→ March 28, 2011
→ By

Dog Soldiers.

Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers won the National Book Award in 1974 and made the TIME 100 ranking, although I haven’t seen or heard it mentioned outside of that context. I’m going to guess it’s because the subject matter and setting feel very dated, making its relevance to today’s reader a lot less obvious, but that didn’t make it a less interesting read for me.

The book is populated by hippies, cheats, losers, dropouts, and freaks, set in the waning days of the Vietnam War and the dissolute California society of the age. John Converse is a writer/journalist of dubious credentials based in Vietnam who allows himself to get roped into a transoceanic heroin deal using a friend he calmly describes as “a psychopath” and his own wife as part of the supply chain. When the psychopath, Ray Hicks, and Converse’s wife Marge connect in California it sets off a chase by some bad guys who moonlight as good guys on their days off and an increasingly desperate and irrational attempt to sell the drugs in territory controlled by other suppliers.

Along the way, there’s a healthy dose of unhealthy drug consumption, copious vomiting, and more than a smidgen of violence. Ray and Marge end up in a hippie commune with the dope and more weapons than a Libyan rebel camp, while Converse tries to avoid the dirty cop who wants to bust Ray and Marge but take the drugs for himself. It’s a nihilistic, unsparing look at compromised people descending into a hell of their own making.

Aside from my inability to really place myself in the story – I’ve never tried a drug stronger than alcohol, unless you count chocolate, which I do – I struggled to find a deeper theme below the story. Maybe the heroin isn’t really heroin, but symbolized something deeper, like a search for meaning in something consumable and disposable like money. Maybe the battle over the heroin stands in as a metaphor for the war, a conflict with questionable and short-lived objectives where the cost in lives can never be justified by the results. Maybe it’s about the fickleness of man, how quickly we’ll sell out our friends for a quick fix or financial gain. All of these occurred to me as possibilities while I was reading the book but none were fully developed as themes, leaving Dog Soldiers as a compelling read but one whose plaudits I couldn’t fully explain.

Next up: Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 14, 2011
→ By

An American Tragedy.

Been busy on the draft blog, with updates on Gerrit Cole, Trevor Bauer, Kyle Gaedele.

—

Clyde Griffiths is dead, and it’s about freaking time already. It took Theodore Dreiser over eight hundred pages to tell a story that could have been told in under half that. An American Tragedy is an acknowledged classic, present on four of the top 100 lists I use as reading guides*, but I found it dull, thin, internally implausible (even though it’s based heavily on a true story), and populated by characters who were lucky to receive a second dimension.

*It’s #16 on the Modern Library 100, #88 on the Radcliffe 100, and on the unranked TIME 100, all of which are limited to English-language novels of the 20th century. It’s also #46 on The Novel 100, which covers all novels and is now back in print.

The story, in brief: Clyde Griffiths is raised in poverty by a pair of non-denominational missionary parents, and rejects their lifestyle and religion to strike out on his own. At every turn, his attempts to move himself forward socially and economically are stymied by his attraction to and obsession with the fairer sex. Eventually, he’s taken in by his wealthy uncle and given work in that man’s collar factory, where he meets and seduces a simple country girl, Roberta Allen. When Clyde finds that society girl Sondra Finchley is interested in him, he ditches Roberta to pursue Sondra, only to find out that Roberta is pregnant with his child and (after failed attempts to abort the baby) insists that he marry her. So he hatches a plan to kill Roberta, and Roberta ends up dead even though Clyde may have had a change of heart at the last second. He’s quickly caught, tried at great literary length, and executed. Fin.

It could easily have been a story of great drama, but it’s not. For one thing, most readers of the book know the ending, which was true when it came out because the case on which Dreiser based the novel was a national sensation, the O.J. Simpson trial of its day (except that the defendant was found guilty and executed).

It could also have been a brilliant character study, but poor Clyde is as narrow as Doug Fieger’s tie and has so little nderstanding of his own actions that it’s hard for me to make any convincing case as to his motives. The closest I could come is to label him a narcissist, since he tends to think of everything bad as happening “to him,” notably Roberta’s pregnancy which was most certainly not happening to Clyde in any physical sense.

