WHITE NOISE - Don DeLillo - Fiction

Do we still bandy about the concept of the Great American Novel? Is there anything to be said about our reliance on consumption, our supermarkets, our television? DeLillo may have drawn the curtains on observations of our depraved, superficial natures. It has now become ironic and passe to draw attention to these aspects of Americanism, and it is this irony which is itself now the subject of novels drawing attention to the depths of our national character. What we would now think of as the supremely ironic class, the cultural theorists that make up the Eastern university at which DeLillo's protagonist, Gladney, teaches, are instead presented as deadly earnest in their devotion to cultural minutiae, a small bellwether that points to the differences and decade-and-a-half between, say, WHITE NOISE and PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER.

By comparing those two, I betray my tastes towards the novel, and the genre of rampant cultural navel-gazing as a whole: I didn't like it. I'd prefer not to. Of course, some of Gladney's observations are spot-on, and of course his children, especially his sons, are quite interestingly characterized--one, the somewhat morbid and disturbing fact-collector and philosophizer, the other quite obviously autistic and willfully undiagnosed, untreated, and unrecognized--but ultimately, what do we gain from reading about the supermarket as the great center of rebirth, of housefires as the most recent recharacterization of the primordial firepit, around which the tribe gathers to pass on life lessons? What is the point in repeating brand names that get enough repetition on the news as it is? Is pointing something out by continuing it actually helping? I have the same concerns with documentaries that point out the plight of starving children or neglected animals, and yet do nothing to help the very problem that they are pointing out as so drastic and worthy of our immediate help. Is writing a novel about the worst aspects of American culture not simply contributing to that culture? Wouldn't it be better and more satisfying to either redeem, as David Foster Wallace and Michel Faber do in their writing, or to change and permute, as Dave Eggers and Miranda July? DeLillo attempts a near-perfect mirror that only sickens, where, for example, Bret Easton Ellis instead chooses a rusted, twisted mirror that grows more and more distorted as our gaze progresses downward, both entertaining and wrapping us in his vision.

It could be that my reaction to the novel is a lack of familiarity with the very specific time and place which it describes. WHITE NOISE was published in 1985, and I was born three years later--altogether too late to perceive the zeitgeist that DeLillo captures. There seem, now, perfect holes in DeLillo's narrative to talk about the internet, about social media, about neoconservatives and 9/11 and shock talk radio, and, in short, everything that came after WHITE NOISE and yet somehow seems presaged by it. Is this a measure of the novel's success, of DeLillo's prescience, or of culture's imperturbability, the inevitability of its course and of the long, muddy, s-winding curve of human nature?

After reading WHITE NOISE, everything seems like a DeLillo interlude. At the bank today, the teller tried to talk to me about the tv show "Jon and Kate Plus Eight." At the supermarket, individual-sized bottles of ranch dressing. Nestle recalling its prepackaged cookie dough because people are eating it raw and getting salmonella. Swine flu. The reaction to swine flu, and the strange non-event it is when a baby is diagnosed with it--here are the fluids, here are the medications, go home and wait it out. Jack Gladney is perpetually interested in defining the point of his wife, "the point of Babette." This seems to be the most salient idea to take from the novel--the idea that rather than caricaturing the people we don't know, it is the people closest to us who come to take on symbolic value, who stand for things and are "about" things and have "a point" and who disastrously, inevitably, betray our expectations.

THE WITHDRAWAL METHOD - Pasha Malla - Fiction

There are certain motifs in Malla's short stories--terminal diseases, childhood innocence, underemployed twenty-somethings--that make you wonder about his own experiences. That, and the fact that one of his narrators shares his name. Autobiographical or not, these stories are intricately constructed and minimally revealing, diving into uncomfortable and even melodramatic territory. Malla's subjects range from a more or less successful foray into historical fiction (telling the story of the Mechanical Turk chess-playing machine as it travels from owner to owner, and is eventually destroyed in a museum fire) to a story, THE SLOUGH, which starts out as something approaching science fiction (involving a cream that allows the user to shed his skin in one piece, like a snake) but then abruptly changes course, concerning itself with the main character's skin cancer, making the reader wonder whether the first half of the story was supposed to be a tale the narrator tells himself to make talking about his girlfriend's illness more bearable.

