Tag: male writer

OHIO by Stephen Markley

I guess I’m not the first person to notice this, but these opiods are a real problem, huh?

I feel like I’ve really been wallowing in the lives of disaffected Americans. It’s remarkable how miserable people in small towns in the Midwest are. Everyone’s a failed high school athlete, a drug addict, a confused lesbian, etc. No wonder they voted for Donald Trump.

OHIO tells the story of four friends from high school who happen to return to their home town on the same night. The reasons are not super believable, but it’s a fun device for having long distant lives intersect, full of drugs and lesbianism, this book being what is it. There is also murder.

This part bothered me. One girl was drugged and raped in high school as a virgin, and developed a searing case of Stockholm Syndrome, which involved her becoming his girlfriend and ‘consenting’ after a bit of beating to all sorts of terrible things. She plots and successfully executes his murder. It is great. Then she gets caught. I can only assume this is because the author is male. I don’t think a female writer could have brought herself to it.

It’s a great in-depth, super specific tour of small town Ohio life. I recommend it.

THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI by Andrew Sean Greer

We are each the love of someone’s life.

I wanted to put that down in case you become so disturbed by the facts of my confession that you throw it into the fire before I get to tell you of great love and murder.

An amazing beginning. I loved Greer’s Pulitzer winning novel LESS, so had great hopes for this book, which is the story of a man who ages backwards.  Set in the early twentieth century, some of it was charming. Lightbulbs are described as “. . . resting on a bed of cotton like the newly deposited eggs of a glass lizard.” Or here is Max’s mother:

She sat sideways in her chair as if she still wore a bustle; she was of a generation that had learned to sit this way in their youth, so she still did it out of habit and out of a sense that this antique pose was the essence of beauty.  The women who sat this way are all dead now. 

Leaving aside how poignant this is, how do you even do the research to know this is a thing of that period?  This sounds like a rave review, but in fact, surprising myself, far from actually really liking this novel, I could not even get up the enthusiasm to finish it. 

The key story is supposed to be his love for some girl.  He barely knows her, and lots of the novel descends into overwrought imaginings of her as the ideal woman.  Somehow this just struck me as very boring.  I’ve don’t know if it was because I had just finished THE HUMAN STAIN, but I just felt like I didn’t need any more of mens’ internal struggle with the idea of women who never actually appear. 

I don’t know if I’m overly woke, or what.  I don’t thinks so though.  I think I’m just very much feeling life’s brevity at the moment, so I’m all about quitting what I’m not enjoying.  So quit it I did, without worrying too much about my reasons.  That I’m not having fun is enough.  I strongly suspect that that, my friends, might be the beginning of adulthood.    It’s been a long time coming.

 

CHERRY by Nico Walker

Emily used to wear a white ribbon around her throat and talk in breaths and murmurs, being nice, as she was, in a way so you didn’t know if she were a slut or just real down-to-earth. And from the start I was dying to find out, but I thought I had a girlfriend and I was shy. 

This is the amazing opening of this amazing novel.  It’s the story of an Iraq veteran with PTSD who pays for his opiod addiction by robbing banks.  It’s semi-autobiographical, as you can tell by the fact that the author is currently in jail for robbing banks.  It sounds bleak, which it is, but it’s also very funny. And so apparently raw that I can only wonder at the huge artistry that went into it.

Let’s enjoy first his descriptions.  A frat house basement:

 done out in plywood, some kind of beer-pong sex dungeon, everything dismal as murder

His fellow recruits in the army:

. .  there was a lot of inadequacy to be seen in the big room.  Fat kids. Acne.  Acne on the face.  Acne on the body.  Skinny kids.  I was a skinny kid.  I wasn’t strong.  We looked like shit.  We’d grown up on high-fructose corn syrup, with plenty of television  . .

