The elements of a literary ghost story

Just to prove (or at least in part to prove) that I don't disapprove of all ghost stories - only those in which ghosts are used as a device to close narrative gaps - I started reading a classic ghost story, Susan Hill's The Woman in Black (1983). The trick w/ any good ghost story is to get the skeptics to buy in - and that's best done, as here (see also the great James' class Turn of the Screw) via a frame narrative, generally told by someone "like us," i.e., I never believed in ghosts until ...  In this novel, the narrator is a middle-aged lawyer, gathered w/ his family - (2nd) wife Esme, her four adult children, plus some (3 boys?) grandchildren - for an xmas gathering at his how in rural, isolated south of London. The adult children begin a game of telling ghost stories one night, which seems to freak out the narrator, who retreats, then crossly says he won't play along. That evening he pledges to himself to write out his experience w/ ghosts and to keep it sealed until after his death - so that's the narrative we're reading, which begins when he is a young atty., engaged to the woman who will become his first wife, and he's sent off to the remote waterlands NE of London where he's to close out an estate of a woman who left no family or friends. En route and in the small village near her home he is rebuffed every time he tries to inquire about her strangeness. At her funeral, he sees the eponymous woman in black, who looks to be about 30 and seriously ill w/ a "wasting disease." It's not clear if others see her at all, but when he mentions her to the local agent he sets off a fright and a panic. Against all recommendations, he insists on going to the woman's house, alone (and it's cut off from the mainland by high tides) to go through her paperwork. Se we have the classic set-up: the strange person in the village, the specter seen but not acknowledged by anybody else, the warnings disregarded, the approach to an isolated, inaccessible locale, and I will add to this that Hill's writing is quite good, including some really fine descriptions of remote landscapes and of London steeped in fog - this novel is much more "literary" in style than the typical work of this genre. She's obviously steeped in the Bronte style.

Provoctive story about workplace sexual harassment in the New Yorker

Last week's issue of the New Yorker ran an unconventional #Metoo story, Ways and means, by Sana Krasikov - a credible and complex story about an incident of sexual harassment in a public radio station somewhere in the Midwest. The story centers on a 30-something woman, Hal, working as a sound engineer at the station who learns to her dismay that the long-time radio host, a 60+ man named Oliver, has been dismissed because of a report of harassment. Over the course of this (relatively) long story, Sana meets w/ and has several conversations w/ Oliver, as we gradually learn that she had engaged in a consensual extra-marital affair w/ O, which is now over (he suspects she may have reported him to HR; she did not), we learn the details of the allegation (he is accused of making inappropriate personal inquiries to and groping the hand of one of the youngest members of the staff, someone whom Hal characterizes as flighty, ambitious, and possibly flirtatious - is this just her envy though? The key moment in the story, however, is Hal's meeting w/ a new HR exec - brought in by new corporate owners - during which, she realizes in retrospect, the HR woman was fishing to see in Hal could be persuaded to file a complaint - new ownership wants to get ride of the long-timer - who is grotesquely overpaid ($250k at a public radio station?, hard to believe). So everyone's complicit, except Hal - and - and the end, maybe, she too is complicit, as she realizes in a fit of pique that Oliver had been making advances while her own relation w/ O was still active. Everyone's guilty, then, of something - tho O is the only one to pay the price. The story is uncomfortable, it will make any reader think about this issue, and it's a tight and convincing narrative right from the start - even from the resonant and, I think, ironic title.

Hate to write negative comments about a debut novel, but

I'm really uncomfortable giving negative comments on a debut novel - it's tough enough for any young writer to break through, and I'm always on the lookout for exciting new talent and would much rather give a ringing endorsement to the first work or even the early work of a young author - but R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries, which has received some positive notices, fell so far below my expectations that I have to take note. Kwon does a nice job, initially, establishing her three main characters, who will narrate this short novel in a rotation of voices (at least 2 of them will; one says very little in his sections), and she is good at sketching in various scenes of college debauchery; this campus novel has far more sex and alcohol-imbued celebration that most of its predecessors - makes Donna Tartt and even Fitzgerald seem like teetotalers by comparison. She establishes in the first chapter that the character get involved in some kind of scheme to bomb a building on or near campus, so, good, she has my interest there. Who are these people, what drew them to such drastic action, what are the consequences? But I have to say that Kwon does little in the way of plot development. The novel is of a college student, Phoebe, bearing a great deal of grif and guilt over the death of her mother, who drifts away from her boyfriend (Will, a former Bible-college student) to join a right-wing Xtian cult. She does nothing to elucidate how or why Phoebe is draw to this cult and to its supposedly charismatic but obviously phony leader, much less how or why she's drawn into acts of extreme violence. Moreover, her handling of the bombing of the local abortion clinic is sketchy: How would the group even know how to set off a fatal bombing? Is it possible that the police would be unaware of such an action in development? Is there no surveillance at the local clinic (esp in the wake of national demonstrations)? Could this small group of students vanish from sight after the attack? And what about Phoebe herself - can we in any way believe that this sheltered young woman could elude pursuit and fake (probably) her death? I could go on - but the point is that the author has set out to write a kind of thriller (compare Hearst-based novel American Woman) but loses interest in or focus on the plot, and along the way lost my interest, too.

Is The Incendiares a true image of contemporary campus life?

R.O. Kwon may have written the campus novel for the current generation - but if so we should despair. The characters in her novel may be in college but they are hardly college students; there's barely a word about courses, studies, reading, ideas - college seems to be a long series of drinking, parties, and posturing. The characters - even Will, who's on scholarship and supposedly waiting tables to make ends meet - seem to have unlimited cash (and time) when it comes to good times, travel, getaways, exotic drinks. OK so it's a dark and despairing view of college life, at least as lived by some. The essence of the plot - as we discern from the title and from a campus bombing described in the first chapter - is about two of the main characters, Phoebe (a former piano prodigy now wasting her time and her family's money in an expensive private college0 and Will (a former Bible student now an apostate) get drawn into a right-wing Xtian club run by the third main character John Leal - supposedly an activist who helped smuggle N Korean Xtians to safety and who for a time was imprisoned in an NK "gulag." If the characters are too dumb to smell a phony from a mile away, readers are not: It's painfully obvious to us that nobody should trust this guy, and his story about North Korea is obviously fake (my only doubt was whether he'd faked the story or Kwon was in over her depth - how could an imprisonment in NK of a US college student/dropout not be a major news story?). So where's the tension, the struggle? Will and Phoebe hook up w/ this group that makes increasingly bizarre demands on their time and commitment, and they just seem to go along w/ the flow. In other words, despite the sensationalism foreshadowed at the outset, the plot just bumbles along, Will and Phoebe go through various periods of estrangement, then they're back together, and then they join the cult together. There's no "collision of forces" to build tension, sorrow, and pity - the characters are branches, floating in the stream, carried from one event to another - with plenty of $ to bankroll their privileged campus lifestyle. We'll see what happens in the final third of the novel, but so far this feels like sensationalism sans sensation.

