Being Difficult

Back in 2002, Jonathan Franzen took a lot of flak for an essay he wrote for the New Yorker, entitled "Mr. Difficult."  It was, in part, about the works of William Gaddis and the changing relationship Franzen had to those works over the course of his life – and about the conclusion he ultimately arrived at, that at heart Gaddis's writing (after The Recognitions) coldly and unrealistically demands that readers "renounce the sinful pleasures of Realism and cultivate a selfless and pure love of Art."  Franzen writes that he believes there is no person in the world, not even Gaddis himself, who would rather read JR than watch The Simpsons, and concludes, "To serve the reader a fruitcake that you wouldn't eat yourself... this violates what seems to me to be the categorical imperative for any fiction writer." 

Numerous writers, perhaps most notably Ben Marcus in a lengthy Harper's take-down, weighed in on this piece, many denouncing what they perceived to be Franzen's weird anti-intellectualism (an anti-intellectualism that was expressed in an impassioned and pages-long discussion of the entire oeuvre of a notoriously challenging and cerebral author, addressed to the readers of the New Yorker).  Had I been blogging at the time, I no doubt would have joined their chorus: there's something off-putting about Franzen's tone throughout the piece, something uncomfortable about the assumptions he makes of his reader, as if on a first date some dude reached across the coffee shop table to straighten the strap of your bra.  "The work of reading Gaddis makes me wonder if our brains might even be hard-wired for conventional storytelling, structurally eager to form pictures from sentences as featureless as 'She stood up,'" he offers in an aside.  To which I'd be inclined to reply, "You don't know the first thing about my brain, 'Mr. Chomsky' – and I'd advise you to keep your hands to yourself." 

And yet, I've thought about that essay many, many times over the years, because in a certain way, I know he's right.  Not about Gaddis, necessarily (I've only read A Frolic of His Own, which I actually thought was a hoot), but about the subjective experience of difficulty, which few critics or essayists really ever discuss. 

Part of what makes reading fiction intense and passionate for me is the fact that it's personal, immersive, one-on-one: that when I am deep inside a book, it's as though I have the author all to myself.  The observations he makes feel almost like they come from inside my own consciousness; the characters' faces and mannerisms, their inflection, are supplied by me from the storehouse of my own experience.  Yet the flip side of that is that when I'm reading and I get confused, lost, I'm in that all alone too. 

In the time I've lived in New York, I've become adept at noticing the exact moment in my interaction with another person when I realize she's insane – actually, certifiably insane.  It happens more often than you'd think.  Once I was at the post office, waiting in an epic line, and the woman behind me and I were commiserating. 

"But you're shipping that domestically," I suddenly observed, noticing she held a Priority Mail envelope.  "You can just use one of the automated machines for that, you don't have to wait here." 

"Oh, I can't do that," she explained.  "Then the government would have my credit card information and they'd track everything I do."

Shields go up when I realize I'm speaking to someone I don't, can't understand.  When I'm reading a book, and it becomes difficult – really thwartingly, incomprehensibly difficult – shields go up, albeit slightly different ones.  Because the thing is, no matter how daunting and impenetrable I find a text, I basically assume that the person writing it is capable of communicating in a straightforward human way.  The fact that they're not, that they're choosing to be opaque, to talk crazy without being it, generally summons in me some knee-jerk feelings of resentment: feelings that are often dispelled by some purpose revealed later in the work, but that well up nevertheless.

"There is nothing like the headache you get from working harder on deciphering a text than the author, by all appearances, has worked on assembling it," Franzen writes. I've had that headache quite a few times myself. And yet only rarely do you see that experience acknowledged or talked about in the (rare) reviews of serious avant-garde fiction. In large part, people prefer to vaguely praise, vaguely criticize, or simply avoid writing about these books at all.  The difficulty – which might be the first (and last) thing many readers take away from their experience of the work – is ignored, making anyone who attempted to read the book feel even stupider, even more resentful, even more alone in his experience of what seemed like the writer's hostility to him, the wall going up on every page. 

There's a Kids in the Hall sketch where Kevin McDonald and Dave Foley play two businessmen meeting for the first time at an office party.  A coworker introduces them, then leaves them alone together.  McDonald tries again and again to engage Dave Foley in conversation, but Foley simply stands there and smiles (the man has an eerie, Cheshire-cat like smile).  When the coworker returns, Foley immediately speaks up and tells him horrible lies about McDonald – I think he calls him a bedwetter.  For many readers who are not writers themselves, this must be the experience, in a nutshell, of taking on one of the more "difficult" writers working today.  You try to engage with this author, you work hard to connect with him, and then as soon as someone else shows up, he makes you feel like an idiot.

The face of contemporary difficult fiction?

But why is it that we seldom talk about difficulty – that we so frequently exclude it from the conversations we have about books?  One reason, the most obvious, is that no one wants to sound like an idiot, even if he feels like one.  But another, equally strong reason is that there's a perception (and not an unfounded one) in the contemporary writing community that our art form is dying, and that it's time to circle the wagons to protect our own.  The very worst thing to say is that a book is so tough to get through that even another professional writer had to struggle mightily to keep turning the pages.

I have a friend who occasionally writes poetry reviews for an online journal.  The editor of this journal told my friend, in so many words, that they do not publish negative reviews, not of any book, ever.  The Believer takes a similar tack, and I'm sure they're not alone.  The idea behind this behavior is of course that negative reviews discourage book sales, and no one wants that – better that readers should approach a work with inflated expectations than not approach it at all.  But I would imagine that the actual result of this is not that "average" (i.e., not professional) readers read more literary books – it's that they don't read literary books or the publications that review them.  They feel excluded from the conversation, and so they leave it entirely.

To a certain extent, this can't be helped.  The fact is, some people eventually lose interest in reading anything with more substance than an InStyle article.  I call these people "Philistines," but to each his own. (There are plenty of art forms I know fuck all about myself – architecture, modern dance – so clearly I'm throwing stones from the roof of a greenhouse.)  But what makes me sad are the people who still have a craving for fiction, but seek out and read only kids' books or trash.

Which brings me back, in a long way, to the subject of my last post.  I think there's something to what Lev Grossman said in in the otherwise heinous Pamela Paul NY Times article "The Kids' Books Are All Right," about the way that YA fiction allows plot to thrive, and I'm going to ponder that more when I write on here next.  But one thing that I feel sure YA fiction offers people is the feeling that they are qualified to take part in a conversation about it, that they won't embarrass themselves like poor Kevin McDonald.  And to me, the fact that things have come to that pass is something that should make all of us feel pretty stupid.

Fahrenheit PG-13

Earlier this week, I made the mistake of reading this article by Pamela Paul over at the NY Times, and promptly went through all five Kubler-Ross stages of grief in alphabetical order, thus ending with depression.  I considered writing a blog post, but the only way I could imagine expressing my feelings was by somehow rendering a likeness of myself lying dead on a tumbled heap of Nabokov and Barthelme, Yates and Carver, my ruined heart overspilling itself, my face stained with tears of blood.  And I don't know how to work the timer on my camera.

It would've looked something like this.

But a couple beers later, it occurred to me that maybe I should put the goth face paint away and try to figure out exactly what it was about this article that upset me so much.  Because the thing is, as I said in my blog post about the show Avatar, I sometimes do enjoy narrative art that's intended for children, and so do a lot of other people I like and respect.  Among their number I'd even count Lev Grossman, the author of the very captivating, very flawed novel The Magicians who's quoted here (and whose point about plot I'll return to in my next post). 

I've written before (here and here) about the phenomenon of adults reading books for kids, and I stand by most of the points I made, especially that defensively snarling "at least I'm reading!" should not work as an excuse for anyone over the age of thirteen.  But when I think about it, I don't consider the real problem here to be what people read as much as the way they read it.   

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm a huge believer in ignoring the artificial boundary lines of genre and often even "good taste;" of following one's passions and interests wherever they might lead.  In a recent essay for the NY Times, Rivka Galchen writes about super-brain Borges's eclectic, sometimes-slumming literary tastes: "If serial rereading is one way to define worship, then one of Borges’s most revered gods was Robert Louis Stevenson. This even though in Borges’s time, Stevenson’s work was basically considered kid stuff... Borges not only commented on books that didn’t exist. He read books — pulpy and arcane alike — that few others bothered to see."  It's this kind of promiscuous reading that makes contemporary postmodern fiction possible: where would we be if Pynchon never read a boy's adventure novel?  Understanding high and low art, its devices and conceits and diction, reading it with an eye for what it leaves out, what it unquestioningly upholds, is absolutely essential for any writer (or reader) who wants to inhabit voices that are not her own.

And in a broader sense, the smartest, most interesting people aren't always interested in the smartest, most interesting things – I'm thinking here of David Foster Wallace's essay "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," about his falling in, and quite rapidly, out of love with a (most likely ghostwritten) sports memoir, or of the fictional Perkus Tooth's weird and sudden obsession with a mediocre Steve Martin movie in the wonderful Chronic City, or Wittgenstein's fondness for the laconic heroes of American cowboy movies, or the many other anecdotally observed cases of writers and intellectuals honing in on shitty, seemingly random pop culture ephemera, which sometimes serve as the subject for art or criticism but most often don't. These brief passions, lavished on the least deserving of objects (literary and otherwise), can be refreshing, even necessary, for intellectuals, providing something that the highest art cannot: a temporary refuge from the genius of others – a space to think for oneself.

