life is great, you can't have any: jess walters' "citizen vince"

one of the most gratifiying things about reading is the slow emergence of patterns. networks of ideas being tossed around in the literary sphere. for example, i just reviewed a book in which the idea of self-improvement plays a central role for at least one character, and after that, i posted an excerpt from "the great gatsby," one of the definitive explorations of the idea of personal change within an american context. this night, i finished another book which centres around the very same issue: is it possible for us to turn ourselves into someone else, say, the person we'd really like to be? what would be the consequences, and what would happen to the smoldering ruins of one's former life?

jess walters integrates this idea into - of all things - a gripping crime novel. now, i don't usually read anything that contains detectives, suspects or heated investigations, but citicen vince turns out to be a coherent, trimmed-down (in a good way) and even literary novel. the protagonist, vince camden, is a criminal from new york who's been allowed into a federal witness protection program - in a very real sense, he gets the chance to start over (in spokane, washington). this is easier said than done, which is why he quickly falls back into his old lifestyle - selling dope, credit card fraud and gambling. since the novel is set in 1980, the election showdown between reagan and carter then serves as a trigger for vince to reconsider his priorities: because of his cleared criminal record, he's able to vote for the first time in his life, which, in turn, makes him try to reattach himself to his social community, to care about something beyond himself, despite himself. the only problem being that at this time, his past catches up with him in the form of an psychotic killer who appears on the scene and seems to have a vital interest in (a) taking over vince's credit card business and (b) putting a bullet to his head.

as the length of the plot outline above suggests, this is a book propelled by storytelling. and i can only say that i'm very thankful for a novel that has a clear, well-crafted narrative structure after having previously worked my way through chabon's somewhat overwrought epic. on the plus side, it even contains literary passages, a great ear for dialogue, ambivalent characters, and beautiful descriptions both of spokane and new york city! thus, it's perfectly possible for so-called genre novels to succeed on their own terms - i definitely had more fun reading this than certain other, sprawling "great american novels" ever provided me with. (oh, by the way, i should probably mention another prime example of a crime book that is simply outstanding - motherless brooklyn by jonathan lethem)

and what about self-improvement? two quotes by walters and chabon (he is good, it's just that his book is too long!) make clear the exhilerating promises and the inevitable disappoinments inherent to this idea which, i guess, to some extent fuels all of our lives.

here's walters, writing about the process of composing "citizen vince": "in my journal, early on, i wrote that in the novel vince must come to realize two things in rapid succession: 'life is great; you can't have any.'" and here's chabon, a direct quote out of "the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay": "[sammy's] self-improvement campaigns [...] always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved." sounds familiar? at least to me it does.

i'll leave you with an image of spokane i discovered while researching walters' novel. more often than not, it's not a complete overhaul of our lives that actually contributes something to our daily existence. instead, a simple snapshot like this might all the redemption we're getting. which, of course, is far from being a bad thing.

passages: "the great gatsby"

another installment of passages, where i post great excerpts from works of literature guaranteed to please. this time, it's the closing passage of f. scott fitzgerald's the great gatsby:

most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any
lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the sound.
and as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away
until gradually i became aware of the old island here that flowered
once for dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world.
its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for gatsby's house, had
once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams;
for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the
presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation
he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in
history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

and as i sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, i thought of
gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of
daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must
have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. he did not
know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity
beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under
the night.

gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by
year recedes before us. it eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow
we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . and one fine
morning ----

so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past.

this is probably the most beautiful celebration of the american dream's original promise as well as its inherent ambiguities that has ever been put to paper. yes, i like the usa. so should you, and if fitzgerald can't lure you in, then you're a lost cause...

lights mistaken for habitation: michael chabon's "the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay"

some books stay with you for what feels like half of a lifetime. and i'm not talking about some priceless wisdom you obtained from the pages of a novel that'll forever be there to guide you through the torrents of your miserable existence - i'm being literal: some novels just sit and sit and sit on the shelves, to be taken down semi-annually in order for you to have yet another go at trying to conquer the vast amount of words printed on what seem to be far too many pages. which doesn't necessarily mean that the book in question needs to be dull: when i was a kid, for example, it took me approximately 3 years and at least ten tries to get over the first 100 pages of "the lord of the rings." once i managed to plough through the tedious initial descriptions of hobbit life, though, i could see it had been well worth the effort. when i decided to tackle "dr. faustus" by thomas mann in my twenties, it was a scattershot affair of inverse stop'n'go reading, too. in that case, i couldn't even pinpoint the reasons for the struggle, since i found the book to be fascinating and involving from the very first page.

