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“By Nightfall” by Michael Cunningham

Monday, September 27th, 2010

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The play of emotions and themes with which Michael Cunningham is most adroit — love, loss, desire, despair, mortality — are again engaged in his new novel set in present day Manhattan. But take note: To launch the reader into the world of “By Nightfall” Cunningham has chosen for the book’s epigraph a line from Rilke’s Duino Elegies: “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” In full text, Rilke’s message is even more chilling: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”  This, Cunningham signals, will be his novel’s all-encompassing theme: the pursuit, use, and misuse of beauty.

Now, this is not the stuff to entice a broad readership.  Many previously attracted by the cross-over appeal of Cunningham’s break-through novel, “The Hours,” will be disappointed to discover that “By Nightfall” is not a comparably rewarding experience. This is, to be frank, a novel for a few.  But still it is a very good novel that I hope will find its audience.

The principal characters in “By Nightfall” are Peter Harris, a 44-year-old contemporary art dealer, and his wife Rebecca, an editor of an arts and culture magazine. The plot, modestly scaled, is set in motion by the appearance of Rebecca’s much younger brother Ethan (age 23), a beautiful, flawed and directionless young man interested in doing “Something in the Arts.” Ethan’s short stay in the couple’s spacious SoHo loft will upend all three lives.

A Slave to Beauty

Here is how Peter remembers his first immersion in beauty, an epiphany he experienced as a teenager at a summer lake as he watched the swim-suited girlfriend of his older brother enter the water:

“It’s not lust, not precisely lust, though it has lust in it. It’s a pure, thrilling, and slightly terrifying apprehension of what he will later call beauty, though the word is insufficient. It’s a tingling sense of divine presence, of the unspeakable perfection of everything that exists now and will exist in the future.”

As a art gallery owner, Peter’s occupation is that of a “servant of beauty.” His role is to judge who among artists is worthy of exceptional recognition and to enable those persons to flourish.  In this endeavor he is suffering a crisis of confidence, seeing himself as a mere “winner of various second prizes,” a person unlikely to rise to the level of taste-maker enjoyed by owners of “first rank” galleries.  He exhibits a post-9/11 existential dread: “[a] conviction, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that some terrible, blinding beauty is about to descend and, like the wrath of God, suck [the world] all away, orphan us, deliver us, leave us wondering how exactly we’re going to start it all over again.”

The Book’s Weaknesses

“By Nightfall” is written in a combination of “voices”: at times there is a third person omniscient narrator, sometimes a second person interlocutor, but principally we are caught within Peter’s own ruminations. The lasting effect is a story told through Peter’s eyes.  While this brings a unity to the novel, it also can be a handicap.  When events, ideas and emotions come to us filtered through Peter’s fears and exquisite sensibilities, the narrative sometimes falls into a rut, trapped by the insular sound of Peter conducting a hothouse conversation with himself.  The reader yearns for more self-sufficiency on the part of other characters — persons we are meant to, and want to, care about.  Happily, Cunningham is terrific with dialog, and the frequent conversational segments — animated, stylish, and verbally agile (these are New Yorkers, after all) — oxygenate the narrative.

One of the reasons “By Nightfall” suffers in a direct comparison with “The Hours” is that the earlier novel gained strength by its focus on the lives of three women (although their lives, too, were mostly “interior” lives).  In following one flawed male exclusively, the new novel is hampered with what I think is weaker stuff.  Consider the following sentiment from the mind of Peter, a view, I suspect, shared by the author:

“We — we men — are the frightened ones, the blundering and nervous ones; if we act the skeptic or the bully sometimes it’s because we suspect we’re wrong in some deep incalculable way that women are not. Our impersonations are failing us and our vices and habits are ludicrous and when we present ourselves at the gates of heaven the enormous black woman who guards them will laugh at us not only because we aren’t innocent but because we have no idea about anything that actually matters.”

Notwithstanding the insight and humor of the author (as evident in the above quotation), the fact is that by situating his exploration of the mysteries of beauty and desire in a precious, privileged environment, Cunningham risks the ire of those same readers now loudly railing against the educated, liberal, upper-middle-class insularity of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” (another study of an unstable love triangle set in the present day). They scream: “Who cares about characters who are not like me?”

The Book’s Strengths

And yet to dismiss the book’s atmosphere as claustrophobic or its world view as irrelevant is, I think, a fraudulent stance.  Yes, the setting and tone is a highly literary one.  That’s what you expect from Michael Cunningham. He writes principally for other voracious, educated readers. Yes, it helps to recognize Cunningham’s allusions to a high culture sources — Joyce’s “Ulysses” and his short story, “The Dead”; Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”; Mann’s “Death in Venice”; and the real-life doomed affair of Rimbaud and Verlaine.  But what is also remarkable is the broad range of topics Cunningham manages to cover in what is one of his shortest novels.

