Do You Believe in Magic?

Believe it or not, working at a low-level position in the publishing industry does not have many perks.  I do not spend my days clad in a bikini of diamonds body-surfing through a Scrooge McDuck swimming pool of coin, nor do I speed a company Mercedes convertible down the West Side Highway as part of my morning commute.  However, when I get lucky, I do get to see an occasional Advanced Reading Copy of a book before it's published, and this time, though I am not affiliated with Random House or any of its imprints, I was fortunate enough to get my greedy paws on Aimee Bender's new novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, which doesn't come out till June.  I'm not going to write a full review here, because, as the back matter sternly indicates, the galley takes its text from uncorrected proofs and is not to be confused with the finished product.  I also feel like I need to give the book another chance, since I was suffering a lingering hangover from my latest Pynchon binge when I cracked its spine.  But it did get me thinking a bit about magical realism, so I thought I'd jot down some thoughts on that subject while they were still fresh in my mind.

In a recent interview, the New Statesman asked Jonathan Lethem if he considers himself a "magical realist."  Lethem's response was both pithy and hilarious: "I've always resisted the phrase, finding both terms - 'magic' and 'realist' - shaky at best, with unwelcome or unexamined assumptions camped out all around them. Some of this reaction is deeply rooted: as a child I hated the whole disingenuous kabuki of stage magicians. I identified with 'Hot Town, Summer in the City' but not 'Do You Believe In Magic?'"  Although I disagree with what he goes on to say about Marquez, something about this statement resonates with me (and it's not just the image of a pint-size Lethem critically assessing birthday party entertainers and the oeuvre of the Lovin' Spoonful).  "Magic" or "magical" are words that, when applied to fiction, do indeed summon up "unwelcome" associations: of pure escapism, of children's books, of deus ex machina, of "fate" or "destiny" subbing in for legitimate character motivations.  The same slipshod approach to storytelling that scared me off of superhero films as a genre until recently has many intellectuals rejecting "fantastic fiction" sight unseen.  A friend of mine recently mentioned a former professor who refused to rent the Lord of the Rings films because he wouldn't watch anything "that has unicorns in it."  Though his students explained that unicorns were in fact not in evidence in any of the three films, he would not be dissuaded.

The Fellowship of the OMG PONIES!!!!1

Yet magic is a primordial force in storytelling, one that predates anything resembling "realism" in the collective imagination of mankind.  Tales of God or gods, of talking animals, of heroes on unlikely quests, form the foundation on which our current literature rests.  A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to see a magic show at Proteus Gowanus art space in Brooklyn, where Acep Hale, street performer extraordinaire, integrated his flawless execution of classic tricks (no "disingenuous kabuki" here) with a lecture about the role of the shaman in historical narratives from ancient times to the present.  The shaman's arc -- a descent into an underworld of some kind, a reforming of the person, and a re-emergence changed -- is one of the most basic stories we as humans tell ourselves, and it accounts at least in part for our fascination with figures from Harry Houdini to Jesus Christ.  But a story doesn't need a shamanic character to take its cues from the magical.  Even superficially plausible modern fiction (like the later epiphany stories of Ray Carver, the family epics of Faulkner, the degradations of Mary Gaitskill, etc.) is often structured in ways that intentionally evoke myths, religious parables, and even fairy tales.

So why is it that when magic is literalized in a story, it often gives the reader pause?  The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake offered me some clues.

