Category: Literary Fiction

What I’m Reading: “The Descendants” (Repost)

(Author’s Note: I’ve been a bit busy lately, so I’m reposting this essay about one of my favorite modern novels. Enjoy…!)

Even though I fancy myself a literary fiction writer (even when I’m writing detective or sci-fi novels), I don’t read that much literary fiction. I read a ton when I was young, especially in college, and lately I’ve found it difficult to find novels that don’t seem derivative or poorly imagined or just downright silly. And for those rare books I do find engaging, I often arrive at them in circuitous ways.

Take Kaui Hart Hemmings’ celebrated novel, The Descendants. Like a lot of books I read, it became known to me from a movie adaptation, although, strangely enough, I didn’t actually see the movie. I was on a flight to Europe some years ago, on an older model jet that still had drop-down movie screen, and the in-flight movie was The Descendants. I didn’t pay for the earphones, but even as a silent film it looked interesting, with George Clooney skulking about some lush tropical landscape that I somehow knew was Hawaii. I looked the movie up on Imdb.com and found that it was based on a novel, so I looked that up. It was a debut novel and looked the kind of book I might like: a literary story, told from a single point-of-view, with relatively few characters, a vivid setting, a compressed time-span, and an intriguing premise.

So, I checked it out on Overdrive. And, man, was I lucky I did.

Continue reading “What I’m Reading: “The Descendants” (Repost)”

What I’m Reading: “Saint Jack” (Repost)

Author’s Note: I’ve be rereading Saint Jack by Paul Theroux this spring. Again. Every time I read it, I feel like my own writing improves. Maybe it’s my imagination.

Anyway, I thought I’d repost this essay about it. Enjoy…!

Novice writers sometimes ask about the difference between “literary” fiction and “commercial” fiction, and so-called learned people often answer something like this: “Commercial fiction is about plot; literary fiction is about character.”

But what any real student of literary fiction knows is that all novels—all good novels, at least—have a plot. That is, they have a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and some element of that story compels the protagonist (and, thus, the reader) through each phase. A short story without a plot isn’t a short story; it’s a poem. And a novel without a plot is a very long poem, the only real difference being a lack of fixed line-breaks.

No, what people really mean when they talk about literary fiction being “plotless” is that the plot, while discernable, is usually internal in nature. This lies in direct opposition to popular novels. Plots of popular novels are often extrinsic, with threats and goals that are externalized and easy to understand. Plots of literary fiction are intrinsic, private to the hidden thoughts, fears, and desires of the main character. Or, put another way, literary fiction often makes use of a plot that revolves around a symbol—something crucial to the hero for reasons that even they might not understand.

Horror and suspense novels have the most obvious and extrinsic plots: Escape the Monster; Kill the Monster; Get the Girl (or Boy); Live to Tell About It. The degree to which the writer of such fiction can make the internal life of the hero relevant to this plot might define the quality of the work, its “literary merit,” but it is by no mean an essential aspect of the genre itself.

Great horror novelists like Stephen King can blur the line between genre and literary fiction almost to undetectability, as in King’s most famous and widely admired novel, The Shining. While ostensibly a ghost story, King elevates his novel by rendering the psychological make-up of his main character, Jack, in vivid and poignant detail. Early in the book, the reader learns that Jack is a failed writer and recovering alcoholic—conditions that combine to make him uniquely susceptible to the seductions of evil emanating from the villainous hotel. But only later do we learn that Jack is also an adult victim of child abuse, a “key” to his psychic make-up that makes the second half of the novel all the more tragic.

In this way, King confirms what Flannery O’Connor said about fiction: “A story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality.” She also said that every novel is, in a sense, a whodunnit, if only the psychological sense. The whodunnit of The Shining is Jack’s abusive, alcoholic father.

Of course, the best literary fiction writers can blur the line, too, from the opposite direction. I’ve written before of my love of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1973. The story of two world-weary young men who conspire to smuggle a kilo of pure heroin from Viet Nam back to the States, the novel could easily be mistaken for a crime thriller. It’s only the way Stone is able to make the heroin a symbol for both of the men, especially the tragic main character, Ray Hicks, that allows him to wind a deeply affecting literary novel around the spine of that frantic and violent tale.

