Category: Uncategorized

THE HUMAN STAIN by Philip Roth

I couldn’t finish this book because there was so much whining.  It tells the story of an older college professor who slowly pushes himself out of his job, because he can’t stand the clamour around an allegedly racist statement he made.  He then has a fling with this female janitor which involves a lot of concerns about his erections.  It’s just like, snore. 

It’s not like I don’t think he has problems, what with needing to time the Viagra and his younger colleagues leveraging the scandal to secure their own promotions, but what I found annoying was the novel’s inflated sense of how unjust this was.  And not even that it was unjust, but that it ought not be unjust. It’s as if they are amazed to learn that life is not fair, and have no equipment for dealing with it  I guess that’s what’s called male privilege.

I so loved PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, but looking back on this blog I see I also hated the first book in this trilogy, AMERICAN PASTORAL.  I think I better give up on Roth.  Though let me end on a sweeter note, as I did like this description of someone giving up dating:

. .. I had altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn’t meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience — or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism — to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.

Erotic professionalism. I love that.

THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai

“the world is a wonder, but the portions are small” (Rebecca Hazelton SLASH FICTION)

This is a well-written novel with two parallel stories. One covers the AIDS crisis among gay men in the 1980s and the other is set thirty years later, with some tangential characters from that first story now dealing with different issues. I enjoyed each of the stories in themselves, a lot, because Makkai is clearly a gifted writer, but I kept waiting for the two stories to join up, or resolve somehow, even if only thematically. They never did. It was bizarre. It was like two traditional novels smooshed together for no apparent reason.

Also, and this has nothing to do with this novel, but it’s remarkably sad how many novels there are about AIDS deaths in the eighties for Americans and how few about Africans

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS by Maya Angelou

For some reason, I always thought this was an epic poem, and avoided it accordingly.  In fact, it is an account of the author’s childhood, which was packed with incident and heroism.  Incident and heroism is good for epic poems, but not what you typically want in a childhood.

She spent much of her early life in a small town in Arkansas, in the 1930s.  I do not need to say much more for you to get the general idea re: racism.  But still, the specifics are surprising.  Apparently, for example, the fact that her grandmother was sometimes referred to as ‘Mrs’ was regarded as a rare mark of great respect, accorded to her because she ran the general store. 

Later Angelou and her brother go to live with her mother, and there she is, as an eight year old, raped by her mother’s boyfriend (that usual suspect). It is a stomach-churningly terrible scene.  She is so hurt she has to go to hospital, but she won’t tell what happened because he threatens to kill her brother if she does.  Her brother reassures here that he can take ‘anyone,’ and so much does she admire him (despite the fact he is just eleven himself) that she believes him and so tells the name of her attacker.  He is sentenced to a whole year in jail. Not to worry, as her family has him murdered the day he gets out.

She moves in with her father for a while, but after being stabbed by her father’s girlfriend (after a very strange trip to Mexico) she runs away, and lives for a month with a group of homeless kids in a junk yard.

After a month my thinking processes had so changed that I was hardly recognizable to myself.  The unquestioning acceptance by my peers had dislodged the familiar insecurity.  Odd that the homeless children. . . could initiate me into the brotherhood of man.  After hunting down unbroken bottles and selling them with a white girl from Missouri, a Mexican girl from Los Angeles and a Black girl from Oklahoma, I was never again to see myself so solidly outside the pale of the human race. 

This bizarre translation of her time at the dump into a lesson in brotherhood is emblematic of the book as a whole. The summary here might make it sound like her life, and thus the book, was bleak and tough, but that is not at all how her it feels: it is fun, and loving, and hopeful, like there’s always a way out.  

In her late teens she becomes worried she is a haemaphrodite (don’t ask).  She approaches a popular boy, and asks the immortal words: 

Would you like to have a sexual intercourse with me?   

Apparently he would like that, and poor Angelous gets pregnant that day.  This is where the book ends, but given what I know about her, I have no doubt that she will transform getting pregnant in high school into something wonderful.  This lady is a boss.  It’s a high bar, in life and in literature. 

Side point, interesting overview of how she wrote:

She would get up at five in the morning and check into a hotel room, where the staff were instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She wrote on yellow legal pads while lying on the bed, with a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget’s Thesaurus, and the Bible, and left by the early afternoon. She averaged 10–12 pages of material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening.

