Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

In my review of Franzen’s previous bestseller, The Corrections, I noted that the story was a thoroughly midwestern one—that is, its character is thoroughly understated and unextraordinary, and yet somehow Franzen’s treatment is surprisingly vicious. It isn’t that the gentle midwestern family hides monsters (as least not in his stories), but that the superficially serene exterior of the atomic midwestern family hides a pathological dysfunction. What makes Franzen’s approach to this dysfunction so unique is that he allows his characters to implode with nary a ripple outside of their clan. It’s simultaneously beautiful and damning.

Freedom is, in many ways, the same story told over again. This time an atomic family in suburban Minnesota disintegrates before our very eyes, beginning (retrospectively) with grandparents and trickling down through the generations, like bad plumbing reaching the floors below. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to reveal that, like The Corrections, Freedom concludes with a sort of uneasy armistice that appears to be a “happy ending” until you stop and think about it.

Wordsmithy

When Freedom came out, the most common criticism I heard about it was Franzen putting words into his characters mouths that they would never, ever say in real life; the implicit criticism is that Franzen’s a pompous ivory-tower academic who writes books divorced from realism and the people they purport to represent. It’s not a small criticism; nor is it wildly off the mark, as Franzen has noted it and done a hat dance around it.

My small hope for literary criticism would be to hear less about orchestras and capturings and more about the erotic and culinary arts. Think of the novel as lover: Let’s stay home tonight and have a great time. Just because you’re touched where you want to be touched, it doesn’t mean you’re cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it. Or the novelist as the cook who prepares, as a gift to the reader, this many-course meal. It’s not all ice cream, but sauteed broccoli rabe has charms of its own.

I’d recommend reading that entire essay, long though it may be. Franzen in this way is very much like his late friend, David Foster Wallace, feeling viscerally compelled to avoid impenetrable academic speech (e.g. Judith Butler), yet apparently incapable of narratively representing themselves as simply and accessibly as lesser writers. I would argue this is perfectly natural, and there is a direct (asymptotic) relationship between complexity of topic and complexity of narrative and speech.

In critique of Franzen, however, his grist for the mill this time around comes from his decision to make a large part of the book be a “book within a book”, written by one of the characters, but the narrative style never changes. Patty Berglund as narrator is not one iota different from Jonathan Franzen as narrator. I questioned, while reading, the wisdom of such a device, until it became important later on; still, a writer of Franzen’s caliber should have found a way around it.

The Normal and the Transgressive

Walter and Patty Berglund are two liberal middle-class parents in a gentrified St. Paul suburb, raising their two children, Jessica and Joey, engaged in a passive-aggressive feud with their neighbor, Carol Monaghan, whose daughter Connie is sexually involved with Joey. The impression we are very purposely given is that Walter is an unremarkable milquetoast who studiously avoids conflict and aggressive; Patty is a neurotic soccer mom with a tremendous mean streak; Jessica remains largely absent from the novel; Joey, despite everyone’s best efforts to deny it, is the spitting image of his mother.

One of the most interesting parts of the book—but one that is also somewhat predictable—is the extended flashback to Patty and Walter’s youth and college years. Each deals with emotional baggage that I won’t deal with here, but it’s important to note that although Walter and Patty end up married, the path to said marriage was not at all obvious or easy in retrospect. Patty, former athlete, aggressive and lusty, pined for a long time after Walter’s rockstar friend Richard Katz, ignoring Walter’s constant and faithful entreaties for a relationship. Walter, the self-described feminist, the safe choice, whose sexual style could be be described as a “light touch”, was silver medal that Patty finally settled for.

The aggressive/transgressive sex (life, really) that Patty always lusted after remained wrapped up in Richard Katz, with whom the Berglunds kept in contact, and which Patty finally consummated in her middle age, as the entire Berglund family started to unwind.

The motif of transgression unsurprisingly rears up in Joey’s life. Still with Connie, years after their sexual relationship started, he begins to feel trapped in the relationship; Connie, though faithful, obedient, and compliant, doesn’t seem an appropriate match for Joey, who wants himself sow his wild oats. It is, unironically, Connie’s willingness for unorthodox sex that keeps Joey in the relationship, and despite eventual infidelity from both, they end up together in a way that hearkens suspiciously to Walter and Patty’s earlier coupling.

Freedom

Everything comes to us filtered through (mostly latent, sometimes explicit) anger and depression, a disheartening but somehow realistic motif that colors the novel from its first page to its last. Consider Franzen’s recent article in The New Yorker, largely a transcription of a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College.

And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).

[...]

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

There is a latent fear shared by all of the characters of Freedom, it seems, to admit their imperfections and be loved in spite of them. Instead, an obsession with the superficial and an intolerance for emotional honesty dominate, and ultimately destroy, the Berglunds’ lives. The concept of freedom comes up in conversations between characters, though it’s mostly of a superficial, free-market sort of freedom. Franzen has said the title itself refers to the existential freedom given to you by accepting what you are rather than clutching your misleading “freedom” to be whatever you want. Franzen has created what Sam Anderson of New York Magazine calls “a social-realist epic about a depressive, entropic midwestern family being swallowed and digested by the insatiable anaconda of modernity.” But he’s also created a bold statement about what it does and doesn’t mean to love someone or something, and what happens when we forget these very basic ideas.

