Creme de la Creme

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark

1961, Macmillan

In a recent issue of The Believer, Nick Hornby wrote in his "Stuff I've Been Reading" column about a recent rash of Muriel Spark novels in his life, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I was rather delighted to read this, as I myself had just finished the same novel, spurred on by an ignorance of Spark's work in light of a new biography.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a very brisk novel at just barely over a hundred pages, but Spark's character development is surprisingly complex for such economical use of space. The plot revolves around the so-called "Brodie set" of an elite private girls' school in England. The Brodie set is a group of girls who fell under Miss Jean Brodie's unconventional tutelage in their youth and maintain her ideals through their adolescence.

The plot of the book meanders quite a bit for such a short novel: essentially, Miss Brodie is eventually fired for her unusual methods and it's revealed that one of the Brodie set is her betrayer. Spark spins the plot out as a mystery of sorts: which one could have done it?

The true driving force of the novel is in Spark's characterization of Miss Brodie and her students. Miss Brodie is a famous character in literature, in part because of the very successful film adaptation in which Maggie Smith plays Miss Brodie. Part of the character's longevity is in her idiosyncratic mannerisms and aphorisms ("For people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like") ; Brodie is prone to spouting phrases in the manner of a parrot, the most notable of which is where the novel derives its title: "I am a woman in my prime."

For Brodie, the idea of a prime entails her engagement in the world around her, both culturally and sexually. she tries to imbue in her pupils an interest in taking part in the world around them, chiefly in art and socialism, two of her largest passions. Her teaching revolves largely around long-winded lectures regarding Italian are and Italian fascism. Her pupils gather around her, holding their history books in front of them as a pretext for the prying eyes of the administration of the girls' school.

While her students are impressionable and naive, Brodie does not condescend to them in discussing such topics. Indeed, it seems her goal is to inculcate these ideals in their young minds. In this, she does not directly succeed. Spark offers a bird's-eye view of the girls as they grow older and none become raging socialists or artists; instead, the qualities that rub off on these girls is a sense of belonging or membership, much like one offered by a community or a private club.

The Brodie set is joined together by this sense of strong definition, each viewing themselves and their group as though from the outside, understanding the perspective an outsider has in evaluating a tight-knit private group. They carry themselves with the sense of superiority that is wholly unjustified; there is nothing to distinguish these girls from the others except their admittance into Brodie's affections. And like all such groups, it is inevitable that it crumbles as each individual girl pursues her own interests, particularly sexual ones.

One of Brodie's most unusual habits is in divulging the details of her sexual past to her impressionable students. She details for them the true romance of her life: a lover who was separated from her during the war. Brodie relays her saga as though reading Bronte to her students, and as young girls tend to do, each of her students eats it up.

This rather frank (and as a teacher, I can soundly say inappropriate) bit of personal history gives a context to two of the major themes of the novel: what Brodie means when she says she is in her prime, and the sexual development of her students.

As to the latter issue, Spark's exploration of the girls' sexualities benefits largely from her non-linear prose. Spark gives herself the opportunity to flash both forward and backward in her characters' narrative arcs. For example:

Mary Macgregor, although she lived into her twenty-fourth year, never quite realized that Jean Brodie's confidences were not shared with the rest of the staff and her love-story was given out only to her pupils...She thought this briefly, but never again referred her mind to Miss Brodie, but had got over her misery, and had relapsed into her habitual slow bewilderment, before she died while on leave in Cumberland in a fire in the hotel. Back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, through the thickening smoke... She heard no scream, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no screams, for the smoke was choking her. She ran into someone on her third turn, stumbled and died. But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss Brodie's pupils. "Who has spilled ink on the floor - was it you, Mary?"

Such narrative play has a chilling effect; Mary's presence in the beginning and in the end of this passage is oblivious to her ultimate fate, rendered so matter-of-factly by the author that one is unsure whether she intends it to play for laughs.

