Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Giantesses

Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me
by Craig Seligman
2004, Counterpoint

Illness as Metaphor
by Susan Sontag
1978, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
by Pauline Kael
1968, Atlantic Little Brown

Both Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael are figures who have acted as intellectual paragons for most of my adult life. Both were strong women who influenced a generation of writers who followed behind them, both held as the standard of their genres by which others would be judges, both interested in the arts. I don't remember the first time I heard of Kael, nor do I remember the first of her writing I read. I do, however, remember first becoming familiar with the persona of Susan Sontag in the aftermath of her (rather incendiary) comments regarding 9/11 when I was sixteen years old.

I also remember the first piece of Sontag's I actually read as a film student in college: a lengthy thicket-like discussion of Bergman's Persona. Sontag's prose was intimidating, frankly. While I admires the precise machinations of her mind, I had no desire to subject myself to another investigation of its depths; I was content to stick with more superficial writing on film - reviews, for example, which are rewarding for their brevity and easily consumable viewpoints against which I might frequently hone the strength of my own intellect. The reviews I read frequently cited Kael and her supposedly divisive and caustic reviews but with few exceptions I was entirely unfamiliar with her work.

Around Christmastime this past year I was shopping at a wonderful knick-knack/curio store in Lowell called Found. I like shopping at Found because of the endless supply of kitschy and often non-functional supply of dated decor and unique oddball items - and also for the brief, but wonderful exchanges with the gay couple who operate it and are some of the people I've met whose minds are as cluttered with popcultural flotsam as mine (on this particular day we managed to hold court on The Puppetland Band, Annie Ross' acting career and Basket Case).

In the back of the store is a small bookcase of some choice books (almost none are novels), collected seemingly at random. It was there I found a copy of Craig Seligman's Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me and took it home as a Christmas gift to myself. It was another month or two before I was able to sit down and read it.

Sontag & Kael is not a biography so much as an auto-biography, of sorts. While there is personal history about each of its subjects - Sontag's difficult relationship with her lesbianism, for example, or Kael's rivalries with her contemporaries (namely, Andrew Sarris) - the book reveals far more about Mr. Seligman and his intellectual development than anything else. The book takes the form of a lengthy critical analysis and consequently discusses major thematic preoccupations of each writer as well as their distinctive stylistic divergences.

Seligman examines at length Sontag's crystalline, precise, endlessly objective prose and his admiration for the cleanliness, the orderliness of her thinking is at odds with his distaste for the coldness, the distance of her prose. For Seligman, Sontag's prose is to be admired, not adored. He is particularly taken with her tendency to lay out all possible conclusions in a laborious Socratic method for proving her point. This technique, with its continuous qualifications of her thought processes, hold him at arms-length and yet appeals to him in what it reveals about her insecurity in the self-evidence of her ideas.

For Seligman, a writer like Kael is personally preferable. Kael's prose is effervescent and seemingly effortless. Kael's writing seems off the cuff in its spontaneity and wonderful expressiveness of ideas; her wit seems natural, unlike Sontag's obviously labored prose. However, Seligman also mentions a personal relationship with Kael which began during his stint as a fact checker for the New Yorker, where Kael reviewed for the brunt of her career. As though to make up for this personal bias, Seligman spends a great deal of his space on Kael with a heavy critical hand.

Despite his retrospective criticism of Kael's inconsistency, Seligman builds a description of his attraction to Kael's acerbic criticism that makes his book ultimately incredibly compelling. At one point, he writes about how seeing films for him began as an opportunity to test Kael's reviews against his own experiences; eventually, however, he began to read Kael instead of seeing the films, her glib summaries of their plots sufficing for the often drab experience of seeing the films. Seligman even recounts his ability to associate certain reviews - Nashville, for example - with where he read that issue of the New Yorker. This admission couches the book in fondly nostalgic tones that are tempered by Seligman's rather intricate exploration of key works of each writer.

