The Name of the Wind

My review of The Name of the Wind and interview with the author Patrick Rothfuss are up at sfsite.com

Renegade's Magic

My review of Robin Hobb's Renegade's Magic is up on sfsite.com
Read it here.

Fool Me Once

A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
462 pp (1980)

Is Ignatius J. Reilly insane? Or is he, per Jonathan Swift's test, "a true genius," recognizable by the fact that "the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Whatever one believes about Reilly, one cannot deny the inescapable conclusion that he (and the novel in which he stars) is a work of genius by the untimely departed John Kennedy Toole. A Confederacy of Dunces defies categorization; it is, like its hero, a world unto its own that dominates the consciousness of the reader. One doesn't review the novel objectively and rationally; rather, one is pulled into an erratic orbit of surprise, laughter, and delight by the gravitational force of the storytelling.

The first and the last thing Toole shows us in the novel is Ignatius. The first thing one must say of him is that he is fat. Not unhealthily obese, in the modern sense, but of leviathan proportions, a biblical or mythological figure. His jowls collapse into one another, his torso billows with each step he takes, contained only by the loosest and sturdiest tweed pants and flannel shirt. Like a whale on land, he flails about, beached on the shores of modernity. The world is wanting a proper grounding in "theology and geometry," Ignatius, a devotee of the medieval scholastics and Boethius's The Consolations of Philosophy, warns. He is a prophet of the fifth-century variety: a misanthropic hermit disdainful of social intercourse but in constant conversation with God or, as Ignatius prays to him, "Fortuna's wheel." His whole being is, like his intestines, in revolt, a giant eructation against the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, and their red-headed stepchildren, pop culture and vulgar democracy.

His girth and mismatched outfits, like Don Quixote's armor, shield him from the imaginary onslaughts of reality, which begin when his mother crashes her car into a building and Ignatius (who, only semi-functional, of course lives at home) must find employment. Ignatius, writing with a crayon on a Big Chief tablet, explains how humanity arrived at such a crisis:

"After a period in which the western world had enjoyed order, tranquility, unity, and oneness with its True God and Trinity, there appeared winds of change which spelled evil days ahead . . . . Fortuna's wheel had turned on humanity, crushing its collarbone, smashing its skull, twisting its torso, puncturing its pelvis, sorrowing its soul . . . . What had once been dedicated to the soul was now dedicated to the sale . . . . The Great Chain of Being had snapped like so many paper clips strung together by some drooling idiot . . . . A vicious fate it was to be: now he was faced with the perversion of having to GO TO WORK."

Like Quixote slaying imaginary monsters, Ignatius sallies forth to perform (one cannot say accomplish) a number of diverse jobs ranging from pants factory filing clerk to pirate-garbed hot dog vendor. Each begins, continues, and ends in farce, usually to the contrary interest of his employers and co-workers, themselves ridiculous figures. The plot, with its reliance on coincidence and the absurd, anticipates the multi-narrative threadwork of filmmakers Robert Altman and P.T. Anderson. The dialogue and characters, with their simultaneous detail-intensity and luminous ludicrousness, partake of the hyper-realism of Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen.

But at the heart of the novel is a salute to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Ignatius is, if not insane, at least as mad as the Mad Hatter, his absurd green hunter's cap a clear acknowledgment thereto. Burma Jones, a black hipster in peonage to a sleazy ginjoint operator, has an uncanny way of showing up at the intersection of events. His perpetual shades echo the Cheshire Cat's perpetual grin, and both characters intervene at key points to tilt the wheel of fate. Mr. Gonzales, the nervous office manager of Levy Pants, resembles no one so much as the White Rabbit, solicitous of his employer's every whim and just barely short of self-awareness of his chronic shortcomings to avoid descending into a nervous breakdown. Miss Trixie, an aged Levy clerk, emerges intermittently from her dementia to issue gnomic pronouncements and then, like the diminutive Dormouse, recede back into her catalepsy. Ms. Levy, the self-absorbed wife of "textile magnate" Gus Levy, wallows in self-pity like the Mock Turtle splashing in the shallows. But who, among these fools, these too-real caricatures, these dunces, plays Alice, you ask? Why, you, dear reader. Welcome to Wonderland.