It doesn’t even work as a polemic. At first it looks like an indictment of religion, or of Puritanism, but that falls by the wayside when Clyde leaves his parents. It could be a criticism of misspent youth, of alcohol, or of venal behavior by “loose” women, but none of those themes sticks around long either. The longest single theme is that of the caste system found in the upstate New York town where Clyde’s uncle and family live, a system that finds Clyde caught in between as the part-owner of a surname associated with success, status, and wealth but himself poor, uneducated, and socially awkward. But then Clyde kills Roberta, gets arrested, and the rich/poor issue is mostly forgotten.

If there’s anything worth pondering in An American Tragedy, it’s whether Clyde was legally guilty of the murder. Clyde sets up the entire crime, then at the last second has some sort of mental apoplexy and doesn’t quite go through with it … but Roberta falls out of the boat, Clyde probably knocks her in the head, and he definitely doesn’t bother to save her as she drowns. Is it murder if he meant it but he didn’t mean it but he meant it anyway? I sure as hell thought so, which made the trial – on which Dreiser spends the better part of 300 pages – as dull as pitcher fielding practice.

And as for the prose, well, Dryser might have been a more appropriate moniker, for the author was no magician with our language, a view to which my friends at TIME also subscribe. The prose wasn’t leaden; it was eka-leaden. To wit:

But in the interim, in connection with his relations with Roberta no least reference to Sondra, although, even when near her in the factory or her room, he could not keep his thoughts from wandering away to where Sondra in her imaginary high social world might be. The while Roberta, at moments only sensing a drift and remoteness in his thought and attitude which had nothing to do with her, was wondering what it was that of late was beginning to occupy him so completely. And he, in his turn, when she was not looking was thinking – supposing? – supposing – (since she had troubled to recall herself to him), that he could interest a girl like Sondra in him?

The whole book is like this, all 353,014 words of it. Another typical Dreiser move is the extended double negative:

Nevertheless she was not at all convinced that a girl of Roberta’s looks and practicality would not be able to negotiate an association of the sort without harm to herself.

You parse that sucker, and get back to me in a week when you’re done.

So … why did I stick it out? For one thing, because it’s on four of those book lists, and while I may not reach 100 on any of them, it pushed me one closer. But it also stood as the last unread novel from my years in school: It was originally assigned to me in my senior year of high school, in the fall of 1989. I got to page 25, hated it, bought the Cliffs Notes, and wrote the paper off that. That’s the same class for which I didn’t read Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a book I went back and read in 2005 and loved. I simply can’t say the same for this paperweight.

Next up: Dr. Michael Guillen’s Five Equations That Changed the World: The Power and Poetry of Mathematics.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ July 13, 2010
→ By

Midnight’s Children.

Futures Game recap is up, as well as a video of me & Jason Grey talking Futures Game.

—

In autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe.

My only knowledge of Salman Rushdie prior to beginning his much-lauded novel Midnight’s Children was that he was the subject of a fatwa for The Satanic Verses and that somehow he’d managed to bag, even temporarily, Padma Lakshmi. His public image and the controversy over the latter novel gave me the impression that he was a dour, serious writer, and I was only reading this work because it appears on the TIME, Modern Library, and Radcliffe top 100s through which I’m gradually working my way. (It also won the Man Booker Prize in 1981, and in 1993 won the Booker of Bookers, given to the best winner from the first 25 years of the award.)

As it turns out – unsurprisingly to me, and probably to you as well – I’d sold Rushdie short. Midnight’s Children is inventive, sprawling, witty, satirical, acerbic, gross, and, in many ways, important. I wouldn’t say I loved the novel, for a few reasons I’ll get into, but I don’t think I have to love reading a book to recognize it as great literature. It is, in many ways, the Indian One Hundred Years of Solitude, not quite as compact or as immersing, but with the same combination of wide and narrow scopes while using magical realism to tell its story.

