Philip Roth - 1933 - 2018

2 giants in 2 weeks, in their mid-to-late 80's. I don't write obituaries for everyone, but I try to write them when I think I can speak properly to their import. In the case of Tom Wolfe, I wasn't familiar enough with his oeuvre to say anything of substance. The New York Times Book Review podcast briefly addressed his passing and while I had intended to do Bonfire of the Vanities and maybe The Right Stuff (one day), their comments seemed to indicate that Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is his seminal work. So maybe that will have to come first. 

Wolfe will be remembered for "New Journalism." What will Roth be remembered for? Not winning the Nobel Prize. He was a Nobel Prize-level writer. I think he will be remembered for demarcating the line between toxic masculinity and horniness. Among other things.

Recently, there was a very scandalous book published that apparently details an affair with a fictional stand-in for Roth. The author admitted that she did, in fact, have an affair with Roth, and not all that long ago. Roth was also recently in the New York Times for an e-mail exchange checking up on him, after all the #metoo revelations, to get his take on the finer points of male desire. He had been retired from his occupation as a novelist over the past several years. 

I read Everyman over 10 years ago now, and that seemed to be his comment on retirement. Indignation still came after (as did The Humbling and Nemesis). American Pastoral was the best. I still haven't read everything. 

Here I've only written about American Pastoral and The Professor of Desire. Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint should be re-read. Both are essential. People have said The Plot Against America is prescient and/or prophetic. I want to read that and Sabbath's Theater.

It's hard to do better than Roth. That is the only thing of substance I can say here, and I'm not even sure that qualifies as substance. 

We wrote about Salinger eight years ago. Salinger was silent for years. He practically hadn't published anything since Roth had first published. They were 14 years apart in age. I consider them equals. They're two of the best 20th century American writers to have lived. Surely there are many great writers that nobody knew about. They both relayed truths rarely spoken, yet often felt. 

Roth's prolific career is a work of art on its own, and this writer is not so deeply familiar with it that an authoritative tone may be struck. Suffice to say, this entire site is filled with instances of exhortations to read so-and-so and while I do truly try to be careful not to overwhelm the casual reader, everybody knows that Roth was a true modern master (in the same way that I know Bellow was, though I haven't read him). He's in the Pantheon. Our world is rapidly evolving and one expects a similar change in the way we consume literature, as well as our expectations of how we expect to be transported by it. So maybe there will be a new literature, and Roth is a relic from a bygone era. History has shown that writers will be remembered if their words can stand up to eternity. Roth is not Plato and he will likely not be referenced by Westworld-types of entertainment 2,000 years from now. Roth may not even be Hemingway. I see many parallels with Vonnegut in terms of output and cultural relevance. Vonnegut was not seriously rumored to win the Nobel. Both were zany, though Vonnegut was zanier. People will inevitably compare him to Wolfe if only for their sense of timing. They were true writers. They made their living off writing their books. Roth was popular, but never commercial. One hopes that writers such as him may still exist and prosper. 

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1963)

The second entry in The Vonnegut Project (following Slaughterhouse-Five) is Cat's Cradle. It is being presented in its relatively unedited format (though I have agonized over the e's from judgements/judgemental), including our nominations for the third entry, which will be Breakfast of Champions.

EMILY: Reading CC was certainly different than reading SF. CC was published six years before SF, and, while there are certain similarities between the two texts (primarily in terms of how the protagonist witnesses catastrophic events without being particularly moved or changed by them), CC feels like an earlier work, without Vonnegut’s essential focus on humanism and humor. I remember loving CC when I read it nearly twenty years ago, but this time it felt difficult, unsettling. The rampant sexism and moderate racism felt more pronounced during our current moment of awareness, and although I appreciate the way Vonnegut consistently dealt with larger questions -- the firebombing of Dresden; the global danger posed by particularly destructive weapons -- after rereading SF, CC feels like a less mature work. I wonder if it would have been published today. I don’t mean to come down so hard on CC. There are moments that I love. Bokonon is, of course, fantastic. And there’s that certain moodiness Vonnegut always has, the ability to pass broad judgements on humanity’s absurdity that made me feel good when I was 15 and still make me feel good today. I don’t think we spend enough time discussing how foolish and judgemental and awful people (especially people from the United States) often are, and when Vonnegut writes sweeping statements like, “The highest possible form of treason is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do,” and, “Americans are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier,” it still paints me with a smug, knowing smile (Chapters 45 and 44, respectively).

But some of his other statements, particularly about women or individuals who aren’t white or who are physically different, are problematic, to use the current term. All the “girls” who work for Dr. Asa Breed, vice president in charge of the research laboratory of the General Forge and Foundry Company, are painted horribly (“I’m dumber than an eight-year-old,” mourned Miss Pefko, a secretary, when she doesn’t understand a concept, and Dr. Breed patronizingly declares that the girls in the typing pool “serve science… even though they may not understand a word of it. God bless them, every one!” chapters 15 and 17). There’s also descriptions of “a small and ancient Negro” (chapter 28) and “beautiful Mona,” a blonde “Negress,” and, of course, poor Newton Hoenikker, a midget who has to constantly be reminded of his small stature.

Overall, this book is a warning against the dangerous power of ice-nine, which turns any liquid instantaneously into ice that won’t melt until temperatures reach 140-some degrees. Immediately deadly and vastly destructive, CC’s unnamed protagonist witnesses the end of the world when a small sliver of ice-nine contacts water (via the corpse of someone it already killed) off the small island (essentially a banana republic, though with neither the resources nor the political capital to make it worth controlling) where he’s recently taken control (the commentary on thinly-veiled Caribbean island life warrants addressing at another time). Ice-nine is a clear stand-in for nuclear weapons, and CC is clearly an anti-nuclear book. It’s useful to note that the Cuban missile crisis happened in October 1962, roughly a year before CC was published, and KV seems to use CC to respond to these ongoing global threats. Ice-nine is destructive, awful, and created by the father of the atom bomb, but its threat is surprisingly less than nuclear energy, since the protagonist and a few select others somehow survive the freezing of the earth’s waters -- though, perhaps, the effects will last longer. (Maybe global warming finally has an upside?) It’s also a book clearly written by a scientist, in which Vonnegut draws upon his years of study to influence the construction of his narrative. (The description of how water molecules stack upon each other like cannonballs in front of a courthouse is particularly charming, in my opinion.)

Despite this valiant purpose, however, CC still seems to fall flat. Vonnegut’s protagonists rarely grow as people; they are acted upon, but rarely act in turn. They’re witnesses, vehicles through which Vonnegut can express his feelings about nuclear war, or World War II, or human stupidity in general. But they’re rarely fully-fledged novelistic characters, in the sense that we witness them grow and change and evolve. They simply witness, Vonnegut inserts his trademark witty commentary, and that’s that. While that’s not a terrible model for a book (let’s face it, I ate this shit up when I was a teen), it doesn’t work as well for me anymore. It was enough for me then because I felt like I needed to hear that wry commentary about people being dumb and Americans being crazy. But now that I’m navigating my thirties, I want to see the interior of people too, rather than just comments from an observant outsider.

Overall, I was less impressed with CC on the second reading, unlike SF which rose in my esteem. But one of the best parts of Vonnegut’s work is that the reading is quick, especially for a book like CC which is written in micro-chapters. So I look forward to our next assignment, and seeing where the third book in our project stands.

JACK: There have not been many times that I have had occasion to say this, but at this juncture I must respond to Emily that I respectfully disagree.

Cat's Cradle, for me, for whatever reason, was my favorite Vonnegut novel, and likely still is. It is better than S-F. Unlike S-F, there is actually a plot. Also unlike S-F, the book is comprised of micro-chapters, which makes it easy to recall when and where major plot points occur.

Maybe Emily's criticism is that this book is all plot and no character, but it seems like she's really harping on the supposed racism and misogyny unwittingly conveyed. While I agree some moments are "problematic," I don't believe that Vonnegut intended to lazily expose his own prejudices (I am reminded of another dear friend who queried whether Nabokov was a "sick man" because he wrote Lolita). Like Breakfast of Champions, the stray comments on race (or, here, on female submissiveness/scientific ineptitude) may be shockingly raw, but they reflect the era. I mean fuck Emily, didn't society really only get taken to task for being shitty towards women in late 2017, a year after our collective misogyny put a megalomaniac (among many other appellations) in our highest position of power? Criticizing Vonnegut's portrayal of the female employees of the foundry company is like criticizing Mad Men because all the secretaries (minus major characters Peggy/Joan/Megan) can only type or connect phone calls. We all wish Vonnegut was a progressive saint but this is not meant to be a socially responsible novel. I would add that later on, Vonnegut's work did seem to take on an implicit air of social responsibility, but Cat's Cradle is more comedic science fiction than pointed political satire.

