Category: american fiction

THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway

This book makes you want to run away to be a writer in Paris. It is full to the brim with the romance of Paris by night, and later with the romance of rural Spain. It is also full to the brim with alcohol.

The central character, an American journalist named Jake, has a serious genital injury, received during the Second World War. A British woman named Brett is madly in love with him, but is in fact engaged to someone else, though it is never quite clear what role the injury plays in this complicated situation. Brett meanwhile is also most cruelly leading on a young American named Robert, who, Hemingway never ceases to remind us, is Jewish. These central characters booze their way across Paris, until the festival at Pamploma begins, at which point they move to Spain to continue boozing. It’s all terribly tortured up to this point; but after the arrival in Spain the book becomes an account of what Hemingway did on his holidays. This is primarily watch bull fights, talk to the locals, and of course, booze. The genital injury abruptly disappears as a thematic point.

So, from the stand point of plot, certainly on odd book, veering weirdly between sexual drama and travelogue. However one can’t help but be impressed by Hemingway’s lovely clean, spare prose. I particularly liked:

The taxi rounded the statue of the inventor of the semaphore engaged in doing same . . .

and

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

Occasionally however even this can be too much of a good thing. Here he is at the end of a paragraph in which he is collecting worms for fishing:

Digging at the edge of the damp ground I filled two empty tobacco-tins with worms and sifted dirt onto them. The goats watched me dig.

Ah, the goats watched me dig. For some reason I find this strangely amusing. I keep thinking about it, and it keeps making me laugh.

EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE by Flannery O’Connor

This book begins with a young man named Julian, who is being forced by his mother to accompany her on the bus to her weight loss class. Public transport has only recently been racially integrated, and for some reason she feels it is therefore now unsafe. Her son finds her attitude almost unbearably annoying. Here they are on the subject of slavery:

“There are no more slaves,” he said irritably.
“They were better off when they were,” she said. He groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled onto it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the station: “It’s ridiculous. It’s simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”
“Let’s skip it,” Julian said.
“The ones I feel sorry for,” she said, “are the ones that are half white. They’re tragic.”

I found this a strangely hilarious window into a certain period in the American South, and was excited to see where O’Connor was going with Julian and his mother. Alas, I was never to find out. EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE is unfortunately a collection of short stories. Here’s a terrible confession for a literary blog: I can’t stand short stories. I find them annoying. You get all involved,and then like twenty pages later it’s over. It’s like getting dumped over and over again. So I stopped after three stories. Bad blogger! Bad!

Let me raise the tone by telling you where the title of the collection, and of the first story comes from. It refers to a work by the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

“Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge”

I assume this refers to poor Julian, and find that this makes the story even more darkly comic.

ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN by Keith Gessen

If you spent your twenties scuffling in the arts, there are many parts of this book which will make you laugh. Keith Gessen has been to this particular mountaintop, and you can tell. Here’s a character at a grocery store:

Others had coupons and carefully they held them, like counterfeiting experts, up to the items they hoped to save on, to make sure they were the ones. Mark never did. He had emptied himself of any attachment to specific foods. The only items he saw were the items already on sale. In this way, he kept his calm, he tried new foods, and he saved.

Or try this:

They kept a budget. At the beginning of the week they gave themselves seventy dollars for food and transport. Impossible? Basically impossible, yes, but not if you never go for ‘drinks’ at a bar, never walk into a restaurant, and never buy an item of clothing not at the Salvation Army on Spring Street and Lafayette.

Oh arts people! Come to my arms. I salute you.

There are three characters in this novel: Mark, Sam, and Keith, all of whom are sad young literary men. We follow them from college through their various attempts at literature: one is a frustrated graduate student, one a failed author, and one a political commentator. Not to worry to separate out these differences; though the book alternates between each of their stories, they are all basically the same person. I gave up worrying which was which, consigning this to the failed post-modern device category, and just enjoyed what there was to enjoy – and there’s a great deal of fun to be had: this is a very entertaining book.

It’s a really heartfelt account of the struggles of your twenties, and I found it both honest and amusing. It traces the kind of compromises almost everyone needs to make over the course of the years after university. One begins with bright-eyed and entirely misinformed naievete, and from that there is only one direction to go, and Gessen examines this painful entry into adulthood very well.

