A little Zorro anyone?

Isabel Allende is the masterful Latin American author of such classics as The House of Spirits and City of the Beasts. In Zorro, she takes the now infamous character and attempts to trace his origins and influences. She weaves a magical tapestry of indigenous and colonial characters who serve in various roles as mentors or foils to the young Diego de la Vega.

I remember my first encounter with the fox. I was a young boy who was mostly unsupervised during Saturday morning TV viewing. Consequently I ignored the more traditional cartoons and scanned the movie channels for something more exciting. I was delighted when I found "The Adventures of Robin Hood" starring Errol Flynn. It was magnificent swashbuckling at its very best. And that smile. Flynn never loses his smile through highly choreographed fight scenes. A close second was "The Mark of Zorro" starring a fairly dashing Tyrone Power. Little did I know that this was merely the fifth movie featuring the masked crusader and precursor to the comic heroes of today. Tyrone Power was not quite Errol Flynn but his sword fights with Basil Rathbone were the equal of anything done by Errol Flynn. And he did his best to keep a dashing grin plastered to his visage throughout many exploits of daring-do. Then of course, there are the more recent films starring Antonio Banderas, whose Spanish heritage and language provided a slightly more realistic portrayal of the masked hero. (Sorry Tyrone, you were just a little too white to be believable.)

So I jumped at the chance to read Allende's version of the legend who had shaped my childhood. I hoped that Allende would do justice to the hero of justicia. I hoped that she would de-Europeanize an essentially indigenous colonial hero. And in so doing, I hoped that she would not over-intellectualize a character who has more in common with Spiderman than Che Guevara. I lay a tremendous burden on the authors I read, but I felt confident that Allende would be able to pull it off. And for the most part, she did.

Allende's Zorro is mestizo. He is half indigenous American and half European colonizer. Given his heritage, it is no wonder that he would grow to live a life full of conflict. Allende goes about describing his Diego's mestizo heritage in a tricky way. Diego's Spanish father is a coldly efficient man, a father who loves deeply but from a distance, while Diego's india mother and milk-brother Bernardo are cautious yet deeply loving and caring. On the one hand, you have a large cold room in the mansion, while on the other lies the cozy bedroom with a roaring fire, warm blanket, and hot cup of cocoa. In his early years, Diego's life is a balancing act between his heritage. He is expected to be the Don, a wealthy colonial landownder who keeps order, provides for the people, and is above reproach. Yet Diego secretly yearns for the almost mystical life represented by his mother, grandmother, and milk-brother. And before long (this is Zorro after all) Diego finds a way to be both the son of a Don and a living embodiment of the indigenous culture that is slowly being destroyed.

Allende often uses magical realism as a technique to explore the metaphysics of the Americas, and she takes it a step further in this book utilizing what I like to call 'tragic magic realism.' The history of the United States is a violent clash of ideas, cultures, and people, and Allende does not attempt to hide this or write her way out of it. She embraces this history (the tragic) but does so in way that respects it and brings it to life without overly romanticizing it (the magical realism). I think that one major danger she faced was to lose the European heritage of the character, but she manages to narrate his time in Spain in an honest, engaging way. However, Allende does not let the reader lose sight of the cultural struggles that engulf Diego de la Vega. In the Americas, he is confronted with the clash between indiginismo and colonialism, while in Spain he is confronted with the vulgar class violence and nationalism that rocked the Napoleanic Age. Allende adds another layer of complexity by introducing a tribe of Roma, or gypsy, who for ages have been amongst the most discriminated against and persecuted groups in Europe. Members of this tribe become fast friends and mentors to young Diego, which gives him another 'cause' to fight for. Allende's task in taking on the Zorro story was made all the more difficult because he was written essentially as a pulp hero. Yet, she gives Zorro cultural depth and complex emotional issues without turning her novel into some sort of insipid melodrama - no small feat. This is her major accomplishment in this book.

