Crass Notes

Home Land

by Sam Lipsyte

2004, Picador

In my latest issue of The Believer Lipsyte's new novel, The Ask was featured in their one-page book reviews. In the review, they mentioned that Lipsyte was a previous winner of The Believer Book Award, an honor which factors, among other things, the results of an annual write-in readership poll (my 2009 votes: Auster's Invisible, Holt's In the Valley of Kings, and Chaon's Await Your Reply).

After a small amount of research the title of Lipsyte's book was Home Land and it so happened my library had a copy on its shelves; it would not even require interlibrary loan to check out. I read most of Home Land riding to and from a local ski mountain in the last two weeks and made short work of it once its rhythmic structure and idiosyncratic voice made themselves apparent.

Home Land is narrated as a series of letters to a high school alumni newsletter by a graduate by the name of Teabag who explains in detail how success - financial, social, emotional - has eluded him since graduation. The letters are incredibly profane and so the principal of his high school, Mr. Fontana whose romantic and professional failures Teabag delights in publishing, refuses to include them in the Catamount Notes.

Teabag's letters general detail his aimlessness in life. He is employed by the Coca-Cola Company creates false bits of trivia for their in-house newsletter; his only long term girlfriend dumped him after growing increasingly frustrated with his sullenness and perversity. Teabag spends most of his time masturbating and getting high with his friend Gary at what Teabag calls The Retractor Pad (which is financed from a lawsuit against Gary's psychiatrist after it was discovered that the memories of his parents ritualistically raping him which resurfaced during therapy turned out to be false).

The letters describe mainly Gary and Teabag's lethargy. Teabag does, however, delight in sharing news of his fellow alumni as he runs across them in embarrassing situations locally. Early in the narrative, Teabag and Gary are at a strip joint and encounter sex-scandal-disgraced Principal Fontana wandering with

an unbelievable amount of blood pouring off the poor guy's head. His shirt collar couldn't soak it up quite fast enough... [and he] walked around the bar like that for awhile, looking for all the world like a butchered zombie, or a man born old, full-sized, womb slime still on him.

As is obvious from the above quote, Lipsyte has a gift for incredibly funny and stomach-churning imagery. Lipsyte's imaginative prowess is most clearly demonstrated when Teabag describes his rather lurid sexual fantasies, which read hysterically funny and yet are the sort of thing that have one reaching for the hand sanitizer after reading.

Lipsyte's humor reminds me quite a lot of Chuck Palahniuk, who blurbs on the back of my paperback edition. The mixture of gleeful description of taboo subjects, wicked wit and droll observations of awkward interpersonal encounters read like caffeinated Bret Easton Ellis.

While Lipsyte delights in exploring the gutter of post-Sunday dinner America his vision is also strikingly warm. There is little question that Lipsyte is sympathetic to his hero or that we are meant to be as well. Teabag is portrayed as the only honest man in his community - the one who is quick to cut to the psychological bone of others' lives.

The supporting characters of Home Land delude themselves as to the quality of their lives - taking greater stock in their superficial jobs and families than they ought to. Teabag strips their underlying insecurities bare and makes the pretense of conventional post-graduate American suburban success the target of his letters. He is an avenger, of sorts. The naive (both met and unmet) aspirations of his classmates pale in comparison to Teabag's multitudinous existential crises (his unfulfilled love life, his embarrassing sexual fantasies, his stunted sense of professional self-worth).

Teabag's derision of and contempt for his fellow classmates is a familiar emotion; who amongst us has not rolled his eyes at the success of a former acquaintance? In this sense, his diatribes are rewarding reading - and Lipsyte's sense of the ridiculous and the profane both make the book somehow special.

But Teabag deludes himself as well. While Lipsyte clearly establishes Teabag as a character we are meant to admire for his forthrightness, he also mines our inevitable sense of superiority. For while we all are no strangers to Teabag's disgust for his conventional classmates, few of us are truly as aimless as Teabag is and he is simultaneously established as a truly pitiable character. Teabag, while disregarding the superficial pleasures of suburban complacency, is devoid of any human connection. He laments his mother's death and wallows in his unrequited love.

Teabag keeps his relationships at an arm's length and preempts any possibility to engage in the more rewarding aspects of even the most superficial relationships. Lipsyte establishes a false dichotomy of Teabag's superiority to his classmates. Ultimately, Lipsyte's book is populated simply with characters at different stages of self deception regarding their lives' worth.

While Teabag is more frank about his failures, his pride in this failure to self-delude leads to its own sense of delusion: that his self-knowledge is indicative of some kind of spiritual success which has eluded those around him. However false the confidence of Teabag's fellow graduates of Catamount High School is, however empty their complacency it is confidence, satisfaction nonetheless. Tragically, it is the very thing he condemns them for undeservedly enjoying - self-worth - that has eluded him.

White Lull

Point Omega

by Don DeLillo

2010, Scribner

At some point in high school, I read somewhere that Don DeLillo was a very important author. I can't remember where I read it, but I have always had an appetite for consuming and evaluating the so-called culture makers in whatever art I am currently interested in. This often pans out in my favor, discovering artists who represent the height of technical and artistic ability in their crafts. Oftentimes, though, I wind up resenting these supposed masters for failing to meet expectations.

Luckily for Mr. DeLillo, I began with his classic White Noise, a book whose prose bristles and sparks with imagination, gallows humor and inventiveness. White Noise made a profound impact on my thoughts on contemporary literature and its criticisms regarding suburbia seemed directed at teenaged life.

Unfortunately for Mr. Dellilo, I have yet to experience a novel of his that affects me so sharply as did White Noise. While I haven't delved extensively into his work, I was disappoint at approximately two year intervals by reading Mao II, his play The Day Room, and Falling Man. As such, Point Omega is the DeLillo work I've read and once again I am left wanting an experience as encompassing as White Noise.

Point Omega is a very slight novel in length - its ambition is another matter. The novel is marked in its lack of scope; the Museum of Modern Art and a house in the desert are the only locales for the action (a term used loosely in describing this inert novel). Similarly, it is populated by (at most) four characters. DeLillo is interested in mining these characters for as much internal psychological drama as possible while refusing to suggest conventional plotted or interpersonal drama.

The novel begins with a strange solitary man in a dark room in MoMA watching Douglas Gordon's avant-garde film 24 Hour Psycho in which Hitchcock's revered film is slowed down to last an entire day. The man in the novel is watching the ubiquitous shower scene and is lost in contemplation of the artistic (and voyeuristic) implications of the capturing of images on film, the staging and perversion of real life to establish an alternate sense of time and place.

The character scoffs at other people who come and go (two characters who will become the novel's central subjects) and are not as enraptured by the film as he is. The painstakingly detailed analysis of the film as well as the clear disdain for less ambitious viewers demonstrate that Mr. DeLillo is the most attentive and thoughtful of filmgoers. I imagine in another life DeLillo could have made himself a career writing book-length intertextual examinations of Warhol films instead of enjoying them for the absurdly wacky trash that they are.

Mr. DeLillo's observations on the film walk a very fine line between the laughably (borderline masturbatory) self-indulgent

Everybody was watching something. He was watching the two men, they were watching the screen, Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress. Nobody was watching him. This was the ideal world as he might have drawn it in his mind. He had no idea what he looked like to others. He wasn't sure what he looked like to himself. He looked like what his mother saw when she looked at him. But his mother had passed on. This raised a question for advanced students. What was left of him for others to see?

and the surprisingly astute

He began thinking of one thing's relationship to another. This film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. The original movie was fiction, this was real... Light and sound, wordless monotone, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not movies.

and even the downright silly:

The film made him feel like someone watching a film. The meaning of this escaped him... But this wasn't truly film, was it, in the strict sense. It was a videotape. But it was also a film. In the broader meaning he was watching a film, a movie, a more or less moving picture.

These observations are not integral to the so-called plot of Point Omega (which centers on a young filmmaker attempting to get a government warmonger to comment on his thoughts about film) but they are integral to understanding Mr. DeLillo's languid pace and reluctance to engage in the more traditionally narrative modes of fiction. These comments regarding Psycho have little to do with sussing out Mr. Hitchcock's vision of the world and instead, like a misguided graduate film studies paper, have significantly more to do with the subject of film as a vehicle for artistic expression.

Similarly, Mr. DeLillo's novel is an excuse to talk about the relationship between life and narrative instead of simply building such a narrative. As such, it is as much of a lifeless indulgent exercise in the mystification of artistic expression as his exploration of Gordon's slow-mo avant-garde epic.

This is not to say that Point Omega is entirely without merit. The character of the philosophical retired general (think Rumsfeld with a PhD) falls entirely flat, but the ambitious young filmmaker is a bit of gem. The young man is reeling from a separation with his wife and becomes somewhat obsessed by erotic fantasies of the general's daughter.

His erotic obsession seems to manifest both his marital frustration and his inability to convince the general to partake in his film. The documentary is a vision of ascetic truth - the general sits in a room and talks about his experience with designing a war and the entire film would be unfettered by stock footage, other opinions, cuts. This desire to express the world in such objectively subjective terms communicate an uneasiness with one's experience of the world - a need to understand the diversity of thought and experience felt by other people, to justify one's own experience of the world with another's.

While this character has a spark of feeling and truth, DeLillo refuses to use the character for anything besides quietly disturbed introspection and does not force his characters into any situation beyond amplified depression. The plot does not so much materialize as de-materialize when the general's daughter disappears at the apparent climax of the novel and then simply remains missing.

One could be led to conclude Mr. DeLillo is attempting to have his fiction more closely mirror life, with its absence of pat character arcs or conclusive narrative threads. But Point Omega, with its dreary, inert narrative fails to realize the more unusual and exciting surprises of daily undramaticized life or the more absurdly funny and horrifying trends of life (as he did in White Noise).

Pay It Forward

Norwood
by Charles Portis
1966, Simon and Schuster


This past summer I read an essay from The Believer on the author Charles Portis. I don't recall the specific details of the article now, but I was sufficiently persuaded to run out to the library and procure a copy of his Western True Grit within the week. I devoured that novel in a matter of a day and a half; its protagonist, the young bull-headed Mattie, was one of the most fiercely and humorously written narrators I have ever had the pleasure of getting to know.

What I love about Portis's writing is his eye for wasted words. Portis writes in his character's vernacular and, as such, the text is laden with none of the writerly subtext and imagery one is accustomed to reading in serious adult novels. He in fact utilizes the vernacular to mine it for seeming non sequiturs and other amusing idiosyncrasies of speech.

Norwood is the character whose perspective Portis adopts for relating the narrative. Norwood is a young ex-marine who spends his time working a boring job at a gas station/convenience store. He shares a house with his sister, who is incapable of handling the upkeep after their parents die. Norwood convinces his sister to get a job waitressing and she meets and eventually marries a prissy stuck-up man named Bill Bird who flaunts his education and more advanced militaristic career over Norwood, who responds to his jabs with sullen tolerance.

Eventually Norwood is offered a job driving stolen cars to New York. While he is suspicious of the job, he is also owed a sum of seventy dollars by a former Marine pal who lives in NYC and so Norwood, with singularity of mind, makes off for New York from his hometown in Texas.

En route he encounters a number of amusing setbacks and strange characters (including a former circus midget). Norwood's view of the world is bogged down neither by political correctness nor by bigotry; he accepts the people with whom he crosses paths and is inclined to speak honestly with all of his companions.

Honesty and forthrightness seem to Norwood's staple traits of interpersonal relationships. He professes to most people he meets his aspiration to become His dogged pursuit of the seventy dollars owed to him is not motivated by greed or by indignation. And after collecting on the debt, he promptly loans the money out to a needy acquaintance.

The strength of the book comes from its incredible sense of humor which uses Norwood's small town perspective without ridiculing his naivete. Take for example, this hysterically funny passage from Norwood's first experience with a subway:

The subway was cleaner and more brightly lighted than Norwood had expected, and it moved faster. He jostled his way forward to the front car and looked through the glass with his hands cupped around his face. He was disappointed to find the tunnel so roomy. Only a very fat man could be trapped in it with a train coming. The air smelled of electricity and dirt.

In one of the pedestrian tunnels at the Union Square stop a man was stretched out on the concrete having a fit and forcing people to step around him in the narrow passageway. Norwood watched him as he gave a few terminal jerks and a long sigh. He knew he should look to see if the man had swallowed his tongue, the way they used to have to do with that Eubanks boy in the fifth grade, but he didn't want to put his finger in the man's mouth unless he had to. It was all right for doctors, they didn't care where they put their hands.

The description is fresh but simplistic - and simplistic without being condescendingly folksy. Norwood's ridiculous thoughts take center stage here - the tunnel being dangerous to only the morbidly obese, doctors' lack of concern for hygiene - and yet Portis is not making fun of Norwood's peculiar thoughts.

In this regard, Norwood reminds me a great deal of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, which also successfully straddled the line between ridiculing his subject. Toole quite clearly dips repeatedly into poking fun at Ignatius Reilly and yet does not objectify him as a buffoon worthy of our derision - Reilly is humanized consistently throughout Toole's novel so that our amusement feels as though it has some element of empathy. Portis walks the other side of the line, refusing to let his reader feel superior to Norwood, but all the while mining him for comedy. Norwood is occasionally played as the perplexed straight man to the characters around him - Bill Bird's urbane syntax, for example, or the intensely neurotic frivolity of his first female companion.

After enjoying in the last year the incredibly funny and brilliant simplicity of both True Grit and Norwood, Charles Portis is quickly becoming a favorite author. I have tried twice now to convince friends to read the former title, with its deliciously toughened self-assured narrator and have yet to be successful in that endeavor. I can only hope someone will be interested enough to investigate Portis's breezily short and utterly delightful Norwood.

Between the Stirrup and the Ground

Brighton Rock

by Graham Greene

1938, Penguin Classics

I first read Graham Greene during my freshman year of college. I spent at the time many weekend mornings checking out books from the Boston Public Library and sitting in the Public Gardens reading for some hours. I remember reading Greene's The End of the Affair in a quite old edition in the fall that year.

So it was with pleasure that I decided to return to Greene at a friend's suggestion. We were at a get-together where Donnie Darko was shown and we both got excited at the scene where Drew Barrymore teaches her English class Greene's story "The Destructors", which both of us loved. She suggested that I borrow her copy of Brighton Rock. We met for drinks later that week and removed the lovely Penguin Classics and as we fawned over the beautiful uncut pages and the jacket flaps, she dropped it into her margarita.

Greene's prose fascinates me. His plots are endlessly palatable and his prose is clean and muscular. Yet, the nearly cinematic tightness of the plot barely conceals churning undercurrents of doubt about human nature and spirituality. Similarly, for all the effectiveness of his sentences ("His room smelt of stale beer") he is not averse to utilizing' the more poetic of his writerly powers ("The huge darkness pressed a wet mouth against the panes").

Brighton Rock, a thriller set in 1930s coastal England, is certainly faithful to both of my ideas about Greene.

The plot of the book is quite engaging. It concerns a gang of hoodlums who murder a newspaper man in the first chapter of the book and their attempts to conceal the crime. An ambitious but naive member of the gang, a young man named Pinkie, becomes over-involved in the process of covering his tracks and his blood lust grows increasingly throughout the novel.

Pinkie is pursued by an unlikely, but dogged, heroine in the form of a lush with conventionally loose morals, Ida. Ida's interest stems from spending an afternoon with the newspaper man before he died and she becomes more involved as Pinkie begins courting a young girl named Rose who may divulge details that would implicate him in the murder.

Through these three characters, Greene explores ideas of religiosity and morality. Pinkie's blood lust becomes increasingly myopic and rageful as the novel progresses. Greene writes him as an amoral child disgusted by sex. He is immature and it is his murder that increasingly lends him confidence and maturity.

Greene contrasts Pinkie's commitment to unholy acts with Rose's Catholic devotion. Rose is likewise written as naive for her sixteen years. Rose attends Mass regularly and is motivated by aspirations toward domesticity which are dashed repeatedly by the cynical Pinkie. Rose is devoted to Pinkie and takes up his defense seemingly as an act of religious devotion. As her devotion to Pinkie's love (which is largely an act of faith on her part, not unlike her former religious mindset) grows, she realizes his guilt in the crimes that guide the plot and, by extension, realizes that her love of god and of Pinkie are mutually exclusive.

Rose and Pinkie are married in a ceremony both regard as a fraud. The wedding, while legally binding, is absent the emotional and cultural trappings of marriage. Rose decides that she is living in mortal sin and rather than denounce her life, decides her sin is too great for an act of contrition to remedy. As such, Rose commits herself fully to her life of sin.

Thoughts of repentance also cross Pinkie's mind as he wonders about the cosmic ramifications of his crimes. Pinkie's contemplation of mortality and morality frames itself in the phrase "between the stirrup and the ground".

Pinkie's cynicism prevents him from considering the afterlife a reward for earthly goodness. As he remarks to himself, "Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust." Sin is derived from an ability to make sense of the world, or to control one's 'destiny'. Pinkie is invigorated by his powers over mortality and is mystified by imagining religious consequences for his actions.

Rose, on the other hand, is so overwhelmingly motivated by her faith in religious consequence that as she begins to stumble towards the path of sin, she entirely disavows her life of faithfulness. Rose views her own soul as irredeemable and as such is able to disregard any moral compunction she experiences. She contemplates her fate as she prepares to commit even more mortal sin:

If it was a guardian angel speaking to her now, he spoke like a devil - he tempted her to virtue like a sin... Moral maxims dressed in pedantic priestly tones remembered from old sermons, instructions, confessions - "you can plead for him at the throne of Grace" - came to her like unconvincing insinuations. The evil act was the honest act, the bold and the faithful.

Both Pinkie and Rose are damned by their inability to frame religious warnings in their own life experiences. For Rose, Pinkie represents a physical actuality in which she can trust more powerful than the god in which she previously placed that trust; moreover, Pinkie can receive her adoration concretely in ways her deity cannot. For Pinkie, his inability to imagine a physical manifestation of faith is proof of its insignificance. Pinkie instead invests his energy and faith in the murder that exhilarates him physically and emotionally.

What makes Brighton Rock a truly remarkable read is in Greene's creation of the character of Ida. Ida, unlike both of the children, is worldly and perhaps world-weary. Ida's experience has led her away from religion and towards instead a life of conventional sin. Despite her sexual freedom, Ida's moral compass guides her towards a sense of justice and protection of innocence.

Ida is untroubled by concerns of an afterlife, and instead has constructed her own belief system which Greene portrays as entirely superior to the Church's. Where Rose viewed one compromise of morality fatalistically, Ida views morality from a more subjective - and realistic - point of view. Ida's realism prevents her from viewing compromise as necessarily preempting goodness.

In contrast to Pinkie, Ida is also concerned with the time "between the stirrup and the ground" but she finds physical manifestation of the gift of life in sexual contact, in meaningful relationships, and in pursuing her sense of what's right.

Ultimately, Green's novel, while utterly compelling from a superficial stance of readability is quite complex intellectually. Pinkie and Rose represent the failure of Catholic dogma to account for the diversity and complexity of daily life so clearly exemplified by the brassy but steadfast Ida.