Conversational Reading

Bolano and Imperfection

After breezing through the first hundred pages of 2666, I had the feeling that I'd finish the book in a week. I read By Night in Chile in a single sitting, Amulet in two, and Distant Star in perhaps three at most, so by extrapolating out, a week seemed perfectly reasonable.

2666 turned out to be a much slower read than I anticipated.

I think, probably, if it was like a 1,000-page version of By Night in Chile, I would have read the book in a week; but I'm not even sure what I just wrote makes sense. I'm not sure that By Night in Chile could ever be a 1,000-page work. By Night in Chile is so tightly wound that every word feels like it absolutely needs to be there. It is a book that, though complex, deals with very precise phenomena, and deals with them in a sharp, surgical manner.

I would argue that books the size of 2666 simply aren't meant to do what books like By Night in Chile do. Books like 2666 take on the biggest themes their authors can imagine, and these themes are so large that it takes serious novelistic real estate to even establish them on paper. They end up being so complex and ambitious that even the best authors can get lost in them. This is all a way of arguing that perhaps there is no way to make a book like 2666 feel as clean as By Night in Chile.

I'm a big fan of imperfection in literature. Although I can admire the tautly constructed small novel for the endless arguability and interpretability offered by its enigmatic clarity--think of The Metamorphosis, for instance--I like the imperfect, large novels for the very reason that I can feel things getting lost and going awry within them. It's these detached or misshapen pieces that often become the most compelling moments in the novel for me.

In his afterword to the first edition of 2666, Ignacio Echevarria, Bolano's literary executor, appropriately quotes this passage from the novel:

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to tak eon the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing; they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

I can't imagine that Bolano wasn't writing this self consciously; 2666 was his last book, by far his most ambitious. It followed a number of those "perfect exercises" and The Savage Detectives, which seems like his attempt to break out of the short novels into something large and ambitious, a midway station between them and 2666.

2666 is also, as far as I know, the only one of Bolano's novels that directly deals with Nazi fascism, a matter that is discussed indirectly everywhere in Bolano's works. I imagine that in writing about this Bolano was engaging in the "real combat" mentioned in the quote.

In addition to the Nazis, 2666 is a book about voids--the void represented by death, by cosmic boredom, by literary insignificance, by senseless violence and death. 2666 engages in real combat with all of these, and now that I have finished the book I want to go back and consider how well Bolano has waged his battles, how well he has added to these concepts, how deeply he has probed them, and how well they function as complements, placed, as they are, side by side in the 5 "books" that comprise 2666. This, I think, will be the true measure of the success of the last book Bolano wrote.

More 2666 on Conversational Reading:

• First Impressions of 2666
• 2666--The Big Book of BEA?

2666: First Impressions

Now that I've knocked off a good inch of 2666, I feel like it's time to say a little about my reactions to it.

At this point, I can't say I'm very much reminded of The Savage Detectives (other than in terms of some very general themes that seem to be present in every book Bolano wrote); that book was about youth and what happens to youth as it grows old and forgotten. It focused on people above society--by that I mean it was about rendering a certain kind of emotional response to a life gone awry. The book was more concerned with this than making you understand a certain condition, the way Sebald makes modernity palpable. As a result the people in The Savage Detectives almost always felt fresh and read, and the main characters of Ulises, Belano, and Madero remain vivid in my mind.

2666 is, perhaps, precisely the opposite. It is a sprawling book seemingly most concerned with instilling something of the melancholy and isolation of late-late (or maybe post-late) capitalism, and to that end I feel as though the people are being given short shrift in favor of the set on which they perform.

The book it most brings to mind right now is Don DeLillo's Underworld. Both of these books feel like a sort of requiem towering over and gazing back at their respective subjects. They are both slow reads in which you feel like you're being taken down more than a few blind alleys, until, tens or hundreds of pages later, you finally see the purpose in where you were taken. Both of these books are immense, sprawling affairs, books full of many discrete parts that I can somewhat see coming together if I continue the lines they trace in my mind.

For example. Here are a few of the items I've encountered so far in 2666: a book (probably imaginary) arguing that one of Chile's founding fathers was part  Native American; a philosophical-geometrical tract that a character discovers packed in his moving-box, and then takes out and hangs on a clothesline like a Duchamp ready-made; the text of a sermon of a black preacher who publishes cookbooks to make ends meet; a film whom the possessor claims was the first movie that director Richard Rodriguez ever made. On and on.

The thing about these pieces is that at this point they are by and large more memorable than the characters themselves, which, although they are far from poorly rendered, do not match up to characters from other Bolano books that I have read. Furthermore, these pieces are imbued with a sort of DeLilloesque instability--first they feel like they are about one thing, then another, then perhaps back again. To my mind they remain mysterious and enigmatic, resisting attempts to say exactly what they are about. They also feel startlingly contemporary, as in the case of a radical Muslim sect that marches in New York City under a banner bearing the face of Osama bin Laden.

Some of the writing even sounds, in a way, a little like DeLillo. Here are some quotes that have impressed themselves in my mind:

. . . though not just any nest but a postnuclear nest, a nest with no room for any certainties but cold, despair, and apathy.

. . . the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers.

The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly began to think, in vain.

I suppose Bolano and DeLillo have more than superficial similarities, as they both are innovators when it comes to writing about the political in their books. 2666 is no less political than any other Bolano book I've read, but, like them, in this one the political is both omnipresent and non-obtrusive. To see exactly what I mean, look how the political ghosts through this paragraph before finally, momentarily, flaring up into outright palpability:

It goes without saying that most of the attendees of these curious discussions gravitated toward the hall where contemporary English literature was being discussed, next door to the German literature hall and separated from it by a wall that was clearly not made of stone, as walls used to be, but of fragile bricks covered with a thin layer of plaster, so that the shouts, howls, and especially the applause sparked by English literature could be heard in the German literature room as if the two talks or dialogues were one, or as if the Germans were being mocked, when not drowned out, by the English, not to mention by the massive audience attending the English (or Anglo-Indian) discussion, notable larger than the sparse and earnest audience attending the German discussion. Which in the final analysis was a good thing, because it's common knowledge that a conversation involving only a few people, with everyone listening to everyone else and taking time to think and not shouting, tends to be more productive or at least more relaxed than a mas conversation, which runs the permanent risk of becoming a rally, or, because of the necessary brevity of the speeches, a series of slogans that fade as soon as they're put into words.

And then we get to the book's two biggest items, two shadowy images that seem to stand like poles at either end of this book. The first is the author Archimboldi. When the book starts he is an obscure German author--he is nothing. Then a translation, a fortuitous review, some interest from scholars, and suddenly there are Archimboldi symposiums as far as the eye can see, titans of the Archimboldi industry fighting for power of interpretation, willing disciples on each side, and, of course, the perennial Nobel watch.

The Archimboldi part is fleshed out in the novel's first section, about a hundred pages, and to my mind it's the most consistent, interesting part of the novel I'd read so far. I don't know if this relates to the fact that 2666 was never really completed, but the first section feels by far the most polished; there are enormous, page-spanning sentences here that unfurl segment by segment, perfectly paced rocking from comma to comma with their own peculiar logic. And there are many of them in a row. The effect is dazzling,a nd I have yet to see something that compares after the first section.

This part of the book ends with the Archimboldi scholars being brought to Santa Teresa in northern Mexico in a vain, you might say pointless, attempt to finally meet up with the reclusive author, and thus we are brought to the book's opposite pole, the bit-by-bit murder of hundreds of Mexican women in Santa Teresa. These are ghastly, unsolved murders that have been going on for years, and the residents of Santa Teresa seem to react to them with an odd mixture of outright fear and disinterest. And Santa Teresa seems a little ghastly itself: it's a huge, ever-growing city made up part of desert, part of sweat-shop style factories. Bolano spends much time evoking Santa Teresa, and I think he does it because in this book Santa Teresa represents something very substantial--I can't say quite what, but something along the lines of a beleaguered retreat, a final resting place, our collective future.

Still aching for more Bolano? Here are some links to past Bolano coverage:

* Our interview with TSD and 2666 translator Natasha Wimmer

* Our interview with Bolano translator Chris Andrews

* Find out where 2666 fits in to the rest of Bolano's collective works with Javier Moreno's awesome Bolano triangle, part of his Quarterly Conversation essay in which he offers a theory of how Bolano's books fit together.

* Read my own Bolano essay from the same issue of The Quarterly Conversation. In it I take a close look at By Night in Chile and consider how the theme of parents and children works in Bolano's books.

* Read our coverage of The Savage Detectives as part of Reading the World 2007

* Read my column where I compare two Latin American deathbed confession novels: Bolano's By Night in Chile with Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz

Friday Column: Mann, Faustus, and the Modernist Morality

(When I decided to discuss Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus on this blog, it quickly became clear that I could expend thousands and thousands of words without nearly exhausting everything there is to discuss in this book. Thus, I'm going to break up my discussion of Faustus into a number of pieces taking on certain of th book's themes and ideas. This is the first.

Note that all quotes are from the original 1948 translation made by H.T. Lowe-Porter. There is a more recent one made by John E. Woods, which I have some reason to believe is a better translation.)

Perhaps the thing I most respect about Doctor Faustus is Mann's willingness in this book to leap into intellectually fraught territory and his utter ability to pull it off. Here, Mann takes on some of the most difficult topics imaginable, and he succeeds in discussing them with great rigor, nuance, and originality. Simply put, in territory where many authors would humiliate themselves or simply fall short in trite banalisms, Mann comes through admirably.

Perhaps the thorniest subject Mann gets into in Faustus is to wonder whether art has moral content. Artists, and those who enjoy their work, seem to be generally sensitive to any attempts to mix art and morals; there's a prevalent idea that to consider a work's morality is somehow vulgar, dilettantish, beside the point, and I think a lot of people would simply disdain the question if it were raised. Perhaps a few braver souls would delve into the matter and come out simply looking foolish.

