First of all, Aias (the title in my edition) is Ajax - Big Ajax, the hero of the Trojan War. There, I saved you from "who the fuck even is this guy." First of all, Aias (the title in my edition) is Ajax - Big Ajax, the hero of the Trojan War. There, I saved you from "who the fuck even is this guy." Ajax plays a big role in The Iliad. At one point he defends the Achaean fleet from the Trojans single-handedly while Achilles is off sulking. But after the war Achilles's armor, which amounts to the Heisman Trophy of the war, is given to wily Odysseus after his speech about it proves more eloquent. Ajax is so pissed off that he goes on a murderous rampage against what turns out to be a flock of sheep. (Fuckin' Athena, always getting up in your head: he thought he was killing Agamemnon and Odysseus.) Humiliated, he kills himself.
The play is about, what happens if the person who deserves the win doesn't get it? What if you feel you clearly earned leadership, but it's stolen by the other guy? Do you go on a murderous rampage? Do you burn it all down?
This review is also here, with a bunch of other Sophocles stuff....more
Colson Whitehead broke into the big leagues with this book, which was the consensus best novel of 2016. I thought it was pretty good.
Whitehead plays wColson Whitehead broke into the big leagues with this book, which was the consensus best novel of 2016. I thought it was pretty good.
Whitehead plays with genre. Zone One is about zombies; The Intuitionist is science fiction. Here he's digging into slave narratives. There's a parade of tropes familiar from the literature of slavery: the middle passage, medical experimentation, women trapped in attics. It's exciting and very plotty: this would be a good book to read if you want to be Readin' Good Literature, but you secretly just like exciting stories. I'm not sure there's a whole lot of depth to it. Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (also from 2016, also on every Best Of list) is also a tour of African American themes, but it has more wisdom in it and I think it's a better book.
There's some hoopla about Underground Railroad's use of magical realism, but it's restricted to one thing: the underground railroad itself is presented literally, as a railroad underground. I like that, because when I was a kid I thought that's what it really was. (Here's what it really was; my friend Amani went and took pictures.) But what's the point? It's imaginative, but it's just a mechanism to get us from one scene to the next....more
Gertrude Stein mounted a sustained attack on language from her salon in Paris, where Ernest Hemingway came to learn most of what he knew about writingGertrude Stein mounted a sustained attack on language from her salon in Paris, where Ernest Hemingway came to learn most of what he knew about writing on her knee. Hers was one of the great artistic circles: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso were also part of her dazzlingly dangerous scene. She was a major influence on modernism.
[image] Picasso painted her, too, and here she is.
What she isn't is a very good writer herself - at least not here, in this unsettling, unfriendly, experimental book. (And this is supposed to be her easiest one!) It feels more like a thesis statement than a book, like Stein couldn't possibly have meant it to be read so much as referred to. Hemingway learned his simple language from her, but his big emotions come through readily. Stein's are so obstinately buried that it seems perverse. Hemingway famously said of Faulkner,
"Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."
Gertrude Stein knows the simpler words too, and she seems to be limiting herself to about ten of them. Each of her three characters gets a few descriptors (she called them insistences). Anna "led an arduous and troubled life," in which the widow Mrs. Lehntman "was the only romance Anna ever knew." Melanctha is “graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive," with "breakneck courage." Lena is "gentle" and "patient." These attributes get repeated, word-for-word, over and over, as though Stein is mocking the very idea of writing.
Melanctha's story, the middle and longest one, is the most annoying. (Of course, this means that English professors also think it's the most brilliant one.) Most of the story is Melanctha fighting with her pain-in-the-ass boyfriend, who is boring and won't shut up. She's basically settling for him because he's a doctor, which, like, fair enough but she should just marry him and then murder him in his sleep like a regular person. Melanctha and Jeff have these endless, circular, repetitious arguments, and of course that is exactly what real relationships are like, so...great? But the thing with literature is that I want it to be both true and interesting, and Stein appears to have missed that second part.
