This Side of Paradise - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Of all the artists, writers, thinkers and musicians to pass in and out through the doors of this precipitously-governed country over the past two hundred and fifty years, there are few closer to my heart than the one, the only, FSF. So fragile was his constitution that he had to succumb to a heart-attack at the unlikely age of just 44. So brilliant was his mind that he could stir a nation with a debut novel at age 24. So inimitable was his voice that he could pen what very well may be the greatest American novel of all time a few years later. So much did he spend during the Depression that he had to constantly write short stories just to make a living. So risky was his lifestyle that he could spend a decade in France, revising the follow-up to that masterpiece while in the throes of alcoholism, marital difficulties, depression, and madness, and emerge with an arguably even greater masterpiece. So epic was his life that it would end in Hollywood, uncelebrated, all but forgotten, but not before the composition of a novel that, were it to be finished, would easily stand alongside his most celebrated work. So winning was his personality that Ernest Hemingway would walk with him into the bathroom to inform him that he had nothing to worry about, that everything was in its proper proportion.

It might just so happen that This Side of Paradise then, published when FSF was 24 but written over the course of several years, may contain his raison d'etre. What a beautiful novel, opening up in description of the person of Amory Blaine, son of Beatrice and a fading father character, born in Minnesota, educated at St. Regis, and finally Princeton, where the majority of it unfolds. Amory is a Romantic Egotist, a personage, and 90% of an intellectual, though lacking the ascetic nature of his philosophical friends Tom D'Invilliers, Alec Connage and Burne Holiday. He writes for the student newspaper, edits the literary journal, takes weekend trips into New York City, and romances several girls. Notably Isabelle and Rosalind. He believes he sees the Devil in one scene. He goes to the Jersey Shore and protects a friend sleeping with a floozy when the cops come in to bust things up. He becomes disillusioned by romance, and goes out on several-day-benders. Amory is not a boring character.

Critics today are quick to point out that This Side of Paradise does not contain as elegant a structure as Gatsby or Tender is the Night and is therefore, merely a "very good" first novel. Of course I disagree with them. Having read this the year before I began my undergraduate education, probably for the 2nd time a couple years later, the third time two years after that, and for the fourth time two years after that, some six months ago, I can safely say that each reading has held a different experience, and that the prose is more deeply-layered and nuanced than I am able to have remembered discerning in my previous reading two years earlier. Never mind that I have only read Gatsby three or so times, and Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon and The Beautiful and Damned (highly underrated) only once all the way through, each. This Side of Paradise is the most user-friendly novel in his oeuvre, and the one most readily relatable to the youth of the 21st century. Gatsby may be even shorter, it seems, but those characters are a bit older. The characters in TSOP are little more than children, but they are given the freedom to live their life as impetuously as they see fit, and Fitzgerald is not dull in describing their activities.

And I still feel as if I have not properly communicated the greatness of the work. Should one point towards its "experimental" structure as being forward-thinking, or merely an anomaly in literature, a cut-and-paste job as some may have blithely referred to it? Or should one point towards the character of Monsignor D'Arcy as evidence that Fitzgerald was wiser than his years, or that he could not imagine a temperate person of substance in which to place his trust? Many details may be dashed off quickly, allowing the reader to make the assumption that in its published form there were still loose ends to be tied, inconsistencies or abnormalities yet to be revised, and there are even what appear to be typos when Fitzgerald breaks from his third-person-narration to command the reader, "Don't Misunderstand!" or to explain a significant detail like, "I see I am getting ahead of myself." A more strict academic reader might dismiss Fitzgerald's first creation as the work of a dilettante or dandy before he acquired the necessary skills to concoct as perfect a novel as Gatsby. But regardless of the lack of perfection, TSOP is as close to perfect as you can get while still being human, in my own meaningless opinion as a writer. The first-person lapses only enhance the novel for me, only give it more mysterious meaning that cannot yet be fully understood. The structure is wild and refuses to provide any easy asnwers to the reader. The ending is nearly the same level of poetry as that famous final page of Gatsby. Which is the more classic line? "Born ceaselessly into the past" or "But that is all?" Carraway's invocation of Gatsby's condition will move many hearts, but Blaine's assessment of his own lack of a grasp on life, society and the world, is one sentiment that cannot by refuted by claiming a lack of application in reality.

