→ February 6, 2009
→ By

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.

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→ January 14, 2009
→ By

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.

    Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
    → January 9, 2009
    → By

    The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

    Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001, is a clever, sprawling novel about two young cousins who become almost overnight sensations in the world of comic books, helping to launch the genre’s golden age leading into World War II.

    Kavalier & Clay tells the story of Josef Kavalier, a Jewish refugee from Prague who flees the Nazis in a most unusual fashion, and Sammy Klayman (who adopts the nom de plume of Sam Clay), his American cousin with whom he goes to live. Sammy has a knack for storycraft but isn’t much for art, while Josef, in addition to being an experienced magician, is a skilled and meticulous artist. Seeing the success of Superman, the two cook up a new superhero, The Escapist, and convince Sammy’s novelty-selling employer to publish a comic book as a way to sell more useless gadgets to kids. The Escapist is a success, but after a few years of glory, the two cousins’ lives take rather sudden turns for the worse.

    Chabon’s mind and typewriter appear to ignore boundaries and guidelines, resulting in a book that often lacks direction and needed cuts both to its prose and to its scope. There’s an entire section, depicting Joe’s time serving in Antarctica during the war, that is superfluous and insanely over the top (Joe survives carbon monoxide poisoning that kills almost everyone in the camp, then survives a plane crash, then survives being shot … come on). The major plot events are usually out of the blue; the first chunk of the novel revolves almost entirely around the development and publishing of the cousins’ comic books, with side stories about their two romantic entanglements, when, roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, Chabon suddenly shifts direction, hitting each cousin with a separate, shocking, tragic event, and turning the book dark as if he’d switched off all the lights.

    The prose suffers similarly from the lack of editing. His vocabulary is immense, including a handful of Chabon neologisms, but he uses a number of words that will be unfamiliar to the majority of readers and would have been better replaced by more common terms. Does he really need to describe an after-lunch event as “post-prandial?” Why would he add the last two words to the sentence, “Lit thus from behind by a brimming window, Josef Kavalier seemed to shine, to incandesce.” Why refer to the “ordinary wailing and termagancy of the dogs” instead of referring to their temper or peevishness or (if he wanted to use a fancy word) choler? These words may all be perfectly cromulent, but it doesn’t mean they were the best words for Chabon to use in his prose. He’s clearly a man in command of the language – referring to an expanse of Antarctic water as “this grievous sea,” calling a dictionary simply “the unabridged” – but his verbal brake pads appear to be worn through.

    The first two-thirds of the novel, before it turns dark, is witty. Chabon is deft at writing quick dialogue and providing dry, almost Wodehouse-ish observations (“He drank an extremely cheap brand of rye called Brass Lamp. Sammy claimed that it was not rye at all but actual lamp oil, as Deasey was strongly near-sighted.), adding the occasional flourish of grin-inducing detail, as in the footnote that tells us that the compendium of one character’s pulp-fiction works was found a half-century later in an IKEA store “serving as a dignified-looking stage property on a floor-model ‘Hjörp’ wall unit.” But those occasional footnotes are another symbol of Chabon’s expansive vision and unwillingness to narrow his scope for the novel’s own good; whereas the miraculous Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is fully committed to the novel-cum-historical-document approach, with copious footnotes and consistent use of fictional reference works, Chabon is a footnote dilettante and gives only splotches of fictional history as it suits him.

    Kavalier doesn’t fare well in comparison to Jonathan Strange beyond their different approaches to adding realistic historical notes and details. Susanna Clarke created two flawed but compelling main characters, putting them in partnership and then in conflict, giving the reader incentives both to support and oppose each character in response to individual thoughts and actions. Neither Kavalier nor Clay is as fully-formed as Strange or Norrell; Sammy’s character, in particular, is only briefly explained by an odd chapter about his odder father, and Clay’s homosexuality is there almost as a plot convenience, with little exploration at all of the conflicts a gay (and mostly closeted) man would have faced in that time. Sammy is gay because it allows Chabon to mess with him twice in crucial plot points that wouldn’t have worked if he was straight. When he’s finally outed, the consequences are almost nil, which doesn’t seem remotely realistic for the time period.

    Kavalier is worth reading for Chabon’s sheer vision – he researched his topic thoroughly and created a paean to the golden age of comics that also covers the Holocaust – and some of the book’s more successful inventive ploys, but the disjointed story and incomplete characters left me disappointed and unaffected at the close.

    Next up: Another Pulitzer winner, the oddly out-of-print The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos. About a quarter of the way through it, I’m not impressed, although I’ll save the biting commentary for the writeup.

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    → December 24, 2008
    → By

    Legs.

    William Kennedy’s Legs, the first of his “Albany” novels (one of which, Ironweed , won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984), is a fictionalized biography of the Prohibition-era bootlegger Jack “Legs” Diamond, using a number of other real people in Diamond’s orbit as characters to give a picture of the life and culture of upstate New York in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As a period piece, it’s very successful, but as a novel, it’s less so.

    The novel opens with a discussion thirty-odd years after Diamond’s death, leading into a series of remembrances of Diamond’s life from his emergence as the main bootlegger in the Hudson Valley until his murder. Kennedy evokes the era by using the vernacular of the time and threading alcohol through every scene (did people drink more during Prohibition, or is that just in the literature of the time?), and I admit that I’m a sucker for books written in this time period. From Fitzgerald to Hammett and just about everything in between, I’m riveted by books about the Roaring Twenties and life under the Volstead Act, so I enjoyed Legs on a superficial level.

