Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Marcel, meet Tina

I am pleased to announce that I have finished Swann's Way and In a Budding Grove, the first volume of my three-volume Proust (1018 pages). I am less pleased to announce that the second volume has close to 1300 pages. However, before I leave the first volume behind, I have promised to explain how reading Proust in conjunction with Tina Fey provides insight into at least one universal question. It should be noted that I do not own Tina Fey's book, Bossypants, nor have I read it, but I have heard her reading from it on NPR several times. In a very funny passage called "A Mother's Prayer for Her Child," Fey writes: "May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it's the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach's eye, not the Beauty. ... May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her own Heart with the sinewy strength of her own Arms so that she need Not Lie with Drummers."

Clearly Fey's profession is as full as mine is with young women--many of them both precocious and "damaged"--who fall prey to the attraction of the infamous "older man." We all know what attracts these women to such men--it feels good to be flattered by your superiors and made to feel special--but what (other than the obvious) is the attraction for these men? It is the job of precocious, damaged, twenty-year-olds to hit on fifty-year-old professors. It is the job of those professors to gently push them away. So why don't they? (I don't believe it's just a sex thing. Really.)

Marcel has a good answer: "In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her."

Brilliant! No wonder all those middle-aged men are putty in the hands of precocious young women. The infatuation works both ways. She is infatuated with him because he is so much older, wiser, more dignified, and so on, while he is infatuated with her merely because she is infatuated with him.

Thank you, Marcel, for that amazing bit of insight.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Proust is hilarious!

Nobody is going to believe this, but Proust's 3000-page-long In Search of Lost Time is absolutely fucking hysterical. When it's not profound, that is. My only complaint--and it is minor--is that someone should have insisted on splitting it up into chapters. I understand why he wouldn't want to do that--he wants the freedom to express a thought in its fullness, and that's fine, but even his thoughts are not 200 pages long. Really, Marcel. There are events; there are sub-thoughts--chapters would not have defeated your purpose.

Aside from that slight quibble (that of one who is reading many, many pages in one sitting and would like to come upon a convenient place to get a snack, ahem) there is so much that is wonderful going on that I begin to wonder if maybe I wouldn't have been better off having been born a modernist, not a post-modernist. I feel such allegiance to Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, and so on. But maybe that's why Melville's so important--he proves that it does not matter what era you are born in...you can write yourself light years ahead of your time.

One of the many amazing things about reading Proust, is that he's a real vocabulary builder--in French, of course, but also, much to my shame, in English. Truly, he is alone with Melville in sending me running to the OED multiple times per sitting. "Anfractuosity," anyone? (Def. a winding channel or course; especially: an intricate path or process (as of the mind).) Very nice. Going to have to use that in a sentence sometime soon. Also, "velleities?" Any takers? (Def. a wish or inclination not quite strong enough to lead to action.) I know some people who need to be hit with that one, hard. Truly, he has inspired me to elevate my French for the first time in years and I am honest to god making flash cards of difficult French vocab on my iPhone.

But to return to the fact that he is hysterical, consider this description of one of the main characters (a courtesan, to put it nicely): "I'd rather have it in my bed than a slap with a wet fish!" Hah! I do so hope that is an accurate translation of a genuine French expression. It captures something so perfectly, like, I wouldn't refuse, but it won't exactly be pleasant. There's also, somewhere in the latter half of Swann's Way a good 500 words devoted to analyzing (and making fun of) different styles of monocle. Honestly, he makes fun of monocles the way we do of...well...all the many things middle aged men do to try to look dignified. I would so love to take Proust with me to a faculty party. He'd have enough material for yet another book.

Coming up...why, if you read Proust and Tina Fey simultaneously, you will learn the secrets of the universe. I kid you not.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Bon Anniversaire, Monsieur Proust!

By happy coincidence, today is Marcel Proust's birthday. 10 July 1871 making him a perky 140 years young. In his honor je vais lire au moins de 140 pages! D'ac? And oh yes, a pretty picture, too.Got to love the mustache.

Swann's Way, "Overture" and "Combray"

Aside from the, ahem, questionable wisdom of taking one's reader on a journey of anywhere between 50 and 150 pp. between chapter breaks, Swann's Way is perfect. It is so wonderful finally to make headway in a "classic" and to discover that it deserves to be called such. Also I learned two new French vocab words: unctuous (used too often in the translation, I think...could have used some synonyms) = onctueux; lubricious (meaning offensively lustful; lewd--thank you OED!) = lubrique, I am pretty sure. I see now one of the inherent difficulties of reading the novel in French--good old Marcel knows words that I not only cannot translate; he knows words I cannot necessarily define. That puts him up there with Melville in my book.

Status: Rebrance of Things Past, Swann's Way, p. 205
Forecast: T-38 days to Law School, approximately 1/15 complete. Looks good so far.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

This time I mean it...

Skye is reading ... Proust's In Search Of Lost Time ... all three volumes and 3000+ pages!!! Really!!! She means it this time!!! No excuses. Six weeks and counting. Next up Thomas Mann's dratted Magic Mountain.