The narrator of Midnight’s Children is Saleem, born at the stroke of midnight at the precise moment that India earned her independence from Great Britain, a date that has symbolic significance as well as plot significance within the novel. The symbolic significance is obvious, as Saleem’s story parallels and intertwines with the history of India, not just as a country but as a people struggling to figure out the whole independence thing, while the plot significance derives from the fact that each of the 1,001 children born in India within the hour after independence develops some particular magical skill or power, with Saleem eventually – in rather crude fashion – discovering that he has the ability to read or even enter other peoples’ minds.

The story of the novel spans three generations, going back to his grandfather and his peculiar courtship of his wife – originally his patient, as he was the town’s one doctor, sent to Germany for his education – through his own parents’ unusual union, with each marriage, courtship, or broken heart sowing the seeds of future calamities. As Saleem’s mother gives birth, a Christian nurse with anarchist leanings switches his tag with that of another baby born simultaneously, altering not just their fates but, in Saleem’s story, at least, that of India as a whole. Saleem leaves India for Pakistan and returns after two separate exiles, leads a mental conference of the thousand and one children of midnight, becomes an ascetic with a preternatural sense of smell, falls in love with an illusionist, becomes a father and a widower, and ends up with a strange wasting disease that leads him to write down the story of his life, one that cannot be untangled from the story of India from its independence through the novel’s present day. His dabblings with various forms of extremism all lead to disaster, not just for him but for anyone who comes near him – he is convinced that he is the cause of the misery – standing in for India’s own unfortunate swings toward communism or religious hatred.

Rushdie’s prose is at once maddening and magical, maddening because of stylistic quirks like strings of three adjectives without interruption of comma or conjunction, magical in passages like this one, where he introduces one aspect of the novel’s altered reality where the emotions of a cook enter her food and the bodies of those who consume it:

And, now restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people’s food seeping into her – because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes umbued with the personality of their creator; Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination.

(The meatballs of intransigence. I worked for someone once who ate too many of those.)

I’m only superficially familiar with Indian history, although I hit Wikipedia many times to check and see if events described in the novel were taken from real life. (Unfortunately, most of them were.) But it’s clear that Rushdie intended to satirize many aspects of Indian culture, society, and especially its government; his comments on Indira Gandhi led the despot to sue him for libel when the book was published. Saleem and his family – included a number of cousins, uncles, and aunts who are various shades of wacko – seemed to me to stand in for various problems or crises of India as a whole, writ smaller and often with comic effects.

I could even see this book used in a class on comic novels – I took such a class in college, where I first encountered The Master and Margarita and If on a winter’s night a traveler – because of Rushdie’s use of farce and dry, sidelong wit, including this almost throwaway line where he pokes fun at Saleem’s innocence as the character walks through a dirty city street:

…and Japanese tourists who all (on this occasion) wore surgical face-masks out of politeness, so as not to infect us with their exhaled germs;

There were a few plot twists that didn’t sit right with me, generally characters making decisions that made little or no sense to me. There’s also a passage where a magician who specializes in making things or people disappear is presumed killed, but it’s not clear why she wouldn’t have used her power to save herself; I imagine it was necessary to have her killed or removed from the story, but the manner in which Rushdie did so felt incomplete, and I was half-expecting her to resurface.

Finally, I found the meandering story of the plot, especially its jumps back and forth in time, to be very distracting, since the transitions often weren’t clear and much of the present-day content was completely ancillary to the main storyline. I thought Rushdie may have even acknowledged the nonlinear, tangential nature of the book through the voice of his main character:

This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

But I may be erring by putting words in the author’s mouth when they only emanated from that of one of his creations. It was a tough read – not Tolstoy tough, but maybe Faulkner tough – but the creativity, the humor, and the borderline insanity of the book was remarkable, and as a window into a country and culture with which I wasn’t that familiar, it was an educational read as well.

It’s worth a mention that the witch with whom Saleem falls in love is named Parvati, while his second wife, who appears as audience and muse when he steps back from writing/telling his life story, is named Padma. So perhaps J.K. Rowling, in addition to reading A Dance to the Music of Time and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, read Midnight’s Children and threw in a reference via the names of two of her characters.

