Recently Reviewed Books…
Winter Journal by Paul Auster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In the hands of a writer, and an accomplished one at that, even the most mundane life can come alive in dramatic quality. And this memoir, written in the winter of Paul Auster’s 64th year, brings into focus not only the author’s life but also Boomer life over that time period.
I recently read Lessons by Ian McEwan, a fictionalized account of that author’s 70 plus years on the planet, and Auster’s journal has a resemblance, in that both authors seem determined to gain immortality by leaving a record of their life activities, whether fictionalized or real, in the public domain.
Winter Journal is narrated in second person, a challenging yet convenient device, because the names of other people need not be mentioned; they only need to be described as “your wife,” “your father”, “your neighbour” etc,. There is no chronology of time here, but one of memory, each scene being recorded as and when they recur to him. Yet, we are able to piece together Auster’s life journey as a career writer: the eldest child in a lonely childhood spent with distant or domineering parents and a schizophrenic sister; escape from school and family into a peripatetic existence on board ships, in Paris for a few years, and back to New York living in hovels in order to write; early struggles writing poetry and dabbling in journalism for minimal pay; a starter marriage that also had many false starts; a breakout book that leads to a different kind of life and an established career with a second writer-wife; the death of parents; facing one’s demons and looming mortality. This is also the typical boomer life path, irrespective of the industry we work in.
Auster is constantly dodging crippling anxiety attacks, yet, like Dickens, walks to shake off his demons and for literary inspiration. He is sexually unrestrained in his youth (weren’t we all in the hippie ’60/70s?) making out with strangers in planes and contracting STDs in strange places. To his support, the uncertainty of life may have been a driver: his grandfather was murdered by his grandmother, his mother dropped dead of a heart attack at 77 and his father of the same ailment at 66, his friend was struck dead by a lightning bolt at 14. These events may have led to his favourite theme of “Chance” that plays so heavily in his fiction. He is therefore unafraid to explore the darker side of humanity and dives into illness and dying without pulling punches.
A few sequences in this disjointed narrative are explored in greater depth than others: the descriptions of the many houses he has lived in provides another incisive picture of his life trajectory; the lamentation on the death of his mother explores the inherent sadness that accompanies him; the meditation on his hands takes us through the many milestones in his life. The itemization of the number of times he could have been killed by a random accident – swallowing a fish bone, knocking his head in a fall et al – is possibly another reason for Auster’s pre-occupation with Chance.
A few philosophical gems are dropped along the way, and I find these important when coming from writers of Auster’s eminence:
“The question of race can only bring dishonour to the person asking it.”
“Panic is the expression of mental flight.”
“One must die lovable.”
There is no dialogue in this journal, and Auster must be glad, for he is not a very dialogue- intensive writer, even in his fiction. Given that we can never reproduce dialogue as it really happened in a memoir, the “telling” works well for this book and renders it more authentic.
This book is an affirmation to boomers that, warts and all, they lived during a great moment in history, one that has vanished now as social media and other technological developments have driven us into a surveillance society where freedoms have been lost instead of enhanced.
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Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
An unusual view into the black experience in America, from that of the intellectual, college educated man rather than from the stereotypical slave or his recently emancipated brother.
The Invisible Man (IM), our nameless Southern Black narrator, lives in his head most of the time, trying to make sense of his existence, even when in the height of danger, hence the book is longer than it should be as we have to constantly accommodate his mental gymnastics. He gains entry to a black state college after winning a competition which he describes in a dream where candidates box on an electrified mat, fighting for a reward of coins. IM believes in black-white co-operation, while his grandfather, a liberated slave, warns of white betrayal. He takes a white benefactor of the college, Mr. Norton, on a tour of the neighborhood, and ends up exposing him to a black sharecropper who has impregnated both his wife and daughter; they then wind up at the Golden Day, a bar full of shell-shocked black vets who give Norton a telling off for his race’s blindness and duplicity, rendering the white man ill from overexposure to stark black reality and anger. For overstepping his bounds and bringing shame upon the black community, IM is punished by his headmaster, Dr. Bledsoe, another servile black man to his white patrons, but a dictator within the school.