Thus far, the first 30 pages (1%) are lovely. A joy, truly, to reminiscence about "Mama," bedtime, and the world's most famous madeline. But also a revelation of archaic French verb conjugations and a reminder why Skye has chosen to read this tome, blessedly, in translation. Camus in French? Absolument. But Proust? Merci, mais non. C'est un travail presque impossible!

Thursday, June 2, 2011

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

While Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is, as advertised, a work about the paternalistic treatment of black patients by white doctors and a formidable expose of the ethical quagmire that characterizes tissue sampling to this very day, it is also something much more profound. In actuality it is a frequently disturbing glimpse into a culture of poverty that most, if not all, readers will think of as characteristic of third world, not first world, societies.

The first hint that something if not greater than certainly different than the sum of the book's parts is going on comes on page xiii in the author's forward, "A Few Words About This Book." Although the reader does not recognize its significance at the time, Skloot's explanation of her attempt to capture the dialects of her interviewees is extraordinarily important:
I've done my best to capture the language with which each person spoke and wrote: dialogue appears in native dialects; passages from diaries and other personal writings are quoted exactly as written. As one of Henrietta's relatives said to me, "If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that's dishonest. It's taking away their lives, their experiences, and their selves." In many places I've adopted the words interviewees used to describe their worlds and experiences. In doing so, I've used the language of their times and backgrounds, including words such as colored. Members of the Lacks family often referred to Johns Hopkins as "John Hopkin," and I've kept their usage when they're speaking.
The first part of this explanation makes sense: Skloot wants to capture Henrietta's experience as honestly as possible, but the seemingly tacked-on explanation of the usage "John Hopkin" feels, in retrospect like a preemptive strike against those who might accuse her of racism, or, worse, of exaggerating the family's, for lack of a better word, ignorance. The whole passage takes on new meaning when the reader realizes that Skloot's attempt to capture "dialect" is not just a matter of tone and idiom, but frequently an attempt to impart the ungrammatical usages that commonly characterize the family's speech and writing.

Skloot's epigraph also becomes doubly important in retrospect. Skloot quotes Elie Wiesel from The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code, saying "We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph." Initially I assumed that Skloot had chosen this epigraph because the Nuremberg Code was the first document specifically to address medical experimentation on human subjects as a crime, but as I read further I realized that Skloot had a different purpose in mind. The fact is, the further I read and for reasons that I will make clear shortly, the more foreign Henrietta Lacks and her family seemed to me, so much so that I was having a hard time empathizing with their plight. But Wiesel is clear: "We must not see any person as an abstraction"--to do so is to take the position of the white side of the Lacks family, who deny their black cousins, and so I struggled to live up to Wiesel's edict, even when, for example, Deborah (Henrietta's daughter) casually explained the nerve deafness that plagued her and her siblings as being "on account of the syphilis" (Henrietta's syphilis, that is) as if that were a perfectly normal explanation.

Although Skloot almost always refrains from editorializing, I am sure that she knows exactly how disturbing Henrietta's world must seem (if only from a public health standpoint) to her educated readership. Henrietta grew up in a society in which the incest taboo had more or less ceased to function (or never started). She bore her cousin's baby at fourteen, and married him at eighteen. Her second child suffered from epilepsy, deafness, and severe developmental delays (she was classified as an "idiot"). Under family pressure, Henrietta institutionalized her daughter in a facility where, unbeknownst to her, gruesome experiments were commonly conducted on patients. Skloot does not tell us whether anyone suspected inbreeding as the cause of Elsie's disabilities. Henrietta seems to have been unconcerned, bearing three more children and intending to have more until radiation left her sterile.

Almost as concerning as the incestuous relationships so common in Henrietta's world was the prevalence of male infidelity and promiscuity, as evidenced by the sexually transmitted diseases men brought home to their wives. At the time of her death, Henrietta suffered from syphilis, gonorrhea, and several strains of HPV (one of which almost certainly caused her cancer); there is no evidence whatsoever that Henrietta could have been infected by these diseases by anyone but her husband. If there is any evidence that Henrietta understood how she kept picking up these diseases, let alone their potential detriment to her unborn children, Skloot does not share it.

Skloot lets the irony of the fact that it was Henrietta who inadvertently supplied (without consent or even knowledge) the tissue sample that would soon become the HeLa cell line--probably the biggest boon to medical science in the 20th century--speak for itself. From the time of her "donation" onward, the story stops being about Henrietta so much as it is about (a) the research made possible by her cells, and (b) the horrific experiences undergone by her family when the name and history of the woman who provided HeLa became public knowledge without their consent or comprehension. The research made possible by HeLa is famously vast. HeLa cells were the basis for decades of cancer and genetics research, founded the basis for the Human Genome Project and in vitro fertilization, were blasted into space by both the Russians and the Americans, and were used to test the effects of nuclear weapons on human cells (among other things).