Wikipeda

Sherry! Like I said, she’s a boss. She was encouraged to write the book by James Baldwin (who reverse-psychologied her by saying no autobiography could be art) and the first person she showed a draft to was Jessica Mitford, sister of the famous Nazis. This is some six degrees of separation

DIARY OF A NOBODY by George and Weedon Grossmith

Here is a comic novel that has not been out of print since 1892.  It’s hard to describe it’s appeal, beyond that it is fun to laugh at the bourgeoisie, especially I suspect if you are the bourgeoisie. 

Charles Pooter has an office job and lives in the London suburbs.  Don’t we all?  He has worked twenty years in the same job, married to the same wife, and loves a little DIY.  His diary is one of small victories and defeats: battles with the housekeeper; awkward dinners with ‘friends;’ his son’s interest in amateur dramatics.  Here he is on housekeeping:

“I told Sarah not to bring up the blanc-mange again for breakfast. It seems to have been placed on our table at every meal since Wednesday… In spite of my instructions, that blanc-mange was brought up again for supper. To make matters worse, there had been an attempt to disguise it, by placing it in a glass dish with jam round it…I told Carrie, when we were alone, if that blanc-mange were placed on the table again I should walk out of the house

He also thinks he is hilarious, which is itself hilarious:

Gowing began sniffing and said: “I’ll tell you what, I distinctly smell dry rot.” I replied: “You’re talking a lot of dry rot yourself.” I could not help roaring at this, and Carrie said her sides quite ached with laughter.  I never was so immensely tickled by anything I had ever said before. I actually woke up twice during the night, and laughed till the bed shook

It’s remarkably mundane, but he thinks it worthy of a diary, and like Peyps, thinks it will be read when he is dead.  I found it very funny at the time, but as I write this blog I wonder if in fact I did not find it rather sad.  I guess everyone has to try their hardest to assign meaning to their little lives, and who can say what level of meaning is ‘enough.’  Cult leaders have probably taken it a little too far. Everyone else, have at it, I say.

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER by Kevin Barry

It’s rare I loathe a book, but here we are.  It has many good reviews, and was longlisted for the Booker, so I am the minority in this view.  But really.  First of all, it’s all very lyrical.  This is always annoying.  Try how this potentially good piece of dialogue is ruined

Personally speaking, Maurice? My arse isn’t right since the octopus we ate in Malaga.
Is it saying hello to you, Charlie?
It is, yeah. And of course the octopus wasn’t the worst of Malaga.
…. They look into the distance. They send up their sighs. Their talk is a shield against feeling

Second of all, it’s all about tough men, and it pretends like it is supposed to show how terrible the consequences of violence are.  Meanwhile clearly this book is all about the romance of violence.  I don’t need to google the author to find out the author is a man.  It’s almost always men who like to spend their novels thinking about violence, and I don’t think we need to think that hard to find out why that might not be so interesting for women.  I just don’t need to live in their fantasy

CARRIE by Steven King

I picked up CARRIE because I read Steven King’s autobiography, and was curious to see what the book that changed his life was like.

It was his first novel,and he almost fainted when the publisher offered him $400K for it, because he was barely paying his bills at the time.  He’d actually thrown the first draft in the bin, and it only made it to the publisher at all because his wife fished it out and insisted he go on with it.  To read his autobiography, you’d think by this stage he was on the verge of past it, about to sink into a life of low income jobs, nearly missing his potential.  In reading the back cover I discover he was actually only TWENTY-SIX.  For god’s sake, Steven, I don’t think it’s even possible to waste your life already when you’re just in your twenties. It’s only in your forties you start looking down that particular barrel.  Unless of course you commit a murder and get caught.  I was listening to a podcast recently about a man who killed someone at 15, and is getting out now, 40 years later.  First thing he is going to do is have an omelette, he said.  Second thing is go to his parents graves to apologize for throwing his life away. 

It’s possible this post is going off course.  Back to CARRIE.  What I found surprising was how straightforward it was, how little plot it had, and how little real ‘horror’ was involved.  It’s essentially a “worm turns” story, though in this case the worm devours its hometown after turning.  For those who don’t know SPOILER ALERT the book is about a girl who is badly bullied at school and ends up blowing up her prom with her telekentic powers.

Apparently when this was written, horror was very much about shadowy alleys and old parchments, so it was revolutionary in its ordinary setting and conventional protagonists.  It no longer feels revolutionary, but is still a solid, engaging read, and captures very well what it was to be a teenage girl (not that surprising because Steven King you were SO YOUNG WHEN YOU WROTE IT I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT HOW YOU FELT YOU WERE WASTING YOUR LIFE.)

