I am surprised this is the first review of a Bret Easton Ellis book on flying houses, but I haven't read or re-read any of his novels in the last 13 months. Oeuvre rule reborn: I've read everything he's written except the entire whole of American Psycho for various reasons. That is probably a good one to earmark for review as it is generally considered his magnum opus--but for my tastes, I prefer Glamorama. Less Than Zero is the perfect wunderkind debut model novel for every 19 year old to follow and fail after attempting. I read it in one night in Paris five and a half years ago. Interestingly, the first Ellis novel I read was The Rules of Attraction, which is much better than the movie, a good execution of the "college novel" as well as the "multi-narrator novel." I read Lunar Park right after it came out in 2005 and devoured it giddily, though it left me feeling strangely empty--like it was all a big joke without much substance. Still, the opening portion is one of the best things he has ever done. I could go on forever, but the point is, I hadn't read The Informers. One of my friends in college was a pretty big fan of his, and I saw the volume on her bookshelf and asked how it was and she said, "It sucks." I don't totally agree but I will agree that it is probably his weakest.
For some perspective, The Informers is a collection of 13 short stories that Ellis wrote around the time of Less Than Zero, or right after. It was released in 1994, after American Psycho and before Glamorama. In a way, the only reason it's published is because it's the same author. I don't think the book would have been published if it had been written by a nobody. There are flashes of brilliance, but no single story will cut a reader dead. It is clever how much of an interconnected fictional world Ellis has constructed, but that is its chief virtue (you can play the literary equivalent of "Where's Waldo" by connecting names in the stories with characters in other Ellis books). There are a few nice aesthetic moments, but these deserve to be taken apart one by one.
#1-"Bruce Calls from Mulholland"-Sort of an atmospheric piece that leaves little impression. About a few different characters and how much money they are worth and who sleeps with whom and it's summer 1982.
#2-"At the Still Point"-About a dinner on the one-year-anniversary of a friend's death. This isn't a bad story, per se, but it's something that would work much better in a larger context, which is my most widespread complaint about these stories, they zip in and out and leave the reader cold.
#3-"The Up Escalator"-The first longer story in the collection, is about the mother of a rich L.A. family and how she is sleeping with a student at UCLA and is married to a movie exec and has two kids and the centerpiece is when they have dinner at Spago. Actually one of the better stories.
#4-"In the Islands"-About a father who takes his son with on a trip to Hawaii and is charming in a "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" type way. This is probably the best story in the collection, which is unlikely, but true, I think.
#5-"Sitting Still"-A girl rides across the country from New Hampshire to L.A. on a train to see her father get married to a woman who is not much more than a few years older than her. I found this story to be something of a snooze but there were a few good parts, probably the funniest single box of dialogue in the book for me:
"Are you okay?" Cheryl asks.
"Yeah. I'm fine," I say sullenly.
"But you don't look too good," Cheryl says. "I mean, you're tan but you don't look happy."
"But I'm okay."
"Have you ever taken zinc oxide tablets?"
"Oh yeah," I say. "I take them."
"But are you still smoking?"
"Not as much."
"Your father promised me he's going to quit," Cheryl says, spooning yogurt into her mouth.
"Uh-huh."
"Does Graham smoke?"
"Yeah. A pipe too."
"Not a pipe," Cheryl says, horrified.
"Sometimes. It depends."
"On what?"
"On whether he would rather use rolling papers," I say and then, when this comment is returned with an uncomprehending look, I offer, "Or if he's lost his bong."
"Do you want to join up for the aerobics class I'm taking over at the plaza?"
"Aerobics class?"
"You say that word like you've never heard it before."
"I'm just tired," I say. "I think I want to go."
"This is kiwi tofu," she says. "I know it sounds totally crazy but it's good. Don't make fun, okay?"
"I'm really sorry."
Later, in the new Jaguar my father bought her, Cheryl asks, "Do you like me?"
"I think so," I pause. "I don't know."
"That's not good enough, honey."
"But that's all I can tell you." (78-79)
#6-"Water from the Sun"-I think this is the same Cheryl from the previous story but under different circumstances and a very changed character. She's a newscaster who does coke in airport bathrooms and wishes someone would chase her. I thought that line was funny. At one point a punk asks her for her autograph in a diner and she obliges while they sort of make fun of her afterwards and it's kind of sad. Not an awful story, but not really that great.
#7-"Discovering Japan"-Initially annoying, this is one of the more notable stories in the collection, about a rock star in Japan misbehaving. It's funny and immoral. It's also surprisingly long.
#8-"Letters from L.A."-Unquestionably the most rote exercise in the book. It might have gotten a good grade in the class I took called "The Letter as Literature," but this quickly gets boring. It's about a girl who moves to L.A. and writes letters back to her friend at college in New Hampshire and it's filled with all the usual stuff of an Ellis book and only gets vaguely interesting when she talks about how she is friends with a suicidal guy named Randy.
#9-"Another Gray Area"-Pretty much a stock Ellis piece about a guy who directs music videos named Martin and his friend Graham and Graham's dad dies in a plane crash and he goes to identify the body, but the best part is when there is a weird hostage situation outside the building where Martin lives, which contains the best line of the book, delivered by the night doorman, which sums up the quintessence of L.A.:
"Jack shrugs. 'Unless you're willing to do some pretty awful things it's hard getting a job in this town--and I'm willing.' (163)
#10-The Secrets of Summer"-The story about vampires that is probably the worst thing I have ever read by Ellis. Perhaps it contains seeds of American Psycho in it, but I found it just silly and boring.
#11-"The Fifth Wheel"-This is not a great story, but it is probably the second best in the collection. If you crossed a Richard Lange short story with one by Dennis Cooper, you would get this. It's kind of complicated but it involves a guy who works at a car wash, who has two random drug addicted friends stay at his place in Van Nuys and how they kidnap a kid for ransom and then don't really make much of an effort to collect anything.
#12-"On the Beach"-Very boring story about a girl who is dying of cancer and wants to spend her last days on the beach. It's random and weird and not very effective or affecting.
#13-"At the Zoo with Bruce"-Mercifully brings the collection to a close. It's not totally awful, but it's not especially worthwhile either. I don't think I've ever read a story that takes place at a a zoo so maybe that is worthwhile for you.
After all of that, it seems like a pretty bad book, but on the whole, it's still above-average, I think. I read it in about one 24 hour period and its 220 pages or so, if that means anything. I also felt the first half to be much better than the second half, mainly because I think I didn't like the vampire story.
There's a new movie out that is the adaptation of this book and it got some pretty bad reviews. I'd like to see it but I think I'll wait until it comes out on DVD because it's barely playing in theaters around here anymore. Ellis is probably the most successful novelist of our time--the only example of the writer who can become ridiculously rich and famous through both books and movies. It's good that he does what he does. That he's the only one and that his subject matter is, unfailingly, sex among uncharacteristically attractive, rich, drugged out people, is a good lesson for aspiring writers (see previous blog post about Dick Caramel's making extra money for stories that sell to the movies that have more "action" in them....Fitzgerald is always appropriate).
Still, even if parts of his books get trashy, I'll read anything he writes. I can't think of anyone else who writes such breezy prose. Sometimes breezy lacks substance (in this case), and maybe that's unsatisfying in the long run, but during the actual reading, it's a pleasure. Maybe his books are more like drugs than most other writers'. Share them with friends, hide them from your parents. His next book should be out a year from now and it is the sequel to Less Than Zero. So there's something to look forward to.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned was published in 1922, almost exactly two years after This Side of Paradise. That Fitzgerald wrote the entire novel between 1919 and 1921 amidst engagement, marriage, the publication and huge reception of his first novel, the sales of first short stories to magazines, and the beginnings of a legendary dozen years of "going on a party," is a testament to the enormous productivity one may be able to achieve in their earlier and more vulnerable years. A friend of mine did not like Beautiful and Damned when I told him he "had" to read it a few years ago. Oh, at the time he said he liked it, but recently he revealed that he thought it was too long and some other vague complaint. Another friend of mine told me, the first time I read it, about four years ago, that it was her favorite novel by Fitzgerald. I may not go as far to say that it is my favorite, but I will say it is his most underrated, and while I recently told that first friend that I felt it was better than This Side of Paradise, I'm not sure I can still believe myself. As an introduction, Paradise is about as good as you can do, but a lot of it is nostalgic and "protected" from the outside world. As a follow-up then, Beautiful is exactly what it needs to be--the logical extension, the harsh realization, the bitter slap in the face. It also stands the test of time as a fantastic example of a "New York Novel."
As far as structure goes, The Beautiful and Damned has a whole lot in common with This Side of Paradise, the main difference being that it is about 100 pages longer. The book is broken up into many "mini-chapters" and there are continued literary experiments in playwrighting format--though the character-penned poetry of Paradise is no longer to be found. The characters are pure Fitzgerald. Anthony Patch is not so different from Amory Blaine at all, except that he has more of an air of vulnerability. Gloria Gilbert is an entirely new creation, and though seeds of her may appear in Paradise, she stands as the total literary execution of the "flapper" par excellence. Aside from character, however, the story in the novel is much more highly developed than in Paradise.
It begins with Anthony as a recent Harvard graduate, going out with his friends Maury Noble and Richard Caramel. Caramel's cousin is Gloria Gilbert, and Maury meets her on a separate occasion, and so Anthony and the reader are more aware of Gloria as a reputation, a mystical figure until she makes her first appearance in the novel, which is a clever way to start writing about a romance. The two take an instant liking to each other--and it is never really clear how much it matters that Anthony Patch is the sole living heir to Adam Patch and his $75 million fortune--and decide to be married. They are given an "ample" allowance to live on and the majority of the plot concerns their first seven years or so of marriage. Anthony has two entertaining attempts at working a job himself, but finds neither of them suitable, and Gloria tries to be a late-blooming actress around age 29, but they spend most of their marriage loafing. Anthony does also have a stint in the Army during World War I that provides the longest diversion in the novel, but things only get worse afterwards, and their drinking only increases with Prohibition. A huge transformation takes place, so much that by the end, Anthony Patch has become inarguably the most disgraceful character Fitzgerald has ever featured principally. The descriptions near the end of the final chapter "No Matter!" depict a pure alcoholic, shaking in bed upon awakening, already needing a drink. Even by today's standards, these portions of the novel can still shock.
