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What does it mean to be against the canon?

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 19, 2012

I was reading Maria Bustillos’ review of some book*, and I came across this phrase: “For those who, like me, are generally opposed to canonical notions of literature, there will be much to quarrel with in [the book that she is reviewing].”

Now, this is the kind of thing that one runs across alot. People who are not just against our particular literary canon (with its admitted overemphasis on white males and its ignorance of genre fiction), but who are also against all canons. Most of the time, I guess I would say that I too am against the canon. But…as I was thinking about this sentence, I realized that’s not true. I am not really against the canon at all. In fact, when I’m looking for good books to read, I frequently retreat into the canon. I attempt to read outside the canon, but when I do so, my first thought is usually, “Is this good enough to be in the canon?”

What does it mean to be against the canonization of literature? Does it mean that you are against assembling lists of really good literature? Isn’t that what the canon is?

To me, it seems that there are three ways of choosing what books to read. You can either do so based on interest, similarity, or quality. Interest means choosing a book because its topics or themes are interesting to you. Similarity means choosing a book because it’s similar to other books that you’ve enjoyed. And quality means choosing a book because it’s very good.

Of course, most people choose books based on all three of these criteria (often all at the same time). But picking books out of a canon is the only method of selection that does not (theoretically) pre-select books on the basis of similarity or interest. You can’t go on Amazon and tell it to show you a list of great books. You can’t go to a librarian and say, “I’d only like to see the awesome books”. But you can look at a canon and know that thousands of extremely knowledgeable readers thought that these books were pretty great. Of course, that doesn’t mean that other books aren’t great too. The canon is definitely not complete. But it’s also not useless.

The canon is the only method of selection that says to you, “You’ve never shown any interest in 19th century Russia and you’ve never enjoyed any family epics about adultery, but you should definitely read Anna Karenina, because it’s that good.” Word of mouth isn’t going to do that. When friends ask me what they should read, I don’t tell them to read whatever was the last book that I read that was awesome (currently, that is Pursuit Of Love by Nancy Mitford). No, I tell them to read a book that I think they’ll enjoy, based on what I know about them. And that’s great. But on some level, I am shortchanging them. I–and almost every other recommendation engine in the world–don’t give my audience enough credit. I don’t trust people enough to love something just because it’s high quality. I don’t trust them to be willing to strike out and read something that’s not like what they normally read.

I loved Anna Karenina. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. But no one ever told me to read it. I used to read mostly science fiction. Before I start picking books out of the canon, I got most of my book recommendations from Amazon.com’s Listmania. Most of my friends and online acquaintances are more likely to enthuse about Neal Stephenson’s latest book than they are about classic literature. Without the canon, I probably would’ve read Anathem and Reamde and Embassytown and The City and the City , but I never would have read Anna Karenina.

 And it’s easy to say, “Oh, that’s just because you ghettoized yourself; if you’d gone out and solicited recommendations or looked through review pages, you would’ve found Anna Karenina or something else, something even more interesting, something that wasn’t by a dead white male, on your own.” But is that really true? No one ever recommends that I read classics (although, actually, I think a few folks have told me to read Pride and Prejudice). Perhaps if there was no canon, people would recommend classics more often. Perhaps these books would compete in the marketplace on their own. Perhaps they’d live and die on their own merits instead of being artificially propped up by English teachers. I don’t know, but that seems awfully speculative to me.

What I do know is that picking books out of the canon has given me much higher-quality reading experiences than browsing in bookstores or using Amazon’s recommendations or even listening to word of mouth. It’s exposed me to books that I otherwise never would have thought about. And while I can see the dangers of becoming trapped in the canon, I don’t think that’s an argument for it’s abolishment…it’s just an argument for a larger, more inclusive canon (which is what everyone and their English professor wants anyway).

Is anyone out there against the literary canon? What does that mean to you?

*FACT: I was really excited about this book until I finally realized that Tom Bissell is not, in fact, the author of Friday Night Lights. No, the name of that worthy is H.G. Bissinger. Man, I would totally read a book of essays by H.G. Bissinger.

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Three pretty good short stories that were published in March 2012

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 16, 2012

This month, I read the March original fiction output of Strange Horizons, Apex, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld.

I really didn’t want to like my favorite story of the month. In fact, I positively resisted it. I read it with the utmost disinterest for about a third of its length until I finally gave in–against my own will and political instincts–and admitted to myself that it was awesome.

