Something to Be Desired by Thomas McGuane

So it's clear where I'm coming from, I first need to explain how much of an expert I am in Thomas McGuane's life and career.

I am nothing of an expert in McGuane's career or life. In fact, reading this book, and having a vague sense his 1985 he-man-isms were the product of an older man at the time, I had a vague question in my head - nothing as well-formed as a theory - that the thinness and sketchiness of Something to Be Desired was due to McGuane being old or even dying during the writing of it, so it could be forgiven or even celebrated as a triumph of  his writing power.

But I checked afterward. McGuane was born in 1939. This was his fifth novel. He's written four more since then, and is still alive today. So I have to revise my theory, and say that this is just how he wanted to write this story: to have a main character who falls backwards into everything, but usually success; to have women who are cyphers at best and sex-rewards or markers for time passing most often; and to have a plot that meanders vaguely and randomly and mostly functions to allow McGuane to toss in his various post-Hemingway musings and attempted Deep Thoughts.

I've only read one McGuane novel before - The Bushwacked Piano - and so any general conclusions I might draw will be badly-informed and slapdash. But both of those novels focus on one guy, and my description of Piano's hero as a "magnificent asshole" applies almost as well to Something's Lucien Taylor as well.

Like Piano, Something begins with an Important Moment in its hero's youth, so we readers are clear that he's messed up because of his relationship with His Daddy. Again, I can't say if McGuane does this consistently throughout his career, but both of these novels are in the the hyper-masculine mid-century style, featuring men who are endlessly self-destructive in ways that never quite damage them in any serious way, endlessly attractive to only the women that readers of these books will find compelling and sexy, and endlessly lucky as the author presses his greasy thumb on the scales to make sure every last aspect of their lives works out for the best in the end, after the requisite amount of hell-raisin' and drinkin' and whorin', of course.

Something mostly takes place over about a year - it's vague in this, as it is in so many things - in Lucien's life. You see, Lucien had Two Great Loves of His Life in college: Emily, who was wild and with whom he would have been two twinned artists' spirits, and Suzanne, who was stable and solid and who he eventually married after Emily dumped him for a doctor.

That was some number of years in the past - let's say ten, since Lucien and Suzanne have a son, James, whose age is never clear in any way whatsoever. (He could be a typical five, or a dreamy ten. McGuane is only interested in the sons of his heroes as signposts to their virility and markers of his line-of-men theories.) Lucien has been working around Latin American for USIA.

But Emily has just murdered her husband, for reasons the novel never quite gets into but assures us are he-was-abusive and entirely justifiable, and, besides, it means she's available for Lucien again, which is the real point. So Lucien immediately abandons his non-working wife and young son in the foreign country his job dragged them to with one of the most obnoxiously stereotypical "I need to figure myself out" speeches in literature, and flies back to his beloved Montana to circle Emily and try to get into her pants and/or save her from the consequences of her actions.

Lucien puts up the money for Emily's bail - where a mid-level foreign-service functionary has that kind of money is never clear; Lucien in general does not seem to be leading the life he actually has in this novel, but something closer to the life of rich, famous writer Thomas McGuane, fawned on by all and serially married - and her ranch is put up as security for his money. This doesn't seem to align to how bail actually works, but, anyway, Emily runs off with another guy to avoid trial and Lucien loses his money but gets the ranch, which seems to be more valuable.

Lucien mopes around, off-handedly sleeping with all of the female barflies of the fictional town of Deadrock - one of them gets a name and almost a personality; she is, of course, crazy. He then gets a bank loan, in a scene that even McGuane doesn't seem to want anyone to believe, and converts a hot spring on the ranch into a massively successful and lucrative spa. Lucien finds running the spa, and generally being a functional, useful adult, to be unpleasant, but he does it, perhaps in McGuane's attempt to show his growth as a person.

He hectors Suzanne, first at long distance - though she seems to have returned to Montana at some point as well - and then in person, when he installs her in a cabin on the spa's land, to return to him, because he's learned his lesson now that he's rich and the crazy women ran away from him.

Suzanne, I'm sorry to say, does somewhat reconcile with Lucien, or at least seems to be heading that way late in this short novel. But, of course, we learn that Emily has killed the guy she ran away with as well - crazy bitches gonna be crazy, right? - and she comes back...for no good reason from her point of view, and really only for McGuane's narrative purposes.

At this point, there's maybe a dozen pages left in the novel: this is a short book and McGuane does not go into detail of anything ever other than Lucien's random he-man thoughts about random bullshit. It has an ending that I seriously hope McGuane didn't intend to be reminiscent of Casablanca - Lucien sticks Emily on a plane with a speech - and then he watches Suzanne drive off with James for a roadtrip the she promises she will return from. And...scene!

I think McGuane is a writer for men of his generation, and maybe somewhat for the generation afterward (mine), but only for the ones already steeped in all of the outdoorsy, he-man women-haters club mindset. His work is often described as funny, and he does have a wit and energy to his writing, but it's in the service of these horrible assholes, and I have a hard time seeing the appeal. I would very much not recommend McGuane to women readers, or to any men readers who have actually liked and understood women at any point in their lives.

Sleeping in Flame by Jonathan Carroll

There are writers you read avidly for a decade or more and then just stop, suddenly. Sometimes you can define a reason - but no one ever needs a reason not to read a book. We all are not reading millions of books, every second of every day. It's the default state of humanity.

I read Jonathan Carroll's books, up to about Glass Soup, I think. I discovered him probably in high school, read backwards and forwards from there, and he was SFF-adjacent enough that keeping up with his work in my SFBC days was simple. But at some point I started saying things in public like "All Carroll novels are basically the same," which indicates a certain weariness.

I think he stopped getting published in as-large ways about the same time I stopped being as plugged-in to publishing, so it's possible I never even noticed he had any new work, these last twenty years. The literary world is vast, and you need to go out of your way to explore it.

I came back to Carroll for a re-read - his 1988 novel Sleeping in Flames was reprinted in the Vintage Contemporaries series, and I still have a shelf of those books for a semi-broken reading project I originally planned to run about a decade ago. (Super-short explanation: read the books in rough Vintage-publication order, basically thirty years after publication. I started just fine, but then fell afoul of the kind of literary novel that kneecaps your entire reading life.)

Carroll writes magic realism - assuming anyone born in North America and mostly resident in Europe can do so, which may be a point of contention - lightly-plotted books, floating along on amiable narrative voices and slice-of-(privileged)-life, in which fantastic elements accumulate slowly but come to be central before the (usually fairly muted, smaller-scale) endings. His first couple of books were published in the fantasy genre, but he's never been solidly at home there: his strengths are much more on the literary side of the divide.

This is the one about screenwriter Walker Easterling, who is not quite an author-insert but is an expatriate American working as a writer and living in Vienna, so he certainly has a lot of points of similarity with his creator. It's partly about his meeting and falling in love with Maris York, but even more so about learning his true origins and dealing with the consequences of that. But, again, Carroll is a discursive writer rather than a plotty one - we learn that Walker was raised by adoptive parents early, but what that means doesn't become clear until nearly the end.

To say much more would be to explain the entire plot, but Walker does have a fantasy background, to be vague about it, and real magic does exist in this fictional world, usable both by Walker and by one other very important character. And the ending sees all of the important questions, including Walker's origins and that magic, resolved neatly.

