Welcome Back

An underrated pleasure in life: something familiar, pleasurable, accessible, and reasonably high quality that we can visit and revisit as we please.  Like having a special restaurant in the neighborhood, a place you know well and enjoy when the time is right.  The food is very good if not five-star, you’re a known and valued customer, you’ve never had a bad meal, and you feel at home.  You can stop by for a comforting and pleasing experience and get a little bit of the relaxation of coming home.

That’s how I feel about Paul Theroux.  He’s written lots of books, and he’s still producing.  I always enjoy reading his work.  I think I know his strengths, and I also know what his fiction is not and probably never will be. But I keep coming back for more, and I’m rarely disappointed.  He has a special talent for getting across the essence of an exotic locale at a particular time in history.  OK, so maybe the plot is sometimes a little contrived.  Maybe the characters don’t exactly resonate with the depth of Tolstoy or Flaubert.  Maybe the language doesn’t have quite the sophistication of Banville or Trevor.  But I don’t know another living author that can give such a sparkling and detailed sense of place and time.

Malawi

‘The Lower River’ is his latest novel.  It deals with the backwater of Malawi.  We learn about how the country has changed in the last forty years (not for the better, despite the all-too-good intentions of many) through the life of Ellis Hoch, an American who spent several years working there in his early twenties, then returns at the age of sixty after his traditional life in Massachusetts explodes.  There are some aspects of plot and character that don’t ring quite true.  But I now feel that I know something about Malawi, its people, its precarious position in the world today.  Not somewhere I’m anxious to visit, but I almost feel that I have, thanks to Theroux’s writing.

We’ve all had the experience of reading a good general newspaper or magazine and learning about this and that.  Until we read something there about a subject we know well; then we suddenly think that the publication is superficial and misleading.  Is that what’s happening about Theroux and Malawi?  I’ve never been there so I guess I’ll never know.  But I do find the portrayal convincing, and I guess that will have to suffice.  Theroux offers no easy answers to the country’s serious problems, nor does he take sides in the various conflicts he portrays.  It’s frankly quite a mess.  That makes the Hollywood ending all the more improbable, but who cares about the last two pages?  The rest is well worth reading.  And it would make a very good movie.

So sit back at your favorite table, have a friendly chat with the waiter you’ve known for years, and order something from the menu you haven’t had before.  The kitchen you know so well will not disappoint you.

More Munro

It’s such a pleasure to read a review or critical essay that instantly clarifies one’s own feelings about an author’s work. Cathleen Schine’s piece on Alice Munro (NYRB, January 10, 2013, unfortunately behind the paywall, so I won’t link to it here), for me, at least, absolutely nails several special aspects of Munro’s stories.  I’ve always loved Munro’s work, and have never been able to figure out what makes the experience of reading her stories so unique. 

‘What Munro has done with this distancing, what she does so powerfully in all her work, is not to withdraw us from her characters or her characters from us, but to create room around them: room for sympathy.  They are not always easy to sympathize with, either.  The inhabitants of Munro’s stories are troubled, peculiar, pinched, violent, prideful, ignorant, envious, meddling, superior – as imperfect as human beings get.  She does not hold back in revealing the wormy crawling activity beneath the rocks of small-town life, the disgust with anyone different or ambitious or literary or imaginative or, worse yet, all these and female, too.  But Munro, like some brisk clear wind, reveals the errors and evils and simultaneously blows away our own initially judgmental reaction.’

The piece covers several other aspects and is well worth reading carefully.

Hmm, looks like Ms. Schine has written some fiction of her own.  And criticism published in The New Yorker and NYRB.  Was married to the film critic David Denby.  Will have to look out for her.

An English Estate in a Little Town Called 'Hope'

Patrick Melrose is now a little older, a little further away from the trauma of his childhood, and maybe a little wiser.  He's severely damaged, but he's beginning to recover. For the moment he’s past the worst of his substance abuse, and he’s primed to find a way to move his life in a positive direction.  He’s just not quite sure how to do it.

‘Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent.’

Like the first two novels in the Patrick Melrose series, Edward St. Aubyn’s ‘Some Hope’ focuses on the events of a single day leading up to a particular event.  Here it’s an elaborate party to celebrate the birthday of an aristocratic friend, one who has his own share of problems.  Princess Margaret is an honored guest at the party, and St. Aubyn’s satirical and cynical pen is especially sharp here.  One guest, a young woman looking to find her way in aristocratic society remarks:

‘Looks didn’t last forever and she wasn’t ready for religion yet. Money was kind of a good compromise, staked up somewhere between cosmetics and eternity.’ 

Patrick says of the host:

‘There’s a blast of palpable stupidity that comes from our host, like opening the door of a sauna. The best way to contradict him is to let him speak.’

Patrick is beginning to come to terms with his deceased father.  His mother is another story:

‘His mother was really a good person, but like almost everybody she had found her compass spinning in the magnetic field of intimacy.’

It will require one more book (‘Mother’s Milk’) for Patrick to come to terms with his mother.

At any rate the social satire in ‘Some Hope’ is stunning and very entertaining indeed.  Here’s an exchange between a minor character (Johnny Hall) and Princess Margaret:

‘It must be funny having the same name as so many other people,’ she speculated.  ‘I suppose there are hundreds of John Halls up and down the country.’

‘It teaches one to look for distinction elsewhere and not rely on an accident of birth,’ said Johnny casually.

‘That’s where people go wrong,’ said the Princess, compressing her lips, ‘there is no accident in birth.’

And here’s another minor character expounding on Europeans and his efforts to fit in:

‘I love the French.  They’re treacherous, cunning, two-faced – I don’t have to make an effort there, I just fit in.  And further down in Italy, they’re cowards as well, so I get on even better.’

The writing is razor sharp and witty.  It’s comforting to see Patrick slowly finding his way to a more normal, productive life given the trauma of his childhood and the paralyzing 'advantages' of his birth.  St. Aubyn at his best. We really feel tremendous sympathy for this remarkably privileged young man.

I’m looking forward to the final two novels in the series.  Already a little sad that the end is in sight.

So Clever

Can you imagine reading a full-length novel, and only at the very end do you understand what the text you’ve been reading really is?  And when we gather that knowledge in the last few pages, we can then deduce the fates of the two main characters without having to be explicitly told. And we also then understand some of the 'weaknesses' that we'd encountered in the book along the way.  It really is astonishingly clever.  I didn’t see it coming, and I was grinning for quite a while after finishing the book.  In retrospect it seems a little unlikely, but it’s just so much fun, who cares?

Ian McEwan brings it off in his latest novel, ‘Sweet Tooth’.  It’s a tale of some pretty tame British domestic espionage in the 70’s.  He does manage to evoke the time very nicely.  There are undoubtedly many specifically British references (especially political and literary) that I missed, but I got enough to remember how those times felt. The writing is slick and professional without calling undue attention to itself.