“The Bells of Subsidence” by Michael John Grist (Clarkesworld) – A young girl leaves a young boy–her very best friend–behind on a desert world. She goes up into a galaxy-trawling spaceship in order to perform the complex mental gymnastics that keep it moving through time and space. The ship moves without guidance or purpose. It is the remnant of an ancient empire that populated the galaxy and then subsided. Now it takes a hundred children from every world that it visits and then it slowly chews them up with its intense mental demands. But the girl remembers her boy. Even as she forgets everything else, she remembers his name. She remembers that the name is important. She resists the crack-up, and retains her mind, and becomes captain of the ship, and searches the galaxy for the answer to a question that she cannot remember.

Now, if you’re like me, you’re groaning right now. Really? Love conquers all? You can become a spaceship captain and travel the galaxy, but what really matters is the boy you left at home? It’s horrifying, and until the very last sentence, I kept hoping that the story would subvert the trope. But it didn’t, and I guess that’s okay. In a way, I suppose the story is a subversion of all the stories in which people are so anxious to get into space that they are willing to take any risk and undergo any kind of physical or mental trauma. In this story, a woman is given the galaxy, and she turns it down, in favor of the comforts of home.

The story is great. Its portrait of an empire that continues to propagate itself mechanically is awe-inspiring. I loved the Bells–the spaceships–and the lost, confused Bell-captains. I loved the strange planets. I loved the way that each third of the book feels different in tone and setting, as if this was three different stories. It’s a beautiful, suspenseful story, and it’s definitely my favorite out of all the ones that I read this month.

Alarms by S. L. Gilbow (Lightspeed) – I think we’ve all met someone whose personal problems made his presence kind of alarming. A person who has made us say to ourselves, “Umm, this guy has way too much going on right now. I’m just going to stay away until his issues sort themselves out”. In this story, a woman finds that her presence sets off all the mechanical and electronic alarms in her vicinity.

It’s kind of a metaphor for the woman’s mental problems, but it’s also a problem that’s treated seriously within the text in that interesting way that genre-fantasy (as opposed to allegorical fantasy) sometimes does things. She can’t go into any building because she’ll set off smoke detectors. She can’t go too close to parked cars because she’ll set off their car alarms. She can’t work. She’s isolated herself. She’s slowly falling apart.

What drives the story is a very spritely voice. Even when things are going to shit, the protagonist remains committed to examining her own life and trying to figure things out. And I really admired the last third: the ending deft and thoughtful. The story takes its premise as a starting point and goes farther than most stories would.

“Nightfall in the Scent Garden” by Claire Humphrey (Strange Horizons) – A contemporary fantasy story told as a letter by a grown woman to her (female) childhood friend. She describes an incident from when they were young. Her friend was about to be enslaved by a fairy queen, but the protagonist claimed her as her beloved and, thus, saved her (or perhaps not–it is implied that the friend’s true desire might have been to go and live with the fairy queen). In return, the protagonist agreed to take no other lovers and to, someday, spend a hundred years in the service of the queen. But now they’ve grown up, and the two friends are not together. Her friend is married to a man and has a child, and the protagonist is left alone with her unrequited love. And the protagonist is wondering whether she should break her deal.

I loved this story. It’s very tragic, but it’s also kind of creepy. The protagonist feels, somewhere deep inside, that she has some kind of claim over her friend, and she can’t stop begging her friend to honor that claim. If this was a straight guy writing to a lesbian girl, it would be super creepy*. As it is, the lesbian girl to straight woman version is just sort of creepy. We’ll know we’ve achieved equal rights when we consider the lesbian version to be just as creepy as the straight version.

At the same time, whatever. We’ve all experienced unrequited love. It’s creepy and it’s quite distasteful, but it’s a real feeling and it deserves a place in our stories. I loved the internal tension in the protagonist. She knows the beautiful–and perhaps the most honorable–thing would be to continue to hold to her bargain and to throw her life away in service to this love, but she also cannot help but struggle against that fate.

 

*It’s kind of hard to imagine a version of this story in which a gay man writes to a straight man, not because it’s impossible for a gay man to have an unrequited crush on a straight man, but because it’d be hard for such a letter to contain a similar allusion to the possibility that the straight man might turn and choose to be with the gay man after all. Rightly or wrongly, men are not thought to be so fluid.

