Probably moving on to The Big Money by John Dos Passos next. Haven’t started it yet, so I don’t have anything to say, except that I’m deeply invested in the USA trilogy, and the last installment is damn long.
Other recent reads:
The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing : This 1940s novel describes the corporate world with such insight and modern cynicism that it seems a shame at first that it doesn’t just relish in it and instead develops a plot. But that plot is ingenious (reassembled from other crime novels though it is) and airtight (well, Fearing does fudge it in a few places, to set up situations in which his themes and metaphors are right at the surface). Fearing was also a poet, that profession other than crime novelist that knows how not to waste words, so the elevated diction and terse objectivity mix beautifully. The novel is frighteningly intelligent, with more on its mind than working through a clockwork plot. There’s a great plotline in which a painter’s career is given a reappraisal in a popular magazine merely to aid in a manhunt (the appraisal is phony; art has no value as art in this world, even though the paintings described sound great and I wish they were real). That same magazine is also working on a project called Funded Individuals, in which every human being will be incorporated for a value of a million dollars and crime will be eradicated. That’s a sci-fi concept if I’ve ever heard one, but by leaving it as a notion of magazine writers and not making it real, this novel underlines the mistake that a lot of sci-fi makes. (There’s also a lot of Jesus/Judas/Caesar/Brutus/maybe a bit of J.P. Morgan stuff going on in the characterization, but that’s beside the point.) The central metaphor here is the big clock that controls life, a meaningless design that cannot be escaped. That’s our hero’s philosophy anyway, though I would have liked to see it removed from the first-person narration and made concrete with a real clock in the action of the story (e.g. The towering Janoth Enterprises building really ought to be topped by a huge clock). But that would make it Fearing’s philosophy as well, and I don’t know if he shares it. The key might be the last phrase, “Ousted publisher, plunges to death.” That reminds me of a song by Zounds, “Did he fall or was he pushed?” Meaningless design or divine retribution? Answer: great novel!
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers : McCullers was one of the first authors I came to love after the long anti-reading period of my early teens (I had to do a report about her in 11th grade), so it is nice to find that she is still one of my favorite writers and not forever locked in the milieu of clichéd teenagerish reading (my other favorites then included Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick). She’s a good writer for young people, and a great observer of adolescence, and this one is something like an extended meditation on puberty, to the extent that it is a fairly unusual coming-of-age story (if it is even that). It is also a story about desperately wanting to be (or be with) your older sibling, which is the oldest story in the world as far as I’m concerned. How refreshing after the entitlement and vague bigotry of The Sportswriter to find a novel with such a deep love for all humanity. Identity is both amorphous and inescapable; the characters here speak frankly about name changes, sex changes, there is a black woman who is slowly turning white. It didn’t even bother me when Frankie scales the impossibly tall heights of naïveté, because her delusions are so much the delusions of a sad young person. This book made me love the author as much as it made me love her characters, which is one of the best feelings that reading novels can give.
I entered that weird zone with The Sportswriter in which I’ve decided I don’t like a book and become increasingly irritated by the tiniest details (overuse of the word “vaguely,” the way Frank’s car is always “easing” somewhere, adjectives that needed to go), but then found myself liking it for extended periods. Richard Ford is a strong writer in certain respects, but I can’t say I got much out of this (he’s prone to clichéd wisdom that he tries to mask with his writerly confidence). It’s good at least to be reminded in these pages that Macalester is a good school and the reason that Montanans are not introspective people (untrue). For the record, Frank does end up changing his mind about the importance of a person’s background, but his original opinion is so unbelievable that this change is the epitome of too little too late. I’d advise anyone interested to start with Independence Day, because it would be a shame to have that novel ruined by a preconceived bad impression of its protagonist. Cases in point: we leave 39-year old Frank in The Sportswriter as he is about to seduce a 19-year old, which he treats almost as an act of nobility; elsewhere, the racism is unsettling, and while it may only be Frank’s racism, it is still unjustified, because there is not much to say about it except to note that it exists (i.e. his racist comments are his birthright). Maybe I’m being stupid and overlooking something, but as a non-introspective Montanan, I guess I won’t look into it.
Other things I’ve liked a lot recently:
Tropic Thunder
Sunrise
Flight of the Red Balloon
Chop Shop
Beijing opening ceremonies
Cola
Laceless shoes
Smell of apple cider vinegar
Certain children
People doing well at the Olympics
Blogging
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Plays
Been reading some plays, because The Sportswriter was for a while too unbearable, and I didn't want to commit to something long that might end up being the same...
Fool for Love by Sam Shepard, Cowboy Mouth by Sam Shepard & Patti Smith : Cowboy Mouth doesn’t do much more than revel in its own coolness, but still manages to be pretty good. It’s fun to read as a document from some bad bad times in early 70s NYC, and I certainly know what a “rock-and-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth” is all about (I agree that Bob Dylan isn’t one—too ambiguous—and Mick Jagger isn’t either—lips too big). Funny that Sam Shepard was flirting with the idea of becoming a rock star, when Patti Smith would be the one who ended up filling that role. Fool for Love was written over a decade later, and despite some similarities is much more polished. It’s supposed to be performed “relentlessly without a break,” which makes me want to see it performed, as it is hard to sustain that energy in my mind (lazing in bed). I did the next best thing and watched Robert Altman’s 1985 film version, which departs from the play only in the long, ponderous spaces inserted between the bursts of dialogue. That makes the story possibly more languid, romantic, haunted, but it also stretches it too thin. The characters aren’t complex in a way that demands that the camera linger on their motionless faces for long minutes, and their verbal sparring is diluted. Some of it is pretty expert, but I still don’t know how it would look on a stage.
Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen : Two young people fall in love before learning that they share a father. That was the story of Fool for Love, and it’s the story of this one too. Was Sam Shepard reading a lot of Ibsen in the 1980s, or were both of these guys just really concerned with incest? Whatever the case, this is a nicely constructed play, and those “ghosts” (could a title be more evocative?) are the same burden as the dead men Holgrave speaks about in The House of the Seven Gables (though Ibsen has much more bile in him than Hawthorne). Ibsen was apparently deep into philosophy when writing his major plays, but he always seems to favor the specifics of a life over generalities (“Don’t let us talk in such general terms. Suppose we say: ‘Ought Oswald to love and honor Mr. Alving?’”), which as a philistine I appreciate.
