The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I recently took up a new writing project (shh, it's a secret--at least as long as I'm still working on a first draft). Let's just say it deals with a certain (and only somewhat improbable--call it a "what-if") post-apocalyptic scenario. To help me along with this, I wanted to read some stories relating to this concept. One was The Road, a Pulitzer Prize-winning apocalyptic novel (and apparent Oprah's Book Club selection), where the future of not just civilization but life in general is bleak.

The Road follows a man and his son as they wander their way south, where they'd more easily survive the winter. It's unclear how long they have been on this journey, nor how old the boy and his father are. While the circumstances of what brought the world into a state of worthlessness remain unexplained (ash covers everything, all plants and animals are dead), it is clear that the chances of survival at this point are slim, with no natural plants coming forth and the canned/preserved goods slim pickings. Their journey is grimmer at some times (such as when they find a charred baby) and less grim at others (such as when they find the untouched underground bunker). While the story ends on a somewhat hopeful note, it is more for the world itself to be able to begin anew, not so much for mankind's survival.

The Road, much like many other post-apocalyptic novels, paints a grim picture of humanity's longevity. At this point it's pretty much every man for himself, and the man gets into a few skirmishes while on the journey. The man speaks of "the good guys" and "bad guys," though he's immediately suspicious of any sign of people. Everything is covered in ash, alluding to a possible nuclear Armageddon or perhaps the eruption of the supervolcano in Yellowstone Park. Of course, it matters not how the world came to be this way--least of all to the survivors who cling desperately on to life. The Road is more of a story of a man and his boy, facing the absolute bleakest circumstances, and the struggle to endure in the face of hopelessness. The imagery mirrors this attitude, with everything being totally gray and colorless, and buildings in various states of disrepair, the man and son disheveled and starved. In a way, it's hard to believe that anyone survived this long, given the cold and rain and lack of food and fire. Many of the scenes are powerful and at times even moving, and you definitely feel sorry for the boy, who will never know the colorful, vibrant world his father knew. I wouldn't say it made me cry, but it filled me with sadness and doubt about the purpose of our own existence. (Let me tell ya, this is not a feel-good read)

One thing that got me, though, was the representation of women--the few glimpses we get of the man's wife were among the powerful moments (the scene where she tries to convince him to join her in committing suicide is wrenching)--but the few women they come across are often described as pregnant. While this is not entirely out of the realm of possibility, what with a lack of access to birth control, boredom, and likely horny/rapacious men--the man and boy were starving. And one group of people ate (or tried to eat) a baby. So I'm guessing the other people they hide from as they pass are also starving. And something happens to women when they're starving, and the medical term is amenorrhea: they stop having their periods since their bodies are smart enough to know when they can't support a fetus. Now, I don't know if all women who are starving get this condition (and certainly not how starved you have to be to stop getting your period), but it happens, and it's not unreasonable. It's also likely that even if these women could get pregnant, few babies would actually be born, since due to a lack of adequate nutrition for even one being, most would probably miscarry early on. So, yeah, while women would more likely to be abused by men in this situation--especially the "bad guys" (which the man uses as code for cannibals)--would they actually be able to bear children? Definitely not healthy ones, if any at all. But would I think a male writer like Cormac McCarthy concerned himself with details like this? Nope. *rant over*

While the world was so cold and lifeless I had trouble believing that people would be able to last even this long, it is a powerful story of compassion and the persistence of the survival instinct. It is up to the reader to wonder whether or not humanity's survival will endure, and whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. It's a novel that makes you think, even if most of it is not so happy. 4 out of 5 stars.

Lydia Davis is Awesome

As a writer, anyway. I haven't met her in person, so maybe she's not super-awesome. After reading that lug 1Q84 I definitely wanted to follow up with some lighter reading, but with my copies of the Hunger Games trilogy back at my parents' house, and a collection of Lydia Davis short stories on my shelf, I decided to read me some short stories. And a lot of them were short: like, really short. Like, one sentence. So I couldn't really quote them in case I get chased down for reprinting without permission. At least in this  particular collection, Varieties of Disturbance.

Aw, fuck it. Here's one of her miniscule gems in its entirety:"Collaboration With a Fly"

"I put that word on the page,
but he added the apostrophe."

The collection contains 57 stories, most of them really, really short. The topics range from the ritual of TV watching, explaining sex to children, caterpillars, babies, and the relationships between friends. Sure, sounds banal, but the stories aren't your typical stories: most of the characters are not named, their focus is somewhat single-minded (on the topic at hand), and there is hardly any scene or dialogue (if any, just one).  Some, like the one above, even have line breaks, like poems. Davis certainly blends the two in cool ways: and not just as punchlines.

Some of them go on for several pages, though, resembling more typical stories, though not quite. "We Miss You" is a lengthy "analysis" of letters written in a fourth-grade class sometime in the fifties or sixties, written to a classmate who was in the hospital. The narrator picks apart these grammar-school exercises in formal writing quite thoroughly, noting the specific phrases and instances of complex sentence structure in each of the letters. Another story, which is much longer, "Helen and Vi," is a report of three women who have lived to be quite old--and the third, Hope, who defies the conventional notions of what it takes to stay healthy and live long, is mentioned peripherally.

