→ June 27, 2009
→ By

Ghost.

I have a new post up with some notes on non-Bryce-Harper players I saw at the Tournament of Stars this week.

River Ave Blues looked at the final mock drafts of the major draft analysts, and they ranked mine as the most accurate.

I’m holding the review of Word Freak for now, as Stefan agreed to a brief Q&A about the book and his current Scrabble habits and I’m waiting for the response.

—

Alan Lightman’s slim, quick-reading 2007 novel Ghost revolves around a very ordinary man, David Kurzweil, whose life is turned upside down when he sees something out of the corner of his eye that he can’t identify or explain. He ends up at the center of a public controversy over the existence of the supernatural, turning his life upside down as he struggles to decide what exactly he saw, and what it might mean.

The ostensible subject of the book is that battle between faith and skepticism, and Lightman – the first professor to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities at MIT – limits the phony dialogue and extended narrative digressions that can easily ruin a book like this, instead creating a raft of secondary characters to represent many different views on the subject. (Oddly enough, the one role he omits is the traditionalist – at no point does David seek counsel from clergy of any faith.) Lightman also cleverly confounds any attempt by his characters to provide a clear resolution to the question, as proving or disproving the existence of the supernatural is not his aim.

I think the book’s ultimate theme – or perhaps moral – is that, in the small view, it doesn’t matter whether David’s experience represented a genuine contact with the supernatural, but whether he fully believes in it himself. David doesn’t see any meaning in life, so he lives a life without meaning. He has a job that, at the time he takes it and even at the time that he sees whatever he sees, is just a job. His love life is in shambles, with a divorce that he hasn’t emotionally accepted after eight years and a girlfriend to whom he can’t fully connect. As he finds himself forced to defend what he saw from skeptics and from co-opters, his personality begins to emerge from a hibernation that may have started when his father died when David was still a child. He has shied away from real relationships for at least the eight years since the divorce, and perhaps for longer (the marriage did fail, after all), and suddenly is forced to deal with people and to define himself along the way. Whether the supernatural exists is not Lightman’s question; he’s exploring what would happen to an ordinary man placed into an extraordinary situation that has the potential to change his life in either direction.

Next up: One of those books that people can’t believe I haven’t read previously – Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,
→ June 15, 2009
→ By

Gone with the Wind.

Gone with the Wind is a five-lister, appearing on the TIME 100 and the Bloomsbury 100, ranking 100th on the Novel 100 and 26th on the Radcliffe 100, and winning the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1937. It is a sweeping epic of the South just before, during, and for years after the Civil War, with an emphasis on both the war’s effects on that region and specifically on the war’s effects on women and their role(s) in society. If you haven’t read the book or seen the film, you probably have the same impression that I did of the story, that it is primarily an ill-fated romance between Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, which ends with their famous exchange:

Scarlett: Rhett, Rhett… Rhett, if you go, where shall I go? What shall I do?
Rhett Butler: Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

As it turns out, their romance is but one of many plot lines underpinning the book, which is much more about Scarlett than it is about Rhett … and the lines above were modified from their original form in the book, where Scarlett says to Rhett after he has made it clear that they’re through, “All I know is that you do not love me and you are going away! Oh, my darling, if you go, what shall I do?” To this, Rhett responds with a hundred-word soliloquy that ends with, “I wish I could care what you do or where you go, but I can’t. My dear, I don’t give a damn,” with the last few words said “lightly but softly.” I’m not sure which is better – the film version is punchier, but feels less authentic – but the difference in effect is striking.

Scarlett herself is a fascinating character and very well developed, or at least becomes so as the book progresses, and it’s a neat trick by Mitchell to flesh the character out without changing Scarlett’s fundamental selfishness or immaturity through a thousand pages* and a series of life events worthy of a month of General Hospital. Scarlett is more anti-heroine than heroine, but she is definitely between the two poles; despite the character flaws mentioned above and an insatiable desire to earn what might today be called “screw-you money,” she is a raging survivalist and refuses to give up hope even in hopeless situations. Her determination, perseverance, and work ethic save her and members of her family – although whether she cares about them is another matter – from death, starvation, homelessness, rape, and poverty, depending on which trial she’s facing, and she’s admirable for that sheer force of will and her view that dwelling on a past that’s gone or on the reasons why she won’t succeed at something is just a waste of time.