The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov : I've long supposed I could never want to die (if I may so conceitedly ruminate), because there will always be one more song I want to hear or one more story I want to be told. It’s a shaky claim on life, one that can’t sustain nations or maybe even most people, but to the extent that this is a hopeful play, the central hope is that the next song or the next story will reveal some crucial meaning. Olga says it best: “The music is so gay, so joyous, it seems as if just a little more and we shall know why we live, why we suffer.” I don’t know if this is a tragedy full of comedy or a comedy full of tragedy (it’s classified a “drama”), but it’s so full of Chekhov’s apparently reliable warmth and humanity that one can’t help but feel that the gloom is never oppressive. It’s another one that would be good to see on the stage, in particular because overlapping action and dialogue don’t read as well as they play, and because it is hard to get a sense of the long swaths of time that pass both during acts and between them (how clever that the play gives the impression of a complete day even as the years go by). I’ve never thought of Robert Altman (still on my mind) as a realist and/or naturalist, but he would have been a good one to film or stage these (long ago Russian) lives being lived. (I’ve never encountered Ibsen’s name without Chekhov also being mentioned, which is why I read them in tandem.)
Fool for Love by Sam Shepard, Cowboy Mouth by Sam Shepard & Patti Smith : Cowboy Mouth doesn’t do much more than revel in its own coolness, but still manages to be pretty good. It’s fun to read as a document from some bad bad times in early 70s NYC, and I certainly know what a “rock-and-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth” is all about (I agree that Bob Dylan isn’t one—too ambiguous—and Mick Jagger isn’t either—lips too big). Funny that Sam Shepard was flirting with the idea of becoming a rock star, when Patti Smith would be the one who ended up filling that role. Fool for Love was written over a decade later, and despite some similarities is much more polished. It’s supposed to be performed “relentlessly without a break,” which makes me want to see it performed, as it is hard to sustain that energy in my mind (lazing in bed). I did the next best thing and watched Robert Altman’s 1985 film version, which departs from the play only in the long, ponderous spaces inserted between the bursts of dialogue. That makes the story possibly more languid, romantic, haunted, but it also stretches it too thin. The characters aren’t complex in a way that demands that the camera linger on their motionless faces for long minutes, and their verbal sparring is diluted. Some of it is pretty expert, but I still don’t know how it would look on a stage.
Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen : Two young people fall in love before learning that they share a father. That was the story of Fool for Love, and it’s the story of this one too. Was Sam Shepard reading a lot of Ibsen in the 1980s, or were both of these guys just really concerned with incest? Whatever the case, this is a nicely constructed play, and those “ghosts” (could a title be more evocative?) are the same burden as the dead men Holgrave speaks about in The House of the Seven Gables (though Ibsen has much more bile in him than Hawthorne). Ibsen was apparently deep into philosophy when writing his major plays, but he always seems to favor the specifics of a life over generalities (“Don’t let us talk in such general terms. Suppose we say: ‘Ought Oswald to love and honor Mr. Alving?’”), which as a philistine I appreciate.
The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov : I've long supposed I could never want to die (if I may so conceitedly ruminate), because there will always be one more song I want to hear or one more story I want to be told. It’s a shaky claim on life, one that can’t sustain nations or maybe even most people, but to the extent that this is a hopeful play, the central hope is that the next song or the next story will reveal some crucial meaning. Olga says it best: “The music is so gay, so joyous, it seems as if just a little more and we shall know why we live, why we suffer.” I don’t know if this is a tragedy full of comedy or a comedy full of tragedy (it’s classified a “drama”), but it’s so full of Chekhov’s apparently reliable warmth and humanity that one can’t help but feel that the gloom is never oppressive. It’s another one that would be good to see on the stage, in particular because overlapping action and dialogue don’t read as well as they play, and because it is hard to get a sense of the long swaths of time that pass both during acts and between them (how clever that the play gives the impression of a complete day even as the years go by). I’ve never thought of Robert Altman (still on my mind) as a realist and/or naturalist, but he would have been a good one to film or stage these (long ago Russian) lives being lived. (I’ve never encountered Ibsen’s name without Chekhov also being mentioned, which is why I read them in tandem.)
Thursday, July 24, 2008
July, July
Currently:
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford : It’s good enough, so it is strange that the only feeling this book has inspired in me thus far is boredom. I’m backtracking a bit with this one, having read the sequel Independence Day last summer (and liking it quite a lot). I was aware reading that book—an awareness I don’t often experience in the realm of grown-up literature—of the impracticality of myself reading about adult dilemmas and mid-life crises. That sensation is even more pronounced reading The Sportswriter, in which our hero Frank Bascombe is a mere five years younger than in the sequel and even more profoundly unrelatable (to me). Given Frank’s (dumb) belief that personal histories are uninteresting and don’t reveal anything, reading in reverse chronology seems quite self-defeating. Frank, a former successful short story writer and budding novelist, also has some annoying ideas about fiction (annoying at least to someone like me who is not yet past the point of anticipating a life that might somehow be involved with literature). About the larger world, he says, “That we all look at it from someplace, and in some hopeful-useful way, is about all I found I could say—my best, most honest effort. And that isn’t enough for literature.” Actually, it is enough for literature, and since Richard Ford is writing literature that espouses such ideas, how am I supposed to feel about Frank? That he’s a poet and he doesn’t even know it? Also, why the insistence on the use of the word “Negro” in a book from 1986, along with statements like, “This is the reason New Orleans defeats itself. It longs for a mystery it doesn’t have and never will, if it ever did”? Taken together, these seem to be some sort of revelation of Frank’s inner character so subtle as to be both baffling and irritating. Frank likes to remind the reader that he lives an ordinary life, and he is often celebrated as one of literature’s few good, honest men, but he seems unaware that only a fraction of the world’s population lives his brand of comfy suburban life, and the critics seem unaware that he is boring. I don’t know why this book is upsetting me so. It’s not markedly different from the sequel, which deserved its Pulitzer, and I’ll continue with it though I seem to be in a poor frame of mind for doing so.
