George R. R. Martin and A Song of Ice and Fire

I have been trying to account for my reading for the past few months. It seems as though I have read thousands upon thousands of pages, but I’ve really only dealt with a few narratives. Here I’ll discuss the three sagas that have in one case been an exhausting and addicting ride, in another been a real debbie-downer of depressive teen angst, and finally been an example of good writing that is excessively annoying because the author just makes random shit up to please himself.

First are the A Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin. There are four books out currently and another due in a few weeks. I have read the first three: Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords. (Though by the time I came back to edit this review, I had finished all five currently available.) I have not yet read A Feast for Crows because the title implies lots of death, and there have already been thousands of pages of gruesome and unexpected death, so much so that I’m not quite sure I have the stomach for much more. I don’t know who is left and I haven’t the energy at this point to read another thousand-page tome on medieval style death and misery.

Let’s backtrack: I went to visit a good friend who I hadn’t seen in far too long. During our ‘missing years’ she got married, bought a house and a dog, and is in the copulative stages of motherhood. I had not yet met her paramour, the licit kind, so I was apprehensive on getting together again. What if I hated him? What if he turned out to be a first-class douche? (Don’t worry, he isn’t but I didn’t know this at the time.) I despaired of the potential disasters that our dinner conservation might engender. After all, my good friend and I had had many hundreds of hours worth of delightfully funny and engaging conversations. I worried that those conversations would become the staid discourse of middle aged bores. Ha! I was wrong. Her husband and I had loads in common – mostly dorky things like genre-fiction (how I detest the term), comics, geography, etc – and I spent far too much of the dinner and evening talking with him while she sat idly by and wondered, perhaps, how it was possible to listen to such dorkish enthusiasm coming at her from two different places at once. At the end of the night, he suggested that if I liked the Lord of the Rings, which I do, then I should read a book called Game of Thrones. Now, I had no idea that if I took up his suggestion I would be in for thousands upon thousands of pages of the aforementioned medieval death and misery. I thought we were talking about one longish book that would be just right as a spring-getting-ready-for-summer-read. Well, I was horribly wrong but the books are good anyway, so I forgive my friend’s lover for getting me hooked.

Unfortunate sidenote: I read the first book – Game of Thrones – on my Kindle. I was traveling at the time and had no desire to lug around an 800 page paperback. Honestly, any paperback over 350 pages is a legitimate pain in the ass. Paperbacks aren’t made to be much longer. When they are longer, the font is inevitably too small and only leads avid readers into further myopic distress while the binding starts off too stressed and tends to give out far too soon. It was a perfect Kindle purchase with one exception: the maps were too small. I love books with maps and was pissed that the damn Westeros maps were unreadable on the Kindle. When it was time for the second book, I decided I needed a physical book to better use the maps. I bought the boxed set because it was cheap and so am I. I noticed that the actor who played Boromir in the Lord of the Rings movies was on the cover of the boxed set and book one. I came to the horrible conclusion that the books were being made into a movie. (This has become the second unfortunate sidenote, sorry.) I decided to hurry up and read them before the movie came out and my imagination was forever tarnished. Then I learned that it was being made into a TV show for HBO. I’m sure HBO will do a great job and the books are so ridiculously long that multiple episodes set over many seasons will do more justice to the books than anything else. But goddamnit, can we ever just let a good book be a good book? Do we have to go around prostituting everything for a growing populace of illiterate fools? Books are always better anyway and any self-respecting reader knows this.

Martin’s books more or less take place in Westeros, an island that seems to be about the size of South America and structured to resemble the culture and politics of medieval Europe. There are castles and kingdoms galore, all seemingly united at the start and disunited for the rest of the series. Everyone, as the title suggests, is vying to be king, and everyone and his brother has a legitimate claim. Most of the men roam about in armor killing each other as a result. Some use swords, some use axes, one even strips the skin off enemies, you get the point. The women and children do their best to survive without getting raped and/or killed. There’s lots of chicanery, death, and overall epic-ness. Martin slowly works in some of the staples of the genre too: dragons, magic, religion in various guises, religious fanaticism, and manifestations of mythic evil. But most of the action takes place among characters built largely like you and me with commensurate mental and physical abilities, except they wield swords like we wield cellphones and so it goes...And so it goes for what will likely be 7,000 pages when the story is complete. Oh and giant wolves play a large role too.

Martin does two or three things that make the series eminently readable if you have 50-60 free hours in your schedule. First, each chapter is told from an alternating character’s perspective. He focuses on 10 or so main characters in each book but slips in a few chapters from other minor characters to liven things up from time to time. This is, as far as I know, a relatively unconventional approach, especially for the sci-fi/fantasy genre. Mario Vargas Llosa, recent recipient of the Nobel prize for literature, does something similar in a book called Conversation in the Cathedral. Vargas Llosa, however, uses five narrators and works out his masterpiece in a measly 600 pages, covering a few decades of mid-20^th century Peruvian history. Martin is trying to cover every single major event in the life of a continent for what will probably end up being five or six years’ time. Martin’s story is so broad that he could probably do with a few more perspectives just so reader’s can more fully understand the story he’s attempting to tell. This technique has some advantages and drawbacks. From an authorial perspective, it allows Martin to have great fun. Some of his chapters are told by innocent maidens whose virtue is threatened at every turn by major players who themselves get no chapters, others are told by aides and assistants to major characters, while a few of the main players get their own chapters. As an aspiring writer I can think of no better way to master the craft than to give multiple characters voices, emotions, and complexity. But it can be daunting when one starts out with the series. I plan, someday, to go back and read the first 300-400 pages of the first book because I spent a lot of time trying to work out the relationships of the characters without paying close enough attention to what they were actually doing and saying.

