Exile on Ninth Street

It's been about a month now since Kurt Vonnegut died. At the time of his death, I had just started reading Anna Karenina, but decided my next read, once I'd finished Tolstoy should be Vonnegut.

It had been long time since I'd read anything by Vonnegut, at least six years, but I had long enjoyed him, though it took me some time to get him (not that I'm a scholar or anything now). The first book of his that I read was Galapagos, his novel about the descent of man.

I picked it up because I thought it was science fiction -- and it is; though not the kind I normally read in 1987, the year I after I graduated high school. I didn't know quite what to make of it (it's set 1 million years in the future, on the island of Galapagos, and humans have evolved to the point of being seal-like creatures). I kept reading it -- though I didn't really catch on to the satire -- because I found it so bizarre.

Though it was such a strange book, or maybe because it was such a strange book, I decided I wanted to read something else by Vonnegut, and I found Cat's Cradle. My first copy of Cat's Cradle was a thin orange paperback, and I thought it was strange to see such short chapters, some just a few paragraphs or so in length. But, I didn't quite get it. There was something about Bokonon, and the children's game cat's cradle and some strange chemical called ice-nine. At the time it really didn't make sense.

But this past week I reread it, not knowing what to expect: Maybe it wouldn't make sense again. And yet it did. I caught onto it--the plot, the satire, the humor.

As I've been reading through this project of mine, I've become more alert to my sense of humor, to actually laughing when I read something funny; it's an experience as a reader that's somewhat new to me.

Part of that comes from personality. Only recently have I realized how serious-minded I am. Not that I lack a sense of humor, but I tend to think too much, and think with a capital T. And that capital T thinking has influenced my reading.

For much of my reading life, I've read with my brain in such a serious mode that sometimes I lost the joy of reading. Part of that mode came from the influence of someone I respected at one time: That person was surprised to hear I liked "fluff" such as Rita Mae Brown, whose serious novels had made me laugh out loud. Part of it came from grad school and the never ending search for meaning through scholarship and theory. Part of it came from my own sense of needing to find personal meaning through reading.

But recently, this journey of reading 100 novels has led me to understand that no matter how great a piece of literature a novel is supposed to be, I can read it and laugh at the funny parts (even in Tolstoy, a Mr. Serious if there ever was one), I can sympathize and empathize with the characters, I can think with a capital T, and I can appreciate the world each novel brings.

And laugh and smirk I did when rereading Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut's sense of absurdity was not only appropriate for the early 1960s, but fits so well now. Absurd religions. Too much trust in science. Overdone patriots. The end of the world.

So it goes. (That's from another Vonnegut novel, you know.)

My lesson learned, perhaps, from Cat's Cradle is that of one of the characters, Frank Hoenikker, "'There was a time when I took people's silly answers seriously. I'm past that now.'"

Or maybe it's the lesson of his brother Newt, "'There's love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.'"

Or maybe there is no lesson in literature.

So it goes.

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...and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. --Proverbs 31:6

When I first read Anna Karenina 15 years ago, I hadn't noticed an interesting detail (perhaps because I was trying to gather up all the plot strands and was missing some details) -- late in the novel Anna becomes a junkie, using small doses of morphine to stifle the emotional pain of a declining romance with Vronsky, as she perceives it.

And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to him. Just as before, only love and by charm could she keep him. And so, just as before, only occupation in the day, by morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he ceased to love her.

What an extraordinary psychologist Tolstoy is: What do humans do to stifle pain? they turn to drugs. Today we get depressed, even a little, and it won't go away, and we get a prescription to fix it. The chemical compounds are perhaps a bit more controlled than a reaction to morphine, but still we seek solace when trouble comes. The thing Anna has greatly feared -- a waning romance with Vronsky -- has come upon her, even if that fear isn't grounded in facts, even if it is wholly irrational (but isn't that where fear comes from, the irrational?). She has no rest, her mind is unquiet. She has to remain occupied during the day, and on morphine during the night.

I find myself at my most sympathetic with Anna at this point in the novel. What a vast, irrational thing human suffering is: Does it matter how we get to the point of anguish? Anyone who experiences grief in some way -- and what is Anna experiencing but grief? -- must be able to find some sympathy when others grieve, even if we don't or can't accept the rightness or wrongness of the actions that took that person to the point in which grief exposes itself, a storm in the mind, as William Styron calls it in his beautfiful book-length essay about his struggle with depression Darkness Visible.

But back to drugs and drug use to stifle pain: It's an ancient solution to the one thing that's truly universal to human experience. "Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more," says Proverbs. And I have to say, "cheers!" to that.

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Saturday, April 7, 2007 it snowed in Central Texas. And maybe a quirk in the weather patterns here was enough to send me to church, devout agnostic that I am, although it wasn't snowing when I stopped at my friend's shop in Salado, Texas; it was just sleeting, and I was 99 percent certain I could get a nice, free hot cup of coffee there, and maybe the sleet would let up, and I'd be on my way.

Or maybe I went to church because my friend invited me to the regular Saturday service at the chapel behind his shop, and that sounded good because afterward would be a potluck dinner in which the main dish was roast lamb, and I hadn't eaten that day, so I'd suffer through a church service for a free meal.

Or maybe it's because I was grateful another friend had loaned me money earlier that day, and a little prayer of thanks was in order to a god I don't really believe in, but what the hell, I'm desperate -- I have little money, no job other than freelancing, and less hope -- and whatever comes of it might help.

Plus, it was sleeting. In April. In Texas. And once I had begun my second cup of coffee, it was snowing. It was snowing, and beginning to stick. In April. In Texas. So, anything could happen. Maybe even a god I don't really believe in would answer prayers, or at least listen. Plus, there was roast lamb in my friend's oven.

Since late March, I've been reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and I've come to the part, about halfway through the novel, in which Levin, an unbeliever, has to make confession in order to marry his beloved Kitty. Levin is my least favorite character in the novel, perhaps because he reminds me of myself in more ways than I'd like to admit (one of his least charming characteristics is his inability to see ambiguity, the shades of gray in human character and action that novels tend to elevate into art; it's a trait I battle with and don't like in myself, especially when dealing with uncertainty). "Levin c'est moi," Flaubert might say.