The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne

Though Jules Verne was best known as the father of science fiction—his most famous works, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Journey to the Center of the Earth, but largely excluding Around the World in Eighty Days, all share this genre—but not even he could resist the hot topic of desert islands. Daniel Defoe arguably started the phenomenon with Robinson Crusoe in the early 18th century, and was imitated by everything from The Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss, 1812) to Gilligan’s Island (1964).

The only reason I so eagerly rushed out to read The Mysterious Island as a young boy was because I heard—the source is lost to me now—that the book contained an appearance by the hero (villain?) of 20,000 Leagues…, Captain Nemo. Moreover, I was promised, this later book would explain Nemo’s origins, heretofore shrouded in mystery. I was vaguely familiar with the genre at that point (I was probably about 10), having watched the requisite television like Gilligan’s Island and even, I suppose, Lost in Space, in addition to having read some pathetic children’s abridgment of Robinson Crusoe. Still, The Mysterious Island appealed to me for a number of different reasons which still hold true today.

In the throes of the American Civil War, five Yankee prisoners of war (and a dog) in Richmond, VA, escape from that besieged city in a hot air balloon, but a terrible storm hurls them to a far-flung island in the Pacific, with little but their timepieces and the clothes on their back. At their lead is Cyrus Smith, an engineer; Pencroft, a sailor and former whaler; Herbert, a teenage boy and budding naturalist; Neb, a freed slave and “servant” of Harding; Gideon Spilett, an intrepid reporter; and finally Top, the engineer’s faithful Anglo-Norman.

The edition of The Mysterious Island I used to own contained an afterword by Isaac Asimov, who, in addition to mentioning the somewhat derivative nature of Verne’s plot by the time he wrote it, also noted that, in contrast to the more complicated characters of a book like 20,000 Leagues, this book contains a lot of Mary Sues: characters so talented and honorable and likeable as to be completely unbelievable.

It should come as little surprise, then, that from the intelligence of Smith and the strong-backed perseverance of his comrades, this little group of castaways managed the transformation from storm-tossed flotsam to a thriving little colony, replete with a sheltered carved from solid granite (thanks to a little nitroglycerin), tools, utensils, and a well-stocked larder. This is relatively standard fare, except for the care which Verne dedicated to the scientific aspects of the story: identifying the floræ and faunæ, describing mechanical and chemical operations undertaken by Harding (including his manufacture of explosives), and plotting the approximate location of the castaways’ new home, dubbed Lincoln Island in honor of the president whom they still assumed to be alive.

The book is another example of my love for engineering novels, in the tradition of Frankowski’s Cross-Time Engineer (or parts of it). There’s something about watching a band of wretches dig in and build up infrastructure that gets my literary juices flowing, and The Mysterious Island is a great example of it, even if their success does seem telegraphed from the very beginning: it is clear this time around who the good guys are, and we as readers have little doubt that they will succeed in their endeavors.

Hanging over everything these soi-disant colonists do, however, is a string of mysterious occurrences—all benevolent—which they are at odds to explain, but which arouses Harding’s largely unvoiced suspicion. This benefactor was responsible for everything from Harding’s rescue from the aforementioned storm to Pencroft and Herbert’s successful return voyage from a neighboring island. Just who this benefactor is, and how he will play into the story, may be spoiled somewhat by my initial recognition that Captain Nemo makes an appearance in the book, but much of the fun is learning the submariner’s backstory, for which you will simply have to read the novel (or the Wikipedia entry, I suppose).

In fact, for much of the novel’s long history, it was unavailable in English in its full, unabridged form. Early editions had changed names (Cyrus Smith became Cyrus Harding) and stripped some of the more technical details; Verne expends no little energy telling his readers how a sawmill works, for instance. It was only as recently as 2001, therefore, that English-speaking readers got the chance to read The Mysterious Island asymptotically approaching how Verne intended us to. I have a history of remarking upon the vagaries of translation; here, though one doesn’t think of Verne as being foreign or inscrutable, this book didn’t even contain the correct character names until more than a century after its first English publication.

Verne is best known for other books—for which see above—and I think it is downright criminal that The Mysterious Island has languished in relative obscurity. One can understand that the tales of a mad scientist-cum-submariner, or a gripping geological descent into the very center of the earth, or even a whirlwind race around the globe manage to capture the fascination more than another book of the “deserted island” mould, but though Verne keeps good company with the likes of Defoe, labeling The Mysterious Island as merely another Robinsonade does it a great injustice.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

Just under two years ago, David Foster Wallace killed himself, leaving behind a legacy that included—and perhaps unfairly focused on—his magnum opus, the 1’000+ page Infinite Jest. Though I happened to appreciate Wallace’s nonfiction (see Consider the Lobster) even more than his fiction, he was equally adept at both forms—at any form, to be honest.

When Wallace killed himself, the internet was full of retrospectives, but the one I recall as being the most beautiful was “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace”, which David Lipsky wrote for Rolling Stone. When I read, shortly after, that Lipsky would pen would of two upcoming biographies about Wallace, I was enthusiastic to say the least. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself isn’t a biography, if one wanted to be pedantic, but it’s as close to an unfiltered volume of DFW as we are likely to get.

The year was 1996. Wallace had just published one of his most famous essays, “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” for Harper’s, which made him something of a pseudo-celebrity in literary circles. But more important, Little, Brown had just published Infinite Jest, that colossal, postmodern book which consumed no fewer than three years of Wallace’s life. In what amounts to a publicity blitz in the high art world, Little, Brown sent Wallace on a book tour, and Rolling Stone sent report David Lipsky to spend a week traveling with Wallace and interviewing him, and amassing a stock of tape recordings and notes commensurate to that long a timespan.