But there are problems - the first and most pressing is the narration. The book begins with a narrative voice that is very dry, bland, and unsentimental. The narrator, whose identity is revealed in the end (though astute readers will figure it out well before then), has absolutely no reason to be so boring, which makes the reading of this book all the more laborous. In the beginning, I fervently hoped that the bland narrative voice would give way to something less formal and more organic, more wholesome, yet this change never occured. It seems that Allende was made aware of this dilemma and tried, during very short interludes, to add more character to the narrator. She failed. Her editor failed. And the book suffers. Aside from an emotionless narrator, the narrative style of this text should have been reconsidered. The narrator is a character in the text looking back on the formative history of Diego de la Vega. A third-person perspective would have accomplished much the same in telling the story and perhaps given Allende a more colorful palette to choose from. Second, Allende has a multi-volume story on her hands. Unfortunately, she chose to pack it all into one book. In addition to bland narration, Zorro suffers from poor pacing and a lack of strong editing. Allende or her editor should have been courageous enough to develop certain characters and scenes at length while leaving others on the cutting-room floor. Instead, there are one or two well-developed characters who reside in a fairly 2-dimensional world. Ultimately, Allende's skill is not put to full use in this novel. Finally, but in relation to the issue of narration, Allende's skill does not shine forth in the words on the page. There is an unacceptable distance between the text and the reader, and it is a distance that absolutely should not exist given the subject, the author, and a potentially vast reading audience of all backgrounds.

Despite its inconsistencies I recommend this book to others. There are many serious political writers in the world and there are many entertaining ones. Allende made her reputation as the former but in Zorro manages to pull of the latter as well. It is a delightful and welcome addition to my bookshelf and can be for yours as well.

Whatever happened to Scout?

I am not a terribly good reader of non-fiction. I've done my fair share so far with graduate school and all on my resume, but I was never particularly delighted by the whole thing. I cannot pinpoint my internal angst over the "real" stuff. My father, who taught me to read primarily by modeling what an avid reader does, is a prolific reader of non-fiction - two or three books a week if he can afford to get new ones. (The library long ago banned my family from its cozy confines.) And when he can't get anything new he just rereads the books in his thousand-deep library. (He suffers from an inability to read fiction. Go figure.) My mother is a librarian. Given this literary genealogy, you'd think that I'd be okay with books of all sorts, but the non-fiction tomes usually elicit a grimace followed by avoidance or a deep sigh that presages a Sisyphisian-like effort. I'll read 'em, but by god I won't be liking it.

Unless a book's author is a member of or devotee to the Frankfurt School, I really don't have the sustained ability to read non-fiction. There's very little inherent puzzle-solving in the genre. It's very tiered and organized and nicely laid out for the detail-oriented types who get into such things. I prefer the psychological zaniness that comes from narrative, that macabre technique that attempts to bring individual structure to pyschological chaos. And I like mysteries (not only the genre but in general). Fiction in its various forms tends often to be about mystery and puzzle-solving, which I suspect is why I love it so. Good fiction is like finding yourself in a new city without a map, a friend, or any food. Survival becomes a matter of some urgency, and you have only your wits to guide you. It's quite a thrill. (When reading a favorite author the situation is the same except you've got that friend encouraging you along your journey.)

Recently though I took a delightful stroll through a rather interesting piece of non-fiction. Mockingbird by Charles Shields is a brilliant biography of the infamously shy and notoriously quick-tongued Nelle Harper Lee, beloved author of To Kill a Mockingbird. While Shields' writing is more Beverly Cleary than Frederic Jameson, his investigative skill is top-notch. Lee quit giving interviews several decades back and never appreciated public attempts to intrude on her private life. This made Shields' task significantly more difficult, yet he somehow manages to paint a mysterious and deeply enduring picture of an author who wrote not merely of an era but of the entirety of American history through the eyes of a precocious pre-pubescent.

Most astute readers figure out the deeply autobiographical features of To Kill a Mockingbird quite early on, and many are left wondering whatever happened to young Scout, serious Jem, and the other residents of Maycomb. (Of course, there is very little mystery left surrounding young Dill, except perhaps the source of Capote's deep suspicion of those who dared love him.) Lee never wrote anything else, despite several different on-going projects, and has quietly slipped into the mists of her fictional alter-ego, Jean Louise. Yet the real Nelle Harper Lee is alive and well, living an active life in Monroeville, Alabama (the source of the fictional Maycomb), with annual sojourns to New York City, the town that nurtured her budding genius. Shields does an excellent job of charting Nelle's life in tiny, yet thriving, Monroeville up to the success of her first and only book. He finds long-lost friends, antagonistic sororiety sisters, and fellow literary aspirants, all of whom spoke candidly about the brash young Nelle. Lee became quite famous during the decade or so following the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, and Shields keep readers informed of the most historically documented portion of her life. Then he uses his impressive research skills to speculate on the last 4 decades of her life. He reaches very few solid conclusions, though his speculations are sound, fair, and obviously the result of a someone who loved her book as much as the rest of us.

