Kylog

I really enjoyed this book, probably as much as any contemporary fiction (not that I read much ;>) of recent years. The only other contender would be The Known World, but save that for another day. So, some notes.

Love the names: Rupp and Cain seem right out of Waiting for Godot, Daniel Riegel is suitably quasi-regal quasi-biblical, Bonnie is just spot-on prairie, Gerald Weber is spot on as well (and at least the same character counts as “Oliver Sacks” hee hee, the Gerald possibly a nod to Gerald Edelman), the slightly off Karin, Karsh the Shark, not sure what to do with Schluter, ….

Love the organization, 5 chapters built around the central puzzle/theme trope of the book, reproduced here b/c I kept flipping around looking for it:

I am No One
but Tonight on North Line Road
GOD led me to you
so You could Live
and bring back someone else

It unfolds nicely as the story unfolds, with the great epigraphs from Loren Eiseley and Aldo Leopold to mark the sections.

The plot is quite crisp, deftly mixing family drama, the mystery of the event, and a rich cast of characters with conflicting motivations and impulses, etc. And though, there is a consistently Powers-ian voice throughout, the per-character instantiations of that voice range widely and effectively.

Best, I love that this is a fiction writer who can unabashedly engage with “science” with a rich, sympathetic, critical set of frameworks. The implicit critique of Sacksian psychiatry is long overdue (one of my college professors, Arthur Quinn, wrote a similarly critical essay on Sacks 20 years ago, but it slipped beneath the waves as far as I know) — what Powers has done here is worth thorough consideration. The engagement with neuroscience and consciousness is compelling (a theme for Powers? the only other book of his I’ve read is the AI’d Galatea 2.2, and the interleaving with ecology is really provocative (Edelman again?).

Oh and can I just say: a few weeks earlier I attempted to read Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and had to put it down as just too hackneyed, cloying, predictable, etc. Just bathing in 9/11. Powers’s book on the other hand is truly and elegantly a post-9/11 book — informed by it, framed by it, could not have been written before it, and yes avoids any easy entrapment by it. Hurrah!

Perhaps more detailed thoughts will follow … ;>

I’m nearing the end of this monumental tome (20 pages left!) and I’m collecting my thoughts. Actually, truth be told, my thoughts were largely collected several hundred pages ago, which is not to the book’s credit. I’m a Pynchon fan, having read everything but Mason and Dixon over the last 15 years, and I eagerly anticipated this book. So, while I’m still blown away by the talent, I’m afraid that this is not his best work.

The maximalist prose is still there, and the classic TP themes are there: the paranoid interpretation, the galloping across history, the ludic sense of humor, the constant interplay of light and illumination, the hard left anti-corporate stance, all of which I love. But …. mmm, where do I start. First, frankly, the man needed an editor here: the book too often feels like an indulgence, an overflowing accretion of ideas. Of course Pynchon has never been the sculptor who produces a chiseled David, but here he’s the sculptor who just kept throwing more and more clay on the figure until it bloats past any point. Someone save this man!

What’s ironic to me too is that of all TP’s books, this is the most overflowing and yet oddly the most linear. For all the time travel talk and the sprawling across 3 decades of turn-of-the-century history, everything pretty much happens in order, it’s clear what year we are in at any given point in the book, and by-god things might even happen for a reason! Quite ironic given his continuing digs at the “Christian linear sense of time,” the toying with bilocation (etc) all the time, and whatnot. So for once his narrative structure is out of line (in it’s linearity) with his narrative topoi — which, when coupled with the book’s sheer unrelenting length, makes this reader end up saying: “Huh?”

One intriguing thing, though, about TP’s reluctant seduction by the muse of linear narrative is that he plays very successfully with some classic authorial voices. For example, he starts with the Chums of Chance narratives, which are straight out of Horatio Alger or other Boy’s Life serial chronicles (side note: why does he abandon the CoC? they were such a great sidebar commentary on the major lines of narrative!). Or again, I just finished reading the bit at the end of Part 4, where he dons the Chandlerian ethos for the hard-boiled detective in Southern California between the wars. Magnificent! It really is impressive how he can take such a classic voice and adopt it and make it his own.

