Blotter Paper

Wherein I free-associate after reading books.

Wrap-Up Season 2011: Predictably Good Books, Part Two

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on December 19, 2011

The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis – This fall I visited LA for the first time in my adult life, and found myself utterly entranced by the place. Before this year, LA had never really existed for me as a distinct place, where people lived…a place where I could go. If I thought of it at all, I thought of it as looking a little like the suburbs of San Jose (but, like, a little bigger). But it is not like that at all. It’s a diffuse, unnavigable mega-city. It’s what Dhaka or New Delhi would look like if they were first world cities. Not only does its sheer size and scale make it much different from anything else in America, it’s also a place that’s been systematically perverted by the influence of the entertainment industry, which shows even in extremely superficial ways (like how attractive everyone in LA is). The Informers is a fix-up collection by Bret Easton Ellis where he briefly and mechanically revisits all of his normal Ellisian tropes: bisexuality, nihilism, drug use, pop music, late-night diners, and sadistic murders. I think the plotlessness and lack of cohesion springing from the format (a fix-up is a collection of loosely linked short stories) actually make the work a lot more interesting, because it means that the only thing to focus on is the scenery.

Something Happened by Joseph Heller – I really liked Catch-22, when I finally got around to reading it last year. This book is nothing like Catch-22. For starters, it’s not really very funny. It’s a book that’s hard to describe. It’s a 1950s businessman (basically Don Draper) monologuing for 200,000 words about his life (how he’s driven to cheat on his wife, how his daughter hates him, how he’s worried that his son is growing to grow up and lose his vitality). The reminisces are not chronological and none of the book takes place in scene, except for short snippets of reported dialogue. The narration is manic and insane. It sounds like a man ranting to you while under the influence of heavy doses of amphetamines. But it’s also hypnotic. It’s a man trying his best (and failing) to gain some understanding of his own life.

Dropsie Avenue by Will Eisner - A pretty awesome graphic novel covering two hundred or so years in the life of a street in the Bronx. You see ethnic groups jockey with each other and then move on, giving way to the next group. You see the architecture and the zoning and the economics of the place change. In its portrayal of any given era and group it might be a little simplified (and sometimes seems to come close to stereotyping), but the epic sweep of the thing makes the book worthwhile.

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Wrap-Up Season: Predictably Good Books, Part One

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on December 16, 2011

I knew these books were going to be good before I read them, and I was right.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens – It’s surprising how little personality David Copperfield (the character) actually has. The entire book is fairly episodic, and the only real throughline is David Copperfield’s involvement with each episode and character, but it’s not easy to get a grip on Copperfield’s character. It’s hard to say anything about what kind of person he is. In fact, when Copperfield becomes a novelist (about 2/3rds of the way through the novel), it kind of comes as a surprise, because there had never seemed to be anything of the artist about him. Still, this book ultimately succeeds because of David Copperfield’s narrative voice. There’s something very kind and worldly wise about him. The book is filled with memorable caricatures: the penurious Mr. Micawber; the scolding Betsey Trotwood; and David’s first wife, the silly Dora. But they only come alive under the kindness of Copperfield’s tone, which is really just a distilled version of Dickens’ overall narrative outlook. Under a harsher gaze, the characters all would’ve seemed like scoundrels and fools, but the virtue of this book is that, even though it’s about really harsh stuff like being an orphan and losing your home and having to work in a bottle factory, it never descends into horror.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson – I’m not sure why Shirley Jackson has become so indelibly associated with speculative horror (other than the vaguely fantastic nature of the short story “The Lottery”), since her work doesn’t seem notably stranger than other writers of grotesques, like William Faulkner or Flannery O’Conner. Still, regardless of genre distinctions, I really like her two novels (both this one and The Haunting Of Hill House). Both her novels start off very nice, and then become terrifying, particularly this one. Her talent is developing situations that you really care about—families and communities that seem like they should continue on in merry eternity­—before brutally destroying them.

Burmese Days by George Orwell- This is kind of a speculative novel. It’s what George Orwell imagined his life would’ve become if he had never left the Burmese Civil Service. It’s a naturalistic novel about an 40 year old civil servant who’s living a life of quiet desperation: he’s hated by the natives and by his fellow civil servants alike. The novel is filled with Orwell’s eye for detail with his satirical powers. I really have no idea how Orwell does what he does. Every page of this novel so sharp, and all his character portraits are so clear and severe.

Just Kids by Patti Smith – Patti Smith’s memoir about rollicking around in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe when she was in her twenties got a huge amount of favorable press coverage when it came out last year. I think this is because book critics are huge nerds, and they really love it when they get to interview rock stars (although I am still not quite sure how much of a rock star Patti Smith is, I’d never heard her music before reading this book). Still, if you love stories about 23 year old bohemians, then you cannot dislike this book.

