Giantesses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heaven is Other People

Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever: Stories

by Justin Taylor

2010, Harper Perennial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Rich Quick

Ravens
by George Dawes Green
2009, Grand Central Publishing


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crass Notes

Home Land

by Sam Lipsyte

2004, Picador

In my latest issue of The Believer Lipsyte's new novel, The Ask was featured in their one-page book reviews. In the review, they mentioned that Lipsyte was a previous winner of The Believer Book Award, an honor which factors, among other things, the results of an annual write-in readership poll (my 2009 votes: Auster's Invisible, Holt's In the Valley of Kings, and Chaon's Await Your Reply).

After a small amount of research the title of Lipsyte's book was Home Land and it so happened my library had a copy on its shelves; it would not even require interlibrary loan to check out. I read most of Home Land riding to and from a local ski mountain in the last two weeks and made short work of it once its rhythmic structure and idiosyncratic voice made themselves apparent.

Home Land is narrated as a series of letters to a high school alumni newsletter by a graduate by the name of Teabag who explains in detail how success - financial, social, emotional - has eluded him since graduation. The letters are incredibly profane and so the principal of his high school, Mr. Fontana whose romantic and professional failures Teabag delights in publishing, refuses to include them in the Catamount Notes.

Teabag's letters general detail his aimlessness in life. He is employed by the Coca-Cola Company creates false bits of trivia for their in-house newsletter; his only long term girlfriend dumped him after growing increasingly frustrated with his sullenness and perversity. Teabag spends most of his time masturbating and getting high with his friend Gary at what Teabag calls The Retractor Pad (which is financed from a lawsuit against Gary's psychiatrist after it was discovered that the memories of his parents ritualistically raping him which resurfaced during therapy turned out to be false).

The letters describe mainly Gary and Teabag's lethargy. Teabag does, however, delight in sharing news of his fellow alumni as he runs across them in embarrassing situations locally. Early in the narrative, Teabag and Gary are at a strip joint and encounter sex-scandal-disgraced Principal Fontana wandering with

an unbelievable amount of blood pouring off the poor guy's head. His shirt collar couldn't soak it up quite fast enough... [and he] walked around the bar like that for awhile, looking for all the world like a butchered zombie, or a man born old, full-sized, womb slime still on him.

As is obvious from the above quote, Lipsyte has a gift for incredibly funny and stomach-churning imagery. Lipsyte's imaginative prowess is most clearly demonstrated when Teabag describes his rather lurid sexual fantasies, which read hysterically funny and yet are the sort of thing that have one reaching for the hand sanitizer after reading.

Lipsyte's humor reminds me quite a lot of Chuck Palahniuk, who blurbs on the back of my paperback edition. The mixture of gleeful description of taboo subjects, wicked wit and droll observations of awkward interpersonal encounters read like caffeinated Bret Easton Ellis.

While Lipsyte delights in exploring the gutter of post-Sunday dinner America his vision is also strikingly warm. There is little question that Lipsyte is sympathetic to his hero or that we are meant to be as well. Teabag is portrayed as the only honest man in his community - the one who is quick to cut to the psychological bone of others' lives.

The supporting characters of Home Land delude themselves as to the quality of their lives - taking greater stock in their superficial jobs and families than they ought to. Teabag strips their underlying insecurities bare and makes the pretense of conventional post-graduate American suburban success the target of his letters. He is an avenger, of sorts. The naive (both met and unmet) aspirations of his classmates pale in comparison to Teabag's multitudinous existential crises (his unfulfilled love life, his embarrassing sexual fantasies, his stunted sense of professional self-worth).

Teabag's derision of and contempt for his fellow classmates is a familiar emotion; who amongst us has not rolled his eyes at the success of a former acquaintance? In this sense, his diatribes are rewarding reading - and Lipsyte's sense of the ridiculous and the profane both make the book somehow special.

