Another new post

But first go read Gio’s–I loved that Alexie novel she writes about below.

I’m gonna cheat, and pull over what I also wrote on goodreads–but while my post is complete there, I’m putting it here to open dialogue–and/or just to keep writing myself. I’m trying to get my head around South African detective fiction, … and unfortunately this is a bad example. (But I’m 80 pages into a good one; more on that soon.)

James McClure’s The Blood of an Englishman:

I’ve been reading my way around a burst of new crime writing in South Africa, trying to get a bead on the movement (if a movement, how a movement, why this genre, etc.)? So I thought I’d stretch out, see what ancestry exists… and, as Deon Meyer pointed out in an essay (re)posted at http://720plan.ovh.net/~villagil/article.php3?id_article=279, crime fiction of any stripe hadn’t blossomed much. But the last fifteen years the genre(s) blew up (see http://crimebeat.book.co.za/2008/02/05/setting-up-a-hit-list-of-sa-crime-writers/), and there are probably any number of good reasons. (I say hopefully, trying to think through some of them myself.)

James McClure is probably the first, and for a long stretch the only, writer in English tackling crime in a post-puzzle, procedural/sociological fashion. And I’d heard all this stuff about how effective his works were at delineating a rich sense of South African society, its (as one reviewer puts it) “racial and sexual tensions.”

Well… judging from this novel, no.

McClure is tediously flat as a crime writer. “Banter” from every character, all the time; an annoyingly conventional stretch of exposition, bad guy laying out his or her motives, actions, to close the book; a reliance on easy stereotypes and a too-neat, too-easy resolution of social order at novel’s end.

That last flaw is exacerbated by a sense of what was actually happening in South Africa in 1980, when the novel was written and set. The novel studiously sidesteps political disturbances or unrest, depicts a black underclass fairly content to shuffle along for the “bosses” and shake their heads at white eccentricity. It’s patronizing in the worst liberal sense, seeing some kind of acceptance and order in the social system–reminiscent of those novels of the late nineteenth century in America, nostalgically reminiscing about the generally positive interrelationships of masters and slaves on the good old plantation. And aside from the occasional mention of Zulus or “coloured,” a profligate use of the term “kaffir,” and a keen eye–the book’s one strong suit–for the class tensions between Afrikaaner and English citizens, it could have been set anywhere …. One of those “exotic” mysteries, for the armchair traveler, with the illusory whiff of otherness perfuming a pretty damn standard bit of fare. Bleah.

Not good.

South Africa and South African fiction

Hey friends. So, as promised to Gio, a little bit of background about my recent trip to the Republic of SA, and some reading I’ve been doing–capsule reactions and suggestions.

My interest in SA first popped up in college. The mid-eighties was the height of divestment agitation on campuses, and my college while far more muted than many was still engaged with discussions about apartheid. I got to know something (something fairly simplistic) about the country; as a person who booked speakers for our campus, I brought in the expatriate journalist Donald Woods, who spoke about Stephen Biko and apartheid. I had the luck of being the guy who picked up speakers at the airport, two hours away–so I spent 2 hours talking with Woods on the way to campus, had dinner with him, saw his talk, then drove him the next day the 2 hours back–and it was astonishing. He was the most generous, open, engaging storyteller, and I learned a lot–and my interest grew. I did a little reading on my own–I think I first read Coetzee’s _Foe_, as well as Woods’ book about Biko.

It all came back when I went back to school in the ‘nineties,

Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love

Thought I’d throw up a post about a book I’m in the middle of teaching.  It’s an old favorite: it follows a family of circus freaks, children all the by-products of Al & Lil Binewski’s chemical experiments aimed at providing a firm foundation both for the traveling Fabulon they run and for their children’s long-term economic security.  (With their freak on, they’ll never go lacking for some sellable commodity.)  You get the gist of the book’s astounding tonal highwire act right away, in the opening sentence –

“When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.  ‘Spread your lips, sweet Lil,’ they’d cluck, ‘and show us your choppers!’”

This is at the far edge of cartoonish grotesquery, dark, provocative, ….

