→ February 20, 2009
→ By

Catch-22.

I’m going to bet that of all the books on the Klaw 100, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the five most-read among dish readers. The book, which appears on several greatest-books lists (it’s #7 on the Modern Library 100, #15 on the Radcliffe 100, #74 on the Guardian 100, and on the TIME 100) certainly seems like a book that many of us read during our high school or college years, whether or not it was assigned reading, simply because it was so damn funny and its status as one of the “it” books of its era never fully went away, the same way Catcher in the Rye has maintained its cachet after forty years*.

*I’m going to steal a page from JoePo today and insert some asides. I was accused in chat in a question I didn’t post of being “anti-cliché” because I didn’t like Catcher. I don’t really know how those two things are connected – neither Salinger nor his novel seem clichéd to me – but, more to the point, is anyone actually pro-cliché? Romance-novel publishers? Slasher-film producers? Actually, a few mainstream sportswriters come to mind so I’ll stop here.

Catch-22 is now one of only a handful of novels I’ve read twice, a list that also includes Pride and Prejudice (didn’t like it in high school, read Emma as an adult and loved it, re-read P&P and realized I’d missed all the wit the first time), Things Fall Apart (first read it at 13, didn’t get the point at all), and The Great Gatsby (just because). I think Catch-22 earns the prize for the longest gap between readings – I first read it in the fall of 1989*, which means it’s been an almost-unthinkable almost twenty years since my first trip through the dystopian anti-war masterpiece.

*I can tell I’m going to beat this gimmick into the ground. I first read Catch-22 by choice, but as it turned out, it was an assigned book during that same school year in AP Lit. We actually had a choice of three novels – this one, Slaughterhouse-Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next – and while I eventually read all three, I took the easy route and wrote my paper on Catch-22.

The funny part of this story is that that class, taught by Mrs. Glynn, was a substantial learning experience for me beyond the books we were supposed to read. I skipped several of the books assigned in that class, including Tess of the d’Urbervilles (rented the movie, then read the book in 2005 and loved it) and An American Tragedy (800+ pages of tiny print and I know the SOB gets it in the end, I’m all set with that, used the Cliffs Notes), and consistently scored 5’s on the papers, which Mrs. Glynn graded on the AP scale. Catch-22 was one of only two books I really read word for word and cover to cover in that class, the other being Ellison’s Invisible Man. Unfortunately, while the paper was in Mrs. Glynn’s hands, she overheard me bragging to a classmate that I hadn’t read the majority of books in her class, and sure enough, on that paper, I got a 3. The lesson I took was that it doesn’t actually matter whether you do the work as long as you act like you did and present it well. I sleepwalked through college on this newfound confidence, only really working hard in math and foreign-language classes. There may also have been a lesson in my AP Lit experience in the value of keeping my mouth shut, a lesson I have never learned and promise you all that I never will.

My memory of Catch-22 was that it was a hilarious, often absurd anti-war romp, almost like an angrier, funnier Vonnegut. I remembered anecdotes, like Nately’s whore, Milo the entrepreneur, and cracks about flies in someone’s eyes. What I didn’t remember – or perhaps didn’t realize the first time through – was that it is a profoundly cynical book, satirizing and savaging more than just war, with democracy, capitalism, government, religion, and often just plain ol’ humanity all taking it on the chin and ending up bleeding on the floor. The plot is pretty thin; the novel itself is more a meandering collecting of anecdotes told in a nonlinear fashion, an effective technique for humor that left me often confused as to the order of events*, although to read and enjoy this book you don’t really need to worry too much about sequence.

*Well, except for when someone was killed – that sort of cleared things up a bit.

In fact, I’d argue that even considering the book’s deft wordplay and ironic humor, the book’s greatest comedy comes from Heller’s scene-shifting gimmick: In the middle of dialogue between two people about a third person, Heller will jump to the third person discussing the same subject without any transition whatsoever. The quotes themselves are usually funny, but the momentary disorientation – hey, he wasn’t in the room a moment ago – increases the humor.

