justin

Sometimes I just get in the mood to read westerns, but they have to be of a certain type. Not about cowboys—ranch life doesn’t interest me. Nor does violence. I’m interested in the adventures of a man (or woman, but in these books it’s nearly always a man) who can read the sky or listen to the wind. A man who can interpret a bear’s track or find water in a dry land. A man who can be alone in the woods for weeks and months at a time, comfortable with himself and at home in the world.

Elmer Kelton is one of the best writers of westerns, and this is one of his best books. Young Michael Lewis is entranced by his father’s stories of far-away Texas, which still belongs to the Spanish. One of those men who keeps moving his family westward as the land gets too crowded, Mordecai continually leaves Michael and his brothers to farm the land while he himself sets out to find some better place or seek some great adventure.

Listening to their father talk about Texas, Michael dreams of a vast and unspoiled land, so when his father and a group of neighbors set out for Spanish-controlled Texas to capture wild horses, Michael decides to follow. However, his first encounter with that land is both brutal and devastating, and he barely makes it home alive. Years later, having become a solitary trapper in the woods he loves, Michael is still haunted by his dreams of Texas and eventually decides to return, accompanied by his younger brother Andrew. As Michael travels along, he recognises that the land around him is good farmland and considers abandoning his quest and staking a claim here. But he is afraid it will soon be settled and changed.

Susan Lang, author of Small Rocks Rising and other books, has said that in westerns, the land itself is a character. As I mentioned re All the Pretty Horses love of the land seems to be wrapped up with nostalgia for an unspoiled world. Perhaps it is just our hindsight, but the trappers and mountain men in these stories, even as they forge their way into new territory, are already regretting its loss, as if the present were shadowed by the future. Part of the romance of the west is that it was “unspoiled” and “unsettled”. But of course there were people living there already.

In The Practice of the Wild Gary Snyder points out that what we call wilderness isn’t all that wild. When explorers landed on this continent or pioneers pushed into the interior, they were not entering an unpopulated land. There were people there and animals and trees and plants, all with their own sets of rules. Ecologists have picked apart the components and interdependencies, even of systems devoid of people. There are rules. They may not be our rules, but they are there nonetheless.

So when we set off into the woods, we are not entering a truly wild place, merely a place where our normal rules don’t apply.

These liminal places fascinate. We sing songs in a minor key and read those fairy tales about venturing off into Germanic woods. It seems—at least until we learn the language—as though anything can happen. Where there is space for something new to emerge or be created, an opening, something new to be explored, an adventure to be had.

Not being overly impressed with the other two McCarthy books I'd listened to and finding the print version impossible to read, I didn't plan on tackling any more. However, I coouldn't resist this one because it was narrrated by the fabulous Tom Stechschulte and I wanted the company of his familiar voice.

The Road is one of those buddy, road-trip stories with a couple of differences: the buddies are a father and young son, and their trip takes place in a post-apocalyptic U.S. where few people are left alive and all of the infrastructures we count on, from food distribution to law enforcement, have disappeared. The survivors have become scavengers, governed only by whatever personal moral code they retain or, if banded together with others, by the mores of that group. Not so different from the wild west.

The father and son are headed south for reasons that are never explained, on foot, with their possessions in a metal grocery cart. They are regularly robbed of these possessions—blankets, coats, food—and sometimes replace them by stumbling over a cache that hasn't already been picked over. They try to avoid other people, not trusting anyone's motives and not wanting to end up as dinner for some ragged and starving band.

I found the story pretty boring, but kept listening, lulled by Stechschulte's voice. What I most liked was the father's protective care and concern for the child. I don't believe I've ever read about such devotion to a child from a man's point of view. At times the father almost seemed to worship the child, the one article of faith left to him, the embodiment of his only hope for the future.

In contrast, I thought of those self-centered parents today who abandon their children: fundamentalists who send their children to Christian boot camps to make them stop listening to pop music, rich people who buy their kids everything on earth and send them off with nannies or to boarding school, drug addicts who can't focus long enough to notice their children. Not all fundamentalists, not all rich people, not all drug addicts it goes without saying, but there are plenty of abandoned children at all levels of society.

