Cross-Promotional Bliss

Just a quick note to say I've been distracted by a side project, namely: a new blog about film.

You can find the first entry in said blog (Auteur Guide) here.

I will continue to book blog, I promise.

Bloglette: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary

by David Sedaris

2010, Little, Brown & Company

I have read a lot of David Sedaris books. There was a time in my life when I virtually obsessed over his brand of wry personal essay. His writing, which undulates on the surface with a hilarious blend of sad-sack cynicism, contains a strong undercurrent of empathy for a wide swath of people and a fair amount of a particularly virulent brand of self-loathing that was quite well known to me. At one point, I was fairly convinced David Sedaris was the only man I could ever love.

So it was with delight, then, that I turned to Sedaris's first

work of published fiction in over fifteen years, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. This collection of stories shares very little in common with the acerbic, melancholic autobiographical essays we, his readers, have grown accustomed to. What it does share is the very kernel of what makes Sedaris so lovable: his seemingly endless supply of hilarity.

Sedaris deviates from his successful formula by regaling us with fable-like stories of anthropomorphized animals demonstrating the foibles of humanity, from its confusing quirks like internet dating to its inevitably vicious social constructs like wealth or gossip. The stories are brought to life by animals doing very human things, all of which are incredibly funny and more than a little bit dark.

My favorite story in the book is the one I heard first, at a reading he did last year at the Wang Center or the BSO in Boston. In the book, it's entitled "The Faithful Setter" and it is narrated by a dog who bickers with his wife about the taste of scented candles and about his career as a stud for breeding. "The Faithful Setter" is a perfect encapsulation of what works about this book: its seemingly blase (or occasionally naive) delivery of what Sedaris imagines to be the annoyances of daily life from an animal's perspective lays bare the inanities with which we, as people, occupy our lives with.

I read somewhere once (who can remember these things) that the best fiction is that which makes the world newly strange, and that is exactly what Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk does: introduces a world eerily inverted from our own that pokes hilarious fun at the way we conduct our lives, constantly enraptured by the sound of our own voices, unwilling to turn our gaze inward, and preoccupied disproportionately with trivial matters right up until the moment of our death.

It's funnier than it sounds, I swear it.

Hard-Boiled Legs

The Grifters

by Jim Thompson

1963, Vintage

Occasionally I like to indulge in a bit of fluff from the past that offers very little beyond stylistic derring-do. Like watching old film noirs or listening to Whitney Houston albums, reading these works offers little beyond the satisfaction of false nostalgia. By this I mean there is something comforting (even a little dazzling) in delving into an out-moded genre knowing that it existed as a pure, inimical product of its time. There was only one unique point in history where Courtney Love could record Live Through This or Preston Sturges could have made Sullivan's Travels; moreover, that point in history has passed and cannot be recaptured. That we may view these artifacts - curios, really - of time gone by is (for most of us) false nostalgia that inspires curiosity, devotion and certainly no small amount of bemusement.

This is why genre exercises (particularly in film) often fall flat. The aping of a sincere mode of an expression inevitably comes off as insincere. To take On the Town and turn it into New York, New York is to plunder something special, something earnest, and make it a false artifact. There is a sly knowingness, a "wink, wink" quality that ruins the purity of these outmoded genres.

In some way The Grifters by Jim Thompson is understood best as lacking what it cannot have: earnestness. In contrast with Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely (which I wrote about here), Thompson's book fizzles where it is meant to crackle. Its attempts to modernize the dimestore noir genre come off as disingenuous when it's good and quaint when it's bad.

It's a tricky case, though. Thompson published pulp fiction from the early 1940s through the late 1960s. The Grifters falls late in his canon - 1963 - and Thompson had to have been aware of how much the world had changed from the world he possessed with Chandler and Hammett decades earlier.

As such, The Grifters is ultimately a self-conscious work. Thompson struggles in the text to maintain tension in true hard-boiled fashion. The story begins with a small-con grifter named Roy Dillon who is caught performing a con wherein he receives an extra twenty dollars by intentionally confusing a sales clerk. The clerk, who thinks he has caught on to this grift, assaults Dillon with a baseball bat. Dillon lands himself in the hospital with severe internal bleeding.

While Dillon, who values the "freedom of movement necessary to carrying on the grift," is laid up in the hospital he is visited by his over-bearing and nefarious mother whose loose morals and similar occupation is what leads Dillon initially to a life of crime.

His mother, Lilly Dillon, is given Thompson's most careful treatment in characterization. Lilly is a woman who "[knows] how to take care of herself" and whose "fatalistic do-or-be-damned philosophy" preempts maternal instinct in favor of a brand of tough love that has the ring of apathy to it. As a child Roy was treated by his mother with carelessness; he is ostensibly a sibling to Lilly, an annoying fact of life that cannot be discarded.

As Roy matures and his body grows into a handsome figure, Thompson alludes to a softening of her manner towards her son, "a suppressed hunger in here eyes." These incestuous undertones allow Thompson to impel the plot forward as Lilly attempts to insinuate herself further and further into her estranged son's life in his time of need. First and foremost, Lilly takes it upon herself to drive a wedge between Roy and his amoral part-time girlfriend, whose on motivation and backstory grow increasingly suspicious.

Where Thompson falters first is in his inability to maintain the necessary tightness to the plot that permits tension. Thompson traces his characters meanderingly, alternating points of view among Lilly, her son and his girlfriend (and even some minor characters). This alternation would be enough to dissolve tension, but even within each character's self-contained chapters there is a constant switching between backstory and present. The backstories do very little except fill in some character detail that does not directly contribute to the plot of the story and distract from its possibilities for tension-building.