I’ve read one of Heller’s other novels, the unusual God Knows, a sort of deathbed memoir of King David of Israel. It too uses a nonlinear storytelling device, but lacks the humor of Catch-22, and I haven’t felt compelled to read anything else by Heller.*

*From Heller’s obituary in the New York Times: “When an interviewer told Mr. Heller that he had never written anything as good as Catch-22, the author shot back, ‘Who has?'”

Next up: A collection of Raymond Chandler’s short stories, The Simple Art of Murder.

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

The Way of All Flesh.

Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh was #12 on the Modern Library 100 (a cheat, since it was written before 1900 but published posthumously) and made the Bloomsbury 100. I don’t usually give up on books, but I’m setting this one aside, at least for now, after making it through less than 15% of the book.

I’ve got two major problems with the novel. One is the sentences, which are positively Proustian (despite coming years before Proustian sentences existed) and meander between dependent and independent clauses that made me dizzy and, worse, disinterested. But the bigger problem for me was Butler’s creation of a central character for whom he has nothing but a deep, pathological loathing. George Pontifex is a weak, insipid man, barely capable of an independent thought, much less an independent decision, and Butler obviously hates him. George’s father, Theobald, is apparently a stand-in for Butler’s own father, so while I guess it’s OK to work out your daddy issues in novel form, the combination of the two characters makes the book start out at the top of a downward spiral, and 40-odd pages in I was still descending. I guess I should never say never – I did return to Tess of the D’Urbervilles 15 years after putting it down after half a chapter – but it ain’t likely.

Instead I’ll start Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool on the flight to Vegas.

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: , , , ,
→ July 23, 2008
→ By

Pale Fire.

You could interpret Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (on the TIME 100 and #53 on the Modern Library 100) in any number of ways. The book comprises an unfinished, 999-line epic poem – occasionally brilliant, but mostly pedestrian and often just silly – by John Shade, and 150 pages of critical commentary by the late poet’s neighbor, the very eccentric Charles Kinbote.

I prefer to view the book as a satire of modern critical commentary on poetry, where the critic or analyst can find whatever s/he wants in the poem by looking hard enough, even though the analysis may be informed by nothing more than a series of coincidences. As a satire along these lines, Pale Fire is undoubtedly successful, blending outright humor with the dry wit that comes of exaggerating the satire’s target to the point of comedy, but satire does not provide a novel with any narrative greed. Only a strong plot can do that, and the plot of Pale Fire is weak, not least because the reader can figure out the two main twists before completing the first third of the book.

Similarly, the clever wordplay throughout Pale Fire is amusing, but doesn’t hold the reader’s attention. Yes, it’s great to see a reference in the poem to “Hurricane Lolita,” followed by a dry, witless comment on the name Lolita. Yes, the reference to “word golf” in the index is funny when you follow the “see also’s” to their conclusion. The play on the names of Oliver Goldsmith and William Wordsworth is good for a chuckle, but the moment passes. You can’t sustain a novel on cleverness alone, so while Pale Fire is undeniably clever, you have to buy into the mystery of the narrator’s identity to find the narrative greed here that will propel you through the book.

Nabokov himself apparently said that the narrator is a fraud, a madman with an invented backstory, but there are other critics and fans of Pale Fire who offer differing interpretations, that perhaps the narrator’s commentary is guided by Shade from beyond the grave, or that the narrator is Shade himself, or that Kinbote is who he says he is (a minor plot point I won’t spoil). These debates are mildly interesting, but even the mystery of who is who and what is what wasn’t enough to propel me through the text. With thirty pages to go, I was still dragging myself to the end. It was obvious from the start how Shade would die, and obvious to me from early on who Kinbote was or thought he was. I thought we might get some major plot twist at the end, but none came, and the fairly insubstantial plot of the attempt to assassinate the king of possibly-fictional Zembla was boring, not least because we know it fails. Nabokov also said that he wrote primarily for himself, and I suppose his tastes were far different than my own.

Next up: An out of print novel by Anthony Powell, one of his first, a comedy called A View to a Death, which preceded A Dance to the Music of Time. I was lucky enough to stumble on a copy in a used book store for $2, although I see some copies online for under $10.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ May 15, 2008
→ By

A Dance to the Music of Time, completed.