I’ve been thinking about all this plot business recently, even since I read a very fine novel called Saint Jack by Paul Theroux. Most people classify Theroux as a travel writer—his book The Great Railway Bizarre is often cited as a masterpiece of travel literature—but I know him primarily as a fiction writer, one of the best of the past fifty years. I had admired his books Kowloon Tong and Hotel Honolulu, but for some reason I never read Saint Jack, one of his earlier novels, despite my having been intrigued by it since I was in high school, when I saw Peter Bogdanovich’s wry and mysterious movie adaption starring Ben Gazarra. Part of my failure to actually read the book probably had to do with its relative obscurity; I could never find a copy even in my favorite used book stores. But one of the great boons of the digital era is that the back-catalogues of countless writers are now available, and Saint Jack somehow popped up in my Kindle recommendations for a whopping two bucks! Woo-hoo!

And, man, was that two bucks well spent! Saint Jack presents the reader with one of the most colorful and endearing low-life characters in the history of literature. American ex-pat Jack Flowers is a part-time shipping supplier and full-time pimp working the streets of Singapore. Middle-aged and mildly alcoholic, Jack’s seedy character is redeemed, somewhat, by the kindness with which he treats his affable young prostitutes (his “girls”) and also the hypocritical men (the “fellers”) who seek their services. At least, Jack hopes he is redeemed, fancying himself as a man of importance, a protector to the feckless, lustful, and greedy souls haunting the streets of the city. Cooling his heels in a hotel lobby as he waits for a girl to finish her session with a “feller,” Jack often indulges in…

[t]hat momentary daydream which flits into every reflective man’s mind and makes him say his name with a tide, Sir or President or His Highness—everyone does it sometimes: the clerk wants a kingship, it’s only natural—this dubbing was a feature of my every waking moment. I wasn’t kidding; even the most rational soul has at least one moment of pleasurable reflection when he hears a small voice addressing him as Your Radiance. I had a litany which began Sir Jack, President Flowers, King John, and so forth. And why stop at king? Saint Jack! It was my yearning, though success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. If the rich were correct, I reasoned, what choice had they made? Really, was disappointment virtue and comfort vice and poverty like the medicine that was good because it stung? The President of the United States, in a sense the king of the world, said he had the loneliest job on earth; where did that leave a feller like me?

Unhappy and adrift, Jack’s only ambition is to somehow strike it rich, though he has no plan for doing so. He once dreamed of opening the classiest whore-house in Singapore, a goal that, we learn, was briefly realized in previous years (with tragic consequences). At the point of the novel’s opening, he seems to have stagnated, both financially and spiritually. Then, a stranger enters his life. Leigh, a British accountant hired by Jack’s boss, is of roughly the same age and disposition as Jack, but his life has taken an opposite path. Completely conventional and straightlaced, Leigh nonetheless takes a liking to Jack, even as he finds himself slightly horrified by the details of the man’s street-wise existence. Jack, for his part, sees Leigh as a kindred spirit, a decent “feller,” albeit one who would never hire one of his “girls”. More importantly, Jack is disturbed by Leigh’s disapproval of him, although he struggles to understand why.

Of course, the reader knows why: Leigh is a symbol. He’s a mirror in which Jack sees himself—or, rather, some better version of himself that might have been. In Leigh, all of Jack’s moral failings are revealed. 

In this way, his appearance serves as the instigating action of the novel, the beginnings of the plot in which Jack will be forced to explore his own life history. A more generic kind of novel might have proceeded with a burgeoning friendship between the two men, Jack and Leigh, in which the former would find enrichment and even escape from his louche existence. But in Theroux’s capable hands, the story takes an unexpected turn when, barely one-third into the novel, Leigh dies suddenly from a heart attack while drinking in Jack’s favorite “club,” surrounded by boozy British ex-Pats (whom Jack loathes even as he craves their approval).

I previously alluded to O’Connor’s theory that every good novel is a kind of whodunnit, and Saint Jack is a wonderful case in point. It falls to Jack to call Leigh’s wife and tell her of the man’s passing, and also to arrange the funeral, which Theroux renders as predictably absurd and yet surprisingly moving. At this point, the story becomes a huge, Mobius-loop of a flashback in which we learn much about Jack’s past, including the reason he finds himself in Singapore (he’s a fugitive fleeing drug charges in the States) as well as his brief and glorious stint as a whore-house proprietor. Jack pours all his artistic and self-aggrandizing impulses into this joint, an opulent mini-resort which he grandly bestows with the name Dunroamin—a moniker which vaguely evokes an English estate as well as being a homophone for Jack’s yearning for permanence, a true home. (He’s “done roamin’”; get it?). He also pours in all his money, and for a time Dunroamin is successful. But its very success contains the seeds of Dunroamin’s destruction, as it soon attracts the ire of the local Triads, whose henchmen kidnap Jack and tattoo his arms with Chinese curses. Upon his release, Jack finds Dunroamin burned to the ground, his hopes for a better future having gone up with it.

