Ada – Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Nabokov

Ada was first published in 1969 and is the work of Vladimir Nabokov.

I’m a Nabokov fan.

I admit it willingly and take my chances. Lolita is one of my favourite novels.

The first thing you have to do when approaching one of Nabokov’s works is resign yourself to the fact that you are going to be swamped by words, imagery, references and literary connotations that will most certainly take you out of your comfort zone no matter how erudite you are.

Case in point – Ada.

I am sufficiently proud of knowing something that I don’t need to pretend I know everything. I am contented by looking up notes in the back of the book explaining the sometimes very recondite references and jokes based on word play in Russian, French and English. Polyglot intellectuals volleying intense word puns at each other (throw in some Latin for good measure) makes for focused reading.

Some readers no doubt find that kind of thing off-putting. I am not one of them. I read and enjoyed “The Wasteland” while other’s in my Lit. class wanted to punch T.S. Eliot in the mouth for not saying what he meant. They argued the point until I calmly stated most of their vehemence was clearly based in the fact that they felt stupid. Ada will surely have the same effect if you are expecting a light read.

The two principle characters are Van Veen and Ada, two cousins that fall in love and have an intense affair in their younger years. They believe themselves to be cousins, and their fathers are cousins and their mothers are sisters. They later discover that they are, in fact, brother and sister.

The story is told in manuscript form, as the recollections of a full grown Van – and folded into the text are Ada’s notes into the margin.

As it is with Lolita, so it is with Ada. The story in itself is rich and textured, lending itself to all kinds of reasoning about a great many topics, philosophy and morals not withstanding as well as literature and art. The structure is of the same complicated nature as well. It’s recollections and oblique passages, comments in the margin, some things gone over and re-glossed, and so on and so forth. It also deals with time as a theme and that’s always a little tricky.

Nabokov is a word nerd. A large part of the pleasure in reading his work comes from the painstakingly carefully wrought crenellations of his style.

And the subject matter might seem simple, even tawdry, at a cursory glance, but good lord, the man can write. The further into the material you go, the more intense it gets. Even if the basic premise is this life long love story between siblings and the occasional duel, threesome, descriptions of brothels and pick nicks in the green, jealousy, philial hate and love, the many tentacled social constellations and so on and so forth – there is still more to parse. It’s not tawdry, never boring and … oh, did I mention the science fiction element? No? Well, this takes place in a Terra/Antiterra not-quite here and now or when and never alternate, but sort of parallel universe.

This is one of those novels that doesn’t hide it’s ambitious nature, it’s literariness and you just have to grab the reins and hold on. It’s not a book you should pick up if you want distraction and an easy read. If you want quality and a challenge, though, this is the way to go.

But, then, I would think that – I am a fan.

Mule

Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson

Stephen Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You first published in 2005 is a non fiction discussion on popular culture.

Steven Johnson has a degree in semiotics and literature and you can kind of tell. This book has the subtitle “How popular culture is making us smarter”. That’s plenty provocative enough, so with that you expect him to plead his case well. And he does.

Johnson takes on the task of discussing mass culture as something other than a trivial past time with no inherent merit. It’s kind of a mouthful to go at, but he does it with verve and humour and a good deal of theoretical structure hiding behind the blithe smile of the text.

It’s actually a relief to find that someone is willing to discuss mass culture as something other than a guilty pleasure we all indulge in, but won’t talk about in the clear light of day. What he goes after is proving that the current expressions of mass culture have definitely become more sophisticated and challenging in later years.

When talking about computer games he point out that the most popular games are not the shoot ‘em up games that get all the attention, but the slow and painstakingly complicated ones like SimCity and Age of Empires. He pleads a good case for the delayed gratification these games offer, the things you so rarely hear discussed, like how many hours you sometimes have to spend on a relatively sedate task in order to achieve some minor goal and the frustration that goes with that.

