After Silence by Jonathan Carroll

I came across this old review by accident, and found that I didn't remember it at all. It appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction some fifteen years ago.

JONATHAN CARROLL: LONG, MEDIUM, AND SHORT


After Silence by Jonathan Carroll (London: Macdonald, 1992; L14.99; 240 pages; New York: Doubleday, 1993; $21.00; 227 pages)

"Uh-Oh City," F&SF, June 1992

"The Lick of Time," in Monsters in Our Midst, edited by Robert
Bloch (New York: Tor, 1993, $20.95; 303 pages)


reviewed by Gregory Feeley


After Silence, Jonathan Carroll's sixth book-length narrative in six years, is remarkably of a piece with the earlier works: vividly and beautifully written, sketchily (if at all) integrated with the other four novels and novelette in the unnamed (and, one guesses, improvised) sequence, haphazardly constructed. As before, Carroll's virtues begin paying off at once -- his sharp observations and striking metaphors are evident from the first page -- while his weaknesses conceal themselves until late, as his structure leans vertiginously forward so that the reader is impelled into the story, beguiled by Carroll's ability to tell (or at least begin) a Tale into a confidence that the author shall bring his Tale safely to harbor that proves finally misplaced. Readers may gnash their teeth at his novel's conclusion (although they should, by now, know better than be surprised), but there is little doubt that they will reach it.

Max Fischer, a successful but rather unreflective cartoonist, finds his long-deferred desire to raise a family suddenly fulfilled when he meets Lily Aaron and her nine-year-old son Lincoln. At once in love, Max falls effortlessly into family life, and lives in contented bliss until the gradual accumulation of tiny inconsistencies in Lily's accounts of her past at last drives Max into an unwise investigation. Discovering an awful secret, he is able to maintain his happy life only by becoming complicit with it.

Like Carroll's other novels, After Silence offers an intensely-felt meditation upon the vulnerability of loved ones (here, as before with Carroll, dramatized in a hospital); like his earlier novels, it captures moments of tenderness toward children with aching clarity (Max, seeking to impress Lily and Lincoln on their first meeting, draws a magic-marker cartoon on the front of Lincoln's white teeshirt while the delighted boy wriggles "like a puppy getting its tummy scratched"). And also, with Carroll, we get his snobbishness, his love of celebrity and disdain for the common, the untalented, and the ordinary; his infatuation with exotic names ("Max" is exceptionally unfanciful for a Carroll protagonist, but the novel contains other characters, all special, whose parents named them Foof, Mabdean, Sullivan, Anwen, Elvis. It is only working-class people -- almost invariably portrayed by Carroll as unattractive and boorish -- who are given names like Mark Elsen and Ruth Burdette).

And like other Carroll novels, After Silence fragments like a flaming race car as it attempts to negotiate a final tight turn and crashes the fence. Max's discovery of Lily's secret, and his decision to make a separate peace with its particular horror -- to brick it up, like a monster in the basement, and return upstairs to resume his happy life -- is powerfully (if, in its extended confession scene, long-windedly) evoked. The jump forward of seven years, and Lincoln's unforeshadowed transformation from a happy ten-year-old to a sullen, hateful, and dangerous adolescent, is dramatized with wrenching poignancy. But this heartfelt and anguished novel's leap into the supernatural (it comes late and abruptly, on page 185) knocks its emotional center from the realm of indissoluble cause and effect into a slumgullion of Carrollian metaphysics that goes nowhere. The inevitability of consequence is asserted -- among the talk of guardian angels, time travelling, and two persons being one -- but it is not made real; and even a last-page attempt to punch back out of the supernatural (it apparently involves a suddenly unreliable narrator) is unavailing.

The problem with After Silence (and, to varying degrees, of the other five volumes of this inchoate sequence) is not simply a matter of plotting. Carroll's inability to cope with the novelistic business of keeping chronologies straight (he tells us that thirty-eight-year-old Max has a brother twelve years younger, then later gives that brother a marital history plausible only for a man of mature years) doesn't finally matter, any more than it matters that he cannot conceive of a human being who doesn't have a quirky and rewarding job, or a dog that isn't a purebred. What matters is Carroll's failure to achieve imaginative resolution: to create artistic closure for the dream he has conceived. Despite his recurring concern with the inseparability of heedless act from tragic consequence, Carroll cannot shape events into a fitting and logical whole, which surprise us with turns that seem afterward as right. Instead, he summons up an otherworldly (and plainly ex post facto) explanation of events as needed and then -- as here, as in Outside the Dog Museum and Bones of the Moon -- rings down the curtain in a shower of magical fireworks.