…and yet, it’s also a gothic family romance.  The narrator–daughter Oly(mpia), a bald albino dwarf–tells the story from childhood (recounting the rise and fall of the family) and in her adulthood, where she follows around her “orphaned” daughter Miranda.  One of my favorite things about the book is its startling openness to the many affects family produces and depends upon–not just “love” but neediness, rage, shame, jealousy.   Early on, Oly grapples with something Miranda said, surprising herself that “[she] would rip [Miranda] to shreds,” “swing her up by her round pink heels and snap her long body until that bright, hairy head smashed against the wall,” and yet concluding the paragraph with the contradictory love and rage for “the arrogant, imbecile bitch, my baby, beautiful Miranda.”

I’m teaching it in a course on disability studies, and the book is a smart-ass, smart-as-hell refutation of pity narratives, and it takes pains to reveal and revel in the kinds of stereotypes that circle around physical and mental difference.  It also enacts a beautiful deconstruction of the norm/freak dichotomy, as one of the major plots revolves around the exploitation of norm fascinations with the freaks’ bodies….  Dunn is also astonishingly good at avoiding the urge toward allegory: these bodies are never mere metaphors, and she consistently avoids abstraction by turning to the messy business of bodily excess.  The material and the metaphorical are in constant, uncertain tension.

And it’s a glory from line to line, prose that (like that first couple sentences quoted above) barks like midway patter.   And it’s a gripping read.  So, since I’m rereading and remembering, thought I’d give it a shout here.

Two strong recommendations

I can’t compete with Gio’s superb short essays on her recent reading–she not only makes me want to read the books she’s named, she makes me want to read the books so I can come back and read more of her prose.  And I’m dead-busy this morning, so this will have to be brief, but I wanted to throw out two excellent titles, just in case anyone is jonesing for something to read in the next couple weeks.  (I actually start teaching on Tuesday, but I assume that’s rarer for most of us.)

The strong but slightly-less-glowing rec is for Stephanie Doyon’s The Greatest Man in Cedar Hole, a biting but not bitter comedy of small-town claustrophobia.  The plot, such as it is, circles around comparisons between the lives of two boys (who later become men): one Robert Cutler, an almost impossibly perfect child, the sort of imaginary kid who emerges from the womb with a sense of grace and etiquette that belies his upbringing, who after school heads to the library where he does chores for fun, who as he grows assumes a mythic presence overshadowing, outstripping, minimizing everyone around him.  The other boy, the much-beleaguered Francis ‘Spud’ Pinkham, is the kind of boy who, despite a good heart and a willingness to change, is instantly pigeonholed by all around as trouble-maker and failure, who is a failure insofar as he fails to convince anyone he’s not a failure.  The story starts with a fairly aggressive edge, each character and all actions limned with a fairly precise vicious wit.  For about 50 or so pages, I was almost going to drop it–did I want to read a fairly long book that detailed the cartoonish limitations and despicable behaviors of people quite familiar from my own small-town upbringing?  But the book surprises: without ever dulling its edge, empathy emerges for each and every character; Doyon manages to sift layers of complexity around each small event, each bit of dialogue, until (about 150 pages in) I was utterly hooked, and read along in a rush.

Some reviewers cast about for comparisons and look to Flannery O’Connor, but I think Thornton Wilder maybe, but Richard Russo (of the earlier novels, especially his brilliant Risk Pool) is a finer echo.  But Doyon has her own sensibilities, and is a careful witty prose stylist, too.  The book was a joy.

Dave Eggers’ What is the What, or rather Dave Eggers’ novelization of  Valentino Achak Deng’s life (or what New York magazine calls “imaginary journalism”) — I snapped it up when published but then had buyer’s remorse.  I loved Eggers’ memoir (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) for its sincere ironies, its playful sadness, its lumpy baggy excesses as text, its sheer chutzpah.  I dug it.  But as Eggers’ literary star leapt immediately to a zenith, the inevitable backlash–and the crowd of imitative doodlers–dimmed my recollection of his brilliance.  I enjoyed but found more to dismiss in his next novel; his book of short stories has a number of pieces that seem more like stunts and capades, but also one or two that really struck me dumb–he has a piece (I think it’s called “Going up the Mountain and coming back down again”) about a hike up Kiliminjaro that was wonderful and unexpected… but, still, this new thing: someone else’s story?  Why a novel?  What’s with that title?  I feared more stunt than stunning, even as the reviews poured in.  (And, heck, even without the reviews: I have scant time to read for pleasure right now, so would I want to read a[nother] harrowing account of human suffering and injustice?)

