40:00.002-07:00

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind by Michael Axworthy (2008)

I read a book like this sort of like I read a novel; what hooks me into the book is the sense of being pulled along on the ups and downs of tumultuous fortune. But a novel is structured so that the plot is simplified. The author makes sure that you have relative ease catching the name of the leading characters, that you understand the setting and can vividly picture a lot of the action. I can honestly say that of all the hundreds of historical personages I was introduced to reading this book, I can only remember one, and that’s Nader Shah, a pretty fascinating “great man” of history whose rise to power was more meteoric than that of Sarah Palin’s.
It’s no surprise that I remember clearly the main thesis of the book, which is that the nation of Iran is defined more by its intellectual character than by any set of boundaries or affiliation with a particular political doctrine. Axworthy spells this out very clearly at the beginning of the book, and refers back to the idea enough times that you really see where he’s coming from.
But there are a number of incidental observations that also stuck with me. For instance, the idea that a government’s primary role really has to be defense in order to serve any useful purpose. It’s memorable because Axworthy does not come across as a particularly hawkish thinker. He never hesitates to criticize the many Iranian leaders who brought ruin on their land by pursuing overly ambitious military campaigns. It’s an interesting principle, the primacy of defense, because it begs the question of what legitimate defense is, and of what happens when aggression is carried out in the name of defense. There are lots of examples of this.
Another observation that stuck with me was that part of the reason Iran seemed to lag behind in terms of technology and modernization is that the terrain of Iran and the organization of its communities really wasn’t suited for the sort of railroad infrastructure that was springing up around Europe and America. Although later on, Iran suffered from the discrepancies in technology, the short-term prospect of investing in these technologies just didn’t exist.
And the observation that was most memorable to me, and also the most incidental of the three I list here, was that the history of empires tends to focus almost exclusively on the causes of their decline. Having studied a lot of German and Austrian history, I immediately said to myself, “Hey, that’s true, isn’t it. Why is that?” My guess is that a lot of the modern study of history in the western world is modeled after the study of the Greek and Roman Empires as seen from the far side of the chasm of the dark ages. Perhaps there’s a crime scene investigation aspect to the study of history, where the first and best question to ask is, “Why did this death happen. Why did this empire decline and fall?” From this vantage points, you get the best access to the eyewitnesses who watched the collapse and reported on it, and these witnesses are better sources than those who were present during the victorious rise of the empire, because during the rise of an empire there’s too much distortion and propaganda, too many people with skin in the game, too much state secrecy and too many people infatuated by political slogans and aspirations. There are too many variables, too many proposals.
Over the past few months, as the debate over national health care reform has occasionally struggled its way in front of Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin to take into the tabloid tinged spotlight of the collective American consciousness, I’ve wondered a lot about what’s really being debated is the health of this nation. Just yesterday I went to an Organizing for America rally held in a local junior high school. It was impressive to see about 150 people gathered and cheering every time the concept of a public option was raised. This is a big crowd for Alaska, and it may be a sign that there’s more political will behind the reform movement than the headlines have led us to believe.
I think that a serious reform of our nation’s health care system, one that provides coverage to the uninsured and includes a public option, is going to be a much more meaningful contribution to our national defense than any invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan. And yet there seems to be an unspoken rule that says we debate the lead up to military campaigns very differently than we debate the lead up to health care reform. In our national consciousness, a war in Iraq is not very different from buying a ticket to see a movie like Transformers or Batman. There’s a sense that, whoever you are, you just gotta see it. You just gotta shell out the money. Even if you have doubts, you don’t want to miss out on this. The money’s already been spent in advance. The troops are already moving in. The demographic tests were performed years ago. Smarter people than you have decided in advance: this is the movie you want to see. How will we pay for it? That doesn’t matter. It’s just a movie. It’ll be over quickly, and after it’s over, you’re supposed to forget about it. So what if the new Transformers movie sucked. Get over it. Only geeks care about old movies.
In the meantime, there’s a different mechanism built up around health-care reform. We’re supposed to think about this sort of issue, and make a mature decision. But what’s our model for thinking? To carry on the movie model, the difference between the Iraq war debate and the health care debate is the difference between a Transformers movie and a movie like The Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons. Yes, there’s a little more time to take in information, but not much more time.
The most salient idea to come out of the health care debate has been: Barack Obama is the Antichrist. His followers are mindless fanatics and they’re determined to take away America’s edge by euthanizing our grandparents.
Is this nonsense? Yes. But there are a lot of reasons why Barack Obama’s supporters haven’t been quicker to rally behind health care reform. Because in the months since his election, Obama has spent a lot more time meeting with the heads of big insurance companies than he’s spent meeting with the uninsured.
Over the past few months I’ve spent a lot of time working as a nurse in the operating room with surgeons and anesthesiologists. I’m privileged to spend so much of my time with these people, some of the best-educated people in the state of Alaska. None of them are really shy about speaking their minds when it comes to political issues, but it’s surprising that there really hasn’t been a lot of intelligent comment on the health care debate. When the issue get’s mentioned at all, it tends to be derisive. “Under ObamaCare, we’re not going to be able to do anything but tonsillectomies,” or “Did you heart them rip Dr Obama a new asshole on tv today?” At the same time that a lot of these docs were making jokes about the new dawn of American socialism, I saw a lot of these exact clustering in the hallways and talking excitedly about how they were taking advantage of the Cash for Clunkers program.
One thing that’s become clear to me over the past few years is that physicians are very smart, but they’re no more likely to form mature political views than anyone else. Just as anywhere else, there’s a lot of diversity of political opinion, and it’s an open secret that in the operating rooms where I work you get a harder time shooting your mouth off in support of a liberal point of view than you do of a conservative point of view.
Here’s a joke I heard recently from a surgeon who will remain nameless: “Did you hear that Obama’s going to tax aspirin now? It’s white and it works.”
Okay. That’s really low. Not only is that joke racist, it’s just not funny.
Physicians often don’t see nurses as their peers. That’s built into the structure of the health care system, and there’s reason for it. I can’t perform surgery, I’m not qualified, at least not at this point, to perform anesthesia. But I’m not stupid, and I do know that racist jokes are a far cry from rational debate.
One of our surgeons, Dr Mark Kimmins, has actually spent a lot of time seriously thinking and speaking in public on the issue of how the health care system works. One day I stopped him after an operation and asked him what he thought of the whole health care debate. While he didn’t exactly state that he was going on record, I don’t think that he’d hold it against me if I quote him when he told me that he thinks a nation ends up with a health care system that reflects its national character. He told me that he would give me a thousand dollars sight unseen if I could go into the doctor’s lounge right now and get any sort of consensus at all among whatever chance assemblage of physicians happened to be in there in the moment. Dr Kimmins spoke a little bit further about his own experience working with both the Canadian and the US health systems. Is the Canadian system perfect? He doesn’t think so, but he also doesn’t think that it’s a travesty. According to him, the nightmare situation where you have a government bureaucrat saying, “No, this surgery simply is not approved” just does not exist in Canada. But as with any system, including the current one we have in America, there is the system between infinite demand and finite resource.
I recently talked to a friend of mine who got a job loosely associated with the insurance industry after he lost a job in the restaurant industry after breaking up a brawl (My friend said, as an aside, that if his unemployment claims didn’t go through, he planned to sue the restaurant). I asked him what he thought of health care reform. He told me that he just doesn't think health care is a right that the government should be supporting. He’s happy with his own health insurance; he hasn’t been to the doctor in a few years and resents the thought of paying money for people who aren’t as smart about their own health care. He then digressed into talking about the fact that what he’s really upset about is the fact that his financial situation is a mess, and that he does fault the government for this because in all he years of education he’s had, he never got a firm grounding of personal finance.
I didn’t put my friend on the spot during that conversation, but I’m putting his thinking on the spot right now. It seems like what he’s doing is cherry picking his rights and responsibilities. At the moment, he feels like the government has a right not only to educate him, but also rather to make choices about his education, and if he comes away from the education making poor personal choices about money, well that’s the government’s fault. At the same time, he’s pretty sure that he’s in a situation now where he doesn’t have to worry about health care. If something bad happens to him, he’s covered, and nothing bad is likely to happen.
Well, I hope for his sake that he’s right. But I know a lot of people who think they’re covered until they get into a catastrophe, after which point they get a rude surprise.
I’m not perfectly happy with the presidency of Barack Obama so far, but I think that he’s right in calling for health care reform, and that we still do have a great opportunity for pushing such reform through in the next couple of months. I was heartened to see that the Organizing for America event I attended last night included some strong rallying cries in favor of the public option.
Health care reform is a complicated issue and I don’t pretend to be a great authority on it, but I do think that I’ve taken steps toward real understanding of the issue. I made a choice last night to throw my own weight heavily behind the Organizing for America initiative to push health care reform through. Do I have doubts? A few. Of course I do. I’m throwing my support behind the passage of legislation that hasn’t been written yet and that’s certain to come in a form that’s needlessly complex and inaccessible to the public understanding. But I’m also convinced that if this legislation does not pass, the situation will get much worse for ordinary Americans; many of us are not covered, and those of us who are find ourselves totally at the whim of whoever provides our coverage. Moreover, I agree with the assessment of Dr Kimmins: America will get a healthcare system that reflects its natural character, and I still do have hope that America’s national character is evolving and maturing toward something more civilized, more humane, and more likely to result in prosperity than the nightmare of the Bush administration.

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind

2009-09-04T14:40:00.001-07:00

Race

2009-08-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

by Studs Terkel

It was on election day last year that I learned Studs Terkel had died . . . I was a few days behind when it came to following along with the news. I’d never read a book by Terkel, I’d only ever heard a couple of interviews with him on the radio and seen a glimpse of him in Michael Moore’s film The Big One. But he’d achieved a sort of legendary status in my mind already as a figurehead of the Left, a man who’s always stood up for the underdog, a man who always lived by humbly and treated himself humbly, a man who’d been involved in the New Deal and had suffered from blacklisting, a man perennially enchanted by the profundity of who had prospered by learning to listen to the voices of ordinary people. I imagined him as our current version of the sage of the middle ages, of Spinoza toiling away in a garret by candlelight, getting his hand dirty with the ink from a quill pen as he jotted down ideas that came not from contemplation of abstract principles, but simply from listening to what people have to say, recording it on tape, and then writing it down.
In the introduction to Race, Terkel describes a scene from his everyday life in Chicago. Hampered by poor eyesight, he would give himself an extra layer of safety when he walked across the street by holding out his palms to oncoming cars as though he were directing traffic. I love the image of this little old man in thick-rimmed glasses signaling, “Stop!” to a whole river of cars.
The stories in Race are like a pocketful of pebbles, each one with it’s own details worth attending to, none of them towering over the rest. One interesting section focuses on a the conflict between a white man(C.P. Ellis) and a black woman (Ann Atwater) in the Durham, NC . . . Ellis had a history with the KKK, Atwater was a civil rights activist, but as time went on the Ellis began to understand things differently, began to see the divide between white and black as something imposed on the south in order to distract from the real issue of oppression of the poor. He and his Atwater collaborate on various local government campaigns, and eventually he becomes an important activist in the community, champion of all races.
As a sideline, we learn that while Ellis has remained vigorous and engaged, Atwater has suffered from declining health and fallen on hard times financially. In another writer’s work, this detail might be drawn out to support some other thesis. Terkel lets it stand as it is. There’s a sense that along with being interested in the issues of race and politics, he also has a great deal of sympathy for the human beings who are involved in the social and politics clashes that define history. There’s a sense that he understands the world as a stage on which we are only players, and that many of the players have these roles thrust upon us. Throughout race, there’s the sense that there’s a tangle of prefabricated narrative we’ve all been provided with to help us think about what’s going on in the world. In the multitude of interviews, you hear the same ideas come up again and again, people positioning themselves on predictable sides of the battle lines, but the artfulness of the book is in seeing how each individual untangles the narrative in a slightly different way.
On the day I learned Studs Terkel had died, I also learned that Barack Obama had been elected president. Since then there’s been an ongoing cycle of news waves, peaks and valleys of excitement based on health care and the war in Afghanistan, stimulus money and torture memos, racial profiling and beer summits, Israeli settlements and Iranian elections, racially insulting cartoons and the call for a renewed dialogue on race. I suppose I count myself among those liberals who feel disappointed at the lack of bold moves for change. I don’t like seeing drone attacks kill Pakistani civilians; I don’t like seeing the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered community put on hold in their struggle for equal rights; I don’t like hearing about Blue Dog Democrats fouling up the public option of the health care plan; I don’t like Timothy Geithner and his coterie of financial insiders cutting deals to give Wall Street an easy ride. But I also do have the sense that most of what I’ve been witnessing is a show, that we’re all being called on to take stands and argue for ourselves, to lobby and make donations and chit chat around the water cooler and pass on internet links and parrot talking points and kick up dust. As a writer, it’s always important to aware that when the dust settles and you see what the battlefield really looked like, you’ll probably meet with bigger surprises than any you might encounter in the heat of conflict.

How to Read A French Fry

2009-07-26T16:17:00.000-07:00

by Russ Parsons (2001)

The book describes the process by which fluid fills the particles of flour, by which chopped bits of zucchini evaporate in a skillet as the oil surrounding them turns them golden brown. Sauces and pie crusts, mayonnaise and breaded fried chicken crusts—Russ Parsons takes us into the abstract world of chemistry in order to set up a chess-like strategy for maximizing the flavor in all these recipes.
A few years back I started enrolling in the prerequisite courses I needed in order to become a registered nurse. I started with psychology, anatomy and basic chemistry. I found I had a talent especially for chemistry, for drawing out the fish skeleton diagrams that describe carbohydrate chains, for understanding the Rube Goldberg contraptions of the cell membranes that drive the process of life. I fell in love with the menagerie of two-dimensional and three dimensional diagrams used to describe molecules—balls and sticks, maps of benzene rings, computer generated images of proteins coiled and fan-folded into structures that allowed them to carry out essential functions of life.
The paradox: I found myself immersed in a Wonderland of facts and specialized knowledge, cryptic terminology and brain-twisting challenges, all of which I found extremely inspirational. But at the same time, I had basically no time to write creatively.
In hindsight, I can get all sly with my former self and ask whether it was really a lack of time that was holding me back, or whether it was a faulty conception of what the prerequisites are of being able to write something.
It’s so easy as a writer to be intimidated. There are so many writers who have come before, and so many of them have succeeded by giving the impression of a deep and encyclopedic knowledge of . . . nearly everything. Herman Melville and the life of the whalers. Thomas Pynchon and the history of Germany after the Second World War. Annie Proulx and rough, homespun culture of Newfoundland. One imagines the time these authors spent researching their subjects and comes away feeling eminently unqualified. Not only do I not know anything about whaling, post-war Gemany or Newfoundland, I don’t even know as much about my own surroundings as these authors knew about their exotic subjects.
The truth is that writing isn’t like that. Since my starting point here is Russ Parsons’s book about food, let me use that as a metaphor: if you want to make and sell a food product in the USA, there’s an established bureaucracy you have to deal with. There are standards, there are rules. If you’re selling lettuce that gives people salmonella, there are investigators that will track you down. When it comes to writing, the situation is different. Certainly, your work will be judged. If you want to get published, there are standards you have to meet. But the bureaucracy your dealing with is one far more mysterious.
I think every creative person at some point becomes familiar with the idea of the “inner critic.” The inner critic is a part of your brain that moves quickly to put a kibosh on any inspiration that we’re capable of coming up with. The inner critic is infuriatingly dynamic. Every day he sits in his little mental office and gathers new examples of why you aren’t qualified to do what you want to do. If you read a good book, the critic will tell you that your work will never be that good. If you read a crummy piece of work, the critic will tell you that it bears remarkable and damning similarities to your own work. The inner critic is ingenious and sadistically cunning. One of his specialties is to take what nourishes you and turn it into something that poisons you. Take advice for instance: there’s all sorts of advice for writers floating around out there. “Show, don’t tell.” “Write the truest sentence you can.” “Avoid adverbs.” “Write what you know.”
This last bit of advice in particular can be an extremely potent medicine and can quickly turn into a potent poison. It can be amazingly liberating, a personal emancipation proclamation when you suddenly realize that you’re able to use your own experience and forget all about emulating the style of Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett or Thomas Hardy as you’ve fruitlessly been doing for the last few years. All of a sudden, it seems like you have a new treasure trove of subject matter. For a while, the inner critic is caught off guard. But he’s nothing if not adaptive. He begins to realize the restrictive potential of this maxim. “Write what you know.” That’s as much as saying “Don’t dare write what you don’t know. Don’t dare speculate. Don’t dare imagine.” Soon the inner critic has the statement crocheted and hung upon his office wall.
It’s easy to get caught up in the despair over how much or how little you know. Some authors can come away from a dinner party with every conversation stored verbatim in their memories. Some draw on their experiences of coming from one culture to another. Some have gone to the best possible schools, trained at the feet of the brightest possible geniuses. And here you are with apparently nothing to work with. It doesn’t seem fair. It’s not fair.
But that’s part of the truth you need to write about, the fact that nothing in this world is fair. None of us knows quite enough to get by, and none of us has quite the social skills to seek the complimentary knowledge from those who surround us. The truth is that I know that I’m inspired by chemistry, and I’m inspired by politics and world history, and I’m inspired by economics and I’ll never be authoritative enough in any of these subjects to write the sort of Pulitzer-Prize winning work that I’d like to, and that doesn’t matter. If I’d wanted, I could have taken a year after my nursing school and immersed myself in chemistry in the hopes that the study would have made me into an expert, would have given me an arsenal of expertise I could draw on for the rest of my adult life as a writer. I could write a book about the lives of chemists and physicists at the turn of the 19th century. All my facts would be correct. I would describe the ways in which methyl groups freewheel at the end of carbohydrate chains; I would describe the way that scientists like JJ Thompson used every day materials to set up brilliant experiments. I would describe the incomparable feeling of being present at the moment of a revolution in human knowledge. But probably the end result would be that I would always feel I had just one more text to read before I was prepared to start writing.
Recently I heard poet Kay Ryan speaking on the radio. She said that the best way to write about something is when you know almost nothing about it. I think this is especially useful information in our current culture, which values realism, polish and an appearance of expertise. Expertise is fascinating, certainly, but if you want to be creative, you need to rely on imagination rather than expertise. Imagination is not the rational irrigation system that supplies the rational fields of expertise—it’s the swamp water that gathers in the wetlands of ignorance.
What does this have to do with the book How to Read a French Fry? Not much, I’m afraid, except to say that this odd little hybrid of a book, not quite a cookbook but not quite a science text, is emblematic of the sort of hybrid knowledge I’m talking about. You won’t come away from it an expert in either chemistry or cuisine, but it may provide you with just the sort of disorienting intellectual spin you need to get yourself back into the dizzy state you need in order to get inspired.

Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales

2009-07-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

Chosen and Edited by Gordon Jarvie. Illustrated by Barbara Brown. (1992/1997) Published by Penguin Popular Classics. 199 pages.

I’ve been to Scotland a couple of times, once to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival. When I was there I was especially impressed by the simple beauty of some of the street names, like “Bread,” and “Home.”
I read this book several months ago. It took me two days to read. Just recently I sat down and gave myself the daunting task of writing a full-length play. As with any creative writing endeavor, this meant pitting myself against the worst, most closed-minded, most pessimistic parts of my own psyche. There’s a part of the brain that was determined to tell me, no, do NOT continue this project, you’ve chosen the wrong subject; you’re taking the wrong path.
For some reason, the memory of this book was especially helpful to me in conjuring up whatever magic spell I needed to keep the inspiration flowing.
We all know that there are epics. There’s a pantheon of Greek Gods out there, armed with complex arsenals of symbolism, laden down with overweening vanity and ambition which send mere mortals off to launch ten thousand stanzas of carefully metered verse to delineate the rise and falls of entire empires.
It’s important to remember that the mighty Zeus doesn’t have a monopoly on magic. There are kelpies and brownies, magic walking sticks and lonely giants out there. They come out of the dark shadows of the woods and interfere in the lives of the simplest of people. To me, fairy tales like these serve as reminders to never take magic for granted. Magic is whatever leads you off the path to grandma’s house and into the woods. If you’re a writer, don’t worry too much about whether the voice that’s beckoning to you from the shadows belongs to the mighty Apollo or a humble Milk-White Doo. If it’s an invitation to get you off the well-trodden path, take it.

Wellen

2009-07-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

by Eduard von Keyserling (1911) Published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. 173 pages.

My favorite passage of the book is the one where Lolo, a young woman who has discovered that her fiancé, Hilmar, doesn’t love her anymore, steps out into the Baltic sea one night and nearly drowns. At the beginning of the passage, we’re told that Lolo wants to make a sacrifice, and she sacrifices herself to the waves. There’s a religious connotation to the word “sacrifice” here (in German, Opfer)—but if the waves hold a religious function in this book, it’s as the centerpiece of a religion of default. The book centers not around a pilgrimage, but rather a rather routine summer vacation to the Baltic Sea, in which a passel of well-to-do folk visit, or perhaps invade, the world of taciturn Baltic fishermen. The goal of the vacation is a secular one of relaxation. People are gathering energy for the future. Generälin von Palikow is getting her family ready for her granddaughter Lolo’s wedding. The painter Hans Grill is taking a moment to relax and paint the waves before taking a new phase in his career—he’s not sure what he plans, but he wants to make his art more marketable, more commercially successful. In the meantime, he’s happy to spend some loose time with his new bride, Doralice, enjoying the treasure of freedom
Hans had devoted his life to freedom. At every turn he extols freedom. He seems to be in the process of developing an informal artistic treatise on the virtues of freedom, an ongoing discourse that serves as a compliment to his paintings. It was with his fiery talk of freedom that he seduced the beautiful Doralice away from her decrepit husband, count Köhne-Jasky. And now that Doralice is his, he bores her with the incessant talk of freedom. And as readers, we get the sense that Hans himself isn’t anywhere near ready for the actual challenges of being free. He desperately needs his wife Doralice. Now that he has her, he wants to settle down, to construct a nice, quiet, suburban life around her. And he’s afraid of her because he senses that she’s the one who’s actually free; he’s the philosopher of freedom. As an artist in pre-WWI Germany, he has an accepted role of being a little bit eccentric, a little bit visionary, a little bit crazed. But its his wife, with her beauty that distorts society by drawing all men toward her, who actually has the gift of freedom, the gift of always choosing a new path. Doralice has already broken out of one marriage, and now she’s approached by Hilmar, the young soldier, and she has the chance to break out of another one, and after that . . . who knows what suitor will come next?
Hans says that he now has only two subjects for his paintings, his wife Doralice and the waves. If the eccentric Hans plays the role of a shaman in this secular society, then he has defined a spirituality based on two idols, one a subject and the other a background. The subject is highly concentrated—a single life, a single life story, a point of focus, a concentration point for attention, an attainable object of conquest, infinitely desirable. The background is diffuse, eternal, indifferent to human struggle.
Like Count Köhne-Jasky, like Hans Grill, like Hilmar, Lolo is also infatuated by Doralice. And when the crowd of those who adores the subject becomes too much, she plunges herself into the background, goes into the water on a cold night and swims out as far as she humanly can, in a moment of unreasoning thought where free-will doesn’t seem to play a role. She’s abandoning human society because human society is unfair, because it arranges itself into games of favor and feverish devotion and there’s no reward for those like Lolo who are left out.
And after Lolo is recued and her family leaves the Baltic in high dudgeon, Generälin von Palikow, outraged, scolds Doralice for having gone too far. It’s okay to break society’s rules. Society’s rules are stupid. Doralice was right in escaping her first marriage, but she can’t go on infinitely breaking out of marriage after marriage after marriage. It’s a surprising moment. Up until this point, von Palikow had seemed to represent the most conservative element character in the book. It’s surprising to learn that her vision of life is much more subtle and wise, that she’s capable of stepping back from society and forming a vision that seems bold and pragmatic, a vision that society itself is something wavelike, that troughs of convention and restriction must be followed by peaks of rebellion, and that these peaks of rebellion themselves must come to an end.
After Palikow’s family leaves the beach and summer wanes, Doralice and her husband Hans are stuck together, and Doralice has little to do but wait for the moment when Hans will forgive her. Life seems limited to her now, broken. One day it seems he’s on the verge of giving her the resolution she craves. And then he goes out to sea in a shabby boat helmed by a drunken sailor, and the two get swallowed by the waves, and Doralice is abandoned with her poor conscience. As the book ends, we see that she’s taken up a strange, platonic relationship with a hunchback, Knospelius, who haunts the beach. Her days of romantic adventure seem to be behind her. The subject fades into the background.

Tender is the Night

2009-07-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

by F Scott Fitzgerald

Take a look at the beginning of this book about a love triangle. We have a young woman arriving at a beach, an out-of-the way French resort. We learn that the woman, Rosemary, is a movie starlet, fresh out of her first picture, Daddy’s Girl, a huge success. Her mother has brought her up ready to face a ruthless modern world where morality is something quaint and tragedies can be taken over.
We enter this novel, in a sense, at Rosemary’s side, walking beside her. If we’re capable of suspending our disbelief in the right way, we’re able to be her, to enjoy the story as if it’s ours. It’s a device for drawing the reader into the story. We stand in the shoes of a young girl who’s ready to be seduced, and the figure who seduces her is a man named Dick Diver.
Diver is a psychiatrist, a man whose job is to profile people, to understand their souls. His wife, Nicole, is in a sense, his patient. She’s a schizophrenic; her mind is deranged because her father raped her once, when she was a child. Somehow, the presence of Diver in her life proves therapeutic, and because of that Nicole’s family, the Warren family, which happens to be one of the wealthiest families in the United States, has seen fit to choose Dick Diver, to invest money in his career, to sponsor a sanatorium in Geneva in order to lend him an air of professional gravity.
Imagine this metaphor: Dick Diver is the author, the young novelist, and the beautiful young girl, Rosemary, is the reader, not so much any particular reader, but the ideal reader that any author imagines, a reader with a healthy, open, young mind that is waiting to be given a chord, a theme, a myth to live by. Rosemary meets Dick when he’s at the height of his prosperity. She falls in love with him, thinks the world of him . . . and because of Nicole’s wealth, Dick Diver is able to show Rosemary an enchanting world, a world of revelry punctuated by little fits of seamy intrigue. Dick gives Rosemary an adventure, the perfect adventure, an adventure that takes her right into the unique gaiety of the post-WWI era she’s growing up in. And she wants as much as she can get out of it. She wants Dick’s soul. She wants to seduce him away from his wife. And she almost does.
And then the rest of the story we see not from Rosemary’s perspective, but from Dick’s. Years have passed. His life has become dreary and professional. His wife’s recurring bouts of mental illness drain his energy. He sees Rosemary again, sleeps with her, but he can’t be the same man he was with her when he first met her.
Let me expand the metaphor again: Dick Diver is the author, Rosemary is the reader . . . and Nicole? Nicole is the subject, the story, a story that the author has chosen to marry himself to, a story that will change itself over time, just as real people change, but that will always remain thematically the same at its core.
I’m not trying to tell you that this is the secret meaning of Tender is the Night, that this is what F Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he actually wrote the book. To tell you the truth, this interpretation of the book just came to me as I was sitting here with my laptop trying to figure out what to write about this book. What I’m trying to do is to show you how I like to read books, to show you a way of engaging your imagination that has worked for me. Read Tender is the Night and try to use the artist-reader-subject metaphor as a skeleton key to open up its core meaning. There will be times when the skeleton key works for you, when it will seem brilliant. I guarantee, it will open up meanings that I didn’t notice when I read the book. And then there are times when the metaphor is a key that doesn’t fit into any lock at all. Don’t let that discourage you. Look for new explanations, see if you can develop your own imaginative key to unlocking the mysteries of the book. And look for those moments when the book needs no explanation, no symbolic code, when just the experience of reading it is pleasurable enough to sustain itself.

Top Headline for 2015. President Palin Resigns, States "Office No Longer Gives Me Opportunity to Use My Gifts of Tenacity, Dedication."

2009-07-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

Top Headline: World Still Reels After Unexpected Death of Karl Malden, Dubbed "King of Televised Travelers' Check Ads."

2009-07-03T22:35:00.000-07:00

Related headlines:

• Will Autopsies Reveal Pepto-Bismol Abuse was a Factor in Malden’s Death?
• Thousands of Mourners in London Chant: “Karl, Don’t Leave Home Without Us!”
• “I’ll Always Feel Karl’s Hand on my Shoulder” An Emotional Retrospective by Reese Witherspoon
• In Later Years, Malden’s Collagen Lip Injections and Accusations of Chia Pet Abuse Overshadowed Artistic Achievements
• Critics Agree: Malden’s Early Work with the Malden Five Helped Define How we Think About Traveler’s Check Advertisements
• A True Look Inside Never-Leave-Home-Without-It-Land
• Custody Battle Over Malden Chia Pet Collection Likely to Ensue
• “We Were All Shocked.” An Exclusive Interview with Germaine Malden
• “Why The Mainstream Media Wants You to Focus on the Death of Karl Malden Instead of the Shocking History of CIA Involvement in the Politics of Uruguay” An Emotional Retrospective by Noam Chomsky
• Why Was Malden Never Comfortable With His Natural Lips? Malden’s Cosmetologist Offers a New Perspective
• “Ten Most Sexually Explicit Jokes About Karl Malden and Chia Pets” An Emotional Retrospective by Tom Brokaw
• “He Paved the Way for Celebrities who Endorsed Traveler’s Checks.” An Emotional Retrospective by Drew Carey
• The Twenty Five Malden American Express Ads that You MUST see on YouTube
• “I’ll Always Feel Karl’s Hand on My Shoulder” An Emotional Retrospective by Ted Nugent
• The Ten Malden American Express Ads That You MUST Buy on iTunes
• “Too Soon to Say Good Bye?” An Emotional Retrospective by George Will
• “Malden and African American Popular Culture: Would There Have Been a Connection had Malden Been African American?” An Emotional Retrospective by Quincy Jones
• The Ten Karl Malden Commemorative Plates that you MUST Purchase By Dialing 1-900-BYE-KARL (And If You Act in the Next Five Minutes, We’ll Include this Free Set of Karl Malden Cheese Knives Plus the Karl Malden Chia Bust Made From Authentic Albanian Marbelite™ Immition Marble at No Extra Cost!)
• “Has Karl Malden’s Memory Been Over-Commericalised?” An Investigative Report by the staff of Yoga Journal
• “ExTEND Ur Love-Life Guaranteed: Generic.Viagra.Cialis.Cheap!” A blogosphere exclusive by aSexyRussianHookerGirl@spamnet.edu
• “He Was A Cultural Bridge Builder. He Shall Be Missed.” An Emotional Retrospective by Mahmud Ahmadinejad
• “Might Media Overexposure Detract from Malden’s True Human Legacy?” An Emotional Retrospective by Donnie Osmond
• “Dialectics and Dialogues: Deconstructing the Brechtian/Marxian Subtext of Karl Malden’s Neo-Post-Commercialist Period” An Emotional Retrospective by People Magazine.

Palestine—The Special Edition

2009-07-01T12:50:00.000-07:00

Palestine—The Special Edition by Joe Sacco (originally serialized 1993-1995. This edition published 2007) Fantagraphic Books. 285 pages.