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I read another one of Anthony Trollope’s bricks, and I enjoyed it quite a lot

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 11, 2012

Most of Anthony Trollope’s enduring work is bound up in two series. The Palliser novels follow the life of a fictional British politician. And the Barchester novels examine life (predominantly clergical life) in a fictional provincial town. Oh, and almost all of his novels are long. They are brutally long and have the kind of leisurely, digression-choked pace that was only permissible during the Victorian era.

After I read and loved the first (and fairly short) Barchester novel (The Warden), I looked with horor upon the 200,000 word behemoth that was the second novel. I didn’t really want to get enmeshed in a series of lengthy books. Instead, I tried the only one of Trollope’s stand-alone books that is said to be worth reading (The Way We Live Now). It was good, but it was also a long and brutal slog that was, in many ways, lacking in much of the softness and charm of the quaint provincial life portrayed in The Warden.

And that’s where I left things with Trollope for several months. I sensed that there was some goodness in the rest of the Barchester novels, but I wasn’t sure I could commit. But finally, after slogging through a dense, dreamy short novel (John Cheever’s Falconer), I looked at the second volume (Barchester Towers), and thought, “Sure it’s long, but it’s so readable. Wouldn’t it be nice to just sort of sink into a book?” Yes, this is the mindset that drives the sales of epic fantasy.

Well, I did read Barchester Towers. And it was nice. It was an extremely pleasant reading experience. The plot involves many of the same persons as the first novel. The kind, bumbling bishop has died and a new bishop who bumbles in a different way has been installed. And with him comes a prideful and avaricious chaplain who plots to marry a girl, and there’s alot of flailing about and maneuvering about who will get this preferment and that deanship. It’s not much of a plot at all, really. Nothing is at stake. Never do you get the sense that the girl is going to end up with either of the two villains who are plotting for her hand. Nor are the villains even that villainous. One is just kind of greasy and greedy. The other is a fop who’s in debt.

But the characters are all very well-drawn. They’re larger-than-life, like Dickens characters, but not nearly so farcical. There’s Mr. Harding, a beloved but kind of ineffectual curate who keeps worrying about whether he’s carrying out his duties well (but makes no effort to actually ramp up his energy-level in undertaking them). There’s the Stanhopes, a family of amoral dissipates, who are the subject of some of Trollope’s best descriptions, such as:

The great family characteristic of the Stanhopes might probably be said to be heartlessness; but the want of feeling was, in most of them, accompanied by so great an amount of good nature that their neighbours failed to perceive how indifferent to them was the happiness and well-being of those around them. The Stanhopes would visit you in your sickness (provided it were not contagious), would bring you oranges, French novels, and the last new bit of scandal, and then hear of your death or your recovery with an equally indifferent composure.

There’s Archdeacon Grantly, who seems quite irreligious and primarily motivated by family pride, but who seems to so genuinely love his family–including his father-in-law (the aforementioned Harding) and his sister-in-law–that you can’t help but like him. There’s Mr. Quiverful, a clergyman who has fourteen children and desperately wants a better posting, but is unwilling to seek it dishonorably. And there’s his wife, who has no such compunctions, and of whom Trollope writes:

Whatever the husband might feel, the wife cared nothing for the frowns of the dean, archdeacon, or prebendary. To her the outsides and insides of her husband and fourteen children were everything. In her bosom every other ambition had been swallowed up in that maternal ambition of seeing them and him and herself duly clad and properly fed. It had come to that with her that life had now no other purpose. She recked nothing of the imaginary rights of others.

And there’s the secret main character of this (and all) Trollope novels: money. He’s one of the only novelists (other than perhaps Jane Austen), who seems to really care about money: what people will do get it and how they will use it. There’s a marvelous scene where he describes the difference between a social-climbing farmer whose wife spends his money on lace and school-lessons for his children and his solid yeoman neighbor–equally endowed with money–who saves up in order to buy farms for all his sons. Trollope can describe how clergyman will live and die with anxiety to move from a 200 pound a year posting to a 400 pound a year posting, and how another clergyman can easily give up an 800 pound a year posting. He is able to describe money as both a marker of status and a divider of social classes and a real, concrete thing that is used to purchase the things that people need (or desire so strongly that the desire seems akin to a need).

