2013, Thus Far: Cat's Cradle, The Marriage Plot, and A Visit From The Good Squad

2013-01-05T00:29:00.001-08:00

Humble Reader, hello again.

I started the year with several days off from work (I'm tech support over the phone - you know, the ones that get abused for personally stopping people's internet from working. We're just that evil [note the sarcasm, please]), which I spent sitting around in a park, finishing off some books I had started last year.

Cat's Cradle (No. 590) by the illustrious Kurt Vonnegut was originally something my boyfriend Scott and I were reading together at night; but had to be given up and set aside for several months. I found the plot to be too scary to even think about at night, and swiftly attempted to forget it.

In short, Cat's Cradle is the story of a narrator, John/Jonah, who is working on a book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped. Fictional scientist Dr Felix Hoenikker is labelled 'the father of the atomic bomb', so John focuses on this man and his human reaction, if any, to that eventful day by attempting to contact the deceased Hoenikker's three children, Frank, Angela and Newton.

After making contact with Newt, John travels around America, and spurred on by his love for the girl Mona and the sudden release of the whereabouts of the eldest Hoenikker son, Frank, from a newspaper article, John then travels to San Lorenzo, the small island written about in the article; and finds himself travelling with Newt and sister Angela Hoenikker.

San Lorenzo's people follow the Bokononist religion, an odd faith made up by Bokonon, a man who came to the island years ago with his friend McCabe. McCabe and Bokonon agree to outlaw Bokonon, making the people happy (somehow) at the time. This practice has been upheld through the years; the current president of San Lorenzo, Papa Monzano, continues the farce of the outlawed Bokononism (despite being a follower of the religion along with everyone else on the island). For whatever reason or another, as Papa dies, he swallows the chips of Ice-Nine; a new compound of water made by Dr Felix Hoenikker and split up between his three children.

Ice-nine works on the premise that the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen in ice could be rearranged to form a crystal of structure such that its melting point is much higher - which of course, when released through Papa Monzano and through the touch of others, wreaks havoc upon the planet.

The novel is not Vonnegut's best, in my opinion; having read Slaughterhouse Five in the sweetness of a time when Scott and I were just starting to be interested in each other, my opinion is biased towards SH5 (he gave it to me to read). That being said, Cat's Cradle is very funny in parts, and thoughtful in its ideas on religion and science. My main discomfort with CC is that it's just too likely to happen someday; the premise is not so strange that we could toy with atoms in such a way that their melting point would change. As a previous scientist, this of course makes the plot much more likely to me than "oh the Russians are at it again, and now we're all dead" (no racism meant here, my apologies), or "we've been invaded by aliens and now everyone is dead". I guess what I mean here is that it's far more likely something simple might be the end of the world, and this is scarier than a nuclear war that has been announced or going for a while (a la WWII which became nuclear at the end); or by aliens invading somehow in another complex plot. The simplicity of the idea makes it the scariest, and here Vonnegut succeeds.

Don't pursue this one at night, humble reader.

The Marriage Plot (No.5) by Jeffrey Eugenides is the third novel by one of my most recently dubbed favourite authors. Having read Middlesex (No. 79) last year and finding it to be perfection on a page, I entered TMP with high hopes...and of course, came out disappointed. Note, spoilers ahoy.

The novel follows a love triangle between Madeleine, an Arts major with a focus in Victorian lit., her boyfriend Leonard, a biologist with clinical depression, and her friend Mitchell, a misogynistic religious major with an extreme case of unrequited love for Madeleine.

This book has been reviewed as many things. I won't even go into the plot like I did for Cat's Cradle above, because that paragraph there just about says it all. The ending makes the entire book not really worth it, although there are some good points about it. I'll explain.

Originally, whilst reading, I couldn't stop raving about this book. Scott was driven crazy on it, and I begged him to read it after I was done. The intense amount of story here meant that reading 10 pages didn't feel like an accomplishment in amount, but an accomplishment in time of story experienced. No sentence was unnecessary and all furthered the plot; not a lot of description here. Eugenides remains top of the game here and still very deserving, in terms of his craft, of his Pulitzer win. I would read a takeout menu that he had authored, and still be delighted in his talent.

That being said, he's got three major plots all going here, with too much he's trying to discuss all at once. Different parts of the novel are narrated by each of the three different characters. While Leonard gets to narrate only once, it felt to me that the character least seen or felt was Madeleine, who seems initially irritated with any offence made towards her by any character, but then immediately forgives them, unable to stick to her guns at all. Of course, with each of the three narrators, their different focuses arise - Mitchell's religiousness, Madeleine's literature and Leonard's experience with depression and his biological science. On top of all these are the themes of Madeleine's lacking sense of self and her dependence on Leonard though he is not good for her; Leonard's clinical depression and his family life that lead to the diagnosis; Mitchell and his problems with women. Finishing college and being lost, not knowing where to go next or what direction you're headed. Family life in all it's forms.

