Book-Drunk

Literary Dealbreakers

2011-09-07T16:42:00.001-07:00

Without getting too much into it, because at this point its painfully boring....I wanted to share something that has come up recently because I decided to join an online dating site. It is great in many ways, but mostly ridiculous. It has however, forced me to acknowledge that all things aside (because all stakes are aside on the internet), there are a few ultimate, non negotiable literary deal breakers for me. Certain authors, books, ideas will make me click away from a page faster than you can say deux ex machina.

1. Chuck Palahniuk
Explanation: Maybe you read him in high school and thought it was really profound and shocking and so deep. Maybe even on a certain level you engaged with his sick and challenging portrayal of contemporary masculinity. However, no one past the age of 17 should respond to these stories. So the conclusion is, you haven't read anything since you were 17 (which is fine, just be up front) or you have awful taste anyway or you hate women.

2. Ayn rand
Explanation: Not Neccessary

3. Catcher in the Rye
Explanation: A variation on #1, if this still resonates with you more than anything you've read since, you aren't paying attention.

There are the obvious dissuasive markers of bad taste: "books?", Dan Brown, Bukowski, Fante...but nothing approaches deal breaker status quite like those three.

What are yours???

Anne Carson!

2011-09-02T16:33:00.000-07:00

In an email exchange with a new friend this week, I was reinvigorated with regards to Anne Carson. We talked about Decreation, its intense loneliness and yearning and maddening detachment. She is maddening not only due to ability to take herself out of the moment but also her penchant for intellectualizing the emotional. We all do this, sometimes its easier, sometimes its safer but it is no less real. Carson exists in a world of overwhelming literary inheritance, a swirling vortex of heavy ideas from the past. She has crafted a body of work that elevates criticism and critical engagement to formative work, art in its own right. She amazes me.

Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

2011-08-22T14:15:00.001-07:00

"The girl would slip into the forest, nocturnal, still as bark, when Palipana died ... She had already cut one of his phrases into the rock, one of the first things he had said to her, which she had held onto like a raft in her years of fear. She had chiselled it where the horizon of water was, so that, depending on tide and pull of the moon, the words in the rock would submerge or hang above their reflection or be revealed in both elements ... He had once shown her such runes, finding them even in his blindness, and their marginalia of ducks, for eternity. So she carved the outline of ducks on either side of his sentence. In the tank at Kaludiya Pokuna the yard-long sentence still appears and disappears. It has already become a legend. But the girl who stood waist-deep and cut it into rock in the last week of Palipana's dying life and carried him into the water beside it and placed his hand against it in the slop of the water was not old. He nodded, remembering the words. And now he would remain by the water and each morning the girl undressed and climbed down against the wall of submerged rock and banged and chiselled, so that in the last days of his life he was accompanied by the great generous noise of her work as if she were speaking out loud. Just the sentence. Not his name or the years of his living, just a gentle sentence once clutched by her, the imprint of it now carried by water around the lake."

Michael Ondaatje is just one of those writers, he creeps under your skin in his subtlest of moments and waits to hit you with the most perfect line of prose you have ever read at the novel's emotional climax. He consistently creates instances of unbelievably grand high drama (recall the English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion - whew!), balancing the narrative on the most precarious of precipices, between a gorgeous and highly articulate style and the demands of a quick, interesting plot. Somehow he saves himself from melodrama and parody. (P.S. He can also act as a fantastic gateway drug for literary fiction....my mother loved the English Patient and I convinced her to read In the Skin of a Lion based on this alone) I have to admit, I have been waiting to read this novel for a long time. I devour his books and it helps to space them out, there is little more upsetting for wanting the voice of a specific author and having no new material!
Anil's Ghost is his fifth novel and in many ways his most subdued. Although it does use multiple shifts in narrative tone, focus and point of view, there is a consistent skeletal structure to the plot. The novel revolves around Anil Rissera, a Sri Lankan expatriate and forensic anthropologist who has returned to Sri Lanka to work on a United Nations project devoted to identifying bodies. Assigned to work with an anthropologist, Sarath, who she (and we) are never fully allowed to trust, she discovers a skeleton on a government site and begins to investigate (or attempt to) who this man was and at whose hands he died. In their attempts to identify him, they come to rely on an artist whose craft lies in painting the eyes of idols. Ondaatje firmly puts the task of truth telling in the hands of the artist, giving his interpretive act evidenciary value. Accurately captured is the pervasive sense of fear and paranoia that monopolizes the actions and reactions of a population immersed in multiple civil conflicts for decades. His characters are entrenched in a kaleidoscopic array of moral ambiguities, choosing by both profession and ethical imperative to confront horror and persist. Anil's Ghost attempts the most difficult of writerly tasks, the balance between the plot and character that tilts so many novels into forgettable territory. Gradually we learn details of the lives of our characters, Anil's love affairs, Sarath's wife and Gamini's tragic loneliness, but it all comes after the impact of the plot has already dominated your reading of the novel. In the attempt to create an emotional unity between the characters at the climactic moment, we are given a bit too little too late, relegating the characters to proxies for Ondaatje's larger moral arguments. I found myself wanting to know more, to spend more time with these people, whose depth was never developed beyond their own functionality as plot devices. The most effective and affective moments of the novel are in his signature meandering passages, the dream-like state he produces reminiscent of a slightly more grounded magical realism.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

2011-08-11T08:41:00.001-07:00

"A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence.
I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."

Full disclosure: I saw Tom Ford's film adaptation before reading the novella. In a particularly self indulgent, down in the dumps kind of day - in fact I had just finished reading Hallucinating Foucault as well, deciding that what I needed to get through the day was to envelope myself in impressionistic treatises about loneliness and catharsis. Now, the film is beautiful - in fact at times it feels like a particularly meditative but gorgeous perfume ad. Julianne Moore chain smokes (only) hot pink Fantasia cigarettes, Colin Firth saunters knowingly in a perfectly pressed suit even while in the depths of depression, the colors are saturated and crisp, and the film is littered with moments in which time slows to a standstill and the soundtrack overtakes the dialogue, plunging the viewer into a purely sensory experience that recalls the plodding act of reading. Now...what the film was missing that the novel captures perfectly is frustration, specifically frustration fueled by anger.
The narrative arc of the film puts the protagonist and his loss at the center and (spoilers), takes the viewer through a single day, the day in which he has decided to end his life. Obviously one assumes shifts in tone and focus in an adaptation, but I never expected such a radical departure. The novel never implies suicide, the protagonist is far too engaged and frankly, angry to consider it as an option. While both consider a kind of reexamination of the vitality of life after considerable loss, the novel's vision of George is much more critical and much less maudlin. There is no doubt that George is depressed, his life after the death of his partner is a series of mechanisms with which to get by. Coping mechanisms and familiar but disdainful activities (driving on the freeway, dinner with his best friend who seems to do nothing but annoy him, social niceties with the neighbors) propel him through his life, his awareness acutely punctuated by heightened moments of justifiable anger at the state of the world and his life.
There are also unlikeable moments for George, which typically occur when he feels the most renewed. He defines himself in opposition to a dying acquaintance and his best friend. In these moments, Isherwood becomes almost too delighted to let George revel in his disdain for the female body manifest in his judgement of these two women whose affectations and histories are rendered as almost farcical. George's vitality in the classroom as well as the constantly humming undertone of sexuality in each of his encounters keeps him from becoming the shadow like character represented by the George of Tom Ford's film. Missing too, in Ford's adaptation is the kind of humor that peppers the prose. George's caricatures paint the world in a colorful and ridiculous light; his voice rings through the narrative as somehow the detached observer deigning to comment on the daily lives of those around him. The subtlety of his satire allows Isherwood to never show all of his cards, balancing the reader between political diatribes, tender memorializing, the anger at aging and the frustration of day to day life.

"George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength."

Angels and Insects by A.S. Byatt

2011-08-02T13:26:00.001-07:00

"Whom can I tell that I should not destroy in the telling."
Two novellas, joined thematically and stylistically, Morpho Eugenia and The Conjugial Angel comprise of Angels and Insects. Byatt returns here to familiar territory for her, the world of ideas in contrast with fantastical spiritualism or overwrought romantic love. Both novellas are set within the milieu of Victorian England, evoking not only the intellectual context but also the general "spirit of the age" that dominated cultural output and social interactions. Morpho Eugenia is in some ways a straightforward dramatic, mysterious love story of Victorian sexual indiscretion writ large and in other ways sets itself volumes apart in its evocation of the personal level upon which the upheaval of Darwinian ideas created rifts in the sense of Victorian self.
Our protagonist is William Adamson, an amateur entomologist whose studies and adventures have taken him to all corner of the earth, he embodies the classic colonial adventurer hero, a symbol of sexual and intellectual experience that disrupts the peace of the Alabaster house. Taken in by the Alabaster family, whose patriarch seems to want to have William around as a theoretical sparring partner for a kind of pseudo religious tract concerning Darwin's philosophies, William promptly falls in love with the tragic and beautiful Eugenia. Byatt at times gets away with the kinds of cliches that I would find obnoxious in other works, just by the sheer power of her prose and in the arch way in which she constructs her more ridiculous characters. Adamson himself inspires empathy and admiration while a character like Eugenia reminds one of a far less intelligent and effective Emma Bovary, if only in her last dying moments (Emma's not Eugenia's). She has a wry sense of humor typically embodied by a strong, contrasting female character - in this case Matty Crompton.
The novella spends a good deal of time setting up what seems to me, a largely overemphasized metaphor of the ant queen. Capitalizing upon the naturalist's tendencies of Adamson, Byatt sets forth long and often arduous descriptions of ant colonies.
I have not seen the movie adaptation - although based on the way in which Posession was filmed/ruined, I'm wary. Here is the trailer for your assessment.

The Conjugial Angel stands in stark contrast to the first novella. Still ostensibly concerned with Victorian morality, this time through the lens of spiritualism. Much less of a story than a kind of study on the relationship between the spiritualist impulse and the attachment to poetics, The Conjugial Angel attempts a meditation on mourning and loss through a fictional take off of Tennyson's In Memoriam. While interesting, the story never gets off the ground or finds its tone, never quite expanding from a philosophical distance.

Room by Emma Donaghue

2011-08-02T13:25:00.000-07:00

"In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.
Also everywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear."

This book seemed to come out of nowhere, although now that I've read it, it makes perfect sense that its doing so well at this particular moment. The cultural landscape is full of stories both real and fictional of captivity, rape, incest and torture. The fact that this book is sharing shelves with the Jaycee Duggard tell all says it all. While it can be said that we've always been fascinated with these stories (A Child Called It, Flowers in the Attic, Speak etc.), I would argue that the recent fictional fare has taken on a hyper-realism that strikes a far different tone than the melodrama of V.C. Andrews. Room was hesitantly suggested to me by a friend who had read it recently for her company's book club; her caveat was that she would rate this book very highly if classified as a novel for young adults, but less highly if it was considered literary fiction. In this regard I agree with her, although I do think that the task of marrying the framing concept with subtlety and literary prose would be next to impossible.

The novel is focused on Jack, our five year old narrator and his mother. We are introduced to them and their reality - the eleven by eleven room in which they live out their lives, held captive. Jack was born in the room and knows nothing of outside reality. It becomes clear early on that Jack's mother has chosen to create as rich of a reality as she can for Jack, completely obscuring their captivity and containing him within a fantasy of their own construction. The sense of space, both claustrophobic and incredibly expansive depending on the moment is immaculately constructed. In their daily routines and habits, Jack and his mother cover every inch of the room, utilizing every thing they have to its maximum potential. Because part of the beauty of the book is the way in which the plot propels from moment to moment through Jack's raw emotions, this is an instance in which I do not want to reveal too much of the plot except to say that it is fast paced and quite literally riveting.

Despite extraordinary circumstances, many of Jack's emotional responses (while magnified) are familiar in a sense. The comfort of constrictions and the antipathy towards change are juxtaposed by the very real need to change for his mother's sake. We experience not only Jack's difficulties but also his mother's through his eyes - the emotional stakes heightened by his undiluted emotional reactions to her coping mechanisms. The transition of Room to Outside is an overwhelming one; as Jack transitions so too does the reader. There is a dizziness and a dislocation that comes from opening up the world of the novel, the readers already well developed sense of empathy for Jack reaches a level of pathos. Jack also becomes a new lens through which to see everyday reality and interaction, calling into question routine, cultural norms and our standards of behavior.

While the story is purportedly based on the Fritzl case, Donaghue narrows the focus on two characters and remains at all times within the realms of hope. Despite the circumstances, Jack is incredibly intelligent, and as well nourished as possible given the reality. Donaghue avoids the depths of gruesome that she could very well justify in this story, instead choosing to focus intimately on the emotional relationship between Jack and Ma, keeping the narrative in Jack's hands makes this possible. In the absence of Ma getting to speak for herself, her darker moments are expressed through Jack's childlike coping mechanisms; without the option for running, hiding or fighting with his mother, Jack creates his own unique brand of logic with which to deal with complication.

Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers

2011-06-28T17:20:00.001-07:00

"Looking downward from an altitude of two thousand feet, the earth assumes order. A town, even Milan, is symmetrical, exact as a small grey honeycomb, complete. The surrounding terrain seems designed by a law more just and mathematical than the laws of property and bigotry: a dark parallelogram of pinewood, square fields, rectangles of sward. On this cloudless day the sky on all sides and above the plane is a blind monotone of blue, impenetrable to the eye and the imagination. But down below the earth is round. The earth is finite. From this height you do not see man and the details of his humiliation. The earth from this distance is perfect and whole."

This is Carson McCullers final novel before her death, and stands as her most uniquely personal and meditative work although nowhere near my favorite of hers. Revisiting familiar themes in her work, isolation, longing, loneliness and the effect of political and social upheaval on the internal lives of Southern folks, she recasts the die in terms of impending death, creating an all the more haunting atmosphere by rendering her usual themes in the light of death as a foregone conclusion. As she does, McCullers sets the scene with characters who are brimming with frustration at their own impotence. In this particular instance we are introduced to the local pharmacist in the small Southern town of Milan, J.T. Malone. He has just been diagnosed with leukemia and told that he may only have months to live - he begins to lash out in anger at the futility of his life. He shuns and ignores his wife, shirks work, maintaining his friendship with Judge Fox Clane most closely.

Judge Fox Clane is also suffering from poor health, the persistent and lonely memory of his dead wife and an inability to deal with shifting social norms and political will. Judge Clane is larger than life, a man of robust appetite and viewpoints. His grandson Jester Clane stands in stark contrast to his grandfather; a progressive breed of Southerner, a sensitive man, and gay. He forms a strong and fervent attachment to his grandfather's amaneunsis Sherman Pew, a blue-eyed black man whose obsession with finding his mother leads him to inventive storytelling. Sherman and Jester exist in that eroticized, antagonistic space familiar to us all, sparring with each other on intellectual as well as personal levels, often leaving one or the other wallowing in embarrassment in the aftermath.

The novel is set on the eve of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, exposing the rawest of nerves with regards to racial politics on the town. Judge Clane is constantly talking about his master plan of cashing in on Confederate money as a form of reparations for the damage done to the South during the Civil War, townspeople are quick tempered when Sherman Pew takes up residence in a part of town inhabited mostly by white people and things turn ugly when it all comes to a head. The long, constant, plodding road towards death works as background for social upheaval; both progressing in spite of those involved. McCullers invokes one of Tolstoy's more famous lines and turns it on its head "Death is always the same, but each man dies in his own way", ironically inverting the sense of tragedy that Tolstoy himself ironically imposed. Sometimes I forget how cheeky she can be.

McCullers addresses her characters in her typical way, delicately placing them in worlds churning with frustration. She keeps a cool distance from them and watches them squirm, forcing you to live through their more acute moments of emotional distress alongside them. Recently I had a long conversation about Carson McCullers with one of my more opinionated friends. He is opinionated in general, which I love but also specifically opinionated about literature, which I love even more. So rarely do I actually get to talk to people about books - even when we disagree vehemently they are cherished conversations. He doesn't like Carson McCullers, feels like her stories are too uncomfortable, too subdued. We had a long conversation that ended up being amazing about the ways in which we ourselves deal with emotion and boredom and powerful moments. It was a testament to how powerful a reader's attachments to literature can be. Anyway, I love McCullers for these very qualities, she creeps up on you like a draft and pulls the rug from under you leaving you feeling exposed, vulnerable and embarrassed not only capturing the emotion but also the response to the emotion. McCullers crafts characters that are simultaneously trying to stifle their emotional truths and constantly wallowing in them. She shatters bravado and self presentation, cutting right through to the lies and disguises we use to hide ourselves.

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

2011-06-28T17:19:00.000-07:00

"One can't have it both ways, but both ways is the only way I want it." - A.R. Ammons
Maile Meloy, darling of Granta and the Paris Review, uses this poem as the epigraph to her collection of stories in addition to using it as a direct illusion in one of its stories. This collection is reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor in both attitude and style, often forcing the reader into close contact with terribly unpleasant people and almost threateningly forcing us to confront moral conflict. The majority of the stories are set against the geographic backdrop of Montana, where Meloy herself grew up. The landscape becomes a living, breathing character of its own, magnifying extreme conditions but also the very real and vast distances between us.

Meloy's characters lack control over their lives and their decisions manifesting in almost violent and sudden reactions to their conditions. They all want it both ways, as one character says "What kind of fool wanted it only one way?", but this sentiment and the consequences stand as evidence to the contrary. Although Meloy avoids descending into what could easily exist as fairy tale style morality plays, she does judge her characters even if from a distance and with reserve.
What is most surprising is how she manages to pack such an emotional punch with such detachment, her voice evokes the mundanity of the day to day, the quiet and desperate way days can casually proceed, but she also delivers unexpected plot twists in and almost backhanded way. She is a master of understatement.

Each story is a close up character study, slowly unfolding from an individual (often a child) perspective. What keeps Meloy from self indulgence is the way in which she implicates the world in these problems. Everyone has a hand in unrealistic expectations and inability to deal with responsibility; a selfish, aging man's desire for an affair are juxtaposed with neglected children or environmental disaster.

My favorite story in the collection is "Travis B.". The story follows Chet Moran, a desperate and lonely rancher whose profession has marked him physically and psychically. This is an instance in which the landscape was used especially well. Chet falls in love with Beth Travis, a white lawyer who travels 9 hours by car to teach in his town. What works here is that Meloy doesn't overexplain. Chet's quiet resignation to his loneliness absorbs all that is unsaid; class, race, age, distance and experience are encompassed in a sigh.

Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Dunker

2011-06-20T14:32:00.000-07:00

" 'Every writer has a Muse,' said the Germanist slowly, 'no matter how anti-Romantic they are. For the irredeemably boring the Muse is a woman they've cooked up in their heads, propped like a voodoo doll on a pedestal and then persecuted with illusions, obsessions and fantasies. Paul Michel wasn't like that. He wanted someone real; someone who challenged him, but whose passions were the same. He fell in love with Foucault. It is absolutely essential to fall in love with your Muse. For most writers the beloved reader and the Muse are the same person. They should be."

The author often becomes the object of projection, against which enthusiastic readers can exercise their passions and their imaginations. The image of the creative genius whose intensity makes them an awkward fit in the mundanity of the day to day is a cliche....but we love it, or should I say I love it. A reader can get attached to an author through their body of work or the mythology constructed around them, imagining a unique connection to their thoughts - imagining that in some small way that they are communicating just to you - how else would they be able to know reach you on such a level? The image of the muse enters into this relationship in a more obtuse way, the author or the artist projecting ideal qualities onto a person in order to create something transcendent, but less is said about your "ideal reader", a reader that will not only inspire but will speak back to your work, an active participant in your discursive activity. Hallucinating Foucault brings this character to the fore, the ideal reader for whom an unhinged author would write - of course it would be Foucault.
In her debut novel, Dunker introduces us to a nameless narrator whose academic ambitions are just challenging enough, whose personality is just interesting enough and whose course through life has been one uninterrupted smooth sail. The subject of his studies is a fictional novelist named Paul Michel, a man whose radical queer politics and narrative passions characterized his career. Abruptly, he ceased to write and at the start of the novel, has spent the last thirty or so years in an asylum in the French countryside. When our narrator begins an affair with another student whose passions for her Phd subject Schiller drive her to tears and fits of passion. She is the one to finally inspire and even pressure the narrator into his pursuit of Michel.
Adopting the pace of a mystery or a thriller, Dunker propels you into the intensity of the relationship between Michel and Foucault, between our narrator and Michel, between reader and writer.

Although you are eventually given details as to the elements of these relationships, which ostensibly solves the mysterious aspects of the novel, the central tensions remain engaged. Dunker is invested in the intimate connectedness of writers and their stories, the "Germanist" (the Phd studying Schiller) is eventually proved correct - the personal details of a writer's life are of equal importance to their fiction. The construction and maintenance of this tension betrays a kind of one to one correspondence that oversimplifies the intricacies of fictional worlds. In a way, this novel exists as a kind of wish fulfillment for the reader, proving ones own importance as a reader while romanticizing the author as a tortured artist.

I'm cheating on you!

2011-06-01T22:25:00.000-07:00

I wrote this review for INTERACTIONS the UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies.

The Journalist by Harry Mathews

2011-04-25T19:25:00.000-07:00

"How can I expect to include all I want from a day or part of a day I’ve just lived through if I meekly follow the line that leads from a beginning to an end? That line can only oversimplify. It sticks to the obvious and reasonable, avoiding all that lies outside its “inevitable” progress, avoiding what I most hope to record, the then and then that might not have led here at all and that, even if they did, had anyway their own momentary savor and deserve better than to be flattened into stepping stones on the path to another night’s sleep. To follow chronology means fitting things into place, making sure that nothing has happened. How to see things out of place? Analysis will subvert the illusory naturalness of memory left to its slippered self."

Other than my YA class, this is the first piece of fiction I have been asked to read since entering grad school. That in and of itself is bizarre for me, I keep expecting to have to dust off the Nortons at any minute but I think I'm finally ok with relegating those to personal reference. Don't worry Nortons I will always love you better than the rest. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised by this read - which is essentially a claustrophobic ride along in the consciousness of someone going slowly and obsessively insane. If our unnamed journalist is to be believed, he was asked to start a journal chronicling the details of his life as part of recovery from a recent nervous breakdown. Instead of adopting the kind of style and habit of a diarist, with a focus on impressionistic and personally significant events, the journalist attempts to record the "facts" and minutiae of everyday life, down to the cost of his coffee and his caloric intake. As he goes deeper and deeper into the record keeping process, the process overtakes his living of life and his need to classify and index moments becomes untenable.

I have often thought about the double edged sword of observation. As an obsessive reader and a lifelong journal-er myself, I can sometimes feel that observation creeping into all realms of life. Moments automatically become significant when observed, transcending from an action to a narrative. The attribution of meaning to minutiae can take its toll, this concept taken to its extreme is embodied in the journalist. As he records, the actions of those around him take on heightened significance, he becomes paranoid and resorts to following people, hiding and speculating. He loses all ability to interact with people significantly as his need to record a moment trumps the experience of that moment. He often finds himself asking someone to slow down their conversation so that he can "accurately" capture it. His attempts at classification function to separate facts from interpretation, dreams from thoughts and people from each other; the classification scheme collapses under the weight of his own observations, each category reducing itself into bits of data, meaningless in the absence of context.

In spite of this the novel is hilarious, reaching almost slapstic moments when his pathological need to record overtakes sanity. A coworker of mine was talking broadly about communication yesterday - and the changes that social media have implemented in our methods of communication. Although I think she is making mountains out of molehills in some respects, or at least the wrong mountains - she was talking about how frustrating things like facebook are because they give us the illusion of constant communication but what they essentially do is act as a clearinghouse for statements and validation, a record of single moments, reducing our daily lives to single bits of data. Her obvious stress concerning what she perceives as a profound loss of connectivity and all important context reminded me of the journalist = that tendency to constantly record in place of experience.

In another more basic sense, the journalist strikes at the heart of the diary/memoir vs. fiction debacle. The attribution of truth or authenticity to the format of a diary or a memoir is an easy categorization but a false one (as we all know deep down because of countless public scandals concerning popular memoirs). The fact that there are scandals about memoirs that are uncovered as having fictional elements is telling, we aren't quite ready to embrace the impressionistic aspects of human memory. Writing in its essence can only capture versions of events, versions of moments filtered through consciousness - the real in this sense is a contradiction. The fact that this diary is a prescription designed to help the journalist come to terms with his own fractured self is the ultimate joke.

Literary Tattoos

2011-04-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

I've wanted this for years:

Yesterday I saw this for the first time:

Awesome all around.

The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

2011-04-04T20:43:00.003-07:00

"People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid of them, though. Humor won’t save you; it doesn’t really do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humor, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death."

On an incredibly simplistic note - reading this book made me realize why I get so annoyed at reading something like The Killer Inside Me, why I should train myself to put something down as soon as I know that it isn't something that will engage me in a critical way, or transmit me or evoke an emotional response. The Elementary Particles brought tears to my eyes in public places no less than three times (for those of you curious those places were: the bus, the dmv - and anything that can break through the hum of the dmv is truly special and el prado on sunset) - tears of sadness and loneliness, tears brought on by a beautiful turn of phrase, tears of empathy for well wrought characters. The Elementary Particles is a philosophical exploration of the elements of every day life, the underlying ideologies and anxieties that construct our reality. His deconstruction focuses mainly on the search for meaning in sexual obsessions/anxieties and spirituality that characterizes contemporary life.

The novel is organized around two central characters, Bruno and Michel, half brothers whose relationship began in adolescence and has never reached a level that could be described anything other than estranged. Michel is for all intents and purposes, an asexual man. He is a molecular biologist whose eventual obsession becomes the elimination of humanity's need to procreate. While Michel feels the expectations and at times feels the desire to connect with other human beings, he is incapable throughout the entirety of his life to connect with anyone other than his grandmother. Bruno is a sexually obsessed English teacher whose simultaneous fixation with human physical connection and inability to enrich any relationship with meaning or affection lead to his descent into madness. This is not a book to pick up when you aren't feeling 100% (although full disclosure, I was in a particularly hopeless mood with respect to romantic relationships when I read it and I found it truly cathartic, incredibly depressing and a little bit of a necessary slap in the face). In terms of plot, very little happens - but it is just that, the stark and unmoving static nature of the characters in the face of transformation (and to some extent the desire for it) that provides the novel with such beautiful tension. These are characters who think they know what they want but are so paralyzed by the terror of aging, of intimacy and connection, that their loneliness becomes a preferred and justifiable state.

