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.