True Grit!

Currently:

The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D’Ambrosio : These stories, set in the present-day, seem to inhabit some shadowy bygone era of the Pacific Northwest, as if Washingtonians are still living in the blurry, rainy world of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I love that mood. D’Ambrosio strikes a reverential tone and finds beautiful images in his final sentences in a way that most writers would kill for. His endings don’t blindside you though. They’re the sort of perfection you expect to find every so often, the sort of genius that seems available to everyone—like the melody of a great pop song—but that very few possess.

Astro City: Life in the Big City by Kurt Busiek et al : Busiek says in the introduction that if Watchmen was the deconstruction of the superhero comic, Astro City is the series that put the pieces back together. That’s about right; the fullness and detail of the metropolis are similar, but the tone is flipped, rollicking and freewheeling but sacrificing none of the intelligence of late 80s comixistentialism. The Spirit is another point of reference, in the way that each Astro City story ends with a punchline that signals narrative completion.

Other recent reads:

They Came Like Swallows is another small miracle from William Maxwell, who beautifully captures the strange and inescapable fact of being alive. That may sound like a blurb, but it’s true.

Keyboard Presents The Best of the 80s: The Artists, Instruments & Techniques of an Era is a collection of interviews from Keyboard magazine in the 1980s, in which all your favorite synth pop artists talk about their interests, their gear, their live shows, and more. I read the articles about OMD, Erasure and The Human League, and the common factors in their worldviews seem to be these: rejection of punk rock instrumentation but a desire to channel its energy; interest in synthesizers not for the sake of the technology but because “we like the way they sound,” and because synths allow autonomy and don’t require great musical skill. All valid reasons, but the proof is in the music, and these are three of my favorite bands ever. They didn’t use keyboard presets, but built all their sounds from scratch, and it shows in the warmth of their recordings. Andy McCluskey of OMD made a prediction in 1982 that the synthesizer would become the cliché instrument of the 80s for all the wrong reasons, and he was right.

Note: When my WMCN membership expires, I will have to reconfigure this as a music blog, so it’s good I’ve been writing a lot about music-related books recently.

Other recent curiosities:

“The Pavement Tapes” by Alex Ross originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1997 and can now be found in that very cool Brighten the Corners reissue that came out last year. Ross writes about how the meaninglessness (or the meaningfulness that defies meaning) of Pavement’s lyrics is one of the band’s greatest qualities, which I completely agree with. I rarely listen to lyrics except when I feel the music urging me to (making Brighten the Corners one of the few albums I can quote) or when the message is especially tied to my worldview (The Queen is Dead and Pet Sounds being two more albums I can quote). The sound of the words usually takes precedence over the words themselves, and as Bob Dylan might have said, rock ‘n’ roll’s meaninglessness is holy. But Alex Ross writes about meaning/words/holiness much more eloquently than I.

Basically I’ve just been thinking a lot again about the genius of Pavement. I never noticed until recently how absurdly (and subtly) elaborate their song structures are (did they ever write a simple verse-chorus-verse?), and (as The Man Who Invented Himself and I discovered) how much wisdom is embedded in a song as seemingly random as “Gold Soundz.” You can never quarantine a past. You’re empty, and I’m empty. They’re coming to the chorus now. But I don’t want my appreciation to become too academic, because that would negate the deep feeling I’ve always had for them.

I was sent a William Saroyan story called “Dentist and Patient” with my Beefheart, and found that it reinforced what I love about Saroyan (whose novel The Human Comedy is one of my favorites). This, in a nutshell, is what happens: the patient refers to himself as a cheater to the dentist, but the dentist, unwilling to believe him, fails to realize he has been cheated by the patient. Saroyan has been criticized as a naïve writer, or one unwilling to recognize the existence of evil (in the way that Roberto Benigni’s fictional denial of evil in Life is Beautiful makes the film itself evil (supposedly), or whatever). In “Dentist and Patient,” Saroyan seems to be casting himself as the naïve dentist, celebrating his own ignorant optimism. If evil in the world makes optimism wrong, does good in the world make pessimism wrong?

