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Another excerpt from my essay on John Hawkes at The Critical Flame:
Second Skin, The Blood Oranges, and Travesty together form perhaps the most thoroughgoing, radical experiment in unreliable narration in the history of fiction. (Another novel, Death, Sleep, and the Traveler, published in 1974, also participates in this collective experiment, but in my opinion is a less compelling work.) On the one hand, Skipper, the middle-aged narrator of Second Skin, provides this novel, through the consistency of voice he brings, with a more obviously unified "vision" than in Hawkes's previous fiction. On the other, this surface unity is ultimately deceptive, since much of what we need to know about Skipper and the misfortune that assails him must be gathered by reading between and around the words he actually communicates.
An essay of mine attempting to stir up some renewed interest in the fiction of John Hawkes is now available in the the new issue of The Critical Flame.
In a recent interview, Ben Marcus resisted being called an "experimental writer," asking rather impatiently, "Does anyone self-identify as experimental? Anyone?" Apparently Marcus is not much aware of his predecessor, John Hawkes, who once told an interviewer, "Of course I think of myself as an experimental writer". . . .
Open Road Media has published all of Stanley Elkin's fiction as e-books. As part of Jewish American Heritage Month, ORM also decided to host a symposium on the subject of Elkin's status as a "Jewish-American writer." I am one of three participants. My contribution can be found here.
Scott Esposito on reviewing translations:
The fact is that a translator’s job is an incredible balancing act, wherein so many things are considered at once: a different language, a different culture, a different writer, a different public, a different set of editorial and publishing standards, just to name a few. All of these things are bound up in each and every decision that a translator makes—in other words, each and every word in a manuscript. To pretend that these choices are immaterial is to choose ignorance and to do a disservice to both the author and the culture from which a book comes.
Sam Sacks on Pauline Kael:
Kael forged her insights from the moment of viewing, and this naturally set her in opposition to academic and theory-based criticism. The problem with theory, she felt, is that it single-mindedly dictates the right and wrong ways to watch and respond to movies. One school of thought might esteem film for its unique montage quality, another for its trend toward realism – but in either case, adherents of each school are guaranteed to promote mediocre films that fit their theory while dismissing great work that doesn’t.
Litlove on Willa Cather:
Where I think Cather is particularly brilliant is in her use of the frame. It’s a splendid device to have her heroines framed by the witnessing gaze of young male narrators, boys who are more than half in love with her pioneering women, but aware they can never possess them in the conventional way of marriage; our view of these women is enriched because we can see the emotions that distort their narrative image and must decide whether to agree with those male perspectives or not.
Mark Atithakis on Updike's Roger's Version:
Yet the most curious, persistent, and interesting tension in Roger’s Version largely escaped the notice (or interest) of most critics, despite the fact that it’s plainly stated in the book's title: Roger is telling a version of events, inventing the affair between Dale and Esther as an angry acting-out of his bitterness over the chill in his marriage and Dale’s intellectual project, which he finds “aesthetically and ethically repulsive.” Roger’s Version isn’t just among Updike’s most meticulously researched novels---it’s also one of his most ingenious in terms of style, perspective, and willingness to test narrative reliability.
I recently tried for a second time to read William Gibson's Neuromancer, which I have long been told is perhaps the most important contemporary science fiction novel, and for the second time I failed--although this time I did make it to page 85, which is about 50 pages farther than I got the first time.
I was defeated mostly by passages such as the following:
At midnight, synched with the chip behind Molly's eye, the link man in Jersey had given his command. "Mainline." Nine moderns, scattered along two hundred miles of the Sprawl, had simultaneously dialed MAX EMERG from pay phones. Each Modern delivered a short set speech, hung up, and drifted out into the night, peeling off surgical gloves. Nine different police departments and public security agencies were absorbing the information that an obscure sect of militant Christian fundamentalists had just taken credit for having introduced clinical levels of an outlawed psychoactive agent, Blue Nine, into the ventilation system of the Sense/Net Pyramid. Blue Nine, known in California as Grievous Angel, had been shown to produce acute paranoia in eighty-five percent of experimental subjects.
