Blasphemous Book Reviews II: Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth

Grade: B

I don't want to mislead you. If this were a novel, or a coherent collection of complete works, it would be pure gold, but Letters from the Earth is not that. It's a collection of fragments, cleaned from the master's desk upon his death, and pasted together by his (probably well-meaning) editor and biographer for the purposes of making a posthumous buck. Said editor made a noble effort to hold the "Papers of the Adam Family" section together, and, to my delight, the titular section holds together quite well on its own, but that doesn't excuse the man for scrabbling together the middle third of this volume. There's great prose in it, but no unity of purpose, and too often it's comprised of the unpublished bits of things that had already grown legs and hiked themselves out of the protoplasm, leaving shed tails behind only for the consumption of completists. It tears my heart out, but I'm afraid the mere passing grade must stand.

But since I'm into blasphemy this time around I'll limit what's left of the review to the section "Letters from the Earth," and similar pieces, which happen to be the good ones anyway. Near the back of the book, there's an essay collection called "The Damned Human Race" which, saying the same thing in more prototypical form, bookends the volume nicely.

When I think of Mark Twain, I consider roughly equal parts schmaltzy Americana, humor, wonderful prose cadence, and negativity. The first thing obviously battles the last, and who can deny that that conflict helped make the man great? The spotlighted satire is probably what delayed the publication of Letters until 1962. Unlike Morrow below, Mark Twain took a dim view of humanity at heart, and a dimmer view of its creator. The letters are from Satan (on leave for his loose tounge) to the other archangels describing the peculiarity of man. Among them: the implausibility of creation; the ridiculousness of devising an afterlife we hate (and other assorted "sarcasms" regarding our view of God and his of us); the description of man as God's lowliest but most prized creation, and the superlative evil we're capable of. People suck, and yet....and yet, here we are.

It's good stuff, and this time around, just what Doctor Downer ordered. Back to my usually jolly self next time around.

[Up next, I go Greek. (Not like that, you perv.) Been looking forward to this pair.]

Book Review: Kurt Vonnegut, Jailbird (A)

When I read Sirens of Titan several years ago, I likened Vonnegut's phrasing to the dropping singular bricks of prose from great height. Such were the little texticules, delivered concisely and distantly for maximum effect. Later, when I read Cat's Cradle, I remarked that he'd moved up to whole paragraphs and pages, each section mounted like an absurdist gem for optimal appreciation, and as the reader strolls though the museum, a floor plan gradually gets revealed. By the time he wrote Jailbird, he moved up to the level of entire story.

There's something about Vonnegut's structure that really grabbed me here, and more completely than before. There is a plot progression in the book but the conclusion is telegraphed early and foregone. The interest arises as the details and the backstory get revealed as the plot slowly gets along. This in itself isn't unusual--lots of authors work in the gradually-filled-in-outline mode--but Vonnegut has transcended the form. He's written a novel that is completely self-similar in form. Each of the large parts of the heirarchy has the same shape as the smaller parts below it. The absurdist style helps. The whole story is a finely crafted irony of a man who drifts from power to contempt with no special skills or culpability or qualifications. The subplots of individual characters are fine synecdoches of this larger arc, the ironies that a friendless old man manages to collect reflect it, and even on the word and sentence level, through clever repetition and juxtaposition, Vonnegut loses none of this punch. He manages to place the whole scope of the book in periodic triple claps that break unwanted into quiet meditations. On top of all this, he manages to deliver the thing in an even comfortable tone of a genial old fart unwinding a long anecdote. I'd never quite grasped Vonnegut's ability as pure storyteller, but it was relentless here. Peace.

I suppose it also helped that he's not, in Jailbird taking on life, the universe, and everything. It's both easier and more ambitious to poke at god, or at the futility of it all. Here he instead takes on the corporate world, painting the proles as sympathetic buffoons, and the managers likewise, just buffoons who've wandered into power. He drops in plenty of references that were probably hard-hitting in 1979, when Watergate was fresh enough, but as I live through the most absurd time in my memory, I can't help but wish he'd written it in 2006.

