Highbrow Historical Pulp Fiction: A review of Them by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is the Tom Waits of highbrow pulp fiction.

My friend Jonathan Kotulski made the above statement, mostly in jest I think, during a recent phone conversation.

We had been talking about Kafka, Musil, Borges, and David Foster Wallace, then I mentioned that I was still feverishly reading novels and short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, and that I didn't completely understand why. The Tom Waits comparison came from the fact that she has produced a huge catalog, and managed to stay consistently challenging over the course of several decades.

My most recent JCO book is actually one of her earlier works. As illustrated boldly in the picture above, it is named Them. The title, which actually does help in the interpretation of the book, does very little to tell you what you are about to read. Nor does the illustration. Nor do maybe the first 400 pages, over the course of which a quarreling, unlikable family staggers through two generations of rapes, murders, beatings, racism, domestic violence, abandonment, bereavement, rebellion, infidelity, alcoholism, obesity, and cancer.

In general, I found the book to be melodramatic, overdrawn, miserable, and taxing. However, there are two tricks JCO pulls, which although they struck me as a little cheap at the time, in retrospect help to tie the thing together and make its reading worthwhile.

The first trick she plays twice. In her intro, she bills the story "a work of history in fictional form." Later in the novel, she prints several letters written by one of the protagonists to herself. She artfully pleads with her readers to accept that, "This is the only kind of fiction that is real."

The second trick, which is complicated by the first, is a bit of a deus ex machina, but in my opinion, it works. The history of the minor characters in the novel is, without much set-up or warning, suddenly linked to major historical events, and everything changes. Which I guess is how major historical events interact with the urban poor, striking without warning. The whole book, the characters seem like anonymous cogs in a big, crushing wheel, then without much warning or setup, the axle breaks.

So at the end of Them, readers are confronted with a story that seems too bad to be true, with a twist that seems too big to be true, yet the author repeateadly claims that the badness and bigness are both historical fact.

As a reader, I love stuff like this. It places me on a precipice. I am cynical, but as P.T. Anderson reminds pomo cynics in Magnolia, "These things happen."

I rarely encounter books that engage me in a struggle, that effectively prod me to reframe, or restate, how I think about the world, its workings, and my connection to them, but Them is one such book. And that doesn't mean I like all the grand gestures, the melodramatic sexual drama, the barrage of tragedies, or the absorption with violence and tension, but like they do in all JCO books, these things fill a space worth exploring, even if they leave me feeling ambivalent and more than a little disturbed.

The Japanese Tourist: A review of Arresting God in Kathmandu by Samrat Upadhyay

Let's imagine that the literary scene in America was pretty quiet, and that Japanese was the international trade language, so Ray Carver learned Japanese and did his writing in Japanese.

You with me? Now, let's picture a Japanese tourist wandering into a bookstore in Los Angeles, wide-eyed about the glamour of Hollywood, the clash of ethnic groups, and the beautiful beaches and deserts he has seen. He loves how crazy America seems andwants to get a little more understanding of the country. He sees a copy of What We Talk about When We Talk about Love in his native language. Our tourist reads the rave reviews on the back, reads how well Carver captures American life, and purchases the book to read on the plane ride back to Tokyo.

What he discovers while he's in the air over the pacific is that Carver is pretty much copying some great Japanese writer with whom our tourist is already familiar, that the stories are about themes that have nothing to do with the America he witnessed during his travels, and that these themes are pretty much the normal day-to-day concerns of your average Japanese short story anyway. Disgusted, our Japanese tourist hurls the book out of the window of his plane (picturing this may require a little suspension of disbelief, but stay with me).

Now, let's assume that this Japanese tourist has a blog not unlike this very blog, where he responds in various ways to books, music, movies, and sumo wrestling matches. And he has been tasked with writing a review, and, upon further reflection, he wonders if maybe he should have given Carver a chance to do what Carver wanted to do, instead of reinforcing the wonder that this tourist felt about America.

My friends, after reading Arresting God in Kathmandu, I find myself in a very similar situation to this imaginary tourist.

