City on Fire - Garth Risk Hallberg (2015)

I first heard about City on Fire on NPR.  Usually I listen to NPR when I drive out to courthouses in collar counties, so this must have been in August or later of last year.  (Update: I believe that day was October 20, 2015, a.k.a. the Day Before Back to the Future Day, or the Day Before the Cubs Would Not Win the World Series Day, due to this.) It had just come out, with a huge buzz attached.  I had no immediate interest to read it, because in fact I had just re-read Please Kill Me and the idea of reading about a fictional group in the same milieu struck me as dull: what fun is it when it's populated by characters we don't recognize?  Ragtime and Underworld successfully blended recognizable personas into their narratives--and yeah, even though Hallberg doesn't reference DeLillo in his acknowledgements at the end, this is basically an alternate version of that heavy tome about New York in the 70's (mostly).  Some remark that it owes a debt to The Bonfire of Vanities and other works by Tom Wolfe, an author I have never read but have always been mildly curious about (in fact my sister recommended that very volume to me recently).

Then, the Christmas season rolled around and my parents asked me to send a letter to Santa to them.  I had been requested in the comments to the review of Modern Romance to consider City on Fire or Book of Numbers and I gave Santa the choice.  On Christmas morning I felt a hardcover heavy gift and unwrapped it to find this.  

I started reading it January 9, 2016, and took brief breaks to read and review Why We Write about Ourselves and Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.  This book lurked in the background.  And I was writing the review of Just Kids as I began City on Fire, and will now be reading M Train as I write the review of City on Fire.  For some reason, this feels a little too close for comfort:

"Two days before the shooting, Samantha dreamed of Patti Smith.  She herself was in a pitch-black room somewhere.  She could not see the walls or reach them--she was unable to move--but the room felt small.  And there was a window nearby, she sensed, a vista of mountains and seas and tiny humans paddling around in canoes and just generally going about their business, if only she could see it.  And then Patti appeared above her in a caul of low blue wattage and informed her that a time was coming when she would have to choose." (739)

So it took me about two months, and I really don't read all that often--just mainly at lunch and on the train ride home and sometimes before bed.  If I'm taking more time out to read something than that, it usually means I really like it.  In this case, I liked it, but I also was pressed to finish it because I don't think I'll be able to renew M Train and need to finish and review that in the next three weeks.  So I was trying to make progress.  

Recently a friend of mine posted on Facebook to ask if he should read Infinite Jest and another friend proposed a 100 page test to determine if a book was worth reading.  It made me think of this.  I couldn't finish IJ and tried twice.  City on Fire is significantly easier reading.  It has relatively broad appeal, but it might fail the 100 page test.  This is mainly because it operates with a cast of characters that doesn't fully coalesce for several hundred more pages.  Still, the writing is engaging, and once one finishes it, somewhat awe-inspiring.  Don't misunderstand--this will not be named to the Best Books of Flying Houses--but it's certainly in the "also ran" category with that Brownstein memoir read concurrently.  Then again, this book is much more entertaining than the Raymond Carver biography.  Basically, Hallberg establishes himself right out of the gate as an Ambitious Writer.  I actually think this would be a much better book if it were about 300 pages shorter, but in spite of some annoying qualities, one must respect the sheer gesture.  This is much much more than a rehash of Please Kill Me.

***

What is the plot of this book?  Well, it opens on William and Mercer, a gay couple, white 33-year-old and black 24-year-old, moving a Christmas tree down a block in a shopping cart.  William is a former heroin addict and Mercer is a high school English teacher at an all-girl's school.  It then shifts to Regan, (William's sister) and her husband Keith, and their two kids, Will and Cate.  Regan and Keith are separated as the novel opens, around Christmas--and here I should mention a unique feature of this book: it shifts around in time a lot.  As in, each new section seems to begin at some point further back in the past.  Or rather, the chapters alternate in time.  Effectively, there is a "present" part of the book, a "past" part, and a "future" part (which really could be one of the best parts about the entire book, but feels oddly underdeveloped, or tacked on).  The "present" encompasses December 1976 through July 1977 (New Year's Eve and the night of the NYC Blackout serve as bookends).  The "past" primarily concerns 1959 - 1976, and the "future" concerns 1980 - 2004.

William and Regan are the children of a corporate scion, heirs to a fortune.  William used to be in a punk band called Ex Post Facto, which was "taken over" by an imitator known as Nicky Chaos.  At certain points, there is reference to a t-shirt that reads "Please Kill Me," but this band does not sound at all like Richard Hell and the Voidoids.  A number of young people have gotten into the punk scene, and one of them is Samantha, who lives on Long Island.  She is the daughter of a "fireworker," which supplies one of the novels primary motifs.  She is also friends with Charlie, who is adopted but raised Jewish by his parents, and later reads the Bible and establishes himself as a "prophet."  Charlie is in love with Samantha, but in practice they are "best friends."  They go to a show on New Year's Eve and meet other band members/groupies D.T. (Delirium Tremens), Solomon Grungy and Sewer Girl.  In a way, these other band members feel oddly cliched or underdeveloped--but I really shouldn't complain about underdeveloped characters in a 900+ page book.

But then, Samantha has to go, and Charlie later plans to meet her at 72nd St just before midnight.  Meanwhile, nearby on the upper west side, Regan is at her family's lavish annual ball, feeling awkward, and runs into Mercer, who is also feeling awkward and crashing the ball as a way of finding William, who has walked out and disappeared after a small fight.  It occurs to me that Mercer spends way too much of this novel trying to find William.

William and Regan's father, also named William, is being held over in Chicago because of "bad weather," so he cannot attend the party.  His first wife passed away, and he remarried Felicia.  Her brother, Amory, is soon invited into William's family business.  Amory is sort of a sinister character and feels more cartoonish than the rest.  Note: I have never seen a character named Amory anywhere else except here, and I'd prefer that future authors do not use the name for villains.

Now something happens this evening in Central Park--there is a shooting.  One of the characters (it's really not a spoiler to say who, but I will keep mum) ends up spending the majority of this novel on life support in Beth Israel Hospital, and one of the most unsatisfying elements of the ending is the ambiguity of their fate.  Perhaps another reader could elucidate the intended effect, or probable truth.

This shooting is so compelling that a journalist begins investigating all of the involved characters.  This journalist later meets up with his neighbor, a Vietnamese-American girl named Jenny, and share nightly whiskey nightcaps.  Jenny works for Bruno, an art gallery owner and dealer, who has been something of a mentor and protector of William.

I think I've covered most of the characters.  At this point I must comment, as I often do, that this also reminded me of my first novel, Daylight Savings Time.  There is a cast of characters with interlocking narratives and coincidences.  It concerns a relatively specific time and place.  One of the characters is heir to a mini-fortune and has no anxieties or insecurities about his lack of a professional life.  There are drug sequences.  And both include a fantasy about being interviewed by The Paris Review.  All comparisons aside, City on Fire is more ambitious and much better.

***

I forgot one more character: the polio-stricken NYPD detective that is friends with the journalist.  It's fair to say that some characters come across more strongly than others, and Pulaski initially interviews Mercer after he discovers the shooting victim.  Then he kind of fades out of the narrative for a while and later gets introduced as one of the characters that get "first personish-third person" treatment.  The novel only breaks into first person when Will narrates.  That feels like a bit of a spoiler, so I'm sorry, but part of the fun of this novel is trying to figure out how everything is going to end, or who that person was in the opening pages talking about their cell phone vibrating.