Despite what was at that time a literary goldmine, Lipsky’s source material was never turned into a product. Rolling Stone‘s editor assigned Lipsky to something else and—much to the magazine’s detriment—these recordings and notes languished in a closet somewhere in the intervening years. The form they take now is an edited transcription, not an entirely new essay based on the source material. The basic form is this:

Time and Location [e.g. Bloomington-Normal Airport]

Lipsky asks something varying from surprisingly intelligent and literate to borderline tabloid, though these usually seem like after-the-face edits rather than faithful transcriptions of Lipsky’s questions.

Wallace responds, and these are—these are, you know, usually straight transcriptions, which veer from, like, that extremely folksy and vernacular way that Wallace could be when trying to be populist and grounded, to extended, beautiful monologues that go on for pages, which finally make you understand what Lipsky means when he says that DFW could extemporaneously “talk in prose”.

[Finally, Lipsky often interjects either narrative, such as describing what the two are eating, to longer musings about Wallace himself. I am unsure if these were inserted in the original notes or after, since some seem startlingly prescient.]

So it goes on for 350 pages. In much the manner you might expect, this narrative veers wildly from the utterly banal to the startlingly brilliant; to one with enough patience, it paints one of the clearest and most haunting portraits of DFW ever put to paper, but the form is filled with noise, and the short opening essays (one of them culled from “Lost Years and Last Days”) by Lipsky tease us with the extraordinary insight and tenderness with which one writing prodigy can more or less eulogize another. I can’t help, therefore, feeling as though, given enough care and time, Lipsky could have finally turned his source material into an amazing chronicle of the life, times, and psyche of David Foster Wallace. The cynical part of me thinks this book was rushed to press—preempting any such calculations—in the wake of Wallace’s death; the more generous part thinks perhaps the author and the editors thought the raw, unfiltered transcript (aided by Lipsky’s interpolations) to be the best tribute to a departed literary giant. In truth, I have yet to figure out which I believe.

What surprised me most about DFW in this interview is just how conflicted and insecure he seemed to be, especially dealing with a dose of newfound fame. Many of his conversations with Lipsky seem to center on how alien and troubling he finds the book tour, the sudden and orgasmic public attention, and the tension between those parts of us which relish low entertainment, vices, and all the visceral pleasures life has to offer (think of Chuck Klosterman’s MTV apologetics), and those parts of us which crave more, which shirk fame for fame’s sake, which—believe it or not—actually crave complicated pomo literature because it asks so much of us intellectually. Forget Lipsky: David Foster Wallace, given sufficient time and prompting, will have an entire dialectical conversation with himself; one gets the feeling it is a permanent fixture in his head, and the engine which drove all of his tremendous creative output. In the meantime, his extemporaneous prose manages to be more brilliant than ten thousand Dan Browns or Stephenie Meyers working in concert, leaving such gems as that which titled the book: “[...] although of course you end up becoming yourself” no matter whom you try to become.

Having read Lipsky’s earlier piece on Wallace, and knowing what he is capable of, I must admit to some measure of disappointment that Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself didn’t carry more of his own input; at the same time, it is impossible not to appreciate this transcription for the unique treasure it is.

Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is hard to get a handle on. The same people who gleefully forward me his scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 would of course be aghast at his most controversial book, God is Not Great; similarly, those who would cheer No One Left to Lie To: the triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton wouldn’t likely appreciate The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. A man who for many years called himself a socialist and or a Trotskyist, Hitchens now finds himself largely decamped from the Left, operating in some vague political DMZ, his politics both hawkish and liberal.

Whether correct or not (most people find at least something about which to disagree with “Hitch”), it would be unfair at least to say that the man is uninteresting, not simply for his intriguing mix of ideas, but for the rather storied life he’s led—even moreso than I was aware. In latter days, he’s become something of a darling of the pro-liberation crowd with respect to Iraq; he’s a frequent contributor to Fox News, though I imagine he finds most of their bobble-head commentators to be irritating and boorish; simultaneously, he’s come to be a leading voice in anti-theist rhetoric (certainly, his lecture schedule has borne that out). But, in fact, I think Hitchens as political polemicist unfairly impinges upon Hitchens as a literary critic and even, oddly enough, Hitchens as a travel writer.

Given how generally well-spoken and well-read Hitchens is, it should come as no surprise that he was something of a nerdy boy, excelling at the private English boarding school to which his parents sent him. It will be a surprise to those who only know the pro-war latter-day Hitchens to know that he spent most of his life being a card-carrying socialist, getting arrested at rallies, demonstrating against dictators, and generally doing the things that insufferable and indispensable young activists do. It was also a trifle surprising to learn that Hitchens is or was bisexual—or at least took part in homosexual sex up through his college years. Ever the understated Brit when it comes to himself, he never comes out and says this, but it’s clear enough that it’s so. Of the many other stridently homosexual writers that Hitchens knows, he is perhaps the most vocal of Gore Vidal (“massive old darling” that he is).

