Books Are The Future

The Manticore by Robertson Davies

Wow, I’m like ten books behind… I read this, what, like, three months ago? It’s almost like work picking up can ruin your hobby or something. Amirite? AM I RIGHT?

Here’s something I am right about: The Manticore is a solid sequel to Fifth Business. It never reaches the highest highs that Fifth Business does—really, Fifth Business is a knock-down, drag-out, crowd-pleasing masterpiece… the farther away I get from it the more I feel that way—but this book does its job well.

It takes the Jungian themes of the first novel and puts them front and center. Boyd Staunton’s son undergoes Jungian psychiatric treatment in Zurich, and the novel is mostly the doctor/patient conversations as related through the Staunton son’s diaries. This is just good, solid stuff. The most acrobatic feat delivered in the pages is Davies’ ability to make a dislikable character enthrallingly readable. 

So here’s my verdict: read Fifth Business if you haven’t, and then you’ll have to read this one. Keep going! WE CAN DO THIS.

Roses Are Red by James Patterson

I didn’t stop reading, so relax, tough guys. James Patterson is a teflon monolith, a critic-proof Genre Plot Machine, a man who, like the underground river of the dead, flows. This New York Times Magazine profile about him says this: 

Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson.

[…]

According to Forbes magazine, Patterson earned Hachette about $500 million over the last two years. Hachette disputes the accuracy of these numbers but wouldn’t provide me with different ones. Regardless, it seems safe to assume that Patterson, who puts out more best sellers in any given year than many publishing houses, is responsible for a meaningful portion of the company’s annual revenues. “I like to say that Jim is the rock on which we build this company,” David Young told me in his office one recent morning.

[…]

What is perhaps most remarkable about the Patterson empire is the sheer volume of books it produces. The nine hardcovers a year are really only the beginning. Nearly all of those books are published a second and third time, first as traditional paperbacks, then as pocket-size, mass-market paperbacks. “Scarcely a week goes by when we aren’t publishing something by James Patterson,” Young told me, only half-joking.

This is the seventh Alex Cross novel, Patterson’s most popular series. I didn’t read the first six. This was my first Cross but third JP novel. I tried to parachute in and get my bearings. Cross is a Washington D.C. police detective with a psychology PhD from John Hopkins, although I didn’t really see that degree utilized in this particular novel. He’s got cute kids and lady troubles/successes. The book introduces the reader to the Mastermind, who is a broad strokes, radically (RADICALLY) uninteresting version of the I’m-A-Brilliant-Serial-Killer-And-In-My-Messages-I-Prove-I’m-Always-Watching-You-Because-Why-Not?-I-Am-Perfect-At-Crime character. The Mastermind robs a bunch of banks using a variety of criminal crews, staying omnipotent and well behind the scenes. He also has sex with dead bodies sometimes.

The book is terminally vile, mostly because Detective Cross is so terminally good and the Mastermind is so terminally bad. The bodies pile up, Cross can’t figure it out, and it’s pretty depressing how successful the Mastermind is at robbing whoever he wants and killing whoever he wants and then sometimes having sex with the dead bodies. He might as well be an earthbound god, and the source/logic of his divine power is hidden from the reader until literally the final line of the book. And then the answer is in italics.

But it’s also blissful in its own way. I get why it’s good. It reads like a dozen blockbuster movie synopses told in feverish, cut-up micro-chapters (the book has hundreds of chapters) with the only synchronicity coming from Patterson’s conductor-like ability to swell the strings all at the same time. In that way, it is virtuosic. It sort of moves like a souped-up dream written by committee by a group of people I think are well-meaning but part of the problem. Kid in the hospital? Killer on the loose? Ex-wife sighin’ over the phone? Why not all at once from a smart, bland man with a good, honest heart? I admire this novel like I do a car, or a motorcycle, meaning: not very well. Sayonara, James Patterson. I think your commercials rule.

The Clown by Heinrich Boll

Boll wrote this novel while translating The Catcher in the Rye into German in 1962. The best novel I have ever read with a comedian as the protagonist. Also a great feverish break-up novel a la Herzog. After a re-read, I might be thinking: top 10 ever?

