He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.

The Yellow Wallpaper, and other stories, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was many things. A feminist, a writer, a public speaker and political campaigner. Her best known story is The Yellow Wallpaper which was published in 1892 in the New England Magazine. It’s a tremendous piece of work. Justly famous.

I read The Yellow Wallpaper as part of a Dover Thrift Editions collection. It stands out from the other stories. Sufficiently so that although I do recommend tracking down a copy of The Yellow Wallpaper itself I’m not sure I’d recommend tracking down her other fiction. Sometimes an author puts lightning in a bottle, and however they try once it’s out they can’t get it back in again.

The Yellow Wallpaper itself is the story of a woman who has recently given birth and who is depressed and nervous. Her husband is a doctor and so also her doctor. He has prescribed a rest cure and they have rented a large Summer house for three months. Her husband is a solid and unfanciful man, and has installed them in what was once the nursery of the house. A large room with barred windows, a solid bed and decaying yellow wallpaper.

Banned from writing in her journal, reading or visiting friends lest she excite herself, the narrator sits and lies in the room staring out of the window or at the peculiar wallpaper.

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.
The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

As the story continues, the pattern becomes more repugnant. A smell is noticed, and the narrator becomes persuaded that she can see a woman moving at times behind the wallpaper, trapped within it but eager to get out. It is almost as if the woman were imprisoned in the room in which the narrator must spend her days…

Essentially, The Yellow Wallpaper is structured as a ghost story. MR James would have been proud of it. It also has elements of the gothic tale with its imagery of a woman trapped in a high room unable to free herself. For all those ingredients though, it is not a ghost story and it’s no spoiler to say it’s not. It’s much more frightening than that. It’s a story about how through a dangerous mixture of love and self-assurance a man drives the woman he loves towards insanity.

John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.

The final pages, the final paragraph, are remarkably chilling. In writing this piece I discovered the story was semi-autobiographical, which makes it all the more disturbing. Gilman wrote at a time when post-partum depression was disregarded as mere hysteria and in which women generally were viewed as intellectually and emotionally frail. That ignorance had a cost.

The remaining stories deal in similar territory, but less effectively. In The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman has very serious points to make. It talks about how female creativity and expression are quashed and so forced to find such outlets as they can. It talks of how men do not listen to women, and of how male certainty can crush women. Ultimately too it talks of how men themselves are damaged by relationships founded on inequality.

The Yellow Wallpaper manages to make all these points while also delivering an excellent quasi-ghost story. The story doesn’t just have a point, it also has a narrative.

The next story in the collection (don’t worry, I’m not going to go through them all) is Three Thanksgivings. An elderly woman of 50 (and yes, I am glad to live in a time when 50 is no longer elderly) is being urged by her now married children to give up the large house she inhabits and move in with one or the other of them. At the same time, she owes a mortgage to a Mr. Butts who is keen to own both the house and the woman herself through marriage.

The story consists of three thanksgivings, as per the title. In the first two she visits each of her adult children, a son and a daughter. The son wishes to make plans for her. The daughter’s husband likewise. The children both mean well but they offer no freedom and nor of course does Mr. Butts. The solution is to create a woman’s society which gathers at the large house and pays its own way with women from all across the county gathering to better themselves and enjoy each other’s company.

The story has a clear point to it. The elderly woman is faced with unappetising choices and with sacrificing her independence. With the aid of other women, she maintains her dignity and self-determination both. Perhaps the reader could organise such a society in her own community?

Gilman can still write. I quite liked the passage I’m about to quote, but overall Three Thanksgivings isn’t so much a short story as a speech in story form.

Afterward Mr. Butts called. He came early in the evening with his usual air of determination and a somewhat unusual spruceness. Mr. Peter Butts was a florid, blonde person, a little stout, a little pompous, sturdy and immovable in the attitude of a self-made man. He had been a poor boy when she was a rich girl; and it gratified him much to realize – and to call upon her to realize – that their positions had changed. He meant no unkindness, his pride was honest and unveiled. Tact he had none.

Mr. Butts is in a way typical of Gilman’s characters. Few of the people in these stories mean unkindness. The enemies here are selfishness, thoughtlessness, assumptions of how things should be. Even the errant husband in Turned who cheats on his wife with their maid (one of the best of the stories after The Yellow Wallpaper) doesn’t mean unkindness, though in his particular case that makes his wrongs all the worse.

As the collection continues, its didactic nature becomes clearer. Several stories are essentially lectures about how letting a wife work might make for a happier marriage, or how when one sex is free the other is freed too. Gilman is no hater of men. For her men are victims too of societal roles that do nobody any favours. Men make their women into ornaments and in turn their women make them into joyless providers.

Another issue I had with the collection is that Gilman’s prescriptions do assume a certain level of prosperity. Perhaps that’s inevitable. Feminism had to start somewhere and starting with the already moneyed and educated has a certain logic. Still I couldn’t help observing that the women in her stories generally had positions fortunate enough to give them options beyond those their men offered them.

One final quote.

Mollie was “true to type.” She was a beautiful instance of what is reverentially called “a true woman.” Little, of course – no true woman may be big. Pretty, of course – no true woman could possibly be plain. Whimsical, capricious, charming, changeable, devoted to pretty clothes and always “wearing them well,” as the esoteric phrase has it. (This does not refer to the clothes – they do not wear well in the least – but to some special grace of putting them on and carrying them about, granted to but few, it appears.)

What’s depressing in that quote (taken from probably the weakest story of the collection, If I Were a Man) is how much of it remains relevant after so much time has passed. One story refers to how women in another state now have the vote. Progress there has been made. On the domestic front though far too much of this collection still stirs a degree of recognition.

The Yellow Wallpaper. Alternatively, as it’s out of copyright, the title story can be found online here . That second link leads to what I suspect may be the original version, as it uses her married name rather than her maiden name which she reverted to. It also comes with illustrations, which for some reason I’m always fond of in a book.

… he moved like a man whose conscience was clear, or lacking.

The Drowning Pool, by Ross Macdonald

Raymond Chandler once said that Dashiell Hammett took crime out from the drawing room and back into the streets. Ross Macdonald in turn took crime out of the streets and into the hills and valleys of California.

I wrote about Ross Macdonald’s background and first Lew Archer novel here. It was a strong novel, but too derivative of Chandler and Hammett. Macdonald hadn’t found his own voice yet.

In The Drowning Pool I’d say he’s already much closer to finding that voice. I liked Moving Target enough to buy the sequel, but The Drowning Pool is better written and tighter and a distinct style is emerging which isn’t just a rerun of Macdonald’s inspirations.

There’s a line early in The Drowning Pool which though a little overwrought captures something key to the hardboiled crime genre: “Sex and money: the forked root of evil.”

Sex and money. There’s more to the hardboiled genre than that, but in terms of the crimes the genre explores those are the only two motives that matter. That’s Hammett’s legacy. The plot may be tangled, but what drives events is very simple indeed.

The Drowning Pool opens with Lew Archer being hired by a beautiful woman (naturally) who has received a poison pen letter alleging infidelity. Archer takes the case, and investigating the woman’s family finds a husband who may prefer other men, a mother-in-law who controls the family purse strings and keeps that husband emasculated and dependent on her, a daughter perhaps unhealthily fond of her father and family friends not all of whom seem all that friendly.

Archer also learns that the whole family are sitting on a fortune in oil. A fortune nobody can get to as long as the mother-in-law (who owns the land) refuses to sell up. When she is found floating face down in the family pool the question isn’t who benefits from her death, it’s who doesn’t.

I’m not going to talk further about the plot. It’s well crafted and satisfying and the various twists and turns are convincing. The plot is what makes this an easy read, it’s what keeps the pages turning, it’s not though what makes it worth reading.

What makes it worth reading is the sense of place, more particularly the sense of California. I said in my writeup of The Moving Target that I was impressed by how vividly Macdonald brought California to life. That’s if anything even more true in this novel. Here Archer goes for a swim in the sea:

I turned on my back and floated, looking up at the sky, nothing around me but cool clear Pacific, nothing in my eyes but long blue space. It was as close as I ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I ever got from all the people. They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted.

