Monday, June 28, 2010

A Tarantula on a Slice of Angel Food

Farewell, My Lovely
by Raymond Chandler
1940, Alfred A. Knopf


As often as I read now as an adult, I feel that my childhood and early adolescence was a period of much more frenzied consumption of books. Mystery novels played an enormous part in my precocious interest in novels.

I remember, for example, in kindergarten or first grade consuming Encyclopedia Browns faster than my library could acquire them. Later, in fifth through seventh grade, I delved enthusiastically into Agatha Christie's oeuvre, borrowing decades-old paperbacks from my great Aunts when the library's stock inevitably failed to meet my needs.

As a teenager, my interest in genre writing was supplanted by my fervor for "literary" works; I'm sad to say that with only four exceptions, I gave away all of my Agatha Christies. In my adulthood, I'm rather ashamed to say that I can count on one hand the number of times I've browsed through a science fiction or mystery section in a bookstore.

Recently, though, I was shopping at a store called Savers in Nashua (ostensibly an upscale Salvation Army) and came across three beautiful Vintage paperbacks of Raymond Chandler novels. I had very recently watched Robert Altman's 1973 Marlowe film The Long Goodbye and so it was with a great deal of excitement that I picked up Farewell, My Lovely and got lost in Chandler's brittle prose.

The actual plot of Farewell, My Lovely is enormously convoluted, but in the most delightful way. The story begins in a seedy bar where a murder occurs and careens from boozy broads and closeted homosexuals to sham psychics and odious doctors. Chandler weaves the story out of these seemingly disparate characters and plot strands, and eventually your seemingly split attention is rewarded as the the strands wind together and produce a coherently sensible conclusion.

This, of course, does not necessarily mean that the bulk of the novel is any more coherent for its conclusive ending. Marlowe bounces from one cinema-ready location to another: dive bars, mysterious hillside mansions, psychiatric hospitals, a floating casino accessible only by boat (a la One-Eyed Jack's). But the inherent confusion in following Marlowe follow leads that don't seem to connect, in moving from one seedy location to another, increasingly signifies a thematic interest in the inherent disconnect of contemporary urban life: the surprising and incongruous neighborhoods and cultures that coalesce and confuse.

The setting, then, is clearly important in understanding the dark undertow that flows beneath the tranquil, picturesque surface of genre. The raging tumult of Los Angeles, its over-population, its ready availability of venues for vice, is no stranger to thematic extrapolation, but when Chandler utilizes the borderline proverbial godlessness of L.A. in tandem with the mess of a plot at work in Farewell, My Lovely the subsequent feelings of confusion give way to fatalism.

Marlowe emerges then as a tragic hero of sorts, fighting to bring sense in his small, defeated way to the overwhelming futility of life in this landscape. He is beaten and bitter this superficial resignation to hopelessness is undermined by his doggedness in his single-minded pursuit of justice. Hoping to make sense in a senseless world makes him naive and yet incredibly heroic; he becomes the sort of man with whom one falls in love. As I read Chandler, Bogart with his endless charm and swagger became an increasingly sensible casting choice.

In truth the underlying thematic portrait of the 1930s lends intellectual merit to the experience of reading Chandler. It justifies what is otherwise a dime store crime novel. But rest assured this is not a novel that necessitates justification, it is one that inspires devotion. Marlowe is intoxicating. Chandler's prose is dizzying. These feats of inspiration require no justification - only slavish devotion.

Let me provide you with some rather dizzying examples of the acrobatic derring-do (most of which take the form of those trusty workhorses simile and metaphor) on display in Chandler's otherwise modest construction:

- "His smile was as cunning as a broken mousetrap."
- "He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."
- "He was a windblown blossom of some two hundred pounds with freckled teeth."
- "It was a lovely bed. It was made of roseleaves. It was the most beautiful bed in the world. They got it from Carole Lombard. It was too soft for her."
- "Time passed again. I don't know how long. I had no watch. They don't make that kind of time in watches anyway."
- "I was a hundred dollar package of dynamite that went off with a noise like a pawnbroker looking at a dollar watch."
- "His voice sounded full of baked potato."