One reviewer commented that most readers will identify with one character most strongly, if not all of them.  For him, it was Charlie.  And I've got to admit, I found Charlie's chapters oddly tedious at first.  To me, they were the most cliche.  However, as it went on, I grew to like them, and maybe that is just because Charlie is one of the few characters that undergoes something of a transformation in the novel.  Many of the characters change, but he is the only one that transforms.  And I did find one passage from one of his chapters notably beautiful, the kind of writing that I've sometimes endeavored to produce.

But I've just re-read that segment (from pages 576-579), which is basically when he kisses Sam for the first time, under kind of gross circumstances, and none of the passages are especially beautiful.  I guess what I meant was, the whole atmosphere of the scene, as it takes place on July 4, 1976, the bi-centennial, and the setting is just sort of perfect.

Also, I've re-read the last chapter discussing the shooting victim, and it appears that there is something of a definitive resolution.  I'm surprised I missed it the first time, but Hallberg does have his way of obfuscating that can sometimes seem like he is just showing off his vocabulary.  Again the book could be a lot shorter with a fair amount of fluffy stuff taken out, but it doesn't feel that bloated due to its large cast of characters.  Many of the same events get repeated over and over again, and retold from different perspectives.  To some this may seem tedious, and it can be, but on balance remains entertaining.

***

Another one of my friends posted a link to the "50 Most Unacceptable Sentences in City on Fire" and I glanced at it when I was still in the first couple hundred pages.  A couple other links showed up on Facebook beneath it, like one from the NY Post that rips this novel to shreds.  The negative reviews have a point, but the NY Post gets it wrong.  They make fun of Hallberg for listening to Billy Joel instead of the Ramones or Television, but there's nothing wrong with Billy Joel!  "Captain Jack" was pretty much my soundtrack to NYC in late 2001.

Clearly there are flaws in the novel, and there are some really pretentious sentences.  But on the whole, the book is pretty down-to-earth.  It's readable.  It's not a challenge like IJ.  A couple critics have made comparisons to Jonathan Franzen and something about the tone did remind me a lot of The Corrections (read almost a year ago, sad!).  I think the film rights have already been sold and an HBO Series may or may not be in the cards, and another review focused on how Hallberg's writing was "televisual" and influenced by The Wire and seemingly made to be adapted.  I would watch the show, and I think the show would be one of those that has the potential to eclipse its written precursor.

Final point: I think this book grows on you.  It can be a little awkward at the beginning, but by the end, you will probably be invested in the characters and know them better than most people you know in real life.  And if you have lived in NYC, it will probably feature a scene close to your past neighborhood(s).  "You can usually find a cab up on Clinton," (116) rang true to me, at least in 2011.

And with several of the characters as artists, Hallberg uses the novel as something of a mirror to the work created by his characters:

"It was as if William Hamilton-Sweeney, despite to her knowledge never having sold so much as a painting, had been trying to re-create the face of the entire city, right here in this attic.  She couldn't tell if it was good, exactly, but no one could say it wasn't ambitious." (667)

Hallberg is only a few years older than me, so he couldn't have firsthand knowledge of the way the city felt in 1977, but it feels pretty real.  

The Pale King - David Foster Wallace (2011) (MM)

Seven months after I published my review, the person who requested that we start a book club sends his.  It is not a traditional review by any stretch, and he asked that I edit some of the more epistolary elements, but I prefer the off-the-cuff charm of informality.  I'm sure his review will be much more useful to you than mine.  I think I was a bit easier on the book than him.  Enjoy.  -JK

I have to tell you: like The Pale King, a couple of the cookbooks in our kitchen come from Little, Brown and Company. We like them and use them a lot. Simple, no-fuss recipes for long day office workers the likes of us. Loads of practical application. I read not long ago about a lifestyle book about cabins they put out and maybe it's okay, too, not really my thing, but I suspect there is an audience for it. It must have been hopeful news for the literature division there when David Foster Wallace (DFW) died and left this book unfinished because 1. Hello Sales Appeal of Posthumous Work!, and 2. The Last Tycoon all over again, Dead on the West Coast at a young age--quick, to the presses! A literary happening!

Finishing the book took a lot longer than I thought it would on account of it being so tedious. I wanted that experience to sink in before forming an opinion. Once I did, I had guilt over it, worrying I was being too harsh: Don't speak ill of the dead...just their art?

The Pale King should not be as difficult to read as it is. Did DFW intend it that way? Was that the point? Working as a federal tax analyst is terrible so reading about it should be, too?

Why am I so preoccupied with his motive, anyway? Usually I don't let biography cloud my impressions of a story, but DFW's celebrity ghost haunts any reading of The Pale King. I expect more from a dead contemporary author, especially one whose genius is so well advertised. 

The Pale King is a terrifically boring read, 547 pages of seldom-funny, excruciatingly detailed tax-memoir-fiction. I kept thinking, "Ah, put it down! Read ANYTHING ELSE!" But I pushed on, reminding myself this is one of the great writers of our time. Really, though, DFW is one of the great essayists of our time. As a novelist, to put it charitably, he is under-edited. For example, chapter 9 of this book would have made a great essay on free speech and government, how the law can stifle expression and creativity, even a massive intellect like DFW's. It reveals an interesting paradox in that DFW once worked for the IRS but legally may not publish the experience as non-fiction:

"For as everyone knows, whether consciously or not, there's always a kind of unspoken contract between a book's author and its reader; and the terms of this contract always depend on certain codes and gestures that the author deploys in order to signal the reader what of book it is i.e. whether it's made up vs. true. And these codes are important because the subliminal contract for nonfiction is very different from the one for fiction." (Page 73)

The Pale King is a not-so-vivid melding of the legal, capital, and creative process of publication, a portrait of end-of-the millennium American artistic frustration. It could not exist as fiction or non-fiction, and so it succumbed to market force concerns and censorship mania that are linchpins of our present national reality. As a reader I hope for better, and am compelled to blame someone for this outcome, which is an attitude itself symptomatic of our age: art consumerism. Give me more and give me better! I'm in my chair with nothing to do! Entertain me or else. Still, I know selling books is no easy task these days, especially high-brow stuff like this. I root for publishers even when a book disappoints me.

A 100-page essay on censorship, something in the tone you find in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, some wit and cultural criticism blended with casual humor and sharp observational reporting, his true bread and butter, would have been more valuable in print than this entire book. Here we have 50 chapters of alternating points of view, unrealized characterization, minimal plot, lots of tax code narrative, and at times amusing though ultimately pointless speculation on the personality types drawn to tax work. Here again I question whether or not this book would've been published had DFW not died and left the decision to others. Couldn't have Little, Brown just held off until 2016 and issued a 20th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest? 

Once someone told me we've grown up when we realize we don't have time to do everything we thought we could do in our lifetime. I was thinking about that when I started reading The Pale King on a flight from Burbank to Las Vegas to celebrate my birthday. Nothing like a dead author and an aluminum tube 20,000 feet in the air to inspire mortality angst, right? An hour later as I was checking into the Golden Nugget, the concierge saw the king of clubs cover of The Pale King sticking out of my luggage and asked if it was about gambling. An apt question in Vegas, but I politely smiled and told her "No". A reader has to bet on gaining something from a book. In choosing to read this one I lost that bet.

