Where Have I Been?

Joan Didion

It’s one of the best aspects of reading. You can read for a long, long time and still discover an author that makes you wonder how you've missed her for so long.  Joan Didion is not exactly an obscure writer, but nonetheless I’ve managed to avoid reading her. Granted she’s not so popular in New York where I lived most of my life.  But having moved to California, several  readers here have recommended her works as serious and worthwhile. So I picked up The White Album.  Very glad I did.

The White Album is a collection of non-fiction magazine pieces (published in 1979) by the relatively young Didion.  For me it’s a new kind of non-fiction that combines traditional non-fiction, memoir, and many techniques from fiction to make a unique style.  It’s both intensely personal and strictly objective.  No real argument presented, at least not explicity. Just multifaceted takes on some important themes, including the late 60’s, the 50’s, California as a place, technology, feminism, and the personal vs. the collective.

I won’t dwell on specifics here, but suffice it to say that I’ve never read anything more insightful on any of the above topics.  She has a wonderful way of coming at a subject from a number of different angles, all personal, all intensely felt, and all telling.  It’s up to the reader to try to assemble those takes into something coherent.  In some cases it’s not possible, and that’s OK.  It’s a curiously creative approach to non-fiction: impressions, ideas, feeling, all presented as strong but divergent vectors that may or may not add up. It’s Didion’s way of portraying complexity, and it borrows from fiction writers who use different characters (even different narrators) to present divergent views of the same events. Didion manages this in the realm of non-fiction.  The kaleidoscope keeps turning, and the views are striking.

Mark di Suvero sculpture in San Francisco

One might expect that just about anything published on these topics in 1979 wouldn't have much relevance today.  Think again.  These pieces will last for a long time; each is filtered through an intensely personal lens. She presents a series of vectors which precariously balance each other and contribute to a shimmering whole. In the long run we learn more about Didion than about the subject at hand, and I wish I had the opportunity to know her personally in those times.  Well maybe not.  I wouldn’t have been up to the challenge.  I’m grateful to know her through her writing.

Fiction as Argument

“And another thing.  And what about this idea?  But you should really also consider this somewhat contradictory line of reasoning.  This is all messy, but I come down squarely on this side of the argument.”

This is the typical subtext of Dave Egger’s novel, The Circle.  It’s the story of a young woman hired for an entry-level position by a powerful Facebook/Google-like company of the near future.  She quickly rises through the ranks to a position of great visibility, and we as readers witness her gradual conversion to the dark side, to the place where privacy is evil, secrets are lies, transparency is paramount, and human values are essentially lost.  The ending is very dark, indeed.

It’s a long parable.  Parables should last a few pages and be done.  This one goes on for five hundred pages.  Eggers makes his arguments; the points are well taken.  In the end, the debate judges predictably side with the author.

But when I read fiction I’m looking for much more than argument.  I’m hoping for richness of language, depth of character, complex situations where morality is severely strained by the understandable immediacy of human need.  I’m seeking contradictions that both delight and baffle; I’m looking for imagery that glimmers and characters that frustrate.  None of this comes here.  It’s really not a novel at all. It’s an argument thinly disguised as third-person narration of one character’s Google-glass-like take on her experience.  It comes across as adolescent, and is severely

constrained by Egger’s evidently urgent need to make point after point.

I have great respect for Eggers.  I’d love to read the fifty-page non-fiction piece that makes his well-considered argument.  It might well be both interesting and compelling. But the propagandistic novel that he actually wrote requires paragraph-by-paragraph translation from fiction to argument.  Just write the argument, dude.

 That being said I am haunted by Egger’s take on this topic as I go about my daily digital life.  Just catching up on my Twitter feed now has a sinister resonance that it didn’t have before.  OK, I get it.  But I didn’t sign up for reading a long young-adultish quasi sci-fi novel that nags at me like a Jewish grandmother.

It is easy to read, and take into account that I am old[ish].  But go forth with caution. Even dystopian fiction should do more than ask us to track the argument on a scorecard.  We also need to wonder, cry, laugh, and maybe shiver. I'm more interested in the questions than the answers.

Croton-On-Hudson

T.C. Boyle and I share a few things:  we both attended SUNY Potsdam, and we both lived for some time in northwest Westchester County, NY in the area around Croton-On-Hudson. I lived there from 1982 until 2010.  As I write this I look up at my wall to the right where I’ve hung a satellite image of the very that very section of the Hudson. Boyle grew up there.  His 1987 novel World’s End takes place there in modern times and in earlier historical periods, including the Dutch/English colonial periods and the post-WWII era.  Because Boyle is true to geography (though a few place names are inexplicably slight altered), I often know exactly the place he refers to.  I have a feeling for the land there, for the river (I’ve spent a decent amount of time on boats and kayaks in that part of the Hudson), for the forest and the rock, for the weather. 

