I took three months out of my life to wade through Against The Day, and then re-enlisted the very next winter to battle through V., and then Mason & Dixon. And somewhere in there I distinctly re-call getting lost amidst the tangles of Vineland, only to pull myself back out halfway through. I’m a fan of Thomas Pynchon—but I can also recognize a critical fact about him: it’s not necessarily that he’s under-appreciated (those who dismiss his intense postmodernism and knack for writing baroque sentences that span paragraphs aren’t lazy, contrary to the belief of some), but rather that he’s over-wrought. In his a-novel-once-or-twice-every-decade work ethic, there appears time and again the tendency to overwrite, coating the pieces of what are undoubtedly brilliant works with layers of dense academia and imagination that are, at their best, nearly as fulfilling…but that can be, at their worst, more off-putting than some sick love-child of Proust and Joyce. It is then that I, from this unique perspective of a fan in a semi-masochistic love/hate relationship with the author, report that his 1966 novella The Crying of Lot 49 is—all at the same time—his most accessible work, his most piquantly engrossing, and his best.
The period from which Lot 49 emerged was a strange one, in the timeline of Pynchon’s work. It came three years after the publication of his debut novel V., a work justly praised for its dense blending of wit, dramatic meta-construction, and archly-grave sociopolitical commentary, and—reportedly—was released at the very same time the author was putting together the beginning pieces of his most adored novel: Gravity’s Rainbow. So, then, could a reader come to this story of Oedipa Mass’ accidental uncovering of a global postal conspiracy and expect to find intermittent touches of the works that came both before and after? Well, I can’t quite speak to the latter—I have yet to build up the mental stamina for another 700-page trek into Pynchonland—but as to the former: definitely not. Sure, the usually flourishes that mark even his most casual output are seen in both stories (e.g., characters with exceedingly silly names, made-up songs that leap into and out of the central narrative spontaneously) but there the similarities end. V. is a difficult, fascinating mess of a novel; something great was it not so opaque nearly 70% of the time. The Crying of Lot 49 is something else entirely—a mystery compounded by elements of suspense and lurking doom, and written with that rarest of Pynchonisms: clarity of purpose.
In just the 150 pages afforded him between the book’s front and back covers, Pynchon writes something that does so much with so little as to make you, in hindsight (if you’ve had the pain/pleasure), regret the nearly 1000 you spent with the dozens of characters in Against the Day. He’s concise and satirical and stark and descriptive and fanciful and, above all else, entirely certain in what direction the book will lead his readers. Mrs. Mass’ journey is one of tension and self-revelation (she begins as an executor for her old lover’s will, and ends up tracking down the agents for a mysterious continent-spanning cabal), but the author himself seems to have gone through a brief journey (if only to slide back into old ways by the ‘90s). The prose is full of such a grand order of symbolic imagination as to be staggering (a third the way through, the main characters attend the performance of some made-up Jacobean tragedy, and for the next twenty-or-so pages, the entire performance is brought to life, act-by-act, from scratch), were it not so compulsively readable. And if you ever get tired, nestled between every page are the usual wisecracks and inane witticisms, just to remind you: even at his tamest, Thomas Pynchon still sees the American novel as his personal playground. And when he has fun—as he does transcendently, madly, deeply, here—so does the reader.
Showing posts with label Book Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book Review. Show all posts
Monday, April 6, 2009
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Breaking Dawn: B+
"...Reason and love keep little company together nowadays," goes the William Shakespeare quote that pops up not even a fifth the way through Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn -- and well they still don't, in this final volume of her vampiric romance novels; it's due to this resolute lack of the twining between the heart and the mind that most of what goes right in the novel does, in fact, go right. Compacted into a radical new structure (say what you will, negative or otherwise about Meyer's books, but each and every previous installment has been concieved and molded into the same pattern), the plot in Dawn has as many twists and kinks woven into it as Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse put together and the majority are born from that chasm between desire and pragmatic function, and they take flight beautifully, if slowly at first, until any reader would be hard-pressed not to be entranced.
Where we left our heroine, Bella Swan, was in that place where she always seems pre-emptively perched: a third the way to heartbreak, and three quarters down the road to joy -- such is her predicament as the sole human girl in the entire Western Hemisphere privy to the supernatural world of vampires, werewolves, and the like. This time, the perpetrator of her distress is Jacob Black, a local werewolf who also moonlights as her best friend; he's sad because he loves her and she loves Edward Cullen, a vegetarian vampire who also moonlights as the cause of her euphoria.
Whatever: save the fancy gothic archetypes for another plot...this is pure harlequin, a love triangle. Not for too long though. Meyer, affable and enchanting as she seems in interviews, is also capable of learning and growing as an author; she powers through the problem poised by the unrequited-ness of her characters' affection pretty early on, setting herself up with more formidable obstacles. Like Bella's mortality (she's gotten Edward to swear to turning her into a vampire after their wedding...a day, surprisingly, not too far off). And the issue of her BFF's "imprinting" (e.g., a werewolf thing that lets its user unconsciously find and devote himself to the love of his life).
Stuff starts to hit the fan in quick order, and what's more, the action is sliced up into three sections -- two narrated by Bella, with a bridge by Jacob. I'm going to go out on a limb (don't hate me) and say this: Jacob's POV is far more entertaining (or rather, less annoying) than hearing Bella in all of her...Bellaness. (It isn't her fault though, blame schizophrenia: she's been described by Meyer in these collective four books as, alternately, clumsy, affable, smart, reliable, emotional, caring, mediocre, average, controlled, and stubborn. Yeesh.) Plus, another leg up for Jacob is that through him, we first glimpse the pivotal hinge of the entire novel, and through him is Meyer's greatest trick realized; with her werewolf as a perfect bridge, she see-saws tonally (delightfully so, might I add) throughout Breaking Dawn, from Rosemary's Baby to that sex scene on the beach in The O.C. back to a grandiose action sequence that feels very much like The Battle of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.
...Which brings up the most interesting point of all, really: improbable as it may seem, and while always keeping the reader off-kilter with new characters and dire threats at every turn, Meyer has found a way to end her Twilight series happily for all involved. And that's her biggest plus. Her biggest minus is that she does such a superb wrap-up while nary exploring the dark, lushly romantic world she's let pour from her skull. Sales wise, she's the inheritor to J.K. Rowling's throne, but artistically? She has imagination, but no accompanying vision -- there's depth but no richness to the acres of her surrounding white canvas.
I'm quibbling; I'll stop. At the heart of Bella's tale, the primal power its allure, has always been its gooey fairy-tale "Awww," factor. Which I didn't so much love. (Really, though, it was the repetition inherent in Meyer's act of shoving such goo down my throat, that irked me.) What I do love is being guided and tricked, pleased and scared, tensed and saddened -- that's the mark of a true storyteller, folks. And Stephenie Meyer is one, even if she is also a resolute fan of her own coyness. (Sex-less sex scenes? Puh-leaze.) Witty when it gets out of its own way, heartfelt and earnest when it comes to any form of any relationship, unexpectedly creepy -- morbid even -- in all the unexpectedly right places, and perfectly structured from opening preface to final chapter, Breaking Dawn is as apt a title as any for this conclusion. Not because it has much Sun involved (Hello kids! Forks is the Rainy Captial of the U.S.), but because the image is perfect for the career of its creator: huge, meteoric in its ascension, and occasionally brilliant.
Where we left our heroine, Bella Swan, was in that place where she always seems pre-emptively perched: a third the way to heartbreak, and three quarters down the road to joy -- such is her predicament as the sole human girl in the entire Western Hemisphere privy to the supernatural world of vampires, werewolves, and the like. This time, the perpetrator of her distress is Jacob Black, a local werewolf who also moonlights as her best friend; he's sad because he loves her and she loves Edward Cullen, a vegetarian vampire who also moonlights as the cause of her euphoria.
Whatever: save the fancy gothic archetypes for another plot...this is pure harlequin, a love triangle. Not for too long though. Meyer, affable and enchanting as she seems in interviews, is also capable of learning and growing as an author; she powers through the problem poised by the unrequited-ness of her characters' affection pretty early on, setting herself up with more formidable obstacles. Like Bella's mortality (she's gotten Edward to swear to turning her into a vampire after their wedding...a day, surprisingly, not too far off). And the issue of her BFF's "imprinting" (e.g., a werewolf thing that lets its user unconsciously find and devote himself to the love of his life).
Stuff starts to hit the fan in quick order, and what's more, the action is sliced up into three sections -- two narrated by Bella, with a bridge by Jacob. I'm going to go out on a limb (don't hate me) and say this: Jacob's POV is far more entertaining (or rather, less annoying) than hearing Bella in all of her...Bellaness. (It isn't her fault though, blame schizophrenia: she's been described by Meyer in these collective four books as, alternately, clumsy, affable, smart, reliable, emotional, caring, mediocre, average, controlled, and stubborn. Yeesh.) Plus, another leg up for Jacob is that through him, we first glimpse the pivotal hinge of the entire novel, and through him is Meyer's greatest trick realized; with her werewolf as a perfect bridge, she see-saws tonally (delightfully so, might I add) throughout Breaking Dawn, from Rosemary's Baby to that sex scene on the beach in The O.C. back to a grandiose action sequence that feels very much like The Battle of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.
...Which brings up the most interesting point of all, really: improbable as it may seem, and while always keeping the reader off-kilter with new characters and dire threats at every turn, Meyer has found a way to end her Twilight series happily for all involved. And that's her biggest plus. Her biggest minus is that she does such a superb wrap-up while nary exploring the dark, lushly romantic world she's let pour from her skull. Sales wise, she's the inheritor to J.K. Rowling's throne, but artistically? She has imagination, but no accompanying vision -- there's depth but no richness to the acres of her surrounding white canvas.
I'm quibbling; I'll stop. At the heart of Bella's tale, the primal power its allure, has always been its gooey fairy-tale "Awww," factor. Which I didn't so much love. (Really, though, it was the repetition inherent in Meyer's act of shoving such goo down my throat, that irked me.) What I do love is being guided and tricked, pleased and scared, tensed and saddened -- that's the mark of a true storyteller, folks. And Stephenie Meyer is one, even if she is also a resolute fan of her own coyness. (Sex-less sex scenes? Puh-leaze.) Witty when it gets out of its own way, heartfelt and earnest when it comes to any form of any relationship, unexpectedly creepy -- morbid even -- in all the unexpectedly right places, and perfectly structured from opening preface to final chapter, Breaking Dawn is as apt a title as any for this conclusion. Not because it has much Sun involved (Hello kids! Forks is the Rainy Captial of the U.S.), but because the image is perfect for the career of its creator: huge, meteoric in its ascension, and occasionally brilliant.