Other recent reads:
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy : This, on the other hand, is great, the type of cynicism that Richard Ford is constitutionally unable to deliver. Fairly experimental in its construction, and I thought all the formal devices worked really well. There’s the paralleling of the courtroom with the dance marathon (obvious but not overdone) as spaces where America’s outcasts are judged. The place from which events are narrated is simply but powerfully rendered in a series of intertitles, and those intertitles are something in themselves, including both the oft-repeated generalities of a prisoner’s death sentence, and information that locates that death sentence in time and space, the specific tags of person, place and date. The way those titles interact with the main narrative is interesting, often surprising. The bulk of the story is a bleak portrait of drifters in 1930s California. Some people hold up Jim Thompson as the darkest chronicler of America’s criminal class, and some say it’s Horace McCoy. I’d go with McCoy. There’s a fair amount of pizzazz in Thompson’s writing, while McCoy simply seems to be saying, “This is the shit.” Thompson’s America might be a bad place because his characters make it bad, but McCoy’s characters have been dealt such a bad hand that there is nothing to do but want to die. A question of immorality versus amorality? Our hero does the humane thing, and the unlawful thing, and morality never enters into it.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill : As great as its reputation. Sad, sad, sad, but the one salvation may be that this is a family that talks to each other, truly talks (like the representative American families in two of my favorite movies, The Best Years of Our Lives—“You may find it very cute and late Victorian of us,” approx.—and Happiness). This is a good one to read (even if you’re lucky enough to live in a theater town): Some of the stage directions are very meticulously phrased and further the themes of the play (the mother’s hands in particular).
In The Killer Inside Me, we eventually get a textbook definition of paranoid schizophrenia, advanced type, and it fits our narrator perfectly. But it’s not a creative shortcoming that the novel takes this definition and has it walk around in the body of a Texas deputy sheriff—the book’s a lot more fun than that, for all its depravity. Strangely, the sheriff's psychosis doesn't make him an unreliable narrator so much as an overly reliable one (hard to believe the stuff he's peddling). I wonder if a movie today could get away with half the stuff that’s in here. Absolute insanity, sir. The ending is spooky, the narrator coming to feel as one with his victims, a community of the too-good-for-this-world. Or too vulnerable, in spite of all the homicidal urges.
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford : It’s good enough, so it is strange that the only feeling this book has inspired in me thus far is boredom. I’m backtracking a bit with this one, having read the sequel Independence Day last summer (and liking it quite a lot). I was aware reading that book—an awareness I don’t often experience in the realm of grown-up literature—of the impracticality of myself reading about adult dilemmas and mid-life crises. That sensation is even more pronounced reading The Sportswriter, in which our hero Frank Bascombe is a mere five years younger than in the sequel and even more profoundly unrelatable (to me). Given Frank’s (dumb) belief that personal histories are uninteresting and don’t reveal anything, reading in reverse chronology seems quite self-defeating. Frank, a former successful short story writer and budding novelist, also has some annoying ideas about fiction (annoying at least to someone like me who is not yet past the point of anticipating a life that might somehow be involved with literature). About the larger world, he says, “That we all look at it from someplace, and in some hopeful-useful way, is about all I found I could say—my best, most honest effort. And that isn’t enough for literature.” Actually, it is enough for literature, and since Richard Ford is writing literature that espouses such ideas, how am I supposed to feel about Frank? That he’s a poet and he doesn’t even know it? Also, why the insistence on the use of the word “Negro” in a book from 1986, along with statements like, “This is the reason New Orleans defeats itself. It longs for a mystery it doesn’t have and never will, if it ever did”? Taken together, these seem to be some sort of revelation of Frank’s inner character so subtle as to be both baffling and irritating. Frank likes to remind the reader that he lives an ordinary life, and he is often celebrated as one of literature’s few good, honest men, but he seems unaware that only a fraction of the world’s population lives his brand of comfy suburban life, and the critics seem unaware that he is boring. I don’t know why this book is upsetting me so. It’s not markedly different from the sequel, which deserved its Pulitzer, and I’ll continue with it though I seem to be in a poor frame of mind for doing so.
Other recent reads:
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy : This, on the other hand, is great, the type of cynicism that Richard Ford is constitutionally unable to deliver. Fairly experimental in its construction, and I thought all the formal devices worked really well. There’s the paralleling of the courtroom with the dance marathon (obvious but not overdone) as spaces where America’s outcasts are judged. The place from which events are narrated is simply but powerfully rendered in a series of intertitles, and those intertitles are something in themselves, including both the oft-repeated generalities of a prisoner’s death sentence, and information that locates that death sentence in time and space, the specific tags of person, place and date. The way those titles interact with the main narrative is interesting, often surprising. The bulk of the story is a bleak portrait of drifters in 1930s California. Some people hold up Jim Thompson as the darkest chronicler of America’s criminal class, and some say it’s Horace McCoy. I’d go with McCoy. There’s a fair amount of pizzazz in Thompson’s writing, while McCoy simply seems to be saying, “This is the shit.” Thompson’s America might be a bad place because his characters make it bad, but McCoy’s characters have been dealt such a bad hand that there is nothing to do but want to die. A question of immorality versus amorality? Our hero does the humane thing, and the unlawful thing, and morality never enters into it.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill : As great as its reputation. Sad, sad, sad, but the one salvation may be that this is a family that talks to each other, truly talks (like the representative American families in two of my favorite movies, The Best Years of Our Lives—“You may find it very cute and late Victorian of us,” approx.—and Happiness). This is a good one to read (even if you’re lucky enough to live in a theater town): Some of the stage directions are very meticulously phrased and further the themes of the play (the mother’s hands in particular).
In The Killer Inside Me, we eventually get a textbook definition of paranoid schizophrenia, advanced type, and it fits our narrator perfectly. But it’s not a creative shortcoming that the novel takes this definition and has it walk around in the body of a Texas deputy sheriff—the book’s a lot more fun than that, for all its depravity. Strangely, the sheriff's psychosis doesn't make him an unreliable narrator so much as an overly reliable one (hard to believe the stuff he's peddling). I wonder if a movie today could get away with half the stuff that’s in here. Absolute insanity, sir. The ending is spooky, the narrator coming to feel as one with his victims, a community of the too-good-for-this-world. Or too vulnerable, in spite of all the homicidal urges.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
The Really Good Stuff
Currently:
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson : Jim Thompson is the most cynical writer I’ve read in a genre of cynics, the crime novel, and this is said to be his nihilistic peak. This is from the early 50s, but none of its horrors are coded: everything is out in the open.
