'What straight middle-aged brother has not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young pussy?'

Wao! So, recently we’ve been talking about why we read less fiction than when we were younger. Gone are the days I did nothing but read Thomas Hardy hour upon hour - even day after day - without end. Our collective reasons for reading less were things like ‘not enough time’, ‘who needs books? This is a golden era of television, you fool’, ‘books are too heavy’ (?) and unsurprisingly, ‘the internet’. We put the above inferred causes to scientific testing and the results were clear - turns out the internet is the chief culprit. We’re jumped-up monkeys with ADHD is all. Can’t focus on a book no longer. We’re neurologically doomed. But - take heart - it’s not our fault.

Last week, an article was published in Slate which said the reason we’re so internet-addled is because receiving an email, or finding a cool new website, etc, feels like getting some sort of abstract reward - we're hardwired to think that deposits in our inboxes are things we want - so our dopamine circuit goes nuts when it happens. This reward-seeking behaviour is why we spend so much time online. In contrast, novels don’t offer the same sweet punch of satisfaction. In this theory’s favour, I can verify that when I received this email in my yahoo inbox yesterday, from HOVEROUND:GET YOUR FREEDOM BACK WITH A POWER WHEELCHAIR, Eli! my dopamine circuits went absolutely mental.

Having said that, I don’t think the promise of power wheelchairs etc are the only reason for us slacking off on novel-reading. A lot of people I know think novels are just serious and boring and didactic. Yeah, a lot of novels are. But not all. Not every novelist is Charles Dickens or Samuel Richardson. As I'll now try to prove...(Though if there are any hardcore non-fictioneers out there, state your case!)

Anyway, due to the above two factors, it's been an uphill slog to find a novel awesome enough a significant number of DABC’ers will put down the internet for and read. You had young adult fiction, eloquent perverts and obese godheads thrown you way, and you were like, piss off, you schmuck, I’m too busy getting dopamine fixes updating my Facebook status. Yeah, me too. But then Junot Diaz came along to save the day… his ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’ was, I don’t think it’s too hubristic to say, the DABC’s breakout novel. Here’s why: I spoke to four whole people who’d read it! And I proslyetised it to thirteen more who said they would! If Trujillo can capture one nation under a narrative, imagine what the DABC could do. But enough about fascist fantasies. What was the difference? Why did 'Wao' work?

Many reasons. First, unlike the massive miserabilist mountain of boo hoo me novels sitting beside it in every bookshop, it was fun. It really was. It was as funny, i dunno, Arrested Development (don't chew me out on this one, it's late and anything - of a certain calibre - will do). Yet it wa horrifically tragic too, so it won on both counts. Most people can sell you only one or the other, tragedy or comedy. Demonstrating the two are indivisible was a fine, and brave (because it‘s so difficult to pull off) thing to do. I wasn’t expecting to be played like that - in fact, I didn‘t know what to expect from the whole novel.

All I knew when I started 'Wao' was that it was a Pulitzer-winning, 11-years-in-the-making story about a fat Dominican science fiction geek. Ahh, my naievety. Once you get into it, horizons expand infinitely. No spoilers here, just props. First, there’s the dictatorship. The anchoring in a part of 20th century history I - I don’t know about you (pl.) - knew nothing about. Nothing about the Trujillo Era - about, as Diaz puts it, ’the asphyxiation of a whole generation of young Dominicans’…or that Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was ‘the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated’. So that was an excellent wake-up call...being eye-deep in a dictatorship I'd not even known about before was absolutely fascinating.

And then there’s the immigrant stories, the opening out from Oscar’s nerdery, the ’moronic inferno’ that is his school, etc, to the backstory of his family, and before you know it you’re in the Cabral vortex, and it’s not only Oscar and Lolita whose lives we give a shit about, it’s Belicia and then Abelard, and La Inca too. Didn’t see any of that coming, nor the way the chronology would weave from past to present and keep us guessing. So impressive. It takes chops to encompass so much so smoothly.

Excuse the lack of coherence here - it's late and there's so much to discuss in 'Wao' that things are

gonna get tangential at some point. Which is why it's already time for some homegrown reader

reception theory. Specifically, the theory of self-identification - which is totally obvious, I guess - that the reason we read/watch/anticipate & enjoy certain things is because they tell us about who we think we are or who we’d like to be. This worked with 'Wao'...at least, I thought so. I saw so many people I know kaleidoscoping around in Oscar, Lola and Yunior's personalities that I enjoyed reading about their lives best of all. There’s a little bit of most of us in each of them…and there’s pleasure in reading about the lives of *very* distant alter-egos. It's not only about the nascent narcissism of self-identification though. Diaz also says something in a ’Narrative’ magazine interview about compassion, which is the other side of self-identification - to feel interested in these characters, you can come at it on the level that you, too, have lived in a dorm room with someone totally different to you, and at some point you've felt like an outsider, or you can try to understand how and why each of these people feels vulnerable, tough, confused, scared, and then shit goes down for them and you feel engaged, completely absorbed, when it happens…that’s having compassion. Then there’s the semi-alien world of Beli which requires even more compassion. And…fuck…Abelard. Diaz asks a lot of a good reader. More than can be broken down by this lame identification-compassion spectrum which is actually bullshit and I renounce right now. To sum up: it’s not boring.