I finally watched the feminist masterwork True Grit, whose central character is an androgynous lesbian teenager (Kim Darby, my new icon) who recruits an alcoholic marshal (John Wayne) to help avenge her father’s murder. The film doesn’t quite deliver on its initial promise as a playful and progressive Western; Wayne, being such a dominating personality, eventually takes the spotlight, and while it’s a thrill to watch him do any old thing, it’s at the expense of Darby’s own “true grit.” Even so, the film puts most “revisionist” Westerns made in the 40 years since to shame, and has a touching denouement. Wayne and Darby stand by the dead father’s grave, and Darby says that one day she will be buried in this plot, and that she would like Wayne to be buried beside her, as he doesn’t have any family of his own. “But you should be buried next to your husband and children,” Wayne says, and Darby doesn’t respond. Here’s what she wants to say:

“You know I’ll never have a family. This country, in this unenlightened era, won’t let me marry who I want to marry, nor adopt children. You and me, we’re meant to be alone. You, because you’re just a loner, and me, because I like womenfolk. Let’s be each other’s family.”

Blogging About Architecture

Currently:

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell : Just barely begun, but the Maxwell touch is already evident in this, his second novel, published 43 years before So Long, See You Tomorrow. Again, the narrative perspective is impossible to define (third person close? retrospective first person with swapped pronouns?) and even seems to break rules, but rendered with such authority that it needs only be defined by the story itself. There is a strange blend of child and adult points-of-view here. Maxwell is not David Gordon Green, making his child characters wise beyond their years. Instead, he shows them following codes, trying to be good, with a sadness and complexity usually reserved for grown-up characters.

Other recent reads:

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle : The thing I admire most about this book, Doyle’s first, is its complete lack of hesitation when attempting to represent the power of music in words. The novel chronicles the career of an 80s era Dublin soul band who mostly play Motown classics, and the lyrics to those songs are sprawled across at least a quarter of the book’s pages with such reckless enthusiasm that the ability of soul music to excite and inspire is always right at the surface. That famous line that says writing about music is like dancing about architecture becomes almost laughable when you see what Doyle can do. Never let anyone tell you music can’t be written about, or that it can’t change lives.

Also admirable is the book’s narrow focus: it moves from the band’s inception to their first practice, rehearsal to rehearsal, gig to gig, with no subplots outside of these distinct scenes. Doyle is a master of what might be called micro-scenes, two or three sentences that accomplish as much as two or three pages by any other writer. For these and other reasons, it might be wrong to call The Commitments a novel (under that category, you might find it “insubstantial”). It doesn’t concern individual characters so much as an entire community (not unlike one of the band’s covers, “Chain Gang,” a song about collective struggle, not any individual man’s). The book is very much about how community grows and how it falls apart, and what’s left behind when it does.

The Commitments’ music might be seen as white appropriation of black culture, but that would be wrong. Instead, it’s a recognition of kinship not previously suspected. There’s a beautiful moment early on when the teenage boys who will soon form The Commitments listen to James Brown’s “Sex Machine” for the first time. There are these white lads listening to the record, and the black lads who sing backup for James, and pretty soon the pronouns start to merge and it becomes one collective musical experience. Black and white disappear; it all takes place via a record player anyway. Then we get this great parenthetical: “The lads (in Jimmy’s bedroom) smiled at each other. This was it.”

By book’s end, The Commitments have dissolved and the remains of the band are looking now to the sound of The Byrds. They’re searching for a new style that can make them famous, sure, but Doyle isn’t being cynical: they really did like soul music, and now they really like jangle rock (notice how the lyrics are represented the same for both styles; that’s the language of love). When Doyle says The Byrds are “the best they’d ever heard,” the boys are simply succumbing to the hyperbole that any music lover who lives in the moment knows.

I could say some of the same things about Mystery Train (which I have finally finished). For one, Greil Marcus often falls victim to the hyperbole of the present moment. There are dozens of songs he believes to be the “most frightening” he’s ever heard. That doesn’t bother me. I do it myself. What does bother me a bit is the way he relies on lines like this, to describe the power in any and every blues vocal: “He sounds as if he has already lost more than anyone can return.” Nobody knows what that means, but it sounds nice, and evokes a tantalizing cult of masculinity that Marcus of course can’t help but get behind in his very masculine book.

But I admire his approach to music writing (like I do Doyle’s). Marcus truly believes that music can tell us what it means to live, and that these meanings can be put into words (only once does he describe a song as “too beautiful for words”). I would happily read his thoughts on anything. Moving through the distinct sections of his book, anticipating what he might say about the next artist—Sly Stone…Randy Newman…Elvis—I had that childhood feeling of playing a video game, progressing through the levels, breathlessly awaiting the next boss. A weird metaphor, I know, but true.

