Category Archives: Culture

To the Lighthouse

June 16, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Are people afraid of Virginia Woolf, per the Edward Albee play, because she’s got the reputation of being a big tough writer, or because she’s genuinely hard to read and understand? As a a relative latecomer to her, the issue was at the forefront of my mind as I read To the Lighthouse, as was how glad I am to have come to her now as opposed to earlier, when I don’t think I would’ve been prepared. Now, I see To the Lighthouse as it was intended: as a vast artistic statement with much history behind it, which makes it a writer’s novel, or an intense reader’s; it reconciles so many opposites, being both fluid and structured, artificial and real, and yet at the cost, I suspect, of being easily understood through one’s first reading. To the Lighthouse demands such familiarity with what conventional narration is that to comprehend it with any fullness requires wide and deep reading as initiation. In Reflections on the Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco describes how he came to structure The Name of the Rose:

After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill (41).

Such a process isn’t built into To the Lighthouse, and without preparation, I suspect reading it would be like trying to understand trigonometry without knowing algebra. That might be an unfair comparison, especially given the hackles I’m sure it raises in the math phobic, but I make it for good reason: Woolf is built on understanding why and how she uses her great strength and technique: free indirect speech or limited omniscient narration, depending on the term you prefer, which allow her to peer into all her characters’ minds, allowing each to perceive the other’s limitations, weaknesses, foibles, and problems. Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Those who wonder: Am I smart enough? Do I not get it? Am I like one of the characters, each of whom is shown with flaws more glaring than those of most hardboiled detective fiction?

The way we learn of those flaws also startles because of the novel’s shifting temporality: long paragraphs of thought explaining an interaction interrupt speech, so that the first statement and response to it are alienated. In later writers, like Raymond Carver, the speech and situation are simply assumed to be alienated from one another, the domestic situation strained or unspoken, and no longer interruptions necessary. But in Woolf, we have an explanation—but only from a character’s point of view. Here is one such passage, quoted at length because shortening it would defeat its purpose:

‘You won’t finish that stocking to-night,’ he said, pointing to her stocking. That was what she wanted – the asperity in his voice reproving her. If he says it’s wrong to be pessimistic probably it is wrong, she thought; the marriage will turn out all right.
‘No,’ she said, flattening the stocking out upon her knee. ‘I shan’t finish it.’
And what then? For she felt that he was still looking at her, but that his look had changed. He wanted something – wanted the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could not do. He found talking so much easier than she did. He could always say things – she never could. So naturally it was always he that said the things, and then for some reason he would mind this suddenly, and would reproach her. A heartless woman he called her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so – it was not so. It was only that she could never say what she felt. Was there no crumb on his coat? […]
[This continues for much longer, until, finally—]
‘Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tonight.’ She had not said it, but he knew it. And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again.

Triumphed? In what context? I hear Kurtz saying, “The Horror! The Horror!” and wonder, like an uncontacted tribe before a helicopter. The “triumph” comes at the end of To the Lighthouse’s first section, and it is as enigmatic as what proceed it. Notice that “he wanted something,” but it’s not clear that the thing he wanted or that she found so difficult is the love mentioned in the next part of the sentence. “Something” hangs ambiguously, like a writer trying to give the reader what the reader longs for but never knew they longed for.

Instead we long for something that we give imperfect names: depth of characterization, fastness of plot, reality, “entertainment,” symbolism, aesthetic experiences, or the other facets of a gem we call literature, or experience, or many other names. In Woolf, the mystery of that search comes from the deep internal lives of the characters and that contrast with their external lives—inside, they register knowledge, social orders, hierarchies, shifts, and even epiphanies, but all this happens beneath the veneer of social propriety and limited, clipped speech like “Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tonight,” ending an internal, gushing well of feeling that finds so little expression in speech. If someone like Robert Penn Warren strives to balance speech and internal monologue, making them reflect one another, abd Elmore Leonard pushes to strive almost entirely for description through speech, then Woolf, in contrast, pushes the seesaw almost solely on the side of the internal—which she can only accomplish through deft, extraordinary use of free indirect speech—otherwise we would have the hammering of a single and limited consciousness, which would deafen us with the repetition of its primary and perceptions, making us try to see through it rather than allowing the narrator to work. But the shifts aren’t easily perceived, making them different from novels where the narrators are clearly delineated, like Eliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity.

These traits make Woolf an acquired taste but one essential for writers to sample, and it’s also one usually acquired after tiring of novels driven solely by plot and novels without the depth of characterization Woolf has. Maybe Faulkner is the same way: I’ve never enjoyed reading his novels even as I recognize their importance. Yet I think I see a dividing line with Woolf and Proust—another modernist favorite more cited than read—on one side and Faulkner and Joyce on the other, with moving toward the former rather than the latter. This post in part articulates why, but there’s much more I can’t yet articulate. All four writers offer mystery above all, and not one that can be explained by finding out whodunit; therefore, I’m left describing without adequately explaining.

What would Woolf make of starting this problem? I’m not sure, as I complete this slippery review that too often uses the word “I,” establishing myself as a single perspective against the many “I’s” in To the Lighthouse. Still, Woolf influences how I now write posts: acknowledging myself, my biases, and the problems with my own reading, as well as what others would say to critics over-fond of “I”: narcissistic, obsessed with their own response, and the like. To them I have no perfect answer, though Virginia Woolf seems a good one.

Mid-June links: The Library of America and the book as an object

June 12, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

* John Lanchester writes that he finds it hard to read those gorgeous Library of American volumes.

No such compulsion here! While I understand his feeling, I highlight when the need arises:

That’s one way of ensuring that the books exist to be read, not fetishized. Lanchester says, “A paperback is a paperback; the collected writings of a writer, any writer, have the air of belonging to Culture in the abstract. That’s off-putting.” I agree: responding to the author in the book itself is one way of ameliorating that problem.

Sometimes I write a fair amount, as in Lolita:

Screw resale value. Then again, Amazon knocks about a third off the price, and the Library of America had a fire sale (haha) of Frost, perhaps explaining part of my cavalier attitude.

EDIT 6/18/08: Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books explains more about books as monuments than I do here.

* Kingsley Amis’ fairly extensive writing about alcohol has now been published in a single volume called Everyday Drinking, as the New York Times reports.

“Serving good drinks,” he wrote, “like producing anything worth while, from a poem to a motor-car, is troublesome and expensive.”

And, as with good food or good writing, good drinks are best prepared for those who will appreciate them.

Although I’m tempted to buy Everyday Drinking, I’m afraid I’ve already laden myself with enough contrarian books, ranging from The Joy of Drinking to The Book of Vice. In addition, despite my apparent dedication to such topics, I feel that drinking is better experienced in person than through the medium of literature, even if reflection deepens the experience once sufficient experience has been had.

Transpose those thoughts to other endeavors at your own peril.

* Nigel Beale writes about “How to re-establish evaluative criticism as central to the academic study of literature.” Since I’m about to start graduate school in English, it’s a topic near to my mind. What he doesn’t mention, however, is that evaluative criticism does exist to a greater extent than he gives it credit for, and it even has its own place in English departments—just under the heading “creative writing,” and “MFA,” rather than in the usual classes.

* Nigel Beale part deux—he says a good book needs:

1) to find and revel in funny, beautiful, thought-provoking phrases, 2) dwell on profound paragraphs that contain useful truths about life and human nature, 3) lose myself in the lives of exceptional characters.

They correspond roughly to professionalism and aesthetic delight, searching for meaning in life, and pleasure at being able to occupy someone else’s mind. Defining what those mean will quickly bloat any discussion of them to the size that Beale is trying to avoid with brevity.

* Jason Fisher on Rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. It’s on my to be read list, along with 100 other books.

* Since science fiction has been in the air, Marc Andreessen’s top books of the 00s (“oughts?”) can land here.

* Read this concerning genre and that great bender Michael Chabon.

* Lester Hunt speculates on the decline of the Western:

[…] a major source of the charm of westerns is that they are set in a situation in which the presence of the state is minimal or non-existent. In the wild West, you often have to enforce your own rights. If you wait for civil society to do it, you’ll be dead. In a word, westerns are about anarchy. They are fiction’s only constitutionally anarchist genre. As such, they represent a wild sort of freedom. Maybe, like the romance of property, that’s not such a popular idea any more, either.

Notice that one of the most popular genres nowadays is the police procedural, in which the protagonist is a government employee. Yecch! Is there any way you could get further away from the ethos of the western? (Try to imagine Ethan Edwards even saying the word, “procedural.”)

This might explain why I don’t much care for police procedurals. Still, I’d note that many of them portray the police as corrupt and incompetent, while the heroes often act outside the traditional police structure.

* By way of Anecdotal Evidence, William Maxwell on reading and aging.

* That the TSA is denying the ability to fly to people without papers is infuriating. Have they not read the innumerable books about dystopias (1984, Brave New World, We…) and history/society (Foucault) on the subject of state surveillance? Evidently not. Slashdot commenters are unusually articulate about the issue. See my thoughts on its relation to reading here.

Reading: Wheaties, marijuana, or boring? You decide.

June 11, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Eventually one must tire of reading the debates about reading and prefer to just read, or, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t, watch T.V., or whatever—though if you don’t like reading, I’m rather puzzled that you’re at this site. Regardless, you should read this long, worthwhile, and non-polemical look at the decline of reading from Heather Harris (hat tip Books, Inq.):

One of the great pastimes of the literati, aside from complaining about the Bush administration and attending live tapings of A Prairie Home Companion, is collective hand-wringing about the sad fact that Americans no longer read. Apparently, most of us would sooner watch Rock of Love–Bret and Ambre are so not going to make it–than pick up a novel. Enter Mikita Brottman: Maryland Institute College of Art professor, Oxford scholar, author, and patron saint of the tome-averse masses in her new book The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. Brottman is the latest in a long line of philosophers and writers to question reading’s value, and in this day of reading campaigns and self-important book clubs, the question of whether reading per se is a virtuous activity is timely.

I’ve been collecting examples of quotes and articles concerning the decline of reading, as the debate about whether reading is good or bad for you seems to have been rolling around since the origins of the English novel. Other required reading on reading is Steven Johnson’s Dawn of the Digital Natives, whose perspective is closer to Brottman’s than the unnamed literati of the article.

I fall into more of the rah-rah reading crowd, both for personal and societal reasons. The argument about writing and reading changing our culture resonates with me, as even people who never read have been affected by the innumerable writers and reformers of various kinds whose work extends perpetually backwards in time. In addition, as Foucault argues, power and knowledge are inherently bound, and the most efficient way to transmit knowledge seems to be reading.

Why have we dismantled most forms of racial discrimination or many of the barriers to women in the workforce or other kinds of discrimination based on things other than ability? Why do we let atheists maintain their beliefs openly? It’s largely because some people were willing to challenge the larger culture, chiefly through writing, and enough people were interested in reading to have absorbed those principles or ideas, which now come at us through a thousand outlets. I just read in Alain Badiou’s ‘Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Wo Es War): “When Nietzsche proposes to ‘break the history of the world in two’ by exploding Christian nihilism and generalizing the great Dionysian ‘yes’ to Life […]” I thought, really? Although I don’t necessarily buy the “exploding Christian nihilism” bit (what nihilism?), count me as a late convert to the Dionysian principle. Without books, it’s doubtful that I would’ve made it there, and it’s in part my own trajectory that leads me to believe, perhaps irrationally, in the transformative value of thinking about the world through reading.

To delve into personal territory, books helped me leave the social carapace that hardened when I was 10 or 11, not create it, as Brottman says happened to her. Books were a recovery from an unhappy move and from video games and helped me articulate more of a worldview and change my behavior, and while I don’t think of books as therapy, they do have some therapeutic aspects to them. To bring the level of seriousness back to an appropriate level, consider what Richard Feynman said in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: “And Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was Von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!”

Without reading, I might lack this powerful sense of social irresponsibility and instead just have accepted accepted received wisdom instead of revising received wisdom. Let this be a lesson, by the way, to the natterers, including myself, on getting young people to read—instead of pushing reading ceaselessly like whole wheat bread, maybe it’s time to forbid it, and stock copies of Henry Miller and Bret Easton Ellis in the liquor store, thereby necessitating that teenagers get their older siblings or boyfriends or whatever to buy it for them. They might pass copies of Lost Girls around like furtive bongs at parties. I call this the “gateway drug” approach to reading, as opposed to the “whole wheat” approach.

Still, on a marginally more serious note, if no one reads, then who will write the challenges to cultural, legal, social, and technical problems? And who will read them? That, implicitly, is what many of hand-wringers worry about. Steven Johnson might argue, perhaps correctly, that those challenges will come from visual media, and that’s possible—but I doubt most visual media can match the depth of depth of text. I’m convinced that reading causes you to think—as Caleb Crain’s Twilight of the Books argues—differently and gives you the tools to argue against bad public policy, bureaucracies, and the like. To me, reading is linked to freedom itself, and I don’t think it’s mere correlation that the initial moves toward democracy coincided with the rise of what evidence we have for written languages, or that repressive governments fear and try to control books and knowledge. Thus, I see reading as important in the personal sphere for individual growth and in the societal sphere for correcting the excesses of organizations with power. And they’re fun—Feynman often criticized such organizations through his social irresponsibility, and has helped transmit that sense to others. Reading doesn’t have to be antisocial, and I usually find being social around people who read is more fun than being around people who don’t, simply because the readers get more and get it faster. Once again, the correlation/causation issue arises, but from my perspective, it doesn’t matter—I’ll take the reader over the non-reader, and many people not in positions of, say, government authority would probably do the same. Without falling prey to Godwin’s Law, I’ll note that many authoritarian regimes try to control knowledge and specific manifestations of knowledge, like books and professors. As a result, I see reading as both a public and private good, although one that, paradoxically, might be best inculcated in young people by trying to show it as dangerous, rather than good for you like Wheaties.

This argument might not matter, since surveys keep appearing that claim people read less and less, but like any believer, I’m still convinced of the faith’s importance. I’m not as much a proselytizer as someone who thinks others should come to it on their volition—I’m less of a Christian missionary and more of a Buddhist monk. Or maybe I’ve just got an economic interest in reading, since I spend an enormous amount of time writing. I think it’s deeper than that, although I won’t be so ridiculously grandiose as to say things like, “The future depends on it!” like a character from a bad superhero movie, I will say that reading still matters as a component of free thought and free life, and it doesn’t have to come at the expense of sociability. It can be good for you but shouldn’t necessarily be pitched that way. The culture, however, will move in whatever way it does, and I suspect those in the debate will be increasingly on the margins of the culture as a whole.

EDIT: Added last paragraph on 6/11/08.

Science Fiction, literature, and the haters

June 5, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 26 Comments

Why does so little science fiction rise to the standards of literary fiction?

This question arose from two overlapping events. The first came from reading Day of the Triffids (link goes to my post); although I don’t remember how I came to the book, someone must’ve recommended it on a blog or newspaper in compelling enough terms for me to buy it. Its weaknesses, as discussed in the post, brought up science fiction and its relation to the larger book world.

The second event arose from a science fiction novel I wrote called Pearle Transit that I’ve been submitting to agents. It’s based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—think, on a superficial level, “Heart of Darkness in space.” Two replies stand out: one came from an agent who said he found the idea intriguing but that science fiction novels must be at least 100,000 words long and have sequels already started. “Wow,” I thought. How many great literary novels have enough narrative force and character drive for sequels? The answer that came immediately to mind was “zero,” and after reflection and consultation with friends I still can’t find any. Most novels expend all their ideas at once, and to keep going would be like wearing a shirt that fades from too many washes. Even in science fiction, very few if any series maintain their momentum over time; think of how awful the Dune books rapidly became, or Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series. A few novels can make it as multiple-part works, but most of those were conceived of and executed as a single work, like Dan Simmons’ Hyperion or Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (more on those later).

The minimum word count bothers me too. It’s not possible for Pearle Transit to be stretched beyond its present size without destroying what makes it coherent and, I hope, good. By its nature it is supposed to be taunt, and much as a 120-pound person cannot be safely made into a 240-pound person, Pearle Transit can’t be engorged without making it like the bloated star that sets its opening scene. If the market reality is that such books can’t or won’t sell, I begin to tie the quality of the science fiction I’ve read together with the system that produces it. Heart of Darkness—forerunner to modernism and one of the deepest and most mysterious novels I’ve read—had only about 40,000 words. In those 40,000 words, it contains more than the vast majority of novels I’ve read with four times as many. The Great Gatsby isn’t very long either—60,000 words, perhaps?—and yet by the standards of contemporary science fiction, apparently neither would be publishable. If this is true, then the production system for science fiction might be harming the ability of writers to produce fiction at the highest possible level.

The other rejection came from an agent who read the entire manuscript. He said he liked it and thought the writing was sharp—an adjective I’ve seen before in rejection letters—but that it was “too literary” and shouldn’t be as “complex.” It can’t bode well for science fiction in general if its gatekeepers are allergic to the idea of literariness, that ineffable quality that haunts this post even as I don’t or can’t define it. To be sure, it’s possible that the agent who called Pearle Transit “too literary” was being nice or using a euphemism and really saying he thought it was boring, or stuffy, or something to that effect, but even if he was, I still think his word choice is illustrative.

The two rejection letters and the literary quality of Day of the Triffids show specific examples of a general phenomenon regarding science fiction. It’s unfortunate that the entire genre gets tarred as junk by some critics and readers when in reality it’s not entirely junk—if it were, I wouldn’t write a long essay describing it. I have a theory as to why science fiction often gets labeled as junk: it values other qualities than aesthetic novelty/skill and deep characterization. It’s more concerned with ideas rather than how ideas are expressed, while the greatest literary fiction sees ideas and their expression as inextricably linked. At the same time, though, I think that science fiction’s defenders might bring on the literary snobs’ ire by doing things like calling them literary snobs when many aren’t actually snobs, but just have standards that science fiction too infrequently reaches in part for the reason I just stated. This is also why, I suspect, science fiction has trouble achieving the critical and academic recognition it should probably have, especially given its larger impact on the culture. I’m one of the defenders of good writing being good writing regardless of where it comes from, but the more science fiction I read, the more I realize so much of it just doesn’t have the skill in narrative, detail, character, sympathy and complexity, language, and dialog that readers of literary fiction demand. I still like a lot of science fiction, but most of it now causes me to roll my eyes and skip pages: characters have no life, the books have no lifeness, clichés abound, and strong setups devolve into variations on cowboys and indians.

There are very significant exceptions, as I said regarding Day of the Triffids:

The only science fiction novels I’m aware of that could stand on their own as a literary achievement is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Some others are serviceable and worthwhile, like Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Walter Michael Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Philip K. Dick’s better novels. But none are great novels, though Gibson comes closest, and while I don’t think the genre is incapable of housing real greatness, the relative lack of literary merit gives me pause when I continue searching for satisfying science fiction.

Jason Fisher of Lingwë – Musings of a Fish wrote an e-mail pointing out that Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 probably belong in the “exception” category too. I agree, as long as they’re fully included in the science fiction umbrealla—while Orwell and Huxley were kind of writing science fiction, their books were much closer to the traditions of allegory and satire, even if they happened to use some of science fiction’s trappings. Someone like Stanislaw Lem or Le Guin, on the other hand, produced genuine science fiction. Bradbury I’d forgotten about, but it’s been too long since I read his books to judge them. Granted, this argument might turn into boundary dispute regarding what’s science fiction and what isn’t, but I think there is something to be said for the science fiction that’s grounded solidly in the “science” as in the technological future world, whereas I see Orwell, especially, and Huxley, to a lesser extent, as being closer to something like Gulliver’s Travels.

Typing “Top science fiction novels” in Google reveals lists like these: the top 50 science fiction novels, the top fifteen great science fiction books, and the top 100 sci-fi books (never mind that some science fiction writers and readers hate the term sci-fi for reasons that are still unclear to me). Most of the novels on those lists don’t meet conventional—an inappropriate word, given that great literature is by definition unconventional—literary standards, with the exceptions already mentioned. Dan Simmons’ Hyperion gets close—very close—but still has that “not quite” feeling.

That Michael Crichton gets on any lists is a bad sign: the best review I’ve seen of his wildly popular and equally wildly uneven, and usually bad, work is in Martin Amis’ The War Against Cliché, when he praises Crichton at his best as “a blend of Stephen Jay Gould and Agatha Christie” and then discusses what’s wrong in the context of The Lost World, but it could be transposed to most of his Crichton’s novels:

The job of characterization has been delegated to two or three thrashed and downtrodden adverbs. ‘Dodgson shook his head irritably’; ‘ “Handle what?” Dodgson said irritably.’ So Dodgson is irritable. But ‘ “I tell you it’s fine,” Levine said irritably.’ ‘Levine got up irritably.’ So Levine is irritable too. ‘Malcolm stared forward gloomily.’ ‘ “We shouldn’t have the kids here,” said Malcolm gloomily.’ Malcolm seems to own ‘gloomily’; but then you irritably notice that Rossiter is behaving ‘gloomily’ too, and gloomily discover that Malcolm is behaving ‘irritably.’ Forget about ‘tensely’ and ‘grimly’ for now. And don’t get me started on ‘thoughtfully.’

So many science fiction novels suffer from the same problems: adverbs that proliferate like triffids, characters who are more alive silent than when they speak, and descriptions that deserve the Amis treatment, above.

Even Philip K. Dick, who aspired to be a literary writer prior to turning to science fiction, gets mixed notices, which Adam Gopnik explores in the New Yorker:

As an adult reader coming back to Dick, you start off in a state of renewed wonder and then find yourself thumbing ahead to see how much farther you are going to have to go. At the end of a Dick marathon, you end up admiring every one of his conceits and not a single one of his sentences. His facility is amazing. He once wrote eleven novels in a twenty-four-month stretch. But one thing you have to have done in order to write eleven novels in two years is not to have written any of them twice.

That’s probably why Dick’s reputation as a serious writer, like Poe’s, has always been higher in France, where the sentences aren’t read as they were written. And his paint-by-numbers prose is ideally suited for the movies. The last monologue in “Blade Runner” (“All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die”), improvised by Rutger Hauer on the set that day, has a pathos that the book achieves only in design, intellectually, because the movie speech is spoken by a recognizable person, dressed up as a robot, where Dick’s characters tend to be robots dressed up as people.

Gopnik is right. Dick himself wrote How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, which Jason sent me. It’s a wonderful essay more about ideas and coherency than skill in conveying ideas through words. It’s hard to imagine him writing something like Kundera’s The Art of the Novel or E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. Maybe Aspects of the Science Fiction Novel, but that cordons science fiction from the greater literary sphere. I dislike the cordon, and yet the more I realize regarding what science fiction seems to value and what literary fiction seems to value, the more I wonder if it’s really undesirable. In his essay, Dick is ready to join literary writers when he says: “The problem is simply this: What does a science fiction writer know about? On what topic is he an authority?” I read much bemoaning of what place, if any, the author has in times of national strife, like 9/11. The answer seemed to be, “not much.” So Dick has something in common with literary authors. In his essay, however, Dick proceeds on a metaphysical binge rather than the deeper realms of what makes great fiction, as James Wood does in How Fiction Works, or Jane Smiley does in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, or Francine Prose does in Reading like a Writer. He writes with great verve and depth about the nature of reality, our place in it, and societal problems—but he doesn’t handle aesthetic problems or people as manifestations of those problems well. Characters come off as manifestations of problems instead of people, which is another way of saying what Gopnik did.

Other writers, like Roger Zelazny in the first section of The Great Book of Amber, is more bad than good, and his writing is frequently irritating for its James Bond tone in passages like this:

I forced my mind back to the accident, dwelled upon it till my head hurt. It was no accident. I had that impression, though I didn’t know why. I would find out, and someone would pay. Very, very much would they pay. An anger, a terrible one, flared within the middle of my body.

The lack of a conjunction between “accident” and “dwelled” doesn’t work here and is jarring, along with the running together of the sounds “it” and “till,” especially when followed by the alliteration of “head hurt.” Finally, the endlessly repeated action-hero trope of “someone would pay,” is expressed exactly the same as it has been thousands if not millions of times before. Occasionally Zelazny wanders in the land of exquisite, terse writing, almost by accident, as when he says: “The night was bargaining weakly with the sun.”

I’ve discussed a few of the novels that appear on those top science fiction lists and I’ve read most of them, although some, I admit, not recently. I like many though love few and suspect I would like far fewer had I not read them in that formative period where novelty is much easier to achieve simply because you haven’t read all that much relative to how much you will. I think there is also something in the modern adolescent temperament that science fiction and fantasy appeals to: the idea that you’re being held back and oppressed and that with time you will acquire devices or skills that lend you great power to overcome forces that seem to be evil. Later, unfortunately, you discover that those forces are not so much malicious as incompetent and lazy and that the structure of the world is very hard to change; what those novels often don’t show is how the heroic quest is symbolic in the real world not of battling demons but of study, thought, and work. As Paul Graham says:

But if a kid asks you “Is there a God?” or “What’s a prostitute?” you’ll probably say “Ask your parents.”

Since we all agree [about lies to tell kids and forbidden questions], kids see few cracks in the view of the world presented to them. The biggest disagreements are between parents and schools, but even those are small. Schools are careful what they say about controversial topics, and if they do contradict what parents want their kids to believe, parents either pressure the school into keeping quiet or move their kids to a new school.

The conspiracy is so thorough that most kids who discover it do so only by discovering internal contradictions in what they’re told. It can be traumatic for the ones who wake up during the operation.

[…]

I remember that feeling. By 15 I was convinced the world was corrupt from end to end. That’s why movies like The Matrix have such resonance. Every kid grows up in a fake world. In a way it would be easier if the forces behind it were as clearly differentiated as a bunch of evil machines, and one could make a clean break just by taking a pill.

And when you’re 15, you also have a lower threshold for art because, at least in the United States, most 15-year-olds aren’t all that well-formed and haven’t experience much; hell, I’m 24 and still don’t feel all that well-formed. Still, if you get someone with plots about breaking through the surface world into some other world underneath, you’re going to speak, in many cases, much more convincingly to 15-year-olds than you are to disgruntled adults who have the freedom to seek whatever they think the truth of the world is and choose not to exercise it, or who are responsible for keeping those 15-year-old dreamers fed and going to school on time. I’ve left out a small but very important group of adults who are still dreaming of greatness and trying to pierce the veil of reality, but I suspect they are entirely too small a group, and those who might join it are often invested in ideologies or systems or other simplifiers of what is a world too complex to explain through simple chants, or what Alain Badiou calls simulacrum and betrayal in his book Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.

I still like Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and I still appreciate some of the criticisms he directed at judgmental society. But if I read him for the first time today, I would’ve already encountered his ideas, and there wouldn’t be the depth of characterization or the skill in writing to carry me through. Then, it seemed original, and I wasn’t old enough to perceive Stranger’s paper-thin chatter masquerading as philosophy. Even Brave New World, for all its virtues, has some of those problems, as when the savage discusses Shakespeare.

This essay discusses science fiction, but its sister, fantasy, suffers from some of the same problems, which I alluded to in my review of The Name of the Wind and The Daughter of the Empire. In contrast to those writers, Tolkien gets deeper and stronger as you get older and more sophisticated, and I suspect Lord of the Rings is a well that will never run dry. First-rate fantasy seems to pop up more often than science fiction—here I’m thinking of Le Guin with Earthsea, or Philip Pullman with His Dark Materials. Even then, it’s still common for writers to churn out elements in different configurations instead of trying, like Paul Muad’Dib in Dune, to break the nature of the genre publishing system itself. How ironic that a genre dedicated to transcending the scrim of reality relies on endless repetition of its core language and features.

After almost 3,000 words, I’ve described a problem, diagnosed some of its causes, shown some ways it operates, but not come to any conclusions. I’m not sure any exist, given the marketplace and reader incentives involved with both the production and consumption of science fiction. And if there is a solution, I hope readers of this are looking for it, and that I can be a part.

EDIT: A follow-up post deals with some of the issues raised in the comments and via e-mail.

Day of the Triffids — John Wyndham

June 2, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids is another early post apocalyptic novels that’s more interesting as a historical curiosity than for aesthetic merit. It suffers from many of science fiction’s deficiencies in terms of writing quality and characterization. These problems might stem in part from science fiction’s focus on novelty in plot, technology, and world, rather than in linguistic or cultural achievement; perhaps fiction is innovative either in what it says or how it says only seldom both. The only science fiction novels I’m aware of that could stand on their own as a literary achievement is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Some others are serviceable and worthwhile, like Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Walter Michael Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Philip K. Dick’s better novels. But none are great novels, though Gibson comes closest, and while I don’t think the genre is incapable of housing real greatness, the relative lack of literary worth gives me pause when I continue searching for satisfying science fiction.

This long introduction is designed to put The Day of the Triffids in a context it doesn’t transcend. The plot begins with a fantastic meteor shower that strikes all who watch it blind combined with the invasion of an insidious species known as triffids, which kill anyone within a few feet via a stinging lash. These walking carnivorous plants become symbolic repositories for our fears and our collective inability to see what’s in front of our faces; as Bill Masen, the overly prim and competent protagonist observes, ” ‘There’s a kind of conspiracy not to believe things about triffids.’ ” There is, and I felt some horror as I learned more about them, but it was an overly familiar feeling from all those end-of-the-world stories: George Stewart’s Earth Abides, which predates The Day of the Triffids by two years, the aforementioned A Canticle for Leibowitz, Larry Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer, and even Stephen King’s The Stand. Except for A Canticle for Leibowitz, they all share the same styles, themes, and motifs concerning humanity’s capacity for darkness and ignorance (“Horrible alien things which some of us had somehow created, and which the rest of us, in our careless greed, had cultured all over the world,” we learn in The Day of the Triffids. Notice the lack of subject or article at the beginning of the sentence, where it seems that one or both should appear). I just wish there were more originality in this, although to be fair Earth Abides and The Day of the Triffids are forerunners to the later developments in the sub-genre of apocalyptic stories.

As in many such works, Bill Masen is little more advanced emotionally and intellectually than the nameless narrator of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. A curious mixture of competence, chivalry, and sexism, Bill Masen wants to protect his women and while keeping them, you know, in their role. Still, to his credit he thinks about a ten-year-old, “[…] the world in which she was going to grow up would have little use for the overniceties and euphemisms that I had learned as a child […]” Still, he’s not perceptive enough to think that perhaps those “niceties” aren’t of use in the current world, as Paul Graham cogently argues. “[His] quest was personal,” although that quest is just to find a girl he randomly encountered, and even then it feels not so much personal as generic and something expected by a certain type of society. I sometimes feel the same way when closing time approaches at a bar. Augie March is on a personal quest, but Bill Masen, alas, is not.

Elsewhere, he almost verges on something vaguely resembling insight when he says that, “There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another.” Maybe so, but even here the awkwardness of the writing, with the disjointedness created by the first comma in both sentences, weakens the sense of flow and as a result the sentiment that is being expressed. And yet his fundamental argument about the resilience of humanity is not a bad one, even if it is not expressed well, and I would’ve liked for more on the subject.

As I said, The Day of the Triffids is most interesting as a historical document: Cold War symbolism abounds, and as disaster befalls England one girl “[…] had an utterly unshakeable conviction that nothing serious could have happened to America, and that it was only a matter of holding out for a while until the Americans arrived to put everything in order.” Contrast this belief with what Fareed Zakaria persuasively argues about the views of America abroad in The Post-American World. In Day of the Triffids, this exchange takes place a few pages after the first quote:

“Try to imagine a world in which there aren’t any Americans—can you do that?”
The girl stared at him.
“But there must be,” she said.
[…]
“There won’t always be those stores. The way I see it, we’ve been given a flying start in a new kind of world.”

Although the girl who believes in America is presented as a fool, it’s still nice to imagine that this sentiment was reasonably widespread during the Cold War. I remain hopeful and perhaps even confident, like Zakaria in The Post-American World, that it will be again in the near future. In the meantime, Day of the Triffids remains dead history rather than living fiction that still speaks loudly to us today, as great literature does.

The Post-American World

May 29, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World is almost superfluous: its arguments about the rise of other nations and how the United States should respond can be found, implicitly and explicitly, in The Atlantic, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and other magazines. Most of its analysis is not particularly deep and didn’t reorient my worldview. But at the same time, I’ve not seen the whole package regarding how the world is changing through the growth of non-Western countries from a single source before, and if nothing else The Post-American World is a handy to have as a pointer—don’t follow my argument regarding the importance of international humility? Read The Post-American World!

Many of the book’s subsidiary claims are disputable—is geography really responsible for the imbalances of world power? How much of China’s lagging after the 17th century is due to its government?—but The Post-American World‘s central thesis concerning the almost inevitable rise of other countries in the political, economic, and social spheres is accurate and worth pondering, especially by the very politicians who seem most likely to ignore it. Indeed, its discussion of the problems of current U.S. politics is coherent and useful, and I observe some small manifestations of those problems on Grant Writing Confidential.

Zakaria stays admirably focused on the big themes, even as he tries to put the fear of Islamic-inspired terror in its place, which is a much smaller one than it currently occupies. He even cites James Fallows’ “Declaring Victory” on this subject. He also effectively ties together two seemingly opposite trends, one toward globalization, heterogeneity, and internationalism, and the other towards renewed nationalism: “But while economics, information, and even culture might have become globalized, formal political power remains firmly tethered to the nation-state, even as the nation-state has become less able to solve most of these problems unilaterally.” To what extent this reflects a minor and odd issue and to what extent it is a damning, fundamental problem is unclear, but raising it as an issue is worth doing and will perhaps curtail it.

Perhaps most refreshingly, Zakaria tries and succeeds at remaining neutral as he discusses the positive, negative, and descriptive attributes of the big three: China, India, and the United States. For example, although the United States comes under justifiable criticism for a wide array of offenses and blunders, including Iraq, Zakaria also points out that “For all its abuses of power, the United States has been the creator and sustainer of the current order of open trade and democratic government—an order that has been benign and beneficial for the vast majority of human kind.” Reconciling these two features—abuse like Abu Ghraib—with the overall positive effect—an increase in worldwide liberty—is too often lost in partisan debate, with the left focuses on abuse and the right on a rah-rah America orientation. It’s also worth noting that a book like this probably couldn’t be published in China.

This is particularly important because one point Zakaria makes and doesn’t emphasize as much as he perhaps should have is that, to a steadily larger extent, the new world demands “the growth of new narratives.” His is one. He also sees cable news stations and other outlets that focus on narrower market segments as examples of this, and to me this profusion of new frameworks for looking at the world, which vary by country, region, and individual, are a powerful subject that is hard to comprehend. Still, American business seems better at responding than government, As Zakaria says, American companies have done better in adapting to the new world than American politicians. To him, “Washington, which faces no market test, has not yet figured out that diplomatic imperialism is a luxury that the United States can no longer afford.”

Still, an examination of new narratives might be an entire book in and of itself just for one country; in China, for instance, the number of new narratives just over the course of the 20th Century seems staggering in how radical the breaks appear to an outsider and non-expert like me, ranging from the imperial domination of others in the early part of the century to Communism beginning in 1949 to the ironically named Great Leap Forward that destroyed much of China’s professional classes to the capitalist reorientation that began in 1979, and those are just examples at the broadest levels. And understanding China and India is going to become more important as time goes on; as Zakaria says, “China operates on so large a scale that it can’t help changing the nature of the game,” much as the United States changed the nature of the European game beginning in the early 20th Century.

So what can be done, or, to put it in less confrontational terms, how should America respond to this world? Zakaria argues that we should focus on our strengths in openness and education. He draws parallels between Britain and the U.S., saying that wealthier countries can lose their competitive edge in technology: “A wealthier Britain was losing its focus on practical education. Science and geography were subordinated to literature and philosophy.” But he doesn’t give convincing, non-anecdotal evidence to support this assertion, and I’m not sure its true, though it is certainly plausible. What he does convincingly show, however, is that immigrants have fueled America’s cultural and scientific achievements, and immigrants continue to be major players in post-graduate degrees, especially in science. “If America can keep the people it educates in the country, the innovation will happen here. If they go back home, the innovation will travel with them.” This problem is real and has been observed elsewhere, but Zakaria underlines how poor a job we’ve done evaluating trade-offs. In a similar area, “The visa system, which has become restrictive and forbidding, will get more so every time one thug is let in. None of these procedures is designed with any consideration of striking a balance between the need for security and the need for openness and hospitality.” Once again, terrorism unhinges us and a do-something syndrome sets in. Getting this issue wrong isn’t as spectacular as terrorist attacks, and yet in the long term might do far more damage to the United States than 9/11. But that hidden damage isn’t easy to cover by TV news and so goes mostly unheeded. Zakaria says that “[The United States] needs to stop cowering in fear. It is fear that has created a climate or paranoia and panic in the United States and fear that has enabled our strategic missteps.”

When friends ask why I don’t feel any affinity for either major American political party, I now have a good recommendation for an explanation other Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, a book that studies the inherent problems with power seekers and their minions. Zakaria argues that today “A ‘can-do’ country is now saddled with a ‘do-nothing’ political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving.” Still, I’m not sure this is any different from normal politics, and Zakaria’s evidence isn’t enough to prove his point. Yet I can’t help but agreeing with his larger thesis regarding the United States’ dysfunctional politics, and I’m not optimistic that a fix will be forthcoming, or, if it is, that it won’t be worse than the disease. At least a do-nothing government will first do no harm, which seems like an improvement on the last eight years, but for the next eighty, we need something better, and someone is at least framing the issues in a positive way.

Memorial Day Links

May 25, 2008 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Mark Sarvas appeared in Seattle, as announced, and… no one showed up except yours truly. Way to go. The good news, however, is that the Seattle Times interviewed him. Alas, the interview leads with a reference to a hatchet job in the New York Times, which I won’t deign to link to here. A snippet of the interview:

Q: I worry that the kind of reading, that trancelike state you achieve when you get deep into a book, is going away in favor of a different kind of reading on the Internet. And what do you think is going to happen with book reviews? Will they eventually migrate to the Net, and how will that affect them?

A: There are different kinds of reading. The kind you do on a couch with a book is different from what you do with your blog.

I share your troubled view of the future — but I think it has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet. This is not just about book reviews; it’s about classical music, architecture, movie reviews.

It’s not a crisis in book reviewing; it’s the fact that we live in an age that I find distressingly incurious — interested in material pursuits, unreflective, narcissistic, shallow. An age when the thing that’s on everyone’s mind is … “Did you see ‘American Idol’ last night?”

It’s nothing to do with the Internet or the loss of newspapers. It’s a much wider critical moment, one that I leave to the cultural anthropologists to figure out.

* James Wood further illuminates what he values and what he doesn’t in fiction while simultaneously (and justifiably!) criticizing bloggers for their too-frequent rush to judgment. If you leave this blog to read it and don’t come back because you’ve spent too much time meditating on what he’s said, I won’t blame you. I’ve got a response rumbling in me, but it’s not ready for publication.

(Hat tip TEV.)

* From Anecdotal Evidence, more preaching to the choir. Granted, I agree with the post, but I’m guessing that the people who should most read it won’t, much like the protests at the NBCC and elsewhere regarding the cutbacks in book reviewing, or those endless damning reports about how we don’t, as a society, read much.

(Hat tip Books, Inq.)

* This video isn’t book-related, but watch it anyway.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

April 27, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex bears more than a passing resemblance to Peter Sagal’s The Book of Vice in terms of tone and content: both take a jaunty look at a squeamish area and then use their investigation as a launching point for examining society, politics, gender roles, and history.

To be fair, the last part of that sentence is overly grandiose, but it’s nonetheless accurate, and many of the positive comments I wrote about The Book of Vice could easily be transposed to Bonk. Perhaps not surprisingly, Amazon pairs the two with its buy-both-and-get-more-money-off-the-combo-package feature. The difference are important, however; if Bonk has a thesis, it is that science has long used its objectivity cloak to elude societal retribution and social backlash, with varying levels of success that have nonetheless increased over the years. Furthermore, much of this inquiry ends up saying more about the scientists and society than it does about sex itself. Roach says:

When I began this book, I harbored a naïve fantasy that I would find a team of scientists working to discover the secret to amazing, mind-rippling sex. They would report to work late a night in a windowless, hi-tech laboratory and have unplaceable accents and penetrating stares.

More often she found rather pedestrian researchers concerned with knowledge and funding to pursue that knowledge in an attempt to bring sex out of myth, religion, and superstition. Her main heroes, to the extent Bonk has heroes, are early sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who make an early appearance on page 23—”Foreplay” is the chapter heading that would normally be “Introduction”—and we’re still learning about them on page 299—”Persons studied in pairs.” To quote Roach again:

I learned about the project in a New York Times health column. Jane Brody had described the book and its conclusions the week it came out. The subheads the paper had supplied were vague and coy: “Persons Studied in Pairs,” said one. It was like writing up the Million Man March under the headline “Persons Walking in a Group.” In a sentence at the end of a paragraph describing study protocols, Brody notes simply: “Some were assigned partners.” The casual reader, alighting here, might have mistaken the column for a piece about square dancing. I immediately tracked down a copy of the book.

Roach likes to castigate the euphemisms and other covers frequently employed by journalists and others, as she does here, while also laughing at the science-y jargon of experts. This gives her prose the slangy style of your friend at a Sunday morning brunch or a comedian at a club the Saturday night before. She can play for the high end of science and the low-end of slapstick. Still, she’s obviously on the side of the researchers and others working toward openness:

But let’s give Masters and Johnson their due. And while we’re at it, Alfred Kinsey and Robert Latou Dickinson and Old Dad and everyone else in these pages. The laboratory study of sex has never been an easy, safe, or well-paid undertaking. Study by study, the gains may seem small and occasionally silly, but the aggregation of all that has been learned, the lurching tango of academe and popular culture, has led us to a happier place. Hats and pants off to you all.

This triumphalism might be misplaced—what would the Wall Street Journal editorial page say to such a paragraph?—but if you look past the humor scrim you’ll see that Roach does have a point, and she also ensures that anyone who tries to refute her in a serious tone will come off looking like a stodgy minister at a dance. Furthermore, Roach seems cognizant of her own place in the historical march toward making people comfortable talking about sex openly, and the future might take as dim a view of her as we take of Victorian sex manuals. And I’m not sure what Foucault would think of Roach’s approach to sexual discourse, particularly regarding its examination of history.

But with luck the future will forgive her and still laugh, since a large part of Bonk, like The Book of Vice, is really just using sex to comment on other or abstract ideas; as one researcher says, “You think you know a lot until you start to ask some really basic questions, and you realize you know nothing.” I’ve heard English and computer science professors make similar remarks, whether about the meaning of the capital-N Novel or whether P = NP; in the case of Bonk, the quote just happens to be on the subject of whether women’s orgasms help with sperm transport and conception. In Roach’s, uh, hands, the question launches a historical disquisition on the quest to discover the answer, which, while amusing, also gives the opportunity to realize that we’re probably living in an era where the dominant beliefs about sex, gender, and the like will appear ridiculous someday. While I mentioned triumphalism before, I should also that Roach is triumphant about progress, both normatively and scientifically, and that is a conclusion I can’t help but agreeing with, especially when it’s presented in such an excellent package.

Media myopia and the New Yorker

April 25, 2008 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

A month ago, the New Yorker published an article called “Out of Print” that shows the collective problems of the newspaper and larger media industries, which has been a regular topic in the industry itself, online, and elsewhere. I’m not one of these awful “bloggers will replace the media” types, chiefly for what, as the article says, “[…] the parasitical relationship that virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with newspapers.” You might notice that I’m linking to a magazine.

Still, I sent this letter to the editor, which went unpublished:

That “Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and . . . their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago” shows the industry’s collective myopia in the face of rapid technological evolution (“Out of Print,” March 31st). As a high school senior in 2001 – 2002, I was the co-editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper and seriously considered picking colleges based on their journalism programs, but even then it was obvious to me that the Internet would make journalism at best a tenuous career choice. From my perspective, the pace of change was entirely imaginable, and I shifted my academic priorities because of it.

Now I write a book blog. Although it is not professionally edited, it is one of many blogs supplementing or supplanting traditional book review sections that have been heavily cut by newspapers. My life is a microcosm of the problems being experienced by traditional print media.

Normally I like to hear about typos and amend them silently. But if there’s one in this particular blockquote—be silent! It’s too late!