Regardless, Spark uses this shifting through time to reveal the adult lives of the students, and consequently, their sex lives. As the girls grow older, they speculate a great deal upon Miss Brodie's love life, in particular as it intersects with two potential suitors among the staff of the school. The girls, as students do, gossip about Miss Brodie's possible involvement with each of these men. Spark fast forwards a great deal to their teenage years as each of these girls begins sitting for one of the possible lovers, an art teacher, in his studio.

Each girls tries to varying degrees to ingratiate herself to the art teacher, even trying to seduce him. Strangely (perversely?) each of his successive portraits looks like none other than Miss Brodie herself, strengthening Brodie as the glue that holds the set together and, moreover, their defining aspect. Brodie's influence is so far-reaching that none of these girls can successfully forge an identity for herself, not even as a sexual object for this man who has been tainted by his love for their teacher.

As for the former theme, that of what it means to say that one is in one's prime, the reader gradually begins to doubt the accuracy of Miss Brodie's declaration. When she announces that she is "in her prime" it is a bit vague what she means by that: that she is at the peak of her life (intellectually? sexually?) or that she is about to reach her peak? That she is ripe for the picking?

But Miss Brodie's actions during her stint as a teacher belie these claims. She shacks up with an invalid teacher in part to jilt her married lover. She reminisces too obsessively about her past love - in fact, communicates through her obsession that perhaps this love affair is truly her prime. The less successful Brodie becomes, the more she clings to the lingering power she has over her set. It becomes apparent that her insistence on instilling in her students her values is the dying gasp of a woman past her prime, trying to regain control over her life through the minds of impressionable ten-year-olds. To build and preserve a legacy.

And yet, Spark holds Brodie at an arm's-length. She is never overtly judgmental towards her title character and she deprives the reader of the kind of close third-person perspective that would allow a fuller picture of Brodie's psychological state. Miss Brodie is a woman identifiable through her actions, not her thoughts. The reader becomes one of her students, puzzling over her odd behavior and unable to know her emotions or thoughts in an intimate manner.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie keeps its main character a mystery one can solve by reading between the lines. It seems, then, that the novel is as much about the futility and inability to truly know those in your life, even those whose influence over you is greatest.

When one of her girls ultimately betrays her, the impression of Brodie being well past her prime is firmly cemented in her nearly daft inability to identify her betrayer and her obsessive rumination over which it could be. She has become, and perhaps always was, a small woman hiding behind her aphorisms, witticisms, insights and demands. That Spark is able to simultaneously stir up sympathy for Brodie's complete obliviousness and satisfaction at her receiving comeuppance is as much a mystery as Brodie herself.

Facade and Charade

Imperial Bedrooms
by Bret Easton Ellis
2010, Alfred A. Knopf


Bret Easton Ellis was one of my first favorite authors. My interest in cinema is what turned me onto his writing in the first place, around the time that American Psycho was adapted into a film. I have a rather bizarre aversion to reading novels based on films in close proximity to one another. Somehow I believe that each experience should stand alone from one another; to read a book after seeing a film is dilute the experience of each with inevitable comparisons to the other.

As such, I didn't read the brilliant American Psycho until much later when I was in college, but by then I was a sworn devotee of Ellis's. Among my early memorable experiences with his novels were Glamorama and The Rules of Attraction, both of which were seductive in their borderline nihilistic culture vulture characters. Ellis's work undulates with a hidden strain of intense moralizing that is only revealed by considering how thoroughly he abuses (punishes?) his characters for their lack of faith in man or themselves. This idea was intensely appealing to me as a fledgling intellectual and Mr. Ellis's masterful interplay between content, context and subtext was, and still is, impressive.

Over the course of the last few years, I make it a point to look for his novels when drifting (as I do so often) purposelessly in the public library. Eventually, my familiarity with his work increased and the only novel of his I hadn't read was Less Than Zero and so it was with some amount of self-kicking that I discovered his new novel was ostensibly a sequel to it.

Mr. Ellis recently came to Boston to read from Imperial Bedrooms and I dragged along a friend who I had been trying to inspire to read more by buying him American Psycho and making him meet the author. The reading did the trick and while my friend has still not read American Psycho, we both bought copies of Imperial Bedrooms and finished them within the week (he in one day!).