In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck – I think this is the fourth book I read this year that had a strike in it (the others were Germinal, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Jungle). But this one was the best of the lot. In it, a (Communist) Party organizer goes out to California’s central valley to foment a fruit-picker’s strike. It’s almost a documentary novel, it’s all about the give and take of the strike: the tactics, shifting movements, and compromises. There’s a lot of fire in this novel, but also a lot of loss. Probably a better strike novel than any of the others, because it’s not heroic, but that also makes it kind of disquieting at times. Steinbeck was really schizophrenic. It’s so strange that the person who wrote novels like this and Grapes Of Wrath could also write novels that idealize working class life in the way that Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat did.

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Wrap-Up Season 2011: Surprisingly Good Books, part two

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on December 13, 2011

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair – This is the novel about Chicago’s meat-packing industry that put the nation into such an uproar over how their meat was prepared (at one point it implies that when workers fall into the renderer and die, their meat is just be added into the sausage) that the government created the Food and Drug Administration and started regulating food preparers. But the novel is actually a story about how this family of Lithuanian immigrants gets totally crushed by capitalism. I particularly enjoyed Sinclair’s attention to the numbers, the amount of dollars and cents this family needs to keep their head above water. It’s a very emotionally affecting novel, and it would’ve been utterly perfect….if it had ended about 2/3rds of the way in. After the family falls apart, it’s patriarch starts going on these picaresque adventures (at one point there is an extended interlude where he helps a drunken millionaire’s son get home and then has a bartender steal the $100 that the son gives him) and then the man ends up embracing socialism, so it all gets a little silly. Still, even that is a little respectable. Sure, all that stuff ruined the book, but I can see why Sinclair had to put it in. Sinclair wanted his book to change the world, so he needed to put in something about what his riled up readers should go out and do. He allowed his political instincts to overrule his artistic ones, and, maybe, for him, that was the right decision.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – This book is by a hedge fund manager who claims that we’re terrible about predicting the future because none of our projections allow for ‘black swan’ events, which are huge, discontinuous events that change everything (like, 9/11, or the Harry Potter phenomenon). That part is pretty interesting and even somewhat convincing. What’s more fun, though, is the narrative tone of the book. The author comes off sounding like a megalomaniac and an amazing dick. He sounds like such an asshole that he almost feels fictional. It’s as if Taleb was writing a very experimental novel where a fictional persona expounds upon a science-fictional idea. It’s a really engaging book.

Candy Girl by Diablo Cody – This is Academy-Award winning screenwriter Diablo Cody’s memoir about her year as a Minneapolis stripper. I was really sick when I read this book, okay, but I still enjoyed it. It goes into all the proper anthropological detail about what being a stripper is like…and I am sucker for that kind of stuff.

Paying For It by Chester Brown – There are a surprising number of graphic novels about the author’s sexual dysfunction, but I think this own stands out even in that crowd. For years (decades?) the author has been patronizing prostitutes exclusively (as in, he has not been pursuing any other kind of sexual relationship) and in the course of this pursuit, the author has developed all these theories about why patronizing prostitutes is a sensible alternative (for people like him) to romance. The book covers his odyssey, beginning with his first visit and ending with him happily ensconced in an exclusive (though still monetary) relationship with one prostitute. It ends with fifty pages of appendixes in which he details his views on prostitution. Oh, and for some weird artistic reason, he never shows the faces of any of the prostitutes he visits! They are always turned away, or their faces are hidden. The book is really bizarre, but it was also really good.

The Professor’s House by Willa Cather – This is a series of three linked novellas that doesn’t sound like it ought to cohere at all. The first is about an elderly professor reflecting on his family and on the son-in-law (who died in the war) who was the only person he felt close to. The second is a flashback to the summer that the son-in-law spent excavating a New Mexico plateau that held a Native American city. The third is about the professor’s lonely summer without his wife and daughter (they’re vacationing in Paris). And yet, somehow, it all does come together. It’s about excitement, and the intellectual life, and loss. It has a very wistful tone, which avoids being cloying because it’s broken up with the very exciting, adventurous middle. Also, maybe I just love Willa Cather so much that I can even enjoy her minor novels.

Portrait of the Addict As A Young Man by William Clegg – Literary agent Bill Clegg’s memoir about a two month $70,000 crack cocaine binge. I don’t know why this was so entertaining. I think it’s because the dreamlike tedium of the narrative kind of echoed the tedium of the binge: the endless succession of hits in an endless succession of five-star hotel rooms. Also, I was really sick when I read it.