Sadness centers on an ordinary young girl, Rose, who at age nine, discovers she has a magical power: the ability to taste the emotions of the chef in whatever food she consumes.  I haven't read Bender's last novel, but her short fiction often centers around characters whose emotional states are similarly made manifest.  (For example, in her story "Marzipan," a man who loses his father wakes up with a hole in his stomach the "size of a soccer ball"; his wife gives birth to an old lady who looks and acts just like her departed mom.)  These stories read as metaphors, smart and small.  Yet in Sadness, Bender extends her conceit for nearly 300 pages.  As the story progresses, Rose comes to prefer pre-packaged food, created in factories, which, oddly enough, she distinguishes first and foremost by their geographic locations: Louisiana, New Jersey, Kentucky.  She discovers her mother's infidelity from a platter of roast beef, and ultimately finds work in a French restaurant where the food is "beautiful."  But unlike, say, Dickens, Bender isn't obsessed with the sensuality of food: for a book with "cake" in the title, her descriptions of flavors, aromas, textures are cursory at best.  When Rose embarks on a tour of LA area restaurants (seeking that elusive thing, a truly happy meal), what we get mostly amounts to a list.  And Bender's not obsessed with cooking either, its rituals and necessities and jargon, the way it carves up time: in fact, except for the initial cake-baking scene, the most memorable evocation of food preparation is in a short description of a factory with a "no touch" system where enchiladas slide off a conveyor belt without ever encountering a human hand. 

I think what interests Bender most is the psychology of the characters.  But that psychology is glossed over, too.  The problem here, as I see it, isn't the magic but the realism.  It's clear from the way she writes Rose that Bender wants her to be a relatable character -- ordinary, likable, familiar -- living in a world very like our own.  Rose loves a handsome older boy, a friend of her brother's; she worries about popularity and her parents; she learns to drive.  Bender makes a point of telling us that Rose has no particular interests, nothing to set her apart; the great tragedy of her young life, along with her parents' troubled marriage, is that her brother is the family genius, tormented and beloved, while she's only average.  Bender also endows her with a magical power, one that would, realistically, make anyone she described it to think she was crazy, or lying, or both.  It's a power that disorders her relationship with food, that allows her to read minds, a power that was granted by an unknown force or that results from a profound, unheard-of mutation in her genes.  Yet somehow, Rose does not fear she's going insane; she doesn't use her ability to manipulate those around her; she doesn't research the phenomena and find others of her kind; she does not become convinced that her superpower makes her superior to her peers, called for some peculiar mission, or inferior, cursed by an unseen Creator.  She doesn't go to great lengths to keep it secret, but, until the final pages, she also doesn't press the issue with anyone who would feel compelled to react: her parents, a teacher, a psychiatrist.  (At one point she mentions it to a distracted school nurse, but they speak at comical cross-purposes; her one childhood freak-out is easily resolved when she eats a bowl of chicken soup.)  She does not even become anorexic or obese.  Bender does not allow the magic to bear meaningfully on the realism, and so the magic stays removed from it -- abstract, fanciful, and therefore tough to swallow, if you'll pardon the pun.

Because, as I said, I'm not reviewing this book here, I won't delve into the subplots about Rose's brother's disappearances, her grandma's care packages, or her father's fear of hospitals, and I won't try to address the overall structure or prose.  I'd also like to add that Bender is a highly original writer, and I'm not coming to any final conclusions about the novel just yet.  But I will say that it's this kind of magic that gives me pause as a reader.  I will accept anything in the world of the story: an apocalypse, dream logic, clones, time travel, a tiger loose in Manhattan, a boy who can fly, yes, even unicorns.  (Thank you, Haruki Murakami.)  All that I ask is that the author stay as fascinated with her own magic for long enough to explore its natural conclusions.

Chronic City, pt. 3: Why So Serious?

"When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death -- how characters act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate... (I suspect one of the reasons that fantasy and science fiction appeal so much to younger readers is that, when the space and time have been altered to allow characters to travel easily anywhere throughout the continuum and thus escape physical dangers and timepiece inevitabilities, mortality is so seldom an issue.)"  -- Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner (Introduction)

Over the weekend, I was thinking a good bit about this statement, and how sneakily true I've found it to be over the last few years.  In my post on violent movies, I talked a little about what I saw as violence's power to make characters real, or more precisely, corporeal, to place the viewer in their living bodies -- to shift the focus from what happened (good or evil, right or wrong) to the necessarily more complex realm of how it happened.  But, more even than violence, I think that the role of death in a work of fiction can lend characters this reality, or conversely, rob them of it.

