A Literary Life

    A lot of people have been struck with great ideas for books, wild notions about alternate universes or shifts of time that usually fit snugly in the sci-fi or fantasy genres. But not a lot of people actually are able to untangle these ideas, weave them together without gaping holes of plot or character, and create a touching and realistic piece of non-genre fiction. It is such a feat of unique vision and technical talent that Niffenegger has pulled of in The Time Traveler’s Wife, her incredible first novel.

Henry DeTamble is a handsome guy if somewhat thin, smart and well-read, multi-lingual, a librarian. He’s also an expert lock-picker, able to violently kick the ass of those that threaten him and turns up naked in public places quite often. These last three character traits stem from the fact that Henry is a time traveler. And no, not in a Jules Vern or Back to the Future flux capacitor kind of way. Henry involuntarily skips through time like an epileptic experiences seizures, traveling more when he’s tired or stressed and can’t seem to keep a grip on the present. He carries nothing with him (hence the frequent nakedness) and cannot control where he winds up. Despite this lack of control and helplessness in the face of time and space, Henry is also uncomfortably aware of past and future events: who will die and when, of the bad choices his future self will make despite his knowledge that the decision will be disastrous.

While this involuntary time travel, treated as a physical disorder, is unique on its own, the author adds depth with the character of Claire, Henry’s wife. Claire met Henry when she was six in a small clearing behind her childhood home. Henry, on the other hand, doesn’t meet Claire until he is 28 and all his childhood visits to Claire are still in his convoluted future. So do Henry and Claire’s lives intertwine over the course of their non-parallel lives, and so is the nature of unconditional, destined love revealed through Niffenegger’s beautiful and concrete — though not romantic or sappy — prose. Sometimes, Claire is faced with two husbands of various ages in one time period. Other times, she is left alone for days, unsure of where or when or in what danger her husband is.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is not an easy story, where all threads are tied off in perfect, little square knots. That’s a good thing, too, because I’m not really a fan of squared off, neat stories. Instead, the book is a rich and complex, incredibly human story, despite the supernatural subject matter. And it’s a book that breezes through the eye, a quick read that keeps you glued to the bus bench, bathtub or wherever else you happen to be reading. It’s the kind of book that proves that books will never die, will never be sacrificed on the altar of television and computers and Progress with a capital P. It’s a book that reminds me why I read — to find these stories and people that are so real, that now exist in my head, that maybe somehow existed all along.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

So the story moves backward… It sounds like a simple enough, oft-tried concept in post-modern writing. Geez, I mean Pulp Fiction did that, right? is what many might ask. The same thought cropped into my mind when I read the premise (It seemed an artificial constraint, an experiment in style, which is always interesting but often badly done), so I don’t blame naysayers for their doubt of the premise’s value. However, this book — regardless of the fact that it was published in 1991 — is unrivaled (in my small experience), unique, insightful and uses the concept of time moving in reverse to establish a truly moving and intellectual premise.

We begin at death, of course, and it takes a while to grow into the mind and world of our main character — a doctor with an obvious secret, a palpable weight around his neck despite his newly acquired life. (Well, he does begin as dead.) We grow into that mind with the narrator, a separate character who is unnamed and unknown even to himself, who witnesses the world mute and impotent through the doctor’s eyes. Because the author takes the concept of the reverse flow of time so seriously and also thanks to the narrator’s innocent anonymity, we see the world in a whole new light. Relationships begin with fights, progress through sex and niceties, only to wind up with the participants slowing backing away from acquaintance. So does the thankful patient get worse as the doctor shoves part of a windshield through his face. The patient then walks out of the hospital angry and upset, waiting for a car accident to put him back together again — the doctor fucks him up, a car accident makes him whole again. So do dead ants heal themselves when they come in contact with a human boot.

“Never watching where they are going, the people move through something prearranged, armed with lies. They’re always looking forward to places they’ve just come back from, or regretting things they haven’t yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye. Lords of lies and trash — all kings of crap and trash. Signs say No Littering — but who to? We wouldn’t dream of it. Government does that, at night, with trucks, or uniformed men come sadly at morning with their trolleys, dispensing our rubbish, and shit for the dogs.”

Imagine the description of eating, of shitting. Or of money, which seems to be given to us wherever we go.