Next up: Kazuo Ishiguro’s frustrating, dreamlike novel The Unconsoled.

Filed Under: TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ June 25, 2010
→ By

Ubik.

Those of you on the fence about buying a Kindle from amazon.com may be interested to learn that they’ve cut the price to $189. Competition is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

—

Philip Dick’s novel Ubik made the TIME list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, one of the few genre novels on the list (and, I’m guessing, a book for which Lev Grossman stumped). I’d read nine other Dick novels, putting The Man in the High Castle – the least sci-fi of any of the books I’ve read from him – on the Klaw 100, but hadn’t read any of his work in close to a decade before picking up this title.

Ubik is typical Dick in that it involves reality turned on its head, where he changes the fundamental conditions of our physical existence, then inserts relatively ordinary people and sees how they act and respond. This time around, there’s a new scientific process that allows people who have died to be placed in a state called “half-life,” where they remain physically dead but their brains can continue to function when they are, in effect, plugged in, a period amounting to a few hours in total between physical death and brain death. So Glen Runciter, who runs an anti-psychic operation, can communicate with his dead wife for a few minutes when he has to make a critical business decision (how terribly romantic), although he runs into trouble early when one such session is interrupted by a neighboring half-lifer who manages to invade the signal.

Joe Chip is one of Runciter’s employees and he, Glen, and ten other employees embark for a highly lucrative mission that goes very wrong when a bomb explodes and somebody dies. What is not clear to the reader is who has died: to the employees, it appears that they all survived but Runciter died, but their world begins acting oddly and they receive messages from their old boss that indicate that they are in half-life and he was the only survivor. The primary mystery of the book is whether or not Joe and his dwindling team are actually alive or in half-life, and they try to chase Runciter’s clues and figure out what they need to do to (half-)survive, with a secondary thread surrounding who is actually controlling their new, unpredictable environment. And the title, a play on the Latin word, ubique, meaning “everywhere” (present in our word ubiquitous or in the Spanish verb ubicar, “to be located”), turns out to be a substance that combats in the rapid physical decay that starts to overtake the members of Joe’s team.

The chapter intros, advertising all manner of products under the Ubik name, usually with comical product warnings, reminded me of the epigrams and fake quotes before chapters in Jasper Fforde’s novels, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to hear Fforde was a Dick devotee. (Stop laughing.) I also thought the idea of a world being created to order for the person(s) experiencing it has been reused a few times, including The Matrix and one episode of 1980s revival of “The Twilight Zone,” at the least.

Dick uses a few early misdirects to keep you guessing about the real explanation behind the bomb and the weird possibly-half-life world, although the result does leave a few plot strands hanging. I also thought the final chapter, barely over a page in length, felt like a cheap add-on, one that undermined a fairly strong if slightly conventional conclusion in the prior chapter. And it takes a good 20-25 pages for Dick to set up his universe, explaining in often dry terms the various forms of psychic abilities in use as well as the whole half-life phenomenon, a section that took up about 10% of the book. Overall, though, it’s a clever, mind-bending novel, and following Joe (the main protagonist) through his confusion about the changing world and then his attempts to save himself, if not others on his team, was compelling.

The question I have is whether this merited inclusion as one of three true sci-fi novels on the list (along with Neuromancer, a decent novel worthy for its prescience; and Snow Crash, a good read but a poor selection for the 100), along with a pair of fantasy novels and a comic book. I’m not an aficionado of the genre, but I could make a case for the Foundation trilogy (they did give The Lord of the Rings a spot, as well as A Dance to the Music of Time), and would argue for Dick’s alternate-history work The Man in the High Castle as more literary and seemingly more serious. And there’s a separate debate over whether six entries out of 100 is too much for the combined sci-fi/fantasy genre, not including works like Never Let Me Go, A Clockwork Orange, or Animal Farm that used elements of altered reality to tell much more serious stories. I liked Ubik and would recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind a little sci in his fi, but as a top 100 candidate it fell short for me.