In the end, he does justice to the book, the author, and to the mystery that continually surrounds Nelle Harper Lee. I don't make it through many of the "real" ones, but this one is excellent, well worth the time and the puzzle.

Of Mice and Men

I just finished reading Of Mice and Men with one of my high school classes. I had never read it before and my students had barely read anything before, so it was a perfect fit. It was a great book to learn about the nuances of relationships. It's also great because you have to be a detective-reader and discover those nuances in between the commas, from page to page. Steinbeck is not out to trick you, but he wants to paint a complete picture. And he wants you to look at it.

One source of conflict in the book comes from an emotionally unstable housewife. She is never given a name, though her crude interruptions in the lives of the other characters results in the loss of the American dream. "The bitch" as she came to be called in my class is a walking bundle of loneliness, and her only means of creating her community is through her overdeveloped sexuality. Interestingly, she was the most talked about character in class, though she was one of the least prominent in the narrative. The scene between her and slow-minded Lennie was probably one of the most interesting pieces of dialogue I have read in quite some time. There are two people talking at each other, though it is quite clear they aren't talking to each other. The absolute absurdity of the situation does nothing to mitigate the impending disaster, which makes Steinbeck the undisputed master of contemporary realism . Steinbeck's writing in this scene is sheer brilliance. More than the much-ballyhooed ending, this scene is easily the best in the book. The tragedy is all the more powerful because it is shared evenly between Lennie and Curly's wife, and because their lives are destined to end in this particular circumstance. Lennie's fate is sealed simply because he lives in a world with women. George tries his hardest to create a world where women are all but non-exisistent, but George knows the first time he sees Curly's wife that Lennie's life is in danger. Curly's wife, bitch though she is, was destined to die at the hands of a man, and her tragedy is being trapped on an all-male ranch. It is a destiny she laments to anyone who will listen. I coulda been in pictures, she announces repeatedly, though no one understands the plea behind this ego-driven statement. She has no words to say, "Get me outta here," though she screams it with every fiber of her being. It was inevitable that the two would find each other and end each other.

There is a disturbingly journalistic quality to the portrayal of race relations in this book. Derogatory words are thrown around casually, and Curly's wife's threats to Crooks, the black stable-worker, are depressing to modern readers given their absolute matter-of-factness. Curly's wife lives a nearly powerless existence, yet she takes a perverse joy in tormenting the only person in a worse situation than her. Crooks for his part reminds me of Tiresias, the blind prophet who haunts ancient Greek literature. There is a somber quality to his pronouncements, though he knows how to survive better than anyone else in the text. He knows before anyone else that the American dream they all seek is a mirage. Yet he too finds a way to believe, to see the vision on the hill, if only for a few minutes. And it is at this point that the text reaches its pinnacle, only to plunge downwards a few brushstrokes later.

If you haven't read this book, you should. It is short and beautiful - more beautiful, I think, than any of Steinbeck's other works save perhaps The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck had the courage to go where Twain only hinted at going in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - he took the narrative to its logical conclusion given his understanding of the world. Twain chickens out at the end Huck Finn, bringing in the endlessly Romantic Tom Sawyer to initiate a fantasy conclusion. Steinbeck points to a happy ending and brutally but perhaps necessarily rips it away to reveal it as the fantasy it always was. That is the truth of the American Dream for all but the most fantastic of us all.

The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth

Phillip Roth is one of the superstars of American literature. He's won just about every award possible, many of them twice. His books are routinely best-sellers. He has the type of broad appeal that gets him taught in college courses as well as read by "common readers." He is old, which gives him the gravitas of an elder literary stateman, yet he still publishes high-qualityh work fairly often, his last book came out in late 2007, which indicates that his powers are still potent.