However, it does give the books a rather episodic feel. Continuity is thrown out the window. And over the course of three-seven books, the alternating chapters can grow wearisome. For example, you just read an engaging chapter about Arya Stark. She is homeless, hunted, bereft of family. Oh and she’s 11. Something interesting happens to her. And then? The chapter ends as a cliff-hanger. Unfortunately, you might not get back to her story for another hundred pages or so. In the interim, you might have to deal with a 30 page chapter on a character you care little about who is participating in part of the story line that you feel is predictable and pedantic. There were several nights where I was ready for a long reading session, but I finished an engaging chapter only to be confronted with a few characters I didn’t want to invest in for the ret of the night. I usually put the book down at that point and gave myself a breather.

Second, Martin makes most characters complex enough to be compelling rather than genre stereotypes. Tyrion Lannister, one of the masters of chicanery throughout the series, is simultaneously a devious villain, a likeable rogue, a grade-A douchebag, and a character for whom the reader has a grudging sympathy. He’s a midget, brother to one of the most renowned warriors in the land, brother to a sister who’s mentally unstable and eagerly wants his death, an uncle to a sleaze of a young king, and son to a father who abhors his grotesque proportions. Tyrion has to be one of the most interesting and well-written characters in modern fiction. He avoids the flatness that characterizes most of Tolkien’s best characters: Aragorn, Sam, and Frodo. Tolkien’s characters tend to be single-minded in their pursuits, their motivations clear from the start. One is never quite sure what Tyrion will do next because of his complex psychological profile. Will he vindictively spite his bitch sister? Will he do something outrageously dangerous to earn the love of his more perfectly proportioned brother? Will he do something noble and generous? Or is he just going to get drunk and find a whore or two to pass the time? The answer is always yes, but at the same time, no character in the story ever trusts Tyrion farther than they can throw his misshapen little body. And Tyrion is just one of a dozen or so characters equally well written with emotional depth and human frailty.

One of the unfortunate features of the sci-fi/fantasy genre is that characters rarely change in the course of the story; they may go on journeys, pass tests of basic moral fiber, become more self-aware or world-wise, or go from nobodies to somebodies, but protagonists rarely if ever become antagonists and antagonists rarely have a change of heart and become good guys. In other words, the assholes don’t suddenly become the guy you take home to meet your parents. And the good guys rarely turn out to be mischievous little fucks in the end. There was always something eminently untrustable about poor old Boromir and we knew it from the moment we met him at Rivendell. Sam, at the same time, is whole-heartedly good, hopeful, and reliable. He never loses any of those characteristics, not once, and we generally tend to love him for it. Personally, I wish he’d quit being the stereotypical working class Englishman who keeps his mouth shut most of the time, and tell Frodo to get his shit together and quit being so damn whiny. Also, it would have really thrown a wrench in things if Sam had just taken the ring from Frodo, headed back to the Shire and kicked old Ted Sandyman’s ass on his way to becoming the dark overlord of Middle Earth. Theoden is a possible exception, but I may be thinking more of the movie than the book. In any case, that type of sea-change just doesn’t happen in the genre. (One possible exception is Heinlein’s tendency to make his chaste characters become randy humpaholics throughout a book, but for him that’s still part of the journey and testing of moral character – randy humping being the end goal for humanity.) But for Martin anything is possible. The biggest assholes in the story (I’m thinking of a certain child-killing, incestuous, murderous lunatic) learn to be less douchy by getting their ass kicked by certain mannish, lesbian warriors. This is not to say that Martin ignores the genre conventions entirely. Every young character is basically in a mini-bildungsroman; the ‘good’ women are always smarter, more ethical, and more powerful than the men give them credit for; and half the damn characters are on a journey of some sort or other.

But, and this is the last point, Martin isn’t afraid to let the plot make uncomfortable but necessary twists and turns. He ends the first book by killing off the character who seems to be the focal point of the series. With that one bold stroke, Martin lets his readers know that his series isn’t like anything that’s come before. One character even gets killed while taking a dump (I don’t think any member of the Fellowship ever used the toilet on the way to destroying the One ring.)

There’s no deus ex machina either; Martin accounts for everyone and everything. While he surprises you all the damn time you can’t say you didn’t see it coming because it was there all along. The eagles aren’t coming in this one; and if they do come it’s because he wrote about for 100 pages two books ago so you know all about the existence of the eagles and what they are or aren’t doing. That’s a refreshing change.

These books are the ‘exhausting and addicting ride’ that I mentioned earlier. They’re great fun. They’re slightly more challenging than many of the books out there, and they’re part of a great story that may not end before Martin gets around to writing and publishing them all. It would be a shame if something happened to Martin before he got to finish this saga. There are a dozen characters out there that I’m truly invested in, and I’d like to know what will happen to them before I turn 40. Hopefully he doesn’t kill them all off. Fat chance!

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

I am the son, brother, partner of and eventual father to feminists. As a teacher, I spend a lot of time and energy focusing on women in science, history, literature, and philosophy. Now hopefully those caveats will prevent a misunderstanding about my critique of The Red Tent.