But in Faustus Mann is pretty clearly debating whether the compositions of Adrian--our composer who has struck a deal with the Devil--should be considered from a moral standpoint. What makes this all the more striking is that Mann puts on this debate in the context of classical music, the art form that is typically considered most abstract and therefore safe from questions of good and evil.

Adrian's biographer, Serenus Zeitbloom, puts us on notice as early as page 10, when he defines culture as the "entrance of the dark and uncanny into the service of the gods." Here he's positing art as something potentially dangerous, something that forces the artist to descend into destructive territory.

But beyond that, Mann is quite consciously placing art into a relationship with the mysterious and with deities, both good and evil. This is important because Faustus is an overwhelmingly theological book, one that not only explores the intersection between art and religion but also takes on a number of long-standing theological questions.

Let's not let the latter concern us right now, though, or else we'll be off in an entirely different direction. The point simply is that Faustus is a book that contemplates religion with intellectual rigor and nuance, and it is no coincidence that religion figures so largely in this book that is foremost about classical music and the nature of art.

To return to Zeitbloom's fine coinage, "entrance of the dark and uncanny into the service of the gods"--I want to look at it in the light of a certain theological discussion that takes place about 50 pages later. Adrian, who as a young man has gone to study theology at university, lays out a Christian responses to the familiar question of why God permits evil in the world. Mann's argument is complex and intersects interestingly with certain ideas meandering through the novel, but I'd like right now to concentrate on what Mann writes about freedom:

God's logical dilemma had consisted in this: that He had been incapable of giving the creature, the human being and the angel, both independent choice, in other words free will, and at the same time the gift of not being able to sin. Piety and virtue, then, consisted in making a good use, that is to say no use at all of the freedom which God had to grant . . .

If we consider the dark and uncanny as an essential ingredient of art, then artists certainly don't make a "good" use of God's freedom. Rather, they must sin in order to explore the realms required by art, and yet, if we follow the quote to its conclusion, they are nonetheless acting in the service of the gods in doing so.

Mann has implicitly placed art into moral territory--the territory of honoring God and the deal He has made with humanity. Then he steps into altogether different moral territory:

Then freedom was the opposite of inborn sinlessness, freedom meant the choice of keeping faith with God, or having traffic with demons and being able to mutter beastlinesses at the Mass. That was a definition suggested by the psychology of religion. . . . [Freedom now plays a role]--as I write down this description of a life--in the war now raging [i.e. World War II], and as I in my retreat like to believe, not least in the souls and thoughts of our German people, upon whom, under the domination of the most audacious license, is dawning perhaps for the first time in their lives a notion of the importance of freedom. Well, we had not got so far by then. The question of freedom was, or seemed in our student days, not a burning one, and Dr. Schleppfuss might give to the word the meaning that suited the frame of his lecture and leave any other meanings on one side. . . . But he was mindful of them. . . . And his theological definition of freedom was an apologia and a polemic against the "more modern," that is to say more insipid, more ordinary ideas which his hearers might associate with them.

And so the matter of freedom is not just an artistic and religious matter--it is a cultural and political one as well. It is something being hotly debated in early 20th-century Germany; by then, freedom had become a realm that was up for grabs, where the religious interpretation fought it out with what an artist might consider freedom to be, or what up-and-coming radical intellectuals might say freedom was. And, as Mann reminds us, though he need not, from this debate over what freedom would mean to the Germans came the distinctly Nazi definition, one which abetted Hitler's rise to power and permitted him and his adherents to carry their their evil agenda.

Though Faustus is a book primarily concerned with artistic freedom, Mann argues that a true contemplation of it must include an analysis of the other kinds of freedom as well; thus, he looks at the concept of freedom from all angles: from the religious angle of why God permits it; from a cultural angle of the classic German ideas of freedom butting up again the modern ones developing in the early 20th century; and from the artistic angle of how art relates to free will and what this means for morality in art.

All this talk of God and morality brings up a good question: Is Adrian doomed to hell, or does he ascend to heaven after he dies? The question must be asked, because if we take Faustus as a book about God, the Devil, heaven, hell, and souls, then we must consider where the book's principal character goes after he dies, and what this implies for Mann's discussion of morality in art. In other words, we must ask whether Adrian works for the Devil, who it appears is the one that permits Adrian to make his strange, sometimes beautifully disfigured art, or if he is really working for God, who allows Adrian his freedom to stray toward the Devil in the service of ultimate good.

But before all that, let's ask a more fundamental question: Does the Devil ever actually enter into this novel? I don't know. All we have of Adrian's supposed deal is a narration of it written by Adrian, who we know is unreliable, prone to jokes, a frequent exaggerator, and someone who was already well-infected with syphilis and perhaps a little mad when the supposed deal took place.

In fact, as if to further encourage us to question the truth of Adrian's tale of meeting the Devil (which itself is an opaque, odd document written in old German and difficult to follow), not long after the deal is confessed to Zeitbloom, Adrian tells him an incredible story of how he and a scientist used a submarine to travel to the bottom of the ocean. Perhaps nervously, Zeitbloom takes it all as a big joke,--and maybe it is--but Adrian remains perfectly deadpan throughout the entire narration, never giving an indication that he is joking. (How a recluse like Adrian who scarcely left his country home could find means to accomplish this is never discussed.)

Mann has placed this amazing tale almost directly after Zeitbloom finds out about the deal with the Devil, and I can think of no other purpose for putting it right there (beside letting Mann flex his considerable lyrical muscle as he describes the realm at the bottom of the sea) than to cast doubt on whether the Devil actually made a deal with Adrian, to ask us to please consider the state of Adrian's mind, or to consider whether this Devil document isn't another one of his jokes.

Amidst all this doubt, I think that, ultimately, the issue of whether or not the Devil was actually in Adrian's presence doesn't matter: what matters is that Adrian has knowingly strayed from God in the service of his art--he has made his own deal, and he knows it--and if the Devil didn't really appear then perhaps the document is an emenation from his guilty conscience. Regardless, the deal--real or not--colors what music comes out of Adrian. Mann paints the 12-tone system (created in real life by Arnold Schoenberg, but in the novel Adrian's creation) as a system that could only have come from a descent into the dark and uncanny, and for the majority of his career Adrian creates music that is tinted by the places he had to enter in order to develop his system. He is further tainted by being a purposeful recluse, a misanthrope who needs his anti-humanism to struggle against the grain of the then-dominant (but also hopelessly calcified) strains of classical music. Adrian's art sends him back before the Renaissance all the way to the earliest stages of modern music, and it is no coincidence that this radical conservatism parallels the very radically conservative ideas that animate the Nazis and their intellectual adherents.

While contemplating the moral content of Adrian's music alongside religion and Nazi politics, Mann also implies that morality in art is perhaps a concern that only became viable in the 20th century. While discoursing at length on Adrian's art, Zeitbloom, as he often does, breaks off to expound on an idea about art and nature that occurs to him. He says that in pre-Modernist periods, artists aspired to make their works appear part of the natural world. He says that the works seemed to spring fully formed nature, like Athena from Zeus's head. In fact, not only were pre-Modernist notable for aspiring toward this; they were also notable for even being able to aspire to it. Zeitbloom contends that in the Modernist period, this is no longer possible.

Artists in the Modernist era and beyond can no longer hope for the naive relationship between art and its viewers that permitted such an idea as the "natural" work because culture has become too sophisticated; we no longer can believe in the work that flows from the pen as if dictated by God; rather, we know what a slow, ugly birth all good art must have. Not only that--also in the Modernist period we begin to interrogate the relationship of the artist to her art, to see the formative process itself as something that art is meant to turn in on itself and contemplate.

This division between natural and unnatural art is a matter of free will--Does the artist struggle and create something herself, or is the art a matter wholly of inspiration, some part of nature that only uses the artist as a vessel?

I think that, in the end, Mann sides clearly on the side of free will. In a rather insidious, telling touch, almost all of the art that Adrian creates while under his deal with the Devil is infected with something of the Devil's evil. It seems that the Devil will have his cake and eat it too--that is, he will get Adrian's soul, but he will also find a way to renege on his contract by corrupting Adrian's work and turning it to his own ends. As proof of the Devil's success, even Zeitbloom, Adrian's biggest backer, accepts that Adrian's greatest masterpiece is a work that is part and parcel of the pre-Nazi sentiment that pervades Germany in the run-up to Hitler. (And Zeitbloom is all too aware that World War II and the Holocaust--as well as the horror of toltalitarian society--will render any art created in the Nazi image unviable after the Germans have been defeated.)

As long as Adrian's art is controlled by the Devil's influence, I think we have to side with the view that art is part of nature, that the artist's free will ultimately doesn't create the art. But then the very final piece that Adrian writes, the piece that Adrian never actually plays because he spiritually and artistically dies as he raises his hands before the piano--I think in this piece, Adrian succeeds in ridding himself of the Devil's influence. The piece is called The Lament of Faustus, and it is the moan of a man pained by what he has done with his life. I think that in this piece Adrian has finally succeeded in battling the Devil to his knees, in creating a work that is not infected with the Devil's evil. It is a lament to be sure, not a victorious trouncing of the Devil but a sort of victory by negation, one that only succeeds insofar as it denies the Devil's spell. And I think that as a sort of last shot at Adrian, a final stalemate between the two, the Devil deprives him of the chance of ever playing his piece. If Adrian beats the Devil by finally writing something contrary to his influence--a wail that demonstrates his anguish and cautions others against his course--the Devil will at least smite him down before he can take the wail from the realm of the abstract and articulate it.