Among those elements is an insider’s look at the cutthroat and compromised world of contemporary art. And let’s give thanks, that, unlike so many other authors who populate their novels with fictional novelists, Cunningham is willing to explore the paths of creativity through non-writer characters.  Aside from references to actual artists (Brueghel, Rodin, Damien Hirst), Cunningham convincingly creates a bevy of working artists, devising for each an interesting aesthetic and conjuring up a room full of their works for exhibition. Also of interest is the well described minutiae and daily grind of office life in what is, essentially, just another small business operation.  Cunningham has fun with the fact that an art gallery must engage in the soul-sapping compromise of stocking what will sell.

As in previous novels, Cunningham is quite skillful at getting us to feel the connections within families that endure even long after childhood (Peter and Rebecca’s family histories are examined in flaskbacks). He is best with younger characters, especially sibling relationships that take on a love/hate dynamic, and he well captures the pangs of growth beyond adolescence. Fears of growing old and dying are also featured prominently in the new novel and are sensitively evoked.

Of course no one can gainsay the beauty of Cunningham’s writing (filled with perfect details), his intelligence, his empathy.  Other reviewers will doubtless cite their own favorite passages, but for me one that stands out is a terrific set piece in the middle of “By Nightfall” which tracks the steps of an insomniac Peter who, in the wee hours of the night, leaves his loft for a meandering nocturnal walk through the irregular streets of lower Manhattan — it is an unexpected, charmed sequence.

Rilke, Flaubert, Cunningham

To return, then, to the Rilke epigraph that presages the theme of  “By Nightfall,” how is it, one asks, that “beauty disdains to annihilate us”?  I think the answer is found in Cunningham’s obvious devotion to Flaubert.  He shares with the French author a despairing sense of the ultimate inadequacy of language.  In the final pages of “By Nightfall” Cunningham quotes not once, not twice, but three times from the following lament expressed in “Madame Bovary” (here in Gerald Hopkins’ translation):

“After all, no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, of his thoughts or his sorrows. Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.”

Here is another translation of that passage, more beautiful and less faithful to the original, by Francis Steegmuller:

“For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”

Coming late, but coming, to self-knowledge

Peter’s dilemma is the common fate of men: “What do you do when you’re no longer the hero of your own story?”  In Peter there’s more than a little of T.S. Eliot’s aging Prufrock (“No! I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord . . . glad to be of use, politic, cautious and meticulous, full of high sentence”). Peter expresses his fate as a resignation to “live on as a solid second-stringer, respected but not feared [and settled into] a career of semi-defeat, a champion of the overlooked and the almost-but-not-quite.”

A re-balancing is in order. Peter, who’s life is the world of art — the representation of a thing or emotion or idea — comes to realize the falsity of his pursuit. At the close of the book he understands it is, rather, “flesh, the true and living thing, [that] trumps every effort at representation.” Confessing his mistakes and transgressions to his wife (a confession that will continue beyond the final page of the book), he sees he has “failed in the most base and human of ways” — for he has “not imagined the lives of others.” Cunningham’s prescription, his choice as a bulwark against annihilation, is this:

“To love, to forgive, to abide.”

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A condensed version of this review is posted on Amazon, here.

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“Out Stealing Horses” and “I Curse the River of Time” by Per Petterson

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

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This month I read, back-to-back, two recent novels by the contemporary Norwegian writer Per Petterson. “Out Stealing Horses,” Petterson’s breakthrough novel from 2003, became an international bestseller. His follow-up, “I Curse the River of Time,” has just been released in the U.S. and is receiving a more muted reception. With both books fresh in my mind, I thought I’d take advantage of a “compare and contrast” opportunity. (It occurs to me this is something I haven’t done formally, at least not with aesthetic material, since college days.)

Wonderfully translated by Anne Born, “Out Stealing Horses” is an astonishing work, one that generously rewards the open-hearted reader. Petterson himself has an easy command of English (as is apparent from this video of his acceptance speech delivered at the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ceremony) and he worked cooperatively with his translator. The result, he proudly says, is this: “Sometimes I think the English version is better than the Norwegian.”

If you’re the type of reader who keeps a pencil nearby to mark passages that “wow” you, if you’re in the habit of drawing stars and exclamation points next to paragraphs that “pierce to the root” of truth, then be prepared to scratch lead onto many a page margin. My copy of “Out Stealing Horses” is now a personal artifact — the sort of heavily marked-up book that, were I to come across something like it at a yard sale, I’d quickly toss aside as wholly unreadable, since who wants some third party interrupting your communion with the author? (OK, maybe if the annotations are the handiwork of a friend of the author, or the bon mots of a later, famous devotee — creating what rare book dealers call an association copy — then I’d consider a purchase, like the critic who confesses to a covetous urge, here.)

