Go With Me

"In the kitchen Fitzgerald waved them toward a round table with four chairs. On the table were two or three dirty glasses and a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam. On the table lay a big Colt revolver, loaded."

- Go With Me, pg. 33

I was lead to this book by an National Public Radio segment called "You Must Read This", found a copy at the local library, and read it in a day. This was no great feat, the novel weighs in at 160 pages, and I needed to get back in the swing of reading. It took me a week to write this review because I do not want to oversell the novel, which I would have if I had written about it just after finishing.

This is an astounding novel. If you are at all interested in writing narrative fiction, find a copy. It is an illustration of a work in which no word is gratuitous. The prose is sparse and Castle Freeman Jr. acheives James Baldwin's dream of writing sentences "as clean as a bone." The quote that forms the frontispiece of this review is an excellent example. The protagonists enter a man's house and he has a loaded firearm on the table, described as a "big Colt revolver, loaded". Whenever I write a gun into a story, it always feels like a contrivance, a McGuffin; I feel like a student filmmaker trying to be the next Scorcese or Tarantino. This is also how I feel when I read about guns in books and I would have felt the same way about this gun. Except for one adjective: Big.

If you've held a gun, you know it has heft, feels heavy. Every gun I have ever held has been heavier than I expected. When Freeman said it was gun, a "big Colt revolver" I wasn't letting my internal censor natter on about what a contrivance this was. I was imagining holding it in my hand, my arm slightly drooping from the physicality of it. All this while, I had forgotten to be critical and I believed in the gun. Without big, it doesn't work. Without the word big, I'm left wondering what kind of person leaves firearms on the kitchen table, and who drinks Jim Beam, and isn't this whole book sort of silly, hey, what's on television?

That is only one in a litany of praises I could sing this book, but I won't. Read this book. Buy a copy and make notes in the margins. I, for one, am going to be seekng out the rest of Freeman's work.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"After I gave birth, in fact, I found myself connecting to people and respecting my characters much more. It’s easy to write a 2-D villain, not bring out the asshole’s humanity. Postpartum, I was like, “Everyone has had someone who went through what I did to have this child.”

- Nelly Rosario, in Callaloo.

I opened this book out of reading rotation, just to see what the first page would be. I sat down on the bed, and stayed there for half an hour. I carried the book wherever I went, read sections out loud to Myles over the phone. When he disparaged the writing as passable, I thought less of him.

I was really excited about reading this book, was excited for the wonderful review of it I would write, the experience of putting the correct number of stars on my Goodreads review (which I use as a virtual photo album/hope chest for books), and also for finishing the book, reading the ending that is implicit in its name.

And then, just like that: Stop. Halt. Go no further. I came to a part where I couldn't read for a bit. The part in the book where I'm reading in a pure, white, burning rage. The same reason why I had to quit reading Dave Egger's What is the What. The reason Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm made me see white, then red, then black. I could feel the acid in my stomach roiling and I put the book down.

This happens frequently. Any story about oppressive regimes, dictators, secret police, or the strong and the smug trampling the small and the pure; I can't process this as a normal human being. I don't understand how anyone could. In this moments, I have a vivid, palpable understanding of vigilantism. Why sometimes violence is the answer. I feel this way reading about the Jajaweed in the Niger Delta, about the drug cartels in Mexico intimidating journalists; I cannot function.

So, I put the book down. I read other things. Until I had told myself enough times that these people were only characters in a book. All except Trujillo. Throughout this book I imagined and reimagined Byzantine tortures and Hells fit for a man like this. I looked at his picture online and hated a ghost. He took liberties and prerogatives, more than belong to any one man in a lifetime. And even if the characters in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao aren't real, they are placeholders for legions of his victims.

This is what troubles me. The existence of pure, unmitigated evil in this world. When you glimpse it, even through the scrim of literature, how can you forget it, move through your day, live? I have no blithe solution to this problem; I am simply unprepared to face it. I have spent years looking at people to puzzle out the secret rhythms of motive. I can tell you why your girlfriend is angry or your boss treats you like trash in public. But I can't tell you why some people think every God Damn thing that they lay eyes on, touch, or covet belongs to them. I can't I can't I can't.

I loved this book. All of the Science Fiction references and the Spanish and the tiny details. I enjoyed Junot Díaz's voice, was crazy about his footnotes and his sentences. I know you aren't supposed to end on such a high note, but I just did.