Carroll is a pleasant writer: enjoyable and discursive, a novelist of books with more depth than they appear and more connections than is immediately evident. He can turn a bit same-y in large doses - as I discovered twenty years ago - but most people don't read in large doses, and that's easy to avoid. This would be a good one to start with, and the fact that it was published on the literary side probably means there are a lot of copies floating around to be found.

The Garden State by Gary Krist

A decade ago, I had a plan for a reading project. I thought it would be fun to read as many of the Vintage Contemporaries as I could, roughly thirty years after they were published. If I could do one of them a month - and that seemed entirely plausible - I could "keep up" with them, and read my way forward through at least the first four or five years when it was a tight, specific series with a clear look and editorial focus.

I read four of them at the end of 2014 - monthly, as planned - and just four more in 2015, where unemployment and a job transition made the first big disruption. And then I tried to read A Fan's Notes, a book that still makes me shudder to this day.

Since then, that tag has had a few scattered entries - three in 2019, one the next year, and then Steps just a month ago. And now I have another, a month later. I'm not back to the old plan - not at all - but I do still have a shelf full of these books, and want to read them eventually. It won't be in publication order, and it won't be thirty (or now forty) years later. (Some of the fatter books, and the ones that remind me more strongly of Fan's Notes, might be much later or not at all.)

That's one reason why I ended up reading Gary Krist's 1988 debut short story collection The Garden State in the summer of 2024; it was a Vintage Contemporary paperback in November of 1989.

The other reason comes from the title - this is a collection of stories all set in New Jersey, by a New Jersey writer, written and published when I was in college (not far from New Jersey) and thought I might turn into a writer myself. It was one of a bunch of collections that came up in lists from various professors, of books that budding writers should look at, and it was in the back of my head for a long time, as I transitioned from a wannabe-writer to an actual editor...and then out of that as well.

Garden State collects eight stories - two of which appeared elsewhere first, so maybe "collects" isn't quite the right word. They're all literary, all stories of relatively normal suburban people, in a modern, realistic world, with what you could call average lives and concerns - set in the milieu of northern New Jersey in the '80s, the era and place where I grew up.

I could run through the stories one by one, but I don't know if that's worth it - there's something terribly frog-boiling about detailing the plots of literary stories. Krist is a thoughtful but relatively straightforward writer, somewhat in the Raymond Carver mode here - these are about the emotions that don't get explained or spoken about, about the ways people connect with each other or fail to.

And I want to be clear that I could easily find these stories more emotionally resonant than the average reader just because they are set in my backyard, and about mostly youngish people during the time when I was young myself. (The first story, "Tribes of Northern New Jersey," is narrated by a highschool senior; there's another highschooler later, and even most of the adults are on the younger side.)

I like reading stories like this, at least every once in a while. They exercise different muscles for a reader than the plottier stories of genre fiction, force a reader to think about and look for different things in a story. And they tend, like Krist is here, to be well-written on a sentence and paragraph level, stories with prose that's enjoyable and supple and evocative - all things not to be assumed with genre.

I don't know if I'd highly recommend this specific book; it connects to me for a lot of extraliterary reasons. But I think every reader should read books like this semi-regularly if it's not part of their core reading diet, to remind them of what is possible and what else stories can do. And this one is a solid choice, especially if you do have any connection to New Jersey in the 80s.

Steps by Jerzy Kosinski

So I've been working on my own derivative version of the Bechdel Test. It's been lurking in the back of my mind, as I've been reading older books by men. I'm sure someone else - probably a woman; men like me take a lot more obviousness to notice sexism than women do - has already created something similar, probably better. But this is where I've gotten to.

There are two kinds of books by men: those in which women are people, and those in which they're not. I don't claim to have made any complete survey of the literature, but the 20th century seems to be full of books of the second kind, which is somewhat disturbing. (My impression is that the 19th was largely the other way.)

This crystalized in my mind - after several Gene Wolfe books recently, among others - when reading the 1968 experimental novel Steps by Jerzy Kosinski, from what I'm coming to think of the core period where a whole lot of men just gave up entirely on the idea of "understanding women." (As if that was a coherent activity to begin with, that "women" were a single thing one could understand - that's part of the "not seeing them as people" idea I'm talking about.)

This isn't a novel of character anyway, so it might not be fair. But the man in Steps is a clear, precise, defined character - my guess, closely modeled on his author. So the fact that the women in it are all cyphers and sex objects and plot tokens is very noticeable. (They might all be supposed to be one woman, as the man is one man. But, since they're none of them defined enough to be anyone, that's a moot point.)

Steps is a novel by courtesy. It's barely long enough to qualify under most definitions - 148 pages in the edition I read. It has no named people in it. It has no consistent narrative or plot. It does have a first-person narrator, but it's not possible that the same person is the "I" of every single section. (For large clumps, here and there - yes.) But it is prose, it is fiction, it is published between two covers - ergo, we can call it a novel.

It's made up of many - dozens - of short sections, the vast majority of them narrated by a first-person narrator, doing different things in different places. They all seem to be mid-century - there's nothing historical - and are somewhat more European-flavored than American, though that's a minor point. It might all be supposed to be set in the same country, but it doesn't have to be. There is a Party that is important in this country, or one of the countries, and it is clearly Soviet in its flavor, postwar rather than the darker more brutal interwar era. (I note here that Kosinski was Polish, born in 1933, and that he emigrated to the USA in 1957, as a young man, and never returned.)

The sections are varied, but the man finds himself in dangerous or uncomfortable situations regularly. He has little power most of the time...though he generally has power over women.

It's the kind of book that gets called a "meditation" or "vision" - that's lit-speak for "nothing consistent." The reader has to assemble any larger meaning himself. 

I found the writing compelling, and the vision of this man interesting. But, at the same time, the focus on sex forced me to realize that the women, or woman, in Steps is not a person - just an element of the plot, or an idea, or a sketch of "woman" for rhetorical purposes. And I'm finding that less and less acceptable, the more I notice it. So that ended up being my major takeaway from Steps: that women are people, and that books should reflect that. It seems a minor point, but it's rarer than I would like.

Rubicon Beach by Steve Erickson

I've written about Steve Erickson before -- hit this link for more details.

But the short form is this: he's been writing imaginative, powerful novels since the mid-80s, books that orbit fantastika elliptically, books that are about things rather than telling stories, books that are unabashedly literary and thoughtful, books that are sometimes (like Leap Year) called nonfiction even when they centrally figure historical figures living in the modern world. His books are weird, quirky, unique -- whatever adjective you want that means "radically different" or "not for a lot of people" or "way out there."

And he's not Steven Erikson: that guy's real name is Steve Rune Lundin, and he started writing more than a decade after Erickson.

Rubicon Beach was his second novel, originally published in 1986 and reprinted by Vintage Contemporaries a year later. I found it, for the first time, then or in 1988, along with Erickson's first novel, Days Between Stations.

I've been reading him ever since. I think his books are some of the most important American literature of our time.

