→ December 14, 2010
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The U.S.A. Trilogy.

My Cliff Lee analysis from last night is up for Insiders, as is a piece from earlier on Monday on Scott Downs, Brendan Ryan, and Ryan Theriot, featuring a TOOTBLAN reference.

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John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy – The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money – is considered a landmark in American fiction, ranking 68th on the Novel 100, 23rd on the Modern Library 100, and 55th on the Brit-lit-skewed Guardian 100. Leading literary lights from Jean-Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer have praised Dos Passos’ writing in U.S.A. and the influence the work had in bringing modernism to the American novel. Taken in sum, this series of interconnected stories presents a panoramic view of the United States from the start of the Great War to the end of the Roaring 20s, where the main character is the scene and setting rather than any individual in the book. It’s not an easy read – more on that in a moment – but it is an important read if you read as a student rather than just for pleasure. (Not that there’s anything wrong with reading just for pleasure, of course.)

(Aside: The Novel 100 is back in print after several years out of it. The book, by literature professor Daniel Burt, ranks the 100 greatest novels ever written with an essay on each, and features a bonus, unranked list of the “second 100” after those. It’s been a great reading list for me, and I enjoy Burt’s analyses and comments on each book’s influence, even if I don’t always agree with his selections.)

Each book in the trilogy includes lengthy chapters following a dozen or so characters whose lives intertwine and whose paths cross with major historical figures, such as the young idealist who ends up working publicity on the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti. These chapters, heavy on descriptive prose, are bookended by two types of mini-chapters, the Newsreel and “The Camera Eye.” The former is a list of clipped fragments from newspaper and magazine articles of the time, anchoring you to a specific year or month while also setting up some of the emotional framework for the chapter to follow; the latter is a somewhat indecipherable stream-of-consciousness, worm’s-eye view of society that I found myself skimming because it gave me bad memories of struggling through Ulysses last winter. Dos Passos also inserts short, stylized biographies of important Americans of the time period, from Henry Ford to Woodrow Wilson to Frederick Taylor to now-forgotten names like dancer Isadora Duncan and labor activist Joe Hill, written with an opinionated voice that also seeks to inform.

Dos Passos also based large chunks of the books on his own experiences in World War I as part of the volunteer ambulance corps in Paris – a role that seems to have required a lot more drinking and carousing than actual ambulance-driving, but one that also seems to have fueled the book’s derogatory portraits of upper-class American twits in Europe, chasing money or skirts or good times while there was a war going on around them.

What I didn’t like about U.S.A. was the lack of a central story, or even set of stories. The existential nature of the trilogy means characters wink in and out of the book and Dos Passos gives a lot of time to mundane matters without investing the reader at all in anyone’s fate or happiness – because, I presume, that wasn’t his point. Dos Passos set out to provide a slice of life, and I’m not sure any American writer has done it better – but it makes for a more academic read than a leisurely one, a trilogy you might pick up to help you better follow the transition in American literature from the 1920s to the 1940s, but not something you’re going to grab to get you through your next long plane ride.

My other regret about U.S.A. is that Dos Passos didn’t use more dialogue, because he was pretty sharp with it and could have given more depth to his characters just by having them speak more often, such as in this banter from 1919 regarding the League of Nations:

“It’s not the name you give things, it’s who’s getting theirs underneath that counts,” said Robbins.
“That’s a very cynical remark,” said the California woman. “This isn’t any time to be cynical.”
“This is a time,” said Robbins, “when if we weren’t cynical we’d shoot ourselves.”

Baseball does come up a few times in the book, as one character is a serious fan (right around the time of the Black Sox scandal, after which baseball earns scant mention – you’d think Babe Ruth would show up in some Newsreels, right?) while the section in The Big Money on Frederick Taylor claims that

At Exeter he was head of his class and captain of the ballteam, the first man to pitch overhand. (When umpires complained that overhand pitching wasn’t in the rules of the game, he answered that it got results.)

And if you’re into food, U.S.A. introduced me to “smearcase,” which can refer to a sort of farmer’s or cottage cheese among the Pennsylvania Dutch, but which in the Baltimore area refers to something more akin to cheesecake. (The name comes from the German Schmierkäse, meaning smear-cheese.)

Next up: I’ve finished Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister and am most of the way through Dawn Powell’s Turn, Magic Wheel. Both authors are among my favorite American writers, Chandler for his phenomenal prose, Powell for her sardonic wit.

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→ September 22, 2010
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Boardwalk Empire and The Constant Gardener.

Two topics in one post, just because. You probably saw my post on why the pitcher win stat must die. Klawchat on Thursday.

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Finally got around to the first episode of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire last night , and I think my expectations were so high that I was bound to be a little disappointed, even though there’s a lot to like. The Prohibition Era/Roaring Twenties is my favorite period in U.S. history, in literature, film, or even non-fiction, so this series is tailor-made for me. Everything looks spectacular (outside of a couple of weak special effects), both the sets and the costumes, and Steve Buscemi really grew into the role as Atlantic City boss Nucky Thompson over the course of that one episode after a weak beginning with his speech to the Temperance League. Jimmy Darmody, (played by Michael Pitt), Nucky’s driver, has a chance to be an even more compelling character as a bright, young, ambitious kid whose moral compass has been warped or smashed by his experiences in Germany in World War I. Eddie, Nucky’s butler, was excellent as a sort of anti-Jeeves, although the role doesn’t offer much substance. And Paz de la Huerta … well, her character (Lucy) is mostly just comic relief, but if she’s naked a lot I won’t complain.

That first episode had plenty of cliches, though, starting with de la Huerta’s dim-witted showgirl/gangster moll. The other major female character, the abused, immigrant wife Margaret Schroder, comes with a back story we’ve seen a million times – beaten and subjugated by a jealous, alcoholic husband, who eventually gets his compuppance at Nucky’s hands, satisfying the viewer’s desire for vengeance but avoiding the harsh reality that domestic violence wasn’t seen the way we view it today. I can’t speak to the historical accuracy of the portrayals, but did notice that they made the Italian guy (Luciano) the loose cannon with the bad temper and the Jewish guy (Rothstein) the money-obsessed guy who cheats in his business dealings, both of which felt like unfortunate stereotyping. The editing style, particularly the montage sequence at the end, involved so many jump cuts that I had a hard time following the multiple strands, and the final murder in the episode lacked any context whatsoever. The main antagonist to Johnson, other than Rothstein, is Agent Van Alden, rocking a Dick Tracy jaw line but lacking any kind of back story to explain his zeal for stamping out alcohol (there are hints at a religious objection, but religious faith alone isn’t much of an explanation for Van Alden’s determination or steely expressions).

Buscemi and Pitt alone are reasons enough to continue watching, and the series is one of the only ones I’ve ever seen where the visual appeal would make me tune in anyway, but I am hopeful that this episode is the one where they worked out the kinks, setting up some stronger storylines and better characterizations for the rest of the season.

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If you’ve set your mind on hiding the truth, then the first thing you’ve got to do is give people a different truth to keep them quiet.

I’ve been slacking on my reading during the moving/unpacking process but did knock out John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener last week. A suspense novel involving spies that is less a spy novel than an angry novel of social criticism, it elevates a straightforward story of a widower’s quest to identify his wife’s murderers into a morally important work that is seldom preachy or strident without cause.

The superficial plot is that of the murder of Tessa Quayle and her research/activist partner Arnold Bluhm; their bodies are discovered in the first chapter, and the next hundred pages or so deal with the mundane nature of the death of the wife of a foreign service official – from the funeral to the investigation to the “handling” of the widower. It’s a slow beginning, but gradually builds enough of the case to set Justin off on the track that leads to the ultimate plot, the role in those murders of the multinational pharmaceutical corporations behind a supposed miracle TB drug called Dypraxa, whose side effects have apparently been ignored as it’s being given to poor Kenyans dying of the disease.

Le Carré still plays to his strengths as a spy novelist by sending Justin off on a run around the world, three continents and at least five countries, fleeing both his former employers and whoever killed his wife. Justin’s titular interest in gardening only plays a small role in defining his character, but le Carré does add some complexity through hints that Justin’s mind may be either going or playing tricks on him, a point of view pushed hard by the British foreign service, who appear to be operating in the pay of those same pharmaceutical companies who may have killed Kenyans through their drug trials and hushed it up. Through Justin’s investigation, which brings him into contact with all of the remaining major players in the drug’s development and early trials, le Carré offers the pharmaceutical companies’ points of view – particularly that they gave the drug to people who were likely to die of the disease anyway – but clearly has little sympathy for it; there’s a righteous anger bubbling just under the surface of The Constant Gardener that wouldn’t work if he was advocating a more controversial point of view, but given the existence of a similar incident that may have inspired this book, it’s hard to take the contrary position. The novel doesn’t have the same tension or psychological emphasis as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but the author’s obvious rage at what he views as abuses of supra-national corporations takes their place to drive the book forward towards its inevitable, tragic conclusion.

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→ November 29, 2009
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Alice Adams.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS some time between 2:30 and 3 pm EST on Monday, topics TBD.

Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, making him the award’s first two-time winner as he won two of the first four given. His first award was for The Magnificent Ambersons, a much stronger book chronicling an aristocratic family’s decline at the start of the 20th century. Alice Adams, while fast-moving and loaded with a healthy amount of satiric wit, relies on character actions that rang false for me and never had the same tension or narrative greed of the earlier work.

Alice is a girl of about twenty who has struggled to make a good marriage because of her unwealthy, working-class parents. While not poor, the family can’t indulge in frivolities like new clothes for every dance or fresh corsages from the florist – hey, I said the plot was nothing special – and Alice’s romantic prospects suffer. She finds herself courted by a newcomer to town, Mr. Russell, and ends up spinning yarns for him about herself and her family for fear that the truth will drive him away, even though, of course, she only makes matters worse through her deception. Meanwhile, her shrewish mother hounds Alice’s temporarily invalid father to leave the comfortable but low-status job he has to strike out on his own by modifying or stealing a company secret that he was involved in developing, a move that puts him into inevitable conflict with the maybe-sorta-benevolent company president. Alice’s smartass brother, Walter, is in his rebellious stage, socializing with blacks and outcast whites while making increasingly shrill demands on their father for a fast sum of money.

Tarkington sprinkles the first half of the book with cutting observations that both define the characters and provide a farcical element to the drab setting and the depressing acts of those higher up in the caste system, such as his description of one of the few men in the circle to pay any attention to Alice:

They danced. Mr. Dowling should have found other forms of exercise and pastime. Nature has not designed everyone for dancing, though sometimes those she has denied are the last to discover her niggardliness. But the round young man was at least vigorous enough – too much so, when his knees collided with Alice’s – and he was too sturdy to be thrown off his feet, himself, or to allow his partner to fall when he tripped her. He held her up valiantly, and continued to beat a path through the crowd of other dancers by main force.

Unfortunately, the wit dissipates in the back half of the book, and there’s this sense of impending romantic and financial doom over the book, both through the obvious setup of the novel – I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d read this story before – and through Alice’s vocalized expectations of an unhappy ending. The resulting structure, where Mr. Russell doesn’t appear until roughly the one-quarter mark and Mr. Adams doesn’t get out of bed till past the midpoint, is awkward and ineffective at building up a good head of steam for the plot. I read it just waiting for the other shoe to finally drop, and when it did it was incredibly predictable and tired.

Next up: The Guardian put Roald Dahl’s The BFG on its list of the hundred greatest novels ever written, which seems a bit daft, but the first half of the book has been good fun.

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→ September 8, 2009
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Tales of the Jazz Age.

I’m a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, with both Tender is the Night (#2) and The Great Gatsby (#17) appearing high on the Klaw 100, but before last week had only read eight of his short stories, those contained in his first collection, Flappers and Philosophers. Tales of The Jazz Age contains another eleven stories, although the edition I read indicates that Fitzgerald published over 160 short stories during his short writing career, using them largely to pay the bills as his novels didn’t come into such wide esteem as they hold today until after his death.

Of the eleven stories, only four really stood out, although there isn’t a bad read in the bunch because FSF was (and remains, I suppose) such a master of prose. The most famous story, at least today, is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is just as you’ve heard – the story of a man who is born at seventy years old and ages in reverse. It’s a clever gambit, and there are some little flourishes around how your apparent age affects the way people treat you (let’s just say that resonated with me), but the story itself isn’t much of a story – just a linear run through his life from 70 to 0. I did find it amusing to see that FSF received mail from loonies much as I do today, as you can see in the Wikipedia entry on Tales, although the edition I read has the word “piece” spelled as “peice” throughout the crackpot’s missive.

My favorite story in the bunch – and easily the most macabre – was “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” the story of a rather strange and insanely wealthy family camped out in a never-surveyed corner of Montana. The family will go to tremendous lengths to protect the secret of their wealth and their very existence. The story works on its own as a Hitchcockian suspense tale, but the family’s anachronistic ways set them up as a strong symbol of traditional views and practices that refuse or even fight attempts to introduce modernity to their world.

The collection also includes one straight-up romance, “The Camel’s Back,” that is almost inconsequential in plot but extremely well-written and witty, and a subtle meditation on risk and safety in life choices called “Oh Russet Witch!” Nothing in the collection is unreadable, although the phrasing in “The Tarquin of Cheapside,” which Fitzgerald wrote while he was at Princeton, is a little over-the-top, and “The Lees of Happiness” is quite sad without any point beyond, hey, sometimes life sucks.

Next up: Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net.

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