LUNAR PARK - Bret Easton Ellis - Fiction

This novel is amazing.

Without knowing a thing about Ellis's prior work, LUNAR PARK succeeds as a remarkably well-thought-out thriller, segueing seamlessly from Ellis's real, sensational past to a fictionalized present, including a marriage and a move to the suburbs, after which his past literally returns to haunt him. The plot draws handily from the genre--a possessed stuffed animal, a shape-shifting house, a group of young boys going missing one by one--and puts the character of Bret right in the middle of it, an already notedly unreliable narrator in personal rehab, reacting with first disbelief, then alcohol, then absolutely numbing terror, to his personal creator and fictional creations seemingly coming to life. Sons become fathers here, boys run away and return, and family is touchingly redeemed, outside of its upper-class nuclear formation. Without attempting to draw a John Irving comparison, a primary message of this novel is the importance of a father's role.

Though as adept as Stephen King (and with the same fascination with old-model cars), Ellis depends less on outside malevolence, eventually rejecting as laughable the idea that his house might be built on a burial ground, and instead is only seriously threatened by what seems to be the work of his own hand. And while these apparitions and attacks are frightening, equally frightening is the fictional Bret's behavior toward his wife, his friends, and his addiction. In this aspect, Ellis returns to a vein that runs through his work from LESS THAN ZERO through THE INFORMERS, AMERICAN PSYCHO, and GLAMORAMA, in presenting crimes equally horrific as daily behavior. The college-age swingers and drug abusers in LESS THAN ZERO are as frightening waking up from a horrendous binge as they are kidnapping a child; Patrick Bateman's sadistic emptiness is exposed just as much in his discussions with his secretary and his long-winded explanations of his outdated and indiscriminating music taste as in his murders. In exposing the upper-class guignol that passes for suburban family life among the rich and paranoid, Ellis illustrates a horror that matches that of his private haunting.

For those readers familiar with Ellis, the novel is even more enticing, as it offers the details we think we know about Ellis (some of the same things we think we know about Chuck Palahniuk, who dives into non-fiction on occasion, to supplement the record). His public castigation for AMERICAN PSYCHO by liberal factions natonwide is the jumping-off point from the intro's factual summation of Ellis's previous crimes into its delineation of his new, fictional transgressions. In a way, this novel is an answering redeption of Ellis, who doesn't hurt a thing but in self-defense: the monster we have come to believe is behind Patrick Bateman turns out to be merely a repentant alcoholic with an uncovered familial streak. Unmasked, Ellis separates himself from The Writer--a character who resides mainly in his head--and a younger version of himself, or possibly his father, who ends up only trying to warn him of a real imposter. As everything in this work is finely wrought and twice-measured, the first sentence is "You do a very good impression of yourself." This applies both to the fictionalized Ellis in LUNAR PARK and the public figure Bret Easton Ellis, gossip column alumnus and well-known bad boy, yet somehow, the novel implies, not the real man at all.

THE FIRE GOSPEL - Michel Faber - Fiction

I was introduced to Michel Faber through his opus THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE (about Victorian-era prostitutes, not, as the title might suggest, racial segregation at Harvard.) Since reading and loving that novel, everything else he writes seems fairly tossed off, especially the more modern pieces. Unless you're David Foster Wallace, a 700+ page book is never going to be followed by something better. Now, FIRE GOSPEL isn't really supposed to be anything more than a trifle. It's Faber's contribution to something called the Myths series, famous contemporary authors reworking a myth in their own styles. Faber's is, I guess, the myth of an additional gospel--adding to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--but I had never heard of this particular "myth," so to me the story seemed rather inventive, which can only have made it better. (To get a sense of my background, or lack thereof, I had to google the names of the original gospels, and I had thought that Isaac was one of them.) The plot draws parallels to Dan Brown's work, but the Aramaic scholar protagonist, Theo, is firmly in Paul Giamatti territory. The thing is, everyone else is, too--the men who kidnap him turn out to be gay and more than a bit confused about the actual purpose of the kidnapping, and the female foils are an unsympathetic girlfriend who dumps Theo when he returns from a close call at a museum in Iraq, and an unscrupulous literary agent who takes the customer satisfaction of her publishing company's biggest star very seriously.

This--let's call it a novella--took about 45 minutes to read, and not quite as long to anticipate, even with its ambiguous ending. Money can't buy you love, religion makes people angry no matter what the message, and instant satisfaction isn't a road to fulfillment. But reading THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE is, coincidentally.