With all of this hanging in the balance....well, there's no balance to them. None of these themes deliver on plot. The 'majors' if you like, of each character, are mostly involved through reading lists and name-dropping - not that this was a problem at first, but when Eugenides finally goes in depth on anything - Mitchell's faith, for example - it stops before he finally gets somewhere. Maybe this is meant to reflect the characters making small breakthroughs at a frustratingly slow pace.

I felt Madeleine didn't have any guts; Mitchell ended up being a pain in the ass who had pined for this girl for so long, to no avail; and Leonard had left without a trace. The obvious David Foster Wallace homage for Leonard was too much to bear as the novel continued; but by the end, perhaps Leonard's silence for the finale, having hidden in a log cabin in the forest with an old friend, never to be heard from again, was a sweet way of explaining his view on DFW's death. Mitchell finally has his chance with Madeleine, and discovers he doesn't want her, AND he doesn't want his religion. What was the point of it all? Surely a person can tell they are unhappy in a degree before they have finished it? (I realise here I am being hypocritical, but at least I got out in time).

The point is, for a book about a marriage plot - the woman with one man for the majority of the book, only to fall into the arms of the other who has loved her all along - it got turned on its head completely; and being a girly fool who thought Mitchell could learn his lesson (and being attracted to his odd attire), I assumed he would finally be successful in Getting the Girl. I guess Eugenides' message here is that the marriage plot is out for good and we shouldn't expect it to be a big theme anymore.

In short, this one left me confused and I'm not certain it should be on the 1001 list at all. I should've just stuck with Middlesex.

To finish; the book I completed today: A Visit from the Goon Squad (No. 4) by Jennifer Egan. Another Pulitzer winner, and an interesting story behind her career; but a book that was a bit here and there.

Goon Squad is written with the idea of taking snapshots of people's lives at different points in time; and this idea is really beautifully done. The book is simple, and quite giving; Egan's writing is elegant again in the simplicity the whole book purveys. It's not a showing-off style piece of work; I imagine she never aimed to win awards for it, but she has. I loved the different styles - the powerpoint really got me - and the obvious changes in voice and tone for each character. It's just that some of the characters are assholes.

Not that they were always assholes, mind you. I imagine that the chapter based on the majority of the characters at school - Bennie and Scotty, Rhea and Jocelyn and Alice in the Flaming Dildos band - being first physically within the novel, would have made this book easier for me to understand. I've seen the reviews so I understood it was about jumping around in time; it was just a little hard to follow how all the characters knew each other. In this, it was not so seamless.

I'm not a big fan of short stories, or collections of short stories. But this felt like a wonderful exercise in limitless creation of characters in any time period possible, in any place on Earth. And every chapter ended in such a way that I felt immensely satisfied with a full arc of story for that person's time period. One chapter is hauntingly beautiful (Robert's chapter) in that the character is introduced only once, and then dies; it's tragedy rippled through me and the sense that only one chapter indicated the life not-yet lived, in just a few pages shows how masterful Egan's prose can be.

This being said, I found Lou to be awful at first - but the first chapter you get of him is towards the end of his life. The playfulness of the book's structure made me uncomfortable in the notion that my first impression was often wrong; the same can be said for Bennie and then Scotty's characters.

The mere story of Egan's winning the Pulitzer - an author who has been around since 1995, with several novels before Goon squad, finally winning a prize she probably didn't expect, for a novel not written specifically with 'Pulitzer' in mind (cough, Franzen, cough); makes the book even more mystical and superb. Reading it in one sitting was so satisfying too; because I felt like there'd been a whole series of lives lived and ended that I had just experienced all at once, in parallel. The book's 300ish pages makes that experience all the more exciting, and just continues to point to my main conclusion: I will be seeking out Egan's previous works and devouring them soon.

Sorry for the intense wall of text, gentle reader. Currently reading list includes The Life by Australian author Malcolm Knox (a recommendation from Scott); Ring for Jeeves by PG Wodehouse, and Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov.
Until next we meet, poor tired-eyed reader.

Beginnings, and Lists

2013-01-04T20:24:00.000-08:00

Humble Reader,
Greetings internet, it is me again. I've tried this before but my personal life remains dull and haphazard for writing entries about. However, books never fail to make up for this lacking, so the aim here is to jot down my thoughts in a place a little more private than my Goodreads page; in the hope that when my brain finally rots away from so much television (or listening to shameful music, which will not be divulged here - cough, sad, now ironic, but much loved 90s classics, cough), I will have a record of what I once thought.

The following link has the full list of every edition of the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Eventually Drop Off the Planet and Cease to Breathe series, now numbering around 1300 books that have ever graced those pages. I'm using that one as my guide here for a lot of the stuff I get through on the commute to work and under certain trees in the city.

http://www.1morechapter.com/projects/1001-list/

Beginnings are always the hardest, eh?
Bec

Oh, This Old Thing?

2013, Thus Far: Cat's Cradle, The Marriage Plot, and A Visit From The Good Squad

Beginnings, and Lists