I just got it! This is TP’s covers album! Hee hee. Almost.

What a wonderful book! Here are some tidbits:

We keep our insignificant blemishes so that we can blame them for our larger defects. (20)

Re his lack of musicality and the piano:

I can play … I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths …. Then of course, a piano needs no real-time tuning. I strike middle C and I know that middle C will come out. Were I to try and learn a stringed or brass instrument that needed me to make the note as I played, then I hate to think what might be the result. (78)

Summarizing his childhood pains:

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing — they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me. (79)

Music matters to me desperately, I’ve made that clear, and I could cover pages and pages with my thoughts about Wagner and Mozart and Schubert and Strauss and all the rest of it, but in this book my passion for music and my inability to express it in musical terms stand really as symbols for the sense of separateness and apartness I have always felt. In fact they stand too as a symbol of love and my inability to express love as it should be expressed.

I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language — not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full-stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.

You see, when it comes down to it, I sometimes believe that words are all I have. I am not actually sure that I am capable of thought, let alone feeling, except through language. (84-85) [and goes on to quote from Wilde’s The Critic as Artist]

But in a culture like ours, language is exclusive, not inclusive. Those on easy terms with words are distrusted. I was always encouraged to believe that cleverness and elegance with words obscured and twisted decent truth…. To the healthy English mind .. there is something intellectually spivvy, something flash, something Jewy about verbal facility. (90)

Definitions of camp (136); great stuff

Queers are not the only unhealthy people to contaminate English society of course.  There are Jews too. (137)

I have mentioned before the use of the word clever and with what particularity it is applied to men like Jonathan Miller and Freddie Raphael [no idea who those two guys are].  Jews, like homosexuals, are not quite healthy.  They are part of that parade of pale, clever men who, at the turn of the century, confused with the healthy world with all that talk of relativism and doubt and those weird ideas about determinant history and the devided self.  … They’ll read anything into the most innocent of pastimes, these Jews and these pansies.  Reading things into things, if that isn’t the favorite hobby of the intellectual I don’t know what is.  (139-140)

Long passage on  EM Forster’s Notes on the English Character from Abinger Harvest, some excellent stuff. (144)

(192) pleonasm, sesquipedalian, tautologous, etc — funny stuff

It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary. (212) [followed some wonderful lists of things to apologize for and not]

Really enjoying reading through Raymond Chandler’s letters.  Here are some odd excerpts:

… my feeling is that somebody might come along who wrote a great deal better than Hammett and still not have anything like Hammett’s success.  But of course these things are quite unpredictable.  In my opinion Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson was an infinitely better and honester book than Of Mice and Men.  Did it get anywhere? I doubt it. (17)

The effort to keep my mind off the war has reduced me to the mental age of seven.  The things by which we live are the distant flashes of insect wings in a clouded sunlight. (21)

[Re Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None:] But as an honest crime story, honest in the sense that the reader is given a square deal and the motivation and mechanisms of the murder are sound — it is bunk. … But I’m very glad I read the book because it finally and for all time settled a question in my mind that had at least some lingering doubt attached to it.  Whether it is possible to write a strictly honest mystery of the classic type.  It isn’t. (27)
Funny thing civilization.  It promises so much and all it delivers is mass production of shoddy merchandise and shoddy people. (29)

From now on, if I make mistakes, as no doubt I shall, they will not be made in a futile attempt to avoid making mistakes. (31)

But James Cain — faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat.  He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. (33)

Reading further into Against the Day, we get Pynchon’s amalgam of 1893 history: Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria 20 years away from assassination, visits Chicago and gets drunk in the poorer district, while the fictional Professor vanderJuice chats about his friend Freddie Turner and the decline of the West. Pynch is having fun with history as always.

