Early in his new memoir My Father’s Bonus March, Adam Langer writes: “It seems appropriate that the most dramatic event in my relationship with my father might be one that I can’t actually remember happening.” Langer then goes on to describe a particularly colorful episode at an old-timey barbershop, wherein he, as a young lad, chokes on a piece of hard candy and is saved by his dad. “My father would never tell me this story,” Langer concludes, revealing the sense of disconnection at the heart of his book. Simply put, My Father’s Bonus March is Langer’s attempt to know, or at least understand his father. Strangely, he uses his father’s passion for a little-remembered event in American history as a means to better know his father, who passed away in 2005, leaving Langer with a sense of unfinished business.
In 1932, a group of WWI Veterans and their families (and sympathizers) camped out in Washington D.C. in protest: it was the middle of the Great Depression and the vets were demanding the bonuses they were promised. (The book’s jacket calls this “a forgotten moment in American history, but I’d like to go on record that, after the intensive hell that was Ms. Bone’s first-period AP US History class, I knew exactly what the bonus march was before I got the review copy). Langer’s father was seven at the time of the protest, but his father served in WWI, and, in any case, it left enough of an impression on him that writing a book on the subject became a life-long dream. Langer’s project is to complete that dream–which he does, quite successfully. Langer’s historical investigation is thorough without dreariness; he draws not just from first-hand sources, like newspapers and editorials covering the march, but also the memoirs and diaries of figures like Eisenhower and Studs Terkel, as well as the work of novelists like John Dos Passos. He even interviews neocon Norman Podhoretz and Bonus March aficionado John Kerry.
Langer’s scholarship is successful, but more affective are his interviews with people who knew his father, including cousins, neighbors, and classmates. Langer has the good sense to present their comments as first-hand accounts, presented with little context. Their stories build a concrete, vivid depiction of Langer’s predominantly Jewish old Chicago West Side neighborhood (“‘GVS’ is what we called it. The Great Vest Side,” one witness recalls). I wish Langer had employed this straightforward documentary technique more often in his memoir as its succinctness and clarity achieves an emotional immediacy in contrast to Langer’s prose passages, which sometimes come across as sentimental or too-artfully constructed. This is simply a matter of taste, of course; I prefer my memoirs raw, and I occasionally found myself grimacing at some of Langer’s constructions, like a trip with his brother to the Hoover Presidential Library or the opening scene with his daughter on the stoop.
At its core, My Father’s Bonus March successfully evokes the reality of one of literature’s oldest narratives–the attempt of the son to know his elusive father (Telemachus and Odysseus, Oedipus and Laius, Stephen and Simon Dedalus, etc.), and it does so with affecting aplomb. Whether we really need another story about a son trying to understand his distant dad is beside the point–Langer has found an inventive and rewarding way to do so. I can’t end without mentioning that at the same time I was reading Bonus March, I also happened to read another memoir about a son trying to better understand his elusive father, Stephen Elliott’s recent essay “My Father’s Murder” (published in last month’s issue of The Believer). Elliot’s terse, frank, reportorial style is in direct contrast with Langer’s overt sentimentality, yet both authors are working toward the same theme–one that clearly resonates across styles and genres. With this in mind, I think plenty of readers out there will both identify with and enjoy Langer’s memoir.
My Father’s Bonus March is available October 20th, 2009 from Spiegel & Grau.
Let’s get a few things straight from the get-go: David Mazzuchelli’s graphic novel Asterios Polyp is a masterpiece, an unequivocal advancement of its medium, and an unqualified joy to read. It’s also not only one of the best books we’ve read this year, but also this decade. While such breathless enthusiasm might seem suspect, even a cursory look over Asterios Polyp will reveal that Mazzucchelli has produced a fully-realized work, one that fundamentally reimagines what a graphic novel is, and how it might be read.
Asterios Polyp is a boorish, solipsistic “paper architect” and tenured professor (none of his designs have ever actually been built) whose life goes to shambles after his sensitive wife Hana leaves him. The novel opens with a lightning strike that literally destroys everything that Asterios owns. He grabs three key items–his father’s old lighter, a magnetically-powered watch he bought as a child, and a Swiss Army knife he found on the beach–and hits the road, heading into the great, normal Midwest, where he takes a job as an auto mechanic (in a lovely scene, Asterios the autodidact, after accepting his new job, heads to the library to learn auto repair in an hour). Asterios’s kindly boss Stiff and his hippie wife Ursula take in the poor soul/arrogant prick. As the plot unfolds, Mazzucchelli contrasts Asterios’s past, full of faculty cocktail parties, affairs with grad students, and highbrow conversations, with his incremental rebirth into a more concrete world. “Be not simply good; be good for something,” said Henry David Thoreau–a lesson that Asterios slowly learns as he finally applies his skill and genius to real-world applications, like building a tree house for the couple’s son and creating a solar-powered Cadillac. Asterios’s emergence as a fully-realized human being contrasts sharply with hist past. Although he clearly loved his wife Hana, he was unable to appreciate her as anything other than a prop in relation to himself–how she complimented him, added to him, reflected on him. The flashback scenes with Hana are keenly realistic and loaded with genuine pathos. They are the heart of the novel.
Asterios’s twin brother Ignazio narrates the novel, only there’s a catch–Ignazio died at birth. This trope of twinning underscores Asterios Polyp‘s philosophical thrust. Asterios, in an attempt to understand (and thus control, at least figuratively) the universe, attempts to systematize it in his own intellectual yet limited projections. For Asterios, the world is all duality–life and death, in and out, form and content, exterior and interior, plastic and linear, black and white. Although he’s willing to make pragmatic concessions to shades of gray–Mazzucchelli is far-too savvy to have his lead as a flat, unrealistic allegorical figure–Asterios’s unrelenting idealism nonetheless repeatedly foils any chance for real happiness. Mazzucchelli’s discussions of philosophy, art history, and human relationships are never heavy-handed and always thought-provoking. Beyond this, his cartooning synthesizes words and art to a new level, one in which form and content are seamless, contiguous, and purposeful.
What, exactly, do we mean by this? To put it plain, there are few graphic novels that reinvent the possibilities of the medium. A handful of examples spring to mind: Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, Dave Sim’s Cerebus, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Like Asterios Polyp, these books envision the graphic novel as more than just “pictures + words.” Mazzucchelli utilizes every tool at his disposal. It’s not just his obvious talent as a cartoonist whose inks recall the best work of Will Eisner. It’s not just his fantastic scripting and dialogue (undoubtedly the most neglected facet of the comics medium). It’s also his sense of space, the rhythm of his panels, the perfection of not just each page but the cohesion of all the pages. It’s also the beautiful palette of Asterios Polyp, its codified world of pastels, purples and yellow, blues and pinks, and its spare oranges and reds. It’s also the lettering, where Mazzucchelli achieves something that I haven’t seen done properly since Dave Sim: he gives each character a unique, personal tone, simply through the shape of their words.
Of course, none of Mazzucchelli’s craft and technique would matter if his story wasn’t so compelling. There’s poignancy and pathos in the tale of Asterios Polyp, and we find ourselves rooting for him as he earns his redemption. And none of Asterios’s journey feels forced, a rarity these days it seems. Instead, there’s unexpected beauty here, especially as the novel unwinds–or perhaps, winds up–to its rewarding end. For the record, we’d absolutely love to discuss the last few pages of this book with anyone who’s read it–have you read it? Why haven’t you read it yet? Without spoilers, let’s just say that the conclusion is both fitting and bewildering, satisfying and yet maddening, a perfect cohesion of the book’s thematic exploration of dualities (and the pitfalls of choosing to codify the world into a series of those dualities). Mazzucchelli’s been around forever (you probably remember him, like me, from his early work with Frank Milleron Daredevil and the groundbreaking “Year One” arc of Batman). Amazingly, this is his first solo graphic novel. Hopefully he won’t keep us waiting so long for the next one. Do yourself a favor and get this book now. Very highly recommended.
