I am a double agent for the KGB, pt. 2

Check out my new review on the KGB Bar's website!  This time I'm writing about Pirate Talk, the new novel by Terese Svoboda.  Here's the link:
http://kgbbar.com/lit/book_reviews/pirate_talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess talking dogs are more literary than I realized.

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

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

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

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

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

Will It Bend? (pt. 1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The one sort of fire bender the show never includes.

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

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

Bad Cop, Bad Cop

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

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

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

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

Sex, drugs, and well -- you know.

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

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

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

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

Joshua Ferris's Day Off, pt. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Making History

I don't often read nonfiction; in general, I find almost anything preferable to reality. However, Jame Loewen's thought-provoking 1996 revisionist text managed to snooker me in with its seductive title: LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME. Although it's filled with surprising information about famous American figures from John Brown to Helen Keller, this book is not primarily a history of the United States. Rather, it's a book-length book review of twelve of the crappiest works of nonfiction imaginable: a representative sampling of high school American history textbooks.

Let me backtrack for a second here. When I was a teenager, I attended (and eventually dropped out of) a conservative religious high school in the Midwest, the kind of hell where a boy with a ponytail gets sent to the principal's office and a girl with a crew cut gets sent to a guidance counselor. Pep rallies were mandatory, and they looked like this:

The Anti-Sex League was a popular alternative to cheerleading.

In short, I hated nearly every minute I spent enclosed in those ironically god-forsaken halls, and the classrooms were even worse. But one class I didn't entirely detest was AP American history. Our teacher was a tremulous-voiced madman so powdered with chalk dust he looked like he'd just survived an explosion, and he addressed us as "children," but with a tone of urgency that suggested not storytime but the last hope of mankind. His lessons on the innumerable tariffs, bills, battles, and Presidents whose progression informed the weekly quizzes were engaging enough, if only because of his forceful way of starting class discussions -- "Children, children! What do you think of this?!" -- but he really came to life on Fridays, when he allowed himself to indulge his passion: conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assasination. To start us off on these paranoid diversions, he always brought in photocopies of what he cryptically referred to as his "documents": telegrams, letters, redacted newspaper articles, photographs, receipts, and an array of other primary source materials, generally involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, LBJ, Kennedy himself, Nixon, or the Cubans. What made these sessions fascinating were not the particular half-baked theories we cooked up as explanations during the discussion, but the sensation that we were actually doing history: that he was empowering us to parse out for ourselves an interpretation of primary sources, and that our conclusions might be as valuable -- even more valuable -- than anything already published in a book.

Part of the reason I found LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME interesting is that Loewen does not set out simply to set the record straight about common historical misconceptions. His larger and more important project is a rethinking of both the way historical narratives are presented and the pedagogy surrounding these narratives. Loewen isn't as much worried that high schoolers don't know "the truth," but that they don't care. Again and again, he points out something that's obvious to anyone who remembers their high school history textbook (and probably even more obvious to those who don't): these books are boring. Before textbook authors can even begin to redress the grave omissions -- and there are many -- they must first learn to write. As Loewen puts it, "Textbooks unfold history without real drama or suspense, only melodrama." Figures from Christopher Columbus to Woodrow Wilson are subjected to what he terms "heroification." In an attempt to cast them as aspirational role models, authors strip them of any potentially controversial qualities, and they become one-dimensional, featureless, indistinguishable figures in an endless parade of feel-good Americana. Positive changes in American life and culture never meet with government (or popular) resistance; progress moves inexorably forward. Events are causeless, struggles without visible opposition, and the outcome -- American triumph -- is never in doubt. This happens again and again in the passages Loewen quotes, even at the level of the sentences, when the authors use the passive voice. It's not just that the books are inaccurate; they don't ring true, because they ignore the significance-making conventions of traditional storytelling -- even more specifically, of good fiction writing.

Potentially, I think this claim is far more earth-shaking than the more specific critiques Loewen advances about the content of sections on slavery, the Vietnam War, and the Pilgrims. It seems to me that if we truly see history as a series of stories we tell ourselves about the past, then it becomes something that can -- and should -- aspire to the condition of art. But, many people would argue, isn't that just total relativism? Are all interpretations created equal? If a "better story" makes for "better history," then can't just anyone be a historian?