Next review: I don’t usually review Agatha Christie novels, but Taken at the Flood interested me enough that it’s worth a few grafs.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 9, 2010
→ By

Mrs. Dalloway.

Virginia Woolf ripped James Joyce’s Ulysses when it was first published, but liked the idea of a single-day novel enough to use it in a novel of her own, one that hews more closely to the conventional novel form and appears to be something of a rejoinder to Joyce’s genre-busting efforts: Mrs. Dalloway. Unfortunately, a straightforward novel about quotidian life is about as interesting as you’d expect a novel about the mundane thoughts of ordinary people to be; that is, it’s boring as hell.

Woolf’s gambit is to spend most of the novel inside the heads of her characters, with jarring, unannounced transitions from head to head, sometimes within a room (almost as if you had a sudden camera change, from behind one character’s eyes to behind another’s), sometimes to a separate time and place through the slimmest of segues. Only one of her characters might qualify as interesting, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith, who today would be diagnosed with post-tramautic stress disorder and possibly treated, thus making him relatively uninteresting for the novelist’s purposes. The contrast between his futile attempts to make sense of a world gone mad – he’s a World War I veteran who hears voices and suffers paranoid delusions – and the utterly insignificant thoughts of the vapid upper-class characters in the rest of the book is shocking, but Woolf spends too much time with the well-heeled and not enough with Septimus.

The one wisp of intrigue in the book comes from the hints at romantic tension between Clarissa Dalloway and her former flame, Peter Walsh, once a boy of some promise but now a man whose progress has been hindered by his own poor choices. The sight of Clarissa still stirs old passions in Peter, reducing him to tears or boiling him in rage … but nothing much comes of it and Clarissa’s party, the goal of her day, goes off as planned. Her own existential crises – mostly a fear of death or simply regret that all this must one day end – seem so much less serious given how she chooses to spend her time or emotions.

Peter does have one small episode that stood out, for me, for its sheer darkness, as he stalks – there’s no better word for it – a young woman in the streets of London for several blocks before giving up:

Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms – his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought – making oneself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share – it smashed to atoms.

Up next: I’ve taken a few days off from reading, but I’ll start Edward P. Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Known World later this week.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ December 29, 2009
→ By

A House for Mr. Biswas.

Lying in the room next to Shama’s, perpetually dark, Mr. Biswas slept and woke and slept again. The darkness, the silence, the absence of the world enveloped and comforted him. At some far-off time he had suffered great anguish. He had fought against it. Now he had surrendered, and this surrender had brought peace.

Nobel Prize-winner V.S. Naipaul first achieved critical acclaim with A House for Mr. Biswas, which appears at #72 on the Modern Library 100 and is on the (unranked) TIME 100. As you might imagine, the novel details the lifelong desire of Mohun Biswas, an Indian man born to expatriate parents in Trinidad, for a house of his own, as much for what it represents (independence, status, success, dignity, masculinity) as what it provides (privacy, stability, an escape from his insane in-laws). But Mr. Biswas is no up-from-nothing Horatio Alger hero – he’s petulant, immature, and incredibly self-centered to the point of all but ignoring his brilliant young son until the son’s academic efforts promise to shine respect upon his father.

Mr. Biswas is partly a comedy, with Naipaul mining some humor from small bits of dialogue and the minor calamities that befall the title character. Mr. Biswas goes to work for one of the smaller newspapers in Port of Spain, and receives some pointed and slightly obnoxious feedback from the paper’s harried editor:

‘”Considerably” is a big word meaning “very,” which is a pointless word any way. And look. “Several” has seven letters. “Many” has only four and oddly enough has exactly the same meaning.’