Carroll's inability to surmount this shortcoming (apparent since Bones of the Moon) has been evident in all his fiction, including short stories and novellas. "Uh-Oh City" (F&SF, June 1992) is a longer work than the volume Black Cocktail (Legend, 1990), and offers the same degree of tenuous connection with his novel sequence: the narrator's daughter, who appears only in a telephone call, is the former girlfriend (never actually seen) of Max Fischer in After Silence. The novella contains all of Carroll's carelessness with detail (the protagonist, a Melville scholar, misspells Moby-Dick; a closer study of his chronology than Carroll seems to have conducted makes sense only if he received his doctorate at twenty-one; the young woman whose suicide he helped provoke is apparently both a freshman and a graduate student) and seems, like much of Carroll's fiction, to have been begun before the author knew what he was about. Entire sub-plots languish neglected, while characters' motivations and range of abilities shift in accordance with plot requirements. Carroll's central image -- an overweight, middle-aged woman who is dying of cancer -- seems to have found its inspiration with the fat lady evoked in the closing pages of Franny and Zooey; but what Carroll has done with it . . . Actually, it's difficult to know what Carroll has done with it. No three scenes in the novella possess thematic or narrative coherence.

The novella -- it concerns a preternaturally efficient cleaning lady named Beenie who persists in turning up unwanted reminders from the protagonist's past -- starts out as a kind of domestic horror story, then swerves suddenly (the cleaning lady turns out to be God, or rather one of the thirty-six lamed wufniks who, in Carroll's version, constitute God) into an emotionally fraught tale of unwitting injury and attempted amends. As long as one is reading, the succession of firecracker revelations hold the promise of coming finally together; it is only when one looks at the work entire that it falls apart.

When Beenie presents the protagonist with the manuscript of a novel written by a student who had committed suicide years ago, the bewildered man quietly decides to send it to her parents. This unannounced action calls down a rebuke from the apparently omnipotent Beenie, who explains, "Things like that, you either throw away or you keep 'em. Never pass 'em on." A few hours later Beenie blithely contradicts this bit of philosophy when she produces a cache of love letters a student once wrote to the protagonist, which she promptly shows to his wife. Bewildered and angry (he knows that both manuscript and letters had long since been discarded), the hapless protagonist goes to confront Beenie -- who proves to be sitting up with the ghost of the student novelist; and the plot takes another lurch.

None of these disparate developments prove compatible with each other. (A small example: The protagonist's wife already knew of the love letters, but had been assured by her husband that they had all been destroyed, as in fact they had. Her distress upon being presented with a batch of them was because she could only conclude, not unreasonably, that her husband had in fact kept the letters. So why would Beenie summon these letters back into existence and show them to the poor woman, if its only effect would be to create a false impression? Carroll doesn't know; the next scene produces a new surprise, and the narrative drops the previous issue, never to return to it.) As with After Silence, everything changes in the last pages, and then again in the closing paragraphs. Approaching the conclusion to a story,
Carroll -- trapped like the man who has painted himself into a corner -- can create dramatic conflict only by successively reversing everything he has hitherto said. Save for the steadily mounting stakes (the stories' final revelations often end up featuring God or angels), there is no inner logic, no structure to these frantic reversals.

At 4000 words, "The Lick of Time" is too compact to tangle itself in its plot threads, although its references to other characters and milieux from Carroll's fiction do get it into minor trouble. (After an entire novel about the problems of the Sultan of Saru, Carroll refers in passing to the "Republic of Saru." If we encountered this in the work of a writer more skilled at drawing connections between texts, we would guess that Saru has had a revolution since the events of Outside the Dog Museum. With Carroll, however, we conclude merely that he is again forgetting himself.) The story's opening lines:

Before leaving her apartment, Erin turned on the new answering machine.

Several nights before, sitting down with the instructions and a glass of wine, she'd waded

through a long list of what-to-do's to make the expensive, high-tech-looking thing work.

is quintessentially Carroll, down to the haughty name, the expensive gimmickry, and the glass of wine. Its striking observations (listening to her first phone messages, Erin notes how callers "lost heart" when they realized that they were talking to a tape and not a human being), and the familiar mise-en-scene -- Erin had a "new job with the theatre group," and works with folks with names like Weber Gregston and Wyatt Leonard -- could almost come from an exceptionally skilled parodist. The protagonist, another articulate, sexually anxious yuppie who isn't very nice, develops an interesting psychological pathology as pressures mount about her (she ends up talking to her phone machine, leaving heartening messages and occasionally acting out responses she had hoped to hear from others), but the story springs a supernatural twist in the final page, and that's that.

Carroll's fluent style, his striking facility with metaphors, and the manifest seriousness of his concerns have struck a chord with many readers ("Uh-Oh City" was a Hugo nominee), but his sloppiness has escalated in recent years from a problem to an embarrassment. Carroll's narrowness of range and problems with narrative are not bound to length: neither short story, novella, nor novel has permitted him to marshall his energies into a coherent narrative, and the reader who looks past the colorful conceits (a "dog museum" that costs a billion dollars; the appearance of a giant stuffed animal in the shape of a childhood nightmare in "Uh-Oh City") will find fictions that are largely a shambles.

More prolific than in his early years, Carroll is notably less craftsmanlike, and has fallen into tics and self-indulgence even as he continues to coin phrases and sentences of startling beauty. A dozen years into a remarkable career, Carroll is wallowing -- apparently oblivious -- in a creative crisis that threatens to whelm it.

The Truman Show: Another Retelling of Hamlet

In an earlier post ("Why Hollywood Movies Are Like Hamlet," May 4, 2008), I described the experience of seeing Iron Man and realizing that Hollywood was again giving us, whether it (or its audience) realized it or not, another retelling of Hamlet. As the tale of a brilliant, troubled young man who, pursued by private demons, acts badly -- especially towards women -- and finds himself (rather being roundly censured by those around him) having everyone wondering exactly is going on in his head (could it have something to do with his intimidatingly impressive father? or maybe the seemingly benign figure who has now taken his place?), its affinities with Shakespeare's 1601 drama seem obvious enough, at least to me. Tony Stark ends up triumphant, rather than dead, but that particular Hollywood revision -- that the hero, a roguishly charming bastard at the film's beginning who quickly turns into a roguishly charming hero, shows his redemption by doing the the Right Thing, at the certain cost of all he values most, but ends up not having to pay the cost after all, and is shown at film's end victorious and universally adored -- is so fundamental as to apply even to, say, Cars.

A few days ago I showed the first forty minutes of The Truman Show to my twelfth graders, who had just finished reading Hamlet. They picked up on the parallels immediately: The Truman Show tells the story of a charismatic young man of seemingly limitless promise, admired by everyone in his tiny clockwork community, who has recently fallen prey to a seemingly unaccountable malaise. Everybody wants him to feel better, and assures him that this will happen if only he stops asking questions about things. His mother wants him to stop worrying and enjoy life; so does the best friend who is choreographed into his path at every turn. The love of a fair woman is dangled before him, inducement enough, people seem to hope, for him to forgo his wish to be elsewhere. But there is some mystery involving his beloved father, who is dead -- or is he? A ghostly appearance one evening . . . .

I mean, that sounds pretty obvious, doesn't it? The Truman Show has two Ophelia figures -- one good, one bad -- and it conflates Horatio with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into one composite figure. But there is a true father (marginalized, indeed only problematically alive), and a would-be, seemingly benevolent father figure who controls all, and who wishes to control Truman as well. It ends in sappy triumph, rather than profound tragedy, but what recent movie doesn't? (Well, Sweeney Todd -- whose protagonist offers us another avatar of Hamlet -- doesn't, but it had its origins far from Hollywood.)

One of my students asked me whether The Truman Show had been intended as a modern-day riff on Hamlet. I told her that so far as I was aware, nobody had noticed the similarities but me. A few days later I checked online, and indeed, there are no references at all to such a parallel. They certainly seem evident to me.

Robinson, Le Guin, Clute, Egan

I came across the file of this science fiction review column, written in April 2002 for the Washington Post Book World. It considers The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin, Appleseed by John Clute, and Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan. I remember that it had been cut on its original appearance, with the final book omitted.

Looking it over, I think I managed to say some worthwhile things, though I would now put more emphasis on the virtues of Schild's Ladder (whose neat parts still linger in memory). Anyway, here it is:


April 2002 Science Fiction

New forms of representing the new are not common under the sun, and science fiction (always a more conservative genre than it admits to being) almost never makes a radical break with its past traditions. "No science fiction novel published at the end of a century of science fiction could stand alone," as one of the authors reviewed this month observes in an afterword, explaining the pressure of history that weighs on every attempt to sketch the future. The four books before us each embody a familiar mode of twentieth-century SF -- alternate history, "future history," space opera, and the scientist's creation gone berserk -- and its authors are in their fifties, seventies, sixties, and forties respectively, which neglects the younger end of the spectrum but does offer a broad-range look at a genre that boomed with the Boomers (and is now being shouldered aside by various flavors of Fantasy).

Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt (Bantam, 658 pp., $25.95) begins in the Islamic year 783, 1405 by the Christian calendar, with a scouting party of the Mongol conqueror Temur crossing west through the Moravian Gate to discover a land decimated by plague. Forbidden to rejoin the Golden Horde for fear of contamination, the party disperses and Bold, an aging campaigner, flees through a desolate landscape that makes clear that the population of Europe has been almost wholly wiped out.

The ten sections of Robinson's very long novel move from that year to the late twenty-first century of a world radically different from our own. Europe is slowly resettled by Muslims, who also colonize Africa and much of central Asia; China eventually conquers Japan and the Incas, while the Hodenosaunee League in North America loses the east and west coasts to encroaching foreigners but holds onto the interior. The developments of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution take place in different periods, under very different conditions.

Alternate history is by now an established commercial publishing category, with a ready audience for books that describe the new course history takes after some implausible event -- hey, what if Robert E. Lee were supplied with Kalashnikovs by South African time-travellers, or a shower of giant meteorites destroyed the rivals to the British Empire, and the Raj prospers into the twenty-first century? -- opens up new military opportunities. Alternate history's appeal to politically truculent readers who seek fictitious validations of their personal ideologies, and to "military history" buffs who enjoy reading exotic variants of their favorite wars, is plain enough, and has given the sub-genre an artistic vitality that falls somewhere those of a role-playing game and a chat-room screed.

Robinson's novel is insistently unlike this, although its opening sections offer vivid tours of the transformed world that seem (at first) fairly conventional. But its sections are unified by an unusual device: the main characters of each are reincarnations of the same souls, whose continuity is easy to trace because their names over the centuries begin with the same letter. That soul who is Kyu in the first story (and Kokila, Katima, and so on thereafter) is combative, imprudent, and prone to getting himself (or herself) killed; while Bold (Bihari, Bistami . . . ) is more comfortable in the world, meliorist and optimistic.

The reader immediately notices that the hierarchical and essentialist metaphysics of the reincarnation theme is profoundly at odds with the rest of the novel, which presents a world that is secular, contingent, uncentered, and driven by economic realities. The system of coding souls by the initial letters of their mortal selves' names is even more peculiar; Robinson can't actually "mean it"; doing so would certainly consistute a Folly.

And indeed, parts of the novel contradict or undermine other parts, which is surely a fault if you believe that alternate history (or fiction generally) should offer a vision of adamantine seamlessness and "inner" consistency. Robinson does not, and his novel's willingness to dissolve boundaries it has earlier set up, or step outside its confines and comment on itself, shows it to be indeed a Folly, which Robinson has come to praise.

At one point relatively late in the novel, two characters are discussing whether history is cyclic or linear. The cyclic model invariably adopts the seasons of the year as metaphor -- "But what if they are nothing at all alike," asks a character, "what if history meanders like a river forever?" The image of history as a river -- specifically of unpredictable change manifesting as rising waters, and problematic revolutionary energies erupting in the breaking of a dam -- appears throughout Robinson's work, and perhaps someone will write a thesis on hydrology as synecdoche in the political imagination of Kim Stanley Robinson.

If so, they had better retain an appreciation of the droll. Robinson's novel is essentially comic, for all that it dramatizes many appalling events, and Robinson's willingness to peep around the side of his puppet theater and wink at the audience (there are half-hidden quotes of Karl Marx, John Fowles, and others, plus a faintly deprecating discussion of the "device" of giving a soul's successive incarnations names that begin with the same letter) stands as an implicit but thorough rebuke to the kind of war-gaming determinism that most "alternate histories" embody. The Years of Rice and Salt is Robinson's richest, most subtle and moving novel, a meditation on history and humanism that abjures easy answers and ends up (unlike most alternate histories) knowing more than in tells.


Six of the eight stories collected in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Birthday of the World (HarperCollins, 368 pp., $24.95) belong to her long sequence concerning the interstellar Ekumen, while one might as well be, and the last -- the longest, a tale of a generation ship's centuries-long journey which the ground rules of her future history preclude -- is antiphonal. Written over the past eight years (about the same period as last year's Tales of Earthsea), the stories are set on seven different worlds, but Le Guin doesn't differentiate between them in terms of gravity, atmospheric composition, axial tilt, or any other particular: they are mostly indistinguishable from Earth. More than ever before, her particulars are the stories' people.