From within the framing device of a future in which Michel's goal has been realized, the novel breaks down and analyzes the shifts in meaning and the complexities of relationships within the context of a paradigmatic transition. Houellebecq situates us inside of the breakdown of the intellectual tradition - according to Houellebecq's formation (ride with citations), the waning of importance or centrality of religion in the lives of people and in mainstream culture accompanied by the sexual liberation of the sixties has led us to the alienation we experience due to our obsessive maintenance of the cult of youth. Here is the interesting thing about this book - politically I hate this book - at the time of publication it was embraced based on surface political agreements with the right wing. The novel lampoons hippie culture, characterizing the peace and love movement as the highest form of selfishness, a movement that would lead us away from connectivity and a rich sense of values and Houellebecq has a touch of that sickly intense judgmental (borderline hateful) view of humanity* that reminds me of Flannery O'Connor. While the narrative voice enters into long descriptions or diatribes about the cultural environment of the novel and of contemporary culture, every "ism"** you can possibly imagine gets explicated in great detail. These passages can get particularly disturbing,and exist in an uncomfortable literary hinterland. It is always a task in self criticism to think about why a book like this can weasle its way into my heart whereas something like Indignation (see earlier indignant post) cannot - and there is a lot to be said about the invaluable difference between writing a book that IS hateful and writing a book that attempts to explore concepts, beliefs and ideas that I find hateful - the difference between writing a racist book and constructing a racist character. His characters are painfully lacking in self awareness, exposing their hypocrisies and insecurities with every gesture that only we are priveleged to see. They are broken people, products of what Houellebecq sketches out as a broken reality. He provides us no way out, no alternative to our inheritance, instead just wheedling into the innermost (what he sees as ) bilious truths with our only logical conclusion is the rejection of our physical humanity.

I'm including two videos with this post - one to illustrate the befuddling, infuriating elements of Houellebecq's personality and typical response to critical questions and two - to give you a taste of his musical career.

*"Suicides provoked neither surprise nor comment; generally, the suicide of elderly people by far the most commonplace -- seems to us perfectly rational. It is perhaps also useful to cite public reaction to the prospect of a terrorist attack as symptomatic: the overwhelming majority of people would prefer to be killed outright rather than being tortured, maimed or disfigured. In part, this is because they are somewhat tired of life; but the principal reason is that nothing, even death, seems worse than the prospect of living in a broken body (205)."

**"The whole spiritual thing makes the pickup lines less brutal. Men who grow old have it easier than older women. They drink cheap booze and fall asleep, their breath stinks, then they wake up and start all over again; they tend to die young. Women take tranquilizers, go to yoga classes, see a shrink; they live a lot longer and suffer more. They try to trade on their looks, even when they know their bodies are sad and ugly. They get hurt but they do it anyway, because they can't give up the need to be loved (117)."

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

2011-04-04T20:43:00.001-07:00

"We might have the disease, the condition; or we might just be cold-blooded and smart as hell; or we might be innocent of what we’re supposed to have done. We might be any one of those three things, because the symptoms we would show would fit any one of the three."

It's been awhile since the most recent film adaptation of The Killer Inside Me came out, and I still haven't seen it...but I will say that like a sucker I got drawn into the controversy and picked up the novel to see what all the original fuss was about. The arguments actually reminded me a bit of the kinds of discussions that went on around American Psycho when it came out (although I would NEVER put these novels even remotely in the same universe in terms of quality or depth), the kinds of dialectical oversimplifications that characterize most debates concerning pop culture: feminist vs. misogynist, too much violence vs. just the right amount, advocating vs. explicating, art vs. exploitative trash. So I picked up the novel and was neither impressed by the way in which Thompson immersed us within the mind of a psychopath - I neither felt complicit in his crimes (or any sense of identification) nor convincing in terms of constructing a character that is compelling enough to carry a novel. Ultimately I found almost everything about this novel flat and progressively obnoxious.

Thompson sketches the narrative in broad strokes; a simple law enforcement officer from a simple town who is expected to marry his simple girlfriend is a ticking time bomb with a history of extreme and irrational violence. Instead of building any kind of tension or even capitalizing on the inevitable curiosity associated with his hidden past and its consequences, Thompson drops us into Lou Ford's stream of consciousness. Lou himself refers to his pathology as "the sickness" and while we wouldn't as readers expect him to be wracked with guilt, he also neither captures the dynamism or capacity for the richness which characterizes even the most dull of mass murderers, psychopaths or serial killers that periodically capture the attention of society. The shock is hinged on Lou Ford's ordinariness, his reputation as a good guy, his identification as a confidant of sorts for some of the townspeople. The narrative is also constructed around two main series of events - the atrocities of his youth and the murders that take center stage of the novel's temporal space connecting these events only through his continual degradation of his girlfriend Amy. The allusions to what is, within the context of the novel, sexual humiliation and abjection on the part of Amy become a kind of trace between his past and present and the intimate link between his sexual proclivities and his blood lust becomes the central driving force and the undertone of the plot. Much has been made of the sexualization of the violence in the film adaptation - well to be more specific I suppose we could say the eroticization. That the link between sex and violence is essential to this story is indisputable, but the mapping of that kind of rage onto a body visually (not to mention the body of Jessica Alba) changes the meaning and reception drastically....but since I haven't seen the film I can't comment further.

People often point, in praise of this book, at the way in which Ford's character is laid out as calculating and rigid, not consumed by rage or passion as one might expect. However, it is important to keep in mind that the novel we are reading is framed as Ford's own retrospective recounting of events. We have no reason to distrust the so called facts of the events that have taken place, since he does nothing to defend or aggrandize, but it is worth considering that his own portrait of his actions might be muted in recollection - had we been along with him in the moment between his urge and the subsequent decision to kill, we might get a significantly different emotional impression of events. To some extent it is possible to get caught up in the plot - watching Ford attempt to cover his tracks and watching him slip under the radar is interesting, but ultimately it all fell flat for me in the face of much more interesting cultural products treating similar issues. I have been told by a friend whose opinions I respect even when we disagree, that this (while the most famous) is not a representative Thompson novel and maybe, someday I will give him another try...but it will probably be awhile.

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

2011-04-04T20:42:00.001-07:00

"Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you saw."

Veronica is an almost claustrophobic character study in which the plot elements are only relevant in their repercussions with regard to the central characters' inner subjectivities and anxieties.

Veronica is the study of the tensions and depth of relationships based on inequality - the motivations for some friendships and relationships can be simultaneously condescending and benevolent. People need each other in different ways and power dynamics can shift and refocus depending on changing circumstances. Gaitskill exposes the illusion of equality that we all cling to in our personal lives. She introduces us to the friendship between Allison, an aging former model and Veronica, a prim and often caustic older woman. Their unlikely partnership is continually pointed out by Allison herself, her own motivations suspect even to herself. Their friendship evolves against the backdrop of the emergent AIDS epidemic, Veronica herself is HIV positive. Gaitskill is famous for her willingness and ability to engage with issues of intimacy. Sexuality for Gaitskill has the potential to magnify isolation. What is unique within the context of this novel is the relationship between sexual intimacy and death or sickness. Each of the characters in the novel are struggling to connect, consistently confronting the impossibility to break through another's subjectivity. Allison uses her father as a frame of reference, his obsession with music and his inability to share his love of it with even his closest friends, creates a kind of resigned melancholy in him. Gaitskill actually frames the discussions of Allison's father within the rhetoric of language - translation - textual gaps - slippery meaning. Allison herself inherits the desire to communicate through the "language of music" and in the book's more heartbreaking moments that desire is juxtaposed with her sharply isolating sexual experiences.

The novel takes place over a single day, all expressed as Allison's interior monologue, predominantly reflecting on the past. In a way, Veronica recalled Mrs. Dalloway for me (near and dear to my heart and not to be referenced lightly), the exploration of interiorities in a stream of consciousness style through the individual while exploding the text outwards into the overarching anxieties of the time period. Allison recalls her exodus from her home in New Jersey, her entry into the world of modeling and the pitfalls and exploitation that occurs within it and her settlement in New York and the formation of her friendship with Veronica. What is strange about this novel was how engaged I remained even while thinking that most of the plot development and exposition with respect to Allison's younger life was incredibly boring and bordering on cliche. The intensity with which Allison recalls her friendship with Veronica - despite the fairly minimal descriptions the reader receives about their interactions, their connection is steeped within a physicality which extends to a kind of emotional depth that leaves Allison at times exasperated, embarrassed, aloof or heartbroken. Both of the women's bodies are sites of trauma - literally through their respective encounters with disease but also in a much more basic way. Their bodies are marked by their lived experience and reflect the ways in which the world treats them - their sense of self is so intimately tied to their body's reception in the world.

Veronica exists within a complex set of relationships between self awareness and delusion. While Allison attempts to dissect her "strange" friendship, she traces the process by which she arrives at the present, the redundant mistakes and the inability to form connection. What we see is a psychological portrait laid bare, allowing access to both the stated and unstated aspects of that formation. Allison returns again and again to her way of explaining situations about which she feels ambivalent - the central image of which is essentially - in nine out of ten visions of this moment x would be true and in one y would be true. She consistently allows for and even relies upon the coexistence of competing or multiple truths subject to perception.

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

2011-03-21T19:57:00.000-07:00

“When she was alone, she was potential; with others she was realized”

Steve Martin was my first celebrity crush - him and Dick Van Dyke (sense a trend?). I used to watch The Jerk over and over again as a kid, laughing and swooning. His eyes conveyed a kind of smugness coupled with vulnerability, his commitment to physical comedy and his ability to lampoon and embody sincerity at the same time appealed to my sensibilities. So he will always hold a very special corner of my heart, even now when the smugness has overtaken the vulnerability - and boy has it. Although I'm nothing but pleased about his music career, I've had various problems with each of his novels and An Object of Beauty is no different. Not only does the novel take place entirely inside of the art boom of the 1990's in New York (the only place more obnoxious I can think of to be is.....hmmm, nope, can't think of one) and its protagonist is an almost irredeemable young woman whose obsessive need to be at the center of it all obscures any remotly interesting facets of her personality or character development. An Object of Beauty attempts to vault itself into the long tradition of art world satire - Stendhal, Wolfe and Houllebecq to name a few, but it never reaches its intended target, too caught up in the admiration of the surroundings to truly deconstruct it. Not only this, but he commits the cardinal sin of failed satire, nothing about this novel is funny. It is alternately flat and far too earnest, struggling to make a grand point while avoiding it altogether.

While the center of the novel is Lacey Yaeger, it becomes almost too easy to forget the identity of our narrator, a young writer named David. David is so detached and devoid of personality, its impossible to even get a feel for his view of the world - the view that is our only window into this particular world. His lack of motivation or personal drive becomes stunted and frustrating, his vision of Lacey is as expasperated and lackluster as it is for the reader. The only descriptive terms we are given for her remain at the level of meaningless and throwaway - 'cute' and 'sexy' meant to describe the impossible way in which she manipuates those around her.

Steve Martin is a fairly well known art collector at this point, and throughout the novel he cannot refrain from injecting bizarrely decontextualized lectures on artists and piece he clearly admires, often accompanied by reproductions on the page. This seems to be the primary tension he attempted to capture with this novel - the hyper ridiculous, saturated and vapid nature of art world celebrity and collecting, confronted by his own unadulterated passion for contemporary art, and its upsetting that someone who has the capability to balance the sincere and the satirical could not make it work. It too falls flat, because even his lectures lack passion and depth, they tend to seem like cursory insertions meant to provide credibility for his arguments - it almost seemed like a fantasy/sci fi world building moment gone terribly wrong.

I hated Shopgirl, and I won't get too far deeply into why here (except for the highly fetishized may december romance framed within a kind of sick assurance of knowing what young women specifically want for themselves and how just the right old man can give it to them - unsurprisingly this ridiculous trope rears its silly head in An Object of Beauty as well), but at least in Shopgirl, the characters were constructed with depth and with compassion. By the end of An Object of Beauty, I just felt exasperated by the lack of attachment (good or bad) to anyone in the novel and just felt relieved to be able to put it down. It would take more than a few bad novels to ruin my love for Steve Martin, and when the next one comes out I'll probably give it another honest try...

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

2011-03-20T15:21:00.000-07:00

"Dearest Diary,
Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die. Others will die around me. They will be nullified. Nothing of their personality will remain. The light switch will be turned off. Their lives, their entirety, will be marked by glossy marble headstones bearing false summations (“her star shone brightly,” “never to be forgotten,” “he liked jazz”), and then these too will be lost in a coastal flood or get hacked to pieces by some genetically modified future-turkey. Don’t let them tell you life’s a journey. A journey is when you end up somewhere. When I take the number 6 train to see my social worker, that’s a journey. When I beg the pilot of this rickety United-ContinentalDeltamerican plane currently trembling its way across the Atlantic to turn around and head straight back to Rome and into Eunice Park’s fickle arms, that’s a journey."

Partly because the title is so tongue in cheek, partly because I had seen the book trailer (below) and partly because someone particularly unromantic recommended this book to me - I did not expect for this novel to actually contain any semblance of a love story...or at least one that would have absolutely any affective qualities. Don't get me wrong, this novel is also hilarious and ridiculous and terrifying. It takes place in a dystopian future in which everyone is constantly attached to their apparati - a device that lets anyone and everyone see what you are buying, how much money you have and allows each person to rate each other person according to fuckability and other such profound personal details. In this future the smell of books is embarrassing and eternal life is thought to be achievable. In fact, our would-be semi science fiction, comically clueless hero Lenny Abramov works for the Post Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, a company whose seventy year old CEO has successfully maintained the appearance of a man in his thirties through the wonder of science. Lenny has heretofore been fairly uninterested in the prospect of eternal life, but when he meets Eunice Park, his view of the whole endeavor is transformed.

Lenny's long, painfully self conscious diary entries are contrasted strongly with Eunice Park's correspondence on GlobalTeens with her friends and family. Her messages are clipped, overly crafted with slang and obscenities, revealing absolutely nothing and everything all at once. Communication is an almost insurmountable feat for Eunice, for everyone really, so focused on the constant flow of information coming through the apparati that their genuine engagement with one another or themselves almost seems passe and quaint, a luddite's feeble quirk.

This world is rife for Shteyngart's brand of satire, and poke he does, lampooning the vapid consumerism that characterizes each interaction. Essentially, the population is so self obsessed and preoccupied with their fuckability ratings and apparati that the global capitalist complex has successfully produced the end of the American empire and the expansion of transnational powers. In this context, you would expect to hate the characters that are a product of this world, especially Eunice since her youth makes her all the more vulnerable to its influence. Instead, Shteyngart restrains the bitterness that so often accompanies satire, and crafts two incredibly heartbreaking figures attempting to build connections against this claustrophobic backdrop. Lenny clings to literary culture and believes wholeheartedly, in spite of all that has happened to him, in true love and romance. Eunice tries in vain to bridge the gaps between her devastating family members and searching for connection even as it becomes increasingly apparent that she is incapable of intimacy. Watching them struggle is both the beauty and the difficult of this novel, hence the super in the Super Sad True Love Story.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

2011-03-20T13:49:00.000-07:00

“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?”

Very recently, this novel won the National Book Critic's Circle Award. The LATimes article announcing the win, was accompanied by a large photo of Jonathan Franzen and the headline read "Egan beats Franzen in National Book Critic's fiction prize". It didn't surprise me, the cult of Jonathan Franzen is as pervasive as it is confounding to me, and despite the fact that Jennifer Egan has been producing enjoyable and thought provoking fiction for years (The Keep was one of my favorite novels in the early 2000s), her name is not recognizable on an Oprah feud kind of level. Nonetheless it was an upsetting moment, reading that article, realizing that Egan's win could so easily be reframed as Franzen's loss. A lot has been said and written as of late about the dire straits of women in the literary world. Fiction by women is less published, marketed bizarrely and ghettoized to genre fiction sections of most book stores, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist - and for some reason I feel as if many readers are complicit in the same way people that complain about the music industry but never actively seek out alternative musicians are complicit. Seek it out, read it, not just because its written by a woman but because its good. Readers and writers are precious commodities, let's support each other - ok, descent from soap box.

So, A Visit from the Goon Squad is he kind of novel you read in one day but spend weeks absorbing. It is disarmingly readable, catapulting you through different time periods, personalities and points of view all relating back into the two concentric social circles of Benny Salazar and his assistant Sasha, and all swirling around the chaos that is the music industry of the past thirty years. The opening section of the novel concerns Sasha and her kleptomania, she ends up stealing the wallet of her awkward date and adding it to her collection of artifacts that form a kind of silent but visible archive of her pathology.

Egan is somewhat brutal, her characters are put through the ringer time and time again and sometimes they deserve it. I like this kind of brutality though (I mean, I LOVE Flannery O'Connor), and these particular emotional experiences ring true. There is only one false step in the novel - the last section attempted to get into a kind of predictive mode, imitating texting styles and giving a vision of a future youth (this seems to be a bit of a trend, next post will be about Super Sad True Love Story so more on this later). This aspect of the novel seems overstated and tacked on, especially in contrast with some of the more jarring and affecting moments.

A woman confronts the man whose sexual manipulations led her to addition and fantasizes about drowning him in his own pool even though he is attached to an oxygen tank and in a wheelchair - confronting the fragility of a person whose power once had grave consequences for you is both a devastating and liberating moment. Two men interact after their lives have diverged greatly, their musical connection forged in dingy clubs has led one to the top of a record company and one to a park bench in central park where every jogging woman who passes sends him into an emotional spiral about his ex wife. When Scott visits Benny on the top floor of his office building, he greets him with a raw fish - slamming it on his desk proudly, both indignantly and as a genuine offering. A former starlet whose career has nosedived takes a job to post as the girlfriend of a world leader whose reputation needs improvement due to his recent association with a certain genocide. Time is the goon here, challenging the importance of each individual character, wreaking havoc on their bodies and minds, daring them to confront their mortality but also their youth.

At times, the story can feel like a bit of a logic problem I used to love doing in elementary school - people connected by attributes and experiences, but you have to take a few steps back to see the fabric of connectivity. In juxtaposing their perspectives, Egan highlights the relative importance of a moment in time - something that represents a blip on the radar of one character becomes the formative experience of another, relationships occur internally more than externally, widening the gap between people and places that may be interlocking. Egan also forcefully uses flash forwards throughout the narrative - propelling minor characters rapidly into their future, giving us a glimpse of how that moment in time might gain significance or alternately fade into the backdrop.

With moments of shocking violence both imagined and real, Egan punctuates her characters' lives and the gradually expanding view of this ensemble cast casually sloughs off the familiarly myopic tendencies of many novels. Even in her more experimental moments that come off a bit silly - there is a now infamous "power point" chapter in which an obsessive child journals using power point - are still imbued with an emotional clarity and narrative purpose that holds it all together.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell

2011-03-20T13:24:00.000-07:00

“Over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night’s rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.”

This is not at all what I expected. Which isn't to say that I didn't love it, because I did. In fact, I drew out the process of finishing it so that I could savor that feeling of being waist deep inside of the narrative - that space where you are thinking about the characters as you're walking to the bus, wondering if they are going to get themselves out of a situation, or hoping that certain threads remain central and others fade away. When I finally finished it I felt sad for a minute, holding the book gently, as if gripping it too hard would somehow harm its integrity.

Most surprising was how narratively straightforward this novel was. Mitchell's status as a literary darling is very tied into the wildly experimental, lyrical work of Cloud Atlas. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet follows the eponymous Jacob, a Dutch accountant with the Dutch East India Company on the fictional island of Dejima off of the coast of Nagasaki in the year of 1799. Japan had just opened its borders in a limited way to trade, skeptical of both the cultural and financial motivations of the Dutch population. Jacob is both the narrative and moral center of the novel, incorruptible in the face of so much trade related corruption. On the island Jacob falls in love with Orito Aiwagaba a midwife and an apprentice studying under the brash and hilarious Dr. Marinus.

The novel is divided broadly into three sections, organized around both lunar and Gregorian calendars. The first introduces the reader to the intricacies of the imperial relationship between the Dutch traders and the Japanese, establishing the bureaucratic protocol and delicate etiquette expectations between the two societal forces. The second section focuses on Orito, after she is abducted due to her father's debt and housed in a holy temple with a horrifying secret rite that both terrifies and disgusts her. This is one of the more obviously compelling moments in the novel, a band of evil monks ruled by one of the most powerful men in the country are secretly using kidnapped, deformed women as breeders for their rites, rites in which they sacrifice and then eat children. Somehow in Mitchell's hand this section does not come off as over the top, even though with some distance it seems ridiculous, his attention to detail and highly referential, literary linguistics create a calm and measured tone that deals with absurdity well. The third section is a bit jarring, as it introduces an entirely new character at a late moment in the novel, but his thoughts and moral dilemmas end up connecting all disparate points of the story, forcing an epic conclusion that matches the scope of the story.

Beginning from historical facts and exploding them into larger than life mythical dimensions, Mitchell has constructed a book that feels like its existed for centuries. The contemporary sensibilities are so subtly woven into the narrative, the use of drawings and diagrams, the experimental use of voice, so seamlessly fit into the narrative. Mitchell does engage with your expectations, withholding information at certain points or shifting realities just when you get involved. We switch right from Orito's perspective in the middle of a daring escape attempt and never return to find out the conclusion directly, it is infuriating but draws attention to our narrative needs and desires. Mitchell balances these desires well, to fulfill the expectation of plot while challenging us in style; to give us what we want and leave us satisfyingly hanging at times. More than this, he inverted the reading public's expectations of him as a writer - known for shifting realities and time periods, literary experimentation of the highest order, instead he gives us a historical novel generally focused on a love triangle. The marriage of these two ideas, the avant garde novelist and the classic story combines for both absorbing and impactful storytelling.

Wise Children by Angela Carter

2011-03-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

"Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been"

We are thrown squarely into the carnivalesque drama of the Hazard family, a dynastic theatrical family, opening upon the 75th birthday of the Chance sisters, Nora and Dora. It is also the 100th birthday of their father and of course, of Shakespeare. With a nod to dramatic form, lots of Shakespeare references and the kinds of familial mixups ripped from the pages of Wilde, Carter takes on a whirlwind journey in the life of these performers. This is Carter's last novel and in some ways the most harried, reading it feels like being dragged quickly along an adventure, holding your breath the whole way, adrenaline allowing you to make it through.

With an almost Dickensian volume of characters, Nora deluges the reader with memories of early shows, romances, family drama and neglect, incest and competition. Her narrative moves at such a staggering speed and with such breadth that if too careful can leave you bogged down in the amount of detail; but like any good Shakespearean construction full of random characters and seemingly dropped in plot lines, it all comes together in the joyous end.

Much of the tension in the novel comes from Melchior Hazard's inability to recognize his twin daughters as legitimate. Carter uses the Thames to explicate this divide, in this case between two sides of a family literally but also figuratively between the two types of performing in which they engage. While Melchior does Shakespearean adaptations, Nora and Dora perform in burlesque halls and bars - while their half sisters live in opulence, Nora and Dora struggle financially. The parallel between the struggle for familial legitimacy and cultural legitimacy dominates the lives of the sisters and the plot of the book - but the joy in the story is in their irreverence.
Carter's talent lies not only in crafting a story, but in making complicated and upsetting circumstances highly entertaining and colorful - her characters and imagery is in high contrast and high saturation, drawing you into the sensuous surroundings that create the heightened reality. I rarely think this, but I think that every Angela Carter novel should be turned into a film, the visual cues and references would so richly translate. The lush descriptions come to visual life would be both challenging and satisfying....dear someone, make it please.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

2011-03-20T12:45:00.000-07:00

"You try, as a child. There was the same old dread, and there was the same old hope, and due to the hope, I ate the piece of pie sliced on the small white plate, with a silver fork, beneath the dual lightbulbs in the ceiling fixture. In my daisy pajamas and ripped bunny socks. The taste so bad I could hardly keep it in my mouth."

Someone recently told me that I am intense. In the moment I was insulted, it felt as if the implication was that I was unreasonable or overly invested or hyper reactive or emotional. Then I realized that whether or not it was an insult doesn't really matter - I think that intensity is a good thing. I like passion in other people - the ability to have an hold opinions, ideas, attitudes - the strength to be honest about these same things even in the face of seeming unreasonable. Intensity is a sensual experience, the way that you interact with life can take on hues and tones and scents that transform the mundane into the ethereal but you have to allow yourself to get there. I sometimes think that people like to dull their experiences so that their expectations can stay at a safe and comfortable, achievable location - protecting yourself can manifest in many ways and choosing to diminish the significance of people and moments is a fairly simple way to insulate.

Rose has no choice to diminish. On her birthday, her mother bakes her a lemon cake and she bites into a piece with the kind of enthusiasm that is still allowed to exist unstifled in children. Immediately she becomes aware of the depths of her mother's sadness, the emptiness that characterizes her life and the unacknowledged desires that exist beneath the surface. Rose is immediately sick, confused, depressed - burdened with a wide swath of emotions that she can empathically feel without being able to comprehend. What makes the experience all the more heightened is the fact that Rose's family are the kind of family that buries things, buries them deep and forever beneath a cordial smile and the most minimal details. They have the kinds of conversations only Hemingway would construct, massively deadly but invisible icebergs lurking beneath the surface of pleasantries.

It isn't just the food made by her family that Rose can experience in this way, she can taste the farmers who picked the tomatoes in her pizza sauce, she can taste whether or not a baker was in a fight with his girlfriend when he baked the morning bread, or whether he was in a rush. The farther she can get from the creator of a food product the better, the more hands that went into it the better, her diet becomes dominated by prepackaged and processed foods - foods that interact very little with human hands. Rose's ability seems to be all encompassing, giving her insight into those around her that would otherwise remain indecipherable.

With her skill comes the overwhelming feeling of being alone, the more she finds out about those close to her, the farther away from them she feels. This is where Bender kind of blows my mind. Although the story expands to involve more than Rose, this novel is fundamentally about the qualities of ourselves that create those massive valleys of misunderstanding or simple ignorance. By the end of the novel I was filled with such a heightened awareness of how lonely it is just to exist, to never be able to really understand another's experience and that the perceptions we do have about what someone else is going through can only serve to make us feel more distant. Told through first person, but eliding he kinds of intimacies you would normally expect from this perspective, Rose's voice allows for the casual weaving of absurd and magical elements to permeate the narrative. Ultimately, moments that should be shocking seem par for the course and Rose becomes a tour guide through a simultaneously emotionally heightened and buried landscape.

Special Exits by Joyce Farmer

2011-03-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

In high school I had a good friend who was fairly well versed in zine and comic book history. I made her mix tapes and she gave me printed materials, it was one of those wholly intoxicating exchanges, where you're simultaneously intimidated, obsessed and sycophantic. She gave me an issue of Joyce Farmer's Tits and Clits Comix on a trip to Los Angeles, I sat in the park eating gummi worms reading it over and over again. It was infused with so much humor and joy coupled with the kind of critical feminist theory that had enabled the new ways in which I wanted to live my life. I hadn't thought about that particular reading experience until I picked up Special Exits at Meltdown, waiting for my roommate to get out of his comics writing class.

Special Exits is Farmer's graphic novel exploration of her years of caring for her aging parents as they slowly lose the will and ability to care for themselves. I began reading this over winter break, sitting on my parents couch, feeling very close to the emergent reality of their own aging processes. The stories are the kinds of devastating memories with which everyone is familiar, the frustration you feel when you become someone's caretaker, the deep sadness of watching someone who used to care for you or someone you are close to transform into another person entirely due to mental or physical deterioration. Farmer doesn't lose her sense of humor here, and in this context it transforms a story that has the potential to become maudlin and self indulgent into something familiar and affecting. It is a difficult task, representing the kinds of frustration involved in becoming a caretaker without lapsing into bitterness or martyrdom - and brave to attack these issues with such honesty.