In light of my recent experience in church, I found myself reflecting on this passage:

Levin found himself . . .  in the vaguest position in regard to religion. Believe he could not, and at the same time he had no firm conviction that it was all wrong. And consequently, not being able to believe in the significance of what he was doing nor regard it with indifference as an empty formality, during the whole period of preparing for the sacrament he was conscious of a feeling of discomfort and shame at doing what he did not himself understand, and what, as an inner voice told him, was therefore false and wrong.

The day I attended the service was Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday, a day of hope because Christ is about to defeat death -- the tomb will be empty and Christ risen on Easter Sunday. It wasn't the first time I had gone to services at the little Episcopal chapel behind my friend's shop; for various reasons I had gone to services in the past (as a journalist covering religion, and interested in immersion journalism, as a potential seeker who ended up at the time confirming his own agnosticism), but each time I dreaded parts of the service, particularly Eucharist (in the Episcopal church anyone is welcome to particpate in communion); because I'm not a believer, I feel strange, as out of place as Levin must have felt, taking something believers take so seriously (Episcopalians believe in consubstantiation -- Christ is present in the bread and wine, but the bread and wine don't become the body and blood as in transubstantiation, which Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches believe), but I take the bread and the wine, because I tend to feel even more out of place sitting in the pew, singled out as being out of place.

This particular snowy Saturday, it wasn't the Eucharist that created such discomfort, but the point in the service in which everyone renews their baptismal vows. I was raised Baptist, and baptised at 17. There were no baptismal vows, you just went under and somehow were a new person.

So, I faced something that was somewhat unfamiliar, but unfamiliarity with the vows weren't creating the discomfort. It was phrases such as "I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth," and "I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord," and "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting" that were making me feel like Levin, as if by saying these things I was being dishonest with myself and others; I was being "false and wrong."

And yet, there was one thing that struck me in the renewal: the repetition of "I will, with God's help." Maybe that's why I was at church. Because I have no strong conviction that it is all wrong. The devout agnostic wanted God's help, because like Job, everything had fallen to shit. I was a character in my own novel, seeking some kind of redemption or atonement, wanting a blessing, rather than experiencing a curse.

As I continue to read Anna Karenina, it's clear Tolstoy to some extent modeled Levin after Job. And most of us at some time must feel like Job, a man subjected to a terrible and shocking bet between God and Satan. No matter what, through loss of everything meaningful in his life, Job never curses God. I haven't been so faithful. I haven't had any faith at all. And perhaps that is justice enough in this god's eyes to continue his wager, and perhaps intentionally lose on occasion.

An unbeliever, Levin slowly succumbs to faith. I still doubt. Levin is one of the few literary characters I've dealt with since embarking on my 100-novels reading project that finds religion forming his character, shaping him, as religion, or the lack of, has shaped me. It's rare to see characters in contemporary fiction show how religion, or the lack of, has shaped them, and yet, at least for Americans, religion is still a viable force that does shape our characters. I wonder why it doesn't seem to shape many fictional characters' lives in any meaningful way.

As for me, I still say I know that I don't know. Unlike Job, I can't say I'm happy with this so-called God, almighty that he (or she) is; faith is still elusive. And I'm not really sure why.

Comments are still turned off, but you may e-mail comments to tglasscock at yahoo dot com.

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I've again been dipping into the 19th Century -- as part of my 100 novels project -- last month  Huckleberry Finn, and this month Anna Karenina. While I'm not up to offering, at the moment, any great, piercing critical insights, I find myself enjoying the formality of the language, of the rhetoric, even in Twain, who presents a genuine American voice. Besides the intimidating length of some 19th Century novels -- my copy of Anna Karenina is 912 pages -- I think modern readers may be intimidated by the formality of the prose. I know I was when I first picked up Twain in elementary school.

As writers and readers, at least in English, we've been influenced by the Hemingway-esque, terse sentences, the zippy, piss-urgent language of The Associated Press, of journalism, and the rhetorical notion of "open" punctuation--fewer commas, and even fewer semicolons (because of the tendency toward shorter sentences?).

But perhaps the 19th Century novelists learned their prosody and punctuation from that era's teachers of rhetoric, of the written word meant to be spoken, of different "beats" or pauses for different punctuation. I get a sense, especially from Twain, that his prose begs to be read aloud,  read carefully, whether read aloud or silently, not zipped through as if it's the latest from the AP. It's hard to say whether this is true for the Tolstoy since it's a translation.

Other oddities of the Constance Garnett translation: I keep encountering many one-sentence paragraphs, and those paragraph breaks sometimes don't seem consistent with the flow of the action of a scene. (Is Russian like this? Or rather, Tolstoy's Russian?)

Posted by Todd at 08:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here is an article I wrote for Blog Critics after my first reading of James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime. (I've recently reread the novel as part of my 100 novels reading project.)

A Feast of Love

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I first understood the power of sentences reading Hemingway. His descriptions read as if they were filmed, not written.

Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.

A sentence like this puts you in the place it describes, an Italian villa during Wordl War I. It was sentences like these that I so wanted to create when I first started writing seriously, not only their visual quality, but also their rhythm. The distinct Hemingway sound. It took me a long time to break away from imitation (though it still creeps in from time to time, especially strings of clauses linked with "and").

When I read, I love encountering great sentences. "Sentences are extraordinary things," writes Tom Grimes in a review of Stephen Amidon's novel The New City. "They're often the taken-for-granted miracles of storytelling, as transparent to readers as the fact that the sun rises and sets every day is to humans. But great sentences, like sunlight, allow us to see what otherwise would remain hidden."

Grimes' review led me to read The New City. I wanted to read great sentences, obsessed as I was with making them. When I first read the novel seven years ago, I read great sentences, as the opening paragraph.