Apart from what I feel is a nitpicky criticism, I can't argue with how the book made Emily feel. I do want to argue that the micro-chapters MAKE the book. There are about 130 itemized chapters, each with a brief title. Sometimes, these are just pure, classic Vonnegut.

I would argue that the book has an incredibly strong first half, and that the second half sort of collapses under its own weight and conceit. Even so, this is a great book!

"Call me Jonah.  My parents did, or nearly did.  They called me John." 

So it begins.  It's a call back to Moby Dick (which I haven't read and probably should one day). Then, we never hear the name again. What does the narrator actually do? Is he a reporter? In a way, this framing mechanism is at the heart of why I believe this is such a successful novel, and why Citizen Kane is such a successful film. That is, the investigation: what is rosebud? What is ice-nine?

Emily brilliantly observes that this is likely an allegory for nuclear weapons and the Cuban missile crisis. But is San Lorenzo a stand-in for Cuba? I don't think so, though there is definitely talk about its communist bent (and the defiantly anti-communist spirit of the American people circa height of cold war).

I do want to ask, regarding the lack of character development: what Vonnegut novel truly does have fully-fledged characters that change and grow?

I wasn't alive and neither was Emily (though she is better equipped to draw such conclusions as an historian) and while I appreciate the interpretation, looking at the book this way sort of ruins it for me. I mean, I know it's a simple story and there's not much there that doesn't feel like anything more than thinly-veiled satire, but it's a story about the apocalypse or the end of the world or the fate of humanity as a whole and it feels Profound in the childish sort of way that Vonnegut sometimes projects perfectly. No, the book isn't as perfect as I remember it being, but it does have an ending to rival S-F. And while it may have come 6 years before (making Vonnegut about 40 at the time of writing?), S-F only feels like a more "mature" work because the characters are not all caricatures (to put it simply). Even with its flaws, I still love this book and think it should be read by everyone.

Nominations for next book:
-Mother Night
-Sirens of Titan

-Hocus Pocus
-Deadeye Dick
-Jailbird or Player Piano worth reading? (2 I haven’t read)
-Bluebeard
-Timequake

EMILY: I think Jack makes a ton of really excellent points and I also think it’s really fun when we disagree. This project is so great! My vote for the next book is Bluebeard, Timequake, or Breakfast of Champions, even though I think that was once nominated and then we took it off the table. I want to put it back on! Put it back on the table like the breakfast of champions it is!

Avid Reader - Robert Gottlieb (2016)

This is the first book reviewed as a result of podcasts.  At a certain point, I am going to write a lot about podcasts, maybe.  Suffice to say, they have been an influence on me.

Because I was listening to WTF, I was turned onto the New York Times Book Review podcast, and because I listened to Robert Gottlieb talk about romance novels on that, I was turned onto his memoir.  I first became aware of Robert Gottlieb after I purchased the Paris Review Interview Volume I.  He was one of the interviewees featured in that volume, and I recall reading his with greater interest than most (at least, for say, Richard Price, Jack Gilbert, Robert Stone, and Elizabeth Bishop).  He couldn't hold a candle to Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, James Cain, Rebecca West, Billy Wilder, or Joan Didion, but he came across as one of the more engaging subjects.

I've just leafed through the first few pages of that interview, and I was struck by how I already knew a few of the stories from Avid Reader.  Like about how he renamed the main character Bob from Bill in Something Happened, or the novel Lilith and the emergence of its eponymous heroine 60-70 pages in and how he suggested renaming it after her to create anticipation.  Gottlieb has a lot of stories and he seems to tell many of them with a gossipy relish.  To be sure, he has had an extraordinary life in letters.  But it's almost as if he feels obligated to share all of these stories, lest they be forgotten to history.  Perhaps they are already marked down elsewhere.

In any case, when he started talking about the The Power Broker in the interview, I had to flip back to reality and remember that the portion on that biography and its author, Robert Caro, is one of the true highlights, just because of its outsizedness.  In truth I read this a few months ago and I have a backlog of posts and I don't recall many specific details of it.  I just remember it for some of the nastier things in it.  It almost seems to have a tabloid appeal at moments.  Much of the time, it seems as if Gottlieb is just bragging about all the great stuff he's done.  He basically goes through his life and different jobs and the writers he edited.     

Here they are:
Sybille Bedford (A Legacy)
Rona Jaffe (The Best of Everything)
Jessica Mitford (The American Way of Death)
Joseph Heller (Catch-22) 
Sylvia Ashton-Warner (Teacher)
Mordecai Richler (Barney's Version)
Edna O'Brien
Toni Morrison (Beloved)
Dariel Telfer (The Caretakers)
Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes)
J.R. Salamanca (Lilith)
Jetta Carleton (The Moonflower Vine)
Robert Crichton (The Secret of Santa Vittoria)
Chaim Potok (The Chosen)
Charles Portis (True Grit)
[not] John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)
James Thurber
Sid Perelman
Cynthia Lindsay
Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain)
Robert Caro (The Power Broker)
Brooke Hayward (Haywire)
Barbara Goldsmith (Little Gloria...Happy at Last)
Jean Stein and George Plimpton (Edie)
Gloria Vanderbilt (Once Upon a Time)
Lauren Bacall (By Myself)
Liv Ullman (Changing)
John Cheever
John Updike
John Hersey
Anne Tyler (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant)
Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire)
Maria Riva (daughter of Marlene Dietrich)
Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook)
V.S. Naipaul
Roald Dahl
Anthony Burgess
Salman Rushdie
Antonia Fraser
Robert Massie (Peter the Great)
Barbara Tuchman (A Distant Mirror, The March of Folly)
Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment)
Bob Dylan (Lyrics--now he's edited 3 Nobel winners)
Irene Mayer Selznick (A Private View)
Katharine Hepburn
Eve Arnold (The Unretouched Woman)
Robert Townsend (Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits)
John Gardner
Cynthia Ozick
Don DeLillo
Denis Johnson
Robert Stone
William Gaddis
Gordon Lish
Harold Brodkey*
Alfred Kazin
Elia Kazan
Nora Ephron (Heartburn, I Feel Bad About My Neck, I Remember Nothing) (one of the highlights)
Dorothy Dunnett
John Le Carre (The Night Manager)
Katharine Graham (Personal History) (also a nice anecdote about Justice O'Connor)
Bill Clinton (My Life) (also one of the highlight)
Will Friedwald (Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers)

*: "And then there was Harold Brodkey--brilliant, maddening, tricky, self-destructive, troublemaking, irresistible; he and Gordon had tormented each other for years.  He was a sacred icon at Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, perhaps Shawn's favorite writer of fiction after Salinger, and Harold dazzled in the same way Salinger had--and with the same narcissistic obsession with childhood and adolescence. (The New Yorker fiction department was far from pleased with this favoritism of Shawn's.) Harold had embarked on what was meant to be, and was heralded (by himself loudest of all) as, a major work to be called A Party of Animals.
Lynn Nesbit was his agent, and she had sold the book to Joe Fox at Random House, but as time passed and the book grew longer and longer but not closer and closer, at Harold's insistence the contract was switched to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for more money.  It fared no better there, and when I arrogantly decided that I was the one who could wrest a novel from the material, it passed to me--in exchange for yet more money.  Harold had by this time married the writer Ellen Schwamm, whose two novels I had edited--the latter, How He Saved Her, being an account of how he took over her hitherto conventional life. (Harold, with his diabolical psychic potency and ambiguous sexuality, would not have been every woman's cup of tea.)"

Moments like this, followed by further anecdote, make me glad to have read Avid Reader.  Maybe I will never read How He Saved Her but it sounds hilarious.

After Gottlieb moves to The New Yorker, there are less anecdotes about famous writers, and more about the staff of the magazine in a constant rush to put out an issue per week.  I don't try to read The New Yorker but I appreciate what it does for society.  This is an interesting part of the book, noteworthy personally to me because he references handing off the reins to Tina Brown, who had published a memoir of her own about her time at Vanity Fair at the same time I was reading this.  I actually listened to her give interviews on two separate podcasts, and she referenced the same things about her interactions with Donald Trump on each.  Gottlieb later returns to Knopf and tells anecdotes about five more notable authors.