UPDATE, December 2010: The University of Chicago Press has made volume one of the Dance available as a free e-book on amazon.com and on their own site.

—

Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, is a masterwork of dry English humor and brilliant characterization. Part of both the TIME 100 and the Modern Library 100 (where it ranked 43rd), Dance is told by Nick Jenkins over a period of nearly fifty years as he moves through the social circles of interwar London, serves in a rather low-risk infantry unit in World War II, and then becomes a distinguished writer after the war and returns to many of the same characters who populated the earlier books. It’s a popular series in the United Kingdom, but it’s not well-known in the United States.

Nick himself is a wry observer but a milquetoast character, and his wife, Isobel, is a phantom in the stories. The main character and antihero is Kenneth Widmerpool, a climber lacking in social skills but not in confidence who always seems to find himself in the right situation, exasperating anyone hoping to see him fail. The series is full of funny, well-drawn secondary characters, from Nick’s alcoholic school-mate Charles Stringham to the “mobile laundry unit” head Bithel to the ice queen Pamela Flitton, who destroys every man on whom she sets her sights. The narrative greed that I look for in every novel isn’t strong here, but the reader is drawn forward simply by the music of time: We’re following Nick as he goes through life, seeing the world through the lens of his professional and personal lives.

Powell’s observations on the rhythms of life display Nick’s interest, but with a surprising bit of dispassion. Broken marriages, personal setbacks, and even deaths are reported as facts intrinsic to life, but by and large unworthy of comment; by the last book, where secondary characters are dropping like flies, their deaths become parenthetical phrases, a reflection (I suppose) on how we perceive the deaths of those with whom we’ve lost touch as we ourselves grow older. Instead, Jenkins (whom Powell admitted was based on himself) prefers to find interest in small stories and little scandals, although as the series advances the scandals do become proportionally bigger and Powell’s writing veers somewhat more towards the risqué and sensational, perhaps a reflection of the various time periods covered by the series.

The twelve novels, comprising roughly 65-70 long chapters over about 3000 pages, don’t quite match Wodehouse for laugh-inducing content, but Powell infuses the writing with wit. His characters names can totter on the line between the ridiculous and the plausible, from the Walpole-Wilsons to Flavia Wisebite (and her ex-husband, Cosmo Flitton) to Scorpio Murtlock. When books written by some of the secondary characters are mentioned, they have glorious titles like Camel Ride to the Tomb and Dogs Have No Uncles. The punch lines, when they do arrive, are funny because of the context; having one character pour the contents of a sugar-bowl over another’s head is not intrinsically all that funny, but when it happens in Dance, it rises to another level of humor. Jenkins plays the Bob Newhart role of the one sane or normal person surrounded by wackos on lunatics, leaving him, with some later help from Isobel, to offer his commentary.

I have a strong feeling that J.K. Rowling has read Powell’s series and paid homage to it through two minor characters in the Harry Potter series. One minor character in the series is a mystic and spiritualist named Dr. Trelawney, who speaks in aphorisms and vague pronouncements, greeting people by saying, “The Essence of All is the Godhead of the True,” and expecting (but rarely receiving) the reply, “The Vision of Visions Heals the Blindness of Sight.” The similarity to Professor Trelawney in name, in bent, and in obsession with visions is unlikely to be a coincidence. I also saw similarities between Powell’s character Sillery and Rowling’s Professor Slughorn; both are slightly unctuous men who ran salons in their college’s houses and seemed to devote significant energy to determining whom to invite, measuring their gatherings’ success by the names and status of the attendees.

If you enjoy English writing, Powell’s depiction of upper-class English society from the immediate aftermath of World War I into the turbulent 1960s is worth the significant time investment. Next up for me: I’m already a third of the way into Emile Zola’s seminal socio-political novel Germinal.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 17, 2008
→ By

Darkness at Noon.

Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (#8 on the Modern Library 100) is Koestler’s confessional after he visited the Stalin-era Soviet Union and became disillusioned with communism. It’s powerful both as a political statement and a literary work, but the narrative starts to come apart in the third chapter (of four) and I found myself losing interest.

