{reviews} bleak books: barnard, west, block

Whoa, so... 
                 far... 
                         behind... 
                                       with reviewing. 

I'll start with three books offering a bleak - but more or less amusing - look at the seedier side of the lives of academics, journalists, and, er, hit men.

Robert Barnard Death of an Old Goat (1974)

Professor Wickham was giving a tutorial. Or rather, he was being given one. Every year he put Hardy as late in the term as possible, hoping that by then his first-year students would have become reasonably chatty. This was because he never could be quite sure which Hardy novel it was he had read. Whichever it was, it had left on his mind a vague impression of doom and landscape, but nothing much else remained.

This is a very funny book about academia and country Australia. Barnard (who died this year) has a brilliant eye for the difficult life facing the second-rate Oxbridge academic exiled to an uncomfortable and ugly rural university ("Even the Queen had managed to avoid it on most of her visits to Australia, and there were few places in Australia of which that could be claimed.") of the type which sprang up in Australia from the 1950s onwards. 

The 'old goat' is Professor Belville-Smith, an elderly Oxford don on a lecture tour of the provinces. He is a typically dry academic figure, full of snobbish distaste - and "senile malice" - for the colleagues he encounters ("tut-tut[ting] mentally at their vowel-sounds and their shirts"); and no one is particularly looking forward to listening to him either, given he "had been delivering that lecture since 1922" (!). But it would seem that the Old Goat knows something about one of the academics he encounters, and what he knows will lead to his brutal death... 

The crime was fairly easy to figure out, but this book was elevated above the ordinary for me by Barnard's absolutely wicked sense of humour about the snobbishness of Australian academia ("This is what one gets for employing Adult Education lecturers who got their degrees at Leeds, thought Wickham grimly.") and the rural 'squattocracy' who provided the social background to all the university's activities ("'Just like the Wickhams to let the drink run out,' said Mrs McKay, a little tipsily, to Mrs Lullham. 'They’re only academics, after all, however much they try to hide it.'"). 

The actual crime, and the inexperienced macho racist cop assigned to solve it, were far less interesting than the setting and eccentric characters who-[might have]-dunnit. (I discovered this book thanks to clothes in books.)

Nathanael West Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

"Perhaps I can make you understand. Let's start from the beginning. A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke. He welcomes the job, for it might lead to a gossip column, and anyway he's tired of being a leg man. He too considers the job a joke, but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator."

Ouch. What a book. Like being mentally excoriated with a wire brush. Like the best sort of totally black satire. No glimmer of relief, no hint of light, and certainly no hint of escape in here. But also funny - well, sort of funny. Uncomfortable, ghastly funny... 

What hope is there for the writer of the lonely hearts column ("the priests of twentieth-century America") in Depression America? Alcoholic, depressed, unloved and unlovable ("his heart remained a congealed lump of icy fat"), prone to fighting, poor at grasping cues, misunderstood, self-defeating ("he stumbled purposely, so that she would take his confusion for honest feeling"), numb from suffering ("more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife"), doomed... 

There's a lot going on here about the body too that I think I haven't properly grasped (when I wikipedia-ed it, apparently it is "Bergsonian" - I am in no way enlightened. Also existential. And Expressionist. Hmmm.). How can something so horribly bleak also be funny? 

A classic: I'm glad I've finally read, but oh how miserable I felt after I finished.

Lawrence Block Hit Man (1998)

He took the exit for the mall and found a parking place, taking careful note of where it was so he could find it again. Once, a couple of years ago, he had parked a rental car at a mall in suburban Detroit without paying attention to where he’d parked it or what it looked like. For all he knew it was still there.

A likeable hit man? A dog-loving stamp-collecting likeable hit man in need of a good psychiatrist? The 'voice' of Block's professional killer is just wonderful - sort of pensive, thoughtful, idealistic, melancholy, desperate to feel needed - a 'good' man despite his terrible day job. This book is a series of short stories ostensibly about John Keller's assignments, but really about what has made him the man he is today. If you like slowish little polished gems (someone sweetening a coffee "stirred it long enough to dissolve marble chips") about moral ambiguity, then these are for you.

He did that sometimes. Looked up his name in the phone books of strange cities, as if he might actually find himself there. Not another person with the same name, that happened often enough, his was not an uncommon name. But find himself, his actual self, living an altogether different life in some other city.

