Review: Siddhartha

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I was in high school, freshman and sophomore era, I first discovered Kurt Vonnegut and then – at the instigation of some older cousins – Herman Hesse. They were the two “serious” writers I first came to, and I can still see their books intermingled on an adolescent book shelf. (They were those thin, cheap mass market paperbacks, probably $ 1.75 or $1.95 each, and I recall the Hesse as being a sort of yellow, though I have a self-diagnosed color amnesia and can generally not remember the color of anything I’ve seen.)

I remember enjoying the Hesse, but I think I enjoyed it more for the idea of myself reading Hesse than for the Hesse itself. I liked the sense of myself as a 15 year old casually paging through a book that college students were struggling over. In any case, I don’t think I understood the context of what Hesse was saying. To me it was a kind of self-help manual. Now, revisiting – still somewhat casually – it seems to me a broadside against more established European philosophy. I must have seen that Siddhartha was “for” the power of the individual experience – the necessity of traveling ones own path – but I’m sure I had no sense that it was arguing against a philosophical tradition that saw itself as building upon those experiences that preceded it.

I admire what Hesse is saying here – that you have to look yourself for wisdom, that relying on teachers will always necessarily subordinate you to the experience of an other. I plan to spend more time chewing on the intriguing notion that our Siddhartha found even the Buddha wanting, not because the Buddha’s spiritual growth was suspect but because, if the Buddha had found a way out of Sansara into Nirvana, the “chink” he found in the great chain of existence was himself. Our Siddhartha (because, of course, the Buddha shares that name, though Hesse uses a different one for him here) believes he has to find his own path. His answer will never be as powerful as the Buddha’s, but it will be his, and that is a necessary component for him.

I’m not sure how sold I am on the image of the voice of the river as that ultimate answer. Listening to the river teaches him that it’s possible to move beyond time, teaches him that – as much as there is to enjoy in the physicality of the world – there is a blessing in recognizing that all things pass and we are part of them.

I read this because I am excited to take on the sequel that my friend William Irwin has just brought out. (Check out Little Siddhartha when you get a chance. I have my copy sitting at home in the kitchen, and I can read it now that I’ve revisited the original for the first time since 1981.) As I reflect on it now, though, I can’t help putting it in conversation with Vonnegut, who lives very much in my consciousness at the moment since I have re-read his work recently more fully than at any time in those same 37 years.

I got to see Vonnegut speak in college, and he said something that’s hung with me. He was very cranky about meditation – as I understand it, his first marriage dissolved in part because his wife found her way into Eastern spirituality, and he felt it estranged them. He told us in Ann Arbor (though it was a canned speech, and I’m sure he made it on many other occasions) that he understood some of the appeal of meditation, of the desire to lose oneself within a larger space of consciousness. He felt there was a Western equivalent, though, one that wasn’t getting the same contemporary publicity.

That is, he said he understood reading as “Western meditation,” as proudly part of the tradition that Hesse implicitly broke with. The goal in reading as he saw it wasn’t to merge with the godhead; it wasn’t to find ones way out of a sense of self and to merge with the divine or another conception of the mechanism of the universe. Instead, he said, the idea is to find oneself within the conversation of one consciousness with another.

That’s stuck with me for a long time and, given the choice, I think I’ll always embrace the experience of my fully aware self shaking hands with another mind over the impulse to lose my mind within something larger.

Meandering as all this is, my point is that I find those two “serious” writers of my adolescence much more at odds than their mixed place on my shelf would suggest. Siddhartha, as I read it, advocates for fleeing the self through a journey dependent on the self. Vonnegut gives us characters who are alien, but pushes toward a sense of recognizing the self as a distinct someone in a lonely universe.

That’s probably too pat to do either justice, but it’s how things look on this morning, some 35 years after I last really saw those two authors as talking to each other, and talking to me.


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Review: Hi Bob!

Hi Bob! by Bob Newhart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you’re watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – and if you aren’t you should be – then you know that Lenny Bruce appears as the comic lodestar of the early 1960s. He’s the one pushing the envelope, the one who’s both a model for and a provocation to Midge as she figures out her own comic voice.

If you look closely, Bob Newhart is there as well. It’s his routine that Midge’s wannabe comedian husband steals and performs as his own. (It’s the skit where he’s on the phone, as Abraham Lincoln’s press agent, counseling him about how to speak to the nation about Gettysburg.) It’s funny, even in the show we see it’s funny, but it’s also safe.