But Teabag deludes himself as well. While Lipsyte clearly establishes Teabag as a character we are meant to admire for his forthrightness, he also mines our inevitable sense of superiority. For while we all are no strangers to Teabag's disgust for his conventional classmates, few of us are truly as aimless as Teabag is and he is simultaneously established as a truly pitiable character. Teabag, while disregarding the superficial pleasures of suburban complacency, is devoid of any human connection. He laments his mother's death and wallows in his unrequited love.

Teabag keeps his relationships at an arm's length and preempts any possibility to engage in the more rewarding aspects of even the most superficial relationships. Lipsyte establishes a false dichotomy of Teabag's superiority to his classmates. Ultimately, Lipsyte's book is populated simply with characters at different stages of self deception regarding their lives' worth.

While Teabag is more frank about his failures, his pride in this failure to self-delude leads to its own sense of delusion: that his self-knowledge is indicative of some kind of spiritual success which has eluded those around him. However false the confidence of Teabag's fellow graduates of Catamount High School is, however empty their complacency it is confidence, satisfaction nonetheless. Tragically, it is the very thing he condemns them for undeservedly enjoying - self-worth - that has eluded him.

White Lull

Point Omega

by Don DeLillo

2010, Scribner

At some point in high school, I read somewhere that Don DeLillo was a very important author. I can't remember where I read it, but I have always had an appetite for consuming and evaluating the so-called culture makers in whatever art I am currently interested in. This often pans out in my favor, discovering artists who represent the height of technical and artistic ability in their crafts. Oftentimes, though, I wind up resenting these supposed masters for failing to meet expectations.

Luckily for Mr. DeLillo, I began with his classic White Noise, a book whose prose bristles and sparks with imagination, gallows humor and inventiveness. White Noise made a profound impact on my thoughts on contemporary literature and its criticisms regarding suburbia seemed directed at teenaged life.

Unfortunately for Mr. Dellilo, I have yet to experience a novel of his that affects me so sharply as did White Noise. While I haven't delved extensively into his work, I was disappoint at approximately two year intervals by reading Mao II, his play The Day Room, and Falling Man. As such, Point Omega is the DeLillo work I've read and once again I am left wanting an experience as encompassing as White Noise.

Point Omega is a very slight novel in length - its ambition is another matter. The novel is marked in its lack of scope; the Museum of Modern Art and a house in the desert are the only locales for the action (a term used loosely in describing this inert novel). Similarly, it is populated by (at most) four characters. DeLillo is interested in mining these characters for as much internal psychological drama as possible while refusing to suggest conventional plotted or interpersonal drama.

The novel begins with a strange solitary man in a dark room in MoMA watching Douglas Gordon's avant-garde film 24 Hour Psycho in which Hitchcock's revered film is slowed down to last an entire day. The man in the novel is watching the ubiquitous shower scene and is lost in contemplation of the artistic (and voyeuristic) implications of the capturing of images on film, the staging and perversion of real life to establish an alternate sense of time and place.

The character scoffs at other people who come and go (two characters who will become the novel's central subjects) and are not as enraptured by the film as he is. The painstakingly detailed analysis of the film as well as the clear disdain for less ambitious viewers demonstrate that Mr. DeLillo is the most attentive and thoughtful of filmgoers. I imagine in another life DeLillo could have made himself a career writing book-length intertextual examinations of Warhol films instead of enjoying them for the absurdly wacky trash that they are.

Mr. DeLillo's observations on the film walk a very fine line between the laughably (borderline masturbatory) self-indulgent

Everybody was watching something. He was watching the two men, they were watching the screen, Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress. Nobody was watching him. This was the ideal world as he might have drawn it in his mind. He had no idea what he looked like to others. He wasn't sure what he looked like to himself. He looked like what his mother saw when she looked at him. But his mother had passed on. This raised a question for advanced students. What was left of him for others to see?

and the surprisingly astute

He began thinking of one thing's relationship to another. This film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. The original movie was fiction, this was real... Light and sound, wordless monotone, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not movies.

and even the downright silly:

The film made him feel like someone watching a film. The meaning of this escaped him... But this wasn't truly film, was it, in the strict sense. It was a videotape. But it was also a film. In the broader meaning he was watching a film, a movie, a more or less moving picture.

