I am a double agent for the KGB, pt. 4

One of my favorite authors, Charles Baxter, has a new book out.  Luckily for me, I got a chance to review it here:  http://kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/gryphon

I am a double agent for the KGB, pt. 3

Just thought I'd mention that my review of Patrick Somerville's masterful and amazing short story collection, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, is now up on the site for the KGB Bar lit journal.  Check it out here: http://www.kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/the_universe_in_miniature_in_miniature

Child Neglect: Some Thoughts on Emma Donoghue's Room

Kids say the darndest things -- especially in contemporary literary fiction, where they have a tendency to shoot their mouths off on every subject from 9/11 to their own rapes and murders.  As a device, child-narration can be tough to pull off, but when it works, it's equally tough to resist.  In his introduction to the Vintage Book of Amnesia, Jonathan Lethem cites amnesiacs as a natural subject for fiction, since invented characters, by their very nature, come to us without pasts, assembling themselves before our very eyes: "Conjured out of the void by a thin thread of sentences, every fictional assertion exists as a speck on a background of consummate blankness."  Child characters are the same way, newly arrived and bewildered in a realm of unexplored possibility -- with an added bonus, too: as young creatures with still-developing minds, they are by nature curious, full of wonder and energy and the potential for intense joy or sadness over the most seemingly insignificant things.

Yet, when child-narration succeeds, it succeeds not because the child in question stays a blank, an innocent, but because she rapidly acquires her own specificity: because we see the adult person within her forming and transforming, struggling to get out.  In his 2005 masterpiece Tideland, filmmaker Terry Gilliam tells the story of a lost child, Jeliza-Rose, who finds herself orphaned in a run-down farmhouse on a featureless plain when both of her parents die from drug addiction.  Despite these dire circumstances, she subsists on her imaginings, and her beautiful visions of sentient Barbie doll heads, talking squirrels, floods, and rabbit holes share equal time with the setting's increasingly grisly realities (her neighbors include an overzealous taxidermist, and the subject of a botched lobotomy with a stash of dynamite under his bed).  In a wonderfully weird introduction to the picture, Gilliam explains, that he's finally found his inner child, "and she's a little girl."  It's clear from watching the movie that this is true.  Even amid disaster and horror, Jeliza-Rose quickly reveals she is no tabula rasa for viewers to project their own child-selves onto.  Like Gilliam himself, she has a distinct, idiosyncratic sensibility that would be recognizable no matter what world we saw refracted through her eyes.

It isn't just what she sees, but the way she sees it.

Emma Donoghue's novel Room starts with a similar premise.  The novel's narrator is Jack, a five year old boy, who is growing up in a grotesquely disturbing home environment: an eleven-by-eleven shed in a maniac's backyard.  His mother, we learn, was kidnapped and imprisoned there at age nineteen, and since then, she's been raped almost daily by the psychopath (referred to only as "Old Nick," not his real name), who keeps her alive on a meager diet of frozen foods, canned goods, and pain pills.  But, like Jeliza-Rose, he's never known a normal life, so to him, "Room" is the world: magical at some moments, frightening at others, but never monolithically vile.

In my opinion, the best moments of this novel unfold in this setting, a place at once otherworldly and plainly, grittily observed.  It's clear that the story is set in the contemporary era -- Jack watches Dora the Explorer on TV -- yet the touches of pop culture, rather than grounding us, make the situation seem even more surreal and impossibly removed.  Room is a realm where the traditional categories of realism versus fantasy no longer clearly apply.  Divorced from the context of larger civilization, Jack and his mother are forced to construct their own society, their own rituals and meaning, and although these behaviors often seem escapist and deluded, confronting their daily deprivations would not just be unlivable for the mother, but incomprehensible for Jack.  Instead, she teaches him to live in life as they know it, without an inkling of anything beyond the contents of their cork-lined cell.

A person's world is defined, we begin to see in Room, not by objective "truth" or even the sum total of knowledge available to humans somewhere, but by the knowledge passed down by authority figures within his particular community.  The whole of North America was once unknown to Europeans; the whole of Europe was once unknown to North Americans.  And Jack's mother doesn't speak Spanish, so to Jack, Spanish is not a "real language."  For him, food or books or toys don't exist until they get inside Room; the idea of their manufacture or purchase is just as mind-boggling as a time before the universe's creation.  He has no idea that Old Nick's nightly visits to his mom's mattress had anything to do with his own conception.  And fairy tales are just as real as anything on the evening news.  This is not magical realism, but reality as the speaker knows it.  And, if Donoghue lingered for longer in Room, allowing Jack to engage with this reality as he grows up (or even just grows a little older), we would come to learn just as much about the particularities of his character as we would about a kid, say, in the Middle Ages, who treats bloodletting as a hated inevitability in service of a greater good (like modern orthodontics), but who still has other qualities, other traits and interests, that make him distinct.

Unfortunately, just as Jack is beginning to come into focus, rebelling against certain of his mom's restrictions (tellingly, his first disobedient act is to come out of the wardrobe where he sleeps at night to take a good look at his father/captor) while continuing to accord with others, Donoghue suddenly moves the plot in a whole new direction.  Jack's mom begins to dismantle the ideas she's imparted to him since birth, fessing up that other boys and girls, sky and trees, are not "just TV," but real things, just past the door.  And SPOILER ALERT, she's planning an escape.

It's at this point that, for me, Jack as a character begins to recede.  His first experiences with the outside world, including a chase sequence where he leaps out of a moving truck, are page-turning stuff, and Donoghue makes a good point by showing him as more terrified and homesick than anything else as he encounters people and situations that just weeks earlier would have seemed as strange to him as taking a trip to Mars.  But after a few pages of listening to him wax nostalgic about Rug and Sundaytreat (the one special item they got to ask Old Nick for each week), I realized, with a sinking feeling, that Donoghue really had no idea who this kid was.  Jack's actions and interactions, his desires and fears, are profoundly predictable, scars left by his confinement.  But there's nothing more personal under them, no sensibility at work that we could recognize even if his experiences had been different.

And so Donoghue switches gears.  Jack becomes a passive observer of his mother's struggle to re-acclimate herself, and the story suddenly becomes something I'd flip past on Lifetime.  In what's easily the worst scene I've read in awhile, Jack throws a temper tantrum just before his mother is supposed to be interviewed for TV -- so she brings him with her (to which I must say: WTFFF?), and he sits, silently listening and hardly commenting even in his narration, as she delivers seven and a half pages of exposition and directly stated thematic material.  This is a disaster for the novel, not just because of the laziness of the fictive technique, but because it betrays the novel's central conceit: that Donoghue is at least attempting to relate this from the perspective of a plausible five-year-old.

