All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (1992), 302 pp. Winner, National Book Award for Fiction, 1992.

Cormac McCarthy’s National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses is a novel which, frankly, deserves every bit of praise it’s received and possibly more. All the Pretty Horses tells the story of John Grady Cole, a sixteen-year-old who, in the wake of his grandfather’s death and parents’ divorce, leaves behind a crumbling life in San Angelo, Texas to ride—on horseback, yes—into Mexico with a friend named Lacey Rawlins. My younger brother, who recommended this book, put it to me roughly this way: “It all starts when a guy hides naked under a horse in a big storm.” (And really, who could resist a book with that synopsis?) The scene my brother described does not occur for nearly 100 pages, but it’s true that the course of John Grady and Rawlins’s trip does change significantly when they meet Blevins, a young boy of probably fourteen riding a horse of remarkable stature and dubious origins. And though I don’t think he’s completely naked, Blevins’s fear of lightening and attempt to take shelter beneath his horse does have profound and unforeseen consequences for the trio.

McCarthy is a novelist I’ve been both intrigued by and squeamish about for a while, since I know of his work mostly as renown for being extremely violent and/or depressing. The Road, which I had to repeatedly stop my boyfriend from attempting to read to me, strikes me as perhaps one of the most perfect marriages of content and novelistic style—in every way it is a bleak, bleak book. All the Pretty Horses is not without violence; in fact, it is at times a jarringly and unsettlingly brutal book. But on the whole, this novel gives the reader so much more than it takes out of her: it is beautiful and devastating and heartening and sometimes even funny all at once. McCarthy’s language, which I had to acclimate to at first, is both simple and grand; it has depth and lyricism and is somehow the type of language which in itself lends significance to whatever it says; it feels elemental, even—as one critic put it—mythic.

There is a film version of this book starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz that I tried but could not find anywhere, possibly because it is apparently not a very good film, as its TomatoMeter reading of 32% seems to suggest (that’s on Rottentomatoes.com, for the uninitiated). The movie was probably never going to measure up to the book, even if it had been well made, but regardless of the fact that I haven’t watched it I can still say that I object on principal to its casting. Not that I don’t like Matt Damon—in fact I think he would have been a perfect John Grady Cole had he not been THIRTY playing sixteen when the film came out. But it’s not just that the ages didn’t match up that makes me protest; rather, I protest because the sense that children are trying to act in a world which history has shaped and molded in ways they cannot possibly understand—which forms one of the book’s central tragedies—is lost if the characters are men instead of boys.

All the Pretty Horses is the first volume in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, which I fully intend to read in its entirety, and—it should be clear by now—I would recommend it to pretty much anyone. It is a novel that grips while you’re reading it and lingers afterward, in that way only the best books can.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (2008), 464pp.

As the title suggests, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a Jewish detective novel. It’s also a type of speculative fiction that takes its premise from an interesting and obscure footnote in American history: in 1938 Harold Ickes, FDR’s Secretary of the Interior, proposed a plan that would open up Alaska—still a territory at the time—to European Jews looking to escape Hitler’s path. This is actually true. It goes without saying that Ickes’s plan was never enacted, but TYPU speculates on what might have happened if it had been. Chabon’s story is set in the present day District of Sitka, a Jewish province on the verge of returning under the authority of the United States government in a process known as the “Great Reversion.” This prospect of the Reversion has unsettled the lives of Sitka’s Jewish residents, but none more than Meyer Landsman, a detective with the Sitka Police Department. And then adding to Landsman’s troubles—of course—is the dead body discovered in the hotel where he is living, with no clue to the victim’s or killer’s identities other than a half-played chess board on the side table.