These randomly selected examples inspire awe. Giddiness. And they don't take the delicious dialogue into account either.

Chandler constructs with his prose another world where such diction is not merely clever but is true. He imbues the entire novel with this air of unreality, poisoning his reader against more staid and stale forms of expression. Moreover, this disconnected, ostentatious prose further serves to create an enveloping sense of becoming lost in Chandler's world. Chandler remakes the world with every bewitching sentence, breaking apart the familiar concepts of character, mystery, climax, stereotype and reassembling them into something wonderfully unique.

Ultimately, Farewell, My Lovely is a delicious confection of hard-boiled mystery. Its gritty and bombastic prose is addictive and the plot is absorbing and falls into place just in time to reward its readers' attention. Most of all, Marlowe is the type of striking character who lingers in your mind long after the book is over, lingering behind street corners in a cloud of cigarette smoke waiting for you to look his way.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Yesterday's Trees, Today's News, Tomorrow's Mulch

The Imperfectionists
by Tom Rachman
2010, Dial Press




I try as routinely as possible to read the Sunday New York Times Book Review to stay abreast of contemporary fiction. Usually this takes place at my friend's camp in Maine, where we spend most of our Sundays throughout the summer working collaboratively on the Sunday crossword. As we sit on the lake dock, we work through our nemesis Will Shortz's thicket of punnery and find our ourselves alternately screaming obscenities in frustration or shouting in joy: "Take that, you piece of ****!" "Mongolia! I ****ing knew it!", etc. In between short bursts of word puzzle concentration and bracing dips in the lake, I usually delve into the Book Review, which on such occasions I read cover-to-cover.


While I would say I only remember to make note of one or two books from any given Book Review, and eventually read only a smaller fraction of these, it is not uncommon to see me a few weekends later with a book in my lap I recently encountered in the pages of the Review. Such a book is usually one accumulating a great deal of buzz or from a particularly ecstatic review (especially if the reviewer is a novelist I admire who contributes to the book review: i.e. Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Jonathans Lethem & Franzen, etc.).


This was certainly the case with Tom Rachman's debut novel The Imperfectionists, which I read about in an absurdly glowing review in the pages of the Book Review (by author Christopher Buckley, whose Boomsday sits unread on my bookshelf). A few short weeks later, The Imperfectionists and I spent some time lakeside together.


While the usual pace of my reading is a rather strong clip, Rachman's novel took me three weeks to finish despite its short (under 300 pages) length; it actually stayed with me to separate trips to two different lakehouses (I lead a privileged life throughout summer thanks to my friends). The reason for this is not that the prose is terribly difficult or the plot too intricate to be able to digest easily, but rather that the emotional depth of the novel necessitated a certain languid pace.


The novel's structural conceit is that each of its approximately dozen chapters is a stand-alone short story about one of the employees of a Rome-based international daily newspaper which can be read and appreciated separately as a complete emotional arc or can be read as part of the narrative whole and grow in meaning and substance as Rachman creates opportunities for telling cameos and inter-textual self-reference. In other words, each story stands powerful and gripping on its own, but when combined, create an overwhelming strength greater than the sum of its parts: think Winesburg, Ohio, say, or the Megazord.


Each chapter begins with a headline, a character and his job for the paper and runs the gamut from foreign correspondents and obituary writers to copy editors and managing editors, e.g "'Global Warming Good for Ice Creams' Corrections Editor - Herman Cohen". The subsequent chapter is ostensibly about that staff member, though as the stories accumulate, they begin to appear in one another's stories.


The effect this has on the narrative is interesting in that it endears the novelist and not his characters to us. (In one sense, it is endearing because of its surface cleverness, but that's not worth discussing.) Take, for example, copy editor Ruby Zaga, whose story "Kooks with Nukes" is an affecting portrait of a woman lost in her somewhat solipsistic attitude towards her workplace. Zaga is a perpetual loner, coming to work early to ensure that no one has stolen the chair she placed a special work order to acquire. She perseveres through the workday by mumbling under her breath about her incompetent colleagues.