OK, I get that Jack is smart, and that he's been trained to parrot back what people say on talk shows (it was part of how his mother taught him vocabulary back in Room).  But being able to parrot back what a person said is a far cry from understanding it, or even finding it interesting.  And, with the swirling newness of everything that would go into this event -- the lights, the cameras, the wires, the boom mike, the tech guys, the clipboards, the makeup -- I find it completely absurd to suggest that Jack would sit there, attentively listening to every word spoken, without ever becoming distracted or having a strong reaction of any kind.  Donoghue has completely lost interest in him as a character, and it really fucking shows.  If he were a real child, the treatment the author gives him in this scene would be akin to forgetting to pick him up at day care and leaving him there for four days.

The book never recovers from this huge misstep, in my opinion, not even with its lyrical tearjerker ending (though I'll admit that passage, a callback to Jack's mother's favorite storybook Goodnight Moon, is crudely effective even in its obviousness).  And once I shut the cover, I found myself wondering why it all had to go so awry.  Donoghue created a wonderful kid in the early chapters.  It's just criminal that she let him die of total neglect.

In the Haus

I do not fall in love easily.  There are many authors I like and respect, many authors who have distinct voices, who competently and intelligently ply the tools of their craft.  There are many other authors whose office chairs I wish came equipped with a remote-controlled emergency eject button, but that's the subject for another post.  My point is that I am not easily bewitched.  My first response to narrative is, generally, analytical, sober, even critical.  I love to lose myself in the dream of fiction, but I usually know when I'm asleep, and when I awaken, I'm ready with an interpretation.  A handful of times in my adult life, though, I've encountered authors who left me giddy, speechless, with little more than stammered profanity at my disposal to describe their work's impact on my ravished sensibilities.  One of these authors I had the opportunity to see at the Brooklyn Book Festival last weekend, and the experience sent me tumbling head over heels all over again.  I'm speaking, of course, of Steven Millhauser.

My love affair with Millhauser's work began when I was in college, when I mentioned to a professor that I was writing a series of slightly fantastical short stories about childhood, but intended for adult readers and with darkly adult themes.  "You should check out Edwin Mullhouse," he suggested.  "I'm not familiar with his work," I replied, feeling chronically underread; up until the previous day, I'd thought Evelyn Waugh was a woman.  "Oh, no, Edwin Mullhouse isn't the writer -- well, he is, but he's fictional."  "Wait, the writer is fictional?  Like a pseudonym?"  "No, no, the writer is Steven Millhauser."  "So, wait, what's the title?"  This who's-on-first went on for awhile, and I soon found myself in the library, searching for a book titled Steven Millhouse by Edwin Mullhauser.  The pretension annoyed me -- in my opinion, only comedians on sitcoms were allowed to give their characters such close variations on their own names -- as did the nerve of this man, who back in the 1970's had already plagiarized what I thought was my own daring and original conceit: childhood recast as adulthood in uncanny miniature.  Finally I found the book, and sitting on the floor between the shelves, flipped to the first page, eager to dismiss this pompous usurper, to parry his vision with a sharper one of my own.  My professor had compared him to Nabokov, but, I reminded myself, one imitated Nabokov at his own peril; one always forgot the visual, the only weapon keen enough to cut loose from those brambles of language.  I read, "I met Jeffrey Cartwright in the sixth grade... I can remember nothing physical about him except his tremendous eyeglasses, which seemed to conceal his eyes; somewhere in the dark attic of memory I have preserved an image of him turning his head and revealing two round lenses aglow with light, the eyes invisible, as if he were some fabulous creature who lived in a cave or well."  I murmured to myself, "Oh fucking kill me now."  Millhauser was the fabulous creature, possessed of dark and unholy powers, and by the end of the first paragraph, I'd handed him my bloody and still-beating heart.

Before Edwin Mullhouse, I had never understood the urge, possessed by characters in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, to memorize a book in its entirety.  I loved Pynchon's prose, but it was to me then as towering and mysterious as scripture, something from another realm.  The sentences in Edwin Mullhouse, on the other hand, were ordinary things, bejeweled with precision.  I fell in love with them individually, reading them aloud, out of context, to anyone who would listen.  Describing a mischevious little girl, Millhauser wrote, "Her favorite dress was a short bright red one with puffed short sleeves, from which her short solid arms hung down alertly, as if she were perpetually prepared to snatch your crayons."  Describing Edwin Mullhouse's grandmother visiting, he wrote, "After the first day, when she talked to Mr. and Mrs. Mullhouse about arthritis, rheumatism, and rising prices, Grandma Mullhouse spent all her time with Edwin... playing Go Fish and Old Maid, making vast bowls of custard or huge yellow cakes with orange icing, and telling stories about the man who thought she was thirty-eight or the man who thought she was thirty-five or the time she used to give piano lessons before her fingers got crooked or the time she was thrown from a merry-go-round halfway across the park and landed on her back and stood up without a scratch; it would have killed most people."  Of a winter day chez Mullhouse, he wrote, "On the shady side of the house the icicles hung hard and frozen, but they were less lovely than the sunny icicles, shining with dissolution."  His ability to specify tiny details that most people wouldn't even have noticed, to wrap an entire character or stage of life into a list, seemed sorcerous not because it came out of nowhere; to the contrary, the very familiarity of his materials was what made his sleight-of-hand dazzle me.  Once when I was a small child, a birthday party magician put a rubber clown nose on his face and squeaked it; he then pinched my own ordinary nose and made it squeak too.  Edwin Mullhouse released the magic power from everyday things in much the same way.

I did not read any more Millhauser for a long time after that.  I was afraid, on one hand, of him disappointing me, and on the other hand, of him not disappointing me enough.  I'd never before encountered an author so capable of influencing my writing style, drawing me, line by line, under his spell.  Though the titles of his other books enticed me, some part of me wanted to resist.  I held off until one day when, during the following summer and on vacation with my parents, I received a call from my boyfriend.  He'd tried to check Edwin Mullhouse out from the library, but they hadn't had it in stock; instead he'd gotten a story collection called The Knife Thrower.  "You have to read it," he said.