Often called the "voice of the Jazz age," Fitzgerald created characters drawn so closely from life that anyone who has known more than a few hundred people in their time will be amazed at a character's resemblance to some such person they met at a party, or in a dorm, or at a bar, or a club meeting. True, Fitzgerald is often described as having milked his real life for his fiction, but after all these years, the gesture is not an unkind one. Who would think that people in New York in 1919 would not be far off from people in New York in 2001? Sure, Amory Blaine might laugh if you were able to describe the Internet to him, but if you were to have a drink with him, it would be little different from meeting anyone you might have known in the years between 18 and 22.

For his stunning statement on youth and ambition, Fitzgerald's first novel introduced him to the world at large before being swiftly forgotten and considered out of fashion. Gatsby may be the book in every high school classroom, but students might be urged to seek out TSOP on their own, as they might read something they could actually identify with, rather than something that they might just not understand.

Killing Yourself to Live - Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman, age 35 or so, is close to the same age as my older brother, and Dave Eggers. Enjoying varying degrees of success and popularity over the last five years or so, Klosterman is undoubtedly a modern heavy in the same vein as Eggers or David Sedaris. He does not seem as principled as Eggers, and he is not as interested in a catalogued autobiography as Sedaris, but he is arguably as popular as either. Whether Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is better than Me Talk Pretty One Day or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is not the aim of this review, but to situate Killing Yourself to Live in a greater context.

Oeuvre rule: I read SDACP in July of 2007, KYTL in August of 2007, and IV in October of 2007. I have not read Fargo Rock City, but for the purposes of populism, let us consider SDACP Klosterman's "debut" in the public sphere. For those unfamiliar, Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs is probably the most straightforward, the best-edited, and most hilarious book Klosterman has written, period. KYTL is much more of an assignment. The assignment? Go to the death places of every major rock and roll star to die tragically before their time. Klosterman's theory? Early death increases cultural significance.

Not a bad point to make, as the work ends in the hometown of that most famous of all early rock stars death, K. Cobain. In the meantime it swings through the country, focusing especially on the South, like Memphis where Elvis and Jeff Buckley both died. He mentions various airplane crashes, automobile accidents and overdoses. I believe he does Sid & Nancy before leaving from NYC on his trip. He does not really do Jim Morrison. (It is perhaps worth noting that he does not do Darby Crash or D. Boon either, the latter perhaps for obvious reasons, the former perhaps because Klosterman's musical worldview, while egotistically inflated, does not stretch past more than a handful of classic rock and heavy metal genres. He often dismisses punk as being stupid, only then to admit that he actually likes it, but thinks it is way overrated. If he has not heard "Lexicon Devil" by the Germs, he should, and then he should write an addendum on Darby Crash, because that would be hella interesting.)

It is a road trip novel that actually turns into Klosterman telling the story of a couple of his past girlfriends--why he loved them, why it worked, why it didn't work--and while my sister has described these sorts of digressions as "self-indulgent" in his work, I do not find them totally out of place. I know about solo road trips, all right, and I know you have a lot of time to think on your hands, a lot of time to mull over the past. Klosterman's stories about these girls are not put in to make himself look cool or make himself look pathetic but to tell the truth, and for that deserve to be lauded. Suprisingly, this becomes the side-plot of the book, while he continues on his rock star death trek undaunted.

Another great scene occurs when he visits the site of the Great White concert where a fire broke out and killed dozens of fans. He visits the cemetery/memorial constructed for the victims, and meets one of the victims brothers, who then offers him cocaine in his pick-up truck. It is a very memorable scene.

Does he mention Janis Joplin, or Barney's Beanery? I do not know. I will have to re-examine, but I do not much remember reading anything about that.

When everything is said and done, and the book ends (more quickly than I wanted it too-usually the case with Klosterman books), you come upon the realization that this is really a novel type of book (though IV features his abandoned novel which was better than I was expecting it to be) and more rewarding than 90-95% of its competition in the 2005 marketplace.