But I still struggle to write about them in any coherent way. His books -- Rubicon Beach strongly follows this pattern -- fall into long sections that each follow seemingly separate characters, in different time periods, doing different things. The obsessions are similar, and the visions of ruin and sadness are common. His main characters are driven by things they don't understand: sometimes internal demons, sometimes events in the world, often both. There are events, but, like our own lives, those events don't tend to be nearly organized into a temporal sequence to generate excitement and adventure.

In Rubicon Beach, we open with the first-person story of Cale, just released from prison in a dystopian, falling-apart America some indeterminate time in the near future. We don't know what happened to this America. There's talk of American One and America Two, of annexes and territories, but no explanations. Cale is dropped of in a flooded Los Angeles, full of canals and ruined buildings and discrete islands. We don't know how that happened, either. He was a political prisoner, arrested for belonging to an organization whose name we never learn and whose goals aren't clear. Maybe to overthrow the government? (But, then, the government of America One or of America Two?) And he was released for an indiscreet moment: he accidentally told a joke in prison that got someone else executed.

And he keeps seeing a young barefoot Latina woman on the edge of the water, here and there in LA at night, with a man kneeling in front of her as she cuts his head off.

He's pretty sure the man is him. Every time.

The second section begins years earlier, and follows a young woman named Catherine, growing up somewhere unspecified in South America. (Yes, she is. Well, maybe she is. Erickson's like that.)

She's alone in life, friendless except for her father, but has a near-supernatural beauty, a face that sometimes transfixes everyone who sees it and sometimes disappears entirely, seeming to be other things so that Catherine herself can't be seen. She's torn from that world. kidnapped, set on a rambling path northward. She makes it to LA, in what seems to be the late '80s, in a world just like the one this novel was published into. She thinks, or is told, that crossing a specific street in LA marks her real entry to America.

That may even be true.

Her mere presence -- she doesn't even speak English; like so many women in Erickson, things happen to and around and because of her but not due to her agency -- wrecks the life of a screenwriter and his family. It destroys more than that, actually. None of that is her fault, or her action.

Her understanding of the world does not match our own. It's difficult to say which of us is correct, in the world of Rubicon Beach.

The third section of the novel dives further back in time. Its central character is Jack Mick Lake, born about 1914 and possessed of an amazing mathematical mind. He comes to believe that he's discovered a new number -- between nine and ten -- and that this number, which could have only been discovered in America, implies a whole new landscape of life. He has a complicated, tragic family. He falls in love with a young radical woman and loses her horribly while in college.

Many quiet, spent years later, he moves to Penzance in England in 1951, for no obvious reason. There he meets an old man who may be Cale and a woman who may be Catherine. And, in the end, he has to return to America, to take another long journey to that final beach.

What these three sections have to do with each other is never cleanly evident. It's nothing simple. In one sense, Rubicon Beach is a novel all about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, even though his name appears nowhere in the book. (Erickson, again, is that kind of writer: his most direct line is elliptical.)

Reading a Steve Erickson book is a distinctive experience. (This isn't even the weirdest one.) Rubicon Beach is actually relatively straightforward for Erickson, with each section telling its story cleanly, always moving forward in time.

If you read books to think deeply, to immerse yourself in new ideas and unexpected constellations of words, to wonder at amazing phrases and be surprised by endless inventiveness, you should try Erickson.

This book isn't a bad place to start, in 2019 -- it shows us a world flooded in the near future, an America broken in two for reasons it won't tell us, secret police and radical cells, women treated as objects, and the yearning for something better and truer. Sound familiar?

Book-A-Day 2018 #356: Story of My Life by Jay McInerney

Some books wear their influences really obviously. So any reviewer has to say the obvious first, just to get it out of the way.

I'm still, in my own mind, in the middle of a reading project to hit all of the classic '80s Vintage Contemporaries. (The original plan was to read them at more-or-less the time of publication, thirty years later, but that foundered on a rock called A Fan's Notes.) So I keep trying to hit those books regularly, and I thought Jay McInerney's third novel, 1988's Story of My Life, would be a quick little read, and I'd finally have a chance to read something by him that wasn't Bright Lights, Big City.

What I didn't realize was just how much Story of My Life owes to Catcher in the Rye. Oh, sure, Alison Poole is four or five years older in 1988 than Holden Caulfield was in 1951, and she definitely does more cocaine and has more sex than he did. (Plus the whole "being female" thing.) But the voice of Story is hugely influenced by Catcher, down to the occasional telling word choice like "phonies" on the first few pages. It also, I assume, was McInerney's attempt to do another book like Bright Lights -- cocaine- and voice-fueled, set in go-go '80s NYC, about spoiled youth going rotten -- after what seems to have been the misstep of his second novel Ransom.

Like Holden and the unnamed narrator of Bright Lights, Alison is hugely spoiled, vastly less self-reflective than she appears to be, adrift in her modern world, and telling us her story with an in-your-face voice. (Alison is in the first person, moving her closer to Holden than the "you" of Bright Lights.) She's a rich-girl college dropout, living on her rich semi-estranged father's dime in an expensive apartment while she takes acting classes but spends most of her time partying with friends and dating a succession of what seem like mostly older men (early thirties) in finance and similar high-paying fields. It is very obviously the kind of life that can't be sustained: Alison complains regularly about how far gone this or that friend is, and we readers are supposed to take that as an indication of how far gone she is, despite her protestations.

Story covers a few months in her whirlwind life, up to her twenty-first birthday and just after. She meets a new guy, Dean, who she seems to like despite her protestations that she doesn't fall in love and inevitably loses interest in a man after a few weeks. She runs around the clubs with her roommate Jeannie, crazy friends Didi and Francesca, and visiting even-wilder-older-sister Rebecca. She goes to her classes most of the time. She complains about her father not sending her allowance, and the resultant money troubles. (Of course, Alison doesn't pay for anything -- not cocaine, not her meals, not her apartment, nothing. That's what rich men are for.)

It is all told through Alison's voice, which is loud, profane, demanding, and endlessly self-centered -- it's a good thing Story is a short novel, because 188 pages is more than enough time to spend this close to Alison Poole. All of the dialogue is reported through that voice: everything in Story is filtered through Alison's monstrously massive self-regard, and she has to be treated as a very unreliable narrator because of that.

I'd class Story as an interesting novel but not a good one: parallel to Bright Lights and offering another view of that Rat Pack '80s millieu, a male writer's attempt to do a modern woman's voice (and not, to my mind, entirely succeeding), a book with a lot of ambitions and chops but also a lot of mess and overreach.

Book-A-Day 2018 #257: Days Between Stations by Steve Erickson

Look, I'm tired of explaining who Steve Erickson is, all right? If you don't know after thirty years, it's no longer my fault.

He's one of the visionary writers of America in our time: I can't claim him for my generation, since he was born nineteen years before I was. But the writers we love best are always a generation ahead of us, aren't they? Those are the ones who were young and vital and exciting when we were just learning what it was to discover young and vital and exciting writers.

Days Between Stations was his first novel. Published in hardcover by Poseidon Press in 1985, one of the early Vintage Contemporaries in September 1986. I found a copy, as a remainder, probably eighteen months to two years later -- I found it alongside a similarly remaindered copy of his second novel, Rubicon Beach, and bought both -- in a mall B&N store outside Poughkeepsie.

I haven't re-read it since then: not in thirty years. But, with my intermittent Vintage Contemporaries series, I thought I might as well.