There is an amusing picaresque quality to the tales of his early life and first marriage, but his social life seems to be intertwined with many female friends that are part of the larger publishing scene.  There are just as many un-famous friends that he writes about as famous subjects, but in a review of a book that I would imagine few in the general American public would seek out, in the society we live in, in the medium this review takes, we have to stick with the famous.  It made me think about getting paranoid about writing a memoir and worrying that such and such person would be offended if I wrote something about them or didn't write something about them.  The next book that will be reviewed is Brix Smith-Start's memoir The Rise, the Fall and The Rise and at times, she will create pseudonyms for less famous friends of hers.  I don't want to spoil it but I will just say that I had a significantly better time reading Smith-Start's memoir than Gottlieb's.  In any case, Gottlieb's writing is much more prim and proper.  There were definitely a few sentences where I was like, "Wait dude, you're an editor?" But then I would re-read them and be like, okay, I can see how that makes sense, or is at least grammatically correct.  I'm not going to compare it to Smith-Start's anymore except to stay that this is better edited, and generally less compelling.

That said, Gottlieb has had an extraordinary life filled with amusing anecdotes, and the effect of this book is to be insanely jealous of him and his fabulous life.  It's not as if he didn't work hard for it, but he seemed to get very lucky, being in the right place at right time and befriending celebrities and literary icons. 

Gottlieb frames his narrative in several long chapters, "Learning," "Reading," "Working" (at Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and The New Yorker), and "Dancing."  Writing about dancing is an acquired taste.  There is a lot of writing about music that I like.  For some reason I find writing about dancing much less interesting, but that is probably because I am not into dance.  In a way, Gottlieb may sense this, and refrains from mentioning anything about it at all until that last chapter.  I skimmed through it.  (I did a similar thing with the final part of Brix Smith-Start's book, but I found her section--on fashion and running a high-end clothing store with her husband--more compelling).

Yet Gottlieb ends on a beautiful note, summing up his 85 previous years on the planet with a remarkable meditation on "retirement" and mortality .  I haven't read many books written from this perspective, yet I can say that Gottlieb writes with clarity, acceptance and gratitude for the life he has lived.  We should all aspire to his level of personal happiness.  I can hardly think of a better life to have lived--though I don't think I could read nearly as much.  If Gottlieb kept a blog like Flying Houses, he would probably have 10,000 posts in 10 years, not 350.  Publishing indeed may be changing, and Gottlieb may not be laying down a "how-to-become-an-editor," but I wish this book had been published in 2004 rather than 2016.  That's not to say I would have modeled my life on Gottlieb's, but it might have been fun to try.

Armageddon in Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut (2008)

Before we proceed with our fifth Kurt Vonnegut review, allow me to make a confession: I am a twerp.  I am a twerp, and I am ashamed of myself.

"I consider anybody who borrows a book instead of buying it, or lends one, a twerp.  When I was a student at Shortridge High School a million years ago, a twerp was defined as a guy who put a set of false teeth up his rear end and bit the buttons off the back seats of taxicabs.
But I hasten to say, should some impressionable younger person here tonight, at loose ends from a dysfunctional family, resolve to take a shot at being a real twerp tomorrow, that there are no longer buttons on the back seats of taxicabs.  Times change!" (30)

This is a somewhat poorly-written first sentence, a rarity for Vonnegut.  I do lend books, so maybe I am not a twerp.  My roommate lent me this book and I lent him Galapagos and reflected that I need to review all the books by KV that I read in the past and loved.

Armageddon in Retrospect is Vonnegut's final published work.  Actually, that's wrong!  It's his first posthumous work.  And there have been 11 or 12 more since then.

It's important because it's connected quite intimately with his death.  His son, Mark Vonnegut, offers an introduction that is about as finely written as anything by his father.  The introduction itself is a true highlight.

This book took me about a week to read, and I was quite casual about it.  It has that trademark Vonnegut appeal, but it's pretty weird.  First, it opens with a speech he gave to accept an award in Indianapolis, IN in 2007, shortly before he passed away (actually I think he passed before he was able to deliver it in person--Mark Vonnegut delivered it instead).  The excerpt near the top of this review is from that speech.

Then, there are a bunch of short stories about war.  Several of these are more tragicomic extrapolations of his experience as a POW in Dresden at the end of World War II, which was also an inspiration for Slaughterhouse-Five (also near the top of my list to revisit).  Prior to the speech is a letter written from a young Vonnegut to his parents while he was a POW, and following the speech is "Wailing Shall Be in All Streets."  There is a New York Times review which posits that these two pieces are the strongest in the collection, and I am inclined to agree.  The former is a surprisingly entertaining and mordant narrative of his experience being captured, and the latter is a deeper, more detailed reflection upon it.

"Great Day" follows and this is where Vonnegut shifts into fiction mode.  It's a mix of a war story and science fiction, and to me it was still kind of confusing what was going on in the beginning, and seems most notable for its ending, which seems inevitable.

"Guns Before Butter" is about a group of soldiers fantasizing about what they are going to eat once they return home and can get off of their soup and bread rations.  They trade recipes with one another, and the German soldier in charge of their supervision chides them for it, then later gets in trouble for something over them, and ends the story indulging their talk.  It's a pleasant and mildly heartwarming lark.

"Happy Birthday, 1951" is another vaguely confusing story that has a post-apocalyptic bent to it.  It is about an old man and a boy in his charge, in a threatening environment which might be depicted vaguely like The Road.  The old man takes the boy out of their hiding place and into the forest so that he can appreciate natural beauty, and away from the perpetual state of war they live under.

"Brighten Up" is another story about war.  By this point in the collection, the reader is thinking, okay, this is Vonnegut's The Things They Carried.  But the stories aren't connected or linked in a similar way, and they're not quite as intricately crafted or emotional.  "Brighten Up" features a soldier (Louis) that extorts valuables from other soldiers and receives preferred treatment from the Germans.  It reads more like a sketch of a real person Vonnegut knew there.

"The Unicorn Trap" is one of the weirdest stories in the collection, and not necessarily the best.  But I did think it was hilarious the way the characters talked, with it taking place in the year 1067.  That aspect reminded me of "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned."

I had almost forgotten that "Unknown Soldier" was in the book, but it's very short and is about the contest that a couple wins when they have the first baby born in the year 2000.

"Spoils" is also pretty short and is again about soldiers trying to take valuables from a pillaged village.

"Just You and Me, Sammy," features a character that seems like Louis from "Brighten Up," except made even meaner and more sinister.  It is probably the most infuriating thing in this collection.  The reader will want to kill George and will most likely the find the ending satisfying.  It's also very long.  After "Wailing Will Be in All Streets," it's the most affecting.

As is "The Commandant's Desk," which seems to take off on a tangent from "Spoils." It concerns an old man and his widowed daughter dealing with American soldiers that have taken over their town.  The ending is clever, and oddly reminds me of some of Nabokov's short stories.

It ends with the title story, "Armageddon in Retrospect," which has more potential than anything else and made me laugh more than anything else but seemed to kind of peter out.  It opens with a brilliant conceit:

"Chronologically, the list should probably begin with the late Dr. Selig Schildknecht, of Dresden, Germany, who spent, by and large fruitlessly, the last half of his life and inheritance in trying to get someone to pay attention to his theories on mental illness.  What Schildknecht said, in effect, was that the only unified theory of mental illness that seems to fit all the facts was the most ancient one, which had never been disproved.  He believed that the mentally ill were possessed by the Devil.
He said so in book after book, all printed at his own expense, since no publisher would touch them, and he urged that research be undertaken to find out as much as possible about the Devil, his forms, his habits, his strong points, his weaknesses." (210)

The story goes some pretty interesting places, but I got lost in the last few pages and didn't really understand how the "Armageddon"  took place.  Still it's the kind of big gesture story that caps off a collection like he did in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" in Welcome to the Monkey House.  Now, this book cannot compare to that one.  They are not in the same league.  But it's a pleasure for the Vonnegut maniac and casual readers alike.  I would advise one to start elsewhere if they had not read much of him, but this shows Vonnegut in his most pacifist element, speaking the most potent truth derived from his past experiences, regarding the senseless tragedy of war.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami (2014)

          

          My husband Dickson belongs to a book club, and last week we hosted his group’s bi-monthly meeting, when six or eight or sometimes ten literary men gather to drink beer, discuss books and eat whatever snacks the host has kindly provided. For this meeting they had read, at my suggestion, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, because the club is mostly made up of runners and Rabbit Angstrom’s story has a decidedly athletic feel. Even though I didn’t attend the meeting (it’s a boys’ club, so I stayed upstairs), when I came down after they were done, the conversation had turned to the newest Murakami – a far cry from Rabbit and his troubled relationship with Janice – and the excitement many club members had about reading his new work.