Rather than stick to a strictly chronological progression, Hitchens divides his chapters by subject, ordered more or less by their order of occurrence. His childhood passes quickly, and I am not terribly surprised that he glosses over this. One of the earliest critical junctions comes at that point where his mother leaves with another man and the two commit suicide in Athens. Hitchens, then in college, describes having to see the crime scene with a sort of distant horror that comes off as heartbreaking. I’ve never known the man to be overly sentimental, and indeed he describes the experience with a philosophical disgust rather than a particularly personal one. This is a memoir, after all, and not a biography: Hitchens controls the content and tone, and thus one shouldn’t expect any shocking revelations from the Hitchens you know and love (hate?) from his appearances on television and previous books. In fact, if you follow his lecture/debate circuit to the extent that Youtube et al. will allow, you’ll find that he uses some of his same phrases, expressions, and stories from the lecture in his book (or vice versa). Though I’ve no doubt that he’s very good at extemporizing (in fact, I’ve seen him do on Uncommon Knowledge), this book as with his speeches is a sort of rehearsed intelligence; or, more likely, he extemporizes from a pool of practiced points, since he lectures so frequently upon the same subject.

One chapter is devoted to his closest friend, Martin Amis; another to Salman Rushdie, which is of course a springboard to Hitchens to express his views on religion, tyrants, and religious tyrants. In fairness to Hitch, he abstains from becoming overly polemical with respect to religion, since his last book was devoted entirely to the subject. He does spend a fair amount of time explaining his views on the various conflicts in the Middle East, which have distanced him from many of his former associates (and employers), but this is largely in service of an overarching point that Hitchens attempts to make with Hitch-22, namely the sort of “double life” that he’s led, both in the sense of believing in two (apparently) contradictory ideas and of having so often compromise his ideals in order to get a story. But don’t mistake me: this is no wistful or maudlin look back, nor an expurgation of youthful indiscretions; though the Hitchens writing his memoirs may be different than the Hitchens planting coffee plants in Cuba after Castro’s revolution, there’s an internal consistency that is at least somewhat gratifying. The same moral impetus made Hitchens (initially) celebrate Castro as made him encourage the invasion (er, “liberation”) of Iraq; defend Paul Wolfowitz and excoriate Henry Kissinger; defame Mother Theresa and laud Thomas Jefferson. The book reminded me more of Love, Poverty, and War than it did his most recent work; stiff-lipped and intellectual, it is occasionally turgid or pedantic, but mostly it’s a fascinating (albeit circumscribed) window into the mind of arguably one of the brightest public commentators of our generation.

Grendel by John Gardner

I read Beowulf in high school, as is the case for a great number of young adults, and was unlikely at that time to be able to appreciate it. The book is, after all, critically easy to misunderstand, misinterpret, underappreciate, or otherwise abuse. J.R.R. Tolkien famously wrote that Beowulf‘s importance as a poetic work far outstripped its value as a historical work. Apropos of nothing, I love Tolkien’s succinct, acerbic summary of all Beowulf scholarship to-date:

“Beowulf is a half-baked native epic the development of which was killed by Latin learning; it was inspired by emulation of Virgil, and is a product of the education that came in with Christianity; it is feeble and incompetent as a narrative; the rules of narrative are cleverly observed in the manner of the learned epic; it is the confused product of a committee of muddle-headed and probably beer-bemused Anglo-Saxons (this is a Gallic voice); it is a string of pagan lays edited by monks; it is the work of a learned but inaccurate Christian antiquarian; it is a work of genius, rare and surprising in the period, though the genius seems to have been shown principally in doing something much better left undone (this is a very recent voice); it is a wild folk-tale (general chorus); it is a poem of an aristocratic and courtly tradition (same voices); it is a hotchpotch; it is a sociological, anthropological, archaeological document; it is a mythical allegory (very old voices these and generally shouted down, but not so far out as some of the newer cries); it is rude and rough; it is a masterpiece of metrical art; it has no shape at all; it is singularly weak in construction; it is a clever allegory of contemporary politics (old John Earle with some slight support from Mr. Girvan, only they look to different periods); its architecture is solid; it is thin and cheap (a solemn voice); it is undeniably weighty (the same voice); it is a national epic; it is a translation from the Danish; it was imported by Frisian traders; it is a burden to English syllabuses; and (final universal chorus of all voices) it is worth studying.”

Then, too, the monsters of the story, Grendel and his mother, are more illuminating than the story’s protagonists. My teacher’s emphasis on the rhetorical devices at play (more on this later) are probably a direct result of this intellectual tradition, although we focused rather less on the monsters than Tolkien probably would have liked. These Monsters, according to Tolkien, are critically underappreciated, historically relegated to two-dimensional foils for the heroic acts of the main characters, be they poetic or historical. Rather, monsters represent a fundamental part of the mythos from which the book was written; Tolkien specifically draws parallels between Grendel and the Cyclops of Homer.

To a reader in 2010, a book which tells a story from the perspective of a villain or antihero is rather blasé. Off the top of my head, I can think of a number of books I’ve reviewed which do largely this: Gregory Maguire’s Wicked; Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible; Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro; perhaps anything by Chuck Palahniuk. But this was not always so; certainly not when Tolkien presented his groundbreaking paper in 1936, but not even when John Gardner published Grendel in 1971.

Grendel tells the story of Beowulf from Grendel’s perspective over a 12-year period. It does not, like Robert Zemeckis’ film, treat him like Gollum and reveal him to be a warped version of a human; neither, of course, can the story continue beyond Grendel’s own death, and does not cover the fight with Grendel’s mother or with the dragon. Fully expecting that his readers will already be nominally familiar with the story, Gardner includes a fair amount of foreshadowing that only really makes sense if you’ve already read Beowulf.

Grendel functions on a number of levels, and succeeds on a subset of those levels; namely, it’s a (a) textbook inversion of character to arouse our sympathies for the misunderstood villain; (b) a modern-day poetic paean to the rhetorical achievements of the original; and (c) a work of existentialist philosophy.

