Second Quarter Fiction Notes: The Johns Hopkins Connection

I read a bunch of fiction in the first half of this year, in an effort to cull the personal library. I was going to do a single re-cap post of this reading, with short remarks, but some of the remarks ran long. So I'm going to separate them out a bit. Here, then, are some notes about books written by two writers long associated with Johns Hopkins University here in Baltimore, John Barth and Stephen Dixon. (Oh, and the "second quarter" in the title is a misnomer of sorts, since the Dixon books were read in the first quarter, but no matter. No one but me's keeping score.)

On With the Story, John Barth - This is a short-story collection from 1996, Barth's first since his much-loved 1968 collection Lost in the Funhouse, a book I frankly found rather annoying. This is the first Barth I've read in years (I still have the enormous novels Letters and The Tidewater Tales sitting on my shelves; it remains to be seen whether I'll take the time to read them). I found that, overall, I enjoyed On With the Story. As is typical with Barth, story-telling is the story. He tries out different modes of telling stories, interrupts frequently to comment on the telling, foregrounds the artificiality of the constructions, writes in very playful, overly punny language that isn't afraid to be annoying, throws in theory about storytelling, including references to how this or that story measures up to the theories, etc. And there's an interspersed framing story throughout (which I suspect was new for the book, whereas the stories themselves all appeared elsewhere previously), with a couple on some kind of perhaps-but-it's-not-clear-last-hurrah vacation, the husband telling the wife stories, which are the stories in this book. All well enough done, some more interesting than others, some admittedly irritating (the sexual wordplay especially: William H. Gass also indulges in too much of this kind of boring guff), but what I really want to highlight is Barth's remarkable ability, amidst all of these meta-fictional methods, to nevertheless create characters and situations that seem real and that we care about. I know, I know; forgive me. Often this kind of observation is made as part of a criticism: why doesn't he just stop with all this tomfoolery and get back to telling the "real story"!? as if there is one somewhere in there in the absence of the so-called tomfoolery. Rather, I think it's fascinating how these so-called "games" both comment on and constitute the "real story". The characters actually attain whatever solidity they seem to have through these very "games" themselves.

I., End of I., & Meyer, Stephen Dixon - I had had four unread Stephen Dixon novels sitting on my shelves, and have now read three of them; the massive Frog remains. As I was reading these novels, I was also trying to decide whether Dixon's books would remain in my personal library, or be discarded. Ultimately, I decided that I like him just enough, and find him just interesting enough, to keep (On With the Story, on the other hand, was discarded, somewhat arbitrarily, I admit, since I clearly liked the book and found it similarly interesting, but I don't know...). In a post I wrote about Dixon several years ago, I said the following:

Dixon's fiction manages to be […] both experimental and realistic, as well as often being emotionally affecting. By exploring the areas of life usually ignored by so-called "realistic" fiction, by worrying at these lines of inquiry, teasing out countless permutations of a line of thought, Dixon risks irritating or even boring the reader. I think that in some way much of the tension in his fiction lies here. If we stay with Dixon through one more apparently tortured locution, or seemingly unending digression, we find that the work builds on what has come before, so that even those moments of irritation and tedium become essential to what makes the fiction work.

It's interesting that in almost all of his fiction, Dixon's narrator, or the main character (or both), is a writer, like he is, who splits his time between Baltimore and New York, like he does, or did, and who is married, usually to a woman with MS, who he takes care of. Many of the details change; he's not always exactly the same. But the focus is often on tedious everyday life stuff, and especially on the minutia of care, the difficulty and unpleasantness in caring for his wife (I often cringe reading this stuff, imaging Dixon's [now deceased] real-life wife reading it; and the writer character often does not come off well at all). The narrator often starts and re-starts the same bits of story, from different places, details changing with each re-telling. I. does this very effectively at times; the narrative is unstable, as if the narrator is trying out different possibilities.

