American literature didn't get off to a fast start. Our best efforts to convince the world that Puritan sermons count as literature aside, nobody realAmerican literature didn't get off to a fast start. Our best efforts to convince the world that Puritan sermons count as literature aside, nobody really got anything decent written until Poe in the early 1800s.
Except there's this, which I found referred to fleetingly as the first viable American novel - 1797 - and I'd never even heard of it, and it's actually pretty great. (It's also based on a true story that apparently had America's panties all moist and knotted, for whatever that's worth.)
The titular coquette, Eliza Wharton, joins a long list of vile women in literature who do gross things like flirt, or show a little reticence about marrying whatever boring Casaubon everyone else decides they should marry. It never works out, so don't get your hopes up. But author Hannah Foster is less interested in indicting Eliza than everyone around her.
Eliza begins the book Emma-ish, headstrong and pleased with herself. The old guy her parents foisted on her has conveniently died before marrying her, and she cheerfully reenters the dating scene, writing that "every thing tends to facilitate the return of my accustomed vivacity." She makes no effort whatsoever to pretend this is a disappointment; she hopes only to find someone a little more interesting this time around. "These bewitching charms of mine have a tendency to keep my mind in a state of perturbation," she chatters. "I don't know how it is, but I am certainly very much the taste of the other sex."
But she's immediately directed toward the reverend Boyer, a safe guy whose love letters are crashingly boring. She prefers the company of Major Sanford, a kindred spirit who unfortunately (and pointedly) can get away with being a coquette himself because he is a dude. When she puts off Boyer, hoping to have just a tiny smidgeon of fun in her life, he storms off in a huff; her friends judge her mercilessly; she's written off as a coquette and abandoned.
As the story progresses and Eliza's options narrow precipitously, her tone changes too - from the vivacity she starts with (and she uses that word like ten times) to a glum desperation. "May my unhappy story," she finally writes, "serve as a beacon to warn the American fair of the dangerous tendency and destructive consequences of...the practice of coquetry."
So the message here isn't that Eliza is a bad person; it's that society sucks, and "vivacity" like hers will be crushed. It's a bummer message, but not a unique one: the literature of destroyed women is rich. This is a worthy entry in it. I'm not sure why it isn't more well-known; it should be....more
"Human beans is thinking they is very clever, but they is not. They is nearly all of them notmuchers and squeakpips," says the BFG in Roald Dahl's mos"Human beans is thinking they is very clever, but they is not. They is nearly all of them notmuchers and squeakpips," says the BFG in Roald Dahl's most philosophical work, and, well, that's about accurate I guess, and I'm not sure how I feel about exposing an eight-year-old to this kind of truth. Fine? Might as well start 'em sometime? "Human beans is the only animals that is killing their own kind," he also says, which is not actually true but the point is more or less valid. And "Just because we happen not to have actually seen something with our own two little winkles, we think it is not existing," which sounds like God stuff but I don't think it necessarily is; it's more about imagination than specific theology.
This is a heavy book, is my point. There's a lot packed in here. But "Meanings is not important" anyway, says the Giant. "I cannot be right all the time." ...more
One of the reasons scifi gets a bad rap is that so much of it is so very shitty, and here's a prime example. There was a major strain of woman-hating,One of the reasons scifi gets a bad rap is that so much of it is so very shitty, and here's a prime example. There was a major strain of woman-hating, mansplaining, faux-intellectual, oft-Randian bullshit that sprang up in the latter 20th century, spearheaded by the idiot propaganda of Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury; this miserable 1951 book was a harbinger.
The setup is standard scifi: human overreaching leads to a holocaust. In this case the overreach takes the shape of mass blindness - like Blindness but dumber - and, more famously, a plague of deadly shambling plants, a proto-Monsanto vision that's amusing enough to give Triffids the minor cult status it doesn't deserve. But the major threat here is, typically, not the plants but the surviving humans. So we get a tour through the civilized options - socialism, feudalism, theocracy - while Wyndham sputters that they're unworkable next to John Galt's solution: selfish oligarchy.
Wyndham's world, where a tiny minority can see and the rest are blind, is a blunt metaphor for Rand's philosophy (popularized eight years previous by her first hit, The Fountainhead). Through no fault of anyone, a tiny group of people are simply more competent. And his point, made again and again, is that those competent people can't worry about the rest: they're hopeless and must be left to die on their own. To try to take care of them is to doom them and the oligarchy. "The thinking has to be done largely by people who are not directly productive," Wyndham suggests. "Either we can set out to save what can be saved from the wreck - and that has to include ourselves - or we can devote ourselves to stretching the lives of these people a little longer. That is the most objective view I can take." Sounds good, right? Sign me up for the thinkin' team! You can be on the doin' and dyin' team. And note the overt nod to the nascent Objectivist movement.