When I got back to LA a gift had come in the mail, a book by Thich Nhat Hanh called How to Love. At 125 3x4-inch pages, including illustrations, I immediately bet it had more to offer than The Pale King. A reflection from that book titled "Opening the Door":

"Once you know how to come to yourself, then you can open your home to other people because you have something to offer. The other person has to do exactly the same thing if they are to have something to offer you. Otherwise, they will have nothing to share but their loneliness, sickness, and suffering. This can't help you heal at all. The other person has to heal themselves and get warm inside, so that they will feel better, at ease, and can share their home with you." (70) 

There is indescribable beauty in the experience of reading great literature, something approaching ecstasy and miracle. It is a simple truth. You only have so much time to gather it up in your heart; spend in on something other than The Pale King. 

The Pale King - David Foster Wallace (2011)

Wow.  At first I was guessing this was published in 2014, before I looked into the copyright page.  I thought this was going to be one of the more "up to date" reviews, but I guess I'm four years late.  Law school can do that to you.  Then again, would I have ever even read this book if it weren't for my friend that sent it and suggested we form a "book club" and read it together?

I mean, I own Infinite Jest, but only got through about 400 pages on my first attempt, and maybe 150 on my second.  I will finish that book the next time I try.  I considered picking it up this morning, needing a new book start on, before What I Talk about When I Talk about Running comes in from the CPL.  But I wanted a lighter messenger bag for a change.  This is the 3rd book out of the last 4 topping out over 500 pages.  I picked up Disgrace instead.

Imponderables aside, the thoughtfulness of the gift both impressed and imposed an urgency upon me.   The Pale King will not make the Best Books list of this blog, but it is up near that territory.  I'm not sure it would be there, for me, in its finished form either, just because of the lukewarm feeling I get about Infinite Jest.  It's something I feel I should respect and admire, but just can't really bring myself to enjoy reading.  This is getting to be a loaded topic, because it brings up criticisms of DFW like those of BEE, who said he was a "fraud" or "full of shit" or something, because he read a biography of DFW that discussed how he did not have much love for BEE, but still recognized him as an influence on his own writing.

This would probably be a much better book if DFW were able to complete it, mainly to see what he might do next.  As much as this seems unfinished, at almost 550 pages it seems pretty representative of what the overall quality might have been.  Parts of it seem lop-sided, but on the whole it seems about 80-85% finished to me.  I suppose it all depends on how long DFW intended it to be.

For sure, it is an audacious concept for a book, and a perfect one for him: a paean to boredom.  Make the boredom of the everyday lives of IRS examiners in Peoria, IL in the late 70's and early 80's into fine literature.  I was about to write 1985, but I don't believe this story necessarily takes place in 1985.  It's so impressionistic that the "plot" seems secondary to the background sketches of the other characters.

It's not even clear what the "plot" really consists of, but it may consist of Claude Sylvanshine and David Foster Wallace's orientation to their IRS posts in Peoria.  It's hot and they ride in a bus that is a repossessed and re-purposed ice cream truck.  One person sweats an egregious amount.  There is some idle chatter with two other employees.  They go, and DFW gets mixed up with another David F. Wallace (who is older and much more valuable in terms of skill set) and gets introduced by the "Iranian crisis," who gives him a blow job in a janitor's closet.  He also glimpses the face of Glendenning, who is basically in the highest post there, who looks at him sympathetically or some related way because DFW has a horrible skin condition that causes most people to look away.  And that's pretty much it, though there may be other characters on that bus ride near the beginning of the novel.

DFW is a character in this novel.  Ostensibly, it is a memoir:

"Plus there's the autobiographical fact that, like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist,' i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.  My specific dream was of becoming an immortally great fiction writer a la Gaddis or Anderson, Balzac or Perec, &;c.; and many of the notebook entries on which parts of this memoir are based were themselves literarily jazzed up and fractured; it's just the way I saw myself at the time.  In some ways, you could say that my literary ambitions were the chief reason I was on hiatus from college and working at the Midwest REC at all, though most of that whole backstory is tangential and will be addressed only here in the Foreword, and very briefly, to wit:" (73-74)

Here, Wallace describes how he paid off his student loans by writing papers for his classmates, and how his school became aware of it.  This is the first part of the novel that feels truly "great."  It is classic DFW, by which I mean it includes footnotes and his trademark erudition.  So yes, certain sections of The Pale King, I would say, are as good as anything DFW has ever done.

This is a great chapter because Wallace could pretty easily convince a person (that didn't know what year he was really born and couldn't do math) that the story is, in fact, true.  One thing I like about his writing is that it captures the essence of reality.  A reader can identify with it on a different level than anything before.  The details--the minute details and almost paranoid insecurities that we all must worry about from time to time--are so readily evoked that DFW appears God-like.  This one of those books that takes you out of your head a bit, and oddly shapes your life around it.

One part, for me, was extremely touching.  One quick background detail, for exposition: from April 2008 through August 2008, I lived in a small bungalow-like studio in Silver Lake, on a hill just off of Sunset Boulevard.  Across Sunset Blvd. was a foot sign.  My friend (the same one who sent me this book) remarked upon it and I agreed it was strange, funny, cute and iconic in its own way.  It was certainly a landmark.  After I left L.A., he sent me an article once about how this sign had actually influenced several fiction writers, such as Jonathan Lethem and DFW.  I immediately thought, "I am chosen.  I was meant to live there, to know that."

Then came page 163, which will from hereon in be christened the "LSAT test," not unlike the "420 test," except that instead of requiring mention because of some relatively direct reference to pot (and while there is a fair amount of "drug material" in this book, it does not pass that test--though page 420 does detail one of the more sensorily-powerful scenes in the novel), it will need to evoke feelings of my life that might be different if I hadn't taken the LSAT and scored a 163:

"I remember rooming in a high-rise UIC dorm with a very mod, with-it sophomore from Naperville who also wore sideburns and a leather thong and played the guitar.  He saw himself as a nonconformist, and also very unfocused and nihilistic, and deeply into the school's wastoid drug scene, and drove what I have to admit was a very cool-looking 1972 Firebird that it eventually turned out his parents paid the insurance on.  I cannot remember his name, try as I might.  UIC stood for the University of Illinois, Chicago campus, a gigantic urban university.  The dorm we roomed in was right on Roosevelt, and our main windows faced a large downtown podiatric clinic--I can't remember its name, either--which had a huge raised electrified neon sign that rotated on its pole every weekday from 8:00 to 8:00 with the name and mnemonic phone number ending in 3668 on one side and on the other a huge colored outline of a human foot--our best guess was a female foot, from the proportions--and I remember that this roommate and I formulated a kind of ritual in which we'd make sure to try to be at the right spot at our windows at 8:00 each night to watch the foot sign go dark and stop rotating when the clinic closed.  It always went dark at the same time the clinic's windows did and we theorized that everything was on one main breaker.  The sign's rotation didn't stop all at once.  It was more like slowly wound down, with almost a wheel-of-fortune quality about it where it would finally stop.  The ritual was that if the sign stopped with the foot facing away, we would go to the UIC library and study, but if it stopped with the foot or any significant part of it facing our windows, we would take it as a 'sign' (with the incredibly obvious double entendre) and immediately blow off any homework or supposed responsibility we had and go instead to the Hat, which at the time was the currently hip UIC pub and place to hear bands, and would drink beers and play quarters and tell all the other kids whose parents were paying their tuition about the ritual of the rotating foot in a way that we all appeared nihilistically wastoid and hip.  I'm seriously embarrassed to remember things like this...." (163)

This turns out to be a videotaped interview with "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle, and it is one of the standout portions of the text.  His father is employed by the City of Chicago as a "cost Systems supervisor," and dies in a horrific CTA accident.  The description of the ensuing litigation with CTA is very accurately rendered.  He grows up in Libertyville, IL and references a number of other towns on the north shore, including Winnetka (a clothing store--Jack Fagman--which his family had patronized since 1964, and which may or may not have existed).  It is basically about the moment that he discovered his calling in life--to serve the IRS.  It details a chance encounter with an Accounting professor at DePaul, and how it took him off the path of serial college enrollments, drugs, and the "wastoid" lifestyle.  In short, this is classic DFW.