Of course, character writing is an important part of what makes novels great - arguably more important than plot. But Thompson's sense of character ends up being a troubling situation.

Where most pulp fiction would not make avail of its female characters, Thompson should be credited for his significant interest in employing female perspective as part of his narrative. Lilly Dillon, as stated above, is given a good deal more care to idiosyncratic detail and psychological complexity than her son. Female characters abound in the book and their power in moving the narrative forward is a testament to Thompson's attention to the issues of feminism that no doubt pervaded cultural discussion in the early 1960s.

But Thompson's treatment of those women is another issue entirely. The three main female characters who appear in the book represent a sort of trinity of conventional female roles: there is a nurse, the survivor of a concentration camp, whom Lilly attempts to foist on her young son; there is the aforementioned over-bearing, criminal mother whose disinterest in her son gives way to incestuous impulses; and finally there is the girlfriend, whom Roy uses as little more than a commitment-free source of sex-on-demand.

For Thompson, women are defined entirely by their sexuality. Roy views the world in terms of women who use their beauty and those who do not:

[Lilly and Moira] were both members of the same flock; women who knew just what it took to preserve and enhance their natural attractiveness. Women who were either endowed with what it took, or spared no effort in getting it.

Thompson's "it" here is central to the problem of his treatment of women; there seems to be an air of predation here. Women are either naturally given the ability to enhance their "prettiness" with sex, subsequently granting them power, or they devote their lives to masquerading as such.

All of Thompson's women are portrayed as either victims or victimizers of sexuality. Lilly is ostensibly a predator, as her callous attitude toward her son is only able to shift when she can sexually desire him. But even Lilly can be victimized by her weakness. She is portrayed as pathetic, deluded by her false sense of female empowerment, when she is abused by her mobster boss. She loses control of her bladder as he burns her with a cigarette. Her manner becomes obsequious, grateful to the man who has spared her life by beating her.

Moira, Roy's girlfriend, uses sex as a bargaining chip in acquiring things in life. She is fully aware of the "delicate shivering of her breasts and the sensual swing of her rounded little hips" and is unafraid to take advantage of her sexuality to accomplish her goals. While Roy chauvinistically uses Moira as a sexual plaything, Moira uses her body for monetary gain.

In one chapter, Moira is confronted by her landlord on an issue of outstanding rent. Moira has the cash at hand and offers to her landlord that he can have sex with her instead but that he would release claim on the cash. "The lady or the loot," she threatens him. Preying on his weakness of character, she submits her body to him because of the perverse power play it permits her to enact, not because of necessity. In other words, her acting of essentially selling her body can only be read as a malicious act, one of depravity, not an act of necessity.

To drive the point home, Moira laughs during coitus and fails in her attempt to "[repress] merriment."

And finally, his nurse Carol, whom Thompson describes as a "child playing at being a woman", is seduced by Roy who cares nothing for her or for her troubled past of victimization. As Roy takes her to bed, Carol naively hopes that her sacrifice will find some meaning in Roy's hands. "In the drape-drawn dimness of the room," Thompson writes, "she was reborn, and there was no past but only a future." Roy consents to sleep with her only once he has established she is not a virgin. In Roy's mind there is a dichotomy that exists wherein women are either virginal Madonnas who are not to be defiled with sex or experienced women who offer their bodies freely for his (and other men's usage). When Roy discovers the source of her de-virginity, her past as a victim of the Holocaust, he is disgusted not by his carelessness in using her a sex object but by the transformation of his sex object into something that requires reciprocal feeling.

"Yes, I was very young. seven or eight, I think. That was the reason, you see: to discover the earliest possible age at which a female might conceive. It can be very early in life, as young as five, I think..."

Roy wanted to vomit. He wanted to shake her, to beat her. Standing apart from himself, as she was standing from herself, he was furious with her... The pious mourning of sin; the joyous absolution of the sinners; the uncomfortable frowns and glances-askance at those who recalled their misdeeds. After all, the one-time friends, poor fellows, were now our friends and it was bad taste to show gas-stoves on television... And after all, those people, the allegedly sinned-against, had brought most of the trouble on themselves.

To read this, wherein our main character wants to strike a woman because he slept with her and then revealed her victimization as a child in the Holocaust is frustrating enough. When Roy decides she is trying to romantically entrap him, that the story is a ploy designed to create emotional connection, he grows very cold. He rationalizes to himself that she is a "nice girl" and that she does not deserve him to enter in bad faith into a relationship. In Roy's view, what she apparently deserves is to disrobe and keep her mouth shut.

But are Roy's attitudes towards women also Thompson's?

It would seem very clear that Thompson, writing in 1963, is not expressing a hatred for women in the telling of Roy's emotional abuse of Carol. he is calling, of course, attention to Roy's misogyny, his self-centeredness, his inherent greed. He is seemingly coming to the defense of this weak, pitiable woman - but in 1963, would it not have been more heroic to portray a woman in a pulp novel who is not victimized by a man?

The answer is in Lilly Dillon, Thompson lamentable interpretation of an empowered woman. Lilly is a strong character insofar as she can manipulate them (until they threaten her with bodily harm) and is not dependent on them for definition (unless they offer her the promise of sexual satisfaction). Lilly, though a fully realized and truly memorable character, demonstrates Thompson's inability to reinvent the crime novel he knew so well in the context of modern issues.