And finally, the novel has the wonderful Trollopean narrator, a first-person character that interjects itself into the novel and frequently runs away on its own awesome digressions, like this one:

‘New men are carrying out new measures, and are eating away the useless rubbish of past centuries.’ What cruel words these had been; and how often are they now used with all the heartless cruelty of a Slope! A man is sufficiently condemned if it can only be shown that either in politics or religion he does not belong to some new school established within the last score of years. He may then regard himself as rubbish and expect to be carted away. A man is nothing now unless he has within him a full appreciation of the new era; an ear in which it would seem that neither honesty nor truth is very desirable, but in which success is the only touchstone of merit. We must laugh at every thing that is established. Let the joke be ever so bad, ever so untrue to the real principles of joking; nevertheless we must laugh—or else beware the cart.

Anyways, yep, it’s hard to recommend this book. The book I’m really recommending is the first book in the series. The Warden is half as long and twice as good. But if you like The Warden, you should not be shy about reading Barchester Towers. It’s pretty good too.

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In which I write about the first book in The Hunger Games trilogy

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 26, 2012

            I finally read the Hunger Games. I started reading it and then, three hours later, I was done. I read it because I love Woody Harrelson. When I heard that he was the drunken mentor in the HG movie, I was like, “I really want to see that.” Normally, I don’t particularly care about reading the book before I watch the movie, but in this case, I decided to. It was pretty enjoyable, but I’m not too sure about whether I’m going to read the next few books. (Hey, umm, some HG spoilers are gonna follow, so beware).

The book is about a teenage girl who’s dispatched to fight to the death on television for the entertainment of an audience of jaded sybarites (in a futuristic dystopia, of course). It has hints of Rollerball, Battle Royale, The Running Man and “The Most Dangerous Game”.  The only innovation of the novel is that the protagonist realizes that she needs to have the audience’s good will in order to survive. This is because the audience is able to dispatch gifts to help their chosen kid, and those gifts can (and do) mean the difference between winning and dying.

However, because this contest has a sort of reality show flavor, what really matters is building some kind of credible storyline. A kid needs to feel like flesh and blood; someone the audience can empathize with and root for. In order to this, the protagonist of the Hunger Games (whose name is Katniss) fakes that she is falling in love with one of her fellow contestants Peeta. While she’s running around killing other kids in a series of moderately gripping action sequences, she also learns how to inhabit her role as a starstruck lover (which is made much more poignant by the fact that she might possibly have to kill her ‘lover’ in order to win the game). I thought this was a neat conceit. It sort of came out of nowhere about a third of the way into the book, and it slowly grew to dominate the whole story. This whole reality show / playacting part of the story was by far its best part.

And I don’t really trust any of the other novels to have good parts that are as good. I mean, the author can’t use this reality show conceit again, right? And even if she did, it wouldn’t really be fresh. I don’t know why I am so suspicious of a series whose first entry I enjoyed so much, but I think what it comes down to is that I just don’t trust Suzanne Collins enough. Pretty much every series starts out with a few good ideas and then slowly exhausts them until eventually the later books of the series turn into pitiful self-parodies. When a series starts out with one good idea, it becomes really hard for me to believe that there is a lot more stuff lying underneath.

On a side note, my problems with the book were exactly the same as everyone else’s problems. Collins manipulates the situations in this book to exculpate her heroine of any of the moral guilt from killing a bunch of other kids. The other kids are either psychopaths or they get killed by the psychopaths. Katniss’ hands remain clean. To me, that seems like a waste. If you have a book where innocent kids are forced fight each other to the death…then some innocent kids ought to actually fight each other to the death!

As a writer, I do kind of understand why Collins did that, though. The audience for stories with moral complexity is a lot smaller than the audience for stories without moral complexity. Even a lot of the series that people claim have a lot of moral complexity are actually just standard Good-and-Evil narratives dressed up in gray clothing. A prime example of this is A Song Of Ice And Fire. People claim that this series is very dark and gritty, but actually, from book one, you know who the heroes are and who the villains are. Sure, some of the villains turn out to be likeable and some of the heroes turn out to be stupid, but very little occurs to make you question the original good/bad classifications.

Even in my own stories, I sometimes step back and am like, “Whoah, no one is going to like this main character” and then I change around some stuff to make him/her more likeable. Because that’s what people want.

This reminds me of the section in A Moveable Feast where Hemingway criticizes Fitzgerald for altering his stories to make them more saleable:

I thought of [F. Scott Fitzgerald] as a much older writer. I thought he wrote Saturday Evening Post stories that had been readable three years before, but I never thought of him as a serious writer. He had told me at the Closerie des Lilas how he wrote what he thought were good stories, and which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into saleable magazine stories. I had been shocked at this and I said I thought it was whoring.

