Month: July 2023

Patient with the French | From Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir Family Lexicon

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In the autumn, I went with my mother to visit Mario, who was now living in a small town near Clermont-Ferrand. He was teaching in a boarding school. He had become great friends with the school’s headmaster and his wife. He said that they were extraordinary people, very sophisticated and honest, the kind of people you could only find in France. In his small room he had a coal stove. From his window you could see the countryside covered in snow. Mario wrote long letters to Chiaromonte and Cafi in Paris. He translated Herodotus and fiddled with the stove. Under his jacket, he wore a dark turtleneck sweater that the headmaster’s wife had made for him. To thank her, he’d given her a sewing basket. Everyone in the town knew him. He stopped and chatted with everyone and he was asked by all to come home with them and drink “le vin blanc.”

My mother said, “How French he’s become!”

In the evenings, he played cards with the headmaster and his wife. He listened to their conversations and discussed educational methods with them. They also spoke a long time about whether or not there had been enough onion in the soup served at dinner.

“How patient he’s become!” my mother said. “How patient he is with these people. With us he never had any patience. Whenever he was home, he thought we were all so boring. These people seem even more boring than we are!”

And she said, “He’s patient with them only because they’re French!”

From Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 memoir Lessico famigliare, in translation (under the title Family Lexicon) by Jenny McPhee.

 

Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory is an abject coming-of-age novel narrated by a teenage psychopath

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Frank Cauldhame, the narrator of Iain Banks’s 1984 debut novel The Wasp Factory, is a teenage psychopath. Frank lives with his eccentric father on an island in rural Scotland. He is an unregistered person with “no birth certificate, no National Insurance number,” nothing to officially prove his existence. He enjoys this unofficial existence, patrolling his island, which he protects through various rituals.

One of these rituals is to construct and maintain “Sacrifice Poles,” and when we first meet Frank, he is “making the rounds” of these talismans: “One of the Poles held a rat head with two dragonflies, the other a seagull and two mice.” Frank has to keep plenty of dead animals on hand for his ritual defenses, and he kills them by slingshot, air-gun, explosives, and even an improvised flamethrower. (Readers sensitive to depictions of animal cruelty, or just cruelty in general, may wish to avoid The Wasp Factory.)

Another of Frank’s rituals consists of sacrificing a live wasp to the titular Wasp Factory (“beautiful and deadly and perfect,” in our narrator’s words). Frank has devised the Wasp Factory as a bizarre death trap built from “the face of the old clock which used to hang over the door of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Porteneil.” Once introduced to the Factory, the poor wasp can fall prey to one of a dozen different deaths, including the Boiling Pool, the Spider’s Parlour, the Acid Pit, or even “the rather jocularly named Gents (where the instrument of ending is [Frank’s] own urine, usually quite fresh).”

Frank’s urine becomes an important motif in The Wasp Factory. We learn fairly early that he is a “unique eunuch,” supposed victim of a dog bite accident that has left him forever unmanned (and deeply misogynistic). Our lad must piss sitting down, a shame he accepts with a hateful forbearance. Urine flows throughout the novel, an abject magical potion.

Indeed, Frank’s rituals frequently call for the most abject residues and excretions for the magic to work. Consider the Naming Ceremony he performs for a new weapon he’s purchased:

I smeared the metal, rubber and plastic of the new device with earwax, snot, blood, urine, belly-button fluff and toenail cheese, christened it by firing the empty sling at a wingless wasp crawling on the face of the Factory, and also fired it at my bared foot, raising a bruise.

Parts of me thought all this was nonsense, but they were in a tiny minority. The rest of me knew this sort of thing worked. It gave me power, it made me part of what I own and where I am. It makes me feel good.

Were it not for the animal cruelty, Frank’s rituals, no matter how abject, might be the stuff of antic children’s games–playing war, building dams, shooting pellets at cans, and so forth. But the ritualized animal murders are part and parcel of Frank’s most sadistic crimes. He is a serial killer.