As it turns out, Jack’s days as a house-pimp are not entirely over. He gets a visit from an old acquaintance named Schuck, a CIA spook who once ran a government-subsidized “hotel” with Jack providing R&R to battle-crazed Vietnam soldiers. If the operation of this hotel represented an even deeper moral failing for Jack than his previous ones, Schuck soon tempts Jack all the way into the abyss, hiring him to film a troublesome American general trysting with a prostitute. Whether or not Jack will go through with the plan is the climax of the novel (and one which I will not reveal here).

Saint Jack is a classic novel by one of our most underrated literary writers. Check it out…

What I’m Reading: “The Elementals”

Last year, I wrote a post about a fine non-fiction book called Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction. I enjoyed the book primarily for the way the author, Grady Hendrix, mixes his obvious love of old, pulpy horror novels with an enormous amount of mockery and snark. Basically, he makes fun of the trends that ran through horror fiction back in the day, as well their emphasis on over-the-top gore and hilariously silly plots. 

As I read the book, though, I noticed Hendrix mention one writer whom he does not mock: Michael McDowell. Rather, Hendrix uncharacteristically bestows a bit of praise on this particular novelist, which made me curious as to why I had never heard of the dude. 

As it turns out, most people haven’t heard of McDowell, even though he was a very respected paperback fiction writer (Stephen King called him one of the best) as well as a successful screenwriter (he wrote the screenplays for Beetlejuice and The Nightmare before Christmas, as well as a lot of TV shows). I, especially, should have heard of McDowell considering he was, like me, a Southern writer—from the Gulf Coast of Alabama, not far from where I spent my summers in Pass Christian, Mississippi. He was also a writer who tried to blend a literary sensibility with an appreciation of genre narrative, which is an achievement which I admire.

McDowell died in 1999, a latter casualty of the AIDS epidemic in America, just a few years before reliable HIV treatments came into common use. In the years since, his reputation seems to have grown, steadily if slowly, to the point where he is now considered a forgotten master. I was surprised to find an e-book edition of his most famous novel, The Elementals, on my local library’s Overdrive site, and I immediately checked it out and tore into it.

It’s definitely worth the read. Set in Alabama, it tells the story of a two wealthy, intermarried families: the Savages, with matriarch Marian and her adult son, Dauphin; and the McCrays, with matriarch Big Barbara and her adult children, Luker (who has a thirteen-year-old daughter, India) and Leigh (who is married to Dauphin Savage). At the start of the book, Marian has just died and the rest of the blended family is attending her funeral:

In the middle of a desolate Wednesday afternoon in the last sweltering days of May, a handful of mourners were gathered in the church dedicated to St. Jude Thaddeus in Mobile, Alabama. The air conditioning in the small sanctuary sometimes covered the noise of traffic at the intersection outside, but occasionally it did not, and the strident honking of an automobile horn would sound above the organ music like a mutilated stop. The space was dim, damply cool, and stank of refrigerated flowers. Two dozen enormous and very expensive arrangements had been set in converging lines behind the altar. A massive blanket of silver roses lay draped across the light-blue casket, and there were petals scattered over the white satin interior. In the coffin was the body of a woman no more than fifty-five. Her features were squarish and set; the lines that ran from the corners of her mouth to her jaw were deep-plowed. Marian Savage had not been overtaken happily.

Even for a funeral, it’s a very dreary and ominous affair. Yet it gets worse when, at one pre-arranged moment, Dauphin rises and stabs a ritual knife into his dead mother’s chest. Yeah, it’s that kind of book. The fact that McDowell can pull it off and still maintain a high-level of physical and emotional realism—not to mention vivid, sharp writing, as in the passage above—is a testament to his mastery. 

The book gets even weirder after the funeral, when the family retreats to their ancestral vacation spot, a tiny barrier island called Beldame, taking with them their Black maid, the long-suffering (and very smart) Odessa. We soon learn that there are three houses on Beldame, yet the family occupies only two of them, leaving the third abandoned. (You can probably guess the reason why, but it has something to do with the house’s intermittent habit of…well…eating people.) 

