Bildungsroman

I've always been annoyed with people who feel the need to have a personal connection to what they read. That mentality has always bugged me, and I know many people who subscribe to it: "It doesn't apply to my life, I couldn't relate to the main character at all" is a common complaint when I loan books to friends. For one thing, that's just lazy- you can always find something to relate to if you try really hard and if you're pretentious/narcissistic enough- and second of all, nothing limits you more in your reading life than making random declarations that you will not read anything which doesn't impact your life personally. 

I've come across this in my time with the exact opposite nature- I haven't felt a connection with books that I felt the similarities were there. This is a genre known as "Bildungsroman," or the coming-of-age story. (It's always fascinated me and made me sort of proud that most teenagers my age can define 'bildungsroman.') A short list of books with this theme I've read include:

1. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

3. Good Times Bad Times by James Kirkwood

4. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

5. The Chosen by Chaim Potok  

6. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky 

7. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

8. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

9. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery 

I liked most of the books on the aforementioned list, and felt very moved by some of them, especially The Catcher in the Rye, Good Times Bad Times and The Perks of Being A Wallflower. But I didn't like the books because I felt any sort of relation, even though I'm currently at the age where 'coming-of-age' should maybe mean something to me, being on the brink of adulthood and leaving home for the first time. I liked the books because they were funny or interesting, or had likable characters and an interesting plot. (Except for Anne of Green Gables, which I found terribly maudlin, and Siddhartha which I felt was dishonest.) 

I'm currently trying to read The Promise by Chaim Potok, and that's what got me thinking about bildungsroman. It's the sequel to the aforementioned The Chosen. I loved the first book, and am a little afraid the sequel will ruin my fondness for how the story ended. I have only read one chapter, and I think it'll be okay, but we'll see.

I think it's a tricky thing in books, when you want your character to get somewhere, and come to some sort of resolution without being cheesy or worse, dishonest. This is a big theme in bildungsroman books, and it is important to the story I suppose, but it's difficult to do it well. Having that great "moment of clarity" is something I've seen in many books (Eat Pray Love comes to mind- a book I would not recommend) and it always seems disingenuous to me. I think The Catcher in the Rye does it well, and Perks of Being A Wallflower came close to being very cheesy but managed to be moving instead, at least for me. 

I think I'm simply too stressed out by school right now to feel the full weight of truly "growing up," plus I have a few months. And I really don't think there's going to be one moment in my life where I feel like everything has changed. Life's nice in that everything moves in increments, and except for moving day, I'm not going to have to face a ton of change right at once. At least that's what I hope. I could never handle a "moment of clarity" where I realize everything is different and I'm a different person. Plus, I don't really want to be a different person. 

Nightmares

The last book to really give me nightmares was Night by Elie Wiesel. We read it in 8th grade, and I've always sort of resented my 8th grade teacher for making us read it. I am as pro "read whatever books you want to, banning books is ridiculous and horrible" as you can get, but I don't think that book was anything that any of us could really handle as 13 year olds. It is such an important book, but I've never revisited it since 8th grade. I couldn't sleep for about two weeks while we were reading and studying the Holocaust, and I was plagued with the most graphic nightmares I've ever had. I don't think I'll ever forget this passage from the novel:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

How are you even supposed to be able to read that and not have nightmares? I cannot elaborate on Night at all, and to be honest, I never know what to say when people ask me what I think of it. I understand why it's so incredibly important, but the selfish part of me just wants to set it aside and never think of it. Some things are too horrific. That's one of a select number of books I've had to just put aside. 

I bring this up because of the current book I'm reading; Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates. It's pretty disturbing, and I've made a point to only read it during the day when I'm around people, because I don't want to have any nightmares about it. The concept is creepy: it's based off the life of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and focuses on the character Quentin, who is also the narrator (he is referred to as Q__ P__ in the book) who becomes obsessed with the idea of performing a lobotomy on someone to turn them into a virtual "zombie" who will always love him. 