It seems to me every great author — and Per Petterson surely is one — possesses in his mind and nurtures in his heart a distinctive worldview. To say this is, admittedly, to accept notions of imagination, intuition and emotion associated with the Romantic era. So be it. I see romanticism not as a stalled literary movement that flourished and foundered in the nineteenth century, but as an artistic spirit essentially continuous with the present. In large measure Per Petterson belongs to this ongoing tradition. Petterson’s worldview is unlocked and offered to readers most convincingly in “Out Stealing Horses”. Consider the heroic isolation of the book’s 67-year-old narrator, Trond Sander, who has retired to a remote riverside cabin; think of his desire for communion with untamed nature; note how nature’s agnostic beauties and onslaughts humble and mold the novel’s characters — all of these facets, each of them close to Petterson’s heart, are Romantic themes.

The reader should be prepared to find the emotion in “Out Stealing Horses” to be of the most subtle kind — mostly unstated, internalized, “suppressed.” Call it Nordic Stoicism. Trond’s father tells him: “You decide for yourself when it will hurt.” The prospective reader should also understand that the book’s principal characters (Trond’s family and neighbors near the family’s summer cabin on the Norway-Sweden border in 1948) are not about to launch into the “talking therapy” as a way to reconcile themselves with their own failures or the universe’s cruelty. Any reader harboring a dislike of characters locked into a Yankee reserve (to compare an American “type” to the book’s Norwegians), or anyone annoyed by Cormac McCarthy’s characters’ Western-based muteness, or anyone bothered by taciturnity in general, should just stay away. So too should readers who prefer flowing plots. Peterson forms this novel not from a smooth story arc but from punctuated incidents of revelation.

But oh what incidents grace the pages of “Out Stealing Horses” — and oh what simple but evocative prose. Time after time, nonverbal communication — gaze and sign, gesture and touch — ushers in direct-to-the-heart epiphanies. Episodes of gorgeous nature-writing transport you. Set pieces describing communal activities in rural Norway six decades ago (harvesting hay and forming hayracks without benefit of machinery; felling trees with hand saws and launching logs on their journey downriver; the morning rounds of a milkmaid) yield a nostalgic glow. So too does the young Trond’s fondness for Zorro, Davy Crockett, and Lassie. The adult Trond’s dog, Lyra, whose character shines through as elementally as any other creature, provides quiet comic relief. Then you shudder as a father who means everything to his son (“we had a pact”) betrays that pact. And always there are bitter truths to bear. Trond’s father tells him: “That’s life, that’s what you learn from, when things happen. You just have to take it in and remember to think afterwards and not forget and never grow bitter. Do you understand?”

This is a book that provides each new reader new reasons to praise it.

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Now, if you have read and were awed by “Out Stealing Horses,” you will find things to admire in “I Curse the River of Time,” translated by Charlotte Barslund and released in the U.S. earlier this month.

The two books have much in common, starting with a reflective male narrator who recalls, in a chronologically jumbled fashion, a handful of events that shaped his current moral and emotional condition. Both novels, at their most poignant, focus on the vicissitudes of the bonds between parent and child: a father and son in “Stealing Horses” and a mother and son in “River of Time.” In both books the eldest character — the retired narrator of “Stealing Horses; the narrator’s dying mother in “River of Time” — travels to a second home at water’s edge to live out their days.

Yet beyond these similarities there are significant differences in setting and tone. There is also a stark contrast in the maturity of the two narrators. If you are a reader entirely new to Petterson, these differences may be important as you select the book most apt to please.

“Out Stealing Horses,” with its spare, classic qualities, and its emphasis on the character-defining power of raw nature, is reminiscent of such American authors as Hemingway and Jack London. Petterson obviously admires their writing. The remote rural setting of “Stealing Horses,” its cast of unaffected men and women who meet hardship with stoicism, and the fact that its narrator is looking back on events that occurred over half a century ago in the era of World War II, allow the story to take on aspects of myth, a feeling at times of Biblical tragedy. No similar elegiac glow illuminates “I Curse the River of Time.” It is set in more recent decades, largely in the industrial and contemporary urban environment of Oslo, leaving little room for myth. Yet “River of Time” is richer in its psychological probing of the central parent-child bond. (This is a paramount interest of the author; in a 2007 interview he noted, “All I ever think about is families.”). Also, “River of Time” is a more interesting study of another recurring Petterson theme: how historical events — in this case, the fall of Soviet-style communism — interrupt the fates of men and women.