Grendel: Misanthrope or Misunderstanding?

In the original text of Beowulf, it’s indicated that his monstrous form is due to his direct lineage from Cain, the damned fratricidal son of Adam and Eve. Popular scholarship places this as an interpolation by Christian monks transcribing the text; I’m unaware what, if any, pagan origins are given for him, but it’s clear that he is by this time both non-human and terribly violent. Even in Gardner’s work, Grendel still begins as a monster, the offspring of an even more gruesome monster. Our indication that he is not entirely evil, however, is evidenced by the Danes—men, in other words—being the first to draw blood. Grendel, with the thought processes of a developed intellectual but the personality of wild animal, originally holds no particular ill will toward humans, until he is decided to be a monster and the Danes direct the full force of their violent horror at him. Gardner’s Grendel is inherently sympathetic then, like the Rambo of First Blood, pushed into action by the abuses of supposedly civilized men.

In fact, during Grendel’s first encounter with humans, he is mistaken for a tree spirit, but the Danes’ initial goodwill quickly sours, and they attempt to kill him instead. I could not help internally comparing Grendel to an Indian and the Danes to white colonists. Grendel is bound to nature, hunts deer, and despite a sort of native intelligence may be otherwise considered “savage”, and it would not be unfair to call him so. Similarly, however, the marauding Danes, while bearing the baubles of civilization, are only slightly less savage, and in some ways even more prone to violence that Grendel himself. One of the major themes of the book is that Grendel watches the rise of Hrothgar for a decade before the events finally catch up to those of Beowulf, and much of it is medieval squabbling between warring Scandinavian tribes. The irony, both stated and not, is that of a incomprehensible monster watching civilized humans kill each other in circles.

Sarte, Camus, Grendel

Either by his explicit belief, or the results of his actions as apparent to the reader, Grendel represents an existentialist view of reality. Though his interactions make him unsure of his role in the cosmic theme, the results of the novel ultimately convince him that regardless of good or bad, everything he has become is by and large self-determined. This is in direct contradiction to Grendel’s conversation with a sleepy dragon—the same one which Beowulf will eventually kill, years hence—who is a nihilist, and instructs Grendel to expending his energy finding gold and guarding it (as the dragon does). According to the fire-breathing fatalist, life is a succession of accidental moments with no purpose or meaning, but Grendel finds himself oddly at odds with this, even despite the dragon’s claim to omnipotence.

Grendel’s philosophy is mirrored in another—namely Beowulf himself, whose confrontation with Grendel at the end of the novel indicates. To wit: Grendel, whatever may have caused him or motivates him, is a rampaging monster—eventually he comes to realize this, actualized by the responses from the Danes. Beowulf by contrast is a hero, and knows it equally well. They both, by this logic, have roles to play, and subconsciously hold some mutant form of respect for each other, despite being sworn enemies.

Paradoxically, though one ultimately destroys the other, Grendel and Beowulf both define each other—that is to say, each respective role is predicated upon the existence of the other. A hero needs a monster, and vice versa. Grendel, the “Hrothgar-Wrecker”, is both a slave to and an escapee from his role as a mere foil to the designs of men, as we see elicited in his death.

The Hrothgar-Wrecker

My English teacher’s favorite part about Beowulf were kennings and litotes. I wasn’t keeping careful track of Gardner’s use of litotes, but I know his use of kennings was not only prolific, but superb, as is his alliteration: “Such are the tiresome memories of the shadow-shooter, earth-rim-roamer, walk of the world’s weird wall” (p. 7). Gardner’s prose is not simply beautiful (and occasionally grotesque ). Gardner, in the spirit of Tolkien, is acknowledging the tremendous rhetorical import of the Beowulf story, what it tells us about the poetry of Old English, and its literary value in and of itself.

Thus, Gardner has constructed an indubitably pretty vehicle by which to translate/transmit the subtext of the original story—that that such implications were a design of its authors, but as modern readers questioning the construction of monsters, we must invariably ask ourselves what engines drove their creation. Gardner realized not simply the mechanics of the Beowulf, but the cultural fear or need which drives our creation of monsters.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman

I like to think of myself as widely-read, though—paradoxically—the more I read, the more I find I haven’t read. Russian literature is an area of particular paucity for me, and it’s somewhat galling because writers like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky are such fixtures in our literary culture. I have a feeling, though, that I am not the only one for whom such writers are the best novelist that no one’s ever read (to paraphrase a well-worn joke).

The Possessed is a collection of essays by Elif Batuman, a (then-?)graduate student in Russian language and literature, written in a sort of gonzo style. Not knowing much about the book when I picked it up, I assumed it would have more to do with Russian writers—a sort of Dostoyevsky for Dummies approach, perhaps—than about its own author, but the results are not only mixed in content, but mixed in success, or so I think.

As I’ve written before about Russian mathematics or Russian mortality, any subject can be definitely changed when adding the variable of Russian culture. It seems to me that there is something unique to that particular part of the world—even as distinct from other sister Slavic cultures—that manages to qualify everything produced, thought, or written on Russian soil. Like Merridale’s wonderful book, I was hoping that The Possessed would give some insight into that phenomenon, and I suppose it did to an extent, but usually through the smudged and warp-inducing filter of a personal reflection both inspired by and tangential to Russian literature.