In his short foreword to Vintage’s massive, new, decidedly unshort The Vampire Archives, Neil Gaiman dryly observes, “And then, one day, they were everywhere. You couldn’t move for vampires. There were paranormal vampire romances and junior paranormal vampire romances . . . Everywhere vampires, stripped down like a simple metaphor for genitalia-free relationships.” We know that vampires are ubiquitous in the late oughties, whether its the turgid teen abstinence vampire theatrics of Twilight, HBO’s addictive interpretation of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series, True Blood, the CW’s latest attempt to cash in, The Vampire Diaries or last year’s fantastic film Let The Right One In. Gamian’s theory for the thriving popularity of vampires (he agrees with Stephen King by-way-of Erica Jong that “Vampires . . . were the ultimate zipless fuck”) is as good as any, we suppose, but The Vampire Archives editor Otto Penzler is a bit more historical in his introduction to the volume, pointing beyond the traditionally-accepted notion that Stoker’s Draculais the first vampire story. Penzler brings up Lilith, the children of Hecate, Lamia, the Chinese monster Kian-si, brain-suckers of American Indian lore, the Scottish Glaistag, and the Brazilian jararaca–just to name a few. He also briefly discusses the lurid histories of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who believed the blood of virgins would sustain her life, die-hard mad prophet Rasputin, and Vlad the Impaler, the historical basis of Count Dracula. Penzler’s eclectic overture here tellingly highlights the diversity of the 85-plus tales collected in the book.
There are “Pre-Dracula” stories here, like Edgar Allan Poe’s gloomy “Ligeia” and M.E. Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne,” as well as classic standards like Bram Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest” and Jan Neruda’s “The Vampire.” Heavy-hitters like D.H. Lawrence and Guy de Maupassant are represented along with the pop fictions of Stephen King and Clive Barker. Especially welcome are Harlan Ellison’s insightful piece “Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time” and Richard Matheson’s taut tale “Drink My Red Blood.” Writers often identified readily with genres other than horror, like Ray Bradbury, Tanith Lee, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also appear, along with a couple of Romantic poems by Goethe, Byron, and John Keats (while the inclusion of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” is great, it’s weird that The Vampire Archives doesn’t have just a little more room for Keats’s excellent “Lamia.” They could’ve also included Coleridge’s “Christabel,” but hey, we can hardly dispute their claim that the book is “The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published”). Anne Rice pops up, naturally, with “The Master of Rampling Gate,” which wasn’t too emo for our icy blood. We also enjoyed H.P. Lovecraft’s creepy and sinuous story “The Hound.” Grave-robbers, weird amulets, ghoulish killers–great stuff.
If you can’t find enough to feed your need for vampire tales in The Vampire Archives, they’ve been kind enough to include what has to be, at 120 pages, one of the most extensive vampire bibliographies ever–although they note that their list does not include “comics, games, movies, plays, television, or radio programs.” While not every story here is gold, more than most of The Vampire Archives is great gothic fun, whether you dig pulp fiction or psychological realism in your horror. If you’re ready to take the next step past Twilight–you’re not a poseur, are you?–The Vampire Archives is an apt starting place.
David Byrne’s new book, Bicycle Diaries (new in hardback from Viking),is an engaging, discursive, and often meditative memoir about the Talking Heads founder’s strange experiences bicycling through some of the world’s most distinct cities. Byrne uses W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn(one of our favorite books) as an entry point for his book. Like Sebald, Byrne attempts to synthesize history, memory, art, architecture, philosophy, science, and a host of other subjects in his writings on cities like Berlin, London, Manila, Istanbul, and San Francisco. The result is a book that is profound and very readable; Byrne communicates complex ideas in ways that are both fun to read and also highly relevant to an age of changing attitudes about how we are to get where we are going.
While hardly a political screed, Bicycle Diaries does contain a central argument: plainly put, Byrne suggests that cities that are bicycle-friendly tend to be more human-friendly, and that the modern/industrial reliance on cars and trucks has resulted in fundamental disconnects between people and their communities. In the first chapter, “American Cities,” Byrne surveys a number of decidedly unglamorous American cities like Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Columbus, as well as smaller towns like Sweetwater, Texas. Byrne’s discussion of Detroit is particularly affecting. From the vantage of his bicycle, Byrne sees a Detroit most will miss, a place of modern ruins and decay. “In a car, one would have sought out a freeway, one of the notorious concrete arteries, and would never have seen any of this stuff,” Byrne writes. “Riding for hours right next to it was visceral and heartbreaking–in ways that looking at ancient ruins aren’t. I recommend it.”
Byrne repeatedly communicates this will to immediacy, for unmediated experiences in Bicycle Diaries. He’s the explorer of the real, trying to understand why folks don’t ride bikes in Buenos Aires, or trying to figure out the cultural significance of Imelda Marcos to the people of the Philippines, or pondering the brutal fauna of Australia. Byrne’s bike rides, as well as his music and art careers, give the book something like a center, but Bicycle Diaries thrives on digressions, asides on ring tones or the Stasi or amateur backyard wrestling or the history of PowerPoint. We loved these moments: it’s when Byrne relates the sad history of George Eastman, founder of Kodak, or when he tells the story of Australian outlaw legend Ned Kelly that Byrne best communicates the thrill of exploration.
Byrne’s voice is ever-earnest and never didactic. There’s a plainness and honesty to his delivery that often seems in direct contrast with the content of his message. And this is the key to the book’s success–and perhaps, more generally speaking, Byrne’s career–this ability to see, to suspend the biases and blocks and filters that too often mediate our perception, and to actually see what is actually around us. From his earliest days in the Talking Heads, Byrne displayed an uncanny knack for turning his eyes on his own culture like an alien ethnographer, yet he always did it with empathy and engagement, and never with smack of clinical remove that might otherwise characterize such a project. In Bicycle Diaries, Byrne approaches America’s reliance on roads and oil and cars with an admirable pragmatism. Where some might scold (and, implicitly, ride a high horse), Byrne is always positive, pointing out the numerous advantages of returning to a community-oriented way of life, with bicycling as a simple and efficient means of getting around in lieu of the cars–and attendant urban/suburban/exurban sprawl–that keep us separated. Byrne also suggests a number of ways that communities and cities can work toward making bicycling a more viable option for their citizens. He even provides a few fun bicycle rack designs for his hometown New York (and yes, they got made).
Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that the book itself is a beautiful aesthetic object. Why don’t more publishers skip those annoying, flimsy dust jackets, and opt instead for something like Bicycle Diaries lovely embossed cloth deal? Just a thought. There are lots and lots of black and white photographs, many by Byrne himself, that genuinely shed light on Byrne’s narrative (the design here is of course reminiscent of Sebald’s use of photographs, only Byrne’s aren’t cryptic and actually make sense in the text). It’s great to love both the content and the design of a book, but we’d really expect nothing less from Byrne. It’s also great when a hero of ours lives up to and then surpasses our expectations–we’ve always loved Byrne’s music and his ideas, so it’s great that we can add books to that list. Highly recommended.
Rebecca Stott’s second novel, The Coral Thief (new in hardback from Spiegel & Grau), tells the story of a naive medical student ensnared in a web of scientific intrigue in post-Revolutionary Paris. In July, 1815, shortly after Napoleon’s fall at Waterloo, Stott’s hero Daniel Connor enters the occupied capitol armed only with the valuable coral specimens he plans to bring to his new place of study, the Jardin des Plantes. Riding on a mail coach into the city, Connor meets an alluring, mysterious woman (of course) who ends up stealing his coral samples, but also introducing him to a radical new idea that will soon change the world: the theory of evolution. In Connor’s pursuit of the coral thief, he also becomes entwined with a sharp police chief who is also searching out the mystery woman.
Stott’s novel moves at a nice, steady clip, propelled by simple dialog and meticulously neat historical detailing that doesn’t intrude into her narrative. The Connor narrative is balanced with short intercalary chapters describing Napoleon’s journey into exile, suggesting a division of ways of thinking: as the Emperor is retired, a new mode of thought going beyond the Enlightenment’s obsession with rationalism is on the rise–evolution. In a sense, Stott’s novel is an attack on dogma, as Connor, the coral thief, and the picaresque band the two take up with, work to challenge the institutions that dominate European thinking. (It’s weird to think in America today that evolution is still a debatable, divisive issue).
