Bartleby the Scrivener

Bartleby, the Scrivener
by Herman Melville
read: 2012

I think I read Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener in high school.  I don't remember it very well and didn't appreciate it very much at the time.  Because while Bartleby is a short story (maybe 20 pages in dead tree form) it is very rich: an absurdist comedy, a cautionary tale for managers, a kind of living ghost tale, a mystery, and a sad tale of depression.  It's really unlike anything I've ever read, and Melville's prose is funny and creative without being unwieldy.  Bartleby may have been wasted on teenage me, but fortunately I got the chance to re-read the story now.

The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage
by Stephen Crane
read: circa 1996
Guardian 1000 Novels

I read The Red Badge of Courage for sophomore English class in high school.  I remember one question on the test.  There's a scene in the novel after Henry, the main character, flees from a battle in fear.  As he is walking along he throws a small rock at a squirrel which darts off, making Henry feel better about his cowardice.  After all, he rationalizes, isn't fleeing from danger a natural reaction for living creatures?  One of my classmates, when asked to analyze this passage, wrote only "The squirrel did not want to die."  Mr. Carta gave him one point partial credit for that answer.  I feel that was a bit generous.

Deliverance

Deliverance
by James Dickey
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #42, Guardian 1000 Novels

I've spent a few posts recently talking about my love / hate relationship with the writing of Cormac McCarthy.  McCarthy's world is full of gruff, strong, Hemingwayesque heroes and anti-heroes in a merciless world where they must kill or be killed.  The people and the situations aren't really relatable for me, but despite that McCarthy manages to hit on universal elements in the human condition.

James Dickey creates a similar situation in Deliverance, but he also does something else.  Ed Gentry isn't an inscrutable symbol of the West; he's a mild-mannered graphic designer who is thrust into a kill-or-be-killed setting that isn't dissimilar from the environment in McCarthy's world.  Through Ed, the reader explores multiple aspects of the relationship between modern society and this more primitive world, a rural river in Georgia.  The country is beautiful but dangerous.  The denizens of the river are territorial - even to the point of murder - but they have cause to be distrustful, as there are already plans to dam up the river and turn it into a lake for further developments.  Ed's experience on the river is the worst thing that ever happened to him, but at the same time the reader gets the impression that he wouldn't go back and undo it if he could.  This tension between the positives and negatives of the primitive world, and how we think about our modern life in relation to it, makes Deliverance one of the best novels I read in 2011.

All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award


Cormac McCarthy is one of the most interesting novelists working today.  I laid out some thoughts on his writing in my review of The Road, but I think I sold him a bit short.  This is what I wrote:

McCarthy has stated in interviews that he doesn't think much of literature that doesn't "deal with matters of life and death."  I disagree with him on this front; once we move past concerns of life and death, we can engage what Faulkner called "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."  My issue with The Road, and with McCarthy in general, is that he doesn't take us there.

Having just finished my fourth McCarthy novel now, All the Pretty Horses, I realize that I was wrong.  McCarthy is dealing with many of the same themes and issues as the other great writers, but he's coming at things from a different angle.  To McCarthy, talk is cheap, and thoughts are even cheaper; it's action that reveals character.  He's not always going to spell out what going's on in the characters' heads, but their actions open a window to their minds and souls.


The question of fate looms large in All the Pretty Horses.  The novel is open to the idea of a Christian God who controls the destiny of His subjects.  This is laid out early in an exchange between John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins.  Cole suggests that if Rawlins' parents hadn't met, he never would have been born.

Rawlins lay watching the stars.  After a while he said: I could still be born.  I might look different or somethin.  If God wanted me to be born I'd be born.

And if He didnt you wouldnt. 

Fate, God, and destiny show up repeatedly in the story.  Blevins is petrified he will be killed by lightning because his family members were all killed by lightning.  Cole himself is a born horseman, who "if were begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway."  Alejandra's aunt notes the trouble her families women has with men and hopes it's not "tainted blood" or "a family curse."  When Cole returns to the ranch towards the end of the story, the workers tell him "that it was no accident of circumstance that a man be born in a certain country and not some other."  However, Cole later tells Rawlins that America, his land of birth, "ain't my country."  There is a capriciousness to birthrights.


Fate is a major topic in a conversation between Cole and Alejandra's aunt after he is released from prison.  She makes the analogy to

A tossed coin that was at one time a slug in a mint and of the coiner who took that slug from the tray and placed it in the die in one of two ways and from whose act all else followed, cara y cruz.

