zodiac

A zodiac is a small, relatively high-powered, ocean-going boat, which entered the popular imagination primarily because Jacques Cousteau used them. They have a hard hull and big, soft, inflatable inner tube like sides. Zodiacs are the kind of relatively simple, fairly inexpensive, highly-effective and versatile tool that occasionally gets made and recognized. They’re fast and maneuverable and useful for getting people around quickly and easily in the ocean over fairly short distances. I rode in one in British Columbia, 17 years ago, to go whale watching; they haven’t changed a lot since then.

For Sangamon Taylor (or just S.T.), protagonist of Zodiac (Neal Stephenson, 1988) and veteran environmental activist, a zodiac is the best way around Boston, a superb tool for harassing toxic chemical producers, and a thrill a minute. In between getting drunk and sucking down large quantities of nitrous oxide, S.T. works against pollution by embarrassing corporations and politicians and, occasionally, by physically plugging industrial waste outflows, thereby at least temporarily shutting down a plant. He is well-known in environmental circles and infamous in the business world. S.T. is young and brash; when he’s working on a job and gets tired enough, he pops a couple tabs of LSD to keep him up. Regardless of his habits, he’s also pretty smart.

Zodiac is about S.T. and his investigation of and fight with one particular pollution problem. It’s told entirely from his perspective and, aside from a few side trips representative of S.T.’s somewhat distractible personality, the story stays focused and moves along well. Written by a young man about a young man, the novel has all the strengths, pleasures, and faults of young men in the U.S. It was a pleasant distraction for me, a break from more thought-provoking reading. In trying to look past the hubris and bravado, I see a lesson about the satisfaction and effectiveness of direct action in politics. What it lacks in profoundness, the book makes up for in fun.

humpty dumpty in oakland

Phillip K. Dick lived from 1928 to 1982. During his almost 54 years, he wrote 44 novels that have been published, mostly science fiction. All of Dick’s books that I’ve read are concerned with the nature of reality, how we know what reality is, and being manipulated to believe in false realities. Frequently there are more-or-less secret realities underneath or parallel to the surface reality that his books’ characters and readers take for granted.

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland was published in 1986 by the estate of Phillip K. Dick. The writing is dry. It’s one of the more matter of fact, plain spoken novels I’ve read. Its non-directed story seems to be going nowhere in a mundane, regular life kind of way. And then, near the end, our understanding of the story is severely questioned; I was left uncertain about what was true and what was fantasy, which I think is exactly what Dick wanted.

Read this book if you are a serious Dick fans or if you are from the Bay Area and enjoy recognizing your home in stories.

apex hides the hurt

In Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), Colson Whitehead continues to demonstrate his novelistic brilliance with a very funny poke at capitalism, public framing, marketing, and their interrelations. With subtlety and wit, Whitehead discusses the impact of branding, names, and naming on our individual and collective psyches. As always, and reflective of the U.S. cultural reality, the entire brew is spiced with considerations of race and class and gender.

I get the sense that this is the stuff of Whiteheads consciousness. He’s walking around thinking about the stories we’re told to explain our places in the world—by everyone from our parents to novelists to marketing consultants (and the overlaps of them all)—and the stories we make up to do the same. That he’s able to share his sensibility, and in such clever, pleasing prose, is a boon to us all. Entertaining and thought-provoking, he could only improve by helping us understand where to go from where we are now. As evidenced by the book’s ending, which is less than satisfying, either he doesn’t know the way out of the cultural decline that he observes or he’s not willing to tell. My guess is the former.

little brother

My younger brother and I were brought up as Seventh Day Adventists, a fundamentalist sect founded in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century. I left that church relatively early, but my brother remains very involved. He’s an accountant and, while he doesn’t adhere entirely to Adventist dogma and will discuss most issues with an open mind, he usually falls on the conservative side. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect he votes largely Republican.

This summer, I went to Minnesota to see my brother’s two sons, 12 and 14, get baptized. On Saturday after church, my family joined a group of locals at the side of a small river for the ceremony, which my nephews seemed to take quite seriously. We sang some hymns and prayed and the pastor said a few words welcoming the boys into the church community.