While The Coral Thief is a novel that weighs history and philosophy, it’s also a great detective story that will appeal to those who want a bit more out of their adventures than Dan Brown can offer. Stott’s writing is succinct and well-researched, with none of the ponderous pretentiousness that can sometimes weigh down historical fiction. (Stott does, however, include a not-too lengthy bibliography for those who wish to read further into her post-Napoleonic France; listed authors include Victor Hugo and Balzac). The Coral Thief is great good fun for thinking people. Recommended.
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is a mannered romance about class and love, family and duty, and the fine balance between logic and emotion. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters adds giant mutant crustaceans, two-headed sea dragons, and rampaging narwhals to the mix. Don’t worry, Sea Monsters still tells the protofeminist tale of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor (sense) and Marianne (sensibility) as they try to navigate the upheaval of their changing fortunes. After their father dies, under the strict (and unfair) laws of primogeniture, the family estate must go to their half-brother and his wicked wife. Co-author Ben H. Winters moves the milieu to a bizarre aquatic world populated by pirates and monsters, full of desert islands and undersea domes. You probably know just by looking at its remarkable cover whether or not this book is for you.
Quirk Classics had a big hit earlier this year with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which, uh, added zombies to a Jane Austen classic. In our review of that book, we praised the concept but found the delivery flat. The zombies-and-ninjas riffing seemed a bit trite by 2009–there just wasn’t enough weirdness to make the book especially engaging. In contrast, Winters’s injections in Sea Monsters are wholly bizarre. The disaster of the patriarch’s death–and the loss of inheritance–is metaphorized in the setting, “the Alteration, when the waters of the world grew cold and hateful to the sons of man, and darkness moved on the face of the deep.” Colonel Brandon, a prospective groom with a dark past becomes a betentacled monster here. The entire oppressive system of Regency laws and social customs takes the symbol of a devouring Leviathan, eating up dreams and hopes. In short, Winters takes his conceit beyond mere ironic fancy and actually weaves it successfully into Austen’s classic. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters succeeds because Winters juxtaposes his sea monster tropes so cleanly and weirdly against Austen’s mannered prose without the least bit of ironic winking at the audience. The sheer silliness of it all is beautiful fun.
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is available September 15, 2009 from Quirk Classics. You can watch the book’s trailer here.
In Pulp’s caustic 1995 anthem “Common People,” singer Jarvis Cocker delivers what has to be one of the best lines in any pop song: “Everybody hates a tourist.” Ironically, I bought the album when I was visiting London as a tourist. I’d never heard of (or heard) Pulp at that point, but our tour guide (it was a high school class trip) told me that they were the best Britpop band to date, better than my beloved Boo Radleys, he assured me. He had great taste; the album is fantastic and “Common People” became a dance party classic (this same tour guide took our entire group of high school juniors, seniors, and chaperons (teachers and parents) to a screening of Trainspotting, which had just come out in Great Britain. Many of the students and chaperons got quite upset, but for me it was kinda sorta life-changing (I was 15 or 16). Later, in Heidelburg, Germany, this same tour guide took a small group of six or seven of us out to one of the coolest bars I’ve ever been to, and laughed about the whole Trainspotting incident. He said he told our teachers that it would be an important “cultural enrichment experience” for us, but in reality it was just a great movie that he thought some of us would like to see).
I realize that this is a long, overly-personal lead-in to a book review, but Clean Breaks, from Rough Guides, embodies the spirit of the trip I discussed above. Richard Hammond and Jeremy Smith’s travel guide is not so much about how to avoid looking like a loathsome tourist, but about how to engage in the real culture of the place you are visiting while getting to know the real people who live there. In this sense, the book is not for everyone, but if you want Disney World or Las Vegas, I’m sure you won’t have any trouble figuring out what to do. However, if you’re interested in, say, hearing the desert music of Mali, or volunteering on a ranch in Brazil’s Patanal wetlands, or fishing for prawns in Kerala, then Clean Breaks is a great starting place for you. As the authors put it in their introduction, a “clean break” is essentially “about minimizing your environmental impact–on your journey and at your destination–by choosing carefully how you travel and the nature of the place you choose to stay at.” To that end, the book concentrates not just on eco-friendly hotels and restaurants that specialize in locally grown food, but also on the type of adventure trekking and activities that put you in real contact with the real people of the place you are visiting. There’s an emphasis on bicycling and walking, guest houses and natural parks, and volunteering.
Again, the adventures in Clean Breaks are certainly not going to be every tourist’s cup of tea, but they aren’t all exactly uncomfortable either. I’m lucky enough to have actually experienced a (very) small fraction of the 500 trips suggested, and can attest to their awesomeness. Taking The Ghan train from Adelaide to Alice Springs, for example, was a highlight of my young life, as was visiting a glacier in the Otago province of New Zealand. And did I mention that there are lots of pretty, pretty colorful pictures and maps accompanying the book’s 500 suggested trips (with key info like email addresses and phone numbers, of course). While Clean Breaks‘s emphasis on “ecotourism” did seem a bit suspect to me at first–just another marketing ploy, perhaps (I’ve attacked the rhetoric of “going green” in the past”)–the authors’ intentions and tone seem wholly sincere. They acknowledge, for example, that terms “such as ‘responsible,’ ‘sustainable,’ and ‘ethical’ are becoming . . . overused (and abused) by websites and tourism companies looking to ride the green wave,” and their repeated emphasis on localism and action over passive “sight-seeing” is admirable. And even though most people will never have the money and time to complete the 500 trip wish-list that Hammond and Smith present here, the book still makes for a great fantasy. Good stuff.
In his essay “In the Ruins of the Future,” published in December of 2001, Don DeLillo wrote this about the 9/11 attacks: “The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon?” His question was both profound and at the same time, paradoxically utterly banal, purely rhetorical–of course it was too soon to measure the affects of the 9/11 attacks. But could the distance of time somehow sharpen or enrich perspective? DeLillo continues: “We seem pressed for time, all of us. Time is scarcer now. There is a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly, time forced and distorted.”
In retrospect–what with the Bush administration’s ludicrous invasion of Iraq and the power-grab of the Patriot Act–DeLillo’s notation of “plans made hurriedly” seems downright scary. Still, when I think back to those early days after the attacks, I remember that feeling of overwhelming shock, the paralyzing inertia that had to be overcome. DeLillo wanted–needed–to grapple with this spectacular destruction immediately. David Foster Wallace responded with similar immediacy; the caveat that prefaces his moving essay “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s“ states that the piece was “Written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock.” The same caveat would also apply neatly to Art Spiegelman’s big, brilliant, messy attempt at cataloging his impressions immediately post-9/11,In the Shadow of No Towers.
In contrast, the trio of 9/11 stories at the heart of Chris Adrian’s short story collection, A Better Angel, all employ distance and distortion–both temporal and spatial–as a means to address the disaster (or inability to address the disaster) of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Adrian’s 9/11 tales (and his works in general, really), ask how one can grieve or attest to death on such a massive, spectacular scale. In his vision, the victims of the 9/11 attacks forever haunt his protagonists, literally possessing them, demons that can’t let go, leaving the living to grieve over and over again. In “The Changeling,” for example, the grief of the attacks is literally measured in blood, as a father repeatedly maims himself as the only means to assuage the terror and confusion of his possessed son. Adrian sets one of the collection’s most intriguing tales, “The Vision of Peter Damien,” in nineteenth-century rural Ohio. This temporal distortion veers into metaphysical territory as the titular Damien, along with other children in his village, become sick, haunted by the victims of 9/11. Adrian’s strange milieu creates a bizarre cognitive dissonance for his readers, a response that DeLillo also articulated in his 2007 novel Falling Man.
DeLillo initiates the novel as a sort of creation story: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.” The demarcation of this new world recapitulates DeLillo’s initial concern with time and space, but his novel seems ultimately to suggest an inertia, a meaninglessness, or at least the hollow ambiguity of any artistic response. This stands, of course, in sharp contrast to his sense of urgency in his earlier essay. Like the performance artist in the novel who is repeatedly sighted hanging suspended from a harness, there’s a sad anonymity in the background of Falling Man: the artist hangs as static witness to disaster, but looking for comfort, or even perhaps meaning, in the gesture is impossible.