            I had already finished Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage three days after I bought the book, and the members of Dickson’s club asked me what I thought. Was it as much of a slog as 1Q84? Was it as otherworldly as A Wild Sheep Chase or Kafka on the Shore? Or was it quieter, like Norwegian Wood, or Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running? I wasn’t entirely sure how to answer. So much of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is like much of Murakami’s other writing, thick with descriptions of simple meals and lonely men and strange, often very strange, sex – yet other parts of it also felt fresh and new. In sum, it was a decent new book from a man who has perfected his own subtle style. Colorless won’t make anyone turn away from Murakami, even if they’ve never read him before, and it’s engaging enough for his diehard fans. I don’t consider the three days I read it misspent.

As we sat in my living room discussing Murakami, we realized that, between us, we had read almost all of his work, and there were things we could all recite as commonalities between his books. In an interview from 2011, Murakami told a Spanish audience that he was a lonely child, and the three things that filled his quiet hours were “cats, books and music.” You can see the vapor trails of each of these things in the work Murakami has since produced, as each is filled with those reoccurring themes playing distinct roles in his characters’ lives.

In this sense, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is no different. There are mentions of cats and their tiny, silent feet, and music, particularly the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s piano solo “Le mal du pays.” Books, whether the characters are active readers or not, also merit mention time and time again, whether in descriptions of people’s bookshelves or as ways to pass the time. And, as usual, there are descriptions of the other things that constantly fill Murakami’s world: of simple meals stirfried with whatever is in the fridge, of physical deformities (six fingers on each hand, like in Wind Up Bird), and of physical activity, this time spent in the pool. There are the now-customary discussions of sexual proclivities that border on the phantasmagoric, but are always told in Murakami’s simple, matter-of-fact voice. And, like Tengo in 1Q84, Tsukuru’s sexual dreams merge frighteningly into reality, blurring the lines (and the effects) between what happens in bed, awake or asleep.

It is, like much of his work, the story of a single man, one searching for something he doesn’t understand, and who may find love or may screw it up. (My bet is usually that he’ll screw it up.) But Tsukuru Tazaki is more lonely than most, and that’s what makes Colorless a remarkable book.

Tsukuru Tazaki lives alone in Tokyo, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, but you’d hardly know it from Murakami’s descriptions of the place. Except for the train stations where Tsukuru spends most of his time (he’s an engineer working to make stations more streamlined and accessible), Tsukuru rarely participates in social life and other people rarely infiltrate his world.

Tsukuru seems to prefer it that way. Save for a friend named Haida and a slowly-blossoming romance with a woman named Sara (who may or may not also be dating an older, mustachioed gentleman), Tsukuru lives, sleeps, eats and exercises alone. And, alone, his life is no big party either. He spent the bulk of his time in college contemplating death, not eating, barely drinking, attending classes to pass the time. Now, at age 36, he’s thin and stark. He eats like a bird and never finishes an entire beer. He knows what he is but can’t seem to change it: the man is boring even to himself.

What could have caused such a sad, desolate life? Herein lies this book’s charm: no one becomes a Tsukuru Tazaki unless something truly traumatic has happened, and Tsukuru’s trauma is dramatic indeed. After his first year of college in Tokyo, Tsukuru is abandoned by his high school friends, all four of whom remained in Tsukuru’s hometown Nagoya after graduation. This group, which had originally numbered five, was once so close they saw themselves as fingers on a single hand. So it came as an abrupt shock when they summarily dismissed Tsukuru with a single phone call, telling him that they never wanted to see or hear from him again, with no explanation as to how or why. And Tsukuru being Tsukuru, he didn’t feel the need to ask.

The title’s reference to Tsukuru being “colorless” comes from the nicknames of these four friends. The two men in the group were nicknamed Red and Blue (or Aka and Ao in Japanese), while the two women were nicknamed White and Black (Shiro and Kuro), with all of the colors culled from their family names. Tsukuru, whose name is a homophone for the Japanese word meaning “to build or make,” has no color; he is colorless, though his engineering degree makes a kind of onomastic sense.

The “pilgrimage” of the title is also apt, since Tsukuru goes on one of these as well. It’s Sara who pushes Tsukuru to contact his old friends (would a guy like Tsukuru ever do that on his own?) when she realizes that there’s something stuck in him that cannot be undone until Tsukuru has learned why he was dismissed. So on this pilgrimage he goes, first back to Nagoya, and then on, surprisingly, to Finland. He contacts each of his old friends in turn to learn why and how, years ago, they could so quickly and completely abandon one of their own.

I won’t reveal the outcomes of Tsukuru’s pilgrimage since that would defeat the purpose of reading Murakami’s book, but I will suggest that, as Murakami ages, we see him treading on familiar ground while, at the same time, invoking something relatively new. Reading Colorless will feel familiar, like reading Wind Up Bird or 1Q84 or Kafka or Norwegian Wood. But parts of it will also feel thrillingly unique, fresh in the increasing span of his decades-long oeuvre. For example, Murakami has never written so movingly about friendship, especially since so many of his protagonists are often alone, and, despite her possible ongoing affair with another man, Sara is one of Murakami’s most competent and least-batshit-crazy female characters yet. It would be lovely to see more of this real emotion explored, especially for the women who are still a minority in Murakami’s world.

But Colorless may also be a sign of the times, or at least a sign of Murakami’s ever-increasing age (he turned 65 earlier this year). In Running, Murakami described the “wells” in his mind, and how a new one must be tapped for each book to emerge. He feared, in his 2008 memoir, that his reserves would eventually run dry, and that at some desperate point the drilling would cease and his career as a writer would dry up as well. The good news is that this clearly hasn’t happened yet. The bad news, however, is that many of the same wells are being used, often at the expense of his writing anything completely exciting or new.

Like Kurt Vonnegut (blessings upon his name), Murakami is getting repetitive with age. (Did A Man Without a Country contain anything we hadn’t read before?) The direct lines between Murakami’s life and fiction are clearer now than they used to be, and themes forming between books (cats, books, music, sex, stir fry, physical deformities, dreams-with-real-consequences, men stuck in wells) are getting easier to track. Aomame, the assassin-protagonist of 1Q84, is clearly based off of Murakami’s own physical therapist, whom he described at length in Running. (A tiny woman who stretches stiff gym-going men? Who uses surprising levels of force to bend and pull stubborn muscles into submission? Who toils and works until both the masseuse and the massaged are drenched in sweat from exertion? Wait a second, we’ve seen this before!) We can see Running’s real gym masseuse in Tokyo transform into Aomame in 1Q84 in the same way we can see a woman with six fingers pop up in Wind-Up Bird and again in Colorless, or in the same way Tengo’s orgasm with Fuka-Eri in 1Q84 results in Aomame getting pregnant while Tsukuru’s dream of sex with Shiro may have resulted in something strangely tragic happening to her in real life (it’s a spoiler alert if I say what this is). In Murakami’s world, the same weird story often gets told, but each time it’s revealed in a markedly different way.

Like the bulk of his characters, Murakami feels most comfortable when treading regular ground, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like reading it every time. Ultimately, what I liked the most about Colorless was how it showed Murakami evolving as a person. Colorless was clearly written by a middle-aged man who has his own struggles with aging and death, and who understands that the past, no matter how painful, can never be completely changed. His characters are getting deeper too: Tsukuru is a thoughtful guy, whose pilgrimage (even if it wasn’t initially his idea) is done with a sense of purpose and commitment. He’s less swept along by the winds of fate, as so many of Murakami’s characters have been before, than he is actively trying to understand his own past, and his confrontations with his former friends are deliberate and calm.

Perhaps this is suggestive of Murakami’s own more purposeful track in life, or at least of the maturity that comes with advancing age. Would a younger Murakami have written a character like Tsukuru, who willingly confronts those who unceremoniously dismissed him years before? Would anyone under the age of 65 be comfortable doing such a thing? For me, at less than half of Murakami’s age, the idea of confronting those who hurt me in the past is terrifying, but perhaps I’m still too young to be judicious about such things. I’d rather lick my wounds than have the cojones to understand why people were once dicks, and this could be the difference between a novel from a 31-year-old versus an aging baby boomer like Murakami. Despite the book returning to his ever-present themes, a younger Murakami could never have written Tsukuru. He could only appear from a more mature, evolved voice.

Ultimately, despite treading this familiar ground, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage will hardly disappoint any Murakami devotee. You can’t separate a writer from his or her themes, and why would you want to? After all, there are probably a dozen literature Ph.D.s whose degrees wouldn’t exist if Murakami didn’t write the way he does. And the world Murakami has created is a good one, a place that millions of readers regularly like to call home. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the things we see can expect to see, Murakami has created a pleasant, often exciting and certainly always perplexing place, where readers can walk on cat-like feet, alone in moments of quiet contemplation, while cooking a simple meal out of whatever they can find in the fridge.

