Good, Evil, and the Rest of the World Between: A Review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

In my living room after church, we discussed good and evil.

The conversation began with a question about how we could claim that one faith was right and another wrong. What followed revealed the difficulty of that idea- establishing right vs. wrong, defining them in your terms, and then assuming that your brainpower, faith, fervor, or whatever is sufficient to guarantee that your terms are correct, and that they supercede the terms of others.

Then you have cultural complications, which it turns out vary from person to person, and adjust or often determine our terms. Then there's religion and all its nuances and claims. Add to that any number of confounding factors, turn up the volume, stir, and you get the world we live in.

So we westerners who tend to like the idea that there is a right and that it's pretty much exactly what we think, gravitate toward art which affirms this. I believe it's why The Lord of the Rings was so popular, why we loved Star Wars. Our fantasies smooth the edges and make perfect our imperfect ideas.

The challenging thing about David Mitchell's latest novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is that it sets up its conflicts between faiths and cultures and ideologies, the twists them sideways and metes out justice in a confounding way.

The story revolves around Jacob de Zoet, a clerk, an underdog, who works on an island off the coast of Nagasaki in Japan at the turn of the 19th century. The manmade island, Dejima, exists to allow the Dutch to trade with Japan without setting foot on Japanese soil.

Dejima is a perfect setting for the story, an island between the East and the West, mistrusted and neglected by the surrounding powers, peopled by employees of a dying company.

Into this play of power, this mess of cultures, and this crux of history, Mitchell does some masterful dreaming. He spends the first act setting up his pieces, shifting allegiances, brewing a storm. Throughout the story, he sets a romantic or an idealist up against a corrupt system. The idealists and romantics are thwarted repeatedly until the final act, where those who survive see their virtue suddenly at the center of a struggle between nations.

In its own way, while it is far more nuanced and bold than the previously mentioned Star Wars and LOTR epics, Thousand Autumns is a moral tale for a postmoral audience. Its good guys bear the same traits-- They have progressive attitudes about equality between the sexes; They listen well to all viewpoints; Then, when all hands are on the table, they act according to their internal sense of conviction.

Their belief systems differ. One good guy is a Humanist. Another is a Christian. One is a Buddhist. But their values are unified, and they always supercede mere expediency. There is always a sacrifice. There is always something selfless. Their creeds vary, but their values are ultimately the same.

It is hard to make a statement about the conclusion without spoiling it, but I will say this. I think good wins out, if imperfectly. There is a cost. There is loss and sadness and complication and poverty waiting even after good has won. In the postmoral fable, there is no happily ever after, just a complicated moving forward.

It's easy to critique this outcome, this path of praising values while eschewing ideologies. You could call it the other side of the same coin.

What I appreciate is Mitchell's seriousness, his artistry, his passion in this experiment. He places us at the island between East and West, the heart of Christianity, Humanism, and Buddhism, and the crux of culture and commerce. Then he looks to see if, between all these absolutes, we still have something good to hang on to. It's a set of intersections worth exploring, and Mitchell leaves us with plenty of insights to challenge, tease, and enlighten us as we follow him, and explore the island ourselves.

No Kings on the Mountain: A Review of Everest: Beyond the Limit

My interest in Everest is highly personal. In less than two months' time, I will be flying to Nepal to begin a trek to Everest Base Camp. EBC is situated at about 17,000 feet, and although it's at the bottom of the mountain, it's higher than any peak in the rockies.

The only things standing between me and the summit of the mountain are the mountain itself, 40,000 to pay for the expedition, years of mountaineering experience, physical fitness, and the nerve to make the attempt.

However, the mere fact that I will not climb the mountain needn't hinder me from popping some popcorn, getting into my pj's, and watching others brave the elements. I may have to take some breaks to get blankets and heat up more tea, but I too can share in the harrowing adventure, thanks to The Discovery Channel's groundbreaking series Everest: Beyond the Limit!

Like any good piece of Entertainment, Everest has its complexities. It offers a wealth of information about the mountain, climate, and characters that define the journey to the top of the world. It explores the motivations of complex people and follows them in their very real life-and-death quest to summit.

A few things worth knowing about the mountain: Removing bodies of dead climbers is next to impossible, so the route is peppered with frozen corpses. It takes several months to summit because of the logistics. Mountaineers have to strategically put their lives in danger based on weather conditions, traffic on the mountain, and wildly unpredictable circumstances. There are also a host of incompetent climbers on the mountain clogging up the route and endangering the lives of sherpas and stronger climbers.