Yes, I would.  So would you.  It’s everything reviewers are saying, which is that the novel is a wrenching account of the experiences of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan that somehow manages to be warm and funny when not terrifying, that is beautifully but not flashily written, that is a gripping and enthralling read even when I am moved to tears, that is perhaps “important” without ever being self-important, and so on.  I’m 1/2 done, so maybe it’ll fade–but I doubt it.  I throw it out because I think folks would really, really, really like it; it’s an astonishing accomplishment, so far, and I’m curious what others might think.

I just can’t get away from the inescapable…

My recent reading has been more school-driven (and from that, I’d put in another plug for Geoff Ryman’s _Air_, which holds up exceedingly well my second time through), but on the side I’ve read two books that fit neatly into the Reynolds-ian love for the end sinister, for the hermetic suffocation of a plot predicated on everyone being trapped. And they’re both quite enjoyable, one perhaps even great and worth recommending to all of you (even when you’re less fond of entrapment than me):

First, Dan Simmon’s _The Terror_ is an account of the Franklin expedition to the Arctic, one which you may know ended, after three long excruciating years lost and packed in dire straits and sea ice, with the starvation and death of all. Just my cup of tea, eh? But why a novel–when there’ve been quite a few historical re-imaginations of the events of this trip (and a whole popular, populous genre of doomed expedition narratives)? Simmons has a couple tricks up his sleeve. Taking the title from a bit of historical coincidence–one of the ships on the journey was fortuitously named “The Terror”–Simmons ratchets up the terror with a near-mythical (or actually mythical) ur-Polar Bear which is wreaking even more havoc with the minds and bodies of the sailors, and conveys some of the claustrophobic political intrigues of ship-bound communal life, while also painstakingly building up painfully realistic accounts of minds drifting into hopelessness, bodies breaking down with scurvy, and so on. It’s a big sucker of a novel, some 700-plus pages, and I read it in doses each night for a few, and I found it utterly enrapturing. Its prose as well as its plotting, despite certain fanciful turns, keeps us grounded in the ice and with the men; each chapter is centered on one character, and Simmons alternates among about 10 as focal points. I really can’t urge those not already interested (by predilection toward horror, a fondness for arctic failure, or a spark emerging from my description) to pick this behemoth up, but it was great good fun to read.

But Gillian Flynn’s first novel _Sharp Objects_ I will urge upon all. Its plot seems at first like a serial-killer thing, with young girls being killed in a claustrophobic Southern town, and a former inhabitant now intrepid Chicago reporter urged back to her home to write a big story. It quickly emerges as something far more sinister, and far more interesting. For one, the Southern town is rife with the kind of gothic underpinnings (decadent homes, slaughterhouses, class warfare, and family sins of any and every stripe) that creep under the skin and stay there. But even more, the protagonist’s voice and sensibility grab hold and don’t let go–we begin to realize, as various details emerge, how little the narrator has really told us, and how much she conceals. I don’t want to give away even one detail, so I’ll avoid going further into plot or substance.

But one last huzzah for the book: its dark humor and casual grace make the prose a pleasure throughout. Rather than a dank, portentous shudder, the book provokes thrills as much with its beauty as with its beaten-down vision of human behavior. As a for instance, when the reporter meets up with an old “friend” now one among the town’s many wealthy awful people:

“‘Ha Ha!’ It was a genuinely surprised laugh, but it came out in a perfect, unlikely ‘Ha Ha!’ Like a cat looking at you and saying ‘Meow.’”

The book is full of gems like that, lines thrown out as if thrown away as we rush toward the plot’s close, the revelations and the awful conclusion… This book really caught me unaware, and I raced through it, and I think this writer will be around for some time. She’s good.

A small bid to catch up…

…and pay Gio back for her dedicated, consistent posting.

