Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson (1949-)

This book is not on the list, but since I'm in love with Denis Johnson, and it's November...I decided to take a short break from the list and read actual good books for a change and as always Denis Johnson does not disappoint.

Tree of Smoke encompasses 20 years around the aftermath of the Vietnam war, beginning with the assassination of JFK and ending in 1983 where the casualties of the war still limp from place to place, soul searching for a sense of meaning in a wanderlust that leads his characters to be forever pilgrims in a heartbreaking world of chaos.

The book focuses on the the elusive and shattering experience of a war without meaning on the many lives it engulfs, heroes that begin their trek with a sense of purpose and order only to come up against a world impervious to order and hostile to meaning.

Skip Sands, an officer of sorts for the CIA has become the renegade operative following orders from his strange and erratic uncle, a Kurtz type from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, creating his own rules and running his own missions. Tree of Smoke is his mission of disinformation that he intends to unleash on the VC, but in a land where all information is suspect, where there are no rules nor understanding of protocol, his disinformation only serves to make the murky haze of any sort of substantial truth even harder to find as the swirling disinformation traps them all in a quagmire of uncertainty.

James Houston and his brother Bill both enlist. Both anticipating the glory that still resonates from the last great war, both finding instead a world that crushes them stripping them of their souls. Bill gets out as soon as possible only to find himself aimless, lost in the do-nothing streets of Arizona, while James becomes addicted to Vietnam signing up for one tour after another, requesting assignment with the more fringe battalions where there are even less rules and where they operate in a system of cowboy survival.

Kathy Jones is a nurse in a small Vietnamese village, struggling with her faith, struggling with the hopelessness of loss, struggling with the stench that invades everything the smell of blood and offal and the inescapable pain and heartache of an endlessly torched world without a savior.  After Tet, she makes her way to a veterinary clinic in hopes of finding medication for the now many displaced and orphaned children only to find the proprietors overcome with grief over the loss of their monkeys. As they sit surrounded by devastation the scientists reminisce about their monkeys while children in the streets are dying. Kathy, a stoic, a survivor continues to nurse men, women and children in one Vietnamese hamlet after another, waiting for the end of the war.

By 1983, not one of the many characters has remained fully intact. The shrapnel of Vietnam has penetrated their souls and bones to the very marrow, leaving empty shadow people to make sense of their lives and pick up the pieces over and over again. Just as there was no definitive winner to the war, there is also no definitive end; the war is carried with the survivors, ruminated like cud, never to be fully digested.

"She sat in the audience thinking - someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone's soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can't remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who've ruined their health, worshiped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved."

Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

So the other day I was going through my Western Canon list, lovingly looking at all the crossed off books, fondly rereading or attempting to read my notes in my almost indecipherably small handwriting (which I use to compensate for my abysmal spelling) when I came across a blank spot...how had I managed to not actually read Ethan Frome? So I grabbed a copy from the library and sat down to what would be an anticipated horrible time.

I guess I have avoided Ethan Frome because the spoiler is bandied about by just about everyone. Why would I want to read a book about a botched suicide that takes place in the silent snowdrifts of New England? Well I wouldn't really, but it's on the list so here it goes.

This book, as expected, was my least favorite of Wharton's novels, although her novels tend to be depressing, fraught with the societal restrictions and conventions that must always keep her heroes and heroines struggling against insurmountable odds,  impoverished and hopelessly misunderstood...this novel or "nouvelle" as she called it was her attempt to teach herself French...and that is sort of the vibe you get while reading it. Something that begins as an exercise in French with a simplistic plot line that lends itself to easy translation into a foreign language doesn't bode well.

I was rereading my review of the Custom of the Country  and found this little gem: " I even found myself whispering under my breath "please Edith Wharton....just make a huge rock fall out of the sky and land on her...not killing her but leaving her horribly maimed and crippled and yet alive enough to live out her endless years in the anguish of being truly hideous..." That is basically the plot of Ethan From...minus the rock...so what's not to love?"

1) The story of  Ethan Frome is pieced together by a young engineer, temporarily trapped first by a strike and then by inclement weather in a small town in western Massachusetts.  The engineer after noticing this strange crippled man shuffling about his business one day finds himself sitting next to him in Frome's wagon hearing his life story. Plot lines like this always feel forced, although Isak Dinesen could pull off the story within a story trope pretty well...Wharton tends to need 300 pages to warm up...so shrinking everything down to 140 pages and having an unnamed Engineer do most of the work seems slightly  unjust and unsatisfying...

2) Most Wharton characters are established individuals, very rarely did I come across a Dickensian type characterture bumbling through the story line...but one of the things I like least about this book is the way Zeenia's character is treated. First she's the buxom cousin that has come to help Ethan tend to his dying mother...and then in a nanosecond she's a toothless hag of a women, constantly sucking her false teeth and clutching around in her least attractive garb, a histrionic personality that suffers constant aches and pains that can never be cured or even identified...  But because she is so grotesque and horrible...does it justify Ethan's actions? Being caught between an aging wife that isn't what she used to be and a younger more beautiful cousin Mattie  isn't really an interesting story it feels more like a painful rom-com that centers around justifiable infidelity.

3) The big idea is that they are going to sled themselves into a tree (Ethan and Mattie) rather than face being apart, which is being imminently forced on them by evil heinous Zeenia...hitting the tree is supposed to kill them instantly while they leave this world held in a perpetual embrace...and yet they botch it. It's not really they're fault though...sledding into a tree is probably the least quantitatively effective way of dying. I have sled into many a tree and street lamp for that matter...and while there where moments when I wish I had died as I crawled home praying there would be no residual scarring or injuries and that my legs would continue to grow at an even rate...I never even came close to the euphoric death scene they have pictured...which makes me wonder if Wharton had ever been sledding herself or if this was just one of those things somewhat unruly people did for fun somewhere west of Massachusetts...

As a treatise on the stunted lives filled with flaccid hope and perpetual regret that the people of small impoverished towns must face and attempt to absolve in their day to day lives, Ethan Frome does create a world where there is no escape, where one is forced into one life altering course after another, there is no individual power to rise above the elements of fate. Like most Wharton characters Ethan is caught between what he sees as a potential future of happiness and the perpetually bleak reality of his life, tantalizingly close enough to foster hope and yet always just slightly beyond reach.  The desire for change and freedom are constantly undermined as the gravestones around his house seem mockingly to say "we never got away - how should you..."

Fiskadoro - Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson (1949-)

Once again, reading Denis Johnson makes me happy to be alive. His writing is like something I have never come across before; it is free and unique and creates worlds that are easily inhabitable. His characters are presented in ways that make them not only familiar, no matter how marginal and foreign they actually are, but they become people you know, people you empathize with, even if they are drug addicted peeping toms. Somehow you find yourself relating to his characters in an almost intimate way.

Fiskadoro is a post-apocalyptic tale about a world left ravaged by World War III, or some form of nuclear catastrophe, wiping out most of civilization and leaving the little that remains to live in a primitive world absolved of memory. The people that remain try to create some form of order to their lives. In a world now devoid of rules and regulations, they suffer loss, anguish and alienation and try to pick up the pieces of who they are and where they've come from, while the memories of their past life slowly dissolve leaving them existing in a state of tabula rasa; their memories left to entropy in the hot sand of the Florida Keys.