You might object to my placing the onus of women's liberation so squarely on Thompson's shoulders. Surely it's not his obligation, as a writer of pulp fiction, to accurately encompass the changing tides of attitudes towards women in his novel of petty theft. Isn't it enough that he devotes so much energy to portraying them in the novel? That he demonizes Roy for his mistreatment of them?

But Thompson determines the terms on which we will engage with his novel. The Grifters is clearly a hard-boiled crime novel that has unusual interest in women for a pulp. This unique preoccupation with the role of women and, especially, sex demands that we engage it on these terms. By 1963, Thompson was no doubt aware of the heritage of pulp fiction he had a hand in creating. To include characters more multi-faceted, more carefully assembled, that the typical ingenue or femme fatale portraiture is to call attention to its modernity.

Thompson's Grifters are set, like Scorsese aping the Hollywood musical in New York, New York, in a hard-boiled past that cannot include it. To demand that we treat The Grifter as both a classic genre exercise and as a modern take on said genre is a contradiction that, like Thompson's unvarying definition of women as wielding the promise or the villainy of sex over men, cannot be justified.

Entertaining Instruction

The Best American Short Stories 2010

Edited by Heidi Pitlor and Richard Russo

2010, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The Best American series originated as a collection of the year's best short fiction by a single editor. Since the late seventies, each year's publication has featured a guest editor who works with the series editor to cull down to 20 the number of stories which will appear in the finished product. The tastes of these disparate editors (who have included the likes of Stephen King and Raymond Carver) rarely seems to have too much of an impact on the collection.

This year's collection is unique in that the best piece of writing it features is guest editor Richard Russo's introduction to the volume.

My experience with Russo is limited. In high school I read his Pulitzer-winning Empire Falls and subsequently gave a copy of it to a friend. This was in a stage of my development as a reader that gave priority to cleanly realistic modes in novels, one that in recent years I have become disinterested in (my entry on John Irving's last novel demonstrates this backlash clearly).

As such, I was a little bored by the idea of Russo guest editing this year's issue, which continues a long line of talented but purely realist writers picking stories of a similar ilk (where, for example, was the guest issue by Donald Barthelme? or Aimee Bender?). Russo would doubtlessly prove to be just like the others, choosing traditional stories of people experiencing quiet epiphanies in their otherwise ordinary lives.

Well, to a certain extent I was right; there are plenty of those (most of which, as those things tend to be, are well written). But oddly the most enchanting piece in the collection is Russo's introduction, in which he recounts a visit to his university from Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Singer had come to read a bit of his work and to answer questions posed by the university's students and faculty on the nature of his craft. Russo describes with loving, amusing detail the comedy of Mr. Singer's struggles with the pile of paper on which his excerpt was written. The papers, not bound together but loose, each have but a few sentences written on them in large print to accommodate Singer's failing sight. As Singer finishes with a page, he drops it off the podium and sails over the audience.

Russo's anecdote, despite being very funny, achieves some sort of gravitas as he relates Singer's suffering as the audience presses him on the purpose of fiction, a question that Singer answers simply by saying, "To entertain... and to instruct."

In this way, the introduction proves to be the perfect segue to these 20 stories of an occasionally entertaining and quite instructive nature. There are, of course, several duds in the collection: stories that wax epiphanic in soapy prose. But it is in the nature of this sort of collection for these things to appear (indeed, each year's edition contains some sort of warning along those lines from its editors). Instead, I'll focus on a small handful of the ones I like best.

Jennifer Egan's story "Safari" appears here, although it was excerpted from her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which just won the Pulitzer for fiction (and which I wrote about here). "Safari" seems to me to need to function within the novel, now that I've read it, but will certainly entertain any reader (regardless of "instruction").

"Least Resistance" by Wayne Harrison describes the flailing attempts at happiness by a young auto-mechanic. The main character in this story is content with his mostly passive life and does not appear to realize that he is stalling out, allowing the doors to his future to close neatly, quietly as he convinces himself that an ill-advised dalliance with the boss' wife ensures him the minimal amount of happiness required to live.

Rebeca Makkai's "Painted Ocean, Painted Ship" is a very funny story about a professor of literature who accidentally kills an albatross, aping Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner". What starts as a delightful saga of this meta-literary murder becomes an exploration of perhaps two of the most complex issues in contemporary American society: race and gender. The professor's neurotic need to be found attractive belies her intellect and her boyfriend's honest attempts at comfort and the professor's insecurity and her inflated sense of her importance at the university set the stage for a larger conflict on racism in higher education that is gripping right until the end.

A story I was not so sure that I loved until I finished it was Brendan Mathews's "My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer", which contains the following sentence (which should tell you all you need to know): "It wasn't just that you were beautiful; there are a lot of pretty ladies in the circus, tattooed and otherwise."

"Lion Tamer" begins with a strong undercurrent of dark humor and gets much darker in a hurry. It's worth a read as its circus act love story recalls La Strada in its pathos.

"Further Interpretations of Real Life Events" by Kevin Moffett is a story I had read previously, in McSweeney's Quarterly, although I was pleased to re-read it. It is the story of a son who is struggling to write fiction about his relationships with both parents. His work comes out puerile or adolescently bitter. He is stunned to discover his father, in his retirement, has taken up fiction writing and begins publishing work about the very same subject. It is probably my favorite story in this year's collection.

