Review- Robinson, “The Years of Rice and Salt”

October 30, 2018October 30, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Years of Rice and Salt” (2002) – Kim Stanley Robinson joins the exalted company of Faulkner, Proust, and Garcia-Marquez in the category of writers that I respect but do not particularly like reading. He might be the only scifi writer in that category. He seems like a mensch. His ideas are interesting. It’s good someone is tackling big, hard scifi, be it about Mars colonization, interstellar travel, climate change, or in this instance, what modernity would look like not dominated by Europe. I respect the amount of research and work he puts into things. But his books run long and schematic. In “Years of Rice and Salt,” it was pretty easy to see what each part would be coming in in this history after the Black Death takes out almost all Europeans instead of a third of them. Samarkand alchemists, must be here’s the scientific revolution, here’s the world war equivalent, etc. etc.

Like most alternate histories it’s way too neat and schematic. This is probably an advantage over sloppy and dull (ala Harry Turtledove) but it usually doesn’t grab me. The players in the history are different — Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and Native Americans — which is a fine change, but the roles are mostly recycled. That might be part of Robinson’s whole Buddhist take- the idea is the characters are reincarnations of the characters in the first set, throughout history. None of it is bad and clearly a lot of it is well-meaning, depicting Muslims and assorted other “Others” of modernity as just as capable of enlightenment and modernity as anyone else. But it could have done more to show how modernity would have been different, beyond lines and names on the map and the demographics of who’s involved. Presumably those changes would have changed what modernity itself was all about. I give it credit for what I’m probably missing, because KSR seems like a good dude, and it’s good to have alternate history not about how cool the Nazis and/or Confederates were. ***

Review- Maugham, “Of Human Bondage”

October 28, 2018October 30, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

W. Somerset Maugham, “Of Human Bondage” (1915) – This one hurt. The only comparison I can think of is Celine’s “Death on the Installment Plan.” Maugham and Celine are on utterly opposite sides when it comes to style: Celine, the great prose innovator of the twentieth century, Maugham, the master of conventional, easy-reading style in whichever medium he used. But both were in medicine before they took up writing, and both knew pain, both taking it and inflicting it. Both wrote great books putting versions of themselves through the wringer of youth.

The main character, Philip, has a rough time from the beginning- he’s got a clubfoot and his parents both die before he turns ten. He’s adopted by a basically indifferent elderly uncle and aunt. He goes to boarding school, which is hard enough when you’re not sensitive and clubfooted, but sucks extra hard when you’re both. He’s the wrong sort of middle class, just enough money to avoid learning anything useful or being able to easily adjust to normal working life, but not enough money to actually skate through.

Leaving school, he tries accountancy, hates it, and then tries to be an artist in Paris at the fin de siecle. Impressionism is just getting off the ground and everyone wants to be an artiste. Maugham draws a grimly convincing portrait of the life of people who want to live the bohemian lifestyle but aren’t quite up to it, artistically or in terms of resources. There are schools everywhere willing to rook credulous anglophones out of their pounds sterling by telling them they’ll teach them how to draw and paint and then blaming their lack of talent — which basically amounts to soul, in this world — when they fail. As Maugham has Philip explicate later, lack of money doesn’t ennoble- it makes money take on hideous proportions, makes you mean and calculating. Throw artistic pretensions on top of it, and Philip gets another beating from life and returns to Britain.

But the pivot of the novel is a Philip’s relationship with one Mildred, a waitress at a coffee shop (shades of Charlie Kelly!). People have wondered about how Maugham, who was gay, portrayed the pitfalls of heterosexual romance as well as he did. Some speculate he had a male Mildred in his life- I think that’s possible but also think that he was a sharp observer, that straight romance is really none too subtle at the end of the day, and that what he’s pointing towards is damn near universal.

Philip essentially uses Mildred as a means of torturing himself. He falls in love with her nearly instantly. I don’t entirely grasp what writers of this generation mean by “falling in love.” Philip has other lovers that he lists off all kinds of positive feelings for, including a sense of loyalty and respect that I associate with love, but insists he’s not “in love” with them. In this book, “love” is a sort of sickness, a fever (to use hackneyed language, sorry), an alibi for all kinds of awful behavior.