The murders are depicted in gruesome detail, and Joyce Carol Oates really gets into the mind of a serial killer, which is extremely frightening, to say the least. As one reviewer put it, "What Joyce Carol Oates has done is not write about madness but write in the voice and with the logic of madness itself. The horror of the novel is in the very absence of horror, as we enter the mind of a murderer who has no trace of what we like to call conscience as he depicts the people he manipulates and the sexual savagery he perpetuates upon his victims." 

I've only sparsely read Joyce Carol Oates; I remember her best for her short stories, particularly "June Birthing," (not my thing) "Life After High School," (probably my favorite) and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" (creepy but good). I'm going to wait until I finish this book to see how I feel about her. I think it's very interesting how she is able to completely inhabit her narrator, and she makes me feel uncomfortable because it's hard to hate the main character. Because to him, what he's doing is not wrong, and he does not have any sort of moral compass whatsoever, and comes off almost sympathetic at times. 

I never know what to think of myself when I feel that way, and similarly, when I watched a documentary about Jeffrey Dahmer last year for psychology class, I felt horrible for feeling sympathy for the man. He savagely murdered 17 young men; he was a monster. And yet, whenever I hear about anyone getting bullied when they were young, I cannot help but feel sympathy. For Dahmer's mother as well- after Dahmer was killed in prison, she said, "Now is everybody happy? Now that he's bludgeoned to death, is that good enough for everyone?" 

On a lighter note (this is the darkest blog entry I've posted in a while; I'm not in a sort of dark mood or anything, it's very odd), I was discussing Joyce Carol Oates with my dad, and his response was, "Eh, she kind of makes me uncomfortable," and when I asked why, his response was, "Well, I don't know, I feel like I'd be having coffee with her, and I'd leave to go to the bathroom, and when I got back she'd have published a new anthology." I was not familiar with how prolific she truly is, I can be surprisingly ignorant that way, but after a quick google search, I understood what my dad meant. She's certainly published her fair share of novels and short stories, and I'm going to have to wait and see what I think of this in order to see if I want to read more of her stuff. 

Why Tony Kushner is brilliant

Tony Kushner has been in the zeitgeist recently, due to the fact that his magnum opus Angels in America is being revived off-Broadway this fall, as well as a new play of his being released. I came across an interview Kushner did in Vanity Fair, and devoted a few hours this past weekend to re-reading this play. I've been thinking about it a lot since then.

Whenever someone asks me to name my favorite piece of literature, the answer is always the play Angels in America. I came across it when I was 15, because my dad was watching the miniseries of it that HBO had produced. The miniseries was six hours long, he told me, and had Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Emma Thompson, and Mary Louise Parker in it, among others. (A random aside- it always felt wrong to me that the first three I listed were always treated like the stars of this film, cause of the name recognition I suppose,  when they really weren't the main characters.) Just from the title and length I immediately brushed it off; I figured it was some weird Touched By an Angel esque thing all about the glory of God, some religious movie. I overheard one line, though, that made me interested in it: "It's 1985. Fifteen years till the third millenium. Maybe Christ will come again. Or maybe the troubles will come. And the end will come. And the sky will collapse and there'll be terrible rain and showers of poison light. Or maybe, maybe my life is really fine... maybe Joe loves me and I'm only crazy thinking otherwise." 

I watched the entire six hours of it that night. The basic plot of it is that it takes place in 1985, during the AIDS crisis and Reagan administration, and it's politics are one of the main aspects of the book. The protagonist is Prior Walter, a gay man living with AIDS in New York City, who is abandoned by his boyfriend Louis soon after his diagnosis. Another character, Harper Pitt, is a Mormon woman also living in New York City who has a valium addiction and agoraphobia, who has hallucinations that get even worse once she finds out that her husband Joe is gay, and Joe's boss is the real-life character of Roy Cohn, a Reagan controlled lawyer who hid his AIDS diagnosis from the public, calling his condition liver cancer. 


Prior begins to get very sick, and is visited by an Angel who tells him that he is a prophet who's mission is to "stop moving." She tells him that God has left Heaven because of human beings moving and changing and causing so much suffering by continuing to progress, and the sadness human beings face is echoed in Heaven. In the meantime, Harper's delusions get worse as she imagines she is living in Antarctica with a man named Mr. Lies. I don't want to ruin the play for anyone who considers reading it, or spend this entire blog summarizing, and at any rate it is a very difficult play to describe. 


