New Year Review 2

What I Read in 2010

Another year has come to a close, and again I find myself saddened that the list of books I read this year is shorter than the preceding year (albeit by only a handful).

What follows is a list of books I completed in 2010. My six favorite are in bold with little summaries, although you will also find links to most of the blog entries on the books as well.

01. Making Your Own Days by Kenneth Koch (poetry manual)

02. McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 31 (literary magazine)

03. McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets (interesting poetry anthology)

04. Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop by Adam Bradley (explication of poetic rap lyrics)

05. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (epic YA novel, part one)*

06. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (novel)

07. Norwood by Charles Portis (funny novel)*

08. The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (epic YA novel, part two)

09. Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me by Craig Seligman (nonfiction critical study)

10. Point Omega by Don DeLillo (novel)

11. Home Land by Sam Lipsyte (novel)

12. Illness As Metaphor by Susan Sontag (essays about illness in culture)

13. Ravens by George Dawes Green (thriller)

14. Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor (short stories)

15. This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson (nonfiction about revolutionizing library systems)

16. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang by Pauline Kael (film criticism)

KKBB is a collection of essays by the venerable Ms. Kael on cinema. Though she writes almost exclusively about a period in the early through late 60s, her writing is exuberant and precise and her perspectives on trends in cinema eerily prefigure the contemporary cinematic landscape. While KKBB would be most rewarding for fellow cinema buffs, Kael's writing is a masterclass in wit, concision and clarity.

17. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (exhaustingly long Victorian novel)

18. Model Home by Eric Puchner (novel)

19. One D.O.A., One on the Way by Mary Robison (short story-esque novel)

20. Ghosts of Wyoming by Alison Hagy (short stories)

21. Chicken with Plums by Marianne Sajrapi (graphic novel about a musician)

22. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (novel)

23. Tinkers by Paul Harding (novel, Pulitzer Prize winner)*

24. Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving (novel)

25. Irish Girl by Tim Johnston (short stories)

26. Buffalo Lockjaw by Greg Ames (novel)

27. The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee by Sarah Silverman (memoirish thing)

28. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman (gospel-style novel)*

29. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman (short storyish novel)*

30. Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler (noir)

FML (not to be confused with the other, more popular acronym of the same name) is a tour-de-force of balls-to-the-wall writing. Chandler invents a good many brilliant, confusing, exciting figures of speech and his writing reads like nothing you've read before. Nothing that doesn't steal heavily from Chandler, that is.

31. Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis (novel)

32. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (novella)

33. Three Delays by Charlie Smith (novel)

34. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (novel)*

35. Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet (sucky short stories)

36. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender (novel)

Bender speaks to me like few of her peers do, albeit in tongues. TPSOLC is a beautifully weird, elusive and elliptical novel about what it means to feel too much, what it means to be overcome by the difficulty of simply being. It struck a chord for me that I'm still feeling echoes of several months later.

37. The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter (novel)

*38. Citrus County by John Brandon (novel)

A terrifying little book about the capacity for wrongdoing that lives in each of us. Brandon makes the quiet, frustrating struggle to overcome inner evil heroic in an unexpected way and he earned every bit of my admiration for his refusal to pander with easy answers to problematic lives. A disturbing, beautiful little book.

39. As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem (novel)

40. All My Friends Are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman (short storyish novel)

41. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace (essays)

Perhaps the most personally influential thing I read in 2010. I am in love with DFW. Nuff said.

42. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (novel)

43. Cell by Stephen King (thriller)

44. The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan (nonfiction about evolution from a botanical standpoint)*

I didn't blog on this one, and I'm not sure why as it was one of my favorites I read this year. Pollan examines the history (sociological, botanical, evolutionary) of four different plants: the apple, the potato, the tulip and marijuana in an attempt to suss out the meaning of the incredibly diverse and remarkable pleasures life offers man. On its surface, it reads like a polemic against the development of monocultures, but at heart it is an ode to evolution and human culture, and the beautiful dance between the two through the guise of artificial selection and biodiversity.

45. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (novel)

46. X'ed Out by Charles Burns (graphic novel)

47. You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe (novel)

48. Fear Street Saga #1: The Betrayal by R.L. Stine (YA novel, part one)

49. Fear Street Saga #2: The Secret by R.L. Stine (YA novel, part two)

50. Fear Street Saga #3: The Burning by R. L. Stine (YA novel, part three)

By far my favorite book to blog on this year was Stephen King's Cell, which proves my theory that it's easier to write about something I hate than something I love. And I am especially proud of my title for the blog entry on Jess Walter's novel about a financial guru turned pot dealer: Stocks and Bongs.

Also of note this year were two wonderfully written guest blog entries:

GB1: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn reviewed by extrachrisb

GB2: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart reviewed by MB

Happy New Year and happy reading!

Bloglette: You Were Wrong

You Were Wrong

by Matthew Sharpe

2010, Bloomsbury

This is going to be a short entry, in part because I returned the book to the library and can't quote and in part because I read it a while ago (and as my computer has been broken for awhile, I've been relatively unable to blog).

You Were Wrong is a very funny, short love story about a high school math teacher who falls in love with his step-sister (unbeknownst to him, naturally). The main character is a buffoonish intellectual who has trouble process information at socially normal speeds. He lives in his dead mother's house with her last husband, an egocentric windbag whom our hero attempts, inexplicably, to kill.

Sharpe writes these incredibly precise little characters who are quite fun to read but then does little from the deus ex machina perspective with his creations. It's as though they are little wind-up toys that we spend three quarters of the book winding, only to watch them scramble about and get stuck on the carpet in its last act.

The plot is largely unimportant and is a little confusing, given how little of it there is.

Sharpe's prose is witty and, well, sharp. He often made me laugh out loud. The dialogue is verbose but its verbosity and the reader's subsequent entanglement in it are delightful in the same way it is to watch Donald O'Connor do a pratfall.

Rebel without a Cause

Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen
2010, Farrar, Straus and Giroux


Several years ago, I became very enamored with The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen's previous novel (also about a dysfunctional Midwestern family). I told everyone I knew to read it, bought copies for numerous people as Christmas presents. I even extolled its pleasures to my AP English teacher, who in turn replied, "Oh, I read that. I couldn't get past the scatological stuff," referring to one character's tendency to store his feces for later examination. No matter, I was seventeen and scatology was just one of those strange obsessions of adults I took for granted as being normal and highbrow, like analysis in Woody Allen movies.

Perhaps the motivation behind this love had more than a little bit to do with Franzen's rather public scuffle with Oprah, in which he insisted he did not feel comfortable with his novel being sold with the Oprah stamp of approval. To my adolescent mind, these were admirable words akin to a giant fuck you to The Man. Franzen was daring for flirting with conventional success

and then shrugging it off, regardless of the consequences.

The idea that Oprah could so easily commoditize literature, that bastion of noncommercial artistic expression, bothered me a great deal at the time. To a certain extent it still does. Franzen's actions, which seemed to so perfectly express a certain punk rock throwing of abandon into the wind, were inspiring for a seventeen year old boy prone to hero worship. The event, I hoped, would call into question all of our quietly, deeply ingrained attitudes towards art-as-capitalistic-product. Why did we buy what we buy? Who controls the taste of a culture? Who decides what ideas take precedence?

Franzen seemed to me to be shrugging off what must be intense pressure from his publishers to play the game of airport giftshop novels. Without any fear of retaliation, he insisted on bucking the system, rejecting the pre-formed systems of cultural consumption, of corporate cross-promotion creating value for art.

That Franzen's literary punk rock maneuvers did not seem at all to match the tenor of his prose did not bother me much then. The Corrections was a stately, largely traditional novel about familial tension and subsequent emotional burdens and not at all the sort of post-modern trailblazing tome a la Chuck Palahniuk, et al I might have otherwise expected.