I can’t read poetry or fiction without trying to see it from the author’s perspective. I like the way that Joe Sacco puts himself into his comic book story about Palestine. He puts himself into the story in a wonderfully unselfish way. As an artist, he moves from gross caricatures at the start of the book to realistic portraiture at the end of the book, but all along the depiction of himself remains the same—a caricature of a bespectacled man who’s in way over his head, who’s busy gathering notes for an unorthodox comic book documentary about one of the grimmest political situations in the world. The caricature of Joe Sacco keeps falling into dreams of making it big, of winning Pulitzer Prizes and changing the world through comic books, only to be reminded moments later of his own weaknesses.
I remember recently overhearing a discussion. Someone I knew had recently returned from Israel and was holding forth about his own experiences. His story rambled a lot, but he kept coming back to the assertion that “the Israeli Arabs are smart.” As opposed to the Palestinians, who, presumably, he believes are stupid. It reminded me of a friend of my grandmothers, an old guy who used to run textile factories, and who would have conversations about how amazed he was at the intelligence and articulateness of “African blacks,” as opposed to African Americans. “You can have a conversation with the ones from Africa. The blacks in America, you can’t talk to them.” That was years ago, at a dinner party at my parents’ house, and I flew off the handle about it, castigated the guy for being a racist creep, and then in turn was scolded by the rest of my family for being rude to a guest. Not that the rest of my family really supported the guy; I don’t think that they were listening to him. Basically, there was just an unspoken rule that everyone else regarded him as an old, crotchety fool in these situations, and that he was to be allowed to drone on and on.
It’s an important memory in my life, so I’ll go into it a little bit more:
I told the old droner to “shut up.” Not a comment that I really premeditated at length, but it came from the heart.
And the old guy took offense, said that I was infringing on his right of free speech. He resumed the conversation with a change of subject: now he was talking not about race, but about his own personal history. Like my own family, he used to live in the Russian settlements in China that existed before the advent of Chinese communism and Chairman Mao. In retrospect, he felt that the Russian settlements had been a haven for liberties that had never existed in Russia either under Czarist or under Communist rule.
“We enjoyed free speech there,” he said, and then paused. “Unlike at this table.”
What did I learn in that conversation? I don’t want to draw a conclusion yet. Maybe not ever. Conclusions can be a wrecking ball to a story. I haven’t changed my opinion of the guy: he was a racist and a jerk, at least a lot of the time. But I also am very careful to avoid people to shut up. I become sphinx-like. I let people express their own views. Which sometimes means allowing them to give themselves enough rope to hang themselves.
The guy who was talking about his trip to Israel was a physician I sometimes work with. A little while later in the conversation someone asked him his opinions about torture. “Waterboarding’s not torture,” he said. “Waterboarding’s a walk in the park.”
There are a lot of testimonials in Palestine from the point of view of Palestinians who’ve been tortured. It’s easy to read (because it’s a comic) and hard to digest. I have a natural tendency to sympathize with the Palestinians, as with anyone who winds up the underdog. I also have a deep love for Judaic culture and history and even for a lot of the early Zionist thinkers, whose essays I studied in Bruce Thompson’s Jewish Studies course at UCSC.
Ten years ago I told a dinner guest to shut up about his racist views. He didn’t shut up, and my outrage has done little to curb racism on a global scale. My outrage about the oppression of the Palestinians is not going to make a decisive change in the course of history. There will be no Onion-like headline saying “Local man has strong opinion regarding Middle East.” Even if the situation in Israel were to resolve itself into a peaceful two-state solution by the end of 2009, it won’t mean an end to oppression and repression as a part of US history.
Read Palestine, is my recommendation. Read Palestine and come away conflicted. A state of internal conflict is a great condition for a creative mind.

A Note About the Blog

2009-07-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

One thing I’ve learned is that writing straightforward book reviews is getting boring for me, and it’s distracting from my work as a writer. This summer I went to the Last Frontier Theater Conference in Valdez, AK. I presented a couple of my plays there, did some acting, and met a lot of incredible creative people. I thought a lot about the creative process. I discovered a couple of things about my own style and method. Improvisation seems to me an integral part of writing. A lot of my favorite books (Gravity’s Rainbow, Beautiful Losers) bear clear traces of having been improvised; other favorites of mine (Shipping News, for instance, or Mating) come off as much more polished, beautifully planned and researched books where the form seems well under control.
If there’s a grand unification theory of my own creative process, it’s that I have to overpower my own intellect in order to make good use of my own imagination. I’m at my best when there’s a level of uncertainty at play in my writing, when I’m not completely sure where I’m going, or I think I know, but there’s always the threat that the creative part of my mind is going to jump the tracks and go off in some odd direction.
I don’t think I have a lot more to contribute in the sense of traditional-style book reviews of the sort that you’d read in the New Yorker or hear from Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air. I love this sort of review, where you get a beautiful, essential synopsis of the book and then the reviewer segues seamlessly into an op-ed about the book’s faults and merits. But I am more in love with reading itself, and with the odd and paradoxical ways in which it feeds my own creativity.
I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to go with this blog, but it’s going to veer more toward stream-of-consciousness. I’m still going to use the books I’m reading or have read as the backbone, the departure point, but the meat of the essays I write will have much more to do with my mental associations as I read the books or after I read them than it will summarizing the book and giving it a tumbs-up or thumbs-down. I’ll write with the assumption that my reader is already familiar with the book in question, or is resourceful enough to track down a summary of the book down and read it.
Basically, what I’m saying here is that I’m going to start doing something that may produce utter crap from now on, but it’s more interesting to me than what I’ve been doing. Enjoy.

Unaccustomed Earth

2009-06-08T15:56:00.000-07:00

by Jhumpa Lahiri (2008) Published by Alfred A Knopf. 333 pages.

Reviewers of this book of short stories all seem to agree in praising Jhumpa Lahiri for her meticulous detail. To me the painstaking detail sometimes comes across as cold and angular, which is good insofar as it reflects the cold and angular thinking of many of the characters in the book. This is a cast made up largely of successful professionals: biochemists, cardiac physicians, freelance photographers, scholars of Tuscan history. But among these affluent characters there’s no sense of the sort of frivolous, jaded high living that you’d expect from, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald. A grim mindset pervades the book, that of people who come from a culture of Bengali immigrants that prizes ambition and achievement.
The most emotionally moving of these stories was Only Goodness, in which a promising young man, Rahul, succumbs to alcoholism while his loving sister begins to surpass him in achieving the sorts of successes he seemed destined for. The internal conflict faced by Rahul’s elder sister, Sudha, is genuine and worth studying—she has a sincere, childlike interest in helping him along, getting him past the worst of his addiction; and yet she also has a stake in his failure, because it’s made room for her.
Sometimes Lampiri goes too far out of her way to bring her plots to a resolution, as in the story Nobody’s Business, where the character Paul is secretly in love with his roommate Sang. Paul is a student of literature, unready for love, living too much in his head even to imagine how he might court the lovely Sang. But his constant attention to her do allow him to figure out that Sang’s boyfriend is a no-good two-timer. The reason the story doesn’t work, though, is that the boyfriend, Farouk, is such an obvious sleazeball that the story inspires pity rather than sympathy for the characters—pity for Sang that she’s so thick not to notice, and pity for Paul for going to such great lengths to prove what’s already more or less out in the open.
The stories Heaven-Hell and A Choice of Accommodations work the best of all the stories. Heaven-Hell is told from the point of view of a girl who witnesses her mother’s unrequited love for a young bachelor who needs help adapting to America. And A Choice of Accomodations is about a man who’s planned career as a doctor never worked out, and now he’s afraid that the passion in his marriage will fizzle in the same way.
The Bengali institution of arranged marriage weaves its way through the book, and comes to symbolize the systematic life that each of the families in the stories has to push aside, each in their own way. They’re entering a culture—(not American culture so much as a modern, globalized one)—that offers more freedom on the surface. But in Lampiri’s stories the freedom of choice itself seems like a demanding, unfamiliar and often hostile taskmaster to these characters who, while unflaggingly intelligent, seem to have a hard time getting to know themselves.

The Essence of Art Nouveau

2009-05-02T18:30:00.000-07:00

by Paul Greenhalgh. (2000) Published by Harry N Abrams, Inc.

This is a straightforward, enjoyable little treatise about one of my favorite art movements. It wasn’t quite what I was looking for; a better title would be Art Nouveau and Its Sources. Greenhalgh gives a thumbnail overview of the history of Art Nouveau and then gives us glimpses into the various influences that came together to form the style. The images are lovely: my favorite is the plate from Ernst Haeckel’s 1898 biology text Kunstform der Natur showing delicate, curvilinear patterns in aquatic siphonophorae that are clearly reflected in the work of Art Nouveau designers.
This is a very good book for the reader who would rather spend more time looking at art than thinking too deeply about the theory behind it.

Barefoot Gen

2009-04-25T19:08:00.000-07:00

Barefoot Gen by Nakazawa Keiji, translated by staff of Project Gen (1987) Published by New Society Publishers, 285 pages.

I like this book because it’s strange in so many ways. It’s a Japanese comic book that was written in the 1970s and translated at the end of the 1980s into various languages by a group of academics and antinuclear activists who saw in this story of a family living in Hiroshima at the end of World War II. The Japan of this autobiographical story has become exceedingly militant—Japanese civilians have been so entrained to believe American soldiers are marauding devils that they commit suicide en mass in Okinawa rather than face surrender; military cadets who can’t handle basic training are hounded to the point of committing suicide—and yet one father, a humble farmer and artisan, is convinced that the war is a stupid idea, and is not afraid to say so publicly, even though it means that his whole family—including the two youngest boys, Gen and Shinji—will be ostracized.
Even for someone well versed in both Western and Japanese comic books, the conventions of this story are unsettling and a little creepy. Any time the characters are upset, huge rivulets of tears stream from their eyes. When Gen and Shinji are happy they do the same weird dance. And whenever anyone is angry, they start slapping and punching each other. Parents punch children, children punch their teachers, the leaders of a work camp sticks at the children they look after. In the first part of the book, young Gen bites off part of the finger of a young boy who antagonizes him. For a book so prized by pacifists, this is immensely violent. Even the most heartwarming parts of the book (such as the story of Gen saving a poor glass merchant who can’t pay his debts) are punctuated by acts of sadism and brutality.
This story is filled with shadows cast by the light of the atomic bomb that’s dropped at the end of the book. It’s a story of childhood memories that can never be clearly recovered because they’ll always be seen through the filter of a mushroom cloud. Even the illustration style in which Nakazawa renders city scenes, wheat fields, train engines and bombing raids gives you a sense of unnaturally acute lighting, a world being recreated in painstaking detail only with the knowledge that at the end all of it will be ripped apart. The early scenes of flowing tears are weirdly conjured up again at the end of the story when we see the horrifying images of Hiroshima’s citizens wandering about zombie-like with the flesh melting from their faces. I’m not sure that any of this was intentional on the author’s part, but perhaps intention doesn’t matter that much, as he’s told a story about people in situations so extreme as to challenge even the strongest of human wills.

Time Immemorial

2009-04-12T20:57:00.000-07:00

A production created and performed by Jack Dalton and Allison Warden; directed by Pincess Lucaj; produced at Cyrano’s Theater

More people HAVE to see this play. It’s a supurb trip through the history of Alaska from the point of view of two Alaska Natives, Tulu and Miti, who are present at the beginning of time, alone together in the midst of infinite darkness with a single glowing ember of light between them, which the bumbling Tulu keeps trying to steal. As the play unfolds, Tulu and Miti pass through eight different relationships: brothers; husband and wife; elder and child; mother and son; sisters; brother and sister; father and daughter; grandmother and grandson. They tell stories together of Alaska Native history—for instance, the husband and wife argue about the coming of white missionaries. “Their God only asks us for one day out of seven,” the husband says, arguing that things can’t be that bad. But of course, they are. The play is wonderfully rich in well-researched historical detail. As an audience, we bear witness to the way that Alaska Native families have been torn apart by plagues and assimilationist boarding schools, by oil company contracts and alcohol. The material is often gut wrenching, but the warm, effervescent, and masterful performances of Dalton and Warden keep the audience engaged and laughing. The only weak point is a prolonged final scene where Tulu and Miti meet again in the void where they began. I got a feeling that two performer–authors kept drawing the scene out because they weren’t quite ready to let go of the rich and meaningful piece of theater they’d created. They can’t be blamed for wanting to dwell a little longer in the light they’ve shone on history in all its tragic glory, but the stronger choice would be to end things a little sooner and leave the audience to deal on its own with the magnitude of the work presented.

Everything is Illuminated

2009-04-11T22:18:00.000-07:00

By Jonathan Safran Foer (2002) Published by Perennial, 276.

This is the best book I’ve read so far this year. It starts out with some truly funny passages written by Alex, a young Ukranian man who’s paid to give a tour to an equally young Jewish American (named Johnathan Safran Foer) who’s come to Ukraine in search of a woman he believes rescued his father from the Holocaust. Alex’s narrative is filled with hilarious thesaurial blunders: he uses the word “rigid” for “difficult”, “flaccid” for “easy”, “manufacture Z’s” for “get some sleep.”
In between sections told by Alex we have stories of the shtetl of Trachimbrod where once a baby girl appeared in the river among an enigmatic cloud of floating detritus: string, clothes, maps, books. The official story is that a wagon crashed into the river, jettisoning the baby and the odd items, but the wagon is never found, and as we watch the baby mature into the beautiful and ingenious Brod we are left to wonder if perhaps her origins are more magical than we were first led to believe: was her coming somehow an omen of the future destruction of the shtetl at the hand of the Nazis exactly 151 years later.
A huge cast of characters is brought into play, the narrative breaks off and starts again at various stages of history, and the story is told at turns through rabbinical diaries of a communities dreams, through songs and wedding invitations, through encyclopedia entries and stage directions, but all of it is a beautiful accretion of mythic speculations built around the sand kernel of a man searching for the lost origins of his family.
It’s interesting: at the start of the book the sections told from the point of view of Alex are by far the strongest, whereas the sections that take place in Trachimbrod read like shoddy ripoffs of Sholem Aleichem. But the novel starts plunging into new depths as soon as the author begins to focus on the recurrent dreams that plague the residents of Trachimbrod, and it just never stops. By the end of the novel Trachimbrod has become as rich, grotesque and weirdly sad as Garbriel Márquez’s Macondo or the post-war Zone of occupied Germany in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
I get a sense that Foer set out to write a rather silly novel and found himself writing something magnificently more profound. While overall the results are incredible. The only big flub, I think, is that as Foer grows as a writer he begins to take the character of Alex a little too seriously, allowing him to morph from a good natured clown into a troubled existential antihero in a way that doesn’t quite ring true. I really liked the choice to add depth to the character: over the course of the book Alex, like the other characters, is confronted with the horrors of the history of the Nazi invasion, the Holocaust, and the possibilities of a godless and meaningless world—it’s natural that the character should change and grow in response to this, but the fact that his joyous, manic temperament disappears altogether is just about the only graceless touch to this otherwise supremely elegant story.

Fallen

2009-04-11T21:24:00.000-07:00

A theatrical production created by the cast and Aerial Angels and directed by Allison Williams and Zay Weaver

This is a show going on for one more weekend at University of Alaska Anchorage, and it really knocked me off my feet. The show draws from several Bible stories, all of them troublesome because of their depiction of women: The Garden of Eden, the stories of Samson and Delilah, Esther, Jezebel and Lot’s Wife. The dialogues and monologues leave something to be desired; clearly this is a play that was written by committee. But the devices used to showcase the stories are often display the sort of brilliance that can come only from a well-tooled ensemble that enjoys working together. The story of Samson and Delilah begins with a gossipy choral telling set in a hair salon, and progresses to an absolutely stunning trapeze routine carried out by Anthony Oliva and Rachael Donaldson at some frightening altitudes. The death-defying (or at least concussion-defying) nature of their work made me feel I was witnessing a primal and carnal liaison of mythic proportions. Later on Kelli Brown and Elizabeth Daniel face each other on either side of a hoop suspended from the catwalks above the stage that serves as a mirror through which Jezebel contemplates the reflection in the moments just prior to her death. The ensuing trapeze routine where the queen and the reflection she worships balance together on their mirror is a subdued and elegant moment, one of the most beautiful in the whole show.
Great kudos have to go out to the whole cast as well as to the Aerial Angels, a touring ensemble of circus-skill performers who have come through Anchorage several times now and who have done a great service to our community by passing on their skills to some of the talented up-and-comers studying at University of Alaska Anchorage.

Ruminator III—This Time It's Personal

2009-04-04T19:09:00.000-07:00

Review of author Denis Bostock's work in progress

It’s now been about two weeks since I finished my close reading of the manuscript of Ruminator III, and I can honestly say that the delightful and anarchic world created by author (and my friend) Denis Bostock continues to shimmer in my mind for several reasons: Bostock’s amazing ability to riff comically on simple absurdities of life and language; the loveable ensemble of characters; and the freewheeling storyline, which satirizes the conventions of social fiction and epic war, while at the same time profiting from the dramatic tensions vital to these spheres of fiction. All this is quite an achievement, especially considering that this is a novel told entirely from the perspective of a band of revolutionary dairy cows who decide one day to throw off the mantle of oppression and stand up—as it were—on their own four hooves.
Bostock’s comic style is readily apparent in the first section of book, which is probably an unrivaled compendium of bovine jokes and puns in the history of western literature. Bostock’s rare and splendid ability to play with words shows itself in the delightful coining of such phrases as “workcowship” for “workmanship,” “bovinity,” for “divinity,” and the phrase, “I felt as if I had butterflies in my stomachs.” At times, the author seems to be channeling the cartoony and conceptual humor of Eddie Izzard, such as when a cow pauses in her conversation to consider the light bulb that has just appeared above her head as an indication that she’s just had an idea. At other times, Bostock’s comedy is like that of Dave Barry during the prime of his Miami Herald humor column: the jokes are unrelenting and shamelessly silly, and half the fun comes from watching the author continue to outdo himself in search of mischievous nonsense.
But for all this silliness, the humor also serves the important purpose of giving the reader a welcome into the story of the dairy farm revolution. The message to the reader is, “I know this is ludicrous, and you know it’s ludicrous, so let’s sit down together and have as much fun as we can with it.” Again and again, we’re invited to laugh as the cows—guided by their leader Daisy a.k.a. Moo See Dung—are torn when forced to choose between overthrowing the unjust power structure of the ruling regime or just eating some grass and taking a nap. The wit and playfulness grows as thick and dense as grass in the first section of the book, and as a reader I was having so much fun a part of me wanted to stay forever in the meadow of absurdity and postpone the action of the plot indefinitely.
But the action does commence. Shortly after taking over the dairy farm, the farmhouse catches fire, and Moo See Dung has to rally her troops to action in a section that gives evidence to Bostock is able to weave humor into a fast-paced scene where a lot is going on. The cows are just barely able to avert the fire, but it still proves to be a pretty simple adversary compared to the problem of their mounting social and sexual frustration. You see, there’s only one bull in their pasture, Angus, and he happens to be a self-absorbed, useless oaf who throws all his energy into perfecting his James Bond impersonation and grooming himself as the world’s first bovine gangster rap star. Driven to despair, the cows send out a single scout, the impetuous Doris, into the world to search for more recruits to their band, and especially for bulls of a higher caliber.
This second section of the book centers on the family history of Moo See Dung née Daisy, her mother Florence, and her daughter Doris. As with any family drama, issues of character take center stage. We see all sorts of little subplots developing, romances between the cows and bulls who are brought in to visit, constant bickering between Moo See Dung and her mother, and Doris’ discovery of her long lost grandfather.
This section of the book ends with the great big wedding festival of Florence and her long lost love, who (a little confusingly) is also named Angus—Angus Senior. The story of the wedding festivities are enjoyable because by the time they occur I felt as a reader that I’d been drawn into the community on the dairy farm, that I cared about who they were and what happened to them. I would very much like to see this aspect of the book fleshed out even more: I’d like get a better idea of the differences between the cows, see more subplots, and be treated to more of the sort of idiosyncratic, slice-of-life humor that is at the heart of all romantic comedy from Jane Austen’s Emma to Forgetting Sarah Marshall. There’s already a lot there: we see the cows worrying about whether they look fat; we see the delight of the sexually frustrated cows when they discover that the washing machine can function as a huge vibrator. I think that Bostock has made a good start here, but has not quite realized the incredible comedic blank check he has written himself in the form of the first great bovine wedding comedy.
Still, by the time that the world of the dairy farm is threatened from the outside, we have a sense that there really is something at stake. The threat comes from the expansionist and imperialist despotism of the pig Bonaparte, a sort of update of Orwell’s despotic swine Napoleon from Animal Farm. Like the cows, Bonaparte has led a barnyard revolution, but he has turned his farm into a massive military-agricultural complex. He is surrounded by a tight coterie of animals, all of whom are not-so-subtle caricatures of despotic figures ranging from Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe to George W Bush and Tony Blair. Bonaparte and his gang has cast a covetous colonial eye on the rich (vegetable) oil reserves owned by Moo See Dung’s revolutionary collective. We’re introduced to Bonaparte’s farm by way of the intrepid cow Buttercup, who volunteers to infiltrate the encampment on the eve of Bonaparte’s impending invasion.
The narrative of Buttercup’s reconnaissance mission is probably the best piece of descriptive prose in the book. The innocent Buttercup is initiated into a nasty and brutish barnyard Gitmo where torture and wanton execution is the order of the day. Buttercup’s horror at what she sees helps to raise the stakes in preparation for the climactic battle scene wherein Bonaparte’s pigs bombard Moo See Dung’s dairy farm with rocks, bullets, flaming catapults and the corpses of conservative British politicians. The story of the battle is told at a fast clip that held my attention, and there are quite a few surprises, especially the transformation of Angus Junior from a useless wanker into a sort of bovine Achilles, putting his life on the line at the height of this barnyard Armageddon.
The story of Bonaparte’s invasion is clearly modeled on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and George W Bush’s “War on Terror,” and so it’s unfortunate that Bostock cheats himself of a fair bit of satiric sting by making the figures of George the bush kangaroo and Tony the toad relatively minor characters in Bonaparte’s army.
But the most important thing is that Bostock has presented in this manuscript the main ingredients of a story that, from start to finish, only he could create. The three main elements of conceptual comedy, ensemble family drama and satiric war epic all fit together in a novel and satisfying way. I think Bostock still needs to do some revision, blend the elements together a little more gracefully—for instance, there’s very little foreshadowing of the pigs’ invasion until the final third of the book—but he’s reached the crucial stage where the roadmap to such revision lies mostly in exploring and augmenting the strengths of the manuscript he’s already developed. I wish him luck in this endeavor, and very much look forward to seeing how the novel develops.

Grendel

2009-01-18T19:43:00.001-08:00

by John Gardner (1971) Published by Vintage. 174 pages.

Reviewed 18 January 2009

John Gardner’s Grendel is a monster who could only live in books. He goes on rampages and midnight raids, he howls at the moon and sneaks up on his enemies, drinks their blood and rapes their wives and does all sorts of other things that could be fodder for movies, but the main thing this Grendel does is to listen. He’s always keeping an eye on the goings on in the little community of Dark Age Danish warrior-folk that he preys upon, and whenever something significant happens he sneaks into the shadows and gets near the action, listens to the secret conferences of those in power, catches onto their petty resentments and feuds, feels glee at their defeats and laughs at their vanity.
John Gardner has taken the character of Grendel from the story of Beowulf, king of the Geats, a heroic figure who slays first Grendel, then Grendel’s mother, and finally kills a dragon. I haven’t read the story of Beowulf yet, but I do know that it’s sort of one of the root stories of English literature, one of the most ancient texts we have in English of any sort, probably one of the oldest poems. And so I understand what it symbolizes for a modern author to go back and revisit this story: by taking his subject from this ancient text, John Gardner is taking a look at the foundation of our culture, trying to track down some of the mysteries of how we came to be who we are. Some of my favorite and least favorite books work along these principles: Derek Walcott’s Omeros uses themes from the Iliad and Odyssey to wonderful effect; Ahab’s Wife, on the other hand, tries to explore the origins of American fiction and just winds up making an ugly mess of the whole thing.
The story of Beowulf is a template for sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and would seem to be a poor source of material for a contemplative book about humankind, but John Gardner makes the matter interesting by exploring the issue of why Grendel has such hatred of the humans that he terrorizes.
Grendel narrates the book in the first person. He’s a creature of monstrous form but with considerable intelligence. His mother is a huge, brutish creature who has nothing to offer him in terms of intellectual stimulation. Although he learns from watching the animals that move about in the wilderness where he lives, he recognizes that they are beneath him. Eventually, Grendel does come into contact with the Dragon, a creature who borders on omniscience. Try as he might, Grendel cannot penetrate the abstract philosophy that occupies the Dragon’s brilliant mind. His intelligence is comparable only to that of the humans who live near him, but because of his form Grendel knows he will never be accepted by them.
It isn’t just loneliness, though, that makes Grendel hate his human adversaries. The thing that really hurts him is the dishonesty that seems to lie at the heart of their society. Growing up, Grendel watches the battles for territory that are carried out as the Danes fight one another. Eventually one Danish warlord, Hrothgar, gains supremacy in the region. Shortly after reaching this pinnacle of power, Hrothgar’s meadhall is visited by a blind bard who has come to seek Hrothgar’s favor. The bard, called the Shaper by Grendel, sings a song that glorifies Hrothgar, praising his rise to power not as a story of pillage and victory of brute force, but as a tale of the triumph of civilization and virtue over “barbarianism.” Grendel is outraged to see that the Shaper’s song casts a spell over the people of Hrothgar’s kingdom, that even though they know the story to be false, they now believe themselves to be the heroic and noble warriors that the Shaper sings about.
In a sense, then, all of Grendel’s ravages against Hrothgar’s people can been seen as the rebellion of true human nature against the lies that we tell ourselves about our own special place in the universe. That’s a little bit too simple an interpretation, but it will serve to demonstrate one of the many wonderful possibilities that arise from this brief but fascinating little tale Gardner has written.

My 2008 Christmas Cartoon

2008-12-28T21:31:00.001-08:00

Here's my 2008 Christmas Cartoon! Enjoy

Freddy’s Book

2008-12-28T21:23:00.000-08:00

Freddy’s Book by John Gardner (1980). Published by Ballantine Books. 214 pages.

The story of Freddy’s Book starts in modern times, narrated in the first person by a chummy professor named Winesap, open minded and jolly, a professor of something called “Psycho-history. Winesap is a refreshing character, genuinely optimistic and kindly, free from all the overblown vanity and professional jealousy that characterize academic characters in most modern literature. It’s especially noteworthy that he seems to be a champion of the talents of the young: he is easily inspired by the prospect that one of the students he lectures to may be “some young Gibson or Macaulay not yet conscious of how good he is.” At a party, Winesap meets a crotchety, mean-tempered professor named Agaard, a scholar of Scandanavian history whom Winesap admires academically even though he finds him personally repulsive. After accepting an invitation to Agaard’s house, Winesap then patiently sits by and endures a barrage of criticism hurled at him by Agaard: real history should be confined to fact, not fiction and fancy. In Agaard’s eye, Winesap represents a sign of fatal decadence.
Why, then, does Agaard invite Winesap to his house at all? The answer has to do with his son, Freddy. Described by his own father as a monster, Freddy Agaard stands seven feet tall and has voluntarily locked himself in a room filled with books. He shows signs of being a genius, but the real nature of his intelligence remains a mystery because he refuses to show anyone the book he’s written. Agaard knows that Freddy admires the work of professor Winesap, and hopes that Freddy will show his book to Winesap, which he eventually does, dropping it off for him in the dead of night.
The book is called King Gustav and the Devil. The first 57 pages of Freddy’s Book tells the story of how Winesap gets possession of the book on a cold, snowy Wisconsin night and the rest of the novel consists only of the text of this strange story Freddy has written. We never find out what Winesap’s reaction to the book is, we never find out whether Freddy eventually is able to escape his self-imposed isolation. But the framing story of Freddy, Winesap and Agaard does serve to prime our minds for the fact that we’re embarking on a weird journey into a narrative terrain very remote from anything we’d expect from contemporary American fiction.
The story concerns Gustav Vasa of Sweden, an actual historical figure, and his faithful friend, the knight Lars-Goren. Lars-Goren is a taciturn man, who is “considered to be of great intelligence, for though he thought slowly, he thought clearly and soundly, so that again and again his opinions were found to be more valuable in the end than the opinions of men quicker and more dazzling.” Indeed, throughout the story Lars-Goren’s thinking process is so slow that he seems entirely inactive. He basically acts as a passive, but very reflective witness as he watches his friend Gustav Vasa be tempted by the Devil himself into starting a revolution against Denmark for Swedish independence. While the plot is filled with historical upheavals, with insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, conspiracies and military campaigns, all these events occur at such a remote distance to the plot that we get the sense that these are merely a mask for something that is emerging much more slowly: the birth of a new sort of civilization.
The most striking element of the story is the Devil, who walks freely about, takes on all sorts of forms, and often makes no secret as to who he is. His role is always to entice more turmoil and bloodshed. He appears on all sides of every conflict, counseling not only Gustav Vasa but also the Danish King Kristian and the supremely cynical Bishop Brask.
We get the sense that for the Devil, all the constant struggle and change in government actually represents a sort of stasis: as long as people keep sowing conflict, the human spirit can never grow.
And the Devil seems farthest away during the prolonged and serene reveries of Lars-Goren as he turns his back on the business of helping found a kingdom and visits his estate, taking joy in seeing his children going up and reflecting on the duties a feudal lord bears to his peasantry. He is especially touched when he sees Bernt Notke’s statue depicting St George’s slaying of the Dragon, a statue that comes to symbolize for him the notion that the Devil himself can eventually be overthrown.
Although we never see an actual glimpse of Freddy again, his character traits do keep popping up in the narrative of King Gustav and the Devil. For instance, take a look at some of the things Winesap says to encourage Freddy:
“It’s not easy writing books! You know, that’s the one place where all human beings are equal . . . whatever we may seem to be—humpbacked, tall or short, pale or ruddy, never mind . . . when we pick up that pencil we’re all in the same boat . . . A man may say anything when he’s just talking . . . but when he’s writing he ha time to think it over and re-do it until it’s right.”
This description of slow, deliberative thought complements the description of Lars-Goren’s own process of circumspection. And the recollections of Bishop Brask also recall the bookish nature of Freddy:
“When I was young, I was a great reader of books. They were my chief pleasure—my very life. . . But books are expensive and you’d be surprised how easily they burn, if the fire gets hot enough. And so one involves oneself in money-grubbing and politics, even war. For the luxury of reading the gentle thoughts of Plato or St. Ambrose, or sharing the pastoral meditations of the Emperor who turned his back on Rome to run a chicken farm—for the supreme pleasure of musing at one’s ease on the glorious illustrations of the Arabs or the masters of Byzantium—one turns one’s whole attention to manipulating fools full of bloodthirts and ambition . . . crushing underfoot all that God and the philosophers have stood for.”
In the end, Lars-Goren and Bishop Brask are sent out to the frozen waste of Lappland on what appears to be a fool’s errand—they must kill the Devil. During the journey across the vast expanse of land, there is little for them to do but talk, debating lofty issues. Brask seems to dominate the discussion, bolstered as he is by his extensive knowledge of philosophy, but Lars-Goren, the man of few words, is the one who proposes new and challenging ideas—a model for tolerance and universal human decency that challenges Brask’s cynicism.
Interestingly, the opening, modern, section of Freddy’s Book reads very much like a contrivance, whereas the fictional story of Lars-Goren feels far more genuine for all its fantastical elements. A modern reader may well be put off by the long sections of philosophical discussions at the end of the book. I think we’ve all been somewhat entrained to interpret novels as plot outlines for movies and there’s a waning recognition of the fact that they can also serve as a wonderful nursery for meaningful ideas and ways of looking at life. In this book, John Gardner seeks to remind us that great ideas may linger locked away for generations inside labyrinths of obscurity unless we engage that most enlightened and democratic forms of action: careful, patient, open-minded listening.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

2008-10-25T15:58:00.000-07:00

By John Fowles

First in a series of 3 installments — 26 October 2008

The Magus is a book about a modern man drawn into a scheme that, while fascinating, is really more like an intricate private fantasy than anything we can imagine happening in real life. The Collector takes place buried in the psychological prison of an enclosure behind a secret door at the back of a basement. How disconcerting it was that the third book of Fowles’ I read should open up its doors on the Victorian era.
For readers of the English language, the Victorian era is the closest thing we have to public space in the world of literature. Wuthering Heights, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, The Christmas Carol; even in a modern America that shuns literacy and denies the importance of anything even slightly old or unfamiliar, our schools and our teachers do seem to recognize that there’s something universal in these stories that can engage children. From early childhood it was always Victorian images that were the strongest in my mind when I was asked to imagine the past, the way the world must have been before the invention of cars and lightbulbs. Knights in armor, cowboys and horses, all these had the aura of something that was partly make believe. But the Masterpiece Theater world of Victorian England was the world as it really was.
In this book, Fowles puts his own research at the forefront. He’s constantly breaking into the narration with references to his sources, with data about the working life of Victorian servants, the prejudices of the middle and aristocratic classes, and especially with reminders about how we must not mistake the attitudes of the Victorians with those of today’s world.
Far from breaking the illusion, these references serve to make this novel feel more real and more interesting, not only because you feel like you’re getting a really high quality tour of the world as it once existed, but also because in setting his novel in the Victorian Era, Fowles has found a perfect setting for his own ideas.
This is how I would propose it: In The Collector, Fowles shows us two people separated by a wall that cannot be broken. The wall is composed of class prejudices, of sexual desire and internal repression, of primal fear and of self-absorption. In The Magus, we see the story of a man who, through the extraordinary efforts of an eccentric millionaire, is allowed for just a moment to see his own personal walls shattered. It’s a compelling story, at least to me, but it’s somehow very hard to understand completely what barriers it is that Nicholas Urfe breaks down, because he lives in the same world we all do.
But the world of The French Lieutenant’s Woman is far enough removed from our own that we’re able to distance ourselves from the character of Charles Smithson, a young man who expects to inherit a baronetcy and a substantial fortune, who’s on the verge of affecting a very comfortable marriage with a woman—Ernestina—who seems perfectly satisfactory by all the standards Charles has been trained to apply to the world around him.
And then there’s the outcast woman, Sarah Woodruff, called “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by some and “The French Lieutenant’s Whore” by others, because she is said to have lost her virginity to a handsome foreigner who has since abandoned her.
John Fowles tells us that the phenomenon of Charles falling in love with Sarah is identical to the end of the Victorian era. And because he’s dug up so many wonderful facts and stories about 19th Century England to illustrate his point, this rather abstract metaphor becomes quite visceral and believable. Unlike Nicholas Urfe’s brief period of disorientation at the hands of the scheming Maurice Conchis, Charles’ crisis is drawn out over more than a hundred pages as he resists Sarah, condemns her as mad, sees his hopes for inheritance dashed, runs for consolation to the seamy demimonde of London, and finally succumbs to the temptation to destroy the self that Sarah represents.
It works precisely because Victorian literature is characterized by such a wonderful tradition of coincidence. Whereas Maurice Conchis’s whole consciousness shattering project seemed a labyrinthine contrivance whose complexity often obscured the revelation at its own heart, the downfall of Charles Smithson seems to be driven by the same forces that drove the fates of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens’s characters.
IB Singer said that every writer needs to find stories that no one else can tell. It’s impossible for me to imagine anyone else telling the story of Sarah Woodruff. Fowles intentionally makes her an enigma. The great characters of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Emma Woodhouse, Ebenezer Scrooge and David Copperfield all are so vivid that they can live inside our minds. But Sarah Woodruff seems to pass mysteriously just beyond our grasp in a way that eludes the Victorian style and makes this novel seem truly a feat of magic.

