Tag: Literature

Book vs Film

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The AV Club’s fun little inventory of literary works that should never be adapted to film again got us to thinking about that age old question — book vs. film. Common wisdom holds that “the book is always better than the film,” with any number of examples as evidence. Some of the works cited on the AV Club’s list are novels that can’t really be translated to film, at least not in philosophical essence (Moby-Dick, for example, and Nabokov’s Lolita, a film that for reasons social and legal, can never be made properly).

Our own observation, or rule of thumb, is that, while canonical “high” literature rarely makes for masterpiece filmmaking, genre fare–done right–can make classic films. In Francis Ford Coppola’s hands, Mario Puzo’s airport bookstore pickup The Godfather became two of the greatest films of all time. Look at what Stephen Spielberg did for Peter Benchley’s beach read Jaws, or what Kubrick did for Stephen King’s pulp horror The Shining. In more recent times, Alfonso Cuarón turned P.D. James’s capable thriller Children of Men into cinematic gold, but, tellingly, stumbled in adapting the Charles Dickens classic Great Expectations. Terrence Malick turned James Jones’s war novel The Thin Red Line into cinematic art and Martin Scorsese spun Goodfellas from Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguy–hardly Shakespeare. Danny Boyle has made a career of turning lesser works by writers like Alex Garland and Irvine Welsh into fantastic films.

Very few films present a tough choice, really–we’re still not sure if the Coens’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men is better than the book, but it might be. Gary Sinise’s measured take on John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men gets just about everything right. Heck, Harold Bloom has even argued quite publicly that John Huston’s version of The Grapes of Wrath is superior to Steinbeck’s. We’re not sure about that one either. Suffice to say that they’re different; that watching a film is not the same as reading a book, nor should it be. We close by saying that we’d love to see Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital adapted to film, preferably by someone awesome like David Lynch or Cuarón, and that, as Sam Peckinpah is long dead, no one should try to adapt Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

Ruby’s Spoon — Anna Lawrence Pietroni

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In her debut novel Ruby’s Spoon, Anna Lawrence Pietroni tells the story of thirteen-year-old Ruby Tailor, an orphan living in the industrial town of Cradle Cross, England in the blighted and confused years after the Great War. Ruby works at a fish and chip shop run by her ersatz father-figure, Captin, and although she’s happy, she dreams of escaping across water. Enter the alien and alluring Isa Fly, an old (or maybe not-so-old) woman who arrives unbidden to Cradle Cross late one night and immediately charms both Captin and Ruby. Ruby and Isa are soon drawn to Truda Blick, an over-educated, under-loved heiress whose button factory is crumbling into decline. Ruby, Captin, and Truda are the minority in their welcoming of Isa, however, and as her visit to Cross Cradle continues, her odd demeanor–and other factors–cause her to be labeled a witch. Climax ensues.

Lawrence Pietroni’s tale evokes Dickensian grime and magical-realist sparkle at the same time, interweaving the highly-specific myth and folklore of the Black Country with the coal and soot economy of a factory town. To capture the spirit of her setting, Pietroni employs the Black Country dialect in her characters’ speech; the vernacular rhythms are a lovely feature of the novel that might challenge some readers. Like Zora Neale Hurston, who preserved Eatonville’s strange colloquialisms (and thus much of its culture) forever in her writing, Lawrence Pietroni uses her characters’ odd speech patterns as more than just a gimmick. However, unlike Hurston, who refuses to provide context to help readers glean meaning from her Southerners’ voices, Lawrence Pietroni at times stages interjections that clarify peculiarities of the Black Country dialect. This is the foremost of several concessions to clarity in a novel that, on the whole, would be more endearing if it allowed its central mysteries freer rein over narrative. The third-person narrator is strongly attuned to Ruby, an insightful girl to be sure, but often Ruby’s realizations, both in their acuity and profundity, read like exposition rather than characterization. Still, these are minor gripes, ultimately more about editing than writing, and they shouldn’t steer one away from the vividly-imagined Black Country world that Lawrence Pietroni presents here. Fans of Susanna Clarke and Sarah Waters will wish to take notice.

Ruby’s Spoon is new today in hardback from Spiegel & Grau.

“Fast Anchor’d Eternal O Love!” — Walt Whitman

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FAST-ANCHOR’D eternal O love! O woman I love!
O bride! O wife! more resistless than I can tell, the thought of
you!
Then separate, as disembodied or another born,
Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation,
I ascend, I float in the regions of your love O man,
O sharer of my roving life.