When Franzen this summer published his new novel, his first since The Corrections, memories of the Oprah fiasco and the media brushfire it set came rushing back to mind. Franzen was the first living novelist to grace the cover of Time in ten years, Obama left a bookstore on Martha's Vineyard with a copy in hand several days before its publication, and - yes, inevitably - Freedom was selected as Ms. Winfrey's newest book club choice.

Wasn't this the same author who had earlier rejected the big O's stamp of approval in favor of dignity? of taking a stand on the pressures of consumer culture? of deferring to one woman's judgment in determining which book to read?

Befuddled and curious, I approached Freedom with no small amount of trepidation. I had an inkling that (maybe this is just the hindsight talking) Franzen's writing, so important to my formative literary forays, would not stand up to adult scrutiny. I was right.

Freedom betrays a definitively adolescent mindset. It portrays a world populated by seemingly complicated figures on their surface who are not fleshed out underneath. Franzen's rough sentimentality takes the place of true empathy, largely because he does not understand his own characters to care about them. When they prove too unwieldy for his abilities, he abandons them.

The novel is about a Midwestern family who is embroiled in political, sexual, and interpersonal drama throughout the course of their lives. There's Patty, the would-be lesbian by way of Martha Stewart drunken homemaker, Walter, the idealistic but mild-mannered father who gets into bed with corporations in order to preserve wildlife, and their son Joey, who is as precocious sexually as he is socially.

Early portions of the novel (the only really good parts) describe Patty's childhood in the voice of her "memoir" (written at the behest of her therapist). In Patty's story, she is described as the athletic, self-sufficient offspring of upper class snobs. Most of her memoir is spent describing her high school rape and its subsequent impact on her sexual life, her friendship with an infatuated drug addict in college, and her crush on a punk rock musician through whom she eventually meets her future husband.

The Patty of these pages is richly complex in emotion and Franzen chose well the therapist-approved memoir gimmick because of the nostalgic, bittersweet scrim through which we can view her life.

But as the novel reverts to conventional third-person omniscient narrator mode, and thus away from Patty's close emotional perspective, it loses its sense of her strongly defined character. Franzen misplaces his sense of her inner life and she becomes cold and removed, not in any significant way, but the way in which one might employ a cliche to resolve writer's block. Patty's emotional turmoil manifests itself in suburban bitchery and nightly wine binges. Her character arc shows little imagination and fails to live up to the promise of the first hundred pages (ostensibly a sixth) of the novel.

Patty's characterization is not the only troublesome entity in Freedom. The aforementioned collegiate object of her affection, a punk rock singer, features heavily as a narrative tool in the deus ex machina mode. When Franzen requires marital discontent, he simply conjures up once again the increasingly haggard and seemingly never-evolving rock star character who, in his later years, has discovered conventional success in some sort of a Wilco type alt-country band.

While I enjoyed reading the parts with this character (in part, I think, because his character arc is unconventional simply in its prominent static nature), Franzen struggles to correctly evoke the voice of a relatively uneducated character.

Consider this passage, for example:

His feeling of having crashed did not consist of envy, exactly, or even entirely of having outlived himself. It was more like despair about the world's splinteredness. The nation was fighting ugly ground wars in two countries, the planet was heating up like a toaster oven, and here at the 9:30, all around him, were hundreds of kids in the mold of the banana-bread-baking Sarah, with their sweet yearnings, their innocent entitlement - to what? To emotion. To unadulterated worship of a superspecial band. To being left to themselves to ritually repudiate, for an hour or two on a Saturday night, the cynicism and anger of their elders. They seemed, as Jessica had suggested at the meeting earlier, to bear malice toward nobody. Katz could see it in their clothing, which bespoke none of the rage and disaffection of the crowds he'd been part of as a youngster.