I read it, and then I read it again, and then I read everything else Millhauser has ever published.  It's all terrific, but The Knife Thrower might actually be Millhauser's masterpiece.  It's twelve stories and with the possible exception of one ("The Way Out") every single piece is a skull-melting, life-altering volcanic eruption of sheer literary force.  Millhauser is obsessed with escalation, the way that, inch by inch, an artist's mind or a community succumbs to its own excesses.  In The Knife Thrower, three separate characters vanish, or nearly vanish, into the sky's gulping blue ("Flying Carpets," "Claire de Lune," "Balloon Flight, 1870"); ordinary settings, like a department store or a suburban town past dark, open into deeper and deeper chambers within themselves, becoming self-enclosed worlds, unknowable from the outside.  But the stand-out piece in the collection -- if such a thing can exist in a collection that left me so overwhelmed with pleasure I frequently forgot to breathe between paragraphs -- is the modestly titled "A Visit," an understated short story that achingly reveals the uncharted loneliness of so much of adult life, as well as the unsolvable riddle of romantic love: that's all I'll say about it here.

Millhauser read from The Knife Thrower at the Brooklyn Book Festival last Sunday, from a passage in his story "Paradise Park."  The story concerns a Coney Island amusement park that, over time, develops from a family-friendly day trip destination into something straight out of the mind of Hieronymus Bosch.  In the passage Millhauser read, about a level in the many-tiered pleasure playground nicknamed "Devil's Park,"  he described children dressed as concubines, a lover's leap that serves as the site of multiple suicides, and a roller coaster that plunges to its destruction again and again in a dark field.

Welcome to the pleasure dome.

The other panelists looked on, aghast and admiring, respectively; the mood of the audience, like the moods of the audiences in so many of his pieces, was awestruck and more than a little unsettled: his words whizzed by our ears too close, like so many coldly glittering daggers.  But as much as I loved the piece, what I loved more was something he said during the Q&A session that followed.  When asked by the moderator if there's ever a time when he's gone "too far" in his writing, Millhauser thought for a moment and then responded that he sees fiction as a seduction, a gradual casting-off of veils.  There's no such thing as "too far," only "too soon."

This statement encapsulated perfectly what it is I love most about Millhauser's writing.  His prose is decadent, forever reaching toward voluptuous release -- but what makes it truly compelling is his restraint.  Perhaps the reason I so love his work is that, in the tenderness and care it takes in presenting each image, each rhetorical turn, it seems to love me back.

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.

Find the Fish

I first saw Monty Python's The Meaning of Life when I was a freshman in college.  At that point of my life, I saw profundities everywhere: in pretentious conversations over late-night nachos, in the garish merchandise of the local Wal-Mart, in endless, debauched theme parties, in the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood, viewed through the nostalgic haze of grainy VHS.  I roamed the campus in a bowling shirt with the word "COCKTAILS" emblazoned on the back in neon letters, waving one finger in the air, spouting revelations.  I wore sunglasses always, even at night, as though the brilliance of the world was too much for me.  I was insufferable.  I was studying philosophy for the first time, and its lunatic sheen was all over everything; the big questions were not only apparent but urgent, and I looked for answers wherever I could.  It comes as no surprise, then, that I found some of them in a musical sketch comedy from the 1980's featuring, among other things, a singing man in a pink tuxedo who lives in a refrigerator.

What did come as a surprise was that, when I watched this movie the other night for the first time in several years, it still resonated.  The Meaning of Life may be a comedy, but its title is no lie.  It really is about the meaning of life.

In his 1983 New York Times review of the film, Vincent Canby writes, "The Meaning of Life is a monumental revue, the 'Ben Hur' of sketch films, which is to say that it's a tiny bit out of proportion, something like a Brooklyn Bridge constructed to span a bathtub."  The New York Times is usually wrong, but this is worse than usual, and I don't care if I am a lifetime too late in saying so.  The Meaning of Life is a comedy, true, but its scope is exactly equal to its ambition, which is as vast and monumental as the stone tablet upon which its title initially appears.  The silliness of The Meaning of Life does not undercut the points it makes; the silliness is the point.  The film's view of human existence is that it is inherently, unrelentingly absurd.  The only meaning to be found is subjective, and pitiably small when seen in any larger context.

The film centers on one of life's central contradictions: the schism between our desire for abstract, timeless wisdom and truth, and the nasty reality of our physical bodies – the things that are, after all, actually alive.  The film is a virtual catalogue of bodily absurdity: messy afterbirth, sperm, vaginal fluids, dismemberment, slippery organs, menses, and vomit, lots and lots of vomit.  Fortunately for us in the audience, the scatological is only hinted at (by a phalanx of men in lavatories during the musical number "Every Sperm is Sacred"), but the point is clear: the meaning of life is inseparable from the stuff of it, the embarrassing "lowbrow" details that are, in fact, the essential facts of every living thing.  When Eric Idle sings, "Isn't It Awfully Nice to Have a Penis?" or a horde of topless women chase Graham Chapman off a cliff, their breasts swinging in slo-mo, it seems incongruous with the film's ostensible subject, but it isn't at all.  Sex, actual, sleazy, real sex, with all its awkward physicality, neurosis, and fantasy, is the source of everything here; during the galaxy song, even the universe forms the shape of a naked pregnant woman and spreads her legs.  Much more incongruous with the "meaning of life" in the film is in fact religion, whose empty platitudes at their best bear not at all on reality ("Oh Lord, you are so big, so absolutely huge...") and at their worst deny it (as with the Roman Catholics' teachings on contraception).  Patriotism and the military don't fare much better here – everyone has something better to do than "marching up and down the square" – nor do any dogmas that allow us to avert our gaze from life in the flesh, and all its grotesque complications.

I also take exception to Canby's claim that this is a "loose collection of sketches."  Although this certainly isn't a narrative in any traditional sense, it's connected by much more than a "theme of sorts."  Images recur, develop, and, at times, take on an almost nightmarish significance, as in the films of auteurs like Bunuel and David Lynch.  On this viewing, I was struck in particular by the fish and the way their story is woven throughout.  In the beginning, we witness the death of one fish (who's served up for dinner in a restaurant), and the philosophical musing that this incites in his mourning companions.  In the end, we meet Mr. Death himself when a dinner party is poisoned by salmon mousse.  The connection isn't linear, but it's also not accidental.  And perhaps the weirdest moment in this movie – the "Middle of the Film," when a man with Dr. Seuss arms and his tranvestite companion taunt us with riddles – seems to be understood by these fish viewers, though certainly not by us.

If one's ideas are funny, are they somehow less true or important?  I don't think so.  Serious thought and humor are far from opposites; in fact, sometimes the latter is the only way to express the former in a work of art.  It's too bad that laughs are so often an excuse for not paying attention to what's really happening onscreen.  At this rate, we'll never find the fish.