Second in series of three installments — 2 November 2008

So what is it that this Sarah Woodruff symbolizes? Like the White Whale in Moby Dick, she stands at the center of a network of symbolism that fills up the whole book, but she never quite passes completely into the realm of pure symbol. In one very interesting chapter Fowles pulls out of the narrative entirely and declares that, although Sarah, like all the characters in the novel, is his creation, he cannot and will not reveal her inner motives, although he had planned to do so. She won’t reveal them up to her author.
Sarah stands out as being the only character in the book that acts even slightly an adult. This is another theme that seems to run through Fowles’s books—although the characters are all adults with adult responsibilities, they seem to be ruled by a set of childish vanities. Charles and Ernestina go through life as though they’re living in a fairy tale, partly because that’s precisely what they are doing. They’re both slated to earn huge inheritances, and while they each have their little cavils and pouting fits with one another, they’re both bolstered deep down by the thought that the ultimate struggle that lies in store for them is the choice of what kind of prosperity exactly they want to choose. Will they move into the large manor house or the small manor house? Will Charles carry on with his amateur paleontology, or will he find some other hobby to occupy his time but not fulfill his longing to ambition.
At first, Sarah seems to be childish as well. She spends her life moping about, staring at the sea, presumably in hopes that the French Lieutenant who once seduced her will come back. But as the novel progresses and she continues to meet with Charles in the primeval groves of the wild region known as the Undercliff, it begins to become clear that she’s not as much a victim of childish passion as we first thought. Does she really have any illusion that her French Lieutenant will ever come back? Did she even love him in the first place? And if not, why does she willingly allow herself to remain in a community where she’ll always be shunned as a fallen woman? Confused by these questions, Charles confides in his fellow Darwinist Dr Grogan, the only man he can trust to respond rationally.
As a Darwinist and atheist, Dr Grogan seems to stand outside the prison of stereotypes and that defines the Victorian era of this book, and yet his response hardly seems that of a reasonable man. He feels certain that Sarah is dangerously ill and must be institutionalized immediately. She is, after all, the inferior of Charles, who must seem to her like a god.
As it turns out, Dr Grogan is correct in thinking that Sarah represents a great danger to Charles’s future as a happy Victorian gentleman, but his notion that Sarah is mad seems diametrically opposed to the sort of rational humanism that Grogan wishes to represent.
The Undercliff, where Charles and Sarah meet, is home to a series of fossils that inspire Charles to realize the fact that Darwin’s natural not only carries the potential for evolutionary progress but also for mass extinction. Sarah Woodruff represents all the forces that will eventually extinguish the Victorian era, but what are those forces? I think that the answer lies in the other name that she’s given by the people of Lyme Regis, the name that’s used least frequently in the book: Tragedy. The true blindness of the Victorian era is not just a denial of sexual desires or the baser nature of even the most refined gentleman, but rather the denial of the tragic nature of life, in the sense of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy where a system destroys itself by its own striving toward nobility. The name “Tragedy” is appropriate for Sarah, but not so much because she’s a victim of tragedy but an agent of tragic catharsis. Although I doubt I can get to the bottom of it, I will try to expand on that idea in my next installment of this review.

Third installment • 23 November 2008

I remember one time I had an acting teacher who suggested that we almost always see the people around us as representations of something rather than as actual human beings. We see people as representations of our ambitions, as challenges to our status, as political opponents or as collaborators at work, as role-models and as supervisors, as parents or children, but it’s exceedingly rare that we simply view them as people who have been set as unwillingly and unwittingly into the great en medias res of life as we ourselves have been.
That memory came to me today as I was thinking about what more there was for me to say about French Lieutenant’s Woman. It seems to me that in all of Fowles’s works I’ve read so far, his central theme is precisely this blindness we carry around with us, this blindness which keeps us from ever quite recognizing the people around us for what they really are. Victorian society especially seems to depend on such blindness. Charles and his fiancée Ernestina enter into the book with a pat answer to every question of human nature that might come their way.
What makes this argument worth listening to is that Fowles doesn’t write off the blindness of the age as a mere handicap. He’s explicit about the fact that he has a great admiration for the achievements of Victorian society, for the incredible productivity and creativity that arose during that time, but he does seem to suggest that these benefits were achieved at the price of creating a society that was incredibly rigid and unyielding in its notions of human value.
I think that one of the weaknesses of Fowles is that his focus on satori-like moment when the scales fall away from a person’s eyes requires him to make his plots pivot on these moments of personal revelation that are very difficult to communicate to the reader and that must seem contrived and alienating to anyone who hasn’t experienced such moments themselves. One of the ways that Fowles manages to get around this problem is by repeatedly bringing up excerpts of poetry by Tennyson and Clough that are always closely attuned to the inner entrapments and awakenings of Fowles’s characters. Another way that he manages this is by admitting that the character of Sarah Woodruff resists even the omnipotence of the novelist. He cannot see fully into her mind, cannot even guess at her true motivations, and in the end this puts her not only beyond the Victorian stereotypes that Charles uses to navigate his way through life, but also puts her outside of the Freudian and Marxist analyses with which Fowles tries to explain his other characters.

The Collector

2008-10-21T21:36:00.000-07:00

by John Fowles. (1963) Published by Dell. 255 pages.

Reviewed 21 October 2008

I decided to change my reading habits a little. Normally, I try to read switch directions as often as possible, to jump from classical to contemporary authors, from fiction to nonfiction and so on as often as possible. But I decided to see what it would be like to focus on one author whom I like a lot. After being so bowled over last year by The Magus, I decided to go back to John Fowles and find out what else he’s written.
The Collector is a book whose subject is so dark—it tells the story the kidnapping of a girl by a young man with a distinctly bland set of sociopathic tendencies—that it’s hard to say “Oh, I just love that book” without depicting oneself as something of a pervert.
While the scenario itself has all the lurid elements of captivity and depravity that are celebrated today in the mythology built up around Hannibal Lecter or the Saw series of movies, it’s notable that there are no scenes of outright torture in this book. The kidnapper, who adopts the false name Ferdinand, goes out of his way to create a comfortable environment for his captive. Does that mitigate his crime or does it serve rather to underscore the fact that no amount of comfort can serve as compensation for the crime of depriving an innocent of her freedom.
There’s something essentially acidic in John Fowles. I think he knew deep down the strident, judgmental direction that literary criticism was headed in, the way that young students especially are encouraged to condemn first and foremost to condemn the author. I think that at some level the sly and Machiavellian Fowles not only anticipated this trend, but he also decided quite deliberately in this, his first published novel, to offer himself up as a sort of intentional sacrifice, and then to profit from the confusion of those who would condemn him.
The first knee-jerk reaction of today’s critic would be to condemn Fowles for writing the ultimate puerile male fantasy novel, a masturbatory wish fulfillment of a man who seeks only to possess a woman, to own her as an object without ever recognizing her as a person.
The second part of the novel takes the form of the diary of “Ferdinand’s” captive Miranda. It is clear after only a short time that Miranda has a far greater claim to the author’s sympathies, and this must give the lie to the knee-jerk condemnation of the book laid out above. If Miranda were to principally define herself as Ferdinand’s victim, if she developed the sort of subservient mentality that he would like to see in her, there might still be a strong case for condemning the book as an example of male objectification. But Miranda is surprisingly indifferent to the person of Ferdinand. Indeed, she’s quite contemptuous of him as a non-entity; she loathes his utter lack of aesthetics. The second part of the book hinges not so much on Miranda’s struggle for her freedom as her attempts to come to terms with her own identity as an artist. Her thoughts are characterized by the anxiety and self-absorption typical of any young artist, but as Miranda’s situation becomes direr it becomes clear that her real struggle is to move as quickly as possible away from her naiveté, to face the fact of her own limitations and come to terms with the facts of her own mortality without the luxury of the slow, ideal ripening processes that most souls in liberty would hope to enjoy.
The Wikipedia entry on this book describes Miranda as a snob. Is she really? Certainly, she’s aware that she’s been trained to look down on Ferdinand for his bluntness of wit and lack of education. But there’s also a deep welling of sympathy in her, an impetus to find redeeming qualities even in her captor.
John Fowles made no secret that he was an elitist, and our young critic eager for a cause to condemn this book might be torn between which character is the more worthy of the reader’s contempt. Does Ferdinand represent the ruling gender elite, or does Miranda represent the ruling cultural elite?
I think the central virtue in Fowles is that he realized the great potential in wandering into this sort of philosophical briar patch. He recognizes the almost visceral need of the reader to rush toward judgment, and he uses it as an engine for his own narrative tension. In some ways, this is a silly book, a little too obvious, with too many heavy-handed references to The Tempest and too much focus on Miranda’s mentor G.P. (Gentle Prospero?) a curmudgeonly and lecherous artist who’s enigmatic pronouncements are not nearly so profound as Fowles thinks they are. But I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to see how paradox and uncertainty can bring a novel to life, and how the fundamental challenge to any reader is to withhold judgment enough that it’s possible to listen to what’s really being said.

Angels and Insects

2008-10-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

by AS Byatt. (1992) Published by Chatto & Windus. 292 pages.

Reviewed 15 October 2008
Nobody can write about ideas the way the AS Byatt does. She allows the worlds of her stories to crystallize around the concepts and issues that she’s chosen to focus on, and this method is illustrated extremely well in the two novellas that sit side-by-side in this polished and successful work.
The first story, Morpho Eugenia, is focused on questions of evolution and creation. The tension between the two is not so much that of a two equal rivals going head-to-head. Rather, it’s the tension of the torch being passed somewhat unwillingly from an old, established sire and a young upstart. The story is that of the young scientist William Adamson who has found himself nearly destitute after losing most of the results from his recent expedition to the Amazon. He gains quick patronage from the Alabaster family; the old patrician Harald wants to use Adamson as a sounding board for his idea about a book that argues the case for God’s existence even in a post-Darwin world. The discussions between the two men are civil, but around the edges of the debate all the more volatile elements of the subject seep their way into the story. As a suitor for Harald’s daughter Eugenia, Alabaster is faced with all the antipathy of a British class system in which wealthy and titled families are infatuated above all with themselves, with their own rituals and routines and the belief in their own innate superiority.
Reading this story, you can understand why, at the tail end of the Victorian Era, a thinker like GB Shaw became so interested in the idea of a “life force.” The world of the landed elite is a sort of shell, ornately beautiful, essentially dead. As William becomes more and more entangled in the world of the Alabasters, he seems to draw his vitality not from the desiccated culture at its core, but from the enthusiasm of those who exist at its edges, the children and servants who inspire William to undertake an engaging project of carefully studying and depicting the natural history of the ant colonies surrounding the Alabaster home.
The real “life-force” that’s breaking through here is essentially the imagination, the ability to create and connect with the world in a meaningful way. Although the world of the Alabasters offers all sorts of material comforts, full acceptance comes at a price of the ability to take part in the world in any creative way. At the same time as Adamson discovers the limitations of the Alabasters’ world, we the readers also discover a lot of the richness of the biological world he studies. This is especially brought out by Matty Crompton, a woman of uncertain status who lives with the Alabasters and serves often as the driving force behind Adamson’s endeavors. Crompton is fascinated by the myriad references to mythology that are woven into the nomenclature of species as assigned by Linnaeus, and she’s inspired by this to create a series of fables which illustrate the way that science in the 19th century really inherited the wealth of imaginative energy that had once been the domain of religion.
In the second story, Conjugal Angel, the situation is quite different. Here, instead of looking at an imaginative journey at its beginnings, we survey it from its end. The story is largely about the strange love triangle Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet Laureate, his sister Emily, and the young genius Arthur Henry Hallam, who was engaged to Emily and who, after his untimely death from a brain hemorrhage, was immortalized by in Tennyson’s long poem In Memoriam A.H.H.
This is very familiar territory for anyone who’s read Byatt’s Possession. To me, this story is a lot harder to read than Morpho Eugenia, but also a lot more rewarding because Byatt is focusing on something she’s extremely passionate about: the connection we form over time with select handfuls of words, snatches of poetry, little remarks, epigrams and observations; the way that these are colored by the criticism and the prying curiosity of the coterie of scholars and biographers and enthusiasts who form a sort of cage around the world of literature. If Morpho Eugenia seemed to be set against a dazzling world of sunshine and picnic-weather, Conjugal Angel has been quite deliberately set in a world of gloom and encroaching night, and all the scientific wonder and clarity has been abandoned for the spooky Victorian fixation on the occult.
After making such a strong case for science in her first story, why does Byatt seem to betray herself by writing a story in which séance goers seems to commune with sinister spirits? I think this is a way of consciously affirming the fact that there is something unscientific and arcane about literature, something inherently backward looking and yet necessary, at least for those who can be moved by careful examination of words. The folks around the séance table are deeply engrossed in a world of Swedenborgian theories and occult associations that seem not so much profane or ludicrous as just hopelessly antique to us now, a system of belief that may be fascinating to us, but which we can’t imagine actually subscribing to and inhabiting. But in order to really understand literature at it’s core, Byatt argues, you have to be willing to reincarnate these ghost worlds, these old systems of sentiment and fashion, these old mores and compulsions that once defined the way that people thought. It requires a lot of patience to follow Byatt as she pries open the minds first of Emily Tennyson and then her brother Alfred, but as you go along you feel that you’re witnessing first hand the way a writer is truly able to enrich herself, to strengthen her arsenal and to use fiction as a way of learning the real purpose of how it is she’s chosen to invest the deepest of her passion.

Begin Chess

2008-08-16T14:26:00.000-07:00

Begin Chess by D.B. Prichard

I don’t know if I’ll ever be really good at chess, having picked up so late in life, and being more attracted to the idea of chess than to the game itself. But reading this book reminded me of the difference that the right approach to teaching a subject can make. Until now, my most “formal” introduction to the game was from another book which, like Prichard’s Begin Chess, was targeted toward children: Let’s Play Chess, a hardcover book filled with lavish illustrations in which the chess pieces are depicted as warriors from a fantasy world, the rooks as riders atop wooly mammoths, the queens as beautiful women in translucent shifts who are capable of firing energy beams from their fingertips. Great food for the imagination, but the text focused jumped quickly from explaining the moves of individual pieces to recounting whole endgames and then entire matches transcribed from the great games of such folks as Bobby Fischer and Gary Kasparov. While it certainly got me interested, it also frustrated me because I felt steps were being skipped.
What I like about Prichard is that for most of the book he forsakes the full chessboard and focuses on fields of sixteen or twenty squares and the conflicts that arise from just a few pieces. He keeps stressing that, while it’s tempting to memorize important scenarios, openings, and even entire games, it’s much more effective to learn a few principles that you’ll then be able to hold onto in a variety of situations. Prichard, I think, gives a little more credit to his audience, trusting that someone who has the time to devote to his tiny illustrations of chess tactics and strategy will then be able to translate them into the more chaotic world of real play.
I especially like that I came away from this book understanding that the chessboard, for all its apparent uniformity, actually has its own geography. Certain squares have their own importance, and this importance changes as the terrain itself is set up by the positioning of the pieces, particularly the pawns. This book has taught me why it might be interesting not just to play chess, but to undertake the thought processes involved in the game.

Vanity Fair

2008-07-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

by William Makepeace Thackeray. (1848) Published by Penguin Classics. 814 pages.

Up to page 426. Reviewed 19 July 2008.

In his introduction to this book, J. I. M. Stewart makes it clear that Vanity Fair is a second-tier work as far as 19th Century British fiction goes. Why even read a book that’s not the best of the best, especially if it’s such a long and involved endeavor as this one?
I’m interested in books from different periods of time for the same reason that I’m interested in learning foreign languages, because it lets me distance myself from the place I live and the habits of thought that I otherwise take for granted. I’m especially interested in the way that humor has evolved over time. Vanity Fair has a few bits of good comedy. For instance, there’s the comedy of mistaken intentions when William Dobbin, the novel’s most sympathetic character, sits down with Miss Jane Osborne, who is dearly smitten with him, and tries to have a conversation with her. The poor Jane interprets every word as a sign that William Dobbin is about to propose. It’s just a short scene, but each little turn of the conversation is so well played out that it comes alive.
Later on in the story we watch the young wastrel Rawdon Crawley as he prepares to go to war, bidding farewell to his young wife Rebecca before going off with Wellington’s army to stave off the advance of the Napoleonic army. Touched by the sudden intimation of his own mortality, Rawdon scrambles to think of every last possession that Rebecca might be able to pawn off in case he dies. At the same moment that we’re amused Rawdon’s venality we’re also touched by the fact that this is the closest he’s going to get to real romantic love. And as soon as he leaves, we take a look into Rebecca’s head and see how she’s already scheming about how she might actually be better off if her husband dies on the battlefield.
Brilliant little Becky Sharp is probably the best reason to read this book. She’s a character calculated to defy every expectation of her era’s class-consciousness. An orphan girl of humble origins, she uses all her assets (a keen intellect, a perfect command of French, a nasty sense of humor and a remarkable beauty) to make the rich and powerful fall head-over-heels in love with her. She has generals making fools of themselves, she brings her best friend’s marriage to the brink of collapse, and she makes herself the toast of Belgian high society after Napoleon is defeated. Those who are won over by her let their imaginations run wild, ascribing to her the noblest, most romantic origins they can think of. In the same way, Thackeray encourages us to let our imaginations go as well when it comes to this character, so that by the time the novel is halfway finished we no longer need Thackeray to remind us of Becky’s ruthless character because we already feel as if we have an intimate understanding of her gloriously amoral style of getting a leg up on the whole world.
Although Thackeray claims this is “a novel without a hero,” it is also not a satiric comedy that’s all pitched at the same level. There are plenty of characters that we’re meant only to find ridiculous, such as the spinster Miss Crawley and the swarm of sycophants who gather around her hoping for a bit of her inheritance. But there are also characters who are more tragically than comically flawed, such as old Mr Osborne, who wants deeply to come to peace with his dead son George but is too stubborn to forgive the way George defied his father’s will and married without permission.
What makes this book worth reading is to see how even a second tier novelist of Thackeray’s era devoted himself to the nuance and texture of the world he created, creating space on the stage for humor and sarcasm to give way to moments of true emotion when the need arises.

pp. 426-660; reviewed 2 August 2008

At the end of a hectic day in our hectic world, it’s such a pleasure to sink into the world of a writer like Thackeray who, writing as he did in a serialized form, had every reason to draw his story out, to linger at every little point of interest, to wander off into idle jokes and contemplation. Especially after the battle of Waterloo has been put behind us, Thackeray seems to sit back and let his plot unfold at a slow pace.
This is a book about waiting. Becky and Rawdon and all their relatives wait for the wealthy Miss Crawley to die and pass on her inheritance. Amelia waits for her bitter father-in-law to forgive his grudges against his rebellious son. Poor William Dobbin waits for himself to build up the courage to finally reveal his love for Amelia. And as readers, we’re waiting for the Becky and Amelia’s sons to grow up. Young George Osborne is the spit and image of his dead father, and develops all his father’s overconfidence and bravado. Young Rawdon Crawley’s father is still alive, but has undergone a sort of spiritual death at the hands of the scheming Becky Sharp, who has encouraged him to dull his wits and go to seed while she pursues her own ambitions to penetrate the highest levels of society and especially to take as much advantage as she can of the lecherous Lord Steyne.
A different, more deliberate novelist might have recognized that the story has a natural climax in the battle of Waterloo. All the themes of the book are present there. We can see clearly the rivalry between Becky and Amelia, the inevitable cuckolding of Rawdon Crawley and the frustrated love of the honorable William Dobbin, who makes so many sacrifices to Amelia and yet can’t bring himself to admit his love for her. Once the smoke has cleared and we learn that George has died in battle, the story proper could end, and we could skip ahead to an epilogue where young Rawdon and George are grown, where Amelia and Becky confront each other, as they must inevitably do.
Such a plot structure would be far more economical and probably better. With all the wooly digressions done away with, this would be the sort of precise, clever book that actually makes a point about some theme, be it the vanity of all our worldly pursuits or the virtue of those who live a life without pretense. As it is, though, the novel is beautiful because it’s so inefficient, because it sprawls and wanders so much as Thackeray moves from point A to point B. We get lovely glimpses of the way old Rawdon Crawley nearly finds fulfillment in fatherhood, but doesn’t quite have the wit to understand what’s happening to him. We get to cringe at the injustice as Amelia not only loses her beloved son George, but also is all but forgotten by him. And all of Becky’s bad characteristics, already established prior to the Waterloo episode, get to come forward and develop fully.
More than half of this book is an extended epilogue, slow paced and idle, but what better form for a book whose purpose is to draw a vast mural of all the idle pursuits that people are guilty of.

p. 660 to end. Reviewed 16 August 2008

The most interesting part of this book’s end is the section where, after spending his entire adult life pining for Amelia Osborne nee Sedley, William Dobbin finally stands up to her and declares that he’s realized she isn’t worthy of him by dint of the fact that she’s spurned him all these years when anyone with sense would have recognized and embraced the worth of so much devotion. It stands out because it’s the closest thing there is in the book to a heroic monologue. During the course of the novel, Thackeray finds few emotional causes worthy of his endorsement. Those tract writers and parliamentarians who oppose the slave trade meet only with scorn. The plight of those less fortunate characters, such as Miss Briggs, are recognized, but only as an afterthought; after we get a dark laugh at the way Becky Sharp cheats Briggs out of her small fortune, we’re comforted by the fact that in the end someone looks kindly on her and provides her with a small income. But Thackeray doesn’t seem outraged at the lot of the poor in the way Dickens often was; he’s merely cushioning the novel out so as not to let Briggs distract from the central theme of the book. There are various devout Christians in the book, but we’re led to believe that, while they may be correct in their beliefs, they’re all rather dull.
In the sections leading up to the battle of Waterloo, we witness a literal overnight transition of George Osborne from a philandering good-for-nothing to a man with noble and heroic character who suddenly recognizes the great debt of love he owes his dear wife, Amelia. Here especially, Thackeray seems to be intentionally filing off the sharp edges of his claws. He admits outright that his domain as a writer encompasses only the activities of civilian life, and so here at the border of the military world he feels obliged to drop his own cynical view of the world and bestow Osborne with a fiction of nobility that Thackeray neither believes nor disbelieves, but one from which he can easily distance himself because it’s not of his own design.
But if the battlefield between warring armies is outside Thackeray’s narrative grasp, the battlefield between those who are celebrated and those who are jilted is firmly within it. That’s why Dobbin’s speech jolts us awake after we’ve spent nearly an eternity snoozing through the descriptions of Amelia and Dobbin’s trip to Germany. In Thackeray’s world, the wounds of a man who’s loved his entire life in vain are far more real than the wounds suffered by soldiers in war or by the widows of those soldiers who find themselves left behind to raise their children.
Dobbin’s speech is foreshadowed by the impassioned outburst of Lady Jane against her husband, Sir Pitt, who is on the verge of granting safe harbor to the scheming Becky Crawley. Lady Jane would be a totally forgettable character if it weren’t for this speech that comes out of nowhere in which this character suddenly finds her voice, reminding her husband of her unwavering loyalty and demanding asserting that in this one instance she must be able to make the rules: she will not be under the same roof as Rebecca Crawley.
Becky is the common denominator in both of these outbursts. Even though William is rejecting Amelia, his eyes have been opened to her flaws only because she’s willing to welcome Becky into her home.
Becky is central to the novel, but it’s difficult to understand what she represents. If I were pressed, I’d have to say that she represents the fact that the social world as Thackeray sees it is a zero-sum game. In order for one person like Becky Sharp to prosper and thrive, to gain the recognition of nobility and royalty, to be considered of “good character,” a whole range of people must unwittingly suffer.
There’s a great story here, but it feels as if Thackeray arrived at it almost by chance. Our own age of efficiency-in-fiction would demand that, having discovered his central theme, Thackeray must then go back over his whole narrative, trimming the fat, carefully orchestrating all the subplots and sideshows of the novel so that they somehow resonate with the story of Becky Sharp and her cursed ambitions.
I’ve no doubt that that sort of creative process would have resulted in a better book. However, for the student of writing it’s worthwhile to examine Vanity Fair as it exists today precisely because it’s so easy to see the novels flaws and its potential resting side-by-side. Each of us would probably revise the novel in our own way. If I were to take the story and run with it, I would first try to expand on the story of Becky’s lover, Lord Steyne. Having established the character of Becky, Thackeray needed to create a temptation worthy of her. Steyne is the Darth Vader of this novel. When Thackeray describes Steyne’s world in the chapter Gaunt House, his language immediately heightens itself, and we get a sense that we’re wandering into a territory where there are many ugly secrets. Later on we see how, confronted with the prospect of a duel with Rawdon Crawley, Steyne is able to essentially buy the man off with the offer of an out-of-the-way post as a colonial governor. And near the end of the book, when Becky is tempted to try to win Steyne back, one of his henchmen gives her an ultimatum that essentially tells her that she’s nothing but an embarrassment to the man, and can either get out of town now or face being killed in the dead of night. It’s a portrait of darkly varnished evil that’s all the more fascinating because Thackeray seemed to stumble on it inadvertently. If he’d been a more organized writer, Thackeray doubtless would have seen the value of the character and “capitalized” on it, introducing him earlier and fleshing him out and making him more central to the books narrative. There’s a lesson here to be learned by any young writer. But perhaps the sword has its double edge. I would wager that if Thackeray had been a less spontaneous, less meandering author, Thackeray never would have wandered into this character at all.

If You Want Me to Stay

2008-07-05T19:29:00.001-07:00

by Michael Parker

Years and years ago I took a creative writing course from Michael Parker. This was shortly before the release of his first novel, Hello Down There. Since then I’ve enjoyed watching the direction he’s taken his work, and I think If You Want Me to Stay is the best so far, a potent, sad story of a boy who is lost in the world, whose connection to the world of adults is mainly through his extensive knowledge of soul music.
Our main character, Joel Junior, received his education in soul music from his father, a man who suffers from episodic bouts of mental illness, which render him a danger to himself and his three sons. The novel starts when the father loses his grip on reality “the worst time.” Joel Junior runs away from home with his youngest brother, Tank, and is forced to come up with a plan to help the two of them survive and find their mother, who absconded a few years ago without warning, having lost patience with her husband’s madness.
We have an intimate look inside Joel Junior’s head. At first, I was apprehensive about the constant references to the music of Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, Mavis Staples and Curtis Mayfield. The idea of giving the novel a “soundtrack” seemed gimmicky, like a writing exercise good for only a few pages at most. But Parker manages to render the way that songs worm their way into the brain so well that it never felt like the musical framework was imposed from the outside. Joel Junior uses his lexicon of soul sounds and lyrics as a guide to help understand all the most adult aspects of loneliness, hope and frustration that he encounters as he wanders through this world, and his interior arguments about the real meaning of songs like Sitting on the Dock of the Bay give us a sense of his intelligence that it would be hard to get otherwise.
We also get a feeling of Joel Junior’s intelligence from his language, which is unorthodox but never sloppy. Joel Junior is the latest in a string of Michael Parker characters who is dangerously naïve and open to the world around him; unlike the other characters, Joel Junior’s mental eccentricity is built into the structure of every sentence.
I love Michael Parker’s writing best for its economy. In composing his words, he leaves little to chance. But like any good magician, Parker has to conceal his craft through misdirection. That’s why it works so well that Joel and Tank’s quixotic journey is littered with so many odd, understated little encounters: along their way they meet fishermen and church ladies, shop clerks and drunkards whose significance is as random as that of anyone we might meet by chance in real life, and yet in the mind of Joel Junior they all become signposts on the way to reaching an understanding of who he is, where he’s come from, and the path that his life is likely to take from here on out. By the end of the book, Michael Parker has achieved stunningly well in creating the sort of poetic landscape of memories and symbols that John Irving so desperately wanted to create for Hotel New Hampshire. The overall effect is so muted and subtle that it’s only afterward that we see the brilliance in the fact that Parker has used soul music as his compass to write a book that captures all the frightening and startling possibilities inherent in the depths of a single human soul.

The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

2008-06-01T16:05:00.000-07:00

by Christopher Moore. (1999) Published by Perennial. 304 pages.

Up to page 81; reviewed 1 June 2008.

Tokyo gets Godzilla; the rural California community of Pine Cove gets The Sea Beast, a five-thousand-year-old reptilian monster with a liberal libido who has no qualms about mounting the first gas truck he happens upon, believing it to be a coy, silver-skinned temptress. This is my first exposure to Christopher Moore, and what impresses me is not just that he’s funny, but that the humor doesn’t ever get in the way of the storytelling. Moore’s sense of comedy is closely related to Gary Larson and his Far Side cartoon, which seemed to be always drawing on the natural world for comedy; as a storyteller, he’s a lot like Stephen King: his world is populated by misfit eccentrics who are just real enough to be interesting but contemptibly twisted enough that we don’t mind too much when they get killed off in the most bizarre ways. Thankfully, Moore doesn’t seem to want to make the story drag on endlessly the way Stephen King likes to.
I especially like the way that Moore weaves in themes of sadness and chemical dependence: the hero of the book, constable Theo Crowe, is hopelessly addicted to marijuana; the people of his community are all unknowingly suffering withdrawal symptoms because their psychiatrist has replaced their antidepressants with sugar pills; and The Sea Beast brings with him an arsenal of disinhibiting pheromones that appear capable of drawing people into the worst kind of Midsummer Night’s Nightmare. And all of it’s rounded off by Catfish the Bluesman, whose story about trying to give the blues to his friend Smiley is one of the best things I’ve read in ages.

28 June; p 81 to end.

For a while, I was put off by the nasty and offhanded way Christopher Moore had some of his characters get killed off in this book (especially Les the handyman). I tend not to like stories that come from the philosophical perspective that most people are just trash. Of course, a lot of people might argue that it’s going too far to suggest that someone like Moore, whose titles include Bloodsucking Fiends (A Love Story). The Stupidest Angel (A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror) and Island of the Sequined Love Nun is “writing from” any sort of philosophical perspective whatsoever.
I’d counter that the author’s philosophy plays a huge role in even the dumbest of books; it’s responsible for the aftertaste we take away from reading, for the fact that even a brutal and tragic tale can leave us feeling stronger and wiser whereas an overly sentimental story can leave us feeling not only sickened but downright misanthropic.
By the end of the book, I thought Moore’s philosophy is not so much that people are trash as that we’re all just animals, all subject to the stresses and carnage of the natural world, and any attempt to place ourselves as a species of as individuals above this level is a feat of embarrassing pomposity. This is why one of my favorite characters in the book was Skinner, the dog, who always thinks of his “master,” Gabe, as “The Food Guy.” I think Moore would agree with me that Skinner is probably the smartest character in the book, and that all the other, human characters, would benefit a lot from giving up their obsessions with status, money, fulfillment and fame. It would be much more sensible to be concerned primarily with the joy of a bowl of kibbles, a friendly scratch behind the ears and an afternoon nap.
So it’s with a firmly biological perspective, driven by pheromones and predatory urges that Christopher Moore turns out a plot that seems somehow naturally absurd, a world in which there’s nothing more logical than a pharmacist’s hidden lust for sex with dolphins and manatees or a session of sexual intercourse between a schizophrenic B-movie actress and a giant sea lizard aided by a weed whacker. The book never gets bogged down in circumspection, but as I reader I could tell that Moore really did take the time to do some homework about themes as diverse as psychopharmacology, reptilian life and the manufacture of crack cocaine. I even learned a few things, like what a “gill tree” is. I got to appreciate the way a really clever author can stack his own deck of cards so that at the end of the book it feels like events really are unfolding faster than you’re able to take them in.
There are some weak points; the group of cultists drawn to worship the giant sea monster in the nude never really seem to have a lot to do, and the community of Pine Cove, though given lots of hormonal incentive, never really erupts into the sort of orgy of misbehavior worthy of Moore’s talent. Still, this was a really fun book to read.