Now, imagine when back in time our main character will take us. I hate to be a spoiler, I really do, but I must hint that at some point, the world will again make sense to the narrator. At some major point in history, we will see our main character heal instead of hurt. We will see his secret and witness a point in time that is so vital, so visceral, that the clock of time maybe should have stopped and turned around on its axis.

Time’s Arrow was gripping, deep and artful. Sometimes the arrow hit the mark so hard that I was forced to stop reading for a moment, put the book down due to an overwhelming and revelatory emotion. It’s a wrench in the mental works I will never forget and also an example of literary artifice, some of which can be clunky and silly no matter how talented the author, pulled off brilliantly with wit, poise and insight.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

I have heard of, but never read, McCarthy’s most famous book, All the Pretty Horses. Published in 1992, I suppose it was somewhat ahead of my reading abilities at the time (I was 12). But it was only after ten pages of The Road–The Boyfriend and I were sitting in the dentist office waiting room and I turned to him in happy surprise, my eyes shiny–that I knew I would not only devour this novel but attempt to get my hands on any other of the 10 novels he’d written, including Pretty Horses.

The Road begins in a post-apocalyptic America where soot and ash cover the world, blowing from place to place on the wind and falling down like rain, a world that is more vivid and believable because the author chooses not to tell us how it became so scarred. He removes the exposition and thereby allows the reader to suspend disbelief effortlessly, not dealing with niggling doubts about whether it could have “really” happened. Instead, we are all the sudden in that world, as stuck as the main characters of father and son in the bleak future, knowing that it does no good to ask why or how but only to soldier on.

For the father and son, this means trudging down the road in the direction of, well, hopefully something better. The father doesn’t know if it will be, the son only has vague ideas of what better even is, but both realize that without the motion of moving on, they will give up hope that “better” is possible. Yes, it is a dark vision. Take for instance the father’s thoughts on the purpose of continuing to struggle, the purpose of thought when it will never be known outside your own head:

No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reasonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.

Yet despite this darkness, and because of it, you are pulled along with these men and their love and dependence on one another. In their quest to remain human and yet still remain alive. As they attempt to find out why alive is better than dead.

(Son:) Can I ask you something? he said.
Yes. Of course.
Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
And we’re still going south.
Yes.
So we’ll be warm.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay what?
Nothing. Just okay.
Go to sleep.
Okay.
I’m going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?
Yes. That’s okay.
And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?
Yes. Of course you can.
What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.

I don’t want to ruin this sparse, powerful story or style with any more commentary. I want to keep its mystery with me and hope that many more readers will, like me, find a memorable jewel of words and ideas in this novel. Polish it up. Put it on a mental shelf.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover.

It took me six weeks to finish this book, which I believe is a personal record. I’ve spent more than six weeks trying (and failing) to finish a book when I was younger, before I was wise enough to know when to throw in the towel, even if the books was supposed to be classic, change-your-life good or the favorite tome of someone I admire. (See here or here for examples). But unlike those paper weights of unfinished (sometimes undecipherable) prose, I loved this six-week long adventure, every one of its 981 pages. That’s 1,079 with the footnotes. Yes, it’s fiction and yet it has footnotes, but we will get to that later.

This is a story about an America of the very near future, where the U.S. has basically annexed Mexico and Canada to form the Organization of North American Nations. They cede “The Concavity,” which is basically America’s toxic waste dump, to Canada, elect a Vegas-crooner ala Tom Jones to the presidency and do away with the numbering of years (i.e. 1999, 2000, 2001) in order to make a buck through sponsorship. Enter the Year of the:Whopper, Tucks Medicated Pad, Trial-Size Dove Bar, Perdue Wonderchicken, Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishwasher, etc. Welcome to the world of modern individualism, technological isolation, educated non-communication, bumbling social/political policy, post-post modern art, Canadian terrorism, and meanlessness existences full of humor and irony, if not true emotion.

This is the story (mostly) of the Incandenza family. A professional grammarian mother and a optics expert/tennis enthusiast/film director/alcoholic father who commited suicide via microwave, who have three boys — a womanizing NFL punter, a disabled budding filmmaker and Hal, our (mostly) main character, who is a nationally ranked student at the tennis academy his father founded and a bit of a pot head. Hal, who …

“… himself hasn’t has a bona fide intesity-of-interior-life type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he is in there, inside his own hull, as a human being.”