David Foster Wallace’s short story“The Suffering Channel,” (from his 2004 collection Oblivion) is in many ways a far more satisfying jab at 9/11, although, to be fair, the majority of the story’s events take place in July of 2001. The story (or novella, really; it’s 90 pages) centers around a magazine headquartered in the World Trade Center that plans to run an article–on September 10th, 2001–about a man who literally shits out pieces of art. Wallace’s critique of American culture (shit as art, commerce as style, advertising as language) is devastating against the context of the looming disaster that his characters are so oblivious too. As the novella reaches its close (culminating in the shit artist producing an original work for a live audience), we learn more about “The Suffering Channel,” a cable channel devoted to broadcasting only images of human beings suffering intense and horrible pain. Wallace seems to suggest that The Suffering Channel’s audience watches for mere schadenfreude or morbid fascination, that modern American culture so disconnects people that genuine suffering cannot be witnessed with empathy, but only as a form of spectacular, disengaged entertainment. And yet even as Wallace critiques American culture, the specter of the 9/11 attacks ironically inform his story. With our awful knowledge of what will happen the day after the shit artist article is published, we are able to see the ridiculous and ephemeral nature of the characaters’ various concerns. At the same time, Wallace’s tale reveals that empathy for suffering is possible, but also that it comes at a tremendous price.
To contrast the journalistic immediacy of pieces like “In the Ruins of the Future” and “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” with their respective writers attempts to measure 9/11 in literary fiction is perhaps a bit unfair. Still, Wallace’s and DeLillo’s essays–at least in my opinion–transmit something of the ineffable, visceral quality of that terrible day, as well as the strange ways we sought comfort through human connection. In contrast, the distance and distortion of their literary efforts lose something. I apologize–I don’t have a word for this “something” that the essays have that the novel and novella lack (purposely, I believe). It’s not clarity, but perhaps it’s a clarity of distortion that the essays convey, the duress, or to return to Wallace’s own notation, the pieces were of course “Written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock.” It’s that shock, I suppose, that I’m trying to name, to say that it’s still there, accessible in those early responses (I realize now I’ve unfairly neglected Spiegelman’s book, which is a great example of immediacy). And to relive that shock is important, because, as Wallace reveals in both of his pieces, the cathartic power of shared tragedy makes us human, allows us to really live, and to be thankful that we do live.
Looking over this piece, I realize that it’s overly long and really says nothing, or at least nothing much about 9/11, or literature, or whatever. But I don’t want to be negative. I highly encourage you to read (or re-read) “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” and “In the Ruins of the Future.” And I’ll leave it at that.
Any bibliophile can attest that one of the greatest pleasures of re-reading a favorite book is that it doesn’t change. You change, but it doesn’t, and somehow, you can measure your own change against it. So when Picador’s new single-volume trade paperback edition of Roberto Bolaño’s magnum opus 2666 (out today) showed up at my doorstep a week or two ago, I was thrilled. I already own the book, but having another copy of it, for some reason–no logical reason, of course–seemed really important. It also puts 2666 in good company: I own two (or more) copies of Moby-Dick and Ulysses, and I’ve had to buy at least three copies of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (damn biblioklepts don’t return books). I bought FS&G’s triple trade paperback edition of the book at the end of last year, and I loved it loved it loved it (review here if you don’t believe me). So how does the new single-volume edition differ, you ask? Well, first off, it’s important to note the gracious similarities–Picador’s edition retains the same pagination, a trend that I hope will always continue with this book (editions of Infinite Jest have managed to keep cohesive to date as well). The new trade paperback is surprisingly supple and portable, with wider margins than the FS&G triple-job. With more room for marginalia in the cohesive package of a single volume, Picador’s edition will likely be the go-to for scholars and book clubs (it’s also about half the retail price of the FS&G editions, but just as attractive).
So, anyway, why should you read 2666 if you haven’t already? I’m going to be lazy and refer again to my original review, but I’ll also be generous and direct you to Macmillan’s resource site for 2666. The site already has plenty of great links to full reviews and interviews with Bolaño, and Picador’s publicists have assured me that they will be updating the site frequently with additional content to aid readers, including artwork and images. Also really cool — the folks at The Morning News, who host Infinite Summer, the Infinite Jest reading project, will launch a similar site for 2666 on January 1st of next year. Even though I’m pointing out all of these resource sites, I think it’s also important to note that 2666 is an incredibly readable book. Which leads back to my current re-reading–and, hopefully, to an argument why you should re-read 2666.
So I bought my original copy in San Francisco last year, on vacation, and began digging into it on the plane ride home. I read most of Part I, “The Part about the Critics” in something of a dazed post-hangover travel stupor. I was familiar with Bolaño’s epic sentences from The Savage Detectives, but I instantly liked this book better. It also seemed to defy all of my expectations–wasn’t this supposed to be an unremitting catalog of horrific murders? Anyway, I got to that part later. Fast forward ten months or so. Again, I’m on a plane, again, coming home, returning from Las Vegas, more dazed, more hungover than before, and I pick up 2666, and again, I dig into Part I. The book is a different book. Lines that made me crack up before seem sinister. I see murder where I’d seen academic squabbling. But there’s also that hope, that possibility, that force of humanity that might be Bolaño’s signature rhetorical move, and I see it too now. Upon a first reading, 2666 might seem impossibly incomplete: a book that could never end, a book that would have to keep going. And it is. It’s a cycle; it returns to itself, a series of calls and responses far richer than can be puzzled out over one, or two, (or three, or four . . . ) readings. But best of all, it’s great, greater than before. What might have seemed a fortunate fluke of a forceful voice reveals itself to be profound and measured control–Bolaño’s themes are layered like a labyrinth, but what a joyful labyrinth to traverse! Re-reading 2666 on the plane was a strange echo, doubled in the myriad echoes that I found on my re-reading. I finished most of Part I (skipping occasionally into sections of Part V, and then Part III, and so on, liberated all of a sudden), and when I got home, despite the paramount exhaustion of a long Las Vegas weekend with a few dozen friends, I collapsed in my bed and into the book, not wanting to put it down, staying up far too late reading. Again. Great stuff. Go get it if you haven’t yet, and if you’ve got it, read it again.
After a minute of deliberate, restrained acoustic guitar phrases accompanied with a few touches of piano, Jim O’Rourke’s The Visitor unfolds suddenly into a warm, rich, full-band arrangement, humming with sinewy slide guitars and clippety-clop percussion. For ten short, gorgeous seconds, O’Rourke declares that, after having made listeners wait for over a decade for a follow up to his brilliant instrumental suite Bad Timing, he won’t delay the magic any longer. After those ten seconds, the music returns to that solitary guitar, but just a minute later, the full band is back again, establishing a rhythm that will permeate the disc.
Space, delay, and restraint have long been some of O’Rourke’s sharpest tools: fans of Bad Timing can attest to the sublime payoff in the record’s final moments, and his work in Gastr del Sol with David Grubbs often challenged audiences’ patience, rewarding them in oblique moments of beauty too strange to name. Not that O’Rourke’s music is wholly strange–in fact, I can’t think of another musician who makes recordings sound so damn good. He has an almost preternatural gift for sonic spaces, whether as a solo artist or as a producer (and auxiliary member) of groups like Stereolab and The High Llamas (or more obscure acts like Wilco and Sonic Youth). In short, we expect that a Jim O’Rourke record (a “proper” one–not one of his (many, many) forays into experimental/improvisational collaboration) will sound really fucking good. In this sense, The Visitor isn’t particularly revelatory: it’s a great-sounding, expertly-played, 38-minute suite of music. It affirms what we know about O’Rourke, and leaves us wanting more.
For a record with such a unified sound and vision, The Visitor is also paradoxically all over the place. It’s one complete track, at least in digital form, and while there are clearly discrete passages, it’s nearly impossible to find where they might distinctly begin or end. Unlike its most obvious predecessor, Bad Timing, an album divided into four tracks, there are no seams showing here. Neither is there any reliance on electronic trickery or production shenanigans (which O’Rourke followers know he could pull off standing on his head). The Visitor is pure musicianship, full of resonant organs, lovely acoustic guitars, and a host of other instruments in the Americana vein that O’Rourke so clearly cherishes (it’s impossible not to hear nods to heroes of his like Van Dyke Parks and John Fahey here, of course). There are amazing moments, like at 11:25 or so when O’Rourke channels Dickey Betts for a killer micro-solo, or does a Brian May send-up at 20:40. There are woodwinds, there are banjos, there are instruments working together that I cannot identify. And it all sounds very, very good.
