High Fidelity

High Fidelity
by Nick Hornby
read: circa 2001
Guardian 1000 Novels

I read High Fidelity in college and liked it. I liked the movie, too, though it bothers me that we have to Americanize everything set in England.

Casino Royale

Casino Royale
by Ian Fleming
read: 2012
Guardian 1000 Novels

I've seen most of the James Bond films, but I'd never read any of the novels until Casino Royale. It's surprisingly not very action-packed; Bond doesn't kill anybody, and doesn't even really get in a fight with anyone. Fleming makes the baccarat scenes impressively compelling, and captures Bond's paranoia and his romantic confusion with Vesper Lynd. A lot more of the action takes place in Bond's head than in the movies.

Bond is a misogynist, and it's unclear to what extent Fleming is trying to excuse his misogyny. Bond's lack of respect for women is set up partially to make his falling for Vesper all the more tragic, but when he starts talking about "the sweet tang of rape," that's a bridge too far. Any character development of Bond's attitude towards women is erased by the events of the novel, so I expect more cringe-inducing moments in the subsequent books.

Bond at one point gets in a discussion with fellow agent Mathis about the moral value of what they're doing, but his argument lacks the moral weight found in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; it feels abstract and  shallow, and Bond ultimately comes to feel it a childish perspective. Casino Royale isn't as complex as a le Carre novel, but it's a gripping read and I'm sure I'll read more novels in the series.

The Human Stain

The Human Stain
by Philip Roth
read: circa 2006
Guardian 1000 Novels

In a lecture on Philip Roth's The Human Stain, Professor Amy Hungerford said:

The very fact of a person's otherness to you means that there is always something fundamentally hidden about them.  And that arises from the simple difference between one consciousness and another.

Perhaps this is the fundamental problem of writing, and perhaps this is the fundamental challenge of being a human. We always spend infinitely more time in our own heads than we do in anyone else's, even those we are closest to. Roth gets this, and arguably the loose trilogy which The Human Stain concludes (also consisting of American Pastoral and I Married a Communist) is thematically linked by the attempt of narrator (and Roth alter-ego) Nathan Zuckerman to understand another man he admires. Professor Hungerford notes some homoerotic undertones in The Human Stain, but Zuckerman's infatuation with Coleman Silk parallels his idol worship of Swede Levov and his son-like affinity for Iron Rinn. Zuckerman is attracted to these men in a (mostly) non-sexual way, and his attraction manifests itself in his efforts to put himself in their shoes, to imagine their thoughts and feelings, to create their life stories out of his research and his imagination. Roth is exploring why literature even exists, and by employing Zuckerman as an intermediary he makes an argument for the noble futility of the craft.

I Married a Communist

I Married a Communist
by Philip Roth
read: circa 2006

I Married a Communist is kind of the second book in a trilogy narrated by longtime Roth alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, but here Zuckerman is more front-and-center than he is in American Pastoral or The Human Stain.  Through the novel Zuckerman finds himself almost as a mentee for a variety of mentors, a passive observer soaking up the wisdom of his elders.  I can identify with that notion, and I liked this book.  Wikipedia says it was just a glorified hatchet job against one of Roth's ex-wives.  It can't be fun to be married to Philip Roth, based on the self he puts forth in his novels, but I love and admire his writing.

American Pastoral

American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
read: circa 2005
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

I read this book shortly after the Time list came out, and I was absolutely spellbound.  I lent it to a co-worker who, upon reading it, called it one of the five greatest books he'd ever read.  I can't disagree.

American Pastoral captures the mental state of obsession; not the external state of stalking somebody, but the internal state of poring over an event or a decision over and over and over again while maintaining a seemingly healthy exterior.  Roth evokes this repetitiveness without being boring; the novel is gripping.  I've read six books of his and in my opinion this is his masterpiece.

Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
read: circa 2010
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

Cormac McCarthy says he doesn't like magic realism:

You're somewhat constrained in writing a novel, I think. Like, I'm not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible.

This makes the character of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian puzzling, or maybe terrifying.  Holden is the most sadistic and ruthless member of a sadistic and ruthless band of scalp-hunters riding across Mexico killing Indians.  He is also the most learned, the most well-spoken, and the most ingenious.  Holden appeared in the desert to the group to aid them in making gunpowder and killing enemies, but each member also had a prior encounter with the judge as he roamed throughout North American sowing chaos and evil.  He is not explicitly superhuman, but as a character he has a mythical presence. This isn't Anton Chigurh, who acknowledges (and is ultimately undone by) the pivotal role of chance and fate in our lives; Holden is beyond such things: "He says that he will never die."

Professor Amy Hungerford of Yale talks about the various allusions present in Blood Meridian - to the Bible, to Moby Dick, to Paradise Lost, to a poem of Wordsworth's - but while McCarthy's words hearken back to those other works, the spirit is different.  Blood Meridian's protagonist (known only as "the kid") does not have the glib humor of Ishmael and there's little of the moral authority found in the Bible.  And while the story structure evokes the bildungsroman and the Western, it ultimately subverts them.  The kid becomes the man, but he never becomes a hero.  His acts of mercy are not good, but weak - in fact, his inability to shoot and kill Judge Holden may be his greatest sin of all.

Blood Meridian pulls from these works and these worlds, but the message throughout the novel seems to be: those original stories were missing something.  They pulled punches.  They were naive.  Because the truth is worse, so much worse.  Evil is everywhere; it is inherent in man, and has been since the beginning.  And it, like Judge Holden, will never die.  None of McCarthy's works have a positive outlook, but Blood Meridian's bleakness feels particularly timeless and profound.

Housekeeping

Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, PEN/Hemingway Award

Normally when I write about novels, I write about themes.  Details are too fussy and insignificant to a whole book.  But Housekeeping is in a lot of ways about details.  It's named after the mundane process of making sure the house is in order, but as with seemingly everything in the novel, it's metaphorical.  The knick-knacks and trash that fill the house where Ruth, her sister Lucille, and their Aunt Sylvie reflect big profundities.  "What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?" narrator Ruth asks at one point, and she might be talking about the novel itself.

Every scrap in Housekeeping is aching with meaning and memory.  One of the most devastating moments in the book is when Ruth looks something up in the dictionary and finds pressed flowers her grandfather had left in the book.  Her sister Lucille, who has little nostalgia, burns the flowers, to Ruth's dismay.  Their grandfather died before they were born, and while they can't know why he deemed those worth keeping, they provide a link between the living and the dead.  Things build these kind of bridges throughout the novel:

Such details are merely accidental.  Who could know but us?  And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable?

Things help us remember those we've lost.  But memory itself is a curse.  Ruth altruistically decides to become a transient with her Aunt Sylvie, because she can't bear the thought of becoming a ghost in Sylvie's memory.  She spends much of the last chapter envisioning how her sister Lucille, who believes Ruth and Sylvie dead, might imagine or not imagine she sees them. Ruth's and Lucille's mother committed suicide when the girls were young, and Ruth blames her not for abandoning them but for haunting them.  She never addresses her feeling of loss; instead her mother's suicide falls like a shadow over the whole story.

If that sounds depressing, it is.  This desire not to be a ghost to others seems to be the only that keeps Ruth from following her mother's path and killing herself, but there is an appeal in death.  "Darkness is the only solvent," she says at one point, and at another she describes herself as "unconsenting" in her own conception.  "By some bleak alchemy, what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.  So they seal the door against our returning."  Bleak alchemy, indeed.