Local by Brian Wood – If there’s anything I’ve learned this year, it’s that I am a sucker for graphic novels about shiftless twentysomethings. In each of this series of twelve comics, the main character, Megan, ages by one year and moves to a new city (and grows up a little). There’s one about her having a horrible roommate in New York and one about her being a fairly creepy movie theater clerk in Nova Scotia and…well…if you like this sort of thing, you’ll really like this series: it is wanksty early-20s at their most elemental.

Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey – Reading this book made me realize what I dislike about biographies. They’re too long. You know, I’m only going to read maybe (at most) 10,000 books in the whole rest of my life. It seems like a huge waste to devote a whole .01% of that to learning about a single person. What have all these famous dead people ever done for me? Why do they deserve so much of my headspace? This book neatly solves that problem through the novella form autobiography. I’d probably never read a full book about Florence Nightingale, but I will definitely read a novella about her. There’s definitely room for biographies at a length somewhere above a Wikipedia entry and somewhere below a full book.

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Wrap Up Season 2011: Surprisingly Good Books, Part One

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on December 12, 2011

When I compelled my list of surprisingly good books, I was so overwhelmed that I decided to pare it down to only 10-15 that I really had something to say about, and also to not discuss any books that I had previously blogged about. Thus, these books are not necessarily the best ones I read this year, they’re just the ones I felt like I could write 100-300 words about.  The second part of this post will come tomorrow.

Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert – This title makes the book sound like a self-help guide or a memoir, but it’s actually a sedate work of science popularization. This is a nonfiction book about why we’re unable to accurately assess what things will make us happy (and then achieve those things) because our brains basically our imaginations are not very accurate. When we are asked to imagine how we will feel in a given situation, we feel like come up with a pretty good simulacrum of that feeling, but actually, we’re totally wrong. In fact, the book is kind of pessimistic about whether human beings will ever (or should ever) overcome these failures of imagination. However, the most important thing to know about this book is that it’s one of the best written works of non-fiction I’ve ever read. There’s a certain non-fictional tone—one exemplified by humorous political books (like those of Michael Moore or Al Franken) or by travelogues for sedate people (like those of Bill Bryson) or science popularization books for teens (like those of Isaac Asimov) – that I find to be very cutesy and twee, and this book has a tone which is very much like that tone, except it is exciting and sharp. On a prose level, the book continually upsets your expectations (and it is very funny). It was only after finishing the book that I read (on the back flap) that the author (who is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard) has also published stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Does anyone know anything about that? I would really like to read those stories.

 Tell Them Who I Am by Elliot Liebow – The author of this book was an anthropologist (the head of the NIH’s National Institute for Mental Health) who was diagnosed with terminal cancer, quit his job, realized he wasn’t going to die, started volunteering at a women’s homeless shelter, and ended up writing a participant-observer study about the shelter’s homeless women. It’s a very powerful and fascinating book about the day to day lives of these homeless womens: how they spend their time, their friendships, their romantic relationships, their monetary situation, and all kinds of other stuff. As a bonus, it is annotated with footnotes by two of the women (so they’re literally speaking at you and sometimes disagreeing with the author). It was really cool. I don’t know how generalizable the study is, but it’s always cool to get a glimpse into someone’s life, even if it’s just twenty women who lived on the streets, twenty years ago.

 Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington – When I read this memoir, last December, I had tons of things to say about it. I had reams and reams of quotations marked out for the blog post I was gonna write. But then my Kindle crashed and I never got around to it. The first third of this book is about Booker T. Washington’s own struggle. It’s a fascinating portrait of a person and a people who are only one generation out of slavery (Washington was born a slave and was freed by the thirteenth amendment when he was like three or four). Washington got his education at a black teacher’s college and then went to go run his own college (The Tuskeegee Institute) and develop his own theories regarding the further socioeconomic development of his race (which are set out in the rest of the book). It’s well known that Washington did not view things the way that people do now. In some ways, his writings are kind of unbelievable. At one point he claims that he had never had a single experience of racism from a white Southerner. I wonder to what extent he self-censored himself because he knew he was writing for a mostly white audience. Still, there’s a tremendous moral force in his writing. In my recollection, every page of the book contained something exciting, beautiful, or startling. He reminds me of Gandhi (another great man who had some very simplistic views).

 The Organization Man by William Whyte – This was Whyte’s 1950s indictment of the way that modern American men were becoming homogenous and risk-averse. This is truly an obsolete document. In 2011, there are no more Organization Men. Nowadays, no one has job security. Nowadays, sucking up the boys upstairs and expressing only the right opinions and living in only the right neighborhoods will not get you nearly the rewards that it gave you in the fifties. Still, this book is very interesting as a historical document. It’s a portrait of what can happen to the human spirit in a very affluent society. I have no doubt that if the good days ever come again (and, economically speaking, the fifties were very good days, with huge growth in wages, GDP, and opportunity), that we will start to see some of these conformity pressures once more.