Undoubtedly, The Visitor will have its detractors. Unlike O’Rourke’s 1999 pop masterpiece Eureka, it is not an album of songs to know and love; neither is it remotely close to 2001’s more aggressive Insignificance. It is, as I’ve stated a few times now, a single suite of instrumental music, perhaps too pleasant for some or too weird for others. And while I’m very enthusiastic about it–I’ve listened to it about 25 times over the past three days–I admit that it also whets my appetite for a follow-up to O’Rourke’s more pop-oriented records. I’d love to hear the guy’s imperfect voice sing those mean, mean lyrics again. And I hope he won’t make us wait another eight years for one. Final verdict: buy The Visitor, listen to it, love it.
Jim O’Rourke’s The Visitor is available September 8th, 2009 from Drag City (who will mail it to you postage-paid for a mere $14 vinyl, $12 CD) or your favorite record store.
In his introduction to his reader’s guide to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Patrick Alexander observes that “Except for those fortunate enough to spend several years confined to a hospital bed, a federal prison, or to be stranded on a desert island with their preselected library, few modern readers have the time to tackle a novel with more than three thousand pages, a million and a half words, and more than four hundred individual characters.” Alexander goes on to point out that “Proust’s novel is increasingly read only by professional academics,” a trend he describes as a “great pity.” Alexander wants you to be able to access all the philosophical insight and rich humor of Proust, and his book Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time makes a great starting point for doing so.
The first of the three sections that comprise Alexander’s book, “What Happens in Proust,” summarizes the seven novels that form Proust’s great work In Search of Lost Time (sometimes translated as Remembrance of Things Past). This is easily the largest section of the book. Alexander summarizes the novels, and contextualizes their themes against their historical and social milieu. Alexander’s second section, “Who’s Who in Proust,” will likely be most useful for readers trying to keep track of the many (many, many) characters in this opus. The final section, “The World of Proust,” situates Proust’s place in Paris, French history, and modern literature. As Alexander points out himself, the book will appeal to three types of readers: those who want to read Proust but are daunted, those who are currently reading Proust and wish for a guide to keep track of all the places and names, and those who wish to return to Proust.
Alexander’s project is ambitious, and guidebooks are always an iffy business of course. I found Harry Blamires’s The New Bloomsday Book, probably the most famous guide for James Joyce’s Ulysses, to be an interminable bore, whereas Joseph Campbell’s lectures on the same subject are indispensable. There’s really a fine balance to be achieved I suppose. I’m currently making my way through another big book (okay, not as big as Proust’s), William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, and so far,Steven Moore’s A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s The Recognitionshas proven to be a valuable resource when I need it. It manages to provide analytical insights and explications of all the many (many, many) allusions in Gaddis’s massive tome without ever being intrusive. Similarly, Alexander understands that a guide should never step on toes. His clean, lucid style is both humorous and realistic, and he’s never overly-reverential of Proust, but respectful at all times toward both his favorite author and his readers. Alexander’s real goal is not to paraphrase Proust, but, like all good critics, to try to get you to read the material. I never got past the first forty pages of Swann’s Way, the first book of Lost Time, but Alexander’s book makes me want to go back and give it another shot.
Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Timeby Patrick Alexander is available from Vintage books on September 22nd, 2009.
In William Gaddis‘s massive first novel, The Recognitions, Wyatt Gwyon forges paintings by master artists like Hieronymous Bosch, Hugo van der Goes, and Hans Memling. To be more accurate, Wyatt creates new paintings that perfectly replicate not just the style of the old masters, but also the spirit. After aging the pictures, he forges the artist’s signature, and at that point, the painting is no longer an original by Wyatt, but a “new” old original by a long-dead genius. The paintings of the particular artists that Wyatt counterfeits are instructive in understanding, or at least in hoping to understand how The Recognitions works. The paintings of Bosch, Memling, or Dierick Bouts function as highly-allusive tableaux, semiotic constructions that wed religion and mythology to art, genius, and a certain spectacular horror, and, as such, resist any hope of a complete and thorough analysis. Can you imagine, for example, trying to catalog and explain all of the discrete images in Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights? And then, after creating such a catalog, explaining the intricate relationships between the different parts? You couldn’t, and Gaddis’s novel is the same way. I’ve finished the first of the novel’s three parts, 277 of 956 pages, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the Gaddis has structured the novel as a triptych. The first part, like Bosch’s painting, The Seven Deadly Sins, is comprised of seven sections.
The Seven Deadly Sins – Hieronymous Bosch
Early in The Recognitions, teenage Wyatt copies The Seven Deadly Sins–his father owns the original, a painted table top he purchased in Europe. Wyatt replaces the original with his own and gets away with this strange crime–no small feat considering the genius of his father, the Rev. Gwyon, a New England priest who, after the death of his wife at sea, comes to reject the austere puritanism of his order and embrace (much to the consternation of his dwindling congregation) a pluralistic religious world view. In one of many stunning passages centering on Gwyon and religion, the congregation is “stirred with indignant discomfort after listening to the familiar story of virgin birth on December twenty-fifth, mutilation and resurrection, to find they had been attending, not Christ, but Bacchus, Osiris, Krishna, Buddha, Adonis, Marduk, Balder, Attis, Amphion, or Quetzalcoatl.” This series of substitutions enacts a chain of recognitions, and, in a sense, compartmentalizes much of the thematic material of the novel: What is it to be a hero, a redeemer, a savior? What is originality, and how does one recognize it? Who originates whom? What does it mean to create? How is art separate from religion? Clearly, these are not simple questions, and The Recognitions is not a simple book.
Triptych with the Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus — Dierck Bouts and Hugo van der Goes
In order to pose (and perhaps offer varying answers to) these questions, Gaddis employs daring, richly detailed prose, larded with esoteric (and not so esoteric) references to mythology, religion, art, music, and literature. Like the discrete sections of Bosch’s Sins, each of the chapters of the first section of The Recognitions has its own distinct idiom, comportment, and rhythm; yet, even as Gaddis’s approaches seem discontinuous from chapter to chapter, these coalesce to a larger picture.
The first chapter is the best first chapter of any book I can remember reading in recent years. It tells the story of Rev. Gwyon looking for solace in the Catholic monasteries of Spain after his wife’s death at sea under the clumsy hands of a fugitive counterfeiter posing as a doctor (already, the book posits the inherent dangers of forgery, even as it complicates those dangers by asking who isn’t in some sense a phony). There’s a beautiful line Gaddis treads in the first chapter between pain, despair, and melancholy and caustic humor, as Gwyon slowly realizes the false limits of his religion. The chapter continues to tell the story of young Wyatt, growing up under the stern care of his puritanical Aunt May, whose religious attitude is confounded by the increasingly erratic behavior of Wyatt’s often-absent father. While deathly ill, Wyatt teaches himself to paint by copying masterworks. He also attempts an original, a painting of his dead mother, but he cannot bear to finish it because, as he tells his father, “There’s something about . . . an unfinished piece of work . . . Where perfection is still possible. Because it’s there, it’s there all the time, all the time you work trying to uncover it.” This problem of originality, of Platonic perfection guides much of the novel’s critique on Modernism.