Lastly, I was reluctant to read the story included by literary super-starlet Tea Obreht given her age (25) and reputation (inflated and rising). I read a few paragraphs of her story "The Laugh", thought to myself "Now, what's all the fuss" and skipped it, vowing to return after I'd finished the other pieces in the collection. Well. I did.

"The Laugh" is without a doubt one of the finest short stories I've read in several years. It is still preying on my thoughts, haunting me with its stunning imagery, its assured sense of location, its gripping view of the ceaseless quest to make sense of our lives through love. I highly recommend it.

Other notable stories in this year's collection included a story by Karen Russell about time-traveling seagulls and a story by Danielle Evans about a war hero who lies his way into a contest to win Hannah Montana-like concert tickets.

One final note: in the past, I had contemplated reading a ten- or twenty-year-old edition of the Best American Short Stories to contrast with the current year's. Would anyone actually find this an interesting exercise? I have back issues dating to about 1987 and could easily execute such a task.

Bloglette: Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Consider the Lobster: Essays

by David Foster Wallace

2005, Little, Brown & Co.

Those of you who know me well are doubtless familiar with my slow-burning obsession with DFW of late. His essays, in particular, have proven fertile ground for the seedling of my infatuation to flourish into a wild post-modern fruit-bearing leafy-looking semiotic representation of a tree.

Consider the Lobster was the most recent of my forays into DFW land. I completed the book

several months ago and due to some moving silliness and personal shirking of self-imposed intellectual responsibilities (aka this blog) never wrote about it. As with all these bloglettes, too much time has passed for me to give an accurate reading of my impressions of the book except that I loved it.

Of particular note were an essay on the debate in the dictionary-writing community between

recording language as people speak it (descriptivists) and recording language as people should speak it (prescriptivists), an lengthy essay on John McCain's failed 2000 presidential bid that assumes that its audience of Rolling Stone-reading 20-something white guys were apathetic towards politics, and a beautifully sad and insightful article on the emotional consequences of Sept. 11th from the perspective of a (like me) highly conflicted American.

What sticks in my mind the most, though, is DFW's alarming ability to shift rhetorically to address the audience he is courting. His explication of the ins-and-outs of grammar snobbery, for example in the aforementioned article on American usage, professes gleefully to DFW's elitism in grammatical matters in order to sidle up along his readership, whereas his titular exploration of the morality of eating sentient food (namely, the lobster) downplays its end-goal of forcing the readers of Gourmet to re-think their position by evading its central moral question until the last few pages, masquerading its point as it were in a cleverly deceptive, nearly parodic description of the mania surrounding a lobster festival. (Hello, run-on, let's be friends.) After all, who could doubt DFW's seemingly impromptu questioning of the ethics of lobster bib-donning when he first describes in excruciatingly funny detail the tumult and buffoonery around him?

Now that I've ostensibly exhausted his nonfiction, you can look forward (if anyone can be said to do such a thing in reading this blog) to my turning an eye to his short fiction soon.

A Cog in Something Turning

Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
2004, Hodder and Stoughton


It's hard for me to keep track of books I'm interested in reading. Scrawling a recommendation on a post-it, for example, is typically proven fruitless when the title comes out of my washing machine mangled in a chewing gum-like wad. The closest I've come to a workable system is in saving notes on my phone, but the down-side to this method, as I've entertained my friends with on countless occasions, is that I'm left to decipher cryptic notes like "Tapper Evolution", "Earth Abides" and "Blood Feast".

This mobile phone-as-notepad system had its genesis several years ago when I first took a walk around the Andover Bookstore, my preferred local indie. Pressed with a sense of urgency to remember the countless employee recommended titles and alarmed at the sheer volume of them, I began a note on my phone in desperation to take down the names of these surely soon-to-be-favorites.

I'll admit that not too many of these titles wind up working their way into my hands. In that first note is a flurry of book titles without coherent punctuation or author names that might help me determine where exactly their names begin or end. I quote: "Wednesdays wars society of the spectacle optic nerve mudbound kaputt cloud atlas the intuitionist the traveler.how to breathe underwater".

Earlier this summer I was reminded of that then-forgotten note when I picked up two things more or less simultaneously: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet from the library and the new issue of the Paris Review (for my boyfriend because of a new story by Geek Love author Katherine Dunn) which featured an "Art of Fiction" interview with David Mitchell.

As you may recall from my blog entry on it, Jacob de Zoet was a delight to read. And so, several months later, looking for a title to resuscitate my reading habits, I turned to that note.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was exactly the book I needed. Like a shot of adrenaline, Mitchell's prose awakened my senses to where my love of reading comes from: a desperate need to validate my existence by forging the kind of connections I was so enraptured by in reading David Foster Wallace's essays. The book is hellbent on forging such a connection; it presents characters whose lives, seemingly removed temporally and geographically from our own, speak to some intrinsic aspiration in human nature to seek understanding for our existence, to find balance and rhythm - meaning, even - to the chaos of our lives.

It will help to explain these concepts with the context of the book itself, which displays bravura shifts in dialect and voice and a remarkable breadth in genre.

Cloud Atlas is composed of six texts. Each of these texts, excepting the centerpiece, is interrupted by another. The narrative unfolds so that these pieces, each functioning more or less independently of the others, is cushioned within another, creating a sort of Russian nesting doll effect. After the centerpiece of the novel is reached, each text resumes its narrative and plays out to its end in reverse order.

This might sound complicated, but while the book is highly structured, its rhythms are anything but oblique. For example, the opening text is a piece called "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing".