Frank confesses his crimes early in The Wasp Factory, and the Scribner trade paperback edition uses his confession as copy on the back of the book to entice would-be readers, so I don’t think I’ll spoil much by sharing it:

Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.

That’s my score to date. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again.

It was just a stage I was going through.

The punchline there at the end is indicative of the dark humor that pervades The Wasp Factory. The edition I’m quoting includes blurbs from negative reviews as well, again highlighting Banks’s mordant glee with the monster he’s conjured. “Rubbish!” declares The Times of London; “There’s nothing to force you, having been warned, to read it; nor do I recommend it,” warns The Scotsman.

Elsewhere, Banks’s humor is earthier, as when Frank recounts some of the early days of his homeschooling at the hands of his ex-hippy chemist father:

For years I believed Pathos was one of the Three Musketeers, Fellatio was a character in Hamlet, Vitreous a town in China, and that the Irish peasants had to tread the peat to make Guinness.

There’s also a sweet streak to the book as well as Frank himself, who, despite his psychotic behavior, is a genuinely caring person at times. His relationship to his only friend, a dwarf named Jamie, is damn near tender; Frank perches Jamie on his shoulders so that the latter can better see the awful punk bands at the local pub.

Frank also cares deeply for his older brother Eric. In the first line of the novel, we learn that Eric has “escaped”; we soon learn he’s escaped from a psychiatric ward he’d been sent to after terrorizing the town folk. Eric’s insane crimes also involve animal cruelty: burning local dogs; force-feeding children worms.

The plot of The Wasp Factory is actually quite simple: What will happen when Eric comes home? Banks keeps the pot boiling through a series of phone calls Eric makes to Frank. We come to see that while Frank might be a psychopath, he is not insane in the way that his older brother is. (A late reveal in the novel that explains the cause of Eric’s insanity is one of the most disgusting pieces of prose I’ve ever read (I write this in admiration.)) In the meantime, Frank attempts to break into the office door that his father has always kept locked.

These twin plots—prodigal son coming home, daddy’s secret locked door—drive the action of The Wasp Factory (oh, and Frank’s basement is full of explosive cordite, too). The book’s real weight comes not from the plot, but from Frank’s narration. He’s a perceptive intelligence, and tuning into his voice is by turns mesmerizing and horrifying.

Not everyone will enjoy The Wasp Factory, as I’ve tried to make as clear as possible in this review. To borrow from The Scotsman, “There’s nothing to force you, having been warned, to read it.” And even admirers may find the twist ending a bit dated and the final moments of Frank’s deep reflection a bit rushed. But Banks does give the reader a conclusion, when it might have been so much easier to leave his characters (and readers) in a noncommittal fuzz of ambiguity. There’s a point of view here, even if it disturbs. The Wasp Factory is a truly fucked up coming-of-age novel, an abject anti-Huckleberry Finn whose narrator makes Holden Caulfield seem perfectly well adjusted. Not for everyone, but I loved it. Recommended.

All inextricably linked to those words and phrases | From Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon

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 My parents had five children. We now live in different cities, some of us in foreign countries, and we don’t write to each other often. When we do meet up we can be indifferent or distracted. But for us it takes just one word. It takes one word, one sentence, one of the old ones from our childhood, heard and repeated countless times. All it takes is for one of us to say “We haven’t come to Bergamo on a military campaign,” or “Sulfuric acid stinks of fart,” and we immediately fall back into our old relationships, our childhood, our youth, all inextricably linked to those words and phrases. If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past, they’re like Egyptian or Assyro-Babylonian hieroglyphics, evidence of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts, saved from the fury of the waters, the corrosion of time. Those phrases are the basis of our family unity and will persist as long as we are in the world, re-created and revived in disparate places on the earth whenever one of us says, “Most eminent Signor Lipmann,” and we immediately hear my father’s impatient voice ringing in our ears: “Enough of that story! I’ve heard it far too many times already!”

From Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 memoir Lessico famigliare, in translation (under the title Family Lexicon) by Jenny McPhee.