Isaac Newton

2008-05-26T20:21:00.000-07:00

by James Gleick. (2003) Published by Vintage. 191 pages. Reviewed 26 May 2008

I always feel a little cheated by James Gleick’s books, which seem heavy on biographical data and low on the science Gleick is supposedly so good at describing. Still, I really enjoyed this book, especially because it did such a good job at showing how Newton was frustrated early on with his attempts to come to grips with physical problems using written language as a tool. Gleick does a great job at showing what a muddle the state of thinking and especially the terminology in regards to physics was at the outset of Newton’s career, and there’s a sense of real excitement when Newton finally takes charge of the language in writing his Principia and selects the amazing handful of concepts (mass, force, velocity) that are still so useful to us now in understanding the world. Also, it was really enlightening to learn about the way Newton’s vast output of private writings was neglected after his death all the way into the 20th Century. This explains a lot about why there are so many questions that still linger about a man you’d expect to be better understood. I do wish that Gleick had lingered as long over Newton’s geometrical demonstrations as he did over the feud with Robert Hooke. Still, I think Gleick’s writing has improved incredibly since he wrote Chaos, and I learned a lot about Newton’s world and thinking process from this book.

The Hotel New Hampshire

2008-05-18T22:05:00.000-07:00

by John Irving. (1981). Reader’s Circle Edition, published by Ballantine Books (2001). 401 pages.

Up to p. 287; reviewed 18 May 2008.

This book lost its thrill for me at about the same point that I started to understand what John Irving was up to. It was right after the character of Susie the Bear enters the book. We’re told that Susie is a homely American girl who patrols the Gasthaus Freud in Vienna (soon to be renamed “Hotel New Hampshire”) dressed in a bear costume. She keeps the hotel safe by growling and charging at anyone who gets out of line, especially those who are taking too many liberties with the prostitutes who work there. Except for the protagonist of the book and his family, no one ever sees through bear disguise. It took me a few moments of trying to fit this into my head (How could she see in the bear costume? How would anyone be fooled for more than a couple of seconds into mistaking a static bear mask for the real face of a living bear? What possible recompense could be enough to get this poor woman to live her life in this bear costume?) before I realized that you weren’t supposed to believe it was true. You were supposed to be swept away with the wildness of it all. There’s no way that Susie the Bear would ever exist in the real world, so obviously the bear is supposed to symbolize something. But what?
I’ve never read John Irving before, but I did see the movie Life According to Garp and I really enjoyed it. Not only did I enjoy it, but I felt that I agreed with it, as though it were a particularly insightful manifesto. Garp seemed to me to defend the importance of living a well-rounded life. The character of Garp is a wrestler but also a thinker. He’s artistic but absolutely unpretentious. He’s proud of himself but he also recognizes his failings. Most importantly, he is sensitive to literature, and he understands that symbolism exists not just on the page but in the world we live in. That’s why he buys a house that’s just been smashed by an airplane—because the house is connected now with an unforgettable event.
I know from experience that it’s easy to be exhilarated by the idea that life is rich in meaning and significance, but it’s hard work to hold onto this exhilaration for long. Life is complex and doesn’t easily boil down to a set of key thematic elements the way a really good novel can. Coming to terms with this fact is an important step in the maturation of anyone who loves literature.
In Hotel New Hampshire Irving tells the comic and tragic story of the Berry family. The family is supposed to be comic because it’s filled up with a bunch of quirky characters, and tragic because members of the family keep dying from heart attacks or train crashes. What’s really tragic about the family is that their creator never gives them the chance to be alive. Each one has been dealt a limited number of traits: the older brother, Frank, is homosexual and pessimistic; Franny is rude and mouthy; Lilly is small; Egg is deaf and loves dressing up in costume. Every time anything happens, we have to go through the same predictable cycle of each one of them reacting to it in his or her own predictable way. If there’s something small, Lilly is excited about it. If someone is enthusiastic, Frank immediately douses the enthusiasm by saying, “It doesn’t matter.” And if there’s someone who needs telling off, whether this someone is a prude or a feminist or a radical, Franny will tell them off with lots of cuss words.
This pattern of family quirks is monotonous enough before the family moves to
Vienna to take over Gasthaus Freud and turn it into the Hotel New Hampshire. As it turns out, they must share the hotel with a group of radicals and also a group of prostitutes. And each one of these characters has a similarly limited range of quirky attributes: Jolanta is the tough prostitute, Babette is the exotic prostitute, and so on ad nauseum. There are about two whole chapters that are basically nothing but a constant riff on this set of a dozen pseudo-characters.
But this is at least mildly amusing compared to the snowballing set of symbols that keeps building up as the book goes on. There’s the recurring motif of bears, and then the dog Sorrow who’s put to sleep because he farts too much, but is then stuffed and mounted. The first time that the mounted body of sorrow causes trouble (it’s put into an “attack pose” and when the grandpa sees it he has a heart attack) it’s clever and enjoyable. The grandfather was killed by an attack of sorrow—neat. But after that Sorrow keeps cropping up at every juncture of the plot until by the end of Chapter 9 he’s brought up on practically every page in close conjunction with other supposedly meaningful leitmotivs: whipped cream as a symbol of maternal love, the phrase “keep walking past the open windows” as a slogan of gallows optimism.
By making these symbols so obvious, Irving is trying to be accessible and unpretentious. All of them are supposed to be like neon signposts pointing the reader toward the melancholy truth at the heart of the Berry family’s existence. Good symbolism alerts the readers mind and allows it time and space to engage the imagination. But the symbolism in “Hotel New Hampshire” is nothing more meaningful or edifying than a string of billboards, a plethora of false advertisement cluttering the landscape and obscuring all that’s really worth looking at.

p. 287 to end; reviewed 26 May 2008

At one point the narrator of the book, John Berry, stands outside the apartment of his erstwhile crush and onetime lover (a radical who goes only by the name Fehlgeburt, meaning “Miscarriage”) and determines by the smell that she must have recently committed suicide. The scene ends with the observation that the scent of Fehlgeburt’s corpse is already worse than the stench of the dog Sorrow’s farts ever were. It’s at this point that I realized that Hotel New Hampshire was not only a disappointment, but that it would go down with Ahab’s Wife and Liam Callanan’s Cloud Atlas as one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
There are really four short stories at the core this book: The story of the Bear named State o’ Maine, the story of Frannie’s Rape, the story of the New Year’s Eve party and the story of the attempted bombing of the Opera in Vienna. Coming near the beginning of the book, the first three stories come off pretty well, but after that point Irving desperately contorts himself to link the first part of the book to the story of the bombing. By the time the bombing plot reaches is climax, Irving seems to be spending much more time luxuriating in the cleverness of the ideas and symbols he’s so far set forward that the events of the bombing seem entirely secondary. The bombers’ plot to take the Berry Family hostage and use them to destroy the Opera seems not only purposeless, but so poorly planned that it would only be feasible due to the absolute inability of said family to do anything but mope, sleep around with prostitutes, and insult each other in supposedly clever ways.
Whereas the book starts out with an enjoyably anarchistic spirit, it ends in this weird paralysis; not only does Irving seem paralyzed as a writer, but his characters more or less seem paralyzed. The narrator John Berry doesn’t seem ever to even consider taking on any sort of job whatsoever, and his father Win Berry retires into apparent dotage and senility at a ripe old age of 45. It’s difficult to reconcile Win Berry’s massive lack of ambition with daughter Lilly Berry’s claim that her father is essentially another Great Gatsby.

Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps

2008-03-30T14:08:00.000-07:00

written and performed by Scott Turner Schoefield, performed at Out North. Reviewed 30 March 2008

I usually don’t like this sort of autobiographical one-person show, but Scott Schoefield is especially good at creating a rapport with the audience. The gimmick of letting the audience select the stories they want to hear from a selection of 127 possible anecdotes about being transgendered works because Schoefield uses it as a way of making the show less formal. The stories themselves come off as well rehearsed and well loved by their creator. The one I liked best was an angry piece directed at the performer’s own father, who’s threatened violence against his own daughter/son. While the performance is not at all haughty or pretentious, Schoefield’s aerial acrobatics, incorporation of Joseph Campbell references and use of ultrasound imaging to evoke the biological capriciousness of sexual determination all add the necessary polish to let the audience want to be guided through the performance wherever it will lead.

Under the Volcano

2008-03-29T12:28:00.000-07:00

by Malcolm Lowry, with Introduction by Stephen Spender. (1947). Printed by Plume Fiction in 1965. 376 pages.

Up to page 48. Reviewed 29 March

This book is the sort of fiction I find most enthralling, where I’m drawn as a reader very deep into the minds of reflective people right in the midst of their daily experiences. The story starts with an evening in the life one M Laruelle, a failed filmmaker living in Quanahuac, a small Mexican town situated between two volcanoes. During this particular evening, he recalls the Consul from Britain, Geoffrey Fermin. As Laruelle gradually drinks himself into a maudlin state of mind, he thinks back on his childhood friendship with Fermin, and summarizes what he knows of the man’s military career, hallmarked by a disturbing act of cruelty against German prisoners of war, which in his darkest moments Fermin admits to have carried out singlehandedly: the prisoners were incinerated in the ship’s boilers.
Clearly this opening section is intended to bracket the subject matter of the latter parts of the book, which will deal with the Consul’s time in Mexico, his broken marriage to a woman named Yvonne, and most importantly with the day of his death. I especially love the way that incidental sounds and occurrences keep penetrating Laruelle’s thinking, because to me as a writer and as a human being one of the most important conflicts in life is the ongoing attempt to find a balance between awareness of the present and reflection on the past: the invisible struggle to weed out distractions while not blinding oneself to the world; the quest for the right chain of mental associations and the endurance necessary to keep hoisting the chain up even as its branchings and tangles become evermore complex and thus weighty.
I very much liked the section that deals with Fermin’s letter to Yvonne, a letter that was never sent, filled with the sort of references to booze and cabbalism made by a man determined to use his own intelligence to destroy himself. I’m less charmed by the part of the second section where a nearby conversation keeps breaking into the scenery with Joycean associations just a little too forced to feel worthy of our attention. Still, I just love reading this book so far and hope the sensation will last.

p 48-121; reviewed 12 April 2008

My favorite part of this book so far has been the section told from the point of view of Geoffrey Fermin as he’s reunited with his wife Yvonne, because it brings together everything that’s horrifying about alcohol intoxication. What’s most horrifying about booze is how much fun it is; how it takes down our internal roadblocks, allows us to treat life as a grand joke, make novel and amusing observations without a moment’s introspection; how it unburdens us from the obligations of identity that are individually so tiny but collectively are capable of pegging us down for a lifetime. In reading the scenes where Geoffrey jokes with his wife, mocks her, struggles not to take another drink and then runs off to a tavern as soon as she gets in the bath, in reading these scenes the impression is of a splendid intellect shattered. Putting the pieces back together is a work of puzzlery for the reader, but because Lowry has made Fermin a full human being, the puzzlery is worthwhile. And Lowry clearly wants us to solve the puzzle, or at least assemble enough pieces that an image beings to form out of the nebula.
In the next chapter, we get a glimpse at Fermin’s rival for Yvonne’s affections: his own half-brother, Hugh, who seems to be plagued by everything that troubles Fermin, but to a lesser degree. A disenchanted journalist, tempted by the romance of throwing his lot in with those who battle against encroaching fascism, Hugh definitely has a trace of his brother’s cynical wit, especially after the first few drinks. But he seems to be protected from going too far with his boozing, protected not by prudence so much as an insulating sense of self-satisfaction. And this smugness, of course, makes him less attractive. It’s never said outright, but Lowry is telling us that Fermin’s alcoholism is a direct result of his brutal honesty and his drive for perfection.
There’s probably always the sense that getting wasted is an act of protest, but this sense must get more and more acute in periods that seem to reek to their core with injustice. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the rise of fascism in Europe or the ongoing American occupation of Iraq, there must be something liberating in the option of intoxication because when you’re drunk or stoned you at least have the option of becoming a conscious participant in the farcical nature of the plot that unfolds all around you.
As I grow older, intoxication becomes less and less attractive to me. Oftentimes it seems as histrionic and pointless an act of escape as jumping out a high window. But even if you don’t want to participate in such acts of self-destruction, it’s important to go to the scene of the tragedy, to examine the broken glass and traces of blood, both with a forensic eye intent upon discovering what horror might drive a person to such a point, but also with an artist’s eye to reassembling the mind and soul that’s been otherwise irrevocably sacrificed.

pp. 121-230; Reviewed 19 April 2007

It’s interesting to watch people attempt to be at leisure. You’d think that being at leisure would be the easiest thing in the world, but in order to take a holiday you first have to unhook yourself from all the reins and surplices that link you to the driving forces of conflict and ambition. So it is with The Consul, Geoffrey Fermin, and his company as they set off on a day trip to the town of Tomalín in order to see a “bullthrowing” competition. (I’m still not exactly sure what bullthrowing is—it seems to be some lesser variant of bullfighting, which itself is less an escape from struggle than an amplification.)
On the way, the group visits an amusement fair. To the addled brain of the Consul, the fair is less an amusement than a gauntlet of purgatorial tortures: suspended upside down on the roller coaster ride, he feels abandoned by the world and realizes he’s lost himself so much to drink that he’d actually prefer sudden violent death to the endless spiral of inebriation; running in search of a drink, he sees his wife and brother, Hugh, enjoying themselves at a shooting gallery and seems to come away defeated in a competition for being carefree. For months Fermin has pleaded with God for another chance at his marriage to Yvonne. Now Yvonne has returned, and asks only to share a little happiness with Fermin. But the only road to happiness Fermin knows passes through the mouth of a bottle of tequila.
You can’t completely love Fermin, but you can’t help empathizing with the dilemma he’s in. As the day wears on and he keeps sneaking away for a drink, he knows that he’s heading for catastrophe. His wife has come back to him in good faith, but instead of an experience of healing, Fermin seems destined to revisit and repeat the schism that separated them the first time around; only this time he won’t have the excuse of ignorance.
On the other side of the coin we have a long section of the book devoted to the reminiscences of Hugh about his career at sea. As a young man, Hugh played guitar and wrote a handful of silly songs. He pitched his own story to several newspaper editors: he would sign aboard a merchant marine ship and take along his guitar and his prodigious intelligence and he would come back a seasoned poet in the mold of Conrad or Melville. On board the boat, he seems to be tormented by how easy the life is compared to the romanticized version of raw toil he’d had in his head. He returns to London disillusioned and prepared to be annoyed at the instant celebrity that awaits him. Imagine his disappointment to find that in his absence his story has been all but forgotten by the press in his absence.
The nuance of the book lies in the fact that Hugh and Geoffrey find themselves in such a similar predicament: they’re quite fortunate men who nevertheless cannot be happy. But what is a comic predicament for Hugh is a tragic one for Geoffrey the Consul. It seems that Hugh will always be bailed out of his misfortunes, will always have the leisure to look back and pity himself for the fact that he deserved to be a much better man than he became. He will love himself, but the world will never leave him alone. The Consul on the other hand has gone a ways further along the road to ruin, cannot even afford himself the luxury of self-pity because he can no longer recognize who he truly is. Hugh can still play at the shooting gallery while Geoffrey is suspended on a roller coaster whose operator has fallen asleep.

p. 230 to end; reviewed 4 May 2008

I rushed myself to finish reading this book over the weekend, and that may have been a mistake. While the tenth and eleventh chapters are easy to follow, the last chapter reaches a chaotic climax that demands a great deal of time and attention if you want to keep tabs of all that’s going on. The idea is that Geoffrey, after cutting himself off from his wife and half-brother, wanders back to the Farolito, a tavern and brothel which, in his own private reckoning, represents the profoundest personal ruin imaginable. By this point he has long since switched from drinking beer and tequila to mescal, a concoction which gives him visions of being swift witted and entertaining but in truth only makes him uncontrollably cruel to those who seek to love him.
At the Farolito Geoffrey does, indeed, meet his ugly demise at the hands of the same band of thugs that earlier that day attacked an Indian by the roadside whom Geoffrey refused to help. There’s something satisfactory in the way that Geoffrey’s drunken mind equates the thugs with the general thuggishness of all those who would oppress the meek and vulnerable. And there’s a lot of poetic beauty in Geoffrey’s final visions of the world collapsing around him as he dies. But the novel fails for me because we never really get the sense of the bridge between the promising youth Geoffrey once was and the drunken wreck he is now. There’s all the drama of Greek tragedy, but without having a sense of inevitability, the tragedy seems histrionic instead.

Gentlemen of the Road

2008-03-15T11:45:00.000-07:00

by Michael Chabon. (2007) Published by Del Rey. 204 pages.

Up to page 107. Reviewed 15 March 2008

Reading Michael Chabon’s account of an uprising in the Eastern European kingdom of Khazaria is like going back to the greatest games of pretend I used to play with my friends in childhood. I don’t know if it’s true of everyone, but my friend Duncan and I used to be shameless borrowers of themes and ideas, taking stories from books, tv and comics and reenacting them with action figures or in drawings or with toy soldiers or even just making up stories. Play was a means of bridging gaps through time and space and trying to explore events real and fictional that we were curious about.
The kingdom of Khazaria was an actual place, a Jewish kingdom located in the middle of Eastern Europe. I first learned of it reading Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume 3, (I highly recommend Gonick's whole series) and it fascinated me because it went so much against the stereotype of European Jews as a permanently displaced people. Michael Chabon is also interested in this aspect of the story and in his book he reminds us of the fact that the ideas of Judaism traveled far and wide during the Dark Ages; the main characters are Zelikman, a Jewish physician from the Frankish kingdoms, and Amram, an Abyssinian Jew on an apparently hopeless quest to find his lost daughter.
What’s fun about this novel? The much-celebrated use of lush vocabulary (fleam, mahout, affined); the sense of taking a visit to an intersection of the great Eastern cultures that actually thrived during the so called “Dark” Ages, which were a time of darkness and squalor mostly from the perspective of Western Europe; the chance to see Chabon flirt with thoughts of today’s cultural wars in the Middle East by drawing a bloody conflict for the fate of Khazaria where the labels of race and creed are all familiar but the affiliations are drastically different; and the chance to see how Chabon, who’s very good at “serious” fiction, takes on a setting that’s Tolkeinesque.
It would be more fun if the characters were a bit richer. Zelikman and Amram are basically nice guys, each with their own troubles and idiosyncrasies, but even halfway through the book I’m sure that neither of them will draw me in enough to inspire the sort of love-hate relationship I had with Grady from The Wonder Boys.

Page 107 to end; reviewed March 22, 2008

107 to end.

At the end of this book Chabon writes a short afterword in which he touches on what should already be blindingly obvious to everybody who’s familiar with his other work: that Gentlemen of the Road is very different from other things he’s written. Any time an author has to go to this much length to explain a supposedly bold artistic choice, you have to wonder if the motive is to vent all the lingering insecurity. In his afterword, Chabon tells us that we might be surprised that he’s breaking the rules; he usually writes New Yorker type fiction about contemporary conflicts and anxieties, and now he’s writing an adventure story. Having loved Wonder Boys, I know that I started reading this book with a sense of excitement. It seems natural that a writer like Chabon should try to expand his horizons, should take the skills he gained in describing more familiar territory and see how they transfer to settings more remote and exotic.
But when a writer enters a new genre, he or she should have something to contribute. Chabon seems to assume that because he’s writing about swordfights and troop movements, he no longer has to live up to the standards set in his previous books. Gentlemen of the Road borrows heavily from the clichés of fantasy writing and historical fiction, and does a major disservice to both genres by never partaking in the sort of overindulgence of the imagination that both genres allow. By taking Khazaria as his subject, Chabon has chosen a distinctive world to set his story in; one hopes he could make it into his own Hogwarts, his own Middle Earth, his own Narnia. But Khazaria ends up being just a piece of stock historical scenery, as though Chabon is saying, “Did you see the movie Gladiator? Just imagine the whole thing transposed a little to the east and you’ve got it.”
By the end of this book the narrative keeps making big jumps in time, as though he’s eager to get away from the whole situation. The sentences get long and muddled. Chabon seems to want to use elephants as a symbol for something, but it’s never clear what. The first chapters of this book were well written and fun to read, but by the end I was just thinking that if Chabon didn’t have anything fresh to offer with this book, at least he had the courtesy to make it short.

I Saw Esau, the Schoolchild’s Pocket Book

2008-03-09T15:26:00.000-07:00

edited by Iona & Peter Opie, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. (1992) Published by Candlewick Press. 160 pages.

There’s nothing in this book of taunts, chants and schoolyard riddles that will make you pause very long and ponder the meaning of life, Nor do these poems have the sometimes fantastical scope that you’ll get from a more “legitimate” book of nursery rhymes. But this book is a lot of fun because the editors have no compunction about filling their book with the silliness and capriciousness of true childhood. And Maurice Sendak’s illustrations give you a sense that spirit of this book, if not some of the rhymes themselves, reaches back beyond all the finery of the renaissance to the gritty and grubby world of the dark ages.

Tishomingo Blues

2008-03-09T15:25:00.000-07:00

by Elmore Leonard. (2002) Published by William Morrow. 308 pages.

Compared to Out of Sight, this book is a little bit lackluster and even phony. The whole idea of mixing up a southern mob thriller with a civil war reenactment seems too pat, a way to fill up a few paragraphs and chapters with trivia about archaic weaponry and bivouac sleeping arrangements. Nowhere is this more true than in the interminable passages where policeman John Rau drones on interminably about how best to prepare salt pork.
Still, in the last few chapters, when the inevitable stand off finally comes to pass, it becomes apparent that Elmore Leonard really is making some points here, especially about the way men compare themselves to one another. As is often the case, he creates a hierarchy based on the concept of “cool,” and the consequence of being uncool is typically death. Coolness is more than simply an ability to be unfazed by violence. The gangster Robert Taylor is able to outcool his boss Caesar Germano simply because Taylor forms a rapport with Germano’s henchmen, jokes with them, treats them with respect, and uses imagination in finding them new assignments and missions. That’s another aspect of “cool” that’s at play here, the concept of something being “cool” in the sense of fascinating. Robert is a dangerous character, but he also understands that behind all the darkness and danger of the world he’s chosen, there’s still the cops-and-robber appeal to the boyish mind. Interestingly, Robert develops a man-crush on the high-diver Dennis Lenahan, who doesn’t have any sort of criminal past but has chosen in his own way to structure his life around facing death.
Tishomingo Blues was an interesting diversion, but I came away feeling my time would have been better spent elsewhere.

Tales from Firozsha Baag

2008-03-02T19:07:00.001-08:00

by Rohinton Mistry (first prineted 1987. This edition first published 2002) Published by Penguin Books. 250 pages. Reviewed 1 March 2008

Rohinton Mistry is preoccupied with suffering. At the end of this book—a collection of linked short stories that develop a novel’s momentum and scope over time—the character Kersi Boyce grows frustrated with his lack of knowledge when it comes to the trees of Canada, where he has made his new home. He vows to purchase a guide to trees so that next autumn when the leaves fall he will be able to recognize than just maple leaves.
In a similar way, by reading the stories of the dwellers of Firozsha Baag (an apartment complex housing members of Bombay’s Parsi community) we get a glimpse of what a field guide to suffering might be like. We see the controlled, redemptive suffering of Daulat Mirza as she bids farewell to her much loved husband; we see the tortured, adolescent sufferings of Jehangir Bulsara as we strives to understand his own sexuality and develop his abundant intellect in the most adverse of conditions; we see the sufferings that arise from pride and selfishness as the Bomans seek to evict the paying guests they’ve taken into their homes; we see the righteous suffering Percy Boyce who chooses to champion the interests of India’s indigent poor; and we see the suffering of the uprooted Kersi, who has to look back on all his memories of Bombay and try to find some sense in it.
I cannot recommend this book enough. The humor is wicked, the subject matter is gutsy, the thoughts are intricate and the characters engaging. In the course of these stories we see Mistry systematically gathering together all the ingredients that will eventually become central to his later novels Fine Balance and Family Matters.

Big Rock Candy Mountain

2007-12-29T17:53:00.000-08:00

by Wallace Stegner, 1943. 563 pages. Published by Penguin.

Up to page 83; reviewed 29 December

I brought this book with me to a Thanksgiving party when I first started reading it. My friend Cody Jane asked me what it was about. I read her the first line of the back-cover blurb: “Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair.” Ah, the sweet escape that fiction affords us all!
The novel starts out as Elsa, a young and intelligent woman, travels by train to a frontier town in North Dakota. It’s about the turn of the century. Elsa has left her home out of a sense of betrayal and disgust after her widower father married her best friend. The image that we get of the American frontier is free of lyrical hyperbole. Elsa feels out of place here. There’s nothing to read, there are few people her age to speak with, and she’s aware that there are some dark goings on at the periphery of her attention, illegal gambling and liquor consumption, a world so foreign to her sheltered sensibilities that she basically chooses to ignore it until Bo Mason, who runs the local saloon (which is disguised as a pool hall) begins to fall in love with her.
The section of the story that tells about Bo Mason’s early life is one of my favorite parts of the book so far, because it gives an idea of the sort of raw intelligence that the developing American West attracted but did not necessarily nurture. As a child, Bo is a prodigious reader, but that doesn’t endear him to his scowling schoolteacher, nor to his father, a burned out Civil War veteran living off a pension. After running away from home, Bo drifts through a variety of jobs, often coming into conflict with the pettiness of his foremen. I like Bo because he’s quick to protest injustice, but usually only when he’s the victim of it—much more believable than old Tom Joad with his too-sweeping vow to serve the underdog, no matter how, no matter where.
Once Bo’s character is established, we see him put to the test as he becomes Elsa’s suitor. Stegner’s account of their relationship is complex and sophisticated. Elsa appeals to Bo largely because she’s someone who sees through his rough exterior and recognizes all his greatness: his ability to learn quickly, his overriding competitive drive, and the ability he has to open up new frontiers for her in life. But Elsa’s family puts up a strong resistance, and confronted with the unfairness of their rejection, Bo’s mood grows dark and brooding, and he takes out his anger in a violent outburst against a vagrant who tries to cheat him. Elsa sees the outburst and it sours her on him. Eventually they do find their way back into each others arms, and on the day they finalize their plans for marriage a tremendous ice storm hits and it’s Bo that ventures out into the blinding snow in order to rescue Elsa’s uncle, Karl, partly out of concern for him, but also in order to protect Elsa from the rumors that are bound to spring up if the young, still unmarried couple spends a night alone together in a fire-lit cabin.
When we next catch up with Elsa, more than seven years have passed. She’s tending a farm household, doing all her chores with one good arm because the other’s been wounded. The wounded arm seems to be a symbol for the hardships of the early years of Elsa’s marriage—confounding, but not debilitating, and not enough to shake her youthful inclination to enjoying life.
Although in general Stegner doesn’t romanticize the frontier life, he wisely includes the romanticism innate in the experience of young people venturing into new realms of experience. Although we sense that Elsa’s been programmed by her stern Norwegian upbringing to be hard on herself and easily victimized, we also have the feeling that she’s just a little too smart to fall completely into the traps of her upbringing. Elsa has traveled West without any big dreams other than simply finding a little bit of contentment with her life; but the man she falls in love with is the personification of impetuous youthful ambition.
Back cover blurb notwithstanding, this has not yet proved to be a depressing book. We have certainly been warned that bad times are ahead for Elsa and Bo, but the concise and well-told romance story at the outset of the book makes us certain that they have something worth pursuing and fighting for.

23 February 2008, p 83 to end

I can pinpoint the moment that I fell in love with this book. It was in a scene in the third section of the book, where the increasingly violent Bo has abandoned Elsa and their two boys, Chet and Bruce, after a fit of abusive rage. Now Chet and Bruce are living in a large and shabby boarding house. The scene starts with Chet in his high bunk, inspecting the treacherous network of roof beams that span the gulf between the boys’ and girls’ sleeping areas. He ponders, wipes some dust from the top of the beam, and then climbs up onto the beam and begins to walk across. He pretends he’s piloting an airplane. He imagines that the fate of the world depends on his making a safe landing.
And when he reaches the girls’ bunks, he encounters a set of blue eyes that are sharp and alive as a rabbit’s. The eyes belong to Helen Murphy, a character so fascinating and well drawn out that I was convinced Stegner planned to use her as an important figure throughout the book. Not so. Helen teases Chet into a game of “I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours,” the kids get caught, and Chet’s mother is called to the carpet by the severe hag of a schoolmarm, Mrs. Mangin.
The scene where Chet crossed the roof beam made me fall in love with Stegner’s writing; the scene where Elsa confronts Mrs. Mangin made me impressed by the character of Elsa, because she holds her ground and refuses to accept the idea that a child should be made to feel ashamed for simply engaging in childish behavior. From this point onward, it’s clear that Elsa’s principal characteristic is her resolve. She refuses to give up her vision of what’s right and wrong: she believes her children deserve a home, that they be protected from abuse and that they be given every opportunity to thrive. At the same time, she believes her husband, Bo, is a man worthy of her love and devotion. And her transition from immaturity to adulthood comes when she realizes that these twin ideals can never be realized together, but chooses to commit herself to them anyway. She resigns herself to the flaws of the world she lives in, and through her resignation she becomes the strongest character in the book.
In the meantime, Bo refuses to resign himself to anything. He’s always dreaming about some breakthrough, a scheme that will not only make him rich but, most importantly, prove that the rest of humanity is made up of fools. For this reason, he’s always drawn to schemes that are ill advised and usually illicit. A lot of the action of the book stems from this fact. Bo’s bootlegging activities, the main source of his income, result in a plethora of car chases, crashes and police raids that make the book a surprising page-turner.
But the real fuel of the book is in the way the characters develop. Elsa becomes more and more silent and stoical, standing by her man in even his most maddeningly foolish schemes, but also lending her children a foundation of sanity they’ll remain grateful for their whole lives long. Chet develops into a charismatic high school hero, winning everyone’s approval but unable to hold himself together when faced with the slightest of failures. And Bruce develops a into a reader and deep thinker. In the last sections of the book his perspective draws on a variety of metaphoric comparisons and analyses ranging from Greek Tragedy to Sigmund Freud. This is especially interesting because Bruce represents the culmination of the Mason family’s aspirations, and also represents an encapsulation of the phenomenon of Wallace Stegner’s subject matter; this is a book written for an educated audience, but it touches only tangentially on the concerns of educated elites. The real root of the book is in the struggle of a family that was never offered privilege but always stayed focused on the promise of a sweet deal, a big break, an assortment of dreams whose value lay in the fact that they were all too good to be true.
While the book shifts from the perspective of one character to another, there’s always a sense that the characters own internal development is tightly lashed to the fortunes of the family as a whole. The only exception comes in the last days of Bo Mason, who seems only concerned with his own vain pursuits. An aging widower now, heavily in debt, abandoned by his fair-weather friends, estranged from his son and unable to let go of his old dreams. In fact, by this time Bo can’t even be seen as a dreamer; what he’s holding onto is the tarnished identity of a misbehaving youth, impertinent and cocksure even as a part of it knows that hope is lost. It’s fascinating to see the way Bo’s psyche begins to percolate with self-hatred. It would be easy to damn this character were his stubborn and juvenile ambitions not so hopelessly entangled with so many desires and comforts crucial to the human development of any family, and were his quest for success not so bejeweled with sweet glimpses of hard-won freedom.

Christmas cartoon, 2007

2007-12-23T23:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a copy of my annual Christmas cartoon!

The Anchorage International Film Festival 2007

2007-12-12T15:00:00.000-08:00

Reviewed 12 December 2007

Last weekend I watched eight films at two venues in the Anchorage International Film Festival. Overall, it was a good experience. I toyed with the idea of reviewing all the films I saw, but instead decided just to focus on the three I liked best. The other films I saw (and enjoyed) were Unraveling the Wind, Nailed, Your Beautiful Cul-de-Sac Home, Body/Antibody, and Donovan Slacks.

REVIEW #1 – PORTRAIT OF A LEGEND: CLIFF HUDSON

This is a documentary about an Alaskan bush pilot who lived most of his life in Talkeetna and holds the records for the most airplane landings on Mt Denali, the highest peak in North America. In its opening moments, the film’s narrator describes Hudson as a quiet, unsung hero. So it seems fitting that through much of the film, Hudson himself seems upstaged by the incredible rural Alaska scenery and by the assembly of typically eccentric Alaska characters who’ve come together to discuss the details of this man’s life.
I must disclose that this movie was made by a friend of mine, Tom Stagg. And I also must say that I envy him the experience of making the movie, of traveling around the area around Talkeetna junction, of traveling the aerial mail route Hudson passed on to his son, and sitting in the living rooms and kitchens of Alaska old-timers, soliciting their stories and reflections.
There’s a strong undercurrent in the movie about the way Alaska’s quirks are sold to tourists. We come out with an impression that Hudson is a man who sold his services as a pilot, but never sold himself, and we get a glimpse of a certain Southcentral Alaska way of life that was once authentic and is now in the process of being turned into a product of great value to the tourist industry.