"Adam Ewing" recounts in the style of a journal its eponymous character's voyage aboard a ship from New Zealand to America. Ewing is an American notary who is unfamiliar largely with the crew of the vessel upon which he travels. Ewing discovers mid-way through the narrative a native New Zealander who stows away in his cabin. Ewing, a man of god, is reluctant to deny the man protection on account of his morals and jeopardizes his standing on the ship by offering him safe harbor.

Meanwhile, Ewing discovers that he has fallen victim to a parasite in his brain that endangers his life. He is offered council and medication from a physician on board, who supplies him with medication during the treatment that has adverse affects on Ewing.

Mitchell's prose in the "Ewing" section is the sort of deck-swabbing, arch nineteenth century writing one might read in Billy Budd. It is initially a little off-putting to slog through; despite its relatively short length (at 40 pages), it took me two days to wade, as though knee-deep through a bog, through Mitchell's thicket of arcane syntax and vocabulary.

Sentences like "Mr. Roderick has little sympathy with my petition to have the offending hawser removed elsewhere, for he is obliged to quit his private cabin (for the reason stated below) & move to the fo'c'sle with the common sailors, whose number has swollen with five Castilians 'poached' from the Spaniard at anchor in the Bay" are not conducive to breezy reading.

Eventually though, the nautical terms like "hawser" and "fo'c'sle" grew on me. By the section's end, I had grown accustomed to beautiful, graceful passages cast in sepia-toned prose like this one:

By day, my coffin is hot as an oven & my sweat dampens these pages. The tropic sun fattens & fills the noon sky. The men work seminaked with sun-blacked torsos & straw hats. The planking oozes scorching tar that sticks to one's soles. Rain squalls blow up from nowhere & vanish with the same rapidity & the deck hisses itself dry in a minute. Portuguese man-o'-wars pulsate in the quicksilver sea, flying fish bewitch the beholder & ocher shadows of hammerheads circle the Prophetess.

Just about the time that I had grown accustomed to this style and passages like that one snagged on my breath and left me gently tugging to set it free, Mitchell cuts "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" off - in mid-sentence, no less!

The second section, which interrupts "Ewing" just as it is getting good, is entitled "Letters from Zedelghem" and is set in Belgium in 1931, nearly eighty years after "Adam Ewing".

"Zedelghem" is comprised of a series of letters from a young composer named Robert Frobisher to a friend from his home in England. Frobisher is traveling in the Belgian countryside to seek a distinguished composer named Vyvyan Ayrs in order to offer him assistance in transposing new musical ideas that have been prevented from being recorded due to illness.

The shift in location across the globe and in time by three-quarters of a century necessitate a shift in style and Mitchell envelopes the reader in a warm, personal narrative full of asides and short-handed cleverness. Where Ewing was writing to no one but himself, Frobisher's narrative (also in 1st person perspective) has an audience: a mysterious man named Sixsmith. As such, the writing is more intimate and more amusing, in the way that one always wants to amuse when writing a letter. Take for example, this passage, in which Frobisher describes being interrupted having intercourse with his boss's wife:

A tiring night turned inside out. J. came to my bed at midnight, and during our athletics, my door was barged. Farcical horror! Thank God J. had locked it on her way in. The doorknob rattled, insistent knocking began. Fear can clear the mind as well as cloud it, and remembering my Don Juan, I hid J. in a nest of coverlets and sheets in my sagging bed and left the curtain half open to show I had nothing to hide.

As the narrative progresses, the bedroom farce of Frobisher's cuckolding of his mentor, the delicious complaints of a stifled artist, and the sneaking suspicion that Frobisher and Sixsmith were gay lovers sucks you in easily. Imagine my surprise when towards the end of the section, Frobisher discovers in his master's library and mangled, interrupted copy of a the Pacific journal of a certain American notary.

It is in this manner that the narrative continues: Mitchell entertains with a passage that is interrupted by another set in the future in which the new main character somehow discovers the preceding manuscript.

It's a complex structure, but a simple idea (nearly a gimmick), but one that compels the reader to zip along, eager to see in what manner Frobisher's letters, for example, will reappear in the next narrative, a airport novel about corporate demonism set in the 1970s.

While part of me is desperate to re-live Mitchell's worlds by describing in depth their virtuosic range in voice, tone, style, characterization, I am reluctant to ruin the pure joy of discovering (and then re-discovering) each layer of this novel. Instead, I suppose I'll stick to generalities, starting with the pure breadth of his writing style.

Mitchell's ear for language, colloquialisms both invented and borrowed, is astounding. His sense of syntax, of vocabulary, of semiotic signification is dizzying. It's not often that I get to read a stylist so prone to inducing goosebumps at the language itself, divorced (as much as it can be) from the narrative framework that surrounds it.

This is not to say that the framework within which these delightful linguistic adornments is not compelling, because it is. Mitchell's six narratives pulsate with rich imagery and wordplay, but so too do his characters thrum with energy. Each is a delightfully realized, idiosyncratic presence - the scrim through which we view the newly weird world around us. And yet, there are distinctive commonalities that help to flesh out Mitchell's themes: among them, the idea of fate, societal and social predation and religion.

The first and last of those themes seem somehow tied together in this work; throughout Mitchell's narrative his characters seem destined, guided by some authorial force. Part of this is overtly literal, of course. Mitchell is their author, their fates in his hands. But moreover, perhaps through the construction of the Russian nesting doll-like narrative, each character seems to be functioning as individual pieces of the same large, multi-decade machine ("I feel to be a cog in something turning," Joni Mitchell has sung). The eventual significance of one character's story in another's, their very interconnectedness, implies some fate that belies the sometimes-illusion of fiction writing that what you read is occurring contemporaneously with the act of reading it.