Malla isn't afraid to talk about anything, really. There are two separate stories that really seem to glory in the repetition of the word 'vagina,' two that describe in detail the way a woman cleans herself after sex. One story is about a pet therapy center in the basement of a hospital having problems when a bonobo chimp takes a liking to the pet sheep in residence. I don't mean to be prudish, but Malla goes the distance.

The most tightly wound story of the bunch, the most affecting and the most richly detailed, is THE PAST COMPOSED, which manages to work in a midwife, a lost child and a lost marriage, and a neighborhood orphan determined on deluding either himself or those around him that he has a family--a very revealing story, but the story that should go in fiction anthologies under "Show, Don't Tell," as it manages to work in every plot point as an off-hand revelation, allowing the reader to connect all the dots.

The second best is a very short, two-page story that closes the collection, a bit of historical-fiction-cum-fan-fiction titled WHEN JACQUES COUSTEAU GAVE PABLO PICASSO A PIECE OF BLACK CORAL. Based off a real event in Cousteau's autobiography, the piece manages to hint at a deeper relationship between the two and throw off some beautiful imagery, of the coral passed between two palms, the painter shrugging and putting it in his pocket, only to use it to seal a subsequent goodbye handshake between the two. The story is all about gesture, and unspoken feeling sublimated into physical proximity, and succeeds wonderfully. Not one uncomfortable moment to be found.

EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED - Wells Tower - Fiction

Wells Tower's stories have that McSweeney's, fiction-workshop feel to them. And that isn't a bad feel. Two of the stories are the same tale, told from the different points of view of two of the main characters. One is the story of a raid, narrated by a Viking who doesn't want to vike anymore. There are the usual suspects--adultery, a young girl being seduced by an older man, an older man preying on a young boy. In one of the most disturbing but surprisingly unexplored passages, a father driving his daughter and his ex-wife's new husband home from camp is told that his daughter's disturbing habit of falling asleep on car rides with the gearshift in her mouth is just something she does to calm down. Try to get a mental image of your daughter's new stepfather telling you that her fellating part of a car is no big deal. There's something a little exploitative in these stories, as there is in the conversation between a stepmother and son, in "Executors of Important Energies," in which she complains to the young man that she wishes she could go back and have sex with everyone who ever offered. The story "Door in Your Eye" is built around the interactions of a father and daughter, each determined to make the other uncomfortable--the daughter through her fearlessness, and the father, inexplicably, by bringing up his sex life again and again. One gets the sense that these are not quite real people.

But that's okay! For all the concern and hand-wringing over the departmentalization of the short story, the workshop effect and the over-edited, purposely quirky feel of the story-writer's story, these are great. These are the real thing. These are rude, petty, self-absorbed people who throw away money, and kill their pets by accident, and are just a little pissed off that their date with a new man ends abruptly when the man's son is molested in an outhouse. In a way, these are updated fairytales, with evil stepparents, where the prize to be won is a new, more confident and popular self. You can think of them as exercises for a budding writer.

If you like the types of stories that make it to the BEST AMERICAN NON-REQUIRED READING anthologies, or ST LUCY'S HOME FOR GIRLS WHO WERE RAISED BY WOLVES or a more masculine, gruff Miranda July, give Wells a try.

PARIS TO THE MOON - Adam Gopnik - Essays

In telling me about this book, my boyfriend admitted that I should have read it before he and I went to Paris. It does explain a lot of the particulars of French eating, driving, and recreational habits--what is the difference between a cafe, a brasserie, and a restaurant, anyway?--but it's just as enjoyable to read after coming back from Paris, relaxing into American life, and then being reminded of the French in small, subtle ways. For someone who came back to Berkeley, the book is particularly interesting, as it spends a few essays discussing American implementations of French food, including the work of chef Alice Waters, whose Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse is a cultural landmark here and abroad. Adam Gopnik spends some time wandering an open-air produce market with her, cooks dinner for her, and ties yet another aspect of French culture, the distinction between experimental, high-class cuisine, and terroir or earthy, regional dishes. Gopnik is able to condense all of his observations of Paris into the distinction between a French sense of abstraction fitting into what seem to us to be small, individual problems or peccadilloes, and the three tiers of French explanations for problems: first, it is the responsibility of a single man; second, it is the responsibility of the system, of the government or a broader set of rules; and third, that is the way it has to be, and there' s no sense arguing with it, a sort of cosmic throwing of hands and relinquishing of responsibility.

Gopnik's own move to Paris can be explained in these three tiers; first, it was the responsibility of his family, he and his wife, both wanting to rekindle their first romance, and raise their firstborn son in such a magical and romantic setting. Second, it was the fault of American culture: the Gopniks didn't want to raise their son with Barney, or many of the other low-key television babysitters. They wanted him to grow up bilingual, with an appreciation for beauty and a sense of mature, and even slightly archaic entertainment. Finally, it was impossible for it to happen any other way: Adam Gopnik found himself in France, and being there, had to continue his stint at the New Yorker by writing essays about his experiences. From experiencing his wife's second pregnancy and the birth of their daughter, to swimming at the Paris Ritz with his son, to trying to join a health club and trying to set up an American christmas tree, Gopnik had adventures big and small, and was involved in politics from the local (strongly protesting the change in ownership of a beloved local restaurant) to the national (attending the war-crimes trial of Papon, a functionary who signed papers sending French Jewish children to the camps that held their parents, and to their deaths.) Gopnik's style is generally humorous, but it was this last essay, touching as it did on post-WW2 politics and the lingering image of the Vichy era in the French collective unconscious, that really displayed his understanding and quiet questioning of the French system as a whole. Gopnik manages to both point out small, funny idiosyncrasies in the French system of being, and simultaneously sketch out their raison d'etre. Plus or minus a few lariats of christmas lights.

Read this book if you're going to France, or if you're in France, and then read it again, once you've come back, to remember the little streets that only permit U-turns of taxis, the bridges everywhere, the desertion of Paris in August, and the triumph of Parisian bakeries. And then, read Gopnik's sequel, fittingly enough about New York City.

PALACE COUNCIL - Stephen Carter - Fiction

Stephen Carter writes wide-ranging historico-political thrillers that are widely enjoyed by the African-American community, who factor prominently in his work. At least, that's what the librarian told me when I checked out PALACE COUNCIL, after having read NEW ENGLAND WHITE a few years ago. (PALACE COUNCIL is something of a sequel, and both follow on the tail of THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK.) All of his novels draw characters from the same pool of elite Harlem figures, people from a community with the same class gradations and ruling families as Early Modern France. At times, Carter seems to be poking fun at these people, and their concerns for what the important people in their society would think of them, and at times not. Carter also sets up his main characters as novelists, one early in life and one later, and throws out marks of literary prestige as though they meant as much as the Légion d'honneur--which in the world he has created, they may. It's hard to tell if Carter's positioning of his main character is due to the traditional novelist's blindness, which sees a writer as the most interesting occupation for any character, or if he is instead also poking fun at himself, at the notion that an author would be caught up in the kind of overblown, rip-roaring plots that embroil Eddie.

There is a lot of disbelief to be suspended in this five-hundred-plus page account of a national conspiracy that spans decades, involves Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Langston Hughes, and other notable political and cultural figures, and draws upon men from the upper echelons of white and black society to come together in a plot, couched in Satanic terms, to overthrow the government peacably and secretively, installing a President sympathetic to the needs of the African-American community. It was interesting to read this novel after watching the campaign and election of Barack Obama, and as the novel was published in 2008, Carter must have had some wind of events that might come. But of course, the idea of political machinations or an African-American president are not the less credible events of this story. From a strictly realistic standpoint, the cloak-and-dagger antics of the FBI and CIA agents who pursue Eddie, and the cabal of men who form the secret society based on obscure literary references to passages of Milton and Lawrence, start out terrifying and end up tedious--the last confrontation between Eddie and his pursuer, on a bridge in Ithaca overlooking a gorge, just sputters out, using up all of its possible tactics of scare and suspense to leave me waiting impatiently for the bad man to leave, having yet again succeeded in 'warning' Eddie without leaving a scratch on him.

