The Awful Possibilities

i figured it had been long enough since everyone was talking about michel houellebecq that i could read the elementary particles with an open mind, and now i’ve read it and my open-minded reaction is:

this book is stoopid.

i’m not just being an ass. my critical take on the book (not that i owe anyone a critical take on any book, not here) is that it doesn’t really merit a critical reaction. but all i’ve got to do tonight is watch the game (go cavs) so let me react anyway and you can take it how you want.

1. the prose ranges from adequate to crap.

it’s a translation, i know, but i can’t imagine this sentence (chosen only because it was the first in the first chapter after i flipped the book open just now) being any better in french:

From a moral standpoint, 1970 was marked by a substantial increase in the consumption of the erotic, despite the intervention of vigilant censors.

it’s clunky, inverted, and doubly passive. none of these aspects is inherently bad, but to what effect here? the thing about the “moral standpoint” is what gets me, though. was there not a substantial increase in the consumption of the erotic from an immoral or amoral standpoint? not substantial enough? are morality and the erotic linked inextricably and in inverse proportion? so inextricably that i seem dense raising the question? and what about “consumption?” is it a coincidence that houellebecq (his translator, that is) uses this word in this context in a book that could be considered a sustained, if diluted, neo-marxist critique of late-twentieth century society and sexuality despite little jabs here and there at marxism or at least communism as practiced? if not, whose “morality” are we talking about when we talk about this consumption?

if it sounds like i’m being pedantic and nitpicking, i dare you to read the book — it’s way more pedantic than i could ever be (and with less swagger) and the sentences don’t get much better (though this is far from the worst). the overall effect is of a decently educated manchild throwing ideological shit at a wall and hoping something sticks.

2. nothing’s shocking.

it’s been said by wiser men than me, many times in the same great song, so why, then, was shock this book’s major selling point? the only people i can imagine being shocked by anything in this book are the type who can say “naughty” unironically and also new yorker readers (a lot of crossover in that venn diagram, too).

oh shit, now i’m really about to get pedantic.

a lot of what has passed for shocking in literature this past, oh, two hundred years (and i know this only applies to certain regions of earth, but odds are you’re in one of them if you’re reading this), is not actually transgression but wallowing (as if the aforementioned manchild played with that shit for a while before flinging it).

misanthropy and nihilism are the best ways to “shock” people these days. pornography doesn’t shock anybody anymore, and the pornography that does shock does so not because it’s pornography but because it’s overtly misogynistic, racist, violent, etc.; and proper, as in overt, misogyny and racism, make you a crackpot, not transgressive.

misanthropy and nihilism are perfectly tenable orientations toward the world, i guess (and i’ve been accused of both, or something like them, often enough, though never by anyone who’s met me or read me well), but there’s an irony inherent in a misanthrope and/or nihilist’s attempt to communicate with the audience he or she hates and/or wants to destroy. if the author expressing the misanthropy and nihilism doesn’t demonstrate an awareness of this irony, then that author is really just taking an adolescent delight in expressing those ideas. that is, wallowing.

and i don’t see houellebecq winking.

some lives are art

3. this book is a damn mess, structurally.

seriously, it lurches forward, flashes back suddenly and without transition (or real reason), and stagnates for long periods of time. in any given chapter, hell, any given paragraph, you can find haphazard juxtapositions of screenplay-like stage directions, interior monologue, poetry (really bad poetry), and essayistic digression.

it almost seems like houellebecq managed to write a novel without ever having read a novel, or maybe heard of one, and never even seen a decent movie. except that would have the potential to be awesome.

eh, he had a fifty-fifty shot and failed.

i’m messing around a little, but i actually think that’s what houellebecq was going for when you consider the narrative trope, which you would call a “trick ending” if this novel wasn’t so literary and important. see, this novel is narrated by a race of post-humans created by the cleverly named “michel,” one of the two main characters, as a way of documenting a long-forgotten and regrettable past, because these post-humans are a more peaceful and less degenerate race.

the problem is, the novel is full of bile — too much for such a content people and too gleefully (in its own faux-deadpan way) — and also these post-humans rely really heavily on already outdated ideas. i haven’t even gotten into the weakass freudian mommy and daddy stuff, and won’t. these enlightened futurefolk are not very good at writing novels or at being enlightened.

it’s conceivable that that’s what houellebecq meant us to take from it — that our successors won’t be any better than us. but as with the misanthropy issue i mentioned above, he doesn’t wink at us (aside, maybe, from a typically clunky digression on brave new world).

i will tell you a thing, houellebecq: if you did want us to believe that post-humans would be no more enlightened than us, you would have made this novel more polished. people with something to hide from themselves work much harder to hide it.

after all this, i can also say i kind of enjoyed reading the book. it was kind of like trashy science fiction without all that science. houellebecq is particularly bad at writing about science. but it was also like a trashy sf novel in the way he injects all that random, reactionary philosophy.

end of the first overtime. looks like the cavs are going to lose.

another thing you could do for short story month is read a short story instead of read about a short story. here is a short story by me that was published on a long gone website called reinventing the world. it’s the first in a sequence of three called “three denials” that will appear in my collection, the one i’ve mentioned before, but which i’ve decided i’m still not going to get into even though i think you should order it.

here is the story:

it's complex

My wife denies being my older self.