Other recent reads:
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder : It doesn’t really need to be said again, but this is a perfect little book, capturing the same poignancy as one of my favorite Morrissey lyrics: All those people, all those lives, where are they now? / With loves and hates and passions just like mine / They were born and then they lived and then they died / Seems so unfair, I want to cry. One might expect a 1920s American like Thornton Wilder to treat his 18th century Peruvian subjects in a condescending manner, but the way they are written, they are as fully human as any fictional character can be.
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow : I love books like this (turn of the century America, high diction, lack of dialogue) simply on principle, but that’s not to say this one didn’t earn that love. It’s a page-turner, though not in the usual sense, and a joy to read, but I’m still pleasurably baffled by some of its effects. The book seems to suggest some of the inherent problems of writing history, and adopts a playful attitude toward the project, taking a lot of liberties with historical “truth” but retaining the essence of the times. One way this plays out is in a series of meetings of the minds, including plausible conversations between J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford, Harry Houdini and Franz Ferdinand, and Emma Goldman (who?) and Evelyn Nesbit (double who?—Wikipedia helped here). How fun! In a way, I would’ve liked the novel to be even more diffuse and abstract, to peer into the minds of other great men and women. More, please! The best lines aren’t the ones that concern the characters, but the ones that begin, “This was the time in our nation’s history when…” After Martin Dressler, this is the second book I’ve read recently expecting, and not finding, a nostalgic romp, which may have been more gratifying but would not have been nearly as fulfilling. I find it odd that Ragtime was nominated for a Nebula (the famous literary sci-fi award) upon its release, suggesting that the grand Nebula committee was interested in Doctorow’s academic project of alternative history (though that genre is usually concerned with the way history impacts the present, while the history presented in Ragtime has no bearing on the time after). There is a scholarly aspect to the novel, but it is a great imaginative feat as well. And how to account for all the changes in America since the turn of the last century? The novel plausibly demonstrates dissatisfaction to be the natural state of the world.
One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry : Collection of absolutely delightful autobiographical comic strips originally published on Salon.com a few years back. Barry went to college with Matt Groening, and she achieves the same warm and loose depiction of a happily dysfunctional American family as The Simpsons. She despairs of her intellectual powers, but in her nine page comic strips, she arrives at moments, concerning music, dancing, pets, the past, and more, as profound as I’ve ever read. She asks more questions than she answers, but her questions are great ones.
Gateway was a pretty compulsive read, and its ending is the most touching example of robot psychology I’ve encountered since 2001. But nothing can excuse its vision of the future as a swinger’s playground. Oh yes, something can: it is from the 1970s. I appreciate the honesty amidst all the casual sex, but I don’t appreciate lines like this one: “Although we had very little conversation in a verbal sense we communicated beautifully with our bodies.”
Two things I learned about Jason Lutes after finishing Berlin: City of Stones: He grew up in Missoula, Montana (!) on a diet of Herge and other such comics luminaries. Also, he has never been more prolific than he’s been over the past year. He has recently churned out a number of new issues of Berlin, and book two, City of Smoke, will be published next month (!). Given the number of storytelling techniques at his command and the wealth of historical detail in book one, there is no reason to stop reading, or to assume the complete trilogy won’t be a monumental triumph.
Plus a little something not related to my daily reading:
I thought I would take a moment to list a few words and phrases that I dislike, ones that often make me cringe when I encounter them while reading. I don’t mean to be nitpicky, and I don’t really have a problem with the use of these words by people who know how to use them properly, but I am not that person.
Because these actions seem impossible…
1. Screwing up one’s face/eyes
Does this refer to making oneself look like the victim of a bar fight, or controlling one’s features with a screw-like motion? I’ve never known, but I don’t know how either one is achieved.
2. Gnashing one’s teeth
Gnashing one’s gums in the absence of teeth is a possibility, but this just seems painful.
3. Sucking one’s teeth
How can you suck something on the wrong side of your lips?
Because they can only be used in one context…
4. Aquiline (as in noses)
5. Akimbo (as in arms)
What’s the use of a word with no versatility? If I could say Have you seen John’s new aquiline dreamscapes or I placed the chairs akimbo in front of the fireplace, then I would like these words, because they sound cool.
6. Graphic novel
For these reasons five:
a. Connotations of the word “graphic.” Doesn’t “graphic novel” describe porno-graphic fiction as well? On a more fundamental level, “graphic” simply refers to writing, and no novel can exist without being written.
b. It is often used erroneously. A collection of Peanuts comic strips is not a graphic novel, but a person who thinks the term is synonymous with “comic book” might refer to it as such.
c. It is often used to justify the literary value of comics by people who would be embarrassed to be caught reading a comic book. Well, not all comics have literary value, though there are other reasons why they are worthwhile for non-adolescents.
d. It removes contemporary comics from the history that they are heir to. A comics artist may be in part a student of literature and construct his work specifically as a novel, but calling it a “graphic novel” emphasizes that aspect of his art and deemphasizes his debt to old newspaper cartoonists and other comics artists.
e. It is such a leaden term. It sounds like required reading.
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson : Jim Thompson is the most cynical writer I’ve read in a genre of cynics, the crime novel, and this is said to be his nihilistic peak. This is from the early 50s, but none of its horrors are coded: everything is out in the open.
Other recent reads:
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder : It doesn’t really need to be said again, but this is a perfect little book, capturing the same poignancy as one of my favorite Morrissey lyrics: All those people, all those lives, where are they now? / With loves and hates and passions just like mine / They were born and then they lived and then they died / Seems so unfair, I want to cry. One might expect a 1920s American like Thornton Wilder to treat his 18th century Peruvian subjects in a condescending manner, but the way they are written, they are as fully human as any fictional character can be.
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow : I love books like this (turn of the century America, high diction, lack of dialogue) simply on principle, but that’s not to say this one didn’t earn that love. It’s a page-turner, though not in the usual sense, and a joy to read, but I’m still pleasurably baffled by some of its effects. The book seems to suggest some of the inherent problems of writing history, and adopts a playful attitude toward the project, taking a lot of liberties with historical “truth” but retaining the essence of the times. One way this plays out is in a series of meetings of the minds, including plausible conversations between J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford, Harry Houdini and Franz Ferdinand, and Emma Goldman (who?) and Evelyn Nesbit (double who?—Wikipedia helped here). How fun! In a way, I would’ve liked the novel to be even more diffuse and abstract, to peer into the minds of other great men and women. More, please! The best lines aren’t the ones that concern the characters, but the ones that begin, “This was the time in our nation’s history when…” After Martin Dressler, this is the second book I’ve read recently expecting, and not finding, a nostalgic romp, which may have been more gratifying but would not have been nearly as fulfilling. I find it odd that Ragtime was nominated for a Nebula (the famous literary sci-fi award) upon its release, suggesting that the grand Nebula committee was interested in Doctorow’s academic project of alternative history (though that genre is usually concerned with the way history impacts the present, while the history presented in Ragtime has no bearing on the time after). There is a scholarly aspect to the novel, but it is a great imaginative feat as well. And how to account for all the changes in America since the turn of the last century? The novel plausibly demonstrates dissatisfaction to be the natural state of the world.