The tragedy of the story is not that Henrietta was mistreated and taken advantage of, although she most certainly was. The tragedy of the story is what happened to her family when their world collided with the world of modern medicine and scientific research years later. When Henrietta's identity became known it became desirable to take samples from her husband and children so as to establish genetic markers. A Chinese postdoctoral student with limited English was assigned with the task of collecting the samples. When she called Henrietta's husband to arrange a meeting, she assumed (whether as a matter of convenience or just logically) that he understood his wife's contribution to modern medicine. Likewise, she assumed that she did not need the informed consent of those to be tested, all the better for her since "informed" consent would have been next to impossible to obtain without making a mockery of the concept. The level of cultural misunderstanding between all parties concerned is practically farcical. The only "cell" Henrietta's family was acquainted with was a jail "cell"--as far as they were concerned they were being tested for the cancer that killed their wife and mother, which suggested that it could be inherited, a misunderstanding that haunted her daughter Deborah and was not corrected until decades later.

Deborah, who has at various times been diagnosed with everything from anxiety to schizophrenia, is the main character of the second half of the book. Her behavior is extremely erratic and, to the outside observer, irrational. What Skloot shows us, however, is that Deborah's behavior is actually based in reason if one takes into consideration the limited information she has along with her level of education. More than most of her family, Deborah personalizes the idea of her mother's "immortal" cells, believing that the cells are actually copies of her mother. When she is told that cancer treatments, nuclear weapons, and the effects of space travel have been tested on her mother's cells, she envisions her actual mother suffering the agonies of these experiments. Likewise, when she reads that her mother's cells have been cloned in London, she combines that information with an understanding of cloning gleaned from the film Jurassic Park and envisions dozens of copies of her mother wandering around London. Deborah is unable to separate fact from fiction, and she reads tabloid horror stories about her mother's cells being combined with animals to create genetic hybrids with the same credibility as the mainstream press. The actual information that might help her is beyond her understanding. One scientist, trying to be helpful, gives her a genetics textbook, which causes more harm than good since, as Skloot explains, Deborah frequently needs to turn to a dictionary to read magazines.

The breakthrough moment of the book--and the moment of slight hope--comes when Deborah realizes that if she and her family had been better educated, they wouldn't have been so easily taken advantage of or become so confused about what was happening to her mother's cells. How could her father, with his four years of formal schooling, have hoped to be anything but befuddled when told that his wife was dead but her cells were immortal? Unsure what a cell was, he took this to mean that some part of his wife was still alive, despite having seen her corpse. Hoping to remedy this situation, Deborah makes elaborate plans to begin taking community college courses, before which she must take remedial classes to advance herself to a tenth grade level. Unfortunately, she doesn't have the money to take any of the relevant classes, and her plan evaporates. Skloot is pleased to report, however, that a few of Henrietta's grand children and great grand children have made it to college, and one even to graduate school.

Ultimately, the story of Henrietta Lacks is the story of her family. Skloot reserves judgment, but the reader can't help but remember that Henrietta and David Lacks were cousins who had five children, all of whom seemed to suffer from deafness and varying degrees of learning disabilities and mental illness. Likewise, when a compassionate researcher explains to Deborah that her mother had several of the HPV strains that cause cervical cancer, she is so relived to discover that the disease is not inheritable that she seems totally uninterested in how women are infected with HPV. The reader cannot help but ask this question, however, and so David Lacks comes off as quite a villain. The tragedy of the book is that the Lacks family was not only confounded by the information they received (much too late) about their mother, but also had no way of knowing what questions they should ask. Hopefully Deborah's epiphany about education marks the beginning of a dramatic new lifestyle for the Lacks family.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Rebecca Goldstein's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God reads like a mixture of Richard Russo's Straight Man and Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. What is good about the novel is its all too realistic depiction of academia, academics, and academic life, complete with a charismatic, ridiculously demanding mentor, and the requisite boy genius. Anyone who has ever suffered through a PhD seminar taught by horribly famous professor insert-name-here will find a lot to laugh about (hopefully in retrospect), and anyone who has ever felt torn between an elite university and an uber-elite university will recognize his or her plight in this novel. What is not good about the novel, however, is that its argumentative premise--a rehashing of the decades' old culture wars--is a tired debate and hackneyed excuse for a novel whose author has a very real and very elite PhD in philosophy.

With the exception of the Hasidic boy genius Azaria, all of the characters conform to types (and frankly Azaria might be seen as a dead ringer for the boy genius Danny in Chaim Potok's The Chosen). Goldstein is, in a way, hoist on her own petard: she contends that an obscure scholar of religion might achieve mass popularity through a brand of humanistic-pragmatism-lite (which is possible) but counts on her readership to be uneducated enough not to realize that this particular brand of scholarship is old hat (Really? We don't need God to justify morality?), reminiscent of late night freshman banter, and only scratches the surface of the kinds of scholarship done by real humanistic-pragmatist-ethicists. I'm not saying that anything Goldstein's main character, Cass Seltzer, says is wrong, just that it is superficial, old news, fodder for a pseudo-intellectual piece in Newsweek, not the debating lectern at Harvard--a school that has a lovely and extremely rigorous Divinity School where these issues are thought about quite seriously. The notion that Cass would be accepted by THE ACADEMY (as represented by Harvard) is a joke.