Keifus

(Next is cynical blasphemy week, I'm just in that sort of mood. I've got Towing Jehovah on deck, in which the corpse of God must be disposed. I plan to follow up with Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth which I've never gotten around to finishing. Other suggestions are welcome.)

Review of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

I have my reservations about jumping into nineteenth century literature. I only have so much endurance for coal-filth and candles, gout and apoplexy, and meandering prose, and most of these books can just go on forever. But I was specifically looking for something down on love (completing the theme), and M. Hugo has been waiting patiently on the shelf for years now. Notre-Dame de Paris is a historical novel, which decently swaps out some of the usual period props, but it's still told in the style of the times, which the authorial voice periodically cheeps in to remind us faithful readers. And not unlike I feared: Hugo almost immediately drifts away from the opening scene to tour-guide our way through the Palace of Justice and a couple hundred years of its history, which is less effective getting me into 1482 than letting the characters open their mouths. Three chapters in, and Hugo drops another anchor, describing--no, delineating--the layout of medieval Paris over the course of 30 or 40 pages. It's not that he's boring when he talks about architecture, but these opening devices don't exactly kickstart his classic plot, they dismissed the characters just as they were getting interesting. And over these last few weeks I haven't had the luxury of time to just sink in and bask in a big heap of prose. And to be fair, even if I mildly object to info-dumping it, one of the writer's purposes was to evoke the character of the city in its time.

Hugo finds momentum well enough when he's not feeling up the masonry. Our opening scene is a mystery performed by the aspiring philosopher Pierre Gringnoire, mercilessly and hilariously cut down by attending students, and ignored by the crowd. Paunchy bishops and dignified statesman filter in and out to create a bigger scene, but much like the stage drama, they're an unloved spectacle, and it takes low humor to get the rabble really aroused. Hugo, to my pleasure and surprise, is really good at humor, and I love how he eyed up the intelligent and powerless (that is, the students) as the eagle-eyed observers of the human condition, and gave them all of the good lines. (As they deserve: I have an affection for the disenfranchised wiseasses of the world.) Unappreciated (and unpaid), Gringnoire wanders dissolute through the Paris streets, delivered into the court of the vagabonds and their sham Justice, and played out for laughs and the uncomfortable bite of satire. Official death loomed over the heads of the poor in Gringnoire's time, and hadn't exactly disappeared by the time Hugo was writing. The characters support the development of the story's tragedies or (as Mark Twain would say it) its sarcsasms, but my favorites were the latter. Our poet is an ineffectual blatherer, charming as a parody of a (real historical) writer, the king of the vagabonds is a debauched and lethal mockery of the Law, and young student Jehan Frollo (brother of Claude) steals every scene he's in, whether throwing about grandiloquent insults, or guilelessly conniving his way to his next bottle.

Even at his most discursive, Victor Hugo clearly takes great joy in the language, on which note, in a case like this, I usually start bitching about translations. The fact that my edition is rendered to The Hunchback of Notre-Dame instead of Hugo's more appropriate original title is a bad sign, as is the failure to credit the translator. How much better did the French flow along? How much more playful, how much more moving was the original? One `particular annoyance: French makes use of a formal second person, but the resulting English thees and thous read terribly. That forced archaism always come off as a cheesy anachronism for anything less than 350 years old.

The obvious liberty with the title is unappreciated because our well-known bell-ringer is only one of a cast of fully conceived players, and not even the best one. Hugo trots him out as not only physically hideous (and deaf), but also a mental defective, amoral, unable to perceive very well the antics of the crowd, nor the whims of Justice. Much later, when he gets speaking lines, he expresses himself differently than he was originally described. He's capable of metaphor, uttering sentences that require the self-awareness he was denied in his introduction. There's clearly an incomplete inner transformation that's intended here, which is similar to the way most of the major characters are developed: whether quintessentially noble, wise, beautiful or brave, Hugo drips with pleasure as he skewers their outward characters with reality, but the author's conflation of physical, mental, and moral deformity are confusing. They violate my admittedly modern understanding of their relationship beyond what I'm willing to give to artistic license.

As a love story, I couldn't be more pleased to read Victor Hugo's side by side with Graham Greene's. Hugo lets his play out with nearly as much cynicism: the hunchback's great love is a beauty; the repressed scholar's great love is a free-spirited ingenue; the sweetheart's is a handsome cad, who, at the moment of seduction, can't even remember her name. The love stories aren't weighted equally--those that contain a particle of actual compassion are allowed the heft of tragedy--but every one of them is ultimately a comedy of objectification that can only end badly, and does every time.

Marriage is painted as a farce too, but as a legal distinction, that's perhaps as much about Hugo's disgust with civic power, which is a much deeper condemnationthan his mockery of romance. Justice is doomed to end badly for its subjects, and the exclusive purpose of its proceedings is to deliver state violence, regardless of cause or merit. The comical vagabond court, we find, is the most pure authority, and the least corrupt. While it feels at times that Hugo is picking on the medievals, and if he taunts the king that his day is coming (that experience was brutal too), mostly he presents the Law as a timeless sort of evil. He's got a good trick where he reveals the mechanics of mysterious events off-handedly, and lets the process play out deaf and thoughtless of the minor truth. Hugo's Justice grinds on with tremendous inertia, abetted by the ecclesiastical powers and the expectations of the people. It exists to drink blood, and no one but a half-mad bell-ringer even thinks to stand against it, wrongly and badly. Notre-Dameis an artful blend of place and character, of comedy and tragedy. You'll laugh until you cry.

Blasphemous Book Reviews I: Towing Jehovah by James Morrow

James MorrowTowing Jehovah (B+)

I was originally going to open this review with "what this author lacks in writing ability he makes up for in big brass ones," but as I went on, I found neither statement to be true. Early on, Morrow drenches his prose in far too many bad similes ("eyes scintillating like twin Van de Graf generators" and such), but he does finally catch a groove with it, and by the time I got to the protagonist's sardonic captain's log, I found myself chuckling with some regularity. And some of the jokes and puns are ridiculous enough to be good. A bookish priest chasing after a bunch of debauched apostates, begging them to remember their Kantian imperative, that's funny stuff. As far as the brazenness is concerned, I guess it's there, I mean what with the gigantic dead body of God floating in the ocean, presented eventually with all its warts and pimples, and defiled with regularity--driven on, towed by its earbones, eaten by sharks and by a desperate crew, burned, rotted, drained of blood and torpedoed. Horrible as all of that sounds, Morrow pulls off something that's more of a madcap romp than it is biting satire.

And that's really the problem--okay, my problem--with Towing Jehovah, it's the utter lack of spite in the thing. The book posits the factual existence of God, and by consequence, the veracity of all the rest of the stuff in the popular Judeo-Christian mythology. A variety of ideological blowhards are assembled to have their philosophies shattered on the bluffs of the floating Corpus Dei, and it's all great fun, but the observation that God tastes more like Chicken McNuggets (you know, for the masses) than filet mignon is about as sharp as the satire gets. Under it all is a secular humanist body of morals that's left in the wake of the ones long ago imposed on stone tablets. Instead of getting angry at a creator that holds his wreck of a creation responsible for itself, Morrow plays all these inconsistencies up for laughs.

Lucky for him, I like laughs, so the high grade is maintained.

(Mark Twain's pen digs less deeply but wounds far more. More on that next, whenever I get around to it.)

