Category: Reviews

U.S.!–Chris Bachelder

Edwin Turner3 Comments

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Chris Bachelder‘s superb novel U.S.! portrays an alternate (and somewhat hyperbolic) United States where the Left (big-L) keeps bringing Upton Sinclair (that guy who wrote The Jungle (maybe you read it in high school (I didn’t))) back to life. These would-be revolutionaries try to keep Sinclair (and hope) alive in spite of the fact that right-wing reactionary populist heroes keep assassinating him. In fact, in U.S.!, Upton Sinclair assassination is its own cottage industry.

Bachelder uses a dazzling range of approaches in the first 200 pages of the novel, employing everything from folk song lyrics to Amazon reviews to talk show transcripts in order to flesh out his alternate universe. The first part of U.S.! essentially sets up the last third of the novel, a relatively straight-forward third-person omniscient account of a Fourth of July book-burning in a Southern state. I won’t reveal any more of the plot, because I’m lazy and you should read this book for yourself.

Bachelder’s writing crackles with wit and surprising warmth, especially in the character of Sinclair, who comes across as a (literally) dusty out-of-touch relic, an idealist as equally unable to effect any change in the modern world as he was able to in his own era. Sinclair and the would-be revolutionaries who resuscitate him serve as Bachelder’s critique on America’s stale, impotent left (or is it Left?). Bachelder also savagely criticizes Sinclair’s rhetoric; one of the funniest sections of the first part of the book involves an analysis of exclamation points (and their overuse) in Sinclair’s novels. Toward the end of the novel, Bachelder employs a meta-critical strategy of adding more and more exclamation points to his own writing; the exaggerated gestures comically highlight the cartoonishly grotesque world of U.S.!, at the same time counterbalancing the understated but profound sadness of the novel.

My only gripe with U.S.! would be Bachelder’s rare lapse into what I like to call “workshop fiction”–fiction that seems the contrived and overwritten product of MFA work-shopping (did I mention that Bachelder got his MFA at my alma mater, the University of Florida at Gainesville? (other great writers associated with this glorious institution include Padgett Powell and Harry Crews)). As I noted though, these instances are rare and mostly notable because the majority of the novel is so fresh, original, and readable. This book is funny, poignant, and you should read it.

Never Break the Chain–Cath Carroll on Fleetwood Mac

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Never Break the Chain: Fleetwood Mac and the Making of Rumours by Cath Carroll (yes, that Cath Carroll) provides an excellent overview of the long, strange career of Mick Fleetwood and company. Like many of you (I’m guessing), I was introduced to Fleetwood Mac via my parents, who played Rumours ad infinitum. It was one of the first albums I “owned”–from the vinyl, I recorded a cassette copy that I played on my Sony Walkman repeatedly. I believe Born on the USA was on the other side. As the years passed, Fleetwood Mac somehow became very uncool to my ears (i.e., they did not rap, there was a paucity of shredding metallic guitar overtures, etc), then slightly cooler, then totally uncool (i.e. the Clintons, the reunion tour), then very very cool (thank you college, thank you Tusk).

Never Break the Chain is organized chronologically, making it easy for readers such as myself to skip around to sections of greater interest. The majority of Carroll’s research comes from previously published articles from magazines like Creem and Rolling Stone, as well as a few interviews. Carroll navigates the Mac’s bizarre history, detailing the numerous personnel changes. Mick Fleetwood is the book’s undisputed hero, the rock(er) who kept the band together through the tumultuous tempest of three decades. It’s fascinating to see how the band transforms from a British blues rock group from the John Mayall school of rock, to the melodic songwriting team that recorded the utterly-Western masterpiece Rumours.

As the title suggests, the making of Rumours becomes the focal point of the book. Carroll explores the bizarre love quadrangles that erupted within the band during that time, although for my taste there wasn’t quite enough VH1’s Behind the Music trashiness to her analysis. Ditto for the legendary cocaine use that supposedly fueled the FM’s late seventies output, which is largely glossed over.  However, gearheads who can’t get enough descriptions of studio equipment, instrumentation, and production techniques will love this book. Carroll goes into very detailed accounts of how FM approached songwriting–some of the most interesting passages recount how the band arrived at the album sequences. Plenty of in-fighting, plenty of fights with the studio, and a whole chapter devoted to Tusk. On the whole not bad. However, no substitution for actually listening to the albums.

Infinite Infanticide (Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence)

Edwin Turner4 Comments

A few weeks ago, I saw (and loved) Children of Men, and it reminded me of one of my favorite books of all time, Ape and Essence by Alduous Huxley.

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If you’ve only read one book by Huxley, chances are it was Brave New World, an incredibly prescient novel that really “got it right” so to speak–especially when compared to George Orwell’s vision of a dystopian future, 1984. In 1984, Orwell assumes that a totalitarian regime will hide and distort information from a suppressed public, that a Big Brother will watch our every move. Huxley’s BNW posits a future where the public could care less about information at all, a public that willingly cedes an antiquated ideal of “privacy.” In 1984, books are banned; in BNW no one wants to read (and who would want to read when a trip to the feelies provides a total synesthetic experience?)
But where was I…

So. Yes. Hmmm. Ape and Essence. This is a fantastic book, thoroughly entertaining–blackly sardonic, acidic and biting, yet funny and moving, full of pathos and dread and the possibility of loss, extinction, the end of beauty. I have forced this book on just about everyone I know, to the point that it is now Duck-taped together. Ape and Essence is a frame tale of sorts: it begins (significantly, on the day of Gandhi’s assassination) with two Hollywood types discovering the screenplay for an unmade movie called Ape and Essence. Intrigued by the strange story, the two head out to the desert to meet the writer, only to find that he’s recently died. The surreal and imagistic screenplay is then presented uncut as the remainder of the book. Ape and Essence presents an illiterate, post-apocalyptic world where grave-robbing is the primary profession. The hero of the story is one Dr. Poole, a scientist from New Zealand (New Zealand was isolated enough to resist nuclear holocaust) who arrives with a team of scientists to the West Coast of America. Poole is quickly separated from the other scientists and forced into slave labor, excavating graves. He finds a world where people worship the satanic god Belial, who they believe, in his anger, is responsible for the high numbers of genetically deformed children. These children are ritualistically slaughtered in purification rites that frame the social discourse of this New America. Additionally, procreation is proscribed to a two week ritual-orgy; other than this fortnight of lust and blood, sex and love are completely forbidden. The rest of the book details Poole’s infatuation with a woman named Loola, and their plan to escape to a rumored colony of “hots,” outsiders who don’t accept Belial and orgies and book burning and so on.

 

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Like Children of Men, Ape and Essence presents infanticide as the ultimate negation of progress. In both stories, people are both root and agent of their own destruction. But playing against this self-destructive death drive is the drive for life, for beauty, for sex. Neither story is willing–or able, perhaps–to make a definitive statement on which drive will prevail. Both stories resist “happy endings,” or can only be said to have “happy” endings in the simplest of senses. Ultimately, the endings are inconclusive, unsure, tentative at best. Will the human race die out? Are simple gestures of human fellowship, of poetry, of love, are these enough to conquer the infinite infanticide recapitulated within the narrative framework? We leave the theater feeling some hope, we close the book praying (to who?) that the characters will make it to a (never) Promised Land, but somewhere in the margins of our consciousness lurks the possibility of extinction–the predicate of loss that drives any story worth telling.

Nursing Gorilla

 

Mythologies–Roland Barthes

Edwin Turner2 Comments

“Myth is a language”–Roland Barthes

Everyone should own a copy of Roland Barthes‘ Mythologies. Published over 50 years ago, the book seems more relevant than ever. Barthes wields his sense of ironic humor like a scalpel, dissecting the ideological abuse of the post-war spectacle society. In this collection of short essays, Barthes examines the ways in which societies create, use and mediate myths–particularly the way that the “elite,” monied crust of society create new myths–whole systems of myths, really–to control cultural perceptions of “reality.” Barthes uses the language and tools of linguistics in his meditations to examine the malleable space between the signifier and the signified.  Barthes analyzes a range of disparate topics: amateur wrestling, plastic, advertisements for milk and wine, the face of Greta Garbo, children’s toys, and modern film’s conception of the ancient Roman haircut are all considered in relation to how these “everyday” things support the dominant cultural/economic ideology. The methods put forth in  Mythologies are certainly a precursor to what we now call popular culture studies; Barthes is certainly one of the first writers I can think of to dissect mass-mediated, popular culture. And even though it was published half a century ago, Barthes’ keenly ironic style and short-essay format comes across as thoroughly contemporary.

In the final essay of the collection, “Myth Today,” Barthes warns us that the myths we uphold to protect our culture can ultimately destroy the culture. What are the contemporary myth-systems of the United States? What ideology do these myths uphold? Do these myths hold the potential to harm the culture of our great country?

In the Shadow of No Towers–Art Spiegelman

Biblioklept5 Comments

Art Spiegelman’s Maus, released as a graphic novel over twenty years ago, did more to legitimize the comic as an art form than any other work I can think of. It won a Pullitzer Prize Special Award in 1992 (the Pullitzer committee found it hard to classify…perhaps they didn’t want to admit that they were giving a prestigious award to a comic book!), and today Maus is a standard on many college English syllabi.

After Maus, Spiegelman worked for The New Yorker for over ten years, quitting in early 2002 after the September 11th attacks to work on a series of broadsheets entitled In the Shadow of No Towers. These broadsheets were collected in 2004 in an unwieldy 15″ x 10″ book.

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Spiegelman lived in downtown Manhattan, right by the towers; his daughter attended school a few blocks away. He saw the towers collapse in person, fleeing for his life with his family. Spiegelman attempts to capture this raw, unmediated, and very personal experience in In the Shadow of No Towers (Sonic Youth’s 2002 album Murray Street works to the same end–only much more abstractly): the narrative is discontiguous, fluctuating from bitter satire to earnest inquiry. Spiegelman’s choice of the broadsheet as his medium (the broadsheets were published monthly by different newspapers as Spiegelman produced them) is tremendously affective: just like the 9/11 attacks, the broadsheets are larger than life, hard to grasp, hyperbolically resisting easy, singular readings. Spiegelman balances bitter attacks against the conformist mentality spurred by the Bush administration with pathos and humor; In the Shadow of No Towers recalls the good-natured satire of broadsheet comics from a hundred years ago, bittersweetening the content. The 2004 collection wisely contextualizes Spiegelman’s work by reprinting broadsheets of “The Yellow Kid” and “The Katzenjammer Kids.”

Like Maus, In the Shadow of No Towers is a fascinating exploration of how disaster confronts and transforms identity. And reflecting its heinous subject, In the Shadow of No Towers ends without concluding: as the foolish Iraq war begins, Spiegelman can no longer shape any meaning or sense from his work. This isn’t a graphic novel–don’t look for a cohesive narrative structure here; instead, In the Shadow of No Towers explores the loose ends, the detritus, the psychic remnants of disaster.

Girl With Curious Hair–David Foster Wallace

Edwin Turner3 Comments

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Scott Martin was kind enough to loan me this book. Did he know that it would forever change the way I read? It was the first semester of my freshman year in college, and I was slowly reaching beyond stuff like Henry Miller, Wm Burroughs and Franz Kafka. David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Girl With Curious Hair introduced me to a whole new world of writing. Reading DFW is like having a very witty friend tell you a moving and funny story over a  few beers. He’s hilarious, thought-provoking, and not nearly as hard to read as people seem to think (by the way, simply googling “David Foster Wallace” will yield several vitriolic essays by people who think that DFW is somehow duping his readers. He’s not. These people don’t know a good story when they read one.)

Girl features “real people” like Alex Trebek, David Letterman, and Lyndon Johnson as characters, but constantly destabilizes any realism these figures might lend to the story. The novella included in this collection, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, alludes directly to John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (another book I’ve loaned out and never gotten back). Westward takes a critical but humorous look at how culture is commodified: the plot centers around a reunion for everyone who has ever acted in a McDonald’s commercial. At the reunion, plans are revealed for a series of real-life “Funhouses,” based on the work of “Dr. Ambrose” (Barth’s stand-in in Westward).

Girl with Curious Hair is probably the best starting point for anyone interested in DFW but daunted by 1000 pages of Infinite Jest (IJ is yet another one I loaned out and never got back). Girl‘s stories have a little more ‘pop’ to them than DFW’s latest collection, Oblivion, and Girl tends to be easier to find used than DFW’s other collections, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (actually a better collection, in my opinion) and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (a collection of hilarious essays and nonfiction).

To sum up: if you still haven’t read DFW go consume this book; when you’re done you’ll be left wondering: “What other good stuff have I been missing out on?”

Reviews in Chronological Order

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Reviews, essays, riffs, etc. Most recent first. Updates sporadic at best.

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