I also have to say that the idea of a man waiting fourteen years to reclaim the woman he loves--waiting through her husband and two children, through her indecision over the direction of her life, over whether she has feelings for Eddie at all, over whether she can marry him, and, ultimately, over whether she can continue to please her society friends if she seemingly justifies all the rumors--is ludicrous. Romantic, yes, but entirely unbelievable. And the ending--which gives some of the reasons for Aurelia's hesitations--is even less believable, because it ruins the entire premise of the novel, the premise that, despite their different choices in marriage, career, and friendship, they are involved in the same hunt, the same mystery, the same desire to answer the same questions. And reader, in the last twenty pages we discover that they are not. That Aurelia has as good as led Eddie on for the past twenty years. I don't believe it, and I don't understand it--Aurelia calling in favors from Nixon, writing to Eddie with breathless concern over his trip to Vietnam, attending his father's funeral, all while hiding from Eddie what he most wants to know? Either Aurelia is hopelessly cruel, or hopelessly misguided, and given that the reader is meant to root for romance between the two throughout the entire tortured plot, I can't really hope for either.

The bright spots in this novel are the finely written caricatures of known politicos--Nixon, Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover--who entertain and shock, and offer an idea of how fun it must be to have the confidence as a writer to not only rejigger history, but to take on the voice and mannerisms of some of American history's most infamous players. Writing dialogue for Nixon! It sounds so audaciously fun, and looks so on the page. Really, that's the most we want out of historical fiction, isn't it? Because however true or false the overlying mystery/thriller plot seems, the joy of writing a novel that spans time from the 1930s to the 1980s is being able to throw your own masks over people who you knew only through the reporting of others--being able to take a picture from the newspaper and animate the black-and-white man inside it, pulling the strings, reanimating the flat characters of our collective social unconscious. Here, Carter does a bang-up job.

THE MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT - Sloan Wilson - Fiction

With the recent upsurge of interest in the 1950s, including the tv show MAD MEN, and the reissue of Richard Yates' REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, it's hard not to compare Sloan Wilson's novel to these examples. The same dissatisfaction with suburban life, concerns over salary and raising young children in a changing economy, and preoccupation with conduct in the war preside over MAD MEN and Yates's oeuvre as well as Tom and Betsy Rath. They're raising three children in a starter home, purchased after Tom's return from WWII as a successful paratrooper who nevertheless made some mistakes which he keeps from Betsy. He has a job at a charitable foundation, arranged for him by his wealthy grandmother, but it pays too little to give him hope of moving to a better neighborhood, so he applies for an ill-defined job at United Broadcasting Company. He is eventually appointed assistant to the head of UBC, a workaholic who represents the kind of man that many 50s careerists were supposed to become: obsessed with working to the point of not seeing his family for weeks at a time, he schedules appointments for every waking minute, is polite to a fault, and never seems to be able to rest or reflect on his situation, except under extreme duress.

In contrast, Tom Rath is only concerned about work insofar as it brings him the money he needs to repair his house, send his children to school, and approximate the standards of living to which he was accustomed, growing up. The minor intrigues of family life, including managing an inheritance from his grandmother, a disgruntled former housekeeper, and a new job with a vague and ever-larger set of responsibilities keep Tom busy, but the real knot at the heart of this novel is the question of how to raise children responsibly. Tom's boss, Ralph Hopkins, is only able to provide money for his daughter, and as a result, she is recognizable as a member of the popular heiresses of today, attracting men, continuously at parties and plays, and unable to articulate plans for the future beyond 'having a good time.' The accusation that Hopkins has failed his daughter by his absence from her life is best, and most damningly, articulated through his wife, who has grown so accustomed to having Ralph out of the house that she refuses his company even in the wake of her daughter's surprise elopement.