The Mid-Day Report

If a short story is shorter than a novella, and a novella is the kid sister of the novel, then it stands to reason that there should be something that dwarfs all of these: a novellum?  A novelot?  Though we may not have a name for the form, that doesn't stop Pynchon from writing them.  It's not just the length I'm referring to here: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, for example, is hardly shorter than one of Pynchon's tomes, and the Harry Potter series, viewed as a single work, is double the length, if not triple, of any one of Mr. P's masterpieces.  But I'd hardly claim Clarke or Rowling's books exist outside the category of Mansfield Park and A Tale of Two Cities.  Their plots obey familiar rules; their structures fall into patterns the average novel-reader can easily predict.  The fact that they can be serialized easily, as multiple volumes or as a series of films or miniseries, reveal them to be nothing more than a series of friendly, approachable fictive units, sitting atop one another's shoulders, clad in a stiltwalker's clothes.

Pynchon, though, is different.  Just as a giant is distinguished not only by his height, but by his curious phrenology, the otherworldly proportions he displays in his limbs and hands and feet, so too are Pynchon's novels marked even at the level of the chapter, the paragraph, the sentence, as the mutants that they are.

An artist's rendering of AGAINST THE DAY alongside two other novels

As readers may remember, I embarked on my ill-advised journey into the giant's mountain cave back in December, when I began reading AGAINST THE DAY.  I am sad to report that after two full months, I am only halfway through the novel(lum), and no closer to unlocking many of its mysteries. 

AGAINST THE DAY is not just a historical novel, but a novel about the past: about innocence, about boys' adventure novels, about the legacy of parents on their children.  And about time travel, let's not forget that.  We move through its pages like these ghostly visitors from a tainted, darker future, unable to quite touch the characters who -- with their blazing red hair or their uncorrupted sensual passions or their inescapable missions or their half-mystical scientific theories -- seem to fly through the world fueled only by air and wonder.

What is this book about?  Icelandic spar.  Revenge.  Two women named Estrella.  Anarchy, dynamite.  A family of magicians.  A dog who reads.  The World's Fair.  A zeppelin.  A harmonica academy.  Venice.  A vehicle that explores under sand.  Eternal youth.  Photography.  An avalanche.  A weapon based on time.

I am not going to lie to you: it is very difficult to follow the "story" of AGAINST THE DAY.  There are several threads I can think of off the top of my head: the story of the Traverse family, headed by patriarch Webb, an anarchist bomber, whose children Reef, Kit, Frank, and Lake scatter in all directions after his untimely passing; Dally Rideout, whose father Merle raises her when her mother runs off to form a new family with impresario Zombini the Mysterious; the Fraternity of the Venturesome Chums of Chance, a crack team of do-gooders who, it's strongly implied, are at least in part fictional; Lew Basnight, an amnesiac detective who uses explosives as a recreational drug and pals around with Englishmen Neville and Nigel; Yashmeen Halfcourt, a beautiful mathematician -- and on and on.  And, as I suggested before, these stories hardly break down into managable fictive units.  Characters appear in passing, then return to dominate a section or chapter; Pynchon lavishes detail on settings that, like the World's Fair, are rapidly dismantled before they can ever be fully explored.  Reading this book is an exhausting experience.

And yet.  I went away over the weekend, and on the train struggled through some fifty or so pages of this novel, only to set it aside.  I felt frustrated that I had not finished the book yet, that I wasn't even close, and that it seemed like I would need to start from the beginning as soon as I finished, if I wanted to be able to comment meaningfully on it.  I planned this blog post to be a tombstone to the reading project, an admission of defeat, a white flag raised to the forces of the forty-hour work week and the Playstation 3.  And yet.  On the train ride back, I read another novel, one I'll talk about in the next post, perhaps, a light, approachable novel about cakes and high school, and it happened to me again.  That old feeling, the same one I had after finishing GRAVITY'S RAINBOW: the feeling that next to Pynchon, nothing has substance, nothing has depth.  And it drove me back to AGAINST THE DAY. 

Because next to Pynchon, everyone looks like a midget.

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."

Yes, We Have No Bananafish

I can still remember sitting in the study hall at my oppressive Catholic high school, dressed unbecomingly in a regulation red polo shirt, matching red knee socks, and a stiff blue flame- (and boy-) retardant skirt, reading my copy of the Catcher in the Rye.  On flickering TV screens in the corners of the room, Channel One, an advertisement-laden infotainment program, blared Mountain Dew commercials at top volume; a few rows ahead, some kids whispered and played poker across a desk.  No one spoke to me, and with good reason: I was hideous, with hair like a clown wig, a face like a pizza, and a smile like a jack-o-lantern's since, by some fluke of biology, I had never developed two of my adult teeth -- two teeth that, even more unluckily, should have been positioned in the front of my mouth.  Most hours of the day, I was miserable.  I hated the hypocrites who forced us to watch television at school but gave us too much work to watch it at home, the asshole chemistry teacher who told struggling students they'd wind up flipping burgers, the classmates who, when given five minutes of free time before the end of the school day, literally talked around me, leaning over my desk to joke as though it were an unoccupied credenza.  Yet, in that moment, I was happy.  I didn't have many friends, but one of them, I knew, was Holden Caulfield.

Yes, like many literary young people, I loved Salinger's work as a teenager: The Catcher in the Rye, of course, but also Franny & Zooey (my favorite at the time), Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction.  I was so obsessed that, early in college, I spent far too much money on two volumes of his uncollected short stories, which I promptly devoured; certain of those ("The Long Debut of Lois Taggett," "The Inverted Forest") top even his more widely published work, in my estimation.

The point of this post isn't to dig into the nitty gritty of Salinger's work, as I've tried to do, however ineptly, with the other reviews and commentary I've put up on here before.  Maybe I'll do that eventually, but this time, I'd like to say something less analytical.  Something more like: thanks.  Thanks for making me feel less like shit, JD Salinger -- for making me feel like there was a place in the world for someone like me.

I'll add just one quick aside.  Some critics consider The Catcher in the Rye the first young adult novel. This idea riled me as a teenager: just because the protagonist was my age, did that make his concerns any less profound, the scope of the novel any less ambitious or philosophical? I'd still disagree with anyone who considers Catcher "simply" or "merely" for adolescents, who's willing to dismiss it because of its subject, but now I do see why the reading of it as YA makes sense. Unlike, say, Edwin Mullhouse, which sees childhood fundamentally as metaphor (for creativity, for passion, for adult life), Catcher provides the reader no such distance. Throughout his work, Salinger is obsessed with children and teens, their wisdom and the immediacy of their perspective. The respect with which he treats his narrator, not despite his age but because of it, is apparent from the first page (it's equally true of the other young people, especially Franny, elsewhere in his fiction).  And in that sense, he is writing for young people, not just about them.

Or, I suppose I should say, he did write for them, until today.  Rest in peace, Jerome David Salinger.  You beautiful, beautiful man.