Kushner wrote this play in response to the AIDS crisis, and the Reagan administrations appalling reaction to what had happened. The play is horribly heartbreaking in some parts, and the few friends I've loaned it to have said that after watching the six hours they've felt emotionally drained. And it is pretty heavy material. Kushner gives us one of the saddest, most sympathetic characters with Prior Walter, who's incredible isolation is felt after his abandonment. (A scene that never fails to make me cry.)


 It is most definitely a political play, and Kushner is an unabashed socialist. Each character discusses and laments over the politics over the time, none more than Louis, Prior's erstwhile boyfriend, who in one memorable excerpt from the play has an almost two page monologue describing democracy in America with Prior's best friend, an African American drag queen named Belize (who also turns out to be Roy Cohn's nurse.) It's pretty dense, but interesting:


Louis: It's the racial destiny of the Brits that matters to them, not their political destiny, whereas in America...
Belize: Here in America race doesn't count. 
Louis: No, no, that's not... I mean you can't be hearing that...
Belize: I...
Louis: It's- look, race, yes, but ultimately race here is a political question, right? Racists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle. It's not really about race. Like the spiritualists try to use that stuff, are you enlightened, are you centered, channeled, whatever, this reaching out for a spiritual past in a country where no indigenous spirits exist-- only the Indians, I mean Native American spirits and we killed them off so now, there are no gods here, no ghosts or spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics, the shifting downwards and outwards of political power to the people. 


I really think this is the play that got me invested in politics, and I started researching the Reagan administration after I read this play. But it also invokes religious issues, as you see characters who are Jewish, Christian, and Mormon and got me interested in different religions. Parts of the play you really do feel Kushner's intense anger and frustration with what had happened in the 80s, and I liked the emotional aspects of it, but I think the main reason I like it so much is that it's so intellectual. I know how pretentious that sounds, but it deals with such intense topics, and holds nothing back. It most definitely has a "liberal agenda," whatever that means, and focuses pretty heavily on the detriments of being individuals instead of communities. Kushner points out the larger culture's disingenuous response to suffering that was seen with the AIDS crisis, and puts out a message of compassion and tolerance, but in no part does the play cross the line to be preachy or manipulative. It rejects the idea of America as it was during the 80s, and strives for something better. In another one of my favorite excerpts, Belize discusses this:


Belize: Well I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It's just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean.


I've had a hard time getting people into this play, and I think going straight to the text might be difficult as like I said, it is pretty intense. But I think everyone should at least watch the miniseries, which was one of the best miniseries (or just movies, for that matter) I've ever seen. I've posted the trailer below:







I wish I could just comb over every single detail about this play and discuss it at length. Everything about it is so wonderfully written, it switches from being unbelievably devastating to hysterically comical to spiritual within pages, and each of the characters is written in such an in depth way. Roy Cohn isn't caricatured, and somehow is seen as semi-likable even though he plays one of the most disturbing and horrible people of the 20th century. Kushner doesn't shy away from anything political, and his open condemning of our past is a hope to pave a way for a better future. Or as Harper puts it in one of the plays final scenes, "Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so."

Dad's books

When I turned 18, my dad wrote me a letter and in it he told me all the books he read when he was 17 through when he was 24; ending the list at the age where he lived in New York City for a couple of months. I've always liked my dad's NYC stories, because they always sound sort of Holden Caulfield-esque, and he had some really interesting experiences that almost sound too fantastical to be real, but I've never doubted him. Anyway, the book list he gave me was as follows:

1. Something Wicked This Way Comes- Ray Bradbury

2. Sweet Thursday, Cannery Row, East of Eden- John Steinbeck

3. World According to Garp- John Irving

4. The Cheerleader- Ruth Doan Macdougall

5. Kinflicks- Lisa Alther

6. Lady Oracle- Margaret Atwood

7. The Razor's Edge- Somerset Maugham

8. This Perfect Day- Ira Levin 

9. Every book by James Kirkwood

10. One Hundred Years of Solitude- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

11. Every Stephen King novel until It in 1986

12. Ghost Story and Shadowland- Peter Straub 

13. Catch-22- Joseph Heller 

14. Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions- Kurt Vonnegut 

His commentary on the novels he read when he was a young adult was also pretty interesting; he described This Perfect Day as a great dystopian novel-- "obviously a rewrite of Orwell but who cares," and said that he remembered liking Kurt Vonnegut but turned away from him after he read those three books when he was in college; he said that Vonnegut's writing was okay for college students, but not "real adults." He said that the Garcia Marquez novel was way over his head and he remembered liking Catch-22 a lot but never revisited it after his first reading. 

