Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin was published in March of 1957. Though mostly written after the completion of Lolita, it was published one year before that volume would be available in America, though two years after its publication in France. Americans were aware of Lolita but generally not able to obtain it, so when Pnin was released by the same author, many people took notice and Nabokov enjoyed his greatest success yet, though it would be nothing compared to the American reception of Lolita.

I can't imagine there being a shorter Nabokov novel than this, so if one wants a little dose of him without the heavy committment of a few weeks, Pnin is for you. I like it better than anything else except for Pale Fire and Lolita. It's significantly more engaging than Bend Sinister and more pleasant and enjoyable than Laughter in the Dark. It's not Pale Fire, but Pnin does appear briefly as a character in that book. It's not Lolita; Nabokov is in much safer territory here. But I imagine it is one of the best--and it won't be possible to verify that for a long time, so intimidating is his oeuvre--alongside perhaps Ada, which is his longest and which I hope I can review one day.

Like Pale Fire, Pnin resists categorization. In the first place, it appeared in pseudo-serial form in The New Yorker prior to publication, with several revisions made in the interim. In the second place, there are seven relatively short chapters which are barely connected by transition and blur the line between short story and novel chapter. It's fair to say Pnin is definitely a novel--not a collection of short stories--but it will be a different novel than you have ever read.

Chapter 1 details Professor Timofey Pnin's miscalculated train voyage to deliver a lecture to a Woman's Club, in which he has apparently brought the wrong lecture, but which is not really revealed in the text until the last words of the final chapter. Weird. Fantastic opening.

Chapter 2 is the story of Pnin's family life. The love of his life, Liza, who has married several other men besides him, often under random chaotic circumstances including a suicide attempt and revolutionary psychiatric practice, and her son (with the man who made a cuckold of him, Dr. Eric Wind) and Pnin's surrogate son, the high-school aged extraordinarily talented artist Victor. In Chapter 2, Liza comes to visit Pnin at his new home, which is in a room sublet by another professor and his wife at the college they both teach at, Waindell. Their daughter has gotten married and Pnin has taken her room. Liza comes to visit and he is overjoyed and he waits with baited breath for her to reveal the reason she came, what she had to tell him. When she reveals her purpose, it is both mundane and heartbreaking.

Chapter 3 is "a day in the life" of Pnin, lecturing at class, going to his office, returning a book to the library because somebody else wants it, which he can't believe, and hearing a random utterance which will later greatly affect his circumstances. I am trying to remove spoilers.

Chapter 4 is like a mini "portrait of the artist as a young man" starring Victor. Indeed you almost forget this book is about Pnin, until you realize the real subject of the chapter is Victor's first visit with Pnin, where he is meant to meet him at a train station, which results in a funny little mistake. Most of Pnin is comic and gets most of its laughs from Pnin's poor use of English and surprisingly confusing accent. Pnin gets Victor a couple of gifts, which don't go over that well, but which is still heartwarming in a way.

Chapter 5 is the story of where Pnin vacations in the summer, and his first attempts at learning how to drive. Here he falls into a nostalgic reverie which is one of the more enjoyable departures of the novel.

Chapter 6 is the most famous part of the book--where Pnin throws a "house-heating" party in the home he has recently rented entirely for himself. He is at his happiest here, though he is about to receive some unfortunate news--though it is only because of his stubbornness that it will affect his life.

In what may be the most inventive part of the book, Chapter 7 reveals the narrator's relationship with Pnin. The narrator who has made sly reference to himself at a few points finally enters the narrative and becomes a character. It is not Nabokov himself, but it would be easy to make that mistake. Some of the autobiographical elements of this novel are probably more revealing than in any other book by Nabokov excepting his autobiography, and gives a very realistic portrait of the life of a college professor, and campus life in general. As the introduction by David Lodge states, it is one of the first examples of the "campus novel" genre, after Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe in 1952. (I take some issue with this claim--This Side of Paradise doesn't take place entirely on a campus, but couldn't it be considered that?)

To my chagrin, Nabokov cannot resist besmirching the reputation of a certain then-recently-departed German author:

"Literary departments still labored under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers." (102)

To that I have to reply, "What do you want, Vladimir?" In all of my years of reading, I have never had to choose between two authors because I knew one author thought the other one's work was terrible. Nabokov is a literary genius and also a genius when it comes to cutting other authors down to size. In this case, it is traumatic for me. I will continue to love them both, and continue to point out every instance I find of Vladimir speaking badly of Thomas. Though Mann was 24 years older than Nabokov, and did not write in English, they are representative of their era in that one left Nazi Germany and one left Communist Russia, both emigrated to America, and both have contributed a few of the major works to the canon of Great Books--though Nabokov would probably disagree. Still, I wish we could leave this superiority-complex and arrogance out of books and all get along nicely, but that isn't Nabokov's style. Regardless, one is able to forget about it when Liza reveals a letter to the narrator in the final chapter:

"The letter has by chance remained among my papers. Here it is:
'I am afraid you will be pained by my confession, my dear Lise' (the writer, though using Russian, called her throughout by this French form of her name, in order, I presume, to avoid both the too familiar 'Liza' and the too formal 'Elizaveta Innokentievna'). 'It is always painful for a sensitive (chutkiy) person to see another in an awkward position. And I am definitely in an awkward position.
'You, Lise, are surrounded by poets, scientists, artists, dandies. The celebrated painter who made your portrait last year is now, it is said, drinking himself to death (govoryat, spilsya) in the wilds of Massachusetts. Rumor proclaims many other things. And here I am, daring to write to you.
'I am not handsome. I am not interesting. I am not talented. I am not even rich. But Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything. And, believe me, this is more than any genius can offer you because a genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do. I may not achieve happiness, but I know I shall do everything to make you happy. I want you to write poems. I want you to go on with your psychotherapeutic research--in which I do not understand much, while questioning the validity of what I can understand. Incidentally, I am sending you under separate cover a pamphlet published in Prague by my friend Professor Chateau, which brilliantly refutes your Dr. Halp's theory of birth being an act of suicide on the part of the infant. I have permitted myself to correct an obvious misprint on page 48 of Chateau's excellent paper. I await your' (probably 'decision', the bottom of the page with signature had been cut off by Liza)." (136-137)

These and other small emotional, comic, linguistic asides like--
"Chateau, who looked so jaunty, with one hand in the pocket of his white flannel trousers and his lustring coat rather rakishly opened on a flannel waistcoat, cheerfully said that in the near future he would have to undergo an exploratory operation of the abdomen, and Pnin said, laughing, that every time he was X-rayed, doctors vainly tried to puzzle out what they termed 'a shadow behind the heart'.
'Good title for a bad novel,' remarked Chateau." (93)
--make up the majority of the pleasures of the text. This is "light entertainment" for Nabokov, but a more serious novel than anything being published today anyways. When you've read the two more "important" books by Nabokov, Pnin will be an enjoyable palate cleanser.

