Yesterday, the snowpack was in retreat, revealing hidden activity in the front gardens on my block.
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In one of his poems e.e. cummings mocks the inventor who builds “an instrument to measure spring with.” His description of the inventor — “some oneyed son for a bitch”– brings to mind a camera.
Hands off my camera, e.e.
Photos of a “reserved” parking spot on my street in Washington, DC, February 13, 2010. It’s nice to see the tradition of using two metal lawn chairs as space savers is being upheld, well into the 21st century.
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So here’s the difference between Philadelphia (where I grew up) and Washington, DC (where I live): In Philadelphia it is understood that if you take the time to clear a parking space in front of your house after a snow storm, you then have a valid claim to its exclusive use. Sweat equity confers upon you that right and interest. Digging out gives you dibs. No questions asked.
But in Washington, questions are asked, ethics are examined, situational nuances are parsed. Commentators turn to Locke and Hobbes for guidance. See, for example, the lively discussion engendered by the article: “Can Shovelers “Reserve” Parking Spots They Clear?” in the Washington Post, here; additional views here and here. BTW, WaPo’s online poll, which has received 5000+ votes so far, finds 76% answering “Yes”. The reaction is more even-handed (but less even-tempered) in the dozens of comments posted by readers.
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“Solar” is something of a departure for McEwan. It is also something of a disappointment.
The novel traces a decade in the life of Michael Beard, a British Nobel laureate in physics. The book begins in the year 2000 as the 52-year-old scientist’s fifth marriage is dissolving (through every fault of his own), and it ends in 2009 as Beard is about to open a cutting-edge renewable energy facility in New Mexico (with personal disaster imminent).
Readers of McEwan’s earliest books (dark psychological explorations; morbid, perverse, violent) and his most recent novels (grandly serious, elegantly crafted) may be taken aback by this new work. “Solar” is being touted by its publisher and editor, Nan A. Talese, as a “comedy” — a book, she promises, you’ll find filled with “comedic antics”.
I agree with the emerging consensus among readers who’ve had access to an advance reading copy: this is not among McEwan’s best efforts.
In the best of his recent novels McEwan provides readers with the supreme pleasure of a plot and characters that fully seize your consciousness. He composes passages with such fine craft that the reader forgets the act of reading and loses awareness of the author’s hand. There are moments when you find yourself being pulled along by a frictionless, seemingly unmediated flow of story and emotion. The opening of “Enduring Love” and parts of “Saturday” achieve this magical state. Many readers, myself included, experienced this phenomenon most fully in the sweep of “Atonement”.
So a caution is in order: if you pick up “Solar”, do not expect to enjoy anything similar.
The Humor Deficiency
Why is there no magic this time? One answer is that “Solar” is, ostensibly, a “comedy”. Whether the demands of comedy are compatible with McEwan’s strengths as a writer is debatable, and there are few subjects more subjective than the question of what’s funny. Then, too, developing a sustainable comic voice is a matter of practice, of paying dues; no one should expect mastery on a first outing. I join with those who find “Solar” lacking in the art of comedy.
The first 50 pages or so are especially dispiriting: filled with lame humor, sub-Neil-Simon one-liners, and flat-footed stabs at wit. Soon thereafter comes an otherwise well-written episode set in the Arctic Circle, featuring a group of artists on an environmental tour. But when McEwan launches his jokes, there’s precious little originality. Even granting allowances for the piratical practice of comedy, you may be struck by how the best laughs are borrowed ones.
[Spoiler alert] For example, you’ve laughed many times at the dilemma of a child straight-jacketed by winter clothing (a staple of kid-centered comic strips, sitcoms, and movies), and so you’ll laugh again as McEwan spends page after page detailing the helplessness of a childish, roly-poly guy, preparing for a sub-zero trek, donning layers and layers of clothes including multiple gloves — who discovers he cannot then put on his boots, or answer a call of nature. You might squirm with delight (as you’ve done before) when the same guy is afflicted by a variation on the gag in the film, “There’s Something About Mary”, getting his genitals caught by a pants zipper. You may be familiar with the caption written by Robert Mankoff back in 1993 for his oft-reprinted cartoon in The New Yorker (the one in which an executive, trying to avoid agreeing to a meeting, rebuffs the supplicant by saying: “No, Thursday’s out. How about never — is never good for you?”). If that cartoon is part of your memory bank, you will smile when reading the flash-back scene in “Solar”, set in the 1960’s, when a coed parries young Michael Beard’s request for a date by replying: “How about never? Can you make never?” [End of Spoiler Alert]
The funny business eases off in the remainder of the book, as if McEwan grew bored with the assignment. Yes, the author can construct solid episodes of mirth, and there are bits of bright irony and satiric commentary throughout “Solar”. But McEwan falls short of nailing the tricky task of sustaining a course of original comedy for the book’s length.