She suggests in the next breath a "puppet show" where the puppet strings "terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on."  All the Pretty Horses is open to the idea of a Christian God, but it doesn't matter.  Because if God exists, His will is virtually indistinguishable from nihilistic randomness.  And ultimately, how can we know if something was fated to happen, or whether it just happened to happen?  The aunt makes this point also:

In history there are no control groups.  There is no one to tell us what might have been.  We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been.  There never was. 

The closest McCarthy gets to laying out some sort of theory, some method to God's madness, is Cole's thought that pain exists as some sort of currency to create beauty.  "The blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."  It's not clear whether this is a blessing or a curse; Rawlins says early on in the novel that a good-looking horse or woman is "always more trouble than what they're worth."


How is a person to act in a world where he does not have control over his destiny?  The book makes two suggestions.  The first is acceptance.  Cole's mother leaves his father and he cannot keep the farm, but he bears this pain without fighting back, even accepting the divorce.  The judge who exonerates Cole near the very end of the tale is another model of acceptance.  He tells Cole that "I sure didnt want to be a judge," but ultimately ends up taking on that role out of duty to his country.  "I think I just didnt have any choice.  Just didnt have any choice," he says.


The other option is raging against destiny.  Alejandra's aunt describes wanting "very much to be a person of value" when she was younger.  "If one were to be a person of value that value could not  be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune.  It had to be a quality that could not change.  No matter what."  Cole subscribes to this philosophy.  Later in the book he tells the judge that his greatest regret is not attempting to intercede when Blevins was killed.  The judge asks him "Would it have done any good?"  He replies, "No sir.  But that dont make it right."  Very early on, McCarthy tells us that "all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise," in a rare instance of the narrative voice telling and not showing.  In a way, All the Pretty Horses mirrors the Book of Job, except unlike Job, Cole does not humbly accept his suffering and trust in God's plan.


There are no easy answers.  Cole's father wastes away, "thin and frail," with "sunken eyes."  Blevins, takes great pains to avoid death by lightning but in doing so sets off a chain of events that results in his death.  Alejandra's aunt tries to set up a better life for Alejandra, but it is unclear whether her machinations will be successful.  Cole's quest to find Blevins' horse's rightful owner, and with it possible absolution in the eyes of Alejandra's family, fails.  So is man to accept his fate, or rage against it?  McCarthy leaves both doors open, but behind each is suffering and death.

True Grit

True Grit
by Charles Portis
read: 2011

I saw the movie, the Coen Brothers one, before I read True Grit.  I found both entertaining but not earthshattering.  The characters, especially Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn, are great and iconic, and the action moves at a quick pace, but it's not the sort of deep book I would mull on for weeks.

The narrative is fundamentally a revenge story, and contains many of the cliches of a good guy / bad guy Western.  What's interesting is that the narrator is not Mattie in the moment as the 14-year-old adventurer, but an older Mattie looking back on her experiences.  One gets the impression that Mattie would not change anything about what happened, but it's hard not to look at her quiet, lonely adult life and wonder if she bears emotional scars from her experiences along with the physical ones.  At the very least, the fact that so many years later this is the only episode of her life she feels worth retelling carries an element of tragedy.

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton
read: circa 1995
Guardian 1000 Novels

I haven't read Jurassic Park in years, nor have I seen the Steven Spielberg movie in some time.  I suspect if I did I would find it doesn't hold up; not that it would be terrible but just that it wouldn't be as good as I remember.  How could it be?

The Andromeda Strain

The Andromeda Strain
by Michael Crichton
read: circa 1995
Guardian 1000 Novels

Neal Stephenson's writing reminds me a fair amount of Michael Crichton's.  I haven't read Crichton in years but read quite a few of his books when I was younger.  Like Stephenson, Crichton will often explore topics (usually science-related) of interest to him in the course of the novel.  This often stops the narration and feels a bit heavy-handed, but it is usually interesting.

Andromeda Strain has one of the lamest cop-out endings of any novel I've read.  I linked a while back to an article suggesting that we don't need to finish books, as readers or writers, and that's advice Crichton should have taken in his career.  I probably read six or eight of his books and all but one or two had lousy endings.  Andromeda Strain might have been the worst.  In fact, it almost completely obscures my memory of the rest of the novel, though I do remember liking it.