a more recent novel that took its time is michael chabon's the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay. i bought it in 2002, and only now have i finally finished it. so, without further ado, let's get down to business:



sammy klaymann and joe cavalier are two jewish kids near the end of their teenage years around 1938, the first being a closeted champion of american-dream-style self-improvement living in brooklyn with his mother, the latter his cousin and a refugee who barely escaped prosecution in german-occupied prague. they decide to pool their knack for low-brow pulp storytelling (sammy) and drawing (joe) to create a successful comic series centred around the escapist, a superhero styled after harry houdini who is engaged in a ferocious battle against thinly-veiled nazi figures. this, of course, also serves as an instance of wish fulfillment (or "wishful figment," as another character in the book has it) on joe's part, who desperately tries to get his remaining family members out of europe and channels his rage at hitler's regime through the extremely violent panels of his comic books.

it is impossible to list every quasi-miraculous turn of events in chabon's novel which involves, for example, the golem of prague, a micro-scale war on the ice of the antarctic and many, many other narrative strains that fill its 600+ pages. and while the text has many merits (more of which later), one thing's for certain: it is, quite plainly, far too long. here's why: there is a tendency in recent american fiction towards the weighty tome, whose practitioners wedge encyclopedic knowledge on every topic imaginable, diverse literary traditions and a huge array of narrative trickery between the cover sheets, which can sometimes be quite frustrating for the reader. the critic james wood labeled this strain of writing "hysterical realism," and - while not talking about chabon in particular - offers harsh criticism that, though to a lesser degree, might also be levelled against "kavalier & clay":

"the big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. it seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. [...] bright lights are taken as evidence of habitation. [but] what are these busy stories and sub-stories evading? one of the awkwardnesses evaded is precisely an awkwardness about the possibilities of novelistic storytelling. this in turn has to do with an awkwardness about character and the representation of character in fiction, since human beings generate stories. it might be said that these recent novels are full of inhumane stories [...]"

putting it more simply: too much stuff happens. too many characters are painstakingly introduced, then suddenly abandoned. the novel knows too much (e.g. about new york in the 40s, the history of comic books, the second world war, jewish mythology etc.), at the expense of characters whose motivations and aspirations go beyond predictable cliches.

however, it is still a good, if not great book. why? because of chabon's writing. he must certainly be one of the most skilled stylists in literary prose working today, and his epic novel contains so many imaginative, often awe-inspiring passages that it is a near-futile undertaking to single out any specific example. b.r. myers, another critic of the weighty tome, accuses contemporary authors - among many other things - of unimaginative symbolic language, a feat he feels earlier writers were able to pull off far more convincingly:

"when vladimir nabokov talks of [...] the 'square echo' of a car door slamming, i feel what philip larkin wanted readers of his poetry to feel: 'yes, i've never thought of it that way, but that's how it is.'"

well, then, consider chabon's rendering of sammy's mother's smell: "the natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings." at least to my mind, this more than holds up to nabokov's "square echo."

alright, now i've exhausted our collective energies for today, dear imaginary audience. i wonder if i'll ever review a book here where i feel the characters are well-constructed and believable... it's becoming more and more apparent to me that this is really one of the central aspects in writing that i'm on the lookout for whenever i start a book. we'll see what the next novel brings.

new music: bob mould's "i'm sorry, baby, but you can't stand in my light anymore"

another one of my occasional music posts. it's more than necessary, however, to direct your attention to the new single by mr. bob mould, whom all of you should revere.



bob mould - i'm sorry baby, but you can't stand in my light anymore (via captain's dead)

don't moan about the auto-tuned vocals - he started it a few years ago, and it seems we need to arrange ourselves with the fact that he won't stop any time soon. apart from that, a classic mould piece in folk-rock mode. hopefully, the record will live up to what the single promises.

