Appetizers

The Vegetable Gardener,
by Arcimboldo (16th century)

I’ve followed Jim Crace since stumbling on ‘Being Dead’, one of the best and most unusual novels I’ve ever read.  It’s one of my all-time favs.  ‘The Pesthouse’ was good, but less appealing to me.  I stumbled on ‘The Devil’s Larder’ (2001) in a used bookstore in Nebraska a few days ago and couldn’t resist giving it a go.  It’s a collection of 64 short stories in a mere 163 pages.  The stories range from one to about ten pages and they all touch on food in one way or another. But this is not a foodie book.  This is a book for short story readers.  Food is just a vehicle in each story in one way or another. The Arcimboldo painting appears on the jacket cover.  Very clever.

The same image
 upside down

Crace is one of the most compassionate, sensitive and loving contemporary writers I know.  He has a wonderful feel for the language, and has very nuanced feelings to express.  Who would think that food could be a metaphor for love, hate, disappointment, pain, boredom, and regret?  The stories include accounts of an execution, a honeymoon, an illness, a trip to the supermarket, a marriage, etc.  Plenty of variety to keep the reader going forward.

This is very traditional writing with not a hint of today’s avant-garde.  But it’s not at all sentimental or old-fashioned.  There is a strain of modernity in the creative ways that food is used, but essentially you can set your clock back and enjoy.  Be lovingly caressed by Crace’s prose.  It feels damned good, and that's good enough for me.

Is This Thing On?

My most recent dip into Nicholson Baker’s works is ‘Checkpoint’, a short work published in 2004.  My first was ‘The Mezzanine’, followed by closely by ‘The House of Holes’.  Both are highly unusual and idiosyncratic creations, and ‘Checkpoint’ is certainly odd as well.  The book is written as a transcription of a tape recording of a conversation between two friends in a hotel room.  One has summoned the other to meet him for a talk. There are no breaks from the transcription format, no interspersed comments from the author, no stage directions, no descriptions.  It reads like a word-for-word transcription of a conversation.

But of course it’s not like any transcription in real life. If you’ve had any experience with oral history (Studs Terkel, for example) you know that literal transcriptions make for very uneven and often boring reading.  They are usual heavily edited when published and accompanied by commentaries putting the interview or conversation in context.  ‘Checkpoint’ is very carefully crafted.  The casual tone of the conversation is illusory. Baker pays attention to every line, every nuance.  There is some wordplay and humor here and there.  Baker seems to truly enjoy the language and can’t resist some fun.  But the tone is very straightforward throughout, almost deadpan.  To me it doesn’t read like a play, it reads like a transcription.

Nicholson Baker

So once again Baker’s prose is pretty much devoid of emotion on the surface.  But that stillness allows us glimpses into the characters and their feelings.  While their conversation is ostensibly about politics, we see the two men as distinct individuals each with their own approach to life.  They’ve made very different choices in their pasts, and the consequences of those choices are evident in the present.

Baker’s leftist politics are very much on display here.  If those views are likely to offend you, don’t read the book.  You’ll just be infuriated and probably miss the point(s) entirely.  You don’t have to agree with Baker’s views, but you need to be able to tolerate them.  But given that both characters are very unhappy with Bush, the Iraq war and the state of politics in general, it’s interesting to note how they react differently.  One is intent on assassinating the President (well, probably not really intent but we can’t be sure).  The other is a more traditional liberal who tries to change the system from within while personally drawing benefit from the system at the same time.

So now in yet another way Baker has written a book without emotional or descriptive display but nonetheless gives us an unsettling, intriguing and human reading experience.  The approach is strictly disciplined.  You’d think it couldn’t be done.  But he does it.  It’s a short book written in one long section.  Probably best read in a single sitting.  It would be readable in a bookstore when you have a free hour or two.  I’d recommend a latte and a comfortable chair.

The Kitchen Sink

On a recent vacation in Alaska I was in the mood for something on the lighter side, so I picked up T.C. Boyle’s latest novel, ‘When the Killing’s Done’. I’m not a huge fan of Boyle, but his novels do tackle serious issues and are usually fun to read.  I especially liked ‘The Tortilla Curtain’, in which Boyle explores the issue of illegal immigration in California.  In this latest book Boyle directs the spotlight on the politics of ecology and conservation.  The plot turns on the Park Service’s efforts to restore California’s Channel Islands (off the coast of Santa Barbara) to their original state before contamination brought on by human-driven events, and the opposition to those efforts by a radical animal rights group.  Boyle tries hard not to take sides, but I did find his portrayal of the Park Service to be particularly distasteful as well as (at least I hope) somewhat unrealistic.

 

The writing is typical hyped up T.C. Boyle.  He uses a 200-watt word where 60-watts would do just fine.  The result is edgy and sometimes overblown, but that’s his style.  For example:

‘It was only then that she became aware of the height of the waves coming at them, rearing black volcanoes of water that took everything out from under the boat and put it right back again, all the while blasting the windows as if there were a hundred fire trucks out there with their hoses all turned on at once.’

Can a volcano rear?  Do we need fire trucks, hoses, and rearing volcanoes in the same sentence?  Well, it is colorful, but you need to wear the literary equivalent of sunglasses when you read it.  Otherwise all that squinting is tiring.

So is it really possible to turn back the clock and undo the changes brought on by human intervention?  Are humans just part of the natural world or are we somehow to be seen as opposing nature? Under what circumstances is killing animals justified?  For what goals and at what price?  Killing occurs in nature every day, but when humans kill animals is that different? These are fascinating questions and Boyle does a good job of using plot and character to pose them.