Darkness tells the story of Rubashov, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution who is arrested in the opening pages and charged with plotting the demise of the Soviet government, which was a capital offense and a pretense used to execute hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens during the 1930s. Rubashov knows this is coming and there’s a slightly cathartic aspect to his arrest. The book then drifts into several key anecdotes from his career as an agent of the revolution, which come to his mind as he’s encouraged and then coerced into confessing to the trumped-up charges that will lead to his death.

As a political statement – it’s not even an allegory due to its intense realism – it’s potent. The ease with which the prison officials discharge their duties is stomach-churning. Rubashov’s own role in sending several loyal Communists to their deaths, whether in service to the party or to save his own skin, is hardly more palatable. And the relentless subjugation of the individual in the service of the masses comes off as incredibly wrong-headed to anyone raised to believe in the sanctity of life.

Koestler makes use of multiple literary symbols to enhance his arguments both about the empty promises of Marxism and about Rubashov’s own guilt and struggles with his conscience, notably through the recurring toothache that appears during periods of extreme guilt over a Party member he betrayed or simply his betrayal of the Party’s original goals. The metaphor of the empty space on the wall where the portrait of the Revolution’s fallen leaders was also clever.

But Darkness didn’t pass the interest test for me. The book is divided into three “hearings” plus a short fourth chapter describing Rubashov’s public “trial” and execution. (I’m not spoiling anything there – you know from the start that he’s going to be shot.) During the third hearing, Rubashov, previously a strong man with complete conviction in the rightness of his actions, sees those convictions weaken and devolves into a rambling, irrelevant ex-revolutionary – exactly what the Party wants him to become. It undermines the book’s essential conflict between Rubashov (the ideologically pure Communist) and the Party (the Stalinist regime, enforcing its will on the people at any cost), and it also meant that there was no admirable or sympathetic character in the story – his prosecutors may have been evil, but Rubashov was weak, and there’s no sympathy in seeing a man hoisted on a petard he helped construct.

There’s no avoiding a comparison of Darkness to the other two classic anti-communist novels of the 20th century, 1984 and Brave New World. Darkness has an insurmountable advantage of realism, both because Koestler went to Russia during the Great Purge, and because his setting is contemporary and characters very realistically drawn. But the other two books were, for my money, better reads, perhaps because their authors took one step back from reality and created environments in which they could control the action. Koestler created a scenario with an inevitable conclusion, and I imagine to a large degree that once he began writing he found the characters moved of their own accord, which created a predictable narrative that, for me, reached the “just shoot him already” stage with fifty pages to go.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ January 24, 2008
→ By

The Age of Innocence.

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (now known as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), with good reason, as Wharton uses the classic love triangle formula to expose the darker side of the seemingly idyllic Gilded Age of the late 1800s while also incorporating some savage wit. It’s also in the Novel 100 (#61), the Modern Library 100 (#58), and the Radcliffe 100 (#42), although it was published two years too early for TIME‘s top 100 list.

Age‘s main character is Newland Archer, a young lawyer in the social elites of New York in the 1870s who is about to marry the pretty but dull May Welland, a socially acceptable match and one he doesn’t question until he meets her cousin, the Countess Olenska. The Countess has just returned to the United States after fleeing a disastrous marriage in Europe to a man who used her ill (although his exact crime is never defined, I inferred that he was beating her), and Archer finds himself drawn to her in an obsession laden with sexual overtones. He ultimately has to choose between his engagement and then marriage to a woman he likes, but for whom he has no passion, and the woman who ignites his passion but for whom he’d have to abandon his family and status while flying in the face of all social conventions.

For a novel built around a serious idea, the choices people have to make between conforming to societal norms and following the riskier paths that offer a chance for greater happiness, Wharton manages to incorporate some bitterly sarcastic humor.

She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English- speaking audiences.

No one is spared, but Wharton has a particular enmity for the small-mindedness of the pro-propriety set, who conspire first to send Countess Olenska back to her husband and later to keep her and Newland apart.

