WordWacky

The Story of Forgetting: A Novel by Stefan Merrill Block

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

If I didn’t really like this book, I’d hate Stefan Merrill Block. The kid – and yes, I mean kid – was born in 1982, as his book jacket brags. He’s still in his 20’s. And this book is good, not good like macaroni art is good, or good like that time that your 12-year-old cooked you pancakes and forgot the eggs, it’s bona fide good. Maybe it’s not great, but jeez, he’s gotta have something to do with the rest of his life, right?

Block creates a familial mythology that is interwoven with a genetic disease, an imagined variety of early-onset Alzheimer’s. On his website, stefanmerrillblock.com, he details the personal origins of his fascination with Alzheimer’s:

When I was a small child, my grandmother was diagnosed with probable Alzheimer’s disease. At that time, I hardly knew what the disease was (I thought the word was “Old-Timer’s”). For the first year or two of her decline, her symptoms were subtle and I was too young to notice anything unusual. By the time my mom invited my grandmother to come stay with us, however, the disease was in its middle stages, and I was old enough to understand that something was deeply wrong. Just before my grandmother arrived, my mom explained to me what I should expect: cognitively, I was now more advanced than she. Difficult as it was to comprehend, I would now have to think of myself as more mature than my grandmother. I would have to watch out for her, like a brother would for his little sister.

Like the disease, the myth of Isidora is carried from parent to child, from one generation to the next. The Isidorans start out unable to remember anything – this is not considered a flaw, but key to their bliss.

Complicated are his ideas on memory, but they are ideas, not permutations of characters at play, but actual ideas. He could have been more coy with his ideas, weaving them seamlessly into stories, but he states them outright, with poetry and grace, and I, for one, am glad he does. Take his ideas of DNA as Memory, birthed of its parent, Chance:

…Chance also created some astoundingly complex and resilient successes, and memory didn’t miss a chance to take these opportunities as far as it could. Eventually, with higher domains of complexity, Memory took on new responsibilities. Once Chance and Memory devised the nervous system, for example, Memory found work for itself beyond its endless, monotonous transcription. Chance interred Memory in their mutual creations, allowing, for example, a simple fish to remember not to eat a bluish alga, or swim too close to the coral. Chance encouraged Memory’s new work, and in new organisms new forms of memory were invented all the time: instinctual memory, procedural memory, sensory memory, short-term memory.

Perhaps the ending, which carefully leaves some laces untied, is still a little too perfectly assembled. I can’t say that I understand how you strike that balance between order and potential, though. Maybe in the next ten years, either Block or I will get there.

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The Bright Forever: A Novel by Lee Martin

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Seldom have I seen an author so skillfully align guilt and innocence, unfold a story with such dexterity as to confound the reader’s own judgment of these usually clearcut qualities.

Our protagonist — if he can be called such — in The Bright Forever is both heartbreaking, almost childish in his innocence, and yet terribly guilty. As lies are told and truths uncovered, we judge and empathize with the character. In the end, we feel nearly as guilty as he does, as we allowed ourselves to love a little bit those we would choose to scorn were the whole story revealed.

Loneliness, shame, and pride are explored in this book — left wide open: the question of redemption.

At many points the main character addresses the reader, daring us to put the book down in condemnation of his actions. While this is not my favorite literary technique, it’s used well here. When we don’t put the book down, read on at times in the story when our worst fears about our primary narrator seem most certain, we give a little bit of doubt away, place a little more trust in him. We collude with him, if you will.

Aren’t we as guilty as he? Aren’t we also the ones charged with forgiveness, if it is to be granted?

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by Anne Carson

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book marks, without an ember of doubt, the first time I’ve ever felt burned by my lack of education in the classics. I approached this book ready to feel cowed and lost, so I was enthralled when that was not the case.

I understand Geryon intimately, for I, too am a red creature.

From a forgotten notebook of mine:

“On my steady diet of nicotine and coffee, my thoughts grind (like bad teeth) into points. I am a sharp-shaped thing. A needle, an arrow, I cut. I can touch rage: rage that was the only sprig of life on the barren potato farm; rage tucked into the left work boot for the dark walk home from the plant; rage channeled into the line of a razor’s making, at first invisible, then blessed red. We all know the color of rage. Red will unmake me.”

Geryon’s red is a different hue, as has my own ripened with age. Passion. Shame. Love. The interior exposed and vulnerable. Heat. Longing. Did you know longing was red? Do you know how close you are to knowing that?

Like the terrestrial crust of the earth
which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul
is a miracle of mutual pressures.

Fuck Herakles. That bitch and his arrogance, never seeing the deep red interior of his jailbait trick. Winning is blindness. Winning is empty. Winning is lonely, even with a joint in one hand and a cock in the other. It is through losing that we learn to make bread in the volcano’s eye. It is through returning that we get wings.

Anne Carson, thank you for making a hero of the vanquished, for turning a flat story over and finding the life growing beneath it.

Geryon stood upright
within the rayon planes of his brother’s sports jacket. Sweat and desire ran
down his body to pool
in the crotch and behind the knees. He had been standing against the wall
for three and a half hours in a casual pose.
His eyes ached from the effort of trying to see everything without looking at it.
Other boys stood beside him
on the wall. The petals of their colognes rose about them in a light terror.
Meanwhile music pounded
across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being
a self in a song.

“What is time made of?” Geryon asks frequently.

Fear of time came at him. Time
was squeezing Geryon like the pleats of an accordion.

And:

…A man moves through time. It means nothing except that,
like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

What does this thoughtful young artist have against time? We might think it’s his death — we all know his demise is assured before reading the book, or at least once we find out he goes up against Herakles:

on the other side of the world somewhere Herakles laughing drinking getting
into a car and Geryon’s
whole body formed one arch of a cry — upcast to that custom, the human custom of wrong love.

But here Carson has turned the story around — it’s not death Geryon waits for, but heartbreak. And heartbreak, as we all can’t help but know, is red like thunder.

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Diary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fiction in which a writer is the protagonist bores me. Faulting the author for too little imagination, I imagine the protagonist to be an ill-veiled version of the real person, the author. Indeed, the protagonist of Diary of a Bad Year is a writer, a writer who is perhaps named Juan C. (The author’s name is John Maxwell, or J. M. Coetzee.)

That’s my own personal bias, not any kind of objective truth — but here’s another piece of much more reputable advice that this book ignores. Don’t build a book around your political agenda. Not only does Coetzee do this, he does it completely blatantly, with little narrative intertwined.

The protagonist has contracted with a German publisher to contribute to a collection of of six authors’ “Strong Opinions.” Those opinions, such as “On Language,” and “On Intelligent Design,” are short non-fiction passages from an old man to the world he finds himself living within.

About assigning the opinions of Señor C to Coetzee, The New Yorker says this:

Many of the protagonist’s essays are reproduced in the novel we are reading. Naturally, the reader wants to make Coetzee’s novels confessional, to claim these opinions as his rightful children. But Coetzee explicitly complicates the question of his paternity, so that these books read less like confessions than like books about confession.

This is an idea I consider, but at best I see Señor C as a self-conscious exaggeration of the author, not as being of an entirely different character than the man who created him. As Coetzee is notoriously reclusive, we may never know how closely the two resemble each other.

But there’s something else much more compelling in the book’s structure. Below each page of the writer’s “Strong Opinions” is a footnote of sorts, finally the narrative we need to hold our interest through this barrage of editorial. The story that surrounds the writing of the opinions is told by the writer, in the first person.

And both are good. Both are engaging, and if we prefer the narrative (which is generally limited in page real estate to less than a third, and often ends leaving white space), we are soon rewarded with more — a third section on each page representing our romantic-platonic leading lady, also told in the first person.

About the opinions I won’t say much, except that I agreed with many, including some harsher reviews of our American Empire. What’s very interesting in the reading of the book is that depending on the story that is taking place, the opinions seem more or less valid — as you grow to know the writer, your opinion of his opinions changes and adjusts. Ultimately, you are left to miss the author’s narrative voice altogether, left with only his opinions and those of Anya, his typist. Could this be the demise of us all, survived only by our strongest opinions and others’ somewhat misinformed ideas about us?

Reading this book is an experience I recommend. Its engaging, lively structure contains a story of its own.