Still, I cannot recommend KYTL as highly as SDACP. IV I would recommend below KYTL. All 3 are good, but there is clearly a best, second best, and third best. One eagerly awaits a new Klosterman volume, so prolific he has been in such a relatively short time, and wonders whether his version of journalism may forge a path for future slacker writers of "trenchant" cultural observation. Amazingly, it does not seem all that far-fetched. I just wonder if it will really matter or not.

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov, born 1899, died 1977, published Lolita 1955, published Pale Fire 1962, remains one of the foremost intellectuals in the better part of 20th century literary world. Notably fluent in Russian, German, French, and English, it almost appears as if Nabokov is not so much interested in plot, character and story as he is flaunting his erudition and obscure knowledge under the guise of tricky wordplay. Regardless of his eccentricities as a stylist, he does not disregard or sacrifice story.

In keeping with the oeuvre mandate, let it be acknowledged that the critic has read Bend Sinister, Laughter in the Dark, Lolita, Speak, Memory, and a fair number of short stories. Pnin, Ada, or Ardor, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Despair, and Look at the Harlequins! are on my list of future books to read. Nabokov was extremely prolific but relatively underappreciated. For all the controversy that Lolita has brought about in the past fifty plus years, Pale Fire follows innocently undetected, while containing more than a few controversial episodes itself. While Lolita may continue to compete for greatest 20th century American novel, I recall seeing Pale Fire on more than one sort of list of books that people would like to read before they die, or a book that was so profound they wanted to read and study to unlock some sort of secret revelation.

That is not surprising given its structure. There is no other book like it. It begins (like Lolita) with a preface. The "foreword" is penned by Charles Kinbote, neighbor to the author of the poem "Pale Fire," John Shade. In the foreword, Kinbote explains how he came to teach at the same university in upstate New York as Shade, and how he happened to rent the house next door to his, and how he happened to run into him and become friends with him. Then he says he is getting too far ahead of himself and stops.

"Pale Fire," a poem in heroic couplets, 999 lines, divided into four cantos, comes next. For all the profound aspects of the novel Pale Fire, the reader might be urged to start here, particularly the majority of canto 3, though Kinbote refers to canto 2 as "your favorite, and that shocking tour de force," which concerns John and Sybil Shade's doomed daughter. We are told in the foreword, that Shade died shortly after completing the final line of the poem--indeed he wrote the poem over the last three weeks of his life.

After the "primary text" comes the "Commentary," which forms the majority of Pale Fire. In it, Kinbote notes some three or four dozen line references with varying degrees of copious analysis and confession and storytelling. Truly, this part is Kinbote's story, and soon he reveals a story he liked to tell Shade about, which was the escaped King Charles of Zembla. As we move closer to the end of Shade's poem, we get closer to the final revealing of the entire story as Kinbote has let us see it. He is meant to be mad, and indeed he seems overly obsessed with Shade, but like Humbert Humbert, he is not a narrative slouch. Indeed, Pale Fire becomes mostly about King Charles at a certain point.

I have almost no idea what these scenes are meant to mean, but they are certainly just as eye-opening as almost any scene in Lolita. What is strange is that Kinbote narrates the story of King Charles at a curious point of disconnect. The reader can almost easily guess the connection between the two by the 2nd or 3rd time Kinbote mentions him. The first time, in fact, I began to think, "how does Kinbote know such intimate details of the king?" Perhaps it is rather obvious, but anyhow, some of the scenes resulted in my doing double takes, memorably while making my way through what must be the most morally offensive segment of the book to conservative minds while reading in an outdoor hot tub at a hotel in Rancho Bernardo, CA on a weekend trip with my parents.

Kinbote becomes rather obsessed with the King Charles story, until eventually the King escapes Zembla, and manages to make his way to America, to happen to teach at a university...And like Clare Quilty in Lolita, there is Gradus, a man suspicious of all those who possess too much knowledge, who stalks the escaped King, and who eventually plays as intrinsic a role in the novel as that aforementioned "double" of a villain. But Charles is not only interested in exotic royal pasts--his ardor for Shade and his work shines through almost as clearly. Most memorable is a scene near the end of the novel, where Kinbote calls Shade on the phone, after not attending a party Sybil threw for the poet's 60th birthday, and screams that he must seem him at once and bursts into tears over the phone. His knowledge of the poet's life, and his possible (and idealized) influences, puts a funny spin on the academic snooping going on in any modern edition of any classic text.