And here, later on that same page, Archer reflects on the oil town that’s sprung up not all that far from that beach:

The oil wells from which the sulphur gas rose crowded the slopes on both sides of the town. I could see them from the highway as I drove in: the latticed triangles of the derricks where trees had grown, the oil-pumps nodding and clanking where cattle had grazed. Since ‘thirty-nine or ‘forty, when I had seen it last, the town had grown enormously, like a tumor. It had thrust out shoots in all directions: blocks of match-box houses in raw new housing developments and the real estate shacks to go with them, a half-mile gauntlet of one-story buildings along the highway: veterinarians, chiropractors, beauty shops, marketerias, restaurants, bars, liquor stores, There was a new four-story hotel, a white frame gospel tabernacle, a bowling alley wide enough to house a B-36. The main street had been transformed by glass brick, plastic, neon. A quiet town in a sunny valley had hit the jackpot hard, and didn’t know what to do with itself at all.

That’s a long quote above, but I think it’s a great one. The town’s expanding, sprawling, it’s capitalism made physical in steel and glass. It’s America changing as it always has changed, with the orange groves and the farms making way for yet another gold rush. It’s money, one half of the forked root of evil, and it’s irresistible.

As so often in the hardboiled genre, there’s a sense of corruption under a glittering surface. California is beautiful, the sea and the sky are both blue, but you don’t need to dig very deep or go very far before you find something much darker. Like the pool itself the surface of California is inviting, but it’s far from the whole story.

The underwater lights of the pool were on, so that the water was a pale emerald depth with a luminous and restless surface filming it.

And with that, there’s not a lot more to say. Macdonald tries less hard here than in the first novel with the zingy one-liners. He still manages a nice line in short sentence descriptions (there’s a couple of examples below) but he’s not trying so hard to mimic Chandler’s polish and the snap of Marlowe’s comebacks. It makes for a less forced style and plays better to Macdonald’s own strengths. Here’s those examples:

There were dark crumbs on the oilcloth-covered table beside the burner, and some of them were moving.

… my hood was still hot enough to fry the insects that splattered it.

I could easily have found more.

In the end, crime fiction is moral fiction. The people Archer encounters are motivated by sex and money, that’s why their actions lead to misery and death. Archer himself though is something quite different. The key difference for me between hardboiled and noir is in the morality of the protagonist. In noir, the protagonist is one more person driven by sex or money or both. In hardboiled, everyone else may be like that, but the detective isn’t that smart. He’s motivated by something else, something more noble, something which frankly the world he’s in has no use for. The hardboiled detective is motivated by the desire for truth, whatever the price, even if the price is paid by him. He’s a paladin, a paragon of virtue in a virtueless world. I’ll leave Archer the final word:

“I don’t know what justice is,” I said. “Truth interests me, though. Not general truth if there is any, but the truth of particular things. Who did what when why. Especially why. …”

The Drowning Pool. That’s the Vintage Black Lizard press imprint, a series I’m very fond of as the covers are generally good, the layout clear and the paper and bindings of good quality.

We are the fucked generation

A common piece of advice given to new writers, is to write what they know. It’s terrible advice. All too many writers don’t know anything much except attending writers’ workshops and struggling to make it as a writer, frequently in New York City. It’s not always New York City, but they often seem to move there, which extends their range to stories about trying to make it as a struggling writer who just moved to New York City, frequently from a small town.

I’ve read that story far too many times, I’ve seen it on film, I’ve been to a musical in the past year which turned out when I got there to be about a struggling writer who had recently moved to NYC and the bohemian people she met there. In the unlikely event anyone reads this who happens to be a struggling writer living in New York (actually, given how many there seem to be, that may not be that unlikely), here’s my bit of advice. Write what you don’t know. Write about a young girl coming of age in 1840s Copenhagen, or about an old man moving into a hospice he knows he’ll never leave, or maybe a satire of contemporary religion from the perspective of a church cat. Whatever. Surprise me here.

Anyway, that aside. Shoplifting from American Apparel is a novella by Tao Lin. It contains a few incidents from the life of Sam, a young Chinese-American writer living in New York. One could possibly call him struggling even. Irritatingly then, I rather enjoyed it. It’s well written, subtle and very unusual in its approach to narrative.

Shoplifting was written in 2007, and is very much of its time. Sam talks to his friends on Gmail chat (as do I most days), checks stuff on Facebook, there are references to the Obama and McCain campaigns. It’s plotless, Sam has desultory conversations, vague relationships with a few girls none of whom he really engages with, goes on a few trips, and gets arrested twice for shoplifting (once from American Apparel, you can’t say the book doesn’t live up to its title). As in Bret Easton Ellis’s 1985 novel Less than Zero it starts at no particular point and ends equally unresolved, it’s simply episodes from a life, with the implication that the episodes not in the book are much the same.

Shoplifting opens with Sam chatting online, in a sequence that manages to both be very funny (if you’ve used Gmail chat anyway, possibly less so if not) and surprisingly accurate about the peculiarities of that form. Here’s two snippets of Sam’s chat:

“What should I eat”’ said Sam. “I have two choices. Cereal or peanut butter bagel.”
“Cereal,” said Luis.
“I wanted the bagel. I’m eating the bagel, I don’t know why I asked.”

…

“Has Marissa ever threatened to kill you,” said Sam.
“Oscar Wilde said that a genius is a spectator to their own life, to the point that the real genius is uninteresting,” said Luis. “No, Marissa has never threatened to kill me.”

I love the inconsequentiality of the conversation, the pointless question about what to eat when Sam’s already decided. Chat for its own sake. Equally, Lin captures the curiously intercollated nature of Gmail chat, where each participant is often a sentence or so out of sequence with the other. Leroy is talking about writing just before that second quote begins, makes his point about Wilde, but while he was writing that Sam’s already asked the question about Marissa. Leroy answers that, which ends up tagged on to the Wilde quote. My own experience of Gmail chat is very similar, if someone changes topic, you’ve often written out a reply to the previous topic before you receive the message telling you they’ve moved on to something new. It may seem unimportant, but then if there’s any theme to Shoplifting at all it’s that everything is equally important or unimportant.

It’s hard, incidentally, not to see that Wilde quote as something of a metacommentary on the novella itself.

Lin is very good at capturing small exchanges, everyday conversations. Although his characters don’t really do anything, and their motivations for what they do do are never really explored (we’re not privy to Sam’s inner life, merely his comments on what it is), there is a sense of the quotidian here which many novelists struggle to achieve. Having just come from The Road, with its dialogue tending to the profound and the symbolic, it’s refreshing to read a work which simply captures the small comedy of everyday life.

There’s a danger to too much analysis of a work like this, it deals very much in surfaces after all, there’s a risk of putting a weight on it it’s not intended to bear. Why does Sam shoplift? Who knows? His only explanation is that he’s stupid, there’s a feeling almost of why not. It is another source of comedy, as an American Apparel manager complains that they’re the good guys and if he’s going to shoplift he should do it from a company with bad labour relations. It also does take Sam from his own milieu briefly, to police holding cells filled with aggressive drunks and possibly crazy people, but he learns nothing from that.

So, Sam learns nothing, he constantly reflects on his own life but in an essentially narcissistic way, there’s no drive to change anything nor does he seem to particularly enjoy it. He just sort of is, aimlessly. His friends are equally aimless, comparing the Amazon rankings of their books and doing occasional readings, but there’s a sense they’re waiting to be discovered rather than working for it. They haven’t opted out, they’ve just never really opted in. Some have talent, many plainly don’t (at one point a band explain with great seriousness that their new song is about how Jesus was a zombie as he came back from the dead, they seem unaware – as Lin I’m sure isn’t – that it’s a commonplace internet joke).

The issue always with plotless novels, is what to read them for. Since much of what I read these days is fairly plotless, it’s a question I have to answer quite often. Without plot, really you’re looking at character and prose. Shoplifting’s light on character, Sam and his friends are fairly interchangeable (itself possibly a comment on them), so you’re left with the prose. Lin has an often dryly ironic tone, which is combined somehow with a stye rather like champagne foam, insubstantial but no less enjoyable for that. He also has a nice eye for the absurd:

“I want to change my novel to present tense,” said Sam. “Is there some Microsoft Word thing to do that.”

or

… my face was bathed in the soft blue light of Internet Explorer.

If I had to criticise, I’d say that some of Lin’s influences are a bit obvious. I enjoy Douglas Coupland as much as the next man, and I’ve read a fair bit of Bret Easton Ellis, but their fingerprints here are easy to spot. At one point a character is even mentioned to be reading an Ellis novel, that’s nicely self-referential and all but (as I’d like a few more TV writers to realise) hanging a lampshade on the point doesn’t mean it’s no longer an issue. That said, Lin has nothing of the ultra-violence (or indeed vampires) so frequent in Ellis’s work, and which for me was the weakest part of Ellis’s material, so arguably he’s improving on Ellis rather than merely imitating him.

Self-referentiality is another big part of Shoplifting, Sam is a Chinese-American writer who writes books about “two people alone in rooms in Ohio and Pennsylvania talking to each other on Gmail chat.” Shoplifting, of course, is a book by a Chinese-American writer and opens with two people alone in rooms talking to each other on Gmail chat. Is Sam essentially Tao Lin? Again, who knows? To me, it’s a form of joke, a metajoke even, Sam writes stories about characters like himself while appearing in a story which may have been written by someone like himself. That said, there’s a laziness to post-modern irony at times, and what works at this length could become very tiresome at full novel length.

If I had to sum up the characters in Shoplifting, I’d do it with the following quote. Here someone is explaining what happened when he ran away from home, an adolescently romantic impulse that descends into banal futility:

Joseph said he stopped going to school when he was sixteen and saved money and left Kentucky on his bike without telling anyone and climbed onto a train, because he had heard of people doing that, and the train went somewhere but then came back and didn’t move anymore and he bought a Greyhound ticket and went to San Francisco and then Arizona.

Sam and his acquaintances lead lives of tremendous material comfort. They have laptops and ipods and all manner of useful things, all they really lack is much of a point. They live in a blanket of pleasant inconsequence, with nothing much to struggle for. They are not religious, or political, or in any way driven. They are the products of a world in which want has largely been abolished, for the children of the middle classes anyway, swaddled until it’s hard to feel anything at all:

“…there was nothing I could do with the emotion really,” said Sam. “It just went away after a while.”

Look on your works, ye baby boomers, and despair.

I heard of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel over at John Self’s blog, The Asylum. He gave it a positive review, the comments to which are also well worth reading. John has my thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Shoplifting from American Apparel

Addressant Unbekannt

Address Unknown, by Kressman Taylor

Address Unknown is a 1938 short story by American writer Katherine Kressman, published under the name Kressman Taylor (Taylor was her husband) as it was considered “too strong to appear under the name of a woman”. It’s published today as a stand alone work, as a novella essentially, though the Souvenir Press edition I read achieved its length of 64 pages by the somewhat shameful expedient of leaving the bottom 40% or so of every page entirely blank. That said, I wouldn’t envy Souvenir trying to sell a 30 to 40 page story at anything like a price that could make it worth publishing, so perhaps the fault lies not with our publishers but with ourselves.

All that aside, what is it? It’s an epistolary tale set in 1933. It opens with Max Eisenstein, a Jewish American, writing to his old friend and business partner Martin Schulse wishing him well on Martin’s recent return to Germany with his family. Max is optimistic, missing his friend but confident he has made the right decision, that he will be happy and successful back in Germany, a land now free of its “old Junker spirit, the Prussian arrogance and militarism”. As Max says:

You go to a democratic Germany, a land with a deep culture and the beginnings of a fine political freedom. It will be a good life.

Max writes too with news of his sister, Griselle. She is an actress and a woman with whom Martin once had a passionate extramarital affair, now ended.

Martin responds in equal good cheer, he writes to “Max, dear old fellow”, laughs about his big new house and the bed he has had made for his wife, but comments too on how rich he is in Germany with his American wealth, his countrymen so poor that he pays ten servants in Germany for the same money as two in the US. His letter is gossipy, emotional, full of affection advising Max to find “a nice fat little wife” of his own. The friendship between the men is evident.

The correspondence continues, and soon Max is asking Martin “Who is this Adolf Hitler who seems rising toward power in Germany?” Max’s reply is equivocal, telling “Dear Old Max” “I think in many ways Hitler is good for Germany, but I am not sure” and adding that he “is like an electric shock, strong as only a great orator and a zealot can be. But I ask myself, is he quite sane?” To the politics, he adds news of family, his wife’s new dress, but he returns to Hitler concerned at where Germany may be headed.

From there, the story takes a darker turn. Max writes enquiring if the stories he hears from Germany, of atrocities against Jews, are true. He is worried and has news that Griselle may herself be travelling to Berlin, a journey he has counseled her against in the circumstances. Max’s reply, to “Mr. Max Eisenstein” is written from his business address, he no longer wishes correspondence from a Jew arriving at his home. He writes:

As for the sterm measures that so distress you, I myself did not like them at first, but I have come to see their painful necessity. The Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbors it. I have never hated the individual Jew — yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.

Martin is a Nazi official now, his wife entertaining members of the party, his son a member of the Hitler Youth. Hitler is now referred to as the “Gentle Leader”, with capitalisations it’s worth noting, the letter is full of Nazi rhetoric, references to the “old, strong gods of the German race” and the “Semitic character”.

I shan’t quote much further, Griselle travels to Berlin, and on that trip turns the former friends’ story. In essence, however, this is an examination of how the Nazi regime changed people, like Martin who starts off praising Hindenburg as “a fine liberal whom I much admire” but later writes without irony of how “We ate the bitter bread of shame and drank the thin gruel of poverty. But now we are free men.” Without irony as, of course, Martin had no such experience. He lived well in America, in partnership with a Jewish friend, Germany’s post World War I hardships were never his.

Address Unknown is a neat and clever tale. Generally a month passes between letters, sometimes two months, we see the friendship die in slow motion, as Martin’s greetings move from exclamations of friendship to literally opening a letter with simply the words “Heil Hitler”. Kressman was inspired to write it, we are told in an afterword, by an experience where German friends who had lived in America but now returned to Germany briefly revisited the US, and while there refused to speak to a former Jewish friend. Kressman wondered how such a thing could happen, how good people could become so indoctrinated that could turn their backs on their former companions. Address Unknown is her examination of that question, and of the absurdities of the regime that gave rise to such results.

Address Unknown is a very fast read, I read the whole work in around half an hour, perhaps slightly less. It’s an enjoyable and rewarding story, well written (Max and Martin have distinct and consistent voices) and the ramping up of tension and the sudden turn of the story as Griselle heads to Berlin are well paced and judged. It’s also a surprisingly prescient tale, illustrating the dangers of Nazism at a time when many weren’t paying attention, it’s easy to forget when reading it that Kressman had no benefit of hindsight. She saw what the Nazis were, and the seductive power of certainty. That last element is why the story remains relevant, the allure of simple solutions and a convenient other to blame never goes away for long.

I learned about Address Unknown from Stewart McAbney’s blog, Booklit, he reviewed it here. Stewart’s review is an exemplary one, his analysis absolutely spot on. In particular, I owe the point that Martin uses “we” when speaking of Germany’s suffering even though he wasn’t there for it to Stewart’s writeup.

Address Unknown

Every route had its traps and only the regular carriers knew of them

Post Office, by Charles Bukowski

Most authors don’t write about what it’s like to have a job, possibly because all too many of them haven’t really had much by way of jobs. They’ll write about what it’s like to be a struggling author, there’s an ocean of novels covering that territory, but there’s not much about life as most people actually live it.

