→ October 13, 2008
→ By

Deliverance.

James Dickey’s Deliverance (#42 on the Modern Library 100, as well as part of the TIME 100) is probably best known today for the film it inspired, and that film is unfortunately best known for one scene. That lens distorts the book’s strengths and has almost turned it – and Ned Beatty – into a punchline.

The novel tells of four suburban middle-aged men, three of whom are married with kids, all of whom are in some way bored with their existences. Lewis, the gung-ho weekend warrior of the group, proposes a weekend trip, rafting down rapids in an isolated forest in northern Georgia with some illegal deer hunting thrown in for good measure. The other three men agree, each considering backing out at some point before they hit the river, and their fears, irrational and abstract at the time, prove well-founded when the trip hits a snag and two of the men run into a pair of insane hillbillies. The four suburbanites escape via violence and take off down the river, a trip that leads to more violence and a desperate, intense quest for survival that pushes Ed, the book’s narrator, to the limits of his courage and strength.

Going into the book knowing the basic plot outline affected its ebb and flow for me. Everything leading up to the encounter with the psychotic yokels seemed deliberate, a forced quietude to dull the reader’s senses and increase the impact of the jarring rape scene that sets the adventure/survival portion of the book in motion. The depictions of Ed’s inner thoughts and struggles as he tries to recover from the attack and then assumes a leadership position in the attempt to get out of the woods alive elevate the book beyond a straight adventure novel into something more literary, a psychological thriller that is purposefully light on action as Dickey delves more deeply into Ed’s mental state. Thus establishing his theme, Dickey imbues more tension to the book’s “After” section, where the men have to finesse their way past the local authorities to get out of town.

The whole novel is a psychoanalyst’s – or a psychoanalytically-minded literature student’s – dream. Why, while he’s on the river, does Ed constantly imagine watching the way his wife’s back undulates when they have sex? Why do the men choose to go on this trip in the first place, and then ignore their doubts before they enter the forest? Isn’t it a little creepy that Ed has sex with his wife in the same position as the one used during the rape? (I mean, Dickey could certainly have had them use the missionary position. This had to be a conscious choice by the author.) Is this book, at its core, about the emasculation of the 20th-century American male? I feel like I’m back in my high school AP Lit class, where my teacher found a phallic symbol on every other page, but if I’m picking up on this stuff, I figure it must be pretty blatant, since I was the kid who would argue that the teacher’s oversexed interpretations were wrong. It would make great fodder for a literature paper, but I could have done without some of the imagery.

(Apropos of nothing: Was the rape scene in Pulp Fiction Tarantino’s homage to the scene in Deliverance?)

I’m backlogged on reviews, having knocked off three other books on the trip; I just started Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, another entry from the TIME 100, last night, but I should have reviews of the other books up this week.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 7, 2008
→ By

The Sot-Weed Factor.

John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (on the TIME 100) is a spot-on parody of the picaresque novel, a genre that includes Klaw 100 entries Tom Jones and The Pickwick Papers, novels with wide-ranging comical adventures running to seven or eight hundred pages. The style had been out of favor for well over a century at the time that Barth began work on his magnum opus in the late 1950s, and in satirizing it Barth also managed to imbue his work with a strain of social commentary and of symbolism that the earlier works often lacked.

The book’s unusual title comes from a real poem of the same name, written by Ebenezer Cooke, an English poet who sought himself to satirize the culture and society of the Province of Maryland, about whom little was known at the time that Barth decided to build a false history/biography of the man. “Sot-weed” was another name for tobacco, and a factor is, of course, a middleman in the trade of tangible goods. Barth takes Cooke and makes him into the poet laureate of Maryland, a man bent on preserving his innocence even as he is caught up in various political, military, and criminal intrigues that involve him, his twin sister, the fallen prostitute who is the object of his affections, and his childhood tutor, the shapeshifting Henry Burlingame. Many of these machinations are apparently at the whim of the God-like Lord Baltimore and the Satanic sociopath John Coode, although their appearances in the novel are oblique, to put it mildly.

In great picaresque style, Barth takes Ebenezer from his childhood to his dissolute days of drinking and idleness in London and then sets in motion a Rube Goldberg-like chain of events that lead him into and out of such troubles as marriage, kidnapping, bankruptcy, various threats to life and limb, the loss of his father’s estate, and endless encounters with impostors, not to mention at least three people who pretend to be Ebenezer when he’s not around to defend his name. Like most picaresque novels, The Sot-Weed Factor starts to drag in its final third, but Barth rallies for a slam-bang finish with a sham trial, the exposure of the frauds that remain on the table, and the settlement of all of the loose ends still untied, all set in motion by another pair of coincidences (a standby of the genre) that put Ebenezer and two of his comrades in just the right place at just the right time.