Some characters are indeed memorable.  The plot takes many turns, some of which are less than totally believable, but just go along for the read.  By the end there are so many points of connection and resonance in the plot that it all flattens out to something like ‘everything is everything’.  It’s all in there (even the kitchen sink), and that’s exactly the way Boyle avoids taking a stand.  He throws everything possible into the book seemingly to make the point that this is all a big mess, any possible point of view is by definition an oversimplification, and it’s all part of some grand human/natural carnival ride. While that may be entertaining I’m not sure it makes much of a contribution to the conversation except to educate us a bit on the subject. He makes it entertaining but also a bit hopeless.  If we can’t find a tenable position in the debate then where do we go from here?

Well, I did say I was looking for something on the lighter side.

Updike/Roth In Context

A must read. The best literary criticism I’ve read in a long time. “American Male Novelists: The New Deal” by Elaine Blair in the July 12 issue of The New York Review of Books. Fascinating insights on Updike and Roth (my heroes) from a woman. Kinda puts me in my place, but I’m OK with that. Available online only to subscribers. Worth a one-time newsstand purchase. She makes many points and pulls together some interesting quotations, including this from a 1997 New Yorker piece by Jonathan Franzen :

“In fact, we’re simply experiencing the anxiety of a free market. Contraception and the ease of divorce have removed the fetters from the economy of sex, and, like the citizens of present-day Dresden and Leipzig, we all want to believe we’re better off under a regime in which even the poorest man can dream of wealth. But as the old walls of repression tumble down, many Americans – discarded first wives, who are like the workers displaced from a Trabant factory; or sexually inept men, who are the equivalent of command-economy bureaucrats – have grown nostalgic for the old state monopolies.”

The piece was reprinted in Franzen's essay collection “How To Be Alone”. I’d read the collection years ago, but it makes a much greater impact on me now. Read the NYRB piece if you enjoy Updike and Roth. It gave me some perspective on what it is I find so comfortable about their take on life. I’ve always considered them to be somewhat guilty pleasures, and have also been troubled about my total inability to share my pleasure with female readers. Given Blair’s insights, it’s no wonder at all that I’m troubled.


Well, I’m still glad to have Updike and Roth on my shelf. Women: Your loss if you choose not to at least attempt to get over the inevitable gender barriers that these authors present to you.


Maybe I’ll go read some Colette. Hmmmm.

Looking Back from the Pulizer

“Olive Kitteridge” was such a surprise for me.  When it won the Pulitzer I gave it a try and was so so pleased.  Sooner or later I had to get around to the two earlier novels.  “Abide with Me” is the second.  The setting is a similar harsh small New England town, and the strict, terse, Protestant aspects are also familiar Strout territory.  I certainly appreciate Strout’s ability to portray this environment with such poignancy, sympathy and grace.  But in “Abide with Me” she seems duty-bound to package this in a structure with beginning, confict, and resolution.  I get the beginning and the conflict.  I don’t get the resolution at all.  The final section tries to clean up all of the ongoing messes in a single plot turn that I didn’t find at all convincing.  All of the bleakness and pessimism is supposedly dissipated.  I found the dark side convincing and the resolution unsatisfying.

That said there is much good writing here.  Just don’t expect a book on the level of “Olive”.  In that later work Strout left aside the need to resolve it all.  The connected stories that comprise the novel raise many questions and delineate some complex emotional landscapes.  But nobody lives happily ever after.  That I get.

The Devil in Mr. Irving

There’s narrative realism, and then there’s narrative realism.  John Irving has demonstrated his mastery of plot and narrative technique for a long time now, and his latest novel, “In One Person”, is the latest evidence of just how effortless he can make it seem.  But when it comes to the ‘realism’ part, well that’s another ‘story’. 

This is a novel about sexuality, indeed almost exclusively about sexuality.  It’s kind of a one-trick pony in that way, but it is a plea for tolerance and understanding of sexuality in all of its various expressions and flavors.  In that sense it touches on both the political and the personal realms.  But Irving has created the most unlikely set of characters with the most idiosyncratic sexual proclivities, all set in a sleepy New England town.  The tolerant, almost ho-hum attitude that the characters display toward each other is certainly not realistic, at least not in my experience.  For me, the tolerance is both off-putting and inspiring, but far from realistic.  And the combination of sexual tolerance with literary knowledge and sensitivity which informs so many of the characters can only be a reflection of Irving’s own sensibilities.

That being said, this is a not-so-short novel that purports to be traditional, narrative, and realistic, but is really (like other Irving works) about ideas.  The plot, the characters, the setting are just vehicles for Irving to make his case.  And make his case he does.

Not that there aren’t evocative and moving passages.  The section which deals with the AIDS crisis of the 80’s is incredibly moving, for example.  But there does seem to be something missing here.  The central character never seems to be truly and fully attached to anyone other than himself.  There is a good deal of narcissism here, and it does get a bit tiresome at times. As with some Dickens, I did get the sense that all of this was contrived just to make the point.

[By the way, an important male character is named Kittredge.  Any connection to Olive Kittredge of Elizabeth Strout’s also-set-in-New England novel?]

What a movie this would make!  It would almost have to be X-rated.  That’s kinda the point.  “Deep Throat”  “Deep Thoughts”  I don’t think this movie will ever be made.

If you’re an Irving fan, it’s a must read.  But if you’re squeamish about sexual topics, think twice.  The Tea Party would not be comfortable with this.  My mother was a very tolerant person, but I don’t think she could have handled this book.  But it is John Irving, and there’s always something to be learned from his books.  For me the more recent Irving novels haven’t regained the heights he reached in “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (perhaps the best plot ever) and “Cider House Rules”.  But I’ll always read what he writes.  And I’ll read it with gratitude and humility.