I know a little about Roth. I studied his autobiography as an undergraduate and included an extensive analysis of it in my undergraduate thesis. Very purposefully I tried not to know much of his fictional work. I wanted to focus on his life and his presentation of his life. Of course, someone might have told me that I couldn't have picked a more elusive author for my attempt. Roth's life in many way is bound up with his fiction. He has made a career out of playing with the distinction between the two and confusing critics, fans, and students along the way. For example, he has written nine books on a character named Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman starts out as a young aspiring writer, much as Roth was a young aspiring writer at the time his first Zuckerman book was published. Over the years, Zuckerman has found some literary fame, had many romantic foibles, and even taught college courses. Not so surprisingly, Roth's life features an incredible number of similar chapters. However, when there seemed to be too many parallels, Roth wrote Zuckerman into situations that were very obviously not autobiographical. Once I figured out the complicated dance that was his life and his work, I walked away. To gain critical distance, but also because I was annoyed and fascinated at the same time, and I didn't have the time to read all his novels. Also, I wasn't entranced by his writing. It was very solid and polished. But it didn't move me the way that Hunter Thompson or Laurie R. King did. Still doesn't.

So after a significant Roth hiatus, I got interested in The Plot Against America. I read the reviews when it first came out and it looked intriguing. I had been interested in Connie Willis at the time, one of the grand dame's of American science-fiction who happened to live in the small town where I went to college and frequented the coffee shop where I did most of my reading and writing. Willis is classified as a sci-fi writer and her books do fit that mold. But she uses sci-fi primarily as a tool to get her where she wants to be. She is really a writer of histories, romances, and the very literary human condition. But she used the sci-fi tool early on and the label stuck. To her credit, she embraces the label and has had unparalleled success. The Plot Against America reminds me a lot of Connie Willis's work. Roth rewrites 1940's U.S. history. He posits that pro-fascist Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election against incumbant Franklin D. Roosevelt and begins a mysterious reign as the elusive anti-semitic president of isolationist America. He tells the story from the eyes of young Phillip Roth, an adolescent growing up in suburban New Jersey. Heady stuff.

The prose is passable and the pyscho-drama is a bit much, but Roth manages to do two things rather brilliantly. First, he creates the mood of a growing, nationally sponsored anti-semitism that is scarily believable. He doesn't hit you over the head with it. Instead, he builds it slowly but inexorably, so much so that sometimes it seems as tangible as mist while at others your heart begins to pound. I couldn 't help but think that the characters may have sounded eerily like Jews in Germany during the late 20's and 30's. Roth's Jewish community spends a lot of time in disbelief, echoing things like "This can't really be happening here and now. Can it? This is America after all." But happen it does, and the parallels with early German anti-semitic activity is all the more shocking. The realism of it all is even more powerful. Roth, the author, creates a socio-historical milieu that is entirely believable and peoples it with the type of folks that we all know. And if you get caught up in the narrative, as I did, then you too might begin to think things like "That couldn't really happen. Could it? After all, it's America, isn't it?" Which is exactly what Roth is going for and exactly what happened in Germany in the 1930's. It's powerful stuff for an alternate timeline sci-fi style book.

The second thing that Roth does well is to recreate the psyche of a pre-pubescent boy. Perhaps the feat isn't all that amazing given that he seems to have rewritten his own pysche, but then you are forced to ask yourself, "Where does the fiction end and the memoir begin?" The book is fiction, right? I mean, it's very nearly science-fiction, but Roth is a good writer and good writers are nothing if not believable. Roth the character is caught up in all the mental chicanery of any normal young boy, and Roth the writer captures it all with an alarming poignancy that is worth the price of admission.

I highly, highly recommend this book to any interested readers, and I encourage you to read it as a "genre" book. (See previous posts on Chabon for a discussion of the "genre" category and all it entails.)

a little pulp to lighten your load

In a strange twist of literary fate, I have finished three books in the last two days. One is the relatively serious Religious Literacy, a short little non-fiction tome bemoaning the loss of religious literacy in the U.S. The other two, alas, are a little less academic and lot more entertaining: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams and The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett.

I have been on a bit of a Hammett kick recently, so let's start with The Thin Man. Hammett established his reputation by writing short, intense detective thrillers. They tended to star The Continental Op, the otherwise nameless detective characterized by his employer, The Continental Detective Agency, and his stature, short and stout. After a time, Hammett tried his hand at longer, more complex narratives. One of those attempts was The Maltese Falcon. More than a novellette but not quite a full-fledged novel, this story featured the inimitable Sam Spade and has managed to stay in the public imagination in no small part because of the film starring Humphrey Bogart. The book works because there are only a handful of characters who lie, cheat, and steal. Plus, Spade runs about keeping them all in check and is himself quite a handful. The Thin Man, however, takes a giant leap further into the realm of complexity. It's almost not worth the ride, but Hammett redeems himself with the delightful duo of Nick and Nora Charles. Nick is a retired detective. He married the independently wealthy Nora, he helps her stay rich, and he spends the majority of his time drinking, carousing, and dodging bullets. He's an homage to old school macho, hard-boiled to the extreme. After getting seriously grazed by a gangster's bullet, Nick asks for a drink before calling a doctor. And while most of Hammett's females are either femme fatales or hilarious send-ups of the weaker sex, Nora is a quick-witted sidekick. She disappears a little too much for a feminist like myself to be happy, but she never frets and gives Nick some well-deserved crap every chapter or two.

Plotwise, this book is a bit of a disaster. Too many characters are doing too many things to too many other characters without probable cause. And it's awfully difficult to see the end from any point besides the end. I like a good mystery. I like to be tricked, too. But the mystery in The Thin Man is not the one described in the book, but rather the fact that it is considered readable by any but the most devoted of mystery fans. Good mysteries usually provide a few clues for the discriminating reader. They leave you scratching your head at the end and thinking, "Man, how did I miss that? It was so obvious." or "Wow, I never saw that one coming." Unfortunately, at the end of this book, I found myself thinking "That was stupid. And incomprehensible." Yes, I actually think things like that. The problem is that everyone ran around being crazy and misleading, and Nick pops in at the end and says, "Here's what I think. Now let's grab a drink." And that's pretty much the entire last chapter. Well, not quite. He gives a nice little speech about how the real world has a lot more ambiguity and indecision than people think. He goes on to say that sometimes that's all you get - there're no guarantees and there's no surety. A thoroughly modern sentiment from a writer who brought about modernity. And on that at least I can look back and say, "A pretty good read." (But if you're new to Hammett, read The Maltese Falcon first.)

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

I recently finished a third reading of The Road, prompted in no small measure by an essay written by Michael Chabon in his new non-fiction book Maps and Legends. Chabon argues, rightfully so, that there ought to be no artificial distinction between literary fiction, by which he means serious fiction, and "genre fiction," by which he means mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance, etc. He uses McCarthy and The Road to point out that serious writers of literature often write "genre fiction" and that the only difference is how such books are perceived by publishers (primarily), critics, librarians, and others whose job is to categorize. Chabon makes an excellent point. And to his point, I would add the following: writers of so-called "genre fiction" walk a more difficult path because their readers have higher expectations of conventions and rules and formulae. This is not to say that a sci-fi writer cannot break the conventions; it is merely to say that genre writers must prove they can walk the walk and talk the talk before their readers will let them get away with bending the rules. In true irony, writers of staid literary fiction walk an easier road because the conventions and formulae of literary fiction are so loosy-goosy that anything goes; and furthermore, to have any expectations for literary fiction is to restrict oneself as a reader, and that simply cannot happen. Or so we are meant to believe.

Chabon goes on to argue that writing is about entertainment, nothing more and nothing less. Therefore, artificial distinctions mean nothing when the only true criterion that exists is entertainment ability. I believe that Chabon is correct and that such dubious categorizations should be thrust aside to make way for the megalithic entity that is entertainment. (Having said that, I obviously don't support the dumbing down of cultural phenomena that seems to coincide with the centralization of entertainment, but that is another post.) We should read and judge and critique based on how well or poorly we are entertained. Chabon makes this argument partly because he admits that he writes to entertain more than anything else. And I suspect that this is true of the vast majority of writers as well. The implicit part of the argument is that "genre fiction" must be pretty darn good because of its popularity and because critics, thinking it an insult, refer to this form of storytelling as "mere entertainment" or some other coded phrase implying "genre" rather than "literary."