Seligman's relationship with Kael's prose gets to the heart of what is so intensely lovable about her writing. After reading his book, I ran to my bookcase and found a very old used copy of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang that I had purchased as a junior at BU from the used basement of the Brookline Booksmith (which used to house the now-closed Cinemasmith).

In reading Kael's book, which ranges from actor profiles to reviews to cinematic trends, I too fell in love with Kael's insightful, deliciously witty prose. As a reviewer, Kael was unforgiving, wonderful, blunt. She was utterly unimpressed by films she was "supposed" to like - Oscar bait, sleepy art films (she was particularly unforgiving about Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad). She was likewise prone to defending, as Seligman refers to it, trash pictures - cult films, which is where Sontag and Kael most closely intersect orbits (in Sontag's genre-defining essay "Notes on 'Camp'") and yet Kael's perspective is not simply one of an reactionary contrarian. Kael is a more deliciously shrewd filmgoer than I could ever be; her dismissal of supposedly great works (and here I have film history's hindsight on my side) is thrilling in its irreverence.

Kael's eye was not trained simply for exposing hacks. Her essays on film trends are uncannily modern. Her essay, for example, on the aestheticization of violence in Bonnie and Clyde could have been written just easily about Quentin Tarantino's ultraviolent, quippily cool masterpieces. Or her essay on heavily ironic "quirky" college-friendly films (she references a film called Georgy Girl in this piece, entitled "So Off-Beat We Lose the Beat") which leaves me wondering how different her take on Wes Anderson, say, or Jason Reitman would have been had she lived to see their films.

But the true beauty of Kael's is in her seemingly tossed-off descriptions that perfectly encapsulate an actor's spark or a film's charm. A large portion of these bon mots are gathered in a collection of her capsule reviews at the back of the collection, where she boils entire films down to a perfect gem of description. Take, for instance, this comment, regarding the unnatural dialogue in All About Eve: "The synthetic has qualities of its own - glib, over-explicit, self-important, the You're-sneaky-and-corrupt-but-so-am-I-We-belong-to-each-other-darling style of writing" or her observation regarding Greta Garbo's performance in Camille: "She is a divinity trying to succeed as a whore."

Kael's book was a charm to get through despite its heft (nearly four hundred pages). Sontag's relatively slender volume (eighty-seven pages) I assumed would be a struggle; based on my undergraduate experience with Sontag's writing on film, I found the slimmest Sontag work I could find at the Methuen library, 1978's Illness as Metaphor. I was surprised to find the book equally engaging and easily digested.

The conceit of Illness as Metaphor is ostensibly an exploration of the mythologization of tuberculosis and cancer in popular and literary culture. Sontag discusses in the early half of the book the role tuberculosis has played in expressing character development in mostly nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works; Henry James's The Wings of the Dove and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain figure prominently.

Tuberculosis, as Sontag describes it, is used mainly to identify characters who are passive and refuse to engage in the world around them, in contrast to healthier, more active characters. TB-afflicted characters are prone to self-doubt and inward-ness and as such cloister themselves in order to disengage for the world. Sontag takes issue with the utilization of illness to express character psychology because of the danger it has in transferring its easy stereotyping to the world at large and as a precursor to the "peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease."

The second half of the book revolves around the intrusion of cancer terminology in modern thought and writing, from sociological texts to militaristic propaganda, an act that likens disease to "invasion" and other fundamentally distasteful modern problems. It seems to me though, that it is unclear in her writing whether she is alleging that doctors have co-opted military phraseology into their description of cancer or vice-versa. Either way, it is a compelling case for the de-humanization of the cancer patient, who is treated as though afflicted by a foreign entity and is thus transformed, as opposed to the more humanistic approach of allowing a cancer patient to maintain his identity (much was made of this work because of Sontag's own battle with cancer).