A GIRL’S STORY by Annie Ernaux

Here is a memoir about a summer of sex and fun.  It drips with shame.  I’m not sure why.  I guess in 1958, things were different for girls.  She’s French, she’s seventeen, a counsellor at a summer camp, and gets into it with a bunch of the boys.  If someone got that much action today it’d be all over her Instagram.  But that’s not how she takes it:

I am endowed by shame’s vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame. 

There is one boy she is particularly in to, and when she finally gets with him (after a fondue party (!)):

There is no sense of degradation, no room for anything but raw desire, chemically pure, as frenzied as the drive to rape, this desire for H to possess her, take her virginity. 

It’s like: sweetheart. Why you on about degradation?  It’s fine. You are allowed to want to have sex.  The whole thing is however swift and painful.  I’m too big, he helpfully tells her.  Also, he comforts her with the information that “often women do not climax until after giving birth”  

She is so bothered by what she did over this summer, and the ensuing rejection by this prince of a guy, that she develops bulimia and stops menstruating.  Then, she reads Simone de Beauvoir’s THE SECOND SEX.  Her life is transformed. She is:

. . .awakened to a world stripped of the appearances it had worn only days before – a world in which everything from the cars on the Boulevard Yser to the necktied students she meets  . . signifies the power of men and the alienation of women

It’s hard to imagine what it would be like having to survive your adolescence without even the basic vocabulary of feminism.  I found it very touching, because I read earlier de Beauvoir’s MEMOIRS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER, where you learn how very hard she fought herself to own her ideas, and it is interesting to see what a gift they were to others.  Still, says Ernaux, understanding your shame does not make it go away. She is thus impelled to write this account of that eventful summer. She writes to understand it:

It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing

This is I think an interesting observation, but overall there was a good deal too much of this.  Ernaux is now an older lady, and spends too much of this memoir reflecting on what writing means in general, and describing in detail how she looked these boys up on this ‘Internet’ she insists on capitalizing.   Like no one ever stalked an ex- before. 

However it was interesting to see how she came to feel so ashamed, and how she hauled herself at least half way out of it. 

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS by Augusten Burroughs

Here is a book about what happens when there are not enough social workers.  Augusten Burroughs parents are getting a divorce:

My father grew hostile and remote .  . . And my mother began to go crazy.  Not crazy in a let’s paint the kitchen red! sort of way.  But crazy in a gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God sort of way.  Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax. 

She eventually give over her son to live with her psychiatrist, Dr Finch, who believes children over the age of thirteen should be completely free.  He also believes that he direction of his poop in the toilet bowl contains messages from god, as does choosing Bible verses at random.  His oldest daughter preserves his poops on an outdoor table, and checks the Bible for him for all sorts of questions.  The other children, some biological, some not, are left quite free, to knock sunroofs into the ceiling (by just making a hole), to eat dog food, and to get raped by adults.  Apparently when children are completely unsupervised it does not take long for predatory types to recognize this as an opportunity. 

At 14 he has a relationship with a 33 year old man that he believes is loving.  So too does the 33 year old, who makes such red-flag covered statements as the below:

I mean my feelings for your are so huge, I don’t think I can contain them.  Sometimes I want to hold you so tight it scares me.  Like I want to hold you until the life is gone, so you can’t ever vanish.

The book is comic, and he is close to some of his step-siblings, so it is not as bleak as the statutory rape would have you believe.  But I see from Google that the Finch family sued, arguing that much of what was in the book was fiction, and now the book  is marketed as a ‘novel’ rather than a ‘memoir’.  They are apparently amazed that someone they looked after at such a time should tell such lies about them.  So I guess it is sad either way: either it’s a sad childhood, or a sad set of lies about a childhood.  Anyway, I enjoyed it. 

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR by Daniel Defoe

I thought this would be pandemic appropriate reading.  Apparently this thought of mine has already been predicted at scale, because someone has emergency published a edition and put it on Amazon.  Truly, if people are looking to seventeenth century literature for their margin, then nothing is safe.  I’m going to go ahead and call it: this truly is late capitalism.  I don’t know what comes after this, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be good.

Perhaps this is dramatic.  The past is not usually so very different from the future.   I learn from this book is that the last pandemic to hit London (the bubonic plague in 1664) is not so very different from this one.  Try this: 

We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now.

I see then as now they were shocked by how quickly things went viral.