The Florida Keys, are now called "Twicetown" because twice atomic bombs were dropped that somehow never detonated, and now these bombs provide the backdrop for all societal gatherings, weddings and funerals that take place in the "town center" which has slowly grown around the bombs. The town is really an evolving barrios, created from anything scavenged the locals can find; the detritus of a foreign world and past life. Old car seats make couches in the roughly constructed huts and abandoned xerox copiers become podiums, while occasionally old radios spit out bits of Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix, men now seen as prophets or potential messiahs.

The book follows three main characters, Fiskadoro, a 14 year old boy, that like any young boy is trying to find a place for himself in a world with a strange mercurial order. He is slightly embarrassed of his name, which translated can mean fisherman, but which he wishes was translated as harpooner. He is shy, infatuated with women, but too embarrassed to avidly pursue them, instead he decides to take up clarinet playing, being the sole proprietor of one of the only two clarinets possibly to survive the Armageddon.

Fiskadoro asks the manager of the Miami Symphony Orchestra, which is comprised of about 4 people, to teach him to play the clarinet. The manager, Mr. Cheung, agrees and although the lessons seem to go nowhere, Fiskadoro being more enthusiastic than talented, Mr. Cheung slowly becomes a pillar of stability in the boys life. As Fiskadoro's life, built on the sandy dunes of vapid understanding, slowly crumbles around him, one day he walks farther along the beach than ever before, following a swamp girl into the unknown.

"Below the level of the dune the wind was stuck. It was like being swallowed alive. The air choked him, and he recognized the odor - it was hers; she smelled like the swamps, like her birthplace and her home. To follow her over the dunes and out of earshot and eyesight of his people, his head spinning and his throat blocked with the honey of tears, was not to know whether he would live or die. Don't look what I'm doing! he begged the dark sea."

Mr. Cheung is the only protagonist who can tangibly feel that there's something missing. An answer, always out of reach, to the question of why and how. He remembers burning copies of the constitution as a young boy to try and stay warm. His family each took two paragraphs to memorize, and now to soothe himself he repeats the constitution, or names the 50 states, places that no longer exist and terms that are now utterly meaningless. He constantly searches for an answer, his mind racing to make sense of the incompleteness and longing for a past he can't recover. His efforts to find something that will explain the End of the World are perpetually thwarted only leaving him more confused and lost, floating without a lifeline in the detritus of a ravaged history.

The last protagonist is Mr. Cheung's impossibly old grandmother who although has survived through the catastrophe can no longer communicate her thoughts. Mr. Cheung constantly regrets that she never told him the story of her life before it was too late and she only uttered strange guttural noises or sat with her lips moving, producing no sound as if no longer able to remember how to communicate.

"...her leathery old Chinese monkey face collapsing into her secret deliberations, her jaw slack, her smokey breath audible in the silences between Sydney Bechet exercises, and her black eyes so totally opaque he couldn't tell if they were sightless, dead, or coldly burning."

 His grandmother had fallen asleep one night in Key West in a world fraught with conspicuous consumption and politics, only to awake the next morning in a world that had ended and "thenceforth to live her life in the southernmost region of the Quarantine, in a time between civilization and a place ignored by authority."

But the grandmother hadn't always been a "sucked-out old woman with the face of a monkey and the skin of someone who had drowned," she had once been a beautiful girl named Marie, and while she sits in her chair chewing on the wrong end of a cigarette  she slowly ruminates about the past and how she's managed to survive. Her memories are disjointed vignettes, cryptically describing her survival; yet leaving so many questions forever unanswered. Unable to articulate her memories or even distinguish between the real and the imagined, the past and present are a blur of consciousness, she knows only that she survived. She knows only that survival cost her everything, and that she abandoned her family, her will and her past in order to continue living.

What I found to be really terrific about this book was Johnson's ability to create a post-apocalyptic world that rather than being dominated by fear, looting and a "Wild Wild West" mentality, instead is dominated by confusion. The people that survive are left to pick up the pieces while language slowly blends into a pigeon English, a poorly constructed patois of English and Spanish telling of the societal decay that has kept them locked in a dreamless void of understanding. His characters exist in a disembodied dream state, but rather than the apathy of post modernism and the angst of existential nihilism they embody a new way of living embracing the only philosophy that makes sense: survive.

According to the May 1, 1985 New York Times review of this book: "Fiskadoro is not the easiest novel to describe. It's the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, "The Waste Land," "Fahrenheit 451" and "Dog Soldiers," screened "Star Wars" and "Apocalypse Now" several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. It's a wildly ambitious book, full of mythology and philosophical speculation about the nature of time and memory and the endurance of language and art. At times it's beautifully poetic, at times insanely rhetorical, but its strange, hallucinatory vision of America and modern history is never less than compelling."

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

Walker Percy (1916-1990)

So before I go any further, let me quickly address the Knopf 1988, 16th edition cover as seen on the left. The caption says:

"Why is the hero of this novel a moviegoer? Why does an intelligent, successful, young New Orleans businessman go to the movies avidly, fiercely - even to silly movies? The answer.."

When I finally picked up my copy from the library, after waiting for it to come in on loan from a different branch, I felt a slight tremor of worry. This is perhaps the worst book cover I have ever seen and makes me hate the protagonist and the graphic designer all before even opening the book. After I finally worked up enough gumption to hesitantly open the book and worryingly peer into its abyss...I was confronted with breathtaking prose and perhaps the best book I have read in a while. Percy is a brilliant author, his writing drips with elegiac prose, some of my favorite being:

 "The earth has memories of winter and lies cold and sopping wet from dew..."

 "...dragging his Saskatchewan sleeping bag like the corpse of his dead hope.."

"We were free, moreover to that or anything else, but instead on we rushed, a little vortex of despair moving through the world like the still eye of a hurricane."

The cover misses the point of the book entirely. This is not a book about going to the movies. It's a book about surviving, about combating the malaise that comes from living endlessly, purposelessly, alone and disconnected and the triumph of surviving day after day in a world that often doesn't make sense, filled with heartache and pointless suffering.

The epigram is taken from Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death and says "...the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair."

Our protagonist is Binx Bolling, a young New Orleander who currently works for his uncle as a stock-broker. After returning from the Korean War, Binx tries to make sense of the world, while feeling alienated from his own life. Although he is good at making money, his life is sepia colored and he desperately seeks the vibrancy and order he sees in films or reads of in books. He is on a search for something beyond the everyday monotony and as he works and wanders aimlessly his quest for meaning follows strict guidelines and requires rigorous study.

"What is the nature of the search? you ask? Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everdayness of his own life...To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."

Although hesitant to discuss the true object of his search, it is evident that what Binx is looking for are the little moments that rise above the brume of the mundane. Although Binx spends hours lost in the otherness of the silver screen, searching for a sense of place, a sense of self; he never does so without first tethering himself to the here and now by having at least one conversation with the movie house staff. Relationship precedes understanding.

"Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

While he somewhat aimlessly searches for meaning, his interactions with his family leave him often further away from his objective. Each family member assesses Binx's life and finds it wanting. At the brink of his 30th birthday they still continue to find new goals and job opportunities for him, unsatisfied with his choice of work, thinking he has more to offer than merely deciphering stocks and bonds. But what does that mean? How is his value assessed?

