Saturday, October 30, 2010

W/R/T DFW, The Meaning of Life, et al.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays
by David Foster Wallace
1997, Little, Brown


I have always had a somewhat uncomfortable relationship with post-modern literature. On the one hand, I admire its ability to extract from the genre a sensibility that expands the notions of what narrative ought and ought not to be, its audacity in discarding stale, traditional methods of developing character or conflict. On the other hand, the quirks that help to define the movement - excessive list-making, large depositories of arcane trivia, meta-narrativity - become cloying over the long form of a novel.

Perhaps the epitome of the long form post-modern novel is David Foster Wallace's 1,079 page opus Infinite Jest, a book often cited as one of the most astounding works of modern literature (Time magazine named it one of the hundred greatest works of literature from 1923 on).

As anyone who knows me is well aware, I have a borderline pathological need to throw my conversational weight around on the topic of most any musician, artist, writer, filmmaker "considered" to be anything at all. As such, the first time I attempted to read Infinite Jest was my freshman year of college.

I checked out the heavy tome and lugged it back to my dorm room where it sat, staring me down with each of its one thousand-plus pages, on my bookshelf through not one but two renewals through the library. After the nine weeks had elapsed, I lugged the thing back to the library and returned it unread.

I have since checked the book out twice more and the closest I have ever come to actually reading the damn thing was in perusing a small portion appearing to take place in a Massachusetts halfway home for drug addicts at my cousin's apartment in Shrewsbury.

Recently I was at a used book sale (a clause that prompts most of the stories that come from my mouth), and stumbled across a copy of Wallace's nonfiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (a title that, perhaps subconsciously, is indebted to the 1960s musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and, guilt-ridden over my failure to ever successfully delve into Infinite Jest, I bought it and brought it home.

Over the course of the last few months, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again has been virtually a companion to me, accompanying me on every car ride, detention duty, camping trip and check-up since I began reading it in August. This collection of work has taken me a long time to read, true, but this is in part due to my preference to juggle reading material (as long as I avoid conflicting genres).

Mostly, though, it is due to an overwhelming desire to never want to leave DFW's head, for A Supposedly Fun Thing... is one of the most delightfully engaging, endlessly variable, intoxicatingly awe-inducing works of nonfiction I've read.

I worry about my ability to write about this book because the depth of my admiration for DFW after reading this collection perhaps interferes with my ability to write sanely. During the few months I read this book I will readily admit to crying - not slow-trickle-tears, but full on crying jags - at least twice not at anything in particular written in one of DFW's essays, but at my inconsolable sadness that because of his suicide, the world has been deprived of what might be one of the most brilliant thinkers I've ever read.

I read this book start to finish, but I didn't start at the beginning or end at the finish. The first essay in the collection I read was the one that perhaps initially grabbed my interest: a sixty-something page essay on the films of David Lynch.

David Lynch is one of my favorite filmmakers: a brilliant, unruly artist who makes infuriating and often incoherent films about the dark underbelly of American society and, perhaps, human nature. DFW was sent to the set of Lost Highway, one of Lynch's deliriously disturbing works. There he wrote about Lynch's filming but the larger essay spins out to include some analysis of Lynch's work and speculation on what it means to be outside the Hollywood mainstream. Consider this excerpt, in which DFW ingeniously, clumsily, describes the allure of film:

Movies are an authoritarian medium, They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is surrendering to it, letting it dominate you. The sitting in the dark, the looking up, the tranced distance from the screen, the being able to see the people on the screen without being seen by the people on the screen, the people on the screen being so much bigger than you, prettier than you, more compelling than you, etc...

Commercial film doesn't seem like it cares very much about an audience's instruction or enlightenment. Commercial film's goal is to "entertain," which usually means enabling various fantasies that allow the moviegoer to pretend he's somebody else and that life is somehow bigger and more coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just more entertaining than a moviegoer's life really is.

DFW goes on to comment that part of the agenda of art film in the last fifty years has been to disabuse moviegoers of this basic seduction (think of the French new wave and its Brechtian techniques). Lynch's films, he argues, fall into neither category: they are not entertainment (though I would suggest they are certainly seductive) but nor are challenging or enlightening. They really just... are. DFW's ultimate point is that Lynch's films are so haunting because we have none of our usual defenses to bring to his films. Because we don't know what they want from us, we cannot respond, sincerely or cynically, to its requests.

Before I slide into a tangent on the power of Lynch's work and DFW's brilliant observations regarding it, I'll force myself to move on. But at the conclusion of this essay (which was initially printed in Premiere magazine) I had already fallen halfway in love with DFW. He took a filmmaker I loved, had spent mental energy on, and he gave me new perspective on what, perhaps, makes his work so inexplicable, so occult.

The essays in this collection range in style from tongue-in-cheek academia ("Existentiovoyeuristic conundra notwithstanding...") to over-caffeinated observer mode. Listen to the way he describes a fairground attraction:


I have a particular longstanding fear of things that spin independently inside a larger spin. I can barely even watch this. The Zipper is the color of unbrushed teeth, with big scabs of rust... One long scream, wobbled by Doppler, is coming from Native Companion's cage, which is going around and around on its hinges while a shape inside tumbles like stuff in a dryer. My particular neurological makeup (extremely sensitive: carsick, airsick, heightsick; my sister likes to say I'm "lifesick") makes even just watching this an act of enormous personal courage.

How can you not read that and feel thrilled? The interplay between archly high language and slangily low is exhilarating. His subtle self-deprecation essentially enables the feat of allowing his reader (this one, anyway) to transfer any and all emotions onto him (this feat similarly evident in Sarah Vowell's work). DFW seems like the best friend I never had.

Some of the delighftul recurring trends in the work include excessive abbreviation. DFW never writes "approximately" when "approx." suffices to service his meaning. "With respect to" becomes "w/r/t", etc. This hastening of communication just emphasizes the feeling that you are sitting at Denny's with the most brilliant person you ever met scribbling his ideas about irony and television in postmodern literature on his placemat in crayon as he gesticulates at you with a lit cigarette.

In other words, the persona of DFW is (I think unintentionally) part of the subject of this work. Whether he writes about tennis, Jacques Derrida or cruise ships, the through-line is DFW himself. You want to be with him while he experiences the world with eyes sharper than yours. He seems, much like the giant-headed movie stars of Hollywood he describes: smarter and more exciting and more brilliant than you. His life seems romanticised, in part because of his explicit acknowledgement that his life is just the opposite.

For lurking equally everywhere in this work, constantly counterbalancing his excitement, his engagement with life, his curiosity about the world, is his overwhelming sadness and depression.

In his essay on cruise ships (that link leads to its abridged form as it appeared in Harper's), from which this collection takes its title, DFW writes about the experience of being pampered by strangers and surrounded by tourists. In this environment designed to numb with luxury whatever troubles you have, to stimulate the pleasure receptors in your brain, DFW feels paradoxically desperate and insignificant:



There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir - especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased - I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture - a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.

Let that sit with you for a minute.

As I alluded earlier, DFW committed suicide in 2008 after a long bout with depression. This, of course, infuses this passage with "unbearable sadness" in retrospect. But reading this passage stirs in my mind both sadness and excitement. The excitement is in the feeling of privilege DFW grants with such brutal self-reflection.

This experience of steeping oneself in another person's world is why I love literature, art, music, film. It is comforting to know that DFW existed, that I am not alone in trying to blindly make my way through life.

I know that this entry has been disorganized and confusing, but my overwhelming adoration of this book interferes a bit with my thoughts.

I am left with the feeling that this is what literature is for. DFW's writing is the perfect expression of a man discontent to let life happen to him. I love this book because it excites the best parts of me, the parts that are equally involved in the world around me.

DFW demonstrates how wonderfully exhilarating it is to engage with life: to not take for granted how odd the world is, to be excited by ideas, by experiences, to be mystified by the mundane, to be charged with emotion during quiet moments when the fabric of the world (a carnival, a cruise ship, a tennis match) is pulled back to reveal sensitive, naked flesh (despair, excitement, hopefulness).

This book is as much about how horrifying and stimulating and wonderful life is as it is about how cruise ships work or what David Lynch's films mean. It's about how beautiful and weird and sad and perplexing this fucked-up world is.

To read this book is to bathe in it. It is to wrap yourself up in the knowledge that you're not alone in life, not alone in worrying what to make of it, in being afraid to use it the wrong way or waste it focusing on the wrong things, in wanting desperately not to take it for granted, in desiring connection with other people.

It is in this connection that life makes sense to me. The experience of sharing your life with another, sharing theirs. The experience of being excited by details, turned on by ideas. It is the reason I love, the reason I read. It is nourishing in the ways only the best things are.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is the sort of book that charges me and David Foster Wallace the sort of writer who makes me grateful to be alive, even if it makes me all the more incredibly fucking sad that he's not.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Lost Signal

Cell
by Stephen King

2006, Scribner


I've always had a sort of love-hate relationship with Stephen King.

Perhaps as a result of my love for another mid-brow form of entertainment, cinema, I am somewhat defensive of Mr. King's oeuvre. I think it is a definite place for an appreciation of genre - even those that cling to certain tropes - in appraising the worth of literature.

Yet, paradoxically, I will admit to being slightly nonplussed by King's recent acceptance among the "serious" literary community - editing Best American Stories, for example, or front page New York Times Book Review features. Most puzzling of all, perhaps, is a medal for distinguished contribution to American letters from the National Book Award, whose fellow recipients include clearly popular but unquestionably "respectable" writers like Toni Morrison, John Updike and Joan Didion.

I first read Stephen King when I was in junior high, at the exact age where the Agatha Christie mysteries I loved so dearly did not seem edgy enough and the Christopher Pike novels I had previously consumed seemed demonstrably below my reading level. In those few years, I read a number of King novels, none of which sufficiently impressed me except for The Shining.

Years later, just after graduating college, I took a few weeks to read The Stand in its unabridged glory, a book I enjoyed a great deal. That book is so incredibly epic in scope one can't help but be swept up into its pages. The ideas and characters in that book remain so crystal clear that they cannot help but become iconography: the deadly superflu Captain Tripps, the kindly negress Mother Abigail, the evil Randall Flagg. These are not sophisticated ideas or characterizations but are powerful in their simplicity. That they are plays on cliches makes them only more essential, somehow; King manages to imbue each with a feeling of necessity.

I was initially quite excited to read Cell. I saw Mr. King at a Margaret Atwood reading in Portsmouth. He was there with his son and it seemed to further cement his ability to traverse the line between popularity and respectability. On the one hand, Ms. Atwood is venerably popular, because of her rather modern approach to genre, but her work is without question considered serious literature. King's presence in the audience was unsurprising; his attendance was more predictable than at a more "serious" literary luminary like, say, a Philip Roth reading.

Cell continues, to an extent, to elaborate on this dichotomy of reputation. The novel again continues, as did The Stand, to find itself convinced that there is strength in simplicity, but manages to wobble over the line from so-simple-it's-powerful to so-simple-it's-predictable with his concepts and characters.

Part of what drew me to Cell was an excitement about the zombie conceit: people answer their cell phones and become rabid, tearing up New England like the caffeinated zombies populating the Dawn of the Dead remake. I was incredibly drawn to the time-tested zombie scenario, and the early portions of the book did not disappoint here. The main character, a graphic novelist about to sign with a publishing house in Boston, witnesses a wave of destruction in downtown Boston as the zombie virus spreads.

The main character holes himself up in a hotel downtown with a small band of cell phone-less survivors, including a middle aged gay man and fifteen year old girl. This section of the book is quite exciting, as they survey the damage inflicted by the cell phone-dependent zombies and hide from potential danger, acquiring shotguns and mapping out a route north that would pass through my hometown of the Merrimack Valley.

As the characters dodge mutilation by zombies, the only thing marring my experience of the book (thus far, anyway) was the very poor editing. It would seem as though Mr. King's status as literary superstar exempts him from being granted a meticulous editor. I found numerous examples of poor editing in the book's early pages and Cell provoked my wrath sufficiently enough to incite me to break out a highlighter, where I captured the following passages:

"What we need to do is get off the street before we get run over," said the man with the mustache, and as if to prove this point, a taxi collided with a stretch limo not far from the wrecked Duck Boat. (page 14, second emphasis mine)
As if to underline the idea... (page 16)
As if to emphasize his point... (page 17)
As if to underline this... (page 23)
As if to underline this point... (page 36)
As if to contradict this... (page 44)
As if in answer... (page 46)
As if the bald sales clerk had conjured it... (page 48)

I certainly don't fault the prolific King on such mistakes. I would imagine that certain phrases get stuck in one's craw; if you were to search my blog for unique keywords or conspicuous vocabulary words, I'm sure you'd turn up some amusing results.

But the fact remains that an untrained (or at least unprofessional) eye such as mine had no trouble locating such repetitive sentence structure in one sitting - why was King's editor unable to do so? Creative talent need not be constrained by the tenets of grammar or spelling, but I think it would be ignorant to say that style is not an integral part of a writer's command of narrative. Moreover, it is a good editor's responsibility to identify and exterminate such stylistic (to borrow a title) dead zones.

There were more troublesome examples of bad writing, of course.

There is a character in the book who is a fifteen-year-old girl, who, in stilted English, remarks:
"To me it looks like a special effect in some big summer movie. Buy a bucket of popcorn and a Coke and watch the end of the world in... what do they call it? Computer graphic imaging? CGI? Blue screens? Some fucking thing."

Perhaps it's just my extensive training as a film snob, but I don't buy the existence of a fifteen-year-old unfamiliar with the phrase CGI. Examples proliferate: at one point whilst under zombie attack, the narrator speculates aloud on how "insidious" the cell phone attack is; the narrator refers repeatedly to wearing "the type of pullover the kids call a hoodie" (you mean a hoodie, Stephen King?); King writes that when under stress, the brain "whistle[s] and tap[s] its foot and look[s] at the sky."

Perhaps my favorite example (and I think my arrogance-fueled cruel streak is perhaps taking over here) though is one of the most convoluted and deliciously "folksy" mixing of metaphors I've ever read. In reference to an upscale Kennedy-esque Boston accent:
That tight little accent grated on Clay's frayed nerves, He thought that if it had been a fart, it would have been the kind that comes out sounding like a party-horn blow by a kid with asthma.

I think I'll let that beauty of a six-degrees-of-representation-Russian-nesting-metaphor stand on its own there.

But despite these inevitable missteps in style, the early portions of the novel actually read quite well. Vaguely reminiscent of The Stand, Cell's early chapters describe tense quests of survival in a land devoid of structured society, a father's altruistic journey to his son, and lots of delightfully gory zombie shenanigans.

Sadly, though, King is incapable of letting these strengths carry to novel to a logical, satisfying, zombie-filled conclusion. King is repeatedly drawn to the concept of psychic ability, so the zombies do not remain the scarily rabid monsters they appear to be at the beginning of the book: they eventually develop hive mind and cluster together to recharge while listening to Lawrence Welk during the daytime on psychically-powered radios, a concept that left me (as did the clueless description of hoodies) wondering in my best Amy Poehler voice "Really, Stephen King? Really?"

That's, of course, not the end to the psychic tomfoolery the zombies become capable of and King imbues them with characteristics cribbed doubtlessly from his own wikipedia "recurring themes" section such as: lucid collective dreaming, induced hallucinations, telepathy, telekinesis, levitation. As in The Stand, the antagonist has the power to communicate visions of the future to his enemies through dreams.

The zombies become increasingly intelligent and benefit from the group-think shtick to threaten human beings for dominance on the planet. Despite their soullessness, one is left wondering whether they are not, in fact, an evolutionary upgrade for the species: the iPhone 4 of homo sapiens?

I found myself pondering a great deal this very question. Even though the super fancy telekinetic zombies basically ruined the second half of the book for me (a problem that did nothing to slow the voracious pace with which I seem to consume King novels when I have the appetite for them), I kept returning to the book's central question: why does the zombie virus spread through the use of cell phones?

If you look at this issue from a purely mechanical standpoint the answer seems obvious. Zombie/apocalyptic lore needs a group of survivors, or there's no narrative. Plain and simple. In most zombie films (et ceteras) the group of survivors is perplexing. Why does one group survive and not another? It seems arbitrary. The cell phone conceit solves this problem. If the virus spreads through cell phone users, King can build in a predetermined group of survivors: the handful of people who still do not own a cell phone (and, if my father is any barometer, probably never will).

This solution to the question, of course, ignores a key tool available to a writer as intelligent as King. The scope of his powers as a writer should include (if not the term "hoodie") the land of signifiers and signifieds: the metaphor.

Of course the answer is both - King ingeniously solves a mechanical issue inherent to the zombie genre, but he's also exploring some aspects of American culture through his utilization of the cell phone as transmitter of evil.

It seems that Stephen King is arguing that over-reliance on such technology leads to zombification; he is likening our culture's obsessive need for the immediate gratification of interconnectedness cell phone use provides us in two ways. First, he is lampooning, I think, the way that cell phones inhibit our ability to think critically or engage effectively in the environments surrounding us. In other ways, our senses, our attention, our motor skills, are impaired in a way one might refer to as zombie-like.

Second, King is targeting our inter-reliance as a deficit of our culture. Cell phone users become zombies who engage in group think, who seem to program themselves to think and speak alike. Their culture is one of thought so immediate in its broadcast it is ostensibly shared, tandem. King puts obvious value on the "lone wolf", the character who is disinterested in synchronizing himself to society's pressures.

At the book's first pages, King quotes Freud on the need for the id to sustain immediate gratification and the tension this causes the psyche. King clearly views the overwhelming (but hardly sudden) trend for members of a society to sign on board with shared interests, shared communication, shared thought.

The members of American society who live on their cell phones because that is what they are told to do, that is what everyone else is doing, are merely the human signified for the signifier's group-think zombies. American society is syncing itself, he is saying, into a culture where everyone thinks and acts the same way. We are merely sheep, who flock together experiencing the same popular culture and technology as one another, at the expense of innovation, variation, individuality.

One, of course, can't help but wonder to where Mr. King sees his own literary contribution to a culture of conformity and shared experience? Or perhaps the joke is on us and he is merely writing to please the id of zombies everywhere.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Science vs. Fiction

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
by Charles Yu
2010, Pantheon


I normally begin my blog entries by explaining what attracted me to a book in the first place. In the case of Charles Yu's first novel, the explanation is very simple: a review in the New York Times Book Review mentioned longtime childhood hero Douglas Adams in its first paragraph and the cover design, by Adam Simpson, is super fucking cool.

How to Live Safely... is a postmodern oddity of a book. It is at turns frustrating in its bells and whistles stylistic braggadocio and touching in its circuitous, uneasy depiction of the father-son relationship. I found myself simultaneously torn in my delight at its brain-scrambling conceptual shenanigans and my annoyance at its obliqueness, its refusal to deal with emotion firsthand.

The premise of the book is that Charles Yu (main character/author) repairs time machines for a living. He recounts the history of modern time travel (which apparently occurred sometime in the early 1990s, coinciding with the advent of CGI?) in which his father had a large hand. Essentially, time travel operates on a purely fictional basis.

By "fictional", I mean that in this novel, time travel is only possible within a purely diegetic space - i.e., narrative. Transitioning from one time to another entails the use of "chronogrammar" - i.e., verb tenses.

From here, the wordplay gets only more complicated. For example, during his journey Yu wistfully misses his wife, The Woman He Never Married. The Woman He Never Married is, he explains, a "perfectly valid ontological concept" as since he has never married, or even met her, she cannot be said to not exist.

Yu plays the concept of time travel for familiar laughs, as in his description of this Marty and Lorraine McFly-esque conundrum:

I see a lot of men end up as their own uncles. Super-easy to avoid, totally dumb move. See it all the time. No need to go into details, but it obviously involves a time machine and you know what with you know who.
The time travel gimmick only works for so long. Yu utilizes some Adams-like touches, like a company manager called Microsoft Middle Manager who is software that encourages you to get to work and tries to get you to go out for beers with it, or the surprisingly paranoid android (the link does not lead to the Radiohead song, but this one does) derivative TAMMY, his operating system on board his time machine, who is highly neurotic and clearly in love with Yu.

About a third of the way through the book, Yu drops of his time machine for repair and when he picks it back up again, bumps into himself exiting the machine, panics, and shoots himself. Trapped now in a time loop paradox, Yu must learn as much about himself as possible before exiting the time machine and getting shot.

Most of this quest for self-knowledge entails reflection on his relationship with his father. Yu uses the "time machine" to reflect extensively on his childhood. These portions of the novel are depicted gingerly and with great sadness, as though too much investigation might shatter these memories.

We wandered from room to room, just missing one another, on paths neither chosen by us nor random, but determined by our own particular characteristics, our own properties, unable to deviate, to break from our orbital loops, unable to do something as simple as walking into the next room where our beloved, our father, our mother, our child, our wife, our husband, was sitting, silent, waiting but not realizing it, waiting for someone to say something, anything, wanting to do it, yearning to do it, physically unable to bring ourselves to change our velocities.
In the above passage, you can get some sense of the thematic play here between this hyper-conceptual word play and a more moving, underlying emotion. The transition here from somewhat arch, bird's eye behavioral description to fully invested, intimate speculation on his parents' inner lives is subtle, in large part because of the truly lovely cadence of the writing.

The observation here is clearly removed, describing their lives as set orbital trajectories whose paths never cross, but he emotionally identifies with his parents, or at least projects his emotions, his need for connection and seemingly inability to establish it, onto them. His yearning becomes their collective yearning. The knowledge of the potential for fallacy here dictates the removed (but passionate - all those commas, as if he doesn't want to let go of a thought) tone of the passage.

Yu's fixation on the past focuses specifically on his father, who one gathers is an absence from his present life; in the novel, Yu's father is stuck in time travel and hasn't been seen in a decade. One can only assume that Yu's relationship with his father is strained, and it remains possible that he abandoned his family a long time ago. This does not stop Yu from speculating about his father's emotions, and what is surprising is Yu's generosity in this portrait of what sounds like a cold man:

I noticed, on most nights, his jaw clenched at dinner, the way he closed his eyes slowly when my mother asked him about work, watched him stifle his own ambition, seeming to physically shrink with each professional defeat, watched him choke it down, with each year finding new and deep places to hite it all within himself, observed his absorption of tiny, daily frustrations that, over time (that one true damage-causing substance), accumulated into a reservoir of subterranean failure, like oil shale, like a volatile substance trapped in rock, a vast quantity of potential energy locked in to an inert substrate, unmoving and silent at the present moment but in actuality building pressure and growing more combustive with each passing year.
Yu is obviously a talented writer. The rhythm of his prose is honed. Despite the long sentences (which, to me, in its nearly smug favoring of aesthetics over formal grammar reveals some training in a graduate writing program), the cadence of Yu's words push the reader on with a light touch. Yu seems unwilling to create prolonged rests in his work, creating a breathless quality that verges on a feeling of inevitability, of fatalism.

The array of scientific vocabulary in that above excerpt (subterranean, potential energy, inertia) brings to light one of the primary dichotomies of the novel - science versus fiction. In the novel, Yu's father is a scientist run ragged on his obsessive pursuit of scientific innovation - the development of the time machine. This obsession leads to his eventual demise and prevents him from truly connecting with his son, who aspires to be worthy of his father's attention, but whose relative lack of talent in the sciences prevents this.

