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(02/28/13 5:00am)
Although I knew she was recently a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel Swamplandia!, I hesitated, at first, to read Karen Russell’s new collection of eight stories. This was mostly out of fear that a collection with “vampires” in the title would be too whimsical, too childlike and too lighthearted for me to take seriously and enjoy. And certainly, the worlds that Russell dreams up in her stunning and beautifully imagined collection do differ substantially from the spaces I tend to favor in fiction. But the quality and emotional force of many of these fictions rank at the top with anything I’ve recently come across.
The stories take place all over the world: in a lemon grove in Italy, and an undisclosed location in late 1800s Japan; in the Midwest during the era of the Homestead Act, in Antarctica, in modern day Nebraska and then finally in New Jersey. What is particularly impressive about this is how real she makes each location feel — the family living out west during the Homestead Act lives in a home that is a “ball of pure earth.”
What’s great about this collection is that the locations themselves aren’t just wonderfully imagined — so are the plots and characters. The title story takes a genre-savvy twist on vampires (the narrator sucks blood only because that’s what the “stories suggested”), and in another fantastic story, “The Barn at the End of Our Term,” a group of United States presidents discover that they have been reborn as horses, trapped on a farm. Russell treats both of these topics with a rare and wonderful humor — literally making this reader laugh out loud.
While just as elaborately imaginative, some of these stories take a much darker turn. “Reeling for the Empire,” the best and most staggering piece in this collection, tells the story of a Japanese woman, Kitsune, in Japan during the reign of Emperor Meiji. In order to help her family, she signs her life over to working in a silk reeling factory. What she is unaware of, however, is that all of the women who go to this factory are made to produce the silk within their own bodies. A special tea that they are forced to drink transforms them into hybrid creatures, “part kaiko, silkworm caterpillar and part human female.” Though unquestionably Kafkaesque, this story’s force arises because of its powerful belief in hope against total despair; in a weird way, this story is outstanding precisely because it is not Kafka.
Interrupting the collection is a long story (56 pages) titled “The New Veterans,” which revolves around Beverly, a selfless woman who works at a massage clinic. In comes a veteran of the Iraq war, Derek, suffering from PTSD from the traumatic death of fellow soldier. The story starts out well enough, and the initial scenes between the two make this reader feel a presence in the story. But, unfortunately, this story drags on and on way longer than necessary. And the consequence is that the ending seems not only emotionally unaffecting, but also long over-due.
But not to worry, for the final, haunting story of this collection, “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” runs roughly the same length but sustains itself both in plot and in language. The narrator, a young boy named Larry Rubbio, discovers an eerie scarecrow tied to an enormous tree where he and his friends (a gang of three other boys nicknamed “Camp Dark”) tend to hang out. Aside from the scarecrows ectopic presence (“A scarecrow did not belong in our city of Anthem, New Jersey,” the narrator thinks), the graveless doll frightens the boys when they notice that it resembles a boy named Erik Mutis, whom the gang constantly beat up in “animal silence.” Suspenseful, honest and funny, this story explores the nature of atonement in a remarkable and unforgettable way.
What links these fascinating stories together, finally, is their entrapment — Clyde, the vampire of the first story, seems stuck in his lemon grove; Kitsune in “Reeling” is trapped in a factory, Rutherford Hayes in “The Barn” is stuck not only in a horse’s body but also in the farm itself, Miles Zegner in “Proving Up, is stuck in the Midwest. Luckily for her characters, and for her readers, these nightmarish situations often move with “the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme;” eerie and despairing for the duration, but ultimately hopeful.
Recommendation: Absolutely read it. It will unlock your imagination, galvanize your feelings and make you laugh.
(02/13/13 11:25pm)
One of the many striking images in Toni Morrison’s slim but forceful novel, Home, involves three men playing scat and bebop in a small smoke-filled room. “Clearly,” the narrator writes, “there would be no musical end; the piece would stop only when a player was exhausted at last.” And though the pianist and trumpet player tire, the drummer keeps playing on and on. When the other musicians realize that the drummer has “lost control” and that the rhythm is in charge, they carry him off the stage, still moving his sticks to a beat “both intricate and silent.”