Also Stein thinks there's a "simple, promiscuous immorality of the black people," so you're gonna have to hear about that.
The other two are easier to get through, and if you're super into cult landmark lit, go for it. Stein has her fans. Virginia Woolf was one: according to Michael Schmidt,
[Woolf] sets the image of the clock ticking at the heart of fiction: Emily Bronte tried to conceal it, Sterne turned it upside down, Proust kept changing the hands to make things happen at the same time. Stein destroys it altogether, and when the clock is broken, syntax and all the other pacing elements perish with it.
Which actually isn't definitely praise. Schmidt himself resorts to phrases like "patternings of parataxis" to describe her, and here we are with a writer who only uses ten words but requires everyone else to dredge up shit like "parataxis" to talk about them and, y'know, I'm not sure this is a conversation I need to be a part of....more
"Kafka's sister" is how Anna Kavan gets described sometimes, and she shares Kafka's frustration, the feeling that the world makes no sense. One is not"Kafka's sister" is how Anna Kavan gets described sometimes, and she shares Kafka's frustration, the feeling that the world makes no sense. One is not sure how to find what one is looking for; one is not even sure what one is looking for. One is not sure what one is doing, but it does not seem to be going well.
All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.
But "Kafka's sister" feels a little patronizing, doesn't it? Kavan is her own thing, too. Right at the snowy outset, as our antihero drives blindly into a storm and off the precipice of reality, you feel immediately that you're in the presence of something real.
And it is about something. Some people I guess think it's about the Cold War, or heroin, sure, whatever. Ice is slippery. It's, the words of it, it's about an abusive man who can't give up his poisonous, codependent, Wuthering Heightsish relationship. He spends the book stalking his skinny-ass blonde ex-girlfriend through an icy dystopian world ruled by an evil warden. Or maybe it's some other skinny-ass blonde, it's unclear whether it's the same girl or whether he cares. There are dreams involved. At times an entirely other reality just takes over for a while, usually involving the skinny-ass blonde girl dying horribly. He explains that he doesn't have a super strong grip on reality. He's such an unreliable narrator that he can't even decide who he is. Sometimes he seems to be the warden instead. Often he has knowledge he shouldn't. Meanwhile, ice encroaches.
Anna Kavan was a lifelong heroin addict who tried to burn all traces of herself so that she'd become "the world's best-kept secret." This is her most famous book - that's not saying much - written in 1967, shortly before she died. Her protagonist is obsessed with the singing indri, a species of lemur that looks like this
[image]
and sounds like this. It's an eerie song, unsettling, and it's pretty great....more
Last Exit to Brooklyn in the boonies is what Jesus' Son feels like. It's an interconnected series of short stories starring the very down and very outLast Exit to Brooklyn in the boonies is what Jesus' Son feels like. It's an interconnected series of short stories starring the very down and very out in rural Iowa as they stagger through young adulthood. Its protagonist's name is Fuckhead, so there you go.
There's this great confused quality that's familiar to me from my own experimental days, which were much less dire (not at all dire) but, like, in one story they're all having a sendoff party for a friend who's going to jail, and midway through Fuckhead realizes that he has this all wrong, it's actually a welcome home party for the friend who's just gotten out of jail, so the entire story changes on a dime: "Oh shit, wait, that's not what's happening." I remember that sort of thing! Except it was more along the lines of whether we'd eaten all the gummy bears yet or not, so the stakes were a little lower.
I like this better than Last Exit. I like both, but Jesus' Son avoids Last Exit's desperate shock tactics; my problem with that book was that every story basically ended, like, "and then everyone got raped," and it felt a little obvious. Plus I like that "Jesus' Son" is from the Velvet Underground song "Heroin."