But the thing I find disturbing about the phenomenon of adults reading YA in general, and the Pamela Paul essay in particular, is that these people (with some exceptions) aren't looking for a space to think; they aren't looking to think at all.  They're looking for pure entertainment and escape, and even worse, many of them have seemingly forgotten that art can offer more than that.  According to this article, anyway, they're not reading these books with an eye for what's been elided, what's been neatened or smoothed for the sake of the tweens.  They're not looking for a brief respite from the emotional and intellectual demands of serious literature.  They're looking for an out-and-out replacement for it.  And honestly, all their perky talk on the subject brings to my mind another genre: science fiction.

"Good Y.A. is like good television," says historian Amanda Foreman, who has the glassy, smiling eyes of a Stepford wife.  "There’s a freshness there; it’s engaging. Y.A. authors aren’t writing about middle-aged anomie or ­disappointed people.  Ever since I started taking Soma, I've felt so much less afraid." 

"They’re also easier to read, and people are tired,” author Lizzie Skurnick chimes in.  I see her as smartly dressed, with a chin-length bob and only a little of her brain dripping from her ear to the table.  "Here, try some Substance D.  You'll like it – everyone does."

"And none of it feels like homework," writes Pamela Paul from her desk in the Ministry of Truth.  "The themes are serious and the discussions intense, but the books are fast-paced and fun.  And there's always enough Victory gin to go 'round."

So tell me: am I overreacting?  Am I wrong?  And are you already one of Them?

Driving Sideways

Awhile back, I blogged about blogging, or more specifically, not blogging -- about the temptation to pick at my posts endlessly, or, when that's time prohibitive, simply not to post at all.  In her amazing memoir Writing Past Dark (which should be required reading for everybody seriously pursuing fiction in or out of the MFA system), Bonnie Friedman writes about what she calls "anorexia of language" -- a far more accurate term for writer's block, in my opinion.  Not-writing is a kind of perfectionism, a way of seeking control over the messy, primal process of creation.  We love our work so much that we're afraid to touch it.  We want so much for it to be flawless we're afraid to let it grow.  And so it starves in the dark.

Yesterday, I saw this blog post about the artist Dalton Ghetti, who carves tiny sculptures from the lead tips of pencils.  As a writer, they appeal to me for obvious reasons: a writing utensil re-shaped into a tiny world of its own probably has metaphorical import for anyone who's ever scratched out a story longhand.  Specifically, it reminded me of a possibly apocryphal anecdote I heard about Victor Hugo and the creation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame: he considered titling the novel What Is In a Bottle of Ink, since he wrote the entire thing by dipping his pen again and again into a single well.  The way that art, specifically language, can open up a tiny space -- turning a pencil into a monument, a page into a window, a keyboard into a galaxy of swirling possibility -- is magic, pure and simple.

But the part of this story that struck me most was the pencil graveyard, the place for sculptures that Ghetti's accidentally broken while working on them.  "People might think it’s weird I keep them but they’re still interesting, " he says.  "I worked on them for months so they might be dead now but at one point I gave them life."  It occurred to me that maybe the pencil graveyard itself, rather than the perfected sculptures, is the best metaphor for writing, or at least writing of a certain kind.  On a blog, for example, where the emphasis is on process over product -- where the past's ill-considered relics greet you every time you scroll down the page.  It can be dismal, at times, to look at all the ways I've fallen short as a writer, intellectually and at the level of language.  But Ghetti explains that, in order to keep doing his nerve-wracking work on his miniatures, he had to change his attitude, to say, "This will break eventually but let’s see how far I get."  From now on, I'm going to try to start thinking about my own prose more that way.  Instead of focusing on reaching my destination, I'm just going to aim to get into the most interesting wrecks I can along the way.  Fasten your seat belts.

Larger Than Life

The Errol Morris television show “First Person” boasted the memorable tagline, “Spend some time in another person’s mind.”  That statement was absolutely true for the program, which revealed the inner mental lives of a diverse assortment of individuals, including a giant squid-obsessed scientist, a neurotic former “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” contestant, and a babe who dates only convicted serial killers.  But it’s also true of first person as a point of view for a work of fiction, at its best.  Most readers of contemporary fiction are familiar with the device of the unreliable narrator.  I'd argue that, in fact, the appeal of any first person narrator lies to some extent in his unreliability, his elisions and generalizations, the limits of his diction and the colors that particular desires and fears paint his reality.  The setting isn't just a physical place, but the inside of someone's head.  In a first person story, the meaning of the narrative is doubled: we wonder not just what will happen next, but why the speaker feels compelled to tell us about it – what he’s getting at.

First person draws greater attention to this question, I think, at the moments when it oversteps its traditional boundaries: when a narrator relates scenes or incidents for which he could not possibly have been present.  This can be a masterful move.  As I noted in an earlier post, one of the only good things about Eugenides’s sloppy, emotionally dishonest behemoth Middlesex was the confident way the speaker reached generations back to lead up to the inciting incident of her/his own birth.  And the shimmering architecture of Lethem’s Chronic City is dotted with several open windows, moments when narrator Chase Insteadmen’s tender observations of his friends allow him, for a moment, to actually step outside himself to inhabit their twitchy, itchy, off-balance selves.  But these moments are stunning not by accident but necessity.  When an author breaks all the rules, there needs to be a payoff, something that makes the gesture a revelation rather than simply a mistake.

This is all a long way of leading into the point of today’s blog post, which is that Tiffany Baker's The Little Giant of Aberdeen County is the worst book I’ve read all summer – the sort of thing airport screeners should forcibly remove from luggage, along with combustible liquids, loaded revolvers, Ebola monkeys, and any other items known for ruining vacations.  And, in my opinion, the first of its many faults is its blatant misuse of the aforementioned device.  In the book, the title character not only steps out of her own subjectivity to narrate scenes for which she couldn’t have possibly been present; she does it to the detriment of the story’s world and the development of the other characters.

 Her narration overshadows everything else.

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County tells the story of one Truly Plaice, a genetic anomaly whose overactive pituitary starts her growth off at lightning speed and keeps her expanding exponentially long into adulthood.  Her monstrous birth (along with a conveniently timed breast lump) destroys her mother, leaving Truly and her lovely, delicate sister Serena Jane in the hands first of their alcoholic father and, after he drinks himself to death, with appointed guardians in town: the Rev. Pickerton & fam for Serena Jane, the down-and-out, ramblin’ gamblin’ Dyersons for Truly.  Serena Jane wants nothing more than to high-tail it out of ol’ Aberdeen to Hollywood, but shucks, fate has other plans in store for her.  She’s date-raped by Bob Bob Morgan, the son of the town’s doctor, and, since in a novel like this a single ejaculation inevitably packs more dramatic punch than a heat-seeking missile, instantly becomes pregnant.  She marries Bob Bob, bears a son, and then disappears, leaving Truly – for some convoluted and underexplained reasons – saddled with the twin burdens of keeping house for her pure-evil husband and raising her odd-duck child.

This is not a subtle book.  This is the kind of painfully folksy yarn where the narrator’s philosophizing about euthanasia is explored through the metaphor of whether or not it’s right to shoot a horse with a broken neck (in case you’re wondering: “You go and get your shotgun and you shoot it right between the eyes, hard.”); where she comments on the differences between herself and her sister with faux-profundities like, “Pretty can’t exist without ugly”; where the daily life of a town is compressed into meaningless generalizations like, “We in Aberdeen are pure creatures of habit” and non sequiturs including, “One of the things you learn growing up in a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business is that desire is communal.”  In telling the story of her life, Truly Plaice takes her own gigantism as a free pass to cast every individual around her, good or bad, as a character straight out of a fairy tale.  Her sister is a “china doll,” with “Kewpie lips… black fringed eyes… flossy yellow hair.”  Evil Bob Bob has “the semblance of a hairless wolf.”  “Without her church face,” we learn, “Amanda Pickerton almost looked like a fox,” but down-at-the-heels country wife Brenda Dyerson is pretty when she stops kneading bread long enough to let it show.  And the problems Truly describes all of them facing are hardly a full step removed from the old vaudeville parody of standard melodrama: “You must pay the rent!” “I can’t pay the rent!” “I’ll pay the rent!” “My hero!”

Now don't get me wrong.  The idea of a gigantic dying narrator who views her world through the narcotizing haze of sentimentality is actually, to me, incredibly compelling, even heartbreaking.  I love the idea that Truly’s isolation, her circumscribed experience, her lack of book-learning and intellectual curiosity (“Me, I’ve never been a big reader.  I figure that if a secret has an answer it’ll out on its own if it’s meant to”) might limit her perspective so much that, like the long-suffering butler in Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, she finds herself unable to see what’s right in front of her face in her community and in the lives of people around her.  It would be tragic if she considered her sister a beautiful princess, for example, the jewel of the town, whose prized virginity was snatched by a dastardly usurper, when in fact her sister was an attractive but average girl whose high school boyfriend knocked her up; if she saw her teacher (named, I shit you not, Priscilla “Prissy” Sparrrow) as a lonely, desperate spinster as a way of projecting her own teenage sexual frustration onto a nearby target; if she imagined the cruel, manipulative Morgans ruled the town and everyone in it with sneaky maneuvers and outright strong-arming, when in fact their only advantages were the typical ones allotted to the wealthier and better educated members of any American community.  Misperceptions of this kind wouldn’t just lend poignancy to the otherwise irritating down-home voice; they would help to explain why Truly remains so inexplicably passive, kowtowing to authority figures and viewing herself as a victim for most of her life rather than actively shaping her destiny.  Bloated with a diet of half-digested Frank Capra storylines and rural truisms, Truly could have been the best kind of unreliable narrator: the kind whose exaggerations and contradictions reveal larger, more disturbing truths about the culture from which she springs.