*So I found a site that has word counts for a lot of famous novels, and it turns out that GWTW is the longest book I’ve ever read. The revised list:

1. Gone With the Wind (418053 words)
2. Don Quixote (390883)
3. Lonesome Dove (365712)
4. Anna Karenina (349736)
5. Tom Jones (345139)
6. Jonathan Strange (308931)
7. Vanity Fair (296401)
8. The Pickwick Papers (274718)
9. The Woman in White (244859)

Two books I presume would be next on the list, The Woman in White and The Sot-Weed Factor, didn’t have word counts listed, but I pulled The Woman in White from gutenberg.org. This is probably of interest to no one but me, although I think it’s odd that I’ve read two of the top three in the last three months and five of the top nine (or six of ten) in the last fifteen months. Maybe I’m getting over that fear of long books?

The main problem I had with GWTW may be connected to how well-formed Scarlett is. Mitchell, according to what I’ve since read about the book (including Daniel Burt’s essay in The Novel 100, which is one of his best), was determined to tell the story of southern women in the postbellum south and how they were expected to fill contradictory roles. To that end, Mitchell created two characters, Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes, who symbolize the two main cultural forces acting on southern women in that time period. Butler represents modernity, a break with the past and with the societal and moral strictures that held women out of the workforce, in the home, and pumping out babies. Wilkes represents the past, but a past that, by the novel’s end, no longer exists – a genteel, aristocratic southern society that was based on slavery and the subjugation of a “white trash” underclass that was largely swept under the rugs of the well-heeled. Scarlett should choose Rhett and let go of her idealized Ashley, but by the time she develops enough self-awareness to see this, it’s too late.

Yet Rhett and Ashley are so busy serving as symbols for the future (or for a future) and the past that they don’t work well as independent characters. Ashley is a simpering dandy with the initiative of a sea cucumber; he makes an expected marriage and has no useful skill or knowledge, since his plan is to live off his family’s wealth and holdings, all of which are destroyed in the war, leaving him an empty shell of a character for Mitchell to kick around when it suits her.

Rhett is far more complex than Ashley, and is constantly operating from unclear motives, which he lays bare (unconvincingly) in the book’s final pages. He’s an amoral opportunist who believes in nothing but his own pleasure and personal gain, yet makes irrational sacrifices that would appear to further neither of his aims. He loves Scarlett and eventually excoriates her for destroying their chance at happiness, without acknowledging that his derision, his neglect, and his recklessness all might place a little responsibility at his feet. His words are usually perfect, so perfect that he’s clearly a fictional character, yet when he is trying to convince his wife to forget the specter of Ashley and love him, he’s verbally abusive and can’t understand why his plan isn’t working. The final confrontation between Rhett and Scarlett, after yet another tragic death of someone close to them, has Rhett saying powerful, horrifying words about the death of love and the inability to erase the past, but his own role in the past is immaterial to him. He is reduced to a prop, like lighting designed to show Scarlett in an unattractive way.

Was Mitchell so locked in to developing her heroine that she left her male characters all half-formed or even caricatures? Was she unable to gross the gender chasm and create a compelling male character? With only one other completed novel during her lifetime, which she wrote as an adolescent, we’ll never get the answer to this. Reasons aside, that flaw keeps the book from greatness. It’s a shame that she didn’t flesh Rhett Butler out more fully, because he is interesting – an intelligent scoundrel who flummoxes Scarlett in their endless bickering:

(Rhett) “Still tied to momma’s apronstrings.”
(Scarlett) “Oh, you have the nastiest way of making virtues sound stupid.”
“But virtues are stupid.”