Friday, June 6, 2008
King Dork: B+
Minor Spoiler Alert: King Dork ends with the line, "Saying nothing." It's in reference to one of the more fascinating (and by fascinating, in author Frank Portman's world, it is of course meant odd, clever, mildly sinister, stoned, and suburban) of the book's characters: the hero's, Tom Henderson, best - and only - friend, Sam Hellerman. The final line is mentioned for the sake of irony; because for the majority of Dork, pretty much everything is said - everything, for the sake of Portman's debut novel, subbing in for complex conspiracy theories, pointed satirical versions of modern high school social hierarchies, day-to-day accounts of survival at the bottom of said hierarchies, and endless riffs on pop culture. (Or more specifically: rock and roll, young adult fiction dating back to the 60s, and counter-culture movies - Rosemary's Baby, Caririe - from around those years as well.) Basically, in the world of our eponymous hero, a lot happens, is discovered, is learned, isn't learned, is egregiously assumed, or flees town. Or some combination thereof.
But all that stuff happens later on. In the beginning, really there isn't much to the world Tom Henderson (aka King Dork, Chi-Mo, Henderson-fag, or, most oddly, Sheepie) inhabits. It's just him, Sam Hellerman, Hillmont High School, and their pretty-much-imaginary band (which, in one of the novel's most intelligent gags, changes names every few chapters or so - from "Tennis with Guitars" to "Ray Bradbury's Love Camel" to "Easter Monday" and so on). In retrospect, what comes to be the fluffiest layer to a pretty engaging treat is captured with the usual tropes; and Henderson himself is a sharply cynical, witty young-ancient protagonist. But after more than 100 pages, it all gets tiresome. Scratch that, after about eighteen pages, it begins to wear thin. There is no particular, solitary, fault. Really it's just that, lacking the angsty heft of something like Special Topics in Calamity Physics, all the verbal wunderkid-tricks and clever satire comes to seem a little aimless, angry.
And then Tom finds his dad's old copy of Catcher in the Rye, and everything starts to change. It should be mentioned that Tom despises (at least for the majority of the novel) Rye. He hate hate hate hate hates it. And the idea that such a flagrant object of his contempt can come to hold so many secrets and fodder for, as he would call it, "a pretty flimsy," if not wholly unimportant, "character arc," is a running theme throughout the book: that things aren't always what they seem, but what they truly are isn't all that different from the illusion you originally held. King Dork holds to this notion pretty steadfastly as well. The reader starts out with the idea this is another overpraised, angrily articulate and intermittently entertaining high school melodrama-athon. But then the reader reads about some cryptic scribbled notes in the margins of the Rye Tom discovered - notes written by his dad, who died mysteriously eight years ago, when he was a child - and their perceptions start to shift. Not entirely, granted, but what once seemed to be aimlessly aggressive, even wearying, becomes a mostly rich endeavor about the life of an entirely too smart, entirely too stunted, hero-mensch.
Portman, for his part, is a marvel: he charts the tortures and travails of his too-insane-to-be-real high schol with consistency, unvailing the darker flairs of his murkier conspiracy with near-perfect timing, Plus his character voices, the majority of which are almost always filtered through Tom's bitter sentimentality, are spot-on. What Dork lacks in early motivation (reader-directed, anyway) it makes up for in the end with sharp humor and a jagged compassion that is at once hard-won and winningly gooey. What happened, or didn't, to Tom's dad may be ultimately of little importance. But the journey he starts on because of it means the world, both for what it sincerely reveals about a teenager's life (e.g., that step-parents can be annoying and likable in the same moment; that assistant principles are usually in league with Satan; that twelve-year old little sisters usually only show physical affection when they cry) and for what cliches it overlooks.
But all that stuff happens later on. In the beginning, really there isn't much to the world Tom Henderson (aka King Dork, Chi-Mo, Henderson-fag, or, most oddly, Sheepie) inhabits. It's just him, Sam Hellerman, Hillmont High School, and their pretty-much-imaginary band (which, in one of the novel's most intelligent gags, changes names every few chapters or so - from "Tennis with Guitars" to "Ray Bradbury's Love Camel" to "Easter Monday" and so on). In retrospect, what comes to be the fluffiest layer to a pretty engaging treat is captured with the usual tropes; and Henderson himself is a sharply cynical, witty young-ancient protagonist. But after more than 100 pages, it all gets tiresome. Scratch that, after about eighteen pages, it begins to wear thin. There is no particular, solitary, fault. Really it's just that, lacking the angsty heft of something like Special Topics in Calamity Physics, all the verbal wunderkid-tricks and clever satire comes to seem a little aimless, angry.
And then Tom finds his dad's old copy of Catcher in the Rye, and everything starts to change. It should be mentioned that Tom despises (at least for the majority of the novel) Rye. He hate hate hate hate hates it. And the idea that such a flagrant object of his contempt can come to hold so many secrets and fodder for, as he would call it, "a pretty flimsy," if not wholly unimportant, "character arc," is a running theme throughout the book: that things aren't always what they seem, but what they truly are isn't all that different from the illusion you originally held. King Dork holds to this notion pretty steadfastly as well. The reader starts out with the idea this is another overpraised, angrily articulate and intermittently entertaining high school melodrama-athon. But then the reader reads about some cryptic scribbled notes in the margins of the Rye Tom discovered - notes written by his dad, who died mysteriously eight years ago, when he was a child - and their perceptions start to shift. Not entirely, granted, but what once seemed to be aimlessly aggressive, even wearying, becomes a mostly rich endeavor about the life of an entirely too smart, entirely too stunted, hero-mensch.
Portman, for his part, is a marvel: he charts the tortures and travails of his too-insane-to-be-real high schol with consistency, unvailing the darker flairs of his murkier conspiracy with near-perfect timing, Plus his character voices, the majority of which are almost always filtered through Tom's bitter sentimentality, are spot-on. What Dork lacks in early motivation (reader-directed, anyway) it makes up for in the end with sharp humor and a jagged compassion that is at once hard-won and winningly gooey. What happened, or didn't, to Tom's dad may be ultimately of little importance. But the journey he starts on because of it means the world, both for what it sincerely reveals about a teenager's life (e.g., that step-parents can be annoying and likable in the same moment; that assistant principles are usually in league with Satan; that twelve-year old little sisters usually only show physical affection when they cry) and for what cliches it overlooks.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
New Moon: B
There are two fundamental notions at work in New Moon that have, in the past, grounded two very different genres of pop culture. The first is the age-old adage that love can come in the most unexpected of places - the saying itself being the obvious harbinger of the romance novel - while the second is that eerily unclassifiable theory of the banality of evil - obviously the surface emblems of such wide-ranging works as American Psycho and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Together, the two flavors intermingle to varying degrees in New Moon, the story of Isabella "Bella" Swan’s love for a baroque and occasionally sullen family of vampires in small-town Forks, Washington. It needs to be mentioned that previous, far better written, mainstays of English literature have approximated the gothic overtone of star-crossed love (Wuthering Heights, Romeo & Juliet) but this second book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series isn’t out to turn doomed love into a soaring, tragic metaphor - when it says it’s a "love story with bite," it means it. Literally.
Moon is, in so many obvious (and some very subtle) ways an improvement over Twilight. For starters, the affectations of a young writer attempting to capture an even younger world (rural high school) are dropped the majority of the time within the pages of the sequel - thankfully allowing a little more of Meyer’s bottled creation to sprawl and breathe. Also, and building upon the just previously-mentioned new amenity, the author brings in practically another whole dozen characters to give her dreary little town life. Yet, one wonders, why would Meyers need anyone to replace Edward Cullen - the youngest of the vampire clan and Bella’s professed true love? After all, both she and her heroine spends hundreds of pages oozing over his perfection, so why only seek to distract the reader from him? The answer is tied into directly what makes Moon a better book, both stylistically and conceptually: the Cullens, fascinating as they are, are removed from the equations. Well...from Forks, anyway.
See, Edward constantly worries about Bella’s safety within his household, and around his brothers and sisters (who all have big, old-fashioned names like Jasper, Rosalie, and Emmett). So when her eighteenth birthday party at the Cullen mansion spirals terribly out of control, he and the rest of his relatives leave town - to save the damsel in distress. See there, though, that’s the catch: in Meyers bewitching post-modern way, Bella would rather risk life & limb than be seperated from her soul mate. She is, though. And the subsequent 300+ pages of aftermath and turmoil give New Moon a healthy jolt. The occasionally oppresive repititions of the young romance at Twilight’s heart aren’t given time to blossom here - angst and heartache do instead - and the empty hole left by our entrancing supernatural family is filled by a couple of surprise guests. After some tricky manuevering, Stephenie Meyers guides her vision into an unforseen twist that’s so catchy, the reader almost forgets the pain of Edward’s absence.
Almost. That’s the second catch, and what will go on to power the final two volumes of the Bella-Edward love story. Since he is so tied to her, and since she is eventually so tied to certain people who despise him, when he returns, certain things do not go well. And though the expected last 100-pages of climax (Meyers does, if anything, structure her books in obsessively predictable patterns) have nothing to do with this animosity - and all to do with a vampiric "royal family" - the aftermath is all but fauning over it. This I can understand. After all, the saving grace of the series is that the muffled, lush, gothic atmosphere of Twilight was finally given room to take (some) flight in its follow-up - the sucess of which is due entirely to Bella’s emerging emotional conflicts between the Cullens, her own mortality, and...well...another pack of super-interesting creatures. So I can completely get behind any attempt by the author to play-up our hero’s turmoil. In fact I welcome it: turning away from these books is difficult to do, but I feel so much better afterwards when they’re actually of measurable, consistent, quality.
Moon is, in so many obvious (and some very subtle) ways an improvement over Twilight. For starters, the affectations of a young writer attempting to capture an even younger world (rural high school) are dropped the majority of the time within the pages of the sequel - thankfully allowing a little more of Meyer’s bottled creation to sprawl and breathe. Also, and building upon the just previously-mentioned new amenity, the author brings in practically another whole dozen characters to give her dreary little town life. Yet, one wonders, why would Meyers need anyone to replace Edward Cullen - the youngest of the vampire clan and Bella’s professed true love? After all, both she and her heroine spends hundreds of pages oozing over his perfection, so why only seek to distract the reader from him? The answer is tied into directly what makes Moon a better book, both stylistically and conceptually: the Cullens, fascinating as they are, are removed from the equations. Well...from Forks, anyway.
See, Edward constantly worries about Bella’s safety within his household, and around his brothers and sisters (who all have big, old-fashioned names like Jasper, Rosalie, and Emmett). So when her eighteenth birthday party at the Cullen mansion spirals terribly out of control, he and the rest of his relatives leave town - to save the damsel in distress. See there, though, that’s the catch: in Meyers bewitching post-modern way, Bella would rather risk life & limb than be seperated from her soul mate. She is, though. And the subsequent 300+ pages of aftermath and turmoil give New Moon a healthy jolt. The occasionally oppresive repititions of the young romance at Twilight’s heart aren’t given time to blossom here - angst and heartache do instead - and the empty hole left by our entrancing supernatural family is filled by a couple of surprise guests. After some tricky manuevering, Stephenie Meyers guides her vision into an unforseen twist that’s so catchy, the reader almost forgets the pain of Edward’s absence.