He has a terrible time in Iraq, reminding us that while it was not Vietnam it was bad enough.  He’s a medic, so there is a lot of putting corpses in body bags.  It’s so bad his relaxation is looking through the IKEA catalogue to decide what he will buy when he gets home.  In fact, when he gets back he does not buy furniture but OxyCotin.  He ends up robbing banks to pay for his habit, offering good advice:

One thing about holding up banks is you’re mostly robbing women, so you don’t ever want to be rude. 

And

I don’t imagine that anyone goes in for robbery if they are not in some kind of desperation.  Good or bad people has nothing to do with it; plenty of purely wicked motherfuckers won’t ever rob shit.  With robbery it’s a matter of abasement.  Are you abased?  Careful then.  You might rob something. 

Things are really bad; he is so sick from withdrawal that he repeatedly pukes into his own shirt while waiting in line to show his gun to the teller. He is almost relieved when he hears sirens as he leaves the bank and knows he is caught.  He waits for them:

There’s a fuckload of starlings gone to war over a big wet juicy bag of garbage – look at them go!  The big swinging dick starling’s got all the other starlings scared.   He’ll be the one who gets the choicest garbage!

I had no reason to add this last quote, just only I thought it was so wonderful

INTO THE WILD by Jon Krakaur

This is the true story of a young man who died trying to live out his dreams.  The dreams were kind of stupid, but it’s still kind of sad. 

Chris McCandless acts normal around his parents at his university graduation.  They don’t hear from him again till he is dead of starvation two years later.  He has plotted this from the start. Here is a letter to his sister:

. . .  once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I’m going to completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as my parents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as long as I live.  I’ll be through with them once and for all, forever. 

His parents haven’t abused him or anything.  They are very normal but he is kind of a little bitch.  The author includes a great quote from GK Chesterton:

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy

Chris wants to be in touch with nature using his own two hands and such implements as he finds romantic (e.g., rifles).  He wonders the country for a while until he decides to backpack into Alaska where due to some blunders (e.g., deciding maps are not romantic) he starves to death. 

Krakeur puts Chris into context with the various other dreamers, such as a climber named Waterman, who spent 145 days alone climbing some mountain and then lost his mind attempting to climb the next mountain with just a tub of margarine as supplies.  Krakeur outlines the type, young men with a monomaniacal bent, of which he says he was one, nearly dying himself in Alaska as a “self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life”  As he says:

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it . .

I don’t know who this ‘you’ is he is addressing but I don’t think they’re probably female.  It is quite sweet though that he thinks this is a universal experience. 

In any case, I have made a little bit of fun of McCandless, which is not perhaps very kind.  I admire his idealism, and his attempt to do something unusual with his life.  It is just very tough to swallow how illogical and contradictory it all is.  The love of Tolstoy, for example, who everyone knows talked a big talk about altruism while frogmarching his unwilling wife through 13 children and into poverty.  This idea that ‘man vs nature’ could involve a gun but not a map.  The idea that living without government is a great idea, as if millions of Somalians aren’t fully available to tell you that it’s not.  It’s all so silly, I struggle to be sympathetic. 

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.

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.

THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN by Wallace Stegner

Well here are some pretty serious #daddyissues.  This book tells the story of a couple who get married, have two children, and move restlessly across the Midwest looking to strike it big.  At least the father is looking to strike it big.  The mother is just hanging on.

It’s a broad sweep of middle America across decades, involving possum-hunting and gold-panning and bootlegging and the Spanish Flu.   (This was remarkably like todays’ COVID.  They went on lockdown, they wear masks, it made me wonder if really medical science has not come on that far after all)

The book is so jam packed with incident, some of it so random, that I started to suspect it must be based on  real life.  I also wondered this because it was so completely judgemental towards the father character.   This dad came from poverty, and pulled himself up into wealth.  He couldn’t stand the idea that he was going to be trapped in a $100/month job because of his lack of education and was always looking for the next big break. I found this kind of inspirational, like he was a class warrior.   His youngest son doesn’t take it that way, and is horrified by his bootlegging (but not so horrified that he doesn’t take that sweet moonshine money to pay for his law degree). 