Views on the use of the supernatural in Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sparsely attended book group last night (4 participants in discussion), and much of discussion centered on degree of acceptance of the appearance of ghosts, visions, and symbols in final chapters of the novel, Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing. As noted in previous posts, I think resorting to the supernatural to tie the threads of the narrative was a mistake: a novel, and this novel in particular, is about people and their relationships to one another. I had no interest in Richie's fate as a ghost (it seems that at the end, though he at last learns why Pap had shot him to death - to spare him a brutal execution by torture - his soul cannot be at peace until he joins the voices of hundreds of thousands of other victims of abuse, who are depicted to the extent that they are at all as spirits hovering in the trees); I do have interest in Richie the character. JW apparently said that she wanted to include in her novel child victims of abuse at the Parchman prison, and the "only" way she could do so was to bring one back as a ghost. Well, there are many other ways she could have done so and this was her choice. Admittedly, it's important to the novel that most of the characters abide in a culture that has much faith in spiritualism, so, yes, the use of the supernatural as a plot device fits w/ the culture that JW is depicting - but be that as it may, my interest in the novel waned rather than sharpened in the final chapters. LR expressed similar views, while M and JoRi were more willing than I to accept the novel as a whole and to try to discern JW's message and intent in the final chapters. On another note, I surmised that if JW were to write the novel today she would have to treat the scene w/ the state trooper in a completely different manner. Within the narrative as it stands this highway stop is meant to be a turning point for Jojo, who is made to kneel on the ground, handcuffed; from this experience follows a distrust of authority. But played against the many stories in the media over the past 2 years of black people shot to death in confrontations w/ the police, this arrest looks tame and benevolent: The cop had good reason to make the stop, the characters were in fact carrying drugs, they were on their way home from Parchman prison no less (which someone blurts to the officer) - so all told it's amazing that he let them go on their way. I didn't anticipate that, and I ended up feeling he was a pretty good guy, which I don't think was JW's intent. Were she writing today, I think she would have made the outcome of that highway stop far more dire.

A campus novel for the current generation? Maybe.

Every generation yields its own campus novel, and a candidate for the current such novel is R.O. Kwon's debut, The Incendiaries. It's hard not to compare her work w/ the Donna Tartt's landmark, The Secret History, a terrific novel set in what was obviously Bennington and introducing a group of sharply drawn aesthete-intellectuals struggling to find themselves and eventually pitted against one another in a book that was both a murder mystery and a tragedy (and a ghost story as well). Kwon's is simpler in scope more grotesque in its characterizations, which may say something about today's college students or today's writers or just about this novel. I'm only about 1/3 through so offering no final judgements, but here's where we are: Kwon's novel is set in what appears to be Vassar, and her narrative rotates serially among 3 protagonists: John, who has spent time in China in a program to help people escape from N Korea and who was imprisoned for several months in a N Korean "gulag" - quite an unusual resume for a college sophomore; Will, a scholarship student who transferred in from a Bible college but who has lost his faith and who more or less supports his addicted mother; and Phoebe, a freshman, of Korean descent, who had been a piano prodigy but has given that up and who lost control of a car while driving illegally and whose mother was killed in the accident. These are 3 atypical characters by any measure, and the world in which Kwon places them is one of extremes as well: lots of sex, lots of drinking, much intellectual and social pretension, and virtually nothing about classes, studies, academics, careers - these are the privileged and the super-intelligent and it's no telling how they acquired such knowledge and mannerisms. I can accept all that, but to this point there's only a hint of a plot: The first chapter shows students watching a campus building explode, and that, playing off the title, is the "mystery" of this narrative, but Kwon is in no rush to building up to that point - nothing so far gives me any info as to who would plot let alone complete such a cowardly and mean act, nor why they would do so. To me the strongest scene in the novel so far is at the restaurant where Will is a waiter - something he hides from his so-called friends (what a shame); I would hope Kwon would make more of this setting rather than use it for just a dash of color; we'll see. (Comparisons w/ Tartt's novel may be unfair, but that novel engaged us w/ the narrative immediately, and the characters, while eccentric and exhibitionist, were engaged in serious academics, under the tutelage of a charismatic classics prof.)

Everyone should read William Trevor's stories

The last 4 stories in William Trevor's posthumous and aptly titled Last Stories give you a sense of his final thoughts and ideas, and dark view of life he had indeed. Three of the 4 stories concern marital infidelity and desertion; two of the last 4, and maybe 3 depending on how you read the final story (The Women) concern people with serious mental illness, delusion, and obsession. Trevor's view of life has always been dark and at times glum, but in most of his earlier fiction that darkness was largely caused by society and forces generally beyond the control of the protagonists; in one that I consider his best story, about a man struggling to make a living in the doomed profession of church statuary (ultimately the only work he can find is on a road crew), Trevor ends w/ the famous observation that "the world failed, not him" (paraphrasing - and BTW many of WT's best stories end with authorial observation and commentary - quite an atypical structure, in which most stories today, following Joyce, end with an "apercu," an observation or perception by the protagonist). Of these final four stories, I think Making Conversation is probably the best: a man becomes obsessed w/ a woman whom he meets by change and stalks her (today, she would immediately call the police for a protective order), and his wife one day shows up at the woman's door expecting the worst. Giotto's Angels is a bit of any outlier here, w/ the protagonist being an expert in restoring church artworks (see above, an occasional WT theme and fitting well w/ his sense of beauty and loss) who suffers from amnesiac breakdowns and perhaps other ailments; he gets corralled by a prostitute who goes home w/ him and faces the dilemma of whether to rob this troubled innocent. Winter Idyll is another strong story and touches on many of WT's final themes: A married man with children abandons his wife to take up w/ a younger woman whom he'd tutored when he was a young man and she a child. Strangely, he doesn't pay much of a price for this decision; Trevor is not one to condemn his characters - rather, he presents them w/ sorrow and pity. I didn't much like the final story, The Women, when I read it in the NYer, and still and troubled by the ridiculous improbabilities of the plot, but on 2nd reading I have come to appreciate the openness and ambiguity of the ending: Is one of the women truly the mother of the boarding-school student whom she's been stalking, or is the woman, like others in this collection, suffering from delusions and mental illness? Trevor was a truly great writer, and everyone interested in the art of the short story should read his collected stories and then Last Stories as a sad coda.