Lawrence Block died this year too (I see a theme here). This is the first of his books I've read, but I'm very keen to read more now. (I found this book thanks to belle, book and candle.)

*

Note [27/11/2013]: Brona remind me that I should link my Barnard post to her wonderful AusReading Month. Please do visit her blog for links to many, many interesting posts on Australian books and writers.

{review} tampa

Alissa Nutting Tampa (2013)

 

Cover of the year, surely?

I could smell the mint chewing gum on his breath -- he'd indeed prepared himself for a make-out session. Could consent have been any more transparent?

This is a controversial book. Its taboo subject matter has led to some informal banning in Australia; it has also polarized readers with regards to literary merit (is it the new Lolita?), its categorization as 'satire', the narrative value of its relentless sex scenes, and so on. It will not be everyone's cup of tea. 

Yet, if one can enjoy a book despite the repugnant theme of paedophilia that forms its core, then I suspect that the author has pulled off quite a coup. I think Nutting has accomplished a remarkable satiric take on her topic. Even more to be admired, Nutting's work forces the reader to have a really good think about the double standard whereby female desire for pubescent males is considered less morally repugnant (and/or illegal) than that of male desire for pubescent prey: "What that jury saw was a red-blooded American teenage boy asked to repent for nailing a hot blonde. I think our chances are good." {spoiler there, obviously!} 

The protagonist is devastatingly upfront with the reader about her desires and how she will achieve them. Calculating and ruthless, obsessed with youth and her prettiness (her own and her victims': "I had a face that denied excretion"), she is utterly fascinatingly monstrous. She will do anything to achieve her ends, and anything to protect herself from exposure (although, like most narcissists, she never really factors in this exposure - "People who look like me don’t go to jail."):

I also had the fear that with the right photographer, the real me might accidentally be captured -- that in looking at the photo, suddenly everyone's eyes would widen and they'd actually see me for the very first time: Oh my God -- you're a soulless pervert!

She will mold her body into a tool to assist her achieve her ends. She will spend years studying a profession which interests her only as a means to gain access to her prey. As a teacher, her only interest is using her classroom texts (brilliantly apt: Romeo & Juliet, The Scarlet Letter, To Kill a Mockingbird; and she had studied classics at college) to get her class to talk "sex talk veiled behind a thin veneer of literary studies". 

She is absolutely aware that she is a predator: "Nothing would keep me from him."

But I wanted him to know this was certainly out of the ordinary. After a moment of debate, I decided it was worth it. "I don’t even do this with my husband," I added. This wasn’t entirely true of course, but I doubted that saying We do this when I want Ford to feel indebted to me and I've doped myself to the moon on barbiturates would have the same persuasive vigor.

She sees "consent" in any minor gesture; pausing only once to examine if she has gone too far, if her victim was "too out of control — too molested perhaps, his orgasms a seeming consent to acts he didn't fully enjoy."

I knew I'd find it hard to cut the girls in my classes any slack at all, knowing the great generosity life had already gifted them. They were at the very beginning of their sexual lives with no need to hurry -- whenever they were ready, a great range of attractions would be waiting for them, easy and disposable. Their urges would grow up right alongside them like a shadow. They'd never feel their libido a deformed thing to be kept chained up in the attic of their mind and to only be fed in secret after dark.

This is a gung-ho portrayal of total female narcissistic sociopathy. Even her ability to fake empathy is secondary to achieving her goal:

I knew I should produce a look of worry or strain, but habit prevented me from forming any facial expression that might aid in the development of fine lines.

What interested me a lot about this portrayal (which we receive through her own voice) is how few excuses we are offered. There is no aetiology. The abuse card seems absent. What has made her the predator she is today? There is a slight nostalgic element, but that's about it (little family background, for instance). What if there are no excuses? What is clear is her own utter repugnance at sex with anyone older than her ideal, including her hapless husband, a policeman. For him, her extreme efforts to remain youthful have rendered her a perfect trophy wife ("The more I did for Ford's ego publicly, I'd found, the less I had to do to satisfy him privately"); his desires - and her occasional inability to fend him off (to "pillage me... to ruin the landscape") - are controlled with sleeping pills and alcohol.

My real problem with Ford is actually his age. Ford, like the husbands of most women who marry for money, is far too old. Since I'm twenty-six myself, it’s true that he and I are close peers. But thirty-one is roughly seventeen years past my window of sexual interest.