Upon seeing this, the novel’s protagonist, Frank Money, a 24-year-old African-American veteran of the Korean War, wonders if he too will be escorted away “flailing helplessly, imprisoned in his own strivings.” His worry is appropriate — Frank suffers from what appears to be a form of PTSD, which results in violent outbursts and sudden near-catatonic states. Due to one of these outbursts, Frank finds himself at the beginning of the novel in a mental hospital, without any recollection of what has happened. Flowing from that moment, the rest of the major narrative follows his escape from the hospital and journey toward Atlanta, Ga. where his sister Cee, whom he loves dearly, and who appears to be the only person he has left in the world, lies ill.
This relatively simple plot only occupies some of this book’s attention, though. Morrison divides the book into two kinds of alternating chapters. The odd chapters are written as monologues, spoken by Frank and, interestingly, addressed to the author, or whoever provides the third-person narration of the even chapters. These narrative-based sections follow at different times, Frank, his sister Cee, Lily (Frank’s ex-girlfriend), and Lenore (Cee and Frank’s self-centered and abusive grandmother). While this form is often interesting, it feels jumpy and uneven, leaving Morrison little space to fully develop any one character.
But even if the characters remain little more than sketches, the thematic connection between them is abundantly and brutally clear: terrible suffering, caused by a system built out of economic and racial inequality.
The examples of this are plentiful. For unexplained reasons, Frank’s family, along with all of their neighbors, was forced out of their home in Texas when he was four. Years later, Frank cannot even walk the streets without worrying about all of the ways in which he could be arrested: vagrancy, loitering, or simply “walking anywhere in winter without shoes.” And of course, not long after he thinks this, the police randomly search him and take what small amount of money he has with him. Lily discovers that she cannot buy a home in the neighborhood she wants to live in because the property cannot be occupied by “any person of the Ethiopian, Malay or Asiatic race.” Lenore’s first husband gets shot, and Cee can barely afford to eat. For such a slim book, the sheer amount of human suffering catalogued in here is incredible, painful and extremely difficult to read. It is a bitter and sad novel, and the events that occur within it more than justify and explain that emotion.
Though it certainly feels like the suffering of these characters experience is structural and inevitable, it never proves to be unendurable, and this rescues the book from despair.
In one of the most elegant and moving passages of the novel, the narrator writes that although the sun above Lotus, Ga., sucks “the blue from the sky” and tortures its landscape, it is “constantly failing to silence it.”
In a way, this applies to the striking image of the drummer who keeps drumming: he does not represent helpless flailing, as Frank initially thinks, but endurance. If the characters come to understand anything at the end of this novel, it is precisely this capacity to continue living.
As far as delivering this thematic message, Morrison’s novel succeeds. But despite the power of this book, there are some problems that might be worth mentioning, if only because they might steer one away from this novel toward another Morrison masterpiece.
In comparison to her other books, the language in Home feels depleted and anemic, and that counts equally, as mentioned earlier, for the character development.
Though the novel displays a change in the characters, the lack of depth renders the changes less amazing.
This is an especially painful flaw for Home because of how moving the changes seem to be.
Recommendation: If you’re going to read Morrison, I’d suggest either Song of Solomon or Beloved.
But those are fairly long novels, so if you’re looking for something shorter, but still distinctly Morrison, then Home might not be a bad choice.
(11/29/12 5:59am)
Both Flesh and Not collects 15 of David Foster Wallace’s multiform nonfiction pieces, including essays and book reviews published between 1988 and 2007. Although most of these essays do not demand to be read in the same way that essays in Wallace’s earlier collections do — this reader recalls fervently reading “Getting Away…,” “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” and “This Is Water” — there are a number of gems in this collection that are thought-provoking and great reads.
Many of Wallace’s best essays, like the examples above, fall into two separate but never totally distinct categories. There are Wallace’s overflowing, catalogue essays that more or less feature a giant eyeball, as Wallace described it, floating around a scene and describing everything possible. In this collection, one truly finds only one such essay: “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open.”