Harry, Revised — Mark Sarvas

April 22, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Mark Sarvas‘ Harry, Revised confounds virtually every criticism I want to throw at it: the callowness of its protagonist, Harry, is more than addressed by its end. The narrative point of view shifts quickly, but that became an aspect of the novel’s internal rhythm. Harry’s friend, Max, is a too-typical sidekick, but Harry and I were the ones fooled when Max announces his plan to move, justifying it by saying: “Thing is, I ask myself, and don’t take this wrong, is what did our friendship really amount to?” It’s a question emblematic of Harry’s dilemmas—most of which are self-imposed—because it’s really a question that asks, “What do you really amount to?”

After these issues have been dealt with, the positive aspects of Harry, Revised, remain: it’s a funny novel that often made me smile at, more often than with, Harry. The wonderful metaphors perk up with wonderful regularity, as when Harry’s dead wife, Anna picks men “out of the field of suitors blackening her front porch like a swarm of death and dung beetles,” or, a slightly more sober note, “[t]ime has lost its shape for [Harry] these days, feeling increasingly like a monochrome jigsaw puzzle.” Such descriptions are reserved for people, however; little is said about the setting of L.A., what Wilshire Boulevard feels like, or how Harry can be a doctor, as his profession seems more window dressing than central aspect of his character. Given the anonymity of L.A., however, it might be appropriate that the land itself is a mere conduit for the plot.

Harry, Revised begins with the newly found object of Harry’s affections, a tattooed 22-year-old waitress named Molly who seems an improbable fit for Harry. Then again, it’s hard to imagine who a probable fit for him would be, including his dead wife, Anna, a woman whose improbable love for Harry is equally improbably, and yet believably, explained. Her first reappearance in a time-shift is jarring—have we just entered a Henry James-esque world of ghosts?—but she is more appealing than her husband in the tradition of Julie in Richard Russo’s Straight Man. Even when the impending revelations about her that you know are coming arrive, she’s still the better person. The time shifts never confuse after the first one, though such devices can be occasionally disorienting. As a narrative game, they’re enjoyable and enhance rather than distract from the novel’s overall effect.

The narrative is unusual in other ways: a third-person genuinely omniscient narrator isn’t found much in modern fiction but is deployed to strong effect here. The present tense is more commonly employed but nonetheless not an everyday occurrence, especially in conjunction with the omniscient narrator, who describes Harry at the beginning—and maybe could describe him at the end—as having “always found it easier to deny, to disavow, and to disengage.” Or is this the free indirect speech much described James Wood, a Sarvas favorite? I’m not sure here: that last word, “disengage,” makes me think the narrator speaks, but perhaps this is also something Harry thinks about himself.

No minor characters are more than flat, which is fine when they’re often so well described: a mortician “was of a type equally at home purveying coffins and caskets or plots of Florida real estate.” Notice the resonance of “at home” followed by the mention of real estate, combined with the idea of caskets or the earth being a final resting home. Two pages later, a theme about Anna gets picked up that is becomes steadily more woven into the narrative: “Fondness-as-finance was the lingua franca of the Weldt family.” The repeated alliteration of the “f” sound brings us through the sentence and the latin phrase that might otherwise be awkward, its “franca” rolling into the “fondness” idea and “family.” Harry himself is perhaps too often described as average, as when “[h]e can’t bear the prospect of the face he knows all too well in all its ordinariness,” but even if Harry is ordinary, his journey is not. Later, “Having, as always, no strong preferences, Harry selects one of the few bottles that’s already open.”

These description make Harry sound unappetizing, and he is, but in yet another example of confounding expectations he’s also likable, perhaps because he recognizes his own failings and tries to surmount them in ways that aren’t going to make him a jerk, which would be the most obvious way to do so. He’s endearing despite occasional repulsiveness (lying, sleeping with prostitutes while married). Again, I have to return to the greatest novelty and the magic of Harry, Revised, which comes from this and from its ability to evade the flaws I want to cite but that just aren’t important.

For example, Harry’s scheme to woo Molly is straight out of high school, or the mind of an emotionally immature man—the two have some overlap—and its implausibility is both irritating and necessary. Clearly Harry is unfamiliar with ladder theory, Neil Strauss’ The Game, or the rest of the caddish, shallow books that, although they are caddish and shallow, nonetheless do impart some useful framework for thinking about and attracting woman. Good buddies of the sort Harry evidently lacks can serve the same function. Hell, even Slate runs stories on the dating market and, implicitly, how it can be manipulated. Instead of evaluating the wisdom of his approach, Harry shows the disadvantages of doing things his way through problems ranging from expense to (in)effectiveness. I diagnose Harry in clinical or economic terms, but his real problems are spiritual and emotional, and at times I marveled at his inability to perceive his own state, like when “[his] thoughts careen and collide in his brain but not amount of effort can move his lips,” or, a few paragraphs later, “The empty words pop like lightbulbs falling to the floor.” There Sarvas is the perfect simile again, the words shattered, no longer illuminating thought but leaving it in darkness. The “splitting” or breaking theme starts with Harry’s last name—rent, and not, I suspect, in the sense of an apartment—and continues as Harry’s life falls apart and is, perhaps, reforged.

The word “perhaps” is important there. As we learn, “Harry doesn’t like this [end of The Count of Monte Cristo], hadn’t reckoned on ambiguity. He likes happy endings, and he wants to see heroes get their due and villains get their just deserts.” As this implies, the ending is not entirely happy. Although I won’t give it away, the end reminds me of T.C. Boyle in the way he likes ending on unexpected, orthogonal vectors that must seem maddening to those who, like Harry, want to see justice meted out—whatever that means. Yet in a world of ambiguity and novels that reflect said ambiguity, discovering who the heroes and villains are and what just deserts means can be vastly harder than dealing those deserts. Yet the shattering of Harry’s complacency is necessary so he can rebuild some new kind of worldview separate from the one be began with; as the subhead to Chapter Thirteen says, “In which our hero begins to put the pieces together.” These chapter summaries are also intentionally archaic, like the ones in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Like the third-person omniscient narrator, however, they come to fit the story and end up concealing more than they reveal: How does Harry put the pieces back together? And does he really? Does Henry Fleming in The Red Badge of Courage become something of a hero or overcome his cowardice and guilt? I’m not sure, and midway through the novel neither is Harry, as when he wonders: “It feels incomplete, this shard of self-knowledge […]”. Self-knowledge is a terrible and wonderful thing to behold. I’m not sure you’ll find completion in Harry, Revised, but I am sure that’s not a bad thing.

As mentioned previously, Sarvas will be at the University Bookstore on May 8 at 7:00 p.m.