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.

1Q84

Slowly but surely, after a month of steady reading, I finished Haruki Murakami's  giant turtle of a novel. It's actually an amazing read--something that I've often found in a lot of long novels, oddly enough. Though the plot swells slowly with every progressive chapter, each page is rich with sensory details and intrigue that pulls me in further to the world with Tengo and Aomame, our two protagonists.

The basic plot of the novel follows the experiences of our protagonists as they enter this alternate version of 1984, and how their journey through this world (dubbed the title by Aomame) brings these two together. Both are drawn into the world unwittingly, and learn of the apparent secrets that few ever come to know: magical "Little People" that are neither good nor evil, two moons hang in the sky, and people who aren't real. It's difficult to explain the intricacies without giving too much away (admittedly, learning as you go along is a part of the fun--and let's face it, a 900+ page novel does not have much re-readability to begin with) but gradually we're drawn from the real world and into this strange magical one--but it's hardly a happy place. Tones of authoritarianism permeate the religion of the Little People, and Tengo and Aomame's most deeply held secrets are found out by complete strangers. People die horribly.

The greatest thing about 1Q84 is how the prose pulls you in so deep you end each chapter gasping for breath. Murakami presents a story so rich in detail, the long slog is more of a scenic route, as with every page we uncover an enticing bit of information about a character or how 1Q84 works as its own world. Each character conceals a fascinating history, full of "aha!" moments where the reader can make connections between the two storylines. The primary challenge of a long novel is keeping the reader interested, and Murakami has no problem with that.

But we don't learn all the answers to all the questions that arise as a result of our visit to this world. This doesn't bother me too much, however. It's fitting that we pretty much know only what Tengo and Aomame know. In fact, the novel ends with the possibility of a sequel, leaving enough unexplored material for another installment. While the point of conclusion may have been somewhat arbitrary (it wouldn't be 1Q84 forever) the novel's long enough that Murakami could have simply decided to stop there. And the ending, while it was great that Aomame and Tengo could finally be together, felt underwhelming. Fo so long we were teased that something major was going to happen--and while Tengo and Aomame finally meeting and escaping from 1Q84 was pretty major, I was expecting something a little more... bombastic? Like the ending of Janacek's "Sinfonietta," which is referenced frequently throughout the novel. Kind of like how in Revolutionary Girl Utena they keep on talking about an impending revolution, but it never happens (though the climax is quite exciting, if confusing because that anime is just one big allegory).  So it really just led to the couple meeting? That's what disappointed me the most.

A few other little things bothered me throughout the novel, though they were quite minor. Well ok, the mystical pregnancy thing put me off at first (and this is why we need a sequel--does the kid have any special powers or what?); that's pretty major. Mainly Murakami's fixation with boobs (and the female body in general) definitely annoyed me; and it was always the women who were objectified--even Aomame, a straight lady, would comment on how nice another lady's boobs were. But it didn't surprise me. There was also a lot of repetition in the beginning--not just to how small or nice a lady characer's boobs were: Tengo's "older girlfriend",  the fact that Tamaru is gay, and Ushikawa is ugly, among other details repeated ad nauseum. This stops mostly in the third part, and I suppose it's helpful to remind readers of important facts in a long story when there's a lot to keep track of, but it was a bit too much. Oh, and the phrase "from the bottom of my heart" popped up in the last three chapters at least twice as many times, appearing nowhere before then (and I HATE HATE HATE that saying! Like, it doesn't even make any sense! If you care so much why do you keep it at the bottom???) though I'll chalk it up to translation goofs, since there's no way the original text literally translates to that super-cliche saying.

But overall, it's an enthralling story. The characters are infinitely interesting, the alternate world intriguing, the love story cute and squee-worthy, the details that tie these together fascinating to find. I would suggest lovers of literature that is immersive, suspenseful, and a little bit weird to take the time to read it--and go slowly. 1Q84 is a lovely place to wander. 4 stars out of 5.

(Not) The Best American Short Stories

Thanks to Jennifer Egan and George Saunders, I picked up a copy of last year's Best American Short Stories from the library to read. I've occasionally perused through the series' previous volumes to get a sense of who got published, and where they were published. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the selections come from the likes of The New Yorker, Tin House, and McSweeney's. Well la-di-da. I actually did try to read through an entire volume once, and I liked some of the stories, but I've forgotten all of them already. I think there was one about an old Jewish man, one with a married couple in Paris... or I could be mixing them up with some other collection. So yeah, they were good all right.

More like Best American Bedtime Stories!

So I don't know why I decided to read more than just two or three of the stories in here. I was setting myself up for disappointment. But Geraldine Brooks made them sound so good in the introduction! (though I guess that's the point). Most of them were well-written, and from an objective point of view I could appreciate them, but for the most part I found them either annoying or boring. I was this close to not even finishing the way-too-long "Bridge Under Water," which did sort of pay off at the end--but even that was a shallow satisfaction.  Many of the stories smacked of the artful literary pretension that pervades this sort of fiction, which I've already discussed before. What is the magic here that I'm not really seeing?