Almost. That’s the second catch, and what will go on to power the final two volumes of the Bella-Edward love story. Since he is so tied to her, and since she is eventually so tied to certain people who despise him, when he returns, certain things do not go well. And though the expected last 100-pages of climax (Meyers does, if anything, structure her books in obsessively predictable patterns) have nothing to do with this animosity - and all to do with a vampiric "royal family" - the aftermath is all but fauning over it. This I can understand. After all, the saving grace of the series is that the muffled, lush, gothic atmosphere of Twilight was finally given room to take (some) flight in its follow-up - the sucess of which is due entirely to Bella’s emerging emotional conflicts between the Cullens, her own mortality, and...well...another pack of super-interesting creatures. So I can completely get behind any attempt by the author to play-up our hero’s turmoil. In fact I welcome it: turning away from these books is difficult to do, but I feel so much better afterwards when they’re actually of measurable, consistent, quality.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
The Secret History: A-
Comparisons need apply between Donna Tartt's debut 1992 novel The Secret History and Marisha Pessl's debut 2006 novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Both feature, most obviously, the same central character structure: an outsider (in Pessl's case, driven by her intellectual superiority, while in Tartt's, financial inferiority) is driven into a romanticized friendship with a close-knit group of precocious young adults and mentored by a glamorously reclusive (and enigmatic) teacher of some glamorously reclusive (and enigmatic) subject; Pessl chose the far more blithe and witty target of film - an area of study rife with options for her razor-sharp pen - while Tartt chooses Classics (the study of Ancient Greece: language, literature, politics, religous rituals and all), a more gothically enamored choice and one that immediately sets a clear dichotomy between her more grave, more psychological, thriller and Pessl's shinier, swifter-moving, twist.
Still, the unnerving similarities do persist. Both plots eventually deal with murder and both eventually, more or less, turn a sharply-toned eye onto it's own protagonists - striving, and achieving to two wildly different degrees, for an air of moral ambiguity. And, too, both Tartt and Pessl's prose glitters on various occasions with the sheer transcendant light of its erudite capability. As it were, after a thorough early preview of the book (I'd plowed through 200 of the 550 pages), I still found the connections between the two too obvious to pass up; I was all ready to declare Physics a subtle - and silent - deconstruction of History's grave, suspenseful, pretension.
But, and after much thoughtful and slowly-paced narrative and interaction, I came to determine that The Secret History is a far more focused and chilling dissection of the discrepancies between Intellectualism and Romanticism; that is, the many differences caused when the world of six sparklingly Hampden college students is forced to collide with a world dark, and squirming, with conspiracy and betrayal and wrenching introspection.
And it all began with Dionysus.
When Richard Pappin discovers a small Northeastern elite college - the aforementioned Hampden - and subsequently is indoctrinated into a small clique of Greek fanatics (among them: wintery intellecutal Henry; broadly charismatic and callow Bunny; grandly dramatic, and gay, Francis; and the twins - Charles and Camilla - a pair of introverted and "compassionate" humans among such scholars), he is intertwined in a conspiracy to cover the mess created when Henry & Co. try to re-create the orgiastic rites of Dionysus, god of wine and sex. Richard, also the narrator, lets us in on the conspiracy from the first page - when he reveals their murder of Bunny - but much of the novel is spent on the slow build-up of tensions that created such a horrific fiasco and the immediate here-after: how an act affects Richard's new group of friends and himself.
Does it sound slow? Then it is; Tartt has a masterful sense of plot construction (she reveals her hair-line fractures of character and twist with maximum arch drama) but none for pacing and only a modicum of it for characters (though the entire group has more individuality than Ms. Pesshl mustered for the "Bluebloods"). Still, History has a slow-burn chill that seeps into you and - in the daring final 100 pages of never-ending climax - finally grabs and shakes you to the core. The epilogue has a jolting clinical style but this debut has a cutting clarity of purpose and confidence that, when it was finally revealed, hit me like a blast of cold, steely, well-written and textured talent. Bravo.
Still, the unnerving similarities do persist. Both plots eventually deal with murder and both eventually, more or less, turn a sharply-toned eye onto it's own protagonists - striving, and achieving to two wildly different degrees, for an air of moral ambiguity. And, too, both Tartt and Pessl's prose glitters on various occasions with the sheer transcendant light of its erudite capability. As it were, after a thorough early preview of the book (I'd plowed through 200 of the 550 pages), I still found the connections between the two too obvious to pass up; I was all ready to declare Physics a subtle - and silent - deconstruction of History's grave, suspenseful, pretension.
But, and after much thoughtful and slowly-paced narrative and interaction, I came to determine that The Secret History is a far more focused and chilling dissection of the discrepancies between Intellectualism and Romanticism; that is, the many differences caused when the world of six sparklingly Hampden college students is forced to collide with a world dark, and squirming, with conspiracy and betrayal and wrenching introspection.
And it all began with Dionysus.
When Richard Pappin discovers a small Northeastern elite college - the aforementioned Hampden - and subsequently is indoctrinated into a small clique of Greek fanatics (among them: wintery intellecutal Henry; broadly charismatic and callow Bunny; grandly dramatic, and gay, Francis; and the twins - Charles and Camilla - a pair of introverted and "compassionate" humans among such scholars), he is intertwined in a conspiracy to cover the mess created when Henry & Co. try to re-create the orgiastic rites of Dionysus, god of wine and sex. Richard, also the narrator, lets us in on the conspiracy from the first page - when he reveals their murder of Bunny - but much of the novel is spent on the slow build-up of tensions that created such a horrific fiasco and the immediate here-after: how an act affects Richard's new group of friends and himself.
Does it sound slow? Then it is; Tartt has a masterful sense of plot construction (she reveals her hair-line fractures of character and twist with maximum arch drama) but none for pacing and only a modicum of it for characters (though the entire group has more individuality than Ms. Pesshl mustered for the "Bluebloods"). Still, History has a slow-burn chill that seeps into you and - in the daring final 100 pages of never-ending climax - finally grabs and shakes you to the core. The epilogue has a jolting clinical style but this debut has a cutting clarity of purpose and confidence that, when it was finally revealed, hit me like a blast of cold, steely, well-written and textured talent. Bravo.
The Golden Compass: A-
To those who keep complaining about the theological subtext of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (of which The Golden Compass is the first installment), I steadfastly reply: get over yourselves; have some fun. Ok, sure, if you're on the lookout for some menacing "God isn't real!" lecture lurking within the pages of Pullman's (an avowed atheist/agnostic) prose, you might pick up crumbs within this first book; but those crumbs are far out weighed by the author's neat prose, brilliant use of perspective, subversive imagination, and dry wit. And certainly for myself (an avowed reader/critic), all these elements add up to one fun time.
But, of course, let's start with the controversial stuff. First off, what it amounts to in Compass is very little considering the brouhaha surrounding the soon-released film adaptation; sure there is a vast, powerful Church in this other world (one vaguely resembling our own, minus roughly a century or so and plus a lot of panache) that seems almost entirely malevolent; sure, too, the main character asks at one point (in refernce to Adam & Eve) "Yes, but wasn't that all just a sort of fairy tale?" But beyond that, very little else.
So what truly remains in these 400-pages beyond an antagonistic Church and a doubtful protagonist? The real workings of a real fantasist. Pullman, previously the purveyour of more contemporary young adult fiction, loses himself and the reader in a clever, subtle, re-working of our world. The new additions include daemons - the physical manifestion of a person's soul (aka, a sort of familiar that takes various shapes depending on personality) - witches, talking polar bears, and experimental theology. This last bit is surely the author's most daring step, and it pays off big in the first novel. As it seems in Lyra's (our hero) world, the Church pre-emptively captured the scientific lightning that was about to strike with the Renaissance by aligning themselves with all these new-fangled "elementary particles" (read: atoms), etc. As such, all scientific discoveries flow through the Church, and their doctrines in turn reflect the glory of science as the Glory of God. As a critical reader, I couldn't have been more delighted at this invention. As a mere human, prone to lose oneself in their books, I fell quite in love with the shadowy mysteries of this vast beauracracy (no longer headed by a Pope, mind you, but re-worked into the Magisterium, a lose working group of "councils, commitees, and the like").
So what mysteries do they portend? Well, the coming of Dust for one - a substance that attaches to a child once they hit puberty, and the cause of much concern for the "all-knowing" Church. Another puzzle they bring is the blossoming of Lyra's destiny - and how she is to "end destiny". Sound impossible? Not so when you have a compass-like alethiometer that sees the answer, if you can see the question; an armored guard of a bear named Iorek; a gyptian consort who lead you to the far North to rescue kidnapped children and father's alike; and a daemon who'd follow you to another world.
Which, in some canny sense, Lyra is. See, by quietly playing up a child's sense of wonder and dread, then intermingling it with Lyra's street-urchin skill, Pullman keeps the reader tethered to a world that unfolds with all the blazing new passion as Lyra herself experiences. Another bonus? It allows quick, surprising turns of plot and character to manifest in barely a pages' time (due again to Lyra's undoubtedly weak grasp of "truth" in her world's time of so-called "high political tension"). It is quite the clever stroke to create such a perspective for the reader; and more lithe still to never have it feel claustrophobic or improbable.
One great benefit against this last thought is in the characters created to populate Lyra's Earth: there is Mrs. Coulter - a charming manipulator, Lord Asriel - a prideful explorer and Lyra's uncle, John Faa - the absurdly wise king of the gyptians, and Serafina Pekkala - a seemingly ageless witch queen who still loves her human savior of 40-years. As is obvious, these are fascinating creations and more fascinating still because we can hardly guess what they truly want, or who they are (a surprising betrayal near book's end will have you recast your entire alleigances). Due to this, and among various other attributes, one must invariably draw the conclusion: The Golden Compass is conceived as fantasia, but cast in a cold, diamond-hard die giving it both the inventions to support dis-belief, and the suspenseful desire to do just the opposite (I dare anyone not to be swept into a desperate thrist for discovery when it comes to the mysteries of Dust, the Aurora, and the Magisterium). Who'd have guessed all of it would come from a "non-believer"?
But, of course, let's start with the controversial stuff. First off, what it amounts to in Compass is very little considering the brouhaha surrounding the soon-released film adaptation; sure there is a vast, powerful Church in this other world (one vaguely resembling our own, minus roughly a century or so and plus a lot of panache) that seems almost entirely malevolent; sure, too, the main character asks at one point (in refernce to Adam & Eve) "Yes, but wasn't that all just a sort of fairy tale?" But beyond that, very little else.
So what truly remains in these 400-pages beyond an antagonistic Church and a doubtful protagonist? The real workings of a real fantasist. Pullman, previously the purveyour of more contemporary young adult fiction, loses himself and the reader in a clever, subtle, re-working of our world. The new additions include daemons - the physical manifestion of a person's soul (aka, a sort of familiar that takes various shapes depending on personality) - witches, talking polar bears, and experimental theology. This last bit is surely the author's most daring step, and it pays off big in the first novel. As it seems in Lyra's (our hero) world, the Church pre-emptively captured the scientific lightning that was about to strike with the Renaissance by aligning themselves with all these new-fangled "elementary particles" (read: atoms), etc. As such, all scientific discoveries flow through the Church, and their doctrines in turn reflect the glory of science as the Glory of God. As a critical reader, I couldn't have been more delighted at this invention. As a mere human, prone to lose oneself in their books, I fell quite in love with the shadowy mysteries of this vast beauracracy (no longer headed by a Pope, mind you, but re-worked into the Magisterium, a lose working group of "councils, commitees, and the like").