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Almost exactly a year ago, I saw Ray Bradbury speak from his wheelchair on UCLA's campus, not more than a few hundred yards where he composed Fahrenheit 451 around 1950. Fifty-eight years later, aged 87 or so, Bradbury remained vivacious despite his being mostly confined to a wheelchair (he did stand for a moment at the beginning as if to bow, and he wore his large medal from France), which is a testament to the good that California can do for a person's health. But I saw him speak because he was the biggest name at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (I missed Gore Vidal due to poor planning and underestimation of his popularity--which I still deeply regret), and it is still remarkable to me how many people crowded into that "Agent's Voices" panel discussion, and sad to remember that David Foster Wallace's agent had been one of the three. More on that here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/04/tobias-wolff-jane-smiley-ron-carlson.html (and note rogue typo along with now-embarassing tirade) and here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008/04/ray-bradbury-042608-royce-hall-ucla.html (and note the error of the author's age).

I had been meaning to read Fahrenheit 451 for somewhere around the last ten years. One of my now ex-coworkers told me he had read it for school in sixth grade. Is it written for sixth graders? It could be understood by them. The content is not objectionable. It's a vaguely subversive book that is meant to inspire revolt against an increasingly complacent future without complex ideas. It's probably a good book for junior high and high school students. As a college student, I should have included it in my independent study on the political novel in the 20th century. I would excise the portions about the comparison between All the King's Men and Primary Colors (though I was attempting to show there are only 2 kinds of political novels--the first a re-imagination of society as we know it, the second a novel "about politics") and compare 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.

First of all, while I enjoyed Fahrenheit 451, found it breezy, entertaining, funny, bizarre, and moving at times, it doesn't stretch to the heights of Orwell's or Huxley's masterworks. Orwell has telescreens, nonstop surveillance, Big Brother, a whole totalitarian political agenda realized. Huxley has soma, three classes of human beings, "feelies," hypnopaedic conditioning, and vacations to exotic places like Utah. Bradbury has the mechanical hound (potentially the star of the novel), "seashell" headphones, VW beetles that go 100 MPH everywhere, outlaw English professors, and firemen who start fires instead of putting them out. While Orwell and Huxley are making larger societal critiques, Bradbury sticks to one subject: books.

Now, here is one area where Huxley and Bradbury can converge: the arrival of the Kindle, perhaps the most evil instrument of technology to have been invented yet. Let me qualify that statement: it's not all bad--people will still be reading, at least, and writers will simply have to accept a new form of payment for their production, a la iTunes for musicians. I don't believe file-sharing will have an adverse effect on authors, and I don't believe libraries will cease to exist. I worry that people will start looking at little screens more often than they already do--Blackberry, iPhone, iPod (the only nicety I am guilty of having--but who doesn't!), Nintendo DS (not so different from Gameboy now some 20 odd years old), Facebook all the time, whatever it is that Twitter is, and on and on...--perhaps there's nothing WRONG with it, per se, but as someone that doesn't do all that stuff, I feel very left behind on this whole cultural revolution stuff--and feel that it is too expensive and not worth the effort for a person like me. I do feel left out, but I don't feel that these gadgets would improve my life anymore. But this isn't about me--this is about book burning.

Sure, six years before this book was written, Nazi Germany burned books, and that's the clearest precedent here: remove information so as to best manipulate the masses. I do not know how America could become like that. There were various restrictions on Google in China, I seem to recall, a few years back. It doesn't seem like Bradbury's warning is all that necessary (that said, it still makes for a compelling narrative). It appears that his spiritual cousin of the telescreen, "the walls" of the living room, where Mildred (main character Guy Montag's wife) spends most of her time, are the sole source of entertainment, and that they include a "family" that the viewer feels they are a part of--not so different from the way people get attached to TV shows, and pretty sharp of Bradbury to portray at the dawn of the television age:

"'When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about, where, when? Well, I'd say it really got started around a thing called the Civil War. Even though our rule book claims it was founded earlier. The fact is we didn't get along well until photography came into its own. Then--motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.'
Montag sat in bed, not moving.
'And because they had mass, they became simpler,' said Beatty. 'Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm, do you follow me?'
'I think so.'
Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. 'Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.'
'Snap ending,' Mildred nodded.
'Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more." (54-55)

So that is one reason--people don't have the time to read, so books are no longer necessary. But burnt so they can never be read? That is an effect, as Beatty later explains, of not wanting to weigh two sides of an issue:

"Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead, he's on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country." (59-60)
Or:
"Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile raction (Ed: note proofreading error--s/b 'reaction') to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment." (61)

This reminds me of people at my first job in California who would be like, "You're so good, you read a lot." They wish they had the time to read. It's not a worthwhile pursuit since they have so many other things they need to take care of and worry about. Leisure time is better spent in front of the television where you can quantify how long you are going to be free from other activity--not like the unpredictability of book, which depends on your doing a lot more work.

Should I give away the plot? Guy Montag meets a girl named Clarisse who questions everything about their society--he sort of even gets a crush on her, though she is 17 and he is married--and so he starts questioning everything. His wife Mildred is thoroughly drugged out and at her first appearance, has just attempted suicide by sleeping pills. Elsewhere in the novel she shows practically zero sign of depression. Beatty is the fire captain, who acts like the character of Mustapha Mond in Brave New World or O'Brien in 1984, who explains the society and therefore provides the most compelling moments.

After writing this review, I feel like Fahrenheit 451 is more important than I initially gave it credit for, and is perhaps closer to society in 2009 than either Huxley's or Orwell's works. It's not as extremely different as the other two. But I feel like, Orwell and Bradbury are clearly against their societies, whereas Huxley is less transparent in his aims. For me, Huxley is the most prophetic of the three, particularly since his book was also the earliest, and has been able to see clearly some 70 years into the future. Bradbury does anticipate the loneliness and isolation of our times, but that is less his motive than to argue in favor of literature, not unlike John the Savage in Brave New World who wants poetry, pain, sadness, everything, which causes Mustapha Mond to reply, "You are reserving the right to be unhappy." Orwell's might be the greatest novel of the three, but Huxley's is the wildest vision, and the most compelling for its sheer imaginative quality. Bradbury belongs right alongside them. History will treat this book as kindly as it does the other two, and let us hope that at least one of the three will be read for generations to come--whether on Kindle or paper.