Realising that I've read a lot of dystopias and end-of-the-world stories lately (Never Let Me Go, Children of Men, A Brief History of the Dead, Oryx and Crake, The Handmaid's Tale), I began to think about what it takes to survive.

In the early 1970s, I knew a man who had already recognised the fragility of our social infrastructures, something many of us didn't think about until the Y2K flap. He bought land in a remote area and stockpiled grains and beans in sealed metal trash cans. He collected hand tools and taught himself to fix any kind of machine, making parts when none were available. He didn't buy guns, like some survivalists, but there was a potential violence in him that convinced me he could protect himself.

The world didn't end. Food is still being delivered to the grocery store down the street; people still stop for red lights (most of the time); policemen and EMTs still come when you call 911. True, I seem to encounter the me-first phenomenon more and more often, especially on the highway, and wish the pendulum would swing back to more concern for the community as a whole. But it doesn't hurt to be reminded now and then of just how fragile the structure of our society is and how close we are to chaos.

As I mentioned last week, I had tried to read this book several times without being able to get past the first few pages. Buoyed by my success with the other McCarthy book, I listened to this one on my most recent road trip. This version didn’t have the wonderful Tom Stechschulte as narrator, which made the story less interesting for me. The narrator was fine; he just didn’t have that so-familiar accent and phrasing.

I’ve heard that people either love or hate this book, but I have to say I found it a rather ho-hum coming-of-age story. In 1949, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole leaves home after the farm he had hoped to inherit is sold out from under him. He doesn’t have any particular skills other than being good with horses. With his friend Lacey Rawlins, Cole sets off into Mexico looking for work, adventure and a chance to earn a stake. They meet up with a younger boy, thirteen, whose reckless ways quickly land the three young men in trouble.

As in No Country for Old Men there is a moment of irrevocable decision. As Cole prepares to help the boy recover his horse, Rawlins says to him, “. . .this is it. This is our last chance. Right now. This is the time and there wont be another time and I guarantee it.” Of course Rawlins is right: their later ordeals follow from this choice. The suffering and loss that Cole endures turn him into a man, the kind of hard-bitten, reticent man who appears in classic westerns. In a sense, this book is the back-story for Shane and all those other western heroes.

However, this excerpt also illustrates what I didn’t like about the book. Why do away with punctuation around dialogue? Cute. Precious. Unnecessarily confusing. Also, McCarthy dresses up this fairly ordinary story with sonorous language, strings of sentences held together by a series of “ands”, making it sound like something important is happening. I can see how a young man, especially one raised on the Bible, might think in such language, but—for me, anyway—the portentous tone backfired because it raised expectations that the story didn’t meet.

While the book didn’t live up to its reputation—the plot a string of brutal incidents, little character development outside of Cole, occasional bursts of poetry at odds with the rest of the story—I did want to know what happened to Cole. What I liked about him was the way he forged ahead, clinging to his own sense of what was right, even with Lacey pushing him to do what was expedient. For all that, Cole’s choices do take him across a moral line.

In a recent (8 August 2007) post to DOROTHYL, a listserv for mystery readers, author Laura Lippman wrote: “Here's my shorthand for noir — Dreamers become schemers. Classic noir stories are about little guys (and gals) whose relatively conventional dreams — for love, money or success — send them across moral boundaries that most of us never cross. And in a classic noir story, they lose, or most of them do.” Lippman’s description certainly fits Cole’s story.

Western noir seems almost an oxymoron, but there’s another sense in which this book reminded me of noir. In a review of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen's Union (“Sashimi with a Side of Fries”, _London Review of Books_16 August 2007) Adam Thirlwell says: “[This book] is also a contraption for trying to understand the meaning of the noir genre. According to this machine, a theory of Judaism might coincide with a theory of noir. Noir fiction describes a society in which happiness and goodness are always nostalgic. They are what might have been.”

In McCarthy’s book, there is a nostalgia, not just for childhood innocence, but for an earlier era. Myths of the American west shimmer behind the story, and shadows of mountain men and cowboys loom behind Cole as he struggles to make his way in a world that has changed and—we know—is about to change even more dramatically as America lurches into the 1950s. The very first image in the book is of “The candleflame and the image of the candleflame” moving together. For all the book’s failures, this is a wonderful symbol for the mysterious double-vision imparted by memory and a sense of the past.