Rather than search for comprehensive understanding, meaning, instead can be found in little pockets of place buttressed by the truthfulness of its identity, if any one of us can simply find the right place, "a shuttered place of brick and vine and flowing water, ...life can be lived."

 In contrast to the existential nihilism that permeates the postmodern era, Binx although caught in the introductory weightlessness, the precursor to despair, is not hopeless. He has a plan for combating the soul-sucking malaise, the angst and disillusionment; he is a remarkable protagonist finding moments of hope in the never ending vapidity of life.

Binx accepts the moments for what they are, rather than fighting sleeplessness, rather than obeying societal conventions and having appropriate hobbies, Binx could care less. Hobbies are for people that suffer from the most noxious despair by simply tranquilizing it.  "I muse along as quietly as a ghost. Instead of trying to sleep I try to fathom the mystery of this suburb at dawn." He combats hopelessness through what he calls rotations, which he defines as the "experience of the new beyond the expectation of the experience of the new. For example, taking one's first trip to Taxco would not be a rotation, or no more than a very ordinary rotation; but getting lost on the way and discovering a hidden valley would be."

As Binx's search culminates in a sleepy attempt to prove or disprove God he makes a note for himself for the next day's search:

"It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God. Yet it is impossible to rule God out. The only possible starting point: the strange fact of one's own invincible apathy - that is the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed. Here is the strangest fact of all. Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference. Is this god's ironic revenge? But I am onto him..."

Them - Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates (1938-)

Out of the few Joyce Carol Oates books I have read I would not say this was my favorite. It seems like there are only two states her characters can occupy, being vibrantly awake or sleep-walking, which results in a lot of the book feeling somewhat aimless and dreamy.

The book centers around three members of a family, each trying to find their way, each battling the ogres of fate and buttressing their dreams against the chaos of reality. Each of them can see where they would like to be, who they would like to become, but the journey of getting there is one fraught with pain and heartache, yet they survive, because it's not that easy to die; even death is something that must be worked at, fought for and often remains illusive.

The protagonists, Loretta and her two children Jules and Maureen all try to rise above the poverty and trauma of life amidst the chaos and turbulence of the 1960's. Loretta begins life with a crazy, alcoholic father and a murderous brother. Loretta's life is irrevocable changed by circumstances outside her control and in an instant she becomes a different sort of person than she ever dreamed possible, slowly transforming into the belligerent housewife she previously despised. Loretta evolves from a thankful mousy young wife, to a loud, sweaty, perpetually housecoat wearing woman as she passes the baton of hope for a new life to her children.

Jules, the oldest son, knows from childhood that he is destined for greatness; that he belongs somewhere else other than the slovenly shanty he occupies with his family. He spends his childhood dreaming of escape. Lost in a world of fantasy, aloof from his family, unable to believe he shares anything in common with them. As he navigates the shifting world, his life is filled with false starts and broken dreams, always searching for love beneath the rubble, until he becomes obsessed with a woman fated to kill his love or kill him. But death is chimerical and instead Jules remains alive, lost in a dream, floating through the chaos of the Detroit riots, unseeing and unseen.

"He himself was a man inside a piece of rotten fruit - it kept getting in his mouth. The sky had a melony, overdone, orange-brown cast, a rotten cast to it, unmistakably...Jules walked along, he was like the invisible child he had tried to imagine himself years ago. But now he had become truly invisible..."

Jules searches endlessly for love, obsessed with an undefinable idea, a tangible thing, this always illusory love. He passionately devours those that find their way onto his path, always striving to obtain a certain something, a certain finality, a mutual understanding. At one point after finding a woman he believes to encompass all that he has searched for, to define what it is that for so long has been lost behind a myopic and dreamy world...they embark together for a new life. But his passion for her is too great, it terrifies her and as he physically becomes ill overcome by desire and eventually the flu, it leaves him lying in his own excrement in a putrid hotel room, while his dream girl vanishes and he lays there wondering if she ever truly existed.

Maureen has the most potential. She is quiet and studious, treating her scholastic duties as part of a sacrosanct ritual. She has been given the blessing of education and despite the chaos of her family, the dirty squalid apartment; her mother running around with different men, each having the potential to become a new father; despite he brother's constant disappearances and her sisters wild and raucous lifestyle always bordering of petty crime of some sort or another, Maureen studies. She dutifully makes dinner when her mother is comatose. She nurses her grandmother who is too sick and melancholy to look after herself. Her only fault is that she is too good. That she doesn't stand up for herself. That she doesn't escape soon enough like Jules.

When she does finally develop a plan of escape it catastrophically backfires and leaves her for a time split in two. Her hopes and dreams packing their bags and leaving for better pasture, while she sits in bed, no longer motivated to escape, no longer motivated to live. Waiting. Waiting for life to call her back, waiting for a hope or a dream to flutter its way back into her lifeless soul.

"The woman by the radiator gets to her feet. She is heavy, she seems pained when she stands: thick cream-colored fat-marbled old legs, veins cracking and rising to the surface, a woman of middle age. Oh, we women know things you don't know, you teachers, you writers, you readers of books, we are the ones who wait around libraries when it's time to leave, or sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen; we make crazy plans for marriage but have no man, we dream of stealing men, we get off a bus and can't even find what we are looking for, can't quite remember how we got there, we are always wondering what will come next..."

Jesus' Son - Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson (1945-)

Jesus' Son is a collection of short stories, each focusing on the hallucinatory experiences of an unnamed protagonists living on the west coast in the 70's consumed by addiction, trying to describe the psychedelic dream world that oscillates between reality. Unlike most addiction memoirs I have read, there isn't a sense of trying to understand why or how he arrives at some of his low points, but rather each day of survival is somehow a surprising gift, which he does his best to describe judiciously.

In "Dirty Wedding" the protagonist describes bringing his girlfriend to an abortion clinic, on their way being sprinkled by holy water by the protesters which is unable to penetrate them. As he waits in the lobby he watches a video on vasectomies and tells the man sitting next to him this is the last time he's ever going to get a girl pregnant. When the nurse comes in to tell him the procedure is over and his girlfriend is fine, he asks if she is dead, telling the nurse he kind of wishes she was...someone else, an innocent bystander has been made to suffer for their mistakes. They can destroy their lives as much as they want, but the reality of destroying another's life is almost too much to bear. As he waits for her to recover he wanders around town looking for drugs, stopping at an old hotel turned drug den where black pimps in fur coats protect women that were "blank, shining areas with photographs of sad girls floating in them." 

"When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

I know they argue about whether or not it's right, whether or not the baby is alive at this point or that point in its growth inside the womb. This wasn't about that. It wasn't about what the lawyers did. It wasn't about what the doctors did, it wasn't about what the woman did. It was about what the mother and father did together."

Throughout the narrative he is an accomplice in the murder of baby bunnies, robs houses of copper wiring, pays for pills the size of eggs comprised of unspecified substances, becomes a peeping tom on a Mennonite family and mixes reality with the lucidity of his dreams so that the two become indistinguishable as he teeters on the edge of his destruction.