Gessen is almost precisely my age, and was in university in the US at almost precisely the same time as me, and reproduces a kind of people, and a world, with wonderful accuracy. Here he is on his drinking in university, and the effect it had on his love life:

Could not even think what to do upon meeting a girl the next day to whom I’d said too much. And so I pretended not to see her, or walked across the dining hall, so that a few months into my freshman year the range of women whom I had not encountered in a drunken stupor narrowed and narrowed until I was reduced to just getting drunk again and hoping someone would meet me halfway. I had done well with girls in high school, considering all my studying, and I was miffed by the new dispensation. At first I basically thought: what the fuck? And then I thought: You’ve got to be kidding me. And then I began to sort of think, Oh no.

All the men in the book date extensively and are very interested in women, and yet the women in the book are without exception fairly faceless, being largely props for more or less humiliating and half-hearted sexual experiences. They also, rather unsettlingly, are very much status objects. At one point, one of the men – who is in his thirties – dumps a 27 year old for being too old, and hooks up with someone just out of university. I am not sure I have any response to that. There is lots of hand-wringng. Try this:

Except every women he dated took a chunk of Mark with her. And vice versa. So that if you looked, if you walked around New York and looked properly, if you walked around America and looked properly, what you saw was a group of wandering disaggregated people, torn apart and carrying with them, in their hands, like supplicants, the pieces of flesh they’d won from others in their time. And who now would take them in?

At first I wondered if this was some sort of post-modern parody. But I have concluded that it is quite sincere. These sad young literary men need to get some therapy. Or else find some sad young literary women. Of appropriate ages.

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED by F. Scott Fitzgerald

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED is a somewhat depressing and an irritatingly moralistic little book.

Set in New York in the early years of the twentieth century, it tells the story of Anthony Patch, a young man living a life of elegance on his trust fund as he waits for his wealthy grandfather to die. He falls madly in love with a noted beauty of the day, Gloria Gilbert, marries her, and they begin to live a life of endless parties and pleasure trips. Anthony continually attempts half-heartedly to find some kind of employment, but keeps being put off by the amount of work that is apparently involved in actually working.

The couple are cut out of the grandfather’s will, spend their money unwisely, and eventually end up in ever smaller and less salubrious accommodation and society. Anthony becomes an alcoholic, while Gloria becomes pathetically fixated on her appearance.

Honestly, I don’t read twentieth century fiction for a moral lesson! How irritating. We get it. Living like there’s no tomorrow often has a consequence tomorrow.

The book is apparently based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s own unhappy marriage, and this is painfully evident. The novel absolutely drips with painful retrospection, with an attempt to dissect everything from the beginning in order to understand what went so horribly wrong. It is like having a drink with a friend after a messy break-up. As a side point, let me just ask: how much do you love yourself when you call a thinly veiled autobiography THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED. Honestly, get over it.

I have been inspired recently by the following: “When life gives you lemons – say fuck it and bail.” Wise words, though they do come from the movie FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL. The early nihilistic partying in this novel reminded me of this fine lesson, and I was sorry Fitzgerald felt he had to make everyone pay so direly for having a little fun.

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ by Walter M Miller

I have concluded upon reading this book that humanity, taken in a mass, is in fact relatively sane.

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ begins with a young monk fasting in a desert. He comes across a hole in the ground which opens into a room, labelled FALLOUT SHELTER – OCCUPANCY 15. He is terrified. He has heard of fallouts, which in the distant past killed huge numbers of people. He pictures them as large and fiery dragons. As his grasp of what is referred to as pre-Deluge English is not great (he struggles with how nouns work, and thus cannot understand the difference between a house cat and a cat house) he fears the shelter is full of fallouts, just waiting to come out.

In short, this is sci-fi. And my favourite kind too, being post-apocalypse sci-fi!

Anyway, the cave is full of technical documents, and the monk’s order is one set up by a certain Leibowitz, who, on surviving the Deluge, set out to preserve humanity’s memory. During the great Simplification, after the Deluge, books and learning were understandably treated with suspicion, and so the order struggles to protect the physical remnants of that memory. The documents are thus a great find.