Underworld - Don DeLillo

In the weeks following 9/11, thousands of desperate conspiracy theorists pointed towards a variety of signs and signifiers as proof that the attack had been pre-ordained. People said that Wilco's album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot prefigured the event. The cover of that album is the famous twin tower parking garage in Chicago. Songs like "Ashes of American Flags" and "Jesus, Etc." seemed eerily topical. But that was only one notable item. In the literary world, the cover of Don DeLillo's 1997 tome Underworld spooked anyone aware of its existence--a stark black and white photo of the World Trade Center, a cross atop of church steeple in front, a bird with what seems a very large wingspan feet from the building, and a huge mess of fog enveloping the scene so the tops are not visible. Did DeLillo know that the 1994 attacks would be repeated? Was the choice of cover photograph a bit of precognitive excess? Is DeLillo the prophet of our times? The reader of Underworld will find few clues to support these wild, supernatural questions. It is all more a sad coincidence. Still, one might consider DeLillo's Mao II, which posits the author and terrorist as being spiritual brothers, and his most recent novel Falling Man, which uses 9/11 as a launching pad for the narrative, as further proof that all of his writing is intricately connected in a cryptogrammic maze. One could even point to 2003's Cosmopolis as a warning for the financial crisis that would occur five years later on Wall St.

I had the pleasure of meeting DeLillo briefly at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on his promotional tour for that book in April or May of 2003. I had recently put out my first ambitious larger-scale piece of writing entitled "Autointoxication," which reprinted a page or two from White Noise as a kind of reverse epigraph, and I wanted him to see it, and hoped that he wouldn't sue me. He read from Cosmopolis, I bought a copy, and I got in line to have him sign it. A few people had managed to convey a sentence or two in their brief moment with the master, and I worried about a failure of confidence, while entertaining a daydream that he might read the piece on his way home, become transfixed and ecstatic, and help me to become a published author at 20. The moment came and I handed over my copy of the book and believe I said, "Mr. DeLillo, I'm a huge fan, I love your work. Would you like a copy of my zine?" I know he only said a few words back to me. "What's a zine?" he responded curtly, perhaps a bit annoyed. "It's kind of like a book in a way," I said back. "Oh, sure." I handed him a copy, took my autographed copy of his book, felt happy I had accomplished my goal, and thought that he would probably throw it away or read a page of it, become disinterested, and dispose of it some other way.

Anyone who has not read White Noise should go out and get it from the library immediately. Underworld may be DeLillo's piece de resistance, but I cannot recommend it as highly as White Noise, which is infinitely more digestible, razor-sharp in its focus, very, very funny, and eloquently composed. A friend of mine suggested that it prefigured the proliferation of Prozac with its Dylar tablet. But onto the real subject--what is Underworld about?

1) The 1951 baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants where Bobby Thomson hit the "Shot Heard 'Round the World"
2) Nick Shay, waste management executive, and Klara Sax, famous artist.
3) A staggering cast of characters like Albert Bronzini, high school chemistry teacher and chess master, Matt Shay, younger brother to Nick and chess pupil, Sister Mary Edgar, a long-term nun given to corporal punishment, J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director, celebrity hobnobber of indeterminate sexuality, Frank Sinatra, singer, Jackie Gleason, comedic actor, Lenny Bruce, stand-up comedian, Brian Glassic, friend of Nick Shay, Marian Shay, wife of Nick, recreational heroin user, Cotter Martin, original owner of the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" ball, Manx Martin, his father that sells it on impulse, Marvin Lundy, tracker and eventual longtime owner of the ball, Ismael Munoz, 'train-tagging' artist and Bronx community steward, the Texas Highway Killer, a serial killer in the spotlight over several decades, Eric Demming, friend and co-worker of Matt Shay, and nuclear radiation fallout alarmist, and Janet Urbaniak, girlfriend and wife to Matt Shay, nurse who runs for 11 minutes straight from her hospital through a rough neighborhood to her apartment shared with other nurses.
4) American society from 1950-2000

Underworld is DeLillo's version of the Great American Novel. It is not a failure by any stretch, but it is not for everyone. It could have used better editing, but that would have detracted from its size and scope, which extends towards nearly every element of cultural information that arose during the Cold War period and after. It is roughly the same length as The Magic Mountain. It is not as good as Magic Mountain, but it is much closer to the sadness of our present reality. It's a very realistic novel, there's very little in it that sounds totally made up.

So....Nick Shay has some horrible secret in his past that DeLillo holds off on revealing until somewhere in the late 700's, but one that the reader will be able to know much earlier--though the actual event of which should be surprising, as it was for me. Klara Sax was once wife to Albert Bronzini, and slept with Nick twice when he was 17 and she was 32 or so, and she eventually became a renowned artist who is decorating over 200 defunct military planes in a desert in the Southwest at the opening of the novel--that is, after the 70 page "prologue" which is probably the greatest literary account of a baseball game yet to have been written.

The prologue was once published separately, and some people might enjoy reading that on its own. The rest of the novel has very little in common with it, beyond the three "Manx Martin" chapters, and a few notable appearances of J. Edgar Hoover later on. Nick Shay is the final owner of the baseball, and it may be some sort of symbol in the book that I am not able to confidently state, and one way to describe Underworld is to say "It's about 'The Shot Heard 'Round the World' baseball and all of the hands its travels through," but the baseball doesn't account for the majority of the plot in the novel.

While there may be conspiracy theories about the cover, I would like to offer my own conspiracy: the page 420 test. This test can be applied to any book with more than 420 pages. The reader should look to page 420 and see if there are any references to pot smoking on it. If the book passes the test, then the author is either aware of its significance, or really just obsessed with pot smoking because it occurs constantly throughout the work, or has really just let something with no real significance happen to occur due to serendipitous printing or extremely precise and drugged out typesetters:

"He'd smoked something that had made him immobile. But not just immobile. Matt was not a user except at parties, where he'd go through the sociable motions, taking a pull on a long-stemmed pipe with a clay bowl that was tamped with a grassy substance. But the thing he'd toked last night was either a rogue strain of hashish or standard stuff laced with some psychotomimetic agent. And he was not just immobilized. And somebody sat in front of him and spoke thickly into his face in a ridiculous movie accent evidently meant to be Prussian." (420-421)