Well, that’s a hideous exaggeration of course, there’s the marvellous Something Happened by Joseph Heller; there’s What was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn; Microserfs by Douglas Coupland; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe; arguably one could even say much of Revolutionary Road. Still, it’s not territory most authors are that comfortable in.

Charles Bukowski’s an exception. His (apparently largely autobiographical) 1971 debut novel Post Office has a lot to say about work, about the sheer grind of clocking in, day in and day out. It’s the story of his alter-ego, Henry Chinaski, and his twelve or so years working at the US post office, first as a substitute mail carrier (mailman in other words) and later as a sorting clerk. It includes absurd bureaucracy, idiot rules, petty and malevolent supervisors, banal inhumanity. It’s very well written, often extremely funny, and desperately sad.

Chinaski is drunk and a womaniser, he plays the horses (generally winning, for a while he makes a living at it), he cheats on his live in girlfriend (whom he refers to as his “shackjob”, because he shacks up with her) casually and without thought. He’s a man who on being presented for the first time with his new born baby assesses the nurse’s figure. He’s lazy, has an attitude problem and hates all his jobs, he keeps up with them just because the women he’s with expect him to make an honest living (rather than one at the tracks) and because he can’t generally be bothered to quit and do something else.

Bukowski clearly understands Chinaski’s world, given he lived it I guess he should. He’s tremendous at bringing to life the stupidity and sometimes downright insanity of the public, with their dogs and demands and random aggression. I’ve worked retail, as a student, and I still remember people asking me as I worked the pick’n'mix if they could both pick and mix, I remember the guy who held up two bottles of water, one in each hand, and asked me which one was colder. People individually in my experience are ok, the public though are insane. Bukowski knows this:

The voices of the people were the same, no matter where you carried the mail you heard the same things over and over again.
“You’re late, aren’t you?”
“Where’s the regular carrier?”
“Hello, Uncle Sam!”
“Mailman! Mailman! This doesn’t go here!”
The streets were full of insane and dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn’t seem to work, and you wondered how they did it. There was one guy who wouldn’t let you put the mail in his box. He’d stand in the driveway and watch you coming for 2 or 3 blocks and he’d stand there and hold his hand out.

For the record, Catherine O’Flynn captures the experience of working in retail better than anyone else I’ve read, Chinaski of course is a public servant, if anything that’s even worse. It comes with additional feelings of entitlement on the part of the public.

Chinaski works for sadistic supervisors who take pleasure in making his life miserable, assigning him impossible routes in brutal conditions and denying him work when he answers back. Employees are expected to look up to old timers whose lives have plainly been ruined by the job, men of stunted horizons whose every interest and spark of life has been crushed under years of repetition. When these figures break, as they do, they are discarded like old machine parts, and never spoken of again.

As the novel continues, Chinaski moves from woman to woman, sometimes hitting it lucky, sometimes not so much. He leaves his job as a mail carrier, but later returns to the post office, now as a sorter. It’s an indoor job, better money but lacking the challenge of making difficult routes on time in bad weather. That said, it is secure:

After swearing us in, the guy told us:
“All right now, you’ve got a good job. Keep your nose clean and you’ve got security the rest of your life.”
Security? You could get security in jail. 3 squares and no rent to pay, no utilities, no income tax, no child support. No licence plate fees. No traffic tickets. No drunk driving raps. No losses at the race track. Free medical attention. Comradeship with those with similar interests. Church. Round-eye. Free burial.

Security here is the trap. The post office offers a good job, good conditions, decent pay, it’s hard to get fired (Chinaski routinely turns up drunk and takes time off without permission). There’s constant chivvying, tasks to be performed in times calculated by external consultants who’ve never done the job, penalties for going to the bathroom or getting a drink of water outside your allotted ten minute break, requirements as to how you sit on your stool while you sort, but if you can put up with all that you could spend decades with the post office. Those who do put on weight, sag and spread, but they’re secure. To Chinaski, it’s a form of death, a way of losing your own life.

Bukowski doesn’t just write about work, Chinaski is popular with women, despite being described by more than one character as looking like a wino. He’s obviously got some charisma, some charm, and although he generally treats women like convenient objects there’s a level at which he remains aware of their essential humanity. At times, there’s even a tenderness:

The blankets had fallen off and I stared down at her white back, the shoulder blades sticking out as if they wanted to grow into wings, poke through that skin. Little blades. She was helpless.

Chinaski just doesn’t connect that humanity, that vulnerability, with any implication that maybe he shouldn’t sleep with the next woman who’s available as soon as his current one is off to work.

Post Office is full of damaged people. Workmates who shout and boast of sexual conquests they’ve clearly never had. People who break down, crying in the locker room as they become too old to still sort post as fast as management requires. Chinaski’s world is a brutal one, supervisors care only about delivery targets, institutions are faceless and indifferent to those they employ, people are messy and drunk and needy but their society requires them to be none of those things. Chinaski inhabits the world of those who slip through the cracks, the people who stop coping, who maybe could never cope, the people who get old and never made enough to create a cushion that could make that bearable:

She got a job as a waitress, then lost that when they tore down the cafe to erect an office building. Now she lived in a small room in a loser’s hotel. She changed the sheets there and cleaned the bathrooms. She was on wine.
…
She went back to her room and put on her best dress, high heels, tried to fix up. But there was a terrible sadness about her.

This is a plotless novel. Stuff happens, but there isn’t really a story arc. Chinaski gets a job with the post office, leaves it and does some other stuff for a while, then returns to the post office. He has relationships, few friendships, he spends a lot of time drunk. That’s about it. What it is though is a portrait of what it’s like to be part of the itinerant underclass, the people in lousy jobs on poor wages, seen as unreliable by bosses who neither understand nor care about the chaos of their lives. These people start out with dreams, ambitions, desires like all of us. But along the way they get crushed, and Post Office in part shows us how:

I don’t know how it happens to people. I had child support, need for something to drink, rent, shoes, shirts, socks, all that stuff. LIke everyone else I needed an old car, something to eat, all the little intangibles.

It’s no surprise to me that Post Office had the impact it did. This is a great novel. It’s ugly, vulgar and crass. It contains a lot of block capitalised shouting. It’s characters are unpleasant, mad, pathetic, often cruel, sometimes downright repugnant (including Chinaski). But it’s true, and for me truth is the essence of good art. This is good art.

Post Office

Morand on Dos Passos

I just finished Paul Morand’s book of recollections and observations, Venices (published by Pushkin Press), which I shall post about later today or tomorrow.

Venices includes Morand’s reflections on a number of celebrated people he knew over the years (he’s a terrible, perhaps more accurately an accomplished, namedropper). Among them was John Dos Passos.

Dos Passos died while Morand was writing Venices, prompting Morand to add the following footnote in reference to him. I repeat it here in its entirety, be warned, it’s a touch depressing:

October 1970. Sheltering from an autumn storm in the Cafe de la Fenice, I perused the newspapers; I learned of the death of Dos Passos: : “My ambition is to sing the Internationale”, Dos Passos used to say, as a young man; he was then the equal of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and Faulkner; Sartre considered him the best novelist of the time. From 1930 on Dos Passos opposed the “New Deal”; he considered the Second World War to be a catastrophe. “We can only regret that such an accomplished literary technician should have adopted such a narrow viewpoint and that the brilliant constellation of 1920 now shines so dimly …” (Herald Tribune, 29 September 1970). “In 1929, Dos Passos unleashed a virulent critique of capitalist society; his work had a considerable impact. The Second World War was to bring about a true conversion in the writer…. At the same time as he altered his political views, Dos Passos seemed to lose his creative powers.” (Le Figaro, 30 September 1970). Yesterday evening, on France-Inter, I listened to Le Masque et la Plume: “How can Ionesco still go on telling us about his death? He’s been dead for ten years.” I’m not very lucky with my friends who have advanced opinions.

Fascinating, that a writer’s talent could be so intertwined with his politics. Perhaps Dos Passos needed the anger given him by socialism in order to be a great writer, perhaps with the loss of one he lost the other, or perhaps his later books were simply less fashionable. Not having read them, I can’t entirely comment, but if anyone reads this and has read his later works I’d be interested in any thoughts they might have.