‘Sweet Tooth’ is part spy novel, part love story, part commentary on what it means to write fiction.  There’s a good dose of autobiography: one of the main characters is clearly a stand-in for McEwan himself.  I’m in no position to judge the extent of truthful correspondence to his own life.  And yes it’s another work of fiction in part about fiction itself.  We do seem to be a bit stuck on that these days.  So many writers have become self-conscious and feel the need to write about themselves writing, all within the boundaries of more-or-less traditional fiction.  Here there's just a hint of self-referential dizziness, and it’s annoyingly indulgent in a few places.  About two-thirds of the way through I got mildly discouraged.  The plot was starting to bog down and I wondered where all this was going.  But the ending makes it all worthwhile.  I don’t know another book quite like it.

Our Own Chekhov?

Alice Munro keeps turning out interesting and exquisitely crafted stories.  She’s no spring chicken at this point, and it would be understandable if she were to opt for the Philip Roth escape hatch of retirement.  But if the latest collection, ‘Dear Life’, is any indication, she still has much to express and lots to teach us about life and writing.

The fourteen stories in the collection had been published elsewhere individually.  I had read a few of them in The New Yorker.  As a set the stories are well matched.  They’re less kinky than some of her recent stories, less explicitly focused on evil.  For the most part the tone is quite neutral; the language is unpretentious.  We see the characters as if from a great height, and the stories maintain a very controlled and almost wistful tone.

My favorites are ‘Amundsen’, ‘Gravel’, ‘Corrie’, and ‘Dear Life’.  Some have interesting plots, a few have a dramatic turn or two, but most are quite even in tone and plot.  Suffering, pain, and joy are referred to but from a distance.  We know they’re there, but Munro doesn’t want us to experience them first-hand in the moment.  Rather years later we come to know the puzzled wondering, the loving reminiscence, the warm recollection, the regrets, the hidden dangers. 

I don’t know how she does it.  The language is so straightforward and calls no attention to itself.  Not much happens.  It can take some effort from the reader to figure out what’s what.  Feels a little like the detached rambling narration of a senior citizen who sometimes mixes times, people, and events in random but telling ways, and always from the point of view of someone who is no longer deeply involved. It must take some effort to keep out anything dramatic, jarring, or strongly felt.  Doing that leaves room for the more subtle intimations of danger, evil, love, and regret that lurk in many of these stories.

Whatever Alice Munro writes I will read.  I will do my best to follow wherever she leads.

A French Pose?

I spent some time in France as a young American music student, and some (not all) aspects of traditional French pedagogy were for me just plain insufferable.  The teacher’s first goal was to show me that I knew absolutely nothing and was basically a worthless piece of shit.  But if I was submissive and unquestioning of their authority, wisdom, and methods, I could gradually build myself into something of value. For me it was a hypocritical pose that was more often than not just an excuse for bad behavior and laziness on their part, and I wanted no part of it. I had enough insecurities of my own and didn’t need a pompous authority figure reinforcing my own self-doubts.

There seems to be a similar pose in some French writing these days.  Instead of simply writing about experience and feeling, some authors are compelled to interject intellectual theory stated as fact.  For me it often comes across as exaggerated and out of place.  I have that reaction to Bernard Henri Levy.  I often want to ask him to stop preaching at me and just say what he has to say in a more modest way.  The ideas are often fascinating if speculative.  But to state them as fact to me is off-putting.  The author claims to have all the answers (even if the answers contradict each other); the reader knows nothing.

So with some trepidation I decided to revisit Michel Houellebecq, whose ‘Platform’ I had read years ago when it first came out.  ‘Platform’ is a fascinating novel that focuses on sexuality and predicts the inevitable conflict between strains of conservation Islam and Western society.  In some ways it’s an outrageous book, full of exaggeration to the point of parody.  Nonetheless, the ideas themselves are captivating.

‘The Elementary Particles’ is another well reviewed Houellebecq novel.  Again sexuality plays a major role in the book. Ideas are prominent, often to the detriment of the fiction itself.  The juxtaposition of narrative and something like pedagogy in this passage is typical:

‘Just after writing this, Bruno had slipped into a kind of alcoholic coma.  He was woken some hours later by the screams of his son.  Between the ages of two and four, human children acquire a sense of self, which manifests itself in displays of megalomaniacal histrionics.  Their aim in this is to control their social environment ... ‘

For me the sudden shift from fictional narrative to a lecture on child psychology is jarring.  The lecture takes me out of the world of fiction as experience and puts me in a different mode, back in the place of that music student that was forced to accept pearls of wisdom from the know-it-all pompous music professor. Can’t the author find a way to make us understand what he wants to express without resorting to a lecture?  Can’t we stay in the realm of experience and feeling?

OK, so the conflict between human feeling and a more objective reality is part of the point of the book.  I get that.  And those ideas are very interesting indeed.  There are many insights here into human experience that are well worth reading and worth thinking about long after finishing the book.  But why do the ideas have to be framed in such a sterile intellectual context? It’s strange to read about life (in a story) and be analyzing life, drawing cerebral conclusions about it, and often making fun of it all at the same time.   Why be haughty?  The characters have real issues, and they experience pain and suffering.  When the author breaks the narrative with these ‘objective truths’ he implies that he’s above the suffering, understands the larger issues in ways that his unfortunate and limited characters cannot, and therefore can live himself by different rules.  Hence for me the basic hypocrisy of the pose itself. 

I’m much more at home with the Philip Roth approach in which the author is clearly just as confused and helpless as his characters.  There are no objective truths that can make sense of the suffering or place any of us above it.  We’re all in the same mess.

How sad that there are no new Philip Roth novels coming our way.  It will be hard to stop anticipating the next one. 

In the Eyes of the Beholder

Ask any serious pianist.  The keyboard changes all the time.  One day the keys feel long, skinny, wet, and slick.  It’s almost impossible to keep your finger from sliding off that thin slippery black key onto the adjacent white key.  Other days the keys seem fat, dry, and sluggish.  On Monday it takes a huge effort to get a certain sound.  On Tuesday it happens with no effort at all.  And on Wednesday it’s pretty much impossible.

Does anything really change in the instrument?  I know my piano sometimes sounds like it has a cold.  At those times in certain registers the sound is muffled and indistinct.  On other days the sound is overly bright, almost painfully brittle.  That’s mostly a function of weather.  A period of humidity really does change the sound.  And dry weather (or running the heat inside, which produces very dry air in the room) can make noticeable changes as well.  More or less moisture in the felt hammers changes the sound. And the action may be a little more sluggish or a little more responsive on certain days.  Again, I think weather is the culprit.  The action is largely wood, and wood changes with weather.

Beyond that, I don’t think the instrument changes much.  The keys don’t resize.  These days they’re covered with plastic (not ivory), and plastic is a dead and unchanging material.  So what does account for the very different feel of the keys from day to day?  For the most part it’s me that’s changing.  Some of that is probably physiological.  Like an athlete, there are times when I’m particularly stiff and inflexible; other days I'm flexible and strong.  But my brain doesn’t read that as a change in me; instead it attributes the change to an external entity, the keyboard.