Many of the essays that follow in Maps and Legends are serious discussions and considerations of "genre literature" of one kind or another. I was drawn to Chabon's book because I notice a lack of serious discussion about the "genre" texts that are extremely entertaining and that I enjoy. I suspect that Chabon himself is guilty of the categorization trap. He starts off by mentioning McCarthy and The Road to lure literary elitists into the conversation; McCarthy has been considered for the majority of his career as a very serious writer of literary fiction. But Chabon quickly relabels McCarthy as a science-fiction writer based on the post-apocalyptic premise of The Road. By this point, hopefully, Chabon has convinced those literary fiction elitists that they need to broaden their perspective, and he then invites us all into conversations about entertaining reading. The main reason I love Maps and Legends is that Chabon makes it cool to talk about writers and texts that I enjoy and, yes, am entertained by. Chabon follows with essays on Sherlock Holmes and fan fiction, Philip Pullman's rethinking of Paradise Lost in the His Dark Materials Trilogy (which I reviewed here), the comic book industry and its perhaps fatal turn toward the adult audience, and comic great Will Eisner, among others. Maps and Legends talks about the stuff that I read and that my friends read, never mind the fact that these friends of mine aren't friends with each other, that they live thousands of miles and in some cases whole oceans apart, and that the main thing that unites us all is our love of comics or mysteries or sci-fi books; in short, we are bound together because we are entertained together. And those doing the entertaining should not be degraded because they choose to entertain via "genre."

Maps and Legends is a wonderful collection of essays on a wide variety of literature. Included are a few in which Chabon discusses his own motivations, fears, and loves. The proceeds of the book go to support 826 National, a national nonprofit that supports youth writing centers in seven US cities. I highly encourage folks to buy and read this book.

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Addendum:

Taking Chabon's words to heart, I decided on a little reading experiment. With a twist. I supposed that Chabon wanted folks who limited their reading to "literary" fiction to branch out and perhaps break down their presuppositions about "genre" fiction. While I am a great lover of literary fiction, I consider myself more of a genre reader. I love Herman Hesse and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I probably spend more time reading mysteries, science-fiction, and comic books than I do reading serious literary fiction. So, I thought it high time that I broaden my own presuppositions about the literary writers. But that wasn't enough -- I wanted to find books by literary types who took a chance and jumped into the genre field. (This way I'd get the best of both worlds.) I wanted to find more writers like McCarthy, writers who took the chance to transcend the artificial categorizations of fiction. I found three books that meet my criteria and will read and review them throughout the summer months. My short list is as follows:

-Phillip Roth, The Plot Against America. Reason: This book uses the sci-fi convention of alternate-history (sometimes called alternate universe) to rethink the history of the USA if pro-fascist Charles Lindbergh had run against and defeated Franklin Roosevelt in 1940's. Roth, of course, is probably one of the most famous "literary" American writers still alive. He's taught all over college curriculums and won all sorts of serious "literary" fiction awards.

-Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Reason: Since Chabon made the argument that provoked my experiment in the first place, I thought I'd give his alternate-history / detective story a chance. There are a couple of things going at once in this book. One: the story takes place in Sitka, Alaska, in the modern age. Chabon's Sitka was settled by European Jews fleeing the Nazis in the 30's and 40's. Sitka is given temporarily to the Jews for 60 years, but when the time is up the district will undergo reversion. The story takes place more or less right now; Reversion is fast approaching. Two: the story's protagonist is Meyer Landsman, a hard-boiled detective in the Chandler/Hammet mold. There is a murder that Landsman must solve. And he'll get pummeled once or twice in the ensuing drama. In addition, Chabon has a "literary" reputation, despite the fact this his last few publications have been strictly "genre" (see my review of Gentlemen of the Road).

-Audrey Niffinegger, The Time-Traveler's Wife. Reason: My partner recently finished this book and loved it. She hates "genre." Rather ironically (for my partner and I that is) Chabon writes about this book as another example of book that crosses/transcends the categorical distinctions of "literary" and "genre" fiction. He considers it sci-fi, and it does have a rather sci-fi plot from what I read of the back cover.

I'll let you know how the experiment goes.

Reading as a Father, Reading as a Fan: McCarthy's The Road Revisited

In a previous discussion of The Road, I talked about the timing of reading the novel. My first reading was before I became a father. Because of this, I connected closely with the little boy. Papa became a surrogate for my own father. And in this way I took the horrific journey that McCarthy had set out for his characters. (Since I've convinced, cajoled, and bribed everyone I know into at least attempting to read this book, I will now progress to discuss important plot points. Just so you know.) In the end, when the father died, and the little boy sat by his corpse in the woods for several days and wept, I too wept. I cried on my couch as I ceremoniously turned the final pages in the dark hours of the late night or the early morning, imagining how I someday will have to deal with my own father's death. I wondered, and still do, if I've learned enough, if I can carry the fire that drives my own family.