A friend commented to me that he struggled with this book, his major complaint being that it was possibly “too Jewish.” While quickly adding that he did not intend this to be, shall we say, Anglo-centric, my friend hit on something important to understand about TYPU—this is a very Jewish book. The reader is given to understand that he or she must assume that all conversations are carried out in Yiddish, except in instances where characters are explicitly described as saying something “in American,” which in most cases is employed for the utilization of the a four letter word that rhymes with duck. Yiddish words are commonly used in the text, and the book comes replete with its own mini Yiddish dictionary in the back.

Even more than its vocabulary, the book is about the idea of home or a homeland—what, who, or where it might be and how it impacts individual and cultural identity. I heard a segment on NPR recently in which several Europeans discussed their perceptions of Americans. One comment that seems relevant here was the observation that Americans tend to be unaware of or disconnected from history, especially the historicity of their landscape. In TYPU, on the other hand, Jewish history—and geography as a way of documenting history—forms the backdrop for understanding how the characters might feel as they face the impending Reversion. The displacement of Chabon’s fictional Sitka Jews is just another movement in a diaspora that’s been ongoing for nearly three millennia.

I had previously expressed a difficulty getting started with TYPU (see here) that I now connect with the book’s tendency to start in the middle of things and work its way backward toward how they began. After a while I adjusted to and even enjoyed this technique; it added to the sense of events unraveling that the experience of reading detective fiction should be. While I did find the resolution of the mystery smart and satisfying, the end left me with perhaps the vague feeling that some minor details weren’t fully sorted out. On the whole, however, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won me over with its earnest, likeably flawed characters, multi-layered plot, and skilled writing. I can say with candor it was all I could have hoped for from I book I bought for $2 because I thought it would look good in my bookcase. So while I might not recommend that anyone scratch off The Brothers Karamazov to put this book at the top of your list, I do think it was a fun read and one worth devoting the time to, if you have the inclination.

The Neon Bible

The Neon Bible by John Kennedy Toole (1989 [written 1954]), 162 pp.

If you were to search for this book in Wikipedia, depending on exactly how you entered the title, you might end up at the disambiguation page. The Neon Bible is a book by John Kennedy Toole, written for a literary contest in 1954 by the then-16-year-old author and published posthumously for the first time in 1989; Neon Bible is a 2007 album by the kick-ass indie band Arcade Fire, as well as the title song from that album. The latter neither draws or borrows from or is based on the former—this is a great disappointment, because if it did that would raise both works to an unprecedented level of awesomeness. But as it is, the two are not related. I wanted to break that to you up front.

John Kennedy Toole has one of the more remarkable stories in recent literary history. Toole committed suicide in 1969 at the age of 31, leaving behind two manuscripts. Some years later, his mother Thelma, through a combination of chutzpah and probably no little bit of badgering, convinced writer Walker Percy to review Toole’s “masterpiece,” A Confederacy of Dunces; Percy aided in the publication of the novel, which subsequently earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. A Confederacy of Dunces is, in my opinion, one of the most imaginative and entertaining books ever written. If you haven't read this book, don’t even bother finding out what it’s about, just open another tab in your web browser there and order it off Amazon. Do it now.

In style, subject matter, and pretty much any other point of comparison I can think of, The Neon Bible is nothing like A Confederacy of Dunces. If I didn’t already know, I would never guess they were written by the same author. Confederacy is a raucous satire populated with many off-the-wall characters, each with his or her own distinct voice. The Neon Bible is an elegant and elegiac bildungsroman told in the simple but insightful voice of the teenage narrator, David. Set in a small Mississippi town in the 1940s, the book is about loss, small-town politics, the bonds of family, war, the hypocrisy of religion, the plight of the impoverished South, and the influence these factors have in shaping one boy’s life.