Okay - anyone reading this far gets a reward, cos this is the internets! Let's talk about pum pum! Cos one of life’s most intriguing contrasts gets a going over - the world that revolves, as Diaz says so sweetly above, around the alchemy of pussy (such a phrase!). At Rutgers, you’ve got the pum pum mad player Yunior (thanks Jake, btw), and soppy fantasist Oscar rooming together in a dysfunctional but bittersweet bromance. You get the contrast between El hyper-masculismo and the boy who has to be begged to stop writing his space opera trilogy so he can do something about his weight and maybe, just maybe, get laid. And this is so sad and funny. Add to this Yunior’s spastic inability to get it together with the awesome, ferocious and beautiful Lola, and he digs himself into unforeseen depths of sad. It gets tragic. Cos Yunior is cool. I kind of admired him. He gets the girls, and he…um…you know, gets the girls. Well done him. And then I read something Diaz said in ’Narrative’ magazine about Yunior:

“Yunior looks at Oscar and sees a person who can expose himself, be himself, be vulnerable, often too vulnerable. Yunior doesn’t have any of that. He always wears a mask and is incapable of taking it off.”

That’s why he can’t get his shit together and man up for Lola. She got to him and he couldn‘t deal. Sad. So you get the hyper masculine unable to man up and be vulnerable, and you get the soppiest boy in the world unable to man up and be cool. (Note to certain men: don’t be Yuniors. Man up. Note to all men: Don‘t be Oscars either. Unless you want).

Um…where was I? Oh yeah. That the novel is jokes. Cos Diaz also said (somewhere…I forget where) how much fun it was to write the Yunior/Oscar banter. The man for whom its always pum pum o’clock and his pathetically uncopacetic roommate. I hoovered this up. It’s like Peep Show, but with a New Jersey accent, a Dominican swagger, and a way more nerdy David Mitchell, if that‘s possible. Here’s Yunior:

(p.173) “Did I try to help him with his girl situation? Share some of my playerly wisdom? Of course I did.

Problem was, when it came to the mujeres my roommate was like no-one on the planet. On the one hand, he had the worst case of no-toto-it is I’d ever seen. The last person to even come close was this poor Salvadoran kid I knew in high school who was burned all over his face, couldn’t get no girls ever because he looked like the Phantom of the Opera. Well: Oscar had it worse than him. At least Jeffrey could claim an honest medical condition. What could Oscar claim? That it was Sauron’s fault? Dude weighed 307 pounds, for fuck’s sake! Talked like a Star Trek computer! The real irony was that you never met a kid who wanted a girl so fucking bad. I mean, shit, I thought I was into females, but no-one, and I mean no-one, was into them the way Oscar was. To him, they were the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the Marvel…Developed crushes out of nothing…Not that any of these shits ever came to anything. How could they? Oscar’s idea of G was to talk about role-playing games! How fucking crazy is that? (My favourite was the day on the E bus when he informed some hot morena, If you were in my game I would give you an eighteen Charisma!)”

Like John B. mentioned, you could see that Yunior’s voice might get wearing. But I really liked it. I like boys to be all urbandictionary.com. And if you tire of Yunior, you get the other stories - which there’s no time to go into detail here, but someone else, if you want to talk about them, please do - the stories which make the novel truly epic - Belicia’s and Abelard‘s. Man, I think I read 'Wao' too quickly the first time because when I finished, I was like, ‘amazing, but too much happens’. Then I read it again. Slowly. Not only then can you savour the language (Diaz is a worship-worthy wordsmith), you’ll also realise, as the Holman pointed out, how he creates lives by giving you the details you don’t expect - not the burn or the rapes, but, say, the story of Jack Pujols. The gangster. The boardwalk boy. The relationships that mattered and that taught the characters how to love and hate and forgive. And that they were fuku’d. This is really strong stuff. And it all culminates in Oscar finally, maybe, possibly, getting some (no giveaways here - read the novel)…but then history and myth come crashing down and fuku shit up. So you get what happened on the edges of lives, the fringe stories, and then you get like this meteor plummeting down into the middle of it all. Repeatedly.