Due to his “love” for Mildred, Philip winds up in an array of situations that, a hundred years later, the internet invented any number of crude terms for, from “cuck” to a quite literal “Captain Save-a-ho” scenario. Shows how our language for romance has degraded! This is a six-hundred page novel and charting all the ins and outs of this torturous non-relationship is more than I can do. He gets in other relationships with good women but leaves them because he’s “in love” with Mildred. He literally gives his best buddy money to take Mildred away for a holiday to bone after he introduces them to each other. In the end it takes a public health emergency and an inheritance to finally give Philip the escape velocity to leave her orbit.

Mildred is one of the better literary depictions of a cipher, a cruel and essentially misogynistic depiction but brilliantly realized. She has just enough humanity to see what she does to Philip is cruel, but between her own callowness and the real limits Edwardian England put on women’s agency, she can’t help but reel him back in again and again. Blame really lies with Philip, and he knows it, but because of the sickness of “love,” he can’t help it. In the end, he basically burns himself, winding up content with a good relationship (though with what we’d see as a sketchy age differential) that isn’t “love” and deciding that’s good enough. Unrequited love is its own peculiar, humiliating type of hell, and Maugham is the Virgil leading us through it. *****

Review- Scott, “The Politics of the Veil”

October 25, 2018October 28, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Joan Wallach Scott, “The Politics of the Veil” (2007) – Like Joan Scott, I come to the veil controversies from an American perspective, where you basically let people wear whatever. The idea you need to strip yourself of communal identifiers — so, ironically enough, you can be an Enlightenment-style individual — to be part of the national community doesn’t make much sense to me. I’ve run into it here, of course. During some of my shittier jobs I was subjected to rants about how people should only fly other countries flags if they flew the American flag at the same height, blah blah. The usual nationalistic nonsense from nationalisms that purport to be about freedom of expression.

AFAICT the biggest irritant here to Joan Scott, a major feminist historian, is that unlike American xenophobia it’s hard to dismiss the French version as just ignorant people being ignorant. Real intellectuals and serious statespeople in France were in favor of the headscarf ban in schools, and later the body-covering ban (which apparently also does unitards? Stupid rules). So Scott tackles the particulars of French universalism that allow for this situation to pass. It’s a picture that doesn’t lack for pathos, even as it veils (heh) xenophobia. The universalist dream isn’t entirely a bad one. The problem is they made (implicitly Catholic, or ex-Catholic) white French men the model of the universal and expect everyone to conform to that. I found myself wondering, “why not mandate baguette eating or cigarette smoking while you’re at it?” if there’s this supposed French way of being everyone needs to do to be French? The answer to that is the usual depressing stuff about racism and colonialism, France’s long war with the Muslims of North Africa. But I guess having grown up free-range, one human thing I have difficulty really grasping is the insistence everyone play the game your way. ****

Review- Cook, “Crisis Boy”

October 23, 2018October 28, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Garrett Cook, “Crisis Boy” (2018) – After several novels — most prominently “Murderland,” “A God of Hungry Walls,” and the bravura “Time Pimp” — Garrett Cook (interest declared- a friend of mine and I once rescued him from Punxsutawney Pennsylvania, true story) has established a distinctive horror voice. This comes through most clearly in his latest, a story about a boy who can survive gunshots and explosions, who is deployed to the sites of terrorist attacked and mass shootings to be killed, over and over again. He’s a crisis actor, except he actually gets hurt, and the events he undermines actually happen.

Cook comes to us from the “bizarro” horror scene, a sort of dada/pop-surrealist offshoot of extreme horror. Truth be told, I don’t get much out of the genre- a lot of strikes me as try-hard edginess. I’m hardly the target audience- I always cocked a snoot at horror in general. I was reading about the Holocaust at six and spent years of my life with Vietnam war documents. I play board games about bloody counterinsurgency wars for fun. Serial killers don’t mean that much to me.

