March 2011 Reading: The Road, Birthday Stories, Child of God, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Bright Lights, Big City, Jesus’ Son

I’ll admit, I’ve had this book for a while, and have been putting off reading it.  The thing is, I’m pretty squeamish, and I have a hyper-active imagination: watching a horror film can result in a week of no sleep.  And I had been warned that The Road wasn’t exactly full of fluffy kittens and rainbows.  That’s not to say I don’t like my books a bit ‘dark’ – I was just slightly concerned that it might be too gory for me.

Fortunately, the slow-burning terror of The Road relies less on guts and gore and more on the poetic, terrible beauty of McCarthy’s language:

McCarthy’s description of a post-apocalyptic landscape is all black ash and charred trees, relentlessly colourless: it is a world where the ecosystem has been all but destroyed.  It cheapens the novel to refer to it as a ‘global warming warning’; we never find out what has caused this destruction – it isn’t necessary.  The emphasis isn’t on the cause, but on what the chilling reality of nature turned barren means for the humans in the novel.  In this, McCarthy’s vision seems terrifyingly accurate – his indictment of human behaviour is all too convincing.  However, amid all the doom and gloom, of which there is a lot, there is an element of hope.  The central relationship, between the nameless father and son, lifts the story out of despair and adds a seam of redemption to the bleak setting.

McCarthy’s sparse punctuation, doing away with speechmarks and apostrophes: “dont”,“cant”, and his truncated, often verbless, sentences allow his words to resonate in an elemental way.  There is a startling authority to the narrative which really makes you believe that this could actually happen.  It’s a book that cannot fail to make you think.  As the father says to his son in the novel:

The Road is definitely one of those things.

One of the things I liked most about this collection of short stories is the brief insight into Murakami’s personality offered by his introduction.  As a recent convert (see February’s reviews), I’m delighted that the man behind the novels seems just as bizarre and baffling as his characters.  He has compiled an anthology of stories about birthdays, basically because he read a couple of stories on the theme, and thought, hey, there must be more.  And there are.  So here they are.  Each author is carefully introduced by Murakami in his own, inimitable style: “his work is not for everybody”, “[his stories] can seem somewhat contrived”, “I myself was fortunate enough to meet her […] and found her to be slim and elegant”.

The stories themselves are well-chosen and varied, and include writers that I have been meaning to check out for a while, such as David Foster Wallace and Denis Johnson (see below for a review of Johnson’s Jesus’ Son).  The ‘birthday’ theme doesn’t overwhelm the anthology, as the stories are of a high enough quality to avoid mawkish sentiment on the subject.  It also includes a short version of Raymond Carver’s story ‘A Small, Good Thing’ called ‘The Bath’: Carver’s editor notoriously pruned his work, much to the writer’s displeasure – hence Carver’s later publication of ‘restored’ versions of his stories.  Murakami being Murakami, he has chosen the first version because it “has its own special flavour […] as if it has had its head lopped off for no reason.”  At a later moment, when I’m feeling extra-geeky, I’ll compare the two properly.  Among the other writers included are William Trevor, Andrea Lee, Paul Theroux, and of course, Murakami himself (rude not to).

All in all, this is a solid collection of stories, and would make a good, if slightly gimmicky, present for literary types on their special day.  Which was probably exactly what canny Murakami was thinking.Child of God by Cormac McCarthy (1973)

Describing Ballard as not ‘right’ is something of an understatement.  As the novel progresses and Ballard retreats further from normal society, his acts of violence and depravity become more and more shocking.  It’s not entirely surprising to learn that the book caused some outrage when it was first published, but it is a testament to McCarthy’s skill as prose stylist that the descriptions of Ballard’s acts, though disturbing in the extreme, never feel gratuitous.  The occasional glimpses of humanity in Lester, such as when he chases, laughing, after a flock of birds, pose the same dilemma as the title of the novel: can this man, for whom the phrase ‘a danger to society’ might have been invented, really be considered a ‘child of God?’.

This is actually a re-read – I enjoyed both this and his previous novel, Everything Is Illuminated, when they first came out, but it was time for a revisit.  Foer is one of those writers I almost love, but have to keep going back to in order to figure out just what is missing for me.  In Foer’s case, it’s hard to identify, as he uses such a dazzling array of narrative tricks and modernist flourishes that it’s easy to get a little blind-sighted.  This novel is full of ‘special effects’, from photos to coloured scribblings to blank pages, all of which teeter dangerously on the ‘pretentious’ precipice.