I didn't find out until later that Special Exits took thirteen years to complete, Farmer herself was 71 years old at the time of publication. It was never intended to be a public project, only a cathartic exercise for her to process her experience with her parents and one can only imagine the edge that would have as Farmer herself reached the age she was writing about and developed macular degeneration.

Not to be understated or overlooked are the background issues and characters that foreground the memoir. Farmer grew up in Los Angeles and she infuses the city with an energy both hopeful and sinister. Her parents lived in a predominantly African American neighborhood during the riots that followed the Rodney King riots, the frustrated rage of that community poured into the streets and Farmer's parents, already incapable of taking care of themselves at that point, became prisoners in their house without resources or the ability to communicate with her. The process of depositing her mother in a nursing home also becomes a source of frustration and fear. As her mother is subjected to neglect and abuse, Farmer struggles with guilt and anger and the helplessness that accompanies the attempt to care for her father and mother as well as nurture her own life and keep herself healthy.

Ultimately Special Exits does read like someone's attempt to process, to absorb what has happened and to honestly contend with your own changing relationship to aging and family. It doesn't read like something meant for an audience, although there is so much love and attention to detail expended in every pen stroke. The lines are almost vibrating with energy, ranging from soft and tender to enervated frenzy, intense and shockingly truthful.

HIATUS!

2010-10-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

Dear World,
I took a bit of a hiatus from the blog but its time to restart! There are too many books in this world and too little time as it is. Don't think that I haven't been reading though. I have started grad school as of one month ago, so my recreational reading patterns will most likely wane quite a bit. Nonetheless, I vow to be consistent once again! Books I've been reading for the past few months with an inexact rating system for your perusal:

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey ****
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger ***
King Dork by Frank Portman**
The Hunger Games for Suzanne Collins ***
The Way I Live Now by Meg Rosoff **
A Step from Heaven by An Na **
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson **
Inexcusable by Chris Lynch **
Feed by M.T. Anderson ***
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier ***
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton ****
Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block ***

Tideland by Mitch Cullin

2010-07-02T11:19:00.000-07:00

"My father was in the chair. I could see the back of his head. And the map of Denmark was saggin, drooping over; a top corner had come unstuck. For a moment I considered fixing the map, but that meant getting close to him. He'd probably changed colors again, and hte thought of his skin spooked me - especially now that the farmhouse had grown darker. He was like the Mood Ring in my mother's jewelry box; sometimes turning blue, sometimes black. That ring never worked right."

I watched a lot of Monty Python as a kid. It is a strange thing to have done, to this day I don't really have any clear vision of where it came from, neither of my parents are especially fond of highly referential, intellectual British absurdism....so whence the Monty Python. So an early love of Terry Gilliam formed, his cruel humor getting fleshed out in pastel animation. Then there's Time Bandits and Brazil and his notoriously cursed movie making process. It was with absolutely no hesitation that I rented Tideland. The film was so, well, creepy and lacking in joy (Terry Gilliam actually filmed himself giving the audience a warning about how completely disturbing this movie is), its tone so overwhelmingly dark and so claustrophobic that it was difficult to get through the entire thing. I had no idea that it was an adaptation of a novel and when I found that out I HAD to know where this terrifying mess had come from and could not have been more surprised by what I found.

Mitch Cullin's Tideland is drastically different in tone, instead focusing on life through the eyes of an incredibly resilient and inventive child. Jeliza Rose's parents are both heroin addicts, instead of going to school she eats crunch bars and learns how to cook up the perfect shot. Her mother hates her asking her to rub her feet and then abruptly kicking her in the face. Her father is a washed up pseudo rock star whose fascination with norse mythology leads him to fantasize about whisking Jeliza Rose off to "Jutland" to be with the bog people. After her mother dies, her father takes her to a remote abandoned farm house in Texas, their substitute for Jutland - a dilapidated house riddled with pests and filth. Her father then dies and Jeliza Rose is left to fend for herself, only individual disembodied parts of barbie dolls to keep her company. The key difference between the film and the movie is in the way the author and Terry Gilliam respectively treat Jeliza Rose's time alone. In the film she is lost and hungry and very lonely - she is all of these things in the novel too, but Cullin somehow imbues every scene with a sense of wonder. She turns the fact that her crackers are covered in ants into an epic battle between the army ants and her army of barbies, she plays in the grass and invents characters and stories and for awhile just keeps assuming that her father is alive and just sleeping. Perhaps its just the consistent confrontation of the image of her rotting father in the film that made it difficult to find the joy - but somehow I think that Cullin's vision of Jeliza Rose is more hopeful. Instead of using the barbie doll heads as eerie props and an opportunity for Jeliza Rose to make bizarre voices, Cullin creates them as external representations of Jeliza Rose's own hopes and fears - as imaginary friends are to most children. She argues with them about what to do, how scared to be, how trusting to find the neighbors, in her abandonment she befriends different aspects of herself through them.

When she finally encounters the neighbors (a taxidermist who is terrified of bees, trades sex for groceries and beats her retarded nephew) and the nephew Dickens who becomes Jeliza Rose's friend and confidant, we are prepared for it to go either way. The relationship between Dickens and Jeliza Rose is so dear from the beginning, exploring the deep sea together using abandoned refuse from the surrounding area. The book also begins in one tone and drastically shifts, holding your hand as you descend into a much more surreal version of Jeliza's surroundings. It begins with the concrete realities, the physicality of her parents' addictions and the immediate hunger that she feels and eventually the logic of the novel allows for a crazed taxidermist who believes she can keep people alive forever and a kiss that ruins Jeliza's chances at being a part of a real family.

It was difficult linguistically to pin down from when/where Jeliza Rose was telling us her story - she had a sentimental but very sophistocated point of view and her language is highly imaginative without being overly flowery, in her first few pages she is using words such as "inauspicious" or "phosphorescence". So if Cullin is positioning Jeliza telling us this story from some future haven of acceptance and safety, a time in which she is able to look fondly upon these memories, we then have to think about the way in which we can idealize our past - even the most vicious parts - if those are the memories of loved ones to which we are able to cling. She imagines her father in retrospect as a failed yet great adventurer, whose wish to take her away from their shitty apartment in Los Angeles led her to these amazing moments in Texas, a place where she met Dickens, her first love. Just like anything else, its all in what you see...and Jeliza sees beauty in her life and most of all in her ability to create her own worlds in the midst of a horrifying reality.

Role Models by John Waters

2010-07-01T13:58:00.000-07:00

" Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; its the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wonering if you can afford it. Of course, you have to read the books, too. Nothing is more important than an unread library."

"It's appropriate to be depressed sometimes. Who wants to be "even" day after day? If you just killed three people in a DWI accident, you should feel bad. If your whole family molested you i a giant basket on Easter moring, you have the right to be grumpy every once in awhile. But feeling down can make you feel up if you're the creative type. The emotional damage may have already been done to you, but stop whining. Use your insanity to get ahead."

"Never have a spontaneous moment in your life again. If you're going to have a hangover, it should be scheduled on your calendar months in advance. Rigid enjoyment of planning can get you high. Militant time management will enable you to ignore how maladjusted you would be if you had the time to notice it in the first place. Discipline is not anal compulsion; it's a lifestyle that breeds power. The only insult I've ever received in my adult life was when someone asked me, 'Do you have a hobby?' A HOBBY?! DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING DABBLER?!"

I love John Waters, I REALLY LOVE John Waters. His recently released book of essays on those who have influenced and inspired him is somewhat predictable if you follow him and his work, and it was a wonderful comfort to open it up on the bus knowing that I would be reading about pornographers, drug addicts, auteurs, freaks and the like in full view of the world (unlike that one time I tried desperately to hide the fact that I was reading the world's most awkward/awful sex scenes that Philip Roth could unfortunately conjure...my fellow travelers need not be subjected to such things!). It's also comforting to hear someone else talk about their role models in a way that acknowledges the impact of sheer culture on us throughout our lives - his role models range from Johnny Mathis to a lesbian burlesque dancer who called herself Lady Zorro - and his acknowledgment early on of the difficult relationship between a person and their role model (especially if you actually meet and get to know them). There is an enforced distance, in order to keep what you need from a role model intact, you have to invent them. Waters almost seems to put them together piecemeal, admiring one aspect even while stressing that you should ignore another aspect, I love the pragmatism...and of course the collection is hilarious, self deprecating and aggrandizing at the same time.

His first role model is Johnny Mathis - positing that maybe it is because Mathis is the exact opposite of himself, non confrontational, easily consumable, safe. When he goes to Mathis's house, I kept expecting for something to happen...for the facade to drop, for the gloves to come off, for their differences to trump the interview...but it remained calm and dignified, discussing the ideas of revisiting your big hit and maintaining your private life in the face of such recognition.
He then takes us through a very short but very emotional essay on the importance of Tennessee Williams, an early cultural force and voice for queer folk, a proud hedonist whose intellect was equally matched by his joie de vivre (if you will indulge). The next essay discusses Waters's long relationship with former Manson family member Leslie Van Houten. This is somewhat familiar territory in that Waters has written about her in the past, and written/said/filmed much concerning the Manson family. What was interesting about this essay in particular was his willingness to come face to face with the ways in which his past attitudes may have been immature. It is bizarre to watch someone like John Waters's distinguish those attitudes. I too, went through (as a part of a kind of pseudo goth phase) a brief but deep interest in serial killers, which tended to wrap up my antiauthoritarian political beliefs with my interest in the macabre and confuse them into one giant pile of misinformed idolatry. So I understand his initial fascination with the Manson family, his attendance of the trials, his amazement at the raw energy generated between them all and I also understand his later embarrassment at his earlier attitudes - his inability to connect with the families of the victims and the prioritizing of symbol over reality. His relationship to Leslie is strange to be sure, and the length of it has guaranteed that he witness what he describes as an incalculable change in her. Playing with his accepted status as a cult icon, he goes back and forth asking the question of what would have happened to his group of friends if they hadn't found eachother....if their energies had been exploited by a different and more sinister cult leader's personality.

He goes on to go through his local idols, his fashion icons that shape his signature aesthetic (and he has never batted an eyelash over the importance of aesthetics), the artists he claims as his roommates after purchasing their work and of course, fringe pornographers whose work seems to simultaneously repel and fascinate. Waters admires the kind of single mindedness that produces an obsessive personality - and while it enrages him to be called a dabbler, the people he idolizes make him look like just that. If nothing else, Waters is an obsessive consumer of culture - and his references and recommendations will leave you with a stack of books to tackle including everything from Little Richard's autobiography to the memoirs of Tennessee Williams to the often overlooked fiction of Jane Bowles. Dear John Waters, curate my life.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

2010-06-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

"In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare."

"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant.

Brunch is a beautiful thing. To me, it has always signified a kind of joyful resignation marked by leisure. If you have enough money to buy yourself a bottomless cup of strong coffee and a plateful of blackberry pancakes, enough time to spend revelling in a Sunday morning and a person whose company you will throughly enjoy and can engage you in the kind of conversation that turns groggy mornings into richly textured, challenging and productive days....you're doing alright. During one of these recent mornings, Joan Didion came up (as she tends to do)- specifically related to a moment in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. In the memoir, she chronicles the year after her husband's death and the simultaneous illness of their only daughter. In this moment, in which Didion is incredulous as someone relates a story used to determine brain activity concerning the death of a supposedly blessed child she asks whether or not it is possible to tell a story without consequence. Is anything ever just a story or just a joke? After talking about this moment in the book I realized that I needed to reread it, I remember reading it by the pool (and while I am definitely not one of those people that thinks that poolside reading should be relegated to gossip magazines or Janet Evanovich, I can also realize that it is more difficult to maintain focus and engage when competing with a warm semi drunk sleepiness) and perhaps had failed to let it sink into me. This feeling combined with the fact that it is now markedly difficult for me to get to the library when it is open (DAMN YOU BUDGET CUTS!), I decided to reread it.

Without the benefit of an ending to her story - a year in this case is somewhat arbitrary even though we provide ourselves with the prescriptive, it only gets better with time. What propels the story then is repetition: linguistic, narrative and stylistic. For Didion, her grief becomes a daily practice of living; relearning to be around friends, drive in neighborhoods where they had lived, work, even eat. The repetition mirrors the surreality of grief, constantly reminding that what has happened is real and that reality has changed irreversibly, but it also mimics the sensation of overwhelming numbness. Didion characterizes this numbness fully, it almost feels like a living breathing protective orb surrounding her - penetrated periodically when she stumbles upon a familiar place or a regrettable memory.

John Dunne died at the dinner table, she describes it as "the ordinary instant". He died after they had both returned from visiting their daughter Quintana in the ICU. In this moment Joan cannot distinguish the reality of the situation from what she perceives as a failed joke - John keeling over and clutching at his chest. She returns over and over to that image and the leftover physical remnants of that moment - the blood on the floor, the chipped teeth. An almost obsessive attention to detail and return to the original source material fills out the rest of the book, the rest of her year. She goes to the literature, peppering in medical details that she believes might give her a window into the moment her husband died. She studies textbooks and consumer reports and argues with nurses about the correct method of treatment. She reads Freud concerning the processes of dealing with grief, she reads Hopkins to connect with the poetry of death.

Didion also pans outward, always with the eye of a writer, folding in the expectations of those around her. Emotions were, for the most part, unwelcome in my house growing up (unless of course they were applied to a movie or a particularly moving sermon on Sunday). If someone were to die, you would grieve privately and quietly, accept your casserole graciously and when plied you might share one or two emotionally uncomplicated stories with friends and acquaintances. Didion confronts this idea, the idea that there is a successful way to deal with your grief and that it all has to do with remaining calm and being strong, presenting a solid front to the world – to prioritize other people’s comfort above all. Her grief is also always tempered with a heightened anxiety because of her daughter’s condition, forcing Joan to be further dislocated and unable to create a new routine (that sacred routine!).

The Year of Magical Thinking is a drastic departure of the classic Didion style, of course she still delivers her expected punch to the gut lines, punctuating the text with a kind of viciously aimed emotional impact. But gone is the typical colorful, saturated landscapes, replaced by and almost Stein like dead pan reiteration and the overall structure becomes almost wave like, being thrust forward and then grabbed back, never allowing you to get your footing. Shortly after Didion finished the manuscript, Quintana died. For some reason people seemed to expect her to amend her book, as if her grief could be lumped together, compounded into a single unifying experience. True to form, Didion’s response was “It’s finished”.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

2010-06-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

"Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."

I will admit, it took me awhile to get through Lucky Jim, sometimes you just aren't in the right mood for a certain type of fiction. I did that stop and go thing - something I have sworn off of this year, due to the fact that there is never enough time in your life to read, let alone waste it on something you aren't interested in! However, something told me to stick with this one and I'm glad that I did. Well worth waiting for the punchline! Lucky Jim follows the somewhat hapless, sporadically devious James Dixon, an unenthusiastic Medieval history lecturer at an unnamed provincial college in an small English town. Amis sets up the tension of the academic world within the social stratification of the university, contextualized by the post World War II time period representative of drastic shifts in British economic and social status quo. Jim is wedged into the academic status quo, treading water in a discipline that looks into the distant past, rehashing the same issues from the same perspectives, with a reverence to a presumably simpler time. He is also unwittingly devoted to a quasi relationship that gives him nothing but emotional guilt and exasperation.

Jim’s frustrations are enacted much like a child’s, making ridiculous faces behind people’s backs, working on his vicious impressions of their voices and mannerisms, pulling pranks with varying degrees of success. His suspicion of all things high culture and his sense of humor set him apart from both the academic establishment and the bohemian crowd that would be the obvious antidote. He immediately dislikes Bertrand, a painter, even before he begins to covet Bertrand’s girlfriend. Amis’s attitudes towards his female characters (which seems to have trickled down somewhat to his more outspoken and less entertaining son) are pretty difficult to swallow. They inhabit pretty standard archetypes in Jim’s assumptions…which always turn out to be true. Jim has many moments of revelation in which he realizes that pretty girls are more fun to be around and is constantly focusing the problems on his relationship with the care or lack thereof his girlfriend puts into her appearance. It is all sidling next to Jim’s foibles – even though he is the hero of the novel and he does indeed “win” in the end, he is still shockingly lacking in self awareness and the butt of the ultimate joke.

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

2010-06-24T13:45:00.000-07:00

``They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part was an accurate portrayal. It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren't changed and there was nothing in it that hadn't actually happened.''

Sure it’s all on the surface – but when surface is the most important thing in your life…those surfaces have meaning. At this point we are somewhat familiar with the characters (presumably), familiar with the references, no longer shocked by the vacuous cruelty that propels the narrative and in this familiarity we are afforded a distance from it all, a vantage point from which to watch from above as it all implodes.

As the novel begins, we are reintroduced to Clay, who immediately dares us to bring our assumptions from Less Than Zero into the present – especially if you’ve only seen the movie. He reconstructs the “awkward reality” (meta meta meta meta) of seeing your life adapted and in his opinion somewhat poorly - of course it is his fate in life to become a screenwriter, this is both the most obvious and hilarious of this novel’s jokes. Clay has just returned from a stint in New York and his life in Los Angeles is exactly what you might expect. His apartment in West Hollywood is sparsely and tastefully decorated (nothing in this man’s life is what one would refer to as cozy), he drinks heavily and obsessively chews Altoids….but soon he becomes enveloped in a panicked paranoia that bleeds into the very language of the rest of the novel. It quickly becomes claustrophobic, trolling from bar to party, between obnoxious acquaintances and personality-less colleagues, passing around sexual partners without joy and digging the hole of delusion to the point of no return.

Now, Clay’s paranoia is not unfounded, he is indeed being tailed by the same car day in day out. He begins receiving messages that indicated he is consistently being surveiled. I’m Watching You. Cue the shivers. Soon after he becomes embroiled with a young actress named Rain, a woman without talent or personality but somehow enters into that time honored paperless contract between those without power and those with. She and Clay trade malice as much as they do bodily fluids, following the downward spiraling trajectory of the entire scene. Dead bodies start littering the streets, bodies that have been mutilated, abused and defiled. All of the murder happens “off camera” as it were, leaving us (and Clay) as detached as possible, his strongest reaction to any of the deaths comes nowhere near a genuine emotion, but then, that’s the point. It’s easy to miss the ironic tension in both this and Less Than Zero – Ellis is a good writer and wildly consumable. It might be tempting to pick it up, devour it on the level of detective novel and then immediately put it down…but it doesn’t end there. More than a dreadful parable about the fate of those who work in Hollywood or even the detrimental effects of privilege or even desperation, Imperial Bedrooms mimics the self fulfilling prophesies we construct for ourselves. By focusing on the artifice of culture, work, sex, friendships Ellis disassembles our methods of self preservation, desecrating that which we hold dear so that all we are left with is Clay’s empty, distant apartment drinking ourselves to sleep in spite of our loneliness and that Jeep parked outside.

ELVIS COSTELLO - Less than zero and Radio Radio (live)

AlCaToff | MySpace Video

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

2010-06-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

"Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except he hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I committed one because they had the papers on me…of course…they never shown me my papers. That’s why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it . Then you’ll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you’ll have something to prove you ain’t been treated right. I call myself “the Misfit” because I can’t make what all I done fit what all I gone through in punishment. "

Soooo...yes, the book club I'm going to is going to be discussing the complete stories of Flannery O'Connor so there will be even MORE of her to come. This collection contains ten stories and I'll just briefly touch on the highlights - saving some words for book club I suppose.

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" is probably her most famous story - read and studied in every class devoted to the short story form. The story begins with a stubborn and martyr-like grandmother, futilely trying to convince her son to change the family vacation plans in favor of Tennessee over Florida. She wants to go home and uses every tool at her disposal to do so, she gets up earlier than everyone else and silently oozes contempt, she repeats a popular news story in which an escaped criminal named "The Misfit" is terrorizing the roads on the way to Florida (foreshadowing!), she even distracts the family off of their route by insisting they stop at an old house with secret passageways for the children to play in and in so doing leads them right into the path of "The Misfit". Her moment of reckoning is as harsh as any O'Connor can deal out. The grandmother refuses to believe that this criminal can be devoid of good qualities, her previous attitudes and pretensions are dropped at his feet in her moment of desperation, leading to one of the best lines ever to be written, "she would have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." In her classic style, O'Connor levels this kind of judgment of the grandmother, whose simultaneous naivete coupled with her intense selfishness and who ultimately is charged as responsible for the consequences the whole family faces.

*And a treat for you*

"Good Country People" is a story that has stuck with me strongly since reading it in early high school. I was lucky enough to have incredible teachers in high school - specifically English teachers. Mr. Tripp was obsessed with Southern Gothic literature, moonshine, and baseball. He also spent his weekends and evenings teaching writing and literature to inmates at a nearby (50 miles) prison. There's no way I could have been aware at the time, of just how much his tastes and ethics would impact my life. In one year we read - and painstakingly dissected - Go Down, Moses (still my favorite Faulkner), a whole mess of Flannery O'Connor and some Arthur Miller...but we also got stories. Stories of his life and stories about how literature was part of his daily lived reality. There cannot be enough said about fantastic teachers. So - "Good Country People" - Joy is the archetypal O'Connor character, an older, educated daughter with an artificial leg, living with her mother. Joy is in a state of perpetual antagonism. Thinking herself too smart to be bothered with her family, considering herself too ugly to be called Joy (and so she changes her name to Hulga) she claims to believe in nothing and seems to enjoy nothing other than smug satisfaction at her assumed superiority. When a young bible salesman who claims to be one of those "good country people" comes to their door, Hulga forges an unexpected connection with him. Through this connection she finally exposes herself, buying into Manley's presentation of himself as a good country person. His perceived innocence leads her to give him her false leg which he proceeds to steal, leaving her in the loft of the barn alone and ashamed. In these moments Hulga's supposed control over her faculties and belief systems and the strength she has always claimed to derive from them fail her, they are lost to a simple huckster. This transformative moment, humbling for Hulga is a moment O'Connor would describe as a moment of grace...a time in which Hulga is stripped bare of her defenses and left open to God. Of course with O'Connor the agent of this grace is a man who hides booze in his bible and steals fake limbs from women.

"The Artificial Nigger" has always been a story that has given me a bit of trouble. It is rare in the sense that although the characters are challenged and put through a traumatic experience that is meant to shake them of their pride and presumptions, the conclusion is shockingly kind and devoid or any kind of catastrophic or cathartic violence. Mr. Head is taking his nephew on his very first trip to the big city. It is clear that he is nervous about his nephew's excitement, and excitement that betrays the assumptions about the supremacy of the city - something that we can all at this point agree is probably a sin (although a small one) in O'Connor's book. The old man's vanity is matched on by his nephew and their age difference renders their banter all the more comical. The humor in this story is also uncharacteristic, it is a kind of pitiful comedy coming from their mutual ignorance and simplicity. The grandfather is sponsoring this short trip for the sole purpose of proving that the big city is a waste of time and so that Nelson could get his fill of all of the supposed wonders of urbanity and be content with home from then on. They get lost of course trying to find their way around the city and they run into a large hanging statue of a black man - a racist caricature hanging from a fence. O'Connor inserts the most heavy handed of symbols into her stories and this is no exception. In fact, this story may be the most overt in its insistence on imbued meaning in every piece of the landscape. Upon finding the sculpture Mr. Head has an intense moment of religious vision, opening him up to accepting even the most minute of his sins. O'Connor's symbology takes on a seriousness that only a Catholic sense of the literal can justify. The statue serves (not unlike Manley Pointer) as an agent of grace, reuniting the two after an intense moment of rejection on the part of Mr. Head. O'Connor allows them to have this moment, in a unique moment they achieve their reconciliation and are allowed to continue on in their life with their knowledge instead of having to die in some sort of horrific, cleansing way. This moment is indeed a rarity in her work - but the story is rare in other ways. It feels remarkably driven by the characters in a way that is not typical of her style. After a highly stylized and delicately laid out introduction to our characters we get a heavy amount of dialogue and emotional intensity from both, making this story oddly touching if not almost uncomfortable in its proximity to the rest of her collection.

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor

2010-06-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

"Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without."

"I wouldn't milk a cow to save your soul from hell."

This collection was completed during O'Connor's final illness but her awareness of her own mortality did absolutely nothing to soften her judgments of the world, in fact she seems all the more cutting in these stories, more intolerant of both hypocrisy and moral apathy. The title story (its title taken from a piece by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) deals with familiar O'Connor themes - the pretension of a younger, intellectual whose judgments of his older mother and her outdated ideals causes an insurmountable rift between them. Julian despises his mother's politics and through their short bus ride together to her YMCA class he relishes the opportunity to make her uncomfortable by interacting with black families on the recently integrated bus system. As always with O'Connor the irony cuts equally in all directions. After complaining about the downward trajectory of society as exemplified by this integration, a black woman on the bus is wearing the exact same hat as Julian's mother (a hat she had previously claimed made her both stylish and classy). Julian's stifled giggles feel simultaneously justified and unbearably cruel. As the bus ride goes on, Julian tries in his own less overt condescending way, to strike up a conversation with a black man on the bus in order to infuriate his mother. The central irony is Julian's continued manipulative belittling behavior towards his mother. He blatantly denies her humanity in the face of claiming his adherence to the principles of the civil rights movement.

In the second story we get to see an even more well developed example of O'Connor's pet peeve - moral smugness. If Julian appeared self righteous, he is nothing in the face of Ms. May whose belief in the undeniable link between social station and worth along with her lack of self reflection lead her into a futile conflict with Mr. Greenleaf. Mr. Greenleaf and Ms. May stand as emblematic of O'Connors views concerning Protestantism and Catholicism. Greenleaf's refusal to try and contain the bull is his recognition of the preeminence of the natural order whereas Ms. May becomes almost obsessive about her own sense of order, trying to mold everyone into the patterns of life that fit her plan. In a way only O'Connor can, she makes her alliances clear, leading Ms. May into a terrifying and unambiguous final tableau.

"A View of the Woods" might be the most devastating of this collection for me. O'Connor sets up yet another wildly unhealthy vaguely Freudian relationship between family members of different generations. Mr. Fortune sees his future reflected in his granddaughter (who just happens to look like him). She is the only member of her family that he finds kinship with and her only flaw is in her submission to her father Mr. Pitt. When Mr. Fortune exerts his control over the Pitts by vowing to sell a part of their land to a gas station for development, Mary Fortune turns against him, lamenting the loss of their view of the woods. Mr. Fortune's emotions completely dominate his sense, his fury and love for Mary Fortune culminating in a flurry of violence and sexual energy that ends them both. The imagery throughout is focused on the animalistic, O'Connor is consistently aligning each character with primal qualities, even going as far back as the earth.

