Thoughts On BooksAll the Pretty HorsesLong before I read All the Pretty Horses, I had read B.R. Myers's essay savaging Cormac McCarthy and other contemporary literary darlings for their pretentious artificial prose. While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned. The criticism of All the Pretty Horses is both fair and unfair. It's true that this sentence and others cited by Myers seem to aim for evocative language at the expense of making any sense. (And shouldn't it be whose will? I think so, but it doesn't make much sense that way either.) But I don't think these sentences are representative of the book as a whole, which has a decent plot and is not just a mass of incomprehensible poetic babbling about horses. McCarthy does eschew certain typographical conventions: he doesn't use quotation marks; he often omits apostrophes; he doesn't use many commas; he likes to form compound words like "cattlebuyer" or "diningroom" without space or hyphen; and he does not capitalize some words like "english" and "french." I don't really know what the point of this is. Anything for a distinctive style?
But I enjoyed the book. I would read something else by McCarthy.
I remember buying the issues of the comic book 2000 A.D. that contained the first and second episodes of The Ballad of Halo Jones. I must have been thirteen years old, and on summer vacation in Scotland. So, partly out of a sense of nostalgia, I picked up The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones with all thirty-odd episodes in a bound volume. Apparently ninety-some episodes were planned, but I guess they were never written. Like the Canterbury Tales. The comic strip is about an ordinary 49th-century girl, a non-heroic protagonist who falls into random adventures. In the first ten episodes she's trying to avoid gangs in the slums of future Earth; then she hitches a ride off Earth and spends the next ten episodes as a stewardess on a space liner; and then later she enlists in the space army. This last segment is somewhat reminiscent of The Forever War.
Which leads me to the thought... Alan Moore must be, if not the most
derivative author in the world, certainly the most derivative author
that I consider a favorite and actively seek out. He's built a whole
career out of parodies, homages, remakes, and bald-faced
rip-offs... of the superhero genre, nineteenth-century literature, or
what have you.
Diamond reviews a number of past societies that went into decline or were destroyed because of environmental damage or climate change: Easter Island, Mangareva, Henderson Island and Pitcairn Island, the Anasazi, the Maya, and the Greenland Vikings. He also looks at some societies which managed to do a better job of dealing with their environmental problems (Japan, Iceland, Tikopia, the Netherlands) and some places that currently have fragile environments (Montana, Australia, Haiti, Rwanda). Of course the most important question is what this all means for the future of Los Angeles, where Jared Diamond and I live. My favorite chapters were the ones on Easter Island (in a nutshell, they cut down all the trees, so they couldn't make canoes to hunt porpoise with, and their vegetable fields eroded, and then they ate all the birds, and then they ate each other) and on the Greenland Norse (climate change killed off their livestock and blocked their contact with the Scandinavians back home; also the native Americans kicked their asses, which is why they failed to colonize Vinland). Chapter One is on Montana. Before starting the book, I read a review that made it sound as if Diamond were really sounding the death knell for Montana as a state on the verge of collapse. In fact he rather pulls his punches, or hedges his bets, saying that of course Montana is not about to collapse, it just has problems (mine tailings poisoning the water, climate change reducing agricultural production), and if even lovely and pristine Montana has environmental problems, think how much worse off the other 49 states must be... I enjoyed Collapse, but as in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond is a trifle long-winded, subscribing to the "tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them, then re-iterate how this ties into what you told them in chapter thirteen, then explain how this foreshadows what you will tell them in chapter fifteen" school of pedagogy.
I wonder if a repetitive style is key to writing a
blockbuster work of popular science that will be made into a
television mini-series, like GG&S or like Dava
Sobel's Longitude. I started reading
Longitude the year it hit the bestseller lists, but I
couldn't finish it; it was so repetitive it drove me
nuts. Jared Diamond is not quite that bad.
The thing that stays with me about The Diamond Age is that the future society had all manner of nanotechnology, could make self-assembling diamond cities, et cetera, but a plot point required that they could not do convincing voice synthesis by computer.
Thus I will always mentally associate it with Starman Jones, a Heinlein novel in which starships jump across the universe faster than light, but the humans on the bridge need to convert decimal numbers to binary by looking up the conversion in a book.