Rejoicing City That Dwelt Carelessly

Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos

I was introduced to John Dos Passos by Kerry’s blog Hungry like the Woolf, here. Before that, I’d heard the name, but wasn’t familiar with the work. Kerry piqued my interest, and a recent trip to New York seemed the perfect opportunity to give Dos Passos a try, starting with his 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer (published the same year as The Great Gatsby, but taking a very different approach to grappling with the issues of the day).

Manhattan Transfer is a panoramic novel, it starts in the late 1890s (not that this is made explicit, but to a contemporary reader it would have been obvious), and then sweeps on through around three decades of New York life. It seeks to show the reader the city as a film might, a sweeping vista in which all its life is made apparent and the metropolis’s intricate mechanisms are laid bare.

To an extent, it’s a fairly unsympathetic portrait. New York is a vast machine that processes people, absorbs them and shapes them – but without regard to their own hopes and fears. The city is a monstrous engine of capitalism, indifferent to the small lives of its citizens and driven by impersonal forces to its own blind ends. The novel was written at a time when socialism was a live force in American life, hard as that is to imagine now, and a socialist current runs through it with the workers’ struggle and the prospects for class revolution concerning several of the novel’s varied cast. Of course, revolution never happened, and as a naturalist novel it doesn’t arrive here either, some may dream of a better world but Manhattan Transfer doesn’t make that world seem all that attainable.

Stylistically, Manhattan Transfer is a little unusual. Each chapter opens with an indented impressionistic passage in a smaller font than the normal text. The following passages are the opening paragraphs of the novel, the first of the two properly should be in a six or eight point font but sadly I haven’t worked out how to achieve that in WordPress so I’m afraid the effect this has in the actual book is a bit reduced here:

Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow as the ferry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip. Handwinches whirl with jingle of chains. Gates fold upwards, feet step out across the crack, men and women press through the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferry-house, crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press.

The nurse, holding the basket at arm’s length as if it were a bedpan, opened the door to a big dry hot room with greenish distempered walls where in the air tinctured with smells of alcohol and iodoform hung writhing a faint sourish squalling from other baskets along the wall. As she set her basket down she glanced into it with pursed-up lips. The newborn baby squirmed in the cottonwool feebly like a knot of earthworms.

What’s noticeable in that first, indented, passage is that it’s not a classic piece of descriptive prose. Rather it’s a collage, a series of images which together create an impression. Here the result is fairly straightforward, in some chapters though it can take concentration to even work out what’s being described, the point isn’t accuracy, it’s sensation (but not to be fair sensationalism).

What’s also I think immediately noticeable is the strange compound words used in those two paragraphs. The novel is filled with them: orangerinds, manuresmelling, cottonwool. Words here mash together, sometimes to create an apparently more meaningful whole, but sometimes just colliding as if the sheer velocity of the prose has pushed them into each other. Equally, the imagery is often repulsive, inhuman. A newborn baby is like “a knot of earthworms”, men and women arriving on the ferry for their day’s work are like “apples fed down a chute into a press.” The whole effect is slightly dizzying, jarring, and that for me made this an often challenging read. The language is dense, clever, tricky in its deliberate ignoring of the normal rules of grammar (and indeed spelling, dialogue is often written as pronounced rather than as spelled). Kerry’s blog speaks to Dos Passos’s stylistic approach in some detail, so I won’t repeat that too much here, but I will say it means that I had to pay attention to read this novel, it requires a little dedication.

Manhattan Transfer is impressionistic in other senses too. Each chapter consists of a number of, often very short, passages dealing with different characters. Out of work men new to the city hoping to find work, ambitious lawyers, immigrants, actresses, Bowery bums, business tycoons, journalists, bankers, seamstresses, everyone is here. The novel dips into these lives a few paragraphs, rarely more than a couple of pages, at a time. Characters recur, their lives develop and sometimes intertwine, but overall the effect is of skimming from life to life with people meshing together as small cogs in a a huge city brimming with ambition, failure, potential, passion, despair, humanity.

There is a cost to this approach, characters’ internal voices are often extremely similar. Spoken dialogue varies a great deal (though often more in terms of dialect than content), but internal monologues not so much. Equally and inevitably, some characters are far more developed than others, many remaining essentially just a representative type. This isn’t really a character driven novel, and if one approaches it looking for acute psychological insight then that isn’t really here to be found.

But of course, that’s not the point. The individual this novel focuses on isn’t Jimmy Herf or Ellen Thatcher (to take the two most developed characters), it’s New York City itself in all its splendour and inhumanity. As a portrait of any given individual, this novel isn’t a great success (save perhaps for those two I just mentioned), as a portrait of a city and an age though, it is.

One of the advantages of Dos Passos’s huge cast is the number of viewpoints it affords us, from the Upper West Side to tenement apartments where upstairs neighbours carry out illegal abortions and snooping landladies mean young couples with no money can have no privacy at all. Money comes with societal expectations that control your life, poverty with a lack of opportunities that mean your fate is just as circumscribed. The only people in the novel who seem at all free are those who live on their own terms, without compromise, those who accept the city’s terms are bound by them and live for it rather than themselves. Even so, that breadth of viewpoints means we see the city’s rich and poor, the struggling middle classes, the upwardly and the downwardly mobile, we see it all.

At times, it’s rather funny, I particularly liked this conversation between some newly arrived immigrants:

‘Eh bien you like it this sacred pig of a country?” asked Marco.
‘Why not! I like it anywhere. It’s all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well; here you are paid well and live badly.’

There is part of me that thinks eighty years later that comment still holds up pretty well.

More importantly though, as this is not a comic novel, is the quality of the writing. Dos Passos can write. I’m quoting the following passage in full because it gives a good feel for Dos Passos’s style, but look out for the line “… the hunched shoulders of men asleep, faces crumpled like old newspapers pillowed on arms”, which I think is simply wonderful.

Joe Harland had slumped down in his chair until his head rested on his arms. Between his grimestiff hands his eyes followed uneasily the lines on the marbletop table. The gutted lunchroom was silent under the sparse glower of two bulbs hanging over the counter where remained a few pies under a bellglass, and a man in a white coat nodding on a tall stool. Now and then the eyes in his gray doughy face flicked open and he grunted and looked about. At the last table over were the hunched shoulders of men asleep, faces crumpled like old newspapers pillowed on arms. Joe Harland sat up straight and yawned. A woman blobby under a raincoat with a face red and purplish streaked like rancid meat was asking for a cup of coffee at the counter. Carrying the mug carefully between her two hands she brought it over to the table and sat down opposite him. Joe Harland let his head down onto his arms again.

Equally, this short passage packs a great deal into very little space, and with considerable elegance:

They had to change at Manhattan Transfer. The thumb of Ellen’s new kid glove had split and she kept rubbing it nervously with her forefinger. John wore a belted raincoat and a pinkishgray felt hat. When he turned to her and smiled she couldn’t help pulling her eyes away and staring out at the long rain that shimmered over the tracks.

There is a restless energy to Manhattan Transfer. In an excellent (and extremely well written in its own right) introductory essay by Jay McInerney, there is a comment that the characters are trying to seek the centre of the city, to find the heart of things, as summarised here by Ellen Thatcher on taking her job at a fashion magazine:

‘… what you want to do is make every reader feel like Johnny on the spot in the center of things.’
‘As if she were having lunch right here at the Algonquin.’
‘Not today but tomorrow,’ added Ellen.

The centre though is unattainable, indeed there isn’t one. There is just the city, a vast ant farm in which the individual is swallowed up, a machine in which each person is processed and absorbed. McInerney’s main criticism of the novel, a valid one, is that in showing how capitalism robs people of their humanity, their meaning, Dos Passos perhaps does the same thing. As he says: “The rapid-transit, discontinuous narrative brilliantly captures the pace of the city, the sense of brief, promiscuous contact with other lives. The metallically impersonal narrative voice carries the hard-edged din of the city at the same time that it keeps us at a distance from the residents; though it may swoop down from the smoky Manhattan skies from time to time to inhabit one of the characters, we are never long in the presence of a sympathetic consciousness. The danger with this method is that the victims of oppression are damned along with their chains.”