Perhaps hindsight here too is working against me in that I live in a culture whose appreciation of cancer is more Terms of Endearment than Estrangement. However, the use of cancer as a screenwriting crutch to endanger young love (A Walk to Remember) or improve strained familial relations (The Family Stone) or generally inject a healthy dose of pathos (Funny People) still tends to turn the disease into a rough caricature, a symbol, a quickest-means to the end. Sontag's insights are clearly still at the least tenable and possibly applicable to our understanding of the cultural attitudes towards cancer.

Sontag's prose proved far less thorny than in my memory. Seligman remarks at length of her effort to clarify her thoughts without simplifying them and thus condescending to her audience. If Seligman was referring to Illness as Metaphor, it is not immediately obvious to me what challenge the argument would have for an adult. Her discussion is easy to follow, incredibly logical, and the reference points are no longer outside my frame of reference. Compared to Kael's seemingly improvised jokes and cutting insights, Sontag's writing is at dry, at the very least. But while her methodology might not be as immediately rewarding as Kael's, it is not confusing and it ultimately gives great satisfaction. Her prose is dry but her ideas practically crackle with energy.

While Mr. Seligman has chosen for his attention two seemingly unconnected subjects (the book, after all, is subtitled Opposites Attract Me), he has also effectively portrayed each in terms of her intellectual achievements. I am happy to see that each merited further investigation on my part, an experience that yielded appreciation. With both Sontag and Kael it was easy to trace the relevance of their thought to my own intellectual development; their cultural relevance should not have been surprising considering their considerable cache but, delightfully, it was.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Heaven is Other People

Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever: Stories
by Justin Taylor
2010, Harper Perennial


Junior year of high school, I took a English course on the American short story. We began with Romanticism, studied Naturalism (at length) and Realism. The entire term I waited with great anticipation for the last quarter - focused on Modernism. I remember being, after all this build-up, disappointed that they stories we read weren't more, well, modern.

It wasn't until college that I, spurred on by my now-ingrained gravitation towards short stories, discovered that loose canon known as 'contemporary fiction'. While some contemporary authors (Jonathan Safran Foer, for example) display tendencies toward postmodernism (meta-narratives, play with font and color, incorporation of multimedia) most of my favorite contemporary short fiction writers are just, in a word, quirky. I am especially drawn to those authors who employ copious film references, adolescent drug-induced malaise, and inordinate amounts of aestheticised violence.

In perusing the Sunday New York Times Book Review (as I often do Mondays during my planning period at school), I often look for phrases and words that tip me off that I'm reading about such an author: the combination of "Raymond Carver" and "Larry David" for example, which appeared to my delight in the review for Justin Taylor's Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever. After a reference to my favorite favorite favorite band ever ever the venerable Pixies, my library card bar code number practically entered itself onto my library catalogue website.

Considering my gusto in response to these pop-cultural touchstones, I suppose it was inevitable that Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever had a difficult time living up to its name.

On the book jacket, the blurbist (blurber?) describes Taylor's prose as "crystalline, spare, and oddly moving". This seems to me an uncommonly bad sign that you might be writing outside of the norm of narrative expectation and this is certainly true of this collection of stories. In this case, the subject matter is not especially surprising of modern short story writers; most of the stories in this collection are about aimless anarchists and disaffected youths. Most of the stories are written with typically preternatural adolescent malaise and ironic affectation that not-so-successfully disguises a deep inner turmoil about some of the most basic ontological problems of living.

So all of that is perfectly in line with most twenty- or young thirty-somethings publishing short fiction. What does set Justin Taylor apart from his peers (and perhaps accounts for the 'oddly moving' descriptor) is his utter self-abnegation. Taylor's stories are so much an exploration of the world and people around him that he seems to largely discount the importance of a narrator.

Taylor's stories are almost reverse-solipsistic - the world only exists insofar as other people do for his narrators to obsess over, to observe. And any amount of self-worth comes from one's capacity to surround oneself with interesting characters - "you are who you love". Most of the stories revolve around a basically indistinct narrator cataloguing the idiosyncrasies - physical, social, emotional - of various people who pass through his life.