Furthermore, Pale Fire introduces the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre, in a manner. The commentary is written so that the reader can refer back to the poem for greater elucidation, and read more than a line, a stanza, or even pages at a time. Also, within notes are references to other notes with references to other lines so that a times a narrative thread can be found with all ensuing references already marked out by Kinbote. Whether Nabokov intends the work to be a massive cryptogram, I do not know, but his typical obsessions like butterflies and chess and intellectualism arise and are treated here as well as in anything else I have read by him.

Nabokov is a master. He did not accumulate the Nobel, or the Pulitzer, but he is clearly a master, and a fine model to follow. Of course, one cannot hope to attain his level of erudition, but it is fun to see what he was capable of, given his talents, his knowledge, and his artistic spontaneity. Pale Fire may not be as densely-layered or as descriptive a work as Lolita, but its poetry is unmistakable. It is more entertaining than Bend Sinister or Laughter in the Dark, and it is more intellectually compelling than Lolita, though it would be difficult to say it is a greater novel than that nearly-untouchable work. It has the same quality of his finest short stories, such as "The Vane Sisters" (which, I have to admit, is really only the first one of two or three which truly amazed me). It may make you gasp, it will most definitely make you laugh, it might confuse the hell out of you, but when you finish Pale Fire, you will feel a sense of literary domination, and for how complex everyone wants to make it out to be, it's really not bad at all. Taken slowly with a painstaking line-by-line close analysis, or speed-read like your typical mass-market trade paperback, Pale Fire will please no matter the method.

Purple America - Rick Moody

Relatively young and a member of the burgeoning "MFA Movement" in Literature, Rick Moody does not pull any punches in Purple America and sticks to a relatively simple formula, which pays off in the end. I have not read The Ice Storm but I saw the movie long ago and it is very good and I would like to see it again and I would like to read the book. But no matter, Purple America could be made into a pretty good movie too.

The novel concerns a character named Dexter who is called Hex instead because that is the way he pronounced it as a baby. Hex is in his late 30's, a New Yorker, and works some vague job in proofreading or publishing. He has been called back to his mother's Connecticut estate to care for her in what appear to be her dying days. I bought this book at last year's Printer's Row Book Fair in Chicago, and I read the first chapter while eating outside at a cafe. It is a very ambitious first chapter, consisting of one elaborately long sentence describing in detail all the sacrifices Hex has to make in order to care for his mother in her very ill state. It brought to my mind my mother's care of my grandmother over the last several years of her life when she was suffering from Alzheimer's, and it brings to my mind what I may in fact have to do one day if all does not go according to plan and my parents do fail to outlive me (an unlikely scenario at the moment). Later, I was sent a portion of a "WIP" novel (four pages, gasp!) by a person who told me her writing was better than mine, and in accordance with courtesy, I sent her my opinion on her work, and I asked her if she had ever read Purple America, because it appeared as if she had ripped it off terribly, when in fact, she had probably never seen the thing.

The fact is, the theme of this novel is caring for a sick parent, the way the theme for Dr. Faustus is genius, and the theme for Professor of Desire is sex & relationships, and the theme for A Long Way Down is suicide. And there are probably only so many things you can say about caring for a sick parent. It is a devastating experience. There is a loss of dignity. The world comes crashing down and your own life appears meaningless when held up against the light of the dying person's nearly-complete end.

But this is not a sad novel at all. If anything, it is a comic novel, and it takes place over the course of just a few days, featuring Hex's stepfather, who recently left her when her illness became too unbearable for him to care for any longer, and Jane Ingersoll, Hex's love interest, a classmate in high school and a denizen of the bar Hex takes his mother to eat at on the novel's final, endless night. Hex's stepfather works at a nuclear power plant that has just had some sort of meltdown, the cataclysmic catastrophe to offset the Mrs. dying. At one point, Hex tracks down his stepfather and (it should be noted that he drinks an awful lot throughout the novel), walking around with a six-pack, finds the house of a friend where he is briefly staying, and attempts to confront him and make him return to care for the mother. This is one of the best scenes of the novel, along with the scene in the restaurant, and the rest of the evening that never seems to end.