So what mysteries do they portend? Well, the coming of Dust for one - a substance that attaches to a child once they hit puberty, and the cause of much concern for the "all-knowing" Church. Another puzzle they bring is the blossoming of Lyra's destiny - and how she is to "end destiny". Sound impossible? Not so when you have a compass-like alethiometer that sees the answer, if you can see the question; an armored guard of a bear named Iorek; a gyptian consort who lead you to the far North to rescue kidnapped children and father's alike; and a daemon who'd follow you to another world.
Which, in some canny sense, Lyra is. See, by quietly playing up a child's sense of wonder and dread, then intermingling it with Lyra's street-urchin skill, Pullman keeps the reader tethered to a world that unfolds with all the blazing new passion as Lyra herself experiences. Another bonus? It allows quick, surprising turns of plot and character to manifest in barely a pages' time (due again to Lyra's undoubtedly weak grasp of "truth" in her world's time of so-called "high political tension"). It is quite the clever stroke to create such a perspective for the reader; and more lithe still to never have it feel claustrophobic or improbable.
One great benefit against this last thought is in the characters created to populate Lyra's Earth: there is Mrs. Coulter - a charming manipulator, Lord Asriel - a prideful explorer and Lyra's uncle, John Faa - the absurdly wise king of the gyptians, and Serafina Pekkala - a seemingly ageless witch queen who still loves her human savior of 40-years. As is obvious, these are fascinating creations and more fascinating still because we can hardly guess what they truly want, or who they are (a surprising betrayal near book's end will have you recast your entire alleigances). Due to this, and among various other attributes, one must invariably draw the conclusion: The Golden Compass is conceived as fantasia, but cast in a cold, diamond-hard die giving it both the inventions to support dis-belief, and the suspenseful desire to do just the opposite (I dare anyone not to be swept into a desperate thrist for discovery when it comes to the mysteries of Dust, the Aurora, and the Magisterium). Who'd have guessed all of it would come from a "non-believer"?
Friday, August 10, 2007
Wicked: B+
What drove the Wicked Witch of the West? What motivated her to wear those horrendous black skirts? Why did she train a legion of animal followers to do her bidding? Why was she the sole green woman in a land of midgets? And why was she so deathly allergic to water? These are some of the central questions kicked around by author Gregory Maguire in his grandly allegorical, philisophically murky Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. In Wicked the future "fiend" is born as Elphaba in a quiet town located squarely in the province of Munchkinland to a zealot father and a morally unscrupulous mother. She is green and her features are sharp, angular, and as fearsome as a pair of scissors. Oddly enough her birth almost exactly coincides with the ascendence of the Glorious Wizard down into the Emerald City - the capital of Oz, her home.
And if this sounds all alittle quiet, rote even, things get pumping in quick fashion. It turns out the Wizard isn't a kindly, bumbling, old man (a la the '39 movie version); instead he is a politically wily despot who, flying down from the sky on his famous red hot-air balloon, quickly stirs up a coup and takes the reigns from the Ozma Regent and his ruling family. Such a shocker! But having changed an iconic figure of quirky modesty and goodness into a tyrant is only the first of Maguire's tricks: he also completely re-imagines the world into which the Wizard arrives. His characters traverse all four of the major Oz provinces (from Gillikin, the rich North, to The Vinkus, the arid West) and along the way the reader is privy to the many vivid imaginings he instills in these lands. More than that he laces his entire work with a gidy cynicism and black humor. Together these two elements form a nifty little elixir of an idea (swirled together from creativity and wit) that has propulsive effect: one finds it difficult to stop reading and reading, curious to see his next inspired revisionist twist.
Anticipation proves a killer however. As the plot kicks into high gear - from Elphaba's days as an activist college student to her days of political exile to her murder - Wicked runs alittle rampant. First off, the author loses sight of his characters, specifically the larger ones. As the chief example of such oversight, our newly discovered heroine also suffers the worst; she leaps from tartly anti-social to malicious to benevolent to submissive and back again in the span of these 400-pages. It's a lurching transition every time. Furthermore her friends seem just as foggy: Avaric, the handsome snob, is a "perfect asshole" until he carries on a genial debate with the Witch near the end of the book while Glinda the Good Witch goes from shallow and likeable to merely shallow (is she a pawn? is she ignorant? does anyone care? hello?).
Lacking strong character foundations, the entire point of Maguire's story (to delve into what made the Wicked Witch "wicked") gets lost in all of his noise. The noise though is almost worth the show. Drenched in homoeroticism, skewered with irony, and set aflame over the roasting coals of giddy toxic sarcasm, the prose of Wicked seethes with tons of combustible, compulsive humor and black-hearted delight. It's a good thing too, since as a main attraction the plot serves up aces until it sputters out at the end with a clenchingly un-satisfying final few pages. I guess the jokes on Maguire then for having engaged himself and the reader on the issue of trancendentalism, the search for a soul, the root of evil, "evil" and history since he can't seem to keep steady with any serious pondering (or, gasp!, ephiphany).
Let's stop for a moment though and consider something interesting but difficult to spot: the fact that Gregory Maguire is actually a pretty proficient word smith, especially late in the book. He toys around with a metaphorical examination of the creation of icicles, spends pages on the architectural stylings of Oz-cities, and has a canny physical curiousity for his creations. As writers go, let's not go so far as to say that all there is to the author of Wicked is a neat-o-keen creativte streak but to think there's a whole lot residing under his crackling send-up would be a misreprensentation; lacking truly rounded personalities to people his pages with and a sorely needed idea of thematic closure, the novel leaves you with a mere vestige of depth...but it, as Maguire himself might say, is something.
And if this sounds all alittle quiet, rote even, things get pumping in quick fashion. It turns out the Wizard isn't a kindly, bumbling, old man (a la the '39 movie version); instead he is a politically wily despot who, flying down from the sky on his famous red hot-air balloon, quickly stirs up a coup and takes the reigns from the Ozma Regent and his ruling family. Such a shocker! But having changed an iconic figure of quirky modesty and goodness into a tyrant is only the first of Maguire's tricks: he also completely re-imagines the world into which the Wizard arrives. His characters traverse all four of the major Oz provinces (from Gillikin, the rich North, to The Vinkus, the arid West) and along the way the reader is privy to the many vivid imaginings he instills in these lands. More than that he laces his entire work with a gidy cynicism and black humor. Together these two elements form a nifty little elixir of an idea (swirled together from creativity and wit) that has propulsive effect: one finds it difficult to stop reading and reading, curious to see his next inspired revisionist twist.
Anticipation proves a killer however. As the plot kicks into high gear - from Elphaba's days as an activist college student to her days of political exile to her murder - Wicked runs alittle rampant. First off, the author loses sight of his characters, specifically the larger ones. As the chief example of such oversight, our newly discovered heroine also suffers the worst; she leaps from tartly anti-social to malicious to benevolent to submissive and back again in the span of these 400-pages. It's a lurching transition every time. Furthermore her friends seem just as foggy: Avaric, the handsome snob, is a "perfect asshole" until he carries on a genial debate with the Witch near the end of the book while Glinda the Good Witch goes from shallow and likeable to merely shallow (is she a pawn? is she ignorant? does anyone care? hello?).
Lacking strong character foundations, the entire point of Maguire's story (to delve into what made the Wicked Witch "wicked") gets lost in all of his noise. The noise though is almost worth the show. Drenched in homoeroticism, skewered with irony, and set aflame over the roasting coals of giddy toxic sarcasm, the prose of Wicked seethes with tons of combustible, compulsive humor and black-hearted delight. It's a good thing too, since as a main attraction the plot serves up aces until it sputters out at the end with a clenchingly un-satisfying final few pages. I guess the jokes on Maguire then for having engaged himself and the reader on the issue of trancendentalism, the search for a soul, the root of evil, "evil" and history since he can't seem to keep steady with any serious pondering (or, gasp!, ephiphany).
Let's stop for a moment though and consider something interesting but difficult to spot: the fact that Gregory Maguire is actually a pretty proficient word smith, especially late in the book. He toys around with a metaphorical examination of the creation of icicles, spends pages on the architectural stylings of Oz-cities, and has a canny physical curiousity for his creations. As writers go, let's not go so far as to say that all there is to the author of Wicked is a neat-o-keen creativte streak but to think there's a whole lot residing under his crackling send-up would be a misreprensentation; lacking truly rounded personalities to people his pages with and a sorely needed idea of thematic closure, the novel leaves you with a mere vestige of depth...but it, as Maguire himself might say, is something.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: A
The wonders of a great book are many, but rarely encountered; once discovered, these novels are difficult if not impossible to put down. You race and race through the pages, eyes glued to the page while the dawn approaches and you start to smell alittle like the stuff in the back of your fridge. But more than that you leap backwards and forwards over the pages, the prose, and the plot - savoring the rarely seen magnificence of a great writer turning their genius into brilliant art. This is, in more or less a small paragraph, how I felt while reading J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - a big, cathartic rush of a tale bursting with satisfaction. The achievements of Rowling's creation will be espoused about at length below but what stands monumentally to all first & foremost is her endurance in imagination; that after seven (seven!) books about a teenage wizard, she remains as she was from the start: a storyteller of breathtaking skill underscored always by her wry, bleak, mirthful intelligence.
But let us start from the beginning of this final chapter (while also trying to dodge spoiling even a tad of the unspooling events). Lord Voldemort, the serpentine spector hovering as the Big Bad for all of the series, marshals his armies still - his coming storm growing more nefarious and lethal by the day. His plans, something woven together by Rowling from Hitler to Vader, march ceaselessly onward from the very first chapter of the book; his malevolence present on nearly every page. From the opening flight to the Burrow to the triumphant return to Hogwarts at the end, the Dark Lord is there. Yet the darkening disaster that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named represents has a flaw...the Boy Who Lived - (a nearly grown) Harry Potter.
Harry still seeks the Horcruxes and he still travels with his best friends, Hermione and Ron. That his search for the dark artifacts protecting Voldemort's soul is intensely enthralling while rarely cheery is a major accomplishment; that Hermione and Ron grower deeper, more lovable as time goes on remains another; and that Harry himself has grown from symbolic savior to bedraggled teen and back again is perhaps the crowning jewel of the book. Except to say that I'd also have to discount the vivid duels, battles, escapes, break-ins, pacts, plans, and dragon flights that also occur. To say that Deathly Hallows is a narrative with a lot going for it would be an understatement; if average novels were a meal, here you will find a feast.
This extends as well to the author's keen mind and wry wit. It is and always has been a delicious treat to watch her prose scintillate with such droll humor and in her latest, though lacking much of Dolores Umbridge (much...but not all!), she rattles off more than enough deliciously dark quips and quotes to satisfy any reader looking for a laugh (though the irony of one coming here, a grand political allegory and adventure saga, for humor is almost too much to bear).