Throw into this setting a team of characters with their demons, ambitions, and big hearts, along with some stunning advances in camera and film technology, and you end up with a series that makes you feel, between bathroom breaks and trips to the pantry for more snacks, like you are right there on the mountain, gritting your teeth and striving for the top.

Away from Our Moorings: A Review of American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates

I have read the following books by Joyce Carol Oates: Solstice, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, Zombie, We Were the Mulvaneys, The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, Black Water, and Beasts.

I believe the only book of these to get more than a three-star rating (out of five) from me was the novella I Lock My Door upon Myself, because I felt that it concisely and poetically probed the human heart cut loose from its usual moorings.

"So," my dear readers ask, "why do you keep reading her work then?"

(I have actually never been asked this, but I have a Host of Imaginary Readers challenging my choices and decisions. They keep me sharp.)

My feeling was that something about I Lock My Door Upon Myself would make more sense as I kept reading, would build and resound with the other books to make up a symphony of meaning (woah, Ian, tone it down here, says my H.I.R., you're getting a little dramatic).

It was with this promise in mind that I opened American Appetites, my ninth JCO book. And during the reading of this book, which bears few of JCO's usual divergences (no rape, no names dashed out, complete sentences elegantly and classically constructed), I realized what the promise was, and exactly what kept me reading, and exactly why I plan to keep reading until I've completed all of her fiftysomething novels.

But first, a little background: I was raised in a right-and-wrong environment. We learned about a God who made it abundantly clear exactly what he expected from us, and our actions were met with consequences according to that code (note: I'm thankful for this, and I retain some of it in a way that would warrant another entry not at all related to this book).

So here is the thing that JCO, an atheist, and a brilliant one at that, has to offer me, a young Christian man: a view of the human experience apart from its usual moorings. She has a thorough, if conventional, understanding of psychology, and the impact it has on us. Her characters act out passions and desires and subconscious impulses and complex relationships in a universe free from God's judging eye.

American Appetites is a bit of an expose of liberal wealthy academia, but that's a tired trope. What makes the novel great is what happens to its characters, and how, and who they end up. Ian McCollough, a great mind and a well-developed character, gets in an argument with his wife over an affair he hasn't had, and when she slashes and pushes at him, he pushes back, and she goes through a window and dies.

Ian McCollough, in all his suffering, in the guilt of what he has done, is accountable mainly to his own impulses, to his motives, his ego, his id, his sexuality and vitality.

Why, then, my HIR asks, would this be something you would seek, would pursue, would read over 50 novels in pursuit of?

Well, dear imaginary readers, because it's good to isolate certain components of life and see what they're made of. And certainly our psychological programming, our developmental makeup, our intellectual environment accounts for more of who we are than my upbringing gives it credit for.

Because for all I know, I am wrong about everything and psychological principles guide our experiences and beliefs. I don't believe this, but it's worth considering, and it's well worth reading the work of a novelist who masterfully narrates this belief into her violent, character-driven tales of pain, loss, horror, and, on rare occasions, of which American Appetites is one, redemption.

So Joyce Carol Oates is not someone with whom I agree on a fundamental level. And I think that critics who call her melodramatic and exaggerated are correct in their assesement, although I don't think those are necessarily negative traits in the world of the written word.

I think though that she provides a vivid, humanistic, gut-wrenching view of people in a world amoral, romantic, and horrific. And for this reason, I call American Appetites a great book. And for this reason, I keep reading.

Aliens and Strangers: A Review of The Stranger by Albert Camus

Let us pretend that this book has not been the subject of a billion Freshman Literature papers.

When I picked The Stranger off its shelf at Borders, I picked a copy that was one among a long row of many copies of the same book. Even the cover, with its sharp dramatic black-and white needles is almost a trademark of Camus books. It's like J.D. Salinger's paperbacks. The book is so canonical that it gets stamped with a single, generic design and churned out for readers who want a copy cheap for college courses.

And then there were all the idealogical wars, where the world accused Camus of being an existentialist and he had to seperate himself from Sartre and make anti-existentialist claims.

Big deal. So now I, being a very casual reader who really doesn't enjoy reading about books or reading criticism, am in the position of writing about a book that most well-educated people have already written about back when they were in college.

But that's the point of this blog anyway. Not to provide a scholarly look but to talk mostly about how a book hit me, what sort of emotional life it entered into and what it said to me.

I think the reason The Stranger got its status is because, on a gut level, it's just so funny and relevant and insightful that people had to dissect it and name its parts.

The main character is a completely logical, honest guy faced with a bizarre world. And the system of how time progresses, how events happen, how relationships change, all conspire against the main character, who eventually must pay the price of violating the world's absurd norms.