Dealing with the tricky subject of 9/11, Foer makes a seemingly wise move in having a child as the main narrator.  Oskar’s father was killed in the attacks, and the novel charts his attempts to come to terms with his father’s death through embarking on a kind of ‘treasure hunt’ to track down the lock which matches a key left by his dad.  Oskar is nine years old.  Supposedly.  And here is one of the problems: Oskar is an often hilarious, sometimes endearing, mostly very odd character, but he is in no way convincing as a nine year old.  Sometimes Foer just about gets away with it, such as this reported conversation with a cab driver to whom he owes $76.50:

but all too often, his precociousness just sounds like the author intruding with another witty gem he just can’t resist.

Another issue, which I also found with Everything Is Illuminated, is that the narrative that runs parallel to the main story just doesn’t interest me as much.  The complex relationship between Oskar’s grandparents, with all its melodrama and historical tragedy, failed to engage me.

For all of these perceived flaws (which are only a matter of personal opinion) I do admire Foer’s virtuoso use of language, his humour, and his daring.  I would love to see him write a simple, pared-down narrative, but it would probably bore the pants of him.  He has a new novel coming out this year – if anyone has read it, let me know.

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984)

I mentioned Bright Lights, Big City when reviewing Then We Came to the End (February Reading) as both novels use unusual points of view.  In the case of McInerney’s narrative, the entire story is in the second person: ‘you’. The novel begins:

From here on, the reader is plunged into the self-destructive world of the protagonist, all the while addressed as ‘you’.  This is a risky move, but one that has resulted in his novel becoming the seminal example of such a narrative.  (Which means, really, that no one else should try it, because it’s been done.)  It does indeed work well – once the strangeness has worn off, it has the effect not of trying to implicate the reader or suggest that ‘you’ yourself are actually the protagonist, but rather of providing a communal bond with the protagonist, a bit like when ‘you’ is used to mean ‘one’ in general, such as when I review a book and write “as the novel progresses, you find yourself beginning to really care about the characters”.

McInerney is careful not to allow this neat little trick to detract from other aspects of the novel.  The supporting cast of characters are colourful and well drawn, especially at the magazine where the protagonist works in the Department of Factual Verification.  In fact, some of these sections reminded me of Then We Came to the End, depicting office life with the same kind of humorous despair.

The novel also presents the various vices of the protagonist without glamourising or demonising.  ‘You’ take drugs, drink too much, indulge in the excesses of the era, but Bright Lights, Big City never becomes a cautionary tale about addiction.  It is about a self-indulgent man who has had some hard times and needs to grow up, to figure out how to live:

Bright Lights, Big City paints a convincing portrait of a young man “all messed up and nowhere to go” in eighties Manhattan; it’s a short, snappy, snazzy book that still feels fresh.

There’s a kind of pleasing symmetry to reading this as my last ‘March’ book – in some ways, Johnson’s work combines the bleak, blank violence of McCarthy’s work and the drug-hazy derailment of McInerney’s novel.  In addition, Johnson’ story ‘Dundun’ was one of the Birthday Stories chosen by Murakami (see above) and contains one of the best sections of dialogue I’ve read recently:

The only minor flaw in this harmonious aligning of the literary planets is that the edition I bought off Amazon is by a German publisher.  Luckily, the stories themselves are in English (heavily glossed – I can now tell you the German for “subterranean”, “to squish”, “yank someone off” and  “f*ck with someone’s high” if you’re interested – although the doubtless insightful mini-essay at the back of the book remains beyond my capabilities).

The stories in Jesus’ Son are all told by the same narrator, though they aren’t entirely sequential, and read just as well individually.  Like McCarthy, Johnson’s prose is lean and precise, and occasionally quite beautiful, despite the grim underbelly of life that he depicts.  The world of drugs and addiction here has nothing of the veneer of respectability it maintains in McInerney’s novel.  There’s a film, made in 2000, which I’d like to watch, although I can imagine I’d have to cover my eyes at a couple of points.  As I said at the start, I’m pretty squeamish, and there’s a guy with a knife in his eye in one story.