At one point in his narrative about his scheduled peeping on the Mennonites, he realizes this is pretty debase even for a drug addicted morally ambivalent drifter, and asks himself "How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse."

In a way, the common theme among all these stories is the lack of shame he feels. Just like the crippled and debilitated, his life is a complete and objective wreck and he makes no excuses for it.  He eventually takes a part time job at a Home for the disabled, and there meets a young man crippled with multiple sclerosis, only 33 but already unable to talk, beyond clamping his lips repeatedly around his protruding tongue while groaning...

"No more pretending for him! He was a completely and openly mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other..."

As he begins a tentative road to recovery for perhaps the millionth time, he sits with his girlfriend and describes his new approach to life, trying to fit in at work, trying not to steal, trying to see each task through to completion. His goal is simply to try, not necessarily succeed and as he slowly gets better each day, although still ramped up on Antabuse, which apparently doesn't count he finds solace in the disabled home.

"All these weirdos  and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us."

Part of his job is to simply walk through the hall and touch people... because ultimately surviving can be a lonely journey. When a muscular grey haired man routinely takes him by the shirt front and admonishes him for dreaming, the protagonist covers his fingers with his own. When a woman, debilitated by a muscular disease, who is perpetually falling out of her chair, cries "Lord! Lord" he walks by and runs his fingers through her hair. Although their souls are untethered as they wander in and out of reality, it is this moment of touch, like a universal truth or a panacea that they all crave, a reminder that no matter who you are, we are all the same. We are all lost human beings trying survive and clinging to the shards of humanity to remind us why we go on living.

The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles (1910-1999)

It is sometime recently after the ending of World War II and Port and Kit Moresby in an attempt to put their lives back together, in the aftermath of a now atomic world order, decide to travel through Africa. Their marriage is in chaos, like everything else around them, and they believe spending time in the solitude of the Sahara will ground them in a reality that can one day begin to make sense. Yet as if afraid to truly confront their intrinsic existence, their failing marriage and the ever widening chasm of utter meaninglessness, they bring along a friend, Tunner, who neither seem particularly inclined to interact with and rather spend most of their time trying to avoid. Yet Tunner serves his purpose as being the foil that keeps them from stepping out into the clarity of their meaningless lives.

The book is comprised of three parts and within the first part the reader is given a taste of the despair that comes with existential nihilism, while retaining a modicum of hope. This is a love story between two people suffering to be seen, or heard or prove they exist. They are constantly within reach of each other's grasp, only to find the canyon wider than they expected. Their conversations are peppered with false starts, while each tries to bridge the gap of their intimacy and yet both stop on the edge of the precipice, realizing the canyon is insurmountable. Yet with each passing day, as they share the agony of the heat and the constant discomfort of Saharan living it seems like the canyon, although still infinitely depthless could be leapt, if one of them would take the initiative.

Yet both seem caught in the hopeless of life, the never ending monotony of it all, unpressed for time, they wait exchanging little more than pleasantries.

"Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth-" She hesitated.

"Port laughed abruptly. 'And now you know it's not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of it ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And then's when you're conscious of the bitter taste."

In part two Port and Kit have successfully evaded Tunner and exchanged one scorching desert town for another. Port's passport has disappeared and with it a sense of his identity, as he is preoccupied with the unsettling feeling that without a piece of paper proving his existence he is a walking shadow he  continues to weave an intricate web of resolution between himself and Kit. One day he realizes Tunner has found them and is on his way to their little town, Port's plan of an unhurried resolution with Kit seem to be foiled until he realizes there is a bus out of town at the end of the day. He convinces the bus driver Kit is ill and must leave the city and spend time convalescing in the country to improve her health, and after expensive bribery, the bus driver is convinced to find two seats among the already filled bus for them. Port tells Kit she must feign illness, which she does begrudgingly, annoyed at having to participate is such a ruse only hours later to realize Port is suffering from the onset of Typhoid.

The last part of the book they are forced to come to terms with the finality of life and the cruelty and heartache of their existence.  Kit, unable to confront reality, becomes lost deeper and deeper in the expanse of the Sahara which becomes an antidote to the ever poisoning of her soul, which she acknowledges is the weariest part of the body. Soul-sick and broken, she refuses to return to society and chooses to rather hide inside herself, joining an Arab caravan, despondent to her fate.

"Before her eyes was the violent blue sky- nothing else. For an endless moment she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her. Someone once said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above."

While this book was perhaps one of the saddest and at times physiologically horrifying books I have read, it was also the best book I have read in a long time. The reader is instantly gripped in the tragedy of their lives, the fruitlessness of it, the meaninglessness of it and is kept almost in a constant state of panic that time is running out, and the unease of not entirely understanding what it all means.

The Visit - Friedrich Durrenmatt

Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921-1990)

A small dilapidated town is waiting for the arrival of one of its long lost citizens, a now millionairess named Claire Zachanassian. She has left the town many years before and as the mayor, bailiff and general store manager Ill wait for her at the station, the mayor persuades Ill to try and convince Claire to leave an endowment to the city. Ill and Claire used to be great, friends, even lovers and if he could just get on her good side, remind her of all the wonderful times they had together, maybe she'll be the town's salvation.

The priest asks if they parted on unsavory terms and Ill quickly denies such accusations:

"We were the best of friends. Young and hotheaded. I used to be a bit of a lad, gentlemen, forty-five years ago. And she, Clara, I can see her still: coming towards me through the shadows in Petersen's Barn, all aglow. Or walking barefoot in the Konrad's Village Wood, over the moss and the leaves, with her red hair streaming out, slim and supple as a willow, and tender, ah, what a devilish beautiful little witch, Life tore us apart. That's the way it is.

Claire finally arrives with a bazaar entourage comprised of a panther, a couple henchmen, a couple eunuchs, her current husband and a coffin. She endures the pleasantries and the towns peoples toadying until at last after a long speech by the mayor touching upon all the endearing qualities of their dear Claire, that they have hastily dug up and somewhat fabricated, she arrives at the true intent of her visit.

She first denies all the accolades saying rather than being an exemplar student she was often thrashed, and her motivation for stealing potatoes for the Widow Boll, was so that she and Ill for once would have a comfortable place to sleep...nevertheless, despite the unabashed pandering to her wealth and status by the township...she will make a deal with them. She is willing to donate one million to Guellen! Five hundred thousand for the city itself and five hundred thousand to be shared among the individual families. On one condition...she demands justice for a wrong that has gone unpunished for the past 45 years.

45 years ago she was involved in a paternity suit, claiming Ill was the father of her unborn child, Ill denied this deciding after a long frolic with Claire, maybe Matilda would make a better wife and effectively jilting her, hiring a couple of ne'er-do-wells to swear to the judge that they had slept with Claire making the issue of paternity ambiguous at best. Claire is forced into a life of harlotry, her baby is taken away from her and she wanders the globe marrying one man after the other biding her time until she can exact her revenge which is this: The life of Ill for one million dollars.

"Feeling for humanity, gentlemen, is cut for the purse of an ordinary millionaire; with financial resources like mine you can afford a new world order. The world turned me into a whore. I shall turn the world into a brothel. If you can't fork out when you want to dance, you have to put off dancing. You want to dance. They alone are eligible who pay. And I'm paying. Guellen for a murder, a boom for a body..."

