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.