And so, I think that when Adrian writes this final piece, he writes it beneath the visage of God: that is, Adrian writes it as a godly man exercising his God-given free will. He has finally embraced true artistic freedom, has created a moral piece of art by using his freedom to create music in God's spirit and not by partnering with the Devil. He has perhaps succeeded in not merely being a vessel but in exercising true artistic creativity. Perhaps then Faustus is telling us that Modernist art, in its struggle to push art into regions it has never before seen, in its Faustian thirst for knowledge that is perhaps different from any that has been felt before the Modernist era, runs dangerously close to courting the Devil, but ultimately can exist in good, moral regions.

In this post I've discussed some of the moral and religious themes that Mann brings into Doctor Faustus. In the next I'd like to get into the nature of the art Adrian creates--how it reflects Modernist art at large by radically regressing to pre-Renaissance art to rejuvenate the calcified forms that emerged out of the Renaissance, and how this sentiment, very much a part of Modernist art, mirrored the political ideas animating the fascist movements then overtaking Italy and Germany.

Greek Romances = Action Movies?

I've been reading Bakhtin's long essay on the chronotopic (that's his word for time and space) in the novel. Basically, in this essay he's laying out how the use of time and space has changed since the first novel-like books appeared.

As the earliest novel precusors, Bakhtin identifies the Greek romances. What happens here is that there's a man who falls in love with a woman, but before the marriage can be achieved something happens, leading to an array of adventures which cumulate in the successful marriage.

Now, a lot of other novelistic genres also use this form, but what Bahktin says sets the Greek romances apart is the utter meaninglessness of everything that happens between the failed marriage and the successful one. All the adventures are just trivial events along the way that serve to put off the final marriage--they lead to no character development, to no discovery about the places where they occur; Bakhtin even says that the characters can't be said to age during these adventures.

As I read this description of the Greek romance and what defines it, it became clear to me that this more or less mirrors the shape of a large number of action movies. Often the movie starts with some kind of incipient romance which is then interrupted by whatever the hand of fate wishes to deal out, the majority of the movie then covers the hero overcoming fate again and again, and finally the romance is successfully completed.

Doctor Faustus

I've been slowly making my way through Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. Despite recently reading proust, Grass, and Kenzaburo Oe, I can pretty easily say that this is the most challenging read I've embarked on in a long time. I've found myself retreating to the safe harbor of Bakhtin just to take on something a little less bracing.

Other than a too-early read of Death in Venice, this is the first Mann I've read, and I'm wondering if all of his books are this intellectual. By that I mean that here Mann is pretty explicitly working out ideas regarding art and culture (obviously, most pointedly as they relate to classical music) and how they parallel the "renewal" of German society brough on by the Nazis.

I think Mann can get away with this because of the form of Doctor Faustus; that is, the book is a biography of a classical composer penned by his friend (an academic), so it makes sense that this book is going to give character and plot short shrift and be more caught up in the ideas at play, and giving us a surprisingly-often rarified discussion of them.

It's a kind of strange novel to read. You can't help but marvel at the level of ideas being brought to the table and how Mann integrates them into the wider plot of Germany in the modern period, but I'm not entirely sure if I feel okay with Mann creating this mock-biography framework to work out his ideas novelistically. I suppose the continuity of the narrator is what holds this book together as a novel (as opposed to just a bunch of ideas strapped onto a fictive body)--that is to say, Mann nails the narrative voice right from the beginning, and he hasn't lost it yet.

Reading Faustus does make me wonder about some of Mann's other big books--whether they're more fundamentally constructed as stories with people, or if the ideas there also predominate to the same degree as in Faustus.

Friday Column: Manuel Puig and the Performance of Ourselves

It has been said repeatedly, and I think correctly, that in this heavily ironized, mediated era we are each method actors performing ourselves. That is, TV, movies, and other mass media surrounds us with role models for any conceivable identity we may want to inhabit, and our well-developed consumer economy offers us everything we need to wear and own to be the person we think we are. From an early age we are sent off on a search to find ourselves—because, after all, postmodern society makes each of us feel the center of the world—and on this lifelong quest we are provided us with all the equipment (both mental and material) that we will need to define our self and then perform it into being.

If this view of things is correct, if it is true that we are all method actors whose greatest role is being our self, then there can be no doubt as to the contemporary author we must read: Manuel Puig. Heavily influenced by the theories of Freud and Lacan, Puig writes as though each of his characters are actors in a movie. His books are all about people who construct their identities by playing roles, and via his plots he deconstructs the ways in which people discover who they are and then learn to act it out.

Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Puig's clear masterpiece, is the book that most obviously reveals his preoccupation with how everyone is himself or herself an actor. It starts, after all, with the narration of a movie.

Two prisoners, one a homosexual window dresser and the other a young revolutionary, share a jail cell in early 1970s Argentina. To keep entertained during the long hours of their imprisonment, the window dresser, Molina, tells movies to Valentin, the revolutionary.

Already Puig has given us a lot to think about: here we have two people what have taken on atypical, ill-defined identities—if anyone needs roles to play, people such as Molina and Vanentin would be them. Furthermore, these two are talking about movies, a medium in which people pretend to be people who they aren't; and, in fact, they are discussing the movie not as seen on the screen but as filtered through Molina's mind.

All this, implicit in the first few pages, is quite a lot to unravel, but the wonderful, dizzying thing about Puig is the way he takes a perfectly intelligent conceit and then he keeps layering it up with levels and levels of meaning.

Take, for instance, the movie Molina is telling to Valentin. It is a fantasy/horror story about a woman who may or may not turn into a ravenous puma when a man kisses her on the lips. As Molina tells the movie to Valentin, the men begin to speculate as to why a woman would concoct such a tale; Valentin thinks it's something she invented because she's frigid, the product of a repressed upbringing that has frightened her about sex. After so many years of internalizing this fear, argues Valentin, she's talked herself into acting the part of a person who believes she'll turn into a puma if she's kissed.

So then the very substance of the movie adds a layer to Puig's conceit—and then another gets added in the form of Molina himself. Genetically a male, he's a fem gay man who prefers to act the part of a woman, especially as regards to romantic relationships. Quite literally, Molina can be seen as an actor: a man acting the part of a woman to the best of his understanding of what a woman is.

That's another layer now, but there's still another, most obvious one: the format of the book itself. Kiss of the Spiderwoman is mostly narrated in unattributed, un-stylized dialog (Puig's prose is littered with "mmm"s and ellipses). By foregrounding speech, Puig very simply emphasizes the fact that one of the principal ways we present ourselves to the outside world is in fact a very considered, very performed one. Speech, after all, is something we're continually constructing, and it changes based on the location we're in, the person to whom we're speaking, the mood we're in at the moment, etc.

And yet, though Puig is clearly taken with the idea that our personalities are performances based on who we think we are—that we're all really actors—the paradox that drives this nuanced, brilliant inquiry is that we're never quite sure exactly how to act out the personality we want to exhibit. Say you want to act the part of a cool person; well, what exactly does a cool person do? How should you act this out? It's a hard question to answer because concepts like "cool" are so overdefined, so ponderous with aggregated meaning and conflicting definitions, that it's hard to know exactly where to start performing them. Watch how quickly Valentin is stymied when Molina asks him what should be a very simple question: What makes a man?

—Well . . . Why don't you tell me what it means to you, being a man? . . .

—Mmm . . . his not taking any crap . . . from anyone, not even the powers that be . . . But no, it's more than that. Not taking any crap is one thing, but not the most important. What really makes a man is a lot more, it has to do with not humiliating someone else with an order, or a tip. Even more, it's . . . not letting the person next to you feel degraded, feel bad.

—That sounds like a saint.

—No, it's not as impossible as you think.

—I still don't get you . . . explain a little more.

—I don't know, I don't quite know myself, right this minute. You've caught me off guard. I can't seem to find the right words. . . .

This paradox is so intriguing because though Valentin can't tell Molina precisely what the measure of a man is, he's generally quite confident that he's acting like a man.

Most of the time, at least. The crises of Molina's and Valentin's lives tend to occur when each is uncertain about how to perform his identity. Thus, for instance, when Valentin falls ill and Molina tries to take care of him, Valentin suddenly flies into a rage (a rage which is acutely felt despite the fact that Puig limits himself to conveying it through about 20 words spread out over a few lines of dialog) because he's feeling a conflict between how he wants to act, i.e. to let Molina care for him, and how he thinks he needs to act, i.e. the stoic revolutionary.

Though Valentin is certainly a well-felt, fully realized character, Molina's thoughts and personal crises tend to be richer, perhaps partly because Puig himself was a gay man, but more likely because Molina's mind entertains more ambiguity than Valentin's and thus opens itself to us more and wrestles with issues a little more poignantly. The difference becomes most clear when Puig momentarily steps out of the dialog to enter into his characters' stream of consciousness (another favorite device of Puig's). Valentin's stream is abrasively jumpy, enough to prevent him from following a difficult thought to completion, and the way in which his mind constructs the narrative distances himself from his feelings and always leaves the truth of the matter in doubt:

—a fellow with a plan on his mind, a fellow who accepts his mother's invitation to visit her in the city, a fellow who lies to his mother assuring her of his opposition to the guerilla movement, a fellow who dines by candlelight alone with his mother . . .

Contrast this with the rawness, the directness of Molina's thoughts, as here when he's stung by some well-intentioned but nonetheless hurtful remarks Valentin makes about a movie Molina likes:

seen from behind, looking elegant, but from behind of course no way to tell if the faces are beautiful or not, and no one realizing that these two are the protagonists of the story that's just been told, and mom was crazy about it, and me too, and luckily I didn't tell this son of a bitch [i.e., Valentin], and I'm certainly not going to tell him another word about anything I like, so he can't laugh anymore about how soft I am, we'll see if ever he weakens or not, but I won't tell him any more of the films I like the most, tey're just for me, in my mind's eye, so no filthy words can touch them, this son of a bitch and his pissass of a revolution

What exactly is Kiss of the Spiderwoman inquiring into? The ways in which we construct our identities, for one thing, but also how exactly gender is created and the ways in which men and women interact according to its dictates. (The latter is, if anything, even more of a preoccupation with Puig than the ways we perform ourselves into our personalities.)