One reason why I prefer “Stealing Horses” to “River of Time” is the flawed character of the new novel’s narrator. The elements behind 37-year-old Arvid’s existential crisis — his membership in the Communist Party has lost its meaning; his wife is asking for a divorce; his dying mother still considers him “too fragile” to survive in the world — are to my taste simply not interesting enough to sustain my sympathy. It is true that Trond, the elderly narrator of “Stealing Horses,” shares Arvid’s nostalgia for the self-centeredness of childhood. But Trond has lived a full life beyond that station while Arvid is maundering through life, hopelessly fixed on the irrecoverable. Arvid whines, he daydreams (in younger years “I had all the time in the world in a way I have never had since”) and laments his present status “adrift in time and space.” His childishness is unaltered — even, shockingly, at book’s end. A preference for one book over the other may also be influenced by the age of the reader; indeed, the author himself plays with the notion of the “age-appropriateness” of certain novels; this is a pet idea of Arvid’s mother.

What partially redeems “River of Time” is Petterson’s command of incident and prose. As in “Out Stealing Horses”, his prose is at once unflashy and gorgeous. There are many beautifully rendered episodes. One is the lyrically described November stay at a country cabin where Arvid and his then girl friend spent a cold afternoon rowing a boat through the thinly iced lake. The author’s easeful way of pulling philosophical reflections from commonplace events is on display as well. When Arvid takes a friend’s dog to the vet to be euthanized, his imagination breaks free: “What worried me was that no one had asked if the dog was really mine. It felt unsafe, ambiguous, anything could happen, to anyone, if the one it was happening to had a trusting heart.”

If you decide to read “I Curse the River of Time” as your introduction to Petterson, please know that the gifts you receive from it will be more than matched if you experience, next, “Out Stealing Horses.”

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Note 1: The content of this post appears, slightly altered, as separate book reviews on Amazon, here and here.

Note 2: Graywolf Press of Minneapolis, MN, the publisher of “I Curse the River of Time,” has created a book that, as a physical object, is quite fine: acid-free paper of rich tone; elegant and readable typeface; and clear, crisp, dark printing. Would that equal care were taken in the making of all books. And a special shout-out to the cover designer, Kyle G. Hunter, who slyly split the six words of the title into two lines, the first line beginning in the middle of the frame, the second wrapping around to start again at the left margin “beginning” — a visual analog to the text’s chronological displacements.

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Ian McEwan in DC

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

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Yesterday Ian McEwan came to Washington, DC, for an evening appearance at the Folger Shakespeare Library, an event sponsored by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. This was one of four stops on McEwan’s American tour promoting his new novel, “Solar”.  I was part of an overflow crowd of 400 people that descended on the Folger Theatre. We were rerouted to a larger venue — a church across the street. The inside of The Lutheran Church of the Reformation was warm. I sensed its walls releasing the heat of a day whose temperature had exceeded 90 degrees. Adding to the heat was radiation from the bodies of hundreds of acolytes. In my mind there arose a vain thought:  The heads of intense readers must radiate a heat more intense than that of non-readers.  A moment after I took this photo, McEwan succumbed to the heat and removed his suit jacket.

After introductions, McEwan spoke a bit about the genesis of “Solar” and then read a section from the book. He chose the episode that begins with the protagonist ruminating upon London’s past, present, and future as his plane circles Heathrow, and ends with amatory daydreaming as he is processed through Customs.

A handful of questions from the audience closed out the hour. McEwan and his attending entourage briskly exited by a side door. (McEwan is a hiker; he may be the sort of man who camouflages discomfort and impatience with long-strided walking; healthy and happy is such a man.) The group scooted across the street to the Folger Library where they set themselves up for the reception and book signing.

Earlier, as McEwan stood on high before us, I could not help but wonder whether anyone among us pew dwellers was offended that an atheist had taken control of the pulpit for an hour. I was reminded of a passage in a Nick Hornby novel describing the sad emptiness of British churches nowadays, when no faithful assemble to warm cold stone. But as for my question, the smart comeback is, Do you really think this is the first time a nonbeliever occupied the pulpit? And so there were no rumblings of unrest. The quiet crowd adopted instead “the intimate politeness with which Americans excel.” (I borrow that formulation from among the many charming observations about America and Americans McEwan includes in “Solar”).

It occurred to me that for believer and nonbeliever alike, the pleasure of sitting quietly inside a church (this church or any other church) rests, in large measure, in the power of the setting to take us out of time, to suspend time.

Twice during the Q & A session McEwan compared himself to the late John Updike. If there was a cynic in the audience, he would have been tempted to read this as a would-be successor’s grab at the mantle of writers’ writer, wordsmith without rival. Or as a foreigner’s attempt to curry favor with us Yanks. I read it as a genuine, guileless statement — one not lacking in support.