Wyndham's alter ego Bill makes these speeches often to his love interest, Josella, whom he spends much of the book searching for because he forgot that she directly told him where to meet her. You can see why he loves her: she's thrilled when, in the midst of crisis, he pauses to lecture her about Latin. (Chicks go crazy for that.) And she's totally down for the idea that the world must be repopulated by means of each man having a harem. She's going to pick out a couple blind women for his harem. Cool, right? "After all, most women want babies anyway," Bill notes. "The husband's just...the local means to the end."
Why a harem, rather than a polyamorous sort of deal? Why should men have several partners but women just one? Because John Wyndham is a jackass.
Here's what Bill does right after Josella proposes finding him a harem of blind breeder women: "I ruminated a little on the ways of purposeful, subversive-minded women like Florence Nightingale and [19th-century prison reformer] Elizabeth Fry. They so often turn out to have been right after all."
If you want to pause for a moment and ruminate a little on the fact that Wyndham just compared Florence Nightingale to a pimp, I understand. I'll be here. "We hold the chance of as full a life as ['those blind girls'] can have," says Josella of the harem idea. "Shall we give it to them as part of our gratitude - or shall we simply withhold it on account of the prejudices we've been taught? ...You don't need to worry at all, my dear. I shall choose two nice, sensible girls."
The danger of lazy scifi is that when you invent a whole world, you can also invent human behavior in it. It lends itself to didacticism - to the creation of a reality that entirely supports one's worldview. Dissenting opinions can be made to fail. A character named Coker tries to create a society that protects the blind, and everyone dies, so...see? Altruism is dumb. After Coker comes around, he says of a less enthusiastic convert, "You'd think she'd be reasonable." Bill replies,
Most people aren't, even though they'd protest that they are. They prefer to be coaxed or wheedled, or even driven. That way they never make a mistake: if there is one, it's always due to something or somebody else. This going headlong for things is a mechanistic view, and people in general aren't machines. They have minds of their own - mostly peasant minds, at their easiest when they are in the familiar furrow.
But there are many furrows, and this one is full of shit....more
Child of God is cool and all, it just feels sortof like practice for what's to come. You can even see it, actually - toward the second half of the booChild of God is cool and all, it just feels sortof like practice for what's to come. You can even see it, actually - toward the second half of the book, McCarthy's trademark "like some [batshit comparison]" trick starts to come out. But it's basically more conventional than his later stuff, which to be fair is still pretty weird and certainly there are some squidgy bits in here. Also some funny bits, btw, I'm not the only guy who finds McCarthy hilarious am I? The dump guy names his daughters after terms from a medical textbook,
Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia Sue. They moved like cats and like cats in heat attracted surrounding swains to their midden until the old man used to go out at night and fire a shotgun at random just to clear the air.
Ha! I mean, you know somebody's getting raped in like a minute, but still. Enjoy that one sentence.
Anyways, so the book's all about this dude whose life is not really going great, he's deficient in the life skills department is how you could say it, and what happens is that when people don't like you, you can get more and more unlikable. Next thing you know, you're engaging in antisocial behaviors. (view spoiler)[Talkin' about corpse-fucking here, and I know we've all been to that well. (hide spoiler)]
I just read Killer Inside Me, so it's been a pretty weird weekend, and I gotta say that Lou Ford is a better antihero. I mean, they're super different, they're practically opposite guys, but they're both not total successes as far as living with society and as far as that goes I find Ford a more memorable and well-drawn character. Lester Ballard is good, though, this scrambling Gollum creature just debased down past debased. "He could not swim," this loveless thing, "but how would you drown him?"...more
It feels weirdly unpatriotic to like the Iraq War book written by a non-vet better than the one written by a guy who was there, but there it is: I likIt feels weirdly unpatriotic to like the Iraq War book written by a non-vet better than the one written by a guy who was there, but there it is: I like this better than The Yellow Birds, not that that's a bad book, but it's a little bit written at times. This one is both less forced and more engrossing.
It takes place over the course of a single football game, as Billy Lynn and his squad of war heroes are paraded around like propaganda monkeys. Flashbacks give you the gist of the engagement that made them heroes, but they're hazy and indistinct; no one is exactly sure what happened there. It looked good on camera. Many of them didn't die, so that seems positive.
While the squad semi-covertly gets drunk and high and tries to screw cheerleaders, they also attempt to negotiate a movie deal for their story, and that's sortof what the book is about: who gets to tell the story. Over and over, they meet people who inform them what their story is. They are heroes; they are fighting bad guys and they are winning. That doesn't seem to be the story to them, or at least not the important part - the important part is that people keep trying to kill them and it's awful - but "forget it, they are the ones in charge, these saps, these innocents, their homeland dream is the dominant force. His reality is their reality's bitch."