At first the city is outraged. They refuse such a deal and say they would rather suffer in poverty than be an accessory to murder, but slowly each one of them begins to envision a life beyond the borders of poverty, a life where they can afford a few luxuries here and there and as if to anticipate such wealth they begin buying on credit, living beyond their means with the imaginable wealth already in their pockets. Even Ill's own son, daughter and wife begin consuming luxuries at a steady rate, the son buying a new car, on credit of course, the wife upgrading the shop. Ill begins to feel trapped, with each pair of new shoes he sees it is a reminded of the terrible price that must be paid.

Finally the townspeople convince themselves that they really are for justice...The Claire Zachanassian Endowment will be accepted, not for the money of course, but for justice, and for conscience sake, "for we cannot connive at a crime, let us then root out the wrongdoer, and deliver our souls from evil, and all our most sacred possessions..." The crowd surrounds Ill, and a moment later after verifying that he is dead, Claire hands the Mayor a check and takes her leave.

This was probably the best play I have ever read. It is at times a little over the top, Claire's entourage all have rhyming names like Roby, Koby, Loby, and Toby...and the humor at times seems a little displaced, but the idea that when confronted with morality and honor or a lot of money....eventually people will take the money and that ultimately justice is corruptible when exchanged for material wealth is a sobering argument.

The Book of Daniel - E.L. Doctorow

E.L. Doctorow (1931-)

There are very few times I have refused to finish a book. Mostly because I'm compulsive and I will do almost anything to cross something off a list and if it involves 16 hours of pain and heartache...so be it. And also, mostly because Harold Bloom has complete control of my life...

I have suffered through the entire Rabbit Run series, Portnoy's Complaint ect. I have read about weird peccadilloes of all kinds...but I draw the line at a wife-beating protagonist who justifies his aggression and hostility against his wife by the fact that a) his parents were executed for being communists (loosely based on Ethel and Julius Rosenburg), b) there is no place for Jews in American society, they are isolated, unwanted and undefended against the aggression of the masses, c) he married intellectually beneath him and since he can't take his anger out on the amorphous society that surrounds him and has destroyed his life, he might as well take it out on his wife. He will humiliate her and overpower her, proving his strength to the wrong witness.

Here I was whining that "World's Fair" seemed written by a child, (which I guess was the point) and how it lacked heart and depth....and then I start reading "The Book of Daniel" which has quite a few crossing themes, both fathers work in radio/music stores, both families are poor, both grandmothers are afraid of being poisoned and both mother's must taste their food before they will agree to eat it...but while "The World's Fair" is a slow laborious plot line..."The Book of Daniel" jumps in to a frenetic rambling, the narrative shifting from first person to third person sometime mid paragraph.  

I think what contributes to making this book horrible is the post-modern quest for truth is a world where truth is no longer definitive. Daniel, who is writing his thesis on the murder of his parents, is constantly trying to rehash what has happened, looking for clues that will lead to a sense of order and cohesion is a world of chaos and entropy. His writing has the split personality style that tries to look at truth from all angles and perspectives, that ultimately leaves the author soulless and void of substance.

I found this review  and a tiny part of me wishes I could make it to the end simply because of how great this review was...but...I can't do it.

Anyway, I'm crossing this off the list even though I only read half of it...to prove my autonomy from Harold Bloom...

World's Fair - E.L. Doctorow

E.L. Doctorow (1931-)

Ok, for starters let's begin with the descriptions of this book on the back cover:

"Marvelous...You shake your head in disbelief and ask yourself how he has managed to do it. An exotic adventure...E.L. Doctorow's most accomplished artistic performance to date."  -New York Times

"Exhilarating ... a thrilling work...World's Fair makes the reader see with a child's eyes the painful clarity of childhood." - Cosmopolitan

Hmm...I was definitely shaking my head in disbelief and it was at times painful...but I'm not sure I'm ready to become a Doctorow proselyte. Reading World's Fair felt like being introduced to a loquacious 9 year old boy who after a few pleasantries and the shy introductions sits down and wants to read me his 300 page journal that he started at age 1.

His first words to the reader are "Startled awake by the ammoniated mists, I am roused one instant from glutinous sleep to grieving awareness; I have done it again." Our protagonist presents himself as an asthmatic bed wetter, growing up in the Bronx in the 1930's. His family is poor, his parents relationship is perpetually fraught with tension and anxiety. His father is unreliable, barely able to provide for his young wife and two small boys. Yet, Edger can empathize with his father:

"I, a quieter  more passive daydreaming sort of child, understood my father with some sympathy, I feel now- some recognition of a free soul tethered, by a generous improvidence not terribly or shrewdly mindful of itself, to the imperial soul of an attractive woman."

For a 9 year old recounting the minutia of his life, the book is not entirely without a few beautiful prose, but they are written in the staccato of short sentences and awkward punctuation, there was never a moment when I became lost in Edgar's story or lost the feeling that he was sitting next to me requiring all my attention when I would rather be talking to his mother, although I can relate to his distaste for overly dramatized birthday parties:

"...a birthday party was a satire on children directed by their mothers, who hovered about, distributing Dixie Cups and glasses of milk while cooing in appreciation for the aesthetics of the event, the way the child was dressed and so on; and who set us upon one another in games of the most acute competition, so that we either cried in humiliation or punched each other to inflict pain."

Edgar, by age 9, had become obsessed with the World's Fair. His older brother went years before and the tales he brought back to regale young Edgar with became the fabric of his dreams. his family cannot afford the tickets, so he must quietly contrive a more creative approach to getting in. One day he sees an advertisement for a writing competition about what it truly means to be an American boy. He secretly submits his essay and then forgets about it as the summer days slowly creep by.

"The typical American Boy is not fearful of dangers. He should be able to go out into the country and drink raw milk...If he is Jewish he should say so. If he is anything he should say so when challenged...In music he appreciates both swing and symphony. In women he appreciates them all...He knows the value of a dollar. He looks death is the face."

One day, Edgar's friend Meg takes him to the Fair with her, Meg's mother works there and they can get in for free, his joy knows no bounds. They explore the fair together, each display being better than the last, they meet pygmies and giants and then finally at the end of the day, Edgar watches Meg's mother perform her swimming routine with Oscar the Amorous Octopus, which results in all the female swimmers, after a rough tussle with the Octopus losing their swim suits and being forced to swim around the tank, their nubile bodies glistening in the murky and yet strategically lit water. Edgar, watches Meg's mother and slowly he becomes aware of the facts of life. He has spent his short life wondering what the crucial secret was, "so carefully vouchsafed"...and here it has presented itself without his bidding, without any planning or calculation on his part, he had worried his whole life about the hidden details of life, and yet all he had to do was be in it, and it would instruct him and give him everything he needed.

This genre, the memoir of an egocentric little boy, is not my favorite, but I found myself pining away for the protagonist in Henry Roth's novel "Call it Sleep" which I hated at the time. Henry Roth managed to create an environment where although from the perspective of a small boy, was written intelligently. The protagonist, David, is aware of far more than the pecuniary concerns of his parents. Their problems are more visceral, their life is more gritty and destitute and his coming of age is awkward and at times heartbreaking. "Call it Sleep" while at the time made me want to administer my own ice pick lobotomy, in comparison was like a satisfying hearty steak dinner compared with the under-cooked runny oatmeal of World's Fair.