I’m also certain that much of this is not in my hands, but in my head.  Probably has to do with expectations and state of mind.  There is that famous story about the concert pianist (pianist A) that had unusually small hands.  He was very successful and had money to burn, so he had a piano custom built with slightly narrower keys (maybe 5% smaller, I’m guessing) so that his small hands could reach larger stretches more easily.  Another pianist (pianist B) knew about it and went to visit him.  Pianist B was greeted at the door by a family member and shown to a large room to wait for Pianist A.  While waiting alone Pianist B sat at the piano he found there and played.  He was amazed at how much further he could stretch and how much easier it was to play certain passages.  Eventually Pianist A showed up and a conversation began.  Pianist B expressed his delight at the new found ease he had discovered at the special piano.  Pianist A then confessed that though he did have that specially scaled piano built, that instrument was in fact in another room.  The instrument that Pianist B had been playing was a normally scaled piano. Because Pianist B expected greater ease, he experienced greater ease: pianistic placebo.

Okay.  There are no absolutes.  I get it.  Heisenberg uncertainty.  But we have to get by from moment to moment.  Our brain has to instantaneously reach useful deductions from a baffling diverse and huge set of data. If we don’t jump to conclusions we’re likely to get eaten by that lion.  Such is the human condition.

Extrapolate this to human relationships. Multiple variables on all sides. No absolute truth. Pretty much total chaos.  All changeable. This is the human world we live in.  Small wonder we make any sense of it at all.  I’m all for artificial self-constructed reality, as long as the people in my life that matter to me are willing to graciously and patiently withstand my version. Maybe that’s what it’s all about?  We construct an artificial reality that helps us get by.  After all, we just need to get to tomorrow, right? We do the best we can and we search for others that will tolerate our peculiar construct. Inevitably conflicts ensue. Alter the construct as needed, but don't forget that the lion may be nearby.  Look for consolation and comfort, but do your best to see the sun come up tomorrow. Be compassionate and somehow keep in mind that others are facing the same daily struggle.

Season to taste.

Good luck, fellow travelers.

Happy Thanskgiving!

An Experiment at the Keyboard

Learning a new piece is a complicated process.  I need to understand the music, how it works, what it has to say, what I want it to say.  I also need to figure out how to play the damned thing, and that means learning the notes, working out fingering, practicing technical passages, etc.  But arriving at musical understanding often depends on being able to execute.  You don’t know what the music is until you perform it, even if you can’t.   And blind under-tempo execution can be devoid of musical intent.  The two areas depend on each other.  Chicken and egg.  Adam’s navel.

I’m a good faker and a good sight-reader.  So I generally take a dual approach.  I spend some time faking through the piece at tempo just to achieve an understanding of how it works and what I want.  (I confess that this betrays a certain impatience.  ‘Let’s just make believe I can play this.  I’d really like to think that I can play this.’) I also spend time working out the technical passages slowly and, I hope, accurately, but sacrificing musical intent. Ideally the two approaches eventually meet.

A version of op76 #1 in Brahms's own hand.

The disadvantage of faking it is that we learn whatever we do.  Every time I fake my way through (to develop understanding, or just for self-deceptive fun) I learn to not execute cleanly.  And that makes it harder to learn to play it well down the road.

So I’m going to try something different.  Lately I've been learning Brahms op.76, a set of eight ‘short’ pieces.  They really are spectacular, and I've never taken the time to study them closely.  But I know some of them well by ear, so I have a pretty good concept of what I want from them.

Op. 76 #1 is a piece I’ve never really learned, but I do (I think) understand it.  So there’s really no need to fake it.  So I’m trying to learn it without EVER faking it.  Just play it ever so slowly.  Never make a mistake.  If I do, I need to go even more slowly.  That means I won’t ever play it up to tempo until I’m ready to do so flawlessly.  No faking.

It’s a little frustrating.  I want to wing it.  But I’m not letting myself do that.  I so hope that playing it slowly over and over will not chip away at the expressive concept that I have for the piece and turn it into drudgery.  I don’t think that will happen.  I’m pretty clear about what I want, and I can imagine it happening, even if I’m playing quite slowly.

Do I have the discipline to stay with this approach?  We’ll see.  I've never attempted it in quite this way.  The best possible outcome would be to arrive at a reliable performance of the piece which says what I want to say and involves minimal technical risk.  On the other hand, I could become frustrated that I never seem to be able to play it cleanly at tempo, and just stop trying.

I’ll keep you posted.

Warm-Blooded Murder

Banville’s ‘The Book of Evidence’ is a short novel written in a peculiar way: it’s a first-person account of a murder written by the murderer while in custody. The criminal then submits the document to the court as evidence. It is both a confession and an attempt at an explanation. The protagonist, Freddie Montgomery, is a well-off Irishman who almost inadvertently commits the crime (the murder of a stranger, a maid who interfered with Freddie's theft of a valuable painting) as part of a scheme to rescue himself and his family from financial difficulties.  Banville certainly makes the events seem possible; I’m sure that law enforcement around the world deals with crimes like this one every day.  Banville carefully explains (or has Freddie explain) every step of the way.  We come to know the events of that fateful day in excruciating detail.  We understand what led to those events. We understand what happened after the murder.  We understand these things because Banville explores Freddie’s feelings, observations, and motivations along every step of the way. The usual Banville sensibilities are on display here.  Even the most subtle emotional reverberations are up for examination.  Also lots of irony and a good bit of humor here and there.

But how probable is it that such a criminal have enough self-awareness to be able to produce such a document?  That’s where I have trouble with the book. Near the end of the book Banville takes a stab (oops) at explaining the moral deficiency which allowed the criminal to act as he did:

‘This is the worst, the essential sin, I think, the one for which there will be no forgiveness: that I never imagined her [the victim] vividly enough, that I never made her be there sufficiently, that I did not make her live. Yes, that failure of imagination is my real crime, the one that made the others possible. What I told that policeman is true – I killed her because I could kill her, and I could kill her because for me she was not alive. And so my task now is to bring her back to life. I am not sure what that means, but it strikes me with the force of an unavoidable imperative. How am I to make it come about, this act of parturition? Must I imagine her from the start, from infancy? I am puzzled, and not a little fearful, and yet there is something stirring in me, and I am strangely excited. I seem to have taken on a new weight and density. I feel gay and at the same time wonderfully serious. I am big with possibilities. I am living for two.’

Yes, it’s very poignant, insightful, even moving. But the same person whose limitations as a person led to murder is now, just a few weeks later, capable of this deep self-reflection? For most of the book Freddie is drifting through life, and seems not to be concerned with concepts like moral culpability. Indeed Freddie describes his thoughts and feelings at the moment of the killing as confesses that his real crime may be his tendency to let things drift:

‘There is no moment in this process of which I can confidently say, there, that is when I decided she should die. Decided? – I do not think it was a matter of deciding. I do not think it was a matter of thinking, even. That fat monster inside me just saw his chance and leaped out, frothing and flailing. He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him. I could not stop him. Or could I? He is me, after all, and I am he. But no, things were too far gone for stopping. Perhaps that is the essence of my crime, of my culpability, that I let things get to that stage, that I had not been vigilant enough, had not been enough of a dissembler, that I left Bunter to his own devices, and thus allowed him, fatally, to understand that he was free, that the cage door was open, that nothing was forbidden, that everything was possible.’

Is it possible to have such insight and such lack of control at the same moment? If you can understand what's happening, would you just let it happen?  Banville writes in the first person, but with the insight and detachment of a third-person narrator.  I would venture to guess that most murderers are so screwed up emotionally (or just plain emotionally deficient) that they will never have the insights that Banville describes so beautifully, or if they do, it would take years and years of therapy to get there.

Contrast Banville’s approach with ‘In Cold Blood’, for example, where the criminals’ utter lack of perspective or feeling about what they’re doing is both stunning and chilling and of course part of the point.  It’s more believable, perhaps, but also more depressing.  For such a person there is little hope. Freddie is well on his way to some kind of redemption at the end of the book.  That may not be credible, but it is comforting.

Banville also writes crime fiction under the name Benjamin Black.  Never read any.  Will have to try one soon.

All that being said there is much good writing here, and lots of insight into how we can be led (or lead ourselves) to actions that we will later regret.  I don’t think it’s Banville’s best book, but it’s a courageous experiment and a short and easy read. 

A Fork in the Road

In a piece of music there are almost always repeating patterns of one sort or another.  But the repetitions can lead to new places.  That’s part of the musical narrative.  First A leads to B.  Later A reappears, bit this time it no longer leads to B; instead it leads to C.

The process of learning and memorizing those passages is interesting to me.  I learn A.  I can execute it easily.  Then I continue to B.  It may take some effort, but I learn B and I learn that A leads to B. Now I can execute the passage A-B just fine. I've built the A-B entity in memory.

Who's old enough to remember the
 Slauson cutoff and the fork in the road?

Next I have to learn a new passage, where A leads to C.  I can execute A, but it takes considerable conscious effort and concentration to get A to go directly to C.  It wants to go to B.  But with time and repetition I get it.  A goes to C.

Unfortunately now I've lost the A-B connection.  In my memory, A now leads to C, not to B.  Now I have to go back and relearn the A-B connection.  It won’t take as long to learn it as it did the first time, but it will take some effort.  And doing that may make the A-C connection a little shaky.  Now that path has to be reinforced.

Eventually I get to the point where I can execute both A-B and A-C without a problem.  But it’s quite a complicated process to get there.

The brain seems have a hard-wired proclivity to assume the highest level ‘truth’ that it can find.  That’s what makes us so smart.  We look for large patterns that will help us survive.  But sometimes the largest pattern needs to be broken, and a smaller pattern added at a lower level.  We can do it, but it seems to run counter to our nature.

We find patterns that help us.  We jump to conclusions. It’s part of who we are.  But we have to be willing to go back and reconsider another outcome.  There might be possibilities that we might not have imagined at first. Might some of those conclusions be faulty, or at least incomplete?

But we can’t consider every outlandish possibility.  Up is not down, right?

Or might it be? Do we have courage to find out?

Sleep

Why do I think about how I think?

I do find it fascinating.  Hoping that it’s not all rooted in some hideous narcissistic obsession. 

I worked hard at the keyboard yesterday to cement in place a particular passage in Brahms op. 76 #2. I made progress, but at the end of the day I still couldn’t get through it reliably and without considerable anxiety. I tried hard, but it just didn’t stick; countless repetitions didn’t make it natural. I was a little discouraged, but I didn’t freak out.

What's happening in there?

Today, I sit down (without warming up) and play through that piece, and all is well.  I execute that passage in the new way without a problem. Why is that? Today was many hours away from yesterday’s practice. If anything, I would expect some backsliding from yesterday's endpoint, but instead today it works, with no practice between yesterday and today. What changed?

Can it be that the brain sometimes needs time to process a new approach?  “Do it this way now!” may not be enough, especially if this way is very different from the old way.  We somehow understand the new way, but can’t get far enough away from the old way so quickly. It takes a little unconscious mental effort to shelve the old way and accept the new.

I’m starting to think that a particularly important factor in making that transition easier is a good night’s sleep.  There really does seem to be some kind of hard drive defrag that happens while we sleep that makes everything work more efficiently.  Part of that defrag may be that we archive more deeply the old pattern that we've decided is no longer optimal.  Maybe we can’t so easily move it off to a remote folder with different access rights when we’re awake and conscious.  It took effort to put that pattern into memory, so why should we surrender it so easily?  Perhaps that pattern was part of a crucial survival mechanism?  If so, we give it up at our own peril.

We understand so little of what sleep really accomplishes.  Surely it has nothing to do with physical exhaustion or lack of energy.  We consume enough calories to keep us going for more than 14-18 hours at a stretch. But our brains seem to require time to recalibrate and move thoughts, patterns, and memories among the various levels of storage that are available to us. We need a period of time without new input for the brain to sort through recent data and experience. Without it, we get confused and frustrated.

And that same ability to recalibrate and re-store is what makes memory so subjective and so unreliable. We remember what's useful for us to remember.  Truth be damned.

The computer hardware industry doubles capacity and processing speed every few years.  The human brain evolves much more slowly.  I’m ready for an upgrade.  How about you?

Memory

Memorizing at the keyboard.  As a young classical pianist I didn’t think too much about it.  I just did it.  And I clearly could do it, in one way or another.  I gave many recitals, even before going to college, and memory was not an issue.

But at the keyboard, memory is a complex issue.  We don’t just have a single capacity to remember.  Instead, we have many abilities which are called on in various proportions.  Different strokes for different folks.

Sentamentalists to the contrary, it all seems to come down to brain chemistry.   There are multiple mechanisms for what we cavalierly call ‘memory’.  What’s your mix?

Imagine yourself as a classical pianist onstage at Carnegie Hall giving a solo recital.  You  walk onstage, bow.  You sit at the keyboard.  What neural mechanisms will allow you to perform?

In my experience, there are at least three distinct types of memory at the keyboard.  There’s visual memory, aural memory, and muscle memory. We all have all three types, but in various proportions.

The pianist with a predominantly visual memory is essentially reading from a photographically-induced imaged of the score.  That pianist is in a permanent sight-reading mode.  It’s not a bad spot to be in.  When things get spotty, just slow down.  You can always read more carefully. You can sight-read it at a slower tempo. Squint a little, squirm a little.

For a pianist with dominant muscle memory the situation is just the opposite.  The connection between one muscle memory movement and the next is tenuous.  Slowed down, those connections disintegrate into chaos.  Instead, we speed up in an effort to minimize those intolerable spaces in time between muscle movements.  Keep them connected at all costs.  Sometimes, that gets us through. But other times, it’s a rushing disaster.  Well learned passages go out the window in an effort to just get to the next phrase before it all falls apart.

And then there’s an aural memory.  We remember exactly what it sounds like.  And if our musical training has been exacting enough (solfege, dictation, score reading, etc.), we know what to do at the keyboard to create the sound in our mind.

So our musical memory is multifaceted.  Like other areas of our lives, we tend to rely on our strengths, and neglect our weaknesses.  At our own peril.  There’s nothing that will increase empathy more for our fellow man than attention to our own weaknesses.

Nothing.

How do we promote that?

An Unexpected Pleasure

Book prizes do serve a purpose of sorts.  When an author I've never read and know nothing about wins a major prize, I take note and often add him to a list somewhere if the work sounds appealing. That's what happened when Julian Barnes won the Booker last year.  This smug little American didn't have a clue about him, and I was intrigued by the reviews of 'The Sense of an Ending'. Turns out I love the soft self-doubting meditative tone of the book.

While wandering around Kepler's the other day (the newly revamped, i.e. shrunken independent local bookstore that nonetheless continues to please me), I noticed lots of other fiction by Barnes. I wasn't sure that I was in the mood for more foggy metaphysical speculation, having just finished the latest Banville, but I don't get to Kepler's that often, so I included one Barnes book in my haul. I chose it almost randomly.

'Pulse' is a new (2011) collection of stories, most of which had previously appeared elsewhere.  Not sure how I missed the ones that had appeared in The New Yorker, but I did. Started reading the first story and was very pleasantly surprised, indeed. Finished the book in a couple of days.

Here there is none of that 'Sense of an Ending' brooding.  And these are old-fashioned short stories.  No tricks or tweets. No vague connections among stories.  No experimental forms, no self-referential circles, no questions about writing while writing.  And unlike Carver, for example, very little happens in these stories.  Not much plot, and a narrow emotional range in each.  Just a snapshot of characters at a moment in time. How refreshing is that?

Within those boundaries Barnes is remarkably versatile. Very different settings, characters, and tones.  Dialog is a major strength.  He can absolutely nail a character with dialog.  Also very British. Very urbane. And very good on relationships and couples.

I try to stretch myself as a reader.  DFW, for example.  Now Proust is on my list.  Recently tackled Barthelme for the first time. And of course David Mitchell. So it's a relief to easily find pleasure in a more traditional high-quality author.  There's so much there to enjoy, and it feels good to have at least the illusion that my ability to understand and appreciate the writing need not be questioned. Maybe it's like swinging the weighted bat in the on-deck circle.  A normal bat then feels light and easy to control.

But enough about me.  How are you enjoying my blog? :)

Again

John Banville has delivered another stunning novel.  The main character in ‘Ancient Light’ is a man in his sixties.  In much of the book he recounts his love affair with an older woman when he was only fifteen.  There is insight here into the nature of eroticism and what it might mean to a boy. There is little that is titillating, but much that is fascinating.  We also learn of his adult life, the loss of his daughter, and of the circumstances of his life in the present.  The language is, for Banville, typically lyrical and poetic.  I just adore his writing and take such pleasure in reading and rereading the sentences.  I have to mark favorite passages as I read.  The ending, where we finally learn yet another and very different version of some important events described in the book, was for me very moving.  How wonderful that mere sentences on a page can magically evoke such a fascinating and complex image of life.

I’ll just mention some of the themes and quote some relevant passages.  Banville speaks best for himself.

Even in the present, we can hardly know in any objective sense what is happening or who or what is in charge.  We can only see through the tiny keyhole of our own selves at that particular time and place.  We can never truly know what another might see or experience.

Hence, about his daughter, the protagonist speculates:

'What may one know of another, even when it is one’s own daughter: A clever man whose name I have forgotten – my memory has become a sieve – put the poser: What is the length of a coastline? It seems a simple enough challenge, readily met, by a professional surveyor, say, with his spyglass and tape measure.  But reflect a moment. How finely calibrated must the tape measure be to deal with all those nooks and crannies? And nooks have nooks, and crannies crannies, ad infinitum, or ad at least that indefinite boundary where matter, so called, shades off seamlessly into thin air. Similarly, with the dimensions of a life it is a case of stopping at some certain level and saying this, this was she, though knowing of course that it was not.'

And about his lover, he confesses that though intimately involved with another, he was actually totally self-absorbed:

'Often it seems to me the closer I come to a person the farther off I am. How is that? I wonder. I used to watch Mrs. Gray like that when we were in bed together, and would feel her grow distant even as she lay beside me, just as sometimes, disconcertingly, a word will detach itself from its object and float away, weightless and iridescent as a soap bubble.'

'I should say that I did not imagine myself so treasured, I did not think myself so loved. This was not from diffidence or a lack of a sense of my own significance no, but the very opposite: engrossed in what I felt for myself, I had no measure against which to match what she might feel for me. That was how it was at the start, and how it went on, to the end. That is how it is, when one discovers oneself through another.'

And when looking into the past, we deal with memories, which are by definition even less reliable than our limited perception of the present. The passage of time enables us to make our own version of the past that serves our present-day needs:

'Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions. Not that there is much difference between the two, if indeed there is any difference at all. Some say that without realizing it we make it all up as we go along, embroidering and embellishing, and I am inclined to credit it, for Madam Memory is a great and subtle dissembler.  When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall experience, except as a final full stop. The items of flotsam that I choose to salvage from the general wreckage – and what is a life but a gradual shipwreck? – may take on an aspect of inevitability when I put them on display in their glass showcases, but they are random; representative, perhaps, perhaps compellingly so, but random nonetheless.'

Even the recollections of specific, seemingly objective ‘facts’ are suspect.

'Details again, you see, always details, exact and impossible.'

Where, exactly, does that leave us?  How are we to live?

'I do not know what I mean, but I seem to mean something. I used to think, long ago, that despite all the evidence I was the one in charge of my own life. To be, I told myself, is to act. I missed the vital pun, though. Now I realize that always I have been acted upon, by unacknowledged forces, hidden coercions.  Billie is the latest in that line of dramaturgs who have guided from behind the scenes the poor production that I am, or am taken to be.'

'I see nothing, or little, anyway; little. It seems not to matter. Perhaps comprehension is not the task, any more. Just to be, that seems enough, for now, up here in this high room, with the girl in her chair at my back.'

With Banville perhaps words can at least portray, if not bridge, the gaps among people, among times. Maybe words can, if carefully crafted, represent the shimmering set of overlapping realities that is our reality.

'Some savants hold that there is a multiplicity of universes, all present, all simultaneously going on, wherein everything that might happen does happen. … Which eternal realm shall I believe in, which shall I choose? Neither, since all my dead are alive to me, for whom the past is a luminous and everlasting present; alive to me yet lost, except in the frail afterworld of these words.'

The Closets Are Still Full

It doesn’t seem to matter how many closets we have or how big they are.  They are always full.

I wonder if the same isn’t true about unhappiness, desire, disappointment. We always want something we don’t have, or complain about the latest disappointment. And if things change to give us what we want (or thought we wanted), it doesn’t take long at all for us to fill up that closet with something else we want and are deeply troubled or disappointed that we don’t have.

The brain is an amazing organ. We’re beginning to understand its awesome power to interpret and filter huge amounts of data into useful concepts, ideas, perceptions.  If it isn’t useful, the brain conveniently filters it out so that we can focus on what might truly ‘help’ us.  I can’t help but wonder if there is such a thing as objective reality out there, or do we simply create what we need out of thin air.  Sometimes we create a version of reality that we desperately need at that moment, even though that version is clearly unreal in many aspects.  But it gets us through the day and on to the next.  Or so it seems, anyway.

If the brain can do all that, it must be burdened with considerable overhead from the stresses of continually constructing and reconstructing a useful reality.  Somewhere we do know more about what’s really out there, and it takes effort to keep it from our conscious thoughts.  We know but we don’t want to know.  Maybe the brain necessarily has its own agenda; maybe that agenda is the source of its power and its limitations.

Perhaps part of that agenda, or part of the resulting overhead from the burden of creating and executing the agenda, is a fixed space for unhappiness.  Maybe we need someone or something to blame.  Maybe we need something to strive for.  Or maybe the construction and continual maintenance of the conscious reality we build is so costly that we’re just plain tired and need relief from the work.  Do we just long for a rest from the burden, a time when we can just be?  And perhaps that longing is deeply unconscious, so much so that we feel compelled to pin assorted aspects or our ‘reality’ onto it so that we can at least have a way of naming it.  If so, it would make sense that if the superficial need or desire is fulfilled, we would just replace it with others.  The closet of unhappiness remains full.

Full at least until we give ourselves a break from constructing and maintaining our conscious reality.  Religion can help us trust in the unknowable and relax a bit in our faith.  Just getting old enough to realize that almost all of life is ephemeral can also help.  If our reality construction job has to proceed, fine, but maybe we can go about it with a healthy dose of cynicism and with less short-term desperation than we did when we were younger. All the world's a stage, so let's do our best to enjoy the show.

It’s all artificial, and once we realize that we can invest our energy a little more wisely. The closets will indeed be full, but perhaps we can be less troubled by that.  Maybe that will free us to act more compassionately towards others because we realize that our own unhappiness may be inevitable but is also quite livable, and maybe even has its own charms.  It’s part of who we are, and we can learn to embrace it.

Or is this all my own peculiar brand of self-deception?

Objectivity? Funtoosh!

I’ve never been strongly attracted to Salman Rushdie’s books, so it was with more hope than enthusiasm that I picked up ‘Midnight’s Children’, the much lauded 1981 novel that put Rushdie on the map.  The novel deals in part with the history of India after independence.  I am a big fan of  Jhumpa Lahiri, Monica Ali, Vikram Seth, and Amit Ghosh, so it seemed logical to go back to early Rushdie, who in some ways paved the way for these writers.

‘Midnight’s Children’ was a challenge for me.  It’s not short.  I did get bogged down a few times and it took some willpower to get back to a steady reading rhythm.  I’m glad I finished it, but my feelings about the book are mixed.

The story tells the life story of an Indian man who was born at the exact moment when India became an independent country.  Rushdie has this character tell his own story in a fanciful and attractive way.  The style of narration borrows quite a bit from Dickens, but without the clear moral compass that is part of just about every Dickens work.  Rushdie’s use of language is fun and creative.  He includes many words from Hindi and Urdu, from slang Indian English, and he also just plain makes up words when it suits him.  No Queen’s English here, and the resulting informality is both charming and entertaining.  ‘Funtoosh’ is slang for ‘finished’ or ‘done’.  Rushdie here clears a path for Amit Ghosh, whose use of dialect is even more radical and fanciful. 

But language is not the only area where Rushdie denounces objective standards and objective truths.  Rushdie also implies that in history as well there can be no single standard or truth.  Instead multiple truths coexist and comingle in complex and confusing ways.  The lack of a simple truth may be the only simple truth.  There is room for a rich interplay between memory and fact, between perception and reality, so much room that objectivity itself becomes an old-fashioned and quaint concept.

That being said the vast sprawl of the plot is both the book’s strength and its weakness.  At times it’s the Pickwick Papers of the sub-continent: very entertaining, but sometimes incoherent.  If the defense is that coherence is in itself necessarily arbitrary and artificial, so be it, but this is clearly dangerous territory.  For me it did make for difficult reading at times.  Best to savor the myriad of wonderful details and trust that the larger picture will somehow take care of itself.  Trouble is that for me sometimes it just didn’t.  Probably my shortcoming.

While I know a little something about the history of modern India and Pakistan, I certainly don’t know more than the average educated American, and that puts me at a distinct disadvantage.  Rushdie’s intentionally distorted and sometimes satirical view of events is probably somewhat lost on someone who isn’t familiar with the details of the traditional textbook account of events.  I’m sure I missed the intended significance of many references and images.

Rushdie also relies on magical realism as a plot element.  He draws on techniques from novels like ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ to clearly differentiate the narrator’s tale from a more objective approach, and to fancifully connect the history of an individual with the history of a nation.  In this way the novel is very different from Vikram Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy’, which is much longer but very traditional in plot and concept. I think I understand Rushdie’s approach in concept, but I’m not so drawn to reading it. Seems like he wants us to have it both ways: a view of real history, but one that makes up its own rules as it goes along.  Again, that’s in part the whole idea.

A movie version is set for release in early November of 2012.  Rushdie himself wrote the screenplay and does the voice-over narration.  Mixed reviews.

There’s considerable literary bravura and writer’s ego on display here.  Be prepared.  If you’re ready for lots of ‘godknowswhat’ and a view of the world that is ‘updownup’, go for it.  I’m a little dizzy after reading it. 

Memoirs

I don’t read many memoirs; the genre is often problematic for me.  An author may be among the least qualified to write about himself.  Political memoirs are often primarily an opportunity to spin for the historians and settle old scores.  Then there’s the credibility factor of many modern personal memoirs.  The bar has been set so high in terms of exaggerated suffering, kinky relationships, and horrific abuse that publishers seem to demand more and more startling confession, less and less good storytelling. I’m not a big fan of the Jeannette Walls books.  Sorry, but I just don’t believe her.  I do better with more casual memoirs that loosely connect memories, books that just try to tell some first-person stories in an engaging way.  They don’t try to drive home key points about the meaning of life.  Try ‘Stuffed’, by Patricia Volk.  In broad terms she takes the approach of one chapter per major figure in her life.  No consistent chronological line from beginning to end.  It’s more along the lines of “Here are some things that happened to me and people that matter to me. You make sense of it. I won’t even try.”

So while 'The Tender Bar' came highly recommended to me, I confess to picking it up with some trepidation.  On the whole, though, J.R. Moehringer has written an engaging book that hangs together pretty well.  Born in 1964, Moehringer published the book in 2005 at the age of 41.  The book deals with his life up to the age of 25.  Pretty early to be writing a memoir.  I’m not sure I can make much sense of my life now at the age of 60. At 41 my vision was even more limited. But nonetheless Moehringer does his best to weave some strands that hold the book together.

But it does make me appreciate the sublime artificiality of fiction.  Blank slate. The author can make up whatever he pleases.  He has so many resources at his disposal:  plot, character, language, tone, structure, etc.  As long as it makes sense on its own terms, fine. Reality be damned. Readers are the real winners.

So let’s start with the title, 'The Tender Bar'.  Play on bartender, of course.  The central place in the book is a specific drinking hole where the author spent lots of time as a young adult.  But it was anything but a tender place. A place that ‘tended’ to him?  Maybe.  I guess.  Seems a bit of a stretch to me.  Could have done better, I think. Seems awkward. What am I missing?

Alcohol as father stand in?

There are a some themes that run through the book: missing and disappointing father; struggling but admirable mother; alcoholism; extended family populated with intelligent but under-educated and under-achieving adults; the usual coming-of-age struggle to find the right place in the world. The father theme was most compelling to me.  At 25 he finally understood that while he was entitled to need what he needed from his father, his father was simply incapable of filling those needs.  Keep looking for that person in his father or accept that his father was in many ways a screw-up.  A lose-lose proposition. His father would never be the person he needed him to be.  To fool himself into thinking that his father was that person but was somehow unavailable was not productive.  Ultimately, accepting disappointment and heartbreak is the only key to freedom. But it sucks.

The writing is just fine, but ultimately a little precious for my taste.  Most chapters have that little tie-up at the end that’s a little forced.  Reads a bit like a collection of college application essays.  Trying really hard to come across well.  (The film rights have been purchased.  Do I want to see this as a film?)

Moehringer is clearly a gifted journalist.  I haven’t read the Agassi book, but from what I hear it’s pretty daring.  Agassi read 'The Tender Bar' and immediately thought: this is the person to ghost-write my memoir.  That’s impressive.

There’s a new book of historical fiction about the bank robber Willy Sutton.  Probably worth a try.

And on a personal note, I’m so pleased to see that Janice Van Horn’s memoir ‘A Complicated Life: My Life with Clement Greenberg' has been published.  She’s an old friend and neighbor from New York, and a terrific person.  I so look forward to reading it.

Simple It's Not

Do you have to be from New York to appreciate Malamud?  Do you have to be Jewish?

I’m from NYC,  I’m not Jewish, and I adore Malamud.  I do have the inflection of the Eastern European New York Jew in my ear.  The sound of Yiddish is comforting to me, and the stereotypical attitude is dear to my heart indeed.  Negative but never cynical, expecting nothing but hoping for the best, cursed and chosen. It’s the generation before Woody Allen, the one who turned it all into the most intelligent and funny whining ever.

Bernard Malamud

“The Assistant” is a marvelous book that deals with what it means to be Jewish in NYC in the 1950’s.  Morris, a older poor grocer, trundles on.  He’s generous and trusting to a fault.  He has a heart of gold.  He makes ‘good’ choices that turn out badly for him over and over again. On the surface, he accomplishes nothing. He’s not religious, but he is quintessentially Jewish.  His foil in the novel is Frank, a younger Italian gentile who struggles with moral issues every day.  Frank tries to be good, but regularly lapses into bad moral behavior. The contrast between the two is striking. Frank is attracted to Jewish culture because he does have a strong conscience.  He tries, but he often fails.  

"About that he knew he could never open his mouth, so he felt that no matter what he did manage to say there would always be some disgusting thing left unsaid, some further sin to confess, and this he found utterly depressing."

And the long series of failures eventually makes him negative, resigned to his fate … and in the end he becomes a Jew.  It’s almost a parable of how the Jews became Jewish.

Malamud has lots to say about morality, intentions, conscience.  And he doesn't provide any easy answers.  The combination of strong moral impulse and human frailty that Malamud portrays draws a pretty clear picture of what Malamud thinks about being a Jew in that place and time. “The Assistant” is not nearly as unrelentingly negative as “The Fixer”.  It’s much more of a mixed bag, and, I think, a more nuanced in its approach. The writing is infused with ethnic touches.  The plot is traditional yet interesting.  The characters are colorful and memorable.

How much is Malamud an east coast phenomena? When I lived in New York he was well known. Almost the Jewish Updike, but I guess that would really be Philip Roth.  Maybe more the Jewish Richard Yates. I’m surprised that he’s less well known on the west coast.  Or maybe I just haven’t made contact with the right circles out here.  Any Malamud fans out west?

From the Clouds

David Mitchell is a force to be reckoned with.  Watch him.

Several years ago I picked up ‘Cloud Atlas’, got bogged down early in the book and set it aside.  Recently prodded by a friend who planned to read the book in advance of the release of the movie version next month, I picked it up again.  This time I loved it and finished it pretty quickly.  I won’t even try to figure out what was different about me then and now.  I’m just grateful that for whatever reason I was able to appreciate this wonderful book the second time around.

Welcome to the Barbershop. Multiple chairs.  No waiting.

The structure in itself was enough to draw me in.  The book consists of six loosely related stories, but they’re not told in a straightforward way.  First comes the first half of Story A.  Then the first half of Story B, etc.  When we get to Story F (the sixth story), it’s told in its entirety straight through to the end.  And what an end it is.  That’s followed by the second half of Story E, the second half of Story D, all the way down to the second half of Story A at the very end.  Very conceptual, very intellectual, and incredibly hard to bring off.

But Mitchell manages it well. First of all, each story takes place in a well defined historical period, and is written in a specific style.  There’s a 19^th-century nautical log, a series of early 20^th-century letters from a serious young musician, a late-20^th-century crime thriller, a British comedy, a Philip Dick-like sci-fi story, and a scary post-apocalyptic vision of the destiny that awaits humankind. We hurtle forward into the future, then lurch back to the place we started from.  Each is written in the most natural way.  Each is convincing, and even more crucially, each is entertaining in its own way. I continue to be surprised by the variety of ways I was entertained by a single author in a single book.

Mitchell is a master of dialect.  A master.  Enough said.  I can’t explain it.  You need to read it.

 The stories are linked by a device that seems at first to be a bit contrived:  In the first half of the book, each story is contained in a document of some sort in the following story.  It’s a bit of an uphill battle in the first half as we gradually gain altitude.  But that plays out in the most natural and inevitable way in the second half, where each story ends with the natural telling of the second half of the following story.  The ease with which we flow from one story to the next brought a special downhill thrill.  It’s just plain neat.  What an idea.

In the end, it’s a pretty depressing view of human nature, but the novel ends with at least some sense of hope.  The general trend may be into the abyss, but if we try hard we can each make a difference.  Might seem trivial to some, but I got it. All we can do is try to make things better in the face of long odds.  The outcome doesn’t look good from a distance, may not be good at all, but the best of us will try nonetheless.  Such is our fate.

The various connections between the stories are too numerous to mention.  In a way it’s the same story told over again in a new setting and context. But it’s different and fresh each time.  By the end I had the sense that I was looking down at humanity and time from a very high altitude, a kind of satellite view of history and mankind that is rare indeed.  How did Mitchell manage to do that?

Gotta look at what else he’s written.

What the hell kind of movie might this be?

The I of the Needle

“Bad News” is the second of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels.  Like the first in the series, it’s relatively short and focuses on the events of a single day.  The main character, Patrick Melrose, is now in his early twenties and travels to NYC to collect the remains of his recently deceased abusive and cruel father.  By now Patrick is hopelessly addicted to drugs and is barely functioning in society.  Only his wealth spares him from complete devastation.

As usual, St Aubyn is a master at portraying the cynical self-absorbed well-to-do Englishman. 

For example:

“Kay told him about her own dying parents.  ‘You have to start looking after them badly before you’ve got over the shock of how badly they looked after you,” she said.

Or:

“How was Debbie?  How the fuck should he know?  It was hard enough to rescue himself from the avalanche of his own feelings, without allowing the gloomy St Bernard of his attention to wander into other fields.”

But there is a cynical desperation here which is very striking.  There truly is no escape for Patrick:

“No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh.  Who could guess what exquisite torments lay ahead in the holiday camps of eternity?  It almost made one grateful to be alive.”

Even sex isn’t a refuge from his alienation and self-loathing:

“He must have her.  He must have her, or someone else.  He needed contact, skin to skin, muscle to muscle.  Above all, he needed the oblivious moment of penetration when, for a second, he could stop thinking about himself.  Unless, as too often happened, the appearance of intimacy unleashed a further disembodiment and a deeper privacy.  Never mind that.  If sex sentenced him to an exile which, on top of the usual melancholy, contained the additional irritation of another person’s dumb reproach, the conquest was bound to be exhilarating.  Or was it?  Who was left to him?  Beautiful women were always with someone, unless you happened to catch them in the split second between inconsolable loss and consolation, or in the taxi that was taking them from their principal lover to one of the secondary ones.  And if you had a beautiful woman, they always kept you waiting, kept you doubting, because it was the only time they could be sure that you were thinking about them.”

For me the most revealing aspect of the book is St Aubyn’s depiction of the power of substance abuse.  Start with this description of the effect of cocaine combined with other drugs:

“Patrick sprang up the steps of the Key Club with unaccustomed eagerness, his nerves squirming like a bed of maggots whose protective stone has been flicked aside, exposing them to the assault of the open sky.”

And then these passages:

“How could he ever hope to give up drugs?  They filled him with such intense emotion.  The sense of power they gave him was, admittedly, rather subjective (ruling the world from under the bedcovers, until the milkman arrived and you thought he was a platoon of stormtroopers come to steal your drugs and splatter your brains across the wall), but then again, life was so subjective.”

“He checked the pills again (lower right pocket) and then the envelope (inside left) and then the credit cards (outer left).  This nervous action, which he sometimes performed every few minutes, was like a man crossing himself before an altar – the Drugs; the Cash; and the Holy Ghost of Credit.”

“What was sex next to this compassionate violence?  Only this violence could break open a world constrained by the hidden cameras of conscience and vanity.”

Patrick is a prisoner of his past.  His desperate struggle to stay at least one step ahead of his trauma is very telling without being the least bit contrived.  Welcome to the inside of the mind of a drug addict.  It ain’t pretty.  St Aubyn doesn’t judge, and he depicts without mercy.  Nobody in this book is the least bit likeable.  Not even a little.  St Aubyn shows us the underbelly of human nature, and you’ll wince more than once.  You’ll probably even look away now and then.  Such is the power and credibility of the writing.  It’s also very funny at times, and though we don’t admire Patrick, we do empathize.

The overall effect is somehow therapeutic.  We all have our struggles, and we can all feel some kinship with Patrick’s predicament.  In the end Patrick is only human.  Even though he fails to make any real progress, his very survival from hour to hour is a kind of triumph.  Compared to that, whatever you or I might accomplish seems downright remarkable.

Last Words

How foolish of me to be writing a short piece about Christopher Hitchens, master of the essay.  Did some mid-nineteenth century hack composer write a symphony dedicated to Beethoven?  Probably many, and they’re all long forgotten.  So even as I resign myself to the scrapheap of not-even-noticed-by-history, I cannot refrain from offering a few thoughts, however trite, on Hitchens’ last work, “Mortality”.  It’s a collection of pieces from Vanity Fair in which Hitchens writes about his experience with esophageal cancer, the disease that eventually killed him.  He brings his usual super-hardnosed approach even to this most personal topic, and the results are not to be taken lightly.  There is no sentimentality, no mawkishness, no self-pity.  There is a kind of helplessness that sets in as the reader discovers how difficult it is to see clearly across the divide that separates the well from the seriously ill.  Despite our best efforts, we are in fact isolated on one side or the other, and though we try to imagine what’s over there, though we try to sympathize, empathize, we try to say the right things, we try to feel the right things, ultimately we just can’t really know what it’s like to be on the opposite side peering over the canyon rim.

Hitchens was a brilliant thinker and a very effective writer.  The discussions are not stuffy, but they’re hardly light reading.  Just the kind of conversations you’d hope to have with your best-thinking friends. The book doesn’t hang together particularly well.  There wasn’t time to put it together into a more coherent whole.  But it’s well worth a few hours of your time to read it carefully.  He remained clear thinking and ruthlessly disciplined to the end.  I’ve seen him interviewed and in discussion many times on television, and that may be his strongest suit: conversation and debate.  He was always entertaining, informative, quick witted, and considerate of others (as long as they were considerate of him).  I’m so sorry I never got to see him in person.  That must have really been something to witness.  The power of that personality had to be tremendous.

For me he’s the closest thing we had in our time to William F. Buckley.  Buckley’s exterior was more elitist, and his politics were certainly different, but the energy, erudition, and strength of personality of Buckley does remind me of Hitchens. And just as with Buckley, we may not agree with some of his political stands, but his position must be heard carefully and taken seriously. There's little that Hitchens didn't take seriously.

He writes beautifully about speech and writing, about the limits of empathy, about the value of trust and of trying, about declining strength, about prayer and positive thinking, and about the compassion and wisdom of our best scientists and doctors . Just read the essays and wonder at the man that produced them during his darkest hours.  Forgive the weaknesses that creep in here and there, especially towards the end. Appreciate the strengths.  Even though we all don’t have his intelligence and knowledge base, I so wish we could have his discipline and high standards.  Something to aspire to, I guess.

Mr. Hitchens, wherever you are or are not at present, we wish you well.  We thank you for your efforts. You are and will continue to be missed.