He also whips off some lovely prose:

But if the Frontier was gone now, did that mean Lew was about to be disconnected, too, from himself? sent off into exile, into some silence beyond silence as retribution for a remote and ancient vice always just about to be remembered, half stunned, in a half dream like a surgeon’s knot taken swiftly in the tissue of time and pulled snug, delivered into the control of potent operative who did not wish him well? (54)

They began to imagine, jointly and severally, some rescuer entering the crew spaces, moving among them, weighing, choosing, a creature of fantasy to bring them back each to his innocence, to lead him out of his unreliable body and his unique loss of courage, so many years in the making …. (55)

Presently, as the Inconvenience began to acquire its own sources of internal power, there would be other global streamings to be taken into account — electromagnetic lines of force, Aether-storm warnings, movements of population and capital. Not the ballooning profession as the boys had learned it. (55)

The closing paragraph of this section has some great stuff:

Later, after closing day, as the autumn deepened over the corrupted prairie, … the abandoned structures of the fair would come to house the jobless and hungry … hell-raisers hired for the run of the Fair, now, their market value having vanished returned to the consolations of drink …. All moving in closer to the fires of Fair debris, once the substance of wonder, as the temperature headed down. (56)

Ah, just starting to read Pynchon’s latest, enjoyable as always. The opening is some “aeronauts” piloting a balloon toward the Chicago world fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition, in 1893. The style is a Pynchonian twist on a late 19th serial novelist a la Horatio Alger. Evidently we are reading the latest in a series of tales of the Chums of Chance, as the narrator frequently reminds us of their past adventures like The Chums of Chance in Krakatoa, etc. He has fun with a set of various post-Civil War characters, including the bumpkin crew of the airship Inconvenience and the stiffly formal Kentucky gentleman St Cosmo, captain of the ship.

Typical Pynchon, though, with kookiness and references pointing in many directions, viz. the dog Pugnax, who is reading Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, about a failed terrorist. I\’m going to throw one other reference in though, and invoke Henry Adams from his Education:

Chandler’s second is in fine form; here are a couple longer selections:

I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room. (238)

She leaned forward a little and her smile became just a little glassy. Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.

She said nothing, but her right hand was tapping the clasp of her bag.

“A very bad murderer,” I said. “Like Shakespeare’s Second Murderer in that scene in King Richard III. The fellow that had certain dregs of conscience but still wanted the money, and in the end didn’t do the job at all because he couldn’t make up his mind. Such murderers are very dangerous. They have to be removed — sometimes with blackjacks.” (279)

First, just a flat out endorsement: great novel.  One of the best contemporary novels I’ve read in years.  I am really impressed.  What follows are some notes about it ….

The known world is the world as known by someone. And in this novel there are so many someones, inhabiting so many worlds, overlapping and not overlapping to such various extents, that there are almost an infinite number of known worlds. What makes sense to any person is delimited by their Known World. For example, one widow of a slaveholder is believed by some to have sold first her slaves, then her two white children:

Negroes said that somewhere in the world, known or unknown, someone might not think twice about buying two happy white children with plump cheeks and able to write and sing like angels and do basic ciphering. (56)

But a white woman selling off her white children we know not to be the case.  But the known world that most of our characters inhabit is most strikingly (and repeatedly) defined by the fact of a black slaveholder. This mixed up world defines the epistemic barriers of all the characters here, but especially that black slaveholder’s many vassals. For example, Moses, his first slave, was owned by two white masters before being bought by Henry Thompson.

In contrast to the limited and incoherent known world of every character in Jones’ world, the narrator is striking in his omniscience, constantly flitting between generations past, jumping into the future to provide one-line narratives of minor characters’ ultimate fates, drumming up census data (there are no footnotes but they are laid out as Fact, part of the book’s known world) to describe the state of Manchester County, Virginia at various decennials, at one point even narrating into the future to describe the tenure path of a professor who studied the time and place of the book (43-44). One is reminded of the stills at the end of a documentary where you’re told the ultimate fate of this or that figure from the film, except that this narrator interleaves these mid-paragraph, in digressions, and even for exceedingly minor characters, who have an interest.