Mao II - Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo (1936-)

Beginning with a mass wedding of 13,000 Moonies, Mao II introduces us to Karen, a young passionate waif, able to interpret and see life in pure holistic way. Unsullied by disillusionment, she stands near her husband she has just met, waiting to begin the rest of her life in a new way, capable of new vision.

Eventually, after being kidnapped back from the Moonies and having her brainwashing brainwashed, she runs away for a second time and is discovered by Scott, a rabid fan of the writer Bill Gray. By some unwittingly good piece of luck and a bit of boy-scouting, Scott has tracked down the reclusive writer and after bringing Karen along with him they establish residence in the writers house. As Scott slowly entwines himself into Gray's life, he becomes a necessity and then takes complete command and mastery over Gray's life.

Gray is caught between a two-headed demon snake of the future. The book that he's been working on for 20 years will never be finished, he writes and re-writes and edits and re-edits, does it's conclusion represent a certain finality of his life? As he become the process of writing itself? Leaving him vulnerable and exposed without it, he continues his work. On the other side of the cavern of fate is his reclusive life is now run by Scott, Scott controls all elements, all opinions as he carefully creates a card catalog out if his life.

The only choice for Gray is to, like Karen, run away from home. But this time run where no one can be found, where you are free to invent and re-invent yourself on a regular basis, yet even Gray cannot outrun his fate and as he runs away he realizes, from ones death there is no place to hide.



"They are gripped by the force of a longing. They know at once, they feel it, all of them together, a longing deep in time, running in the earthly blood. This is what people have wanted since consciousness became corrupt.The chant brings the end time closer. The chant is the end time. They feel the power of the human voice, the power of a single word repeated as it moves them deeper into oneness. They chant for world shattering rapture, for the truth of prophecies and astonishments. They chant for new life, peace eternal, the end of soul-lonely pain. Someone on the bandstand beats a massive drum. They chant for one language, one word, for a time when names are lost."

"He went downstairs to the paperbacks, where he stared at the covers of mass market books, running his fingertips erotically over the raised lettering. Covers were lacquered and gilded. Books lay cradled in nine-unit counterparts like experimental babies. He could hear them shrieking Buy me."

"...words that were part of the synthetic mass language, the esperanto of jet lag..."

"He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, a humpback, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth. Took him all these years to realize the book was his hated adversary..."

"She took it all in, she believed it all, pain, ecstasy, dog food, all the seraphic matter, the baby bliss that falls from the air. Scott started at her and waited. She carried the virus of the future..."

"Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and it devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence..."

"It was a life consisting chiefly of hair - hair that drifts into the typewriter, each strand collecting dust along its length and fuzzing up among the hammers...hair that sticks to the felt mat the way a winding fiber leeches on to soap so he has to gouge it out with a thumbnail, all his cells, scales and granules, all his faded pigment, the endless must of all this balling hair that's batched and wadded in the works."

"It made him anxious, not having a pencil stub or a scrap of paper. His thoughts fell out of his head and died. He had to see his thoughts to keep them coming...only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain. Written words could tell him who he was..."

There was something about her hair being cut straight across the forehead that made him think he was feeling up a teacher in a storeroom filled with the new-penny freshness of school supplies..."

Running Dog - Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo (1936-)

Sometime in the late 1970's when the residue of the Vietnam war can still be felt, when the Warren report is still alive and being combed through word by word, a small time erotica sales man, Lightborne, gets wind of what could potentially rock the industry: a pornographic film rumored to star Hitler himself. The countless grotesque and unimaginable sordid details this find could reveal is almost too much to hope for and Lightborne shops the rumour around looking for potentially interested parties.

One interested party happens to be a Senator, who unwilling to reveal himself and his predilection for bazaar erotic art has hired a man named Glen Selvy to be his buyer. Unbeknownst to the Senator, Selvy is a double (or triple?) agent hired by a clandestine covert branch of the military, Radial Matrix, to collect incriminating data on the Senator. As he lives out his daily life of espionage and intrigue, filled with rules and rituals, living in a hovel, completely devoted to his work, he meets Moll Robbins, a reporter for Running Dog magazine.

Running Dog, a once radical but now fairly mainstream magazine, has assigned Moll to get the scoop on the Senator, there's nothing that the American public loves more than a dirty sex scandal of sorts involving politicians or celebrities:

In the words of the Senator himself " celebrity was a phenomenon related to religious mysticism... Celebrity brings out the cosmic potential in people. And that couldn't be anything but good. What was the word? Salutary. That couldn't be anything but salutary."

And what could be better, or more intriguing than a celebrity with a hidden smut collection? Perhaps even funded with tax payer dollars! It's almost too good to be true. As Moll delves into her research, somehow Selvy finds her apartment and they begin one of those liaisons found only in literature, with lots of whiskey drinking, the periodic changing of clothes and an inhuman amount of sex, that leaves all of us non-literary characters wondering if our lives are somewhat lacking in passion.

The similarities between Libra and White Noise are abundant. The endless quest for something elusive, whether it is the cure for the fear of death, a country that will appreciate your sacrifice or a historical porno featuring the Fuhrer. Where Libra felt like organized chaos, there was ultimately an idea that propelled them all forward, the disillusionment of JFK and the American dream, in Running Dog  there is no organization, just chaos. In a way it seems like something Tom Clancy and John Updike would come up with in a brainstorming session run by Suzanne Collins.

Slowly the plots begin to unravel and the one dimensional characters begin to make their exits. Running Dog, this once radical magazine that would stop at nothing to reveal the corruption and lies swirling around us, is little more that a public interest magazine. The magazine producer/editor Grace, refuses to publish Moll's findings and winds up in bed having pillow talk with the head honcho of Radial Matrix...Selvy, after getting on the wrong side of Radial Matrix and realizing his strict rules are beginning to slip, finds himself being chased by a pair of Vietnamese. At one point along his run, he meets up with a girl whom he befriends, she asks him what his heritage is and he tells her he's Indian. She doubts him and asks if he's Indian what his Indian name is...there's a pause and then Selvy says: "Running Dog."

Running dog is a literal translation of the Chinese/ Korean communist pejorative that means lackey or lapdog, an unprincipled person who helps or flatters another more powerful. It is derived from the eagerness with which a dog will respond to its owner when called for even a scrap of food. While the magazine attempts to use this name ironically, they are little more than puppets obeying the laws of gravity. The realization that Selvy deservedly is a Running Dog, little more than a lackey or lap dog chasing his master's scraps, is the moment he accepts his fate, his disillusionment and his inevitable death.

"He realized he didn't need the blanket he was wrapped in. The cold wasn't getting to him in that way. In a way that called for insulation. It was perfect cold. The temperature at which things happen on an absolute scale. All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now...choice is a subtle form of disease."

The post-Vietnam world is one were guerrilla warfare has moved into the homes of its citizens, the enemy is indistinguishable, elusive and relentless. There is no clarity who or what the bad guy is, only a vague sense of disorganized evil. But when the most comprehensible evil moves into the mainstream, when Hitler porn is the hidden treasure...where is the normalizing level of morality. Who are the good guys? Do bad guys even exist in a post-modern world where everything is relative?