And Naipaul’s ear for dialogue down to the minutiae of conversation is very strong. But the core theme, that Mr. Biswas perseveres despite continued misfortunes, strikes me as less a celebration of human dignity than a mockery of how some people can’t get out of their own way – or perhaps that people can achieve their goals despite screwing up left and right for twenty or thirty years. Almost everything that goes wrong for Mr. Biswas is his own fault. He rushes to marry a girl of whom he knows nothing, then he keeps knocking her up despite the fact that they have no money and mooch off her extended (and crazy) family). He blows a month’s salary on a dollhouse for his daughter; he buys a house he can’t afford without even bothering to see it in the daylight; he’s rude to everyone, including his wife, and then acts surprised when he gets nastiness in return. By the end of the book, I was half-hoping he didn’t get the house after all, even though it was promised in the prologue that he did.

Naipaul receives tremendous praise for his prose, which is effusive and heavy on descriptive language, reminiscent of Dickens’ prose … but of course, Dickens wrote in serial form and was striving to fill pages and stretch stories out over more issues, making him the bane of English and American schoolchildren for over a century now. The book appeared on the TIME 100, compiled in 2005, but received a less-than-flattering review in the magazine in 1962 when Mr. Biswas was first published; the reviewer praised the colorful patois of the Indian expatriates in the novel and their melange of old and new customs, “but Naipaul’s House, though built of excellent exotic materials, sags badly; ‘economy, style, and a less elastic blueprint would have done wonders.” A verbose author can be a pleasure to read when the plot moves quickly or the novel is short, but neither was the case in Mr. Biswas, which runs 560 pages in the current paperback edition and lacks any major narrative thread to pull the reader to the finish.

Next up: Back to Wodehouse – sort of a Christmas tradition for me – with one of the few Jeeves novels I’ve never read, The Mating Season.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ October 27, 2009
→ By

Revolutionary Road.

I’ll be on 1080 the Fan in Portland Oregon tonight around 5:40 local time, and on AllNight with Jason Smith in the small hours. Tomorrow I’ll be on the Herd at 12:10 pm EDT. Look for my World Series preview piece on ESPN.com around midday.

—

Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, which made the TIME 100, portrays the fraying marriage of Frank and April Wheeler in mundane detail, highlighting their mutual contempt and the cruel manner in which they treat one another (and ignore their kids), until an unexpected event accelerates their downward spiral into an inevitable (and, I thought, rather predictable) climax.

The Wheelers have recently moved to a Connecticut suburb from which Frank commutes to an unchallenging, uninteresting job in Manhattan, and the move further away from city life and culture has only widened the cracks that were already appearing in their relationship. When April appears in a community theater production – which is, individually and collectively, a small disaster, a symbol of the thriving city culture they’ve abandoned for the superficial yet hollow suburbs – her contempt for her husband surfaces in her language and tone:

“Well,” he said, “the thing is, I already said we could. I mean I just saw them out there and I said we would.”
“Oh. Then would you mind going out again and saying you were mistaken? That should be simple enough.”
“Look,” he said. “Don’t start getitng this way. The point is I thought it might be fun, is all. Besides, it’s going to look kind of rude, isn’t it? I mean isn’t it?”
“You mean you won’t.” She closed her eyes. “All right, I will, then. Thanks a lot.”

Very little happens in Revolutionary Road; Frank has an affair, but it’s almost preordained, and the other significant events that have shaped the Wheelers’ lives exist only in flashbacks, until the Big Thing that leads to the book’s conclusion. The novel is instead driven forward by dialogue and Yates’ clever, meandering prose:

It looked, as John Givings had once said, like a place where people lived – a place where the difficult, intricate process of living could sometimes give rise to incredible harmonies of happiness and sometimes to near-tragic disorder, as well as to ludicrous minor interludes (“That’s All, Folks!”); a place where it was possible for whole summers to be kind of crazy, where it was possible to feel lonely and confused in many ways and for things to look pretty bleak from time to time, but where everything, in the final analysis, was going to be all right.

Yates appears to have taken his nomenclature seriously. Frank is excessively so, candid to the point of speaking against self-interest, as if his internal censor has been shut off permanently. April’s name is more ironic, as she feels like she should be in the springtime of her life but is trapped by an unwanted marriage and two children for whom she feels no affection. They live on the Revolutionary Road of the book’s title, referring both to the sexual revolution (which only accelerated after the book’s publication in 1960) and the economic revolution of postwar America, including the flight to the suburbs that ensnares the Wheelers and intensifies their alienation from each other and from society.

