Tag: Books

The Marriage Plot

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The Marriage Plot:

Its the early 1980s — the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to the Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.

As Madeleine tries to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth century France, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead–charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy — suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old “friend Mitchell Grammaticus — whos been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange — resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biologicy laboratory on Cape Cod, but cant escape the secret responsible for Leonards seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Summary from Powells.com

Last night, in a fit of momentum and a fair bit of insomnia, I finished Jeffrey Eugenides’ new book The Marriage Plot. I really enjoyed his previous book Middlesex, and all of the advance press that I read about the book led me to believe that I would like it (I know we’re not supposed to like books set on college campuses about declining upper-crust society, but there it is). Once I decide to read a book, I try and ignore reviews until after I finish it, so I only got bits and pieces of information about the book, so when I started reading, this is the information I had in hand:

  1. The characters within the novel are embedded in the semiotics/lit crit scene at Brown University in the 80’s.
  2. There’s a love triangle.
  3. The book contains a marriage plot, and is at least a little self-referential.

All of those things are true, but only up to a point. I was worried that the novel would be partially closed to me because I haven’t read Derrida/Eco/Barthes, and so any subtext involving the clime of life in an 80’s English department would go over my head. But while I think the specificity of Eugenides descriptions of syllabi and coursework and thoughts help fix the novel in time (and other references, like the brands of beer the college students drink and the music that they listen to ring true), I don’t think you have to have lived through that time to appreciate and understand his characters. That being said, it is set during the college years of our current crop of publishers and critics, so I can understand why they might overemphasize the novelty of seeing your past dramatized in such a detailed way.

And there is indeed a love triangle, but as with the semiotics, is not that important to the plot. More important is the concept of the marriage plot. In his interview with KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt, Eugenides explains that he was intrigued by the idea that shifting norms of love and marriage could render the marriage plot obsolete, and he wanted to write a marriage plot novel set in a (nearly) contemporary setting. It was only in the last  hundred pages or so that I realized that the novel is a bit of a puzzle. It wants you to be thinking about the conventions of the marriage plot, and is in dialog with it. The college setting, the changes in literary criticism of the time, these are all secondary. And that simultaneously impressed me, and took a little away from my enjoyment of the novel.

This book is its characters. In contrast to Middlesex, which had characters that were shadows of family destiny, or unwitting products of the past (a kind of Midwestern magic realism), the characters of The Marriage Plot are nothing but themselves. So when you encounter a passage, such as the heavy-handed but extremely clever ending, that reminds you that these characters are just pieces in that puzzle, it can’t help but to dampen your enthusiasm for them and work against all of the craftsmanship that Eugenides puts into making you fall in love with them.

I did like the book. It gets way deeper into it’s character’s heads than Eugenides did in  Middlesex, and his representation of bipolar disorder is heartbreaking and rings true. Although Middlesex is also pretty high-concept and has characters that are bound to a carefully constructed plot, it still feels a little more human and deeper than The Marriage Plot.

I’ve stayed away from spoiling the plot, but please drop a comment if you’ve read the novel, or if you think I’m completely wrong.

a bit of irresponsible commentary

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
Haruki Murakami

I’m working through Haruki Murakami’s  Wind Up Bird Chronicles for the first time. Strike that. Let’s not oversell it; I’m a few pages into WUBC. Flipping past the numerous reviews of the recent 1Q84 impressed upon me two things: 1. Murakami is a genius, etc. 2 1Q84 was probably not a great introduction to his work*.

*On the other hand, I sometimes perversely wonder whether the best way to be introduced to a great master is through their least-regarded work. There’s always the chance that the experience will be so bad it will turn you off forever, but if it doesn’t then every new work is better than the last.

And really, it’s far too early for me to be giving any sort of opinions on the work. I’m literally like 10 pages in. One thing I can say is that I’m enjoying the similarities between Murakami’s work and that of one of my current favorite writers, David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet)*.

*Murakami’s such a well known and beloved figure that it’s probably meaningless to say that any writer is “familiar” with his work, but I would put money down on the fact that Mitchell–who has set several of his works in Japan–has consciously modeled his style on him.