“I’m not your older self,” she says.

Everything was going fine until the vows.  Everything always goes fine until the vows.  I find someone to love.  I find someone I can find no wrong in, another self.  And then comes that part in the vows, my other self.

“But we said in the vows my other self,” I say.

“It’s a metaphor,” she says.

“And you’re older than me,” I say.

She’s got six months on me.  Six months less four days, leap year notwithstanding.  It’s one of those April-December things-myself one of them, herself the oldster-if only April and December weren’t so far apart.

“You’re the one who insisted we write our own vows,” she says.  “You wrote my other self,” she says.

“If only April and December weren’t so far apart,” I say.

“What the fuck do April and December have to do with anything?” she says.

“It’s a metaphor,” I say.

“For what?” she says.

Here comes the explaining.  I hate having to explain this, having to explain myself to my older self, the possibility, the inevitability that in six months I could be so dense as to need a statement like if only April and December weren’t so far apart explained for me.

“It means you’re six months older than me,” I say.

“April and December are eight months apart,” she says.  “Or four months apart,” she says.

“I said it’s a metaphor,” I say.  “For how you always get there first and then you ruin things for us,” I say.

“Neither of us was born in April or December,” she says.

“You don’t understand,” I say.

Try explaining anything to my older self.  Sometimes I think she’s willfully misunderstanding, though, to advocate the devil for only a moment, it could be the restricted blood flow.

“Maybe we could work this out if you’d just untie me,” she says.

“I’ve heard that one before,” I say.

And I have.  There were a couple of times I even fell for it.  Don’t imagine this one’s my only other, older self.  Or imagine whatever you want.  What are you, my judge?  No seriously, are you my judge?  Then maybe you can understand why I do what I do?

thank you. there is only one other story of mine that i know of online. i think it’s good, but it isn’t in my collection, and i’m obliged to tell you it isn’t representative of what i’ve been up to lately.

at the emerging writers network they’re doing this thing, short story month, where they talk about short stories they like. they have a logo and everything, and guest contributors, and then other people are doing it on their own soapboxes, so i figured i would do one on mine.

i choose linh dinh, particularly his story “what’s showing” from his collection blood and soap.

it’s a mystery to me why linh dinh isn’t better known than he is. maybe he is better known than i know he is, among poets, for example, for his poetry. maybe he isn’t as well known for his fiction because his reputation as a poet colors readings of his fiction, makes poems of his stories in his readers’ minds. his stories could be accused of being prose poems.

like “what’s showing,” from his collection blood and soap. it’s a series of short descriptions of movies that i don’t think are showing or ever actually shown. here is one:

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1996) 1 hr. 10 min. This Chinese flick has nothing to do with the noir classic by James M. Cain or the two American movies of the same name. Instead, it features a genial mailman who always rings twice at the six hundred-plus houses in his daily round for nearly forty years before he retires. (PG) ****

the reviews i saw of this book compared dinh to borges and calvino, and i think those comparisons are apt (i might add daniil kharms as well), but there’s something else to these stories, a very particular kind of “outsider-ness,” for lack of a better term. in context, linh dinh isn’t just trying to be funny here, it isn’t weirdness for weirdness’ sake. the cumulative effect of “what’s showing,” and really the entire collection, leaves me with the impression that in dinh’s world, his own version of the postman always rings twice is just as likely to exist as cain’s.

same as it ever was

i’ve had this sense since the first time i read his book back in 2004, but last month i had it confirmed for me when i went to a reading he was doing and found out that he actually lives in philadelphia. at the reading i found out he kept a blog called detainees. detainees is full of pictures of philadelphia, of places in philadelphia that i go all the time. i know i go to the places in his photographs all the time, but in the photographs i don’t recognize them. he makes the familiar unfamiliar. if that sounds cliche then probably no one has made the familiar unfamiliar to you lately or ever.