Zora Neale Hurston’s Love Spells

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Valentine’s Day will be upon us in just a few hours, but it’s not too to late conjure up some last minute romance. In the appendix to her collection of Florida folktales, Mules and Men, author Zora Neale Hurston offers up a host of Hoodoo, including the following love spells:

TO MAKE A MAN COME HOME

Take nine deep red or pink candles. Write his name three times on each candle. Wash the candles with Van-Van. Put the name three times on paper and place under the candles, and call thee name of the party three times as the candle is placed at the hours of seven, nine or eleven.

TO MAKE PEOPLE LOVE YOU

Take nine lumps of starch, nine of sugar, nine teaspoons of steel dust. Wet it all with Jockey Club cologne. Take nine pieces of ribbon, blue, red or yellow. Take a dessertspoonful and put it on a piece of ribbon and tie it in a bag. As each fold is gathered together call his name. As you wrap it with yellow thread call his name till you finish. Make nine bags and place them under a rug, behind an armoire, under a step or over a door. They will love you and give you everything they can get. Distance makes no difference. Your mind is talking to his mind and nothing beats that.

TO BREAK UP A LOVE AFFAIR

Take nine needles, break each needle in three pieces. Write each person’s name three times on paper. Write one name backwards and one forwards and lay the broken needles on the paper. Take five black candles, four red and three green.

Tie a string across the door from it, suspend a large candle upside down, It will hang low on the door; bum one each day for one hour. If you burn your first in the daytime, keep on in the day; if at night, continue at night. A tin plate with paper and needles in it must be Placed to catch wax in.

When the ninth day is finished, go out into the street and get some white or black dog dung. A dog only drops his dung in the street when he is running and barking, and whoever you curse will ran and bark likewise. Put it in a bag with the paper and carrv it to running water, and one of the parties will leave town.

Hiding Man — Tracy Daugherty

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Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s excellent and insightful biography of Donald Barthelme begins with a fascinating anecdote. Daugherty, a student of Bartheleme’s, is told to “Find a copy of John Ashbery’s Three Poems, read it, buy a bottle of wine, go home, sit in front of the typewriter, drink the wine, don’t sleep, and produce, by dawn, twelve pages of Ashbery imitation.” We’re not sure if that sounds like fun homework or not, but it does signal both Barthelme’s imaginative trajectory as well as Daugherty’s intimacy with his subject. Elsewhere in his introduction, he notes that “it’s wrong to think of Don as a victim of neglect. He was, rather, a connoisseur of it.” In short, Daugherty argues that Barthelme was a “Hiding Man,” an artist of structured subtlety who remains under-appreciated and misunderstood.

Daugherty’s book is at once a well-researched biography, a work of cultural and literary criticism, and a writerly affair–that is, its written with a novelist’s fine ear. He weaves Barthelme’s personal life with the man’s stories against the backdrop of a rapidly changing society, weighing Barthelme’s themes and methods along with a shift in literature, art, film, and culture. The book is most interesting when Daugherty situates Barthelme’s writing along/against other writers, particularly the other authors at the forefront of the so-called post-modernist movement. In one late episode, Barthelme organized what has come to be known as “The Postmodern Dinner,” inviting literary giants like William Gaddis, William Gass, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, and Susan Sontag to a fancy SoHo restaurant (Thomas Pynchon politely declined the invite). By 1983, postmodernism had fallen out of favor in lieu of minimalism; Barthelme wasn’t the only writer at the dinner who we might–even now–see as a “victim of neglect.” Many of these writers were attacked (and continue to be attacked) as verbal tricksters, hacks playing at a literary shell game. But, as Daugherty makes very clear in Hiding Man, Barthelme was deeply concerned with matters of meaning and art and philosophy and life and love. He was, like most postmodernists (and Modernists, and post-postmodernists), simply willing to remove some of the strictures that bound distinctions of high and low culture, all as a means of getting closer to a core of truth and perception–not as a means of displacing or denying it. He was an artist.

Hiding Man both begins and ends with an assignment. Daugherty invites Barthelme to read at Oregon State University in early 1989, six months before his death. After the reading, in a moment of utter poignancy, Barthelme asks his former pupil, “Did I do okay for you?” As Barthelme gets in a taxi to leave he gives Daugherty one final assignment: “Write a story about a genius.” Daugherty gets more than a passing grade on this one. Recommended.

