Imagining Our Souls: A Review of Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

Before I get into Saul Bellow's little powerhouse of a novel, a word about introductions, forewords, and prefaces.

Unless I finish a novel with a feeling of wonder, I rarely read the introduction. Any kind of foreword usually functions to inflate the page count, advertise the book (why, if I'm already reading a book, do I need to read an ad for it?), and attach some big shot author's name with the work at hand.

However, there are those few introductions which function as great literature in their own right. Tom Wolfe, in his introduction to Bonfire of the Vanities (I have yet to read the book, but I have read the introduction at least three times), offers readers a lucid, hilarious, paradigm-shifting look at the history of style and content in the modern novel. David Eggers, in the Preface to A Hearbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, confronts every imagined complaint about his memoir and vehemently defends his choices, offering a blazing portrait of the self-consciousness that he goes on to explore in the book. And, in the intro to Seize the Day by Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick effectively illuminates literature's unique power, and spotlights Bellow's work as a defining example of that force.

She compares literature, with its descriptions and suggestions, with the pre-processed sights and sounds of television and cinema. She mourns the time when novels were a shared language in our culture, saying the following:

If literature can give new eyes to human beings, it is because the thing held in common is separately imagined.

A world where we all share a certain bibliography, with which we all interact in our own imaginations, is difficult to imagine. We just don't read that much anymore, and the volume of books being published scatters the few readers left to their own favored genres and authors.

So, fellow readers, if we are to correct this problem, I suggest that we start with Seize the Day. I suggest this for a few reasons.

First, the book is notably short. Barely over one hundred pages, it is compact in its time span, plot, and action. Second, its density is astounding. It packs in stunning, nuanced explorations of loyalty, generations, marriage, financial stress, cities, psychology, spirituality, and the quest for the soul. Third, on the tail end of the second, it presents us with a shared Truth which we seperately imagine: We each have a soul that transcends our circumstances.

The book spends its time in the head of Tommy Wilhelm, a failed actor and an unemployed salesman, seperated from his family, living in an apartment near his retired father in New York. Wilhelm throws his money into one last gamble, trusting a purported psychologist and investing in lard.

While the mind of a character has been a common setting for novels in recent years, Bellow's choice to paint the landscape of his character's inner life was an innovation in its time, and it still astounds and inspires in its result, despite the flood of followers.

The final chapter, moving in response to Wilhelm's misfortunes and poor choices, plunges deep after the human soul, until it is out of sight.

The way Wilhelm falls apart, the way he rages and fumes and fights and grieves, all suggests some presence beyond comprehension. Some guiding platonic reality that requires the complete obliteration of his pride, self-delusion, and wealth.

Very little in the story goes the way we might hope. But when we leave Wilhelm's story, and we are filled with a new, deeper sense of hope that transcends the events of the book.

So the book leaves us with a sense of assurance that there is a soul within the man, but it allows us to wonder at its nature and to wonder at our own souls as well.

That, fellow readers, is an outcome well worth both our shared exploration and our individual imagination.

No Life Intact: A review of Dolls

There was a director named Robert Bresson who refused to call his subjects "actors." He insisted on referring to them as "models." He always hired unknown talent and used them in only one movie before finding a new cast. He rehearsed only to drain the emotion out of his models. To flatten their performances.

Bresson made the following statement:

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

What I felt watching Bresson's A Man Escaped, Au Hasard Balthasar, and Diary of a Country Priest, I felt again watching Takeshi Kitano's Dolls, a quiet little film about people for whom love is an irresistible and fatal noose.

While Bresson's choice to minimize the emotion of his actors comes from a general philosophy of film, Kitano's flows from the story, as love entices, manipulates, and destroys his protagonists.

But while Kitano turns down the volume on drama, he cranks up the color, using vivid reds, sudden season changes and clear visual symbolism as the lovers adopt the outfits worn by puppets in the opening sequence, and as they stroll together bound by a scarlet rope.

Where Bresson did what he did for different reasons, Kitano ends up with a similar effect. Great minds think alike, but for vastly different reasons. The outcomes are worth observing, though.

Actors, stripped of their freedom to act, and placed in very carefully orchestrated shots and stories, seem to carry a paradoxically potent emotional kick. In Dolls, that minimalism communicates a fatalistic view of love, that it takes in who it wills and leaves no life intact.

