Tag Archives: Literature

Henderson the Rain King

May 23, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Henderson the Rain King is not my favorite Bellow novel: Henderson’s sojourn in Africa is unconvincing and borders on Orientalism, the novel’s symbolism is heavy, and some disjointed sections feel superfluous, as when Henderson writes letters to his wife, Lily, in Chapter 19, or when he discusses the lion hunts with King Dahfu. Still, even Bellow batting below average scores more hits than most writers at their best, and in rereading Henderson I remember why I like Bellow so much—he’s so alive, and his characters ceaselessly try to expand their own lives and learn to encompass this big thing we call life. Granted, they’re always unsuccessful at the latter, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s an impossible quest just to understand life—especially humanity in all its varieties—let alone encompassing it, is probably impossible.

This might feed into what Bellow, like some other great novelists, so disliked about academic research and writing, as academics by definition try to define and elucidate, while so much of Bellow’s writing shows why some major factors of life simply can’t be elucidated. Therefore, academics and critics like me are ourselves going on a futile quest in our attempts to comprehend Bellow, who wrote novels like Henderson that show why the explaining isn’t possible; as Sam Tanenhaus wrote regarding the Library of America edition of Bellow, “It may be heretical, or just foolish, for a book review editor to admit it, but there are times when criticism is beside the point.” Indeed, and it makes me wary in writing this. No wonder Bellow liked Blake’s poetry, as I see some of the same defiance of full explanation in Blake, especially his later work. Henderson is a particularly strong example of this tendency, with the protagonist’s constant drive toward something he can’t seem to articulate beyond “I want, I want,” forming a base for the unnameable: what does Henderson want? Life? Experience? Knowledge? Something else?

Much of Henderson is, I think, intended as comic, given its outlandish events. Still, those events, like the lion hunt or the moving of the statue, are too symbolically endowed for my taste. They seem more like a statement of Henderson’s character than necessary events to the novel. Such scenes also parallel to too great a degree Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. That book came out in 1949 and Henderson in 1959, and during the period between them Bellow might have read or at least heard about Hero. Many of its elements show in farcical ways: the call to adventure is through narcissistic desire that leads to departure from the United States for Africa; failure in the blown-up water cistern; initiation in the form of moving a statute; and eventual success, after a fashion. Henderson is more concerned with himself than anyone or thing else, however, and rather than reconciling himself with his society he thinks that, “this is the payoff of a lifetime of action without thought” when he’s forced to imitate a jungle beast. As he says elsewhere, noting the ridiculousness of his own situation, “If I had to shoot at that cat, if I had to blow up frogs, if I had to pick up Mummah without realizing what I was getting myself into, it was not out of line to crouch on all fours and roar and act the lion.”

Yet in Henderson those comic aspects are also a critique of the quest narrative, as Henderson can’t find wholeness or completion. He searches for an abstraction layer not available through travel, even when elements of home—the United States—follow him: “It was just my luck to think I had found the conditions of life simplified so I could deal with them—finally!—and then to end up in a ramshackle palace reading these advanced medical texts.” The issues keep coming: “And though I’m no expert I guess he’s [King Dahfu] thinking of mankind as a whole, which is tired of itself and needs a short in the arm from animal nature.” If that weren’t enough, he continues: “Anyway, I begin to ask (or perhaps it was more a plea than a question), why is it always near me—why! Why can’t I get away from it awhile? Why, why!” Why indeed: it’s a question religion doesn’t answer, or at least not satisfactorily anymore, and that philosophy seems to have failed at answering despite its numerous and increasingly verbose attempts, and that novels pose and don’t seem to answer. In the mythology Campbell discusses, you come back from your quest whole and ready to take your place in the adult community or you die and uphold the standards of that community or you transcend life; in Henderson and later, ironic texts, your quest is forever incomplete, because like Henderson, you can’t answer that pivotal question that becomes an exclamation: “Why, why!”

Why, why! indeed, and Bellow keeps setting up the questions through exploration without giving answers. The closest he comes, I think, is in Ravelstein, where Chick marvels at the “creature” that is Ravelstein while also being resigned to accept his fate. Whether this is an improvement on the manic energy of earlier Bellow novels or a depressing acceptance of the end is a matter of perspective on which I have no opinion. But, like the master, I will try to frame the issue, even if the issue has a habit of being larger than that frame. And so the critic struggles with Bellow like Itelo wrestling with Henderson, and even champion critics don’t seem able to win. But this preoccupation with trying to explain Bellow stays with me, and this is not, I suspect, my last word on the subject, even if my attempts are as futile as Henderson’s.

