The story is well-known to those of my friends that I unleash my artistic insecurities upon, for lack of better conversational material or to convince myself that my work is less dubious than it appears: the time is December 2006. The effort is an MFA application. The problem is a lack of confidence in any of my prior work for use as a writing sample. The solution is this volume, inspiration, and three or four stories written in a period of three or four weeks, now of questionable value. Two-and-a-half years later I still don't have an MFA.
Bought from a used bookstore on Clark St. in the summer of 2006 for $3.00, this collection of seven short stories has been perused two or three times since that initial encounter, spawned an interest in three long, great novels Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, and appropriately earned the distinction of the 99th post on Flying Houses.
This collection will prove to be more difficult than any other review on this blog because of the quotability of far too many passages. Inevitably some great ones must be left out. There are seven stories, and while each deserves much attention, it will be clear that in this collection in particular, there is a definitive progression. I am not sure what other Mann story collections include. Perhaps four or five of these are included in most collections, and there are other stories of a different quality that deserve recognition--in particular "Mario and the Magician"--but I am convinced that if you have not read Mann and you need a place to start, this is the only way to go. Seven stories, around 260 pages, and almost perfect the whole way through.
"Little Herr Friedemann," published in 1897, begins the collection, and Mann's literary career on a hilarious and horrible note: "It was the nurse's fault." (3) The nurse has a problem with drinking, and so has dropped a baby which will now endure the rest of its life a hunchback. A breezy biography of the next thirty years of this person's life follows, including the one time he was afflicted with sexual desire, at age 16, and how he realized--"such experiences...obviously engrossing though they were for others, belonged like gymnastics and ball games to the category of things for which he was not suited." (5) The next fourteen years pass unperturbed until a new military commandant and his wife, Gerda, settle in the town and Herr Friedemann cannot help but be moved. The manner in which his attraction is evoked, nurtured, teased, and ultimately denied, is the element of the story that elevates it to a higher level. Also, it gives a taste of what is to come, since many of these stories share the same disconsolate themes.
"The Joker" comes next, and hardly anyone could fail to love a story that begins as such:
"The end of it all, the upshot of life--of my life--is the disgust with which it fills me. A worthy ending indeed! Disgust with it all, disgust with the whole business, this disgust that chokes me, goads me to frenzy and casts me down again into despair--sooner or later, no doubt, it will give me the necessary impetus to cut short the whole ridiculous, contemptible affair and clear out for good. True enough, I may well hold out for a month or two yet; maybe for another three or six months I shall carry on eating, sleeping and passing the time--in the same mechanical, calm and well-ordered fashion in which my life has outwardly gone by all this winter, contrasting so hideously with the vile process of my inner disintegration. One might almost suppose that a man's inner experiences become all the more violent and disturbing the more undisturbed and uncommitted and detached from the world his outward life is. There is no help for it: life has to be lived--and if one refuses to be a man of action and retires into the quiet of a hermit's solitude, even then the vicissitudes of existence will assault one inwardly, they will still be there to test one's character and to prove one a hero or a half-wit." (31)
This troubled character is unnamed and proceeds to tell his story in the first-person of how his parents died and how he was given an inheritance and how he traveled for three years and then settled and never really developed any serious occupation and then lived his days in quiet, contemplative leisure. Until, he happened to see a young woman in particular driving a horse carriage, and how he saw her again at a performance of Faust, and how he found out that she would be at a bazaar, selling wine from a booth (on this point the story could be construed as another version of Joyce's "Araby," except about ten times more depressing), and how there has always been a certain other gentleman caller close by, and how he finally comes upon the decisive moment at the bazaar, and, much like "Little Herr Friedemann," experiences horrible disappointment.
"The Road to the Churchyard" is story #3, and it concerns another alcoholic--this one a widower who cannot stand the fact that a boy (named Life) is riding his bicycle on a road leading to a churchyard instead of on the main road. This character, sporting the moniker Lobgott Piepsam, owns perhaps the most depressing history of any Mann character, in a sprightly and ironic kind of way:
"He was--in rather low spirits, is that it?...It is hard to explain these matters to happy people like yourselves...But yes, he had his little troubles, you know, he was rather badly done by. Alas, if the truth be told, his troubles were by no means little, but grievous in the highest degree--in fact, his condition could fairly be described as absolutely wretched.