I thought immediately of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Infinite Jest, and the film Idiocracy. There is hilarity and paradigm-shifting insight in entering the mind of someone unassuming, reasonable, and straightforward. We can't really understand how crazy our assumptions and norms are until we have someone like Camus come along and dissect them for us.

Part of the reason I love living and working with aliens is that they do this so naturally. "Gringo" behaviors are pointed out as such and ridiculed. Pretenses are recognized and ridiculed. And if something doesn't make sense, it gets noticed. And ridiculed.

It's good to get kicked around a little. It's good to have your absurdities pointed out. It's good to read books like The Stranger and think a little more humbly about who we are, how we all fit together, and what we take for granted.

On Potential: A Review of The Instructions by Adam Levin

Adam Levin's The Instructions is a pretty book. Admittedly, I fell in love with it for surface reasons. I pulled it off the shelf upon noting its size, the simplicity of its design, the texture of its covers, the little McSweeney's chair on the spine. I ran the "opening paragraph" check next, and I read the following:

There is damage. There was always damage and there will be more damage, but not always. Were there always to be more damage, damage would be an aspect of perfection.

I saw that this book would have something to say, and kept reading, straight through its 1,030 pages, and a few days after, I am still trying to juggle the ideas it presented and how they affect the story at its core.

There is a lot going on in this book. The novel covers four days in the life of a ten-year-old scholar, lover, fighter, and potential messiah. Large passages are given to interpreting Torah. Others are given to a strange adolescent love story. There is ample violence, some literary theory (Philip Roth even makes a cameo during a hostage crisis), a few thoughts on education systems, some prophecy, invented vocabulary, and fierce humor.

At its heart, though, is a fairly simple story: A boy grapples with what it means to be chosen.

This thread propels the novel and makes its numerous pages move by quickly. And it resonates across faiths. Christians call it "election." New agey types like the word "destiny." Naturalists can call it "fate."

But we all want to know what put us here, why, and whether or not we have something important to do.

If The Instructions has its shortcomings (and I believe that it does), it certainly does this well: It examines what it means to be chosen.

The main character claims his chosenness, disowns it, doubts it, battles it, follows it, and then, finally, when the bloodshed is over, he leaves it to Adonai and waits for the next step.

I should hope to do all the same things with mine.

Sexy Old Cold Leopold: A Short Review of Water Drops on Burning Rocks

Watching movies about sex is a risky business. I admit that. They have a host of potential effects on the mind, and you can't really know what a film will do to you until you have watched it. By that point, you've already gone and watched it.

But there are certain directors who seem able to explore the realm of sexuality with a kind of honesty, compassion, and candor that edifies the right viewer at the right time. So if I watch movies about sex, I tend to go to directors who I trust.

While Fracois Ozon, the director of Water Drops on Burning Rocks, has had his hits and misses in dealing with sex, he wasn't the reason I wanted to see this film. It was the involvement of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who wrote the story as a play when he was only 19. Fassbinder was a prolific and brilliant filmmaker who turned in a stunning body of work before he died of an OD at 36.

This early piece, about a 50 year-old insurance salesman named Leopold, reminded me of so much truth. Like any good film about sex, it's not just about sex, but about what plays itself out around and in the sex. Leopold is a real man. He is the one who uses sex as power, who wields it mercilessly, and who leaves a wake of broken lives behind him.

He's at least three people who I have known, whose victims I have sat across from in coffee shops and on sofas and whose lives I have tried to support and help hold together where I could.

The thing that made watching Water Drops on Burning Rocks so telling, and the reason I choose to watch films about sexuality at all, is because they tell you a bit about yourself. Because I felt, as the seductions began, turned on. Just like the characters. I took the journey with them. So when the toll is paid, it's hard to blame, it's hard to remain detached from the darkness of the end when I felt the magnetism of the events that preceded it.

In this way, a good sexy movie tells a truth. Not just in an arty, detached sense, but by igniting my own desires and revealing to me the shadows that wait in their embrace.

On Myth and History: A Short Review of Ondine

I spend a great deal of thought on faith. I examine its objects. I see it as its own entity sometimes. I wonder whether it is a lens or a creative force, a reflection of truth beyond our reach or an idol to an unknowable God. At times, whether the effect is intentional of corollary, a movie places me between the cold edge of history and the whisper of hope.

The tale of Ondine begins when an Irish fisherman pulls a woman up in his nets. She is beautiful, speaks with a foreign accent, and sings mysterious melodies that put fish in his nets.

The characters in the fisherman's town build an elaborate mythology around the woman, "Ondine," who plays to their stories with a quiet grace, seeming to prefer their versions to her reality. But the darker edges of their stories reflect a history that draws a family into a collision between a thread of hope and the shards of their broken lives.