When discussing television he compares the series Dallas to 24 or the Sopranos, making good arguments for how the complexity of the story line has something to do with the taste of the viewers. There’s also a mention of the extremely fast paced and incredibly complicated series The West Wing, a series that actually doesn’t explain anything to the viewer, and more than that, makes it really necessary for the viewer to be active rather than passive.

He also discusses things like how the show The Apprentice or Survivor requires skills like social intelligence rather than the trivia knowledge you need to keep pace in random game shows.

Why is all this relevant? Well, there’s something to it, alright.

“So this is the landscape of the Sleeper Curve. Games that force us to probe and telescope. Television shows that require the mind to fill in the blanks, or exercise its emotional intelligence. Software that makes us sit forward, not lean back. But if the long-term trend in pop culture is toward increased complexity, is there any evidence our brains are reflecting that change?” (Johnson, p. 136).

I am a child of the postmodern, or what Bauman has chosen to term “liquid modernity” so of course this approach is going to appeal to me. Johnson offer the opinion that you have to ask a different set of questions to the popular culture than has been done in the past. I’m all for it. By all means, look at the statistics and see how the levels of complexity offered in computer games challenge the players ability to vast amounts of information at a glance and what that means in terms of intelligence and information assimilation.

There’s always been a sort of canonical war between high and low culture, but there’s always been considerable crossbreeding between the two as well, and this book argues the point that the sheer complexity of some popular culture is a symptom of something or other. That, in an of itself, is enough to make this a work worth reading.

And besides… it’s fun.

Mule

Michael Herr “Dispatches” – The Vietnam War

Michael Herr’s Dispatches was first published in 1977 and is a non-fictional book.

There are all kinds of first hand accounts of war. I’ve read quite a few, probably more than I should have at an age when most people were still trying to work through the dolled up teenage literature so heavily prevalent. I went straight to Eric Maria Remarque, Sven Hassel and suchlike.
The Vietnam war has seeped down deep into the mythology of America that it is subjected to a little cross cultural bleeding. But the thing is, there haven’t been many books like Michael Herr’s Dispatches to say anything about the experience itself.
I do the movie thing too, so it’s easier for me to find references in that arena. But there’s a lot of tricky territory to navigate and it’s easy for it to disintegrate into a moral tale like Oliver Stone’s Platoon, or a convenient backdrop the way it’s used in a great many bland American action movies.
There is a brilliant jewel of a parallel here in a totally different style, though, and that’s Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War (1994). But that’s a story for a different time.
Herr’s perspective is that of the perpetual outsider, because he is a journalist. That being said he is in it with the soldiers because he is a battle field journalist. He’s there in the mud and jungle and in the strange highlands alongside the soldiers seeing what they see, but one step removed from them, because he isn’t actually fighting. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t get shot at, though.
But he is trained at observing and that makes this book more immediate. He has an uncanny ability to keep the bigger picture in mind, what’s being said by the generals and press officers as well as what’s going on in the field. He offers a million observations of minutiae like the gunner in a helicopter that asks him to cover up the corpses they’re riding with when the tarp comes loose, or random comments and little throw-away things, like the patter of the soldiers trying to distance themselves or the things they’ve written on their helmets and flak jackets. “A sucking chest wound is natures way of telling you you’ve been in a fire fight”, that kind of thing.
It takes a while to figure it out, because the tone is seductive, but this is actually literature. It might as well be fictional, it is written with that kind of sensibility. It doesn’t pretend to be a truthful account of what happened while Herr was “in country”. It records the experience and gives the reader a good sense of what it was like, of how these event actually felt for someone who was there.
The movie reference isn’t idle on my part, Herr does that himself too, saying those that were there knew what movie they were in. It’s this kind of awareness of cultural pattern that’s laid down over all of it as a template that makes this book so much a warrior poet retelling on par with Sassoon or Remarque. It doesn’t matter if Herr is describing the way Saigon feels or the jungle or the highlands, or his fellow journalists or the grunts.