This is fine writing, no doubt, but it calls to question the issue of authority here. Is this Franzen's voice? or the musician's? Ideally, it would be a balance of both wherein the musician's perspective is filtered through Franzen's voice. A good author gives voice to emotions his characters would have trouble enunciating. But here it seems that Franzen's voice has overtaken his character's, allowing his diction and rhythm to dictate the tone of the passage.

While this creates an obvious and, to some extent, necessary level of cohesiveness, it prevents Franzen's characters from fully expressing their individual natures. Ultimately, after six hundred pages, all the characters sound like Franzen and not at all like themselves. This is not problematic except in the case of employing a close omniscient third person - in other words, using the narrator to give voice to an inner monologue of sorts - as Franzen does throughout the novel.

The lasting impression is that Franzen is unable to give a unique voice to his characters and his prose ultimately sounds like just that: prosaic, almost clinical.

If Franzen's talents do not lie in his prose-making or his character development, than surely he must rely on plot to carry his novel. But that too proves not to sustain the weight of extensive scrutiny. The narrative arc follows the fairly predictable line of Patty and her husband's marriage, divorce and re-marriage. For six hundred pages, relatively little happens.

In one of the more off-putting sections of the novel, Franzen, who is narrating over the shoulder of the precocious son Joey, describes the 20 year old's attempt to cheat on his wife. He follows a girl to Argentina, where he intends to sleep with her, but before his departure he masturbates with his wedding ring in his mouth. He swallows it.

When it comes time to perform the infidelity, he becomes impotent and embarrasses himself by falling asleep in bed with the deed left undone. In the morning, he finds he has overcome the previous night's impotence and attempts once again to seduce his bedmate. Before he is able, though, he discovers he must move his bowels and after he runs to the bathroom, Franzen writes the following scene, in which he must retrieve his wedding ring from his feces.

The oldest turd was dark and firm and noduled, the ones from deeper inside him were paler and already dissolving a little. Although he, like all people, secretly enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was something else. It was bad as to seem evil in a moral way. He poked one of the softer turds with the fork, trying to rotate it and examine its underside, but it bent and began to crumble, clouding the water brown, and he saw that this business of a fork had been a wishful fantasy. The water would soon be too turbid to see a ring through, and if the ring broke free of its enveloping matter it would sink to the bottom and possibly go down the drain. He had no choice but lift out each turd and run it through his fingers, and he had to do this quickly, before things got too waterlogged.

So yeah.

That's disgusting.

It was around this point, with the intermixing of sex and shit, that I started to check out a little bit. Franzen seemed to me to betray an overwhelming adolescent mindset. While the above passage is truly disgusting, it also one of the most imaginative movements in the novel, which I think reveals more than a bit about Franzen.

At the novel's end, the absence of sufficient character development collapsed whatever remnants of interest I had in its resolution. Patty and her husband, who have not spoken for ten years following a bitter divorce, are reunited in a way that emphasizes Franzen's fundamental lack of understanding of his own characters, and perhaps by extension, the adult psyche. One day Patty shows up at her ex-husband's door and when he does not speak to her, she sits mute own his stoop in a snowstorm and literally freezes.

Her husband finally caves and brings her into the house and then they happily remarry and the novel ends. At no point is there a sense of catharsis narratively or psychologically. The characters simply do nothing. And yet this resolves their conflict.

Neither proves to be a realistic, emotionally round character, because Franzen lacks the imagination to supply a resolution to his own novel in which his characters must change or at least accept some culpability in their own inherent shittiness as people. Franzen is not sure why they would reunite or how they would go about it if they did, so he resolves their relationship through an act of such inertia that it makes the novel;s emotional entropy obvious in retrospect.

I am no longer the same seventeen year old boy who was so easily impressed by Franzen's finger-flipping at Oprah. What seemed heroic in a countercultural fashion then seems as adolescent now as my hero-worship.

Still, I tried to approach Freedom from a neutral perspective, one that might re-kindle my admiration, if not for Franzen himself as a trail-blazing literary rogue, than of his prose.