One feels the narrator is hovering over the map of the Known World like a cold, benign owl, swooping in to illuminate one sub-story then back in time to explain someone’s roots, or forward in time to deliver someone’s ultimate fate, or sometimes the fate of their descendants.  And a couple maps are at the center of the novel.  At the end of the 5th chapter we encounter the French murderer Broussard:

He pointed to the left wall where Skiffington had hung a map, a browned and yellowed woodcut of some eight feet by six feet. The map had been created by a German, Hans Waldseemuller …. Heading the legend were the words “The Known World.” … The map had come from the Russian in twelve parts, each weighing about three pounds. (174-5)

This is one portion of the novel that is tied to accepted historical fact, as there was a map created in 1507 by a Martin Waldseemuller, the sole copy of which was purchased by the US Library of Congress in 2001 (a couple years before _The Known World_ was published). It was also in twelve parts, and the dimensions mentioned in the book. Just a curiosity, since I haven’t found similar anchors in historical fact for other tidbits of the book.

More importantly, it does echo the structure of the book: twelve chapters, each prefaced by three summarizing weights, for example chapter 5’s “That Business Up in Arlington. A Cow Borrows a Life from a Cat. The Known World.” And a tidbit (also vouched for by the LOC): “it was the first time that the word America had ever been put on a map.” (174)

So Jones aspires to provide a map of the known world, situating America on the map. Of course, the soon to be executed murderer Broussard keeps reiterating “I get you better. I get you more better map.” (175) And Jones isn’t the only one who seeks to map the world; the book ends with a second map.

Alice the fool, escapes Manchester County for Washington D.C. and, in the epilogue, beyond the confines of the known world of Manchester County, she displays her own two maps, one “a kind of map of life of the County of Manchester, Virginia” and the other the Townsend plantation at the center of the novel’s action and characters’ lives.

The contrast between the confined world of many characters, such as the “world-stupid” (359) Moses whose tribulations frame the book, and the narrator who is not merely omniscient but worldly-wise, even elegaic, this contrast provides the extraordinary pathos of the book.

Horses and mules …

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights. 152-3

[I] sat in my chair thinking about Harry Jones and his story. It seemed a little too pat. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact. 165

He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse. 166

I hung there motionless, like a lazy fish in water. 167

The little dead man sat silent in his chair, beyond fear, beyond change. 174

… my mouth was open and the ache at the side of my jaws told me it was open wide and strained back, mimicking the rictus of death carved upon the face of Harry Jones. 174

“He’s like all mechanics. Always got his face in a job he ought to have done last week.” 181

She brought the glass over. Bubbles rose in it like false hopes. 186

Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house. 186

The word of the day recently was epithalamion, a poem honoring a wedding. I know of only two contemporary examples: the rap done at my wedding (thank you, Barry) and J.D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. So I decided to reread Salinger’s novella, for the first time in years and years.

How perfect is the closing image of that novella, where the narrator Buddy imagines sending a cigar butt to his elder brother Seymour as a wedding present, “wrapped in a blank sheet of paper, by way of explanation.” For a wedding that didn’t happen, after a non-reception in Buddy’s apartment, attended by people who couldn’t be further from Sappho’s carpenters with their lack of sympathy (for the groom at least), including a deaf-mute who understood nothing of what transpired but left a cigar butt. Yes, a blank sheet of paper would be the perfect explanation for such a wedding gift.

Despite the perfect coherence of the story, and despite Salinger’s incomparable fluency as a writer, always a marvel and a joy to experience, I didn’t find myself as moved by the story as I remember being in the past. The Glass family schtick of bitter-sweet remembrances of this incredibly clever, intellectual family, led after a fashion by Seymour and his taste for Zen philosophy, lyric Greek poetry, and epiphanies of the mundane; it’s all very intriguing but it didn’t get under my skin this time.

I’ve speculated 3 reasons: first, that I’ve simply internalized it all so much, and been around others who’ve internalized it all so much, that it’s not new; second, that Salinger’s novelty has gotten diluted over the years as I’ve read others from his generation, like Delmore Schwartz; and third, that I myself am no longer quite the angst-ridden Glass-like philosophe of my 20s. Now though, I read Salinger in a new light, fitting into my new gloss of the 50s. I juxtapose Salinger with Schwartz, and the Beatniks, and Eisenhower and Oppenheimer and it all makes an eerie sense.

But returning to the book, it is a lovely homage to the time and to Seymour. One unavoidable in reading this book is the filial love, as befits an epithalamion, even or especially one for such an un-wedding.