All joking aside, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is an emotionally-stirring, masterful piece of fiction and Rowling its emotionally-stirring, masterful creator. The myriad loose ends of her tale are wrapped up with minimal effort; the expected "explanations" given vivid sprucing up when they occur during oh, say, a trip down the last memory lane you'd expect. To top it all off, the final pages tell not of that climactic showdown we've waited nearly 10 years for but of the aftermath; and let it be known that this boldly domestic, even quiet, epilogue marks a perfect ending to a perfect story - one, as they say, for the ages. In the end it is with great sadness that I depart from Rowling's world yet it is with still greater joy that I think back upon it; upon a spell of happiness and wonder that breaks not even to this day.
But let us start from the beginning of this final chapter (while also trying to dodge spoiling even a tad of the unspooling events). Lord Voldemort, the serpentine spector hovering as the Big Bad for all of the series, marshals his armies still - his coming storm growing more nefarious and lethal by the day. His plans, something woven together by Rowling from Hitler to Vader, march ceaselessly onward from the very first chapter of the book; his malevolence present on nearly every page. From the opening flight to the Burrow to the triumphant return to Hogwarts at the end, the Dark Lord is there. Yet the darkening disaster that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named represents has a flaw...the Boy Who Lived - (a nearly grown) Harry Potter.
Harry still seeks the Horcruxes and he still travels with his best friends, Hermione and Ron. That his search for the dark artifacts protecting Voldemort's soul is intensely enthralling while rarely cheery is a major accomplishment; that Hermione and Ron grower deeper, more lovable as time goes on remains another; and that Harry himself has grown from symbolic savior to bedraggled teen and back again is perhaps the crowning jewel of the book. Except to say that I'd also have to discount the vivid duels, battles, escapes, break-ins, pacts, plans, and dragon flights that also occur. To say that Deathly Hallows is a narrative with a lot going for it would be an understatement; if average novels were a meal, here you will find a feast.
This extends as well to the author's keen mind and wry wit. It is and always has been a delicious treat to watch her prose scintillate with such droll humor and in her latest, though lacking much of Dolores Umbridge (much...but not all!), she rattles off more than enough deliciously dark quips and quotes to satisfy any reader looking for a laugh (though the irony of one coming here, a grand political allegory and adventure saga, for humor is almost too much to bear).
All joking aside, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is an emotionally-stirring, masterful piece of fiction and Rowling its emotionally-stirring, masterful creator. The myriad loose ends of her tale are wrapped up with minimal effort; the expected "explanations" given vivid sprucing up when they occur during oh, say, a trip down the last memory lane you'd expect. To top it all off, the final pages tell not of that climactic showdown we've waited nearly 10 years for but of the aftermath; and let it be known that this boldly domestic, even quiet, epilogue marks a perfect ending to a perfect story - one, as they say, for the ages. In the end it is with great sadness that I depart from Rowling's world yet it is with still greater joy that I think back upon it; upon a spell of happiness and wonder that breaks not even to this day.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Founding Brothers: A-
Let's begin with a silly question: who likes learning about the American Revolution? Anyone? Ok, let's get more specific: who likes the learning about the Founding Fathers, those sage like demigods who have evolved in the last 200 years to become eternal paragons of American sainthood? I think, and do correct me if I'm wrong, that most people feel sleepy when the topic of Revolutionary history is discussed. And let me just say that I feature myself proudly among these people. Or at least, I did before I read Joseph Ellis' transfixing, deliriously researched, and astutely grounded Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. In Ellis' study of seven key figures of that early time in our Republic's history - Hamilton, Madison, Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Burr - the quaint and continual deconstruction of myth to man takes place over such a luxuriated well-written timespan that by the end, never again will you see our first Presidents in the same (sacred, shiny) light.
Our author begins with a tidy little preface - it is a quiet beginning and in retrospect a rather mundane introdution to such a deeply learned, fascinating literary voice - to outline the themes his book will espouse and discover pulsing throughtout the veins of our Revolutionary heroes. In no uncertain terms he makes the rather obvious, yet bold, claim that history as viewed then wasn't history at all; that what seemed certain to us, looking as we are through the pane of glass that is the last 200+ years, seemed more foreboding and improvised to them.
Following up this historical analysis is the book itself, seperated out over six vignettes of American history. It is these vignettes, Ellis says, that will cement to us all the true scope of the Revolution back then. Which is to say, there was no scope - except perhaps in Thomas Jefferson's mind. Well let me say, in no uncertain terms, that the vast rogue's gallery of crusty figures Ellis summons for his book prove his point and even more: they cement to us Ellis' talent as a historian of calm style and cool wit who turns past memories of hot days in a classroom into an exciting journey of surprising human depth.
He begins with the Hamilton-Burr duel. To those that don't know, it was a fatal contest of honor that resulted in Hamilton's death. The incident itself actually shares large portions of its screen time with other aspects of the showdown: Hamilton & Burr's respective political careers, their verbal war that lead to the gun battle, and the history of American dueling as a whole. These may seem odd puzzle pieces to fit together but they somehow are - in a fit of elegant writing that ties them all together by the image of that five-second clash (Hamilton's planned mis, Burr's un-planned hit). As historical dissections go, "The Duel" has more depth in its simple investigation than large portions of school-issued textbooks (plus, its fun to read!). Furthermore its the perfect opening act as it only hints at the discoveries to come: Jefferson's relationship to John Adams (a roller-coaster of a friendship), Washington's relationship to the public (a scarily eloof one), and Madison & Hamilton's relationships to the political scene (these two men could give Karl Rove a run for his money when it comes to brilliantly orchaestrated surges of political power) in addition to a few others.
Ellis launches into each of these new tales with relish and yet not losing a single drop of his cool demeanor and style. He sets up facts and fictions with straightforward no-nosense and his eventual conclusions (eluded to in the preface) are some tasty delights. It would be difficult for any writer, fiction or non, to match the divine experience of reading the twelve-year letterathon between Jefferson and Adams, a correspondence that started first as a reconcilliation following the party wars of the '90s and then evolved into a rumination on all the two had accomplished with the fledgling country. Their words speak for themselves, and Ellis lets them for the most part, but when the author does intrude it is only in the most elegant and un-intrusive of ways: to say with calm flourish that his points had been proven and his case won; that these weren't gods that planned our bloody uprsing, they were men of great ability and great flaws who were in the end capable of great humanity.
Finally though it isn't his separate stories that are the point, though they are arguably some of the more highly entertaining I've read, or even the understated thesis. No, the final point I think resides in the simple, easy, razor sharp rendering of Ellis' work; he has alchemized some of our greatest high school woes and boredoms into a supreme biography; a work of potent significance because it has done the impossible: it has grounded the Gods.
Our author begins with a tidy little preface - it is a quiet beginning and in retrospect a rather mundane introdution to such a deeply learned, fascinating literary voice - to outline the themes his book will espouse and discover pulsing throughtout the veins of our Revolutionary heroes. In no uncertain terms he makes the rather obvious, yet bold, claim that history as viewed then wasn't history at all; that what seemed certain to us, looking as we are through the pane of glass that is the last 200+ years, seemed more foreboding and improvised to them.
Following up this historical analysis is the book itself, seperated out over six vignettes of American history. It is these vignettes, Ellis says, that will cement to us all the true scope of the Revolution back then. Which is to say, there was no scope - except perhaps in Thomas Jefferson's mind. Well let me say, in no uncertain terms, that the vast rogue's gallery of crusty figures Ellis summons for his book prove his point and even more: they cement to us Ellis' talent as a historian of calm style and cool wit who turns past memories of hot days in a classroom into an exciting journey of surprising human depth.
He begins with the Hamilton-Burr duel. To those that don't know, it was a fatal contest of honor that resulted in Hamilton's death. The incident itself actually shares large portions of its screen time with other aspects of the showdown: Hamilton & Burr's respective political careers, their verbal war that lead to the gun battle, and the history of American dueling as a whole. These may seem odd puzzle pieces to fit together but they somehow are - in a fit of elegant writing that ties them all together by the image of that five-second clash (Hamilton's planned mis, Burr's un-planned hit). As historical dissections go, "The Duel" has more depth in its simple investigation than large portions of school-issued textbooks (plus, its fun to read!). Furthermore its the perfect opening act as it only hints at the discoveries to come: Jefferson's relationship to John Adams (a roller-coaster of a friendship), Washington's relationship to the public (a scarily eloof one), and Madison & Hamilton's relationships to the political scene (these two men could give Karl Rove a run for his money when it comes to brilliantly orchaestrated surges of political power) in addition to a few others.
Ellis launches into each of these new tales with relish and yet not losing a single drop of his cool demeanor and style. He sets up facts and fictions with straightforward no-nosense and his eventual conclusions (eluded to in the preface) are some tasty delights. It would be difficult for any writer, fiction or non, to match the divine experience of reading the twelve-year letterathon between Jefferson and Adams, a correspondence that started first as a reconcilliation following the party wars of the '90s and then evolved into a rumination on all the two had accomplished with the fledgling country. Their words speak for themselves, and Ellis lets them for the most part, but when the author does intrude it is only in the most elegant and un-intrusive of ways: to say with calm flourish that his points had been proven and his case won; that these weren't gods that planned our bloody uprsing, they were men of great ability and great flaws who were in the end capable of great humanity.
Finally though it isn't his separate stories that are the point, though they are arguably some of the more highly entertaining I've read, or even the understated thesis. No, the final point I think resides in the simple, easy, razor sharp rendering of Ellis' work; he has alchemized some of our greatest high school woes and boredoms into a supreme biography; a work of potent significance because it has done the impossible: it has grounded the Gods.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Special Topics in Calamity Physics: A-
I can't stop thinking about Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Debut author Marisha Pessl's dense study of murder, adultery, shadowy organizations, and high school clique-politics is quite the unforgettable ride - witty, showy, thrilling, and dark. Its plot is an admittedly far-flung tale but it has a superb anchor in Blue van Meer, the bookish main character. Add to that Pessl's shockingly abundant talent as a writer and what you get is a rare treat; a hefty novel imagined with such lighter-than-air exuberance that its every twist & turn is a new delight, a new treasure, to be discovered in these 500-pages.
Topics starts as Blue recounts to us the time she spent at St. Gallaway's, a glamorous private school, how she came to be there, and what transpired after she arrived. She came in a blue Volvo with her dad, a roving idealist-academic, and set-up preparing to waste away her senior year as any other: being the smartest kid in the room that no one will talk to. Her plans are thwarted though when she meets Hannah Schneider, a teacher at St. Gallaway's, and the catty-charismatic circle of students that surround her. The circle, known as the "Bluebloods", is an uber-exclusive cult of celebrity at the school that Blue, strangely enough, is quickly drawn into.
At their center, the magnetic Hannah - a noir dame whose characterization has an exotic, illustrious appeal - and as the months wear on Blue finds herself one of them and consequently, a school celebrity. Of course the ranks she joins are not quite pleseant company; Jade, the vixon-diva, Charles, the extraordinarily handsome romantic, Nigel, the bespectacled teen pulsing with pathos, Milton, the beefy Southerner, and Leulah, the Rapunzelesque wallflower, each prove themselves to be snarky coiles of acidity and cynicism and yet their charms are immediate - to Blue and the reader.