To begin with, he drank. Well, we shall have occasion to refer to this again. Secondly, he was a widower and a bereaved father, forsaken by everyone; he had not a soul left on earth to whom he was dear. His wife, whose maiden name had been Lebzelt, had been snatched from him six months ago when she had borne him a child; it was their third child, and it had been born dead. The other two had also died, one of diphtheria, the other of nothing in particular, perhaps just a general deficiency. As if this were not enough, he had shortly afterward lost his job, he had been shamefully dismissed from his employment and livelihood, and this had been in consequence of the above-mentioned ruling passion, which was a passion stronger than Piepsam." (64-65)
Lobgott, who had been drinking before setting out to visit the graveyard, becomes so infuriated with the boy that it becomes the central plot of the story. To be sure, this is the greatest trifle in the collection, but a lighthearted comic one, with obviously very dark shades. Mann had just completed Buddenbrooks and had intended this story as a light afterthought. Story #4, "Gladius Dei" perhaps concerns itself with a pressing artistic controversy--censorship--but is definitely the second trifle in the collection. This should hardly be taken to mean that these stories should be skipped in reading--but perhaps if you are on your deathbed, and you have very little time, if you absolutely must...but they are the most variegated, they conform least to Mann's set of governing themes, and so may be of potentially greater interest.
This story concerns another unhappy protagonist, this one named Hieronymus, who is religious and lives in "resplendent" Munich. There is an art gallery in town displaying some rather immoral artwork in its front window. Hieronymus takes extreme issue with the proprietor of the gallery, in a way that almost mirrors Lobgott in the previous story in the sense that, the entire central arc of the story concerns the main character's (potentially) deranged invective against a "disrespectful" representative of common society:
"Art! they cry--pleasure! beauty! Wrap the world in a veil of beauty and set upon everything the noble imprint of style!...Enough of this infamy! Do you think gaudy colors can gloss over the misery of the world? Do you think loud orgies of luxurious good taste can drown the moans of the tortured earth? You are wrong, you shameless wretches! God is not mocked, and your insolent idolatry of the glistering surface of things is an abomination in His sight!...'Who are you,' you will answer, 'to be reviling Art?' You lie, I tell you; I am not reviling art! Art is not a cynical deception, a seductive stimulus to confirm and strengthen the lusts of the flesh! Art is the sacred torch that must shed its merciful light into all of life's terrible depths, into every shameful and sorrowful abyss; art is the divine flame that must set fire to the world, until the world with all its infamy and anguish burns and melts way in redeeming compassion!...Remove it, Herr Bluthenzweig, remove that famous painter's work from your window--indeed, you would do well to burn it with hot fire and scatter its ashes to the winds, yes, to all four winds!..." (87)
Once we arrive at "Tristan," we enter into the final trilogy of stories, and the proceedings are driven up a notch. After reading The Magic Mountain, it is clear that "Tristan" shares many similarities with that novel (despite being published 21 years earlier) in its central arc alone--the sanatorium romance. This time it is between Herr Spinnell and Gabriele Kloterjahn--a writer and a wife of a businessman. "Tristan" definitely marks a turning point in the collection towards heavier material. There is also the first WTF moment when Spinnell and Gabriele sit at the piano while she plays music from Tristan and Isolde and it turns into a kind of metaphysical narrative that is about the story of the opera, but really symbolic of the short story at hand, confusing enough that you will have no clue what is going on--markedly similar to the segment near the end of The Sorrows of Young Werther where Goethe goes off on the Ossian tangent towards a parallel aim--and one which enhances the mystery of the story. Near the end, Spinnell writes a letter to Gabriele's husband, and it begets the most satisfying moment in the piece. Also, Spinnell has horrible contempt for Gabriele and Herr Kloterjahn's infant son, which is hilarious. The passages to note are too numerous to mention. But the most touching for me at least remains the description of how husband and wife met:
"'Yes, all those years are a precious memory to me; especially the garden, our garden behind the house. It was terribly wild and overgrown, and the walls round it were crumbling and covered with moss; but that was just what gave it its great charm. It had a fountain in the middle, surrounded by a dense border of flag irises. In summer I used to sit there for hours with my friends. We would all sit on little garden chairs round the fountain.'
'What beauty!' said Herr Spinnell, raising his shoulders. 'You sat round it singing?'
"No, we were usually crocheting.'
'Ah, nevertheless...nevertheless...'
'Yes, we crocheted and gossiped, my six friends and I...'
'What beauty! Ah, dear me, how beautiful that is!' cried Herr Spinnel, with his face quite contorted.
'But what is so particularly beautiful about that, Herr Spinnell?'
'Oh, the fact that there were six young ladies besides yourself, the fact that you were not one of their number, but stood out amongst them like a queen...You were singled out from your six friends. A little gold crown, quite inconspicuous yet full of significance, gleamed in your hair...'
'Oh, what nonsense, there was no such crown...'
