Toward the less goodies

Continuing the post below...

Nabokov: finished Pnin, and was just plain inspired by it. The prose is intimidatingly masterful. Here's a beautiful sample:

From a smaller boulder than the one upon which Chateau was perched, Pnin gingerly stepped down into the brown and blue water. He noticed he still had his wrist watch - removed it and left it inside one of his rubbers. Slowly swinging his tanned shoulders, Pnin waded forth, the loopy shadows of leaves shivering and slipping down his broad back. He stopped and breaking the glitter and shade around him, moistened his inclined head, rubbed his nape with wet hands, soused in turn each armpit, and then, joining both palms, glided into the water, his dignified breast stroke sending off ripples on either side. Around the natural basin, Pnin swam in state. He swam with a rhythmical splutter - half gurgle, half puff. Rhythmically he opened his legs and widened them out at the knees while flexing and straightening out his arms like a giant frog. After two minutes of this, he waded out and sat on the boulder to dry. Then he put on his cross, his wrist watch, his rubbers, and his bathrobe.

Simple, right? Just an intimating ease. You know, while Nabokov was a famous egotist, I sense in Pnin a deep sympathy for all the rest of us who lack Nabokov's magical facility with English. He is less sympathetic toward those who mock poor Pnin simply because he never quite masters the language. There is tragedy in his inability to communicate in any significant way to the non-Russian-speakers around him his complexities and beauty as a human being.

Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 - here we start to get into the writers I have much less feeling for. I knocked out this short novel to see whether I'd want to read the longer ones, and I'll have to take a pass. I just don't care what happens to people in unreal worlds. I don't see the drama of an anything-can-happen situation. Which isn't to say I didn't see some fun in this novel. But I can't say it's more than fun, and I can't say I'll dedicate the weeks it would take me to plow through one of his longer novels simply for fun. That's not what brings me to the novel reading business. When he begins to be deep or philosophical or metaphysical or whatever, I completely check out. It's hard enough for me to buy into that sort of stuff in a realistic novel (see Humboldt's Gift), but in a fantastic novel you're just trying to build a castle on sand.

I've been attempting to read books from the New York Times' 10-best lists from 2006 and 2007. So far, I've made three efforts, and all have failed. I'm not consciously trying to not like these books, and I certainly give them less of a chance than others might because I'm a slow reader and have to decide early whether I'm going to commit myself to a lengthy novel. One of the three was a book of short stories, and to give it its due, I just don't like short stories. I'll get into why some other time. But here are the novels:

Absurdistan: Read 20 or 30 pages of this, but two things really turned me off.

First, the central character and narrator is obese. He talks about his obesity and his desire for food in cartoonish ways that convey a twin feeling of hilarity and disturbed repulsion. I can understand why the trim author thinks being fat is both hilarious and repulsive. But I cannot imagine a fat person thinking of himself in both these ways at once. BTW, Martin Amis' Money also features a fat person (though at one point it is revealed he weighs in the area of 210 pounds, which may be bizarrely obese to reed-thin Amis but is not really particularly fat), and I was similarly put off by Amis' nauseous dislike of overweight.

Second, the novel features unfunny white rapping and an unfunny "girl from da hood" talking like a "girl from da hood." Oh sigh. The author should consider writing what he knows.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics: I didn't read more than 10 page of what is truly a terribly written book. Here's a sample:

It began with simple sleeplessness. It had been almost a year since I'd found Hannah dead, and I thought I'd managed to erase all traces of that night within myself, much in the way Henry Higgins with his relentless elocution exercises had scrubbed away Eliza's Cockney accent.
I was wrong.

Do you get the impression the author stopped for about 5 seconds to come up with this timeless metaphor? What on earth is it supposed to mean? And the Dunh!Dunh!Dunh! sentence, "I was wrong?" Come on, that's something a 12-year-old would write. (And she did it twice in the handful of pages I read) But maybe I'm wrong. Let me try you on another gem of a metaphor:

And scars didn't necessarily mean one couldn't be, say, more Katharine Hepburn than Captain Queeg when it came to overall outlook and demeanor, a little more Sandra Dee than Scrooge.

Doesn't that parallelism imply that Katharine Hepburn and Sandra Dee are alike in "overall outlook and demeanor?" Am I the only one who has a problem with that? Again, the novel seems to have been written in one sitting.

I remember some gossip when the book came out about how the author, Marisha Pessl, is a devastatingly attractive young woman, and how the publisher was playing this up. As I recall, the stories I read tended to either not pass judgment on the book or praise it. Are people just blind to terrible writing? What the fuck is going on here? I'm baffled and kind of upset that a book written in this way was deemed one of the 10 best in the English language for its publication year in the NYT. That just can't be right.

Oldies are rather goodies

I'm so far having much better luck with dead novelists than I am with active ones. Here's the recent rundown, from deadest to least dead:

Nabokov: Pale Fire was a terrific read. I read Lolita years ago and have occasionally struggled, always unsuccessfully, with Ada for probably a decade. I'd fogotten what pure pleasure Nabokov's easy, confident prose can be, mired as I became in the tiresomely continuous efforts at brilliance in Ada. Pale Fire was authentically funny and ingenious and created a remarkable character in Kinbote. I'm now thoroughly enjoying Pnin, which is even less pretentious.

Bellow: Humboldt's Gift was a combination of a book I thoroughly enjoyed and a book I found a thorough chore. The one was a story of people and relationships (Heliogabulus likee that). The other was thoroughly unconvincing, tedious ruminations on metaphysical BS (Helio no likee). Where the two met, I found myself waiting impatiently for the characters who made fun of anthroposophy to be proved right. But no, the reader is apparently supposed to take this nonsense seriously, even to be moved by it. That's way beyond the powers of my imagination.

That said, Bellow's prose is absolutely wonderful. I had great pleasure (more, in fact) in reading Bellow's essays (in a volume called, I believe, It All Adds Up). Fascinating too, as a writer, to see how many of the minor characters and minor opinions in the novels can be found in the essays as people Bellow met and thoughts he thunk. I knew his novels were very autobiographical in their story lines, but seeing the same oddball people in his essay "reality" and his novel fantasy gave me a compelling sense of occupying the mind of the man.

Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot was fun and inspired me, as I'm sure it did many, to read more Flaubert. I've started on the letters, which some rightly call his masterpiece. I also started Salammbo, but its lack of realistic characters put it a bit beyond my attention span. As for FP, I thought the "novel" element was forced in, as if JB himself was embarassed by his obsessive interest in Flaubert and had to put it on a fictional character. Otherwise, a quick and enjoyable read.