At first the damage didn't look that bad. There was a jagged crack running through the front door's glass, but that could have happened in a hundred innocent ways.  And the lobby's disorder -- sand spilled from an upright ashtray and a scattering of drug awareness pamphlets -- looked like the usual by-products of teen rowdiness.  As Austin Swope stepped onto the metal staircase that helixed up into the converted silo, he began to think that maybe the security people had exaggerated when they spoke of a riot.

A great paragraph of description, visually strong, it sweeps you into the narrative as well as Hemingway. Plus there is that use of the verbal "helixed". What a surprising word, "helixed".  A perfect word to describe a spiral staircase, a word that eventually evokes the chaos that evolves the novel's plot. (Amidon might get tsk-ed, though, by Renni Browne and Dave King, authors of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, who consider "as" constructions unsophicated, hackneyed.)

Set in in the 1970s in Newton, Maryland, a planned community, a quasi-utopian dream of city planner Barnaby Vine, The New City follows several characters, chief among them the ambitious Austin Swope, as the city, and the idea behind the city -- to harmoniously bring all classes and races together -- comes to clash with the one antagonist common to utopian literature, human nature. In other words, Newton fails its Freudian reality test, largely because of Swope's ambition, his blindness toward his son Teddy's adolescent petty jealousies, as well as a Romeo-Juliet-plot of young lovers (black boy, white girl) torn asunder. 

On the second reading, I was still moved by Amidon's sentences, although they falter sometimes as Grimes notes: About two-thirds of the way through the novel, the narrative slows because the sentences "fluidity and caustic accuracy degenerate into imperatives. 'He had to get out of here. He had to go talk with his dad . . . He had to act fast.'"

Maybe "falter" isn't the right word. In the passage Grimes has quoted (spoiler warning), Swope's son Teddy has just caused the death by drowning of Susan Truax, love interest of Joel Wooten (Joel is Teddy's best friend, and Teddy sees Susan as a rival). Teddy has just taken an argument too far; a push meant to simply dunk Susan as payback for an insult goes horribly wrong. What Grime's quotes is Teddy's voice.  A panicked, urgent voice from a character that no longer has time to be fluid or caustically insightful. And Amidon picks the narrative pace up in the final third of the novel.

The sentences stand out, and illuminate the novel's world, an imagined world that reads like reportage. Amidon has worked as a journalist. Details matter. And The New City is filled with details.

Posted by Todd at 07:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this week I finished reading Jose Saramago's Blindness. I became interested in this novel after reading a post about it at Of Books and Bicycles. Set in an unamed vaguely European country, the novel follows a set of characters stricken by a mysterious "white blindness," which seems to be some kind of contagious affliction, spread it seems simply by contact. The main characters, those initially stricken by the blindness, are quarantined by their Government in a former mental hospital. Under armed guard, and restricted to the hospital's main compound, the internees' lives quickly devolve into a nighmarish hell, particularly after a criminal element begins to horde food, become violent, and resort to rape. Eventually, the rest of the country submits to the blindness; the remaining internees escape to the outside world, only to discover their society and country have resorted to a state of survival, barely coping with their affliction. 

One of the curious aspects of this novel is its style, which Dorothy of Of Books and Bicycles also finds interesting. The language itself (translated from Portugese) is very lyrical, but the setences and paragraphs are loosely punctuated, frequently using run-ons (commas and periods are the only marks of punctuation used), and no paragraph breaks for dialogue. I wonder if the style is meant to simulate Portugese syntax, because from what I've read, it's a style common to Saramago's English translations.

Once you get used to the style -- it actually flows fairly well -- the story and its themes hold you until the end. Blindness, of course, is a constant theme in Western literature. I've been thinking about blindness and sight lately after reading Oedipus Rex and King Lear, and now Saramago. Blindness in Oedipus Rex tends to become a way to at once hide from sin and repent of it. In Lear loss of sight seems to lure one toward the abyss, into nothingness. Often in Blindness, this is where Saramago takes us: "...blindness is also this, to live in a world where all hope is gone."  But unlike other works, the blindness in Saramago's novel doesn't fully promote change in the characters, or the human condition. Some of the characters in the novel learn to love, and cooperate, others resort to criminality and violence, particularly when interned, as they might even if they weren't blind. The blindness doesn't seem to be transformative or redemptive, rather it places characters in an extension of Sartre's hell, found in Sartre's drama No Exit. Sartre's statement in that play is "Hell is -- other people." And Saramago seems to extend this idea in his novel, although, since not all of the blind succumb to their dark sides, perhaps Saramago isn't fully pessimistic. Perhaps he's suggesting "Hell may be other people."

Saramago also seems to be working within the tradition of the dystopian novel, a la Orwell. The Government is blind to the plight of the internees. They become indifferent to them, often shooting and killing them when the soldiers guarding them begin to fear the blindness. They are dictatorial, controlling food, limiting healthcare to the point that it's almost nil, and yet leave the internees to their own devices.

(As you may have noticed, I have shut off comments for the time being, until I can figure out how to best filter out spam. If you would like to comment please do so at tglasscock at yahoo. )

Posted by Todd at 07:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Loiusa May Alcott's Little Women is the 32nd selection on my 100 novels reading list.  Another classic I've never read, I decided to read the novel because Francine Prose mentions it in her Reading Like a Writer as one of her Books to be Read Immediately. I'm in the process of slowly rereading that book as well. Prose places Alcott's novel in a list of books and authors that appealed to her as a child because of their "plucky heroines."

I love the description Prose gives of reading these books, among others, of the power of reading itself: "Each word of these novels was a yellow brick in the road to Oz. There were chapters I read and reread so as to repeat the dependable, out-of-body sensation of being somewhere else."

Isn't that one chief reason we read--to be "somewhere else"? It's a wonderful experience to feel such.

But my first impressions, and the reasons I'm enjoying reading Little Women aren't necessarily to experience being somewhere else, namely Civil War-era America. While the novel is an interesting look into lives and particularly and pecularily American ideals and attitudes, I'm also enjoying reading it as a writer, and seeing all the writing "rules" that Alcott breaks--things as dialogue tags such as "grumbled Jo". Haven't we all been instructed not to use such tags, and use instead the unnoticed, unobtrusive "said"? And yet such awkward phrases don't take away from the story, or getting involved with the characters, and much of the melodrama the novel presents.

One of the main ideas Prose makes in Reading Like a Writer is that the "rules" we tend to learn in creative writing classes or from books on writing, don't always necessarily hold up. She points to this frequently in the book. And when you read a classic like Little Women, you can see Prose's point. Sometimes those "rules" can be cast aside and you still have an engaging imaginative work.

Posted by Todd at 08:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As part of my 100-novels reading project, I've selected Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy as my 31st read.

As the back cover material notes, this novel unfolds the story of a 14-year-old boy known only as The Kid, and his journey into the dark and bizarre world of westward frontier expansion in the 1850s; the novel specifically chronicles incidents on the Texas-Mexico border. The Kid encounters a variety of violence on the frontier, including a massacre of a Texan militia by the Comanche, and joining a motley crew of mostly white scalphunters.

The more I read of McCarthy, the more I think of him as a latter-day Conrad. Blood Meridian is an early novel of McCarthy's, but like No Country for Old Men, it explores the human heart of darkness, fully apocalyptic and scarily prophetic. In Blood Meridian there seems to be a Kurtz figure in the scalphunter's leader Judge Holden, and my guess is, as I read, that the Kid is Marlow.

Published in 1985, the novel treads on the heels of the film Apocalypse Now, another exploration of the heart of darkness. There are images in the novel that remind me of that film as well. One of the scalphunters wears a necklace of shriveled human ears, and this reminds me of stories I've heard about soldiers collecting such morbid trophies in war, and I think there may be a scene either in Apocalypse Now, or perhaps Platoon, in which an American soldier collects the ears from his kills.

I'm only 100 pages into the novel, and true to McCarthy, there has been plenty of bloodshed.

I was also chilled by this prophetic line uttered early in the novel by the captain of the Texan militia that goes on a mission to take back Mexico (the novel of course is set vaguely around the end of the Mexican-American War): "'We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land.'"

The captain later leads his expedition into a trap and all but a few, including The Kid, are mercilessly slaughtered by the Comanche. Such a brutal evocation of the dangers of American imperialism. Sadly evocative and prophetic of our present darkness, as well.

Posted by Todd at 09:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've never read Alice in Wonderland, and now I've added it to my 100-novels list. So far, I'm loving it, especially its beautiful sentences.

Lewis Carroll's sentences are wonderful, graceful and marvelous examples of craft. Early in my reading I was particularly impressed with the following sentence and how it handles narrative proportion:

Suddenly she  came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass: there was nothing on it but a tiny golden key, and Alice's first idea was that this might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them.

A less skillful writer might've chopped this sentence into three sentences, and thus breaking  up the rhythm and making  the action choppy, in particular the action that follows the colon after "glass". I can imagine sentences like this:

There was nothing on it but a tiny golden key, and Alice's first idea was that this might belong to one of the doors. She tried the keys. Either the locks were too big, or the key was too small. None of the doors opened.

I could also imagine a modern editor insisting upon such breaks to get rid of the repetition of "but". As we know, repetition is a sin in modern editing.

Posted by Todd at 07:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (7)

Books Bought:

• The Best American Essays 2005, edited by Susan Orlean
• Ailce's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

Book read:

• Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

This is a reread. I first read Miller in graduate school and was swept up by his exuberant language and the (pardon the pun) fuck-everything eroticism. At the same time I was enthralled by Henry & June, the film of Miller's affair with Anais Nin and his writing of Tropic.

The film still enthralls me. When I first saw it, I wasn't aware it was drawn from Nin's journals. Reading Tropic the first time, I tried to find parallels between it and the novel. After reading Tropic, I then read Erica Jong's biocritical The Devil at Large, which celebrates Miller's attacks against American "sexophobia." (That bio has one of the best chapter titles ever "Crazy Cock in the Land of Fuck".)

Jong's basic thesis is that Miller could lead us back to a pagan sense of eros, and I swallowed that thesis. Until my recent reading of Tropic.

I wasn't enthralled by this reading. To me the novel now has the feel of a period piece. It captures the underworld, Left Bank world of Paris in the Thirties, just as the Lost Generation was fading into the Great Depression.

When I first read Miller and Jong and saw the film, I was less jaded by relationships and sexual relationships. I'm a bit more jaded now, and have read novels, such as James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, that are clearly influenced by Miller, and explicit sex scenes in novels as well as film are no longer censored or uncommon.

Tropic of Cancer does have value; its influence extends to writers beyond eros. Miller writes extensively in the American apocalyptic vein. Throughout Miller, the world is closing in on blowing itself up. Most of his images come from World War I -- poison gas, Big Bertha, etc. -- but it's still apocalypse.

Oddly, I find the apocalyptic strain appealing. I don't know why. Maybe it's the latent Baptist in me, watching Armageddon being played out in the Middle East.

Posted by Todd at 07:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When I first started my 100-novels project, a la Jane Smiley, I told myself I wouldn't start a book and not finish it.

I started The Godfather by Mario Puzo and slugged my way through it, despite its stylistic and structural shortcomings (I may also be the only person in the universe who doesn't like the film version all that much either).

But, this weekend, I gave up on a book, The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman, which would've been the 27th novel in my selection. (Book 25, A Changed Man by Francine Prose and Book 26, Modern Baptists by James Wilcox, I hope to comment upon later.) I selected Stones because of a wonderful film The Stone Reader, a documentary by Mark Moskowitz, that I watched in the summer. (Anyone who loves reading--I highly recommend this documentary.)