Tom sees his children nightly, commuting from New York City to their home in the suburbs of Connecticut, but the primary conflict in the story is Tom's reluctance to admit to his wife that while he was stationed in Italy during the way, he lived with a young woman, who may or may not have been a prostitute, and left her pregnant and alone when he was sent on to attack an island in the Pacific. News of his illegitimate child comes from an elevator operator at his new job, a man he served with during the war, who married his own Italian sweetheart and brought her to America with him, to be an elevator operator as well. Although it is obvious from the example of Hopkins that providing a child with money is not enough to consider oneself a parent, Tom's only concern is being able to get money to the child in Italy, first without his wife knowing, and finally without becoming a part of small-town gossip. Tom is neatly able to draw parallels between himself and Ralph Hopkins, in order to illustrate the striving Protestant work ethic by which he is reluctant to structure his life, but doesn't seem to realize that leaving his child in Italy while he went home to a secure future and the beautiful Betsy amounts to the same abandonment as Ralph Hopkins spending his time at work, instead of with his family. Tom looks back fondly on his time in Italy because of the continuous present in which he lived, every day fearing that he would be called to ship out to the Pacific, but at the same time faults Hopkins for not thinking about his future, and what would happen when he was forced to retire, or see his daughter grow up without him, or finally pay attention to his encroaching health problems. In a neat ending, Betsy accepts Tom's infidelity after a few hours' drive to collect her thoughts, and the Raths seem on their way to happiness, and the completion of their real estate money-making schemes. The future of Tom's Italian child, though, is less certain, and the money Tom promises to send is unlikely to convince the child that his father didn't abandon him with a sense of relief--the same sense of relief with which Ralph returns to the office, to his work, to ignoring the plights of his wife and daughter.

SKIM - Mariko Tamaki - Graphic Novel

Comic books and graphic novels have become the realm of the outcast, with GHOST WORLD, BLANKETS, and PERSEPOLIS exemplifying the genre's acceptance of the generally socially rejected. Kim, the protagonist of SKIM, falls snugly within this category in a number of ways. She's an overweight half-asian teenage wiccan, a budding lesbian, and a goth. Her best friend is also an outcast, and the popular girl has just suffered the double setback of her boyfriend breaking up with her and then committing suicide. If you follow the threads of teen genre cliches, you know what's going to happen--as the girls grow into puberty, they will leave each other behind, one embracing boys and the cool crowd, and one sticking with her individuality and her art; the popular girl will turn out to be not so bad, maybe even a little weird herself; the misappropriated affections directed toward a teacher will be softly rebuffed, and first heartbreak will wax and wane. The plot is not the strong part of this story, it's the little jokes--"if I was taking someone to an AA group, I would have mentioned that EARLIER"-- and the short reversals of a few of the teen angst conventions. When Kim and another shy girl are kicked out of the popular girl's slumber party, Kim frames it in terms of race, wondering if that's how her foreign friend assumed parties ended--"Asians first." When the final memorial service is held for the boy whose death sparked a crusade against depression and suicide in the girls' school, the rumor going around is that he killed himself because he was ashamed of being gay, and remarkably, nearly all of the girls seem to accept this in stride, without having to go over the conventions of the homophobic majority stood up to by the plucky outsider. Perhaps it's because it's Canada, but the girls, most of them smokers at 16 and adept at finding dates, seem more mature than their American counterparts.

Despite the story's focus, the art is inconsistent, and the most adeptly rendered characters are Kim's caucasian father and her shakespeare teacher, fair and freckled. Kim herself has a lumpy, highly mutable face that seems to morph through an array of ages and nationalities, never settling on anything remotely pleasing or recognizable. There are similar problems with Lisa, Kim's friend, and for the most part the Asians in the story are portrayed quite unattractively. If it was a conscious choice, it's a disruptive one, because the storyline practically begs the reader to sympathize with Kim, but doesn't give enough of a mental image of her to hold on to, even when she stars in nearly every frame.