After I read Chronic City, I struggled to articulate what made Perkus Tooth so real to me as a character.  A larger and perhaps more interesting question, though, is why anything in the world of that novel felt as significant to me as it did.  Chronic City presents a landscape burgeoning with pop culture references, and satire, and stoner humor, and sex.  Eagles and tigers render characters homeless; an installation artist digs big holes in the ground.  And Lethem is well aware of the hilarity of all this, playing even poignant moments for laughs: for example, when Perkus's heart is breaking, he "blame[s] the nearest cultural reference he [can] find"; when he and Chase are fighting over a burger waitress, he refuses to celebrate Thanksgiving, ostensibly "out of respect to Sacheen Littlefeather."   The epic quest for the grail-like chaldron takes them to -- where else? -- ebay.  In a certain way, the book sets itself up to be dismissed (a "baked Seinfeld," as one reviewer put it). 

And yet, from the beginning, death circles this novel, just as the birds circle Insteadman's church spire, just as Janice Trumball's doomed space station orbits the earth.  When Chase first meets Perkus, he observes, "With Tooth's turtle's posture and the utter slackness of his being... I could have taken him for elderly... [but] he was in his early forties, barely older than me.  I'd mistaken him for old because I'd taken him for important."  Perkus's fragility, and his failure, are the open secret of this novel, the first and truest fact of him.  And though his quests and his brilliance and the bizarre accumulated complexity of his life and relationships for a time overshadow this in the reader's mind, it's his vulnerability that subconsciously sticks.

The same is true for the other characters.  At the funeral where Oona and Chase initially pursue their love affair, Chase describes "the shameful survivor's lust I've known to sometimes wash over me at funerals, the giddy, guilty apprehension of one's own continuing lucky freedom to feast and fuck and defecate, to waste hours flipping cable channels watching fragments of movies or half solving crossword puzzles then tossing them aside, to do pretty well anything but sit and honor the memory of another whose lucky freedom had run out."  When he and Oona flee the funeral together, they are fleeing death.  Yet the two of them are no less mortal than Perkus or, for that matter, the now-deceased Junrow.  When they visit the Urban Fjord, a child asks Chase if he's the same boy from the sitcom reruns; "You look old," he says, to which Chase replies, "I am old."  And Oona?  "Her frame wasn't strong enough to carry around a coat heavy enough to warm her."  Neither of them are indestructible.

Throughout the novel, the characters seek to halt the inexorable forward motion of time through language, argument, art.  Oona keeps Janice Trumball alive through the letters she ghostwrites; Biller removes the fact of Brando's death from the star's Wikipedia page; Insteadman's younger, immortal self is preserved on VHS as if under glass.  And marijuana, their substance of choice, is known for its strangely slowing effect on one's perception of time.  This is not your teenage brother's stoner novel.  Only in forgetting the past, however temporarily, can these characters ignore the looming fact of a future where they'll have vanished into complete insignificance.

As Heidegger says, death is the essential fact of one's existence; though someone might sacrifice himself for my survival, no one can die my death for me.  That death is my own.  On further reflection, I think it is Perkus's death, more than anything else, that provides the center, the grounding, to his vast and complicated character, just as the presence of death does the same for the larger world of this novel.  In his descriptions of Perkus, narrator Insteadman creates, at moments, an illusion of the infinite: "[Perkus's] mind's landscape was epic, dotted with towering figures like Easter Island heads," he notes upon their first meeting.  Yet what ultimately defines Perkus, renders him tragic, is his finitude.  Perkus never knows romantic love; he is a pawn in the conspiracies of others; his body is falling apart; and even his verbosity, his intelligence, once met its limit: "It's like when I tried to write a book, Chase.  Practically every day I had to remind myself what it was even about, why I'd even started it!" he confesses in their final conversation.  Insteadman wants us to mistake Perkus for important, for larger than life, just as he did; he wants to immortalize Perkus.  But it's Perkus's unimportance that brings him to life -- and makes his death heartbreaking.