Here, Wallace explores the 1995 U.S. Open, and he frequently deploys his characteristic descriptive tactics to enliven the event. One finds poetic exaggerations like “air so clear you can almost hear the sun combusting,” and the typically dark humor: Wallace, looking up from the bottom of a stadium, sees stands “so vertiginously steep that a misstep on any of the upper stairs looks like. It would be certain and hideous death.” He writes in this essay with frequent contractions, sprawling footnotes, and an absence of a single guiding thesis. This style amazes the reader because it displays the structure not only of Wallace’s mind but also the way the world sometimes feels overwhelming and abundant.
Wallace describes this feeling as “Total Noise” in “Deciderization 2007 — A Special Report,” which falls into the second category of essays, which like “This Is Water” are generally serious and overtly philosophical. Beginning as an introduction to Best American Essays 2007, “Deciderization,” in meditating on nonfiction’s job to decide what to represent, veers into a discussion of practical philosophy about what it means to have freedom and be an adult in the contemporary U.S.A, where other “Deciders” are constantly choosing what ideas we should be exposed to. “The real measure of informed adulthood,” Wallace writes, consists of “acuity and taste in choosing which Deciders one submits to.” He finds a ray of hope in the postmodern condition’s pre-chosen reality because one can still learn to winnow and triage, to have the freedom of choice.
One of Wallace’s last nonfiction pieces, “Federer Both Flesh and Not” represents a marriage and perfection of these two kinds of essays; although still a catalogue, this essay eschews the humor Wallace relies on in his other essays in favor of a more serious and reverent tone. At certain times the essay reports on the final 2005 Wimbledon match between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, and at other times attempts to explain just what is so incredible about Federer.
For Wallace, Federer interrupts the “dogma” of power baseline tennis, playing with “consummate finesse” and beauty that he finds not only uncommon but genius and “ineffable.” The essay concentrates on the extreme minutia of tennis and Federer’s game, and although this might be less interesting for a non-tennis-loving reader, his descriptions are precise, and they expand out toward a more general sense of aesthetic awe.
As for the other essays in this collection, many will only interest those particularly captivated by Wallace’s writing. Of the five book reviews, Wallace’s review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress illuminates the novel in the most interesting and intricate way. This review in particular shines a great deal of light on Wallace’s hope for his own fiction. “The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2,” though somewhat dated, observes the trend, only now fully realized with Michael Bay, for post T2 films to entirely focus on F/X while ignoring plot.
The too-short and highly-relevant final essay of the collection, “Just Asking,” considers a post 9/11 problem of freedom, and is an elegant final conclusion to this collection, which is full of essays that ask readers to think so deeply and profoundly. Although this collection rarely hits the emotional pitch that some of Wallace’s fiction does, fiction that makes “heads throb heartlike,” it does excogitate with both lucidity and profound belief. Each essay is, in Wallace’s words, a “quantum of information and a vector of meaning.”
Recommendation: For Wallace fans, this is a great read and a neat and clean way to carry around essays that most have already read. If you’ve never read Wallace before, though, I recommend reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again instead. I can almost guarantee it will make you want more.
(11/29/12 5:51am)
Two major problems of rhetoric occur when a contemporary director chooses to put on a Shakespeare play. One problem concerns the comedy itself; what an audience found funny 400 years ago may fall flat today. But, surprisingly, this particular issue rarely plagues Professor of Theater and Women’s Gender Studies Cheryl Feraone’s As You Like It. A mix of Ben Orbison’s ’13 well-timed physical humor as Touchstone and Christina Fox’s ’13.5 intentionally over-articulated lines as Rosalind served to enliven a cliché comedy.
The second rhetorical problem (and this unfortunately presented greater, though not crippling problems for this performance) concerns the language. No matter how well the actors speak and understand the lines, an unfamiliar audience must pay extraordinary attention in order to understand plot and jokes. Despite these actors’ competent locution of Shakespeare’s English — Sarah Lusche ’13 as Celia performed particularly well in this regard, speaking the lines with both fluency and comprehension — demanding this extra attention for two and a half hours seemed excessive, especially for a generation and audience so accustomed to constant entertainment. Here, I do not condemn difficult and time consuming works of art; rather, I expect a greater reward at the end of such work. And quite frankly, Shakespeare’s often-interchangeable comedies do not quite provide that recompense.
The plot of the comedy involves brotherly conflict, an exiled Duke, a court-and-forest opposition, a woman dressing as a man and a ridiculous amount of marriages. Sound familiar?