In the introduction to my edition, Kermit Vanderbilt supplies a mountain of information about every single notion of an event concerning this volume's publication, interesting because it is not considered a classic by any means. The Great Gatsby is obviously, Fitzgerald's total classic--and also his most mainstream offering--seeds of which may be contained in a choice utterance by Dick Caramel in this volume--but not his most popular at the time. Paradise earns that distinction, and is probably a leg or two behind Tender is the Night in terms of long-term critical approval. The Last Tycoon is usually written off as an unfinished novel but anyone who has read it knows that it stands on its own surprisingly well and is the most modern of all Fitzgerald novels--but the point needs to be made: all 5 of his novels are excellent. Some are better than others, but none deserve to be totally ignored. Fitzgerald had his own misgivings about the novel, which are probably correct in their estimation since this novel is, unfortunately, usually given bottom-of-the-barrel treatment along with Tycoon:
"His rather frenzied state of mind is obvious in the letter to Hovey. This 'bitter and insolent' novel, he feared, 'will never be popular and...will undoubtedly offend a lot of people.' Rather perversely, he added, 'Personally, I should advise you against serializing it.' (x)
What is most offensive about the novel? Probably a few of the choice religious statements made by Maury Noble, who is apparently a not-much-disguised version of H.L. Mencken. I can find no better example than an explanation offered near the end of the chapter "Symposium":
"Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief--that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:
'Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over--and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world.
'Finally, let us take care that book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.'
'So the men did, and they died.'
'But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible." (213)
Later, Dot, the girl whom Anthony has an affair with while he is in the Army is described in euphemistic terms as being promiscuous, and I could see how these few pages describing the previous men she had "seen" could be viewed as offensive. Finally, some of the descriptions of alcoholism near the end are, again, difficult to swallow. But this is not a "pulp" or "underground" novel--most of it is concerned with the aesthetic guidelines governing the aristocracy during a short period in 20th century American history. Much of that, obviously for Fitzgerald, revolves around art and literature, and in Richard Caramel he presents what must be a skewed version of himself. Caramel's first novel "The Demon Lover" shares the original working title of The Beautiful and Damned and close to the end Fitzgerald employs the type of self-reference that would later become vogue with writers like Bret Easton Ellis:
"'The arts are very old,' said Anthony after a while. With a few glasses the tension of his nerves relaxed and he found that he could think again.
'Which art?'
'All of them. Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later. For instance, the beautiful word, the colored and glittering word, and the beautiful simile belong in prose now. To get attention poetry has got to strain for the unusual word, the harsh, earthy word that's never been beautiful before. Beauty, as the sum of several beautiful parts, reached its apotheosis in Swinburne. It can't go any further--except in the novel, perhaps.'
Dick interrupted him impatiently:
'You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I've read 'This Side of Paradise.' Are our girls really like that? If it's true to life, which I don't believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I'm sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there's a place for the romanticist in literature.'" (347)
At the beginning Caramel has yet to have his success, and Patch and Noble consider him one of their best friends, but also denigrate him to some degree for always talking about himself and his writing and question his intellectual rigor. But later he is extremely successful with his first novel, and writes short stories for the income, both of which are part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald myth. In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway mentions how he didn't agree with Fitzgerald that a short story could be formulaic and successful--that "cookie cutter" short stories weren't worth writing, basically. But Fitzgerald contended that there was a need for money and that he had figured out a pattern to follow and there was nothing wrong with using one's talents towards a profitable aim. Also, some of Caramel's beliefs point the way towards what would become Fitzgerald's next novel:
"In the two years since the publication of 'The Demon Lover,' Dick had made over twenty-five thousand dollars, most of it lately, when the reward of the author of fiction had begun to swell unprecedentedly as a result of the voracious hunger of the motion pictures for plots. He received seven hundred dollars for every story, at that time a large emolument for such a young man--he was not quite thirty--and for every one that contained enough 'action' (kissing, shooting, and sacrificing) for the movies, he obtained an additional thousand. His stories varied; there was a measure of vitality and a sort of instinctive technic in all of them, but none attained the personality of 'The Demon Lover,' and there were several that Anthony considered downright cheap. These, Dick explained severely, were to widen his audience. Wasn't it true that men who had attained real permanence from Shakespeare to Mark Twain had appealed to many as well as to the elect?" (184)
Ultimately, the most compelling aspect of this novel is the depiction of the non-working life. Near the beginning, Gloria states that she doesn't know why anyone ever does anything, and Anthony tries a variety of earning methods, though most of his attention remains focused on writing historical essays about the Middle Ages. He later, on advice from Dick, attempts to sell his own short stories to magazines, which doesn't work either. He tries two jobs--one of them a non-descript office job in the sales industry and the other selling stocks in a book called "Heart Talks on Ambition" which is a kind of cross between How to Win Friends and Influence People and Think and Grow Rich in a kind of "get rich quick" scheme that is redolent of the online scam ads of today. The second contains the more entertaining sequence, with Anthony getting progressively drunker and trying to conduct "business" through cold-knocking on doors, and eventually shouting at everyone in a delicatessen, but the first contains one of the most powerful statements on the compromise that society makes on the artistic soul:
"One discussed how Mr. Wilson had made his money, what method Mr. Hiemer had employed, and the means resorted to by Mr. Hardy. One related age-old but eternally breathless anecdotes of the fortunes stumbled on precipitously in the street by a 'butcher' or a 'bartender,' or 'a darn messenger boy, by golly!' and then one talked of the current gambles, and whether it was best to go out for a hundred thousand a year or be content with twenty. During the preceding year one of the assistant secretaries had invested all his savings in Bethlehem Steel. The story of his spectacular magnificence, of his haughty resignation in January, and of the triumphal palace he was now building in California, was the favorite office subject. The man's very name had acquired a magic significance, symbolizing as he did the aspirations of all good Americans. Anecdotes were told about him--how one of the vice-presidents had advised him to sell, by golly, but he had hung on, even bought on margin, 'and now look where he is!'
Such, obviously, was the stuff of life--a dizzy triumph dazzling the eyes of all of them, a gypsy siren to content them with meagre wage and with the arithmetical improbability of their eventual success.
To Anthony the notion became appalling. He felt that to succeed here the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind. It seemed to him that the essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal, self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge; it was obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom--so, with appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there." (190-191)
Fitzgerald's prose is "reproachless," to use a word that is repeated often throughout this novel, and one could scarcely hope for a better model for the "early marriage" story. I am interested in reading Revolutionary Road to see how closely it compares with this, though they already seem quite different. And Beautiful and Damned is not so different from Tender is the Night, either, except Tender is more intricately constructed, an infinitely more laborious product, and depicts the actual end of a marriage whereas Beautiful depicts a marriage inflated to the point of bursting with conflict and debauched behavior. It may not technically be his "best," but I just want to say that with Fitzgerald, it doesn't really matter--as long as it's a Fitzgerald novel, it's going to be excellent. Even if the closing lines do reflect the closing lines of This Side of Paradise, on a severely less eloquent note,
"'I showed them,' he was saying. 'It was a hard fight, but I didn't give up and I came through!" (370)
there are still many cases one could make for this novel eclipsing the quality of its predecessor. But that's beside the point--these first two novels show Fitzgerald at his most ambitious, his most driven, his most productive, and his most experimental, while also providing a glimpse into his uncertain, mythological future.
As far as structure goes, The Beautiful and Damned has a whole lot in common with This Side of Paradise, the main difference being that it is about 100 pages longer. The book is broken up into many "mini-chapters" and there are continued literary experiments in playwrighting format--though the character-penned poetry of Paradise is no longer to be found. The characters are pure Fitzgerald. Anthony Patch is not so different from Amory Blaine at all, except that he has more of an air of vulnerability. Gloria Gilbert is an entirely new creation, and though seeds of her may appear in Paradise, she stands as the total literary execution of the "flapper" par excellence. Aside from character, however, the story in the novel is much more highly developed than in Paradise.
It begins with Anthony as a recent Harvard graduate, going out with his friends Maury Noble and Richard Caramel. Caramel's cousin is Gloria Gilbert, and Maury meets her on a separate occasion, and so Anthony and the reader are more aware of Gloria as a reputation, a mystical figure until she makes her first appearance in the novel, which is a clever way to start writing about a romance. The two take an instant liking to each other--and it is never really clear how much it matters that Anthony Patch is the sole living heir to Adam Patch and his $75 million fortune--and decide to be married. They are given an "ample" allowance to live on and the majority of the plot concerns their first seven years or so of marriage. Anthony has two entertaining attempts at working a job himself, but finds neither of them suitable, and Gloria tries to be a late-blooming actress around age 29, but they spend most of their marriage loafing. Anthony does also have a stint in the Army during World War I that provides the longest diversion in the novel, but things only get worse afterwards, and their drinking only increases with Prohibition. A huge transformation takes place, so much that by the end, Anthony Patch has become inarguably the most disgraceful character Fitzgerald has ever featured principally. The descriptions near the end of the final chapter "No Matter!" depict a pure alcoholic, shaking in bed upon awakening, already needing a drink. Even by today's standards, these portions of the novel can still shock.
In the introduction to my edition, Kermit Vanderbilt supplies a mountain of information about every single notion of an event concerning this volume's publication, interesting because it is not considered a classic by any means. The Great Gatsby is obviously, Fitzgerald's total classic--and also his most mainstream offering--seeds of which may be contained in a choice utterance by Dick Caramel in this volume--but not his most popular at the time. Paradise earns that distinction, and is probably a leg or two behind Tender is the Night in terms of long-term critical approval. The Last Tycoon is usually written off as an unfinished novel but anyone who has read it knows that it stands on its own surprisingly well and is the most modern of all Fitzgerald novels--but the point needs to be made: all 5 of his novels are excellent. Some are better than others, but none deserve to be totally ignored. Fitzgerald had his own misgivings about the novel, which are probably correct in their estimation since this novel is, unfortunately, usually given bottom-of-the-barrel treatment along with Tycoon:
"His rather frenzied state of mind is obvious in the letter to Hovey. This 'bitter and insolent' novel, he feared, 'will never be popular and...will undoubtedly offend a lot of people.' Rather perversely, he added, 'Personally, I should advise you against serializing it.' (x)
What is most offensive about the novel? Probably a few of the choice religious statements made by Maury Noble, who is apparently a not-much-disguised version of H.L. Mencken. I can find no better example than an explanation offered near the end of the chapter "Symposium":
"Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief--that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:
'Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over--and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world.
'Finally, let us take care that book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.'
'So the men did, and they died.'