These observations are not integral to the so-called plot of Point Omega (which centers on a young filmmaker attempting to get a government warmonger to comment on his thoughts about film) but they are integral to understanding Mr. DeLillo's languid pace and reluctance to engage in the more traditionally narrative modes of fiction. These comments regarding Psycho have little to do with sussing out Mr. Hitchcock's vision of the world and instead, like a misguided graduate film studies paper, have significantly more to do with the subject of film as a vehicle for artistic expression.

Similarly, Mr. DeLillo's novel is an excuse to talk about the relationship between life and narrative instead of simply building such a narrative. As such, it is as much of a lifeless indulgent exercise in the mystification of artistic expression as his exploration of Gordon's slow-mo avant-garde epic.

This is not to say that Point Omega is entirely without merit. The character of the philosophical retired general (think Rumsfeld with a PhD) falls entirely flat, but the ambitious young filmmaker is a bit of gem. The young man is reeling from a separation with his wife and becomes somewhat obsessed by erotic fantasies of the general's daughter.

His erotic obsession seems to manifest both his marital frustration and his inability to convince the general to partake in his film. The documentary is a vision of ascetic truth - the general sits in a room and talks about his experience with designing a war and the entire film would be unfettered by stock footage, other opinions, cuts. This desire to express the world in such objectively subjective terms communicate an uneasiness with one's experience of the world - a need to understand the diversity of thought and experience felt by other people, to justify one's own experience of the world with another's.

While this character has a spark of feeling and truth, DeLillo refuses to use the character for anything besides quietly disturbed introspection and does not force his characters into any situation beyond amplified depression. The plot does not so much materialize as de-materialize when the general's daughter disappears at the apparent climax of the novel and then simply remains missing.

One could be led to conclude Mr. DeLillo is attempting to have his fiction more closely mirror life, with its absence of pat character arcs or conclusive narrative threads. But Point Omega, with its dreary, inert narrative fails to realize the more unusual and exciting surprises of daily undramaticized life or the more absurdly funny and horrifying trends of life (as he did in White Noise).

Pay It Forward

Norwood
by Charles Portis
1966, Simon and Schuster


This past summer I read an essay from The Believer on the author Charles Portis. I don't recall the specific details of the article now, but I was sufficiently persuaded to run out to the library and procure a copy of his Western True Grit within the week. I devoured that novel in a matter of a day and a half; its protagonist, the young bull-headed Mattie, was one of the most fiercely and humorously written narrators I have ever had the pleasure of getting to know.

What I love about Portis's writing is his eye for wasted words. Portis writes in his character's vernacular and, as such, the text is laden with none of the writerly subtext and imagery one is accustomed to reading in serious adult novels. He in fact utilizes the vernacular to mine it for seeming non sequiturs and other amusing idiosyncrasies of speech.

Norwood is the character whose perspective Portis adopts for relating the narrative. Norwood is a young ex-marine who spends his time working a boring job at a gas station/convenience store. He shares a house with his sister, who is incapable of handling the upkeep after their parents die. Norwood convinces his sister to get a job waitressing and she meets and eventually marries a prissy stuck-up man named Bill Bird who flaunts his education and more advanced militaristic career over Norwood, who responds to his jabs with sullen tolerance.

Eventually Norwood is offered a job driving stolen cars to New York. While he is suspicious of the job, he is also owed a sum of seventy dollars by a former Marine pal who lives in NYC and so Norwood, with singularity of mind, makes off for New York from his hometown in Texas.

En route he encounters a number of amusing setbacks and strange characters (including a former circus midget). Norwood's view of the world is bogged down neither by political correctness nor by bigotry; he accepts the people with whom he crosses paths and is inclined to speak honestly with all of his companions.