The Last Judgment – Hans Memling
Wyatt studies but ultimately rejects the ministry, opting instead to become an artist. The second chapter finds him in Paris, attempting to sell his original work. The chapter is a bravura shift into the sounds, sights, and consciousness of another world, another distinct mythology–ex-patriot Paris, Hemingway’s Paris, Woolf’s Paris. Gaddis shows a heavy debt to James Joyce‘s innovations in Ulysses here (and throughout the book, of course), although it would be a mistake to reduce the novel to a mere aping of that great work. Rather, The Recognitions seems to continue that High Modernist project, and, arguably, connect it to the (post)modern work of Pynchon, DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace. (In it’s heavy erudition, numerous allusions, and complex voices, the novel readily recalls both W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño as far as I’m concerned). By the third chapter we find Wyatt married, quite unhappily, producing hack work, copies he lets his boss put his name on. The chapter is painful and often ugly, as we see his marriage disintegrate. In this chapter he meets Recktall Brown, the Mephistophelean business man who will arrange Wyatt’s future career as a counterfeiter of original paintings. As the chapter ends, Wyatt is no longer referred to by his name, a device that continues throughout the rest of part one (and perhaps the whole book). It’s as if he’s lost something intrinsic, some core originality in exchange for the ability to “become” the artist he is emulating. Wyatt now disintegrates into the background of the narrative, and is exchanged for a young Harvard grad named Otto. Otto follows Wyatt around like a puppy, writing down whatever he says, absorbing whatever he can from him, and eventually sleeping with his wife. Otto is the worst kind of poseur; he travels to Central America to finish his play only to lend the mediocre (at best) work some authenticity, or at least buzz. He fakes an injury and cultivates a wild appearance he hopes will give him artistic mystique among the Bohemian Greenwich Villagers he hopes to impress. In the fifth chapter, at an art-party, Otto, and the reader, learn quickly that no one cares about his play–everyone’s busy making their own original art. Gaddis’s evocation of a Village party in the late forties/early fifties here is wonderful, fly-on-the-wall stuff. His rhetoric captures the buzzing musicality of a raucous house party, and even if his mockery of the assembled artists, critics, and wannabes is savage, it’s also loving. Gaddis has an astute ear for the mid-twentieth century, where gossip infiltrates debate on aesthetics, and commercials punctuate classical scores on the radio.
Wyatt (unnamed) returns for the seventh (and longest) chapter of part one. He’s been very successful at his work, although he seems not to care at all for the money he’s making. Instead, he seems obsessed with channeling these ancient masters, for only in this pre-modern world is originality possible. Of course, the levels of irony are confounding here: Wyatt’s only access to originality is to pretend to be another person. The originality of the paintings he creates is subject to the condition that they be not original to him (their creator) but to another. While this attack on Modernity–namely, that originality is impossible–is severe, it’s also worth noting that Gaddis’s writing enacts originality, even as it cobbles together disparate sources. This is what makes the novel such an addictive pleasure to read. While I cannot make any final claims about a novel before finishing it, I will go out on another limb and suggest that those who already own this novel and have not yet made a crack at it for fear of its massive size and allusive structure should go ahead and take it up: it’s dark, erudite, sad, and very, very funny. It’s also not that hard to read, and if the allusions get too dense, there’s always Steven Moore‘s fantastic resource, A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, now available in its entirety online. Have at it. More when I finish Part II.
Twenty years after its release, Rowdy Herring’s neo-western Road House holds up better than ever. The film stars an iconic Patrick Swayze as a philosophical cooler named Dalton hired to clean up a road house bar. In this process, Swayze’s Dalton discovers that the small town is under the thumb of the bullying gangster Brad Wesley (played with zealous malice by Ben Gazzara). Dalton cleans up, kicking ass without bothering to take names, and leaving a not-unsubstantial body count. This short plot review in no way conveys the brilliance of this film, which can’t really be captured in words–Road House must be witnessed. You have to see the rampant brawling, hear the awesome dialog (sample: “Pain don’t hurt), experience the spectacle that is Road House. That said, not everyone can appreciate what’s going on here: it merits a 5.7 out of 10 at IMDB and a 42% at Rotten Tomatoes. In short, the film is divisive. In his original review of the film, Roger Ebert wrote, “Road House exists right on the edge between the “good-bad movie” and the merely bad. I hesitate to recommend it, because so much depends on the ironic vision of the viewer.” A careful reading of Ebert’s review reveals that he really enjoyed the film. “Was it intended as a parody?” he asks. “I have no idea, but I laughed more during this movie than during any of the so-called comedies I saw during the same week.”
Ebert’s question of intentionality is instructive (if not ultimately that important). Any savvy viewer–especially those with a fine-tuned sense of “ironic vision”–will have to ask herself whether director Rowdy Herring and his crew meant to create such a sublime parody, or if the resulting masterpiece is just a happy accident. The simple answer to the question is that it doesn’t really matter, of course, but I still find it a curious issue of aesthetics, especially in light of a new breed of action films that are particularly self-aware. These include Jason Statham’s Crank films (2006 and 2009), movies that ask the viewer to suspend any rudimentary understanding of physics in exchange for ninety-minute doses of adrenaline overdrive. I’ve actually just described most Statham vehicles, but it’s the knowingness of the Crank movies that make them such a joy: part of the joke is that the film recognizes its ludicrousness. The Cranks want to make sure that the audience gets that they get that the audience is getting what the films are getting at. 2007’s Shoot ‘Em Up, starring Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti operates on the same principle. Shoot ‘Em Up is a series of action set pieces so ridiculous that the phrase “over the top” doesn’t even begin to function as a critique (during one of the film’s many, many gun battles, Owen’s character delivers a baby and then cuts the umbilical cord by shooting it). In a sense, films like Shoot ‘Em Up and Crank operate outside of any normal critique, including not just visual cues but also dialog to announce their parodic intent (Giamatti’s villain exclaims that “Violence is one of the most fun things to watch,” at one point). This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to be critical of such films (it’s very, very possible, actually), just that the films incorporate a sort of generational “ironic vision” of their audience as part of the viewing experience.
Indeed, these films count their success on the audience’s ability to “get”–and appreciate–the irony being conveyed. While action films have long used irony and meta-fictional devices as part of their vocabulary, those devices have usually been an invitation to the viewer to deepen his or her fantastical identification with the film. 1993’s Schwarzenegger vehicle The Last Action Hero is a consummate example here; in this dreadful film an action hero comes to life at the behest of a young boy who becomes a surrogate for the audience. The meta-troping here isn’t so much ironic; rather, it’s just another reification of hero-spectacle-audience dynamics. Films like Shoot ‘Em Up and Crank, in contrast, ultimately disconnect the heroic-identification most traditional action movies strive for. This isn’t to say that the audience member’s ironic vision prevents him or her from living vicariously for 90 minutes through the hero (or, more accurately, anti-hero)–it’s just that the vicarious, distorted nature of the identification is always on display. Put another way, Shoot ‘Em Up, Crank, and other movies that fit this mold (these might include Tony Scott’s unfairly maligned 2005 film Domino, 2008’s Death Race, 2007’s Smokin’ Aces, and even Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror (although surely that particular film is a separate discussion)) invite their audiences to both revel in and mock the conventions of heroic narrative filmmaking. These films take place entirely within scare quotes; there’s no danger that their irony might be misinterpreted. Only the most callow of viewers will not “get” the intentionality of parodic irony here (contrast Ebert’s unconfused review of Shoot ‘Em Upwith his questioning of Road House; there’s not a hint of nervousness that the silliness of the latter might be unintentional). These films wink so often at the viewer that the gesture becomes a distracting nervous tic.
While I have a certain fondness for the parodic, ironic action films I’ve mentioned, I have to admit that their greatest failure is, ironically, their defining characteristic. They announce their parodic content at all times, squashing any of the anxieties about intention that a viewing of Road House engenders, and, in doing so, they lose an unqualifiable, unquantifiable joy. The greatest parodies never announce themselves as such, and thus create a contradictory balance of trust and anxiety from savvy viewers. In my estimation, no one does this better than director Paul Verhoeven, auteur behind Robocop, Starship Troopers, and Showgirls. Verhoeven’s films are doubly generous: on one hand, they function beautifully as straightforward Hollywood fare; on the other hand, with the assistance of a particular ironic vision, they are brilliant satires of not just culture and politics, but also of the very art of filmmaking and the implicit contract between film and audience. In contrast with the studied irony of certain latter day action movies, the films of Verhoeven don’t blink, let alone wink at their audience, making the irony that much more delicious. Road House, without the benefit of a director with the oeuvre of Verhoeven, is certainly one of the most quizzical documents of the late eighties. Is the film self-aware? Swayze’s winning performance gives nothing away, allowing the audience to fully identify with his rampant bad-assery. There is no simple answer to the question the film must prompt to any contemporary viewer, just as it did to Ebert in 1989: “Is this for real?” It’s that anxiety of indulgence, of undecidability, this central ambiguity that makes Road House such a joy to watch. The film does not force you to watch it through any particular ideological lens. Celebrate Road House‘s 20th anniversary by giving it a proper re-viewing; whether you bring your ironic vision is up to you.