Which is true, although I try not to think of it in such gloomy terms.

Mindblown: A Review of My Custom Van by Michael Ian Black

He won't really go there, will he? Looks like he will. Holy Cow. He went there and just kept going...wait. Did he just write what I think he wrote? I mean, yes, it's there in print, but still. It's hard to believe he would go that far.

The above is a selection from the internal dialogue of someone who has a sense of propriety and reads My Custom Van ...And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All over Your Face by Michael Ian Black.

Since I don't have much of a conscience when it comes to comedy, my internal dialogue was more like, This creep is hilarious. hahaha.

I've been a fan of MIB since he played alongside Michael Showalter and David Wain in the short-lived Comedy Central series Stella, where the three comedians played three unemployed, suit-wearing roommates who live in a surreal version of the world.

If I'm honest, I also have to admit that the fact that his middle name is my first name may have influenced my feelings toward him.

In fact, if I'm going to be completely honest, I have to admit that anyone with the name "Ian," be it her or his first, middle, or last name, deserves to be showered with money and venerated on a global scale.

To that end, I submit this modest review to my readers, and I will wait a few days for its truth to register before your money and worship come pouring in.

Too Many Tears: A review of Little Bee by Chris Cleave

It's hard to quantify what makes writing bad, but about one third of the way into Chris Cleave's novel Little Bee, I had a wicked idea. I should count the instances of characters crying. The word, "cry" itself is used in abundance, but Cleave pretty much exhausts the Thesaurus for synonyms as the tears flow.

Crying punctuates every emotional conversation, along with gestures like turning dramatically away, holding one another, hitting things, holding one's own head in one's own hands, and so on.

Had I counted the cries, I would have a fact to substantiate my claim that Cleave took a great, relevant social concept, and wrote it into the ground. But I did not have the interest nor the patience.

So instead, I will just say so: Cleave took a great, relevant concept and wrote it into the ground. His characters acted in grand gestures, wore their symbolism loudly, overexplained their motivations, and seemed stuck in melodramatic loops that felt like they were created in a lab.

The story can be summarized like this: Two women, one Nigerian refugee and one English magazine editor, participate in the same horrible event in Nigeria. They end up together in England. Tears and revelations ensue.

Admittedly, the better I know a topic, the more critical I am about how it is presented. I work with refugees, and I have African friends. One of my closest ministry partners is Nigerian, specifically from the same tribe as the character in Little Bee. So when someone told me about Little Bee, I felt like I should read it. I was wrong.

What might have been an upsetting personal look at how rich countries deal with third-world suffering ended up feeling like a cross-cultural soap opera, with agonizingly obvious revelations, improbable twists that just kept coming, and some confounding moral questions which the author was, in my opinion, unqualified to address.

On the bright side, Cleave, a white man, made a lot of money off this piece about suffering women. Hopefully he spends it addressing the social problems introduced in the story, so that someone who the story purports to speak for will benefit from it.

Canyonlands: A review of 127 Hours

Spoiler Alert: The guy cuts his arm off and survives.

I was aware of that much when I first saw the trailer for 127 Hours. Aron Ralston is pretty much world famous for chopping his arm off after exhausting all his other options when he got trapped in a canyon.

What I missed in conversations about Ralston (I never read his book) was where his harrowing captivity took place. It's set in Canyonlands in Utah, a place where I spent a week last year with my brother and my good friend Charles Chung.

A sprawling, stunning array of rock formations, boulders, canyons, historical relics, and geological wonders, Canyonlands is about as remote as something that beautiful can be in the mainland USA.

It's a great place to go if you want to disappear. Which Aron Ralston did. Which is why he didn't tell anyone where he was going, which caused a lot of problems for him after his arm got pinned down by a boulder in an obscure crevasse.

The movie is cut together like a music video, pulling all sorts of cinematic stunts like split-screen montages, stock footage, dream sequences, massive aerial camera movements, and video-screen-within-the-film metanarrative.

I would think it would be enough to make me forget that the whole thing takes place in a canyon, under one rock. But it doesn't. All the gimmicks are used so well, and with such a sense of timing and story, that they enhance and heighten the Ralston's struggle to stay hopeful, funny, sane, and alive.

127 Hours is a racous, full-tilt film that uses every tool at its disposal. It has a lot to say, but never does so too obviously. And that leaves room for plenty of thinking about what we hope for, what we believe in, what it means to really live, and who we are.