 Germinal by Emile Zola – I kept meaning to write a comprehensive post about Emile Zola. So far this year, I’ve read six of his novels, and each one has impressed me with its grotesqueness and power. Germinal is the one that I read first, though, and it’s still my favorite. This novel is about a labor strike at a coal mine in 1860s France. Most of Zola’s novels are about how human beings are horrible and wicked and love to do terrible things to each other, but they paint that world in tremendously grand and heroic strokes. The typical Zola is a series of grand set-pieces: one chapter will be a mob riot; another will be a series of workers excavating for coal deep underground; another will be three morally bankrupt children picking flowers. He’s one of the few naturalist-type authors who is as exciting for his artistry as for his content. No one writes crowd scenes like Zola. And, although it still ends in death and despair, Germinal is actually a lot more hopeful than most of Zola’s novels. At least this one shows the heroism in united action (although the typical sexual and moral sordidness of Zola-world is also on display).

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Wrap-Up Season 2011: In Search Of Lost Time

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on December 7, 2011

With yesterday’s completion of Finding Time Again, the seventh and final book in Proust’s series, I’ve finally finished a quest that I began way back in February, when I checked out Swann’s Way from the Oakland Library just because I had to check out to two books before my lending privileges would be fully activated and the library’s attractive-looking copy of the Lydia Davis translation was one of the first things to catch my eye in my hurried glance through the stacks (the other being The General In His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which was also pretty good).

I can’t tell whether the final book is actually better than all of the previous books or if I only enjoyed it more because the previous books had taught me how to read Proust, but I think this book contains three of the most delightful set-pieces in the whole septology.

Firstly, roughly the first third of the book contains a discussion of Paris during war-time (and the activities of some of the characters during the war). I’ve always thought of Proust as being a very domestic sort of novelist, but he’s surprised me time and again. Throughout the series, he devotes considerable attention to political matters (such as the Dreyfus affairs) and technological ones (such as lengthy meditations on first the telephone and then the airplane). But, considering that he began the novel during peace-time, in 1907, I think it showed a lot of courage for him to incorporate the war into the work, and I think he does a really good job of using it to start wrapping up a lot of his threads about patriotism, nationalism, and masculinity.

The next fourth of the book balloons outward from when the narrator steps on an uneven pair of cobblestones and immediately remembers another uneven pair of cobblestones mentioned earlier in the novel (I know that this kind of seems like a joke about navel-gazing French novels, but that’s really how it goes down) and realizes that in the circumscribed span of time between the two events—the present moment and the event he’s remembering—he’s found the grand theme of the literary work that he’s been thinking about writing for the past 3500 pages (the narrator is an aspiring writer).

The next sixty pages basically contain Proust’s guide to the themes and aims of the book that you’re holding in your hand. I’m sure I’m going to garble this, but he basically writes about how we live primarily in our own memories, and how, in remembering, we resurrect the past, but we also fill it with a kind of goldenness that didn’t exist at the time. He writes about how he can be filled with exhilaration by the memory of his childhood, even though it was actually filled with boredom and anxiety. That’s because the moment is kind of a mishmash of sensory perception, but in our memory, we craft a sort of more idealized, more artistic moment. We select the stimuli we will remember, and we create something beautiful out of our raw impressions. He thinks that the purpose of his literary work will be to capture these intervals of time and allow the reader to not only live within them, but also teach the reader how to recapture his (or her) own past and own memories and reanimate those as well.

The rest of the book is given over to a description of a dinner party where Proust highlights how everyone has aged by describing them as if they are actors who are wearing makeup. It’s one of the best 100 page dinner parties of a book that has at least six or seven 100 page dinner parties. You get to see what everyone is doing and how they ended up. You get to see characters whom you met as youths and see how they’ve been transformed into old women.

For me, the prime joy of this series was always in its characterization. Proust doesn’t pay attention to any of the normal ways of making a character arcs. His characters don’t progress from one goal to another, from one personality quirk to another. Instead, his characters are discontinuous. He spends fifty pages sketching a static portrait of a character, and then, two books later, he’ll spend another fifty pages sketching a portrait of that character is mostly, though not entirely, different.

Proust is the only novelist who shows people from multiple angles. Like, you know how when serial killers get caught, their wives and neighbors will often describe them as alright guys? Well, that’s not just because they’re putting up a façade. It’s also because we are simply different people at different times and places. That’s why Proust can show someone like his maid Francoise as being devoted to correcting anything that might even slightly inconvenience him, and then later show her as being selfish and bitter and cruel. Even though they can be contradictory, his portraits retain enough overlap, and resonate strongly enough with each other, that they never seem arbitrary.