Ironically, Cass's girlfriend feels the same way, although her contention that her brand of hardcore positivist logic is really more "valuable" compared to Cass's musings is equally hysterical.

So, then, Goldstein's attempt to juxtapose different schools of thought--the secular humanist (Cass), the positivist (his girlfriend), and the hardcore Christian (Felix Fidely)--becomes a transparent ploy and the novel itself becomes entertaining for the jabs she takes at the academy, rather than for what she's actually saying, which is disappointing, because I don't really think she's the populist she's pretending to be. I think she has it in her to write a truly intellectual novel but, sorry folks, this isn't it.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Room

Superficially, Emma Donoghue's Room bears a resemblance to the Josef Fritzl case in which a father kept his daughter and her children (conceived through incest) in captivity for over twenty years. Although Room also deals with a mother and child (conceived through rape) kept in captivity, the story is not so much about captivity as it is about the mother-child relationship that develops due to their circumstances, as well as the changes it undergoes when they are thrust into the world.

Room
more closely resembles the Greek film Dogtooth, in which a husband and wife keep their children in captivity and manipulate their understanding of the world. But if Dogtooth shows the psychological horrors a parent can inflict on his or her children, Room shows the psychological strength a devoted parent can impart within the same situation.

The story is not as much about "Ma," the kidnapped woman (we never learn her actual name) as it is about her five-year-old son, Jack, the first-person narrator of the novel. Jack has never known a world other than the 11 x 11 soundproofed shed he inhabits with Ma, and he has essentially no comprehension of there being an "outside." He is in some ways extremely precocious (verbally, mathematically), but in others utterly naive. Jack and Ma have a television, for example, but Ma, not wanting Jack to understand that he is deeply deprived, tells him that the people he sees on TV are every but as much a fantasy as his favorite Dora the Explorer.

When, after his fifth birthday, Ma begins to teach Jack about the "outside," he doesn't really believe her. Despite all her efforts to create a normal life for Jack, his development has been seriously stunted. Just how much so becomes clear when the two escape and are placed on a psychiatric ward. For all his intellectual sophistication, Jack cannot go up or down stairs, wear shoes, or stand to be away from Ma for even a moment. He has no social skills whatsoever, and he doesn't know how to play like a normal child. The outside world is so threatening that Jack wishes they were back in the room where he had exclusive access to his mother.

While the first half of the novel chronicles the difficulties of captivity, the second half chronicles the difficulties of living in the world and shows Jack very slowly coming to terms with his new life. Room ultimately suggests that ignorance is not really bliss as Jack comes to enjoy the opportunities available to him in the real world and he and Ma make a list of the things they hope to accomplish.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Child of God

It's really quite hard to figure out what to say about a book centered around the main character's necrophilia. The one thing I'm sure of is that I'm deeply jealous of Cormac McCarthy, an author who manages to write beautiful, lyrical, books about mass murder, incest, cannibalism (he's obsessed with cannibalism), and, yes, necrophilia. While he stops short of allowing us to sympathize with or pity the characters who perform such acts, he also stops short of allowing us to condemn them outright. He makes it clear that we belong to the same species as these characters and, "there but for the grace of God" and so on.

This is the premise of Child of God. In the first description he gives us of the novel's main character, Lester Ballard, McCarthy makes this premise explicit, saying: "A child of God much like yourself perhaps." From the very beginning, then, McCarthy makes clear the contention that the reader has more in common with Ballard than not. And yet, the question that shapes this slim novel is also clear: is it possible to become so depraved as to no longer be a "child of God?"

Ballard is essentially a hunter-gatherer, fulfilling his needs through his wits and his gun. He eats what he can find and what he can kill; if he has money it is because he stole it. His interactions with those around him--and especially women--are more or less cro-magnon--although not necessarily more so than those who surround him. McCarthy makes a particular point of describing a neighbor who has more daughters than he can count (or whose names he can remember) and multiple grandchildren on the way, yet who treats his daughters as whores at his disposal.

In this context it's hard to say that Ballard's necrophilia is really the ultimate depravity. Indeed, the whole town seems steeped in a kind of sexual hypocrisy, with primal lust trickling just below the surface. At first Ballard satisfies his sexual urges by spying on couples who drive up into the woods to have sex; it's almost natural, McCarthy seems to be saying, that when he comes upon a couple dead mid-coitus he (hunter-gatherer that he is) claims the girl's body for his own use. And then Ballard crosses the line that separates the civilized from the uncivilized, the sane from the insane (or does it, asks McCarthy?). Ironically, Ballard treats the dead girl better than any other woman he encounters, buying her clothes and brushing her hair. McCarthy's description of his ministrations is almost sweet, if one can forget the context:
He sat and brushed her hair with the dimestore brush he'd bought. He undid the top of the lipstick and screwed it out and began to paint her lips. He would arrange her in different positions and go out and peer in the window at her. After a while he just sat holding her, his hands feeling her body under the new clothes. He undressed her very slowly, talking to her. Then he pulled off his trousers and lay next to her. He spread her loose thighs. You been wantin it, he told her.
This is far and away the most sympathetic sexual encounter in a book full of sexual encounters. Ballard is not just using the dead girl for sex; he is also using her to fulfill a need for companionship that cannot be filled by any living woman. He is astounded by the novelty of having a woman to buy clothes and lipstick for, the novelty of looking into his decrepit house and seeing a woman sitting inside. The fact that she is dead is almost incidental.

When it becomes not incidental is when Ballard, convinced that he has found the solution to his loneliness, begins killing women in order to satisfy his urges. It's clear that the necrophilia isn't really the problem for McCarthy--there are plenty of rapes in the novel that are obviously much more abhorrent--but rather the need to kill live women because one can't interact with them. That's when Ballard becomes a ghoul, when he takes to living in a cave surrounded by "ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints."

Child of God is ultimately an indictment of Ballard, but it is every bit as much an indictment of the society he lives in. He is the product of all their illicit desires, all their mistreatment of women, their incivility and uncivilizedness, taken to an extreme. No surprise then, that he ends up not in a jail cell, but in a psychiatric hospital. No surprise that his society looks at him and sees not a felon but a crazy man.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

The Diary of a Country Priest

The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos (the inspiration for the Robert Bresson film of the same name) is the story of a naive young priest thrust into a venal, superficial, society that he is unprepared to understand. The animosity of his flock, combined with his failing health, lead him to a crisis of faith in which he comes to doubt that God is with him. This crisis is resolved only in the final moments of his life. As one critic says, his “road to death becomes a path to the Cross, minus only the crowds and the persecutors. His agony is neither symbolic nor comforting but a Christ-like sacrifice hidden from view, an unknown holocaust” (Bonnaud 41).

The priest teaches catechism classes to the boys and girls in the village, and, much to his dismay, they (especially the girls) delight in tormenting him. This is seen more succinctly, and thus more clearly, in Robert Bresson's film adaptation of the novel. In the film we see the priest holding Seraphita, his best student, after class to give her a prize. He asks her if she is looking forward to her first communion, and she says, essentially, it will come when it comes. But you're such a good student, he says. It's because your eyes are so lovely, she replies, and runs out of the church, accompanied by the laughter of the other girls who have been eavesdropping outside the door. The priest suspects that such humiliating encounters are planned, in advance, by the girls. “Children are children,” he tells himself, “but oh, why should these little girls be so full of enmity? What have I done?” What the novel (as opposed to the film) adds to this discussion is the fact that it is displays of premature lust that particularly horrify the priest, leading him to fear that there is no such thing as childhood innocence. This fear is embodied especially well in something the Countess tells the priest when, speaking of Chantal, she says, “You imagine that a girl has to grow up before she becomes a woman." This is
precisely what the priest fears most—that the young girls in his catechism class might develop womanly wiles and appetites before they have even grown up.

The Country Priest's relationships with women are deeply influenced by his fear of lust, which he does not so much see as a threat to himself, but rather as a threat to his parishioners, especially adolescents. He writes:
Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with that desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumour with the very organ which it devours, a tumour whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape. … With what strange solicitude humanity keeps watch over its children, to soften in advance with enchanting images this degradation of first experience, an almost unavoidable mockery. And when, despite all this, the half-conscious plaint of flouted young human dignity, outraged by devils, is heard again, how quickly it can be smothered in laughter! What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness!
Most important, the priest's diary hints at the profound crisis of faith that he is experiencing. In one passage, “overscored” but legible, he writes, “I wrote this in a moment of overwhelming agony, agony of the heart and of all my senses. A mad rush of thoughts, words, images. In my soul nothing. God is silent. Silence." He writes:

I feel that the worst is still to come; the real temptation which I await is far beyond, advancing slowly upon me, heralded by delirious cries. And my miserable spirit is also crouching for it, silently. A fascination of body and soul. (The sharp withering horror of this misfortune. The spirit of prayer was not torn out of me, it fell away of itself as ripe fruit falls.) Horror came afterwards. It was only when I saw my empty hands that I realized the vessel had been broken.
These passages show the priest looking deep inside and acknowledging the crisis of faith that he is experiencing. The fact that the lines are “overscored” (but not entirely) and not ripped out shows the priest's ambivalence about the feelings they express—although he is not totally comfortable putting them in writing, he also knows that destroying the evidence of his crisis would defeat the purpose of using the diary as a confessional. The priest's crisis of faith is expressed (or hinted at) several more times in the diary. He later writes, “Only God can know what I am suffering. But does He know?” before several other lines which he scratches out. Still later, several pages are again torn out leaving only one paragraph:

Resolved though I am not to destroy this diary, I felt bound to take out these pages, written in what really amounted to delirium. And I wish to bear witness against myself that this trial—the greatest disappointment of my wretched life, for I can imagine none worse—found me at first unresigned and without courage, and I was tempted to …

It appears that the priest was unable to resist the temptation to tear out the pages that expressed the darkest moments of his crisis. We can only wonder what he was tempted to do. Kill himself? Renounce his faith? Perhaps the strongest statement of the priest's faith (next to his parting words) is expressed in a sentence he writes in his diary quite clearly: “I believe that ever since his fall, man's condition is such that neither around him nor within him can he perceive anything, except in the form of agony." The priest here stares straight in the face of something most others cannot acknowledge: truth is about pain.