Review: It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis

It Can't Happen Here, published in 1935, is a famous book. It retains a cultural cachet (in way that political predictions do, but scientific predictions don't) for its contemporary awareness, for having been accurately cognizant of fascism when it was not politically nescessary in this country to be so, and for anticipating some of its expansionist aims. It is, as the title suggests, the development of an American version of the movement, developed shamelessly from our own national myths, and opposed (or not opposed) by various liberal cultural or philosophical elements. Having cultivated this sort of cynicsm for a couple of years, I was expecting to find some connection to this book, at least as a warning against the self-proclaimed authorities. And, so, how to put this exactly? It has a couple of moments, but I don't think it was a great work, maybe not even an especially good one.

Sinclair Lewis (I learn) made his living, and eventually garnered a Nobel prize, for chronicling the middle class American angst of his pre-Depression day. This puts him as his generation's Franzen maybe, or Updike, or any of that stable of writers that I've neither read, nor can get myself to notice outside of their tedious "great writer" acclaim, which for me anyway, doesn't add up to an optimum set of associations, but still hardly enough to condemn. In any case, It Can't Happen Here is considered one of Lewis's late novels, published after his prime, and no doubt it got some penetration based on the famous name. The blurbs stress "important" and damn the reading with a faint "almost-as-good" praise when compared to his earlier works. Failing an easy connection to himself, you might be tempted to compare this novel with those of other authors who've also been astute and lonely critics of power, something like The Quiet American, but it doesn't hold as well as a character or a political study. As well as being observant, Graham Greene's will also go down as being an objectively good novel (to the extent that these things can be considered objective of course). Not to say it's awful--It Can't Happen Here has an impressive comic start, taking the gimlet to a couple Rotarian speakers—from the military and the DAR—but it doesn't decide well where it wants to be. The humor and the cuts don't keep up past the first 30 pages or so, and after that, the reader can look forward to only two or three episodes later in the novel that remind us that there was ever a satirical intent. The book makes a sorry bridge between the wit of Mark Twain and the bitter satire of Vonnegut or Heller. To my mind, It Can't Happen Here is closer in spirit to any number of late-model counterfactuals, and if AH writers like S.M. Stirling or Harry Turtledove might include more armchair generalism and less couched liberalism; more heroic violence and less subversive penmanship, the literary depths are similarly plumbed as by those more niche-oriented authors. Not necessarily a bad read, but it ain't indispensible.

Here's the basic problem: it's not enough to say it can happen here, what made it happen here? There's only a smidgen of this, in the brief satirical opening and in the description of the growing appeal of president Buzz Windrip, but mostly what we get is mechanism, a sequence of events, a lot more what and not much why. Even there, the sections where external drama is given to unfold (outside of the protagonist's, Doremus Jessup's, point of view) are told in summary form, a lot of this-happened-and-then-that-happened, and the higherups don't develop into particularly understandable characters. These parts are like reading an outline of a novel instead of the book itself, breaking the cardinal rule of showing instead of telling. What's in the national (or hey, human) character that leaves us open to dictators? We don't get a good deal of the psychological landscape that let Windrip-mania take root, other than what's revealed through a few meetings and dismissive opinons of Jessup, who is standing in as an obvious proxy for the author. Jessup is the only real point-of-view character we get, the only head we get too far inside, and he's likeable enough, coming together as a gentle critique of the American liberal, drawn by circumstances into radicalism.