I don’t think any other novelist has yet done anything like Proust. In a way, it’s kind of demoralizing, because it exposes how much of ordinary novel format is a kind of consensus fiction. We know that humans are really much more complicated than the way they’re shown in novels, but we accept that as “reality” just because we’ve been taught to.

Still, his work is not something that can be followed up or built upon. It’s hard to imagine imitating its structure. Actually, I’m surprised that even Proust managed to do it. This is the kind of work that seems like it ought to be forever unfinished. However, even though he never managed to edit the last four volumes, I think that the series comes to a satisfactory conclusion. Part of me would like to see someone try to give the Proustian treatment to something other than fin de siècle French high society, but I don’t think that anyone else can or will try.

Anyways, when I started reading Swann’s Way, I was like, “Holy shit, I am going to have to read all the rest of these now, aren’t I?” and when I read the next book In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower and saw how interconnected it was with Swann’s Way, I realized that I was going to have to read the whole series in a pretty short timespan, if I wasn’t going to forget who everyone was. So I did, and it was pretty decent. If anyone wants my tips on reading the series, I offer them as follows:

·         I have absolutely no opinion on which translation is the right one to read. I chose the more recent Penguin translations because I had a suspicion that the Moncrieff translations (from the 30s) might bowdlerize the homosexual content (which I was particularly interested in). The last two volumes of the Penguin translation are not available (due to copyright issues) in the U.S. I ordered them from amazon.co.uk because I figured that I might as well.

  • If you’re not sure whether you’ll like the series, then I recommend that you read the middle section of Swann’s Way (entitled Swann In Love) first. It’s about 200 pages long. If you like it, you’ll probably like the rest. It’s kind of the whole series in miniature.
  • You can’t really skim Proust, since it doesn’t go anywhere. There’s no point rushing to reach a destination that won’t give you any satisfaction when you reach it, since the main pleasures of the book don’t arise from resolution of plot threads or character development. Whatever pleasure you derive from each page is pretty much it. The sum is not much greater than the parts. However, I do recommend that you don’t read too closely (unless that kind of reading comes naturally to you, of course). The writing is very dense, and it’s easy to read and reread the same passage, but I didn’t find that very rewarding. I found that whatever I didn’t quite get on my first read-through of a page was unlikely to reveal itself on a subsequent read-through of the same page. I tried, as much as possible, to read it like a regular book, and to keep going through it at a reasonable clip, finishing each book in a week, at most.
  • Read the books in rapid succession. Even ten months between the first and last book was almost too much. There were allusions in the final book to events that I didn’t remember from previous books.
  • Don’t worry if you get bored sometimes. Sometimes I’d be reading the book and I’d start thinking about something else, and I’d read several pages without retaining a word of them. I don’t think the solution to boredom is to keep re-reading the boring part until you remember it; I think the solution is to read onwards until you reach an interesting part.

 

 

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Sold my story–”We Planted The Sad Child, And Watched”–to Daily Science Fiction

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on December 6, 2011

I think the title says it all. This is a longer story, so it’ll probably take awhile for them to put it up. This is my second sale to Daily SF. My first one–”The Black Spirits Which Rage In The Belly Of Rogue Locomotives”–is going to be posted in a few weeks, on December 16th.

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Wrap-up Season 2011

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on December 2, 2011

Another December, another wrap-up season. This year I’m planning on following the same general scheme as I did last year. I’m going to write about the books I’ve read about this year, dividing them into four categories according to my reactions to them: Predictably Good, Surprisingly Good, Mixed, and BAD!! Then I’ll have a post including links to my favorite posts from my year of blogging. Then on December 20th, I will wrap up my eighth year as an aspiring writer. And finally perhaps a post about everything else in my life.

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A note to my writer friends. If you die and leave me with your brilliant unfinished manuscripts, I will burn them.

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on November 21, 2011

One benefit of being an aspiring writer is that you enjoy many literary works much more because all the thinking you’ve done about words and stories has given you the ability to detect finer differences between works and to appreciate a given work for the things it is doing that are new and original (and hard to do). However, one cost of being an aspiring writer is that sometimes you get so totally wrapped up in the creation myth which surrounds a given work that you enjoy it less than a non-writer would. For example, I can’t ever read a Ted Chiang story without thinking, “Holy crap, this took a whole year to write. Every sentence has been re-written a hundred times.”

Similarly, I recently read Franz Kafka’s The Castle and tweeted:

            Reading Kafka and thinking, “Wow, if there is an award in Heaven for best friend anyone’s ever had, it should definitely go to Max Brod.”