As I've alluded to in earlier posts, many of my reading choices are directly influenced by my father, and I trust his judgment greatly. Of this list, I've read Catch-22, most of James Kirkwood books, Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, and that's it. Some of these books listed I have no desire to read: I think One Hundred Years of Solitude is way over my head as well, and I'm not much of a Stephen King fan, (though I do appreciate him mocking Stephanie Meyer in a column for Entertainment Weekly) but I'm going to keep this list as a reference for the future. My dad has given me a huge list of books that he thinks I should read in addition to those listed above; I'll list the ones I'm actually looking into reading:

1. Leviathan- Paul Auster

2. Bright Lights, Big City- Jay McInerney 

3. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami (also his short story "Sleep") 

4. War and Peace- Leo Tolstoy (I've read this but I was too young to "fully understand it" as my dad puts it and need to revisit it as an adult) 

5. Operation Shylock: A Confession- Phillip Roth

6. All short stories by Ray Bradbury 

I think my relationship with my dad is different than anyone else's. All he does is give me books to read and fight with me about politics. I don't think he's ever asked me "how was school" in my life. 

James Kirkwood

I think it's about time I devote a blog to James Kirkwood, especially since I've began reading his novel There Must Be A Pony. I've read three of his novels; Good Times Bad Times, P.S. Your Cat is Dead, and Some Kind of Hero. Kirkwood is the author I like to brag about having "discovered," because whenever I mention his name invariably no one around will have ever heard of him, and most of his books are out of print and difficult to come by. But this is really me just being pretentious; while many people may not be able to produce his name, most people have heard of A Chorus Line, which he co-wrote. He also has a Tony award and Pulitzer prize for this play, but oddly enough I've never liked that particular play. Kirkwood's three novels I have read, though, are among my favorite books of all time.

Kirkwood's style is very reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye, and in all of his books the characters are strikingly similar, and there are minor characters that appear in each books, tying them all together (Michael Chabon does this as well), or at least citing how they all happen in the same universe. Kirkwood's protagonists are always male, straightforward, and observant; but it's not gimmick-y, and it's more like he takes the same type of character and puts him into a completely different, bizarre situation. (In P.S. Your Cat is Dead, for example, Jimmy Zoole ties up a burglar who has broken into his house, and then spends the entire New Year's Eve with this man, playing tricks on their friends.) Kirkwood's characters are simply funny and likable, and one of my favorite passages in Good Times Bad Times is when Peter and his best friend, Jordan, are giving all the teacher's and other students at their school nicknames that they then refer to them by for the rest of the novel ("Casper" and "The Terrible Twins" are two examples) and Kirkwood books are the ones I cannot recommend enough. I actually prefer Good Times Bad Times to The Catcher in the Rye, and that's really saying something.

James Kirkwood definitely lived an interesting life, in that there's a lot of confusion on him. For example, I've read three different accounts (online, so take that for what it's worth) of how he died: one says he died from complications to AIDS, one said he had cancer, and the other said he committed suicide. He was also good friends with Clay Shaw, who was charged with conspiracy charges for the murder of John F. Kennedy. (He wasn't convicted.) Kirkwood used the events in a book called American Grotesque, which, just from the title and the cover, I want to read. At any rate, the moral of this is that everyone should read a Kirkwood book.

Arrested Development

I have about 50 college essays to write, so I've started doing a marathon of Arrested Development again. It's wonderful. 

"It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house-- like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree."

That was probably my favorite line in The Plot Against America, which I just finished tonight. I liked the book quite a great deal, and I will say right now that I'm going to talk about the ending so if anyone reading this has a desire to read this book at some point, I'd steer clear of this post.