Literary critic and Harvard professor James Wood’s How Fiction Works, new in trade paperback from Picador, argues that “fiction is both artifice and verisimilitude, and that there is nothing difficult in holding together these two possibilities.” This thesis is rather broad, and really not so controversial; I’d certainly agree with it. It’s when Wood goes about showing how fiction successfully or unsuccessfully artfully represents reality that I find myself shouting at his text.
Not that I didn’t know that we were going to butt heads (to misapply a metaphor) before I began reading. After all, I was familiar enough with Wood’s aesthetic approach to literary criticism, one that eschews any notions of ideological underpinnings of a novel. In concrete terms, this means that all those discourses so (apparently) fashionable in English departments are out–you know, Marxist critiques, French deconstruction, post-colonial studies, gender readings, all that stuff. How wonderfully freeing for Wood to dispense with the baggage of history and ideology! Of course, certain novelists have felt the need to respond to these ideas, even if Wood hasn’t, leading our critic to deride a whole “genre” of “hysterical realism.” I happen to like a lot of this so-called “hysterical realism”: Pynchon, DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace spring to mind (Wood takes Wallace to task a few times in How Fiction Works, arguing that Wallace’s pseudo-business speak in “The Suffering Channel” is “fairly ugly, and a bit painful for more than a page or two”). Wood’s attack on “hysterical realism” centers on his claim that such novels privilege a (failed) attempt at a global, historical perspective at the cost of intimacy and human communication. The aesthetics here, for Wood, are precisely about how to accurately and intimately portray the world. To this end, Wood, favors writers like Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Chekov, and he spends much of How Fiction Works illustrating how marvelously these writers employ what he calls “free indirect style,” a type of narration where the lines between author’s and the character’s language are perfectly blended.
That Wood spends so much time on Flaubert and James (he devotes five pages to the latter’s ingenious use of the adverb “embarrassingly”) is telling when one considers the authors not represented in this book. While no literary critic should be condemned for not including every writer under the sun, it would be helpful if a book ostentatiously titled How Fiction Works took a look at something besides the work of dead white men. But there I go again, suggesting that ideology has some function in literature. Maybe I’m reaching here–to be fair, if Toni Morrison doesn’t even warrant a mention in Wood’s canon, then neither does Nathaniel Hawthorne (in fact, How Fiction Works is remarkably light on American writers in general–Melville only warrants a passing mention).
More disturbing than Wood’s limited pool of authors is his disingenuous claim that this book is for a common, everyday reader. With a hint of the anxiety of influence, he remarks that his hero Roland Barthes “does not write as if he expects to be read and comprehended by any kind of common reader,” but it must be noted that Wood will have lost anyone not fairly conversant with the history of literature by his first twenty pages.Hopefully, students new to literature will avoid Wood’s book and read something friendlier and more helpful, like Thomas C. Foster’sHow To Read Literature Like a Professor.
Did I forget to mention in all of this that I liked reading this book? Like most people who love to read, both academically and for pleasure, I like a good argument, and Wood’s aesthetic criticism is a marvelous platform for my ire, especially in a world that increasingly seems to not care about reading fiction. Wood is a gifted writer, even if his masterful skill at sublimating his personal opinion into a front of absolute authority is maddening. There’s actually probably more in his book that I agree with than not, but it’s those major sticking points on literary approaches that stick in my craw. It’s also those major sticking points that make the book an interesting read. I’d like to think that I’m not interested in merely having my opinions re-confirmed. I’d recommend How Fiction Works with the caveat that the reader not fall victim to Wood’s forceful rhetoric, to the erroneous assumption that Wood’s aesthetic values somehow trump one’s own. Read this book, but don’t mistake it for a substitute for the real education that great novels can provide. “I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries,” writes Wood in his introduction, but make no mistake, Wood cannot transmit the real in his criticism. It can only be found in reading the sources yourself.
Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice is a detective-fiction genre exercise/parody set in a cartoonish, madcap circa-1970 L.A. redolent with marijuana smoke, patchouli, and paranoia. Navigating this druggy haze is private detective Doc Sportello, who, at the behest of his ex-girlfriend, searches for a missing billionaire in a plot tangled up with surfers, junkies, rock bands, New Age cults, the FBI, and a mysterious syndicate known as the Golden Fang–and that’s not even half of it. At a mere 369 pages, Inherent Vice is considerably shorter than Pynchon’s last novel Against the Day, not to mention his masterpieces Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, and while it might not weigh in with those novels, it does bear plenty of the same Pynchonian trademarks: a strong picaresque bent, a mix of high and low culture, plenty of pop culture references, random sex, scat jokes, characters with silly names (too many to keep track of, of course), original songs, paranoia, paranoia, paranoia, and a central irreverence that borders on disregard for the reader. And like Pynchon’s other works, Inherent Vice is a parody, a take on detective noir, but also a lovely little rip on the sort of novels that populate beaches and airport bookstores all over the world. It’s also a send-up of L.A. stories and drug novels, and really a hate/love letter to the “psychedelic 60s” (to use Sportello’s term), with much in common with Pynchon’s own Vineland (although comparisons to Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, The Big Lebowski and even Chinatown wouldn’t be out of place either).
While most of Inherent Vice reverberates with zany goofiness and cheap thrills, Pynchon also uses the novel as a kind of cultural critique, proposing that modern America begins at the end of the sixties (the specter of the Manson family, the ultimate outsiders, haunts the book). The irony, of course–and undoubtedly it is purposeful irony–is that Pynchon has made similar arguments before: Gravity’s Rainbow locates the end of WWII as the beginning of modern America; the misadventures of the eponymous heroes of Mason & Dixon foreground an emerging American mythology; V. situates American place against the rise of a globally interdependent world. If Inherent Vice works in an idiom of nostalgia, it also works to undermine and puncture that nostalgia. Feeling a little melancholy, Doc remarks on the paradox underlying the sixties that “you lived in a climate of unquestioning hippie belief, pretending to trust everybody while always expecting be sold out.” In one of the novel’s most salient passages–one that has nothing to do with the plot, of course–Doc watches a music store where “in every window . . . appeared a hippie freak or a small party of hippie freaks, each listening on headphones to a different rock ‘n’ roll album and moving around at a different rhythm.” Doc’s reaction to this scene is remarkably prescient:
. . . Doc was used to outdoor concerts where thousands of people congregated to listen to music for free, and where it all got sort of blended together into a single public self, because everybody was having the same experience. But here, each person was listening in solitude, confinement and mutual silence, and some of them later at the register would actually be spending money to hear rock ‘n’ roll. It seemed to Doc like some strange kind of dues or payback. More and more lately he’d been brooding about this great collective dream that everybody was being encouraged to stay tripping around in. Only now and then would you get an unplanned glimpse at the other side.
If Doc’s tone is elegiac, the novel’s discourse works to undercut it, highlighting not so much the “great collective dream” of “a single public self,” but rather pointing out that not only was such a dream inherently false, an inherent vice, but also that this illusion came at a great price–one that people are perhaps paying even today. Doc’s take on the emerging postmodern culture is ironized elsewhere in one of the book’s more interesting subplots involving the earliest version of the internet. When Doc’s tech-savvy former mentor hips him to some info from ARPANET – “I swear it’s like acid,” he claims – Doc responds dubiously that “they outlawed acid as soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn’t want us to see? Why should information be any different?” Doc’s paranoia (and if you smoked a hundred joints a day, you’d be paranoid too) might be a survival trait, but it also sometimes leads to this kind of shortsightedness.