Lewis was a writer, and his wife a journalist. Making heroes and martyrs out of writers and journalists (Doremus was an newspaper editor, and the plot revolves around his criticism of, punishment by, and resistance to the fascists; team Jessup worked against the "Corporate State" by printing and distributing pamphlets) may be drawing on autobiographical fantasies. We all like to think we'd be the ones to stand up to tyranny, and those of us with a wordy inclination like to think that we see the world clearer than others, and that anything we write matters. If we switch to a contemporary context, it's hard not to see Doremus as a blogger. I spent an inordinate time (supported by Lewis of course, and I bookmarked a bunch of well-written paragraphs that maybe I'll remember to throw at people who annoy me later, but which don't seem terribly relevant for the purposes of a review) wondering just what his political philosophy was. He identifies as liberal, but he starts out with a healthy (in that downplayed upstate Yankee way) wisdom about authority and politics and general. In a few occasions, Doremus defends middle-class intellectualism (we're not the same as the proletariat, he thinks, and that's okay), and finds both common ground and ultimate differences with the radical leftists of the 1930s brand. His viewpoint solidifies a bit in opposition to the Corpos, and maybe Lewis is offering a lesson that we resist to a degree that's appropriate to the political environment, mildly cynical in civil times, and bravely defiant in violent ones, a revolutionary that (somehow!) resists the formation of alternate tyrannies. This moderation moves from a weakness to, as Jessup's role solidifies, something definitive of the American version (evidently similar to the writer's own views), perhaps giving in to some myths of national character after everything. Pinning a philosophy on Corpoism is harder, and after some reading (particularly as he opens a succession of chapters with excerpts from Windrip's intentionally risible Mein Kampf knockoff), it's obvious that the actual version is vacuous. Some egalitarian-seeming or even Socialist measures are offered to the public, in a way that doesn't offend power interest too much, which I might have taken differently if Jessup didn't take a moment to pick it apart. It's funny how a fascist takeover is fronted by language of freedom and liberty.

A couple of odds and ends. Increasingly, I'm looking, when possible, for personal figures to help place novels in time. Jessup's daughter Sissy (who seems like a great kid even though she was stuck with awkward dialogue) was born in 1917, the same year as my grandmother. In 2010, she'd have had a full life behind her, which feels like a strange and sad perspective. Also in 2010, we're living in the wake of a banking, um, crisis, sufficient to generate some real antipathy for the industry. In 1935, a complaint against "bankers" was often veiled anti-semitism, and Lewis certainly intended this to be an element of the Corpoist rhetoric. Is that the case today? It never before crossed my mind to make a connection like this when I get mad at the current financial industry. I wrote in my last post "the Democrats didn't exactly give the lenders a hard time." I was going to write "didn't exactly chase the lenders from the temple" but suddenly sensitized, I didn't want to go there. I guess I'll have to be careful to be precise about those sorts of things.

Book Review Index

Since I bother to rate my enthusiasm for the books I review, it will be helpful to both of my readers to get a feel of my tastes. Here's the index since 2004, when I started keeping it. I omitted books that I either couldn't remember well enough or reviewed too poorly to re-grade. I also omitted most of anthologized shorts, and all of the world-events and opinion stuff I read when I am supposed to be working (and of course the technical stuff I read when I actually am working).

The grades reflect my subjective enjoyment more than any objective evaluation. (How else to explain how Conrad did so poorly? Tuan Jim just didn't have the snappy move-along plot I needed at the beach that summer.) The grades may seem to be on a curve, but I think that's less due to inflation and more to my care in choosing reading material.

Anderson, Poul Operation Chaos (B)

Bellairs, John, The Face in the Frost (B+)

Benford, Gregory Cosm (A)

Blake, Katharine The Interior Life (B)

Blish, James A Case of Conscience (A)

Bourdain, Anthony, Kitchen Confidential (B)

Brown, Dan Angels and Demons (C+)

Bujold, Lois McMaster Diplomatic Immunity (A-)

Carroll, Jonathon After Silence (A)

Carroll, Jonathon Sleeping in Flame (B+)

Chabon, Michael The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (A+)

Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood's End (B)

Clarke, Arthur C. Rendezvous with Rama (B)

Coatzee, J. M., Elizabeth Costello (A)

Conrad, Joseph Lord Jim (B)

Dahl, Roald The Roald Dahl Omnibus (B-)

Davies, Robertson, The Rebel Angels (A)

Daniel, Tony Superluminal (B+)

Dean, Pamela The Secret Country (B+)

Dean, Pamela The Hidden Land (B)

Dean, Pamela The Whim of the Dragon (B+)