In this sense, Dixon, in these books, struck me more than ever as a kind of Beckett-lite. Not in the sense of Beckett's actual increasingly spare project, but, say, the Beckett on the cusp of that project, the Beckett of Watt. (also, Dixon's prose is pedestrian by comparison with Beckett's, and all too often comes dangerously close to being outright bad). Recall, there, the passages which unfold various possible ways in which Watt may have entered Mr. Knott's house, or the sequence describing the preparation of food, and the availability of the dog, and so on—recall, that is, Beckett's apparent reluctance to "bully the reader", to insist on his story, resulting in, as Hugh Kenner put it, the "provisional nature" of the narrative. In I., as noted, Dixon considers his narrative from all possible directions, all possibilities. He won't let the reader settle on a given sequence of events. In particular I'd direct the interested reader's attention to the final chapter, "Again", by far the longest, in which we read several somewhat overlapping accounts about how I. and his future wife met. Was it at a party? Was he invited? Was she already in a wheelchair? The details shift across the chapter, never allowing us to settle into a "real" story. There is also, throughout, evidence that what we're reading is being written, perhaps a rough draft, with occasional interjections, such as "no, that's not right", or comments on word-choices. "Again" is an example of this too, and not only because of the shifting nature of the narrative. Here's how that chapter begins:

He meets her at a dinner party. Did that he doesn't know how many times. Meets her walking up a building's stoop to the party. Meets her while resting on his way up the brownstone's stairway to the party. Meets her in the apartment building's elevator going up to the party. Meets her outside the door of the party where she's taking off her snow-wet boots and changing into shoes. Meets her coming out of the one bathroom at the party which he knocked on repeatedly because he had to pee badly and thought the person inside was taking too much time. Meets her on line at the buffet table where they're both helping themselves to food. Meets her at the drink table which he followed her to so he could introduce himself.

That second sentence stands out a little (who did what how many times?) so that it seems that it's the writer writing. Perhaps the subsequent sentences are some of the many times he's attempted the meeting in writing, and so on.

Meyer focuses on the writer character's inability to write. Each chapter is a different attempt by Meyer to get moving on his writing, though distractions abound. It's an enjoyable read. Of the three novels, End of I. is by far the weakest, and most irritating. My understanding is that Dixon had expected to be writing three novels for McSweeney's (publisher of I.), who then decided they either weren't interested after the first one, or had stopped publishing fiction for a bit (that doesn't sound right, somehow, but I can't be bothered to look it up), so then he re-used some of the material for books published through Melville House (publisher of Meyer, as well as Old Friends and Phone Rings), then McSweeney's called back, wanting another book, and he cobbled together a short second volume, End of I., and it does indeed read like leftovers.

A World That Has Always Existed

Poetry works on a different level to the novel, and goes much further. The novel accepts the everyday; it narrates it. - Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity

As part of my ongoing effort to clear out my personal library, I'm currently reading V. S. Naipaul's novel A Bend in the River. Thus far it's been an uneasy read (I've interrupted it twice to read other perfectly fine if inessential books of fiction). Where once I would have simply read the novel without complication, enjoyed the smoothness of his prose, now I'm suspicious, I feel on guard. He's a prickly character, of course, a controversial public figure, often given to making reactionary remarks. And since his books are about places in the world that I've never been to and know relatively little about, I'm wary of the world he narrates. To a large extent, I'm in a position to take his word for it, which is a big part of my unease. His novels (and travel writing, I'd imagine) seem to play a certain role in critically representing parts of the world for a Western audience, telling parts of that audience what it wants to hear about the scary other. At least that's the sense I get from reading some limited criticism about his work. I'm very wary of having Africa narrated to me in this way, and it makes me think about who such books are for.

A Bend in the River is just the third of Naipaul's books for me, after A House for Mr. Biswas and The Enigma of Arrival. The latter is one of my favorite novels, and it strikes me as nothing like the other two. In that book, the narrator is relating, with much uncertainty, those events and thoughts which ultimately resulted him becoming a writer and the person he is. It is altogether wonderful. It is writing, though it's unclear how much of a novel it really is. A House for Mr. Biswas was a kind of sprawling family drama, but perhaps since the story seems closer to Naipaul, it's not so much of a problem (though, admittedly, when I read it I was reading with somewhat different eyes; perhaps a re-read would reveal then-unnoticed issues). Salim, the narrator of A Bend in the River, is there for all sorts of observations about Africa, Africans, modernity, history, politics and political independence, education, and so on. Were the book more fanciful, I wouldn't feel as though I were having some aspect of the real world narrated to me, but it reads like a report, though a smooth one. I feel considerable less wary when Salim simply talks about himself and his own problems; the writing is more interesting in such passages, too. Already halfway through the novel, were I able to discern a plot or point, other than to represent an Africa for the reader, perhaps then I'd feel less overall unease.

Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in his memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished. - The Swedish Academy, on announcing V.S. Naipaul the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature

Salim's account isn't, on the surface, obviously biased one way or another. It's not as though, at least so far, the novel reads as a statement against African independence, though indeed there are complications to be considered. The Swedish Academy is not wrong to note that Naipaul is attentive, here anyway, to what colonial empires "do to human beings", or to "what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished". That's here, and not without sympathy. It is interesting, however, that the Academy highlights "[h]is authority as a narrator" in light of this attention. As if writing should necessarily be authoritative. Again, as if a report.

I'm reminded, as I often am, of Gabriel Josipovici and his arguments about modernism. In the chapter, "It Took Talent To Lead Art That Far Astray" in his book What Ever Happened to Modernism? (my review), he discusses contemporary writers who "are concerned with telling a story and telling it in such a way as to make readers feel that they are not reading about a world that has been freshly made but about one that has always existed." One of the passages he provides happens to be from Naipaul's somewhat earlier novel, Guerrillas (1976; A Bend in the River was published in 1979). Now, to be fair, I don't think quoting individual paragraphs out of context, as Josipovici does in that chapter, is a terribly illuminating maneuver (and in the event, it proved to be part of an unfortunate distraction, for many readers, from the book's basic argument), and I will have more to say about that in another post, but the point he's trying to make is an important one, and relevant to my point here. Naipaul's Africa, in A Bend in the River, is narrated as though it has always existed, which encourages us to let it all too easily stand in for the real Africa. This is further exacerbated by the fact that Salim narrates looking back on events, from a seemingly distant, settled future. Yes, Salim observes and reports changes that have happened, but the world he narrates is there, ready, waiting for consumption.

"Enlightenment? Marvelous! But out of hand, wasn't it?"

Saul Bellow remains a divisive writer. Some are put off for good by the increasing reaction evident over time in his books. Others find his writing artless, idea-heavy, grasping for significance in its abundant references to intellectual figures, his critical popularity more a function of politics than literature. Still others would name him the exemplary American writer, the great American writer of the 20th century, modernist par excellence. For my part, I like him, though I've had my struggles at the level of the (sometimes rambling, aimless) sentence, and have written about him accordingly (see my two posts (one, two) on re-reading The Adventures of Augie March). And I find I'm interested in the reactionary strain in his writing, in the way that conservatism can be instructive, can tap into something overlooked by others, or perhaps in its willingness to lay bare a problem otherwise obscured.

All of which is preamble to the following long-ish passage from Mr. Sammler's Planet, one of Bellow's more controversial novels (I've seen it dismissed out of hand as "racist", and indeed the subplot about the crazy black man who exposes himself to Sammler on the bus is... well, it's problematic at best). The passage comes early in the novel, and Sammler is musing about his niece Angela (in whom "you confronted sensual womanhood without remission. You smelled it,  too." (!)) and the implications, as he sees them, of modern rights and demands and etc:

Sammler in his Gymnasium days once translated from Saint Augustine: "The Devil hath established his cities in the North." He thought of this often. […] Without the power of the North, its mines, its industries, the world would never have reached its astonishing modern form. And regardless of Augustine, Sammler had always loved his Northern cities, especially London, the blessings of its gloom, of coal smoke, gray rains, and the mental and human opportunities of a dark muffled environment. There one came to terms with obscurity, with low tones, one did not demand full clarity of mind or motive. But now Augustine's odd statement required a new interpretation. Listening to Angela carefully, Sammler perceived different developments. The labor of Puritanism now was ending. The dark satanic mills changing into light satanic mills. The reprobates turning into children of joy, the sexual ways of the seraglio and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses of New York, Amsterdam, London. Old Sammler with his screwy visions! He saw the increasing triumph of Enlightenment—Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Adultery! Enlightenment, universal education, universal suffrage, the rights of the majority acknowledged by all governments, the rights of women, the rights of children, the rights of criminals, the unity of the different races affirmed, Social Security, public health, the dignity of the person, the right to justice—the struggles of three revolutionary centuries being won while the feudal bonds of Church and Family weakened and the privileges of aristocracy (without any duties) spread wide, democratized, especially the libidinous privileges, the right to be uninhibited, spontaneous, urinating, defecating, belching, coupling in all positions, tripling, quadrupling, polymorphous, noble in being natural, primitive, combining the leisure and luxurious inventiveness of Versailles with the hibiscus-covered erotic ease of Samoa. Dark romanticism now took hold. As old at least as the strange Orientalism of the Knights Templar, and since then filled up with Lady Stanhopes, Baudelaires, de Nervals, Stevensons, and Gauguins—those South-loving barbarians. Oh yes, the Templars. They had adored the Muslims. One hair from the head of a Saracen was more precious than the whole body of a Christian. Such crazy fervor! And now all the racism, all the strange erotic persuasions, the tourism and local color, the exotics of it had broken up but the mental masses, inheriting everything in a debased state, had formed an idea of the corrupting disease of being white and of the healing power of black. The dreams of nineteenth-century poets polluted the psychic atmosphere of the great boroughs and suburbs of New York. Add to this the dangerous lunging staggering crazy violence of fanatics, and the trouble was very deep. Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility it might collapse twice. He did not agree with refugee friends that this doom was inevitable, but liberal beliefs did not seem capable of self-defense, and you could smell decay. You could see the suicidal impulses of civilization pushing strongly. You wondered whether this Western culture could survive universal dissemination—whether only its science and technology or administrative practices would travel, be adopted by other societies. Or whether the worst enemies of civilization might not prove to be its petted intellectuals who attacked it at its weakest moments—attacked it in the name of proletarian revolution, in the name of reason, and in the name of irrationality, in the name of visceral depth, in the name of sex, in the name of perfect instantaneous freedom. For what it amounted to was limitless demand—insatiability, refusal of the doomed creature (death being sure and final) to go away from this earth unsatisfied. A full bill of demand and complaint was therefore presented by each individual. Non-negotiable. Recognizing no scarcity of supply in any human development. Enlightenment? Marvelous! But out of hand, wasn't it?

Oh, man, there's so much! Obviously, on the surface, this reads like a cranky old-man rant about the kids and the girls and barbarians. And he comes right out and says that Enlightenment is all well and good for white folks and Western culture, but worrisome when everyone else wants in on the game. And he's focused on moral decline and sexual mores, which is hard to take too seriously. And he subsumes under the phrase "the power of the North" all the labor it exploited in the so-called South. And there are some great dog whistles in there, like "petted intellectuals" and "disease of being white and of the healing power of black" and the spectre of Muslim-lovers and so on.

And I love it. I love it for the writing, for one, for the way he moves through this paragraph, with its piled-on parallel phrases and its crazy lists and those characteristic not-quite-grammatical turns. But I also love it for its ideas, though I look at them a little upside-down from how they're no doubt intended. After all, never mind whether "this Western culture could survive universal dissemination", it cannot be universally disseminated, and its deepening and spread to date has been setting the stage for world-wide ecological collapse for decades now. But even without that immanent collapse, and here we return to a regular theme of mine, where is the labor and the energy going to come from if everyone is entitled to the modern, Western way of life? The left's critique of capitalism has, in my view, generally failed to take this into account, taking for granted the necessity and desirability of being "modern". We've bought wholesale into the culture of ever-continuing and -expanding consumption, the apolitical notion of economic growth (apolitical because placed outside of politics and all too much left-wing political thinking), all lip service to the contrary notwithstanding. Sammler is going on about morals and sexual mores, which is easy to laugh at and dismiss, but it's classic misdirection, perhaps even of himself. The real "full bill of demand and complaint . . . presented by each individual" is that of modern conveniences and air conditioning and cars and iPods and the Internet and everything else. Enlightenment? Maybe. But it's Modernity, and all the assumptions and expectations, political, economic, cultural, that's out of hand. What will we do about it? What can we do about it? Is it possible to think an inclusive polity that does not depend on unsustainable features of modern life?

Expression of a Distant Destruction

In the most recent edition of Jacobin, Curtis White has an interesting article about philanthropic foundations and their uneasy relationship with progressive movements, "The Philanthropic Complex". It's a pretty good read. The following passage appears midway through the piece:

They do not have to justify the origins of their wealth, or how they use that wealth, or what the real benefit of their largesse is.

 §

In the end, what the foundation can be trusted to understand is not forest health, or climate change, or the imperatives of recycling; what it can be trusted to understand is the thing that gives it its privileges: its endowment.  Unfortunately, managing how the endowment is invested often leads to conflicts with the stated social purpose of the foundation.