Imperial Bedrooms is essentially a sequel to Less Than Zero and begins with a neatly self-referential passage about the 1980-something adaptation of the book into a film. The narrator of both books, Clay, acknowledges the existence of both the previous book and its adaptation, basically claiming that the book was a fictionalized (but accurate) version of his life. This bit of post-modern twisting neatly cuts off an indebtedness to the previous book that I think ultimately benefits me in my ignorance of that book's contents.

Imperial Bedrooms is composed in a series of vignettes as Clay returns to Los Angeles to cast a movie that he has written. His subsequent descent into sexual debauchery, self-medication and paranoia serve as the not-unfamiliar premise of Ellis's book.
At the reading I attended, Ellis cited Raymond Chandler as a primary influence in cultivating the tone of this book, and in truth, I feel that these back-to-back blog entries might seem a bit redundant, when one considers that both books share similar virtues. Imperial Bedrooms, like Farewell, My Lovely, uses Los Angeles as a backdrop for alarmingly immoral activities. Drugs are omnipresent in the pages of Imperial Bedrooms and Clay abuses them freely. The extended use of drugs throughout the novel lends the character an air of defeatedness; Clay seems to use drugs because he is too bored or broken to do much else and the other characters in the book use drugs as a shield from behind which they are protected from scrutiny, by self or others.

Among Los Angeles's other temptations are the of-the-flesh variety. Clay indulges in a fair bit of gratuitous sex throughout the novel, as do most of the characters who surround him. He abuses his position of authority (however slight) by granting sexual favors to aspiring actors and actresses and failing to follow up in the implicit quid pro quo.

On a side note, this is one of the things that I so adore about Ellis's work in general: his willingness to portray gay and bisexual characters; they proliferate his novels. But it's not that Ellis merely populates his environments with a PC Big Brother-esque rainbow of lifestyles. Ellis is genuinely interested in utilizing these characters to their fullest, which often entails a rather heroically unflattering portrayal of their sexual vices and moral squalor.

During his stay in Los Angeles, Clay becomes increasingly paranoid: he believes he is being followed by at least two different cars, he begins receiving anonymous threatening text messages, acquaintances go missing, etc. As Clay's desperation intensifies, so do his sexual misadventures. An aspiring actress he has been stringing along begins to reveal her mistrust in Clay's power and so their sex becomes increasingly depraved with Clay's role as sexual tormentor becoming starkly revealed. Towards the end of the novel, Clay engages in a scene of sexual torture that is startling in its brutality; it reads like something from American Psycho.

Beneath the narrative, Imperial Bedrooms is laced with an inherent solipsism. Clay is unable to connect with anyone, and the auxiliary characters in the novel remain as mysterious to the reader as they are to Clay. Ellis provides them virtually no flesh within which to inhabit their bodies, and so they seem rather like the drug-induced paranoid hallucinations that one might imagine our narrator being afflicted by.

Moreover, there seems to develop in the novel the sense that there is a larger plot construct within which Clay's narrative takes place that neither he nor we are not privy to. The side characters begin to inspire suspicious, conspiratorial thoughts as the novel betrays some sense of plot unfurling around us, obscured by Clay's self-involved worldview.

The Clay of Imperial Bedrooms is a man who is incapable of making a connection with his fellow man, especially his former friends who populated Less Than Zero. Ellis's work, which is often teeming with immoral characters engaging in reprehensible material, has often attracted a great deal of controversy or scorn from conservative-minded readers.

While there is nothing palatable in Ellis's (usually quite blase) description of disgusting behavior, I've often said that his work is firmly directed by an implicit moral compass. In the case of Imperial Bedrooms this moral compass takes the guise of Clay's seemingly endless self-loathing. As Clay becomes more desperate, so too do his actions, and the character arc is indistinguishable from a classic tailspin with all its panic and gravity.

The film industry setting for the novel is clever. Ellis is no stranger to glamor-industry settings for his novels (Wall Street, the modeling world, etc.) but the facade and charade of film proves a perfect backdrop for the endless deception and interpersonal fraudulence that permeates Clay's life. The film setting lends a particular eeriness to aforementioned conspiratorial paranoia; it is like Clay is a secondary character in someone else's drama. In this way Imperial Bedrooms reads almost like a diary from a bit player on a film for which he has not read the whole script.