Yu portrays science as being kindred spirits with creativity - the father's toiling is the kind of superheroic, myopic commitment one envisions afflicting D.H. Lawrence or Mozart. His father's disinterest in acknowledging the validity of this view is a major part of the driving emotional force of the book.

Listen, for example, to Yu reflecting on his father's equation-making:

The words were right in there, close to the curve, close to the y-axis, just floating in the plane along with the graph, this space the Platonic realm, where curves and equations and axes and ideas coexisted, ontological equals, a democracy of conceptual inhabitants, no one class privileged over any other, no mixing or subdividing of abstractions and concrete objects, no mixing whatsoever. The words an actual part of it, the whole space inside the borders, the whole space useful and usable and possible, the whole, unbroken space a place where anything could be written, anything could be thought, or solved, or puzzled over, anything could be connected, plotted, analyzed, fixed, converted, where anything could be equalized, divided, isolated, understood.

This, of course, is a fallacy. Yu's father's science is the means to the end of their relationship, not the conveyance through which resolution can be reached.

As such, the focus on science in this book becomes bittersweet. Yu, as established, is talented in aesthetic sentence construction. One can't help but wonder if the novel would be stronger without the occasionally silly "chronodiegetic" science fictional conceit. The writing is strong enough to sustain a razzle-dazzle-free straightforward memoir, the emotional tenor of the piece elegiac enough to please serious fiction fans but accessible enough to appeal to a lower common denominator (file under "immigrants, tenuous parent-child relationships of").

But I suppose that in the end, goofily adopting the tongue-in-cheek brand of science fiction on display here is the only means by which Yu can resolve the science versus fiction dichotomy. What better way to justify the father versus son (science vs. fiction, sobriety vs. humorousness, discovery vs. creation) conflict than to unite them. This is possibly the only means Yu has for delivering some kind of catharsis, personal or fictional, by novel's end.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is a novel with a wounded heart. Yu's relationship with his father is clearly as unresolved in real life as it is at the novel's end. The only means for resolution available here is to project Yu's sense of loss about his relationship with his father onto the character of the father, to imbue him with the same sense of loss, of hurt, that Yu experiences.

In the end, it is not the blank grid paper on which anything can be "analyzed, fixed, understood" but the world of fiction. However, the distinction between science and fiction is as false a distinction as of that between father and son. They are the same thing, their emotions shared, inextricable. Son becomes father, father is son.

But then again, this synchronicity of father and son, of loss and understanding, is itself a fiction as desirable, intoxicating, implausible as time travel itself.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Sadder than a Speeding Bullet

All My Friends are Superheroes
by Andrew Kaufman
2003, Coach House Books


I have a certain stock group of people I rely on for really good book recommendations - people whose taste I trust across a variety of media. One of these friends very passionately recommended All My Friends are Superheroes to me a few years ago. I checked the library or bookstore several times over to no avail. Recently I explained my inability to locate it and I was granted, in the absence of a loaner copy, a signed, adorably well-read copy of what turned out to be a really wonderful book.

Before handing me her copy, my friend warned me that the book's author, Andrew Kaufman, was heavily inspired by Aimee Bender and that the influence would be obvious. All My Friends are Superheroes indeed wears its magical realistic roots on its sleeve, but its heart becomes all the more tender despite it.

Like Bender's work, Kaufman's book imagines a world not entirely unlike our own. It takes place in airports and apartments, backyard parties and basement get-togethers. Magical realism draws its strength from engaging the conflicts and parallels that emerge from uncommon goings-on in common settings. As the title would suggest, this particular foray into the genre is populated by characters with superpowers of one variety or another.

Many of the characters appear in the guise of traditional superhero roles - invisibility, for example, or the power of persuasion. Kaufman deliciously deviates from the path of predictability here in creating a number of characters whose superpower is merely a thinly veiled satire on the culture in question: the social and romantic lives of twenty-somethings. To wit:

The Chip

Chip was born with a chip on her shoulder. It's an immensely heavy chip, a chip that weighs so much it forced her to develop superhuman strength. But the chip on Chip's shoulder weighs so much that only her super-strength could remove it, but she can't use her super-strength until she gets rid of the chip and she can't get rid of the chip without using her super-strength. She appears no stronger than any regular.
The book is populated by a series of vignettes describing these superheroes, who more often than not ring uncannily familiar as the denizens of most social gatherings one suffers through in young adulthood.

While the satirical bent to these portraits is sharpened to a rather nasty edge, this in no way dulls the cumulative emotional effect of Kaufman's book. Coursing between these delightfully cynical vignettes is the blood of a terribly sentimental heart.

The story is primarily concerned with the relationship of the main character with his girlfriend, The Perfectionist. The Perfectionist (or Perf, as he diminutive-izes her) is just that: a girl who must have everything exactly so in her life, in her apartment, in her surroundings. She possesses a magical skill to make every moment he spends with her utterly, unerringly perfect.

One of Perf's ex-boyfriends becomes jealous of the main character Tom. The ex's superpower is the ability to convince people of things and Perf falls so heavily under his powers of persuasion that she no longer sees her boyfriend. He simply disappears.

The book is short, largely due to Kaufman's knowledge of how far he may draw out a somewhat simple concept. And while the magical aspect of magical realism here is laid on pretty thick, it opens Kaufman to explore rather grand subject matter in a a precise, but generalized way. In other words, unfettered by traditional realistic characters and settings, he need not mince words to convey a theme that is gnawing at him.

For an example of how Kaufman generalizes his themes, read the following excerpt in which Perf invites a door-to-door love salesman into her home to receive his pitch. Here, Kaufman rather beautifully categorizes the scope of human affection into commodities that ring so true it smarts.

"What kind of love are we interested in today?" he asked.

"What kinds do you have?"

"Well," he said. He stood up. "I've got the love you want, the you think you want, the love you think you want but don't when you finally get it..."

"That must be very popular."

"It is."

"What else have you got?"

"I've got the live that's yours as long as you do what you're told, the love that worries it's not good enough, the love that worries it'll be found out, the love that fears being judged and found lacking, the love that's almost - but not quite - strong enough, the love that makes you feel they're better than you..."


The effect is rather tongue-in-cheek but, conversely, quite sentimental in its seriousness. Kaufman's talent as a writer is in the precarious balancing act of these brittle, winking satirical asides and the rather earnest emotion running alongside it. Each tendency tempers the other; without the caustic and cheeky asides, the emotion would come across as plangent, excessive, or desperate rather than quietly sweet. The effect is one of a deeply intelligent writer who wears his heart on his sleeve but deftly layers his outerwear.

The thought that has stuck with me the longest since completing the book is the book's conceit - that Tom is the only non-superhero in the world in which he lives. The feeling that one is dwarfed by the achievements, talents, skills and quirks of others is familiar territory, personally.

To take the emotional concept of never feeling good enough - which I think, is intrinsic in most romantic relationships - and transpose it into a cute metaphor of superpower is handled with grace. It would be too easy for the concept to become cloying. In Kaufman's able hands, his imagination flourishes into an earnest parable of sincerity, love, self-worth and loss.

While Tom may suffer internally from his dearth of overt magicalness, it is without question his realness that endears him to both The Perfectionist and the reader.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

The Observer Principle

As She Climbed Across the Table
by Jonathan Lethem
1997, Doubleday


I don't recall anymore when I first read Jonathan Lethem, but in the last year he has been a reliably fascinating writer. In this blog's infancy I spoke a little bit about his collection of stories Men and Cartoons and then again a few months later about his new novel Chronic City. Last winter, I was delighted to read a twisted little story of his in the new issue of Zoetrope about hairdressing.

Lethem is so consistently entertaining, that it's often that I search for his books when wandering around in a library, as was the case a few weeks ago when a friend and I were exploring the Newburyport Public Library, which was unfamiliar to both of us. To my surprise, it was well-stocked Lethem-wise and I excitedly checked out a copy of As She Climbed Across the Table and it was a truly breezy read.

As She Climbed Across the Table is an amazingly beautiful love story. It takes place on the campus of a small college where great discoveries occur in basements unbeknownst to its denizens, distracted as they are by the campus's quaint beauty. I picture here the kind of New England institution with large grassy commons strewn with autumnal leaves and hoodie-clad coeds that has become synonymous with serious academia.

The college in question is indeed host to one such amazing scientific breakthrough and as the campus clamors to investigate its unique foibles and tiny miracles, it tears asunder two lovers: our increasingly despondent narrator Philip Engstrand, dean of interdisciplinary studies, and Alice Coombs, professor of particle physics.

At the beginning of the book, Professor Coombs and her colleagues conduct an experiment designed to create a universe and fail in this goal in a peculiar way. They do indeed generate something, but it fails to exhibit the intended effect and the "event", as the professors initially refer to it (other descriptors include "breach", "portal" and "aneurysm", all of which smack of euphemism), begins to take on a life of its own.

Professor Coombs discovers that the portal displays a tendency to consume certain particles and not others. Coombs and her colleagues begin to diverge in their assessment of what's happening in their physics lab. The breach eventually picks up the moniker Lack and Professor Coombs becomes increasingly obsessed with its preference for particles. She and Professor Engstrand begin to drift apart as her research occupies most of her time.