back in the 90s, i - as usual - spent the night over at a friend's, playing c64-games until the early morning. said friend was into hiphop, but also fugazi, and he pointed out that sugar were a pretty good sountrack to jump'n'run games in the vein of mario bros. since their music had such a colourful, bubblegum-like quality to it. looking back, i can only say that the gum certainly hasn't lost its flavour yet.

btw: if you haven't checked out sugar or hüsker dü before, your life has been a waste of time up to this very moment. get started!

passages: "the dead"

yeah, it's the holidays! thus, more time for blogging... currently reading the new david sedaris book, and waiting for my copy of jeff walters' "citizen vince." since i've got no book to review at the moment, i'll introduce a new feature: there'll be regular posts that contain passages from literary works that i find worth your while.

here's the first one:

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

this is arguably one of the most beautiful passages in literature. it's the closing paragraph of james joyce's short story "the dead" out of dubliners, before he went all stream-of-consciousness. i was never too interested in any other work by joyce (though i did have a go at "portrait of the artist as a young man" once), but this is simply stellar writing. i read it while being stuck at the celebration of my grandfather's 90th birthday at the end of winter, 1999, and the memory never left.

new -ish fiction: matt ruff's "safe negro travel guide"

oh, i forgot that i promised some links to short stories on the web. so here's another one:

matt ruff - safe negro travel guide

it's ctulhu once again! i think it's kind of disappointing that the story stops when it starts, but still... ruff writes that this was supposed to be the exposition to a whole tv series called lovecraft country, and these are basically the leftovers. whatever - enjoy!

zzzzz.... zombies: max brooks' "world war z"

in the unlikely case that anyone is still checking this site - i've been terribly busy lately (new job and all), thus the negligence of the blog. also, i've heard rumours that i need to update my 'google stats,' whatever that means. help is appreciated.

so, just a short entry this time. due to me being a full-time teacher now, i haven't had time to read much. however, there's one book i managed to finish:




max brooks, author of the zombie survial guide and son of mel brooks, delivers a story about - you might have guessed already - a world-wide war against the undead. the interesting thing is that he doesn't stick to convential horror lore - instead, he presents a fictional non-fictional account of the dawn, spread and eventual defeat of a zombie pandemic in the not-too-distant future. the book consists of interviews with veterans of said conflict which detail the economic, military and political impact of the rise of the living dead.

overall, it's a good read. especially brooks' observations concerning the consequences of a global downturn struck me as eerily relevant in the face of the economic crisis we're facing today. also, it's a strange coincidence that his descriptions of the unnamed, heroic us president more than once mirror obama, although there are hints in the text that the vice-president, nick-named 'the whacko' for his radical politics, is an african american, not the president himself. talk about fact outrunning fiction.

however, brooks is not a great writer: especially his characterizations are mostly ham-fisted, clumsy and rely on tried-and-tested stereotypes far too much. which, of course, is a problem for a book that basically evolves around the frequent introduction of new characters who get to voice their point of view. especially the unconvincing narrative voices of the american survivors of world war z are often hard to bear, in some cases insufferable.

but still, the novel manages to entertain. i once read an editorial piece in time out where the author tried hard to come to terms with the fact that he actually enjoyed "the da vinci code'" despite dan brown's abysmal writing - it's not as bad in brooks' case; his text is cleverly constructed, well-paced and full of interesting ideas. which, in turn, makes me realize that he might not be a bad writer after all, since all of the things mentioned above are, of course, essentials of storytelling. it's just that i (as pointed out earlier) like books with fully-realized characters, which is what brooks doesn't pull off.

well, so much for the undead. the entry turned out not to be so short after all. taking a look at the books and stories i reviewed so far, it looks as if i mainly stick to horror/fantasy-tinged ficition with a literary bend. that's quite a surprise to me, since i always liked to think of myself as an aficionado of post-postmodern serious stuff. time to face the facts: i'll have to write something about pynchon or gaddis, otherwise my self-perception will be completely fucked.

now: back to work. get your guns, your machetes, canned food and a huge supply of clean water. and always aim for the head. good night.