Before this book, I hadn’t read anything by McCarthy. I’d looked at All the Pretty Horses a couple of times thinking I ought to check it out, but couldn’t make it past the first couple of pages, with that disjointed first paragraph and the (I gather) now-famous image of a train as a “ribald satellite”. No, I thought. I have better things to do with my time. However, choosing books on tape at the library for a road trip, I picked this one up not realising who the author was and did, in fact, end up listening to it. Two things kept me interested.

The first was the narrator. With audio books, I’ve found that the narrator can make all the difference to a story. For example, I had no interest in the Harry Potter books until, on a friend’s recommendation, I tried Jim Dale’s audio versions and was immediately hooked. Other books I’ve had to give up on: the narrator’s tone was too uninflected (hence, boring); his/her accent was incorrect; s/he couldn’t differentiate the characters’ voices or—in one terrible case—keep the different voices straight.

Here, Tom Stechschulte gives a fine performance, but what really hooked me was that he sounds just like a friend of mine who is a native Texan. Now, I know several folks from Texas, but I’d never met anyone who sounded so much like my friend, not just the accent, but the intonation, the expressions, the pacing—everything. It was like having him right there in the car with me, telling me a story.

The other thing that kept me interested was the idea of the irrevocable decision. Llewellyn Moss, out hunting on his day off, stumbles across a drug deal gone bad, cars and dead men just lying there in the desert sun. He bypasses the drugs but chooses to take the bag full of money, a decision that drives the rest of the book. Yes, it’s your basic thriller, an ordinary man caught up in violent events he doesn’t completely understand. Moss is pursued by many people, but principally by Anton Chigurh, a killer for hire who is relentless and brutal.

Chigurh seemed like a robot to me, or maybe the posse in Butch Cassidy—something put there to keep the plot moving. It wasn’t just Chigurh; all of the characters except Moss seemed wooden and predictable. And the story seemed like one of those kill-fest films that are on tv sometimes on Saturday afternoon: just a lot of car chases, fight scenes and gore, without even a wood-chipper or a tango to make things interesting. Yet I kept listening, beguiled by Stechschulte’s voice, fascinated by the thought that one decision can set you on a path there’s no coming back from.

When I read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard back in my teens, I was horrified by this line of Guildenstern’s: “‘There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said—no. But somehow we missed it.'” For years I painstakingly examined every decision, not wanting to miss that moment. However, despite all my obsessive care, no major decision has turned out the way I thought it would. I’ve learned to live with my irrevocable decisions and their unintended consequences. Still, I was curious to see how Moss’s decision to take the money would work out, if he would find a way to avoid the fate the book’s title promised.

Like The Handmaid’s Tale this story is set in a future that is only too possible. Atwood’s story-telling gifts haven’t diminished, nor has her eye for potential social problems lost its focus. It’s an end-of-the-world book, after the apocalypse, but the mechanics of how we got there are less interesting to me than the ruminations of the main character.

In the opening pages we meet Snowman, a man in a Red Sox cap waking to his world where there is no medicine for infected mosquito bites and only a mango (if he’s lucky) for breakfast. We meet the mysterious children who can’t identify the hubcaps and fast food containers that wash up on the shore and look to Snowman for help. The story unfolds, as addictively readable as all of Atwood’s work, through this man’s thoughts, his lonely fantasies, his memories of a time that is gone. The stream of his consciousness is very well done, larded with trivia, half-remembered commercials, snatches of speech that have lost their context.

We learn about Snowman’s past, as a boy named Jimmy who hung out with his best friend Crake, playing videogames and surfing the web. There, on the web, he catches sight of a girl who will haunt him all of his life: Oryx, whom he will meet and love as an adult. Jimmy’s world is one in which the rich live in gated compounds protected by private police forces which everyone else lives in the riotous and dangerous pleeblands. The compounds are company towns, run by corporations looking to make money off of gene-splicing experiments. Not so great a stretch from where we are now.