So needless to say I was square enough going in that, friendship with Garrett aside, I was unsure about the premise. “Why,”said the reviewer, like a square, “would they need crisis actors if the massacres happen, in gruesome detail?” Well, because fuck you, that’s why, Cook tells us. Because the world is run by monsters of every conceivable type and they just want to fuck with people, get people online convinced that what they see isn’t real, and squabble over which parts are or aren’t.

John the Crisis Boy decides to try to turn the tables because he meets a pretty girl. Of course, it gets all messed up, and even though he kills the monster — a slasher villain turned patriotic superhero, a nice touch — he winds up demonized as the sort of killer who has killed him numerous times, and in a crumbling reality to boot. It’s hard to tell what exactly goes on in this crumbling reality and whether his existence is real or a projection of the sort of damaged psyche his existence is meant to inflame. That’s something of a problem with this sort of fiction- endings. Especially if you’re not going to go with a nihilistic copout, which Cook generally refuses to do.

All of this — the crumbling reality, John’s teenaged angst, and the scenes of gore and extreme depravity — are carried along by Cook’s voice, which makes everyone a knowing but predetermined actor in the grand guignol of life in a Garrett Cook story. The narrator and most of the characters accept the absurd dream logic of their given scenarios and speak them aloud. This helps avoid letting things get too cute or too melodramatic, a difficult balancing act. Whatever you want to say about this sort of horror as a whole, Garrett’s provocations are part of something larger he’s doing, and the last thing he ever was was a try-hard. ****

Review- Slotkin, “Regeneration Through Violence”

October 22, 2018October 28, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Richard Slotkin, “Regeneration Through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860” (1973) – This is a great big humdinger of a book, and the first of three laying out Slotkin’s thesis on the roots and branches of American culture in violent frontier myth. Historiographically, it lays at a transition point in American Studies. The original American Studies scholars explicitly founded it as a Cold War enterprise, a way to foster their vision of America —more or less, that of Cold War liberalism — back when people still thought culture was a big Cold War weapon and that Jackson Pollock was worth CIA money. Slotkin turns away from their vision of America as the culmination of western humanism but still uses a lot of the old American Studies concepts and tropes. These include canonization — Slotkin both crams old AS favorites like Melville and Hawthorne into his thesis and tries to canonize new ones, like frontier writer Nathan Filson — and an attachment to the concept of myth as an explanatory category. Analyzing the frontier as myth goes a long way in American Studies. It’s poignant, in a way- the American Studies cadre included many of the first generation of American Jews given equal footing in American schools, and in general it was more nerdy New Yorkers and immigrant’s kids — names like Slotkin and DeVoto — defining this picture of America and the frontier than it was sons of the pioneers.

Like the American Studies guys (and like me in some areas), Slotkin is an arch-lumper in this book. American culture as a whole, he argues, is defined by a series of tropes descended from the English encounter with the wilderness. Because some of the first English to do it (and especially to write about it) were Puritans, one major strand of processing that encounter entails seeing the wilderness as a place of evil, a place where good Christians go to become bad and die, a reflection of the dark spaces of the mind and soul. One of the ways the Puritans processed this was through captivity narratives, where a Puritan is captured by Indians, lives with them for a while, and then escapes or is bought back into the fold, chastened and stronger in faith.

But as the frontier expanded and white people got more used to it, the idea of the wilderness as a place of fulfillment got bigger, but with caveats. American litterateurs struggled mightily with how to cope with the identification between the wilderness and the Native Americans (so too, for that matter, does Slotkin, who lumps them all together into one culture more or less at one with nature, etc etc). The whites wanted to master the wilderness the same way they thought the Native Americans had, but it was important that they maintain their special white, Christian status. As mythic figures like Daniel Boone became national (and international) favorites, the frontier became, in narrative anyway, a place for whites to prove their mettle by entering into the wilderness. They could learn from the natives and even befriend them, but would eventually master them at their own wilderness abilities, initiating themselves into the mysteries of the hunter and the warrior. This would lead to the ushering in of white civilization, where the frontiersman would either need to assimilate or move on, the sort of prepackaged tragedy narrative from which Anglo culture gotten so much mileage.