Chin wanted to discuss the use of sci-fi and comics in the novel. Maybe this would start with Diaz’s explicit parallel of the Antilles with the kind of burnt-out apocalyptic chaos you’d find in sci-fi dystopias. I can see it’s a great reflection…the ruined cities, the paranoid citizenry, the maniac overlord. My only tiny problem with how this mirror of sci-fi chaos was spun out, notwithstanding some really funny invocations of the Fantastic Four at crucially tragic moments, was that some of it seemed to be obvious. As in, many SF tropes are so disappointingly binary in the first place that lassoing them into metaphor for the story (eg. ‘The Darkness’, ‘the phantom zone’, 'the immortals', 'the apotheosis’) doesn’t do much in the way of illumination. I felt they were flat, rather than expansive, metaphors. (although I have aped such usage here cos i'm lazy, i mean, meta). In 'Wao', though, it’s still beautifully done. It’s original and makes brilliant sense - why not parallel the Trujillo regime with leg-shaking, awe-inspiring, cosmic fear-inducing sci-fi/comic tropes? People thought Trujillo was superhuman (a ‘cosmic force’) anyway. And the curse, the fuku, is always a great story thing. Who doesn't get off on a good curse? Actually, pre-empting this criticism, Diaz said in an interview in good old Slate:

(page 2)"No one can write a straightforward political novel about the Trujillato and capture its phantasmagorical power. That's another reason I had to go hard-core nerd. Because without curses and alien mongooses and Sauron and Darkseid, the Trujillato cannot be accessed, eludes our "modern" minds. We need these fictional lenses, otherwise It we cannot see."

Dunno if you'd agree with that. Up for debate.

So...it’s been rumoured Diaz gets about 100 emails a month, all written (poor fucker) in Yunior-style, saying ‘please share the secrets of writerly success, yo’…to which Diaz replies: ‘Accept that it‘s a tough road to choose. Good luck’. (I paraphrase. Okay, I invent. Never mind). What he's doing is light years beyond making a tough choice, though. It's not perfect, but for a first novel it's peerless right now (or not?). Whether it will become part of an early 21st century canon and go the distance is something I’d love to discuss. Will it slip through our fingers? I think Diaz is a phenomenal writer. It was only when I stopped zooming through the story and started paying attention to its construction, to the elegance of the way its layers fell on one another, and to its words and how funny and perfectly chosen they were before I realised quite how amazing it was. As a still-alienated lit-otaku, I have a feeling what I just said - about the words -will pass some people by, but that doesn’t matter. That's just me being obsessed by one particular form of communication. It's nothing. As long as people read 'Wao' and enjoy it then we don’t need to give a monkeys about the intricacies of each others‘ opinions.

Except that’s the point. So please, please read and get involved! Get intricate!

The cheapest of cheap cuties

So the woman who puts the 'hick' in 'chick lit', Nina L, was going to guest-write this post, whacking on here a dashed-off undergraduate triumph about Nabokov and his relation to something-or-other (she mumbled it to me, but it sounded intelligent). Sadly, she realised it was on the wrong computer and couldn't get to it or something (also mumbled, but sounded plausible)...so the ball's back in my court.

As i get the sad, paranoid feeling that approximately one person other than me reads this (hi mum!), it doesn't matter what i write here, and since i'm feeling lazy too, no-one's going to be disappointed if i select some choice quotes from 'Lolita', passively enjoy them, and leave it at that. If anyone genuinely was looking forward to some robust monologue, there'll be some when it comes to current Dusty book '...Oscar Wao'. Cos i have a shit-ton to say about that firecracker. Or Nina can find her essay. It's never too late for an English degree to be useful.

Nabokov is amazing. After his native Russian, English was his second language, and his grasp of it is (insert preferred superlative, i'm all out of interesting ones). In a note on 'Lolita', he said he wrote the novel as a 'record of his love affair with the English language'. (Although he then said English is apparently 'second-rate' compared to the 'infinitely docile Russian tongue' - cheers mate!), but - my god - what a great reason to write a novel, just to play around with nice words. And what a novel to choose to write!

I can't be bothered to discuss sympathy or otherwise for Humbert 'Jeremy Irons' Humbert. The tragedy at the heart of 'Lolita' is its blinding central conceit, and it's devastatingly clear that HH is a child rapist – although Lolita initially seduced him, fairly soon after she was desperate to get out of his clutches and he kept her with him, raping her, occasionally paying her for it (ie. using her as a whore) for two years (the second half of the novel). I find it utterly baffling that anyone could see him as sympathetic...though obviously one of Nabokov's tricks is to have us understand, on one level, that HH cannot help himself - he's just too much of a romantic to resist his 'schoolgirl nymphet'. And it's like he has this big modus operandi only he has the guts to deal with...as he says - 'i am not concerned with so-called "sex" at all. Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavour lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'.

Hmm. I was bored on a plane journey recently, and needed to do something intellectually stimulating to mitigate the fact I'd just enjoyed and cried (a lot) at 'He's Just Not That Into You' and 'Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2' (which, by the way, is awesome) - and 'Lolita' was the only book I had, and since I'd already read it 1.5 times at that stage, I decided to make a close examination of the language used in their sexual conduct, in order to try to ascertain the levels of self-deception and reader manipulation going on in our narrator. I came to the definitive conclusion that there are numerous instances of rape reported by Humbert Humbert as acts of love. I didn't pick up on them on first reading, but it was a bleak exercise -they're there. I do wonder how much the light, vivid tone causes readers not to see clearly quite the level of cruelty that's played out through the entirety of the novel.

p.185: 'I would lead my reluctant pet to our small home to a quick connection before dinner'.

