Tag: male writer

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

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.)

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?