Another notable section near the end focuses on a conversation between Shane Drinion and Meredith Rand, two other IRS employees, at a bar's happy hour on a Friday.  Drinion is cyborg-like in his communications, but Rand is relentlessly confessional.  The subject matter of this scene is also touching and personal to me, as I wrote my second novel in between 2007 and 2008, finishing most of its rough draft shortly before DFW committed suicide.  It is heartening to think that we might have been compelled to write about the same topic for similar reasons:

"'I didn't know why I did it.  I'm still not sure, except he taught me that trying to analyze it or understand all the whys was bullshit--the only important thing was knocking it off, because if I didn't it would land me right back in the psych ward, that the idea I could hide it with bandages or sleeves and keep it a totally private thing that didn't affect anybody else was arrogant bullshit.  And he's right.  No matter where you do it or how carefully you do it, there's always a time when somebody sees something and says something, or when somebody is funking around in the hall and pretending to beg you to cut algebra and go to the park and get stoned and climb on the statue of Lincoln and grabs your arm too hard and some of the cuts open up and you bleed through your long sleeves, even if you've got two shirts on, and somebody sends for the nurse even if you tell them to fuck off and it was an accident and you'll just go home and get it seen to at home.  There always comes a day when somebody sees something in your face that tells them you're lying and then the next thing you know there you are, in a lit room with your arms and legs uncovered, trying to explain yourself to somebody with zero sense of humor, actually a little bit like talking to you right now.' With a quick tight smile." (468-469)

While these chapters--DFW's delayed "foreword," the story of "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle's revelation, and the conversation between Meredith Rand and Shane Drinion--are my personal favorites from this book, I hasten to add the caveat that they also go on too long.  Another similarly great chapter is about a young man (who later rides next to DFW on the way to the Midwest REC) who sweats profusely during periods of anxiety.  It is tremendously entertaining and profound in its sensitivity to human nature, but the situations are truly mined to the depths for details.  This may or may not have been a casualty of the incompleteness of this novel.

This sort of seems to be characteristic of his work in general, though, with another one of his chapters ending in the middle of a sentence.  I am not sure how you could provide appropriate closure for Infinite Jest, though I believe Joyce achieved it with Ulysses, which one really must mention in the same breath.  Because if you subscribe to the belief that Ulysses is the greatest English language novel, then I think you will also enjoy DFW to the max.  I don't always, but I think I can appreciate the generic expectations of a reader that sort of begs for a little bit of "guidance" from the author.  DFW definitely provides that "guidance" at certain points, and it is refreshing.  But other parts of this book are about as difficult as Infinite Jest.

My opinions on this book have been adequately dispatched, I believe, but please feel free to comment below, as this truly is the first post on Flying Houses spurred by participation in a book club.

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami

What I Talk About When I Talk About Murakami: Mystery and Memory in 1Q84 

by Emily Dufton

My notebook states that I finished reading Haruki Murakami’s 925-page opus 1Q84, first published in the United States in October of 2011, on March 2, 2012. Almost exactly a month earlier, on February 1, I scribbled in my book that I had finished rereading, for the third time, Murakami’s 2008 memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is perhaps my favorite of his works. In the four weeks and one day that spanned the completion of Running and 1Q84, I left behind the stark and direct world of Murakami’s nonfiction and reentered the familiar fictional world this author has so consistently reproduced over the course of a dozen novels and thirty years. Which is to say that I left behind his essays – so clean and concise, about early morning training runs in Hawaii and traversing the route of the original marathon in Greece – and reentered that other, stranger place that I can only associate with this particular writer’s fiction. Here is a man who writes books the same way he runs marathons: methodically and purposefully, creating a world of chaos out of the mundane.

In what can only be credited to the construction of a coherent oeuvre, there exists in the fictional world of Murakami a very specific, if often troubling, place: a Japan that lives on the border of reality and imagination, a world of mystery, confusion, disorientation and delight, where men – and his protagonists are almost always men – are confronted by the fantastic and often surreal as they struggle within the context of quotidian Japanese life. I think of Toru Okada in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, whose story begins when his cat runs away. This small event seems to trigger (or release) a series of events, some of which border on the completely phantasmagoric, even as Toru remains chained to his everyday routines. Throughout the book there are these wonderful, quiet moments, far outside the scope of missing cats and missing wives and psychic prostitutes and newly acquired abilities to heal, that reveal the majesty of Murakami’s craft: it is within descriptions of Toru making small meals, drinking a beer at the kitchen table alone at night, or the thoughts Toru has as he looks up at the sky where the real beauty of Murakami’s writing lies. These moments, far more than the mysteries, seductions, and action that also suffuse the text, interested me most during my initial reading of the book and they’re the ones that I carry with me now, years after I put the book back on the shelf.

Other examples of the Murakami Man are myriad: the unnamed protagonist in A Wild Sheep Chase who follows a sheep (and a ghost) to the mountains of Hokkaido while he revels in the stark silence of the cold northern territory. There is young Kafka, in Kafka on the Shore, who runs away from home and hides in a library near the ocean, reading books as rain quietly falls and a man who kills cats wanders the streets. And there is Tengo, one of the protagonists of 1Q84, a young writer and math tutor in Tokyo whose introduction to a remarkable young woman named Fuka-Eri and his induction into a parallel world do little to stem his interest in listening to records at home or wandering through a nearby park. And these are just a few of the many Murakami men who sit idly by as the strangest and most remarkable situations draw them into their grasp, these men-boys who so often live alone and exist in that strange, liminal, crepuscular world between no-longer-adolescence and slack-jawed-adulthood, looking through the fridge for another beer or something to eat while, outside of their apartments, two moons are rising in the sky.

It’s as though Murakami himself doesn’t quite know what to focus on, probably because he loves both stories – the magical and the mundane – so dearly and so deeply, as they both so profoundly influence his work. There is mystery, challenge, tension and thrill hovering around the nucleus of all this writer’s work, but there, at the dead-center of the story’s very core, is thick description so anthropological in shape that its attention to the minute details of quotidian Japanese life could allow aliens to mistake Murakami’s books for lessons in the post-World War II, late-twentieth century Japanese experience. And this is the purposeful (or concomitant) result of a man who writes his books on the fly. In a 1997 New York Times review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Jamie James noted that Murakami “does not plot his novels beforehand but lets the story reveal itself to him as he writes.” This makes sense. In some sense, a reader could get the feeling that if a character busies himself with stir-frying leftovers for an entire scene, it was most likely written on a day when that was all that Murakami wanted to do too.