Quick connection, eh? There's tons of these. The closer you read, the darker it gets.

Anyway, whatever. Got no desire to continue the epic show of pedantry...the point was meant to be that if anyone is actually reading this and hasn't read 'Lolita', read it. As dark as it is, its also hilarious and somehow, incomparably beautiful. Don't limp out and see the film instead - the Adrian Lyne version of the film was so diluted and lacking in comparison it made me remember, cos i sometimes forget, why books will always be superior to films (although I haven't seen the Kubrick version nor the Nabokov script for the Kubrick version, but c'mon!). So lets scamper onwards from the grimness of HH and look at writing instead. Nabokov is the best writer ever. Discuss. Well, in lieu of quoting the whole damn perfect novel, here's my favourite bit, which, in sheer writing terms, is genius:

(It's Humbert describing Lolita playing tennis, p.263 in the Penguin Red Classic edition)

'She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before going into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball once or twice, or pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the score, always cheerful as she so seldom was in the dark life she led at home. Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it was the very geometry of reality.

The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact. Her form was, indeed, an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis - without any utilitarian results. As Edusa's sister, Electra Gold, a marvelous young coach, said to me once while I sat on a pulsating hard bench watching Dolores Haze toying with Linda Hall (and being beaten by her): "Dolly has a magnet in the center of her racket guts, but why the heck is she so polite?" Ah, Electra, what did it matter, with such grace! I remember at the very first game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convulsion of beauty assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip.'

Wow. Especially 'hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm...' So beautiful. But this is one random sentence (albeit from an exceptional paragraph) out of hundreds as equally good in 'Lolita' - the imagery's so vibrant and different and yet still obvious - look at a gorgeous young girl playing tennis - she's not just 'hot', she's gleaming, pristine, burnished, capable of creating her own mini-cosmos. Understanding you can see all that in a simple tennis serve helps me to see the world (yeah, and tennis) more richly. That's what the whole of 'Lolita' is like; fracturing into prismatic brilliance what would be in most other hands another motherfucking mundane view of reality. The scene in the hotel when Humbert gives Lolita the sleeping pill, then, 'somewhere behind the raging bliss, bewildered shadows conferred' (which is my favourite sentence in the whole novel), as he figures out how to get it on with her, having realised the pill ain't that strong, and worrying she's going to wake up cos of the gurgle of the 'manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet', is both poetic heaven AND comedy gold. And when Humbert trips over some chairs and calls them 'incarnadine zebras!' Awesome!

Also, it's kind of frowned upon by the grim masters of domestic realism to use adverbs in fiction, but Nabokov's poetry flows so well that you don't trip over, or find excessive, his use of 'inordinately', 'absolutely', 'infinitely', etc, which would be excoriated in the hands of a lesser poet. Which just goes to show...something.

Perfectly timed is this mid-1950's interview with Nabokov on NBC, from Monday's Boing Boing.

His accent rocks!

Anyway, enough. i guess it made me realise why i'm such a word slut...when they're used well together, you get comedy and controversy, poetry and beauty, motel paeans and roadside thrills...they're the architecture of other worlds. Pretty cool.

Whittled down...

Things have been quiet here. i've been equator-hopping and skipping through Lolita again in faraway airports and thinking that if i write about it, all that will be accomplished is i'll realise i don't know enough synonyms for awesome. Reading and then instantly re-reading it (because it's that jizzworthy) has put me into a state of Barthesian jouissance*. All I want to do is quote Nabokov into the ether. But to say, 'Look! how beautiful! How gorgeously he talks about being a child rapist!' and then roll out a ton of divine Nabokovian sentences wasn't quite the point of what i had imagined as a happy drooling place for alienated lit-otaku. Arse. Maybe I'll indulge myself anyway though...it'll be more fun to read than this drivel.

So, drivelling on, I've whittled down the list of books on the Dusty table. I'll be ransacking these babies at a rate of a little more than one a month. With you (plural). Hopefully.

July: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Díaz

August: Oblivion - David Foster Wallace

September: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver

October: The End of Mr Y - Scarlett Thomas

November: The City & The City - China Mieville

December: The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

These 6 books promise to be quality literature - "qualit lit" as the Americans say. The Junot Díaz and China Mieville ones have received tons of praise in recent months. All are highly recommended and you won't be wasting your time! I'm hoping 3 weeks for each, but we'll see how it goes. If you're up for joining in with reading and discussing even just one of these, that'd be sweet.

The book mountain

A longlist of the books currently grabbing DABC's attention. Cross-genre, in no particular order, this is what the forthcoming few months of Dusty Anachronist reading will look like.

More suggestions happily received. An order of sorts will be decided soon.

Descriptions of lesser-known books will be sent out so you can have a gander and see whether they spark your interest. 

I got linking disease - this list is linked to the maxx

did somebody say gravity's rainbow?