Unsurprisingly, I was unable to get past the scatological stuff.

iPod People

Editor's Note: This marks the second guest blog that Pygmies and Peanut Butter has hosted. I am thrilled to invite my friend MB to share her thoughts on Gary Shteyngart's dystopian-ish Super Sad True Love Story. You can find our last guest blog entry by extrachrisb on the classic Geek Love here.

I will again encourage anyone reading this to consider guest blogging, it would be my pleasure to host your work, as it has been in this instance. I hope you enjoy the blog entry below, I know I did.


Super Sad True Love Story
by Gary Shteyngart
2010, Random House


Set in a dystopian near-future version of America via NYC, Shteyngart's fictional world is the stuff of every urban-dwelling liberal's worst nightmare: books have fallen out of favor, preteens are sporting transparent "onionskin" jeans, and no one dares to leave the house without their hand-held mobile device (known as an "aparat"). The dollar is nearly worthless, creating an ever-widening chasm between rich and poor. America is falling apart and its pieces are being auctioned off to the highest bidder.

In the midst of all this chaos springs the love affair between Lenny Abrimov and Eunice Park, as told through his candid diary entries and her archived internet activity (blog entries, e-mails, and instant messages). The plot follows these two as they wade through social, political, and familial turmoil, as well as their own emotional baggage, in search of their place in the world.

Lenny is an unattractive middle-aged man desperately trying to succeed in a post-modern America that values wealth, youth, and looks above all else. Unfortunately for Lenny, his love of books, taste for good food, and visceral need for emotional connection leave him ill-equipped for the task. We often find him succumbing to the ideals and pressures of society, even though they are at odds with his own values, as clearly demonstrated by his blind love for the young and stunning Eunice Park.

Eunice, Lenny's object of desire, is a young, attractive Korean-American post-grad from California. She is a true product of the culture; she is self-obsessed, materialistic, and permanently connected to her aparat. Paralyzed by low self-esteem, Eunice denies herself the right to feel intelligent, talented, or worthy of affection. She exists as an empty and consumer-driven shell of herself.

Deep down he knows Eunice isn't a match for him intellectually, but he enjoys the societal approval that comes with dating a beautiful young woman. Through Eunice's youth and looks, Lenny finds himself attractive and young by proxy. This all makes him feel a bit silly and shallow and in order to rationalize these feelings, he convinces himself that there is understated depth in her vanity and materialism - depth that simply isn't there. Lenny's assessment of Eunice's character is often funny in its willful delusion.

The allure of youth, and by extension, immortatlity, is a prominent theme throughout the novel. Lenny makes his living as a salesman for Post-Human Services, a company that sells indefinite life extension to the very rich. The allure of immortality is a prominent theme throughout the novel; as his boss (and mentor) Joshie puts it, "Eternal life is the only life that matters. All else is just a moth circling the light." When we first meet Lenny, he is determined to live forever.

As society breaks down and the future of America grows bleak, Lenny and Eunice are forced to self-reflect. This is often painful as they are accustomed to a steady steam of distractions from their own inner lives. Out of necessity, they begin to establish honest human connections and slowly accept their true nature. The cracks in Eunice's veneer allow us to see through her vapid, self-centered exterior to the genuine and caring person underneath. As for Lenny, he finds himself questioning his devotion to the promise of youth and immortality.

And that is the take-home message: We Americans go to great lengths to avoid confronting our own humanity and mortality. We exploit entertainment and technology to distract ourselves from the difficult, painful, and embarrassing aspects of human experience. Yet, it is only when Lenny and Eunice are forced to leave behind their distractions and confront these uncomfortable truths that they are able to find true meaning in their lives.

Super Sad True Love Story is not a love story of two people. It is an ode to everything that makes us human and ultimately, death - super sad, true, and beautiful as it is.

Guest blog entry by MB.

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.

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.

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.