I love this book so far, and this passage may come as close as anything to an early thesis for what Ginzburg is doing. I suppose, too, I deeply identify with this idea, this notion of phrases, saying, quips, in jokes, etc., as the psychological basis of familial identification.

Cortazar/Crowley/Ford (Books acquired, 27 July 2023)

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I went to the bookstore today looking for a copy of Katherine Burdekin’s dystopian 1937 novel Swastika Night. I was unsuccessful there, but while browsing the scifi and fantasy section, I came across three books that I couldn’t resist.

The first was an unread hardcover first edition of John M. Ford’s 1983 novel The Dragon Waiting. This book was only on my radar because Slate republished a 2019 article on Ford by Isaac Butler and a friend sent me the link (his message was simply “?”). From Butler’s article:

The Dragon Waiting is an unfolding cabinet of wonders. Over a decade before George R.R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, Ford created an alternate-history retelling of the Wars of the Roses, filled with palace intrigue, dark magic, and more Shakespeare references than are dreamt of in our philosophy. The Dragon Waiting provokes that rare thrill that one gets from the work of Gene Wolfe, or John Crowley, or Ursula Le Guin. A dazzling intellect ensorcells the reader, entertaining with one hand, opening new doors with another.

Wolfe blurbed the back cover of the copy I bought, by the way.

Maybe Crowley was in my subconscious too; while searching for Swastika Night under the Cs (it was first published under the pseudonym “Murray Constantine”), I came across a cheap hardcover copy of Crowley’s 1976 novel Beasts. I’d read Little, Big years ago, enjoyed it, but gone no further. (There were no copies of Little, Big in Crowley’s placarded section, all though I did find three copies in the “General Fiction” section, away from the beautiful weird scifi fantasy ghetto.)

I’ve long been a sucker for the mass market Avon Bard Latin American writers series, so I couldn’t pass up the copy of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (translated by Gregory Rabassa). It sat upon a miscellaneous, dusty stack of outcasts in the middle of the “D” aisle in the scifi fantasy ghetto, waiting for me.

 

Reclining Nude Reading — Felice Casorati

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Reclining Nude Reading, 1943 by Felice Casorati (1883–1963)

“Nervous,” a very short story by Robert Walser

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“Nervous”

by

Robert Walser

translated by Christopher Middleton

I am a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden, shot full of holes. Mortars have mortared me to bits. I am a little crumbly, decaying, yes, yes. I am sinking and drying up a little. I am a bit scalded and scorched, yes, yes. That’s what it does to you. That’s life. I am not old, not in the least, certainly I am not eighty, by no means, but I am not sixteen any more either. Quite definitely I am a bit old and used up. That’s what it does to you. I am decaying a little, and I am crumbling, peeling a little. That’s life. Am I a little bit over the hill? Hmm! Maybe. But that doesn’t make me eighty, not by a long way. I am very tough, I can vouch for that. I am no longer young, but I am not old yet, definitely not. I am aging, fading a little, but that doesn’t matter; I am not yet altogether old, though I am probably a little nervous and over the hill. It’s natural that one should crumble a bit with the passage of time, but that doesn’t matter. I am not very nervous, to be sure, I just have a few grouches. Sometimes I am a bit weird and grouchy, but that doesn’t mean I am altogether lost, I hope. I don’t propose to hope that I am lost, for I repeat, I am uncommonly hard and tough. I am holding out and holding on. I am fairly fearless. But nervous I am, a little, undoubtedly I am, very probably I am, possibly I am a little nervous. I hope that I am a little nervous. No, I don’t hope so, one doesn’t hope for such things, but I am afraid so, yes, afraid so. Fear is more appropriate here than hope, no doubt about it. But I certainly am not fear-stricken, that I might be nervous, quite definitely not. I have grouches, but I am not afraid of the grouches. They inspire me with no fear at all. “You are nervous,” someone might tell me, and I would reply cold-bloodedly, “My dear sir, I know that quite well, I know that I am a little worn out and nervous.” And I would smile, very nobly and coolly, while saying this, which would perhaps annoy the other person a little. A person who refrains from getting annoyed is not yet lost. If I do not get annoyed about my nerves, then undoubtedly I still have good nerves, it’s clear as daylight, and illuminating. It dawns on me that I have grouches, that I am a little nervous, but it dawns on me in equal measure that I am cold-blooded, which makes me uncommonly glad, and that I am blithe in spirit, although I am aging a little, crumbling and fading, which is quite natural and something I therefore understand very well. “You are nervous,” someone might come up to me and say. “Yes, I am uncommonly nervous,” would be my reply, and secretly I would laugh at the big lie. “We are all a little nervous,” I would perhaps say, and laugh at the big truth. If a person can still laugh, he is not yet entirely nervous; if a person can accept a truth, he is not yet entirely nervous; anyone who can keep calm when he hears of some distress is not yet entirely nervous. Or if someone came up to me and said: “Oh, you are totally nervous,” then quite simply I would reply in nice polite terms: “Oh, I am totally nervous, I know I am.” And the matter would be closed. Grouches, grouches, one must have them, and one must have the courage to live with them. That’s the nicest way to live. Nobody should be afraid of his little bit of weirdness. Fear is altogether foolish. “You are very nervous!” “Yes, come by all means and calmly tell me so! Thank you!”