The answer, of course, is both yes and no. For something to qualify as history rather than a novel or re-imagining, it obviously must be based in research and verifiable evidence. But beyond that, I do think we should hold history, along with other forms of narrative nonfiction, to the same standards as fiction. It's not enough for a textbook, revisionist or traditionalist, liberal or conservative, to reproduce names and dates for our perusal. It must transform that material into something meaningful, or else it teaches us nothing worth knowing. In a scene from the Steve Martin play Picasso at the Lapin Agile, the character of Albert Einstein offers that his profession is just as concerned with beauty as any artist's: "...the theories must be beautiful. You know why the sun doesn't revolve around the earth? Because the idea is not beautiful enough. If you're trying to prove that the sun revolves around the earth, in order to make the theory fit the facts, you have to have the planets moving backwards, and the sun doing loop-de-loops. Way too ugly." Picasso asks him, "So you're not just describing the world as it is?" and Einstein replies, "No! We are creating a new way of looking at the world!" I would submit that students should learn to see history the same way: as something made, by and for the human mind.

For Kids of All Ages, pt. 1: Why A?

I recently read an article in the LA Times online about a phenomenon I posted on back in November: the fact that more now than ever, adults are reading novels and fiction series intended for young adults. Spurred on, I guess, by the worldwide success of titles like Harry Potter and Twilight, readers (and thus publishers) increasingly regard these books as intended for an audience far beyond the too-old-to-nap, too-young-to-drive. My initial response to this, as chronicled in my earlier post, was reflexive snark: adults were trying to escape, rather than encounter a genuinely challenging aesthetic experience, and for that reason the whole scene was a damn shame and I was going to have another beer before going to bed. I see now, though, that this attitude is as vague as it is dismissive. The question I failed to ask then, but that I'm asking now, is, "What is it that makes something a young adult novel, rather than simply a novel about young adults?"

It's probably obvious by looking at my earlier posts that I don't believe that a literary work's success hinges on its subject matter. In my life, I have loved books about everything from unicorns to the apocalypse, and found fault with ones whose heroes run the gamut from magicians to hermaphrodites. I also have loved a lot of books with child or teenage narrators. For several years, my favorite novel of all time was Steven Millhauser's masterful Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, a vision of childhood hallucinatory in its accuracy, purportedly penned by a pre-teen with a Nabokovian vocabulary and a covetous, lonely soul. I already told you how I feel about The Catcher in the Rye, a book all-too-often undervalued by adults precisely because of its appeal to the young. And Huckleberry Finn needs no endorsement from me to demonstrate its self-evident weight and significance (the ending is lousy, though).

These books -- and there are others in their company -- could easily be classified as YA because of their characters and subject matter; the edgy parts of any of the three have nothing on today's reads, where rape, violence, murder, S&M, substance abuse, promiscuous werewolves, pregnancy, and relentless texting are giving parents panic attacks, or driving them to Borders to buy copies of their own. Yet I would argue that, despite the subject matter they chose, Millhauser, Salinger, and Twain's novels are in fact not members of the genre they resemble.  Here's why.

Let me offer, for your consideration, the following theory. The young adult novel is about a flirtation with independence -- a journey that has its roots in the tradition of children's books, akin to the voyages of Max in Where the Wild Things Are or the title character in The Runaway Bunny. In the young adult novel, the protagonist visits the grown-ups' world, but he does not stay: sometimes chastened, sometimes changed, he returns at the end to his childhood for a little longer, usually with a greater appreciation for it now that he knows what's in store. In the young adult novel, there is, beneath all the chaos, a profound faith in order and authority.  Though the protagonist may feel at sea, there is in the end someone -- or Someone -- to take charge, if only he'll let them.

Big Bunny is watching you.

Young adult novels can do beautiful, brilliant things: Coraline by Neil Gaiman is a delight, for example. But there are two things they cannot do (and this goes for young adult movies too). First, they can't intelligently and honestly investigate the inner lives of their older characters; this would make these folks incarnate, fallible, and as such would undercut the whole enterprise, like seeing Jesus on the toilet (eww). Second, as much as they may imbue their teen or child characters with precocious wisdom, this wisdom must always have clear limits, beyond which adult authority endlessly stretches. The child narrator, regardless of his worries or his crimes, must always lack some essential perspective that, when finally grasped at the end, returns him to his rightful place in kid-dom.