I suppose that this sort of infodumping is part of the admission price in most science fiction, but I confess I have a hard time slogging my way through it, an even harder time actually caring about the "information" once it's been dumped on me. I know that I am eventually supposed to understand what a "link man" is, who the "moderns" are, what the "Sprawl" is, and why "MAX EMERG" is a code being used. That the "Sense/Net Pyramid" is a highly significant sort of thing will become clear. But since the presentation of these things in the pedestrian prose of this paragraph has left me indifferent, I also know I'm not going to be able to muster up much interest when they make their inevitable returns. A passage like this doesn't so much incite my imagination as it does beat it into submission.
Perhaps this kind of interlude would be tolerable if it were just an occasional hazard, but unfortunately in Neuromancer such piling-on of exotic details just keeps on coming. And perhaps I would be more willing to accept that as a necessary part of the "world-building" of science fiction if I could take some interest in the novel's plot and characters, or find some other aesthetic attraction to offset the tedium of the endless exposition, but alas the characters are made of the thinnest of cardboard (limited almost exclusively to their function as devices to advance the story), the "plot" seems just a retread of the Hollywood thriller with its international cartels and conspiracies as objects of intrigue, and the writing itself never rises much beyond the perfunctory--move the characters through their melodramatic paces, offer up the "vision" supposedly invoked by the unfamiliar terms, occasionally pause to feature some snappy dialogue. Finally it seems that the unfamiliar terms and their world-building are primarily what the novel exists to provide, as if the accumulation of the nomenclature in itself is some kind of aesthetic accomplishment.
Maybe I'm asking of science fiction such as Neuromancer something it isn't intended to provide. Maybe "art" is not what draws most of its audience to the genre, and thus I should just leave it to those who do appreciate what it wants to do. I'd still like to think, however, that science fiction can have aesthetic interest that isn't overridden by the need to "say something" about the future (and implicitly about the present), turning fiction almost entirely into a form of cultural criticism.
Somehow this got by me: A whole issue of the journal Hyperion devoted to the work of James Purdy. I'm just beginning to work on a critical essay on Purdy of my own, and I will probably at some point in the near future comment on some of the essays included in this special issue.
At Big Other, Amber Sparks reviews The Bee-Loud Glade, by Steve Himmer:
We believe the book’s simple allegory, until suddenly the allegory is complicated and everything we think we know has been turned upside down. We’re not sure what to root for or how Finch will finish out, and left paging through Thoreau to find the answer. But of course Steve Himmer is writing a very different book than Thoreau wrote, and in our fast-paced, everyone-connected-to-everyone modern lives, he clearly believes in slowing down without shutting everyone out. The life Finch has lived has been another kind of sleep, the dream of self-reliance, and to keep his Eden Himmer has forced him to confront the dishonesty that’s lived at the core of his most precious illusion.
"Bob Einstein" (Matt Rowan) considers St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves, by Karen Russell (Swamplandia):
[Russell] writes stories that don't always fully commit to their subject matter. Her whimsy feels only halfheartedly implemented, like an author who'd prefer to be writing fiction of a more realist bent but who likewise feels as though (s)he is not making enough of his/her creative abilities by doing so. Had George Saunders never existed, I feel like Karen Russell would be a very different kind of writer, as would many who appear in publications such as The New Yorker.
Charles Baxter's stories, as collected in Gryphon, seem to me to epitomize an approach to fiction writing that has become the trademark approach in the era of the Creative Writing program and its "workshop" method of instruction. Whether Baxter has simply become the most consistent enabler of this approach, or might even be a model to which other aspiring Creative Writers turn for inspiration, Gryphon is a virtual sourcebook of the workshop method, and might ultimately be interesting for later readers and critics who want to understand the nature and appeal of this method--although, in my opinion, they will prove interesting for very little else.
The stories included in this volume are not exactly bad, but they certainly are dull. Consistently and surpassingly dull. First and foremost they are dull because they are so formulaic. It is true that Baxter's stories do not emphasize "plot" in the most traditional, drama-building sense of the term, but for this they substitute a more meandering, "slice of life" technique that nevertheless almost always leads to a moment of revelation, understated in the "quiet" manner favored by workshop realism (presumably a legacy of minimalism, but now more a mannerism than an intentional strategy), but a gathering-point of plot nonetheless. In a Baxter story things happen, and they are always pointing to a resolution of the underlying tensions the story has introduced. This sort of slackened plotting so predominates the stories in Gryphon that it quickly comes to seem just a pallid variation on conventional plot devices and settles into bland routine.