Hiding Man is new this month in trade paperback from Picador.

Faulkner Source Material Discovered

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The New York Times reports that “what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger [detailing the genealogy that haunts Go Down, Moses] as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.” The article continues:

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.”

History, particularly the strange, paradoxical, and taboo history of the plantation underwrites almost all of Faulkner’s significant fiction, so any historical document that served to inform his writing will be of particular note to enthusiasts and scholars alike.

All Known Zora Neale Hurston WPA Recordings

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Check out this tidy collection of all known Zora Neale Hurston audio recordings from the 1930s, when the writer put her anthropology degree to work collecting Florida folklore as part of the Works Progress Administration. (We recommend “Tampa” for some good puerile fun (Tampans may be unamused)).

“I Guess My Work All These Years Has Been about Living in Dangerous Times” — Don DeLillo Interviewed on NPR

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Driving to work this morning in the dark dolorous haze appropriate to a post-Super Bowl Monday, I was more than a little surprised to catch Steve Innskeep interview Don DeLillo on Morning Edition. If you missed the interview, which focuses on DeLillo’s latest, Point Omega, you can listen to it or download it from Morning Edition‘s site. The usually-taciturn DeLillo is particularly reflective, even generous in this interview. “I guess my work all these years has been about living in dangerous times” he says, “and part of this danger has been what the media reports, and how it changes our perceptions.” It’s also kinda strange to hear his voice, which seems frailer and more awkward than I would have imagined. Very cool interview.

Three Days Before the Shooting . . . — Beginning Ralph Ellison’s Posthumous Second Novel

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In 1952, Ralph Ellison secured his place in the American literary canon with the publication of his picaresque verbal tour de force, Invisible Man. He never published another novel in his lifetime. Five years after his death in 1994 saw the publication of Juneteenth, a book cobbled together from the sundry drafts that Ellison had spent over forty years crafting and revising. Those papers ran to over 2000 pages. Now, editors John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley have made good on the promise to release an expanded version of Ellison’s proposed second novel. That effort, new in hardback this month from Random House’s Modern Library series, is Three Days Before the Shooting . . ., a massive, complex, and perplexing volume running to 1101 pages — not including editors’ notes, chronology, prefaces, and introductions.

I usually eschew introductions (or at least read them after I’ve read the text proper) in the hopes of not having my reading colored by some critic’s own thoughts, but in the case of Three Days, with its bulk, with its mystery, it seemed necessary to see what Callahan and Bradley had to say. What, exactly, would I be reading? How was it put together? Is there a real novel here? Our esteemed editors point out that:

. . . one might reasonably have expected to find among [Ellison’s] papers a single manuscript very near to completion, bearing evidence of the difficult choices he had made during the protracted period of the novel’s composition. One might have expected, perhaps, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, a fragmented with a clearly drafted, clearly delineated beginning and middle, whose author’s notes and drafts pointed toward two or three endings, each of which followed and resolved the projected novel as a whole. Or, to cite a more contemporary example, it might have resembled Roberto Bolaño’s 2666; upon its posthumous publication in 2008, Bolaño’s editor remarked that, had the author lived to see it through to publication, “its dimensions, its general content would by no means have been very different from what they are now.” In the extreme, one might have expected something like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a glorious mess of a novel that defies the very generic restraints of the form.

Callahan and Bradley pose these novels only as examples to contrast Ellison’s work as “something else entirely: a series of related narrative fragments, several of which extend to over three hundred manuscript pages in length, that appear to cohere without truly completing one another.” There’s a fun laundry list of where and on what Ellison composed the work, including the various types of paper he used and the different machines on which he wrote. The logistics are important from an editors perspective, of course, and as an interested reader it’s fascinating to see how Callahan and Bradley put all of Ellison’s disparate sources together. But what becomes most apparent in their general introduction to the work is that, even as he was always writing, Ellison was stalling, hoping to revise his novel in light of social changes–only, those social changes were happening relatively rapidly. It took Ellison over eight years to produce and edit Invisible Man, a novel that brilliantly captures American identity in the postwar era. For his second novel, Ellison clearly wanted to engage in such a critique again, but the rapidity of social and cultural change seems to have outpaced his ability to write and edit. He satisfied his public and the literary establishment by publishing excerpts of the novel (eight in total, all reproduced in Three Days), but most of his writing career, at least in terms of publishing, was spent writing (and revising) essays and critiques.