'But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible." (213)
Later, Dot, the girl whom Anthony has an affair with while he is in the Army is described in euphemistic terms as being promiscuous, and I could see how these few pages describing the previous men she had "seen" could be viewed as offensive. Finally, some of the descriptions of alcoholism near the end are, again, difficult to swallow. But this is not a "pulp" or "underground" novel--most of it is concerned with the aesthetic guidelines governing the aristocracy during a short period in 20th century American history. Much of that, obviously for Fitzgerald, revolves around art and literature, and in Richard Caramel he presents what must be a skewed version of himself. Caramel's first novel "The Demon Lover" shares the original working title of The Beautiful and Damned and close to the end Fitzgerald employs the type of self-reference that would later become vogue with writers like Bret Easton Ellis:
"'The arts are very old,' said Anthony after a while. With a few glasses the tension of his nerves relaxed and he found that he could think again.
'Which art?'
'All of them. Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later. For instance, the beautiful word, the colored and glittering word, and the beautiful simile belong in prose now. To get attention poetry has got to strain for the unusual word, the harsh, earthy word that's never been beautiful before. Beauty, as the sum of several beautiful parts, reached its apotheosis in Swinburne. It can't go any further--except in the novel, perhaps.'
Dick interrupted him impatiently:
'You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I've read 'This Side of Paradise.' Are our girls really like that? If it's true to life, which I don't believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I'm sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there's a place for the romanticist in literature.'" (347)
At the beginning Caramel has yet to have his success, and Patch and Noble consider him one of their best friends, but also denigrate him to some degree for always talking about himself and his writing and question his intellectual rigor. But later he is extremely successful with his first novel, and writes short stories for the income, both of which are part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald myth. In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway mentions how he didn't agree with Fitzgerald that a short story could be formulaic and successful--that "cookie cutter" short stories weren't worth writing, basically. But Fitzgerald contended that there was a need for money and that he had figured out a pattern to follow and there was nothing wrong with using one's talents towards a profitable aim. Also, some of Caramel's beliefs point the way towards what would become Fitzgerald's next novel:
"In the two years since the publication of 'The Demon Lover,' Dick had made over twenty-five thousand dollars, most of it lately, when the reward of the author of fiction had begun to swell unprecedentedly as a result of the voracious hunger of the motion pictures for plots. He received seven hundred dollars for every story, at that time a large emolument for such a young man--he was not quite thirty--and for every one that contained enough 'action' (kissing, shooting, and sacrificing) for the movies, he obtained an additional thousand. His stories varied; there was a measure of vitality and a sort of instinctive technic in all of them, but none attained the personality of 'The Demon Lover,' and there were several that Anthony considered downright cheap. These, Dick explained severely, were to widen his audience. Wasn't it true that men who had attained real permanence from Shakespeare to Mark Twain had appealed to many as well as to the elect?" (184)
Ultimately, the most compelling aspect of this novel is the depiction of the non-working life. Near the beginning, Gloria states that she doesn't know why anyone ever does anything, and Anthony tries a variety of earning methods, though most of his attention remains focused on writing historical essays about the Middle Ages. He later, on advice from Dick, attempts to sell his own short stories to magazines, which doesn't work either. He tries two jobs--one of them a non-descript office job in the sales industry and the other selling stocks in a book called "Heart Talks on Ambition" which is a kind of cross between How to Win Friends and Influence People and Think and Grow Rich in a kind of "get rich quick" scheme that is redolent of the online scam ads of today. The second contains the more entertaining sequence, with Anthony getting progressively drunker and trying to conduct "business" through cold-knocking on doors, and eventually shouting at everyone in a delicatessen, but the first contains one of the most powerful statements on the compromise that society makes on the artistic soul:
"One discussed how Mr. Wilson had made his money, what method Mr. Hiemer had employed, and the means resorted to by Mr. Hardy. One related age-old but eternally breathless anecdotes of the fortunes stumbled on precipitously in the street by a 'butcher' or a 'bartender,' or 'a darn messenger boy, by golly!' and then one talked of the current gambles, and whether it was best to go out for a hundred thousand a year or be content with twenty. During the preceding year one of the assistant secretaries had invested all his savings in Bethlehem Steel. The story of his spectacular magnificence, of his haughty resignation in January, and of the triumphal palace he was now building in California, was the favorite office subject. The man's very name had acquired a magic significance, symbolizing as he did the aspirations of all good Americans. Anecdotes were told about him--how one of the vice-presidents had advised him to sell, by golly, but he had hung on, even bought on margin, 'and now look where he is!'
Such, obviously, was the stuff of life--a dizzy triumph dazzling the eyes of all of them, a gypsy siren to content them with meagre wage and with the arithmetical improbability of their eventual success.
To Anthony the notion became appalling. He felt that to succeed here the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind. It seemed to him that the essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal, self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge; it was obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom--so, with appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there." (190-191)
Fitzgerald's prose is "reproachless," to use a word that is repeated often throughout this novel, and one could scarcely hope for a better model for the "early marriage" story. I am interested in reading Revolutionary Road to see how closely it compares with this, though they already seem quite different. And Beautiful and Damned is not so different from Tender is the Night, either, except Tender is more intricately constructed, an infinitely more laborious product, and depicts the actual end of a marriage whereas Beautiful depicts a marriage inflated to the point of bursting with conflict and debauched behavior. It may not technically be his "best," but I just want to say that with Fitzgerald, it doesn't really matter--as long as it's a Fitzgerald novel, it's going to be excellent. Even if the closing lines do reflect the closing lines of This Side of Paradise, on a severely less eloquent note,
"'I showed them,' he was saying. 'It was a hard fight, but I didn't give up and I came through!" (370)
there are still many cases one could make for this novel eclipsing the quality of its predecessor. But that's beside the point--these first two novels show Fitzgerald at his most ambitious, his most driven, his most productive, and his most experimental, while also providing a glimpse into his uncertain, mythological future.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin was published in March of 1957. Though mostly written after the completion of Lolita, it was published one year before that volume would be available in America, though two years after its publication in France. Americans were aware of Lolita but generally not able to obtain it, so when Pnin was released by the same author, many people took notice and Nabokov enjoyed his greatest success yet, though it would be nothing compared to the American reception of Lolita.
I can't imagine there being a shorter Nabokov novel than this, so if one wants a little dose of him without the heavy committment of a few weeks, Pnin is for you. I like it better than anything else except for Pale Fire and Lolita. It's significantly more engaging than Bend Sinister and more pleasant and enjoyable than Laughter in the Dark. It's not Pale Fire, but Pnin does appear briefly as a character in that book. It's not Lolita; Nabokov is in much safer territory here. But I imagine it is one of the best--and it won't be possible to verify that for a long time, so intimidating is his oeuvre--alongside perhaps Ada, which is his longest and which I hope I can review one day.
Like Pale Fire, Pnin resists categorization. In the first place, it appeared in pseudo-serial form in The New Yorker prior to publication, with several revisions made in the interim. In the second place, there are seven relatively short chapters which are barely connected by transition and blur the line between short story and novel chapter. It's fair to say Pnin is definitely a novel--not a collection of short stories--but it will be a different novel than you have ever read.
Chapter 1 details Professor Timofey Pnin's miscalculated train voyage to deliver a lecture to a Woman's Club, in which he has apparently brought the wrong lecture, but which is not really revealed in the text until the last words of the final chapter. Weird. Fantastic opening.
Chapter 2 is the story of Pnin's family life. The love of his life, Liza, who has married several other men besides him, often under random chaotic circumstances including a suicide attempt and revolutionary psychiatric practice, and her son (with the man who made a cuckold of him, Dr. Eric Wind) and Pnin's surrogate son, the high-school aged extraordinarily talented artist Victor. In Chapter 2, Liza comes to visit Pnin at his new home, which is in a room sublet by another professor and his wife at the college they both teach at, Waindell. Their daughter has gotten married and Pnin has taken her room. Liza comes to visit and he is overjoyed and he waits with baited breath for her to reveal the reason she came, what she had to tell him. When she reveals her purpose, it is both mundane and heartbreaking.
Chapter 3 is "a day in the life" of Pnin, lecturing at class, going to his office, returning a book to the library because somebody else wants it, which he can't believe, and hearing a random utterance which will later greatly affect his circumstances. I am trying to remove spoilers.
Chapter 4 is like a mini "portrait of the artist as a young man" starring Victor. Indeed you almost forget this book is about Pnin, until you realize the real subject of the chapter is Victor's first visit with Pnin, where he is meant to meet him at a train station, which results in a funny little mistake. Most of Pnin is comic and gets most of its laughs from Pnin's poor use of English and surprisingly confusing accent. Pnin gets Victor a couple of gifts, which don't go over that well, but which is still heartwarming in a way.
Chapter 5 is the story of where Pnin vacations in the summer, and his first attempts at learning how to drive. Here he falls into a nostalgic reverie which is one of the more enjoyable departures of the novel.
Chapter 6 is the most famous part of the book--where Pnin throws a "house-heating" party in the home he has recently rented entirely for himself. He is at his happiest here, though he is about to receive some unfortunate news--though it is only because of his stubbornness that it will affect his life.
In what may be the most inventive part of the book, Chapter 7 reveals the narrator's relationship with Pnin. The narrator who has made sly reference to himself at a few points finally enters the narrative and becomes a character. It is not Nabokov himself, but it would be easy to make that mistake. Some of the autobiographical elements of this novel are probably more revealing than in any other book by Nabokov excepting his autobiography, and gives a very realistic portrait of the life of a college professor, and campus life in general. As the introduction by David Lodge states, it is one of the first examples of the "campus novel" genre, after Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe in 1952. (I take some issue with this claim--This Side of Paradise doesn't take place entirely on a campus, but couldn't it be considered that?)
To my chagrin, Nabokov cannot resist besmirching the reputation of a certain then-recently-departed German author:
"Literary departments still labored under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers." (102)
To that I have to reply, "What do you want, Vladimir?" In all of my years of reading, I have never had to choose between two authors because I knew one author thought the other one's work was terrible. Nabokov is a literary genius and also a genius when it comes to cutting other authors down to size. In this case, it is traumatic for me. I will continue to love them both, and continue to point out every instance I find of Vladimir speaking badly of Thomas. Though Mann was 24 years older than Nabokov, and did not write in English, they are representative of their era in that one left Nazi Germany and one left Communist Russia, both emigrated to America, and both have contributed a few of the major works to the canon of Great Books--though Nabokov would probably disagree. Still, I wish we could leave this superiority-complex and arrogance out of books and all get along nicely, but that isn't Nabokov's style. Regardless, one is able to forget about it when Liza reveals a letter to the narrator in the final chapter:
"The letter has by chance remained among my papers. Here it is:
'I am afraid you will be pained by my confession, my dear Lise' (the writer, though using Russian, called her throughout by this French form of her name, in order, I presume, to avoid both the too familiar 'Liza' and the too formal 'Elizaveta Innokentievna'). 'It is always painful for a sensitive (chutkiy) person to see another in an awkward position. And I am definitely in an awkward position.
