9/21/09 - Into The Wild

Watched Into The Wild over the weekend. I haven't read the book but now I'm basically a ravenous slavering book-craving monster after watching the movie. I thought that the movie had its flaws but the central tragedy is really present throughout.

I immediately put the book on hold at the library, but in the meantime sought out the Outside magazine article that Jon Krakauer originally wrote. In the year after I finished teaching, when I started really getting into non-fiction after a lifetime of exclusively reading fiction, Krakauer was one of the authors that gave me the entryway. He's justly famous for the harrowing Everest disaster account Into Thin Air, but it was his also-heralded followup to that book, the true-crime and Mormons tour de force Under The Banner of Heaven, that really sunk the claws in me. Both books I thought were exceptional, but what Krakauer accomplishes in Under The Banner of Heaven is a riveting mix of social history and individual tragedy.

So it's somewhat surprising I didn't pursue him back to Into The Wild then. I think it's because, having dabbled benignly in outdoor pursuits, the tragedy of McCandless's short life was too painful to look at directly. Even through the fictional prism of the movie I find it a tough pill to swallow. I can only imagine the loved ones in my life had I disappeared only to die inglourious and alone - but then, that's a sharper realization now that I'm older.

As Krakauer observes about his own younger self, regarding a similarly foolhardy Alaskan expedition that he took when he was McCandless's age:

"At the time, death was a concept I understood only in the abstract. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts."

http://outside.away.com/outside/features/1993/1993_into_the_wild_1.html

9/3/09 Infinite - Jest, pages 500-700

1. Randy Lenz. Good Lord. Wallace may not uncork a lot of narrative thrill-rides, but as I've written about before some pieces of this book could be made into some pretty intense short stories. Along with the horror of Hal's discovery in the microwave, James Incandenza's father shearing his knees off, and Joelle's overdose, add Randy Lenz and the Curious Incidences of the Animals in the Nighttime. Brrr. For a book without much overarching narrative drive, the shorter contained narratives can get pretty white-knuckled at times, as they do with Lenz's noctural adventures. Reading sections like this is kind of like seeing those early Picasso paintings where one realizes that he can paint realism that he wants to. It puts the cubism into context - makes the aesthetic choices seem more deliberate. Or listening to Jack White shred the guitar and then going back and listening to White Blood Cells. For a book whose overall plot is either static or vaguely non-existent, the micro-plots and character arcs can get pretty gripping.

2. Tonally, the mixture of menace and comedy of the A.F.R. is a pretty complicated cocktail. Wallace does a really masterful job of building them up as a threat, even though as a concept they're pretty ridiculous as a terrorist group. In some ways, Wallace's strengths as a humorist come from his ability to wield a certain deadpan tone of narrative voice when approaching patently absurd situations. In his fiction, he's able to lay out absurdities as he sees fit, and the A.F.R.'s danger/menace cooexists uneasily but effectively with their comedy. I particularly like the oft-repeated assertions that really, the only thing they fear is hillsides. It's a Monty Python touch for an organization that proves, in its murder of the Antitoi brothers, to be completely serious and brutal. It's a delicate shifting point, that murder of the brothers, because for so long Steeply and Marathe have been all talk, no action. We get the suggestion that the A.F.R. should be feared - the sound of the squeak, and all that, but it's played mostly for comedy. But when the broomstick comes out, it's like Wallace is pulling back the curtain on the comedy and saying hey, you know how it's really funny to have a terrorist organization with mostly legless members? They're still a terrorist organization - i.e. terror and fear are indeed their weapons.