The thing with Fuckhead is that he has no self-esteem at all. He feels no shame when he peeps in some lady's window, because he has no shame left. He's made it down to raw animal level. I feel catharsis when I read characters like this, if they're well-done, as he is. I've dipped a toe or two into low self-esteem, at moments in my life. I don't think about it real often, because those were bummer moments. It's nice to understand that others know what it's like way down there where you can't see in front of your face. You don't read stuff like this too much. Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, maybe - Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. But you don't see it often, because it's dark down there. Paradoxically, so, this book feels like a little light....more
Writing is a hostile act, says Joan Didion, not in this book, just generally, that's a thing she says. She clarifies in this terrific interview:
It's
Writing is a hostile act, says Joan Didion, not in this book, just generally, that's a thing she says. She clarifies in this terrific interview:
It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way.
So here she is wrenching around your mind in a basically hostile bummer of a book. Her lead, Maria, lives permanently at rock bottom - high, promiscuous, desperately low on self-esteem and purpose. She seems perpetually one step away from giving up, but the thing about her is that she abides. She's like an empty shell caught in the surf: helpless, battered against rocks with every swell, somehow never breaking. Her ex bullies her into (view spoiler)[getting an abortion - no one's really sure who the father might have been - and it fucks her up even further, (hide spoiler)] but she still abides.
The one thing she cares about is her daughter Kate, and what even is wrong with Kate? She's hospitalized and on methylphenidate hydrochloride, that's like our only clue; that turns out to be Ritalin, which was used to treat depression in 1960. Kate's four, I think, which seems early for depression. I don't know what her damage is.
Maria's an unforgettable, unique character. In the end she makes her only active decision of the book, passively: (view spoiler)[she chooses to keep her friend BZ company, instead of stopping him, as he commits suicide. She ends up, maybe mercifully, in an asylum for it. (hide spoiler)] She lives on the edge of the abyss, eyes locked into the void. "I used to ask questions," she says, "and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is 'nothing.'" This book is something, though. I loved it....more
"Exit, pursued by a bear" is the most famous stage direction in literature. It comes here in Winter's Tale, at the end of Act III, and it's famous bec"Exit, pursued by a bear" is the most famous stage direction in literature. It comes here in Winter's Tale, at the end of Act III, and it's famous because it's funny.
And the really funny thing is it's been a hella dark play until this moment. What happened is King Leontes has become suddenly and irrationally convinced that his wife is cheating on him (like Othello, with some Lear), so he thinks his infant daughter isn't his, so he orders her exposed in the wilderness to die, and the guy who drops her off, Antigonus, immediately gets chased off screen by the bear. It's conceivable that Shakespeare used a real bear. Antigonus (view spoiler)[dies, by the way, the bear gets him. (hide spoiler)]
That stage direction marks a shift: the bear chases tragedy off screen, and brings comedy in with him. Act IV moves forward 16 years and shifts radically into silliness - and porniness, too: the dialogue between Florizel and Perdita is some of Shakespeare's hornier work. A tinker shows up bearing "such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings," and fadings means orgasms and dildos means dildos, so if you're wondering where dildos pop up first in literature it's Aristophanes but here's this too.
Act IV is not really very good: it's confusing, full of characters and subplots that aren't remotely necessary. And that tonal shift is jarring. This is sometimes called one of Shakespeare's "problem plays": the bummer rug gets pulled out from under us when it ends happily, and we're left unsure what to make of it. Queen Hermione (view spoiler)[comes back to life in a Pygmalion moment, and it's not even clear whether this has been magic or trickery. The obvious guess is trickery, but when she died it was implied that Leontes saw her body. (hide spoiler)] And after all, Prince Mamillius (view spoiler)[is still dead of grief. (hide spoiler)]
It's a little unsatisfying. But it sticks with you; it leaves an impression. "I am a feather for each wind that blows," complains Leontes, and the play feels a little like that too. But it's an interesting wind....more
This is called poshlust, an untranslatable word referring to a kind of banal tackiness special to Russia. Here's anoHere's a Russian douchebag.
[image]
This is called poshlust, an untranslatable word referring to a kind of banal tackiness special to Russia. Here's another Russian douchebag:
[image]
The stereotype goes all the way back to 1842 and Gogol's great antihero dandy grifter Chichikov, with his Navarino smoke-and-flame silk frock coat and his violet-scented snuffbox, and according to Nabokov poshlust is the great theme of this book, a definition of an essential theme of Russian character.