On top of the love triangle and its underlying story about choice, The Age of Innocence reflects the social upheaval of the interwar period in which it was written. May Welland represents the longing for the pre-war period, a true age of innocence in which the U.S. hadn’t been embroiled in a major conflict since the Civil War, and prosperity and opulence seemed guaranteed. The Countess represents the future, from the vantage point of the end of World War I, from America’s increasing involvement with foreign nations to the uncertain economic outlook (the book was written in 1920, before the great bull run of the 20s) to the changing cultural and sexual mores of the time. Wharton comes down clearly in favor of the forward-looking viewpoint, but that doesn’t mean that Newland and the Countess live happily ever after.

The Age of Innocence is comfortably in the top 20-25 books I’ve read, more evidence that the most fertile period for the American novel was the time between the wars. It’s an outstanding marriage – pun intended – of wicked humor and social commentary, with a simple plot made interesting through strong characterization.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ November 30, 2007
→ By

A Handful of Dust.

Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust starts out as another great Waugh black comedy, detailing the gradual decay and eventual end of the marriage between Tony and Brenda Last, an upper-class couple who can barely afford to live on the outsized estate they own, paralleling the end of an era in British society. But the last thirty-odd pages prove a grave disappointment for anyone wrapped up in the plot.

An odd sequence of events puts John Beaver, a social parasite who does the luncheon circuit but has little money of his own, at the Lasts’ house for a weekend, where Brenda, bored with her stale marriage and disconnected emotionally from her son, John Andrew, develops a bizarre obsession with Beaver, eventually conning her husband into getting her a flat in London so she can pursue the affair. She detaches so much from her home life that when her son dies in a freak horse-riding accident and she is told that “John is dead,” she bursts into tears, only to recover when she hears it was “John Andrew,” saying, “Thank God.” A few days later, she insists on a divorce, leading to the novel’s funniest passage, the attempt to create evidence of infidelity to justify the divorce request.

The decline in English morality was a regular theme in Waugh’s work, cropping up here in the ease with which Brenda cheats on her husband and forgets her son, as well as in a few offhand references to other affairs and peccadilloes among their gossiping social set. Waugh’s own marriage had ended badly shortly before he wrote the novel, but he spews almost equal venom at the husband as he does at the faithless wife.

But the novel’s resolution falls flat, working on a metaphorical level but deflating like a balloon with a rusty nail through it on a straight plot level. The end of Tony’s plot line is macabre, but it’s also a bit contradictory – Tony finally grows a pair in his dealings with Brenda, but turns back into a sniveling git once in Brazil, almost a case of character undevelopment – and it’s also more of an infinite loop than an ending. (It’s also oddly similar to Stephen King’s Misery, so much so that it seems improbable that King was unfamiliar with Waugh’s book.) Brenda’s fate is mentioned in passing as we see the Lasts’ cousins taking over the estate, which means that neither of the main characters gets a fully realized conclusion. So while A Handful of Dust works as a comedy, as a novel, it’s short of the mark.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 12, 2007
→ By

Scoop: Feather-footed through the plashy fen…

So in a recent chat, I mentioned that I had Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop on my to-be-read shelf, and a reader said something to the effect of, “You HAVE to read Scoop!”

Dear Anonymous Reader:

You were right.

Keith

It’s been a while since I ripped through a classic novel the way I tore through Scoop last week. It is brilliant, hilarious, sublime, a pinpoint satire with an everpresent smirk. It’s the novel I wish I could write.

For those who, like me, were introduced to Waugh by means of the good but serious Brideshead Revisited, here’s a quick synopsis of Scoop: John Boot is trying to land a high-paying, low-work job to escape from a persistent girlfriend. Lord Copper, the head of the tabloid newspaper The Beast, ends up with his request and hires the wrong man, William Boot, as their new foreign correspondent and sends him to cover the brewing civil war in the African nation of Ishmaelia. Misadventures ensure, including a question of whether the civil war brought in the reporters or whether the reporters (especially William) brought on the civil war.

I’m hesitant to say anything more for fear of ruining any of the jokes. It’s a hilarious book, laugh-out-loud funny in many places, and amusing throughout, with shades of Wodehouse in the snarky prose and Molière’s touch for satire, with almost everyone and everything in the book looking like a sendup of someone or something else. My favorite joke in the book involves the Ishmaelian town of Laku, including the origin of its name. You’ll have to read the book to understand why, but you won’t regret the choice, either.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , ,