If you've read Ann Patchett's memoir TRUTH AND BEAUTY, you know the Lucy Grealy story. And honestly, Patchett's is a better version, as Grealy's autobiography completely elides mention of Patchett, her best friend through college, grad school, and beyond.
It's hard to say that an autobiography by a woman who died--from complications dating back to her childhood cancer--is at all bad. It's true, it's her story; it quite adequately describes the pain and psychological effects of having cancer, losing normal facial appearance, and spending years in and out of hospitals, learning and unlearning the particular variety of helplessness that accompanies drastic surgery.
But goodness, for a book that spends so long dissecting loneliness, failing to mention the existence of a friend like Patchett seems like a grave omission. Grealy's parents are inexplicably distant, to the extent that Grealy's father's death hardly affects her, and the familial anecdotes seemed pitched and perhaps concocted to make sure that all the sympathy flows downhill, to Lucy. Her siblings are mentioned in passing, where their lack of reaction to her deformity is interesting, but it is particularly jarring to look at how much time Lucy spends, as a child and an adolescent, wondering what she would have looked like without the surgery, when she has a female twin. A twin! That is almost exactly how she would have looked, and if we're to believe the narrative, she never realized this. It just seems remarkable.
Ann Patchett wrote a postscript to this memoir, recounting a shared book tour she and Grealy embarked upon, after AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE was met with resounding success. In a transcribed question and answer, Grealy bristles at being asked how she remembered so much; she is a writer, she tells the befuddled questioner, and she made it up. I wonder, though, how much is made up, especially knowing the, shall we say, personality quirks of Grealy as depicted by Patchett. How much is for sympathy, and how much for show? Grealy is said to have joked about writing a follow-up to this memoir, a sort of "Behind the Music" explaining the "real" story. If only she had written that book the first time around.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
POINT OMEGA - Don DeLillo - Fiction
I'm working off a huge backlog of reviews--turns out it's easier to read books than to write about them, who knew?--so I thought I would start with the best, which is conveniently the most recently released. Go, read POINT OMEGA! Even if Don DeLillo put you off with FALLING MAN (which, to be honest, I liked a lot), there's something for the old-school UNDERWORLD fan in his latest. It's been said around the internet that its length might have something to do with its appeal (my hardcover version was around 120 pages) but my favorite fiction is the kind that can be expediently and expertly condensed, and this is quite the example. It's a pint-sized thriller that seems so simple in construction, but has such graceful, economized sentences that it's worth the multi-year wait between books for something like this.
The plot is: a documentary filmmaker accompanies a sort of Donald Rumsfeld-like figure to his vacation home in the desert, hoping to convince him to star in a film project that sounds like an Errol Morris production: one man, one take, one hour, a plain wall as a backdrop, explaining the war from his experience helping to plan it. There are complications: Richard Elster, the war-planning academic, is more interested in having a companion at his desert retreat than agreeing to do any film. And time does seem to stop for both of them, in the vast heat of the desert, even when Elster's daughter arrives for a vacation, providing a welcome distraction for our narrator, Jim.
The novel is bookended by two interesting scenes of a video installation in the MoMA, describing a real piece, "24 Hour Psycho." The video consists of the film Psycho slowed down to take a full 24 hours of runtime, and the first scene of the novel takes us into the exhibit through the eyes of an obsessive sociopath who is entirely in tune--almost too much so--with the underlying meaning of the exhibit. He wishes for a woman to come into the exhibit with him, and stay for a suitable amount of time--at least half an hour--and he wishes for the exhibit to be more structured, to last all 24 hours and not admit anyone after starting, or allow anyone to leave. To take a writerly step back, the portrayal of a disturbed character is spot-on, here. The guy is creepy, and we can tell that from the first two pages alone, without anything overtly creepy having to happen. It's a perfect setup, but the beauty of it, in the one-two punch of my favorite literary technique ever, is that we forget about it by the time we get around to its relevance to the main story. Because Richard Elster's daughter was involved with a man who gave her mother the willies, in her New York life, and a few weeks after she comes to live with her father in the desert, she disappears.
The landscape comes into play here, its neverending sprawl, its deceptively long sightlines, its ability to swallow up a human, or an ill-prepared hiker, and never spit her out. When Richard and Jim come back from the grocery store to find Jessie utterly vanished, with none of her personal belongings touched, it is immediately hopeless. The desert is too big, and people too frail, as their abortive search efforts demonstrate. Jim and Richard leave without Jessie, and her disappearance is a mystery, though with a few hints, we know exactly what happened. And then, the final scene, we are back in 24 Hour Psycho,with our very own psycho of the first scene, and we see him meet Jessie. Jessie stays for half an hour. He follows Jessie out of the exhibit, and gets her carelessly relinquished phone number. And thus it starts. And we knew it all along.
Focusing on the mystery and its construction doesn't do justice to the meditative parts of the novel, the parts that focus on war and its effects, the academicization of war, and the distancing mechanisms used by its instigators. And these masterful flights of dialogue are difficult to describe simply because they are so trim and spritely. It will take you only a couple of hours to read POINT OMEGA, and there is no question that those hours will be worth it. That if it were possible to stretch the text out over 24 hours, we might never cease to find further meaning.