But this is not a retrospective on Murakami’s collected works; it is a review specifically of 1Q84, which I intend to write in a specific way. March 2, 2012, is eleven months ago now, and 1Q84 still sits on my shelf. I’ve hardly opened the cover since I finished the last page and noted the date of its completion in my little book. But I’ve decided to keep 1Q84 there, shelved and unopened, while I write this review. I don’t want any new experience to influence what I want to say. Instead, this review is going to be written blind, based entirely on the memories and feelings I’ve retained after finishing the book. Why? Because it is only in Murakami’s work where I find myself paying such close attention to the quiet moments that lie so far outside of the story’s main action: to food, to drink, to a character sitting on the floor, to the moments late at night when the wind blows or there is quietly falling rain. 1Q84 is full of such moments – one might argue that these moments make up too much of the text – moments of solitude and loneliness, of characters trapped in place, of people trying to work through issues of magnificent scope (religious cults! Parallel worlds! Mysterious pregnancies! Missing children! Unanswered questions about a mother’s marital fidelity!) in a manner more befitting of trying to figure out what to have for lunch.

So, that being said, I don’t want to provide a synopsis of the tale, which is too convoluted to be adequately explained, nor do I want to focus exclusively on what I liked or didn’t like. Instead, I’m going to focus less on 1Q84 itself than on two other, very specific things: first, on how the book made me feel when reading it, and second, on what I can continue to recall about the text nearly a year after completing it. Less a traditional investigation of style and form, this will be an analysis of the reading experience and an examination of the metaphysics of memory as they concern Murakami and 1Q84.

What I remember most from 1Q84 are people stuck, trapped if you will, in places they cannot leave for reasons they do not entirely understand. Everyone seems trapped in 1Q84: Aomame and Tengo trapped in a parallel world, Fuka-Eri and young Tsubasa trapped in a cult, the Leader of the cult trapped in a painful body, and nearly all of the characters trapped somewhere in the past. Then there are the physical, constructed restrictions as well. This book features more people trapped in apartments than any of Murakami’s works I’ve ever read before, and this is an author notoriously fond of placing his characters in constrictive locales.

First there is the long period where Aomame, Murakami’s female protagonist (a trainer at a Tokyo gym when she’s not a hired assassin), is stuck in a new apartment in a new complex in an underdeveloped section of Tokyo for – what is it, days, weeks, months? She is kept there by the Dowager, her employer, for her own safety and is sent groceries, a stationary exercise bike, and weights to lift to keep her fit. Her only access to the outside world is through the deliveryman who comes weekly to bring supplies from the Dowager, a window and balcony that look out onto a park, and the NHK man/ghost who knocks on her door from time to time. She is kept there for chapters, maniacally exercising in the apartment to stay in shape, chopping and stir-frying vegetables for meals, and waiting through the time by reading or staring outside. She is caught between the interior and exterior worlds in the apartment in the same way she is caught between 1984 and 1Q84.

(Is it strange that, after reading those chapters, I wanted the same solitude? A blindingly white apartment in a place where I knew no one and no one knew me, where people brought me what I needed and I had no responsibilities other than riding a stationary bike and preparing simple meals?)

Then there is Ushikawa, the private detective hired by the religious cult Sakigake to investigate Tengo and Aomame. Usikawa, whose constant descriptions of being ugly made me pity him (surely he can’t be that bad; no one is), camps out on the ground floor of Tengo’s apartment building to keep an eye out for Tengo’s comings and goings. He has nothing in the apartment but a sleeping bag and a hot plate. He wraps himself in the sleeping bag to avoid the cold and stares out the window with binoculars and a camera, eating cans of beans that he’s heated up for dinner. Is there a more pitiful existence, even for a private eye? Staring between the slats of a Venetian blind, hoping the person that you’re looking for walks past? Not only does Ushikawa spend multiple chapters waiting in this empty apartment, but if I recall correctly, it’s also the site of his death. Poor Ushikawa – Murakami never gave you a break.

Fuka-Eri also remains housebound. As public interest in her novel "Air Chrysalis" reaches fever pitch, she is forced to remain inside Tengo’s apartment, sleeping in his nightshirt and listening to his records while he’s at work. Here is, as Murakami describes her, a preternaturally beautiful 17-year-old girl who lives with Tengo for days and weeks, forced into house arrest because of the strangeness of her visions. When she and Tengo finally have sex (in the weirdest sex scene I’ve ever read, even for Murakami), it is, of course, Aomame who gets pregnant. How? Why? Do these questions even matter? And when Fuka-Eri disappears – a clean break if I ever read one – we don’t need to know where she goes, in the same way that we, the readers, don’t seem to have to know the answers to any of the questions Murakami brings up.

Ultimately, what remains with me almost a year after finishing 1Q84 is how unsatisfying the storyline really is. More than any other feeling, and more than any other of his books, Murakami’s latest opus left me feeling sad. It was a half-finished, half-baked, coitus interruptus of a text, one that brought forth all of my favorite Murakami ideas only to leave them, half-assembled, in the nearly-1,000-page book on my shelf. There is a startling number of questions unanswered at its end. I remember being two-thirds of the way finished, then three-quarters through, then four-fifths complete, wondering when Aomame was going to get out of the white apartment, when the questions about Tengo’s mother’s relationship with that strange man were going to be resolved, how Murakami was going to explain all of these things, while the number of pages dwindled and the storyline seemed stuck. It was frustrating, watching the remaining pages on the right side of the book diminish while so much remained to be explained and understood.

There is so much beauty in Murakami’s work. The descriptions of the hothouse where the Dowager would meet Aomame for tea, where exotic flowers grew and butterflies fluttered and landed lightly on the Dowager’s shoulder, are such lovely visions of Japan (or anywhere) that I can’t get them out of my head. The meal that Aomame shares with her policewoman friend Ayumi at the Italian restaurant, with thick description of their entrees and choices of wine, seemed as comforting as eating a rich Italian meal myself. Tengo standing on top of a children’s playground slide, staring up at the moon (two moons? One moon? How many did Tengo see?) at night, is a stunning scene in its powerful simplicity.

So why then does Murakami’s book have to ultimately feel co-opted? Lost? Half-finished and unsatisfying and DOA? There was so much discussion of him receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years back, with various reviewers calling 1Q84 genius, his chef d’oeuvre. But I couldn’t help feeling a little gypped at the end, as though I bought into a promise someone made but couldn’t fulfill.

For all the reasons I love Murakami – his creativity and vigor, his intelligence and prolificacy, the quietness of his writing that centers on moments of such stunningly peacefulness even in the midst of so much surreality – I enjoyed 1Q84. But for all the reasons Murakami pisses me off – his lackadaisical style, his hanging questions, his unplanned endings and his liminal characters – 1Q84 also deeply pissed me off. Maybe it’s impossible to answer all the questions Murakami brings up. Secret religious cults, tiny creatures that emerge from dead goats’ mouths to spin an ethereal chrysalis, mysterious pregnancies, a world with two moons – I mean, it’s all a lot to deal with, a lot to convey. And I’m not suggesting that every question an author brings up demands an answer within that same book; certainly, I’d assume, neither is Murakami. Instead, what he notes, and what is necessary to understand, is that there is mystery in the world – deep and trenchant mystery – especially in a place as otherworldly as Japan, which deserves to be looked at and examined, if not understood.