I'm not interested in quibbling over genre terms.  Some people have described Chronic City as science-fiction.  It's also fucking hilarious.  But, when I return to the Pynchon quote, I can't help but think of it first and foremost as "serious fiction."

Chronic City, pt. 2: Perkus Tooth Owns Your Soul

Characters have always been the most enigmatic part of fiction writing to me. David Mamet once said, "There are no characters. There are just words on a page," and when I first heard that quote I found it liberating. It's easy to forget that writing is, by its very nature, made not of dreams or souls of feelings, but of words. There is nothing hidden: where would it hide? Everything that happens in a story, happens on the page.

Fair enough. Yet characters, even more than a novel's static images, seem capable of wriggling free from the books that give them life; stepping, like the cartoon characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, from their fictive world into our own. If a character only exists in the writer's words, how is it that we feel we can remove him from the specific scenes dramatized in the book, that we can imagine the "outtakes," the wealth of ordinary days that stretch between the novel's oases of drama? And even if we loosen this definition of character slightly, saying that the character is defined not just by the specific words the author used to capture him but, in a larger sense, by his role in the story, how is it that we feel we can remove him from those circumstances and speak meaningfully of the same entity? To do such a thing is to be like the Little Prince, who imagines a real sheep living inside a drawing of a box.  Which is to say what I'm suggesting is impossible. But it's nevertheless true, at least true for me, of the way I encounter characters in fiction.  And it was particularly true of the way I encountered Perkus Tooth, one of the primary subjects of Jonathan Lethem's unqualified masterpiece, Chronic City.

Perkus Tooth is a mouth. He eats, he smokes, he talks, talks, talks. He is a consumer of music, film, pop culture, a ravenous devourer of information. To love him is to love the sound of his voice; his friend Chase declares, "Oh I missed him, and his ridiculous language. I wanted to hear Perkus speak it again." Like the novel's Gnuppets, Perkus only exists from the waist up – or more accurately, from the neck up. Headaches afflict him, hiccups destroy him. When he finally finds a soulmate of sorts in the pit bull Ava in the book's final chapters, Lethem makes the basis of their kinship clear: "...from the first instant, before even grasping his instinctive fear, Perkus understood that Ava did her thinking with her mouth."

Perkus Tooth is a knight.  He quests for a grail, the fabled chaldron; he loves chastely; he devotes himself loyally to his kings (Brando, the Stones) and even to the haphazard alliances of his friendships – Les Non-Dupes, the Coalition of the Chaldron. A monster, the novel's "tiger," besets his city, destroys his home, slays a woman he loves. Yet he lives always by his code.

Perkus Tooth is a lazy eye, roving rudderless from subject to subject.  Perkus Tooth is a critic, defined by reactions rather than actions. Perkus Tooth is a headache, a brain filled to rupturing. Perkus Tooth is "Shattered." Perkus Tooth is a fictional character in a metafictional novel, a character clad in iconography who speaks in riddles and allusions. And yet at the same time, Perkus Tooth is irreducibly, wholly, unmistakably alive: a little man in a crushed velvet suit, no more and no less. But how does Lethem accomplish this? How is it that Perkus, laden with so many symbols, does not get buried under their weight but rather flourishes, becomes more completely himself? How is it that I feel like I now know Perkus, despite the fact that he does not, and never will, exist -- how is it that I can imagine him sitting on my couch, analyzing the finer points of Brando's performance in The Island of Doctor Moreau? What is it, for lack of a better phrase, that "brings him to life"?

So. Perkus's verbal tic is a segue, and with good reason: each time Lethem has gotten a point across, each time a motif in Perkus's behavior has become almost predictable, stable in its meaning – from the brand of weed he smokes to the reasons behind his frequent visits to Jackson Hole – Lethem changes the subject, the focus of his prose. He complicates Perkus. He keeps showing him from new angles, in new conjunctions. Though Perkus does change over the course of the book, his real depth comes not from what develops but from what is revealed to have been there all along. Like a conspiracy, he connects improbable players, positioned worlds apart. He is Richard Abneg's loser friend, Oona Laszlo's former boss (and romantic reject), Chase Insteadman's mentor, Biller's library, Lindsay's best customer (probably Watt's, too). Perkus is a madman and condescendingly sane ("A dog doesn't need a stereo," he tells Insteadman), a ringmaster and a recluse, a paranoiac and a naif. Throughout the novel, Chase Insteadman as narrator tries again and again to encapsulate him in metaphor, including some of the ones I've listed above, and yet Perkus resists every time.  As readers, we find ourselves in constant conversation with him, without hope of a final summing-up.