In the both "The Enduring Chill" and "The Comforts of Home" O'Connor uses one of her more familiar tropes, previously experienced in the title story. The educated adult child returns to their childhood home and proceeds to mock (whether overtly or covertly) the older generation's social norms and perceived naiveties and ending up in a kind of pathetic caricature of a morally vacuous product of a secular self righteous generation. Sigh. In that familiar O'Connor way, no one comes out the better...even those whose actions might seem on the surface to be at the very least innocuous and at the very best selfless and admirable get whittled away to the bare bones of pure intention - which O'Connor seems to posit, is ALWAYS morally suspect.
This idea gets fully fleshed out in "The Lame Shall Enter First", a story that has always seemed to me like a stripped down, sharper version of The Violent Bear It Away which I read/wrote about back in October. The story is told through the eyes of Shepherd, whose inability to empathize with his child's immobilizing grief at the death of his mother leads him to an almost cruel and condescending place. He insists that his son is lazy, spoiled and selfish and in order to teach him the benefit of charity he focuses his time and attention on a "troubled" neighborhood boy who is differently abled. O'Connor's characterization of this boy is vicious - he thinks of himself as touched by Satan, unredeemable and unloveable and spends his time emotionally manipulating father and son for the sake of it. In the climactic moment, Shepherd finally realizes (TOO LATE) that he has taken the love and empathy away from his son and focused it on this boy and as in most cases where one is truly delusional, he has to say it aloud before it finally sinks in...and it wouldn't be Flannery without a moment of final thwarted redemption now would it? In the same vein as The Violent Bear It Away, O'Connor mistrusts all intentions, especially those coming from a supposed moral highground and even more when it is a secular moral highground.

O'Connor remains on point through the rest of the collection, exploring the same themes with the same blend of unflinching judgment and heightened moral and religious tragedy. "Parker's Back" follows a man through his futile attempt to connect with his wife whose piety terrifies and attracts him. "Revelation" follows a woman who believes she received a message from God in the form of a book to the face from a disgruntled teenager. "Judgment Day" struggles through the changing subtleties in relationships marked by racial difference in the South. An old man moves to the city to live with his daughter and his attempts to (in his mind) form a bond with a black family next door leads to a shocking end. She constructs the dynamics between the generations within her own framework of Southern sensibility, bringing to the surface impossibly delicate and unspoken class conflicts, layers of racial tension, the violence of emotions, and her own distrust of secularism and Protestantism in any form. Reading these stories back to back to back can take its toll, sinking you into a paralyzing self reflection and leading you to second guess even your own most unquestionably charitable intentions. In her world there is no charity, there is no purity and surely isn't any room for optimism. Her characters aren't likeable - even the presumed victims of time, violence or decay. Those who meet the most violent ends are also enveloped in a scene visually akin to religious ecstasy and some of O'Connor's most beautiful prose comes in her most cruel moments. More on her soon, as I'm rereading ALL OF IT for a book club. I'm excited to talk to people about her work, I've always just sort of accepted that I loved her and moved on but in really sinking into all of this it's becoming important to me to also think about why. It's not just because she has perfected structure and the one two punch, or that sometimes a sentence of hers can just make me cry. There's something there at its core that I can't get to, underneath the harshness and intensity, something proud and beautiful and solely hers.

David Boring and Caricature by Daniel Clowes

2010-06-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

With the recent release of Wilson (which I haven't read or even procured quite yet), my interest in Daniel Clowes was rekindled. Soooo I checked out everything available from the LAPL - which is less than you think. David Boring is a noir graphic novel in three acts, following the life of David Boring who is in search for information about his father and looking to fall in love. Clowes likes to deal in obsession and David is no different, constantly searching for the woman who fits his physical ideal which is painstakingly documented in a bizarre scrapbook made up of clippings and photos. The bulk of the novel is covered in Act II which takes place at David's family's retreat - cutoff from the mainland and contemporary technology - and filled to the brim with sexual energy that engulfs the family, resulting in mysterious deaths, escape plans and abandonment. Written during his work on the film adaptation of Ghost World, it is easy to see Clowes's adoption of a cinematic world view - both visually and in terms of structure. He leads us through a whodunit rife with innuendo all set in a time of teeming paranoia concerning an almost imminent nuclear attack.

At the beginning of the story, David's best friend gives him his lucky penny (and is subsequently murdered), a penny that gets handed along to lovers and friends as the story moves along. After David (also) gets mysteriously shot, him and his friend Dot join David's overbearing mother at the family retreat - an island with no technology and means of communication with the outside world. In this incarnation, the island is like a miserable purgatory, forcing the family to stay together despite their deteriorating relationships and ever increasing distrust. This island represents David's only apparent happy memory of a sexual relationship - a childhood infatuation and unfulfilled desire focused on his cousin, whose image is echoed in every photo in his scrapbook. The island eventually becomes a kind of isolated paradise for David, Dot and their two lovers, cutting ties with social norms, familial expectations and the threats of the contemporary world (not to mention they're running from the law!).

The storyline concerning David's search for information about his absent father by imposing grandiose meaning and inserting overly symbolic subtext into his father's comics, is one that I wish was explored to its fullest. Clowes abandons the storyline in favor of David's sexual satisfaction - almost, at least for me, making the emotional connection to David as a character a tad more difficult.

Caricature is an entirely different ball of wax. Nine separate character studies striking vastly varied styles and tones while maintaining the Clowes trademark blend of hyper nostalgic kitsch and the more grotesque aspects of our idiosyncrasies. In this way, Caricature was very very reminiscent of Ghost World for me. The characters felt like they existed inside of that same reality - searching for the same things, interested in the same aesthetics, similarly alienated and intensely intelligent if not cripplingly self aware. My favorite selection from Caricature concerns a caricature artist - because Clowes is as self aware as his most neurotic character - whose portraits gain praise from an Enid like younger woman. She talks to him about how he is an artist and his vision is important and that he shouldn't waste it drawing people with the delicate sensibilities that he has always maintained. She urges him to draw caricatures in the way she thinks they were meant to be, exaggerating people's worst qualities. After giving it a shot and making an unsuspecting customer cry in response to his drawing, he finds himself unable to do the work he loves. Clowes takes it all to task, artistic pretension, the idea that honesty holds more integrity than a white lie, and personal choice. Clowes himself is a fan of the negatively exaggerated caricature (if you've ever seen his self portraits you know that this is a universally applied practice) and it is interesting to see him possibly arguing for the kindness that can be found in art practices. I have to say, I liked Caricature much more than David Boring - even in their shorter segments I found the characters more developed not to mention interesting than for what Boring allowed. Clowes parades out these short studies of people whose obsessions lead them all over the place, for ill or good, in a place of happiness or a bubbling, intense anger or clumsy clumsy sex.

About a Mountain by John D'Agata

2010-06-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

"For what attracted the extra million visitors to Lake Mead that year was not the usual lure of the lake’s artificial beauty, nor its recreational usefulness, not even just the novelty that such a lake could exist, but rather the simple fact that the lake was slowly dying, that as the city quickly drained it the lake’s level lowered, and there slowly reemerged from its sinking blue surface that far distant past of the city of Las Vegas: a chimney stack from a concrete plant poking higher and higher above the water every day, part of a giant complex of mixing vats and grinders that was built in the thirties to help pour Hoover Dam, then was flooded by the lake that the dam had helped form; there was the B-29 bomber that crashed into Lake Mead, left there by the Air Force in 1949 because at that time it was so deep that divers couldn’t reach it; there was the sundae shop; there was the baker’s shop; there was the grocery store; a bank; there were 233 crypts and tombstones that were stripped bare of clothing and necklaces and bones when every deceased resident of St. Thomas, Nevada was ziplocked and carted north and reburied upriver, just days before the growing lake would swallow their town whole."

In my junior year of high school, Congress approved President Bush's rehashed approval of Yucca Mountain as our nation's nuclear waste repository. Not coming from a family of activists, or folks that I would even characterize as familiar with local politics, my knowledge about this issue was and is woefully out of proportion as a Las Vegas (semi) native. I vaguely remember going to a few benefit shows in the area, I remember yelling along when people were angry about it all - as if the assumptions that people had made about Vegas our entire lives from the outside were being congressionally sanctioned - we were the place you hid things you didn't want to deal with with absolutely no thought concerning the lives of the people that keep the city alive.

It wasn't until later when pieces of the story and the history of the area's relationship with nuclear technology that the full horror of the situation came to life for me. It wasn't until I read John D'Agata's essay (an excerpt from About a Mountain) in the Believer back in January that I was able to read about it in an emotionally connected way. The essay "What Happens There" was primarily about the suicide of a teenage boy who jumped from the top of the Stratosphere. Its reach extended out through the fabric of the city delving into Las Vegas's disproportionate suicide rate, the symbology of architecture to the efforts expended on creating a means of communicating with the future population concerning the dangers of our nuclear waste repository at the heart of Yucca Mountain. I read it while visiting my parents for the holidays and remember crying on the couch when I finished it.

John D'Agata is not from Las Vegas which has its pitfalls and benefits in a book like this. It helps that his experience in the city was initiated by helping his mother move to Summerlin, so his writing is characterized by an openness with respect to the more mundane aspects of life that are so often wished away by other writers with Vegas as a subject. After accompanying his mother to a meeting of local activists in which they watch Harry Reid desperately, passionately but ultimately futilely rail against the Yucca decision, he becomes fascinated by the entire process and ends up staying in Vegas to write a series of articles that would eventually becomes About a Mountain. D'Agata is an entertaining essayist and I enjoy and admire his willingness to be taken along for the ride. He meanders through points (sometimes to the detriment to the organization of the book and sometimes to surprising emotional pitch) leaving the enormous massive bureaucratic nightmare that defines Yucca mountain behind for a tour of the neon graveyard or an incredulous tour of the centennial celebration (in which approximately 5 percent of the world's largest cake was consumed) or a comical if shallow background on someone who can only be described as the world's most ridiculous political figure, Oscar Goodman.

D'Agata tapes into the undeniably engraging reality of the Yucca Mountain situation. Fact after fact emerges and side by side they create something bordering parody. Evidence has come out that the science supporting the safety of the project has been falsified, when D'Agata finally (after being redirected through six different agencies) discovers the reasoning behind the 10,000 year half life standard that has guided the Yucca Mountain discussion is almost entirely arbitrary and most likely dangerous and incorrect in its assumptions. The picture he paints is of an issue in which EVERYONE knows that it won't work, EVERYONE knows its ill advised and dangerous and unworthy of consideration, but for lack of a better solution we're not just burying our head in the sand but actively digging towards the center of the earth.

The connective tissue between his more well developed research concerning the mountain and his exploration into the shocking suicide statistics (through the experience of a teen who with whom D'Agata is convinced he spoke through his volunteer work with the underfunded undersupported suicide hotline) is somewhat tenuous. The connection is the city - both in its actuality but also in its perception from those on the outside. Much of the prevailing attitudes about suicide from within the city is governed by the need to provide a consistently glossy image to the outside. No one wants Vegas to have its problems. No one wants it to complicate the fantasy. I do think that D'Agata's strength is as an essayist, his pieces are stronger independently and in short form. It is obvious that he is still formulating how to pack the kind of punch he wants into a longer form, his conclusion works as one for a shorter piece but it lacks the extended impact required of the entire book.

Property by Valerie Martin

2010-05-26T19:22:00.000-07:00

"He had not so much destroyed my life as emptied it."

I finished this book a week ago, but I've been thinking about it since, not quite being able to put my finger on why it was so affecting. The prose is decidedly sparse, each character is simultaneously easy to identify with and highly unlikeable, and the clipped pacing left me feeling a little startled. There was something about it though - somehow breaking through the polarizing effects of the traditional narratives one might find concerning slavery, in the most uncomfortable sense. Property doesn't provide a crystal clear conscience for the contemporary reader with the kind of narrative distance of typical historical fiction. By creeping in to the psyche of a slaveowning woman through the course of small uprisings and changes in her life, Martin allows for the complications and depth with which issues such as slavery deserve. Our narrator is not a reluctant slaveowner or a brave abolitionist or any other such easily categorizable heroic figure nor is she any brand of slaveowning Legree-like villain. She resides in an uncomfortable space between, Martin lets her characerization slowly pool out into the larger world folding in her resentment of her slave's "relationship" with her husband not to mention the fact that she has to care for their children, but also her disgust with her marriage and lack of agency. The only control she exercises is upon Sarah (her slave).

Manon Gaudet truly despises her husband, and it is easy to as well as the first time we see him he is enacting some kind of sadistic sexual game with a group of his slaves outside of his wife's window hoping that she is looking on. Manon feels as if every aspect of her life has lost any redemptive or pleasurable quality, the "color has been drained" from her life. Of course, the narrative is set up in such a way that while we identify with the obvious restrictiveness and absolute drudgery or Manon's daily life as well as the constant humiliation she feels at the hand of her husband, she also appears ridiculous when the lens recedes. She has not the capacity or inclination to imagine her life as more restricted, to put herself into the daily humiliation that is Sarah's lot. What is so startgling about this book is Martin's devotion to the construction of a realistic character, the gut wrenching physical and emotional abuses are woven into the fabric of life such that Manon seems almost sociopathic in how casual her cruelties become. There are no boundaries which she will not cross and she greets any resistance or familiarity with solid incredulity. The question I kept returning to was, how on earth do I get through this novel. I never found my stride with Manon - Martin never gave me enough to want her to succeed. I suppose that I kept waiting for what the traditional literary tropes have taught me to expect, some sort of change of heart or alliance forged between her and Sarah through shared hardship...but instead we get a realistic and maddening moment in which Manon is genuinely surprised when Sarah does not sacrifice herself in order for Manon to escape a slave revolt.

What really works in the novel is Smith's implication. Manon is an intensely strong willed woman, intelligent and socially observant and it is just as natural as breathing to her to treat Manon as she did. Martin's cutting implication gets right to the heart of those big questions we all shirk from - how easy is it to go along with it all, to get swept up in the dominant ideology and only dig our heels into the ground when our own comforts and rights are the ones being eroded. We hate the character of Manon because she is too close to home and too much of a reminder that the worlds tragedies and horrors are enacted daily by average people.

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

2010-05-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

"For I think of us more as flowers in the attic. Paper flowers. Born so brightly colored, and fading duller through all those long, grim, dreary, nightmarish days when we were held prisoners of hope, and kept captive by greed."

This is how the book begins....followed shortly by the narrator comparing herself humbly to Charles Dickens (sigh).
My mother would never let me read this book as a kid. Not only did she have a problem with the incest but also with its negative depictions of religious people. I remember seeing all of my friends carrying it around with them, hearing them talk about the books insanity and later recognizing it as one of the best selling "young adult" novels of all time as well as one of the most banned books in America. I knew vaguely what to expect even though my mother's warnings led me to avoid the book until now and having never seen the film adaptation...but I have to say that this book is kind of insane but in an absolutely amazing way. It is camp in its purest form, unselfconscious and overarticulated.

As the novel begins we are thrown into the world of the Dollanganger family, through Cathy's point of view. Her, her older brother Chris and their two twin siblings are somewhat affectionately referred to as the Dresden dolls by their neighbors, they have a charmed life and a loving family. When their dad dies in a car accident it all quickly unravels. Suddenly their mother's rich relatives are revealed, rich parents whose religious zealotry lead them to disown her after she married her half uncle (Cathy's dad). In a plot to win back her father's affection and her inheritance, mother conspires with grandmother to hide her children in the attic of their gigantic house until the grandfather dies.

What follows is the three years the siblings spend alone together in their room, fending off the hyper paranoid (but eventually right!) assumptions that Cathy and Chris are having an incestuous relationship, trying to stay strong in the face of their mother's indifference which grows at an almost comically exponential rate, recovering from physical and emotional abuse and caring for each other as their health deteriorates.

Overtly concerned with class and materialism, the central tension remains to be the desire for money versus the desire for freedom. Obviously the mother's need for material wealth causes her to completely abandon her children, but even Cathy and Chris at a certain point acknowledge the fact that they could leave for any moment but that their sacrifice would be for nothing unless they stuck it out to the end and claimed their inheritance. The cruel joke with which the novel ends crushes any remnants of this idea. Cathy becomes the foil for Andrews's own commentary, she repeats the primacy of individual freedom from the beginning, making her a target of everyone else's scorn.

Flowers in the Attic is almost a classical fairytale, adopting the gothic elements so familiar to us all. Like many of our most treasured fairytales, the absence of the father signifies the beginning of a dark time, a time usually controlled by a controlling, jealous female figure. Think Snow White, the Little Mermaid, Hansel and Gretel (somewhat), Cinderella etc. etc. Also, in keeping with the traditional fairytale trajectory the plot is primarily concerned with Cathy's transition from childhood to adulthood and her resulting sexuality (one of the more horrifying moments of the novel comes when the grandmother threatens to chop off her hair, a traditional symbol of female sensuality). Cathy is forced to grow up quickly and completely buys into the narrative that her growing up requires her entrance into motherhood. The incest between her and her brother comes up not only through their proximity but also through their mutual desire to replicate their lost family unit. Andrews loves fairy tales, gothic literature and Freud.

The quality of Andrews's prose hovers somewhere in between the shockingly simplistic, grammar addled Stephanie Meyers and the self indulgent melodrama of Charlaine Harris. (The dialogue is especially ludicrous.) It has that shlocky quality that fills in all the gaps for you, setting up the dominoes in order to knock them down at the exact moments we expect them. Everything that makes this book hilarious are the things that got it banned, and I think the assumption that this is a young adult novel comes only with the assumption that young adults can't read complicated writing. I have compared another book on this blog to candy, and felt similarly about this one - this is the literary equivalent to The Room.
Well, I mean, they made a film adaptation, which I'm sure is even more ridiculous in the film...although I hear it somewhat skirts the incest subject. THIS MOVIE LOOKS AMAZING.

This blogger does a really amazing detailed incredulous reading, much like the Twilight video guy.

Ask the Dust by John Fante

2010-05-16T12:03:00.001-07:00

"One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out. That was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed."

Sometimes the world is trying to tell you something. You learn a new word and you hear it everywhere. You see someone while picking up your morning coffee and then again at the library and then again at the bank and then again at your neighborhood bar. Sometimes the signs are more obvious than others and sometimes they lead you to overcome certain literary prejudices you may have had that were completely unfounded....
For the past few weeks I've been bombarded by John Fante. From the hottest guy on the internet (see below, thanks Nikki) to the guy who works at the coffee shop next door to work wearing a t shirt with the book jacket design on it, to an latimes write up! I had avoided John Fante purely because I have some holdover extreme Bukowski related anger that began in my early highschool years and extends to the present - periodically reinvigorated by the occasional tactless drunk artist pretender tossing shots back at the Smog Cutter because "the man" used to drink there, sitting on a stool romanticizing the days when misogyny was the sign of an irreverent man and a complete and utter disregard for your fellow human beings could easily be passed off as countercultural. UGH. Anyway, as a wise friend recently said me, you can't blame the influencers for the shitty art they have unwittingly inspired. Thus, I finally checked out Ask the Dust.

Ask the Dust is a semiautobiographical novel about Arturo Bandini, a young struggling writer living in Los Angeles (specifically on Bunker Hill). Bandini survives from moment to moment, stealing buttermilk from trucks, savoring orange peels and coveting steak whose smell wafts through the neighbor's walls.
He is caught somewhere between Catholic guilt and a misanthropic faithlessness, his sexual inexperience torturing him from all sides, his sensual relationship with the world magnified to almost tragic heights. What surprised me most about the character of Arturo was his sensitivity, his vulnerability and the way in which he almost seems to bumble through life. It is in this sensitivity that I see Fante bringing not only the character to a fully formed place, but also explores the writer's relationship to Los Angeles at large - Bandini's insecurities and childish playacting of the part of the blustering successful writer comes off as painfully familiar to those of us residing in this fair city. His momentary successes come almost in spite of himself, he is dominated and overwhelmed by emotion and completely unwilling to acknowledge or process any of it. Fante captures brilliantly that unbelievably frustrating moment on the beginning fringes of adulthood, characterized by a kind of blanket righteous indignation putting you at odds with any and all simple answers. He is so full of desire and painfully unable to articulate or even conceptualize how to fulfil it. Bandini conceives of himself in a fictional sense, consistently referring to himself in the third person and oscillating between crippling self consciousness and bravado.

Fante's Los Angeles both nurtures and rejects Bandini, simultaneously the city that makes up the architecture of his dreams while stifling him with its sheer size and diversity. It is a novel that is quite sparse plotwise, instead focusing on the city's ability to create and foster tensions from the depths (Fante loves throwing in the not so subtle moments - earthquake during an emotional crisis anyone?). Aside from his writing, Bandini spends the majority of his time obsessively pursuing a local waitress Camilla who in turn obsessively pursues Sam. It's a kind of trickle down effect of emotional abuse leaving Camilla wandering the desert out of her mind on drugs and Bandini in a comically uncomfortable suit.

Ask the Dust is also pretty hilarious, although the humor resides uncomfortably inside of Bandini's own discomfort between his writer's persona and his terribly self conscious nature. Bandini exists in that long line of unreliable narrators - we have to take his word instead of reading his work first hand, we have to exist within his neurosis constantly for better or worse. The humor also capitalizes on the fantasy of the writer's life, the romanticized version of inspiration, words materializing out of the ether in a haze of alcohol and sexuality. Bandini has none of these trappings, instead painstakingly constructs his novel out of the disgusting tragedy of those around him, stripping the fantasy of the writer down to its most humble essentials.

Here's the trailer for the 2006 film adaptation which apparently decided to take this story and make it into some shlocky romance focusing on interracial relationships in depression era Los Angeles starring two people who apparently have absolutely no chemistry and who decided to put the absolute minimum of effort into a very wilted script. Not since Posession have I felt like this about a film adaptation!

The Square Root of Wonderful by Carson McCullers

2010-05-08T11:59:00.000-07:00

"The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else."

It's no secret that Carson McCullers is my favorite author. I keep extra copies of her novels around to give to people when I feel they might need them, or as happens just as often, when I need to give them to someone. That said, I have a difficult time reading plays - I live for the descriptive meat of a novel, the subtext that resides in the space between the spoken lines of a moment between two people. Without the fleshing out that comes with the work of actors and directors, plays often feel flat to me. The plays that I have enjoyed reading, I've enjoyed because I have already seen them on stage. For some reason then I am completely capable of imagining the infinite variations - the subtleties of directorial style and an actor's person relationship with a character, but I need someone to take that first step for me.

The Square Root of Wonderful is Carson McCullers only play. Edward Albee turned the Member of the Wedding into a fantastic play with her help, but this was her only independent theatrical effort. I was apprehensive about reading it, I love her so much and I have such difficulty with plays....but at a certain point if you're going to claim someone as your favorite author you have to really be willing to dive into everything they've done headfirst with no expectations. A word about context - I decided to read this play outside since this week has been one of the most beautiful weeks since I've moved to Los Angeles. It's been the kind of week that makes you feel bad for anyone who doesn't live here. So I went for a bike ride with a few books in tow and feeling pretty triumphant I made a dramatic gesture to lay down in the grass, clutching the play to my chest and so ready for a few hours blocking the sun with a book. Then I felt a pinch on my arm, sat up and realized that I had crushed and had subsequently been stung by a bee who was out to ruin my reading experience and my post bike ride euphoria. Not to be defeated I relocated to a picnic bench and read the play there, cover to cover, so as to prove that I would not be thwarted by the aforementioned bee, but I digress.

The Square Root of Wonderful displays McCullers at her most cutting - one of the qualities I most admire in her fiction is that of creating characters whose flaws do not eclipse the obvious love she puts into them. The desperate, the misunderstood and even the unlikeable always find a little ember of compassion or elicit a bit of sympathy due to the way in which she fully develops their humanity. She doesn't get there in this play, revealing very little complexity in any of the characters aside from Mollie our protagonist. Mollie is married a second time to a man she had previously divorced, an abusive, unfaithful and selfish writer whose success and critical acclaim from his first novel has never been met thereafter. While he is away at a sanitarium, Mollie develops a relationship with a tenant in her house, a seemingly innocuous and passionless architect who is madly in love with her. The basic tension is between the obvious intensity of the sexual connection between Mollie and her first husband and the support and security that is offered by the architect. Her son is caught in the crosshairs of the same tension, displaying fierce pride at his father's success and unconventional life while fantasizing about the beautiful house that he might live in with his new family. McCullers representation of sexuality is always unique, but in this play its almost stunted. Mollie spends most of the play in a state of embarrassment about her desires, claiming that she can't kiss anyone lest she fall into an uncontrollable sexual downward spiral. Sex is linked intimately with violence and with a sense of abandon that leads to the destruction of the family and the degradation of every character.

The most interesting moments occur with Mollie's mother in law and sister in law. The mother is a source of comic relief in an otherwise bleak landscape (although McCullers doesn't do an altogether stellar job of weaving the humor into the fabric of the story - at times it comes off as too callous since it is in such stark contrast to the action of the play). She is an unrepentant classist, insulting everyone around her, most of all her daughter, whose debut into society was filled with such expectation that her current spinster (librarian!!!) status has only served to pile on the shame for her mother. The sister is by far the most interesting character. All external factors would point to her as an obvious candidate for self pity but she is the most confident and contented among the bunch. She confesses to Mollie that she has protracted, passionate love affairs with imaginary foreigners and that is all the love that she needs in her life. She eventually expresses some regret at not having her brother's talent but she still maintains a certain serenity that is completely lacking in the rest of our cast.

McCullers presentation of these two polarized versions of love feels a little forced to me. Its not as simple as her arguing against the kind of illogical magical deep connection between Mollie and Phillip and pushing Mollie into a more "mature" logical approach to love and sex. It can certainly be read that way, but I think it can only be read that way in the void of McCullers's other material. Her panoply of unforgettable characters are always operating in a nontraditional conception of love and romance, intricately crafted out of their cultural identity and individual approach to the world. She writes about queers and even the straightest of her queers never engage in something that would be so pejoratively referred to as "logical love". Mollie has been completely debilitated by her love for Phillip and the remoteness she feels from John would allow her to explore other parts of her life worth exploring. This in and of itself is a queer choice, rejecting the external obligations of husband and house, to make a different choice for yourself. Acknowledging different types of love that serve different purposes at times in our life is in no way rejecting one for the other - using the metaphor from McCullers herself - when Mollie thinks about each man the ordinary objects in her room radiate.

When the play premiered, the expectations were high. Having garnered critical success for her fiction and a stage hit with her collaboration with Albee, the devastation of this play's utter failure both critically and popularly was quite a blow. As a public attempt to exorcise the demons brought on by the suicide of her husband and the death of her mother (both occured while she was writing the play), it seemed to represent a lack of synthesis in emotions and clarity, a less well developed and passionate character analysis than any of her other work.

The Black City by George Sand

2010-05-08T11:42:00.000-07:00

“There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.”

So this was officially my first George Sand novel. There will probably be many more to come, although from this experience I probably wouldn't read them back to back, more of a smattering of Sand here and there when the time feels right. Her prose is a bit stilted for me, making it difficult to connect with characters on a personal level - their emotions seemed distant and their speeches overly practiced.