First, a note on MEMOIRS:

–I’m way late for the party, but I finally got Bechdel’s _Fun Home_ from the library, and…. well, wow. This is a fantastic memoir–inspiring equally an emotional wallop and a visceral thrill at the layers of interpretive structure. Perhaps as a lifelong practitioner of the fine arts of swallowing feelings and then revelling in the freedoms of the text Bechdel struck me–in certain, yet significant ways–as a kindred spirit. Or put less obliquely: reading has always been a tool for breaking through my own social terrors, my emotional walls–even a way to see through, around, over, despite the walls that seem to pop up in my family. So while Bechdel makes some demurrals about how her endless ‘discovery’ of textual allusions might keep her story’s emotions somewhat distant, I think her narrative enacts the opposite: through the careful reading, she finds her way toward a kind of love (of her father, her self, her experiences) and grief, and out of shame and terror.

Two somewhat-analogous memoirs: one I read a while ago, Jonathan Lethem’s _The Disappointment Artist_, is sold as a collection of essays on art (from films to music to books) that mattered to him, but each chapter’s careful reconstruction of the pleasures of the text reveal so much about Lethem’s pains, pleasures, and psychology that it’s a thin disguise.  Or, as he puts it in one of his essays, the texts are “the beards” that allow him to sneak past self-censors to engage with his younger self, as well as the disguises that self put in to try to fashion some coherent identity out of (and into) his daily life. Some of the essays are outstanding, and Lethem’s criticism is dead-solid-wonderful, even if I longed for perhaps more connectivity across the collection. (He wasn’t trying to do what Bechdel did, but that doesn’t stop me from saying I did prefer Bechdel.)

And right before reading Bechdel I read Jonathan Franzen’s _The Discomfort Zone_, another slew of essays, but more centrally focused on being the neurotic, unlikable narcissist Jonathan Franzen. Most of the essays circle in on some central concept — a text (Schulz’s “Peanuts” strips, a youth Fellowship group, birdwatching) — which in careful, detailed observations open up frames for seeing the author as a young man.

Two things stand out: one, the essay on the Peanuts is a glorious reading of that comic strip–which meant a HELL of a lot to me growing up, too–and its near-bitter generosity toward the neurotic and nasty impulses of its protagonists. Franzen does some lovely things reading the drawings, particularly the heads, and some even lovelier things reading how the cartoon(ish) offers us up a chance to engage with an “otherness” and with ourselves, how a cartoon can allow the kind of dismissive, derisive human engagement with those different while also painfully exposing the links to our own experience. We laugh at the big-headed kid, but the openness of his face and the painful regularity of his fate are both draws toward a more expansive empathy (opening us up to love that other, and ourselves, even more). I don’t do it justice–it’s great stuff.

And then (two) this reading of such cartoonishness serves as a template for how to read the characters/caricatures in the memoir. The Jonathan Franzen of these essays really is almost painfully awful in so many ways. And it’s beautiful. Without ever glossing into sap or sentiment, while maintaining a corrosive critical attention to the failings of this young man, Franzen engages our sympathy. It’s fantastically funny–somehow being the kind of self-absorbed thing I despise in so many memoirs, while also brutally revealing such self-absorption. (Michiko Kakutani, reviewing it in the Times, didn’t see any such structural irony, and just hated the narrator; I, however, see this in line with Albert Brooks or Woody Allen’s painful self-revelations–self-absorbed, yes, but never less than scathingly self-critical. And funny.)

–I also read Jess Walter’s _The Zero_, which is the story of a NYC police officer who’s losing huge gaps in his consciousness of his everyday activities, in the days and weeks following 9/11. It is a blistering satire of the selling of grief, the self-absorption of Americans, the lightning-fast return to the kinds of political and economic and social fraud prevalent before the attacks (but now flying under the cover of sanctimony and patriotism and fear). The ’shtick’ of the gaps–scenes ending abruptly mid-sentence, and the book kind of rolling along, whole blocks of event and narrative not revealed or represented–is surprisingly effective at catching something of the feelings of trauma (around the event), the amnesias of sociopolitical life, the fragmentation of contemporary media, and so on. There is an ostensible thriller plot behind it all (a sense of conspiracies in which the protagonist may, in his lost moments, be a central agent) but it’s mcguffin: read it for the glorious details, the attitude, the resistance to the mainstream narratives of 9/11 which are so hard to imagine an escape from. Plus it’s funny. Did I say it’s funny? It’s funny.