IM does various jobs in New York and learns that the black man is “the machine within the machines” that keeps the white man’s world working, yet blacks are not united and fight among themselves. One such fight lands him in hospital and exposes him to rounds of electroshock therapy that makes him a new man; he even forgets his name. Now he is able to speak his truth, powered by fear and anger. He is drawn to the Brotherhood of Man, a mixed-race organization “working for a better world for all people.” His gift of oratory – low on substance, high on emotion – makes him their spokesperson, and lands him a job as a fellow Brother in charge of the Harlem district. Yet, he senses that there is dissension in the Brotherhood, jealousy over his popularity on the street, and he is excluded from the grander strategy of the organization, although, for the first time, he finds purpose in his life and is no longer invisible. He senses attempts of entrapment when white women lure him into their bedrooms, but the call of his loins renders him unable to avoid such temptations.
When he is accused of overreach and transferred, pending an investigation into his conduct, all hell breaks loose in his district and a giant race riot erupts, forcing IM into the grim reality that he is still invisible, still a pawn in a much larger game. Despite IM’s desire that everyone be equal, his grandfather’s philosophy is still alive – you can’t trust the white man. IM retreats into a cellar, and into true invisibility.
Key scenes are too long: the boxing match; the sharecropper’s tale about his sexual peccadillos with his wife and daughter; Norton at the Golden Day; Barbee’s eulogy to the founder of the black college, IM’s tryst with Sybil, the race riot, and many more. Yet metaphors and symbols compensate: the inscription on the briefcase IM wins for gaining entry into college, “Keep the Nigger Boy Running”; Brother Tarp’s leg-link that IM uses as an ornament and a weapon; Brother Clifton selling Sambo dolls; the evicted couple on the sidewalk that kickstarts IM’s career with the Brotherhood; the red-headed woman giving IM hell for trying to use her garbage pail; the syphilitic man begging; Ras the Exhorter turned Destroyer astride his horse and armed with a spear; white Brother Jack’s revealed glass eye suggesting his lack of insight into the problems of Harlem blacks; Rinehart, the only successful black because of his ability to shapeshift between being a pastor, a numbers man, a ladies’ man, and a thug.
A lot of is left hanging: what happened with the investigation into IM’s overreach – was he found guilty or innocent? Did the white women he had sex with betray him? And what was the Brotherhood’s grand strategy that led them to sacrifice Harlem? And despite IM’s pledge to rise from the cellar and strike back at the white man in Rinehart-like style, we are left waiting for that to happen.
We take away that just as IM sits in his cellar, illuminated by 1369 lights—another symbol for healing and self-care—the black problem will remain unresolved, and the black man will remain invisible in the white man’s world, just like wiser people such as Grandpa, the mad vets, and Ras had predicted.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Stories by unknown author
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The best ten percent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s more than 160 short stories he wrote during his short life. His untimely passing robbed us of a deeper and broader view of the jazz age, and the opportunity to see how it would have been treated beyond WWII through the author’s literary lens.
Jazz age types are caricaturist: young, privileged, class-conscious, hedonistic, self-indulgent – not unlike our social media types today, just with more primitive technology. Their time is spent at golf clubs, country homes, and parties, lubricated with plenty of booze. Despite their material wealth and station, they are deeply unhappy. Alcoholism, boredom, and mental ill-health plague them. They are trapped in a social fishbowl where reputations can be broken by being seen with the wrong man or woman not of their class. Financial ruin sits on their shoulder. Suicides will take place if reputations are compromised.
Some of the stories are macabre, some religious, some sad, others fantasist – all have edge. One even goes back to the sixteenth century when a famous bard acts like a jazz-ager. Fitzgerald is anal about descriptions – of setting, clothes, interior décor, and nature. His omniscient narrator takes firm hold of the characters and marshals them about each story. His writing style preceded the writing schools, so there is a lot of repeated words and unnecessarily long sentences, and the language is archaic (after all, his stories were written nearly 100 years ago) – when he says “making love” (which he does often), it is not what you and I mean. A couple could be taking a walk in the park and making love at the same time – a figure of speech for “wooing,” I think it was.
