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.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
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.
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:
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.
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:
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 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.
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.
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