–Long ago I promised some words on Tom Drury’s latest series of sly existentical comic digressions disguised as a noir novel, _The Driftless Area_. I won’t give it to you now, or ever–I liked the novel, and I remain a huge fan of his. But instead go back to his first novel, recently reprinted after years out of publication: _The End of Vandalism_ shows off the same seemingly-plotless comic beauty, detailing a year’s worth of months in middle(-of-nowhere) America. Drury writes the kind of sentence and paragraph that leapfrogs away from expectation into surreal and/or silly delight; he’s like a patient detailed social realist whose resistance to master narratives, whose attention to the real plotless pursuits of everyday life, emerges in an atmosphere of laughing gas. I love the novel, line by line, and yet I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the plot. Stuff happens.

Recently dispatched–Geoff Ryman’s AIR

I owe some answers, or have some stored up, to questions and comments posed/raised on other threads, but I also felt like I’d piled up a reasonably-interesting batch of recent reads, and so wanted to name and, in a couple instances, praise them. Here’s a first installment:
Every year when I teach a course that I end up teaching repeatedly, I try to shuffle up my assumptions by picking some new title, something (ideally) I don’t know at all. This year I made a couple of shifts in a survey of American lit, but in my basic Comp/Intro to Lit class, I did a wholesale revision. I had on my shelf a novel by Geoff Ryman, a Canadian-cum-English writer of texts often labelled sci-fi. Why not, I thought?

I first read Ryman’s Was, a brilliant reconstruction of The Wizard of Oz, which had four intertwining stories: a young Dorothy, exiled to home with abusive Aunt and Uncle, whose teacher is an Easterner named Frank Baum; a gay actor dying of AIDS, who travels to find the birthplace of Oz; a young athlete whose friendship with an elderly woman at a senior center leads him to drop his football and take up social work; and Judy Garland, child star and subsequent ex-child star. Sounds cutesy as all fucking hell, doesn’t it? Yet the novel avoids any hint of whimsy or romanticized, sentimentalized resolutions — it’s a serious, thought-provoking, emotional examination of how we use imagination to escape from and recreate our realities.

Ryman builds a serious cross-cultural mythology out of Oz, as if Baum’s story resonates just under the surface, bubbles up meaningfully into every aspect, of all human life. Baum the teacher notes how the Turkish word “uz” “means ‘real and genuine.’ It means ‘pure and unadulterated.’ It means ‘kernel and cream,’ and it means ’self.’ It is the root word for ‘yearning’ and for ‘homesickness’ and for all the things that people want….” I was astonished by the book, so I went looking and the next thing I found by him was a novella called “The Unconquered Country,” which sort of is set in the future in South Asia, but is also sort of about Cambodia and the ruthless American bombing of it. Then I read 253, in book form, but found out that it is available still as an online novel — 253 separate stories, each with 253 words, about the various individuals on the Tube, the morning of a disastrous crash. Sounds (again) like shtick, but it was gloriously inventive, surprisingly narrative (and blew up my assumptions about the long, loudly-trumpeted hypertext). (See it at http://www.ryman-novel.com”)

So I bought up his book Air, a novel about a village in the distant reaches of Karzistan (a fictionalized version of the Asian Steppes in the east of the former USSR), a place not yet caught in globalization but just on the edge of being swept up as the result of a new extension of the web (basically, everyone’s brain serves as a wireless interface with the ‘net). Great premise. Seemed, after I bought it, kind of cutesy… and, damn, it was long.  So it sat there waiting on my shelf, until I was choosing up books and thought it might do…

Boy am I glad I read it. The narrative centers on–and through–Chung Mae, the village “fashion expert,” who makes her living through sheer attitude, traveling to the nearest quasi-city and bringing back vague notions of ‘new fashion’ which she sells to the women at home. The big sci-fi-ish events do happen–Air does arrive–but Ryman (as his above novels indicate) is more interested in a grounded vision of how people live, how they structure their lives, and how fantasy, scientific innovation, the raw stuff of speculation both alter and reveal those lives. Over the course of the year Mae becomes an expert in the new field; there are debates and discussions about how the processes of globalization produce both loss and gain for those excluded from political and economic centers; it is a glorious examination of how culture works, and evolves, and struggles to persist.  And yet it’s all decidedly village-bound: we see one very small community, come to know its social histories and its dense social web.