Or maybe just who Aron Ralston is, depending on how much you identify with his character.

Having been around Canyonlands myself, and having felt that childish impulse to drop off the map for a while, and having wondered at certain times why I should keep going, I found the whole thing invigorating, fresh, and celebratory.

Even during the whole arm-removal scene, which was vivid and gruesome, it's like the film was telling me, Look here. See how bad it gets? See how much he suffered to keep going? Don't doubt for a second that it's worth it.

Self-Speech as Self-Defense: A review of Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher

Admittedly, I'm writing this review in a rush.

I made a resolution this year to review every book I read for this blog, and I finished this book Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher, and I loved it so much that I ordered the movie from Netflix. The movie arrived in the mail today, and Ruthie and I are going to watch it after dinner, which Ruthie is currently preparing.

And I know that somehow, in some way I can't yet identify, writing a review of the book after watching the movie would be a whole different deal. How could I avoid a comparison? How could I speak to the content of the book when its images have been jostled around, overrun, and challenged by the movie?

And this book already has enough filmic baggage to deal with. For example, take the inevitably distracting fact that it was written by Carrie Fisher, who plays Princess Leia. It's hard, while reading, not to imagine Leia with her white gown and buns of hair narrating this story. It's also hard not to think of it as autobiography, which I'm sure much of it is. And then to wonder who did to her what the characters in the story do to the narrator.

And I suppose that layer adds to the whole story, which is good enough on its own. The main character essentially watches her own life and narrates it to those around her in witty one-liners, transcending her own pretensions by pretending to be honest by being honest.

As she runs through rehab, unemployment, a return to stardom, one relationship and one complicated unrelationship, Fisher does such a hilarious job, both as a character in the story and as an author fictionalizing her own very surreal life that I thought on more than one occassion of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

I told my friend this on the phone last night and I instantly wondered if that was a mistake. It might make it sound like I didn't understand IJ, or like I enjoy fluffy little Hollywood books as much as big blue masterpieces. I'll stand by the comparison, though. While Wallace treats the theme of honesty as a form of pretense incidentally, Fisher wallows around in it, draws it out, and tickles it. Her form is so understated and witty that I wonder if I should take it as seriously as I do, and feel so moved.

So there you have it, kids. If you liked Infinite Jest, you should check out Postcards from the Edge. It will blow your mind, but in a much smaller block of time, in a much more modest way, and with absolutely no endnotes.

Be Brave and Take Hold of It: A Review of Pontoon and Garrison Keillor's Books in General

You can be a fan of Garrison Keillor without reading a word he has written. Most Garrison Keillor fans I know are that way. They saw the movie, they listen to his radio show, they love his voice and timing and wording, and they don't really need to sit down with his novels.

That's fine. His work seems to all be built on the same bittersweet humor, and whether you're watching him deliver it live, hearing him on NPR's A Prairie Home Companion show, or sitting down with one of his books, you're meeting the same people, hearing the same jokes, feeling the same chuckle-inducing sense of absurdity and nostalgia that blankets his stories.

But to those who have thought about reading a novel because they like GK on the radio or in his poetry anthologies or in the Robert Altman movie, I'd recommend diving in.

I just finished reading Pontoon this week. It's the ninth book by GK I have read, and it fits right in there. Like his better work, there are bits of high and low humor about sex, faith, death, coincidence, and revelation. He seems to be able to make fun of his characters and their ideas without bile, able to skewer and examine them and then send them back on their way.

His humor is in his ability to see how silly people are and can be, and the reason it doesn't get tiresome is because he seems to like them so much anyway. The fact that he keeps writing about the same town, and often the same people, seems to suggest that, with all their backwards ideas and quarrels and losses and blindnesses, they're worth coming back to.

Pontoon is not the greatest of his novels. But it's good to settle down with a hot cup of coffee and this book or any of his novels when you have some time and feeling to invest. It also has some passages that warrant several readings.

In one of my favorite passages, a jet-setting mom writes a letter to her alcoholic daughter that ends with this line: "Life is unjust and this is what makes it so beautiful. Every day is a gift. Be brave and take hold of it."

Those are some words to think about. Everything breaks. We can live with that fact or rage against it. GK gently, hilariously, and consistently suggests that we embrace it. Being prone to rages and despair, I find that suggestion calming and hopeful every time I read one of his novels.