Most comparisons I’ve seen have likened this book either to the works of great mid-century Southern writers like Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor or to Harper Lee’s classic bildungsroman, To Kill a Mockingbird. These may be apt comparisons, but they aren’t the ones that first come to my mind. For me, The Neon Bible evokes the style of Hemingway—an understated simplicity that belies great psychological and emotional depth—and the characterization of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Also a story (more properly a “story cycle,” or set of related vignettes) about a small town, Winesburg is famous for its singular and slightly sad cast of characters. The Neon Bible has its own memorable and sometimes desperate figures: David’s father, who attempts against all logic to farm the inhospitable Mississippi clay of his backyard; Aunt Mae, an aging lounge singer who longs for the success she never found in her youth; a traveling evangelist eerily reminiscent of Paul Dano’s character in the film version of There Will Be Blood; and the preacher, who tries to control popular opinion from the Op/Ed page of the local newspaper. Winesburg also ends—as The Neon Bible does—on a train headed out of town.

The Neon Bible is a beautiful little story. Those who have read A Confederacy of Dunces will definitely want to check out Toole’s incredible range—it’s a tragedy that we don’t have more from this author. Win Butler of Arcade Fire should also consider taking a read; a Neon Bible II would always be welcome.

PS - Just for fun, Arcade Fire fans click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjxef8AfVQg

Fool

Fool by Christopher Moore (2009), 311pp.

Christopher Moore is a comic novelist and the author of about a dozen books with titles like Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story and The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror. Before Fool, my only experience with Moore was his book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, which gives an account of where Jesus traveled and what he did during the years of his adolescence and early adulthood not covered in the four canonical gospels. Lamb is likely the only (loosely) Biblically based book in existence in which the Kama Sutra figures—though it is Biff, not Jesus, who learns from it, this should give you some idea about Moore’s comedy nonetheless.

Fool is a retelling of Shakespeare’s great tragedy—some have argued his greatest tragedy—King Lear, a play about an old king who divides his kingdom among his daughters, is betrayed by them, and ends up wandering through the English countryside yelling in the rain. Seriously though, King Lear features some of the most outstanding speechifying in English, and taking it on from a comic perspective shows some major, ahem, cojones on Moore’s part. PLUS, fools, or court jesters, appear frequently in Shakespeare’s plays, but Lear’s fool is one of his darkest and most sophisticated, which only makes my previous point about Moore’s cojones more true. I came to Fool initially because I love Shakespeare—this was a mistake. Pretty much the one guideline I would put forth in recommending this book is: don’t do that. Read this book if you love Moore or comic novels or are looking for something fun and irreverent. Do not read it solely because you are a fan of Shakespeare or King Lear. You will not find what you’re looking for.

This may seem like a simple proposition, but it took me about a third of the book to figure it out. At first, I was having a pretty lackluster time. I was finding the story a bit silly and not quite true to plot, the language an uneasy marriage of modern and archaic, and the allusions distractingly anachronistic (at one point Pocket, the title fool, quotes William Blake). Then, about a hundred pages in, I finally came to terms with the obvious point that Fool isn’t Shakespeare and isn’t supposed to be. Once I unshackled myself from this expectation, I couldn't help but be entertained. Because ultimately, Moore’s genius (and incidentally, this was Shakespeare’s, too) is that he creates from existing source material something totally and completely his own. Fool is much less an adapted from King Lear than it is inspired by it—a story about a fool that just happens to be Lear’s fool. And because Moore allows himself these liberties, he’s able to create characters, a world, and a story that are interesting and compelling in their own right. He struck exactly the right note between showing his knowledgeability of Shakespeare’s canon and medieval England (the story is set in the thirteenth century) and showing his disregard for fidelity to the facts. My favorite part of the book is that Moore borrows liberally from Shakespeare’s other plays—most prominently from Macbeth, but lines from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet make an appearance as well. And of course, in true Shakespearean fashion, “there’s always a bloody ghost.”

This is a bawdy book with no shortage of bonking (one of Pocket’s many inventive words for sex). It’s is, on the whole, antic and absurd, but it is not without depth. At times it also managed to be sad—downright poignant, even—and uncomfortably frank about the inhumanities often enacted by those in power.