I traveled to Nepal recently, and I spent a few days in Kathmandu before and after trekking to the base camp of Mount Everest. While in Kathmandu, I sought literature to help me understand and enjoy the culture I was witnessing. Samrat Uphadyay's collection of short stories seemed promising. However, in the air on my way back to Atlanta, I found the stories to be mostly like Carver's, except a little less good.

The writer spends very little time on the context for these characters. Absent are the lurid descriptions of Pashupati Temple or responses to the smog or the litter or examinations and riffs on the vibrant cultural whirlwind that I witnessed over there. Instead, I read straightforward accounts of Nepali people adrift in the face of sexual, family, and relational concerns.

Now, upon revisiting AGiK, I have to admit that I broke a basic rule to reading and responding to literature, which is to let it speak on its own terms first. I drowned the book in my own expectations, then discarded its breathless corpse.

Upon further review, I found stories which had a quiet kind of power to them. Upadhyay's tales rarely tell you what they are about. Instead, they paint understated portraits of characters suffering under massive emotional currents. I still found the writing style weak, but the characters and content took on new life once divorced from a tourist's expectations.

That said, I still don't really like these stories. But now for different, less prejudiced reasons. There are moving moments and keen observations, but overall, I just don't find the work that well-written or the stories particularly interesting.

Either way, I was glad for this book and the way it revealed the blinding power of my own context and expectations. I hope to find a book about Nepal that does the same thing, except leaves me more touched, challenged, and impressed at the end.

Classism vs. The Caste System: A Review of Fatalism and Development by Dor Bahadur Bista

While I was in Kathmandu on vacation, I asked the president of a local university if he could recommend any books. I felt enchanted and a little baffled by the social movements I saw around me. And the varieties of skin tone, appearance and religions suggested a storied history. Without hesitating, he offered me only one title. I immediately found the book, and as I asked other translators, missionaries, and teachers what I should be reading, they all recommended the same book.

You know that a book has something to say when the author disappears under mysterious circumstances soon after its publication. So it is with Dor Bahadar Bista's little critique of his homeland. In Fatalism and Development: Nepal's Struggle for Modernization, Bista searches through Nepali history to find the influences, patterns, and ideologies that make it so difficult for Nepal to meet the numerous challenges of adapting to a changing world.

What he turns up is fascinating. Bista suggests that despite numerous attempts by Indian immigrants, Nepal never fully adopted the caste system. Instead, it created a permeable set of classes with its own set of disadvantages. The main one being that once a Nepali makes it into political or economic power, he/she is taught to disdain work. So the resulting society has a group of wealthy leaders who, through a set of cultural loopholes and customs, don't do much work.

A lesson learned on this very blog in my review of Overnight suggests that when we receive our titles, when we get public approval, that's when we really need to get to work.

I am a fan of Nepali culture. I love the people of Kathmandu. But, as I read bits of this and other books by the light of my headlamp because of yet another power outage, I had to agree that the administration of the country could use some improvement.

I can't confirm or deny much of the material in the book because my entire time in Nepal consisted of about three weeks, but the study seemed to resonate with the patterns I saw around me. There may not be much here for your average reader, but for culture and history geeks, Nepal's developmental and political structures offer some compelling tensions.

To Sing His Praises: A review of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

I do not know my audience, so I have the privilege of imagining them. I'm sure that a few of my friends from Facebook pop over to my blog, shake their heads at the amount of time I spend reading, and go back to watching that Bed Intruder song on youtube.

The other three readers are subject to my imagination, so I create the readers I want. Readers who will foam at the mouth when I say that the great Borges himself was a fan of Flann O'Brien, and marveled at the labyrinthine masterpiece At Swim-Two-Birds. They will nod with respect when they hear that Graham Greene championed the unknown Irish writer, and they will gasp when they learn that James Joyce himself, the exalted one, the reinventor of the novel, the pope of Irish literature, was a big fan of Flann O'Brien.

In the course of this review, I have captivated this imaginary audience. They are hanging on, teeth clenched, knuckles white, noses running. It must be flu season in imaginaryland. The problem with such a well-versed audience is that they quickly become agitated. Their illness makes them irritable. Their wealth of literary knowlege runs away from me, and they become an angry swarm. Quickly, I placate them with a summary of The Third Policeman to keep them at bay while I think of what to say about the book.

An unnamed character, vague in personality and motivation, obsessed with an obscure thinker name DeSelby (who presents a theory and defense of the idea that the world is sausage-shaped instead of round), commits a murder for money. After hiding the loot, he returns for it, and finds himself in an increasingly bizarre, aggravating, and insane loop of events which turns out to be... You thought I was going to give it away, didn't you? Hah!

Reading O'Brien is watching a great mind move unafraid. There is dark humor, bright humor, slapstick, tragedy, and, ultimately, underneath it all, a kind of subdued horror at human absurdities.

I assume that during the course of reading this review, all of my imaginary readers, unable to resist their massive intellectual curiosity, have gone out and read the book. Wasn't it great?

And finally, after the last page is closed and we are all reeling from the sheer originality of this work, here's the shocker: This book was never published during O'Brien's lifetime. No publisher would accept it! O'Brien, admired by the kings of literature in his day, could not get a reading with the masses outside of his newspaper column, and The Third Policeman, arguably his masterpiece (although I'm partial to At Swim-Two-Birds), perished largely unread, and has only found an audience in recent years, as it was unearthed.

So here, imaginary readers, is the question we must ask ourselves: who are we overlooking in our day? Who deserves a reading, but isn't getting one? Who is the Flann O'Brien of our era? I send you forth with this charge: find her or him and bring the writer to me, that I may review her or his work and thus claim a little bit of the genius apparent there.

Out of Balance: A review of Rabbit, Run by John Updike

It is hard not to hate Harry Angstrom. It is hard to hate Harry Angstrom.

Harry Angstrom is the American man who refuses to be the American man. He is the Kerouac who pays, whose leavings take a toll. He is Rabbit, John Updike's most notorious protagonist, and it's hard to read his story without feeling ambivalent.

I should say first that I don't like Updike very much, despite the fact that he is undoubtedly a master stylist and an engineer of perfect sentences. David Foster Wallace called him one of the "Great Male Narcissists," a label that fits, and which could offer a hint as to whether or not you like his work.

I must also say that without Updike's popularization of the present tense narrative, my fiction writing would probably be very different.

But to the story at hand: Rabbit, Run concerns former star athlete Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit, who refuses to settle into his adult life. He sees its horror and flees, but finds it inescapable, so he runs, returns, runs, and returns.

He is simultaneously rich, full, blunt, obtuse, lustful, loving, and detestable. He's basically everything at once, which makes him pretty much nothing in any given situation. He flees his family to mate with a whore, turns his whore into a mother, then, well, in case you haven't read it, I won't say, but it's a cyclical thing, and Updike doesn't leave the cycle, merely points eloquently to its existence.

The thing that makes RR almost unbearable to me is Updike's obsession with sex. While it does indeed define the main character, I think it neuters many of the other themes of the story. Where my other favorite authors, Keillor, Doyle, Pynchon, and Joyce are able to fit sex in as part of the psychological landscape, Updike seems to place it on an altar at the expense of other truths swimming through his tales.

My complaint here is hard to state carefully, but I think there's some merit to it. Reading Updike is like listening to music where the guitars are turned up so loud you can't hear the singer. Or like watching a movie where the reds are so saturated that they drown out the other colors. In Rabbit, Run, the sex is so prominent and definitive that Harry Angstrom becomes a part of its landscape instead of it being part of his. The same was true of Terrorist, the only other Updike novel I have read, an otherwise perfectly plotted book where the sex seemed grotesquely unnecessary and overplayed.

So I agree with those who assess Updike as a master of the English language, a prose architect, and an incisive examiner of the middle class. But his stories come off as phallic odes instead of well-rounded stories. And, as a result, they end up feeling grotesque and a bit cold to me.

In short stories with sex as the subject, Updike shines, but the theme gets stretched a little thin in longer form, as it did in Terrorist and Rabbit, Run. However, I still intend to read all the Rabbit novels. So my opinion, as always, remains open to influence.