But Baker leaves no room for us to question Truly’s version of events.  Instead, she actually grants Truly greater authority by bestowing on her omniscience, allowing her to routinely relay information that she couldn’t possibly have access to.  These moments are never bracketed with caveats – “I imagine” or “she later told me” – and they aren’t mere asides: they’re given to us in full scene, as if Truly were truly there. 

Yet in these moments, the fact of Truly’s remove, her position as observer rather than participant, is also oddly emphasized.  In one of the weirdest passages of the novel, she depicts the scene of her sister’s date rape, prefacing her description with this statement: “What can I say about the events that followed that evening between Bob Bob and my sister?  Only that Serena Jane always wanted a starring role in something, and she finally got it… Thinking about all of this – even now – is like watching a movie for me.  There’s the urge to scream at the person on the screen, to warn them, but of course, doing so only results in a sore throat and nasty looks from everyone else around you.”  Highlighting herself as viewer – as voyeur – may seem bizarre, but it serves a purpose: it makes it more difficult for the reader to reject what follows as hearsay or supposition or outright fabrication.  Truly can see what happened, frame by frame.  She is a camera (here, that metaphor is explicit), and everyone knows that cameras don’t lie.

In this way, Baker is successful in discouraging the reader from approaching Truly’s narration critically.  But the larger effect of this is to make the story’s world not more real, but less.  We’re given no alternative to viewing the other players in this story the way Truly does, and thus the stereotypes she presents us with are externalized.  The haughty princess, the calculating villain, the gentle gardener, the spinster schoolteacher are not timeworn paradigms a miserable woman employs to make sense of her frustrated, stifled existence; they’re the actual figures present in this town.  And so, reading this book isn’t allowing us to spend some time in another person’s mind; it’s sentencing us to a prison term in a town built from the ground up of everyone’s clichés.  No wonder so many people in this community come to Truly begging for death potions to help them finish themselves off peacefully.  Once you realize you know everything that’s coming, it can be a chore to wait for the end.

He's Dreamy

Ever since I can remember, I've been fascinated with the connection between dreams and storytelling. After all, dreams are the first stories we tell ourselves, the first narratives that – like it or not – engulf and overwhelm our senses, that can move us (at least for a moment) with the same power real events do. Dreams raise the fundamental questions of human existence to us in a way that is impossible to ignore. I don't think that children are afraid to go to sleep just because they fear the specific apparitions who haunt their nightmares – Ronald McDonald, a garbage can with teeth, a taxidermied moose head with hard glass eyes. I think they fear it for a deeper, more primal reason: because sleep is the one place they have to go by themselves, without adult protectors, and whatever lurks there is theirs alone to face. If "no one can die my death for me," as Heidegger suggests, the journey into dreamland may be a more temporary death, but it's no less isolating. And it comes as no great comfort that the monsters there come from inside ourselves. Though that might make them less real in one sense, it also makes them far more difficult to permanently escape.

For those reasons, I have never agreed with Henry James's asinine generalization, "Tell a dream, lose a reader," nor with the more commonly held opinion that dreams stall the action of narrative, that they hold characters in artificial stasis. To know a character's dreams is, in my opinion anyway, to know that character's humanity; it provides the same intimacy as witnessing his birth or death or the intricacies of his sexuality. In fiction, details have to be carefully chosen, whether they're the contents of a wallet or the tchotchkes on a shelf, but although those details may work on a metaphorical level toward developing the protagonist or themes, they also have to operate impersonally, causally, in accordance with the laws of the story's world. In depicting a dream, though, that causality itself functions as metaphor. Objects shift, transform, appear, disappear in ways that mirror the character's psychology; there are no accidents, no rote necessities. Everything means something. In this sense, I think that, only in a dreamscape (or a landscape that functions like one, as in Kazuo Ishiguro's masterpiece The Unconsoled or the films of David Lynch) can plot itself aspire to the lyric condition of poetry.

The Christopher Nolan film Inception does not aspire to the lyric condition of poetry. Inception aspires to the condition of the summer blockbuster, specifically of the whiz-bang variety; it aspires to pack in as many twists and turns and explosions and car crashes, gun-toting extras and special effects, as is legally possible to cram into a PG-13 two and a half hour extravaganza. Like Space Mountain, it is a hell of a ride, and if you can get through it once without throwing up, you may find yourself tempted to get back in line and go again, because it leaves you so exhilarated and refreshed.

These are accomplishments, huge ones, and they're even more impressive when you consider all the seemingly obligatory things the picture doesn't do. Inception is a movie where, in the course of the present action, no one dies or gets laid; it's a heist movie where nothing gets stolen. The characters are ciphers, with hardly a defining characteristic among them – there's a single memorable beat of romance/comic relief, when Joseph Gordon-Levitt cons Ellen Page into a kiss, but other than that the characters are little more than attractive mouthpieces for hefty chunks of technical sci-fi exposition. Yet the story moves: there's always a ticking clock or a ticking bomb, a bullet to dodge, or – in the most literal sense of the word "suspense" – a white van hanging off the side of a bridge, falling in slow, slow motion to the chilly waters below.

It feels silly even to bother pointing out that this film is overcomplicated to the point of absurdity: "Whose subconscious are we going into now?" Ellen Page asks at one point, in a line of dialogue that I suspect was taken verbatim from a confused reader's marginalia on the screenplay. It feels silly, too, to point out the overdetermined Freudian arc of the dream narrative. For the five of you in America who still haven't seen this movie, Leo & Co. are tasked with implanting an idea in a young CEO's mind: they need him to dismantle the energy company he recently inherited from his dad. I WILL BREAK UP MY FATHER'S EMPIRE, Leo pens on a whiteboard during a strategy meeting of the mind-invasion team. "The most powerful ideas have emotional meaning," he explains to those assembled. "But how do we turn a business plan into an emotion?" a clueless flunky asks. I guess for this guy, a cigar is just a cigar.

Perhaps the human mind isn't so complicated after all.

But, although I did find moments in the film unintentionally funny, that wasn't why I was so disappointed in Inception. For me, the biggest let-down here was the simple fact that the dreams did not remotely resemble dreams. As I said before, dream worlds in fiction are fascinating to me, not simply because they can be fantastical, imaginative, wondrous, and strange (though those things can come as additional perks). What makes dream worlds fascinating is the fact that everything within them is the construction of a particular idiosyncratic human mind. If I recall correctly, Freud believed that the raw material of dreams came entirely from objects and images the dreamer had encountered in life; dreams were in this sense vast collages filled with items that never entirely relinquished their initial significance, a whole world hued with nostalgia. Inception takes this idea one step further: since the agents access the dream state consciously, they can build within it consciously too, creating impossible architectures and landscapes that defy the laws of physics at the speed of thought. But given this freedom, what do they create? The sets from the Bourne Identity movies, apparently, and, in the case of Leo and his wife Mal, an empty city of repetitive fascist architecture, with one or two replicas of their former homes at the outskirts.

This looks boring, sure, and it tells us zilch about the characters, but the problem is bigger than that. By showing us dreams but refusing to let them convey any information through suggestion or metaphor, Nolan is devaluing the whole visual aspect of his very visual medium. He's saying, "You don't need to watch; you just need to listen, and everything will be completely explained." And by encouraging this kind of passivity, this inattention, in the viewer, he's drawing attention away from the very qualities that could meaningfully distinguish his work from that of his contemporaries. Like the dream-architects here, Nolan could've made this look like anything in his imagination – he could have made this personal, haunting, zany, or gorgeous. But except for one or two amazing moments (as when a vast gray city folds in over itself like a piece of curling linoleum, or a very old Ken Watanabe eats porridge in a room with a thousand hanging lanterns), he chose to make this world look like any random thriller at the multiplex. Perhaps making us believe the third-act twist, about fantasy and reality being indistinguishable, was more important to him than creating a visually arresting film. But even with that twist in mind, I'd encourage Nolan to take a look around the world outside the shooting set sometime. The Earth can be a pretty weird place. That's why it gives us such bad dreams.

It's a Dog's Life (and Death)

Awhile ago, in an ill-fated quest to find out what George Burns looked like when he was young (answer: he never was), I discovered the above clip from the classic TV game show What's My Line? For those of you who, like me, were not glued to the tube between 1950 and 1967, the conceit of the show was that each week, blindfolded celebrity panelists would question visitors to see if they could guess their occupations. In addition to ordinary folks (a bricklayer, a schoolteacher, a telephone operator), each episode would also feature a "mystery guest," someone who was famous enough that the panelists were expected not to guess just his occupation, but his actual identity as well. All of this seems straightforward enough – "will they figure it out or won't they?" and "who will guess first?" are classic sources of suspense, enough to keep viewers tuned in.