Home Land had many more laughs, some unbelievable carnage, and ended on a cosmic “this is what life means” level, unexpected but satisfying proof that the author was all along aware of the philosophies embedded in his absurd scenes. Hicksville wasn’t as full of laughs or carnage, but while comics tend to be more ambiguous in their meanings, it also reached its own cosmic closure. Hicksville’s library of unpublished comics is one of the great fictional places, like Oz or the Death Star or Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama.

Sam Barry progress:

80 pages.

Clowntime Is Over

Currently:

Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks : Excellent comic book, with multiple levels of narration that don’t make it impenetrable but only add to its charm. The story is set in a town in New Zealand where all the citizens either write comic books or talk about them at the local tearoom. It’s one of those quaint villages full of colorful locals who all know each other. We get samples of comics writing from many of the characters, one of which contains this great bit of dialogue: “Perhaps I missed my true vocation when I became a cartoonist… Maybe I was meant to be a mortician… or else Morrissey.” In its evocation of place, Hicksville reminds me a bit of Night Fisher by R. Kikuo Johnson (Hawaii) and Waterwise by Joel Orff (Pacific Northwest, I think? In any case, its Northwestern-ish locale is well conveyed).

Home Land by Sam Lipsyte : Am I not accustomed to books that bend reality to such a great degree for the sake of humor? I forgive it all the time in movies. Well, I’ve warmed up to this, because (1) the underlying tragedies of the reprehensible narrator’s life start to emerge in pieces fairly early on, and (2) a crucial moment in which he proves himself, with unquestionable logic and great emotion, to be the least reprehensible character in the book. If you haven’t forgiven the book’s absurdity by the time his former high school’s former principal engages in sex with a vacuum, it’s time to give up, and I haven’t given up yet. Here’s my favorite line: “I’d hopped the bus out there to perv on rich wives from Tobias Hills, drop in on Roni’s mother at Slice of Life, cop some snatches of what contemporary amnesiacs call punk rock on those consoles at the record outlet.” Specifically the last part.

No mystery why Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train is such a “seminal text,” if a work of rock criticism can be so named. Just call it an established classic, I guess. The best compliment I can give it is that I now want to start listening to The Band (couldn’t shake the feeling he was actually writing about Fleet Foxes in that chapter) and Randy Newman, and at the same time know that they won’t live up to Marcus’s descriptions. He writes with such authority, which only bothers me when the subject is Sly Stone or Newman’s slave ship fantasy “Sail Away.” If you’re going to start a sentence with, “Young black men began to imitate the movies,” at least insert a “some” or a “maybe” at the beginning. But then, I’ve always been apologetic in my writing.

Other recent reads:

The Strange Case of Edward Gorey by Alexander Theroux : Not very informative Gorey biography, though I suppose it’s the best we’ll ever get. It works fairly well as a character sketch, but is mostly just an endless list of the man’s varied interests. Most of the sentences follow this construction: He liked ____, and also _____! Fill in the first blank with a work of high art, and the second with some low culture junk. The novels of Anthony Trollope and Days of Our Lives? Yep, he liked both of them.

Speaking of, the remainder of Amphigorey was wonderful. I agree with Theroux’s estimation of Gorey as a writer of realism; a story called “The Willowdale Handcar,” in which three bored young people go riding off on a handcar, have some modest adventures, and never return, could not ring truer, in any of its details or in overall effect.

Girl Factory had a characteristically great ending, an unexpected indictment of the American prison system wrapped up in the narrator’s plea to remember his sad tale.

Haunting my bookshelf:

Early William Maxwell novels; Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day; Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club; William Kennedy’s Ironweed; the rest of James Baldwin; Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin. Can anyone recommend any of these? Is John Wray’s Lowboy as great as they say? Why am I such an undisciplined reader these days? Why do all these authors have such unspectacular names?

Happy birthday to occasional blog commenter Aaron (I still feel guilty for forgetting earlier).