There’s a lot of interesting material in this book, overstuffed in that classic AS way with block quotes, stories about publishing, etc. There are fascinating characters like Gilbert Imlay, a Kentuckian conman and lover of Mary Wollstonecraft who sold an enlightenment-tinged vision of frontier democracy to get radical French and British to sponsor a western breakaway state before fleeing a pregnant Wollstonecraft with the money. There’s also some interesting stuff where European and northeastern writers wanted to depict the whole thing as capital R Romance, which culminated with James Fenimore Cooper’s lachrymose and intricately symbolic tales of the noble savage white guy who was more native than the natives but also white and what a dilemma! But western writers — and most audiences — wanted more realism, i.e. shootings and scalps.

The basic thrust of the analysis seems sound, especially when it leaves the Jungian myth stuff to one side and hews to the material. One thing that encouraged an American monomyth more than anything unconscious was a monolithic capitalist publishing industry centered in New York, that had to try to sell books the whole country would buy. The frontier story appealed to all sections, even as Slotkin details how the different sections interpreted Boone and other figures according to their peculiar lights. My understanding is that American Studies turned more towards questions of creating a national consciousness — and even more to questions of race, which Slotkin does not interrogate enough — after this transition point in the 1970s. It’ll be interesting to see if Slotkin’s later books, bringing the story of frontier myth to the twentieth century, handles that. ****’

Review- Bacigalupi, “The Water Knife”

October 6, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Paolo Bacigalupi, “The Water Knife” (2015) – On the surface, this book is very much “my shit.” Set in a near-future where the Colorado River has largely dried up and the Southwest states fight underground wars to keep the water coming in and refugees out, it’s the sort of crime-scifi mix that I tend to enjoy.

It turned out pretty good. The titular “water knife” is Angel, a former gangster and now enforcer for Las Vegas’s water rights. Vegas is the second banana in all things western water-related, able to maintain its casino-arcologies but always in the shadow of the big daddy, California (the tune “California Uber Alles” came to mind several times while reading this). The big losers have been Texas, hit by both drought and hurricanes and the source of most of the refugees trying to cross over into California and Nevada, and Arizona, where Phoenix is in the process of dying a slow death. This book was first recommended to me by a friend on a post I made about how seeing Phoenix out of an airplane window freaked me out- all that perfectly geometrical green sprawl against that stark desert… this depicts that society in collapse once both nature and politics started restricting the water. Refugees, gangs, dust storms, bags for converting piss into drinking water, all in the shadow of arcology towers built by the Chinese.

But some Las Vegas agents are getting bumped off in Phoenix, in increasingly grotesque ways, and Angel has to go and find out why. Of course, he can’t trust anybody, and there’s a lot of running away from shadowy “Calies” and fights and the like. He gets embroiled with a reporter looking into the murders (they hook up, natch) and a Texan refugee looking for her ticket out, who gives us a grounds-eye view of refugee life. It turns out the whole thing revolves around “senior” water rights- water rights granted so far back that they would allow the holder (originally Arizona) priority over all the water in the basin. It’s worth billions of dollars, and of course, a good many betrayals and torture-murders.

The plot was basically fine from a crime fiction angle, not the best but good. There are some parts of it that make little sense. This novel depicts the states getting into all but open war with each other over water rights. California and Nevada National Guards routinely invade and blow up waterworks taking “their” water, including a bravura scene at the beginning where Angel leads a helicopter raid. The Constitution has been changed such that states can enforce state borders, generally with violence. Why would they care about a deal Arizona made with the Pima Indians that long ago if force seems to be what decides things? Why care about the letter of the law? I guess you need a McGuffin and this is a reasonably fun one.