A Labyrinthine Entertainment: A Review of At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

A few posts ago, I introduced my actual readers in cyberspace to my Host of Imaginary Readers (HIR), who question pretty much everything I write, and don't like me as a thinker, a builder of sentences, or as a person in general. The HIR badgers me every time I sit down to work on my novel, and the only thing that allows me to move forward under their crippling attacks is the fact that they're not really there.

I thought I had it pretty bad with my unseen critics, until I read Flann O'Brien's labyrinthine novel At Swim-Two-Birds.

See if you can follow this: An unnamed student spends most of his days in bed, taking occasional excursions to drink stout with his friends and wander the campus where he attends classes. He is working on a novel. His novel concerns an author named Dermot Trellis. Trellis creates characters for his stories and has them live in the same hotel that Trellis lives in. These characters tell stories of their own, creating more characters. That's four layers of narrative to keep track of so far.

Then it gets a little strange because, as our unnamed narrator traverses town, skips school, drinks stout, argues with his uncle, and works on his book, Trellis' characters realize that they are parts of his stories, and that if Trellis sleeps, they are free to do what they want with their lives.

So the characters band together with characters of their own creation to recreate Trellis' own story to put Trellis to sleep. Permanently.

In the meantime, there are diversions into dictionaries, commentaries, narrative subplots, poetry, folk tales, and scripture.

It's a work that captivated James Joyce, Graham Greene and Jorge Luis Borges, but failed to find such a large and enthusiastic audience. Which is a shame, because At Swim-Two-Birds is one of those books you get to just when you're starting to wonder if you've pretty much been around the block in terms of what books can do. It takes your brain, engages it, kneads it, tickles it, whips it around, delights it, confounds it, and then, lightly, places it back in your skull with a kiss.

So Trellis had it way worse than I have it, for his creative processes were not only criticized by phantom readers, but he was beset and plagued and attacked and drugged by his own creations. But the result for his readers is worth his pain, mainly because he isn't real and we are.

So Ian, inquires my HIR, where are you going with this? Are you just trying to tell us you liked the book? Isn't there a lesson? Are you trying to justify a book merely on its merits as entertainment? Its razzle-dazzle? Is this seriously where you're going to end this review?

Dim Light Shed: A Review of Overnight

When I first saw Boondock Saints (heretofore referred to as BS), back in my early college years, I thought it was pretty cool. A cool mix of accents, a cat getting shot, bagpipes, brotherhood, drinking, and extreme violence. It had all the elements that get the neurons in a young geek's mind going.

I was not much for restraint at the time, nor did I think critically about the film until a friend smirked when I said I liked it.

He said something like, "It feels like a bunch of guys got drunk and just thought of everything cool they could cram in a movie, and did that."

Which moved the film from my "most liked" to my "most hated" list, in the way that someone else's opinion can when you're young and impressionable.

After watching Overnight, which details the rise and fall of the director of BS, Troy Duffy, I realized exactly how accurate my friend's assessement was. Duffy was a hard-drinking, self-righteous bartender with a bunch of hard-living friends who wrote a script between hangovers that turned a few of the right heads.

The story goes like this: when fame knocked on his door, he answered in his overalls, and immediately, before any movie was made, declared himself the future of Hollywood. He proceeded to drink away his success, alienate anyone who tried to help him, and by the time the movie came out in just four theatres and bombed even in that setting, he had no friends left.

BS enjoyed a somewhat happy ending, and made wealthy whatever distributor picked it up and got it into the hands of high school and early-college aged men like myself, looking for something loud and flashy. Duffy didn't see any of that money, and he quickly drank away his own meager earnings.

The lesson is supposed to be that fame doesn't make you better. It just turns up the pressure.

For me, the lesson is that when you get that deal, when opportunity knocks, when the world starts listening, that's when the work really starts. It's not whether or not you get there so much as what you do once you get there.

Anyway, I don't feel exactly edified or enlightened either way. It's a true story, but its truth is not particularly surprising or interesting to watch. Once you realize that the lead is a self-destructive, delusional windbag, you pretty much know how things are going to go. It's maybe interesting as a bit of Hollywood history, for those who haven't heard its story a hundred different times before. It's a nice little glimpse behind the scenes of BS, for whatever that's worth.