A completely different reading opened itself to me after my daughter was born. I finally understood the deep commitment to responsibility that drives the father in the book. All of his actions took on a clarified meaning. While I never questioned the moment when he shot a potential cannibal who grabbed his son, now I started to question why he didn't shoot him sooner. The words, the gestures, and the caresses now meant something completely different. In this most recent reading, I am no longer the passive recipient of such actions, I am speaking, doing, holding myself. There is an urgency to how I read the book. I know the father is dying. While I knew that the first time I read the book, the immediacy of it never connected with my comprehension of the narrative. Now, every cough in the day, every night spent in unsleeping agony by the father hits me on an emotional level that I never experienced before. He is absolutely aware of the world in which he will leave his son. It is Hobbesian- nasty, brutish, and short. So he must protect him as long as possible and then hope against hope that he did enough. These are the same requirements for any parent, though I didn't know with the pit of my soul about this as I read the first time. Now I know.

The angelic and messianic perspective that the father holds for his son also became much more prominent in this reading. It is no coincidence that the boy's hair is an unruly mess of golden tangles or that the light tends to hit him just so. If it is true that the father and son are carrying the mysterious "fire" of goodness, then the boy is undoubtedly a messiah or an angel. And, the father, his protector, must in turn be ruthless and cold on occasion to ensure his survival. And if there is no one to spread the fire to, then the father's agony is all the more poignant because his actions ultimately amount to nothing and his son's existence is also futile.

While McCarthy is often considered a "serious" novelist (see post on Chabon's Maps and Legends), this book is very clearly in the science-fiction / fantasy style. McCarthy uses some of the techniques from this "genre" quite effectively. I think back to Tolkien's work and how the characters routinely found a safe haven that allowed them to collectively catch their breaths for the next part of their journey. These save havens were frequently semi-magical forest realms, peopled by the immortal elves, where time seemed to stand still. McCarthy's morbid twist is that anything combustible is already destroyed or burning as his duo walk the road, yet they too find safe-havens. The most notable is an underground bomb shelter, a leftover relic from the Cold War that unfortunately did its builders no good in the nuclear holocaust that presages the events in the book. The father and son find temporary sanctuary, though they, like the hobbits of Tolkien's Middle Earth, know that their journey has not ended and that despite the temptation, they too must continue. I've always enjoyed this technique and the various ways in which my favorite writers choose to employ it. There are few authors as morbid as McCarthy, and it was intriguing to see the way he would twist this genre device.

Finally, like many readers I believe that what makes a book good is that it endures. Each reading is new. Each reading presents new interpretations and imagery and connections. The Road is a dark and twisted book. In many ways it is on par with the horror works of Stephen King or Edgar Allan Poe. It is also transcendent because it finds the common thread of humanity that connects us all - the fire it is called by the father and son - and builds on that thread, tenuous though the structure may be. Like the father and son, the book itself endures even though the world it depicts may not. I look forward to reading the book again in a few years to see what new discoveries await me.

Dying Inside

I sometimes read like a starving man. I don't always notice the details, but I know when I'm satiated, if I'm satiated. The voracious style, as I like to call it, can be problematic at times. For example, I am rereading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The book is dark. Really dark. I remembered the cannibalism, just not the quantity and the ubiquitousness. I remembered the theistic ruminations, just not their intensity. I am reading slower this time, being more methodical. I'm writing down the lines that jump out at me. (For example: "Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them." Crazy beautiful.) This particular rereading has the feel of the first time through. Perhaps its McCarthy. Perhaps its me.

I recently finished Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg. I took it down quickly, perhaps too quickly. It was given to me by a close friend. I am hesitant to read books recommended by close friends. What if I don't like it? Worse, what if I think it's rubbish? How do I tell this to someone who treasures the book so much? Yes, book recommendations can be a tricky thing. Dying Inside has that tricky feel to it.

The protagonist is David Selig. He can read minds. And he is slowly losing that power. I found the premise both rich and personal. Who hasn't dreamed of the possibilities of mindreading at one time or another? Who hasn't thought, perhaps a little guiltily, that maybe someone is reading their mind? I have done both, mostly as a child, but there are paranoid times when still I wonder. Silverberg does a tremendous job of writing an interior monologue for a character who has/had the ability to pick up on the interior monologues of others. Selig basically invites the reader to do what he does all the time, namely to tease out the innermost details of what makes us who we are. And his inner self, like yours, mine, is convoluted, insecure, and just trying to make it from day to day.