A Dance to the Music of Time

A Dance to the Music of Time
Series of 12 books
by Anthony Powell
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #43, Guardian 1000 Novels, James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for At Lady Molly's)

Atonement reminded me of A Dance to the Music of Time, particularly how the lives of the characters were disrupted by the war.  But while the characters in Atonement are mired in the blood and guts of the conflict, narrator Nick Jenkins is mired in red tape.  The war effort is not spared author Anthony Powell's dry wit, and Jenkins spends his time sending paperwork to embassies, helping a lovelorn officer, and (as always) trying to avoid being swept up in Kenneth Widmerpool's machinations.  But it's not all humor; many friends and family members die in the War, and the reader gets the impression that their lives were snuffed out with their stories yet untold, much as a person living then would.

I spent a long time with these books.  None were particularly long but there were twelve of them.  Most had themes, and often the story jumped between time exploring those themes.  For instance, the first book "A Questioning of Upbringing" concerns Nick's relationship with schoolmates Peter Templar and Charles Stringham and issues of class, "The Kindly Ones" features the occult, especially embodied in the odd Doctor Trelawney, and "Temporary Kings" deals with themes of sexual deviance.  Each book can be read as a standalone work, especially since narrator Nick is largely a background character, but reading it in sequence you become fond of the different characters, even the officious, manipulative Widmerpool.

I feel like making this entry a lot longer, to preserve my memory of the characters and the episodes in the different books.  But it's hard to know where to start.  I think I'll just leave it in my memory so I can return to it when prompted, as the narrator is at the very beginning of the novel.

Atonement

Atonement
by Ian McEwan
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I try not to read too much about these books before I read them.  Afterwards I might go back and see what the critics thought or what the author said about the novel or at least read the page on Wikipedia, but I like to form my own opinion first.  The first third or so of most books is a game where I'm trying to figure out what kind of book it is, what the author is trying to say, and why he wrote the book.

Through that lens, it seemed like Ian McEwan was messing with my head.  As I read the first section of Atonement (the part labelled "Book I"), I kept seeing setups of what kind of story this way.  A silly misunderstanding over an accident as Robbie and Cecilia broke the vase?  No, Cecilia just fixed it, good as new.  The semi-autobiographical story of a writer's development, as a paragraph reveals little Briony's future history as an author?  No, let's forget about that for a few hundred pages.  The story of Robbie's unrequired love?  No, it just takes a couple dozen pages to reveal the love is requited after all.  Is the not-yet-seen husband having an affair, and that's going to be a big reveal?  Well, he is, but no, it isn't.  His wife Emily is well aware Jack's not staying in a hotel when he has to work late in the city, but doesn't care.

But just when I thought the novel was going nowhere, that it was just an exploration of the form, teasing me with hints of stories, McEwan staggered me with a right cross.  Books II and III, which focus on Robbie's experience as an infantryman in World War II and Briony's nursing career in a wartime hospital, respectively, are devastating.  There's a scene between Briony and a wounded French soldier where you can see the tragic ending coming from pages away it does nothing to cushion the blow.  The effect is, I imagine, calculated to approximate the effect of a war, with all of the melodramatic prose describing 11-year-old Briony's despondency over the disruption of her play seeming very silly compared to 18-year-old Briony dealing with real matters of life and death.

The novel then takes a meta twist towards the end, and ultimately the book stands as a statement on the life-destroying and life-preserving powers of fiction, and the God-like qualities an author possesses while wielding a pen.  Atonement is a great book that will be kicking around in my brain for a long time to come.

Snow Crash

Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
read: 2011
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I read Cryptonomicon a few years ago and enjoyed it, and friends had recommended Snow Crash, so I was looking forward to reading it as I work my way through the Time 100 Novels list.  And I did enjoy it, quite a bit.  But it was kind of the same book as Cryptonomicon.  Both were epic, long, ambitious, and full of digressions.  The romantic relationships in each were less-than-well-developed.  Hiro Protagonist, the, er, protagonist of Snow Crash, is very similar to Cryptonomicon's Randy Waterhouse: a talented underachiever who comes through when challenged by a major threat.

The biggest difference is that Cryptonomicon takes place in our world, or at least a world very similar to our own, while Snow Crash is science fiction, taking place in a future world.  Stephenson had to imagine not just a world (Mafia-controlled sprawl, skateboards with wheels that adjust to terrain, cyborg attack dogs), but two worlds, as much of Snow Crash takes place in a virtual reality that foreshadowed some of what the Internet would eventually become.  This is the part of Snow Crash that's most enduring, and probably why Time put it in their list of 100 greatest novels.

A random note: Snow Crash's villain L. Bob Rife, who may be the anti-Christ, is a Rice grad in the novel, like me.  He's probably not going to make the Owlmanac alumni magazine anytime soon.