The neighborhood where I used to live, situated a little north of the geographical center of the city, wanted to build a wall around itself and remake itself as a gated community, plucked out of the city’s grid of streets. Several of us fought the notion and eventually they let it go, but they did hire a private police force whose first action was to shoot the foxes and other wildlife that have taken refuge in the city as their usual habitats have been destroyed. Their next action was to arrest an elderly man going down his sidewalk in pajamas and bathrobe to get the morning paper. His crime? He was African-American, so obviously couldn’t be a homeowner in that upscale neighborhood. Atwood has carried this cultural trend forward into its logical end.

I know little about gene-splicing, though GM foods make me nervous. Still, I can well believe that scientists somewhere might be looking to create a pigoon: a pig genetically modified to grow transplantable human organs. But for Snowman, starving and determined to travel to the ruins of the nearest compound in search of food, the pigoons, feral now and starving themselves, have become a threat.

What Atwood does so well is sprinkle these futuristic elements into the rich batter of life as we know it, of familiar thoughts and obsessions. Her characters are completely human and recognisable. If I were teaching a fantasy/scifi writing class, I would use this book as the primary text because, quite aside from the mechanics of creating this believable future, she has told a story that has had me puzzling over its implications for days and wondering how much is too much.

Even those people in my book club who were put off by the perception that this book was science fiction found it not just readable but impossible to put down. I first read it twenty years ago, and wondered if I would still find it as terrifyingly plausible as I did then.

The answer is yes. Even more so.

Offred is the handmaid in this story and gives a first-person account of her life under the Gilead regime, a political and cultural system put in place ten years previously, a system which is quite simply the logical extension of what the neo-conservatives and religious right of today say they want: a “return” to the “good old days” when rich and powerful white men ruled with Bibles in hand, and women and minorities knew their place.

In a world where fertility rates have fallen disastrously low due to pollution, epidemics and a nuclear meltdown or two, babies and the ability to make them are prized above everything else. The only roles open to women are wife, housekeeper and baby-maker. The baby-makers are the handmaids, fertile women such as Offred who are given to powerful men to bear their babies, who are then given to the wives to rear as their own. Women are not allowed to hold jobs, attend school, manage money, even read or write. They must wear long loose robes, color-coded for their role—burkas, anyone?—and infractions draw drastic punishments: for a third offense of writing, a woman’s hand is cut off; enemies of the state are publicly hanged. Laws are based on the Bible, hence the servant women are called Marthas, and the handmaids are justified by the story of Jacob and Rachel.

As Offred describes her days and nights in what is obviously Cambridge, Massachusetts, I found myself wondering why she and others seemed to have accepted these changes so passively. After all, she still remembers her previous life and longs for the husband and child who have been taken from her. Yet, when she sees Japanese tourists on the street dressed in skirts and hose, she is shocked by how naked they look. How could she have become so accustomed to the Gilead culture, in just ten years? Then, as I was filling up my car at the gas station, I realised that it has only been a handful of years since gas prices tripled, creating huge profits for the gas companies. Yet in these few short years people—including myself—have come to accept these price increases, even if it is a grumbling acquiescence.

As Offred recounts the events leading up to the coup that created Gilead, I was reminded of Nazi Germany and the way people tolerated infringements of liberties of others until finally it was too late to protest the loss of their own freedom. There were many other echoes of past—and present!—times, such as the Puritans’ approach to justice, making everything just that much more believable. In a recent interview, Atwood said that there is nothing in this book that has not happened in some culture at some point in history.

I was shocked by how powerless this one woman was to prevent her life from imploding along with her cultural world. Yet there was nothing she could have done, save perhaps try sooner to escape to Canada. The book forced me to reflect on my own powerlessness and the precarious nature of the gains we have made. In my all-girls high school, the curriculum included only the most basic math and science because girls’ brains, of course, couldn’t handle such things. Twenty years ago, as an engineer I sat in a smoky office full of chain-smokers, watching unskilled men get promoted over me. We have come a long way, but we could lose it—and more—in an instant if we are not vigilant, if we don’t speak up.

Luther Albright is a civil engineer who not only designs dams but also designed and built his own home, alert to every one of its systems, constantly fine-tuning the wiring and plumbing. His family life as well seems pleasantly under control, with a loving wife and an agreeable teenaged son. He seems to have a perfect life, until a minor earthquake exposes faults in its foundations.