The strengths of this solid performance did not lie in plot. Nor did they lie in an artistic unity of set, plot and costumes. The set of this rendition struck me as rather beautiful in its simplicity: an abstract single metal chair that changed, later, to a swing, and scores of white umbrellas floating from the ceiling jellyfish-like, reminiscent of Magritte paintings. But this design unfortunately added nothing to the thematic interpretation and was, at times, dazzling to the point of total distraction from the play.
This went double for the fascinating costumes, co-designed by Artist-In-Residence Jule Emerson and Annie Ulrich ’13. The beautiful three-piece suits, vintage dresses and capes all suggested an early 1900s Edwardian silhouette, but, again, this had nothing to do with the plot. They were, however, impressive. All of the costumes adhered strictly to a palate of beige, cream and brown, with dark green and copper accents, but somehow they seemed elegantly profuse, a kind of bland near-decadence that was unified rather than needlessly restricted by the colors. For such a limited color scheme, the sheer abundance of various outfits was miraculous.
But it is too bad that more was not done to marry the text of a comedy with World War I and Dada costume and set design; post WWI disillusionment cannot and does not speak with what is fundamentally, by definition, a comedy.
Speaking of dissonance, one should also note the unnecessary plethora of singsong in this play. Moments when characters suddenly broke into dance or song felt divorced from the play, separate in an almost alien-like manner. Aside from this being highly confusing, I found the singsong pointless, never once working with the notion of revelry which we are supposed to feel in the forest scenes. And how, I ask, can one take singsong seriously in a play anymore? Television has satirized this to a point at which it’s impossible to enjoy it smirklessly. This criticism comes despite, again, formal beauty in the singing, and a stunning orchestration of such a large group of people.
What did hold the play together, though, were some of the smaller details: Oliver de Boys’s (Teddy Anderson ’13.5) eerily realistic black eye and dirtied suit, the blood on Orlando de Boys’s (Jake Connolly ’13) arm and the acting itself. Although Fox seemed to struggle in the early scenes to find a way to match her words with her actions, her later scenes, often when paired opposite Connolly, were riveting, funny and tension-filled. Fox had a way of suddenly and dynamically switching from romantic and swooning to formal and reserved that fit her character perfectly. Connolly played his part, reacting to such dynamics, with sincerity and believability to counter her volatility.
That is not to mention Daniel Sauermilch’s ’13 sassy, haughty interpretation of Duke Senior, which was unexpected and somehow perfect. Orbison’s Touchstone, mentioned surpa, was also unexpected, funny not just in lines but in body humor. Though Touchstone became shrill at times, Orbison’s physical humor, particularly mimicking Charles the Wrestler, was masterful.
(11/07/12 11:32pm)
This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz’s latest work of fiction since his widely-acclaimed, Pulizer-Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, consists of nine beautifully interrelated, confessional short stories. They do not disappoint.
Most of the stories occur at different points in the life of Yunior, a Dominican who immigrated to the United States at an early age. As one can gather from the title, these stories illustrate the capacity for men to act horribly and disrespectfully in relationships. The first story, “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” begins with this confession from the narrator: “I’m not a bad guy. I know how that sounds — defensive, unscrupulous,— but it’s true. I’m like everybody else, weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.”
This is an honest account of Yunior, who cheats on and sleeps with as many women as he can. And while the reader feels a certain disdain for this character, Yunior’s self-deprecations and deeply honest lamentations elicit well-deserved sympathy. Perhaps the crescendo of the collection comes as Yunior, astounded by the depths of his own “mendacity” finally calls himself a coward, and believes without doubt that his previous girlfriend did the right thing in dumping him.
Make no mistake, though, this collection, imbued with regret and loss, provides little redemption. As the title suggests, these stories involve losing women, not gaining them back. Diaz displays a great talent in this collection for pinning down that horrible, tension-filled moment when you realize your relationship is dead or dying: “your heart plunges though you,” he writes, “like a far bandit through a hangman’s trap.”
Constantly on the periphery, and sometimes in the center spotlight, Diaz explores problems of race, and coming to America from the Dominican Republic: Yunior often mentions the racism that immigrants encounter with a horrifying casualness. Living in Boston later in his life, he writes without commentary or reflection “on the walk home a Jeep roars past; the driver calls you a … towelhead.” The insouciance with which the narrator drops these details reveals the frequency of such moments.