Granted, I did like some of them: namely, the ones that toyed with reality. "Phantoms," "The Sleep," and "ID" were my unequivocal favorites. I also didn't have that much negative thoughts on "Peter Torelli, Falling Apart:" that story was moving and engaging in all the right ways, and was at least a little bit different from the literary mainstream. There were only two Holocaust-related stories included this year: "Free Fruit for Young Widows" presented an interesting moral question regarding a man's murderous tendencies bred by captivity in concentration camps; the other story, "The Hare's Mask," was about rabbits or something (guess which one I liked more?). Jennifer Egan's story "Out of Body" presented NY teens in a realistic light, though I'm not sure if the "you" narrative was really the ticket; and this, like a lot of the other stories, gets big-picture at the end (and maybe someone dies?). You can't really get more cliche with a short story (or any story) than having somebody die. George Saunders' piece, "Escape from Spiderhead," starts off too silly and ends too sentimental; I liked "The Call of Blood," but didn't get it until I read the contributor blurb; I also liked "To the Measures Fall," but it's pretty pretentiously meta. "The Dungeon Master" and "Soldier of Fortune" reek of the melodrama of Oscar-winning films, even if the funny moments are redeemable. The rest were worthy of bedtime--they'll put you to sleep in minutes! I don't even want to waste my time going over them; the thought makes me want to nap.

Still, I think it was worth reading these stories; as always when reading as a writer, I've got to keep in mind what kind of stories I want to write--and if this hipster bullshit is not what I want to write, I got to know what it looks like so that I can stay the hell away from it... and if I catch myself writing like this, stop before I shoot myself.

Overall, then, I actually enjoyed slightly less than half of the stories, many of which are pretty memorable--a far cry from the other Best American collection I read. I might even read more stuff by the select authors that I actually liked. Other than that, I'm going to continue sniffing out anything that seems new and different--a nigh impossibility in this age, but it's out there! for example, I'm intrigued by this Flame Alphabet book...

Swamplandia! is uh, ok

I picked up a copy of this New York Times bestseller way back in October, at the Boston Book Festival--and I even met the author! And I finally got to it last week. And... no offense to Ms. Russell, but I am not that impressed. This novel is good, but way over-hyped; it didn't deserve the amount of praise it got. (Like Jeezus, the first four pages are positive blurbs! Oy)

Swamplandia! has an intriguing setup: a gator-wrestling theme park located in the fringes of Florida, near the swampy Ten Thousand Islands. It's family-run, a modest operation. But when Swamplandia!'s headliner and matriarch dies, the family (and park) experiences a downward spiral, hitting rock bottom more than a year after her death. Swamplandia! closes and the Bigtree clan spends the summer apart: the Chief making money on the mainland to pay off debts, Kiwi working at the rival park, Osceola running off with a ghost; and Ava (our protagonist and mostly-narrator) goes off on a journey to find her, accompanied by a shady character known only as "the Bird Man."

Now gator wrestlers, theme parks, ghosts, and a journey to the underworld seem like a recipe for a delightfully goofy (if somewhat creepy) story. Not quite. About halfway through, the plot takes a dark turn (way darker than I was expecting) that made me want to put the book down for a while. I did not expect rape and fights to the near-death in this story. Hell no. So I thought why the fuck is this shit in here? And the answer is that once you take away all the larger-than-life trappings, it's nothing more than a variant of the coming-of-age novel, lost virginity/innocence and all. There's nothing wrong with being a coming-of-age novel, but you have to be original with more than just your set pieces. So much of the novel is amazingly mundane--especially as we see more of the mainland world--which is still wacky to an extent (especially to the isolated islanders of the Bigtree clan) that it's not that much different from your typical literary novel.

The novel's not all mediocrity though. The depiction of the swampland makes it seem magical, thanks to Russell's vivid descriptions and Ava's childlike perspective (and I love the nakedly ridiculous moments on the mainland).  It's at times borderline cartoonlike in its representation of theme parks and mainland antics (is there an Adult Swim cartoon about a theme park? If not, I call dibs!) I really preferred this as a comic novel, with less heavy stuff--it would have been more fun, at least. I actually kind of liked it until the story took that dark turn.

Russell reminds me somewhat of Stacey Richter, who really cranks up the ridiculousness levels in some short stories, mixing the light stuff up with the heavy. But at least Richter didn't rationalize the incredibility of her stories' premises, writing off ghosts as symptoms of a mental illness and the underworld as a place pervs lure you to rape you (Russell really had me going there--for a minute I believed in the Underworld as much as Ava did, and was probably more crushed than she was when I realized it was a ruse--was I really so eager to believe that something fantastic would happen?) And Richter isn't the best writer, either. I do also see a resemblance of Russell to Kelly Link and George Saunders, whom she does credit as influences. (I was reminded of Saunders' story "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline", which I liked...but I'm also not a fan of Kelly Link. She's good, but her stories annoy the shit out of me. But that's another post.)

