Tag Archives: Culture

Dune and its laughable honor code relative to Beowulf and Fast & Furious

May 23, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Note: this is an addendum to an earlier post on Dune.

In Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents ,* Elaine Showalter quotes a letter that Kingsley Amis wrote as a student regarding the Old English requirement at Oxford: “The warriors and broken-down retainers who strut bawling across its pages repel by their childish fits of self-glorification and self-pity. The cheapest contemporary novel has more to teach us than those painful reminders of what we have long outgrown.” Although I think Old English has more merit than Amis gives it here, the sentiment regarding the sentiment of that time is one I can get behind, and one of my major criticisms of Frank Herbert’s Dune is essentially that it is guilty of the same sins: childish warriors, ceaseless strutting, and the acceptance/embrace of retrograde cultural ideals regarding the roles of women and the need for killing.

You can see the worship of honor in Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, when the eponymous warrior’s death is occasion for twelve warriors to ride around the king and for them to “extoll… his heroic nature and exploits / and [give] thanks for his greatness; which was the proper / thing.” This scene wouldn’t be out of place in Dune, which is a problem for a novel written in 1965 rather than, say, the tenth century.

That’s not to say that these problems are limited to Dune, or to novels. Take the recent movie Fast & Furious, which is is astonishingly good when measured by decibel. In it, Paul Walker is compared unfavorably to Vin Diesel when a character implies, with a completely straight face, that Walker has no “code.” It was one of many unintentionally funny moments because the creators of the movie apparently missed, say, the last two hundred years of cultural development away from the idea of rigid masculinity codes and towards a great sense of irony and fluidity. If your code of honor forces you to kill someone because they’ve disrespected your MacGuffin, or whatever, your most likely destination is jail, which is appropriate, and your code is likely to prevent or hamper you from adapting to new social or environmental situations. But Dune and Fast & Furious both present having codes and what not as positive. In that respect they resemble Beowulf

I would like to imagine that at some point the culture as a whole will move beyond its silly obsession with tit-for-tat internecine identity fighting that causes people, usually of the male persuasion, to behave like moose who ceaselessly charge against one another because it’s mating season. Still, given the deep cultural, and maybe even biological, roots of this disorder, I’m not counting on this happening anytime soon, but maybe recognizing malady, as Amis did, is a step towards dialectically surpassing it.

* Which I’m reading in preparation for a conference. More perhaps on that later.

The Red Leather Diary — Lily Koppel

April 7, 2008 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Alas: Lily Koppel’s The Red Leather Diary goes far past the point of diminishing literary, intellectual and emotional returns. The book feels stretched, as though it doesn’t contain enough material for its size—which might appropriate, since its genesis is “Speak, Memory“, an article Koppel wrote for the New York Times two years ago.

The Red Leather Diary is structured in an unusual way: it has an introduction and conclusion written in Koppel’s voice, in which she describes finding the diary and then its writer, Florence Wolfson. The middle section is the longest, which contains the raw diary entries in italics, like this:

How my heart’s wagging! I have no right to complain—Four boys called last night and there wee many moments when I would have preferred solitude—but. I made three or four appointments next week.

Below, a section in the reportorial third person explains or elaborates on the passage, presumably with the help of today’s 90-year-old Wolfson. The companion for the diary entry above says:

The Wolfsons’ telephone, a heavy black Bakelite French model, had recently replaced the old candlestick kind with the receiver hanging from a hook. It was always ringing, its loud, clear bell announcing new admirers for Florence. […] Her father, who had his office in their apartment, answered calls at night in case it was a patient, but usually it was for that “boy crazy girl.”

This passage also illustrates some of the book’s problems: the long strings of adjectives piled on, the general statements that don’t add much to the narrative or mise en scène, and the tendency to give random detail, like the nature of the Wolfsons’ phone. I liked reading The Red Leather Diary but tended to skip parts like the one above in favor of the introspective or, to use an anachronism appropriate in the context of the late 1920s, “racy” parts. The dull and exciting could exist back to back; on page 62 we learn that Florence “enrolled in a life drawing class at the Art Students League on West Fifty-seventh Street […] There she drew for a few hours several days a week after school and on Saturday mornings.” Page 63 brings something beyond reportage: “The other students were older than Florence, serious about their art, but seemed defeated by life. They were weighed down by unhappy marriages and boring office jobs.”

The “defeated by life” cliché annoys, but the move toward commentary on the anonymous and, presumably, unsuccessful would-be artists reminds me of the precariousness of hope and talent. This juxtaposition of solid, understated writing and what induces yawns continues throughout. On 299, Koppel tells us “It was a sad day when [the Claremont Riding Academy] closed in 2007.” Sad? Why? And is “sad” all that can be said for it? From pages 312 – 314, however, Koppel evokes the passing of time well, thought it succumbs to The Wonderful Past:

“The people, the culture, the brains […] It’s terrible today. Does anybody think and write philosophy? I can’t imagine my grandchild or my great-grandchild or anyone writing this,” she said, tapping the diary.