In the case of Underworld, I think it is the third possibility. There is a fair amount of drug use in the book, along with drinking and cigarette smoking, but I don't know how much DeLillo would care about passing the 420 test and exciting the imaginations of academiliterate stoners with too much time on their hands. There is also lots of sex in the book. Probably the most inventive sexual aspect is the scene in the store Condomology, which occurs near the beginning of the novel, and which reminded me of White Noise:

"Behind the products and their uses we glimpsed the industry of vivid description. Dermasilk and astroglide and reservoir-tipped. There were condoms packaged as Roman coins and condoms in matchbook folders. Brian read aloud from the copy on the boxes. We had natural animal membranes and bubblegum scenting. We had condoms that glowed in the dark and foreplay condoms and condoms marked with graffiti that stretched to your erection, a letter becoming a word, a word that expands to a phrase. He did a little Churchill--We shall wear them on the beaches. We had lollipop condoms, we had boxer shorts printed with cartoon characters shaped like condoms standing on end, sort of floaty and nipple-headed, who spoke a language called Spermian." (111)

While there is something entertaining and notable and occasionally profound about every "movement" of the book (6, plus 1 prologue and 1 epilogue), Parts 4 and 5, "Cocksucker Blues" and "Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry (Selected Fragments Public and Private in the 1950s and 1960s)" struck me as the strongest. The former is a loving portrait of New York City in the summer of 1974, the "summer of rooftops" for Klara Sax. Two memorable scenes involve viewing the Zapruder film in a techie's apartment (which reminded me of a scene from the film Slacker), and viewing the banned-lost-rare-uncovered Sergei Eisenstein film Unterwelt which comprises the centerpiece of the novel as a whole.

Many of the chapters follow random narratives for many times smaller supporting characters, but the best of these is the one about the Texas Highway Killer, who calls up a television station and admits he is the real one and answers questions from the anchorwoman Sue Ann. It was too bad there was only one of these chapters:

"They talk about head trauma. They talk about is he adopted or was he abused? The problem is all in the spacing. If you fire out the window on the driver's side, which you have to do if you don't want to shoot across the width of your own car and the space between your car and the other car, you still face the problem of having to fire across the space between cars and the width of the other car because the other driver's side is the far side in relation to your position at the wheel. You are not going to shoot a passenger. If you shoot a passenger, then the driver is liable to take evasive action and note your license number and make of car and color of hair and so on. So you are going to shoot lone drivers and you are going to fire out on the window on your side using the left hand to hold the weapon. But the fact is, as he eventually figured out, that if you shoot with the right hand, the natural hand, your projectile travels the same distance across the same spaces, pretty much, as the self-taught method of the left hand. He figured this out after victim five or six, he forgets which, but decided to stick with the left hand as the shooting hand even though it made more sense to steer with the left hand and shoot with the right. Because the right hand was the born hand." (267-268)

Finally, there are mentions of the World Trade Center for which the cover photograph is not inappropriate:

"The World Trade Center was under construction, already towering, twin-towering, with cranes tilted at the summits and work elevators sliding up the flanks. She saw it almost everywhere she went. She ate a meal and drank a glass of wine and walked to the rail or ledge and there it usually was, bulked up at the funneled end of the island, and a man stood next to her one evening, early, drinks on the roof of a gallery building--about sixty, she thought, portly and jowled but also sleek in a way, assured and contained and hard-polished, a substantial sort, European.
'I think of it as one, not two,' she said, 'Even though there are clearly two towers. It's a single entity, isn't it?'
'Very terrible thing but you have to look at it, I think.'
'Yes, you have to look.'
And they were out of ideas for a while, standing at the ledge and taking in the baleful view together, uncomfortably, she thought, because esthetic judgments feel superficial when you share them with a stranger, and finally she sensed a rustle, a disturbance in his bearing that was meant to mark a change of subject, earnest and determined, and he said to her, still looking towards the towers, he whispered actually, 'I like your work, you know.'
'Yes?'
'Very sympathetic.' (372)

And earlier in the novel, in relation to a New Jersey waste dump, some 15 years later in chronological time, where the cover photograph is most clearly ascribed:

"He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramids at Giza--only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying perfumed water on the approach roads. He found the sight inspiring. All this ingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one. Bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs, graving docks, container ships, all the great works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to this culminating structure. And the thing was organic, ever growing and shifting, its shape computer plotted by the day and hour. In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami." (184)

I don't think you should read Underworld as your introduction to DeLillo--White Noise should be that--but Underworld was named "runner-up" in the New York Times Book Review of the Best Fiction of the last 25 Years list. Beloved was #1. The co-runners up were Updike's 4 Rabbit novels, Roth's American Pastoral (on the short list of future Flying Houses reviews), and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. You will need to take a good month out of your time to make room for this novel, though some people read a lot faster than me. It would be hard to absolutely hate this book--everyone should find something in it that they like--and though it may wear you down, it keeps you reading to the end by virtue of its comparatively short, dovetail-narrative chapters. It may not explain why 9/11 happened, but Underworld is an extraordinarily thorough document of America in the latter half of the 20th century that few others will ever match, or even want to attempt. If there was a list for Best Fiction About the Last 50 Years, Underworld would be #1.

The Visitor - Dir. Thomas McCarthy

The Visitor opened about a year ago, at a time when few "awards-minded" films are released. It was one of the first movies to open in 2008 with an Oscar buzz attached to it, for lead actor Richard Jenkins. Jenkins was nominated, and a few weeks ago he lost out to Sean Penn. I could have tried to rent Milk last night but I was just assuming it would be not be available. I watched The Visitor on Starz On-Demand last night, very tired due to a reckless Friday night which involved 3 hours of sleep, at best, thinking, "Well, I'll probably fall asleep but it's supposed to be good, so I should at least try...."

I'm very glad I decided to do that, and I did not fall asleep. I am writing about it on Flying Houses because this is the kind of movie that gets forgotten about by the public at large and flits around on cable for months or years--perhaps like The Station Agent, McCarthy's only other film which he wrote and directed, which is supposed to be quite good, and which I've never really tried to see. The Visitor is a very good film--the only criticism I can make is that it tends to view the world through rose-colored glasses too much. Not in its conclusion, or portrayal of law enforcement procedure--but in its total disregard to issues of cost of living.