Batuman, you see, is (I believe) Turkish, and not the Russian which I impetuously believed her name to be. She also, though she studies Russian literature in graduate school, spent much of her time in the fuzzy gray area of Turkey and Uzbekistan, the blending of cultures there producing an odd mix of Turkish and Russian that isn’t easily transmitted via discussions of Babel or Tolstoy. In fact, there are no fewer than 3 chapters devoted to Batuman’s semester studying in Samarkand, which is about 3/4 personal narrative and 1/4 discussions of some Russian short story or tortured novelist placed at right angles to her own. If only because my expectations were so radically different, I found that these particularly personal stories were the weakest of the lot.

In fact, Batuman started out strong: her opening essay about Isaak Babel, a Soviet writer who was “disappeared” by the secret police in 1940. Using the vehicle of a conference at her university about the author, and all of the interest scholars who attend it, Batuman tells a genuinely interesting story, including not only the particulars of Babel’s life for those readers—like me—who don’t know him, but also liberal doses of literary theory, comedy, and personal narrative. It’s the perfect blend, in fact, and I think it’s the strongest chapter of the book. Her descriptions of the quirky academics who attend the aforementioned conference even made me giggle out loud, which is both good (for her) and bad (for me).

But somewhere along the way, The Possessed seems to lose focus, and can’t decide whether it wants to be a series of semi-humorous vignettes about Batuman’s life, including her relationship with her estranged fiancé, Eric, or nuggets of literary criticisms buried in somewhat-related personal stories. Batuman isn’t always able to repress the graduate student in herself, sometimes letting slip with nuggets like this:

Because mimetic desire is contagious, a single person is often the mediator for a number of different desiring subjects, who then enter into the ultimately violent bonds of mimetic rivalry. In the next decades, Girard developed mimetic contagion into an anthropological theory, using it to explain historically and geographically diverse manifestations of social violence from Chukchi blood feuds to the cult of Dionysus. In his first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard posits mimetic desire as the fundamental content of “the Western novel.” Don Quixote, it turns out, doesn’t really want any of his ostensible objects; what he wants is to become one with his mediator: Amadís of Gaul.

Which may, of course, be correct and enlightening and marvelous, but doesn’t mean much unless you are Elif Batuman or one of her kind. The fact that I more or less understand what she’s talking about notwithstanding, I can find this kind of literary criticism with my University’s database: I read books published on a major label because I expect a little more, and I feel as though the glue between her ostensible topic of Russian literature, and the reader-facing materiel with which she tries to make it topical and accessible, simply isn’t there for a number of her essays. I can see her trying, but she seems to lack any semblance of a story arc. Even simple humorist like Dave Barry can appreciate the mechanism: given a context of personality, you introduce a problem or topic, build a brief story which builds up to a climax, and then a casual dénouement into a snappy ending line. With Batuman, so many of her stories seem less like narrative arcs and more like flat recitations of events. The fact that she personalizes them (and she does try, for just about everything, to tie it to her own life) is meaningless if the shell itself is boring: over the course of three chapters, she visited Samarkand and stayed largely the same; her relationship with Eric remained largely the same; her progress learning Uzbek was slow but steady, and she encountered a cast of static characters who were perhaps initially humorous but ultimately simply uninteresting. So much of the book seems to be a look at a the fine art of standing still in the supremely insular world of graduate-level literary studies: my preference for “boring” books stretches further than the average reader, but we all have our limits. How much time should we spend reading a book that appears to simply run in place?

If I seem overly harsh, it’s simply because the overall execution of the book was poor, but I saw so much promise held within. As both her publisher and other reviewers have noted, Batuman has the makings of a talented writer, and in fact we get to see that talent at work in the opening essay (“Babel in California”); were the whole book of that calibre, this review would be very different, indeed. But The Possessed seems to scramble for its focuses, never quite sure where to spend its times or how to do it, and the book as whole suffers for it. I would rather enjoy seeing Batuman tackle either a full-on book of literary criticism or or a straight memoir, without the fatal indecision or incompatibility between the two; I have a feeling the result would be a better read than The Possessed.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 31 ed. McSweeney's

Every issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern comes with a sort of prompt given to its writers. In some cases, the theme is more generic; in other cases, it’s a more limiting construct. In the case of Issue #31, writers were either given or allowed to select (I’m not sure which) an old cultural form of story or poem. In the finished product, each form is introduced with information about its era, use, and prominent adherents. Then the editors excerpt a short (no more than two pages) historical example of the form by one of its more prominent authors (if, indeed, you could call them “prominent”). Finally, a significantly longer (except in the case of poetry) new work by a McSweeney’s contributor which follows or attempts to follow that same form.

The quality of the entries is the usual Gaussian distribution that accompanies many McSweeney’s publications. Some new works are impressive (Doug Couplad writes a humourous tale about Survivor in the form of a biji, more or less the 800 A.D. Chinese equivalent of a blog; Will Sheff writes the store of Varg Vikernes in the form of a Viking saga), some are considerably less so (Joy William’s nivola is almost as uninteresting as the original by Miguel de Unamuno); most are in between, including the many pieces in the poetic form of the pantoum and Shelley Jackson’s attempt at a consuetudinary.

But the general quality of the pieces are not of any particular concern to me. More interesting, I think, is the editorial decision to devote an issue to reviving old forms. Here’s what Darren Franrich and Garahm Weatherly say about it:

Everything about the way we write changes constantly. New forms are created and destroyed, conjoined with others and absorbed back into the cultural mainstream; parchment is replaced by pen and paper, which is replaced by predictive text on Finnish cell phones. In the wake of those changes are dozen of dead forms from every corner of civilization, strange and wonderful styles thousands of miles and hundreds of years removed from what we read now. With this issue, we’ve dug up those old genres, dusted them off, and recruited writers to revitalize the ones we thought demanded it.