That, or something like it, is what I’d say, having my gentle and courteous bit of fun. Let man be courteous, warm, and kind, and if someone tells him he’s totally nervous, still there’s no need at all for him to believe it.

The Cinema — James Boswell

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The Cinema, 1939 by James Boswell (1906-1971)

“Double Escape” — Moebius

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“Blown Away” — Tom Clark

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Riff on Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

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Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1975 volume The Wind’s Twelve Quarters collects seventeen short stories, offering, as the author puts it in her foreword, “a retrospective” of her career to date: “a roughly chronological survey of my short stories during the first ten years after I broke into print.” Le Guin adds that The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is “by no means a complete collection” of her short stories to date, and that the book does not include “fiction which doesn’t fit under the headings Fantasy or Science Fiction.” In addition to her foreword, Le Guin offers brief introductory notes to each of the seventeen tales.

For me, these introductions were often as interesting as the stories themselves. In her introduction to “Semley’s Necklace,” for example, Le Guin declares that the “candor and simplicity” of this early story exemplifies the “romanticism” characteristic of her early work — a mode that has “gradually become something harder, stronger, and more complex” as her career developed. In her introduction to “The Good Trip,” she tells us that her “only strong opinion about drugs (pot, hallucinogens, alcohol) is anti-prohibition and pro-education” but also admits that “people who expand their consciousness by living instead of by taking chemicals usually come back with much more interesting reports of where they’ve been.” In her intro to “Nine Lives,” which was originally published in Playboy in 1968, Le Guin laments that it appeared “under the only pen name I have ever used: U. K. Le Guin,” and that it is “surprising to me to realize how thoughtlessly I went along with them. It was the first (and is the only) time I met with anything I understood as sexual prejudice, prejudice against me as a woman writer, from any editor or publisher; and it seemed so silly, so grotesque, that I failed to see that it was also important.” In her introduction for “A Trip to the Head,” Le Guin describes a dark bout of writers block she experienced over a period of two years living in England. Giving herself permission to write “A Trip to the Head” released the block:

There is a kind of story which I would describe as a Bung Puller. The writer for one reason or another has been stuck, can’t work; and gets started again suddenly, with a pop, and a lot of beer comes leaping out of the keg and foaming all over the floor. This story was definitely a Bung Puller.

“A Trip to the Head” is one of the very few examples in the collection where the introductory material outweighs the tale it introduces. The story starts promisingly enough:

“Yes, this is Earth,” said the one beside him, “nor are you out of it. In Zambia men are rolling down hills inside barrels as training for space flight. Israel and Egypt have defoliated each other’s deserts. The Reader’s Digest has bought a controlling interest in the United States of America/General Mills combine. The population of the Earth is increasing by thirty billion every Thursday. Mrs Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis will marry Mao Tse-Tung on Saturday, in search of security; and Russia has contaminated Mars with bread mold.”