One of the thing that I’m sensing about Murakami is that he, like Mitchell, likes to play with the idea of characters that are both completely specific and completely symbolic. These characters are just slightly larger than life, but not so much as to disrupt a sense of reality. This frees the writer to write in a style that’s a little more plot-centric while remaining in the realm of literary fiction without becoming banal. It’s the strategy that ties Murakami’s pop-culture references and hints at magic realism, and Mitchell’s polyvocality and postmodernism together. Characters that are complete archetypes, that in a less ambitious work would be stock, are given weight by the knowledge that all of their actions carry subtext, and that for all the emphasis on narrative and plot there is another story also being explored.

Translating Lem

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I was shocked to discover that Stanislaw Lem’s classic science fiction novel, Solaris has never before been translated directly from Polish to English:

The first ever direct translation into English of the Polish science fictionauthor Stanislaw Lem’s most famous novel, Solaris, has just been published, removing a raft of unnecessary changes and restoring the text much closer to its original state.

Telling of humanity’s encounter with an alien intelligence on the planet Solaris, the 1961 novel is a cult classic, exploring the ultimate futility of attempting to communicate with extra-terrestrial life. The only English edition to date is Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox’s 1970 version, which was translated from a French version which Lem himself described as poor.

Now Bill Johnston, a professor at Indiana University, has produced the first Polish-English translation of the novel. It has just been published as an audiobook download by Audible, narrated by Battlestar Galactica’s Alessandro Juliani, with an ebook to follow in six months’ time. Lem’s heirs are hoping to overcome legal issues to release it as a print edition as well.

The reason why I, and I imagine most, know of Solaris is through its 1972 movie adaptation of the same name. That film is regarded as a cinema classic, and it is astonishing to me that a book, both highly esteemed as a classic of mature science fiction and as the inspiration for another classic piece of art, managed to escape for so long (50 years!) without a proper English translation. The rest of the Guardian article makes clear that the mistakes in the translation are far from esoteric; in the game-of-telephone translation dialogue was reduced to narration, scientific points were reduced to gibberish, and a couple of passages came to mean the opposite of the corresponding passage in the Polish original.

Because I have a near-comic inability to keep myself from tying everything to classical music, I want to draw attention to a Bach organ prelude that appears several times in the 1972 Solaris. The prelude is Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (I call to you, lord Jesus Christ); it appears in the opening credits, at the end of the film, and I believe once more in the course of the film. The video I’m embedding is actually a piano transcription by Ferruccio Busoni. Vladimir Horowitz is the pianist.

Infinite Jest: Part One

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

Year of Glad

The familiar panic at being misperceived is rising, and my chest bumps and thuds.

I am not what you see and hear.

There’s an amazing moment in the 1997 Charlie Rose interview that I’ve embedded above (transcript). Rose and David Foster Wallace have been chatting about academia and balancing writing with teaching, and Rose suggests that the reception of Infinite Jest has given Wallace the literary respect that he has been seeking. Wallace is visibly uncomfortable with that suggestion, and after ambivalently disagreeing for a couple of minutes, says “A lot of people hadn’t had time to read the book yet. So the stuff about me or interesting rumors that developed about the book and all that stuff getting attention — I found that — I didn’t like that very much just because I wanted people to write — to read the book. I’m sorry that I’m essentially stuttering.” To which Rose responds, ” No, you’re not. You’re doing just fine.”

That essential fear of communication, of desiring so much to express oneself to another while being paralyzed by the possibility of misunderstanding, is the central dynamic in this first section. The overwhelming horror that the three admissions officers have towards Hal’s personal statements are so over the top that the section becomes a darkly comic piece of absurdity. I think the episode in the interview shows that this “familiar panic at being misperceived” was something familiar to Wallace, and it’s hard for me not to read this section as Wallace’s personal nightmare. It also makes me think of my first times being under the influence of, say, alcohol. Because the self-control of intemperance was something new to me, I was paranoid that, even though the people I was with could hear and understand the words I was saying, nobody was understanding what I wanted to communicate. Social situations, especially new situations, give me some anxiety at being misunderstood, but it’s rare that it approaches the level described by Wallace through the eyes of Hal.

