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.

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.

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.

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.

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.