I won’t cover all the stories, which average about twenty pages in length. But a couple of the longer ones that stand out are “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” both which I would classify in the fantasy or speculative fiction categories; they ask questions of how we would behave if certain counter-natural occurrences took place. In the first story, a man discovers a mountain made up of solid diamond, making him, by far, the richest man who will ever live on earth, and yet it is a fortune that his progeny will not be able to hold onto, another version of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, I thought. In the second story, which was made into a movie, a man is born at the biblical age of “three score and ten” (70) and ages backwards; his best years are his middle ones when he is on par with his peers, but at either ends of his “aging” there is nothing but alienation and ostracization – a metaphor for the outsider.
Fitzgerald comes up with great lines that encapsulate the jazz age and its characters:
“At 18, our convictions are hills from which we live; at 45, they are caverns in which we hide.”
“Every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge.”
“Deep pain is only reserved for the strong.”
“I’m more beautiful than anyone else. Why can’t I be happy?”
“His was a great sin who first invented consciousness.”
Shades of Gatsby appear in the final story in this collection, titled “The Rich Boy,” in which despite all the partying, money, and “making love,” the protagonist is left loveless and alone because he is not able to love anyone else but himself – a symptom of the jazz age which has amplified in our present time.
Coming up for Air by George Orwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“You can never go back” is the moral of this tale of a middle-class, WWI veteran who returns to his childhood home to recapture a world that had been safer and more predictable, only to find the opposite. In this seemingly innocuous, mildly humorous, extremely detailed account of life between the two world wars, Orwell paints us a picture of the Lost Generation.
George Bowling is an insurance salesman, 45, fat with false teeth, married with two children, living in suburbia where all the houses look the same and everyone engages in predictable activities. It is 1938 and the clouds of war are gathering again, and George predicts 1941 to be the year of conflagration – he is being generous, unknowingly. His wife, Hilda, is a worry wort when it comes to household expenses and suspicious of his on-the-road affairs, his children are a pain in the ass, and he is fed up with this miserable existence that only holds the promise of an early death.
On his day off from work to get a new set of false teeth, he has an extensive recollection of his life, of growing up in Lower Binfield where his father owned a grain store. He had two passions as a teenager – fishing and reading – both of which he had to give up as the demands of life claimed him: to get a job at 16 when his father fell upon hard times, to join the war at 19, to get injured two years later and sit out the rest of the conflict guarding a food supply on the west-coast that no one wanted, although at this last posting he got to read extensively again as there was nothing else to do. Sales jobs followed in peacetime culminating in the insurance job held for 18 years, marriage in 1923, followed by life in suburbia where he gradually gave up on dreams and started to put on the weight. His marriage is moribund; Hilda who came from the penniless Anglo-Indian officer class, only wanted to trap a husband, then let herself go, and worry about the bills they had to pay, thereby kiboshing every leisure initiative George came up with. “We can’t afford 10 bob for a fishing rod, George!”
George decides to take a trip down memory lane. He concocts an excuse to put Hilda off the scent and takes a week’s vacation to Lower Binfield to recapture his safer and happier past. He is in for a surprise and a disappointment. The village of 2000 is now a town of 25,000. Housing sprawl is everywhere. His former girlfriend Elsie is a hag who can’t recognize him, and his old fishing holes are littered with naturists or turned into garbage dumps. He beats a retreat home to concoct a new excuse for the wily Hilda who has blown his alibi.
The level of memory recall that Orwell draws from is impressive; every hue, smell, texture, and sound of that period is on display in his detailed descriptions. His social and political observations are at their sharpest. George Bowling sees no future for himself or England. He worries more about what comes after a war – the streamlining, as he calls it. George sees fear keeping people in jobs – fear of bosses and customers; everything is made from something else like manufactured goods; he can’t even get it on with women anymore – who would want a fat man with false teeth? And yet he has been a mean man too: he dumped Elsie when it was convenient for him; as a child, he broke birds’ nests and stamped on the chicks, he blew up frogs with an inflator until they burst; and as a husband, he cheated on Hilda until he got fat. George is truly a specimen of the Lost Generation. Unlike Hemingway and Fitzgerald who tried to elevate the heroism of this cohort, albeit tragically, Orwell makes no bones about displaying their ineptness and hopelessness.