The book's title is apropos, not simply for the neat parallelism in Costello references. In the novel, the bedroom becomes the only place Clay can assert his power, bolster his self-image. The bedroom is where he subjugates men and women alike, building his empire. But Clay, like all empires and emperors, is blinded by ego - in this case, not by inflated but rather deflated ego. Clay is oblivious that since Less Than Zero was written about his life, he has become less and less the main character of his own story.

A Tarantula on a Slice of Angel Food

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Imperfectionists
by Tom Rachman
2010, Dial Press




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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Thorns from a Fig Tree

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

by Philip Pullman

2010, Canongate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There are true prophets and there are false prophets, and this is how you tell the difference: look at the fruits they bear. Do you gather grapes from a thorn bush? Do you look for figs among thistles? Of course not, because a bad tree can't bear good fruit, and a good tree can't bear bad fruit."

Christ thinks that ends (manipulation of historical documents, embellishment of Jesus's god-like powers, adjustment to Jesus's teachings to expand appeal) justifies the means (the establishment of a lasting church through which to proselytize). Pullman clearly disagrees. The novel suggests that the organization of a philosophy necessitates an inability to retain a philosophy's original truth, in other words: institutionalization causes corruption.

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

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

Arrested Development

Buffalo Lockjaw

by Greg Ames

2009, Hyperion

Recently, The Believer magazine named their fifth (or so) winner of the annual Believer Book Award. The award went to a book called I Am Not Sidney Poitier, which I have to admit interests me very little. But a few months earlier, the staff of the Believer had sent out a small postcard asking readers for their suggestions for the most moving and inventive works of fiction that they read in 2009.

I suggested on my card Auster's Invisible, Holt's In the Valley of Kings, and Chaon's Await Your Reply, all of which wound up the reader survey shortlist published recently. At the top of the reader list, in which I was far more interested than the staff award, was a novel called Buffalo Lockjaw by Greg Ames. After a short investigation, I discovered that my local library had a paperback copy and I went right over and picked up.

Buffalo Lockjaw, as its title might suggest, takes place in upstate New York. In reading it, I was reminded of a recent article that appeared in the New York Times regarding the maturation (or lack thereof) of Gen X. While Ames's age is not readily apparent (and I am also more than a bit confused about where generations begin and end), Buffalo Lockjaw would seemingly fit rather well into A.O. Scott's explanation of the inherent silliness of the irony-laden anxiety-riddled over-educated under-achievement that seem to typify that particular generation at first glance.

The main character of the book is one such underachiever, a young man named James who has moved to Manhattan to make something of himself and has fallen somewhat short. James, who is now a greeting card writer (much like Joseph Gordon Levitt in 500 Days of Summer, but less of a romantic), has returned for Thanksgiving weekend to his boyhood home in Buffalo, New York.

James's trip home is fraught with interpersonal peril; he attempts, with hesitation, to reintegrate himself temporarily into his home life, which seems to have more or less carried on without him.

His friends still hang out in the backyard drinking beer, getting stoned, grilling hotdogs. James finds it all too easy (and more than a bit eerie) to slip back into these behaviors; it is as though none of his friends have aged a day since his last winter break from college. For these ambition-less townies, James's move to Manhattan is not entirely dissimilar from his semesters at school. his stymied attempts at success in the world are, for all intents and purposes, the continued false starts of those early collegiate attempts at becoming an adult; while he has made nothing of himself yet, he still might.

It seems that James holds his re-admittance into this slacker circle at an arm's length. James is reluctant to socialize with them and caves from boredom, he doesn't flaunt his career in Manhattan in part from embarrassment at what it ultimately amounts to and in part from humility at what it implies about their own stalled lives. But moreover, James is disturbed by what this smooth transition to old social patterns implies about his life: is it possible he hasn't changed as much as he has thought?