[image] Chichikov
That's not what Gogol thought Dead Souls was about. He thought he was recreating the Divine Comedy; a morality tale, with three books corresponding to Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise. He only finished the first one: in one of the great tantrums of literature, he burned most of his draft for the rest and then starved himself to death. Lucky for us, Inferno is always the good part.
[image] Gogol with his emo face on
The fragments that survive of the rest of Dead Souls, like the ending of Crime & Punishment, get a lot less fun in a hurry. This is the thing about tales of redemption: the redemption is definitely not the fun part. But it's the first great Russian novel, and you can see prototypes here for Raskolnikov and Tolstoy's great conflicted landowner Levin.
Book One of Dead Souls, which is about two thirds of what we have, is awesome. Vivid, surreal, funny, almost silly, as Gogol is. He's dead serious under that, of course, as they always are. Here's close enough to a mission statement:
Some wondrous power has doomed me for a long time to walk hand in hand with my strange heroes, to survey in its entirety life that rushes along so massively, to survey it through laughter that is visible to the world and through tears which the world cannot see and does not know.
Unfinished books are always frustrating, and I didn't enjoy the fragments after Book One. But that first bit is one of my favorite reading experiences this year. This is the great epic of Russian douchebaggery. Unbutton the top four buttons of your silk shirt and get psyched....more
The Woman in Black features one of the great haunted houses in literature. It rises straight out of a marsh, flat water in every direction, accessibleThe Woman in Black features one of the great haunted houses in literature. It rises straight out of a marsh, flat water in every direction, accessible only by a spit of sand during low tide. The book itself is an homage to Victorian gothics and set in vaguely Victorian times. (It was written in 1983.) Jane Austen is cited, but it has more in common with Edgar Allen Poe - or even Turn of the Screw - than the giddy Northanger Abbey. It's a ghost story and it features one of my favorite Gothic characters, the sinister governess. It's brief, it keeps the action moving, it has a great dog named Spider, and the ending is fantastic. I needed a spooky book for Halloween and I got it....more
What happens is you look up "top ten horror books" for Halloween and then before you know it you've moved on to "top ten most disturbing books," and hWhat happens is you look up "top ten horror books" for Halloween and then before you know it you've moved on to "top ten most disturbing books," and half an hour later down the internet rabbit hole you're looking at, like, "top 13 splatterpunk books you've never heard of," and the next thing you know you're reading this fuckin' thing and you're like how did this happen? Why am I doing this? This is not my thing. I read seeeerious books. This book is not serious. (Although it is, technically, an exploration of the Faust myth.) This is like one step up from self-published. Why would I even review it? It's like a Hindu reviewing Methodists. Who cares what I think? Look: if you're considering reading this book at all, my opinion is not the one you should be listening to. Read the other reviews. I like Virginia Woolf. I do not like this book and I shouldn't have read it.
It's not at all splattery, btw, and the ending is a catastrophic fail....more
"Alice came out of her room with only her shoes and stockings on," reads an imaginary woman to her inventor in Shirley Jackson's novel Hangsaman, and "Alice came out of her room with only her shoes and stockings on," reads an imaginary woman to her inventor in Shirley Jackson's novel Hangsaman, and I was like oh, what's this now? Well, it's this book right here, an anonymously written 1908 BDSM smut novel.
Obviously I went and read it. It's free online! Hooray, internet. The best thing about it is that the sex dungeon the dude builds to trap the lady in, he calls it The Snuggery, which is just a terrific name for almost anything.
When completed, the 'Snuggery' (as I christened it) was in appearance a distinctly pretty and comfortable room, while in reality it was nothing more or less than a disguised torture chamber!
And now your living room has its Halloween costume. It has like hidden straps in the armchairs and whatnot - "bolts, rings, pulleys, etc." he says helpfully as though you'll be all oh, yeah, totally. Pulleys.