'You, Lise, are surrounded by poets, scientists, artists, dandies. The celebrated painter who made your portrait last year is now, it is said, drinking himself to death (govoryat, spilsya) in the wilds of Massachusetts. Rumor proclaims many other things. And here I am, daring to write to you.
'I am not handsome. I am not interesting. I am not talented. I am not even rich. But Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything. And, believe me, this is more than any genius can offer you because a genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do. I may not achieve happiness, but I know I shall do everything to make you happy. I want you to write poems. I want you to go on with your psychotherapeutic research--in which I do not understand much, while questioning the validity of what I can understand. Incidentally, I am sending you under separate cover a pamphlet published in Prague by my friend Professor Chateau, which brilliantly refutes your Dr. Halp's theory of birth being an act of suicide on the part of the infant. I have permitted myself to correct an obvious misprint on page 48 of Chateau's excellent paper. I await your' (probably 'decision', the bottom of the page with signature had been cut off by Liza)." (136-137)
These and other small emotional, comic, linguistic asides like--
"Chateau, who looked so jaunty, with one hand in the pocket of his white flannel trousers and his lustring coat rather rakishly opened on a flannel waistcoat, cheerfully said that in the near future he would have to undergo an exploratory operation of the abdomen, and Pnin said, laughing, that every time he was X-rayed, doctors vainly tried to puzzle out what they termed 'a shadow behind the heart'.
'Good title for a bad novel,' remarked Chateau." (93)
--make up the majority of the pleasures of the text. This is "light entertainment" for Nabokov, but a more serious novel than anything being published today anyways. When you've read the two more "important" books by Nabokov, Pnin will be an enjoyable palate cleanser.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Almost exactly a year ago, I saw Ray Bradbury speak from his wheelchair on UCLA's campus, not more than a few hundred yards where he composed Fahrenheit 451 around 1950. Fifty-eight years later, aged 87 or so, Bradbury remained vivacious despite his being mostly confined to a wheelchair (he did stand for a moment at the beginning as if to bow, and he wore his large medal from France), which is a testament to the good that California can do for a person's health. But I saw him speak because he was the biggest name at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (I missed Gore Vidal due to poor planning and underestimation of his popularity--which I still deeply regret), and it is still remarkable to me how many people crowded into that "Agent's Voices" panel discussion, and sad to remember that David Foster Wallace's agent had been one of the three. More on that here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/04/tobias-wolff-jane-smiley-ron-carlson.html (and note rogue typo along with now-embarassing tirade) and here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/04/ray-bradbury-042608-royce-hall-ucla.html (and note the error of the author's age).
I had been meaning to read Fahrenheit 451 for somewhere around the last ten years. One of my now ex-coworkers told me he had read it for school in sixth grade. Is it written for sixth graders? It could be understood by them. The content is not objectionable. It's a vaguely subversive book that is meant to inspire revolt against an increasingly complacent future without complex ideas. It's probably a good book for junior high and high school students. As a college student, I should have included it in my independent study on the political novel in the 20th century. I would excise the portions about the comparison between All the King's Men and Primary Colors (though I was attempting to show there are only 2 kinds of political novels--the first a re-imagination of society as we know it, the second a novel "about politics") and compare 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.
First of all, while I enjoyed Fahrenheit 451, found it breezy, entertaining, funny, bizarre, and moving at times, it doesn't stretch to the heights of Orwell's or Huxley's masterworks. Orwell has telescreens, nonstop surveillance, Big Brother, a whole totalitarian political agenda realized. Huxley has soma, three classes of human beings, "feelies," hypnopaedic conditioning, and vacations to exotic places like Utah. Bradbury has the mechanical hound (potentially the star of the novel), "seashell" headphones, VW beetles that go 100 MPH everywhere, outlaw English professors, and firemen who start fires instead of putting them out. While Orwell and Huxley are making larger societal critiques, Bradbury sticks to one subject: books.
Now, here is one area where Huxley and Bradbury can converge: the arrival of the Kindle, perhaps the most evil instrument of technology to have been invented yet. Let me qualify that statement: it's not all bad--people will still be reading, at least, and writers will simply have to accept a new form of payment for their production, a la iTunes for musicians. I don't believe file-sharing will have an adverse effect on authors, and I don't believe libraries will cease to exist. I worry that people will start looking at little screens more often than they already do--Blackberry, iPhone, iPod (the only nicety I am guilty of having--but who doesn't!), Nintendo DS (not so different from Gameboy now some 20 odd years old), Facebook all the time, whatever it is that Twitter is, and on and on...--perhaps there's nothing WRONG with it, per se, but as someone that doesn't do all that stuff, I feel very left behind on this whole cultural revolution stuff--and feel that it is too expensive and not worth the effort for a person like me. I do feel left out, but I don't feel that these gadgets would improve my life anymore. But this isn't about me--this is about book burning.
Sure, six years before this book was written, Nazi Germany burned books, and that's the clearest precedent here: remove information so as to best manipulate the masses. I do not know how America could become like that. There were various restrictions on Google in China, I seem to recall, a few years back. It doesn't seem like Bradbury's warning is all that necessary (that said, it still makes for a compelling narrative). It appears that his spiritual cousin of the telescreen, "the walls" of the living room, where Mildred (main character Guy Montag's wife) spends most of her time, are the sole source of entertainment, and that they include a "family" that the viewer feels they are a part of--not so different from the way people get attached to TV shows, and pretty sharp of Bradbury to portray at the dawn of the television age:
"'When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about, where, when? Well, I'd say it really got started around a thing called the Civil War. Even though our rule book claims it was founded earlier. The fact is we didn't get along well until photography came into its own. Then--motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.'
Montag sat in bed, not moving.
'And because they had mass, they became simpler,' said Beatty. 'Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm, do you follow me?'
'I think so.'
Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. 'Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.'
'Snap ending,' Mildred nodded.
'Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more." (54-55)
So that is one reason--people don't have the time to read, so books are no longer necessary. But burnt so they can never be read? That is an effect, as Beatty later explains, of not wanting to weigh two sides of an issue:
"Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead, he's on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country." (59-60)
Or:
"Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile raction (Ed: note proofreading error--s/b 'reaction') to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment." (61)
This reminds me of people at my first job in California who would be like, "You're so good, you read a lot." They wish they had the time to read. It's not a worthwhile pursuit since they have so many other things they need to take care of and worry about. Leisure time is better spent in front of the television where you can quantify how long you are going to be free from other activity--not like the unpredictability of book, which depends on your doing a lot more work.
Should I give away the plot? Guy Montag meets a girl named Clarisse who questions everything about their society--he sort of even gets a crush on her, though she is 17 and he is married--and so he starts questioning everything. His wife Mildred is thoroughly drugged out and at her first appearance, has just attempted suicide by sleeping pills. Elsewhere in the novel she shows practically zero sign of depression. Beatty is the fire captain, who acts like the character of Mustapha Mond in Brave New World or O'Brien in 1984, who explains the society and therefore provides the most compelling moments.
After writing this review, I feel like Fahrenheit 451 is more important than I initially gave it credit for, and is perhaps closer to society in 2009 than either Huxley's or Orwell's works. It's not as extremely different as the other two. But I feel like, Orwell and Bradbury are clearly against their societies, whereas Huxley is less transparent in his aims. For me, Huxley is the most prophetic of the three, particularly since his book was also the earliest, and has been able to see clearly some 70 years into the future. Bradbury does anticipate the loneliness and isolation of our times, but that is less his motive than to argue in favor of literature, not unlike John the Savage in Brave New World who wants poetry, pain, sadness, everything, which causes Mustapha Mond to reply, "You are reserving the right to be unhappy." Orwell's might be the greatest novel of the three, but Huxley's is the wildest vision, and the most compelling for its sheer imaginative quality. Bradbury belongs right alongside them. History will treat this book as kindly as it does the other two, and let us hope that at least one of the three will be read for generations to come--whether on Kindle or paper.
I had been meaning to read Fahrenheit 451 for somewhere around the last ten years. One of my now ex-coworkers told me he had read it for school in sixth grade. Is it written for sixth graders? It could be understood by them. The content is not objectionable. It's a vaguely subversive book that is meant to inspire revolt against an increasingly complacent future without complex ideas. It's probably a good book for junior high and high school students. As a college student, I should have included it in my independent study on the political novel in the 20th century. I would excise the portions about the comparison between All the King's Men and Primary Colors (though I was attempting to show there are only 2 kinds of political novels--the first a re-imagination of society as we know it, the second a novel "about politics") and compare 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.
First of all, while I enjoyed Fahrenheit 451, found it breezy, entertaining, funny, bizarre, and moving at times, it doesn't stretch to the heights of Orwell's or Huxley's masterworks. Orwell has telescreens, nonstop surveillance, Big Brother, a whole totalitarian political agenda realized. Huxley has soma, three classes of human beings, "feelies," hypnopaedic conditioning, and vacations to exotic places like Utah. Bradbury has the mechanical hound (potentially the star of the novel), "seashell" headphones, VW beetles that go 100 MPH everywhere, outlaw English professors, and firemen who start fires instead of putting them out. While Orwell and Huxley are making larger societal critiques, Bradbury sticks to one subject: books.
Now, here is one area where Huxley and Bradbury can converge: the arrival of the Kindle, perhaps the most evil instrument of technology to have been invented yet. Let me qualify that statement: it's not all bad--people will still be reading, at least, and writers will simply have to accept a new form of payment for their production, a la iTunes for musicians. I don't believe file-sharing will have an adverse effect on authors, and I don't believe libraries will cease to exist. I worry that people will start looking at little screens more often than they already do--Blackberry, iPhone, iPod (the only nicety I am guilty of having--but who doesn't!), Nintendo DS (not so different from Gameboy now some 20 odd years old), Facebook all the time, whatever it is that Twitter is, and on and on...--perhaps there's nothing WRONG with it, per se, but as someone that doesn't do all that stuff, I feel very left behind on this whole cultural revolution stuff--and feel that it is too expensive and not worth the effort for a person like me. I do feel left out, but I don't feel that these gadgets would improve my life anymore. But this isn't about me--this is about book burning.