Giovanni's Room

"Oh, you're handling it all wrong." I said. "He's mad for you. He just doesn't want to seem too anxious. Order him a drink. Find out where he likes to buy his clothes. Tell him about that cunning little Alfa Romeo you're just dying to give away to some deserving bartender."
"Very funny," said Jacques.
"Well," I said, "faint heart never won fair athlete, that's for sure."
"Anyway, I'm sure he sleeps with girls. They all do, you know."
"I've heard about boys who do that. Nasty little beasts."

- Giovanni's Room, pg. 42

I have two issues with this book. The first is the back cover:

"Set in the contemporary Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality."

Suggested Addition: ...and by the way, there's gay guys in this. Conventional morality? Is this blurb under the Hayes code? People who don't want to read about bumshoving aren't going to be fooled by that. I mean, what the hell else could it be?

My second complaint is about this section, occurring on pages 38-39:

"There were, of course, les folles, always dressed in the most improbable combinations, screaming like parrots the details of their latest love affairs...they looked like a peacock garden and smelled like a barnyard. I always found it difficult to believe that they ever went to bed with anyone, for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them...I confess his grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people's stomachs."

This guy sure knows how to pick the low-hanging fruits. It has always been so easy and safe to make fun of effeminate gay men. Even within the community, you'll see personal ads that end with "No femmes or fatties." First of all, I am portly, asshole. Second of all, somebody is having sex with all these sissyqueens. You know why? Because being with an effeminate man is nothing like being with a woman. Wake Up Call: You are pandering to a heterosexual mindset that will never include you. You are still in the bargaining stage of denial.

I've listened to the way you talk about it too: "Even though I like men, I'm not one of those sissy queens who prances about in a tiara, I'm a real man." And that is idiotic. If a real man is stalwart and strong, who has more courage? The "Straight Acting" guy, with self-hatred metastasizing through his body like a velvet cancer? Or the Disco Queen who hikes 5 blocks in makeup and a dress, trailing thrown beer bottles and poorly-worded insults?

Now that I am done with complaints, this book had a wonderful tone. It reminded me of Camus' The Stranger and Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar. Baldwin combines an excellent ear for dialogue with a stout narrative sense. It was an easy read, great imagery in parts, but was largely forgettable.

A Mercy

"If they worried that the little survivors would infect them, they chose to ignore it, being true soldiers, unwilling to slaughter small children."

- A Mercy, pg. 47

"The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old woman in charge of the children, [the sachem] had apologized for his error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease more would always come. They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god."

- A Mercy, pg. 54

In the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean Luc Picard encounters a spatial anomaly in the Romulan Neutral Zone. Finding that the anomaly is larger in the past and non-existent in the future, he surmises that the anomaly is traveling backwards through time.

There is something in that anomaly in A Mercy; in all of Toni Morrison's novels. The reader learns something, something small and horrifying, that detonates out the front of the novel, leveling the reader's previous perspective. If this is done poorly, it is known as a twist.

The beginning of this novel is deadly, terribly dull. The first narrative is scattered and unintelligable; the next feels like historical fiction. Which it is. All of Morrison's work is, to some degree, historical fiction. But it always feels so wonderfully pregnant and breathless, defying the genre.

An Example of the Miasmatic properties of Historical Fiction:

"Mr. Blithe stared out into the field, smelling the cool Virginia air. He knew he had to bring the lambs in before Sarah started jawing at him about the wolf she had seen at the far end of the pasture, waiting. A clean, Protestant woman, she was far gone with his child, he hoped a boy, one that would survive the long winter."

Of all the things I've written this year, that was the easiest. Do you want to know why? It sucks. It pretends that a man is the sum of his demographics, the way hats were worn in his time, and his lineage; it assumes that if you've read enough obituaries on microfilm, you can encapsulate a human life.

All is not lost. There is a section, 50 pages in, where Morrison hits her stride and gets the old juice back. The rest of the thing feels like a Master's Dissertation in a creative writing program. Not even a program at a major university, one of those schools with a dash and the name of a city at the end. This is the best student in the program, but she's up against some soft competition.

I enjoyed parts of A Mercy, but it reminded me of what Doris Lessing said after she won the Nobel for Literature last year, about the way that Stockholm strangles the writer you used to be, and replaces it with celebrity. After Love and A Mercy, I believe her.

A Mercy was, mercifully, short. I will shelve it, and dream of another Beloved.