Themes in William Trevor's final stories

William Trevor was without doubt one of the greatest English-language writers of our time, in particular for his short stories, the closest any English-language writer has come to the tone and style of Chekhov. Trevor died two years ago, and his final 10 stories appear in the aptly titled Last Stories. Nobody would consider these the best among WR's works (based on first 6 + one more I read in the NYer), but they are still excellent and worth reading for a sense of WT's final thoughts as - as he clearly knew or sensed - his writing (and therefore his life) was ending. Among the first six, most set in contemporary London, almost all are about the loneliness and vulnerability of the elderly, several about various scams perpetrated on the elderly and infirm, and several involve recently widowed people seeking a new life, a new partner, a way out of their loneliness. The stories are more trim and exacting than most of WT's earlier pieces, sometimes requiring extreme concentration to figure out who's speaking, sometimes requiring us to "fill in the blanks," so to speak, regarding key pieces of narrative: e.g., in The Crippled Man WT never directly tells us whether the eponymous man has died, but the concluding lines of the story give us the information we need to find the missing pieces. One story - about a couple out to scam an elderly man seeking a woman's companionship - is so oblique that I really can't figure out the end. The first story, The Piano Teacher, is quite sudden in its conclusion - and in fact I think (though I could be completely wrong) that the story as it appeared some years ago in the NYer was longer, with some material on the star student's stunted career. Perhaps the strongest among the first six is Mrs. Casthorpe (sp?), about a woman, "liberated" by the death of her much older husband, tries to attract another man - a story that with few deft strokes gives us a painful portrait of the life of this woman as well as great insight into the life of the man she is trying, unsuccessfully, to attract. Another story, The Missing Girl (?), about a cleaning woman who dies in a pedestrian accident - possibly a suicide - and her stunted relationship w/ the son of her former employer; again, the story is oblique and understated, we learn little about the actual relationship - I wished for more information. So these stories are pared to the point of near minimalism, but as a collection we we a theme emerge: the fear of death, of aging, and of a brutal and uncaring world.

Thoughts on 2nd reading of Sing, Unburied, Sing

Having finished the re-read of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, I recognize one major mistake in my memory from first reading Pap/River has, over the course of the novel, told his grandson, Jojo, about his horrible experiences in Parchman prison, and in particular about how he tried to protect a young prisoner, Richie, from attack and abuse, but he never quite finishes his narrative, leaving unexplained Richie's fate - until the end of the novel. At that point, as Pap's wife has died and he's in mourning, he tells Joho the end of the tale: In essence, he led Richie (an escapee pursued by a posse) away from the chase and then kills him to protect him from death by torture that he would have faced when caught by the posse. I'd thought the ghost of Richie tells Jojo this tale; in fact, it's important that Pap tells the story himself, expiating the guilt he has felt across his adult life. The ghost of Richie hears this tale and feels freed - at last he understands why his protector turned on him. All that said, I think this would have been a stronger novel if Ward didn't steer it toward the symbolic and supernatural at the end; do we really need the ghost of Richie as a character? At the end, there's a lot of symbolism and imagery that Jojo, who is gifted in the supernatural, witnesses - the ghosts of spirits of many abused prisoners hovering among the branches of a tree, the transformation of people (Riche's ghost?) into a white snake - honestly, I can't figure out what Ward is getting at here. What I prefer to focus on is her excellent use of first-person voice to establish a # of radically different characters, her understanding of the difficult life in rural poverty in the Mississippi delta, her information about the horrors of abuse in a Miss work prison, her ability to create characters who are deeply flawed while maintaining her (and our) sympathy and compassion for them. Why bring in the ghosts? The heart of the initial narrative (movement #1, as noted in a previous post) is left unresolved - and I think she had an opportunity for either a tragic or romantic conclusion. I suspected she was headed toward an R&J/West Side Story conclusion, in which the white and black families, mortal enemies, would come together over the death of their children, but no, she backs away from that possibility - maybe for the good, as it might have been melodramatic, but still, a novel is about people, not about imagery, and I wish she had not reverted to the supernatural to tie up strands at the end.

Ward (Jesmyn)

So what to make of the turn toward the mystical and magical in the third "movement" of Jssmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing? It's her novel and obviously the inclusion of ghosts (who speak and appear to some characters and not to others), visions of totems such as a white snake, knowledge of mysterious healing herbs and roots (again, a gift some have and others don't) is important to her as a writer and as a chronicler of life in black communities in the Deep South. But I can't help but feel that the mysticism that predominates at the end of the novel is a narrative alright of hand. To take the main example, the ghost of Richie appearing to learn at last how and why Riv aka Pops abandoned him at parchman prison decades before. In my view it would be a more powerful narrative has Pops confessed all to grandson Jojo- it would be a human story, emotional, rather than the confusing mishmash of voices and symbols. Resorting to mysticism can be a narrative copout, tho I don't think that's the case w Ward, for whom the mystical and communication w other worlds and belief in the gift of communion w spirits is central to her work, to her understanding of life in the community she depicts. You have to take her writing as a whole - tho I do wish she'd have more trust in her characters: she does a great job up to a point in having them narrate their own stories, but once she starts having them communicate w ghosts and spirits she lets go of the reins: once you rely on mysticism the narrative is unbridled, it can go anywhere, and it seems too easy a way to wrap loose plot strands. Why not more dramatic face-to-face confrontations like Michael confronting his racist father? That should be the source of the conclusion of this novel - family reconciliation despite tragedy and bigotry - rather than the expiation induced by a ghost.

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Thoughts on the unsympathetic characters in Sing, Unburied, Sing

Jesmyn Ward will never be accused of sentimentality regarding her characters; one of the strengths of her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing is her ability to portray her main characters as malicious and self-centered yet, amazingly, keeping us engaged with their fate and sympathetic about their sufferings. One of the main characters, Leonie, in the 2nd "movement" of the novel (about which see yesterday's post), travels north through Mississippi to greet her boyfriend (and father of her two children) on his release from Parchman prison. En route she does some really stupid things, starting with stopping by a meth dealer's and procuring some crystal meth or, on a less grand scale, more or less entrusting her infant (maybe 2 or 3 years old?) daughter, Kayla, to the care and attention of her young (maybe 10 or 12?) son, Jojo, even as the child gets increasingly feverish and nauseated; in fact, she concocts a ridiculous brew of berry tea (her mother, is a skilled herbalist from Leonie did not pick up the knowledge) - fortunately, Jojo surmises that the brew might kill Kayla and forces her to vomit up the mess. These are just some examples, and normally I would have no sympathy for these characters, but Ward is so clear and precise about depicting the poverty and racism of their home and environment and her sketching in of a character is so effective that we are rooting for these guys even though we see their irresponsibility. One character about whom I have no sympathy is the lawyer who got Michael's release from prison and who puts up Leonie et al en route to Parchman - even providing her with a packet of drugs - some favor, she's lucky the Rx didn't land Michael right back in prison, following a traffic stop. Thanks, buddy, real nice way to work w/ your clients. (And who paid the lawyer? We suspect it must be Michael's father.) On the long drive home from the prison Jojo imagines he sees and hears, or maybe within the magic-realist scope of this novel he does see and hear, the ghost of Richie, a young man who'd been imprisoned years ago w/ his grandfather and tells the story of Pop's efforts to save Richie from punishment and abuse. I really don't know why Pop couldn't tell this story and Ward had to resort to use of a ghost to do so, but that mysterical thread (movement 3) seems to be important to her as a writer so, well, it's her novel.