Sure, six years before this book was written, Nazi Germany burned books, and that's the clearest precedent here: remove information so as to best manipulate the masses. I do not know how America could become like that. There were various restrictions on Google in China, I seem to recall, a few years back. It doesn't seem like Bradbury's warning is all that necessary (that said, it still makes for a compelling narrative). It appears that his spiritual cousin of the telescreen, "the walls" of the living room, where Mildred (main character Guy Montag's wife) spends most of her time, are the sole source of entertainment, and that they include a "family" that the viewer feels they are a part of--not so different from the way people get attached to TV shows, and pretty sharp of Bradbury to portray at the dawn of the television age:
"'When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about, where, when? Well, I'd say it really got started around a thing called the Civil War. Even though our rule book claims it was founded earlier. The fact is we didn't get along well until photography came into its own. Then--motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.'
Montag sat in bed, not moving.
'And because they had mass, they became simpler,' said Beatty. 'Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm, do you follow me?'
'I think so.'
Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. 'Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.'
'Snap ending,' Mildred nodded.
'Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more." (54-55)
So that is one reason--people don't have the time to read, so books are no longer necessary. But burnt so they can never be read? That is an effect, as Beatty later explains, of not wanting to weigh two sides of an issue:
"Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead, he's on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country." (59-60)
Or:
"Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile raction (Ed: note proofreading error--s/b 'reaction') to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment." (61)
This reminds me of people at my first job in California who would be like, "You're so good, you read a lot." They wish they had the time to read. It's not a worthwhile pursuit since they have so many other things they need to take care of and worry about. Leisure time is better spent in front of the television where you can quantify how long you are going to be free from other activity--not like the unpredictability of book, which depends on your doing a lot more work.
Should I give away the plot? Guy Montag meets a girl named Clarisse who questions everything about their society--he sort of even gets a crush on her, though she is 17 and he is married--and so he starts questioning everything. His wife Mildred is thoroughly drugged out and at her first appearance, has just attempted suicide by sleeping pills. Elsewhere in the novel she shows practically zero sign of depression. Beatty is the fire captain, who acts like the character of Mustapha Mond in Brave New World or O'Brien in 1984, who explains the society and therefore provides the most compelling moments.
After writing this review, I feel like Fahrenheit 451 is more important than I initially gave it credit for, and is perhaps closer to society in 2009 than either Huxley's or Orwell's works. It's not as extremely different as the other two. But I feel like, Orwell and Bradbury are clearly against their societies, whereas Huxley is less transparent in his aims. For me, Huxley is the most prophetic of the three, particularly since his book was also the earliest, and has been able to see clearly some 70 years into the future. Bradbury does anticipate the loneliness and isolation of our times, but that is less his motive than to argue in favor of literature, not unlike John the Savage in Brave New World who wants poetry, pain, sadness, everything, which causes Mustapha Mond to reply, "You are reserving the right to be unhappy." Orwell's might be the greatest novel of the three, but Huxley's is the wildest vision, and the most compelling for its sheer imaginative quality. Bradbury belongs right alongside them. History will treat this book as kindly as it does the other two, and let us hope that at least one of the three will be read for generations to come--whether on Kindle or paper.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Underworld - Don DeLillo
In the weeks following 9/11, thousands of desperate conspiracy theorists pointed towards a variety of signs and signifiers as proof that the attack had been pre-ordained. People said that Wilco's album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot prefigured the event. The cover of that album is the famous twin tower parking garage in Chicago. Songs like "Ashes of American Flags" and "Jesus, Etc." seemed eerily topical. But that was only one notable item. In the literary world, the cover of Don DeLillo's 1997 tome Underworld spooked anyone aware of its existence--a stark black and white photo of the World Trade Center, a cross atop of church steeple in front, a bird with what seems a very large wingspan feet from the building, and a huge mess of fog enveloping the scene so the tops are not visible. Did DeLillo know that the 1994 attacks would be repeated? Was the choice of cover photograph a bit of precognitive excess? Is DeLillo the prophet of our times? The reader of Underworld will find few clues to support these wild, supernatural questions. It is all more a sad coincidence. Still, one might consider DeLillo's Mao II, which posits the author and terrorist as being spiritual brothers, and his most recent novel Falling Man, which uses 9/11 as a launching pad for the narrative, as further proof that all of his writing is intricately connected in a cryptogrammic maze. One could even point to 2003's Cosmopolis as a warning for the financial crisis that would occur five years later on Wall St.
I had the pleasure of meeting DeLillo briefly at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on his promotional tour for that book in April or May of 2003. I had recently put out my first ambitious larger-scale piece of writing entitled "Autointoxication," which reprinted a page or two from White Noise as a kind of reverse epigraph, and I wanted him to see it, and hoped that he wouldn't sue me. He read from Cosmopolis, I bought a copy, and I got in line to have him sign it. A few people had managed to convey a sentence or two in their brief moment with the master, and I worried about a failure of confidence, while entertaining a daydream that he might read the piece on his way home, become transfixed and ecstatic, and help me to become a published author at 20. The moment came and I handed over my copy of the book and believe I said, "Mr. DeLillo, I'm a huge fan, I love your work. Would you like a copy of my zine?" I know he only said a few words back to me. "What's a zine?" he responded curtly, perhaps a bit annoyed. "It's kind of like a book in a way," I said back. "Oh, sure." I handed him a copy, took my autographed copy of his book, felt happy I had accomplished my goal, and thought that he would probably throw it away or read a page of it, become disinterested, and dispose of it some other way.
Anyone who has not read White Noise should go out and get it from the library immediately. Underworld may be DeLillo's piece de resistance, but I cannot recommend it as highly as White Noise, which is infinitely more digestible, razor-sharp in its focus, very, very funny, and eloquently composed. A friend of mine suggested that it prefigured the proliferation of Prozac with its Dylar tablet. But onto the real subject--what is Underworld about?
1) The 1951 baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants where Bobby Thomson hit the "Shot Heard 'Round the World"
2) Nick Shay, waste management executive, and Klara Sax, famous artist.
3) A staggering cast of characters like Albert Bronzini, high school chemistry teacher and chess master, Matt Shay, younger brother to Nick and chess pupil, Sister Mary Edgar, a long-term nun given to corporal punishment, J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director, celebrity hobnobber of indeterminate sexuality, Frank Sinatra, singer, Jackie Gleason, comedic actor, Lenny Bruce, stand-up comedian, Brian Glassic, friend of Nick Shay, Marian Shay, wife of Nick, recreational heroin user, Cotter Martin, original owner of the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" ball, Manx Martin, his father that sells it on impulse, Marvin Lundy, tracker and eventual longtime owner of the ball, Ismael Munoz, 'train-tagging' artist and Bronx community steward, the Texas Highway Killer, a serial killer in the spotlight over several decades, Eric Demming, friend and co-worker of Matt Shay, and nuclear radiation fallout alarmist, and Janet Urbaniak, girlfriend and wife to Matt Shay, nurse who runs for 11 minutes straight from her hospital through a rough neighborhood to her apartment shared with other nurses.
4) American society from 1950-2000
Underworld is DeLillo's version of the Great American Novel. It is not a failure by any stretch, but it is not for everyone. It could have used better editing, but that would have detracted from its size and scope, which extends towards nearly every element of cultural information that arose during the Cold War period and after. It is roughly the same length as The Magic Mountain. It is not as good as Magic Mountain, but it is much closer to the sadness of our present reality. It's a very realistic novel, there's very little in it that sounds totally made up.
So....Nick Shay has some horrible secret in his past that DeLillo holds off on revealing until somewhere in the late 700's, but one that the reader will be able to know much earlier--though the actual event of which should be surprising, as it was for me. Klara Sax was once wife to Albert Bronzini, and slept with Nick twice when he was 17 and she was 32 or so, and she eventually became a renowned artist who is decorating over 200 defunct military planes in a desert in the Southwest at the opening of the novel--that is, after the 70 page "prologue" which is probably the greatest literary account of a baseball game yet to have been written.
The prologue was once published separately, and some people might enjoy reading that on its own. The rest of the novel has very little in common with it, beyond the three "Manx Martin" chapters, and a few notable appearances of J. Edgar Hoover later on. Nick Shay is the final owner of the baseball, and it may be some sort of symbol in the book that I am not able to confidently state, and one way to describe Underworld is to say "It's about 'The Shot Heard 'Round the World' baseball and all of the hands its travels through," but the baseball doesn't account for the majority of the plot in the novel.
While there may be conspiracy theories about the cover, I would like to offer my own conspiracy: the page 420 test. This test can be applied to any book with more than 420 pages. The reader should look to page 420 and see if there are any references to pot smoking on it. If the book passes the test, then the author is either aware of its significance, or really just obsessed with pot smoking because it occurs constantly throughout the work, or has really just let something with no real significance happen to occur due to serendipitous printing or extremely precise and drugged out typesetters:
"He'd smoked something that had made him immobile. But not just immobile. Matt was not a user except at parties, where he'd go through the sociable motions, taking a pull on a long-stemmed pipe with a clay bowl that was tamped with a grassy substance. But the thing he'd toked last night was either a rogue strain of hashish or standard stuff laced with some psychotomimetic agent. And he was not just immobilized. And somebody sat in front of him and spoke thickly into his face in a ridiculous movie accent evidently meant to be Prussian." (420-421)
In the case of Underworld, I think it is the third possibility. There is a fair amount of drug use in the book, along with drinking and cigarette smoking, but I don't know how much DeLillo would care about passing the 420 test and exciting the imaginations of academiliterate stoners with too much time on their hands. There is also lots of sex in the book. Probably the most inventive sexual aspect is the scene in the store Condomology, which occurs near the beginning of the novel, and which reminded me of White Noise:
"Behind the products and their uses we glimpsed the industry of vivid description. Dermasilk and astroglide and reservoir-tipped. There were condoms packaged as Roman coins and condoms in matchbook folders. Brian read aloud from the copy on the boxes. We had natural animal membranes and bubblegum scenting. We had condoms that glowed in the dark and foreplay condoms and condoms marked with graffiti that stretched to your erection, a letter becoming a word, a word that expands to a phrase. He did a little Churchill--We shall wear them on the beaches. We had lollipop condoms, we had boxer shorts printed with cartoon characters shaped like condoms standing on end, sort of floaty and nipple-headed, who spoke a language called Spermian." (111)
While there is something entertaining and notable and occasionally profound about every "movement" of the book (6, plus 1 prologue and 1 epilogue), Parts 4 and 5, "Cocksucker Blues" and "Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry (Selected Fragments Public and Private in the 1950s and 1960s)" struck me as the strongest. The former is a loving portrait of New York City in the summer of 1974, the "summer of rooftops" for Klara Sax. Two memorable scenes involve viewing the Zapruder film in a techie's apartment (which reminded me of a scene from the film Slacker), and viewing the banned-lost-rare-uncovered Sergei Eisenstein film Unterwelt which comprises the centerpiece of the novel as a whole.