Ondine, in its final act, leaves slivers of its own mythology intact, and it seems to praise the power of myth even as it shatters it. Here, it suggests is where your myths fall short, and here is where they stand.

To me, a faith-hounded viewer, this film and the life it enters offers room to hope and wonder despite the incompletions that our histories would wield against belief.

Things You Can Get Away with on Letterman

I don't get any channels on my TV. I use it strictly for DVDs or for shows on DVD. Usually, I'm glad to be free of its distraction. But I do miss late night talk shows. I am a fan of Letterman especially.

I love the live bands at the end of the shows the most. These are a few of my favorite Letterman performances, for three completely different reasons:

First, The Rapture. I have no idea who on Letterman's staff booked them or what they expected, but the Rapture pulled off a surprising bit of artistry:



Second, the Vines. I have no idea how much of this was planned, but it's hilarious to watch:



Finally, here's an Elvis Perkins number. It's perfectly structured and delivered. It's hard to imagine someone accomplishing more within the time constraints of Letterman's music spot:

Short Review of The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is an unapologetic nerd, which is one of the things that makes his work so likeable to me. He wins a Pulitzer Prize for a piece of historical fiction about two friends during the golden age of comics, and follows that audacious victory by writing a piece of Sherlock Holmes fan fiction that's barely long enough to be called a novel. So he publishes it as "A Story of Detection."

Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. Chabon's gift for long, eloquently crafted sentences and his prediliction for shifting perspectives get in the way of an otherwise great little yarn.

I never expect sparse prose from Chabon, nor do I think a short story can't sustain stylistic flair, but as a subjective reader, I feel the story slipping away from me.

There are reasons for the rules that govern genre fiction. Generally, if you write a detective story, it is best to use first person or, at the very least, to limit the perspective to one main character. This creates a sense of immediacy, a feeling of immersion, and a focus that you need for that edge-of-the-seat effect and that sense of epiphany at the solution.

Chabon's changes in perspective bother me. Each one happens quickly, without warning, and they do not remain in play long enough to engage me. I feel that the climax loses its gravity because of one such change. Just as I adjust to the inside of the head of an unconventional character, the section ends, the tension releases, and the story is over before I have a chance to care.

There's also a reason I typically see short sentences in detective stories. Detectives are fact-oriented. The emotional and artistic movements of a detective story usually flow from an interest in the facts. While this is another rule that can be well-broken, The Final Solution suffers for it, at least in the heart of this reader. Long sentences seem wasteful, excessive, and distracting. The facts and bits of information that are so central to the solution of a story get fluffed, obscured, and blunted by long sentences.

That Chabon is the master of the sentence, and a powerful storyteller, remains clear to me. I just feel that The Final Solution broke rules to its own detriment, where Chabon's other work seems to benefit from the same gestures. So I won't say The Final Solution wasn't a good book. All I can say is that, as a reader and fan, it didn't work for me.

Short Review of Ordinary Decent Criminal

One of the pitfalls of using Netflix as opposed to the library or Blockbuster is that it makes you a completist. Now you don't go and pick out one movie that you want to see. You add all of a certain actor or director's movies to your queue. Sometimes it pays off. You end up seeing an Altman movie like A Wedding, which you would never go to the rental place and pick out, and it turns out to be a beautiful, funny, moving piece.

On the other hand, sometimes you go on a Kevin Spacey spree, then a year later, a movie like Ordinary Decent Criminal shows up in your mailbox, and you feel obligated to watch it because it's there, and because you can't get that Everest documentary you've been waiting for until you ship back the Kevin Spacey movie you didn't really want to see.

And the movie turns out to be one of those lifeless late-nineties thrillers with a lame twist at the end and a bunch of American actors using fake Irish accents while underusing the actual Irish talent (Colin Farrell) that could have maybe made for an interesting movie.

And you want to write some kind of meaningful something about it to justify the time you wasted on it, but nothing really comes to mind except that this came out the same year as American Beauty, and it's a good thing for Kevin Spacey that we remembered that one and forgot about Ordinary Decent Criminal. Think how many fewer Kevin Spacey fans would be out there if the opposite were true.

Short Review: Crazy Heart

While country troubadors have been around for pretty much the entire history of our country, a little group of them sprung up in the 70's and saved what was left of country music. They are the subject of a beautiful documentary called Heartworn Highways.

Some of them found a niche in the industry (Rodney Crowell), Some of them burned out (Townes Van Zandt), some narrowly escaped self-destruction to find a second wind (Steve Earle), and some just sort of kept on keepin' on (Guy Clarke).