Two stories, for example, are written about the elusive, emotionally distant singer of an anarchist punk band and the narrator's overwhelming desire to make her notice him. Another story is about a man who exhausts himself sleeping with a girl who's spoken for and lusting after the skate boarder whose pants hang deliciously low at the deli where he works.

The effect is that the stories exude, paradoxically, distant intimacy. Each of the stories is written in first person, which is a convenient way for an author to disguise his narrator or his lack of insight into his narrator. Taylor's narrator's voice is sharp in its insights on other people but these narrators are virtually indistinguishable from one another; each seems to blend into the next with the exception of rare conspicuous deviations in minor demographic variables like age.

It is inevitable that when a first person narrator fails to adopt a convincing characteristic voice - especially when that voice is revisited over and over in a collection of stories - that a reader begin to substitute the author for that collective narrative voice. The game then becomes exploring an author's psyche rather than exploring an author's worldview through a character's psyche. Every story becomes revealing in terms of what it shows us about the author, like eavesdropping on a friend's intimate conversation or seeing someone naked for the first time. It's intriguing for all the wrong reasons; when Taylor's narrators display casual bisexual tendencies, for example, my interest is purely voyeuristic.

(This reader-author voyeurism is partially, perhaps, my problem with memoir.)

The trouble with this dynamic is that it places the reader in a place of judgment over the author, rather than the reverse. Taylor's inability to flesh out truly idiosyncratic first person narrators reads as his attempt to disguise his own presence in these narrators and imparts a minor feeling of victory when he reveals himself as opposed to when an author prompts a moment of self-discovery.

This is not to disparage the quality of Taylor's characterizations of his secondary characters, the objects of his narrators' lust. His collection is full of vibrant characters who struggle to distance themselves from their existential sorrow and morose, apathetic characters who disregard common sense approaches to safety in true anarchic spirit. These characters are fluid sometimes, but have some essential element of truthfulness about them. In this way, Taylor's stories feel refreshingly modern to me. The characters here feel an accurate portrayal of what I hesitate to call my generation.

His friends, with their raucous spirit nearly brimming over with frustration at the difficult problem of discovering how to live and their self-effacing irony about their own sadness, remind me a great deal of my own friends. I suppose then, that part of my discomfort with Taylor's narrative ambiguity is the role it casts me in by extension - that I, too, am but an observer wrapped in lusting and idealizing and mourning the parade of people around me like satellites easy to make out in the sky but too far to touch.

One of his narrators remarks at one point that "the world is not brimming over with grace, but it does have some." This sentiment (I hesitate to call it that; it feels cheap) speaks not only to the gratefully melancholic mood of Taylor's book but to a certain extent my own ethos (if I can be said to have one). It seems that Taylor would do well to turn this principle inward and to be unafraid to find some self-worth beyond his adoration of broken, beautiful people. And I suppose I could take my own advice.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Get Rich Quick

Ravens
by George Dawes Green
2009, Grand Central Publishing


When I was in junior high, I devoured any and every Michael Crichton novel I could get my hands on. His Dickens-long opuses filled some adolescent need I had for vicarious thrills, chills, and occasional moralizing. As an adult, I have learned that Crichton's novels are too, well, expertly programmed for my enjoyment now. Re-reading his work elicits none of the nostalgic charm I get from Agatha Christie, another childhood favorite.

I am very much interested in reading thrillers, particularly expansive inventive ones. But as I read more, my standards for literate, moving prose get higher and higher. Ravens does not meet those standards. George Dawes Green, its author, writes as though he learned to read from John Grisham movies.

The plot revolves around a trashy Southern family who win the lottery. The mother, as depressing and cartoonish a lush as any on Lifetime, plays religiously and her continuous losses on further her spiral of depression and worthlessness until what Dawes Green might call 'the fateful night' when her fortunes are 'seemingly reversed' and she hits it big - to the tune of 816 million dollars.

The plot 'thickens' when two aimless degenerate types stop at the convenience store where the winning ticket was sold and 'hatch a plan' where they will take the family hostage and concoct a ridiculous story to cover how the state should award half the winnings to the more confident of the pair, Shaw McBride (a name seemingly pulled from a Rolodex of potential movie villains).

Mr. Dawes Green's first 'fatal flaw' is his failure to elaborate on the backstories of these two gentlemen. It is understood they are involved in some way in computer programming and have trouble maintaining jobs or social lives. What these gentlemen are doing on the road trip that delivers them to the home of the winners - the improbably named Boatwrights - is as much a mystery as is their personalities.

Although it seems unfair to compare Dawes Green to as practiced a storyteller as Stephen King, I am reminded of Mr. King's work in reflecting on the missteps at the beginning of this novel. Where King's novels - The Stand, for example - spent dozens and sometimes hundreds of pages slowly building suspense and creating elaborate, Dickensian character histories, George Dawes Green spends next to no time getting his plot underway.

King's novels build suspense in the period it takes him to establish scenarios and locations and while King often plays into the Crichton-like gimmick of beginning his stories with little cliff-hanger episodes, his novels are deceptively leisurely at their beginnings. Dawes Green's first twenty pages demonstrate a distinct impatience to 'cut to the chase' and get burdensome aspects of novel-writing like character development and narrative exposition.

The plot continues as the mystery men take captive the Boatwrights and, unsurprisingly, Stockholm Syndrome strikes. The rest of the events are as hackneyed as this plot twist might suggest, with the notable exception of a 'from left field' development whereby Mr. McBride becomes a prophet of sorts and the family's deeply Southern values are confused by their current trials and tribulations and Mr. McBride's charisma. Consequently, the villain becomes increasingly introspective and disconnected from reality and waxes philosophically about his finally finding a purpose and meaning to his life.

Dawes Green's prose is clumsy at best. His unfortunate habit of typing, for instance, anyone yelling in caps is amateurish and vaguely reminiscent of poor online fan fiction. His sentences are frequently flabby and while he thanks his line editor in the acknowledgements for "teaching him to write", I would be embarrassed at being recognized as the woman who gave the okay on this gem: "Claude never winced but was stoic throughout."

The general laziness in the editing does not end at conjunctions. Inexplicably, Dawes Green shifts at odd moments from third to first person. It is unclear to me if this is intentional, as though trying to demonstrate the author slipping so close to the character's thoughts that they become one, but in any event the technique (if I can be charitable enough to call it that) is utilized so infrequently the effect reeks of nothing but laziness. Take this passage, for example:

He drove to his favorite hiding place on Rt. 17, near the Spur, behind a mess of oleanders, and raised dutifully his radar gun. But today was a lucky day for speeders in Brunswick, Georgia, because he wasn't even looking at the numbers. All his thoughts were on Nell Boatwright. Now she'll be lost to me forever. Her son Mitch will buy her a mansion in the south of France, and she'll have tea with duchesses and play seven-card stud with Bea Arthur who will adore her drawl and her crazy piercing laugh, and she's lost to me. It's finished now. I'm done and I just ought to own up to that fact.

I am accustomed to authors choosing a voice and sticking with it. At the very least, considering his familiarity with caps, I would assume he'd know to use italics to communicate internal monologue. (I will only parenthetically direct your attention to the awkward syntax - "raised dutifully"? This is no e.e. cummings poem.) Of course, it only takes a little bit of flipping to find that Dawes Green does indeed use italics to communicate internal monologue (" ...you think about Romeo and Romeo's sickness and Romeo's bloodlust while I tap into the power...") So what gives?

At the very least, Ravens was a brisk read so my frustration with such lapses in editorial oversight were thankfully shortlived. I wish I could recommend it despite its shortsighted prose for its great plot but the only thing more cardboard in construction than its characters is the predictable twists and turns of its hackneyed plot. But as Mr. Grisham has demonstrated to his would-be protege, these are the very elements that make a fledgling writer a sum rivaling the Boatwrights' for his effort - or obvious lack thereof.