Because it’s hard for me to read Kafka without thinking about how abominably unfair it all is. I mean, here’s a guy who kept most of his work in the drawer and then, when he died, his best friend (a very successful novelist in his own right) went out and published it all and basically devoted his whole life to hustling in order to preserve Kafka’s legacy. Kafka didn’t even have to finish his three novels. Don’t you think Max Brod got a little resentful about how little cooperation Kafka gave him? Kafka didn’t even say (the way, for instance, John Kennedy Toole did), “Hey Max, I have this finished novel in my desk drawer. I think it’s pretty good, but all these publishers disagreed. Can you please get it published?”

No, he was more like, “Hey Max, these unfinished scraps are awful. Please burn them (wink, wink).” And then Max had to shovel that stuff together, assemble it into a finished-looking novel, hawk it to publishers, and then endure being called an awful person for years by scholars who objected to the way he’d edited his friend’s work.

Meanwhile, is there anyone reading Max’s work? On Amazon, the only in-print English translation of a book by Brod is his memoir about his relationship with Franz Kafka (oh, okay, this also looks like it’s still in print: Tycho Brahe’s Path To God).

If there’s anyone who deserves to be obscure, its Kafka. He didn’t even try. It’s kind of a truism that there are way more great books than there are famous books. Given that, why does an unfinished book that someone left in his desk drawer get to be a famous book?

Here is normally where I say that, of course, the book deserves the plaudits its received. But I am not sure that’s true. The Castle is unquestionably a great book. It’s very entertaining and it does lots of interesting things. I especially like the way it’s told primarily through monologues. Some of the monologues are really breathless and masterful, particularly Olga’s, near the end of the book. I enjoyed the book a lot. But I did not get the sense that this book ‘deserved’ the incredibly extravagant reward it received. I could understand it if this book had dandied itself up and combed its hair and thrown itself over a publisher’s transom like a good little boy. If the book had submitted itself to honest competition, I wouldn’t begrudge its success. But the book did no such thing!

Instead, was a misshapen ugly thing, born of a neglectful parent who threw it in a trunk. It lolled around for years, doing nothing, and then got rescued by a fairy godmother. The book is basically the Cinderella of books. What book could deserve that kind of luck?

More important, what did Kafka do to deserve his phenomenal luck? Isn’t the saying, “winners make their own luck”? How did Kafka make his own luck? While the rest of us are out here hustling for a break, Kafka just worked his cushy insurance job and did a lil’ scribbling in the early AM, and if he didn’t like what he wrote then he just didn’t send it out, or even bother to finish it. Of course, Kafka did have a few instances of bad luck in his life, like his horrible, early death–starving to death at age 40 because tuberculosis had screwed up his throat–but still, plenty of people suffer from horrible, early deaths…whereas only two people in all of history have been resurrected and acclaimed as world-class artists after telling their executors to burn all their work because they were annoying perfectionists who didn’t think it was that good (the other being, of course, Emily Dickinson).

If it had only happened once, then we’d know that Kafka was a fluke. However, since it’s happened twice, I think we can safely assume that there must be hundreds or thousands of  ’great’ novels locked away in other desk drawers. My only consolation for the grotesque injustice of Kafka’s fate is imagining all the hundreds of Kafkas whose Max Brods looked at their novels and said, “Gee, this is interesting stuff. Shame he never finished it,” and then chucked the unfinished garbage into the fire. Some people would call that a tragedy. Not me. Those Kafkas deserved what they got.

I’m not categorically saying that I would refuse to help out a dead homie who told me to “burn” his manuscripts, all I’m saying is…well…yeah, I think that is what I am saying. I will slap a magnet on your hard drive and not lose a moment of sleep over it.

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Are comedic novels supposed to be funny in the same way that stand-up comics are funny?

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on November 14, 2011

I like funny things. Well, not videos of cats. Actually, I avoid humorous Youtube videos of any sort. But I am generally capable of appreciating all other forms of funny media: musicals, jokes (even puns), stand-up comedies, sit-coms, etc.

But I’ve always been a little mystified by comedic novels. I mean, I’ve read and enjoyed fair number of ostensibly comedic novels….but I haven’t found them funny.

I find it easy to recognize some kind of similarity between the feeling I get from a good joke (even if I don’t laugh at it) and a comedic song. But that feeling seems, to me, to be so different from the feeling that I get from comedic novels that I hesitate to call them the same feeling.

Out of all the prose works I’ve read, there aren’t more than a handful that I’ve found to be really funny: Simon Rich’s Ant Farm; Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens; and (at least when I read it like ten years ago) Dave Barry’s Big Trouble.