And the grace of Murakami’s books is not only that he brings up such luscious mysteries, but that he cloaks them in the quotidian ubiquity of daily life: there might be a woman who covertly kills abusive men for her job, but her days are still filled with the quiet rising of the sun and the silent nights when she stays up long after everyone else is asleep. There’s still the daily question of searching the fridge to see what could be stir-fried into dinner, and that is comforting, even if it makes me upset.

But still – still – I wanted more. I didn’t want 1Q84 to end like the television series "Lost," with a quick and ill-conceived wrap-up that was superficially satisfying while doing nothing to illuminate the larger story. But it did. Both "Lost" and 1Q84 started big, making enormous promises that ultimately neither could fulfill. Did they take storytelling too far? Bite off far more than they could chew? Perhaps, and maybe that’s why Murakami didn’t win the Nobel Prize and "Lost" became a laughingstock rather than a television series that earned a rightful place in the pop culture canon.

Even so, I’ll probably never get rid of my copy of 1Q84. Like when I finished Infinite Jest, there’s always an element of pride to completing a large and monumental work. And that, I guess, is the strange relationship we have with texts: we keep our books long after we’ve completed them because, in the process of reading, they become our friends. 1Q84 will stay on my shelf even as it remains one of my most frustrating friends, a book I’ll look at again from time to time just to remind me to keep away from starting things I know I can’t complete. Still, it’s a friend I won’t abandon any time soon. Friends like these are important – or at least some of them are – because they remain meaningful long after we’ve finished reading what they contain.

Ulysses - James Joyce

Any discussion of Ulysses in 2009 must begin with the obvious: the Modern Library. Of course, this novel occupies the #1 slot of the "100 Best Novels" according to "The Board." According to "the Readers" it is #11. According to anyone that is not an English major, or a highly pretentious literary dilettante, it is unrecognized. It is obsolete. Or rather, it is highly regarded, but mysterious. Of all the books I have read there is only one other that can be put in the same class with it, and that would be Infinite Jest. Now, I gave up on Infinite Jest after about 300 or 400 pages (and I intend it try again in 2010), and I gave up on Ulysses after about 120 pages about 9 years ago. I still remember going to stay over in Hoboken, NJ, the night after going on a guided tour of what would become my alma mater, and remarking to my hostess for the evening that I tried reading the book, but that I didn't understand any of it, except for the phrase "ineluctable modality of the visible," and she said it was an impressive phrase nonetheless.

That phrase opens up Chapter 3 out of 18 (and just so you know, I had to go back and mark all 18 chapters tonight after finishing, so that I could be sure I properly understood the boundaries of this work), and it is one of the most commonly associated "things" with the book--I believe because it is about as far as most people get:


"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see." (37)

Let us backtrack a moment. One of the most intelligible parts of my edition of Ulysses is the foreword by Morris L. Ernst and the decision by Judge John M. Woolsey, lifting the ban on Ulysses on December 6, 1933. Woolsey provides as fine a lens through which to view the novel as anyone:

"Joyce has attempted--it seems to me, with astonishing success--to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing." (xi)

He also mentions that it is "not an easy book to read or understand" and that understatement seems typical of the writing practiced by legal professionals. Now, okay, I have yet to read a single volume from D.H. Lawrence or Joseph Conrad or William Gaddis, but let me just say that Ulysses is the hardest book I have ever read, and only Infinite Jest can compare (in my own experience) but a comparison of the two will have to wait for another time.

This will be a different sort of review for Flying Houses because most of the passages that I intend to include are not especially for beauty, but rather as examples of the difficulty its audience will find in trying to attain a coherent interpretation of the text. To some this may seem pointless, or pessimistic, but I am trying to look out for the average reader here. Most people will be able to understand at least a few parts of this book (after about page 450 it becomes noticeably easier on the eyes), but few will see the point in struggling towards the end.


Who struggles towards the end?
English majors and highly pretentious literary dilettantes, once again. I really don't think anybody who says, "Oh Ulysses is my favorite novel" is telling the truth, but rather showing off. It does not offer much pleasure for the reader. That it was banned on the grounds of being obscene or pornographic--written for the purpose of igniting the sexual excitement of the reader--is laughable. Oh, parts are certainly pornographic, but there is plenty of obscure vocabulary, irrelevant detail, confusing changes of scenery, randomly introduced characters, and, well, what seems on the surface to be PURE NONSENSE, to keep 99% of the general public at bay. Those looking for a more transparent thrill will find it here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/02/annotated-lolita-vladimir-nabokov-ed.html, it must be noted, #4 on the above-mentioned list. Of course that volume, along with Naked Lunch and our present topic, generally comprises the trifecta of the most notorious banned books. Ulysses has much in common with Naked Lunch, but its degree of obscenity---on a scale of 1-10, Naked Lunch is about a 9, and Ulysses is about a 5--but the percentage of the actual text that is obscene--that is where they differ. Ulysses has nearly as much politics in it as sex. Naked Lunch has nearly as much drugs in it as sex.

But that is not a bad starting point to understanding the type of book Ulysses is--that is, like Naked Lunch or Infinite Jest. It's not very straightforward. These writers (Joyce, Burroughs, Wallace) are capable of straightforward storytelling, but it appears they find it boring. They experiment with form (Ulysses chief virtue, in my mind, is its sheer creativity; Burroughs obviously did the "cut-up" thing; and Wallace has his footnotes, though Salinger, among others I am sure, also did those, but not to the same degree, I am sure), they end up alienating a ton of readers, but they don't care and they end up creating some of the most enduring masterpieces of the English language--or at least the most controversial or provocative.

Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904 and is billed as an extremely loose interpretation of The Odyssey. Here is the plot as far as I can remember. There are two main characters, well, three: Stephen Dedalus (formerly featured prominently in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Leopold Bloom, and Mrs. Marion Tweedy "Molly" Bloom. The third does not make her appearance until the final chapter but should be included as a main character because of the nature of that final chapter. The night before, Stephen stayed over at his medical student friend Buck Mulligan's boarding house, and the novel opens with them preparing to have breakfast. They drink together a lot and sometimes go to see whores. Stephen is about 22 and an English professor. The first three chapters, part I, detail his early morning. Chapter four and part II opens up with Leopold Bloom, wanting to buy a kidney from a butcher, preparing to to attend his friend Paddy Dignam's funeral. He goes later, and so does Stephen's father, Simon Dedalus, who apparently is very well respected about town. (But then later it appears they are actually poor? The first of many confusing interpretations I am bound to make.) After the funeral, he goes to a museum, but if this part is included in "present tense" in the novel, I missed it completely. He goes to a bookstore. Stephen's sister is there, I think. Later he goes to the beach, around sunset, and there is a girl named Gerty there.