It’s also worth mentioning to anyone who does decide to tackle this book that it is full of language that today is considered highly offensive, mostly directed at blacks. There’s dialogue from whites towards blacks using plenty of n- and d-words, there’s also narrative text including those same words, but black characters’ dialogue is all written in the mocking style of “An’ den he say, Tell Miss Scarlett ter res’ easy. Ah’ll steal her a hawse outer de ahmy crall effen dey’s ary one lef’.” White characters in the book would have spoken English with a heavy Georgian accent as well, but Mitchell didn’t see fit to alter their dialogue to reflect the regional pronunciation; using stunted spelling for the words from slaves’ mouths serves to establish them as inferior persons within the book. Perhaps in a book of 300 pages, I could have overlooked it, but in 400,000-plus words, that type of language grates.

Next up: Nonfiction, just for a break – Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak, about the rather odd subculture of competitive Scrabble.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ June 5, 2009
→ By

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

I recorded a half-dozen draft preview videos for ESPNEWS and the dot-com; the first two are on Steven Strasburg and the top hitters in the draft. Today’s chat transcript is here. Deadspin had a good post today on the Austin Wood/Mike Belfiore debacle, which quoted me, which is what made it a good post in the first place.

—

After the dual endorsement given by the two critics behind the TIME 100, I expected to love Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but I didn’t. I liked it, and I can see glimmers of brilliance in it, but the core story just didn’t grab me or propel me forward.

Oscar Wao is a Latino geek in New Jersey caught between his ethnic identity and his inner dork, a lover of sci-fi magazines and role-playing games who speaks in his own stilted vernacular and can not, for the life of him, get laid. His life is brief and not really all that wondrous, although it is pretty crazy, a sort of hysterical realism along the lines of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The narrative breaks several times to shift narrators and jumps back once to tell the story of Oscar’s grandparents, particularly his grandfather, an educated man jailed over an apparent trifle by the brutal Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Indeed, Trujillo might be even more of a main character in this book than Oscar is, as the murderous tyrant appears in the subtext even in the present day, and the history of the Dominican Republic seems to parallel (imperfectly) Oscar’s story.

Díaz has a definite gift for language (Beli tried her hardest but she couldn’t spin bomb-grade plutonium from the light-grade uranium of her days) and reading his prose is frequently like tap-dancing on the edge of a deep crevasse – exciting, confusing, frightening, but, assuming you survive, something you’re not likely to forget any time soon. But ultimately, the story revolves around a character who’s not that compelling: Oscar is a geek and unlucky in love and life, but he’s not sympathetic – he’s almost robotic, and naïve only works on my sympathies for a little while, after which I start to wonder how a character who is allegedly quite smart can also be so dense. Diaz’s verbal gymnastics, his cleverness, and the intermittent humor all make Oscar Wao worth reading, but a tighter story and a central character who’s more human could have made this a masterpiece.

Next up: I’ve got about 360 pages left in Gone with the Wind.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ May 17, 2009
→ By

So Big.

You’re probably not familiar with the name Edna Ferber – I wasn’t until I saw it on the list of winners of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel – but you’ve probably heard of her work by way of the movies. She wrote the novels behind the films Showboat, Cimarron, Saratoga Trunk, and Giant, the last perhaps more notorious for being James Dean’s last work than for anything else. So Big, the novel that won Ferber the Pulitzer, has been adapted three times for the big screen but, by all accounts, never successfully, and given its leisurely pace and deep characterizations, I’m not terribly surprised.