'Ah, but there was: it gleamed there in secret. I should have seen it, I should have seen it in your hair quite plainly, if I had been standing unnoticed among the bushes on one of those occasions...'" (108-109)
From there we proceed to "Tonio Kroger"--arguably Mann's greatest work, the one I believe Franz Kafka valued more highly than any other, generally regarded as his second greatest story. Here the prose noticeably becomes even more direct. I think it is fair to say that "Tonio Kroger" is the most autobiographical of all of Mann's stories in that it presents his artistic concerns under less of a veil than his other characters. The long middle portion--the salon between Tonio and his painter friend Lisaveta--is perhaps the greatest discussion of the "artist" as a type that I have ever read.
The story opens with a young Tonio and his friend Hans walking home from school. Tonio writes poetry and loves reading Schiller's Don Carlos; Hans loves riding horses and looking at picture books of them. Then it is clear that Tonio loves Hans, and Hans considers Tonio a friend, but not quite to the same extreme. And so Tonio suffers. Several years later, there is Ingeborg Holm, whom he longs for at a dance. He makes a mockery of himself at the dance by performing the female part of one, and the instructor points this out for everyone's entertainment, and then he goes and stands in front of a window, even though a shade is drawn and he cannot see out of it, and he waits and hopes for Inge to "put her hand on his shoulder and say: 'Come back and join us, don't be sad, I love you!' And he listened to the voices behind him, waiting in senseless excitement for her to come. But she did not come. Such things did not happen on earth." (148)
Later he enters into a career as a writer, and almost immediately, the 4th chapter showcases him now in his early 30s, delivering a near-monologue to Lisaveta for approximately ten pages, finally settling upon an element in the artist that is tantamount to all others:
"You see, Lisaveta, I harbor in my very soul a rooted suspicion of the artist as a type--I suspect him no less deeply, though in a more intellectual way, than every one of my honorable ancestors up there in that city of narrow streets would have suspected any sort of mountebank or performing adventurer who had strolled into his house. Listen to this. I know a banker, a middle-aged man of business, who has a talent for writing short stories. He exercises this talent in his spare time, and what he writes is often first class. Despite--I call it 'despite'--this admirable gift he is a man of not entirely blameless reputation: on the contrary he has already served quite a heavy prison sentence, and for good reason. In fact it was actually in jail that he first became aware of his talents, and his experiences as a prisoner are the basic theme in all his work. One might draw the rather fanciful conclusion from this that it is necessary to have been in some kind of house of correction if one is to become a writer. But can one help suspecting that in its roots and origins his artistic tendency had less to do with his experiences in jail than with what got him sent there? A banker who writes short stories: that's an oddity, isn't it? But a banker with no criminal record and no stain on his character who writes short stories--there's no such phenomenon...Yes, you may laugh, but I am half serious nevertheless. There's no problem on earth so tantalizing as the problem of what an artist is and what art does to human beings. Take the case of the most remarkable masterpiece of the most typical and therefore mightiest of all artists--take a morbid, profoundly equivocal work like Tristan and Isolde, and observe the effects of this work on a young, healthy listener of entirely normal sensibility. He will be filled with exultation, animation, warm, honest enthusiasm, perhaps even inspired to 'artistic' creative efforts of his own...Poor, decent dilettante! We artists have an inner life very different from what our 'warmhearted' admirers in their 'genuine enthusiasm' imagine. I have seen artists with women and young men crowding round them, applauding and idolizing them, artists about whom I knew the truth...The sources and side-effects and preconditions of artistic talent are something about which one constantly makes the most curious discoveries..." (158-159)
Later, Tonio travels, and is mistaken for a criminal in his hometown, where they have turned his family home into a public library. And then, in Elsinore, Tonio finds "Hans" and "Inge" at a dance at his hotel. This is a story whose greatness is not easily described--but for me, at least, its greatness lies in Tonio's articulations on the nature of art and the artist, along with the atypical, yet direct and confrontational views of love and romance that affect Tonio. Also of note in the story is Mann's use of leitmotif--the repetition of certain phrases--which imbues the story with a lyricism seldom found in prose--some of these phrases like "such things did not happen on earth" or "the girl who was always falling over" or "in it there is longing, and sad envy, and just a touch of contempt, and a whole world of innocent delight" or "And if it was the wrong way, then that was because for certain people no such thing as a right way exists" or the oft-quoted "After all, I wasn't born a gypsy in a green caravan"--some of these phrases comprise the final 1/3 of the story's near-perfection.
From there we proceed to the title story, generally viewed as Mann's most important contribution to the western literary canon. And a difficult one to write about. If you would like a fine distillation and something more involved, I would like to point you towards Andrew O'Hehir's astute and scholarly review http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2004/08/10/venice/index.htmlfrom roughly five years ago (of a different translation/edition/collection)--not two years after he served as my only professional mentor in the journalism trade when he presided over a couple meetings as technical advisor to our college newspaper arts section. I will not be able to focus my efforts as singularly on this story as O'Hehir, but I will make my best effort.