Links for May 12

May 12, 2008 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
  • Simon Lipskar, a literary agent whose assistant sent perhaps the nicest and most encouraging rejection letter I’ve ever received, recently gave an excellent interview, in which he most notably said, “Writers should write the books they love. That way, no matter what the market says, their time wasn’t wasted.” I agree, but it would also be nice if the market were interested. The theme of love and market is one you’ll hear more about shortly.

“The New Confessions” is my favorite of Mr. Boyd’s many fine novels, but I recommend all of them. His most recent, “Restless,” a historical spy story published last year, is intelligent and thrilling; its heroine is an old woman. “Any Human Heart,” perhaps Mr. Boyd’s most critically acclaimed novel, is also a fictional autobiography of an English adventurer not so different from John James Todd.

I’ve often wondered why Mr. Boyd hasn’t become a British literary star in America, the way Nick Hornby, Martin Amis and John Mortimer have. He’s as good a writer as any of them. Maybe there’s no rational explanation for why some great writers don’t win the commercial sweepstakes. Maybe it’s just luck.

As if that weren’t enough, she also says:

In my last column I asked for recommendations of chewy modern novels. One reader mentioned “The Echo Maker” by Richard Powers, which I agree is one of those rare books with a plot that races and a thoughtfulness that slows you down. Two other modern novels I found equally provocative were “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell and “Seven Types of Ambiguity” by Elliot Perlman. I have a friend who recently reread “Cloud Atlas.” She said it was even better the second time.

Hmmm, among that, Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night, and rereading some Saul Bellow, I’m not sure where I’m going to find time in the next few weeks.

  • “The Watch That Ends the Night?” you ask. Terry Teachout says:

At any rate I finally got around to reading The Watch That Ends the Night last week, and I was knocked flat by it, so much so that I had to ration the number of pages I allowed myself each day so that I wouldn’t be distracted from my deadlines. I intend at some point in the next couple of weeks to discuss it in the weekly book column that I write for Commentary’s Web site, so I won’t jump the gun here. Suffice it for the moment to say that I feel inclined to rank it alongside Peter de Vries’ The Blood of the Lamb, an equally ill-remembered novel of similar vintage and subject matter (both books have at their center a woman who is suffering from a fatal illness and are narrated by a man who loves her).

  • Razim questions why modern literature doesn’t appeal to him so much as the past and comes up with a lot of answers that sound, to my ears, vaguely sexist. A more probable answer is this: modern literature—meaning anything published after World War II—is still being sorted out as to what’s worth reading and what’s not, and the cacophony of popular literature has probably drowned out some of the avant garde that will one day be acknowledged as great.

In addition, I think tastes have also shifted and become more dispersed, meaning that multiple kinds of canons are being created, rather than the more singular, dominant kind of past. Finally, I’m not sure the demand shift Razim argues is enough to explain the changes in literature; even if women read most fiction, an absolute number of men read it sufficiently to create their own market. This goes back to the dispersion argument.

(Hat tip Tyler Cowen).

Life

May 9, 2008 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

“What happened was this: I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but this is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind which become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters.”

—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

The Inner Circle

May 8, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

T.C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle is the infrequent novel that improves substantially the second time around to the point of making me reevaluate it altogether. It features Boyle’s mischievous, whimsical prose:

[…] Laura Feeney smiled and before I knew it I was on my way to becoming an initiate in the science of sex, abandoning the ideal for the actual, the dream of Stella (“True, that true beauty if virtue indeed”) for anatomy, physiology and an intimate knowledge of the Bartholin’s glands and labia minora. All of it—all the years of research, the thousands of miles traveled, the histories taken, the delving and rooting and pioneering—spun out like thread from an infinite spool held in the milk-white palm of Laura Feeney on an otherwise ordinary morning in the autumn of 1939.