REVIEW #2 – FAT STUPID RABBIT

In today’s culture of Second Life and Reality TV, it’s useful to remember that Shakespeare himself posed the metaphor of life as a stage. As with all Shakespeare’s metaphors, this one maintains its potency in spite of massive and flagrant misuse, abuse and overuse. This Russian romantic comedy is proof.
The hero, Arcady, is an aging Russian actor stuck in a rut. He’s performed 300 times as a rabbit in an inane children’s play about woodland animals in which. Lately, he’s been drawing ridicule for breaking into Shakespearean soliloquies in the middle of performances.
To me, this film captured more of the true spirit of Shakespeare than many of the direct adaptations of Shakespearean work that have come out on the screen in my lifetime. Arcady is cast as a King Lear figure, and his character is built up with all the highlights and shadows of the original Lear. The symbolism is obvious but not overdone. The rabbit costume Arcady wears onstage is ridiculous, but as the plot goes on we have a stepwise chain of associations reminding us of the associations of the rabbit with Easter, childhood, springtime and renewal and the Christ story, but because of the initial silliness these parallels never outweigh the story itself. There are obvious parallels and allegories: the theater company is taken over by a merchant who wants use it as a vehicle to promote sausage sales; the lecherous producer tries to seduce the beautiful young girl Arcady is in love with. It’s a story about the way art is corrupted by money and cronyism, and the way that idealism in general is corrupted by cynical calculations. But the story is so full of magnificent specifics and authentic bits of comedy stolen from everyday life that it can’t possibly be reduced to mere symbolism.

REVIEW #3 – CTHULHU

Illustrators have long since discovered the graphic possibilities in Lovecraft’s stories of monsters and monstrous deities intent of preying on the world. There are lots of wonderful images of Cthulhu, the octopus headed giant asleep in his palace beneath the sea, or Azathoth and Shoggoths, Lloigers and the Old Ones. Someday soon there will be some large budget movie that attempts to capture the whole vision in lavish computer generated animation. Sadly, it’s only a matter of time.
I sensed that this movie was something better than that when I saw how the director used images of the ocean, casting it as a vast but none-to-comforting alternative to the complicated and frustrating world on the land. Most importantly there’s the conflict of Russ, a college professor whose open homosexuality has brought him into conflict with his family’s constricting religious beliefs.
This conflict itself is a worthy basis for a wholly “serious” film, and would benefit from all the clichés that would place it firmly in the Drama section of your local Video Bargainville. But inevitably there would be a lot that’s lost.
Along with being a good writer of scary fiction, HP Lovecraft was able to root out and exploit the sensation of feeling like a stranger in your own flesh in a way no other writer could, not even Edgar Allen Poe. The creative team of Dan Gildark and Grant Cogswell are absolutely right in approaching Lovecraft’s work from this angle, of using Lovecraft’s storytelling with all it’s grim suggestiveness and slow emergence of unearthly details to explore the way the judgments of modern conservatism can suffocate the sense of individuality in anyone who is different.
Images of the ocean are used brilliantly in this film. As the inevitable apocalypse draws near, two mysterious barges dominate the seascape. The plot is driven forward by a white-bearded old sailor who admits to going out on the sea for five days tripping on acid when he netted a creature that was “like a gigantic baby.” Russ’s early memories of his first romance, simultaneously sublime and profane, play out on the planks and struts of an old pier. And a scene of predatory seduction is carried out in front of an aquarium tank where two massive polar bears swim and gobble fish.
With all its quiet, slow moving scenes this movie is exactly the sort of guilty pleasure I love best in movies. Its quality is likely to go unrecognized for some time by people who need everything to fit into their perfect pigeonholes. Don’t believe such critics. If you’re looking for inspiration and new ways to make storytelling fresh, this is a great place to go.

The Lotus Caves

2007-11-24T19:49:00.000-08:00

by John Christopher. (1968) Published by Collier Books. 215 pages.

Reviewed 24 November 2007

A little ways into “Lotus Caves” the first big mistake comes up: the main character, a child named Marty, has a friend over and they listen to some music—on tape. In this science fiction story set in a colony on the moon in the year 2068, the presence of audiotape is an obvious, if forgivable, flaw. It’s also a flaw that betrays a lot about the man who made it.
The lunar colony of “Lotus Caves” is characterized by scarcity. All resources must be shepherded, messes and waste are forbidden. Christopher isn’t interested in extolling the state of tomorrow’s technology, but in underlining its disappointments; in the schools of the lunar colony (informally called “The Bubble”) the students are able to enter into holographic reconstructions of past eras—the Roman Empire, for instance—but the technology to simulate tastes and smells has been forbidden, for fear that it will make children distressed over all they miss out on by not being raised on the world.
I first got to know John Christopher in elementary school, where I read his “White Mountains” trilogy and was captivated by it. John Christopher is a children’s writer who is quite concerned about the state of childhood in the modern world. In “White Mountains” we have a world colonized by aliens who implant hardware into the brains of adults in order to make it impossible to rebel or even think disobedient thoughts. In “Lotus Caves” it’s all about a sort of squalor of the senses and the soul, a legislated dispiritedness and pessimism. I imagine that the soul stifling culture of the Bubble is based on the rationing of goods in England after the Second World War.
What’s really interesting to me is the nature of the main characters in this book. Marty and his friend Steve seem to be remarkably thoughtful children. Even though the whole plot is driven by their disobedience (they take a lunar crawler out beyond the bounds of radio transmission) they don’t seem at all like “problem children.” There’s no roughhousing or mouthing off or restlessness. But the characters are not miniature adults. This is the sort of child that I was growing up . . . or rather, I had the distinct potential to be this sort of child. I engaged in long thoughtful spells and was quite curious about books, even though my learning difficulty made it difficult to read them. I think during the 1980s American culture was just starting to move away from encouraging these sorts of character traits in children, maybe because thoughtful children are less likely to push their parents to buy things; I don’t know. What I do know is that John Christopher’s vision of childhood is something important that we shouldn’t lose track of.
The storyline of “The Lotus Caves” shouldn’t be too unfamiliar to anyone who watched the old Star Trek series. While exploring the moon, the two children stumble across a cave inhabited by an advanced life form, a massive plant that fills the whole cave in the form of mushrooms, vines, trees that produce organ music, grassy meadows and luminescent moss. Because the organism doesn’t want the human colonists to find out about its existence, it insists on keeping the children locked up inside its domain. If offers to keep them entertained and feeds them fruit that levels their personality and quells their desire for escape. In order to succeed, the characters have to find a way to overcome their complacency and build their fighting spirit. In the end, their escape from the caves is pretty easy. The plant doesn’t put up much of a fight; indeed, it’s much easier for the boys to liberate themselves from the forbidden caves than it was for them to get away from their human settlement on the other side of the moon.
The friendship between Steve and Marty is the weakest part of the book. We're told that Steve is the domineering one, and that Marty has to “gain ascendancy” over him in order to pull off the escape from the caves. But Steve doesn’t seem to have much personality of his own, and there’s definitely a coda in their relationship missing from the end of the book.
But what’s good about this book is that it does such a great job at raising the frightening specter of a lifeless, overly controlled childhood, a childhood where all sense of joy and abandonment has been legislated away. There are lots of kids who are in no danger of this, but for some kids the biggest danger is to shy away into a life of obedient introversion. You can’t just deny that kind of personality; there are those of us that are contemplative by nature, who spend a lot of their lives in our heads. But there’s a crisis point where an introspective person has to decide whether or not to succumb fully to the undertow of isolation, or to spend a lifetime fighting the current and making efforts to get out and participate in life. This crisis is very real to those of us who face it; what’s rare about Christopher’s work is how well he brings it to life.

Underworld

2007-11-22T12:36:00.000-08:00

by Don DeLillo (1997) Published by Scribner. 827 pages.

Up to page 345; Reviewed 22 November 2007

There are times in life, events and environments, that make us listen better than we usually would. We listen well in crises because we have to, because that’s the primal reason for our being able to perceive the universe at all, so as to avoid calamity and find our way back to safety.
We listen well when our senses are enticed by ceremony, when our minds are cued by the excesses of pageantry to cue in because the event about to occur is something everyone cares about, something that people will ask us about later, something that we’re expected to look back to as a defining moment in our existence.
And we listen when we’re relaxed, when we let our guard down. When you meet someone you feel comfortable with, when there’s a break in the demands of the working day, when you’ve just sat down in a restaurant booth after a hectic bike ride in the snow, when all the survival mechanisms go on standby and nobody’s watching the clock to evaluate your productivity—in these moments we start listening because now we have an opportunity to be human, to open our senses like a Canadian border checkpoint and just let ideas and impressions roll on through.
At the start of “Underworld,” DeLillo demonstrates his ability to exploit the first two enhancements of listening. There’s a chase scene; we watch a group of Brooklyn boys jump a turnstile to get into a baseball game, watch them running from the guards, get all the messiness and thrill of petty crime; and then the focus moves to the baseball game itself, a match between the Giants and Dodgers in October 1951, a match which DeLillo frames as an epic event, history in the making, Homeric light dribbled over every little detail. And the effort doesn’t seem wasted or overblown because in hindsight all the casual details of an afternoon at the stadium in the early 1950s seem so different, pure, uncomplicated. As a reader I had no doubt that there was a real drama at the core of all DeLillo’s fine prose, and looking at it now I realize that the drama lies in the knowledge of how quickly things change in our world, how quickly our comforting customs and pastimes vanish, or transform themselves into shallow artificialities.
After showing he’s capable of crisis and pageant, DeLillo shifts into the mode he’s most comfortable with: a subdued, strolling casualness where profound truths are likely to crop up out of nowhere.
Years ago I read one of DeLillo’s early novels (maybe his first?): “Great Jones Street.” I was unimpressed by most of it. It was a hard-to-swallow story of a rock star obsessed with the sort of ideas that only a graduate student in literature or linguistics to devote much time to, and that no one’s likely to get especially worked up about. But what I admired about the book was its casual tone, totally unhurried. It’s the tone people use in their minds when they have the time to really stop and think things through, let the fabric of our thoughts uncrumple so we begin to notice the details we spend so much of our lives filtering out.
In “Underworld” DeLillo achieves a sort of Taoist mastery of this shuffling, hands-in-pockets literature. None of the characters seems to be drifting exactly, but neither are they the masters of their own destiny. None of them really has the infinite stretch of contemplative time enjoyed by the rock star in “Great Jones Street,” but we get to see them in those brief moments when the mind is free to stretch itself out; a nun prepares to cleanse her hands at the end of the day; a retired schoolteacher gives a haircut to a dying friend; an aging mother and her middle-aged son stay up late at night watching television together.
This isn’t a novel where nothing happens, but even in those moments where a “big event” occurs (an extramarital affair, let’s say; or watching a videotape of a serial killer’s latest murder) you get the feeling that the characters are in an abstracted state, their souls just a millimeter or two away from meshing with the big cogwheel of reality.
In the next section of this review I’ll talk more about the actual storyline and characters of this book, but I do want to point out how well DeLillo depicts his oldest characters such as Marvin Lundy, the widowed baseball memorabilist; Albert Bronzini, onetime schoolteacher and chess aficionado; and Sister Edgar, the nun who has visions of a Hieronymus Bosch world just beneath our own. DeLillo neither fawns over these characters, nor does he relegate them to the sidelines of the story.

2 December 2007; pp 345-460

I promised a plot synopsis in the last entry, but the plot is so sprawling that it would be a waste of effort. It’s not just that the plot is sprawling, it’s that there seems to be an underlying logic to the plot. The narrative jumps from character to character, and tends to work its way backward in time from the early 1990s toward the 1950s of the prologue. Every once in a while, we are reminded that the plot isn’t nearly as disjointed as we think. Apparently peripheral characters are actually linked closely to the more central characters, but the link happened long ago. But the more important links between characters are the thematic ones, the way each of their preoccupations and traits serve to shed light on the same issue, even when they physically inhabit remote spheres of existence.
One central theme of the book is waste. The character Nick Shay works as a waste analyst. He studies the way garbage is managed and stored by private individuals, city governments, large corporations, and by the military. As the novel’s narrative drifts gently backward in time, the theme of waste becomes more and more poignant. What became of old love affairs, of the things once considered to be precious? Why do some parts of the past become increasingly precious, while others are classified as simple junk?
Nick is preoccupied with his father, Jimmy, who disappeared when Nick was still a child. Nick is convinced that Jimmy, a small-time numbers runner and fence, was murdered by the Mafia. No one else takes this theory seriously. Nick himself recognizes it as a little bit crazy; he has no evidence to support his theory other than a series of numerological cabbalisms based on the number thirteen. Nick’s mother and brother, Matt, are both convinced that Jimmy merely walked out on his family because he was too weak and immature to handle being a father.
To label Jimmy the victim of a mob killing is to make him somehow precious. To label him a deadbeat father is to make him junk.
This is a template for other conspiracy theories that crop up in the novel. Nick’s friend and colleague Big Sims tries to convince him that there’s a dark connection between the waste industry and the Mafia. Matt Shay’s friend and colleague, Eric Deming, tries to haunt him with rumors of secret government experiments in the Southwest where soldiers and civilians were unknowingly exposed to radioactive fallout.
In his book “U and I,” author Nicholson Baker described that women have mastered the craft of the novel; when men produce significant works of fiction, they’re often odd, inward looking books focused on private obsessions. I could cite many of my own examples: Moby Dick, Gravity’s Rainbow, Beautiful Losers, The Magus, and Infinite Jest. In all of these books, the truth for some hidden connection dominates the plot, perhaps at the expense of a serious exploration of humanity. From Ishmael’s long maunderings on the whale’s sublime dimensions to Tyrone Slothrop’s fascination with the international cartels of the early 20th Century, there is always a mental quest that seems half lurid and silly, and half serious search for mystic revelation.
What makes all these books worthwhile is the way that they try to get underneath the surface, try to discover the motive behind the compulsive digging in the dirt.
In “Underworld,” the character Klara Sax seems to stand in contrast to many of the male characters. As an artist, she’s also fascinated with obscure connections, but whereas other characters share an unhealthy conviction that they’re uncovering a real conspiracy outside themselves, Klara Sax appears satisfied that what she’s discovering a network of associations and connections that says something about herself. Whereas others try to hide their revelations about the world, Klara seeks to share her vision with others out of conviction that many share her sense that there’s more to life than meets the eye, that there’s something in the past worth salvaging through continual re-exploration. Of all the characters, Klara seems the only one whose focus flows in the opposite direction to the narrative, moving toward the future.

11 February 2008; p 460 to end.

After finishing this book, I went out to a chamber music concert at Alaska Pacific University. I noticed a similarity that was difficult to ignore but also difficult to put my finger on. The experience of watching the cellist, violinist and pianist walk out onstage in single file, the applause of the audience, neither spontaneous nor routine, the formality of dress both onstage and offstage, the way that the performers went straight to work without giving any verbal introduction, plunged right into the sea of notes and musical phrases—there was a sense of formal polish that comes when things that are sublime enter into a realm normally occupied by the mundane. That’s the sense that DeLillo evoked throughout his book, the sense that he’s a writer who feels most confident dealing with those things in life that are most ordinary and casual, but that he’s well aware that in this book he’s tackling issues that are huge. He’s putting on his best suit to write this book, taking a moment of silence to compose himself, arrange his thoughts, and he hopes that we, the readers, will do the same.
I’ve always been a little irritated with the way authors treat characters that are supposed to be linguistic prodigies. It’s so easy to pick out a handful of twenty-cent words from a thesaurus and put them into the mouth of a ten-year-old protagonist and say, “Look, this child is brilliant beyond his years.” Much harder to recreate the actual sense of wonder that captivates those who are beguiled by words their whole life long.
I feel that DeLillo came close to capturing this sense of wonder when he depicted a pivotal scene in the life of protagonist Nick Shay. The scene takes place after Shay has done his stint in juvenile prison for killing a man. For the rest of his life, Nick will be jarred by the ambiguity of his crime; he’ll never quite be able to know whether the act was intentional or accidental. But what he is certain about is that he wants to turn his life around. He gives himself over completely to the rehabilitation efforts of the juvenile prison system, and proceeds with equal enthusiasm to a Jesuit school, where he encounters Father Paulus.
In a truly fascinating scene, Paulus brings Shay into his office. The old Jesuit seems to be in a mood of some despair. After some words are exchanged about the nature of knowledge and learning, Paulus invites Shay to look at his own shoe and to name the parts of the shoe. When Shay flounders, Paulus runs off the list of names as though they were the names of cities in the holy land. One of Paulus’s points is that until we are fluent in the names of the things around us, we will see the world as dull and foolish.
As someone who lived through the final years of the Cold War, I must admit that in some ways I am as daunted by the many facets of this historical period as poor Nick Shay was looking at the leathery surface of his own shoe. Coincidentally, as I was finishing up the book I happened to learn a few facts that taught me something about the sources DeLillo used. For instance, I had known who Bobby Fischer was, but I’d never realized that his career as an American chess prodigy matching wits with Russian chess prodigies was seen as a very deliberate Cold War battle. I learned about this only because of the news coverage that arose after Fischer’s recent death. It immediately became clear to me that the character of Nick Shay’s younger brother, Matt, was a sort of portrait of Fischer. Matt was a young chess prodigy whose abilities seemed to provoke conspiratorial murmurings from many adults, including the enigmatic Father Paulus. There’s a sense that the intelligence of both brothers Shay, as well as the native intelligence of American youth in general, has suddenly become a strategic asset because of the dangers posed by the hydrogen bomb.
At the end of the book we see Nick coming to terms with the brokenness of his marriage. The Cold War has ended, and he has flown to Central Asia with the man who cuckolded him. The ostensible reason for the journey is to see a new technique for disposing of radioactive waste: blowing it up in deep underground chambers with the aid of nuclear warheads. Shortly after reading this scene, I learned that this disposal strategy was actually proposed by a Russian entrepreneur who claimed to be in possession of his own nuclear warhead.
I suspect that in my hurry to read this book cover to cover, I missed many similar allusions, many subtle hints dropped by DeLillo to give the overall impression that all the events of the book are influenced by the actions of a conspiracy that is vast and so nearly invisible that even those involved in it aren’t sure it exists.
What’s wonderful is that you don’t need to get all the references in order to enjoy this book. The book is a pleasure in itself. When in the last pages we see Nick Shay mourning the wild, aimless days of his youth, we see quite clearly that he was asked to transform himself, asked by authorities like Paulus to become someone sophisticated and analytical when he might have followed a quite different destiny—had it not been for the overarching struggle of the age. The story is meaningful even outside the context of the Cold War. It’s a dynamic that’s been happening on a personal and a global level ever since humans started climbing down from trees.
Similarly the last section of the book, which focuses on an ostensible miracle that occurs in the darkest, most dangerous corner of the Bronx, is clearly a prayer for peace. DeLillo adds plenty of qualifiers, recognizes that there have been missed opportunities at every turn in the course of human history. But he also rightfully acknowledges that there is a great readiness for change among the people of today’s world, and that even if we’re destined to fall back into old patterns of struggle and war, witnessing the multitudinous for a better world can itself be a redeeming experience.

Cambridge

2007-11-11T20:50:00.000-08:00

by Caryl Phillips. (1991) Published by Vintage International. 184 pages.

Reviewed 11 November 2007
This is a novel about two topics that interest me a lot: colonialism and slavery. The first, and longest, portion of the book deals with Emily, an intelligent young woman in the19th century whose father owns a sugar plantation in the West Indies. After a short prologue in the third person, the rest of this section is made up of entries in Emily’s diary. She’s en route to her father’s plantation. She describes everything in language that, at first, seems a little too flowery, always searching for the most roundabout ways to describe her experiences. It’s a little off-putting; to the reader it was as if the author is straining to create an authentic 19th century sound, getting a good handle on the intricacies of the language, but missing the simple bluntness that writers of that time were capable of.
But as we get to know Emily better, the pretentious and overwrought tone makes more sense. She’s a young person of great intelligence and greater ambition. After her trip to the Caribbean, she has little to look forward to besides an unappetizing arranged marriage; the only thing that might add an element of variety and freedom to her life would be a career as a lecturer, traveling about England and sharing her experiences, observations and vision on the future of British colonialism. It all hangs on her intelligence, her verbal agility, and her ability to ferret out the truth.
This makes for excellent reading. The author bestows Emily with such a richness of vocabulary and wit that it’s possible to see in her prose all the complex mechanisms of 19th Century hypocrisy. One senses that, had she been born in another era, Emily could easily concoct a first class exposé about the inhumanity of slavery and the essential wrongness of the exploitative sugar trade. But she’s endowed not only with a journalist’s innate appetite for the truth, but also with an aristocrat’s instincts of self-preservation. She knows that her life of luxury is supported by the exertions of slaves who daily perform labors in the cane fields that would kill an ox or horse. She knows that her future career as a lecturer will only bear fruit if she stays well within the boundaries of what the English public is willing to hear. So she succumbs eagerly to all the fundamental lies of the planters’ culture. She allows her formidable wit to be eclipsed by an even more powerful cowardice.
That we’re able to witness all this so clearly is a tribute to Phillips’ masterful talents as a writer and a scholar. Voluminous research went into creating Emily’s account of her voyage, and Phillips strikes the perfect alchemical balance, transforming historical details into a young woman’s living perception of a world alive with promise and intrigue.
Standing on its own, the first part of “Cambridge” is the best thing I’ve read since starting this blog. It isn’t just the historical flair that makes it so much of a pleasure to read. Also there’s the way Phillips builds the plot of sexual tension. Emily gradually comes to realize that, as the daughter of an absentee plantation owner, she has the status of royalty without the limitations. She takes a sadistic pleasure in frustrating the ambitions of her less satisfactory suitors, none of whom have the wit to win her favor. Only the plantation overseer, Arnold Brown, is able to seduce her by gradually adopting a more gentle persona toward her, while still continuing to be cruel and wicked to his slaves, particularly to the enigmatic Cambridge, a strong and obdurate man whose self confidence and mastery of scripture makes the white slave drivers distinctly uncomfortable.
The second portion of the book belongs to Cambridge. It’s an autobiography of his life from the time he was captured in West Africa to the days shortly before his death. It’s a much more sweeping narrative than Emily’s diary, and yet it feels much less real, much less gripping. I got the feeling reading this portion of the book that Phillip’s was actually a little bored by the whole prospect of the firsthand experiences of a man enslaved. Whereas the Emily portion of the book was overflowing with descriptions of the various luxuries of colonialist life and the peculiarities of the plantation setting, Cambridge’s account seems very much a lifeless, dutiful exercise in connecting point A to point B through an extremely circuitous route. Whereas Emily’s transatlantic voyage as a privileged passenger is described in great detail, Cambridge barely goes into depths about his experiences being transported in the belly of a slaver. There are a few horrifying details, but they somehow seem obligatory.
In his first experience of being enslaved, Cambridge is taken to England, where a rather ineffectual “owner” allows him to get an education and marry a white servant girl. On the “owner’s” death, Cambridge becomes a free man, traveling around England and lecturing for various abolitionist groups. Cambridge embraces the Christian religion as a doctrine of universal freedom and human rights, but we never really get to see the evolution of his thought process. This creed of universal human dignity is what his abolitionist tutor believed, and this is simply the belief that Cambridge adopted. When Cambridge is eventually taken into captivity again (during a voyage to Africa, to make a series of abolitionist lectures there) the effect is unnaturally comic. He seems to take this new and tragic twist of fate as just a big misunderstanding, an inconvenience. “Isn’t this just my luck?!” When he arrives at the sugar plantation in the West Indies, he holds himself aloof from his fellow slave laborers. Only the schizophrenic Christiania earns his attention, and as she seems incapable of lucid speech, she never seems to have her own mind, her own voice.
In order for the novel to work, we need a sense that as sophisticated an intellect as Emily is, Cambridge is ten times as sophisticated. I think this is the story that Phillips wanted to tell, and I think it failed because of the limitations of the tradition of historical fiction he abides by. Whereas there’s an abundance of firsthand source material by colonialists, the voices of those who labored for them as slaves was largely kept silent because slaves were forbidden much formal education. This in itself constitutes one of the great tragedies of history. In order to recover the voices of those who were forbidden to record their own histories, a writer must take a powerful step into the realm of imagination, speculation. This means being willing to make huge mistakes, even to resort to lies.
I think this is foreign to the current trends in historical fiction, which becomes ever more methodical, ever more scholarly, ever more dependent on the carefully woven safety net of official, documented truth and ever more reluctant to go out on a limb in the way that only fiction can.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret

2007-10-20T18:20:00.001-07:00

by Brian Selznick. 2007. Published by Scholastic Press. 534 pages.

Reviewed 20 October 2007

In my lifetime, an interesting cultural switcheroo has taken place. What happens backstage is much more interesting to us now than what happens onstage; practically every DVD comes with a compilation of interviews and outtakes detailing the process of how the film was made. Political campaign coverage focuses on fundraising and campaign logistics. It’s no longer necessary for us to suspend our disbelief; it’s not so important now that we succumb to illusions as that we are curious about how the illusion is accomplished. There’s the danger here that all this will result in a gradual death of the faculty of imagination. The wonder of tales and legends will be deflated and replaced merely with a bland, utilitarian interest in plain facts. But there’s also the hope that as viewers and readers get more interested in the processes of creativity, a new sort of legend will begin springing up, one which brings creators and audiences closer together.
“The Invention of Hugo Cabret” is a perfect example. The author’s love of silent movies is captured in the sumptuous pencil, charcoal and chalk drawings as well as in the way that the illustration and text are interspersed. At the core of this novel is a good deal of sound research into the history of the first years of cinema, the movies of Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, the Lumire Brothers and Georges Méliés. And around this core is built a narrative that incorporates all the pathos and simplicity of these old classics. The story is about an orphan boy, Hugo Cabret, who steals the inner workings from windup toys in order to rebuild an old clockwork automaton. Along the way, Hugo meets the orphaned girl Isabelle; her stepfather forbids her visiting movie houses, but still she’s fallen in love with the medium, and sneaks Hugo in to see a matinee showing. In this sequence, the narration gives way to the image of a set of heavy, tasseled curtains pulling aside to reveal an empty screen. Then we see the light of the projector come on and finally, the image of Hugo’s face, lips parted, eyes widening, the contours of his cheekbones and forehead highlighted by the reflected glow of the screen.
In this scene and in the whole book, you can almost feel the flicker of an old movie projector as it churns out the story, reel after reel after reel.

Der Verlorene—Text und Kommentar

2007-10-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

by Hans Ulrich-Treichel, Commentary by Jürgen Krätzer, (1998, commentary 2005), published by Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek. 175 pages.

6 October 2007; pp. 1-129

In German, “Der Verlorene” basically means, “the lost person,” but there’s some subtlety in the title that’s hard to describe in English. “Verloren,” related to the English word “forlorn,” is simply an adjective: lost. In German, it’s possible to take an adjective like this and turn it into a noun. Usually this is done when the noun itself is clear. If you’re talking about two men, one short and one tall, you can say “Der Große,” and it’s clear you’re referring to “Der große Mann,” or “the tall man.” But In the title of Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s novel, it’s almost as if the noun itself is what’s missing. Something or someone is lost, so very lost that it can’t even be given an true identity. All we know about it is that it’s really and truly gone.
The literal answer to the question of who or what has been lost: a child, Arnold, the infant child of a German couple at the end of World War II. In a moment of panic, when Arnold’s mother thought she was going to be accosted and killed by Russian soldiers, she gave the infant Arnold to a passing woman. As it turned out, she was neither accosted nor killed; she and her husband made it safely to the West of Germany and managed to start a new life, but they never recovered their son, and never recovered from the pain of losing him so suddenly and so pointlessly.
The story is narrated by Arnold’s younger brother, born after the war, who’s lived out the early years of his life in Arnold’s shadow, never quite understanding what happened to Arnold, but always burdened with a sense of shame that pervaded his household. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that not only is Arnold lost, but also the younger brother has lost something. He’s never experienced a moment of kindness from his father. He’s never experienced a loving embrace from his mother. Most of all, without understanding what really happened to Arnold, he’s never been able to understand who his parents are and who he is.
Treichel has mastered the sort of humor that characterizes a lot of my favorite German fiction, where the joke is rooted in the way a child’s mind tries to come to terms with all the metaphors, euphemisms and half-truths that characterize adult speech. As the plot rolls on and the parents try everything they can to try and find their lost child, the narrator grapples with a sense of jealousy that defies logic but nevertheless makes a lot of sense: he’s jealous of how easy Arnold has things, how he has two parents who are willing to sacrifice so much to find him, and yet never has to suffer the father’s coldness, the mother’s tragic mood swings, the anxiety of having one’s life invaded and eclipsed by an older brother who’s been elevated to a sort of mythic perfection by the fact of his perpetual absence.
The best parts of the story are the characterization of the father, who seems in some ways to be the most lost of all the figures in the book; the story of the kindly policeman Herr Rudolf, who stands as a perfect counterpart to the cold, remote father figure; and the strange monologue of the hearse driver who enters the story midway through and plays the same role as the gravediggers in “Hamlet,” reminding us that death is unrelenting and ever-present, unglamorous, not glorious, redemptive, nor particularly tragic—and that in our struggle to deny it, we ultimately turn ourselves into the basest of comedians.

Inland Empire

2007-09-30T21:19:00.000-07:00

Directed by David Lynch, starring Laura Dern

Reviewed 30 September 2007

Wow. I’m not going to try and sum this movie up or even to get very in depth about the history of my passion for David Lynch movies. Suffice it to say that I feel with this movie Mr Lynch has fulfilled a promise he’s been making for years and years with his more recent films. The confusion of “Mulholland Drive” and “Lost Highway” are mixed with the tenderness of “The Straight Story.”
Laura Dern is so amazing to watch. The more the movie progresses, the more I was amazed at what I saw coming from her. It’s as though she pours forth a whole career in this movie, acting out every conceivable character she might be called upon to play. What’s wonderful is that she has such total conviction that this wacky-ass David Lynch mindfuck has something genuine at its heart. And, in return, Lynch seems to have realized that however much eccentric vision he’s capable of concocting in his mind, it can only be realized if he allows an actor with Dern’s genius to have her own vision, to stand at the heart of the movie and drive it forward with all the heart and soul anyone could possibly ask for.

At The Still Point

2007-09-30T21:17:00.000-07:00

by Mary Benson. 1969. Published by Virago Modern Classics 1988. 250 pages.

Reviewed 30 September 2007

This is a book about South Africa, about Apartheid and oppression, about justice, about civil rights checked and frustrated. We follow the travails of Anne Dawson, a writer who’s been unlucky in love. After breaking up with her flame in New York, she returns to her home country of South Africa. Here, she finds herself torn between her family’s racist friends and a group of dissident, anti-apartheid intellectuals who are closer to her heart, but who frighten her because of the risks they take in defying an increasingly oppressive South African government.
What works about this book is the political and journalistic angle. I got an education about the history of government restrictions, about the pass laws (requiring Africans to carry their papers on them whenever they went out in public), about the way the white government urged former members of the African National Congress to testify against one another in return for lighter prison sentences.
The story of Anne Dawson, of her inner life and of her romance with the activist attorney Matthew Marais, is less engaging and less genuine. Narrating in the first person, Dawson goes to great lengths to create a jumpy, disoriented stream of consciousness, full of vivid sense impressions and memories that leap at you from out of nowhere. But the more we get to know her, the more it seems that Anne is actually a very linear, prosaic person; the edgy narrative style seems an affectation and a distraction. It gets even worse whenever Anne gets going about her romance with Marais. The writing in these sections gets so overwrought you almost want to take a pen and just cross it out and get back to the main part of the book.
In the course of the story, Anne discovers her true path in life as she chronicles the injustices carried out every day in the South African courthouses against civilians such as schoolteacher Beatrice Qaba and ANC leader Daniel Makhana. The quality of prose in these courtroom scenes is so much superior to the mushy narration of the romantic scenes that it seems that Benson must also have been in a process of discovering what did and didn’t work for her as she wrote this book. I suspect that there were a lot of forces at work both internally and externally that told her politics was a poor choice of subject matter; perhaps too dangerous, perhaps too obvious, probably not “artistic” enough. It’s clear that as a writer and a reader, Mary Benson had steeped herself in poetry and psychological fiction, and probably envisioned herself going in this direction.