Far me it from me to steal a group a forward-looking writers and literature aficionados from the throes of their experimentation. I’m a fan of esotery as much as the next guy—but I wonder, at the same time, if they did not create a self-defeating product. After all, the excerpts of historical forms are the most pure or most illustrative of that form: the modern variation will, by definition, only approximate them. The editors even include red annotations in the grand old tradition to point out what part of the form the original authors are attempting to emulate.

The question becomes this: did the new stories need to be written? Let’s assume that all of the new stories are in and of themselves worthwhile pieces of literature (a generous but not ridiculous idea). While a reader conscious of the the editorial theme might judge the story based upon its adherence to the form (tallied ever-so-helpfully by the red annotations), a more astute reader would note that the stories which hew less to the form and take more liberties with its structure and tone are generally the best. Does Coupland’s “biji” actually emulate the historical biji provided? Not particularly—but this is hardly problematic because the story itself is humorous and well-written.

There is, in many cases, a good reason why these literary forms are no longer practiced: they aren’t very good. Most were the product of a brief trend (see Graustarkian romances) or a cultural artifact that has less to do with stories in the McSweeney’s sense and more to do with arbitrary communication. In this respect, either the form is historically important and should be viewed as a piece of history (and we should read its historical participants), or it’s not, in which case we should read Coupland’s piece regardless of whether it is a biji or not. Otherwise, the danger is that these new instances of old forms become little more than parodies or farcical emulations, and while there is nothing necessarily wrong with that, an entire issue dedicated to the prospect is a little much.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

I read this book previously in 2007.

There’s something particular about debut novels; sure, some authors start small and refine their craft, becoming better authors later in life. But there’s a particular kind of new author—the brash, young literate authors—whose first novels are fireworks displays, the pent-up combustive energies of potentially years worth of frustrated writing.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics feels like one of those explosions.

When last I read and reviewed Marisha Pessl’s murder-mystery-cum-bildungsroman-cum-Judy-Blum-novel, much of the review (and, it appears, many other reviews of the same book) was focused on the density of its prose and the degree to which it borrowed from and referenced a massive store of literature and cinema.

The prose didn’t phase me this time around, perhaps because I was prepared for it. What I came to realize, eventually, was the Special Topics… is a Frankenstein’s monster (or, less morbidly, a patchwork quilt); the entirety of its story is told in the tropes of media, saturated with metaphor and simile. A man isn’t “tall, dark, and handsome”; he’s “Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind [1939]“. Blue van Meer, out intrepid narrator, doesn’t simply posit an idea; she cites a source, as though she really is writing the book as some sort of term paper.

While I initially thought of this is nothing more than a clever narrative trick—a way to make the prose unique in a world full of unpublished books—I came to realize this time around that Blue’s frantically-literate narration isn’t an infelicity on Pessl’s part so much as her attempt to flesh out Blue’s character. The narrator of any story is inherently unreliable until we know otherwise; Blue, likewise, may describe herself or her history with varying degrees of accuracy, but it’s in her total reliance on these other tropes to tell her story that gives us an insight into her character.

Here is, after all, a girl whose mother died when she was young, and who has spent her formative years being dragged to an average of three new towns (and three new schools) a year by her father, a brilliant but enigmatic professor of political science, whose extraordinarily-high expectations for Blue are likely both healthy and debilitating. What we get, as a result, is a socially-crippled teenager whose literary and investigative brilliance is perpetually qualified by this lens through which she perceives and narrates her life.

While technically a murder mystery, the actual murder and mystery are simply catalysts for Blue’s character development. The vast majority of the book, anyway, has nothing at all to do with the murder in question; it’s a long, detailed—example-filled—narrative of poor Blue’s upbringing, her strange yet close relationship with her eccentric father, her vast store of literary knowledge, and her struggle for acceptance at St. Gallway school. It is only through the ministrations of the beautiful, mysterious teacher Hannah Schneider (whom, we are told in the first chapter, is eventually found dead, hanged with an electrical cord), that she is drawn into a group of favored students know as the “Bluebloods,” with whom Hannah has developed personal relationships.

I won’t spoil the plot itself for you: Pessl actually does an excellent job of building the mystery without being obvious about it; like a Bruckner symphony, it’s a long narrative arc, the ends of which aren’t easily visible from the middle. I will say that despite its promises of ambiguity, there are few loose ends left when the last page is turned. The last hundred or so pages devolve into a blur of problem-solving, Blue’s dizzying name-dropping having segued into a complicated, equally-dizzying flowchart of events and rationales. There’s no Raw Shark Texts ending, no choose-your-own-adventure bifurcation; Pessl provides the wiggle room for Blue’s ultimate conclusions to be wrong, but no plausible alternative is offered, and the reader has to accept—fabulistic though it may be— Blue’s cloak-and-dagger explanation. As fantastic as the “murder mystery” portion may be, it therefore comes almost as a surprise that the interpersonal relationships that Blue has been developing with her high school friends are thoroughly conventional.

The Mean Girls subplot, therefore, to which Pessl appears to devote so much verbiage, is orthogonal to the novel. It’s a lot of white noise into which she slips coded messages about the upcoming mystery, and when the bait-and-switch comes, you realize that you’ve been missing said hints all along.