"Vietnam, in more ways than one, was a war based on hybrid gibberish. But Mudger could understand the importance of this on the most basic of levels, the grunt level, where the fighting man stood and where technical idiom was often the only element of precision, the only true beauty, he could bring with him into the realms of ambiguity."

In some of the reviews I read they described this book as funny...maybe if they meant funny in the sense that life is meaningless and we're all in the process of slowly dying? Although this book, like the others I've read were engrossing and easy to lose myself in...I would not describe this as funny, nor would it be my favorite DeLillo book I've read thus far.

White Noise - Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo (1936-)

Jack Gladney is the perfect postmodern hero. He believes truth is debatable, that true facts are whatever other people say they are, that "no one's knowledge is less secure than your own."  He and his composite family often debate the relativity of truth over greasy chicken wings which they devour, animal like, grease dripping down their forearms, without making eye contact. Jack is a professor at a small college, where he has created a somewhat renowned school of Hitler studies and has slowly lost himself in the persona he's created as its chair. He adds initials to his name, wears foreboding eye glasses which distort his vision but create an imposing figure.

"The chancellor warned against what he called my tendency to make a feeble presentation of self. He strongly suggested I gain weight. He wanted me to "grow out" into Hitler. He himself was tall, paunchy, ruddy, jowly, big-footed and dull. A formidable combination. I had the advantages of substantial height, big hands, big feet, but badly needed bulk, or so he believed, an air of unhealthy excess, of padding and exaggeration, hulking massiveness. If I could become more ugly, he seemed to be suggesting, it would help my career enormously. "

As the Hitler studies give Jack something to grow into and develop towards, he doesn't speak German, a flaw he is deeply ashamed of and realizes he his little more than a false character that follows a name around...he eventually realizes that helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic figures, men who intimidate and loom darkly. While some people are larger than life, Hitler is larger than death, and Jack has developed a world where the overwhelming horror would leave no room for his own death, where he would be sheltered, protected, submerged in the tragedy of another's life.

Jack lives with his fifth wife and their brood of children in an idyllic town where things happen mostly to other people and are broadcast over the air waves via the radio or television, the other members of this composite family, in a world where technology has become an extension of self or even the identifier of self. How can you know who you are and what you're worth without a commercial reminding you what you need to become the best version of yourself. All knowledge becomes filtered through some form of mass media as they create an imperial self out of tabloid aspirations.

The Gladney's take comfort in their middle class status, because truly horrific things can only happen to poor people. "Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters." And to reassure themselves of their safety they frequently shop, whether to wander around the aisles of luxurious grocery products, establishing themselves as stalwart figures in a pecuniary culture, or to binge purchase the items that will truly identify them as legitimate original individuals. While the socialists in Libra are constantly arguing against the exploitation of the masses and deriding a culture of conspicuous consumption, the Gladney's seem to thrive in a culture of manic consumerism.

Behind Jack and Babette's facade of composure, both are incapacitated by an overwhelming fear of death, although Babette does her best to hide the extent of her fear by drowning it in Dylar, an untested, unapproved black market substance in the clinical trial phase, alleged to remove the fear of death. As she stoically goes about her daily routines, she is whoring herself out to a dry and crusty, wrapper of a man in exchange for access to the drugs.

As they both live their quite lives, Jack meditating on his fear of death from an academic perspective, Babette running up stadium stairs in sweatsuits and demanding her little boy, Wilder, stay an infant forever, a looming catastrophe makes its appearance. There has been a toxic spill that now threatens anyone within its proximity. As they slowly make their way to the refugee camps stationed around the state, the fear of death becomes palpable. They realize that the people in charge of the disaster are using this event as training for the Simulated Evacuation process, using a real event to rehearse a simulation. The borders between truth and reality become hazy as the family sits in the Boy Scout cabin curling up on cots wondering if the danger is real or imagined.

When Jack finally elicits a confession from Babette about her drug use, her fear of death and the agreed system of reciprocity, Jack overlooks her unfaithfulness and slowly becomes obsessed with obtaining this miracle drug for himself. When he thinks his daughter has thrown out the bottle he paws through weeks of garbage, dissecting a palimpsest comprised of the residue of their lives, obscene cartoon characters drawn in a childish hand, a tampon hidden in a banana peel, as he picks his way through the fetid garbage searching for the remainder of a pill that has the potential to eradicate his fear of death, he wonders if we hide the parts of ourselves we wish to avoid or leave unacknowledged.

As he continues his quest for the panacea, he finds his wife's drug lord, a shell of a person wearing Budweiser shorts and living in a motel and eating Dylar like its candy, the precious drug scatter around the room and crushed into the fire-resistant carpet. The drug is obviously having a strange effect on this man, and while Jack contemplates what to do...he has a fleeting moment of compassion for his wife.

Finally he meets a cadre of nuns and priests that don't believe in God. Their faith or rather the assumption of their faith is simply for the masses. The people would be crushed if they didn't believe, so they put up a facade of belief in God, of heaven, of good and evil...all the while thinking only the truly desperate would cling to that sort of ill-founded rhetoric. There is no truth. Our acceptance of truth is only for the benefit of others. 

The book ends with a final expedition to the grocery store, which has been rearranged, leaving the patrons anxious, lost and confused. As Babette and Jack stand in the check-out lane they realize that here, in line at the grocery store, surrounded by bar codes and price tags, where the holographic scanners "decode the binary secrets of every item, where the dead speak to the living" is the last truly democratic place left. They stand, regardless of age, race and status, their carts piled high with the detritus of consumption, slowly moving forward, reading the tabloids.

"Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead."

Libra - Don DeLillo

Don DeLilllo (1936-)

As Ayn Rand once said, "No country can be destroyed by a mere conspiracy, it can only be destroyed by ideas." 1  In Libra, Don DeLillo presents a moment in time when the country was primed with a sense of hostility, laying fallow, waiting for a sense of direction.  Rather than an organized conspiracy, a few disgruntled men light fire to the tinder of the emotionally unstable and desperate, those willing to do anything and give up everything for the chance of a better future.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco there are many covert operative that feel that they were betrayed by Kennedy, some feel the loss of pride, others have made investments in Cuba that are now unprofitable, although most of these disgruntled covert operatives have their own reasons for the increasing hostility they feel toward the President, they all agree that the shame of losing to Castro when they were so close is unpardonable. But as the county's politics ebb and sway it looks like there will be no retaliation. The planning, the pain and the heartache of barely surviving in Cuban prisons...all of this will be for nothing unless the country can be persuaded to declare war on Cuba and the only way that can be accomplished is if the country sees Cuba's existence as a national threat...

Lee Harvey Oswald is presented as a emotionally unstable, dyslexic, revolutionary, obsessed with Trotsky, obsessed with freedom for the working class. As we are introduced to him, he picks up a pamphlet off the street that talks about the Rosenberg case...the seeds of conspiracy being planted. The government has become a capitalist monolith, it squeezes the life out of the working class, exploiting them for the maximum profit and then disposing of them when they reach the limit of their value. Even as a young man, Lee is frustrated by the limitations and impositions of the government, constraining him from what he knows he has the potential to become.

As he grows up, De Lillo imagines the circumstances that feed the flames of Lee's distrust and repulsion of the government, he becomes a marine, only to be abused by the hierarchy, he expatriots himself and flees to Russia, where he assumes he will be taken seriously and perhaps used to his potential, only to work a menial job in a factory which slowly feels more and more futile. He marries a Russian girl and decides he should return to the states, only to live a life of abject poverty, again, unappreciated by the country he has foolishly had so much hope for. He is erratic, sometimes abusive, a web of personalities and aliases, the perfect foil for a plot that has slowly been woven together by a cast of dissatisfied characters.

Finally, in one last attempt to survive, Lee tries to flee to Cuba, but Cuba won't have him and as he returns to the states he is met my a disgruntled agent, part foil / part plot instigator who tells Lee if only he could do something to show Castro how much of a patriot he was, how zealous he was for the cause, something like...take a shot at the president? The seed is planted and Lee needs to further prompting. And as the plot is revealed, there is no true leader or singular entity, but rather a vast array of people poised and ready to be used to their potential and advantage in a scheme that has gotten widely out of control.

Eventually another pawn is needed to remove Lee from the spotlight, and Jack Ruby, a casino/strip club owner is convinced that all it would take to become a national hero would be to shot walk up to Lee and shoot him, point blank. To show the country that he's had enough, to become the voice of public outcry. He does so, ending the vision Lee has had of living out his Trotskyesque dream of imprisonment, a life of study and writing and developing himself into the revolutionary he is destined to become. Ruby is imprisoned, and rather than becoming touted as a national hero is destined to a life of penile obscurity.

"Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you." 

Rather than a simple conspiracy theory, De Lillo presents a imaginative, plausible version of events where everyone seeks their own reward, acting on their own volition for their own separate agendas. As Nicholas Branch, the CIA operative, hired to makes sense of the overwhelming documentation and find a single thread, a single conspiracy, he is lost in the magnanimity of the details, the disparate agendas, the lack of coherence and as he spends his life, like Icarus following one lead after another only to have them lead to empty dead ends and more questions rather than answers, he searches for truth in a generation where everything is relative.


1. "The Atlas Society: The 'Lost' Parts of Ayn Rand's Playboy Interview.""

Foe - J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee (1940-)

In the novel Foe, the events of Robinson Crusoe are imagined from another point of view. While the original story cast Crusoe as an industrious hero living in a man's world, this new interpretation, from the perspective of Susan Barton, casts Cruso as an ineffectual man stripped of desire, able only to slowly over the course of fifteen years build terraces that sit idly by waiting for seeds to some day turn them into a garden.  Even after the arrival of Susan, a woman ready and willing to be the garden for the only type of seed accessible to Cruso, he lacks the gusto to pursue her even for purely physical and practical reasons.

Foe is ultimately about voice and the ability to communicate. After a year of being stranded on the island, Cruso, Susan and Friday are rescued by a passing ship, unable to sustain the journey, Cruso dies  and it is left to Susan to find a place in the world for herself and Friday. While Friday is mute, Susan is a prolific talker and yet despite her never ending verbosity, she is unheard, first by Friday who either chooses to ignore her or truly cannot understand, and then by Foe, the publisher she has taken her idea for a manuscript to.

As she fights for her voice and her identity and the right to remain true to her story, she is ultimately forced to fight for her substance as a person. Left to wander around Newington, waiting for their story to be published and they to gain monetary liberation, they exchange one island for another.

"...you will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we led on Cruso's  island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day."

These are the islands of the marginalized, the cast off and forgotten, able to coexist within a world that doesn't recognize them. As Susan and Friday continue to wait for Foe to respond to her letters, they take up residence in his house and live out of the little garden plot and try to avoid the debt collectors that come often to remove more and more of the articles in the house, while ignoring the presence of the squatters. When a young girl presents herself as Susan's long lost daughter, Susan responds by telling Friday:

"It is nothing Friday, it is only a poor mad girl come to join us. In Mr. Foe's house are many mansions. We are as yet only a castaway and a dumb slave and now a madwoman. There is still place yet for lepers and acrobats and pirates and whores to join our menagerie..."

Yet Susan later in a way justifies the invisibility of marginalized when she is forced to confront whether or not she believes Friday is or was a cannibal, something she ponders regularly. She tells herself it is unacceptable to shrink from disgust from our neighbors touch because she perceives or assumes there is uncleanliness. "We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable."

Yet it is exactly this ignorance and blindness that Susan must fight against to be seen. When she first boards the ship, they tell her she must refer to herself as Mrs. Cruso, otherwise society will fixate on what a single woman was doing with a single man alone on an island for a year. Next, when she tries to tell her story of that year being a castaway, when it proves less interesting than she hoped (they were not attacked by cannibals, the wild apes were relatively passive and other than the occasional inclement weather, there was little intrigue to speak of) Mr. Foe first tries to persuade her to come up with something a little more intriguing, before deciding that the castaway story should be book-ended with something more relational, her quest to find her daughter, her year on the island, her daughter's quest to find her.

While Mr. Foe continuously asks how she lost her daughter in the first place, how she survived in Bahia for two years and many other questions I was genuinely interested in knowing the answers to, Susan sticks to her guns, she is not a story that can be ameliorated to please her readers. She does not owe anyone an explanation of who she is, and she can choose to tell whatever part of her story she wants as well as choose not to tell others.

"I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world...I am as familiar as you with the many, many ways in which we can deceive ourselves. But how can we live if we do not believe we know who we are, and who we have been?"

Although this is true, what right to we have in asking anyone to prove the substance of their existence...her lecture comes at a bad time. I found myself wondering if she was slipping as a reliable voice...or wondering if she ever had been. While her verbosity is potentially unrivaled, its the things she omits that begin to create the story that draws you in. Who is this person? Are there unreliable, less than truthful places in her story? As she tells the part of her story she wants to over and over again there are subtle changes. Is she changing her story? Are we having a Pincher Martin moment, where her soul is trying to come to terms with her death while she wanders around one island after another?

Her only hope and aspiration is to someday have heads turn in the street as she walks by and a low murmur throughout the crowd that says "There goes Susan Barton the castaway..." But it is a dying ambition. She can play the role of mother, whether reconciled or unreconciled, she can play the role of mistress or sometime lover, she can play the role of wandering gypsy or house keeper...but she cannot play the role of Robinson Crusoe.

While she constantly struggles to have ownership of her story and have a voice, Friday has consigned himself to not communicating in any way. While Susan talks endlessly to Friday, not needing a response to prod her along, Friday never attempts to communicate back. Even when Susan thinks they are making music together, it is her constant, frenetic attempt to communicate, not his. And when she stands in front of him playing anything she can think of to cause the most discord, Friday doesn't even look up. He is lost in a world that has refused to see him, so he refuses to acknowledge it.

When Susan begins to consign herself to her fate, she has gone from "castaway" to "muse" to "whore," while Friday is being taught to write and been given the tools to finally express himself. Will he be able to? If he finally does learn to write, to have a voice and speak for himself, will he then have to fight for the right to keep his authenticity?  He emerges as a tabula rasa, and the reader is hopeful for him, while Susan, jaded seems to drift into a ineffectual silence.