The Character Deficiency
If you are a reader who prefers strong main characters and an engaging story arc, “Solar” may disappoint. It does not help matters that, for his choice of a protagonist — the figure who will be the sole thread of continuity among the vignettes that jump around in time and geography — McEwan has conjured up, in the character of Michael Beard, a thoroughly despicable man. Beard is, by his own estimation, “neither observant nor sensitive.” Worse still, he is an inveterate liar and thief, a criminal in the making, and morally bankrupt to boot (“But why should he feel guilt? Someone please tell him why.”) Being in his company is a chore — certainly so for his five discarded wives and the professional colleagues he mistreats. Perhaps for the reader too.
Do not expect any new perspective on adultery or failed relationships. At one point, when Beard is trapped by the prospect of his two current lovers bumping into each other, he sighs: “Someone, or everyone, would be disappointed. Nothing new there.” I expect at least one unhappy critic will grab onto those words for use in her or his indictment of the entire book. (Click here to read one online reviewer’s lengthy analysis, headlined with a four-word verdict: “A flabby character-portrait”). But I can’t agree with those who are totally dismissive of the work.
Extenuating Circumstances
However shaky its humor and however repulsive its protagonist’s antics, “Solar” still offers redemptive qualities and content. This is, after all, Ian McEwan, one of our best writers, and the bones of his talent cannot be disguised even in this ill-fitting raiment.
McEwan is a master analyst of decaying relationships, of psychological gamesmanship, of battles for personal supremacy. Beard’s failed marital relationships and his disputes with associates provide opportunities for the author to rehearse those tensions.
McEwan seeks to explore nested worlds: Beard’s personal circumstances; the larger sphere of the scientific community of which he is a prominent member; the enveloping social and political order (rapidly descending into disorder); and finally, the natural order of the planet (also under threat). McEwan is a terrific observer of the interrelationship of these spheres.
I was charmed by McEwan’s take on America, where he sets the final third of the book. This British author is evidently fond of our country. At one point he mentions “the plenitude and strangeness of America as represented by its television.” Beard’s American physician “could be counted on to deliver a clinical judgment with the proper neutrality, without the moral undertones, the hint of blame or poorly suppressed outrage Beard had come to expect from his [British doctors].” McEwan approvingly observes “the intimate politeness at which Americans excel.” He notices the way “Americans good-naturedly declare a class affiliation” — citing, by way of example, a woman who chews gum remorselessly. Here is how Beard’s female companion in New Mexico is described: “She was so merry, so hopelessly optimistic and well-disposed. So American.” And, of course, the weather is better here:
“Always a delicious moment to be savoured, and never to be had in the British Isles, when, showered and perfumed and wearing fresh clothes, one steps out from the air-conditioning into the smooth, invincible warmth of a southern evening.”
Among the themes McEwan briefly explores in “Solar” is the trendy academic movement that would define all areas of knowledge as “socially constructed” – even the hard sciences. The malleability of memory is a recurrent motif, as is the related phenomenon of our all too human capacity for woeful misunderstanding, leading to catastrophe. There is lively (but, again, abbreviated) attention paid to the Two Cultures debate: science versus the humanities (or, more particularly, in the case of Beard’s first marriage, physics versus poetry; Beard’s scientific way of “knowing the world” locks him out of an appreciation of “other ways” of knowing the world.).
Final Observations
In an effort to propel “Solar” forward, McEwan employs the same device used by John Irving in his most recent novel, “Last Night in Twisted River”. Each subsequent section of the book leaps ahead several years, and, after the reader is duly situated into the new period, the author uses flashbacks to fill in the gap. This technique, which might annoy some as desultory, actually does the work of keeping the reader engaged.
The book’s second most important character — a young post-doctorate member of the team of scientists at the British Centre for Renewable Energy — hides a clue to the novel. His name is Tom Aldous. That name, I believe, is a conflation of the names of two real persons, from two previous centuries. McEwen, whose 21st century novel features the dominant science story of our day (climate change) as its “background hum“, has decided to invoke Thomas Henry Huxley, the 19th century scientist who championed the world-altering scientific development of his era, Darwinism. “Tom” Huxley is linked to his grandson, Aldous Huxley, the 20th century author of the enduring utopian novel, “Brave New World”. Aldous was also a writer of satiric novels, some of which featured a topical scientific twist. There may be a humbling lesson in the fact that those satiric novels have long since been forgotten.