Watching the Watchmen, pt. 3

This movie has a bit of Barthelme in it.  Throughout Watchmen, Snyder directly appropriates sound and images from popular memory: the moon landing, the Zapruder film, Dr. Strangelove's war room, Ridley Scott's perfume commercial, Apocalypse Now's potent mixture of Wagner and Vietnam.  Even the scenes that are not in direct homage to earlier sources are made to look like found objects: we see police footage of Rorschach; Adrian Veidt poses for photographs with Annie Leibovitz; Nixon speechifies, live, before the post-apocalypse damage is even tallied.  And when characters break, that happens iconically, publicly, too: Moth Man's institutionalization, replete with flashbulbs; Dr. Manhattan's prime-time freakout.  Televisions are everywhere in this movie, just as print matter (books, newspapers, comics) turned up page and page again in the graphic novel.  The Comedian, minutes from death, flips channels, adjusts the volume; protesters throw explosives through the window of an electronics store glowing with illuminated screens; we hear about Rorschach's arrest and Mason's death from the nightly news; at the film's close, Veidt brandishes "another ultimate weapon": his remote control.  Snyder has adopted the book's technique of collage, but tailored his allusions to work in moving pictures rather than static ones.  The result isn't just that, as he modestly and somewhat repetitiously states on the director commentary, "it looks cool," but that, like the graphic novel, the world of Watchmen the film is an explicitly postmodern world, inhabited by postmodern characters who are aware of their actions not just qua action but as public symbol, metaphor, myth.

The most postmodern stroke of all in the film's ultimate cut, though, is the one that does directly reference comic books: the Black Freighter subplot.  Even after seeing the theatrical cut of the film and reading the graphic novel, I had doubts about the possibility of integrating this story into the film -- though I saw the thematic connections, I wasn't sure what it would really add.  The ultimate cut proved me definitively wrong.  The Black Freighter sequences, executed in vivid (and often disgusting) 2-D animation, aren't just a visual triumph.  If in the book this captain's sordid tale ran parallel to the main story, serving to provide mainly a meta-textual commentary on the nature of comic books themselves, in the movie it becomes something less cerebral: a kind of David Lynchian opening into of the city's troubled mind.  In one scene, the camera zooms on a single panel of the comic -- slowly the waves begin to lap, and we are transported.  Yet the animation, bracketed by a primarily live action film, serves as a constant reminder that the story we're viewing is the creation of someone, that it's the product of a particular psychology and perspective.  And while the graphic novel told us who drew Black Freighter and why, creating a larger context in which the comic functioned as society's mirror, the movie allows us to access the comic's grisly seascape only through the more junior of the two Bernards, whose response to it is nuanced, perplexed, and largely internal.  If Veidt's creation -- a united world -- is meant to be that public and impersonal thing, the greatest good for the greatest number, the Black Freighter is the perfect counterpoint: private, handmade, self-contained, the product of neurosis and obsession, and without a materially positive effect on anyone, yet somehow viscerally true.  It's apt that we see the obliteration of this comic, and this reader, in Veidt's nuclear blast: in destroying the city, he hasn't just wrecked one real world, but the millions of tiny imagined ones carried around in people's heads.

I could spend some time pointing out what's wrong with this film -- the unintentionally hilarious sex scene, Malin Akerman's wobbly performance (she sure is cute though), the dialogue's sometimes clunky exposition.  But none of that interests me nearly as much as the picture's sweeping ambition, and its great success on the whole in realizing it.  The Village Voice once famously said reviewing Mason & Dixon was like "reviewing the Atlantic Ocean"; I'd have to say the same thing about Watchmen.  It's dark, and deep, and sometimes very cold, but it merits a lot of exploring.

Watching the Watchmen, pt. 2

I have never liked superhero movies.  I didn't care for Spiderman, Iron Man, X-Men, Superman, or Transformers.  Mystery Men was sporadically funny but mostly stupid.  The Incredibles was cute but silly.  Unbreakable was okay.  Hellboy was dazzlingly bad.  The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was muddy and incomprehensible.  Except for the brief appearance of an adorable vampire Pomeranian, Blade was interminable.  And though I saw merit in both the Nolan and Burton visions of Batman, especially in their iconic villains, their films as films left me strangely cold.

My favorite supervillain, until recently

I did not particularly want to see Watchmen.  I anticipated two plus hours of latex and explosions, and I'd heard rumors about a giant naked blue guy (a theme that, unbeknownst to the moviegoing public, would be revisited by Avatar later in the year).  I figured it would be crowded, with long lines at the concession stands and teenagers kicking the back of my seat, and that if the comic book's dark ending had been changed, as I'd heard – I hadn't yet read it at the time – the film no doubt would close on a montage of sequel-mongering and sexual consummation.  It sounded like the kind of movie they'd play on flat screen TVs in Circuit City to demonstrate the picture quality.  

All of this changed for me nearly the instant the film began.  A lot of reviewers have commented on the title sequence, in which the lives and, often, deaths of the Minutemen (the original superhero organization in the film) and then the Watchmen are related in brief to the tune of Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin."  Obviously, this sequence sets up the tone of nostalgia; by inserting these characters into iconic national moments – VE Day, the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination – the film grounds them historically, in a context already rife with associations, and thus renders them "unforgettable" for viewers. 

But for me, this sequence did something else too.  The film opens with a scene of the aging Comedian thrown to his death by an unknown assailant; if that was followed immediately by Rorschach's ruminations on a possible Mask Killer, the story would have begun on the trajectory of a classic murder mystery.  But by jarring us from that thread right away with a sequence that reveals the forward movement of time to be the world's only indestructible power, the movie forces us to step back, to remove ourselves from the immediate suspense of the situation (The Comedian is dead!  Who killed him?) and read it metaphorically instead. (The Comedian is dead, sure – and so are Silhouette, Dollar Bill and JFK.  So what?  Even the larger-than-life aren't larger than death.)  Structurally, we fall into a Dr. Manhattan-like intellectual remove, reading this story on two levels, the specific and the abstract, almost before it even starts.

The conflict between these two points of view, and the moral consequences of each, is the conflict at the heart of Watchmen.  At the abstract end of the spectrum – get ready for some serious spoilers, folks – is Adrian Veidt, supposedly the smartest man in the world, who literally destroys that world in order to save it:  in a utilitarian calculation that would make Peter Singer blush, he wipes out dozens of major cities in order to bring what he believes will be humanity's only lasting peace.  He is the only main character whose dreams and memories we never access* in the film, and it's an appropriate omission:  to him, the subjective experience of a single life is without intrinsic value.  The only thing that matters is the big picture, the Alexandrian "vision of a united world." 