Perhaps Lethem himself says it best, when he writes:

"...it’s right to remind a reader that a character is a chimera, a shadow, a glance, far less in substance than even the shallowest human being who ever lived, it’s equally true that most characters are dwelling-places for dozens of human lives, containers for much more than a description of a single person."

Maybe the reason this character is so singular a creation is because, paradoxically, Lethem doesn't try to pin him down. The symbols that make up Perkus Tooth point in all directions, to literature, to New York City, to the personal and to the public. His obsessions have made parts of our world his -- and in the same way, as we piece him together, as we make sense of him, he becomes part of us. Lethem may claim that he is "incapable, with words and sentences, with speculations, of stealing anyone else’s soul," but he was capable of borrowing mine for long enough that I saw myself in Perkus Tooth's asymmetrical eyes, looking back.

Chronic City, pt. 1: Almost Like Being in Love

Much has been made of the "bro-mance," so popular in Hollywood of late: the stories of male friendships, often fortified with a diet of Bud and bud, platonic but more potent at times than the competing ties of sexuality and romance.  The films of Judd Apatow, Pineapple Express, Old School, the Harold and Kumar franchise, Stepbrothers, Jay and Silent Bob -- the list goes on.  Despite their box office success, these movies have been called, variously, everything from homophobic to homoerotic, not to mention misogynistic, scatological, and crude, and have been slammed more than once for celebrating relationships based on male self-indulgence and escapism, for thinking it's funny when husbands skip out on their dishwashing duties to smoke pot together behind the garage.  Though I take issue with the tone of this criticism -- lighten up, mom -- it is true that these movies are at times dismissive, or at least glib, in their treatment of female characters, and that all too often, they are disappointingly stupid. 

But at a deeper level, the movie "bro-mance" is simply a popularization of a thread long present in American storytelling, from the buddy road trip of On the Road to those two marriage-crashers, Nick Carraway and Gatsby, to the laugh-out-loud hijinks of Huck and Jim, utterly companionable even when pissed at each other.  Friendship, though less glamorous than true love and less sexy than, well, sex, is a subject that in my opinion lends itself well to long-form narrative exploration, because its stages and heartbreaks and sheer importance remain mostly unarticulated in our culture; it's necessary to write about, if only to explain it to ourselves.  We may have weddings and anniversaries, Valentines and housewarming parties to celebrate new developments in our love lives, but how do we celebrate our friends?  Usually we don't, and we only realize how much they meant to us when death -- or life -- permanently separates us.

So, when I say that Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem is a masterpiece of bro-mance, a wildly ambitious stoner novel, an epic of two guys on a couch, I mean no contradiction.  Lethem has taken on a vast challenge in painting the portrait of this friendship, and doing it (unlike so many of his aforementioned contemporaries in Hollywood) with unerring sensitivity, imagination, and depth.  It's difficult for me to even begin writing about this book, in fact, because despite the fabulist slight-of-hand that renders his Lower Manhattan invisible behind a gray cloud and sets loose eagles and what might be a tiger on the rest of the island, this book and especially its characters felt so real to me, so true and vibrant and achingly alive, it's almost impossible for me to admit that they were constructed by an author out of mere words.  I'm going to write a series of posts about the book -- probably two or three -- as my thoughts continue to percolate, but for the time being, I can only say that Chase Insteadman is right: Perkus Tooth's friendship (and ergo, his apartment) is a "magic zone," an enchanted place I never wanted to leave.  And if that's not love, I don't know what is.