So Big is the story of a mother and a son, starting from the mother’s sudden thrusting into the world after her father’s sudden (and somewhat comical) death and running into the son’s late twenties and early thirties. The mother, Selina Peake, is admonished by her father that life is an adventure if you get after it, but lets life lead her along until she’s forced to take the reins, after which she shows herself as a woman of spirit and initiative:

Youth was gone, but she had health, courage; a boy of nine; twenty-five acres of wornout farm land; dwelling and out-houses in a bad state of repair; and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.*

*I’m about 90% certain I read a passage similar to this one that used almost identical wording at the end in Lonesome Dove, used to describe Clara, but of course, I didn’t write down the page number and I’m not likely to find it by skimming through a 900-page book. If any of you choose to tackle that tome in the future, keep an eye out a phrase like “Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”

Selina, widowed with her young son Dirk (nicknamed “Sobig” after the “How big is baby?” game played with him as an infant), takes over the family farm and, with the help of the novel’s one substantial coincidence, carves out a living and eventually a life for the two of them, making Dirk’s well-being her driving force, ensuring that he receives an education and can start life with the advantages she lacked. It is, along those lines, a bit of a love story in the way that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is – a parent, alone, who will do anything for his/her son.

Somewhere past the novel’s midpoint, the focus shifts from Selina to the adult Dirk, first in college, then in his aimless early adulthood both in work and in his personal life. He starts out in a career he likes but finds no success, then in a career in which he finds success but no pleasure. He is good-looking and inadvertently charming, but almost apathetic towards women, with no interest in the type of woman he “should” be seeing:

The Farnham girl was a nice girl. She was the kind of girl one should fall in love with and doesn’t. The Farnham girl was one of the many well-bred Chicago girls of her day and class. Fine, honest, clear-headed, frank, capable, good-looking in an indefinite and unarresting sort of way. Hair-coloured hair, good teeth, good enough eyes, clear skin; sensible medium hands and feet … Her hand met yours firmly – and it was just a hand. At the contact no current darted through you, sending its shaft with a little zing to your heart.

It’s a pleasant read with dry wit like that of the passage about (I found “hair-coloured hair” rather clever) and an incredibly compelling and well-drawn character in Selina, for whom one must root as she faces adversity, although her one big low moment ends prematurely with the aforementioned coincidence (you could even call it a deus ex machina). Dirk is less compelling, by design, although it slows the book’s final third considerably until he meets someone who, more than anything, is spirited like his mother. The book also slowed a bit for me for the unclear theme – what are we looking at here: Selina’s trials? The rise of an independent woman? Her dedication to her son? Her son’s lack of lust for life? The rural/urban divide of Chicago in the early years of the 20th century? I couldn’t tell you; all of the above are present, none is dominant. I like my novels to be about something; this was about many things, but perhaps it was about too many things for a novel so short.

Next up: From the seventh winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel to the second-most recent winner of its successor award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Filed Under: Literature, Media Tagged With: , ,
→ April 30, 2009
→ By

Light in August.

Quick admin notes: Chat today at 1 pm (just for an hour). I’ll be on WHB in Kansas City with Rany Jazayerli at 7:30 CDT tonight. I’m trying to work out a hit time for our Chicago affiliate for tomorrow night as well.

On to more important matters…

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.

William Faulkner is best known for a quartet of books that dot all of the greatest-books lists to which I look for reading suggestions; The Sound and the Fury is his most acclaimed, but Light in August isn’t far behind, appearing at #57 on the Modern Library 100, #65 on the Radcliffe Course’s 100, and on the (unranked) TIME 100, as well as on the honorable mentions (the “Second 100”) in the Novel 100. So, as a Faulkner fan, I’m disappointed to report that I didn’t love it the way I loved Sound, Absalom, Absalom!, or his final novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Reivers.

Light in August is a story of isolation and the oppression of history, set in Faulkner’s usual spot of Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi. Although the novel has several foci, the main charater for much of the book is Joe Christmas, a man of mysterious origins and unclear ancestry whose life has been marked by rejection and alienation. The book begins with the story of Lena, a young and naive woman, eight months pregnant, who walks and hitches her way from Alabama to Mississippi in search of the jackass who knocked her up and skipped town; when she arrives in the town of Jefferson, it is just after her paramour and Joe have been mixed up in a horrible crime, after which Faulkner jumps backward repeatedly in time to unfold Joe’s story in stages, from his brief time in an orphanage to his upbringing in a very strict household to, eventually, the circumstances of his birth. Joe himself suffers from a lack of identity because of his darker complexion and the possibility that he is part black, which in the south in the 1920s was (apparently) a major problem. Joe finds himself unaccepted by either the white or black communities and settles, by default, for a life of solitude until he meets a woman who is, if possible, more isolated than he is.