I think this section has some broad social implications as well. In the past couple of years, as internet communication has become more democratized, we’ve seen countless episodes that play out this conflict between communication and misunderstanding in public. Teenagers spreading embarrassing texts and pictures of each other. The ACORN video. Shirley Sherrod. NPR’s Vivian Schiller. Digging up politician’s college theses for provocative statements. And this has given rise to a whole industry trafficking in false communication speaking a false language. Politically incorrect public statements and emotionally neutral non-apologies. David Letterman interviewing Paris Hilton. Press releases apologizing for a star’s transgressions. We have more venues for wide-spread and instantaneous communication than ever before in human history. But with this freedom of communication comes a greater fear of one’s words being taken out of context. This can lead us to withdraw, to stop trying to communicate for fear of misunderstanding. At that moment, our more advanced communication tools actually impede true communication and human connection.

Stray Observations

  • Hal’s narration is clearly stylized and not-naturalistic. His vocabulary is absurdly tortured and his syntax convoluted (though probably grammatically correct). It throws off my perception of the character. Hal’s uncle is unquestionably presented as a buffoon, and yet all of that character’s linguistic tics (“And let me say if I may that Hal’s excited, excited to be invited for the third year running to the Invitational again, to be back here in a community he has real affection for, to visit with your alumni and coaching staff, to have already justified his high seed in this week’s not unstiff competition, to as they say still be in it without the fat woman in the Viking hat having sung, so to speak, but of course most of all to have a chance to meet you gentlemen and have a look at the facilities here.”) are also present, to a lesser degree, in Hal.
  • I’m going to interpret Hal’s annoying use of “de moi” to be a sign of pseudo- something.
  • I’m not sure how to take Hal’s characterization of the Director of Composition as “effeminate.” That word is almost always used as a pejorative, and frequently as code for gay. The effeminate academic cowering and jealous of the independent, masculine writer is a trope from Hemingway to Bukowski to Mailer. It just doesn’t seem to jibe with what I know of DFW.
  • At one point, Hal mentions that he thinks that Dennis Gabor is the Antichrist. Wikipedia tells me that Dennis Gabor was the inventor of hologram technology. This delights me to no end. Of couse Gabor would be the antichrist in a setting in which holographic transmissions are the dominant media form! It’s one of the early example of DFW world-building and differentiating the setting of his book from our own present.
  • Hal makes reference to a retired Venus Williams coming to watch his match the next day. Wikipedia sleuthing tells me that Williams was 16 at the time that Infinite Jest was published. That’s an impressive bit of prophecy on Wallace’s part.

new Vocabulary:

  • Wen: a boil or sebaceous cyst.
  • Kekuléan: refers to Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, the organic chemist who discovered the chemical structure of benzene. He supposedly came upon this structure after seeing a ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail.
  • Lapidary: a phrase engraved in stone or of suitable for engraving.
  • Presbyopia: farsightedness caused by loss of elasticity in the lens. Usually presents in middle age.
  • Parquet: wooden flooring made by geometrically arranged blocks.
  • Enfilade: a volley of gunfire directed in a straight line, end to end.
  • Espadrille: a light canvas shoe with a plaited fiber sole.
  • Martinet: a strict disciplinarian, especially in military context.
  • Etiology: the cause or set of causes of a disease or condition.

The Hunger Games Trilogy

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

1. i am getting old

I’m only 20 years old. That makes me 3 years out of high school, 7 years out of middle school. Although it feels like ages ago…it really wasn’t. And yet I found out about the Hunger Games phenomenon from the A.V. Talk podcast, which is only one or two steps away from finding out about teen culture trends from Newsweek or The New York Times. Their opinion of the book (they were discussing the third in the trilogy, Mockingjay) was that it was grimmer than any other YA series that they had encountered before. I was intrigued, so I picked up the first book.

Aside: I’m really not in a position to know how popular these books are in the middle/high school set, but there must be someone interested, because the Wikipedia page on The Hunger Games universe is absurdly detailed.

2. plot & reading experience

Wikipedia has a perfectly adequate summary of the trilogy’s plot.