It's an ingratiating book, no doubt. There's a sexy-cheerleader subplot that's only a little more interesting than the bare minimum, and there are at least two real rah-rah scenes where the little guy gets to have a little victory, and what the hell, let's have Beyonce show up too. But it has serious things to say, and I don't mind a little sugar to go with it. It's a win of a book. ...more
Right in the first chapter of the book, Lesser drops major spoilers for virtually all of Henry James, The Leopard, Wolf Hall, The Brothers Karamazov, Right in the first chapter of the book, Lesser drops major spoilers for virtually all of Henry James, The Leopard, Wolf Hall, The Brothers Karamazov, The Redbreast, Rosanna and Os Maias. She does driveby spoilings, just mentioning in passing the end of two books she's not even talking about. She does stealth spoiling - like this: "Sometimes the killer is even the butler, as in [name of book]", so the spoil comes before the title. It's like she has a pathological urge to spoil books for you.
And it'd be one thing if she also said interesting things about books - then this would be an okay book for people who don't mind spoilers - but she frankly doesn't. The whole thing feels like a first draft. It's rambly, self-indulgent, and never comes to a point. You know what it reminds me of? You ever start to read a Goodreads review and you're like "This is pretty well-written," but then it just keeps going on and on and you give up because you don't really care that much? It's like that. Just an overlong Goodreads review that got way off track, written by someone who likes to hear herself type.
Silly and pulpy and fun. Obsessed with pop psychology, and you should pretty much ignore those parts, but aside from that it's fast-paced and a fun plSilly and pulpy and fun. Obsessed with pop psychology, and you should pretty much ignore those parts, but aside from that it's fast-paced and a fun plot, and the precursor to both We Need to Talk About Kevin and Dexter. Feel free to roll your eyes as you go, but you're probably going to have a good time....more
Harriet the Spy was one of my very favorites when I was young; I'm happy to cede the World's Biggest Harriet Fan crown to El, but I was pretty amped tHarriet the Spy was one of my very favorites when I was young; I'm happy to cede the World's Biggest Harriet Fan crown to El, but I was pretty amped to run across this at a stoop sale.
When I first read it - possibly also when I second read it - I immediately started carrying my own notebook around and writing in it all the time. Everyone did, right? I got in super trouble for that, too, because my fourth grade teacher - I think it was fourth? - confiscated it, and then read it, and then I had to talk about why I was saying such mean things about all my classmates. And this is why teachers who don't read books are at a disadvantage.
It holds up wonderfully, and that's nice. It's still a book with great insight into how kids work, and not a little insight into adults while we're at it. And its central message - other than "Blow up the school," which is definitely suggested, and remember when you could just suggest that, and everyone would be like *shrug* yeah, that does sound like a decent idea, one has to admit. Anyway, the other central message is that writing is a great way to explore one's feelings and exercise one's brain, and that really stuck with me, to the point where nowadays I pretend to write book reviews just so I can ramble about my fourth grade teacher. I don't remember her name but she was not great. You know what, I'm pretty sure I came out better than she did. I wonder if she's dead. She might be.
Harriet's a tough nut: weird and terrifyingly bright and given to breaking and entering. (And perhaps gay.) I was of course not a weird kid, I was perfect, but if I had been weird, this book would have given me a lot of great ideas for how to handle my weirdness, and it would have done the same for my mom, and I would say this is a pretty good book to read no matter what level of weirdness you and yours are at.
This was a deep favorite of my friend El's, and we bonded hard over our mutual love for it. We bonded hard over a lot of things. I stumbled across this review today and saw that the first thing I did was link to El's review. I do that a lot - my reviews are littered with links to El's reviews. I want these to be entertaining, and often the most entertaining thing I can do is to link to El.
We won't get any more reviews from El. But she did get to no less than 1335 of them before she died, so that's not bad. Once again, this is what she sounded like....more
That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Wr
That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.
NYRB Classics, the imprint that's mostly about reviving out-of-print books they think deserve a second look, got a big hit with Stoner a few years back; now Speedboat is getting a little traction, and I'm happy to say that it's better. I first heard about it in this piece, which compares her to Joan Didion.
It has no real plot; it's more of a series of very loosely connected vignettes. Some are funny; some are wise; some are mystifying. And it's very much New York. It's ironic and it can be cynical, but it's not without hope. "I wanted to write the kind of book I liked to read," says Adler, "which is narrative, thriller, with plots...I found I didn't seem to be doing that. I thought, 'Well, now what do I do?'" And the answer is fuck it, apparently.
The problem is this. Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in the literature.
At times it comes off like Lydia Davis, whose short stories are famous for being very short. Here's one of hers in its entirety:
They Take Turns Using a Word They Like "It's extraordinary," says one woman. "It is extraordinary," says the other.