The thing that makes a book about a young person part of adult literature, in my opinion, is that the protagonist in question knows just as much, if not more, about what is going on than the adults surrounding him do; that he, in fact, is pointing out truths about grown-up culture that grown-ups can't or won't face. When, given a choice between submitting to what he believes is divine law and following his own judgment, Huck Finn actually rejects God ("All right, then, I'll go to Hell"), he also marks the novel that contains him as a whole different kind of journey than the roundtrip represented by the children's stories noted above. In adult books about children, the child-characters ultimately face the potentially terrifying reality that no one knows what the hell they're doing, that the world is unjust, that some mistakes cannot be undone, and that nobody but Nobody is in charge. They may wish they could relinquish their independence in the end, but there's no going back. They can't rewind the tape.

This is all a long way of leading into what I'm going to talk about in my next post, the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a highly original, tenderly poignant, inventively constructed book that I would nevertheless place squarely in the genre of the Young Adult Novel. The book fascinated me for a number of reasons, but perhaps most of all because of what I saw as the schism between the reach of its formal ambition and the thematically inhibited, even precious way it approached certain questions of character, death, and survival. I have many more thoughts on it, but for the time being just let me say it's well worth a read, even if it has some growing up to do. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be watching the Muppet Show.

The Clerk's Tale

When I was a little kid, I idolized the guys who worked at Blockbuster.  In their blue collared shirts, bad haircuts, and cargo pants, they stocked VHS tapes, shuffling dutifully between the shelves as TVs in the corners of the store flashed action scenes with fireball explosions.  The video store guys (and they were all guys) seemed to have sacrificed something important to these glowing boxes, something other people prized: adulthood, maybe?  Happiness?  They joked with each other in movie quotes, drank Jolt, and never seemed to age, caught for all time in a kind of patchy adolescence.  The pictures they preferred were not so much good or bad, but implacably cool, almost sociopathically unsentimental, with unhappy endings and unrated trailers.  They drove to work in dented cars and left with new releases.

These were their patron saints.

The first thing I remember learning about Quentin Tarantino was that he worked in a video store, and this knowledge has informed the way I view his films, especially since Tarantino's aesthetic seems so in line with the aesthetic of the movie guys I grew up admiring.  Tarantino's movies are compulsively meta-cinematic, laden with a dizzying array references to everything from blaxploitation to anime, but first and foremost they're cool: suspenseful and nasty and sarcastic and violent and above all, entertaining.  Emotionally, they're cool to the point of being chilly, and at their worst (like in parts of the second Kill Bill movie), they can come off as empty stylistic exercises, lovingly designed worlds inhabited only by cardboard cut-outs, like the 2D Darth Vader propped up next to the shelves in the sci-fi section.

Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino's latest, is possibly his most interesting film yet, at least for me, simply because rather than fighting this tendency in his work, he embraces and even explores it.  Inglourious Basterds tells the story of a daring military coup: mid-WWII, the head honcho Nazis, including Der Fuhrer himself, pile into a French theater for a screening of Goebbels's latest propaganda effort, a film called "Nation's Pride" about a Nazi sniper who single-handedly killed hundreds of American soldiers in a matter of days.  What the Nazis don't know is that a crack team of American Jews are out to shoot them in the head as many times as possible, and the theater's owner, a disgruntled Jewish Frenchwoman, plans to blow them sky-high by setting her nitrate film reels ablaze.

Here's what I found interesting about Inglourious Basterds.  Like most of Tarantino's films, it takes an older genre as its trope, this time the spaghetti western.  Like Once Upon a Time in the West, this picture starts out with a family killed, heartlessly and unnecessarily, by a straight-up villain, the self-proclaimed "Jew Hunter" Col. Hans Landa.  When we meet Lt. Aldo Raine (with a hick accent from the Smoky Mountains, natch) and his posse, who plan not only to kill but scalp as many Nazis as possible, it seems that Tarantino is laying out a classic story of cowboy justice: good vs. evil, the old American way.  "Nazis ain't got no humanity," Raine declares, and we're inclined to agree. 

But as the movie progresses, Tarantino keeps allowing hints of doubt to creep in.  The Nazis here are not inhuman, at least not all of them.  In one scene, we meet a Nazi soldier whose son Max has just been born; he's beaming with joy over the future of his child, and harmlessly playing bar games with his friends.  In another scene, Shoshanna, the revenge-seeking theater owner, grudgingly admits that her cinema is named for a talented German filmmaker -- an artist is an artist, regardless of nationality.  And even Private Frederick Zoller, the war hero and star of Nation's Pride, is more vulnerable and endearing than is convenient for us to believe: Goebbels calls him a "strangely persuasive monster," and it's true.

At the end of the film, when the Nazis are watching their propaganda movie, crying out with laughter and spontaneous applause as Zoller's character on screen pops American after American with his seemingly unlimited supply of ammunition, Tarantino is certainly poking fun at them.  But he's pointing a finger at us too.  After all, if we're Americans, we've come to the theater for essentially the same reason as these doomed Germans: to watch a triumphant picture in which our enemies are slaughtered en masse, in the most graphic way contemporary filmmaking techniques allow.  Isn't Nation's Pride basically just Inglourious Basterds in fascist drag?  And if so, aren't we a little like Hitler, slapping his thigh and telling Goebbels this is "the best one yet"?  It's an uncomfortable moment of recognition, one that tinges our self-congratulation, our patriotism, with doubt.

In the end, of course, Tarantino lays these doubts to rest.  One of the most memorable motifs in Inglourious Basterds is Lt. Aldo Raine's habit of asking any Nazi in his charge what he plans to do with his uniform after the war.  When the captive Nazi replies he will burn the uniform, or never wear it again, Raine replaces it with something he won't be able to take off: a swastika, inscribed in the Nazi's forehead with the point of a hunting knife.  To Raine, the uniform is not just a costume, the black hat or white hat of a face-off in the wild west.  By donning it in the first place, the Nazi has permanently mortgaged his individual personhood; regardless of who he might be "inside," he no longer deserves to be seen as a three-dimensional character.  Now he's a target.  Raine's just adding the bull's eye. 

Raine's absolutism is appealing in its simplicity, perhaps necessary in a time of war, and the film ultimately endorses it -- but not unquestioningly.  And it's that questioning that makes Inglourious Basterds more than cool for me; it makes it smart.  The guys at Blockbuster would approve, and this time, they'd be right.

Magic for Intermediates

I read The Magicians by Lev Grossman in less than two days. I could not put it down. I read it on the subway, on the bus, on my lunch break, and until the small hours of the morning; I read it in the line at the DMV and on the elevator. I read it in the obsessive, giddy way I read about Narnia and Middle Earth and Wonderland and William Sleator's multiverses as a child, which is to say I read it just the way I imagine Grossman wanted.

The Magicians is a fantasy novel that’s about fantasy, and about novels. It follows Quentin Coldwater, Brooklyn native, type-A personality, and loner extraordinaire, from the day he’s first summoned to Brakebills college for magicians for an entrance exam in his late teens, to sometime in his mid-twenties. Quentin, who grew up on the Fillory and Further novels (a fictional series, loosely based on, you guessed it, the Narnia books) has dreamed since he can remember of escaping to a magical realm, and in the book we find out what happens when he gets his heart’s desire.

This is not your kid sister's magic academy.

Grossman’s prose has the kind of conversational effortlessness that makes any one element impossible to single out and question, a transparent lucidity that makes the images feel like they came straight out of a half-forgotten recurring dream. But what got me, what really pulled me in, was the magic, which was unlike the magic of any other book I’ve read. In The Magicians, magic is not a deus ex machina, a blessing, a duty, or a curse. No one knows what it’s “for”; it reveals nothing, or at least nothing conclusive, about good or evil, the nature of the universe or God or man. Magic heightens sensations, intensifies experiences, endows the ordinary with meaning, but in a way it's profoundly useless. Upon graduation, most magicians end up doing academic research, or undertake “massive art projects, manipulating the northern lights and things like that, decades-long enchantments that might only ever have an audience of one.” Some work undercover, for the government or other organizations, but in a world with “too many magicians, not enough monsters,” they’re not really necessary.

For these reasons, magic in The Magicians functions, for me at least, as a kind of book-length extended metaphor for literature, and the role that discipline plays in the lives of its oft-dissatisfied acolytes. This begins almost at the start, when the Fillory novels are introduced for the first time: “It was almost like the Fillory books… were about reading itself. When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock… and slips through into Fillory… it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better.” In Fillory, even the vistas look like the inside of a book; Grossman describes it as “a landscape as black and white and stark as a printed page.”

However, when Quentin learns that magic is real, he discovers that, like literature, it does not spring into being fully formed: “The same way a verb has to agree with its subject, it turned out, even the simplest spell had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstances of its casting, and a hundred other factors.” Like an MFA student plowing into the revision process for the first time, he finds himself engulfed in minutiae, the stupid repetitive grit of learning. It is not “an orgy of wonderment”; it’s hard and it sucks. But life without it is unendurable. When Quentin arrives in New York City after graduation, he observes, “Nothing was enchanted: everything was what it was and nothing more. Every conceivable surface was plastered with words… but none of it meant anything, not the way a spell did.” Magic, like fiction, like poetry, spans the gap between thought and reality, between subject and object. Once enchanted, a deck of cards or a glass marble become an extension of the magician’s mind, just as a book is the extension of an author’s. As Quentin’s old professor says, “The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded. But somewhere in the heat of magic, that boundary between word and thing ruptures… Language gets tangled up with the world it describes.”

This conceit is heart-poundingly, throat-clenchingly, head-smackingly brilliant (why didn't I think of this shit?), and for a long time, as I ripped through these pages, I thought the novel would turn out to be an utter masterpiece because of it. Yet as I continued reading, I found myself distracted more and more by a nagging concern that quickly developed into a criticism and ultimately, crushingly, into a full-blown disappointment: the character development of Quentin's lover, Alice.

Everywhere in this book, Grossman calls into question our assumptions about the genre, from a scene where a drunk teenager prepares for an intracollegiate game, snarling, “Gotta get my quidditch costume,” to the impotent, helpless ram who is to Fillory what Aslan the lion was to Narnia. Our hero, self-loathing and melancholic, is a tour de force of psychological realism; no one could mistake Quentin for the aspirational champions of the kids’ books this references. But there’s one escapist trope Grossman has forgotten to send up. A girl who's beautiful when she takes off her glasses, plus brilliant and good in bed; a girl who never makes a mistake in the classroom or on the battlefield, but who's so disarmingly shy and self-deprecating you never feel challenged or emasculated.  A girl who waits around patiently for you to make up your mind if you want to date her, and then has no qualms of her own about leaping into the sack and the full-fledged monogamous relationship.  A girl who's never irrationally bitchy, never self-involved, never needy or demanding or shrill or passive-aggressive or petty or arrogant or mean.  A girl who never tries to defend her weirdo parents and shows absolutely no signs of becoming like them.  A girl who has no friends to compete for her time and attention, no bosom buddies whom you suspect might know her even better than you do.  A girl who has no sexual history worth noting, who never flirts, never cheats (unless you cheat first, and even then she doesn't enjoy it); a girl who puts off her own sizable ambitions while you try to find yourself.  A girl who loves you, only you, unconditionally, even to the point of death – and SPOILER ALERT, who in fact dies, tragically young, sacrificing her life to save yours just after you've tenderly reconciled and she's forgiven all your misdeeds... Well, that's a fantasy, too. And it's one this book doesn't question, not even in a metafictional aside, for all of its 400+ pages.

Grossman didn't make this mistake because he's a male writer; to say so would be letting him off the hook way too easy. Male writers have written devastatingly complex and conflicted female characters (think April Wheeler from Yates's Revolutionary Road, or for that matter, Emily Grimes from his Easter Parade: dude writes like a lady), and female writers have dropped the ball with their fictional counterparts big time (see my post on another magician novel, Susanna Clarke's otherwise masterful Jonathan Strange). No, what Grossman's done here is both simpler and less forgivable: he's allowed his imagination to fail. In a novel where he turns college students into geese, opens a portal in a Brooklyn vacant lot, fabricates a whole fictional world's mythology, and reveals a gorgeous parallel between the magic in books and the books that contain it, he fails to do the first, most obvious thing: turn one of his main characters into flesh and blood.

I still urge you to buy The Magicians, and to read it in the binging, breakneck, flashlight-under-the-blankets way it requires, and to allow it to gobsmack you with the resplendent unfurling of its many mysteries. Most books have flaws, and this one's strengths are as dazzling as a pyrotechnic display made by Illusionist magicians. But if the book's ultimate lesson is that magic is wherever you look hard enough, I wish Grossman had taken more than a passing glance at Alice. Right now, we only see her as Quentin does when they're on their separate treks in the Antarctic: at a great distance, and in a rosy light.

Burn Baby Burn

In the 2002 film Decasia, director Bill Morrison assembles a vast collage of decaying film stock and, with nothing more than a soundtrack, pieces it together into a film-length visual poem.  Vortices of blackness sweep through sunlit scenes. Poxes of dots and splotches swarm over happy dancers; bodies appear lit from within, aura-like outlines of white tracing their bodies, or darkness masks faces unnaturally, as in a photo negative.  Inky waves lap the screen.  The film is a testament both to film's artificiality, its impermanence, its gaps and stutters and lacks, and a celebration of the way those lacks can reveal something – sometimes nightmarish, sometimes beautiful – about the human condition.

Like Decasia, Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas presents itself as damaged goods.  The book, published by Featherproof in 2009, is designed to look like a moldering library volume; on the jacket and on the pages within, we find stains and wrinkles, amorphous dapplings of water and fungus.  The edges of the pages are darkened to look singed.  And the text inside is also splintered: first into 13 sections (stories? prose poems? chapters?) that don't quite hang together as a cohesive narrative, and then at the level of the sentence.  Characters speak in "rhyme and benediction"; the prose cracks into lists, line breaks, call and response. Things "smear," "squirt," "ooze," "froth"; they're "runny," "endless," and everything is damp.

Ostensibly, the book is about a world going through an onslaught of Biblical plagues, or perhaps an apocalypse in stages.  But Butler's not much interested in the breakdown of society; what fascinates him are the imploding families, crushed under disaster's weight.  Rowdy children tie their mother down to suck her breasts, their necks "fat with mold"; a nameless dead baby swells to fill an attic; a mother dies birthing a strange gown for her daughter to wear. 

I'm not going to lie: Butler's language is oppressive.  His sentences are forever turning in on themselves, hiding otherwise straightforward images in twisted syntax ("In the light slurring behind him he watched the streets eject a thing that moved").  This linguistic static muffles even the characters' innermost thoughts ("My brain wormed in want of recognition, turned over and over in cold sputter") or dresses them up in preciously unusual language even when the meaning's clear ("Here's a picture of my first girlfriend, whom I never got a chance to nuzzle").  This is a book where words like "shriek" or "murmuration" can slip by without making a ripple.  It's obvious Butler's not trying to create differentiated narrators, or even characters.  These folks all talk the same, and they're mostly passive victims of the same bizarre calamities.  The main distinction is the extent to which they're bloated with pus and spores. 

Yet, while I usually consider such verbal overkill annoyingly sloppy, in this novel even the messiness contributes to the overall effect.  It's as if the language itself has decomposed, and, like the figures in Decasia, the folks of Scorch Atlas have melded together unnaturally in the resulting corrosion.  I'll be interested to see what this writer does in the future... that is, if there is one.  After reading his book, I'm not so sure.

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.

I Mean It's Like I Don't Know What

Over the weekend, I saw my first Mumblecore movie: Funny Ha-Ha.  I've seen films by Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes, Francois Truffaut, and other New Wave/cinema verite auteurs, but nothing I've come across in the past quite prepared me for this.  In description, the film sounds simple enough: it tells the story of a young woman named Marnie, who works as a temp (later she becomes a professor's assistant); she's attracted to one guy, makes out with another who's attached to her friend, and goes on a few dates with a third.  In the beginning, she drinks too much -- then she stops.  We learn that she wants to play chess and spend more time outside, because she makes a to-do list. 

But Funny Ha-Ha is a bizarre cinematic experience, for one primary reason: not only is this movie nearly devoid of meaningful action, it's also nearly devoid of meaningful information.  There are no telling details here.  While a film like Clockwatchers (for example) also tells the story of a lonely temp to whom nothing much happens, that picture fetishizes certain images, endowing them with power and meaning: a green plastic monkey, the clock of the title.  The office setting there, though drab and depressing, is depicted memorably, almost as a character in the film: rearranging the temps' desks becomes an act of betrayal.  With the exception of one scene where Marnie finds a packet of birth control pills in a potential boyfriend's desk, though, the characters in Funny Ha-Ha hardly interact with their settings or the objects within them.  Scenes are vaguely grounded in apartments or on the street or in other interchangable locales; the camera rarely, if ever, hones in on anything besides a person's face.  We never get a sense of the relationships between the characters, their shared history, or their individual backgrounds.  Even the actors' physicality is nonspecific, fidgety, and vague.

All of this probably sounds like criticism.  But in fact I thought Funny Ha-Ha was beautiful and fascinating and deeply, compellingly strange, and for me it raises an interesting question about storytelling.  The popular wisdom seems to be that, if the viewer/reader is confused, he will get bored and abandon whatever story he's watching or reading.  But often, when a film or book refuses to directly offer the elements of conventional narrative – character motivation, for example, or exposition – I find myself seeking those out, almost desperately, from whatever material is available.  When one character in Funny Ha-Ha suddenly and inexplicably gets married (off-screen, of course), I project onto his situation all kinds of possible explanations: maybe his new wife guilted him into it?  Maybe there was some practical reason – health insurance, a green card?  Or maybe his attraction to Marnie has frightened him?  Far from boring me, puzzling over this question draws me deeper into the film than many plausible explanations could.

Though the characters in Funny Ha-Ha are unguarded, awkward, and vulnerable, the experience of watching the film is far from intimate.  On the contrary, the viewer becomes a voyeur.  We don't know these people.  These scenes have not been prepared for us.  We rifle through them, as Marnie rifles through the materials on her would-be lover's desk, piecing together a story from whatever clues we can find.

Joining the Blue Man Group: James Cameron's Avatar

Certain qualities -- stunning special effects, explosions, a fast-paced story, stars -- may guarantee a strong opening weekend for a movie.  But it takes something extra to propel a film to true market domination, to the level of an "event."  It requires an ability on the part of the filmmaker to tap into the subconscious of the moviegoing public, to understand the paradigms that underlie the way they see the world and somehow render those paradigms onscreen.  A film that succeeds in this way does not necessarily succeed artistically; it doesn't necessarily fail either.  That sort of accomplishment is beside the point.  The point is simply to create something both so spectacular and yet so recognizable that audiences inhabit it as easily as their own dreams.

If America dreams, it dreams James Cameron movies.  And though Avatar may at times seem like the result of too much bad pizza right before bed, it nevertheless speaks to our national preoccupations and desires far more directly than I suspect even its fans would like to admit.  A lot's been written already about the hilariously bad dialogue ("Come to Papa," "let's dance"), the creepy love story ("local tail" has never been used so literally), and the blundering obvious-ness of the characterizations.  For anyone who's seen Titanic, none of this will come as a surprise.  But the thing that's weirdest about Avatar, and in a way, most interesting about it, is what it has to say about nature and technology, and the surprising way those two intersect.

In the film, our protagonist, Jake Sully, is a paraplegic, a Marine injured in combat who's now given a second chance at life when he's called on a mission to the planet Pandora.  Once there, he is to remotely operate an avatar grown from a mixture of extraterrestrial and human DNA that resembles a member of the local alien race of blue humanoids, and thus insinuate himself into their community.  In short order, he experiences the wonders of the forest, becomes enamored with alien culture, and goes through the "fun part" of his tribal initiation to manhood with a local hottie under the glowing tentacles of a ghost tree.  I won't go any deeper into the plot: it's unnecessary, and based on ticket sales you've probably seen it already.

What I will point out is the rather obvious fact that, inherently and from the beginning, Sully's attraction to the new world bears no resemblance to our traditional ideas about a love for nature.  What he is attracted to is, bizarrely, provocatively, unnatural: the opportunity to trade his broken body in for a new one.  By creating a character -- a young disabled veteran -- who indisputably deserves a second chance at fitness and finds it in a body not his own, I'd offer that Cameron is slyly sneaking in an idea, increasingly prevalent in our culture, that flawed bodies (overweight, aging, scarred) do not "represent who we are" -- that, in some way, physical imperfection, not the correcting of it, surgical or otherwise, is what's unnatural.  Part of the fantasy here is not just that Jake Sully gets his legs back; it's that any of us can imagine plopping into a blue body that's like our own, only with longer legs, firmer abs, golden eyes, and arms that swing gracefully from tree to tree.  This is reinforced by the appearance of the two other characters who also go avatar: Sigourney Weaver's character, a tightly wound, middle-aged chain-smoker, seems effortlessly athletic and relaxed in alien form, and Joel Moore as Norm Spellman, her gangly, nerdy sidekick, turns valiant hero when he switches bodies.

I mentioned plastic surgery already.  But there's something else this resembles even more clearly.  When Sully sees his alien for the first time, suspended in an aquarium of what I assume is Blue Dude Amniotic Fluid, and later, when he first entombs himself in a gel-packed pod filled with nerve-grabbing hookups and wires, I found myself thinking of another zeitgeist-courting film of yore: The Matrix.  Released ten years ago, when our dependence on computers was still incomplete, that picture hinged on Keanu's decision to choose the red pill, rejecting a comforting simulacrum for a grittier, grayer-toned reality.  That film was characterized by a deep unease with our still-nascent desire to leave our bodies behind.  Now, in the era of Second Life, Facebook, the iPhone, the Wii, the PS3, and such, where folks -- like me and most everyone else -- spend half their lives in front of a flickering screen, we've become more comfortable with our avatars.  In fact, they're starting to look more like us than our real reflections do.

And the plugged-in quality of Avatar's world goes deeper than just Jake's point of access.  Cameron (and many viewers) may think he's evoking the web of life, but Pandora is closer to another web: the World Wide one.  We're told that the planet's tree roots form a network with more connections than the human brain; data, including sound, is stored in phosphorescent vines.  And the local people walk around with connectors in their ponytails that recall nothing so clearly as USB ports.  They can hook into anything -- horses, dragons, plant life, you name it -- and immediately download and transmit information.  In one of the film's weirdest lines, Sigourney Weaver says that the aliens' attachment to the ghost trees is not "just some pagan ritual"; the trees, she explains, contain actual, scientifically measurable data.  Has America arrived at its atheist moment?  (If so, go team.)  Because this is tantamount to saying that knocking out Google's servers isn't like trashing the Vatican -- it's much much worse.

Part of the reason that, historically, nature has been both appreciated and systematically destroyed is because large parts of it are not immediately useful to us.  Here on Earth, we cannot charge up our cell phones by touching a toadstool or discover our grandma's favorite cookie recipe by licking a tree.  What we can do is look upon nature in wonder, as something outside of ourselves and our direct control (a feeling that can inspire a sublime religious or spiritual perspective), or we can look upon nature practically, as a collection of raw materials to be shaped.  Neither perspective is plausible for the characters who inhabit Avatar.  Pandora is a video game world.  Everything there is already a tool, a toy, a challenge, a sex object, an entertainment system.  To plug in, all you have to do is pick out a skin -- preferably a more attractive version of yourself, and definitely blue.

After watching the movie, I walked out of the theater declaiming on it at some length. 

"I kept thinking one of them was going to get his ponytail cut off," I said.  "Shouldn't they have explored that?  What would happen then?"

"He'd probably just have wandered around forever, looking for a wireless signal," said one of my friends, turning his phone back on.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, pt. 1

In my opinion, Terry Gilliam has made five perfect films: Tideland, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 12 Monkeys, The Fisher King, and Brazil.  In each of these, he marries his rococo visual style with an omnipresent -- in fact, at times overwhelming -- emotional immediacy.  His characters, grotesque as they can sometimes be, are entirely transparent to us in these pictures: Fear and Loathing manages to paint an incredibly complex portrait of two men, despite the fact that they are never for a moment sober, and by yanking us painfully out of their protagonists' imaginary worlds, the endings of Tideland and Brazil reveal how close we've been to these characters all along.  Gilliam can take me from weeping to laughing faster than any other filmmaker (the moment in Fear and Loathing when Hunter awakes from his early 60's reverie to find a Z on his forehead and a gun in his hand springs to mind); he sees the complexity in even minor players (like Fisher King's unforgettably tragic gay hobo, or the veteran in that movie played by Tom Waits), and he knows how to get insanely good work from actors: tiny child Jodelle Ferland detonates in every scene of Tideland, 12 Monkeys boasts brilliant performances from Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, both generally reliable but unextraordinary, and the flicker of mania, desire, and pain across Robin Williams's face in Fisher King make it, for me, his only truly accessible film performance.  I may come to Terry Gilliam for the scenery, but I stay for the people chewing it. 

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus isn't like these movies.  It didn't do a Mexican hat dance on my heart or leave me wanting to adopt a junkie's child.  Though the performances were strong -- particularly by Christopher Plummer and luminous newcomer Lily Cole -- I didn't feel I was inside these characters, despite the fact that I spent a decent amount of time literally inside their imaginations.  For the most part, they're depicted as fairy-tale types: the Devil, the child-bride, the trickster, the oldest man in the world.  We hold them at a distance, and their actions often read as pieces of a half-remembered story, performed for our pleasure, rather than human choices enacted in the moment.  But, unlike Gilliam's lesser-but-fun Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, I didn't feel that this distance came from a desire to keep the material light and storybookish, the action quick and springy.  This is a dark, ambitious, panoramic film, sprawling and loose-ended, a collage of landscapes and narratives and layered symbols.  As a character in the film advises us, "Don’t worry if you don’t understand it all immediately."  And don't worry: you won't.

For that reason, I'm not going to write a real review of Imaginarium until I've seen it at least one more time.  But I would advise you to get out to it as fast as you can, because I have a feeling it won't be in theaters for too long.