The book was quite interesting in that the first 300 odd pages of it are this basically dystopian version of America, that has a sort of laissez-faire anti-semitism to it and regular compliance with Hitler. What I thought was very intriguing about it was that you never really got the feeling of whether Roth's family were being actively persecuted or if it was just them being overly paranoid. While the organizations set up by Lindbergh (The "Office of American Absorption") seemed to make the case for the former, as well as the fact that America did not enter the war and took on a Hitler-supporting stance, there were instances where it did seem like the Roth family was being overly paranoid about what was happening, and were being regularly frightened by Walter Winchell.

However, this all took a turn at the ending, which I have to say had quite an interesting twist. The book's about 365 pages long, and in the 65 pages of the ending, Roth simply describes what happened in the world, event after event, without really stopping to reflect on what they were. Walter Winchell was assassinated. Lindbergh disappeared, assumed to be kidnapped. America almost went to war with Canada. Riots over Lindbergh's disappearance cause hundreds of civilian deaths. The Democrats win the Senate and House; Roosevelt is elected President once again, the U.S. enters the War, Hitler surrenders, FDR dies in office. One thing right after another, and after the chapter ended, I felt like it was almost a cop out; this entire book, presenting this harrowing version of events, and it all ended up okay within one chapter. But Roth didn't stop there, and the last 30 pages of the book were eerie yet again; Roosevelt gets arrested, the U.S. is on the brink of war, and Philip's cousin Alvin and Philip's father get into a violent confrontation ending in bloodshed. While ending on a definitively sadder note than what it would have been had he ended it simply with Roosevelt being elected again and all being right with the world, Roth's sort of creepy, depressing ending that showcases the destruction the family faced during the two years of Lindbergh's presidency is a much more satisfying, less cop out-y way to end the novel.

What I liked the most about this novel was that Roth rarely ever went for the emotion. The despair felt by the family was extreme, and evidenced by the angry outbursts of Roth's father, but Philip himself almost never betrays any emotion, and when he did it was superficial- annoyance at the prospect of having to move to Canada; dislike of having decreased free time- all the things you would expect from a 9-year-old, which was the age of Philip in the novel. The one line that I quoted in my header was one of the rare moments where Roth breaks his character, and was one of the rare lines that seemed to voice his despair and regret. For the most part, you felt it from all the other characters; just not the protagonist.

Very good, interesting book.

Jónsi- Animal Arithmetic

Great song/video

"Straw House, Straw Dog"-- Richard Siken

Here's a poem by Richard Siken I like.  


 1
I watched TV.         I had a Coke at the bar.       I had four dreams in a row
where you were burned, about to burn, or still on fire.
         I watched TV.          I had a Coke at the bar. I had four Cokes,
four dreams in a row.

Here you are in the straw house, feeding the straw dog. Here you are
         in the wrong house, feeding the wrong dog. I had a Coke with ice.
I had four dreams on TV.          You have a cold cold smile.
         You were burned, you were about to burn, you're still on fire.

Here you are in the straw house, feeding ice to the dog, and you wanted
an adventure, so I said Have an adventure.
The straw about to burn, the straw on fire. Here you are on the TV,
         saying Watch me, just watch me.
 2
Four dreams in a row, four dreams in a row, four dreams in a row,
         fall down right there. I wanted to fall down right there but I knew
you wouldn't catch me because you're dead.          I swallowed crushed ice
pretending it was glass and you're dead. Ashes to ashes.