Storytime

50 Great American Short Stories
Edited by Milton Crane
Bantam Books Anthology
502 pp.

What makes a great short story? For that matter, what makes a great American short story? Bantam Book's anthology of 50 Great American Short Stories edited by Milton Crane provides 50 ways of finding that out. The most common denominator is, of course, author origin. But thematic motifs recur across the pages, which themselves are arranged chronologically spanning Washington Irving to John Updike. One can, surveying from a distance, witness the themes develop, as subject, perspective, style and diction change with a nation itself undergoing growth fits.

The early stories partake of romantic tropes. Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe summon tales of the supernatural, the allegorical, and the exotic. It's a bit unorthodox that a book of American short stories should begin with a story set in France called "The Adventure of the German Student." The story starts with the hand-worn invocation, "On a stormy night," and we know that we are still in the realm of the nightside tale, not the formally structured, effective short story. Then the masters appear. Hawthorne, in his masterpiece "Young Goodman Brown," eschews any hint of realism for a highly stylized narrative that is like the devil's re-write of The Pilgrim's Progress. A puritan steps from the threshhold of family and faith into the untamed woods, and is, like Dante by Virgil, led by the hand into the realm of sin. And this is the first appearance of a seminal American theme, the Adam, the new man, venturing forth into a new world full of promise only to have his future burn to ashes in his mouth as he learns that men carry their evil inside them, wherever they go.

In later selections, the tone brightens with the rambunctious fervor of a young frontier nation stretching its limbs. Of course, perspective is all, and if you are of a mind with Mark Twain in "Luck," you might see the early American experience as just so much sound and fury of star-blessed adolescence. Twain gleefully recounts the career of an army enlistee who, from cadet to colonel, succeeds only by the intervention of blind luck. He misinterprets a signal to retreat as a signal to charge, saving the day. He is the prototype of the ugly American, obliviously self-confident. He anticipates Chauncey Gardner from "Being There," walking on water with no idea of the yawning depths beneath him.

And what would an American short story collection be without an entry from O. Henry? His "Masters of the Arts" tells the adventure of two friends, the self-promoter whose entrepreneurialism has shades of the confidence man, and the hunger artist, living in New York City in a garret with some bread, water, and paint. The former proposes a scheme to the latter where they will go to South America and pose as renowned artists to paint the portrait of a vain dictator for a pot of gold. The scheme succeeds, then fails, then succeeds again, but I won't tell what happens last or why--that's the best part.

Finally, the book advances into contemporary realism. In "To Build a Fire," Jack London evokes the apathetic brutalism of nature. A prospector alone but for his dog attempts to cross the Arctic tundra of the Alaskan plain during a snowstorm. After setting his scene, London informs us that "all this--the mysterious, far-reaching hair-line trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all--made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a newcomer in the land . . . and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination." Specifically, he is without imagination of the scale and ferocity of nature. In one particularly nice image, London shows us the depth of winter by painting a word picture of the prospector's journey as over a sliver of earth in the shadow of space without the heat of the sun; in effect, pulling the camera back to let the reader glimpse the coldness not only of the earth but of the universe. Man is not even a figure in this landscape, much less the center of it. He is a dot, that can be scratched out even by mere accident or inattention.

Sherwood Anderson's "A Death in the Woods" tackles nature as well, but approaches it from a social angle. "She was an old woman and lived on a farm near the town in which I lived," he begins. "All country and small-town people have seen such old women, but no one knows much about them." This old woman has a child and a husband but lives alone--the former a ne'erdowell and the latter an indolent, gambling brute. Life for her reduces to simple, quotidian tasks necessary for survival: cleaning, feeding, gathering wood, buying supplies. Constant work. The narrator tells her story with empathy without degenerating into sentimentality. And there's a rugged grandeur to the protagonist owing to her sheer stamina. But in the end, reality intercedes. Individualism is the American creed, and the freedom of the few to do wrong sometimes undermines the cosmic principle of justice to all: the gambler remains a gambler; the prodigal son does not return; and the shoulders that carry the world try not to shrug.

