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.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
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