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To call In the City… lyrical, brilliant, epic, ambitious, and accomplished is certainly true, but also disappointing. Don’t use such ordinary words for this book. This book inspires the study of ancient languages and invention of new words to surround it. Choreograph a 1000-person line dance in Thompkins Square Park as a humble tribute. Buy a copy for every rehab and homeless shelter and gay community center in the country.

I want to live in this book. I have lived in this book. I am still living in this book. I’m in love with the characters: William of Heaven, Fiona Yet, Rose and Ruby, Charlie and True Shot. They are my Art Family, hanging out in the foundation of my memory, lovely new additions to the swarm under the jumbotron that says “Gotham.” How could new people — fictional characters, even — insinuate themselves into something so impermeable as my own history? It’s magic, but they have done just that.

Speaking of magic: I knew there was a divine tether between the Known Universe and this book, that it is somehow a hologram of the human experience twisted into a raunchy fable. That is magic enough, but here’s some more magic: In the City of Shy Hunters was published in the early months of 2001. A quote from p. 437:

“As I lit the cigarette, the World Trade Center was in the rearview mirror, and I turned around to look. The World Trade Center buildings were so beyond human they’d disappeared.”

This book is a beautiful example of contemporary urban wisdom, heart, and tragedy as it truly is — inseperable from, a celebration of Life Cafe: the ouroboros, the peace pipe, and the pungent wafts of dog shit.

There’s nothing more to say about this book, it’s true. Yet I also believe my reading experience is enhanced by a multitude of ideas around a single work.

This is the book your creative writing teacher wants you to write. It is sparse, and the verbs are active. Epic without being overwritten, it has a verbal landscape that exactly mirrors the charred country the protagonists traverse.

Yes, it’s apocalyptic; yes, it’s man versus man — along with man versus nature (himself?). It is every paranoid’s fantasy taken to its impossible, right-around-the-corner conclusion. It is predictable in this way.

You won’t care.

This is a story of love and commitment under the harshest imaginable conditions. Our unnamed heroes walk on, always at the brink of unthinkable deaths, and still there are lessons, a father’s lessons, his legacy to his son, a son’s lessons of innocence for his father.

Most of the insights of the father go unspoken, however: “The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone.”

McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks to mark dialogue. His commas are so infrequent, you almost believe they’re completely absent (on two full pages of complicated sentences, I counted two). All of the -n’t contractions lack their apostrophes. Many to-be verbs are just missing. Civilization has broken down completely, and with it all order, says McCarthy with these omissions.

The placement of text on the pages — lone paragraphs and vacant expanse of page — contribute to the barren landscape of the characters’ worlds.

A paragraph separated by breaks on either side:

In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.

I had to read this paragraph several times, inserting mental commas as I went. I enjoyed every reading of it more than the last.

What do you want when there’s nothing left to want? Who do you trust when there’s nobody left to trust and the rules you learned to live by no longer fit — how would you even figure out who to trust? What would you do — or not do — to survive?

These are worn out questions that are haunting and dusty and new and familiar in The Road.

In A.M. Homes’s novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, middle-aged protagonist Richard Nowak has had what he believes is a brush with death, followed by a mid-life crisis.

This is a story we’ve heard before — in fact, Homes is flirting with some real cliche in the subject matter of her book. But it manages to be completely unexpected, anyway.

Bizarre things happen to Richard Nowak. They will make you laugh.

The characters in This Book… are mostly described without any real reference to their physical form. We understand them, picture them because of their actions and dialogue. We imagine we know someone like each of them.

Richard’s position and circumstance (crossed with his near death experience) allow him to be absurdly helpful to others — strangers, family, his housekeeper — and as a worldly cynic, you wait the entire story for this to backfire on him. People can’t just go around being maniacally generous like that, you think. And his life definitely gets more complicated, but it also gets richer.

The prose is simple and unobtrusive, allowing the incredible plot (and I mean that in a couple of ways) and pitch-perfect dialogue to stand out. My critic was forced into hiding, edged out by the characters that had come to life in my mind.

Can a fable take place in modern day LA, with complex, quirky characters that curse and threaten and fuck? A.M. Homes says yes, and she’s proven it to me with This Book….