It is at this point, the scene with Gerty on the beach, that the novel became tolerable to me. This section was the first part that I could truly call beautiful. Joyce switches perspectives from Gerty to Bloom as they regard one another from a distance. Bloom is the "strange man" that Gerty is attracted to, oddly trying to expose herself to him. It seems that Bloom is a big fan of looking up girls' skirts. Gerty is with a friend, and two toddler twins playing. There is a church service going on nearby (I think?). What is beautiful about this section is the way Joyce suddenly introduces the human element, with straightforward description. It reminded me of something I might read in Mann, albeit without the exhibitionism. At the end of the scene it is revealed that Gerty has a certain disability, and the manner in which this is discovered makes for arguably the most heartbreakingly beautiful moment of the novel. This is also apparently the masturbation scene, but I did not catch it. This is the 13th chapter in the novel, which ends roughly before page 400, and the moment at which the novel becomes palatable.

Though chapter 14 is pretty much impossible to read, chapter 15 is almost 200 pages long and takes the form of a play script, which makes it quicker to read. This is also a protracted scene in a whorehouse, which made me think, "Okay, so this is where it starts to get obscene." Yeah right! On the surface this seems like it would be one of the easier parts of the novel, but it is just as confusing as anything that came before. This is finally where part II ends. Chapter 16 and the beginning of part III involves Bloom taking Stephen away from the whores and into a cabman's shelter, drunk, and here, finally, the novel becomes understandable all the way until the end. Chapter 17 and 18 are definitely the two best parts of the entire book, in my opinion. 17 involves Bloom taking Stephen back to his house to recuperate--but the form of this chapter is what makes it so great, and allows Joyce to offer his most profound ruminations on the nature of existence.

But chapter 18 is the most fucked up part of the entire book-- and in case you didn't guess, the obscene part. Anybody that flips through Ulysses and sees that the final sixty or seventy pages appear to be one unbroken paragraph without punctuation might wince and feel that it is the final push of complexity before being freed of the chains that are this novel, but that is not the case. Actually, incredibly, this is the most transparent episode in the entire book. Bloom has gone to bed, and crawled beside his wife Molly--and Molly contemplates their life together as she tries to fall asleep. She also contemplates the many, many men she has cheated on her husband with, and this primarily comprises the "dirty" part of the book. And it does get quite dirty, but I don't think anybody that is able to read that far is going to be morally offended by it.

Finally, the last two pages of the book are incredibly beautiful. It is one of the most perfect endings I have ever read in my life. So it is worth it to get there.

But along the way, believe me, you will have to fight every urge to give up. The first twelve chapters of the book should make most people do that. Still, I have to point out that this book is extremely important for writers, and anybody who considers themselves a writer should force themselves to read all the way to the end, whether they understand it or not. The Wikipedia page is very helpful on this novel, but I didn't read it until I was finished.

Why is this book so important for writers specifically? Joyce's creativity. Chapter 7 of this novel takes the form of a series of newspaper headlines, and this form was mimicked by me when I was just 18 in the first essay I wrote for college, and many people found it quite good. The play format of Chapter 15 is not necessarily anything new, but the hallucinatory nature of this part is way ahead of its time (but so is this http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/12/faust-johann-wolfgang-von-goethe.html, our 1 year anniversary...sigh). The form of Chapter 17 has to be one of the most original devices ever employed in literature. Finally Chapter 18 should teach anyone that thought literary experimentation reached its apotheosis with the Beats a lesson. Also anyone that thought punk rock was an original idea in 1976.

Joyce also predates the MFA contingent with their lists of things:

"From his girdle hung a row of seastones which dangled at every move of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the Ardi Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill, Father John Murphy, Owen Rose, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell, Red Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan O'Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry Joy M'Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan, Marshall MacMahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castille, the Man for Galway, The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Man in the Gap, The Woman Who Didn't, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L. Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir Thomas Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo, Hayes, Muhammad, the Bride of Lammermoor, Peter the Hermit, Peter the Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez, Captain Nemo, Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn, Waddler Healy, Angus the Culdee, Dolly Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben Howth, Valentine Greatrakes, Adam and Eve, Arthur Wellesley, Boss Croker, Herotodus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama Buddha, Lady Godiva, The Lily of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye, the Queen of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O'Sullivan Beare." (296-297)

Right there, if you ever need to think up a name for a character if you are writing a piece of fiction, go to this section of the book. This is one of at least three ridiculously long paragraphs containing tons of names. I don't understand anything about it.

Probably the most useful way to read Ulysses, in my opinion, is to go through it with a pencil or pen, and circle or underline every word that you do not know. You will find hundreds, I promise you. Perhaps a thousand. Some of them are made up, but you will be able to increase your vocabulary greatly if you make the effort to look up all of those words in a dictionary. The problem is that most of these words are obsolete anyways, and no one uses them anymore, and if you use them other people will just think you are being pedantic.

Another note about this text--it would help to have a grasp of Irish history. Do you know who Parnell is? I don't. Parnell is mentioned enough in this book to be considered a character. It is almost like people writing the name Bush in America one hundred years later. Except I think people will know who Bush was one hundred years from now. People will remember 9/11 for a while.

That is another thing about this book--its prophetic quality. Disaster in New York. Thousands killed. Read it and you'll understand. There are a few other instances of Joyce predicting future events. The Holocaust is not predicted per se, but the words "concentration camps" appear, and a lot of anti-semitism directed towards Bloom, who is part-Jewish.

But do not be discouraged, and push through to find beautiful parts such as this:

"For Gerty had her dreams that no-one knew of. She loved to read poetry and when she got a keepsake from Bertha Supple of that lovely confession album with the coral-pink cover to write her thoughts in she laid it in the drawer of her toilettable which, though it did not err on the side of luxury, was scrupulously neat and clean. It was there she kept her girlish treasures trove, the tortoiseshell combs, her child of Mary badge, the whiterose scent, the eyebrowleine, her alabaster pouncetbox and the ribbons to change when her things came home from the wash and there were some beautiful thoughts written in it in violet ink that she bought in Hely's of Dame Street for she felt that she too could write poetry if she could only express herself like that poem that appealed to her so deeply that she had copied out of the newspaper she found one evening round the potherbs. Art thou real, my ideal? it was called by Louis J. Walsh, Magherafelt, and after there was something about twilight, wilt thou ever? and oft-times the beauty of poetry, so sad in its transient loveliness, had misted her eyes with silent tears that the years were slipping by for her, one by one, and but for that one shortcoming she knew she need fear no competition and that was an accident coming down Dalkey hill and she always tried to conceal it. But it must end she felt. If she saw that magic lure in his eyes there would be no holding back for her. Love laughs at locksmiths. She would make the great sacrifice. Her every effort would be to share his thoughts. Dearer than the whole world would she be to him and gild his days with happiness. There was the allimportant question and she was dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind. But even if--what then? Would it make a very great difference? From everything in the least indelicate her finebread nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen woman off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men, with no respect for a girl's honour, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess. Perhaps it was an old flame he was in mourning for from the days beyond recall. She thought she understood. She would try to understand him because men were so different. The old love was waiting, waiting with little white hands stretched out, with blue appealing eyes. Heart of mine! She would follow her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was the master guide. Nothing else mattered. Come what might she would be wild, untrammelled, free." (363-365)

There are not many other very good reasons to read this book beyond the desire to witness a genius at work--and there are those that will persist in stating that Joyce is no genius, but a nut. And okay, from everything I've read or seen about Finnegan's Wake, it may have turned true--but Ulysses is not the work of a mind that has lost touch with its genius. It may have lost touch with populist sentiment, or the desire to be understood, but it is a work of genius, and near the end, as near the end of this contemporaneous novel of nearly the same length (http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/01/magic-mountain-thomas-mann.html), the reader forgets their preconceptions and just starts believing whatever the author writes, as fantastic as it may be, the author becomes the final authority on God, the universe, and the nature of existence:

"He believed that human life was infinitely perfectible, eliminating these conditions?