The other thing is this… it’s hard to believe that US state origin would suddenly matter more than race. I know, I know, the Dust Bowl and the anti-Okie stuff, but still. I’d have difficulty believing this stuff wouldn’t be racialized, with Latino and black refugees treated the way they are in this book, and white refugees not nearly as bad. White people across the southwest seem to relate to each other more than people of color from their own state. It think that would structure how they deal with these crises. There’s a lot of people of color in the story, but beyond some cultural stuff it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, certainly much less than which state you come from. This rings untrue. That’d be less of a problem in a gauzier scifi novel, but the tone of this novel is so gritty and “real” that kind of thing sort of hurts the realism. All in all though, a decent read. ****

Review- Stansell, “American Moderns”

October 5, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Christine Stansell, “American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century” (2000) – New Yorkers already think they’re at the center of the universe- why write books arguing for it? I’m being facetious, there’s more to Stansell’s books on the Edwardian counterculture in the Village than that. But even as she nods to New Yorker self-importance, she still basically grants it’s right. We’re not stuck with Victorianism anymore because of the mixture of libertines, political radicals, and artists who glommed themselves together in Greenwich Village between 1890 and 1920, is the basic thesis. They got together, broke various rules pertaining to art, expression, and relationships — across gender, class (sort of), nationality, but not generally race lines — and broadcast the results to the rest of the country and world. Change followed.

I don’t know… this book seems well-researched. Stansell is part of a wave of accomplished American social historians who came around in the 70s and 80s who know their way around the archives. You can learn a lot about stuff New Yorkers said to and about each other. But look- I’ve read a lot of histories pertaining to the 1960s counterculture, as someone not notably interested in it qua itself but for other reasons. And the thing you get from there is that it was less the actual activities the hippies did that were so unique — their parents were on various drugs (pills and booze), slept around, used to listen to unapproved music (jazz), etc. — but more… well, it’s hard to say. Some people figure it out better than others, but most just go on and on about Ken Kesey as though there’s something intrinsically interesting about the man. And whatever the equivalent of that analytic something is for the 1910s bohemians of the Village, Stansell doesn’t really say it. It’s just assumed that they are as they presented themselves, the diametric opposite of a standard order that Stansell also doesn’t really define or interrogate.

I like to defend old-school social history. It did a lot of good things in terms of bringing to light the lived experience of everyday people, and at its best used that to create larger, more systemic pictures. But the cultural turn had its uses, namely, it shook up people’s assumptions about the immutability of social structures. This leads to some issues (it took the new cultural historians a while to really think seriously about capitalism) but it also means challenging ground assumptions. Like that we all just know what the norms are and how people relate to them, and that the function of “norm-upholder” and “norm-violator” just sort of wander through history perennially, unattached to any cultural or social structures because they ARE structures. But they’re not. They’re dependent too.

I’m making this book sound awful. It isn’t. Artistic resistance is something of a cringe topic for me- I first came to political awareness at the height of the power of adbusters-style culture-jamming nonsense, so that stuff plucks some bad chords for me, especially seeing genuine radicals like Emma Goldman get wrapped up in it. But if you want to know about this stuff, Stansell isn’t bad. But for someone more interested in the broader significance, it’s about as useful as yet another recitation of the deeds of Timothy Leary. I guess I do it to myself by picking these books, but hey… I don’t see anyone else here writing reviews, do you? ***

Review- Cole, “Open City”

October 4, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Teju Cole, “Open City” (2011) – Ehhhh… maybe I’m biased because he wrote that stupid article about the Charlie Hebdo massacre or maybe I’m just biased in favor of books having a plot, but I couldn’t get into this one. Cole’s sentence/paragraph level writing is pretty good. But it’s a book about a guy walking around New York (and, for part of it, Brussels). Nothing happens, there is basically no plot.

Here’s what I don’t get about these books about the experience of a city, and this goes from Whitman to Mary McCarthy to Cole (all writing about NYC, it occurs to me)- the idea behind cities is that you pack a bunch of people and resources together more densely than in other places. Presumably, this should create stories, more than other places (and, indeed, it has proven a gold mine for such, as the hardboiled tradition shows).