The Black City is the diminuitive for the factory town, or "Lower Town" in which our characters live and work. Our protagonist, nicknamed Sept-Epees for his blacksmithing skills is in the prime of his life. Young, ambitious and more financially secure than his peers, he's got designs on changing his station in life. He wants to own his own business and eventually move to Upper Town leaving behind the Black City and gaining the independence that is so far out of reach for the whole of his fellow workers. The people surrounding him are representative of differing attitudes toward life, Sand has clear a clear point of view about who she thinks is correct but steers Sept-Epees down his own path in order to expose not only the difficulties of climbing the class ladder but also the motivations behind such a climb. Sept-Epees best friend Gaucher has opposite inclinations, content to be in another's employ and completely fulfilled with the love he feels for his wife and children.

Sand isn't subtle about her economic and political views, her value system aligns with the plight of the worker, simultaneously praising consistency and hard work while pointing out the pitfalls of ambition for ambition's sake as well as ambition that would separate you from your class. For Sand, leaving the Black City is tantamount to rejecting its value system and engaging in class warfare, Sept Epees moment of realization comes when his illusions about just how small of chance he ever had at leaving the Black City - and this moment is met with a serene satisfaction, an acceptance of place. The implication is not only that its more than ok to be a worker in the Black City, but also that those who want a different life are selfish and foolish.

At the center of all of this commentary exists a love story, an exhausting exercise in miscommunication, stifled emotions and frustration for all parties involved (not least of all the reader). Because the speech of the characters made them all seem so remote, it was difficult to care very much about the epic love story Sand was constructing. Tonine whose generosity and fierce independence makes her an absolutely groundbreaking female character finds herself caught up in her own sense of pride when it comes to Sept Epees, who as we've already seen is too wrapped up with his ambition. Each has a false sense of what the other wants and needs and spend years perpetuating their own personal pathological attitudes toward one another. At their eventual union, the exhaustion is almost too much and Sand gets sloppy with her plot points, relying on nonsensical twists and turns that leave the reader slightly confused and frustrated at the duplicity of the characters.

The Black City had a skeletal structure that I could get behind, the plight of the common man, a foreboding allegory about the dangers of misplaced ambition, the tragedy that occurs when pride gets in the way of true love....but Sand just doesn't flesh any of her ideas out in a meaningful way - it was lacking the feeling you get when the best storytellers draw you in. There were no goosebumps or instances of tears, I didn't feel outrage or even shock when bad things happened to the main characters. I wanted to love this book so much, I wanted to love George Sand so much! I'm not giving up, maybe her passion just took a vacation while she was writing this one, or it could be a terrible translation lacking in he poetry existing in the French? Sigh.

BRONTESAURUS

2010-05-08T11:38:00.000-07:00

Barbarians at the Gate of the Public Library by Ed D'Angelo

2010-05-07T10:15:00.000-07:00

I should note before I get too far into this, that the full title of this book would not fit into the "Title" field - so the full title is:
Barbarians at the Gate of the Public Library: How Postmmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and The Public Good

Basically, D'Angelo uses the developing history of conceptions of the library alongside the development of the current philosophies towards the market to paint a bleak picture of the form and function of current library systems. He traces the original ideas behind the need for a library as intimately tied to the notion of public good - of betterment through education and edification and asserts that through the rise of consumerism, that concept changed. He views the library now as operating within current business models founded on consumerism, acting more as a customer service driven entertainment outlet with no real impetus for creating a more informed or well educated citizenry. He cites attitudes toward circulation as well as the de professionalization of librarianship as a complete disregard for the central mission of the library at large.

I appreciated the way that his arguments were laid out, particularly since my background in political philosophy and American business history is definitely not well developed. I was a little disappointed in how little he actually talked about the current landscape of libraries. He seemed to tack on a kind of "so there" argument at the end of the book assuming your agreement after his well laid out foundation. There is a tendency to wax poetic about the concept of developing a cohesive overriding mission statement for the library on a national level, which I personally have mixed feelings about. I do agree that it is difficult to provide the kind of financial and logistical support for libraries because of the focus on local issues and individual communities...but on the other hand I believe strongly in responding to the needs of those same communities, needs which are vastly different from Beverly Hills to Highland Park. D'Angelo does force you to wrestle with some basic concepts about the role of the public library. It is frustrating that the availability of books is dependent on their ability to sell in the marketplace - but I also have a hard time with the idea that it is the job of the librarian to tell people what to read. Do I think we would have a more vibrant, well informed and active society if people read more Tolstoy and less Janet Evanovich? I can't answer that question and more importantly in the context of D'Angelo's book - do I think that it is someone's job, be it the government's or the individual librarian's to make sure that people's experience at the library is guided by some sort of "higher" principle.

I have always felt a strong connection to the library, as a child I hid from the world in books and it became a kind of sanctuary. As an adult, my relationship to it is different (not that occasionally I don't still run away from the world by hiding in the stacks), and the reason that I am professionally drawn to librarianship has more to do with the ways in which contemporary librarians have figured out how to help people than the more sort of curatorial duties that D'Angelo seems to be more focused on...I don't mean that to sound belittling, because I do think that that aspect of librarianship is of amazing importance and is intimately tied to one of the most important and basic ideas held dear by librarians - the idea of access to information. For me though, the library in some ways becomes the place where people gain access to technology, job resources, literacy and community...I guess what I mean by that is that first thing seems first. Teach people to read first, get them a job, teach them how to do basic searches on the internet or put together a resume - these to me, are pieces of the puzzle just as vital to active and informed citizenship than what a person chooses to read. I also recognize that there is this kind of hypocrisy to be found in my approach to things. On the one hand I agree with D'Angelo that many times people might not have the resources to be well informed enough to make decisions in their own best interest (which is why I felt like banging my head against the wall watching working class people and their invigoration at the presence of Sarah Palin) and that allowing that kind of philosophy to continue under the guide of democracy which in facts stunts the intellectual growth of the population but that idea also exists (for me) right next to being terrified of the paternalism that so easily comes from that same idea.

I appreciate anything that gets people to think about the state of the library and the ideas behind it and hopefully HOPEFULLY gets people to think about the ways in which it should be improved or developed. D'Angelo did leave me feeling a little bleak and for me I needed a bit of time to really think about things in a meaningful way. I'm still working through it, if anyone has read it I would really appreciate your thoughts and comments!

Watch this, think about it.

2010-05-04T16:35:00.000-07:00

No really, do.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

2010-05-04T16:17:00.000-07:00

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more."

After reading Carrie, I found myself craving some more horror. Never having seen the movie or read the book and having a surface level knowledge of Shirley Jackson's work I decided that this would be the direction for me to go. Honestly, I wasn't really expecting that much, just another way to fulfill my temporary need for some sort of genre horror novel. What I wasn't expecting was a truly terrifying character study, exposing deep seated psychological issues manifesting themselves in a house that is described as having been "born evil".

We begin with Dr. Montague, whose explorations into the world of the paranormal have left his colleagues a little bit bemused by his work. His plan is to rent Hill House, recruit "assistants" to live with him and observe the psychic phenomena that he is sure will take place. His personal beliefs reside somewhere in between the skeptical and the earnest, hoping that something interesting occurs but open minded about the explanations. He wants to conduct a truly scientific study of Hill House and hopes to publish a definitive book on the experience. He sends out letters to a handful of people who have had documented experiences with paranormal activity or psychic phenomena, hoping that they will be especially attuned to the occurences in the house. Only two people respond - because who really responds to a cryptic random solicitation from someone they have never met to come live in a house and be his "assistant" for a period of time??? That is the brilliance of Jackson's premise, Dr. Montague has already self selected people whose need to escape their lives trumps the uncertainties of the new situation.

Jackson has given me one of my new favorite characters of late with the protagonist Eleanor Vance. Eleanor has spent most of her life taking care of her invalid mother, having her life completely planned and laid out for her by her overbearing sister and her simpering brother in law. She has never done anything on her own or for herself and so her participation in the hill house experiment is momentous. She steals her sister's car, takes off and begins to imagine a life for herself with the kinds of broad strokes of a teenager. Every sign post represents a possibility and every house contains a possible life intricately detailed and full of hope.

Like any truly fantastic horror story, the action requires a slow build, bringing you to a fever pitch of anticipation. Jackson spends a good bit of time delving into the dynamics between the two assistants, the doctor and the heir to hill house. While they play chess and paint each other's nails and make flippant puns about the presence of spirits, you begin to feel as if their bravado is soon to be cut short. Jackson also gives the house its own spiritual past, not just the basic, expected tainted history filled with suicide, tragedy and neglect (although it does definitely have that) - instead she adds a kind of preternatural effect to it, insisting that it was born bad, born evil. It was constructed in labyrinthine fashion. Rooms don't match up, sculptures loom with dramatic lighting, windows look out onto parts of the house that don't really exist, doors refuse to stay open because the house is on a constant tilt - possibly part of Jackson's disdain for vanity which seems to run like a tension rod through the narrative and each character's life.

Ultimately the brilliance in the story structure is in the lack of clarity - Jackson doesn't really let you in on her thought process, you are constantly torn between believing that the house truly is a malevolent force, flying in the face of the very foundational definitions of home and and thinking that it is the deteriorating psyches of the character(s) that lead to the terrifying events that follow. For Eleanor, the things that they experience in hill house do not detract from her desperate need for freedom and she becomes obsessively and maniacally attached to the house, separating herself from the other inhabitants and forging emotional and physical bonds with the structure itself. The chilling conclusion can only come after Eleanor's severance from the group, a group with which she so desperately tried to bond, a group that represented her very first friends. Her humanity is subsumed by her bond with the house and its unwillingness to allow her to leave provides Jackson with the ultimate moment to showcase her capacity for terror.

Solar by Ian McEwan

2010-05-04T15:59:00.000-07:00

"Solar energy ?" Beard said mildly. He knew perfectly well what was meant, but still, the term had a dubious halo of meaning, an invocation of New Age Druids in robes dancing round Stonehenge at midsummer's dusk. He also distrusted anyone who routinely referred to "the planet" as proof of thinking big.

Ok, my expectations were pretty high for Solar. I LOVE Ian McEwan. LOVE HIM. Not to mention that everyone in the world has been freaking out about how Solar was his first science fiction novel - all of my nerd blogs were abuzz and as a result I bought a copy the day after it came out, which is something I usually don't do. I will not say that it met my expectations, because that would be ludicrous after the build up I put myself through, but I will say that I found myself laughing out loud on the bus, I devoured it in terms of both plot and prose and I've already passed it along to someone (the mark of true admiration). All of that laid out though, I will say that McEwan's capacity for emotional depth and long lasting heartfelt resonance may not have been completely reached. I don't think that was a goal of Solar, so I can't fault him for not reaching his own signpost...but I can lament the missed affectations that could have elevated it to one of those books that crawls deep into your heart to live forever (such as Atonement, Enduring Love, The Cement Garden...).

In Solar, McEwan has created one of the truly unlikeable characters of our time. He is self absorbed, deluded, unaware, emotionally abusive and unavailable, gluttonous, lazy and unrepentant. Several of the more memorable scenes have to do with our main characters extreme physical discomfort brought on by nothing but his own carelessness or willful overindulgence. Michael Beard is a Nobel prize winning physicist, riding the wave of early fame and renown into a life of leisure and gradually receding relevance. The brilliance of the character of Michael Beard is that you are constantly rooting for those around him, at every turn you expect him to get caught or found out or ruined, but he doesn't. He is tortured by his wife's infidelity even though he has had upwards of eleven mistresses himself in the past two years alone, he brushes off his most earnest graduate student whose work he will later plagiarize, he ruins a man's life for no discernible reason and over time convinces himself that he hasn't quite ruined it enough for his taste.

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is Beard's absolute lack of conviction when it comes to his life's work. McEwan has clearly done his research, and if you've seen him talk in the past five years, you know that he is passionate about climate change politics. In the face of that knowledge, its astounding that he would write his big "climate change" novel focusing on a man whose blatant opportunism is the only cause of his positive work, work founded upon the intellectual property of another. McEwan's finest moments in the novel come about when he points out - with layers upon layers of linguistic subtlety - the irony of Beard himself. Beard has an extended passage in which he describes his romance with his first wife, whose heart he won by pretending to love the poetry of Milton. He asserts that literature is a ridiculous field of study precisely because it was so very simple for him to understand and pretend an expertise - this comes at a moment when his entire professional life has been founded on stolen intellectual property. McEwan's sense of humor is bleak and amazing, leading us to a kind of unfulfilled climax in which Beard might finally have to face the absolute wreckage he has created in his wake of pure selfishness.

The novel takes on a lot of big ideas, the obvious larger concepts of climate change, the moral imperative of scientists, relativism, intellectual rigor and property rights and storytelling. Beard is constantly revising the story for his own purposes - something that we all do continually, but watching Beard do it is somewhat unbearable. It is wholly satisfying when we get to see glimpses of other people's perspectives with respect to Beard. When we see him through the eyes of his business partner or through the eyes of a group of postmodern feminists, you can't help but crack a smile.

I had moments in which I wished that something or someone had brought me into closer contact with Beard, because ultimately there is little with which to emotionally connect. This is an unbelievably readable novel, funny and thought provoking and structurally interesting (although at times I questioned the necessity of splitting up the narrative instead of just creating the linking passages). McEwan's prose always leaves me floored and I find myself circling sentence after sentence and letting them kind of roll around in my brain for awhile. We are left somewhat unfulfilled, not that I really needed to see Beard punished completely - he is a miserable enough human being that he elicits a kind of sympathy by default, but we are left without knowing about the fate of Beard's project, the fates of the lives he has ruined and most importantly the ultimate impact of his work on the world. Solar felt uncharacteristically carefree - not in the sense of the characters or even the general plot, but something about it was conspicuously missing. His novels are usually so tightly wound and perfect, every word in its place and every emotion tucked carefully underneath, that it is all the more obvious when he misses the mark. It is well worth the read, but its definitely not going to be the novel that you give to your new girlfriend or your penpal.

AND....just because its amazing:

If you haven't read the Cement Garden - DO IT!

Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn/Pia Guerra

2010-05-04T14:54:00.001-07:00

"No. No, first comes boyhood. You get to play with soldiers and spacemen, cowboys and ninjas, pirates and robots. But before you know it, all that comes to an end. And then, Remo Williams, is when the adventure begins."

As an occasional comic reader and outspoke Lost fan, I cannot accurately count the number of times that this series has been recommended to me over the past five or so years. I finally gave in, borrowing them incrementally from a friend whose excitement at my agreement to read it ultimately pushed me over the edge. I will admit that I had apprehensions, the premise to me seemed rife with possibilities of oversimplification and glossy political cop outs. Sometimes my assumptions were right, but more often than not the series takes on a more complicated bent than expected, displaying a maturity that represents a gradual flowering of viewpoints over the five years it spent in publication.

We are introduced to Yorick Brown, a pop culture nerd whose penchant for magic, laziness and just all around immaturity have left his romantic relationship in jeopardy and his prospects for life relatively limited. His anthropologist girlfriend is traveling the world for the sake of her work while he pines, practices magic tricks and socializes primarily with his monkey. Then the "gendercide" hits and he suddenly becomes the last man on earth, him and his monkey become the last male mammals in existence. The planet is sent into (at least temporarily) tailspin, Israel and Australia become the world's super powers because of the presence of women in their militaries, the infrastructure of the world's major religions is all but wiped out, and the women of the world are dealing with their new reality in myriad ways. I was hoping that Vaughn would find a way to represent this new world without resorting to some of the most obvious tropes - the vindicated/man hating Amazon woman for one (yawn - they run around the countryside destroying sperm banks and claim that the destruction of man was God's retribution for patriarchal oppression) but he does experience some pitfalls here and there. He does spend a bit of time letting Yorick revel in his newfound juvenile fantasy of being surrounded by beautiful women who cannot resist the last man alive - and there is an implied congratulations in Vaughn's writing for the fact that Yorick doesn't spend the entire series running around having sex with every woman he can get his hands on.

Yorick was an English major and Vaughn looooves references (LOST!), dropping music, comic, filmic and literary nods left and right. Sometimes it gets to be a little much, you just want to shake him and say - we get it, you're well read and you're basing your story on a cultural history that you want all of us to recognize...Y does exist firmly within the tradition of literature of a type, referencing Shelley's The Last Man directly, referencing Perkins Gilman's Herland by implication. Yorick is somewhat surprised at the chaos that still exists in the world, having had the expectation that women's nature would have eliminated war, competition and vice. The women of the world move on, creating economy, perpetuating both the best and world qualities of humanity - Vaughn's vision of human nature is certainly no walk in the park.

Anyone familiar with LOST will also recognize the ways in which Vaughn builds character, gradually laying out their flaws against the larger backdrop of their lives and their world, slowly fleshing out each person while retaining their initial archetypal features. He doesn't stray too far from this pattern, each of our heroes has that oh so familiar tragic flaw that can be witnessed in almost every decision they make. However, I will say that he also focuses heavily on character development, finding space for our main characters to stretch out and mature, in the face of their new reality but also in terms of their relationships to one another. Sure, they are in a kind of mindbogglingly new environment, but the greatest developments come out of the interpersonal relationships they develop and the consequent changes in morality, character and compassion (again, LOST!). One of the more obvious issues I had with the series is that there are too many characters, and if I took more than a day off between issues I would get a little lost trying to sort of place myself back into the narrative fully. The central characters: Yorick, Ampersand (his monkey), agent 355 who is charged to protect him and Dr. Allison Mann who is on a mission to both discover the cause of the gendercide as well as develop a long term solution for the survival of the human race via cloning, spend most of their time running from people trying to destroy them or capture Yorick for political purposes. There is no shortage of action, and the episodic form suits the tension Vaughn creates.

Y goes off in directions I never expected it to take, exploring the cathartic function of sadomasochistic sexual practices, the morality of scientific development's position in reproductive processes, the signifiers of masculinity in a world without men. Sometimes it does seem that Vaughn brings up these issues just to sort of prove that he can, and then galavants off into a more action packed storyline without fully exploring the relationship of those issues to the plot. Not to mention that Vaughn portrays trans men as kind of simpering, pathetic male imitations filling a void in the market - an idea that could have been quite brilliantly developed into a discussion about gender, sex and the marketplace....but is more so left as a punchy effect and a potential disguise for Yorick.

At times the plot twists seemed a little half baked, and the motivations of the characters unclear and it gave me the sense that maybe Vaughn didn't have it all mapped out from the beginning, propelling his characters into situational conflicts without the clarity of a final satisfying resolution. That said, the resolution was brilliant. I don't want to ruin it for anyone who hasn't read it - but I will say that every person who told me to read this series told me that I would cry in the end and I did. The emotional pitch is perfection for having invested so much time and narrative effort into a work, leaving you with a conclusion that doesn't feel forced, cheesey or unrealistic in the context of the comic's world. It also capitalizes on one of the more uncomfortable themes of the series, the relative unimportance of the individual in the context of the global trauma experienced by the world. The plot is intermittently interrupted by Guerra's newsreel like artwork representing the circumstances in other countries in that exact moment, contextualizing the individual dramas of our characters.

On an entirely different note, I realize that maybe I was expecting too much for Guerra's illustrations to represent diversity...in a world full of women, 99.9% of them are still huge breasted, tiny waisted and have long flowing hair that gets tossed in the breeze for affect. Guerra really shines on the individual issue covers and in her more expressive modes. When she has the space to get impressionistic, we get illustrations that fully accompany a terrifying, somewhat apocalyptic and romantic storyline.

Vaughn - again as we all know from LOST, is also a master of the one liner. Y: The Last Man is unexpectedly funny, and feels more like witty banter amongst a bunch of smart characters than it does a series of setups and drumrolls. In places, the humor does a fantastic job of expressing the desperation of their situations, or the extreme irony of the main narrative. One of the most fantastic lines in the entire series occurs in a dramatic moment in which they are all on a sinking ship and the captain tells Yorick, "Now that you're here, I'm just another crazy bitch fucking up the world you're gonna save. It figures. An entire planet of women, and the one guy gets to be the lead." Vaughn acknowledges the contradiction in his fictional world, while simultaneously pointing out the literary legacy within which he operates. It would be absolute brilliance if I didn't feel like he then proceeds to kind of sweep it all under the rug. Also, pretty unsurprising in a comic whose primary concern is masculinity, in a sense it's all a pretty traditional coming of age story in which unforeseen circumstances abruptly force Yorick into manhood.

Ultimately I enjoyed reading Y, I'm glad that I did. It was interesting to see the development of a storyline over five years and the differing levels of maturity it represents in terms of political engagement, interpersonal relationships, gender issues, feminist politics etc. etc. I appreciate its unwillingness to be uncomplicated and applaud Vaughn's obvious storytelling prowess. Finally, everyone can stop telling me to read it!

Carrie by Stephen King

2010-04-23T10:53:00.000-07:00

"Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutterball when you're bowling with the girls in the leage. True sorrow is as rare as true love."

I love horror movies, I have always loved them. Good, bad, trashy, artful, chances are I will watch them and love them. Carrie was one of the first, Brian De Palma's dark and lyrical take on King's novel elevated Piper Laurie's insanity, Sissy Spacek's ethereal beauty and the absolute horror of Carrie's claustrophobic, tragic life. What first struck me upon finally reading the novel, was the prose's insistent realism. Whereas watching the film leaves you with a grimey discomfort and lingering creep factor, the book forces you through an uncharacteristic epistolary style and with the slogging through of daily high school drama, to recall the cruelties of your own adolescence no matter which side you were on (and we were all on both).

Two scenes from the film have always remained firmly implanted in my memory, clearly the climactic pig's blood prom night moment - drawn out to an almost farcical moment by De Palma's slow motion echo chamber effects, and the opening scene in which Carrie is being taunted in the locker room shower by her classmates whose inability to empathize with her terror is both shocking and illness inducing. These scenes are so stylized and so surreal that De Palma creates for the audience, a distance between her tormentors and you. King gives you no such luxury, allowing you a glimpse into the minds of the women who torment Carrie, their own motivations and fears, jealousies and insecurities. Most effective are the moments when you are allowed a glimpse into the thought process of their gym teacher - who struggles between her obvious duty to stop the scene and her disgust with Carrie. In one of King's more reaching moments of symbolism Carrie reaches out for help and leaves a clear handprint of menstrual blood on the pristine white shorts of her teacher, who fights back disgust in order to take Carrie to the principal. King opens the novel with such intensity, putting his heroine in one of the most vulnerable spaces imaginable. A place full of confusion, sexuality, shame and power all swirling around in the perceptions of your body in contrast to another group of bodies. Carrie's fear and sadness are as palpable as it gets.

Carrie is King's first published novel and it shows. It is a testament to his sheer force as a storyteller that such a rough novel should have become a story whose thematics, imagery and characters have entered the public consciousness on such a scale. He has difficulty in shifting points of view and unfortunately that is the entire stylistic conceit of the novel, which alternates between psychological analysis, present day interviews with survivors and the interiority of the characters themselves. Tellingly, in both the film and the novel, we are given Sue Snell - a character that supposedly redeems humanity with her condescending compassion and inability to stand up for anything, at all, ever. We are only supposed to identify with Carrie up to a point and in the novel more than the film, she becomes an otherworldly force that checks her humanity at the door. Sue becomes our last remaining link to the events and even King's attempts to question her motivations seem half assed, Sue may be naive but she isn't mean spirited.

What I enjoyed most about the book, was the exposition of characters that were left so one dimensional in the film, characters that became archetypal stand ins or caricatures meant to define alliances in broad filmic strokes. Even in his most psychological career phases, I would never call DePalma subtle. Christine Hargenson and Billy Nolan (played by John Travolta!) are satisfyingly fleshed out in the novel. King develops Nolan into a reluctant boyfriend whose resentment and hatred of the priveleges enjoyed by upperclass teenagers (including his girlfriend) leads him to commit this horrific prank regardless of its victim. He has no stake in the shaming of Carrie - King actually brilliantly sets up a parallel in which one might imagine an alternate world in which Nolan and Carrie were allies. Nolan is vicious and cruel, Hargenson just comes across as desperate and tragic - hear meanness comes from the depths of insecurity. Someone who both the novel and the film leave almost completely up to the viewer/reader is Tommy, whose motivations and almost cherubic innocence set him apart from his peers and surroundings. In the film he almost appears saintly, in the book he comes across as kind of stupid. He is the only character with such a staggering lack of personality, that he literally has no opinions about anything one way or the other. His supposedly heroic gesture of taking Carrie to the prom struck me as odd and underdeveloped, although he is the only character who is neither terrified of or condescending to Carrie.

I read an interview with Stephen King awhile back about his state of mind while writing Carrie. To paraphrase, he said that Carrie came out of a young man whose mind had just been blown by feminism in an undergraduate setting. Whew! I mean, it is clear that classical mythology, issues concerning female power especially with regards to personal agency over the body, ideas about religious persecution and the scapegoating of women, the handing down of shame and pain from one generation of women to another, the psychiatric industry and its attitudes toward women, both historically and presently, were all swirling around in King's mind as he was constructing the story - but for some reason I was a bit shocked that he was so up front about the roots of his book.

What I find interesting is that Carrie could be seen as a very straightforward allegory for exploring a traditional fear of women's bodies. At the onset of puberty, Carrie's psychological power manifests, her blood literally gives her power over the people around her. A good deal of the novel is spent trying to complicate that narrative, giving us a picture of Carrie's life and circumstances that could provide us with nothing but pity, showing that after all that has happened to her, she still obeys her mother, she still wants to be friends with the girls at school, her intentions remain intact. At the moment she hits puberty, she begins to question her mother - whose chanting about women's inherent sin via the tree of knowledge becomes apropos precisely because Carrie begins to wise up and wield her power for personal agency. King seems to have a dual narrative going on, one in which he sets up all of the traditional establishment foils to shoulder the blame for Carrie's oppression and one in which he/we are still absolutely terrified (and should be) by her terrific power. She does end up killing almost everyone, sure, it's only when she feels the ultimate betrayal, the moment when the audience breaks out into laughter is almost too heartbreaking to get through, but she still decimates the town, and her humanity is completely subsumed by this mythical Fury-like being whose insatiable blood lust leads to her own demise as well. It's almost the anti Medea, the extreme violence sanctioned by no one, not even the author who spent two hundred pages cultivating sympathy for this tragic, lonely figure. But Medea always had complete awareness and control over her power, a distinction not lost when thinking about Carrie, its classical roots and the implications during a sort of break in mainstream second wave feminism.

When it comes down to it, Stephen King is a STORYTELLER. His stories are such a part of our collective cultural language its almost difficult to fathom. He is so prolific that he obviously has high highs and low lows, but in terms of sheer story you just can't fault him. My favorite piece by Stephen King is a novella called "A Very Tight Place" that I read in a McSweeney's Quarterly Concern a few years back and can also be found in his 2008 collection Just After Sunset. It's a much more tightly woven exploration that something like Carrie and delivers the kind of insidious, realistic horror that is just accessible enough to leave you with chills for days. Whew! Find it and read it, you will not be sorry.