Barth’s novel also veers from the picaresque norm, perhaps by way of deepening the parody, through its sheer bawdiness. The prose is full of double entendres and euphemisms for sex and the body parts used therein. Men are often depicted as sexual animals who’ll take whatever they can get – in some instance, not distinguishing between man or woman, and in one instance between man or beast – while women veer from manipulators who use sex as a tool or as trade to victims-in-waiting for rape or abuse. (Indeed, the offhand treatment of rape was the one glaring negative aspect of the experience of reading the book; whether or not it is appropriate to the time in which the book is set and faux-written does not make one more comfortable with reading about rape, even when it’s never brought to pass on the page.) Tom Jones, at the least, had plenty of sexual shenanigans, and part of the book’s climax (!) comes as the title character nearly unknowingly commits incest. Barth gives the reader more sex, particularly more talk of sex, both satirizing the giants of the literary genre but also setting contrast to the willful virgin Ebenezer, whose drive to protect his innocence is a joke that runs through the entire work to the very last pages. One of the best in-jokes of the book is the alleged “true story” of John Smith and Pocahontas, after which you will never think of an eggplant in the same way again.

Next up: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 24, 2008
→ By

On lit lists.

So reader ajd posted this in the comments on my Vanity Fair review, a follow-up to his question of whether I ever read lesser-known works by great authors:

My original question was, in part, based on criticism in works like Myers’ _Reader’s Manifesto_, i.e. that certain “great” literature is only considered great because it is deemed so by the keepers of the kingdom. I’ve always wondered how useful certain lists of great books are for this very reason — do the authors pick the best books, or do they pick the books that make them look the most intelligent and the most in tune with what other literati value?

Obviously this is moot to some extent, as one simply has to start somewhere. And some of your less-favorable reviews seem to indicate that you agree with this general premise above; I’d just wondered if, once you’ve read other works by authors on these lists, you’d found you preferred them over the best-known books.

I’m with Myers and ajd to a point; there is no question that some books are considered great because they’ve always been considered great, and I think there are a few books that are considered great because they’re incredibly hard to read. There’s also the whole stream-of-consciousness movement started by Joyce – like a viral infection through the world of fiction – that gets praise from academics but that leaves most readers cold or on the outside altogether. I admit I haven’t read Pamela or Clarissa, but their greatness has to be almost wholly derived from their influence on contemporary or near-contemporary authors, since they’re scarcely read today.

However, there’s a limit to this absolute-contrarian view. Some books are considered great because they’re actually great. One Hundred Years of Solitude (in the top 20 of the Novel 100) is one. Most of you who’ve read The Master and Margarita (which is in the honorable mentions for the Novel 100) agree that it’s phenomenal. I don’t hear anyone saying that Don Quixote (#1 on the Novel 100) isn’t anything special.

I also run into a fair amount of disagreement on the rankings of novels by prolific authors. What is Charles Dickens’ greatest novel? In high school, we read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. The Novel 100 includes the former, but adds Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers (the latter being my favorite). Some cite Hard Times for its blend of comedy and biting social commentary. And when the Guardian did its list, the only Dickens novel on it was David Copperfield.

Part of why Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is typically considered his best book is that it’s his most serious, and there is absolutely an academic/critical bias against comic novels. (That said, Modern Library put A Handful of Dust over Brideshead Revisited, while the Bloomsbury 100 includes the former but omits the latter.) It is almost as if a comedy has to be very old (Fielding, Austen) or the author’s only great work (Heller’s Catch-22) to be taken seriously.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ September 22, 2008
→ By

North and South.

I always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack-in-a-box, for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is a somewhat forgotten (at least in the U.S.) classic of 19th century Brit Lit which I discovered by way of the Bloomsbury 100. It’s a sort of Pride and Prejudice meets Germinal, combining a romance between two people who can’t admit their feelings for each other with a commentary on Britain’s “social problem” during its Industrial Revolution in the early to mid-1800s.

North and South‘s heroine is Margaret Hale, who opens the book by rejecting a marriage proposal from Henry Lennox, the old-fashioned and paternalistic lawyer whose brother has just married Margaret’s cousin, Edith. Margaret’s father then announces that he has become a Dissenter and is leaving his post as minister in the southern hamlet of Helstone, instead moving the family north to the industrial town of Milton (a thinly-disguised version of Manchester) where he’ll become a tutor to a local industrialist named Mr. Thornton. Thornton and Margaret take an instant dislike to each other, sparring over the rights and responsibilities of labor and management in a mirror of the contemporary debates over workers’ rights in England at the time. And, of course, they fall in love.