This story concerns Gustav von Aschenbach and a sudden whim that directs him on a vacation to Venice. After a couple preliminary oddities, in a cemetery and on a ship, he arrives in the title city and notices a particular Polish family, whose youngest member is a 14-year-old boy named Tadzio. Aschenbach is smitten with the boy, and the fixation becomes the central element of the story. Along the way, something else is amiss in Venice, and the authorities are trying to cover it up, and it is transparently suggested that the greater chaos at hand is reflective of Aschenbach's inner turmoil.
The story is generally regarded as "the" originator in the Queer genre of literature. For being written in 1912, it is very far ahead of its time. The subject matter is still very unsettling and it is hard for a reader to sympathize with Aschenbach, and still harder to denounce him. To add another layer of controversy to it, this may be regarded as Mann's second most autobiographical story, as it all apparently happened, while he was on vacation in Venice with his wife and brother, to a somewhat less severe degree, we can assume. He said he wanted to portray "the loss of an artist's dignity"--and in the end, this little infatuation proves to be the ultimate vehicle for that sentiment. Few would argue that the story cannot be deeply felt or that it lacks emotional power. In giving voice to a situation without literary precedent, under circumstances of the utmost disgrace, with both seriousness and irony, Mann created a very unlikely masterpiece indeed.
While Aschenbach does eventually lose all sense of moral decency and takes to following the Polish family around Venice, there are moments where he realizes the incompatability of his attraction with his respectable exterior, and attempts to self-reconcile:
"Nevertheless, there were moments at which he paused and half came to his senses. Where is this leading me! he would reflect in consternation at some moments. Where was it leading him! Like any man whose natural merits move him to take an aristocratic interest in his origins, Aschenbach habitually let the achievements and successes of his life remind him of his ancestors, for in imagination he could then feel sure of their approval, of their satisfaction, of the respect they could not have withheld. And he thought of them even here and now, entangled as he was in so impermissable an experience, involved in such exotic extravagances of feeling; he thought, with a sad smile, of their dignified austerity, their decent manliness of character. What would they say? But for that matter, what would they have said about his entire life, a life that had deviated from theirs to the point of degeneracy, this life of his in the compulsive service of art, this life about which he himself, adopting the civic values of his forefathers, had once let fall such mocking observations--and which nevertheless had essentially been so much like theirs! He too had served, he too had been a soldier and a warrior, like many of them: for art was a war, an exhausting struggle, it was hard these days to remain fit for it for long. A life of self-conquest and of defiant resolve, an astringent, steadfast and frugal life which he had turned into the symbol of that heroism so much in keeping with the times--surely he might call this manly, might call it courageous? And it seemed to him that the kind of love that had taken possession of him did, in a certain way, suit and befit such a life. Had it not been highly honored by the most valiant of peoples, indeed had he not read that in their cities it had flourished by inspiring valorous deeds? Numerous warrior-heroes of olden times had willingly borne its yoke, for there was no kind of abasement that could be reckoned as such if the god has imposed it; and actions that would have been castigated as signs of cowardice had their motives been different, such as falling to the ground in supplication, desperate pleas and slavish demeanor--these were accounted no disgrace to a lover, but rather won him still greater praise." (245-246)
For the time it was written, these are some revolutionary statements to be included in such a mainstream work. But moving just beyond the salacious element, the story is certainly Mann's most elegantly composed piece. It is precise, pure, and detailed to just the right degree. A feeling of mystery enhances the opening pages and the driving compulsion that pushes the story to its already-promised end render it a surprising page-turner. And there are still moments of overpowering emotion at which the reader cannot help but be moved, as after the time that Tadzio recognizes Aschenbach and smiles at him:
"He who had received this smile carried it quickly away with him like a fateful gift. He was so deeply shaken that he was forced to flee the lighted terrace and the front garden and hurry into the darkness of the park at the rear. Words struggled from his lips, strangely indignant and tender reproaches: 'You musn't smile like that! One musn't, do you hear, smile like that at anyone!' He sank down on one of the seats, deliriously breathing the nocturnal fragrance of the flowers and trees. And leaning back, his arms hanging down, overwhelmed, trembling, shuddering all over, he whispered the standing formula of the heart's desire--impossible here, absurd, depraved, ludicrous and sacred nevertheless, still worthy of honor even here: 'I love you!'" (241)
I am not sure the degree to which these stories shattered the conventions of their times--some of them are quite ordinary--but for me, this short story collection was a discovery of rare value. I feel that Mann is one of the first writers to experiment with so-called "transgressive fiction" in the modern sense of the term, and while he has legitimately cemented his place in the canon of German literature, proving himself worthy of the kind of respect only known to Goethe, few present day American readers will be familiar with his work. One should not forget that Mann himself became an American citizen in the 1950's and lived in California, and there is sometimes an American element that will appear in his stories that will make one proud with the kind of respect he shows this country and its citizens. Keeping all of this in mind, if it is your motive to review all of the classic works of literature created in this world before you die, please add this collection to your list. I do not think you will find the time wasted.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
American Pastoral - Philip Roth (incomplete)
American Pastoral is a fantastic novel but I only made it through 75% of it until circumstances forced me to abandon reading it. I wanted to open up this review with two anecdotes about Philip Roth--one about a certain beach reader of The Plot Against America who made me feel like most people that like Philip Roth in fact suck as human beings (though I know from experience that it could not be true), and another about a friend who tried to stalk J.D. Salinger and instead got intercepted by the police and told me last time I was in New York that I had to read American Pastoral, that I wasn't aware what I was missing.