Zaga's self image is one riddled with superiority and disgust at her favored colleagues and this misplacement of ego is somehow endearing in the same way a slightly ugly dog is, or the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. In other chapters, Zaga is the object of derision fromher colleagues when referenced and is generally seen as a bumbling harpy.


Strangely, though, the affect for the reader here is not increased sympathy for Zaga herself, who comes off increasingly as self-deluded, but rather for the author, whose empathy for his characters becomes evident as though through sleight-of-hand. Rachman ultimately comes off as far more empathetic and caring than any of his characters, who cannot take the time to know one another, despite his cruelty towards them.


And cruel he is. Perhaps the most disturbing and upsetting of the chapters concerns the Chief Financial Officer of the paper, who is set up rather carefully to be a tragically misunderstood figure whose impatience with her colleagues is a defense mechanism in place to protect her from the sorts of emotional collateral that may ensue when she implements a cost-cutting tactic for the paper. Despite the large quantities of sympathy Rachman wrenches out of the reader, he ultimately debases and shames her in what is perhaps the most horrifyingly striking chapter.


While the aforementioned chapter is hardly the only to exhibit sadistic tendencies on the author's part, his proclivity to put on display the loneliness and desperation, there are also several stories of rather touching redemption, as opposed to prolonged suffering and neurotic disconnect. One such story is that of Ornella de Monterecchi, a subscriber to the paper who reads each issue cover to cover, which necessarily takes longer than an actual day, causing her to lag behind be twenty-five years. She stores each issue fastidiously in her library and reads a different issue every day. Ornella forbids from guests and family references to modern politics or history so as not to ruin the events that will transpire, as the plot of a never ending novel, in her daily reading.


This system of reading acts as a suppressor on Ornella until she gloriously frees herself from her inability to let go of the past, making her chapter the most moving in the collection by far.


Each of the stories that comprises this novel is different, leading to an array of perspectives on the success or failure or the human spirit a la Altman's Short Cuts or Forester's Howards End. The novel's scope is therefore terribly honest and realistic in its inability to commit to any given view of the human experience; Rachman is content to be neither bogged down by his characters' inability to better their lives (Irish Girl) nor to be buoyed up by the triumphant rise of the human spirit over adversity (The Blind Side). What's left is an appropriate mix of the two where some people botch their lives, some scrape by, some transcend their experiences - a delicate and finely-wrought mix of tone.


The prose itself is also given to shape-shifting in the same way the novel's tone is. Some chapters are given to long passages of description, some to lengthy bouts of internal monologue, some almost entirely to dialogue. These shifts seem to depend in large part on each character's level of interaction with the world around him. This variety in writing style is by no means schizophrenic in nature; all are united by a larger authorial style and jive with one another in the grand scheme, but do lend the novel a bit of variety in the actual reading.


Ultimately, the strongest impression The Imperfectionists makes on me, other than the virtuosic talent of its author, is its slightly hermetic tone. After nearly a dozen characters and short stories revolving around this newspaper, one is left with the impression that despite the incredibly close working quarters most share with one another, none of these characters truly know each other. Our only glimpses into their inner lives are through the forty pages we spend with each character and as we move on and these characters are again referenced in subsequent chapters or in the afterword at the end of the book, I feel only a lingering sadness that my experience with each character was so short and that I can never feel as close to them again - rather like the emotional experience of staying in touch with a formerly close friend.


Rachman's characters exist together in a maelstrom of activity but despite their mandatory collisions seem not to know or care much for each other, unable to see the trees for the forest even though they're planted right next to each other, lending the novel a decidedly somber tone throughout. It's as though each character is holed up in Ornella di Monterecchi's library, sealed off from the contemporary world and to be cherished one at a time, once and then discarded forever, leaving only the traces of a context that help to inform tomorrow's news.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Thorns from a Fig Tree

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
by Philip Pullman
2010, Canongate


I have a long and complicated history with my faith (as I hesitate to call it). I was raised in a very conservatively and observantly religious home, one in which it was taught being good and being devout were interchangeable concepts.

