Category Archives: American literature

April 11, 2014 · 1:18 pm

Vernon God Little: What we avoid

There’s no question DBC Pierre’s first novel, Vernon God Little, is an excellent piece of fiction. The book takes a school shooting in Texas (is it Texas? Somewhere near Mexico, anyway) and explores the community reaction to the event – spectacle, denial, scapegoating – through the darkly comedic story of Vernon, falsely accused and prosecuted for the crime. The first person narrator of Vernon is masterfully represented in his fixation on shit and young women, as well as use of diction, phrasing, pace and image that moves past conjuring a character to allow the reader to fully accept and inhabit him (if not identify with – a problem to come to). The narration also does well to explore his complicated feelings around the massacre, the (failure) of adults to take responsibility or engage with grief, his expectations of justice and the justice system and his attempts to reform himself and his relationship with others.

Despite the brilliant narration and the timely thematic questions (what is the role of the press in perpetuating/perpetrating crimes? how does collective culture sublimate grief? how do we understand and make sense of the senseless? what are the effects of poverty on access to justice?) I read this book knowing it was great, but feeling at a remove. If literature is great because (and if) it can allow (or require) the reader to adopt different perspectives, to explore experiences unavailable in lived experience AND because it is masterfully constructed in literary technique, Vernon God Little shines in the latter and wavers in the former.

I should say this book sat on my shelf at work for eleven months before I finally read it. And not because I lacked time or opportunity. I tried reading it twice before. It wasn’t until I’d forgotten my book at home and it was a choice between no novel (a gasp of impossibility) or Vernon God Little that I gave it sufficient time (the 60 minutes of my lunch break) to get invested enough to read the whole thing. It wasn’t a novel that grabbed me. Is it that the first person narrator repulsed me a little? Maybe. (and maybe he’s meant to) It’s not that the experiences in the book are too far removed for me to care about – all kinds of my favourite books are those that I love precisely for their ability to take a seemingly distant experience and make it relevant and poignant for me and to let me see my world and relationship to it differently – it seems more the case that Pierre didn’t do enough to make these foreign experiences connected to this reader. There wasn’t opportunity for empathy, or even sympathy, no chance for identification or care.

So I read the book with a respect for the writing, an understanding that it was an important topic and explored with great literary skill. And yet I found myself unmoved and unchanged in its reading. Uninterested in what becomes of Vernon. Is that a problem of this reader or of the book? You read it and tell me what you think.

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February 21, 2014 · 2:39 pm

The Goldfinch: Literary and popular

At just under 800 pages Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch isn’t the kind of book you take lightly. That’s a joke of course, because the subject of the book is far from light itself: the maturation of a boy grappling with the loss of family/innocence, the role of art and beauty in making life worth living, the bonds and responsibilities of affiliative relationships (as opposed to ‘filial,’ or familial relationships, affiliative are those relationships with those we freely choose) and the consequences (or lack thereof) of making ‘bad’ and ‘good’ choices (and whether such choices are, in the end, ours to make).

It is a rich, complex, heady story with masterful plot sequencing and character development. It is a book that has been uniformly celebrated by literary critics  and masses of readers in an unusual congruence of what is both literary and popular as both groups connect with the complexity of the protagonist, Theo, who is simultaneously sympathetic for his orphan-hood and frustrating for his continued terrible decision making. The art heist elements lend a certain suspense, the post-event narration allows an editorializing on events as they unfold that does double duty as assurance to readers and warning that supposedly innocuous events are going to have dire consequences. The atmosphere of the novel – a combination of the dire with the luxurious – speaks to the experience of this contemporary reader: a constant striving coupled with a certainty that at no point will the material objects ever amount to real feelings of security, safety or happiness.

While this reader (I might be so bold to say I am both literary and popular – bam!) delighted in the writing and the genius of the plot and its thematic questions, I found Theo and his story somewhat uneven. I devoured the story in Theo’s years in New York, yet found his time with and post-Boris (his great friend) to be alternately plodding and disconnected. I read Boris’ unpredictability and intensity as in some ways a scapegoat for Theo’s choices and also as convenient ways to resolve apparent impediments in Theo’s life. Boris to the rescue! Boris as catalyst! While the relationship between the two character is far from pat – in fact the evolution of their friendship and relationship is fascinating – Boris’s function in the novel at times reads as too much plot incitement.

So too my sympathy for Theo waned as the narrative continued. A characterization meant to remind the reader that we are only so tolerant of those with addiction, mental illness, those overcome with grief and trauma, that we are willing – for a time – to be gracious and understanding and then we want people to “get over it” to “move on” to “pull themselves together.” The Goldfinch resists this impulse. Instead we are made to suffer along with Theo as he makes, remakes, and makes again the same mistakes and poor decisions – while knowing that he’s doing so. I suppose the frustration and annoyance is, then, that I somehow want my fictional characters to do what I cannot. I want them to be braver, stronger, better than I am. So it’s not a complaint so much as a warning that Theo is not a hero, even if he has heroic aspirations, he is instead utterly human and truthful about what that means: to do the wrong thing over and over and to still (somehow) hope and plan to be better.