One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry : Collection of absolutely delightful autobiographical comic strips originally published on Salon.com a few years back. Barry went to college with Matt Groening, and she achieves the same warm and loose depiction of a happily dysfunctional American family as The Simpsons. She despairs of her intellectual powers, but in her nine page comic strips, she arrives at moments, concerning music, dancing, pets, the past, and more, as profound as I’ve ever read. She asks more questions than she answers, but her questions are great ones.
Gateway was a pretty compulsive read, and its ending is the most touching example of robot psychology I’ve encountered since 2001. But nothing can excuse its vision of the future as a swinger’s playground. Oh yes, something can: it is from the 1970s. I appreciate the honesty amidst all the casual sex, but I don’t appreciate lines like this one: “Although we had very little conversation in a verbal sense we communicated beautifully with our bodies.”
Two things I learned about Jason Lutes after finishing Berlin: City of Stones: He grew up in Missoula, Montana (!) on a diet of Herge and other such comics luminaries. Also, he has never been more prolific than he’s been over the past year. He has recently churned out a number of new issues of Berlin, and book two, City of Smoke, will be published next month (!). Given the number of storytelling techniques at his command and the wealth of historical detail in book one, there is no reason to stop reading, or to assume the complete trilogy won’t be a monumental triumph.
Plus a little something not related to my daily reading:
I thought I would take a moment to list a few words and phrases that I dislike, ones that often make me cringe when I encounter them while reading. I don’t mean to be nitpicky, and I don’t really have a problem with the use of these words by people who know how to use them properly, but I am not that person.
Because these actions seem impossible…
1. Screwing up one’s face/eyes
Does this refer to making oneself look like the victim of a bar fight, or controlling one’s features with a screw-like motion? I’ve never known, but I don’t know how either one is achieved.
2. Gnashing one’s teeth
Gnashing one’s gums in the absence of teeth is a possibility, but this just seems painful.
3. Sucking one’s teeth
How can you suck something on the wrong side of your lips?
Because they can only be used in one context…
4. Aquiline (as in noses)
5. Akimbo (as in arms)
What’s the use of a word with no versatility? If I could say Have you seen John’s new aquiline dreamscapes or I placed the chairs akimbo in front of the fireplace, then I would like these words, because they sound cool.
6. Graphic novel
For these reasons five:
a. Connotations of the word “graphic.” Doesn’t “graphic novel” describe porno-graphic fiction as well? On a more fundamental level, “graphic” simply refers to writing, and no novel can exist without being written.
b. It is often used erroneously. A collection of Peanuts comic strips is not a graphic novel, but a person who thinks the term is synonymous with “comic book” might refer to it as such.
c. It is often used to justify the literary value of comics by people who would be embarrassed to be caught reading a comic book. Well, not all comics have literary value, though there are other reasons why they are worthwhile for non-adolescents.
d. It removes contemporary comics from the history that they are heir to. A comics artist may be in part a student of literature and construct his work specifically as a novel, but calling it a “graphic novel” emphasizes that aspect of his art and deemphasizes his debt to old newspaper cartoonists and other comics artists.
e. It is such a leaden term. It sounds like required reading.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Comics, etc.
Currently:
Gateway by Frederik Pohl : I haven’t read any good SF (I would say sci-fi, but I’m afraid a fanboy might find this blog) in a long time. I think Ubik was the last one, and that was like a year ago (!). The chief interest of Gateway so far is that it is a pretty standard SF narrative told as flashbacks during the protagonist’s therapy sessions with an artificial intelligence. That seems to be a way of injecting a genre that’s usually big on ideas and short on characters with a little humanity. Robinette Broadhead (that’s the narrator’s actual name) is hiding some secret pain, you see. It’s oh so very 70s, full of the sort of pop psychology that The Bob Newhart Show was so good at poking fun at. But there is quite a bit at stake with all the psychoanalysis, because beneath the narrator’s lackadaisical façade he seems like he maybe did really become unhinged during his time at Gateway. And he’s started repeating himself, in very obvious ways, even in complete sentences, which may be greater proof that something is not quite right in the deep structures of his brain, that his “feelings” are troubled. Or maybe his brain operates according to a system of functions just like his robot analyst. Hmm…
Berlin: City of Stones by Jason Lutes : Beautifully drawn fictionalized account of the last years of the Weimar Republic. So technically proficient that it seems a bit lifeless at times, but this guy’s lines are unbeatable, and I’ve never read a comic book that’s so well oriented in the space of a big city. The discussions of art, writing, Frans Masereel, etc. among the characters are illuminating, authentic, not too meta. Structurally this is fairly similar to John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy: the same era, the same sorts of players with interlocking narratives, different country.
Other recent reads:
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain : I guess Billy Wilder knew he had a hot property when he filmed this, because not much was changed for the movie. The ending is a bit different; the main players meet the same fate, but in a way that is more fatalistic, more Cain (the attractiveness of Death, star-crossed lovers, and all that). There’s also some nice play with a minor character’s doctoral thesis (which Cain wisely doesn’t make a big deal out of, just a clever aside), and some weird (maybe non-existent) homosexual codings unlike any I’ve ever encountered. I don’t think James M. Cain was gay, but there’s always such an overbearing psychosexual element in his novels that it carries over into every interaction.
Bighead by Jeffrey Brown : An individual Bighead comic might seem amateurish even to a child, but collected in this volume, they really are quite something. Jeffrey Brown is so insistent with this Bighead character that it becomes apparent that he needs the comics like R. Crumb needs the comics. The series is both a deflation and a celebration of superhero comics, featuring villains whose chief crime is selling bootlegged CDs, and lines something like the following: “My name is Crabby, but most people call me… Crabby!” It will make you feel good about being a hopeless nerd.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao never lived up to those first 80 or so fantastic pages, but I still have a lot of affection for it. It is one of those novels in which everything is overstated (always trying hysterically to maintain its vitality, as James Wood might say). This doesn’t work as well in the historical sections as it does in Oscar’s (where it comes across as ironic and funny) and Lola’s (where it adds up to the sort of tragic teenager narrative worthy of the (brilliant) new M83 album). The sections relating the lineage of Oscar and Lola are good enough, and I like the idea of using one’s parents’ histories as a template for making a start in life, but otherwise it’s been done before (I can't help thinking of Zadie Smith again)—whereas books are never written about people like Oscar, even though he deserves to be the hero more than most.
Gateway by Frederik Pohl : I haven’t read any good SF (I would say sci-fi, but I’m afraid a fanboy might find this blog) in a long time. I think Ubik was the last one, and that was like a year ago (!). The chief interest of Gateway so far is that it is a pretty standard SF narrative told as flashbacks during the protagonist’s therapy sessions with an artificial intelligence. That seems to be a way of injecting a genre that’s usually big on ideas and short on characters with a little humanity. Robinette Broadhead (that’s the narrator’s actual name) is hiding some secret pain, you see. It’s oh so very 70s, full of the sort of pop psychology that The Bob Newhart Show was so good at poking fun at. But there is quite a bit at stake with all the psychoanalysis, because beneath the narrator’s lackadaisical façade he seems like he maybe did really become unhinged during his time at Gateway. And he’s started repeating himself, in very obvious ways, even in complete sentences, which may be greater proof that something is not quite right in the deep structures of his brain, that his “feelings” are troubled. Or maybe his brain operates according to a system of functions just like his robot analyst. Hmm…
Berlin: City of Stones by Jason Lutes : Beautifully drawn fictionalized account of the last years of the Weimar Republic. So technically proficient that it seems a bit lifeless at times, but this guy’s lines are unbeatable, and I’ve never read a comic book that’s so well oriented in the space of a big city. The discussions of art, writing, Frans Masereel, etc. among the characters are illuminating, authentic, not too meta. Structurally this is fairly similar to John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy: the same era, the same sorts of players with interlocking narratives, different country.
Other recent reads:
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain : I guess Billy Wilder knew he had a hot property when he filmed this, because not much was changed for the movie. The ending is a bit different; the main players meet the same fate, but in a way that is more fatalistic, more Cain (the attractiveness of Death, star-crossed lovers, and all that). There’s also some nice play with a minor character’s doctoral thesis (which Cain wisely doesn’t make a big deal out of, just a clever aside), and some weird (maybe non-existent) homosexual codings unlike any I’ve ever encountered. I don’t think James M. Cain was gay, but there’s always such an overbearing psychosexual element in his novels that it carries over into every interaction.
Bighead by Jeffrey Brown : An individual Bighead comic might seem amateurish even to a child, but collected in this volume, they really are quite something. Jeffrey Brown is so insistent with this Bighead character that it becomes apparent that he needs the comics like R. Crumb needs the comics. The series is both a deflation and a celebration of superhero comics, featuring villains whose chief crime is selling bootlegged CDs, and lines something like the following: “My name is Crabby, but most people call me… Crabby!” It will make you feel good about being a hopeless nerd.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao never lived up to those first 80 or so fantastic pages, but I still have a lot of affection for it. It is one of those novels in which everything is overstated (always trying hysterically to maintain its vitality, as James Wood might say). This doesn’t work as well in the historical sections as it does in Oscar’s (where it comes across as ironic and funny) and Lola’s (where it adds up to the sort of tragic teenager narrative worthy of the (brilliant) new M83 album). The sections relating the lineage of Oscar and Lola are good enough, and I like the idea of using one’s parents’ histories as a template for making a start in life, but otherwise it’s been done before (I can't help thinking of Zadie Smith again)—whereas books are never written about people like Oscar, even though he deserves to be the hero more than most.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
June, cont'd
Currently:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz : This year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, currently all the rage, and it’s pretty damn wonderful (wondrous) so far. Two epigraphs and an introductory chapter frame the idea of the novel a bit too thoroughly before the players are even introduced, but as opposed to someone like Zadie Smith, Diaz actually cares about his characters’ lives and not just the idea of their lives. I haven’t loved a protagonist this much in a long, long time, which probably says a lot about my inner nerd.
The Spirit Archives, Vol. 16 by Will Eisner : I’d previously read the earliest, and fairly conventional, Spirit comics from 1940 (collected in volume one), and after seeing the teaser for the new Frank Miller film adaptation (which looks all wrong, by the way, like an unnecessary extension of the lame-brained Sin City), I thought I should catch up with The Spirit post-WWII, when Eisner was defining new rules of comics storytelling and creating the so-called Citizen Kane of comics. There’s no doubt that Eisner is a master, as evidenced by his later Contract with God series (the second novel, A Life Force, is the masterpiece that the first is often claimed to be), and pretty much every seven-pager of The Spirit circa 1948 has many clever new ways of telling a standard action story. Each one is packed with detail, but with a very impressive narrative economy, and the splash pages are quite something. The minstrel character Ebony is still around, and his appearances are even more disconcerting in the 1948 comics than in those from 1940. Maybe Eisner is trying to tackle a serious subject when Ebony has a flash of a noose while on the lam after stealing a dog, but the caricatured depiction makes it seem that Eisner is simply ignorant of the stereotypes he’s reproducing. Ebony is even told, “It is your kind of villain who makes this community so unsafe,” with, unbelievably, no detectable irony. And why is it wrong when Ebony threatens to kill a bad guy, while it’s just good fun when the Spirit piles up dead bodies?
Other recent reads:
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata : A great translation by one Edward G. Seidensticker. Either Kawabata is such a great writer that the beauty of his prose comes through effortlessly in English, or Seidensticker is something of a poet himself. It is soothing to read about the coldness and darkness of wintry Japan during the heat of summer, while the warmth of the novel comes exclusively from the characters, who speak in peculiar ways, with plenty of double and other multiple entendres. I expected a 50’s Japanese novel about a geisha would probably be fairly misogynistic, but this captures the ambivalence of the character Komako’s position pretty well. A great book, masked by its subtlety.
