Category Archives: Books

Life

December 9, 2006 By in Books, Life, Links

Among the more amusing reviews I’ve read recently is Cristina Nehring on Esther Perel’s new book, Mating in Captivity. The last sentence of this paragraph in particular is a standout:

Even though [Esther Perel] was born in Belgium and schooled in Israel, and speaks eight languages, she is fundamentally, deeply American — indeed, announcing that you speak eight languages is a deeply American thing to do. (As I write, I am living in Crete, where half the people who wash floors in hotels speak eight languages and don’t tell you.) Perel is American in both the best sense and the worst in which Europeans use the term: She is American in her can-do conviction that people will live happily ever after. She is American also in her self-promotion[…] She is American, finally, in her unquestioning assumption that we should work like hell on our sex lives.

Straight Man—and short stories

December 4, 2006 By in Books, Life 1 Comment

For a really funny book, try Straight Man, which, like its literary predecessor Lucky Jim, takes place in academia. Lucky Jim is better than Girl, 20, another Kingsley Amis novel—Lucky Jim has many of its strengths and none of its flaws. Straight Man builds on Lucky Jim and the other campus novels that preceded it; the good news about life, whether academically or elsewhere, is that it provides plenty of absurdity for writers.

Straight Man finds academics fighting for budget and prestige like dogs over a scrap of meat, while the more reasonable narrator stumbles, perhaps intentionally into ludicrous situations—such as threatening while on camera to strangle a goose, which he calls a duck—in part because of his environment. It’s a long book that never its pacing or jokes; I’m thinking about Straight Man in the context of an e-mail I sent about why I prefer novels to short stories. By the time I get into a short story it’s already over, and I’m forced to learn a new set of names and circumstances and assorted other trivia that too often feels too much like trivia. The kinds of longitudinal narrative arcs (and jokes) that make the best novels what they are interest me, and short stories by their nature cannot encompass them. One could certainly argue the opposite, and I’m not about to quibble with taste, but I understand mine well enough to know what I like.

And I like Straight Man because it takes us through Hank Devereaux’s world. That means repeated references to William of Occam’s Razor, the ultimate fate of the duck, and the way his students, peers, and superiors inadvertently conspire against him. Or he conspires against all of them, depending on one’s perspective (“Orshee,” who adds “or she” to any sentence referring to a person of indeterminate gender with a singular male pronoun, would no doubt consider Hank a nemesis). That’s not to say I always demand brontosaurus novels, as I also like some that are closer to nibbles—Tom Perrotta writes short, for instance—as well as really long ones, such as Neal Stephenson’s awesome, 1,000 page opus: Cryptonomicon.

Bear in mind that I like novellas too: Heart of Darkness, if that counts, and Byatt’s Angels & Insects—which, like Possession, takes place in the Victorian era. But both are long enough to engage me and last long enough that I can get my bearings in the story’s world.

Once I’m fully in a novel, I don’t want it to end; my real issue with short stories might be that either a) I don’t have enough time to decide a short story is excellent before it’s over or b) even if I do decide it’s excellent, I know how quickly it will end. Short stories are vehicles for the pure power of language, while most novels have more plot to unfold. As the title of this blog shows, stories—their content—is what I most care about. Obviously form can never be fully separated from content and vice-versa, but if you put them on a continuum, I want more of the story. And that usually means novels.

Straight Man has both, and it is Richard Russo’s best novel, followed just behind by Empire Falls. Short stories, though, don’t, and though I read them when I had to for school, I never really wanted to. So now I read chiefly for pleasure, and few books offer as much as Straight Man.

The Mating Season and Girl, 20

December 3, 2006 By in Books

The Mating Season and Girl, 20 feel more like cultural artifacts from a bygone age; Shakespeare feels more contemporary than The Mating Season. Their humor doesn’t age well and has molded rather than matured and deepened. Reading them feels like watching an old sitcom. The Mating Season is the worse offender: who lets family get in the way of romantic entanglement, anyway? The problems seem quaint, as does their resolution.

Girl, 20 held up better, but I can see why it’s out of print in the U.S. (hence no link. I found a used hardcover first edition with numerous typos). Parts still shine, even if the specter of famous older men behaving badly and dating spectacularly younger women doesn’t seem surprising or even noteworthy anymore, if it ever did in the first place.