Erickson is often called a visionary writer: his books are full of connections based on image or affinity rather than logic, held together by fine writing and striking images, full of things that happen rather than conventional plots, moving through landscapes of startling transformations, as influenced by cinema as by novels. All of that was in place from the beginning -- he's been consistent from Days Between Stations until now.

So to talk about the plot is nearly beside the point, and the characters aren't much more central. There's a woman, Lauren. When she was young, she called the cats in from the Kansas farm-fields of her youth, and then she married a competitive bike-racer, Jason, who was always away and relentlessly cheated on her. After years of neglect, she makes a connection with a mysterious man, called Adrien or Michel, who manages a club they frequent in Los Angeles.

Adrien/Michel is the viewpoint character for a while, and we learn of his complicated American-French heritage -- he's the grandson of Adolph Sarre, a young wunderkind in early cinema who nearly completed a film called The Death of Marat, which would have been a masterpiece.

And then the focus shifts to Adolph as a young man of uncertain parentage, growing up in a secret room in a private Paris brothel in the years before The Great War. He's passionately in love with Janine, the daughter of the whore who he thinks is his mother and the owner of the house -- but the owner's legitimate son is also obsessed with Janine.

(I didn't notice this the first time around, but women are often things to be fought over rather than people in Erickson's novels, symbols and metaphors rather than independent actors. Of course, even the men are driven entirely by forces they don't understand, but the women seem to be instead driven by what the men do, one step further removed from agency.)

The middle of the novel is taken up with Adolphe's struggles, but we will return to Adrien/Michel and Lauren eventually, as they end up in Paris and find some happiness there, for a while, before things get worse again.

Everything is falling apart in Days Between Stations. In the modern plot, Lauren and Jason's marriage is basically a sham, even though she's still deeply in love with him, no matter how much she wants not to be. The world is falling into ruin as well: LA is wracked by sandstorms; Paris is powerless and icebound; the Mediterranean is drying up, leaving Venice high and dry, horrifyingly hot and smelly. In the historical plot, Adolph will never complete his movie, he will never get to keep Janine, and he has to get through WW I before he even gets to those further shocks.

You read Erickson not for the story or even the people, but for the moments and images and ideas: he's the fantastika equivalent of those SF writers most impressive for their new concepts. He writes sentences like no one else, drawing the reader into his dream-worlds and making them real. This is as good a place to begin as anywhere, since so many of Days's elements recur in his novels: uncertain apocalypses, the power of the movies, obsessive men and the women burdened with them, twins and lost children, and the horribly unrelenting power of what we might as well call "love."

Book-A-Day 2018 #175: The Wrong Case by James Crumley

Private eye novels were traditionally about men with something wrong -- whether it was the vague white-knightism of Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer's detached voyeurism. Eventually, the field opened to women -- Kinsey Milhone and V.I. Warshawski and their sisters -- who were just as damaged in their own ways. And, maybe, eventually, there was even room for some relatively normal men and women along the way.

Anything's possible, I suppose.

But here were are back in the old PI tradition, in James Crumley's first mystery novel, The Wrong Case, from 1975. And his Milton Chester Milodragovitch (the Third) is a detective in the old tradition: drunk, tired, and not a bit better than he should be. We meet him in the small city of Meriwether, somewhere unspecified in the Pacific Northwest but probably out in the Eastern end of Washington or Oregon -- far from the coast, closer to logging and hunting and fishing and the mountains. Milo was a specialist in divorce proceedings, tracking wayward spouses and getting proof of their sordid affairs, but his state has just enacted no-fault divorce and destroyed his entire business: no one needs proof of adultery to get divorced anymore.

Milo is also the latest in a line of once-prominent men in town: his great-grandfather parlayed an encounter with a local outlaw into a long and successful law-enforcement career, and the line has been dwindling into obscurity and alcoholism since then. Milo's father died drunk, leaving Milo a sizable inheritance that he'll only get at age fifty-two -- still more than a decade away. So Milo is trying to live on what he has -- and support two ex-wives, since he's never been known for making good decisions -- until the big money comes in and he can enjoy life. At this point, he still thinks the money will let him enjoy life; that will change.

This was the first novel about Milo; he turned into something like a series hero -- not so much hero, and not all that much series, either -- over the years, as Crumley returned to him now and then. The second book was Dancing Bear, almost a decade later; I looked at that when I thought I could get through one Vintage Contemporary a month and read them all by now. (We all think we can do things that turn out to be impossible -- it's one of the things I share with Milo.)

But here Milo was as much of a private detective as he ever was: hired by a woman to investigate her missing brother and soon churning the underbelly of Meriwether, in these just-past-Vietnam years of freaks and drop-outs and druggies. He was never one of the more organized PIs, but he did actually go around to talk to people and learn things in this book -- it didn't work out all that well, but that's Crumley's world. Nothing ever works out all that well. Nothing can.

This is a fine detective novel in the old tradition, about men and the stupid things they do and the women who come into their world. Crumley's women are more rounded and real than the standard for the genre and the time, but they do have their cliches, and they're seen entirely from outside -- by men who never have understood women, and never will. I'm glad I read it again, now that I'm older than Milo, and have a better acquaintance with failure and regret: this is the kind of book that rewards that kind of experience.

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley

This is the book that broke me, broke the Vintage Contemporaries reading series, broke it all to hell. A Fan's Notes has only 383 pages in the edition I read, but it took three long weeks to slog through it, and only the fact that it was finite kept me going. Then, only the end of a year could induce me to finally write about it, now that the memory has receded a bit and I can think about it without cursing the name of Exley.

In case you have a short attention span, I'll say this up front: I don't recommend reading A Fan's Notes. Unless, of course, you happen to be a ne'er-do-well alcoholic wanna-be writer far too obsessed with football in the late 1960s. If that's the case, boy howdy, do I have the book for you.

A Fan's Notes is one of those books that claims both to be a novel, so that the real people who Exley knew would not sue him, and the essentially true story of his real life, because no one would care about it at all otherwise. Exley's dead now, and so is Frank Gifford, and probably most of the other people mentioned, under their own names or others, in this book -- so it now doesn't matter how true or not it all is. That frisson is long over, and the book has to stand on what it is -- one long whine by a guy who feels he deserves better than he gets but is smart enough not to say so explicitly.

Exley was born in 1929, to a locally prominent family in a small city in upstate New York, and had the misfortune to have a father who both was a star of the high school football team in his youth and died right in the middle of young Exley's own non-football-playing high school years. And then he went to USC at the same time as Gifford, which cemented his football obsession -- mostly focused on the Giants, though, like all American sports manias, it was wide enough to cover whatever game was on at the moment. [1] This all conspired to ruin young Exley, as A Fan's Notes more-or-less says, at much greater length and with copious Hemingway-esque tough-guy writing that wants to be profound but ends up deeply in tedium.

Oh, and he had some degree of mental illness -- either resulting from his alcoholism, or vice versa, or maybe even co-existent but independent. And so he spent time in asylums in the early 1960s, during that great era when Americans had absolutely no idea how to deal with mental illness. (One can feel sorry for Exley for this, which is something -- everything else is utterly his fault.)

