Each Man Knows: A review of Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

I hope that Viking Press didn't pay too much for the cover design on their initial printing of Saul Bellow's novel Mr. Sammler's Planet. Although I could see them cycling through a host of options before finally throwing up their hands and deciding to just take a deep blue and slap some black and white letters over it. Then, of course, they had to make them overlap a bit, for creativity reasons.

As he often does, Bellow travels through whatever weaving line the story follows, painting an alarming, complex portrait of the mindscape of his protagonist. And what a protagonist Mr. Sammler is. A one-eyed Holocaust survivor in his twilight years, Sammler reflects and speaks to a lifetime of study and thought as characters around him fight recklessly to find their place.

He interacts with a princely black pickpocket, a dying doctor, a Hindu scientist interested in the colonization of other planets, a driftless entrepreneur, a coattail-riding artist, an adoring niece, and his own promiscuous daughter. In the face of these characters and their stabs at meaning, Mr. Sammler speculates. He pontificates. He wrestles.

And when he gets to where the story has been going all along, the mass of images and ideas forms a crystalline web that centers elegantly on Bellow's subject, which I would humbly submit is the question of how we respond to our destiny.

Like most of my Imaginary Readers, I cringe when I read the word destiny. It's a Disney word. A Pocahontas-type concept. In our culture, it's the stuff of lame self-help literature. But not in Bellow's hands.

In Bellow's hands, destiny is the sum of countless inscrutable factors. It's something you can't name, something you wrestle with, something that defies your best understanding, but that you can recognize immediately.

Sammler has plenty of ideas to keep his mind occupied, to get him through explanations, but in the end, after the death of a dear friend, Sammler says this:

He was aware that he must meet-- through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding--he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows.

And, despite all that Sammler doesn't know, can't understand, can't explain, the truth of his observation resonates. We are people of destiny. We are moving through a story with an ending out of reach.

We know this is true, but we fear it. We cringe from it. We squirm and argue our way out of it. And, in the end, when our hand has been played, our life is defined by how fully we live out the terms of our contract.

And perhaps those who designed the cover to this resonant novel felt that they had found the cover that destiny had ordained for the book. Which is a scary thought for several reasons which I do not aim to explore here.

Obscure Heart: A Review of My Left Foot

A good friend of mine grew up with Cereberal Palsy. At a recent party, another of my friends asked him what he was going to do when he got to Heaven. While his disability obscures the impulses of his heart, his smile seemed sincere and sad at the same time.

-I dunno. I'll probably run I guess, he replied, pivoting his head toward the roof.

It was hard to keep the tone of the party light after that comment.

We tend to consider our bodies as the final expression of who we are. When we gain too much weight, when we sag around the edges, when our eyelids hang heavy, when our hands shake, when depression slogs through our veins, we tend to think, in one way or another, Look at who I am. Here, now, it shows.

We venerate the bodies that work best. The Anton Krupickas and Michael Jordans and Lance Armstrongs receive our worship because in their motion we see the poetry of the soul. Actors, models, and musicians all stand under on the altar of magazine covers, inviting our worship.

And there is some truth to this perception that our body, this collection of atoms, cells, impulses, and nerves, guides and creates who we become. But we can forget about the sheer power of the spirit. We forget or adamantly deny that the body is not all that makes us who we are.

Then, all at once, My Left Foot asks us, with its earnest portrait of love, relationship, and disability, Really? That's all there is to it? What about this man? What do you say about him?

The film depicts the upbringing of Christy Brown, an Irish writer and artist who only had control of one foot. He uses his toes to convey his tremendous heart and spirit in books and images that arrest his family, his countrymen, and eventually an audience around the world.

Christy grows up amid a swarm of brothers and sisters, surrounded and sculpted by their love and by their battles. With their tremendous company and support, he seeks to make his spirit known, despite the overwhelming, obscuring power of his CP.

Christy presents a resounding challenge to me, because for most of his life, his brilliance was obscured by his body. I still believe that our relations with our body shape our hearts and souls.

But I realize as I watch Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal of the tortured writer, that I underestimate the power of our spirits, their enduring legacy, and the fact that our bodies are only a frail surface, the tip of the iceberg, a twisted little expression of tremendous will, potential, and love.