When I was very young, my father and I attended Mass together and my experience of sitting, early in the morning, alone next to my father who sang all of the hymns by heart and with sincerity, was a profoundly moving experience. Sitting in those rickety wooden pews, I felt a sense of community and purpose to my life that, as I got older, seemed more and more a false sense of community. This increasingly hollow sense of purpose revealed itself around my adolescence, a very confusing time in my life in terms of identity. This body that seemed to give me such a sense of belonging gradually revealed its disdain for who I was. It's like the opposite of that Groucho Marx joke - I no longer wanted to be in the club that wouldn't have me as a member.

Rekindling that sense of purpose, of understanding, remained a futile quest until I discovered the arts - specifically, film and literature - whose answers to my questions were infinitely more complicated, less easy on the palate.

In high school, I first read Philip Pullman's first installment of his His Dark Materials series, The Golden Compass. The Golden Compass is an intensely exciting, mythology-laden, brilliantly written children's book that deals with, among other things, the dangers of organized religion. After reading its rather condemning portrayal of a Church that slaughters innocent children because of paranoia surrounding the concept of original sin, it came as no surprise that Pullman is an atheist.

In the past few months, I have taught The Golden Compass to my 8th grade class, re-reading it in the process and also read part two of the series, The Subtle Knife. So it was delight that I learned his novel would, instead of tackling organized religion as a subplot straw man, handle the gospels themselves as directly as re-writing them.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ re-envisions the New Testament through the story of Jesus, a prophet of God, and Christ, his twin brother who aspires to greater accomplishments. Written in the style of the gospels themselves, Pullman's novel begins by interpreting the story of Mary's virgin birth and Joseph's trepidation over her claims to faithfulness. When Joseph finally accepts Mary's word and his wife goes into labor, it is revealed that Mary gave birth to twin boys, one of whom was foretold to be the prophet of God.

As Jesus and Christ grow up, Jesus is revealed to be more than a bit rambunctious; he is disdainful of rules, and gleefully flouts authority. Christ proves to be an excellent scholar of scripture and more than once is able to extract his mischievous brother from dangerous situations.

While Christ remains a diligent student, Jesus becomes increasingly wild in his interests and behavior. Eventually, Jesus realizes that he is a prophet and begins preaching to the people of Jerusalem.

Christ tries to convince Jesus to use his powers as a miracle worker to impress and enlarge his following, but Jesus is reluctant and prefers to leave his teachings at wisdom, as opposed to razzle dazzle. Here Christ makes the argument to his brother:

"Jesus, don't be angry with me. Just hear me out. I know you want to do good, I know you want to help people. I know you want to do the will of God. But you must consider the effect you could have - the effect on ordinary people, simple people, ignorant people. They can be led to the good, but they need signs and wonders. They need miracles. Fine words convince the mind, but miracles speak directly to the heart and then to the soul...He'll believe every word you say then on. He'll follow you to the ends of the earth."

Herein Pullman establishes both the central theme and conflict in the novel. The rift between Jesus and his brother grows significantly as Christ attempts to form a church to spread Jesus's gospel. Pullman makes the case that modern Christianity's popularity is largely derived from the miracles performed by Jesus, as opposed to his actual teachings - or at the very least, that without said miracles, the Christian philosophy would not have as wide-ranging an appeal. Miracles spur otherwise lazy thinkers but intrinsically god-fearing people into unconditional worship, whereas philosophy spurs intelligent thinkers to reevaluate their behavior; in other words, miracles can either be believed or not and the centers of the brain that deal in fear (awe, wonder) make one inclined to want to believe in miracles, but philosophy is not a matter of belief or disbelief, it is a matter of thought and consideration, of self-reflection and adjustment.

Christ is unsuccessful in convincing his brother to implement his miraculous power to persuade followers in the worthiness of his message and Jesus continues preaching despite the absence of such miracles. Before long, Christ is approached by a mysterious stranger who asks him to begin recording Jesus's sermons for posterity.

Christ begins by at first faithfully transcribing the subsequent events in his brother's life, detailing his philosophy and his methods of spreading it. Eventually, though, Christ begins to have qualms with Jesus's teachings: Jesus makes incendiary remarks that Christ worries will alienate his future followers, so Christ begins to interpret Jesus's remarks and finesse wording to meet Christ's reinterpretation.