    By posing as a biography, Legs loses something in the way of plot. Diamond is simply careening from one event to the next – a shooting, a trial, a tiff with his wife (Alice) or mistress (Kiki) – without any clear cohesiveness or upward trajectory to the story. Jack’s character doesn’t develop at all, nor does that of the narrator, Marcus, who remains as detached at the end of the book as he is at the beginning. It makes for an interesting read, but in the last few pages, I found myself wondering what the point was.

    If there’s any point at all, it revolves around Marcus, who begins the novel as a successful lawyer on the rise in Albany circles, with an eye towards a career in state government. A chance encounter leads him to become Jack’s lawyer, and he becomes a consigliere to Jack up to the gangster’s death, all the while telling Jack he doesn’t want any part of this scheme or that plan while going along with them. Is Kennedy trying to tell us that we all have the capacity to talk ourselves into going along with something we know is wrong or is a bad idea? Is he detailing the journey of a man disaffected by success and society who looks for a more dangerous path to bring some excitement into his life? These feel like stretches to me, since neither theme is all that well explored with Marcus telling stories about Jack that often don’t directly involve him.

    Next up: A brief nonfiction read, Amir Aczel’s The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World.

    Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,
    → December 18, 2008
    → By

    Nobody’s Fool.

    Admin stuff for today: Chat 1 pm EST, and I’ll be on ESPN 710 in Los Angeles at 1:40 pm PST.

    Sully had known Rub too long to believe this particular coincidence. He could tell by the way the young man was carrying his large head, like a medicine ball precariously balanced on his thick shoulders, that he was coming to see Sully and that he wanted to borrow money. In fact, Sully could tell just by looking at him how much Rub wanted (twenty dollars), how much he’d settle for (ten), and how long it would take for them to arrive at this figure (thirty minutes).

    Sully is the ne’er-do-well protagonist of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, written before his Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls and something of a tune-up work, a funny and engaging novel where the reader can see the author working on his craft, particularly his prose.

    Sully, né Donald Sullivan, is a sixty-year-old man living in a dying town in upstate New York, a ne’er-do-well in a community short of do-wells of any ilk, although his own brand of doing-not-well is as unique as a fingerprint. He’s surrounded by a cast of believably-crazy locals, from the dimwitted Rub of the above quote to his tightly-wound ex-wife Vera to his landlady Miss Beryl (who talks to her late husband’s picture as well as to the African mask on her wall) and her hyper-ambitious son Clive Jr. Yet Sully is most affected by one character who died before the book even began – his alcoholic, abusive father.

    Russo unfolds a tableau more than he tells a straight story, although there is ultimately a central narrative thread revolving around Sully’s relationship with his father and reconnection with his estranged son, Peter, whose own marriage and career are falling apart through bad choices in a higher-rent variation of Sully’s life. The story is richer by far for the additional characters and subplots – although “subplot” sounds so perfunctory for the side stories Russo weaves so well into and around the main narrative – built around well-rounded characters living believable lives and facing difficult choices.

    Many of those choices revolve around getting older, whether it’s the infirmities and occasional indignities of aging (faced by, among others, Sully and his wounded knee, and Miss Beryl and her slender threads of independence), or anticipating and then dealing with the death of a parent. Yet despite so many heavy storylines – among others, there’s a man who hunts down and nearly kills his estranged wife – Russo manages to infuse the book with humor, particularly in the dialogue. Sully is the perfect smartass, a lifelong class clown who never stops running his mouth, often to his own detriment – not that that stops him from running it.

    Empire Falls is a more complete novel, with a better-rounded storyline and a more empathetic main character, but it doesn’t have the same degree of wit or slapstick as Nobody’s Fool; I preferred the former but would recommend the latter as well. And I credit Russo for acknowledging that life revolves around food by putting that most American of culinary institutions, the greasy spoon, at the center of both novels.

    Next up: William Kennedy’s Legs, part one of the “Albany” trilogy that eventually earned him a Pulitzer Prize of his own.

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    → December 5, 2008
    → By

    Snow Falling on Cedars.

    I meant to write up David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars over a week ago, but I got sucked into Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Novel and kept putting off the review, in large part because Cedars was so blah. It’s a heavy-handed story about racial prejudices on one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state a few years after World War II; a man of Japanese descent who was raised on the island and fought for the U.S. during the war stands accused of killing another local fisherman, and it’s not entirely clear whether the accusation is more than just racially motivated.

    While the core story is interesting – I continued reading to find out how the core mystery would be resolved – the novel itself is clumsy and amateurish. Guterson’s prose, which gets plaudits in pull quotes from reviewers, is atrocious, particularly his dialogue, which might as well have been pulled from a Law & Order: SVU episode; there’s one passage where an atheist soldier tells a military chaplain that he’s an atheist, that he’s the exception to the rule about there being no atheists in foxholes … who talks like that? No one I’ve ever met, and trust me, Harvard was full of people who spoke in unusual rhythms and keys.

    I also found that Guterson’s back-and-forth technique damaged the flow of the present-time plot line, the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, and the subplot involving the man who runs and writes the island’s newspaper and Kabuo’s wife, with whom the writer (Ishmael) had a love affair when the two were teenagers. The long and sometimes long-winded flashbacks decapitated the tension that Guterson built up during some of the courtroom scenes. He might have actually been better served cutting back and forth more frequently to keep the digressions shorter.

    Guterson also overplays the race card. Rather than letting the main stories – the criminal case, and the rise and fall of the romance between Ishmael and Kabuo’s wife – tell us the story of race, he puts his feelings on the subject into the mouths of his characters. It’s certainly realistic that Kabuo and his wife would complain about racism, but the extent to which they bring it up pushes the book slightly into “preachy” territory.

    As for Jonathan Strange, I’m just debating how high up the Klaw 100 it’ll be at the next revision of the list.

    Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
    → 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: , , , , ,
    → 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.

    Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,