Half Life - Shelley Jackson

My Name is Red - Orhan Pamuk

The Drowned World - JG Ballard - unless anyone fervently recommends other Ballardaciousness  

Something by Jane Smiley (maybe A Thousand Acres)

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -Junot Diaz

The Savage Detective - Roberto Bolano 

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets - David Simon 

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth - Chris Ware 

Stone Gods - Jeanette Winterson 

Howl’s Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones (I fell asleep in a pizza coma when watching the film of this but you gotta trust the words of Michelle Madsen) 

Silence - Shusaku Endo

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver

East of Eden - John Steinbeck

Bigot Hall - Steve Aylett (my idol)

The Years of Rice and Salt - Kim Stanley Robinson

Austerlitz - WG Sebald

The Intuitionist OR Apex Hides the Hurt - Colson Whitehead can't decide which

The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

The Calcutta Chromosome - Amitav Ghosh

Mating - Norman Rush

A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul 

Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

Portnoy’s Complaint - Philip Roth

The End of Mr. Y - Scarlett Thomas 

Fat City - Leonard Gardner

Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny

The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood  

Lost Souls - Poppy Z Brite

The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse

The City & the City - China Mieville  (my ideal man, as it happens)

Black Swan Green - David Mitchell (the only DM i haven't read - hope it's as great as the rest)

Naïve, Super - Erlend Loe (awesome the first time round - also the only Trondheim writer I know) 

The Last of Her Kind - Sigrid Nunez this is meant to be Excellent.

Oblivion - David Foster Wallace 

indigo-blue sky

So you meet this boy. He’s from somewhere you’ve wondered about but never been, and at first, he captivates you. You hang out with him. You realise he’s not all that, but still, you like him. There’s something he does that you want more of as soon as you’ve had a taste. Maybe it’s the way he speaks. He doesn’t fuck around with ums and ers, his voice is soft and clear. He’s a bit naïve and a bit sad, like life’s already robbed him of something, but he’s tough too, like he has an old soul. When you’re not with him, you clean forget about him. But when you meet up, you have an awesome time, you fall into his space, you make up your mind that he is all that. You even start to fall in love with him.

Time passes. The boy disappears, or you disappear. One or the other is inevitable. You weren’t looking, but some other boy has stepped into his place. And this guy - woah. His brain is like seventy times the size of the first boy. His sense of humour is precisely 900 times bigger. And he’s less melancholy and more batshit insane, and you find both these things irresistible. So much so that you can’t not be with him. You wanna just like, fiddle, with him all the time. You know that this is a collision; it’s going to be quick and intense, and you’re going to part ways soon. Then he’ll be loitering in your head for a long time after, and since, as Stephen Malkmus said, ’you can never quarantine the past’, you’ll probably rose tint it instead. Meanwhile, you stop sleeping, eating, seeing other people, going to parties, making proper meals, because you want to do nothing but inhale him, his wisdom, his wit, and his filthiness, while this thing you have is still hot. Then you find a photo of the first boy. You can’t believe you slumbered through a quasi-relationship with him for so long. Dude’s middle name was ‘mundane‘. Your connection was childish, forgettable. What you have now - this is love.

Hmm. What I’m trying to do is find a way of not writing about The Heart is A Lonely Hunter in a GCSE style way. It’s a problem. The bullshit introduction above is something I’ve set up to let me off the hook (I'm aware that it's my illusory hook, but still) of discussing it for longer than a few short paragraphs - you‘ll see. It’s an analogy for comparative analysis. But in the meantime, here goes.

I was meaning to write up my thoughts about THIALH (hey - instant lisp!) a fortnight or so ago, but back then, I thought it was amazing, and because it’s so much harder to write praise than slag something off (at least in my experience), I had nothing more to say than that. Then I figured out the why of amazing, but banging on inarticulately about why Carson McCullers was able to do what Hemmo couldn’t (in ‘Arms’) - well, I’m outta practice. I can’t find the words. Besides, I’m not sure how much more is necessary than to illustrate just one thing - in THIALH you empathise with the characters. Which is what reading novels is, say, 95% about - going outside yourself, getting inside other lives, giving a shit about what happens to them. The human condition, maaaaan.

The six main characters in THIALH are drawn in such a way that their headspace is wide open, yours for the taking. I’ll just make a quick point before returning to that - ‘nuff readers can only wade into new headspaces if they’re armed with pre-existing categories and stereotypes that let them make sense of who/what they find. Especially in literature that's been earmarked for GCSE level analysis. Fr’instance, when I was reading around about the novel, I kept on finding these character summaries - Mick - sexually precocious, McCullers’ alter ego, Biff - blatant trannie, Jake - raging drunk, Dr Copeland - freedom fighter doomed to failure, a symbol, a victim of social injustice, Singer - mute, possibly gay and jewish. Antonapoulos - chubby mentalist. Okay, no-one actually said ’chubby mentalist’. But these labels, however correct they are, make me feel So what? If all you can draw out of the novel is that Biff likes wearing women‘s things, Singer must be gay and Dr Copeland is illustrative of the struggles faced by black people in the South in the 30’s then big wow. Sure, maybe these would make decent starting points for queer or postcolonialist interpretations of ye text. But, y’know, gaping yawn. Gaping yawn if you’re gonna respond to THIALH by writing about Biff’s burgeoning transvestism, which is a really minor aspect of the story. It ain’t luminously revealing of anything. It’s what it is.