I know all too well what I am missing now and it makes it all the more painful to blog about this kind of material. In fact, what happened to me is appropriate to the book in a really sick way.
I made it about 300 pages through this novel. There were 422 pages or so and I was looking forward to putting the "420 test" to it, but I am reasonably sure it would not pass it. However, I happened to stay at a friend's house this weekend, and he happened to lend me the novel A Winter's Tale by Mark Halperin, a nearly 700 page behemoth, which I begrudgingly accepted. I put these into my messenger bag. We decided to see Terminator: Salvation the next day.
We did that and parked on the street because parking in that lot was deemed a ripoff. We found what looked like a good spot and I left my bag in the car because it seemed like a safe neighborhood. I never even thought twice about leaving my bag in any car in the past.
We watched the movie and deemed it "okay" (I even thought about posting a review of the movie during the first half hour or so until I realized it wouldn't be worth trying to untangle the plot) and walked back to the car. Out of the corner of my eye it looked like the passenger side window was opened in a weird way. My friend said, "We got broken into," and I ran up to my door in disbelief. I looked down to the floor and sure enough, the bag was gone. There was shattered glass all across the front two seats. They had left my Nalgene bottle. They had thrown a cement rock through the window specifically for my bag.
Inside my bag were the two books, one pair of prescription glasses, an empty glasses case, an Alfonso Soriano #12 blue Cubs t-shirt, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs CD It's Blitz and the Superchunk CD Leaves in the Gutter, my orange journal, (purchased in Florence for me by a friend that now couldn't care less about me, and besides, there wasn't much worth preserving in that journal anyways, more to be embarrassed by, and so not a cause of great concern for me) a notebook full of factual information that I had kept for the last six and a half years, seemingly unimportant but a great loss of contact information, and, most painful of all, one of the last few objects to give me pleasure in life, my iPod, 60 GB, nearly 12000 songs, still going strong after three years, my companion on countless hours of highway driving, an essential component of all exercises taking place in the last three years, gone.
American Pastoral is about a guy who seemingly has the perfect life only to give birth to a daughter that ends up becoming a "Weather Underground" type of revolutionary zealot that can't really provide convincing evidence that her behavior is justified when she wants to set off bombs and kill innocent people. It's a totally great novel and I liked it much more than Underworld (both published in 1997, both "runners-up in the Best Fiction of the last 25 years" thing alluded to in the Underworld review) and I can't wait to read the last 122 pages, but for me, this book will always symbolize what (pathetically) is one of the worst experiences of my life. If I wanted to replace that bag and its contents, I would need to spend more than $1000. As it is, American Pastoral was on loan from the library so I have to settle things with them. The loss for me has been extremely painful. People may find it pathetic to find someone so consumed by their possessions, but there were not many objects that I held important beyond those that I kept in that bag, and intrinsically, the bag itself, which garnered so many compliments from so many random people in the too-short two years I had it.
A huge loss, and a lesson learned--people will break into a car for a bag so long as they stand little chance of getting caught. This happened around 1:00 in the afternoon. I am deeply sorry to my friend who has to deal with getting his window repaired by insurance and I am deeply upset with the City of Chicago Police force (unless they miraculously return these items to me, which I highly doubt because in filing the report, there seemed to be massive problems with setting an address to the location of the crime) and the City of Chicago itself. It is ironic that in the beginning of American Pastoral there is talk about how horrible a city Newark is and how it has the highest incidence of car thefts in the nation. People say something much worse could have happened, and I'm sure it could have, but it doesn't take away from the fact that a huge part of my life was just taken away from me and I feel emotionally devastated by its absence.
So please, do not leave your bag in your car. The world is full of horrible people.
I know all too well what I am missing now and it makes it all the more painful to blog about this kind of material. In fact, what happened to me is appropriate to the book in a really sick way.
I made it about 300 pages through this novel. There were 422 pages or so and I was looking forward to putting the "420 test" to it, but I am reasonably sure it would not pass it. However, I happened to stay at a friend's house this weekend, and he happened to lend me the novel A Winter's Tale by Mark Halperin, a nearly 700 page behemoth, which I begrudgingly accepted. I put these into my messenger bag. We decided to see Terminator: Salvation the next day.