Fool is quite different from what I normally read, but it made for an excellent change of pace. Rigid practitioners of Bardolatry excepted, I would recommend this pretty much anyone. It is fun, imaginative, and offers the chance to see a seminal work of Anglo culture desecrated in the best possible way.

Tender is the Night

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934), 315 pp.

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920), 240 pp.
The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922), 449pp.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925), 189pp.

The novel under review here is supposed to be Tender is the Night, but since I read it to finish out Fitzgerald’s four major novels, it seems like the perfect time to say a few words on the others, which I might not have another occasion to write about. More to the point, it would be difficult to say anything about Tender is the Night without touching on Fitzgerald’s broader oeuvre and the literary landscape in which he put pen to paper.

Literary modernism, which roughly encompassed the years between WWI and WWII, is probably my favorite literary movement ever. The work belonging to this period is so diverse, sophisticated, lyrically and emotionally complex, textural, atmospheric, moody. It’s for this reason exactly that I think modernist literature sometimes scares people away. Major writers of the era like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf can be dense and difficult. Ditto for major poets like T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. I’ll own up to the fact that this quality appeals to me. I would not want to be sent away to a deserted island without a copy of The Wasteland.

But even—or especially—if difficulty in literature does NOT appeal to you, Fitzgerald may be your man. His writing is quite readable but still manages to say a lot about the world after the Great War. No doubt it would make my old professors cringe to see me reduce an entire movement to a single sentence, but in reviews people expect to find out what things are “about,” and so it’s for my readers that I do this: simplified greatly, modernist literature is essentially “about” the loss of the world outside oneself. There are lots of different facets of this—problems of language, skepticism about religion and other traditional forms of knowledge, the unsettling of gender and class—but they all point to the disintegration of an identifiable relationship between individuals, other individuals, and culture.

So, why is this cool? Well, for me it’s cool because I see modernism as maybe the earliest literary movement to really reflect the contemporary psyche. Huckleberry Finn, for example, is an awesome and very human book. But Huckleberry Finn does not speak to today's readers with any present historical relevance; it’s a book you have to talk about by saying “people at that time believed” whatever they believed, as distinct from what we believe and identify with today. Modernism, on the other hand, was just an earlier stop on a line of thought and inquiry we are still very much, in my opinion, traveling. In my experience, many of us still face questions about how we relate to others and the world outside ourselves. Post-9/11, I think we have perhaps even cycled through the cynicism of postmodernism to ask these questions more so again in hopes of finding authentic connections.

Anyway, after a lengthy and possibly belabored introduction, some commentary on the actual books. It’s your duty as an American to read at least one of them. I recommend them in this order:

The Great Gatsby
It’s not for nothing that Gatsby is a classic in American lit. It’s a scathing story beautifully rendered with some of the most memorable and iconic imagery in our canon. Annals have been written on this book, so I will leave it at that.

This Side of Paradise
This Side of Paradise is way underrated, to my mind. Written by an early 20-something about early 20-somethings (Fitzgerald was 24 when it was published), it has the distinct melodrama of youth, which is why I usually suggest people read it before 25, if they’re not already there. Regardless of age, though, This Side of Paradise is just a solidly good book about growing up and growing into a fractured world (the book’s chronology spans WWI). And it’s not without philosophy: in his pronouncement, “I know myself, but that is all,” protagonist Amory Blaine is basically a poster boy for modernist sentiment.

Tender is the Night (if you have time)
Tender is the Night is a compilation of standard Fitzgeraldian set pieces. Dick Diver and his wife Nicole, a trust fund baby, party among the fashionable elite of American expats in Europe, falling in and out of love with each other while struggling to find meaning in their separate lives. Much like the Diver’s relationship, I found that this book quietly petered out for me, not leaving the impact I was hoping for.