That’s John Milk speaking, the narrator who is as bland as his name, and an assistant to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Notice, however, the cleverness of the long, almost run-on sentences in that quote, with Milk on his way “before I knew it,” and us readers past that idea before we knew, drawn along by the rambling, Bellow-like tide of the sentence. Then, Boyle almost wanders into the cliché of comparing life to a weaver’s loom, which goes all the way back to the Greeks and, more recently, Shakespeare, but he pulls back from it by using Laura’s palm as the focus and playing with the idea of the milk-white of her palm and “Milk” as his name. And he is often played with by others, whether by women or by Kinsey. His central narrative gift is to simultaneously describe his interaction with Kinsey, the great man, while deluding himself concerning the extent of his self-involvement and dependence on Kinsey. After a spurt of initial interest brings Milk to Kinsey, Milk is ruled by the older man, and it’s not Laura’s palm but Kinsey’s that controls Milk.

The Inner Circle has wonderful resonances, with phrases, descriptions, ideas rolling into and referring to one another in a subtle harmony that is difficult to untangle even on a second reading. The philosophical tension between the mind’s creation of love and the body’s needs is always present, along with the push and pull of Kinsey on Milk and whether Milk is his own person. The obvious and probably correct answer is “no,” despite Milk’s protestation to the contrary. He’s self-delusional throughout, and says of a comment made by Mac, Kinsey’s wife, that “I saw the truth of it,” as he thinks he does numerous times. Elsewhere, Milk says that “rumormongers”—note the deliberately anachronistic word—say that Kinsey chooses “the members of his team based on his ability to control and dominate them […]” He does, and the reader sees that even if Milk doesn’t. When Kinsey lightly rebukes Milk for holding up the work because Milk comes in late, our narrator says “Normally I would have been mortified—I hated for anyone to question my devotion and loyalty, especially [Kinsey], to whom I owed everything […]” Does that sound like the voice of an independent man? I thought not.

How much of this description of Kinsey is accurate and how much the artist’s creative prerogative is unclear; outside of what I know from Bonk and popular culture, I’ve never learned anything of Kinsey. Boyle conveniently thanks Kinsey’s various biographers, so one looking for more can find more, but I’m rather content with his story, which is perhaps the truth rather than the facts. And if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter; the device of using Milk as a narrator works: except for his major blindspot regarding his own independence, he serves as a strong vessel for Boyle’s usual panache with words.

To be sure, the novel is not flawless: Iris, who is supposed to act as the counterbalance to Kinsey and a voice encouraging Milk to resist, is never forceful enough, and the major clashes between Iris and Milk are too curt and claustrophobic. Kinsey himself never gets more than the touch of Ahabian madness he really needs; until his own strength is giving out near the end, he doesn’t show how he considers himself the singular figure we suspect he thinks he is. Nonetheless, these flaws are paltry next to The Inner Circle’s verve, and now it surprises me that I didn’t better appreciate it the first time around.

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.

Lush Life and Richard Price in Seattle

April 10, 2008 By in Books Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Richard Price’s Lush Life is a study in power—who has it, who doesn’t, who is trying to get it—and dignity, which, sooner or later, almost every character loses. Those who have power and dignity in one sphere, as detective Matty Clark mostly does in the police world, lose it in another, as Matty does at home. He is uncomfortably close to a stock genre detective, but the lush language of Lush Life gives Matty others such life that they are people, and people who reflect their social and media environment.

Lush Life begins not with a murder but with the “Quality of Life Task Force,” a group of four white cops who are lowering, not raising, the quality of life. The idiotic speculation of one is juxtaposed with an image representing one of the book’s central concerns:

“Who the fuck puts a Howard Johnson’s down here?” Scharf gestures to the seedy-looking chain hotel, its neighbors an ancient knishery and a Seventh-Day Adventist church whose aluminum cross is superimposed over a stone-carved Star of David. “What was the thinking behind that.”

Groups overlap in Price’s Lower East Side, with the influence of the earlier group never fully erased, just as the Star of David is still faintly visible. People linger, which Price spoke about when he visited Seattle in March, saying that there are “six groups of people who don’t realize they’re not there anymore.” Moreover, as he says, “nobody knows anybody, nobody sees anything,” especially relating to crime, which leads to the perceived necessity of the Quality of Life Task Force and the real necessity of detectives like Matty.