In the documentary, Moskowitz gives high praises to Mossman's novel. Moskowitz picked up the book (published 1972) after reading a glowing New York Times review by John Seelye, who introduces the hardback version of the novel reissued in 2003 by Barnes and Noble Press. After reading the novel -- it took several tries over a period of years -- Moskowitz became curious about the novel's author. Like Harper Lee, who only recently resurfaced in the public eye, Mossman disappeared off the literary map after publication of his novel. (Lee, of course, served as Truman Capote's assistant when Capote was researching In Cold Blood and so didn't completely go away from the literary limelight, at least for a time.) Unlike Lee, whose To Kill A Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961,  Mossman's book received its glowing accolades and then faded away into seeming oblivion, until Moskowitz's film.

The film made me curious about the novel. I received a hardback version through BookMooch and decided to put it on my reading list. But, just five pages into the book, I gave up. Perhaps my recent experience of grading freshman composition papers has jaded me, but Mossman needed an editor. I realize that the opening section is narrated by eight-year-old Dawes Williams, but the prose is so purple as to be a brilliant violet that hurts the eyes.

When August came, thick as a dream of falling timbers, Dawes Williams and his mother would pick Simpson up at his office, and then they would all drive west, all evening, the sun before them dying like the insides of a stone melon, split and watery, halving with blood.

The opening sentence. What? August "thick as a dream of falling timbers," the sun "... like the insides of a stone melon ...." Can we obscure meaning anymore with such overextended metaphors? What I see in this is an attempt to imitate Faulkner's language. (And Faulkner sometimes verges on the purple himself.) It's a failed attempt.  The prose carries on like that, at least throught the first five pages. And then there are several unecessary lapses in grammar (the voice of the narrator doesn't seem to justify lapses such as this: "Before him lay the farm, Arthur.") These lapses are distracting and such distraction takes the reader away from the fictional dream, or it did for me in this novel.

When Moskowitz discovered Mossman, who lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he grew up, Mossman had become something of a recluse. He hadn't written much of anything since Stones. Writing the novel apparently brought on a nervous breakdown as well as a major case of writer's block, and the film makes clear how taxing writing a novel is to the writer's psyche. I can sympathize with Mossman on this: Writing, any comittment to a work of art, is taxing; it takes everything you've got, and then some. I hope Mossman perhaps writes something else and submits it to an editor who cares enough to edit it. Stones has a glimmer of good storytelling, despite its faults. If a good editor were to pick it apart and remove the attempts at a faux-Faulkner, there might be something to it.

Perhaps one day, like Moskowitz, I can pick up Stones and see its value, but for now, I can only recommend the fine film Moskowitz made; it's a beautiful tribute to the power of reading and the written word.

Posted by Todd at 04:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Hazy is the first word that comes to mind when reading Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. It takes a while to get into the story, because details are slow to come. We have McCarthy characters like The Sheriff appearing and a lot of pronouns with hazy reference. And a lot of moments when the action of one set of characters moves through and into the others. Hazy also from the film of blood that stains the novel from the beginning. Bodies fall from the very beginning:

The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see.

A random, seemingly hazy murder, done by a character, Anton Chigurh, whose motives for murder seem random. As random and hard to fathom as the violence that seems at the heart of America; it's a violence with an apocalyptic streak. McCarthy's characters and world seem as doom-haunted as Faulkner's. Something in his characters' worlds always seems to be coming to an end, whether its the vanishing frontier of All the Pretty Horses, or thin vanishing strings of sanity and certainty of No Country.

A plot does develop around the violence: A Vietnam veteran, Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup near the border surrounded by dead drug dealers. Moss takes off with a load of heroin and two million in cash. Cash that not only do the remaining drug dealers want, and will take any means necessary to retrieve, but also money that Chigurh wants. Chigurh's motive for wanting the money, or how he knows about it seem unclear, as unclear as anything that motivates Chigurh, other than the pleasure he seems to take in killing.

The book erupts in a flurry of violence the law can't contain. On the whole it's as violent as some combination of Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers and the Book of Revelation, and share's that book's apocalyptic tone.

In the end, nothing that happens seems to make sense, even to the characters who survive. An older sheriff reflects on the madness overall that he sees:

It's like they woke up and they don't know how they got where they're at. Well, in a manner of speaking they dont.

We're in a new age, a new era. We are Adam. But, we are Adam standing at the edge of the earth and we can't see ahead of ourselves or make sense of our madness.

Posted by Todd at 05:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind solved the problem of sex rather well." Thus begins J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, a novel about professor David Lurie, who doesn't really sovle the problem of sex at all.

Published in 1999, a year in which the problems of sex were fresh on American minds at least, given then President Clinton's own problems (just an aside: really, folks, was an unusual use of a cigar worse than invading another country unprovoked?), Disgrace's central plot unfolds when Lurie has an affair (potentially unwanted, though that's ambiguous in the narrative) with a student, Melanie Isaacs. Though set in South Africa, the campus where Lurie teaches frowns upon such behavior, as do American campuses in sex-hating America. Such behavior is seen as an abuse of a power relationship, and there is a hint of rape in the Lurie-Isaacs relationship.

The affair gets revealed and Lurie, refusing to publicly admit he's sorry for the affair (in several scenes that resemble an Arthur Miller witch trial or Hawthornian scarlett-lettering) resigns his post and leaves in disgrace; he travels to his daughter Lucy's farm. Father and daugther are estranged and Lurie seems to want to make an attempt to close the gap on the estrangement.

Only this doesn't work. David and Lucy are attacked by a gang of bandits and Lucy is raped.  Lucy refuses to acknowledge the rape publicly. Lucy, of course, isn't much older than Melanie Isaacs and Lurie can see the irony in the situation.

His insistence that Lucy acknowledge the rape only further estranges him from her. Indeed, from the downfall brought about by Eros (Lurie acknowledges, and follows, the god's dark side, James Salter's "satanic happiness") to the continued estrangment of daughter and father to the inability to repair any of his relationships, Lurie hasn't sovled the problem of sex, neither erotically or in relation to gender.