And so A Fan's Notes is the long, meandering story of how Exley fucked up his life -- getting jobs because he's a white guy who went to a good school, even when he's clearly unsuitable, losing those jobs for cause, getting married to a woman who must have seen something in him though I'm damned if I can tell what, shattering that marriage once they had children for maximum fuck-up-itude, and so forth. Throughout it all, Exley has an unshakable conviction that he is A Writer, and that will finally redeem him and make him important.

And when he pulled this monstrosity out of his ass in the mid-1960s, the all-white, all-male literary establishment of the time apparently was so impressed that one of their own could so impressively fuck up (and, supposedly, recover) that they made A Fan's Notes a minor commercial success and a strong critical one. But, speaking as a white male from a slightly younger generation, this was all in-group bullshit, and they should have called Exley on his flaws rather than enabling them.

(He later continued along the same path, with two more similar oh-look-I-fucked-up-again books and an itinerant teaching career mostly based on having written this. If A Fan's Notes had sunk without a trace, he might have actually had to clean himself up and settle down to do something.)

Don't read this book. Forget it ever existed. It's just the story of one guy who got far too many breaks for far too long due to his inherent privilege, and used all of those second chances just to make a crappy, self-indulgent book about how sad his life was. I say phooey to him and phooey it all.


[1] Exley doesn't claim to be a close friend of Gifford's; they seem to have met briefly a couple of times and that's about it. But Gifford was a great football player and Exley aspired to be a great football fan, which is good enough for him.

A Piece of My Heart by Richard Ford

There's a kind of literary novel where antecedents don't follow proper names the way you expect. In a normal book, if the first sentence of a paragraph has a character speaking, and the next sentence begins "He," the reader knows its the same guy.

But Richard Ford doesn't play that game. His debut novel, A Piece of My Heart, is divided into alternating sections named after his two main characters, Robard Hewes and Sam Newel, and, by God!, if a sentence begins with "He," it purely and only means the viewpoint character for that section, antecedents be damned. This seems like a minor point, but it's so cross-grained to the way a reader usually interprets a story that it causes confusion in nearly every paragraph, not just until the reader gets used to it, but again and again until the novel is finally done.

(This rule does not apply within sentences though, since that would be madness. And that adds another level of decoding necessary for the reader. This particular reader is of the opinion that the effort was not worth the payoff, since he was not able to detect any payoff even with high-powered scientific instruments.)

Piece of My Heart is a novel of parts; Hewes and Newel's stories do intersect but they are essentially separate, and the pieces of this book were originally published as separate stories in various literary journals in the early 1970s before Ford's novel appeared in 1976. Hewes is a tough blue-collar guy in his early thirties who thinks with his pecker; he's traveling to rural Arkansas to see a female cousin for carnal purposes even though he hasn't seen her in fifteen years and only knew her biblically for a couple of days then (and she's been writing to him since then, trying to entice him, unsuccessful until suddenly successful). Newel is younger and doughier and ritzier: dawdling for no particular reason between law school at Columbia and taking the bar exam in Chicago. Newel has even less reason to be in rural Arkansas than Hewes; his on-and-off girlfriend's grandmother has a place there, and the girlfriend told him to go rusticate, since it would be good for his troubled mind.

So Ford has two insufficiently motivated protagonists here: I believe he's trying to show that they each have deep wellsprings for their behavior and are driven by things they don't understand, but they come across as men who suddenly go a great distance for something they don't want and aren't interested in. Newel is even worse than Hewes; he goes to a hunting and fishing camp but doesn't want to hunt or fish. Hewes, at least, is chasing tail, and Ford makes it clear he's done that his whole life. (Though, even there -- and at least one secondary character lampshades this specifically -- there are women in California, where Hewes was living, and they would have been much more convenient to him.)

This all is in a modern version of Southern Gothic style; before the first Hewes section, we get a brief Prologue in which W.W. Justice -- the minor-league baseball player married to Hewes's cousin -- is pursing Hewes for that cuckoldry and comes across a young man who says he just shot someone dead. So right up front, we know one of our protagonists will be killed; the only question is whether Ford will go it straight, and make it Hewes, or throw a curve-ball to kill Newel.

We see Hewes leave his wife and job in California after getting yet another letter from his cousin, but we don't know why this letter moved him. He comes to that hunting and fishing camp -- in suitably dramatic fashion, it's on an island in the middle of the Mississippi that doesn't appear on any maps, and would legally be in the state of Mississippi if anyone official knew about it -- to have a base nearby, so he can screw his cousin regularly, and takes a job with the suitably overbearing, grumpy, blustery old-man owner of that camp to guard the place from poachers. His cousin is demanding and mercurial, as the straying woman in a Southern novel must be, and we know this will eventually lead to Justice finding out -- well, we've already seen that he finds out.

Newel, on the other hand, is supposedly filled with ennui, but he just seems like a lump. Ford doesn't go in for interior monologues, and instead explains Newel's character and actions through italicized flashbacks to his childhood that never told this reader anything germane. He mopes in New York, thinks about moping in Chicago, goes to that island to mope some more, and then finally mopes off to Chicago like he was going to in the first place.

In the end, Justice finds out about the affair, as expected. He chases Hewes. Someone dies.

There's a reductive definition of the literary novel as a story about adultery. It may not be true in all cases, but it clearly applies here: A Piece of My Heart would have nothing if it weren't for Hewes's two thousand mile journey to screw his married cousin once again. Some readers may think it has nothing even with that adultery, and I have great sympathy for that opinion.

Ford has written many novels since this, winning top literary prizes and gathering massive acclaim. So I have to assume that he got much better than A Piece of My Heart as he got more experience behind him; eventually I hope to check for myself. But probably not for some time.

The Debut by Anita Brookner

One of the most unsettling feelings for an experienced reader is that insecure unsureness that strikes at the end of a highly-lauded novel that fall flat. Did you miss the point? Was the point ever there to begin with? It takes a lot of nerve to declare that a book doesn't work when it's entirely possible that you just didn't see it working.

Anita Brookner's first novel, 1981's The Debut, is problematic in exactly that way: the opening line declares that "Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature," but then the book spends the majority of its short length on Ruth Weiss's young adulthood. We don't even see her achieve her doctorate before the book ends, so the implication is that she was ruined very early and remained ruined in exactly the same way for the two decades that the book declines to dramatize for us.

This is probably explained by the fact that The Debut was that typical first-novel thing, a transmuted autobiography. Brookner's life was evidently much like she describes Dr. Weiss's for its first forty years -- hermetic, circumscribed, bounded by books and the monstrously needy egotists that were her parents, kept separate from the expected world of boyfriends and marriage and a family of her own. (Or even much of a life of her own.) But this reader doesn't see that Brookner makes a convincing case that literature ruined Dr. Weiss: I could argue for her mother, or her father, or both in tandem, equally well. But literature only got to her once she was already severely handicapped by those charming, horrible people.

The Debut itself is as hermetic as Dr. Weiss's life; it's set almost entirely within the Weiss household, and Brookner avoids making it clear when any of this takes place. Reading the book, I worked with the assumption that it was written about 1980, and thus Dr. Weiss was forty then and born about 1940. But Brookner herself was born in 1928, as I found out afterward. Either way, I looked in vain for any signposts from the outside world: I was looking for the hurlyburly of the London '60s and didn't find it, and even WWII makes no impression, even if Ruth's extended stay in Paris, if it matches a similar experience for Brookner, must have taken place in the late '40s. This is a novel about a family, not about the world they live in. That world only impinges slightly, in the characters that members of the family love or exploit or use as escape vehicles.