While these are all sad stories, the reader can rely thoroughly on one thing to carry him through to the end: Diaz’s language. He writes with a beautiful, unaffected blend of Spanish slang and elevated English; describing Pura, a woman whom his brother is dating, Yunior writes: “guapísima as hell: tall and indiecita, with huge feet and an incredibly soulful face, but unlike your average hood hottie Pura seemed not to know what to do with her fineness, was sincerely lost in all the pulchritude.” Diaz’s sentences have an immense rhetorical authority, written neither for flare nor flash, but just because this is how the language speaks itself.
The other stylistic trait worth noting is Diaz’s habit of narrating in the second person singular, “you,” used in four of the nine stories, totaling about 84 pages. This technique both gives off the feeling of an older narrator chiding his younger self, (“You , Yunior, have a girlfriend named Alma,” one story begins), and at the same time addresses the reader, assuming that he too has committed these acts of selfishness. While Diaz deploys this POV to near perfection, more naturally than one might imagine possible, he overuses it too, limiting its oddness and, in this reader’s opinion, testing his audience’s patience.
Another complaint concerning an element of style: Diaz relies heavily on a voice that tells and does not show the stories; rarely does he build up pieces of a scene. Similarly to the use of second person singular, this technique has its benefits, the natural conversational feel. But it also reduces some narratives to wispy, fleeting memories, as light and sheer as one girl’s tank top “that couldn’t have blocked a sneeze.”
But with overwhelmingly beautiful sentences and descriptions, like “shiny ice that scars the snow,” and with such deep and precise engagement with the difficulty of relationships and race in the U.S., these problems are hardly the defining characteristics of this strong and honest collection.
Recommendation: This collection isn’t a must read, but if you like Junot Diaz, or have any interest at all in race in the U.S., or if you feel particularly strongly about relationships, I fully suggest it.
(10/25/12 5:08pm)
D.T. Max’s revealing and compelling biography of the writer David Foster Wallace comes at a time of surging popularity of Wallace’s writing and new academic analysis of his work.
Wallace, tragically, ended his own life in September of 2008 after a long struggle with depression and an inspiring literary career. His foreshortened body of darkly brilliant work at the time of his death consisted of two essay collections, two other nonfiction books, three short story collections and two novels, one of which, Infinite Jest, is considered by most to be his magnum opus and one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century. In 2011, Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, was published to great acclaim, receiving a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Despite the relatively small body of work, critics have consistently named him the greatest writer of his generation.
Given the excitement surrounding Wallace, it should be no surprise that fans have long awaited Max’s biography. Luckily, Max’s book seems to have met the enormous expectation surrounding it, which is, I should add, no small accomplishment.
Drawing on Wallace’s letters, interviews, essays and novels, Max depicts Wallace as a fascinating, dynamic and truly pathetic figure. Some of the most interesting moments of this biography provide little glimpses into his life, some sad and disturbing: his hospitalizations for previous suicide attempts, or his moments of uncontrolled rage, like when he, deeply enraged by his then-girlfriend, walked outside and punched his fist through a car window.
But the biography also illuminates some less grim details behind his books, like a copyright debacle that preceded the publication of his first short story collection, Girl with Curious Hair, or the strange cover of Infinite Jest. Max provides these details with great care and, for the more challenging moments, with great sympathy and understanding.
As most literary biographies do, this one ties moments of Wallace’s life, settings and characters, to the novels and short stories. Members of Wallace’s MFA class appear in his short story “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way;” a man from a halfway house in Boston in which Wallace stayed appears in Infinite Jest, as does his mother, in the form of Avril Incandenza.
D.T. Max also pairs moments from Wallace’s life with their corresponding instantiations in his novels: the beginning scene of Infinite Jest, in which Hal Incandenza has a “breakdown” during a college interview, comes from an interview Wallace had with Oberlin College as he was applying there.
As with this scene, Max often describes moments of Wallace’s life by simply quoting the descriptions from his novels. These comparisons are prone to reducing fiction to nothing more than autobiography, but Max deploys them with such elegance that they rarely, if ever, impoverish Wallace’s writing or underplay his imagination.