Purple America takes a little while to get into, but because the action is so compacted, the reader is drawn to continue on and finish quickly. It is a quick read, a relatively light read, but certainly one of the best novels I have read on its topic, and probably iconic for that matter. It is continually hilarious, though at times veering too much into the ridiculous. There are a few scenes that Moody might have been able to cut that slow the narrative down, particularly the sub-plot of the stepfather's troubles, which actually then, becomes more interesting than the mother's suffering.

Important to understand the novel though, is that while the mother suffers, she seems only to act meaner than previously. She is not a totally sympathetic character. In this way, Purple America is different from your typical stories of death and dying. While hardly essential, this is a good, strong, modern novel (published in 1994 or so, if I am not mistaken, and as the follow-up to The Ice Storm) that could be turned into an Academy Award winning film.

But one further note on Moody, a former student in Columbia's MFA writing program, a program I applied to a year ago because of his celebrity as an alum. He stays in relatively safe territory. So do most other writers earning their MFA and publishing on a national stage. If you are an ordinary person from an ordinary American family, you will probably find this book nice and enjoyable and entertaining. I did. But if you are not completely resigned to a life of ordinary, typically American events, you may find the novel to be exasperating and annoying. But that is unlikely. While no Doctor Faustus, Purple America is easily better than The Professor of Desire and A Long Way Down in terms of craft, execution, and originality. I say originality and I have claimed it is a very typical theme for a novel, but as I said before too, this is an iconic treatment of a typical theme and therefore, is original.

A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby

A Long Way Down is a recent novel by Nick Hornby (published in 2005, if memory serves) which I read roughly five months ago. Of Hornby's oeuvre, I have read High Fidelity and Songbook. No About a Boy, no How to be Good, no Fever Pitch, et al. It is perhaps worth noting that Hornby achieves what, to my mind, is the greatest contribution a novelist can make to a society at this odd juncture of superfluous entertainment options. That is, to coin a phrase recognizable to a mass segment of the population: Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music? The other achievement of course, is that Hornby's books enjoy a very high percentage of film adaptation, most of which are generally approved by audiences. High Fidelity is of course his biggest hit to date, and the film version certainly added a lot of mileage by bringing in John Cusack and switching the city from London to Chicago. About a Boy and Fever Pitch had films made out of them to slightly lesser degrees of success, but the fact remains Nick Hornby is certainly in the Top 5 Novelists in their Prime in 2008.

I bought A Long Way Down from Borders because it was part of a Buy 1, Get 1 50% off deal but it was not necessarily a waste of money. I also bought it for egotistical reasons. Immediately upon reading the description, I realized that Hornby's novel was extremely similar to my first novel, and I had to read it to see how he made it work. Someone famous like him could certainly give me some pointers in the way of getting published. He read in L.A. last October 26 or so, and I wanted to interview him afterwards to ask him about these sorts of things, but I did nothing that night instead.

The novel concerns four characters--Maureen, Jessica, J.J., and Martin--who accidentally meet each other on New Year's Eve on the top of a building. Each of them planned to commit suicide. Maureen has an invalid son that she must constantly attend to, denying her much of any social life, as she wades through her early fifties. Jessica is an 18 year old girl who has recently broken up with her boyfriend and who generally, amongst all the characters, is the stupidest and most annoying. J.J. is a 27 year old American musician who moved to London to be with his girlfriend, who recently broke up with him, and likewise his band, and is now delivering pizza. Martin is a formerly successful ex-host of a TV show like Regis & Kelly in his mid-forties who slept with a 15 year old girl, ruining his marriage, family and career.

Each of them wants to die, but they keep each other from doing it, and they have a variety of adventures as a "foursome," most notably when Jessica claims they didn't jump because they saw an angel, and then all three others have to lie and agree with her so the tabloid story holds water.

The problem with the novel is the same problem with my first novel--it floats around aimlessly, content to record the characters' witty asides instead of finding a proper resolution for the narrative. I did like the ending, however, because it refused to make any concrete declarations about the futures of these characters. The characters do go through changes though--Maureen lives a little more and grows to appreciate the little things, Jessica begins to act slightly more grown up, J.J. makes amends with his girlfriend and his best friend/bandmate, and Martin even sees his ex-wife and daughters and begins a difficult climb back to respectability.