The obvious comparison text to Tampa is Nabokov's Lolita. It might be considered more of an intertext than a comparative text - the verbal 'music' of Nabokov's text is not echoed, for instance, and Tampa is sometimes crushingly obvious ("There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?"), but to appreciate fully Nutting's takedown of another sexual double-standard, Lolita is an essential text. "If you were a teenage male," the commentator began, pointing a leering finger back at the photo, "would you call a sexual experience with her abuse?" 

That one comes to sympathize (to some extent) with this woman and her fears of ageing and becoming sexually unattractive to boys, is also due in no small part to the fact that this book is as funny as it is devastatingly unsettling.

His hands slid up to his face and over the back of his head. "God," he said. His breathing broke into an unusual pattern; for a moment I thought he might cry. "You can see into my bedroom from the street? But it’s so far back on the side..."

In a perfect world, I could've assured him that without binoculars one probably couldn't see inside very well at all, but discretion warranted I keep this detail to myself.

This book raises all sorts of questions, of course, perhaps the most interesting being that of whether satire has any boundaries it cannot cross or any finally definitive taboos that it cannot challenge. Then again, after Lolita, what ground can Nutting retread that could so profoundly and deliberately shock our sensibilities? 

I almost daren't offer an "If you liked this...", but I was reminded of another extremely funny sexual satire upon an unpromising topic - sex work in the office - which I read last year, and which gives a taste of the tone of Tampa, without the paedophilic content: Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods {REVIEW}. It is not, I suspect, a coincidence, that the sex of both of these authors has influenced my tolerant responses.

     

{review} lightning rods

Helen DeWitt Lightning Rods (2012)

Everyone gets crazy thoughts from time to time, it’s what you do about them that counts.

This is a book about a man who installs women as sex-workers in corporate offices. It is also a brilliant and funny satire on sex, salesmanship and corporate culture. 

Joe is a down-at-heel and not very successful vacuum-cleaner door-to-door salesman when he is struck by a brilliant idea to counter sexual harassment in the workplace by providing a practical and anonymous outlet for all that pent-up corporate machismo. That the idea is born of his own particular personal masturbatory fantasy only makes him more convinced he is the man to sell it. And so the 'lightning rod' is born, along with a host of other masterful ideas that were not necessary but become a necessity - "a multi-million dollar industry that would improve the lives of millions of Americans." 

This book is wonderfully grubby read: what if your crazy 'What if…?' porn brainstorm became embedded in corporate culture - and even law - all the way up to the very top of government? 

So, what does a lightning rod, earning money to put herself through Harvard Law, do during the time she is required to "stick her fanny through a hole in a wall and let someone give her the old Roto-Rooter from the rear"?

She spent quite a lot of time thinking about which particular project would give her a real sense of achievement. What she finally decided was that this was the ideal opportunity to read Proust’s masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, in French. The amount of time lightning rods were typically expected to be on duty would be just right for working through a French text. On the one hand she wouldn't be reading a lot at any one time, so she wouldn't get discouraged. On the other hand, it was quite a long book, so by the time she finished she’d probably have enough money for Harvard Law School. She could look at the volumes on her shelf and see how far she had to go. So she went to the university bookstore and bought the complete set, and she started at page one, paragraph one on her first day on the job. Sure enough, the idea worked perfectly. The fact that she had to struggle with the French meant she didn't have a lot of attention to spare for anything else that might be going on. She’d go through as much text as she could, underlining words she didn't know with a pencil. At night she’d look up the words and read through the passage again. The next day she’d read on. Within a month she was having to look up fewer words. Within six months she was reading the French almost as well as she read English—and that was entirely the result of doing it on a daily basis.

In sum: dementedly funny and rather shocking; perfect characterization; spot on narrative tone. Not for the faint of heart. I wonder how I would feel about this book if it hadn't been written by a woman? Do I become complicit in my own objectification when I think that it must be OK because it was written by a woman? Hmmm.

{review} stepford wives

Ira Levin The Stepford Wives (1972)

Ah, cultural memory. I've neither seen the films (1975; 2004) nor read the book before now but the concept of a 'Stepford Wife' is nevertheless embedded in my consciousness.

...Kit said, folding the T-shirt. "These thngs came out nice and white, didn't they?" She put the folded T-shirt into the laundry basket, smiling.

Like an actress in a commercial.

That's what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That's what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

This is a very clever little book - Levin takes contemporary anxieties about the effect of the feminist movement on women as home-makers and turns them into a horror story. The men in this book, for the most part, give lip service - and what often seems like far more than lip service - to the emancipation of women, but all along they're plotting. Against us... 

Joanna moves to the inordinately perfect town of Stepford (Connecticut) with her husband and child. She is a photographer who has had some successes with her work. Her husband is a traditional provider figure who goes off to the city to work, but he is keen to support her enterprises. This is, after all, the early 1970s and women are getting a grip on their 'rights'. When Joanna attempts to set up some - to her - familiar women's groups in Stepford she runs into a strange phenomenon: almost all of the women she meets express a lack of interest in outside activities. They are content to stay in their homes and they have no time for meeting with other women because they must clean their homes. 

Joanna asked, "Were the Women's Club meetings more boring than housework?"

Kit frowned. "No," she said, "but they weren't as useful as housework."

Why are all their husbands spending so much time at their men's club? The charmingly messy Joanna slowly becomes suspicious of their wives' automaton-like devotion to housework. And, ominiously, slowly but surely all of the recent arrivals in Stepford are also changing into sort of fantasy housewife sex-bombs with housework obsessions who won't go out at night as they've got to scrub all the floors. Again. And again.

[Bobbie] looked the way she had on Sunday - beautiful, her hair done, her face made-up. And she was wearing some kind of padded high-uplift  bra under her green sweater, and a hip-whittling girdle under the brown pleated skirt.
In her immaculate kitchen she said, "Yes, I've changed. I realized I was being awfully sloppy and self-indulgent. It's no disgrace to be a good homemaker. I've decided to do my job conscientiously, the way Dave does his, and to be more careful about my appearance.

Can Joanna save herself from the fate of a Stepford Wife before it is too late?

A thoroughly enjoyable satire on the hidden perils of suburbia. This book makes one uncomfortable enough that I think it should nowadays also be considered a seminal text within the history of the women's movement.

{review} flowers of unnatural hue

Robert Hichens The Green Carnation (1894)

"I heard a bon mot of yours at the Foreign Office last night.

"Indeed. What was it?" 

"Er--really I--oh! it was something about life, you know, with a sort of general application, one of your best."

I thought I should read something appropriate while following Oscar Wilde Week at Esoteric London last week.

"These strawberries are very good," he said. "I should finish them, only I hate finishing anything. There is something so commonplace about it. Don't you think so? Commonplace people are always finishing off things, and getting through things. They map out their days, and have special hours for everything. I should like to have special hours for nothing. That would be much more original."

The Green Carnation ("the arsenic flower of an exquisite life") is notorious for cementing Oscar Wilde's fall from grace. Hichens was well acquainted with the circle around Wilde. His satirical take on these late nineteenth century 'Moderns' is pitch-perfect. This is a very funny book if you can forget the terrible aftermath. It is wall-to-wall Wilde-styled nonsensicality; indeed "the art of preposterous conversation" often reads just like Wilde. The effect of this overload of overstyled observations on the most banal topics - along with sweepingly illogical twists on the  Wildean 'habit' of contradiction and unconventionality and originality - serves to render Wildeism ridiculous.

"How curious," said Mr. Amarinth, taking a bun delicately between his plump white fingers. "My temper and my heart are the only two things I never lose! Everything else vanishes. I think the art of losing things is a very subtle art. So few people can lose anything really beautifully. Anybody can find a thing. That is so simple. A crossing sweeper can discover a sixpence lying in the road. It is the crossing sweeper who loses a sixpence who shows real originality."

Wilde is referred to in the text by name ("I shall go and lie down and read Oscar Wilde's 'Decay of Lying.' That always sends me to sleep. It is like himself, all artfulness and no art.") but he is represented in the satire by one Esmé Amarinth ("I was born epigrammatic, and my dying remark will be a paradox") who is inseparable from Lord Reggie Hastings (i.e. Lord Alfred Douglas). It is Lord Reggie's role as an inferior copy of the dazzling original which enables the text to poke its best jabs at the Wilde phenomenon:

Reggie Hastings, at least, was not ashamed. The mantel-piece in his sitting-room bore only photographs of himself, and he explained this fact to inquirers by saying that he worshipped beauty. Reggie was very frank. When he could not be witty, he often told the naked truth; and truth, without any clothes on, frequently passes for epigram. It is daring, and so it seems clever.

Lord Reggie and Esmé go to Surrey for a week of carefully contrived rusticity with the London hostess Mrs. Windsor ("Ah! here is our Bovril! I feel so delightfully vicious when I drink it, so unconventional!"), the theatrical Madame Valtesi ("I always hate to see people drinking when I have finished. It makes me feel like a barmaid.") and the young and highly conventional widow Lady Locke who may or may not marry Lord Reggie:

"What do you think about it, Reggie?" Amarinth said, as they began to discuss their oysters. "Could you commit the madness of matrimony with Lady Locke? You are so wonderful as you are, so complete in yourself, that I scarcely dare to wish it, or anything else for you: and you live so comfortably upon debts, that it might be unwise to risk the possible discomfort of having money.

Lady Locke soons discovers that the handsome Lord Reggie is appallingly self-obsessed and shallow. But is he also wicked?

She still fancied that Lord Reggie was nothing more than a whimsical poseur, bitten by the tarantula of imitation that preys upon weak natures.

But further events leave her unconvinced:

"But do you really object to the green carnation?"

"That depends. Is it a badge?"

"How do you mean?"

"I only saw about a dozen in the Opera House to-night, and all the men who wore them looked the same. They had the same walk, or rather waggle, the same coyly conscious expression, the same wavy motion of the head. When they spoke to each other, they called each other by Christian names. Is it a badge of some club or some society, and is Mr. Amarinth their high priest? They all spoke to him, and seemed to revolve round him like satellites around the sun."

"My dear Emily, it is not a badge at all. They wear it merely to be original."

"And can they only be original in a buttonhole way? Poor fellows."

"You don't understand. They like to draw attention to themselves."

"By their dress? I thought that was the prerogative of women."

"Really, Emily, you are colonial..."

She declines Sir Reggie's proposal ("Esmé said to-day that marriage was a brilliant absurdity. Will you be brilliantly absurd? Will you marry me?"):

It seems to me that Mr. Amarinth has created a cult. Let me call it the cult of the green carnation. I suppose it may be called modern. To me it seems very silly and rather wicked. If you would take that hideous green flower out of your coat, not because I asked you to, but because you hated it honestly, I might answer your question differently. If you could forget what you call art, if you could see life at all with a straight, untrammelled vision, if you could be like a man, instead of like nothing at all in heaven or earth except that dyed flower, I might perhaps care for you in the right way. But your mind is artificially coloured: it comes from the dyer's. It is a green carnation; and I want a natural blossom to wear in my heart."

Masses of epigrams on the commonplace are all marked by the simplistic opposing of whatever society values: "We make vices of our virtues, and virtues of our vices. The former we consider the duty that we owe to others, the latter the duty that we owe to ourselves." 

The text also takes some jabs at the issue of whether Wilde's epigrams were indeed original or borrowed from other languages. 

The Londoners escape to rusticity is as much a fraud as their utterances: "She rustled away with weary grace, rattling delicately a large bunch of keys that didn't open any thing in particular. They were a part of her get up as a country hostess." Everything is a vast fraud:

"That sky is becoming so terribly imitative that I can hardly go on. Why are modern sunsets so intolerably true to Turner?"

[Reggie] was holding up a table-spoon filled with marmalade to catch the light from a stray sunbeam that filtered in through the drawn blinds, and wore a rapt look, a "caught up" look, as Mrs. Windsor would have expressed it. "Good morning," he said softly. "Is not this marmalade Godlike? This marvellous, clear, amber glow, amber with a touch of red in it, almost makes me believe in an after life. Surely, surely marmalade can never die!" "I must have been mistaken," Mrs. Windsor thought, as she expressed her sense of the eternity of jams in general in suitable language.

As I said, a very funny book.

I read The Green Carnation for 99 cents on my Kindle but it is available all over the place for free (e.g., Gutenberg) Incidentally, I didn't realise that Robert Hichens wrote The Paradine Case (1933) on which was based the Gregory Peck movie of the same name (1947).

Rating: 9/10

If you liked this... read the real thing. Oscar Wilde.