March (Beware)

Currently:

Girl Factory by Jim Krusoe : 2008 novel that initially seems to come from the McSweeney’s school of funny premises (women suspended in yogurt), but then, like the comics of Jason, takes that premise to examine some slippery moral questions and the big themes of life and death. Krusoe is very good at a number of things:

—Creating a system of metaphors (mostly involving yogurt) that is determined by the unlikely images within the story, so that a crayon drawing that looks like “claw marks on the inside of a jar filled with yogurt” 1) is a functional, not outlandish, metaphor, 2) keeps the story tightly knit, and 3) is very funny.

—Mocking the clumsy exposition (those moments when the narrator goes into a trance to remember some detail of his past), functional dialogue (“Instead, I propose that we all stay behind, and you try to take a nap”) and fetishistic detail (the father’s death scene, in which every image lays the pathos on real thick) of more “serious” writing by indulging in them himself for the sake of discomfort and/or humor.

—Also: long sentences; crosscutting for ironic effect

It’s not all cute tricks, though. The narrator, for all his psychosis, never seems like anything but a normal, and one who cares very deeply about animals. It is very affecting when those mice die, and then the rat, and then all those women, as he bungles it again and again, and even more affecting when he lists all of the dead in one especially masterful long sentence.

Amphigorey by Edward Gorey : A collection of short works by the man who first entered my consciousness under the category of “famed children’s illustrator.” What I’ve read so far doesn’t seem especially intended for children. One of the pieces features limericks about subjects as diverse as a group of hairy Harvard men burning a fairy and a woman who feels she has become unsexed (Gorey’s word, not mine). The best, though, is one called “The Unstrung Harp,” about a novelist in the process of writing his new book. I read it just before beginning my own writing last week, and laughed in recognition (that old thing) a number of times: when he ponders how to insert exposition into a completely unrelated scene; when he moves through the house, with his permanently petrified expression, picking up loose objects before putting down a sentence. Later, the author is embarrassed to find his book sitting in a shop window; that and other modest skewerings of the publishing process seem to be sadly perfect, little as I know about it.

Mystery Train by Greil Marcus : Marcus is the epitome of the 1970s American rock critic, so no surprise that this book is so male-centric. Its subtitle is “Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and while I don’t think Marcus believes that women haven’t contributed any worthwhile images of their own, there is a curious absence. That caveat aside, it really is a shame that this sort of writing is a lost art today. I’ve read so far Marcus’s musings on Robert Johnson and The Band; he digs deeply into the lyrics, the landscape, packs in the literary allusions, and still writes in a way that feels more perfectly suited for a rock mag than an academic journal.

One more caveat: Marcus says in the forward that he is writing about connections in the American imaginary that already exist, not merely synthesizing his own interests, but really, I believe it is more the latter. I don’t see how Randy Newman and Sly Stone inherently belong together

Other recent reads:

Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick : I guess any book about Robert Johnson benefits from the inherent fascination of the Johnson mythology, though this one struck me as very well done, especially in the way it describes the greater relevance of his work. Guralnick writes that Johnson “was suddenly elevated to significance by an act of creative will, by a synthesis of all he knew, of all he ever was to be,” and while that may be overstating it, it is the same sort of thing (in the same hyperbolic terms) that I’ve recently been writing about. This book proved relevant to my own “short novel,” and surprisingly so, in a number of ways: thinking about a time when musical discovery could take place in a void; thinking about the rudimentary ways music was recorded in bygone eras.

We Disappear continued to seem like a book I might write, and that sense of kinship with the author (reinforced by his blog) was more satisfying than the story itself. It lost some of its interest toward the end, but as a tribute to Heim’s mother it is very touching.

Little as I’ve been reading, the best writing I’ve encountered recently is from the best comedy of recent years, Tropic Thunder, which I watched again the other day. I transcribed my favorite scene, for my personal amusement and for easy reference. I’ve labeled the actors 1, 2 and 3, as it seems somehow improper to be absolute about their names. Here it is:

1: You gonna focus up now motherfucker and say it. “It’s me, Tugg.”
2: It’s me, Tugg.
1: That’s right, now Tugg who?
2: Tugg who? I don’t know, who are you?
1: Me, I know who I am. I’m a dude playin’ a dude disguised as another dude. You’re a dude that don’t know what dude he is.
2: Or are you a dude who has no idea what dude he is and claims to know what dude he is by playing other dudes?
1: I know what dude I am.
2: You’re scared.
1: I ain’t scared. Scared of what?
2: Or scared of who?
1: Scared of who?
2: Scared of you.
3: What’s going on?
2: The dudes are merging.

