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
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.
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.
The Anchorage International Film Festival 2007
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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