We did that and parked on the street because parking in that lot was deemed a ripoff. We found what looked like a good spot and I left my bag in the car because it seemed like a safe neighborhood. I never even thought twice about leaving my bag in any car in the past.
We watched the movie and deemed it "okay" (I even thought about posting a review of the movie during the first half hour or so until I realized it wouldn't be worth trying to untangle the plot) and walked back to the car. Out of the corner of my eye it looked like the passenger side window was opened in a weird way. My friend said, "We got broken into," and I ran up to my door in disbelief. I looked down to the floor and sure enough, the bag was gone. There was shattered glass all across the front two seats. They had left my Nalgene bottle. They had thrown a cement rock through the window specifically for my bag.
Inside my bag were the two books, one pair of prescription glasses, an empty glasses case, an Alfonso Soriano #12 blue Cubs t-shirt, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs CD It's Blitz and the Superchunk CD Leaves in the Gutter, my orange journal, (purchased in Florence for me by a friend that now couldn't care less about me, and besides, there wasn't much worth preserving in that journal anyways, more to be embarrassed by, and so not a cause of great concern for me) a notebook full of factual information that I had kept for the last six and a half years, seemingly unimportant but a great loss of contact information, and, most painful of all, one of the last few objects to give me pleasure in life, my iPod, 60 GB, nearly 12000 songs, still going strong after three years, my companion on countless hours of highway driving, an essential component of all exercises taking place in the last three years, gone.
American Pastoral is about a guy who seemingly has the perfect life only to give birth to a daughter that ends up becoming a "Weather Underground" type of revolutionary zealot that can't really provide convincing evidence that her behavior is justified when she wants to set off bombs and kill innocent people. It's a totally great novel and I liked it much more than Underworld (both published in 1997, both "runners-up in the Best Fiction of the last 25 years" thing alluded to in the Underworld review) and I can't wait to read the last 122 pages, but for me, this book will always symbolize what (pathetically) is one of the worst experiences of my life. If I wanted to replace that bag and its contents, I would need to spend more than $1000. As it is, American Pastoral was on loan from the library so I have to settle things with them. The loss for me has been extremely painful. People may find it pathetic to find someone so consumed by their possessions, but there were not many objects that I held important beyond those that I kept in that bag, and intrinsically, the bag itself, which garnered so many compliments from so many random people in the too-short two years I had it.
A huge loss, and a lesson learned--people will break into a car for a bag so long as they stand little chance of getting caught. This happened around 1:00 in the afternoon. I am deeply sorry to my friend who has to deal with getting his window repaired by insurance and I am deeply upset with the City of Chicago Police force (unless they miraculously return these items to me, which I highly doubt because in filing the report, there seemed to be massive problems with setting an address to the location of the crime) and the City of Chicago itself. It is ironic that in the beginning of American Pastoral there is talk about how horrible a city Newark is and how it has the highest incidence of car thefts in the nation. People say something much worse could have happened, and I'm sure it could have, but it doesn't take away from the fact that a huge part of my life was just taken away from me and I feel emotionally devastated by its absence.
So please, do not leave your bag in your car. The world is full of horrible people.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Top 10 LSAT Topics
Anyone planning to take the LSAT should be prepared to answers tons of questions about the following topics (note I thought this list would be a lot easier to make and actually only the top 5 or so are really bizarrely pervasive):
Top 10 LSAT Topics
10) Fossilized Evidence from the Ice Age
9) The Effects of Political Debates on Voting
8) Television Viewing and Violent Behavior
7) Police Presence and Crime Rates
6) Global Warming – Species Extinction (tie)
5) Childhood Education
4) Smoking Cigarettes and Lung Cancer
3) Native Americans
2) Cholesterol and Heart Disease
1) DDT/Pesticides
Top 10 LSAT Topics
10) Fossilized Evidence from the Ice Age
9) The Effects of Political Debates on Voting
8) Television Viewing and Violent Behavior
7) Police Presence and Crime Rates
6) Global Warming – Species Extinction (tie)
5) Childhood Education
4) Smoking Cigarettes and Lung Cancer
3) Native Americans
2) Cholesterol and Heart Disease
1) DDT/Pesticides
Monday, May 18, 2009
DST Promotional Post
For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, last night it dawned on me to finally do what I had been thinking of doing over the last year or so--create a blog for one of my books. Faced with more depressing appropriate thoughts about my future job and LSAT study (the LSAT is 3 weeks from today, BTW) and despairing over never attaining my idyllic dream of a career ensconced in the world of literature (undoubtedly affected by my present reading of American Pastoral, which should be reviewed sometime in the next week or two), I felt it was appropriate to put it out there, at least, that I had actually put my mind to something at one point. Last night I thought about doing blogs for all 4 books and immediately decided against one of them (the short story collection), because several of those items are already on this blog itself. Later, this morning I decided against another, my most recent, still in its rough draft form and one I am not sure will ever be seriously revised, my NaNoWriMo project from last year, titled Think and Grow Poor: Cultivating a Negative Mental Attitude, a memoir of my life from July of 2007 through Election Day 2008--I decided against this for personal reasons, and though it is no small achievement, it is probably my weakest overall work, with only a few chapters in particular (maybe 5) that eclipse most of my other work. Of course, we could not get to DST without mentioning S/M, which may follow suit on its own blog if DST is met with any small level of success. S/M is undoubtedly my finest work, but one that will also "offend a lot of people" and probably make people "concerned" about me. Still, while I don't really believe either DST or S/M is good enough to be published properly via an agent, etc., S/M is the more focused of the two, the more direct, the more emotionally powerful, and the more "something to say" of the two. I am putting these books up because, who knows, maybe someone will see it and want to publish it in book form, because reading a whole novel off a blog could get a little crazy.