I learn from the Introduction that indeed this is the story of Stegner’s own family.  Sadly his mother, brother and father all died within three years of each other, and it was then he decided to write about them.  This casts the book in a different light for me.  I see what it is, his effort to record and remember them, to create a monument to their messy lives.   I can’t imagine what it must be like to be the only one who remembers your childhood, though I guess that if I am lucky enough to live to a great old age I will find that out.    I wonder if I’ll want to write about it, when its only me left. 

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris

There was a period in 2011, not coincidentally not a great time in my personal life, when I read a lot of David Sedaris.  And by a lot, I mean it all, and mostly in the early hours of the morning. 

Recently  I googled for authors ‘like Sedaris,’ and was surprised  by how few options there were.. I gave the options a go (Crossley, Burroughs, Rakhoff) and can report that the options are even fewer than Google suggested, in fact essentially nil.  No one is writing the comic personal essay like Sedaris.  And by no one, I mean no one.  Really, I find this remarkable.  Everyone has a personal life.  Most people have a sense of humour.  It’s incredible that Sedaris has, at least in my opnion, not one truly viable competitor.

I started a re-read of him, to try and figure out what he is doing.  My blog tells me this is the third time for FLAMES.  And three times round, I still can’t tell exactly what it is he is doing so well.  Here he is on glasses:

Today these frames sound ridiculous, but back then they were actually quite stylish.  Time is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses for special punishment.  What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion.

And on smoking:

As with pot, it was astonishing how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life was a play, and the prop mistress had finally shown up.  Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill, and then empty. 

I tried to map out a couple of the essays, and my theory is the success is the apparent ease: conversational and yet so artful.  In later years he has got a bit sappy, one has to hear about his feelings, and in particular his feelings about his father, but at his best: he’s quite alone in his medium. 

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

A bizarre tale of income inequality and spontaneous human combustion, NOTHING TO SEE HERE is so good it kind of depressed me.

 It tells the story of a young girl, Lillian, from a poor background who works very hard to get a scholarship to a fancy boarding school:

I didn’t know the school was just some ribbon rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. . . . . I wasn’t destined for greatness, I knew this.  But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

This is in the first few pages.  Already at this stage I had a sinking feeling in my stomach about how magically good this one was going to be. 

At this school, she really, really likes her roommate. Here is part of one of their early conversations:

“. . I want to be so important that if I fuck up, I’ll never get punished.”  She looked psychotic as she said this; I wanted to make out with her.

. . .“I think we’ll be friends,” she said. “I hope so, at least.”

“God,” I said, trying to keep my whole body from convulsing.  “I hope so, too.”

Years later, when Lillian has lost her way and spends most of her time smoking pot in her mother’s attic, this friend asks her to nanny two children who have behaviour issues.  The behaviour issues are they burst into flames when they are upset.  The friend is married to a Senator, Jasper Roberts, and is fabulously wealthy.  Here he is on TV:

Jasper was on C-SPAN, smiling, listening thoughtfully, nodding, so much nodding, like he understood every fucking thing that had ever happened in the entire world.  They would cut to different senators who were on the committee and it was like a practical joke because they all looked exactly the same. 

Part of the weird power of this book is the dreadful acceptance of how the world is; that is, that the rich are rich and will always be rich, and the poor are staying poor.  Eventually Lillian comes to love the children, and there is a degree of redemption in this.  Here is her fantasy of reunion with her mother that never happened:

. . .  And she would hug me and it wouldn’t be weird. It would be like the way somebody hugs another person. And the entirety of my life, everything that had come before, would disappear. And things would be so much better.

In the end though it’s really a sort of bleak novel.  Lillian find some sort of hopefulness, but it’s a narrow, conditional thing, in the middle of world that is totally unfair and will stay that way

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