The Beautiful and the Damned (if you still have time and are not tired of Fitzgerald yet)
I found this to be a somewhat bitter book. Like Gatsby, it is an open critique, attacking the dissolute life of boozing, partying, and reckless spending led by protagonist Anthony Patch (another trust fund baby) and his socially ambitious wife, Gloria. The Patches, who go through most of the novel drunk or hung-over, embody Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “my candle burns at both ends” (that poem was published in 1920, by the way, almost exactly contemporaneous with the writing of The Beautiful and the Damned), but whereas Millay’s candle “gives a lovely light,” Fitzgerald shows the Patches’ lives to be shallow, driven by greed, and devoid of any kind of happiness.

In sum, although this has turned out not to really be about Tender is the Night at all, I think I’ve made it clear that I think Fitzgerald (F. Scotty Fitz, as I like to call him) is a good choice for anyone’s reading list. The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise, especially, are books that have stayed with me and I suspect will stay with me for a long time. They made me feel something and made me look at the world differently—which is all I can really ask of any work of art.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007), 339p. Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2008.

I didn’t realize it until I sat down to write this, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has a fair bit in common with Middlesex: it’s a novel about family, history, the impact of family history on individual identity, about immigration, and about growing up on the fringes. Set in the Dominican Republic and Paterson, New Jersey, Oscar Wao follows three generations of the Cabrals, a formerly prominent family whose fortune changes after Oscar’s grandfather raises the ire of infamous Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina.

As much as any other, literature from antiquity has been interested in the theme of free will vs. predestination—whether humans make their way in the world or are simply pushed and tugged along according to the whims of the gods, God, fate, chance, nature, institutions and discourses, or what-have-you. Obviously what constitutes “predestination” has always been culturally relative: for Aeschylus it was the pantheon, for Frank Norris social determinism. Oscar Wao is in its own way simultaneously rooted within and riffing on this thematic. From the first page, the narrative invites readers to consider its story in light of the concept of fukú—a curse. According to the narrator, there is an entire mythology surrounding Trujillo, part of which is the suggestion that he is the source of a powerful fukú, which can be transferred to those who piss him off. The question constantly in the air is then, are the troubles that befall Oscar and his family a consequence of the choices they make, or are they running up against the inescapable tide of fukú?

From what I had heard from other readers, I had really high expectations for this book. I wanted it to be completely emotionally wrenching and tragic. But while I ultimately liked it, its capacity for emotional devastation did not quite satisfy my expectation. A contributing factor in this was my ambivalence over how I felt or thought I was supposed to feel about Oscar. Oscar is a pathetic figure, and watching him struggle with his weight, social awkwardness, girl anxiety, etc, struck me at times as depressing rather than sad. A separate but closely related factor was the book’s resolution, which the critic in me admits makes a lot of sense structurally, thematically, and in terms of character development, but the reader in me rejects with as seeming frivolous. Since it is my commitment in this blog to avoid spoilers at all costs, I will say no more, but if you’ve read and have an opinion on this matter, I would love to hear your comments below.

Now, the good stuff: Oscar Wao is what I would describe as a very hip book. The voice is young, and the narration is casual but still on-point in terms of technical sophistication. There is plenty of Spanish interspersed throughout. If you speak/read Spanish, you will have a field day; if you do not speak/read Spanish, I do not suggest that you attempt to put the Spanish-language parts through Google Translate. I tried reading both with and without the aid of Google and found that translating did not contribute much that couldn’t already be gleaned from context. By the end I had actually picked up a couple of Spanish words, though, all of which turned out to be obscenities.

Another part of the book that cannot go without comment is Diaz’s presentation of the Dominican Republic, which comes alive as a character in itself. The historical dimension of Oscar Wao is maybe my favorite part about the book. The Trujillo storyline is full of intrigue and brutality in addition to—and this is the important part—being principally true. The fact that I had never before heard of a man thought to be responsible for the deaths of at least 50,000 people reminded me forcibly what we Americans often tend to forget—namely, how much of the world exists outside our borders. Even apart from its substantial literary merit, this is reason enough for me to say that everyone ought to read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.