3. The Crooner Johnny Gentle section (which we see through Mario's history film) ascending to the presidency is another place where the tone of the book shifts pretty abruptly. Despite all of the literary pyrotechnics, for the most part Infinite Jest seems to try to capture real people and real personality types - there aren't many flat, cartoony characters despite its occasional trips into satire. Gentle, though, really is more of a cartoon; more a collection of tics than anything resembling a real person. The picture that's painted is a kind of funhouse Reagan, I guess; with his history of artifice as a singer and the kind of intimidations-beneath-charm that seem vaguely Reaganesque, Gentle comes off as as Reagan moved to logical extreme. I think what Wallace is trying to do here is to draw out the American tendency to deify celebrity. The daily doings of Ben, Jennifer, Brad, Robert Pattinson, etc. etc. etc. are the subject of much ink (electronic and otherwise) and care, and for some reason celebrities exert an enormous gravitational pull on American culture and its members. I'm hardly immune - why should I know about Matthew McConaughey playing the bongos naked on his front lawn and get arrested? I have no idea, but I do. Gentle then is the logical extreme of this tendency to value celebrity as currency - he is put in a position of power by virtue of his celebrity, and allowed to run amok. I'm not sure what Wallace is suggesting by the fact that Gentle seems to be such a shrewd and ruthless negotiator, though. The whole execution of the Concavity/Convexity plan is like the way the CIA sees itself operating - coldly, efficiently, and for the National Interest (as opposed ot the way they seem to actually operate: blindly, confused, and with the lurching contradictions of any large organization).

4. The book seems unfair to Avril. It's clear that her family has issues with her which results in a fair amount of hostility (Orin demonizes her pretty unmercifully, but Hal also doesn't seem to have the most positive of feelings towards her), but the narration seems to suggest that there is something terrible and off in Avril's treatment of her family. The thing is that her openness to her sons seems genuine, and even though she may take pains to ensure that they know they are loved, it doesn't seem fair from a narrative standpoint to continually insert these suggestions that her love is smothering or somehow solipsistic. As an outsider, it seems to me that Avril is doing the best she can to hold together a pretty screwed-up situation - there are suggestions of infidelity and a certain locking-away-of-skeletons, but these seem like understandable human responses to the kinds of things that have befallen the Incandenzas. Not to mention whatever sadness she has around her life with Jim and his death; that remains unexplored so far. We have a scene from Jim's history; why is Avril's pain obscured and why is she painted as having some kind of sinister life-sucking presence hovering underneath her declarations of maternal love?

5. I love Gately and the Crocodiles. Wallace really dignifies these men that have survived despite everything, and captures something authentic about the way that confused people like Gately can accurately see that beacons of hope and wisdom are often contained within foul-mouthed individuals of seemingly foul countenance. Their sheer cussed tenacity and emphasis on confronting real shit head-on is such a contrast to Hal's fakery when it comes to dealing with real emotions/sadness.

6/23/09 - Infinite Jest, pages 1-80

All right, so what makes a better summer beach book than David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest? Nothing! You can learn new words while you listen to the surf crash on the shore, and if anyone attempts to take your shiny new beach chairs you can beat them off with a book that weighs about as much as a small dog. That's right, this is one intimidating mutha of a book; and, truth be told, I'm thankful that Wallace was able to crank out his magnum opus before his disease got the better of him - he's too good a writer to have not attempted a batshit crazy epic, so God bless him for getting this thing written. It's a doorstop, but it ensures that all readers of Wallace have a north star to guide them by, and it's this attempt of Wallace's to write the epic of modern living, or so it would appear from the reviews, hype, and snippets gleaned from various Wallace interviews.

So, then, how did I come to this book? Like many, primarily through Wallace's non-fiction, which as I've written about previously is simply stunning in its brilliance. Moored to everyday reality, with the events of real life (somewhat) providing a natural grounding force for a towering, towering intellect, Wallace just owns the essay form. The best essayist I've read since James Baldwin, and that means not a lot since I don't read many essayists, but his short-form journalism is simply amazing. Plus, it's accessible. I've only read Oblivion, of his fiction, and while also brilliant, it's a harder read, because Wallace can really get bleak in his fiction in way that he rarely does in his non-fiction. His non-fiction voice quizzical, ironic, questioning. His fictional narratives in Oblivion plunge full-bore into depression, anxiety, confusion, and despair, with a lot less of the humor that characterizes his non-fiction. Granted, he was struggling with some pretty heavy stuff by the time that story collection came out, but it still gave me pause at opening up Infinite Jest.

