Black Garterbelt

"Death is no different whined at than withstood."

[Minor spoilers for The Road to follow.]

I’m worried about Nick Hornby.

Apparently, someone pressed a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road on him.  Even worse, he read it.  Still worse than that, he chose to write about what a traumatic experience it was.  (A fragment of that can be found here.)

He starts out reasonably, but inexplicably slips into second person when he considers the fate of the character of the son:

As you probably know by now—and more than eight million of you voted for it in the Believer Book Award—The Road may well be the most miserable book ever written, and God knows there’s some competition out there. As you probably know by now, it’s about the end of the world. Two survivors of the apocalypse, a man and his young son, wander through the scarred gray landscape foraging for food, and trying to avoid the feral gangs who would rather kill them and eat them than share their sandwiches with them. The man spends much of the book wondering whether he should shoot his son with their last remaining bullet, just to spare him any further pain. Sometimes they find unexpected caches of food and drink. Sometimes they find shriveled heads, or the remains of a baby on a barbecue. Sometimes you feel like begging the man to use his last bullet on you, rather than the boy. The boy is a fictional creation, after all, but you’re not. You’re really suffering. Reading The Road is rather like attending the beautiful funeral of someone you love who has died young. You’re happy that the ceremony seems to be going so well, and you know you’ll remember the experience for the rest of your life, but the truth is that you’d rather not be there at all.

When considering a phenomenon as wonderfully manifold as reader reaction to a work of powerful fiction, a moment of thought is enough to convince the average reader that slipping into second person—that is, more or less telling your reader what she was feeling as she read—is a foolish approach.

It just so happens, Mr. Hornby, that I was not “suffering.”  Concerned for the fate of the character; at times, very concerned, perhaps, but that's all.

But I was certainly not suffering, nor suffering from a weird, solipsistic transference whereby the suffering of the character is dismissed (the character is Not Real) but is passed unashamedly along to the reader for his indulgence.  This can only be called a complete failure of the temporary suspension of disbelief, although it does put a perverse spin on Narcissus, with Mr. Hornby refusing to gaze in the reflective pool because the boy he sees there will terrify him.

(There’s a separate question of why Mr. Hornby suffered so much when reading The Road, but I won’t presume to tell him how to feel as he reads.  For me, fiction is a safe place to examine the awesome and terrible, as their deleterious effects are lessened by the aesthetic pleasures contained therein.  As opposed to the news, where the story like this leaves me feeling quite small and alone and upset as I consider the depths of human depravity.  But that’s me.)

In short, Nick Hornby suffered through The Road.  So much so that he slipped the surly bonds of the first-person to touch the face of You.

As for the funeral analogy, I invite you to make sense of it in its entirety.  I understand that the gist is “[I’d] rather not be there at all,” i.e., I wish I hadn't read this, yet my experience of The Road was nothing like a young friend’s funeral.

Perhaps he’s hearing voices telling him to abandon that charming everybloke quality that has served him so well and assume one of the less popular and useful modes of narration.  This is pure speculation, but somewhat grounded, as apparently someone is telling Mr. Hornby (i.e., You) that there just might be a duty to read certain books:

It is important to remember that The Road is a product of one man’s imagination: the literary world has a tendency to believe that the least consoling worldview is The Truth.  (How many times have you read someone describe a novel as “unflinching,” in approving terms?  What’s wrong with a little flinch every once in a while?)  McCarthy is true to his own vision, which is what gives his novel its awesome power.  But maybe when Judgment Day does come, we’ll surprise each other by sharing our sandwiches and singing “Bridge over Troubled Water,” rather than scooping out our children’s brains with spoons.  Yes, it’s the job of artists to force us to stare at the horror until we’re on the verge of passing out.  But it’s also the job of artists to offer warmth and hope and maybe even an escape from lives that can occasionally seem unendurably drab.  I wouldn’t want to pick one job over the other—they both seem pretty important to me.  And it’s quite legitimate, I think, not to want to read The Road.  There are some images embedded in my memory that I don’t especially want there.  Don’t let anyone tell you that you have a duty to read it.

There’s a fair bit of strangeness here.  Let’s unpack.

The Spoils of War

We don't deliver the news around here very much, but this one's worth a shout: Friend of RP/BGB Nick Arvin's novel Articles of War was chosen as the 2007 selection for One Book, One Denver.  From the Denver Post:

"Articles of War," like other wartime novels before it, centers on the question of when does fear turn into cowardice.

The book's protagonist, George Tilson - known as Heck because of his reluctance to use foul language - is an 18-year-old Iowa farmboy who is sent to Europe in World War II. His reaction to his first taste of battle could be seen as cowardice, and Heck struggles with his conscience for the rest of the war.

Heck's path crosses that of Pvt. Eddie Slovik, the only U.S. serviceman to be executed for desertion since the Civil War. Although the outcomes of their actions are vastly different, the novel points to certain parallels between the lives of the two men as well.

Don't be afraid to pick this one up, even if you're not lucky enough to live here.  It's short--which your pal loves--and a good one.

(RP's previous Arvin coverage can be found here, here, and here.)

Vista, Tabernash, CO

Graphomania?

Just to note that Against Assassination is updated to address James Wood's Reply to the editors of n+1, and to tip my hat to Garth Risk Hallberg's The One That Got Away: Why James Wood is Wrong About Underworld (And Why Anyone Should Care), a worthy read.

Against Assassination

[Updated below]

So: James Wood.

No argument here that he can be an intelligent critic, but I nonetheless often find that his criticism reads like gibberish, simply because I strongly disagree with some of his guiding assumptions.  When he once again attacks hysterical realism and its crimes, I don't see the badass critic that others seem to, roaring through the postmodern wasteland on his hog and spitting truth, blood & dust at the feet of the local warlords.  Rather, I imagine a man squeaking down the sidewalk on a tiny red tricycle, pedaling like mad with his knees pumping up and down dangerously close to his ears.

In other words, it's unbecoming.

Wood has most recently baffled me with a statement reproduced in this article, titled "The elegant assassin" in honor of Wood's becoming the "most feared man in American letters."  (I assume the use of "man" is deliberate, as it dispenses with Mr. Shea having to address the most feared person in American letters.  Who would be Oprah, with apologies to Ms. Kakutani.)

As Conversational Reading notes, other men and women of letters contacted about Wood take pains to point out that he, as an Englishman, might be inadequate as a judge of American fiction:

John Leonard, a book critic at Harper's and television critic for New York magazine, said in an e-mail that while he's determined not to start an intramural sniping session among critics, given the market pressures hurting literary criticism as a whole, he is also "tempted to suggest that not appreciating either Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison suggests that maybe you are tone-deaf to the American language as she is written."

This theory seems a misdirection, but I include it as the set-up for this:

And the idea that [Wood] doesn't "get" America, in all its weird glory?

"Look, we all live in America. We are all aware of its weirdness. But how mimetic does fiction have to be about this weirdness -- how much does it have to reflect this weirdness? And how distinct is this weirdness from the weirdness of 20 years ago?" Amid postmodern tumult, "people are still dying around us, having children, making friends. Without wanting to make fiction domestic in a dreary, writing-workshop way, you do feel a lack of these experiences in fiction."

As Benny Profane once said: Wha?

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