Cryptonomicon

Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
read: 2004
Guardian 1000 Novels

I read Cryptonomicon abroad, on a dare, and mostly while ill.  A co-worker had just finished it and said it had taken him a year.  I said I could read it in two weeks and took it with me to England.  I got sick one weekend and read 500 pages or so, which is about half of it, and was able to finish it not too long after that.

I liked the book.  I've read two Stephenson novels and both have some pretty didactic digressions that make it seem like fiction is just a platform for him to write about topics he finds interesting: mostly cryptography in this case, but he also pontificated on technological development in the Philippines, Van Eck phreaking, sexual deviance, and anti-Genocide resistance.  These tangents don't always have anything to do with the main story, but they're some of the most interesting and vivid scenes in my memory.

Beloved

Beloved
by Toni Morrison
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

If you want to understand race in America in modern times, you have to go back.

You have to go back to the period after the Civil War.  The slaves weren't immediately given equal rights after the Emancipation Proclamation.  They weren't given jobs, or money, or land, or instructions on how to live in a white-dominated world.  They weren't put in schools, or taught to read, or educated.    If ex-slaves wanted to move to areas with more opportunity and less racial prejudice, they had to do it themselves.  If they could find such a place.

There was little family structure.  Husbands were sold from wives, mothers were sold from children.  There were few grandparents to advise parents on how they had done things.  Men and women were bred together like horses.  Many children were products of slave women raped by their white masters.  Any community the ex-slaves had, they had to build themselves.

Slavery itself had destroyed the culture blacks had left behind in Africa.  They had names given to them by the white man, religion given to them by the white man, language given to them by the white man, and any attempt to continue or recreate their African traditions was stamped out.

Is it any wonder African-Americans are still disadvantaged?  The seeds were sown in the America five or six generations ago, and it is the world in which Toni Morrison's Beloved is set.  The characters have "freedom" but still depend on white people for work.  Sethe, a runaway slave, lives in terror of whites and being sent back to that world.  Sethe and Paul D are shamed by the scars from the abuses they suffered while slaves.  Sethe's daughters Denver and Beloved suffer for the sins of their mother, sins brought on by the fear, shame, and terror of slavery.

Morrison has a gift for playing with morality.  Sethe commits a horrid crime but comes off as almost saintly.  The largesse of white people is shown to be fool's gold.  When characters Beloved and Paul D appear, disrupting the home shared by just Sethe and Denver, we go through the feelings of distrust, happiness, anger, rejection, and acceptance the characters have for one another.  Morrison's style adapts, shifting from folkiness to poetry, taking us into characters' heads in stream-of-consciousness sections, in and out of the past, beyond the wall and death and back.  Beloved is a powerful work, with some devastating sections but also real optimism.  It's the best book I've read in 2012.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
read: circa 1993
Guardian 1000 Novels

This blog has largely focused on "literature," the fancy-pants books that make up greatest of all time lists and are read pretty much exclusively by English majors and high school students under duress.  I love those books.  But if I could only take a handful of novels to a desert island, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is in the life raft with me.  I've probably re-read it more often than any other book as an adult, and it always makes me laugh.

I'm something of a Hitchhiker's completist.  I have the paperback, the fancy-edition hardcover, the British mini-series on VHS, I saw the Mos Def movie version in the theatres, and I have the Neil Gaiman making of book with the radio transcript.  I've read all five books in the trilogy, including the dreadful Mostly Harmless.  I love Hitchhiker's.  I miss Douglas Adams.  R.I.P.

The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer
by Walker Percy
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #60, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

Franny Glass of Franny and Zooey also reminded me a bit of Kate Cutrer, narrator Binx Bolling's distant cousin and sometime love interest in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer.  Like Franny (and The Bell Jar's Esther Greenwood), Kate slips into depression not because of a disastrous event that happened to her, but just as a reaction to everyday events around her.  She falls into a malaise where even the process of getting through her day is overwhelming to her.

Bolling is in a similar funk, though it manifests itself differently.  He professes to contemplate the point of existence but seem to spend a lot of his time avoiding such contemplation.  He goes through his job mechanically, has shallow affairs with his secretaries, and, as the title betrays, watches a lot of movies.  The novel is narrated in first person, but the story is in what Binx doesn't tell you as much as what he does.

Looking back on the story, I think of John Cheever's Falconer, another book that raises a lot of questions without spelling out the answers.  I imagine I'll want to revisit both books down the road sometime.