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..."