The telescoping eye of the author gives you glimpses and catches and explanations as well as just remembrances that enhance and enrich the descriptions. There’s very little glory in it all, but there is a kind of beauty none the less, and that makes it all the more compelling and horrific. Which is just the way you want this kind of narrative to be really, at least to my mind.

Mule

Generation X by Douglas Coupland

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland was first published in 1991.

According to Thomas Reed Whissen’s Classic Cult Fiction no one can set out to write a cult book on purpose, at least not in the same way as you can write a western or a whodunit; cult has to do with reader reaction rather than genre.

But if there ever was a generic cult book Douglas Coupland’s Generation X is a strong contender for the title. It has it all. Already the word “generation” in the title gives away the subculture, spokesman-ambition. And the “X” – symbol of the unknown – catches the spirit of alienation, essential to culthood, perfectly. As if this is not enough, Coupland offers the reader a trip via identification with the narrator, Andy, to the Shangri-la of all cult books: ego-reinforcement and spiritual rebirth. It serves up Mcjob-cynicisms and spiritual sustenance in the same helping and it is all very masculine, white, alienated and intelligent. A counter-culture assault aimed at the kneecaps of mainstream America, Andy thrashes contemporary yuppie culture verbally, while his friend, Dag, who is more physically resolute and subversive, vandalises expensive cars. In between these moments of revolt Andy, Dag and Claire share stories with each other and experience some kind of nostalgic hope.

Do I sound hostile?

I am not, really. It may be that the writing is according to prescription, but I buy it all the same.

The three friends are confused, disoriented. To be more precise, they are lost in the desert of Palm Springs and their disorientation is metaphorical rather than geographical. They are not roaming the desert: they are meditating in it. Very little happens. They relax by the swimming pool, earn their living from unqualified jobs, refuse to take responsibility of their lives, and do their best to keep boredom at bay by going into an ironic self-chosen exile where they can tell stories and anecdotes, decamerone-style, about themselves. But it is not the plague that is being exorcised here, or even the atomic threat (evoked again and again in the book), but rather a sick society that threatens to infect them with a fatal attraction for conventional middle (or should I say middling) class life.

But it is easier to take the rat out of the rat race than to take the rat race out of the rat. Andy, Dag and Claire have chosen their lot as castaways of society. Yet at the same time they want to be part of it. Actually, they want to have the best of both worlds: the adventure of the republic of Bohemia and the security of the kingdom of Boredom. But they cannot, and they are frustrated. This is not as bad as it seems, however: their frustration leads to a delicious sensation of weltschmerz – enjoyable since the pain is able to make up for the lack of meaning and can make them feel somewhat alive.

In real life the options are not that big either. In practice many young people are forced to become castaways, X-ers, outsiders, whatever one wants to call them – they have no choice. The price to pay for a middle class situation in terms of workload and stress increases day by day. Hence, one of the mottoes of Generation X is “reinvent the middle classes”.

Statistics available at the back of the book point to the fact that the polarisation between the rich and the rest (in the US and the rest of the west) is increasing. Rich or poor – soon there will be nothing in between. Given this social context it is small wonder that Andy & CO feel neurotic and alienated.

But to be alienated is not entirely bad. If you are an outsider, you are somebody; you have an identity, since identity to a large extent is a question of defining oneself against a norm. Women, blacks, children, the old and handicapped, the underprivileged are all defined against such norm or “ideal”. But what do you do if you are defined as the norm? Young, white men are per definition without identity – at least if they are well behaved. In my opinion cult books show that these “men without qualities” are special too, and different, albeit neurotic…This explains too the high status cult books enjoy despite their often counter-cultural messages.

When maladjusted young, white man reads about another maladjusted young white man a very special chemical process is started. Boy meets boy = True. Whissen uses words like idealisation, alienation, suffering, ego-reinforcement, behaviour-modification and vulnerability to define this truly platonic love.