The Red Tent is an ambitious book. It attempts to write women into the masculine, patriarchal, chauvinistic, and oppressive narrative of Genesis. And for the first 50% of the book, Diamant does an amazing job of providing a literary presence for the women who are given names and little more in the Hebrew Bible. But Diamant does more than that. She writes Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah as real characters with more than just passing emotional complexity. She weaves their lives into the sophisticated socio-economic tribal milieu that was the Holy Land more than 3,000 years ago. For the first half of the book, she takes the barest mention of Jacob’s wives from out of the Hebrew Bible and creates something truly real in a wonderful, creative, and conscious voice.

The majority of the story is told by Dinah, Leah and Jacob’s only female child and the only daughter amongst Jacob’s famed 12 sons. As narrator, Dinah does a good job of putting the Biblical stories into context. One particularly well-written section is about Jacob’s flight from his father-in-law Laban, Jacob’s reconciliation with his brother Esau, and his eventual settlement in Shechem. More importantly, she explains the female role in this society. But in the course of narrating the family’s struggle to immigrate to and set up their own small tribe in Canaan, Diamant’s flaws begin to rear their ugly head. In Genesis, Jacob is supposedly accosted and beaten by a stranger who may or may not be an angel. This hard-to-decipher section of Genesis is equally hard to interpret in The Red Tent. That Diamant felt obligated to include it in her book indicates a strange writing choice. Genesis in particular is an inaccurate history, written by at least four separate authors with competing agendas, none of which included an expressed goal to give women a place in Semitic tribal culture. In the first half of the book, Diamant presents one strong narrative voice in Dinah with an expressed goal to give women their due place in Semitic tribal culture. Yet Diamant seems to have felt bound by Genesis as a master text from which she could not deviate. When Genesis gets detailed and specific, as in the case of Jacob and his wrestling-assaulter, Diamant feels compelled to include the same detail – all this despite the fact that she spent the first half of the book deviating in very political and gender-specific ways from the master text.

The first half of the book works because Diamant does a masterful job in fleshing out the barebones story of Jacob and his wives and giving those Biblically minor characters a vital voice; the second half of the book fails because Diamant felt obligated to stay close to a more detailed (and flawed) master narrative. Diamant created a covenant, so to speak, with her readers: I will tell you the true story including the half that was left out by oppressive patriarchal Biblical writers and compilers. It was a brilliant covenant, honestly and deftly executed. Unfortunately, she broke her covenant with readers and, to the book’s detriment, deferred back to the Hebrew Bible, at the very point when that narrative breaks down.

The Hebrew Bible tells us that in Shechem, Dinah is abducted and raped (“seized her and lay with her by force” in the NRSV) by the prince of the Shechem’s ruling family who is also called Shechem. Diamant retells this as a love story between Dinah and the prince. So far, so good – she keeps her covenant with the readers. Genesis goes on: Shechem and his father the king ask for Dinah in marriage, and Jacob and his sons declare that every man in the town of Shechem must get circumcised in order for their families to unite. This certainly seems a case of Biblical hyperbole, but Diamant stays faithful to her source. The men of Shechem are circumcised, all of them. Shortly after, as the men are recovering, the Hebrew Bible tells us that two of Dinah’s many brothers, Simeon and Levi, steal into the town and murder all the men for the defilement of Dinah. Again, Diamant makes a baffling decision to remain true to her source material, and has the exact same thing happen in The Red Tent. You know its hyperbole when you’re thinking to yourself, “How could two guys kill every man in the whole town? Even if they were recovering from circumcision?” Diamant’s Dinah is of course horrified by the actions of her brothers and spends the rest of her life avoiding and latter and reconciling with parts of her family (primarily famed brother Joseph while living in Egypt) while trying to recover from the ghastly atrocity of having her lover murdered in her bed. This is made all the more difficult because she as pregnant with Shechem’s baby when her brothers murdered Shechem. When Jacob fought the mugger/angel and Diamant chose to include that in her narrative, it was irritating in a small way but by no means a deal-breaker for me. When she chose to keep all of the details from the Shechem part of Genesis, I found myself losing interesting in both the theory and narrative of The Red Tent.

One of my favorite post-colonial books is The Empire Writes Back. One of the things this book explores is how the creative output of colonized peoples constitutes a critique of the powerful influence of European ideas about creative work. Now, Diamant is more obviously in the feminist school of literary theory rather than postcolonialism, but her unstated goal is very similar to that described in Empire: to give voice to the marginalized women of Genesis and allow that voice to critique its predecessor. I admire this goal, and I think Diamant does justice to it in the first half and perhaps latter fourth of the book. However, her own text suffers when it allows itself to be dictated to by the Hebrew Bible. And, let’s face it, it’s the worst facets of Hebrew Bible ideology that overwhelm The Red Tent: male oppression, xenophobia, and the tendency towards violence. Diamant tries to bring the narrative full-circle in the last quarter of the book; she goes back to the things that made the first half of the book so successful: an engaging, instructive narrator carving a place for herself in an oppressive patriarchal world. But the Shechem interlude, itself so illogical and counter-intuitive, is foundational for he latter part of the book, and it really is a disastrously poor foundation.

I praise The Red Tent for its original creativity and its rebellious nature. It is well-written to boot and for those reasons I highly recommend it. Furthermore, despite my critical misgivings, The Red Tent is a must-read if for no other reason than to further discuss and explore my own critique with other thoughtful readers.

