A plaintive cry from the depths of the unknowing

So, now that I've finished reading Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, can someone tell me whose copy I have got? Really. Most likely candidates: Sam, Ron, Raf and Tenny. This isn't a joke.

With the ferrule of his walking stick

With the ferrule of his walking stick Denis began to scratch the boar's long bristly back. The animal moved a little so as to bring himself within easier range of the instrument that evoked in him such delicious sensations; then he stood stock still, softly grunting his contentment. The mud of years flaked off his sides in a powdery scurf.

'What a pleasure it is,' said Denis, 'to do somebody a kindness. I believe I enjoy scratching this pig quite as much as he enjoys being scratched. If only one could always be kind with so little expense of trouble...'

from Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close / Jonathan Safran Foer

How I felt about Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, somewhat in the style of said book:

This is a book I didn't read for a long time, because sometimes it gives me extremely heavy boots thinking about books that lots of other people have read and I haven't read yet, and on top of that, it's a book about a so, so sad thing in recent Western history that is very confusing and distressing. Anyway, I finally got around to reading it, and I really liked it, and it definitely wasn't shiitake like I was scared it would be.

This is a book about a boy called Oskar Schell, who is extremely clever and endearing -- that is, if you like smart kids who have no friends -- and whose family has suffered a lot, including when Oskar's father died when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. One day, Oskar finds a key in an envelope that has BLACK written on it, and this makes him EXTREMELY DEPRESSED VERY EXCITED INCREDIBLY DETERMINED, since he thinks it has something to do with his dad. So he tries to find out which of the 162 million locks in New York City the key opens, and along the way he meets people like Mr. Black, who was born on January 1, 1901, and has a bibliographical index with cards and a one-word biography ("Henry Kissinger: war!" "Tom Cruise: money!") for tens of thousands of people.

Another thing that Jonathan Safran Foer does with this book is talk about documentation and how it helps people process things and also, how much people love words and pictures. Oskar has a scrapbook titled Stuff That Happened to Me and it looks like this:

(I got these pictures from here, here, here.)

Oskar's grandfather can't speak and he has to also write a lot, and he has plenty of notebooks that have just one word or phrase on them, like this:

help

And sometimes Jonathan Safran Foer uses other ways of showing how heavy people's boots can get by doing things with words and how they sit on the page that are different to what other people usually do in books. Like sometimes he does this thing with kerning that I can't figure out how to do with html. And sometimes he does things like lots of space to you can tell or what's going on. (Okay, it turns out I can't make bigger than a regular word space in html either. Who knew?) Sometimes I wished the author wouldn't do all these things, but other times I really didn't mind. There's a really good couple of pages about testing pens.

One thing that was weird was that Oskar gets a letter from Stephen Hawking, which I'm pretty sure would never happen. What about how busy he gets? What about the fact that he probably wouldn't really have time to read all the letters a little kid sends him? What about the time that even if he read all the letters sent to him by the kid, he wouldn't have time to send a letter back? I just googled "getting a letter from Stephen Hawking" and there were no results, so I don't think anyone has ever received a response from a fan letter to Stephen Hawking, and I guess if anyone ever googles that again, they'll just get my blog. José!

I guess the final thing I want to say about this book is that the father in it, and the son actually too, are two of my favourite characters in a book I've read all year. And this book is a really beautiful way of saying: 'I love you and I want you to be safe' to fathers and sons and mothers and daughters like Oskar and his dad and mother and grandmother.

Quiet weeks.

Hi everyone. It's going to be a bit quiet here for the next couple of weeks. There are just some things a girl has to do. Like work, and eat pastries. Sadly, in this case, it's more of the former. But, god as my witness, I will manfully try to up the ante on the latter.

Carry Me Down / MJ Hyland

MJ Hyland is one of my 2009 obsessions. First reason: watch this SlowTV video to see why. Just two minutes will do. Are you back? That powerfully resonant voice, her dark lipstick, the way she described her third book, This Is How, as her 'turd' novel: Hyland has a kind of terrible, magnetic charisma. I've heard she only eats meat and chocolate. I'm terrified of her, and I've never even met her. Second reason: Carry Me Down, which is almost a perfect book.

I've written before about how I seem to be reading a lot of books that feature a child as the main character lately -- Lindqvist's Let the Right One in, Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Larbalestier's Liar quickly come to mind. Carry Me Down is no different, with eleven-year-old John Egan's tale beginning as follows:

It is January, a dark Sunday in winter, and I sit with my mother and father at the kitchen table. My father sits with his back to the table, his feet pressed against the wall, a book in his lap. My mother sits to my right and her book rests on the table. I sit close to her, and my chair, which faces the window, is near the heat of the range.

There is a pot of hot tea in the middle of the table and we each have a cup and plate. There are ham and turkey sandwiches on the plates and, if we want more to eat or drink, there is plenty. The pantry is full.

It's an incomparable picture of familial equanimity, simple and affecting. If a child could feel this at ease and complete on a day of no import, perhaps the family described is like this every day. And if this is an 'every day', then it's a warmly intellectual family: the cat's name is Crito, and the book John's father, Michael, is reading is called Phrenology and the Criminal Cranium. He is studying for a university entrance exam and plays word games with John at table, encouraging John to spar with him using the tales of Sisyphus and Tantalus.

Of course, it's not long until these perfect elements shift and grate against one another. Helen, John's mother, is changeable. She fends off and interrogates John as she might an adult: 'You were staring again. You were staring at me'; or she is charming, engaged, fun -- a delightful mother who tickles and tells stories. John's grandmother is there too, or rather, the three Egans live with her, as Michael hasn't been employed for three years. Michael himself is a gamble at the best of times. One day, he and John must drown the kittens Crito has borne. When John challenges his resolve ('I knew you couldn't kill them'), Michael takes one of the kittens in his hand and smashes its head on the bath, and then says he is not sad about what he has done. However, John knows that his father is lying.

John's realisation precipitates not a readjustment of the way he sees his family, but an obsession with becoming a human lie detector. Obsession is a boon to any plot, but the way Hyland ascribes it to this young boy is both sympathetic and disturbing. John creates a journal called the Gol of Seil and records inside it every lie he witnesses. It's a simple project that echoes the limits of his ability to understand the many societal roles of untruths, whether they are (in his taxonomy) major, minor or white. His attempt to control the emotional chaos that is bristling around him is touching and remarkably single-minded. As John Egan attempts to strip the people around him of his lies, so too does he strip his world of its protective buffers and linings, uprooting a thorn bush of a family that had well tangled itself across and into the ground. It's riveting to read, and the results are severe to experience.

Carry Me Down uses deceptively simple language to uncover a fraught domestic world, one in which the players begin with a face for each other and us, through the child John; and another for other times and other places. I said at the outset that Carry Me Down is an 'almost perfect' novel, and these other lives evaporate a little towards the end, a little unnaturally. But there's no denying the power and beauty of this novel. Read it and weep.

David Foster Wallace Week: Part V

Möbius master: David Foster Wallace and the masculine manipulator^1,2

It's been a week-long Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace spectacular here at 3000 BOOKS. I've been discussing various aspects of the late writer's second short story collection. What could be more fitting than to end by discussing the 'Interviews' themselves? Why, I can't think of anything. Let's proceed.

There are four interview interludes in the book. Each interlude contains a number of dialogues with so-called hideous men. It's not entirely clear what the context of these conversations is, although we can guess that it's something scientific or medical. A new interviewee is denoted by depersonalised details: 'B.I. #20 12-96; New Haven CT'. The interlocutor is similarly mysterious; questions are cut out and replaced with, simply, 'Q'. (The film -- which, despite my enduring love for Will Arnett, I will in high likelihood not be seeing -- has made its own pretty safe guess about who 'Q' is.)

DFW makes it rather obvious why these fellows aren't the nicest of people. One guy, R, describes implies that he hit on a woman he met at an airport. He meets her while she is breaking down, after realising her lover has broken his promise to start a life with her. R 'start[s] telling her how she's right and don't even deserve and how it's true most guys are shit and how my heart's going out and all like that.' And then, in truly one of the most loathsome outros to a conversation ever recorded in the annals of American literature, 'A' asks R what happened:

R: 'Heh heh.'
A: 'Heh heh heh.'
R: 'You really got to ask?'
A: 'You bastard. You shitheel.'
R: 'Well you know how it is I mean what are you going to do.'
A: 'You shitheel.'
R: 'Well you know.'