This is not one of my better Orwell books. The pacing is slow, the conflict moderate, and the humour is muted. And yet it captures the essence of an entire generation, one that has been lost behind others (The Greatest Generation, the Boomers et al) who have dominated recent literature.
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Zone One by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Even though I am a fan of Colson Whitehead, this book reveals that a dystopian, speculative novel can run into trouble when given the full literary treatment.
We follow three days in the life of Mark Spitz (not his real name but one given because he couldn’t swim), an average guy turned into a survivor when a virus infects humanity. The afflicted turn into flesh-eating zombies (nicknamed skels), others die of the infection and are frozen in the spot (nicknamed stragglers) – no explanation is given as to why each behaves that way. The world has been divided into the afflicted and the survivors – the latter who live in camps behind walls protected by the military that shoot skels on sight – and sweepers who clean out buildings by doing the same to stragglers. The dead are packed in body bags and dumped on the street to be taken away by the horse-drawn Disposal unit and deposited in large incinerators that spew the landscape with ash.
Why has this cataclysm occurred? The author gets off an indirect, moralistic explanation: “The human race deserved the plague, we brought it upon ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species into extinction: the entire collapse of values as evidenced by everything from nuclear fission to reality television to alternate side of the street parking.”
The survivors have a memory of the Last Night when the world changed. Mark survived by foraging on his own for the period known as the Interregnum when the world adjusted to the new normal, before joining a sweeper unit of three, named Omega, during the period called American Phoenix (the reconstruction) and being posted to Zone One, a subsection of New York City encompassing Chinatown. The Government has shifted to Buffalo. New York is the hope for the new world; if they can get the city running as normal again, it will be a beacon for the world to come out of this plague.
And so, we follow Mark and his colleagues, Kaitlyn and Gary, as they clean up office towers, strip malls, houses, and roads of stragglers, heavily suited in Hazmats and wary of a bite from an infected one that will force them to join the other team. Between these episodic peregrinations through Zone One, the Omega members recount and mourn the loss of their normal lives before the Last Night. Their family members are dead or unaccounted for, relationships are now transient as a partner could go missing or die while out foraging for food or on sweeper duty. And everyone is suffering from PASD (Post Apocalypse Stress Disorder) – in other words, 100% of the world is mad. Survivors suddenly commit suicide as a result.
The American Phoenix is under threat because as much as the camps are walled in and secure, the bridges and tunnels in and out of Manhattan are unprotected and troop supplies are stretched.
There is a lot of world-building here, and Whitehead does not make it easy for the reader, for there is no chronology of events and descriptions are indirect, literary, and couched in dense prose. Kaitlyn’s background is described as: “Kaitlyn’s native herd had grazed on the sweet berries of gentility. She had been bioengineered in the birthing vats of a sanctified mid-western principality, an upper-middle-class Kingdom of Bruiselessness.” Why not just say “Kaitlyn was an upper-middle-class, sheltered kid”? Therefore, this otherwise thrilling novel wades through many unnecessary words, obfuscatory sentences, and fragmented scenes and flashbacks, making reading difficult. In the middle of an attack by five skels, with one zombie about to chomp his neck off, Mark Spitz has a lengthy flashback that destroys the tension of the attack scene.
Given the bleak dystopia we are in, characters are not fleshed out (pardon the pun), other than for Mark, death is random, relationships are fleeting, and personal survival is topmost. There is also no storyline unless it is deemed to be “Three Days in the Life of Mark Spitz, with flashbacks.”
Without giving the end away, let me say that it was inconclusive. We are not sure which side will prevail, and whether Mark Spitz will live long enough to learn to swim.
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