There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and death: the monotonous menstruation of simian (and particularly) human females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclysms which make terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis from infancy through maturity to decay." (697)

And here, when Bloom and Stephen are regarding the stars, near the end of the narrative, perhaps a commentary on the discovery of the atom:

"Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in the cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatazoa: of the incalcuable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by the cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached." (699)

I don't care to type much more, but here is an excerpt from the final chapter. To my mind, the primary merit of the final chapter is the way in which a single character is fully evoked, without reservations. Of course, Molly is unfaithful, but so is Bloom, and the nature of their adultery is arguably the most bittersweet, painful revelation of this entire work. They are compatible, so they stay together. But Molly is so tired of Bloom, and Bloom can be a lech at times--their adultery is almost approved. Bloom is still the more sympathetic character in the final chapter, as Molly contemplates how she would like Stephen to come around more often afterwards, for obvious reasons:

"Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathing place from the side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that thered be some consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he bought I could look at him all day long curly head and his shoulders his finger up for you to listen theres real beauty and poetry for you I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock there so simply I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white he looked with his boyish face I would too in 1/2 a minute even if some of it went down what its only like gruel or the dew theres no danger besides hed be so clean compared with those pigs of men I supose never dream of washing it from 1 years end to the other most of them" (775-776)

In this final chapter, Joyce gets to the point that I have always thought I knew something about--that is, burying the sordid detail underneath a mountain of text, so that the reader will have to do the work to get there, so that it is almost like a secret or dirty joke that cannot be uttered aloud. Ulysses is obscene, but only really after about 700 pages, so no one should be bothered by it. It is not an affront to public morality more than any other book has been in the past, because barely anyone that is part of "the public" will be exposed to it. And there can be much value in a frank discussion of sexual mores, particularly in the 1920's, and mixed in with that, there can be real instances of proto-feminism:

"I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldn't in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had thats why I suppose hes running wild now out at night away from his books and studies and not living at home on account of the usual rowy house I suppose well its a poor case that those that have a fine son like that theyre not satisfied and I none was he not able to make one it wasnt my fault we came together when I was watching two dogs up in her behind in the middle of the naked street that disheartened me altogether I suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same since O Im not going to think myself into the glooms about that any more I wonder why he wouldnt stay the night I felt all the time it was somebody strange he brought in instead of roving around the city meeting God knows who nightwalkers and pickpockets his poor mother wouldnt like that if she was alive ruining himself for life perhaps still its a lovely hour so silent I used to love coming home after dances the air of the night they have friends they can talk to weve none either he wants what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy Im not like that" (778-779)

I have said all I can on Ulysses, I think. I recommend it, but primarily for writers. I do not know if I will ever read it again. I might, but only if I wanted to write a novel that was a very loose retelling of the story, the way this was a very loose retelling of that older, classic story, which can be read by almost anyone. If anything, it made me want to re-read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners. Perhaps in 2010, those will appear on Flying Houses, and perhaps Infinite Jest will too. But don't hold me to that, please.

David Foster Wallace - 1962 - 2008

In the grand scheme of things in 2008, the shocking death of a literary celebrity barely passes for news, particularly when we are just a month and a couple of weeks away from an highly historical election. It doesn't help that it first started getting reported the night of a rather historical, happy occassion in Chicago. On Sunday, September 14, 2008, what remains of my family living at the base compound was gathered around the television, watching Carlos Zambrano accomplish the highly unlikely. He did it. He threw a no-hitter. It was the first one thrown by a Cubs pitcher since 1972. At a highly tense moment, just before Zambrano induced a foul pop fly which he rushed over to catch, my little sister, on a laptop computer, said, "David Foster Wallace."

I said, "What, what did he do?" Thinking perhaps he may have been nominated for the Nobel prize for literature, or had a new book coming out that was going to be news-worthy, or Pulitzer worthy...

"Is dead. He killed himself."

I said, "No way, that's unbelievable."

My parents didn't know who he was and I went off about how intelligent he had to have been.

Zambrano caught the foul pop fly and my father went nuts over the athletic feat that he had just accomplished, which was the first or second out of the 9th inning, and my mom seemed temporarily more concerned about my concern for this modern author who probably only wasn't more famous because he wouldn't want to sell out and be accessible, despite her being a lifelong die-hard Cubs fan. After a couple sentences exhibiting my shock, I stopped, and enjoyed the enthusiasm that everyone on the Cubs began to show. Screaming and shouting, excitement, this was the big milestone that was going to psyche them up, that proved that they truly were a different team this year and that it was no question they could play with anyone in the World Series.



The next day there was a short article in the Chicago Tribune written as a tribute to Wallace, and there was a segment on NPR that I happened to hear that was very moving. Both mentioned his previous musings on suicide. Some of the ideas they discussed were exceptionally powerful. And to think that I myself questioned Wallace, found him to be a bit more difficult than he needed to be, thought him to be something of a snob-genius, elevating himself above the masses, publishing a book that could insult anyone who ever thought they were intelligent. The NPR tribute made the exact opposite claim, that he wrote to prove to readers that they were intelligent.



That book of course is Infinite Jest, his most famous, and it should be a love-it-or-hate-it volume. Whenever I meet anyone who has happened to read it, and who has happened to love it, I am always shocked and feel they are lying for saying they liked it, or actually got all the way through it. I stopped around page 350. It may be an odd coincidence (but I am not making it up) that I had a vivid dream about reading that very book, about three weeks or a month ago, how in the dream I had picked it up again and come across a very revelatory section, something clear and precise and comprehensible, much like the second "chapter" of the book that I liked very much, and how I was going to finish it now that it seemed there might be another part like that too. Well it is in storage in a box in a garage in Northbrook, and soon enough I will go and reclaim it. Perhaps on Sunday when I have to evacuate this house along with the pets for an open house showing.



In the Paris Review anthology released on their 50-year-anniversary, there was a story by Wallace which was my first introduction to him and I was totally, totally blown away. The story was called "Little Expressionless Animals" and concerned a lady who was about to become the all-time longest-running Jeopardy! champion (many years before Ken Jennings began his famous streak) and I read it in one sitting and considered it as close to a perfect short story as a person can write, particularly in our present cultural milieu, which is so distracting and makes you wonder if literature has any place at all in it anymore. After trying to read Infinite Jest, I had the sense that Wallace himself (strongly resisting the urge to capitalize that) could have gone on Jeopardy! and had his own ridiculous streak--it almost seemed like there was no limit to the knowledge he had accrued in his lifetime.

As far as literary giants go, I feel this is nearly as cataclysmic event as Ernest Hemingway's suicide, or at least contemporaneously, those of Kurt Cobain or Elliott Smith in the music scene. Since barely anyone on the major media outlets seem to notice that this happened, and only those who are more-or-less dedicated to the literary cause seem to care, it is very depressing indeed, for more than the obvious reasons. At the very least, one could hope that Wallace's books will enjoy a resurgence in popularity (I particularly want to get Oblivion), and that challenging, experimental literature will be given a a brief moment of deeper examination. But people would rather hear more about Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin on SNL. It's significantly more prescient information.