Borges: Selected Poems and On Writing

Upon meeting myself at the coffee shop last week, the departing me told the arriving me that I ought to get busy reading some stuff by Jorge Luis Borges. The arriving me was thoroughly preoccupied with other things: papers to grade, Greek things to read, and searches for a more materialistic outlook to be discovered. Howsomever, the arriving me soon became the departing me and Borges tapped me on the shoulder (metaphorically of course) and reminded me of his presence.

Upon further review, I had some trepidation to Borges. I never quite know what to think about authors whose political viewpoints run semi-antithetical to my own. We aren’t exactly perpendicular, Borges and I, but we aren’t parallel either, so we must at some point cross each other, and this crossing can lead to a serious falling out depending on the nature of the angle. But this isn’t always the case. Some crossings have spent so long in developing that the deceptive appearance of parallelism can really quite mute the conflict that arises at crossing and turn it more into a friendly encounter – like the happily long-running disagreements that frequently occur between comrades over tea.

I think our crossing is the delicate kind that occurs over tea. We agreed, for example, on dictatorships and their resulting terrors, and while I may be more sympathetic to communist ideology that Borges, we can at least agree that libraries are very important places and that our fathers’ book collections made a profound influence upon us at an early age, and, you know, that is very nearly enough for our crossing to not dissuade us to be enemies.

I prefer the solid reality of fiction to most other forms of writing. It’s not that I’m against poetry, it’s just that I think most poets wanted to write novels but were too busy doing other things and had to abbreviate their work, or, as in the case of Coleridge, were entirely too distracted by the multiplicity of words and their multiplicity of meanings so as to be driven truly mad by the infinite possibilities of expressing one single thought. (Browning is nice though.) This fact alone makes it all the more interesting that I found myself reading Borges’s poetry to my partner in the wee hours of the night and discussing his obsession with duality.

I remember the first Borges poem I ever read. It was not suggested by my Latin American literature teacher, though I’m sure he may have mentioned Borges frequently enough (but seeing as how he was a communist, my teacher that is, I’m sure it was in a very disapproving way). Rather it was recommended by my philosophy instructor who was, at the time, teaching a class on Plato, Socrates, Descartes, and Kant. I can’t make the connection between Borges and those other august thinkers at this time, so I’m not sure how Borges came up, but I still have a copy of the original email (is such a thing even possible in the digital age?) in which he sent two of the poems under discussion and the volume in which they could be found – it was Dreamtigers. Much later in life, I needed to buy a book so as to begin reading something, though with me the buying of the book does not necessarily mean I have to read the book I just purchased. I’ve never understood the phenomenon, though I frequently find myself in used bookstores buying something just so I can go home and pick up an unread book sitting on my shelf. I bought at this time a compilation of Borges’s poems which included one of the poems mentioned by my old philosophy instructor along with selections from most of his published collections of poems. I have been reading this book recently.

It is appropriately titled Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems. It is an appealing quality paperback that cost me $19, though in its favor are impressed concentric circles on the front and the uneven pages of fancier volumes. It has the poem in its original Spanish on the left-hand side of each page and an English translation on the right. Sometimes I read the Spanish original first, but this doesn’t happen too often because I’m often eager to read the English. I shall keep the title of my favorite poem to myself, though I may at times hint at it, and instead mention some others that I also like. One is ‘Anticipation of Love,’ which has a beautiful line explaining why we watch the ones we love while they are sleeping:

you will give me that shore of your life that you yourself do not own

Another poem I like is ‘Odyssey, Book Twenty-three.’ I think this poem speaks to my yearly obsession with The Odyssey, which I teach without fail to distrusting high school students so they might learn to love both guile and beauty so they may better get along in life. And ‘Simplicity’ also speaks to me, though by no means because it is simple or makes things simpler, but perhaps because it reminds me of certain parts of the Upanishads, which in turn remind me of comments made by Aristotle in De Anima, which, at this late date, I may or may not be remembering correctly, but certainly bring back memories of the professor who first suggested some poems of Borges for me to read.

Even more recently I bought a collection of Borges’s writing that had to do with writing; it was appropriately titled On Writing. The short essays ‘Literary Pleasure’ and ‘The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader’ are both helpful in reminding readers why they originally became readers – because something they read grabbed them individually and made reading the best thing they could be doing at that particular moment, regardless (and this important) of the perfection or imperfection of the text. Readers, says Borges, can too quickly become critics and read only with the critical mind; I find that this happens to me too, as it did with him. When this happens, they may have lost their reading way. But our history of reading can at least remind of us of the joy we once experienced when reading was good enough by itself.

Another thought runs through the various essays which span from his early years to his later ones: the sheer magnificence that occurs when an author creates an alternate version of the world. Borges talks about Joyce in this regard and the timelessness of Cervantez; I am reminded of Tolkien. Borges, like Chabon, also reminds us of the complete arbitrary nature of categorization. Detective novels may be great literature, and we shouldn’t let ourselves be tricked into thinking that they are somehow lesser just because they are detective novels. As a connoisseur of detective novels, I particularly admire this line of thinking.

I am glad that I reminded myself to read Borges. Poetry too often eludes me, or me it, and Borges’s poems were a much-needed corrective to my potentially narrow reading habits. His essays have many great attributes, the least of which is their length: they are short and consequently I can usually read one or two a day while in the bathroom. Brevity aside, the essays cover two topics that are of central importance to my solitary life – reading and writing - and there are times when it is necessary to consider those two activities from the craft perspective.