At the other end of the spectrum is Rorschach, a man whose very name evokes the irreducible complexity of a specific human mind.  Nursing grudges (his enemies list would, heh heh, dwarf Nixon's) and neuroses (his attitudes about sex and hygiene make Ignatius Reilly look datable by comparison) yet unflinchingly loyal to his band of "masks," Rorschach does not believe the ends justify the means.  "Why does one death matter against so many?" he asks rhetorically. "Because there is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of Armageddon I shall not compromise in this." Like a deranged Kantian, he lives by unshakable moral principles of his own making, hard-won after a lifetime lived in "gutters... full of blood": tell the truth, stick close to your friends, and never compromise.  Though his voiceovers may sound jaded, he's the film's one true idealist, the only one heartbroken by deaths that do not affect him directly.  As he mournfully observes, "A Comedian died last night, and nobody cares. Nobody cares but me."

Suspended between these two polar opposites, of course, is Dr. Manhattan, the one person (notice I don't say human) who might have the power to tilt the balance.  Though paranormally equipped in his perception of reality and time, he can't help but suffer human emotions as well:  loneliness, jealousy, tenderness, guilt.  The internal conflict of these two contrary perspectives comes to a head during his time on Mars, when he tries to eschew his humanity entirely by seeing reality only through the abstract.  He tells Laurie there is no point in saving life on earth from nuclear holocaust – "The universe will not even notice" – but then promptly changes his mind when presented with the unduplicatable fact of another human being: her.  Observing the bizarre circumstances of her birth, he says, "It's you – only you – that emerged. To distill so specific a form, from all that chaos. It's like turning air into gold. A miracle."

The joke here, of course, is that Laurie isn't a miracle, any more than the boy reading comic books next to the newsstand, or Rorschach's shrink, or the Comedian himself.  She doesn't even have superpowers (unless you count her uncannily gorgeous hair).  She's just a human being, and abstractly, objectively, as Manhattan earlier observes, a live one and a dead one have the same number of particles.  What he realizes in that scene really has nothing to do with genetics or probability: it's the intrinsic value of her personhood, something that has no structural properties at all, something that, outside of the law of human morality, doesn't empirically exist.  Manhattan's realization is not an arrival at superhuman knowledge; it's a temporary regaining of human perspective, which he of course quickly casts off again in later scenes.

A superhero movie confronting ethical conundrums is nothing new.  But what surprised me the first time about Watchmen, and surprises me even more in the extended version, is the film's true refusal to take sides.  Although Rorschach dies a hero's death (hey, I warned you about spoilers) the movie's cliffhanger ending indicates that his personal idealism may posthumously fuck things up just as much as Veidt's cold utilitarianism.  And we're given no reason to believe that Adrian "I'm not a comic book villain" Veidt is motivated by anything more selfish than the reasons he supplies.  There's no twist ending where he becomes president (though Ronald Reagan may), or benefits directly from what he's done.  Instead, the movie leaves us responsible for drawing our own conclusions, ones that may make us realize things about ourselves we'd rather not know. 

In reading over this post, I realize that much of what I've said about the film, with the exception of my discussion of the opening sequence, could also apply to the graphic novel.  Let me say a word or two about that, since it was such a source of controversy at the time of the film's release.  Although the movie certainly cuts rich and meaningful elements of the graphic novel (Dreiberg and Mason are significantly more developed characters in the book, for example), I think the only major regrettable omission in the theatrical version of the film was the Black Freighter story, which is masterfully included in the ultimate cut version.  In my next post, I'm going to talk a little about the movie's use of collage, and why I think it was fundamentally faithful not only to the book's plot and "look," but also to its genre-shattering postmodernism. 

And maybe then I'll get back to complaining about shit I hate.

*OK, I have to offer a caveat: we do see his memories of the Comedian during the funeral sequence.  But even here I would argue that we never have access to the personal significance of his memories in the way we do with, say, Laurie Jupiter's.  Nor do we see how past events transformed Veidt in the way that we do with Rorschach, Manhattan, etc., because to Veidt, biography is not a reason for action – only logic is.

Watching the Watchmen, pt. 1

Negative reviews -- of both books and movies -- tend to be more popular with readers than positive ones do.  In my opinion, this is true for a number of reasons.  First, negative reviews tend to be funny, or at least have more potential for humor.  By casting a serious attempt at artistic craft in a light that renders it absurd, the reviewer has ample opportunity to display his own wit, skill with language, and imagination.  In some of the most hilarious negative reviews, the author, like a good prosecuting attorney, is able to simply step aside and let the work damn itself.  Second, negative reviews allow the critic to insert himself as a character in a way that positive reviews often do not.  Held at a remove from the work, the critic is witness, narrator, and, at times, even protagonist.  In Roger Ebert's classic review of Caligula, he appears as a solitary and powerless figure -- a lone sane nobody, unable to redirect the stampede of movie-goers as they plunge endlessly into the abyss ("Surely they know there are other movies in town that are infinitely better," he writes.  "It is very sad.") .  But third, and I think, most importantly, the arguments made in negative reviews at least present a veneer of objectivity: the reviewer has "standards," these "standards" have not been met, and thus, the work is flawed.  Why oh why, the negative review asks, didn't the author approach his work some other way -- in the first person, in the third person, in a plainer style, at a faster pace?  What's with this structure, why didn't the writer stick to a tried-and-true arc -- or if he did, why didn't he reach for something fresher, more innovative, surprising?

Now don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that negative reviews can't be accurate, or even enlightening; defining one's own aesthetic against something one considers "sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash," to use Ebert's phrase, or even just deeply flawed, can bring one's opinions into sharp relief.  And, unlike some folks, I would not argue that "critics with staying power never employ snarkiness"; to the contrary, a well-crafted zinger -- even an empty one -- can linger in the reader's memory far longer than its intended target. 

But I do find that writing negative reviews, especially the ones that have me snickering as I type, can leave me at something of a loss when I approach material I really love.  If the negative review asks, "Why this way and not some other?" then the positive review must speak to the necessity of the choices made by the work's creator; otherwise by comparison, it reads like hollow praise.  Especially for works that are sprawling, ambitious, and complex, it can be easier to speak in enthusiastic generalities.

This is all a long way of leading into my subject: the 215-minute monster that is the "ultimate cut" of Zach Snyder's film Watchmen.  This movie, uneven, bizarre, pulpy, and mammoth, discredited by comic book purists and scoffed at by the easily confused, blew me away in the theater, but this longer cut was a revelation.  My next post may not have the entertainment value of a pithy dismissal, but I will try my best to dig into at least one or two aspects of a work that kept me transfixed for three and a half hours, and still left me wanting more.

Me and Mr. Pynchon

In life, I've found, we have two kinds of friends.  First, we have the friends we admire.  These are the friends who send us Christmas cards with pictures of their pets and children, the friends who throw dinner parties and attempt dishes out of cookbooks illustrated with photographs of the food.  These friends own appliances, knit, and regularly wash their hair.  These are the friends whose sheer competence dazzles us, gives us hope, that we too will one day have some similar measure of control over our own lives.

Then there are the other friends.  These are the friends we can't take anywhere.  These are the friends who barrel through life, leaving a scattered trail of McDonald's wrappers and parking tickets in their wake.  These friends alternate between stunning us with their intellectual brilliance and describing their gynecological problems in graphic detail.  These friends trash our apartments, drink our booze, crash our computers, and scare our dogs.  These friends give us presents they found in the garbage, and those presents are lovelier than anything else we own.

Of course, this is a vast oversimplification: in life, our friends are generally some amalgamation of these two categories -- they wouldn't be bearable otherwise.  But for the sake of argument, let me offer that we generally love and admire others because they either maintain a degree of control that we cannot, or because they allow an amount of chaos that both frightens and excites us.  For me, writers are the same way.  Steven Millhauser, Charles Baxter, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver are, for me, all examples of the first category: though their work is at times really freakin weird, there's a sanity, a logic, to the way that images and characters are conveyed.  When reading, say, The Feast of Love -- an intensely ambitious, formally experimental novel, mind you, and one of my all-time faves -- I still had the sense that Baxter inhabited the same world that I did: his mall coffeeshop, his Humane Society, his football stadium were all instantly recognizable to me, and within them, he was articulating thoughts that I might have had myself, if only I'd thunk a little harder.

Thomas Pynchon, on the other hand, has always been, for me, squarely in the second category.  Though I believe that a sort of skewed logic usually -- probably? -- underlies the choices he makes in his work, I am not going to sit here and pretend that I know who or what the Kenosha Kid is supposed to be (I never did).  Pynchon's work has left me laughing, annoyed, stupefied, wowed, puzzled, turned on, grossed out, and bored, and in many ways, it would be easy for me to dismiss it now.  When I first read the guy, I was in college, still infatuated with the Beats, and wild for anything -- intellectual or otherwise -- that would blow the conservative Midwestern sensibilities of my childhood to smithereens.  Pynchon, with his pornographic imagination (I adored his original title for Gravity's Rainbow: Mindless Pleasures), his panicked, drugged-out antiheros, his steamroller intellect, and his compulsive distrust of authorities and systems, even the mail, for Chrissake, became my patron saint. 

In his New Yorker essay "Mr. Difficult," about his complicated relationship with the work of William Gaddis, Jonathan Franzen describes his experience reading The Recognitions for the first time: "I sat and read the next seven hundred pages in something like a fugue state, as if planting my feet on a steep slope, climbing. I was reluctant to leave my ultrasuede perch for any reason... I was alone and unprepared on a steep-sided, frigid, airless, poorly mapped mountain. Did I already mention that The Recognitions has nine hundred and fifty-six pages?  But I loved it."  I read Gravity's Rainbow -- after two other "long books," A Hundred Years of Solitude and Anna Karenina -- during an internship at a library in my hometown the winter I was nineteen.  Alone in a cubicle with not nearly enough to do (and a roll of toilet paper for my consistently runny nose), I wandered beneath those endless arches of sex and death, a sleepwalker in Pynchon's dream.  When I'd finally finished the novel, I decided to go for something lighter -- only a week or so remained before I returned to school -- and picked up a copy of The Whore's Child, a short story collection by Richard Russo, whose Empire Falls I'd read for a class and liked okay.  It was a mistake.  I couldn't even get through the first story.

"I feel like I have the bends," I told a friend.  "Compared to Pynchon, everything's shit."

Now, though, many years and an MFA later, Pynchon no longer towers over my intellectual landscape, laughing maniacally and killing everything else in sight with a rocket launcher.  I don't write like Pynchon -- other authors, mostly the sane ones, have influenced me more -- and though I've reread Slow Learner, The Crying of Lot 49, and large chunks of V. over the years, I haven't gone back to Gravity's Rainbow in a serious way since that enchanted winter.  Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Inherent Vice, and -- until recently, of course -- Against the Day have had to wait their turn behind, among many others, Murakami, Link, Auster, Christopher, Nabokov, Ishiguro, Chabon, Calvino, McCarthy, and both Shelley and Shirley Jackson.

Yet, returning to Pynchon now, after all this time, I find, almost to my disappointment, that he's still got the old magic in spades (and this time, with more anarchists).  Against the Day is, if anything, more beautiful, heartbreaking, panoramic, and simply weird than the other three novels of his that I've read, and I'm only 119 pages in.  Watch for more updates as this old buddy continues to make a mess of my (intellectual) life... and for God's sake, if he wants to crash on your couch, let him in.  It's worth the chaos.  Take it from one who knows.

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.

"The imagination is a dying animal."

In my first post on this blog, I admitted that I do not entirely understand my own taste -- that sometimes I am moved beyond reason by writing or films or television or even advertisements that do not satisfy my own stringent criteria for greatness.  And I promised that, from time to time at least, rather than pretending to be a stainless priestess of high art, I would acknowledge and even try to articulate why I love the things I do.

I'm going to come right out and say it: I love the Kids in the Hall.  I love them beyond sense or reason.  I laugh every time I watch them, despite the fact that they're sometimes not funny.  Sometimes I laugh because they're not funny.  The summer before I left for college, Comedy Central played two episodes of Kids in the Hall every day in the afternoon.  I watched these episodes every day.  I also tape recorded them and have watched them repeatedly since then.  There are many TV series that I find sporadically entertaining, that I'll watch when they're on: South Park, the Wire, who the hell knows.  Fundamentally, though, it would make zero difference to me if these shows had never existed.  Not so with Kids in the Hall.  Kids in the Hall is my show.  Something in it speaks to me.

I once had a professor who told us that, when asked to name his influences, Borges listed a very strange assortment of authors, including Robert Louis Stevenson, who was considered something of a hack writer at the time (and is still regarded that way by many, despite the patina of age that has transformed several of his books into "classics").  This professor told us that our own work would benefit if we followed Borges's example.  Instead of copying the writers we saw as the most accomplished or influential, we should take our inspiration from the writers who excited us the most, regardless of what they actually had achieved.  In fact, if they were second-rate, so much the better.  That way, we'd be mining uncharted territory, rather than picking over the dust and nuggets left in a ghost town after the rush.