The 3 "movements" of Sing, Unburied, Sing

Re-reading Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing in preparation for this week's book group, and also read my (5) previous posts on this novel. Sometimes when I look back on previous posts I wonder what I'd been thinking (that's part of the point of this blog - not "reviewing" a book upon finishing reading but writing about the reading experience as it unfolds over days or longer), but this time the previous posts seemed pretty much on the mark. What's more clear to me, looking back (and re-reading, though I'm only about 1/3 finished) is that the novel seems to be in three acts, stages, or, preferably, "movements." It starts off as a great family tragedy - black family and white family in rural Mississsippi, hating each other, a blood rivalry, on the what men murdered one of the black men and got off w/ a light sentence; white man (Michael) marries and has two children (Jojo and Michaela/Kayla) by black woman (Leonie), and his family refuses to refuses to recognize the marriage and the grandchildren. 2nd movement begins when Michael is to be released from Parchman prison upstate, and Leonie takes the children (and a friend, Misty) on a long journey to pick up Michael on his release and bring him home - a "road novel," episode, complete with Odyssean stops along the way - at a meth dealer's, a defense attorney, etc. Third movement involves the young man at the center of the novel, Jojo, learning about his grandfather's (Pop's) experiences in Parchman, particularly about his protection of a young man (Richie) imprisoned and vulnerable - narrated or revealed by Richie's ghost; not sure really why the novel had to become a ghost story of sorts at the conclusion, but Ward clearly has a lot of interest in folklore, folk remedies, potions, and so forth - so there you have it.

The challenge of bringing a narrative to conclusion - in There There

Tommy Orange's debut novel, There There, about the Native American community in Oakland, gets off to a great start, then founders. Orange creates vivid portraits of a # of characters, each shedding some light on the current status of urban-living Natives (O's preferred term), dealing w/ poverty, addiction, broken families, a history of prejudice and injustice. He doesn't flinch from creating unsympathetic characters, and he creates an intricate web - for me at times too intricate, I had to constantly check back to ascertain the complex family relationships among the characters eventually resorting to some note-taking - that links the many of the characters. He also builds the plot carefully, as the narrative moves toward a grand conclusion at a Native powwow at the Oakland Coliseum. It becomes obvious that all of the characters, and plot lines, will converge at the powwow, with several possible dramatic revelations, e.g., a young man on the planning committee will meet for the first time his estranged father, now the emcee. That said, Orange doesn't quite rise to the challenge of bringing the narrative to an emotional conclusion - in fact (spoiler here) he ends the narrative with a huge shoot-out at the powwow, as some of his characters make good on their plan to rob the till at the event. Several of the characters get shot to death (Orange does a good job creating what I imagine to be the feelings, fears, emotion of someone shot in ambush), others survive, but the plot is in tatters - none of the characters seems transformed, awakened, anything - just dead (or not). Somehow, I think, he should have done more w/ this tragic event - perhaps shown its aftermath, or its effect on the survivors. What we're left w/ is a novel w/ some really fine character sketches - many like short stories in their own right - and a rather bleak, if incomplete, portrait of a little-known (to most readers) community ; had the potential to be an urban Erdrich, but doesn't quite rise to the challenge - though I do expect more work from Orange and hope for a novel w/ more depth and fewer pyrotechnics in the future.

A fine story by Callan Wink in current New Yorker

Callan Wink - a Montana resident and ski instructor whom, I think, is one of the few writers introduced recently to a wider readership by none other than the New Yorker - has a really fine story, A Refugee Crisis, in the current issue. As the narrator of the story says to a fellow ski enthusiast much his senior, he's writing a story about a writer who has trouble writing. Noting the uninterest on the part of his friend, the narrator adds: It's better than it sounds, I think. He's right - it's much better than it sounds, a story with many dimensions. The narrator - who seems much like the author - reflects on his early and unexpected success and the difficulty he's having writing in the wake of same; he wryly notes that in his first book he had about 100 different lyrical descriptions of mountains, and now all he can say is: mountain. And of course it may be the just-=plain-mountain is better (though by the end of the story, when he's eschewed literary affectation, noting that sometimes when a writer doesn't know how to end a paragraph the best thing is to stop right there, he slips a few really fine descriptive phrases right by us. But the story, as the title suggests, has much wider implications and greater ambition: The narrative involves the sudden re-appearance of a former girlfriend who's been living in Serbia and advocating on behalf of the refugees, and has become pregnant by one of the refugees, a much younger man. She's back in Montana to end the pregnancy. The narrator and she, named only M, get into some spats, in particular as she encourages him to write about the refugee crisis and he brushes that off; she can't understand how a writer could avoid writing about what she considers the key issue of our time. But he does keep a few notes on a possible story about a young American woman obsessed with the refugee crisis, from a wealthy family, perhaps involved in this issue because it's a trendy gap-year project. M finds his notes for a story - obviously, the story we're now reading - and leaves him a blistering response. At the end, he notes to M that he has written about the refugee crisis after all, but it's not the story she'd expected - nor had we. So it's almost as if the narrator - or Wink himself - is a refugee, struggling w/ his fate and with his calling, almost but not quite - because he's obviously privileged and wealthy in comparison to those whom M serves. She's right in upbraiding him - but wrong and doctrinaire in her assumption that a writer owes it to himself to take on social and political issues. Wink prevails in the end, but at a cost.

Reading Tommy Orange's There There is a challenge but worth the effort

I won't minimize the difficulty one must overcome to read tommy Orange's novel, There There - many characters introduced in a string of short chapters most of which could stand alone as stories - w/ at first tenuous connections linking the characters and their stories. So much to keep in mind - a trend I think in stories about large ethnic communities or families, cf Urrea's The House of Broken Angels, and I do wish these authors would make it a little easier to engage w/ their work - but in the case of the best of these complex-web novels such as this one the effort to engage is well spent. Orange writes about a community that is far from the literary mainstream - Native American (or Native) populations in East Oakland - and no doubt unfamiliar to the vast majority of his readership. W/out having read the author's note nor in fact anything at all about Orange, I'm supposing he has direct ties to this community, and, to his credit, his view of the community is unflinching and not at all romanticized: Many of the characters have a great ethnic pride, others seem indifferent to their race. Most of the characters suffer from extreme poverty and broken families; some make sincere efforts to pull their lives together (one for example receives an arts grant to do a documentary film about the community, another gets a decent job at a Native American community center); others succumb to crime and addiction (some do both: One character struggling w/ her alcoholism has done a lot of fine community work). The novel centers on - and it takes a while for this point to come into focus - a planned great powwow in Oakland; some of the characters are planning this event, others planning to attend, others planning to commit some kind of robbery or heist at the event to pay off debts to drug dealers - so you can see the range of characters and personalities in this novel. I'm more than half-way and will surely finish, but I'd be smart to keep on the side a set of notes about these characters and their relationships - familiar, social, or just crossing lines on the network of this narrative.

A challenging novel (in stories) on Native Americans in Oakland - There There - gets off to a fine start

Tommy Orange's new novel, There There (a reference some will get to the city he's writing about, Oakland), gets off to a great start. After a prologue recounting many of the atrocities and massacres and humiliations and misinterpretations forced upon various Native populations in the Americas, he focuses on the small community of Natives (his preferred term) in Oakland, most of whom are living in poverty. (It's a seldom-if-ever chronicled population; does recall the fine film about Natives in SF, The Exiles.) At first it seems that we're reading a story collection that can only by loose definition can be considered a novel, but over the course of the reading - I'm only about 25% in, first 4 chapters - we see that there are connections and threads slowly developing and emerging. Each of the first 4 chapters is about a different Native in Oakland: the first about a young many suffering the effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, he calls himself a "Drome," who gets involved with the drug trade in E. Oakland and makes incipient plans to rob a huge Native convention - a Powwow - to take place in the city; obviously, there will be more to come on that. 2nd chapter is about a young man whose uncle, who works as a gaffer in the film industry, has a dream of making a movie about Natives; the uncle dies, and the young man picks up his vision (and equipment) and wins a grant to do a film that will consist of unedited interview on camera w/ many Natives in Oakland: Each of us has a story to tell, he surmises. More to come on that, too. 3rd chapter, set in 1970, introduces a young woman whose family (single mom, sister) lives from eviction to eviction and eventually joins the Native takeover ot Alcatraz Island, a little-remembered episode and a failure of the first order. She will clearly appear in the present time later in this work as a voice of experience in the Native community (she would not be about 60). 4th chapter is about a young man who'd never met his Native father who studied Native American Lit in college and can't find a job; he makes contact w/ his father via the Internet, and learns his father is coming to Oakland for the powwow (see above); his mother, deeply worried about her son who is obese and spends his entire life online, gets him a job as a paid intern helping to run the forthcoming powwow. So, each chapter stands alone as a fine short story and the connects gradually emerge - making this a strange book: Easy to read chapter by chapter and a serious challenge as we try to remember the characters and connections across the course of many chapters. (Didn't Erdrich, mentioned in heroic terms in this novel, write an early work w/ the same structure?)

Some strange narrative decisions by Hemingway in To Have and Have Not

For inexplicable reasons - pay-by-the-word magazine fees? - Hemingway needlessly included several chapters in the 4th story, Harry, in his novel in stages To Have and Have Not (1937); not content w/ writing a good crime novel about a charter-boat captain (the eponymous Harry) desperate for $ who agrees to run some men by night from the Keys home to their home in Cuba. The men will be carrying the proceeds from an armed robbery of a Key West bank, bringing the $ to Cuba to support their revolution. Harry plots to kill all of the men in an ambush on the southbound boat - an especially daring (if not to say stupid) move, given that Harry is one against 5 and that he has use of only one arm. Anyway, the robbery and the shootout on the boat play well (and were especially effective in the 1950 film of this work, The Breaking Point), but H strangely stops the narrative once Harry is wounded and on his way back to home port and introduces some new, and gratuitous, characters: a writer struggling with a new novel about a strike at a textile mill (must be based on someone H knew), hard drinking couples in various stages of marital breakup (must have been based on one or more of H's marital breakups), a long section about the lives and thoughts of various people on various boats in port a the marina (one of which is a clear attempt to echo Joyce's Nora soliloquy - you can almost hear EH straining against the public and critical perception of his writing - smooth, efficient, understated, often contrasted w/ Faulkner - He'll show them not to judge him too quickly!) before the narrative at last reverts to Harry on the boat entering port. I won't give the conclusion away but suffice it to say that the film adaptation consistently, right to the end, brightened and softened Harry's character, making him more sympathetic and more of a family man (and in the process scrubbing the novel of its racism, homophobia, cultural stereotypes, and drunken crudity). The book may be more real (i.e., realistic) than the film adaptation - it usually is - but the film is more palatable.

Translating Hemingway into film: To Have and Have Not

Hemingway's 1937 novel, To Have and to Have Not,  is essentially what today we would call "linked stories," 4 stories about the same character, Harry, a charter-boat captain in the Keys (ex-Miami cop), each can stand independently (a certain benefit in the time years ago when there was a huge market in magazines for short stories) but that together make up something like the narrative arc of a novel (though they are actually told from different points of view - 3, I think, narrated by Harry; one, not). Essentially the breakdown is: Part 1, Harry stiffed by a guy who charters the boat and then runs (or flies, actually) off w/out paying the bill. 2: Harry is shot in the arm while dumping a load of smuggled liquor. 3 (maybe I have 2 and 3 reversed): Harry, hard up for $, agrees to smuggles into the US from Cuba a dozen Chinese laborers, but double-crosses the smuggler, shoots him to death, and offloads the men back in Cuba; and 4: Harry makes a deal with Cuban mobsters to use his boat for some nefarious purpose (still reading this section). Thinking about the adaptation to film - the more "faithful" adaptation, in fact - Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (1950), you can see that MC and his writers used all 4 plots, but each w/ a significant change and in a newly created narrative sequence (e.g., the shooting occurs at the end, as Harry confronts the mobsters  - seemingly Italian in the film). Most or all of the changes are intended to make Harry (an excellent John Garfield) more sympathetic - a good idea, as he's a racist and a double-dealer in the book, a fully likable guy. One major change is to add many domestic scenes, showing Harry as a good dad and a loving though troubled husband (his wife has a cameo in the novel, that's it). A major change - though conceivably introduced in part 4 that I'm still reading - is the intro of a blonde "femme fatale" (Patricia Neal), who tempts Harry to be unfaithful to his wife, and who provokes the wife's jealousy and doubt; again, probably a good addition for box-office reasons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the introduced material - the domestic and the "femme fatale" scenes - though important to building sympathy for Harry, are full of awkward, cliched dialogue and hammy moments; all the best dialog in the film comes directly from Hemingway. Though EH was clearly at a low point in his career w/ this novel, he always showed the ability to write great, laconic, understated dialog.