It was 400-some pages, and I wish it had been longer. I honestly could have kept reading about Mae and that world for weeks. I’m ridiculously pleased that I chose it for class–a real lucky accident.  I recommend all of his stuff, and seriously urge you to at least check out a little of the online novel–it gives you a sense of what he can do.

More on more books later (Tom Drury’s The Driftless Area, Chris Abani’s GraceLand, Dennis Lehane’s Coronado, and Glen Hirshberg’s The Two Sams–gotta wash the kid.

The Echo Maker

I am about 1/3 of the way through that Richard Powers’ novel I discussed–The Echo Maker–and am thoroughly enjoying it. To remind you of the plot: a slightly burned-out going-nowhere guy in Kearney, Nebraska, has a serious accident and emerges from a coma with Capgras Syndrome, a disorder wherein the sufferer imagines that the people closest to him (those most intimate family members and loved ones) are impostors. His sister tries to grapple with his dismissal, and calls in an Oliver-Sacks-stand-in named Weber, the renowned author of studies of various cognitive functions/dysfunctions.

The book is a-bubble with the kind of thought problems that fascinate me: what is the relation between those things we conceptualize as wholes (bodies, selves, worlds) and the fragmented nature of perception and cognition? The problem at the center of the narrative–how does the ‘pathology’ of this particular disorder expose certain issues symptomatic of all identity (mutability, the vagaries of memory). I’m astounded in how effortlessly Powers strings together, riffs off his central tropes and issues… many have criticized him in the past for a tendency to THINK a novel into place, to write small essays with lecture-spouting characters, and to overdetermine the metaphorical shape of the writing (as I noted earlier, hammering away at the reader, so she can’t forget what he’s up to). This novel does NONE of that–its underscoring of the central themes occurs just about every page, in some small stray detail or perfect little metaphor, and in ways that you could completely ignore, concentrating instead on…

…the decidedly gripping and emotional story. The sister’s grief over her brother’s symptoms stems, in large part, from the alienating after-effects of their upbringing — a strict, scheming loser of a father, a fundamentalist mother.

There’s also a link–which hasn’t fully developed yet–to the annual migration of cranes to the Platte River, those birds Aldo Leopold wrote so eloquently about in his Sand County Almanac. Powers is a novelist of ideas, and the focus on consciousness is contextualized here within eco- and biological problems. He’s always a kind of startling synthesist, making connections across the chasms between divergent disciplines (arts and sciences being just one recurring strand of such negotiation).

I highly recommend this, but perhaps I’m safer (before completing the book) just bringing him up as someone worth checking out. I think I’m most fond of Plowing the Dark, which crosscuts between two narratives–one, a group of programmers attempting the most elaborate and fully-realized human virtual reality space, tying together arts, economics, history, science; the second, a narrative of a hostage’s imagination, as he struggles to cope with the isolation of his cell/room in Beirut. Its point can be easily summed up (we are always imagining the world, and there are whole astonishing constellations of intersections between the different languages for understanding and approaching the world). But it plays out movingly and with constant surprise at the author’s imagination.

(A close second: Galatea 2.2, wherein a novelist–named Richard Powers–gets a fellowship at a Center for Cognitive Studies, where a scientist is trying to construct an artificial intelligence. Powers is charged with teaching the construct about literature…)

What I’m up to

I just spent a couple days over a week with family in upstate New York, reimmersing in family politics and drama both old and new. Bleah. On the one hand, as my grandparents both seem to be quite near their ends (and there is nothing quite so tough as sitting down for a “nice lunch” while everyone at the table kind of knows without saying that this may be the last time the respective parties ever see one another), it was good to be home. But I always get tired.

So right before and while there, my reading’s been mostly of the quick and dirty and pleasurable variety. I got in a hardboiled mood, and read Donald Westlake’s old slick revenge thriller 361, reissued by the decent little press HardCase books–what I especially like about Westlake is a dry dark wit:

“There were three cops I talked to. One was a local plainclothesman, a comic relief clown who chewed cut plug. One was from the county District Attorney’s office, a ferret with delusions of grandeur. And the third was State CID, an ice-gray man with no tear ducts.”