-Emily Dufton

            

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1965)

I first read God Bless You, Dr. Rosewater when I was a junior or senior in high school, on the recommendation of a classmate.  I have not read it since.  I do not know why that classmate felt the need to recommend it so strongly, but perhaps it was because we both had something in common with Eliot Rosewater:

"Eliot had unremarkable academic careers at Loomis and Harvard.  He became an expert sailor during summers in Cotuit, on Cape Cod, and an intermediate skier during winter vacations in Switzerland." (15)

This could hardly be the reason, but the fact remains that I have never read another book whose main character went to the same high school as me.  And that high school should have been proud to put this book on its English course syllabuses--or at least assign it for summer reading for incoming freshman students rather than Clan of the Cave Bear.  Because this book has a very positive message, and is much more fun to read.  I'm afraid, however, that it might be considered "too racy" or "adult" even though it is comparatively tame.

But the book was worth reading in 2000 and it is worth reading today.  Oddly enough, I could appreciate it more after going through law school:

"No one ever went out to lunch with Mushari.  He took nourishment alone in cheap cafeterias, and plotted the violent overthrow of the Rosewater Foundation.  He knew no Rosewaters.  What engaged his emotions was the fact that the Rosewater fortune was the largest single money package represented by McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee.  He recalled what his favorite professor, Leonard Leech, once told him about getting ahead in law.  Leech said that, just as a good airplane pilot should always be looking for places to land, so should a lawyer be looking for situations where large amounts of money were about to change hands." (4)

This is how the novel opens up: Norman Mushari is a young attorney straight out of Cornell Law School working for a firm that represents an $87 million foundation headed by Eliot Rosewater.  Eliot also went to Harvard Law School but he does not work for anybody.  He oversees the foundation.  His father is a senator, representing Indiana.  Mushari hopes to have Eliot adjudged insane so that he may be removed as an officer of the foundation and that control may pass to Eliot's second cousin, Fred Rosewater.

The action of the book moves to Rosewater, Indiana.  Eliot's ancestors founded the town, and he returns to set up new headquarters for the foundation.  This part of the book details the breakdown of his marriage to Sylvia and the business that he carries out.  He has a black phone and a red phone.  The red phone is for the fire department, where he is a volunteer, and the black phone is for the foundation.  The foundation essentially takes phone calls from anybody that is having any kind of problem.  Eliot is a sort of therapist and philanthropist to everyone in town.  The people of the town are often referred to as idiots.

In my review of Slapstick, I said that book bears a passing resemblance to this book (though Vonnegut self-graded that novel a "D" and gave this one an "A") and that a theme of that book was "extended families."  God Bless You, Dr. Rosewater is a better book largely because its plot is not nearly as unbelievable.  Yes, the plot is sort of ridiculous, but it is not altogether implausible that a person could be impossibly rich and feel that they don't deserve the money and thus go out of their way to help people less fortunate than themselves.  It is a rather heartwarming conceit, and while I might label most of Vonnegut's novels "heartwarming," this might be his "most heartwarming novel."  Eliot Rosewater is also one of the best characters he created.  Rosewater shows up in a few of his other books, though not nearly as often as Kilgore Trout, who also makes an appearance in this novel.  

There is also some clever commentary on obscenity.  The Supreme Court was still trying to define obscenity in 1965, but Vonnegut offers his own parallel reality:

"The Rosewater Law was what the Senator thought of as his legislative masterpiece.  It made the publication or possession of obscene materials a Federal offense, carrying penalties up to fifty thousand dollars and ten years in prison, without hope of parole.  It was a masterpiece because it actually defined obscenity.
Obscenity, it said, is any picture or phonograph record or any written matter calling attention to reproductive organs, bodily discharges, or bodily hair.
'This psychoanalyst,' the Senator complained, 'wanted to know about my childhood.  He wanted to go into my feelings about bodily hair.' The Senator shuddered.  'I asked him to kindly get off the subject, that my revulsions were shared, so far as I knew, by all decent men.'  He pointed to McAllister, simply wanting to point at someone, anyone.  'There's your key to pornography.  Other people say, "Oh, how can you recognize it, how can you tell it from art and all that?" I've written the key into law!  The difference between pornography and art is bodily hair!'" (95-96)

The plot may be described as thus: Eliot gives advice to people who want to kill themselves in Indiana.  This is the heart of the book and as such I don't want to spoil these scenes.  But there is another segment to the book: the Rhode Island part.  The action switches to Pisquontuit, Rhode Island, where Fred Rosewater, the son of a suicide, sells life insurance and is generally sad about his life.  This is a rather strange part of the novel, though I could not quite call it a misstep.  It just seems to get into a lot of detail about all the people in Pisquontuit, while Fred mainly exists as Eliot's potential replacement.  Mushari is the villain of the novel (though sometimes Senator Rosewater seems like a villain, too) but the book is not about the plot.  It's about how society reacts to a modern-day "saint"--is he a lunatic or is he the sanest man in America?

Like any Vonnegut novel, however, this is pretty light reading, and mostly fun for the humor of it.  But it is still just as relevant in 2013 as it was in 1965:

"'Well--' and Trout rubbed his hands, watched the rubbing, 'what you did in Rosewater County was far from insane.  It was quite possibly the most important social experiment of our time, for it dealt on a very small scale with a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines.  The problem is this: How to love people who have no use?
'In time, almost all men and women will become worthless as producers of goods, food, services, and more machines, as sources of practical ideas in the areas of economics, engineering, and probably medicine, too.  So--if we can't find reasons and methods for treasuring human beings because they are human beings, then we might as well, as has so often been suggested, rub them out.'" (264-265)

In short, more people could stand to be like Eliot Rosewater.  If they did so, the world will be a better place.  This is why whenever I receive a phone call from some random person who managed to get my number in some strange way (like, for example, an extraordinary voicemail greeting I left on a phone at the City of Chicago Department of Law in the summer of 2012 that laid out every possible way to contact me) that I listen to them and try to help them as best as I can, rather than saying, "I'm sorry, there is nothing I can do for you."  There is much that can be learned from this book, and even if you didn't go to Loomis, I think you will find it highly worthwhile.

Slapstick - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

In Palm Sunday (1981), Kurt Vonnegut gives each of his previous books a grade.  These are the results (books I have read will be marked with an asterisk; books I have reviewed on Flying Houses will be marked with a double-asterisk):

Player Piano: B
The Sirens of Titan: A*
Mother Night: A*
Cat's Cradle: A+*
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A*
Slaughterhouse-Five: A+*
Welcome to the Monkey House: B-*
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
Breakfast of Champions: C**
Slapstick: D**
Jailbird: A
Palm Sunday: C*

Slapstick (1976) thus appeared to me to be a waste of time, something I would put off until after reading all the other Vonnegut novels.  (I still have a lot to go, and a lot to re-read to be posted on this blog).     Over Thanksgiving break, I saw a copy of the book on the kitchen counter-top in my parent's house.  I asked my mom who was reading it and she said she had come upon it at the dump and felt that I might be interested in it.

None of this sounds very reassuring, I am sure, but I have to say that Vonnegut was unduly harsh on himself in his grading of this novel.  While it does not rise to the heights of Cat's Cradle or Slaughterhouse-Five, it bears a certain resemblance to God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, is probably more entertaining than Mother Night (though I would have to concede that book to be much stronger overall), and may be nearly as strong as Sirens of Titan (though some people may want to hang me for making that statement).  The bottom line is that, just as Vonnegut is too harsh on himself with Breakfast of Champions (which undoubtedly deserves at least a B+ if not an A-), so too does Slapstick deserve a higher grade (B+).

I am not sure why people would forget about this book more than the others.  It is typical post-Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut, where he seemed to dismiss the idea that he should attempt to write "serious" books, while concurrently writing on a more subversive level that was more reactionary to the contemporaneous political regime.  And yet Slapstick, despite its title and moments of sheer ridiculousness, is a very serious book in terms of pinpointing the problem of all government: the idea of "extended families," out beyond the "nuclear family" or the "immediate family."

The story concerns two twins who are grotesque and tall and ultra-intelligent.  But they seem to become stupider when they are kept apart from one another.  They have some sort of telepathic connection in their sinuses.  This makes the book sound strange.

But early on they make several discoveries about the world, and one of them was quite enjoyable for me, as I was studying for my exam on the First Amendment (Constitutional Law III) at the time of reading:

"Yes, and Eliza and I composed a precocious critique of the Constitution of the United States of America, too.  We argued that it was as good a scheme for misery as any, since its success in keeping the common people reasonably happy and proud depended on the strength of the people themselves--and yet it described no practical machinery which would tend to make the people, as opposed to their elected representatives, strong.
We said it was possible that the framers of the Constitution were blind to the beauty of persons who were without great wealth or powerful friends or public office, but who were nonetheless genuinely strong.
We thought it was more likely, though, that the framers had not noticed that it was natural, and therefore almost inevitable, that human beings in extraordinary and enduring situations should think of themselves as composing new families.  Eliza and I pointed out that this happened no less in democracies than in tyrannies, since human beings were the same the wide world over, and civilized only yesterday.
Elected representatives, hence, could be expected to become members of the famous and powerful families of elected representatives--which would, perfectly naturally, make them wary and squeamish and stingy with respect to all the other sorts of families which, again, perfectly naturally, subdivided mankind.

***

Eliza and I, thinking as halves of a single genius, proposed that the Constitution be amended so as to guarantee that every citizen, no matter how humble or crazy or incompetent or deformed, somehow be given membership in some family as covertly xenophobic and crafty as the one their public servants formed.

Good for Eliza and me!" (57-58)

The book details Eliza's and Wilbur's (the narrator) upbringing.  They are sheltered and locked away, they behave like idiots, and they secretly learn Greek and Latin and read every book in the family library.  There is also a fair amount of incest, which is a bit disturbing, but mitigated by the fact that the plot of this book is almost entirely absurd.

Wilbur is 100 years old as the novel begins in medias res and living in Turtle Bay in Manhattan.  Manhattan is referred to as the "Island of Death," or "Skyscraper National Park."  Gravity (and the Albanian flu) has destroyed a large majority of the human population on Earth, and the Chinese have figured out a way to shrink themselves beyond all possible human proportions.  Wilbur is President of the United States of America at one point, and runs his campaign on the slogan "Lonesome No More!"  It is based upon the idea of giving everyone new middle names, and it seems rather nice in theory:

'I spoke of American loneliness.  It was the only subject I needed for victory, which was lucky.  It was the only subject I had.

It was a shame, I said, that I had not come along earlier in American history with my simple and workable anti-loneliness plan.  I said that all the damaging excesses of Americans in the past were motivated by loneliness rather than a fondness for sin.

An old man crawled up to me afterwards and told me how he used to buy life insurance and mutual funds and household appliances and automobiles and so on, not because he liked them or needed them, but because the salesman seemed to promise to be his relative, and so on.  

'I had no relatives and I needed relatives,' he said.

'Everybody does,' I said.

He told me that he had been drunk for a while, trying to make relatives out of people in bars.  'The bartender would be kind of a father, you know--' he said.  'And then all of a sudden it was closing time.'

'I know,' I said.  I told him a half-truth about myself which had proved to be popular on the campaign trail.  'I used to be so lonesome,' I said, 'that the only person I could share my innermost thoughts with was a horse named "Budweiser".'

And I told how Budweiser had died." (183-184)

It is also funny when another faction springs up:

"Was there no substantial opposition to the new social scheme?  Why, of course there was.  And, as Eliza and I had predicted, my enemies were so angered by the idea of artificial extended families that they constituted a polyglot artificial extended family of their own.  

They had campaign buttons, too, which they went on wearing long after I was elected.  It was inevitable what those buttons said, to wit: 

[Picture of a button that reads, 'Lonesome Thank God!']" (197)

There are moments in this book of total absurdity and also moments of deep profundity.  I can sort of understand why Vonnegut might have given himself a "D" (sometimes the book seemed "padded" in some way), but it is of fairly substantial length, and--typical for Vonnegut--able to be read in a day or two.  

The small moments of profundity definitely make this book worth reading.  One of them comes near the end:

"I was impressed.  I realized that nations could never acknowledge their own wars as tragedies, but that families not only could, but had to.

Bully for them!" (244)

The science fiction elements of Vonnegut novels are not always believable, but sometimes they are at least plausible.  As usual, his imagination is driving at full speed, and it makes for a solidly entertaining read.  I certainly recommend this book--with the caveat that there are perhaps a dozen Vonnegut novels I would recommend be read before it.  

Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Oeuvre rule: as previously reported, the only major items by Kurt Vonnegut that I have not read number few more than five: Slapstick, Player Piano, Jailbird, the new story collection, and various collections of essays, unpublished stories, etc. I first read Breakfast of Champions nine or ten years ago, in the midst of Vonnegut mania after reading his oft-cited masterpieces (Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, Deadeye Dick--Sirens of Titan would languish in libraries for five more years, Hocus Pocus less than one), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Welcome to the Monkey House, and Mother Night. Timequake fell along somewhere in there too. It was safe to say that Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger were my two favorite writers before I got into F. Scott Fitzgerald, and then many others later. Vonnegut is prime material for high schoolers because the language is so simple--but moreover, in his re-definition of what literature can be, readers may be driven to reassess the total value of books themselves, and to explore unthought philosophical tangents relating to the fabric of their existence and consciousness. This is one of Vonnegut's chief virtues as a writer: his ability to make his audience think. His body of work is also probably the single funniest in the canon of Great Books.

Breakfast of Champions came out in 1972, or around the time Vonnegut turned 50, and in his preface he writes of how the book is a birthday present to himself, and how he plans to "retire" several of his characters. Up until this point in his career, he had written six other books--Player Piano, Sirens of Titan, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, and Slaughterhouse Five. The progression from novel to novel seems to indicate greater experimentation and more absurd humor--which I think hits its pitch for Vonnegut's career in Breakfast of Champions. In addition to its relative plotlessness, there are probably close to a hundred small drawings by Vonnegut also.

The book concerns Dwayne Hoover, who is a car salesman who is one of the richest men in Midland City, Ohio, whose wife killed herself by drinking Drano. He goes crazy. That is basically the plot of the novel. But in the meantime, a whole other cast of characters is introduced, and destiny will bring him into contact with another major character: Kilgore Trout, who will make Dwayne crazy by giving him his novel Now It Can Be Told, which posits that the reader is the only live creature in the universe with free-will and that everything around them has been created for their stimulation. The novel is actually fairly complex, when you get down into all of the individual episodes--but here is where it differs from Vonnegut's previous work: it can barely be classified as "science-fiction" at all. Kilgore Trout is a "science-fiction writer" and many of his stories are retold or recapped in this novel, but none of the major themes are particularly science-related. Instead, this is Vonnegut's "realist" novel.

Midland City could be any city in America, and Vonnegut's evocation of "small town life" where everyone is interconnected reads like a play on popular television and film of the day. More importantly, Vonnegut breaks down the concept of the novel itself when he juts into the narrative and offers a personal detail about how someone he knew, or someone in his family, is like one of the characters currently being discussed. And later, when he introduces himself as a character as the novel nears its climax. There is absolutely no pretense about the act of reading this book. Vonnegut does not attempt to disguise it as anything but what it is--which can barely be called a novel, though ultimately it is.

I struggled with whether to blog review this book for one important reason: Kurt Vonnegut needs no introduction. He does not need any "press." Anyone who is ever going to read his books will find them on their own. By high school, anyone who cares about literature will be exposed to him in some way. Several of his works stand up in comparison with some of the greatest novels any American has ever produced--while making it look way too easy. Perhaps Vonnegut is responsible for my own (failed as-of-yet) ambitions of writing.

I struggle with whether to quote any single portion of this book for fear that I cannot reproduce the pictures. Any single paragraph could be quoted as emblematic of the rest:

"Dwayne had a hamburger and French fries and a Coke at his newest Burger Chef, which was out on Crestview Avenue, across the street from where the new John F. Kennedy High School was going up. John F. Kennedy has never been in Midland City, but he was a President of the United States who was shot to death. Presidents of the country were often shot to death. The assassins were confused by some of the bad chemicals which troubled Dwayne.
Dwayne certainly wasn't alone, as far as having bad chemicals in him was concerned. He had plenty of company throughout all history. In his own lifetime, for instance, the people in a country called Germany were so full of bad chemicals for a while that they actually built factories whose only purpose was to kill people by the millions. The people were delivered by railroad trains.
When the Germans were full of bad chemicals, their flag looked like this: (Nazi flag picture)
(German flag picture) Here is what their flag looked like after they got well again:
After they got well again, they manufactured a cheap and durable automobile which became popular all over the world, especially among young people. It looked like this: (picture of VW Bug)
People called it a 'the beetle.' A real beetle looked like this: (picture of beetle)" (669-671--my edition, which contains the first six Vonnegut novels, sans Rosewater, a collection I will keep with me forever.)

And so on.

