Cleaning Up the Subjunctive: A Review of Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

Some months ago, I sat in the back of a taxi racing through Kathmandu and listened to an Evangelical leader bemoan contemporary grammar in secular America. "As a writer, you'll appreciate this," he told me, before launching into a eulogy for the subjunctive tense. At the time, I did not have a clear understanding of what that was. I nodded, under the spell of jet lag and wanting to focus on the city passing by my window rather than engage in a conversation on a topic where I had a hunch the guy was misinformed or under some idealogical skew.

The subjunctive, which is basically a hypothetical tense (as in "if there were...") I think he was trying to say, had fallen out of currency because this current generation (my generation, although he probably thought I was in his corner), was unable to imagine or believe in anything but the noise that surrounded them (us).

The conversation lingered in my mind, not because I agreed with what the guy was saying, but because he gave me more credit than I deserved, and then said something that I had a hunch I disagreed with. It was a conversation left dangling, and I rarely let those be.

A few months later, I was reading Thomas Pynchon's historical reimagination, Mason & Dixon, and I noted the use of the word "Subjunctive," and a fairly substantial meditation on it. The word is used a few times in the book, which takes place before the revolutionary war in the colonies that would evolve into the United States, fracture again, and then reunite, leaving some discontented Confederates to echo down through the generations.

It struck me as I read the book that here was a novel from the nineties, mining and critiquing the use of the subjunctive! It was looking back at ideals yet to be formed, when America was pretty much a subjunctive idea, a beautiful hypothesis, an unexplored frontier, an unfought war.

As I plowed through the book and wrestled with the gap between Pynchon's imagined New World and the tumultuous America around me today, I began thinking on the so-called disappearance of the subjunctive. Maybe it is the result of an intentional shift of ideas, and maybe it's not so bad, if we are still aware of and willing to interact with the tense.

This thought sprung out of my reading of the book, and it has yet to be fully formed, but I thought that it would be worth mentioning here: Maybe my generation's failure, or refusal, to speak in terms of imaginations or what ifs comes from the fact that we see a dark cloud of unheeded fact that needs to be dealt with first. And perhaps it is our shortcoming, or perhaps it is a necessary step in the shattering and rebuilding of dreams that did not include the people or movements that we see around us.

I'm not trying to be all gloomy, but Mason & Dixon did a good job of pointing out the fallacies planted in the American Dream from its inception, and many of us are wondering if all the subjunctive terms used to describe our utopia need to be reimagined.

So, in the interest of not sounding like I'm hanging on some generational pendulum, I will say that there is room for imagination, for the subjunctive, in our language today, but as we are all learning (thank the mighty internet) as we connect with those who have been overlooked or even actively abused in pursuit of an imagined future, it is time to do so with a little more care.

To the writers and thinkers of my generation, I say, use your subjunctives with great care, and dream new dreams carefully, knowing that you only have part of the narrative.

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.