You wanted to be cremated so we cremated you and you wanted an adventure
         so I ran          and I knew you wouldn't catch me.
You are a fever I am learning to live with, and everything is happening
         at the wrong end of a very long tunnel.
    3
I woke up in the morning and I didn't want anything, didn't do anything,
         couldn't do it anyway,
just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made
         any sense, anything.
And I can't eat, can't sleep, can't sit still or fix things and I wake up and I
wake up and you're still dead, you're under the table, you're still feeding
         the damn dog, you're cutting the room in half.
Whatever.           Feed him whatever.           Burn the straw house down.
  4

I don't really blame you for being dead but you can't have your sweater back.
         So, I said, now that we have our dead, what are we going to do with them?
There's a black dog and there's a white dog, depends on which you feed,
         depends on which damn dog you live with.
5

Here we are
         in the wrong tunnel, burn O burn, but it's cold, I have clothes
all over my body, and it's raining, it wasn't supposed to. And there's snow
         on the TV, a landscape full of snow, falling from the fire-colored sky.
But thanks, thanks for calling it          the blue sky
         You can sleep now, you said. You can sleep now. You said that.
I had a dream where you said that. Thanks for saying that.
         You weren't supposed to.

Guilty Pleasures

 I'm almost finished with the Philip Roth book, and am feeling a bit overwhelmed by my list of books I want to read. I have The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo which I'm willing to give a shot but am very ambivalent toward; There Must Be a Pony, which is a James Kirkwood book (one of my favorite authors), and then Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates and The Letters of Allen Ginsberg.

I was listing off my book list to a friend of mine, who then proceeded to ask me if I ever read books that are just fun books. And I think my current book fits that expectation: The Puzzling Adventures of Dr. Ecco. It tells the story of a brilliant mathematician (He went to Harvard at age 11) who takes on clients, ranging from politicians to millionaires, who require his services. The entire book is filled with puzzles, and in the context of it, the author outlines the puzzle that Dr. Ecco has to solve, and you're supposed to figure out if you can solve it before reading the solution. It has been an immensely entertaining book, even though I am completely abysmal at math and can never solve the puzzles. And while it would be completely false to say that this is a book that doesn't make me think, it is a more light-hearted book that I can read without devoting much energy to it.

This book prompted a discussion with my dad and later a few of my friends about books that we know aren't considered great or significant works of literature but we still like anyway. When I told my dad I couldn't think of any for me, he rolled his eyes at me and said "Don't make me go all Lestat on you," an allusion to a character from one of my favorite book series, The Vampire Chronicles. I used to make fun of that series- and Vampire-based books in general- until I got bored last year's winter break and read the first 6 of them in about a month. The author of the books is Anne Rice, who has always fascinated me because she seems kind of crazy. She used to be an atheist, than became a die-hard Christian, and then left the church, saying that she was not going to be a part of a religion that was infamous for its' intolerance of homosexuality, feminism, birth control, etc. While I have not read any of her other books outside of the Vampire Chronicles series, I was shocked when I discovered they are actually very well written, something I did not expect. But almost all of my friends and family make fun of me for reading them, and assume they're trash. 


Trying to determine what a "great" work of literature is is in itself a problem, because that is obviously a very subjective idea, and while there are many lists of "1000 books to read before you die" that steer you in the direction of what quality literature is, ultimately people will always like different things. I personally think Anna Karenina is a better book than War and Peace, but most literary experts do not agree with me. I have a friend who loves Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, when everyone else I have talked to who has read that book thought it was the most boring book in the history of literature. (I concur with that; I read it twice and still had no idea what actually happened.) One of my good friends and I are constantly at odds over what constitutes "great" books- she thinks that only very high, poetically written books should be considered in the realm of "great" literature, whereas I think that there are many books that are written in more of a colloquial or straightforward manner that can still- and are still- considered masterpieces, like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, or The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger. 


And I don't think it's wrong to enjoy books that maybe aren't highbrow. Almost everyone I know loves Harry Potter, a series very tough to argue for elevated literary value. My dad loves Raymond Chandler, and he and I both got hooked on Denis Lehane last year, but I can't envision either of them (usually pigeonholed as mystery/genre specific authors) winding up on a list with Tolstoy or Shakespeare anytime soon. 


It's quite interesting to go through 'top books' lists, and so I'll put one here:


http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1951793,00.html


There are definitely books on this list I don't think should be there, and ones I feel should that were omitted, but overall I think it covers all the bases. I may consult this list in the future, but honestly I prefer book recommendations from my father and my librarian. 