Written in first person from Luther’s point of view, the events of the novel unfold through his language and interpretation. I can see why some people in my book club found this first novel bland and mundane, but I really liked it. Bezos perfectly captured the way some engineers—often the most competent—lack people skills that the rest of us take for granted. Luther was an extreme example, but I certainly know people like him.

I liked Luther. I felt for him. He thought he was doing the right things, both in his professional life and his home life, not realising that he didn’t understand his family's, his co-workers', or indeed his own emotional needs.

The story is organized around a series of “tests” to which Luther is subjected, and part of the mystery is understanding what the tests are, why they are being administered, and who the force is behind them. As Luther struggles, long-buried memories of his childhood begin to surface. I found myself thinking about the various ways we find to express love, resentment and other emotions.

Bezos did a fabulous job of taking us through these shifting relationships with friends and family. I also liked the way office life was presented. Bezos really captured those co-worker relationships: close without being close, familiar without necessarily liking each other. She described so well the way alliances shift between being competitive and supportive.

I don't think the book would have worked if written in any other point of view. For me, what made it interesting was seeing what was going on inside Luther's head. My only minor complaint was that the wife and son were a bit too good to be believable. But I highly recommend the book. There is a lot going on beneath the surface of this deceptively simple story.

This novel is set in Chautauqua, where a family prepares to sell their long-time summer home. I enjoyed it a great deal—in fact, I picked it up off a table when I was at camp (yes, adults too sometimes go to summer camp) and became so engrossed that I inadvertently walked off with it, much to the dismay of the book's owner who ended up searching all over camp for it. Needless to say, I was terribly embarrassed about having stolen his book but that didn’t stop me reading it straight through once he was done with it.

Part of what fascinated me was that O’Nan’s description of the summer home took me back to the place on the Chesapeake Bay where we sometimes summered when I was a child. The musty smell, the cardboard walls, the odd-tasting water, the cluttered garage . . . all resonated with my own half-buried memories. But it was really when the adult “children” went upstairs to unpack that a shiver of recognition tore through me. The upstairs area, where they had slept when young, was one large room with beds at either end, just as ours was.

Rounding out the physical description of the home were the shifting relationships between the family members: alliances and competitions, informed by memories of past betrayals and allegiances. These, too, made me think of my adult siblings and the way our carefully distant relationships have been altered by the events of the past year as our remaining parent slipped away.

I thought O’Nan’s book absorbing and thought-provoking, but in coming to that judgment, how much of a factor were my memories? So often my response to art—whether a book or music or visual art—depends largely on what I bring to it. There have been many popular and award-winning books that I came to with high expectations only to be disappointed, as I was with The Dante Club a few weeks ago. Would I have liked them better if I had stumbled across them with no introduction, such as happened with Behind the Scenes at the Museum back in April? There have been paintings such as Charles Ritchie’s Study for “Pike” whose fascination for me might stem from the strong memories they evoke rather than from artistic merit (however defined).

In the translation class I’m taking, we discussed Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Task of the Translator” in which he says that “In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful. Not only is any reference to a certain public or its representatives misleading, but even the concept of an ‘ideal’ receiver is detrimental in the theoretical consideration of art, since all it posits is the existence and nature of man as such. Art, in the same way, posits man's physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”

As a writer, I understand and agree with the idea that you cannot write for the reader, but out of yourself, the deepest, most authentic self you can summon. At the same time, I do care about the response of my readers. That is to say, I want them to respond. However, readers bring such a variety of experiences, prejudices, amities and antipathies to the table that there is no way to anticipate what their response will be and, judging from my book club’s discussions, their responses will vary considerably. I like Stephen King’s image of writing the first draft with his study door closed and the second draft with the door open.

Max Morden is an “almost old” man who, after the recent death of his wife, returns to the village where he summered as a child. Despite the controlled narration and the delight he takes in language, he is clearly in a bad way and tries the patience of those around him, saying once that “if there is a long version of shrift”, that is what he needs.

Another story about a self-described “middling man”, I found this book hard to warm up to at first. The narrator is a pedantic man, precise and playful with words, but his word games, as with other tricks the narrator employs to hide his feelings from those around him and even from himself, have the additional effect of distancing the reader. This reader, anyway. I had trouble engaging with the character or his story, picking up the book an putting it down several times before it finally caught my attention through the sheer virtuosity of the writing.