What works about the novel is that while the romance is the foundation of the story, it spends most of the book in the background as Gaskell uses Margaret and Thornton as launching points for subplots around the labor-management strife in Milton. Margaret’s chance encounter with Bessy Higgins, who is terminally ill from working in a textile mill during her childhood, and her father creates a direct window into the life of workers in England’s factories during the 1800s. Gaskell relies a little heavily on coincidence to make sure that the lives of Margaret, Thornton, the Higginses, Margaret’s godfather Mr. Bell, and even Henry Lennox all intersect, although this was very common even in the best literature of the period, and it’s a justifiable maneuver to ensure that both the social commentary and the romance come to a conclusion in the book’s 500-ish pages.

What worked less for me was the romance itself, which felt a little too derivative of Pride and Prejudice and finds a resolution that is driven in large part by money, rather than by emotions or the development of the main characters. In Austen’s masterpiece, Elizabeth Bennet comes around as she learns more of Mr. Darcy’s character and has to admit to herself that she did him an injustice in their earlier meetings. Here, Gaskell imbues Margaret Hale with similar strength of spirit, but denies her the chance for a completely self-sufficient redemption.

Next up: I like big books and I cannot lie – John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, a parody of the picaresque novel, in all its 750 pages of glory.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 11, 2008
→ By

You Shall Know Our Velocity!

I don’t remember who recommended Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity! to me, but I liked the title and have seen a few things on McSweeney’s that made me laugh, so I figured I’d give it a try. The book is funny in places, especially in the first third or so, but as Eggers tries to become more serious (well, I think he was, at least), the book started to unravel for me.

Eggers’ prose is his strongest point as a novelist. He’s got a great knack for descriptive text, whether in analogies (“Down a low-ceilinged hallway and down again and then through a swinging double-door and finally we were in a sort of basement den, the basement of an ancient building, almost surely once this structure’s dungeon or crypt, where hay would be stacked in one corner and men tortured in the other.”) or just in piling words together – and I do mean piling, to the point of overflow – to create a mental picture. Some of the reviews I found compared the running internal monologue of the narrator to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but Eggers crushes them on readability, and contrasting those monologues to the actual dialogue – what we say, versus what we should say or want to say – gave the book an extra layer of complexity and ultimately of meaning.

Much of the book’s humor comes through the fact that neither of the main characters (Will, the narrator, and Hand, his friend – you could write a thesis on the meanings of those names alone) is all that bright. They plan a trip around the world to all sorts of random countries, without thinking that they might need visas or that there may not be a direct flight from Ulaan Baator to Greenland. Will doesn’t want to bring the heavy Churchill biography he’s reading on the trip, so he rips out the first two hundred and last two hundred pages instead. Hand puts on a pretty good smart-guy act, giving us some clever one-liners:

“The mafia here is organized.”
Here I knew what Hand was going to say – I saw it coming from miles away, a slow steamtrain chugging and hooting – and I could do nothing to stop it.
“So you might call it … organized crime?”

The novel starts out as something of a madcap quest to travel around the world for a week, giving $32,000 (a windfall won by Will in appropriately silly circumstances) to deserving people. As the two men travel – and often fail to travel through their own incompetence – they find that giving the money away isn’t as easy as they expected; or, perhaps, that they’re judgmental assholes who keep finding reasons not to give the money away. Or maybe both. Will engages in some internal monologues, rationalizing away his reluctance to give money to certain deserving people, and often gives the money away in hit-and-run fashion – here, take this money, don’t talk to me, don’t look at me, I’m just going to run away now thanks bye.

The descent into vague self-loathing, accented with small doses of existential doubt and and unresolved but never quite explained issues between the two friends, gets old quickly. Will tells us about their longtime friend Jack, who was recently killed in a bizarre car accident, and it’s possible that this is all a reaction to their sudden loss … but the treatment is superficial, just some scraps that could let us speculate wildly but not enough to let us talk intelligently. A novel that started out funny and clever with great prose ended up dull and slow and almost difficult to read.

There are two versions of Velocity! out there, one of which contains a roughly 50-page addendum narrated by Hand that, among other things, casts doubt on Will’s reliability as narrator. The section was apparently written after the book’s publication and is available on the McSweeney’s site if, like me, you get the original edition of the book. If the additional material is meant as satire – a self-deprecating review of sorts, written by one of the principal characters – then it’s clever and kind of funny. If it’s meant as a serious addition to the book, then I wish I’d never seen it.