Troy by Adele Geras

So the back of the book tells me all the prizes that Troy by Adele Geras has won or been shortlisted for: ALA Best Book for Young Adults, Publisher's Weekly Best Children's Book of the Year, A Carnegie Medal Finalist, etc. Before reading I was highly impressed. As I've been teaching The Odyssey and working my way through The Iliad and The War that Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander, I though that Troy would fit right in. And for the most part, it was a pleasant little excursion into the personal lives of some rather unimportant inhabitants of Ilium, Priam's town, who nonetheless interact with all the notables - Priam, Hector, Paris, Andromache, and Helen. But my god if the writing didn't make me want to strangle myself.

I've read some horrible writing recently - the worst being Angelogy by Danielle Trussoni, perhaps the most poorly written book of the new century. The one thing the poorly written books I've read seem to have in common is that their idea is original and engaging but the execution destroys the value the once-shining original idea ever had. And I think, rather unfortunately, that Troy fits the bill as well. Geras has created some likable characters with enough depth to keep them engaging. The story centers around young Xanthe, who is the nursemaid to Hector and Andromache's young son Astyanax. She falls in love with a young soldier named Alastor when Aphrodite appears and makes her smitten. Aphrodite goes on to complicate things in the way that only the capricious Greek gods can by forcing Alastor to fall in love with Xanthe's sister, Marpessa. Shenanigans ensue.

But the shenanigans, which are artfully setup to play out in the waning months of the ten-year war, are just so annoyingly described. Take this comment from the scene in which Paris kills his son in a case of mistaken identity: "I never knew I had a son. Can you believe that? And no sooner does he announce himself than I kill him. A terrible sin...the worst sin in the world to kill your son." (214) Wow! Really? You think? Way to sum it up for the readers there Ms. Geras.

I know that this book is written for the younger reader in mind, but I think the simplicity with which Ms. Geras describes the life of her characters is insulting. Part of learning to become a good reader is being able to tell a character's emotions without having them announce it in the easiest terms possible. After all, most humans don't go around saying, "I'm mad because my boss blamed me for something that was caused by someone else. And that is why I feel terrible." Frankly, the reason we have therapy is so that people can spend years and thousands learning to say things like that, but Ms. Geras rarely lets readers make any inferences at all. I think we need to let teen readers understand inferences. Too much concrete thinking leads to simplicity, and we could all use a good dose of intellectual complexity in our lives.

Wao ruminations concluded

The world seems to be caught up in an overwhelming tide of
tragic-ness. This is true most intensely in literature. I can't
think of too many books that I've read recently that aren't built
solely around exploring every possible nuance of a tragedy and how it
effects me, and Oscar Wao fits into this category as well. I've been
recommending The Road by Cormac McCarthy to a lot of people recently,
and I've been thinking about why this book has so struck a chord with
me, and I think it's because while it addresses the theme of tragedy
and explores it in-depth, it doesn't end with tragedy as the be-all,
end-all function of existence. Admittedly, the ending is bleak, but
it's also inspiring at the same time. And I don't think I can say
that about Oscar Wao. I mean Diaz built the ending up 100 pages
before it actually occurred, and I had to spend the last part of the
book watching it move inexorably closer, and the pain of reading it
was only increased by the fact that I knew I was going to read it for
so long. Then of course the book ended in its own bleak way, and
other than the physical text itself resting comfortably in your hand
or on your bookshelf, there wasn't a whole lot that you could walk
away with and be encouraged about.

Maybe my expectations for books are unreasonable, but Mark Twain's
books didn't always end with a bereft longing glance at nostalgia and
tragedy. Neither did Steinbeck or Garcia Marquez (well, ok Marquez is
generally pretty bleak, but he usually transcends that after a page or
two), or even Michael Chabon, who has to write 'genre' just so he can
have positive endings or think transformational thoughts. Are we that
caught up in the bitterly pessimistic worldview these days? I think
we are, I think almost all of us are despite our protestations that we
have happy moments or weeks or years. I think we tend to define
ourselves by our tragedies, and I wonder if that has anything to do
with world events - 9/11, Katrina, war, etc - or if it is the defining
zeitgeist of our generation. And if it is, what the fuck? I mean we
have to move past that at some point don't we? And I'm not sure I
need to hear that it could only be a white American asking this
question, because that sentiment, however true, only pulls us back
into the morass that so many people of so many different backgrounds
are trying to escape - hence the reason for the book Oscar Wao in the
first place, am I wrong?

So, while I loved the book, I am struck by the tone in a deeply
philosophical and existential way. And that tone seems to be an ever
present burden on the shoulders of everyone, and I am wondering if we
haven't set for ourselves an inescapable trap. And our books are just
the explanations of these traps, and sometimes that gets ridiculous.
And if that's the existential reality of the book and of our lives,
well then that just plain sucks. I don't think I can buy into a
paradigm that says life will be shitty forever and ever and oh woe is
me and all that crap. And that seems to be the approach of so many
books that I've read. It's like we can't seriously talk about the
transformational value of literature anymore because literature has
become a solipsistic cesspool. Is it any wonder that no Americans
have won the Nobel in a good long time. We're all focused on one
thing, and that one thing isn't terribly affirming, unless of course
if you count the fact that it is about 'me' and 'I' and certainly not
about the other because they can worry about their own damn selves.
Well, I've rambled enough and not all of it about the book.

some continuations

Recently I have found myself reading books that are entries in long-standing series. On one level this bothers me because it suggests that a) there is nothing 'new' out there worth reading or b) I don't know what new books I should be reading. In either case, I'm not very happy. But I have been reading some good stuff recently. Here's a run-down:

A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire:

The third book in the Wicked series chronicles the life of the cowardly lion, named in this book at least Burr. Maguire has written a fascinating character in Burr. He is a lonely, ashamed soul seeking redemption in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. He is America before we found ourselves and voted for the symbol of Obama. He is materialistic and opportunistic because he thinks that is how to get fame (as my students would put it). He is lost and empty because nothing he does provides joy or solace, and the book is a brilliant examination of his psycho-social development to the point where he sees himself truly for the first time. This book is more complete than the middle entry in the series - Son of a Witch - because Burr is more fully realized than Nor, the son of Elphaba. (Ironic isn't it, and intentionally so, that the Lion is the most fully realized character since Elphaba.) The tortuous route to self discovery made by Burr is paralleled by another character, of Maguire's own devising, called Yackle, who has floated mysteriously throughout the other books in the series. Her presence bothered me immensely in Wicked because it was completely indecipherable; here she comes through in a most winning way and her own story makes me want to go back and read Wicked again just so I can see what she was really all about. Good writing that.

Rubicon by Steven Saylor:

Yes, I am a lonely man looking for prostitute fiction written about ancient Rome. This series is the high class hooker. The Falco books by Lindsey Davis are the joyful BJ or handjob or backseat quickie, but Saylor writes about the overnight stay at the Mustang Ranch where one's needs are really met. I say all that mostly so you will pick up the other books in the series which are all quite good. This one, however, is average. Gordianus, our delightfully aging protagonist, makes some ethical leaps in the book that are inconsistent with his character as it has been built in the previous books. It's still a good read, and it takes up during a period about which we know the most historically. But I think Saylor did a better job writing about the more obscure historical developments in Rome - dealing with Sulla and Crassus and the notable poet Catallus. This one features Ceasar and Pompey, two of the giants of Antiquity, and Gordianus really has no reason to be involved with them. And that of course is my dilemma with the book. But it's a rollicking good adventure nonetheless.

The Gunslinger by Stephen King:

I have never before read King, and I may never again. King's ideas are quite original, even when he's riffing off of Robert Browning, which he is in this book. But his prose is so tromping and his situations so blah. I will continue to read the Dark Tower series because I'm intrigued to see where King goes, and Roland his protagonist is well-written primarily because he's written as the slightly less intellectual fanatic. He tends to have notions rather than ideas, and he understands that things will change without actually being able to predict those changes. He is more like you and I than most epic heroes. But I'm never quite sure why he finds himself in half the situations that he does. What's the point, big Stephen? I'm still trying to find out.

Dropped Books

While I had a successful reading summer, getting through a modest 12-15 books, it has ended on a low note. I recently had to retire a book before completion. This, to me, is disastrous. The book was Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves. I have read some of Graves' other works including I, Claudius, the sequel Claudius the God, and some of his brilliant poetry. Overall I find him engaging, spritely, and emotionally complex - just the sort of qualities that tend to get my attention. However, Homer's Daughter was a wreck. The premise, in the form of a question, is quite simple: what if The Odyssey wasn't in fact written by Homer, but instead by a young noblewoman from Sicily during early antiquity? Beyond the premise, I can't think of much else worthy of mentioning because its execution barely touched upon the intrigue articulated in the premise.

How, I ask myself, could something so promising become so ass-boring? (Ass-boring is of course a highly technical critical term involving all sorts of detailed criticisms relating to characterization, plot, style, pacing, etc.) Homer's Daughter fails to be readable on any level. It's connections to The Odyssey are sophomoric and quite a bit silly to boot. And the plot is so contrived, building as it does on a series of random selections from The Odyssey, that each chapter hits like a wave of bilious bitch-slap. Ouch! And the most distressing fact of all is that I've been waiting to read this book for nearly 3 years. The letdown of course was all the more painful since I all but devoured an historical novel by Bernard Cornwell post-haste. Cornwell, while lacking in the literary credentials of Graves, does all the small writerly things well, things like characterization, plot, style, and pacing.

I believe that narrative, far from reflecting our lives, is a survival mechanism that is simultaneously simplistic yet defining in that it brings order out of chaos and allows our communal minds to coalesce around shared experiences that are too often denied our waking lives. So, thank you Bernard Cornwell, thank you for being entertaining and engaging and salvific when I lost myself in the hands of one whose job it was to redeem my wayward soul. I haven't made it back to dry land, but I'm clinging tightly to a stout board, there is an island in the distance, and I am paddling slowly but surely in its direction.

Two Old Friends

I recently reread two books that I've thought about a lot in the last couple of years. The first was Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King. It is the seventh book in a series that takes up the life of Sherlock Holmes just at the beginning of the Great War, which is where Conan Doyle left him in the last stories about the eponymous detective who defined the genre. In King's world, Holmes is a retired beekeeper in 1915 when he is stumbled upon (literally) by a precocious fifteen year old orphan who he decides to train and mentor. Over the course of the next few books, their intricate relationship evolves slowly into a professional partnership and a romantic relationship via a series of highly engaging murders, thefts, and world travels. Did I forget to mention that the orphan is female? Oh well she is, and her name is Mary Russell, and she is half-English, half-American, tall, blond, and ridiculously intelligent and charming. I read the first book in the series when I was 15 and instantly connected with Mary, or Russell as she is affectionately called by Holmes. Like me she is always reading, has or will take an advanced degree in theology, and needs constant challenges to avoid boredom. Unlike me, she is female and married to a much older spouse, though my partner is an "older woman," living in a decidedly different age, and gets to daily engage in conversation and problem-solving with the best possible mind on the planet (fictional of course).