What is most endearing about the novel is the way the characters latch onto one another and become friends and support one another through their life's obstacles, as trivial as they may sometimes be. At times it seems as if they are having fun, but usually they are really just trying to make sense of why they wanted to kill themselves, whether their life is really worth living or not, and what they are going to do now that they are still alive.

While High Fidelity may be about as perfect a modern novel as there is, A Long Way Down attempts a more experimental, almost philosophical, story, and in return loses a certain charm. One criticism of my first novel is that many people do not know which character to care about (there are 10). That is one similar thing I could say about this. I want to care about all of them, but I end up caring most about Martin, to be honest. Maureen also, is very sweet, but J.J. and Jessica are both young and their issues seem more trivial somehow, though one knows from experience that their problems are probably just as psychically traumatizing. It is much easier to care about Rob in High Fidelity than any single character in this novel, because there is a definite plot to his life. In a plotless atmosphere, Hornby attempts to diagnose modern depression and define the suicidal impulse, an admirable goal for a novel. However, one feels it might have been more effective to have focused on a single character, rather than four, but I am sure the ensuing adaptation (one can only assume...) will be highly entertaining and more original than 90% of the fare Hollywood shovels out in 2010.

The Professor of Desire - Philip Roth

The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth was published in 1977, when Roth was 44. Now 75, Roth is arguably the most celebrated living novelist in America (excepting J.D. Salinger, who published his last book around the time Roth was publishing his first, and who has remained one of the greatest literary mysteries of all time). Last year Exit Ghost won many favorable reviews, and the year before last Everyman proved that he could write as effectively about aging as anyone before him. He has won very many awards which are listed in the flaps of any of his books. He is extremely prolific. He is the last "youngest" great. But, as a professor of mine once stated, "Even Homer nods," and likewise, even Roth can be deemed "average" when it seems like he's doing his best not to repeat himself.

The novel (like several others apparently) features David Kepesh, who has not been turned into a breast, but who does dream of meeting the whore that Kafka used to visit, introduced to her by his childhood hero and muse invoked to open the novel, Herbie Bratasky, a young entertainer who works at the hotel David's parents own and maintain. David goes to school at Syracuse for undergrad, goes abroad to London and meets two girls/whores who have a threesome with him and then leave him always feeling as if adventure seeped out of his sexual life thereafter, then goes to Stanford for graduate study, and meets Helen. Helen is beautiful, but crazy, and still loves a man who once took her to Hong Kong and asked if she would be an accomplice in his wife's murder, so that they could be together without any troubles. Helen often wishes she went along with him, later, and starts doing lots of cocaine, and does annoying things that make David want to divorce her, and finally they do, and then he is alone in New York, subletting from an actor, seeing a psychiatrist named Dr. Klinger, somehow corresponding with the Schonbrunns, fellow professor and wife at Stanford, and eventually meeting Claire, somewhat more simple than Helen, but much more sane, and much better for David, and eventually everything ends rather happily.

There are good moments in this book. The beginning is pretty good, the middle is pretty good, but once all the action shifts to David flying to Hong Kong to find Helen and then divorce afterwards, it begins to seem more tepid. However, David's first-person-narration never really cuts himself any slack, and he constantly doubts whether or not he will be able to love Claire forever without wanting something more, and towards the end, these are the most eye-opening segments, whereas in the beginning the novel discusses nearly every sexual whim one could expect to come across in a textbook. That is the problem of the book for me. The beginning is very dirty and the ending is very nice. It goes from XXX to PG in 250 pages. It is an inconsistent tone, but I suppose, David is also growing up, is he not? And with maturity comes family, and with family comes family films, the second half of which, Professor of Desire could pass itself off as.

As previously mentioned in the Doctor Faustus post, oeuvre is an important consideration in reviews. I have only read "Goodbye, Columbus," Portnoy's Complaint, and Everyman. Where does POD rank? At the bottom of those, unfortunately! But it is still a very good book. A light read, a vaguely guilty pleasure, but meritorious nonetheless. I believe, at heart, POD is an attempt at classifying desire which cannot be realistically aligned with a long life of monogamy and temperance. For attempting to intimate the myriad complexities of the allure of crazy sex, POD earns an above-average review. Certain moments in the novel (between two and four, perhaps) approach a fragile sort of poetry which occassionally made me think it was about to kick into high gear. As previously stated though, this novel starts high and ends low, though not without its charms. Even the PG ending is rather charming. David's father is probably the most ebullient character in the novel, but it is his poverty of education that mirrors the suffocated structure of the novel, not the offbeat humor or old fashioned common sense.