One quirk of this novel that is perhaps worth noting is the prevalence of the "n-word." It appears so many times in this novel that it could be banned on those grounds alone. Of course, it is used satirically, but I am sure it would be difficult to publish this book thirty years later. Upon reflection, the "n-word" appears so many times (it far outnumbers the "f-bombs") that it makes me want to say Breakfast of Champions's secret theme is racism. Its major theme is of course, the "illness" that civilization suffers from (perhaps the major theme of all of Vonnegut's work)--but its primary variant is racism. There are perhaps a dozen little tangents in this book, hateful little anecdotes about racism, sometimes shocking in gruesomeness. The message is ultimately anti-racist of course, but so much of the material is presented with such detachment and objectivity and ambiguity that many could be confused. This "racism theme" is something I did not notice my first time reading it, but seemed to stick out much more the second time.

Of course, both times I could not forget about all of the statistics of penis sizes. Or the line "dumb fucking bird."

I didn't like Breakfast of Champions as much as the other supposed masterpieces by the same author, and I think it does leave a bit of a sour taste in one's mouth. But it's only because the hero is an anti-hero (though Trout is something of a hero), and there is no easily defined plot or action to anticipate. As Vonnegut became more absurd in his humor around this time, he also moved increasingly into autobiography over the next two decades, and one can witness the shift in his artistic sensibilities with this volume. He is confident that he can do whatever he wants and it will be published. But he uses that template to create a much more ambivalent work of art that still contains some of his most beautiful moments (the description of Rabo Karabekian's The Temptation of St. Anthony, the last line of the novel, spoken by Kilgore Trout) but will probably confuse or distress some. I recommend everyone read every Vonnegut novel. I still have several left to go, myself.

I have never read Player Piano, but it is in this edition, and I should blog review it. I have never been able to get into it, the one or two times I tried to start it. I really just want to read Cat's Cradle for the third or fourth time.

The Original of Laura - Vladimir Nabokov

If The Original of Laura were as great as Knopf would like everyone to believe, then I would have read about it before last September, or October, or whenever, when I read that Wall Street Journal article about "Ghost Writers" and new books by Kurt Vonnegut, Nabokov, and Ralph Ellison.

I love Nabokov; I am one of his biggest fans. But it was a mistake to read The Original of Laura before the majority of his other work. Oh, I have tackled Lolita three times, Pale Fire once, Speak, Memory once, Bend Sinister twice, Laughter in the Dark once, Despair once, Pnin once, and several of his short stories out of the sixty-five in the collection I have of his--but Ada looms as the final masterpiece that I have yet to digest--and it will be soon.

But still, even with Ada sitting on my shelf, there are so many others remaining: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Invitation to a Beheading, The Defense (which seems boring--if it is about chess...), The Eye, Look at the Harlequins!, King, Queen, Knave, Transparent Things, and I am probably forgetting one or two others. I bet all of these are far superior to Laura, and yet it is Laura which will receive far more attention than anything he has done since Lolita.

Why is Laura such a hot topic? Well, it's the myth surrounding it, but let me clear something up, probably the only time I feel like I am being a good samaritan since my review of the Times New Viking album back when this blog started--this is more of an arts and crafts/board game "Let's Play Author!" than a real novel. When I checked it out from the library, I was like, whoa, that's thick. Some 270 pages, not a slight novel in the least--but there is all that talk about index cards, and how there are only 120 or so, and that comprises all of the text....

Okay, so the edition is beautiful, credit where credit is due. It goes for $35.00 and I would be shocked if they print this in paperback. It's the index cards that represent the majority of the publishing costs--they are lovingly re-created, and anyone interested in Nabokov's handwriting will love it.

But it was one of the most bizarre reading experiences of my life--every two pages would not contain even a whole paragraph. As if this weren't annoying enough, almost half the time, the next index card poses no resemblance to the previous one, which means the story has almost zero continuity.

Well, here is the myth that surrounds this volume and accounts for its popularity--Nabokov revivalism. Probably around the 30th anniversary of his death, his son Dmitri must have decided that it would be a good time to put a different sort of book into the marketplace. Basically, Vladimir was working on this at the time of his death, and he told his wife to burn the index cards if he never completed it. Well, she didn't, and years later, Dmitri decided it should be published, despite intimations from the man himself that the work was not up to code.

Dmitri's introduction to the volume is probably the best thing about it, because you get about five or six pages of memories of Vladimir, as he neared death, and it is quite alluring, for example, to read about how he once collapsed while hunting for butterflies, and his cries for help were laughed at by passerby. But Dmitri compares himself to Max Brod, publishing Metamorphosis and The Trial after Kafka's death, though Kafka instructed him to burn them. The Original of Laura is not Metamorphosis. No. Fucking. Way.

What is Laura about? Well, it seems to me to be a highly self-conscious (which makes it seem interesting for Nabokov lovers, but really it's not so much) meditation on being a novelist in love who has published a thinly-veiled story about a girl named Flora titled Laura--the novelist Philip Wild's wife--and Wild is dying, and while in the hospital, he methodically imagines each of his bodily appendages and organs being removed, which becomes a kind of ecstasy to him. That is it.

Now, some passages are pretty good, but they are never attached to anything else to make them stand out as "great." This is not a great novel, or even a good novel, or even a bad novel. It is not a novel. It is supposedly "a novel in fragments," and in the introduction Dmitri states that "despite its incompleteness, was unprecedented in structure and style," (xvii) and maybe I'm not reading closely enough, but it hardly seems like Nabokov intended for so many of these index cards to abruptly cut and move on to something completely unrelated.

If Nabokov had lived another year or so, Laura might have germinated into something truly wondrous, a volume that could fit alongside his absolute best work. It is true that the basic story could have been a winner. But I am sorry, I feel bad saying this because I want to like this book, and I like Dmitri--his writing style is clever enough as it is--but I really feel that Vladimir's wishes should have been respected.

Take out the index cards, shuffle them as the author probably did, read them aloud at a dinner party, and laugh about how "dying is fun." But don't expect to read a real novel. Here's looking forward to Ada, and another entry in the "most difficult books to read reviewed on Flying Houses" category.

Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger

What can you really say about Franny and Zooey that is profound, important? Only that, if you haven't read it, and you have read that other more famous book by the same author, you will be caught unaware.

Recently I read it for the second time. The first time was in the summer of 2002, over seven years ago. Has my experience of being alive changed since then? Yes. Am I in a very different personal situation than the time of the previous reading? Yes. Did my experience of actually reading the book differ at all? No.

This book is about nervous breakdowns and praying. During one particular day last week (last Tuesday, six days ago), I read the majority of Zooey, the much longer second part of the two prose pieces that comprise the volume, in between a lunch and dinner shift of my current stint of waiting tables at a restaurant. I was very depressed this day, and the book made me feel it even more so.

The crux of the entire work is Franny's dilemma--what is she supposed to do with her life?:

"'All right,' Franny said wearily. 'France.' She took a cigarette out of the pack on the table. 'It isn't just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness' sake. I mean if he were a girl--somebody in my dorm, for example--he'd have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through Wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and--sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.' She stopped. She shook her head briefly, her face quite white, and for just a fractional moment she felt her forehead with her hand--less, it seemed, to find out whether she was perspiring than to check to see, as if she were her own parent, whether she had a fever. 'I feel so funny,' she said. 'I think I'm going crazy. Maybe I'm already crazy.' (26)

Franny takes place almost entirely in a restaurant. It is the beginning of a weekend she will be spending with her college boyfriend Lane. Franny counters practically everything that is said to her in conversation with a depressing, fatalistic rejoinder. Then she goes into the bathroom and cries. Then she holds up her book, "The Way of a Pilgrim," and is able to stabilize. Then she tells Lane about the book, which is based around the idea of "praying without ceasing." If you repeat the phrase 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,' over and over, it will eventually be worked in the natural rhythm of your heartbeat and will open you up to a spiritual experience. Then she compares this basic prayer notion with that of several different Eastern religions and claims that the exact same thing is described in various texts by them. Then she faints. Lane, who has been rather curt and dismissive of her throughout the entire story, finally shows some tenderness and the ending has him vowing to help her get some rest and recover.

Zooey probably takes place a few weeks or months after the incident described in Franny. It is here that the Glass family is introduced. It would be tedious to get into all of the details that explain the authorship of Zooey, but basically, the story is written by Salinger's most frequent literary stand-in--Buddy, who is also born in 1919, the oldest living child in the Glass family, in his mid 30's and a writing teacher at a college in a rural part of the Northeast. Zooey is about 25 and an actor and taking a bath and reading a long letter from Buddy as the story opens, and his mother comes into the bathroom and has a long conversation with him about Franny. How are they supposed to make her feel better? Zooey concerns itself with this notion for its entire duration, but it also contains the synthesis of the religious inquiry of its predecessor.