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Addendum: A Weird Coincidence (a/k/a, the Bacon Bookmark)
On page 167 of “Solar”, McEwan illustrates Michael Beard’s disorderly habits with the story of the time his third wife, while cleaning their home, “discovered in the pages of a valuable first edition an ancient rasher of his breakfast bacon doubling as a bookmark.” A day after I read that passage — cringe-inducing if you’re a book lover — I happened to be watching Stephen Colbert’s interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, author of “Eating Animals”. At the end of the segment, Colbert uses a strip of bacon to mark his place in his copy of Foer’s book. Check out the video, here; Colbert brings out the bacon at 4:45.
I awoke this morning to a Hiroshige-like scene of bare tree limbs filled with cottony snow:
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Below is Utagawa Hiroshige’s “Evening Snow at Asukayama” (1837-38), a Japanese wookblock print from his series, “Eight Views from the Neighborhood of Edo”:
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It’s not clear whether the pack animal in the second picture came from an early Honda dealership.
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Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) wrote “Monsieur Pain” in 1981-82, at the start of a brief but productive career as an imaginative writer of fiction. The Chilean-born Bolaño is best known for his dazzling breakthrough novel, “The Savage Detectives,” and the posthumously published “2666″. (For an excellent summary of Bolano’s main themes and motifs, see Henry Hitchings review of the “summative” novel “2666″ here.)
“Monsieur Pain” is a short (134-page) work, and two audiences may find pleasure in spending a few hours in its spell:
Happy veterans — readers who have been entranced by one or more of Bolaño’s celebrated later works and who want to trace the origin of his mature themes, his obsessions, and his methods, back to the time of their youthful first expression, will find revelations in “Monsieur Pain”.
Wary novices — new readers who are intrigued by, yet also skeptical of, the Bolaño phenomenon. A Washington Post critic, reflecting on Bolaño’s death in 2003, declared: “Bolano has joined the immortals” — and this kind of passionate celebration, echoed many times over by the mainstream critical establishment, garners attention and maybe distrust among general reader population. Some potential readers are, understandably, daunted by the weight of his final writings. They may also be confused by negative reactions to the author, as voiced in the two dozen one- and two-star complaints among the customer reviews of ”2666″ on Amazon.com. For those wary readers I recommend this novel as good investment of your time.
Another reviewer described Bolaño’s worldview as “strange and marvelous and impossibly funny, bursting with melancholy and horror.” By Bolaño’s own reckoning, his formative literary influences were all over the map. In the case of “Monsieur Pain” Bolaño turned to Edgar Allan Poe as the animating force for his narrative. This is not hidden. Between the Dedication Page and a Preliminary Note, on what is sometimes referred to as an Inspiration Page, Bolaño placed a dialog excerpt from Poe’s short story of 1844, “Mesmeric Revelation.” That tale is told as a conversation between a hypnotist and an invalid, a man on the cusp of death, who is placed under hypnosis in an experiment to see whether it will afford him a glimpse of the after-life. At one point the hypnotized patient confides: “the mesmeric condition is so near death as to content me.”
“Monsieur Pain” combines elements of a mystery and a detective story, the latter a genre Poe pioneered. But it is much more than that; the novel genuinely defies categorization. It is narrated by Monsieur Pierre Pain, a veteran survivor of the battle of Verdun, where he was gassed. Two decades later, he is a pensioner living, poorly, in the Paris demimonde. He has studied mesmerism. Pain is called upon to apply his mesmeric skills to save the life of a hospitalized poet. Not long after his initial visit to the Clinic, events begin to assume a surrealist bent. Blended with a free-floating paranoia, this surreal atmosphere holds sway over the remainder of the novel. Time and space bend: time, at one point, is described as running faster than a clock; the Clinic morphs into a prison, its corridors a labyrinth.
Try as he might, Pain cannot shake off a pair of Spanish assassins, one of whom, when given the chance, attempts to escape, Oswald-like, by ducking into a movie theater. (Whether Bolaño, who would have been 10 1/2 at the time, followed the news of the JFK assassination, is unknown.) Pain is amused by an odd pair of young artists, genuine twins, ensconced in a bizarre cafe whose every fixture and surface is painted a shade of green. These brothers construct miniature disaster scenes (car crashes, train wrecks) inside fish-tanks. (The novelty of this art eerily anticipates Jeff Koons’ likewise surreal basketballs-in-a-fish-tank constructions?) Pain learns about a conspiracy that may involve radiation experiments; he’s made privy to a rumored love affair involving Madame Curie’s daughter. Pain encounters a former friend who has since become a torturer for Franco’s forces.