Old Worlds and New Worlds Spinning in Dream Verse

Nylund, The Sarcographer

By Joyelle McSweeney

132 pp

Tarpaulin Sky Press

October 1, 2007

Flet
By Joyelle McSweeney
152 pp
Fence Books
November 30, 2007

Words mean a great deal to novelists. They mean everything to poets. Working in the space between are those writers transitioning between mediums—where poesy is refigured into prose through the treacherous task of anchoring verbal flights of fancy with thick narrative ballast while maintaining the velocity of sound, sense, and syllable. With the back-to-back publication of the novels Nylund, The Sarcographer and Flet, poet Joyelle McSweeney may now be counted and even esteemed among such wordsmiths, as her novels represent not merely an attempt to cross the chasm between poetry and prose but a bridge slung to span the divide. But in fashioning novels more enamored of self-conscious language than plot and character, McSweeney’s triumph possesses a half life as short and ephemeral as her own verbal ingenuities.

In Nylund, McSweeney forays into the mind of a self-described lug, a practitioner of the fabulated art of “sarcography” whereby one comprehends the world through its surfaces. The term owes a nod to Jeffrey Ford’s The Physiognomist: deriving an ornate mental gestalt from the tactile impression of a simple object, such as the austere etchings of a sarcophagus or the artless contours of a face. Sarcophagus means “flesh eater” in Greek; rendered literally, sarcography, thus, means “flesh writing,” baroquely evoking the image of Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, whose tattoos herald what is and what will be.

Nylund explains his gift as a sort of telepathy, but the reader detects traces of schizophrenia: walking down the street in a downpour he is “a sarcographer of raining. I had to build a cask around it, built like itself.” When he is fired from a newspaper for hoarding readers’ letters, he describes how in his basement he would “place [his] hands on one and read its innards like an ancient roman.” After a night of troubled dreams—“the sheets’ sarcography”—he stumbles into a world of noir familiars: men in trench coats, tough guys, kidnappings, and a dead dame. McSweeney even gives a tip of the fedora to Chandler’s signature metaphorical descriptive style: “Nylund breathed for a moment before willing himself to separate from the shadow which put its hands on his cheeks and kissed his face.”

Yet her primary interest is not plot, which she props up only as a backdrop to Nylund’s involute psychology, twisted by the disappearance of a twin sister some years past. The mysteries converge in Nylund’s mind, if never in events; a structure reminiscent of Paul Auster’s post-modern noir classic The New York Trilogy. Metamorphosed, Nylund is “huge and furious, his carapace big as the sky’s. He shoved his feelers in his mouth then vomited out a thick beam of blackness.” Later, when employed as a floor-room polisher in a department store pushing the dubiously Christmas theme of “Household Murders,” Nylund “nestled in the polish fumes and feeling the flexible chamois glide . . . felt his mind itself stretch and bend in sarcography. An entirely unhumanoid consciousness, without even the shape of mind, running, dribbling, flooding, bounding, bouncing, collecting and pooling across a series of cool and curving places.” McSweeney strings playful, but dark, puns (“Call me Caul”) and intense imagery (“The gravel driveway curved away like a uterus and the Mister and the Missus were born through the threshold and into the house”) to stitch together these moments of reverie. Readers expecting a Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe should revise their expectations: if William Faulkner had written a noir from the perspective of Benjy Compson, the mentally damaged simpleton from The Sound and the Fury, he would have produced a specimen not very different from Nylund.

An empathetic author would be at pains, however, to reproduce a novel like Flet, a dystopian science-fiction tale as flintily unresponsive as its eponymous protagonist. Whereas Nylund swims in an id-dark sea of decadent language so ripe and soft and green that it gives under the lightest touch, Flet spins itself into a cocoon of fluorescent futurism as hard and cold and lifeless as crystal. The title character is a personal assistant to the “sub-secretary of education media,” an official who travels the country preaching a “standardized Brickless curriculum” for students in a terror-struck future where, after a biological attack on the capitol in which the legislature perished, everyday is “Emergency Day.”

McSweeney’s description of this September 11 analogue is not unmoving: “Mud and spit, current and ash, bone and trouble and bile. That’s how the thrum of then, then gives way to an intense, almost endurable since then, the compound and accruing now.” Nor is her heroine, who, in a sterilized, homogenous universe, cherishes “a blue comb, a cheap Easter egg novelty, and a pale green pamphlet” without humanity. But McSweeney salts her story too freely with stale themes which she, in any case, takes little time to develop. A “Continuous Heritage Board” produces animations to teach children about the world’s lost animals, which “they will never lay eyes on outside filetape.” Phillip K. Dick wrote an entire novel on humanity’s response to such a catastrophe (Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep), but the idea gets a two-page treatment here. The “Administration” treats citizens as compulsory consumers, requiring a minimum quota of fuel consumption. While the conceit does set up Flet’s driving “off the map” to forbidden ruins, it also limply echoes the tired refrain of Brave New World’s anesthetized citizenry. There are minatory rumblings of the post-privacy information society, but nothing that wasn’t already trumpeted ten or fifteen years ago by William Gibson.

While McSweeney demonstrates an undeniable facility for turning a cliché phrase into a delightful gem of surprise and meaning, her handling of cliché themes mars Flet as a whole. Readers with the patience and persistence of pearl fisherman, however, can dive into this book with the expectation of sundry, scattered treasures, moments when the author’s prose and her purpose are in perfect sync—such as when Flet, drawing her own map, wonders while riding a ferry: “Has the water been totally sterilized, is it vacant, an empty thought, an automatic gesture, like reaching a book from a shelf behind you, this water reaches them over to the land.” Writing like this, when sustained and well plotted, comes from a master.

Nylund and Flet

My review of Joyelle McSweeney's two new novels, Nylund, The Sarcographer and Flet, are posted now at Blogcritics. Follow the link below if interested.

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2008/01/23/063501.php

Behind the Canon: Introduction

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
Edited by Vincent Leitch et al.
2624 pp.

This is a big book. Bigger than Atlas Shrugged. Gorging is, therefore, not recommended. Better to sample, roll the passages around the palate, and take ample time to digest each morsel. That is what I propose to do here.

Norton sets the benchmark for publication of literary classics. It publishes two series. "Norton Critical" comprises scholarly editions of canon works and includes the original text, historical and contemporary reviews, author letters, miscellaneous background material, and key essays. Whenever possible, I purchase Norton Critical Editions. They do not come in hardback and the cover art is often appallingly bland, but the wealth of research they contain is unsurpassed. One can dip into the back of the book before, during, or after a reading and thereby enrich, prolongue, and deepen the experience. The other series available is "Norton Anthology," collections organized by subject-matter. World Literature, American Literature, Short Stories, Poetry -- these are some examples. They generally contain an introduction and one or two pages of background on the author of each excerpt.

The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism collects the principle works from the past 2400 years discussing literature -- what literature is, what it isn't, what powers it draws upon, what faculties it affects, what relation it bears to truth, beauty and the good, etc. The editors organize the material chronologically: antiquity, medieval, renaissance, enlightenment, romantic, modern, postmodern. My practice here will be to comment approximately every 100 pages more or less, depending on how much or little I manage to read in a week. I'm sure the editors intended for the book to be amenable to many uses, for the reader to be the ultimate arbiter of value. But I will be proceeding systematically and analytically, treating the book as an informal philosophy of literature. I guess we'll see how that goes.