When I saw Crazy Heart advertised, it brought this group of musicians to mind. The main character, an alcoholic country legend way past his prime and out of ideas, could have easily started in the same place as any of these artists.

For that reason, and because of the involvement of Jeff Bridges and T-Bone Burnett, I expected to enjoy this movie.

Ruthie and I watched it on Saturday, and when it was finished, Ruthie said, "That was sad."

Which was true. It was. But it was the kind of sad you hear in this kind of music. The kind of sad that comes from trying to keep your story interesting, trying to sing and make something beautiful while the world shifts, breaks, and rebuilds itself around you.

I always liked country music for this reason. It often seems to find a good mix of heartbreak and hope. And when you mix those things in right proportion, and keep the tone honest, you end up with a song or book or movie that strikes a chord. Crazy Heart was that kind of a movie.

Short Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Michael Cera gets cast as a gawky young man on the fringes of hip society. Again. His character plays bass in an indie band and he sees the world in terms of video games and comics, neither of which interests me much. The theme is something about self-esteem and relationships.

None of this would suggest to me that I would like this movie, but it was a long Saturday, and Redbox was low on other options, so I gave it a shot. And it turned out to be funny, visually interesting, and constantly entertaining.

While the bottom of the film is somewhat shallow, it occupies its ample energy whipping viewers through the mind of its protagonist, taking whimsical stylistic turns, employing the vocabulary of classic video games, hip culture, and underground music, and skewering its characters with enough self-awareness to poke fun at its own form.

There is nothing much in terms of substance here, but Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a good-natured, inventive little film that earns its laughs.

Short Review: Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

Allan Bloom wrote a bestseller titled The Closing of the American Mind. I had not read this book when I began to read Ravelstein by Saul Bellow. Nor did I really know who Allan Bloom was, or even that the lead character in Bellow's novel was based on the real and famous professor Allan Bloom.

Nor did I know what Bellow was talking about in a good half of his allusions during the course of the book.

As I read it, I pondered the following questions: Is a novel without a plot still a novel? Or is it a character sketch? How many intellectual, sociological, academic, philosophical, religious, and literary allusions am I really interested in reading? How important is my comprehension of these allusions to my enjoyment of the novel?

And, perhaps most urgently, How much background should you need to know beforehand in order to enjoy a story? To this question, I would answer, a lot more background than I had before I began reading Ravelstein.

So you could blame me for most of this, but I found this novel to be a bit unrewarding and, to be blunt, boring.

Perhaps I'll return to Ravelstein in a few years after my brain grows a few sizes and I read several more books, and I'll slap my forehead and wonder how I missed the brilliance the first time.

Or perhaps by that point I won't be interested in reading a bunch of references and anecdotes about stuff I've already thought through and wrestled with. It's hard to know what the future Ian North will think about a younger Ian North's somewhat fierce and impulsive interaction with books.

Short Review: Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

Chabon's other collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, felt to this reader like a bunch of deadline-pressed tidbits sandwiched between strong opening and closing pieces.

Maps and Legends, on the other hand, is compelling throughout as Chabon, a shameless geek, wanders through and across genre and high-art/low-art boundaries to defend, examine, and recover a lost sense of entertainment in literature.

Chabon loads his flawless prose with meaning, humor, and insight into what makes stories work, how we read them, and how we should categorize them if we should at all.

His closing essay works wonders with the theme of storytelling as the art of lying. Although he's not exactly the first writer to speak of this, the way he embeds his message in the structure and narrative of the piece is a thing to behold.

Short Review: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

While it may be true that this book was groundbreaking in its time, and that it necessitated some important legal battles about freedom of speech in literature, I had to plod my way through it with the aid of caffeine and a sense of historical import.

Its characters are walking ideologies who interact with so much melodrama that they're difficult to believe in.

I'm sure Lawrence's approach to the spirit/body dynamic was fresh in its time, but this reader/reviewer finds it fresh no longer. And the explicit language, so horrifying to our ancestors, seems more than a little cheesy in retrospect.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lawrence's earlier novel Sons and Lovers, and I intend to spend time with his other books in the future, but I ended this one with a sense of disappointment. I gave it some credit for being a brave effort by an author I like, but I can't offer any real praise for the content and approach of this novel.

Resolution

Last year, I resolved to read 52 books. That's one for every week of the year. I passed my goal somewhere before six months was up. I went for double, and fell one book short. I was able to read 103 books.

I hope to read fewer books this year, and spend more time writing my own. I have also resolved to do a better job of responding to books I read, so to that end, I will be posting a brief review of every book I read on this blog, which may have seemed like a ghost town to my three faithful followers.

Ghost Town, come alive!