INFINITE JEST - David Foster Wallace - Fiction

As you can see, I haven't posted anything in a month, because I've been doing Infinite Summer (http://infinitesummer.org) --reading Infinite Jest cover to cover from June 21 to mid-September. As you can see, I've finished early. There comes a point in every engrossing mid- to enormous-length novel at which I am so caught up in the story that I have to finish it as soon as possible, and for me that point came about two weeks ago, when I started reading Infinite Jest whenever I could--at work, while eating breakfast, while on the bus, while walking home if that were possible. It was a combination of wanting to finish it so that I could think about it, wanting to know what happens to Hal and Don Gately and Madame Psychosis, and loving the visual of moving my two bookmarks farther and farther back. (Two: one for the regular text, and one for the footnotes.)

Infinite Jest is a novel about adolescent tennis players, recovering addicts, dysfunctional families, independent filmmakers, disabled and disfigured people, terrorists, bumbling politicians, and obsessive compulsives. It is set in the future, has about forty main characters, involves complex acronyms frequently, and gives the full chemical name and manufacturer of every drug, medicinal and recreational, mentioned in its pages. And yet, it is one of the easiest-to-read and most compelling books I've ever come across. I tried to read this book in high school, when a friend was deeply into it, and stopped after about a hundred pages, caught up in other books, sidelined by the need to keep so many names and facts and incidents in play at once.

I now think that was simply not the right time. This book is about a lot of very depressed people, and as such, probably requires at least a passing familiarity with and a fair amount of temporal distance from a form of long-term ennui that you might call depression. I'm not the addictive personality, I've never felt a residual craving for any of the capital-S Substances that I've ingested over the years, but I think that this book would be even more meaningful to someone who has been addicted, even if, as an acerbic aside mentions early on, there might as well be 12-step programs for anything which one could possibly enjoy.

Infinite Jest proposes, in a number of ways, that interaction with the outside world is imperative--a supremely entertaining video turns people into vegetative viewing-machines, drugs repeatedly close people off from their circumstances, characters frustratedly and impotently lose the ability to speak and communicate, and live radio is described as the most fascinating and affecting type of entertainment available. Hiding in other ways--hiding waste in a giant feral ditch in the northeast, hiding drugs and illicit activity from school authorities, hiding possible deformity behind a veil, hiding love or caring concern--has unfortunate effects. This isn't a terribly complicated thesis, but as any reader of Wallace's journalism will realize, Wallace needs to prove to the reader everything, and if he felt that the modern world's dependence on things for entertainment and validation was worth addressing, it makes sense that he would spend a thousand pages proving that it was so.

In order to talk about this book in any comprehensible way, I'll have to limit myself to only one topic, so I'd like to talk about the distinction between the portrayal of AA, NA, and their meetings (Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, respectively) and the meeting of a men's-feelings-empowerment group that Hal stumbles upon by accident, hoping for a remote NA meeting. Because in the world of Infinite Jest, AA is a categorical force for good. AA helps people, one day at a time, to stay people, and resist destructive impulses which they term a disease. AA is described as incomprehensible to the novitiate, and a little like a cult, but successful and powerful, as well. The meeting that Hal goes to, though, is clearly embarassing and disturbing for him, what with its regressed men and emphasis on an "inner infant" whose needs have to be cared for from within. Here is the first contrast: AA demands that a Higher Power be invoked, anything from God to fate, which is appealed to for help, and thanked for each day of successful sobriety. The method takes away some of the fear and doubt that comes with a disease that is ultimately a disease of the brain and the will: if we believe it is instead in the charge of a Higher Power, we don't have only our fallible, disappointing selves to rely upon. The support group that Hal happens upon also regresses its participants, makes them think and act like infants again, in order to surpass some perceived childhood trauma. AA, on the other hand, demands that its participants think of themselves as adults, act like adults, and accept total responsibility for their actions. AA frowns upon any thinking that blames a person's problems on the influence or actions of others, whereas the men's support group firmly places blame on childhood experience.

But is Hal even the right person for an AA or NA program? Hal quits marijuana cold turker, and completely loses touch with himself--he is unable to think clearly, then unable to control his facial expressions, and finally, as was revealed at the very beginning of the book, unable to even speak. It seems in some ways that marijuana was holding Hal together, possibly due to the stress of having spectacularly lost his father, or the stress of being a nationally-ranked junior tennis player at a demanding academy, or the stress of having a mother who is emotionally schizoid, and carrying on a sexual relationship with his primary tennis competitor. Perhaps due to the stress of all of these, combined. Nevertheless, Hal is demonstrably better able to perform and cope WITH his Substance, rather than without it. All the stories we are told of drug addicts who have Surrendered to AA and Come In involve people who were functioning incredibly poorly Out There--Hal is functioning incredibly well, at least until he gives up the Substance. It's an interesting story for Wallace to sketch, even as he seems so celebratory of AA.