Richard Jenkins plays Walter, an economics professor at Connecticut College, who is summoned to New York to present a paper at NYU which he co-authored, though he really just read it and attached his name to it. The woman more responsible for it is in the throws of late-stage pregnancy, and so he agrees to go to New York, where it is casually revealed that he keeps an apartment--for the last 25 years. I understand that tenured professors make pretty good money, but still, a home in Connecticut, and an apartment in New York that he almost never goes to--that's the first offense. He finds two people living in his apartment, Syrian musician Tarek, and Senegalese jewelry-maker Zainab. At first they flip out because they think it's their place--they've been rented it by a man named Ivan, who is only mentioned by name and never explained, offense #2. Walter feels bad for them after they leave, because they've been polite and understanding, and tells them they can move back in and stay for a few days.

He goes to the conference at NYU, which are certainly some of the best scenes in the film. The Kimmel Student Center is used to excellent effect in the film. He goes to Washington Square Park and starts to listen to the drummers playing the bongo on the bottoms of buckets. He later finds that Tarek plays the bongos, and after being taught a few lessons, realizes that the drums are one of his great undiscovered loves. These are some of the other best scenes--for about twenty minutes--perhaps minutes 20 through 40 of the film--it can seemingly do no wrong. Never mind that Tarek and Zainab are supposedly looking for an apartment--who knows how they'd be able to afford it--but because it doesn't come to fruition it is not enough to call if offense #3. You can't help but be happy for Walter, who is such a cut-and-dry figure at the beginning, and who develops this very real, dare-I-say heartwarming friendship with Tarek and his girlfriend, who is oddly standoffish at points.

The turning point of the film occurs after the drum circle performance at Central Park, another one of the best scenes. In the rush to get through the subway turnstile, Tarek gets his giant drum bag stuck at an interval after it has locked, and he casually steps over it. A note on turnstile hopping: I do not know if I have done it in New York, but I definitely did it in Paris a few times, where it is commonplace enough that I saw a few other people do it, generally at night. I might have done it once in New York, but the manner in which Tarek is stopped is something very real and frightening and you really just want to curse the hell out of the subway police. Definitely one of the most emotional parts of the movie, and Jenkins plays the part of powerless advocate at just the right tone. Later Tarek is brought to a correctional facility in Queens, and then for the final arc of the film, his mother arrives from Michigan because she believes that her presence alone in the city will help get him out.

Another great scene is when Tarek's mother, Mouna, meets Zainab and asks, "Show me what you liked to do in the city with him." And they ride the Staten Island Ferry, because it's a free boat ride, and because you can point out where the WTC used to stand, even if you didn't get to see it in person, and because you go right by the Statue of Liberty, which is certainly a major symbol in the film. Later there seems to be a relationship blossoming between Walter, a widower, and Mouna, a widow, but the film never veers into sacharrine unrealistic notions of romance, and is all the more powerful for it.

While the set-up may be a bit unrealistic for monetary reasons, and while the issue of illegal aliens in the U.S. is given a rather elementary surface examination, The Visitor is still a film that everyone should see. It will make you happy in ways you didn't expect, and it will make you really start to care about the characters, whether you recognize the manipulative quality or not. That extra 20% in income taxes that Tarek and Zainab avoid having to pay is maybe just what they need to make living in NYC work out alright. I think the film could have presented the other side of the issue, at least slightly, just to give a voice to the other side, but it is still an important film politically, because it calls for revision of U.S. immigration policy, which has only become more strict and harsh since 9/11. What happens to Tarek is upsetting, and while he may not technically be allowed to stay in the country, there still should be some way to allow him to become a naturalized citizen before such life-shattering actions are taken. Jenkins voices these emotions in such a way that you don't disagree with him, and while it is up for debate whether he deserved the Oscar, he clearly deserved the nomination. While this is definitely a "message film," it's not a boring or inappropriate one, and the last shot of film is memorably great. It may not seem like the most exciting movie from a synopsis standpoint, but it deserves to be given a chance by everybody.

Trail of the Dead - Jon Evans

As a formatting issue, Flying Houses reviews music with the band name first and the album title after the dash, and books with the title first and the author's name after the dash. This is because it just seems like the journalistic standard. That new Franz Ferdinand album might make for a confusing review or the Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified could be the same.

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (a.k.a. Trail of the Dead) have put out their newest album last week and a review can be found here http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/149323-and-you-will-know-us-by-the-trail-of-dead-the-century-of-self and if I were myself from a couple years ago I would probably be taking the long walk down to Reckless Records to buy it, but I digress. Their secret new album is called "Jon Evans" and is coming out later this year, in a move not unlike Radiohead's "Kid A"/"Amnesiac" release schedule. Naming their album after a person is a curious move, but does not come as a total surprise after one of their earlier songs that staked out their reputation, "Mark David Chapman" was similarly-titled, not to mention "Baudelaire."

But "Jon Evans?" Who is Jon Evans? Well, he is a writer. A real living person. "Dark Places" is his first novel. He has written four more. Here is what a short biography on a book site says about him: Jon Evans is the son of an ex-pat Rhodesian father and Canadian mother and was born and raised in Canada. He has travelled extensively all over the world and works as an IT consultant between trips. He currently lives and works in San Francisco.

The Trail of the Dead have created a concept album based around this man's life. Does it come close to Zen Arcade or Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness or Cursive's Happy Hollow? Sadly, not. However it is a very original idea that should not be discounted. The first track on the album is about a guy named Paul Wood who goes hiking on the Annapurna Circuit in Malaysia. He and his friend from South Africa are hiking around a mountain and they discover a dead body with Swiss Army knives in his eyes. The man's name is Stanley Goebel which immediately makes me think, Nazi.

But Stanley is actually a fellow Canadian of Paul's (whose name is actually Balthazar) and a pretty good guy on all accounts, and Paul continues home to San Francisco in the second "movement" of the album, titled "California." There he works as an IT Consultant, and soon the economy topples and Paul gets laid off. Conrad Keely must be trying to make a statement about the current state of global society. Now all art will be about desperation, poverty, and human resilience. It works in this case, as Paul uses the opportunity of unemployment to solve the mystery of this murder--because here's the kicker--two years earlier, his girlfriend Laura had been murdered--in the same way! With knives in her eyes!

Probably the best song on the album is "Cookie Monsters" which involves Paul's attempt to track down the killer via posts made to a secret online page where the identity of the murderer is revealed. One of the rules of the game he plays is to only log onto the page at public terminals and then to delete all the browsing history before he leaves--but he forgets to delete the cookie history too! Since Paul is an IT Consultant he knows all of these secret tricks to online pseudo-hacking and eventually hatches a plan to lure the murderer back to Africa, where Laura's murder took place, while recruiting several old friends from the overland trucking trip to Africa that the first murder happened during.