My family used the occasion as an excuse to have a family reunion of sorts. Other than the baptism, we spent the entire weekend laying about, making and eating food, playing games, and generally enjoying each other’s company.

In the midst of all this my little brother gave me Little Brother (Cory Doctorow, 2008), saying something mellow and innocuous like, “I think you might like this.” I not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t what I got.

Little Brother is about a young man in high school in San Francisco in the present/near future. He and three friends are techie geeks and participate in complex games that integrate fantasy, technology, and the regular mundane world in ways that promote superb problem solving skills and strong group loyalty, as well as strange public behavior. Adept at avoiding the high-tech tracking and observation that infest their high schools and, to some degree, their city, these youths are bright, motivated, and highly skilled. When, early in the story, their lives are severely disrupted by a terrorist attack, their city and country are propelled into even more paranoia than that with which our society currently suffers. The Department of Homeland Security descends on the Bay Area and the rest of the story is about what happens to the teens and how they respond.

Doctorow sees one of his primary messages to be about privacy, especially digital and internet privacy. There’s an after word in which he talks about online security, encryption, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and more. Identify theft, data mining by the government and/or corporate entities, digital spying, and other forms of privacy invasion are serious issues. And for me they aren’t the real issues framing this story.

For me Little Brother is about “Big Brother” (from Orwell’s classic, 1984). It’s about government authority and liberty and fear and xenophobia and the ways that our country’s conservative leaders manipulate our society to fit their authoritarian worldview, lining their own and their friends’ pockets along the way. Doctorow’s ideas are a pretty natural extension of the direction George W. Bush was taking our country: unending foreign wars, spying on citizens, racial profiling, immigration injustice, holding people indefinitely without charge, torture, and privatization of it all. The big losers were citizens, especially low-income populations and people of color; the winners were corporations and those that controlled them.

I was confused for a while about why my brother suggested I read this story, because its message seemed to run counter to his politics. Then I remembered the paranoia about the end of time in my Adventist upbringing. That religion’s vision of the Earth’s last days includes harsh persecution for anyone who doesn’t go to church on Sunday; Seventh Day Adventists will be outlawed and, unable to work or even buy food, forced into the hills to survive. Perhaps my brother saw in the novel an explanation of how our society might descend into religious persecution and all the worst fears of our childhood. Of course, this explanation is needed only if we think there’s no religious or other persecution in this country already. Sadly, our nation, supposedly founded partially to protect religious and other cultural rights, has a long history of genocide, racial injustice, social and economic inequality, and religious discrimination. Current practice is little better—it’s dangerous to be Muslim in the U.S. today, just to name one target of oppression.

Little Brother brings up all this for me. Though written for a young adult audience, the story rarely, if ever, wallows in the teenage angst that often makes the genre unbearable. It’s a page-turner, yet the book’s potential to provoke a critical look at our democracy gives it a weight not found in many a more “serious” work. Thanks, little brother.

life & times of michael k

Apartheid in South Africa became an official policy in 1948. The policy created separate and unequal societies for whites and blacks in South Africa and tried to prevent mixing of any kind between the groups. Internal resistance to Apartheid began almost immediately and ranged from public protest to open warfare. Until 1994, when South Africa held a multi-racial election in which the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela won control of the government, the country was torn apart by racism and violence against both persons and property.

Into this time, put Michael K, a black man with a hair lip, a connection with the soil (the only job he can keep is working for the parks, tending the grounds), and a strong sense of duty to his mother. This might describe Life & Times of Michael K (1983), a story that Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee tells in short, almost journalistically simple, Hemmingway-like sentences. When Michael’s mother dies on their trip back to the land of her childhood, Michael is left with little to do and not much to live for. He wanders in the brutal and arbitrary atmosphere of a country suspicious of everyone, seeking mostly to be left alone, but not succeeding for very long.