Christmas himself is about as clear a Christ figure as you’ll find in literature. (Thomas C. Foster’s book How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines, in addition to just being a fun read, has a whole chapter on Christ figures and how to spot them.) Christmas’ initials match those of Christ, he appears at the orphanage on Christmas Day (hence the name), he is 33 years old at the time of his death, and his parentage is unclear and the subject of much rumor and speculation. He’s not Jesus, of course – he’s selfish and a survivalist and angry at everyone – but the allusions are there, and Christmas himself wonders (indirectly) about whether God has forsaken him.

Most of the book’s main characters are on the run from history. Christmas is running from an ethnicity and upbringing he didn’t choose, and it is as if his story was written for him once he was born and rejected by his mother’s family. Jefferson’s disgraced minister, Reverend Hightower, has been haunted since birth by visions of a grandfather who was killed in battle before the Reverend was born, almost as if he is that grandfather reincarnated, and his inability (or unwillingness) to carve out his own path instead of chasing ghosts from the Civil War doom his marriage, his ministry, and ultimately his happiness. Lena is the only character running toward something, but she’s running toward a man who doesn’t want her (or their baby) and ignoring forks in her road that could give her stability, if not actual happiness.

The prose example I used above is, to me, classic Faulkner, a circular style where the author bends language to his will and gives abstract concepts physical form. Sound and Absalom are difficult but rewarding reads because of this prose style, but August is largely written in a more traditional style that robs the book of some of the color and complexity of Faulkner’s other works. I also found Christmas – described by one critic whose name appears lost to the sands of time as “the loneliest character” in literature – unsympathetic despite all of the hardships he endures and the fact that he starts life in an 0-2 count; although he fights at the drop of a hat, there is no fight in him, only a cold survival instinct, which may be realistic for someone who comes from a childhood devoid of love or affection but doesn’t make for a great central character.

Next up: Jasper Fforde’s First Among Sequels, book five (well, six, if you count The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco) in the Thursday Next series.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 21, 2009
→ By

Tropic of Cancer.

I hated this book. It’s not a novel, certainly; filling 300 pages with f-bombs and see-you-next-Tuesdays without regard for plot or character does not a novel make. There is one sequence, covering about 3% of the book, that might actually be called a plot, but the rest is the self-serving and often vile ramblings of Miller’s alter-ego narrator. I’m a little Homer Simpsonish in that I like stories. When I pick up a novel, I want a story. Miller didn’t bother with one. Somehow it still made the TIME, Modern Library (#50), and Radcliffe (#84) 100s.

And since there’s little more to say on that front, here’s the Klaw anti-10, the ten books I’ve read through and hated the most.

10. A Death in the Family, James Agee.

Reviewed in December of 2007. Depressing, but also incoherent and distant.

9. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon

I know many of you loved it. I found it simplistic and totally derivative of the first book of The Sound and the Fury, and was put off by the diatribes Haddon put into the protagonist’s mouth. And it was boring. Other than that it rocked.

8. The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos.

Reviewed in January. Other than occasionally making me hungry with its descriptions of Cuban food, the book has nothing to recommend it. It’s definitely in the Miller tradition of sex-as-bodily-function writing, but I’m pretty sure Hijuelos was trying to be lascivious, whereas Miller was just writing whatever words he vomited out of his brain.

7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Difficult prose, the merest shadow of a plot, and a completely bizarre and long tangent on the specific physical characteristics of hell. I know I’m eventually going to crater and read Ulysses, but let’s just say starting Joyce with Portrait because it was short was a Pedroia-esque error on my part.