Which brings us to the political. The dread hanging over Paris in the year 1938 is the specter of totalitarianism. For Bolaño, who considered himself primarily a poet, the personal sorrows of a young Keats (half in love with easeful death) are distant indulgences, supplanted in the modern era by men powerfully in love with half death. Poe would not have been surprised by this turn of events. The question of the poet’s response to fascism, hinted at in “Monsieur Pain,” will take on greater urgency in Bolano’s subsequent novels.
By the mid-point of “Monsieur Pain,” the narrator has fallen sway to paranoia, he is captive to waking dreams. (Those many dreams had a real effect on me: I went to sleep immediately after finishing the book, and that night had more vivid dreams than I’d had in a long time.) Encounters with labyrinths, real and metaphorical, multiply. No matter where you are, you never really find the way out of the labyrinth. The novel ends with an Epilogue for Voices that reveals the main characters’ fates.
Some readers will find all of this a weird, indigestible brew, a fun-house ride not worth taking. If the prospect of Poe meets Borges meets Paul Auster meets Thomas Pynchon is off-putting, best stay away. But if you stick with it, you will appreciate how economically Bolaño sketches scene after scene, how he manages to maintain a fast pace throughout, disorienting the reader yet maintaining equilibrium. For me, the reading experience was similar to watching a film noir with an experimental bent. From time to time I was reminded of Hitchcock, especially in the way Bolaño “edits” a sequence for the reader’s consumption, and the way he uses physical surroundings to reveal psychological space, and vice versa. There is a cleverly unfurled scene in a movie house in which Bolaño’s piecemeal description of the plot of the film being screened serves as counterpoint to the stories exchanged by two former friends catching up in the audience. True, the book offers no big pay-off; it never soars. Instead, its rewards are modest. Yet you are sure to come away respecting how Bolaño, the poet, can access beauty through sensitive description. You will learn how touching he can be.
Despite or maybe because of the book’s incoherence I wound up liking it; another short novel of his, “By Night in Chile,” is on my near-term reading list.
[Update (01-30-2010): An abridged version of this essay is published as a book review on Amazon.com, here.]
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A personal essay by David Owen (“The Dime Store Floor”) graces the Jan. 25, 2010 edition of The New Yorker magazine. Throughout the piece Owen’s narrative is intermittently brilliant, as he riffs on a theme posed as a question: What did childhood smell like? I think Owen should try his hand at writing a novel. At one point he describes a recent bike ride near his home, as he came upon members of a girls’ high-school cross-country team running in tight formation:
“As I passed the girls I rode through the invisible trailing cloud of their mingled shampoo fragrances, and suddenly I felt a sort of dumbbell patriotism. My thought was something like this: This is the tremendous strength of America — our vigorous, optimistic young people and their clean, clean hair.”
Dumbbell patriotism. I like that formulation. As an expression of aw-shucks awe at this, our country, and what this country hosts, it captures what I feel each time I come across some vibrant display of the nation’s life-blood.
I’m especially moved to thanks-giving by instances of everyday, nonchalant tolerance. In concept America is defined by freedom and diversity of thought in the public sphere. Happily, there are still a visible examples of that in practice. Consider the advertisement I spotted this week on the rear end of a public bus chugging along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.
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British novelist Ian McEwan, in conversation with Richard Dawkins, is less sanguine about the durability of America’s greatness in this regard. Video here. Dawkins mentions what he sees as an America “rapidly degenerating into a theocracy.” McEwan agrees, and says this development is “one of the most extraordinary reversals in history, isn’t it? You have this extraordinary social experiment: America, an immigrant state, founded in reaction to the religious absolutisms of Old Europe. And then, fast-forward a couple of hundred years, you have at least in Western Europe, more or less entirely, a set of secular governments, and political conversations conducted without any reference to God, while the United States is a place where you cannot hold high office without invoking this Deity.”
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You Are What You Buy . . .
America’s embrace of this belief is a major cause of the nation’s current economic, social and political predicament. When did we first adopt this way of life? The answer is there was no single moment; the seduction was gradual. Yet if you were to go searching for markers along the path to our present baleful state, one way station might be the event mentioned by Deborah Solomon in her review of two books about Pop artists Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, in today’s NY Times:
“It is probably relevant that in July 1959, the so-called kitchen debate was held between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon. Staged in Moscow, in a faux suburban house constructed expressly for the occasion, the encounter offered Vice President Nixon the chance to demonstrate the everyday comforts and conveniences of American life, from Pepsi-Cola and Betty Crocker cake mixes to Cadillacs and G.E. dishwashers. The debate was seen around the world and redefined America virtually overnight as a consumerist utopia where the goods you stored in your kitchen cabinets were as much a symbol of cherished values as the bald eagle and the flag.”