For example, one of the emerging controversies in the world of private philanthropy is the 95-5 question.  Foundations are required to give away just 5% of their endowment each year.  The other 95% is invested.  But invested where?  Environmentalists are particularly sensitive to this question because if the money is invested in companies that continue to pollute, you have a very disturbing reality.  5% does (theoretical) good while 95% does demonstrable bad: chasing profits in the same old dirty and irresponsible way.
This issue came to a head when the Los Angeles Times concluded a long investigation into the investment practices of foundations by revealing that the Gates Foundation funded a polio vaccination clinic in Ebocha, Nigeria, in the shadow of a giant petroleum processing plant in which the Gates Foundation was invested.

The Los Angeles Times report states:

But polio is not the only threat Justice [a Nigerian child] faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it “the cough.” People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Say what you like about the need to invest wisely for the future of the foundation, but this is prima facie evidence of a deep moral conflict not just at Gates but in all of private philanthropy.  The simple fact is that most boards actually don’t know if their investments and their missions align.  When pushed on the matter, most foundations respond as Gates did:  investments are the foundation’s private concern and no business of ours.

But the problem remains, when organizations receive funding, what confidence do they have that this happy money is not itself the expression of a distant destruction?  (Perhaps your funder owns stock in British Petroleum.  Of course, for the people of Louisiana, that’s anything but distant.)  When philanthropy proceeds without acknowledging this reality, it proceeds without conscience.  It proceeds pathologically.  It destroys the thing it claims to love.  And it makes the organizations it funds complicit.

These are important points to make, and I quoted White at length here to present some of the movement of his argument, but I want to say this: there is no such thing as significant wealth that "is not itself the expression of a distant destruction". There's not! Investments and positive missions cannot ever align! Capitalism requires destruction. Accumulations of wealth, of capital, means dispossession, theft, someone somewhere getting enclosed, robbed, impoverished, maimed, killed. That's the whole game! Our continuing ability to pretend that it's possible to somehow reform into existence, or big money into existence, our allegedly desired better world is amazing.

Fiction Notes: Two Books

I somehow neglected to include in my list of incoming books Agota Kristof's excellent trilogy of novels, collected in one volume, The Notebook, The Proof, and The Third Lie. Possibly because I'd already read them before writing the post. Kristof is a Hungarian writer, of mostly plays, living in Switzerland, writing in French. The novels came to my attention by way of the list of Eastern European writers compiled earlier this year by Anthony of Time's Flow Stemmed. The Kristof recommendation came from Stephen Mitchelmore in the comments, which, as is usually the case, meant it shot up to the top of my own secret list of books to look into. The first book is a notebook ostensibly kept by twin brothers living with their unpleasant grandmother in wartime. The second is a third-person account of the life apparently led by one of the twins after the other manages to escape their occupied town. The third is a first-person account of the brother who left, after coming back to find his twin. I say "ostensibly" and "apparently" because little is as it seems. Anyway, I'm not going to review them, but I think they are remarkable novels. Simple language, though each book is slightly different given the differing modes of narration (and each book was translated into English by a different person). Worth a look.

One book that I did include on the list was Teju Cole's novel, Open City. Cole first came to my attention a few months ago via his Twitter feed, which primarily consists of "small fates": daily deaths or violences rendered as oddly literary, elliptical mini-stories suitable for the 140-character medium. They gave me pause, and seemed to fit in with my mainly leftwing timeline. Only later did I learn he'd not only written a novel but that it was up for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Awards don't mean much to me, though I confess the NBCC carries a wee bit more cachet for me than the others, for no good reason I can name. Possibly the attention they pay to William H. Gass. But anyway. In this case, it was, perhaps too easily, the comparisons to, and admitted influence of, Sebald that got my attention. Also, I wasn't sorry to have a contemporary non-white writer to look for. In the event, the book is pretty good. Our narrator, Julius, a psychiatric resident, keeps himself at a distance, as he recounts various events and interactions, including a trip to Brussels and brief sketches of his childhood in Nigeria. A disquieting read, at times, including a couple of surprises, about which we are unable to either come to any conclusion or to feel comfortable. The Sebald comparison is appropriate, without his influence being felt too heavily (happily, there are no photographs). The spectre of 9/11 hangs over it a bit, but again, not too much. I'll be looking out for any subsequent novels Cole may write in the future.

Incoming

Yes, lots of books are going out, but that doesn't mean nothing new is coming in, particularly when a birthday comes along. Mine was last week (42), and not surprisingly, I received several books, plus gift certificates to book shops.