Oh yeah....and this!
http://rockbottomremainders.com/

Six Word Story by Margaret Atwood

2010-03-29T14:39:00.001-07:00

Sigh. There aren't enough words for Margaret Atwood. Continually challenging the reading public and herself by exploring new worlds and genres and literary styles. She belongs to that precarious world of literary sci fi novelists, those who have had crossovers but still maintain the love and respect of some of the most die hard but finicky fans in the world. Awhile back Wired magazine asked a group of authors to write six word stories for them, they included exactly three women - you can probably guess exactly who - Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin and Eileen Gunn. The other authors were all over the place in terms of talent, reputation and career choice but still.....
Anyway, since it's so short and such a thing of beauty, I thought I would just quote the entirety of her story:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

This Book is Overdue! by Marilyn Johnson

2010-03-29T14:03:00.000-07:00

"The profession that had once been the quiet gatekeeper to discreet palaces of knowledge is now wrestling a raucous, multi-headed, madly multiplying best of exploding information and information delivery systems. Who can we trust? In a world where information itself is a free for all, with traditional news sources going bankrupt and publishers in trouble, we ned librarians more than ever."

So in the fall I will be starting a Master's program in Library Science. There is always a little bit of a battle when I share this news with people, as the majority of folks don't seem to really understand just what it is that librarians actually do, much less why they need to go to professional school in order to do it. At this point I've got it down to a few sentences mostly centered around the ever expanding volume of information to which people want/need access, the ever widening technology gap, the library as the cornerstone for technological development and information for folks whose economic, social or linguistic circumstances limit their ability otherwise. I wish that everyone who asked REALLY wanted to know and then I would hand them this book, which covers some of the more inventive and contemporary attitudes toward librarianship as well as the ways that librarians are at the forefront of debates concerning civil rights, queer politics, children's literacy and the preservation of rapidly deteriorating knowledge.

Marilyn Johnson takes you into the behind the scenes workings of one of the most dynamic professional communities around, people whose careers revolve around the constant maintenance of the information cycle and are devoted as a life choice to the dissemination and retention of that information. It is an amazing book, that I don't want to ruin with a bunch of little anecdotes that are best left to her meandering style as it is. It did make me want to run around like a chicken with my head cut off because I want to be every kind of librarian ever and right now my head is flooded with all kinds of possibility, which is obviously the highest end problem.

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

2010-03-29T12:59:00.000-07:00

"Your body has a life of its own that you like to think is yours".

Sometimes my bus route takes me right by a highschool as it lets out for the day. An amazing girl sat next to me for the first time a little while back while I was in the middle of Nightwood, she was interested in what I was reading, asking me if it was good, what it was about. My first instinct was to just give her the book - as far as I'm concerned when any young person shows interest in a book it is my duty to provide the assist - but I hesitated. This was my fourth time reading Nightwood and I'll never understand it (not that that's the point of course), I imagined my fourteen year old self encountering an older person on a bus reading something that looked enticing only to find that it was a dense poetical tract with little to no discernible plot development or satisfying resolution. Frustrated at best, an enemy of literature for life at worst. Maye it didn't help that the day before I had read an article about the "books that ruined literature", which discussed several books that are zealously and perennially dissected by high school english teachers anywhere only to alienate bored and disillusioned students desperately hoping to read something that can only be described as relatable. So I kept my book and I told her that it was about a woman who couldn't figure out what she wanted....

I was spurred into rereading Nightwood this time around when an excerpt was read at the ever impressive 5 Points Reading series curated by the illustrious Nikki Darling and Kate Wolf (full disclosure, I read an extended piece from my blog in their January installment! p.s. the readings occur at the dynamic gallery, performance and event space run by Daniel Ingroff and Paul Pescador Workspace). The February reading featured several Los Angeles area artists, professors and intellectuals reading chosen pieces from the lesbian archive. The last reader, Kelly Besser constructed a panoply of excerpts and read them at high speed back to back for maximum impact, positioning the "lesbian rage" of Nightwood against the manifesta for sisterhood of Zami and assertions for butch identity and lesbian subcultural recognition. I went home and put everything she read in my "to read" pile, reinvigorated about my own lesbian archive at home.

Anyway, the matter at hand, Nightwood and its constant evolution in my own life and in the literary world. After it was published and endorsed heavily, in the introduction and otherwise by T. S. Eliot, it gained attention for its experimental structure and poetic prose. Capturing the avant garde mood of the time, Barnes's carnivalesque atmosphere of the Parisian underworld exposed the mechanisms of self creation, loss, the inadequacies of language, the simultaneous desperation and ennui that can accompany sexuality and ultimately the disruption of established orders. The dizzying, voluminous language and movement flows through Dr. O'Connor - charlatan, drunk, Irish - American expat, posing as a gynecologist - his hyperbolic language creating a kind of razor edged reality of ham handed gestures and constant play acting. We only have four central characters throughout Nightwood, all anchored by the Doctor's reliable inconsistency. Nora Flood, an American expat whose romantic relationship to the idea of Paris cloud the reality of her situation, Robin Vote whose indecision and malleaility leave those around her in emotional decrepitude, Felix Volkbein a self hating Jew whose aristocratic legacy is as propped up as Dr. O'Connor's medical license. All are woven together in their confusion and their inability to fulfill their own needs and desires.

The doctor is our only character who reeeeally talks, and boy does he. The moment he opens his mouth you know you are in for several pages of rapidly strung together half truths and exagerations. Our other characters retreat into silence, their characteristics and sensibilities only appearing in the high relief of Dr. O'Connors orations. Uncertainty is really the keystone of the novel, disrupting every aspect of the identity of the characters, the physical space they inhabit, the general conceits by which they live. In this sense it truly belongs to the Modernist tradition that surrounds its publication. What also surrounds its publication is the zeitgeist that dominated the intermediary time between the great world wars, the confusion and insanity of the age seeped into every word of her novel, questioning not only the nationalism that for some became necessary and for others led to facism but also the general concept of historical progression as a positive, the identity of the individual and the state pulled down from a sacred place and examined with poetic license under a linguistic microscope. The fourth time around I let myself sink into Nightwood, as expectationless as a person can possibly be. I tried to let the language envelop me without searching for the meaning behind it as I would typically do. I still came away with the feeling that something was just on the tip of the tongue of my brain, some kernel of wisdom was just a moment of understanding away, but I also came away with the realization that maybe that's the point - that searching sensibility is exactly what Barnes wanted to foster in her readers.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

2010-03-08T12:07:00.000-08:00

“Was I beginning to have standards and principles and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in the way?”

Sally Jay Gorce is a hapless American, trying desperately to navigate her way through the ultra shallow waters of a pseudo Bohemian Paris of the 1950s. She is always wearing the wrong thing, dyeing her hair the wrong color, eating at the wrong restaurants, losing her passport and falling desperately in and out of love with the worst people. Dundy’s semi autobiographical debut novel takes us through that glorious period of life just after college in which your insistence on proving your independence and the absolute surety of your identity is outmatched only by how terrified you are of the world around you, Sally Jay is a mess, albeit an hysterical mess.

After an affair with a caricatured older married Italian, she falls in love with a kind of slimy character from back home. The foreshadowing couldn’t be more heavy on his part, Sally can never pinpoint how he makes his money, or anything else about his life for that matter. He is secretive, alternately protective and dismissive of Sally, someone you long to see her leave in the dust if it weren’t for the fact that it was all as interesting as watching the impending trainwreck. Sally tries her hand at acting, gets bored when the champagne stops flowing, abandons her first really caring lover to take off to the beach with a stranger and becomes disillusioned very quickly with the way her adventures are turning out. Her kind uncle whose only paramaters for the funding of her trip were that she remain completely independent for two years and not contact him for help is bemused at her inability to do just that. The independence that Sally longs for does not magically appear just because she leaves the country, it is something she finds within herself after trusting the wrong people one too many times.

Dundy’s conversational style wraps us into Sally’s experience, at one point I actually tugged on my own hair in frustration at her decisions. It also works to endear the reader to her, I feel as if I got to know Sally far better than many other more seemingly well developed literary characters that I have lately encountered. She feels like a traveling partner, a frustrating one, but a partner all the same. Dundy’s style extends to the epistolary and incorporates diary entries, placing the emphasis on the internal and personal development of Sally. Her greatest fear is that she will one day end up with the most unglamorous career – a librarian – she actually has nightmares about becoming a librarian. Upon returning home, she decides that in honor of all that she has learned about frivolity and carelessness, pursuing that career is what she deserves….not realizing of course that it requires a bit of education and preparation and does not solely entail the reshelving of books…even after her bumpy road to maturity, Sally still makes room for the ridiculous. The conclusion of the novel felt a bit too tidy for me, while I developed a great affection for Sally I wasn’t entirely convinced that she was ready or entitled to everything she wanted in the end, a few more pitfalls, a few more slaps to the forehead are in order.

Bliss by Peter Carey

2010-02-26T11:38:00.000-08:00

"His hair was a curling mess and he showed the proper desregard for sartorial elegance which Harry had always seen as a sign of reliability in a person. Neat men always struck him as desperate and ambitious."

Harry Joy has a heart attack and dies temporarily. When he comes back to life, he is convinced that all of the details of his life, his loved ones and his enemies alike are all actors commissioned in the sadistic play that is his own personal hell. He has always been a man that other people liked, what he lacked in passion he made up for in sheer pleasantness, but his blissful ignorance came to a screeching halt when he died and his newly developed conscience concerning the kinds of companies for which he advertises leads his family to believe that he has gone insane.

After his family has him committed he is thrown into an even more warped reality than before, confronted with a man who tries to steal his identity inside of the mental institution. As Harry finds his sexual, emotional and spiritual salvation in Honey Barbara - a zealous advocate of healthy living, self awareness and a staunch environmentalist, Carey's humor reaches a fever pitch. He pokes and prods at our weaknesses easily, but always with a little edge of love that characterizes perennial family ribbing; he deconstructs consumerism while still allowing our hero to retain his love of the plush and the comfortable, never questioning that this is an essential part of his humanity, Bettina (Harry's wife) despises the "regular" people she sees on the street because they are not the cosmopolitan crowd by which she wants to be surrounded when she finally....finally reaches New York - her ambitions are ridiculous but romanticized. His real teeth come out when lampooning the government, religious institutions and especially big business. Bliss has a tendency to feel a little dated, the expose of the big cancer inducing corporation with institutionalized duplicity while obviously still necessary (sigh), is a trope we have revisited time and again in various fictional forms.

This doesn't stop Carey from being undeniably hilarious. The humor is by and large the fantastic part of this book, at times the humor puts a halt to any emotional connection or deep revelation. The plot twists keep you going, but sometimes you don't get the payoff for which you hope - I kept waiting for more about Harry's kids, whose character development comes in fits and starts, but is hilarious and compelling when it occurs.

This is Carey's debut novel, since then he's won a few Bookers, made a few movies, pretty much became the most prolific and successful Australian author living....so all in all not a bad beginning. Apparently after ten years of struggle, Australia's most treasured composer is turning Bliss into an opera! What an amazing medium for this story, stuffed to the brim with melodramatic farce and surrealist maneuvering around political messages, it should be fantastic on stage. It was also adapted into a film in the eighties which looks awesome and ridiculous. Also, can I just say that the photo above makes me want to be best friends with Peter Carey. Thoughts?

Video by Meera Nair

2010-02-23T17:33:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since I've read a collection of short stories, it's not as is I forgot how amazing a collection can be, but I just hadn't been in the mood. Full disclosure, I may or may not have bought this book at the thrift store because I thought it was by Mira Nair - and I thought Vanity Fair!!! Mississippi Masala!!! - but it is not by her, their names are completely different and I feel like a bit of an ass. Alas, serendipity, Meera Nair is fantastic. In this collection of ten stories I laughed hysterically on the bus, cried in the bathroom at work a little bit, and rediscovered my inspiration to do a bit of my own writing. She impressively embodies the voices of people across geography, sex, age, culture and personality. She weaves in larger political and cultural concerns into the minutiae of everyday life, steeping the reader in the physicality of emotion, focusing on the sensory and the immediate.

The title story, "Video" is perhaps the most bold in the collection. After fifteen years of marriage, Naseer accidentally sees a porno at his cousin's house, drastically altering the dynamic between Naseer and his wife Rasheeda. The video forces discussions about boundaries and desire, cultural norms, compromise and...well, boundaries. This story is so subtle that it leaves you on edge throughout, almost without your knowledge. From there she moves through the vitality of cooking to a man with an exceptional nose whose difficult time creating a niche within the Indian immigrant community in Arizona becomes of the utmost concern, to the inhabitants of a small village who spend weeks preparing for a visit from Bill Clinton only to be brushed off at the last minute due to security concerns, to a woman who is restricted from participating in her father's funeral rites, to a man obsessed with marbles. Nair shifts in tone so completely, but her staggering empathy creates a throughline with which to glue these stories together. She also focuses on fixations, characters whose attachment to a certain action or ability puts them in the crosshairs of respectable society - sculpting women out of sand, polishing marbles, brashly sniffing others' dishes; her characters are wholly immersed in their sensual experiences of the world around them.

There is a hint of the parable about her story structure, you get down to a rhythm and you can feel where she is taking you - but I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, I enjoyed these stories immensely. This, as far as I can find, is Nair's only published collection. Her stories have been in several literary journals and quarterlies but Video seems to be the sum total of her work thus far. She won a mess of awards for the individual story "Video", making her one of the most largely recognized "undiscovered writers" in short fiction. Hopefully there is more to come from her, she has a rather cinematic eye, her writing is extremely tactile, creating an engulfing environment that would translate well visually. May I suggest a Mira/Meera collaboration???

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

2010-02-23T16:44:00.000-08:00

"I am a writer who has always wanted to live on a lonely island."

When Borges recommends a book to you in the same paragraph that he effectively trashes Proust, you kind of have to read it. Not to mention it is another in the illustrious company of LOST references...

The Invention of Morel was not what I expected, a fugitive (of what? from whom?) escapes to an island without inhabitants but with a few well built structures. When he sees people on the island he becomes scared and obsessed with the idea of hiding from them. His internal struggle develops as he falls in love with a woman whose place among the intruders tortures him from afar. Our narrator, the fugitive maintains a level of paranoia that casts doubt onto his state of mind, his paranoia sustains even the realization that he is still the only actual person on the island. As he attempts to interact with the "intruders", he fails continuously. Each interaction is stranger than the last, he assumes that everyone is ignoring him, his mortification increases exponentially.

Eventually it all comes together, as we find out that Morel is a scientific genius who has lead all of the intruders on the island to their deaths and eternal artistic survival - he has successfully created real life projections of an entire week of their lives. They will live forever (or as long as the projection machines last) on the island, repeating this week long vacation and all of the conversations they've had. Faustine, our romantic heroine, rarely speaks (she is apparently inspired by the beauty of silent film star Louise Brooks, whom Casares also loved from afar). To be near her, our fugitive figures out how to create his own projection and seamlessly inserts himself into her eternal week, securing his death but eternity at her side. It was Morel's unrequited obsessive love of Faustine that led him to capture her image with his on the island forever, the kind of obsessive madness that places him in the company of a long line of mad scientist characters - not least of which is his referenced namesake on an entirely different island, Dr. Moreau.

The prose is dream like and ethereal without taking on overly indulgent tones - the plot remains skeletal and matter of fact even while dealing with the concept of reality itself. As the fugitive and the reader attempt to explain the phenomena of the island with philosophical and artistic referents, we can only imagine that our fugitive is dreaming or hallucinating (just like Hurley?), but there emerges a non supernatural reason for the existence of his particular reality. Borges compares it to the Turn of the Screw - and it is similar in its economy, creepiness and surreality - but it couldn't be more different in terms of language. Casares is sparse and straightforward with an occasional romantic aside, a flowery passage concerning his life changing attitudes towards Faustine's "projection". Casares has hidden the mystery in the plot, James hides it doubly in the language.

In terms of LOST, this just feels like another reference point for them to question both the ease with which we classify any of our characters' visions as hallucinations, or in how we conceive of reality and control. The fugitive escapes to the island so that he can take control of his own life only to be thrown into a system of machines that manipulates his reality. The illusion or reality of control, the presence or absence of someone's free will, your brain's subconscious tricks or a spiritual vision or a scientific projection??? No wonder Sawyer couldn't pull himself away from this one, if I was trapped on an island and my grip on reality was questionable at best and I spent a good part of my time encountering new power structures and organizations that consistently alter that reality.....I'd be reading this book too. Lost removes its clips quickly, so here's a different video that is amazingly absurd and appropriate.

Attic by Katherine Dunn

2010-02-23T13:47:00.000-08:00

“I’ve decided that there is no lucidity of vision, only consistency of distortion"

Almost everyone I know has read at least part of Geek Love, for some reason it seems to be a hard book to finish for lots of folks. I have a special place in my heart for it though, it was one of the books my sister left at the house after a Christmas visit - which, at that time, meant that I consumed it in a day, plumbed its depths for meaning and wore it like a badge of accomplishment on my sleeve declaring to the world that I too had taste. Of course, my sister probably didn't even like the book or may not even remember reading it - that's sort of beside the point.

Anyway, Geek Love was great and definitely had a time and place in my reading life and so when I found Attic at Out of the Closet I was excited - not only had I never read any other Katherine Dunn, I hadn't even seen any of it anywhere. Attic is intense, a semi fictionalized account of the author's time spent in prison after being arrested for cashing a bad check that came from her stint with a magazine selling cult.....sound confusing? Not quite yet. Dunn just dives in without giving us any room to catch up or even get our bearings, her prose is the kind of swirling, claustrophobic, nausea inducing stuff that immediately makes you want to put it down while at the same time begging you to come along for the ride. You are disoriented but it is also incredibly clear what is happening, even with changing faces and unreliable surroundings she captures the completely surreal reality of prison.

The novel takes us through her initial arrest, arraignment, her experiences with her cellmates (one of whom wears five girdles constantly, a defense mechanism she acquired after a brutal rape), her tenuous relationship with her own legal defense and her vague flashbacks to how she ended up where she is. You never get a straight answer, as her reality unravels around her, her consciousness becomes more and more muddled, more and more impressionistic and terrifying. She pulls the reader down into the depths of confusion but even in the midst of the chaos, the only thing real is her fear and loneliness. Her formal experimentation is effective in one sense but incredibly alienating in another - she conveys the emotional pitch of the situation but fails to draw the reader into a connection with her. We are thrown in but have no real reason to stay, the horror of the situation is somewhat remote and we can't relate to her pain or struggles. From the outside it seems crazy but there is never a crossing into a more meaningful connection. Ultimately it felt quick and messy and unsatisfying.

Reality and Dreams by Muriel Spark

2010-02-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

"He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God's dreams."

Spark is hard to talk about, wehter you are trying to summarize or simply identify why exactly you enjoyed reading her. She buries her ideas, arguments and conflicts so well into the narrative that it can at times come off as indifferent. Reality and Dreams is about just that, the influence of one on the other, the conflation of the two, the unwillingness to compromise either. She begins the novel, cleverly enough, in the hazy brain of a director whose vanity led him to hoist himself unnecessarily up into a faulty crane and resulted in grave injury. Tom Richards (our director) is in the middle of making a movie about a single impression, a momentary glimpse of a girl making hamburgers on a campsite in France. Her image has stayed with him, inspiring an elaborate production that takes on elements of the absurd and that shifts according to which actress he is attempting to seduce. Tom's wife Claire, who is both mind bogglingly laid back and incredibly rich (Muriel Spark has never had any qualms about the benefits of being a member of the aristocracy) seems just, kind of, along for the ride. He has two daughters, Cora from his first marriage, is alarmingly beautiful, serene and bohemian while his daughter Marigold whom he had with Claire is moralistic, cold and vindictive.

Tom is the ultimate egocentric auteur, casting every person into his life as a character, removing their humanity for the sake of his art. He causes havoc around him - not because he is oblivious to his effect on others - but because he is indifferent to all but his most present obsession. No one in the novel is given a redemption, Tom blithely floats along, only shaken almost momentarily when a death occurs as a direct result of his actions. No one has a pass and no one is particularly likeable. Spark seems to be trying to expose to be dealing with only the obvious, painstakingly cataloging the events that come to pass sequentially without waxing poetic about the consequences. She writes the characters with such a matter of fact tone that it doesn't surprise you when someone goes off of the deep end - you are never caught up in the madness, just observing it from a distance - as a director might, tweaking the details to achieve the aesthetic and emotional pitch without ever allowing oneself to be carried away by the story itself.

Tom's vision of himself borders on the megalomaniacal, a self worshiping self confidence that does not diminish despite his obvious consciousness of it. Spark herself likes to flirt with the idea of self consciousness, forcing the reader to confront the more embarrassing elements of ones self construction and exposing all of those little hypocrisies that we hold closest to ourselves to maintain the fragile fabric of our personalities, our belief systems and our lives. Her use of irony is cutting and hysterical, as it should be, her form belongs to the golden age of satire that is so rarely translated into the present climate (since satire requires a kind of sincerity rarely achieved in our oh so postmodern condition - sigh - and irony is relegated to the realms of snarky quotation marks). She is not gentle with her characters, her readers or her own methods and can sometimes come off as heartless, but on the contrary I think that the way she holds us all under the glaring harsh light is proof that she cares very very much.

The Humbling by Philip Roth

2010-02-10T11:34:00.000-08:00

"All he was doing was helping Pegeen to be a woman he would want instead of a woman another woman would want. Together they were absorbed in making this happen."

If you walked into my room and looked at my bookshelves, you would probably get the impression that I am a pretty devoted Philip Roth fan. I have a whole section devoted to him, something I hadn't realized until I recently alphabetized my collection. This impression isn't accurate for several reasons, first, I haven't read a significant amount of Philip Roth's work and what I have read is either fantastic and devastation or infuriating and devastating. Second, his books tend to be plentiful on thrift store bookshelves, my primary source for the books I purchase. Third, I continue to buy them because I feel that someday I'll get around to it and I can finally sort out how I feel (misogynist! genius?!) about (arguably) the most revered and famous American novelist alive.

The Humbling is a lean novel, 140 pages that you can knock out in one sitting....and I would suggest doing so because its most positive features rely on its immediate consumption. It's protagonist, Simon Axler, a famous and revered actor who has abruptly lost his talent, has a crisis of faith that leads him through a stint in a mental institution, a transformative love affair and the inevitable fallout. In keeping with Simon's profession, the novel has a quality of the stage, a three act structure that pauses for dramatic effect between beats - calling Chekov to mind both structurally and in name at one point and it is with this reference that you know things probably aren't going to end well for Mr. Axler. While this book is immaculately put together and packs a pretty big emotional punch that leaves you staggering, it also has some incredibly frustrating moments that unfortunately turned a book into about sexuality and aging into a farcical treatment of a fragile ego.

For example, I was jokingly talking about the book with a friend when I was just halfway through it, talking about how the whole plot centered around an old man who had lost his talent and confidence and was revived by his affair with a lesbian who he presumed he had turned straight. We laughed about how upsetting that plot is at face value, obnoxious to think about, completely cliched - that a man who had lost something would then gain back his confidence by proving to the world that he was so irresistible to a woman who had "rejected" men. He spends the better part of their relationship buying her clothes and paying for haircuts, changing her appearance to presumably match her new life. In joking, my friend said, yeah, I'm surprised he didn't just come right out and say that he "fucked the lesbian out of her", a comment that was met with laughter because no no, that would be too ridiculous, even for Roth. Lo and behold twenty pages later that was almost an exact quote. Of course, Axler fails to fuck the lesbian out of her, because its a false idea, an insulting premise. Of course, when he fails, it puts him back into the realm of instability that had landed him in an institution. Instead of tackling this idea from the angle that Axler is tragically off base, a man broken by his own insecurities and attitudes, we are set up to see his lover as a heartbreaker whose motives were questionable from the start.

The latest era in Roth's career has dealt exclusively with aging and obviously there are some incredibly interesting issues to think about when addressing the intersections of sex, aging and ego - but I believe that here he misses the mark. The sex scenes come off as silly...about as silly as an old man writing about an old man believing he can fuck the lesbian out of someone.

Deep River by Shusaku Endo

2010-02-10T10:34:00.000-08:00

"in every companionship there remains a mutually insoluble loneliness"

LOST fans are notoriously obsessive and the creators tend to provide copious opportunities to supplement the material within the show by citing literary, philosophical, religious and historical frames of reference and works both visually on the show and in interviews, press releases or statements concerning the show. Obsessive fans + nerdy obsessive writers and creators = a neverending pool of resources for people to speculate, theorize and further discuss the larger mythologies of this alternate world. By now you can probably tell that I am one of these people, I have rewatched the series multiple times, thought about it even more and tend to scrape up the little crumbs of information put on the table by the creators. So when they mentioned that the impending (now two weeks in) final season of LOST was heavily inspired by Deep River, I immediately read it.

Deep River and LOST have structural similarities, chapters are defined as "cases", taking us into the lives of each character and exploring what led them to the journey that brings them together. These cases also serve broadly as cultural and individual archetypes, universalizing the personal problems and spiritual struggles of our tour group. Essentially Deep River brings together several Japanese tourists who are traveling to the Ganges together on a guided tour, each for their own reasons, some explicit, some not even known to the traveler herself. Isobe, whose wife has recently passed away is in India tracking down what he believes to be his wife's reincarnated spirit in the body of a four year old destitute little girl. Mitsuko doesn't know why she's there, but her life keeps putting her into the path of Otsu, a spiritually complicated Catholic priest whom she emotionally tortured during college, constructing a sexual game and forcing him to abandon his faith in order to be with her. Numada, a children's book author who credits his survival of life threatening tuberculosis with the generous sacrifice of a myna bird has come to mine for inspiration for his new story as well as repay the myna bird. Kiguchi, a war veteran whose experiences have left him forever marked has come to set up a memorial to his fallen brothers in ancient Buddhist temples. While fleshing out these individual stories, Endo brings us back to the thematic center in their spiritual journey to the Ganges.

Endo, a Japanese Christian himself, seems to spend most of his narrative steam on attempts to reconcile Western Christianity and Japanese sensibilities. The clear hero to me is Otsu, the priest shunned by the Catholic establishment because of his pluralistic view of spirituality. He keeps on trying, ending his religious career carrying the bodies of the impoverished to the banks of the Ganges. While Endo's agenda and personal struggle (his works are highly recognizable as autobiographical) run through the narrative clearly and strongly, it was impossible for me to read this book without searching for its connections to LOST. For me, it seemed to be, aside from structural issues, concerned with the concept of free will vs. destiny - a dichotomy very familiar to every LOST fan. What will be interesting is how these themes will be played out on the show now that the Locke - Jack philosophical opposition has been somewhat complicated. LOST has always constructed large, unequivocating dichotomies, it was laid out from the first episode in which Locke explains backgammon to Walt - there are two sides, one dark and one light. This season is no different, clearly setting up (or capitalizing upon the already existing?) an oopposition.