That said, when I sent DST to a friend of mine a little more than a year ago, he wrote me back immediately saying that he had read it from start to finish on his computer without leaving his seat. It remains the best compliment I have ever received on this title. Later, I gave it to a very well-read future medical student in Beverly Hills who often spoke of her latest forays into Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, or Proust, and she gave me the second-best compliment about it, that she knew what good writing was and this was it, and that she would classify it as a kind of "sci-fi beat." Also, she had read it with her back up against a radiator and she had so lost herself in it that later she had a welt from the heat, never realizing what was happening. That was through a hard copy I had made for her, and the impetus for the second post on Flying Houses "Online Store"--a stint that has been over for 381 days now and so is no longer possible. In earlier times, before the rough draft had been officially completed, one roommate in particular told me that parts of it were good but that he was not impressed with it overall, and that I might be able to publish it as YA Fiction.
Now, this is not YA Fiction. S/M could be YA Fiction, but DST does not deal with characters in their teenage years--no, the time is clearly post-college for these characters. How old are they? That is up for debate. The setting is Chicago. There are many inconsistences (see the last name of the character Spencer as well as the name of the coffee shop where Ted and Penelope work changing from Mellow Grounds to Uncommon Grounds) and there was an abandoned gimmick about the novel being a post-humously published novel by the older brother of the author, but it was not necessary to pull that trick. Yes, the "twist" at the end is enhanced by the concept of all the events of this piece taking place in "true reality"--but it is ultimately not necessary, nor would it achieve any greater pleasure for the reader.
You can read DST by clicking on the link to the right that says "Daylight Savings Time." Why do I acronym all of my books? Because my titles are cliches. My books are not cliches though. I don't want to market this book to agents, and I don't want to market S/M either. You can take it or leave it. Of course I want to publish them and make money off of them (God knows how badly I need it), but ultimately it's more appealing for me to put it out there on a blog for anyone to read whenever they want than for me to keep it locked up on my computer for no one to ever realize it even existed.
That said, when I sent DST to a friend of mine a little more than a year ago, he wrote me back immediately saying that he had read it from start to finish on his computer without leaving his seat. It remains the best compliment I have ever received on this title. Later, I gave it to a very well-read future medical student in Beverly Hills who often spoke of her latest forays into Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, or Proust, and she gave me the second-best compliment about it, that she knew what good writing was and this was it, and that she would classify it as a kind of "sci-fi beat." Also, she had read it with her back up against a radiator and she had so lost herself in it that later she had a welt from the heat, never realizing what was happening. That was through a hard copy I had made for her, and the impetus for the second post on Flying Houses "Online Store"--a stint that has been over for 381 days now and so is no longer possible. In earlier times, before the rough draft had been officially completed, one roommate in particular told me that parts of it were good but that he was not impressed with it overall, and that I might be able to publish it as YA Fiction.
Now, this is not YA Fiction. S/M could be YA Fiction, but DST does not deal with characters in their teenage years--no, the time is clearly post-college for these characters. How old are they? That is up for debate. The setting is Chicago. There are many inconsistences (see the last name of the character Spencer as well as the name of the coffee shop where Ted and Penelope work changing from Mellow Grounds to Uncommon Grounds) and there was an abandoned gimmick about the novel being a post-humously published novel by the older brother of the author, but it was not necessary to pull that trick. Yes, the "twist" at the end is enhanced by the concept of all the events of this piece taking place in "true reality"--but it is ultimately not necessary, nor would it achieve any greater pleasure for the reader.