The ending to Revolutionary Road was, as I said above, quite predictable – Yates foreshadows the hell out of it – and I always find it hard to read about marriages of contempt and cruelty. I’m sure this relationship exists all over the place, and I have seen married couples speak to each other as Frank and April do, without love or tenderness, through gritted teeth meant to barely disguise the lack of respect, but it remains very hard to take even when it’s well-written.

Next up: I’m more than a third of the way through Tree of Smoke and I’m still not quite sure what the point of it is.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: ,
→ September 8, 2009
→ By

Under the Net.

I was originally going to call Iris Murdoch’s* Under the Net the poor man’s Lucky Jim, but by the time I finished, I changed my view. It’s more of the homeless man’s Lucky Jim – a similar modern picaresque around a hapless central character who can’t get out of his own way, but maybe 25% as funny as Amis’ novel with an ending that made no sense to me at all. It appears on both the TIME 100 and the Modern Library 100 (at #95).

*If Murdoch’s name rings a bell for you but the book doesn’t, the 2001 film Iris was about her, with Jim Broadbent winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Murdoch’s husband.

I admit, however, that the novel’s foundation in philosophy was probably lost on me, since I’ve never taken a philosophy course or had any interest in the subject. Murdoch herself was a philosopher, writing five nonfiction books on the subject, and philosophy is a running theme through Under the Net, with references to specific philosophers and discussions of the subject both through dialogue and through the plot. I didn’t appreciate any of the references and the dialogue tended toward the boring, while the narration … well, you tell me:

The roadway was glowing with light. One one side the Arc du Carrousel stood like an imagined archway, removed from space by its faultless proportions; and behind it the enormous sweep of the Louvre enclosed the scene, fiercely illuminated and ablaze with detail. On the other side began the unnatural garden, with its metallic green grass under the yellow lamps, and its flowers self-conscious with colour and quiet as dream flowers which can unfold and be still at the same moment. A little distance beyond the railings the garden ran into trees, and beyond the trees an explosion of light announced the Place de la Concorde, above and beyond which was raised upon its hill the floodlit Arc de Triomphe standing against a backdrop of darkness, with an enormous tricolore which reached the whole height of the archway fluttering inside the central arch.

That paragraph includes 143 words of descriptive text … in the middle of a pursuit scene. Just when I thought we were getting somewhere with the plot, Murdoch decides to stop and smell the roses.

Next up: Something a little more fun – Walter Moers’ City of Dreaming Books.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 4, 2009
→ By

Falconer.

John Cheever’s Falconer, another book from the TIME 100*, made little sense to me as anything more than a superficial story of a man in prison until I read a little of Cheever’s biography. If you know two basic things about the author, the novel takes on significantly greater meaning: Cheever was bisexual and struggled to come to terms with this, and he was a lifelong alcoholic, which was probably tied to the first fact. After learning those details of Cheever’s life, I found more meaning Falconer as a story of self-acceptance and recovery.

*This is the 80th book I’ve read on the TIME list, and 90 seems well within reach, but I can already tell you those last five will be a bear, if I even choose to tackle them: Infinite Jest, An American Tragedy, White Noise, Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Recognitions. That’s about 4700 pages across five novels, and three of them have reputations as difficult reads. Ninety-five sounds like a lovely number, don’t you think?

The main character, Farragut, is a husband and father and has more or less had a successful career despite a heroin addiction dating back to his service in World War II, where he became hooked on morphine. For reasons not explained until near the end of the book, Farragut kills his brother, after which he’s sentenced to prison. His marriage, not strong before the murder, falls apart; his dependence on methadone becomes central to his daily life; and, even though he’s “not queer,” he has an affair with a fellow inmate. Although Cheever surrounds Farragut with a cast of wackos in his cell block, the story is entirely about Farragut and his struggle to maintain – or discover – his humanity in jail.