But while all of these details are enriching and important, the real strength of this biography lies in its agenda. Max has a very clear, and largely helpful, interpretation of Wallace and his work. For him, Wallace began with a “quintessentially metafictional mind,” writing his first novel with a picture of Pynchon above his desk and The Crying of Lot 49 on his mind.
But as Wallace grew older, he began to see postmodern fiction as unhelpful and cliché, co-opted by media itself. Thus, according to Max, he began searching for “fiction that surmounted television-mediated reality.”
The final product of Infinite Jest was just that: “In Infinite Jest, Wallace was proposing to wash Pynchonian excess in the chilling waters of DeLillo’s prose and then heat it up again in Dostoevsky’s redemptive fire,” says Max beautifully.
In his mind, Wallace went from a clever postmodern writer to one concerned with morality and spirituality and redemption, an “apostle of sincerity.” This interpretation, although somewhat limited and flawed, ultimately proves convincing.
The ending of this biography is heartbreaking. The last chapter of the book ends, as Wallace wrote in The Pale King, with the “abruptness of a coastal shelf.” In spite of this, Max tells a powerful tale, one that this reader found nearly impossible to put down.
This biography is truly fitting for such a beloved writer, and Max, through his own emotional engagement with the story, seems to have found a kind of redemption in Wallace’s life, which is, in Max’s view, something we should all try to see.
Recommendation: If you’re an avid reader of Wallace, this is a must read. But if you’ve never read him before, go read his commencement speech online. It will change your life.
(10/10/12 9:15pm)
The occasion for this review of Don DeLillo’s historical tour de force Libra, first published in 1988, is its beautiful reprinting in the Penguin Ink series. In a wise attempt to make books worth purchasing, as opposed to the ever-more-popular (and purportedly environment-friendly) e-book, Penguin has hired tattoo artists to create gorgeous, inspired covers for some of their classic novels. With an artfully drawn cover, sturdy, expensive and deckle-edge paper, this edition of Libra makes a convincing argument for purchase.
But this new edition’s physical beauty should not, ultimately, persuade you to purchase this novel. For judging this book by its cover would woefully underestimate its power and sheer aesthetic force.
The plot of the novel follows and reimagines the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, from his childhood in the Bronx, to his military service in Japan and his defection into Russia and finally to his fateful return to Texas, where he assassinates JFK. In alternating chapters, DeLillo also envisions possible members of the conspiracy, plotting toward the final moment of assassination, which DeLillo refers to as “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.” The novel has an eerie feel to it precisely because of this alternating structure. Throughout the novel, it becomes difficult to tell which moments, which images and which people have been invented, and which have not.
DeLillo, although strangely still obscure, is one of the greatest living American novelists. His other books explore a wide range of American themes, like road trips, Rock n’ Roll, football, the CIA, college, baseball, New York city taxis and 9/11. Among his 15 novels, four could easily be considered masterpieces: White Noise, Libra, Mao II and Underworld.
What is both odd and great about DeLillo’s corpus is that all of these novels concern themselves with a similar set of preoccupations and themes, including language, media, crowds, images, pictures, watching, history, names, secrets, conspiracies and connections. Somehow, DeLillo does this without ever seeming repetitious or obsessive. Libra discusses most directly the force of history and conspiracy and the inevitability of connections, but one can always spot the recurrent themes. For example, Carmine Latta, a casino owner, comes under surveillance by the FBI and suddenly discovers that he not only has FBI watching outside of his home, but, absurdly, “sightseers come to the street where he lives to watch the FBI watching Carmine.”
But mediation and watching, which were central points in his previous novel White Noise, only show up tangentially. This novel speaks of history, and connection: one character, a conspirator, informs the other, “I believe there are forces in the air that compel men to act. Call it history or necessity or anything you like.” Another character, plotting to use Oswald to assassinate the president, plans to create a “fabric of connections.” This belief in history as a connecting force seems to motivate the characters of the novel, who are all struggling to merge their lives “with the greater tide of history.” The reader watches in amazement as all of the different characters do indeed merge together in history, connecting in a single assassination plot.