Consider that in relation to a critic responding to a fake diary of 18th century Europe, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal: “No modern girl will ever write a diary like this. Cleone Knox breathes the very spirit of the witty, robust, patriotic, wicked, hard-drinking, hard-swearing 18th century.” This theme of past greatness is a persistent irritant in The Red Leather Diary. Apparently, in the 1920s, reporters were also recalling how it used to be, as Koppel quotes one who writes of actress Eva Le Gallienne, “‘She evokes another age, far removed from our restless today, a time when Leonardo lay for hours watching a tiny flower unfold, when living itself was a fine art.'”

Maybe so, but for most people in most places I suspect life has been hectic and filled with strife, whether physical or mental, even for the wealthy and privileged like Florence. Yet her life was rich and she was perceptive; one entry says, “Out with Pearl [one of Florence’s female lovers] and accidentally came upon a life that was real and beautiful and made me feel loathsome—a blind pianist who is happy—in a small cheap restaurant.” So it is with this book: the generic and the oddly touching juxtaposed, with too much of the former and too little of the latter.

The Red Leather Diary also has distracting statements that are bizarre and probably wrong, as when Koppel says, “Our colossal spires are no longer seen as great lighthouses for the triumph of the human spirit but as dusty old stage sets, the backdrop of chain stores.” She’s talking about skyscrapers, and “colossal spires” is an artistic reach that falls flat, and, furthermore, I’m not sure they were ever seen as “great lighthouses for the triumph of the human spirit,” and, if they were, why would that have changed? And who is doing the seeing and perceiving in this sentence? I could take some guesses, but reading thoughts like this one combined with the aforementioned one about drawing frustrated me. The original article was all substance, while The Red Leather Diary is considerably less than all substance, and even if the absolute amount of substance might be greater than “Speak, Memory,” trawling through the filler lessens its impact.

Charles Bock in Seattle and Beautiful Children

March 25, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Charles Bock was more fun to hear speak than to read; alas, I began Beautiful Children with anticipation that went unfulfilled. Problems manifested early: descriptions of video games modeled on Doom sounded vaguely off, and I’ve never seen “hard drives the size of mini-fridges.” Yet I could ignore linguistic problems when I find also find a perfect description of many would-be artists: “He had aspirations to nothing less than the creation of sensitive, artistic, emotionally honest pictures that, just maybe, would get him laid.” In another section, evocations of common ground seem strained, as when the father of lost boy Newell Ewing says that “He got […] trapped in another Politics of Marriage Conversation.” Status is everywhere in Beautiful Children, but more often stated than shown, or shown via consumption. But whenever I was about to stop reading, I’d find something like this:

Propped up against the base of the casino wall like an abandoned doll, the body was bulky in places, but still frail enough to look as if it might be carried along by a good wind. Electricity glossed over its mess of hair—kinked and matted strands of indistinct, artificial colors, clumped in all directions.

Er: it’s almost right, but “electricity” feels wrong because it’s not electricity but electric light that illuminates hair. This is a microcosm of Beautiful Children: it feels like it should be more right than it is. Clichés distract—someone “was bleeding like a stuck pig” and elsewhere a stripper named Cheri goes on “about character arcs and emotional journeys until the friggin’ cows came home.” Perhaps this is how the character would think, but the problem of how banal, uneducated characters think and speak versus the literary needs of the author is never really resolved*. If teenagers sound like teenagers they’re often boring or vapid; if they sound like adults, they don’t sound real. If there is a satisfactory solution to this problem, it is not obvious in Beautiful Children; in other novels it involves a “precocious” or abnormally literary narrator. Instead, Beautiful Children opts for long transcriptions of teenage argot that eventually had me flipping pages in a quest for substance. It was hard enough to find when a character thinks, “You cannot possibly fathom an end to your observations about the status of your physical decline, a final finality. Such things are beyond you, as they are beyond anyone; and yet the evidence permeates your days, unavoidably present, oozing from the southwestern decor of a master bedroom […]” I can’t see Robertson Davies going into such despair. Perhaps John Banville would, but much more artfully.