Here's something from Speedboat, presented - like many vignettes - without context or comment:
"Well, you know, you can't win them all," the old bartender said. "In fact, you can't win any of them."
This is mostly what Speedboat ends up being: just little sketches, sometimes with a punch line, sometimes not. There are no rules.
I underlined like half of this book. It gave me at times insight into my own life:
I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.
And I thought oh, that's wonderful: finally, someone else who knows about that. Sometimes Adler shows you a whole horizon with a single sentence: "'Self-pity' is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative." Sometimes I underlined things just because they were funny: "Many English girls one meets abroad are called Vanessa," she mentions, and then just moves on. Or when a child named Kevin goes missing on a field trip:
It turned out that every single child on the school bus had known that [Kevin] was missing. They had not mentioned it to the driver, or their teacher, or each other. They took it that Kevin had been left, forever, for some reason, which would become clear to them, with patience, in the course of time.
I find myself thinking of this story surprisingly often. It's funny, of course - you can imagine a standup comedian killing with this story. But it feels meaningful, too. Isn't that what your life is like? We all just...assume that there must be some reason for this? Or look at this little excerpt, which starts as observational humor and rapidly raises the stakes:
"Take off everything except your slip," the nurse said. "Doctor will be with you in a moment." Nobody under forty-five, in twenty years, had worn a slip, but nurses invariably gave this instruction. There they all are, however, the great dead men with their injunctions. Make it new. Only connect.
And you're like holy shit, where did Ezra Pound and EM Forster come from?
I'm quoting a lot from this book because that's the primary thing it is: quotable. I rarely buy books I haven't read: I buy them later, when I decide that a book I've already read is important enough that I want its help defining me. My bookshelves aren't to-do lists - they're a collection of talismans that remind me how to be. I'd like to buy this book.
ETA and I did buy it - I found a signed copy at Powerhouse! - and it is all good. Here it is with its bookmark, which due to one of the quotes above is a grenade pin.
I liked this, but failed to write a review at the time and therefore retained nothing about it. In the general genre of "literary fiction about large I liked this, but failed to write a review at the time and therefore retained nothing about it. In the general genre of "literary fiction about large families of jerks," a la Franzen or the Amazon show Transparent....more
Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books, so I was pretty excited for this one...and I feel let down. It's not as good.
It's a sprawling story, coveGrapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books, so I was pretty excited for this one...and I feel let down. It's not as good.
It's a sprawling story, covering three generations and two families, but focusing on wealthy farmer Adam Trask, his butler Lee, his estranged and sociopathic wife Cathy Ames, and their twin sons Caleb and Aron, who are analogs for two other literary brothers: (view spoiler)[Cain and Abel, and Steinbeck will tell you that in case you didn't get it. Which, by the way, one problem with making a reference like that is that it basically spoils itself: there's only one very important thing about the story of Cain and Abel. (hide spoiler)]* Steinbeck's own family makes an appearance, and the story is narrated by Steinbeck himself; this is a conceit that doesn't go anywhere and doesn't really work.
* I had the same problem with the TV shows Sons of Anarchy, which billed itself as "Hamlet on motorcycles" and then tried to make a mystery of who killed the protagonist's dad.
Speaking of Sons of Anarchy, there's some rough stuff in here. Steinbeck can be lurid. The fate of one character's mom is brutal: "My father clawed me out of the tattered meat of my mother with his fingernails." Holy shit, bro.
I like the sprawl of the book, and Steinbeck has no issues with storytelling: he can keep a guy turning pages as well as anyone. Cathy is the most fun, of course - the villain always is, and Cathy at one point considers murdering a guy via tapeworm, which is awesome - but all of the dozen or so stories Steinbeck juggles here are entertaining reading. The problem is that it's all pretty melodramatic and heavy-handed and sentimental. It teeters on maudlin, and in the end goes all the way over.
The main offender is Lee, the Chinese butler to Adam Trask. He talks in a way no human has ever talked, and he does a lot of it. I was constantly reminded of Harrison Ford's despairing comment on George Lucas's Star Wars script: "You can type this shit, but you sure has hell can't say it." It doesn't ring true at all. And Lee seems to be contagious, too: whenever he starts banging on, everyone else starts talking like him too. Here's an example of Lee talking:
A few are women from the moment they're born. [This one lady] has the loveliness of women, and the courage - and the strength - and the wisdom. She knows things and she accepts things. I would have bet she couldn't be small or mean or even vain except when it's pretty to be vain."
...Hmph, that didn't have the impact I was hoping for. It's more the cumulative effect, I guess - the fact that he always comes out with shit like that, like, over breakfast. He's like your over-serious friend who's always trying to make grand speeches when you just want to talk about TV.