I’ve long thought that “the dudes are merging” is the sure-thing catchphrase that never was, but watching the movie a second time, I’m pretty sure I heard it as “the dudes are emerging.” “Emerging” is funny enough, but not nearly as funny as “merging,” so I stubbornly insist that the latter is still the proper reading.

February

Haven’t been reading much lately; haven’t really missed it. I’m writing a novella/short novel/jumbo story and am on the lookout for anything that might serve as inspiration: biographies and memoirs of musicians; any hyperbolic first-person account of the narrator’s schlubby acquaintance, a la Oscar Wao or Humboldt’s Gift (as recommended by my advisor); stories set in Butte, Montana; stories with interesting mother/son relationships. This next one has the latter:

We Disappear by Scott Heim : Astonishingly, I am reading another brand new book. This is Heim’s first, I believe, since Mysterious Skin in 1995. I’ve reached the point where the novel begins to justify its strange premise by unveiling the deeper meanings involved. Specifically, the “We” in the title refers not so much to the missing children that mother and son obsess over, but the mother and son themselves, one dying of cancer and the other always high on meth. It helps to know that both characters are a little bit out of their minds, because even though Heim makes every attempt to make the story plausible, so much of their motivation defies easy description. I feel more strongly and consistently about this book than I have about any other that I could and probably would write something like this myself. This includes the excessive use of lists and semicolons; the ornate but pretty language that doesn’t seem to come easy to its writer; the ideas, objects and ways of life with which the novel concerns itself. Heim includes a list in the back of the book of the albums he listened to while writing it (I don’t find him the least bit crazy for doing this, though I guess some writers can’t have any distractions while they’re working) and I wasn’t surprised to find many of my ambient and electronic faves among them: Future Sound of London, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, Low, M83, Boards of Canada, Angelo Badalamenti. This all must be ideal music to channel the strange and somber frequencies along which Heim’s mind clearly operates.

Jazz by Paul Tanner, David W. Megill, Maurice Gerow : Boring but marginally useful textbook for my jazz class that appears to have been dumbed down from previous editions. Thank God we’re also reading this…

Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, edited by Robert Walser : Source material going back to the origins of jazz. Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton are particularly eloquent when reflecting on their experiences and exaggerating their own importance.

Other recent reads:

The Listening Book by W.A. Mathieu : Corny but entirely genuine series of observations to help the reader get in touch, so to speak, with the hearing mechanism. There are about ten sentences worth of real wisdom, which almost made it worthwhile.

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday : Great book, whose best qualities have more or less escaped my mind by now. I had a sense of vast spaces and movement within them, on a cosmic level that few books achieve. At the end, when Abel returns home, it is unclear to me whether men still run through the canyon, or if these are just the ghosts and echoes of previous generations. It is an ending that is not as hopeless as it could be, like many things I have encountered recently (the beautifully sad Wendy and Lucy, for example, which like the other two best movies I have seen recently—Chuck and Buck and The Wrestler—strikes me as a literary achievement as well as a cinematic one).

Gilead was great. My Oscar favorites (with only the Winslets and Changelina yet unseen):

Picture: Milk
Director: Gus Van Sant
Actor: Sean Penn
Actress: Melissa Leo
Supporting Actor: Josh Brolin
Supporting Actress: Viola Davis
Original Screenplay: Milk
Adapted Screenplay: Doubt

Nu-Boox

Currently:

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson : I never expected to love a novel about a preacher so much, but this one, while not secular, has a humanist emphasis, with a narrator who is constantly surprised by the wondrousness of existence. Robinson’s interest in John Ames has much to do with what they share as writers, or as people who concern themselves with the lives of others. Baptism is described as a sensation of “really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time,” a line that corresponds to this one: “Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.” Both of these work as descriptions of what a truly great writer like Robinson does. I hope those lines give a sense of how much more approachable this book is to a heathen like me than anything by Flannery O’Connor or Graham Greene. Gilead makes clear the true and simple purpose of religion in Ames’ life: to help him live a purposeful life, be good, occupy his time, and recognize beauty.