The final questioner asked McEwan about the inspiration for the framing device in his most loved novel, “Atonement.” There was a moment of awkwardness. Earlier it had been made abundantly clear to attendees that this was a Solar day. We were to bring only that book for signing, thank you very much. But McEwan gave an expansive answer. At one point his voice veered outside its natural baritone placidity. This was when he chided critics of “Atonement” who thought the book’s ending was equivocal. “I am an empiricist!” McEwan said, adding that no reader should doubt the lovers die in the war (he at Dunkirk and she in a London bombing raid). There was in McEwan’s demeanor an air of satisfaction common to the empirical wing of the enlightened.

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“Noir” by Robert Coover

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

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To borrow the second person voice (“you”) that controls the narrative of Robert Coover’s new novel, “Noir”, let it be noted at the outset that you fall within one of three groups.

1 -   You are a Coover aficionado and have read most or all of his output to date. You will buy or borrow the newly released “Noir” and read its slim 192 pages in a feverish swoon, critics be damned. If, at some point, you find yourself reading reviews of “Noir”, it’s because you’ve finished the book and want to relive the experience or compare your reaction to others.  For you, there are comments further below.

Or:

2 -   You have read one or two Coover books (maybe as part of a post-modern lit course) and want to catch up with what the 78-year-old author is doing nowadays. Is he still in the game, you wonder?  The news is positive. You will find the pages of “Noir” spellbound by Coover’s signature mordant wit and claustrophobic worldview. Elsewhere you may have come across the much repeated statement by NY Times book critic Michiko Kakutani: “Of all the post-modernist writers, Robert Coover is probably the funniest and most malicious.” So, yes, you’ll find “Noir” fitfully laugh-inducing — especially if you’re in the mood for a relentless, demented, hallucinogenic parody of crime fiction. If at its end you are still ambivalent about the book, well, that it not uncommon with Coover. At its close you may place a hand on your belly and think to yourself, that was not so much a satisfying meal as a bitter entrée. Or, you may be so delighted by its denouement, incorporating street philosophy, word play, puns, double entendres and all-around cleverness, that you will forgive being dragged through some slow sections.

Or:

3 -   Coover is entirely new to you. If so, you are wondering how do you get a good sense of what “Noir” will mean to you as a reading experience? You’re finding most reviews of the book are frustratingly un-useful to a novice reader.  (There seems to be a jargon-loving Coover clique that luxuriates in the cryptic.) Well, you might consider first checking out a short interview in which Coover himself explains the style and themes of “Noir”. This is available online (use these three words in Google search: Coover bookslut interview). Consider also spending a few minutes watching Coover in action, as he reads an early scene (and arguably the best pages) from “Noir”.  The video is available using four terms in Google search: Coover Penn Reading Video.  (His reading from “Noir” occupies the final minutes of the QuickTime video).  If the interview and video generally pique your interest, and if you would not be put off by what is essentially a light entertainment somewhat burdened with down and dirty stretches of bleak pessimism and erotic haunting, then by all means read “Noir”. Or, consider one of the following alternatives to “Noir” as a better first experience of Coover: “Pricksongs and Descants”, his ground-breaking short story collection; or “The Origin of the Brunists”, a conventionally generous and very American tale of the spawning of a religious cult in a mining community; or, if you can find a used or library copy of  “A Political Fable: The Cat in the Hat for President” (unfairly, it is currently out-of-print).  “A Political Fable” may very well become your favorite piece of zaniness by any author ever.  It is mine.

Finally, here are a few stray perceptions of my own to share with Coover fans who have finished the book.

Coover is nothing if not quotable. Wherever you are in “Noir” you are not far from coming upon yet another comment on humankind’s bleak condition. Coover spins endless variations on an astringent melody whose lyrics tell of “your incorrigible weakness in a meaningless universe” (page 103), a ballad “meant to provoke reflections upon life’s brevity, and its thin sad beauty” (page 108). Other examples: “It’s not the story you’re trapped in but how you play it out … your style … steppin’ round the beat … How long does that matter? As long as you live, meaning, no time at all.” (page 52).  “What’s the connection? No idea. Connections [are] probably an illusion in such a fucked-up world as this. Why you’re down here. Illusory connections” (page 113). “The city was as bounded as a gameboard, no place to hide in it, no way but one to leave it, you alone defenseless in it, your moves not even your own” (page 175). Most Hobbesian of all is this: “The body has to eat and drink so it can stay healthy long enough to enjoy an agonizing death, and the mind, to help out, has to know where the provisions are and how to get them and who else is after them and how to kill them” (page 159). The novel’s close brings a softer tone: “You can’t escape the melody but you can make it your own.”

Especially at the novel’s climax, borrowings from films are abundant: the shifting cityscape of “Dark City” (page 163), the mirror room scene in “The Lady from Shanghai” (page 181), and the false-identity caper “Catch Me If You Can” (page 186).