Banville and Davies, however, wrote many novels over the course of their careers, and, at least in Davies’ case, his early novels were not as masterful as his later ones. Beautiful Children is a first novel that Bock says took 11 years to write and, presumably, publish, and I can’t help but thinking he would’ve been better served to finish it or have otherwise built his skills elsewhere. Beautiful Children is not a bad novel and perhaps it is even good, but not 11 years good. It has an admirable range of cultural references, from Blake to The Outsiders (a “young adult” novel assigned to me in middle school) to visual media detritus. Like Richard Price’s Ladies’ Man, Beautiful Children heralds better things to come. Now that Price comes to mind, Lush Life covers ground not dissimilar from Beautiful Children and does it better. And he wrote it in four years. Bock said Beautiful Childrentook so long because it was an “ambitious book, and I just didn’t know what I was doing for a lot of it.” Many novels gestate for a long time, and he rattled some off: Catch-22 stayed with me, but there were many others. Alas, I don’t think Beautiful Children will have the lasting power of Catch-22 or Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, another superb first novel. And in those novels, I doubt anything is “unceremoniously rejected,” as something is at the beginning of 3.3 in Beautiful Children.

Bock seems to have better novels in him; in Seattle, he said, “[Beautiful Children is] a dark book, but I believe the darkness is there to illuminate some of the wonderful parts of humanity […] also, I think there’s some pretty good jokes in there too.” There are, and he was wonderfully candid when someone asked why the dialog seemed so good and, by implication, authentic: “I have no idea.” Although he elaborated, I suspect the real truth came first. Still, I’m not sure I agree with the premise of the question: sometimes the dialog clicked and sometimes not, like much of the rest of the novel.

In another answer, Bock said he used Ponyboy because he’s an “iconic young adult character” and that he intentionally “recycles—Vegas is a place where they fake the Eiffel Tower and the great monuments of the world and turn them into casinos.” There is “no end to the uses of pop culture,” though he tries not to name drop. The recycling theme is heavy in Beautiful Children and perhaps a topic for some future graduate student. Today, someone looking for pleasure and depth could do worse than Beautiful Children—but they could do better. In “Books Briefly Noted,” the New Yorker has its own take on the novel’s problems, starting with praise and then moving to: “Yet [Beautiful Children] doesn’t quite achieve its intended emotional resonance; there is too much shaky dialogue and improbable Vegas kitsch (breast implants with candle-wax-filled nipples, for a pyrotechnic striptease), and the boy at the center of the plot is thinly drawn and so obnoxious that his disappearance is not unwelcome.” I read “Books Briefly Noted” after writing the first draft of this post, and realized that I structure my commentary the same way the New Yorker did its.

* The best description of I’ve read of this issue comes from James Wood’s How Fiction Works.

Modernism — Peter Gay

March 20, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The great danger of a book as broad as Modernism is also its strength: breadth. In trying to cover a gigantic, multifaceted movement that lasted, by Peter Gay’s definition, from the 1840s into the 1960s, one risks a superficial treatment of so many topics as to make the entire book superfluous. But Gay avoids that fate in all subjects save film, which is the weakest section of a book that I otherwise would call “magisterial” were that term not so overused. He also uses his best tool in writing a history of all the branches of modernism well: adept comparisons abound, which show the parallel developments in visual art, books, music, and architecture and the interplay among them. Modernism ruled in some fields more than others; architecture, which, by its nature, is a rich person’s sport, sees much less modernism than, say, literature, which requires only inexpensive writing instruments. Music sat between architecture and literature, and it’s also hard to describe because it split in many directions—the rise of modernism occurred concomitantly with that of pop music. Technological developments helped cause classical music’s share in the average mind grow with the birth of radio and shrink as time progressed.

This is a small example of the idea that Gay reiterates well: that modernism was experienced by a relatively select few even as it influenced the many. It’s even true today, when, as he notes, about half of all paperbacks sold are small-r romance novels and the literary fiction covered by most major print outlets only receives a tiny slice of the market’s dollars. This is not to start a tedious genre debate, though no romance novel I’m aware of has broken from its pigeonhole, as many science fiction, fantasy, horror and detective novels have, and I suspect few owe much to “The Wasteland.” As Gay says on page 459 (of 510), “The question just whom modernist novels, or movies, were intended for was one that had been difficult to answer for decades” (there probably should be an “of” between “question” and “just”). Indeed! But such modernist works receive a share of critical attention far out of scope with their readership or waters.

Maybe the key tenants of modernism inherently limit its accessibility, especially given the definition Gay establishes for modernism: “the lure of heresy that impelled [the modernists’] actions as they confronted conventional sensibility; and, second, a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny.” The case for using this, as opposed to other definitions, is an excellent one, and in reading Modernism I cannot help but feel that his ideas about what makes modernism modernism have been wandering about in my mind, unrevealed to me prior to this book. And yet, as Gay’s comments about romance novels demonstrate, he keeps his sense of proportion among the tectonic shifts in art and thought that occurred over the period he covers. Modernism has influenced nearly all avenues of thought, but some aspects of culture and emotion have been more touched than others, though probably none in Western culture remain unmoved.