Andy is a higher being, despite his alienation. He is supreme because of his intelligence, his radical attitude and, not least, because of his suffering. Identification with Andy leads to a situation where the reader’s ego is stroked and petted. You feel almost as intelligent, radical and brave as he. Yet identification can never be complete and this is of course unsatisfactory. Hence, the ideal cult reader modifies his (it is usually a he) behaviour in order to emulate the idolized and idealized Andy.

Whissen claims that this kind of reading process both depends on the reader’s vulnerability and enhances it. You have to be vulnerable to be receptive to cult books. The problem is that this openness also makes the cult reader an easy prey for ideologies hazardous for one’s mental health. A reader cum disciple is susceptible to simplified solutions and does not take real responsibility for his actions.

I don’t know.

I don’t think it is an ideal to be a superman reader – texts ricocheting from one’s impenetrable breast, texts scrutinized with X-ray vision. Words must be allowed to stab you in the heart, to flash in your eyes, to turn you on – at least for a blissful moment. Anyway, neither Andy, nor any other cult hero I know of would model their lives on a book. If I want to be as smart as X-friend Andy I too have to  realise that I must take the responsibility for my own vulnerable life.

Mule

The Prestige

This is a Christopher Priest novel written in 1995.

Now this novel has all the trappings that should make a successful story. At the heart of the story is the bitter feud between two stage magicians Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier.

The reader is first introduced to the grandchildren of these two magicians who are investigating what really happened between the two and the effects this has had on their own lives almost a century later.

The overall structure is very familiar to anyone who has even a glancing knowledge of the classical Gothic horror story. We have the large house with its unspeakable secrets hidden in the basement, in this particular case the Tesla machine, we have the secrets hidden in the manuscripts of Borden and Angier – manuscripts found and read in the middle of a dark and stormy night leading to horrible conclusions. And towards the very end the main character even goes into the cavernous basement where the past becomes known in all its decadent gory glory. The basement also happens to double as a family tomb.

So – yeah, I’ve seen this before.

Another main theme of the novel is the “dark double”, another Gothic classic. Stage magicians rely heavily on the prestige, the reveal at the end of a magic trick. And they rely on deceit. Some magicians go further than others in staging an illusion – and there is throughout the novel a discussion of whether Borden is one or two men. He might actually be a set of identical twins, something that figures heavily in his most famous trick “The New Transported Man” – an illusion that plagues and harrows Angier until he actually finds a way to replicate and improve on act.

But Angier takes it further than Borden. He finds a way to actually transport himself, at a high cost, via his Tesla machine. The machine itself is a classic Gothic horror too, complete with coils and wires and electrical flashes. He pays through the nose to have the machine constructed and then pays a more subtle price for using it.

All this makes for one fine and lurid tale indeed. Problem is, I know the conventions too well and find myself unaffected by the prose. The epistolary style leaves me cold, it is written in a way that’s meant to be a couple of diaries and when the voice does not appeal to you as a reader you quickly lose interest. I like Borden, there is a greater sense of mystery there, but the diary of Angier is quite frankly dull. It doesn’t bother with evoking the period, it doesn’t sketch the personality of the author to any great extent,  merely cataloguing the main events.

The ending is supposed to be a big reveal, but by the time we get there I have frankly lost interest. Borden, who is the foil all through the action, is summarily knocked-off earlier and we are left with the vestiges of the prestige of Angier

I can’t really go in to it in greater detail than that without giving it all away.

I remain sadly unimpressed. But then I have read all the classics in the genre, The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Inmost Light and The Fall of the House of Usher to mention but a few – and they are by far a much more interesting read. Mostly I think because in and around the horrors are woven the minute and detailed character portraits that drive the action. If you want Gothic go straight to the source.  Start with Arthur Machen. Leave The Prestige for those who have not read the forerunners.

Or watch the movie. It makes good the promises of costume, time and suspense in a way you could only infer in the novel.

Mule

Rumble Fish

S.E. Hinton’s 1975 novel Rumble Fish is generally described as a youth novel. That’s not all it is however.

While involved in another project I actually stumbled on this novel and re-read it a little while ago. Sometimes a novel benefits from being left alone in your book case for a while and this was definitely one of them. For me personally most of the novels I read in my early teens have lost their pertinance and as we all know there come a time when you must put away childish things.

This novel however stands the test of re-reading and actually as your own perspective changes so do the connotations. Since my last reading I have gone though a lot of literature in the alienation genre and I catch the tone here as well. It is in part because the voice of the main character Rusty-James has that same distance and anhedonic quality.

As a matter of fact all the characters are more or less iconic in that respect. The Motorcycle Boy is referes to as The Pied Piper, Robin Hood and Jesse James all rolled into one and he sees these tags given him more as a burdon than an honour. He chastises Rusty-James gently when they speak of it and says it’s great to be a leader if you have somewhere to go.

The novel also gives a very precise voice to Rusty-James. He know himself well enough to know that he is not smart like his brother and father and he doesn’t understand what goes on around him like they do.  He believes that he could have been just like Motorcycle Boy, but everyone around him tells him that would never be the case.  He wouldn’t be in charge of the gang his brother used to run, he doesn’t have the brains.

Rusty-James best friend, Steve, also fills a particular role. He is in a way the voice of reason, as well as the recorder. He starts the story off by running in to Rusty-James on a beach and making him remember the past. I think it is this particular framework setting off the story that  makes me think of alienation.

Rusty-James doesn’t think about the past, perhaps because it is too painful, but running in to Steve means he is forced to remeber and once the floodgate is open the story pours out of him.

The prose is terse and precise and has a lot to recommend it, actually. Writing from the perspective of a young adult is never easy and Hinton manages to work around the difficulties by giving herself some leeway with the distance of recollection.

The novel gets a lot said in a very short space of time, using language sparingly and leaving a lot of imagery behind. Specially for those of us who enjoyed the movie.

Mule

Cold Mountain

Charles Frazier 1997 novel tells the story of Ada Monroe and Inman during the American Civil War. This is a massively well researched novel. Not only does Frazier work around the American Civil War (1861-65) like he knows the terrain, he also includes the every day tools, implements and attitudes of the period into every line of prose.

I quite often find that period pieces have a tendency to be so much in love with their own project that they forget to tell a story, rather focusing on the detail. I don’t have that kind of interest in history, sadly. I guess I should, but to coin a phrase it all seems like a seedy succession of robber baron scumbags to me.

Now, that being said, when it is as well done as it is here it just deepens and textures the story imbuing it with so much life and blood that it becomes a geniune delight to read.

Taking up the tradition of alternating chapters we follow Inman on his journey home from a war hospital to Cold Mountain and Ada’s development from a lady of leisure to a hard working farm owner.

Inman has had enough of killing and after taking a wound to the neck he finally just deserts intending to go back home and propose to Ada, the minister’s daughter. On his journey he meets good people and bad and generally has a hard time of it. Every person he meets gets to tell their story, or involve him in their lives in some way and it is easy to make the parallell with Odysseus and Penelope. Inman, to my mind, displays every characteristic of battle fatigue. He is sick of killing and wants to be left to lead a simpler life, hoping against all hope that he can be put back together.

Ada, on the other hand, has a different challenge to contend with. Her father dies, leaving her alone and basically penniless. He had taken up residense in Black Cove at a farm being given the recommendation from a doctor that it sould be good for his lungs. The farm has never been intended as a working farm. He has a deep fascination with Emerson and that naturally leads to some more idyllic and scenic notions of what a farm should be. Once the money runs out and Ada is basically facing starvation she is lucky enough to have a young girl named Ruby come and work with her. Ruby’s story is also told and it is an equally fascinating one. She has grown up fending for herself in the woods since her father is a useless layabout and drinker named Stobrod.

The rich layered text is not only descriptive and beautifully crafted, it takes its metaphores and imagery from the context. Inman at one point fights off three men intending to beat him down with a scythe. He reflects on how good it feel to hold a scythe again and working with it, moving at the mens’ legs. When it breaks he beats at them with just the snath. A little thing like that is just indicative of how deep inside this world, this character’s head we get to go as readers.

It is all together too simple and just plain wrong to think this is a simple love story, even if Ada is the motor that gets Inman moving. There is so much more to draw out of this text, like an understanding of how hard life actually is when working on a farm where every aspect of life is gruelling work. Ada is so inept she does not even know how to cook for herself, make butter or kill a chicken. Ruby teaches her by example how to lean in to the burdon.

Each character has an arch and when Ada and Inman finally do meet up they are two very different people from what they were when they parted. And there is no story book ending to this kind of tale. Which is to say that Fazier does not take the easy way out. Their meeting is brought about by violence, Ada has her gun cocked at Inman not recognising him and it is certainly not the home coming he was hoping for. Once they do recognise each other at least the gun gets lowered, but it is still a stark contrast to the dreams they’ve both had. And I like that. I like the fact that this could have been a big Hollywood moment with a sweaping violin score in the background, but instead it is a case of two wounded animals circling each other cautiously.

There really is a bit of everything in this novel. Sex, blood, violence, war, coming of age stories, home guard and fiddle music. Philosophy and religion figure too, just like the intertextual nods to everything from Emerson to the Odyssey to the Bible to the lyrics of Wayfaring Stranger. Above and beyond it all we have the basic notion that you can never step into the same river twice, or go back home. I like the tone and texture of the novel. I like the scope and the richness. I like it so much I can actually read it more than once, and that doesn’t happen that often.

I think it has something to do with the fact that it operates on at least two levels at the same time. We have the big, sweaping tale of a homecoming and the minute details of every moment in between.

MULE

Nice Work

David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988) is described as a mix between an industrial novel and a university novel. It describes the two separate lives of feminist writing lecturer Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox the managing director of an engineering firm.

Examining the basic premise of the novels action you get the idea that this could be interesting. The feminist critique part of the novel symbolised by Robyn vomits French literary critics on you complete with arguments on deconstructionalist and postmodern theorems. She is the very essence of the ideas she promotes, living in an open relationship with another university intellectual and she promotes her own purposes within the academic structure in order to gain tenure.

Vic is a man possessed by the bottom line, increased efficiency in his factory, margins and business in the time honoured tradition of factory work. He is a cog in a bigger machine, being responsible for turning the factory he has been hired by profitable. He talks of cost margins and labour reduction. His home life is the sedate wife-on-valium and two rebellious teenagers, a boy and a girl, just like you’d expect.

They meet due to the “shadow project” in which a member of staff from the university is drafted to follow a business man around for one day a week during eight weeks.

So far so good.

We are dealing with types and tropes here. We’ve seen all this before. She is an intellectual, and idealist and a feminist. He is a salt of the earth worker in the world of margins. So of course she will reject his values and he will not understand hers. No big surprise there. They are attracted to each other. The world of culture seduces the world of work. And again, no big surprises there. Robyn beds Vic, he believes himself to be in love. She rejects, not only his love, but love as a patriarchal notion designed to control female behaviour.

I got half way through and felt like… So? Introduction of characters completed. Please let story commence. After having finished the novel I realised this is all there is. And if that’s all there is… then let’s go dancing.

That’s how I felt right up to the last couple of chapters when I went from “stop wasting my time” to “oh, no tell me you didn’t”.

Lodge chooses to attach a very sticky classical comedy ending on this story of opposites. There is a timely resolution to everyone’s situation largely due to an inheritance from an uncle in America. Deus ex machina crap.

This is supposed to be a witty observational novel of opposites. It is supposed to juxtapose industry and academia. But is does not, despite it’s best intentions. If it was to have any clang, boom and steam, it should have been a factory worker, not an executive in the role of industry.

The ending seems so false, so contrived, that I can’t even relate to it as irony. It all feels too detached, too disinterested in its own theme.

On the cover it says it was shortlisted for the Booker prize. Well, sometimes the weak fall by the wayside. Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda won that year. Just goes to show that being on the shortlist doesn’t mean a damn thing.

I picked this book up at an second hand book store in a moment of acute booklessness when I was heading for the train station. I paid for it with the very small change in my pocket, and that is as far as I can see, exactly what it was worth. Don’t waste your precious time on this one. Not even if you are faced with staring out a train window for four and a half hours.

Mule.

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) is a comedy about death, if you can believe that sort of thing. The main character who gives voice to the action is a college professor by the name Jack Gladney who has made a name for himself in the academic world in the very unusual field of Hitler studies. Jack has a few failed marriages behind him, and four children: Heinrich, Denise, Steffie and Wilder. His current wife Babette is described as suffering from some vague medical condition, that puts you in mind of Alzheimer’s.

In the beginning of the novel the whole family has to evacuate their house due to an “airborne toxic event”, a non descript cloud of foulness that suddenly takes everyone out of their humdrum routine existence and turns the citizens into refugees in their own country, an experience that is described as surreal, harrowing and kind of funny.

Once the toxic event is under control and people return to their homes, Jack begins to worry more about Babette and he manages to find out that she is taking an experimental drug called Dylar. Much of the action of the second part of the novel rests on this drug, what it is supposed to cure and what Babette has had to do to be accepted in the study that provides the drug. I’m not going to give it away here, but let’s just say it has some far reaching and absurd ramifications.

This is one of those novel’s that have gained the dubious soubriquet post-modern fiction. And if you have read any Paul Auster you know what that means. A meandering tale, vague and a bit pointless, like life itself, that isn’t afraid of the lacunae and leaving you hanging without answers. At the same time it is sharp in its observation of detail. It is rich in witty dialogue and has lots of mad ideas. The structure is more a triptych than a straight forwards novel with beginning, middle and end. It is not a morality tale.

Sometimes with postmodern fiction it is easier defining what it is not… But it is enjoyable, witty, dark and has a deep underpinning of humanism in its true sense. DeLillo pokes fun at consumerism, false intellectualism and the family unit. Several of Jack’s ex-wives have worked in intelligence, making a career of lies and deceit. DeLillo makes fun of conspiracy theories and he makes fun of fear.

But at the same time he is caustic and observant when it comes to human behaviour. Like some other postmodern authors you get the sense that in observing the minutiae, the tiniest details of human behaviour, we stand a better chance of making sense of things than if we try to look at the bigger picture. “Il n’y a pas de hors texte” as Derrida put it. There is nothing outside the text. Stop trying to act like this is reality… Or something like that.

Here’s a little sample of the dry humour:

“I’d like to lose interest in myself, I told Murray. ‘Is there any chance of that happening?’

None. Better men have tried.” (DeLillo, p. 152)

That pretty much says it all as far as postmodernism and the subject of the self goes.

I enjoy DeLillo in that somewhat disjointed way you enjoy postmodern fiction. Trying to explain what it is about and why you like it is always a little tricky because it has to do with a general reshuffling of categories. But if you don’t mind not getting all the answers and find the mind set appealing this is one of the good ones.

Mule.

Rant – Palahniuk’s future

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey (2007) is another tour de force by Chuck Palahnuik. This is a distorted dystopian futuresque rambling tale of disjointed accounts centred around the character “Rant” Casey. Because it is an oral tale, and because characters and events are described through the eyes of others there is a lack of exposition, which I for one enjoy. I’ve never been a big fan of the endless descriptions of who, what and where when it comes to future-fic, and I have read quite a bit of that kind of stuff, since one of my major essays was about Dystopia. This novel dumps the reader squarely in medias res and takes off running.

First thing we find out is that Rant is presumed dead. So right off the bat the main character is dead already. The tale of his life gets slowly reconstructed in bits and pieces by the people who have run into him at one time or another. Rant comes from a small town and parts of his childhood are retold, both by friends and foes. The outlandish stories about how Rant has found gold coins in old paint cans all around town, the gory story of how he got his nickname “rant” and stories of his mother and father – all of this is woven into the descriptions of what is going on in the relative now.

The world of Rant is an obscure future deceptively close to our own with some big differences. For instance, there is a curfew separating those who are active during the day from those who live and work at night. It becomes ever more strict when there is an epidemic outbreak of rabies. Nighttimers and Daytimers go through that classic division where they categorise each other as Other and blame societies ills on each other. All the tragically familiar reasoning we have seen time and time again over race, class, gender etc. is suddenly focused on which time of day you are active in.

There is also a loving description of an ousider sub-culture which revolves around party crashing, a sort of deliberate demolition derby run amok in the streets. People dress up as wedding parties, soccer moms, Christmas tree buyers or high school fotball supporters and crash into each other in the streets. It seems the more expensive the cars and fancier the dress-up the better. Rubber necking is more than a past time, it’s an entire world unto itself.

Rant is at the centre of the action, not just because he is wealthy from all the “tooth fairy” money he has, but also because he is a carrier of a new strain of rabies which he infects friends and lovers with. The virus spreads in the Nighttimer community and further deepens the rift between Daytimers and Nighttimers. Rant himself is fine, and there are parallells drawn with Typhoid Mary and other super carriers. The reader will recognise some typically Palahniuk social commentary in the critique of how society handles contagious diseases – from the times of creating a smallpox pandemic amongst the Indians in the 1800s and to the AIDS epidemic in Africa in current times – saying that it’s odd how these things always seem to happen when the rich white west needs to find a cure and needs lots of test subjects.

Rant Casey is a man pieced together through the recollections of others. This is a pretty typically postmodernist attitude towards the truth and identity. He looms large in the text, never given a voice of his own, and the reader has no way of divining his intentions. Why is he so obsessed with sticking his hands and feet down wild burrows and waiting to get stung or bit by whatever lives there? That’s how he contracts rabies and learns of the priapism caused by the bites of certain spiders. What is he up to in general? Infecting people with rabies?

None of this, however, is the strange part of the story. The strange part (well stranger part then) is the theory that slowly comes to light over the pages that given the right set of circumstance and the right mind set you can place yourself outside time and in effect timetravel. No machines needed. This puts an interesting spin on the grandfather theory – one that has been recounted many times – where you travel back in time and accidentally kill your own ancestor. It seems that here the theory here is more about going back in time and siring yourself, creating a superior version of yourself. Palahniuk just sort of slips this in there. Just like he does with the rabies, the party crashing, the curfew and the “ports” some people have in the backs of their heads.

To my mind some of the best dystopian fiction does just that, describes a world alien to ours but without making that the whole point. And just like Fight Club you can easily imagine “Party Crashers” taking a step in from the fictional realm in the good old tradition of life imitating art.

I like the mix of ideas and Palahniuk’s take on the bleak future/now. I like the covert social criticism. I like the way he deals with his topics without becoming preachy and obvious. It is quite a trick to pull off all the differnt voices and still manage not to lose the main plot. This kind of eye witness account of events can become stale and too much like boring journalistic text, but not in this case. It is a good read, sedcutive as ever, funny, nauseating and frightening. The ending is sufficiently open that you can easily imgaine this tale continuing in some form or shape. A dark and disturbing brave new world with all the literary tricks of a really talented author.

MULE