appointment in samarra: a call for sotted suggestions · 19 May 10 by j.
In the novel I’m currently writing, Tree Listener (see some shameless self-promotion here), the protagonist is a 39-year-old recovering alcoholic named Wayne who’s white-knuckling his way through sobriety. (He also has a gift for tree listening, but that’s beside the point here.) Anyway, a very good friend and fellow fiction writer (shout out to you, PC) recently read the first 60 or so pages, and he had some qualms about the form-meets-content nature of the alcoholism aspect, namely that it wasn’t jiving. I couldn’t agree more. Hence, after about a week of freaking out, a new and improved draft is underway, largely due to what I’ve begun reading: books where at least one of the characters is a stumbling drunk, albeit wet or dry.
And so what better place to begin than with Appointment in Samarra, John O’Hara’s debut novel from 1934. His protagonist is Julian English, a silver spoonfed 30-year-old who brings the term self-destruction to a whole new level. With the help of alcohol – Scotch mostly, with the occasional rye and ginger ale thrown in when the Scotch is gone – English manages to essentially ruin his life in the short span of three days. While you might not be surprised to learn that this book is a bit of a tragic read, the story itself is told with an unmistakable energy and, believe it or not, beauty. I mean, good God, O’Hara can even make a hangover sound lovely: “It is a pretty good hangover when you look at yourself in the mirror and can see nothing above the bridge of your nose. You do not see your eyes, nor the condition of your hair. You see your beard, almost hair by hair; and the hair on your chest and the bones that stick up at the base of your neck. You see your pajamas and the lines in your neck, and the stuff on your lower lip that looks as though it might be blood but never is. You first brush your teeth, which is an improvement but leaves something to be desired. Then you try Lavoris and then an Eno’s. By the time you get out of the bathroom you are ready for another cigarette and in urgent need of coffee or a drink, and you wish to God you could afford to have a valet tie your shoes. You have a hard time getting your feet into your trousers, but you finally make it, having taken just any pair of trousers, the first your hands touched in the closet. But you consider a long, long time before selecting a tie. You stare at the ties; stare and stare at them, and you look down at your thighs to see what color suit you are going to be wearing. Dark gray. Practically any tie will go with a dark gray suit.”
See what I mean? A poetic hangover if I ever read one.
My students know that one of the things I love most is restraint. “Resist the urge,” I tell them, probably more often than they’d like. And that’s perhaps what I most respect from O’Hara here. He never says that English is an alcoholic; he doesn’t have to. And yes, it’s because he shows us, but not in the way that you might think. Let me explain. Over the course of the novel’s three days, there are three major events that spur English deeper and deeper into the shame and destruction that ultimately undoes him. Interestingly enough, however, O’Hara doesn’t directly show us the first two – he instead leans on imagination, the power of suggestion, and the reliable rumor mill of a small town; the third is a fight that happens fast and messy. O’Hara skips these pivotal acts in favor of focusing on English’s more subtle actions, details that reveal his true character and state of mind – English hiding out all night in a locker room with a bottle of scotch under the false pretense of waiting for a priest, English slurring drunkenly while hitting on the girlfriend of a mob boss, English with that pretty good hangover previously mentioned. Ultimately, English only cares about two things: what others think of him, and drinking, and through O’Hara’s unadorned yet energetic prose, he does a profound job of showing how each of these priorities is a direct result of the other.
The penultimate chapter demonstrates this clearly. When things finally go black for English, it is because of the painful words of others that play back incessantly in his head: “Wish Julian English would act his age. He’s always cutting in. His own crowd won’t have him…No thanks, Julian, I’d rather walk…Julian, I wish you wouldn’t call me so much. My father gets furious…Listen, you leave my sister alone.” And what follows seems inevitable: “He had a drink. He had another and he got up and took off his coat and vest and tie. He had another and he brought the Scotch over and stood the bottle on the floor, and he got out his favorite records…He drank while walking and this demonstrated the inadequacy of the glass. He had a smart idea. He took the flowers out of a vase and poured the water out, and made himself the biggest highball he ever had seen. It did not last very long…He spun a spoon around, and when it stopped he would play the record to which it pointed. He played only three records in this way, because he was pounding his feet, keeping time, and he broke one of his most favorite…He wanted to cry but he could not. He wanted to pick up the pieces. He reached over to pick them up, and lost his balance and sat down on another record, crushing it unmusically…He used the vase for resting-drinking, and the glass for moving-drinking. That way he did not disturb the main drink while moving around, and could fill the glass while getting up and sitting down…He found he had two cigarettes burning, one in the ash tray on the floor, and the other getting stuck in the varnish on the edge of the phonograph. He half planned a lie to explain how the burn got there and then, for the first time, he knew it would not make any difference.”
Wayne, my own protagonist, might be sober (though just barely), and clearly English is not, but both men are on a downward spiral that lasts just a handful of days, and in the end, the only man each has to blame is himself. Drinking is an addiction, a sickness, yes, but usually it blooms from something deep and painful and true. And blooms strikes me as just the right word here, because it’s true there’s nothing lovely about addiction, but surely it can be considered a kind of rebirth if one is able to overcome it.
And so I ask you, dear readers: what are your favorite books about drinking and/or sobering up? I’m open to anything and everything. On deck, I’ve got Fitzgerald ( Tender is the Night ), Burroughs ( Dry ), and London ( John Barleycorn ), plus I’m doing some of my own research, i.e. drinking a glass of Chinon as we speak. I mean, I’ve got to do something to lift my spirits considering all the tragic literature that awaits. So, suggestions?
the story of edgar sawtelle: an ode to costa rica and silence · 18 April 10 by j.
Last week I was on a beach in Costa Rica, sipping cold cans of Imperial beneath an umbrella. I had been staying in Coco Beach for a wedding, but that morning we’d taken a shuttle an hour south to Tamarindo a.k.a. Tamagringo, a touristy beach full of ex-pats surfing. Some of my friends had opted for lessons, but I feigned exhaustion. “I really just want to lie on the beach,” I explained, though the truth was that I really just wanted to read my book.
I was only about a hundred pages in to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, but already it had begun to seep into my mind and bones, blooming like the black spots that both Edgar, the protagonist—a mute farm boy who finds his own transcendent ways of communication—and Trudy, his mother, experience in varied forms. What I mean is: it was getting to me. Admittedly, it was sort of a terrible pick for a vacation read, mostly because it’s the kind of book you want to crawl into, and I found only snatches of reading time in which to immerse—early mornings with coffee on the pool-facing balcony, and later in the days, in the time spent out of water, often brief because of the constant temperature that hovered around one hundred. But here was a free afternoon! Most of my playmates were in the sea, and I was beneath an umbrella, shaded with my book and a cold can of beer bought from one of the many locals dressed in jeans who spend their hot days pulling coolers down the sand. Finally, I reopened my book and sank into a new chapter.
Not two minutes later, an unknown voice: “Hey!”
I looked up: one of those aforementioned ex-pats, female, fifties, friendly face, slicked back blond hair, body squarish and compact beneath her wetsuit bottoms and bikini top, surfboard tucked beneath one arm. “Hi,” I replied.
“I just finished reading that book!” she cried, grinning. “Oh, my gosh. Can I please tell you the end?”
“What? The end? Uh, no, well, I’d rather you didn’t. I’m only a hundred pages in.” (FYI: it’s nearly six hundred.)
“Oh, wow. Okay.” She inched closer, squeezing water from the tiny pointed ponytail at the nape of her neck. “Just tell me this: have you met Ida Paine yet?”
Ida Paine: a creepy character. A convenient store psychic or something. “I have.”
She shuddered. “She’s one of the witches from Hamlet.”
“You mean Macbeth?”
She shook her head and switched her surfboard from one arm to the other. Her grin expanded. “Nope.”
“Okay,” I said, trolling through the plot of Hamlet in my head: uncle kills brother, marries mother. Son broods, considers revenge. Ophelia drowns in grief. I half-knew that Edgar Sawtelle was based on Shakespeare, but I usually try and avoid other people’s readings and reviews until after I’ve read things myself. But frankly, witches in Hamlet? I just don’t think so. “Well, thanks.”
“It’s just so terrible,” she said.
“The book?”
“Oh, no! That’s wonderful. It’s just hard enough to find people that speak English, let alone people to discuss books with, and here you are, reading the very book I want to discuss.”
I smiled and shrugged. “Sorry,” I said. “As I said, I’m only on page a hundred.”
“Yeah.” She looked down at her feet, lingering. “Okay, well, enjoy.”
“Thanks.”
I returned to my book, read a handful of pages, but for some reason I couldn’t concentrate. I tucked my book away and spent the rest of the afternoon in the ocean, diving under and over waves; I spent dusk in a beach bar with friends and frozen cocktails, the evening on the bumpy bus ride back. That night a group of us cooked dinner with all the food left over in our refrigerators because we were all heading home in the following days. I didn’t revisit Edgar Sawtelle until the voyage home, where I read through two flights and a layover and finally finished a few mornings later, tucked up in my own bed on a rainy day. As soon as I was done, I thought of her, that surfing woman on the beach. Inexplicably, I felt guilty. How strange it must have been to immerse oneself on a farm in rural Wisconsin, a kingdom really, occupied by apple trees and a family with a long history of breeding and training dogs after their own namesake—Sawtelle—while living on a beach peppered with mango trees, monkeys, and coconuts. How solitary to read of a lonely, mute boy who sees his father’s ghost in the rain while spending your days balanced on a surfboard beneath the Central American sun. Because this book simply pulls you in, yanks you underwater like—forgive me—an undertow, and once the first tragedy hits, the tragedies just keep rolling on in, not unlike all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, not unlike—forgive me once more—the sea.
Unlike my surfing friend, however, I do not wish to tell you the end, though I will say it doesn’t aim to lighten anything up. In a way, I hesitate to directly discuss the book at all. I have no quotations to offer, no favorite lines or scenes to share, because I think discussing it in this manner might diminish the experience of its quiet world. Let me explain in a roundabout way. I like to begin my creative writing classes with a quote from one of Flannery O’Connor’s letters. In it, she ponders the thing that makes great fiction work: “I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity…It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.” Because Edgar cannot speak, he signs—he gestures, if you will—and it is only in the absence of words that he is able to truly communicate something much deeper than language. He is a character not of this world, and rather than a single event or gesture that indicates the heart of this story, I instead think that it is Edgar himself who works as the beating heart—Edgar with his invented sign language, his transcendent communication, his silence.
And so, my surfing friend, despite my guilt for brushing you off, for ignoring your desire to talk, for correcting your Shakespeare knowledge, I feel that in the fact that I have now finished this book and yet am unable to communicate with you in a traditional manner, I am finally able to do both you and this wonderful book justice. Pura vida!
my return from the infinite: week, ahem, sixteen? · 30 September 09 by j.
I know it’s been a while. I will save you from all excuses and distractions and simply say that at a certain point in my immersion of this novel, this huge and epic and downright beautiful novel, I found that I did not want to write about it anymore. I did not want to check in with infinitesummer.org. I did not want to talk it over with people who’d read it. And I certainly did not want to talk to the people on the subway who endlessly asked me with eyebrows raised: what’s that about? In short, the act of reading this particular book became a thing that was totally and completely mine, done mostly in the half-dark of my apartment after everyone had gone to sleep (like a drug, you might say) and frankly, I didn’t want to share it with anyone. In fact, there seemed to be an urge to do just the opposite, an inexplicable urge to hide.
Now that I’m finished with this behemoth, I think I’ve begun to understand why it has such a cult following, why, when I was in my first hundred pages and still rather opinionated, devoted IJ fans responded to my comments in ways that I thought were, frankly, a unique blend of condescending and unhinged. But now I think I’m starting to get it. Last week, when I had the tiniest pinch of pages left, when I was oh, oh, so close, I was riding the green line home in the early evening. (It might be worth noting that I actually let my students out of class twenty minutes early because I knew I would finish the book that night, and I just wanted to get on back to it already; of course, they were let out early on the pretense of having extra time to work on their looming papers.) Anyway, three college-aged guys, BC dude-types, sat down across from me, and one of them leaned forward and said: I just want you to know that it’s my life’s goal to read that book. In response, I smiled. You should, I said, then went back to reading. His friend asked him: What’s it about? And the guy launched into what was perhaps one of the most painful monologues I’ve ever been subjected to. Well, he began, David Foster Wallace killed himself last year, yeah, he hung himself, and it’s like this real shame because he was like this New Yorker writer, you know, all the good writers work at the New Yorker, it’s like the best, and so he wrote this amazing book of stories called Consider the Lobster, and wow, the characters are just really so accessible. It’s really much more approachable that what she’s reading. But she’s my hero. Did you hear that? You’re my hero. This time, I didn’t smile or nod. I completely fucking ignored. And his friend, who, kudos to him, belied his idiotic appearance by realizing that his friend had yet to answer the initial question, turned instead to me: Hey, so what’s it about? I looked him straight in the eye and said: Tennis. Tennis? he asked. Yeah, that’s right. Tennis. And the original asshole, the guy who’d probably never even read a New Yorker cartoon said: Umn, I don’t think so. You guys, I think she’s fucking with us.
Now of course the book is about much more than tennis. In fact, if I had to choose a single word that summed it all up I would probably say: addiction. It is probably the most beautiful and accurate account of addiction that has ever graced the face of American Literature, and is it wrong that there was just some part of me that wanted to hide such beauty from this idiot who wouldn’t know the difference between a story and an essay if it crawled into his ear and procreated? I don’t want this guy to read Infinite Jest. EVER. He doesn’t deserve to. Is that so wrong? In retrospect, I do realize how ridiculous this is; the English teacher/writer in me does believe that every person deserves access to every book, that, in fact, that guy probably needs it more than most. However, back on the green line, I’m still deeply despising this kid, and instead of thinking calmly and logically I simply disengage from reality and, in a very IJ-esque fantasy, see myself stand up and beat this kid over the head with this beautiful, hefty book, much in the same way that Gately beats the Canadians in the middle of the street. Gately just goes into protection mode, even if he doesn’t know why, and I found myself wanting to do the same for DFW. I wanted to smash that kid’s head in with my five-pound book while his friends watched in utter horror. I wanted to be escorted off the green line by MBTA Police. I wanted there to be small specks of blood left behind on those thousand pages. But of course that didn’t happen. Of course I just said: Well, when you have twenty pages left in the book and someone is keeping you from reading it, you can decide for yourself what it’s about. Ouch, his friend said, and when they got off on the next stop, leaving me to finish in solitude, I swear a certain someone mumbled a very derogatory term under his breath.
So yes, David Foster Wallace killed himself, and yes, it is pretty much the worst thing that has happened to American Literature in a long, long while, and yes, IJ devotees, of which I now count myself as one, might act a little psychotic every now and then in defense of our author, but it’s important to understand that something happens to you when you read this book. And I think even moreso now, after his tragic death. It’s like the stakes are raised in some way, and furthermore, like any a-hole on the street now thinks he knows something about DFW, just because he knows this gnarly fact. But here’s the thing: once you read this book, you don’t want him to be remembered for that. Or at least I don’t. It’s just not the point. This book gets inside you, lives with you long after you finish the last page, and in that sense, Wallace is the furthest thing from dead. I know it’s the most cliche, cheesy thing to say that his work lives on, but in this case, it’s just kind of true. I mean, the act of reading may recede like the sea, but you’ll always be on that freezing sand, still wet from where the water just was.
infinite grammar: week three · 9 July 09 by j.
As the above picture makes clear, I’ve done most of my recent reading amidst the water, sun, and trees (and lately, the rain) of New Hampshire, and so I haven’t exactly been able to keep my OED at arm’s length. Hence, I’ve taken to circling the words I don’t know, and I’ll be honest, certain pages have ended up looking like a pathetically-rendered word search puzzle.
The point is, vocabulary is a major part of this novel, not only because Wallace is a master of language, but because he has a tendency to make use of words most readers have never even heard of, and furthermore, will probably never need again.
Some examples:
festschrift: a volume of articles, essays, etc. contributed by many authors in honor of a colleague, usually published on the occasion of retirement
quincunx: an arrangement of five objects, as trees, in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle
prolix: extended to great, unnecessary, or tedious length; long and wordy
Now, I’m all for a challenging read. I’m all for expanding my vocabulary. I’m all for a writer flexing his or her brainiac abilities. But as the pencil in my hand found itself circling again and again, I couldn’t help looking for a larger reason. As a writer myself, I know that every single thing an author does (or doesn’t do) is a choice, and while I consider myself a member of the school that believes Wallace is genius-material, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he spent a hefty bit of quality time with the OED while writing this opus. It might be his style, but it takes a lot of time and research to create such a style. And so we are back to my original question: what is the larger reason behind such language?
aleatory: depending on a contingent event, or pertaining to accidental causes; of luck or chance
fallow: uncultivated (as in land) ; not in use, inactive; pale-yellow or light-brown
creosote: an oily liquid having a burning taste and a penetrating odor, obtained by the distillation of coal and wood tar, used mainly as a preservative for wood and as an antiseptic
And then on page 100, something clicked. This is the scene where Hal and all the boys from ETA are in the locker room venting and decompressing. They are beyond tired, and so in order to express the extent of their exhaustion, they begin to experiment with description:
“My bones are ringing the way sometimes people say their ears are ringing, I’m so tired.”
“I’m waiting til the last possible second to even breathe. I’m not expanding the cage till driven by necessity of air.”
“So tired it’s out of tired’s word-range,” Pemulis says. ‘Tired just doesn’t do it.”
“Exhausted, shot, depleted,” says Jim Struck, grinding at his closed eye with the heel of his hand. “Cashed. Totalled.”
“Look.” Pemulis pointing at Struck. “It’s trying to think.”
“A moving thing to see.”
“Beat. Worn the heck out.”
“Worn the fuck-all out is more like.”
“Wrung dry. Whacked. Tuckered out. More dead than alive.”
“None even come close, the words.”
“Word-inflation,” Stice says, rubbing at his crewcut so his forehead wrinkles and clears. “Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation…”
Hal raises his eyebrows at Stice and smiles. “Hyperbolicker?”
“My daddy as a boy, he’d have said ‘tuckered out’ll’ do just fine.”
“Whereas here we are sitting here needing whole new words and terms.”
“Phrases and clauses and models and structures,” Troeltsch says, referring again to a prescriptive exam everyone but Hal wishes now to forget. “We need an inflation-generative grammar.”
Keith Freer makes a motion as if taking his unit out of his towel and holding it out at Troeltsch: “Generate this.”
Strangely, this scene reminded me of Faulkner, as well as a paper I once wrote about his influence on Junot Díaz. In Absalom, Absalom, Faulkner makes certain choices in telling the story, or, in some cases, in not telling it. In that novel (and, come to think of it, in this one) there are multiple unreliable narrators narrating from multiple time periods, and the language is often difficult, wordy, and winding. It’s as if the story itself resists being told. Faulkner most likely made this choice because he was trying to get at something very deep and complex, this idea that the South was essentially destroyed by slavery, and yet, how can an author convey such destruction in a single novel? In short, he must create “whole new words and terms.” He must make use of new “phrases and clauses and models and structures.” When the old, traditional, and linear ways of storytelling simply do not cut it, he must find new ways to tell his own in order to convey the depth of feeling that such destruction elicits (albeit on a smaller scale). Díaz does something similar in his latest novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He uses multiple time periods, an unreliable narrator, and footnotes that interrupt the narrative, all by way of telling the complicated story of one family’s history under the violent Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. And you know what? I’m starting to believe that Wallace is doing something similar here, not only with his endnotes that constantly interrupt, not only with his multiple voices, environments, and strangely-named years, but also with his use of dense language and difficult vocabulary. (Sidenote: I would wager that it is no coincidence that Hal’s mother is the book’s grammarian. So far she is a shadowy figure, but once she comes center stage, as I have no doubt she will, I think her role in this deferment will be made clear.)
eidetic: of, pertaining to, or constituting visual imagery vividly experienced and readily reproducible with great accuracy and in great detail
mishit: a bad or faulty hit, as in tennis or cricket
meatus: an opening or foramen, esp. in a bone or bony structure, as the opening of the ear or nose
Two hundred pages in, I cannot logically expect to know what Wallace is trying to convey with all this, but my gut feeling is that it has something to do with the desire to get at this all-encompassing tragedy and sadness that lurks within – for lack of a better term – the American Dream. Page 173: “Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.” It is no coincidence that the two major settings of this book are a school for the highest-achievers and a rehab for society’s rejects, with a simple hill between them. Perhaps Wallace is suggesting that addiction is a byproduct of a failure of talent, of the failure to grasp this inherent dream. Only the next eight hundred pages will tell.
let the infinite summer begin: week one · 24 June 09 by j.
While I never subscribed to the delusion that I had actually read Infinite Jest, I was still under the impression that I had owned a copy for many years. I could even remember where I once kept it: on a shelf beneath a glass-topped coffee table in the living room of my old Los Angeles apartment, where it conveniently impressed guests and gathered dust. But it’s been eight years since I lived out west, and while it’s possible that I lost it or gave it away in the midst of a move, it’s more likely that that novel belonged to my roommate, who – it’s starting to come back to me now – may have actually read the thing. At any rate, this all led me to the Brookline Booksmith on June 21st (Day One), where I proceeded to buy a brand-spanking-new copy of David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece, and in some weird way, the heft of its promise in my hands felt like the turning of a new leaf, or perhaps, excuse the pun, many leaves. (Like paper, get it?)
In short, I have decided to jump onto the bandwagon of this summer project – www.infinitesummer.org – which aims to encourage “enduring bibliophiles” throughout the nation to read this baby once and for all, start to finish, on a suggested schedule that I for one have nestled into my bookmarks bar. Beyond the nifty calendar, the site offers all kinds of cool stuff to pillow its readers through the process – guest bloggers, public forums, and tips that are both cute and useful. All in all, a neat idea, and slightly reminiscent of social reading experiments such as The Big Read and One City, One Book that have each shared success and disaster. (When the latter tried to launch in New York, the Times published an article titled NYC; One City, One Book, Zero Chance.) But as I said: new leaves.
And so as I write this, I’m on page 42, although it only took me 6 to get to the line ”[T]he air over the table like the sparkling space just above a fresh-poured seltzer,” and then 7 more to reach “I am concentrating docilely on the question why U.S. restrooms always appear to us as infirmaries for public distress, the place to regain control,” both of which only deepened my confidence in the fact that I have undertaken a summer project well worth the attention. So far I’ve done most of this reading on the subway, but each time I am always at least half-transported to the back porch of my old apartment in Jamaica Plain, where six years ago a roommate’s girlfriend lent me a tattered copy of Broom of the System, which I then read each morning with coffee, wrapped up in the blanket we kept on the rocking chair for early autumnal weather. That was my first and last full foray into DFW, and now, several years later, I find myself immediately lost in that familiar atmosphere of cold mornings and french-pressed coffee, of stunning descriptions and systematic language, of poking holes through the useless but often blinding sheen of the everyday. Because that is what is essentially magical about Wallace’s work – the creation of a complete bubble for the reader to disappear into, and yet the simultaneous destruction of our ideas about society, which is, in a sense, the ultimate bubble.
the believers: another exercise in psuedo-feminism · 5 May 09 by j.
Here in Boston we have this elite little group called the Bad Girls Book Club. We drink wine, eat cheese, and talk text. Female-penned prose, usually. The Believers, by Zoë Heller, was on the chopping block a few months back, and while I hadn’t planned on writing about it at first, a small thing happened to make me change my mind.
While recently practicing my pioneer spirit on the treadmill (see: previous post), I was simultaneously enjoying a certain shameless act that, in my opinion, should only be done when there are workout machines in the vicinity: reading tabloids. Now, I don’t remember which one it was, but I do remember that I came across a book review of The Believers that deeply, deeply annoyed me. It was only a paragraph long, mostly negative, and relatively unmemorable but for the line that basically read: the novel ends with Karla (one of the Litvinoff family daughters) embarking on a completely unbelievable and ridiculous love affair that puts the finishing touch on the book’s absurdity. I admit this may be a slightly exaggerated paraphrase, but as I mentioned, the review annoyed me. In reaction, I rolled up the stupid magazine, stuffed into the treadmill’s cup holder, and upped the speed of the machine.
I found The Believers to be a flawed, enjoyable read. Despite the fact that I disliked pretty much all of the characters, I found myself unable to put the book down. I think Heller herself would be for the most part content with such a reaction. In this interview I learned that she doesn’t necessarily put much stock in the idea that characters have to be likable and/or relatable. I mildly agree with this. One doesn’t have to necessarily like every character he or she encounters (think of Raskolnikov), but it helps if one cares what happens to them. In the case of The Believers, I kept reading because I wanted to know just that, but in the end I was left disappointed. Events did indeed happen, just not at the behest of any of the characters. Well, except for Karla.
A short synopsis to help extricate my point. At the novel’s outset, the patriarch of this upper-middle class liberal New York family suffers a stroke, leaving the women around him – a wife, two daughters, and a soon-to-be-not-so-secret lover – to flounder in his absence. There are two sons as well: Lenny, thirty-something, adopted, struggling with drugs, and Jamil, four years old, mixed race, illegitimate. Consequently, neither son has true access to the family, and what with Joel in a coma we are left with the Litvinoff women – mom, Audrey, and her two daughters, Karla and Rosa – as the three varying perspectives and protagonists.
My main problem with the novel was that these major female characters neglect to take their fates into their own hands. In short, they are discontent and remain so for the majority of the novel; Audrey with her lack of sympathy toward everyone save her husband’s faceless left-wing causes; Rosa with her radical past, her present job at an inner city program for teenaged girls, and her flirtation with Judaism; Karla with her blockhead husband and thankless career as a social worker. Eventually, however, it is the latter – Karla, the most unlikely of the three candidates – who begins to embark on what turns out to be real change through her unexpected relationship with Khaled, an Arab shopkeeper. Hence, why that article made me so cranky in the first place.
Still though, the novel left me wanting. While its biting satire was often witty and extremely well-written, it was also empty, and didn’t really make me feel anything, which, in my case, is kind of why I read. I like the premise of three women left to struggle aimlessly when the man around whom they orbit is snatched away, but overall I did not feel the depth of this struggle. Not even when the Litvinoff women are faced with Berenice, Joel’s secret lover, and their child together, Jamil, do they allow their lives to be shaken in a meaningful way, something that is wonderful only in its potential. This door of dramatic intrigue is opened, but unfortunately, the author chose to keep her characters from walking through.
my ántonia: the feminist farmer · 14 April 09 by j.
Above my desk sits a stack of books upon a shelf, chosen to inspire my current novel; they lay on their sides, lengthwise, so that their titles can haunt me clearly. The pile at a glance: a logging memoir, an historical book on Maine, a handful of short story collections where the protagonists are men and the settings are wooden (Faulkner, Pancake). Willa Cather’s My Ántonia was chosen in particular for Cather’s well-known capacity for the language of nature. Just a few pages in: “As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.” Lovely. I can only hope that her style has had some effect on my own work, but the truth is that while reading, I found myself hung up on an issue beyond language.
In the prologue, Jim, the novel’s narrator, delivers a manuscript to a friend. “Here is the thing about Ántonia,” he says. “Do you still want to read it? I finished it last night. I didn’t take the time to arrange it; I simply wrote down pretty much all that her name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn’t any form. It hasn’t any title, either.” This unpublished manuscript – which, cleverly, the reader begins once he or she turns the page – gives identity to the hard female faces often found in old black-and-white photographs such as the one above. Here her name is Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian transplant through whom the quintessential pioneer woman is given both form and title. This gradual definition actually serves as kind of a neat parallel to America’s early western settlers. What I mean is: those guys really had to wing it. As Jim points out upon his childhood arrival in the then desolate Nebraska: “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” America was but a baby, and the largely untapped western plains represented the harsh promise of possibility. Like the prologue’s manuscript, it had neither form nor title, and therefore no identity, not until the mish-mash of people who tilled its earth inadvertently blessed it with one.
Inasmuch as this novel follows the bloom of Jim’s relationship with Ántonia, it journals the daily toils of life for the men, and perhaps more importantly, the women who endured this pioneer era. While it is largely Ántonia’s story, however, it is not her voice we hear. Back in the prologue, Jim is unhappy with his manuscript’s lack of name. “He went into the next room, sat down at my desk and wrote across the face of the portfolio ‘Ántonia.’ He frowned at this moment, then prefixed another word, making it ‘My Ántonia.’ That seemed to satisfy him.” This may be a small nudge on Cather’s part. I imagine her saying, pay attention! You are learning this woman’s story, but it is through a man’s eyes. And it’s true. So much of this novel is Jim’s view of Ántonia, his watchful gaze revealing her transformation from exotic childhood playmate to beautiful young woman who, because of familial circumstance, must reject school in order to work the fields. Jim describes her in the act. “She wore the boots her father had so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and his old fur cap. Her outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as brown as a sailor’s. Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders, like the bole of a tree out of the turf.” In the field, Ántonia wears men’s clothes, and her arms and throat – archetypal feminine features – are compared to those of a sailor’s. On this day, when Jim tries to convince her to return to school, she rebuffs him. “I ain’t got time to learn. I can work like mans now…School is all right for little boys. I help make this land one good farm.” Jim doesn’t like this new Ántonia, or rather, he doesn’t know what to do with her. In his mind – and perhaps in the minds of most men at this time – he believes that women belong in the kitchen, cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. This is further proved later, when Jim’s crush on Ántonia is revived only when she leaves the family farm for a job in town, cooking and cleaning for his neighbor. Here she becomes lovely again, wearing dresses and letting boys walk her home after the Friday night dances. It’s as if she can only be attractive, be a woman, when she’s nestled safely into the stereotype of the time. (And, side note, I can’t find any definitive etymological proof, but I’d like to believe that the phrase “working out” in the fields has in some part evolved into “working out” at the gym; something once so anti-feminine has become a necessity for contemporary female attraction via the male gaze. Oh, the irony. But back to the novel.) Jim soon leaves Nebraska to attend college out of state, while Ántonia is essentially left by her fiancé at the altar, pregnant and alone. It seems as though the stereotypical female role doesn’t work for all the girls.
Years pass, and the two friends lose touch. Jim leads a scholarly and well-traveled life, eventually landing in New York City as a railroad executive. (“He loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches.”) When Jim returns to visit Ántonia in Nebraska, he finds her back in the country with a farm of her own, a loving husband and ten children. He is struck by her appearance. “She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last…It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.” As much as this novel is about everything I’ve already discussed, it’s also about Jim’s (a.k.a. the male’s) ability, in the end, to accept Ántonia for who she is and where she belongs. Through the book that Jim writes about her, Ántonia slowly comes to embody that pioneer spirit, in both the American and feminist understanding of the term.
a new year. · 12 January 09 by j.
Dearest readers,
With this post, I solemnly swear, to bring forth many more in this year of 2009. There is a large pile of books on my bedside table, as well as one on my desk, not to mention that growing stack on the shelf known only and shamefully as “the unread.” There exists as well a parallel of unwritten blogs alongside these unopened pages. In this new year, I aim to unlock them all, or at least to dent the surface. Look forward to some new views on old classics, talk of nature-driven prose as I attempt to invoke my own Willa Cather within, and light shed on those contemporary unknowns who have blindly sent me their stuff. So for now I must go; there is much to read.
piano&scene at design hive! · 23 November 08 by j.
Design Hive is a radical holiday indie market, held every Saturday in the basement of the Maria Baldwin school between Harvard and Porter Squares. All items are handmade and one of a kind, thanks to craftiness of your local working artists. On a recent day I saw necklaces made of molten maple leaves, clocks made of vintage book covers, and baby onesies made of recycled materials. Yes, I meant it when I said radical. Anyway, I’m very excited to announce that Piano&Scene will have its very own table on Saturday, December 6! Please come by. Just think: you can show your support of artistic community and cross some items off your shopping list all at once!
the boy who lived dies, but then lives again. · 3 August 07 by j.
A brief history of my relationship with Harry Potter:
I was late in climbing on this train, skeptical to say the least. But after enough trusted opinions insisted on my reading of “the boy who lived,” I finally gave in. Truthfully, I myself could’ve lived without the first two books, though that’s not to say I didn’t fly through them, reading each one in only a day. They were great, but definitely written for kids. The good news is that as Harry grows up, so does the writing and subject matter; things get darker, scarier, and also, more romantic, meaning Harry starts to notice girls. And so I read three and four next, one right after the other, and eventually five and six, and if you haven’t read all these little Potter stories yet, here’s the way I’d suggest: Buy all seven, lock yourself in a room, and read. It’ll be just like that time you ordered a season of Lost from Netflix and hid in your living room for a week, only better. The details, the subtleties, the threads, will never get lost. The momentum will never stop moving.
And so to book seven, the big ending.
I have to say that as I closed the cover on that whopping 759-paged book, the first thing I felt was relief, then accomplishment, but then, disappointment. But why? Let’s cover the possibilities. Was I disappointed because it was finally over? Because there would be no more books (supposedly), no more adventures of Harry, Ron, and Hermione? Maybe, it is sort of sad. Truthfully, I miss them already.
Or was it because I just wasn’t happy with the ending? Because I must admit, when it became clear to me that Harry would have to die in order for everything to come together in the end, I was impressed with Rowling’s guts. Wow, she’s really going to do it, I thought to myself. She’s really going to kill Harry. I was sad, but as a writer, I understood it had to happen that way for the story to work. I imagined Rowling at her desk late one night, the moment she realized she would have to kill Harry in the end. What must’ve that moment been like?
But anyway, so then some things happen, Voldemort kills Harry, and then…wait a second, Harry’s not dead! He’s in some sort of train station/purgatory place having a nice little conversation with Dumbledore and then next thing you know he goes back to life to kill Voldemort, save the world, get married, put his little kids named after the deceased main characters onto the Hogwarts Express and assumably live happily ever after! Yay!
Except where are the details about Harry’s life as an adult? I mean, I don’t want to know the inner workings of he and Ginny’s sex life, but I’d like to know what the man who lived does for a living, wouldn’t you? Is he an auror? Are aurors even around anymore? Does he hope to be headmaster of Hogwarts? Or does he feel deeply depressed because he fulfilled his purpose in life at age seventeen and now the only place to go is down? Oh my God, is Harry one of those awful people whose golden years were high school?
Okay, okay, okay. It’s a kids’ book. I have to keep reminding myself of this. And maybe that’s simply why I was disappointed – because in order to be fair to the millions of children reading this book, Harry couldn’t die. What would the message be? Work hard even if no one likes you, be true to yourself, triumph over evil, then die. I mean, that might not be far from the truth but we don’t have to go around printing it out for kids everywhere.
Or maybe I was just disappointed because anything that is this built up has an irrevocable tendency to disappoint. One word: Sopranos. Sometimes an ending can just do no right.
But through all this, I am still impressed (read: jealous, envious) with J.K. Rowling. I am endlessly amazed with authors who can create entirely new worlds that pulse with such character and detail. For a long time my single complaint of the series was with the language – because it was written for children, I felt there was something lacking. Don’t get me wrong, the scenes are vivid, the descriptions spot-on, but clearly there are none of those heartbreakingly good sentences that you’ll find in the best of adult fiction. Never was there a sentence where I said, “Ouch.” But then I realized that these books are ripe with language, just not in the way I’m used to. Essentially, Rowling has created a brand new dictionary of words, amazing words: horcrux, hogwarts, auror, deluminator, polyjuice, slytherin, cruciatus, quidditch. It’s as if Rowling uncovered a brand new alphabet.
All things considered, the story of Harry Potter from beginning to end is inventive, original, and well worth the read, even if for the mere reason of not letting the countless private jokes understood only to Potter fans fly over your head like a runaway Snitch. Should you read it? Yes, all seven.