Many of the chapters follow random narratives for many times smaller supporting characters, but the best of these is the one about the Texas Highway Killer, who calls up a television station and admits he is the real one and answers questions from the anchorwoman Sue Ann. It was too bad there was only one of these chapters:
"They talk about head trauma. They talk about is he adopted or was he abused? The problem is all in the spacing. If you fire out the window on the driver's side, which you have to do if you don't want to shoot across the width of your own car and the space between your car and the other car, you still face the problem of having to fire across the space between cars and the width of the other car because the other driver's side is the far side in relation to your position at the wheel. You are not going to shoot a passenger. If you shoot a passenger, then the driver is liable to take evasive action and note your license number and make of car and color of hair and so on. So you are going to shoot lone drivers and you are going to fire out on the window on your side using the left hand to hold the weapon. But the fact is, as he eventually figured out, that if you shoot with the right hand, the natural hand, your projectile travels the same distance across the same spaces, pretty much, as the self-taught method of the left hand. He figured this out after victim five or six, he forgets which, but decided to stick with the left hand as the shooting hand even though it made more sense to steer with the left hand and shoot with the right. Because the right hand was the born hand." (267-268)
Finally, there are mentions of the World Trade Center for which the cover photograph is not inappropriate:
"The World Trade Center was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks. She saw it almost everywhere she went. She ate a meal and drank a glass of wine and walked to the rail or ledge and there it usually was, bulked up at the funneled end of the island, and a man stood next to her one evening, early, drinks on the roof of a gallery building--about sixty, she thought, portly and jowled but also sleek in a way, assured and contained and hard-polished, a substantial sort, European.
'I think of it as one, not two,' she said, 'Even though there are clearly two towers. It's a single entity, isn't it?'
'Very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think.'
'Yes, you have to look.'
And they were out of ideas for a while, standing at the ledge and taking in the baleful view together, uncomfortably, she thought, because esthetic judgments feel superficial when you share them with a stranger, and finally she sensed a rustle, a disturbance in his bearing that was meant to mark a change of subject, earnest and determined, and he said to her, still looking towards the towers, he whispered actually, 'I like your work, you know.'
'Yes?'
'Very sympathetic.' (372)
And earlier in the novel, in relation to a New Jersey waste dump, some 15 years later in chronological time, where the cover photograph is most clearly ascribed:
"He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramids at Giza--only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying perfumed water on the approach roads. He found the sight inspiring. All this ingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one. Bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs, graving docks, container ships, all the great works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to this culminating structure. And the thing was organic, ever growing and shifting, its shape computer plotted by the day and hour. In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami." (184)
I don't think you should read Underworld as your introduction to DeLillo--White Noise should be that--but Underworld was named "runner-up" in the New York Times Book Review of the Best Fiction of the last 25 Years list. Beloved was #1. The co-runners up were Updike's 4 Rabbit novels, Roth's American Pastoral (on the short list of future Flying Houses reviews), and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. You will need to take a good month out of your time to make room for this novel, though some people read a lot faster than me. It would be hard to absolutely hate this book--everyone should find something in it that they like--and though it may wear you down, it keeps you reading to the end by virtue of its comparatively short, dovetail-narrative chapters. It may not explain why 9/11 happened, but Underworld is an extraordinarily thorough document of America in the latter half of the 20th century that few others will ever match, or even want to attempt. If there was a list for Best Fiction About the Last 50 Years, Underworld would be #1.
I had the pleasure of meeting DeLillo briefly at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on his promotional tour for that book in April or May of 2003. I had recently put out my first ambitious larger-scale piece of writing entitled "Autointoxication," which reprinted a page or two from White Noise as a kind of reverse epigraph, and I wanted him to see it, and hoped that he wouldn't sue me. He read from Cosmopolis, I bought a copy, and I got in line to have him sign it. A few people had managed to convey a sentence or two in their brief moment with the master, and I worried about a failure of confidence, while entertaining a daydream that he might read the piece on his way home, become transfixed and ecstatic, and help me to become a published author at 20. The moment came and I handed over my copy of the book and believe I said, "Mr. DeLillo, I'm a huge fan, I love your work. Would you like a copy of my zine?" I know he only said a few words back to me. "What's a zine?" he responded curtly, perhaps a bit annoyed. "It's kind of like a book in a way," I said back. "Oh, sure." I handed him a copy, took my autographed copy of his book, felt happy I had accomplished my goal, and thought that he would probably throw it away or read a page of it, become disinterested, and dispose of it some other way.
Anyone who has not read White Noise should go out and get it from the library immediately. Underworld may be DeLillo's piece de resistance, but I cannot recommend it as highly as White Noise, which is infinitely more digestible, razor-sharp in its focus, very, very funny, and eloquently composed. A friend of mine suggested that it prefigured the proliferation of Prozac with its Dylar tablet. But onto the real subject--what is Underworld about?
1) The 1951 baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants where Bobby Thomson hit the "Shot Heard 'Round the World"
2) Nick Shay, waste management executive, and Klara Sax, famous artist.
3) A staggering cast of characters like Albert Bronzini, high school chemistry teacher and chess master, Matt Shay, younger brother to Nick and chess pupil, Sister Mary Edgar, a long-term nun given to corporal punishment, J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director, celebrity hobnobber of indeterminate sexuality, Frank Sinatra, singer, Jackie Gleason, comedic actor, Lenny Bruce, stand-up comedian, Brian Glassic, friend of Nick Shay, Marian Shay, wife of Nick, recreational heroin user, Cotter Martin, original owner of the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" ball, Manx Martin, his father that sells it on impulse, Marvin Lundy, tracker and eventual longtime owner of the ball, Ismael Munoz, 'train-tagging' artist and Bronx community steward, the Texas Highway Killer, a serial killer in the spotlight over several decades, Eric Demming, friend and co-worker of Matt Shay, and nuclear radiation fallout alarmist, and Janet Urbaniak, girlfriend and wife to Matt Shay, nurse who runs for 11 minutes straight from her hospital through a rough neighborhood to her apartment shared with other nurses.
4) American society from 1950-2000
Underworld is DeLillo's version of the Great American Novel. It is not a failure by any stretch, but it is not for everyone. It could have used better editing, but that would have detracted from its size and scope, which extends towards nearly every element of cultural information that arose during the Cold War period and after. It is roughly the same length as The Magic Mountain. It is not as good as Magic Mountain, but it is much closer to the sadness of our present reality. It's a very realistic novel, there's very little in it that sounds totally made up.
So....Nick Shay has some horrible secret in his past that DeLillo holds off on revealing until somewhere in the late 700's, but one that the reader will be able to know much earlier--though the actual event of which should be surprising, as it was for me. Klara Sax was once wife to Albert Bronzini, and slept with Nick twice when he was 17 and she was 32 or so, and she eventually became a renowned artist who is decorating over 200 defunct military planes in a desert in the Southwest at the opening of the novel--that is, after the 70 page "prologue" which is probably the greatest literary account of a baseball game yet to have been written.
The prologue was once published separately, and some people might enjoy reading that on its own. The rest of the novel has very little in common with it, beyond the three "Manx Martin" chapters, and a few notable appearances of J. Edgar Hoover later on. Nick Shay is the final owner of the baseball, and it may be some sort of symbol in the book that I am not able to confidently state, and one way to describe Underworld is to say "It's about 'The Shot Heard 'Round the World' baseball and all of the hands its travels through," but the baseball doesn't account for the majority of the plot in the novel.
While there may be conspiracy theories about the cover, I would like to offer my own conspiracy: the page 420 test. This test can be applied to any book with more than 420 pages. The reader should look to page 420 and see if there are any references to pot smoking on it. If the book passes the test, then the author is either aware of its significance, or really just obsessed with pot smoking because it occurs constantly throughout the work, or has really just let something with no real significance happen to occur due to serendipitous printing or extremely precise and drugged out typesetters:
"He'd smoked something that had made him immobile. But not just immobile. Matt was not a user except at parties, where he'd go through the sociable motions, taking a pull on a long-stemmed pipe with a clay bowl that was tamped with a grassy substance. But the thing he'd toked last night was either a rogue strain of hashish or standard stuff laced with some psychotomimetic agent. And he was not just immobilized. And somebody sat in front of him and spoke thickly into his face in a ridiculous movie accent evidently meant to be Prussian." (420-421)
In the case of Underworld, I think it is the third possibility. There is a fair amount of drug use in the book, along with drinking and cigarette smoking, but I don't know how much DeLillo would care about passing the 420 test and exciting the imaginations of academiliterate stoners with too much time on their hands. There is also lots of sex in the book. Probably the most inventive sexual aspect is the scene in the store Condomology, which occurs near the beginning of the novel, and which reminded me of White Noise:
"Behind the products and their uses we glimpsed the industry of vivid description. Dermasilk and astroglide and reservoir-tipped. There were condoms packaged as Roman coins and condoms in matchbook folders. Brian read aloud from the copy on the boxes. We had natural animal membranes and bubblegum scenting. We had condoms that glowed in the dark and foreplay condoms and condoms marked with graffiti that stretched to your erection, a letter becoming a word, a word that expands to a phrase. He did a little Churchill--We shall wear them on the beaches. We had lollipop condoms, we had boxer shorts printed with cartoon characters shaped like condoms standing on end, sort of floaty and nipple-headed, who spoke a language called Spermian." (111)
While there is something entertaining and notable and occasionally profound about every "movement" of the book (6, plus 1 prologue and 1 epilogue), Parts 4 and 5, "Cocksucker Blues" and "Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry (Selected Fragments Public and Private in the 1950s and 1960s)" struck me as the strongest. The former is a loving portrait of New York City in the summer of 1974, the "summer of rooftops" for Klara Sax. Two memorable scenes involve viewing the Zapruder film in a techie's apartment (which reminded me of a scene from the film Slacker), and viewing the banned-lost-rare-uncovered Sergei Eisenstein film Unterwelt which comprises the centerpiece of the novel as a whole.