Other recent reads:

Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan : Mediocre comic book with hyperbolic praise on the back cover by Joe Sacco (whose Palestine I have avoided reading because the new edition comes with an introduction by Edward Said—nothing against Edward Said, but I don’t like comics and theory to mingle so closely). The story is typical: two characters search for a man missing after an attack on a bus station in Tel Aviv; they become intimate along the way, discover things about the missing man, discover things about themselves, so on and so forth. The drawing style is lumpy and awkward; I don’t expect (or even desire) great art in a comic book, but I could never warm up to Modan’s drawings. There’s nothing in the characterization to make the protagonists more than bland and anonymous; a wider array of facial expressions would certainly help here. I will say that Modan is a fantastic colorist, though.

Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser : I adore Steven Millhauser, except for those moments when his writing makes me aware of his weird sexual foibles. There’s not a female character in this entire collection who is not either weak, invisible, or in the act of turning her face away. Is he even aware? Well, perhaps it’s to be expected, as invisibility is one of his primary concerns, along with invention, architecture, history, passion that borders on madness. He’s an ideas man, and not in some boring theoretical or philosophical way, but in the way that Thomas Edison was an ideas man. He’s more a watchmaker than a writer, and reading these stories is like being presented with some fantastic new invention, complete in itself.

Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen : A very good first novel whose pleasures are mostly in the Philip K. Dick vein. I guess all of the sci-fi elements here are simply delusions of the narrator, but I read the book in a sci-fi frame of mind, holding out hope that the delusions would eventually prove themselves real. In the end, the book is a love story, not a meteorological thriller, but it’s a lot of fun while it lasts. It’s full of brilliant observations, most of which double as hypothetical science fiction ponderings and romantic truths.

I don’t know what the hell I was talking about the last time I wrote about The History of Love (I mean my vagueness, not the quality of the book), but here are some things about it that seemed to me to be unbelievable (implausible)—nearly as unbelievable as that moment in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button when Tilda Swinton’s character is referred to as “plain as paper”:

1) Reading The Street of Crocodiles in one afternoon. I seem to recall this book being about 140 pages long; it is fairly dense and the character who reads it in The History of Love is only 15 years old. I’ve estimated my reading rate to be about 20 pages an hour on average, so The Street of Crocodiles must have taken me about seven total hours—certainly more than an afternoon—and that after years of practice reading “fairly dense” books. At a full time job where my only duty was reading books, I would get through two 400-page books per week, or The Street of Crocodiles six times. Anyway, I’m insecure about how slow I read, and moments like this, in which teenage characters read with such ease, frustrate me enormously. (Even more infuriating: hack film critic Noah Forrest, who seems nice enough but who I love to hate, claims to have recently read Watchmen in one afternoon! What? Even the superhumans it depicts couldn't possibly read that fast, especially a 400+ page book so dense with meanings. It took me a week of heavy reading to get through it!) But it’s nice to see Bruno Schulz getting some love, because he’s one of the best and I thought only weirdos like Guy Maddin knew who he was.

2) The book is saturated with “firsts”: the first time Leo Gursky becomes aware of death, the first time Leo Gursky becomes aware of love. Literature is full of these moments, which I don’t believe have any existence in reality. I don’t mind the hyper-literariness of The History of Love for the most part, but this is one place where it strikes me as a flaw, because it makes even a character like Leo, despite the richness of his voice, seem overly constructed and impossible to grasp. I could accuse Everything is Illuminated of a similar implausibility, but I liked that book better because it was more willfully and consistently eccentric. Krauss seems to want it both ways, to write about rich characters and to write meta-literature (she is brilliant at the latter), while Foer, by being simply absurd, arrives with ease at big emotions, and melds the two halves of his story without the awkward construction of Krauss’ ending. And it seems to me a much more profound revelation to find out that Alex has never been carnal with a woman, than it is to find out that Bruno isn’t real.

However, I really liked when the mother makes a dinner of fake meat chicken nuggets. That could not be more plausible.

Nu-Year

Currently:

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss : A book about words, literature, books, characters who sometimes believe in one or all of these things and sometimes don’t, but who keep coming back. Well, I don’t want to generalize too much yet, but I’ve gotten a sense of Krauss’s larger design, and it seems like it might be beautiful. The book suffers at times from the “tyranny of the short sentence” (though that is perhaps just how Leo Gursky speaks), details that are mere details, and, yes, cleverness, that modern feature that is a flaw only when it undermines the laws of the fictional world for the sake of poetry. Krauss is allowed some leeway because her book is very much about language: the right words, the wrong words; a character speaking a “wrong sentence” is an admission that there is a right sentence. I can think of many situations for which the right words exist. But then I have never doubted the existence of poetry or the right words.

