Cartoon Therapy

Depression as depicted by Brosh

If you’ve ever owned a dog, you simply must read Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Brosh.  It’s a collection of posts (cartoon drawings with prose) from her blog of the same name. The pieces about dogs are laugh-out-loud, teary-eyed hilarious. The drawings are fun, the prose easy.  The book is over 350 pages long, but you can easily read it in a single sitting. She has a real talent for contrasting the limited vision of one being with the broader wiser approach of another. Whether it’s dog and owner, child and parent, or inner child and outer adult self, there’s much wisdom here about the games we play in day-to-day life. She’s smart about depression (having gone through it herself), and very insightful about motivation in general. She tries hard to apply logic to situations which are inherently illogical. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, and always revealing. You’ll see yourself and your loved ones in many of the pieces, and in some cases you won’t be so happy about that. But what a refreshing and creative way to deal with deep psychological issues. Blog on, Allie.

By Its Cover

To most people I come across as well controlled, a little inhibited, objective, not particularly emotional.  I appear not particularly touchy-feely, and I require a bit of a physical buffer zone between me and those around me. The few who know be well understand that the surface is not an accurate representation of what lies below. I’m actually intensely emotional, very sentimental, surprisingly (painfully) sensitive, expressive, and quite affectionate physically. Reconciling those differences is in effect my life’s work.

The writer that best depicts those contradictions for me is James Salter. A Sport and a Pastime is a favorite, so I had to get his latest novel, All That Is.  It’s vintage Salter; he’s at his best here.

The plot follows the male protagonist from WWII into the 1970’s.  He is a book editor, a conventional fellow in many ways, well-educated but not rebellious, knowledgeable but not erudite, smart but not brilliant. He follows society’s conventions pretty well, but his emotional side emerges in his relationships with women. There his feelings are intense, there he awakens to the full quotient of life’s possibilities, there he allows himself to obey the dictates of his innermost feelings.

Salter is often described as a writer’s writer. I’m no writer but I do appreciate his prose. Succinct, no extra words, no exaggerations, not poetic exactly (as in Banville, for example) but beautifully crafted, straightforward and to the point. There are many minor characters here, and many of those have back stories that are briefly but pointedly told.  They are more or less extraneous to the main plot line, but they are nonetheless fascinating. For example, Swangren is a small character, an aging writer of much fiction, some of it very successful. He has produced several books along the same lines, and he is still turning them out, even if his best days are behind him.

“Swangren had been born on a farm in eastern Ohio and had a farmer’s broad hands. In the Alleghenies, he said, they often had coal beneath their land, and after working all day, the farmers would go down to mine a little coal. As they dug underground they would leave staggered columns of coal, pillars, to support the roof, and when the vein finally ran out, they would retreat, mining the pillars as they went. Pulling pillars, they called it.

That was what he was doing at this stage, he said. Pulling pillars.”

Salter describes the attitude of most Americans at the time to the Vietnam War:

“Everything, during this time, was overshadowed by the war in Vietnam. The passions of the many against the war, especially the youth, were inflamed. There were the endless lists of the dead, the visible brutality, the many promises of victory that were never kept until the war seemed like some dissolute son who cannot ever be trusted or change but must always be take in.”

Salter’s assessment of the role of literature in the America of the 1970’s:

“The power of the novel in the nation’s culture had weakened. It had happened gradually. It was something everyone recognized and ignored. All went on exactly as before, that was the beauty of it. The glory had faded but fresh faces kept appearing, wanting to be part of it, to be in publishing which retained a suggestion of elegance like a pair of beautiful, bone-shined shoes owned by a bankrupt man. Those who had been in it for some years … were like nails driven long ago into a tree that then grew around them. They were part of it by now, embedded.”

The passages and many others give me much pleasure, and for me are reason alone to read Salter. Such insight compressed into lovely and uncontrived prose.

I fear that many women might have difficulties with Salter. His point of view is unrelentingly male. Sexuality plays a major role, and most of the female characters are traditionally passive. But Salter is far from Updike’s “penis with a thesaurus”, and he will not engender the offence and even rage that so many modern women feel toward Roth. Nonetheless they might not be in the best position to grasp his subtle blend of outward conventionality and underlying torrent of feeling. The patterns are so traditional, and perhaps so accurate and personal in nature, and if they probably wouldn’t offend the modern feminist, their beauty and relevance might just escape her notice entirely.

There is little tension in the plot itself.  The beauty is all in the precarious balance so carefully maintained (and occasionally lost) by the main character. Stay within the allowable boundaries. Don’t upset the current order. Fit in. But find an outlet for your inner feelings where you can. Sometimes beautiful, often messy, but necessary.

I hope to make more progress in reconciling my own contradictions. Year by year it does get a little easier. There’s less and less need to hide aspects of my personality. I find that the people that really matter to me have known all along. So much energy wasted in hiding, so much anxiety that didn’t have to be. In the meanwhile I do find it comforting to know that I’m not alone in facing such contradictions.