The writing helps: Gay has many wonderful passages, including one I have already quoted and many more I would like to. A scholarly subject came surprisingly alive, like math taught by an enthusiastic teacher with a contagious sense of play—in other words, the one I never had till after I graduated from high school. But I digress: the point is that Modernism is having almost as much fun as its subjects, and perhaps implying that, even if some of its criteria are wrong or that modernists are not all that important, so what? It is an implication that I suspect modernists would agree with.

Still, the book can slide into academicese: “The indifference and hostility of conservative tastes and the ideological objections of powerful institutions often limited, or delayed, a positive response to aesthetic innovators.” Yes, I agree after Gay’s persuasion, but I’m still thinking that he traded ease for brevity. Elsewhere, he says “Much like the stream of refugees from Nazi Germany who signally enriched American and British culture, Italy, too, had its share of enforced cultural transfer […].” Wait, “signally?” What does “signally” mean here? I have no idea, but, minor issues are passing clouds in an otherwise sunny sky.

Sometimes Gay’s wrong notes do not seem part of an atonal scheme, but just an example of the elegant variation:* “On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin, an irrevocable exit that would release worldwide rejoicing.” To my knowledge, suicide is always irrevocable, making the fussy phrase “irrevocable exit” redundant redundant, but he certainly gets the “rejoicing” aspect right. For the most part, Gay’s flawless prose operates on many levels:

From [Strindberg’s] subjective vantage point, he argued that human nature is not cast in bronze, but open to the most disparate pressures, some from social demands and others, less easy to trace, from inner urges. Nor can desire and anxiety escape the conflicts that contradictory impulses arouse in the individual. In a hysterical period—and Strindberg insisted that his culture was helplessly mired—contemporaries necessarily display an unsorted patchwork of qualities old and new that prove vacillating and are given to self-contradictions.

Wow: an argument about art, internal versus external manifestations of thoughts and feeling, society’s role in those manifestations, and Strindberg’s thoughts on them and his society. That I wrote “is it really, or did modernists make it so?” in the margin now seems churlish. He makes statements that are, at times, too strong or unsupported, as when he says we live in a “post-Christian” age—did no one tell America’s presidents or its legions of church-goers?—but in most ways he is just the professor you wish you had: knowledgeable, considered, devoted to correctness and willing to see many sides of a thing or idea.

He also reminds me of how far we’ve come: when I pass blank canvasses and other such foolery at the Seattle Art Museum, I just yawn and walk by. The frequent modernist cries in attempting to rip the veil from reality or “declare their [Van Gogh and Gauguin] innermost selves without bourgeois reticence” are themselves examples of veils or reticence. Such paradoxes, oxymorons, and the like might be another of modernism’s defining characteristics, and Gay shows many examples of them; I have not found a better curator.

* As defined by the eponymous blog:

The Elegant Variation is “Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do.”

Seattle visits from Price and Ferris

March 18, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Richard Price will be at Elliott Bay Books on Friday, March 21 at 7:30; he’s the author of Clockers, which I haven’t read but the National Book Critics Circle loves, Ladies’ Man, which I read but didn’t love, and, most recently, Lush Life, which I plan to read and the New York Times loves.

Joshua Ferris will also be at Elliott Bay, but on Monday, March 24 at 7:30; he wrote Then We Came to the End.

Barring disaster, I’ll be at both.

The Magus

March 17, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

John Fowles’ The Magus is one-third to half again as long as it should be; that it is among the most uneven novels I’ve read is, I think, a consequent of length. At places its greatness nearly overwhelms, while in others melodramatic banality utterly underwhelms. I think the latter is a symptom of length and the necessity of having numerous reversals of character psychology. Each time we think the narrator, Nicholas, has uncovered the truth of the characters’ interactions, yet another layer emerges. Over time this became tedious, as declarations of love were made—again—only to have me glance at the thick stack of pages remaining and know without even needing to guess that the would-be lovers are not about to sail off the Greek island, back to England, and embark on raising two kids in the suburbs. Incidentally, this problem does argue well for something like the Kindle if for no other reason than not having a page count might maintain suspense, especially because so many sections in The Magus felt like they heralded “The End” only to have the marathon continue to the point of punishment.

The Magus begins with the end of a love affair between Nicholas and Alison, which coincides with a strange offer for Nicholas to teach at a boys’ school on a Greek remote island. The offer is taken and the affair ends, or perhaps the other way around, as it’s hard to track the order of events in a novel where so much and so little happens. Causes and effects become entangled somewhere towards the middle, when you lose track of what’s known and what isn’t and who has declared love and retracted it and who will again. Much of this is intentional: Nicholas takes the job and is entreated by a strange man who would be named Prospero if the Shakespeare allusion weren’t too obvious. Instead his name is Conchis, and he runs a game/theater on Phraxos, which appears to be a fictional island. I’m willing to roll with the premise, though I’ve yet to run into a megalomaniacal rich person who wants to play twisted emotional games with real people, which should be relatively easy given Seattle’s proximity to Microsoft. But I’ll assume that such people exist and that they have enough manipulation for 656 pages.

Like Nicholas, I kept getting caught on an unseen bramble when I came to passages like “The old man had surrendered” (359) or “‘It’s how you made me feel'” (363), only to know that all wasn’t well because of aforementioned stack of 300 pages left. All that is after a woman declares, “‘I don’t know what I feel, Nicholas. Except that I want you to feel like that'” (355). Ah, yes: the hardest travel of all is to the heart, but The Magus is a travel novel for what happens to its characters and because it would be an excellent companion—it’s fairly compact but very long and would be marvelous in exotic places like the ones it describes. In addition, you would have some opportunity to forget or forgive the more ridiculous passages and savor the meatier ones. The melodrama wouldn’t gall as much, and the overly cute bits could be taken with the seriousness they appear to shoot for. The Magus is clever but takes too many pains to be clever: I understand the commentary it makes implicitly and explicitly about the shimmering, leaping, uncertain border between life and art, but I just wish it weren’t so damn annoying about it. And that the characters would just get it on or break it off already.

Finally, on a personal note, the oddest thing about The Magus for me was the eerie resonance some passages had with some of the writing I’ve been working on. Especially in first third of The Magus, I kept having to shake off the bizarre feeling of being preceded by an author I’d never read and knew little about. And yet my novel is done, and so to find aspects of it in The Magus unsettles. But I do think I avoided many of its pitfalls and kept some of the qualities that made The Magus delightful.

Ladies’ Man

March 16, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Repulsive characters go a long way back before 1978, but I can’t help noticing the peculiar slime of a guy whose girlfriend has a 105 degree temperature, and then says: “She fell asleep in my arms and I lay there furious because she didn’t acknowledge my sacrifice, the comforting strength of my goddamn presence. I wanted her to say ‘Thank you’ or ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you’ or ‘Oh, Kenny’ or something […]'” Richard Price’s Ladies’ Man spans a week, and this thought occurs on Friday, but the object of his objection has already dumped him in more a de facto than de jure manner on Monday or Tuesday. Like Kenny, the narrator, I found it difficult to remember what happened on what day. This is in part because nothing major happens to him, in the physical, emotional, or intellectual worlds, though a man who thinks: “It was my ‘leisure’ time and I was blowing it. What leisure time? That’s all I had was leisure time” is an unlikely person to have a great epiphany.

Like Ladies’ Man, however, Kenny is not without some redeeming qualities; he “pretend[s] to watch a basketball game which had orange guys against green guys.” This predates The Onion’s hilarious, “You Will Suffer Humiliation When The Sports Team From My Area Defeats The Sports Team From Your Area,” which covers the same territory. But his lack of interest in basketball mirrors his lack of interest in most of the rest of his life, and he’s so ironic and distant and above the fray that I wonder if we should care about Kenny only as much as he cares about everything else. Even his relative humanity is insincere:

Nothing heavy. Just misty sadness. It was over. It had been the best and now it was over and nothing had ever felt as good. We had peaked back then, and all we’d been doing since was dying.

This is a 30-year-old reminiscing about sweaty high school makeouts. He’s self-indulgent in other ways: “No wonder I was so goddamn lonely. Friends, man. I didn’t have any fucking friends. And friends were the bottom line.” Well, yes, and we get 264 pages demonstrating exactly why Kenny has no friends. What’s he going to do when he’s, say, 50? Perhaps read The Sea, which is at least a higher level of melancholy wistfulness. Oh, and Max Morden is as nicer a person than Kenny as a golden retriever is a nicer animal than a cobra. One woman who Kenny picks up feels his bite, although it is one of indifference rather than venom. For a character with vastly greater self-absorption than Kenny who is also vastly less constrained by society, try John Self in Money, who is the king of these weak anti-Hemingways who are also created by Price, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis.

I mention Hemingway because all three writers use devolved versions of his characters and prose. Kenny speaks without the classical background of Jake in The Sun Also Rises, and he has none of the restraint or passion of the characters in that book. Still, he whips out the occasional great metaphor in the pulp style: “For eighteen years that sound was an unnoticeable to me as my heartbeat” or “he had enough chest hair for a national park.” You can hear Elmore Leonard, or one of his models, George Higgins. These metaphors can’t redeem a long, awkward sex scene and lots of navel gazing or a character who can’t figure out that perhaps assholes are the only people who think everyone else is an asshole, as Kenny does at a bar: “Loud, suburban contractors and their wives, drunk Texans, Jap businessmen, medical students; assholes, all assholes.” We’ve been feeling scorn for the bourgeoise since Flaubert if not earlier, but now we have someone who doesn’t even recognize where his opinions come from, despite alluding to Joseph Conrad.

Kenny says things like “‘How many zorts that set you back?'” and wallows in the detritus of TV pop culture. Yes, we get it, but as the cliche goes, lie down with dogs and wake up with flees. Kenny, however, lacks the consciousness to realize this.

I read Ladies’ Man because I’d heard about Price’s Clockers and his new novel, Lush Life, both of which have been favorably compared to Ladies’ Man. I’ve read neither yet but intend to: Ladies’ Man is not without artistic redemption, and it sounds like Price’s bigger, better novels are worthier. Whether they live up to expectations remains to be seen.

Ladies' Man

March 16, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Repulsive characters go a long way back before 1978, but I can’t help noticing the peculiar slime of a guy whose girlfriend has a 105 degree temperature, and then says: “She fell asleep in my arms and I lay there furious because she didn’t acknowledge my sacrifice, the comforting strength of my goddamn presence. I wanted her to say ‘Thank you’ or ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you’ or ‘Oh, Kenny’ or something […]'” Richard Price’s Ladies’ Man spans a week, and this thought occurs on Friday, but the object of his objection has already dumped him in more a de facto than de jure manner on Monday or Tuesday. Like Kenny, the narrator, I found it difficult to remember what happened on what day. This is in part because nothing major happens to him, in the physical, emotional, or intellectual worlds, though a man who thinks: “It was my ‘leisure’ time and I was blowing it. What leisure time? That’s all I had was leisure time” is an unlikely person to have a great epiphany.

Like Ladies’ Man, however, Kenny is not without some redeeming qualities; he “pretend[s] to watch a basketball game which had orange guys against green guys.” This predates The Onion’s hilarious, “You Will Suffer Humiliation When The Sports Team From My Area Defeats The Sports Team From Your Area,” which covers the same territory. But his lack of interest in basketball mirrors his lack of interest in most of the rest of his life, and he’s so ironic and distant and above the fray that I wonder if we should care about Kenny only as much as he cares about everything else. Even his relative humanity is insincere:

Nothing heavy. Just misty sadness. It was over. It had been the best and now it was over and nothing had ever felt as good. We had peaked back then, and all we’d been doing since was dying.

This is a 30-year-old reminiscing about sweaty high school makeouts. He’s self-indulgent in other ways: “No wonder I was so goddamn lonely. Friends, man. I didn’t have any fucking friends. And friends were the bottom line.” Well, yes, and we get 264 pages demonstrating exactly why Kenny has no friends. What’s he going to do when he’s, say, 50? Perhaps read The Sea, which is at least a higher level of melancholy wistfulness. Oh, and Max Morden is as nicer a person than Kenny as a golden retriever is a nicer animal than a cobra. One woman who Kenny picks up feels his bite, although it is one of indifference rather than venom. For a character with vastly greater self-absorption than Kenny who is also vastly less constrained by society, try John Self in Money, who is the king of these weak anti-Hemingways who are also created by Price, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis.

I mention Hemingway because all three writers use devolved versions of his characters and prose. Kenny speaks without the classical background of Jake in The Sun Also Rises, and he has none of the restraint or passion of the characters in that book. Still, he whips out the occasional great metaphor in the pulp style: “For eighteen years that sound was an unnoticeable to me as my heartbeat” or “he had enough chest hair for a national park.” You can hear Elmore Leonard, or one of his models, George Higgins. These metaphors can’t redeem a long, awkward sex scene and lots of navel gazing or a character who can’t figure out that perhaps assholes are the only people who think everyone else is an asshole, as Kenny does at a bar: “Loud, suburban contractors and their wives, drunk Texans, Jap businessmen, medical students; assholes, all assholes.” We’ve been feeling scorn for the bourgeoise since Flaubert if not earlier, but now we have someone who doesn’t even recognize where his opinions come from, despite alluding to Joseph Conrad.

Kenny says things like “‘How many zorts that set you back?'” and wallows in the detritus of TV pop culture. Yes, we get it, but as the cliche goes, lie down with dogs and wake up with flees. Kenny, however, lacks the consciousness to realize this.

I read Ladies’ Man because I’d heard about Price’s Clockers and his new novel, Lush Life, both of which have been favorably compared to Ladies’ Man. I’ve read neither yet but intend to: Ladies’ Man is not without artistic redemption, and it sounds like Price’s bigger, better novels are worthier. Whether they live up to expectations remains to be seen.