6. The Sportswriter, Richard Ford

I would guess that of the TIME 100, this book is the most-read among BBWAA members, most of whom have told me they liked it. I found the title character to be insipid and immature and self-justifying and I wanted to smack him for about 300 pages. Grow up already.

5. Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin

Perhaps the only major work of African-American literature that I didn’t like – and oh boy did I not like it. It was never clear to me what the book was about; there was brutality, but to what end? I also felt no connection or empathy with the main character, John, which made the whole exercise seem like a waste of time.

4. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

More plot than Joyce or Miller, which is saying little. Three parts, the middle being the shortest and containing all of the significant events. I don’t love Hemingway’s sparse prose but it’s ambrosia compared to Woolf’s.

3. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence

Another utterly pointless book, also banned or criticized for obscenity. The introduction to the edition of Tropic of Cancer that I read argues that Miller is the only author to write properly about sex, saying that Lawrence and James Joyce had “too much religion in their veins.” I have to say I found neither depiction of sex all that compelling, but at least Lawrence has the tension that arises from a set of externally-imposed sexual mores coming into contact with the physical and emotional nature of sex. Miller wrote about sex as a bodily function; getting laid was like taking a dump, more reminiscent of the random sex of Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms than anything approaching erotica. Anyway, Women in Love is primarily notable for nothing much of anything happening until someone dies in a skiing accident, after which the book mercifully ends.

2. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller.

Suck. QED.

1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

If this is the Great American Novel, everyone should just put away their typewriters and go home. They chase a whale that may or may not exist. There are extended passages that seem to be straight out of a 19th century whaleopedia. They chase some more. That’s pretty much the book, and the prose is maddeningly slow. Yet it was #5 on the Novel 100 and will come up in any discussion of great novels in the English language. My wife was an English major but never read the book for any class; she asked one of her college professors if she should read it, knowing it was considered a classic, and he gave an emphatic, “No.” He was probably later denied tenure for literary apostasy.

That list includes four books on the Novel 100 and five on the TIME 100, so even those rankings haven’t been fully reliable as my reading lists.

Next up: The City and the Mountains by Jose Maria Eça de Queirós, which I am already reading and enjoying.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ February 28, 2009
→ By

The Simple Art of Murder.

Playing catchup on the reading list a bit here … Raymond Chandler, one of my favorite authors in any genre, wasn’t an especially prolific writer; he published nothing until he was in his forties and his total output was seven completed novels and (according to this Chandler bibliography) 25 short stories, some of which he expanded into novels years after they were published in pulp magazines. The Simple Art of Murder includes eight of his short stories as well as his famous essay from Atlantic Monthly that gave the collection its title. That essay is a spirited defense of the detective story as a literary art form while also serving as a criticism of the degeneration of the genre through what Chandler seems to have considered hack writing, including contrived plot details and unrealistic motives.

The short stories seemed to lack the crisp writing and brisk pacing of the Chandler novels I’ve read, but the constant change of detective characters and milieus means that if you like the genre at all, you’ll probably find a story in the collection that hits all the high notes for you. It’s more a matter of taste than quality, but I enjoyed “Pearls Are a Nuisance” with its main detective’s stilted language and light parody of bad detective stories, and the closing story, “Nevada Gas,” which had a faster pace, higher stakes, and a slightly more intricate plot than any of the other stories. None of them can match The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye for character or tension, so if you’re new to Chandler I’d recommend you start with those novels and save Murder for later.

Worth checking out: The Raymond Chandler fansite I mentioned above is the best resource I’ve seen on his works. You can read the full text of the essay “The Simple Art of Murder.”

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 12, 2009
→ By

Rabbit, Run.

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.

Rabbit, Run, (#97 on the Radcliffe 100 and part of the TIME 100) has been on my to-be-read shelf for a few months, but in light of the recent death of author John Updike, I decided to move it up in the queue. I originally started this book about ten years ago, got through three or four pages, realized it was going to be depressing, and sold it at a used book store. I was more successful in a second attempt.