This sense of authorial guidance seems to be part and parcel of Mitchell's characters' tendency to seek guidance of some religious nature. In part one, Adam Ewing is a man of profoundly religious devotion whose faith as a Christian leads him to make moral choices that directly lead him down his eventual course. In a later portion of the book, corporate enterprise takes the place of religious devotion as characters worship, in Orwellian fashion, the visage of a Ronald McDonald-like commercial logo.

Mitchell's work, while transparent in its authority (in an inversion of an Oz axiom, Mitchell seems to call us to "pay attention to the man behind the curtain"), is sincere and ambitious in its determination to present its characters as living truths while keeping them characters - that is, dramatic (or almost semiotic) representations of people. Mitchell's sense of humanity is warm, all-encompassing. In his portraits of characters striving to make sense of their fated lives by fighting the apathetic or malignant societal machinations that surround them, his demonstration of their devotion to causes and ideas beyond themselves, and especially his loving, precise crafting of their voices - in all these things, we see a writer whose abundant goodwill towards humanity-as-the-individual and whose profound suspicion of humanity-as-the-collective is transformed by his gift for style into the beautifully elegiac fates of the six characters in Cloud Atlas.

All You Need Is Love

Editor's Note: This entry marks the third guest blog to appear on Pygmies & Peanut Butter and the second by guest blogger MB. You can find her previous effort, on Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story here.

The White Album
by Joan Didion
1979, Simon & Schuster


The White Album is a collection of essays by iconic journalist Joan Didion concerning the cultural climate of 1960s America. It is not, as the title may suggest, an examination of that infamous Beatles record. In fact, throughout the text there is a conspicuous lack of reference to the Fab Four or their copious musical output. With no other apparent justification for the title, the onus is placed squarely on the reader to make sense of the allusion.

Although the book was originally published in 1978, many of the individual essays were written in the late 60s or early 70s. Seeing as I personally came of age during the grunge era, the more obscure references (of which there are many) were lost on me. What I did understand was that being alive, American, and socially conscious in the 1960s was like being on one of those carnival rides that spins around faster and faster until the laws of gravity that have governed your whole life up to that point suddenly fall away and you are left untethered to the earth, realizing that everything you once believed can no longer be trusted. The most romanticized era in American history is known for free love, rock 'n' roll, flower children, and "peace, love, and understanding." It was also the decade of political turmoil, Charles Manson, Vietnam casualties, and Lee Harvey Oswald. I read the news today. Oh, boy.

The essays, in true "new journalist" fashion, parallel social evolution with the author's personal experience. We begin with both America and Didion in a state of disillusionment. The cultural revolution of the late 50s/early 60s promised change and offered radical solutions to society's ills. But as solutions failed and changes remained only superficial, Americans were set adrift wondering who they were and what, if anything, to believe in.

It was at that point of critical mass that Didion personally suffered a nervous breakdown. To her contemporaries she seemed to have it all: a family, a home, a successful career, public accolades. On the inside she felt out of control and disconnected from the world around her. She describes the experience as that of having "lost the narrative" of her life, reducing her existence to one of "disparate images" devoid of cause and effect. As her depression worsened she retreated into herself more and more, eventually reaching the point of hospitalization for "nausea and vertigo." Didion credits the absurdity and pretense of the time for her descent into depression. As she puts it, her breakdown "does not now seem... an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968."

Throughout the next nine essays she goes on to expose social and political hypocrisy in all its forms. Joan Didion is displeased with Jim Morrison, Los Angeles traffic control, the literary style of Doris Lessing, collegiate political rallies, the Getty Museum as well as the critics of the Getty Museum, the fact that not enough Hawaiians have read From Here to Eternity, and the Women's Movement - just to name a few. I found her ceaseless derision of all things relevant to be tiring, especially in the absence of any clear opinions or solutions of her own. I grew weary of her in the same way I'm weary of condescending hipsters and their ironic t-shirts. I was clutching desperately to the hope that she would eventually stand up in favor of something, anything at all really, but in the back of my head I was snarking, "Hooray for you and your ability to see through everyone's bullshit! You're a regular Holden Caulfield!"

At the absolute breaking point of my frustration with Didion and her distaste for everyone and everything I actually had to shut the book and walk away. The next day, feeling newly energized by the hot L.A. sun, I began where I left off, with her essay on Georgia O'Keeffe. To my delight, Didion not only praised O'Keeffe but unabashedly gushed over her with that special kind of adoration usually reserved for the parents of very young children. She loved O'Keeffe's paintings, yes, but what truly impressed her was the spirit of the woman who made them. To wit: "George O'Keeffe seems to have been equipped early with an immutable sense of who she was and a fairly clear understanding that she would be required to prove it."

From that point on, the tide changes. There is still plenty of finger-pointing and condemnation, but we see Didion gradually coming to her personal salvation. She finds worth not in communal experiences or social "movements" but in the very personal and solitary act of loving something beyond oneself. She gravitates toward those who dedicate their lives, beyond all rationalization, to whatever it is they love, be it painting flowers, harnessing water, or breeding rare orchids. The act of love is what gives the narrative meaning.

In fact, the only collective human trait Didion seems to find desirable at all is the irrational love of something above all else and beyond all hardships. At first it seems as if this is a quality she admires in others simply because she doesn't possess it herself. She sits high in her ivory tower above everything, judging those who do care. What I eventually realized is that she does love something above all others and beyond all reason: writing. She cannot live without it.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

These are the very first words of Didion's treatise on America. Taken out of context, they appear dreamy and romantic. To tell stories is so uniquely human, and aren't we proud of anything that sets us apart from the other primates? But as I read on past the first few lines I began to wonder if this opening statement weren't a whimsical musing after all but rather a pointed finger of blame aimed squarely at us all and the narratives we so often create to soften the world's harsh truths. Even weeks after finishing the book I am left pondering the meaning of this deceptively simple line. Maybe it is simply a fact, devoid of virtue. Good or bad, we need the narrative in order to survive.

Guest blog by MB (with apologies to Elvis Costello and The Beatles).

Take my wife. Please!

Mr. Peanut

by Adam Ross

2010

About halfway through Mr. Peanut a mysterious hitman named Mobius remarks to the detective investigating a murder that he hates movies.

"What do you hate about them?"

"They're overdetermined."

"Meaning what?"

"In a movie, everything means something. If a man says, 'That tank's filled with compressed air. If you're not careful, it will be explode,' then you know that at some point the tank will explode."

This incarcerated man seems far cleverer than his profession might suggest; he psychoanalyzes his questioner as part of some quid pro quo wherein the detective relives the torturous details of his wife's murder. Mobius's interest in the detective's painful past lies in the case's subsequent prosecution; the detective himself was ultimately accused of his wife's murder and the case was never resolved. Mobius agrees to provide information about the detective's case for the truth of his culpability in his wife's death.

It's true that in film, an inherently visual medium, objects take on a nearly mythological significance and seemingly casual plot points are almost always returned to later in the story to explain away a narrative inconvenience or to enhance the plot.

Filmgoers sense this relationship between upfront foreshadowing and subtler deus ex machina, which leads many of them to cleverly whisper anticipated plot points in each others' ears during screenings. "I bet that her cell phone is going to die since she left the charger on her table," etc.

It seems Mobius's complaint is taking issue with Chekhov's oft-quoted axiom (and frequently erroneously attributed to Alfred Hitchcock) that if there is a gun in act one, then it must go off by act three.

In good films, particularly thrillers like those by Hitchcock, Sam Peckinpah or David Fincher, one eagerly anticipates the revelation of each bit of narrative trickery as one is exhilarated by the completion of a jigsaw puzzle, where each piece seems so clearly and suddenly to fit but seems also to strike you as so clearly obvious that it always belonged there. Or better put, when these narrative plans pay off, it seems both inevitable and surprising. And eminently satisfying.

Novels, with their tendency to fetishize the minutiae of daily life and the human psyche, do not seem to fall prey to the convenience of Chekhov's Gun as easily as films do. And yet when Mobius voices this complaint, it strikes a nerve awfully close to home.

After all, in Mr. Peanut every man wants his wife dead.

Mobius is being questioned in the death of Alice Pepin, discovered in her apartment dead from an allergic reaction to a can of the eponymous legumes. The detective (remember, similarly accused of uxoricide) alleges that her husband Alan forced her to eat the peanuts and the husband claims she has committed suicide by ingesting the forbidden food.

Ross uses the book to trace and re-trace the relationship Alan and Alice had with each other and themselves in search of the truth: who in fact killed her? Significant detours are permitted for both of the detectives investigating the crime, the aforementioned one (based on the infamous case of Sam Sheppard) whose wife was in fact murdered and the other who fantasizes of murdering his bedridden spouse.

At a certain point, it starts to become too convenient that every male character in the book is engaged in wife-killing. It starts to have the same weight of significance that movies suffer from in Mobius's estimation.

Other facts in the novel seem to smack of the same taste of convenience. The character Mobius seems pulled out of one of Alan Pepin's videogames (he designs them) based on the work of M.C. Escher. Alice's troubles with food and weight gain seem to shed thematic light around her masticatory demise. Numerous allusions to Hitchcock films are eventually followed by towards book's end by a veritable dissertation on his films:

"Next, stairs. Stairs are always significant in Hitchcock's films. A character's decision to make an ascent reflects a central moral choice, a commitment, a willingness to endanger himself or herself for someone beloved, a literal and figurative striving for higher ground. And mirrors. He uses them to suggest doubleness, and this symbol becomes even ore fraught when his work turns darker during his later films, so mirrors in Notorious mean something very different from mirrors in Vertigo or Frenzy."

Ross's digression on Hitch becomes nearly condescending as he ventures in the theme of marriage in the films and the concept of the MacGuffin; one begins to wonder whether or not Ross is explaining to the reader the MacGuffin as a sly wink (an "I know you know") or as a pedagogical device ("Let me explain how my book works and blow your mind").

For by now an astute reader would have determined that the peanut-assisted suicide/murder in chapter one was in fact a MacGuffin, that convenient plot device Hitchcock pioneered as a means to draw a viewer into a plot and provide immediate expository motivation for the characters.

The peanut, and by extension the endless ruminations on spouse-killing, proves to be a MacGuffin as it eventually tapers off in interest for the characters, the reader and the author. Ross employs this narrative sleight-of-hand to redirect the reader to the tribulations of marriage. The book eventually becomes an exploration of how difficult it is to share one's life with another and the constant self-sacrifice required in this effort.