I recently read Hannibal, by Thomas Harris, the third Hannibal Lecter book after Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. (Lecter is only a secondary character in Red Dragon.) If you haven't read the first two books, I recommend them--they're quite good. But the third one is really a letdown, especially in the second half. There are three main reasons for this. General Decrease of Writing Quality. Maybe when one of your books becomes a grand-slam motion picture sensation, you figure the audience for your next book will be a lot stupider. Or maybe you figure it'll be a bestseller no matter what and you aren't motivated to make it any good. Or maybe your editor no longer has the power to keep you in line. Whatever the reason, there's a noticeable slump in the writing. Harris has an annoying tendency to switch tenses between past and present at will. He also has a tendency to repeat himself, i.e. you get reminded at the start of Chapter 5 what happened at the end of Chapter 4. Speaking of repetition, there is a detective Pazzi in this book who once tracked down a serial murderer... in almost exactly the same way that another detective caught Hannibal Lecter in Red Dragon. I guess there's only a limited number of good ways to catch serial killers. Hannibal Lecter as Superman. Okay, previously Hannibal Lecter was a brilliant insane psychiatrist with artistic talent and a remarkable sense of smell. But in this book, Harris pumps up Lecter's IQ to superhuman levels, absurd levels. Hannibal Lecter not only speaks flawless accentless modern Italian, he is also completely fluent in fourteenth-century Italian dialects, indeed he is the world's greatest authority on pre-Renaissance Florentine art, literature, and history. Hannibal Lecter is conversant with string theory (I'm not kidding) and enjoys perusing Stephen Hawking's papers, looking for errors. Hannibal Lecter subscribes to every academic journal there is. Hannibal Lecter could probably fix your car, even if it were a lowly sort of car and not a supercharged high-end Jaguar such as Hannibal Lecter would drive. Past a certain point it just gets ridiculous. Also, there is the difficulty, familiar to science fiction readers, of how a presumably-non-superintelligent author can supply words and actions for a superintelligent character. Lecter gives a supposedly brilliant lecture on Dante which I found not very impressive (but very short-- I wish all the lectures I sat through were over in five minutes). Hannibal Lecter as Hero. In the previous books, Hannibal Lecter was not mistaken for a role model. He was, perhaps, a cool villain, but he was still a dangerous and unpleasant lunatic who ate people and should be perpetually confined in the deepest dungeon available. Now Harris has decided to root for Lecter as a charming aristocrat of exquisitely refined sensibilities who drives around in supercharged Jaguars and eats people. Not only is this change of perspective morally repugnant, but it requires that the book have a number of characters who are so cartoonishly evil, or corrupt, or male-chauvinistic, or uncultured, that the reader will not mind when they are killed and/or eaten. (Hannibal does still kill innocent people as well, mainly when he needs to take their job, or their house, or their plane ticket, but these incidents are glossed over and not described in any detail.) Like any bad sequel, it's really pretty depressing. I suppose there might be a fourth book, in which Clarice Starling would wake from her hypnotic trance and hopefully blow Lecter's psychopathic genius brains out. But it wouldn't be enough of a fix somehow.
I think the kind, rational thing to do would have been to get Thomas
Harris evaluated by medical professionals. I mean you don't go from
writing Silence of the Lambs to writing
Hannibal just because you had a bad day at the
typewriter. I'm thinking Harris could have been biking without a
helmet, he takes a low-hanging tree branch to the head, finds his way
home a few hours later and writes Hannibal. That kind of
thing happens. He wouldn't necessarily remember the tree branch the
next day or know where his bike went.
The stories in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories run the spectrum, from pretty good, through disappointingly-ended, to stale and weak. The best ones are "Lusus Naturae" by Margaret Atwood and "Reports of Certain Events in London" by China Mieville. This anthology opens with an introduction by Pulitzer-Prize-winning Michael Chabon, asking "what is genre fiction? The stories in this book dance at the interface between genre fiction and literary fiction blah blah blah." I had the notion going in (which may have been correct) that the authors featured in this collection have Literary Pretensions, and are either like Margaret Atwood, a filed-under-literature author who claims that her science fiction novels aren't nasty science fiction at all, or like Stephen King, a filed-under-horror author who wishes literary critics would give him the Respect he Deserves. Due to my own prejudices about this kind of thing, I was primed and ready to find that the supposedly-literary authors, slumming in the ghetto of "weird fiction," would turn out genre stories that were actually weak and conventional compared to the work of their supposedly-formulaic genre cousins. But in fact, no such clear pattern emerges. As I said, the two best stories are by the closeted-science-fiction-writer Ms. Atwood and by China Mieville, admitted fantasy writer. And of the two worst stories, one is by a literary magazine editor, about as effetely "literary" as you can get, but the second-worst is by a writer of one of those series of mystery novels with thematic titles, about as "genre" as you can get.
So. Go figure.
This is apparently John Kenneth Galbraith's third novel. I enjoyed Galbraith's non-fiction books The Affluent Society and The Great Crash. However, this novel is fairly atrocious. It appears to be Galbraith's idea of an escapist wish-fulfillment fantasy. The protagonist is a bright young economist. He gets his undergrad degree at Harvard, then he gets a Marshall Scholarship to Cambridge. Should he perhaps go to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D.? No. He goes to Berkeley instead. Where he writes a successful thesis. And then is offered a full-time teaching post, with the first year off for research. Eventually, he gets tenure at Harvard. (Only another academic could imagine this was a gripping tale...) Along the way he marries a girl who is "exuberant" in bed, and who is brilliant, but not quite as brilliant as he is, and who inherits a considerable sum of money. He comes up with a formula for identifying irrationally overvalued stocks and sells them short. They become enormously rich and use their wealth to support various liberal causes. That's it. That's the book. It manages to be a quick read (197 pages) but also rather dull. Galbraith tends to end each chapter with an ominous threat of something about to happen ("Of this [serious and highly unwelcome trouble] there would now be some indication") but these threats generally remain unfulfilled. I felt that both the politics and the economics in the book were rather naive. You would think that an esteemed economist, who among other things wrote a book on the 1929 stockmarket crash, might recognize that identifying irrationally overvalued stocks is easy. In order to make large amounts of money from the crash, you really need to know exactly when the euphoria will end, which is much harder. |