Michael K is not a long book (184 pages), but it contains a lifetime of sorry and pain, both physical and emotional. The injustice it deals with is real. Michael’s attempt to deal with that injustice and his ultimate failure to rise above on more than a very personal level demonstrate the impact of racism and other inhumanities that people with power over others sometimes perpetrate.

the city & ytic eht

In his sixth novel, The City & The City, China Miéville writes a straight up mystery, observing most of the genre’s conventions while still managing to create a new world within the world we inhabit. Miéville constructs two cities-states (Beszel and Ul Qoma), somewhere on the west coast of continental Europe, whose claims to territory interlace with each other so closely that buildings in one city can abut building in the other. Streets can be shared (or not), but have different names. Parts of town are “total” (i.e., no part of the other city intrudes in that area) or crosshatched (a mix of both cities) or “alter” (all in the other city).

Whether the mixing of the cities is literal or operates in some mystical, parallel-dimensional way is not completely clear and it’s not important. What matters is that the two cities have developed two distinct cultures that share very little. Partly the differences are about two cultures living close to one another and distinguishing themselves sharply, even if the differences aren’t as great as the cultures pretend (e.g., “NoCal” culture is so very different from “SoCal’s”). But another big reason for the differences between Besze and Qomic cultures is so that everyone can tell which city they are seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, and tasting. The languages, architecture, dress, food, music, and every thing of human construction are different enough that people who grow up there can instantly “unsee” and “unhear” the actions of people in the other city, even though they may be literally walking and talking right next to each other. The taboo against acknowledging in any way the people living in the other city is very strong and enforced by a semi-mystical group of individuals living “between” the cities and operating beyond the ordinary laws, with apparently supernatural powers; no one wants to break the barrier and, worse, there’s the sense that you’ll be seen and disappeared if you do. Crossing the “border” between cities officially means you have to now ignore your friends and notice the neighbors you used to unsee: code-switching par excellence.

Like all good science fiction and fantasy writers (some call Miéville’s specialty “speculative fiction”), he uses the literary freedom of the created world to talk about something in our own world in a new way. In this case, Miéville uses the two cities to explore cultural difference. Not being seen or heard, despite occupying spaces next to each other is something people of color and other people marginalized by our culture experience all the time. People from dominant groups have the privilege of ignoring parts of reality that people in subordinate positions can ignore only at great psychic and physical risk. Miéville’s exploration of a culture that explicitly promotes and expects—even carefully trains visitors in the taboo before allowing them travel visas—such “blindness” is fascinating. He carefully follows the logic of the idea to powerful and thoughtful effect. In the end, the bad guy has studied the cultures enough to move and talk in a way that is so ambiguous that no one can tell which city he is in; therefore, no one can truly look at or notice him, let alone arrest him.

Miéville’s prose continues to improve and his pacing works most, if not quite all, the time. The moments it doesn’t work so well reflect the problem that many science fiction or speculative fiction writers have—the problem of explaining the world (which is essentially a boring activity), while still moving the story along and keeping our interest. Nevertheless, The City & The City is a good mystery with a well-executed conceit that helps us think about the world in which we live.

beloved

Much has been written about Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and Beloved, Morrison’s novel of slavery, family, and community. Along with many others, I think and feel Beloved is among the best novels ever written; the book is hard for me to write about because I have such strong feelings about it. Moreover, I’ve realized that the difficulty is related to why the work is #2 on my most current top 100 novels list.

As I’ve described briefly elsewhere in this blog, the criteria for my top 100 novels include subject matter, emotional impact, intellectual impact, and the ability to work on many levels at the same time. Beloved has it all. It moves me emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. I am alternately and sometimes simultaneously horrified by the brutality it describes, impressed by its ability to evoke deep senses of human commonality, and stunned by its structural power. It’s a prose poetic masterpiece of rhythm, structure, theme, and symbol. It’s a ghost story cut by enigmatic motivations and profound mysteries of life, love, and death. It’s a powerful indictment of our nation’s history of slavery, of the dehumanizing effects of that institution and the on-going impact of racism and injustice. Structurally, the novel mirrors a consciousness, cycling forward and back, remembering and re-remembering in an associative, flowing logic.