Baxter's characters are similarly repetitive, and ultimately seem alternative versions of the same character, however much the superficial circumstances change. Most often, they seem to be just drifting along in their lives (so the "drift" in the plotting, of course, is even more directly mimetic); sometimes they are merely eccentric outsiders, other times outright losers; often they are disappointed with their lives (whether they admit it or not), and even those characters who seem mostly content with their lot have experiences that bring out latent conflict. These characters are subject to the revelatory moment or episode, usually a realization on the character's part about the state of his/her life, to which the stories are leading. Usually the revelation adds up to the fact that the character is, well, drifting, disappointed, conflicted, etc.
Both Baxter's habitual mode of plotting and characterization could no doubt be called "quirky," or at least this is the overall "feel" of the stories. The characters are off-centered enough and the narratives just nonlinear enough that they can pass for unconventional, but "quirky" has become its own kind of storytelling mode, almost a genre of its own, in both fiction and certain "independent" films. It seems to designate a sufficiently unorthodox approach to suggest such works are to some degree original and innovative, but these "quirky" films and fictions are actually a flight from originality and innovation, a retreat into formal timidity and aesthetic sameness. They pretend to be daring in their choice of character, subject, or milieu, while reinforcing all the unadventurous expectations of narrative transparency that ensure readers won't be alienated by a work that is unduly "difficult." Charles Baxter's stories could be the lodestar of this style of "quirk."
Much of this quirkiness is also, ultimately, sentimental. The characters and their travails inevitably provoke, or are meant to provoke, protective feelings on their behalf, feelings of sorrow or pity for their limitations or of satisfaction at their occasional triumphs. Baxter's stories share in this sentimentality. The first two stories in Gryphon, featuring elderly characters with dementia, lay it on pretty thick, but while not all of the stories are quite so explicit in their heart-tugging, most of them most of them do ask the reader to indulge in emotions that are essentially sentimental. "Surprised by Joy" is an especially egregious example, a story about a couple whose daughter has died. The wife finally seems to manage to find "closure," but the husband still has not, and the story ends with the husband exclaiming "I don't want to be all right" while the wife looks at the beautiful mountains in reawakened joy. "Shelter" concerns a man who takes a sudden interest in helping the down-and-out and brings one young homeless man home with him, bemusing his wife but upsetting his son. In "Flood Show," a man almost drowns trying to cross a flooded river to reunite with his ex-wife, to whom he then confesses, "I couldn't help it. I never got over it." All of these stories take ostensibly strange turns to get to their sentimental conclusions ("Shelter" ends as the protagonist asks his wife to "shelter me" and embraces her), but they are finally just a diversion from the hackneyed tropes and cloying emotions in which the stories habitually traffic.
Often enough the stories attempt to cloak their sentimentality with portentous conclusions. In "Harmony of the World," a failed musician turned music journalist takes on a side job playing accompaniment for a singer whose lack of talent he can't finally keep himself from declaring. The protagonist, who is also the narrator, concludes by reflecting on the fate of souls in Dante's limbo, where they suffer "grief without torment." The narrator observes, "These sighs are rather like the sounds one hears drifting from front porches in small towns on soft summer nights." The bathos of this is overwhelming. The story does nothing to convince us that life in "small towns" rises to this level of grandiosity. (The analogy actually makes it seem rather banal and sordid.) It does convince us that the narrator is wallowing in his own self-pity. In "The Disappointed," a Swedish engineer visits America on business, perhaps to stay on in Detroit as a consultant. Not surprisingly, Detroit provides a virtual reverse image to the protagonist's antiseptic native Sweden, and at the end of the story he is mugged. Leaving the hospital, he "steps[s] out onto the front sidewalk, and to the air, which smelled as it always had, of powerful combustible materials and their traces, fire and ash." One hardly knows what this sentence is supposed to signify. It clearly wants to mean something. The "smelled as it always had" seems to add some pseudo-allegorical implication, but at best we are left with a story of ordinary, even obvious, disillusion elevated into faux-apocalyptic imagery.