The haul, fiction or literature-related (*=acquired w/gift certificate):

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956
Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
Tyrant Memory* by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Open City* by Teju Cole

Non-fiction (*=ditto):

The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook by James Boggs
The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s  and  
The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914 both by Immanuel Wallerstein  
Direct Action: An Ethnography by David Graeber  
Works of Love* by Søren Kierkegaard  
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison* by Michel Foucault

And I notice these books were all written by men. How easily my apparent default re-asserts itself! To be fair, the bookshops are not awash with books by woman authors that I'm interested in. Almost picked up Marilynne Robinson's new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, and may still. Ditto Ellen Meiksins Wood's Liberty and Property, her follow-up to Citizens to Lords (which readers may recall I wrote about here), as she continues her social history of Western political thought.

I'm naturally very excited to finally have the second volume of Beckett's Letters in my grubby hands. It's enormous! The first volume, my first time reading an author's letters, was marvelous (see my post on it here; links to several other posts drawing from the volume can be found therein). Satantango will be my first Krasznahorkai novel, so I can finally see what some of the fuss has been about. Unless I foolishly acquire one of his others before reading it, like I might once have done. (I'm not going to do that.) The Moya was kind of a wildcard. I was looking for Senselessness, which had been much blogged about a while back; failing that I just wanted an interesting New Directions or Dalkey book. The shop I was in didn't have too many (fewer than they used to have, I think; but god do they have tons of NYRB Classics: and yet, somehow, none of the ones I'm interested in). Then surprisingly I noticed Tyrant Memory, so we'll see. Open City, I admit, has my attention because of the Sebald comparisons; a brief sample was inviting enough. And I like Cole's twitter feed, so there's that.

I read The American Revolution this past week (it's very short). It's good, though not nearly the great book that Revolutions and Evolutions is. I hope to have something more to say about both books in the coming weeks. I'm pleased to have the third and fourth volumes of Wallerstein's awesome Modern World-System study to hand. Though I'm eager to dive into them, I'm going to have to hold off, because I want to revisit the first two, make some useful notes, both towards a blog post or three and towards re-acquainting myself with his arguments. Suffice it to say that I find Wallerstein's theses persuasive (and the Marxist criticisms of them as unpersuasive; basically they amount to "you're not being Marxist enough", which oddly isn't terribly helpful). Direct Action is but one of a few David Graeber books on my list to read, after loving both Debt and, previously, Possibilities. This one is huge, too, and I still have yet to write anything about Debt (which I will, I hope, probably in conjunction with whatever I have to say about Wallerstein's work). So it may be a while before I dive into this one.

Works of Love crowded its way into my awareness by way of Simon Critchley's bibliographical essay at Ready Steady Book, in support of his new book Faith for the Faithless. His book looks interesting, too, but it'll have to wait. It's probably a little silly to have acquired Works of Love just now, given that I've yet to finish reading Either/Or, but I knew it had a decent chance at being available at the relevant bookshops, and so it was. And that brings us to Discipline & Punish. I'm wary of Foucault, for a variety of meta reasons, but I've actually yet to read him. I picked this one, on a whim, because I'm increasingly disgusted by our prison industrial system and wanted to see what he has to say about the origins of prison as such (I also expect to be reading more deeply into Angela Davis' writings about prison; not surprisingly, none of her books were on hand in the shops). (Note: the Foucault and the Kierkegaard books are both available in new editions from their publishers—Vintage and Harper Perennial, respectively—both of which publishers have revamped their lines of literature and philosophy, at least in the US. I only bring this up because the Harper Perennial covers are hideous; the Vintage ones are much better.) (Second note: I still have gift certificate cash to burn.) And so it goes.

Fiction Notes

I know, I know. I was going to be reading all this fiction, wasn't I? And presumably writing about it, but it's been seemingly all non-fiction all the time here at the blog. So it might seem. And yet, it turns out, of the 20 books I've read so far this year, 13 have been fiction. Though writing about it is something else entirely. So then this is something of a first-quarter round-up (which runs the risk of making it sound like I expect/plan to be doing quarterly fiction round-ups; note/reminder: no announced plans have ever come to fruition on this blog).

Anyway, here are the 13 I've read as of today, with remarks, maybe:

• Lightning Rods, Helen DeWitt — I really enjoyed this novel, and frankly, it was just the thing I needed to get back to fiction. It's smart, not difficult. And funny, very funny. I thought the workplace satire was spot-on, and I loved the piled on clichés, some of which were just perfectly employed to comic effect. It's not the brilliant novel that The Last Samurai is (few books are); it's much more modest in scope, doesn't try to do too much, or convert its satire into an obvious message. 