The two are clearly related. It's often far easier to say what something isn't than what it is, and accordingly, in Puig's books characters are able to define themselves as men and women most distinctly when interacting with people of the opposite gender. Spiderwoman, like all of Puig's books, can well be seen as people's investigations into otherness, that is, people figuring out how to define themselves through extended conversation and interaction with other people who quite obviously aren't them. Thus you can find odd pairings throughout Puig's works: fem gay and red-blooded straight; old man and young man (Eternal Curse on the Reader of these Pages); Don Juan wannabe and earnest provincial; seductress and good daughter (the latter two groupings in Heartbreak Tango). Because of their differences, conflict between these characters becomes inevitable, and yet, though at root this conflict is based in the inner turmoil people feel when they strain to understand themselves, Puig always makes these conflicts the natural outgrowths of perfectly normal situations.

Friday Column: How Should the First-Person Be Written?

Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier seems to me to possess precisely those virtues to which the novel narrated in the first-person is best suited. Often in first-person novels, the narrator is magically able to relate her story with the polish and skill of a novelist, and no effort is ever made to address why an otherwise ordinary person possesses such sharp storytelling abilities. The Good Soldier strikes me as such an accomplishment because Ford does not only provide us with a narrator whose storytelling skills are realistically diminished; he also integrates the narrator's diminished capacity into a portrayal of his character and an investigation into how the memory works and how we draw out memories by stringing them into stories.

A useful comparison: The Good Soldier very much brings to mind the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. As with Ishiguro's novels, Ford's proceeds along the winding, backtracking path of a mind mulling over a certain period of life. This kind of storytelling might be called disorganized organization; that is, in its purposeful aimlessness, it attempts to resemble the workings of a human mind as it gives shape to a mass of memories. As such, at many points in both authors' works the entire basis of the plot changes as the narrator recalls a previously forgotten fact. We jump back and forth in time according to the narrator's whim. Revelations that would generally sit at the apex of a climax are made here almost casually.

The difference, to me, between The Good Soldier and Ishiguro's novels is that some of Ishiguro has seemed to me just a bit too clean. His novels are so well-built that one never feels the muddle of a mind trying to reconstruct the past; throughout, the skill of their maker continually belies the fact that the novel is not the product of a mind like ours, but rather that of a master storyteller who has marshaled all his skills to shape a story.

By contrast, The Good Soldier is often a frustrating, amorphous read. Major events and crucial plot points are shrugged at us so casually that it's easy to miss them entirely. In the event that they are not missed, they often make such a meager impression that they are soon forgotten, or only half-remembered. Seemingly minor details are doted on to such an extent that one begins to lose faith in Ford—why does the narrator bore us with this matter of no significance?—and then, perhaps 50 pages later, we discover the true import of the event when the narrator happens to tell it from a completely different perspective.

This makes perfect sense. When the narrator discusses something, he is in possession of all the facts. He knows exactly what he's referring to (even if we don't), so why would it occur to him to spell it out for the benefit of his audience? Only a good storyteller would do that, and Ford's narrator clearly isn't one. What makes Ford such an extraordinary writer is that he provides us all the information we need without ever making his narrator seem anything more than the bumbling writer that he is.

In its apparent formlessness, the book loses the narrative drive that characterizes Ishiguro's novels, and so, The Good Soldier is less of an entrancing read than Ishiguro's addictive works. I think, though, that Ford's novel is the superior one, in that he has hidden his construction so well that on a first read it truly does look as though he gave no thought to structure. By its very difficulty the book proves its merit, as attempting to understand another's mind is never so easy and planned-out as Ishiguro's novels make it feel.

What might save some of Ishiguro's novels is that some minds are very simple; they see only in bright, clear tones, and so they might lack the complexity that a less simple mind would see as it looked back into its past. These minds, perhaps, would not be difficult to grasp, and the stories they concocted might be as clean as Ishiguro makes them.

This isn't the case with The Good Soldier—which isn't to say that I found the book's narrator particularly smart or even praiseworthy. The narrator is a man who for nine years was cuckolded in complete ignorance by Ashburnham, a man he quite admired, and then, when he found out after Asburnham's sudden death, went right on admiring him. The narrator is a man thoroughly aware of his own ignorance (although he attributes it more to a general, existential human ignorance of everything, rather than consider whether others are less ignorant than he in certain matters), and he is possessed by a clear and potent urge to overcome this ignorance, even though he doesn't seem to really believe it's possible.

In other words, he's a lot like you and me; that is, he's driven by an urge to understand his life, but he's not really sure that there is any meaning to it. To make sense of it, he is writing down the story of two disastrously failed marriages, his and that of the man who made his wife a mistress.

Rarely does an unreliable narrator so invite us to question his judgment. Partially this is due to his overall tone; the cadences of the narrator's sentences move with the seesawing vacillations of the wishy-washy and uninspiring, and he constantly cries out for meaning and explanation. But even more, it is hard to take seriously a man who speaks in such a steadfastly positive way about the man who for nine years slept with his wife, who seems so fundamentally innocent of why either partner would engage in the adultery.

We're tipped off to the narrator's supreme unreliability early enough on that The Good Soldier amounts to a virtual invitation to participate in the construction of meaning. It is, perhaps as a book like this must be, more documentation than storytelling, as the narrator's rendition of events is so suspect and so jumbled (and his mind so besotted by his ignorance of everything) that we simply cannot say that the narrator is consciously shaping the meaning of the facts he gives us. What makes Ford's rhetoric so elegant is that he is shaping our perceptions of each character (and often at cross-purposes with the narrator) while maintaining a narration that appears so purposelessly jumbled. It's as if we were to listen to static coming out of the radio and nonetheless develop feelings typically associated with hearing music.

What you might say Ford is doing here is hiding the meaning in plain sight. The Good Soldier was published in 1913, and, unlike a lot of books published around this time, the prose style of this one isn't terribly difficult or experimental. On the face of it, it seems like most close readers could more or less agree on the general shape of the narrative, what it's rock-bottom "truth" is. But in reality, the closer you look at this book, the more even the most basic points of the plot begin to unravel in contradiction and ambiguity, and you begin to see that you're no closer to knowing what really happened than if Ford had adopted a purposely opaque, indefinite style of constructing his sentences.

In this end, this may be Ford's ultimate concession to his narrator. So riddled is he by innocence and self-deception that it simply wouldn't be realistic to think that any story but a fundamentally unknowable one would come out of such a narrator. Ford's courage as an author is to face this head-on and to write a book that requires a great deal of perception and faith on the part of the reader. As a result The Good Soldier is a book with affecting moments, but one that in the aggregate doesn't have the ability that a more conventionally arced plot would to make us feel something; the feeling at the end isn't anything but uncertainty and a desire to look back and begin to construct meaning. It's a perfect acknowledgment of the narrator's repeatedly professed helplessness to understand what this episode in his life means, and it's a challenge to us to try and do better.

Although I'm far from arguing that all first-person narrators should be like The Good Soldier's (exceptions that instantly come to mind would include those that are narrating an episode as it happens or those that are recounting an episode that they have gone over again and again in their minds (as in some Ishiguro)), I nonetheless think that a lot of first-person narratives needlessly shun the kind of difficulty that The Good Soldier thrives on. It's not the easiest book to write or read, but it is honest to reality, and for writers who adopt the first-person that should be an important consideration.

The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander

The Ministry of Special Cases is not a great novel. It is, however, a pretty good novel that could have been great and certainly shows signs of greatness. It's author, Nathan Englander, is worthy of your attention.

Let's try, for instance, this passage from page 93. Here's the set-up: 1976, Buenos Aires. The military has just taken power, and in true paranoid style it's been rounding up teenagers. Kaddish has been having intense arguments with his son, Pato, over burning his books before some Fascist decides they're subversive. Now Kaddish has up and decided to do what he thinks is best while his son's out of the apartment.

For Kaddish, the [book]shelves were a sign of what he'd done right with his son. And this is where Pato misunderstood him. The books made Kaddish proud. He loved that Pato was educated. It was Pato's educated attitude that made Kaddish want to wring his neck. He could dump them all if he wanted, every last book. Simpler. But he wasn't an animal, he wasn't being cruel. As always, as forever, Kaddish was trying his best.

First pause on the irony embedded in the two sentences "He loved that Pato was educated. It was Pato's educated attitude that made Kaddish want to wring his neck." You can laugh at (or pity) Kaddish for thinking he could educate his son and still control his attitude. Or you can simply admire Englander for elegantly making the fine distinction between a son's education and the resultant attitude.

Alternately, you can step back and note that Kaddish's thoughts about Pato's education are tellingly similar to those of the Argentine fascists who Kaddish fears might kill Pato, and whom Kaddish is trying to preempt by burning Pato's books.

Or simply appreciate the distillation of the paradox that is a father-son conflict into this fine moment: the proud father attempting to protect his son by secretly, guiltily burning the emblems of the very thing that makes him a proud father.

Here, Englander is doing what good authors do: he's making a story his own. This isn't the first description I've read of a fascist-inspired book burning, but I've never read one quite like this. What's special here is how Englander herds so much of this novel through this tiny flashpoint. The book burning not only encapsulates Kaddish's conflict with his son; it is also a major point in the development of Kaddish's tragically sad, try-hard aptitude for failure; it's also the beginning of the fascist half of this book; it's also taking the theme of erasing history into a new direction; it's also . . . well, you get the idea.

Of course, there's more to this scene than just the above-quoted paragraph. Though I'm not going to quote them to you, the three pages that sandwich this paragraph are equally beautiful. They are characterized by the kind of lean, smart writing that makes our paragraph so thoroughly enjoyable to read into. Together, these three pages mark a definite turning point in the novel, one that follows a certain amount of hard-won optimism on the part of Kaddish, Pato, and Pato's mother.