What it doesn’t tell you is that the book is super fast paced, even though it doesn’t always avoid the YA sins of simultaneous over- and under-explanation, characters that grasp the situation they are in far later than the reader does, and character interactions that read like stalling for time (Don’t worry. It’s no Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). It reads like crack. I waited a couple of days after buying the book to start reading it, but from the time that I opened the cover of the first book, I didn’t stop reading until the end of the third book. I don’t live close to a bookstore, so I ended up buying a Kindle edition of the second book rather than waiting a day to get a physical copy or go to the library. Thankfully, my sister owned the third book.

3. the truly unique

Probably the strongest feature of the novel, as well as its most original element, is the character of the protagonist, Katniss. Her character incorporates features common in female (“mother” to younger sibling, knowledge of healing plants, in the position of choosing between two males, deep sense of responsibility and affinity with community) and male (physically dominant, ideologically pure, angered by injustice) YA protagonists, but something about the mixture of them within this character feels…fresh. Katniss’ cynicism (which I’ll talk about later) that develops throughout the trilogy works within a tone that usually falls outside YA literature–I can’t think of another book that has anything like it.

Everything else kind of falls into the category of “things I’ve encountered elsewhere.” The elements certainly haven’t been assembled together like this before, but each one taken separately is like a paraphrase of another work. The prose is workmanlike and otherwise undistinguished. Moments of cynicism feel earned, moments of grief are unconvincing.

4. a brief detour through nerd city

One feature of the book that never ceased being ridiculous is its worldbuilding. Yes, I do understand that it sounds like the most cliché complaint ever (demographics of magic families in Harry Potter? thermodynamics of The Matrix?) but seriously, the worldbuilding in this series is wack. I don’t even need to nitpick; some features of this world are so patently stupid and dysfunctional that I was almost convinced that the book was meant to be allegorical. Some easy examples: Demographics: The book explicitly states that it takes place in the land of the former United States of America, that has been divided into a Capitol state and thirteen Districts (Get it?! How about now?!). District 12, where our protagonist is from, is supposed to be in the former Virginias, yet the entire population of the area fits in a single town square (I think the figure 8,000 for the district is thrown out, yet I can’t be sure) and lives close enough by to get there easily for a district meeting. Other districts are mentioned as being bigger, however even if you allowed for districts many orders of magnitude bigger than District 12, that would put a population the size of Connecticut throughout the entirety of North America. Politics: The government within the world is so lazily sketched out that it’s almost not worth mentioning, but it seems to be at different times dictatorship, constitutional democracy, and China-style central committee controlled. It doesn’t make sense in any plane of reality close to ours. Economics: the entirety of the Virginias only produce food for their district and coal. All of California produces food for their district, fish and seafood. It’s stupid.

But surely this doesn’t matter, right? I’ve already said that the writing was like crack, and none of these details affect the main plotline. Well, yes, except that the central character motivation that drives the plot is that this is a completely evil system that must be destroyed. And it’s hard to take that motivation seriously when it’s obvious that the system would destroy itself in about two weeks.

5. but what does it mean?

One thing that I found myself asking as I read these books was what does it mean that such a dark, cynical dystopia appeals to such a mass audience of teens. Some teen tropes–like the love triangle that this series has in common with the Twilight series–are fairly easy to understand. But if this series is escapism, I’m not clear on what its readers are escaping from, or to.

I can understand the desire for your life and decisions to have greater meaning. I think that’s probably why I enjoyed so many books where children are put into life and death situations when I was younger, from Gary Paulson’s Hatchet to Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. And that element is certainly present in the Hunger Games book; Katniss is fighting not only for her sister, not only for her community, but for the whole of the society.  I don’t know what it means that the society that Katniss lives in is cartoonishly evil (at one point it’s established that the evil President Snow’s breath smells like blood). There are some superficial attempts at contemporary social satire, from its character’s beliefs about class dynamics to it’s presentation of an obsessive media culture.

Are young readers resonating with the depiction of rebellion against the social order? Do they believe that our society is that diseased, that unbalanced? Is it simply a desire for a simpler, more good-and-evil world to live in, to escape the unsatisfactory choices that most of us make in a world where almost everything is at least partly evil and partly good?

Of course, it could be that young readers just like a good yarn, but it seems like there is a pretty passionate fanbase, and fans usually don’t become passionate for a work that only has a good plot.