Why no one reads To Have and Have not today

Giving Hemingway's 1937 novel, To Have and Have Not, a go for one reason only - curiosity about how it was adapted to film in the 1950 The breaking Point, and can see right away why no one reads this novel today. H's racism is appalling right from the start - can't even begin to describe much less to justify the barbarity Andy ignorance of his language , and yes it may be so that his language is "appropriate" to the narrator, Henry, and charter-boat captain working out of Cuba and the Keys, but still H could at least write about this guy in a civilized if not enlightened manner. I will read further to see if there are any positive developments. It's a shame because this novel otherwise could be a pretty good crime adventure novel - by no means H at his peak, more likely at his nadir, but you can see that he was trying for a best seller and made some poor narrative decisions - and he did right himself obviously on later works that covered the same territory but w greater sympathy for his characters and w meaning beyond crime and thievery, notably the famous old man and the sea that resurrected his reputation and islands in the stream. Interesting in thinking about the film adaptation how director Michael Curtiz treated the black character who helps manage the charter boat w dignity and how he chose to open the film w a domestic scene rather than w a shootout. He also makes the femme fatale a major character from the outset H does not intro her till at least beyond the second chapter

Issues of faith in the conclusion of Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945) concludes w another chapter devoted to a character who'd been peripheral to the narrative up to this point, Lord Marchmain, titular owner of the estate (through this whole novel I've assumed the estate was called beidesh but now I'm not sure somthe hell w it). Marchmain was estranged from his wife and uninvolved w the lives of his children , each of whom screwed up in his or her own way. Now he comes back to the estate (he'd been living in Germany I think - it's now the eve of WWII and not a time to hang around in Europe) to, as we son see, live out his last days. He comes in giving about a million orders to the many servants - any american reader will or at least should be appalled by the deference everyone gives to the so-called nobility of England - what did Lord M ever do in his life to merit such deference and servitude? - but in any event he is nobly ensconced in the manor and proceeds to share his low opinions about his children as he decides who will inherit the estate. The narrative focuses on a long debate among the offspring as to whether a priest should come i. To administer last rites, which Marchmain strongly opposes. At the end lord M accepts last rites and all the children are happy - but this leads daughter a Julia to recognize that she could never marry the narrator, as he is a nonbeliever - and they go their separate ways. So I. The end what is Waugh' point, or point of view? Evident,y he was a man of faith, but is it really credible that all will be well for a nasty character like lord M if he passively accepts his last rites? Sure Julia has a reaffirmation of her faith at the end but that doesn't lead her to any positive,charitable action. The hero to the extent there is one , for me, is youngest child Cordelia (the name is too significant) who has devoted her life to helping others at the cost of some sacrifice of her own potential happiness and comfort. The novel poignantly ends w the narrator now in the British army helps prepare the estate for troop occupation during the war - things have changed.

The saddest moment in Brideshead Revisited

Picking up on versions of sin in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Julia goes off on one of the longest jags in this novel after she leaves the room in tears when her brother Bridey accuses her of living in sin w narrator, Charles  - she seems to be ranting against the forces of morality and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church (she is an RC) though it's hard to interpret this odd and out-of-character outburst.  What's notable is that at the end she recalls her stillborn daughter and cries out that "they" wouldn't even let her see the child. I don't know whom to blame there - the church, the doctors, her family, her husband - but's the saddest moment in this novel. Shortly thereafter the other Flytr daughter, Cordelia , returns to Brideshead and to this narrative after a ten-year absence doing nursing duty in the Spanish civil war and in Europe - narrator notices how plain and aged she looks, even tells her so when pressed - this novel is surely in part about the ravages of time, on people, families, marriages, houses. None of the flute children has fulfilled early pro,use, or st least early hopes. Cordelia gives the narrator a long update on the condition of his first friend (first love?), her bro Sebastian- now living in an alcoholic stupor at a Moroccan monastery- it's a god portrait of the man in ruins but of course indirect, second-hand. What we're waiting for if a final meeting e Sebastian, a scene in which the narrator comes to some kind of recognition and reconciliation w the divergent paths of their lives and with what caused them both to avoid emotional commitment, family, parenthood.

Versions of sin in Brideshead Revisited

To my surprise- in yesterday's post I speculated that the Charles's affair w childhood friend Julie was a "screen" for his homosexual attraction to her older brother, Senastion, but as the chapter in the third and final part of Evelyn Waigh's Brideshead Revisited continues we see a year or two down the road that Charles and Julie remain in a serious extramarital relationship.  Both of them are pretty much estranged from their spouses yet both also go to some lengths to keep up the facade of a marriage: Julie has to or so she thinks protect the reputation of her politically ambitious husband and as for Charles it seems easier to keep up the facade rather than unravel the marriage. Neither he nor wife Celia seem to care much for each other and his estrangement from his children is actually appalling. This section includes a strange chapter w C and J spending some time at her family's eponymous estate when her mysterious brother, Brideshead or Bridge (!) appears out of the blue so to speak - he's had no role in this narrative other than as an example of priggish vacillation and career failure (he thought about entering the church but is unable to do anything substantive or meaningful w his life).  B announces that he is engaged to marry - a woman he met through her late husband w whom he shared a passion for collecting match boxes, his on,y real interest!  He also says he's unable to invite her to Brideshead because C and J are living there in sin. This provokes both of them to anger, understandably, and few deserve it as much as Bridey, but part of me thinks he has a point - not the "sin" but their complete indifference to the lives of others - spouses , children, family -and their lack of values. C at least is committed to his work as an artist, but it says something that his main subject is English estates on the verge of demolition, i.e., a celebration and commemoration of a vanish way of life - and good riddance to it!

Repression in Brideshead Revisited

What kind of marriage is this? The narrator, Charles Ryder, in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), now (ca 1935?) a successful painter who specializes in paintings of English manors due for teardown because of ruinous condition and to make way for shops and flats, takes a 2-year journey to Latin America to paint the ruins he finds in Mexico and the Amazon region - leaving behind in England his (pregnant!) wife and their young son. Two years! And when he finishes his project she travels to NY to meet him and to prepare for their voyage back to England. Charles is as cold and distant as can be - hardly speaks to his wife except condescendingly, only reluctantly (it seems) having sex w/ her, asks nothing at all about the children. On the voyage home she, like most of the passengers, gets terribly seasick, and Charles uses the opportunity to re-connect w/ childhood friend Julia who happens to be on the same passage. Julie is Sebastian's sister (and a character who is just barely sketched in over the first 2/3 of this novel), and Sebastian has pretty much drunk himself out of this narrative - but Charles in a half-veiled manner indicates to Julia that S was his first love. Julia marriage, the Canadian bounder Rex Mottram, is pretty much over, and the Charles and Julia have sex and it looks as if they're building a new relationship on the ruins of their two marriages (like the houses C paints?). When they get to England, Charles doesn't even want to go home to see his son and to see for the first time his daughter - what a hideous man. But that said, it seems increasingly obvious that this is a novel about the pains of repressed homosexuality: Sebastian drinking himself to death, and Charles unable to love a woman and doing his best to destroy his marriage and his family and to enter into another hopeless relationship. Does Waugh know this, or is this homosexual element an underground stream coursing beneath this narrative, tapped by the author but never directly visible?

Excellent Richard Ford story in current New Yorker

Excellent Richard Ford story, Displaced, in current New Yorker, tells of a young (15) man in Jackson, Miss., whose father has just died unexpectedly and who struggles w/ feelings of loss, self-pity, and social isolation - notably, that all the kids at school treat him differently, as a kind of pariah, and he cannot explain or comprehend this change in his fortunes. His mother takes a job as a motel desk clerk, and much of the story involves his fascination, at first at a distance, w/ a boarding house on his street (touches of Carson McCullers here?), which eventually leads to his friendship w/ a slightly older but far more experienced young man, Niall, from a family of Irish immigrants who live in a few rooms in the boarding house - his father supposedly a cab driver but who most of the time is "under the weather," so Niall has free access to the cab. He asks the narrator (Henry?) to join him at a drive-in movie, where he offers the narrator some "hooch" and then makes a pass at him, completely confusing and befuddling the young man. At the end, we learn that no more came out of this - save a vow of silence on both sides - and Niall heads off for the Navy, where, he informs them by letter somewhat later, he washes out and the family returns to Ireland - the opposite of the American Dream. Ford tells the story from the vantage of a mature adult man looking back, and the story has the virtues, so family from many Ford stories and novels, of a tone of honesty and clarity of vision about the past, plus the added quality of leaving some things hinted at but unsaid: The narrator's mother seems attracted to Niall in a strange way, but we never know whether anything came of that attraction. It's suggested the N left the Navy because of his homosexuality, but, again, that's just a possibility, hovering above the edge of the narrative. The narrator himself is a blank - seldom gives more than two-word answers to any social overture and, as the adult looking back, he gives us little or no information about the effect of this homosexual overture - did it change his life in any way? Through guilt, desire, taboo, loathing? We don't know, and that openness is one of the strengths of this story. My only quibble is that Ford seems to spin his wheels in the first few paragraphs, belaboring the point that the death of a father affects the son socially in many ways, but this part of the story is abstract and ineffable - perhaps would have been better to start more quickly and let us just surmise the social isolation or perhaps give an example of the social ostracism the narrator experienced on his father's death.

The narrator of Brideshead Revisited - the vacuum at the center of the storm

Much of the second (of 3) sections in Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel, Brideshead Revisited, concerns the lead-up to the ill-fated marriage of Rex, an ambitious, blustering, social-climbing, MOP (tho Canada-born and raised) and Sebastian Flyte's (I still don't get why that's his surname) sister, Julia. All sorts of obstacles arise, few to the credit of Rex, who thinks he can buy or bluff his way through everything, and he pretty much can. No reader could possibly expect anything good to come from this marriage, but literary characters are bound to their fate - we can't intervene and save them. So we watch another member of the House of the Marchmains make a bad decision and begin to ruin her life. Meanwhile, brother Sebastian's drinking and pilferage has gone even further, as they track him down in a hovel in Fez, where he's living with a German man who shot off his own toe to get out of service w/ the Legion; the narrator, Charles, goes on a quick mission to Morocco to try to get S back before his mother's death - fails to do so - but in this mission we see the complete ruination of Sebastian's life and his homosexuality is now an open secret. What about the narrator? He's now pursuing a reasonably successful, or at least fulfilling, career as an artist (architectural painting), but to this point in his life - he'a in his mid-twenties, he seems to have no relationships w/ either men or women (setting aside his college-years relationship w/ Sebastian). He's not a "naive narrrator," in that the novel is told from the vantage of an older man looking back at his youth and his follies, but he's the vacuum at the center of the storm - we know surprisingly little about him other than his awkward relationship w/ his emotionally distant and at times emotionally cruel father; he's everybody's friend (although Lady Marchmain rips into him for his abetting Sebastian's drinking) but not close to anyone (a result of childhood - his father's distance, mother's early death?).

The relationship between Charles and Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited

Part 1 (of 3) in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945) takes us through the 2nd year at Oxford, as the narrator, Charles Ryder, observes the gradual deterioration of his friend Sebastian Marchmain. At the outset of the novel the narrator is taken in by the witty and idiosyncratic and wealthy set of intellectuals and aesthetes, and, as noted in previous post, it looked as if he was squandering his intelligence and his prospects through too much drinking, lounging, spouting off, and social-climbing, but by the 2nd year Charles has his feet back on the ground so to speak, and seems to mature - and by the end he tells his father he wants to leave Oxford to pursue a serious career as a an artist/painter - and my thought is, good for you, you're focused on your passion and you have decided to pursue your love of painting wherever it may lead. But set against this is the disintegration of Sebastian, who plunges into alcoholism and depression, ruining his prospects at Oxford and falling back upon the resources of his wealthy family. It's impossible to read this novel today and not think about the extent that homosexuality and homoerotics are part of the narrative. As everyone knows there was (and is?) a lot of homosexual behavior at the British boarding schools, and that's something that the main characters in this novel would have experienced, but Waugh is coy (or discrete?) about mentioning homosexuality explicitly. It's possible, but probably incorrect, to read Charles's relationship with Sebastian as just a male friendship; Waugh includes a few hints that the two young men were in love - never explictly stated (at least in the first third of the novel) but seemingly understood, especially by Sebastian's father's new wife, who tells Charles that she understands the nature of his friendship. The sad this is that the need to be secretive about their love is no doubt part of what drives Sebastian into drinking and depression; Charles, for some reason, seems to have more resources - even though (or maybe because?) his widowed father is at best uninterested in Charles's life and at worst neglectful and self-centered. Charles, unlike Sebastian, has an independent spirit and drive for success, probably because he needs that in order to survive; Sebastian's life is too easy, or at least it would seem so to others.

Waugh's experiences in Brideshead Revisited and my own

Started reading Evelyn Waugh's most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1944?), which is a revisit for me because I read it maybe 20 years ago and remember little, though it's coming back to me as go through the first 60 pp or so (I never saw the movie or the TV series, either). The novel is a journey into the past as experienced by the narrator, Charles Ryder, who is an officer in 2nd World War stationed in England and at the outset of the novel moves his troop to a new location which re suddenly recognizes as a now-in-ruins Brideshead, an estate where he'd spent much time when in college ca. 1920? And we go back to his college experience: We learn that he is from a wealthy but, as we would say today, dysfunctional family - mother dies while working as a nurse in the first WW and father estranged and deranged. Ryder settles in at Oxford and is taken in by a group some upperclassmen, notably Sebastian (of Brideshead) who are wealthy profligates, heavy drinkers, would-be aesthetes, highly affected, and predatory. Ryder, on his first visit to Brideshead, meets Sebastian's sister, Juliet?, and she will obviously be a key plot element, though Waugh is slow to develop that story line. The whole crew of wealthy dilettantes may seem extreme and improbable to some readers, but I can vouch for the uncanny accuracy of the portrayal, having lived alongside a very similar group of undergrads in my youth; I witnessed and observed in an attenuated American version of this type of what we then called "preppy" life: Extreme privilege (for most, some lived precariously above their means), cultish behavior, flamboyant personalities, scorn for work and studies, essentially a-political and insular, lots of homoerotic overtones, and extremely funny, insightful, worldly, and alluring conversationalists. There's material for a novel in my experiences, though at such a remove in time I know it's beyond my grasp. Reading Waugh instead.