This kind of fake profundity embodied in the story's concluding image or gesture is unfortunately yet another characteristic of the workshop story Baxter shares, to the ubiquity of which he has no doubt contributed. Such a device is just "indeterminate" enough to seem appropriately "literary," while managing to simulate a moment of insight that is sufficiently arresting to convince some readers the story must be consequential. In all of the devices that Baxter uses, he works to manufacture this illusion of substance, both formal and thematic. Since I have not found a single negative print review of Gryphon, I have to conclude he is apparently succeeding.
My review of a new biography of Stanley Elkin has now been posted in the April issue of Open Letters Monthly. While you're there, go ahead and read the whole issue, which as usual contains many very intelligent reviews of other books.
Translator Daniel Hahn expresses irritation at the way his work is sometimes regarded:
So what makes me crazy is when the reviewer praises something that I did and gives the impression that I’m not there. By all means compliment the author on the tightness of the plotting, on the deftness of the characterization, and ignore me—they’re supported by my work, of course, but marginally. But a reviewer who thinks he can praise the rhythm, the texture, the beauty of the prose, the warmth and wit of the voice, without acknowledging who’s responsible—as though those things in an author’s original simply reappear automatically after the mechanics of translation have been applied to a text—that’s a reviewer who simply has no understanding of what translation is. There’s a reason the copyright in my translations belongs to me and not the original author. The plot and the ideas and the themes aren’t mine, but the words are, all of them, and the way they all fit together, too.
It seems to me that almost all reviews of translated fiction make the error Hahn is lamenting. They don't stick to what can be discerned of the "plotting" and other structural devices, but move on to make comments about the quality of the prose or the "tone" of voice, without acknowledging that the prose giving rise to the voice has literally been composed by the translator, not the author putatively under review. No doubt some translators do a better job of others at getting us as close as possible to the prose style of the author, but finally the words will be, indeed, the translator's. Too many reviewers make too many facile judgments of translations in which the translation itself drops out, the focus being on features of the author's text the reviewer simply hasn't actually experienced unless that reviewer has read the text in the author's untranslated original.
This is the tragedy of translation: Many of us will read some great books only in their translated versions, and thus we won't finally really know fully what makes them great. It's also possible we might read some rather mediocre books that have actually been made better by their translations.Given the cachet translated fiction seems to have acquired among some readers (its very lack of widespread availability, its lack of attention from the major newspaper book reviews perhaps allowing the devotee of translated fiction to feel one of the enlightened few), I think it likely some translated books of this latter kind are getting more attention than they deserve--under the prevailing circumstances, any new translated work deserves notice. Making authors and their work available through translation is an entirely worthy service, but understanding their limits are also important. We shouldn't make claims about the underlying work--on which the translation is a variation and therefore a new work--we can't possibly validate without in fact reading it.
Nichole Krauss is very worried about the disappearance of bookstores, which are apparently run by men and women of great nobility:
The bookseller. . .was, from the beginning, an innately independent figure, in spirit if not by law. As the availability and variety of printed books increased, the bookseller became a curator: one who selects, edits, and presents a collection that reflects his tastes. To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame. Within that frame, she can decide what she likes and doesn't like, what is for her and not for her.
Bookstores also uniquely facilitate the life of the mind:
A bookstore. . .asks you to scan the shelves on your way to looking for the thing you had in mind. You go in meaning to buy Hemingway, but you end up with Homer instead. What you think you like or want is not always what you need. A bookstore search inspires serendipity and surprise.
Further:
To browse in a bookstore, however, is to explore a highly selective and thoughtful collection of the world—thoughtful because hundreds of years of thinkers, writers, critics, teachers, and readers have established the worth of the choices. Their collective wisdom seems superior, for these purposes, to the Web’s “neutrality,” its know-nothing know-everythingness.
We must assume that Krauss is fortunate enough to have ready access to the kind of bookstore she describes, one managed by a "gatekeeper" with impeccable taste, its shelves full of the great books comprising a "thoughtful collection of the world." For those of us not so fortunate, that is, most of us, Krauss's hymn to the bookstore is laughable.