Manhattan Transfer is a difficult novel in some respects, I had to consciously push myself through it and it took me far longer to read than I expected. It comes together at the end, however, in a very rewarding fashion which for me really made that effort worthwhile. There are novels that are let down by their endings, and novels (like Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay) where the ending redeems the novel changing the experience from irritation to enjoyment. Manhattan Transfer never irritated (though Dos Passos does share Huxley’s fondness for dropping in bits of dialogue in untranslated foreign languages, a habit I dislike), but it wasn’t easy and if like me at times you find it hard going then it is rather marvellous to reach the end and find it brought together into a coherent artistic whole that as a completed work is intelligent and rewarding. It’s not flawless, but it is excellent for all that.

My final comment would be that if you are to read this, it may be worth just spending twenty minutes or so first reading up on early twentieth Century history on Wikipedia. I mentioned at the start of this blog entry that to a contemporary reader the period details would be obvious. To a modern reader that isn’t necessarily the case, and early on I got quite confused as to exactly when things were happening, what period I was actually in. A very basic grasp of what to a contemporary reader would have been common knowledge will help keep the chronology straight, this isn’t historical fiction with that genre’s helpful explication and Dos Passos didn’t seek to help out future readers whose recollections of to him recent events such as the Russian-Japanese war might perhaps be less than the novel assumes.

Manhattan Transfer

it’s supposed to be a good school

A Good School, by Richard Yates

Richard Yates is an underappreciated writer, not forgotten, but not widely read either. The recent film of his classic , Revolutionary Road, may help change that, but I have my doubts.

Revolutionary Road, which I write about here, was Yates’ first novel and is still his best regarded. A good school, which I’ve just finished, is among his least regarded (though a lesser regarded Yates is still better than most writers are capable of).

A good school is dedicated to the memory of Yates’ father, and is thought to be largely autobiographical. It is the story of a second-rate (if that) prep school with beautiful buildings but money problems, the Second World War is looming and against that backdrop Yates explores the lives of the school’s staff and pupils and of one of those pupils in particular – William Groves.

William Groves is not one of the popular boys. He is not good at games, and adolescence is not being kind to him (it is to so few of us). He is subjected to sexual hazing games (which the text does not shy away from), looked down on by the teachers and the book is often at its best when discussing his painful attempts to make friends and fit in.

The novel opens with a first person perspective (rare for Yates), with an unnamed narrator looking back and remembering his father, a once-promising tenor who became and lived his life as “assistant regional sales manager for the Mazda Lamp Division (light bulbs).” There is a sadness to this opening, the narrator’s parents are divorced, there is a distance between father and son, but the father is doing his best and that includes paying for a prep school he can’t really afford but which the mother – persuaded by aspirational dreams and a salesman headmaster – is convinced is the right place for their child. The novel briefly returns to this first person voice at the close, a small reflection on the school and the narrator’s father.

The first person passages provide a viewpoint that is looking back, an authorial voice detached from the immediacy of the main part of the book. That main part, almost all the novel really, is written from a third person perspective but up close, right in the school with the teachers, the boys, all their rituals and dramas. The effect of the shifting narrative voice is to create a distance at the start and end, a perspective, but otherwise to immerse the reader deep within the world of the school. The adult can reflect on what happened, what if anything it meant. The boys don’t have that luxury, they are steeped in a world of direct and pressing experience, fevered immediacy, their only reflections are about how other boys will view them and whether they are fitting in.

Yates is particularly good at capturing the trials of adolescent life, the way for example communal showers become a battleground for asserting status, for glory or humiliation.

Lear had nothing to fear from the scrutiny of the shower room: he might not be as spectacular as Terry Flynn but he was all right, his prick was adequate, and he had powerful, admirably hairy legs. Another thing, he knew better than anyone how to snap a wet towel against the buttocks of other bathers.

A boy who has a large penis, or well developed body hair, he has nothing to fear. A boy though whose genitals aren’t really developed yet, whose pubic hair is arriving late, for him every shower is a trauma, an unavoidable ordeal that cannot be discussed with others even though they share it. In later life, status will be driven by considerations of job, money, possessions, but for now it is driven by issues of physical development, sporting prowess, rumoured success with girls. Popularity is a capricious thing, effortlessly achieved for some, unavailable despite all efforts for others.

The school, Dorset Academy, is near bursting with sexual tension. Masturbation is a fact of life, something one puts up with in roommates and which on occasion is done forcibly to a less-popular boy as a means of humiliating him. Erections are yet another source of embarrassment, rearing up at the most inopportune times and prompted by mere conversation with a girl. The boys fixate on the one girl their age they ever see, Edith Stone, a teacher’s daughter and student at a nearby (but quite inaccessible) girls’ school, they dream of her though few of them ever actually speak to her. Sex is an issue for the teachers too, with the crippled chemistry teacher’s wife sleeping with the French Master. The atmosphere is thick with lust, unsatisfied or illicit.

A good school has a wider focus than did Revolutionary Road. Here, Yates explores a whole school, the lives of several of the teachers and pupils. While William Groves is the focus, his experience the core of the narrative, the novel in the main opts for breadth of coverage rather than depth. That said, Yates still has a precise and unsparing eye which captures characters’ vanities and disappointments in a line. Here he describes a teacher’s wife after a quarrel:

When he’d gone she walked the floor for a long time with one hand at her forehead. She might have cried, except that it almost never occurred to her to cry when she was alone.

What impressed me with A good school was the clarity with which Yates captured those years. My own schooling was as far from Dorset Academy as can be imagined, a trendy inner city comprehensive in London rather than a failing prep school in pre-war Connecticut, but for all that I recognised almost everything. There is a universality of experience here, our schools may differ, but adolescence remains much the same. At one point the novel follows Edith Stone, the school’s lone girl, and her life is not that different to the boys – confused, pulsing with unsatisfied desire, obsessed with her developing body (is her chin alright? She checks in the mirror, repeatedly). She is as they are. To them, she is a mysterious and desirable creature, woman with a capital W, but in fact she is just another child struggling with a changing body and a crush of emotions she barely understands.

The opportunities for hurt, the uncertainty of those years, the sheer physical need for friendship coupled with the fear of showing weakness in front of your peers, I recognised it all and I thought it probably the best depiction of what school is like that I’ve read. We didn’t board at my school, but we had school trips where we had to choose roommates for the cheap hotels booked for us, this is how that went and I’m glad it was just for a fortnight and not for a year:

There was a rule at Dorset that you had to room alone during your first year, having a roommate was a privilege reserved for “old” boys. This made for a good deal of emotional tension every May, when the double-room assignments were given out.
“Hey,” one boy would shyly say to another. “Want to get a room together next year?”
“Well, the thing is I’ve already promised somebody else.”
“Oh.”
For a week the quadrangle pulsed with awkward little conversations like that; it was a time of subtle pursuit and hurt feelings and last-minute settlings for second best.

Equally, the following passage reminded me so strongly of when I was a teenager it bordered on painful to read:

Grove spent most of that vacation teaching himself to smoke. He would soon turn seventeen, and he didn’t want to be the fool of the senior club.
First he had to learn the physical side of it – how to inhale without coughing; how to will his senses to accept drugged dizziness as pleasure rather than incipient nausea. Then came the subtler lessons in aesthetics, aided by the use of the bathroom mirror: learning to handle a cigarette casually, even gesturing with it while talking, as if scarcely aware of having it in his fingers; deciding which part of his lips formed the spot where a cigarette might hang most attractively – front and profile – and how best to squint against the smoke in both of those views. The remarkable thing about cigarettes, he discovered, was that they added years to the face that always looked nakedly younger than his age.
By the time of his seventeenth birthday he was ready. His smoking passed the critical scrutiny of his peers – nobody laughed – and so he was initiated.