Many of the chapters follow random narratives for many times smaller supporting characters, but the best of these is the one about the Texas Highway Killer, who calls up a television station and admits he is the real one and answers questions from the anchorwoman Sue Ann. It was too bad there was only one of these chapters:
"They talk about head trauma. They talk about is he adopted or was he abused? The problem is all in the spacing. If you fire out the window on the driver's side, which you have to do if you don't want to shoot across the width of your own car and the space between your car and the other car, you still face the problem of having to fire across the space between cars and the width of the other car because the other driver's side is the far side in relation to your position at the wheel. You are not going to shoot a passenger. If you shoot a passenger, then the driver is liable to take evasive action and note your license number and make of car and color of hair and so on. So you are going to shoot lone drivers and you are going to fire out on the window on your side using the left hand to hold the weapon. But the fact is, as he eventually figured out, that if you shoot with the right hand, the natural hand, your projectile travels the same distance across the same spaces, pretty much, as the self-taught method of the left hand. He figured this out after victim five or six, he forgets which, but decided to stick with the left hand as the shooting hand even though it made more sense to steer with the left hand and shoot with the right. Because the right hand was the born hand." (267-268)
Finally, there are mentions of the World Trade Center for which the cover photograph is not inappropriate:
"The World Trade Center was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks. She saw it almost everywhere she went. She ate a meal and drank a glass of wine and walked to the rail or ledge and there it usually was, bulked up at the funneled end of the island, and a man stood next to her one evening, early, drinks on the roof of a gallery building--about sixty, she thought, portly and jowled but also sleek in a way, assured and contained and hard-polished, a substantial sort, European.
'I think of it as one, not two,' she said, 'Even though there are clearly two towers. It's a single entity, isn't it?'
'Very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think.'
'Yes, you have to look.'
And they were out of ideas for a while, standing at the ledge and taking in the baleful view together, uncomfortably, she thought, because esthetic judgments feel superficial when you share them with a stranger, and finally she sensed a rustle, a disturbance in his bearing that was meant to mark a change of subject, earnest and determined, and he said to her, still looking towards the towers, he whispered actually, 'I like your work, you know.'
'Yes?'
'Very sympathetic.' (372)
And earlier in the novel, in relation to a New Jersey waste dump, some 15 years later in chronological time, where the cover photograph is most clearly ascribed:
"He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramids at Giza--only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying perfumed water on the approach roads. He found the sight inspiring. All this ingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one. Bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs, graving docks, container ships, all the great works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to this culminating structure. And the thing was organic, ever growing and shifting, its shape computer plotted by the day and hour. In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami." (184)
I don't think you should read Underworld as your introduction to DeLillo--White Noise should be that--but Underworld was named "runner-up" in the New York Times Book Review of the Best Fiction of the last 25 Years list. Beloved was #1. The co-runners up were Updike's 4 Rabbit novels, Roth's American Pastoral (on the short list of future Flying Houses reviews), and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. You will need to take a good month out of your time to make room for this novel, though some people read a lot faster than me. It would be hard to absolutely hate this book--everyone should find something in it that they like--and though it may wear you down, it keeps you reading to the end by virtue of its comparatively short, dovetail-narrative chapters. It may not explain why 9/11 happened, but Underworld is an extraordinarily thorough document of America in the latter half of the 20th century that few others will ever match, or even want to attempt. If there was a list for Best Fiction About the Last 50 Years, Underworld would be #1.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
The Visitor - Dir. Thomas McCarthy
The Visitor opened about a year ago, at a time when few "awards-minded" films are released. It was one of the first movies to open in 2008 with an Oscar buzz attached to it, for lead actor Richard Jenkins. Jenkins was nominated, and a few weeks ago he lost out to Sean Penn. I could have tried to rent Milk last night but I was just assuming it would be not be available. I watched The Visitor on Starz On-Demand last night, very tired due to a reckless Friday night which involved 3 hours of sleep, at best, thinking, "Well, I'll probably fall asleep but it's supposed to be good, so I should at least try...."
I'm very glad I decided to do that, and I did not fall asleep. I am writing about it on Flying Houses because this is the kind of movie that gets forgotten about by the public at large and flits around on cable for months or years--perhaps like The Station Agent, McCarthy's only other film which he wrote and directed, which is supposed to be quite good, and which I've never really tried to see. The Visitor is a very good film--the only criticism I can make is that it tends to view the world through rose-colored glasses too much. Not in its conclusion, or portrayal of law enforcement procedure--but in its total disregard to issues of cost of living.
Richard Jenkins plays Walter, an economics professor at Connecticut College, who is summoned to New York to present a paper at NYU which he co-authored, though he really just read it and attached his name to it. The woman more responsible for it is in the throws of late-stage pregnancy, and so he agrees to go to New York, where it is casually revealed that he keeps an apartment--for the last 25 years. I understand that tenured professors make pretty good money, but still, a home in Connecticut, and an apartment in New York that he almost never goes to--that's the first offense. He finds two people living in his apartment, Syrian musician Tarek, and Senegalese jewelry-maker Zainab. At first they flip out because they think it's their place--they've been rented it by a man named Ivan, who is only mentioned by name and never explained, offense #2. Walter feels bad for them after they leave, because they've been polite and understanding, and tells them they can move back in and stay for a few days.
He goes to the conference at NYU, which are certainly some of the best scenes in the film. The Kimmel Student Center is used to excellent effect in the film. He goes to Washington Square Park and starts to listen to the drummers playing the bongo on the bottoms of buckets. He later finds that Tarek plays the bongos, and after being taught a few lessons, realizes that the drums are one of his great undiscovered loves. These are some of the other best scenes--for about twenty minutes--perhaps minutes 20 through 40 of the film--it can seemingly do no wrong. Never mind that Tarek and Zainab are supposedly looking for an apartment--who knows how they'd be able to afford it--but because it doesn't come to fruition it is not enough to call if offense #3. You can't help but be happy for Walter, who is such a cut-and-dry figure at the beginning, and who develops this very real, dare-I-say heartwarming friendship with Tarek and his girlfriend, who is oddly standoffish at points.
The turning point of the film occurs after the drum circle performance at Central Park, another one of the best scenes. In the rush to get through the subway turnstile, Tarek gets his giant drum bag stuck at an interval after it has locked, and he casually steps over it. A note on turnstile hopping: I do not know if I have done it in New York, but I definitely did it in Paris a few times, where it is commonplace enough that I saw a few other people do it, generally at night. I might have done it once in New York, but the manner in which Tarek is stopped is something very real and frightening and you really just want to curse the hell out of the subway police. Definitely one of the most emotional parts of the movie, and Jenkins plays the part of powerless advocate at just the right tone. Later Tarek is brought to a correctional facility in Queens, and then for the final arc of the film, his mother arrives from Michigan because she believes that her presence alone in the city will help get him out.
Another great scene is when Tarek's mother, Mouna, meets Zainab and asks, "Show me what you liked to do in the city with him." And they ride the Staten Island Ferry, because it's a free boat ride, and because you can point out where the WTC used to stand, even if you didn't get to see it in person, and because you go right by the Statue of Liberty, which is certainly a major symbol in the film. Later there seems to be a relationship blossoming between Walter, a widower, and Mouna, a widow, but the film never veers into sacharrine unrealistic notions of romance, and is all the more powerful for it.
While the set-up may be a bit unrealistic for monetary reasons, and while the issue of illegal aliens in the U.S. is given a rather elementary surface examination, The Visitor is still a film that everyone should see. It will make you happy in ways you didn't expect, and it will make you really start to care about the characters, whether you recognize the manipulative quality or not. That extra 20% in income taxes that Tarek and Zainab avoid having to pay is maybe just what they need to make living in NYC work out alright. I think the film could have presented the other side of the issue, at least slightly, just to give a voice to the other side, but it is still an important film politically, because it calls for revision of U.S. immigration policy, which has only become more strict and harsh since 9/11. What happens to Tarek is upsetting, and while he may not technically be allowed to stay in the country, there still should be some way to allow him to become a naturalized citizen before such life-shattering actions are taken. Jenkins voices these emotions in such a way that you don't disagree with him, and while it is up for debate whether he deserved the Oscar, he clearly deserved the nomination. While this is definitely a "message film," it's not a boring or inappropriate one, and the last shot of film is memorably great. It may not seem like the most exciting movie from a synopsis standpoint, but it deserves to be given a chance by everybody.
I'm very glad I decided to do that, and I did not fall asleep. I am writing about it on Flying Houses because this is the kind of movie that gets forgotten about by the public at large and flits around on cable for months or years--perhaps like The Station Agent, McCarthy's only other film which he wrote and directed, which is supposed to be quite good, and which I've never really tried to see. The Visitor is a very good film--the only criticism I can make is that it tends to view the world through rose-colored glasses too much. Not in its conclusion, or portrayal of law enforcement procedure--but in its total disregard to issues of cost of living.
Richard Jenkins plays Walter, an economics professor at Connecticut College, who is summoned to New York to present a paper at NYU which he co-authored, though he really just read it and attached his name to it. The woman more responsible for it is in the throws of late-stage pregnancy, and so he agrees to go to New York, where it is casually revealed that he keeps an apartment--for the last 25 years. I understand that tenured professors make pretty good money, but still, a home in Connecticut, and an apartment in New York that he almost never goes to--that's the first offense. He finds two people living in his apartment, Syrian musician Tarek, and Senegalese jewelry-maker Zainab. At first they flip out because they think it's their place--they've been rented it by a man named Ivan, who is only mentioned by name and never explained, offense #2. Walter feels bad for them after they leave, because they've been polite and understanding, and tells them they can move back in and stay for a few days.
He goes to the conference at NYU, which are certainly some of the best scenes in the film. The Kimmel Student Center is used to excellent effect in the film. He goes to Washington Square Park and starts to listen to the drummers playing the bongo on the bottoms of buckets. He later finds that Tarek plays the bongos, and after being taught a few lessons, realizes that the drums are one of his great undiscovered loves. These are some of the other best scenes--for about twenty minutes--perhaps minutes 20 through 40 of the film--it can seemingly do no wrong. Never mind that Tarek and Zainab are supposedly looking for an apartment--who knows how they'd be able to afford it--but because it doesn't come to fruition it is not enough to call if offense #3. You can't help but be happy for Walter, who is such a cut-and-dry figure at the beginning, and who develops this very real, dare-I-say heartwarming friendship with Tarek and his girlfriend, who is oddly standoffish at points.
The turning point of the film occurs after the drum circle performance at Central Park, another one of the best scenes. In the rush to get through the subway turnstile, Tarek gets his giant drum bag stuck at an interval after it has locked, and he casually steps over it. A note on turnstile hopping: I do not know if I have done it in New York, but I definitely did it in Paris a few times, where it is commonplace enough that I saw a few other people do it, generally at night. I might have done it once in New York, but the manner in which Tarek is stopped is something very real and frightening and you really just want to curse the hell out of the subway police. Definitely one of the most emotional parts of the movie, and Jenkins plays the part of powerless advocate at just the right tone. Later Tarek is brought to a correctional facility in Queens, and then for the final arc of the film, his mother arrives from Michigan because she believes that her presence alone in the city will help get him out.
Another great scene is when Tarek's mother, Mouna, meets Zainab and asks, "Show me what you liked to do in the city with him." And they ride the Staten Island Ferry, because it's a free boat ride, and because you can point out where the WTC used to stand, even if you didn't get to see it in person, and because you go right by the Statue of Liberty, which is certainly a major symbol in the film. Later there seems to be a relationship blossoming between Walter, a widower, and Mouna, a widow, but the film never veers into sacharrine unrealistic notions of romance, and is all the more powerful for it.
While the set-up may be a bit unrealistic for monetary reasons, and while the issue of illegal aliens in the U.S. is given a rather elementary surface examination, The Visitor is still a film that everyone should see. It will make you happy in ways you didn't expect, and it will make you really start to care about the characters, whether you recognize the manipulative quality or not. That extra 20% in income taxes that Tarek and Zainab avoid having to pay is maybe just what they need to make living in NYC work out alright. I think the film could have presented the other side of the issue, at least slightly, just to give a voice to the other side, but it is still an important film politically, because it calls for revision of U.S. immigration policy, which has only become more strict and harsh since 9/11. What happens to Tarek is upsetting, and while he may not technically be allowed to stay in the country, there still should be some way to allow him to become a naturalized citizen before such life-shattering actions are taken. Jenkins voices these emotions in such a way that you don't disagree with him, and while it is up for debate whether he deserved the Oscar, he clearly deserved the nomination. While this is definitely a "message film," it's not a boring or inappropriate one, and the last shot of film is memorably great. It may not seem like the most exciting movie from a synopsis standpoint, but it deserves to be given a chance by everybody.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Trail of the Dead - Jon Evans
As a formatting issue, Flying Houses reviews music with the band name first and the album title after the dash, and books with the title first and the author's name after the dash. This is because it just seems like the journalistic standard. That new Franz Ferdinand album might make for a confusing review or the Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified could be the same.
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (a.k.a. Trail of the Dead) have put out their newest album last week and a review can be found here http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/149323-and-you-will-know-us-by-the-trail-of-dead-the-century-of-self and if I were myself from a couple years ago I would probably be taking the long walk down to Reckless Records to buy it, but I digress. Their secret new album is called "Jon Evans" and is coming out later this year, in a move not unlike Radiohead's "Kid A"/"Amnesiac" release schedule. Naming their album after a person is a curious move, but does not come as a total surprise after one of their earlier songs that staked out their reputation, "Mark David Chapman" was similarly-titled, not to mention "Baudelaire."
But "Jon Evans?" Who is Jon Evans? Well, he is a writer. A real living person. "Dark Places" is his first novel. He has written four more. Here is what a short biography on a book site says about him: Jon Evans is the son of an ex-pat Rhodesian father and Canadian mother and was born and raised in Canada. He has travelled extensively all over the world and works as an IT consultant between trips. He currently lives and works in San Francisco.
The Trail of the Dead have created a concept album based around this man's life. Does it come close to Zen Arcade or Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness or Cursive's Happy Hollow? Sadly, not. However it is a very original idea that should not be discounted. The first track on the album is about a guy named Paul Wood who goes hiking on the Annapurna Circuit in Malaysia. He and his friend from South Africa are hiking around a mountain and they discover a dead body with Swiss Army knives in his eyes. The man's name is Stanley Goebel which immediately makes me think, Nazi.
But Stanley is actually a fellow Canadian of Paul's (whose name is actually Balthazar) and a pretty good guy on all accounts, and Paul continues home to San Francisco in the second "movement" of the album, titled "California." There he works as an IT Consultant, and soon the economy topples and Paul gets laid off. Conrad Keely must be trying to make a statement about the current state of global society. Now all art will be about desperation, poverty, and human resilience. It works in this case, as Paul uses the opportunity of unemployment to solve the mystery of this murder--because here's the kicker--two years earlier, his girlfriend Laura had been murdered--in the same way! With knives in her eyes!
Probably the best song on the album is "Cookie Monsters" which involves Paul's attempt to track down the killer via posts made to a secret online page where the identity of the murderer is revealed. One of the rules of the game he plays is to only log onto the page at public terminals and then to delete all the browsing history before he leaves--but he forgets to delete the cookie history too! Since Paul is an IT Consultant he knows all of these secret tricks to online pseudo-hacking and eventually hatches a plan to lure the murderer back to Africa, where Laura's murder took place, while recruiting several old friends from the overland trucking trip to Africa that the first murder happened during.
Since Keely & Co. have constructed such an elaborate plot for their album, it is very difficult to discern the majority of the action in the story. Only if you read all of the lyrics from beginning to end will the story come through at all, and even then it seems vague. Just hearing Keely try to sing songs about all of this complicated subject-matter makes for an unforgettable listen.
Finally, Paul stages a dramatic conclusion during the song "The Pillar of Hercules" that ends the story on a happy note. Not to be outdone, Trail of the Dead close out the album with the revelation of Jon Evans--the author of the story about their album about Paul Wood--and how he is a successful mass-market paperback writer that won an award for his debut novel and now finds himself blocked, and so is forced to go back into more IT work than writing. For the originality of the material, Trail of the Dead have released their most essential album since Source Tags & Codes, one that will capture the attention of adventure-seekers and serial killer-hunters and superhero-impersonators everywhere. Their conceit is not to be outdone, and the humor they reveal displays a side of the band that will be totally welcome in indie rock circles everywhere--total disregard for audience expectations and totally random musical ideas. It's weird, but it's usually compelling, though not as good as the greatest concept albums of all time, still an album that should rank in the top 20 of 2009. At the very least, it's a gift for Jon Evans, the real writer, who will no doubt be amused that a pretty popular band has decided to write an album about him. They even make another prescient observation--the only band Paul mentions liking is Prodigy, and Prodigy released their first new album in five years (since Evans wrote "Dark Places," actually) the same day as their other recent album, "The Century of Self." You've got to hand it to them--they definitely don't lack any ambition.
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (a.k.a. Trail of the Dead) have put out their newest album last week and a review can be found here http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/149323-and-you-will-know-us-by-the-trail-of-dead-the-century-of-self and if I were myself from a couple years ago I would probably be taking the long walk down to Reckless Records to buy it, but I digress. Their secret new album is called "Jon Evans" and is coming out later this year, in a move not unlike Radiohead's "Kid A"/"Amnesiac" release schedule. Naming their album after a person is a curious move, but does not come as a total surprise after one of their earlier songs that staked out their reputation, "Mark David Chapman" was similarly-titled, not to mention "Baudelaire."
But "Jon Evans?" Who is Jon Evans? Well, he is a writer. A real living person. "Dark Places" is his first novel. He has written four more. Here is what a short biography on a book site says about him: Jon Evans is the son of an ex-pat Rhodesian father and Canadian mother and was born and raised in Canada. He has travelled extensively all over the world and works as an IT consultant between trips. He currently lives and works in San Francisco.
The Trail of the Dead have created a concept album based around this man's life. Does it come close to Zen Arcade or Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness or Cursive's Happy Hollow? Sadly, not. However it is a very original idea that should not be discounted. The first track on the album is about a guy named Paul Wood who goes hiking on the Annapurna Circuit in Malaysia. He and his friend from South Africa are hiking around a mountain and they discover a dead body with Swiss Army knives in his eyes. The man's name is Stanley Goebel which immediately makes me think, Nazi.
But Stanley is actually a fellow Canadian of Paul's (whose name is actually Balthazar) and a pretty good guy on all accounts, and Paul continues home to San Francisco in the second "movement" of the album, titled "California." There he works as an IT Consultant, and soon the economy topples and Paul gets laid off. Conrad Keely must be trying to make a statement about the current state of global society. Now all art will be about desperation, poverty, and human resilience. It works in this case, as Paul uses the opportunity of unemployment to solve the mystery of this murder--because here's the kicker--two years earlier, his girlfriend Laura had been murdered--in the same way! With knives in her eyes!
Probably the best song on the album is "Cookie Monsters" which involves Paul's attempt to track down the killer via posts made to a secret online page where the identity of the murderer is revealed. One of the rules of the game he plays is to only log onto the page at public terminals and then to delete all the browsing history before he leaves--but he forgets to delete the cookie history too! Since Paul is an IT Consultant he knows all of these secret tricks to online pseudo-hacking and eventually hatches a plan to lure the murderer back to Africa, where Laura's murder took place, while recruiting several old friends from the overland trucking trip to Africa that the first murder happened during.
Since Keely & Co. have constructed such an elaborate plot for their album, it is very difficult to discern the majority of the action in the story. Only if you read all of the lyrics from beginning to end will the story come through at all, and even then it seems vague. Just hearing Keely try to sing songs about all of this complicated subject-matter makes for an unforgettable listen.
Finally, Paul stages a dramatic conclusion during the song "The Pillar of Hercules" that ends the story on a happy note. Not to be outdone, Trail of the Dead close out the album with the revelation of Jon Evans--the author of the story about their album about Paul Wood--and how he is a successful mass-market paperback writer that won an award for his debut novel and now finds himself blocked, and so is forced to go back into more IT work than writing. For the originality of the material, Trail of the Dead have released their most essential album since Source Tags & Codes, one that will capture the attention of adventure-seekers and serial killer-hunters and superhero-impersonators everywhere. Their conceit is not to be outdone, and the humor they reveal displays a side of the band that will be totally welcome in indie rock circles everywhere--total disregard for audience expectations and totally random musical ideas. It's weird, but it's usually compelling, though not as good as the greatest concept albums of all time, still an album that should rank in the top 20 of 2009. At the very least, it's a gift for Jon Evans, the real writer, who will no doubt be amused that a pretty popular band has decided to write an album about him. They even make another prescient observation--the only band Paul mentions liking is Prodigy, and Prodigy released their first new album in five years (since Evans wrote "Dark Places," actually) the same day as their other recent album, "The Century of Self." You've got to hand it to them--they definitely don't lack any ambition.
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