Paprika

2007-09-02T00:29:00.000-07:00

1 September 2007

Just as I was clocking off work today, one of my coworkers came up to me and told me I had to see this movie, no questions asked. I’m so glad she told me. This was just a wonderful picture.
The story is about a research team busy developing a product that can allow dreams to be transferred onto computers. It’s supposedly going to be very useful in psychotherapy. But when a disgruntled member of the research team steals the device, the whole crew has to kick into action to prevent the world of dreams from breaking through and overwhelming reality.
We’re never completely sure, though, if the research team itself is especially “real.” As the movie goes on layer after layer gets pulled away. People keep “waking up” from one reality into another even more fantastical than the last. But even as every bit of reality comes into question, the characters themselves become more and more real to us, especially the brooding, beautiful At-Chan, who’s created an alternative identity in her dream life: the sprightly and flirtatious Paprika.
In the century or so since Freud released his book on dreams, it seems we’ve amassed this huge visual vocabulary of dream images that we collectively know tell us something about ourselves: lately a slew of science-fiction movies have come out which attempt to harvest the vast field of burgeoning archetypes in a single swoop of the cinematic scythe. “The Matrix,” “The Cell,” and “Existenz” all come to mind, but none of them are quite as honest or as beautiful as “Paprika.”

After Dark

2007-09-02T00:27:00.000-07:00

by Haruki Murakami, 2004, translated to English by Jay Rubin, 2007; published by Knopf. 191 pages.

1 September 2007

Interesting: This was a page-turner in which nothing seemed to happen.
The story is about a bookish girl named Mari who’s spending the night wandering around a seedy part of Tokyo. In the meantime, her sister, a teenage fashion model named Eri, is lying asleep in her room when something strange begins to happen. Her unplugged tv flickers on. A man with a mask (called The Man with No Face) watches her from the screen, and then she vanishes from the bed and appears to have been sucked into the television.
In the meantime, Mari gets called on to help a Chinese prostitute who’s been beaten by one of her customers. A photograph of the abuser is sent to the Chinese gangsters, who swear they’ll get their revenge.
To me, these are all cliché scenes from the sort of Japanese movies I love watching. Revenge, weird science fiction abductions, and especially the blurring of the border between reality and fantasy. So all through the novel I was eager for the moment when that big explosion or chase or revenge killing would happen.
And in the meantime, I was killing time with Mari, listening in on her conversations with the various people she met in the night, with Kaoru, the massive female wrestler; with Korogi, who’s running away from people who want to kill her; and especially with Takahashi, a messy-haired jazz musician who seems to be falling in love with Mari, but isn’t quite sure and can’t quite convince her to let down her guard.
It was only after the book was over, and I was puzzling over whether I’d missed something or not, that I began to wonder about that Man with No Face, about the way he never did anything but watch. I wondered if he wasn’t maybe supposed to represent God, or whatever mythical being we hope or fear might be there beyond death, beyond the other side of the screen.
What exactly happened to Eri when she was trapped inside that tv set? Although we never find out, it’s interesting that practically every character in the story has some recollection about being trapped in a small, enclosed space. Sometimes it’s in a dream, or it’s the way they felt during a difficult period of their life; in Mari’s case, it was a real-life experience of being trapped in an elevator.
With all its eeriness and simplicity, this story leaves a very clear image: life is just one room, and eventually we all have to leave the room. Whether there’s another room out past it, nobody can say. But the truth is, we’re all a little scared of that exit we have to make. If we want, we can make our time in the room quite miserable for everyone involved. Or, if we’re willing to share our fears, we might instead offer one another a little comfort.

Hard Times

2007-09-02T00:26:00.000-07:00

by Charles Dickens, 1854, published by Penguin Classics with introduction by Kate Flint in 1995. 319 pages.

1 September 2007

For a story that starts out on the precise wrong footing, I thought this worked really well.
What I mean is this: The first scene in “Hard Times” is of a headmaster, Old Tom Gradgrind—stodgy and domineering—drilling a class of mostly working class children. His strategy, we are told, is to emphasize pure reliance on facts and to suffocate all traces of imagination, fancy, passion and wonder from these children’s minds.
Furthermore, we find out that as a father, old Gradgrind has made his own two children, Young Tom and Louisa, the prototypical examples of his no nonsense ideas.
The problem is that Dickens has so much fun drawing a buffoonish caricature of Old Tom Gradgrind and his thinking. Then for the rest of the book, we’re asked to witness the story of Louisa’s journey into womanhood, her failed marriage to a wicked and lecherous old man, and her brother Tom’s devolution into a gambler, petty thief, and first-class lout. The story fleshes itself out with remarkable detail, but every time things really get rough, Dickens points us back to Old Gradgrind, and reminds us that his philosophy is the root cause of all this suffering, and it just can’t be believed.
Kate Flint’s notes make it abundantly clear that Dickens meant Gradgrind to stand for the Utilitarian school of thought, especially for the key assertion that all people act only in self-interest. But though both Tom and Louisa bemoan the way their youth has been stolen from them, we never really see what’s so awful about the way they were brought up. We’re merely told that at one point in her girlhood, Louisa said, “I wonder . . .” and her parents told her she must never wonder.
Old Tom Gradgrind is nothing but a paper tiger, and you’d really expect more from the man who brought us Ebenezer Scrooge.
Or even Mr. Bounderby, the aforementioned lecherous old blowhard who sucks Louisa into a loveless marriage. With all his hypocrisy and lack of compassion, Bounderby is a first-rate villain. More importantly, he has a first-rate foil: Mrs Sparsit, a nosy old widow who’s willing to slog through muddy, slug infested gardens in order to get Louisa out of the picture and become the new Mrs Bounderby.
The scenes with Mrs Sparsit are downright hilarious. Indeed, there are so many excellent things in this book that it really is worth reading for all its flaws. From the slimy womanizer James Harthouse—a bored aristocrat who plays carelessly with the emotions of both the Gradgrind children—to the surprisingly realistic account of the way the entire city of Coketown rallies to rescue a worker who’s fallen down an abandoned mineshaft, this book inadvertently proves a very Utilitarian lesson: that a story doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it can be enjoyed.

Girls + Boys

2007-09-02T00:24:00.000-07:00

by Lynda Barry, 1981, Reprinted in 1993 by Harper Perennial. 94 pages.

1 September 2007

I read this whole book of comic strips while taking a walk through the quiet neighborhood where I live. My favorite part was the story of the Donut Boy of Seattle, Wash, who struggles with life until a psychiatrist tells him to stop whining and get a job like everyone else.
Lynda Barry’s drawings are ugly depictions of ugly people. Her stories are often short, usually just enough to establish that the main characters have some serious problems. They seem to come right from that fine borderline where ideas first become reality: Is this idea worth putting to paper, or should I just crumple it and throw it away? All these scrawled pictures seem to make the case for salvaging every idea, bringing it just far enough into the light, then moving on and ferrying the next one over. With all her stories of miserable single women and bullied children, Barry seems to have been acutely tuned into the emerging spirit of the 1980s, which I certainly remember as a decade when America decided the underdogs had received all the chances they deserved. Lynda Barry doesn’t spare her characters moments of huge embarrassment and suffering, but she also doesn’t follow the Regan era prescription that if you just ignore all the “losers” they’ll just go away. I’m glad that Barry decided to scrawl out this little collection of odd thoughts and nightmare stories, and I’m curious to see what she drew next.

Essay on Man and Other Poems

2007-08-04T18:27:00.000-07:00

by Alexander Pope. (1996) Published by Dover Thrift Editions. 99 pages.

4 August 2007: Page 1-79.

A poem and an essay are not the same thing, are they? Just like a novel is not a newspaper article, and a screenplay is not a rock song. Today the categories are clear. Poems can serve all sorts of roles. They can be tributes or snapshots of emotions, they can be bold attempts to sabotage language by evoking bizarre images in meaningless cacophonies, or they can be straightforward, impressionistic portraits of beautiful landscapes. It can be a form of improvisation, of jazz, of competition even. What they cannot be is essays. They’re not a suitable medium for serious arguments. We turn to poetry to escape, to find something less bureaucratic and less academic than prose.
I think from Pope’s point of view, and probably from the point of view of many of his contemporaries, poetry represented the end of a stage, the last stage of a process of metamorphosis like that of grain of sand to pearl or caterpillar to butterfly. Once a truth had been argued out in dry prose, once philosophers had argued away the last absurdities and refined their arguments, the final step was to take the results and state them in verse whose rhyme and meter reflect the inner truth. While Pope allows in his “Essay on Criticism” for the fact that there’s certainly room for frivolous poetry, for poetry independent of serious philosophical intent. But he doesn’t seem to think that there’s room for serious thought that refuses to wear the beautiful vestments of poetry.
Pope himself lets his hair down in his farcical “The Rape of the Lock,” in which a petty spat amongst a bunch of foppish dandies is chronicled with all the vigor and pathos of a Homeric epic. Indeed, it contains some of the most impressive and witty poetry in the whole book, as in the section where a game of cards is described as a battle between heroic and villainous kings, queens and knaves.
I have a real soft spot for humor like this. There’s just something so satisfying in thinking that the revered elders found laughter something worth aspiring to. When I see Pope put so much of his significant, serious, craftsman’s talent fully behind the task of a silly joke, I—a frivolous and shallow person—feel somehow deeply honored.
And so it’s out of common courtesy that I lend an ear to his more serious works, such as the “Essay on Man.” At first it’s a little hard for me to accept the unabashedly circular logic with which Pope sets down his arguments about the Great Order of the Universe. It’s as absurd to doubt God as it is to have the foot rebel against the head, we are told. Man has to pursue his goals one step at a time, whereas God created the universe in a single action. Therefore, God is greater than man. And because God is greater than man, and God created the universe, it’s sheer folly for man to see any fault in the universe. If we think we see fault, it’s only because we can’t see the “big picture.”
This isn’t the way I see things. It’s not the way I think about my life, not right now. But I remember at times that I was very depressed about my life, I relied upon exactly such thoughts as these to help lift me out of despair. Furthermore, once I got past the initial arguments, I found Pope had a lot of interesting things to say about happiness and justice, about the futility of striving for power and the need to seek personal happiness through charity and kindness.
It’s just this sort of all-pleasing, totally reasonable Enlightenment Era Englishness that sent thinkers like Nietzsche around the bend. He railed against it, calling it weak, cloying, effete. But there’s a sense of viability, vigor and downright truth in Pope’s straightforward verse that puts Nietzsche’s thundering and dundering to shame. Yes, Pope was a little too formal, a little too stiff, but at the heart of his arguments is an affirmation of the value of happiness, which is the same as an affirmation of the value of life. This affirmation was echoed and enhanced later on by the more free-spirited Walt Whitman in his “Song of Myself.” In fact, it pleases me to think that just as Pope improved upon prosaic philosophy by organizing it into verse, so too did Whitman improve on Pope’s era by freeing verse of its Byzantine rules and conventions, by making the sentiments less reasonable and more fierce.

1 September 2007; p. 79 to end

There’s not much more to say about this book other than that the last two poems included are a little disappointing after what came before, filled with personal references, inside jokes and cultural minutiae that haven’t aged well.
I would like to say a word, though, about Dover Thrift Editions and how much fun they are to pick up and read. They’re printed on pulpy paper that reminds me of the pages of the drawing tablets I used to have as a child. They’re all available for $2 or less, and usually they have some very low budget but lovely image on the cover, a swatch of Victorian wallpaper or a section of intricate lacework. There’s something wonderfully monastic about reading these books, as though you’re opting out of the whole free market system, out of the whole of modern society, pared down to pure literature. Probably if there is a nuclear war, Dover Thrift editions of Kate Chopin and Anton Chekhov will be the only pieces of literature to survive, and they will serve as the basis of a new civilization. Of course, in a world where Disney keeps lobbying for extensions of copyrights, at some point there will come a day when it’s harder and harder for a company like Dover to find the sort of classic, public domain material that serves as its lifeblood. Ah, well, it’s a pity.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2007-07-28T21:08:00.000-07:00

by JK Rowling. (2007) Published by Scholastic. 759 pages.

28 July 2007

I went out and picked up my reserved copy of this book the day it was released, and I finished it on the evening of the day after. It was an odd feeling, knowing that except for a few people on the other side of the literary curtain, I was among the first to find out all the little secrets of this last chapter in Harry Potter’s adventures.
Some have complained that Harry’s long trek from campsite to campsite with his friends Ron and Hermione got a little boring. I think it is true that JK Rowling had to stretch the plot a little to make it fill out the usual framework of a full academic year. But each time our three fugitive magicians come out of hiding, there’s so much action that I felt I needed the long stretches of tedium to be able to catch my breath, and also to take a step back and appreciate just how far this series has come since its beginning.
I remember in 2000 I picked up the first Potter book. I read through it quickly and felt a little embarrassed to be reading what seemed to me a faddish kids’ book. As Harry took his first shopping trip for a wand and magical tomes, as he visited a deep underground bank run by goblins, as he took the train to Hogwarts and entered the great hall with an enchanted sky for its ceiling, I started to get sucked in by the concept. I thought that in terms of creating a fantastic world, Rowling had written herself an enormous blank check. But I expected the characters to be little more than action figures moving through this fantastic world.
There’s a point in this final book where Harry Potter breaks out into a fit of rage at a father on the verge of abandoning his wife and child. “Parents,” he says, “Shouldn’t leave their kids—unless they’ve got to.” It’s one of the best parts of the book, the whole series, maybe Harry Potter’s truest moment of heroism. One reason the Harry Potter series has worked so well is because of Rowling’s miraculous restraint with her own imagination. Though her world is awash with wonders, none of them could ever fully distract from the sadness at the heart of the story: the orphaning of an infant child. In his first few books of the series, Harry is able to enjoy his childhood, making friends and playing sports and spending a realistically minimal amount of time soul searching. But as his adolescence progresses, old phantoms and longings from his past come to haunt him.
JK Rowling avoided letting her series descend into hollow fantasy, but she also avoided making the novels too precious. True, sometimes Harry’s fireside chats with Dumbledore seemed a little bit like therapy sessions. But though each book contained it’s neat little life lesson served up at the end, it never dominated the plot, never consumed it. Rather, it was always the feelings and emotions that tripped him up as he was looking to concoct a potion or tame a hippogriff. We as readers never had to deal with “Harry Potter and the Journey of Self Discovery” or “Harry Potter and the Battle with Substance Abuse.”
Using the miracle of teleportation, Rowling takes us on a wonderful final tour of her magical world in this last book, whipping up some first class adventure scenes at Gringots Bank, the Ministry of Magic, the home of the wicked Malfoys, and of course Hogwarts Castle. Deftly as ever, Rowling paints the encroaching regime of Harry’s enemy Voldemort with traces of racism, fascism, and the love of torture: her most deliberate touch is the wizard Grindelwald, defeated by Dumbledore in 1945, infamous for building the Nurmengard prison, above whose gates stood the slogan “For the Greater Good.” But we also get a realistic look at the dynamics of blacklisting and hate campaigns as we see the Ministry of Magic come under the sway of the dark new regime.
There’s not much else for me to say here that you won’t find elsewhere. I’ll just tell you that this is an excellent conclusion to a wonderful series. A hundred years from now, people will look back at this time period and find many things confusing and confounding, but they will certainly understand the success of JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter.”

Walking the Black Cat

2007-07-28T20:02:00.000-07:00

by Charles Simic (1996) Published by Harcourt, Brace & Company. 83 pages.
Reviewed 28 July 2007

What’s great about Charles Simic is you never know when to take him seriously. This is the second book of poetry I’ve read by him; the first was “The World Does Not End,” an earlier book that won a Pulitzer Prize. “Walking the Black Cat” is both funnier and creepier than its predecessor.
If you’ve never read Charles Simic before, the key thing is to prepare for a lot of disjointed images. A lot of people have no patience for this, and who can blame them? Why force yourself through a book of poetry when the job of making sense of everything has been outsourced to you the reader? Why not just shut the book and go look for somebody who’s willing to tell you a story and make sense of what’s going on?
Of course, if you read, say, poetry by Shakespeare or Milton, you’ll encounter plenty of references, terms and phrasings that make it incomprehensible to the modern reader, but most probably you’ll also be presented with an infrastructure of footnotes, glossaries and critical essays that will help you find your way through. Underneath all the obscurity there is usually an orderly, understandable system of poetic symbolism.
One of Simic’s talents is to simulate that sense of confusion, to give us a sense that his poems have been salvaged from some different age, a different world, that with just the right key, it would all make sense. But there never will be a decoding ring for Simic’s puzzles. While Shakespeare’s references to Greek myth and the Chronicles of English history can all be unearthed and dusted off, there will never be anyone to tell us what, exactly, Charles Simic means when he says that Happiness “sat over a dish of vanilla custard without ever touching it!” Even when identifiable figures appear, as they often do, their actions are difficult to interpret. Why is the ghost of Hamlet’s father wandering around a Vegas motel? What does it mean when Adam says the “secret of the musical matchbox” has been stolen from him?
There are frequent references in this book to ghosts, and to hotels, cafés and casinos visited by the dead. There is a sense that these poems are all stories told by a man who has seen the most important figures in his life pass on to another world. He is left alone to tell stories he can’t completely understand. He has precious little real information at his disposal, but a wealth of inklings and dark intuitions.
There are other elements, too. Strange bits of comedy, as when a man demands that his pet canary sing in exchange for the privilege of being able to witness the act of lovemaking. And a few poems that strike a surprisingly candid tone, such as “Slaughterhouse Flies” or “Little Unwritten Book,” which tells the story of a beloved cat who disappeared years ago. The owner still goes out each morning and calls for the cat and leaves a saucer of milk on the porch, to no avail.
Some of the poems are a little weak, such as “The Something.” At his worst, Simic seems like he’s just fiddling around with words, creating little formulaic oddities. But these poems are few; mostly, this book is filled with stylish, enjoyable, spooky morsels of verse.

Katzenkopfpflaster

2007-07-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

by Sarah Kirsch. (1979) Published by dtv. 119 pages.

8 July 2007

This is a collection of poems from four books published by Sarah Kirsch between the years 1969 and 1979. As a reader, I got to witness how early on in her career Kirsch focused on complex narratives with syncopated construction (rhythms independent of sentence structure, and both independent of the breaks in lines of text and strophes), and how ten years later she began to produce tiny, lyrical images, often focused on the beauty of the landscape. I never felt like Sarah Kirsch was a poet enraptured by the beauty of the landscape, but rather one who escaped into it in order to flee an ever less tolerable world.
My favorite poems were from the 1974 book „Zaubersprüche.“ It felt to me like at this point Kirsch grew tired of the burdens of self-consciousness and personal symbolism. In the poem „Georgian, Photographen,“ she starts to let the pictures speak for themselves. She never abandons symbolism, but after this turning point I always felt as though she’d let go of her poems, let them be more spontaneous and open to interpretation and—more importantly—misinterpretation.
It was a hard book for me to read, because of the language, because of the fact that I’m a poor interpreter of poetry, and because of the fact that—aside from the last set of poems, which express Kirsch’s gradual personal rebellion against the East German government she once supported—I often have no context. It’s often hard for me to tell whether Kirsch is writing about her own life or the lives of characters she’s created. It’s often difficult for me to understand the significance of place names and of places described. Because my mind is focused on grasping the vocabulary, I often lose my sense for the sound of the words, and don’t catch the music or dissonance the author intends.
But misunderstanding is not the same as failure. A lot of meaning is lost in the gap between my German and my English, and a lot is lost from the fact that I’m a man a Kirsch is a woman. From where I’m standing, the reception is poor, but what I’m able to salvage from behind the static is still mine. As Kirsch says of kite flying, „Uns gehört der Rest des Fadens, und dass wir dich kannten.“
Yesterday I went to the wedding reception of two friends of mine, both of who are writers, and both of who are women. After the buffet had been served up, the two brides read poems by themselves and others. Because I knew those involved, because I’ve witnessed their relationship over the years, the significance of the words was instantly clear to me, and the meaning was intensified by the fact that these words were being spoken on this day, that they were chosen to honor a union that had finally reached its knotting point.
It’s impossible to recreate those circumstances for someone else. You had to be there. The poems themselves can be written on paper and carried from place to place over the Internet, but the context can never be fully carried along.
On the other hand, the context is never fully lost. This is one of the special abilities of poetry. When we encounter these little broke-lined passages standing alone on roomy pages, when we struggle through them and recognize this symbol and are confused by that one, we always have to repeat the thoughts and questions of William Paley’s analogy of a man discovering a watch on the ground: “This has a purpose. This has a creator. Who created this and why?”
It’s easy for me to understand what Kirsch is talking about in political poems, such as „Änglisches Lied,“ where a feudal subject describes an attitude of absolute subservience to her master. But in reading the earlier poems of Kirsch, I’m able to get a glimpse of the path she took to get their; I’m able to watch as she teaches herself to speak, as she looks around the world and harvests different sorts of empathy, and makes the crucial decision of what, if anything, is worth saying.

The Comedians

2007-07-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

by Graham Greene. (1965) Published by Penguin Books. 287 pages.

Reviewed 5 July 2007

As a writer, I’ve always been a little shy of the subjects of adultery, affairs and jealousy the way that you might be shy of opening that great big present someone gave you for your birthday, the one in the enormous box with the massive bow. Mystery writers can rely on sexual jealousy as a surefire motive guaranteed to contain more spice than simple monetary greed. Serious writers seem obliged to dwell on the complications of extramarital affairs the way that traditional haiku poets were obliged to dwell on the blossoms of cherry trees. Affairs, custody battles, divorce, feelings of loneliness, these are all cliché subjects, but they’re clichés that many of us have to visit because these are the subjects that get under the skin of the safest, most stable, most “mature” people, the apparent pillars of our society. If you want, you can write about mob lords, private detectives, wizards, soldiers, whalers, firefighters, people who throw themselves into conflict and adventure. Heroism and villainy are legitimate subjects for serious literature. But in order to gain maturity you also have to recognize the forces in life that make mature adults act like selfish children; you have to recognize the fact that even when people seek to avoid conflict, even when they try to settle down, conflict comes and finds them right where they live.
Graham Greene is thinking about these issues and many more when he brings together Brown and Jones, two men who have spent much of their lives as itinerant con artists. After a particularly successful scam involving forged paintings, Brown retreats to Haiti and decides to settle down into the role of the owner of a hotel he inherited from a mother he barely knew. He manages to turn the Hotel Trianon into a favorite spot for poets, artists and thinkers, and also starts up a romance with the wife of an ambassador from an unnamed South American state. Brown scoffs at the way the ambassador is obsessed with his own sense of ownership, the way he treats his wife as a possession and always emphasizes the word “my” in the phrase, “my wife.”
But Brown finds that he too is susceptible to jealousy and pettiness when he encounters Jones, a laid-back smooth-talker who boasts of his spurious military achievements in Burma during WWII. As a fellow con-artist, Brown can’t look down at Jones for playing fast and loose with the truth, but he feels threatened by the fact that Jones is capable of something that’s always eluded Brown: the ability to make people laugh.
What’s great about this book is the fact that the narrative is so prosaiac and matter of fact that I kept getting caught off guard by Graham’s great talent. Over the course of the book, Graham takes the carefree sense of humor that Brown so dreads and uses it as an anchoring for a series of literary fancy knots, reflections about the dark comedy of the increasingly corrupt Haitian Government under President “Papa Doc” Duvalier; about the tragically absurd comedy of guerilla forces who think they have a chance to overthrow a despotic government able to rely on CIA support; about the comedy of the American utopians who come to Haiti in hopes of building a vegetarian center that will bring peace to the country by removing acidity from the Haitian diet; and most of all, about the farcical and pitiful comedy of misunderstanding that arises when Brown fails to heed the wisdom of his own mistress’s words: “Perhaps the sexual life is the great test. If we can survive it with charity to those we love and with affection to those we have betrayed, we needn’t worry so much about the good and the bad in us. But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination . . . then we fail.”

Suicide Club (自殺サークル）

2007-06-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

(2002) Directed by Sion Sono. Distributed by TLA Releasing.

23 June 2007

I fell quickly in love with this grim flick that takes the clichés of Japanese horror cinema and turns them into something touching and surreal. The plot deals with a rash of unexplained suicides in Japan. The suicides have a cultish aspect: for instance, a group of uniformed schoolgirls line up on a train platform, join hands, and chant “one two three,” then throw themselves together in the path of an oncoming train. Furthermore, some of the suicides have identical wounds, rectangles of flesh sliced away.
An investigator following up on the suicides takes a soulful look around himself on a subway train and sees a pervasive melancholy in his fellow travelers. Soon after, he begins receiving ominous phonecalls from a child who seems to know something about the alleged suicide club. These phonecalls are genuinely creepy because of the coldness in the child’s voice and the disconcerting, unexplained cough that happens after every puzzling statement the child makes. The phonecalls seem to imply that suicide is preferable to life because only in suicide can one affirm one’s connection to oneself. Later, we are treated to a look at a strange conspiracy of children who seem to be at the root of the suicides. In an unforgettable scene, the children enter a long hallway infused with pink light. Chirping baby chicks dart around the floor of the hallway, and a man in a black mask prepares a carpenter’s tool to slice rectangles of flesh from the backs of the children’s victims.
There is a sequel to this movie which explains some of its mysteries, but the piece stands alone as sad, beautiful enigma.

The Ice Storm

2007-06-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

by Rick Moody, 1994, published by Little Brown and Company, 279 pages.

23 June 2007

This is a harsh diatribe on the state of the American family. The ice storm of the title refers partly to the storm that descends on the US east coast during the winter of 1973, but also to the lack of real, simple, warm love that seems to have descended upon prosperous American families. Moody focuses on two families in the Connecticut town of New Canaan: the Hoods and the Williamses. At the beginning of the story, father Benjamin Hood is having an affair with his neighbor Janie Williams. By the end of the book, their counterparts, Elena Hood and Jim Williams, have also jumped in bed together. But the real story is not the affairs but the environment that nurtures them: an alcohol riddled culture where parents gather together to play seemingly casual adulterous trade-off games (the men throw car keys in a salad bowls and the women fish them out, choosing their mates for the evening), while the children are left home to occupy themselves with television, talking toys, and of course the budding beginnings of their own sexual desire.
Rick Moody’s greatest talent is in giving voice to the children in his story. There is Wendy, who at fourteen is impatient to shed all vestiges of sexual innocence. There’s always a sense that she’s wandering off into deep and dangerous waters, but also a feeling that her nymphomania is driven by something natural and with the potential for fostering goodness. Down in the Williamses’ basement she bargains for sexual favors with schoolmate Mike Williams, demanding boxes of Bazooka Bubblegum in return for going all the way. Later, she helps Mike’s younger brother, Sandy, hang his talking GI Joe doll, and suddenly finds herself unable to resist him. She breaks down his inhibitions with a bottle of vodka, and in the morning imagines that in this prepubescent boy she’s found the love of her life.
We also get to look in the head of Wendy’s older brother, Paul, who’s on his way home for the long Thanksgiving weekend. Paul, too, is obsessed with losing his virginity, but a few years of age has made him more reflective. He draws parallels in his mind between his own crumbling family and the domestic problems of Reed and Sue Richards in the comic book series “Fantastic Four,” which makes for some of the best passages of the book.
If poetic depths can be found in the way these children interact with supposedly childish things, we also have to admit the shallowness of the adult culture in the book, where the platitudes of economist Milton Friedman and est-founder Werner Erhard seem foster a state of perpetual insecurity, a sense that life is about pursuing the best possible deal possible, and that you’re a fool if you settle for what you’ve got.
While this book covers the same territory as John Updike’s “Couples,” it’s a far better book because it is so focused, and because it is able to chronicle not only the selfishness of adults but also the consequences faced by their children.

The Magus

2007-05-26T23:16:00.000-07:00

by John Fowles (1965). Published by Little Brown & Company.

26 May 2007. Up to page 227 of 607.

A good author can manipulate the reader’s general interest into a sort of hunger. One way of doing this is to create suspense. You see this a lot in the Harry Potter books. Halfway into the book, you’ve got about seventeen different storylines going at once and are smacking your arm like a junkie waiting for the next little hit of information on any subject whatsoever. Here, the author is playing on the natural instinct of the human mind to constantly orient itself. By being stingy and tantalizing with information, JK Rowling hooks us firmly and well.
John Fowles traps his readers in a different sort of way. The first section of his book, “The Magus,” follows the life of a jaded and selfish young man named Nicholas Urfe. The story is quite believable. We see how Mr. Urfe falls in love with a feisty young Australian girl named Alison, only to leave her in order to run away to a solitary Greek island named Phraxos, where he plans to teach English and nurture his own poetic talent. Shortly after he gets to the island, he comes to the sobering realization that he has no poetic talent worth nurturing. Furthermore, the people of the island bore him to death; the children he teaches are more interested in their job prospects than in literature; the other teachers are all stick-in-the-muds. He contemplates suicide but can’t bring himself to do the deed.
The whole story is told in the first person, and the language is so rich and spirited that, while we can’t bring ourselves to really like Nicholas Urfe, we do think he might be a tad harsh when he labels himself untalented. Indeed, he seems to be a man of wonderfully acute and active intelligence. The danger is that all this intelligence is now trapped on an island with nothing to apply itself to. We’ve come right into a cul-de-sac of the soul, and we’re only a tenth of the way through the book. We can’t help but imagine that the rest of the book will be an excruciatingly detailed meditation on loneliness and boredom and routine, with a prose whose eloquence and beauty grow in inverse proportion to the suspense quotient.
So by the time the character of Maurice Conchis makes his entrance, we’re SO ready for a little bit of magic.
Maurice Conchis is an old man who lives an apparently solitary life in a mansion almost hidden from view. He is surrounded by books and beautiful paintings, periodically immersing himself in elaborate harpsichord music and in the undersea life of the nearby reefs and islets.
It certainly seems that Conchis is the Magus described in the book’s title, but what sort of magic does he have at his command? At first, it seems that the magic referred to is only the magic of enlightenment, of friendship, the magic of hope and engagement in life. But that’s only part of what’s going on, because Conchis also starts dropping hints that he’s a more literal type of magician; that he’s discovered a secret method for gaining contact with the spirit world.
Soon we’re caught up in a game of many-layered ambiguity. As Conchis spins out the story of his early life at a leisurely pace, the characters he describes begin appearing in real life. But Nicholas Urfe refuses to believe they’re actually ghosts, and he soon puts his intellect to the task of figuring out how exactly Conchis has organized this extensive charade. At the same time, he finds himself falling in love with one of Conchis’s “ghosts,” the delightfully coquettish Lily, who corresponds to Conchis’s first love, a woman whose erotic coercion prompted him to enlist in the army as a foot soldier in the first world war.
So is Conchis a teacher? A charlatan? A dandy? A philosopher? What is the purpose behind the elaborate masque that he constructs around poor Nicholas Urfe?
I can’t tell yet, but it seems as though Conchis’s masque is very much meant to be a collection of all the kinds of magic that fiction and literature can offer to rescue us from boredom and despair. Fowles seems to be gleefully mixing up a potion that includes just as much of the profane as it does the profound: mystery and romance, mythological symbolism and historical intrigue as well as serious meditations on death, free will, and the inevitability of evil all come together around Conchis, and the real magic behind it all is the way that the reader’s mind comes alive when faced with the many emotional and intellectual challenges presented by this truly fascinating book.

2 June 2007; pp. 227-351

It’s important when reading this book to keep remembering that as the reader, you have an advantage over the narrator. You, after all, are reading a work of fiction. Anything goes. And if the fiction you’re reading is a book called “The Magus”, you at least have to entertain the fact that some real magic is going on.
You have to remind yourself of this fact to keep from getting annoyed by the way that poor Nicholas Urfe keeps dragging his feet, concocting less and less plausible theories to explain the strange things that are going on around him. How is it that he sees the beautiful Lily—supposedly a ghost conjured up from Mr. Conchis’s past—down by the beach and moments later standing up on the balcony of Conchis’s mansion, looking wistfully to sea? Nicholas U of course rules out the supernatural and becomes convinced that “Lily” has a twin sister. He suggests the matter to Conchis, who at first scoffs at it, but soon the twin sister reveals herself, and Nicholas Urfe feels smugly confirmed that he worked out the secret.
To me, though, it seems more likely—because it’s more interesting—that Nicholas hasn’t discovered the existence of twins, he’s created their existence. At one point, Conchis tried to convince Nick that Lily is actually a schizophrenic, compelled to always put on new masks and pretenses. And at one point, Lilly refers to herself as Astarte, a Semitic Goddess of mystery who corresponds to the High Priestess of the Tarot deck. The reference to Astarte appears playful, and almost passes unnoticed amidst the many other mythic and cultural references dropped around this book, unless you recall that John Fowles has dedicated the book “To Astarte.”
So for my money, Lilly (who later claims that her real name is Julie Holmes, sister to June Holmes) is most probably the goddess Astarte herself, a sort of mad goddess who needs the enraptured imagination of a clever young man like Nicholas Urfe in order to guide the constant changes of her own identity.
All of which would be a fascinating intellectual game that we as readers could play alongside poor Nick Urfe, if it weren’t for the fact that Urfe seems to have chosen the wrong game to play. He’s determined to have sex with Lilly–Julie. He thinks about her constantly. The more he thinks about her and how to get her away from Conchis, the more Conchis fades into the background, and also the promise of a gift of wisdom and enlightenment that Conchis seemed once to extend. Earlier in the book, Conchis seemed to have something to say, something about morality and mortality. He had survived the horrors of the trenches in the First World War; he had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second. In one creepy incident, he uses a loaded die and a cyanide tablet to bring Urfe face-to-face with the fear of death.
There’s a sense that if Nicholas weren’t so dead set on sexual conquest, he might listen more to Conchis, and Conchis would then have more to say. But instead, he keeps pursuing Julie through all her various identities. And as he does so, he keeps encountering more and more frightening characters, including a man dressed as Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, and a troop of men dressed as Nazi soldiers (Nick, of course, is convinced that they’re actors in Conchis’s hire).
The book seems both a fantastical retelling of the story of “Faust” and more especially “The Tempest.” But the references to the World Wars suggest that the turmoil of the twentieth century make it impossible to escape fully into fantasy. Heaven may still be something phantasmagoric, but Hell has already been brought into being in this world in the recent past, and new generations discover this at their peril.
This is a fun book to review, although it’s so unusual that it’s hard not to want to just summarize the whole thing.
The emotional spine of the book is the relationship between Nick and his old flame Alison, who tries to draw him back into her life during a weekend trip to Mount Parnassus. Nick seems to view her as nothing more than a distraction and an annoyance until at one point something she does reminds him of a poem he once read, at which point he decides he has to have her as well as Lilly.
The argument that ensues is the most real thing in the book. Alison accuses Nick of being too cowardly to be capable of love, and Nick proves her right by only being able to respond with lame attempts at wit and romance, constantly calling her ‘darling,’ and calling himself a worthless bastard. Which is only an excuse because it’s obvious that this is a man who is actually quite in love with himself.
Before the argument with Alison, the game between Conchis and Nick seems like a wonderful second chance at life and fulfillment. But once we see that Nick has the chance to be with this woman who loves him, and blindly wounds her by chosing a woman who seems only to be a fantasy, or who rather seems to be fantasy itself, we can’t help but felt hat the game has become hollow. And at this point, Nick shifts from being someone we have difficulty liking to someone we sort of hate.

16 June 2007; p. 235-end

In order to discuss this book, I have to mention another book I read a long time ago: “Illuminautus!” by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert J. Shea. Today, the book is known mainly as a cult classic. It breaks all the rules, it fails majestically, it reads like bad 70s porn, it’s full of adolescent attempts at far-out chaotic montages of images that are almost unreadable. The sex is raunchy, the violence is graphic, and the whole this seems to have been plotted in a drugged-out haze.
But at the time I read it, I was only twelve years old, and it was the book that got me truly interested in reading. Although it’s not the sort of book I would like to reread now, it does hold a special place in my heart, and it’s important for me to think about it and understand what made it so meaningful at the time.
Cut down below all the psychedelic and the stew of conspiracy theories, get passed all the injudicious slang and you’ll find the story of Hagbard Celine, a renegade sea captain and philosopher who’s created his own alternative world inside a golden submarine, the “Leif Erickson.” Many of the book’s subplots are about people who are somehow abducted or tricked by Celine, and are subsequently put through a barrage of weird psychological situations, often involving sex, drugs and the threat of death.
What makes the book remarkable is the fact that Celine turns out to be a teacher at heart. His mind-games are tailor-made for his subjects. He sets out to identify a person’s own fears and taboos, and break them open; he teaches cops to hate authority; he teaches rapists to empathize with their victims; he teaches believers to be skeptics and skeptics to be believers.
The most interesting student of Celine’s is George Dorn, a headstrong intellectual hippie radical who begins to learn from Celine to stop living in his head and start living in his senses, who begins to learn bravery and confidence.
Corny as it sounds, this theme of learning and personal growth raises the novel up a notch from just being a piece of shock anarchic trash. Throughout his career, the late Robert Anton Wilson was always moved by the idea most people live their lives imprisoned in a rigid set of ideas. In dozens of books and articles he tried to incorporate Celine-like games to create satori-like revelations, to wake people up to . . . something vague and hard to define, yet exciting. The revelation, perhaps, that we are free.
What’s particularly interesting to me is the idea of a character like Hagbard Celine. By the time we’re adults, we all recognize to some degree that there are pivotal moments in life, galvanic moments when you realize who you are or you drastically change the course you’re going to take in life. For many people, these are moments of trauma; many report having such experiences in war; becoming a parent can trigger such moments; sometimes, just a conversation with someone very significant can be enough to trigger a massive change in perspective.
There’s usually an element of chance in the way these moments enter our lives . . . but what if someone created a system to engineer such moments, to accelerate the progress of humankind by creating carefully controlled psychological moments of crisis and enlightenment? Hagbard Celine is just that; he’s a sort of super genius whose purpose in life is to raise consciousness, an authority figure whose goal is to teach people to question authority, an entrepreneur who invests millions of dollars into getting people to cross personal thresholds, an old man who seeks not to censor the impulses of youth, but to enhance them.
The character of Hagbard Celine always seemed to be the most original, unprecedented part of “Illuminautus!” so I’m both proud and disappointed to have discovered at last his direct predecessor in John Fowles’s Maurice Conchis.
As in “Illuminautus!” the story of the Magus is ultimately one of teaching. Nicholas Urfe finds himself caught up in a sort of game of secrets and lies with this strange, possibly crazy old man on the island of Phraxos. As in “Illuminautus!” there is a recognition of the fact that a young man’s mind is much more receptive and malleable when he’s in a state of sexual excitement; Maurice orchestrates a bevy of beautiful women who play on Nicholas’s vanity, social pretensions, and predatory urges. Alternate explanations keep be offered for what is “really” going on. Conchis presents himself at various points as a psychic conjurer of ghosts; the well-meaning ward of a beautiful madwoman; an avant garde theatrical director creating a drama without an audience; and as a psychologist engaged in a bizarre and unethical experiment with Nicholas Urfe as the subject.
Each of these identities is somewhat accurate. Also, as readers, we should be alert to the fact that Conchis prefers his name to be pronounced with a soft “ch,” so that it resembles the word “conscious.” He represents the evolutionary process by which a young man like Nicholas rises from narrow selfishness to a more nuanced awareness of sharing a world with other people, a world where freedom and love are not simply abstract concepts and where there are no pat answers to ethical dilemmas.
Conchis’s own ethical dilemma took place during the German occupation of the island during WWII, when a sadistic German soldier presented him with the choice of personally executing three freedom fighters or standing by and watching as the Germans execute eighty civilians—including woman and children—in their stead.
It’s easy to see that John Fowles was a more artful and meaningful writer than Wilson and Shea ever were. “The Magus” is a masterful work, partly because it is a more focused work. He is able to tie together ideas about love, politics, free will and the existence of God without sacrificing believability because he shows the way that all these issues can tie into a single person’s life.
In contrast, “Illuminautus!” is a sprawling, disorganized work that makes a failed attempt to chronicle dozens of characters being subjected by Celine in parallel journeys of self-discovery. Although this weakens the novel, we shouldn’t see “Illuminautus!” as a failed rip-off of John Fowles’s work. Fowles is concerned mainly with the individual; in his novel, set in and informed by the moral climate of a world that had just recently witnessed the Holocaust and Hiroshima, learning is a lonely and painful experience reserved for the few.
“Illuminautus!” on the other hand is a novel grounded firmly in the 1960s when it seemed for a time as though whole western cultures were prepared to undergo a revolutionary change into something more open and exciting. If you ever saw Robert Anton Wilson speak before an audience, you realize that he was a very social man interested in broadcasting his ideas to the many than enclosing them in gilded envelopes and passing them on to a chosen few. The grand awakening promised in the 1960s by people such as Robert Anton Wilson’s mentor Timothy Leary never occurred, probably never had a chance of occurring, but the impetus to believe in it is a beautiful things.
It doesn’t matter you find more truth in isolationist books like “The Magus” or “Steppenwolf,” or communalist books such as “Illuminautus!” “Gravity’s Rainbow,” or (I’d argue) “Harry Potter.” What matters is seeing what makes these books special: in all these books magic itself serves as a symbol for something sealed away from us, something capable of nurturing us and bringing us toward ripening maturity. Because of this they speak to those of us who grow up feeling trapped in life, hemmed in by a culture riddled with prejudice, mendacity and self-centeredness. At their worst, books of this class tempt us to regress into childish fantasizing; but at their best, they encourage us to bring forward a child’s spirit of openness and exploration to matters which are very much adult.

Requiem for a Dream

2007-05-11T19:20:00.000-07:00

by Hubert Selby Jr, 1978. Published by Thunder Mouth Press. 279 pages.

Reviewed 11 May 2007

When I first started reading this book, I saw the faces of a lot of my friends light up. That’s a GREAT book, they told me. It was a little surprising, because my previous experience with Hubert Selby Jr. was reading “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” When people talk about reading “Last Exit,” it’s with a sense of residual devastation. It’s like recollecting a famine or a plague, a notable event but not one that you’d call enjoyable.
It wasn’t as though “Requiem for a Dream” seemed like a bright and cheerful book. The main plot follows the parallel addictions of an aging Brooklyn widow and her son. He’s a heroin dealer who’s hooked on the drug himself, and she’s a lost soul who gets addicted to amphetamine tablets prescribed to her as diet pills. It’s clearly a book about downward spirals, and yet people come away from it with a “Holden Caulfield” reaction; they feel as though they’ve spent valuable time with someone who really understands them.
Maybe it’s because “Requiem” strolls along at an amiable pace. There isn’t the sense of dread that pervades “Last Exit” from beginning to end. In “Last Exit,” we know almost immediately that the characters are already living in Hell. We know it, but the characters don't quite, and the plot rushes us toward the moment of ugly revelation. Here, on the other hand, there’s a sense of innocence. Although the book opens with a disturbing scene (Harry Goldfarb locking his mother Sara into her closet so that he can steal her television and sell it for money to buy heroin) the clouds seem to lift when we see Harry and his dealing partner Tyrone shooting up with their friends who work at the morgue. The drugs seem to disarm these supposedly rough and dangerous characters; it makes them cuddly and giggly. There’s a feeling of rightness, of return to sanity. Later in the book, as things become more desperate, I found myself almost hoping that Harry and his friends would score so that they could escape back into their protected world.
There are strong religious undertones in this book, which opens with Biblical quotes and reaches climax with a near-death experience in which Harry finds his soul caught between light and darkness. But as with “Last Exit,” the cause of our downfall is not partaking from the tree of knowledge; rather, it’s ignorance. In a key scene, Harry brings a new television set to his mother. She’s overjoyed, not by the set, but about seeing her son. Harry feels a flash of something like love, something that seems almost like a heroin high. Although the moment seems to capture his attention, he never comes back to it.
In “Last Exit,” another character named Harry finds himself in a gay bar and notices for the first time that the place he’s in makes him happy. In discovering his own homosexuality, this Harry seems to grow as a person, but he’s too naïve to translate discovery into understanding. Rather, it’s as if the newfound energy gives him only the power he needs to bring on his downfall.
A consistent idea in Selby's work seems to be that our desires are not sinful. Indeed, desire is like a compass pointing us toward salvation. But we have somehow lost the key to read the compass, or maybe we have been maliciously misled into believing that love and charity can be substituted with addiction and brutal domination of our fellow human beings.
In “Requiem,” television plays the role of the seducer, of the malicious misleader. As the heroin addicts grow less and less capable of dealing with the world, the orbit of their lives constricts itself until its radius is nothing but the short line between the tv set and the sofa. And then there’s Sara Goldfarb, who’s so enthralled by a bogus offer to appear on a television game show that she becomes a pill popping imbecile, condemned at last to electroshock therapy and brain-numbing Thorazine at the hands of the same medical establishment that encouraged her addiction in the first place.
Sometimes when Hubert Selby is talking about Sara, you get the sense that he’s become a bit like Erskine Caldwell, looking down on his benighted subjects and tsk tsk-ing about the way they’ve all been duped so bad by the Man. But at the same time, the book is more universal than “Last Exit,” less focused on revealing the secrets of a squalid demimonde and more interested in using the Brooklyn setting and characters to diagnose the illness that effects us all. Whereas heroin and amphetamines wreak havoc on people’s lives, Selby keeps reminding us that their effects on the system are predictable and well understood. The more sinister drug lurking in the wings is television, evolving, irresistible, always reaching out to a wider audience, distorting the needle of our inner compass, consuming us by equating consumerism with joy.

The Game

2007-04-20T18:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-15T01:53:00.000-07:00

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?

The Areas of My Expertise

2007-04-05T00:38:00.000-07:00

(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.’”

Dear Mili

2007-03-28T22:50:00.000-07:00

(1988) by Wilhelm Grimm. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Michael di Capua Books. (21 March 2007).

28 March 2007

The text of this book is from a recently discovered manuscript by Wilhelm Grimm. The dust-jacket blurbs make it out to be a previously undiscovered fairy tale to complement “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Red Riding Hood.” But actually, the story here is much closer to religious allegory than what you’d expect to find in a normal Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale—and this is an excellent vehicle for Maurice Sendak, whose talent is to mix images from the worlds of adulthood and childhood and to invite readers from each side of the age divide to look at the details from their counterparts’ perspective, details they normally would filter out. This is a story of the enduring love of a mother for her lost child. Images of trees and flowers, of spreading roots and ruined chapels and crumbling tombstones fill every page and give us a sense of the power time has both to deepen our sorrows, and to bring about a sea change into ripeness and redemption.

White Teeth

2007-03-28T22:49:00.000-07:00

(2000) by Zadie Smith. Published by Random House.

Up to p. 217 of 448; 28 March 2007

If you want to understand how far a writer can push the envelope her audience’s sympathy, look no further than the character of Samad Iqbal, the creation of one Zadie Smith. Iqbal is an ageing Bangladeshi who served in WWII. Frustrated in his ambitions to become a renown scientist, he scrapes along as a waiter in London. He bolsters his ego by nurturing an obsession with his ancestor Mangal Pande, a failed rebel whose story constitutes the most minor sort of footnote imaginable.
When Iqbal gets into a love affair with one of his sons’ teachers, he’s filled with shame, but he can’t really recognize it for what it is. He blames the decadence of modern English society, and can only remedy his guilt by splitting up his twin sons, sending one back to Bangladesh.
Zadie Smith is almost cruel. At every turn she invites us to laugh at Iqbal’s pomposity and blindness to the way others see him. But her portrait of Iqbal also includes so many little intimacies and scraps of humanity that we can’t hate him; we can’t even think he’s a particularly bad guy. Like all the characters he’s been loaded up with flaws that have to do with the past.
While reading this book, I keep thinking back to Naslund’s “Ahab’s Wife,” in which the main character, Una, was essentially a person far superior to her time, impervious to any hint of bigotry or chauvanism. It’s a grand thing to wish for, but it doesn’t tell us nearly as much about how real people work as does Smith’s novel in which the characters’ are living in and of a world packed with prejudices and misunderstandings.
In general, the men in this book are a little shabbier than the women. While Samad and his best friend Archie are fixated on their trumped up stories about their respective pasts, their wives Alsana and Clara are at least able to take steps toward adapting to the world of the present. But this gender skew isn’t exactly unfair because Smith recognizes that our ideas about our past, make-believe or not, are essential to our sanity and survival. Samad and Archie are a couple of old geezers who are long on talk and short on heroic deeds, but Smith doesn’t negate the importance of their inflated stories—rather, she pays subtle tribute to them, as in the section where she describes how old men telling stories in cafés use salt shakers and eating utensils to stand for the heroes and villains of their own stories, and how the act of storytelling brings these old men to the full flush of life in a way that nothing else can.

4 April 2007; pp. 217-338

One of the first writers’ manuals I first looked through was Rita Mae Brown’s “Starting From Scratch.” Brown is remarkable for how frankly and directly she deals with matters of social class in American life. The middle class, she says, never interested her much as a fictional subject; rather, she focuses on the tensions that come up when the poor and the rich come into contact.
You can tell that Zadie Smith has entertained some of the same contempt for the people in the middle as Brown does. In the third part of the book, the children Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal are sent to spend some quality time every week with the Chalfans, a stable, upstanding family who are seen to have a lot to offer to kids from “disadvantaged or minority backgrounds.”
Well. Of course, once we see inside the home of the Chalfans (and especially when we see inside the mind of mother Joyce Chalfan) the results are scathing. The family is immensely self-satisfied, and nearly every comment out of everyone’s mouth is packed with unconscious bigotry and condescension. Joyce, a popular author of books about houseplants, is overflowing with ridiculous theories about how Asian societies “mess kids up,”; when Millat’s lesbian cousin Neena and her lover come over for dinner, Joyce can’t resist asking, “Do you use each other’s breasts for pillows?”
What’s remarkable about the portrait of the Chalfans, though, is how compassionate it is. Zadie Smith has an ability to let her mind run on parallel tracks; she never cuts herself off from the funny, disparaging aspect of observing her characters; but deep down, there’s something very fair-minded and objective determining the overall structure. The cool, scientifically detached part of her mind seems to determine what elements to describe when fleshing out the details of a character’s culture. And the human part (the part with sharp, white teeth) is in charge of how to describe it.
Take the subplot involving Millat Iqbal, a young man blessed with the charms of Adonis and hence with a nonstop sex life. Just as Millat seems to be actually falling in love with somebody, his friends from the group KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation) start blitzing him with pamphlets about the flaws of Western sexuality. All of a sudden, Millat finds he can’t be around his darling Karina without thinking she dresses like a prostitute. He’s trying to get her to cover up the belly he used to find beautiful to look at. He’s stopping random women in cafés and trying to talk to them about how much more alluring it is to conceal than to reveal.
In the real world, whole European legal systems are reduced to slobbering incoherence by the issues of headscarves in public places, but Zadie Smith can saunter right into this territory without missing a step. Millat is neither a villain, nor is he wholly a fool; when he cuts himself off from Karina, we’re in no doubt that he’s messing up a good thing, but we also get a hint of the real draw that the KEVIN pamphlets have on his psyche.
Smith does an good job giving us brief immersions into a great variety of cultures: Bangladeshi, British middle class, Jamaican, Jehovah’s Witness, white imperialist, academic, bureaucratic and the little nameless subcultures that spring up at the intersections of these larger categories that supposedly explain so much.

14 April 2007; pp. 338 to end.

Something I liked about this novel is that it never tries to be exhaustive. I always had the feeling that there was a lot to be said about the various characters, that their lives had been plotted out in detail, but Smith is decisive in only giving the facts necessary to tell this particular story. This is really nice to see in a young writer, because it indicates at once an awareness of the huge potential territory to be explored during a career, and the necessary ability to zero in on one particular part of it.
In the last sections of the book, Smith focuses more and more on ideas about genetic engineering, by way of Marcus Chalfen’s scientific process of creating a FutureMouse™ whose seven-year destiny has been entirely determined in advance by genetic engineering. This hot topic in bioethics fits very well with the themes of religion, race, family and attachment to the past that overshadow the first parts of the book.
And yet the books denoument, in which we follow all the characters to the much heralded unveiling of FutureMouse™, is pretty weak. The point-of-view shifts between too many characters who have too little to do. It’s impressive that Smith is able to show how various fundamentalist groups (Jehova’s Witness, militant Islamist, animal rights’ extremists) are all unified in their opposition to this tinkering with nature, but it still feels artificial . . . and moreover, bringing all these conflicting elements on the same stage is only setting the reader up for disappointment if the ending is anything less than a massive cataclysm. It isn’t, and you leave the book feeling a little sad that the only really misstep was right at the end.
Because the rest of the book is great fun. Indeed, maybe the reason that the ending doesn’t work so well is because Smith created such a perfect climax a little earlier when the fast-maturing Irie Jones finally gets together with her longtime crush Millat. The outcome is so artfully done, weaving together all the themes of the book so beautifully, that it can only be called genius.

The Science Times Book of the Brain

2007-03-22T00:03:00.000-07:00

(1998) Edited by Nicholas Wade. Published by the Lyons Press.

21 March 2007

The curse of the popular science reader is that you have to read the same explanations over and over again in book after book, article after article. Whether you’re trying to bone up on physics, evolution, genetics or the subject of how the human brain works, you’ll inevitably start to feel like you’re just being fed the leftovers of a predigested meal. There’s only so much that you can explain about hardcore science without having to learn hardcore math. To me there seems to be a middle ground. Some authors, like Rudy Rucker of David Foster Wallace, have been able to translate complex mathematical ideas into prose that’s fun to read, but most pop sci authors don’t take that risk, they just regurgitate the same set of interesting teachable moments that have been found to work in science classes.
One refuge for the pop sci reader is to specialize. There’s a book called “Foam” about the different manifestations of foam in different scientific disciplines that’s actually pretty good. Sue Hubbel writes great books about insects and arachnids.
Another alternative is to turn to a book like this one, that chronicles the scientific developments as they occur from a layman’s point of view. “The Science Times Book of the Brain” is a collection of about two dozen articles published in the “New York Times” during the 1990s about new ideas developing in the charting of the brain. In a sense, the authors and the scientists they’re covering are all in the same boat, trying to draw conclusions from brand new studies, trying to evaluate the significance of theories and models hot off the presses.
Is it worth reading? Maybe. Depends what you’re looking for. If you want to learn how to be a scientific journalist, this book should serve as a great role model. The “Times” style is never too flashy nor too technical, and there are only a few of the groaner puns that science writers often resort to.
And if you want a historical snapshot of a science right at the outset of a revolution, this is also your bet. The real story of this book is the story of the cornucopia of possibilities that opened to brain researchers with advancements in imaging technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography. These techniques have allowed scientists to get very detailed visions of how the brain shunts blood flow while human or animal subjects are engaged in various thinking tasks. A theme that comes up again and again is that age-old theories about the brain are finally becoming testable, and old presumptions challenged.
The problem is that the snapshot is taken a little too early. What we really see in this book is a set of creative and inquisitive scientists who are just starting to play with a new set of toys. They’re throwing ideas out on the table, ideas that might one day contribute to a comprehensive understanding of how the brain works. But there is no groundbreaking masterstroke to compare with Crick and Watson’s elucidation of DNA's function.
Brain science is so dynamic and so fluid that this book, less than 10 years old, already seems a little dated. If you want an introduction to the science, this might be a reasonably good place to start, but you’d be better advised to tune into a show like NPR’s “The Infinite Mind,” in which the same questions are being addressed in something more like real time.

Elegy for Takashi Miike

2007-03-15T00:20:00.000-07:00

Part I
14 March 2007

My first encounter with Takashi Miike was watching a movie called “Gozu.” The grainy style of the film and the strangeness of the plot made me think it was a movie from the 60s or 70s (I was tired and didn’t notice the cell phones that cropped up in the first hour). The whole thing seemed to be filled with the kind of symbolism that filmmakers of that era felt compelled to put into their films: a car gets a flat tire from running over a bone in the road and a man with half his face painted white offers help; an old woman spurts milk from her breasts and whips her mentally disturbed brother in an attempt to summon a spirit that cries like a baby. In a central scene, a half-naked man with the head of a cow appears in the night and licks the face of a man in search of his missing friend.
It was fun and often humorous, but I wrote it off because I assumed that underneath it all, there was probably some easily deciphered statement being made. Maybe it was a political allegory (one character, the American proprietress of a liquor store, is featured in front of a prominent American flag and has to read her Japanese lines off cue cards) or an attempt at creating an ‘alternative’ view of reality like Salvador Dali tried to in “Un Chien Andalou,” a world that’s visually striking and memorable, but ultimately far too cool for the rest of us poor spectators to be invited into.
I have fun watching such things because they seem crazy and predictable, but it's fun at the expense of the filmmaker. Ultimately, I enjoy it only because it’s the product of a very predictable mind that thinks its own ideas are so original that they can only be expressed through an elaborate code of symbolism and myth that turns out, in the end, to be redundant.
But there’s another reason someone might make a movie as weird as “Gozu,” a reason much more honest and much more obscure. The filmmaker might be a person truly confounded and mystified by life. As I re-watched scenes of “Gozu,” and eventually the whole movie, I started to think maybe that’s what really was going on here. Or, even more radical, maybe the guy who made this movie was just fucking around in the most devilish way possible. And so this is how I first got hooked on the movies of Takashi Miike.

Part II
21 March 2007

So I was thinking the other day, is this Takashi Miike a lightweight?
How to define a lightweight? I think about someone like Woody Allen. I love Woody Allen, but when I read interviews in which he says he’s not going to make any films dealing with the Iraq war, I think he’s wussing out in some ways, especially when he’s so bold about talking about the war when he’s not behind the camera.
In his movie “Gozu”, Takashi Miike shows a middle aged woman filling bottles with her own milk to sell to children, and later a sexy young girl gives birth to a full-grown man. This definitely breaks some taboos about what it is we’re physically comfortable watching onscreen. But Adam Sandler breaks taboos about what we’re physically comfortable seeing, and that doesn't make his work especially interesting.
What I wanted to know is whether or not Takashi Miike has ever had the guts to make a political statement.
The closest answer I can find is in the movie “The Bird People in China” (“Chugoku no Chojin”), which follows a Japanese businessman on a trip into the mountains of Yunnan Province of China to evaluate a potentially rich vein of jade. This is the least violent of T.M.’s films. In fact, one of the major themes is the longing to escape violence, embodied by a psychotic Japanese Yakuza (gangster) who has been shunted into a low profile assignment in China that chafes at him.
A series of accidents leaves our party of businessman, Yakuza and Chinese guide stranded in a rugged and beautiful region of the world, and Takashi Miike does an incredible job at depicting the quiet way in which an encounter with a “primitive” culture can be simultaneously thrilling and unsettling for people who have never known an alternative to high-tech civilization.
What’s especially interesting is the idea, brought up early on in the movie, that Yunnan Province is actually the anthropologic source of Japanese culture. As the movie goes on we see how the main characters are tantalized by the idea that this remote, bucolic river valley is where they belong, and that their truest identity is to be found among the gentle, welcoming people who live there.
When the Yakuza finally blows his top at the end of the movie, he’s not like the blindly sadistic mobsters in T.M.’s “Ichi the Killer,” nor like the trumped up maniacs in “MPD Psycho” who have been genetically engineered to kill just for the sake of it. The Yakuza is determined that if the discovery of viable jade is broadcast, it will bring a wave of development, pollution and crime that will destroy this most unspoiled region of the world. And we actually stand by him because T.M. has let the natural scenery speak for itself in this slow-paced, luxuriant film.
And yet the indigenous people are the first to clamor for civilization. Once the vein of jade proves to be viable, they cheer, “Now we will get electricity!”
I’m not saying that the only way to become a worthwhile filmmaker is to go out and make clear, Al Gore-like statements on current issues ripped from today’s headlines. But “The Bird People of China” sheds light on ideas that seem to inhabit all Takashi Miike’s movies. In “Gozu,” the main character gets lost in the boondocks of Japan where logic seems to dissolve and a form of primitive, ritual magic seems to hold reality in its sway. In “Audition,” a comfortable television executive has a close and brutal encounter with a woman who inhabits a much harsher world of petty crime and sexual abuse. In both of these movies the friction between two worlds is handled like a drug trip, which is fine. It’s interesting to watch.
But in “Bird People of China,” T.M. visits a much more realistic intersection of worlds, and the results are impressive.

Part III

28 March 2007

One theme that keeps coming up in Takashi Miike’s movies is family. Even in his Yakuza movies, there’s a sense that there’s a familial bond between the gangsters. In “MPD Psycho,” the main character is a detective whose mind is home to a family of personalities who are sometimes at odds but ultimately have an affinity with one another. Two of Miike’s strongest films deal explicitly with family.
“The Happiness of the Katakuris” is about a family that buys a house in a remote part of Japan, right at the foot of an active volcano. At first it looks as though they won’t get any guests at all, but the real problem turns out not to be a lack of guests, but the fact that the guests keep dying. The funniest of these death scenes is one where a famous sumo wrestler comes in with his underage girlfriend. You don’t need to be too imaginative to guess how it ends up.
TM has always had a talent for throwing comedy into places you wouldn’t expect it. The comedy is what elevates his movies over their various genres. “Katakuris” is different because it’s intrinsically a comedy. At the heart it’s about the pretensions of the characters. The father wants to reunite his family while getting rich quick. The grandfather wants to ennoble himself by taking the blame for all the dead customers. The daughter falls in love with a con artist who is obviously Asian but is passing himself off as a British serviceman and member of the royal family.
It all gets pushed over the top when, about a third of the way in, it becomes a musical comedy. When the Katakuris find their first dead customer, they break into an 80s style video. The mother and father do a karaoke number complete with a shimmering disco ball. The con artist Richard Sagawa and his victim do an amazing number about the glories of falling in love.
It’s not a deep movie, but it works because there is a sense that Takashi Miike means what he’s saying. The myth of a happy family that can muddle through is as ridiculous as the phony story of Prince Charles having an illegitimate Japanese cousin who’s flying over Iraq, but for some reason we all buy into the former myth while seeing right through the latter. It’s only by falling for ridiculous delusions that we’re able to survive, so let’s go ahead and be happy.
“Visitor Q” is a much scarier movie that touches on the same topic. We’re brought into the troubled life of a tv reporter who’s career has been ruined after he broadcast a man-on-the street interview in which he gets sodomized by a group of teenage boys. Now his world is a nightmare. His wife is a heroin addict who gets beaten by her son, who in turn is beaten up by bullies. His teenage daughter is a prostitute, and in the opening scene he pays her for sex. His ex-lover, a news reporter, can barely stand being around him, but he continues to harass her with his new idea: a reality show based on the ruin of his own life.
This is not easy stuff to watch, but it’s not exactly gratuitous. As in Camus’ “The Plague,” the goal here seems to be to show what happens when the things we dread invade our “normal life.” As in “Gozu,” one of the chief images of “Visitor Q” is an older woman—the mother, in this case—who finds that her breasts can miraculously produce huge quantities of milk. By the end of the movie, she’s transformed into a goddess-like figure.
I suspect that both of these movies are about the Japanese recession of the 1990s. There is a game afoot, and both of these families are clearly the losers—losers in the global economy, losers in the Japanese social hierarchy, losers in the search to satisfy one another. But they have been trained to try and make the best of things, to act optimistic, and this leads them to a strange sort of Hell where humiliation and death become the only sacraments left.

Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination

2007-03-07T22:48:00.000-08:00

by Edogawa Rampo. Tanslated by James B. Harris, 1956. Charles E. Tuttle Company.

7 March 2007; Up to page 88 of 222.

I found out about Edogawa Rampo by watching a movie based on four of his short stories. The movie is called Rampo Noir, and is so disturbing and perverse at its heart that it’s almost beyond the limit of what I can take. Still, I had to be curious about the man who created these stories, a man described as the Japanese Edgar Allen Poe. (The name he wrote under isn’t actually his real name, but rather a transliteration to Japanese of “Edgar Allen Poe.” Neat trivia, huh?)
What I’ve found so far is that Rampo’s stories are not nearly so dark as the films that have been made from them. For instance, in adapting The Caterpillar, the filmmakers took the story of a woman who tortures her husband, who was severely wounded on the battlefield, and makes it much more brutal. Where the wife in Rampo’s story blinds her husband in a fit of rage and frustration, the film shows and act of deliberate, premeditated sadism.
Really, this is a lot like Poe, who was a man who principally succeeded in putting ideas out there into circulation, ideas that captivate the imagination without necessarily pleasing it. Whereas Rampo’s detective fiction is nothing to rave about (nor is Poe’s, I think) his ability to wander into the grotesque is somehow admirable, because it’s honest to the nightmarish way the human imagination can work. Rampo strikes me as a man who wasn’t interested neither the sort of artistic tropes nor gratuitous violence that are so prominent in the film adaptations of his work, but I imagine that he would be quite happy to find that a new generation of storytellers has taken his ideas and decided to “ratchet them up.”

14 March 2007; p. 88 to end.

I was never really impressed by the stories in this collection. Maybe they’re not representative of Mr. Rampo’s talent. Maybe they're poor translations. But all in all, I think he might have been a little too enamored of his idol Edgar Allen Poe. The more Poe wrote, the more he seemed infatuated by his own cleverness. Over and over we are told how clever his detective Daupin is, and Poe seems almost to gloat over the fact that people would fall for his balloon hoax.
In the same way, Rampo seems far more impressed with the ingeniousness of his characters than we as an audience ever are. Watching one of his murderers gloat over the perfection of his or her master crime, we’re as likely to be impressed as we would be to watch someone win a hand of poker after stacking the deck. Rampo's supposedly fiendish criminals have all been dropped into a world of morons who seem to be just waiting for someone to come along and fool them.
Still, it’s interesting to watch Rampo’s fascination with mirrors and optical devices, and the last story in the book, “The Traveler with the Rag Painting” evokes a somewhat dreamlike quality as it tells the story of a man who goes through the wrong side of a pair of binoculars into the picture of a woman he’s fallen in love with.
Maybe the reason why mirrors and optical devices work for Rampo is that, as with Poe, he has a talent for writing a story about people who are dangerously obsessed. I wonder if this is the direction his other work goes in, or does it just remain smug?

Sympathy for the Underdog

2007-03-01T02:05:00.000-08:00

Directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Starring Koji Tsuruta and Noboru Ando. 1971. Released in DVD by Home Vision Entertainment.
Reviewed on 28 February 2007

This Japanese gangster movie has a lot of the style of one of the old Rat Pack flicks, boosted up by lots of footage of Vegas-like neon lights, a hep jazz soundtrack, shots of the gang walking in a tight-knit cluster down the street looking cool in the face of death. There’s lots of fake blood in this movie, and it all looks like the producers used red finger-paint to create the effect. The hokey quality of it doesn’t really detract from the film much—in fact, it makes it easier to stomach the violence and enjoy the movie as a sketch of revenge and a cast of over-the-top underworld characters. Tsuruta carries a lot of the movie as Gunji, the determined yakuza boss so solitary and mysterious he even puts his sunglasses on right after having sex. After being edges out of the Japanese mainland by a big mob organization that’s run like a business, Gunji takes his ragtag gang of six loyal followers to Okinawa, where he has to battle the local criminal element, including an American named Carter (who sounds like he learned English by listening to automated phone recordings) and a one-armed giant (who has a suspicious bulge beneath the “armless” side of his jacket . . . hmmmm).
The whole thing would fall apart if the actors didn’t seem to be 100% in earnest from start to finish. As it is, it’s a fast paced, enjoyable piece of fun, and you get to see some great glimpses of what Okinawa was like in the 70s.

I’m Nobody! Who Are You?

2007-02-21T00:48:00.000-08:00

By Emily Dickinson.
Illustrated by Rex Schneider. Introduction by Richard B. Sewall. 1978, Stemmer House, Maryland.

20 February 2007

I’m going to be a father soon, so children’s books have been on my mind of late. This one’s illustrated almost entirely in color pencil and possibly pastel, and the goal is to make Emily Dickinson’s poetry more accessible to children. I think overall it works very well. In fact, I’m not embarrassed to admit that having everything drawn out for me helps a great deal; I don’t have the sort of brain that’s good at solving riddles, and many of Dickinson’s poems are just that. Maybe it’s cheating, but when I have an illustrator there to whisper unsubtly in my ear “It’s about a snake!” or “She’s describing a snowstorm,” it’s much easier for my mind to settle down and enjoy the poem line-by-line.
Schneider takes advantage of the fact that Dickinson never gave titles to her poems. Sometimes the last line of a poem will be withheld so you have to flip the page to see the resolution. (“It’s about a snake!”) Sometimes two short poems will share the same page. The overall effect is that the whole book is one big poem, a series of glances at the imaginative world of a bright and reflective woman you can’t help want to know better.
The introduction by Richard Sewall gives a good rundown on the both the rewards and punishments of reading poetry. It’s written in just the right tone for kids age 10-12, candid and not at all patronizing. And the glossary at the end gives great tailored descriptions of words kids might stumble over.
Schneider’s drawings of people come off a little stiff and the various elfin figures he uses to represent winds, frost and seasons have a little too much Disney in them for my taste, but the overall effect of seeing Emily Dickinson’s thoughts on nature rendered on the page is so refreshing and fun as to rinse the mind of all trifling concerns about petty details. This is a book to be thoroughly enjoyed.

Die Pest (The Plague)

2007-02-21T00:41:00.000-08:00

by Albert Camus, 1947, translated to German by Guido G. Meister, published by Rowohlt, Hamburg.

20 February 2007; Up to page 27 of 182.

I haven’t come very far in this book. The copy I have is an old paperback with a spine reinforced by the publishers with heavy tape. I found the copy at C&M used books while coming back from a volunteer activity at a local soup kitchen. I’ve read two other books by Camus in German, so it’s becoming a tradition for me. Oddly, it’s easier for me to read Camus than it is to read almost any other author in German. It’s even easier to read it than it is for me to read a lot of prose in English. I think the reason is because Camus wasn’t trying to play any games with language. As a reader, I never feel like he’s trying to buy me off with any tricks or affectations, nor do I feel he’s struggling with any need to bolster up his own enthusiasm for what he’s writing. Everything’s cool and sharp like surgical equipment just before a surgery.
I’m not being wholly accurate. Der Fall, a later book, is more vague and lackluster. But Der Fremde (The Stranger) is told in a voice so remote and matter-of-fact that I read the whole book with a luxuriant case of the existential creeps. Der Fremde is the first-person account of a man who goes through life with almost total emotional and moral detachment. Camus makes no attempt to delve into the past and explore the cause of this constant calm. Rather, he simply lets the character pass through all the situations that we assume would trigger passions in anyone: love, injustice, murder and damnation. He takes part in all of them, takes note of all of them, and accepts them. Only at the end does the protagonist have a fit of rage when a minister attempts to bless him before his own execution.
Where Der Fremde deals with an individual, Die Pest brings us into a community, seaside town in Algiers sometime in the 1940s. The plot itself deals with signs of an emerging bubonic plague epidemic—first an infestation of rats, then a series of grotesque deaths, all described in a resigned and neutral tone that serves to amplify the horror of the matter. But though the tone is similar to Der Fremde, I think Camus has a different strategy here. We meet a number of characters, and each seems to have some sort of burden. The solitary Cottard attempts suicide. Dr. Rieux is worried about his wife, whose tuburculosis has forced her to go away to a sanitarium. Michel, the superintendent of Rieux’s building, is dismayed at how the rat infestation reflects on his self-image. The general impression is that everyone suffers in isolation. No one is capable of starting a relationship where compassion and healing could take place.
I know that many people have interpreted this novel as an allegory of fascism, so I suspect that as the story develops, we’ll see that brutality can break through the walls where compassion cannot.

28 February 2007; pp. 27-102

First off, a couple notes about the copy of the book I’m reading—it was printed in 1960 and right about page 94 there’s a cigarette ad. Not a glossy advertisement, just a page of the same paper as the text is written on with the slogan An guten Dingen finden alle Völker in gleicher Weise Geschmack. And there’s just a drawing of a cigarette. It’s hilarious and weird.
Also, in 1960 as today, many German novels will come with a page near the beginning with a condensed account of the author’s life as well as a summary of the novel’s plot. Whereas most American published books are highly marketed packages, with every blurb and graphic designed to increase the potential consumer’s willingness to open the old pocketbook, these descriptions of content (Inhalt) have more in common with the nutritional labels the FDA requires on foodstuffs. The Inhalt section of Die Pest notes that this book represents Albert Camus breaking away from the hard-line existential pessimism of his one-time mentor Jean Paul Sartre.
Reading the book, I understand this description. As the plague continues in the isolated city of Oran, a group of conscientious (and philosophical) citizens decides they must act independently to form a sanitation committee to “fight the plague.” In a prolonged subplot, the journalist Rambert, who seeks only to escape the city and be reunited with his lover, is won over to service in the sanitation group.
If you’re not reading the plague as a metaphor of fascism, and the sanitation group as a symbol of the resistance organizations in occupied and Vichy France, this whole section of debates about public health makes little sense, especially in a book where so little time is spent describing the actual physical and medical results of the plague, and so much is spent following the main characters around to various cafés and listening in on their conversations about the nonexistence of God.
I do have to say that though I’m happy Camus started finding some purpose in life, it didn’t stop him from making Die Pest a novel that’s sometimes too slack and lackadaisical. This is somewhat forgivable if you think of how long Europe basically shrugged off the emergence political radicalism in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy as just another way of doing things, and the way that the citizenry of fascist regimes were so “good” about swallowing their doubts and trying to just go on about their business. The best parts of Die Pest so far are the descriptions of mass psychology, the way Camus captures the canned heat of a community that can’t come to terms with its own impending doom.
But Camus hasn’t succeeded so far in creating an engaging cast of central characters. For the most part, the main characters Rieux, Tarrou, Rambert and Grand seem slight variations on the same personality; they’re all un-heroic, fundamentally disillusioned people who nonetheless choose to make sacrifices for a cause that’s humane yet hopeless. Their philosophical discussions seem much more like the inner dialogue of a single mind, rather than the dialogues of diverse people who have to challenge themselves to find common ground.
The only part of the book that’s a little embarrassing is the depiction of the clerk Grand’s attempts to be a writer of fiction. I guess we’re supposed to be amused when we see how the poor guy spends weeks anguishing over the choice of words for the first sentence of his novel, but it really seems like the sort of humor you’d expect to see on an episode of Family Ties or The Facts of Life than something that belongs in a philosophical novel.
I do expect the plot to pick up a little, and hope the characters gain a little bit of independence as the history of the plague unfolds.

7 March 2007; p. 102 to end.

At first it seemed odd to me that Camus spent so little time focusing on the actual effects the plague had on those suffering from it, almost as though admitting that the plague was just an excuse for him to depict the stresses put on a society by extraordinary forces such as war and repression. I should have known not to underestimate this writer. Rather than play up the horror of the situation, Camus’ plague-ridden city of Oran is under a quarantine law by which those diagnosed with the plague are immediately removed from their family members and loved ones. The sick are kept in provisional hospitals, often set up in schools, and the family members are kept under observation in a sports arena near the outskirts of town. Through most of the book, we observe the quiet, dreamy atmosphere of a town that lives in this state of weird divorce both from the outside world and from the disease that’s killing more and more people every day. Right at the heart of the narrative, we get an extremely concentrated look at the effects the plague has on a single boy. The detail is excruciating, from the young boy’s crabbed hands to his cries of sheer rage at the pain. By focusing on this one instance of crushing misery, Camus makes the book simple, believable and deadly serious, and made me feel that the main characters, almost all of whom are present at the boy’s bedside, really are driven to grappling with the thoughts about suffering, justice and the worth of life in dialogues that, in a lesser book, would seem abstract and pretentious.
One of the most interesting of these discussions is between the book’s central character, Dr. Rieux, and the Jesuit priest Paneloux. Witnessing the suffering and death of an innocent child, Paneloux is faced with fundamental challenges to his faith. I especially liked this character because he’s believable and complex, and represents a maturing perception of religion on Camus’ part. Whereas Der Fremde reads as a complex but ultimately childish and spiteful putdown of religion as a whole, in Die Pest Camus seems to recognize that sincere faith is too important to be simply brushed aside by even the most disillusioned existentialist. For one thing, the sacrifices that some religionists made in fighting fascism during the 1930s and 40s were often great and admirable; and on the other hand, religion has dealt for so long with the same issues that concern existentialists that, even if the two schools of thought are bound to come to different conclusions, it would be dishonest to deny that they share a concern with the same questions and they must speak of them in the same vocabulary.
Is the plague a metaphor for fascism? Kind of. But Camus is aware of the fickleness of the mind, aware that even among serious thinkers, fashions come and go and there will be a day when people fool themselves into thinking that the rise of militant totalitarianism was merely a thing of the past. Rather, Camus uses the plague as a metaphor for the phenomenon of suffering itself. He draws clear parallels between the conditions in Oran and those in Europe under fascism, but he also intentionally divorces the plague from politics by making it a force beyond human control. “Yes,” he seems to be saying, “The Nazis may have unleashed great suffering into the world, but it would be too good to them to credit them even with responsibility for the suffering they brought to the modern world: in truth, suffering and atrocity is always present, it is more true than any abstract idea of nation or creed.”
Camus entertains the idea that of all we experience in this world, suffering is the only thing that is true. But he also gives fair play to the possibility that suffering is rather only the gateway to truth, that truth can only be attained by those who head straight on into Hell and aren’t afraid. While Die Pest is not as enjoyable to read or even as well written as Der Fremde, the fact that Camus can find room in one story for two worldviews so powerful and contradictory makes this the better of the two books.

Addition: My latest Christmas Cartoon

2007-02-19T01:12:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest in a series of Christmas cartoons I've been sending out to friends.

Japan, A Short History

2007-02-19T01:11:00.000-08:00

by Mikiso Hane
2000, Oneworld, Oxford

30 January 2007 . Pages 1-70 of 212.

I get really carried away sometimes wanting to take in a lot of information, dipping into way too many books at one time. This is especially true when I’m working on a book or play. I want to create a broad base of knowledge for myself because I like books by authors who seem to be geniuses, such as Thomas Pynchon, Gore Vidal or Norman Rush. Never mind that I’m hindered with being a slow reader with an only moderately retentive memory. Never mind that as I’ve grown up, I realize these writers often trip themselves up on their own erudition; still, there’s something in me that feels a novel should be a vast collage of facts and ideas from many different disciplines. So I’ll go to the library and grab a lot of books off the shelf. When I was less mature, I’d have grabbed some ancient, voluminous history of Japan, which would probably have been jammed from preface to appendix with raw data. But wanting to keep my sanity, I know that it’s a wiser first step to go with a book like Mikiso Hane’s, which is at least manageable that you can get through it and feel you still have time left over for having a life.
Of course, a book like this requires a lot of concentration and a lot of imagination. You can’t drop a stitch. For the novice, every concept and historical figure is new, so you have to keep close track of them all as they're introduced. What’s a Shοen, who were the Takugawa, and what roles did the two play in relation to the Bakufu? Blink and you’ll miss the definitions, and so you have to either be constantly flipping back or you have to make the compromise of skimming forward and just getting an intuitive overview of the shape of the thing. Maybe that’s the most productive way to approach a book like this: even if you’re not trying to memorize the entire labyrinth of Japanese history, you get a sense of the ball game of history, the way that chaotic free-for-alls resolve into stable hegemonies, and the way these hegemonies decay. Some interesting things to me so far have been: the fact that even though the Japanese have long viewed the Emperor as a godlike figure, he’s usually had very little real power; the early conversion of hundreds of thousands of Japanese to Christianity; the plight of the peasantry, which suffered famines so harsh that mass cannibalism may have occurred; the Confucian-influenced caste-system, which included an “untouchable” caste called the burakumin; and the various sects and divisions of Buddhism, including Mahayana, which focuses on the compassionate Bodhisattvas, the Nichiren Sect, which extolled the power of meditative chanting, and the Jodo school, which believed that merely by saying the name of a gracious Bodhisattva, Amida, with true devotion, one can gain salvation. I do wish that there were more attention given to art and culture. We get a quote from Hokusai and learn that Hiroshige was a master of depicting the various different effects of light, but it seems that in order to put art into its own perspective you have to somehow approach the artist’s own inner conflicts and social relationships with the same attention you pay to the intrigues that take place between the samurai and the imperial court.
(The brief description of Hiroshige made me take a good look at a set of postcards of his prints, compiled out by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and published by Pomegranate in San Francisco. It’s definitely worth looking at. I especially enjoy the way he’ll often put objects in the extreme foreground, as though the viewer’s face is just inches away from them. For instance, one scene is a rice paddy as viewed through the gaps in a stand of irises; in another scene, a descending raptor fills the top of the picture and the remainder of the scene is a distant, snowy landscape.)

18 February 2007, pp. 70-136

As history progresses toward the present, Mikiso Hane seems more in his element. This is especially true of the social history of Japan, i.e., the conditions of abject poverty endured by many. The section about factory workers during the late Meiji Era is a study in brutality, and it ought to ring a bell for people today who get a little anxious with the way “globalization” seems primarily to be about the dismantling of social safety nets. The section on factory workers takes us on a guided tour through some of the vicious cycles and catch-22s that characterize the condition of workers in that time. The system described seems not just unfair and dishonest, but also intentionally sadistic. High rates of injury in factories were blamed on workers’ “carelessness.” Workers with cholera were sometimes burned alive. Contrast this with the obscenely wealthy zaibatsu (basically the dominant corporate interests in Japan at the time) and you begin to see the scope of the economic tensions at play.
The subject of labor history brings up the subject of another book I read recently, Thomas Pynchon’s "Against the Day", which focuses largely on the frictions between a Colorado mining family and the family of plutocrats who set out to cause their downfall. If you’re not a fan of Pynchon you can skip this paragraph. What struck me about Day is that Pynchon, who tends to revel in ambiguity and intellectual game playing has come down so solidly on the side of the workers and anarchists of the period. Pynchon’s historical fiction is a lot more fun than a lot of the “straight” stuff that’s out there because he presents conspiracy theories, tabloid hoaxes and pure invention on the same footing as “legitimate” fact, and he does so for a good purpose: to take away the drab shroud of dignity that we usually bring to the past in literature. But in Against the Day, Pynchon seems much more careful about preserving some dignity when it comes to the workers’ movement at the turn-of-the-century. He does this, I think, because he sees this part of history as the bedrock reality, and the story of presidencies, the rise and fall of economic and cultural institutions, and even the progress of science more as fictions and myths that may be freely tampered with. Furthermore, the sweeping “global” aspect of the book that seems to have annoyed so many readers seems to turn things inside out and show us that history might be easier understood if we see the most exploited and oppressed peoples as composing a cohesive, underlying fabric whose wholeness is compromised and distorted by the patterns of nationality and hierarchy that are stitched on from above. That’s a clunky description on my part; suffice it to say that because of Pynchon’s book, I’m looking for different things in Mikiso Hane’s book than I would have otherwise.
The no-nonsense style of the book (no illustrations, no maps, very little biographical background and only a handful of illustrative quotes from the people involved) is necessary to keep the book slim and manageable, but it does make it hard to keep track of the many players who seemed to act as midwives to the transition of Japan from a feudalistic to a more modern government. I wonder if this might not be more appropriate to our era: after all, with internet access as long as you have at your disposal names such as Okubo Toshimichi and Yamagata Aritomo, all you need to do is type in the name and you’ll have a wealth of graphic information right on your screen. Will printed histories evolve towards simply being repositories of keywords that can be looked up online for further details?
One other thing to say is that once the Meiji Era starts, the coverage of artistic and intellectual developments becomes much more comprehensive and interesting. The description of Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s disturbing Jigokumon (The Hell Screen) is enough to make me want to seek the story out on my next trip to the library.

14 March 2007: p. 136 to end.

Hane has written some other history books, some of which deal with postwar Japanese history. His short history shows how differently he regards the story before and after the war. Before the war, whether we’re talking about prehistory, the days of the shogun, or the battles of WWII, all questions are essentially answered. After the war, however, mysteries still exist. Why did Japan become such an economic powerhouse? What is the relationship between Japanese corporations and yakuza?
This isn’t intellectual dishonesty; it’s a matter of perspective. From the point of a historian of recent events, bygone centuries have to stand as a pedestal upon which our own period must stand that we might view it. What’s amazing is that Hane has managed to look back so far, and tell the story in such detail. He’s not exactly consistent: each period has its own focus, based on what he thinks is the most significant arena of development. But overall, we get an amazing glimpse of how a student of history can trace lines of cause and event from the oldest available archaeological data to the present day without exhausting his or her mortal capacity.
I like the way that Hane affords himself a single sentence of punditry and commentary when he notes that the militarists and nationalists who led the charge into WWII and who sent soldiers to war sat safe in Tokyo while their soldiers die, as leaders during war almost always do.
And it’s interesting to see the way that many of those people and forces who led the nation into war managed to slip back into power once the war was over—although alliegences had changed (in line with the new Cold War) and progress had been made on issues such as suffrage for women.
One thing that’s missing from the book is a study of the environmental side of Japan’s history, which is a shame because Japan faces so many challenges that force it to walk an ecological tightrope that other industrialized nations have not been forced to.

Ahab’s Wife, or the Star Gazer

2007-02-19T01:10:00.000-08:00

by Sara Jeter Naslund, 1999. Perennial, NY

24 January 2007 – up to page 192 of 666

For me, this book didn’t start to take off until Una Spenser—the title character and the narrator—trades in her button boots for a pair of flat-soled men’s shoes in order to pass herself off as a cabin boy on the ship Sussex. The story of a woman taking on a disguise in order to gain entrance into the restricted world of men is one we’re all with. Una herself, an exceedingly clever young woman, is able to list off a string of examples from literature and history.
The device is so powerful in historical fiction because it’s such a concentrated act of rebellion: by crossing the gender line and putting herself to all the tests of seafaring life, Una defies the prejudice of her age. And because up until this point the character’s mental and emotional development have been so carefully recorded, it’s exciting to see the character enter into a whole sphere of experience that would normally be cut off from her. In order to prove herself to prospective employer Captain Fry, Una must climb to the top of the ship’s rigging, which she readily does, using the strength she gained from climbing the lighthouse on the tiny New England island where she spent her late childhood. As she climbs the rigging, it feels as though not only Una but also Naslund is going through a rite of passage, a transition from one style of literature to another. The early sections of the book, dealing with Una’s life at the foot of the lighthouse, represents one style of fiction in which the action is primarily in the mind. We witness Una’s psychological development, enjoy watching her exploration of the senses and her evolving sense of her connection to others and of her own mortality. It’s the realm of Jane Austen, and as with Austin’s characters, there’s a sense that Una’s intelligence and imagination are enough to give her freedom even within the confines of a cozy and withdrawn domestic life. But there’s also a sense of regret at the fact that Una has to experience so much vicariously. As with Austen’s characters, Una is faced with a romantic choice between two potential suitors, the bookish Giles and his more ruddy and emotional companion Kit. In choosing between them, it’s as though Una also has to admit her limitations, because her choice is between two lives she might only experience vicariously, waiting patiently for them to return to her after their trip to sea on a whaling vessel. And so it’s a palpable relief when she simply cuts the Gordian knot and joins the crew of the same vessel.
I’m interested in this idea that there are two parallel literatures, one for men and one for women. Clearly, this is true of juvenile books—Tom Swift is for boys, Little Women is for girls. The same divide exists in adult literature, but we’re a little less comfortable speaking about it. Moby Dick, which is almost bereft of woman players, is probably the least ambiguously male book you could choose—and yet we’re taught that this book is a classic of universal importance. Little Women? Well, that’s a classic of girl’s fiction, but if a guy doesn’t read it, no one will tell him he’s missing out.
And yet on the other side of the divide, there’s a growing sense that the actual life of literature lies with woman readers and woman authors, and the fact that men tend to have an aversion for things that are “for women” is seen as more an emotional and intellectual handicap than anything else. Let the men stay out at sea, stranded on the doomed Pequod, while the real work and truth of life goes on shoreside.
So the way I see it now is that in writing Ahab’s Wife, Naslund is striking a much deserved blow at the haughty prejudice represented by Moby Dick, but she’s also making a conscious effort to reach out and bridge a divide. Essentially, she’s saying that Herman Melville is still worth reading, that the book is not the moribund repository of stale thinking one might suspect. All it needs is a fresh set of eyes, a fresh population of readers, used to a different tradition and ready to see something that all the scholarly experts have missed.

30 January 2007: pp. 193-242 of 666

What bothered me about the first part of the book was how pristine and utopian everything seemed to be. After a twelve-year-old Una expresses doubt as to God’s existence her fundamentalist Christian father starts acting threateningly toward her. Fortunately, she has an aunt and uncle who are extremely liberal and very kind. They oppose slavery, they don’t slaughter their livestock, they encourage their daughter Frannie to explore the world around her. It corresponds a little too well to the sort of wishes that a late-20th-century humanist would have for the world, but it doesn’t jibe too well with accounts I’ve read about the realities of pre-Civil War progressives, who often mixed a heroic opposition to slavery and support of women’s rights with a dour and constricting Puritanism and an often abortive naïveté when it came to managing their own finances. (For more on this subject, study the history of Oberlin College).
If Una were to go forth from this utopian upbringing like some angel shedding rays of enlightenment into her backward era, teaching valuable life lessons about tolerance to a 19th-Century America just a little too dim to catch on to the blindingly obvious fact that we should all just accept ourselves for who we are, this would be a pretty silly and fluffy book. It almost seems that this will be the case; the Captain of the Sussex seems as enlightened a mariner as one could hope to set sail with. When confronted with the actual business of capturing and slaughtering a whale, Una is revulsed in a way that seems haughty, far too much like the save-the-whales mentality that evolved in later times, far too different from the way Herman Melville’s enthusiasm for all things that had to do with the whaling trade. There’s even a scene where Una and her two suitors, Kit and Giles, are able to steal away below-decks for a late-night faux picnic with stolen wine and cheese. It seems here like the narrative is going to skirt easily away from the tough issues of inhumanity and oppression that confront anyone who looks seriously at the past, if not the present.
But Naslund is playing a more sophisticated game. Having just weathered a rough patch of storm, the ship’s crew lets out a collective sigh of relief. “. . . [R]eally, we felt the need of nothing. . . Nonetheless, we were a whaling ship, and to complete our completeness if that is a possible idea, we began to watch eagerly, again, for a whale.”
In a scene that is (intentionally, I think) almost cribbed from the end of Moby Dick, the ship is destroyed by an enraged whale, and goes down. Three open boats are left out at sea, they get separated. They’re too far from land to have a realistic hope of survival. In the end, Una and her two friends, Giles and Kit, murder their fellow boat-mates and drink their blood to survive. They’re rescued after a month at sea, and come aboard the Albatross, a vessel whose caring crew nurses the castaways back to health in yet another show of civilized compassion—but our heroes can’t forget the evil they’ve partaken in. Eventually, Giles falls from the high rigging and drown. It’s unclear whether it’s suicide or an accident.
It may seem a little twisted to think that this sort of thing should happen. I remember once when I was at a book fair, a potential customer asked me why it was that fiction tends always to be so dark. I’m not sure I understand this myself. A couple of quotes I tend to keep in mind: in the introduction to Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon says that the serious of a book is determined by the way it deals with death. And in his introduction to the short-story collection Bagombo Snuff Box, Kurt Vonnegut encourages writers to make terrible things happen to their characters, “So that we can see what they’re made of.”

6 February 2007: pp. 242-456.

I’m afraid that the deeper I get in this book, the more my initial excitement turns to lukewarm appreciation. The breaking point came for me when our protagonist, Una, finally comes together with Ahab after seeing him confess his love and inner torment to the flames of a burning building. Unfortunately, Ahab is due to ship out the next day, so he leaves his newfound wife with a purse full of money and instructions to shop exuberantly. Is this supposed to be a spoof of the modern credit-card-as-therapy genre of fiction? It almost seems so, but the joke doesn’t really bear fruit. In a way, Una’s reaction to coming into wealth is supposed to show that she’s a person whose intellectual refinement is reflected in material taste, much like in Edgar Allen Poe’s essay about interior decorating. But while Poe’s article was meant to stand alone, Una’s new identity as a shopaholic dilutes the tale of passion and self-discovery that this novel had the potential to be.
There are other things that fall short of the mark. For instance, Ahab’s sermon to the flames reads more like a freshman composition on the theme of “What would a sea captain say when he’s in love?” than something that comes from the heart. Likewise, Ahab’s letter to Una from the Pequod is filled with forced references to Shakespeare’s Sonnets and with descriptions of the process of ambergris formation that are more informative but less jazzy and interesting than Ishmael’s dissertations about all things aquatic in Moby Dick.
That being said, it’s not as though I feel I’m wasting my time with this book. It’s a good piece of work, and Naslund clearly has something to say about the value of tolerance and kindness. More and more, Una resembles one of those Jane Austin characters who, with her force of wit and maturity, is able to set things straight in the lives of all those around her. She uses her wealth to help set things right with her friend Charlotte, and she acts as a confessor for the troubled bounty hunter David, who guides through the forest and back from Kentucky to Nantucket. Una even learns to overcome her intolerance for religion in order to befriend the escaped slave Susan, who attributes her newfound freedom to divine intervention.
But Una doesn’t have the impetuousness of Emma. Her progress through life seems as calm and well measured as the pace of her narration. At no point do I feel overwhelmed, and feeling overwhelmed is one of my favorite parts about reading good fiction. Whereas Emma seemed so full of vivacity that it was hard to imagine a world that could contain her, Una seems to be in a perpetual process of settling down, even when she comes face-to-face with major hardship. When, on her shopping trip, Una meets up with Margaret Fuller (a real-life historical figure who espoused feminism in the 19th century), you can tell that this is supposed to be a mentor-student relationship, but Fuller seems to have little to impart in terms of real wisdom. All we see is a sort of cosmopolitan aspect of sophistication and a deft command of literary references from various languages.
One of the things that interested me about this book is the possibilities that arise when a modern author “revisits” a classic work of fiction and expands on characters and events that would otherwise have remained marginal. I think the best example of this is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which manages to create a parallel world that both complements that of Hamlet and is capable of standing on its own two feet. So far, Ahab’s Wife is mainly demonstrating that this is a tricky literary feat not everyone’s capable of.

14 February 2007

pp. 456-574

There’s a really interesting part of the book. I’m not completely sure why, but I see it as the best example of what’s wrong with Naslund’s book as a whole. While trying to track down her friend and mentor Margaret Fuller, Una comes afoul of a mysterious figure who, it seems, is Nathaniel Hawthorne. He seems a clownish figure who takes himself far too seriously. When asked what he writes, instead of giving a real answer, he merely quotes a single sentence, completely out of context: “I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.” Una is immediately struck by the sentence. Hawthorne (?) asks her, “What associations does it set to resonating?” And then Una rattles on for about two pages, dissecting every little piece of the sentence, from the coincidental reference to whaling and a woman named Susan (the same name as Una’s best friend) down to the references to love, domesticity and a relationship to nature. Finally, Una goes into a reverie about the sound of the sentence itself, especially the profusions of “s” sounds.
Where to begin? First of all, this seems to be Naslund showing off something special that she’s learned in the academic study of literature. A sentence is actually a jewel box, but it takes a special person to note the richness that lies within. Una, we’re supposed to believe, is this rare sort of person. I think Naslund intends this interchange between Una and Hawthorne to be the sort of thing that young writers will copy down verbatim and turn to whenever they want to remind themselves the true potentials of language and expression, or something like that. Unfortunately, she doesn’t pull it off, not by a long shot. What happens is that the character of Una who was being carefully developed earlier in the novel is compromised and diluted because Naslund wants to show off her idea of what a wonderful, well rounded 19th century woman should have been like. Similarly, when Una meets the father–daughter team of naturalists, the Mitchells, she instantly pops out a couple of impressive sounding observations about the digging habits of squirrels and the weather patterns in Kentucky, observations that she’d made on her own while growing up. We’re supposed to think, What raw talent and potential this young girl had. But what we wind up thinking is: Where did this come from? Since when did Una start caring so much about squirrels and storm patterns?
In another sense, Naslund uses the scene as a criticism of Hawthorne. He’s too puritanical, too mean-spirited. This could be a fair criticism. I haven’t read much Hawthorne, and I don’t know much about him. I do know that he supported Herman Melville in turning Moby Dick into the ambitious project it became, so maybe Naslund is hinting that if not for Hawthorne’s influence, Moby Dick would have been a more sensitive story, more representative of the harmonious balance between humanity and nature that Una supposedly represents.
What I remember about reading Hawthorne is that, while it wasn’t always the most interesting reading, it at least had a sense of tension. As a reader, I moved through dense paragraphs of description because they seemed to fit together into a story that meant something. "The Scarlet Letter," for instance: Descriptions of the woods and old mansions, suits of armor and grim colonial meetings all seemed to come together to form a background that seemed necessary for the main story of hypocrisy and damnation. The language was overwrought, but it seemed to serve a purpose other than drawing attention to its own prettiness.
I think that the central flaw of Ahab’s Wife is in making Una both the main character and the narrator. Not that you can’t have a main character who narrates her own life, but in this book it doesn’t work because Naslund’s intention is to create a sort of paragon of enlightened womanhood. Because Una is telling a story designed to show off her own virtues, she comes off as a vain person who is perhaps dishonest even with herself of her vanity. The idea of grief keeps cropping up in the novel—Una loses her first husband, her mother, her first child. But she never really seems to be hit by the simple pain that real people associate with suffering. Rather, we have long meditations on such things as the ocean and the moon and the stars that seem like attempts to come up with as many frilly, elegant sentences as possible. Grief serves only as an excuse to make pretty metaphors (“Like funeral cloves are these stars, spiky and spicy. Like cloves in an orange, they are the preservers of the skin and of the black flesh of space.”) In real life, of course, grief is something demanding—it can overwhelm us and sap our strength. But if Una was ever overwhelmed by grief, she might seem less perfect and more human, and in the end, it seems like that’s a sacrifice Naslund is not willing to make.

20 February 2007; page 574-end.

There’s not a whole lot I have to add about this book. As the plot progresses, the number of characters who seem nothing but excuses to bring up “interesting” subject matter increases. For example, Una’s friends the Mitchells allow ponderings about astronomy to be added to all the other ponderings that gather like barely used playthings in a storage shed of superfluous metaphor. Characters who once had some promise, such as young cousin Frannie or bounty hunter David Poland, return as lifeless functionaries to whatever purpose Naslund thinks this book serves. The only story that’s really moving is that of Susan, the escaped slave we meet at the beginning of the book. Other than her struggle to reunite with her still enslaved mother, I get the sense that the only thing in this story worth worrying about is Una’s peace of mind, and as even the death of a beloved husband Ahab seems barely to rattle her for a moment from her even keel, I was confident that Una’s peace of mind was never really in question. Near the end of the book Naslund provides a “twist” ending that I won’t give away except to say that no one really cares how much of a twist you put into a limp noodle.