It’s like when I wrote a thesis on Jane Austen’s shit-hot ’Mansfield Park’ and focused the whole thing on the few hints here and there that Sir Thomas Bertram owned a slave plantation in Antigua. An epic rant about a peripheral point. But I was righteous, had been abutted by the film adaptation which featured slaves giving Sir T blowjobs (it‘s a shocker), and thought the rest of the text wasn’t worth discussing. I liked the fact that if you’re taking a queer or postcolonial viewpoint (and I can’t believe I’m even using these terms), you can usually go somewhere juicy. They take you straight to the heart of what literature students know is supertrue - literature is about sex and power. Identity, gender, race etc - follow those routes and you’ll see they’re nice shortcuts to the weird, difficult and fascinating heart of the matter.

Except literature isn’t all about sex and power. There’s really no point in dissecting THIALH down lines of ‘what is McCullers saying, revealing, denying, whatever, about identity and/or sexuality?’ because that’s clearly not what the experience of reading it should be about. (I may be a little influenced here by Zadie Smith’s ideas about morality and fiction, cos I was reading one of her lovely, lucid essays on this subject recently). But also, what I’m about to say occurred to me in the shower, and it’s fact - and science - that what occurs to you in the shower is good and real and true. What’s worth discussing about THIALH is how and why McCullers succeeds in making us care about her characters, whether they’re mute, gay, gray, green, Daniel Johnston lookalikes, whoever. Cos the rest of it, the identity bits, the hints at this and that, while interesting, is incidental. Anyone disagree? Um…er…

So I’ve only got two answers for this. First, the novel, obviously, is about loneliness. C-Mac works and works on loneliness, kneading away at at that tricksy little bitch. All the characters, despite their surface differences, are the same cos they’re all lonely. They have no-one to talk to about what’s churning away inside. Hence Singer. They’re entrenched in their perspectives and unable to step outside them (except for Biff and Harry), which makes them all seem kinda emotionally stunted, but also pushes them into being increasingly frozen in isolation. And so, loneliness. Cha-ching! Who can’t empathise with that? ‘Nuff empathy points there. Anyway, having made an insight derived from the novel’s title alone, I’ll move on.

The other key awesome thing about THIALH is the fact that all the characters go around pedestalsing others and doing hardcore projection because they badly need meaning/validation in and of their lives. I don’t think the pathetic folly of projection has been more clearly pointed out in a work of fiction (as far as I know, though I’ve only read five books). First, the whole Singer deal. Yipes. If you’re a mute, you can’t tell the people who’ve decided to think you’re great that you’re (almost) as flawed and confused as they are. Although yeah, *SPOILER ALERT* shooting yourself might do it.

And then we come to Spiros. Spiros, Spiros, Spiros. You fat fuck. You lie around, gobbling up offerings from the dutiful Singer, throwing them away when their shiny appeal dulls, usually in under a minute, and you don’t even once say thank you. Not only because you’re a mute. Because you’re frakkin graceless. The sad and awful thing about Spiros is that Singer treats him not like a saint, as some people have suggested, but as god. Mini-example:

“Sometimes he thought of Antonapoulos with awe and self-abasement, sometimes with pride - always with love unchecked by criticism, freed of will”.

Singers’ actions are pure bhakti. But McCullers is like, hey, you chose the wrong dude to worship. Cos Spiros is a prick and you were too blinded by your hopelessly hopeful delusions to see that.

So where does this get us? Well, you empathise with a bunch of lonely people who project their illusions of greatness and godliness onto all the wrong things, and you begin to realise that you, too, have to be careful not to dress people up as you want them to be, instead of taking them for what they are. I need that lesson perpetually kicked into me. And, you can admire the clean, beautiful prose, and marvel that McCullers was just 23 when she knocked this baby out. (The bit when Singer goes to see Antonapoulos for the last time and is on the train is just awesome writing, and makes me wanna bomb ass-first into those cypress swamps. I’ve always been a sucker for the word ‘indigo-blue’).

But then I cracked open ‘Lolita’. ‘Lolita’ is the new boyfriend in the crap analogy above, the one that’s made me reconsider THAILH as a witless, dickless square. ‘Lolita’ is so damn poetic and naughty and funny that I wonder why I thought THAILH was ayyymaaaayzing. It ain’t. It’s just good and the prose is solid and does what it does well, and as my first dalliance with southern literature since I threw ’As I Lay Dying’ under the bed, bored and incomprehending, so I could play Championship Manager, back when I was 14, it is gorgeous and worthwhile in its slow, sad, extremely clever way, and I‘ll be back there soon, for sure. But Nabokov …well…Nabokov has just raised the bar. Nina used to wonder, shocked, why it had taken me so long to get round to reading London Fields and Lolita, and it wasn’t that I had anything against Amis and Nabokov. I just didn’t think they would be good. I’m an idiot.