It's this dark exploration of eros that is attractive. Lurie is a Romantics professor who intellectually understands the lyrical nature of passion, while at the same time, is unable to unlock himself from simple desire. His problem with Eros, is Eros itself and Coetzee captures this nature very well.

Posted by Todd at 06:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Forgive my hiatus. I've just finished my first week at my new job as an adjunct community college instructor, teaching three sections of freshman composition.

I've had much I've wanted to write in the past few weeks, but some of those ideas have passed.

Anyhow, this morning I was reading Alice Walker's The Color Purple (number 21 on my 100 novels list) and I noticed something about this novel--how insignificant of a role setting seems to play. It not only seems true for this book, but also for the last book I read--Karen Boren's Girls in Peril.

The Color Purple begins with its protagonist, Celie, writing letters to God about her life and the lives of those around her. I was only vaguely aware of what the setting was. It was clear only that this was a poor black community, probably in the South and probably sometime after the Civil War and Emancipation. But how far beyond has been a question I've pursued since reading. Celie/Walker only begins to give clues as the narrative progresses. 

The best I can gather is that it's some time in the early 20th century, and probably in the 20s or 30s. Celie's sister Nettie talks about visiting Harlem during its renaissance, which occurred in the 20s. But other than these clues, there isn't much there there.

I'm about halfway through the novel, and the strongest sense of setting comes from the letters Celie finds from Nettie, who is a missionary among the Olinka tribe in Africa. But even in those letters Africa itself seems no more than something we see in old movies and the Olinka, as Nettie describes them, seem like an Everyman tribal people, not really distinct. Of course Nettie isn't an anthropologist and is selecting particular details to give an overall picture to Celie.

The overall lack of a vivid setting seems to me a weakness in this particular novel. Walker's use of Celie as a narrator has a lot to do with this weakness. We see only through her eyes and she gives us mostly snapshots of the interactions between characters. It's hard to get to know her or the other characters, because much of what she describes is the sexual interaction between the characters, and even that seems vague. It's hard to get a sense of how the world around her affects her. Or does it? Her narration has sort of an autistic feel to it.

In Girls in Peril, the setting is vaguely a Midwestern town in the summer in the mid to late 70s. The narrator is a collective "we" of pre-adolescent/early adolescent girls and the book itself is reminscent of Jeffery Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, which also uses a collective "we" narrator, only of boys rather than girls.  

Unlike Eugenides' book, which presents a vivid suburban Detroit neighborhood, Boren's girls live in a vague Midwestern suburb, or small town; it's difficult to be sure. These girls could be anywhere. Nothing really stands out as peculiar to the Midwest, whereas Eugenides develops a neighborhood that is particular and peculiar. It's hard to imagine the characters in another setting and the setting itself helps bring the characters alive. Boren's characters are vivid and as a collective "we" do seem like a troop of girls, but other than the curious Jeanne Macek, with her extra thumb, nothing about them really stands out. They aren't really a part of anything like the boys in Eungenides' book are a part of their neighborhood.

The homogenized American setting proves to be valuable, though, in Leah Stewart's The Myth of You and Me. It fits with the protagonist, Cameron, who's father is in the Air Force, and so she has always been used to moving around, one place like another; her settings, or lack thereof, have influenced her character. She isn't used to staying in one place for long or with people for long. When she goes to work for the retired historian Oliver in Oxford, Miss., his home becomes the first place that's really been a true home for her. Living in his home, in which history is so important, helps develop part of Cameron's conflict--to find a place in the world for herself; it becomes part of her quest to reunite with her friend Sonia.

I like vivid settings in novels and they can add to the character, in most cases. What do you like about setting? Does a vivid setting draw you into a book? As I'm revising my novel, I'm seeing how the characters to some extent are affected by their setting--Austin, Texas, mostly--and I find myself affected by my setting as well (Central Texas in the summer) and I find I keep making digs against the 100-plus degree heat we suffer every summer here. (I'm ready for some cooler weather.) I think if I were writing a science fiction novel, there would be a desert planet in there somewhere.

Posted by Todd at 09:58 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (5)

As I draw near the end of reading (rereading) Madame Bovary, I find myself shocked at how contemporary/modern Emma is for a character in a 19th century novel. Aside from the setting and the consequences, Flaubert's development of Emma as she goes from romantic farmer's daughter to bored middle class housewife to adultress is chilling modern psychology. Of course, as other critics have noted, if Emma were a late 20th century character, she would've gone to a psychiatrist (or perhaps a marriage and family counselor) and probably would have been prescribed antidepressants to deal with her malaise.

But, still she stands out. Jane Eyre, on the other hand, while certainly a stronger character, a woman willing and able to withstand substantial suffering in order not to compromise her sense of self, is still a woman of the 18th/19th century: She values marriage and family and waits until the right person (Rochester) comes into her life. And she is willing, even after coming into her own fortune, to serve Rochester (although by the time they reunite he needs the help). In her character, though, is a precursor to a moderate feminist model. That, I would think, couldn't be said for Emma Bovary.

Many have said it's difficult to actually like Emma Bovary. I'd say it's really difficult to like Flaubert's characters, in general; as with real people each has his or her own flaws. It's not necessary to like a literary character, though. But I do, as many others, have sympathy for Emma.  I also admire Flaubert's psychological insight into adultery itself. In Emma we find ourselves. If anyone has never longed for something different than what she has, or have found themselves unsatisfied and unhappy with their circumstances, then they can't be living. The Buddhists know that every moment we are alive, we desire something. How we act on those desires determines our fate. We are indeed Emma Bovary.

As Emma recklessly spends and as creditors come to take the Bovary estate away, I suddenly felt as if Flaubert had been staring into my own life. As I read, my father's  (not be too personal) own straying down the Bovary path, sinking his family into debt, came to mind. This is real, I thought of the book. This is how these things happen.

I remember in grad school discussing the various literary theories, and how exciting theory was. Back then I had a distaste for Reader Response theory, which basically said, as I understood it, that it's the reader who makes the meaning. I was much more keen then on Barthes and Bakhtin and unraveling discourse in the texts (as theorists like to call books). Now, though, I prefer reading the oldfashioned way, following narrative and story and character and discovering meaning as I read. And I've discovered the meaning changes when you read. I first read Flaubert in my early twenties and was much more in sway to the book's romanticism and to characters like Roldolphe.

Now, though, I sympathize with one character and then another. I was deeply touched by Emma's funeral. Though I thought Charles was a bit too overwrought, I understood the grief, having recently lost both parents. It's the strength of Flaubert's storytelling that makes Madame Bovary such a fresh novel.

Posted by Todd at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (3)

A reader recently noticed I've been neglecting posting about the books I've been reading. And I have. So here are some initial thoughts about Madame Bovary, the most recent novel selected in my 100 novels reading project.

At about the 10 percent mark of the novel (I've borrowed this arbitrary figure from Jane Smiley and so far it's been correct) Flaubert has introduced his key figures, Charles and Emma, has them married, and by page 43 [my edition] introduces a complication:

Before her marriage [Emma] had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn't come, she supposed she must've been mistaken.

Then Flaubert slows the narrative down some for a brief analysis of why Emma might believe her marriage hasn't brought her the happiness of love she has sought. In short she's a capital 'R' romantic. Nothing short of high passion all the time will make her happy. Flaubert, in a few pages of narrative summary, deepens Emma's character.

Posted by Todd at 01:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I found this nifty essay by A.S. Byatt on the origins of Possession. I particularly liked the first paragraph about scholars becoming possessed by dead minds. I know this feeling well. Here is that paragraph:

The beginning of Possession, and the first choice, was most unusually for me, the title. I thought of it in the British Library, watching that great Coleridge scholar, Kathleen Coburn, circumambulating the catalogue. I thought: she has given all her life to his thoughts, and then I thought: she has mediated his thoughts to me. And then I thought "Does he possess her, or does she possess him? There could be a novel called Possession about the relations between living and dead minds." This must have been in the late sixties. It was the time of the nouveau roman, of the novel as "text."

Posted by Todd at 03:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A.S. Byatt's Possession offers a good reason why I don't really enjoy literary scholarship as it is practiced, or as it was practiced when I was in grad school in the '90s: There is a sense of "possesion," of being overtaken by your subject, as seems to have happened to the scholars Blackaddder and Cropper. They are obssessed with Randolph Ash (a fictional poet, as far as I know) down to the minutest details--and what for? Of what value is this sort of scholarship? Possession also reveals problems with lit theory. 

When Roland and Maud are reading Christabel LaMotte's personal letters, Maud is shown reading a critical study of LaMotte's work filled with the falseness of literary theory:

The theme was of particular interest to a woman writer, as it might be said to reflect a cultural conflict between two types of civilisation, the Indo-European patriarchy of Gradlond and the more primitive, instinctive, earthy paganism of his sorceress daughter Dahud . . . . "

Fictive scholarship about a fictive poet. It's a bit of fictive genius for Byatt to have imagined this, but this passage just drains the poet of her imagination, killing her with theory--a theory that it's likely a victorian poet wouldn't have. The critic is imposing her views on the poet's mind, invading it with jargon.

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I haven't been keeping you up on my 100 novels reading list: Last week I finished Good Faith by Jane Smiley. I had difficulty getting into this novel, perhaps because I knew so much about its composition. Smiley discusses its composition in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.  It was a difficult novel for her to write. She was in the midst of its compostion during 9/11 and after that harrowing day, had a true bout of writer's block. But its subject matter was just as hard to take on: The novel is set in the 1980s and deals with the beginnings of that era's excesses. I'll let her summarize it:

Joe, about forty, is a small-town real eastate agent in a scenic region; he is newly divorced but not generally happy and not filled with high aspiriations. At the beginning of the novel, two things happen, apparently independently of one another-- a stranger (Marcus) comes to town full of big plans; and an old friend of Joe's (Felicity), the daughter of his partner and married, entices him into having a clandestine affair....Joe allows himself to be seduced by both of them, with consequences that are, to say the least, surprising to him ....

I think what made the read difficult for me, at first, was Smiley's choice of using Joe as the first-person narrator, because Joe becomes a pigeon in Marcus' real estate scam and it takes a while, or did for me, to sort out what's going on. Most of that was because of unfamiliarity with the territory of real estate.

But once I caught on, and also realized that Joe hadn't (for irony's sake) I could see Joe's fall. And he falls hard, and takes a lot of his town with him.  But Smiley gives Joe a reprieve. He loses a lot of things, loses friends, money, possessions, but gains grace.

To some extent the grace is offered in the same way that it's finally offered to Job in the Old Testament--in an almost Zen-like moment of acceptance, with no real explanation. Joe just takes his lumps and sees that things could've been much worse. Perhaps more people could've gotten hurt, or lost. What's left becomes what's important.

I suspect Joe will go on trying to maintain this equilibrium. It's a subtle comedy of justice that Smiley's written.

My 10th novel on the list is also by Smiley--her campus comedy Moo! It was the first of Smiley's books I've read and I'm enjoying the second read so far as well.

The more I read Smiley, the more I like her. She's truly talentted with the comic novel, as Good Faith demonstrates. Eventually, I'll have to give her tragedy A Thousand Acres another try. 

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I finished The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini last night. The eighth selection in my 100 novels reading quest is marvelous.

It takes a lot for me to get teary. The end of Hosseini's novel did it with its genuine emotion.