Still. Forty years and only eight published snippets? Really? Our fearless editors seem exasperated themselves, writing, “The longer one puzzles over what Ellison left behind, the more maddening it seems that he did not simply will himself to bring the book to a close, that he didn’t find his way to that ‘meaningful form’ he sought.” And there is so much narrative here; Ellison’s major concern — beyond revising in light of cultural and social upheaval — was simply fitting his pieces into a coherent whole. Not that there isn’t a plot. To borrow again from our generous editors:

The basic plot of Ellison’s novel as it emerges in these manuscripts centers upon the connection, estrangement, and reconciliation of two characters. The one is a black jazzman-turned-preacher named Alonzo Hickman, the other a racist ‘white’ New England Senator named Adam Sunraider, formerly known as Bliss–a child of indeterminate race whom Hickman had raised from infancy to adolescence. The action of the novel concerns Hickman’s efforts to stave off Sunraider’s assassination at the hands of the Senator’s own estranged son, a young man named Severen.

Callahan and Bradley go on to point out that, of course, this is simply the bare bones of the plot; that Three Days teems with characters and voices and motifs and strange little riffs. So far, my reading of the book upholds this assertion–and also suggests that the best way to enjoy this book is simply to dive right in. Yeah, that’s right. Ignore all the context. Skip Callahan and Bradley’s prefatory material completely–it’s well-written, highly informative, and will get right in your way. Just start at page one and enjoy Ellison’s rhythm, his inimitable language, his bizarre sense of humor and his deep pathos.

The book opens with a prologue that details a visit Hickman and his congregation make to Washington, D.C. three days before the shooting of Senator Sunraider. They attempt to warn him but are blocked at all turns. Book One then opens immediately with that assassination attempt, seen from the perspective of a journalist named McIntyre who narrates Book One in first-person. The first few chapters are set in the panicked claustrophobia of the post-shooting Senate where police detain everyone present. These chapters detail the strange rumors that circulate about Sunraider, including

. . . the rumor that for a time during his youth the Senator had been the leader of an organization which wore black hoods and practiced obscene ceremonials with the ugliest and most worn-out prostitutes they could find. Like certain motorcycle gangs of today they also engaged in acts of violence and hooliganism and were accused of torturing people — derelicts and such. They were also said to have distributed Christmas baskets and comic books to the poor.

What a great punchline. These early episodes made me laugh out loud at least three times. They’re also rather unsettling, and, more than anything, intriguing. In short, so far the book compels reading, and it’s hard to believe that such inspired riffs won’t add up to greater things. Our editors warn that the book doesn’t so much “end” as simply “stop,” but, right now, I’m fine with that. Ellison fans who don’t own this will want to pick it up forthwith; anyone daunted by its size, scope, or the context of its creation might miss some really great writing. More to come.

Occupied City — David Peace

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“You want to know what happened, yes?” an old detective asks near the beginning of Occupied City. “No? You want to know the truth? Make up your mind! Which do you want to know; what happened, or the truth?” This preoccupation of “what happened” vs. “the truth” fuels the central tension in David Peace’s new novel, a postmodern noir exercise set in the desolation of 1948 Tokyo. Based on the true story of the Teikoku Bank Massacre, Occupied City investigates the postwar slaying of twelve bank employees who were poisoned by a man dressed (perhaps) as a government official. There’s a parenthetical “perhaps” around just about everything in Peace’s book; he cites Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s short stories “In a Grove” and “Rashomon” (as well as Kurosawa’s film adaptation of that story) as inspirations for the structure of Occupied City.

And rightly so. The few witnesses who survived the massacre get to tell “what happened”; their testimony is combined in a pastiche of sources including official government documents, a detective’s notes, newspaper reports, and personal and professional letters from an obsessed American Lieutenant Colonel. There’s a classically-neutral narrator whose reportorial rationality is undercut at every turn by the interceding lamentations of a Beckettian speaker dipping into madness. And there are the dead, the victims who cry out to be seen as more than just victims. Peace’s techniques are somehow both stochastic and tightly controlled at the same time, as he weaves the disparate voices through his tale to square the different perspectives of “what happened” in an attempt to reach “the truth.” Peace’s language frequently vacillates between elliptical and elusive abstraction and the visceral immediacy one would expect from a detective novel. The verbal tics add up to a visual poetry, as Peace’s repetitions, redaction, strike-throughs, and columns reinvigorate a genre that too-often relies on stodgy convention. For many readers, this eclectic style will be at times challenging or even come off as pretentious, but those who submit to Peace’s tumult of language are in for quite a ride.

Occupied City is a smart, well-researched historical thriller that recalls the verbal grit and energy of James Ellroy, who Peace interviewed earlier thie year. Like Ellory, Peace’s detectives investigate the seamy gaps in history from myriad perspectives, prodding readers into violent alien territory. And like Ellroy’s work, there’s no easy “truth” at the bottom of this book, but there are plenty of unsettling questions. Occupied City is a stark, bewildering challenge from a writer who deserves a wider audience. Recommended.

Occupied City is new in hardback from Knopf this week.

“If We Do This as a Conversation, It Will Be Easier for Me” — David Foster Wallace

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David Foster Wallace’s 2003 interview on German TV station ZDF has been viewable for awhile in its full 84 minute glory, but it’s only just now been uploaded to YouTube in more digestible and manageable 10 minute chunks.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned — Wells Tower

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Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned takes its title from the name of the final story in the collection, but the phrase is also an apt descriptor for the underlying themes that most of these stories explore. Tower’s world is a neatly drawn parallel reality populated by down-on-their-luck protagonists who we always root for, despite our better judgment, even as they inadvertently destroy whatever vestiges of grace are bestowed upon them.

There’s Bob Monroe in “The Brown Coast,” who has “perpetrated three major fuckups that would be a long time in smoothing over.” He’s lost his wife and his job, but he finds a measure of solace in adding fish to an aquarium–until that project is ravaged. There’s the father of “Down through the Valley” — estranged against his will — who attempts to make nice by driving his ex’s injured new husband home from a New Age retreat. The poor guy, like so many of the characters here, stumbles into one bad situation after another. He’s not the only dad here — there are plenty of fathers in Everything Ravaged, and there’s also a strong undercurrent of Oedipal rage. In “Leopard,” (written in that rare beast, the second-person), Tower explores the psyche of an angry pre-adolescent boy who hates his dickish stepfather. When the lad discovers a flier warning that a pet leopard is on the loose, he fantasizes that the creature will solve his problem. The teenage lead of “Wild America” — the only female protagonist in the book — lives with the shame of having “tried to stab her shy father with a nail file.” In “The Brown Coast,” Bob calls his home to find that his Uncle has taken up with his wife. “Executors of Important Energies” brims with Oedipal tension, as a failed inventor has to come to terms with his father’s dementia. He’s had to live most of his life in ambivalence over his stepmother, who splits the age difference between him and his father:

The particulars weren’t absolutely clear, but I had a hunch that somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, he was going to take me out to a desert overlook where the sun was going down and announce that he was giving Lucy to me, along with his Mustang fastback, along with some Schlitz, and maybe a cassette tape that was nothing but “Night Moves” by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.”

If “Night Moves” is the dream, Seger’s “Beautiful Loser” is the reality for most of the characters in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. And Tower’s world is strangely beautiful, an evocatively drawn portrait of the little rural pockets that permeate the American Southeast. Sure, there’s a story set in New York City, and “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” is about Vikings in the Dark Ages, but for the most part Tower sticks to the weird, unstable borders between civilization and wilderness. It’s a world where seemingly peripheral characters all of a sudden fall into the narrative as essential players; it’s a violent world–and an engrossing one.

“Retreat” might be the finest of the stories here. It tells the story of two long-warring brothers who try, at least on the surface, to make amends. The protagonists (or, more rightly mutual antagonists) are typical of Tower: rough and physical, but also prone to moodiness and obsessive self-reflection. There are two versions of the story, initially published in issues 23 and 30 of McSweeney’s. The one published here is the later version, told from the perspective of the more financially-prosperous brother (the first is told from the viewpoint of the less well-off brother. Both brothers are total assholes). We kinda sorta wish that both versions were included in the collection, because they’ve come to form a composite story in our mind, but hey, you can’t always get what you want. “Retreat” unfurls in muscular, organic prose, bristling with fresh metaphors and similes. Great stuff.