Some of the stories are so abstract, terse, and just plain short, I question whether Davis even edited some of these stories, and just submitted them after jotting them down thanks to some inspired train of thought. It certainly puts the idea that writers are supposed to slave and suffer over their drafts into question: sure, you can agonize over perfecting a single sentence, but how much agonizing can you do when that's all the story is? Of course, I don't really know if Davis slaved over her writing or not.

The shortness of many of her short stories/prose-poems also enable re-readability: something that busy poeple such as myself do not really have time to waste with. This increased my enjoyment of the stories as I could easily read them again. And on some occasions, I dwelled on a story for much longer than the time it took for me to read it. Whether the short ones are hit-or-miss, they certainly require thinking about the relationship of the title to the sentence, which is not always apparent.

Lydia Davis's style is reminiscent of David Foster Wallace, with clever and absurd turns of phrase accompanying the ennui and hopelessness of everyday life, in addition to reality-bending realism. However, Davis is much more abstract and much less concerned about details than Wallace was; in fact, a lot of her stories are quite anti-Wallace, the prose vague and bare and conceptual (rather than meticulously detailed and concrete); thus her stories average only a few pages, while Wallace's go into the double digits. Her stories address storytelling and other meta-narratives in much a similar manner, in much less space; so it made me think why I had never heard of her before? Is it because she writes fiction/prose-poetry and not essays too? Because she wasn't in journalism? Because she's a woman? Of course, Wallace is still one of my favorite authors, but I think Lydia deserves some love too.

The short, terse style of Lydia Davis's stories are the real future of American short fiction, which is currently oversaturated with tedious depictions of everyday life for a specific (often based on a real person) character as they go through a change (usually aging or death). Writers: you've learned what the rules are; if you want to know how to shatter them completely, Lydia Davis is a must-read writer for you.*

A rare 5 out of 5 stars for this one. (Not perfect, but I'm grading on a curve here)

*I am basing this after reading just one collection, so I could be incorrect in saying that Lydia Davis eats nails instead of bran for breakfast, if you know what I mean.

The Hunger Games Movie Review; Or, How the Movie is Never, Ever Better than the Book

So it looks like The Hunger Games is going to be a real blockbuster trilogy, along with the books, following Harry Potter and Twilight before it. There was some slight nervous anticipation before it came out in theaters a couple weeks ago, nail-biting over the fact that the protagonist was female and if the movie was going to be any good. There was criticism early on about the fact that the casting call for Katniss called for a specifically white woman, and the fact that the person who ultimately played her was a blonde in real life. I myself was a little miffed about the imperfect appearances (in stark contrast to the first Harry Potter movie, where each person looked the part)--Peeta needed blue eyes, Gale's hair needed to be longer and his skin darker, Haymitch was definitely not blond (and he needed to be more messed up!), and Snow needed to have had some work done. Katniss's criticism goes without saying. I also imagined Rue to be darker-skinned (after all, she's described in the book as having dark brown skin), but the actor who played her fit the part anyway. I'm not going to touch on all those racist Hunger Games fans who thought that Rue wasn't supposed to be black: you people need to pay more attention in both English and History class.

In spite of that negative impression, I was excited to see this movie, not nervous about it like with The Golden Compass (LOVE the books, do not ever want to see the movie!). I went to see it on opening day in a packed theater--we probably bought some of the few tickets left available for that showing. And I liked it a lot; I wanted to just go and read the books again immediately afterward. Though the movie was over two hours, and a bit slow to start, it breezed through the story, much like an abridged version of the book (which isn't really necessary). The shaky-camera thing was odd in the beginning, when there wasn't that much going on, and I wanted more scenes pre-Hunger Games--preferably more with Cinna. People say Lenny Kravitz did a good job, but there wasn't that much for him to do... And the scene when the tributes from District 12 are set on fire is supposed to be incredible, but I was underwhelmed. So, they just wear fire for capes?

Once the Hunger Games begins, though, the film finds its legs, and it captures all the important plot points with seamless faithfulness to the source material. Rue's death was as tragic as it was in the books. However, they did sort of mangle the end: we don't see much of what happens to Katniss and Peeta after the Games end--they don't even look as fucked up as they are in the book--and the rift that forms between them on their way home. Even earlier, as the Games are about to end, they changed Cato's death to make him even more pitiful than he needed to be, and I imagined the moment with the berries to be more dramatic, because they were going to send a big fuck-you to the capitol.

There were plenty of other deviations (such as when Katniss receives the Mockingjay pin) and omissions from the book, predictable in any movie adaptation of a story longer than 60 pages. This is how books are superior to time-constrained media like films: the audience has a chance to get to know the characters, and in the case of speculative fiction, the world, better. We learn a lot of juicy details that wouldn't even make it into a screenplay, let alone a rough cut.

The movie was predictably clean: everybody looked quite clean and healthy for starving civilians and beat-up games contestants. While they could have done something with makeup to produce the haggard effect, I'm not really surprised that everybody looks pretty damn good in the movie. More realistic portrayals of what humans look like has long been relegated to the indie film circuit.

So, while I wasn't one hundred percent thrilled with the look of the film, it was really well done as a movie, with moments that will leave you tense with anticipation even if you've read the books, and enough excitment to have you wanting more. (and there should have been more!) I look forward to the sequel, and hope that it's even better than the first. If you've been thinking about seeing this movie, go ahead and see it: you could do a LOT worse. 3 out of 5 stars.