Seven aspects of O'Brien's The Third Policerman

Following up on yesteday's post as to what Flann O'Brien's (1940?) novel, The Third Policeman, is and is not: I see it as a compendium of satires on various literary (a nod to O'Brien's countryman, Joyce, there w/ his compendium of literary styles in the English lit history chapter in Ulysses): First (and foremost?), it's a satire on police procedurals/crime novels - beginning w/ the (unnamed) narrator's confession to the murder of neighbor Mathis (and his claim to have conspired w/ his tenant, Divney, in the crime), and he goes on to describe the murder plot and his intention to make of w/ a strongbox of valuables and of course what we quickly recognize is that the narrator is being duped and set up by his so-called partner. Second, it's a satire on scholarly writing, as much of the novel consists of the narrator's occasional comments about his revered philosopher-physicist, de Selby, w/ each mention appended by lengthy footnotes in small point size tracing scholarly debates about some of de Selby's "ideas" (e.g., that darkness at night is caused by black winds), a great parody of academic writing. Third, it's a take on supernatural sci-fi/adventure writing, as the narrator heads off in search of the strongbox and ends up at a police station where the two officers on duty take him on an underground journey to a secret laboratory - a dreamlike sequence so extreme and preposterous as to be parodic rather than surreal or in any way frightening. Fourth, it's a parody of an adventure novel, as the narrator ends up in prison and sentenced to death and as he watches the construction of the gallows on which he is to hang - and plots, in a bumbling, comical manner, his escape. Fifth - and there may be a bit of a spoiler here - it's a parody of a ghost story, as we learn (though we might have figured much earlier) that the narrator is a ghost who - at the end - appears before his co-conspirator, terrifies him (to death), and they head off together to the surreal police station, evidently doomed to repeat for eternity this pattern of crime and punishment, which makes it, sixth, a parody of existential, philosophical, moralistic writing. Seventh - in this is not a parody or satire - it's a highly comic novel from which you could take almost any passage and certainly any passage of dialog and read it aloud and get a laugh; as noted previously, O'Brien had to be a huge influence on Monty Python (just as he was influenced by Joyce) in a great chain of Anglo-Irish literary comedy.

What The Third Policeman is - and is not

Don't read Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman for the plot, which is ludicrous in the good sense of the term (i.e., something to laugh about) and which will drive you nuts if you try to take it literally but do read it for the humor, which I think you can pick up on any page, any snatch of dialog, and rumination by the unnamed narrator - and in particular in the "footnotes," which represent the narrator's thinking and writing about his favorite philosopher/scientist, de Selby. In the section I just read the narrator expounds a few of de Selby's theories, such as his theories about the noise the results from hammering, about which he opines that the noise comes about from the explosion of thousands (millions?) of microscopic balloons that constitute the atmosphere. He also has a "famous" set of theories about water and his turned his house into a laboratory for water experiments - a lair of pipes, spigots, and valves that enable him to draw so much water that he aroused the authorities. His experiments involve efforts to "dilute" water, for whatever reason and by methods and means that remain mysterious. The narrator shares w/ us lots of information about controversies surrounding de Selby studies, one in particular that involves a manuscript though by some to be the key to understanding his work abut that appears to be something like 200 pages of writing (on both sides of the paper) in pencil and entirely illegible. Some claim to have cracked the code; others, that de Selby was cracked. Anyway, Third Policeman (who, by the way, has not yet appeared in the novel except by reference - his name is Fox and he works the night shift, supposedly) is funny throughout and, at this point (3/4 through) the narrator is being held in a cell in the police station on the charge of murdering his neighbor in a botched robbery (this happens to be true, but the police have no evidence but arrest him anyway) and he's scheduled for execution in a day or so after his arrest; he watches from his cell as they erect the gallows, and ponders ideas for escape. Despite that fairly reasonable summary of the plot, this is by no means a police procedural, a crime novel, nor a thriller - it's a novel of the bizarre, much like an extended Monty Python episode (as noted yesterday, I'm sure Python was influenced by O'Brien).

Further thoughts on the odd humor of Flann O'Brien

There are at least 2 aspects to the strange humor of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman - a work that, btw, must have been a huge influence on Monte Python, not only w/ its hilarious patches of dialog and focus on bewildering eccentrics but right down to the title. First, the many references to the philosopher de Salby, about whom the (unnamed) narrator is writing treatise that he hopes to self-publish (and participates in a murder and botched robbery to get the funds to do so): as one "commentator" on de Selby notes, his work brings great joy and solace to all readers because in reading de Selby you realize that of all the "nincompoops" in the world you are not the biggest. Among Selby's theories are that the earth is not spheroid but is shaped like a sausage and that it is impossible to travel from one place to another as any movement is made up of a sequences of still moments placed almost infinitely close together (he arrives at this insight from studying cinematic film, and he tests it by locking himself in a room while he intends to travel to a nearby city, expecting to find himself there when he steps out of the door). The other weird humor comes from the plot itself: The narrator after killing his neighbor is unable to find the box where the neighbor supposedly held his valuables (pretty obvious to us that the co-conspirator ran off w/ the loot) so he goes to the police whom he thinks can help him locate the lost treasure; the police department, however, has only one interest - bicycles (and bicycle theft) - and the officer on duty has the odd idea that, as we are composed of atoms that consist of circulating particles and so are bicycles those who ride bicycles for a long time become "part bicycle" as our atoms intermix (and the bikes gradually become part human as well). This theory is much discussed. Is there any book w/ humor more odd?

A police procedural and confessoin from a naive narrator in a novel like none other

Interest sparked by a (review of) new biography of the pseudonymous Irish writer Flann O'Brien, I've picked up my old copy of his (posthumous?) novel, The Third Policeman, and begun reading (years ago I read his most famous novel, At Swim-Two-Birds and all I recall of it is that I thought it was strange and funny). So far, Third Policeman is also strange and funny, and like no other novel I've read. It's narrated by a man who is the extreme case of a naive, perhaps therefore unreliable, narrator, and he begins by telling us how and why he murdered a guy named (I think) Mathis - so this novel is structured as a confession, perhaps to the police or authorities?, not yet clear. The narrator describes his obsession w/ a philosopher (not a real one - can't recall his name at the moment) who has written many treatises on his odd theories such as darkness at night is a result of black-colored winds that arise in the upper atmosphere. The narrator takes these and other theories seriously (as does O'Brien; the novel includes footnotes about various commentaries on the theories). The narrator also explains how he has hired a man to help run his family farm and pub and how much the man has helped him - when it's obvious to us that the man has swindled him over many years - and ultimately the man gets the narrator to go alone w/ him on a plot to kill and rob a wealthy, reclusive neighbor; again, it's clear to us that the man has set up the narrator while making off himself w/ all of the plunder. The narrator sees none of this. So this is something like a Mice and Men as if narrated by Lenny; as we read we keep thinking, oh, you poor guy. And yet - it's all very funny, not only because of the crackpot theories of the philosopher whom the narrator has studied and written (he hopes to publish a book, and his motive for participating in the robbery/murder is to get money to do so) but also because of the narrator's quirky self-expression - a police procedural perhaps, but like none other. Not sure how this will sustain over 200 pp (I'm about about p 40), but a good start.