Since Keely & Co. have constructed such an elaborate plot for their album, it is very difficult to discern the majority of the action in the story. Only if you read all of the lyrics from beginning to end will the story come through at all, and even then it seems vague. Just hearing Keely try to sing songs about all of this complicated subject-matter makes for an unforgettable listen.

Finally, Paul stages a dramatic conclusion during the song "The Pillar of Hercules" that ends the story on a happy note. Not to be outdone, Trail of the Dead close out the album with the revelation of Jon Evans--the author of the story about their album about Paul Wood--and how he is a successful mass-market paperback writer that won an award for his debut novel and now finds himself blocked, and so is forced to go back into more IT work than writing. For the originality of the material, Trail of the Dead have released their most essential album since Source Tags & Codes, one that will capture the attention of adventure-seekers and serial killer-hunters and superhero-impersonators everywhere. Their conceit is not to be outdone, and the humor they reveal displays a side of the band that will be totally welcome in indie rock circles everywhere--total disregard for audience expectations and totally random musical ideas. It's weird, but it's usually compelling, though not as good as the greatest concept albums of all time, still an album that should rank in the top 20 of 2009. At the very least, it's a gift for Jon Evans, the real writer, who will no doubt be amused that a pretty popular band has decided to write an album about him. They even make another prescient observation--the only band Paul mentions liking is Prodigy, and Prodigy released their first new album in five years (since Evans wrote "Dark Places," actually) the same day as their other recent album, "The Century of Self." You've got to hand it to them--they definitely don't lack any ambition.

Dishwasher - Pete Jordan

A few years ago (in 2006) I hated my job so much that I typed something into Google like, "My job sucks." It brought up a few results, and the one I ended up clicking on was an account of a guy taking a bunch of dishwashing jobs, even though he seemingly hated them. It struck me as hilarious that someone would willingly subject themselves to low wages and back-aching conditions just to enjoy the minimum responsibility possible.

A couple years ago (in 2007), I was at a bookstore in Nantucket where Doctor Faustus caught my eye. I read the first chapter and decided I needed to own it. At the same time, my younger brother had found a book himself--Dishwasher. Remembering the online writings I had found, I put two and two together and decided that it must be the same guy. Apparently he had gotten a book deal. It was published in 2007 after all. I told my brother to get it, and he did. He enjoyed it, and now I had a chance to read it, and I am here to report that it is quite enjoyable, and thought-provoking in ways one might not expect.

If there is any problem with this book, it is that dishwashing really is the primary subject. People might think this makes for a boring book. But it is not--it may not be one of the best books I have read in the last year, but it is certainly way above average. So there is not really any problem with it, but people may initially balk at the idea of reading about dishwashing. It could make for boring subject matter, but Pete Jordan is idiosyncratic and ethical enough to wrap his story in a rather engaging context--that is, his quest to wash dishes in all 50 of the United States. Does he accomplish his mission? Will Sufjan accomplish his?

Having worked in a restaurant (as a waiter, not a "pearl diver," which probably robbed me of a little extra enjoyment out of the book) I can understand that jobs in the food service industry are prime fodder for literature. There is just something about feeding people, and the personalities that get involved in that pursuit, that combines to make for memorable episodes. Pete meets many people along the way as he attempts to fulfill his quest through the years of 1989 - 2001, but most of them are seemingly fans of his zine "Dishwasher," which released 16 issues. To have gained such a popular following with his zine is a huge achievement, but Pete does not consider himself a writer. He considers himself a dishwasher who happens to write.

In an age where all the dream jobs seem to be stacked in competition, and life resorts towards constant disappointment and disillusion, Pete's story is a breath of fresh air. It is easy to get a dishwashing job anywhere--though few of them end up being ideal. In his best gig, he works in an Alaskan fishing town over the summer, works 120 hours a week (padding his hours which doesn't faze his boss), receives health insurance, and makes around $1,000 a week. In the early 90's or whenever this took place, that's not bad at all. Sure it's an insane amount of hours, but his room & board is also covered, and is a 30-second walk to his workplace--the dishpit. He seems to gravitate toward Portland, OR many, many times. He finds many readers of his zine there, and meets his future wife who happens to work at a store where it is sold. He goes to New Orleans and tries to disprove the common perception that only black people are allowed to wash dishes there while white people must be the waiters. He dishes on an oil rig, which is close to breaking his fundamental rule that every dish job must include the ability to leave at a moment's notice. The number of times he gets hired and the number of times he quits is insane. He generally gets every free meal he possibly can out of each of his gigs, and beyond that he keeps a generic macaroni & cheese box cut-out art piece which includes all the different brands that he has tried. He dishes at two different communes in Missouri, also intriguing scenarios. He provides accounts of former dishwashers turned famous personalities--Malcolm X, George Orwell, Jay Leno, Sidney Poitier, Larry Flynt, Richard Gere, Ronald Reagan, Bruce Lee (sic), Little Richard, Alex Chilton, and several others I am forgetting. He is not blind to the objective appeal of the position--he is well-aware as he reveals here:

"I guess he was worried that dishwashing would be considered too low class. After all, in an opinion survey of 1,166 adults who were asked to rate the status of 740 occupations, dishwasher ranked #735. Only envelope stuffer, prostitute, street corner drug dealer, fortune teller and --#740--panhandler rated lower. What appealed to me about the job--that low status--was the very thing that embarrassed my dad." (75)

He also finds out the answer to Charles Bukowski's question, "What woman chooses to live with a dishwasher?" He also makes an appearance on David Letterman--sort of. Overall, this was a breezy book that provided a good share of laughs and always intriguing accounts of real life. I read it in a few days and didn't like putting it down very much. It's also a good example of zine culture, which sadly may die out as things like this very blog tend to overrun that noble and old-fashioned pursuit. Writing a blog post is so much easier than printing out a new zine and shopping it around to independent bookstores and selling it for 50 cents. I suppose it's all a matter of how much stock you put in real printed material.

Well now Dishwasher Pete lives in Amsterdam and is apparently writing a book about bicycling around that crazy city. I'm sure that will be enjoyable as well. As a final word, I can only say that if you hate your job, this is a good book to read--and probably a good book to read on lunch breaks, as I did.

The Annotated Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr.)