Well, imagine my surprise then to find that Wallace the raconteur is in full effect in Infinite Jest. He doesn't write comic setpieces in the Confederacy of Dunces sense, but already in the first 80 pages of the book he sets up very vivid scenes of anxiety that are shot through with the kind of ironic good humor that he uses so effectively in his non-fiction. Thus, the scene of Erdedy waiting for a delivery of marijuana is a humor and dread tour de force as Wallace burrows deep in the man's mind, tracing his every attempt at reformation, which always involves throwing out all of his bongs, weed, and smoking paraphenalia, only to have to buy it all again when he is fiending anew.

What's also stands out is Wallace's Jules Verne-like take on entertainment in the future. Published in 1996, which if I remember right is about the time of AOL demo discs spreading the gospel of pay-by-the-hour dialup throughout the land, it's incredible the way that Wallace's imagined Teleputer anticipates the whole laptop/iPhone/Hulu/streaming video axis of constantly available entertainment. Roku came out this year, and Wallace is writing with his usual easy facility about purchasing entertainment online and watching it instantaneously. It makes the whole near future in which Infinite Jest is set seem both more contemporary and more prescient.

The novel also has genuine narrative drive, which is more than I expected from both the stories in Oblivion (which are structured like more-or-less detailed sketches - few of them really hit any sort of climax or rising/falling action) and the usual critical writeups of the book. But Hal Incandenza, Don Gately, the nameless marijuana addict, and a whole host of other supporting characters are all well-drawn - the footnotes are a lot less intrusive than they are in, say "Host" (the essay about talk radio in which the footnotes were visually designated and quite distracting), and all told, reading the book is a lot more straightforward than I expected, even with the requisite alternate future and chronological shifting.

5/9/08 - Jonathan Safran Foer - how precious is too precious?

I missed out on reading Everything is Illuminated when it first came out and got the full-bore hype/critical raving treatment across the media universe (NY Times - "a touching, searing, broiling, fried platter of delicious, delicious musings on the human condition!", etc.), probably because I was insanely jealous of Jonathan Safran Foer. He was in his 20s, living in Brooklyn, and a writer. I was 2 of these things, and seeing someone else achieve a dream that I've had was vexing, even more so because it just provided a counterpoint in the writerly work ethic - Safran Foer had completed a book, and I had not. How dare he?

So out of explicit or implicit protest I gave it a pass. I gave the same pass to Fortress of Solitude by the other Brooklyn Jonathan, for much the same reason.

Once I moved to San Francisco, I revisited Everything is Illuminated, and had to admit that it was great. Not flawless, but certainly great. The great strength of the book, in my opinion, is the character of Alexis, and the way that Safran Foer uses the English-as-second-language effect for humor and pathos. Alexis is a fully realized character, and his reflections on the events of the book are consistently affecting and funny. The account of the awkward dinner scene at the diner, especially, is a tour-de-force of cultural misunderstandings and the embarrasments peculiar to cultural currents crossing and swirling. Not to mention the expertly rendered hilarity of Alex's family dog, Sammy Davis Junior Jr.

An excerpt:
And I still haven't mentioned that Grandfather demanded to bring Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior along. That was another thing. "You are being a fool," Father informed him. "I need her to help me see the road," Grandfather said, pointing his finger at his eyes. "I am blind." "You are not blind, and you are not bringing the bitch." "I am blind, and the bitch is coming with us." "No," Father said. "It is not professional for the bitch to go along." I would have uttered something on the half of Grandfather, but I did not want to be stupid again. "It is either I go with the bitch or I do not go." Father was in a position. Not like the Latvian Home Stretch, but like amid a rock and a rigid place, which is, in truth, somewhat similar to the Latvian Home Stretch. There was fire amid them. I had seen this before, and nothing in the world frightened me more. Finally my father yielded, although it was agreed that Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior must don a special shirt that Father would have fabricated, which would say: OFFICIOUS SEEING-EYE BITCH OF HERITAGE TOURING. This was so she would appear professional.