Yet why is Hannah, a forty-something teacher, socializing with teenagers (no matter how glamorous she may be)? Better still, why do people keep dying around her? And why is it that in occasionally gloomy moods Hannah will hint at dark secrets, a dark past? These are just some of the mysteries that pull our hero inexorably into a web spanning many countries and many years...or maybe not. The sheer roccoco ecstacy with which Pessl piles on the questions - faux confessions here, a red herring there - is in itself a joy but its even better to watch her eyeing the mess she has created at the end of the book, an unfortunate pile-up of too much ??? and not enough !!!, and then with minimum flair, clean it all up in an impossibly logical ribbon with just a hint of red (for flair).
As you can tell, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is an over-stuffed endeavor, filled with too many Big Ideas and not enough Big Answers. And yet, working outside of the mystery mold and settling nicely into coming-of-age stream-of-conscious, the novel is a sparkling success; Blue's introspective wit burns holes in the pages its so wicked smart. And Marisha Pessl's sure-footed conclusion is in itself a small-scale satisfactory feast. Sure the Bluebloods fall occasionally into un-characterized limbo and the sudden shifting gears of the third act will give most readers whip-lash, but there lies a winning (and audacious) seduction at the core of Special Topics in Calamity Physics that promises everything from savage school staff to sudden love scenes, and it delivers...mostly.
Topics starts as Blue recounts to us the time she spent at St. Gallaway's, a glamorous private school, how she came to be there, and what transpired after she arrived. She came in a blue Volvo with her dad, a roving idealist-academic, and set-up preparing to waste away her senior year as any other: being the smartest kid in the room that no one will talk to. Her plans are thwarted though when she meets Hannah Schneider, a teacher at St. Gallaway's, and the catty-charismatic circle of students that surround her. The circle, known as the "Bluebloods", is an uber-exclusive cult of celebrity at the school that Blue, strangely enough, is quickly drawn into.
At their center, the magnetic Hannah - a noir dame whose characterization has an exotic, illustrious appeal - and as the months wear on Blue finds herself one of them and consequently, a school celebrity. Of course the ranks she joins are not quite pleseant company; Jade, the vixon-diva, Charles, the extraordinarily handsome romantic, Nigel, the bespectacled teen pulsing with pathos, Milton, the beefy Southerner, and Leulah, the Rapunzelesque wallflower, each prove themselves to be snarky coiles of acidity and cynicism and yet their charms are immediate - to Blue and the reader.
Yet why is Hannah, a forty-something teacher, socializing with teenagers (no matter how glamorous she may be)? Better still, why do people keep dying around her? And why is it that in occasionally gloomy moods Hannah will hint at dark secrets, a dark past? These are just some of the mysteries that pull our hero inexorably into a web spanning many countries and many years...or maybe not. The sheer roccoco ecstacy with which Pessl piles on the questions - faux confessions here, a red herring there - is in itself a joy but its even better to watch her eyeing the mess she has created at the end of the book, an unfortunate pile-up of too much ??? and not enough !!!, and then with minimum flair, clean it all up in an impossibly logical ribbon with just a hint of red (for flair).
As you can tell, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is an over-stuffed endeavor, filled with too many Big Ideas and not enough Big Answers. And yet, working outside of the mystery mold and settling nicely into coming-of-age stream-of-conscious, the novel is a sparkling success; Blue's introspective wit burns holes in the pages its so wicked smart. And Marisha Pessl's sure-footed conclusion is in itself a small-scale satisfactory feast. Sure the Bluebloods fall occasionally into un-characterized limbo and the sudden shifting gears of the third act will give most readers whip-lash, but there lies a winning (and audacious) seduction at the core of Special Topics in Calamity Physics that promises everything from savage school staff to sudden love scenes, and it delivers...mostly.
Friday, June 1, 2007
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 600-page novel about the rise of comic books in the mid 1900's that incorporates extensive explorations into such themes as inherent Jewishness and homosexuality. I loved every gosh-darn second of it; whizzing through the chapters of writer Michael Chabon's distinctive prose, savoring the central characters - Sam Klayman, a Jewish boy with comic-book empire dreams, and his cousin Josef Kavalier, a Czech refugee from Nazi Germany with a brilliant hand and a burning soul - and wallowing in the sheer ecstatic scope of the story. This is not an "epic" story, it is simply a great one (and one the best tales I have read in quite some time); go figure it won the Pulitizer Prize.
The story kicks off in Queens a few years before Pearl Harbor when, quite unceremoniously, Sammy Clayman meets his cousin Josef Kavalier - here to stay away from both Hitler's wrath...and his family, still trapped on the other side. Sammy soon discovers that the newly christened "Joe" has a great eye; Joe soon discovers that Sammy has a great ear. Together the two of them set out to build a dream castle - each hoping to invest in this magnificent structure their respective desires, dreams, and frustrations. For Sammy that means an empire of whizzing superheroes and acres of lean script; for Joe that means an empire of money with which to free his family. When you put these two together, the result is magic - both on the page and off. Soon, "The Escapist" is up and running (his origin story having been provided to the reader via a clever sleight-of-hand).
But that is just the beginning for these two cousins-turned-brothers-in-comics. As the Golden Age of Comics erupts around their ears, romance enters the picture. Joe meets Rosa Saks, a bizarre Surrealist painter who plays a major part of the book's fractured, compelling soul. Sammy meets Tracy Bacon, the handsome actor assigned to voice The Escapist in radio serials. Joe gets Rosa pregnant; Sam gets tired of "shadow games" with Tracy - sacrificing, as he finds out, the first and last true love of his life. But even this isn't the end...or even really the beginning.
No, the true start of Michael Chabon's immensely addictive story begins after Joe Kavalier returns from WWII. Here, in Brooklyn with a child and in the middle of a strange romantic-tangle, the novel thrums along on waves of lyricism, rage, melodrama, and love - replicating, as Chabon says himself, the style of Douglas Sirk. Together with Sammy and Rosa, Joe must try and sort out the pieces of his life - and theirs - while also trying to revive the imperiled "funny-book" genre. It is a surprising metaphor, paralleling the rise & fall of someone's life with that of a comic book, but it works wonders.
It would be unfair to say that this exquisite book is a leanly-written, high-brow affiar. The truth is the prose is unabashedly pulp, "purple" as some say, and it speaks with frankness about everything: sex, religon, love, family. Some may be offended by such out-in-the-open energy but there are other benefits to this style: huge scenes explode with vivid, unrivaled power (like Joe's brief stint in Antartica, or the closing scene of the entire enterprise), characters coil so tightly upon themselves they may almost seem to breathe real air, and the plot becomes almost impermeable to any sense of disbelief - the soft science fiction ideas and the fanciful turns of fortune having become reality
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the work of a magician; a wizard of imagination, scope, invention, and idea. Also like any great magic trick, I'm still not sure how its creator managed to pull the entire thing together (I could have sworn that for awhile, the plot's imminent unraveling seemed certain), but he has. As the reader finishes the final, 636th page, an ecstatic sense of satisfaction is sure to envelop of them. Yet there is sure to be sadness too; after all, here is the end of not just something magical, but also something more undeniably readable and wondrous than just about anything else in recent memory.
The story kicks off in Queens a few years before Pearl Harbor when, quite unceremoniously, Sammy Clayman meets his cousin Josef Kavalier - here to stay away from both Hitler's wrath...and his family, still trapped on the other side. Sammy soon discovers that the newly christened "Joe" has a great eye; Joe soon discovers that Sammy has a great ear. Together the two of them set out to build a dream castle - each hoping to invest in this magnificent structure their respective desires, dreams, and frustrations. For Sammy that means an empire of whizzing superheroes and acres of lean script; for Joe that means an empire of money with which to free his family. When you put these two together, the result is magic - both on the page and off. Soon, "The Escapist" is up and running (his origin story having been provided to the reader via a clever sleight-of-hand).
But that is just the beginning for these two cousins-turned-brothers-in-comics. As the Golden Age of Comics erupts around their ears, romance enters the picture. Joe meets Rosa Saks, a bizarre Surrealist painter who plays a major part of the book's fractured, compelling soul. Sammy meets Tracy Bacon, the handsome actor assigned to voice The Escapist in radio serials. Joe gets Rosa pregnant; Sam gets tired of "shadow games" with Tracy - sacrificing, as he finds out, the first and last true love of his life. But even this isn't the end...or even really the beginning.
No, the true start of Michael Chabon's immensely addictive story begins after Joe Kavalier returns from WWII. Here, in Brooklyn with a child and in the middle of a strange romantic-tangle, the novel thrums along on waves of lyricism, rage, melodrama, and love - replicating, as Chabon says himself, the style of Douglas Sirk. Together with Sammy and Rosa, Joe must try and sort out the pieces of his life - and theirs - while also trying to revive the imperiled "funny-book" genre. It is a surprising metaphor, paralleling the rise & fall of someone's life with that of a comic book, but it works wonders.
It would be unfair to say that this exquisite book is a leanly-written, high-brow affiar. The truth is the prose is unabashedly pulp, "purple" as some say, and it speaks with frankness about everything: sex, religon, love, family. Some may be offended by such out-in-the-open energy but there are other benefits to this style: huge scenes explode with vivid, unrivaled power (like Joe's brief stint in Antartica, or the closing scene of the entire enterprise), characters coil so tightly upon themselves they may almost seem to breathe real air, and the plot becomes almost impermeable to any sense of disbelief - the soft science fiction ideas and the fanciful turns of fortune having become reality
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is the work of a magician; a wizard of imagination, scope, invention, and idea. Also like any great magic trick, I'm still not sure how its creator managed to pull the entire thing together (I could have sworn that for awhile, the plot's imminent unraveling seemed certain), but he has. As the reader finishes the final, 636th page, an ecstatic sense of satisfaction is sure to envelop of them. Yet there is sure to be sadness too; after all, here is the end of not just something magical, but also something more undeniably readable and wondrous than just about anything else in recent memory.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
The Remains of the Day: A
It is the rare novelist that can turn even the most mundane of life's events into a tale of resplendent force. Stevens, the central character in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, has been a butler for many years. He has served only two prominent masters: Lord Darlington (who owned the residence that Stevens currently works at, Darlington Hall) and Mr. Farraday - the man who hired Stevens after Lord Darlington's death. On a whim Stevens decides that he will inquire as to the employment status of a former housekeeper, Mrs. Kenton, and perhaps see if she is interested in returning to the grand old mansion. When given the leave to do so, he sets off on a five-day journey to bring him back into contact with a long lost friend. Along the way perhaps he will sample some of the famous sights that are visibile in his homeland but that he has never seen.
Ishiguro is writing solely with that narrative thread in mind. Or at least, it would seem so. Armed with as much wisdom and compassion as he had in 2005's chilling Never Let Me Go, his sublimely well-paced tale races off the page - as any good confessional does. Yet it isn't an outright confession you are reading. After all, the butler hasn't done anything wrong has he? The answer, the graceful climax that results, is what drives you through his slim tale of a man revisiting his past on an innocuous vacation drive. His memories are sometimes uproarious, others are cruelly repressed. he narrator's thoughts themselves are as flawed as the memories he reflects on.