Laurie R. King's books can occasionally get bogged down in plot minutiae - the latest entry in the series was disastrously slow-paced and a bit pedantic, and a 'to be continued' which just plain annoyed the shit out of me. But King is easily the best character writer in the business. Her Holmes is better than Conan Doyle's, and Mary Russell may be one of the best multi-dimensional characters in modern literature, which probably annoys the hell of writers of 'serious' literature because I haven't read much recently that even comes close to a multi-dimensional character in any work from the last 20 years. Locked Rooms is one of my favorite books in the series because it is a psychological study of Mary Russell which reveals so many new and interesting things about a character that had been well fleshed out in the previous six books. The plot is slow and is resolved out of nowhere, except for an engaging section where Sherlock Holmes must recruit a new batch of irregulars while in San Francisco with Mary working on the death of her parents many years before. But the slow realization by Mary that she wasn't responsible for the death of her family is quite magnificently worked out, and the peripheral characters that help in this realization are really quite impressive: flappers and other excitable folks living in the high-rolling 1920's when Prohibition was failing so dramatically and comedically. King has a tendency to add prominent fictional and historical characters into her novels to spruce things up, and in Locked Rooms she writes of an incredible encounter between Sherlock Holmes (who I probably forgot to mention is portrayed as a real historical fellow who tends to get quite pissed off when his literary executor Conan Doyle goes around talking to ghosts) and Dashiell Hammet, the tubercular writer who is credited with having taken detective stories and made them 'hard-boiled,' the guy who came up with Sam Spade and the Maltese Falcon. Hammet was real, and a fairly admirable fellow in real life, and his encounter with Holmes is absolutely priceless considering that the real Hammet spent some time as a workaday detective for the Pinkerton Agency. Locked Rooms is truly a magficent look at how to write characters with depth and put them in situations where their depth is called upon to drive a book. King does a great job with this in all the ten or more books of hers that I've read. She is truly gifted if a bit unknown outside the mystery 'genre.'

The other book that I reread was written by an incredibly well-known writer who hasn't been overlooked by anyone since writing Wonder Boys and the Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Michael Chabon, who took his own stab at Sherlock Holmes in The Final Solution, is one of the few prominent writers around that has actually berated the literate world for creating categories of literature - things like mystery, science-fiction, and romance. His claim, that writing is about entertainment, which I've explored elsewhere, and is either done well or poorly regardless of genre, is one that has helped me immensely in my own writing and reading. In Gentleman of the Road, which I believe I've written about before as well, and which Chabon had given the working title of Jews with Swords, Chabon writes a delightful action story whose intended audience would probably be a bunch of 12 year old boys with absurdly wonderful vocabularies. The story is even better the second time around, particularly as I was less daunted by his obscure verbiage, and I got a better look at the two characters. Chabon, like King, does a pretty great job at giving his characters depth. Amram and Zelikman, the Jews with Swords, are a bit less multi-dimensional than Mary Russell; however, for a two-hundred page action thriller, they are more like Meryl Streep and Judi Dench than Paris Hilton and Cameron Diaz. Writers like Chabon and King are great precisely because they come up great characters, which seems to be the overall theme of this post, that thrive despite awkward plotting or distracting vocabulary. It is not fashionable these days to talk about literature outside of culture, history, or other interpretive lenses, but I think the farther we get from the core elements of literature like characters, the more we miss the essence of what makes reading a uniquely human and enjoyable activity. I'm all about talking about literature as a humanizing activity, and the best literature is that which helps us connect with others by showing us what our humanity is and how it works. And if you can do that as a writer, then, at the very least, you'll be admired by me.

I finished Gone With the Wind and The Wind Done Gone

So yeah, I finished the second-longest book I've ever read in my life. After a time, the length became so overwhelming that it really seemed to swallow the narrative, and I just kept pushing myself to finish the book. This was relatively easy to accomplish because the book, or rather the character of Scarlett O'Hara, is so engaging. But it was still a long, onerous bastard, and I tip my hat to a book so challenging and simultaneously so enthralling. I have two perspectives on the book which I shall relate below, in the order in which I had them:

#1 - Scarlett O'Hara might be the quintessential American female epic heroine. I can't think of any other woman who so forcefully shapes her own destiny and the world around her. I'm not saying that all the things she does are terribly moral or even helpful, but Scarlett does do things with an epic flair that is unmatched in American letters, perhaps even world letters. I spent a long day and night trying to come up with any other epic female characters in my meager knowledge of world literature, and I had a hard time. A friend suggested that several of Shakespeare's females were vastly superior to Scarlett O'Hara, and I would agree that the emotional complexity of two or three of Shakespeare's women - Lady MacBeth, Kate from the Taming of the Shrew, and possibly Hamlet's mother - rival that of Scarlett O'Hara, but I definitely would not go so far as to say that they were vastly superior. Scarlett makes her world, and more than anything I think that is the single most important factor for an epic hero or heroine. Furthermore, she is not very likable, which makes her abilities at creation all the more intriguing. By sheer force of will and and a powerful ability to ignore potential obstacles, Scarlett O'Hara figures out the means to survive events that would flatten most people, and then she takes it a step further and figures out a way to turn every situation to her advantage. I feel almost traitorous with what I'm about to write. . . . but these are the very characteristics that make Odysseus so powerful and transcendent. I think that the female persona that Virginia Woolf created throughout her works demolishes Scarlett O'Hara in terms of being epic status and the ability to make the world, but that creation came about over several different books and under the guise of several different characters, all of whom were, of course, Virginia Woolf herself, but I just thought I'd throw that idea out there.