Philip Roth's The Plot Against America

When my dad first told me to read Philip Roth, I ignored him for about a year because Philip Roth is in the genre of "speculative fiction," which I wasn't into until recently. Right now I've read about 150 pages, and it's a very intriguing novel. The basic premise of it is that it's an alternate reality in 1940 where Charles Lindbergh, a staunch isolationist and sympathizer of Hitler, is elected President instead of Franklin Roosevelt. What ensues is the United States not entering the 2nd World War, Lindbergh and Hitler coming to a "negotiation," and the government of the United States organizing a program rooted in anti-semitism.

I've become surprisingly inadequate at talking about this book, and as my dad asked me what I thought this afternoon, my reply was simply, "It's... eerie." And it is. When I read it, I come frighteningly close to believing that it's real, a level of which is very uncomfortable. Up until 1940, what is depicted in the book is what actually happened, and Roth doesn't go so far off the radar as to present situations that in no possible circumstance could've ever come to pass. It's one of those books that actually requires outside research, and the book's depiction of Lindbergh shocked me. It's embarrassing how ignorant I apparently am over him, but honestly, if someone asked me to describe Lindbergh before reading this book I could say that he flew from New York to Paris and that his baby son was kidnapped and murdered. I knew of his involvement in America First, but I had never really known about his suspected anti-semitism resulting from a speech given where he criticized the groups who he saw "pressing this country toward war", the three groups being "the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration."

I've always been impressed when author's can completely involve the reader in the time period they choose, and this is a definitive example of that. Even though I know that what Roth depicts is not what actually happened, I still feel frightened and threatened in thinking about what is going to happen next. A sense of helplessness is very present in this novel; people unable to change the course of history and directly affected by the failure of the times. That is also a notion heavily present in possibly my favorite work of literature ever, the play Angels in America by Tony Kushner. Set in 1985 during one of the worst years for the AIDS crisis, Kushner's protagonist Prior Walter is afflicted with the disease and faces head on the Reagan Administration's failure to handle that crisis effectively. In Prior's delirium, he sees an angel who tells him that he a prophet who has to get the world to "stop moving." When Prior relays this message to his friend Belize, they have the following exchange that, while extremely simple (especially in the context of a Kushner play), is profoundly effective:

Prior: It's all gone too far, too much loss is what [The Angels] think, we should stop somehow, go back.

Belize: But that's not how the world works, Prior. It only spins forward.

Prior: Yeah but forward into what?

The feeling that there has to be some way of stopping, something done to prevent what has come to pass is extremely prevalent when I have been reading The Plot Against America. It's so strange, because obviously what Roth depicts did not actually happen, but for some reason when I read this, I feel a distinct sense of fear for the characters, knowing that in this alternate history- where America doesn't enter the World War and Hitler continues to reign- his Jewish family will be doomed. 

I don't feel ever like Roth is giving the reader a cautionary tale, and he's not using giant changes in American culture to show how Lindbergh's rule changed history, (something that would've definitely taken the reader out of focus) but rather subtle instances of anti-semitism for the Roth family that aid to their despair. The most heartbreaking scene I've read so far is when young Philip sees his father breakdown and cry over what has happened to their family, and the country itself by extension, and Philip realizing that his family is being torn apart, and that he is really alone. 

Roth's writing style is really interesting. It's without a doubt written in an intellectual style, but I don't feel that it is difficult to read, and Roth doesn't get bogged down in overly flowery diction or rhetorical devices, which sort of fit with the story itself. I hope to check out some more of his stuff if I get the chance. 

The Foer Dynasty

Jonathan Safran Foer has always fascinated me, and I recently finished reading his book titled Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close after reading his novel Everything is Illuminated last year. I read it in one day; it was one of those books that you really don't want to stop reading. It tells the story of Oskar Schell, a 9 year old kid who's father died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City. Oskar becomes obsessed with a key in a jar he finds in his dad's room, that has the word "Black" written on it. He decides to find every person with the last name of Black in the city to see if they know what it's about. Oskar is undeniably extremely advanced for his age, and defines himself as a pacifist, atheist, and vegan, among other things. Foer's writing is decidedly post-modern, and the book is interspersed with drawings and photographs, different narrators, and a non-linear format. I was extremely moved by the book when I finished it, and the last page of the book had one of those great lines that nearly made me cry.