When I read this passage, I was shocked. Since Fitzgerald’s stories are pretty sublime, I wondered what in hell it was that he was changing in them? I had a sneaking suspicion that maybe if I read the unchanged stories, I wouldn’t like them very much.

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Confessions of a Pick-Up Artist Chaser, by Clarisse Thorn

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 23, 2012

About ten days ago, I read Mandolin’s* review of Clarisse Thorn’s ebook Confessions of a Pick-up Artist Chaser** and I did something that I almost never do after reading a review: I bought the book. Of course, it helped that the book was only 2.99 for the Kindle. But still, even the idea of a feminist writing about pick-up artists resonated strongly with me.

Some blog readers might remember that at about this time last year, I read Neil Strauss’s The Game, and completely loved it. Pickup artists are just so silly and adorable. Reading about them is like reading about people who turn couches into snowmobiles. There’s just a cuteness factor to the whole endeavor–nerds deconstructing and systematizing flirtation–that is hard to ignore.

But I can also sense something very threatening about pickup artistry. After all, picking up women is kind of what all of mainstream culture is about. It’s kind of weird to think: wow, these guys have pretty much won the game. By the standards of pop songs and movies and television shows and middle school playgrounds, there is no one in the world who is more successful than these guys. Even if we’ve rejected those mainstream standards of value (and, actually, in our pursuit of sexual accomplishment, many gay males aren’t actually too different from the the stereotypical straight male), I think that most men still have that mainstream imprinted on us somewhere deep inside. It’s like how I think catching balls really silly, but I still love the glitz and drama of sports movies.

Anyways, the union of those things (the adorableness and the threateningness) makes pickup artistry really fascinating for me.

But Clarisse Thorn’s book is not about me. It’s about a woman–a feminist sex educator–who spends several years interfacing with the culture, interviewing pickup artists and observing them in action. Since The Game has pretty much no female characters (except Courtney Love) to provide perspective on the whole endeavor, Thorn’s book really filled a gap for me. I was definitely fascinated to see what it might be like for the women who end up spending time with these pickup artists, since pickup artistry is both completely dependent on acquiring females but also curiously lacking in any place for them.

Thorn provides an outsider’s description of pickup circles and the requisite feminist critique of their misogyny and sleaziness, but I think that the story really shines in her first-person descriptions of the various guys that she meets and spends time with. In its approach and style, the book reads like a participant-observer study. Thorn carefully selects anecdotes to use in developing her own theories on flirtation and on the appeal of pickup artistry. Personally, I thought some of her pickup artist theory was also kind of interesting–particularly on the role of ambiguity in developing romantic attachments–and at times the book almost veers towards becoming another pickup guidebook (Thorn even flirts with the idea of running her own classes and seminars for pickup artists).

Oh, I also love the style of explication in this book. Thorn explains everything. She explains who everyone is. She explains all the feminist concepts she uses. She really just starts at square one and says, “This is what pickup artistry is. This is why people think it’s problematic. This is why I like it” and so on and so on, building in more and more concepts, until, with the last chapter, she puts the last few bricks into the edifice. I really like this kind of “smart dummy” approach to non-fiction (i.e. you’re smart enough to understand this, but I’m assuming that you’re a dummy who doesn’t already know it). Of course, this might just be because I actually am a dummy about most of what she’s talking about (especially feminism and S&M [oh yeah, there’s a lot of S&M in the book too, which, sometimes come off as seeming a bit random]).

Yennnyways, the book is now $9, but you should consider reading it. Actually, you should probably read The Game first, and then (especially if The Game made you kind of angry), you should read this book.

*For all of you SF writers, this is one of the pen names of Rachel Swirsky.

**Here is a link to the Smashwords page, if you want to buy a non-Kindle version of the book.

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The First and Last Novels That Made Me Cry

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 16, 2012

So, I was recently recommended John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars, which is a YA novel about a sixteen year old girl with terminal cancer (its main schtick is that the girl herself is somewhat aware of cancer-novel tropes, which the novel sometimes subverts and sometimes gleefully obeys). Anyway, I was basically promised that the novel would make me cry. I was ready to cry. I was primed to cry. And although I loved the novel, I did not cry.

I was disappointed. I have cried while reading novels before, but it is not common, and I am always startled and happy when it does happen. So much of novelistic pleasure is, for me, somewhat abstract cerebral, that it feels really strange to be reminded that some part of my mind actually believes that this crazy written-down shit is happening to real people in some real place.

Anyways, I wish that I had, once upon a time, made a list of novels that made me cry. But, alas, I made no such list, and now I cannot remember whether Grapes of Wrath or The Jungle caused any moisture. What I can remember, though, is the first and last books that made me cry.

The first was, I think, near the end of Mercedes Lackey’s By The Sword, where the mercenary captain Kerowyn is coming to the rescue of the beleagured nation of Valdemar, but shit looks totally helpless, and everyone looks like they’re going to die, but people are waiting to die heroically…well, I teared up (I was about eleven). And I remember thinking, “Wow, this is the first time that a book has ever made me cry.” Man, I’ve reread that book so many times, and I still love it.

The last time I cried while reading a novel was about three months ago, on Christmas Day. It was somewhere during the closing chapters of Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks Of Being A Wallflower: a YA novel about a slightly disturbed high school freshman who makes friends with some totally awesome high school seniors who are like the coolest thing ever, jeez, my eyes are stinging just thinking about it.

Oh, I also just remembered that the first time I cried during a video game was during Phantasy Star IV (for the Sega Genesis), when Alys died. Man, that was so sad. It was such a good death, too. It wasn’t a girlfriend getting refrigerated; it was a powerful female mentor sacrificing her life (Obi-Wan style) to save her naive male mentee.

And the first time I cried during a movie was in Braveheart, when that motherfucking Robert the Bruce betrayed Mel Gibson and lost him the Battle of Falkirk.

Both of these prior two crying incidents were around when I was eleven. I know this because right after I cried while reading By The Sword, I remember stopping and thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what other stuff I’ve cried during. Oh yeah, there was that time during Braveheart….”

I think the lesson here is that the best media-related crying comes either: A) when you’re a kid; or B) while consuming media meant for kids. What times have you cried while consuming cultural product?

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The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 14, 2012

I am almost ashamed to admit that I liked this book. If there’s anything that a good non-realist writer ought to stand for, it’s the goddamned fact that there are way too many stories about writers (in this case, a sportswriter) who are on the early side of middle age and who haven’t really managed to figure out what, if anything, matters to them. But I can’t do that. I just can’t. I have to cede this ground to the enemy, because this book is awesome.

The secret is in the voice. You’d expect this book to be cynical and pain-filled. But it’s not. It’s dominated by this tone of slow startlement that captivated me from the very first page, which begins:

My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter.

For the past fourteen years I have lived here at 19 Hoving Road, Haddam, New Jersey, in a large Tudor house bought when a book of short stories I wrote sold to a movie producer for a lot of money, and seemed to set my wife and me and our three children—two of whom were not even born yet—up for a good life.

Just exactly what that good life was—the one I expected—I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn’t say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between. I am no longer married to X, for instance. The child we had when everything was starting has died, though there are two others, as I mentioned, who are alive and wonderful children.

Now how could anyone not be willing to give that a chance? The book is nothing more or less than what is promised by these paragraphs. It is one weekend in the life of Frank Bascombe. He goes on a trip with his girlfriend, comes back, meets her family, talks to his wife, talks to his children, talks to some friends, and then it’s over. Oh, some other stuff happens too, but it’s fundamentally a pretty slow, dreamy affair. And one that is very easy to read. Nothing gets between you and this novel. It has transparent prose; not the kind of transparent prose that is so dull that you don’t notice it, but the kind that is so captivating that you forget you’re reading a book.

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February 2012 Short Fiction

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on March 6, 2012

 All The Young Kirks And Their Good Intentions (Clarkesworld) by Helena Bell – Earth is being ravaged by some kind of disease. It responds by sending a few brilliant men and women to a moon colony where they try to recreate Earth’s (often extinct) ecosystems. Meanwhile, the town of Riverside, Iowa, has gotten caught up in this interplanetary fervor: it starts naming all of its children after a mythical hero from the past, James Tiberius Kirk.

I am normally very suspicious of fan-service stories, because I think they have a tendency to try to glamour their audience by namedropping nerdery instead of creating interesting characters, situations, and settings. And perhaps that’s what is happening here, but if that’s the case, I am thoroughly beglamoured. I love this story.

It’s just a story about kids, jostling to be special. Ostensibly, they all want to grow up and go to the moon and be heroes. But right now, they’re sitting in Iowa, playing status games with each other. The story is slow, but implacable. All of its pieces resonate with each other, and obey some unseen internal logic.