The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard 

Yep, 104 stories on 104 pages. All of them read like hearsay read from a disreputable and paranoid newspaper, meaning: it’s a great read. You can read five of the stories here, and I copied down one of my favorites, called “Papermakers”:

The papermaker Filzmoser shot his neighbor Nostlinger, who, like him, was employed in the paper mill in Steirermuhl, by mistake, as he stated in court. He had shot at a pheasant that suddenly flew up out of the undergrowth in the so-called Peiskamer Forest, but instead of hitting the pheasant he had hit Nostlingr, with whom he had regularly gone hunting for twenty-five years. Nostlinger died immediately. He stated that he, Filzmoser, and Nostlinger had been lifelong friends. Witnesses testified in court that the two men had not spoken to each other since the moment when Nostlinger had obtained a loan to build an extension to his house and had been able to start building the extension at once. The reason was that Filzmoser had been denied a similar loan by the same place in Linz. It is well known that in the area of the River Traun a lot of men obtain a hunting permit solely for the purpose of committing murder.

Oh, Bernhard.

How Fiction Works by James Wood (2008) 

If you want to read a short history of the realistic novel, and a lucid explanation of the free direct style, I recommend this book. Also recommended if you want to be reminded that reading more Flaubert, Stendhal, Diderot, and Chekhov sounds like fun. Warning: Wood quotes his favorite authors early and often. I also want to highlight his chapter called “Brief History of Consciousness,” which, despite the sleazy title, is an exciting trip from the Bible’s King David to Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov woven together by examining the “audience” to whom each speaks. (David/God; Macbeth/audience; Raskolnikov/reader.) It leads to such insights as:

Raskolnikov is unnaturally theatrical, or better still, histrionic: he seeks attention, and is desperately unstable and inauthentic, hiding at one moment, confessing at another, proud in one scene, self-abasing in the next. In the novel, we can see the self better than any literary form has yet allowed; but it is not going too far to say that the self is driven mad by being so invisibly scrutinized.

That’s great, but the big problem is that Wood doesn’t care at all about plot, seems to get no joy out of it whatsoever, and tsk tsks over-plotters like Thomas Pynchon for eschewing something he calls “final seriousness.” Wood on Pynchon:

There are pleasures to be had from these amiable, peopled canvases, and there are passages of great beauty, but, as in farce, the cost to final seriousness is considerable: everyone is ultimately protected from real menace because no one really exists. The massive turbines of the incessant story-making produce so much noise that no one can be heard.

I think this condemnation is a lack of imagination on Wood’s part. Wood sometimes seems only capable of finding “pleasure” in character development and “beauty” in well written passages, and I think he misses why Pynchon would construct such plot-heavy turbulence. I always interpreted Pynchon’s style as an attempt to get readers to see the menace in the connections, in the matrices, in the whole, and that his final seriousness came from looking at aerial views of his worlds, not over the shoulders of characters. There is a lot of noise, and Pynchon to wrestle good books and truthful insights out of it. It’s in the struggle between the individual and the massive whole; and, if we’re going there, I might as well throw in that it’s the struggle between George Trow’s “grid of intimacy” and the “grid of two hundred million.” The middle distance, the buffering communities—for example, Raskolnikov’s St. Petersburg, or even his mom and sister and friends—doesn’t exist for Pynchon’s characters. Instead, you get something like, in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pig Bodine popping out of nowhere every few hundred pages to distribute drugs and sing a song. Yeah yeah yeah, it sounds like farce, but the accumulation and repetition of the episodes reveal scarier possibilities. I think part of the pull of Pynchon’s fiction is that he has been asking, since the late 1950s, if all we have is our life inside our head and the super-connected life of the whole earth. And that neither, at the end of the day, might make any sense. Why can’t that be final seriousness?

So that’s my gripe. But Wood is good. I still can’t believe he’s younger than David Foster Wallace would have been.

Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard (1985)

Wow, and I thought rants were for blogs and pundits. This book is an unbroken 150-page paragraph, and, well, this is what you’re in for:

When we see the crowded millions of state people in the big cities we feel sick, because we also feel sick when we see the state. Every morning, as we wake up, we feel sick at this state of ours, and when we step out into the street we feel sick at the state people who populate this state. Humanity is a gigantic state which, if we are honest, makes us sick each time we wake up. Like everybody, I live in a state which makes me sick when I wake up. 

Hate-jazz prose, but the writing doesn’t elicit “yikes” reactions all the time. Bernhard, an Austrian who wrote about post-World War II life in his country, is branded by many critics as “difficult,” and I think a lot of them just type the word, or its synonyms, to pat themselves on the back.

Don’t let professionals claim Bernhard. This is great fiction that you can just pick up, crack open, and absorb. Old Masters is a hotshot sponge of real anxieties, and the sponge is soaking wet: you can bathe in it (no one needs to teach you how to bathe), and you will feel scrubbed. Bernhard may be an iconoclastic hater, but moments of great humanity spring from this novel. These characters spew garbage but, despite themselves, let their heart out; and that’s when I know I am in the hands of someone who really, really cares.

I laughed, I cried, I immediately re-read it again. The second time I read it I didn’t do the deed start to finish; I simply opened it up to random pages and fell into the text. 

It’s caustic, for sure, to the hilt, but never unfair. Bernhard’s not the answer, he didn’t seem to want to be (what a relief!), but I think his idea of a screaming fiction is. 

Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz (1975, a new English translation from 2004)

A concentration camp novel about a Hungarian Jewish teen written by a man who spent a year in Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Zeitz as a Hungarian Jewish teen. 

This novel is a tour-de-force of defamiliarization, as Kertesz obscures the reader’s expectations of a Holocaust novel (I don’t really feel like I need to tell you what you expect from a Holocaust novel) by emphasizing, instead, the matter-of-fact anti-sentimentality of his narrator’s inner-voice. Pick up this book: a captivating, haunting look at a disaffected teenager’s mind under extreme duress. A great—and maybe this sounds weird, but I feel it—novel about a teenager.

An excerpt:

Another thing that somewhat set me thinking that day was the fact that, as I was informed, this place, this institution, had already been in existence for years, standing here and operating exactly the same way, day after day, but nevertheless, as it were—and I admit this notion may, perhaps, contain a certain element of exaggeration—ready and waiting for me. In any event, our own block chief—more than a few people referred to this with distinct, one could say awestruck, admiration—had already been living here for four years. It occurred to me that that had been a year of particular significance for me, being when I enrolled at the grammar school. [The headmaster] had made reference, I recollected, to an ancient Roman philosopher, quoting the tag “non scolae sed vitae discimus”—“we learn for life, not school.” But then in light of that, really, I ought to have been learning all along exclusively about Auschwitz. Everything would have been explained, openly, honestly, reasonably. The thing was, though, that over the four years at school I had heard not a single word about it. Of course, that would have been embarrassing, I conceded, nor indeed did it belong to education, I realized. 

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies (1970)

A page-turner in the Bellovian model of a cranky, aging intellectual justifying his life and personal philosophical system. It is: immensely readable; frequently laugh-out-loud funny; and downright musical in its mastery of narrative flow. Davies’ reverence for myth, and the ways in which he allows such reverence to bend the shape of the story, reminds me vividly of James Branch Cabell. Like Cabell, Davies has the knack for the detail that punches the psychological (as the anonymous tumblr user who recommed this book noted, Jungian) gut. I am loathe to explain any of the plot, except that you meet memorable and very alive people at every turn: a fool-saint, a very serious magician in need of a bombastic fake autobiography, a soft drink mogul, and, of course, the Fifth Business himself, Dunstable Ramsay. Dunstable Ramsay, our narrator, is a one-legged, one-armed World War I veteran, a private school teacher, and a well-regarded scholar of the saints. What is Fifth Business? Here’s the epigram, to explain:

Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were nonetheless essential to bring about the Recognition or the denouement, were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business.