The plot is: a documentary filmmaker accompanies a sort of Donald Rumsfeld-like figure to his vacation home in the desert, hoping to convince him to star in a film project that sounds like an Errol Morris production: one man, one take, one hour, a plain wall as a backdrop, explaining the war from his experience helping to plan it. There are complications: Richard Elster, the war-planning academic, is more interested in having a companion at his desert retreat than agreeing to do any film. And time does seem to stop for both of them, in the vast heat of the desert, even when Elster's daughter arrives for a vacation, providing a welcome distraction for our narrator, Jim.
The novel is bookended by two interesting scenes of a video installation in the MoMA, describing a real piece, "24 Hour Psycho." The video consists of the film Psycho slowed down to take a full 24 hours of runtime, and the first scene of the novel takes us into the exhibit through the eyes of an obsessive sociopath who is entirely in tune--almost too much so--with the underlying meaning of the exhibit. He wishes for a woman to come into the exhibit with him, and stay for a suitable amount of time--at least half an hour--and he wishes for the exhibit to be more structured, to last all 24 hours and not admit anyone after starting, or allow anyone to leave. To take a writerly step back, the portrayal of a disturbed character is spot-on, here. The guy is creepy, and we can tell that from the first two pages alone, without anything overtly creepy having to happen. It's a perfect setup, but the beauty of it, in the one-two punch of my favorite literary technique ever, is that we forget about it by the time we get around to its relevance to the main story. Because Richard Elster's daughter was involved with a man who gave her mother the willies, in her New York life, and a few weeks after she comes to live with her father in the desert, she disappears.
The landscape comes into play here, its neverending sprawl, its deceptively long sightlines, its ability to swallow up a human, or an ill-prepared hiker, and never spit her out. When Richard and Jim come back from the grocery store to find Jessie utterly vanished, with none of her personal belongings touched, it is immediately hopeless. The desert is too big, and people too frail, as their abortive search efforts demonstrate. Jim and Richard leave without Jessie, and her disappearance is a mystery, though with a few hints, we know exactly what happened. And then, the final scene, we are back in 24 Hour Psycho,with our very own psycho of the first scene, and we see him meet Jessie. Jessie stays for half an hour. He follows Jessie out of the exhibit, and gets her carelessly relinquished phone number. And thus it starts. And we knew it all along.
Focusing on the mystery and its construction doesn't do justice to the meditative parts of the novel, the parts that focus on war and its effects, the academicization of war, and the distancing mechanisms used by its instigators. And these masterful flights of dialogue are difficult to describe simply because they are so trim and spritely. It will take you only a couple of hours to read POINT OMEGA, and there is no question that those hours will be worth it. That if it were possible to stretch the text out over 24 hours, we might never cease to find further meaning.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
CHRONIC CITY - Jonathan Lethem - Fiction
I was one of the few readers who enjoyed YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET, the novel preceding CHRONIC CITY in Lethem's hipster-slacker-chic oeuvre. So it is with some actual sadness that I report, after four-hundred-some pages with Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman, that this novel at best resembles the first draft of a passably good novel. In tone and plot points, it owes a tremendous and unacknowledged debt to Bret Easton Ellis--GLAMORAMA in particular--yet fails to get its strange and guarded characters off the ground. Everything, from the muddled mystery of an underground tiger on the loose, to Chase's astronaut fiancee, stranded on a space station, to the quest for the impossibly beautiful chaldrons, is a massive let-down. Lethem attempts reversals on the order of M. Night Shyamalan--is it real? Is it fake?--and then doubles back on himself, sometimes giving two contradictory explanations for the same mysterious phenomenon, as though writing both potential endings to a set-up and forgetting to delete one. Is the tiger a runaway drilling robot, or an actual two-story-high phantasmic tiger? Both, we're told, with equal narrative sincerity. This doesn't work. This kind of narrative disarray doesn't make these characters more interesting, or their daily stoner peregrinations any more purposeful. It leaves us with a mess of loose ends and no sense that there was a cross-stitch pattern underneath. It hampers the suspension of disbelief: halfway through this novel, it became almost stressful to read, because I wasn't sure that Lethem was actually going to be able to finish a coherent narrative. And he didn't, really. He threw a few smoke bombs, killed a character, and escaped citing the unpredictability and ineffable nature of real life.
I'm going to ruin a few of the novel's surprises, here. First of all, Chase Insteadman's fiancee, the astronaut trapped on a space station that has drifted into a field of orbiting Chinese mines? One of the only truly funny and interesting characters in the novel? Ends up being fake, a character written into a screenplay by Chase's new girlfriend Oona Laszlo, even though Oona enters the picture long after Chase supposedly receives the screenplay from a team of unknown young producers. Also, having received that screenplay, Chase somehow not only agrees to play the part but completely internalizes it, acquiring a weird form of selective amnesia about his past life such that he believes he really does have a fiancee in space. Chase does this without even realizing it. Then, Chase runs into the producers at a party, and they ask him WHAT HE THOUGHT OF THE SCREENPLAY. Even though Chase has apparently already STARTED PLAYING THE PART, so not only do they know what he thinks of the screenplay, they are EMPLOYING HIM.