Several of you have suggested I read either of Eggers’ other books, and since I liked his prose style, I’m sure I’ll give A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius a try.

Next up: I have already started and finished a nonfiction book, Taking on the Trust , about investigative reporter Ida Tarbell and her groundbreaking series about the Standard Oil trust. I’m now into a Brit Lit novel, North and South , by Edith Gaskell.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,
→ September 6, 2008
→ By

Call It Sleep.

I’ve said before that I don’t really get Jewish-American literature, and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep – on the TIME 100 and #67 on The Novel 100 – now joins that list. It is apparently considered one of the best, if not the best, depictions of the Jewish immigrant experience in America. There was, somewhere, a central theme or concept in this book that flew right over my head, which left me with a slow, difficult-to-read novel with very little plot until the very end of the book.

The protagonist is David Schearl, a perpetually terrified boy who, after arriving as an infant in the prologue, is eight years old at the start of the first section and eleven at the end. He has a vivid imagination, usually for the worse, is afraid of everything, and engages in incoherent internal monologues whose style I imagine is ripped straight from Ulysses. (They were reminiscent of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, which supposedly took the technique from Joyce’s novel.) His father is a violent man who can’t keep a job because he does things like attack co-workers with an axe. His mother coddles him and tries to protect him from his father. His aunt comes to live with them for a few months, runs her mouth (not without justification), and ends up feuding with David’s father.

I look for a consistent plot to carry me through any novel, but Call It Sleep offers the thinnest of threads. In the final 60-70 pages, Roth finally gives us a story, a question about David’s parentage and the true pasts of both of his parents, leading to a confrontation and an accident that may have had some deeper symbolic meaning, but again, it was lost on me. While we’re waiting for something to happen, we have chapter upon chapter of David’s time in Hebrew school, or hanging around the other Jewish kids in his neighborhood. As a slice of life in a short story, it would be interesting, but as a novel, it’s a weak foundation. It might be that my own life experiences are too far away from those of the protagonists in novels like Call It Sleep, Herzog, or Portnoy’s Complaint for me to relate to them and to understand the central themes, but then again, I’ve had no problem with African-American classics, and I doubt that I am more in tune with Milkman Dead or Bigger Thomas than I am with David Schearl or Alexander Portnoy.

Next up: I’m halfway through Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity!, a reader suggestion from probably a year ago.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , ,
→ August 14, 2008
→ By

Famous last lines?

Was asked this in chat today:

(51) j (rh)
klaw-couple weeks ago you answered favorite literary first lines. how bout favorite last lines?

I have to say nothing came to mind right away, but I was reminded of it by the last line of my daughter’s new favorite movie, Mary Poppins, spoken by Bert: “Goodbye, Mary Poppins, don’t stay away too long.”

Anyway, two of my nominees:

Catch-22: The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.

1984: He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. (Yes, technically two lines.)

So I’ll open the thread to everyone. Need help? I did, and found this list of 100 “best” last lines.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With:
→ August 5, 2008
→ By

Embers.

I first learned about Sándor Márai’s Embers through this peculiar list of the top ten novels in Eastern European literature (according to Tibor Fischer), part of a long series of literary top tens that the Guardian has run. Márai’s stood out as one that was short, available in English, and Hungarian, a country that has always fascinated me, both before and after my 2003 pilgrimage to Budapest. I bought the book, and then reader Amy asked (randomly) in a recent chat whether I’d heard of the book, a sure sign that it was time to crack it open.

Embers itself is an unbelievably simple and powerful story, with just three main characters, one of whom is dead but who appears in flashbacks. The two living characters, both now in their mid-70s, meet for the first time in forty-one years as the visitor, Konrad, has returned from a self-imposed exile. Henrik, his host and formerly his closest friend, receives Konrad with cold hospitality and a long but spellbinding harangue on their friendship, Konrad’s exile, and the event that triggered Henrik’s flight.

There’s almost no action, and what action there is occurs in cut scenes where we meet Krisztina, the late wife of Henrik, and discover the key differences in Konrad’s and Henrik’s upbringings. Márai replaces action with the gradual unfolding of secrets and the stories that bound the three characters together and then drove them apart. Along the way, Henrik muses (to Konrad) on the nature of anger, betrayal, and vengeance. It’s a deep psychological novel in the tradition of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but in a much more manageable package. For those of you still in school, it would lend itself well to an analysis of how Marai uses environmental factors such as light, temperature, and weather to reflect or even set the moods of the book’s various scenes.

To say more of the characters would be to risk spoiling the plot, if I haven’t done too much of that already. If you can stand a book that is all talk and no action, but is gripping all the same, Embers is worth the three or four hours it will take you to tear through it.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ August 3, 2008
→ By

Bel Canto.

