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.

The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
read: circa 2008
Guardian 1000 Novels

"Franny," the short story about Franny Glass' mental breakdown that begins Franny and Zooey, brought to mind The Bell Jar, another story about the mental disintegration of a young woman who is sick of the shallow world around her.  Lane going on about the brilliance of his paper on Flaubert mirrors the superficial conversations Esther Greenwood had in New York bars while interning at Ladies' Day magazine.  A possibility both books raise is that what we think of as insanity is in fact a rational response to the meaninglessness and falseness of Life In the Real World.  It's hard not to see Sylvia Plath's suicide and J.D. Salinger's reclusion as ultimate endorsements of this mentality, and it's hard to read The Bell Jar (like Infinite Jest or Nirvana's In Utero) without seeing omens foreshadowing the artist's eventual destruction.

Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey
by J.D. Salinger
read: 2012

Another book for Professor Hungerford's class on the American Novel since 1945.  Like Wise Blood, it has a lot of religious themes and features a lot of unlikeable characters - the short story "Franny" that opens Franny and Zooey is painfully and deliciously cynical in its treatment of Franny's boyfriend Lane Coutell and his pomposity - but it feels closed in, almost like a play (a point Hungerford makes in her lecture).  The story is almost all dialogue, and it can be didactic at times.  Franny and Zooey don't come to any ultimate epiphanies through actually living life - they do it through the mere power of words.  Hungerford suggests this is part of the point, emphasizing that it is the shared language of the Glass family  that has the power to change minds, but it still feels a bit hollow.

That said, the message of the story is really profound: a major part of the human experience is doing one's best even when one doesn't know why.