Almost all the other comedic novels I’ve read have seemed to me to possess nothing more or less than the typical qualities of a novel: complicated characters, interesting situations, well-observed social dynamics, etc. It’s true that in ostensibly-comedic novels, these things are exaggerated in certain ways, but most novels make heavy use of exaggeration and satirical elements as well.

For instance, 1984 is not considered a comedic novel, but in its cartoonish depiction of a world of doublethink, Big Brother, two-minute hates, and the like, the novel seems to be satirizing real world institutions in exactly the same way as, say, Catch-22.

As another example, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye (and, to some extent, Franny And Zooey) is about an intelligent but deluded fool who feels very estranged from the world in which he lives and goes wandering around a large city and criticizing everything around him; that’s also the same premise and technique of John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy Of Dunces. But the former is rarely described as a comic novel, while the latter is frequently described as one.

And that would be fine, if the latter novel was funny and the former was not. However, I don’t perceive that distinction. To me, 1984 and Catcher in the Rye are good in pretty much the same way that Catch-22 and Confederacy of Dunces are good.

I don’t recognize comedic novels as being funny, but there is something that I enjoy about them. I like their niceness and miniaturization. Most of life isn’t heart-rending and life-altering. Most of it is tea parties and little arguments. I think that ‘comedic’ novels tend to capture that pretty well and, in some ways, they feel more true than more ostensibly realistic novels.

The closest thing to a comedic novel is probably the romantic comedy film. Rom-coms are generally not that funny. Instead, they’re cute. They’re romances without passion. They’re dramas without bite. When I say it that way, it kind of sounds like I am slamming them, but I actually like the absence of passion and drama. I think that it’s an interesting way of portraying life. And since we don’t know quite what to call things that are ‘cute’ or ‘nice’ in this way, we call them ‘comedies.’

Recently, I have read five extremely good comedic novels and I am going to summarize my reactions to them below.


Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh – One of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s a very fast-paced novel about petty English gentry in the inter-war period. I don’t think I’ve ever read another novel that was about precisely this milieu and time period. Or rather, perhaps I have (most of the Bloomsbury Group’s novels must be about these folks) but I haven’t recognized it because no one else has so skillfully drawn out matters of money and social relationships. This book is also told in a really interesting way. It’s composed primarily of very short–less than 500 word–scenes and has very abrupt transitions between scenes.

Decline And Fall by Evelyn Waugh – This is Waugh’s first novel (and my introduction to his work). I’m always surprised at the gall of some authors. Waugh wrote a novel that’s basically about an Oxford student who gets kicked out of college and goes on to do a bunch of things that are sort of like what Waugh did (like teach at a private school) but, of course, a lot sillier. I don’t think fiction ought to imitate real life in this way, because real life generally makes very little sense. This comes through pretty well in the novel. The only reason the main character does the next thing is because the author wants to talk about the next thing. Still, the novel turned out well (but I bet most novels that are like this one are pretty horrible). Also, Waugh’s

novels also tend to have horrific subplots that you should look for. People die between scenes for no good reason.

Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene – Because of his daughter’s extravagant pecuniary demands, a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana agrees to become an informant for a British spy agency. But because he’s lazy, he just sends back doctored reports. This is only barely comic. Informants actually do this kind of thing all the time. But there’s something in the twisting desperation of the informant to manufacture a good life for himself and his daughter that is really interesting.

Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene - This book is about a boring fifty year old man (a retired bank manager) who meets his septuagenarian aunt for the first time and starts going on crazy world-spanning adventures with her. The most interesting thing about this novel is its sense of restraint. If I (or any other imitator) was to write a character like the aunt, we’d make her backstory outrageous and diverse. We’d put in everything into her backstory. We’d have her taming lions in Senegal and blasting off to outer space and saving the President from assassins in Tulsa. She’d basically be Pippi Longstocking. But although Graham Greene doesn’t reveal her entire past, he basically allows the reader to reconstruct a very coherent timeline from the aunt’s stories. Although she’s still a ridiculous character, her comprehensibility makes her seem much more realistic; she’s not just some crazy awesome Chuck Norris type who no real person could ever live up to.

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh – I also read Scoop. But I am blanking on what to say about it right now, so instead I’ll just transition directly into:

 

ASIDE: Is Dickens supposed to be comedic or what? I mean, do people find him funny? Do people find him dramatic? Dickens is so weird. It’s hard to know what to think about him. He’s pretty much his own entirely inimitable blend of the absurd and the dramatic. Nothing about Dickens is real and nothing about him is funny, but when you see his mannequins walk around, some kind of real emotion oozes up out of you. I guess that he’s sort of like a musical. If you stop to think about what musicals are (stories about people who just burst out into song in the most ordinary situations) then they start to seem really ridiculous. Maybe most forms and genres of media are pretty ridiculous if you’re not willing to embrace their conventions.