All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.

Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a PEN/Faulkner Award, is a beautifully written, intelligent novel with one of the best-developed character ensembles I have ever found in a work of literature.

Bel Canto is based on the 1997 hostage crisis in Lima, where fourteen members of a fringe guerrilla group invaded the Japanese embassy and held 72 people hostage for four months, at the end of which the Peruvian army stormed the embassy and killed all of the terrorists, with one hostage dying of a heart problem in the assault. Patchett’s version is in an unnamed, poor, Spanish-speaking country, in the Vice-President’s residence, where a party is being held in honor of a Japanese executive, Mr. Hosokawa, who may be about to bring a large capital investment to the country. However, he only agreed to attend the party when the organizers agreed to fly in Roxane Coss, a world-famous opera singer and Hosokawa’s favorite artist.

Patchett tips us off up front that the eventual murder victims will be the terrorists, not the hostages, although of course the characters don’t know that as we follow them through the ordeal. Patchett has created an amazing number of fleshed-out characters, showing skill both at delving into human emotions and at painting characters with the flourishes that give them definition. Once the initial period after the raid has ended, each character, terrorist and hostage alike, finds his or her niche within the makeshift commune, like the Vice President who becomes the housekeeper, or the poor priest with a secret love of opera. (In a flashback scene, Father Arguedas confesses his love of opera to his priest, who responds, “Art is not sin. It’s not always good. But it’s not a sin.” The priest asks Arguedas if he prefers Verdi or Wagner, and when Arguedas responds, “Verdi,” the priest answers, “You are young. Come back and tell me again in twenty years.”) But more impressive is the way Patchett takes the relationships between some of the hostages and some of the terrorists beyond simple Stockholm Syndrome territory, showing how factors such as age, size, gender, and skill define interpersonal relationships and building a web of interactions on that basis.

If there’s a flaw at all in Bel Canto, it’s that Patchett made her terrorists too sympathetic. Most of the rank and file members are just teenagers without ideology, and each of the leaders has some distinct humanizing trait. It’s good writing, but also the book’s biggest departure from reality.

Bel Canto lacks a linear plot, instead telling the stories around the shift from the captor/hostage dynamic to a commune that is so tranquil that some of the hostages find they lose their desire to leave. Whether this is because they’re truly happy or because they’re happy to be escaping from the tedium or stresses of their daily lives is left to the reader to decide.

Next up: I owe you reviews of Embers and the nonfiction book Manhunt, but the next book for me to read is a behemoth, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ July 31, 2008
→ By

The Road.

In The Road, the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Cormac McCarthy tells a story about goodness surviving in the most awful of circumstances, but does it in such a brutal, hopeless way that it’s hard to walk away from the novel feeling good about much of anything.

The Road takes place in a world devastated by a nuclear holocaust. Most of the world’s population appears to be dead, and all animal life is presumed extinct. Nuclear winter is gradually setting in; the sun is barely visible through the permanent cloud of ash and dush, and the temperatures are dropping. The story itself involves a man and his son moving south on The Road to try to get to a warmer climate, struggling to survive along the way, needing food and water while also avoiding the derelicts, bandits, and cannibals – yes, cannibals – who also travel The Road.

If you focus almost entirely on the interactions between the man and his son – identified, in true McCarthy fashion, as the Man and the Boy – you find a powerful and tender portrait of filial love. The Man is motivated to press on in hopeless circumstances because of his love for his son, who was born on the night of the first bombing. The other people remaining in the world are separated in the eyes of the Boy into “the good guys” and “the bad guys,” and while the latter appear to far outnumber the former, there are hints of goodness here and there in their limited encounters with the good guys, and of course, in the sacrifices the Man makes to give the Boy a chance at some kind of life.

It was hard for me to glean those glimpses of goodness or faith in the human spirit among the sheer desolation of the setting and the stark brutality of McCarthy’s view of humanity, which borders on misanthropy, muted only slightly by the glimpses of empathy he slips into the text at the bleakest moments. Yet the most powerful moments in the book are the most depraved and the most disturbing, not the few moments of tenderness of the Man towards the Boy or the one meeting with “the good guys” on the Road. The prose, as it was in Blood Meridian, was amazing, and McCarthy knows how to weave little mysteries into his writing with talk about “the fire,” but again, beautiful writing that looks into the abyss is still, at the end of the day, about the abyss. It’s a brilliant work, and I can see why it won the Pulitzer, but it was an arduous read and one I can’t say I enjoyed.

Next up: I’ve already finished Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto and am most of the way through Sandor Marai’s Embers.

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