Lee is critical to the central message of the story; in fact I think you could make the argument that he's the real protagonist. He learns Hebrew in order to re-translate the Biblical word "timshel" as "Thou mayest," rather than "thou must" or "thou will," thus bestowing free will on humanity. It's not a super deep message.
There's a good character in Lee, a second-generation Chinese who's perfectly fluent in English but hides behind pidgin because it's easier to get along when you do what people expect. And who, I think, may be closeted but in love with Adam. Lee could be compelling. But Steinbeck blows it by turning him into Obi Wan Kenobi.
And he blows this book, basically. I mean, I liked it - it's just that my expectations were very high, because Grapes of Wrath is a monster of a novel. This is just a fun book to read. It was written 13 years after Grapes - 1952 to 1939 - and without the help of his editor and first wife Carol, and I don't know if he just got old and sentimental like men do or if he needed that editor or what, but East of Eden is the work of a writer who is no longer great....more
"Be sick," is the advice I got on reading Gravity's Rainbow. "Be sick and bedridden and read the whole thing through with no interruptions, and when y"Be sick," is the advice I got on reading Gravity's Rainbow. "Be sick and bedridden and read the whole thing through with no interruptions, and when you're done, flip back to page one and do the whole thing again."
And I get it: that would indeed be a good way to understand this drunken maelstrom of a book. But I don't care enough about it to do that, and also I don't get sick very often, so I was forced to just muddle through. Have I unlocked its many secrets? I have not. I can't tell you what Gravity's Rainbow means to a Pynchon enthusiast; I can tell you what it's like for regular folks.
Here's what it's like: dicks. Dicks dicks dicks dicks dicks. Dicks in the shape of rockets; dicks in the shape of bananas; dicks in the shape of dicks; people in the shape of dicks. The main guy's superpower is that he gets a hardon whenever a rocket is headed in his direction, and what can you say about that plot? At one point a guy turns into his own dick. Even saying "This is the most dick-centric book I've ever read" feels insufficient: when it comes to dicks, this book makes Henry Miller look like Jane Austen.
Also, this is the only book I've ever read where I get the feeling that the scene - the world the author is trying to describe - is actually a cartoon.
When I read the embarrassing Bleeding Edge a while back I was pretty uncomfortable with how it dealt with race and women, and at this point we've definitely got a trend here. I don't think Pynchon thinks he's racist, but he deals with race in a Tarantino-esque way that doesn't sit well with me. I don't think he gets women at all.
So it's a tale told by a dick, full of dicks, signifying dicks. But while it was basically too much dick for me, I could kinda get into a bit of it. Just the tip of it. It's madcap and smart and it feels original. And Pynchon's the only guy I can think of who can include song lyrics in his book and they're actually cool. Look, it's probably the best 800-page book about Nazis and dicks I've ever read, and please don't make me read The Kindly Ones.
Still, though. This is my third Pynchon book; I think I get the idea, and it's not really my favorite idea. I'm not going to be sharing anyone's pus pudding just for an excuse to read it again....more
"A bomb to blow up smugness" is what one woman hopefully calls her child in Sinclair Lewis's broadside attack on mainstream America, and that's surely"A bomb to blow up smugness" is what one woman hopefully calls her child in Sinclair Lewis's broadside attack on mainstream America, and that's surely what this book is.
I didn't know a book can be quiet and bombastic at the same time, but Lewis has written it. It covers just over a decade in Carol Milford's life, as her dreams are repeatedly drowned. She comes to Main Street, America, with grand plans to mean something in a dimly socialist way. Main Street is having none of it.
Lewis has a message. It's about socialism, and it joins Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath as one of the few socialist novels that aren't terrible. And it's about accepting difference, class struggle, and more than anything, feminism. He's trying to create a feminist hero here. He gets a little heavy-handed about it at times, but just a little. It's not enough to make this less than a five-star book; it's just enough to keep it off my top Novels Written For Grown-Ups list. Ishiguro's Remains of the Day is tighter.
The message here has something in common with Middlemarch. Here's Eliot's thing, right?
"The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
And here's Carol Milford:"I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith."
She had fancied that her life might make a story. She knew that there was nothing heroic or obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some significance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life of the age, made articulate and protesting.
These are characters who find fulfillment in making it through a real life with a semblance of self-respect. That's grown-up stuff. I mean, not that I'd know, but that's what I hear from old people.
Which, I mean, the danger of an unexceptional life is that it makes boring reading, and one criticism of Main Street has been that it's plotless. I get that, but I think it's a narrow definition of plot. I thought of Madame Bovary while reading this, because they're both intimate looks at dissatisfied women by men who don't totally get it; that book has the dramatic events people are missing here. But I think it's a worthy achievement to pull off a novel without the help of big pageturning drama, and I think Lewis has done it.