All this in a mere 275 pages—the multifaceted punch and epic sweep catapult Beloved to almost the top of my list (superceded only by Garcia Marquez’s even more epic tale). It is a glorious novel, painful to read, and which, in even my third or fourth reading, continues to yield new gems of connection and understanding.

[Caveat for the first-time reader: get through the first 50 pages, just going along for the ride. You’ll probably be confused. Try to enjoy the images and prose. It gets easier and the work is more than worth your while.]

john henry days

With John Henry Days (2001), Colson Whitehead continues to show the stylistic prose talent that prompted me to put his first novel, The Intuitionist, on my top 100 list. If the novel’s structure was as tight as the prose, this novel would be high on the list, as well.

Don’t get me wrong. Whitehead is clever. His protagonist, J., is a freelance journalist who mooches free meals, free drinks, and even free clothes off the various events to which he is invited, supposedly to write them up for publication. A new product is being announced; the manufacturer wants publicity and invites journalists to the event, treating them to a good time in the hopes of a good article. Similarly, a new company is launched, a politician’s campaign is begun, an unknown author publishes a book. J. and fellow “junketeers” go, get what they can out of it, and make a getaway when possible. As long as they write up a certain percentage of the events, they’ll be invited to the next one.

Does this life exist? I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. Whitehead invents a small world of junketeers who see each other at events frequently, developing a language all their own and even an “Anatomy of Puff” to describe the articles they often write (Bob’s Debut, Bob Returns, Bob’s Comeback, and the newly-created and somewhat controversial Bob is Hip). They talk a lot of smack and drink as much as possible on someone else’s dime. It’s plausible, while at the same time unbelievable enough to make you laugh at the conceit.

A bunch of these New York freeloaders end up in a small West Virginia town for the first annual John Henry Days—a weekend festival capped off with the unveiling of a new stamp celebrating John Henry, semi-mythic local figure of story and song who supposedly died after winning a steel-driving contest with the new-fangled steam steel-driving machine. The novel is populated by numerous characters related in some way to John Henry and/or his legend: a collector of John Henry memorabilia and his daughter; historians; musicians; a stamp collector; and even John Henry, himself, and fellow workers. Unfortunately, we meet these characters, sometimes only briefly, in a pastiche of chapters organized in some way that I cannot explain.

The fact that John Henry was Black, a former slave, freed by the Emancipation, is relevant throughout. Race consciousness and racism are never far away, often on the surface in both the past and the present. J., who is also African-American, is nervous walking down the road in rural West Virginia and I could only agree that caution and awareness are warranted in such a situation.

But despite the cleverness, stylistic prowess, and powerful themes, the book lacks focus and unification. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the books ending, where we are left knowing that J. must choose between professional and relationship goals, but not what that choice will be. It is not clear that either choice will yield positive results—in fact, one of them could lead to his death. An ambiguous ending is not bad, in principle, but in this case the result is unsatisfying at best. And, while I acknowledge the difficulty of creating good endings for novels, this one seems particularly unconsidered. It is as if Whitehead couldn’t decide what to do, so he just chose not to decide. In writing, as in life, such a non-decision is a decision in disguise; and in this case the disguise doesn’t hide a weak ending.

Whitehead is a gifted writer. That his second novel is not as good as his first only makes him human and I look forward to reading another of his novels soon.

the high window

Picture a white man in his late 30s, early 40s on the outside, in Los Angeles. He lives alone and drinks alone—pretty regularly—and has no women permanently in his life. He has a small spare apartment and an even smaller and sparer office from which he runs a private detective business. He is generally disaffected, acts like he knows what he’s doing, and talks mostly in smart-ass one-liners. When he has a chance at human intimacy, he passes. He’s a hard man with nothing better to do and no desire to do it.