#2 - Margaret Mitchell has crafted a completely adorable version of the South, both before and after the Civil War, which is so wonderful and pleasant that I wouldn't particularly mind having lived in that time and place. Oh wait, I forgot. It's completely fake, absurdly romantic to the point of outrageous fabrication, and quite possibly one of the single largest hoaxes perpetrated in American literature. In Mitchell's Georgia, the slaves love their situations, their is virtually no violence committed against slaves by white people, and the Civil War is presented as an affront to the very dignity of slavery. What the fuck?!? Oh and of the few male characters I remotely connected with, most turned out to be leaders of the local KKK, which was presented as an almost benign organization. Again, what the fuck!?! If people make the mistake of reading Gone With the Wind as any sort of historically accurate portrayal of the American South in the 1860's and 1870's, then it's no wonder Americans are looked on as ignorant brutes by the world. Mitchell lived in the first half of the twentieth century and undoubtedly had access to the works of folks like Mark Twain, who was himself under no illusions about the brutal legacy of American slavery on every soul in the nation. Yet, she seems to have created a South that was nothing by happiness and joy. And the Civil War came along and destroyed that happiness and joy, and damn those Yankees for messing things up. Now, obviously this seems to be the dominant perspective of Scarlett O'Hara, but I have a difficult time believing that Mitchell could so easily present such a malformed notion of one of the central episodes in U.S. history. It's really quite baffling to me. Either she did it intentionally as part of the romanticism of the world created by Scarlett O'Hara and felt readers would be under no illusion that Scarlett's paradigm was itself an illusion of such vast and comic scope that readers would never entertain the notion of it being anything other than farce. Or - there's something more substantial to Mitchell's portrayal of South, something sinister like revisionist history. And I say this because I've been to parts of the South that so directly contradict Mitchell's paradigm, even 150 years later, that I am so pissed at her for even making the implicit argument that underlies so much of the book.

#2.5 - Which leads me to the book I read immediately after Gone With the Wind: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall. The central premise of Randall's book is that Mitchell is a big fat liar when it comes to writing about plantation life, so she takes it upon herself to describe a more realistic version of the events in Gone With the Wind from the perspective of a mulatto slave child fathered by Scarlett's Irish father and Mammy the predominant black female slave in Gone With the Wind. The character is Scarlett's half sister, though as a slave her status in the family is nothing more than property. Randall wondered why Mitchell left out this particularly bleak part of history that was so essential to plantation life: white men raped their female slaves repeatedly in order to create more property thus making them richer. The Wind Done Gone is an incredibly rich look at Gone With the Wind and I suggest that it is required reading for anyone bold enough to take on the dual challenge of Mitchell's book: the first being its daunting length and the second being its fantasy-filled look at historical antebellum Atlanta. Randall, furthermore, is a prose genius. The language of The Wind Done Gone is haunting and beautiful and art of the highest caliber, almost more verse than prose. Cynara, Scarlett's half-sister, tells her reader early her ability to read and write were earned through struggle and she does not take them for granted. It's almost as if Randall is implying that it's easy to romanticize history in the way that Mitchell has done but the truth is hard and vicious and not for the meek, and she intends to communicate that truth in a way that will leave the reader no doubt as to the historical veracity of her work over Mitchell's. There was much controversy surrounding the publication of Randall's book because the Mitchell trust tried to get it from being published, though ultimately they failed, and I am grateful to Randall for writing an antidote to the sweet-tasting poison that Mitchell presents so sumptuously on a silver tray. The Wind Done Gone shows that true literature cannot help but guide us through the trauma and beauty of history with elegance, force, and art.

So I finished Oscar Wao, which I'll write about more at a later date after I've had the chance to discuss it with some friends. And I've started Gone With the Wind. I've never seen the movie, which is a benefit in this situation, besides which I have other motives for reading the book.

You see my grandmother is old and very sick and it's her favorite book. I often connect with people via books - I mean there is something incredibly profound about reading someone else's favorite book and then talking about that book together. It's a window into another person's soul, and books are so multi-faceted that you get the joy of figuring out which part of the book touched their soul and then you get to see if any part of the book touched your soul too. Sounds a bit corny, I know, but I seem to spend a lot of time with people yet I often feel that I don't know them, and books are one way to expand any type of relationship.

I'm hoping to expand the relationship with my grandmother through Gone With the Wind. I already have several interesting insights about that book and her personality. But the book is so gall-darn long - my copy is 1,000 pages which is incredibly daunting. I often ask myself: is this 1,000 pages the best possible use of the finite number of pages you will get to read in your life? It's kind of a jacked-up question, but I still ask myself all the same. And so far. . . it's been worth the effort. I'm only 1/3 of the way through so I might change my mind, but it's been an intense ride so far.