Masterful. The joke, obviously, is that "Officious Seeing-Eye Bitch" is the exact opposite of "professional", and Safran Foer carries it off with panache. Aside from the comedic aspect of Alex's character, the key function that Alex provides is to remove the authorial-focused myopia that can often grip first novels with a vengeance. At its heart, after all, "Jonathan Safran Foer" looms large as a character, and the work is clearly personal in a way that can prove troublesome to writers. Put simply, an introspective writer from Brooklyn is not interesting as a character, being prone to lugubrious navel-gazing and writerly conceits that are so stale at this point that I now skip the fiction section of certain monthly magazines with regularity. By framing the "Safran Foer" character through the lens of Alex's perceptions, Safran Foer the author is able to deflate a lot of the saggy writer-as-protagonist drag that the base story/plot of the book uses (writer searches for family history, discovers Holocaust terror).


The weakness of the book is that the family history is pretty much just cut-rate Garcia Marquez, and specifically cut-rate One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Example:
THE 120 MARRIAGES OF JOSEPH AND SARAH L

The young couple first married on August 5, 1744, when Joseph was eight, and Sarah six, and first ended their marriage six days later, when Joseph refused to believe, to Sarah's frustration, that the stars were silver nails in the sky, pinning up the black nightscape. They remarried four days later, when Joseph left a note under the door of Sarah's parents' house: I have considered everything you told me, and I do believe that the stars are silver nails. They ended their marriage again a year later, when Joseph was nine and Sarah seven, over a quarrel about the nature of the bottom of the Brod. A week later, they were remarried, including this time in their vows that they should love each other until death, regardless of the existence of a bottom of the Brod, the temperature of this bottom (should it exist), and the possible existence of starfish on the possibly existing riverbed. They ended their marriage thirty-seven times in the next seven years, and each time remarried with a longer list of vows. They divorced twice when Joseph was twenty-two and Sarah twenty, four times when they were twenty-five and twenty-three, respectively, and eight times, the most for one year, when they were thirty and twenty-eight. They were sixty and fifty-eight at their last marriage, only three weeks before Sarah died of heart failure and Joseph drowned himself in the bath. Their marriage contract still hangs over the door of the house they on-and-off shared - nailed to the top post and brushing against the SHALOM welcome mat:

It is with everlasting devotion that we, Joseph and Sarah L, reunite in the indestructible union of matrimony, promising love until death, with the understanding that the stars are silver nails in the sky, regardless of the existence of a bottom of the Brod, the temperature of this bottom (should it exist), and the possible existence of starfish on the possibly existing riverbed, overlooking what may or may not have been accidental grape juice spills, agreeing to forget that Joseph played sticks and balls with his friends when he promised he would help Sarah thread the needle for the quilt she was sewing, and that Sarah was supposed to give the quilt to Joseph, not his buddy, deeming irrelevant certain details about the story of Trachim's wagon, such as whether it was Chana or Hannah who first saw the curious flotsam, ignoring the simple fact that Joseph snores like a pig, and that Sarah is no great treat to sleep with either, letting slide certain tendencies of both parties to look too long at members of the opposite sex, not making a fuss over why Joseph is such a slob, leaving his clothes wherever he feels like taking them off, expecting Sarah to pick them up, clean them, and put them in their proper place as he should have, or why Sarah has to be such a fucking pain in the ass about the smallest things, such as which way the toilet paper unrolls, or when dinner is five minutes later than she was planning, because, let's face it, it's Joseph who's putting that paper on the roll and dinner on the table, disregarding whether the beet is a better vegetable than the cabbage, putting aside the problems of being fat-headed and chronically unreasonable, trying to erase the memory of a long since expired rose bush that a certain someone was supposed to remember to water when his wife was visiting family in Rovno, accepting the compromise of the way we have been, the way we are, and the way we will likely be...may we live together in unwavering love and good health, amen.

Yeah, sure, One Hundred Years of Solitude is great. But its one of those books that can only be written once, because the formal structure matches the central theme in such an exacting 1:1 ratio. Catch-22 is a similar book - great, and stylistically resistant to replication. So the "village" portions of Everything is Illuminated, while well-written, have a grating, imitative quality that the Alex portions do not.

I started reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and found, to my dismay, that Safran Foer attempts the same trick twice and encounters that dread beast: the law of diminishing returns. He again places much of the primary narrative in the hands of a character whose perspective as expressed is slightly off; this time, it is not to create distance from the too-easy trope of writer/protagonist, but to create distance enough to look at the fallout from the destruction of the World Trade Center towers.