You can read DST by clicking on the link to the right that says "Daylight Savings Time." Why do I acronym all of my books? Because my titles are cliches. My books are not cliches though. I don't want to market this book to agents, and I don't want to market S/M either. You can take it or leave it. Of course I want to publish them and make money off of them (God knows how badly I need it), but ultimately it's more appealing for me to put it out there on a blog for anyone to read whenever they want than for me to keep it locked up on my computer for no one to ever realize it even existed.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell
I bought Blink at a Barnes & Noble or Borders (can't remember) in L.A. (can't remember what part) because it was part of a "Buy 1, Get the 2nd 50% off" promotion along with Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, which I had been wanting to read. I read the Hornby book back in October 2007 and it is one of the first reviews on this blog. I picked up Blink now and again whenever I didn't have anything better to read, and I never really got into it. At the time I first glanced at it, I was looking for a job in L.A., and it made me think, "Well, if I go into an interview, they will decide whether or not to hire me in the first second, regardless of what I say," and it made me nervous that nothing mattered, that first impressions counted more than common sense would like us to believe. This may be an oversimplification of that volume's thesis (and I'm not really sure, because I never read the entire thing, only about half, and scattershot at best) but it appears to me that Gladwell is on the forefront of a new movement in sociology that is highly influenced by the "sound-bite" theory of new media. There is a definite hook to his idea, but in the end it does not really tell us that much about ourselves that we didn't already know.
Thus, Outliers. I wanted to read this book because it was popular and new (came out in late 2008) and because I thought it would tell me the secret to being sucessful. No such luck. If you read this book, you will learn why Bill Gates and the Beatles became successful. It has to do with practicing one thing for 10,000 hours. You will learn why so many hockey players are born in January. You will learn why Jewish lawyers born in the early 1930s whose parents worked in the garment business and who specialized in corporate takeovers are great successes not because of their intellect, but because of their circumstances. By the end, the book had become so repetitive at hammering home this idea that I just wanted to skim the text because it had become so predictable.
The best part about the book is the chapter on plane crashes. It made me want to become an airline pilot. The transcriptions from the black box recorder are dramatic, morbidly depressing, tragi-comic, and very unsettling. It all ends up having to do with Korean Air and how they had such a horrible record of plane crashes and how they turned it around.
I don't even know what I want to say about this book. It became a chore for me to read after a while. I'm glad it's over. I don't recommend it, but it is depressing and funny to think about what people will be saying about people born between 1980-1987, or whatever, seventy years from now. We are products of our circumstances, sure. And there's no way out. You're either lucky or you're not. If you're Asian, you'll be good at math and properly adjusted to the concept of rising before dawn 360 days out of the year. If you're an American inured to the long summer break rule of the predominant educational system, you'll be limited in ways you never knew. Reading this book made me feel pathetic and hopeless. Some of it may be "interesting" and "revealing"--and non-fiction sociological texts serve a different purpose than fiction--but still, I would have liked to see a small qualification, one random deviation to give the regular everyday reader a tiny smidgen of hope that they would be able to do something great with their life even if they weren't lucky in all the right ways.
Thus, Outliers. I wanted to read this book because it was popular and new (came out in late 2008) and because I thought it would tell me the secret to being sucessful. No such luck. If you read this book, you will learn why Bill Gates and the Beatles became successful. It has to do with practicing one thing for 10,000 hours. You will learn why so many hockey players are born in January. You will learn why Jewish lawyers born in the early 1930s whose parents worked in the garment business and who specialized in corporate takeovers are great successes not because of their intellect, but because of their circumstances. By the end, the book had become so repetitive at hammering home this idea that I just wanted to skim the text because it had become so predictable.
The best part about the book is the chapter on plane crashes. It made me want to become an airline pilot. The transcriptions from the black box recorder are dramatic, morbidly depressing, tragi-comic, and very unsettling. It all ends up having to do with Korean Air and how they had such a horrible record of plane crashes and how they turned it around.
I don't even know what I want to say about this book. It became a chore for me to read after a while. I'm glad it's over. I don't recommend it, but it is depressing and funny to think about what people will be saying about people born between 1980-1987, or whatever, seventy years from now. We are products of our circumstances, sure. And there's no way out. You're either lucky or you're not. If you're Asian, you'll be good at math and properly adjusted to the concept of rising before dawn 360 days out of the year. If you're an American inured to the long summer break rule of the predominant educational system, you'll be limited in ways you never knew. Reading this book made me feel pathetic and hopeless. Some of it may be "interesting" and "revealing"--and non-fiction sociological texts serve a different purpose than fiction--but still, I would have liked to see a small qualification, one random deviation to give the regular everyday reader a tiny smidgen of hope that they would be able to do something great with their life even if they weren't lucky in all the right ways.
Friday, May 8, 2009
The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis
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.
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.
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.
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