If I were teaching a course on how to use vivid, unusual imagery to describe people, places, weather, mood, etc., I would assign this book as required reading. For example, Max hears a recently switched-off car “still clicking its tongue to itself in fussy complaint”, and “faintly from inside the house the melting-toffee tones of a palm court orchestra playing on the wireless.” I can’t remember the last time I picked up a dictionary while reading a novel, yet had to look up a dozen words here that were new to me yet wonderfully accurate for their context.

But what really won me over were the rare but devastating insights about childhood and loss and how memory works or doesn’t. Tossed in as almost casual asides, they made me read on, hungry for more.

The children, Max himself and the two children he becomes friends with, are anything but idealized. Max’s recollections openly portray their selfishness and cruelty, their curiously attractive coldness. One of the children is mute, though whether by choice or not is unclear. The uses and limitations of language, however, affect all of the characters and there is much employment of body language—scratchings and sprawlings and outstretched arms—as well as descriptions of freckles and noses and even body odours to convey what is happening. Max’s mother, afraid of the sea, would only play crocodile (as we used to call it) in a shallow pool but was dragged into deep water by her husband’s manacle-like grip on her wrists.

The sea is a continuous presence, binding the present to the past, enduring in the way that things do while people come and go. I would have said that I’ve read so many descriptions of the sea that no one could say anything new about it, yet again and again I was struck with fresh remembrance, thinking oh yes, I’ve known it like this.

At a certain point in life, it seems as though there is nothing left to do but count over the deaths of those we have loved and look forward to our own. Despite my initial difficulties, I was captivated by Max’s story as he, almost in spite of himself, began to reconnect with the past and present, this world and the people in it.

Natsume is one of the greatest Japanese writers. I'm told that some of his books, though not this one, are part of the standard curriculum. Written in 1910, this is the story of Sosuke, a mid-level office worker who lives with his wife Oyone in a rented house at the bottom of a cliff. Childless after three miscarriages and stillbirths, they have drawn together, contra mundum, sitting in their parlor every evening on either side of the lamp that creates a circle of light in the dark world around them.

The book opens on a Sunday, the one day of the week when Sosuke doesn’t have to work, a day of melancholy for him, longed for but so quickly gone. There is so much that he wants to do, but he usually just ends up going for a walk and visiting the public bath. Although he lives and works in Tokyo, he cannot afford to enjoy its many pleasures. Sosuke and Oyone’s precarious finances become even further strained when they have to assume responsibility for Sosuke’s younger brother. Then Oyone’s health begins to fail.

These may seem like commonplace events, yet Soseki made me care deeply about these characters. After it was pointed out to me that the Japanese language does not have as many adjectives and adverbs as English, I noticed how plain the language in this book is. Thoughts and events are recounted sparingly, enhancing the bleakness of the characters’ lives while making the rare simile, when it comes, strike with great power.

I found the beginning of this book tremendously sad, entering into the mind of a man who can hardly bear the stress and tedium of his life, yet lacks the will to make a change. What I’ve heard about the lives of Japan’s salarymen gives new meaning to Thoreau’s remark about people living lives of quiet desperation. Last year when one of the trains in Tokyo was out of service, Jeremy said that it was probably because of a jumper, adding that there seemed to be at least one suicide every day.

Sosuke begins to become friends with his landlord Sakai who seems to have everything Sosuke desires: children, success, leisure, limitless funds. Sakai has a life, as people say nowadays. In one of their conversations, Sakai talks of his own younger brother who has become what Sakai calls an adventurer, traveling in Manchuria and Mongolia, hoping to make a fortune. To Sosuke, an adventurer is someone decadent and desperate, even corrupt. Yet it is hard for me not to wish that Sosuke had a little more of the adventurer in him. I thought of Lucinda Matlock from Spoon River: “It takes life to love life!”

Some parts of the book puzzled me, but the introduction by Peter Owen, which I did not read until after finishing the book, helped a great deal. As the gradual unfolding of Sosuke’s past begins to explain his current predicament, so Nietzsche’s image of the Gate of Eternal Return, where the past and future meet, helps to explain the meanings behind this remarkable book.