I live in a university town (the state's flagship university and my alma mater), and one could assume that such a town would contain at least one bookstore approaching the ideal Krauss describes. I can testify, however, that this is most definitely not the case. The campus bookstore is a joke. You can find all of the university athletic paraphernalia you want, but as to actual, serious books, forget it. No "browser" of the kind Krauss invokes would go near this place. Otherwise, there is a sizable Barnes and Noble at the city mall. This B&N is like most B&Ns: you might come in looking for Larsson and find your way to Rowling, but the journey from Hemingway to Homer would be very brief, with few if any side trips available. Anyone who depended on this store to expand his or her intellectual resources would end up destitute indeed.
I can also testify that in this state's biggest city there is exactly one quality "independent" bookstore of the sort partisans of the brick-and-mortar stores like to herald. Here you can occasionally find less-publicized books by worthy authors, but the entire shelf devoted to such books is no bigger than one row of the "Fiction and Literature" section in Barnes and Noble or Borders. The last time I went there I had two or three titles I hoped to find, but none of them were on the shelf. I wound up ordering them from Amazon after all.
For me, bookstores have become completely superfluous, and this is at least as much because they do a poor job of serving readers as because online alternatives are available. I have visited a few bookstores in other parts of the country that were good enough for my needs that I almost might have considered going there in addition to using Amazon or Powells.com, had I lived in Minneapolis or Madison, Wisconsin. But even many of these stores are now disappearing, and I don't see the point in lamenting them. The "know-nothing know-everythingness" of the internet can just as readily be a "know-what-you-want-to-knowness." The "serendipity" that supposedly makes bookstores superior exists online as well. I can actually find out more about a particular book than I can at a bookstore, by looking not just at the information provided at Amazon but by looking at the publisher's site or the author's own site. I can quickly call up a few reviews as well. This makes deciding if I want to read the book much more than the on-the-spot guesswork I would have to do relying only on the bookstore experience.
If Nichole Krauss wants to leave her own decisions to the "curator" who owns the bookstore, so be it, but, given the manifest inadequacies of this curating in most bookstores, I don't see why we should be led to admire her for it.
In a negative assessment of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Biblioklept reports finally giving up on the hope that the novel "might have something to say about American culture and politics in the early 21st century." My own fear in reading this novel, confirmed almost immediately, was that Shteyngart did have "something to say" about politics and culture and thus his novel would be a "commentary" or a "critique" or some other version of "social observation" rather than an aesthetically credible work of fiction. And such it is.
Of course, another word to use in describing a work like Super Sad True Love Story is "satire," and it would be more charitable perhaps to discuss the novel as a participant in this genre rather than as something making a claim to be "art" in the first place, Although certainly the best satire is also the most artful, I would still maintain that satire aspires to be primarily a mode of moral or political discourse, or of cultural criticism, and not an object of aesthetic contemplation. (Some works of literary art, however, do create secondarily satirical effects that add to their appeal, as in the fiction of Stanley Elkin, for example, while other "classic" satirical works take aim at a sufficiently universal kind of human folly that they retain their satirical edge, as in the plays of Moliere.) Satire needs to be aesthetically compelling enough that readers tolerate a message delivered in an indirect way through narrative and character rather than more efficiently through direct discourse but ultimately it is judged by its purchase on the conditions it critiques, not its formal or stylistic accomplishments.
Unfortunately, even by this alternative standard, Super Sad True Love Story doesn't measure up. It is just another of those by now familiar futuristic satires that projects a few years ahead to reveal that current trends have reached a kind of logical conclusion, making the United States into a dying Empire ruled by clueless politicians and unabashed oligarchs, who have brought consumerist ruin on the land and are in the process of asserting class-based tyranny. What Super Sad True Love Story adds to the mix is the portrayal of a society addicted to cyber technology and its own ruinous effect on literacy and its relegation of books to the peculiar few. This will no doubt become a popular trope in later iterations of the dystopian vision, as writers continue to worry their vocation is headed for the dustbin. Shteyngart's narrative makes the predictable points: that the wired world exacerbates our preoccupation with trivia, that it reinforces our tendency to self-absorption, that it enables a passivity the powers-that-be can exploit, ultimately that it makes us stupid.