Tom Wolfe has similarly randy hunters in A Man in Full and The Bonfire of the Vanities; they’re also funnier books, even if Wolfe lacks the critical reputation Amis has. Their strong time and place means that they too might seem irrelevant, like Girl, 20, in another 20 years, but the older/younger sexual relationships are not central to the plot of either novel. Both also work with the idea that dating or marrying much younger women doesn’t elicit much more than yawns in the larger society these days. The dissipation of the social stigma around the phenomenon is part of what makes Girl, 20 seem like something from deep in history. I wonder if Less Than Zero and Story of my Life will share the same fate.

And yet Girl, 20 is just 35 years old, but that’s apparently long enough for Sylvia—the tart of the title—to lose her charms. The narrator, Yandell, is very much out of touch—a classical music critic in a pop-culture era— which is probably supposed to provide for some dramatic irony, but he is more an annoyance than anything else. There are parts with perfect pitch: “I got to my feet and looked round the room, which was furnished with a hi-fi set-up, a mahogany sideboard that had a marble top visible here and there among bottles, a science-fiction giant lily or two, some bloated china cats, and framed posters of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Mihn, a nude couple making love and other key figures of the time.” The whole doesn’t work despite the evidence of Amis’s technical skill as a writer.

It’s not easy to ascribe a cause to why Girl, 20 doesn’t work. I just don’t care nearly as much about Sir Roy Vandervane as I do about Von Humboldt Fleisher or Moses Herzog. Kingsley Amis is as good a writer as Bellow, but like Bellow he had his weaker books, and Girl, 20 is one of them.

Something on About Last Night inspired me to buy Girl, 20—perhaps this, or the several other references to Girl, 20—but I was disappointed; I’m still hoping The Dud Avocado turns out better, if for no other reason than because of the name.

Cryptonomicon

November 29, 2006 By in Books

Another one from the top five list: Cryptonomicon is a massive, funny read, and even if the end creaks, the ride makes the destination a tertiary concern. The language is there, the story is there, and the characters are there, even if they brush the cartoon line.

The mathematically-inclined Waterhouse clan makes a strong showing, including Lawrence Waterhouse, a World War II-era mathematician with a mind too logical for social graces. His grandson, Randy Waterhouse, using his Lord of the Rings classification system, sees Lawrence as an Elf, while he (Randy) is a Dwarf, and his longtime girlfriend and her nitwit academic friends are squabbling hobbits. A subplot with Randy’s ex-girlfriend takes potshots at academia, a target Neal Stephenson regards with bemused detachment in this Slashdot interview. It’s worth reading the whole interview to see a chaotic (in the sense of Chaos Theory) mind at work.

Lawrence probably has an equally chaotic mind, even if Randy probably most resembles the author. Randy is a contemporary hacker who is bright but not brilliant and knows it, and as such is just trying to make his way in an insane world—populated with some minor characters who keep reappearing like unwanted infections. They can be handled, though, with good friends and steely resolve, even if those good friends sometimes pontificate.

Okay, so they do pontificate a lot, but their conversations are so fascinating that the book’s length seems if anything too short, but too long on a few ideas. At the end there’s a mini-dissertation about the importance of myth, which is fantastic, but a few scenes degenerate into cartoonish and mindless subplots. The latter is embodied by the comments on Qwghlm, a made-up place and language designed to comment on linguistic and cultural quirks that seem more silly than anything else. Still, such very minor flaws are obscured by enormous strengths, as Cryptonomicon is as hilarious as Straight Man and as deep as Proust. One scene takes multiple pages to describe eating Captain Crunch. I’ll never look at breakfast cereal quite the same way.

There are also plenty of bits about the nature of life and reality—properly placed in a story so bound up in abstract math and seeing the patterns in existence where some see none. It’s also meditative at times, such as when Enoch Root, who plays the sagacious guide, says:

Some complain that e-mail is impersonal—that your contact with me, during the e-mail phase of our relationship, was mediated by wires and screens and cables. Some would say that’s not as good as conversing face-to-face. And yet our seeing of things is always mediated by corneas, retinas, optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information from the optic nerve and propagates it into our minds. So, is looking at words on a screen so very much inferior?… Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget about the distortions and imagine you are experiencing them purely and immediately.

So what is real, anyway, Root? Nothing, I suppose, since an inappropriate application of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to consciousness tells us that we can’t step outside the system of consciousness to evaluate that systems. So we’re inside looking out, but we can’t really hold up a mirror to ourselves—which is itself just a metaphor for the abstract concept I’m trying to convey. Or, as Randy’s ex-girlfriend might say, reality is a cultural construction.

Philosophy done right is hard. So is math, full stop, without even saying “done right”. No wonder they both used to be the same thing: natural philosophy, or what we now think of as science. Stephenson’s telling us in Cryptonomicon that there’s no real separation between the two, despite the school system’s artificial segmentation of naturally overlapping disciplines into neat subjects.

Cryptonomicon is more fun than deep, particularly regarding the odd mating habits of nerds, who are the unusual heroes of this book—even more so than a gung-ho World War II-era China Marine, Bobby Shaftoe, the third protagonist. Granted, he’s an unusually perceptive gung-ho China Marina, but he’s still an action hero with more lives than Cat Woman and a knack for being in the right place at the time right historical time. Stephenson likes that sort of thing: The Baroque Trilogy is filled with such handy coincidences, although those three novels aren’t anywhere near the level of Cryptonomicon. Well, at least the first one, Quicksilver, isn’t, since it’s the only one I read, but I assume the others don’t improve.

If the book has a major weakness—I don’t count the end as major—it’s how difficult understanding the storylines can be, but by a quarter way through you start to see how they intertwine, and although the end that brings them together may not pull them as tightly as it could due chiefly to strain of trying to keep three zany plots together, it does work—and the first thing you want to do is go back and read the first half again, so you can perceive all that was previously uncertain and confused. In that way you get two books in one, but it’s more like two times three: Cryptonomicon’s length comes from the three storylines, any one of which would be sufficient to fill a book of normal girth. The same strategy applies to The Baroque Trilogy, but in that case the sausage components burst through the casing.

Cryptonomicon is amazing. It’s the book that’s easy to read and yet offers astonishing intellectual rewards. Any criticism above is minor in comparison with the magnitude of the work. Losing sight of that is easy in the dissection of minor flaws, so I will reiterate the point here.

Mating

November 24, 2006 By in Books

Odd things happen in the wild. Odd things happen in the mating game too, and in the eponymous book, with its title carefully chosen for an association with animal instincts. Norman Rush’s Mating is all about contrasts: our perceived intellectual ability despite being trapped in a big piece of meat, our capacity for delusion and belief in the face of overwhelming and contradictory evidence, and the power of knowledge to enlighten—and to trap.

Mating reminds me of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in that both are about the highest, most abstract levels of love and sex even while basic instincts still control and inform those functions. The overall strategy about love is probably is probably as well understood by your average sixteen-year-old as your average Ph.D., even if the teenager can’t articulate anything with the verbal dexterity and alacrity of Mating’s narrator. They’re both looking at the game theory of love: How do I achieve success if I’m dependent on the posturing of others? What is success in a field as elusive and uncertain as relations among people? Perhaps most importantly: how will others perceive me, how will they perceive me perceiving them, and so on in an infinitely recursive loop?

Someone schooled in the sophistication of societal relationships takes those questions to a deep place, watching the interplay between self and other. The narrator of Mating is, in the fashion of intellectuals, very aware of her own awareness, and the awareness of others. She doesn’t get lost in watching, however, because she’s too busy acting; no longer an anthropology student, the narrator doesn’t need to worry about the observer’s paradox.

What happens when utopian-inclined but jaded brains mate in the wild? Hilarity, among other things, a comic journey into the heart of darkness and heart of lightness, corresponding to the heaviness and lightness in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Whether life is lightness or darkness depends on how you perceive and accept it, but for the narrator, it’s lightness even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

And it’s a fun journey, to a land in Africa where a man wants to set up women as the socially powerful, as a test of human relationships from the individual to the national to the societal level. Regular readers of novels or nonfiction about utopian movements can probably guess what might happen, but Mating is not a conventional story, and both the narrator and her guru/lover, Nelson Denoon, are regular readers and constant consumers and processors of information. They know about love as well as societies—but what about each other and their own society? That’s harder to see for reader and actor, and even until the last three sentences you don’t know what’s going to happen.

But it is unusual, just like the journey. So try the journey—Mating slipped under my radar for far too long a time, until I saw it in the NYTimes’ effort to identify the best work of American fiction in the last 25 years. Mating didn’t win, but it is in good company, and worthy of the accolades it received.

Elmore Leonard

November 23, 2006 By in Books, Life

Why is Elmore Leonard so damn good when he’s at his best? His best excuses his worst in the same way hitting a three at the buzzer in game seven excuses a season of bad rebounding and missed lay-ups. His middling caper novels are better than the best of most writers; the best Leonard is seeing the master work because you don’t see him work unless you’re paying attention to all those deft cuts and all that masterful dialog. You have to slow down if you’re going to consciously notice how good he is, because you’re reading so fast that you’re not even reading—you’re living, and when you look up and see it’s two hours later and you still have to get up for work in the morning, you’re let down because work isn’t going to be nearly as good as what you’ve just been reading.

He’s so good that reading generalized criticism raises my hackles. One disappointing part of Reading Like a Writer came with the put-down that Leonard, though highly skilled as a writer, is basically formulaic. He’s not, and the rest of Reading Like a Writer lets me chalk up the disagreement to differing taste, but accepting Prose’s judgment on other books doesn’t come as swiftly after she hits Leonard.

Still, even I have a hierarchy within the Leonard canon. I didn’t love The Hot Kid: Leonard’s milieu is in the contemporary caper world; his early westerns don’t hold up well. Some reviewers, including the one of the NYTBR, called The Hot Kid his best, but I disagree. He’s said that it takes about a million published words, and if his westerns trained him for his later work, I’m glad they were published.

It’s tough to get a feel for Leonard without reading an entire book. He doesn’t deliver big ideas into poetic aphorisms. His genius is between and among the lines, and it’s often not until I’m done with a book that I realize how good it is—not just in terms of the “plot,” which is the only way people can defend garbage like The Da Vinci Code, but in terms of the writing and especially the dialog. This comes from Out of Sight, although stripped of the preceding pages it doesn’t come as such a surprise:

He said, “It doesn’t have to, it’s something that happens. It’s like seeing a person you never saw before—you could be passing on the street—and you look at each other . . .”
Karen was nodding. “You make eye contact without meaning to.”
“And for a few moments,” Foley said, “there’s a kind of recognition. You look at each other and you know something.”
“That no one else knows,” Karen said. “You see it in their eyes.”
“And the next moment the person’s gone,” Foley said, “and it’s too late to do anything about it, but you remember it because it was right there and you let it go, and you think, What if I had stopped and said something. It might only happen a few times in your life.”

Yeah, we know what you mean. The exchange is so good because of how implausible it is, and yet its perfection in the story’s context. They’re telling us what Charles Foster Kane did fifty years ago—he once saw a girl in a white dress on a passing ferry, and yet still often thinks of her, even after acquiring all the wealth and power the world had to offer. Leonard’s characters don’t have anything but their experience and wits, but they feel the same feelings, the same longings, that don’t know the boundaries of class or time.

In the story you get the impression that Foley and Karen Sisco are overcoming themselves to have that exchange, each tentatively probing to see if the other is going to shut down, and in a flawed book it would’ve been forced. But the passage fits so naturally, and it’s so understated, that you’re already jumping ahead to what happens next. But Leonard doesn’t overplay his hand—he seldom does—and the description doesn’t fail. Problem is that it might be too late for Foley, this thing that happens only a few times in his life, but you’re not quite sure: with Leonard it could go either way.

One unusual note about Out of Sight: it’s almost as good a movie as a book, and experiencing both back to back is worthwhile.

The best of Leonard’s best is Get Shorty, and if you haven’t read it already, get it. The only danger in starting with it is the possibility of disappointment when you read the rest, but it’s worth the risk.

He is, after all, both popular in the sense of making the bestseller lists, and respected by reviewers and critics. It’s a rare feat these days, with the stereotypical effete, elite fiction dominating among the literati while garbage thrillers occupy the New York Times bestseller lists, to have both—and be worthy of them.

Nonfiction roundup

November 20, 2006 By in Books

I finished The Story of English and The Book of Lost Books, neither of which merit a recommendation. The first was a quick read more anecdotal than comprehensive, and its status as a companion to a PBS show is apparent through the book’s episodic nature, which has the some of television’s defects.

As a description of the English language’s development the book does well enough, but it leaves unanswered the better question of why English developed as it did. The fundamental story of English is inexplicable: we can see, sort of, how it happened in retrospect, but English’s modern domination of the linguistic world wasn’t even apparent until the fall of the Soviet Union. Which language will dominate the future is equally uncertain. English, Chinese, and Spanish seem the most probable candidates, in that order, with Arabic running a distant fourth. The only lesson one can draw from the past is apparently that the future is inscrutable, but The Story of English doesn’t even fully establish the links between past and present that could’ve elevated it beyond a collection of miscellaneous facts.

The Story of English was most interesting on the level of meta-commentary: the book reinforced the domination of English merely by being written in that language, just as this post reinforces the power of language it’s written in. It makes you think about the power of your actions in day-to-day life, and what practices or ideas you’re tacitly endorsing through individual choice. It’s too bad that such insights were bound in an unappealing package.

The Book of Lost Books should have been left as cocktail trivia and academic banter. The hard core bibliophile might like it, much as the basketball fanatic might know the names of the men on every NBA roster for 1974, but I didn’t care for its ceaseless speculations about what might have been, anymore than I want to hear myself recalling the lovers who slipped away. The world might be a better place if The Book of Lost Books were a lost book.

His Dark Materials

November 19, 2006 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments

Like so much fantasy, His Dark Materials has more commentary on our world than about its own, just as Paradise Lost is more interested in the world of men than that of God. The fingerprints of Paradise Lost are all over His Dark Materials, and intentionally so, even if one of Pullman’s purposes is the diametric opposite of Milton’s. Pullman has discussed the connections to Paradise Lost in interviews, and a quote from it starts The Subtle Knife.

If Paradise Lost justified the ways of God to Man, then His Dark Materials justifies the ways of Man to Man—or, rather, the fiery spirit and independence of the individual against the poisonous power of authority. It’s more about the relationships of men among each other.

His Dark Materials points toward self-reliance, and the American myth of it informs the books’ championing of the individual against the faceless bureaucracies. The fear of Big Brother is there, although Big Brother is the Church rather than government. It’s anachronistic to cast the Church as a villain—that would’ve been more appropriate five hundred years ago, or at least during the Victorian age, because the major potential oppressors of today are governments, not religions. Still, if Pullman is concerned chiefly with the oppression of a particular individual, his villains work, and when either institution concerns itself with reducing individual liberty, it is as terrible as the other.

Missing all that among the ceaselessly moving plot should be forgiven: The Golden Compass starts fast and never lets up. Not until the middle of The Subtle Knife does the pacing even catch a breath. Lyra, who seems built around the adjective “spunky,” has no one but herself, and like so many Romantic protagonists, begins the story as an orphan. But her parents turn out to be more in the model of the power-crazed and narcissistic ones in Story of My Life or Less Than Zero than the classical model of caring guardians who were forced to abandon her, leading to a joyous reunion. Lyra has to find companions and helpers where she can, and the motley ensemble must take on the mighty, glittering edifice of the dominant social and political structures.Over the course of the flight and then fight Lyra matures. The external plot charts the internal process of growing up: taking on responsibility, dealing with adversity, and a host of other things that, so baldly stated, sound terribly boring. Much better to represent them through a fantastic world filled by marvels and not bound by science as we know it. The external actions are a manifestation of the internal development. In many ways, it parallels the growth of adolescence into adulthood, which is even more explicit in His Dark Materials than most fantastic literature because of Lyra’s age. If the external/internal growth process sounds familiar to regular readers, that’s because it is.

Although featuring children and obviously targeted in part at them, His Dark Materials is a hybrid in the sense that adults can read and enjoy it as well as children, much like The Chronicles of Narnia. The same is true of Harry Potter, although to a lesser extent: His Dark Materials reflects a strong classical education, which allows it to function at deeper levels and with a greater awareness of what has come before. His Dark Materials is stronger than either of those series, both in terms of the writing itself as well as the content; its tone remains strong and serious, even when it is funny, whereas The Chronicles of Narnia at times descends to the level of conventional children’s stories, and Harry Potter never fully leaves that realm.

The ending, like that of Lord of the Rings, is bittersweet: the gains outweigh the losses, but those losses can never be assuaged or made whole; they merely become a burden that can be transmuted to wisdom, but the some aspects of the loss endures despite all efforts to mend them. So it is with the transience of life, and like all the best works of art, His Dark Materials has a lot to say about life—if we are perceptive enough to listen.

The Deptford Trilogy

November 17, 2006 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I mentioned The Deptford Trilogy in relation to Brian Evanson, but the novels are worth an independent post. I have a bit of trouble with whether I should write “a novel” or just “novels,” because although they were published separately, their thematic and structural links means that severing one from the whole—though any one could stand alone—would lessen their combined power, which is greater than the sum of their parts.

Those parts are fabulous: finishing the trilogy leaves one with a sense of completeness, like finishing an excellent meal but not gorging. The books are realistic and yet steeped in the mythological. If this sounds like a difficult to feat, that’s because it is. And yet the blending of myth and commentary on myth into life is so smooth that the mythic overlay is never ostentatious. It is made explicit at times, but not in a way that seems like a lecture or, worse yet, a dissertation.

The books—though I do think of them as a single book than as parts—explain thought without being didactic, and their powerful story—they do tell a single story—allows the many quotable sections to flow without damming the work.

The skeptical but not cynical Dunstan Ramsay narrates and is the subject of, Fifth Business, but only narrates the third, World of Wonders. He is, among many other things, a teacher of the sort it would have been marvelous to have; Ramsay is never fanatical about anything but inquisitiveness, is serious and yet self-effacing, and possesses the quiet and stern humor mastered by the British, but perhaps also understood by their Canadian cousins. He felt a little like a provincial Gandalf stripped of overt manifestations of power but still possessing his wisdom—only Ramsay’s is infused with irony.

Ramsay takes himself seriously enough not to be a fool but laughs at himself enough to know his own limitations. That’s probably the sanest way to go through life without being as utterly ridiculous as so many of us are.

The irony keeps him from being a joiner or true believer. It is impossible to assign Ramsay a conventional political point of view, for what he knows best is human nature, and political views are most often adapted to whatever is most convenient for their holders. The holders, meanwhile, are often unable to perceive themselves, and instead leave to the marginal characters of a society to speak, if not the truth, something close to it:

… like so many idealists, [radical party members] did not understand money, and after a meeting where they had lambasted Boy and others like him and threatened to confiscate their wealth at the first opportunity, they would adjourn to cheap restaurants, where they drank his sugar, and ate his sugar, and smoked cigarettes which, had they known it, benefited some other monster they sought to destroy.

This reminds me of someone I knew who would type his anti-corporate screeds on a Dell computer and defend his choice of a Volvo station wagon as being “less commercial.” He did not perceive the webs that made him, like all of us, complicit in the schemes we disagree with. I do not approve of China’s record on human rights, yet I write this on a computer manufactured there, and I no doubt own clothes made there. China has benefited me—but I do understand the webs that the radical party members do not, and Ramsay, though he doesn’t say as much, probably does.

As such, Ramsay is not easy to co-opt. Ursula K. Le Guin, in receiving a recent Washington State Book Award , said: “most governments dislike [literature], justly suspecting that all their power and glory will soon be forgotten unless some wretched, powerless liberal in the basement is writing it down.” Governments dislike literature and idealists dislike money: Ramsay could believe both things and avoid being a fool by being observant.

That is his chief value as a speaker: the power of observation combined with self-reflection. David Staunton, fierce lawyer and uncertain man, narrates The Manticore, is also observant, but lacks Ramsay’s inner ballast. Still, his therapy sessions illuminate much beyond his inner self, or even the lives of the principal characters from Deptford. As Dr. von Haller says: “The patterns of human feeling do not change as much as many people suppose.”

So they don’t: we read The Odyssey and see the pattern it set—or noticed—in many lives, whether our own odyssey is conquering nanotech or just getting to work in the morning. We see it today as we did then, just as our own history is seldom so exceptional as we might wish it. Much of Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, which synthesizes his lifetime of studying Western culture, focuses on history’s repetition (or rhyming). The similarity of so much of human existence is more astonishing than the differences.

For one thing, the capacity for self-deception seems eternal. As David’s therapist observes in The Manticore:

DR. VON HALLER: Yes, I think that would be best. You have got into your swing, and done all the proper lawyer-like things. So now let us get on.”

MYSELF: What do you mean, exactly, by “the proper lawyer-like things”?

DR. VON HALLER: Expressed the highest regard for the person you are going to destroy. Declaring that you have no real feeling in the matter and are quite objective. Suggesting that something is cool and dry which by its nature is hot and steamy. Very good. Continue, please.

In other words, the way one wants to appear and present oneself is perpendicular to the way one is, and we accept the deception as a way of continuing to function despite contradiction. It’s much like accepting mythic narrative: the specifics of any life or story will not completely conform to the arc, but the arc remains nonetheless. Dr. von Haller specifically talks about lawyers, but she could just as easily discuss a myriad of professions, occupations, or people.