Obviously, this professor wasn't saying we should be inspired by the flawed techniques or sloppiness of these mediocrities.  He was saying, though, that respecting, say, the craft of Raymond Carver doesn't mean you have to write about realist characters getting divorces in laundromats.  This is a sentiment echoed by George Saunders in an interview.  After naming a handful of writers -- Gogol, Hemingway, Kafka -- whose influence he still feels, he goes on to say, "But I think also, lately, I'm starting to be more honest about the fact that there are a lot of TV influences and pop culture stuff in there too. You know, in a funny way I'm starting to rethink the whole influences thing. It feels to me like you're born with certain neurological tendencies or affinities, and then you just kind of walk through the world picking out the things that feed that."

As a writer, I understand this perfectly: in my own art anything goes.  If Kids in the Hall, or for that matter, the New Kids on the Block, inspire me, it doesn't matter; the only thing that counts is the end product of what I create.  But as someone who wants to write critically about narrative art, this troubles me.  How much of my experience of, say, Kids in the Hall, is a result of my "neurological tendencies or affinities," and how much is a result of my considered judgment?  And, if I admit that most of my experience is a result of these affinities, then what does that say about my opinion of a film or novel I regard as a masterpiece? 

Wittgenstein, to rope him into my arguments again, once wrote, "When I read over a poem or narrative with feeling, surely something goes on in me which does not go on when I merely skim the lines for information.  What process am I alluding to?  The sentences have a different ring."  When I first started dating my partner, I couldn't believe he didn't love Kids in the Hall.  I "told" him many of their jokes and sketches, which I had memorized, or nearly, and he generally thought they were funny.  When we watched the aforementioned videotapes together, though, back in my childhood home, he still didn't love it the way I did.  "They draw every joke out for way too long," he argued.  "And a lot of it just isn't that funny."

A teenager tells his uncaring parents, "You have carpet on your hearts."  A young man rhapsodizes about the legs of his lover as she stands in the water: "Like God's own barge poles."  A blues guitarist sings, "You can't use your tongue to stop a fan," and his back-up drummer sticks out his tongue to reveal a prominent band-aid.  A pyromaniac French woman pouts when her boss puts out a fire: "Monsieur!  Mon feu!"  A bearded lady declares, "We're freaks!  We can drink as much as we want!" and a confused waiter replies, "But don't you get drunk?"  "Of course," replies her companion, the Chicken Lady.  "My brain is only the size of a waaaalnut."  After writing this paragraph, I went to the Kids in the Hall Wikipedia site to look for more examples and laughed so hard I literally started crying.  But my partner has watched these episodes, and though he saw the same show I saw, he didn't see in it what I saw.  It didn't have the same ring.

I'd argue that, with a truly accomplished piece of art, it doesn't all just come down to the randomness of taste.  There are things we can point to, structurally and at the level of the sentence, that clearly denote a rigorous craftsmanship in the piece's design and execution.  But as much as I admire these qualities, and as fascinating as I think they are to talk and think about, they're not necessarily the reason I love the piece in question -- or at least not the reason I fell in love with it in the first place.

Who says a blog post has to have an ending?

The Road, or Dad You Suck

Did God create man, or did man create God? This question has been pondered by great thinkers (Nietzsche) and not-so-great thinkers (the Kids in the Hall, stoned philosophy majors) since the mid-morning of human history, when things with the sabertoothed hyenas had cooled off enough for the pondering to commence. And it's been the subject for no small amount of literature since then, from po-mo shindigs like The Dead Father to the grotesque stylins of Flannery O'Connor.

Although The Road by Cormac McCarthy is, like most masterpieces, about a lot of things -- nuclear winter, cannibalism, suicide, and canned pears also top the list -- I would argue that it is also in large part about this question, and that its answer is a strange one. To me, The Road emphatically takes the position that our universe is Godless and seriously fucked up, but that paradoxically, it is for that very reason that our idea of God is so precious and important.

In The Road, a man and his son -- both unnamed -- travel across an America transformed by nuclear winter into a wasteland of swirling ash. Each is "the other's world entire." The father is no hero. Over the course of the novel, he kills (or effectively kills) two men; he cannot dissuade his wife from committing suicide; he does not help the sick and starving they pass along the way. His only goal is survival for himself and his boy.

But -- and here is the interesting part -- the father, who could tell his son anything and be believed, who could easily paint himself as utterly justified in all his actions, has instead chosen to teach the boy to believe in ideals that he himself doesn't live up to, ideals that have no real place in a world of cannibal gangs and scorched human skeletons: ideals like generosity and heroism and morality, and yes, even God.

Like any parent trying to do the right thing, of course, he finds this comes back to haunt him. As the son gets older, rather than becoming more realistic and pragmatic, he becomes more intensely idealistic, beginning to see how they fall short of the "good guys" featured in his father's lessons: "The boy looked at him and looked away. Those stories are not true... in the stories we're always helping people and we dont help people." The son is so utterly convinced of the truth of the father's philosophy that it in fact distances him from the very man who taught the philosophy to him. Yet, in the world of the novel, we never see any evidence (until the very end) that the type of goodness the father describes still even exists. The "fire" the father refers to is not one placed in him by God; it is one kindled in his son through the power of his words.

Raised on his father's stories, the boy is "an alien," "a creature from a planet that no longer existed." Despite the fact he has never known anything else, he is still shocked to see cooked human flesh; he is concerned with the morality of looting, even though it is their livelihood and is unsuspicious of strangers. At times, the boy's naivete and dogmatism is almost annoying to the reader. But the father is never annoyed by it. He reinforces it, encourages it. And, at the end of the story, in a final, unheroic act, the father cannot bring himself to sacrifice it: even though he promised he would never leave the boy, and even though the boy has no obvious way of surviving on his own, when the father is dying he cannot bring himself to kill his child. "I cant hold my dead son in my arms. I thought I could but I cant," he says, describing even this final act of love in terms of his own frailty, his own shortcomings. He is like a Biblical Abraham in reverse: when tested to prove his faith, he chooses the life of his son over his ideals. Yet those ideals live on, in the boy.

There is a moment in the novel when the father is going through the wreckage on board a beached ship and he finds a beautiful brass sextant still in its case. "It was the first thing he'd seen in a long time that stirred him," McCarthy writes. A sextant, a nautical navigation device, allows human beings to chart their course in the path of the stars. The father himself is like that sextant. He is like a tool who allows the boy to chart his course by something far loftier and more eternal than himself.

I think what I love so much about The Road is what it suggests about parenthood: that a truly good parent is humble enough to teach his kid to look beyond his own example, toward something greater; that a truly good parent trains his children to be disappointed in him. Maybe he's not a hero, but he's a damn sight better than some white guy in the sky.