Monthly Roundup - June 2009

Reading Snapshot:

Light in August by William Faulkner
Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver
Love, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
The Man of My Dreams Ed. by Chris Navratil

Disconnected Musings:

Because of Light in August, I am seriously considering a section entitled "Life's Too Short", wherein I highlight books I have abandoned over the month and why they made me want to open a vein. Faulkner drags, epically. The Line of Beauty is shaping up to be better, more beautiful, and sexier than The Swimming-Pool Library. Love, Stargirl is just not up to the original. Carver is uniformly wonderful. The Man of My Dreams is pretty much high-grade erotica which I got for a dollar at half-price. The central premise of the Marquez book pisses me off.

I haven't been following my canon reading - partially because of my time constraints, but also because reading the Faulker was like chewing peach pits. Attempted A Mercy, by Toni Morrison, and it was the only book I can remember of hers that I just simply could not stand. I read Beloved in a single night, I carried The Bluest Eye around with me from the moment I pulled it off the library shelf - I read while walking to class, eating, lying in bed, it is one of less than a dozen books I have reread in my life. I am a huge Morrison fan. But this book was a terrible trial.

I am taking up the canon reading again, using The Line of Beauty as a starting point. I might as well read something I can stand. Here is a quote from The Line of Beauty, in which the protagonist is entering a party already in progress:

"Drinks were being served on the long terrace, and when he came out through the French windows there were two or three small groups already laughing and glowing. You could tell everyone had been on holiday, and like the roses and begonias they seemed to take and hold the richly filtered evening light."

It's pretty dope.

Last Night

"Her legs Brian saw when she came into the bar at the U.N. Hotel and sat down beside him with a smile, completely at ease. He had been nervous, but it left him immediately. From the first moment he felt a thrilling, natural complicity. His heart filled with excitement, like a sail."

- "Platinum", James Salter

I read a review of James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime two years ago in Esquire. It was a quarter-page review by a famous author. In it the author talked about hearing about Salter for years, finally reading him, and loving him to bits. I can't remember who wrote the review, only that I had enough respect for him to take notice.

This book reminded me why I don't read The New Yorker. You try to read stories by all those old, established New Yorker authors, and the prose is very safe and bland and full of craftmanship. There are flashes of brilliance here and there, a certain turn of phrase that sings above the rest, but they are offered with a tinge of embarassment. My writing teacher told me to kill-my-darlings and all that. Madness.

Every single story in this collection is about adultery. Every single one. A good chunk of the prose is devoted to describing how women look in clothing, out of clothing, reclining, walking, standing. If women leave you "empty-legged" as Salter puts it, this might be just your thing. For the rest of us, it is a little flat. People eat caviar in these stories. They drive expensive cars and everyone went to the best schools. It is a by the numbers collection of stories.

What's more, Salter has a tin ear for dialogue. His characters' speech isn't nuanced or real, lacking the spark of life. It is easy to read, clean, compressed, sparse, just as all the reviewers mention. But unlike Hemingway's prose, where what is on the page intimates the vast inner lives of the characters, Salter's stories don't have a lot going on in them.

Salter is a craftsman. He has gone to the writing workshops, he has won awards, he has been well-published. But his prose could have been written by committee. He doesn't surprise or excite and that is what prevents him from being an artist.

NPR Review of Last Night

Music For Torching

"If you burn down somebody's house on page 30, where do you go from there?"

- A. M. Homes, talking to Steve Bertrand

Where indeed? Music for Torching is a novel about a couple who are both going through mid life crises at the same time; in the first few pages of the novel they set their house on fire and walk away and from there it only gets worse. They torture each other, act irresponsibly, fight, scream at each other, try to make things right, fail. Homes is a less subtle Raymond Carver, writing about people leading lives of loud desperation; Music for Torching is Sartre's No Exit with sex scenes.

Parts of the novel are quite well written; Homes hints at the secretive lives of the couples that surround Paul and Elaine, dropping clues so naturally that it is hard to see exactly what might be around the bend. But if Homes had cut more of the story, compressed the action more effectively, she might have had a wallop of a short novel. Instead, Music for Torching is largely a clunker with some new parts, making the rest of the thing look that much more threadbare.

Having said all that Music for Torching was an enjoyable read. Homes succeeds in some exciting ways; the places where she doesn't perform as well are forgiveable. If pressed, I would recommend This Book Will Save Your Life in place of Music for Torching.