Of course, Chandler did this better than anyone. He did it so well, he didn’t do much else–his books are collections of beautiful phrases and descriptions, and the hell with plot. Westlake likes plot, and the book is very good at keeping you guessing about motivations. Particularly for a book told in first-person, it manages a suprising amount of suspense about what the central protagonist is trying to accomplish. At first, he seems almost an ingenue, and when his dad is killed he “turns” to vicious vigilantism. Of course, his dad wasn’t what he seemed, and the “turn” is less transformative than we’d thought, and so on.

So then I read another Westlake, one of his written under the name Richard Stark. Under that name, he wrote a number of great great novels about a thief named Parker (made, most effectively, into the great great John Boorman film Point Blank).

Then I picked up and read three by a new guy, Lee Child. All very gripping and fun.

But on the way home I put aside the pleasures of ruthless killing and rigorous hardnosed plotting and picked up Richard Powers’ new novel, The Echo Maker: a man suffers serious brain injury after an accident in central Nebraska; his sister struggles to help him through recovery; the injury emerges in something called Capgras Syndrome, where the victim imagines that his loved ones are actually imposters…. And all the while, woven through, is a central image motif using the return of the cranes to the Platte river. Powers is one of the most gifted cogni-centered writers–he thinks up a helluva problem, and then every sentence is hammered into metaphors that resonate with the central problems. This one’s about consciousness, and our relations with others and with the world. Pretty damn good, but I know Powers isn’t to everyone’s taste.

Schulz

Okay, to get this off my chest: every time I think about this book we’re reading, I mutter to myself “Schulz” in a frantic Colonel Klink voice.  I’m pathetic.

I am NOT stealing Michael’s thunder, but I am about to leave town so wanted to post just a couple quick thoughts about _The Street of Crocodiles_:

1.  Appreciation vs. admiration.  I admit that up until the “Tailor’s Dummies” stories, I was pushing myself through, admiring the density of image and metaphor but not really hooked.  Even thereafter, I found myself occasionally speeding, rather than really reading.  What works best for me: those moments where the narrative energy–a sense of forward motion, even if in the strange stories-within-stories that Father tells–contextualizes the imagery.  I begin puzzling together the various details, rather than feeling awash in them.

2.  Reimagining childhood: even without the (very useful) cues from the New Yorker article Michael posted, I’d have caught on to this–and it is Schulz’s great strength.  I’ve always thought that children are like another species, whose experience of the world is alien to my own; rather than little people running around with our faces (to quote Alan Rudolph), they’re more like extraterrestrial anthropologists.  What I loved about Schulz is that sense of surprise and confusion in the mundane, what the essayist calls his sense of the mystical (or mysterious) everywhere around the narrator.

But I’d push…. the stories are a far cry from the romantic visions we so normally use to entrap children, to lock them up in neat frilly packages.  There’s something terrifying about the world the narrator discovers; there’s something terrifying about the narrator.  Childhood as other.

I’m perhaps pushed to this by a book I’m reading right now–Clifford Chase’s _Winkie_.  The book opens with a quote from Schulz, the bit about having to “reimagine” the stories of childhood; Chase’s slim little novel is about a teddy bear passed down in his family for some 80 years.  What works very well in his novel is the point of view of the bear, initially a ‘girl bear’ named Marie, living with a Christian Science family.  Family life seems full of hierarchies and arbitrary cruelty, as well as inexplicable moments of connection and compassion.  The bear is a fantastic, and (I can see now) Schulzian, consciousness through which to envision a world.

I can think of few writers who are very good at this kind of otherness.  The New Yorker article mentioned one: David Grossman, whose _See Under: Love_ is outstanding but tough, tough to read–simply in terms of its narrative complexity and the absence of conventional story elements or markers.  I also have some appreciation for Mark Haddon’s _The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time_, sold as “different” because of its narrator’s autism, but I think it’s closer to my sense of childhood than most other books.   (And you can probably see how–unfairly–my admiration for Schulz, rather than appreciation, leads me to find his influences rather than pay attention to him.)

3.  Prose poem.  Another cue from the New Yorker, and I happen to be working with a student researching prose poems at the moment.  I’m intrigued by this reading, which most poets would reject–but it does suggest some of the escape from narrative into the possibilities of lyric and metaphor.  At the very least, there’s an interesting tension throughout _Street_ between my own desires to pinpoint history/story, to set things into a forward-moving dynamic, versus the seeming stasis of rich observation.

I’m also interested in Schulz as comic writer, but… I gotta run to a class.