The Book of Vice

March 9, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Arguably, if you need a book on how to do vice, you’re unlikely to actually commit many vices. That’s the message I took from Peter Sagal’s The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (And How to do Them), a hilarious book that examines vice from an anthropologist’s perspective rather than a participant’s. Even if you do learn how to commit vices, you’re unlikely to do so on the scale discussed here. Sure, Sagal discusses swinging and even goes to a swingers’ event, but he doesn’t actually, uh, swing, in the chapter he goes on a long, quasi-scholarly tangent on the mating habits of bees:

When the male honeybee ejaculates, he explodes. And before female readers start weighing the pros and cons of this, consider that via this explosion, the honeybee separates himself from his genitalia, which he leaves lodged in the female, preventing any further canoodling. The bee goes to his death in his moment of ecstasy, his last thought probably being the honeybee equivalent of: “ha!”

Fortunately, Sagal is such an excellent, funny writer that I’m more than willing to read his tangents on animal mating, which is a persistent theme. His descriptions are better than those in most literary fiction I read and are rivaled by Woody Allen: “Somewhere out by the Glendale Freeway, miles away from the louche hillsides and corrugated flats of Porn Valley, there is a particular eruption of cinder block, with asphalt and chain-link moat, generic even by L.A. standards.” L.A. is perhaps the most generic city in existence, unique only for how generic it is, which makes this particular shack especially notable. In the section on strippers, Sagal says that “They [the strippers] exposed their buttocks and the Mysteries Within to us in a manner that reminded me, a little dizzyingly, of mating displays I had seen on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.” But don’t think he looks down on strippers or any of the others he studies, as the overarching theme isn’t really vice—it’s power, a sort of laymen’s Foucault that deals not with political structures and networks but interpersonal struggles and cash. Arguably interpersonal struggles and cash can be incorporated into Foucault’s discourse, but that’s wandering too far afield: Sagal is interested in how strippers extract cash from their clients, porn stars extract it from their clients, restauranteurs from their diners, and the like. Even the host of the swingers’ party makes a little cash, though not too much. The same is true of consumption in the sense of conspicuous, as Sagal rides in his in-laws’ private jet, notes yachts, and discusses the hierarchy of high-end automobiles and what they signify. Once you have enough money, it becomes gauche to drive a Maybach and cool to drive a beater, as Warren Buffet apparently does. The only people who find Ferraris cool are apparently software millionaires, aspiring software millionaires, and mobile home residents. Many if not most cars, like much consumer detritus, are meant to signify power relationships, with the beater cars driven by gazillionaires an indication that the gazillionaire has risen so high that he—and he is almost always a he—has risen so high as to not need to display his ostentatious wealth, which in turn becomes ostentatious.

Studying the meaning of power and vice can become exhausting in trying to decipher its meaning. This is why it’s good that Sagal has a deft touch with euphemism, as the above quotes show, and with humor in its many forms. On the wealthy, he notes that many purchases aren’t designed just to show money, but that the rich “want a little token, just a package of wild rice, to indicate that they’re liked.” He sets the tone in the introduction:

Two hundred and thirty-odd years ago, a progressive thinker of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment envisioned a utopia, and in America we have come near to perfecting it on earth. Wherever the Marquis de Sade is now, he must be proud. I imagine him wandering through the Power Exchange [a San Francisco sex club inhabited mostly by lonely men whose pornographic dreams don’t come true], eyeing the copious bowls of condoms and lube, the porn playing in continuous loops on monitors and the walls, and saying, “Truly, this is the paradise that I envisioned. . . . But why does everybody look so confused?”

Many people do look and act confused in this book, including at times the purveyors of various kinds of vice. Josh is the son of the owner of the Power Exchange, and Sagal observes that “Josh, in his father’s eyes, could do nothing right, which might explain why he found it so hard, as I observed him that evening, to do anything right.” I doubt I’d do any better than Josh at hosting an exhibitionists’ show in a sex club. Vice, as with most things done right, is hard work. It’s also elusive, and Sagal says that “The Power Exchange was, for the most part, nine thousand square feet of tease.” It’s a bit like a BYOB party, except you’re not brining beer. The same is true of the swingers’ event where Sagal doesn’t swing, and it’s also a lot of work to set up.

By the end of the book, you can’t help thinking that Sagal is happier being happily married than he would be a glutton, a gazillionaire, a swinger, a porn star, or a gambler. It’s easier being faithfully married, for one thing, and it’s perhaps easier to keep that ironic eye on the rest of the world, and especially the small corner of it engaged in serious vice. Despite the way formerly big vices are becoming commonplace—”Nowadays, as with almost every other aspect of what used to be the Divine Right of Kings and Kings alone, anybody can partake in these pleasures: aristocracy, like roof tar, seeps downward”—Sagal implies that you’re probably better off not indulging in them, or indulging when you’re young and frisky and then settling down, as at least one porn star does. Furthermore, those engaged in vice are working, and working in jobs that quickly become just jobs; as one man says of strippers, “‘They’re like psychiatrists […] except they get paid by the minute, and in crumpled dollar bills.'” More hilarity from Segal’s choice of quote, and underneath that more commentary on the relative power of the vice seeker and vice provider. They’re both work. I can’t help but thinking that The Book of Vice is more likely to anesthetize one’s desire for vice, rather than enflame it.

Perhaps that’s Segal’s biggest point. But on the way it’s a very fun ride, and probably much more fun than paying more than $50 to be a single male at the Power Exchange.

Sleepless Nights — Elizabeth Hardwick

March 8, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Sleepless Nights isn’t much good for sleepless nights because it’s not somnolent, and yet it also isn’t engaging. Rather, it’s a jagged and random novelette that so leaps from idea to idea and style to style as to make me roll my eyes and give up. It is a novel only in that it departs least from that form, but, unlike In Search of Lost Time, which has been described the same way, Sleepless Nights is irredeemably irritating. Nothing in it hangs together, and it is like a cruel parody of modernism without the levity of satire to make up for its deficiencies. With it I’m tempted to play the Derrida parlour game.

For those of you unfamiliar with it, the game goes like this: take one of Derrida’s convoluted sentences and negate it, such that the sentence says the opposite of what it once did. Read or give both sentences to someone else, ideally an expert in Derrida, and ask them to decide which he wrote. I once tried to play this with a literary theory professor, who didn’t like the game. The same game could be played here too: does Hardwick say, “Nothing groans under treachery,” or,”Everything groans under treachery?” Does she say, “Real people: nothing like your mother and father, nothing like those friends from long ago […]” or “Real people: everything like your mother and father, everything like those friends from long ago […]”? Does she say, “The weak have the purest sense of history,” or “The strong have the purest sense of history?” Either could be true, with no change in the narrative or outcome, if you can call what happens “outcome.”

Then there is fuzzy language of the sort B.R. Myers hates; I have yet to see “acrimonious twilight [fall].” And do the weak have the purest sense of history, which the narrator (also named Elizabeth) posits? Maybe: but if so, this novel doesn’t prove it, or even do more than state it and move on. It also goes for the obvious and tautological in the place of the profound: “It was what she was always doing, and in the end what she had done.” Yes, the present becomes the future and we’ve eventually done whatever it is that we’re doing. This would seem obvious, and I wouldn’t note it if it were somehow connected to the rest of this disjointed narrative.

Nothing connects and little happens, which Geoffrey O’Brien excuses in the introduction: “The norms of fiction, the reader of Sleepless Nights might well conclude, are after all a constriction, or at least a superfluity: Since to live is to make fiction, what need to disguise the world as another, alternate one?” There is much to be said about challenging the norms of fiction, but this book doesn’t: it wanders and meanders into nothing. And what O’Brien means by saying “to live is to make fiction” he never explains, and the only way to make living a fiction is to stretch fiction beyond whatever bounds it might have into something so unrecognizable that it covers all things and thus loses the specificity that make it a definitive concept in the first place.

This is, he says, “a novel that could allow itself to move in any direction in time that it chose, that could shift its attention from one person or situation to another as abruptly as a filmmaker might splice together two incongruous images; a novel that seem[s] to declare the impossibility of separating itself from life […]”. Even if a novel can move in any direction and through any time, perhaps the fact that it can doesn’t mean it should, as Sleepless Nights demonstrates. And all this double-talk is merely from the first page of O’Brien’s introduction. Compare O’Brien’s facile dismissal of “the norms of fiction” to what David Lodge says of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: “The process [of placing the novel in a historical period, which Lodge explains] demonstrates an interesting aspect of the composition of fiction, namely, that the acceptance of a constraint which may seem frustrating and bothersome at first often leads to the discovery of new ideas and story-stuff.” It doesn’t appear that Hardwick had any problem using constraints to discover new ideas and story-stuff, since Sleepless Nights has little of either.

To be fair, in the introduction O’Brien is describing what will come more than anything else, and it is not his description so much as his defense that I attack. And I attack it all the more because a few passages ring: “Every great city is a Lourdes where you hope to throw off your crutches but meanwhile must stumble along on them, hobbling under the protection of the shrine.” In this context, the passage is vulnerable to the Derrida parlour game, but it could be something more. Alas: amid the random thoughts, incomplete sentences, and even more random shifts in place, perspective, and the like, it is adrift, cut off from its network and lost amid the vicissitudes of a book with no spine.