Where Portnoy's Complaint may be no-holds-barred, Professor of Desire attempts a sweeter veneer, and ends sounding just a tiny bit fake (but, importantly, true to life) . "Goodbye, Columbus" is probably a more entertaining PG read and Everyman certainly contains more life lessons than Kepesh Sr. can hope to elucidate for all these crazy young people, such as the ones who turn his hotel into a ski lodge after he retires. All things considered, POD is a quality book, but little more than that. It is light, it might make you laugh, and it might be fun for you to compare the crazy things that have happened in your past relationships with Kepesh's odd experiences. And of course, any novel that has a character cry because she wants more than anything to be penetrated from behind can't be all bad.

Doctor Faustus - Thomas Mann

As far as reviews go, I feel it is appropriate to mention that a critic's knowledge of an artist's entire oeuvre is certainly indispensable when situating a work in a greater context. In the case of Thomas Mann, I have yet to read (and I greatly look forward to) The Buddenbrooks, or The Magic Mountain, or The Confessions of Felix Krull, or "Mario and the Magician," but I have read a collection of his early short stories and I did read Doctor Faustus, which is more than you can say for the vast majority of this current American populace. Little does it matter that Mann composed Faustus in California in the mid 1940's after escaping Nazi Germany. What Americans read German authors, even if they are amongst the all-time greatest, and only removed little more than a hundred years from Generation Y2K? Ambitious, literary Americans will embrace a Fitzgerald, a Hemingway, a Salinger, and they may even be brave enough to embrace a Kafka, but Mann is in different territory. To be sure, Kafka is far more famous, but to be sure, Mann is far more decorated. The Magic Mountain earned him the Nobel Prize when he was 54 years old. Faustus was published shortly after his 70th birthday. After reading only 750 pages or so of Mann's prose, I feel compelled to review his final book, so excited (and intimidated) I am to move forward into the rest of his oeuvre. I plan to read The Buddenbrooks next, immediately upon completion of my second novel, and to finish it before I begin my third. If you do not already realize that Mann has seriously changed the way I thought about writing, then you probably do not understand why I am writing anything at all in the first place.

I have read that Dr. Faustus was originally conceived as a short story, and then expanded into the 530 page epic it became. I have also read that in the first sentence of the novel, Thomas Mann meant to be providing a parody of his general syntax. Regardless of its parodic elements, I read the first chapter in a bookstore in Nantucket and decided that I must at once own this paperback novel. I would not finish reading it for another six or seven months, but once I made it through the 200th page, nothing else seemed to matter except finishing the book to see how it would end. And what an ending!

The novel concerns one Dr. Serenus Zeitblom, who has been moved in his elderly age to write a biography of his lifelong (and long deceased) friend, Adrian Leverkuhn, the famous German composer. The first 200 pages describe their early years together, and goes to great lengths to emphasize the importance of one of their instructors, Kretzschmar, apparently very influential to the young Leverkuhn. The beginning is extremely difficult because it often dissolves into lengthy discussions by the youthful characters on philosophy and Nationalism. Whether this sort of dialogue is believable or not, I cannot tell, but one thing for sure that I know is that people today are about one hundred times stupider than any single one of the many intimately-felt characters in this novel. I mean that they are incapable of communicating on the level of these characters. To look back on Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and consider the philosophical discussions in that text is to witness a century of reduction happening by a mere 20 years difference in age, and a different country in the midst of prosperity, as opposed to another country building towards a terrible climax.