DeLillo’s themes are only half of the equation. His oft-praised style, at once both musical and colloquial, represents some of the best writing in the English language. He focuses not only on the assonance and alliteration of words, but also on their “architecture.” One can find this even in a simple half-sentence: “Beautiful auburn glitter at the bottom of a glass.”
The precision within this single sentence imbues the language of the entire novel.
By itself, the plot of Libra should fascinate anyone interested in America and its history. Add in DeLillo’s preoccupations and nearly superhuman style, and one finds an awe-inspiring novel, one that not only demands to be read, but reread. In his new introduction to the novel, DeLillo writes that “some stories never end,” and that these stories seep into “the very texture of everyday life.” So long as this book remains in print, whether in Penguin Ink or e-book form this story will constitute the texture of everyday life for each of its readers.
Recommendation: Read it immediately. Let yourself slip into the “assassination aura.” It will be better than almost any novel or textbook you’ll need to read for class.
(09/26/12 2:43pm)
Jonathan Franzen’s new collection, Farther Away, gathers together 21 highly readable essays, originally published between 1998 and 2011.
The essays cover a wide variety of topics — ranging from birds and the environment, technology and the death of Franzen’s friend, the writer David Foster Wallace — that obsessively repeat themselves. The title essay combines these recurrent themes into a single, beautiful essay, which is easily the most compelling nonfiction writing in the book. In it, Franzen recounts a dangerous journey he made to Masafuera (“Farther Away”), an island five hundred miles off of the coast of Chile.
Motivating the journey was Franzen’s deep sense of boredom and frustration after he completed his latest novel, Freedom, as well as the desire to retreat to an isolated location and properly deal with the recent death of his close friend.
Carrying with him only the bare supplies to live and navigate on the island and a copy of Robinson Crusoe (the novel that inspired him to try his luck alone on an island), Franzen hoped to escape from his ever present Blackberry and see the Masafuera rayadito, a songbird native only to that island.
Although the essay is at times humorous — he arrives at the island prepared with a tent only to discover the comforts of a refugio (a well-stocked wooden cabin), which he humorously becomes unable to refuse — the tone of the essay is unmistakably serious, meditative and, as is customary with Franzen’s fiction, angry.
At times, the beginning and purpose of novels becomes the topic, and at other more impressive moments, the sadness and fury that accompany Wallace’s suicide. In these moments, Franzen comes off as truly furious; at one point, he claims that his friend’s suicide was “done in a way to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most.” These sentences are both painful to read and shockingly honest.
In the wake of this moving essay are pieces covering, more specifically, its individual themes. In “Pain Won’t Kill You,” which was originally a commencement speech, Franzen perceptively comments on technology’s “commodification of love,” a subject that he explores further in “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” Both explore that extreme difficulty love faces in the contemporary world, and they convince the reader to reconsider the significance of technology.
But Franzen’s more impassioned writing concerns birds and the environment. Two of the longest essays “The Ugly Mediterranean” and “The Chinese Puffin” (around 40 pages each) investigate the environmental and aviary atrocities in China and Malta. In particular, these essays feel journalistic and documentary-like, making them by far the most informative and shocking. Little did I know that bird-hunting and the consumption of songbirds as a delicacy is both rampant and illegal in the Mediterranean. Here Franzen displays a gift for effectively and humorously quoting interviewees. Whendiscussing the status of anti-bird hunting laws in Malta post-EU-membership, Franzen quotes one man who said that “the situation has gone from being diabolical to merely atrocious.”
Aside from the essays on birds and technology, a formidable chunk of this collection, nine essays totaling about 75 pages, consists of book reviews. Some focus on contemporary writers like Alice Munroe and Donald Antrim, but most consist of, in Franzen’s own words “pleas for underappreciated writers,” whose works are invariably older. These reviews, while interesting at times, are neither urgent nor convincing. Despite the reviews’ immense readability — Franzen consistently writes clearly in both his fiction and nonfiction — I found myself, like the narrator of “Father Away,” a little bored.
But for me that is not the real problem with these essays. The greatest difficulty with reading Franzen is his tireless anger and pessimism. It seems that, regardless of subject, Franzen discovers some new and innovative way to be outraged. Even worse, this attitude is intentional; in the first essay of the collection, Franzen admits that “Whatever I most hated, at a particular moment, became the thing I wanted to write about.” I find it challenging to recommend over 300 pages of hate-motivated prose.