Other recent reads:

Why Are You Doing This? and I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason : Was it a mere two years ago (give or take a few days) that I first became consumed by the world of comic books (to say nothing of my childhood, when I read mostly Ren and Stimpy comics, something called Tales from the Bog, and other such slim issues indiscriminately)? Aye, it was. No better way to round out the second annum than with these two by Jason, a Norwegian artist who writes novelette-length absurdo-deadpan tragicomedies starring animal-headed humans. Both are conventional by definition (conventions recycled): Why Are You Doing This? is a wrong man thriller, and I Killed Adolf Hitler is the most brilliantly silly time travel narrative of recent years. Also, an economical and beautifully patterned love story (I have just described Back to the Future). Even so, it is the lesser of the two Hitler assassination plot stories I’ve encountered recently (Valkyrie was surprisingly good). I wonder if these stories would be even funnier if the characters were visibly human. I suspect they might be.

Drown by Junot Diaz : Not unlike his novel, though these stories benefit from having a less intricate overall design. Recalls Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, both thematically and in terms of sequencing. Diaz ends with an archetypal yet meticulously detailed story of a Dominican man making his life in the U.S. It is as powerful, though perhaps not as beautifully written, as Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent.” A certain commenter on this blog was right in describing the title story in this collection as similar to something I’ve recently written. I couldn’t hope to match Diaz’s quality of writing, or the bottomless despair of his narrator (I might’ve called it “Drown, but maybe float in the end”), but I could easily have included the only corresponding character who is absent in my own story, the mother, because she is so recognizable. Regret…

Destiny by Otto Nuckel : 1930 woodcut novel, the most relentlessly bleak story ever told. I read a couple of these “picture storybooks” last winter, by Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward. Masereel’s The City is among my favorite things ever, a happy-sad succession of images of decadent 1920s Germany. Masereel’s cuts are somewhat lumpy, absent of cross-hatching, but in a single image, he can convey all of the beauty or sadness of a life. Lynd Ward’s Mad Man’s Drum tells a linear story, and is built around a single gesture that gains in power and evil as it recurs. Those fingers, held in that position…so disturbing it could just about make you pass out, an even likelier possibility given the breathtaking intricacy of Ward’s images. In Destiny, Nuckel opts for a blurry style of cutting, particularly effective in rendering human faces. More than Masereel or Ward, he relies upon universal human experience, and his cityscapes are smothering and prison-like. It is fitting then that the woman whose destiny is shown is fuzzy-faced, her suffering always seen from a distance. There is one exception: in a single image Nuckel gives her real visible features, and it is unbearably sad to see her there, reaching her hand out to a bird on the table. At book’s end, after her fate has been sealed, a bird lies dead on the ground, pierced through the heart. So much for a happy ending. Nuckel was not optimistic about life, and “destiny” has no glorious connotations here.

Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine : Four great stories in the Daniel Clowes style, though different in that Tomine doesn’t seem to have any attitude toward this world of high schoolers and twentysomething survivors of high school. That makes these stories more pleasurable in a way: no cynicism, just a strange sympathy for his characters and their weaknesses; the real life world to Clowes’s ghost world. Compulsively readable, like a good crime novel: there is mystery in these lives.

Maurice has a remarkably happy ending (spoiler) in which Clive continues to lie to himself and will spend the rest of his life lying to his wife, with whom he has no physical relationship, for which reasons Maurice tells him off and then goes to live with charming Alec in the wilderness, owners of the land but outcasts from English society, existing outside class and the infinite invisible pressures that imprison the supposedly enlightened masses. In a nutshell. Forster says the novel might have been published upon being written had he given it an unhappy ending, because then it would have read like a warning, but that he would not have written it for any reason but a happy ending. I personally agree (I would never write anything with no hope in it), but I wouldn’t want to generalize to discredit a book like Destiny, which is hopeless, but authentically so. Thank God Maurice got away from that Clive fellow for another reason: his chastity was becoming unbearable. A last bit of pondering: how might this book be different if race was a factor? I’m thinking of an article by Dan Savage about homophobia within the African American community and racism within the gay community (not an equilibrium, according to Savage). Pure and pale love between men seems to be a prerequisite for Maurice; I don’t think a gay black Englishman would get much love in its pages, but I might be wrong.