DeLillo, Don Underworld (B+)

Eco, Umberto Baudolino (C)

Friesner, Esther Wishing Season (C+)

Gaiman, Neil Anansi Boys (A)

Gibson, William Idoru (B+)

Gibson, William Pattern Recognition (B+)

Gibson, William Neuromancer (B)

Goldman, Willian, The Princess Bride

Greene, Brian The Elegant Universe (B)

Greene, Graham The Power and the Glory (A)

Harris, Bob Prisoner of Trebekistan (B+)

Helprin, Mark Winter's Tale (A-)

Holman, Sheri The Dress Lodger (A-)

Juster, Norton The Phantom Tollbooth (A+)

Kay, Guy Gavriel The Last Light of the Sun (A+)

King, Stephen Wolves of the Calla (A-)

King, Stephen Song of Susannah (B+)

King, Stephen The Dark Tower (B+)

Kushner, Ellen Swordspoint (B+)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed (A)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness (A)

LeGuin, Ursula K. The Telling (A-)

Levitt, Steven and Stephen Dubner Freakonomics (B+)

Lieber, Fritz The Big Time (B+)

McCarthy, Cormac The Road (A)

McEwan, Ian Saturday (B)

Mirrlees, Hope Lud in the Mist (A-)

Morrow, JamesTowing Jehovah (B+)

Nafisi, Azar Reading Lolita in Tehran (A-)

Noon, Jeff Vurt (B+)

O'Connor, Edwin The Last Hurrah (A)

Park, Paul Celestis (B+)

Park, Paul Soldiers of Paradise (A)

Patterson, James and Andrew Gross The Jester (C)

Powers, Richard, The Echo Maker (A-)

Powers, Tim The Drawing of the Dark (B)

Powers, Tim Declare (A)

Powers, Tim Last Call (A+)

Pratchett, Terry Maskerade (B)

Pratchett, Terry Soul Music (B-)

Pratchett, Terry The Wee Free Men

Pressfield, Steven, Gates of Fire (B)

Priest, Christopher The Separation (A)

Robbins, Tom Jitterbug Perfume (B+)

Roberts, Keith Pavane (B+)

Ryman, Geoff Air (A)

Saberhagen, Fred The Berserker Throne (B)

Stephenson, Neal Zodiac (A-)

Stephenson, Neal Snow Crash (A)

Stephenson, Neal Cryptonomicon (A)

Stephenson, Neal The Diamond Age (A-)

Stewart, Jon Naked Pictures of Famous People (B)

Stewart, Sean The Night Watch (B+)

Swanwick, Michael Bones of the Earth (B)

Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace (A)

Twain, Mark Letters from the Earth (B)

Varley, John The Golden Globe (A+)

Varley, John Millenium (B-)

Vinge, Vernor Across Realtime (A-)

Vinge, Vernor Rainbows End (B+)

Vinge, Vernor Tatja Grimm's World (C+)

Vonnegut, Kurt Cat's Cradle (A-)

Vonnegut, Kurt Jailbird (A-)

Westlake, Donald E. Bad News (B+)

Westlake, Donald E. Drowned Hopes (B)

Williams, Walter Jon City on Fire (B+)

Wilson, Robert Charles Blind Lake (A)

Wilson, Robert Charles The Harvest (B+)

Wilson, Robert Charles Spin (A+)

Wolfe, Gene The Knight (A-)

Wolfe, Gene The Wizard (A)

Wolfe, Gene Nightside of the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene Lake of the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene Calde of the Long Sun (B+)

Wolfe, Gene Exodus from the Long Sun (A)

Wolfe, Gene On Blue's Waters (A)

Wolfe, Gene In Green's Jungles (B)

Wolfe, Gene Return to the Whorl (A)

Wolfe, Gene Soldier of Sidon (A)

Zelazney, Roger Changeling (D)

Zelazney, Roger Damnation Alley (C-)