A lot of it is effective, as Safran Foer is able to accurately grasp a nine-year old kid's wild mood swings and emotional responses to such a traumatic event (which veer from fantasy to catastrophic sadness and back again, like a compass needle unable to find true north). But there is a limit to this version of the conceit; it's impossible to credit Oskar Schell, the protagonist, with the outsized intelligence that Safran Foer imbues him with. Oskar's peculiar and blinding intellect provides a lot of the humor, but it also continuously yanks the reader out of the narrative by calling attention to his identity as a narrative construct, not a flesh-and-blood human being.

The best of example of this is when Oskar meets an attractive older lady in his search across the city for a lock that fits his dad's key (at least that's what he thinks he's looking for). Oskar's attraction to the lady and his proposal to kiss her are kindly rebuffed, and his longing and disappointment ring true to his age. But then he hands her his business card, which reads the following:

OSKAR SCHELL
INVENTOR, JEWELRY DESIGNER, JEWELRY FABRICATOR, AMATEUR ENTOMOLOGIST, FRANCOPHILE, VEGAN, ORIGAMIST, PACIFIST, PERCUSSIONIST, AMATEUR ASTRONOMER, COMPUTER CONSULTANT, AMATEUR ARCHEOLOGIST, COLLETOR OF: rare coins, butterflies that died natural deaths, miniature cacti, Beatles memorabilia, semiprecious stones, and other things
E-MAIL: OSKAR_SCHELL@HOTMAIL.COM
HOME PHONE: PRIVATE CELL PHONE: PRIVATE
FAX MACHINE: I DON'T HAVE A FAX MACHINE YET

Funny because of the vagaries of interest, and the last 2 lines especially ring true to the 9-year old mind, but "Francophile"? "Jewelry Fabricator"? Sorry, but hell no. Those are cheap jokes by a very literary twentysomething. I don't care how gifted/peculiar Oskar is, there's no way the kid puts "Francophile" on his business card. It turns him from character to construct in an instant, which undercuts Safran Foer's very real mission to come at the tragedy from an off angle so as to better apprehend it.

What most impressive in retrospect then is that he never commits this slipup with Alex in Everything is Illuminted. He makes it seem so easy, so natural to assume that Alex is a real flesh-and-blood person inhabiting a real flesh-and-blood universe that it's a letdown when he can't repeat the trick the second time out.

Wednesday Narrative Post - Disappointments of the Dark Tower

Spoiler Warning: If you haven't read the Dark Tower series and plan to, don't read any of this. A lot of discussion of plot points throughout the first five books below.

I returned my copy of “Song of Susannah” (the 6th book in Stephen King's Dark Tower series) to the library today without even opening it. I felt a little disappointed, both in myself because I don't like to leave books or series of books unfinished, and in Stephen King, because I've felt for 2 books now that the series has been descending in quality like a leaky hot air balloon. This is frustrating, because book 2 of the series (The Drawing of the 3), was so incredibly compelling,
with book 3 matching it and raising the stakes.


I was afraid of this slow decline in quality before I even started the series, though, because of King's stated reluctance to outline his books. It's not a new observation, but this aspect of King's narrative craft tends to lead to 2 things - great setups/plot developments, and terrible, terrible endings. I respect King's belief that the spontaneous nature of writing without the net of an outline leads a narrative down exciting, interesting, paths, but if those paths just dead-end then I think it can have a detrimental effect on the work as a whole. When this work is something like "IT", and the collapsing ending takes the form of the nameless terror appearing as a giant spider and then some sort of cosmic lightbulb (not really that scary), it's kind of a bummer but doesn't completely ruin the suspense and terror of the earlier parts of the book (the haunted house, the evil bird, etc.). What's left on balance is 800 great pages of setup and development, and 200 pages to get through the whole Evil Lightbulb in the Cosmos part.

But this lack of an outline really bites King in the ass over the course of a 7 volume fantasy series. The best long-form works of fantasy are works of nigh-obsessive attention to detail, from the totemic Lord of the Rings on down. And while I don't think it's necessary to create an entire freaking language to play in the long-form fantasy sandbox, I do think that when you're dealing in a multi-volume epic there has to be some sort of long term plan. Otherwise, instead of looking at 800 pages of setup and 200 fizzle, you're looking at 4-5 solid books followed by an epic 2 book long bellyflop into a pool of cement.