Note: This review is in part an excerpt from a longer paper I am writing comparing Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin to the Country Priest. All rights are my own!









The Almost Moon

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold will ring true to anyone who has a history of mental illness in his or her family. From the very first sentence--"When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily"--we know we're in for a whopper.

Helen and her mother Clair are trapped in a co-dependent relationship, the agoraphobic, paranoid, and increasingly demented Clair demanding near-constant care and attention and repaying her seemingly devoted daughter, Helen, with epithets like "Bitch." Helen explains that her mother's dementia has revealed the "core" of her dysfunctional personality, a core "rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks-old vase of flowers."

Helen has known for most of her life that Clair lacks the capacity to love her. Since she was a teenager she has frequently fantasized about dismembering Clair and shipping her body parts to various far off locales. What is fascinating about the relationship is that Helen snaps not as a teenager or young mother when she is perhaps most acutely aware of her mother's failings, but rather on the very day she recognizes that Clair needs hospice care. In other words, Clair is incredibly close to death, but Helen simply can't take it any more. Struggling to move Clair's body into a position where she can clean her of the feces from her most recent accident, Helen come face to face with the weight of Clair, the burden of Clair. She says: There is no excuse to give, I know, so here is what I did: I took the towels with which I had meant to bathe her [and] ... I smashed these downy towels into my mother's face. Once begun, I did not stop. ... I held the towels for a long time, staring right at her, until I felt the tip of her nose snap and saw the muscles of her body go suddenly slack and knew that she had died." The murder, in fact, after the intense animosity Helen has expressed toward Clair, is practically anticlimactic.

The latter, perhaps ultimately more interesting, half of the novel deals with Helen's understanding of how Clair's pathology has twisted its way into every other aspect of her life, from her father's suicide to her relationships with men, to her relationships with her daughters. Helen must ultimately decide whether to let Clair determine her entire future, follow in her father's footsteps, and shoot herself, or instead salvage what she can of her relationships with her ex-husband, daughters, and grandchildren by attempting to break the cycle of mental illness. It's a tough decision and not one with which every reader will agree, but a brave one nonetheless.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

One Sick Girl

Sick Girl, by Amy Silverstein, is a memoir worth reading (perhaps even in one sitting, as I did). The book chronicles twenty years of her life, from her diagnosis with a mysterious heart ailment as a twenty-four-year-old law student, to her transplant operation a year later, to her early forties, at which point she has outlived her life expectancy by at least ten years.

Silverstein's memoir is important for what it reveals about doctors, patients, and the relationship between patients and loved ones when one is a perpetual patient. Silverstein initially brings her complaint to her internist, but comments that internists are basically doctors "for healthy people," because as soon as something actually goes wrong they refer you to a specialist. There's nothing wrong with this per se--internists should refer to specialists--but what galls Silverstein is that the moment a specialist enters the picture, the internist, no matter how profound his/her relationship with the patient, exits stage left, never to be heard from again. It's a hard blow to take, that the doctor with whom you have a relationship is no longer managing your care. Silverstein also does a wonderful job describing the tendency of specialists to, as she calls it, "punt," a question to another specialist, thereby avoiding responsibility for the problem. Finally, she has an all too realistic understanding of the fact that doctors, no matter how close and longstanding the relationship might be, are not your friends; if you expect them to be so, they will fail you miserably. In her case the transplant doc with whom she has worked for seventeen years is on vacation when she has a cancer scare. When she finally manages to get an email to him explaining the situation, his response is that she should find an oncologist. He later admits that if he had taken just five minutes to look at the case he would have realized that there was nothing to worry about and been able to save her weeks of needless stressful, painful, procedures. Finally, Silverstein writes at length about a medical culture in which anything--good or bad--that can't be explained can send a doctor running. It doesn't really matter if the particular phenomenon is positive or negative--if it can't be explained, the doctor's out the door.

Silverstein writes compelling about what it means to be a patient, and the difference between being a good patient and a bad patient. Her boyfriend, then finace, then husband, Scott, forces her to be a good patient most of the time, but her underlying inclination is to kick and scream and go into "bad patient" mode. ("Bad patient" mode, incidentally, consists of questioning or fighting against anything a medical professional tells you to do. Ever.) She is also quite clear regarding the indignities of being a patient, as when, while waiting to be anesthetized for her heart transplant she becomes overwhelming insecure about the fact that her breasts are exposed to all and sundry. She understands that being self-conscious doesn't just go away because a doctor's in the room.

Silverstein also writes about the profound sense of loneliness that comes from having a rare, chronic, condition. Although she finds great strength in her boyfriend/fiance/husband Scott, who is remarkably accommodating and accepting, she realizes that not even he can understand what it feels like to be sick all the time, exhausted all the time, forced to take medicines that are in fact poisons all the time. She puts on a happy face virtually all of the time so that she will not upset (or wear out the patience) of those around her, but then finds herself resenting the fact that they don't understand how sick she really is. She comes face to face with the hard truth that those who have to work the hardest to appear well generally get the least amount of credit for the effort that goes into creating that appearance. Not maintaining that appearance, though, blows everything to bits. When Amy lets her "sick self" out of the bag, nobody, not even Scott, is prepared to support her.

The most fascinating aspect of the book is Amy's descriptions of the ways in which a transplanted heart, because it is not attached to the nervous system, never really feels like one's own. A transplanted heart gets a lot of mixed messages, adrenaline-wise, and it's constantly pounding like crazy when it shouldn't be, or not pounding like crazy when it should be. It's a good metaphor for this kind of chronic illness as a whole.

True Grit

True Grit, by Charles Portis, is that rare exception--a movie that is better than the book from which it was adapted. The Coen brothers did an amazing job paring the book down to its emotional essence, leaving out redundancies in the plot, and turning a book that doesn't know if it wants to be tragedy or farce into a razor-sharp film that actually succeeds in making the tragedy more tragic and the farce more farcical. Much of this is accomplished by the casting of Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, who, in the film, gets many more of the best lines than she does in the book. Also playing a bigger, more farcical role in the film, is Matt Damon as Texas Ranger LeBoeuf ("LeBeef," as they say in Texas).

None of which is to say that the book is by any means bad, a letdown, or even disappointing. It just doesn't share a lot of the imagery and pitch-perfect dialogue that make the film so wonderful. As critic Roy Blount Jr., says, "Charls Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he'd rather be funny." While the Coen brothers have in no way detracted from the humor of the book, they are devotees of Cormac McCarthy (see: No Country for Old Men), and they have heightened the McCarthy-esque tragic elements and imagery. There are some beautiful scenes in the movie--a corpse hanging in a snowfall, an Indian in a bear suit (literally) materializing out of the mist--that did not come from the book and could only have come from the Coen's McCarthy-infused minds.

In short, the Coens have not only returned True Grit to a form (unlike the earlier film) faithful to the book, they have also turned it into a work that McCarthy could be proud of. They have a fine aptitude for bringing the simultaneously grotesque and absurdly comical to the screen, a quality that characterizes McCarthy's work, but not so much Portis's. Overall, by heightening both the tragic and the farcical aspects of Portis's novel, the Coen brothers have outdone themselves and created a film following the viewing of which you actually do not need to run out and immediately buy the book thinking you are missing something. You're not. The film is self-sustaining, and ultimately much more satisfying, when allowed to stand on its own.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Infinite Jest: The Best Book I'd Never Read (so far)

It's very hard to know where to start discussing Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's (hereafter DFW) Macarthur award-winning magnum opus. To concur with the Macarthur people, to call it a work of "genius" is not to overstate the point. DFW manages to work a more sophisticated understanding of the vices that plague our society into his novel than one would find in a barrage of sociology texts. His basic contention is that we are all addicted to something: television, materialism, drugs, depression, and so on. Even the things with which we seek to replace our addictions--AA, for example--just offer another form of addiction.

To those who think that Infinite Jest is just a lot of postmodern gobbledygook, take heart. Although DFW grouped himself with Pynchon, et. al., he reads a heck of a lot less postmodern than, say, Joyce or Faulkner. Yes, the narrative is fractured--it is fractured because our lives are fractured--and DFW seems to be saying that there is a fundamental fracture in our society that makes it impossible to tell a story without a multivalent point of view. What he presents, then, is a series of narrative "threads," all loosely connected, that tell a couple of stories. There are basically four threads: the kids at the tennis academy on top of the hill, the addicts at the halfway house at the bottom, the wheelchair-bound Quebecois terrorists, and the transvestite junkies. Within the threads there are numerous characters, and yes, it takes a while to sort them all out, but after about 100 pages you feel like you've got your feet under you. (So no more excuses, all you haters!)

That said, if you are the kind of reader who prefers your 985-page novel to bring all the threads together and show you how they are more than tangentially connected...you might be disappointed. (I was.) My reaction, though, was basically a confirmation of the fact that I liked these characters; I wanted to know what happened to them, and I was mad at DFW for leading me on for almost a thousand pages and not offering me any resolution. But maybe that's the point...maybe I'm as addicted to resolution as the addicts are to crack. In fact, I'm sure that's the point, given that I would have happily subjected myself to a couple hundred more pages if I could have had some resolution.