You can find many other instances of superior construction like this throughout The Ministry of Special Cases; that's why I'm calling it a very good book that might have been great. Here's another good example of Englander's art:

Lillian stood and leaned her forehead against the window. She couldn't herself believe it. Her husband with his handsome new nose, the face after a lifetime finally right, and now, the final touch, his proper boundaries had fallen into focus. The man coming toward her was sharper, more defined, more perfectly and painfully her Kaddish than any she'd set eyes on before.

It was the closest to him she'd ever felt, the clearest he'd ever been. Kaddish stepped between cars and onto the sidewalk. He craned his neck to look up into their window, as if remembering something, as if he'd sensed he was being watched. Lillian waved with both hands, sliding them back and forth across the glass. Kaddish gave a sad half smile. He raised a hand and waved back to his wife. He paused for a second before disappearing into the building. Her husband, her dear Kaddish, a perfect fit. Kaddish Poznan, father to a missing son.

Look how Englander calmly sets you up and then drops that last line, neatly reversing everything that had come before. There are hints, that "perfectly and painfully," Kaddish's "sad half smile," but still, at this point in the story (now that Pato is missing and Kaddish's marriage is falling apart) you are hoping for something positive. You really do want to read it as praise of Kaddish, and you are believing that perhaps there is some cause for hope that Englander hasn't revealed yet. But then, that last line forces you to read all of Lillian's thoughts as sardonic commentaries on her impotent husband and her hopeless situation.

This is what Englander, at his best, is doing in The Ministry of Special Cases. He's creating nice little labyrinths of prose that take two very familiar plotlines (the father-son battle; life with a Kafkaesque fascist government) and turn them into something that bears a very definite Englanderian style. He reminds me a bit of Michael Chabon—not because they're both Jews writing about Jewish characters but because The Ministry of Special Cases has a definite genre tilt to it, and also because of Englander's fantastic plotting and for his somewhat distant yet nonetheless compelling characters (on which more later).

There's are some things not to like about this book. Though Englander is often wonderfully subtle and intelligent, balancing exactly between "too much" and "not enough" information, at other times he falls into the trap of interpreting his book for you.

Also, though Englander's book is full of period details about Buenos Aires in the 1970s, I never really got a sense of place. (This is somewhat like Pynchon, who does the same thing with the details, but the difference is that in Pynchon it's more of a stylistic affect than an authentic attempt to recreate place, all of Pynchon taking place in a wacky, hyper world that no one has yet convincingly named.) Except for a few noteworthy pages narrated from the perspective of a disappeared teen, there's rarely enough intimacy to the prose to tie it to this particular novel, this particular place and time.

Despite these flaws, I think Englander has done a lot of good here. I thoroughly enjoyed the character of Kaddish. All of Englander's characters are more described than embodied, and this leads to some problems, but in Kaddish's case Englander has, by the novel's end, nonetheless made a compelling character. Kaddish had become one of those tragic, almost epic, suffering characters. Tragic suffering may be Kaddish's one defining characteristic, and yet, Englander creates a singularly Kaddish version of it, in kind of the way that Pynchon makes Benny Profane's one characteristic indisputably his own.

I think what makes Kaddish work as a character is that in The Ministry of Special Cases Englander isn't afraid to follow his novel's logic right to the bitter end. Englander manages to do this for the book as a whole, and that counts for something. (What also counts for something is that Englander does it without belaboring the point, without feeling the need to drone on for a couple-hundred unnecessary pages.) Englander carefully takes his premise in every direction worth taking it, one by one he leads us down each path, until, at last, he has exhausted them all. In so carefully doing this, Englander's structure displays a definite taut elegance, and, as with his carefully developed paragraphs, this construction provides much food for thought. By the time Englander has taken us down that final path he has filled us with the possibility of everything else that will happen to Kaddish once the novel ends, he has given us a sense of the absurd questions that resist Kaddish's best efforts to answer them, and at this point Englander wisely brings his novel to a conclusive but nonetheless troubling end. His story is one that, despite the familiar contours, has stayed with me.

Friday Column: Murakami By Any Other Name

Let's have a little pop quiz—I'm going to write down a list of clues, and you tell me what author and book I'm talking about:

1. The author is a Japanese male
2. He's writing about a first-person book about a depressed narrator with a troubled marriage who occasionally goes into a hole in the ground to think
3. Two major themes in this book are body alterations and how Japan's wartime history affects its present
4. The book draws on the American English vernacular to enrich the Japanese prose

If you said "Haruki Murakami, The Windup Bird Chronicle," give yourself half a pat on the back. If you said "Kenzaburo Oe, The Silent Cry," give yourself a full pat.

I don't often hear Oe mentioned as an influence on Murakami, but I suspect he might be. It's popular to talk up Murakami's affinities for great American authors and his frequent use of American culture in his novels, but after reading The Silent Cry I'd be surprised if Oe wasn't an influence on Murakami as well. There's just too much overlap—with The Windup Bird Chronicle in particular—for it to be a coincidence.

As I read Oe's book recently, I kept coming back to how much it reminded me of some of Murakami's work. I don't mean stylistically, where the two authors are very different, but thematically, in terms of the feelings and events from Japan's history that the authors are interested in exploring.

Not that Oe would necessarily approve of Murakami as a literary heir. Oe, among others, has accused Murakami of "failing to appeal to intellectuals" and of letting America infect his prose too much. (This is a fine line, as Oe has used American English to enrich his Japanese prose, but obviously he doesn't approve of the lengths that Murakami has taken it to.)

Despite Oe's words, though, it's clear that the two men do share some beliefs: the '60s protests in Tokyo have played a large part in the development of both men's lives and fiction; those protests loom large in both Murakami's Norwegian Wood and The Silent Cry. After reading each book, one gets the impression that the two men view the protests in a similar way. There was some confirmation that the two writers have similar ideas about Japan's history when Oe awarded Murakami the Yomuiri Prize for The Windup Bird Chronicle, arguably Murakami's most historically involved and Japanese novel.

Though there is some overlap, it's quite clear that Oe isn't Murakami, nor is Murakami Oe. The Silent Cry features a depth of psychological insight and interiority of perspective that Murakami's books just don't have. Whereas Murakami's plain prose makes the perfect building block for metaphorical structures that can at times take on the complexity of a good character portrait, Oe, by contrast, gives us formally difficult prose that challenges readers to comprehend the mind of the narrator. The Silent Cry starts "Awakening in the predawn darkness, I grope among the anguished remnants of dreams that linger in my consciousness, in search of some ardent sense of expectation. Seeking in the tremulous hope of finding eager expectancy reviving in the innermost recesses of my being . . ." From this rather convoluted opening sentence, the prose doesn't let up, although as we get used to inhabiting the mind of Oe's narrator it does become less opaque.

As with many of Murakami's novels, Oe's Silent Cry deals with the personal struggles of an alienated narrator (albeit in the '60s, not the '90s and '00s, which is more Murakami's territory) and Japan's uneasy relationship with Westernizing influences. The Silent Cry revolves around the return of it's depressed narrator and his brother to the rural community in which they were born. There, they find that a Korean marooned in Japan after being brought over as slave labor 25 years earlier during World War II has become a wealthy supermarket baron who now dominates what's left of the rural settlement.

Oe is interested in exploring the paradox of how we create our own memories of the past, but then let ourselves become dominated by them. The brothers argue over the exact roles played by their great-grandfather and his brother in a rural rebellion in 1860, and as they develop their own understanding of this historical incident, each begins to take on aspects of their favored ancestor. Whereas in Murakami the break between generations is a spiritual one, in Oe it comes from a lack of information. The narrator of The Windup Bird Chronicle comes to see how his alienation from his ancestors has made him ignorant of Japan's history and therefore susceptible to it, whereas in The Silent Cry the brothers fall under the sway of the past because they can't stop theorizing and arguing about it. They become so passionate about their pet ideas that they begin to live them out.

For all their literary similarities, however, Murakami and Oe do have a rather big difference in popularity, at least in America. Murakami is, of course, the most popular Japanese writer on the planet, and thinking about how Oe and Murakami compare to each other sheds some light on why certain authors become popular internationally while others don't. Every October Murakami gets bandied about as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, yet the much less famous (in America) Oe actually took home the award in 1994. In an interesting essay on reading Murakami in translation, Reiichi Miura proposes that this may be because Oe is thought of as an ambassador of Japanese culture, whereas Murakami represents something different:

There have been several Japanese authors who have achieved a more or less world-wide reputation: Soseki Natsume, Junicihiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, and the Nobel award winners Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe. Murakami is exceptional, however, in the sense that those other authors were already domestically considered to be the best when they got their international reputation. They got the chance of translation to begin with because they were seen as the best and representative of the Japanese literary scene. So when they are read in translation, they are supposed to represent Japanese culture: they were the cultural ambassadors of Japan, as it were. They represented nationality—so, I believe, they never gained better evaluation or more readership abroad than at home. Murakami, by contrast, is comparable to the cases of Steve Erickson and Stuart Dybek in the sense that the reception grows regardless of nationality: nationality has become an irrelevant parameter for them.

When being international thus means being freed from domestic limitation, their reception loses its center, making problems even for interpretation: if Murakami is tremendously popular in Italy, at the same time that there exists some antagonism to Murakami's trendy text in Japan, it actually becomes very difficult to decide whether Japan or Italy appreciates him more. . . .

If all art aspires to the condition of music, Murakami writes a novel as if it were a pop tune. Japanese love the Beatles songs even if they do not understand the lyrics.

If Murakami's books can be compared to t pop tune, then, increasingly these days, they sound like a pop tune that's been played a little too much. More prolific than ever, Murakami, to my eyes, has fallen into a creative rut. Readers who routinely scoop up the newest book from the increasingly repetitive Murakami might do better to hunt down a copy of one of Oe's works, even though many of them are no longer in print over here. His prose is a bracing break from Murakami's, and his perspective may make you think about your Murakami novels in a new light.