The intersection of two particular groups leads murder, one group being the relatively wealthy suburban kids—I think of them as kids though one, Eric Cash, is a 35 waiter and would-be screenwriter—who move back to the areas their grant parents fled and provide the victim. The other group is the poor urban kids who might have provided the perpetrators. None come off well. Nor do their parents, who range from uninterested in actively hostile. The murder of Isaac Marcus, for example, inspires his divorced parents to shack up again in a hotel, and when Matty arrives afterward and opens a curtain, “both of them staring at him with the unself-consciousness of animals, with unblinking pie-eyed shock.” But are they in shock at the light, Matty, themselves, or the situation? I’m not sure, which is part of the novel’s beauty.

Ambiguity is everywhere, as characters hope and dream of higher places. Eric is a friend, loosely defined, of Isaac Marcus, his desire to get into the movies is a much lighter version of Sean Touhey from Clockers. Lush Life in general is a better, subtler, richer version of Clockers, which is a tremendous compliment, for Clockers itself is a strong novel. But Lush Life goes beyond it, artistically and socially. Where Clockers is all cops and robbers, Lush Life encompasses everyone from the rich kids and the nominally upper echelons of society to the street dregs. It captures the former better than, say, Claire Messud’s good if indulgent The Emperor’s Children, which also focuses on them, and the latter with the skill Price has already established. You see a fantastic collision on page 92, when Eric tries to describe his work, of which he is vaguely ashamed, especially in the face of the skeptical cops. And with good reason: Matty belittles him, the scene is so effective I a) hesitate to quote it and yet b) want to so badly*. The scene works so well because you know Matty’s description is what Eric thinks of himself if he’s being intellectually honest.

To the extent there are novelistic rules about plot, characterization, movement, motion, and the like, I don’t think Price breaks them—he simply wields novelistic conventions better than almost anyone else and uses his talent on language itself. One dangerous thing about writing a long post and then leaving it till much later for proofreading is that you never know when James Wood is going to come along and preempt you. But his discussion of Price’s dialog is worth reading, and I note that he also found the excruciating interrogation scene and quoted the same scene. Wood focuses on the dialog, but the brilliant descriptions and contrasts also help:

Despite its stark opulence, the place was the size of a shoe box, with barely a foot clearance between that huge bed and the three-sided terrace, which offered an imperial overview of the area: a sea of cramped and huddled walk-ups and century-old elementary schools, the only structures out there aspiring to any kind of height the randomly sprouting bright yellow Tyvek-wrapped multistory add-ons, and farther out, superimposed against the river, the housing projects and union-built co-ops that flanked the east side of this grubby vista like siege towers.

All that in one endlessly rolling sentence: by the time you’re at the end, you’ve forgiven him for using the shoebox cliché. Notice the missing verb between “height” and “the:” but it’s okay, the verb would only interrupt the flow of the speech, and I hadn’t realized its absence until after I quoted it here. The sentence tells you how the landscape reflects the people, with the age of it providing a backdrop of substance in lives that often seem to lack it.

Imperfections in Lush Lifeare minor: Tristan is flat, which is perhaps appropriate given his youth and the cruel environment in which he lives. Some allusions are improbable; would Eric or the third-person narrator mention the dancing of Tevye? Maybe, but despite Eric being Jewish I’m skeptical. Two pages later, though, and Price is hitting the high notes again, hiding and eliding and showing: “Seated with Minette on the front steps of the now deserted Langenshield, Matty went through the motions of rattling off a cursory progress report, omitting, of course, the continuing press gag, the scuttled seventh-day recanvass, and the unreturned phone calls.” We get a picture of the bureaucracy, are reminded of the plot, and learn about Matty in his role of cop in one swift, seamless recap; a page later, Matty’s lack of enthusiasm about his children is obvious: “He said, ‘Yeah,’ but Minette read the tell, searched his eyes for what he wasn’t saying.” As previously mentioned, Matty does fit the template of emotionally wounded but dedicated cop too well, just as his sidekick, Yolanda, is too close a fit to the wisecracking assistant, but these are things only recognized afterwards, as I discovered that the characters lead lives of what appear to be squalor from the outside. But Lush Life gives the sense that maybe their lives are redeemed by moments of happiness or small success. As the conflicts between cultural and social classes, law and desire, and power and language play out, Lush Life brought me along like a literary but streetsmart guide. I mentioned how few novels have moved me recently, and it’s a pleasure to find one that does so with such panache and skill.