I didn’t teach myself to smoke. I did, however, have to teach myself how to drink beer. I’d go down the pub when my friends were otherwise occupied, buy a half-pint and force myself to drink it until I got used to the taste. I trained myself to enjoy having a drink, so that I could fit in, so I wouldn’t look childish. To me now, as an adult, that seems bizarre. At the time, it seemed vital.

As the novel continues, Grove starts to find his own place within the school, his own niche. The school’s finances continue to deteriorate, the tensions between the teachers to worsen. For all that, the question remains as to whether it is after all in some sense a good school. Boys who treat each other with appalling cruelty in the early years sometimes find an accommodation, to an extent they simply grow up and become less savage to each other, Groves, though never an academic success, becomes involved with the school newspaper so paving the way for a later career as a writer. Dorset Academy is a lousy school, run by a shyster of a headmaster and with a distinctly dubious reputation and teachers who try to pretend to themselves that it’s a better place than it is, but it is the only school Groves has and lousy as it may be it doesn’t do that badly for him, for all the misery along the way.

A good school is a short novel, under 200 pages, and it’s not at the level of Revolutionary Road. For all that though, it’s well written and it captures the brutality and promise of those years with exceptional skill. It’s a sad novel in many ways, and not always wholly successful (the boys start to get called up as the US enters the war, which is convincing and powerful, but I wasn’t persuaded the novel really needed those elements), but its depiction of school and adolescence is powerful and true and it reminds me how thankful I am to have left those years behind.

A good school

You’re the neon type, aren’t you?

The Moving Target, by Ross Macdonald

It’s a curious thing how writers come in and out of fashion. A writer can be a great success in their lifetime, critically acclaimed, popular perhaps too, yet after a few years be largely forgotten. Others languish in obscurity, are even ridiculed, but years later come to be seen as masters in their field. There’s little pattern to it that I see, literary immortality is a crapshoot.

Ross Macdonald hasn’t fared so well at the tables the last few decades. In his day, Macdonald was a major writer of hardboiled fiction, he was referred to as belonging to the holy trinity of crime, along with Chandler and Hammett. Now, he’s little known, undeservedly so because while I don’t (so far anyway) put him next to Chandler and Hammett in terms of ability he’s an enjoyable read with a fine line in snappy dialogue and sense of place.

I heard about Ross Macdonald through a Tobias Jones article in the Guardian, which can be read here. Jones argues that Macdonald surpasses the other hardboiled greats, but that this took time with the early novels consciously imitating his predecessors. That’s interesting, and in a way reassuring, because I started with Macdonald’s first and while I enjoyed it I couldn’t help but notice quite how derivative of Chandler in particular it is.

Macdonald’s protagonist is private detective Lew Archer, the name a reference to Miles Archer – Sam Spade’s partner in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Archer operates out of LA, mostly doing divorce work, but in this first of fourteen novels he is hired by a Mrs. Sampson to find her husband who has failed to return from a trip. The Sampsons, naturally, are rich, and Mrs. Sampson is determined to outlive her husband and inherit his wealth. She’s concerned that he might be with another woman, which could mean she could get squeezed out of the inheritance, it soon becomes apparent though that the truth is more likely to involve kidnap.

As you’d expect, matters soon complicate. Sampson’s daughter, Miranda, is young and beautiful and in love with Sampson’s private pilot, handsome young Alan Taggert, but Taggert doesn’t love her back. Who is in love with her is Albert Graves, a lawyer and old friend of Archer’s, but to Miranda an old man of 40. Mixed in too are a has-been film star, a California guru operating a mountaintop temple, a piano bar singer with a background in jazz and drug-induced psychiatric problems, a smooth and silver haired hood and many more. It’s not original, these are all pretty much stock characters for the genre, but it’s well written and moves along speedily.

Normally, I like to quote passages from works, so as to give a feel for the writing. Here though, the one-liner tends to be king. Hardboiled fiction loves snappy dialogue, Chandler can maintain it for whole passages of glittering beauty, Macdonald isn’t that good (yet anyway), but he still has his moments. I thought this line, from the first page, quite marvellous:

The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money.

I also liked “unripe oranges like dark-green golf balls”, and generally was impressed by how vividly California was itself brought to life, a character in the drama. Archer goes from rich and secluded estates, to downtown dives, to grimy shacks, and throughout it all Macdonald has a nice eye for the California landscape.

From the summit of the pass we could see the valley filled with sunlight like a bowl brimming with yellow butter, and the mountains clear and sharp on the other side.

There’s a lot of nice little character descriptions too, a telephone operator who “was a frozen virgin who dreamed about men at night and hated them in the daytime.” “Her tone clicked like pennies; her eyes were small and hard and shiny like dimes.” A thug is described as follows “I didn’t like the way he moved toward me. His left shoulder was forward and his chin in, as if every hour of his day was divided into twenty three-minute rounds.” That’s very easy to picture, and tells you all you need to know of the thug in two sentences.

The Moving Target is an easily read book, which of course it should be. It was hampered for me by my reading it during a week when I’ve had a cold nasty enough to kill my concentration (though not so bad as to keep me from work), which meant it took days to read what should have taken an evening, even with that though I found my interest sustained and the pacing held up well. As it goes on, it gets nastier, as Archer gets further into the twisted lives of Sampson and his associates, a world of jaded sex, drugs, new age beliefs (not that they called it that then, but it’s what they are) and of course money.

The most unusual element is a focus on psychology, something I understand gets much more pronounced later in the series. The piano bar singer sings a song about her psychiatric issues with “decadent intelligence”, Archer early on asks if there’s “a psychological explanation for my being here”, Archer’s a form of secular priest, a therapist even, bringing the truth to light and encouraging confession (which may be good for the soul, but it’s lousy for your chances of avoiding the needle). Of course, hardboiled detectives always have that element of clergy to them, that feeling of being agents of a higher justice in a world that feels no need for it, what’s unusual here is the way the references tend to the psychological, the psychiatric even. So far it’s an interesting twist, I’ll see in due course if it gets too much in later volumes.

As I noted above, this is Macdonald’s first, and though at times there are some lovely bits of dialogue (“I wouldn’t trust him with a burnt-out match.” is another), at others he slightly overdoes it. The line between inspiration and pastiche can be a thin one, and once or twice Macdonald crosses it. Here, I thought the tires element just a metaphor too far:

“You want to go there?”
“Why not?” I said. “The night is young.” I was lying. The night was old and chilly, with a slow heartbeat. The tires whined like starved cats on the fog-sprinkled black-top. The neon along the strip glared with insomnia.

That’s just too hardboiled. I couldn’t take it entirely seriously, it was too studiedly Chandler-esque, too plainly an imitation. Macdonald also has a habit of describing all the female characters’ breasts, which have nipples that look at Archer like eyes or point out at him (going on the films I suspect 1940 bras were a bit pointy actually) or generally tend to be a bit noticeable – giving me at least the slightly unfortunate impression that Archer was one of those men who speak to women’s chests rather than their faces.

Plotwise, this goes as you’d expect, Archer gets beaten up and sapped a few times (“His fist struck the nape of my neck. Pain whistled through my body like splintered glass, and the night fell on me solidly again.”), has guns held on him more than once, people get killed and the whole thing turns out more complex than it looks. This isn’t a novel that pushes the boundaries of its genre, it’s rather a novel by an author drawing heavily on what went before and writing firmly within the genre his predecessors created. It’s enjoyable, but it’s a novel for genre fans, not so much for those looking to take a dip outside their usual literary waters, for whom I’d recommend going back to Chandler or Hammett just like Macdonald himself did.

Still, for all that I am a genre fan, so I’ve ordered the next. For me, the jury’s out whether the psychological elements coming more to the fore will make it better or worse, it’s good Macdonald later finds his own voice but I may not of course like that voice. Still, there’s only one way to find out and this was good enough to make it worth sticking with Macdonald a bit longer while he finds his feet.