It is an indelible force of a character that has been written into this manswervant and the author wields his presence with a virtuostic skill. The haunting outward supernatural element is missing from this masterpiece as it wasn't from Never Let Me Go, but the result is something infinitely more paramount. Kazuo Ishiguro has taken T.S. Elliot's famous quote "the world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper" and scrambled it all to hell, creating perfection in the process.
Ishiguro is writing solely with that narrative thread in mind. Or at least, it would seem so. Armed with as much wisdom and compassion as he had in 2005's chilling Never Let Me Go, his sublimely well-paced tale races off the page - as any good confessional does. Yet it isn't an outright confession you are reading. After all, the butler hasn't done anything wrong has he? The answer, the graceful climax that results, is what drives you through his slim tale of a man revisiting his past on an innocuous vacation drive. His memories are sometimes uproarious, others are cruelly repressed. he narrator's thoughts themselves are as flawed as the memories he reflects on.
It is an indelible force of a character that has been written into this manswervant and the author wields his presence with a virtuostic skill. The haunting outward supernatural element is missing from this masterpiece as it wasn't from Never Let Me Go, but the result is something infinitely more paramount. Kazuo Ishiguro has taken T.S. Elliot's famous quote "the world ends not with a bang, but with a whimper" and scrambled it all to hell, creating perfection in the process.
The Road: A
In a desolate corner of the world, one imagines that Cormac McCarthy would be in heaven. Of course, his entire body of work – from All the Pretty Horses to No Country for Old Men – is indicative of his vivid power as an empath of the dead and dying. Nowhere else this year, or perhaps in many a year, will one feel the full power of his craft as in The Road.
The story is spare and ripe with poeticism. A father and his son wander through America searching for the coast. They head to the coast for reasons unknown and the world they straggle through is unlike anything else that has been written in a long, long while. Ash flies and piles in huge drifts that cover the countryside. Nearly everyone is dead and all of the vegetation along with it. Houses and cities have been burned (and in the greatest line of the book, a couple sits sipping wine watching the collapse of civilization) and the other survivors can be hardly called such. For those that are encountered they are all hungry, desperate for even a taste of food. Their food isn't of the natural variety, unless of course you think human flesh is natural. This is a world that isn't teetering on the edge of destruction, waiting for a savior (as in Stephen King's The Stand), it has fallen down that dark deep well of Oblivion and has festered there, sprouting a Hell on Earth.
Stripped of those unnecessary functions of writing – such as dialogue quotes and proper time and place as well as "proper exposition" – McCarthy has attained the visionary power of a prophet. On every page his powerful voice, vast catastrophic vocabulary, and unassailable position as Master Stylist of Cataclysm, all add up to a supremely unshakable imagining of the World at World's End; it has exhaled its last gasp and is now merely waiting for those final moments as the light slips away. And yet in this creeping darkness, hope. It is because in a most wise decision, McCarthy turns the entire focus of his idea to spin about the relationship that exists between the man and the boy, the parent and the child. Here is where his poetic pondering makes the most sense and the most indelible impression. It is the final piece of a puzzle that when arranged, paints a picture of society that is unsettling - and thinly hopeful - in every iota.
The final scene is restrained and a tad ingratiating in its quiet musing but it may be the novel's only flaw. The sheer meteoric impact that his nightmare will make in your mind is alone worth the price of purchasing this book. Be warned though: there is madness in the corners of this writer's midnight-black world.
Against The Day: A
As a reader - nay, a critic even - who took nearly four months in which to finish Thomas Pynchon's byzantine, labyrinnthe, massive novel Against The Day, I feel I stand on pretty good grounds in which to state: this is a difficult book. Filled with vocabulary that requires you to be both sharp and current, multi-national language usage (some of which, I'm sure, is purposefully incorrect), and references to a myriad of concepts ranging from the mystical to the mathematical - none of which date farther forward in the world timeline than the 1920's - the author is practically begging you to be at some point so frustrated with his book that you will leave it to gather dust on a shelf somewhere far, far away. In fact he would be the first to say that the reader is forewarned in picking up his book.
They should know of course, having had some previous experience with Mason & Dixon, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, that Pynchon is famous for his incredibly dense, incredibly intellectual, incredibly murky writing. However, what he is also famous for (to those that bother to lift the heavy burden entailed, both physically and metaphorically, by picking up one of his novels) is his hilariously ridiculous humor, rapid fire exchanges, and those moments of brilliance so insightful they will make you wish he were a less difficult writer.
In his latest offering he takes on a subject perhaps more sprawling than nearly any of his other targets. He chronicles the lives of nearly a dozen characters over the course of roughly twenty-five years (those being 1893 to 1918). Each of his many creations does wildly different things - there are baloonists, spies, bisexuals, tranvestities, mystics, psychics, brothers, fighters, and capitalists - and yet they manage to converge on each other at times so random and constant that to say Pynchon is mocking Fate would be putting it lightly. But it isn't just Fate he is mocking. He's also poking fun at various styles of writing, historical accuracy, and all of current American politics. But as much as there is humor here (and trust me, Pynchon's stabs and parodies of life and culture are spot-on and immensely side-splitting) there is also a surprising amount of power and insight. You may be laughing wildly at such activities as "Anarchist Golf" and yet Thomas Pynchon's dialogue-free passage on the Great Chicago Fire will leave you speechless.
His stories are themselves also alternately theatrical, theoretical, fanatical, and grim. Here, a few samples: a trio of brothers try over a course of years to kill the rich man that killed their father, a girl goes off to see the world (and maybe the mother she never knew that is purportedly lurking some therewithin), several different revolutions occur, a sodomitical British Spy goes cavorting about the precarious political scene of Europe right before the Great War (and manages to be entangled in a threesome of both man and woman that provides a deliriously romantic near-end vision of sex and heart), a group of skyship pilots termed the Chums of Chance go flying to the sky doing nice and Boy Scout-y things, and a detective first chased out of Chicago finds himself enlisted by a mystical "darkness fighting" organization in order to satisfy demands made on him by people who may not even exist.
I feel it is necessary to say again that undertaking this book requires patience, for the author's endless indulgence in, well, indulgence, as well as enormous amounts of heart and mindpower. And yet if one is willing to undertake this ordeal, they will discover a work of near literary brilliance that has done what no other book I have read has done to date: envisioned the world full of menace and apathy and that the great tragedies that were to follow would merely grow out of that. In fact the greatest of world tragedies here is everyone's mad descent into a hellish and bloodthirsty system. That system is capitalism and to Pynchon, a wily liberal anarchist in his own right, it is the ultimate fall from grace. Yet he ends his creation on a hopeful note, suggesting that we need only to fall in love to start flying towards grace.
They should know of course, having had some previous experience with Mason & Dixon, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, that Pynchon is famous for his incredibly dense, incredibly intellectual, incredibly murky writing. However, what he is also famous for (to those that bother to lift the heavy burden entailed, both physically and metaphorically, by picking up one of his novels) is his hilariously ridiculous humor, rapid fire exchanges, and those moments of brilliance so insightful they will make you wish he were a less difficult writer.
In his latest offering he takes on a subject perhaps more sprawling than nearly any of his other targets. He chronicles the lives of nearly a dozen characters over the course of roughly twenty-five years (those being 1893 to 1918). Each of his many creations does wildly different things - there are baloonists, spies, bisexuals, tranvestities, mystics, psychics, brothers, fighters, and capitalists - and yet they manage to converge on each other at times so random and constant that to say Pynchon is mocking Fate would be putting it lightly. But it isn't just Fate he is mocking. He's also poking fun at various styles of writing, historical accuracy, and all of current American politics. But as much as there is humor here (and trust me, Pynchon's stabs and parodies of life and culture are spot-on and immensely side-splitting) there is also a surprising amount of power and insight. You may be laughing wildly at such activities as "Anarchist Golf" and yet Thomas Pynchon's dialogue-free passage on the Great Chicago Fire will leave you speechless.
His stories are themselves also alternately theatrical, theoretical, fanatical, and grim. Here, a few samples: a trio of brothers try over a course of years to kill the rich man that killed their father, a girl goes off to see the world (and maybe the mother she never knew that is purportedly lurking some therewithin), several different revolutions occur, a sodomitical British Spy goes cavorting about the precarious political scene of Europe right before the Great War (and manages to be entangled in a threesome of both man and woman that provides a deliriously romantic near-end vision of sex and heart), a group of skyship pilots termed the Chums of Chance go flying to the sky doing nice and Boy Scout-y things, and a detective first chased out of Chicago finds himself enlisted by a mystical "darkness fighting" organization in order to satisfy demands made on him by people who may not even exist.
I feel it is necessary to say again that undertaking this book requires patience, for the author's endless indulgence in, well, indulgence, as well as enormous amounts of heart and mindpower. And yet if one is willing to undertake this ordeal, they will discover a work of near literary brilliance that has done what no other book I have read has done to date: envisioned the world full of menace and apathy and that the great tragedies that were to follow would merely grow out of that. In fact the greatest of world tragedies here is everyone's mad descent into a hellish and bloodthirsty system. That system is capitalism and to Pynchon, a wily liberal anarchist in his own right, it is the ultimate fall from grace. Yet he ends his creation on a hopeful note, suggesting that we need only to fall in love to start flying towards grace.
Wuthering Heights: A
Emily Bronte managed only to publish one book in her life before she died tragically on the moors of England. Her sole work, Wuthering Heights, is one of superlative writing and it brings the point home that had Ms. Bronte lived, she could have delivered even more perfection.
The story of Catherine and Heathcliffe is set in Victorian England on the moors. They were raised as brother and sister (even though Heathcliffe is adopted and completely dispised by their other sibling, Hindley) but as time went on their relationship bloomed from the platonic into the sort of soul-wrenching love that many a masterpiece has been written about. Wuthering Heights is no different. Catherine marries herself off to the Linton family (the Linton's having money and power, of course) and leaves Heathcliffe off to stew in a pool of his own poisoned love, self-pity, loathing, and vengence. When he finally does return to exact a price for his suffering, after nearly three years, his plan is almost delicious in its cunning and brilliance. Make no mistake however, Heathcliffe is as bad a man as his lover is a manipulative, scheming, vile woman.
What then empowers this book to such pained, grand proportions? What keeps it afloat in the story seas of melodrama and overripe dialogue? It is by sheer strength of talent that Emily Bronte holds every piece of her story together. Brought to life by her rich, witty pen Bronte creates a story that is (at it's roots) a tale of love gone so blindingly wrong that neither of it's victims are ever able to see again.
Full of violence, despair, imprisonment and death, Wuthering Heights is as near to an old-fashioned page turner as your likely to find in Victorian literature. Each character has a voice powerful enough to shake the very foundations of the modern novel at the time. After all, the intricate narration style by which the book was written wasn't exactly "cookie-cutter" at the time. Niether than was the bruise-black premise or the cutting emotional undercurrents. This "stuffy old novel" exhibits the striking power to exhilirate and horrify, thrill and delight on every page. Emily Bronte may not have set out to write a jubilant, magnificent celebration of love in all of its forms, (be they vile or pure..or in some cases both) but she succeeded at just that and she did it flawlessly.