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This week I raked leaves in front of the house. While cleaning out the tree box near the curb I found, amongst brown oak leaves blown there from up the block and around the corner, a crumpled piece of paper. Unfolded, it revealed a drawing done with colored pencils. The artist’s use of line and color suggests it is from the hand of the same child artist responsible for the sidewalk chalk-drawing of a Mouse Musketeer I came upon last summer. (That earlier work is reproduced here.)
On the 9″ by 6″ sheet are two figures: a reindeer and snowman. The snowman sports a two-tiered hat, a classic carrot-orange nose, a lopsided mouth like Dick Cheney’s – and a rarely seen pair of legs and feet.
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The relational displacement of the snowman’s eyes, nose and mouth recall the portrait innovation Picasso developed in the 1930s — a style that led many exasperated viewers to blurt out, “My kid could do that!”:
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The first six words in the title of this post — if you count each un-capitalized “i” as a word — is the tagline of a new advertising campaign for Jeep vehicles. The campaign’s 30-second TV commercials have not been well received by media observers. See, for example, comments here, here, and here. Jeep is also placing “i live, i ride, i am” advertisements in magazines, and in my opinion these are truly, madly, deeply, bad. I’m talking about text so awful it defies parody. Here is a two-page spread in the December 14, 2009 edition of TIME magazine (pages 34-35):
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The words that appear in faint gray type in the upper right quadrant — the text providing the premise for the punchy tagline — reads as follows:
i’ve been through hell and high water
i can text but prefer to talk
i read Keats and wear cleats
i think toy dogs are ok
but big dogs rule
i get my “fresh catch” from
the sushi bar sometimes
i wear all earth tones,
but mud is my favorite.
Yes, those lower-case “i”s are indigenous to the copy. It wouldn’t surprise me if a phalanx of Apple attorneys were suspiciously eyeing those “i”s. It also wouldn’t surprise me if those same lawyers offer Chrysler, in lieu of crippling litigation, a friendly settlement proposal calling for minor changes in the tag line:
i live. i ride. i phone. i pod. i mac. i am.
But for now let’s give credit where credit is due. It was the Mad Men at Jeep’s advertising firm who came up with the idea of eschewing margins in favor of pseudo-poetically centering each of the nine descriptive lines. And it was their idea to italicize the word sometimes — a nuance sure to render many a reader weak-kneed.
I confess I was puzzled, however, to find the bold lack of punctuation surrendering to convention just when the statement reaches its final two lines. It’s as if the copywriter, almost done with the task, was suddenly touched by the ghost of her tenth grade English teacher, who whispered a plea: A comma and a period, please!
On the other hand, who among us can resist forming a wry smile at the rhyming of Keats with cleats? Clever.
As for the trendy sentiments expressed in the ad, yes, they’re sophomoric. But so what? (The visiting ghost came from the tenth grade, remember?) Maybe the whole thing is an homage to the malarkey found in the Manifesto of Thompson Hotels?
But enough about words. The bigger oddity is the photo in the left panel of the ad. This, presumably, is the Keatsian survivor of the fabled watery hell (or was it hellish waters?). This is a man who does not know for sure whether tonight’s dinner will include sushi. Can you blame him for scowling at us? Of course not.
But I wonder: Why was he asked to take a pose that is in-your-face and awkward, macho and goofy? Hey, I know the arm swing’s a guy thing; I do it too. But here’s the risk: Someone will be tempted to suggest this guy’s next gig ought to be on stage playing opposite Katisha (She: “My right elbow has a fascination that few can resist.” He: “Ditto my left, baby.”)
Is it just me, or do you also find the more you stare at the picture the more his bare forearm looks like a raw turkey drumstick attached to his left ear? (OK, maybe it’s just too close to Thanksgiving for me.) Whether it be a drumstick or an arm, the fact is the thing’s projecting forward from pictorial space, and none too elegantly. As artists will testify, foreshortening can be a bitch. See, for example, Durer’s posthumously published treatise, De Symmetria. So why did the creator of the ad go there, and why compound the problem by featuring a limb that’s freakishly fingerless?
At least when we watch Simon Cowell’s bad habit of scratching the back of his neck, we see him in motion (as in this video at 1:41 – 1:43) and we get to see his hand, as shown in this screen shot:
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[As for the title of this post, if you want to read more about "i yi yi" (aka, "Aye Yi Yi"), an expression used to show frustration, hopelessness, sadness, annoyance, click here and here.]