To his credit, Lewis doesn't make anyone an obvious archetype. Carol is his hero, but she's flighty, changing, a pain in the ass. A lesser writer might have written her husband as an oppressor, but Kendicott is a terrific guy: his ambitions are different than hers, but he does his very best. Even the terrible ladies of Main Street have depth and shading.
Main Street is often funny. It's brilliantly written: just in terms of making sentences, Sinclair Lewis is gorgeous. It's much less obvious than it could have been, but still a bit thudding here and there. It's feminist without totally getting women.
It was a smash hit when it was published, somewhat surprisingly given its full-frontal attack on half the country, but then that's sortof the point of Main Street: we all live on it, but many of us consider ourselves, smugly, above it.
ps Years later, I tried to convince my wife that a great middle name for our kid would be "Bomb To Blow Up Smugness." She disagreed....more
What is it about people I agree with that makes them so boring? Jack London,Upton Sinclair,Richard Wright, now Ursula Le Guin...it seems like every What is it about people I agree with that makes them so boring? Jack London,Upton Sinclair,Richard Wright, now Ursula Le Guin...it seems like every time I read a book whose philosophy I'm generally down for, it bores the hell out of me.
Thank God for Ayn Rand, who reminds me that the problem exists on the other side too. I guess it's not the belief that sucks; it's the believing. If you have something to say about humans, then you're writing a novel. If you have something to say about ideology, you're writing a tract, and it's boring.
Le Guin's a smart lady: she lays out what she likes about the idea of anarchism, but she also lays out the drawbacks of a system of total individual freedom. All well and good but very, very talky. And she's not helped by her genre. She herself has said of science fiction that "The future is a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in," and that's all too true. It lacks the messiness of real life - and even when she tries to create it, she does so in ways that work for her message. It doesn't feel quite real enough to engage me.
The plot, such as it is, involves a dude from that "ambiguous utopia" anarchist society, who travels to a capitalist one in service of his research into some kind of unified theory of spacetime a la Einstein, who actually appears in the book, as Ainestain, I assume because Le Guin lost a bet and the penalty was "name a character something annoying." The chapters skip back and forth in time as a nod to that unified theory, which can be summarized as "Remember those parts of True Detective that you didn't pay attention to?"
[image]
But the plot, and the characters, are in service to the message. And the message is noble, but boring....more
Lost Horizons is a very silly, dumb book, but charming and fun for all that.
It's racist and sexist, in that casual and unmalicious way that you see inLost Horizons is a very silly, dumb book, but charming and fun for all that.
It's racist and sexist, in that casual and unmalicious way that you see in, like, Mad Men. The "hard, mocking, sex-thirsty voices of women" are mentioned at one point, and the inhabitants of Shangri-La are described as "cleaner and handsomer than the average" Chinese. Compare it to Sax Rohmer's The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu from 30 years previous: that book is obsessed with the danger of cunning, diabolical Chinamen, while this one is obsessed with how romantic and wise they are. Both are dumb.
It indulges shamelessly in adolescent wish fulfillment: just an inordinate number of pages given over to explaining (never showing) how wise and interesting its hero, Conway, is. It's certainly one of those books that threatens to make your eyes roll right out of your head. Here's a great passage:
[Conrad's] love demanded nothing, not even reply; it was a tribute of the mind, to which his sense added only a flavor. She stood for him as a symbol of all that was delicate and fragile; her stylized courtesies and the touch of her fingers on the keyboard yielded a completely satisfied intimacy."
Oh my God, right? Hoo boy.
But, again, for all of its many and glaring flaws, it's...sortof fun. I mean, for one thing Hilton is inventing Shangri-La here, and that's pretty cool.
And he's dealing - ungracefully, but in his own dumb way - with a real debate between faith and atheism: do you believe that Shangri-La is magic? Or is it an asylum run by ancient nutty inmates? To his credit, Hilton gives you plenty of evidence each way. He does that part competently.
So, I mean, it's fine. It reads quickly and pleasantly. If your young adult is reading it, you might use it as an opening to talk about how Asian fetishes are racist. (Show him some porn as a visual aid!) If you're reading it yourself, just try to watch the eye rolling. You can sprain those things....more
Camilla: You, sir, should unmask. Stranger: Indeed? Cassilda: Indeed it's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you. Stranger: I wear no mask. CamillaCamilla: You, sir, should unmask. Stranger: Indeed? Cassilda: Indeed it's time. We have all laid aside disguise but you. Stranger: I wear no mask. Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask! - The King In Yellow
I came to this by way of the HBO show True Detective, which is pretty cool although not anywhere near as clever as it thinks it is, and which features references to the Yellow King and to a ruined city called Carcosa. Robert Chambers was the first guy to write about the Yellow King, in the first four stories in this 1895 book.* And they're pretty cool. I liked the first and last ones the best - "Repairer of Reputations" and "The Yellow Sign".
