I figured maybe I'd try writing rambling mini-reviews of books as I finish reading 'em. What do you think? (No, don't answer. You never really do, do you? Only when I don't ask. I've noticed that.)
The main reason for my reading this book was that Pynchon blurb. I do love me some Pynchon and have indeed read several books at his indirect recommendation—Warlock by Oakley Hall was probably the most recent one—but in particular it was the combination of the fact of Pynchon's thumbs-up and the particular thumbs-up he gave: "The Novel of Bullshit is dead."*
HOW I JUDGE BLURBS: I do weight The New York Times higher than Newsweek, and I certainly weight a writer I like higher than any given publication. A blurb comparing a book to a writer I like: that's important. And what the blurb says is important. I'll always prefer "hilarious" to "heartbreaking" and "brilliant" to "poignant" (for example), but more generally I'm interested to hear something specific described. For example, White Teeth is "Brilliant," "vibrant," "magnificent and audacious," "dazzling," and "ambitious," and The Amazing Adventures of Bullshit and Boring is "smart, funny," "sprawling, idiosyncratic," and "towering," but Jesus' Son "consistently generates imagery of ferocious intensity, much of it shaded with a menacing, even deranged sense of humor" (emphasis mine), Barthelme "can sound like S.J. Perelman or Groucho Marx one minute and like Hugo or Kafka the next," Pynchon's "comedy crackles...puns pop...[and] satire explodes," and "If [Christopher Lehmann–Haupt] were banished to the moon tomorrow and could take only five books along, [Gravity's Rainbow] would have to be one of them." These are not necessarily the best examples, but I trust you get the gist.
[Here are a couple of other blurbs that, in my college days, totally persuaded me:
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
"An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kind of stories we need to get us through these times." –Thomas Pynchon
"Mr. Saunders writes like the illegitimate offspring of [Nathanael] West and Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps a distant relative of Mark Leyner and Steven Wright... Mr. Saunders's satiric vision of America is dark and demented; it is also ferocious and very funny." –The New York Times
Giles Goat-Boy
"Barth is a comic genius of the highest order." –New York Times Book Review
"Giles Goat-Boy is a gothic funhouse fantasy of theology, sociology, and sex." –Time
"Funny, bawdy, exciting...There is greatness in it." –Saturday Review]
Newsweek tells us that Nog is "Somewhere between Psychedelic Superman and Samuel Beckett." Beckett, yes. But what is Psychedelic Superman? I'm sympathetic to the idea: I mean, I like the sound of it. Reading Nog is like reading something like Molloy, maybe more like a cross between Beckett and...well, sure, something psychedelic. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,† Nabokov writes that "super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others." In October 1998 I wrote, "This is not so queer. The more cutting-edge a work is, the less close to it emotionally an audience can be, because (at least in part) its appeal is in its distance and foreignness. The speed of a work's decay is proportional to the distance between it and its audience at the time of its inception." I think I may have had that exactly backwards. But, yes, I think Nabokov's point, however you explain it, is in play now. The novel was published in 1968: now I think, "Ah, right, hippies and drugs"—and I've read Denis Johnson—but I can't really imagine how it must have read when Pynchon was reading it, back when it made sense for him to drop at least two sunny-eyed drug metaphors in his review. It was all new.
The ways in which I'm most sympathetic to this novel are the ways in which it's still new, somehow, somewhat. That's impressive. Unfortunately, half the ways in which it feels new are rather off-putting and not necessarily successful, exactly: for example, the way in which identity and even verb tense are constantly shifting, past tense, present tense, past tense, present tense: "I listened for Bench's whistle, but I can hear nothing. I stood up and looked back, shielding my eyes as if there is something to shield my eyes from. There is a small point of light. It might be the dying fire on the ledge or perhaps another star. I crawled through the flap...." Interesting but not necessarily compelling. (Although now, as I look for examples, I'm wondering whether all physical actions are in the past tense and all feelings or perceptions are in the present tense? That's neat if so. I am too lazy to check. You check if you care so damn much!)
Henry Miller wrote, in Tropic of Cancer, that "a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul."‡ Even the massively overrated, pretentious, and largely intolerable Everything Is Illuminated had one splinter of a toenail of greatness:
US, THE JEWS
Jews are those things that God loves. Since roses are beautiful, we must assume that God loves them. Therefore, roses are Jewish...
THE ANIMALS
The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love.
OBJECTS THAT EXIST
Objects that exist are those things that God doesn't even like.
[And this is the part I really liked:]
OBJECTS THAT DON'T EXIST
...If we were to imagine such a thing as an object that didn't exist, it would be that thing that God hated.
There are great pages in Nog. Some of the sex scenes are really something; that much deserves mentioning. Check out this description of the [presumably] burnt-out narrator's description of a building orgasm: "It is a time to ruminate. A force is building inside me. I feel the hint of something, a line broken, another line joined, a few extra breaths seized. I am about to break away from all the weights behind me and created new weights. It is becoming clearer, the line from where it begins to where it is going..." There's something in that.
In case a review is meant to tell people whether to read something, I'll say this: if you like reading unusual fiction, or if you're infatuated with the extremes of the drug culture of the 1960s or are just in love with intoxication generally and like to romanticize the near-total annihilation of self...or if Henry Miller is one of your favorite writers, or particularly if somehow Miller and Beckett are two of your favorites...if alienation and confusion and existential insanity appeal, then, sure, take a look. But walk, don't run.
Nog.
* Of course, when you look inside you see that that's some relatively creative quoting: what Pynchon actually said was that Nog is "hopefully another sign that the Novel of Bullshit is dead"—but whatever.
† And in The Gift.
‡ As I noted in 2002, "Tropic of Cancer has more than one great page in it" (this was not intended as understatement).
§ According to the Internet.
0 comments:
Post a Comment