Thanks, DFW. Point taken.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

The Kindly Ones

If you like Greek Tragedy, absurdism, Holocaust literature, and turns of phrase like "the demented vision of a perfect coprophagic autarky," (and, believe me, you'll be happier if you don't look that one up), then Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones is for you. Also, best to have a strong stomach. Critic Michael Korda says, "You want to read about Hell, here it is. If you don’t have the strength to read it, tough shit. It’s a dreadful, compelling, brilliantly researched, and imagined masterpiece, a terrifying literary achievement, and perhaps the first work of fiction to come out of the Holocaust that places us in its very heart, and keeps us there."[20] The book caused a sensation when it was published in France several years ago (according to Wikipedia, Gallimard was forced to suspend publication of the current Harry Potter novel to keep up with demand), much ire when published in Germany, and a curious mix of reviews from the Brits and the Americans, Korda's being the "best," and others accusing the book of being sensationalistic or even hinting at its underlying depravity.

There are a number of things going on that explain the wildly mixed reception the novel has received. First, we are used to Holocaust literature coming from the perspective of a member of a persecuted class--a Jew or a homosexual, say, not a member of the Nazi elite. And the view from inside is, indeed, stomach-churning in its straightforward acceptance of unbelievable cruelty, but it is also, at many times, painfully, stultifyingly, bureaucratically dull. Which is perhaps the point.

We are also not used to thinking of high-ranking members of the SS as anything other than brutes or fiendishly clever evil geniuses, and Littell's Dr. Aue is neither. What he is, is an overeducated intellectual who speaks a great number of languages, has an (over)active fantasy life, troubled past, and extremely sophisticated mind--but who still falls for National Socialism hook, line, and sinker. The attraction of National Socialism for him is one part intellectual/patriotic and one part a kind of homage to his absent father, who abandoned the family after the end of WWI. At the beginning of the book we discover that he has homosexual tendencies, which is something of a curve ball, but later on we learn that his homosexuality has more to do with his suppressed--I say suppressed not repressed--desire for his twin sister, with whom he had an incestuous relationship in childhood and early adolescence, than it does with any real desire for male companionship. So, from the top, we have an intellectual with an active inner life, a bureaucrat's distaste for violence, and an enormous sexual hang up. If Littell wanted to humanize Dr. Aue, mission accomplished, but if he wanted to depict Nazis as anything other than sexually oppressed, shall we say, "perverts"...not so much.

One thing that must be said--Littell has done his research. He sends Dr. Aue from the Ukraine to the Caucasus to Stalingrad to Berlin and we see how the war is progressing on all these fronts. Used as I am to either Western European accounts of the war or Russian horror stories about the siege of Leningrad, it was a learning experience for me to finally understand just how vast a territory the Germans occupied at the height of their power. Several times I pulled out the world map to trace the German-occupied territory, which I finally understood to have been both enormous physically and an enormous threat politically, which I had understood before only as it pertained to Western Europe, as opposed to, say, the Caucuses.

Above all else, Dr. Aue is two things: a coprophiliac, and a bureaucrat. His obsession with diarrhea and feces, his own and others', is just that, obsessive. Unfortunately for him, he has what one might call a "nervous stomach," and the stress of participating in mass executions in the Ukraine or being on the front lines in Stalingrad aggravates his bowels. His descriptions of creeping around Stalingrad and shitting, literally anywhere and everywhere are grotesquely hilarious. As a bureaucrat, he is somewhat removed from the general slaughter. Someone hands him a gun and he finishes off a couple of Jews at the Babi Yar massacre (as befits his status) but until the very end of the novel, he is otherwise always a mere observer of cruelty. And what cruelty he observes. He witnesses several massacres notable for their sloppy execution, with too few shooters aiming poorly at too many victims, who then need to be finished off one at a time. He sees the urine and shit and vomit that are the end result of the special gas trucks intended to make executing Jews "easier" on the German soldiers. He witnesses the selection process at Auschwitz, with the women and children sent straight to the showers.

Throughout it all, he expresses no real antisemitism of his own--his antisemitism, it seems, is the product of culture, not nature. Indeed, he goes so far as to agree with a friend that there is no logical economic or military reason that the Jews should be eliminated. In his job in Berlin working for Himmler he must constantly negotiate the tension between men like Eichmann who want the Jews eliminated no matter what the cost to the Reich, and industrialists like Speer who want the male Jews, at least, to be kept alive (and fed decently) to provide free labor.

One thing that Littell accomplishes very well is showing the dissension among the ranks, at all levels, when it comes to massacring Jews, especially when the edict comes down that women and children are to be killed, too. We don't see men defying orders, but we do see them questioning them. And the SS men are very clear on the fact that the greatest purpose of the acts they are being asked to perform is to entrap them all in one web of guilt and remove all plausible deniability. War may make men brutes, Littell seems to be saying, but they remain thinking brutes, capable of suspecting that they are being duped.

My only real problem with the book is that I think the Greek Tragedy frame story feels tacked-on and unbelievable. I can believe in Dr. Aue's sexual dysfunction and his family dynamic, but the two police officers who dog him (like the furies) even as Berlin is going up in flames seem to push the metaphor too far. I get the larger point--justice, in the Reich, has regressed to a pre-law state, and I think that's a valid observation. I just don't think Littell needed to be quite so literal about it.