After I began reading Foer, a friend of mine sent me an article about his two brothers, also writers- his older brother, Franklin, is an editor of The New Republic, and his younger brother, Joshua, is a freelance journalist who sold his first novel for a reported 1.2 million dollars. This enraged many in the literary world; so many people want to be published, and the "Third Foer" is able to get a million dollar advance without any prior publications seems more than a little shady- many assumed, reasonably so, that it is his familial relationships that propelled such a sum. On March 3rd, when the book is actually released, will we actually see if it's good or not. But I really think people are going to hate it no matter the content, because he is part of that "Foer Dynasty."

The Foer dynasty has always seemed a little creepy to me; here were kids who's parents had them compile information on subjects and give presentations on said subjects regularly. Fans of the Foer family say this isn't anything untoward- the three boys all suffered from paralyzing shyness at a young age, and this was a tactic to help them overcome it. Foer haters, of course, talk about how wrong it was to make their children do this; labeling it as "Writer bootcamp." The boys were all trained to be writers; isn't there something a little disconcerting about that? Shouldn't writing be innate, not something your parents pushed you towards?

I can certainly relate to that. My parents are both incredibly literary minded, and from a young age I was told how important it was to read books of "high literary merit." My dad regularly gave me book lists, as did my mom- Edgar Allan Poe stories were my bedtime stories. It was my parents' influence that got me to read The New Yorker, James Kirkwood, Bertolt Brecht, Tony Kushner, and many of the authors I love are ones that my parents love. I like that I read books that I feel are highly regarded, and how I do have a pretty good sense of cultural literacy. But it IS a little disconcerting, because I don't know whether I like Bertolt Brecht and Anthony Lane because I was sort of trained to like them by my parents, or whether it was my own discovery. I'm not going to do a Carrie Bradshaw-esque question of the week here, but it is an interesting idea.

Another problem people have with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is that it has 9/11 as a backdrop, and one of the most difficult parts of the book to read is when Oskar is listening to the messages that his dad left in the time after the towers were hit. It was published in 2005, and was one of the first fiction books to incorporate the national tragedy into it's plot. Many critics felt this was too soon, and the book received a gigantic polarized response. In one interesting review titled "Extremely Cloying and Incredibly False: Why the author of Everything is Illuminated is a fraud and a hack" (Available to read here: http://www.nypress.com/article-11418-extremely-cloying-incredibly-false.html) author Harry Siegel wrote:

Foer, squeezing his brass ring, doesn't have the excuse of having written the day or the week after the attack. In a calculated move, he threw in 9/11 to make things important, to get paid. Get that money son; Jay-Z would be proud. Why wait to have ideas worth writing when you can grab a big theme, throw in the kitchen sink, and wear your flip-flops all the way to the bank? How could someone so willfully young be so unambitious?


Other critics criticized the novel for bearing stark similarities to his wife Nicole Krauss's The History of Love. (An article about that is here- people have way too much fun mocking his title: http://www.mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a4048.asp) Foer has also been labeled a narcissist, for basically inserting himself into each of his books (Oskar being his 9-year-old self) and, of course, a hack.


I don't know why I've spent this entire blog talking about how everyone hates Foer when, as I explained in my opening paragraph, I was so moved by Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It's strange; all the criticisms I see of his book and his family seem very valid to me. I can definitely see where they come from, when usually I'm blindsided by my love for an author to accept any criticism. (I'm oddly protective of writers I like in that respect.) Was it too soon to publish a book with 9/11 in it in 2005? Do Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss collaborate too much? I don't know, maybe. All I know is that while I can see the criticisms people have, and understand their validity, I don't subscribe to them. Foer's novel was one of those rare novels that provoked such an emotional response, I'm sort of blinded to judging it. 


I'm planning on reading Foer's non-fiction novel Eating Animals soon. I'm excited for it. I like Jonathan Safran Foer. 


Here is another review of the book that explains what I was trying to in a much more eloquent matter:


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jun/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview22


(Big thanks to one of my best friends for getting me into Foer; who, for anonymity's sake, I'll only call Safran Flyte (homage to her favorite author/book character) and providing me with a lot of the information I used to craft this.)