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.

One of Life's Pleasures

I don’t know how they do it.  A weekly magazine that covers culture and current events, and includes well chosen fiction from today’s most interesting writers.  As a bonus we get to enjoy some of the funniest cartoons to be found on the planet.  Hats off!

Had to write this after reading stories from two recent  issues.  ‘Amundsen’, by Alice Munro, is included in the August 27 issue.  Ms. Munro has been turning out stories for a long time.  Of late she’s dabbled in some more extreme content, but ‘Amundsen’ is pure traditional Munro.  The tone is remarkable throughout, a flat matter-of-fact key that perfectly suits the subject matter.  She is a master who deserves all the accolades that have come her way. We’re lucky to have new material from her.

‘Birnam Wood’ by T.C Boyle is in the September 3 issue.  It’s not the typical over-the-top T.C. Boyle that we’ve come to expect.  The story is actually quite subtle and understated.  Not at all what I expected.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that he has the flexibility to do something different.

Kudos to The New Yorker for doing this week after week.  Yes, the magazine has changed quite a bit over the last twenty years.  It’s shorter.  Lots more ads.  A bit less intellectual.  Also less stuffy.  But for my money it’s the best American magazine out there.

Gator Aid?

As a young teen I went to a prestigious music camp for two summers.  The instruction wasn’t bad, and the opportunity to be a part of a community of talented young musicians was important for me at the time.  I somehow remember a fanciful hand-drawn map of the camp.  Off to one side was a boggy area labeled ‘The Slough of Despond’.  No idea why I remember it now.  I never went there when I was at the camp.  I had no idea until much later that the name was lifted from “The Pilgrim’s Progress”.  Such an evocative name, indeed.

Well, “Swamplandia!”, despite all the good press, despite the Pulitzer nomination, left me in a pretty down place.  Maybe not despondent  exactly, but not buoyant either.  Karen  Russell is young, and we should be grateful that talented people are writing fiction that gets the attention of readers.  But a Pulitzer nomination?  Come on.

The story takes place in the vast swamps of Florida, a region that Ms. Russell clearly knows well.  The exotic setting is the most interesting part of the book, and helps us to suspend disbelief.  Who knows what could really happen in such an odd place?  But the plot is common coming-of-age, the writing isn’t bad but not original either, and the characters are right out of a young adult novel.  Why all the hoopla?  Dunno.

My advice:  skip it.  Read something serious.  There are new books coming out by Tom Wolfe, Louise Erdich, Barbara Kingsolver, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Chabon, and John Banville.  I’ve already started Hitchens’ “Mortality”, and it’s great to be back in the major leagues.  More on that book later.

Yes we need always be on the lookout for promising young writers.  But we don’t have to heed the publishers’ hype and follow sheepishly into the bog.