The other day, DeWitt pointed us to the discussion at The Morning News Tournament of Books, in which her book was pitted against the latest by Julian Barnes in the quarterfinals of their ridiculous annual competition. Though it's hard to argue with Kevin Guillefoile's observation that Lightning Rods might be a difficult book to recommend in certain company ("I would have to know you really well before I would suggest that you would like this novel."), the conversation (or "meta-commentary") between him and John Warner didn't offer much (not that I expected it to), and worse, led me into reading the annoying and stupid comments that followed. Actual complaints about a lack of realism. Arguments about verisimilitude, in connection with inaccurately reported details from the book. Fun.


• Zone, Mathias Énard (French; Charlotte Mandell, trans.) — The back copy of this novel claims it is "One of the truly original books of the decade—and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence . . . " Propulsive? Yes. Hypnotic? Possibly. Occasionally. Physically irresistible? Hm, at times, OK, yes, I'll allow this. A single sentence? I've already tweeted about this to some annoyance, but it's not a single sentence. It's not even close! The novel is primarily a stream-of-consciousness sort of narrative, the thoughts and memories of a French-born Croat who's spent the previous couple of decades doing awful things, as a spy, a soldier, etc, in some of the worst wars and hot spots in Europe ("the Zone"), on his way via train to Rome, where he is supposedly to hand off a briefcase full of intelligence on countless other similar types of bad characters, some of whose stories we are treated to as he recalls their adventures, after which he is to ride off into the sunset under a stolen identity. There is not a single full stop in these parts of the novel. Where people get the idea that a sentence must have a period in order to come to an end is beyond me. This is not exactly written according to Strunk & White's guidelines. For one thing, it's divided into chapters, each of which begins what is obviously a new sentence, punctuation or no punctuation. For another, several thoughts are completed, and do not grammatically belong with the thoughts that follows them. Complete sentences! Perhaps I'm belaboring the point and no doubt you don't care. But also: there are three chapters that are from the novel our narrator takes a break from his reveries to read from. Its prose is fairly conventionally punctuated. Sentences! OK. Enough with that. The novel itself is quite good (propulsive, at times even hypnotic). I may have already mentioned this, but it reminded me a great deal of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, in particular the detailed descriptions of the unpleasantness of war, which we usually prefer to ignore.


• Liquidation, Imre Kertész (Hungarian; Tim Wilkinson, trans.) — I'm sorry to have to report that I have nothing at all to say about this novel, other than I liked it, I think. It didn't leave much of an impression. It came to my attention via David Auerbach's discussion of the other Hungarian writer, László Krasznahorkai, who all of the lit blogs I follow have been talking about constantly lately; he referred to Liquidation as "stunning", so when I saw it at the library, I took a shot.


• Stoner, John Williams — I wrote about Stoner here. To re-cap: I thought this novel was wonderful. I'd begun a second post about the novel, intended to focus on Stoner's wife, but I have as yet been unable to finish it. I make no promises that I ever will.


• Dreaming of Dead People, Rosalind Belben — Belben is a favorite of Gabriel Josipovici's, which automatically makes her a writer I want to read. And yet I've had difficulties. Our Horses in Egypt, while at times quite lovely, nevertheless seems written with a very specific, that is to say necessarily small, audience in mind: readers familiar with horse jargon, World War I military jargon, and Edwardian slang. I am, it turns out, not one of these readers; as such, the book was at times very nearly unreadable for me. And yet, for all that, I nevertheless found the book charming (though not enough to feel I needed to keep my copy or ever read it again). I'd been assured that some of her earlier novels were likely more my speed. And, indeed, Dreaming of Dead People is frequently marvelous. The recollections or meditations of a lonely old woman, observing the world around her, and the course of her life, it is at times heart-breaking. And sexually frank, which was something of a surprise.


• I., End of I., & Meyer, Stephen Dixon — I have a post in the works on these three Dixon novels; stay tuned.


• Slowness, Milan Kundera (French; Linda Asher, trans.) —entertaining; not as good as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, better than Life is Elsewhere. Alternating tales of seduction, two hundred years apart. Seemingly a trifle, and not without its cloyingness, but the stuff on slowness and time and memory set it apart a bit, and help it remain in the library.