This isn't clever storytelling. This is shoddy editing.
Okay, and then there are Chaldrons. Chaldrons are both holograms of vases and icons of vases in a virtual-reality game based on Second Life. They are difficult to make, although it is apparently both possible to make them if you have some skill, and impossible to make them unless you are the virtual world's creator. This isn't my misunderstanding. Both facts are presented, less than a hundred pages apart. We are told that Biller, one of Perkus Tooth's friends, has made a fortune crafting chaldrons for the virtual world and selling them on ebay. Then we are told by the mayor's personal assistant that her brother, the creator of the virtual world, made a certain finite number of chaldrons for the game, and that more chaldrons cannot be created, so their value keeps increasing. BOTH OF THESE CANNOT BE TRUE, AND THIS IS NEVER ADDRESSED. Furthermore, Chase, Perkus, and their third Musketeer Richard Abneg spend days--if not weeks, months--attempting to purchase a chaldron, believing that chaldrons are physical pieces of pottery. They try multiple times to bid for one on ebay. So, what, they never read the item description? They never read the wikipedia article on chaldrons, even though wikipedia is read and referenced by the characters? It seems highly implausible that three men could somehow not know that what they were attempting to spend thousands of dollars on was an item of currency in an online game. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because an actual chaldron is an obsolete measure of volume used for coal. The associations with "cauldron" are obvious and linguistically supported. Nevertheless, Lethem is really, really into his idea of chaldrons, and even produced a limited-edition tie-in item available through Thing Magazine: a pair of hipster glasses with text on the side-pieces. This he calls the Chaldron Optical System. Need I explain how ludicrous and annoying this is?
This review may not be adequately conveying my feelings about this book; I read it. I finished it. The first half I even found entertaining. It was the second half, as I realized that the book was on a downward arc that would never intersect with my expectations, that brought me to this point of annoyance and dismissal. I don't blame Lethem, I blame his editor, for not reigning in his tangents and forcing him to confront the inconsistencies of his text. Better luck next time.
I'm going to ruin a few of the novel's surprises, here. First of all, Chase Insteadman's fiancee, the astronaut trapped on a space station that has drifted into a field of orbiting Chinese mines? One of the only truly funny and interesting characters in the novel? Ends up being fake, a character written into a screenplay by Chase's new girlfriend Oona Laszlo, even though Oona enters the picture long after Chase supposedly receives the screenplay from a team of unknown young producers. Also, having received that screenplay, Chase somehow not only agrees to play the part but completely internalizes it, acquiring a weird form of selective amnesia about his past life such that he believes he really does have a fiancee in space. Chase does this without even realizing it. Then, Chase runs into the producers at a party, and they ask him WHAT HE THOUGHT OF THE SCREENPLAY. Even though Chase has apparently already STARTED PLAYING THE PART, so not only do they know what he thinks of the screenplay, they are EMPLOYING HIM.
This isn't clever storytelling. This is shoddy editing.
Okay, and then there are Chaldrons. Chaldrons are both holograms of vases and icons of vases in a virtual-reality game based on Second Life. They are difficult to make, although it is apparently both possible to make them if you have some skill, and impossible to make them unless you are the virtual world's creator. This isn't my misunderstanding. Both facts are presented, less than a hundred pages apart. We are told that Biller, one of Perkus Tooth's friends, has made a fortune crafting chaldrons for the virtual world and selling them on ebay. Then we are told by the mayor's personal assistant that her brother, the creator of the virtual world, made a certain finite number of chaldrons for the game, and that more chaldrons cannot be created, so their value keeps increasing. BOTH OF THESE CANNOT BE TRUE, AND THIS IS NEVER ADDRESSED. Furthermore, Chase, Perkus, and their third Musketeer Richard Abneg spend days--if not weeks, months--attempting to purchase a chaldron, believing that chaldrons are physical pieces of pottery. They try multiple times to bid for one on ebay. So, what, they never read the item description? They never read the wikipedia article on chaldrons, even though wikipedia is read and referenced by the characters? It seems highly implausible that three men could somehow not know that what they were attempting to spend thousands of dollars on was an item of currency in an online game. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because an actual chaldron is an obsolete measure of volume used for coal. The associations with "cauldron" are obvious and linguistically supported. Nevertheless, Lethem is really, really into his idea of chaldrons, and even produced a limited-edition tie-in item available through Thing Magazine: a pair of hipster glasses with text on the side-pieces. This he calls the Chaldron Optical System. Need I explain how ludicrous and annoying this is?
This review may not be adequately conveying my feelings about this book; I read it. I finished it. The first half I even found entertaining. It was the second half, as I realized that the book was on a downward arc that would never intersect with my expectations, that brought me to this point of annoyance and dismissal. I don't blame Lethem, I blame his editor, for not reigning in his tangents and forcing him to confront the inconsistencies of his text. Better luck next time.
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