The book is adequately well-written. It's often funny, sometimes intentionally so. Whether you'll like it or not depends entirely on whether you're looking to read BDSM smut written a century ago. If that's your thing, you're welcome. Especially if you're into feathers? There's a lot of tickling, which, y'know, your mileage might vary but I hope it doesn't because erotic tickling is dumb.
Of course it is all very rapey. Rape is most of the plot. Our heroines (there are several) are of course aroused by the rape, which is how things often go in consensual BDSM fantasies. You have probably made up your own mind about how you feel about this sort of thing. It's nowhere near as intense as De Sade's stuff, but it is explicit.
I'm going to go ahead and confess that I didn't read Part II because I was pretty sure I had the general idea. I understand that there is lesbian incest stuff in part II, so...there's...that?
The title, btw, comes from the Bible. One of the wack books, Proverbs.
There are three things which are too wonderful for me, Four which I do not understand: The way of an eagle in the sky, The way of a serpent on a rock, The way of a ship in the middle of the sea, And the way of a man with a maid.
Which, you're like, honestly, that fourth thing you could probably figure out if you tried, right? And also the second thing is pretty straightforward. He's probably just hanging out there. Rocks are warm. WTF, King Solomon.
It's weird and awkward to review porn. Listen, rapey stuff is fine, lesbian incest is whatever, but I draw the line at erotic tickling. That shit is fucked up....more
People talk about the Rabbit tetralogy and they rarely acknowledge the fifth coda of a novella, included in this collection. It's called Rabbit, RememPeople talk about the Rabbit tetralogy and they rarely acknowledge the fifth coda of a novella, included in this collection. It's called Rabbit, Remembered, and it isn't. This is because it's totally unnecessary. It's not bad, it's just irrelevant.
It picks up about a decade after Rabbit's death, and here come some spoilers for this and previous Rabbit books. (view spoiler)[Janice has married Ronnie Harrison, Rabbit's old frenemy and the widow of his end-of-life affair, Thelma, she of the golden showers. Nelson is ensconced in his mundane life as a counselor for the mentally ill. He's estranged from his wife Pru, she of the bizarre Rabbit pity fuck. Annabelle finally confirms that she's his half-sister by Rabbit's fling from the first book, Ruth. Over the course of the book Nelson will tentatively reunite with Pru, Annabelle will reveal that she was sexually abused by her stepfather - this plays no role in the story and I don't know why it's here - and Ronnie will continue to be an unmitigated dickhole. (hide spoiler)]
Updike revisits some of his favorite themes here: oblique references to incestual longing that he likes to drop and then skitter away from, and self-conscious references to contemporary events. (We're in the last days of the 1900s, and "Now the bitch is going to run" says one woman about First Lady Hillary Clinton.) The sex is mostly missing, which of course is sortof a relief since Updike's sex is mostly uncomfortable.
Nelson continues to be basically unpleasant. He's a good character: he means well and he tries, but he is not much of a person. He's small, like Rabbit was, but in a different way; he lacks Rabbit's grudging charisma.
Updike has a talent for seeing these small, unsuccessful people. He lived in Beverly, Massachusetts, where I went to high school and fled as quickly as possible, so I know first-hand that he had plenty of sources to draw on. That's a town of rabbits. It has nothing very interesting to offer, and neither does this book....more
Goethe's breakthrough hit haunted him all his life. Poor guy: it's embarrassing. It's about a young guy around Goethe's age (24), whose name more or lGoethe's breakthrough hit haunted him all his life. Poor guy: it's embarrassing. It's about a young guy around Goethe's age (24), whose name more or less rhymes with Goethe, who falls hopelessly in love with a married woman, like Goethe did, and then mopes about quoting poetry like this:
It is night; I am alone, forlorn on the hill of storms.
Goethe is inventing emo here, and let he who has not written shitty poetry in his or her youth cast the first stone. (Here he's quoting an imaginary author named Ossian, so this is Goethe's poetry but not Werther's.) I can't even begin to tell you how lucky we all are that you've never heard some of the stuff I came up with back in the day.