* El says not to bother reading the rest of it, so I didn't.
The King in Yellow here is a play, and if you read past the first act of the play you go nuts. And these stories are weird, macabre fiction in the grand American tradition that reaches back to Poe - if we're being honest, past him and back to that master of horror Jonathan Edwards.
Carcosa is mentioned here, and that in turn is a crib from the short story "An Inhabitant Of Carcosa" by Ambrose Bierce, which shares themes with his more well-known "An Incident At Owl Creek Bridge." Bierce doesn't really do it for me.
And later on Lovecraft will borrow the King in Yellow for his story "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1930). The idea of fiction spilling over into life, like The King in Yellow does, is one that Lovecraft took about as far as anyone else has, so you can see why he grabbed onto it; his Necronomicon almost exists at this point, so carefully has it been insinuated.
So True Detective is part of a long conversation here, and my friend Liz pointed out over brunch that we're seeing the creation of a myth, like Faust: an idea fun enough that people want to pick it up and play with it and make it theirs. It's a meme. Outside of the specific myth of the King in Yellow, the broader idea of entertainment that will kill you is increasingly ubiquitous. David Foster Wallace plays with it in Infinite Jest, and there's the 1991 Japanese novel Ring, better known for its movie adaptations, and Cronenberg's 1983 Videodrome, and etc. It is not an example of a tulpa, a thing created by force of imagination a la Slenderman. That is a silly idea and it doesn't exist. It is not, in other words, possible that by producing and consuming enough stories about stories that drive the consumer insane, we might inevitably, eventually produce a story that will actually drive us insane. That's ridiculous.
Anyway, I'll write more about this later but my wife wants me to watch a movie with her.
I was playing around with this idea that maybe King is the best horror writer of all time. Poe, his only real competition, only wrote short stories, sI was playing around with this idea that maybe King is the best horror writer of all time. Poe, his only real competition, only wrote short stories, so maybe by volume alone? But as much as I'd like it to be different, I just can't convince myself that King's actual sentences are any better than functional. He's ...like, he's a great creator of books , but not a very good writer of them.
This dip back into his work reminded how annoying I find Stephen King's writing tics. Particularly the incessant quoting of song lyrics. He's a dorky writer, isn't he? Effective, but dorky.
Here's how these novellas went for me:
1922 Didn't love it. A lot about rats.
Big Driver Contains an explicit rape, which is tough stuff, but I thought it was the strongest story here.
Fair Extension The shortest, really more of an outline than a full-fledged story, but fun and affective.
A Good Marriage A woman finds out years into her marriage that her husband has been a serial killer the whole time. Good concept, right? I liked the first half, but the second half was just eh for me.
Are Gothic novels respectable? Let's talk about it. Would this be a good time to sit backwards on my chair? Fuck yes it would, Let's Get Real. I recenAre Gothic novels respectable? Let's talk about it. Would this be a good time to sit backwards on my chair? Fuck yes it would, Let's Get Real. I recently read Anthony Trollope's landmark Serious Novel The Way We Live Now, from around the same time to (1875 to Silas's 1864), so let's use that one to compare themes.
- Class, especially the fortune of landed gentry vs. their non-landed relatives: check - The powerlessness of women to control their own destinies: check - The quest for power and money, and its corrosive effects on the soul: check
So Gothics are concerned with the same issues as other novels - but they deal with them more hysterically. They take place in a heightened world. They're not meant to be seen as realistic. But that doesn't mean they're less serious.
Okay, look, not many books can stand next to The Way We Live Now, whose best character, Marie Melmotte, turns out to have more agency and strength than we gave her credit for. Poor dear Maud, in this book, spends an awful lot of time being shuttled about helplessly.
What Maud is, though, is she's a perfect example of a Final Girl, who for some reason is associated mainly with slasher films although the Gothic novel totally invented it. The Final Girl is often passive through most of the story; always virginal; and always the last person standing, finally taking action to defeat the monster. (That last bit often comes with a twist.) This is Halloween, Friday the 13th, Mysteries of Udolpho, and Uncle Silas.
It's worthy literature, damsel and all. The hysterical reality of the Gothic (and its trademark squicky parts) can make reading it more fun, while you think about the same real issues brought up in more realistic books. Uncle Silas is one of the better Gothics. It's a terrific example of all its tropes executed well - the spooky old estate here is wonderful, one of the great spooky old estates. There are two great characters, Silas and Madame de la Rougierre. It hangs together and the ending works. It's literature....more
"'You speak like a heroine,' said Montoni, contemptuously; 'we shall see if you can suffer like one.'"
And if all the sentences in this book were half "'You speak like a heroine,' said Montoni, contemptuously; 'we shall see if you can suffer like one.'"