The story is about a man who, unlike most wealthy people, decides to try and ride out the plague in town, rather than rushing to the country.  While Defoe did not actually live through the plague, his uncle did, and most people believe this is pretty fair evocation of what it was like.  Just like today, it was hardest for the poorest: 

The truth is, the case of poor servants was very dismal, as I shall have occasion to mention again by-and-by, for it was apparent a prodigious number of them would be turned away, and it was so. And of them abundance perished, and particularly of those that these false prophets had flattered with hopes that they should be continued in their services . . .

The rich meanwhile fled easily, carrying the plague with them all over the country.  Those left behind as today found ways to work through it.  Shops made you put your money in a bowl of vinegar before your touched it. 

Other things were not like today.    While this vinegar thing does not sound like a bad idea, they had some much worse ones.  Lots of people thought writing ABRACADBRA on a piece of paper and tying it around your neck would do the trick.  Perhaps I just need to clarify, for those people who believe that e.g., 5G causes corona, but that is does not in fact work.  Indeed they had ‘dead carts’ circling around eery night, and they would holler, “Bring out your dead,” so they could take them to the pits.  Let’s end on this long piece about the pits. 

I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, though not so freely as to run myself into apparent danger, except when they dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it. As near as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about fifteen or sixteen feet broad, and at the time I first looked at it, about nine feet deep; but it was said they dug it near twenty feet deep afterwards in one part of it, till they could go no deeper for the water; for they had, it seems, dug several large pits before this. For though the plague was long a-coming to our parish, yet, when it did come, there was no parish in or about London where it raged with such violence as in the two parishes of Aldgate and Whitechapel.

I say they had dug several pits in another ground, when the distemper began to spread in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began to go about, which was not, in our parish, till the beginning of August. Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from 200 to 400 a week; and they could not well dig them larger, because of the order of the magistrates confining them to leave no bodies within six feet of the surface; and the water coming on at about seventeen or eighteen feet, they could not well, I say, put more in one pit. But now, at the beginning of September, the plague raging in a dreadful manner, and the number of burials in our parish increasing to more than was ever buried in any parish about London of no larger extent, they ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug—for such it was, rather than a pit.

They had supposed this pit would have supplied them for a month or more when they dug it, and some blamed the churchwardens for suffering such a frightful thing, telling them they were making preparations to bury the whole parish, and the like; but time made it appear the churchwardens knew the condition of the parish better than they did: for, the pit being finished the 4th of September, I think, they began to bury in it the 6th, and by the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into it 1114 bodies when they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being then come to lie within six feet of the surface. I doubt not but there may be some ancient persons alive in the parish who can justify the fact of this, and are able to show even in what place of the churchyard the pit lay better than I can. The mark of it also was many years to be seen in the churchyard on the surface, lying in length parallel with the passage which goes by the west wall of the churchyard out of Houndsditch, and turns east again into Whitechappel, coming out near the Three Nuns’ Inn.

Okay, these pandemics are not that similar.  I am so grateful for modern science.  These anti-vaxxers, 5G-ers, climat change deniers: to the pits with them. 

MAGICAL THINKING by Augusten Burroughs

Finally someone with some success in the field of the personal essay!  I enjoyed this one.  Burroughs is a prolific memoirist.  Wikipedia tells me that:

Burroughs’ writing focuses on subjects such as advertising, psychiatrists, religious families, and home shopping networks

This is totally humourless but also pretty accurate. He’s an alcoholic and an advertising executive who is struggling to date in New York.  He has some serious #firstworldproblems, as below, but so do we all

Last weekend, I spent Sunday in a Starbucks writing Amtrak TV spots.  I was drinking double espressos and really trying to be positive instead of enraged and spoiled.  One of my problems is that I have completely disconnected those blue envelopes my paycheck arrives in with doing any actual work.

I particularly enjoyed his problematic love life

He’s blown me off and is hoping that I’ll just get the message and go away. It’s the modern, passive, gay way to be direct.  I know this behaviour because it’s something I would do.  This is how compatible we are. 

And:

I’m starting to go a little crazy, needing desperately to be in control of the situation and feeling terrified he won’t fall in love with me and knowing that I can’t even know what my own feelings are until I know that he’s safely in love with me so then I can decide. 

And:

He knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I’m writing about is me.  I tseems wiser to let him think I’m an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other sixteen.

I do always wonder about this.  These writers who produce a lot of content about their own lives, how do they do it?  Physicists I guess think a lot about physics.  Memoirists think about memories.  I’m torn.  Are they having deeper lives because they are thinking about them more deeply?  Or is it just all rather creepy and they ought to get out more?