 

Bear In Contradicting Landscape (Apex) by David J. Schwartz – An author finds that a character from one of his early (terrible) short stories has come to life. In most hands, this story would be really playful and silly and insubstantial. But Schwartz just keeps throwing stuff in there. He spends all this time detailing the really dystopian story that the character came from. Then he starts describing the author’s girlfriend, a woman who is having her whole life story tattooed on herself. Then he’s writing about the character’s wife and her fascination with Elvis. And then the character’s cats corner a rabbit and the author saves the rabbit.

There’s really not a wrong note in the whole story. I’m just reading and reading and I’m never thinking–as I usually am, for most stories–”Okay, how is all this crap going to cohere.” No, because it’s cohering and agglomerating as we go. Even the everyman schlub narrator manages to avoid being just another everyman schlub. He has an engaging, fox-quick voice that’s full of wonderment and understanding (rather than the usual self-pity and neuroticism that I’ve come to expect from everyman schlubs). Anyways, I liked this story alot.

 

Aftermath (Strange Horizons) by Joy Kennedy-O’Neill – The zombie plague was averted after only a year by an airborne cure that turned the zombies back into ordinary human beings. A former literature professor struggles to live with a husband who succumbed to the plague and spent several months as a flesh-eater.

I love zombie stories. And I love that zombie stories are so versatile. They’re not just about titillation, like vampire stories, or about scaring you, like most monster stories. Zombie stories are about how we relate to society: the blank mass of strangers that we see around us everyday. And I love this story’s twist on the zombie tale: in this story, the zombies come back to life and try to live like ordinary people (they don’t remember any of their former atrocities). It has a lot of resonances with many modern situations in which people have to live with situations that they were not fully responsible for: Slavery or the Civil War (in America) or The Partition (in India). But it’s also a story that fully engages with its own premise. This is a story about the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. It’s rigorous and it doesn’t provide easy answers to the dilemmas that it raises.

 

In addition to the stories mentioned above, I also enjoyed Genevieve Valentine’s “The Gravedigger of Konstan Spring” (Lightspeed), Brooke Bolander’s “Tornado’s Siren” (Lightspeed), and Justin Howe’s “Shadows Under Hexmouth Street” (Beneath Cease Skies)

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The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 27, 2012

            This book is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Like all great books, it’s about a lot of things but the thing that interested me most about the book was its defense of organized religion (and, in particular, the Catholic Church). It has an incredibly intellectual honesty. Graham Greene does not take any shortcuts and he does not make any excuses. He lays out his scenario with incredible skill and then he follows it to its most logical conclusion.

In my little socioeconomic slice of America, it is an article of faith that organized religion does not serve much of a positive purpose. Of course, religious faith is fine (some of us think it’s salutary, others think it’s silly, but everyone thinks it’s fundamentally acceptable), but all this stuff with priests and churches and bishops and tithing and catechisms and fasting on Fridays and catechisms and creeds and religious litmus tests is all kind of silly. Since religion is fundamentally irrational, why should any person be able to set himself up as being closer to God than anyone else?

In The Power And The Glory, Graham Greene writes about a 1930s Mexico that’s adopted much the same sort of belief. While it’s still permissible for people to personally retain their faith, the churches have been torn down, religious ceremonies have been outlawed, and the priests have been pensioned off, shot, or driven away.

The main character of Greene’s novel is an unnamed man who is perhaps the last active priest in a Mexican state where the persecution has been particularly savage. This man travels wide circuits on his mule, staying at each village for only a day or two, conducting masses and baptisms in barns and hearing confessions in horse stalls. And at the start of the novel, the governor of the state empowers an equally unnamed lieutenant to do anything–including taking and shooting hostages–in order to capture and execute the priest.

But this priest is not a saint. He is an alcoholic (and he spends a lot of time scheming to acquire alcohol, since wine and spirits are illegal in his state). He has fathered an illegitimate child. He haggles with the peasants over the price of baptisms and such. He’s a hypocrite. When he preaches, he tells peasants to do things that he doesn’t do himself. When he gives confessions, he tells them to refrain from sins that he is actively committing. There’s not that much compassion or understanding in him (there’s not that much of anything in him). And although he has faith, sometimes it seems like a shallow, rote sort of faith…not a faith that’s touched him very deeply in terms of his character.