Intrinsic ironies aside, Inherent Vice can be read straightforward as a (not-so-straightforward) detective novel, living up to the promise of its cheesy cover. Honoring the genre, Pynchon writes more economically than ever, and injects plenty of action to keep up the pace in his narrative. It’s a page-turner, whatever that means, and while it’s not exactly Pynchon-lite, it’s hardly a heavy-hitter, nor does it aspire to be. At the same time, Pynchon fans are going to find plenty to dissect in this parody, and should not be disappointed with IV‘s more limited scope (don’t worry, there’s no restraint here folks–and who are we kidding, Pynchon is more or less critic-proof at this point in his career, isn’t he?). Inherent Vice is good dirty fun, a book that can be appreciated on any of several different levels, depending on “where you’re at,” as the hippies in the book like to say. Recommended.
Inherent Vice is available from Penguin August 4th, 2009.
How does one grieve? This central question runs through the nine stories that comprise Chris Adrian’s A Better Angel (available now in trade paperback from Picador). For Adrian’s protagonists, mostly adolescents and children, the past is inescapable and insurmountable, and the future promises only depression at best and eternal suffering at worst. These are stories about hauntings. In Adrian’s world (and it is a fully-realized world in the same way that Tolkien’s Middle Earth is its own discrete place), ghosts, angels, and even wayward friends are all likely to to demonically possess some sad, troubled weird kid. Again and again, these stories force their protagonists–and their readers–to question how one might witness to death, disease, and disaster–and still keep a modicum of sanity.
Those who’ve read Adrian’s novels The Children’s Hospitaland Gob’s Grief will find that the stories in A Better Angel work to flesh out a distinctly Adrianesque milieu. There are hospitals and doctors and nurses, dead brothers and absent parents, events of epic destruction and personal crises of illness, drugs and alcohol, ouija boards, and plenty of angels and demons. Adrian’s narratives explore a fine line between metaphysics and pure biology that each protagonist has to navigate. In “The Sum of Our Parts,” nurses and doctors wonder how our body parts make us individuals as a ghost tries to escape her coma-bound body. The fraudulent doctor of “A Better Angel” uses drugs as a way of subduing the angel who haunts him. “I make my living praising the beauty of well children,” he says. “I love babies and I love ketamine, and that’s really why I became a pediatrician, not because I hate illnesses, or really ever wanted to make anybody better.” Indeed, Adrian’s characters seem doubtful that anyone can make anyone else better, but it doesn’t stop them from trying. There’s the father of “The Changeling,” whose son is possessed by the ghosts of those murdered in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, who parcels out his own body as a sacrifice to appease the dead. The story recognizes though that it’s not really the dead he is honoring–he’s really showing his love for his son–but this measure of love is not enough for the dead. “The Changeling” is one of three stories in A Better Angel addressing the 9/11 attacks (we’ll write more about this trio in an upcoming post, and we’ve already addressed one of the stories here), but the September 11th victims are hardly the only ghosts here. In “A Hero of Chickamauga,” Civil War re-enactors try to commune with the dead and somehow bring personal justice to something beyond comprehension. “A Child’s Book of Sickness and Death” posits disease as the ultimate affront to cosmic justice. Its protagonist Cindy, an ailing “short gut girl” who lives in semi-permanent residence at a children’s hospital, remarks to no one in particular after the death of a young child,
“It seems to me, who should really know better, that all the late, new sadness of the past twenty-four hours ought to count for something, out to do something, ought to change something, inside of me, or outside in the world. But I don’t know what it is that might change, and I expect that nothing will change–children have died here before, and hapless idiots have come and gone, and always the next day the sick still come to languish and be poked, and they will lie in bed hoping not for healing, a thing which the wise have all long given up on, but for something to make them feel better, just for a little while, and sometimes they get this thing, and often they don’t.”
Cindy’s is just one of many negative epiphanies here. It’s also worth noting that this Cindy is but one of several Cindys populating this book, and she also seems to be another version of a short gut syndrome Cindy who appears in The Children’s Hospital. In fact, most of the primary characters in “A Children’s Book of Sickness and Death” are also present in The Children’s Hospital, underscoring the sinew that connects Adrian’s milieu.
This holistic vision marks Adrian as an accomplished–and challenging–author. Adrian’s challenge is not so much an issue of readability; we found ourselves quickly devouring these stories. No, what we have here are tales that many will find hard to digest, the sort of stuff that some readers will find too bitter to ruminate and puzzle out. Adrian, through his protagonists’ bleak outlooks, doesn’t offer a cure or even much solace from the pain and sickness in the world, but he does offer some temporary, if mild, relief, a sort of reckoning with that pain and sickness. Although the angels and demons and ghosts of Adrian’s world cannot be ignored or dismissed, they can be confronted, even if that confrontation must repeat without solution. Instead of pandering to his readers with Panglossian platitudes or metaphysical escape hatches, Adrian dramatizes the realities of our mortality in a way that compels both sympathy and repulsion, and above all, some deep thinking. Highly recommended.
I’m about half way through two books right now: Chris Adrian’s A Better Angel, and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Pynchon’s latest novel–I’ll talk a little bit about it in a sec–comes out in hardback from Penguin August 4th. Picador will release the first trade paperback edition of Chris Adrian’s latest collection of short stories on August 3rd. I’m really digging A Better Angel so far, but before I talk about it, I just wanna shill for Picador. They put out really cool, great-looking books from really cool authors like Roberto Bolaño, J.G. Ballard, Denis Johnson, William Burroughs, and DJ Kool Herc, and they also have a sexy little imprint called BIG IDEAS//small books that puts out some killer jams. They’re also really nice about sending review copies. Shill shill shill. I’m a whore, but I’m an earnest whore.
Anyway. Back to Adrian. Just finished “The Vision of Peter Damien,” a 9/11 story set in what seems to be nineteenth century rural Ohio. Damien, and then the other children of his small rural community, catch an illness that gives them unexplained, vivid hallucinations of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers. Adrian works in a mode of distortion throughout most of these stories so far, repeatedly employing metaphysical disruptions as well as playing with time and setting as a way of alienating his characters from each other and the reader. Adrian uses the temporal/metaphysical disruptions of “The Vision of Peter Damien” to respond to 9/11, creating an uncanny milieu for his readers. The cognitive dissonance here reminds me of other responses to 9/11, like DeLillo’s Falling Man, David Foster Wallace’s short story“The Suffering Channel,” and even Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. Actually, Wallace’s essay “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” does a really good job of capturing all the problems of witnessing to, understanding, reacting to (etc.) spectacular disaster. Adrian’s story recapitulates the same paradoxes, injecting a motif of illness and brotherhood, contagious decay and redemption that seems to run through all of the stories collected here. I don’t have a larger comment about literature’s response to 9/11 yet, but I think that it’s fascinating to watch such stories emerge and evolve. We’re still seeing the various shapes, tropes, strategies, etc. that authors will employ to tackle (or chip at, or remark upon, or even elide) such a big historical marker. Full review of A Better Angel at the end of this month.
Far less serious is Pynchon’s new novel, Inherent Vice, a detective noir painted in day-glo psychedelic swirls. Doc Sportello, at the behest of his ex-, is searching for a missing real-estate billionaire in the dope-haze of late 60s/early 70s LA (it appears to be set in 1969, as there are repeated references to “living in the sixties and seventies”). Pynchon’s new novel is a hard-boiled detective mystery, a psychedelic caper, an LA story, a comment on the decline of idealism and the emergence of media-unreality at the end of the 60s (because we needed another story about the 60s!), and probably a shaggy dog tale. The cover has gotten some criticism for its decidedly unliterary look, and last March I called it “horrendous.” I take it back: the campy cover, with its neon shock and beach-as-pastoral-idyll is lovingly ironic, satire that does not announce itself as satire and is thus always open to a straight-reading. Just like Pynchon’s novel, the cover can be read as an homage to both Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard (with a sly nod to all the Leonard ripoffs out there (glancing your way, Jimmy Buffett). As its cover suggests, this is a Pynchon book you can read breezily on a beach or airplane. Sure, it’s got the usual Pynchon trademarks–it’s overcrowded with zany, one-dimensional characters, it operates on a Looney Toons system of logic, it’s full of linguistic goofs–but it’s also incredibly easy to read (unlike, say, just about everything else Pynchon has ever written). It’s also a lot of fun. And to prove it’s a beach read, I’ll finish it this week at St.Augustine Beach, inebriated by strong margaritas and even stronger sun. Full review when I get back.
Biblioklept 