Recommendation: Unless you really like Franzen, or you’re looking for some insight into his novels (“On Autobiographical Fiction” reveals a great deal behind the writing process behind the National-Book-Award-winning novel, The Corrections), I do not recommend buying or reading this collection. I do, however, suggest reading the title essay, which you can find for free on The New Yorker’s website.
(09/18/12 2:35am)
When Stephen Greenblatt was an undergrad at Yale University, he stopped by the local Co-op and, browsing through some unwanted and cheap books, he discovered a prose translation of Lucretius's two thousand year old poem, "On the Nature of Things." He purchased it for ten cents.
Greenblatt begins his brilliant and fascinating new book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, with a similar anecdote of discovery. He recounts the journey of Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary and humanist who, in the winter of 1417, traveled to a monastery looking for ancient manuscripts. There he rediscovered, by accident, one of the last known copies of Lucretius's text, thus preventing its disappearance into oblivion.
It is the bold thesis of this book that this moment, the rescue of "On the Nature of Things," caused a "swerve" in the course of history, urging Europe into the Renaissance and the Early Modern period. According to Greenblatt, Lucretius's poem, written in 50 B.C.E., had this history-altering and "dismantling" effect because of the dangerous ideas that the poem contained, including the existence of atoms and the idea that the universe lacks a creator or afterlife. The release, spread and percolation of these concepts, so argues this book, profoundly altered the way the world thought.
It might sound absurd to suggest that a single poem could cause such a profound ripple effect. Greenblatt's book reminds the reader of a classic superhero movie, except here, it is "one text that saved the world." But Greenblatt's thinking is not all that strange, and it in fact follows one of the most significant movements in literary criticism in recent years, New Historicism. A scholar practicing this method of criticism often focuses on reviving and discussing a little-known writing or anecdote, making the resuscitated document the center piece in an analysis of a more famous Early Modern text. Such a writer also attempts to show that history does not simply influence texts, but that texts influence history. This book is the ultimate New Historicist tale, written with the same style as the criticism, but less obscure.
The Swerve does not simply explore the profound implications of the poem on history, though; those fascinating and ultimately convincing details that show where exactly the text influences writers and thinkers lie in the back 80 pages of the book. The first 180 pages of this book, barring the anecdote discussed at the beginning of this review, involve historical context: the world in which Lucretius wrote "On The Nature of Things," the tragedy of lost texts in the ancient Roman world, the Christian attempt to smother the Epicurean philosophy, information about the humanists, bibliomanic monks copying old texts, the nature of printed scrolls at the time Poggio rediscovered Lucretius, Poggio's life as a secretary to a corrupt pope. Though these details sometimes seem tangential, Greenblatt consistently manages to connect his commentary to the initial anecdote of Poggio's journey, using the information to paint a powerful story.
If this kind of world isn't compelling to you, there are still other reasons to read this fine pop-New-Historicist accomplishment. For one thing, Greenblatt showcases some gorgeous prose; in describing, for example, why Poggio may have been grasped by old texts, it was because they "were not texts but human voices." He also manages to find and exploit a great deal of humor during the course of weaving his story, referring to the corrupt anti-pope as a "thug, but a learned thug."
Aside from his elegant prose and wit, Greenblatt also frequently makes use of his powerful imagination. Because of the rampant absence of information on his subject, Greenblatt is often forced to conjecture about the details of his story. The reader frequently notices words like "perhaps" and "could" and "might have been" peppering his work. The constant speculation, far from revealing a lack of research, makes the reader remember how little history has been preserved, and how important the imagination is in any work of writing.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book, and the biggest reason you should read it, is the contagious enthusiasm that Greenblatt has for all things literary. He writes with not only passion, but with unstoppable love for and fascination with his subject. In an interview with Charlie Rose about the book, Greenblatt mentioned, with a smile, that he was thrilled to have learned on Amazon that Lucretius was, briefly, the third best-selling poet in America. You could tell that this kind of resurrection was his dream all along.
Recommendation: Definitely read it. Or read anything by Greenblatt, for that matter, especially if you're looking for inspiration for writing an academic essay.