To kickstart what deserves to be one of the truly momentous posts on Flying Houses, I submit to you a (n expurgated) journal entry dated March 9, 2002:

"3.9.02 2:10 PM (on a bus)
Iowa is dreary. I am not really in Iowa yet, still in Illinois actually, but this landscape is exactly what Iowa will be like, and it is dreary.
I am on my way to Iowa to visit (...) I think we are still in Illinois. This writing interrupts my reading of Lolita, so it must be worth it. Ideas pondering lately:
-What is fiction or drama? I mean, what is the purpose in it?
(...)
I was expecting a beautiful sunset (Ed. corrected author's error of "sunrise") amongst the barrenness of Iowa and I hope the stars are out tonight.
1. What is fiction? There seems to be no point to fiction. If you ask a person who loves fiction as much as I do, they will say fiction is about the evocation of beauty. What is beauty? Empathy + hope + present-time happiness + an unfading beautiful memory + ephemeral joy + (we are in Princeton, IL now, I saw the sign. I have heard of this place before but I have never seen it until now. That can be construed as a thing of beauty.) inspiration + justice (circled with an arrow pointing to the squared passage 'why everyone loves a happy ending, because we love the character so and we see they deserve the best.') + brilliant observations + respect + fun and happiness w/out the knowledge that it will end!
Thus, beauty is proof of a divine presence, and to see or experience beauty is to see or experience God or whatever construct we have created. Two things:
-I believe in myself (for I see the world through my eyes and I know I am experiencing whatever life I create and so on.)
-I believe in God because everything that is must have been created (Before Big Bang, unmovable mover (Aquinas said that), etc.) Everything else (in the world) can either be:
a) logical and mundane
b) divinely influenced
....
A) There is logic to everything. Logic of human emotions (which seem mysterious and divine) can be unlocked by looking into the chemicals of your body. The mind, I, is really the only mysterious/divine thing about the human being that cannot be unlocked by science or explanation. We have this much to go on for proof of divinity. If part two to "two things" does not suit you, do not believe it. It is obscenely logical almost so much that we might discount it. But perhaps b/c of my Christian upbringing, my view of the depths of the universe, etc. I suppose that even of God's existence I cannot be sure, but if he does exist, there is a more hopeful view of humanity to be had, since the will to create is always a benign one (at least to oneself) and for the best of your creation. People do not have babies to torture them, usually. Authors do not want their books to fail, usually. It is these "usuallies" that reveal why part 1 of "two things," Descartes philosophy, is the most true thing we can hope to learn. Part two is a mystery that we cannot be fully sure of, I suppose. But we are sure of ourselves.
In the search for God, the knowledge that "I exist" will prove to be the most fruitful of any other explanations we can come up with. The only other explanation that I can find for proof of God, is randomness and randomness may be just that, but it could also be proof of a divine presence or predestination or whatever you call it. 8.18.01, which nearly began this once-black book, and now appears near the end, is an example of that randomness. If the encounter had happened on the most remote point on planet Earth, then I would be inclined to say that predestination is true, though unbelievers would still be able to call it chance/randomness. I will talk about the other things at a different time. My hand hurts. I will mention that handwriting yields better writing than typing because I believe there is an automatic filter in your brain that forces you to say exactly what you want to say in the fewest words. It's called laziness."

Why include this bizarre philosophical tangent in a review of Lolita? This was my first time reading the book. I read it a second time at some other undisclosed point (sophomore year in college--a year later?) and now several years later read it a third time, after purchasing this annotated edition from a Barnes & Noble in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. I cannot resist:

"3.11.02 5:00 PM (on express Metra train to Wilmette)
Made it back from Iowa. Read Lolita the entire time! Had = 40 pages left - got through about 20. Was thinking too much. Nabokov = great writer. Everything falls into place perfectly. Commercial work of art! (Note: FSF is not in small bookstores where the likes of Heller and Nabokov are...FSF is less popular, is he not as good?) I read 20 pages of Lolita for about 5 hours. That is 4 pages per hour or 15 minutes per page. The fact that I did not get bored at that rate shows just how good Nabokov is. Mind you I had other distractions. Nonetheless, quite an experience."

Have you read Lolita? Of course you have. If you haven't, go to the library now, or the bookstore now, and borrow or buy a copy. It is a necessary experience. I will address those who are vaguely aware of its existence and yet shun it based upon its subject matter later. Of course, if you don't care about literature then you need not read it, but I don't feel that you would be reading this if you didn't care about literature.

I include these excerpts from my first ever "serious" journal to illuminate the process that a great work of literature can have upon a less articulate mind--total exhilaration. To witness Nabokov at his peak is to feel the desire to achieve one's own peak as well. Before I enter into proper review mode (as much of a joke as that may be from the concept of this blog) I would like to point out the fact that, while reading Pale Fire (almost exactly one year ago from today, on lunch breaks at work at "J & C" in L.A.--also one of the first posts on Flying Houses), my co-workers would ask me, "What are you reading?" And I would explain the book, which has a complicated plot, and then try to interest them slightly by saying, "It's the follow-up to Lolita (which may or may not be accurate)." And they would say, "What's Lolita?" And I would say, "What?!" I went around the office and asked everyone if they had heard of the novel, and to my amazement none of them had. My partner, a Filipino barely a year into the United States, came closest when he said, "Isn't she a porn star?" One of my other co-workers who had majored in English vaguely recalled it, and said she had never read it, saying, "Why would I ever want to read about a pervert anyway?" More on this later. Needless to say, a generous portion of the present-day American populace is probably unaware that the novel even exists, further proof that we are responsible for the current mess we all find ourselves mired within in this dismal post-2000 A.D. world.

In case you are culturally uneducated, Lolita is the story of Humbert Humbert, a man who writes this "confession" or "memoir" from a prison cell as he awaits his trial for the murder of a man that need not be spoiled by reviews. He recounts his early life, his first love, his first marriage, and his subsequent emigration to America in the 1940's, where he had been assigned a teaching position at a certain college named Beardsley, and how he had become a boarder at a home in New England for the summer before he was to begin, and how he had fallen in love at first sight with a "nymphet," the daughter of the woman renting him his room. He recounts how he would try to get closer to the girl, eventually going so far as to marry her mother, and to even consider drowning her in a lake, until Fate takes matters into its own hands and grants him his wish. What follows is a long road trip across the United States with the girl, a temporary stop for employment at Beardsley, another road trip, and finally, loss and disillusion. What follows after that I had even forgotten about this time around--a more appropriately-aged girlfriend, a plan for revenge, and a "moral apotheosis." The story should be well-known but perhaps has faded into a vague cultural myth. Two films have been made from the novel, which may be addressed later, and significant scholarship has followed the novel over the past fifty plus years.