For a novel primarily concerned with spiritual, religious and moral debate, Deep River is highly readable, constructing interesting characters whose flaws lead them to their place and make them relatable instead of merely archetypal. This post may or may not be amended as the relationship between the text and LOST become more clear oooor for that matter, when good friends of mind are done catching up and I'm not living in absolute terror over revealing secrets and ruining their experience....

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

2010-02-10T10:32:00.001-08:00

"I am coming to save your friend’s life, and my own.
I must ask two favors. First, you must write me a letter."

When I picked up the latest Newbury winner, all I knew was that it was a fictional homage to A Wrinkle in Time, which is all I really needed to know. What I wasn’t expecting was a wonderfully wrought, spare and emotionally complex blend of mystery, science fiction, historical fiction, teen drama and touching family story. Not a line is wasted in this compact work thrusting you into an unraveling puzzle beginning at the end and working forwards.

On the Upper West Side of New York City where sixth grade Miranda lives with her mother, the neighborhood is as closely knit as any small town, she outlines her landmarks, the signposts of her daily life – the man who sleeps under the mailbox, the deli, the dented garage across the street. Miranda begins by addressing us; she hopes she is telling the story she was asked to; she begins at the beginning, when her best friend Sal was hit in the street by a stranger, a moment she also identifies as the end of the intimacy of their friendship. After this she starts receiving anonymous notes predicting her future, begging her to help the note writer with an imperative mission to save her friend from a horrible fate. Miranda and we – are confused, clinging piece by piece to the mystery that leads to a moment so simultaneously touching and intense that it becomes increasingly difficult to put this book down.

The mystery itself is definitely the center of the spoke, but what endears you to the story are Miranda’s interpersonal relationships, her loving but not uncomplicated emotions with her mother, her struggle for connection once she loses her closest companion, her foundationless rivalry with a girl at school, her devoted attachment to her favorite book. Miranda is a complicated girl who is handling the job of growing up as gracefully as can be expected, and dealing with time travel to boot.

The Saga of the Bloody Benders by Rick Geary

2010-02-03T13:36:00.000-08:00

So, in another slightly embarrassing admission on this blog, I will tell you that I went through a phase in life (during early highschool, it corresponded with the purchase of an eight foot tall Joy Division poster, the obsessive rewatching of the Crow and the first reading of In Cold Blood), where I was really interested in famous murderers and murder trials. For those of you who don't know, there are such things as serial killer trading cards of which I had many - had I the resources, I would have joined John Waters in traveling around the world getting to know famous convicts, taking notes at trials - I found this element of culture incurably fascinating - especially when it involved a complex mythology or system of ethics that supposedly justified violent action - either on the part of the killer or those in the media. Anyway, the point of this little ramble is that I am surprised that I had never encountered Rick Geary comics before. Beginning with his collection a Treasury of Victorian Murder, he has begun a series of nonfictional accounts of famous murders. A friend of mine who read on my blog that I was taking suggestions concerning graphic novels very kindly brought me a copy of the Bloody Benders - friends who bring you books are the best friends you can have.

The Bloody Benders was awesome - clearly Geary is devoted to research, detail and context - not to the detriment of the story but to its credit. I had no knowledge of the Bloody Bender story and now I want to know everything! Essentially a family (the members of which may or may not be related) of German immigrants settle in the prairie of Kansas, buying property, building a small store and placing themselves in the community just as much as necessary. The daughter, the captivating spirit medium Katie Bender is believed to be the ringleader of the operation, luring in travelers and members of the community alike into their home and setting them up for murder. People start to disappear, family members start questioning, sending out search parties and eventually the town decides to investigate. All of a sudden the Benders pick up stakes and are never truly heard from again. Sightings and possible identifications abound, the legend grows and the body count ticks up and up and up - leaving everyone wondering how this had happened in their home but also why? Motivations are never given, although the speculation is that Katie is some kind of unhinged spiritual maniac, Geary's last page has her looming spectre inside of the clouds, insane eyes, wielding a knife, looking down on the Kansas prairie. Geary clearly loved the character of Katie, he devotes energy to developing her imposing physicality and and questionable, menacing energies. He contrasts his drawings of her with the presentation he uses for most characters - an almost posed, photographic quality that evokes the world weary, tough look of American pioneers. He uses hatching to create a kind of heavy relief and contrast between dark and light. He maintains a matter of fact tone, laying out descriptions of crimes next to detailed maps of the area. I am excited to delve into the rest of the series, which covers more famous murders (i.e. Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden).

Raise High The Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger

2010-02-03T12:22:00.000-08:00

“A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn’t stink a little bit of the writer’s pride in having given up his pride.”

Salinger has always been hard to write about - his reputation and the cultural lunacy that has sprung up around him tends to eclipse his actual work, making it next to impossible to say something meaningful without your opinions and passions being lumped into the general mass. I also think that, like many people who take their reading seriously, there is usually a phase in which you shrug off Salinger - precisely because of that reputation. Catcher in the Rye is something you read in high school, and has become a kind of bible for the self indulgently rebellious, people claiming a false mantle of different and edgy, a caricature of the disaffected. In a way for years I had inadvertently bought into that same incredibly lame and half cocked image, simply by refusing to acknowledge Salinger's genius work because he was lauded by people who annoyed me. It's an embarassing thing to admit, but I'm willing to cop to it.

After his passing last week, I decided to reread my favorite of his works and I'm infinitely glad that I did. It's up there with Turn of the Screw or The Ballad of Sad Cafe in my esteem, it has a sense of humor and emotional resonance that propels you through the narrative. Buddy Glass returns as a familiar narrator, taking us through Seymour's wedding day. Buddy is on leave to attend the wedding, shows up as the only groom's guest, and clings in a moment of confusion to the wedding party of the devastated bride who has just been left at the altar because her fiancee had claimed to be "too happy" to get married. Buddy finds himself trapped in gridlock in a limo with the Maid of Honor, a gruff and aggressive woman who has little love for Seymour now that he's put her friend through such a tragedy, her husband who is just along for the ride, a deaf mute man whose presence serves as a balm for Buddy's tattered nerves and the bride's less than pleased aunt. As per usual, the Glass siblings serve as the backdrop for the narrative, Buddy's descriptions are fluid and hilarious as always, perhaps more so in this case because of his relative isolation from his family members. He hops between character descriptions, and expands upon each person with increasing depth until their place in the story becomes both inescapable and satisfying - by the end of the short novella, they all feel like old friends with whom you share inside jokes and the recognition of the tiniest, endearing character flaws.

The second novella, Seymour: An Introduction, is less exciting to me - it has always seemed so painstakingly crafted, overly precious at times and purposefully obtuse at otheres. This is Buddy's introduction to his brother, compiling reflections and anecdotes about someone who has always struck me as a kind of obnoxious guy. Seymour is smarter than everyone, smugger than everyone and supposedly too nice to even notice. Seymour represents every problem I have with Salinger - he tends to squeeze every ounce of meaning out of the details and by pointing them out makes reading so unchallenging and unexciting that its difficult to get through no matter how straightforward his prose may be. This is the stuff of Salingers that spawned things like Garden State - quirky overly clever characters yearning for some kind of authenticity in a world that - goddamnit - just doesn't understand them. The tone is so drastically different between the two pieces - they have the same narrator - but in the first instance Buddy is fictionalizing the day of his brother's wedding whereas the second part is a rambling, semi autobiographical, reflection on Seymour. Buddy's charm is lost, his humor is gone, he overreaches for emotional effect and it leaves me with such a sour taste in my mouth...and it's truly ironic because it runs at such a countercurrent to everything with which Salinger (via Holden Caulfield) has become synonymous - being a phony.

So I guess in thinking about Salinger's legacy, I would hope that people can read him with a critical eye and not lump everything into an untouchable cache of cool as it has tended to be in the past. I also hope that his wishes are respected and that thousands of awful people don't come rushing to make nauseating film adaptations of his books. Let our most famous literary recluse stay that way, that's part of what made him so sustainably interesting and enduring. For goodness sakes please don't ruin it, love it or hate it or something in between but please please don't ruin it.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2010-02-03T10:37:00.001-08:00

"You're not going to be different ... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you."

"They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox."

I guess that I had always assumed that Tolstoy was boring...or maybe I just spent too many years hating Harold Bloom...or maybe I was slightly intimidated. Tolstoy can be a daunting figure. The combined weight of page count, historical importance and literary heft makes for a difficult start. It had gotten to a point though, where several people whose opinions and tastes I respect immensely were shocked to the point of annoyance at my reluctance to pick up one of the world's most consistently beloved books. So I finally put aside the expectations and tried to dive in....luckily for me, Tolstoy is everything he's cracked up to be and Anna Karenina is one of the most absorbing books I have ever read.

In case you weren't aware, this is a very large novel, divided into eight parts (originally published serially). There is really no point in me summarizing it, in fact I think that summarizing it would take away from the pleasure of reading it. The plot so artfully unfolds at the pace of every day life, capturing the resting moments between action in an almost breathtaking way. The panorama of characters Tolstoy builds upon are in constant states of agitation - whether it is spiritual, social, financial and its consistent shift in perspective between the major characters gives us insight into their attitudes and interior struggles. Towards the end, when focused on Anna's unraveling, Tolstoy stylistically anticipates the stream of consciousness techniques that become the hallmark of some of my favorite modernist works (aka there is no Mrs. Dalloway without Anna Karenina). I do wish that I knew more about Russian history - while i still enjoyed reading through the political arguments about the role of the peasant, theories of labor and technology etc., that take place at almost every social function, I feel as if I couldn't quite place my finger on what was going on some of the time. Tolstoy is clearly using his well crafted characters to convey political meaning, giving a snapshot of the political climate of the time, his own preoccupations and in a lasting way, the relationship of political theory to individual lives.

All of our beloved characters oscillate between the socially active, morally ambiguous, distracting tempo of city life with the purity of agricultural life - one of the most unexpectedly affecting scenes is nothing but one man threshing wheat for hours on end. It's insane how gorgeous this scene is. My preferred moments however, and they occur quite often, are Tolstoy's brilliant depictions of the failure of communication. Everyone always has so much to say and they can never ever figure out how to say it to the person with whom communication is vital. Anna cannot communicate with Vronsky, Karenin cannot talk to his wife, Kitty and Levin take years to traverse a misunderstanding. Another absolutely beautiful scene takes place between two marginal characters who everyone expects to profess their love for one another while taking a walk - the weight of expectation in the air, they begin their walk. Tolstoy takes us through each of their thought processes in which each of them goes from expectation to elation to tragic disappointment while walking together and talking only about birds. The moment that could have changed their lives forever comes and goes within minutes and they feel it as soon as it passes.

Ultimately though, the novel is a tragedy, a portrait of dynamic and misunderstood woman whose life is ruined because of her infidelity (while of course, many other characters are continually unfaithful or otherwise morally ambiguous with no consequence). She is judged and scorned by compulsive gamblers, self righteous idiots, gossipy manipulators and everyone in between. She is undeniably full of life and even after the world has abused her she continues to put on a brave face and never becomes spiteful. Her own descent into ruinous jealousy stems only from the utter isolation and entrapment of her life - she is not protected in fact of by law, has no family, is separated from her son and society. The mindboggling hipocrisy of the people surrounding Anna is devastating and is made even more infuriating by the way in which they are unaffected by tragedy. The end of the novel was difficult to me - Tolstoy wrote a kind of extended denouement after the climax of the plot - which at first struck me as callous and anticlimactic. These feelings were somewhat stoked by reading this a piece by Stephen Emms over at the Guardian who had also recently fallen in love with Anna but had fallen seriously out of love with the ending. But, after talking it over an amazingly intelligent friend whose love for Anna Karenina partly convinced me to finally pick it up, I realized that the end achieved exactly what it was meant to. It's meant to make you angry and sad and unsatisfied in the sense that that's how you should feel about the way that life just kind of putters on no matter what happens. Horrible things happen, the world treats amazing people poorly and no matter how unspeakable the consequences are, life has to go on and chances are that everyone is still going to be petty and preoccupied and sometimes disappointing. At this point it seems beyond saying but Bravo Tolstoy, Bravo.

A History of Violence by John Wagner and Vince Locke

2010-01-27T10:54:00.000-08:00

I confess that I didn't know that this amazing amazing Cronenberg movie had come from a graphic novel - the movie blew my mind when I saw it, its quiet, menacing, claustrohpobic mood so brilliantly effected me and those around me. The story is captivating, a small town family man gets thrust into the spotlight when he protects his diner and a few of his neighbors from a few criminals who attempt to rob him. The spotlight leads a group of truly awful people from his past to track him down in his new life, turning his world inside out, making his family question him, forcing him to protect his new reality from the mistakes he made in his youth.

The movie focuses mainly on the action after Tom McKenna's heroism and subsequent unraveling of his life - whereas the graphic novel gives you an enormous amount of exposition and much more grotesque conclusion than the film dared to. Tom and his friend had ripped off the mob and the exposition makes it clear that they did this as young people with few options trying to help their families and counterbalance the negative effects the mob has had on their community. Tom's friend can't hide the money - flaunting his victory all over town and giving away their secret in the most trivial of ways, causing the mob to retaliate and Tom to run away and start a new life in a small town. As things begin to fall apart for Tom, his desperation is palpable, the regret he feels at the way his family will from now on look at him, the violence he must resort to and the danger his family has fallen into.

I have to say though, that I liked the movie better - I feel in this case that the cuts made to the story were amazing, creating the kind of tension you cannot maintain with so much explanation. In the movie you never reeeeally know what happened or why and so your impression of Tom goes under the same stages of doubt and suspicion that his family does. The novel gives you a play by play that creates a much more sympathetic character but a far less interesting one. Even aesthetically, casting Viggo (while undeniably extremely handsome), is an interesting and unusual looking man in contrast to the novel's Tom who has as Liz Lemon would say "airline pilot" good looks. The character of the wife is almost completely ignored in the novel, the process of her acceptance of Tom's past is so easy and blindly layed out that it just plays false. The visual style was a bit too chaotic for me too, and while clearly this was the intention, it was distracting from everything else going on and made me put the book down several times in order to concentrate.

Blankets by Craig Thompson

2010-01-11T13:06:00.000-08:00

“how satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface.”

So, my initial forays into the world of the graphic novel have been pretty fantastic. Autobiography seems to be a popular genre for the graphic novelist, and typically this isn't a genre which particularly interests me unless its someone that I'm already pretty excited about. Luckily the last two I've read, Fun Home and Blankets have been phenomenal. They couldn't be more different, Thompson's story is much more self indulgent in the sense that it is entirely focused on personal growth. Obviously he uses different points in his life, different external factors and relationships to move his journey along but ultimately it is an internal development and one that brings him from a guilt ridden abuse victim to a self assured artist and someone who has an enormous capacity for love.

The novel begins in Thompson's early childhood, taking us through the emotional abuse inflicted by his father, the sexual abuse of his babysitter, the intense religious beliefs fostered by his family and community and the guilt that he feels at not being able to spare his brother the same fate. The line quality of Thompson's drawings is the simplest and most straightforward I've encountered to date, allowing him to manipulate the single line to many broad emotional strokes. He can convincingly grow older and more emotionally complex while retaining the clarity and accessibility of a youthful perspective. Blankets of sorts become the connective tissue of his development, from the bed he shares as a child with his brother to the handmade quilt made for him by his girlfriend, but the larger idea is comfort and protection. Craig creates his own world through dreams and drawings and his Christian faith and struggles when thos protective mechanisms come into conflict.

His identity as well as his socio economic realities puts him at odds with the mainstream of his Christian peer group, and his questioning of the uniformity of Christianity stands at odds with his ideas about individual faith. At his annual church camp excursion, when he is finally at an age where he can identify and feel comfortable approaching other "outsiders", he meets Raina who quickly becomes his muse and first love. After they leave camp, they begin an intense correspondence and eventually make plans for a visit. A large part of the book deals with this extremely brief visit, where Thompson intricately depicts the dynamics of Raina's family. Her parents are in the middle of a divorce that has left her mother using pills, oversleeping and leaving the care of her two mentally handicapped children in the hands of Raina.

Thompson has a somewhat dreamy style, drawing Raina in elaborate dreamstates, raising their day to day interactions to the realm of myth. Apparently, he worked with a watercolor brush, giving the lines a kind of sweeping motion that lends an ethereal quality. These scenes with Raina return him to the art that he had used as a child to escape his reality, providing him with a protective mechanism and comfort that his religion had forced him out of. Ultimately this story chronicles Thompson's realizations about the necessity of his art - of creating impact and of creating connections that nurture you. It propels you through his life crystallizing around his experiences sleeping next to another person, what it feels like to share your space, your dreams. His art not only becomes a cathartic action for him alone but another blanket (I know, subtle) for him to share out of love instead of fear. It's difficult to explain for me, but this story just leaves you with a feeling of being surrounded, comforted, quiet and safe, it accomplishes this feeling like nothing I've ever read.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Allison Bechdel

2010-01-11T11:30:00.000-08:00

Now that I’ve read it, I completely understand the looks of shock and dismay on the faces of those who have asked me for my thoughts and been met with the response of “I just haven’t felt compelled”. Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home is absolutely beautiful, gracefully treading that line between intellectual and cerebral, a nontraditional coming of age story in which she struggles to foster the links between her and her father through their love of literature and their queerness against a backdrop of global events that draws the story out if its shell.

Bechdel pulls us into her world through her father's obsessive behaviors and attitudes towards restoring their Victorian home. Everyone in Fun Home has a tangible fixation, an attachment to artifice that clouds the depth of the complex relationships and emotions residing beneath those surfaces. Allison develops a connection to the trappings of masculinity showing the same attention to detail that her father so painstakingly exerts into their house.

After beginning college and discovering - through books - that she is a lesbian, she comes out to her parents through a letter. Their responses are unique to their situations, her mother expressing regret at her daughter's "choice" and revealing a long heretofore secret history of her father's dalliances with the younger men in their lives - babysitters, his highschool english students, teenagers he hired to work in the yard. Allison is at once startled, feeling a kinship with her father but she is also annoyed that he has in effect, stolen her thunder. Her father dies soon after and she cannot divorce those two events in her mind, forever changing her memories of her father and even the smallest of their interactions. Every remaining moment of the novel circles the drain of this central idea, the revelation of her sexuality leading to her father's death.

Appropriately enough, Bechdel discovers the most truth about her family in fictional tropes and imagery, reaching into the literary past to understand the present. One of the first images of the novel is of Allison and her father playing airplane with her projecting the ideas of Daedelus and Icarus onto the past. In one of her more impressively self mocking moments she draws herself reading Ulysses with "What the fuck?" printed over her head while a stack of Kate Millet and Radclyffe Hall queer classic sits next to her enticingly. She then proceeds to draw the parallel between hers and her father's relationship with that of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom - inverting our expectations (and succeeding in being the first person to convincingly reference Ulysses with emotional resonance and humility).

Bechdel's constructions are deceptively simple, her drawings look quick and effortless but belie a painstaking process by which she builds her world. Autobiography is always a process of self created and sustained memories, reconstructed for an audience, but something about the way that Bechdel uses the process as the result is truly unique and arresting. She is unsure about what the past means, and she takes us along with her as she attempts to decipher it all. Bechdel does this with a reliance on the aesthetic, the image, creating an even stronger link than she could have just by writing about her relationships. From her father's obsessive attention to the details of their imposing house to her own very clear dependence on the visual she makes those connections permanent.

Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

2010-01-09T10:29:00.000-08:00

The movie version of Ghost World has always had a special place in my heart, it's a movie about a lot of things but ultimately it's about being a weirdo and reaching out to connect with other weirdos in whatever way you can so that you can feel supported and whole. I wasn't expecting the original comic to be an exact predecessor of the film, but I wasn't expecting it to be an entirely different animal. Ghost World is a short, punctuated comic serialized and then released as a complete story much later.

In the comic Enid and Rebecca's actions are much more episodic, becoming an exagerrated ode to voyeurism, following them following others and never bridging the gap between those strangers as the film does. There is no love story, no Seymour, no summer school and Rebecca isn't nearly the kind of stick in the mud that she becomes in the film. Still, even with its lack of narrative focus, you really get a sense of Enid who remains the center of the story - her frustrations and jealousies expressed both outwardly and inwardly. Her and Rebecca have that kind of high school friendship that is obsessive and romantic and completely codependent all at the same time. That emotional confluence runs true through the comic and the film, their entrance into the real world not only forces them to figure out what they want to do, but it also forces them to consider each other in a more "adult" light. Their relationship cannot translate itself into "real world" terms. The hardest thing for me about leaving home was separating myself from my high school best friend, realizing that we would develop inside jokes and lives with other people, that we would no longer share the exact same cultural context. It's a devastating realization and well suited to Clowes's territory.

Clowes seems to have an interesting relationship with his characters. He is at once unsparing in representing their flaws and insecurities but there is never a doubt that he feels a kind of kindred spirit compassion for them. Enid is very familiar to me, as a person who similarly hid behind taste and disaffection because it seemed infinitely more interesting than falling apart or falling in line. I have read a lot of criticism of Clowes for his depiction of Enid's sexuality or lack thereof, but I also think that this is a very unique representation of an individuals attitudes toward sex. Enid is an obsessive aesthete, manipulating her style and attributing meanings to benign details - for me, it seemed as if her sexuality was so linked to this, so linked to an internal impression of the way things should be, that she couldn't let herself explore human connection. One of the more charming moments that could have gone horribly wrong in the hands of another writer - he lets Enid wax poetic about how she imagines this author - Daniel Clowes - to be her ideal, physically, culturally and otherwise. She goes to a signing and of course is disappointed, because the world can necessarily never conform to your exact imaginings of it. Enid's sexuality to me represents a frustration you rarely see in fiction - the frustration of an overly imaginative somewhat cerebral girl whose expectations are so thwarted that she just puts her desires on the backburner.

Anyway, it was nice that reading the comic was such a different experience to a movie that is so dear to my heart. I appreciate that the movie developed the love story that was so impossible to create for the comic book version of Enid and that we get to see such short bursts of daily life from characters that clearly have so much depth even in their most seemingly shallow moments. Ultimately, the film and the movie both hilariously represent the frustrations of feeling apart from the rest of the world, the longing to belong that sits side by side with the pride in difference and maybe a little hatred (maybe a lot) of the rest of the world.

Reading Resolutions 2010

2010-01-08T11:31:00.000-08:00

This year, my resolutions are taking the form of loosely held goals for myself to whom I am ultimately accountable - maybe that's the way resolutions are always supposed to be? Usually I feel like resolutions are just something you say to the people you are around on New Year's day to prove that this year you are going to try and be "better", whether it takes practical or impractical forms, it feels like being better should be a lifelong process instead of a perennial goal. That being said, I have some reading goals for me, goals that will hopefully be challenging but enjoyable!

1. Expand my limited exposure to the graphic novel genre with the help of my incredibly knowledgeable friends.

2. Read Anna Karenina.

3. Get over my aversion to contemporary poetry and explore a bit.

4. Give Hemingway another try.

5. Get through all of the big prize winners of 2009.

6. Read The Red and the Black.

7. Read Ulysses and hopefully understand/enjoy/engage this time around.

8. Read a book my mother loves with an open mind.

The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot

2010-01-08T11:23:00.000-08:00

I checked this out because of a passing suggestion by a fellow library browser who saw that I was hoarding a pile of graphic novels on a nearby table, and he refused to tell me what it was about insisting that it would be more worthwhile to just sit down and absorb it in one sitting. So, here’s to taking random suggestions every once in awhile! Through the eyes of a teenage runaway whose only friend is a rat and whose only support are her cherished Beatrix Potter books, Bryan Talbot hurtles you into a sad but redemptive story of childhood abuse and the creation of new family.

After running away from home to escape her abusive parents, Helen Potter is thrown into the hostile urban world, unable to make connections to people, contemplating suicide, unable to stop blaming herself for her own abuse. As she travels with her rat companion we get periodic flash backs filling in the blanks on the events leading up to Helen’s solitude, the experiences that haunt her and keep her alone.

She follows in the footsteps of Beatrix Potters life, moving from the claustrophobia of the city to the freedom of the country. Beatrix Potter’s transition from a painfully shy, cloistered child into a self assured artistic woman sets the backdrop for Helen’s development. The country becomes a place of realization and healing, allowing Helen to confront her family, reach out to new people and finally develop her own artistic voice.

Talbot styled each character and setting on models and photographs and the sense of the reality of her situation is absolutely gripping. It is a straightforward style that captures both the transformative landscapes and the seriousness of the subject matter. In his afterward, Talbot discusses the importance of accessibility for this story, intentionally manipulating the style so as to be welcoming to those who are less familiar with the traditional comic book visual vernacular. He does this beautifully, seamlessly crafting connective tissue between segments and fostering a traditional narrative structure. Not least of all, it is gorgeous.

Blue Angel by Francine Prose

2009-12-28T22:43:00.000-08:00

“Sherrie stays for two weeks, fourteen days that seem longer than their whole life together so far because time stretches out in a sequence of discreet, dreadful moments, no major blowouts, surprisingly, but a steady killing politeness. Every over-careful exchange is a boulder in their path, which they must either squeeze around or gracelessly stumble over. Every conversation dead – ends, every effort they make – Sherrie telling a story about the clinic, Swenson summarizing something he’s read – requires a heroic, futile effort to appear natural and normal. When Swenon reaches for Sherrie’s hand, he stops himself and draws back; every instinctive, affectionate gesture has come to seem like a calculated ploy, or worse, a heartless insult.”

You can never claim to give your final word on a novel, well anything really, but especially a novel. Your perception of the events, your understanding of the characters and their circumstances changes over time and depending on your own experiences. I find myself much more forgiving of characters that I would have condemned at other points in my life and vice versa. I was recently joking around with a friend of mine that I am finally able to understand the “aging male writer/professor” genre, whereas before it just came off as whining and overblown. So I began Blue Angel with an open mind, knowing that it was both an aging professor novel but also a purposeful and cutting satire of what is perceived as a cripplingly reductive and silly sexual harassment prevention movement on college campuses. This is a novel wouldn’t have even picked up three or four years ago – not that my opinion have necessarily changed on the policies lampooned in the novel, but I am more willing to sit down and air out the complexities of an individual story regardless of its somewhat heavy handed (at times) message.

Ted Swenson begins the novel with a fairly enviable life. He is tenured at a prestigious private college, has had a few successful and critically acclaimed novels, and has a devoted wife whose personality and interests fill the blank spaces of their lives. His classes are the worst part of his day, having to awkwardly skate around the rigidly outlined sexual harassment properly without limiting the subject matter of his students’ creative work. He is woefully self pitying and ungrateful for what he has in life, he can’t finish his novel (what sounds like an overly cerebral continuation of the Red and the Black called the Black and the Black – sigh). His trouble begins when he begins to obsess in a shockingly pathetic way, over the work of an extremely talented student in his class, progressively giving up his dignity, his marriage and career for stolen moments with her.