[image]
Charlotte Buff, Goethe's own Lotte
The thing about Werther is that this book could have been written yesterday. Goethe does a bang-up job of describing the hopeless angst of young love, and the embarrassing excesses that go along with it. Angst is timeless.
Alas, this void! This dreadful void that I feel in my breast! - I often think: If you could press her to your heart just once, just once, the entire void would be filled.
Right? This is some Romeo & Juliet shit here, and I kinda love it. Bummer for Goethe that he wrote the epic Faust but all his life people were like "Lol, that's that emo guy who got dumped." But it's kindof a great book.
Okay fine, you know what, here's the first song I ever wrote. I was 13.
All alone After eight What to do? Masturbate!
And then I just yelled "Whackin' off!" a bunch of times. It was called "Whackin' Off." With hindsight, that's honestly way less embarrassing than Young Werther.
Translation I read the Corngold translation, which comes with an awful but apt Twilightish cover. It reads well....more
Chester Himes brought noir to Harlem in 1957. This is dark, inner-city Harlem:
Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of bla
Chester Himes brought noir to Harlem in 1957. This is dark, inner-city Harlem:
Below the surface, in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts. Stick in a hand and draw back a nub.
That is Harlem.
As you can see, the man can write. His landmark Rage in Harlem combines that writing with a sortof madcap caper story, complete with a gold ore MacGuffin, a femme fatale ("Come on in and kill him, Daddy. I'm all yours.") and a junkie whose racket is disguising himself as a nun. There are some very dark moments - the death of one character is downright upsetting - and some funny ones, culminating in a crazy hearse chase with a corpse lolling out the back and what might be the invention of the "car chase through crowded food stalls" staple. He manages to keep his hands on the reins, just barely.
Himes is building on a Harlem Renaissance tradition that began with books like Claude McKay's Home to Harlem and particularly the work of Nella Larsen, who can make a pretty convincing case for being the first African American noir writer herself. Himes' audacious mix of tones, and the grimy feel of his writing, make A Rage in Harlem feel distinctive and memorable; this is a great book.
"'I ain't done nothing.' 'Den what you runnin' for?' 'I just don't want to get caught.'"...more
Nightmare Abbey is a minor classic of gothic comedy, in the vein of Northanger Abbey. Thomas Peacock hung out with the Shelleys and their crew; his prNightmare Abbey is a minor classic of gothic comedy, in the vein of Northanger Abbey. Thomas Peacock hung out with the Shelleys and their crew; his protagonist here, Scythorp Glowry, is based on Percy Bysshe.
It's slight and short and fun. Peacock is one of those authors who takes pleasure in making sentences and cares less for where they end up. His prose is ornate and sometimes requires reading twice, but it's a short book so it's no big deal. His vocabulary is obscure and sometimes invented; my favorite new word is "antithalian," meaning "opposed to fun or festivity," and which this book isn't. He deploys spectacular images, describing (for example) a novel as "A mass of vice, under a thin and unnatural covering of virtue, like a spider wrapt in a bit of gold leaf, and administered like a wholesome pill." His bouillabaisse includes flavors of Shakespeare,Rabelais,Pilgrim's Progress,Voltaire, and of course Gothictropes. His characters are memorable caricatures. Mr. Toobad constantly intones, "The devil is come among you, having great wrath." Mr. Flosky is a nihilist, gleefully predicting impending entropy. Everyone frequently speaks in play-style dialogue.
The plot is nearly irrelevant. Glowry is in love with two women. He keeps one of them locked in a secret compartment, because why not. Mostly everyone sits around chatting; Gore Vidal calls it a "symposium novel." "We are most of us like Don Quixote," Peacock says, "to whom a windmill was a giant, and Dulcinea a magnificent princess: all more or less the dupes of our own imagination." Peacock has decided not to fight it....more
But everybody has a gun in Dashiell Hammet's first novel (1929). This is one of the most action-packed books I've"Who shot him?" "Somebody with a gun."
But everybody has a gun in Dashiell Hammet's first novel (1929). This is one of the most action-packed books I've ever read, 200-some pages of black cars skidding around corners with gangsters hanging out of them spraying bullets everywhere.
Hammett's weirdly chaste, unnamed protagonist arrives in Personville bringing absolute bloody havoc with him, for reasons even he's not completely clear on. He's not much of a hero: "a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy" by his own description, and usually at least half-drunk. He works for the Continental Detective Agency and is referred to as the Continental Op; he stars in many of Hammett's stories. The agency is based on the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, which Hammett was an alumnus of. Personville - it's pronounced "Poisonville," of course - is crawling with corruption, and the Op catches it. He wants to clean it up, but along the way he wants to kill. There are ways, he thinks, for him to get "the support I needed to swing the play legally. I could have done that. But it's easier to have them killed off, easier and surer, and, now that I'm feeling this way, more satisfying." He loses control so badly that when he's framed for murder, (view spoiler)[he's legitimately unsure about whether he's guilty. (hide spoiler)]
Red Harvest has a sprawling cast of characters and a dizzying plot; if you miss a thread here or there it barely even matters. It's less tight and less good than The Maltese Falcon. It's still awesome, though, supremely entertaining and hard-boiled. Just don't bother to count the bullets....more
"Our own homegrown Borges" is how Ursula Le Guin describes Philip K. Dick, because they both use writing to question the nature of reality. Both write"Our own homegrown Borges" is how Ursula Le Guin describes Philip K. Dick, because they both use writing to question the nature of reality. Both writers assume that everything is up for debate: the story, the page it's written on, the author writing it.
Dick is my favorite of the pack of mid-century science fiction writers. (The "Big Three" of Heinlein,Asimov and Clarke, plus Bradbury,Le Guin and him.) He's best known as a short story writer; of his 44 novels, The Man in the High Castle is his most famous but it's pretty flawed, so when Lev Grossman wants him represented on Time Magazine's top 100 novels of an arbitrary period, Ubik is up.
But who are the characters? What is the setting? Does anyone exist? What time is it? In 2016 I'm reading a book written in 1969, set in 1992, decaying to 1939. Here's a chart. [image]
Here's what happens: (view spoiler)[Joe Chip, his femme fatale Pat Conley, and their whole anti-psionic team are assassinated via bomb by the psi organization Hollis. They are all stashed in cryo sleep, where they can be somewhat communicated with by (among others) their employer and sole surviver Runciter. There they're ambushed by a powerful cryo sleeper named Jory, who manipulates their near-death dreams in order to swallow their souls. (hide spoiler)] Every chapter is basically a twist ending to the chapter before it - this book is like a series of trapdoors - and in the final twist, (view spoiler)[Runciter realizes that he too is dead. They have perhaps all been invading each other's dreams. (hide spoiler)]
Ubik - pronounced like "ubiquitous" - is slippery. Nostalgia is death, literally, and Ubik (in its MacGuffin form, as an aerosol spray) is the new, which might save you - at least temporarily. But why the cynical ads for Ubik products at the top of each chapter? That implies that it's rotten itself. It doesn't seem to work very well, anyway.
This is anticlimactic if you try too hard to explain it. The answer isn't the answer; the question is the answer. (Whee!) It's fun to wrestle all this out, but there's no explanation that totally satisfies. Like Kafka, Dick isn't trying to write something that makes sense. He's trying to point out that nothing makes sense. Reality is subjective and you will never be sure that the one you experience is "real."
So far so Borgesian, but there's a difference: Borges knows he's playing. For Dick the questions are more serious. His major influence is noir, and his books are dark, and when he questions reality he's seriously questioning reality. He doesn't really have a guess. He was beset by hallucinations throughout his life. He believed for a while that he was the reincarnated prophet Elijah. He may have been schizophrenic. He was certainly a heavy drug user. There's anguish at the bottom of his writing. Borges thinks it's neat to wonder what's real. Dick thinks it's terrifying....more
What I like about Everything I Never Told You is that it's about parenting, and that's surprisingly rare. There are lots of books about kids, not so mWhat I like about Everything I Never Told You is that it's about parenting, and that's surprisingly rare. There are lots of books about kids, not so many about parents.
It's a mystery; 16-year-old Lydia dies in the first sentence. So if you're into calling the Gillian Flynn genre "chick noir," which I'm not, you could call this "mom noir" and be similarly wrong, or at least unright. It's just a mystery. None of these books have the tangled plots or breathless prose of proper noir.
It's about parenting and more specifically how bad are you fucking your kids up, and I'm tired of that dumb Philip Larkin poem but here's an aspirational scale I drew up for my friend Carol:
How much you will fuck up your kid not at all--------------a little-------------lots IMPOSSIBLE------AIM HERE-------UH-OH
This book is about uh-oh.
It's set in the mid 70s (thus the jarring use of the word "Oriental") as the children of biracial parents come of age. Marilyn (cauc.) has seen her dreams of becoming a doctor swallowed by motherhood, while James (Chinese) has elevated himself from the son of janitors to a college professor. Each parent wants something better for their children. James wants Lydia and Nath to fit in and have friends, Marilyn wants Lydia to become a doctor. She's uninterested in Nath; neither parent is interested in poor third child Hannah, who is to the family as chicken fingers are to an appetizer sampler at Applebee's.
Anyway, their expectations fuck their children up, and I hope I do at least a little better with my Nath, who's now seven months old. I tell him, Nathan, I look forward to finding out who you are, and helping you become a happy version of that person. Whatever that is, it's cool with me, buddy. I mean, but not a Republican. And your rhythm on those bongos I bought you seems, how should I say this, fanciful. And are you sure you wouldn't rather read this book than eat it? And you don't seem like you're all that motivated to grow any hair, little buddy. I just want a better life for your hair than my hair had....more
"The grift's like everything else. You don't stand still. You either go up or go down, usually down."
The Grifters is a tidy hard-boiled book, dark and"The grift's like everything else. You don't stand still. You either go up or go down, usually down."
The Grifters is a tidy hard-boiled book, dark and twisty and full of existential questions. Roy Dillon is the grifter son of a grifting woman, and the question is whether he's beyond redemption. Can he go straight? Can he fall in love and join the world? Jim Thompson is the darkest of the hard-boiled writers, so you know the odds are against him. But Thompson's also a master writer, so he sets it up cleanly and maybe there's hope.
There's a subplot with a nurse named Carol who's Jewish, and I'm not sure where her sad history fits in. It felt like a tangent, and distracting. That bit had me wavering between three and four stars - that and the fact that I'm starting to have a sneaking feeling like, how many hard-boiled books does one need to read? They start to run together a little, with their bleak sensibilities and twisty plots. I've been assuming that I love noir, but I haven't really examined that; maybe I just like it.
What sets Thompson apart - and he's one of the top five, no doubt - is, again, that he's willing to go darker. There's a torture scene in here that's very nasty; it goes beyond what other noir writers are willing to put on the page for you. I'm not saying that's a pro or con, just a difference. Dillon's relationship with his rough customer of a mom is nuts too: (view spoiler)[it very nearly tips over into incest, just before she murders him. (hide spoiler)] The other book I've read by Thompson is The Killer Inside Me, and I liked that better. But this is solid stuff; if you like noir / hard-boiled books, you'll like this....more
I wanted this to be super fun spy stuff, but it turns out to be an awful lot of men sitting around talking about other men. I had trouble keeping the I wanted this to be super fun spy stuff, but it turns out to be an awful lot of men sitting around talking about other men. I had trouble keeping the characters straight. I found it confusing and static. I didn't hate it - le Carre's a great writer of sentences, and there's a couple scenes of spy stuff that are very exciting - but it didn't make much of an impression....more
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