The prison of the book and Farragut’s gradual recovery from addiction and acceptance of his own character seem to be a metaphor for Cheever’s own life, where he struggled to accept his own bisexuality and promiscuity and drowned himself in alcohol, an addiction he apparently kicked around the time he wrote Falconer. Early in his confinement, Farragut is briefly denied his daily methadone dose and ends up suffering withdrawal symptoms, after which he pens three letters, one to the governor, one to his bishop, and one to his wife; armed with the knowledge of Cheever’s troubles, I read those letters as Cheever’s own rebellion against the authority figures in his life and prevented him or pressured him to keep his sexual orientation a secret and to feel shame for it, or just his awakening to the possibilities of a life outside of the oppression of those authority figures. Farragut’s eventual acceptance of himself is neither easy nor predictable, and in some ways it’s incomplete, but that made the book seem more real by giving Farragut antiheroic qualities.

The book is short and moves along quickly between Cheever’s prose and, outside of those three letters, little introspective text. It also moved quickly for me because, once Farragut is settled in prison, Cheever devotes a lot of ink to his main character’s sex life in prison, and I found those sections a lot easier to read if I just didn’t read them at all. The man was clearly obsessed with his own peter; perhaps there’s some Freudian analysis to be made there, but having never read Freud I saw no value in those details.

Next up: I’m still a bit behind, having just finished F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second short story collection, Tales From The Jazz Age, this morning.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , ,
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The Confessions of Nat Turner.

My Kazmir trade analysis was posted this morning.

William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1967 and is on the TIME 100, but its main claim to fame is the controversy that surrounded its publication, as African-American writers and scholars largely banded together to criticize the book’s fictionalized portrait of its title character. Turner led the only major slave rebellion in the U.S., killing 55 white men, women, and children before the rebellion fizzled out and he was captured, but very little is known of his life other than what we have in the 20-page document known as “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” the accuracy of which is in question because it represents Turner’s words as written by one of the white attorneys working on his case. The novel did little for me – the prose was bombastic and the story is so full of digressions, tangents, and internal monologues that Turner’s reasons for rebelling are beaten into the ground – but the controversy is worth a deeper look.

The edition I read was the 25th-anniversary reprint that includes a new afterword from Styron, who quotes his (African-American) friend and fellow author James Baldwin to argue that, had he himself been black, he would not have caught the same criticism. That is, his biggest crime was being a white author writing about an African-American icon, intruding into territory in which he did not belong. I’m sure there was some element of that in the backlash against Styron’s book (which included an influential book of essays called Ten Black Writers Respond), but Styron glosses over some of the least flattering elements of his portrayal.

Styron ties Turner’s desire for rebellion to three causes. One is religious fanaticism, which we know was a factor from the actual confessions; Turner was a preacher who believed his violent rebellion was a divine mission. Another was certain aspects of his life as a slave for both cruel and kind masters, which was fictionalized but is almost certainly a valid explanation. But the third is a deep sexual repression that manifests itself in disturbing ways from a sexual encounter with a teenaged boy to a fantasy of raping the woman who is perhaps the only white person in the book who treats Turner as something approximating a full human being. The portrayal, which as far as I can tell has no basis in reality, demeans Turner and diminishes his myth by removing any righteousness from his cause. Demonizing Turner would have been easy enough through more attention to the violence of his makeshift army’s rebellion, where revenge was taken on all whites, including young children. Adding this bizarre sexual-repression twist seems to tie into the view of white slaveowners, that blacks were more akin to animals than to whites.

The book is fiction, not a biography, and Styron emphasizes that point in his afterword in response to critics of the book’s inaccuracy. I have no particular issue with an author creating a backstory for an actual historical figure about whom so little is known. What bothered me was the creation of a backstory that delegitimizes the simple idea (or myth) that Turner rebelled against the system that enslaved him and over a million other blacks at the time of the rebellion. We can condemn the violence of the insurrection while still understanding and sympathizing with its causes.

Next up: I’m a little behind, having just finished Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees this morning. Let’s just say for now that I don’t agree with the Baltimore Sun critic who referred to Kidd as “a direct literary descendant of Carson McCullers.”

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,