Category Archives: American literature

September 21, 2011 · 9:35 pm

Zeitoun: Novel News

       At age fifteen or sixteen I began a semi-permanent ban on television. The no-television-under-any-circumstances policy lasted from 1999-2001, with a reprieve on Sept 11, and then again enforced as of Sept 12. I began university in 2002, and from that point until the present I haven’t owned a functional tv. I’m still a voracious consumer of news – listening to daily reports on the radio and reading newspapers in print and online – just a consumer of news without the barrage of images to accompany the stories. This consumption pattern meant that in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans I didn’t see (m)any images of the disaster. I certainly heard reports, read stories of the damage, looting, and unpredictably zealous or absent support from the authorities.

So when I read that Dave Eggers – one of my long favoured authors* – had written another news-novel (more on the genre distinction in a moment) about one family’s experience of the Hurricane, I put it on my list. I admit that what I read amounted to novel news to me in the sense of altogether unknown news about the hurricane. I had little idea that so many citizens were wrongfully and illegally detained in the aftermath of the hurricane; I wasn’t sure about the reports of rape, looting, assault (though to be fair, the novel does a fairly poor job of clarifying whether these events did in fact take place; rather, Eggers points out that there were contradictory news reports and leaves it – frustratingly – at that).

Grounding the hurricane (ha!) in the story of one family – the Zeitoun family – allows the reader to care deeply about the disaster because it has been carefully and thoroughly personalized. I wonder whether the Zeitoun family already inhabited a host of compelling issues in contemporary American life, or whether Eggers emphasized these issues in order to craft a more compelling novel (okay, so I don’t actually wonder, but it’s worth asking the question), but whatever the case, the Zeitoun’s embody questions of race, religion, patriotism, the precarious middle class in ways that read as genuine and appropriately complex.

In terms of genre I have a hard time accepting the designation of ‘non-fiction’ (as assigned by my library). The book is a novel, a historical one, perhaps, or what I’m calling here a news-novel. It has the usual plot, characters, and setting, but more crucially in the ‘novel’ designation – for this reader, anyway – it has thematic preoccupations (what can one man accomplish when set against nature? against the state?), symbols (the flood, drowning, risks of water, rainbows, bleh), and a shifting point of view. Much like What is the What the news-novel asks the reader to accept that what is written is for all intents ‘true,’ but allows that in any telling there will be fictional elements. It is, in short, a genre I like.

*I also like Dave Eggers. Those with reservations who have only read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius would do well to try reading something else he’s written. I myself enjoyed AHWOSG, but see a stark (really) difference between the autobiographical work and his news-novels and short stories. So here’s my plug for an author I adore (not like he needs a plug, but still): he’s really very good.

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August 13, 2011 · 9:46 pm

Player Piano: Meh.

     In one of the more awkward chapters of my adolescence, my dad started to read me Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, which if you haven’t read before, or if it’s been awhile, you ought to know opens with graphic (literally) descriptions of beavers – animal and otherwise. While I knew enough to be mortified, and my dad knew enough to immediately stop reading, I couldn’t help but recognize something addicting about an author who wrote in such a sacrilegious tone, with such disregard for the pretensions of readers. And so later, under the covers and lit by the hallway light, I read Breakfast of Champions, and decided that Mr. Vonnegut was okay by me.

Now, decades (!, well, a lie, just a decade) later I’ve read Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, and I’m reluctant to report that it’s… not very good. Not bad! (I’d rather not post at all if it meant besmirching the good name of one of my better, favourite authors) Just, not very good. The novel follows Paul Proteus as he sorts out what it means to be human in the age of machines, and what it means to be smart/wealthy (smalthy?) in the age of mass unemployment and ignorance. His journey (a short one) to the climatic not-epiphany takes us through farming, summer camp, and nights at the bar. His not-epiphany? Art might make us human; hierarchies, while troubling, might ultimately be for the greater good. Always might.

To what do I attribute my dissatisfaction? Well, Paul, despite his ostensible ideological journey, doesn’t evidence any noticeable character change – I’d just as easily believe he swears allegiance to the company as to the radicals (is this the point? maybe…) and the symbols bear down on this reader like too much bread and potatoes.

Why does it still count as not bad? Well, expert in tone, Vonnegut delivers in the first novel the same wry tone you’ll know and love in later novels, as well as the simplest of questions – what makes us human? – explored as it ought to be, through a fiction we recognize as true (enough).

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August 5, 2011 · 11:34 am

A Farewell to Arms: Will she die?

                               Being a literary scholar (of sorts), I suppose should have known more about A Farewell to Arms. I feel like the books that float about in the cultural ether as “great books” ought to be known for more than their greatness, and perhaps for their content. In any case, I expected a book about dirty trench warfare, and instead got something like a romance.

Only something like, because rather than Catherine as a woman (I mean, putting aside her very visceral body in the book) I’d rather think of her as a metaphor for the end of a rationale age, the beauty of an era where people cared for one another (and apparently only one another)? Why do I prefer it that way? Well, I don’t like romances.

(side note: turns out I was meant to read “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and not “A Farewell to Arms.” Those assiduously following my 10-10-12 list will, no doubt, note yet another alteration to the list…)

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July 24, 2011 · 3:34 pm

American Psycho: Impressive Point of View

      American Psycho may be a lot of things – a remarkable exploration of the gap between self-perception and external recognition, a metaphor for the grotesque imbalance between rich and poor and the exploitative conditions that support such an imbalance, an exercise in reader self-reflection – but it is not a book that ought to be banned (have yet to encounter a book, really, in the banned books category that makes me seriously reconsider my stance on no-banning-of-books). Above all it is a book that thoughtfully explores the possibilities presented by narrative point of view.

With the notable exception of a half dozen pages in a climactic scene the novel is narrated in the first person point of view of Patrick Bateman a wall street worker (of some kind) and psychopathic killer (maybe). Whether or not Patrick actually kills anyone is a question I don’t have an easy answer for, though the novel certainly details the rape, torture and murder of many, many men, women and (one) child. How can it be that the novel could narrate these events but I still be unsure whether they actually took place? Such is the marvel of the untrustworthy and “mad” narration. Patrick interweaves his descriptions of torture with his obsessive (really obsessive) descriptions of what people wear, where he has eaten, when Les Miserable will be playing and how long he has worked out for. The imbalance among what Patrick thinks about, how he describes himself behaving, and how others react to his behaviour alert the reader to a consequential disconnect between the ways Patrick describes himself and “reality” as it is experienced by those around him. That this gap describes how every individual reader operates in the world should go without saying, but the novel does a spectacular job of highlighting in the extreme how detrimental and alienating this fissure must be. That we ought to spend more time listening to one another and more time trying to explain how we understand the world isn’t the solution offered by Ellis; rather, I think the book gets at the tragedy – the real horror – that we must all experience the world alone, from our particular (insane) point of view.

That the book includes scenes of extreme violence is interesting because these chapters precede exceptionally dull chapters recounting Patrick’s review of the body of work of artists like Whitney Housten. The result? This reader *skipped* the dull chapters on album reviews in order to return to the (truly) captivating narration of Patrick’s life. What does this desire to return to the horrific over the banal say about this reader? Well, it really is a most impressive point of view.

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