Opening in December 2001 (you know the backstory on that don't you?) the novel is sort of a coming of age book, narrated by Amir, a mid thirties Afghani living in San Francisco. He reflects on his childhood in Afghanistan in the mid 1970s. Amir grows up in a wealthy middle class neighborhood in Kabul and lives with his widowed father Baba and their servants Ali and Hassan. As Amir and Hassan grow up they become close friends, unusual because of their separation of class and race (Amir is Pashtun, a member of the ruling class, Hassan Hazara). The boys encounter racism and brutality and grow to love each other as friends. The central event of the novel occurs just before the Soviet invasion. Each winter Afghani boys participate in kite-fighting tournaments. Amir enters a tournament with the hope not only to win (the kite's strings are lubricated with tar and glass substance that allows for cutting when in flight) but also to gain respect from Baba. Hassan is his kite runner, the boy in charge of retrieving kites that have fallen in battle. Amir wins the contest. Hassan gives chase through the streets and alleys of Kabul. Amir follows and when he discovers his friend, Hassan is being threatened by the sociopathic Assef (a bully who admires Hitler). Assef wants the kite. Instead of brutally beating Hassan with his brass knuckles, Assef brutally rapes Hassan, since Hassan will not give up the kite. Amir witnessesthe rape, but zips the incident in his conscience without interfering.

Rape and redemption is a theme also of the first novel on my 100 novel list,  Atonement by Ian McEwan. Jane Smiley in her 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is critical of what she believes is McEwan's failure to fully explore the supposed rape of a central character and its consequences. Amir, like Briony in Atonement, becomes a novelist. However, unlike the rape Briony believes she witnesses, Hassan's rape is real. Amir further betrays Hassan by planting a watch in his things and dropping hints that Hassan has stolen the watch. Which Hassan does not deny. This "theft" causes Ali dishonor and he and Hassan leave Amir and Baba. When the Soviets invade, Baba and Amir are able to escape to America.

Only later does Amir become able to atone for his silence. Hosseini deftly explores the consequences of Amir's betrayals of Hassan: Hassan survives the Soviet invasion only to lose his life to the Taliban. Hassan's son Sohrab, though, survives, is sent to an orphanage where he ends up taken by the Taliban and the now Talibani leader Assef as a sexual plaything. Amir returns to Afghanistan at the request of one of his father's friends, exiled in Pakistan. It is through this friend that Amir realizes he must atone for his sins by retrieving Sohrab. The expedition into Taliban-controlled Kabul just before 9-11 is one of the strongest pieces of the novel.

Posted by Todd at 03:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Finished reading The Godfather last night. It wasn't the satisfying read I had expected, given its reputation, especially because of the film, as an iconic piece of American culture.

The novel itself is a structural mess, leaping back and forth in great chunks of narrative between the present and past of the Coreleone family. It's also a stylistic mess, not, say at the level of Theodore Dreiser, but the sentences, the narrative as a whole is pretty dry.

There is a story of some interest in this murk--Puzo has an idea somewhere in there about the criminal mind and it's justification of itself. (Talk about a clunker of a sentence.)

Interestingly enough, according to a Salon article on Puzo, who died in 1999, Puzo wasn't happy with the novel itself, except that it made him a ton of money:

Figuring he could raise some cash writing a book that collected the many stories he'd heard about organized crime, he dashed off "The Godfather." "I wished like hell I'd written it better," he would later say. "I wrote below my gifts in that book." But the desire to make a quick buck on Mafia sensationalism turned out to be a true devil's bargain. Read all over the world, the book is regarded as his single achievement, and his regret -- how many times must he have rewritten in his mind what he had believed were disposable sentences -- must have been keen.

Posted by Todd at 11:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Finished reading James Magnuson's Windfall last week, as the sixth novel in my 100-novels reading project.

Windfall concerns the story of Ben Lindberg, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin who finds several coolers filled with a total of $7.5 million in an abandoned feedstore. The money is clearly drug money, or gotten illegally by some means or another, but, Ben, under financial strain as his wife Katy is finishing up her school and raising two kids, succumbs to the temptation of taking the money. The plot slowly evolves until Ben winds up battling the drug dealers whose money he's taken.

Magnuson takes a middle-middle class man and thrusts him into a extreme situation. The plot of the thriller itself is about at the level of a made-for-TV movie cop show. No international intrigue, say, on the level of John Le Carre. However, the small scale thriller plot of Magnuson's book serves its purpose: to show the effects that money has on people and, moreover, the effects lying has on a family. Throughout the novel Ben, a somewhat idealistic prof of Thoreau and Emerson, maintains a lie--he never tells his wife and family about the money until the end, when it's too late, or almost too late.

After I finished reading the novel, I ran across the following passage by Jane Smiley in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (the book that inspired my 100-novel project). In the passage, Smiley is talking about Honore de Balzac and how he deals with money in his novels:  

"In this sense [Balzac] is a quintessential realistic novelist, since nothing drives sentimentality out of a novel like exact sums of money, and monetary anxiety is a common feature of novel plots, both because the opposing temptations of greed and true feeling offer efficient moral choices for characters and because authors themselves are often writing for a living and pressed for money, and so monetary questions are interesting to them."

In Windfall,  Lindberg lives with monetary anxiety and with his need to make a better life for his family. That need motivates his lie: It's how he justifies to himself not telling his wife about the money, or making a show of it. He goes through emotions of what may be true for someone with such a dilemma, especially paranoia--the paranoia creates the climatic scenes in which Ben becomes forced to confront the drug dealers in order to rescue his daughter. And while he experiences fear and paranoia about taking the money and figuring out what to do with it, he never truly feels guilty about lying to his wife or his children. Even at the end, though he sort of regrets his lies (his family goes into the process of breaking up; his daughter feels deeply betrayed by him) he doesn't seem to feel as if totally has to redeem himself to his family. He seems resolved to his fate of living alone, and in the end receives another smaller windfall from a student Daniel Sweeney, whom Lindberg gets involved with while trying to launder the money. (Sweeney steals the money in the end and gets away with the theft.) Lindberg comes out as something of a cold character at the end because he only half-heartedly tries to make a reconciliation with his wife and children.

It's an interesting take Magnuson has regarding Lindberg's windfall. At the end, it indeed makes the novel unsentimental, which to me is a relief, given that if this were a TV movie, it would be necessary somehow for Lindberg to reconcile with his wife and family. Probably a counselor or consultation with some insightful clergy would get inserted to keep the family together.

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