The problem is even more exacerbated by the epic length of the Dark Tower. The flaws start to pile up around the halfway point, in book 4, when King steers off of the main plot to give us an extended flashback Roland's youth.

After the high-suspense jolt of the lobstrosity threat that shapes Book 2's narrative drive and the hell-in-a-handbasket ride through the diseased city of Lud in Book 3 (which similarly serves as the suspenseful fulcrum of The Wastelands), King presents a long, unwinding tale of Roland's past that is too bloated by half. Alain and Cuthbert remain shapeless archetypes, even while Roland's character is deepened through his experiences with Susan. The villains are cardboard cutouts; mean and stupid men with tattoos of coffins, a far cry from the seductive and insane Blaine, the mad beating heart of the dystopian city of Lud. Against such colorless villains and allies, the slow pace and texture of the story brings the momentum of the overall series to a halt. It's one of King's patented left turns off the main road, and though as a standalone volume it has plenty to offer, it's location in the middle of the 7-volume epic is really the point at which King's tendency to build and build and build some more when he should start the process of wrapping up starts to rear its ugly head.

Book five doesn't recover the momentum, seeing as how its narrative arc is that of a hybrid Western/mystery and the solution is incredibly dull (the Wolves are mechanical, just like Shardik the bear! OMG!). This leaves the Western, which is servicable, but not particularly interesting, especially since the Calla is another outpost-style town that resembles nothing so much as the setting of the Wizard and Glass. After going to such efforts to flesh out his post-apocalyptic Mid-World, King pulls back drastically to portray 2 books worth of the small town blues. Meanwhile, the details of Mid-World itself, instead of beginning to resolve into a greater narrative, start to just pile up into an unwieldy mess. The structure of the Beams, the cosmos existing inside a rose in Midtown Manhattan, the suggestions of a Chief Malevolent Baddie by the name of the Crimson King: all of these details rob King's imagined universe of its internal consistency as a believable place that works according to its own rules and logic. It starts to come to resemble a cosmic stew of the supernatural.


By the time that a Stephen King book shows up at the end of Book 5, I knew I was done. Sure, sure the 4th wall and all of that, but fantasy breaks enough rules as it is that it paradoxically requires a greater internal consistency and logic in its imagined worlds. The metatextual touch of Father Callahan reading about himself in 'Salem's Lot didnt' give me chill bumps. It made me angry, as it seems the ultimate example of King writing himself into a corner.

As the internal logic of King's Mid-World breaks down, the flaws of his writing start to grate more. Eddie Dean, always speaking as the hepcat cool guy, delivering the wiseass SK lines. No major characters dead. No new major characters added. Sure, they're a traveling band, but the reduction of our cast of heroes to basically the same crew from book 2 onward flattens and constricts the imaginary universe. The narrative flaws begin to illuminate the flaws in charaterization, and the whole series goes south fast.

Compare this to the exquisitely plotted His Dark Materials, for example, where upon the conclusion every action, bit of dialogue, and description, seems to expand the universe and drive the overall plot forward, or to something like Gaiman's Sandman's, in which every digression is spun off of one of the central themes, and the Dark Tower shrinks as an achievement. The fight against the Wolves of the Calla is a b-grade mystery/western that doesn't speak to King's themes of a world moving on. The "Ramadan" chapter of the Sandman, in addition to being gorgeously written and illustrated, is a direct exploration of one of the central meaning's of the word "dream", namely the cost and pain that lies in the space between desire/aspiration and reality. The caliph would rather his kingdom endure in a dream than exist in reality only to be lost to memory, and thus sacrifices the prosperity of the now for the "Arabian Nights" romance of a dreamed Baghdad. This story slots neatly and naturally into the overall arc of the King of Dreams, almost as if Gaiman had (gasp!) outlined it be thus.

King, writing out on a limb, has no such option, and thus I find myself abandoning ship before it sinks even further. I have no faith that things are now on their way to resolving; instead, I fear the Deadlights ahead again.