The next interview begins like this: 'I have to admit it was a big reason for marrying her thinking I wasn't likely going to do better than this because of the way she had a good body even after she'd had a kid. Trim and good and good legs -- she'd had a kid but wasn't all blown out and veiny and sagged.' Hold on there, ladies, form an orderly line.

But there would be no kick to the stories, nothing to keep my eyes to the page, if these hombres³
were just all nasty. The most involved interview occurs late in the book, with Mr. 'New Haven CT' responding. New Haven is talking about how he fell in love with a woman after she related to him the horrifying story of her rape and near-murder by a severely mentally ill man. Not so bad on its face, really. Like many of DFW's 'hideous men', NH is extremely intelligent and self-aware; he is extravagantly minded to preclude criticism or negative impressions and is able to do so adroitly:

I'm not putting it right, I can't make you feel what I felt. You'll turn this into Narcissistic Male Wants Women's Gaze On Him At Climax, I know.

Nothing new there: intellectual douchebag appropriates women's theoretical constructs to further oppress them. NH rankles along, pre-emptors armed and clichés spiralling everywhere, but then he, like many of the other interviewees, has an epiphany:

It would depend what you meant by true. I simply didn't care. I was moved, changed -- believe what you will. My mind seemed to be moving at the quote speed of light. I was so sad. And that whether or not what she believed happened happened -- it seemed true even if it wasn't. That even if the whole focused-soul-connection theology, that even if it was just catachrestic New Age goo, her belief in it had saved her life, so whether or not it's goo becomes irrelevant, no? Can you see why this, realizing this, would make you feel conflicted in -- of realizing your entire sexuality and sexual history had less genuine connection or feeling than I felt simply lying there listening to her talk about lying there realizing how lucky she'd been that some angel had visited her in psychotic guise and show her what she'd spend her whole life praying was true?

NH is still, no question, a prick. The self-conscious ('quote') framing of his soliloquy, his disdain for the beliefs and even the experience of someone he is meanwhile claiming he loved and who changed his life, all that purely rhetorical interrogation...I'll bet this guy earns his money at the Bar. And even this quote, excerpted, probably isn't enough to turn the casual reader into an NH convert. But for me, the fact that DFW could make me give two tosses about whether NH was really in love, after making me wade through torrents of the man's disgusting platitude/anti-platitude schtick, was a huge achievement. Such a huge emotional torque is a writerly feat not to be coughed at. I was kind of almost steaming in admiration at this point. Of course, I got my just deserts for allowing myself to be manipulated. I won't tell you how, but DFW's pattern was entrenched enough by this point for me to know what was coming -- and I still felt a sucker-punched.

No matter what you might like to say about DFW, I think I would try and jump a stream for him. You can't admit but that he put everything on the line for his readers, and that is why I loved reading this book so much. Not to venerate a palpable trickster over a quiet one -- I would easily walk miles for Marilynne Robinson, for example.⁴ But it's always exciting to watch the Indian Juggler: someone who does something so unimaginable for your own physical body or operating brain that it seems impossible. Yet when they do it, it's perfect, it's beautiful, and it just about takes your breath away.

¹ Wow, if I'd known in advance about the lame, faux-academic titles I was going to use for this series, I would have tried to make a Harry Potter joke, at least.
² It's as you feared: now that I know how to do superscript in html, you'd better expect at least a footnote per post from this point on.
³ 'I'll take synonyms for "men", for five hundred, Larry.'
⁴ Not sure what's with all the 'prove your admiration through the completion of physical challenges' clauses here.

David Foster Wallace Week: Part IV

David Foster Wallace and pre-empting the editorial reader

The therapist said that she felt she could support the depressed person's use of the word 'vulnerable' far more wholeheartedly than she could support the use of 'pathetic,' since her gut (i.e., the therapist's gut) was telling her that the depressed person's proposed use of 'pathetic' felt not only self-hating but also needy and even somewhat manipulative.

...

The behaviors, in other word, were primitive emotional prophylaxes whose real function was to preclude intimacy; they were psychic armor designed to keep others at a distance so that they (i.e., others) could not get emotionally close enough to the depressed person to inflict any wounds that might echo and mirror the deep vestigial wounds of the depressed person's childhood, wounds which the depressed person was unconsciously determined to keep repressed at all costs.

(italics mine, from 'The Depressed Person', Brief Interviews with Hideous Men)