Basically, Zooey is much longer, and solves the problem, or question, that Franny poses. And yet it still does not really reach a satisfying conclusion. What is most touching about the work are the lengths that Zooey goes to in order to help his sister. Eventually he tells her what she should be doing with her life, and that everything she is going through is "normal" because they, the two youngest Glass children, are "freaks."

Anybody between the ages of 18 and 26 may benefit most from reading this volume, but for its analysis of religious devotion, this should be required for anyone with strong opinions about that phenomenon--which, okay, is just about everybody in the world. Catcher in the Rye may be regarded as Salinger's most important contribution to literature, but I think it is fair to say that Franny and Zooey is a more polished and precise work--and while it may not be as titillating, it is certainly reaching for a higher echelon.

In Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut wrote that J.D. Salinger was probably the most influential writer of his generation. Along with Vonnegut himself, I feel that Kerouac rounds out the trifecta of the most influential novelists of the 20th century--and all were born within a three year span. Kerouac died forty years ago, Vonnegut died a couple years ago, and Salinger has not published anything in 44 years. Salinger is certainly the most selective of the three when it comes to the total number of books that he felt he needed to publish. It would be interesting to compare the religious philosophies espoused by Kerouac and him, but it is fair to say that he is the more abstinent of the two. My only point in writing this final paragraph is to say, Vonnegut was right. As a writer, he is the only one in our lifetime to have achieved a mythic status--that of a literary god. While it may not be 100% true, it's basically safe to say that every single young writer has been influenced, whether they realize it or not, by the predominant literary style that Salinger has helped to create. All four of his books are excellent, and while Franny and Zooey may not be the most "entertaining," it does offer the most profundity of all his works and may therefore be considered his true masterpiece. One could also say that his oeuvre as a whole is the true masterpiece.

Desolation Angels - Jack Kerouac

Of all the great 20th century American novelists, Kerouac stands as probably the coolest. He will probably remain the coolest novelist of all time until for establishing so much of the American “hip” character. But he himself is not proud of this achievement! Desolation Angels is Kerouac’s attempt at explaining himself fully, without ornament, and apparently, more directly from his own diaries than in any of his other work. For further proof that I am not crazy in thinking Kerouac was not proud of creating an archetypal image of hipness, see the experience captured in Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday of Vonnegut’s son returning to his father’s house on Cape Cod carrying a duffel bag and wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, with Kerouac sitting at the table, suddenly starting up, claiming, drunkenly, “You don’t know anything about me!” or his ruminations appearing near the end of Desolation Angels, documenting the period in which Road was published:
“And just like in New York or Frisco or anywhere there they are all hunching around marijuana smoke, talking, the cool girls with long thin legs in slacks, the men with goatees, all an enormous drag after all and at the time (1957) not even started yet officially with the name of “Beat Generation.” To think that I had so much to do with it, too, in fact at that very moment the manuscript of Road was being lineotyped for imminent publication and I was already sick of the whole subject. Nothing can be more dreary than “coolness” (not Irwin’s cool, or Bull’s or Simon’s, which is a natural quietness) but postured, actually secretly rigid coolness that covers up the fact that the character is unable to convey anything of force or interest, a kind of sociological coolness soon to become a fad up into the mass of middleclass youth for awhile. There’s even a kind of insultingness, probably unintentional, like when I said to the Paris girl just fresh she said from visiting a Persian Shah for Tiger hunt “Did you actually shoot the tiger yourself?” she gave me a cold look as tho I’d just tried to kiss her at the window of a Drama School. Or tried to trip the Huntress. Or something. But all I could do was sit on the edge of the bed in despair like Lazarus listening to their awful “likes” and “like you know” and “wow crazy” and “a wig, man” “a real gas”—All this was about to sprout out all over America even down to High School level and be attributed in part to my doing! But Irwin paid no attention to all that and just wanted to know what they were thinking anyway.” (358-359)
True, it may all be “dreary,” but it’s amazing how many people will namedrop Kerouac having only read Road (if even all of it, word by word) and diffuse so much of his energy through their own ambitions towards literature or celebrity. Kerouac is notorious for having written Road the way he did (people disagree with me, but I believe I am correct in saying, in three weeks, on one long sheet of paper (which no one debates, and which was actually on display in a bookstore in Boulder, CO one day I happened to be there, but which I passed up, for what reason I do not know, something stupid, so many stupid decisions of late…) and probably on some form of pep pills or something or other), and less-famous for the Subterraneans (a three-day-novella) and justifiably noteworthy for the crisp, more-straightforward narrative of The Dharma Bums. Now, after Desolation Angels, which I am prepared to say is my favorite Kerouac novel so far, my interest in him has been resuscitated, if only especially because everyone seems to have missed his point. And studying him for the purposes of literature ends in claiming that he himself often threw caution to the wind when it came to providing work worthy of “literary criticism”—there is a passage I will quote later (when I find it) where he details his method somewhat iconographically. There are no secret Nabokovian games Kerouac plays (he usually doesn’t leave the reader in the dark), beyond giving one character appearing in a brief moment the last name of Nabokov, certainly not an invisible personage several years after Lolita came into print. He doesn’t need to, because he’s got Irwin Garden and Bull Hubbard to talk about, and their equally famous recently published masterworks “Howling” and “Nude Supper.” Other characters pop in and out—famously Cody, who more or less makes a series of cameos, Ben Fagan, a Frisco buddhist appearing significantly in The Dharma Bums, Raphael Urso, a New Yorker poet who I still don’t was in real life, Simon (Irwin’s lover), his younger brother Lazarus, the Ruths Heaper and Erickson, Julien, who plays a large role in Subterraneans, Alyce Newman (Joyce Johnson, who wrote the introduction of the edition I read), and finally Keroauc’s Mother, often talked about as if a legend, finally given a total portrait to close out this amazing 400 page + prose masterpiece. I have not read Proust. I may have mentioned that before. But Kerouac does it so well. The self-styled novel-memoir can only be taken so many places. I must read Proust. I must read Big Sur. I must read Tristessa. I must read Doctor Sax (which I remember reading somewhere that he wrote entirely on “tea”). I must read Vanity of Duluoz. I must read Swann’s Way before most of those, though.
Kerouac’s importance in literature is often undersold by scholars and oversold by dilettantes who don’t really understand him and just like getting fucked up, and writing while they’re getting fucked up, and believing they don’t need to revise because everything a person says is holy and true when uttered in that one, original, unique moment, and everyone is God and everything is God, and we’re all far too uptight about the way we go about our lives. Important lessons all—but if we are going about it all wrong, what is the right way, Mr. Kerouac? He offers many instances of appreciating life, but finds little all-consuming happiness. With Ruth Heaper and Alyce Newman there appear fleeting moments of “normal” American domestic bliss, but after an opium high in Tangiers, he suddenly realizes that he no longer wants to participate in life. He wants to live in a quiet house and have no one bother him. All of the madness of his youth and the Beat generation has gotten him nowhere, except it has made him famous. One of the funniest lines in the book is when Raphael says, “Don’t comb your hair!” when talking about the Life magazine photographer coming to take pictures of the three of them together.
His love for his Mother, which some may laugh privately at, or roll their eyes at, or furrow their brows at, is actually one of the most beautiful sections of the book. There are only about forty or fifty pages with Kerouac and his Mother as the primary characters, but the way Kerouac describes her—how good she is to him, how greatly she still takes care of him even though she is 62 and he is 34, how she is willing to try to move from Florida to Berkeley with him on cross-country Greyhound bus trip, how he takes her to Mexico briefly and she experiences a higher revelation, how she drinks with him on the bus and talks about how she doesn’t like the Rocky Mountains because she thinks they’re going to fall over and crush them at any minute—is more loving than any other character portrayal, with Cody being the only one that even comes close. When he first mentions her he says, “Now we’re getting to the best person in the book,” and indeed that’s exactly what she seems. Though the narrative with her may actually deal more heavily in frustration than the other segments, and though it may not present anything so nearly transgressive or titillating as the rest of the book by the literary standards of the mid 1960’s, it is sort of the perfect ending for the book—slow, contemplative, and finally true, more honest and true than any other section in the book.

And at the end Kerouac seems to sneak in a few “trailers” for his other books, talking about Cody’s fate, saying something tragic happened, but then things went back to the way they used to be, and even though he swore off living wildly, Kerouac still goes out to have an adventure at Big Sur that he alludes to. The complete story of Kerouac can only be known to someone who takes the time to read all of his books, and then maybe someone who takes the time to read his journals and his letters to analyze how much truth and how much fiction comprised his work. I would say it highly consists of truth.