In summation, the family separates, and comes back together at the end of the summer. The children have changed, and they leave the island behind. And that's another thing. The ending was rushed and too brief--there's not even a mention of the last time they see their island; the narrator absent of affect, as if that summer robbed her of the ability to feel emotion. She says they'll stay strong, but she sounds so weak. I expect that life on the mainland would be a drag for them, devoid of the enchantment of the wilds. There's no mention of what Ava's doing. So much for a happy ending.

What bugs me the most about it is how ordinary it turned out to be: Osceola wants romance, Kiwi wants a career, and Ava wants to be like her mother. Sound familiar? I felt a strange sense of deja-vu all throughout the novel, as if I've heard the same story from a different voice before.The setting and characters are pretty unusual, but the story isn't. When it comes down to it, the Bigtrees aren't that different from your typical family--they just seem strange because they ran their own theme park, and thus are eccentric. (I can't be the only one who was disappointed that there weren't more theme park shenanigans) In the end the story is tragic--they've lost their mother and their home--and they learn to move on. Nothing too original or innovative there.

Karen Russell has potential--if she keeps at it, this could be the worst book she ever writes (and really, it's not that bad)--but there was no need to inflate her ego with meaningless praise. When you strip away the trappings that make Swamplandia! extraordinary, you have a novel that is saddeningly ordinary. The literary establishment succeeds in fooling us again. 3 stars out of 5.

This Post Was Going to Review Memory Wall, But...

The last book I read was a collection of short stories by Anthony Doerr, called Memory Wall. It's six stories, and they're all linked thematically, to an extent. Memories do play a big role in them, for one. I liked the one story of his that I'd read in a writing class, called "For a Long Time this was Griselda's Story." It was a little outlandish (the title character becomes a magician's assistant) and folktale-y, but was presented in a very real way. I spotted this book in the library, and decided to take it out, even though I really shouldn't have. I liked it, especially the stories that featured women prominently (that was actually most of them) ... But I don't really want to sing its praises. Turns out I'm still suffering from the Franzen fatigue that came over me last September...I'm just not in the mood to read that kind of shit anymore. Or review it, really.

Books: By dudes, for dudes since 1700

Doerr isn't as infuriating as Franzen, as he doesn't use tired and annoying plot twists and character tics and doesn't stick to reality 100% of the time. Doerr actually brought some new ideas to the table, like visions of the Afterworld through epileptic seizures, and memories recovered through clunky cartridges and viewable by machine. I almost feel bad that I'm not giving this book a review; it's not really that bad--plenty of other people liked it, too.

Not to steer the conversation towards Franzen, but part of what I don't really like about him is how much everyone sang his praises--and I hardly heard anything about last year's National Book Award winner, a Black woman. I read this article, published in last week's Phoenix, that criticizes the publishing industry, the New York Times, and NPR for gender bias in terms of who they publish and how much publicity they get. As a woman who likes to write fiction that doesn't necessarily adhere to realistic boundaries, much less convention, it's discouraging that someone like me will (still!) have greater difficulties in rightful recognition than a male writer writing about men (hell, aside from the fact that I naturally gravitate toward writing about women, aren't there enough stories about men?) And I am also guilty of reading more books by men than women, though I often prefer books by women, rather than men.

Anyway, I've been feeling this way since I went to a reading last weekend--five men went up to read in a row. Once I realized that no women had went up to read, I didn't stick around to find out if there would be any--the fact that none had gone so far said enough to me. The worst part was that I hadn't even noticed until the fourth man went up to the mic. There is the idea that women are generally more timid, and therefore reluctant to share their work--after two years of workshops with a bunch of other writers, and hearing how hard it is to be published, my confidence was crushed. Though I know I have more than potential. If women do need more encouragement, then we need to do that. These problems pervade not just the literary world, either--it's a problem in all media, to varying degrees. It's sad that we still can't get past the fact that women are just as capable as men at creating art (sometimes even more so) and that their stories and perspectives are just as relevant. I appreciate writers like Doerr who do bring in other perspectives--in addition to elderly women, he writes about other countries, like China and South Africa--we could also bring in people who've actually had these experiences, with less risk of objectifying and exotifying them.

But there's something else in that kind of fiction, aside from the narrow worldview--it's hard for me to put my finger on what it is. I do know how to describe it: BORING. Finally, after four years of indoctrination by literary "experts," I can finally admit that straight-up literary realism bores me to tears! That's why no one reads these books--because they're all about the SAME DAMN THING. I'll take robots, wizards and warlords over a broody middle-aged man any day!

All told, I think I'm done reading this kind of fiction for a while. This is not the kind of fiction I want to write, so why should I waste my time with it?

*note: this post was originally written a week ago (1/29/12) so temporal references are a week off. I'm just feeling too lazy to change it.