If Christy with his foot can shake the world without the cooperation of the rest of his body, then our frailties should not be treated as obstacles for our souls. We have a choice as to how we perceive them. They can either stand as distractions or as monuments to the powers beyond them.

Shame, Shame: A link to a good article on book reviewing

I am a man who uses lazy language.

Here is the article that challenges me to repent: http://www.examiner.com/book-in-national/the-top-20-most-annoying-book-reviewer-cliches-and-how-to-use-them-all-one-meaningless-review.

Read and be blessed.

Fighting through It: A Review of Running with the Buffaloes by Chris Lear

Somewhere out there, in some college textbook, there exists a guide that walks aspiring writers through exactly how to process and write about the books that they read. If someone were to walk up to me and offer me a copy of such a guide, I would thank her or him (I'm a very polite person, eager to please), and then go home and throw that guide in the trash or, if I lived in a house with a fireplace, burn it.

Because every book is different, and deserves to be processed and loved or hated on its own terms. That's what I'm trying to do on this blog. To let books, music, and movies speak to me, then to have a good time writing about what I heard.

I think that our official guide to reviewing books would have me poo-poo Running with the Buffaloes for its heavy use of runner's jargon, its typos, its lack of engaging sensory information, and its brief, episodic chapters. That alone is another good reason to scrap our theoretical guide, because outside of those technicalities, Running with the Buffaloes is a lot of fun to read. Especially if you're a runner, which is what I am.

In fact, author Chris Lear's decision to present a season in the life of Colorado University's notorious men's cross-country team without adornement, without much additional information, and with minimal dialogue, kinda works in its favor. At least to me.

Last April, when I read Christopher McDougal's Born to Run, it gave me this idea of the glory of running, the potential for exploration, and the possibility of running really, really far. Which, during the year after I read it, I did.

Now, in March of the following year, suffering from an injury, feeling discouraged at how slow I am, wondering if I'll be able to keep at this whole running thing, I feel a little ticked at BtR for its hyped-up promises. Which is why the sparse, brutal, and focused RwB works so well for me.

It talks about the injuries and fatigue that sideline even the best runners. It tackles the despair and emotional tension that attack endurance athletes, and examines how those who triumph do so. And its short, point-by-point chapters capture the blend of suffering, monotony, competition, and drive that make up the day-to-day training and life of a runner.

So, despite what a technical point-by-point review would say, RwB is a great read in its own way, and comfortably makes it onto a very short list of my favorite running books.

My Complaining Brain: A Review of Helvetica

I consider myself a messaging geek. I go through my life listening, watching, and feeling for communication. I roll through stories in my mind when I have down time, thinking through how they came across, why, and through what channels. I cheer for a good commercial.

But while words and their import consume much of my brain activity, a vital component sneaks its way through my circuits without notice and does its work.

I'm talking about font here.

I never think about fonts, but they shape much of how I perceive branding, they guide how I understand a message, and they adorn the pages of every book I read. In short, they are a the big deal.

And Helvetica opens wide the theoretical, marketing, messaging, artistic, and historical aspects of font design. By interspersing montages with interviews with the geeks who design and use typefaces, the film provides tangible views of its subject matter, while its subjects grapple with what we see in text and what impact it has on us.

All of which is engrossing and beautiful, but my brain is a little upset about it. Thanks a lot, Helvetica, says my brain, as if I didn't have enough to juggle while I'm walking down the street and watching movies and reading books. Now I have to obsess over font too?

To which I say, aloud, "Suck it up, brain. You're there to think, and think hard. That's what all that coffee is for."

To which my brain does not have much of a response, since it has learned to depend on coffee for much of its functioning.

Honestly, Joyce: A review of A Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates comes off as humorless most of the time. Not that I expect her tales of rape, hauntings, violence, isolation, infidelity, and despair to be lighthearted. But just as I expect any good humor writing to depict a kind of pain, I expect depictions of pain to have their own sense of humor. From my little worldview, it's part of being an honest writer.

In fact, right before reading JCO's sprawling epic A Bloodsmoor Romance, I told a friend that I liked everything about her books except that they were all so humorless.

Do you see where this is going, readers? Right after I made this judgment, I read a book by Joyce Carol Oates which was tragic, tangled, and consistently funny. OH, THE IRONY!

The unnamed narrator, a virgin, tries to keep her Victorian sense of propriety and decency as she details the lurid dissolution and reunion of an upper-class Pennsylvania family. She makes a great show of defending "proper Christian" conduct, then goes into painstaking detail about the unseemly events that bring the Zinn family into a new century.

There are infidelities, sex changes, ghosts, murders, meltdowns, spies, elopements, betrayals and abandonments, all tragic in their own way. All surreal and haunting. Cumulatively, however, in the voice of their virginal, self-righteous narrator, they make for a rollicking, jeering epic of a novel.

So I was wrong about JCO. In fact, I wonder if the same dark humor that infuses and carries A Bloodsmoor Romance isn't present in her other work as well. Maybe, like the narrator, I missed certain undertones and ironies in my rush to criticize.

Either way, A Bloodsmoor Romance joins the ranks of full-hearted epics like Infinite Jest, Catch-22, and Lolita that manage to elicit laughter, even as they batter and dissolve the relationships and spirits of their main characters.

So, I'm sure it offers Ms. Oates no small amount of relief to know that I no longer find her work humorless. In fact, Joyce, I salute you. You can be a very funny lady if you put your mind to it.

Movie Round-up: Short Reviews of Scarface, Postcards from the Edge, Pollock, and Frida

My Host of Imaginary Readers hates my success.

I started a writing business a few months ago, and a few big projects materialized very quickly. Consequently, my time for review-writing has tapered off a bit.

I've kept pace on the books, mainly because reading them takes way more time. But I'm behind on movies. So to keep my HIR happy, I'm going to bring the blog up-to-date with a roundup of the last four movies I watched.

"Four reviews in one?!" cries my HIR, delightedly.

"You bet your sweet imaginary butts," I tell them. And thus we begin:

Artists are a tortured bunch. We want to recreate any beauty we see, and the impossibility of this desire torments us, and drives us to folly. Most of us are so plagued by self-doubt and emotional turmoil that our inspiration chokes before it produces.

Once in a while, someone comes along who has the right combination of productivity and inspiration to change his art form. But success doesn't usually calm a stormy soul. It amplifies it.

And so it did with Jackson Pollock, who made his name by perfectly and completely embracing the reality of a flat image on a flat canvas. Watching Ed Harris portray this volatile painter is a revelatory and terrifying experience.

I feel similar to Pollock in all the wrong ways. I am prone to recklessness, rage, selfishness, and despair if my impulses are allowed to grow.

Pollock is a resounding, rattling challenge for this young creative to calm down, to let go of my raging desires, and to quietly go about the work of bringing my little inspiration to bear.

Warning- This will be a confusing sentence. Bear with me: Frida is one of those exceedingly rare movies about artists which emulates the form of that artist while successfully telling that artist's story while retaining its own power as a film, all at the same time.

It belongs in a small camp with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and maybe Rushmore if we are liberal.

Frida is a sensual, stylized masterpiece which, as Volver did with Penelope Cruz, takes an actress who America pretty much sees as a vacuous sex symbol, and shows us that our obsession with appearances blinded us to a phenomenal talent.

What does one say about a movie like Scarface, about which so much has been written and said?

Nothing.

I made the grave mistake of watching Postcards from the Edge right after I finished reading Carrie Fisher's book of the same title.

The movie retains few of the assets of the novel. Carrie Fisher adapted her own book, and she did an okay job. While the dialogue and characters have all been altered and amplified, the punchlines remain the same.

What made the book so powerful to me was the internal monologues of its characters. Their self-absorption is hilarious and captivating. The movie, by virtue of not being a book, can't really touch that theme. So instead it plays like an overblown Altmanesque riff on the novel. By the time I got oriented and stopped rolling my eyes at all silver-screen-Hollywoodization of the story, the movie was over.

If there was something here for me, I missed it.

And there we have it, my actual and imaginary readers: Four reviews in one. I hope you're happy. I know I am.