I find myself struggling to come out with a definite conclusion/recommendation on the novel. I suppose I don’t have to do that with these posts. I can, instead, give you my impressions and leave it to you to decide. Much in the same way, I suppose (though without the genius of Tartt) as the novel does in asking the reader, in the end, to pass judgement on what makes for a good life, a life good enough, and a life that we somehow fall/stumble into without deciding only to realize – with horror, sadness or resignation – that the last page is fast approaching.

 

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December 31, 2013 · 10:14 pm

The Circle: May it be Unbroken

Here is the good thing about Dave Egger’s *The Circle*: the premise. And what’s the premise? A tech company “The Circle” in the not-so-distant future *cough Google cough* has saturated the market to the point where it controls access to all information and uses this ‘power’ to control all spending, government, actions, individual thought. Protagonist Mae begins the novel indifferent to the power of the Circle, but becomes increasingly infatuated and then utterly committed to the ideology of the Circle – “all must be known” and “information is a human right” and “privacy is theft.” She is intended to serve as a reader-surrogate so that the reader might recognize the ways in which her current unconcern or apathy about the reach of global information conglomerates could readily bleed into a) total obligation to and investment in the conglomerate, b) an inability to think independently or to be alone and c) the totalitarian endgame of one entity (re: company) controlling all aspects of a citizenry. That is to say this is a book with a partisan message: start thinking seriously about the power of Google, start actively questioning reasonable limits of information access/sharing, start protesting the erosion of privacy and public space.

And that’s where the good in the novel ends. The premise is executed with a clumsiness and heavy-handedness that made me suspicious of Egger’s trust in the intelligence of his readers. And in the clumsy and heavy-handed I was left with a book that was still brilliant in its idea, rich in its setting, but entirely frustrating to read.

George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” posits that one of the principle reasons for writing is to articulate and argue a political position. It isn’t, I don’t think, a terrifically trendy way to write or read fiction in 2013. And so perhaps it’s the decidedly aggressive political argument of *The Circle* that rubs me the wrong way – not the message itself, rather, the heavy-handed way the novel goes about making its argument. It lacks elegance, subtlety or complication. In its rush to make sure the reader gets the allegory and adopts the position of protecting privacy the novel risks negating the potential disruption of the allegory itself. I became less unsettled by the message (and at first it really was compelling) and more annoyed by how little Eggers trusted me to get the idea without Being Showed It In Capital Letters: ALLEGORY.

This heavy-handedness is most obvious (and annoying) in the character development of Mae. We’re supposed to – I imagine – see her casual decline into full acceptance of all things Circle. We’re supposed to see the semi-climactic scene where she’s in a room with one of the Wise Men (really. did I mention it’s heavy-handed?) getting a lesson on the selfishness of secrets and the rationality/generosity of open and unfettered access to individual actions, thoughts and beliefs as some kind of moment of revelation and change. Except all this reader could concentrate on was how *obvious* the whole thing was. The move from dependence on the company – excellent health care! fancy workplace! prestige! – to acceptance of its doctrines for pragmatic reasons – I’ll tweet and email because I’m told to! – to an adoption of the dogma because people are unthinking and pliable enough to assume any ideology if exposed to it long enough.

So while I’ll recommend *The Circle* because I think the (albeit grossly heavy-handed) message is worth considering, I do so with the caveat that if you’re already suspicious of the influence of Google then go ahead and skip this one. However, if you were – like me (and I’ll admit it) – apathetic about questions of surveillance, privacy, access-to-information, public space then do read it. Or at least, do read the first 75 pages. It makes a compelling – if also tenacious and indefatigable – argument well worth considering and acting upon.

 

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October 29, 2013 · 1:25 pm

Stoner: Overlooked Gem

Published in 1965 John William’s *Stoner* reads like something written forty years earlier. I’m not sure how I’d never heard of the book before, though a quick search of the internet suggests no one else has either (thanks mum for point it out to me). It was reissued in 2006 by New York Review of Books with an accompanying set of quotes from famous people (Tom Hanks endorses it!) pointing out its relative obscurity. So! If you’re looking for that hipster book that will set you apart as a reader who knows what’s what… No really, this book well deserves much more attention (something beyond a Wikipedia *stub* for instance).

Except it’s sort of a thematically appropriate obsolescence and obscurity. The novel takes a realist and measured approach to the question of what makes our lives meaningful – recognition? reputation? family? career? – and ultimately concludes that most of us – including our titular character and protagonist – will die unremarkable and unremembered (just like the book!). Against the idea that this obscurity is to be bemoaned or fought, the novel suggest that by embracing the small, idiosyncratic “purposes” that enliven our individual lives we can find, if not notoriety, then contentment. This message is one well worth considering in an era of ubiquitous fame and instant-celebrity. Instead of imagining that life fulfilment will come from celebrity, or even posthumous remembrance, the novel suggests that it is the quotidian and the insignificant that afford life its purpose and satisfaction.

In a similar vein the novel poses that the disasters that befall us (our protagonist is an English professor at a small American college who cannot communicate his desires, married to an unhappy and angry woman, father to an unhappy and angry daughter) as smaller – even to ourselves – than we might imagine. Disasters of workplace tension are nothing compared to the personal horror of making the wrong choice in a partner or abandoning our parents’ dreams for us to pursue our own. 

A humble book about a humble man that is, in this humility, simply extraordinary.    

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