That these are potential dangers in our use of digital technology seems undeniable, although its potential to do exactly the opposite in each of these effects seems to me equally real. More importantly, the novel seems to exist primarily to point out these dangers, and since I was already perfectly aware of them (as I imagine most readers of this novel are, as well), I found Super Sad True Love Story a particularly unrewarding reading experience. It offers few aesthetic pleasures apart from its oft-invoked theme, and it isn't very funny. (It becomes progressively even less so as the story plods on.) Once you get that the characters are addicted to their "apparatti" (supercharged Blackberries of some sort), which has led to their passivity in the face of the authoritarian rule of the "Bipartisan Party," it's hard to take the rest of the narrative's reiterations of these notions as very "edgy."
The most noteworthy achievement in this novel is Shteyngart's evocation of the "voice" of the protagonist's love interest, a young woman who both carries the burden of the novel's indictment of digitalized culture and becomes its test case in the possibility of transcending that culture. She is presented to us both indirectly, through the protagonist's written diary, and directly through her own "apparat"-powered communications, reproduced dialogically with the protagonist's diary. Shteyngart's mimicry of the verbal mannerisms and patois of a young person wired from birth is compelling enough, although her eventual transformation into a more self-aware and responsible adult is less convincing and makes her contributions to the alternating narrative strands just as dull as the protagonist's. The latter's diary writing is flat and uninspired, and I often found myself impatient to get through it in the hope that the next offering by the girlfriend would be more lively. The protagonist is himself a standard issue slacker whose inability to either go all-out for material success or lapse into a resigned mediocrity accounts more for his holding-on to the printed word than any real allegiance to "verbal" culture. He can't quite bring himself to discard his books and his antiquated writing habits but he wishes he could. Being neither bold nor entirely complacent just makes him seem adrift, and ultimately irritating.
Shteyngart's vision of America in terminal decline, hastened by the technology of distraction, is one shared by Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death. One might almost think, in fact, that the two authors had commiserated with one another over the grim fate they both foresaw and decided to compete for the title of dystopian of the year. Shteyngart probably wins, but only because Super Sad True Love Story so relentlessly pursues its dystopian "vision," its very existence so dependent on the explication of this vision. The Four Fingers of Death, while hardly a work of overpowering originality, nevertheless manages to embody its theme in a formal structure that provides interest in and of itself, to produce comedy that, although it is often satirical, also provokes laughter for its own sake, and to employ language that often enough enlivens the narrative rather than just dutifully carry it along. Whereas I had to force my way through Super Sad True Love Story, I found large portions of The Four Fingers of Death (and it's a 700+ page novel) to be quite entertaining.
One could call the novel a "frame-tale," as we are first introduced to Montese Crandall, a writer who inhabits a United States some fifteen years into the future and who writes a kind of minimalist fiction reductio ad absurdum: "very short, very condensed literary pieces, and by short, I mean very, very short. Shorter than you have probably read in your reading life. More than one word, usually, because one word is too easy, but quite a bit more modest than five score. The three hundred and fifty pages of a novel. . .are a tedious elaboration." Crandall manages to get himself assigned to a "novelization" of a low-budget science fiction film, which he will turn into the The Four Fingers of Death, the narrative that itself then constitutes most of the novel we are reading. The novelization relates the story of a manned mission to Mars undertaken by an American government desperate to distinguish itself in some way in the face of an undeniable loss of prestige and influence and increasing unrest. The mission goes horribly wrong, and a remaining crew member attempts to return to earth. This part of the novelization is related by that crew member, but before he can reach the earth he dies of a disease contracted on Mars and the rest of the novelization relates the aftermath of the mission, during which the atronaut's arm, still living as a result of the disease, wreaks havoc across the land and threatens to infect the world.
The first part of the narrative is the strongest, and not just because the narrator, Colonel Jed Richards, manages to buoy the story through the acuity of his observations and the urgency of his style. Implicitly it becomes obvious that Montese Crandall has discovered the virtues of maximalist storytelling, that what he previously regarded as "tedious elaboration" is something for which he has some talent after all. We are as well surely to note that Crandall has made this discovery while "converting" film into fiction, as if it has taken being confronted with the real differences between the visual storytelling of film and the verbal demands (and possibilities) of fiction for Crandall to understand that fiction is language, not its dissolution. If the story Richards tells is finally not cutting-edge science fiction, just a recognizable SF kind of plot well-told, it is well-told, and the "commentary" on the skullduggery of the American government (the disease brought back by Col. Richards is a bacteria the government intended to use for biological warfare) is not so ponderous as to pull the narrative down into the heavier gravity of explicit satire.