The book moves forward in history two or three times, on each occasion by a few centuries, as human learning is rediscovered, and it ends, predictably, with another nuclear disaster. To tell you the truth I found the last half a little dull, and did a fair bit of skipping, as there were lots of scenes where men shouted at each other about military tactics.

However, it was an interesting immersion in the concerns of the 1960s. The immediacy of their fear of nuclear annihilation is fascinating. No doubt the apocalypse will happen, and I personally am totally ready to survive it (eat leather, eat other people, drink urine, you name it); but I am encouraged that we have all managed to hold it together so far, and that we’ve had a good half century without species-wide suicide. Let’s go humanity!

LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry

This one is 900 pages, but I promise you it goes down incredibly quick, like a cold glass of water after a long ride across the dusty plains.

As you may suspect from this rather tortured similie, it’s another western novel. Bizarrely, my third this month. I can’t recall when, if ever, I’ve read a novel of the American West, and now I’ve done three in three weeks. This has happened largely by chance, but by about page 700 I was completely ready to chuck it all in and be a cowboy. I am so up for drinking buttermilk, eating sourdough biscuits, and spitting tobacco, it’s not true. Also I want to go round calling people whores like that’s totally acceptable. All I need is a gender change, and for the American West still to exist.

LONESOME DOVE, which won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, tells the story of a cattle drive which starts in Texas and crosses over 3000 miles to arrive in Montana, establishing the first cattle ranch in that state. It’s a vast novel, and there are many ways you could see it. On one level, it’s a novel of the American landscape, taking us from the heat and dryness of the South to the snow and mountains of the West, and as the group struggle through rivers, across dry plains, and round tiny towns, it’s a monument to the sheer scale of the country. On another level, it’s a kind of elegy for what was lost when the settlers arrived. The leaders of the drive, Gus and Call, were once Texas Rangers, who existed to keep settlers safe from Indians. Now that they have ‘won’ they have time to consider what may have been lost. The book is full of encounters with various small Native American groups trying to find a way to survive. The Rangers, who knew the plains when they were full of buffalo – so full you could ride for a hundred miles along a single herd – are horrified by what seems to be the disappearance of that animal. They pass now roads of bones, the only remnants of these herds.

On another level, and this is the level on which its most engaging, it’s a story of the relationships of the group, from Newt, the yongest, newest hand, to Sean, the new Irish immigrant, to Jake Spoon, the gambler on the run from the law, to Lorena, the prostitute accompanying Jake, to Call, the old Ranger who feels his life’s work is over, and that it has largely been a waste. There’s friendship, and enmity, and personal growth, and death. Here’s my tip: DON’T TRUST MCMURTRY. You might think, oh, this character’s too important to die, that character’s too central to this plot arc to die, he can’t kill them, he won’t kill them. Oh yes he can. OH YES HE WILL.

It’s a very funny novel. Here’s a man who own a tawdry saloon in a tiny town:

Once as a boy he had carried slops in a restaurant in New Orleans that actually used tableclothes, a standard of excellence that haunts him still.

Here’s Call, on the subject of when to ride over into Mexico on raids:

Men he’d ridden with for years were dead and buried, or at least dead, because they’d crossed the river under a full moon.

I think dealing with that inconvenience, people who aren’t men, is very difficult when writing about the profoundly male world of the American West, and it is here that McMurty stumbles. There is a gang rape scene written from the victim’s perspective, that I found very dubious, and some odd observations – here’s one, on a prostitute named Maggie:

Maggie hadn’t had it in her to refuse a man. It was the only reason she was a whore, Call had decided – she just couldn’t turn away any kind of love.

What total nonsense. I had to stop at this point and do a quick Google to find out if this book was written in 1986 or 1886.

However, overall, a great novel. I strongly recommend it, and am currently trying to restrain myself from pouring a glass of buttermilk, whatever that is, and starting right in on the sequel.

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES by Cormac McCarthy

This is a lovely little story of the Wild West, just at the period when the West was ceasing to be Wild. It is a coming-of-age story tinged with the melancholy of a disappearing world.