• Mavis Belfrage, Alasdair Gray
• Now that you're back, A.L. Kennedy — The fact that I'm lumping these two books together is a sure sign that I have next to nothing to say about them. Years ago, I traveled to London with a friend. I took with me a list of Scottish authors and titles to look for. I was in the midst of my expansive attitude toward fiction, but before the despair had set in. I think I'd read Janice Galloway's excellent Dalkey-published novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, and had read an interview with her in which she named several other Scottish writers. And I'd by then already acquired my copy of Gray's Lanark. So, this is where I first found James Kelman's novels, and where I got these two books, both of which, I just noticed, are story collections. I appreciate some of Gray's work (Lanark still seems worthy, as does Janine, 1982); this particular collection, as with the novel Something Leather, is mildly diverting, but ultimately slight and forgettable. Kennedy's collection is not unlike Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains in its evident skill—she's not a bad writer at all—and in my overall indifference. A couple of the stories achieved a kind of creepy dread that made them stand out from the whole (like, "A Perfect Possession"), but overall not terribly memorable. Of the six books by Gray and Kennedy mentioned in this paragraph, all will be discarded, save Lanark and Janine, 1982. I also have two other Kennedy books that I need to at least sample before deciding their fate.


• Dogma, Lars Iyer — I wrote about Dogma here, to widespread indifference.


• Eva's Man, Gayl Jones — I don't have a lot to say about this novel in particular, but it's made me want to revisit a long-dead post sitting in draft-mode about Jones and modernism, in connection with her novel Corrigedora, in which I'd like to include something about Eva's Man as well. In this case, the narrator is a black woman, in jail for poisoning a man. The account of the events leading to the murder is interspersed, often confusingly, with fragmented memories of various stages of her childhood and previous encounters with boys and men.

I also read several pages in books by Martin Amis, James Wilcox, and Toby Olson, as part of my plan to read and re-read books to determine whether or not I want to keep them. Wilcox and Olson don't mean a whole lot to me (they are very very different writers, incidentally; it amuses me to pair them like that, though I don't particularly care to elaborate). Wilcox's Modern Baptists is part of Harold Bloom's modern canon, and came to my attention by way of Dan Green of The Reading Experience, in a list of under-appreciated novels he posted eons ago. Count me among those who under-appreciate it. Anyway, I read it years ago, to little impact. I also along the way acquired Wilcox's novel North Gladiola. I took a few passes at reading it, and I just didn't care. Admittedly, I was being a bit rash, but given my overall indifference toward the earlier book, I just didn't see it getting more interesting for me. Then I took a long look at Modern Baptists again, too. Decided I didn't need to keep either novel. As for Toby Olson, I've previously read, and enjoyed, two of his novels: The Blond Box and The Woman From Shame. I liked them, but they weren't important to me; they're being discarded. I'd also acquired two others: Utah and The Life of Jesus. I settled onto the couch with Utah, expecting a good read, but not expecting I'd feel the need to keep it around after I was done. But I couldn't get into it. About 20 pages in, I was bored, even irritated. Where normally I'd either persevere or put it aside for later, my attitude now is: immediate discard. The Life of Jesus, on the other hand, looks just interesting and weird enough that I did put it aside for a later pass.

Which brings me to Martin Amis. I've written how Martin Amis was once one of my favorite writers, and how I'd soured on him. I've already gotten rid of most of my Amis books, but had kept back what I always think of as the big three: Money, London Fields, and The Information. Money is the one that still has the decent reputation among people I respect. London Fields was the first of his books I'd read; it was nothing like I'd ever read before, and I still have a big soft spot for it. And The Information, I'd felt, was every bit as entertaining and fascinating, even if I was confused as hell by the ending. Though my opinion of Martin Amis has shifted over the years, to the point that I now find him rather unpleasant, still I have fond memories of these three novels, and rather looked forward to re-reading them, to see if they hold up, among other things; I figured, even if they didn't hold up, they'd still be fun reads. I started with The Information, perhaps because I'd thought it was the more difficult book of the three . . . and, god, I just couldn't do it. Where I expected to find and enjoy the great prose style he's so famous for (and which I remembered), I found instead awful, turgid writing. I couldn't make it past the first ten pages! Now I look on the other two with much wariness. Will they be painful, too? Is it worth it? Wouldn't I rather keep my fond memories? Wouldn't I rather spend my time reading something else? As of this writing, I'm still undecided.