At one point Philip Noir tries to recall who once likened an odd juxtaposition to “a pearl onion on a banana split.” This is a line used by Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe. When another character advises, “Plant you now, dig you later, man” (page 111) , this is a twofer or maybe a three-way: its source is the jazz world of the 1920′s/30′s, but the phrase also was used as a title of song in “Pal Joey” and later as the title of a “Gilligan’s Island” episode — facts surely not lost on pop culture maven Coover. Other more careful readers (with or without benefit of Google search) will best me in this endless game of spot-the-allusion, but final mention should be made of one “high culture” reference I spotted, a reference that informs the musical ambiance of the book. Philip Noir notices a few words carved into the wooden tabletop at a jazz joint: “You are the music while the music lasts.” This is a line from “The Dry Salvages”, the third section of “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot.

I wonder whether the sympathetic character of Michiko (“she’s a work of art”) is Coover’s homage to the sympathetic critic of his work, Michiko Kakutani. But, given the fate Coover confers on the fictitious Michiko, I’m thinking maybe this is best left unexplored. As the author himself cautions:

“It’s all quite simple. But sometimes not knowing is better. It’s more interesting.”

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One final observation (to be filed under “Annoyances, Petty”):  The covers of both the American and French editions of the novel sport photos that are at odds with the story. Both photos are of daytime scenes of a walker in a city. But the perambulations of Philip Noir take place entirely at night. Does the discrepancy matter? Probably not, but wouldn’t it be nice if the photographer, or the editors who selected the final images, had actually read the book?

(A version of this review appears on Amazon.com, here.)

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“Monsieur Pain” by Roberto Bolano

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

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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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Connecting the dots

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

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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Here comes a decade-long, Big Five-O party

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

A collective shrug of “Uh, who cares?” greeted the recent spate of 40th anniversary celebrations. Woodstock? Yawn. The moon landing? Snooze. The birth (arguably) of the Internet?  Feh.

But while these fortieth birthday parties fizzled, that won’t stop promoters exploiting all of the upcoming big Five-O shindigs.

In just a few weeks the calendar will flip to the year 2010.  As with any year, 2010 is an abstraction. Right now 2010 is content-free, sans emotional resonance, non-seductive. Yet our culture is at the mercy of a base-10 numbering system. The media, needing to fill time and space, will grab at mathematics: 2,010 is the sum of 1,960 plus the very marketable, “Hey, it’s been 50 years, so let’s get a party on!”  With box cutter knives in hand, the whole exploitive band of writers, commentators, filmmakers, sordid hangers-on, are all poised to attack the packed  boxes labeled “the ’60s.” Unpacked, their contents will be spilled across every available screen.

If I were asked to set the agenda for this non-stop orgy of baby-boomer nostalgia, I’d first remind my staff that the distinction of the 1960s was not so much its general calamities amidst general progress. That can be said of every decade in recent world history. What the ’60s was more “about” was something in the realm of feeling: a relentless pow! pow! pow! of special tragedies and triumphs of an intensely personal kind. To set up this theme, I suggest the festival begin on January 4 with a somber program devoted to Albert Camus. An odd choice? Perhaps; but hear me out:  It was on January 4, 1960, that the 46-year-old Camus, then at the height of his creative powers, a man immersed in the struggle for individual freedom in an absurd universe, met a violent death in a car crash. Surely this was a lesson for us, a warning to prepare for a decade-long reminder of an inescapable truth: Everything that grows holds in perfection but a little moment.

Which, on a happier note, will also set the stage for a 2017 program devoted to Twiggy.

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UPDATE (11-23-2009): Today, the New York Times reports that, to mark the 50th anniversary of Camus’ death, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to transfer the writer’s remains to the Pantheon in Paris, one of the most hallowed burial places in France.

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Quote for the Week . . . and a Spammer’s Joke

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

From an article in The Wilson Quarterly, online here, comes this observation by Tyler Cowen:

“The measure of cultural literacy today is not whether you can ‘read’ all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whether you can operate an iPhone or other web-related technologies.”

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In recent days this blog has received a spate of comments from spammers fronting for online “pharmacies” (if you know what I mean). Each message begins by recounting a joke (to lower your defenses?). I thought one of the jokes was good enough to repeat here.  It’s in the child-pleasing Q&A format and goes like this:

“What happens to illegally parked frogs?”

“They get toad away.”

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Separated . . . by time and space

Friday, July 24th, 2009

“Separated at Birth?” — that is the title of a game described by Wikipedia as the light-hearted activity of pointing out people who are unrelated but bear a notable facial resemblance. This usually involves celebrities.