But here's what I found fascinating. What makes the clip above so entertaining is not the contrived game show scenario and the tension that it automatically manufactures. What makes it entertaining is the way that scenario allows Burns to create and develop a memorable character, his own persona as a game show contestant. The makers of the show even bend their own rules, with Burns answering questions inaccurately ("I'm Nat King Cole") and one of the panelists nearly removing his blindfold mid-interrogation, in order to get the most mileage out of this characterization. These game show makers understood something that's largely been forgotten by their contemporary counterparts: the outcome hardly matters. Viewers watch a show because of what the situation – as gimmicky as it might be – allows individuals to reveal about themselves.

On the surface, it might seem like an episode of a game show from 1961 and a novel published in 2003 have little in common. But when I recently read Carolyn Parkhurst's The Dogs of Babel, it got me thinking about how a similar phenomenon plays itself out in a fictive context.

The Dogs of Babel squarely fits into the category of "high concept," a label which all too often seems to mean "a concept that film or publishing executives thought up while high." Here's Babel's elevator pitch: A man's wife falls out of a tree in the backyard to her death. The only witness to this event is the couple's dog. In order to find out if his wife's death was an accident or a suicide, the man decides (get ready) to teach the dog to talk. Duh-duh-duuuum!

This sounds like the script for a Twilight Zone episode that Rod Serling rejected for its implausibility, and to be honest, I didn't expect to care much for this book. (It didn't help that I had heard the publisher referred to it as The Lovely Dog Bones – a backhanded compliment, in my opinion.) But much to my surprise, I found that it did something I wasn't anticipating: like the George Burns episode of What's My Line, this novel has the good sense to keep the emphasis off the contrived central mysteries of its "hook" (will he teach the dog to talk or won't he? which was it, accident or suicide?) and on the meaningful specificity of a recognizable human being.

I guess talking dogs are more literary than I realized.

Because, SPOILER ALERT, there isn't any mystery here, not for Paul. He knows before the novel begins that his wife Lexy's death was a suicide: the signs were laid out for him clearly. An unreliable narrator, Paul lies to the police (he claims that his wife never talked about killing herself, when in fact she'd even attempted it in her girlhood) and withholds information from us (he knows, but doesn't mention, that Lexy was pregnant and didn't want to be). His entire quest with the dog is meant to obfuscate, not reveal, this truth – both for the reader and himself.

If this book were written "straight," depicting a grieving husband who does actually teach his dog human language to solve a crime, it would most likely devolve into one of those awful "cozies" so popular in large-print editions, the ones where cats unravel mysteries instead of curtains and romantic relationships are considered consummated when the duo become bridge partners. Which is to say its author would seem desperate and sad. But here, it's Paul who seems desperate and sad. His ultimate salvation comes not when he succeeds on his own terms (he doesn't), but only when he's able to wriggle out from under the edifice of this plot to truthfully observe the thing's absurdity. Parkhurst breaks the rules she sets up in the first few pages, when Paul, narrating, writes, "Simply put, [our dog] knows things I don't. I must do whatever I can to unlock that knowledge... It is my proposal to teach Lorelei to talk." By the end, this turns out to be wrong on both counts: the dog doesn't know anything Paul doesn't, and Paul never goes to any particularly great lengths to endow her with speech. This statement looks like Chekov's "gun on the mantle," an authorial promise to deliver on a certain kind of action by the novel's close. But instead, it's Paul's delusion – a delusion that serves as an excuse for the novel we have in front of us.

And Paul's not the only one who's deluded here: far from it. At its heart, this whole book is about self-delusions and the dubious comforts they provide. On a trip to New Orleans, Lexy is inspired and moved by a visit from a woman she thinks is a fabled ghost. A few pages later she discovers, much to her chagrin, that this spectre was actually a drunk fellow vacationer dressed in old-timey clothes. A society of men Paul encounters have dedicated their lives toward surgically enabling dogs to speak words; their one supposed success story, Dog J, is able to form human consonant sounds, but the noise he makes is nonsense – they only hear language coming from him only because they so desperately want to. Even TV psychics, with their leading questions and their scammy predictions, are taken to task: here, as in life, they can only tell a person what he already knows.

Unlike The Lovely Bones, with its magic fairytale promises of a custom-built afterlife, complete with peppermint stick ice cream and hot posthumous sex, when a person (even a beloved person) dies in Parkhurst's novel, she stays dead, and in her absence she becomes even more unfathomably distant than she was in life. Contemplating ghosts, Paul muses, "It's wishful thinking... If the dead wandered among us, their spirits still present on this earth, what need would we have for grief? Scary as it is, it's what we hope for. How else would we go on living?" Yet at the end of this book, Parkhurst forces him to answer that last question honestly – to find a reason to go on, not in self-deception and fantasy, but in reality.

This book isn't a masterpiece – the dialogue is often clumsily expository, and as a narrator Paul really needs to lay off the rhetorical questions, especially the faux-poetic ones (of his dog, he says, "Who am I to know what heart beats beneath that fur?") and the ones that make the reader want to scream YES, just listen to yourself! ("Am I getting myself into something I might not want to be involved in?" he wonders just before attending a meeting of amateur "canine linguists," led by an incarcerated man nicknamed "the Dog Butcher of Brooklyn.") But the charm here is Parkhurst's interest in investigating a real human experience, rather than pandering to her audience with uncut escapism. There's nothing wrong with a light read as long as it doesn't insult the reader's intelligence. For this one, Parkhurst deserves more than my throwing her a bone – she deserves a pat on the head.

Will It Bend? (pt. 2)

I saw The Last Airbender movie on Friday, and already I've forgotten most of it. The reviews are right: it is leaden and pretentious, afflicted with some of the worst child acting I've seen in a long time. In fact, Dev Patel, playing moody Prince Zuko, is the only one who even attempts to create a character, rather than squintily reading his lines from some giant cue card with improper punctuation positioned just offscreen. Yet, unfortunately for Patel, the script betrays him at every turn, offering him little more than ponderous exposition and a fight scene against the Avatar that looks more like two kid brothers wrestling in a cluttered garage. The other actors here do not even deserve our pity, although their characters are written just as badly, or worse. In possibly the most amusing moment of the film, Aang sits down to meditate in a holy place in the Northern Water Temple. "Some monks can meditate for four days!" he exclaims. He positions himself and closes his eyes. Four seconds pass. "Aang, can you hear me?" his friend Katara asks.

I could talk about some of the other bizarre decisions Shyamalan made regarding the story -- probably the weirdest was his decision to have benders execute an entire series of complicated dance moves before their various elements respond, which makes the "action" sequences move about as quickly as a poorly prepared middle school pom pom routine. But the greatest disappointment of this film is that it's not even fun to tear apart. Unlike the truly amazing crap films of the 1980's (including the gloriously depraved Howard the Duck, the epic failure Dune, and Trancers, a gem I discovered over the weekend, which stars Helen Hunt and a boom mike), The Last Airbender isn't mistakenly in love with a faulty, unworkable premise. Where Howard the Duck, for example, answered questions no one in their right mind would want to ask (like, "What would a sentient, midget-sized duck do in bed with Lea Thompson?"), The Last Airbender doesn't answer the basic questions its own characters raise -- like, "How could the earthbenders be defeated and contained when their weapon is the ground beneath their feet?" It's this incuriosity, more than anything else, that makes it suck.

For the love of God, I do NOT WANT TO KNOW.

It's also this incuriosity that makes it particularly lousy as a children's film. Anyone who's gotten on a bus with a second grader knows well the proclivity of man-larvae for the question, "Why?" One of the reasons behind the aforementioned trend of adults reading children's books is, I think, the fact that children's book authors are not afraid to answer this question, sketching out whole fantastical worlds with the resulting explanations. These worlds don't have to be realistic, but they do have to hold up under investigation -- to reveal causal connections, social relationships, customs, and habits that resonate and fit into the whole. In this sense, coming to understand the world of a story is an education in miniature for children who are at the beginning of learning about the order of our world. As I said in my previous post, the greatest strength of the original airbender show was the way that it rewarded the viewer for wondering about details -- about everything from the various nation's cultures to the flora and fauna of the wilderness. By comparison, the film isn't awful. It's just empty.

Will It Bend? (pt. 1)

In a couple of earlier posts (here and here), I wrote about a phenomenon that I would generously call "not a good sign": the increasing tendency of adults to prefer novels intended for children over novels intended for people their own age. Interestingly enough, this doesn't seem to be as prevalent a trend with other narrative arts. Though a large segment of the population, young and old, can be counted on to trek out to the latest Pixar offering, and Twilight and Harry Potter's grown-up fans never missed the chance to see them in theaters, most blockbuster protagonists are grown-up enough to wield firearms or disrobe onscreen, and the same goes for TV. Even shows like South Park, The Simpsons, and Family Guy, all of which prominently feature child characters, make that part of the joke: look, they're little kids, but they're advocating genocide, becoming members of Mensa, or talking like Rex Harrison (respectively). Our full enjoyment of these kidlets depends on us, the viewers, being able to see and identify their apparent contradictions from an adult perspective.