Why, then, do so many big name writers eschew plot and get all figurative when attempting to describe a big city? It makes sense when the romantics did it for rural landscapes. There’s less of human society going on there. Before you jump on me for just not getting it, keep in mind I lived in New York for two years and still have affection for the place. I, too, have perambulated alone through the streets of the city at night, thinking thoughts and feeling feels. I’d say I’d be as bored by a book of those thoughts, but no- beyond garden variety narcisissm, I think I came up with more vivid and involved fantasies and conjectures than Julius, the main character, does. My star ratings are always about some murky mixture of how much I like a book and how good I think it is. I’m going to lean more towards the latter on this one and give it an extra star for technical accomplishment, but I did not get much out of it. **’

Review- Naipaul, “A House for Mr. Biswas”

October 1, 2018 Peter BerardLeave a comment

V.S. Naipaul, “A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961) – One of the hardest things to do in literature is to maintain a real satirical eye. You need both a sharp, unforgiving perspective and an ability to recognize real pathos. TV sitcoms often do the debased version of this, twenty-one minutes of intermittently-amusing cruelty with a dumb moral slapped on in the twenty-second. When it’s done right, it looks like there was no other way it could have been- that the sensitivity and the sharpness constitute each other.

This is what you see in V.S. Naipaul’s breakout novel. Mohun Biswas, based on Naipaul’s father, is born into the poverty and insularity of the Indians imported Trinidad by the British as cheap labor in the sugarcane fields. Caste, religion, and tradition hem him in on all sides, even as these things are all challenged and broken down by modern conditions in a place thousands of miles away from where they were originally developed. A pundit decides he’s bad luck when he’s born, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. His parents and community treat him as bad luck, which helps make him feckless, resentful, and dishonest, which in turn lead to disasters like the death of his father. It’s a hard life.

Mr. Biswas (as he’s referred to throughout) is a character you could call “Berard Complete”- fully realized without being tediously fleshed out in the manner of bourgeois character development. He has ambitions most of us would recognize as valid. More than anything, he wants to be independent, to escape from a world that is, shall we say, overdetermined. Buying or building his own house symbolizes that commitment, and it takes the whole book, over five hundred pages, to finally land one for him to die in. But he’s also something of a prick. He’s not the martyr-saint of so many stories about a man at odds with society. His fecklessness, his dishonesty, his resentments feel as real as his yearning to leave his predicament.

His predicament is symbolized by the Tulsis, the family which he marries into and the house in which they, and for a while he, live. They are a sprawling, matriarchal clan dedicated seemingly solely to reproducing itself, complete with immune system of shaming, shunning, and bribery to keep potentially restive cells of the body, like Mr. Biswas, in line. Along with symbolizing the stasis of the Hindu community in Trinidad (a controversial enough thesis), the Tulsis also represent Naipaul’s longstanding issues with women. But Naipaul’s satiric eye doesn’t fail him- Mr. Biswas may complain about his wife Shama, and her family trapping him, but he’s depicted as at least as responsible for his own status as they are, and probably more. The thing with living under various kinds of oppression, Naipaul reminds us, is that it doesn’t make us into saints or superheroes. It more often makes you and those around you a mess.

Insights like these are one of the reasons Naipaul was such a controversial figure in the liberationist 1960s when he came to literary fame. His ideas about women are what brought him his last major controversy before he died this year. But Naipaul’s satirical eye really did range everywhere, though he was soft on the English Tories who propelled his career and could probably have used it. To use a cliche, he was an equal-opportunity hater. In no wise was this more true of himself and his family. He loved his father, by every account. One of those accounts is in the book: the relationship between Mr. Biswas and the character of Anand, based presumably on Naipaul himself and something of a swotty little shit. But like Mr. Biswas, he consumes his father- in this case, using his struggles (including struggles to become a writer) as fuel for his escape from Trinidad into literary glory. He never flinched, or said he didn’t, or indicated regret. He saw what he saw, whether imagined or not, and said it, as well and as clearly as he could. When it worked, it worked spectacularly. *****

Too Much Berard

Month: October 2018