Sylvia by Leonard Michaels

Here's a beautiful paragraph from Sylvia by Leonard Michaels:

Whatever my regrets about school—lost years, no Ph.D—I wasn't yet damaged by judgment. I hadn't failed badly at anything—like Francis Gary Powers, for example, whose name I heard every day. His U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Russia, and he'd failed to kill himself before being captured. Instead, he confessed to being a spy. President Eisenhower, who claimed the U-2 was a weather plane, looked like a liar.

What makes this graf work so well is Michaels's intense subtlety. President Eisenhower was, in fact, a liar, and Michaels even supplies his lie for anyone to see. Yet in the context of the story—Powers first "failing" by being shot down, then failing again by not killing himself, and finally failing by telling the truth—Eisenhower can only look like a wronged boss. Just by how he tells it, Michaels shifts the blame without anyone noticing: Eisenhower isn't wrong for not only sending a man over enemy territory but also expecting him to commit suicide; rather, via a bit of rhetoric Powers is made into a failure and a coward who ultimately makes Eisenhower look like a liar.

In this brilliant, complex paragraph, which occurs on page 5 of Sylvia, Michaels prepares readers for the amoral, topsy turvy world that his narrator will soon inhabit. The book concerns a disastrous marriage between two young bohemians in Greenwich Village, and, as with Ike and Powers, success and failure in this marriage's many, tortuous fights is meted out largely by measure of who can marshal the most power and best rhetoric to his or her side. As the narrator says in the paragraph's first sentence, the damage he receives in this four-year relationship is largely the damage of "judgment," just the kind that would doom Powers.

What I have really enjoyed about this short book is how virtually every paragraph stands up to the kind of close scrutiny that I've just subjected the above one to. Michael's deeply interpretable prose mirrors the world that it describes: Sylvia's world is one without any absolutes, one in which definitions are very fluid and have yet to be sorted out:

We carried away visions of despair and boredom, but also thrilling apprehensions of this moment, in this modern world, where emptiness could be exquisite, even a way of life, not only for Monica Vitti and Alain Delon but for us, too. Why not? Feelings were all that mattered, and they were available to us. We understood. We were susceptible to the ineffable strains and moods of modern life.

Such a free-form world is baffling; it is mirrored by Sylvia's mental illness, which causes her to fly into rage at the narrator and ultimately leaves him baffled as to what she wants or needs. Things can't remain formless forever. The story of the narrator's relationship is, largely, the story of judgment, or of the setting out of definitions to such a degree that they eventually become suffocating. For each fight between the narrator and his wife Sylvia, there's a little Ike and Powers moment, a horrible scene via which the victor will have set a tiny portion of the relationship in stone. This happens again and again until the relationship has become so stifled by years-old fights and patterns of behavior that there is really only one thing to do.

Borgesian Pastoralism

I've been reading Place Names by Jean Ricardou, recently translated by Jordan Stump for Dalkey Archive Press. It's hard to believe, but this may be the first English translation of this short novel, originally published as part of the New Novel movement in France in 1969.

I've come to dub Ricardou's style here (at least for the book's first half) as "Borgesian Pastoralism." This first half is essentially a series of descriptions of some small villages in the French countryside. What's Borgesian here is the minute attention to detail and the fact that, read one way, the book essentially says nothing, but read another way virtually ever single sentence is bursting with significance.

The pastoralism comes from the places themselves--they're lovely, and I want to visit them all. For instance, this from the chapter Belabrre:

Some ten leagues from the touristic village, the road responds to the enticements of a nearby valley; soon it follows the bed of a narrow river, the Demoiselle, conforming to its ever meander. A visitor willing to stop at the place called "le Tournant"--"the Turning" may there witness a phenomenon rarely seen even in hilly calcareous regions such as this. Setting off from a bend in the road, a steep footpath will lead him beneath a verdant arcade, straight to a place where the river's waters begin to whirl in a swift spiral.

If chance has not sent a fragment of bark, several leaves, or some manner of twig tumbling into the current, he need only gather such objects from his surroundings and cast them into the river at some point upstream. In so doing he will better distinguish the waters' rotations, made manifest by the floatsam: he will see the debris veer, then spin, and vanish into the center, aspirated by an intense circular flow. . . .

Needless to say, whatever natural charm these places have is done a great service by Ricardou's prose.

This is interesting to me because although I've read a number of novelists who have all reminded me of Borges's style for one reason or another, I can't really remember one that felt pastoral like Place Names does.

Unfortunately, I'm not too sure if I'm with the second half of this novel. In the second half Ricardou abandons  his "travel guide" writing for something that quite obviously explores the novel's various subtexts. The second half has its merits, but I think Ricardou is too intently guiding us toward meaning. Especially bothersome here is some dialog that goes beyond the simply unrealistic to read like something out of an academic journal.

Inevitably, whenever an author tries too hard to instill a certain meaning into a text she is actually sapping meaning from it, because guiding us toward a preferred reading necessarily reduces our ability to provide our own readings. What I liked about the first half of Place Names was how aloof it was from trying to "tell" us anything, how it simply presented a number of interesting elements that were obviously linked in some way.

Friday Column: Some Notes on Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea

The Sea, the Sea feels like something J.M. Coetzee might have written had he suddenly dropped his minimalist approach for full-fledged realism. The protagonist, whose journal comprises all of The Sea, the Sea, is one of those lonely, casually dismissive, socially upward men that Coetzee excels in describing.

But this isn't Coetzee, which is readily apparent from the start. Whereas Coetzee often seems impatient to get his narratives rolling (Elizabeth Costello simply begins with him irritatedly flicking his hand at realist conventions), Murdoch is admirably true to the journal form that she has selected. Rather than unrealistically propel us into the story, she gives her narrator enough room to tire out from random jottings about the sea, his new home beside it, and his childhood. It is only as he begins to get bored with being alone and randomly jotting that his journal inevitably becomes a chronicle of the new course he sets his life on.

Charles Arrowby is a somewhat famous actor and director who has retired to a creaky old house on a rocky promontory next to the sea. He has decided to get away from London life once and for all, and to simply watch what remains of his life unwind before him. He has vague ambitions to write a memoir, but his jottings are unserious. For about 50 pages he muddles around, discussing his difficulties climbing out of the water and onto the steep, tide-battered rocks, the physical attributes of his new home and its environs, and his mother and father. Near the beginning, Arrowby sets out to describe his new home, but then gets entangled in ramblings on his culinary preferences:

It gradually became clear to me that guzzling large quantities of expensive, pretentious, often mediocre food in public places was not only immoral, unhealthy and unaesthetic, but also unpleasurable. Later my guests were offered simple chez moi. What is more delicious than fresh hot buttered toast, with or without the addition of bloater paste? Or plain boiled onions with a little corned beef if desired? And well-made porridge with brown sugar and cream is a dish fit for a king. Even then some people, so sadly corrupt was their taste, took my intelligent hedonism for an affected eccentricity, a mere gimmick.

These unformed, early sections connote the drift of Arrowby's life and feel true to a retired man who has suddenly found the urge to write about himself. They make clear that Murdoch has done more than simply frame her book as a journal; she is dedicated to miming the look and feel of a journal, as well as how the people who write journals interact with them and how the form shapes whatever narratives they contain. Importantly, these early sections also present Arrowby to us without the life baggage that we will soon find out about--we are given a chance to get comfortable with Arrowby as a somewhat particular but nonetheless enjoyable man before Murdoch unleashes certain facts that will put him into a much darker light. This is quite important, because as The Sea, the Sea progresses our tolerance for Arrowby is significantly tested, and I think that, in my reading, without this initial getting-to-know-you mine would have been broken.

It's not long before Arrowby receives a letter from Lizzie, an actress slightly younger  than him who he has been stringing along for some time now. It turns out that at some point before the story begins Arrowby tugged the string a bit with a letter to her, and she now replies to him by baring her struggles over her love for Arrowby and her conflictedness about his recent letter to a degree that we can be quite confident Arrowby disdains as gushy and feminine.

Lizzie's letter is significant because it offers (after nearly 50 pages) our first view of Arrowby from the outside, so it comes as a surprise when we hear Lizzie say a numbero f things that Arrowby has never implied about himself; notably, she declares "you know you can't keep your hands off women," which conflicts sharply with Arrowby's own claim that he has always treated the other sex fairly and is an "unsexed" individual.

Unreliable narrators are of course to be expected in the first-person and even more so in The Sea, the Sea because it comprises a written account that is subject to whatever Arrowby's sizable ego and fragile memory can do to muddy the waters. Nonetheless, Lizzie's letter brings up just how crucial unreliable narration is to the fabric of Murdoch's story. Up to this point Arrowby has alluded rather romantically and deterministically to a first love named Hartley who was his only true love and which ruined all future chances at happiness in a loving relationship. Shortly after Lizzie's letter we discover that this love ended when, at 18, Arrowby was left by Hartley for no apparent reason. And then, not long after that, Arrowby discovers that in coming to his present home, he has happened to move virtually next door to her and her husband of many years.

What occurs next, and what makes up the bulk of The Sea, the Sea is a protracted, slightly bizarre, attempt by Arrowby to draw Hartley back. Arrowby's justification relies in large part on his belief that he has proven that Hartley's husband is a tyrant who keeps her locked into an abrasive, failed marriage. Though we only know what Arrowby--who has a well-known weakness for jealousy--chooses to tell us, it is nonetheless necessary that we decide the truth about Hartley's marriage and determine our sympathy for Arrowby's subsequent actions. How much of Arrowby's harassment is permitted by the unhappy marriage justification? Do we believe that Arrowby had included everything in his narrative (which is being written as it unfolds)? Has he represented it accurately?