Tower is a writing talent that we’ve been following for awhile now, and Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is the sort of book that makes you want to track down the stray stories not collected here (a good starting place for those interested: “Raw Water” in McSweeney’s 32). And while we’ll never knock the short story as a lesser form, surely this man has a novel waiting in the wings. We’d love to read it. We very highly recommend Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is available today in trade paperback from Picador.

David Peace on Occupied City

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We’re currently reading–and really enjoying–David Peace’s Occupied City, a dark and bewildering account of the 1948 Teikoku Bank Massacre in Tokyo. Peace’s book gets its American debut later this week from Knopf. We’ll run a proper review then. For now, here’s Peace discussing the project, his difficulty in writing it, the crime’s contemporary resonance in modern Japan, and how he stole from Rashomon:

“William Burns” — Roberto Bolaño

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Hey! Check it out: new (well, new as these things go) fiction from Roberto Bolaño. The New Yorker has published a selection called “William Burns,” which may or may not be (but we’re thinking probably is) an excerpt from a longer work, one that will probably come out in the nearish future. Chris Andrews translates. “William Burns” tells the story of the eponymous Californian, a “laid-back guy who never lost his cool,” who seems to be a private investigator entrusted to protect two women from a killer. The story builds in typical Bolaño fashion: plenty of sinister, Lynchian ambiance punctuated by strange humor, with a good shot of banality to smooth things out. Our favorite passage:

If I were a dog, I thought resentfully, these women would show me a bit more consideration. Later, after I realized that none of us were feeling sleepy, they started talking about children, and their voices made my heart recoil. I have seen terrible, evil things, sights to make a hard man flinch, but, listening to the women that night, my heart recoiled so violently it almost disappeared. I tried to butt in, I tried to find out if they were recalling scenes from childhood or talking about real children in the present, but I couldn’t. My throat felt as if it were packed with bandages and cotton swabs.

WSJ Interviews Don DeLillo

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The Wall Street Journal has published an interview with Don DeLillo where the reclusivish author discusses the genesis of his new novella, Point Omega. From the interview:

The Wall Street Journal: How did this book evolve?

Don DeLillo: The idea began in the same place where the novel begins — in the sixth floor gallery at the Museum of Modern Art — and at the same time, summer of 2006. I wandered in and there was “24 Hour Psycho,” which I found very interesting to watch and to think about. In fact, I returned two or three times after that, and by the third visit I was fairly certain I wanted to write something about it — the idea of time and motion and the sense of self-conscious seeing, because everything happens in such slow motion and because the imagery is somewhat familiar from the movie itself. I began to wonder about such things, about how we see and what we see, and what we miss seeing when we’re looking at things in a more conventional format. And I decided finally that I wasn’t going to risk writing a piece of nonfiction because I’m not a philosopher or a physicist and I could not study time in the matter that seemed to be warranted. So I placed a character in the gallery and began from there.

The Wall Street Journal seems to be on a streak when it comes to interviewing authors who typically avoid interviews–Cormac McCarthy talked with the financial magazine late last year. Maybe we should scour their archives more closely–who knows, maybe there’s a secret Salinger interview stashed away somewhere.

Point Omega — Don DeLillo

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Don DeLillo’s latest work Point Omega takes an oblique, subtle, and unnerving tackle at themes of time, perception, family, and, ultimately, personal apocalypse. It’s not a particularly fun book nor does it yield any direct answers, but it’s also a rewarding, engaging, and often challenging read.

Point Omega pretends to be a novel about two subjects: the Iraq War and film. Its narrator Jim Finley is an experimental filmmaker who travels to the Arizona desert in an attempt to convince aging intellectual Richard Elster to participate in a film comprised solely of one long, unedited take of Elster talking about whatever he likes. Although Finley repeatedly claims that Elster can talk about whatever he chooses to in the film, it’s clear that that the younger man wishes for the subject to be Elster’s involvement in the planning of the Iraq War, a sort of mea culpa from the intellectual elite who rolled over to the Bush administration. Elster’s involvement was essentially to provide academic credibility to the invasion:

He was the outsider, a scholar with an approval rating but no experience in government. He sat at a table in a secure conference room with the strategic planners and military analysts. He was there to conceptualize, his words, in quotes, to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counter-insurgency. He was cleared to read classified manuscripts, he said, and he listened to the chatter of the resident experts, the metaphysicians in the intelligence agencies, the fantasists in the Pentagon.

Elster becomes disillusioned with the whole process soon; he comes to realize the hollowness of his role and soon moves to the desert. “He’d exchanged all that for space and time,” writes DeLillo, announcing his theme. Later in the novella, Elster claims that the geologic time of the desert allows him to feel, “Time falling away . . . Time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time.” He contrasts this “deep time” with the time of cities:

It’s all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature is meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

Elster appears concerned that humanity is approaching Teilhard’s omega point, the maximum level of complexity of consciousness toward which the universe is evolving. He concedes that this idea might be “a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea our experience.” For Elster, the omega point is inevitable and leads to either “a sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion.” Ultimately, his viewpoint seems nihilistic: he’d rather human beings somehow be transformed into stones, be somehow absorbed into a new time, a geologic time.

The obsession with time and film literally wraps the book in two short chapters called “Anonymity” (a prologue) and “Anonymity 2” (an epilogue (or a prescient epitaph, perhaps?)). Both sections describe a man who spends all of his time at MOMA’s presentation of Douglas Gordon’s videowork 24 Hour Psycho, a silent showing of Hitchcock’s Psycho over 24 hours. Neither section is narrated by Finley, although it later becomes clear that he–along with other principals in the story–is present at the showing. The unnamed man whose consciousness permeates these chapters finds his own omega point in the crawling pace of the film. 24 Hour Psycho divorces itself from the healing powers that stories give us, the power to narrativize all the gaps and crevices of life. It’s no longer the medicine that Elster suggests literature (or film) might be. It now exists outside of narrative cohesion and somehow resonates with the purity or transcendence of geologic time.

Fortunately, DeLillo is gracious enough to his readers to not attempt replicating the pace of geologic time in his book. Point Omega is particularly slim–under 120 pages in hardback–and reads with a the conciseness and clarity which has been a hallmark of DeLillo’s style. As perhaps the signal writer of post-postmodernism (whatever that means), DeLillo continues to engage and anticipate new and emerging forms of alienation, and he does so without gimmicks or trickery, just the purity of considered ideas. Point Omega works best when he allows those ideas some room to breathe; the late-night scotch-soaked dialogues between Elster and Finley are some of the finest passages of the book and it’s a pity there aren’t more of them.

But it seems like we’ve digressed from some of our starting points, doesn’t it? Many critics will call Point Omega DeLillo’s “Iraq War novel,” which is a mistake akin to calling Underworld a book about baseball or White Noise a book about Hitler. The war is merely an entry point to the greater, more personal tragedy that underlies the book, a tragedy that will perhaps make Elster reassess his own value system. We won’t name the trauma at the core of the book–to do so might spoil a twist in a book largely devoid of conventional concrete plotting–but it is worth noting that DeLillo optimizes suspense and tension as the novel builds to its own omega point. While many will feel left cold by the book’s ultimately ambiguous invocation of personal calamity, we found in it a meaningful counterpoint to Elster’s explicit commentary on time and identity. DeLillo’s novel, in the end, requires an intellectual–or perhaps, dare we say spiritual–leap. Point Omega is hardly a satisfying read, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Highly recommended.

Point Omega is available February 2nd, 2010 from Scribner.

DeLillo Goes Psycho

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Okay. We admit that’s a stupid headline. Anyway.

We dove into our review copy of Don DeLillo’s latest novel (it’s really a novella, despite claims made by its cover and press materials) Point Omega last night. It opens with a protracted scene of a man at the 2006 MOMA showing of Douglas Gordon’s videowork, 24 Hour Psycho. Gordon’s project, first presented in Glasgow and Berlin in 1993, slows Alfred Hitchock’s classic Psycho to a crawl, stretching the entire film over 24 hours.

DeLillo’s description:

The slightest camera movement was a profound shift in space and time but the camera was not moving now. Anthony Perkins is turning his head. It was like whole numbers. The man could count the gradations in the movement of Anthony Perkins’ head. Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements rather than one continuous motion. It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything. Anthony Perkins’ head swiveling over time on his long thin neck.

Ah, DeLillo — “it was not like or unlike anything” — redact your own similes. There’s also this classic DeLilloian line in the episode, somehow both concise and oblique: “The film made him feel like someone watching a film.” Maybe watching this 35 second YouTube clip of 24 Hour Psycho will make you feel like someone watching a 35 second YouTube clip of 24 Hour Psycho.