Of course, this all means nothing if you find yourself unable to get past Pessl’s writing; some reviewers have raked her over the coals for her hyperkinetic style. I personally find it engaging and exuberant—but then, I’m the sort of person who gets unduly excited about interesting prose. If you prefer that of, say, Dan Brown, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

First, a preamble. If you’ve been hiding in a cave with your eyes closed and cotton in your ears, you might not be aware that zombies are in. Though at one point nothing more than one entry in a pantheon of ghouls (which also included mummies and vampires), they have quickly worked their way into popular culture. Nowhere is this more apparent than the internet, where they have become a meme along with such colorful characters as pirates, ninjas, pirates vs. ninjas, lolcats, raptors, &c..

Zombies in particular have proved fodder for both cursory reference and more substantial fare: be it books such as World War Z or Breathers, films such as 28 Days Later, or video games such as Resident Evil or Left4Dead, zombies have begun to infiltrate our niche media.

It was from this laundry list of internet memes that Grahame-Smith chose his topic (this isn’t speculation; it’s from his mouth). Rather than simply write another book about killing zombies, however, he decided to pair the crass and referential nature of the zombie meme with a paragon of Victorian elegance and eloquent English: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Austen is listed (first) as a co-author, and for good reason: her original text, abridged, makes up the bulk of this satirical version. The superstructure of the plot is largely the same, including the same characters we know and love, seeking love, fighting against the vagaries of 18th-century British economies, and bumbling around comically against the walls of their own vanity and misunderstandings. But now, zombies roam the countryside, occasionally crashing parties in their hunger for brains; the Bennet girls themselves are consumed by the “deadly arts,” Elizabeth in particular being skilled with both the musket and the sword.

The humor inherent, as you have already guessed, is the incongruity of the base novel and the additions which have been bolted on. A section of florid Victorian prose turns on its head when it ends with a Bennet girl beheading a shuffling zombie. Here’s the problem: it’s really the same joke, repeated ad nauseam. There are only so many times that the sudden shift from “Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen, to sit down for two dances” to “[Elizabeth] saw Mrs. Long struggle to free herself as two female dreadfuls bit into her head, cracking her skull like a walnut” can induce either mirth or a high-minded sort of appreciation.

The truth is, this entire concept, though I may admit dreadfully clever, belongs as a 10- or 15-page story in a McSweeney’s anthology, whose readers would appreciate its many merits. But a full novel, consisting of little else than modules of zombie-killing or mortal combat strategically dropped into a Jane Austen’s text? By the time I was a third of the way in, I wanted to toss it. What a labor! It’s like having the drunk at the party slur the same joke at you every fifteen minutes.

I appear to be the minority in my opinion though, as the books has been receiving generally high marks (and has been optioned into a feature film).

If you want to read Pride and Prejudice, then read Pride and Prejudice (or, if you are more of an audio-visual person, see Joe Wright’s excellent film adaptation); if you want to kill zombies, read a Max Brooks book, or play a video game. I can’t escape the feeling that at 320 pages, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was 300 pages too long.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 30 ed. McSweeney's

This is the very first issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern that I have read, though not for lack of trying. Its title (if you can call it that) is “Rejoice,” and is clearly a nod to the recent election of Barack Obama as U.S. President, and all the warm, gooey-on-the-inside sort of feelings that might entail for you. On the surface, Issue 30′s stories appear surprisingly, well, depressing for such a lauded event.

What “Rejoice” actually seeks to do is outline the human condition: specifically, there is a distinct difference between “hope” and “inspiration.” “Rejoice” is full of stories about sad people; occasionally, as with the story by Michael Cera (which was to me a highlight of the collection), it is about terrible people, but people regardless.

Bill Cotter’s “Pfaff II” opened the collection off on a desolate note, detailing a nameless, historyless narrator’s relationship with another troubled patient. It’s an existentially depressing tale because it chronicles a series of events which have no apparent purpose or particular resolution. Yet it occurred to me while reading that the story is, despite its sadness, detailing the perfectly ordinary: two mentally-unstable people in a hospital for the mentally unstable. We as readers seek to dramatize (perhaps the narrator is really just a hopeless romantic, shoved in an asylum unjustly, and looking for a way to bridge the gap of his personal loneliness), rather than acknowledge the ordinary or routine nature of the disaffected, or question the reliability of a narrator residing in a mental institution. This same general philosophy applies to one of the more detailed stories (Bussinger’s “Foothill Boulevard”), about a distant and unlikeable narrator in a loveless, utilitarian relationship who chases deadend opportunities to fulfill some internal obligation to herself. Once again we are treated to the perfectly ordinary (subpar relationship, and a fixer-upper house in a bad neighborhood) with a gravitas and emotional weight that makes it appear to resonate with a greater meaning or a metaphorical overlay. It’s actually the simple machinations of people being people.

Not all the stories are that depressing; some flirt with unintelligible science fiction (Shelley Oria’s “The Beginning of a Plan”); some talk about assholes (Cera’s “Pinecone”); some are interesting snapshots of father-son dynamics (Moffett’s “Further Interpretations of Real Life Events”). All in all, it was an odd collection of stories that was misadvertised by its collection’s title, I think. Perhaps that was just McSweeney’s attempt to thwart its audience (haha! you tricksters and your meta-humor!) all along. I was a little underwhelmed, in the end, but that may be because my capacity for short stories is minimal unless they’re satirical. Here’s hoping that Issue 31 is more my speed.