Herzog, in the end, is probably a masterpiece, though so particular to the time in which it was written that it is hard to capture the relevance of its ideas. Do people experience Herzog’s anxieties and philosophical crises anymore? Being alive in the modern world, being anonymous, the end of moral suffering? Probably not, so a novel in which he is set up as ambassador of the human race seems a bit odd in 2008. African Americans and transvestites and homosexuals (and everyone who is not Herzog) are often lingering in the background of his world, and it is too painfully obvious that they could never be front and center in a Saul Bellow novel. But still, the greatest stylist of his era? For sure. Herzog makes novels with plots seem absurd.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz : This year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, currently all the rage, and it’s pretty damn wonderful (wondrous) so far. Two epigraphs and an introductory chapter frame the idea of the novel a bit too thoroughly before the players are even introduced, but as opposed to someone like Zadie Smith, Diaz actually cares about his characters’ lives and not just the idea of their lives. I haven’t loved a protagonist this much in a long, long time, which probably says a lot about my inner nerd.
The Spirit Archives, Vol. 16 by Will Eisner : I’d previously read the earliest, and fairly conventional, Spirit comics from 1940 (collected in volume one), and after seeing the teaser for the new Frank Miller film adaptation (which looks all wrong, by the way, like an unnecessary extension of the lame-brained Sin City), I thought I should catch up with The Spirit post-WWII, when Eisner was defining new rules of comics storytelling and creating the so-called Citizen Kane of comics. There’s no doubt that Eisner is a master, as evidenced by his later Contract with God series (the second novel, A Life Force, is the masterpiece that the first is often claimed to be), and pretty much every seven-pager of The Spirit circa 1948 has many clever new ways of telling a standard action story. Each one is packed with detail, but with a very impressive narrative economy, and the splash pages are quite something. The minstrel character Ebony is still around, and his appearances are even more disconcerting in the 1948 comics than in those from 1940. Maybe Eisner is trying to tackle a serious subject when Ebony has a flash of a noose while on the lam after stealing a dog, but the caricatured depiction makes it seem that Eisner is simply ignorant of the stereotypes he’s reproducing. Ebony is even told, “It is your kind of villain who makes this community so unsafe,” with, unbelievably, no detectable irony. And why is it wrong when Ebony threatens to kill a bad guy, while it’s just good fun when the Spirit piles up dead bodies?
Other recent reads:
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata : A great translation by one Edward G. Seidensticker. Either Kawabata is such a great writer that the beauty of his prose comes through effortlessly in English, or Seidensticker is something of a poet himself. It is soothing to read about the coldness and darkness of wintry Japan during the heat of summer, while the warmth of the novel comes exclusively from the characters, who speak in peculiar ways, with plenty of double and other multiple entendres. I expected a 50’s Japanese novel about a geisha would probably be fairly misogynistic, but this captures the ambivalence of the character Komako’s position pretty well. A great book, masked by its subtlety.
Herzog, in the end, is probably a masterpiece, though so particular to the time in which it was written that it is hard to capture the relevance of its ideas. Do people experience Herzog’s anxieties and philosophical crises anymore? Being alive in the modern world, being anonymous, the end of moral suffering? Probably not, so a novel in which he is set up as ambassador of the human race seems a bit odd in 2008. African Americans and transvestites and homosexuals (and everyone who is not Herzog) are often lingering in the background of his world, and it is too painfully obvious that they could never be front and center in a Saul Bellow novel. But still, the greatest stylist of his era? For sure. Herzog makes novels with plots seem absurd.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
May & June
Currently:
Herzog by Saul Bellow : I’m 50 pages in, and at this point the book is a bit too masculine and too heterosexual for my tastes (i.e. Bellow is great at describing what women mean to men, but doesn’t know how to describe women, etc.). That would be fine if that was simply the approach Bellow had taken to this specific material, but his style and his worldview seem to be synonymous, so that it is hard to imagine him writing about any other sort of character in any other manner (and from my other Bellow experiences, Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King, it seems his protagonists are always more or less the same as Herzog). I guess I should appreciate that he knows his limits, and pushes himself more on a formal level than an empathetic one. Otherwise, this is really a novel’s novel by a writer’s writer, and is holding my interest based on the quality of the writing alone. Showy novels can be stifling, but this one already has a number of beautiful moments to its credit. Great rambling structure, too.
Other recent reads:
Wrack and Ruin by Don Lee : An immensely entertaining read, that I wouldn’t be surprised to see optioned by Hollywood. Elmore Leonard comes to mind. Everything that can possibly (and impossibly) happen, happens, but there’s a nice lackadaisical quality to the whole, and some pleasant themes floating around. I was reminded of that speech by Gandalf, choosing between what is easy and what is right. Here the choice seems to be between what is comfortable and what one truly desires. There’s a strange pleasure in seeing the two brothers become more and more bruised and broken as the novel progresses, and most importantly, the writing is often hilarious. I appreciate any book that takes time to ponder the fate of one hit wonder Christopher Cross. Mad props to former Macalester College professor Don Lee.
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser : Millhauser definitely has a list fetish, and the same perverse interest in the products of human ambition as his subject (who is made to stand in for that category of men at the turn of the century who became entrepreneurs, tycoons, and World’s Fair designers). The book is more about an idea than about its characters (and nearly dialogue-free). Plot-wise, the only real development is an escalation of monotony—Martin builds grander and grander buildings, endlessly—but every word is deliberate (Millhauser excuses his stylistic eccentricities by drawing a parallel between his own and Martin’s; novel-writing is his version of dreaming), and there’s always an implicit guarantee that the last few pages will respond to the previous three hundred in a big way. That’s exactly what happens—my expectation was that the dream would collapse, but instead Martin just walks away from it, lingeringly. The book wisely sidesteps some potential pitfalls—there’s no clever post-modern trickery here, and no attempt for relevance to the world as it is today. It’s also not about evoking a bygone era (though it does that); it records how the world feels when life seems fated, or like a dream. And Chapter 3 is one of the most stunning things I’ve ever read.
John Crow’s Devil by Marlon James : Novels about religion (primarily Christianity, and specifically Catholicism) usually baffle me (Wise Blood, The Power and the Glory, etc.), but this one is both very entertaining and fairly enlightening. There’s an archetypal battle between good and evil at the center, but the characters are very well drawn. There’s also a whole lot of nymphomania and pedophilia (and accompanying questions of homosexuality), but in a roundabout way, the book ends up celebrating women and homosexuality (or at least the ability to perform one’s true identity). Mad props to Macalester College professor Marlon James.