This fudging of details prompts the mysterious stranger to encourage Christ to begin embellishing Jesus's story at his whim.

"There is time, and there is what is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God."

The distinction between "truth" and "history" here is at the center of Pullman's argument as to the veracity of the Bible.

Increasingly, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ appears to be a novel about the process through which stories endure. Pullman's Christ values the gist of Jesus's gospel: the least offensive, most palatable, most awe-inspiring version of the events and his selection of detail gently cultivates a Jesus whose philosophy is vague enough to appeal to the most common denominator but also buoyed by a wide array of miracles that compel belief.

Christ is greatly conflicted over his task; should he continue to manipulate his brother's teachings to form a strong base upon which to build a church or let his brother's words stand true as they are and thus condemn them to languish without a permanent following?

Pullman's book is written in the style of the gospels themselves: minimalist sentences, terse chapters. It also follows the basic narrative structure of the gospels, with telling deviations, particularly where some of the sermons and miracles are concerned. (For example, in the tale of the loaves and fishes, Jesus simply encourages his followers to share whatever food they have handy to feed the crowd and Christ translates this as the miracle of multiple the loaves and fishes to feed everyone.)

The book was published as part of a series by Canongate examining many of the enduring myths of literature and storytelling, and Pullman's choice is apropos for a number of reasons - Christian mythology is among the absolute most persuasive, enduring and influential in existence, and it also appeals to Pullman's atheistic tendencies in providing him an opportunity to examine the process of myth-making itself as it applies to the veracity of the New Testament.

While Pullman's book has already attracted some controversy, I'm not sure his novel should become the target of devout Christians adamant about the Bible's authenticity; it's no secret that the four gospels disagree on a number of points, and Pullman's conceit of Mary's twin sons is obviously not a claim for an alternate history as much as it is a fictional venue in which to explore the motivations behind the publication of the gospels and to explain the discrepancies that must inevitably exist between them and reality. The most ire-inducing bit of revision in the novel is the suggestion that Jesus does not in fact rise from the dead, but that his brother Christ dutifully perpetrates this hoax to secure his brother's legacy.

Where I suppose a number of Christians might take issue with the book is in Pullman's treatment of organized religion. Pullman's resistance to organized religion is now secret; its thematic presence in The Golden Compass is undeniable. It seems as though Pullman uses "the scoundrel" Christ (who, in the novel, acts as Judas, betraying his brother in order to hasten his assassination, thereby cementing the mythology of Christ) as a figure to clarify his interpretation of the Church: a body that willfully manipulates historical record to attract a following. At one point during the novel, Jesus sermonizes about false prophets:

"There are true prophets and there are false prophets, and this is how you tell the difference: look at the fruits they bear. Do you gather grapes from a thorn bush? Do you look for figs among thistles? Of course not, because a bad tree can't bear good fruit, and a good tree can't bear bad fruit."
Christ thinks that ends (manipulation of historical documents, embellishment of Jesus's god-like powers, adjustment to Jesus's teachings to expand appeal) justifies the means (the establishment of a lasting church through which to proselytize). Pullman clearly disagrees. The novel suggests that the organization of a philosophy necessitates an inability to retain a philosophy's original truth, in other words: institutionalization causes corruption.

He seems to suggest that the modern church with its exclusion-based, divisive teaching and its radical, hatred-fueled adherents resembles the thorn bush his Jesus teaches of. While this view is obviously more than a bit simplistic, it is a largely implied reading of Pullman's theme, bolstered no doubt by my own tenuous relationship to the church that raised and then shunned me.

What is truly moving about the book is its portrayal of a writer in the process of reinventing the world, of discovering new, difficult truths and manipulating them into an understanding of the world. Where Christ manipulates these truths into an easier understanding of the world, Pullman does what I in my adolescence found art could do for me where religion could not: he manipulates the hard truths of life to speak all the louder and more clearly for their difficulty, to be filled with all the more meaning and purpose and beauty for their thorniness.