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Woman as Financial Vampire

Posted by R. H. Kanakia on November 1, 2011

I’m currently reading (and considerably enjoying) Edith Wharton’s Custom Of The Country. But I am also disquieted by the novel. At its core, the story of this novel is a very familiar one. It’s about an ambitious woman who sucks dry a somewhat dreamy man with her incessant financial demands.

The cunning woman who only longs for fine society and fine objects and uses her beauty as a tool with which to entrap men into providing for her desires is an incredibly familiar figure in literature. She is so familiar, in fact, that I kept having these strange echoes while I read the book. I’d have a brief impression, and then I wouldn’t be able to rest until I remembered the other book that I was being reminded of.

I haven’t tracked down all the impressions of what I call “woman as financial vampire”, but I can name a few. There’s Emile Zola’s Nana, about a French prostitute who destroys the fortunes of her admirers. There’s Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, whose eponymous heroine eventually gets her husband deep into debt after issuing numerous notes and trying all kinds of financial manipulations with the village moneylender. There’s Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie: the main character has a paramour who engages in embezzlement to meet her monetary demands. There’s Becky Sharp, from William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, who bankrupts her creditors (and ruins her admittedly horribly husband) by knowingly borrowing huge sums and then running away from her debts. There’s Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind: who screws over her second husband in various business deals. There’s Grushenka in Dostoyevsky’s Brother’s Karamozov, who causes the central conflict of the novel by creating a large need for money in the oldest brother, Dmitri. There’s Polina in Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler, whose mysterious need for money causes the hero to take up gambling.

Perhaps the most nuanced and complex use of this female trope comes (rather surprisingly) from Charles Dickens. David Copperfield’s first wife, Dora Spenlow, shares many traits with the financial vampires described above: she’s spoiled, petulant, short-sighted, and used to being supported by wealthy men. And when she married David Copperfield, one is almost sure that she is immediately going to drive him to ruin. But she doesn’t. Their marriage is not precisely happy, but she does not destroy him. In the end, it seems like he genuinely loves her and she genuinely loves him.

Most of the examples I cited above are from a particular time period, and, indeed, I think it’s difficult to find more recent examples of the woman as financial vampire. An example from the fifties is Millie, from Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana, whose financial demands cause her father to enter into the spying business. Another that springs to mind is Jorah Mormont in A Song Of Ice And Fire, who becomes a slaver and a mercenary in order to satisfy his wife Lynesse’s need for jewels and finery and parties.

There must be many more examples of this trope, but its frequent occurrence in my own reading is enough to satisfy me that it is definitely “a thing”.

But it does puzzle me. The occurrence and reoccurrence of the fantastically spendthrift woman in literature seems to suggest that she is being used to work out some sort of deep cultural anxiety. In many cases, her financial needs are coupled with a sexual unfaithfulness, which seems to suggest that they’re both part of some kind of fear of emasculation or loss of control.

But it’s the financial aspect that has always been more startling to me than the sexual aspect. After all, a woman can’t be spendthrift without her husband’s consent. In most of the above relationships, the man has to sign for each and every purchase. He is fully capable, at any time, of cutting the purse strings, but he is so ensnared by her charm that he is unable to.

It’s a strange sort of anxiety and I question how often women like this actually existed. She’s more like a monster than she is like a real person. She has an unholy power to glamor a man. And she has an unquenchable appetite for jewels, hotel rooms, meals, carriages, and dresses.

In some cases (as in Our Man In Havana) the financial vampire is just a plot device. She’s a way to provide the hero with a huge need for money without also making him seem greedy or repellent. But many of these novels are explicitly devoted to the psychology or origins of these women. It’s quite fantastic that so much ink has been spilled about the inner workings creature that can’t have been very common.

But it doesn’t matter that the financial vampire probably didn’t exist too often: what matters is that she ought to exist. Most of these novels conclude that mankind deserves the financial vampire. Halfway through Custom of the Country, a character rather explicitly says that America gives rise to these financial vampires because it infantilizes women and doesn’t allow them to have real pursuits: the reason they have no real concept of money is because they are not allowed to work, and the reason they ruin men is because they are taught that their virtue is measured in what they can extract from males using their beauty and charm.

Personally, though, I am not convinced by these pseudo-feminist morals. Despite the gloss that these novels put on what they’re doing, they are still trafficking in very charged, very sexist imagery, and I think that part of their emotional appeal, as literature, is due to the horror that these women arouse in men. If I created a movie where a mob of blacks rioted and raped a bunch of white women, I think I would still be playing to the racist anxieties of my audience even if I ended the movie by saying “They were driven to this by your racism!”

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