Human Imperfection

The four stories that comprise Andre Dubus III’s new collection, Dirty Love, are very loosely connected.  Major characters in one story make cameo appearances in another; geography is shared. But the more important connections go much deeper. We all crave love. We want and need to love and to be loved. But love is rarely pure. It’s often mixed with other emotions and needs, or tainted by circumstance or by character flaws.  Hence the love as lived is dirty, not as in shameful, but in need of a good washing, which at least in these stories never really happens.  Indeed the dirt is the real subject here. Our need for love is so strong that it pulls us into situations that we actually know we should avoid, or at least we should do a better job of actively and skillfully navigating through this complicated and changing territory. But in general we don’t navigate well.  We try, we even achieve some temporary successes, but more often we fail. So we go on and we try again, often repeating the same failures.  Who is to say that we’d be better off without those failed relationships?  As long as no irreparable damage is done, perhaps we need to keep trying no matter what the outcome?

Dubus’s writing is awfully good. The first story is the strongest, and there are some truly haunting passages there. He describes a failing marriage in great detail.  The searing hurt, the desire for retribution, the irrational hope, the failure to understand what really happened, the misguided efforts to heal, it’s all there to contemplate.

The last story is by far the longest, and while it has some interesting elements, I’m not sure that it hangs together so well.  The juxtaposition of an older generation’s alcohol abuse with a younger generation’s internet use is interesting.

The middle stories are shorter and a bit less interesting. The second is particularly limited, but the third has more substance. The characters are in the process of learning about themselves, finding out who they are and what really might work for them. Unfortunately they learn mostly by making bad choices, and in the process they hurt themselves and others. But they do learn a little something about navigation along the way.

All four stories end in a kind of perfect balance. The main characters are at a turning point where they have choices to make about how to move forward. While for the most part we know that the outcome will have significant downsides, and those choices might lead to disaster, but we know the characters will try as best they can, then go on.  No happy endings here, but there is some hope for progress.  And if the ending isn’t pretty, there is plenty of emotional nourishment along the way.

Some of the complexity reminded me of McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.  Dubus lacks McCann’s tremendous Irish generosity of spirit, but he does have a similar sensitivity to human emotion and experience.  The human heart is on display here for all to marvel at.  Oh, the messes we get ourselves in, the pleasures we enjoy, the pain we endure. Dubus makes it all seem inevitable and maybe even forgivable.

Modernized Mythology

Donna Tartt’s A Secret History has been around since the early 90’s.  It’s not a book you hear much about these days, but a small but surprising number of readers put the book on their list of all-time favorites.  Her latest heavyweight novel, The Goldfinch, made a stir in the Booker competition and has been getting quite a bit of press (not all of it good).  Never read her at all, so A Secret History seemed like the place to start.

I did find the book interesting to think about, but maybe less interesting to read.  It’s a story about a young student from backwater California who enters college at a small exclusive rural East coast liberal arts school (probably Bennington College, where Tartt went to school).  Because he’s already studied some ancient Greek in California (not so likely), he quickly joins a small and very exclusive group of students who are studying the Classics very intensively with a single idiosyncratic and isolated professor. This sounds more like Oxford than Bennington, but I guess anything was possible in those lefty days.  I don't find it believable that a young student with his limited background would be instantly comfortable in the rarified and sophisticated air that surrounds this particular group, nor does it seem likely that he would be quickly embraced and trusted by such a secretive and exclusive group. But I guess we just have to set plausibility aside. The story gets less believable as we proceed.  The group ends up murdering one of their own, and the second half of the book traces the inevitable decline that the initial murder triggers.  One by one they fall apart, and at the end of the book they are mere shadows of their former selves. No plot surprises here; we know in the first few pages what’s going to happen.  Watching it unfold is supposed to be the fun part.

Bennington College: Breeding ground for evil?

There’s absolutely nothing likeable about any of these characters.  They’re all selfish, excessively indulgent, substance-abusing, snobby smartasses in various proportions, and the adults in the book aren’t particularly attractive either.  There’s nobody to like here, but that’s we’re not supposed to like them.  Rather we observe them under stress, almost like watching lab rats that have been injected with an experimental chemical. It ain't pretty.

The narrative is handled quite skillfully.  We understand the major events of the plot, but we don’t witness them directly in the plot.  There’s lots of indirection and subtlety here.  And the gradual mood shift through the book is also quite interesting.  The first half of the book takes place almost entirely within the inner circle of friends, and the atmosphere is downright claustrophobic. It’s a small group, and their incestuous obsessions (yes, sometimes literally) and selfish concerns take up all the air in the room.  All of it.  There is no relief for the reader, no fresh breeze, not even a view from the outside, and that made this part of the book very unappealing, unrealistic, and monochromatic for me.  But in the second half very gradually the focus shifts back to the real world, and that shift is fascinating to observe.   The more the characters have to deal with the real world the less well they fare.

It’s also a book about ideas, mostly Greek philosophy, but also ideas from other times and places. I’m often fascinated by fiction that attempts to illustrate and draw consequences from abstract ideas, and I did appreciate that about the book very much. One thing to read about the contrast between Apollo and Dionysus in a philosophy text, quite another to see it play out very explicitly in a full novel. The book is almost an extended parable, a warning about what can happen when the human psyche is pushed to extremes.

The last hundred pages unfold nicely; it’s a page-turner by the end, and the denouement comes off well.

There’s a lot to think about here, and the atmosphere is haunting. But if it’s redemption you’re after, look elsewhere. Here you’ll find distasteful amoral behavior, sometimes superficially justified by circumstance or philosophy, sometimes simply allowed by individual inadequacy. Despite the interesting ideas and the sharply focused writing (or perhaps because of them), we end up weighed down by the banality of evil.