The Moving Target. I read this in the Black Lizard edition, a range published by Vintage. Black Lizard tend unfortunately only to be available in the US, I like them as they’re physically light with good paper and printing making them an easy and pleasurable read. Hopefully we’ll see more of them in the UK going forward, as there’s a bit of a paucity of good imprints for works of this kind right now in the UK (which is, in part, why I’m so fond of Serpent’ Tail).

a salad of despair

Thomas Pynchon has a reputation as a challenging author. I’ve just finished The Crying of Lot 49, he lives up to that reputation. This is an extraordinary work, not one that apparently Pynchon himself rates but one that I definifely do. All that said, it’s complex stuff.

Pynchon is most famous for his third novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, a book with such impact that Pynchon’s career is now divided into pre- and post-Gravity’s Rainbow phases. By all accounts, Gravity’s Rainbow is a masterpiece, a triumph of 20th Century literature, it’s also though famously dense and rather long and so perhaps a slightly amibitious entry point to Pynchon’s work. The Crying of Lot 49, by contrast, is around 110 pages or so and is thought to be one of his most straightforward and linear novels. Straightforward is relative, it is superb, but having finished it I’d be hard pressed to tell you what the plot was, or even whether there was a plot.

On the surface, it’s the tale of how Oedipa Maas is appointed executor to the estate of a rich ex-boyfriend, and as a result comes to uncover an ancient conspiracy dedicated to creating a rival postal service to the US Government one. It’s not that simple though, there may not be a conspiracy, if there is it may not be that one, there may be several conspiracies, there may just be random noise, throughout this novel meaning is always just out of grasp, never quite realisable, perhaps not there at all.

Here’s the first sentence of the novel:

One Summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsh in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or the supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous enough and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

That’s a very characteristic sentence, dense yet clearly written and already not wholly serious. It also contains what is usually a pet hate of mine, blatantly incredible character names. Obviously in real life few people have names like Pierce Inverarity or Oedipa Maas. Generally, when novelists seek to give characters cutesy names I find it alienating, it reminds me I’m reading a book. Waugh’s Scoop was in large part ruined for me by the obviousness of the silly names given to the newspapers in it.

Here, that didn’t happen, and the reason it didn’t is that the names have a purpose. Before I get to that though, here’s a few more, a sample of some of the characters encountered in this short work:

Wendell ‘Mucho’ Maas, Dr Hilarius, Metzger who used to be a child actor named Baby Igor and who is now a lawyer (and whose life story is being made by a former lawyer who is now an actor named Manny Di Presso), Mike Fallopian, Randolph Driblette, Genghis Cohen. There’s also the wonderfully named law firm of Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, of Los Angeles.

A lot of these names are allusions, though not necessarily ones with any actual significance to the text. Some, Genghis Cohen, are outright jokes, but most of them almost mean something. Oedipa Maas, Manny Di Presso, the references are obvious, but meaningless. Like so much of this novel, they tremble on the brink of significance, they appear important, but it’s really not clear that they mean anything at all.

As Oedipa starts to investigate Pierce’s affairs, she becomes involved with co-executor Metzger, and becomes aware of what may be a conspiracy running right through Southern California involving a centuries-old organisation dedicated to alternate means of mail delivery. She goes to see a newly staged Jacobean revenge play, which contains within it curious references to the contemporary conspiracy, she visits an inventor of a perpetual motion machine that doesn’t appear to work, and becomes alert to the symbols of the conspiracy – a line drawing of a muted trumpet, forged stamps each containing intentional and often disturbing minor errors.

Her psychiatrist, Dr Hilarius, presses her to take part in a new study using LSD for therapeutic purposes, her husband is still scarred by the psychological trauma of having worked on a used car lot and now works as a DJ but is having a crisis of faith in that calling, Manny Di Presso is being hunted by one of his clients, the hotel Oedipa books into is used for practice sessions by a mock-English band called The Paranoids who try to spy on her in the mistaken belief she is having bizarrely kinky sex. Paranoia then is everywhere, paranoia is at the heart of the novel.

Pynchon creates here a powerful sense of place, even though the place much of the story occurs in is made up, San Narcisco:

San Narcisco lay farther south, near LA. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a group of concepts – census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access routes to its own freeway.

Throughout the novel there is a sense of 1960s Southern California, a mix of drugs, capitalism, creativity and urban sprawl. The weird is everywhere, there is a bar that only play electronic music (which to me is a form of music that originates in Germany and Britain in the late 1970s, I don’t really know what it meant back then), with live nights on Saturdays. The defence contractor Yoyodyne has its offices here, where the staff sing company songs but use their own private mail network (separate to the conspiracy) to pass contentless messages, sent to each other only to ensure the private mail network has something to deliver. There is a company that makes bone-dust cigarette filters from the bones of dead GIs. It is an an insane melting-pot of innovation and horror.

Among the chaos of Southern California, Oedipa begins to find meaning in her investigation of the conspiracy, assuming it exists that is. Is she herself descending into paranoia? Is it all some post-mortem joke of Pierce Inverarity’s? Is it in fact an ancient conspiracy, albeit a singularly pointless one? The search for meaning creates meaning, we find patterns in the noise, but whether any of it exists outside our own heads is unclear, perhaps unknowable.

And that is a large part of what this is about, for me anyway. It is a vision of paranoia, of the terror of a world in which everything makes sense, we create conspiracies though because even that is preferable to a world where things make no sense at all. They are out to get you, but at least they care enough to try. As reader, we are like Oedipa, looking for meaning in a mass of references, allusions, apparent themes, we draw conclusions on what it’s all about but who knows if we’re right? Perhaps we just want it to be about something, so we find things within it that support our expectations.

Along the way, there is some genuinely very funny comedy here, it contains for example one of the funniest, and stupidest, sex scenes I’ve ever read and there are some marvellous throwaway lines:

Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you.

There is also a certain beauty to the whole thing, wonderful and disturbing imagery, an exuberance bursting through the pages which seems uncontrolled but which is in fact expertly crafted. At one point Oedipa finds herself staying in a hotel which is also hosting a conference for deaf-mutes:

Back in the hotel she found the lobby full of deaf-mute delegates in party hats, copied in crêpe paper after the fur Chinese communist jobs made popular during the Korean conflict. They were every one of them drunk, and a few of the men grabbed her, thinking to bring her along to a party in the grand ballroom. She tried to struggle out of the silent, gesturing swarm, but was too weak. Her legs ached, her mouth tasted horrible.They swept her on into the ballroom, where she was seized about the waist by a handsome young man in a Harris tweed coat and waltzed round and round, through the rustling, shuffling hush, under a great unlit chandelier. Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow’s head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined. Something they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. She followed her partner’s lead, limp in the young mute’s clasp, waiting for the collisions to begin. But none came. She was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus, everybody took a break, without having felt any touch but the touch of her partner.

Apart from the beauty and strangeness of the imagery in that passage, I can’t help but see it as an image of America itself. Everyone dancing to their own dream, somehow not colliding and the whole thing unexpectedly working. There is something both frightening and magnificent in it, it’s not the only vision of America out there (I don’t myself buy into American exceptionalism), but it’s a vision and in some ways an optimistic one. And if America is anything, it’s optimistic.

So, there are my thoughts, for now anyway. Whole books have been written on The Crying of Lot 49, books longer than the novel itself. There are essay collections about it, teacher study guides, any blog post is but a thin scraping at the surface. This book is packed with references, to Nabokov, to the Beatles, to all sorts of things, most of which I probably didn’t get. Most of which I doubt anyone gets, though we’d each likely get different ones.

I’ve not even touched here on many possible core issues of the book, communications theory and failures of communication, consumed experience, the blurring of the self, entropy, I could write 10,000 words and still not manage all of it. For me though, it connected most as a story of the search for meaning and the (perhaps?) creation of it where we don’t find it – the imposition of patterns on random data. Other readers could, many have, drawn quite different conclusions.

It’s an extraordinary achievement.

The Crying of Lot 49