So: Ruth is raised as a child mostly by her paternal grandmother, who lives with her deeply-self-centered parents in a big posh apartment in London, whenever The Debut is set. But that grandmother dies when Ruth is young, and a live-in helper, Mrs. Cutler, insinuates herself into the family. Ruth is left to herself and her books much of the time: her father is an inheritance-supported  dilettante who owns, then sells a used-book shop and her mother is a deeply narcissistic minor actress whose career dies from lack of attention when Ruth is in her early teens. The two do nothing, care about nothing but themselves, and are interested in nothing: pure egoists of the worst, most useless kind. And they even get worse as the book goes on: her mother, Helen, turns herself into an invalid out of lassitude and indifference, and her father George is only very slightly better in his needy affairs with women connected to his book shop. As I said above, it really does feel like Ruth is doomed from birth, as the only child of such soul-sucking creatures: she would have had to be much stronger and more fearless to have any chance to escape them.

But Ruth is not strong or fearless: she's quiet and mousy and devoted to books, like so many of us. And her faltering attempts to make her own life -- a school friend who urges her to live for herself, a would-be boyfriend as needy and narcissistic as her parents, and most importantly that year in Paris that she hoped would be a life -- are, in the end, crushed not by literature but by the demands of her grasping parents. She cannot escape them, and The Debut explains why.

But it does not show how they captured her, or draw out the pattern into her adult life. At the age of forty, in what is basically a very thin frame story, Dr. Weiss is still caring for her aged father and still living mostly in and for books -- teaching, writing, reading, thinking. She may have realized at that point that she was ruined -- leaving aside my quibble about what actually ruined her -- but Brookner does not move beyond that realization.

The irony of The Debut is deep: it is not the story of Dr. Weiss's debut. It is the prologue. The reader may believe that Dr. Weiss, at the age of forty, is finally ready to make a start of her own independent life -- as Brookner evidently did about the same age -- but that would be entirely a leap of faith, since we don't see any indication that Dr. Weiss is ready or inclined or able to do such a thing. So any reader is left with that question, weighing hope against experience -- and Brookner's novel will not tip its hand either way, unless the title itself is the deciding point.

Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen

Adventure stories don't have to be simple. They don't have to be obvious. They don't have to be clear, or linear, or told in flat prose like red bricks. Those of us who read genre fiction should know that most of all, though maybe we forget it, sometimes, when we wander back towards "regular" fiction.

Far Tortuga is an adventure story, the tale -- and I think that word is justified, for once -- of nine men on a boat in the Caribbean, squabbling and fishing and complaining and making mistakes they can't take back. Conrad is in the background, somewhere, and the long tradition of stories about men at sea. But it's also a deeply literary novel, with pages intermittently laid out like concrete poetry and a complete lack of dialogue tags and a cast of often hard-to-differentiate men, all speaking in the same thick dialect. And so it also has Joyce in its literary DNA: it's a straightforward story told in a deliberately opaque way, for effect.

Does it work? Well, Peter Matthiessen is one of the major figures of modern literature, and I'm a guy with a blog who might want to get a publishing job working with someone who knew him. So perhaps it would behoove me to be a little more enthusiastic here than I might otherwise be. (I could always stand to be a little more enthusiastic, actually: sometimes I feel like the economists who predicted twelve of the last five recessions.)

But Far Tortuga is not an easy book to get into: it has its own rhythms and ways of operating, and any reader will have to get used to not being entirely sure who is speaking much of the time. It's a book that stands in its own way, most of the time, demanding that readers do most of the work themselves to be worthy of the experience.

That experience is the final voyage of the Lillias Eden, a small turtle-fishing boat out of Grand Cayman, captained by a man not nearly as smart as he thinks and crewed by a miscellaneous rabble who are almost as bad as that captain thinks they are. It leaves port too late in the year, when the turtles are hard to find and hurricanes are starting to stir. And it's a bad boat, poorly maintained and only half-converted from sail to diesel, so it runs roughly both ways. And the choices her captain makes -- along with the things he doesn't get to choose -- are ill-made, as well.

The Eden's story could be written as a tragedy, but Matthiessen doesn't want a tragedy. What he does want -- what he did write -- is more difficult to describe, something like a sour comedy of errors. It's not that everything goes wrong for the Eden and her men, since some of the major things the reader expects for the entire book never actually happen. But enough things do go wrong, and there's little enough room for error on that rotten hull, to get Matthiessen to the ending he wants.

Some of Matthiessen's characters are vivid and crisp, particularly the grumpy Captain Raib Avers. But the crew are often hard to differentiate when Matthiessen isn't harping on their specific important traits -- this one is superstitious, that one is black and from Honduras, the other has a muddy past and two names -- particularly when they're complaining to each other about the ship or filling in more world-building details. There are stretches of two or three pages at a time where it's clear Matthiessen knows who's talking, but the reader will be much less sure.

The prose, though, is magnificent when describing the sea and the voyage: Matthiessen doesn't just lay it out like poetry, he writes in a near-Homeric mode and elevates his entire story through the force of his gaze.  But then there's another scene of two unspecified characters nattering on about the Captain's nemesis and half-brother, who occupies far more space as an influence in the book than he deserves, and all of the poetry is smashed until the next time Matthiessen elevates his tone.

I don't know who would want to read a book like Far Tortuga; I only read it myself because I'm working through the Vintage Contemporaries series. Most fans of adventure fiction will find it clotted and pointless, and readers of serious literature will need to be persuaded that an all-male turtle-hunting expedition in 1968 is something they should care about. It definitely has its strong points, but it also manages to combine the most audience-alienating aspects of both the adventure story (a complete lack of women and domestic life) and the literary story (deliberately difficult-to-understand dialogue and unpleasant characters). If you're the kind of person who seeks out the most recondite and complex literary books, though, you'll want to find a copy of Far Tortuga at your earliest convenience.

Vintage Contemporaries Update

Just in case anyone is actually following this odd series of reviews: yes, I did skip February.

It wasn't on purpose, but the combination of being unemployed and reading Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga pushed me well beyond my usual deadline, and so I held that off to the next month. I did finish Far Tortuga in mid-March, and my review will post later today.

At this point, I expect to get back on the horse and hit the last day of each upcoming month with another Vintage Contemporaries review, but -- as I've said before -- I don't put a whole lot of faith in my own expectations these days.

I would like to spend more time writing about books rather than about how I would be absolutely perfect for such-and-such a job, but that's not up to me at this point. Right now, my chef d'oeuvre is the cover letter, and it will remain so as long as necessary. And I'm sure this all annoys me even more than it annoys all of my readers aggregated.

Dancing Bear by James Crumley

How old is forty-seven? When I first read Dancing Bear in college, that was old -- almost inconceivably so, older than my parents, old unto geezer-dom, old like something historical. But these days it looks like tomorrow -- I'll turn forty-six myself later this year.