The other cast of characters is filled out by a range of addicts, alcoholics and junkies who at one time or another inhabit the halfway house down the hill for the tennis academy.

This is the story of searching for meaning and finding none, of creating your own, of cracking jokes that are too serious to be funny and suffering tragic circumstances without getting the larger joke. It’s about depression and the substances or people we use to plug the gaps in ourselves. It’s about our burning hunger for entertainment, any entertainment to escape the self, and of the ultimate entertainment–an elusive film that is so perfect, it could infest humanity like a plague, bringing mankind to his knees faster and more effectively than any bio-terrorist WMD every conceived

“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what?”

But mostly, this book is pure David Foster Wallace. Dense and intelligent without taking the world too seriously. Incredibly funny without being vapid. Very long sentences trailing into the distance, moving at the speed and with the course of thought, punctuated with volumious footnotes that bounce you in and out of the narrative, in and out of time, in and out of character’s minds, out of your mind in general. He oscillates between erudite words rarely found outside of dictionaries (my favorite repeated examples being prandial and fugue) and amusing, made-up constructions, tweaked pre- and suffixes, or misused nouns (like “polyesterishly”).

No, the novel is not for everyone. What 1,000-page novel is? But I enjoyed it immensley, envied Foster’s brilliance, and know that it will stick in my mental craw for quite some time, interupting routine thought patterns like a wrench in the works, forcing me to think in different circles, giggle at interior jokes no one else (who hasn’t invested the 1,000 pages) will get, and be a slightly different, more complex person with a new point of view on the world at large. Now that is the true hallmark of good fiction.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

Robert Coover is one of the most amazing, incredibly influential writers you’ve probably never heard of. I know I was only introduced to him in college during one of those American Fiction survey courses with a textbook four inches thick covering the classic, modern short stories: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Caleveras County” by Mark Twain. Coover’s classic is “The Babysitter,” a story that in retrospect I didn’t understand all that well. The tale shifts perspective constantly and explores all the threads of the possible, changing the plot in front of your eyes. As a student, I found the story ominous and portentous, as if there was a mystery there I needed to figure out, a mystery that was going to end worse than I could ever imagine. I re-read the story later in his book “Pricksongs and Descants” (and reviewed it here) and now understand that, sure, it was ominous but it was also sheer play, a man who is throwing around words like marbles on pavement, seeing which ones fall in to the realm of the possible and in awe of how they glint and prism in the sunlight. Robert Coover is also a professor at Brown, the school I would earn my MFA from if pure desire were the only qualification for admission. Sigh. No really, I’m not bitter. Just mildly bruised.

With all this glowing praise thus far, you will understand that I really looked forward to reading more of his work and decided recently upon his 1998 novel, “John’s Wife.” Why? It was on the shelf at the library. May not be the best reason but I gotta tell you I am thankful it was there because I was flabbergasted and amazed by this book. From the cover of the book to the last word (which is “Once,” not that that spoils anything), I was hooked. Again, Coover is his fabulist meta self, shifting narrator from paragraph to paragraph throughout a cast of characters who inhabit a nameless Midwestern (I think) town.

Forty one characters to be exact–I just counted. This movement between the 41 causes the plot to shift back and forth in time as well as reveal the past and future in tempting bits and pieces, crumbs of the pie so to speak. At times, the narration passes from person to person like the flu, moving with a touch or an interaction to the next person in contact. Other times, it revolves around a theme. For example, let’s see what everyone in town is dreaming tonight or let’s chronicle how everyone lost their virginity–when, with whom, with each other? Only one person’s name may be in the title (John) and the subject of that title (John’s wife) is never identified as anything else. That’s because despite the title, this is the story of an entire town. The stories of entire lives, successes, mistakes, humanity. The story of how different, similar and connected all of those individual lives are, to the point that maybe they aren’t individual at all. Maybe our own voices are not distinct in the crowd, and we thinkwe can hear ourselves only to stave off madness.