“Why then,” said he, “nothing has changed.”

—but then Le Guin makes good on that “nothing has changed” idea, even as, paradoxically, her story’s undefined protagonist transforms through a series of identities. “A Trip to the Head” is a postmodern experiment that doesn’t really succeed, unless, of course, you count that its creation unblocked our author.

And it’s a good thing Le Guin broke her block: some of her strongest work came after “A Trip to the Head,” including The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, and the first two Earthsea novels. Most of the stories in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters that came after “A Trip to the Head” are quite strong. 1971’s “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” part of Le Guin’s Hainish universe, tells the story of SPACE MADNESS! and a murderous empathic jungle. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) is a successful morality experiment (or “psychomyth,” to use Le Guin’s term). “Omelas” proposes a utopia where “millions [are] kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment.” In her introduction, Le Guin attributes this riff on the scapegoat to William James’s essay “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (although she concedes that she first read the scenario in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov). “Omelas” is a highlight of The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, as is 1974’s “The Day Before the Revolution,” which details a day in the life of the aged anarchist revolutionary Odo. “The Day Before the Revolution” serves as a kind of prologue to The Dispossessed, a move that appears elsewhere in the collection.

The opening story, “Semly’s Necklace,” is quite literally the prologue to Le Guin’s first novel Rocannon’s World (1966). “Winter’s King” (1969) was the spark that led to what many consider Le Guin’s finest novel The Left Hand of Darkness (published later the same year). 1964’s “The Word of Unbinding” and “The Rule of Names” preceded the Earthsea novels that Le Guin would begin in the late sixties. While these germinal tales are intriguing, its clear the Le Guin, ever the anthropologist, would like to do more than her limited canvas can hold. These tales are most notable as ancillary material to be situated in the worlds that Le Guin would go on to conjure in a much wider scope.

Ursula K. Le Guin portrait by Henk Pander.

Some of the best stories in the collection are self-contained, even as they point to Le Guin’s developing larger themes and goals as a writer. “The Masters” (1963) is a lovely dystopian riff on power, control, and knowledge (“The theme of this story is one I returned to later, with considerably better equipment,” Le Guin remarks in her intro, adding, “It has a good sentence in it, though: ‘He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God'” — that is a good sentence!) 1970’s “Things” imagines the paranoia of a promised apocalypse, with a brickmaker turned boatbuilder and a widowed weaver providing their own imaginative resistance to the coming onslaught. 1962’s “April in Paris” is a lovely oddity—a romantic time traveling tale with a sentimental happy ending:

The alchemist and the interstellar archaeologist went first, speaking French; the Gaulish slave and the professor from Indiana followed, speaking Latin, and holding hands. The narrow streets were crowded, bright with sunshine. Above them Notre Dame reared its two square towers against the sky. Beside them the Seine rippled softly. It was April in Paris, and on the banks of the river the chestnuts were in bloom

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is not a great starting place for anyone interested in Le Guin’s worlds. Interested parties would do better to start with The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, or The Left Hand of Darkness—but interested parties are probably aware of that. The book is better suited for folks like me—folks who tore through the Hainish cycle and the Earthsea books and collections, and still wanted a little more. The Wind’s Twelve Quarters is ultimately most interesting as a document of a writer coming into the prime of her powers, and, as such, is indispensable for hardcore Le Guin fans.

Double Door — Lois Dodd

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Double Door, 1976 by Lois Dodd (b. 1927)

Moby-Dick, but just the punctuation

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Impossible Body 2 — Adrian Ghenie

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Impossible Body 2, 2022 by Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977)

“Space” — Mark Strand

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“Space”

by

Mark Strand

A beautiful woman stood at the roof-edge of one of New York’s tall midtown apartment houses. She was on the verge of jumping when a man, coming out on the roof to sunbathe, saw her. Surprised, the woman stepped back from the ledge. The man was about thirty or thirty-five and blond. He was lean, with a long upper body and short, thin legs. His black bathing suit shone like satin in the sun. He was no more than ten steps from the woman. She stared at him. The wind blew strands of her long dark hair across her face. She pulled them back and held them in place with one hand. Her white blouse and pale blue skirt kept billowing, but she paid no attention. He saw that she was barefoot and that two high-heeled shoes were placed side by side on the gravel near where she stood. She had turned away from him. The wind flattened her skirt against the front of her long thighs. He wished he could reach out and pull her toward him. The air shifted and drew her skirt tightly across her small, round buttocks; the lines of her bikini underpants showed. “I’ll take you to dinner,” he yelled. The woman turned to look at him again. Her gaze was point-blank. Her teeth were clenched. The man looked at her hands which were now crossed in front of her, holding her skirt in place. She wore no wedding band. “Let’s go someplace and talk,” he said. She took a deep breath and turned away. She lifted her arms as if she were preparing to dive. “Look,” he said, “if it’s me you’re worried about, you have nothing to fear.” He took the towel he was carrying over his shoulders and made it into a sarong. “I know it’s depressing,” he said. He was not sure what he had meant. He wondered if the woman felt anything. He liked the way her back curved into her buttocks. It struck him as simple and expressive; it suggested an appetite or potential for sex. He wished he could touch her. As if to give him some hope, the woman lowered her arms to her sides and shifted her weight. “I’ll tell you what,” the man said, “I’ll marry you.” The wind once again pulled the woman’s skirt tightly across her buttocks. “We’ll do it immediately,” he said, “and then go to Italy. We’ll go to Bologna, we’ll eat great food. We’ll walk around all day and drink grappa at night. We’ll observe the world and we’ll read the books we never had time for.” The woman had not turned around or backed off from the ledge. Beyond her lay the industrial buildings of Long Island City, the endless row houses of Queens. A few clouds moved in the distance. The man shut his eyes and tried to think of how else to change her mind. When he opened them, he saw that between her feet and the ledge was a space, a space that would always exist now between herself and the world. In the long moment when she existed before him for the last time, he thought, How lovely. Then she was gone.

Kafka diary entry, 19 July 1910

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Sunday, 19 July, slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

From Diaries, Franz Kafka; trans. by Joseph Kresh.

Bunch’s Moderan/Ginzburg’s Dry Heart (Books acquired, 14 July 2023)

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Picked up two on Friday—

I’ve been wanting to read Natalia Ginzburg for a while, and when I saw a used copy of her novella The Dry Heart (translated by Frances Frenaye), it seemed like a good entry point. It was really the description on the back that grabbed me:

The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

I read NYRB’s collected Moderan a few years ago, but I couldn’t pass up this Avon Bard mass market paperback.

Opening track:

“THINKING BACK (OUR GOD IS A HELPING GOD!)”

by

David R. Bunch

FLESH seemed doomed that year; death’s harpies were riding down. The once-beautiful, sweet and life-sustaining air was tinged with poison now, and man drank at his peril from the streams that had once been pure. He prayed to a God that was said to be in all things good, true and beautiful, but especially was thought to be all sternness and goodness, justice and loving-care, in some milk-white place far away, “On High.” And those prayers if answered were answered very obliquely indeed. For the air got deeper in poison from the tinkering with lethal things the flesh-man indulged in when not praying, and the water got fuller with danger as each new explosion pounded the bomb-fevered air. There was talk of the End; great discussions were handled in great halls across the land. Treaties were signed among statesmen to help the air get better, to allow the streams to recover and run pure once again. But even as the flesh-hands grasped the pens to scrawl the marks of good faith in some countries, fear lashed at capitals in other countries. Arsenals were tested anew. Things done were undone. The air got sicker; the streams ran not pure but pure danger—There seemed no chance for flesh-man, and his God seemed entirely silent wherever He was, wherever His white throne was. The HOPELESS signs were out everywhere. Little children asked that they be allowed to go quickly and not grow up hurting and maimed. Adults in what should have been the full flower of brave manhood and fair womanhood quaked, looked heavenward for some hopeful sign and, finding none, fell down and cried bitterly. The aged ones, quavering and whining now, finally decided that yes, truly they were most glad that they were so very old. The flesh billions courted at the Palace of Danger so ardently had turned against them and the mass wedding of Death and Destruction seemed now all but assured.

And then—and then this chance! Offered to all. It came first as small hope, the rumor of it, a faint faint breath of a chance seeping through the flesh-fouled metropolises. And then it was confirmed as glowing fact when the tour went round that year, year of the Greatest Darkness. And yet—and yet they scoffed, scoffed by the billions at this man working his hinges and braces, would not believe his heart was an ever-last one, had no credulity for his new wonderful lungs that could breathe him a forever-life even in bomb-tainted air. When they saw that his hands were steel they yelled robot! robot! When they saw that his eyes were wide-range, mechanism-helped, and that he’d a phfluggee-phflaggee button on his talker that he pressed from time to time to aid in his speech expression they laughed and yelled . . . Continue reading “Bunch’s Moderan/Ginzburg’s Dry Heart (Books acquired, 14 July 2023)” →

A review of Stone Junction, Jim Dodge’s alchemical pot-boiler

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Jim Dodge’s 1990 novel Stone Junction tells the life story of Daniel Pearse, a young man of preternatural talents and sharp intelligence who trains under various tutors in a secret society, steals an enormous diamond, and eventually attains enlightened apotheosis. A lot of other stuff happens too.

Dodge subtitled his novel An Alchemical Pot-Boiler, a description that punctures any premature accusations of pretension, yet also calls attention to the novel’s arcane subject matter. The subtitle’s also a joke, of course—Dodge invites us to read his 500-pager as a kind of alchemist’s cauldron, a kitchen sink overloaded with spies and thieves, gamblers and quick change artists, holy fools and madmen. 

And Dodge, as promised, keeps his pot boiling. Stone Junction is a propulsive and engaging read largely because of the world he imagines for Daniel to grow up in. Stone Junction isn’t a magical realism act, but magic exists here. From a very young age, Daniel is initiated into a clandestine organization called AMO. Said aloud, as a young Daniel points out, the name “AMO” is suggestive of both “ammo” and the Latin verb amo, it’s really an acronym:

AMO is the acronym for Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws – or, as some members claim, Alchemists, Magicians, and Outlaws, which they contend was the original name. Another faction, small but vocal, insists AMO has always stood for Artists, Myth-singers, and Outriders. As you might sense, there is constant and long-standing contention about AMO’s origins and development

…AMO is a secret society – though more on the order of an open secret, in fact. Basically, AMO is a historical alliance of the mildly felonious, misfits, anarchists, shamans, earth mystics, gypsies, magicians, mad scientists, dreamers, and other socially marginal souls.

After the violent and mysterious death of his mother (and his own near-death), Daniel comes under the tutelage of those dreamers and socially-marginal souls. Extended episodes of Daniel’s working and growing under a new teacher make up the bulk of Stone Junction; these inventive and enjoyable sections are the finest parts of the book. Thomas Pynchon offers a nice catalog of Daniel’s various mentors in his introduction to the 1997 reprint of Stone Junction:

Wild Bill Weber teaches meditation, fishing, waiting. Mott Stocker teaches Dope, its production and enjoyment. Ace safecracker Willie Clinton (yep) instructs the boy in how to get past all kinds of locks and alarms, rendering him thus semi-permeable to certain protected parts of the world, setting him on his path to total dematerialization. For a while Daniel teams up with poker wizard Bad Bobby Sloane, roving the American highways in search of opportunities to risk capital in ways that cannot be officially controlled… The shape-shifting genius Jean Bluer teaches Daniel the arts of disguise… At last Daniel comes circling back to Volta…who teaches him the final secret of Invisibility. None of your secular Wellsian tricks with refractive indices and blood pigmentation here, but rather the time-honored arts of ceasing to be material.

It makes sense that Pynchon (who praises Stone Junction as “an outlaw epic for our own late era of corrupted romance and defective honor”) would stick on that big “I” Invisibility, always a byword in his own novels.

Dodge’s byword in Stone Junction is another i-word: imagination. Especially in its final third, Dodge’s novel, and its characters, repeat the importance of imaginative possibility, of imagining new realities, new states of being.

Volta is the dark sage magician guiding Daniel on his quest toward imagination. Or, rather, his quest to steal an enormous, perfectly-circular diamond from the U.S. government. He might throw Daniel into a den of lions, but our boy’s an escape artist. His last name, Pearse, among other transmutations (pierce, purse, pairs), suggests Percival, one of Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. (Like Percival, Daniel is raised alone in hermetic seclusion by his solo mother.) The diamond is Daniel’s grail.

In her contemporary New York Times review of Stone Junction, Michele Slung pointed out the novel’s debt to Arthurian legends, among other sources, calling it “a post-psychedelic coming-of-age fable that’s part Thomas Pynchon, part Tolkien, part Richard Brautigan, a story that owes as much to The Once and Future King as it does to Huckleberry Finn.” Like Huck Finn, Stone Junction has a ramshackle, picaresque energy, but it nevertheless adheres to a plot, with the mystical diamond a MacGuffin for Daniel (among other thieves and spies) to quest after—once he’s matured and advanced in his outlaw skills, of course.

As I stated above, the strongest elements of Stone Junction revolve around Daniel’s adventures and training. (His time on the poker circuit with Bad Bobby Sloane is a particular highlight.) Dodge transmogrifies the raw material of American Weirdo Mythos into new inventions, zany recapitulations of occult outlaw fables.

Dodge’s prose style, while effective in its descriptions of characters, cannot quite approach the register of his imaginative inventory. The novel relies heavily on exposition, and while major characters like Volta and Bad Bobby Sloane speak with authentic and differentiated voices, a monolingual sameiness pervades too much of the prose. In its strongest moments, Stone Junction reads like a YA Pynchon novel; in its weakest moments, it reminded me of Tom Robbins.

The stronger moments prevail, however—Stone Junction is a fun, flighty, and at times unexpectedly heavy summer read. The novel might also be read in (stoned) conjunction with Pynchon’s 1990 twin Vineland. Both novels diagnose the fallout of the 1960s counterculture wave crashing against the Reagan eighties; both seem attempts to, at least in the world of letters, check the burgeoning nostalgic romanticization of that turbulent decade. Pynchon’s is the more flawed, sillier, and better-written effort; Dodge’s is likely his magnum opus.

If I’ve namechecked Pynchon too much in my review, forgive me: His name is on the cover of Jim Dodge’s novel, and his own (far more-detailed, far better-written) review precedes Jim Dodge’s novel, and his endorsement is frankly the reason I sought it out to begin with. I called Stone Junction “YA Pynchon” above, but I didn’t mean it as an insult—it’s YA in an older sense, in the sense of the novels handed me when I was young, hardly adult, novels that etched their own versions of reality onto our own banal reality; realities more real: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Outsiders, The Once and Future King, The Lord of the Rings, Hatchet… Stone Junction is about youth, but it’s also about maturation, and the ache and melancholy of aging out of the game, personified in the semi-tragic figure of Daniel’s would-be mentor, Volta.

I don’t think I would’ve appreciated the depth of Volta’s melancholy as a much younger person, which is the time I wished I had first read Stone Junction. I should’ve found the novel almost 30 years ago—let’s say the summer I stayed in my cousin’s old bedroom. I was fifteen or sixteen, and he, a decade older than me, was doing Adult Things. I listened to the tapes and records he had left in his high school bedroom, taking a few with me at the end of the summer. (Tripp, if you’re reading, I still have your cassette of New Order’s Low-Life in a box somewhere. Drive up sometime and we can search it out together.) I read almost all of his cheap paperbacks, and took as many as I thought I could reasonably get away with with me: Fear and Loathing, Cat’s Cradle, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, both Miller Tropic novels, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Dharma Bums, Delta of Venus, The Beautiful and the Damned. That would’ve been the perfect summer for me to first read Stone Junction, but I didn’t read it then. I read it now. Let a younger person in your life steal it from you, sooner rather than later.