More than anything, the priest is petulant, guilty, and bewildered. He doesn’t know how he’s found himself in this position. He constantly seeks to escape from his ministry (and leave this state entirely without clerics), but he keeps getting drawn back, almost as if serving God was a weakness that he kept succumbing to. It’s clear that he’s not accomplishing much good. He’s not organizing anything or changing anything. All he’s doing is fulfilling some silly forms that the local peasants require because his church has taught them that they’ll go to hell unless the right words are said. And he’s not even doing much of that: in the last year, he’s only said four masses and heard a hundred confessions. Mostly, he’s just running from this implacable lieutenant.

And the lieutenant is as virtuous as the priest is venal. The lieutenant loves children, he gives to the poor, he is personally honest. Although he kills people, he does not love doing so. He kills because he knows he has to. He believes that the Church has oppressed his people for centuries; that the Church is a tool which the landlords have used to pacify the peasants. He knows that stamping out the church is a necessary precondition of making everyone wealthier, better-educated, and happier.

But…out of this loaded scenario, Greene somehow manages to demonstrate the value of the Church. Neither the peasants nor the priest can understand what they’re doing, but the ritual observance is what keeps God alive. Greene shows how God withers when it is kept trapped up inside the heart, and how faith requires some kind of community in order to remain strong. And he shows the consolations of faith. He shows how even a very thin faith is able to ennoble this priest, whereas the lack of it has sapped the humanity from the lieutenant.

The most virtuosic performance in the novel comes at the end, where the priest is wondering whether he himself is going to go to heaven. Actually, the priest is not wondering at all. He knows he is not going to heaven. He knows he is damned. He’s sinned too repeatedly, and, what’s more, he’s not contrite about his sins. He knows that it would be the height of pride for him to forgive himself…it would just be another sin loaded on top of all the rest. The priest knows that what he needs is another priest–another man, acting using the spark of Godliness that is inside all men–to hear his sins and look inside him and tell him that even he is, somehow, worthy of salvation.

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The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on February 23, 2012

Okay guys, so, I don’t know if I told you, but the theme of this year’s reading is 19th Century English Literature (the theme of last year was Proust and the theme of the year before that was The Russians, okay). And in keeping with said theme, I recently read Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. This book is really, really long. And it wasn’t until I was about 60% of the way through (maybe 700 pages, if I’d been reading a paper book), that I decided I liked it.

The book is basically an all-encompassing indictment of the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the social, business, political, and personal mores of British society. The plot revolves around this financier who’s basically running a Ponzi scheme involving stocks of an American railroad company. But all of that is completely unimportant.

The amazing part of the book was a subplot involving the rapidly aging 29-year-old gentlewoman Georgiana Longestaafe and her engagement to a 50 year old, widowed, Jewish banker named Ezekial Brehgert. Basically, all Georgiana wants is a husband who’ll be rich enough to give her both a townhouse in London and a house in the country. And to get those things, she’s even willing to marry a Jew. But she definitely regards it as a pretty major concession on her part.

However, to her family, this is totally beyond the pale. But Georgiana holds firm against them, and, slowly, begins adopting all this egalitarian rhetoric about how Jews are just like everybody else and what does religion matter, it’s not like anybody goes to Church anyway. She actually does her best to hold out against some fairly determined opposition from her family. And she slowly comes to realize that they don’t really care about her quality of life. They want her to be respectable, but she wants to be rich. It’s a slow sort of emancipation.

I thought it was delightful. Anyone can write a story where True Love overcomes prejudice, but it takes a genius to write Greed overcomes prejudice.

Beware, though, lest anyone think that this book is not anti-Semitic, that is absolutely not the case. The book repeatedly implies that the aforementioned shady financier is Jewish. Trollope suffers from that weird Dickensian anti-Semitism where he hates the Bad Greedy Jews but is willing to point out some Good Honest Jew and say, “Oh, look, some Jews are honest and don’t love money.” (It’s kind of like how some straight guys who don’t like feminine gay men will go out of their way to try to prove their lack of homophobia by pointing at a more masculine gay acquaintance and saying, “Oh, he’s a real man, even though he’s gay”).

Anyways, I am not sure I can recommend this book. But it has lots of things in it that are really interesting. The book is not nearly as comedic and exaggerated as most 19th century British classics, and it’s much more concerned with actualities: money and the practical mechanics of things like earning a living or proposing marriage. Thus, it many incidents within it provide a sort of counterpoint to Dickens, Austen, and Thackeray.

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