“Rabbit” is Harry Angstrom, a 26-year-old former high school basketball star who is now married to a twenty-year-old woman who has already born him a son and is pregnant again. Their marriage is crumbling, or has crumbled, to a point where any conversation degenerates into sniping and insults and where Janice is just withdrawn into alcohol and the television. Rabbit has a job demonstrating the MagiPeeler, a vegetable peeler for sale at the local five and dime store, a career roughly as fulfilling as his marriage. Faced with nothing rewarding in his life, Rabbit runs off, walking away from wife and job and falling into an affair with a slattern from the other side of town.

The fundamental problem with Rabbit, Run from my perspective is that Updike seems to be trying to present Rabbit as a sympathetic character: A young man suddenly realizing that he is trapped into a life of mediocrity and unhappiness, both in stark contrast to the small-world stardom he had in high school, who decides that the best option is to run, both physically and metaphorically. The truth is that Rabbit is a grade-A Asshole who mistreats his wife and then his mistress, refuses to take responsibility for his actions or to live up to the obligations of commitments he’s made (like, say, knocking up two women), or to just generally behave like an adult. Yes, his wife is a train-wreck, an alcoholic with hints of depression, but Rabbit at one point puts alcohol back in her hands when she is trying to give it up, because he can’t adjust to a reality of her sober and the commitment that that implies. But not only is his wife never depicted as “bad” enough for him to leave her, he has an innocent son, Nelson, who adores him as two-year-olds adore their parents, and on whom Rabbit runs out without any apparent pangs of remorse. I have a two-year-old, and I can’t imagine any situation in my marriage that would make me leave the house and not even try to see my daughter for over two months. Janice (Rabbit’s wife) tells her husband at one point after he has returned from his lost weekend about Nelson:

“Oh. Every day, ‘Daddy home day?’ until I could belt him, the poor saint. Don’t make me talk about it, it’s too depressing.”

It’s heartbreaking, and it makes Updike’s attempts to show some affection on Rabbit’s part towards the boy ring totally hollow. You have a clear two-way bond with your child by that age; if you can walk away from that for two months without making any attempt to see the kid, in all likelihood, you have no soul.

The craft of Rabbit, Run is strong. Updike’s prose is wonderful, as anyone familiar with his article on Ted Williams’ retirement knows. He’s also telling, or trying to tell, a larger story of the fears a person faces upon realizing that he has inextricably left his youth behind and has even made irreversible choices that dictate the path of the rest of his life. Rabbit is surrounded by people who symbolize hopes and fears and responsibilities, from the minister and his wife who represent faith and doubt, to the declining high school basketball coach who represents the past and ages and fades like memories, to the baby Janice bears, a metaphor for their marriage, briefly reborn as that, for whatever reason, is the event who finally brings Harry back home. But the fact that it’s well-written only made it an easier read, not a more compelling one, as my dislike for Rabbit only grew as the book went on and he failed to show any sign of maturity or simple recognition of the consequences his actions have on those around him.

Next up: A re-read of Catch-22. I have crab apples in my cheeks and flies in my eyes already.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 6, 2009
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All the Pretty Horses.

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses is an almost straight-up western novel with a slightly hackneyed romance plot layered on top of it. Other than his affinity for the polysyndeton, McCarthy writes very readable prose while still managing to craft the quotable and memorable lines.

The protagonist, John Grady Cole, decides to leave home with his friend, Lacey Rawlins, and head south into Mexico after his parents’ divorce becomes final and he realizes that the ranch on which he grew up is going to be sold. The two boys meet up with a runaway, calling himself Jimmy Blevins, who is a few years younger and both impetuous and immature, standing in as a metaphor for John Grady’s dying (or dead) innocence. Blevins loses his horse in a storm and in the process of stealing it back from the villager who took it in kills two locals and a law officer, after which he himself is killed in what one might loosely call an extralegal proceeding. The brouhaha enmeshes John Grady and Lacey, who had been working on a ranch where John Grady fell in love with the daughter of the hacendado. If this sounds convoluted, it is, with the romance subplot sitting on top of the more traditional western story of outlaws, corruption, and occasional gunplay; the way the romance ends, in predictable fashion, and is never revisited for the last fifty pages of the book gave it the feeling of a second story added after the fact to flesh out the main plot and give it a broader appeal. I doubt that’s actually how it happened – McCarthy doesn’t seem to be an author concerned with commercial success – but there’s a disconnection between the two plot lines that was never satisfactorily resolved.