… but isn’t it a little bit your fault, really?

jeff parker and i went to the same graduate program but i never knew him. he graduated before i got there. and yet it seemed like everyone there had known him, or has known him since, and has had good things to say about him, and so, when his first novel, ovenman, came out long after even i had left graduate school, i bought it, out of solidarity with him for having braved three winters in syracuse (even though they weren’t the same three winters i had braved, one of which came within a tenth of an inch of breaking the record for all time snowiest), and for publishing with a relatively independent press, and because people had good things to say about it, the novel, as well.

but then i didn’t read it, because the good things people were saying weren’t really good enough. they weren’t bad. in fact, i think the word i heard most often was “fun.” my friends will tell you i’m not against fun — they might actually tell you that i’m way into it — but i don’t mind saying that i’m usually looking for more than that from a book, because, let’s face it, the “fun” of a book can’t really compare to the fun of, for examples, dancing your ass off in a dense crowd of strangers, sitting on a stoop with your friends and some beers, or going out to dinner with your wife, all of which examples are regularly available to me and which compete with my book time.

dare i say i’m actually looking for some kind of edification from most of the books i read? the aesthete i once was would kick my face in. he was about 70 pounds heavier than me, a non-effete aesthete. let’s get away from me, all of them, and just say that some of the compliments sounded a little condescending, if not back-handed.

which sucks, because the thing is, this is a book deserving of really high compliments. and when i was first reading it i got a little peeved at my friends who didn’t recommend it strongly enough. but as i went on, i developed a theory as to why nobody talked about it well:

if you try to describe any event in the book you will sound like a total douche. i know because i tried about three times before i finally gave up, realizing i was doing more harm than good.

so rather than try to describe anything concrete, let me say two things.

it was either this or decide where to get dinner.

1. this book is incredibly well written. but it’s written in such a subtle way that you might not notice it, and if you do, and then you try to describe it, you might, again, risk sounding like a douche. so, rather than analyze or explain, let me show you the sequence, which falls on the second page of the novel, that sold me for good:

Last time I went before a judge — that time to take care of over two K in parking tickets, a figure he dropped to five hundred, a figure i’ve yet to pay — he said to me, “Son, this represents a serious caricature flaw.” His Southern made certain words come out more syllabled.

if you can take it from me that this doesn’t come across as mannered or flashy in context, and just appreciate the rhythm and comic timing of the sentences and sensibility, and still not see the brilliance here, then i hate you.

but sentences aren’t everything, with all due respect to gary lutz (seriously, tons of respect, just found this essay a little much) (the fat aesthete i once was loved it, though), so we move to the second thing:

2. i expected parker’s protagonist, when thinfinger (also not as bad as it sounds in context), to be a loveable loser, and to tell the truth, i’m getting tired of loveable losers, so tired i might have to address the issue at a later date. by loveable loser i mean the kind of down on his (it’s always a him) luck sucker you just can’t help but root for. the loveable loser is a caricature of pathetic, a caricature so you don’t have to acknowledge how pathetic you are, whoever you are. he’s a cartoon that makes you feel better about yourself. i’ll do more about him another time.

for now i’ll say that when thinfinger is pathetic, but not a caricature of pathetic, loveable (maybe) and a loser (sure), but not a loveable loser. he’s ambivalent, but also amoral, and he takes agency, which makes the book much, much darker than any of the reviews let on. unfortunately, i can’t risk describing that here.

so how can i reinforce my case? two things i can say that are pretty much undeniable:

1. while the book does its own thing, it shows the influence of padgett powell’s edisto, which, with that qualifier (that it still does its own thing) is one of the highest endoresements i can give.

2. there are gorgeous descriptions of menial labor here. and i don’t want to give you examples. i want you to see them in context. they will make you hate your neighbor so much less.

that’s a philadelphia reference for you.

i spent a lot of time while i was reading the savage detectives thinking about ca conrad.

one of the things that the savage detectives spends a lot of time on that my brother and i didn’t spend a lot of time discussing in all that time we spent is the role of poetry and poets in the world, politics in particular. belano, lima, and the other visceral realists consider themselves revolutionaries, and the novel about them feeds on the tension created by the mixture of nostalgia, disillusionment, and maybe secret hope of the speakers looking back on the movement and realizing it hadn’t amounted to what they thought it would.

i was thinking about conrad while i read it because he has the same kind of hope for poets and poetry that the visceral realists express, but he will never have their regrets. i feel corny as shit writing that, but it’s true, and i admire that about him.

a robot with a mohawk, for example

i also admire his poetry, and he came out with a new book when i was thinking about him while reading bolano, and i bought it then, and i’ve read it now, and it’s excellent. it’s called the book of frank.

imagine a novel written by the most enthusiastic person with all of the suck sucked out of it and you’ve got an idea. here is one tiny sample:

monkeys inside

frank ascend

until

his

bare

face is

covered

i don’t know if that’s representative or not. representative becomes confusing with conrad. his first book included a sincere request for a cuddle session with our last president. anyway, keep reading. it will change your brain like the knowledge, whatever your knowledge is.

p.s. — if conrad would be belano then frank sherlock would be lima. i recently read his book over here and found it excellent also, but in a way i don’t feel qualified to speak about.

p.p.s — i know this has been my least competent post ever. don’t hold it against the books. just click the links and see.