Lolita, Lolita, a novel’s worth of poetry…

A Goodbye To Guns

Right,

Rav here. Taking advantage of my hard-won administrator’s privileges, and with apologies for the delay – as you may well know I’ve been, ahem, distracted – here’s my take on A Farewell to Arms.

You remember Titanic? The film, I mean? Some people hated it, and some people loved it. My English teacher, I remember, said he thought it was great without any caveating or qualification, which I remember thinking was admirably unpretentious of him. Anyway, I half-liked it: but in the reverse way to a lot of my friends. They all hated the first two hours, with the Leo-Kate romance, but enjoyed it once the ship started sinking.

I completely disagreed. I found myself reasonably well swept along by the first two hours, which though cheesy in places (“I’m flying!”) nonetheless made me want Kate’n’Leo not to die. But once the ship started its interminable decline, I was bored rigid. Water crashing through a room! And another room! And a corridor! Leo’s trapped! Now he’s free! Now he’s trapped again! Billy Zane is waving a gun for some reason! Yawn. When the stern of the ship tipped up vertical in that actually-quite-nifty climactic scene and was sucked forever into the whirlpool, I breathed a sigh of relief that we could get back to the characters. For the ten remaining minutes, at least.

So fucking what, you ask? Well, the more perceptive of you have probably figured it out: I feel the same about A Farewell to Arms. I actually really like the main relationship, the which manages through the sheer inscrutability of the writing to appear both cynical and gloriously heartfelt – at least on the narrator’s part. Catherine’s determination to play the part of the dutiful lover always seems to stem from the conviction that she can’t ever actually succeed in giving Henry a happy home – which, of course, turns out to be true. She knows she’ll fail, so there’s a play-acting quality to it that makes it sweeter than it is depressing. Henry’s transition from detached cynic to hopeless romantic is more jolting, which is odd, what with Hemingway being the big writer of men and all. But generally, while I wouldn’t  agree with the blurb on the back of my copy which says that the relationship “glows with an intensity unrivalled in modern literature,” I do certainly find it touching and largely believable.

But then comes the “war bit” – according to my copy’s blurb, “one of the greatest moments in literary history.” Well, I am obviously a bloody great philistine, because I could barely keep my eyes open for most of it. Little details, in principle, are the essence of realism, especially Hemingway’s studiedly hardboiled variety. But the nice details – the failed St. Anthony’s medal on page 44, for example – are swamped by the sheer amount of passionless description. They trudge/drive from place to place, Hemingway seeming to deliberately allow the reader to lose all sense of their actual route or destination. They eat. They drink. They walk a bit more. Little, supposedly touching, moments of compatriotship occur. They drink some more. Then it all comes to a faintly infeasible conclusion with the hero – spoiler alert - swimming off to safety.

I don’t know why it didn’t work for me; there are similar pages of description in The Old Man and The Sea that I found perfectly compelling. But I think it’s because, unlike in Old Man, the action section of Farewell comes after an awful lot of something else – explicit and quite generous characterisation, making the grittily emotionless writing of the war section seem somehow churlish. The reader feels bereft at being deprived of Catherine and her strange charm, and the guilt-free idyll their relationship offers. But instead of letting the reader associate their feelings of deprivation with Henry’s, he doesn’t allow Henry to acknowledge his, leaving us simply bored.

Still, throughout the book there are those odd little turns of phrase which always grab the attention. Like, on page 14, talking about the priest: “He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.” Or the wonderful moments where a sort of sublime insight arises from a long gusher of description, like the opening paragraph of chapter 2.

And there are some distracting oddities. Like the fact that everyone drinks all the time, even while on active duty, without ever apparently feeling any ill effects. The novel’s obsession with alcohol has probably been the subject of a PhD thesis or two, but I – being, it must be said, a total lightweight- just find it a bit befuddling. A pleasant evening meal is accompanied by two bottles of wine between the couple. Stocking up to leave for Udine the motley crew of retreaters take several bottles of wine, but no water. Wine and apples is considered “a good breakfast.” I honestly don’t know if this is simply of its time or a weird Hemingway tic. I know people used to have a beer at morning break back then, but surely this is a bit OTT? It’s page 273 in my copy, after hours of rowing, before anyone actually drinks any water. In Italy, in wartime!

Then – just as clear but just as matter-of-factly presented – is the weird homoerotic charge to Henry’s friendship with Rinaldi. “Baby, baby,” he calls him. On page 67, it’s surely more than just cultural differences in attitudes towards male affection going on here:

“We won’t quarrel, baby. I love you too much. But don’t be a fool.”

“No. I’ll be wise like you.”

“Don’t be angry, baby. Laugh. Take  a drink. I must go, really.”

“You’re a good old boy.”

“Now you see. Underneath we are the same. We are war brothers. Kiss me good-by.”

“You’re sloppy.”

“No. I am just more affectionate.”