For much of this story, our lack of knowledge is paralleled by Arrowby's. Jealous egotist that he is, he does at times question whether his manner of stealing Hartley is justified and whether he even knows the truth about Hartley's marriage. Certainly he is working with limited information: Hartley gives him precious few details about her own life and steadfastly (but in a manner that perhaps implies domination by her husband) refuses to leave her husband.

The question here is whether all the uncertainty surrounding Arrowby makes him a sympathetic enough figure, whether Arrowby's imperfect information plus his pre-existing weakness for leaping to conclusions plus our own uncertainty about him let us conclude that he's a fundamentally decent person whom we are seeing at his absolute worst. He is certainly one of the more disagreeable narrators I've read of late, and one of this book's challenges is staying true to Arrowby in all his distastefulness while leaving enough room for us to like him and  keep him on as a narrator. (At one point, despite Murdoch's lovely prose and engaging plot twists, I was on the brink of putting the book down and forever concluding my relationship with Arrowby.) There's also the fact that The Sea, the Sea is more tragedy than comedy. In a burlesque we might simply laugh at Arrowby and not care how scummy he is, but here we're made to care enough about him that his life registers as tragic, so if the book is to work we have to retain some sympathy for him. I think that in the end Arrowby is salvaged long enough by omission that we can reach a point in the story in which he sufficiently redeems himself to let Murdoch conclude the novel.

In a way, The Sea, the Sea is simply "about" deciding whether or not we like Charles Arrowby and watching Murdoch keep us off balance long enough that we get to find out, but in another way this novel is a thorough explanation of the way love perverts one's life. In her letter to Arrowby, Lizzie begs him not to impose himself on her because she knows that it will waken "forces which I commanded to sleep." She wants them to "love each other, but not in a way that would destroy me."

The obvious irony is that the old cad Arrowby gets a dose of his own medicine when his love for Hartley is awakened and almost destroys him, but I think Murdoch is after more here than this simple demonstration of the Golden Rule. There's the fact that Lizzie's entrapment by love is designed by Arrowby, whereas Arrowby's own entrapment comes about by an astonishing coincidence. In fact, it strains credulity to believe that Arrowby, who searched in vain for Hartley for years after she left him, would just happen to move next door to her late in life. Coincidence or fate?

There's a strong current of mysticism--albeit, mysticism always quickly discounted--running through The Sea, the Sea. Early in the story, Arrowby records that he becomes terrified when he sees a horrible monster like a 30-foot eel coil up out of the sea. Eventually he puts it down to a flashback occasioned by his use of LSD once when he was younger, but the impression of something else remains. Later, Arrowby is half-convinced there's a poltergeist in his home when items start mysteriously breaking. (It turns out to be an old flame entertaining herself with a bit of playful malarkey.) Arrowby's older cousin James spent a good deal of time traveling through Tibet while in the military; a Buddhist, he is deeply enmeshed in the ancient religious traditions he discovered there, and yet he says that things like the Indian rope trick or being able to change body temperature by force of will are simple tricks that anyone can learn. Seen in this light, it's possible that what appears to be a clunky coincidence--the one flaw in a marvelous structure--it might be yet another one of these ambiguous brushes with the mystical. Perhaps in purposely making Arrowby's rediscovery of Hartley inexplicable The Sea, the Sea is placing that itself into the realm of the inexplicable; making it a force with its own logic that we only see a small part of, just as we only see part of the intelligence that comprises Arrowby.

In addition to telling Arrowby about the rope trick and Tibetan mysticism, James also tells Arrowby about bardo, a sort of holding pen for souls in between their trips on the wheel of life. It's pretty explicitly stated that Arrowby's life in between leaving London and before discovering Hartley is a sort of bardo for him, that in between trips on a wheel of love one enters a lonely, painful sort of place that one is eventually released from. (There's also some indication that at novel's end, after a short period of aloneness after Hartley, Arrowby will soon take another ill-fated venture on the wheel of love.) In addition, Arrowby is not the only one to take trips on the wheel of love--there is the aforementioned Lizzie, as well as a number of other of Arrowby's friends who all fall in and out of love over the course of the narrative. These loves are all linked, dependent on the actions that other people make while completing their own circuits. In that light, perhaps the coincidence that brings together Hartley and Arrowby is both mystical and earthly. Perhaps it is part due to the incomprehensible logic of love and also due to the simple substance of life constantly occurring around us.

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Friday Column: Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

Aware of how much has already been said about Deborah Eisenberg's short story collection Twilight of the Superheroes (imposing masses of blurbs sit at both the front and back of my copy) I'm going to do my best to offer a few new thoughts on this fine little book.

First of all, I direct your attention to the word twilight in the title; implying repose laced with somberness and perhaps the beginning of a long, hard night (or, maybe, just a pleasant sleep until a bright morning), twilight is exactly the word to sum up the feel of each of these stories. If the stories were moments in time, they would be twilight, that moment when darkness looms and when you just sit there and try to think as life passes through you. In this collection, Eisenberg's stories are more embodiments of a certain feeling than narratives with movement, and the characters are almost always people so pensive that they border on inert. Generally, they are mulling over their cheerless lives. And always, there's the suggestion that bad as things are right now, they might just get worse.

This feeling of dread is what I think brings these stories together and gives them their unique character and continuity across the collection. Except for one character (more on her in a bit) none of the people in Eisenberg's stories have anything particularly bad waiting for them in their futures, and yet, it's hard to read these stories and not feel that some kind of tragedy is just within reach of everyone. Although at times Eisenberg very explicitly links this vertigo to the national mood of America post-9/11--for instance, there's a mordant bit about a teenage daughter scared witless by some loud noise overhead and her parents who tell her to calm down, that it's just a police chopper out searching for a criminal somewhere in the vicinity--it's also very clear that Eisenberg is dread as something that's been going on much longer than the last six years. For the adults in this collection (and the divide between adults and their children is very clearly felt throughout) the dread drudged up in the wake of 9/11 just seems to be another variety of dread to file alongside all the others that have already defined their lives.

Eisenberg is very good at conveying the different species of dread, at defining each character's particular permutation as separate from all the other kinds of dread found here. Within a few pages multiple characters have been sketched, their relationships to one another have been defined; the space thereafter is often dedicated to an elaboration of whatever kind of dread is being experienced in this particular story. And there is quite a lot. We have: youngsters aching at the world's injustice; youngsters aching at their own passive futures; old people aching at the loss of youth; middle-aged people aching at their inability to give their life a direction; mothers aching for the children they can't comprehend; adults acing at their impotence in the face of life's questions; and everyone making space for the permanent ache that something really, really bad is going to happen just a little bit in the future. It's no coincidence that the first three pages of this collection are dedicated to the story of a "miracle" in which the miracle is that nothing bad happens.

All this dread can get a bit deadening. The two weakest stories in this collection (the last two, "Revenge of the Dinosaurs" and "The Flaw in the Design") lack the kind of thorny dialectic that gives life to Eisenberg's other stories. Instead of providing competing systems of thought that give rise to nuanced conversations and potent symbols, these last two stories just give us a bunch of people trapped together in the same malaise. One might credit Eisenberg for her courage in showing us unabated ugliness ("Revenge of the Dinosaurs," for instance, is the real-time story of middle-class siblings bickering over material questions while their grandmother ebbs into death), but to me they feel a tad too simple for someone of Eisenberg's abilities. The fact is that people like this probably do exist, and Eisenberg's renditions of them feel more or less correct, but I don't see the value in making them the centerpiece of a story. In the end, these pieces feel a bit preachy, like cautionary tales about the pitfalls of lifestyles that we had probably already figured out were lifestyles we didn't want any part of.

We can contrast the single-mindedness of the last two stories with the conflictedness of "Window," the story that I think is the most challenging one in the collection. It's a kind of quest tale of a young lady named Kristina. A year out of high school, she flees her hometown for another town because she thinks has a nice name. True to form, the town turns out to be an Edenic sort of place of "white houses and gentle hills," a "tender, miniature world." Kristina gets a job as a waitress and moves in with a gentle couple a few years older than her, and for a while everything is perfect. But then, suddenly, the couple is five months pregnant and they're going to need the room that Kristina is living in. Too poor to find another room in the community, Kristina marries a man named Eli who occasionally comes into town, and he takes her to his basic and isolated cabin deep in the woods. The marriage gets off to a fine start, but Kristina has problems handling Eli's toddler son (left to him after his previous wife ran out for unknown reasons). It also slowly dawns on Kristina that in the cabin she's a bit of a kept woman. Her isolation and suffering at the hand of Eli's child get worse and worse until, almost instantaneously, she defies the baby, earning his respect, and defies Eli, earning a black eye. Kristina is given to know that something similar happened to the previous wife, and, though Eli is a model of repentance after hitting Kristina, she runs out on him, kidnaps Eli's son, "steals" the car of the couple she originally lived with (they kind of let her take it but call it stolen for legal reasons), and ends up at her half-sister's house, a depressing sort of place that's reminiscent of the life she originally fled from at the start of the story. All this is told to us in flashback, and the story begins and ends with brief framing sections of Kristina's first night in her half-sister's house, where she's on the run, low on money, and caring for Eli's son, who has contracted an illness.

It's impossible to do this story's intricacies justice in the space of a paragraph, but the above should give a decent idea of what's at stake in "Window." In the space of just over 40 pages, Eisenberg has given us a detailed account of a young woman's fall from youth and emergence into adulthood, while also presenting us with some difficult questions: Why did she take the baby? Was she right to take him or not? What is the significance of the mysterious illness Eli's son has contracted, and what's the link between this baby and the one that precipitates Kristina's exit from her youth?

In its general sweep, "Window" gives us a lot to think about, but in its particulars the story is also quite thought-provoking. Consider, for instance, everything bound up in these lines of dialog as Kristina is driving with Eli to his cabin, just after their marriage.