Nickelodeon's show Avatar: The Last Airbender is not like these other cartoons. The children in Avatar do things that real children couldn't, but we're not supposed to laugh at the impossibility; we're meant to suspend our disbelief. And the series as a whole definitely meets my criteria for a young adult story: the characters develop and age, but they never change in ways that permanently mar their innocence. It's certainly not intended for adults. Yet to me, the thing that makes it really terrific children's television, and entertaining for the rest of us, is the unique way the series as a whole is structured.

I find it surprising that, miniseries aside, so few television programs are constructed with the end in mind from the beginning. Like emperors demented with hubris, show creators must think that they are immortal, that they'll never have to relinquish their reign, and that their empire will only become more powerful the longer it exists. Of course, the opposite is true. The expression "jumped the shark" was coined just to capture that moment when a TV series goes from being relevant and entertaining to embarrassing, and I won't bother listing the shows where this has happened: it's nearly all of them. The ones that have escaped this grim fate ended too – they just knew when to stop.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is striking not for what it does so much as what it doesn't do, which is to careen wildly off course. In the first episode, the central path of the narrative is laid out. We learn that in the world of the story, certain gifted warriors are capable of "bending" or controlling each of the four elements: water, earth, air, and fire. Only one person can learn to control all four. This person is the Avatar, reincarnated in each generation, and in this one he's a little boy named Aang, the airbender of the title. But his duty to humanity is even greater than the Avatars of the past, because now the Fire Nation is intent on conquering the rest of the world. Only Aang can restore balance by freeing the other nations. And then, over the course of three seasons (each named for an additional element he masters: water, then earth, then fire), that's exactly what he goes on to do. This sounds predictable, and it is. But that macro-predictability gives the makers of the series incredible freedom to bring the world of the story, and its characters, to life in the individual episodes. Since they know where they're going, they can take their sweet time getting there.

Watching the series was useful to me as a writer, since I seem to find this simple truth very easy to forget. For a long time, in fact, I used to think that plots needed to be convoluted, or at least not "obvious," in order for the finished story itself to be wildly imaginative. When I made my first serious attempt at writing a novel in college, I so eschewed the notion of straightforward plot that I didn't even bother writing the action in sequence: instead, under the heavy influence of freshman year philosophy courses and Mountain Dew (which I consumed by the case), I scribbled random scenes into notebooks so filled with doodles they resembled illuminated manuscripts penned by gonzo monks. Every day I felt inspired. Some year and a half later, when I began to look back over the gory Frankenbook I had created, filled with characters hurling cats at one another and shouting about Descartes, I knew something had gone horribly wrong, but I didn't know what.

Perhaps Avatar: The Last Airbender might have saved me some time and the world some paper. I think the thing I find the most striking about it is how much fun the creators seem to be having, just making things up. Most of the animals in the show, for instance, are hybrids – badger moles, koala sheep, lizard rhinos, a lion turtle – and there's a weird moment of humor when a regular bear is introduced, much to the confusion of the main characters. Nearly every permutation of the four "bending" styles is eventually explored: although characters just start out controlling the basic elements, they eventually learn that other substances containing or contained by their elements are subject to bending as well. An earthbender learns that she can shape metal, forming a suit around her body; firebenders can shoot electricity from their fingers – or catch it and shoot it back; and in a genuinely creepy episode that might be the high point of the series as a whole, a waterbender learns that she can "bend" blood inside of people's veins, turning them into living marionettes. By the end of the series, I had the feeling that the makers of the show had completely exhausted their material, which I mean as a high compliment: there's nothing more frustrating than feeling like an artist didn't do his own idea justice.

The one sort of fire bender the show never includes.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the simple overarching structure of Avatar: The Last Airbender allows the show's creators to dig deep into their thematic material. Its peace-loving message may rival Fraggle Rock for naked idealism, but it beats the Fraggles hands down for subtlety. (Sorry, Wembly.) While most kids' shows with a moral message set up simple parables, solved over a single episode and generally with maximum preachiness, Avatar: The Last Airbender is able to build up to ideas slowly. The Fire Nation, which starts out as pure enemy in season 1, is gradually revealed to be a sophisticated, beautiful culture, as much worth preserving as the civilizations it decimates. And the people in it are complicated, products of their country's nationalism and xenophobia but not incapable of change. Similarly, though they learn to work together, the peoples of the other nations aren't a unified front: the Air Nomads are vegetarians while the Water Tribe eats practically nothing but meat; each nation worships its own gods. That's not the kind of idea that gets a lot of play on Captain Planet.

All of this is the reason that I was horrified when I saw that the show had been remade as a live-action movie by M. Night Shymalan; I was even more horrified when I read Roger Ebert's review. Nevertheless, because I apparently don't know what's good for me, I'm planning to see it later this week. I'd say I'm interested in finding out what happens when a sprawling narrative like this collapses in on itself to fill less than two hours, but that would be a lie. I'd really go to see any movie that promises a flying bison in glorious 3D.

Bad Cop, Bad Cop

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was a big fan of noir movies when I was growing up, from classics like Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity to neo-pictures like LA Confidential, which came out when I was in the eighth grade, and which, like an entire bag of Halloween candy consumed in one sitting, left me sick and dizzy with bliss. To me at the time, noir wasn't simply an occasion for snappy dialogue and great retro fashion -- though I loved those elements too. It represented a deeply subversive way of seeing the world, a way that reflected my own discontent with unthinkingly obeyed authority figures and the rote proprieties of organized religion. The world of noir was a funhouse, a labyrinth, a hall of mirrors, a paranoiac's dream, intricately designed for the hero but without his best interests at heart. It was a constructed place. As a pretentious freshman in high school, I wrote an essay comparing The Usual Suspects' Keyser Soze to a book's author inserting himself into the text, or to God. Yet the world of noir was also inhabited by characters who insisted on tearing apart this creation, who partook of damning knowledge and dirtied their hands to get it. If crime bosses, corrupt police departments, and crooked government officials are the gods of noir, then the gumshoes and amateur sleuths are its original sinners.

As I got older, of course, I began to see that, like anything else, noir can be blighted by cliches -- that for all its emphasis on seeking and questioning, this genre can be just as beholden to audience expectations as those pathetic rom-coms that always seem to include an unexpected pregnancy or a slobbery dog. Look, there's the hooker with the heart of gold, the obligatory ominous limo/"you're in over your head" scene. Yet I still find myself drawn to noir, sometimes despite myself, and for that reason, in the last week, I've seen not one but two recent noir movies: Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me. Both of these films focus on corrupt detectives who use their badges as permission slips for a whole range of scandalous behaviors; both films include grisly murders, elaborate cover-ups, and true love with a noble prostie. But my reactions to the two films couldn't have been more diametrically opposed.

Bad Lieutenant is like a cross between Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Richard Loncraine's Richard III, and a session of Grand Theft Auto played by a particularly testosterone-flooded fourteen-year-old boy. Which is to say it fuckin rocks. In one scene that I think represents the brilliance of the whole, Nicholas Cage emerges from behind a door, inexplicably shaving with an electric razor, to strongarm two grandmas into giving up information. He pulls the oxygen tubes from one old lady's nose, threatens the other with his pistol, and snarls, "You're what's wrong with this country!" The film is set in post-Katrina New Orleans, but whatever political subtext can be gleaned from this exchange is only discoverable once the viewer has stopped laughing, which is not for a long, long time.

Bad Lieutenant takes a necessary risk with its material, which is that it's not afraid to be outrageous. Over the course of the film, as Cage's character goes from bad to worse, he hallucinates iguanas and breakdancers, does drugs in front of a kid in his care, threatens to kill a whole carload of gangsters "till the break of dawn," and offers a crime lord use of his "lucky crack pipe." By embracing and exploring its own absurdity, the film doesn't just avoid becoming unintentionally hilarious; it achieves something much more impressive. In my earlier post, I wrote about how violent movies can make their viewers feel complicit by placing them, physically, within the characters' bodies. But by making us laugh along with Cage's character -- by making us see what he sees -- Bad Lieutenant places us inside his mind.

Sex, drugs, and well -- you know.

Not so with The Killer Inside Me. Despite its title, this movie does not spend much time inside any of its characters, least of all its protagonist, a murderous small-town cop named Ford (played by Casey Affleck, who seems to have a knack for murderous small-town Fords). Although we're privy to Ford's private memories, these flashbacks confuse more than they clarify. One of the film's creepiest scenes shows us Ford as a tween, confronted with a woman who reveals her bruises to him, seemingly as erotic enticement: "This is what your father did to me; I liked it," she tells him. Edgy stuff -- only no one in the group I saw the picture with could figure out who the hell she was. I assumed it was his mom, perhaps just before her untimely death; another viewer thought it was his sister; a third person (the only one who had read the Jim Thompson novel on which this film is based) seemed to remember she was supposed to be a housekeeper, or maybe a stepmom. Yet surely Ford himself knows -- surely these scenarios are not all equivalent to him. By showing us this scene without the context we need to render it meaningful on a specific, personal level, the filmmakers satisfy our curiosity about Ford in a rote way (bad childhood) while still holding him at an artificial distance.