Engstrand is confused by her distance and becomes jealous of Coombs's attention towards Lack. Coombs's theory forms the crux of the book's narrative: that Lack is in fact sentient, as demonstrated by its preference for certain particles. Engstrand begins to feel as though his former love is enamored of an insentient being and when Coombs holds a press conference to announce the discovery of her sentient portal, Engstrand bitterly goads her on.
"I have to question the assumption that Lack's preference is for particles, in and of themselves... Why do we assume out visitor is a physicist, that he finds particles interesting? So he prefers H's to M's. What about summer and winter? Which does he like best? Black and white, or color? Poetry or prose?
Bebop or swing? I think we're leading the witness. Our questions are dictating his answers. We want physics, so we get physics. But until we ask every question we can think to ask we're - pardon me - failing to do anything except masturbate in front of a mirror."
This sets of a chain events that sends the campus - and Coombs's and Engstrand's lives - into a furor. Professor Coombs begins sending all variety of objects through the portal, recording what it accepts and what it does not. The daily paper begins publishing a "Lack Watch" wherein it lists Lack's preference for items, what it swallows and what it doesn't.
Lack had swallowed an argyle sock, ignored a package of self-adhesive labels. He disliked potassium, sodium, and pyrite, but liked anthracite. He ate light bulbs, but disdained aluminum foil. Lack accepted a sheet of yellow construction paper, a photograph of the president, a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Lack went on a three-day hunger strike, refusing a batter's helmet, a bow tie, and an ice ax. He took a duck's egg, fertilized, refused a duck's egg, scrambled.
A variety of proposed research projects are granted by the university: a group of students who concoct a measuring device solely out of materials it has been proven Lack will accept, a pompous Derrida-esque deconstructionist named Georges de Tooth who argues Lack has authored himself and will respond to it, inevitably, with "more text". Coombs's obsession spirals out of control. She stops talking, spends long nights in the laboratory, eager to fight the other academics for time with Lack.

Engstrand becomes despondent as it becomes ever clearer that Alice is in love with Lack, in love with something that can give nothing back to her, but can accept anything and everything she throws at it without becoming overwhelmed, without the distraction of personality to interfere with her rabid adoration.

I realize a good portion of this blog entry has been given over to plot summary, but part of what makes this book so delightful is its dizzying science fictional bent, its cutting satire of academia.

Truly, at this book's heart is an incredibly moving love story. Its title is derived from Alice's attempt to be devoured by the object of her affection, her attempt to induce Lack to consume her as she is consumed by him. Her failure in this task wreaks emotional havoc on her jilted lover and herself both.

As She Climbed Across the Table is a story of obsession and a tragic telling of why we don't want what wants us most, our cruelty to our loved ones. The more Engstrand loves Alice, the less she loves him. The more Alice loves Lack, the harder Lack's rejection of her becomes. Lethem creates the Lack to be just that: an absence of something, in this case reciprocal affection. Lack creates self-doubt and frustration and his very presence indicates the fundamental deeply human inability to appreciate what's directly in front of our faces.

Lethem's digressions are an integral factor in what makes this book so fascinating. One such digression is what leads to the book's emotional denouement. a rival Italian physicist, Braxia, postulates that the Lack is prone to influence from its discoverer. He speculates,
"Everything is only potential until consciousness wakes up and says, let me have a look. Take for example the big band. We explore the history of the creation of our universe, so the big bang becomes real. But only because we investigate... There are subatomic particles as far as we are willing to look. We create them. Consciousness writes reality in any direction it looks - past, future, big, small. wherever we look, we find reality forming in response."
Braxia theorizes that Lack can only exist because he has been discovered, but that he is gratified by his observers and is drawn to the "gigantic reservoir of nearby consciousness". Lack is desperate to please his discoverers, for without them, he cannot exist. Without observation, existence is null - the old "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, does it make a sound" conundrum. In its effort to preserve its own existence, it must intrigue, confound and please its observers.

Yet, as science demonstrates in the observer effect, it is impossible to observe something without changing it in some way. Narratively speaking, this creates a situation wherein Alice Coombs and Lack and the predilections and distastes of both are all inextricably woven.

While Lethem uses a great deal of metaphysical trickery to keep his plot moving, the reliance on science fiction is an endearing characteristic. His prose is clean and relatively unadorned, but he manages to find rhythm in his descriptions of Lack's preferences and is often very funny, even. His characters, main and secondary alike, are memorable and lovable.

The plot, which is gripping in its cleverness, leads us in a roundabout fashion to the conclusion that this book is, after all, a remarkably moving love story about why we deny ourselves the things that we want, why we want the things we can't have, and of the extent to which we go when we're falling in love.

Is it possible that, as Braxia speculates, love too is something that only flourishes with an observer? That love does not exist anywhere in the universe until you, as observer, discover it? I think that however solipsistic it may sound, that there is some truth in that.