The core plot line would have made for a short novel, but it’s well-written (of course) and has several amazing passages, particularly John Grady’s quixotic effort to obtain justice for Blevins at the end of the book, encountering first the corrupt captain responsible for Blevins’ death and John Grady’s incarceration, then an amusing episode in front of a judge after he’s accused of theft, and then an encounter with another man named Blevins as John Grady attempts to return Blevins’ horse to its rightful owners. John Grady’s paramour has little interesting to do or say, but her protective aunt – speaker of the quote up top – offers several insightful if slightly verbose thoughts on history, both of humanity and of individuals, and how we are shaped by it and often live in reaction to it.

I’ve got a few other books from my vacation to write up – Greene’s The Quiet American and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado – and am now about a third of the way through Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 14, 2009
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The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Suck.

I don’t think I have completed and hated a book as thoroughly as I hated Oscar Hijuelos’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. I can hardly decide where to start in listing what I disliked.

    • The two main characters. The Mambo Kings are two brothers who emigrate from Cuba to the United States. Nestor, by far the more interesting of the two characters, is either depressed or just lovelorn, and is dead before the book’s midpoint. Cesar, the older brother, is dissolute, obsessed with his penis, drunk nearly all of the time, and depressing as hell as he approaches his own death.
      The sex. I don’t mind if there’s sex in a novel as long as it’s well-written and not gratuitous, but this entire book was full of passages that would have won the Bad Sex in Fiction award had it existed at the time of the book’s publication. The novel must hold the record for the most uses of the word “pubic” in any publication that isn’t sold with a black wrapper around it. Hijuelous treats us to images like “the head of his penis weeping semen tears;” a woman’s “bad habit of yanking hard on his quivering testicles at the moment of his climax;” almost clinical descriptions of straight-up, oral, and anal sex; and – most disturbing of all – a reference to Cesar thinking about being in his mother’s womb while he performs oral sex on women.
      The story – or lack thereof. This isn’t about the rise and fall of the brothers’ band, called the Mambo Kings. When Nestor dies, the band dies; the book is almost two separate novels cobbled together, although neither would have been much better had it stood alone. It’s not about Cesar’s descent into a physical condition that matches his broken emotional state, or his lifelong struggle to overcome the abuse he suffered as a child at his father’s hands. It’s not about Nestor’s depression or melancholy, since he’s dead before we get much insight into that. It’s about Cesar whoring and drinking and eating his way through middle age into an early death.

    • The best explanation for this awful mess that I could conceive is that Hijuelos was trying to offer some sort of meditation on mortality, how potentially short our lives are (Nestor) or how we might look back when at death’s door and consider and reconsider our actions (Cesar). What we get, instead, is a catalog of Cesar’s sexual exploits and regular references to his acid reflux. Hijuelos even manages to make food boring, with lists of foods at the huge meals the Cuban brothers would eat but none of the descriptive language needed to bring those foods to life – although, given the crude and methodical descriptions Hijuelos gives us of sex acts, perhaps we should be thankful that he didn’t ruin food for his readers as well.

    I have actually seen the 1992 adaptation, The Mambo Kings, starring a then-unknown-in-America Antonio Banderas as Nestor, but the film was very loosely based on the book, and the interpretation of what comes after Nestor’s death bears little relation to Hijuelos’ text. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

    Next up: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, by Assia Djebar, named one of the twelve best African books of the twentieth century by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in 2001.

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