Mystery, both in noir and in other genres, is one of the central engines of suspense, and the best mysteries pose questions that are maddening in their specificity (Who killed Laura Palmer?), weighting a single piece of information with so much value that we will spend hours or days working to discover it. A good mystery, in my opinion, is not, "Why the hell did any of that just happen?" posed with indignation as the credits roll. Yet the latter was the question I found myself asking about The Killer Inside Me. BIG SPOILER ALERT, but let me submit for your consideration the following puzzle, first pointed out by one of my fellow viewers. Early in the film, Ford beats his prostitute girlfriend Joyce nearly to death, for some complicated reasons that sort of make sense. He's told by other policemen that she died in the hospital, and he's not treated as a suspect; in fact, another young man is arrested in the crime. For most of the picture, the other police seem to trust Ford; at one point, when Ford is chasing an unarmed man down the street with a butcher knife, another cop even shoots the guy for him (thanks, dude). Then, at the end of the film, several police officers escort the prostitute girlfriend to Ford's home -- she's still alive, just a little scarred up is all. "I didn't tell them anything," she claims. Aww. Ford stabs her anyway, then blows up his house.

Now, here's the problem. If the other cops didn't suspect Ford, why did they tell him his prostie g.f. was dead when she wasn't? And if the other cops did suspect Ford, why did they help him kill that guy? Jeepers, I don't know! It's a twist!

The Killer Inside Me is boring and illogical, sure, but that's not really what bothers me about it. In the end, I'm much more bummed that a movie this unafraid of explicit violence and sexuality doesn't harness their power in service of story. What makes great noir films truly subversive isn't just that they depict crime and perversion: it's their ability to make criminals and perverts intensely interesting to us -- sometimes even as mirrors of ourselves. It may take guts to put this stuff on screen, but it takes talent to make it awesome.

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart, Joan Rivers

An older woman I know, a lifelong feminist, is very fond of the famous quote about Fred Astaire: "Sure he was great, but don't forget Ginger Rogers did everything he did backwards . . . and in high heels!" On the surface, this quip looks like a rallying cry for women trying to succeed in male-dominated industries: it suggests that although the bar may be set higher for a woman, it's possible for her to excel without sacrificing her femininity, or even changing her shoes. Yet, to me, there's something troubling about the image this sentence presents, something a little grotesque. It seems to me that a career spent dancing backwards is a career fundamentally out of one's own control.

Let me back up a little: last night, I saw the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, and if you go to the theater where I watched it, you will probably find fragments of my broken heart scattered amid the popcorn kernels and Skittles on the floor. It isn't a perfect film -- more on that in a bit -- but it's an undeniably powerful one, as jaw-dropping, maudlin, hilarious, tacky, tragic, merciless, and completely badass as its protagonist.

Before seeing this movie, I remembered Joan Rivers only vaguely, as the skeletal creature who prowled red carpets during the awards seasons of my youth like a vulture searching for roadkill along a desert expressway. To be honest, I hadn't thought about her for years. Back when I was a teenager, I probably would have added that she looked like she'd had a bunch of plastic surgery, a practice of which I vaguely disapproved; her naked hostility also seemed to make celebrities uncomfortable, which was odd, considering that it was her job to chat them up. But to me, Joan Rivers -- along with People magazine, Anna Nicole Smith, VH1, and the poetry of Suzanne Somers -- was not a person, but a single tiny cog in the Great Mass Media Dream Machine, a device as annoying but as essentially harmless as whatever made all those bubbles on the Lawrence Welk show. I saw no reason to care. I got my information from the New Yorker.

Dear Joan Rivers: I'm sorry for being a pretentious asshole. I've learned my lesson now.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work follows a year in the life of this comedian/actress, who during shooting celebrates (although that's hardly the right word) her seventy-fifth birthday. In terms of flat-out bizarreness, the Joan Rivers of this film is up there with the R. Crumb of Terry Zwigoff's unforgettable documentary. She lives in a townhouse that she describes as "how Marie Antoinette would have lived if she had money"; it's one part Versailles, two parts the Bellagio Hotel. In a heartfelt Thanksgiving toast, she says she thanks God every time she steps into a limousine. She asks if a joke where she refers to stylish first lady Michelle Obama as "Blackie O" would be in bad taste. On hold with a network exec for less than ten seconds, she has time to mutter, "Would've gotten through faster if I were Kathy Griffin." With no visible irony, she explains how making a TV movie about her husband's suicide helped her and her daughter work through their grief. She snarls at her Pekingese, "It's bacon, you idiot," as he reluctantly accepts a treat. On more than one occasion, she refers to herself as "the Queen."

And then, of course, there's her face -- a face that was disturbing in 1996 but now brings to mind Laura Dern's distorted clown visage at the end of Inland Empire. (I know what Plinkett would ask her.) Joan Rivers may have started out trying to look young, but at this point, it's almost like she's just trying to get a rise out of people. More than almost: her face is an accusation, acid tossed in the eyes of the male gaze. In one scene, she shows up to a play rehearsal so bloated with collagen her speech is affected. She talks about how terrifying it is to catch a glimpse of herself without makeup. And in perhaps the most shattering sequence of a film that's filled with them, she sits in a chair at her Comedy Central Roast as comedian after comedian razzes her for the surgeries, that face (and the smile on it) an impenetrable shield against whatever's going on within.

All of these things make Rivers a fascinating character, but what captivated me, what bound everything together, was her inextinguishable rage. Joan Rivers is the human equivalent of Centralia, PA, where a fire burned underground for 40+ years. Several times in the film, Rivers makes a point of saying she's willing to do anything, anything, for her audience, sometimes joking but mostly not. She says she'll knock out her teeth for a denture commercial, that she'll wear a diaper. And in fact she does agree to some equally far out things. She competes with her own daughter on a reality TV show, she allows herself to be subject to the aforementioned roast, she performs stand-up in a podunk Wisconsin casino, where she claims the slot machines dispense not coins but raw fish. But the two things that ultimately define Joan Rivers are the two things she refuses to do: she refuses to desexualize herself, and she refuses to go away. "There will be claw marks down that red carpet before they take it from her," says her longtime manager, and he's right.

What is it about Joan Rivers that's so unsettling, that even now, in this era of Sarah Silverman and Lady Gaga, makes us squirm? Some people might say that it's her obvious insecurity -- her desperation, her need. This is a woman who tells the camera that no man has ever called her beautiful; during a radio interview about plastic surgery, another woman asks her, "But don't you want to be loved for your intelligence, your sense of humor?" and Rivers replies, "I just want to be loved." In the documentary, Rivers reveals that she sends the children of her friends to private school -- "I'm a small industry," she says, signing a stack of checks -- and her reactions to fans, even awkward ones, are uncharacteristically warm. She is the empress of a dying world. I think it's tough to watch this movie without seeing hints of Sunset Boulevard. Like Gloria Swanson's character, Joan Rivers is forever plotting an unlikely comeback, vamping for the camera with her monster movie face, and reveling in long-ago glories ("Johnny Carson said to me, 'You're going to be a big star'").

Yet what I think is most shocking here is that, unlike Swanson's character, Joan Rivers is in on the joke. She knows exactly how she fits into the comedy food chain. One hilarious moment comes when she's going through a line-up of comedians she'll be performing with, sizing up each as competition ("Bill Mahr, brilliant. Jon Stewart, very smart. Ben Stiller, eh."). She's realistic, a businesswoman to a fault. When she finally wins on Celebrity Apprentice, she bitchily dismisses it ("It's not an Academy Award"), and after a performance of her play in London, she's unable to celebrate or even relax until she sees the reviews (they're not good). Sure, she sells jewelry on QVC and wears sequins, but with her razor-sharp intelligence, her self-awareness, Joan Rivers defies our ability to hold her at a distance. She is a funhouse mirror of our celebrity-obsessed culture, and like a mirror, she forces us to see ourselves in her. And that identification is the thing that makes Rivers now, if anything, even edgier than she was at the beginning of her career. If a comedian like Patton Oswalt is able to look at pop culture as if at an alien civilization, Joan Rivers is that alien. And she's asking, "Can we talk?"

I loved this movie; at times I found it absolutely devastating. Little scenes, as when Rivers and her grandson share a tender moment in her limousine ("I love your hands," she tells him), or when she lays bare her fears of failure in the wake of her play's flop, made me feel as though I was seeing her from the inside out. That said, there's a lot that's glossed over here. We don't get anyone else's side of the story re: the NBC debacle that tore a rift between Rivers and her then-mentor Johnny Carson, for example, and I get the sense that there may be others in the industry who would also cast her in a less-than-rosy light. But I don't think this film needs to cross-examine its subject a la The Fog of War to reveal some essential truths about her character. If Rivers has spent her entire career dancing backwards in heels, it's hardly surprising that she's stepped on a few toes.

Joshua Ferris's Day Off, pt. 2

As I wrote in my previous post, Joshua Ferris's first novel Then We Came to the End was a book publicist's dream: funny, timely, people-pleasing, and, like a good PowerPoint presentation, characterized by the smooth elision of anything truly unsettling. After that debut, it was difficult to guess what he'd do next. Then We Came to the End did not wear Ferris's obsessions on its sleeve: there was the sense of humor, probably its greatest strength (I did laugh aloud during the "buckshelves" scene), the interest in characters (like Karen Woo, with her off-the-cuff invention of "lastive acid"), even the workplace itself, that cathedral to the ordinary, with its banks of elevators, its encoded chairs, its "take-ones and tchotchkes." But it was tough to figure which – if any – of these elements Ferris would carry with him to Book 2.

Even so, The Unnamed is still a far cry from anything I would've expected. The Unnamed tells the story of Tim Farnsworth, an attorney afflicted with a condition that sends him inexplicably walking, in no particular direction and in all kinds of weather. It's also about his wife Jane, who succumbs first to alcoholism under the strain of her husband's affliction and then, eventually, to cancer. (No shoe shopping this time, thank god.) And it's about his daughter Becka, a rocker chick whose unwelcome obesity is the cause of much hand-wringing both for her and for her significantly more fucked-up parents.

The Unnamed is the kind of book that cries out for interpretation. Is Farnsworth's undiagnosable disease a metaphor for spiritual malaise in the face of worldly success? For that dark unknown at the heart of every marriage? For death? With its main character's sudden transformation – an ordinary life utterly dismantled by an unexplained affliction – it recalls philosophical hand grenades like The Metamorphosis and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, but its scope in terms of both the time the story covers, its emphasis on the protagonist's strained relationships with his family, and the length of the book itself, The Unnamed is reaching for something more panoramic. But what?

Let me be decadently honest: The Unnamed reminded me, more than anything else, of a book I'm half-ashamed of enjoying, the improbably named Audrey Niffenegger's breakout literary beach read, The Time Traveler's Wife. Now, before you begin lobbing time-traveling fetuses at me like so many overripe tomatoes, hear me out. Both books tell the story of a wildly, some might even say irritatingly affectionate marriage (in Ferris's novel, the long-married spouses call each other "banana" and screw in the bathroom of their favorite restaurant; in Niffenegger's, our heroine worries aloud, "Henry – do other people have sex as much as we do?"), periodically interrupted by the man's wandering, one through space, the other through time. In both books, the men leave home involuntarily, often sans adequate protection from the elements. In both books, the men lose lower extremities to the cold (in Ferris's novel, Tim's mummified toe drops off in his sock; in Niffenegger's, poor Henry's feet are amputated after frost bites). In both books, the couple has an only child, a daughter, who serves as the mother's consolation in the father's absence. And in both books, the man's disappearing act is pathologized by nearly all of the characters: the quest to find a diagnosis, a doctor who understands, is in both cases central to the characters' coming to terms with the plight.

The major difference between the two novels, of course, is the diagnosis. Henry is able to get one: his time-traveling is in his genes; it's even passed on to his similarly day-tripping spawn. The Time Traveler's Wife thus succeeds as a classic tear-jerker, heartbreaking but also heartwarming – don't blame him, he's just built this way. (Like a Delorean.) In The Unnamed, though, as the title would suggest, Tim doesn't get off so easy. Is he crazy? Is his behavior really outside of his control? It's this question that torments not just our hero, but that drives a wedge between him and those he loves and respects. Even his daughter wonders if he fakes it. A key detail in the narrative, for me, is that Tim tells his colleagues at the law firm that his wife is dying of cancer in hopes of eliciting their sympathy – and it works. When the reality of his situation is revealed, though, he loses his partnership in the firm. What's in a name? When it's the name of a disease, quite a lot, apparently.

All three of the main character in The Unnamed suffer from predicaments that straddle this line between straight-up medical condition and lifestyle choice. Tim's daughter Becka is obese*, increasingly so as she ages; his wife becomes an alcoholic, briefly lost in a Bermuda triangle between her hotel and a small town Bennigan's where she gets snockered. To me, it seems that Ferris is zeroing in on a question that, in a society where self-destructive behavior is increasingly pathologized, is at some point an inevitable one: what exactly constitutes an autonomous decision?

Don't we all want to leave Bennigan's?

Yet, although I find this idea compelling, I'm not sure it makes for compelling fiction. The characters here, especially Becka, start out promisingly: I adore the description of her singing "coffeehouse ballads cryptic with yearning" alone in her bedroom as a teenager. But, if character is action, an entire novel that focuses on involuntary (or at least little-understood and unconsciously adopted) compulsions doesn't lead to the most fascinating development of those characters. As other critics have pointed out, too, the passages about Tim's walks could be livelier and less pretentious stylistically. If this book had come first, I doubt it would have made Joshua Ferris famous; it's certainly not as superficially entertaining as his last. What I do respect, though, is that he didn't simply write Then We Came to the End all over again; he tried to do something riskier and weirder. And for that reason alone, it's worth going on this walk with him.

*I don't mean to imply that all obese people "suffer from" their obesity – I'm aware of the Fat Acceptance movement, Health at Any Size, etc. I just mean that the character Becka's weight is treated as a predicament within the context of this novel.

Joshua Ferris's Day Off, pt. 1

Reading Joshua Ferris feels a lot like watching premium cable. There's a sharpness, a cleanness to the images, the sort of deft editing that suggests real time and effort and money went into the enterprise; the work gestures toward the great recent auteurs of the medium knowingly, but without heavy-handed homage; there's drama, even melodrama, but it's reigned in, never devolving to sweeps-week absurdity. The sex is tasteful, the portrayals of characters beg to be labeled "funny and wise." And yet in both cases, the aesthetic often seems to be determined not by a single, obsessed human mind, but rather by a sort of highbrow corporate sensibility, a "The-Way-We-Live-Now" checklist complete with defanged satire and cutesy asides. It's not dumb, but it's not unsettling. "It's not TV," as those surreal HBO ads insist -- but it's not quite anything else, either.

Or at least that was true of Ferris's first novel, the widely acclaimed Then We Came to the End. I think I'm the only person in America who thought that debut was a bone-crunching flop, the chalk outline reminder of what happens when a brilliant premise (and mind-blowing opening chapter) plummets to its grisly doom. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Like some sort of Manchurian Candidate brainwashee, I viewed its famous book trailer online one morning and seconds later, found myself half-jogging down the block to my local independent bookstore, my Hello Kitty pajama top tucked into the pockets of my jeans, thinking something to the effect, "The Virgin Suicides meets 'The 300 Pound CEO' meets Revolutionary Road meets Office Space meets, oh kill me now, this will be a fucking masterpiece!" And then it had the gall not to be.

Then We Came to the End betrayed me in two major ways. First, and perhaps most unforgivably, it abandons its own weird and twisted first-person-plural narration midway through in favor of a close-third-person section I described at the time as "a Cathy cartoon about cancer," a yucky, pandering subplot in which a strong, career-driven woman finds herself filled to the brim with regret about neglecting her personal life in the face of her breast tumor. The night before her surgery, she takes solace in a local Nordstrom's, I kid you not, and Ferris actually, unforgivably, writes the words, "And all of it soured by the lack of the one thing she wants: not likely to find Martin here in the women's shoe department, is she?" (Just once before I die, I want to read a story where a chick's true passion is her work -- where an unrepentant female CEO shouts into a conference call from her hospital bed: "Julian, Edna, they're shaving me down -- I'm going to have to put you on speaker.")

Whatever happened to dying with dignity?

But, sexual politics aside, I hated this section with a blinding passion simply because of its aesthetic laziness. For me, part of the thrill of stunt narration -- you know the oddball kind I mean: second person, weird dialect, rotating firsts, a parody of another form (academic annotations, epistolary, diary, kids' books) and of course first-person-plural -- is that "how's he gonna get out of this one?" moment that comes when it occurs to the reader that the story is going somewhere the speaker can't easily follow. You see stunt narration a lot in short fiction (Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," Rick Moody's "Boys") at least partly, I think, because its authors tend to paint themselves into corners at the first stroke of the brush. That's not intended as criticism -- there's something extraordinarily satisfying about a perfect miniature -- but there's something to be said for the tour de force that takes that and raises it one, that insists on letting the crazy voice determine the shape of an entire book. As much as I admire the craft of screenwriting, I also love when the idea for a story could only be a novel -- when a seeming gimmick of POV in time reveals itself to be inseparable from the meaning of the book's events. The aforementioned Virgin Suicides, as well as recent novels like The Cardboard Universe, The Boy Detective Fails, Letters to Wendy's, and Cloud Atlas all rely on techniques of narration that seem shallowly attention-grabbing, even silly, on the surface. But in committing to the limitations or "rules" of this narration, these authors create fictive realities that then seem to overspill their containers -- that, like the best photographs, leave us craning our necks to look beyond the edges of the frame. I think the reason for this is that these authors bothered to ask themselves "why." Why am I fascinated by this form of narration? What is it about a plural narrator, an encyclopedia, a boy's adventure novel, a restaurant comment card, a story-within-a-story, that makes my heart pound? What is it about this form that irritates me, that foils me at every turn? What is it that this form can never do or say, and what is the shape of that absence? Great writers, I think, work in both positive and negative space: the questions they leave us with are just as specific, as decided-upon, as the answers they provide.

Not so with Joshua Ferris. Here's a real quote from his interview with Powells Books, discussing Then We Came to the End: "It was first person plural, but basically when that got tiresome to me as a writer, I figured it had gotten tiresome for the reader about two sentences back, so I stopped and entered into a third person... It was a kind of fantasia of all the different ways that I had thought about point of view, being a student and just being an admirer of nifty craft decisions." Writers, even the best ones, tend to damn themselves when speaking about their work (with some notable exceptions), so I won't rake Ferris over the coals too much here. But I do think there's something extremely telling about his observation, "when that [narration] got tiresome to me... I figured it had gotten tiresome for the reader about two sentences back." I know next to nothing about etymology, but I've always thought the connection between the word "author" and the word "authority" is a meaningful one: in my opinion, the author should be, after all, not just the creator, but also the resident authority, the expert in the field of his own book. And this expertise is what qualifies the writer, rather than the reader, to dictate the narrative's path.

Much of the best fiction, at least at moments, takes the reader places she does not want to go: it annoys, it confuses, it frustrates, it exhausts. It challenges. And then, ideally, it rewards. Yet Ferris seems unwilling to challenge the reader, because, I suspect, he's not quite willing to challenge himself. He abandons the second person before the reader gets tired of it not simply because he wants to entertain, but also because, if the reader gets tired of a technique, she might begin asking why it was employed in the first place, and that's a question he hasn't concretely posed to himself. He doesn't see himself as an author(ity), but as a "student"; not as a craftsman, but as "an admirer of nifty craft decisions." And that lack of confidence makes him second guess the fundamental brilliance, the audacity, of his own damn premise.

The other thing that bugged me about Then We Came to the End is tougher to couch as a criticism, but I'll try. There's a long tradition in American storytelling of depicting the "little guy" fighting against the forces of corporate authority -- watch any Frank Capra movie or pick up any novel by John Steinbeck and you'll see what I'm talking about. There's also a strong anti-authority strain, in which characters see the homogenizing forces of capitalism and conformity in a struggle not just for their time but for their very souls (see also, Film Career, Jack Nicholson's). Even in Then We Came to the End there's a character who's trying to write a book along these very lines: "a small angry book," he calls it, "about work." What's different about Then We Came to the End, of course (and what ends up being different about this character's book, too) is that it chooses instead to reveal an unexamined truth: these wage slaves like their cage; they love it, actually, and the novel's major threat is the possibility it will be taken away.

To me, that's terrifically accurate and potentially heartbreaking. (There's a reason I adore Kazuo Ishiguro.) Yet -- and here's the problem -- is that, in showing this love of employees for employer, Ferris never goes so far as to suggest that it's truly unrequited, that the folks in power do, in a matter-of-fact and perhaps inevitable but nevertheless profound way, see their employees as expendable. The bosses' greatest fault here is that they hold themselves apart from the warm camaraderie of the speaker "we," but their reasons for this are personal, painful: Lynn, on her cancer deathbed, speaks of how, "All these other people have so much going on in their lives. Vacations, activities. I've never been able to do that"; as a teenager, Joe Pope once stood by and watched a group of his friends beat someone up, and now fears the licensing intimacy of any community: "Joining the club, losing control... That's what I'm guilty of, Genevieve."

But the reason employers hold their employees at a distance isn't just because of private pain and insecurity. It's also because of the inherent power structure of a company, which is dictated by the necessities of capitalism. To put it bluntly, it's because, in order to do their jobs successfully, bosses do have to see their employees in terms of the bottom line. This doesn't make those bosses monstrous, but it's also not a facet of their characters that can be entirely ignored -- especially not in a novel about work, which, as one character points out, is where people spend most of their adult lives. Yet, just as Jonathan Safran Foer wrote an entire novel about 9/11 without having a single character motivated by anger, so has Joshua Ferris written an entire novel about the advertising industry without having a single character motivated by money. For serious, dudes?

Glib, funny, warm, and charming, Then We Came to the End totally enraged me. Yet when Ferris's new novel came out, I found myself intrigued. And I have to say that, though I'm not exactly a fan of The Unnamed, it definitely wasn't what I was expecting. I'll be back in the next few days with my thoughts. Until then, don't touch that dial.

Writing in a Material World, or: When Wishing Makes It So

At the end of the children's novel The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, the kingdom of Fantasia has been destroyed by the Nothing, an all-consuming force that literally obliterates everything in its path. But a scrap of hope remains in the protagonist Bastian, a confused kid who got sucked into this magical land by reading about it in a dusty old book. Moon Child, Fantasia's empress, appears before him and explains that the future of her kingdom is in his hands: "Fantasia will be born again through your wishes, my Bastian. Through me they become reality." Bastian asks how many wishes he gets. Moon Child replies, "As many as you want -- the more, the better. Fantasia will be all the more rich and varied." In the face of this unlimited freedom, Bastian chokes, his mind suddenly blank, and Moon Child grows concerned. If he can't think of anything, she warns him, "there won't be any more Fantasia."

I will use any excuse to put pictures of cute dogs on this blog.

You do not have to be Gilbert Sorrentino to detect some metafictional hijinks going on in this passage. Back when I read it, circa 1993, I still licked "scratch-and-sniff" stickers to see if they tasted as good as they smelled and considered non-matching socks a couture fashion statement. Yet even I could see a glimmer of something self-conscious here, a statement about the make-believe aspect of the book's own fictive universe. This was the first, and perhaps truest, lesson I absorbed about the nature of the writer's task: that the more wishes you make -- the more images and characters and scenarios you articulate in language -- the richer your fantasy grows.

Around the same time, I remember thinking hard about the lyrics of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," a chart-topper during our Advent-season chapel services in my Christian school. In one of the later verses, there's a line that goes, "veiled in flesh the God-head see/hail incarnate deity," referring, of course, to baby Jesus's grand entrance through the fabled virginal meat curtains. There was something I found particularly entrancing about the words "veiled in flesh," the same kind of twisted logic I associated with another favorite at the time, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. After all, in reality, a veil hides something visible -- usually flesh, in fact. But if the flesh itself is a veil, what does it conceal? Isn't the bare flesh, by definition, naked? If you stripped the flesh (and blood and bone) from a person, what would be revealed? Wouldn't you just be left with nothing? Or at the very least, nothing you could sing about?

Religious folks would no doubt have a smart answer to this question, but I'm not religious and I never claimed to be smart. And I'm not trying to make a religious point here, but an aesthetic one, which is this: in a piece of writing, there are two forces, the force of Something and the force of Nothing. Something is just what it sounds like: it's the stuff of the world and the imagination, falling out onto the page. Something is made of images, characters, names -- it's flesh. You can claim there's a god* under there somewhere, but you'd be hard pressed to see him if there wasn't skin on top. Then there's the force of Nothing. Nothing doesn't have to be a bad thing, and in fact, it's essential at the beginning of a project. Nothing is the whole roaring universe of possibility. In a way, I could just as easily call it the force of Anything, since the beauty of Nothing is that it doesn't preclude any choice the author can make. The problem comes when, like Bastian, the author freezes in the face of this dizzying array and finds himself unable to choose -- unable to veil his god in anything the reader can see.

I'm saying all this before returning to the subject of my last post because, to me, these ideas are all connected with the act of naming, not just characters, but the stuff of a character's world. One way that the Nothing can win is obvious: it's writer's block, when the author finds himself unable or unwilling to choose a single path from amid the myriad that present themselves. Thomas Mann once said, "A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people," and while that sounds like a pretentious bullshit excuse for drinking during the day, there is a grain of truth to it. The more a person reads and writes, the more possibilities and approaches appear, and the larger the Nothing becomes. But the second way the Nothing can win is more insidious, occurring within the work itself.

When I was in a writing workshop during college, we read a couple of student stories where the gender of the first person narrator went unspecified. The class was somewhat divided about whether to regard this as a problem or not, and rightly so. There are certainly times when ambiguity -- about gender, race, etc. -- can itself be a distinct and provocative choice. But I remember being bothered at the time not just by the fact the genders were going unstated, but by the attitudes of some of the students, including the author of one of the stories, who said it "didn't matter."

On one hand, of course, this is inarguably true: it's not as though fictional characters are real people who will eventually be faced with, for example, having to choose the men's or women's restroom in a crowded movie theater whether the author likes it or not. But the author's willingness to relinquish such a basic aspect of her own creation, not out of hopes of making a statement but simply out of apathy, needled me deeply. One might suggest, of course, that I'm misreading the statement, "It doesn't matter." Perhaps the author herself believes gender shouldn't matter, and wants that attitude to be reflected in her fiction, by creating a world where it doesn't. Even if this is case, though, the author still has to sketch in that world for us, because it's a place no one currently living on earth has ever visited. Alternately, one might suggest that the narrator's gender doesn't matter to the narrator. Yet if the narrator's gender does not matter to the narrator, the fact of regarding oneself as genderless in a gendered world is an interesting enough character trait to merit the story's attention.
Again, I'm not arguing that there aren't times when ambiguity isn't the most powerful choice. But a writer can't use that as an excuse to avoid making a choice at all. The problem here, I think, is that when writers see an opportunity not to make a decision, not to pin something down, they often seize it. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, if they see a fork in the road, they take it. And this goes not just for student writers, but a lot of published ones too. A favorite teacher of mine once sadly observed, "In contemporary fiction, nobody has a last name or a job." It's worth wondering why not.


*I use "god" here as a stand-in for any intangible quality of fiction — its "heart," its "soul," etc.