He reached over and unpinned her hair.

This is a very crazy thing to do, she said.

Which is crazier? he said. This, or not this?

She must have been smiling, because he'd laughed. What a skeptic, he'd said. So, it's a risk, yes? Okay, but a risk of what? Look, here's the alternative, we meet, we like each other, we say hello, we say goodbye. Not there's an actual risk. That's pure recklessness. We're scared--is that so bad? Because when you're scared, you can be pretty sure you're on to something.

On one level, this dialog presents is a recognition of what's at stake in the choices we do and don't make--that every behind decision we make is some great risk, whether we see it or not. This fact is a veritable thematic melody that reappears constantly in "Window," both before and after the marriage. (The decision to marry, itself, seems to be the most profound repetition of this theme.) By the end of the story, as Kristina is perched on a precipice and keeps thinking she sees Eli coming to get her through a window, she's well aware of the risk we're constantly courting in life.

But there's more here. Look at when Eli says "when you're scared, you can be pretty sure you're on to something." Is this an implicit approval of Kristina's future decision to kidnap Eli's son? (Because she's pretty damned scared at the end of the story.) Also, consider that this bit of dialog is pondering concepts of normalcy--which choice is crazier? The choice to marry or to not? The choice to kidnap or not? The choice to look risk in the face or pretend it doesn't exist?

At its finest, Twilight of the Superheroes bristles with these kinds of moments, but I think the weakness Eisenberg shows here is that the majority of these stories don't have these moments of triumph. Excepting "Window" and parts of "Some Other, Better Otto," Twilight of the Superheroes lacks mystery. Let me put it like this--most good books have a very well-defined, built-in structure, but it's usually only on the second or third reading that such a structure begins to become visible. (And for some books, like Gravity's Rainbow, the structure is almost impossible to see without a guide.) In Twilight, by contrast, the structure of each story is fairly easy to pick up while you're reading; you don't even need a second pass. Items that are destined to become symbols are clearly marked off as symbols; the system that each character represents is apparent almost from the very beginning; the conflicts that Eisenberg explores tend to be fairly common and are easily identified (though she does explore them to great depth). To put it another way, this would be a good collection for teaching a creative writing class because it's so easy to see exactly what's going on in each story. Reading Twilight, I got the feeling that if you gave this collection to ten intelligent readers, you'd be likely to get the same ten readings.

This is the reason, incidentally, why I think this collection received such unambiguous praise when it was published: Eisenberg's very fine craftsmanship is always clearly on display here, and while we're reading it's a very pleasant experience. Though these stories are very long compared to most stories, they never feel long, and the entire book passes by very quickly. Everything seems to fit satisfyingly together and make sense. And though I think the story "Twilight of the Superheroes" will be read for decades as a brilliant evocation of what it was like in America at a certain point in our history, I don't think this story contains a whole lot of mystery. A book with a few rough edges to sort out, with a little more difficulty, would almost surely have been more polarizing.

Eisenberg compensates for this by taking these easy-to-recognize pieces and putting them into interesting combinations. As with the piece of dialog taken from "Window," many of the dialogs in Twilight of the Superheroes can be read very deeply, and this is due to the skill with which Eisenberg brings together the systems represented by her characters. She takes characters who view the world from very different places and then makes their conversations both conversational and philosophical. (Within Eisenberg's sprawling stories, the dialogs are noticeably minimalist.) The pleasure in this isn't in interpreting just what happened or what X means, but in deciding what the morality of each story consists of. We don't argue over what the presence of a certain character means, but rather over which character is right, or who is more sympathetic.

All in all, I liked these stories a great deal simply because Eisenberg is a brilliant writer (noticing the occasional, minor shortcoming in her style feels like discovering an Easter egg) and because the stories in Twilight of the Superheroes are such wonderful experiences. Though I may only return to two or three stories in this collection, that's still more than for most collections I read. And moreover, Eisenberg simply evoking is better than most short story writers trying their darndest to create significance.

Friday Column: Hope At the End of The Road

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is fundamentally about the resiliency of the human spirit. Do not mistake that for meaning that it is an uplifting book. It is not. In fact, the book may be critiquing the very idea of hope, possibly even making it look small and provincial.

Let's first get something straight: in The Road humanity is at an end. I take McCarthy's "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" to be an asteroid colliding with the Earth, which is consistent with the ash that coats everything, the thick dark clouds that "banish" the sun to "circle the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp," the perpetual winter and long, almost daily rains. There are no more animals, the climactic change makes farming absurd. Humanity has regressed to a loose collection of individuals and marauding groups that have almost entirely pillaged the great storehouse of treasures left behind by capitalism. Once these give out, the only food source will come from cannibalism, already practiced and self-defeating for obvious reasons.

So this is it. Regardless of whether or not humans could possibly survive an asteroid, in McCarthy's scenario they are not going to.

Into this world McCarthy places two individuals: one who fundamentally understands hope like most of us do and one who does not. They are father and son.

It is getting unbearably cold in the northern states where the father/son duo starts out the novel, and the father decides their only chance for survival is to head south. Survive for what? one might ask, and it's a good question. It's exactly what the father's wife asked not long after giving birth to their son, just after the asteroid.

Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They'll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won't face it. You'd rather wait for it to happen. But I can't. I can't. . . . We used to talk about death, she said. We dont any more. Why is that?

I don't know

It's because it's here. There's nothing left to talk about.

Indeed, there's more than just the rapists and cannibals to save yourself from. The world itself is pretty bad. The long, shivering, drenched nights McCarthy describes are only slightly less horrible than that cannibals he lets us glimpse. The Earth is a wreck of miles and miles of melted pavement, burnt trees, and corpses. Ash perpetually gets in your lungs, precipitating a hacking cough. The father admits that most nights he "envies the dead."

And yet, the father is marshalling his and his son's last bits of strength to march south in hopes of . . . well, in hopes of what? Occasionally, the father makes vague remarks about there being something south, there being heat, there being civilization, there being something. But a canny man like the father, a man quick enough to begin filling his bathtub with water the moment the asteroid hit, quick enough to contrive the necessities of life from a destroyed world, must know that there will be nothing in the south. It is in the father's desperation to get south no matter what, despite all the evidence and all his intelligence, that I think McCarthy locates our version of hope.

But in The Road's overwhelming world such hope often looks foolish. Before the asteroid, one could always argue that the father's brand of hope made sense. You never knew what the future would hold, and at the very least he needed to fight to hold out the chance that his son could live a better life than he. But in The Road this is absurd. the father knows that whether he survives for 10 days or 10 years, the future holds nothing for him. As for his son: perhaps the father's struggles will give his son a few more detestable years than he might have otherwise, but that's all his father can possibly do. In reality, the father's drive to go on is an outmoded remnant of a human world that is now obsolete.

This is most clearly seen in something the father and son occasionally say to each other. The father has drummed it into his son's head that they are "carrying the fire"; they are "the good guys" who will not descend to barbarity and are preserving civilization for the future. It's worth quoting a typical conversation between the boy and the father in which they use this phrase. At one point, they wake in the middle of the night and have this exchange:

We're going to be okay, arent we Papa?

Yes. We are.

And nothing bad is going to happen to us.

That's right.

Because we're carrying the fire.

Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

Just who is reassuring who here? The son often says to his father "because we're carrying the fire," and one gets the impression that, young that he is, the boy has already learned to humor his father. Both must know that there's nothing to be carrying the fire for, but I think the son understands that the father needs to believe in "carrying the fire." It is what gives purpose to the father's life in a world that can only offer horror, or, at the very best, barrenness.

The father's life may need a purpose, but not the son's. It is significant that the son was born after the asteroid: he knows nothing first-hand of our world, and so there is an unbridgeable gap between his world and his father's. At one point the father muses,

"He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he."

The son has grown up in a world devoid of the hope that the father carries in from the world before the asteroid, and it shows. The few times the two meet up with travelers too wretched to pose a threat (and everyone in The Road is potentially deadly), it is the son always begging the father to share with them. It is the son who never wants to explore potentially dangerous houses for more food, who always feels guilty about taking whatever food they do find, who never understands why they have to press on, who "always wants to stop."

This might just be a naive little boy who doesn't understand the world, but I think it's the opposite--the boy understands the world better than his father. From birth, the father has been indoctrinating the boy into the necessities of survival in this new world. He has been drumming just his brand of survivalism into the boy's head. More than that, the boy knows that they are slowly starving (despite the father's attempts to deceive him on this), that they need every last bit of food.

If the boy could understand his father's brand of hope, then he would have long ago taken to his father's indoctrination, if not the dictates of his own body. He would have long since become just as cut-throat as his father. But the boy has grown up in a world that has very clearly stated that there is nothing to survive for. He has never known a world that is otherwise, and not continuing may be the sanest choice for his world. The boy has no cognitive space for his father's brand of hope, so why not give away your food? Why not restrain yourself from exploring other people's houses? Surviving is only forestalling the inevitable, and besides, what is the point of going on when there is no future?

This is quite a jump off the tracks. One of the few universals one might imagine humanity to possess is the fundamental resiliency of hope, the fundamental belief in a future that can be better, the belief that something larger is out there. Even in history's worst moments--in the concentration camps, in the gulag, in tyrannical dictatorships--such a hope has been documented to exist. But here, McCarthy has created a world in which that resiliency shouldn't exist. He has showed it to be something that only existed so long as the Earth that we know did.

It is on the knife's edge between these two conceptions of hope that McCarthy balances the entirety of his novel. He continually offers us ambiguous statements that hold out the possibility of something, daring us to read them with the father's kind of hope while giving us a world that only understands the boy's version. It is in this way, by actually letting us change back and forth between a world that means something and a world that means nothing, that The Road lets us feel something of what it would be like to exist within its world.

At times we are led to believe in some divine presence that will save humanity. "What if I sa