So Milo -- Milton Chester Milodragovitch III in full -- is much more immediate these days even if I'm not a borderline-alcoholic, cocaine-abusing ne'er-do-well scion of a rich Montana family. He's tried and failed at a lot of things in his life, and now lives as best he can as a security guard for a local company owned by a Colonel Haliburton. (Possibly a coincidence in a 1983 novel, though the Evil Empire Halliburton -- with two Ls -- has been around pumping oil and making money since 1919.)

Milo was a private eye -- Crumley's earlier novel The Wrong Case was set during that time -- and is an orphan and only child, "the last of the Milodragovitches," as he says. But now he's just counting days until he turns fifty-two, finally comes into his inheritance and, Crumley strongly implies, finally drinks and drugs himself into the grave. He's a damaged man who takes little enjoyment in anything, and drinks peppermint schnapps even though he hates it because it's the only way he's found to balance the terror of being sober with the black hole of drinking. His use of cocaine is less restrained, though Crumley shows Milo in a world where nearly everyone is willing to do a bit of coke here and there -- maybe it's the early 1980s, maybe it's Montana, maybe it's just fiction.

Milo is dragged out of that uneasy rut into a much more uneasy life by Sarah Weddington, a local rich lady who had an affair with his father forty years before, an affair Milo was often in the middle of. Sarah, now old, claims to be eccentric and bored, and asks Milo to investigate a couple she sees meet regularly at an intersection outside her window. It's a weird job, and the justification doesn't really make sense to Milo even at the time, but it's a big pile of money, and he's desperate for something to change in his life.

That's what sets Dancing Bear going: what seems like a frivolous tail job, a chance to do some surveillance, waste time, and make too much money. But Milo is soon up to his neck in murder and drugs, though he has no idea at all why. For most of the length of Dancing Bear, he's reacting and running, using his investigative skills to keep himself alive and try to dig into this strange case, without much luck. Only at the very end does it become clear -- or as clear as it will ever become.

Milo is an unforgettable character, vividly imagined. You wouldn't want to be him, but you know him deeply. Dancing Bear is more scattered and less focused than Wrong Case was -- and Crumley's thrillers would only get more so from this point, with ever more ever older men doing ever more drugs and brandishing ever larger weapons. But Dancing Bear is still a strong portrait of a broken man, showing what he can manage to accomplish in spite of the break.

Book-A-Day 2014 #365: Cathedral by Raymond Carver

When I was young and thought that I wanted to be a writer, Raymond Carver was a god. Not my god, though: my gods had names like Silverberg and Wolfe and Zelazny and a different Raymond named Chandler. But a little bit in highschool and a whole lot in college, Carver's minimalism was the epitome of what a would-be writer was supposed to aspire to, the template of what we should be trying to achieve.

I was reflexively contrarian in those days -- perhaps not so different now, though maybe more self-knowledgeable about it -- so I avoided Carver at every turn. I didn't want to travel his route, I didn't want to be influenced by him, I didn't want to read him, I barely acknowledged that he even existed.

Thirty years later, though, Carver is dead and I'm not a writer. So the question of which writers I'm not like is purely academic, in dustiest medieval-scholastic style. And so I finally found time to read Carver's Cathedral, one of his major short-story collections. It was originally published in 1983 and reprinted in paperback in the fall of 1984 for the launch list of Vintage Contemporaries, which is why I came around to it now.

Cathedral has a dozen stories about small-time people and their small-time lives: living in cheap furnished apartments, working as chimney sweeps or at "the plant," getting by but no more than that. Their landscape is the mid-20th century, domestic edition; the stories take place in living rooms and kitchens, mostly, with people who smoke and drink too much and whose intimate relationships are very likely to have just fallen apart. So call it grubby realism, call it kitchen sink drama: it's close to the cliche about literary fiction, though there are no professors here. No one in Carver's world is a professional or a success: there might be a highschool art teacher but not anyone tenured, and if anyone works at a hospital it would be a janitor rather than a doctor.

They're inarticulate people, too: they can't say what's wrong with their lives, because they don't have the words to describe it. When the estranged wife calls from California, where she's run off with another man to find herself and become an artist, Carver's narrator can't yell at her or lash out, so he just sits there quietly and says standard bland pleasantries while she natters on about her self-actualization. So Carver can't have them explain themselves or their lives to us, and his narrative voice is stripped down and stark, too [1]: we have to feel it for ourselves.


And yet it works. More than that, it works brilliantly: Carver really does craft epiphanies out of this incredibly unlikely material, and makes stories that have an amazing Everyman appeal because of that kitchen-sink-ness. After all of these years, it turns out my professors were right: who would have thought it?


[1] Although it turned out that voice didn't really originate with Carver himself but was imposed on him in slashing edits by Gordon Lish of Knopf.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #334: The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane

In literary fiction, there's a strong tradition of the magnificent asshole: the guy so charismatic and interesting that the reader mostly ignores that he's an absolutely horrible human being. Think Randle McMurphy, Horse Badorties, Ignatius Reilly -- for the length of a book we're on his side as he battles regular society, or the Man, or just whatever happens to be in the way, even if we'd go out of our way to avoid anyone half that annoying in regular life. [1]

The trend was most pronounced in the twentieth century -- Faulker had a couple of doozies, and Kerouac rarely wrote about anything but -- though there had been similar characters back at least as far as Prince Hal and Falstaff. The essential version, though, is usually post-modern, and placed in solid opposition to the world of squares and three-piece suits and 9-to-5 jobs and all the usual things to rebel against. Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses, and sometimes it's not clear what happened -- the important things are that he's magnificent, he's an asshole, and that he fights.

Nicholas Payne is a fine member of that august company: he's larger than life, utterly insufferable, and any reader's enjoyment of the book he dominates will be entirely determined by the ability to stomach this self-important prick. To be honest, it took me a while to warm to him -- I was expecting something very different from Payne's author, Thomas McGuane, who I'd pigeonholed as a writer of rural semi-humorous he-man stories, like a somewhat more domesticated Hemingway who stuck closer to Michigan. That pigeonhole was based entirely on supposition and inference, though, and it just shows how badly expectations can go wrong -- I'd had the completely wrong image of this writer in my head for a good thirty years.

Payne louchely saunters through the American landscape of about 1969-1970 in McGuane's second novel, The Bushwhacked Piano -- the title comes from the first page, where he shoots a neighbor's piano at the age of ten or so, nearly twenty years before the action of the novel. He pursues the local beauty, Ann Fitzgerald; he works on a one-armed man's ill-conceived plan to build large bat-houses all across the country to eliminate mosquitoes; he ruminates on cars and hunting and fishing and other manly pursuits; he does any damn thing he wants to, the less sensible and reasonable the better. He's also the closest thing to a rounded character in the book -- everyone else is a type at best, a collection of twitches at worst, there to bounce off Payne and show various aspects of his character.

McGuane tells this story in a high-octane, look-ma-I'm-writing style, as filtered through heartland America -- razor-sharp transitions between scenes or ideas or characters, arch dialogue and narration that talks around the events, and a focus on cars and women and machismo. The voice is laconic and quietly authoritative, so it can take a while to realize just what that voice is telling you -- like John Wayne narrating a Hunter Thompson audiobook.