Honesty and forthrightness seem to Norwood's staple traits of interpersonal relationships. He professes to most people he meets his aspiration to become His dogged pursuit of the seventy dollars owed to him is not motivated by greed or by indignation. And after collecting on the debt, he promptly loans the money out to a needy acquaintance.

The strength of the book comes from its incredible sense of humor which uses Norwood's small town perspective without ridiculing his naivete. Take for example, this hysterically funny passage from Norwood's first experience with a subway:

The subway was cleaner and more brightly lighted than Norwood had expected, and it moved faster. He jostled his way forward to the front car and looked through the glass with his hands cupped around his face. He was disappointed to find the tunnel so roomy. Only a very fat man could be trapped in it with a train coming. The air smelled of electricity and dirt.

In one of the pedestrian tunnels at the Union Square stop a man was stretched out on the concrete having a fit and forcing people to step around him in the narrow passageway. Norwood watched him as he gave a few terminal jerks and a long sigh. He knew he should look to see if the man had swallowed his tongue, the way they used to have to do with that Eubanks boy in the fifth grade, but he didn't want to put his finger in the man's mouth unless he had to. It was all right for doctors, they didn't care where they put their hands.

The description is fresh but simplistic - and simplistic without being condescendingly folksy. Norwood's ridiculous thoughts take center stage here - the tunnel being dangerous to only the morbidly obese, doctors' lack of concern for hygiene - and yet Portis is not making fun of Norwood's peculiar thoughts.

In this regard, Norwood reminds me a great deal of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, which also successfully straddled the line between ridiculing his subject. Toole quite clearly dips repeatedly into poking fun at Ignatius Reilly and yet does not objectify him as a buffoon worthy of our derision - Reilly is humanized consistently throughout Toole's novel so that our amusement feels as though it has some element of empathy. Portis walks the other side of the line, refusing to let his reader feel superior to Norwood, but all the while mining him for comedy. Norwood is occasionally played as the perplexed straight man to the characters around him - Bill Bird's urbane syntax, for example, or the intensely neurotic frivolity of his first female companion.

After enjoying in the last year the incredibly funny and brilliant simplicity of both True Grit and Norwood, Charles Portis is quickly becoming a favorite author. I have tried twice now to convince friends to read the former title, with its deliciously toughened self-assured narrator and have yet to be successful in that endeavor. I can only hope someone will be interested enough to investigate Portis's breezily short and utterly delightful Norwood.

Between the Stirrup and the Ground

Brighton Rock

by Graham Greene

1938, Penguin Classics

I first read Graham Greene during my freshman year of college. I spent at the time many weekend mornings checking out books from the Boston Public Library and sitting in the Public Gardens reading for some hours. I remember reading Greene's The End of the Affair in a quite old edition in the fall that year.

So it was with pleasure that I decided to return to Greene at a friend's suggestion. We were at a get-together where Donnie Darko was shown and we both got excited at the scene where Drew Barrymore teaches her English class Greene's story "The Destructors", which both of us loved. She suggested that I borrow her copy of Brighton Rock. We met for drinks later that week and removed the lovely Penguin Classics and as we fawned over the beautiful uncut pages and the jacket flaps, she dropped it into her margarita.

Greene's prose fascinates me. His plots are endlessly palatable and his prose is clean and muscular. Yet, the nearly cinematic tightness of the plot barely conceals churning undercurrents of doubt about human nature and spirituality. Similarly, for all the effectiveness of his sentences ("His room smelt of stale beer") he is not averse to utilizing' the more poetic of his writerly powers ("The huge darkness pressed a wet mouth against the panes").

Brighton Rock, a thriller set in 1930s coastal England, is certainly faithful to both of my ideas about Greene.

The plot of the book is quite engaging. It concerns a gang of hoodlums who murder a newspaper man in the first chapter of the book and their attempts to conceal the crime. An ambitious but naive member of the gang, a young man named Pinkie, becomes over-involved in the process of covering his tracks and his blood lust grows increasingly throughout the novel.