The first story, "Coming of Age in Karhide," is a first-person account of a young Gethenian (a hermaphroditic native of the world Le Guin dramatized in The Left Hand of Darkness) growing into puberty in a clannish community where sexuality is not an issue except for a few days a month, when sex is an imperative and any non-relative a potential partner. The story proceeds smoothly -- abjuring all the conflicts and resolutions of conventional plot dynamic -- from ignorance to experience, and the protagonist's account of the sensations and misgivings s/he experiences is at once recognizable and strikingly unfamiliar. The reader's inability to draw a line where the one becomes the other -- that is, the story's ability to confound any reader's attempt to parse it -- is vivid evidence of its imaginative power.

Le Guin at her best is always undermining the borderline between categories, which is good because she has something of a weakness for them. Universality vs. individual experience, nubby particularity vs. general truths, are forever attracting Le Guin, who yearns to reconcile such oppositions in what a character calls "the body's obscure, inalterable dream of mutuality" but finally pulls back, knowing better. This tension often threatens to pull her stories apart, but seems actually (at least in her best work) to hold it together.

A critic once spoke of Orson Scott Card's stories as coming from either "Nice Orson" or "Nasty Orson," and one can venture (very provisionally) to see in Le Guin's work the hand of a Good Ursula and a Bad Ursula, the improving moral instructor and the scapegrace artist who capers outside the other's judiciously ruled lines. A model that attempts to account for a writer's resistance to modeling is a pretty shaky thing, and the most immediate problem with this one is the readiness of Good Ursula and Bad Ursula to switch roles when you're not looking. This readiness is nowhere more evident than in Le Guin's long interest in patterns of sexual politics, a subject (increasingly central since her 1991 volume Searoad) which has driven her at times to the precincts of the counsel of despair.

Le Guin's invocations of sexual violence, the destructive powers of religious orthodoxy (almost always masculine in nature), and men's susceptibility to militarism lead her time and again to the verge of concluding that there is something irredeemably destructive in the male psyche. Every story that touches this point, however, immediately reaches offstage to produce an example of a good male, an exception to what it seemed otherwise ready to rule. This is Good Ursula, recoiling from dogma and being fair. What is fascinating (I do not mean this sarcastically) is to see how Bad Ursula immediately undercuts this, showing -- with real subtlety and rhetorical power -- how this good male really isn't very different from the rest after all. Good Ursula may scruple at making such judgments, and Bad Ursula not hesitate or care, but there is no question which figure is more imaginatively alive.

If "Coming of Age in Karhide" is purely wonderful, and the next story, "The Matter of Seggri," scarcely less so, the rest seem (with the exception of the penultimate, title story) to march steadily downward in quality, which is troubling because Le Guin seems to have arranged them in something close to their order of composition. "Paradises Lost," the generation ship novella, is full of sharp observations and lovely moments, but gives us a devious religious cult that is too plainly tailored to merit the reader's scorn for it to possess any imaginative reality. The natural world with its discomforts and dangers is proven superior to an artificial environment; uncertainty and openness superior to serene dogma, especially when it's sneaky. Too tidily categorical, the story undermines only its own straw men. Bad Ursula does better with real targets.


The inhabited galaxy of John Clute's Appleseed (Tor, 335 pp., $25.95) seethes: with people zipping through vast artificial structures, starships popping through wormholes, tractor beams and laser weapons and other sci-fi hardware flashing across space. But mostly it seethes with the movement of data, AIs (here called Made Minds) as ubiquitous as the electronic devices in the kitchens, home offices, and living rooms of Clute's twenty-first century readers. The protagonist's ship is named Tile Dance and the tiles suggest both the computer chips of our own era, the tiny colored tiles that constitute figurative wall designs (the Portugese art of azulejaria is repeatedly cited), and any flat surface -- a screen, a sheet -- that can offer a vista onto distant realms. On every page, they dance.

Radically transformed environments are inhospitable to description via familiar language, and Clute's first novel in twenty-five years employs a prose style that fuses neologisms, old-fashioned slang, and various arcane terminologies into a dense kinetic impasto ("For several Heartbeats, within Klavier, where a trillion trillion axons had begun to find each other again across the commissural link forged by Tile Dance, the wound of Vipassana's passage through muscle and tendon of the heartwood burned like a white-hot poker caught between teeth. A trillion tongues burned to ash"). Readers used to a diction that holds to a high (or low) style, or who balk at mixed metaphors, may have trouble getting a grip.

Clute's tale of the complications that envelope the captain of the Tile Dance when he accepts a job transporting cargo to an unfamiliar planet is fast-moving, crunchy in its gnashing complexities, and suitably cosmic in implication; a sequel may be needed. A turbo-charged space opera that shows considerable fondness for its earnest predecessors (it was Clute who made the remark about the influence of a century of SF), Appleseed has seemingly little in common with The Birthday of the World. Yet each shows a painful awareness of the dichotomies between embodiment and abstraction, between ravening male and abiding female; each expresses -- in very different ways -- a yearning to locate a state of true center, where incompatibilities can be balanced if not reconciled, and authenticity, a dream that haunts both books, can body forth distinct from the imitative and the unreal.


Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder (Eos, 342 pp., $25.95) deploys a good deal of ingenuity and mathematics to tell his story of far-future scientists who create a novel vacuum state that expands uncontrollably, eventually filling millions of cubic light years and swallowing thousands of worlds. Unfailingly imaginative and intelligently written, it does everything more than ably -- Egan surmounts many problems he sets up for himself, such as maintaining interest in superhumans who can flee even such a cosmic calamity without loss of life -- and offers plausible renditions of a range of striking notions, such as the Qusp, a "quantum singleton processor" installed within the human brain that allows people to carry out cognitive operations without producing entangled systems, thus allowing posthumans to become what Homo sapiens had merely imagined themselves to be: creatures of choice, "capable of doing one thing and not another."

A conceit this piquant should give rise to some deeply strange protagonists, but Egan's characters seem surprisingly drab, despite the increasingly bizarre transformations they undergo. Egan creates an interesting twist on the Frankenstein theme by giving us a protagonist who finds the expanding menace the most refreshing thing to happen to mankind in millennia, but the reasonableness with which he (and his opponents) explain their convictions becomes slightly numbing. More interesting for its individual moments than for the (surprisingly conventional) form of its tale, Schild's Ladder fails to startle the reader in the way that Egan's best work does. When Egan is ready to tell a story that confronts the implications of its strangest elements, he will produce something genuinely uncanny.

Right about the Anthrax

This week's news has brought to mind my story "Giliad," written during the fall of 2001 and dealing with the events of that time. I opened up the file and searched on "anthrax," to find this:

The weeks that followed pulled Leslie in opposite directions: toward the fixity of the past and the lunacy of a fantasy future. She read with disbelief the mornings' news of anthrax spores mailed to TV studios and the nation's capital, with senators' offices contaminated and postal employees dead. The conclusion was inescapable: the United States was under attack by biological agents. The twenty-first century was turning out just as her teenaged sci-fi reading had predicted.

"They say it's Saddam." Trent was following the links from news reports on the spores' surprising sophistication to declarations by "fellows" at right-wing institutions that Iraqi responsibility was certain.

"Well, it certainly isn't the Taliban." The medieval theocrats who were regrouping in disarray under assaults from their warlord adversaries and miles-high bombers seemed poor candidates for the invisible attack that sent the world's superpower into panic, though perhaps (pundits mused) al Qaeda's penchant for low-tech operations staged within the target country had led them to obtain a cache of Soviet-era war germs. Such a theory did not require the hand of Saddam, but Leslie found it hard to push the reasoning further. The idea of pestilence blooming in the nation's nerve centers like sparks falling on straw left her disoriented. She did not fear for her own safety, but felt the axis of her being tilt vertiginously, a slow tipping into boundless freefall.

And, a few pages later:

By this point Trent was convinced that the anthrax attacks had not been the work of Islamic militants at all. He suspected rogue forces within the American "bioweapons community," which had secretly developed the strain of anthrax. "Even the administration has admitted that the spores belong to the 'Ames strain,'" he argued, link-clicking deeper toward the documentation he sought. Leslie found his explanations painful to listen to, and she shrank without looking at those windows he left on her screen: laparoscopic images of warblog, like lab reports of current pathology.

It seems as though my character was right.

Why Hollywood Movies Are Like Hamlet

Emily's choir group is off touring this weekend, so we took Nathaniel (who felt neglected) out to see Iron Man. Felt like a lemming doing so, being stampeded right in the direction that most lemmings go.

The film is what (I hope you) would expect; for $100 million plus, you get a polished script with some funny and witty lines, and striking special effects. It is also emotionally dishonest in the way that virtually all big-budget Hollywood films are: it trucks essentially in one theme, Redemption, which is achieved at no real cost. The protagonist was a roguishly charming bastard at the film's beginning, and now he's a roguishly charming hero, but exactly what has he renounced, and with what effort? He has, in the climax, done the Right Thing, at certain cost of his life, but he didn't die, the Right Thing did exactly what it was supposed to, and now he's universally adored.

Look at just about any contemporary Hollywood epic (at least one with a male protagonist) and you get the same thing. Which is to say that the film is, on one level, basically Cars.

And on another level it's basically a bargain-counter Hamlet. Has anyone noticed how many Hollywood movies are about a charismatic, brilliant, but troubled young man who acts badly and, instead of being roundly censured, has everyone wondering exactly is going on in his head? And a dead father figure, not necessarily murdered by the false father who stands in his way, but usually something like that? And bad behavior toward women, which the film wants us to forgive readily?

I don't get to watch a lot of movies, but I see this quite often when I do. Did anyone else notice that The Truman Show is basically Hamlet?

Pynchon's Prose

Here is a paragraph from Thomas Pynchon's new novel Against the Day. (It's from pp. 359-360). I want to discuss Pynchon's prose in this novel, which differs, subtly but distinctly, from that of his previous books.

First the post, then I'll come back tomorrow and make a few comments. You don't have to wait for me to go first.

This passage is set in the Rocky Mountain region around Colorado, just about a hundred years ago. Stray (Estrella) and Reef are a young couple.

"This was how for years, all through that quarter of the continent, they had fought, fled, beckoned, resumed . . . . If you took a map and tried to follow them over it, zigzagging town to town, back and forth, it might not have been that easy to account for, even if you recalled how wild, how much better than "wild" it'd been not all that many years ago, out here, even with the workdays that had you longing for the comforts of territorial prison, yes hard as that, when whatever was going to become yours--your land, your stock, your family, your name, no matter, however much or little you had, you earned it, with never no second thoughts as to just killing somebody, if it even looked like they might want to take it. Maybe a dog catching their scent coming down the wind, or the way some trailhand might be wearing his waterproof, that could be enough--didn't matter, with everything brand new and the soldiering so hard, waking up each day never knowing how you'd end it, cashing 'em in being usually never too distant from your thoughts, when any ailment, or animal wild or broke, or a bullet from any direction might be enough to propel you into the beyond . . . why clearly every lick of work you could get in would have that same mortal fear invested into it--Karl Marx and them, well and good, but that's what folk had for Capital, back in early times out here--not tools on credit, nor seed money courtesy of some banker, just their own common fund of fear that came with no more than a look across the day arising. It put a shade onto things that parlor life would just never touch, so whenever she or Reef pulled up and got out, when it wasn't, mind, simple getting away in a hurry, it was that one of them had heard about a place, some place, one more next-to-last place, that hadn't been taken in yet, where you could go live for a time on the edge of that old day-to-day question, at least till the Saturday nights got quiet enough to hear the bell of the town clock ring you the hours before some Sunday it'd be too dreary to want to sober up for . . . . So in time you had this population of kind of roving ambassadors from places like that that were still free, who wherever they came to rest would be a little sovereign piece of that faraway territory, and they'd have sanctuary about the size of their shadow."

Short Article on Thomas Pynchon

This appeared in the current issue of the New Haven Advocate. (They didn't put it into their online edition, so I am posting it here.) The title isn't mine, but I can't think of a better one.

DAY TRIPPER
by Gregory Feeley


A month after its long-awaited publication, Thomas Pynchon’s sixth and longest novel has received a problematic reception. Early reviews were sharply mixed, with a publication-day savaging from the New York Times’s notorious scold Michiko Kakutani, who called it “a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative . . . complicated without being rewardingly complex,” followed by a longer, more astute appreciation by Sunday reviewer Liesl Schillinger, who hailed it as “his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel.” If it is not hovering low on the best sellers’ list, as Pynchon’s previous few novels had managed in their first weeks of publication, it has nonetheless enjoyed a fierce, if focused, attention: a Wiki site devoted exclusively to its mysteries was launched the day the novel appeared, burgeoning with glosses and annotations that grow by the day.

In fact, both Times critics are wrong: Against the Day is not a pretentious mess, nor is it the best entry point for readers new to his work (The Crying of Lot 49, scarcely a tenth the current novel’s size, is surely that). Its tremendous length – the 1,085 pages hold nearly half a million words – encompasses something like half a dozen plot lines, most spooling off from a murder of a Colorado anarchist in 1900 by union-busting mine owners and his various children’s attempts to avenge or come to terms with it. Numerous reviews have mentioned the multiplicity of narratives and enormous cast, and all have noted its succession of exotic locales (and no surprise: the jacket copy, written by Pynchon, colorfully emphasizes it).

As reviewers have also mentioned, Against the Day shares many features with earlier Pynchon novels. The underrated Vineland had a comic subplot involving a Japanese monster attacking a city; Against the Day features a much stranger and melancholy tale of an indefinable (and, strangely, soon forgotten) monster devastating New York City. Gravity’s Rainbow opposed the arc of nature’s rainbow with the malign trajectory of the V-2 rocket; Against the Day plays off both metaphors. The nineteenth-century fancy of a hollow Earth, which figures in Mason & Dixon, reappears (to even stranger effect) in Against the Day.

More significantly, the vivid central image of Mason & Dixon – its protagonists’ boundary line conceived as a gash upon the Earth’s being, the imposition of unnatural linearity upon the complex topography of the living Earth – is evoked repeatedly in the new novel, where numerous man-made features – mine shafts, state lines, railroads – are presented as industrial capitalism’s violations of nature. (The name of the murdered anarchist, Webb Traverse, embodies this tension between linearity and an organic interrelatedness.)

What no one has mentioned is how profoundly this vision seems indebted to a much older writer, one whom Pynchon’s postmodern fans have probably never read: D.H. Lawrence. It may seem peculiar even to mention the hectoring and deeply unfashionable Lawrence, who since the Sixties has been excoriated (somewhat unfairly, if only somewhat) as a male supremacist and proto-fascist. But Pynchon is a child of the Fifties, not the Sixties, and the Fifties saw Lawrence as an apostle of sexual liberation and heroic opposition to the dehumanizing power of modern society and industrial capitalism. The opening chapters of his 1915 novel The Rainbow, which dramatize the sundering of the Brangwens’ farmland by the first railroad lines, sees a powerful echo in Pynchon’s scene of Traverse selecting and then blowing up a railway bridge that cut through the countryside and people’s lives.

Lawrence’s biographer John Worthen has noted that what Lawrence’s contemporaries found radical and upsetting about his work was how it “centered on articulating the experiences of the body,” and this characterizes Pynchon’s work as well. Lawrence and Pynchon are profoundly different writers – Lawrence could be pretty humorless, while Pynchon is as comic a writer as Joyce – but the Lawrence who wrote in 1914 that “You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character” is a writer with whom the author of Gravity’s Rainbow – whose protagonist in the end simply dissolves into the landscape – possesses important (and overlooked) affinities.

Pynchon’s novel opens with a scene of high-spirited airship-flying young men – the Chums of Chance – soaring through the clouds, a parody of the boys’ adventure novels (such as The Airship Boys Due North) of the early twentieth century, which Pynchon relates in the actual style of those old novels. This tactic was first used in Into the Aether, a 1974 novel by Richard Lupoff, but Pynchon’s use of it is considerably more original and complex.

Lecturing at Cornell in the Fifties, Vladimir Nabokov noted that the fantastical scenes in the Nighttown episode in Ulysses could not be explained as the hallucinations of any character or combination of characters, but represented something strikingly more free-form: “The book is itself dreaming and having visions.” Pynchon was one of Nabokov’s students, and the strangest, most disconcerting aspect of his later novels – that some scenes are set in a different universe than others – may have had their inspiration here. The Chums of Chance, like the indeterminate monster and other bizarre creations, inhabit a different reality than the rest of the novel, and until the reader realizes this, he will vainly try to reconcile Pynchon’s painstakingly researched evocation of pre-World War I America with an alternate universe in which people used airships like roadsters.

Much of Pynchon’s novel is a good deal easier than this: Schillinger is right to emphasize its humor, and to observe that Pynchon can be “uncharacteristically earnest” when treating political matters. (Various characters, including Traverse’s youngest son Kit, must deal with the system’s attempts to co-opt them, which Pynchon describes – “Despite having gone in with a determination to cut the place some slack, Kit had seen Yale almost immediately for what it was” – with unconcealed disdain.)

How good the novel is – whether it will be remembered, like Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, as one of the great American novels of our time – is a judgment no one can make after a single reading, and I certainly have not yet gone through its thousand pages twice. Richer and more various than any six novels you are likely to encounter, Against the Day requires a significant investment of time and energy. Like exploring a new continent, it promises to exhaust you at times, leave you feeling lost, and show you some things you have never seen before.