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