To counterpoint this theme of paranoia about the true extent of one's adulthood, James attempts to ingratiate himself to his nuclear family. James's father is a garden variety local charmer who knows the waitresses at the restaurants and remembers the names of people's mothers. James's sister, a lesbian who brings her partner home to visit, is and always will be more successful than James in everything from earning their parents' adoration to social grace to striking out in the world. James's move to Manhattan pales in comparison to his sister's successful career which has taken her to the Pacific Northwest.

James is unable to make an impression on either his sister or his father as much of a success. James seems unable to shake his post-adolescent personality with either his family or friends; the impression he made as a young adult proves too deep to change, or perhaps the distance he has carved out for himself has effectively eliminated the ability for anyone to witness such a change.

Perhaps the person who might be able to afford James a sense of perspective on himself, his fears about not having matured enough or his inability to reconnect successfully, is his mother, who is in the last stages of Alzheimer's.

Part of James's desperation to be taken seriously as an adult is because he has decided to undertake the emotionally devastating project of euthanizing his mother.

Buffalo Lockjaw, then, seems to express rather perfectly the fear that as you grow older and mature, there will be no one to guide you or to recognize the changes you have been through. James is forever to his family and friends as he was at 19 and while James could easily look outward to serious relationships with women or building a family, Ames directs the reader's attention backward, to the past.

Ames seems to be giving voice to the childhood fear that there will be no one to see your success, to appreciate who you are, and that those we suspect might are forever disconnected from us. James has no one from which to obtain the approval he needs to successful strike out as an adult in the world. His return home, with its specifically adult quest to silence his mother's suffering, is disconcerting.

James does not feel confident in his adulthood when he can too easily mirror his adolescent life and where no one can tell him that it doesn't fit him anymore. In James's Buffalo, you can go home again, but you might find you don't like how easily you belong.

"Hardscrabble" Lives

Irish Girl

by Tim Johnston

2009, University of North Texas Press

Recently, I had an opportunity to see David Sedaris read for the second time in a year read at Boston Symphony Hall. Mr. Sedaris is one of my favorite writers and he is an absolute delight to hear read his sardonic, but incredibly vulnerable, prose.

Sedaris recommends a book written by another writer each time he goes on a new book tour. Last year, he was peddling The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders (for whom I did not particularly care until he published an adorable little story called "Fox 8" in a recent McSweeney's). Sedaris reads from these volumes as part of what I hesitate to call his set. When I saw him most recently, he had selected a book of short stories that recently won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for short fiction, called Irish Girl. He read a very short excerpt and prefaced his selection by insisting that the stories within the collection were very, very dark.

Irish Girl isn't really as dark as I was led to believe. It's stories are reminiscent of Carver in their focus on blue collar people fumbling their already broken (what a jacket writer would prefer to call hardscrabble) lives.

Tim Johnston's stories are full of empathy for his characters even as he tortures them with the full range of his deus ex machina abilities. Johnston's stories, while well-written, are essentially one of many collections in which uncommonly bad things happen to uncommonly normal people.

The title story of the collection was a notable exception. "Irish Girl" tells the story of a young boy who idolizes his older delinquent brother. He forms a special bond with this brother and watches as his brother smokes pot and cigarettes and generally carouses with other maladjusted teenagers.

The boy's father tries desperately to eliminate the possibly corrosive influence the older boy has on his younger brother, but in doing so alienates the older boy with his judgmental outbursts. The younger boy is swept away by his brother as a birthday present and spends the evening with his friends, including the incredibly beautiful titular Irish girl. At the end of the evening, the boy is dropped home by his brother who disdains to spend an evening with the harried father and is subsequently hit by a train in his car. The younger boy's relationship with his father is forever altered after the tragedy.

While I summarize at length (and also comprehensively), I cannot fully convey the beautiful, sad horror of this story, of what it means to be torn from a parent by allegiance to a spurious idol, of the father's sadness and frustration at his inability to preserve a child's innocence.

The entire collection is very readable and I wouldn't shoo anyone away from reading it in its entirety. However, it is the highly visceral title story with its elegiac tone and empathetic point of view that makes Johnston memorable.