I was reminded of this when, having finished the first chapter of Jonah Lehrer’s “Proust was a Neuroscientist,” I set the book aside and in the process took notice of the author’s publicity photo on the book jacket. Something about the picture resonated with me. What caused the buzz in my brain? 

This: 

Intentionally or not, when composing the shot, the photographer, Guy Jarvis, captured a look similar to that of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Jonah Lehrer and the unknown young woman could be distant cousins, separated by an ocean and three and a half centuries.

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No, General, I won’t fund your culture war

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Yesterday’s mail brought a fundraising letter from Lt. Gen. Josiah Bunting, III, a man of great distinction.  Bunting asks for money on behalf of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a component of which, the Lehrman American Studies Center, he serves as President.  The letter bothers me for four reasons.

1.  Who’s there?

The unsolicited letter is written in a manner that’s sure to annoy more than a few recipients, and I wonder why ISI didn’t assign someone with the right skills to edit it, if only to sand down its grating style.  Given Bunting’s long career as a writer, scholar, and educator, it’s hard for me to believe that he drafted, edited and finalized the document.  Which is to say that when, in the paragraphs that follow, I indicate that “Bunting writes …” or ”According to Bunting …”,  I sincerely hope I’m wrong and that the text I’m citing is not in fact conveying his voice, his temperament and his knowledge, but instead is content furnished by ISI and anonymous staffers. 

2.  The familiarity ploy

Before the letter launches into histrionic mode (more about that, below), Bunting warmly addresses me as “Dear Friend,” and soon thereafter as “My friend.”  Now, I swear I don’t know him from Adam, yet he says he knows me.   An ersatz friendly tone is often found in charity fundraising letters, of course, following a template pushed by consultants.  But Bunting says I (along with thousands of others who received the same letter) deserve a bear hug for good reason:

Your name has been given to me as a steadfast supporter of the preservation of America’s founding principles; a steward of freedom who cares deeply about the future of our nation.

Is he channelling Eddie Haskell or what?  And yet, unctuousness aside, who am I to quibble with this glowing description of me?  But, on the matter of familiarity, wouldn’t it be nicer, I’m thinking, to receive an unsolicited letter that displays honesty and humility?  And for a model I turn to an uneducated fourteen year old named Huckleberry Finn, who, in his own overture to readers, in his very first words, confesses:

You don’t know about me . . . 

So, anyway, I decided to dig deeper into the letter.  And that’s when I came upon a creepy come-on, as I’ll describe next. 

3.  Questionable command of English

Here is the third sentence of the letter:

As a true American patriot, I know you are concerned about the direction of America’s colleges and universities.

Well.  One thing I am a true believer in is English grammar and clear writing (while, Lord knows, I mess up all the time).  A rule students learn in high school and are expected to obey in college and beyond is that a modifier (“a true American patriot”) should be placed as close as possible to the word it modifies (“you”).  Although there are colloquial exceptions to the rule (in spoken English), the rule should be followed if there is a risk of confusion due to the presence of more than one noun/pronoun the modifier could be describing (here, both “you” and “I” are candidates).  Bunting himself is half a century removed from his undergraduate degree in English, but rules are rules, and clear writing is timeless.  If ISI truly intends to flatter the reader, or even if it’s just a ploy, the drafter should consider this formulation:

As a true American patriot, you are undoubtedly concerned about the direction of America’s colleges and universities.  

The thought I resist is that the Lt. General is trumpeting his honorable military service and combining it with a boast of uncanny power to discern like-mindedness in others:

I, as a true American patriot, know you too are concerned about the direction of America’s colleges and universities.

In its original state the letter gives the impression of being either a slap-dash effort or a crude stage for chauvinism — a terrible irony in a letter requesting money to support improving higher education. 

On to page two, where this plea pops up:

But, who’s going to climb a hill for others if their hearts are bitter towards their own culture?

Something is not right.  The word “who” can be singular or plural.  In this sentence it appears to be plural, referring to persons (plural) who possess hearts (plural).  But the word “who’s” is a contraction of “who is,” a misplaced singular.  The sentence needs not an “is” but the plural verb “are.”  Or, in the alternative, the simultaneously singular- and plural-fitting verb ”will” will do the trick, as in the sentence, “But, who will climb a hill for others …”  Yet another possible reading of the sentence is that the author meant for the cited “hearts” to belong to the “others” for whom the single hill-climber is making a sacrifice.  But this makes no sense in the context of Bunting’s argument, which is that young persons must be inculcated with unquestioned love of country (we must “nurture the next generation of patriots”), for if we do not, we will fail to produce  citizens able to meet the demands of inevitable wars.  Then again, the letter’s expository prose is so muddy at times that the reader may be unavoidably flummoxed.  