The novel is an historical tour de force, jumping back and forth in time, making obvious (sometimes all too obvious) connections among eras and characters.  Most of it is believable though some stretched my credulity beyond the breaking point.  But no matter, that’s not really the point.  The area is a product of its past, and I know enough of the area’s present to see and appreciate the historical roots that Boyle so painstakingly illustrates.

 

Looking south on the Hudson towards World's End

I’m not sure how I could have lived there for so long and remained ignorant of the area’s post-war past. I knew nothing, absolutely nothing of the Peekskill riots of 1949.  I’m proud that the place had socialist elements, but not so proud of the violent backlash.  And the telling details of the hardships of colonial life are striking indeed.  The Native American thread is also fascinating.  Boyle is rarely noted for his subtlety after all, and he is a little heavy handed in his bold implied assertion that nothing much changes, the same strands continue to interweave over and over, pretty much without resolution or reconciliation.  Despite all the technical and economic progress over the centuries, people are just about the same: capable of empathy and good behavior but more often than not repeatedly falling short and letting each other down.

The language is a little exaggerated, but not as much as in some of his other novels. The plot is contrived.  Some of the themes (eating disorders, racism, rampant out-of-control capitalism) get tiresome.  It’s a long book and I did lose interest here and there.  If you like Stegner on California history, you should give this a try. Different place and a different literary approach, but there are some similarities. I’m not sure how it would come across to someone unfamiliar with the area.  It might seem like science fiction instead of the ultimate historical realism that Boyle was (I’m pretty sure) trying for.  That’s the price to be paid for exaggeration and caricature.  Never stopped Dickens.

From The X-Book Files

No, it’s not x-rated; it’s experimental.  S, by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst is a book within a book.  It exists only in old-fashioned hard copy for good reason.  The physical object is carefully crafted to look like a well-used library book with many handwritten margin notations.  The library book is ostensibly Ship of Theseus by V.M. Straka.  Straka (a fictional author of fiction) is a mysterious 20^th-century author whose very identity is in dispute by literary scholars (at least by the scholars in this book).  Nobody really knows who he was, but we do know he was tied to decades of political and literary turmoil, and that he was tied in some ways to a group of such figures known loosely as “S”.

The margin notes are written by two young adults, one a college senior, another an ex-graduate student.  They discover each other by accident through the physical object of the book.  Indeed they don’t even meet for some time, but they do leave the book in secret places for the other to pick up after adding more notes in the margin.  The notes are handwritten, and by taking into account the handwriting and the color of the writing, the reader can piece together the chronology of the notes.  A real conversation ensues in these notes, a conversation that turns into a loving relationship. In addition various freestanding documents are inserted in the text for our pleasure and illumination: postcards, handwritten letters, archival documents, newspaper clippings, etc.

So there are multiple simultaneous levels here:  the original Straka text, the accompanying documents, the mystery of the historical figure Straka, the longstanding scholarly debate over his identity (some of this in footnotes), and several layers of conversation between the two present-day young adults.  Ideally one would read the book several times:  first just the Straka text, then the footnotes, then one time through for each layer of handwritten annotation.  But it’s not a short book, and just getting through it once is an effort.  It takes a while to find a reading rhythm for this odd arrangement, so I couldn’t imagine going back through it all multiple times. In a way it was fun to read and juggle the layers all at the same time page by page.

Conspiracy theories abound; intrigue and danger (some imagined, some perhaps real) lurk around every corner. The atmosphere is intense. Complexity abounds in the form of multiple historical characters, multiple theories about what the author might have intended, and hidden codes in the text that the young adults gradually crack.  The Straka text provides lots of vague passages that the young adult annotate to express their feelings about themselves, their past, and each other. The connections between fictional text, historical past, and actual present events are very cleverly drawn.

But what’s missing is the richness of human experience and emotion.  We don’t really care much about the codes because they don’t unlock anything that matters to us.  Yes, pieces of the puzzle are revealed, but the larger puzzle seems to be made up almost entirely of mood and atmospherics.  We don’t much care which way the history turns out.  We do care a little about the present-day characters, but there is no direct narration about or from them.  It’s all indirect, like a hall of mirrors.  If the mirrors don’t reflect anything we care about, then the mirrors become an effective but shallow trick that fails to keep our attention.  The book has two authors.  That should be enough to tell us that this will not be a book with deeply personal insight.

Very clever and well worth a read, but don’t expect a fulfilling experience. I smiled many times. I was delighted by the clever interplay, but in the end I wanted more depth.  But experiments are experimental. They’re meant to give us new knowledge about how things might work. They don’t have to answer all the questions at once.  This is a hint at an interesting new approach to fiction.  Will it bear fruit?  Not for me to predict. For now I’ll say that cleverness isn’t enough here.  But maybe there’s a path forward from here.