A Separate Peace: A-
Consider John Knowle's bleak and pointed novel A Seperate Peace much like descending into hell (perhaps a hell much like the one envisioned by Jodi Picoult in The Tenth Cirlce). At first everything at Devon School For Boys seems to hang in a kind of tranquil limbo. It is the summer before The United States officially declares it's involvement in World War Two and for two best friends, Gene and Phineas, that summer will be their last of fully realized peace.
Gene is a boy whose sole defining characteristic is his sarcasm and perhaps his all encompassing lonliness. Phineas is the kind of person that can dictate a crowd with almost astonishing ease. His natural grace and charisma create an aura that is almost entoxicating. As Gene would say, his very voice is music. Together the two of them go about, with "Finny" doing most of the going, rousing fellow schoolmates into doing genial acts of felony and whatnot. His rationale being that this is their last refuge from the outside world, without this merriment what reason is their to fight for civilization? Tranquility soon proves to be quite a facade however. Gene's jealously bubbles over more and more at Finny's every move and the am I/aren't I battles in his mind are powerfully realized by Knowles' pen. What starts out as jealousy eventually manifests itself in an act of cold, arbritrary violence that leaves its stain on the rest of the novel.
The ups and down that follow occur mainly between Gene, Phineas, and their conceptions of the outside world. Every tragic illusion of Finny's is brought to a hollow ripeness and every anger in Gene is brought to resolution. What they manage to create between them and impose on the world around them is a creation of fanciful rigidity. Try as they might they can't escape the cold hard truth. Gene can't escape his consequences and ultimately Phineas can't escape Gene's actions. This bleak, sweeping novel of darkness and tragedy is slow to build but stick with you, in part because of the thoughtful prose with which it was written. As I said in the beginning, abandon all hope ye who enter here.
Gene is a boy whose sole defining characteristic is his sarcasm and perhaps his all encompassing lonliness. Phineas is the kind of person that can dictate a crowd with almost astonishing ease. His natural grace and charisma create an aura that is almost entoxicating. As Gene would say, his very voice is music. Together the two of them go about, with "Finny" doing most of the going, rousing fellow schoolmates into doing genial acts of felony and whatnot. His rationale being that this is their last refuge from the outside world, without this merriment what reason is their to fight for civilization? Tranquility soon proves to be quite a facade however. Gene's jealously bubbles over more and more at Finny's every move and the am I/aren't I battles in his mind are powerfully realized by Knowles' pen. What starts out as jealousy eventually manifests itself in an act of cold, arbritrary violence that leaves its stain on the rest of the novel.
The ups and down that follow occur mainly between Gene, Phineas, and their conceptions of the outside world. Every tragic illusion of Finny's is brought to a hollow ripeness and every anger in Gene is brought to resolution. What they manage to create between them and impose on the world around them is a creation of fanciful rigidity. Try as they might they can't escape the cold hard truth. Gene can't escape his consequences and ultimately Phineas can't escape Gene's actions. This bleak, sweeping novel of darkness and tragedy is slow to build but stick with you, in part because of the thoughtful prose with which it was written. As I said in the beginning, abandon all hope ye who enter here.
Never Let Me Go: A
The genius of Kazuo Ishiguro's wintery novel is his ability to draw you into an all too well lit story and then destroy your perception of all you once held true.
He builds this story around a series of flashbacks narrated by the mysterious carer Kathy H., who as a student attended an English private school called Hailsham. What is Hailsham? Who are these "doners"? And what exactly does a "carer" do? All these questions permeate the pages of each and every flashback. Each flashback is wonderfully detailed, yet another of Ishiguro's tricks, and each character is a small puzzle box supplying just the right piece to the story when nessecary.
There are three main characters. Characters that form a sort of love triangle. Kathy, her best friend Ruth, and Ruth's boyfriend and slightly-off Tommy. To not be pulled into their lives is impossible as the author's prose is smooth and calculated. You feel as if each step you take has already been thought out but it doesn't matter, because the scenery along the walk is amazing.
As we are lead through story after story of this girl and her triangle (first young then growing older) we are lead to believe she leads a happy, if naieve life.It is through this naievete that Ishiguro achieves his greatest feat. And to say anymore would spoil it. Know this though, come for his beautifully written story. Stay for the horrific secrets and perceptive insight hidden within.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: A
So after I read this book I, naturally, wanted to write a review for it on my Blog. I said "yeah this will be great!". And then I started writing. You must know that this book is hard to write about, but I will try. So here goes:
We are told a story, in ironic detachment, about a man in his early twenties, half-way through college, whose parents die of cancer 5-weeks apart. Bam. He is left with an older brother, an older sister, and a much younger little brother. The little brother is his to raise. And we are to get the sense that he raises his brother with a zeal, a desperate need, to right past mistakes. But mistakes of whom? And why? Eventually we are shown just how deep the author's wounds run. Just how horrifying his past and his addiction to exist in chaos are. But we are also shown another deep running feeling. His love for his family, and most of all his little brother. Who he constantly refers to as "perfect" "golden" "amazing" "beautiful" "sage-wise" and any number of other things. However this book would be a big crazy mess if not held together by his ferocious insight and intense wit.
There are two ways to live life. Self-consiously, or Self-devouringly. As the author transistions from the former to the latter, and sinks deeper into the pain he so long held back we discover more and more of his addictions, his cravings, his lust, and his love. And we are drawn into it and become it. For all of it's unruly structure, insanely irritating mis-prints of fact (minor characters names change in a space of a few pages), and too long running clever literary devices (did we really need a Real World interview to run on for 40 pages?) I can honestly say that this book is truly a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
We are told a story, in ironic detachment, about a man in his early twenties, half-way through college, whose parents die of cancer 5-weeks apart. Bam. He is left with an older brother, an older sister, and a much younger little brother. The little brother is his to raise. And we are to get the sense that he raises his brother with a zeal, a desperate need, to right past mistakes. But mistakes of whom? And why? Eventually we are shown just how deep the author's wounds run. Just how horrifying his past and his addiction to exist in chaos are. But we are also shown another deep running feeling. His love for his family, and most of all his little brother. Who he constantly refers to as "perfect" "golden" "amazing" "beautiful" "sage-wise" and any number of other things. However this book would be a big crazy mess if not held together by his ferocious insight and intense wit.
There are two ways to live life. Self-consiously, or Self-devouringly. As the author transistions from the former to the latter, and sinks deeper into the pain he so long held back we discover more and more of his addictions, his cravings, his lust, and his love. And we are drawn into it and become it. For all of it's unruly structure, insanely irritating mis-prints of fact (minor characters names change in a space of a few pages), and too long running clever literary devices (did we really need a Real World interview to run on for 40 pages?) I can honestly say that this book is truly a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
The Tenth Circle: A-
I'm not quite sure how to review this novel. It is surely one of the most closely-observed and depressing family dramas I have ever read. It also quite possibly one of the best - taking a backseat only to the marvelous "Poisonwood Bible".
Jodi Picoult is a writer who can't ever seem to get her voracious need to describe everything around her under control. She writes dizzying circles of metaphor around herself just to explain to us the potency of life and love and pain and tragedy and growing up.
How would you react when confronted with this situation: You are an up-and-coming comic book artist who has put his career on hold for the last 15 years to raise your daughter, who you love more than life itself, and be a stay at home dad. Your wife teaches "The Inferno" at the local college and is one of the premiere Dante scholars in the country. You feel yourself growing distant from your daughter and you know your wife is hiding...something. But you're all shocked into reality when your daughter accuses her ex-boyfriend of raping her.
This bare-bones description doesn't come close to expressing the intricate-ness of Picoult's 13th work. Near the end the cracks start to show as all of her wild imagery and metaphor (filled with blizzards, birds, eskimos, and folk lore) seems to gain a mind of its own and leaves the reader in the dust, although wisely paralelling her story with an in-book comic helps us decipher some of the more subtle messages. I'm floored by the near perfection and inventiveness of Picoult's writing style. As she would say perhaps about her own book: it lands like a crow on your stomach in the middle of a snow storm.
Jodi Picoult is a writer who can't ever seem to get her voracious need to describe everything around her under control. She writes dizzying circles of metaphor around herself just to explain to us the potency of life and love and pain and tragedy and growing up.
How would you react when confronted with this situation: You are an up-and-coming comic book artist who has put his career on hold for the last 15 years to raise your daughter, who you love more than life itself, and be a stay at home dad. Your wife teaches "The Inferno" at the local college and is one of the premiere Dante scholars in the country. You feel yourself growing distant from your daughter and you know your wife is hiding...something. But you're all shocked into reality when your daughter accuses her ex-boyfriend of raping her.
This bare-bones description doesn't come close to expressing the intricate-ness of Picoult's 13th work. Near the end the cracks start to show as all of her wild imagery and metaphor (filled with blizzards, birds, eskimos, and folk lore) seems to gain a mind of its own and leaves the reader in the dust, although wisely paralelling her story with an in-book comic helps us decipher some of the more subtle messages. I'm floored by the near perfection and inventiveness of Picoult's writing style. As she would say perhaps about her own book: it lands like a crow on your stomach in the middle of a snow storm.
The Chocolate War: A
Robert Comier is a master at writing teen fiction. So detailed is his writing that he manages to capture almost all elements of a teenager's life. This often leads to conflicting paragraphs - isn't a teenager's life by nature conflicting? - but his observant style makes up for it. He turns his trained eye onto the story of a New England prep school for boys known as Trinity. Trinity is controlled behind the scenes by an underground society known as The Vigils, who manage to keep everyone under their thumb through an odd mix of psycological guerrila warfare and violence. The leader of The Vigils? A student by the name of Archie Costello, he's known as The Assigner and it's his job to dole out the tasks that make sure everyone, including the staff, know that The Vigils see all.
The annual chocolate sale comes under the watch of The Vigils and Archie plans to derail it for a few days (who really likes school spirit?) by having one freshman - Jerry Renault - refuse to sell them for 10 days. 10 days go by and he is still refusing. Suddenly not only is the school thrown into doubt (as is the temporary headmaster Brother Leon) but people begin to question the all controlling influence of The Vigils. Archie can't have that so he destroys Jerry's life. He starts with harrasment in the form of continuous late night phone calls then gets even Jerry's best friend, The Goober, to desert him. Finnally it all leads to the point of a very climatic boxing match full of triumph and bloodshed.
Cormier's beautifully written story is a real downer but also sheer joy to read.
The annual chocolate sale comes under the watch of The Vigils and Archie plans to derail it for a few days (who really likes school spirit?) by having one freshman - Jerry Renault - refuse to sell them for 10 days. 10 days go by and he is still refusing. Suddenly not only is the school thrown into doubt (as is the temporary headmaster Brother Leon) but people begin to question the all controlling influence of The Vigils. Archie can't have that so he destroys Jerry's life. He starts with harrasment in the form of continuous late night phone calls then gets even Jerry's best friend, The Goober, to desert him. Finnally it all leads to the point of a very climatic boxing match full of triumph and bloodshed.
Cormier's beautifully written story is a real downer but also sheer joy to read.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