Alice Pepin becomes less a murder victim than a woman in danger of losing herself to marriage, of being engulfed by joint identity. There follow a number of pieces of very poignant writing. One can't help as a reader but be aware of the book's bait-and-switch, though, and during the middle of the book it seems to lose a lot of momentum and as pleasantly as the thing is written, one becomes restless.

This restlessness leads to incredulousness at some of the plot developments (Sam Sheppard's presence as a character, despite the complete chronological illogic) and then inevitably to irritation.

As all good suspense movies do in the end, though Mr. Peanut delivers in a twist ending that seems entirely a cheat but simultaneously and completely reasonable, eve tidy, explanation for all of the reader's cumulative dissatisfaction. Just like those movies Mobius complains of, everything turns out to have meant something after all and the pieces of Mr. Peanut fall neatly, infuriatingly, into place and leave behind a soundly constructed, morbid little puzzle.

The time to make up your mind about people is never.

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

by Zadie Smith

2009, Penguin Press

In reading Changing My Mind, what becomes quickly apparent is how incredibly diverse Smith's interests are - as a writer, as a person. She can hold her own on topics as seemingly disparate as contemporary cinema, Kafka and solipsism in DFW. Each section of this book is devoted to a different theme - one for literature, another for film, several more for personal reminiscences or reportage.

Smith's collection is great fun in part because her interests are as diverse as I imagine mine are. She seeks meaning in a variety of media; this betrays a sort of intellectual restlessness on her part that I identify with. After all, I've often thought this blog could have just as easily been about cinema or music as books.

What is impressive in Smith's writing is not simply the variety of intellectual pursuits but her fierce acuity in uncovering meaning within those media that pique her interest. Here, I feel perhaps disconnect with and certainly inferiority to Smith. While I pride myself on my ability to understand most ideas - I can read virtually anything and understand it - I think I fail to a certain extent at formulation of ideas. In other words, while I understand ideas, I don't have too many of my own (I've been puzzled, for instance, at the idea that I might have to write a thesis at some point).

What this means for me, I've come to realize, is that I am usually convinced of the veracity of the ideas of whomever I'm reading at any given moment. The same goes for films and music; I like music as divergent as new wave, grunge and indie pop, for example, and do not think of the ethos of one as precluding interest in any of the others.

I think in this way that I have a sort of experiential lust when it comes to culture. The point of reading is not to discover a movement that perfectly defines the meaning of art (and by extension, life) for me, but more to flirt with a variety of these schools of thought.

While Smith is clearly well-versed in a number of different movements, she has the advantage over me of being able to read perceptively enough to, say, rebuke the realistic novel as chasing its own tail, as she does in the essay "Two Paths for the Novel".

In this work, she discusses Tom McCarthy's Remainder and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and skewers O'Neill's work as being intellectually flaccid.

This paragraph is structured like a recognized cliche (i.e. We had come, as they say, to the end of the road). It places before us what it fears might be a tired effect: in this case, the nostalgia-infused narrative of one man's retrospection (which is to form the basis of this novel). It recognizes that effect's inauthenticity, its lack of novelty, even its possible dullness - and it employs the effect anyway... It's a novel that wants you to know that it knows you know it knows.

The level of insight here is impressive. Smith dissects O'Neill's novel, pulling apart its deeply disguised neuroses and formulating its plot as the dying gasp of a self-obsessed genre. Smith is perhaps a little cruel analyzing this work, but the essay as a whole is not the curmudgeonly complaint of a lifelong pessimist. Smith's exultation of McCarthy's Remainder is forward-looking, breathless in its optimism.

Smith's enthusiasm infuses many of the pieces with a giddiness that seems youthful, but that never threatens to belie her intellect. Take for example, her description of Greta Garbo:

Garbo has no quirks at all. A close-up of her face appears to reveal fewer features than the rest of s have - such an expanse of white - punctuated by the minimum of detail, just enough to let you know that this is flesh, not spirit. Her vulnerable, changeable face is what comes prior to the emphatic mask of a beautiful woman - she is the ideal of beauty that those masks attempt to capture... The idea of Garbo is somehow more elevated than [the idea of female ambition, diva-ness] - it doesn't even condescend itself to the pursuit and fulfillment of talent. It merely is. Garbo was not an actress in the way Bette Davis was an actress. Garbo was a presence.

Smith writes as one who has fallen under the spell of Garbo's seduction. I think this is part of what I love so much in Smith's book: her ability to generate genuine enthusiasm for her subjects.

The last portion of the book is a lengthy essay on the work of David Foster Wallace (whose work I've discussed elsewhere on this blog). Smith's exploration of meaning in DFW's work runs the gamut from the micro (syntax, word choice) to the macro (ethos, genre) and manages to connect them together into a sensible explanation of his work.

This essay is by far the most intimidating to read. Smith is adept at reading between and into the lines in DFW's work and her explanations are eloquent, accessible and precise in a way that sometimes DFW's writing (wonderful though it is) is not.

I spoke earlier about the idea of my love of films and books and things being evidence of a kind of experiential lust. Initially, I was thinking about this idea as a foil for Zadie Smith, with her robust intellectual lust, but over the course of the last few days I've come to reconsider. Changing My Mind is a paean of sorts to the experiences that life offers both mind and soul - Katharine Hepburn's captivating posture, E.M. Forster's easy accessibility, Obama's complicated biracial nature. Smith's enthusiasm for these disparate topics are clear evidence of a passion for life's quirky pleasures.

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.