In the first of his two post-scripts on page four, Bunting proudly informs us ISI’s charter says the organization’s headquarters “cannot be in the nation’s capitol.”  Well, of course not.  The word “capitol” (with an “O”) always refers to a building.  Watch the cute video, here, on this point.  The building housing our nation’s legislative branch is the U.S. Capitol.  It was Thomas Jefferson who insisted the legislative building be called “the Capitol.”  

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It’s a large building, to be sure, but it would be the height of arrogance for ISI to think it had a chance of being located inside the nation’s capitol.  In contrast, “capital”  (with an “A” as the final vowel) refers to the District (see Article One, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution) within which the federal government, and many a non-governmental organization, reside.  The same capitol-versus-capital distinction applies at the state level.  With this error, ISI, which sponsors the National Civic Literacy Board, earns a bonus point for irony.

Let me stop there, and express the hope that an intern with serious skills is hired to scrub through the next ISI letter prior to its release.  

4.  The culture war is here for you to join

What galls me is this:  ISI’s presumption that I am on its side.  I’m not speaking of the “side” in favor of improving classical education while strengthening all Americans’ understanding of our country’s long history and our nation’s uniqueness.  On that ground I have my feet firmly planted, thanks to a superb liberal arts education.  As a student of political science and history, and as a current participant in government, my mind and heart are there too.  No, I’m referring to the  letter writer’s assumption that I stand on his “side” in a great cultural war the far right desires to foment. 

The letter is very clear on this point:  the reader will be judged to be either “upholding the principles of the Founders” (values to be defined by . . . the Lt. General?) or found unworthy of  ”confidence.”  For now, at least, I’m in Bunting’s good graces; he reports I have been tested and, in his words, ”You have proven your dedication to the values upon which this country was built.”  (Should I keep a copy of that certification in my wallet, in case I need it to pass through check-points, come the revolution?)

Presumptuous? Arrogant? Scary undertones of Big Brother?  You betcha!  The  four page letter is chock full of radical right code words, phrases, and bêtes noires.  An ideological slant is never far from the surface, and frequently bursts through.  ISI says the American university system is being poisoned by a toxic culture.  Students are paralyzed by revisionist liberals.  A cadre of apologists (a term the letter neither defines nor assigns to named individuals) have made it their life’s work to disconnect our young people from the values and institutions that sustain a free and humane society.  Moreover, if we do not act, the anti-freedom crowd will gain the upper hand in the fight for our future leaders’ hearts and minds.  The letter closes with a statement that would fit nicely into a ritual session of Two Minutes Hate:

It is our job to expose them and I am counting on Americans like you to help us educate for liberty. 

I am struck by what is absent from the text.  Nowhere in four full pages addressing  American principles does the word democracy (or any of its variants) appear.  It seems Bunting believes the “nation’s heritage” ended before 1800, and so nowhere is there an appreciation of two centuries of subsequent history — a history forged by American people of faith and courage and intelligence equal to (or in the case of religious faith, exceeding) that of the leaders who emerged during the period of armed Revolution.  The letter displays a fetishistic attachment to the Founding Fathers, to the exclusion of our grandly successful, ongoing American experiment.  When describing today’s youth, Bunting casually tosses off calumnies (“their hearts are bitter towards their own culture”).  These are the words of a curmudgeon blind to the actual lives and character of young Americans.  (Say it ain’t so, Joe!)

I believe the study of history, which Bunting says he supports, shows America to be an unfinished nation.  Our nation is still being created.  This idea scares many people, I know.  Many prefer the sclerotic over the dynamic.  But the rest of us — and I believe we are the democratic (small “d”) majority — must steadfastly guard against the baleful consequences that would flow if personal fears prevailed.  That is the true threat to our lives, our liberties, and our happiness.

Whenever I encounter someone arguing that the America they live in today is not the country of their youth, let alone the country as founded over two centuries ago, I’m reminded of W. S. Gilbert’s lines satirizing a particularly sorry fellow:  “The idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this, and every country but his own.”   As with us all, time’s fell hand ultimately will sweep them from the scene. 

I am struck by the aging of persons prominantly embracing a Manichean world view.  I’m noticing, for example, how Pat Buchanan is becoming unsteady in his argumentation.  Just this week he asserted, erroneously, that no blacks fought and died in the Vicksburg campaign (video, here; historical facts, here and here).  Sadly, the reason Buchanan denies history is so he can argue white males have a superior claim of ownership of America, de facto (long exclusive possession) if not de jure.  Also this week, in a different forum, Buchanan misquoted the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution in support of a related wacky argument, to the effect that the progeny of the Founding Fathers (white males) are the legitimate inheritors of a nation “created” back in 1787. 

All of which goes to show, some folks way past their college years need remedial education in this nation’s history.

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