Francine Prose has clearly had it up to here with the climate of college campuses, the hatred seethes in her descriptions of token faculty members (the deconstructionist, the feminist, the poet) – everyone is so absurdly careful about what they say that they can never say what they mean or effectively discuss their academic work. She paints a picture of students whose entitlement includes the assumption that they should never have to hear anything they don’t want to hear, anything that will make them uncomfortable. For Prose, the fact that there is no distinction between the p.c. strictures that dictate sexual harassment policies that are supposed to protect people and the intensity that accompanies academic discourse is preposterous. For her the lines here are very fuzzy and she resents the effect that these rules and regulations have had on her world.

So essentially, the novel takes us through a process of calculated seduction by Swenson’s one talented student. She slips him her novel covertly, bit by bit, reeling him in with a beautifully and erotically written story about a high school girl’s fantasies about her music teacher. The first half of the book is sustained with this eroticism which quickly peters out as we begin to sense both Angela’s manipulations and Swenson’s increasingly desperate stupidity. The plot tightens from here – and not in the sense that it gets efficient and sparse, but that it creates a maddening claustrophobia. Swenson’s complete and utter disgrace is inevitable, his crimes trotted out in a sick sad parade. She is an impressive manipulator, but her motivations are never quite clear, unless we are to believe that she was working out material – was testing the world to see how far she could take it all. Her grip on reality is questionable and in a painfully obvious moment she confuses Swenson with the character in the novel and no one notices but Swenson himself. Swenson’s tragedy is inflated to the highest form of melodrama, we can almost hear the violins as he walks out of his hearing to the sound of bells (the audible symbol of the women’s group on campus declaring their victory – geez) and glimpses a deer unbothered by its surroundings.

I absolutely love the way that Prose writes, her grasp of language allows her to embody so many different authorial voices within the same novel that you can realistically envision each and every separate consciousness. I did have trouble with her venom, her dismissal of sexual harassment between students and professors as trite compared to the serious academic work that could be done without those measures – those power dynamics have real consequences, real victims and real outcomes. Does “p.c” sometimes go too far? Limit essential dialogue? Cloud truths with veiled reference and obscure language? Absolutely, sometimes discomfort is good, but her outright dismissal of theoretical principles and real life measures that have been enacted in response to abuse and inequality just seems a bit flippant. No question about it, she has created a powerful character in Angela, and obviously it is not irresponsible or even problematic without qualification, to write sexually aggressive and complicated female characters that turn the tables on presumed power dynamics….in fact one could make a case that that is also a familiar genre in feminist literature and criticism. However, doing so for the purpose of mocking feminist academics and conscientious campus politics is a little disturbing. It’s a complicated issue, and there is a very real sense in which the ousting of academics for strong language and opinions is also disturbing, I just wish she had made the distinction between those issues - and she is such a fantastic writer that I can only imagine how delicately she could have done so.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

2009-12-28T11:21:00.000-08:00

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

“He stared at Dickie’s blue eyes that were still frowning, the sun-bleached eyebrows white and the eyes themselves shining and empty, nothing but little pieces of blue jelly with a black dot in them, meaningless, without relation to him. You were supposed to see the soul through the eyes, to see love through the eyes, the one place you could look at another human being and see what really went on inside, and in Dickie’s eyes Tom saw nothing more now than he would have seen if he had looked at the hard, bloodless surface of a mirror…It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst would be that it would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike.”

The Ripliad is well known and Highsmith a well regarded master of the mystery genre. Her language recalls literary masters such as James and Waugh and her stories are page turning while delving into subtle, richly layered and infinitely creepy far reaches of the sociopathic brain. In the first in the series, Tom Ripley is mistaken for a close friend of Dickie Greenleaf by Dickie’s father. Out of desperation, Herbert Greenleaf asks Tom to travel to a small coastal Italian town to retrieve his son whose lack of ambition in anything other than recreational painting has frustrated him to no end. Tom sets out with questionable intentions – he has already revealed a tax scheme he has set into motion just for fun, exposed his contempt for the cold, distant woman who raised him and expressed his utter disinterest in social or emotional connection.

Tom gradually inserts himself into every facet of Dickie’s life, on the Greenleaf dime he travels around Europe and becomes more and more obsessed with Dickie. Highsmith’s talent for sneaking up on you is impeccable, we become so in tune with Ripley’s mindset that we occasionally understand his logic and it is only in the more obvious moments that you are forced to pull back and reassess the situation. Tom is constantly thinking about the next move, studying Dickie’s mannerisms, trying on his clothes in secret and inventing intricate and elaborate stories for any situation that may come up. Ripley is so good at what he does that he believes the alternate realities for which he is responsible. By the time we get around to Dickie’s murder and Ripley’s assumption of Dickie’s identity, it seems like the next logical step and the cat and mouse game laced with paranoia and self aggrandized pomposity on Ripley’s part is alternately joyful and excruciating.

Both Highsmith and Ripley play it pretty close to the vest, rarely saying exactly what they mean and waiting for someone else to fill in the blanks in order to retain plausible deniability. Highsmith introduces the possibility of Ripley’s desire for Dickie in a series of roundabout ways, creating an active queer subtext lending a complexity to Ripley’s isolation that would otherwise be left undeveloped. Some of the most compelling moments take place in the space of Tom’s insecurities with respect to Dickie, his dejection or elation with respect to how sure he feels about Dickie’s feelings are fully realized and relatable. Tom spends much of his time agonizing over the tiniest detail as proof that their relationship is indeed meaningful, calling to mind the more horrific aspects of being a teenage girl. Tom’s violent behavior is triggered by his desperation when Dickie pulls away from his obsessive neediness and each and every other violent act is “necessitated” by Dickie’s murder. What is shocking is the lack of emotion – other than relief, that Tom feels with each sinister act, his method is one of unshakeable logic unimpaired by humanity – in one of the more chilling moments in the book he reflects on how it was a good decision not to kill Marge (Dickie’s friend and lover) because she later provides him with an alibi. At that point you are so deeply in tune with Ripley that it takes a moment to detach yourself from his thinking and process how disturbing a scene it is.

In a sense, Ripley’s story is a very traditional American Dream narrative, he pulls himself into an entirely different socio-economic class with little resources. He gains respect and wins friends only followed by a paranoia about being caught that may never subside – a sense that doesn’t seem very important to him. What is incredibly interesting about this novel is just how much is left unsaid, much of the success of the story and the characters depends on the reader applying their assumptions and emotional perceptions to the text, the text is both malleable and confident and forces you to confront your own assumptions about individuality and honesty.

Persepolis 1 and 2 by Marjane Satrapi

2009-12-28T11:17:00.000-08:00

“In life, you’ll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it’s because they’re stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance…always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.”

After being made into an award winning animated film a few years back, Persepolis has received a hefty amount of praise and attention. For some reason until now I had never picked it up but I am glad that I finally got around to it. Both are autobiographical, the first allows us to see the Islamic Revolution through the eyes of a precocious young child raised by parents whose devotion to intellectual development, Marxist politics and personal acts of rebellion creates a space for dialogue the includes everything from Kim Wilde posters to no nonsense advice from her acerbic grandmother. Through the eyes of a child, the increasingly conservative demands of the Iranian government seem even more inexplicable than face value. Persepolis gives us the harsh reality that adolescence and political oppression are difficult even when you are equipped with the intellectual framework through which to process such events. Reality is reality and the suffering of Satrapi’s community cannot be set at a distance for the reader or for her. As a small child she developed a personal relationship with God and thinking that she is going to become a prophet she feels on comfortable footing with him - pulling him into conversation, screaming at him in moments when she feels injustice, abandoning him when she feels he no longer serves her purpose.

Satrapi doesn’t pull any punches, she becomes a victimizer herself, wanting revenge on the child of someone whose activities with the shah seem to pit them against each other. Her actions have consequences but as a child she is unable to fully understand them, she knows that she cannot wear certain things, but the reasons don’t make sense to her, she knows that her family members were heroes but doesn’t understand why that might be perceived negatively by others. The purity of the point of view Satrapi shares is a rare opinionated but not judgmental depiction of an historical moment whose consequences are still incredibly fresh and anything but simple. As Satrapi grows up, the realities come into sharper focus and people in her life begin to die. Before it becomes impossible, her parents send her to Europe in hopes that she will be able to continue her education.

The second novel is a much more unforgiving portrait of Marjane herself, she has pointed out this contrast as being an unavoidable side effect of representing a teenager/young adult as opposed to a child. The traits that seemed endearing become grating, her exile sharpening her. She begins her time in Europe in an Austrian convent, learning how to relate to her new roommate and seeking out friendships for both good reasons and bad. She falls in love, experiments with sex and drugs and pretentious attitudes toward literary theory and ends up homeless in Vienna before returning home to Iran. Autobiographical graphic novels have traditionally been the realm of simultaneously arrogant and self effacing awkward teenage boys, and Satrapi completely makes the genre her own, exposing her most vulnerable moments while giving us a well developed glimpse into the process by which we come to define ourselves as adults.

Satrapi straddles the divide between her home and the life represented by her European experiences, bringing her personal story into the realm of global significance. She feels prudish and nervous in Europe while she feels whorish and over the top in Iran. She has created a graphic novel that operates entirely within the feminist political point of view of “the personal is political”, the actions of governments both past and present have created her reality and the parameters within which she is expected to live and her relationship to that idea is both assured and frustratingly limiting for her. It is fortunately, not limiting for her audience, who is served well by her artistic exorcisms. Her language is matter of fact and her simple drawings convey intricate layers of emotional intensity. I look forward to the next phase of Marjane’s life and the hilarious, complicated, challenging work she is sure to continue producing.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

2009-12-28T11:14:00.000-08:00

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

the man who smelled of boiled bird-flesh was going mad”

It is difficult to ignore (at least in Los Angeles) the advertising plastering every flat surface in sight, reminding you of the Christmas release date of the Sherlock Holmes movie. Unbeknownst to me, I had picked up an apropos little volume in randomly checking out Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution. Chabon brings back Holmes as an elderly, retired neighborhood figure, more content to spend time with his bees rather than solve crimes. He infuses “the old man” with the characteristics of Holmes’s methods and attitudes and throws in references here and there to his old doctor friend, but Chabon avoids an outright Holmes copy. It stands as an homage rather than a cheap capitalization on the Holmes craze past and present.

We begin with “the old man” contentedly reading in his most comfortable chair and as he sees a young boy in the company of an African gray parrot about to stumble onto the electrified train tracks across the way, he spends a good while debating the merits of saving the boy versus his inclination to stay comfortable. He eventually stops the boy but cannot get the boy to speak, only hearing the bird repeating a series of numbers in German.

The boy, Linus, is a mute German orphan whose parents were killed in a concentration camp. Chabon pours out the foundation for our mystery with this backdrop of human sorrow on a massive scale represented in the individual “blank back page” of a face worn by Linus. The bird is his closest friend and its ability to recite poetry, sing popular music and recite these mysterious numbers eventually get him stolen and another man murdered.

Chabon litters the narrative with names of Dickensian hilarity, Bellows, Panicker, Quint and even Linus himself. He adopts the language of Victorian mystery, stretching individual thoughts and sentences into meandering and ornate architectural structures and bringing you in and out of the moment, mimicking the structure of the mystery itself. This in a sense, is another way in which Chabon departs from traditional Holmes stories. He is much more interested in language than plot, the most interesting moments of this book take place in the chapter that delves into the interior monologue of Bruno the parrot. The parrot has the most complicated intellect of our characters, exposing the horrors of the human world in which he lives.

The real problem with this novel is its length, its compactness disallows the complete fleshing out of the characters and the glimpse that we get into the product of Chabon’s actual success in this matter makes it all the more frustrating. Because he prioritizes language over plot, the plot almost falls by the wayside and I came away feeling as if I didn’t really know how it ended. This is a novel of unbelievable potential, I just wish it had been a draft of a much longer project.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

2009-12-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

"So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all. "

Wide Sargasso Sea is both a reimagining of and prequel to Jane Eyre, telling the story of the madwoman in the attic, before she became such a specter relegated to the periphery of Mr. Rochester's country life. Rhys begins with the skeletal portrait of Bertha given by Bronte and fills her out into a living breathing woman whose realities as a white Creole heiress from a slave owning family has precariously positioned her somewhere between worlds.

Antoinette (Bertha) watched her mother's own descent into madness following the razing of their home and the death of her son as a consequence. Antoinette was given to a local convent for her education and shelter and is eventually sold to Mr. Rochester in marriage with the money she was left by her stepfather. Her inheritance and independence dissipates with that decision and she is linked to Rochester under false pretenses that lead both to despair. Rhys constructs parallel lives for Bertha and Jane, each overcame the hardships of their youth, maintained their independent spirits and were educated in religious houses. Jane in fact, is always in the backdrop of this story (or at least she was for me, having always heard Wide Sargasso Sea discussed in it's referential relationship to Jane Eyre).

Wide Sargasso Sea is continually shifting points of view, further emphasizing Antoinettes multiple identities and the complexities of constructing her world. In a post emancipation Jamaica, she has been squeezed out of both the newly freed Jamaican population and the European flight, it is clear that their family is in neither camp. Her attachment to her home which was destroyed as well as her romantic expectations of England inform her double identity, which while unsettling, creates ambivalence in the characters and the reader. Once she becomes attached to Rochester, we shift into his point of view, he is at times overcome with lust for her but never feels tenderness. He is wary of the people around him but also trusts them in their warnings concerning Antoinette. He learns that her mother was insane, he learns of her parentage, he learns that he was to some extent tricked into marrying her - and instead of letting her go, he brings her to England and locks her away in a disoriented state, driving an already unsound mind into the depths. Rochester systematically chips away at her identity, refusing to call her by her chosen name and coldly spurning her attempts at connection.

The text has a illusory, claustrophobic quality, forcing you to question both your trust in the accuracy of the words but also your manipulated emotions throughout. This is all heightened, of course, by the fact that you know exactly where Antoinette ends up and exactly what she ends up doing. Even before anything has happened to her, you aware that she will eventually be held as a prisoner and shameful secret and so every joyful moment (of which there are but few) is tinged with regret in advance. Antoinette's alienation is palpable and she is tossed around by colonial, racial and sexual politics, her only defense being to retreat in her own mind. Even the eventual climax (coinciding with Eyre) where Bertha burns down the house comes out of her obsessive dreams about escaping Rochester, a figure representative of patriarchal forces governing morality, the law and ultimately, Antoinette. Rochester is transformed from a hero at the center of a familiar romantic quest into a pawn of political and social forces.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

2009-12-15T17:17:00.000-08:00

"One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet."

Apparently I have unceasingly intelligent and wonderful friends, gifting me fantastic recommendations back to back to back. To be clear, the world at large tends to recommend this book, its dripping with awards and praise and a kind of hushed awe that rarely accompanies a contemporary work of literature. It is exceedingly different though, when someone puts their personal, lovingly worn copy into your hands and says "You need to read this". This is not a gesture I take lightly, so I immediately went home and began. I'd like to think that I was prepared for what followed, given the aforementioned praise etc., but I have to admit I was absorbed beyond my expectations.

The task of summarizing the action of the novel is daunting at best and disengenuous at best, but I will attempt a bit of a gloss. David Lurie is a former literature professor at the former Cape Town University whose professional passions and expertise have been relegated obsolete by the new order of the University in a post apartheid South Africa. He quarter heartedly teaches communications, drowning himself in the kind of justifying, aggrandizing self pity that creates monsters. He finds himself in a state of....disgrace after the extreme sexual harassment of a student, harassment that he dismisses after claiming that he was transformed into a servant of Eros, there is literally no limit to his ego. Through the ensuing scandal his words fail him, in one of Coetzee's less graceful moves, the communications professor loses his ability to communicate with his colleagues and community. He is offered clemency in exchange for repentence but does not understand the point and in a scene that captures tension and calm detachment simultaneously the entire process of "getting it all out in the open" into question and with echoes of the South African reconciliation commission in the backdrop, Coetzee lays heavy stakes on David's attitudes and inability to deal with his present state.

David retreats to the country to be with his daughter, a woman whose life choices exist in complete indifference to David's passions and expectations. He tries to negotiate building a relationship with her and assumes that the supposed simplicity of her life and surroundings will somehow bring a sense of calm and order to his newly unpleasant life. What he finds is a shifting balance of power enacted in chaotic forms. David and his daughter become the victims of a vicious attack that leaves him humiliated and angry while his daughter is left quietly resigned to both the consequences of the attack and the bleak future of her rural life.

David becomes is reduced to desperation, lashing out at his daughter for not reacting the way he would want her to, going to lengths to secure the empty justice that the police might provide, completely ignoring the practicalities of the situation because that would reduce him to the tiniest consequence. He is broken down to his smallest, finding redemption only in a kinship with the unwanted animals put to merciful death at an animal shelter run by the simple, powerful Bev Shaw. Disgrace is a shattering but immensely readable book - buoyancy and weightiness coexisting within the layers of the text.

Digging to America by Anne Tyler

2009-12-15T16:32:00.000-08:00

"She wondered if there was a gene for that – for holding oneself back, resisting the communal merriment. It had never before occurred to her that she had passed this trait on to Sami."

There's something so incredibly satisfying about finishing a novel you've enjoyed that came to you as a recommendation from a friend. Anne Tyler is the favorite author of a friend of mine and although I cannot claim that Digging to America was supposed to be where I began, it is nonetheless where I found myself. The novel begin with the meeting of the Yazdan and Donaldson families, each at the airport retrieving their newly adopted Korean children. It is an emotionally charged scene from the start, harnessing both the excited expectations and debilitating fears of expanding a family. From the moment of the arrival as it becomes later known (the novel is punctuated by a yearly "arrival party" celebrating that day), the two families become intimately intertwined, lovingly portraying the universality of the need to belong, the constant feeling that one does not and the hopeful meeting in the middle.

The Donaldsons take up space, they are assertive in their friendliness and are a fairly comical satire on a certain kind of contemporary parenting. The Yazdans, an Iranian family whose varying degrees of willingness to "assimilate" often puts them at cultural odds with the kind of romantic view held by the Donaldsons. Their child is quickly renamed Susan, but just as quickly earns a Farsi influenced nickname, Susi-June. Susan's grandmother, Maryam becomes the eventual centerpiece of the novel, which spans seven years. Tyler brings Maryam slowly into focus, moving her from the periphery of the family into an indispensable role that forces her to reconsider her own assumptions about where and why she belongs. Our first impression is that of other characters, that Maryam is cold and aloof and it isn't until we shift into her point of view that she gets fleshed out. Bitsy's widower father falls hopelessly in love with Maryam and initially she has no idea what to do. She is immediately confronted by his sheer American-ness, or at least what she perceives as such. He rearranges her life, takes up room, clutters her living space and is constantly just there. Maryam's depth is astounding, in part because of her stoic exterior. Once we are allowed into her thought process, she never shuts down, constantly exploring contradictions and rethinking her relationship to the world. She claims a kind of "otherness", she even has a t shirt labeled "foreigner" that she received as a joke from her son on the day she became an American citizen; but it becomes painfully clear that she also longs to belong not necessarily to America in any concrete sense, but to the people around her.

The scope of the novel is simultaneously minute and massive, Tyler exposes the sweeping drama inherent in the smallest details of our daily lives. There were moments that it felt as if Tyler was glossing a bit, scratching the surface of may issues and then settling on one once you are halfway through the novel, but its cleverly set out like a trap. You are caught off guard by how attached you've grown and how well you feel you know these peoples. One of the most riveting scenes involved the outcome of an illconceived "binky" party in which Bitsy is trying to help rid her second child of her pacifier habit. Despite the smallness of it all, we recognize these people and we chuckle at their familiar moments. I found myself laughing aloud when Maryam couldn't remove a new bike helmet and cracking a knowing smile when Jin-Ho attempts to relate the wonderful qualities of the American girl doll to her mother who would give anything to keep her daughter's Korean heritage "in tact". In tackling these small moments, Tyler creates a universalizing force without obscuring the individuality of the characters and their respective cultures. Maryam especially becomes integral to this idea, in coming to recognize that ironically the constant nagging outsider-ness that she feels is what connects her to the world, that there is something entirely all too human about feeling apart.

Nobody Move by Denis Johnson

2009-12-05T16:18:00.000-08:00

"Jimmy Luntz had never been to war."

Nobody Move was originally serialized in four parts for Playboy as the follow up to Johnson's National Book Award winner, Tree of Smoke. In a novella that has been billed as feeling like Hammet, Chandler and everyone that generates the immediate reaction of glee at at a hardboiled detective noir style novel, he traces the escapades of a band of thugs, criminals and idiots in Bakersfield, California. Johnson is by all accounts bleak and my expectations were that he would not be able to adopt a level of levity that would help lift this story into that hardboiled category.

My expectations however, were traded in favor of broad strokes in the other direction. It seems as if Johnson checked his subtleties at the door and created a serial that could easily be consumed on the back of a cereal box as well as in Playboy. It is quick and simple and mildly entertaining at times, but it doesn't give you enough to get involved and the effect is a rootless few hours.

Nobody move has a narrow, short focus and a closed circuit of justice, bringing us into the story with Jimmy Luntz's gambling problems and escalating. You can feel Johnson's head swimming with pop culture references and it seems impossible to divorce individual scenes from multiple viewings of Pulp Fiction. Luntz is an idiot who attempts to stand up for himself and in so doing brings the wrath of a small crime boss into his life. Luntz meets Anita Desilvera, whose situation is less tragicomic, on account of the fact that she is a startlingly beautiful badass who predictably falls in with Luntz and uses him as a tool to fix her own morally ambiguous situation.

Every character is an archetype, rendering the story enjoyable but ulimately forgettable. The dialogue eclipses the characters, the attempts at imitating the kind of wisecracking style of noir fiction and film eliminates the possibility of creating one even remotely relatable character. While there is a rather forced and expectant violent climax, the ultimate outcome is almost inconsequential. The New York times has called this novella "a Warhol soup can", the implication being that the meaning is in the surface....the difference for me being that I at least enjoy looking at a Warhol soup can...and looking at it isn't exactly a huge time waster, but wasting two hours plowing through slapstick violence between obnoxious and vacuous characters is less than enjoyable. I look forward to Johnson's next real effort.

Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates

2009-12-05T15:49:00.001-08:00

“If you loved him, you leapt unquestioning into the happiness that Eddy Diehl was offering you, otherwise the foxy smile would cease abruptly, a hard cruel light would come into the narrowed eyes.”

Sometimes I forget what I’m in for when I pick up a Joyce Carol Oates novel. Sometimes reading her work feels a little like being put through an emotionally exhausting event, leaving you hollowed out and staring blankly at the last page. She forces you to stare into the abyss, but one that is painfully and tragically familiar. She’s known for her hyper detailed emotional realism, intricate exposure of the inextricable relationship between class, race and gender with every facet of our lives and her deft portrayal of small towns eroded by social and economic strife. Little Bird of Heaven is no different, situating a gruesome murder at the center of Sparta, New York and gradually spiraling outward cataloguing its effects on the community.

Two men are named suspects in the murder of Zoe Kruller, an intoxicating, ephemeral cocktail waitress and bluegrass singer. Her husband Delray and her longtime love Eddy Diehl are sent into a tailspin, watching insidious and irrevocable seeds of mistrust sprout within their families and communities. Each man serves for the other as the obvious killer and overarching symbol for the destruction of their lives and the tarnishing of their reputations. The story is laid out for us between two narrators, the youngest daughter of Eddy Diehl, Krista and the only son of Zoe and Delray Kruller, Aaron.

The novel begins with Krista, whose voice tends to remain in a mist of childish nostalgia dna longing even though we are reading reflections from a thirty something woman. Her memories are hazy and strung together through association, rejecting the structure of a traditional mystery and often frustrating the reader with her tangents. Nothing here is superfluous though, each moment serves as a part of a slow build of intensity. Most criticisms I’ve read of the novel recently have expressed extreme frustration with this aspect of the book, but I find it extremely successful even in its most tedious moments. The way Krista ignores her instincts in order to cling to the trust she wants to have in her father, the betrayal she feels by her mother and brother because they don’t defend Eddy, the alienation she experiences at the hands of Sparta and the eventual overwhelming need she develops to connect with Aaron as the only other person with whom she could possibly share these emotions. As JCO often does, she constructs Krista carefully, letting the inextricable linkage she feels between violence and sexuality run fluidly between her childhood craving for her father’s attention to her dangerous pursuit of Aaron Kruller. With her father’s descent into desperation to prove his innocence and win back his family, Krista willingly accompanies him to the very end and only in the last moments realizes that she has stepped back from the edge.

JCO plays with us here as throughout the novel, throwing our suspicions onto Diehl and then back onto Delray. Interestingly enough, she does this through their children who are their most ardent supporters. It isn’t until Eddy Diehl puts Krista in danger or until we hear Aaron falsely alibi his father out of nothing more than a sense of duty that we are swayed in either direction. Vague allusions to Zoe’s dangerous lifestyle and need to get out of Sparta at any cost are ignored in the face of these two men.

The second part of the novel shifts into Aaron’s perspective, taking us through this same time period we have just experienced. Aaron is absolutely devastating and effects a much more mature voice than Krista’s. He was the one who found his mother’s body, his sensory memories bubbling up at every turn, becoming (as with Krista) the genesis of the linkage between extreme violence and sexuality. He was emotionally abandoned by his family far before Zoe’s murder and his desperation for connection gets tossed aside by his father whose frustrations and humiliations at the way his community has treated him in the face of his wife’s death have rendered him incapable of providing even cursory care for his teenage son. All three of our central male characters are depicted as helpless in terms of engaging with other people and the world at large. They are cast in the die of violence and resort to it when cornered or challenged, but ultimately their acts of violence come off as pathetic attempts to focus attention on themselves as they have no other tools to do so. JCO keeps calling into attention, the inescapable “maleness” of each characters body and presence, trapping them in their physicality and highlighting the ways in which this very fact obscures their individuality.

While the book begins at a quick pace, reeling you in with the promise of a fulfilling and somewhat melodramatic mystery/thriller, it becomes something more of a study of the effect of Zoe’s murder on the most vulnerable characters. Krista and Aaron develop under the expectations of their town as the children of supposed murderers, they are alienated and emotionally bereft, seeking connection through violence as the only way they know how to reach out. All against the backdrop of Sparta in a state of extreme decay, littered with drug use, murder, adultery and desperation. It is a cruel place where affection becomes conflated with anger. JCO has described this novel as “a love story in the guise of a mystery”, a statement that for better of for worse, made me rethink the way I had read the novel, unsettling the sense of cause and effect that to me had seemed a logical aspect of the novel. Whether Krista and Aaron’s connection is of primary importance with how they became connected being of secondary importance or vice versa, the results remain devastatingly affecting. There is no escaping this story, JCO does nothing to break it up, it is continual desolation.

You will eventually find out who killed Zoe, but by the time you do it seems incidental. It is anticlimactic for anyone still there for the mystery aspect of the novel – but I can’t imagine that anyone would have lasted through if that was their primary reason for being there. The questions of innocence and tarnished reputations that have defined both Aaron and Krista since the murder are finally book to rest, their fixations and doubts exorcised. JCO writes her characters here in the blurred lines of reality, thwarting the stark divisions between families and concepts of wrong or right in favor of the messy confusion left behind by unforeseeable tragedy.