It is the 1940s, and a teenager, John Grady, convinces his friend Rawlins to ride away with him from their Texas homes in search of adventure in Mexico. They end up at a ranch, capturing and breaking wild horses, and John Grady falls in love with the rancher’s daughter. Mexican justice is almost as capricious as a Kenyan policeman, and the two are unexpectedly imprisoned, somewhat randomly, and have to fight for days with the other inmates. On their release, Rawlins goes back home, and the scarred John Grady returns to try and win the rancher’s daughter.

The heart of this book, as in any good Western, is the relationship between the two boys, which is sweet, loving and very funny. I am now trying energetically to work “crazy as a shit-house rat” into my everyday conversation. Here is an extract from a section where Rawlins hasn’t seen John Grady for a while:

Bud is that you?
Yeah.
Sum buck, he said. Sum buck. He walked around him to get him in the light and he looked at him as if he were something rare.

You may gather from the lack of conversation markers that this is a literary book, and you’d be right. The evocation of the West is gorgeous:

He pointed his horse at the polestar and rode on and they rode the round moon up out of the east and coyotes yammered and answered back all across the plain to the south from which they’d come

.
(A long literary sentences is however a difficult thing, and can go badly wrong. This one, for example, makes me want to smack someone in the mouth:

The barn was built on the english style and it was sheathed with milled one by fours and painted white and it had a cupola and a weathervane on top of the cupola.

Oh shut up.)

This was a very action-packed book, and the action was so fast paced and brutal that if there has not been a movie made of it I will eat my Stetson. However, I found the book to be really rather sad. This is in part because any novel about growing up is always melancholy, because it always implies a loss, of innocence, or of childhood. In part, also, the book seemed to be mourning a certain kind of lost masculinity. Personally, I don’t think there’s much to mourn there, masculinity and feminity both seeming to me to be primarily a kind of trap – but this book is all about the romance of fulfilling your gender role. Mostly however the sadness comes from the fact that the world of the West is so clearly dying out over the period the book covers.

The car, and modernity, are everywhere in the book. Thus, when John Grady and Rawlins first set out:

The store had nothing in the way of feed. They bought a box of dried oatmeal and paid their bill and went out. John Grady cut the paper drum in two with his knife and they poured the oatmeal into a couple of hubcaps and sat on the picnic table and smoked while the horses ate.

And at the end of the book:

He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.

BABBITT by Sinclair Lewis

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

This is how Sinclair Lewis describes our central character, Babbitt, who, when the book opens, believes he is happy. He does what everyone else does, thinks what everyone else thinks, and is dedicated to material wealth and the myth of the white picket fence.

When he laid out the Glen Oriole acreage development, when he ironed woodland and dipping meadow into a glenless, orioleless, sunburnt flat prickly with small boards displaying the names of imaginary streets, he righteously put in a complete sewage system.

His best friend from university, Paul Riesling is deeply unhappy, and when they go on holiday together to Maine, Babbitt begins to question his life. Says Paul:

But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun

Paul eventually shoots and wounds his wife, and this affront to accepted behaviour jerks Babbitt out of his stupor. He attempts to make some resistance to the norms of his world, and finds himself slowly excluded from that world. He is immediately unhappy. His wife develops acute appendicitus, and in sympathy his bourgeois circle opens a little to let him back in. He leaps back into their waiting arms, glad his revolution is over.

I love this:

Though he saw them twice daily, though he knew and amply discussed every detail of their expenditures, yet for weeks together Babbitt was no more conscious of his children than of the buttons on his coat-sleeves

There is some redemption in the end, through these very children, because the book ends with Babbitt supporting his son against all their family in choosing to get married young, and become a mechanic, rather follow the traditional route of university and a showy wife.

It’s now a commonplace that the accouterments of late capitalism – cars, shops, housing developments – cannot make you happy. What is interesting about this book, written as it is at the very birth of this kind of capitalism, is to see the very birth of this critique – when the idea that money will not make you happy was still new, and unusual. He writes about it terribly seriously, and it’s very sweet, rather like having a child show you how to ride a bike.