What makes Lolita so great? Well, the story for one, is very delicately and perfectly imagined. The characters are quite unforgettable as well. But ultimately, few will disagree that the primary strength of the text is Nabokov's use of language. There are almost no other novels that can compare with the dazzling display up for interpretation here. He truly "puts on a clinic," to use a rather hackneyed phrase. There are moments of heartrending beauty--lines I cannot forget like the closing lines of the book--"I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." (309) Closing lines that can even put the great last lines of The Magic Mountain to shame. There is also the last meeting with Lolita, one of my personal favorite scenes in the novel--"hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D.--and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else." (277) Words that send shivers down my spine as I read them. "'Lolita, I said, 'this may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is very short. From there to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.'" (278) Words that give a higher-meaning to life. "I covered my face with my hand and broke into the hottest tears I had ever shed. I felt them winding through my fingers and down my chin, and burning me, and my nose got clogged, and I could not stop, and then she touched my wrist. 'I'll die if you touch me,' I said. 'You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this.' 'No, she said, 'No, honey, no' She had never called me honey before." (279) I could go on quoting parts from every single section of the novel, but just recognize, you are unlikely to read a novel as emotionally satisfying, despite its ignominious qualities, as this one.

Which makes Appel's notes somewhat disturbing. What he uncovers is a whole other book's worth of material. Appel was a student of Nabokov's at Cornell in the early 1950's, while he was about to write this great novel, and himself is still a professor (an aging one but as far as I am aware, still active) at Northwestern University--which on a more personal note, really attracted me to their PH.D program in English--only I am not enough scholar for academia, as badly as I would like that opportunity. He wrote the excellent introduction to the text from Wilmette, IL on May 21, 1990, when I was no more than several blocks away, a 7-year-old playing in my parent's front yard. What is disturbing about Appel's notes are not the erudition he displays in unlocking the hundreds, maybe a thousand, allusions to other literary texts, true stories, 1940's and 1950's culture, Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll, Carmen, Robert Browning, Freud, Shakespeare (as we find out, Nabokov is obsessed with him--which is fitting as he is arguably the greatest writer since him), and surprisingly and most interestingly of all, James Joyce and Ulysses. There is a reference to the Ulysses trial on obscenity charges. There are references to stream-of-consciousness literary stylings. Appel supplies tantalizing stories about Nabokov's and Joyce's friendship:

"In a 1966 National Education Television network interview, Nabokov said the 'greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's Transformation, Bely's St. Petersburg; and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time.' 'On fait son grand Joyce after doing one's petit Proust,' reads a parenthetical statement in Ada, added to the manuscript by gently derisive Ada herself. 'In [her] lovely hand (p. 169). When Vera Nabokov saw some of the opened pages of the annotator's copy of Lolita, the typeface barely visible beneath an overlay of comments in several colors of pencil and ink, she turned to her husband and said, 'Darling, it looks like your copy of Ulysses.' Although there are strong artistic affinities between Joyce and Nabokov, he dismissed the possibility of formal 'influence.': 'My first real contact with Ulysses, after a leering glimpse in the early 'twenties, was in the 'thirties at a time when I was definitely formed as a writer and immune to any literary influence. I studied Ulysses seriously only much later, in the 'fifties, when preparing my Cornell courses. That was the best part of the education I received at Cornell' (Wisconsin Studies interview) (407)

From there, Appel tells the story of their abbreviated friendship, and it is hard not to wonder what Joyce would have thought of Lolita, as I think it fairly ranks alongside his masterwork confidently. What is disturbing about Appel's notes are that, Nabokov is such a genius, that he overshadows anything anyone else believes they could ever capably accomplish--and he does so with such gusto, such confidence, such dare-I-say arrogance--that one begins to have a more complete picture of the artist than one would like--and it can be depressing for a reader that has writing dreams of their own to witness someone with such contempt for so many otherwise well-appreciated literary works (I am thinking of a couple flippant comments about Thomas Mann--don't speak badly of my Thomas!). To top it all off, he is a butterfly expert, and Lolita is not about wanting to sleep with underage girls so much as it is about using that subversive context as a kind of challenge to oneself, to write about appalling items so beautifully that it can rank as a cultural landmark. The fact that Nabokov never received the Nobel Prize for Literature (or even the Pulitzer, I believe) goes to show that, once again, people are idiots:

"Such recondite materials reminds one of Lolita's reputation, among non-readers, as a 'pornographic novel,' and also underscores how Nabokov has had the last laugh in more ways than one. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes about the 'delusive opening moves, false scents, [and] specious lines of play' which characterize the chess problem. The subject matter of Lolita is in itself a bravura and 'delusive opening move'--a withdrawn promise of pornography. The first one hundred or so pages of Lolita are often erotic--Lolita on H.H.'s lap, for instance--but starting with the seduction scene, Nabokov withholds explicit sexual descriptions, while H.H., trying to draw the reader into the vortex of the parody, exhorts us to 'Imagine me: I shall not exist if you do not imagine me' (p.129). 'I am not concerned with so-called 'sex' at all,' H.H. says (p.134); Nabokov, on the contrary, is very much concerned with it, but with the reader's expectations rather than H.H.'s machinations.

'Anybody can imagine those elements of animality,' he said, and yet a great many readers wished that he had done it for them--enough to have kept Lolita at the top of the best-seller list for almost a year, although librarians reported that many readers never finished the novel. The critics and remedial readers who complain that the second half of Lolita is less interesting are not aware of the possible significance of their admission." (441)

This finally brings me to my final point concerning "prudish" readers: I think ultimately it is more suspicious to avoid reading it because of its subject matter than it is to praise it to the heavens, as I am doing. Though there may be a few passages (probably about 3) that might be difficult to get through due to disturbing content--there is one indisputable truth about perverse confessions: the reader may be satisfied that the narrator is keeping nothing secret. "Nothing is sacred" goes a cliche, and so none of Humbert's emotions strike one as being false. These kinds of books, as I may have stated before (see Black Postcards review), are ultimately more revealing and "useful" than other more typical romance stories, which always is sure to make a significant contingent of its audience to groan at its maudlin, saccharine, potentially fake, or false overtones. It is rather difficult to be cynical about Lolita.

One final note concerning the annotated edition--if you have never read Lolita before, I would highly recommend reading the text without reading the notes first. The notes are the truly wonderful pleasure of this edition, but if you are obsessed with reading the notes (I am thinking of my experience with Infinite Jest) you run a sharp risk of getting frustrated with moving so slowly through the story. Read it once, note-free, then read it again, note-enhanced. This will always rank in my top 5 favorite books of all time. I hope at this point, after everything has been said, it doesn't reflect poorly on me as a human being. One wonders about the rights we enjoy as Americans if that thought is too deeply fixed in our minds.