The Body Artist by Don DeLillo : A brief novel, but one that continually redefines itself. A belief in time is essential for establishing a concept of self—that seems to be the ultimate conclusion, though there are ideas and moments along the way that are more interesting. Crucial realizations for the 21st century abound; there’s a very funny line (I don’t remember it exactly) in which a character looks at some manufactured product, and realizes that its manufacturing is a part of the way the world works, and that’s just the way things are. I can’t think of a more precise writer than DeLillo, but here he uses his talents to show how imprecise language can be. And in so doing, proves the opposite.
Plus:
Taking It All In by Pauline Kael : I’ve been browsing through some of Pauline Kael’s early 80s movie reviews. She was as hard to please then as ever. She can be quite nitpicky, and I have to wonder, doesn’t she realize how oppressive a perfect movie can be? But she’s like a theater critic in a way, taking great joy in picking things apart (performances especially). I wonder how despairing she would be of the worst bad movies today. She is resolute and persuasive even when I disagree with her (No on Fitzcarraldo? Seriously?).
And a couple I didn’t have time to finish during the semester:
Londonstani by Gautam Malkani : The surprise ending was spoiled for me, and my reading was so prolonged anyway that the potency probably would have been diminished. I don’t feel one way or the other about the final revelation, though my ambivalence probably says something about its effectiveness. Otherwise, the book can be maddeningly trivial at times, though that’s part of its charm.
Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra : This is a great novel. For Chandra, the ideal story would seemingly include everything, and that’s what his follow-up to this one, the 900-page Sacred Games, apparently does. Maybe I’ll get around to that book sometime within the next 50 years (right after I finish War and Peace).
Herzog by Saul Bellow : I’m 50 pages in, and at this point the book is a bit too masculine and too heterosexual for my tastes (i.e. Bellow is great at describing what women mean to men, but doesn’t know how to describe women, etc.). That would be fine if that was simply the approach Bellow had taken to this specific material, but his style and his worldview seem to be synonymous, so that it is hard to imagine him writing about any other sort of character in any other manner (and from my other Bellow experiences, Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King, it seems his protagonists are always more or less the same as Herzog). I guess I should appreciate that he knows his limits, and pushes himself more on a formal level than an empathetic one. Otherwise, this is really a novel’s novel by a writer’s writer, and is holding my interest based on the quality of the writing alone. Showy novels can be stifling, but this one already has a number of beautiful moments to its credit. Great rambling structure, too.
Other recent reads:
Wrack and Ruin by Don Lee : An immensely entertaining read, that I wouldn’t be surprised to see optioned by Hollywood. Elmore Leonard comes to mind. Everything that can possibly (and impossibly) happen, happens, but there’s a nice lackadaisical quality to the whole, and some pleasant themes floating around. I was reminded of that speech by Gandalf, choosing between what is easy and what is right. Here the choice seems to be between what is comfortable and what one truly desires. There’s a strange pleasure in seeing the two brothers become more and more bruised and broken as the novel progresses, and most importantly, the writing is often hilarious. I appreciate any book that takes time to ponder the fate of one hit wonder Christopher Cross. Mad props to former Macalester College professor Don Lee.
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser : Millhauser definitely has a list fetish, and the same perverse interest in the products of human ambition as his subject (who is made to stand in for that category of men at the turn of the century who became entrepreneurs, tycoons, and World’s Fair designers). The book is more about an idea than about its characters (and nearly dialogue-free). Plot-wise, the only real development is an escalation of monotony—Martin builds grander and grander buildings, endlessly—but every word is deliberate (Millhauser excuses his stylistic eccentricities by drawing a parallel between his own and Martin’s; novel-writing is his version of dreaming), and there’s always an implicit guarantee that the last few pages will respond to the previous three hundred in a big way. That’s exactly what happens—my expectation was that the dream would collapse, but instead Martin just walks away from it, lingeringly. The book wisely sidesteps some potential pitfalls—there’s no clever post-modern trickery here, and no attempt for relevance to the world as it is today. It’s also not about evoking a bygone era (though it does that); it records how the world feels when life seems fated, or like a dream. And Chapter 3 is one of the most stunning things I’ve ever read.
John Crow’s Devil by Marlon James : Novels about religion (primarily Christianity, and specifically Catholicism) usually baffle me (Wise Blood, The Power and the Glory, etc.), but this one is both very entertaining and fairly enlightening. There’s an archetypal battle between good and evil at the center, but the characters are very well drawn. There’s also a whole lot of nymphomania and pedophilia (and accompanying questions of homosexuality), but in a roundabout way, the book ends up celebrating women and homosexuality (or at least the ability to perform one’s true identity). Mad props to Macalester College professor Marlon James.
The Body Artist by Don DeLillo : A brief novel, but one that continually redefines itself. A belief in time is essential for establishing a concept of self—that seems to be the ultimate conclusion, though there are ideas and moments along the way that are more interesting. Crucial realizations for the 21st century abound; there’s a very funny line (I don’t remember it exactly) in which a character looks at some manufactured product, and realizes that its manufacturing is a part of the way the world works, and that’s just the way things are. I can’t think of a more precise writer than DeLillo, but here he uses his talents to show how imprecise language can be. And in so doing, proves the opposite.
Plus:
Taking It All In by Pauline Kael : I’ve been browsing through some of Pauline Kael’s early 80s movie reviews. She was as hard to please then as ever. She can be quite nitpicky, and I have to wonder, doesn’t she realize how oppressive a perfect movie can be? But she’s like a theater critic in a way, taking great joy in picking things apart (performances especially). I wonder how despairing she would be of the worst bad movies today. She is resolute and persuasive even when I disagree with her (No on Fitzcarraldo? Seriously?).
And a couple I didn’t have time to finish during the semester:
Londonstani by Gautam Malkani : The surprise ending was spoiled for me, and my reading was so prolonged anyway that the potency probably would have been diminished. I don’t feel one way or the other about the final revelation, though my ambivalence probably says something about its effectiveness. Otherwise, the book can be maddeningly trivial at times, though that’s part of its charm.
Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra : This is a great novel. For Chandra, the ideal story would seemingly include everything, and that’s what his follow-up to this one, the 900-page Sacred Games, apparently does. Maybe I’ll get around to that book sometime within the next 50 years (right after I finish War and Peace).
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