The second part of Crandall's novelization does get bogged down, both by overworked devices such as the extended passages related from the point of view of a language-challenged young male whose every other word is "fucking" ("In fact, Vienna had just fucking called him, in that fucking ridiculously fucking sex voice of hers that sounded like a ten-year old on helium") and by more obviously satirical episodes and plot twists. Jed Richards's disembodied arm run amok in the Southwestern desert gives Moody his opportunity to present his dystopian vision of America hollowed out by corporate, political, and technological overreach and on the verge of a mass uprising of the dispossessed. Some of the episodes are funny enough, including those featuring a chimpanzee who through a scientist's experiment becomes aware of his circumstances in an animal research lab and begins to speak with great intelligence and fluency, but they seem mostly pasted together, the novel's maximalism stretched beyond aesthetic coherence.
One could say that the novel focuses at least as much on the physical fragility of living bodies, the way their limitations always act to check our pretensions, as on the political and economic dangers we are facing. In this way, The Four Fingers of Death offers more than the transient satire of Super Sad True Love Story. But both of these books are pretty clearly motivated by a perception that the United States is currently heading in a destructive direction that could perhaps still be avoided if the warnings signalled through the narratives are duly registered. For those reading these novels who aren't already aware that this country faces dangers of the sort they dramatize, such signals may be useful, but for those of us already quite aware of the ominous portents for American culture we can discern all too plainly, the novels' most fundamental reason for existing at best only reinforces what we already know. Finally nothing in either of them allows them to sufficiently transcend their origins in topical satire that we should want to read them beyond their notoriety as works of satire. The Four Fingers of Death is lively enough to pay off the time spent with it, but certainly Super Sad True Love Story holds little purely literary interest. Like most satires of its kind, it is a self-consuming artifact: once it is no longer topical, it will have exhausted its value.
A very good piece on James Purdy's Cabot Wright Begins:
. . .one can readily understand how a novel like Cabot Wright Begins might be dismissed, but that would be the result of superficial reading. This is comedy at its sharpest and blackest. In terms of style it resides somewhere between the darkest fantasies of John Hawkes and the tendency to whimsy of Donald Barthelme. Take the best of each of those writers, the grotesquery of Hawkes and the satire of Barthelme, and you begin to get a measure of Cabot Wright Begins and, indeed, of Purdy’s work in general.
As I have said before on this blog, James Purdy is an overlooked but important postwar American writer, and his work needs to be rediscovered. I am in the beginning stages of a long-ish critical essay on Purdy's work that I hope might contribute to this process, but in the meantime here is the James Purdy website.
In a recent review, Steve Almond asserts:
. . .novels depend on rising action. Characters can’t just wander and brood. They have to be driven by passionate agendas, and the conflicts between them have to be dramatized.
Why? Why? Why, and Why?
Who says novels must incorporate "rising action?" Can't a novel be written that intentionally ignores this hoary old device? (Such novels have been written, of course. Failing to acknowledge this has to be Almond's way of insinuating that they're not really novels, and a convenient way of dismissing the novel under review without examining the underlying assumption.) What exactly is wrong with characters who "wander and brood"? Surely wandering and brooding characters can be made just as aesthetically compelling as those who. . .whatever it is Almond believe they should be doing.
All characters must be driven by "passionate agendas"? Where does this leave the characters of Samuel Beckett's fiction? Gilbert Sorrentino, some of whose novels barely have characters in them at all? It sounds right to say all "conflicts" must be "dramatized," but who said there must be "conflict" in the first place? Perhaps conflict and drama can help you get your book on the best seller lists, but what if you don't want to write to the lowest common denomimator? What if you're willing to accept the smaller audience and the tsk-tsking of some reviewers? Does this mean you're not really writing a novel, which properly ought to be something that can be made into a movie?
At best, Steve Almond is declaring here that novels with rising action, "real" characters, and "drama" are the sort that he prefers. He is of course entitled to say that. They're pretty retrograde preferences, nevertheless.