So, as we allow the history of American standup to solidify into a canonical narrative, that seems Newhart’s place in it. He’s the epitome of that formative moment’s notion of solid and safe. He is, to take a later era’s players, the Jay Leno of the early to mid-1960s, someone who reliably delivered laughs but didn’t leave behind the ripples of the more influential David Letterman or even Gary Shandling.

I think this book is Newhart’s answer to that implicit, whispered sense of his legacy. In it, he interviews – or, really, converses with – a series of today’s heavyweight comics. It’s loosely organized around topics, with the interviews broken up and spliced into something like a coherent whole, but the essence of it is to remind us that Newhart’s voice still resonates in the way he’s influenced this impressive wave of comedians. (And it is impressive: Will Ferrell, Conan O’Brian, Judd Apatow, Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel, and Lisa Kudrow.)

And, while if it ever comes to Team Lenny Bruce vs. Team Bob Newhart I’m all in for Bruce, I think that’s a good thing. If the Bruce school of comedy is all about making comedy a weapon to go after the hypocrites who are – and always will be – in control, Newhart’s is simply about taking the sting out of the discomforts of the modern world. He sees hypocrisy too, and he looks at it with his eyes open, but he takes it on by gentling it. He isn’t angry, and that anger isn’t born from the ashes of a frustrated idealism. Instead, he’s amused by the human condition. Bruce wants to get us out of our seats and agitating the status quo. Newhart wants us to see that the status quo is us. It isn’t revolution, but it is a small step toward making us all a little better.

This is an audiobook, which is a good way to hear Newhart’s voice. There’s perhaps a little more warble than there was in The Bob Newhart Show days, but his impeccable timing is still there. He is, at age 88, still a very funny man, and part of the charm of this book is to remind us that he has always appreciated comedy as an art form, that he was one of the boosters of the generation (and possibly generations) that have followed him.

There are some good insights into how comedy works. Silverman, Ferrell, and O’Brian in particular talk with him about some of the art of standup. There are also some nice nuggets about the comedy world of five or six decades ago. I mean, who else alive can talk about headlining in Vegas in the mobbed-up moment of the Rat Pack’s preeminence.

But the real reason to listen to this is that it’s a lot of very funny people telling stories and jokes that, with few exceptions, hold up. Lenny Bruce was incandescent and, if you buy into the narrative around him, that very incandescence meant he was doomed to a brilliant but short career. Newhart always cast a gentler light, one that’s directed the way for more comics than he gets credit for, and, remarkably, it’s still shining.


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Review: The Power

The Power by Naomi Alderman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novel has a magnificent premise. It’s a premise on the order of Gulliver’s Travels or Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” It’s the kind of premise that allows you to see through a lot of the contradictions of our culture, that strips away the familiar and leaves you looking at possibilities that didn’t seem to exist before it. It’s the kind of premise that could conceivably give birth to multiple novels and short stories, all taking it in different and provocative directions.

The problem is, Naomi Alderman has given us multiple novels at the same time.

Alderman imagines a world in which women have developed the power to transmit electricity through touch. They can deliver paralyzing and even fatal charges that render them, all at once, the stronger gender. In the span of several years, men go from being implicitly in control – thanks to their larger muscles – to dependent, based on the fact that they would lose in physical encounters with most women.

Parts of this story deal with the personal level. We see young women who, discovering what they can do, take control of their lives, measure the emptiness of revenge, and deal with the complications of romantic relationships shaped differently from the ones they’ve been schooled to expect. (Think of much of the Jocelyn story here.)

Parts deal with the cultural. We see women pushing for notions of gender equality with greater power behind them. They don’t have to settle for the role of ‘little sister’ or ‘dependent girlfriend.’ They can take over and run things like the men who ran them before them. (Think of Roxy.)

Parts deal with the geo-political. We see, for instance, the rise of a new nation headed by the angry and ambitious Tatiana, and we see Margot building a political and business consortium that allows her to become one of the United States’ most influential politicians.

Parts deal with greater and deeper anger. Allie, who reconceives herself as “Eve,” nurtures an increasingly apocalyptic vision in which she reinterprets traditional religious scripture as a mandate for women’s superiority, can never escape the shadow of the sexual abuse she experienced as an adolescent.

And parts deal with meta-narrative in which we see the events of the novel as the imagined reconstruction of a time of upheaval as reconstructed by a man 5000 years in the future. He’s trying in his work to question the, by that time, implicit understanding that women dominate men.

I wish Alderman had picked one of those stories to explore and broaden. Any one of them would likely have been powerful. Instead, it’s as if she’s taken a plate full at a story buffet. Like an analogous plate at a Chinese restaurant, the result is promising flavors that bleed into each other. There are different places that look as if they’d make a full and memorable meal, but there’s no opportunity to enjoy the full experience of any of them.

The clash of impulses shows up in many places. For one, most sections of the novel come to us in conventional (and effective) ways as present tense. We see characters respond to changing events and grow with new experiences. It’s “novel” in the sense that it seems to be working toward the new, toward a surprise discovery. At the same time, though, we’re supposed to accept the frame narrative that the entire story is the product of an archeologist historian so unfamiliar with our world that he can’t conceive of large scale issues like sexism or Christianity as we know it. At a level of representation, it simply doesn’t work. I’d like to read the novel that results in the confusion that Alderman exploits – that she exploits with real effectiveness in the closing exchange of letters in the final chapter, for instance – but that’s not the one she’s written. Given what we know of our future historian’s ignorance, there’s no way he could have known enough to write the larger story we’ve received from such a personal perspective.

Or, for instance, there’s the clash of scale. Much of this deals with the sort of narrative I expected when I first heard the premise. We see women, or really girls, who discover what it means to be powerful, who discover what it means to own a privilege contemporary women know to be denied them. We see characters like Jocelyn negotiating those changed sexual politics as their strength subtly shifts a balance that is, for purposes of their story, real but invisible. At the same time as individuals struggle for a fuller sense of self, though, we learn about other women who have taken over the government. These women have skipped the personal politics and gone straight for all-out war. I care about Jocelyn, but there’s only so much I can care when others have cultivated their strength to the point that armies are on the move. There’s simply a contradiction in the way we’re called upon to see the simultaneous effects of the power.

And, even at the level of the premise, there’s the question of what’s happening. This begins, as we see it primarily through Allie/Eve’s eyes as a mystical experience. It’s moving to sense that the power has emerged from millennia of repressed hurt and anger. Women deserve this power as something that can allow them to make amends for a sexism that stretches back to our animal origins. Somewhere around halfway, though, the mysticism gets pushed back as scientific explanations begin to predominate. It’s less a mystical notion than a physical one, and scientists identify an organ, “the skein,” as a bundle of nerves running through a woman’s collarbone, as the explanation for what’s going on. Unlikely men – a group of Jewish gangsters – come to understand the anatomy well enough that they can even surgically remove one skein and implant it into a man. I find that change in tone, that surrendering of the mystical, righteous anger that gave birth to one idea of the power, as much a sci-fi mistake as it was for the “first” Star Wars trilogy to reduce “the force” to something called midichlorians in the blood stream. It’s not just lazy storytelling; it’s also a diminishment of what made the work evocative in the first place.

There’s much to admire in what’s here sporadically, and I have a sense it might work very well in the apparently in-production large-scale television series that may come of it. Given a larger canvas – and, I trust, with the awkward framing device removed – it will be something to see the unfolding of a new culture as women establish themselves as the more powerful gender. I won’t forget the premise, but I will forget most of the confused and contradictory strands of the stor(ies) that emerge in this version of it.


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Review: Creative Quest

Creative Quest by Ahmir Questlove Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this one for a lot of different reasons, ones that don’t cohere, but that I think reflect some of the messiness, serendipity, and inspiration of this intriguing work.

1) It was on sale. That may sound silly. I can certainly afford to buy full-priced books – even the audio books I consume at a clip of 4-5 a month these days – but I find it overwhelming to look at the tens of thousands of options in the full bookstore. Instead, it’s easier to look at the ones Audible puts on sale for just a day. I pass on most, but one in ten or sometimes twenty will grab me. This one did.

2) I’ve thought a lot about creativity and its sources myself. I have an essay about plagiarism that, filtered through some practical concerns, became a class I designed (with help) for incoming Honors students called Ideamaking. I have another essay about the distinctions between creation, invention, and discovery. Until I started thinking about this book, I hadn’t realized how consistently I’d been asking the same sort of questions Questlove is.

3) I don’t know Questlove all that well. For that matter, I don’t know hip-hop as well as I’d like. From what I understand, he’s an articulate figure within the genre. He’s someone sufficiently on the cutting edge to matter, yet he’s also got a capacity to talk to “squares” like me or Jimmy Fallon, guys too old to have absorbed hip-hop in our adolescence. His voice holds up here, and I enjoyed my time with him, but there are spots where things get a bit repetitive. I liked it, but I think it might have been stronger at about one-fifth shorter. Some of the references came too quickly for me, but I’m trying to catch up now that I’m finished. I have a D’Angelo song playing right now. It may still not quite do it for me, but I am hearing it in a different way. I am imagining how I might really enjoy it, and that has to count as a real win for this book.

4) I discovered only after starting this that Questlove’s co-author is Ben Greenman. Ben was a classmate of mine at Northwestern. He didn’t rise to the level of friend, but we had at least a couple classes together and spoke a handful of times. He was himself a strangely creative person. I remember him most dramatically in a class where we were both a little bored. I compensated by forcing myself to be over-interested, to take absurdly complete notes and raise my hand often to try to find ways to engage with the material. Ben said nothing. Instead, he’d stare at the professor as he wrote – somehow not looking at his notepad – strange free association stories and essays. I never got to read any of them (he wouldn’t share) but I asked him about them a few times. I probably even tried a couple times to read over his shoulder if I happened to be sitting next to him.

5) Questlove talks a lot here about the nature of collaboration, so it’s intriguing to read this for signs of my old acquaintance’s contributions. I can’t tease out too many of them – there’s the occasional literary reference that seems to have his fingerprints on it – but Questlove acknowledges Ben a handful of times. I imagine Ben is proud of his contributions to this (I certainly would be) and it’s interesting to think of how certain works of art that grow out of collaboration, even when they have one person’s name on them, have multiple influences. This is, in part, Ben’s book. Maybe there are even an atom or two of it that grew out of the conversations I had with him after class or in one of Evanston’s bars – not my ideas, but ideas Ben sharpened when he explained them to me and the rest of our class. You don’t have to be the knife that carves the wood; sometimes you contribute by being the whetstone.

6) And then there’s the fact that Questlove (and Ben) have some thoughtful things to say about how to understand and possibly stoke creativity. I liked his breaking down the notion of cognitive disinhibition, the sense that we can’t be afraid of new ideas even though we set up all sorts of barriers against them. (My father wrote about a different version of the same thing in a short essay called “Circumventing the Self-Censor.”) I also liked the way he emphasized the notion of “seeds.” In a way that brings those two things together, he says, “It’s not about letting everything in; it’s more about not keeping things out.” The line between the two is thin, but it seems the sort of notion that, in its necessary vagueness, becomes a useful meditation for the would-be creative.

7) And, in a final thought, I really liked his discussion of “negative theology” as a metaphor for the unwritten (or uncomposed) work. That is, in some Jewish theology, we can’t know G-d directly so we work to know what G-d is not: not localized, not time-bound, not singular in essence. We should not worship our own art – I’ll add that as paraphrase and caution – but we can begin to recognize it before it comes into existence if we decide what we don’t want it to be. I like that idea enough that I think I will use it as part of the next brainstorming activity I do in class.

8) So this book is all those thoughts and more. It’s not my usual audio fare, but I mostly enjoyed it. It’s a strange book with an appeal to only a certain sort. If you’ve read this much, though, chances are you’re one of those sorts.


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Review: Terry and the Pirates: Enter the Dragon Lady

Terry and the Pirates: Enter the Dragon Lady by Milton Caniff
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Terry and the Pirates is a one of those phenomena that time forgot. For a while not so long before and during World War II, it was one of the leading comics of its moment, up there with Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie as one of those cultural touchstones that every kid would have known and every adult would have recognized. Terry told the adventures of its title character and some of the adults he met in his travels in China and the Far East. And, more famous than even the strip’s heroes, was its seductive villainess, the Dragon Lady.

There’s an adventurousness to all this, and it’s only fair to note that Caniff could really draw. It’s amazing to think he wrote and drew a daily strip and then, at least for part of that time, added a full-blown Sunday as well.

But, but, but, the racism and sexism are simply shocking. I read this because I have a student doing some very interesting work on the image of China in the West – shout out to Alexis – so I finished something that often felt flat-out insulting. I mean, can you imagine someone referring to a woman as a “slant-eyed broad”? Or, can you imagine a servile sidekick, Connie, who happily accepts being kicked around and mocked, even by Terry and their hero-pal Pat? And “very” spelled as “velly”? Ugh.

It’s easy to forget now, but both Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie were conservative political imaginings. I did a part of my dissertation on the anti-immigrant implications of Dick Tracy’s capacity for recognizing villains as ethnically other. And there isn’t much more to say about Little Orphan Annie than that her adoptive father is Daddy Warbucks, a reimagining of the war profiteer as secretly generous…despite what those commies might think.

The crucial difference here, though, is that while those strips dealt with difference within America – as they performed what my old advisor Carl Smith called the “cultural work” of naming the differences among our different American constituencies – Terry and the Pirates dealt with a purely imagined “Orient.” Its hero is allowed to be tougher than everyone else. He can be referred to as “the handsome one.” He can be sold into slavery as a mercenary, but he commands a dramatically high price because of his capacity to outfight everyone else.

And, of course, the Dragon Lady is imagined as a woman of staggering beauty who cannot be satisfied by any but a white Western man.

As such, Terry ultimately had less to say about “us,” about America as it was, than it did about an American vision of China and the East that never could be. It’s a fantasy, one firmly rooted in jingoism and, yes, sexism. Dick Tracy may have been square-jawed and all-too-certain in that police-state way, but he dealt with the reality of crime. Terry and the Dragon Lady celebrated a sense of privilege and Western supremacy that, especially in retrospect, seems full of an anxiety it never finds the courage to confront.

The whole premise is ugly and, outside its intriguing art work and historical role, there isn’t much reason to remember it.

Still, Alexis is working to show that the trope of the Dragon Lady – of the Chinese woman who uses her beauty and wiles to entrap Westerners – is an enduring one. There may have been hints of it before Terry, but she made it full blown. And it persists today. I’m thinking in particular of the disappointing news that the generally culturally sensitive J.K. Rowling has announced that Voldemort’s snake, Nagini, was originally an Asian witch who transformed.

I satisfied some curiosity in reading this one. I’m happy to move on and leave it to Alexis.


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Review: The Poser

The Poser by Jacob Rubin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I came across this one when I was looking into some questions of impersonation and politics and found that Rubin had written a thoughtful essay on Dana Carvey’s take on George H. Bush. I thought it was very well done, and it didn’t hurt that I share his opinion that Carvey introduced a new twist into Saturday Night Live’s political discourse with that act.

In any case, this novel starts out beautifully as it fulfills a difficult ambition. Giovanni can impersonate anyone. He’s a prodigy; even as an infant even he responded to the facial expressions greeting him. To make this work, Rubin has to be a skilled mimic himself, has to be able to perform one voice after another on the page.

And, for most of this, he is. The guy can write, and the joy of discovering that in this, his first novel is part of what makes reading it so rewarding. It’s a novel that carries with it some of the weight of the act that Giovanni puts together and then performs in a seedy little theater.

So the character and context here are terrific. The story that develops in that space takes more time, and, while it starts out just as impressively, it tails off toward the end.

Initially, Giovanni finds himself drawn to impersonating others because it seems he may have no self at the core of his identity. When Max, a two-bit show biz manager finds him, he gives Giovanni someone to imitate. Through that mimicry, Giovanni finds a public pose that allows him to market his skill. Max is a bit of shyster, but he’s ultimately loveable, and that gives Giovanni a purpose.

From there, Giovanni finds himself drawn to imitating Bernie, a much more serious theater owner. Bernie represents a more sinister allure than the pleasantly shady Max. He’s aggressive in business, disparaging of those who work for him, and ultimately ruthless. If you throw in Lucy, a not-so-talented singer-actress who may or may not be the first person (beyond his controlling mother) to love Giovanni, and you have an almost mythic array of characters and relationships.

The novel starts to weaken a little when Rubin has to move those characters into new situations and settings. We leave the Broadway-like setting of the first two-thirds or so and wind up, first, in Hollywood where Giovanni becomes an unlikely movie star, and then in a less clear context where he becomes a right-wing political provocateur. Shaped by Bernie, he brings his capacity for mimicry to the campaign trail, and he weds his gifts to a cruel species of politics.

The novel is two or three years old, but, in that respect, it feels as if it’s anticipating Trump in the way that Kosinski’s Being There anticipated Reagan. Where that previously unthinkable empty suit candidacy was central to the whole novel, though, this feels somewhat appended. It’s not, ultimately, a political or even social novel. At its best, and that best is impressive, it’s a personal one.

The tragedy of Giovanni’s life is that he’s not sure he can find himself beneath the voices of others that he wears like a protective suit. Rubin gets back to that in the end, after his detour into perhaps too-public a life, and brings those ideas back as Giovanni meets a peculiar therapist who mostly understands him.

It’s not a complaint to say that this excellent set-piece veers a bit too long into picaresque. Rather, I’d be happy to try to imitate Rubin myself since I’m awfully impressed by what he’s pulled off.


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Review: The Unknown Terrorist

The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I am currently auditioning Flanagan for my favorite active writer. He got off to a great start in my reading with two of my favorite novels of the last few years – The Narrow Road to the Deep North and First Person. At his best, he strikes me as world-class, as someone who ought to get sounded out for a Nobel Prize, especially given that he comes from Tasmania and gives voice to a culture the rest of the world doesn’t get to glimpse all that often.

I had more mixed feelings about his Death of a River Guide, but that was the first he’d written, and I figured he’d learned more of his craft afterwards. This one, though, is a disappointment. It may well have packed a certain power when it first came out, but at this point it seems to be cherishing insights that we now recognize as commonplace.

Stripper Gina Davies goes out one evening with an attractive Middle Eastern man. When he’s murdered soon after, the authorities mistake her for his partner, and she becomes the most wanted terrorist in Australia. Taking place in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster, this novel tries to capture the universal paranoia of that moment. The central notion is that we have to find someone to blame, that our culture demands almost a collective sacrifice to begin to feel safe again.

As the novel moves along, Gina becomes that central sacrifice. She’s elevated to it by the machinations of an over-the-top journalist who has it out for her ever since she rebuffed him at her dance club, and then she eventually embraces it herself. She comes to see herself as almost a “painted bird” (to take the title metaphor of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel) whom the rest of the world has turned upon. And [SPOILER:] she embraces it, deciding at the end to kill the journalist and own up to the fictional crimes she’s been associated with.

While there’s something in the general paranoia of that situation, it feels cliched by this point – and that’s before we get to such flat characters as the pudgy journalist, the heart-of-gold best friend stripper, or the overweight cop who’s a step slow to solve the whole problem. We’re almost two decades away from the sense that terrorists have the power to rewrite the narrative of the culture, and Don DeLillo was making that point at least as far back as Mao II in 1991. From within the years just after 9/11 – and this was published five years after – it felt as if “we” were trying to recover our mutual bearings, as if we accepted a sense of arbitrary guilt. Some of that manifest itself through efforts to understand the experience of the dispossessed of the Middle East. More of it came clear through impulses like George W. Bush and the Neo-conservatives drumming for war with Iraq.

Gina’s eventual self-sacrifice seems to me an ironic rendering of that neo-conservative notion. ‘The world is off its axis. We have to attack someone to restore it.’ In the end, though, I don’t find it all that satisfying. I’m not in an especially ironic mood – with Donald Trump as President, there’s already a toxic level of irony in our everyday lives – but I don’t know that I’d have appreciated this even a few years ago. I simply don’t see Gina’s fundamental transition. In fact, I can’t quite shake the fact that it took a bad coincidence for her not to turn herself in before things reached crisis levels – when she arrives at the police station, a detained man creates a scene and the police clear the station. No such accident, and no such novel.

I could almost forgive the empty center of this if the novel weren’t rife with other problems. Gina is almost always called “the doll,” a name that comes from her performance as a pole dancer. That is, she’s objectified from the start, from even before she turns into an accidental terrorist. The first thirty or forty pages seem larded with gratuitous descriptions of her naked self, yet, in the classic irony of pornography, her nakedness is precisely the shield that makes her invisible.

As a consequence, when she does transform, it’s less clear what she’s transforming from: is it the clear-minded woman saving her dollars for a dramatic new start, the spend-it-while-she-has-it would-be fashionista, or the almost-enlightened woman who recognizes her suffering in the suffering of others. She performs as all three from the very beginning, and her final self-sacrifice seems more dramatic than narratively determined. I just don’t see the growth that would stamp this as a true success.

I’m not giving up on Flanagan. I’m still shooting to read all of his work. I hope this one is simply a one-off mistake, a misstep by a writer as talented as anyone I know of right now.


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Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve been ambivalent about W.B. Yeats’s poem, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” for many years. In it, Yeats grapples with the death of the son of his long-time friend Lady Gregory by reviewing the many deaths that have shaken him over the years. He thinks of his grandfather, an uncle, and a mentor figure, and only after that, he turns to think of Robert Gregory, shot down as an aviator during World War I. As he concludes, “a thought of that late death took all my heart for speech.”

On the one hand, I’ve admired that line for its implicit power. Here is arguably the greatest poet of the century claiming that words fail him. In so quiet a way, he pays the deepest respect he can to the friend and son-like figure he’s lost: he’s said that even he cannot find language for the deep grief. On the other hand, it looks like an instance of Yeats blinking in the face of his own great pain. It is, in that view, a kind of cowardice. Owning up to it would mean wrestling with a pain that might make him question all he knows of his life; it might mean a naked self-examination he chose not to undertake. (There’s a lot to be said about Yeats’s fundamental cowardice, the sense of his living his life and career in a self-scripted fashion that ultimately underwrote his fascism, but that’s a story for another time.)

I think of Yeats as I think about this powerful memoir of Joan Didion because, in contrast, Didion is fearless as she contemplates the loss of her husband and the imminent loss of her only child. From its opening line, “Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant,” we see Didion acknowledging the most difficult truth possible: that she may not know enough even to be writing the words that she is. In fact, she acknowledges that she wrote those words and then had to come back to them later to realize the vulnerable place she’d set upon to begin with.

Overall, yes, this is a book about mourning, and it’s been good for me to read it in the lightening shadow of my own mother’s death this summer. But what I take away most from it is Didion’s absolute insistence on looking the unknown in the face and not blinking. She cries a lot. She allows herself to be distracted by quotidian memories of a life that, charming as it is, isn’t all that interesting for those of us who didn’t lead it. And she finds solace in quick references to classic and contemporary books that she sees as providing glimpses of the same grief she’s experiencing. But, throughout, she is grappling with the kind of deeply honest question that Yeats so articulately side-stepped: an idea I’d paraphrase as “What’s left of me when so much of my world is gone?”

If that weren’t enough, the first 30-40 pages of this are absolutely stunning. It’s hardly news that Didion is one of our best living essayists (although it may be worth noting, as I read this book almost 13 years after it came out, that she hasn’t written a great deal since this great public disrobing) but the quality of her prose is flat-out lyrical in that opening sweep. I must have read parts of this when it came out because much of it was very familiar. I hadn’t read it all, though, yet it remained familiar even as I kept going to passages that must have been new to me.

The metaphor that kept coming to me was jazz. It felt like I was reading a solo by someone like Dexter Gordon or John Coltrane, like I was hearing something the musician/author was creating in the instant. In the best jazz, you get the sense that the next note is arbitrary, as if it could be any number of possibilities, but that, once played, it could only have been that note. It’s as if the musician/author is unearthing something that hadn’t existed until it did, and that then had to be the way it was.

I’m not sure quite how long that lyrical section runs on, but that’s part of its power. It catches you up and wraps you in its language. It may as well be a poem, and I suspect even Yeats might have admired its technical power.

Then, not abruptly, we get interrupted by Didion’s reconsideration of the life she’s choppily trying to resume as well as by memories of the everyday life she and her husband lived. I’ll own up, as many other reviewers have acknowledged, that it gets a little slow in those parts. I’m sympathetic when she describes the child-made bookmark she finds in the last book her husband was reading or when she listens to his voice on the answering machine message, but I’m not particularly moved. There’s a quotidian quality to it, an almost boring sense that she’s making a public record that would ordinarily belong to her private self.

As I kept going, though, I began to sense that even such slowness was part of the jazz composition effect. The quotidian is counter-point to the lyrical. Didion knows she’s good in those early pages. She knows she’s found the voice that made her famous and that she’s using it to grapple with her new crisis. And yet, in a way I find beautiful beneath the ordinariness, she doubts that. Unlike Yeats, she lets herself ponder herself without “the coat” (as Yeats puts it in one early poem) of her great language. He boasts “there’s more enterprise in going naked,” but she’s the one who goes to that place of vulnerability that he can never let himself reach. She is, in other words, unafraid to step outside her Coltrane-like technique and confront her loss in language ordinary enough for most of the rest of us to have used.

Through all that, I haven’t touched what seems to me her central insight. In classical times, we understood grief as a necessary and public experience. We lost loved ones too often, and we lost them in sight of others rather than in quiet hospitals. As a result, we recognized the world-denying “illness” of grief as something that would change the way we interacted with the world.

In our contemporary time, we have worked to shelter ourselves from death. Our medicine is so powerful that we can deny it in ways unthinkable even a century ago. The classical thinkers would have thought us children for the hope we place in recovery from infection or physical defect; they could not have believed the tenacity with which we still imagine even our weakest will hold onto life.

As a result, we tend to be more startled by death and therefore less prepared for it. Our grief has a different power because we have not allowed ourselves to anticipate it in the same ways. We have, that is, allowed our technology and the busy-ness (yes, the quotidian) of our culture to keep from us the truth we all begin to suspect even in childhood: that everything and everyone we know will pass.

So, Didion’s book here questions much of the foundation of our contemporary experience. This is a memoir about the loss of her husband – and about the dawning acknowledgement that she is losing her daughter – but it’s even more powerfully about her recognition that there is more yet to lose. That’s as brave a recognition as I can imagine, and she faces it with a courage that makes it seem possible for me to take one more small step away from my own grief at losing my mother.

It's hard to ask much more of any book.


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Review: Mother Night

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m now halfway into my third period as a Vonnegut reader. The first was when I was in high school and the beginning of college. He was, then, the first “serious” contemporary writer I discovered, the first novelist who gave me some of the tools to make sense of the adult political world I was discovering, in large measure, through the critique he offered of it.

The second was, for most of my life as a serious reader and thinker about literature – a period when I got advanced degrees in American literature and taught full-time at the college level – when I generally dismissed Vonnegut as a writer of his moment, as someone who was “fun” when I came across him but who no longer had a great deal to tell us.

The third started seven or eight years ago, I suppose, when I re-read Cat’s Cradle and realized it remained, to paraphrase Ezra Pound’s quote that “poetry is news that stays news,” still novel. Since then, I have been slowly reworking my way through the Vonnegut canon. They haven’t all held up – Breakfast of Champions, for instance, strikes me as gimmicky and unrealized even though it has moments of being fun – but most have. I am, for instance, trying to weigh whether I can live with standing behind the claim that “Slaughterhouse Five is one of the important American novels of the 20th century.”

The sum of all this is that I am contemplating some big project on Vonnegut, an academic article or even a book about him and the distinct way he addressed the narrative of trauma. My thesis is that, unlike Hemingway who taught us that trauma expresses itself in the difficulty of forming the coherent sentence, Vonnegut gives us easy sentences that push against the possibility (a possibility he sometimes casts as immoral) of creating the coherent narrative. Another possibility is a senior seminar or adult ed class where we look at Vonnegut’s canon.

All of that is too-long prologue for my sense that Mother Night – which does hold up better than I thought it might – seems to me an important Vonnegut novel. It may clock in behind Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, but I think it’s right there with God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in the next tier.

As I see it at the moment, Slaughterhouse Five is the culmination of Vonnegut’s career; it’s the novel he knew he had to write in order to express the central trauma of his life. Mother Night is, instead, an inspired idea for a novel, one that reflects on the news of its moment and that Vonnegut used as a means to develop the voice he’d use more personally in his later works.

The crucial news of the moment, which Vonnegut references in the novel, was the arrest and trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here was a man who, looking as Hannah Arendt would describe him, “banal,” stood behind the most horrifying evil of the century, perhaps even in all of human history. Arendt’s signature work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, actually came out after Mother Night, but each was grappling with the same question: how could our everyday life, our banality, persist while the memory of such crime lingered or, worse, while we allowed such memories to fade.

Arendt wrote as an observer, as someone frustrated with her inability to see Eichmann as a sign of such evil. In a way that strikes me as deeply brave, Vonnegut inserted his own consciousness. As a novelist, he assumed some of Eichmann’s guilt – he gives us a first-person protagonist who’s served as a heinous Nazi propagandist – but he complicated it.

Howard Campbell, Jr. is not purely evil. In fact, though he spoke as he did throughout the war, he did so as a secret agent, managing to transmit crucial information to the Allies. He is a hero of the most complicated sort, one whom politics and history can never acknowledge. And, as the compelling conclusion puts it, his heroism is still not enough to save him from himself.

So, where Arendt makes an abstract philosophical claim about the nature of evil, Vonnegut places the question on the individual. He asks, Is real but secret resistance to the evil sufficient motive to be seen, forever, as complicit with it. And he asks even further, Can any of us be innocent if we have lived in a world that permitted such evil. Those are powerful questions, ones that resonated with me as an adolescent but that likely would have mattered to me less in my young adulthood.

And, while there are some Vonnegut mannerisms that sometimes distract from that central seriousness, there is something timeless about this novel. I hadn’t read it in more than 30 years, but I found crucial plot points – [SPOILER:] that Resi is posing as Helga, that Bernard B. O’Hare has a false sense of self-importance, that the Blue Fairy Godmother reveals himself – not just familiar but seemingly necessary. That is, it took me that long to realize it, but Vonnegut achieves the level of “true fable” with this. He creates an imaginary experience that seems entirely true to its internal premises.

As a bottom line, I am still working through how exuberantly I am willing to praise Vonnegut. If he is as great as I think he might actually be – if he really is one of the crucial writers of the second half of the 20th Century – then this is a novel we ought to be reading for a long time to come.


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