And if all the sentences in this book were half as good as that one, we'd be looking at a five-star book here, but sadly the rest of it is just hella boring. You might be reading a lame book if you have this thought: "Oh great, it's one of the heroine's long, shitty poems; that's three fewer pages I'll have to actually read." And if you think Montoni's threat means that the torture device you briefly glimpsed 50 pages ago is going to make a second, more exciting appearance, you are wrong.
Mysteries of Udolpho is the second classic Gothic novel, the first being Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1763), which is better mostly because it's much shorter. And Radcliffe pours on the Gothic stuff; this is like a master class in the Rules Of Gothicness, and here's a Gothic drinking game (which I fleshed out quite a bit here): drink for each of the following plot devices:
- Spooky castles - Ghosts, vampires or other monsters - Nasty weather - Overwrought language - Ancient family curses - Damsels in distress - (distress of losing their chastity) - in nightgowns - who faint a lot - Byronic men - with secrets
If you find yourself drunk you are reading a Gothic novel. Or watching Scooby Doo.
[image] ^ Damsel
Anyway there are like two or three spooky castles in Mysteries of Udolpho, I lost count, and who knows how many lengthy descriptions of unpleasant weather, and not a small amount of fainting.
And she manages to make all that just spectacularly boring, which is really sortof an achievement, but not one to be proud of.
Here's one of the things about Ann Radcliffe: she really liked landscape paintings, and she didn't get out much, and what that means is that she sets the scene by spending paragraph upon paragraph describing paintings she likes, and that's exactly as boring as it sounds. Here's a painting by her favorite guy, Claude Lorrain:
[image] "Shepherds and shit," is probably what this is called
She's made an effort to create a twisty, mysterious plot, but she's hilariously terrible at big reveals - plot twists happen with the impact of your grandfather telling an anti-Semitic joke at Thanksgiving, everyone saw it coming and no one liked it - and basically none of it works. Two stars because that one sentence I quoted above is fucking amazing; no more stars because most of the suffering was done by me. 'Cause I was so bored. This is the second classic Gothic novel, but The Monk (1797) is still the first good one....more
Northanger Abbey is Austen's most exuberant novel, and while it's also definitely the slightest, it's still enough fun that it's worth considering as Northanger Abbey is Austen's most exuberant novel, and while it's also definitely the slightest, it's still enough fun that it's worth considering as a person's first Austen. It's also super short - another bonus if you're shy about old books.
It was the first book she wrote, and the last published. It's (often) a satire about Gothic novels: Catherine Morland is obsessed with them, to the point where she starts imagining herself in one. "Someone around here must be a villain," she says: "I'm in a spooky old abbey." Which she isn't really, but close enough. So she joins Don Quixote and Madame Bovary on the list of people who read too many books, but Austen is more forgiving than Cervantes or Flaubert are: this is a friendly book, and everything will be okay.
Northanger Abbey is the only good reason to read Mysteries of Udolpho, by the way. That's the major Gothic Austen affectionately picks on, the one Morland lugs around with her for half the novel, and if you've just finished reading it, like I have, it's almost like you and Jane get to snicker about it together. Which is great, although honestly not great enough to read Mysteries of Udolpho, because that book is mad boring.
I said this is the slightest Austen, and it is. I was going to say the worst Austen, but that makes it sound bad, which it isn't. The least awesome Austen? Here's the deal: the first half is a pretty fun, typical Austenian time. Catherine visits Bath in search of friends and love, is snatched by the scheming Isabella, for whom she's no match at all; complications ensue. Then she visits Northanger Abbey and blasts into full Gothic heroine mode - where are the secret passages?! she would like to know; this is by a long shot the best part of the book, and I wish there was more of it. And the ending - everything from her departure from the Abbey on - is rushed and not very well thought out at all. The common accusation is that it doesn't "hang together," and come on, it totally doesn't. Which is particularly surprising from Austen, because at her best she's a meticulous plotter.
So: the least of Austen's books, and possibly the best introduction to her. *shrug* I don't have to make sense, I'm on the internet. Emma is my favorite, but it's also one of her longest. I also tell people to read short, punchy Macbeth before better-but-longer Lear or Hamlet.
Edition Notes: I have the vaunted Coralie Bickford-Smith edition, and the 47-page introduction to it is boring and lame. Look, she spends like five pages talking about the literary value of the "Radcliffean heroine" (that's Udolpho) and you can't really take her seriously here, because Radcliffe is a bullshit writer. This is not the first time I've been bored by a Bickford-Smith edition's intro, and there's also the depressing translation choices Penguin has made for foreign works - recycling Rieu's outdated prose translation of the Odyssey, for example. One starts to wonder whether these editions aren't made more for people who like looking at pretty things than for people who like reading books....more
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