By today’s standards, this man is a borderline drunk, semi-depressive, relationship avoider. When Raymond Chandler places the same man in the 1930s, he’s Philip Marlowe, a very cool, very smart borderline drunk, semi-depressive, relationship avoider—that is, he’s basically a regular guy. Chandler, one of the masters of the hard-boiled detective novel, knows the ropes and how to work them. In The High Window (1942), the third of seven novels Chandler wrote using the Marlowe character (he died in the middle of an eighth), Chandler uses all his tricks and even a wonderful, pre-postmodern self-reflexive moment, making fun of the genre’s conventions:

“Alright,” he said wearily. “Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book.”
“Sure. Taking the evidence piece by piece, putting it all together in a neat pattern, sneaking in an odd bit I had on my hip here and there, analyzing the motives and characters and making them out to be quite different from what anybody—or myself for that matter—thought them to be up to this golden moment—and finally making a sort of world-weary pounce on the least promising suspect.”

Chandler’s descriptions of rooms and people are almost tediously detailed, his similes (“I chewed my lip. It felt as stiff as a piece of glass.”) campy. The dialog, often in less than full sentences, is short, snappy, and hard to follow if you’re not paying attention. It’s a fun novel when you look past the whacked out gender assumptions rife throughout and the rampant self-destructive behavior. But this is all part of the book’s and Chandler’s appeal and why Bogart played Marlowe in the movie version of The Big Sleep. Many have loved the blasé, explicitly non-pc, anti-hero. Because I reject the premise of a man who has made choices about his life that he cannot undo is not a reason to reject the books. I read them as part of their era and as an important part of the noir tradition.

the lover

Marguerite Duras begins The Lover with the image of a 15 year-old girl, leaning on the rail of a ferry crossing the Mekong River. She’s a thin, wisp of a girl, pale and fragile and innocent, yet old before her time. She is old because of her unstable, insecure, unhappy mother. She is old because of her oldest brother’s vicious jealousy, his irresponsible gambling, his caring for no one but himself. She is old because of the deep connection between herself and her other brother, the middle child, too sensitive for the world he inhabits and certainly for living with his older brother. She is old because she is white—and therefore socially above the “natives” in colonial Cambodia and Vietnam—but poor (the death of her father left the family nearly without income and her older brother gambles away what wealth they have). They always eat, she says, but she makes little other claim to being taken care of.

Into this milieu comes the son of a local, ethnic Chinese millionaire. He sees the girl on the ferry and asks her if he can give her a ride to school. So begins their relationship. Every day he drives her to and from school. Soon he is bathing her, pouring cool water from a jar over her, and then carrying her to their bed. Sometimes he takes her whole family out for dinner and drinks where her family ignores their benefactor as completely as they eat the food.

Published in French in post-colonial 1984, the novel is set entirely in an era when traveling to the colonies—by ship, the only real option—was an exotic adventure, a lark for the upper classes. Race and class are always a part of the story, though almost never mentioned. Most of the story takes place in Cambodia and Vietnam, and characters are not named there; it is simply her brother, her mother, the man from Cholon. Only when referring to a later time, in Paris, does any one get a name and there it is two women who live in Paris but are not French—they are American or English. They make lasting impressions on the narrator because they are exotic and lovely in ways that the narrator does not know. I believe, in fact, that she loves those two women as she never loves her always-nameless Chinese lover. Yes, she loves him in a certain way that is about need and even desire; but she admires and respects those women in some way very different and more profound.

The book ends symmetrically with the now 17 year-old girl leaning on the rail of the ship taking her to France, never to return; she watches her lover’s parked black limo slowly disappear into the distance. He visits her once in Paris, many years later; he tells her he still loves her as he always has. But the past is the past and they do not even try to recapture what they once had.

The Lover is an imagistic novel, written mostly in set pieces of a few paragraphs. With each little section, Duras powerfully conveys the slow tragedy that life’s complications can be, the sense of inevitability we sometimes have, the way that family and social conventions and structures limit the ways we act, and the way that despite our best efforts our feelings are not limited or restricted at all.