As soon as Leverkuhn finishes his studies and begins living in boarding houses and going around with his new friend Rudolf Schildknapp, the novel begins to pick up and the scenes seem more carefully chosen. By the last 150 pages, barely anything is contained that is not absolutely essential and revelatory. In the first chapter, Zeitblom briefly mentions genius, and attempts to come up with a tidy definition of it. As the novel evolves, genius becomes its principle theme, and to get to the heart of why I find this book so essential, so classic, so deserving of canonization, to read Thomas Mann's reflections on genius is to sit before someone you can actually believe rather than thinking them boring and pointless. Genius may go unnoticed by peers and genius may be good for little in this age of great technological equalization (not!), but it still requires genius to be a successful artist, and Mann's portrait of Leverkuhn, as special a circumstance as it may be, gives one hope that greatness is not unreachable so long as all the elements are in their appropriate place.

Notable is Zeitblom's self-consciousness as a narrator. I do enjoy his digressions about how hard the book is to write, and about how he has been unfair to the reader by making some chapters too long, and his musings on the present condition of his home-state, which are obviously, chaotic and dismissive. The way he sets up the reader for what they are about to see is not only hilarious, but also very accomodating for all future readers of his, because these are really the only parts that don't require a degree to begin to understand. That said, most of the general plot of the novel is also rather simple--it is in the intricacies of Mann's language that most readers will be left in the dust.

Consider Chapter XXV, which Zeitblom opens up bombastically, stating that now, in this important 25th chapter, he will reveal Adrian's secret manuscript which he has kept concealed from the reader until the appropriate time. (It may be important for me to note that I have not read Goethe's or Marlowe's version of the same fable, and those familiar with it will intuit what the 25th chapter contains). Zeitblom exits as narrator, and Leverkuhn takes the reader on a 30 page fevered-dream/vision/hallucination which will directly lead to his artistic dominance over the following twenty-four years of his life. What Adrian must give up is not only his soul, but also the ability to love anyone else.

The final requirement of his agreement becomes responsible for arguably the most beautiful sections of the book. He begins courting one Inez Rodde, through the violinist friend of his Rudi Schwerdtfeger, and becomes part of a circle of artists, intellectuals, and bourgeois dilletantes interested in the pose of appreciating art. My personal favorite character is Frau Knoterich, who, besides sharing the same suffix as my surname, is a morphine addict who eventually converts her entire circle of friends to that same illicit practice. Mann's brief description of her practices in the throes of addiction alone show the kind of sensitive detail that all too many modern novelists would shelve in favor of shock value. But to return from the digression, the ending is arguably one of the saddest and most beautiful in all of literature.

It begins with the entrance of Neppo (or "Echo" as he calls himself), Adrian's four-year-old nephew who stays with him and becomes a cherished object to him and everyone that meets him. A tragedy slowly develops, and Adrian's exclamation to Zeitblom after everything has happened remains the only time I can recall that he shows any sort of emotion whatsoever. The effect is undeniable to any reader adventerous enough to stick with Mann through all the seemingly boring episodes of Adrian's sheltered emotional life. I wanted to cry, and I still want to cry when I think about that exclamation.

But the book would have no ending without the presentation of Leverkuhn's final symphony, the eponymously-referential "Lamentation of Dr. Faustus," which Zeitblom believes is his greatest work to date. Adrian invites all of his friends, nearly every major character in the novel to appear, to his home for the presentation of this magnum opus, and he "makes a scene," to put it simply. I tried to tell a friend of mine what happened in the scene but he stopped me, saying he didn't want me to ruin it for him. Yes, I do not want to ruin it for anyone, but it is such a good ending! It is hilarious, it is horrible, and it is totally perfectly the way the novel should end.

But it goes on even another chapter, to describe the circumstances of Adrian's later life. This too, must not be ruined, but I must admit I was suprised to see it continue on the way it did. Regardless, the final page of the novel was excellent, and Mann doesn't finish before he gets in his final word about Germany, which, considering the timing of the novel, seems rather accurate, but in hindsight, appears rather extreme, though not without its obvious point. On the back of the novel, the publisher states that Adrian's rise mirrors that of the Third Reich in Germany, but honestly I could not see the parallels, except for Zeitblom's personal musings on the status quo.

There are few times one has to read for absolute pleasure anymore, and while an ordinary reader may not derive much pleasure from the beginning of Dr. Faustus, if they are able to stick with it, to see the value in it, they will be vastly rewarded upon completing it (and perhaps may be forfeiting more than they realize).