Michael McDowell

As the sand-dunes slowly encroach and bury it, the empty house attracts the curiosity of the young and intrepid India McCray, who ventures inside and sees something impossible yet real. And terrifying. 

Of course, The Elementals isn’t just a generic ghost story, nor a generic Southern Gothic novel. The characters are vividly drawn, sympathetic, and believable. Their conversation is fraught with age-old tensions and resentments, yet it’s often very funny in a Curb Your Enthusiasm kind of way. And the characters of India and Odessa are especially well-realized. Linked by their intelligence and, as McDowell implies, some kind of psychic power reminiscent of The Shining, each comes off as a kind of hero in their battle against the evil hiding (rather obviously) in House #3.

The Elementals is a literary horror novel, meaning that it bridges the gap between genre story-telling and development of realistic characters. The book really comes to life (forgive the pun) in the chapters about India as well as of the adult male characters, Luker and Dauphin, both of whom struggle—in true Southern fashion—with the dark legacy of the past and especially surround their own family. Self-indulgent, smothering matriarchs like the recently deceased Marian are, in particular, a source of psychological revulsion. Indeed, they are central to the main theme of the novel, which I will not spoil here.

There is also a good amount of subtle criticism about the racial divide that existed at the time (and now) in the deep south. Odessa, the Black maid, is the only character who does any real work in the book, busy doing the cooking and cleaning for the affluent Whites, just as she has done (we are told) for thirty years. And, of course, Odessa is not only smarter than most of the family members (except, perhaps, for India) she is the only one who knows what the hell is going on in House #3, using her power of second-sight as well as (it is implied) a familial knowledge of voodoo. 

Yes, as many reviewers on Reddit have observed, Odessa is an instance of the Magical Negro Trope, of the sort that genre writers, both Southern and not, have abused for a century. This trope is, of course, a literary stereotype, and like any stereotype it can be harmful if taken too far and left unexamined. But if Odessa is a Magical Negro, she is a very world-weary and snarky example, with both courage and brains. I simply loved her character. Sue me. 

In fact, I loved the whole book, which feels a bit like a mash-up of Tennessee Williams and Stephen King. Check it out. It deserves some attention. Better late than never.

What I’m Reading: “Mona Lisa Overdrive”

The great sci-fi writer Clifford D. Simak was known for writing novels and short stories with off-beat main characters. Often, his protagonists were cynical, working-class stiffs (often with a drinking problem) who stuck to their own, private, moral code, often at great cost to themselves. One of Simak’s editors once groused that all of his stories were about “losers.”

“I like losers,” Simak replied.

I just read this quote the other day, and I immediately thought of William Gibson’s books—specifically, Mona Lisa Overdrive. I first read MLO back in the early 1990s, just a few years after its publication, and I thought it was great. I never really thought of reading it again, but for some reason—perhaps because I’ve been a bit down, of late—I recently checked-out the book and re-read it. And I’m really glad I did. One of the foundational works of the cyberpunk sub-genre (along with Gibson’s Burning Chrome, Neuromancer, Count Zero, and other books), it still holds up, both as a work of speculative fiction as well as just a damned good, vividly imagined, human story. 

A lot of people heap praise on Gibson’s novel—and on the Cyberpunk genre in general—because of their ideas, the thematic questions they ask about how humanity can relate in an age of overwhelming, dehumanizing technology. And what are the brutalizing effects of the ever-increasing disparity between the high-tech haves and the lower-tech have nots? Et cetera et cetera. 

Myself, I like Gibson’s characters. Often, they are losers, of the sort Simak wrote about. Little people eking-out an existence on the fringes of society. MLO is no exception. The last of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, after Neuromancer and Count Zero, it’s set on a near-ish future Earth where mega-corporations, trillionaires, and criminal cartels have replaced all governments, and most of humanity muddles along in a rat-race of late-stage capitalism. The plot is a complicated skein of four interlocking narratives, each centered on a different character: Mona, a teenaged prostitute; Kumiko, the tween-aged daughter of a Yakuza boss; Angie, a beautiful young star of virtual reality films (“simstims”); and Slick Henry, an artist who sculpts robots and suffers from government-inflicted memory loss. I find it interesting that, of these four characters, two are children (Mona is sixteen), one is addicted to drugs, and one is brain-damaged. Additionally, two of them (Mona and Slick Henry) are poor, while the other two “rich” characters (Angie and Kumiko) are virtual prisoners of their wealth and position, separated from any real friendships or human connection. 

Most notably, none of them have real families. Mona is an orphan; Kumiko’s mother died under mysterious circumstances, and her father is an aloof cypher.

In short, all of Gibson’s view-point characters are underdogs, one way or another. The closest he has ever come to a real, kick-ass hero is in one of his best supporting characters, Molly Millions, the cybernetically enhanced mercenary who figures so prominently throughout the Sprawl trilogy (not to mention Gibson’s landmark short-story “Johnny Mneumonic”, which first appeared in Omni Magazine in 1981; yeah, I read it fresh off the newsstand). And even Molly is more of an anti-hero, selling her services to the highest bidder, yet always displaying a basic, inner decency and compassion.

It is Molly, in fact, who becomes the physical catalyst that eventually brings the four narrative threads of the plot together in the MLO’s final chapters. I don’t want to spoil it completely, but the story involves a plot to kidnap Angie (the simstim star, whom Mona strongly resembles; hint, hint) and prevent her from reuniting with her boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, whose body lies comatose in Slick Henry’s art studio while his mind is busy in cyberspace. Kumiko, too, finds herself caught up in this plot, if only tangentially.

Having just re-read the book for the first time in thirty-odd years, I find myself liking it even more now than I did back then. I am awestruck by how deft Gibson’s prose is (he is surely one of America’s most underrated writers), as well as how quickly the story sucks the reader in. Almost every pop-novel out there these days is written from multiple, shifting points-of-view, but very, very few manage to draw their individual characters so vividly, or keep the reader as invested in the plight of each. 

And, yeah, Gibson’s ideas are really, really cool. My favorite revelation in the book is when Slick Henry’s friend, Gentry, figures out that the L.F., the device attached to Bobby’s skull, is really an aleph, referencing the 1945 short story by Jorge Luis Borges. (If you read enough cyberpunk novels—or urban fantasy novels, for that matter—you’re going to run into Borges eventually.)

To sum up, Mona Lisa Overdrive is one of my favorite novels, sci-fi or otherwise. Check it out…

Why Do We Read “Heavy” Novels?

Recently I was chatting with a friend of mine, and at some point in the course of the conversation I told her about one of my favorite thriller novels of the last twenty years. It was Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, who sadly passed away in November. I described the plot to my friend, explaining how it’s about a 16-year-old girl, Ree Dolly, who lives in the Ozark mountains, raising her two little brothers. When her meth-dealing father goes missing, Ree faces the prospect of the bank foreclosing on the family mortgage, which would leave them all homeless (in addition to crushingly poor). To prevent this, Ree goes alone on a quest to find her father—or, at least, to find his body (she suspects he’s dead) so that she can get the money from his life insurance policy. This quest leads her into the mountain-shack domain of the local drug lord.

As I told all this to my friend, her expression became doubtful. 

“Sounds dark,” she said.

I was taken aback, momentarily, and not just because my enthusiasm for Woodrell’s book failed to penetrate her skepticism. I was taken aback because I did not, in fact, have a good reply to her complaint. Yes, Winter’s Bone is a dark novel. Very dark. About as dark as you can get in a realistic, literary work. However, my enjoyment of the book is not dark. In fact, I remember the light-hearted, almost giddy thrill I felt while reading it—feverishly, tearing through it in a couple of days. It was the sensation that Vladimir Nabokov called a “kindling of the spine,” which one gets when reading a truly fine book.

What I found myself unable to communicate to my friend is the simple fact that I loved Winter’s Bone, even though its subject matter sounds like the stuff of an awful, depressing PBS documentary. How is this possible? Why do people like me sometimes read, and love, “dark” novels. More to the point, why do we read “heavy” novels in general—novels about tough subjects, adult circumstances, and big, real-life, consequential choices? 

Why don’t we only read fun, predictable, pop-novels of the sort that dominate the best seller lists (not to mention the top 100 slots on GoodReads)?

I often think of something the late, great film critic Roger Ebert once said: “Happy movies don’t make you happy, and sad movies don’t make you sad. Good movies make you happy, and bad movies make you sad.” 

Daniel Woodrell – MPR News

Such a simple statement, and yet so profound! It applies equally well to novels. Good novels make you happy, and bad novels make you sad (or, at least, bored). Ultimately, though, Ebert’s aphorism is insufficient to answer my friend’s reaction. What does “good” mean in a movie, or a novel? For that matter, what does “happy” mean? Neither word seems easily definable, in this circumstance. 

Happiness, in the grand sense, is not the sensation one gets from a book like Winter’s Bone. As thrilling and, yes, entertaining as it is, it does not induce true happiness. Rather, what it grants the reader is a sense of being transported—of movement, into the mind and world of the main character. That is, for each one- or two-hours session of reading the book, one becomes Ree Dolly. Take this opening paragraph:

Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.

What most people misunderstand about books like Winter’s Bone is that they are not merely well written. Yes, good writing is a necessary—but not sufficient—quality of a successful literary novel. What is also required, though, is this shift in psychic awareness. In the paragraph above, we feel Ree’s sense of life—her desperation, her determination to survive in the most severe physical circumstances. We, as readers, are right there with her, standing on the snow, freezing our butts off, wondering how we’re going to survive the winter.

In a later passage, we also get a sense of Ree’s love and compassion for her two little brothers: 

Sonny and Harold were eighteen months apart in age. They nearly always went about shoulder to shoulder, running side by side and turning this way or veering that way at the same sudden instant, without a word, moving about in a spooky, instinctive tandem, like scampering quotation marks. Sonny, the older boy, was ten, seed from a brute, strong, hostile, and direct. His hair was the color of a fallen oak leaf, his fists made hard young knots, and he’d become a scrapper at school. Harold trailed Sonny and tried to do as he did, but lacked the same sort of punishing spirit and muscle and often came home in need of fixing, bruised or sprained or humiliated.

The great novelist Martin Amis once related Vladimir Nabokov’s belief that the reader should not identify with the character in a novel; rather, they should identify with the author. But I’ve never believed it. Yes, a good book does impart the wisdom of the author (this especially true in a masterpiece like George Eliot’s Middlemarch), as well as the benefit of their wit and depth of feeling. But that’s not the main reason people read novels. Rather, it is identification with the protagonist. And it’s not just that we identify with the main character; we must sympathize with them. We must participate in their struggle.

Even a rat-bastard character like Nabokov’s own Humbert Humbert—the most famous pedophile in literary history—could not keep our attention as readers if we did not, on some level, see ourselves in him. We must like him, if only a little. Feel sorry for him, even. Yes, he commits dreadful acts, but he does so, we sense, in a mistaken pursuit of happiness (that, what he believes is happiness, as he equates it to his sexual possession for Delores Haze). He is, in other words, a very wicked man but not a truly evil one. 

Ree Dolly, of course, is neither wicked nor evil. She is, in fact, a completely valiant and admirable character. But that’s not the point. The relative morality or immorality of the main character is almost irrelevant. The only real requirement of a successful novel is that, through the art and skill and sympathy of the author, we are able to pierce the membrane of our own egos and enter that of the character. And, in doing so, we inevitably reflect upon our own, personal, real-life struggles. To paraphrase something I once heard Harry Crews say, it is a psychological truism that, in thinking about and judging a character in a novel, we inevitably come to think about and judge ourselves.

Right about now, you might be thinking of the Ancient Greek concept of carthasis, which refers to that paradoxical feeling of renewal one gets after watching a great, tragic play like Oedipus Rex or Othello. It is the sense of having participated in the plight of the tragic hero and come out the other side, as if reborn. And this idea certainly applies to literary novels. But what I am talking about is even deeper, more elemental, than catharsis. Rather, it has something to do with what Joseph Campbell described as “the rapture of being alive.” The rapture can, and in some ways must, transcend what we normally think of as decency or even morality. It goes deeper. It gets as who—and what—we really are, as beings that exist on both a physical and a spiritual plane.

So, I guess the title of this essay is a trick question. I don’t know why we read heavy, challenging novels. I don’t know why we enjoy them, and even need them. And I doubt anyone else really knows, either.

I just know that we do.

My Christmas Sci-Fi List

For some reason, I read a lot of science fiction during the holidays.  Maybe this is because I loved science fiction as a kid, and I had more time to read it during the Christmas break.  At any rate, this year I decided to post a list of great literary science fiction novels.

I’m not qualified to give a meaningful explanation of the difference between popular and literary fiction. My old professor, Jonathan Penner has already done that in his fine essay “Literary Fiction Versus Popular Fiction” (which I cannot find on the Internets, alas).  But suffice to say that popular fiction is defined by a formula.  As Penner states, “Every work of literary fiction seeks to be like none other; every work of genre fiction seeks to be like many others. Genre fiction works for effects on which the reader knows he or she may rely. Literary fiction always tries to see the world freshly.”

The novels I list below certainly fall into the category of popular fiction.  They all make use of the common tropes of science fiction stories: space travel, robots, aliens, and the end-of-the-world.  So why do I call them literary?  Because each one of them, while remaining on a generic level, is centered around a vivid and successfully realized characters.  Also, each is written with a emphatic artfulness and grace.

So here’s the list:

The Left Hand of Darkness  Strangely enough, I first got interested in Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel when I read a review of it by John Updike.  It’s about a human envoy who is sent to a distant alien planet called Gethen.  Gethen is remarkable not only for its isolation, but also because the locals, although descended from homo sapiens thousands of years of previously, are all hermaphrodites.  Specifically, they function as men for certain part of their lives, and as women for the other.  It sounds a bit hokey now (the plot was even ripped-off on an episode of Star Trek), but it’s a fine little novel, with some genuinely compelling drama.  (It  actually develops into a kind of wilderness adventure story when the main character gets entangled in the political intrigue of the Gethen government.)

Lord of Light  Roger Zelazny was a hell of a good writer who is best known for his Chronicles of Amber series of fantasy novels.  But my favorite is Lord of Light, which is the first novel I ever read that seems, at first, to be one genre (religious fantasy), but then reveals itself—convincingly—to be another (science fiction).  Zelazny sets the story on an unnamed, earth-like planet where the gods of the Hindu pantheon (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, etc.) are real and very much alive.  These dieties use their Godly powers  to rule over a pre-literate culture of peasants (controlling them in ways that are often less-than-divine).

The story centers on Sam—who closely resembles Gautama Buddha but with a Marlowesque twist—who is trying to unseat the vain and profligate Gods from their position of power.  Sam, we soon learn, is one of the original crew members of a starship called The Star of India, which crash-landed on the planet eons previously.  Apparently, Sam and the other surviving officers used their technology to set themselves up as “gods” to rule over the other castaways, and eventually came to believe their own propaganda.  It’s a far-out idea, which Zelazny delivers in a surprisingly subtle, vivid novel that is part epic, part spoof.

Virtual Light  I think William Gibson is one of the best writers of his generation, literary or otherwise.  He invented the term cyberpunk, and its attending genre, of which Virtual Light is my favorite example.  It’s about a young bike messenger, Chevette, who spends her day cycling through the teeming, corporate-ruled streets of a future San Francisco.  In a plot twist that is almost Dickensian in its lyricism, Chevette accidentally comes into possession of a very unusual pair of computerized sunglasses, which a villainous corporate hit-man is very anxious to get back.  Gibson is a genius at mixing high-tech plots with low-tech heroes, and Chevette soon has to take refuge in an underground, DIY society based on the remnants of the Oakland Bay Bridge.

The Martian Chronicles  Okay, it’s a stretch to put this one on the list, not because it isn’t literary, but because it really isn’t science fiction.  It’s actually a collection of interlocking fables, all of which are based on Mars during the early phases of its colonization.  Unfortunately, the planet is already occupied by an ancient race of Martians.  If you substitute Illinois for Mars and the Sioux for the Martians, you get an idea of the feel of this novel, which Bradbury himself said was inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s classic collection, Winesburg, Ohio.  Many of the stories are genuinely beautiful and haunting.

The Tripods If you didn’t read Samuel Youd’s trilogy when you were a kid, you should do so now, especially if you have a kid of your own.  Earth has been conquered by aliens, and what remains of humanity exists in a servile, pre-industrial society.   Young Will and his cousin Fritz escape their village and go on a quest for the fabled “White Mountains” where a human resistance is forming.

A Clockwork Orange  The movie has outshone the book for most of my lifetime.  But the book is actually better, written in the inimitable voice of Alex, a fourteen-year-old sociopath who is just trying to have a good time in an Orwellian England of the near future.

God Emperor of Dune  The original Dune is a really cool adventure story.  I always thought of it as Lawrence of Arabia in the 30th Century.  But I think Herbert’s fourth novel in the series, God Emperor of Dune, is the best, from both a narrative and stylistic point-of-view.  It focuses on just a couple of characters (as opposed to dozens) and it presents Leto Atreides (son of Paul) as genuinely sympathetic character.

Nova  Samuel R. Delany could never decide whether he was a physicist or a mythologist or an literary fiction writer.  Why limit yourself?  Nova, the story of a mad space-captain seeking to fly through the center of an exploding star, is Delany’s tightest and most interesting novel.

Childhood’s End  I hesitate to put this one on the list.  I loved it as a kid, as I loved all of Arthur C. Clarke’s books.  As a writer, he was very, very limited.  But in Childhood’s End, he really outdid himself.  It’s the first novel I ever read that broached the concept of a technological Singularity.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep I can’t help but think that, in some alternate universe much like those he described in his novels, Phillip K. Dick is alive and well and living as a respected and beloved literary fiction writer.  In this universe, however, he wrote mesmerizing, almost hallucinogenic sci-fi novels about good and evil, the definition of “reality”, and what it means to human.  His best book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is a haunting classic.

Author’s Note: This post first appeared some years ago on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.

Today I Learned a Word: “Precovery”

Uranus, The Seventh Planet from the Sun

As part of the work for the Read a Classic Novel…Together channel, I’ve been reading a very old classic indeed, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (almost always abbreviated to just Tristram Shandy). Published by Laurence Sterne in 1767, it’s a very funny, sly book—kind of like Curb Your Enthusiasm, but in the 18th Century—and I found myself imagining George Washington reading it (and laughing his ass off) while holed up in some winter bunker during the dark days of the American Revolutionary War. 

The story is told by Shandy himself, a very smart but self-absorbed and neurotic man (again, a lot like Larry David) who tells his life story in wry, sardonic, and occasionally schizophrenic prose. At one point in his rambling narrative, he mentions the “seven planets” in the heavens, which surprised me. Sure, I knew that even the ancient Romans knew about the inner planets, as well as Jupiter and Saturn. But the fact that the unfathomably distant Uranus was known in the 18th Century struck me as remarkable.

As it turns out, I was wrong. Uranus was not discovered until 1781, over a decade after Sterne wrote his novel (but still much earlier than I thought). Which means that there is no way that either Sterne, the writer, nor Shandy, the character, could have known about the actual seventh planet. 

So, what, exactly, is Shandy alluding to in the “seven planets” bit? It seems that he was referring to the astrological planets in their classical (and very unscientific) sense, i.e., the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. This context makes sense, in retrospect, because Shandy is obsessed with astrology and its supposed effect on a person’s character. (Yes, he’s a bit of a kook.)

Lawrence Sterne

By the time I sorted all this out, however, it was too late; I was already deep down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole. I looked up the history of the outermost planet (not to be confused with the dwarf planets like Pluto and Ceres), Neptune. Neptune was discovered by French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier in 1846. Not only was it the first planet to be discovered entirely by telescope, it was also the first one whose existence was surmised before it was actually observed. That is, Verrier and fellow astronomer John Couch Adams had noticed irregularities in Uranus’s orbit, which, they suspected, might be caused by a seventh, hitherto unseen planet. They then deduced the probable location of this hypothetical planet and hunted it down.

And that’s not all! I also learned that Neptune was actually discovered before it was discovered. As historians found later, Neptune was seen at least three times before, by Galileo Galilei in 1613, Jérôme Lalande in 1795, and John Herschel in 1830. Each of these men recorded seeing something in that spot, but none of them realized it was a planet and not just a weird “fixed” star.

Apparently, this sort of thing happens with some frequency in the world of science, to the point that it actually has a name: precovery. In a precovery, someone finds all the information they might need to make a real (and potentially career-making) discovery, but they never put the pieces together. (Or, at least, they never publish a paper about it.)

I think there might be a profound lesson here about the difference between data and knowledge, observation and understanding. 

It’s also a lesson about publishing what you’ve got, ASAP. Before some other doofus steals your thunder.

Why Do Movies Get Remakes, but Books Don’t?

TomJonesMovie1
Tom Jones, 1963

If you’re a liberal-arts nerd like me who thinks about culture all the time, you have probably pondered this question: why do people remake movies, but not books?

Yeah, I know. On the surface, this seems like a silly and even naive question. Movies, after all, are a popular medium. They belong primarily in the category of the performing arts, like theater and ballet and classical music. And, as we all understand, no one over ever gives the “final” performance of Hamlet or Don Giovanni or The Jupiter Symphony. Yes, there are certainly “classic” performances of all these works—some of them, made in the past century, have been recorded for the ages—but none is ever the last performance. Each generation must have its own Hamlet, Don Giovanni, etc.

Okay, so we’ve settled that question.

Or have we?

Continue reading “Why Do Movies Get Remakes, but Books Don’t?”