The book is full of allusions to "literature," by which I mean the type of stuff that Harold Bloom would canonize if society just let him categorize to his elitist little heart's delight. I caught a lot of the allusions, though I couldn't tell if they were mentioned to move the narrative along or to name drop. Selig too is a voracious reader, and he peppers his interior monologues with the aforementioned connections. But the character, with his vast repository of classical knowledge, does little more than mope. He is an older, more bitter Holden Caulfield who has the ability to read minds but does little with the ability other than spy, gripe, and lament his own insecurity. I couldn't stand The Catcher in the Rye, and I had that same terrible feeling for a good portion of Dying Inside. Fortunately it was short, and the author concludes with a slightly more redeeming feeling about mankind.

The human condition is ultimately what all narratives are about. Some lament, some celebrate, some ruminate, some plain and simply are there for laughs. The redeeming feature of Dying Inside is that while it spends an inordinate amount of time lamenting the human condition, it is ultimately a celebration of those very characteristics that make us human, that make us beautiful, and that make us fragile. The name-dropping, which I feared at the outset as a sort of intellectual masturbation, may in fact be a celebration of intellectual and cultural pleasure. The rampant insecurities explored ad nauseum by Selig take on a slightly more salvific connotation when he makes it clear to the reader that his insecurities are the very things that unite, not separate, him from the society in which he struggles to live.

This book is surely not for everyone. Those with an interest in deeply existential narratives will enjoy it immensely. Those who may want a glimpse into the psyche of Holden Caulfield at a later age may find it helpful. It is not, however, a quick summer read, and for the most part it is not a "feel good story." But it is the human condition at its most redeeming.

Books are like lovers. You caress them gently. You hold them in the late hours cherishing their secrets. You choose them with care, hopefully, and speak their praises to others. You try to be discriminating in the ones you choose to spend time with because it feels horrible to get deeply into one with the notion that it will all be just a giant waste of time.

I am in between lovers right now. Or rather I should say I am testing the waters. A little from this one, a little from that, trying to find just the right dance partner. But each has something slightly different to choose from. This one is dark, intense, engaging. Perhaps a little too engaging for a summer fling, though. That one is older, a truly classic stunning beauty. But perhaps I want a little less experience and a little more rough around the edges, know what I mean? Maybe I want something superficial, a rebound book, if you will. I know it won't last, but that doesn't mean we can't have fun for a time.

Oh, the choices, the choices. I am enjoying my bachelorhood, knowing that there's no reason to rush into anything. There's no pressure. Just how it should be in the summer.

I've been off books for a couple weeks now and can't seem to figure out why. After Chabon, I polished off A Farewell to Arms which my junior/senior class was reading in school. I've been wondering if Hemingway is the cause of my literary doldrums. I've always loved the beautiful simplicity of The Old Man and Sea - I can see why it got him the Nobel. And I've heard amazing things about A Farewell to Arms. In fact, it's the only Hemingway I've managed to finish in the last decade; For Whom the Bells Tolls fell by the wayside twice and The Sun Also Rises never got off the runway.

So, I more or less enjoyed AFtA - the ending is just so damn brutal but beautiful at the same time, but I haven't gotten into anything since then. I'm reading a non-fiction book (yes, it does happen from time to time) about the Templer Knights. It started out brilliantly, but I've since lost interest (as happens with most non-fictioners). And I haven't felt anything about books since. And this lack of feeling has got me worried. I usually have an aching need to be reading something, to be living in someone else's world or just their head even if it's only for 20 minutes a day. I even have a Didius Falco mystery, my standby series for the last 3 years, sitting on the table ready to go at a moment's notice, yet I haven't so much as looked at the cover.

I went through my comics recently to see if I needed a change of milieu, so to speak, but I haven't really gotten into any of the oldies or any of the unreads yet either. What is wrong? Perhaps nothing is wrong and my mind just needs some sort of reading vacation, though I feel like this explanation is a bit of a stretch. If anyone is reading this and has any insights on the situation, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think. Otherwise, I shall just go around blaming Ernest's overly-stoic depiction of manhood for a while, until I finally find something worth perusing or give up on literacy altogether.