It’s quoted from a fake Danish reference book, so you know this author has what it takes. Serious thanks to the anonymous tumblr user who recommended me this book! I’m definitely going to try and sneak Fifth Business into my everyday idiomatic lexicon. And, of course, I’m going to finish this Deptford Trilogy.

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya (2004, translated into English 2008)

I told my buddy Toto at the very moment the marimba started playing a new song, a chilling sensation, by the way, as if I were about to live out a destiny in which my will barely counted and whose principal feature was danger. 

So goes an early, musical sentence from Senselessness. Very stylistically representative, too: the novel is a unnerving, endless knotted-scarves-up-the-sleeve reveal by an anxious, frightened, angry magician. In an unnamed Latin American country—apparently you can figure out it’s Guatemala from context clues, I didn’t, but it doesn’t matter—a writer facing exile in another country arrives to edit a 1,100-page manuscript detailing the horrors indigenous people have experienced at the hands of the police and army. The stark, graphic and grammatically-imperfect words of these people affect him deeply—I couldn’t stop thinking of the letters in Miss Lonelyhearts—and heighten his anxiety even while alleviating it. He rails against the Catholic church, women, his friends, this country, everything, but he keeps coming back to the beauty of these words: “If I die, I know not who will bury me”; “For always the dreams they were there still”; “I am not complete in the mind.” There are chapter breaks, but each chapter is an unbroken paragraph. It’s a nod to Thomas Bernhard, for sure, and Castellanos Moya—a Honduran writer now living in Pennsylvania—is an avowed fan of the caustic Austrian. He even wrote a book narrated by a character named Thomas Bernhard (not translated into English yet… I can’t wait). For the record: Senselessness was the first of his works to see English translation, but now you can get Tyrant Memory, Dances With Snakes, and She-Devil in the Mirror, too.

Back to Senselessness: this thing radiates the grandest of fuck-you vibes in its looping, angry, anxious talk. But please don’t let the novel-as-diuretic-consciousness scare you away. The action is wonderfully comic, and it moves quickly and with loads of assurance. Castellanos Moya weaves the yukes into the paranoia, brutality and vulgarity in dizzying ways. One of my favorite moments: 

Paralyzed, my mind gone blank, not knowing what to do, wishing that the whole thing had been some kind of nightmare from which I would soon awake, I discovered that Johnny’s bathroom was luxury itself; 

The sentence keeps going (of course), but tell me: what’s not to like here? Dread and panic foment and flow but retreat at the exact right moment for a human to humanly notice the nice bathroom he’s in. And of course it takes place in the bathroom. What an awesome book. 

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World’s Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding (2011)

“Is it hungry? / Is it real? / Does it know basically how I feel?”

            -Wounded Lion, “Hungry?”

If Wounded Lion, here, is asking about Coca-Cola, Michael Blanding answers, “yes.” Throughout The Coke Machine, an unflattering tour of the company’s extensive, and near-labyrinthine, history of lies and greed, Blanding positions Coca-Cola as the “essence of capitalism,” which would be a hungry beast, indeed. The book is an attempt to portray company history as a feedback loop of turning the cold shoulder on vices and moral wrongs—especially the obesity problem in the USA, and political murders and environmental destruction in foreign countries—to maximize shareholder profits and positive brand image.

This addition to the world of Soft Drink Studies is at its best when chronicling action. The lattermost part of The Coke Machine guides the viewer chronologically through an interconnected series of legal maneuvers against the company, pitting the Atlanta headquarters against a diverse cohort of lawyers, activists, union leaders, and far-flung villagers in an attempt to get Coke to admit its wrongdoings in Columbia (murder) and India (water rights, and pollution). In these pages, the book becomes an impressive bureaucracy procedural, detailing the way the courts, the lawyers, and the executives work together to make justice as complicated and ill-meted as cynically possible.

Elsewhere Blanding tries to scorch Coke with his prose, but all he can muster is a lukewarm cliché. If you can, fight through writing like this: “Finding the Coca-Cola Company accused of murder is like finding out Santa Claus is accused of being a pedophile.” Yikes. Forgive the style, and you will be rewarded with substance. It’s by no means essential, but I will never grudge the world another book about soda.