Pinkie is pursued by an unlikely, but dogged, heroine in the form of a lush with conventionally loose morals, Ida. Ida's interest stems from spending an afternoon with the newspaper man before he died and she becomes more involved as Pinkie begins courting a young girl named Rose who may divulge details that would implicate him in the murder.

Through these three characters, Greene explores ideas of religiosity and morality. Pinkie's blood lust becomes increasingly myopic and rageful as the novel progresses. Greene writes him as an amoral child disgusted by sex. He is immature and it is his murder that increasingly lends him confidence and maturity.

Greene contrasts Pinkie's commitment to unholy acts with Rose's Catholic devotion. Rose is likewise written as naive for her sixteen years. Rose attends Mass regularly and is motivated by aspirations toward domesticity which are dashed repeatedly by the cynical Pinkie. Rose is devoted to Pinkie and takes up his defense seemingly as an act of religious devotion. As her devotion to Pinkie's love (which is largely an act of faith on her part, not unlike her former religious mindset) grows, she realizes his guilt in the crimes that guide the plot and, by extension, realizes that her love of god and of Pinkie are mutually exclusive.

Rose and Pinkie are married in a ceremony both regard as a fraud. The wedding, while legally binding, is absent the emotional and cultural trappings of marriage. Rose decides that she is living in mortal sin and rather than denounce her life, decides her sin is too great for an act of contrition to remedy. As such, Rose commits herself fully to her life of sin.

Thoughts of repentance also cross Pinkie's mind as he wonders about the cosmic ramifications of his crimes. Pinkie's contemplation of mortality and morality frames itself in the phrase "between the stirrup and the ground".

Pinkie's cynicism prevents him from considering the afterlife a reward for earthly goodness. As he remarks to himself, "Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust." Sin is derived from an ability to make sense of the world, or to control one's 'destiny'. Pinkie is invigorated by his powers over mortality and is mystified by imagining religious consequences for his actions.

Rose, on the other hand, is so overwhelmingly motivated by her faith in religious consequence that as she begins to stumble towards the path of sin, she entirely disavows her life of faithfulness. Rose views her own soul as irredeemable and as such is able to disregard any moral compunction she experiences. She contemplates her fate as she prepares to commit even more mortal sin:

If it was a guardian angel speaking to her now, he spoke like a devil - he tempted her to virtue like a sin... Moral maxims dressed in pedantic priestly tones remembered from old sermons, instructions, confessions - "you can plead for him at the throne of Grace" - came to her like unconvincing insinuations. The evil act was the honest act, the bold and the faithful.

Both Pinkie and Rose are damned by their inability to frame religious warnings in their own life experiences. For Rose, Pinkie represents a physical actuality in which she can trust more powerful than the god in which she previously placed that trust; moreover, Pinkie can receive her adoration concretely in ways her deity cannot. For Pinkie, his inability to imagine a physical manifestation of faith is proof of its insignificance. Pinkie instead invests his energy and faith in the murder that exhilarates him physically and emotionally.

What makes Brighton Rock a truly remarkable read is in Greene's creation of the character of Ida. Ida, unlike both of the children, is worldly and perhaps world-weary. Ida's experience has led her away from religion and towards instead a life of conventional sin. Despite her sexual freedom, Ida's moral compass guides her towards a sense of justice and protection of innocence.

Ida is untroubled by concerns of an afterlife, and instead has constructed her own belief system which Greene portrays as entirely superior to the Church's. Where Rose viewed one compromise of morality fatalistically, Ida views morality from a more subjective - and realistic - point of view. Ida's realism prevents her from viewing compromise as necessarily preempting goodness.

In contrast to Pinkie, Ida is also concerned with the time "between the stirrup and the ground" but she finds physical manifestation of the gift of life in sexual contact, in meaningful relationships, and in pursuing her sense of what's right.

Ultimately, Green's novel, while utterly compelling from a superficial stance of readability is quite complex intellectually. Pinkie and Rose represent the failure of Catholic dogma to account for the diversity and complexity of daily life so clearly exemplified by the brassy but steadfast Ida.