I felt his breath come towards me. “Good-by. I come to see you again soon.” His breath went away. “I won’t kiss you if you don’t want. I’ll send your English girl. Good-by, baby…”

I mean, you know.

Then there are the sudden moments of insight, which typically come in sudden rushes of words, like after days of only thinking thoughts worth saying – practical, quick thoughts – Henry suddenly allows his thoughts to race faster than he can speak and is surprised where it takes him. Like the treatise on the deceptive nature of concepts like honour, on pages 184-5 in my copy (“the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.”) These rare insights gain extra power for being rare, of course, and it’s one of the most satisfying aspects of Hemingway’s bare style. But there are really only a handful such moments in the book.

Basically it’s a flawed book, it seems to me. Maybe those flaws are really marks of genius that I’m too daft to see. Certainly Hemingway conjures up a fine romance; he also has the makings of a fine semi-comic, semi-tragic war novel. But the tensions, in terms of plot and style, of combining the two ultimately overwhelm the book.

Got me a feeder

¡Hola! Dusty Anachronites. Thanks for checking in. I've been slowly making my way through The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, and am beginning to see why people talk of its 'treacly effect'. It's definitely a treacly novel. Full of boarding houses on arid streets, boozed-up ranting under hot skies, and next door neighbours with secrets. Treacly fo' shiz. But I'm on page 100 and not addicted yet, and not sure if i will be.

I'm being lame with THIALH cos my housemate, Miss Librarian, handed me a book called 'Feed', by M.T. Anderson and told me to "Read 'Feed'". Not only had she retrieved it from a bunch of old books in a box, which made it genuinely dusty, it was part of that dinky 'lil subgenre YA fiction. So i scoffed at it and went to do something more grown-up. Cos YA = Young Adult fiction. Like Point Horror and Sweet Valley Shenaniganzy Blonde Bullshitz. This anecdote has an obvious ending so i'll spare you/me/The Ether the build-up. I cosied up with a camomile tea and cracked open 'Feed' one quiet night last week. And it was so, so good.

Okay, it helped that dystopian YA fiction is my favourite genre. What's not to love about having a shit time on the moon and losing your boyfriend to a girl with a more futuristic hat than yours and not remembering the last time you breathed real oxygen? I refer, um, you, to 'This Place Has No Atmosphere' by Paula Danziger (YA goddess) for a perfect example of all this, in what was a seminal moment for YA fiction, and, actually, my life. 'Feed' has that same satirical voice, and gorgeous prose to boot. I forgot how great it is to read someone who doesn't heap on the lame-ass simile showboating but can still make you cry cos the characters just get to you. S'pose that's the beauty of YA fiction - you're not trying to be Pynchon or Carver or fucking Tom Robbins, whose prose, in 'Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas', I've felt like sticking a knife through (and it's not just that he keeps on using the word 'panties' like a dirty old man... apparently he averages one working day per metaphor, which makes me want to kill him. I hope he spends the rest of his time a little more usefully). Anyway, in YA fiction, you're only trying to communicate that you're starting to be suspicious of the way the world works and that your life FUCKING SUCKS. Since my mental age is stuck at 14, I appreciate this.

'Feed' is about the interwebs and TV taken to a creepy extreme so their driveltastic datastreams are fed via a transmitter directly into your brain. It's 100% glossed-up sales talk whirling up your neocortex at the behest of corporations (of course), and it creates full-on consumers out of all of us. The message of the novel is an 'Adbusters'-esque resistance to this, including a hot date culture-jamming at the mall. It's territory so old it ain't fit for speculative fiction, but hey, could be new territory for Young Adults. And resistance will be an important message till we all embrace Neo-Quakerism, so, um, buy the book. yeah.

More compliments, cos i'm having one of those quasi-orgasmic Blogger-font/interface catalysed Csikzentmihalyian flow experiences... 'Feed''s future slang is so casual and good it almost falls into cool as 'Clockwork Orange' territory (i say almost - this is a dainty parable, 'tis no 'Orange', droogs). The characters and their relationships were beautifully developed anus and it's funny and sad, funny and sad, comedy and tragedy, ad infinitum, cos that's all there is to life. Funny, sad, weird shit goes down, some of us distract ourselves to numb ourselves, some of us don't, then we die. Pop stars get skin lesions to look cool. I can see LiLo doing that. You can upload and try on your friends' memories and experiences. Everyone is a hottie cos their genes were selected in a conceptionarium *stellar idea*. And the seas, the sun and mountains are all breathtaking, cos they're computer generated backgrounds. And you spend spring break on the moon:

"We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck."

That's the first line of the novel. Good, eh? M.T. Anderson is a fantastic writer, 'Feed' rocks, I'm ready to get intimate with YA fiction again, but I will spare the DABC any further reviews. 'Feed's exceptional though - it takes an evening to ram through it and it'll warm you up in the way only good old-fashioned dystopian satire can.

God, it's quite hard to be interesting when you all you want to say is GREAT! Yeah! COR! and then do some boring preaching like READ IT IT IS GOOD FOR YOUR SOUL!