Those are the two things that make up The Bushwhacked Piano: the character of Nicholas Payne, doing every last thing that comes into his head, and the voice of Thomas McGuane, telling us about Payne as if he wanted to cram in every thought he ever had about America or men or life or society along the way. It's not a book of plot, and the other characters won't engage you for a second. It's not quite a counterculture novel -- Payne has one speech quite clearly against hippies -- but it's in that vein, and from that era: a barbaric yawp against a world that no longer made sense. If you can get into its groove, it can be a very funny book -- McGuane's writing is supple and quicksilver, flicking from topic to topic like carp in a pond -- and Payne is indeed magnificent despite (or because) of being an asshole.


[1] I won't state absolutely that there's no such thing as a female magnificent asshole -- I hope someone will point me to one -- but I can't think of any, and the type is heavily coded male.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #304: Dancing in the Dark by Janet Hobhouse

Thirty years is enough time to bring a bit of clarity and distance: things that seemed high and impressive (like Bright Lights, Big City) have dwindled, and things that didn't have so loud a clangor at the time are still as interesting, though perhaps getting even less attention that they got then. But it's still soon enough that all of the peaks are familiar, even if the whole territory isn't: we recognize the #1 bestseller of this week in 1984 (The Talisman, by King and Straub) and most of the rest of its company on that list as well. But we don't recognize the books that didn't become bestsellers that year, unless we had a special reason to know them -- there are hundreds like them, rushing out enthusiastically every year and being mostly forgotten by the time that year was done.

Dancing in the Dark is one of the non-bestsellers. It had a decent chance, since it was chosen as one of the seven books for the inaugural paperback list of the Vintage Contemporaries series, but it just didn't click. (Three older books -- call them modern classics, ten or fifteen years old. Three reprints of new 1983 books, including Dancing. And one original, Bright Lights, to draw attention.) Maybe Dancing was too much of its time, a social novel set in Manhattan club society in the early '80s, and maybe that focus was too much like Bright Lights, which stole all of the attention available. Maybe it was because the author, Janet Hobhouse, only wrote three novels, all during the 1980s, and died soon afterward, too early, from ovarian cancer. Maybe Bruce Springsteen came along and stole the title out from under her, right in between paperback and hardcover. Maybe something else happened: an editor left at the wrong time, a chain-store buyer hated it, a major review was too sour. But these days even a search for "dancing in the dark vintage" brings up someone else's novel first -- and even Amazon links Hobhouse's book as "another edition" of that twenty-years-newer novel.

Or maybe Dancing in the Dark was just a chilly, interior novel, deeply urban and urbane, of the kind that couldn't be expected to travel too far. It's the story of one marriage that almost broke, and the two equally culpable people who didn't quite break it, almost despite their efforts. Morgan and Gabriella Callagher are sophisticates in the early thirties: together since college, married ten years, no kids or sign of any coming along soon. In the early part of the novel, their strained relationship seems to mostly be Gabriella's fault: she runs off to clubs nearly every night of the week with three gay friends, sometimes with Morgan in tow and sometime not, though he never enjoys it. One of those friends, the charming and endlessly ingratiating Claudio, is even living with the Callaghers. (As is a friend of the couple's, Kate, who has just been dumped by her husband Richard -- both of those guests clearly trace back more to the gregarious Gabriella than the saturnine Morgan.)

But there's plenty of responsibility for Morgan as well: he's distant and passive-aggressive, and never says what he wants or needs. And he has a cruel streak as well, which we see later in the novel. There's nothing essentially wrong with either of them: they're decent enough people, capable of love and friendship and caring and living up to their capacity about as often as any of us. But they've drifted in different directions, and gotten into a disruptive pattern. Dancing in the Dark is the story of that pattern, about how they were turning on each other and then found a different way to turn later on.

It is all more than a bit cold and distanced: there's no dialogue at all in the first chapter, and Hobhouse is more of a precise writer than an embracing one. She tells us what Morgan and Gabriella and their friends are like, but keeps us out of their heads, and walks us through their world without giving us a lot of sensory cues to feel that world. This is an intellectual novel, a sophisticated novel, a novel about a particular society and a particular collection of people, a novel concerned with anatomizing a certain kind of marriage and seeing what makes it tick. It is not a famous novel, and never will be, but it's an interesting novel in its chilliness and particularly fascinating seen in parallel with Bright Lights, a much warmer (but, I think, less successful) book about a similar milieu by a younger male writer with a flashier style.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #271: Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

It's not every day a literary generation arrives. (If you want to be pedantic, it only happens roughly every twenty years.) But, in 1984, literary Generation X -- my generation, the ones who were the losers and slackers who could never be as special as the Baby Boomers, before that generational burden passed to the Millennials -- was suddenly on the map, young and snotty and complaining like all of the other new literary generations before them.

Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis and many others would come later -- and some of them would eventually be from the actual demographic Generation X -- but what kicked it all off was one slim novel about an unnamed second person narrator having one very bad week in early '80s New York City. Like all smash-hit artistic works, it wasn't as groundbreaking or different as it was billed, but Bright Lights, Big City still is a fizzy, conversational novel with closely examined characters and a tight grip on the zeitgeist of the time.

Jay McInerney's first novel is probably more Catcher in the Rye-manque -- with its sad-sack hero moping around New York for a few days, dragged here and there by his own indifferent uncertainty and the influences of others -- and less a roman a clef about McInerney's own life, but the latter was the story that helped put it over the top in 1984. McInerney was a former fact checker for The New Yorker; his cocaine-abusing protagonist had a very similar function at a teasingly unnamed highbrow Manhattan magazine. And so all of Bright Lights' early readers speculated how much of the other details of the protagonist were true of McInerney -- the runaway model wife, that unremarked addiction to any substance he can get his hands on, the tragic backstory that finally comes out at the end of the book. But even without knowing for sure, those elements all feel fictional: they're the stuff of a thousand mid-century novels and late-'70s writers' workshops, the stew McInerney was simmering in as he worked on his own version of all those ideas.

Frankly, Bright Lights should not be as good as it is: it's very much a first novel, with a hero who is all yearning and passivity, a sequence of frankly familiar scenes, and a tattered heart firmly stuck to its sleeve. It works because of McInerney's sentences, two or three steps away from really colloquial, and because of its setting, the collision of high art and low culture as its hero's days shade into nights and vice versa. For it to work at all, it needs a reader who can sympathize with that hero in all his neediness and unfiltered emotion, who can take scene after scene of him thinking about things and not doing them, who wants to hear more about that world and the people in it. 

The story is that old stand-by, the week in which everything falls apart. Our hero has been screwing up at work since his model wife left him -- in another cliche, she did it on a phone call from Paris -- and running around every night through a succession of neon-lit clubs filled with people he doesn't like, dragged by the inevitable confident, sharklike friend, Tad Allagash. He burns the candle at both ends, and this is the week it burns him back.

Bright Lights probably won't be read in a century, at least not in a literature class -- I can easily see it, Slaves of New York, and Less Than Zero being the core of a cultural studies course -- since McInerney didn't have the brilliant career expected of him at the time, and because the best things about Bright Lights are from other, better books. But we're still close enough to its world that it has a crackling energy, and I expect a lot of people will keep reading it for a while for much the same reason I did: to remind them of when they were young and invincible and at the center of the world.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index