The best part of the book is the language itself, which is so rich that I could post a quote of the highest quality for a month and still have more. I find it odd that I’ve never heard about Robertson Davies in newspapers, blogs or school. For all I know Davies is relatively famous, although this seems unlikely because I’ve seldom seen any reference. I wonder if literary politics explain why I hadn’t heard of Davies before pulling Deptford off the shelf of a bookstore. The school issue is understandable—Canadians are a tough lot for American schools: the “big” authors like Shakespeare and Joyce have to be covered, as do big American authors like Hawthorn, Emerson, and the like. Curriculums need some minority voices as well, which usually get covered by Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, and whoever wrote Bless Me, Ultima. Then, if there’s room, they want a few European writers not from Britain and maybe even an author or two from the third world. The Canadians, meanwhile, are close enough to not to count as foreign or exotic but not actually part of the U.S., so their important authors don’t get stuck in the American lit sections. Therefore, they don’t get read, although if I recall correctly Margaret Atwood is Canadian, which would make her an exception. Australians are in a similar boat: they’re of British descent and mostly white, which means they don’t get minority points, and they’re not sufficiently foreign to make it in under the third world rubric.I’d like to think that’s a view Ramsay could hold about his author’s own relative lack of fame.

Story of My Life

November 13, 2006 By in Books

The biggest problem with a book like Story of My Life is extrinsic and not the fault of the author: the sort of people most likely to benefit from it are probably the ones least likely to read it. Although set in “nineteen eighty-whatever,” to use Alison’s parlance, Story of My Life could just as easily take place today—or in the 1920s. The diction would be marginally different, as would the slang, but the tone and overall thrust would remain the same.

Oh, and the drugs might not be as good in the 1920s, which would be a problem for Alison, since drugs and men are the primary things she does: imagine Alice in Wonderland grown up and wielding unlimited credit cards and speaking in a jaded, valley-girl voice. If not for the requirements of food, sleep and air, “primary” could probably be replaced with “only.” The narrator isn’t as shocking as Bright Lights, Big City, which has become the canonical example of the second-person voice in addition to being a fabulous story about narcissistic hedonists in New York. The second-person perspective quickly becomes natural in Bright Lights, Big City, just as Alison’s rich-girl patois quickly becomes, if not invisible, at least accepted.

At times Alison veers too far into obvious and breaks the limited spell she puts us under: “[Whitney] goes on and on and I’m thinking she sounds like an idiot. Yada yada yada. God, she sounds just like me. A few weeks ago this story would’ve had me rolling on the floor and slapping my ribs but now I’m hardly listening.” This observation comes late in the story, so close to the end that we want to go on, even though that end is foreseeable. But it’s still jarring, if for the content more than the form.

So if you, Alison, are an idiot, why have we listened to you for nearly 200 pages? Maybe the joke’s on us—maybe the joke is always on the reader, who must willingly ignore the knowledge that they read about imaginary events—or maybe we’re learning that Alison is learning something aside from how to score (apparently it isn’t difficult if you’re rich and pretty). Whatever we might be learning, it probably isn’t big, and whatever Alison is learning probably won’t take.

It’s tempting to just slather Alison with the word “vapid,” but she isn’t entirely so—if there weren’t something to be gleaned from what appears at first glance to be inanity, Story of My Life wouldn’t work. The same is true if it only held prurient interest, although that is certainly there too: Alison’s catalog of her sex life would probably captivate thirteen-year-old boys if not for the harder stuff so readily accessible online. It’s a fun and fast book, much like its narrator is a fun and fast girl. Story of My Life does offer a certain amount of voyeurism and vicarious living.

The novel does work, and not just as a way for over-educated readers to condescend to someone whose life appears so shallow that it would be difficult to write more than a People Magazine article about it. It’s a criticism of the culture more than an endorsement, but it’s also an explanation—a cheaper version of Martin Amis’ Money, which is the BMW of books about wealthy, decadent assholes.

Story of My Life fascinates much more than it repels, and it lingers in my mind far longer than it probably should, which is an informal test for separating the verbal candy from the substantive. I like the McInerney for its unusual voices, even if I’m not sure it’s going to hold up well over time. Books like Story of My Life and Bright Lights, Big City are more than just narrative novelty, and they are more than just fun, and thus worth reading even if the joke is on us.