The crowd at his reading, or at least the verbal part of it, seemed less interested in discussing the novel itself and the aforementioned panache and skill than the Lower East Side. A number of older transported New Yorkers came to talk, apparently, about geography and places.

But Price talked about ideas, too—about the residents who don’t want to complain too much because they’re immigrants, the families who came to the Lower East Side as immigrants and fled as soon as possible, and the ones now going back because of the real estate costs elsewhere in New York. One thing Price avoids is The Wonderful Past, as he said the Lower East Side “has always been a hellhole,” and sentimentality about it is only useful for the preservationists and such. One ironic point Price made is that a tenement museum exists not far from actual tenements, which I can believe.

I asked about the connection between Tom Wolfe, whose The Bonfire of the Vanities bears many similarities to Lush Life, and his own work. Price thought I referred to “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast” as mentioned here, but I said I meant that or Wolfe’s fiction. Price said it wasn’t explicitly on his mind but that Tom Wolfe had a point with his essay, and that there’s a whole world out there and you’re not obligated to make yourself its center. Instead of searching one’s interior, Price said “you can find yourself by getting lost,” and that’s been doing so for 15 years by following his gut wherever it takes him.

I got the impression that Price doesn’t really like Wolfe but respects him; in Lush Life, Price is a more consciously literary version of Elmore Leonard, which is a very good thing. Regardless of literary influences, however, Price has written as good a book as I’ve read recently and one that will, I imagine, prove even more resilient than Clockers.

* Okay, I can’t resist, but you’ve been warned that I recommend you skip it so the passage blows you away in the context. Matty tells Eric: “I have listened to your shit in here all day. You are a self-centered, self-pitying, cowardly, envious, resentful, failed-ass career waiter. That’s your everyday jacket. Now, add to that a gun and a gutful of vodka? I don’t believe that shooting last night was an accident. I think you were a walking time bomb and last night you finally went off.”

Life

April 9, 2008 By in Life Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

“The Past was tied to him like a tin can to a cat’s tail, and even the smallest effort he made to advance produced a shaming din behind him.”

—John Banville writing as Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan

A Confederacy of Dunces

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

One good link deserves another: I mentioned a Cynthia Crossen column in my post on The Red Leather Diary. A few weeks ago, however, she wrote about the binary views John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces inspires:

I managed to get through 100 pages before I let myself off for time served. My sides didn’t split, my belly didn’t ache, my eyes didn’t water. With its wooden dialogue, one-ply characters and a plot as twisty as a clothesline, “A Confederacy of Dunces” left me wondering who were the dunces on the Pulitzer jury in 1981.

Some readers had predicted I might not appreciate Mr. Toole’s humor. James Mosrie of West Palm Beach, Fla., wrote, “In my experience, people either love or hate this book. I can never quite gauge what reaction they will have because I’ve known people of so many varying types and tastes be so extreme with their views on the book.”

Another reader wrote, “This may be the most polarizing book of all time. I know approximately 15 people (counting you) who have read it. Without exception, the book has either (a) immediately entered the reader’s “top-five all-time” list or (b) so turned off the reader that they couldn’t finish it. For whatever reason, there is no middle ground with this book.”

I’m in category (b): I tried to read A Confederacy of Dunces, saw nothing redeeming, and couldn’t finish it. Like Crossen and Terry Teachout, however, I wish funny books got more literary respect, especially because some of my favorite novels include Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, and Kingley Amis’ Lucky Jim. Only one of those makes it on Crossen’s list of recommended funny books, which appears at the bottom of her column.

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.

It’s Not You, It’s Your Books

April 4, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I’m sure that by now every book blogger has linked to It’s Not You, It’s Your Books in The New York Times. It’s hilarious, and I essentially agree with Beverly West except with the genders reversed:

After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.”

Finding someone who likes to read is one way of avoiding the bigger problem discussed in the next paragraph:

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”

Nabokov seems like a needlessly high test of literary taste, like demanding that a significant other not only be athletic, but participate in marathons. The purported link between fiction and empathy deserves a note too, since it might be used to justify otherwise almost sadistic requirement for literary knowledge and pleasure.