Of course, let me quote the author’s own words, told in the voice of the philosophical town librarian to her pharmacist husband after watching a monster movie:

“We like to think, even when we’re being reasonable, that there are fixed boundaries—to our bodies, our essential being, our homes and families, our towns and nations—it’s how we know or think we know we have a self. But maybe it’s all a mad delusion, maybe there are no boundaries and no selves either, our conscious life just a way of hiding the real truth from us because, simply, it’s too much to live with. We have to stuff it back down in the pit where the creepies live, if we want to function at all, even if functioning, as we call it, is possibly the craziest thing we do. Art, even bad art like Hollywood horror movies, puts us in touch with that truth by breaking down the boundaries for a moment, producing monsters we secretly know to be more real than the good citizens that eventually subdue them.”

I say I was hooked. Now, I don’t want to mislead you with that phrase. It did take me a bit over two weeks to finish “John’s Wife” and that is a really long time in Kate world. Therefore let me warn you that this brilliant, witty narration can also be thick and confusing. The first hundred pages, I had to keep referring back to see who was who in an effort to keep the names straight. And the in-your-head streaming of thoughts made me often pause to catch my breath so I read in short–but satisfying–bursts. The concept, which I am amazed Coover was able to sustain so well for so long, sometimes makes the reader think that they are losing track of the plot, a confusing sensation that makes you doubt your own abilities of comprehension.

But of course, the characters are thrown into that world of doubt, too, of doubting their eyes, their hearts, their own existence. In the beginning, the characters may have reminded me of my grandmother and her sisters and friends, who grew up in a small town in days she paints with the “good ‘ole” brush. But then we see sin, temptation, greed, orgies, homosexuality of both sexes (which no longer remind me of my grandmother, naturally). We see reformed sinners as well as the religious kind in disguise. Oh and it gets better. After that comes the supernatural. Ghosts, metaphysical experiences, medical abnormalities, alternate realities. Fire, giants, gods, art.

I think the reader is supposed to experience that sensation of disorientation. Lose the train of thought that is. Get lost in the coal smoke and see that the scenery rolling by is becoming more surrealistic. Like you are on the track to hell but everyone sees, no one denies it and the rest of humanity does not implode, vanish or in any other way prove that it is not really happening. So it is really happening. Your disbelief is suspended into the atmophere, or even over the rainbow into Oz.
Let me again quote the author in the words of the town newspaperman/hopeful author, who missed an issue of the paper due to a personal meltdown:

He had not, for the first time since he undertook the task, kept the record [published the newspaper], he knew that, but the record he had kept all these years, or thought he’d kept, was now, he found, dissolving on him, as though to teach him what he had always known—that words were not, as he liked to pretend, the stubborn monitors of time, adamant and fixed as number, but were time’s recombinatory toys and about as hard as water—and so to taunt him with the futility of his record-keeping mission… Art emerges, not from the seen, but from the longing for what is not seen.

Yet the reader keeps reading those futile words… and with gusto. Not because the words are facts, permanent and set. But because they are shifting, confusing, false and therefore totally human in a way that truth could never be.

Right? Have I lost ya? Well, can’t say that I blame you if I have. After all, it took me more than two weeks to digest it all and it is well worth the meal. I didn’t read a story. I read all the stories. Every story. I didn’t learn anything or have any revelations. Instead, I learned about the revelations behind the falsity of facts.

I was like Otis, the police cheif, whose…

… desire [was] now was to recapture that visionary moment just before, wherein, as he now recalled, his whole life as Officer Otis the guardian warrior had been revealed as a mockery, a self-delusion: what did his lifelong obsession with order and disorder have to do with this turbulent, radiant, and tender world which knew, at heart, no such distinction? … Yes, he had been ready at last to shed all artifice—to be a man merely of the here and now was to be a man closed out from eternity!—and to embrace, if it could be said to be embracable, the legendary abyss, which seemed to lie just beyond the war undulant flesh.

Two weeks. Yes, two weeks on one book is a long time for me, like watching a nine-hour marathon of Law and Order or The Sopranos (or some other deep show you like, doesn’t matter). You don’t regret it. In fact, you loved it. But it’s time to change the channel now, maybe towards some Gilligan’s Island or a nice game show. I think for my next book I will try out something fluffier, something that tells a nice story that moves from point A to point B and ends at point C. Not that such a linear plot means life, literature or art is so linear or logical or valid. But like the librarian character points out, we all need our little delusions and distractions.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover