The Broom of the System

I won an audiobook version of David Foster Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System (read by Robert Petkoff) over at A Bookworm's World this fall. And I could barely stand to finish it because I was so exasperated by the characters and their situation. I ended up driving around yelling at the sound system in my car, trying to get to the end of the long walk across the desert. I mean that literally, as various narrative threads come together in a fictional manufactured desert near Cleveland (the Great Ohio Desert; note the acronym). Obviously, the situation of the novel is comical, and so a reader's response, however incensed, is going to be commensurately comical.

The character names alone are ample warning that nothing is to be taken seriously in this novel--especially if you hear them out loud, rather than reading them to yourself, silently: Mindy Metalman, Wang-Dang Lang, Biff Diggerence, Rick Vigorous, Candy Mandible, Judith Prietht, and Peter Abbott, just to name a few you're introduced to in the first pages.

Listening to these characters tell stories to one another and become disconcertingly aware that they themselves are in a story while driving around rural Ohio may in fact be the ideal way to experience this peculiar novel. The novel's concern with communication between people and the difficulty of defining the self and the Other comes across well out loud, although the supremely irritating psychiatrist, Dr. Jay, reaches the unbearable level sooner on audio than I think he might on the page. As is my habit, I had to find a library copy of this book after listening to the audio version so I could give you one of Lenore's therapy sessions with Dr Jay:

Jay: Rick knows he must forever remain an Other to you. Rick knows the meaning of membrane. Rick is like a sperm without a tail. An immobilized sperm in the uterus of life. Why do you think Rick is so desperately unhappy? What do you think he means by the Screen Door of Union?....He means membrane! Rick is trapped behind his own membrane. He hasn't the equipment to get out.
Lenore: Hey, you're not supposed to talk about your other patients.
Jay: Why do you think he's so possessive? He wants you in him. He wants to trap you behind the membrane with him. He knows he can never validly permeate the membrane of an Other, so he desires to bring that Other into him, for all time. He's a sick man.
Lenore: Look, stop trying to swim around. You've made your point.
Jay: No, you've made your point. All distinctions are shattered. I am not here. I am the sperm inside you. Remember that you are half sperm, Lenore.
Lenore: Pardon?
Jay: Your father's sperm. It's part of you. Inseparable.
Lenore: What does my father have to do with all this?
Jay: Admit.
Lenore: Admit what?
Jay: That you want someone truly inside you. That your membrane is crying out.
Lenore: Jesus.
Jay: Listen. . . Hear that? The faint cry of a membrane, isn't it? "Let me be an ovum, let--"
Lenore: He loves me.
Jay: He does? The Adonis? The valid Other?
Lenore: Rick, you dingwad. Rick loves me. He's said so.
Jay: Rick cannot give us what we need. Admit it.
Lenore: He loves me.
Jay: It's a sucking love, Lenore. An inherently unclean love. It's the love of a flabby, unclean membrane, sucking at an Other, to dirty. Dirt is on this membrane's mind. It wants to do you dirt.

This is the point where I got completely fed up and started yelling at the sound system in my car. That worsened as Rick continues to tell Lenore stories and she becomes less and less able to play his game. The reader--or listener, in this case--is similarly unable to play the novel's games anymore, and so I drove around aimlessly waiting for the resolution and relieved when the desert was finally traversed and I could put these characters back into their can.

It was an absorbing, if exasperating, journey. The point of it, as one character comes out and says, in the final pages, is to "play the game together. I promise that no player will feel alone." It might put you off of psycho-therapy forever, though.

Crossed Wires

Last week I read what struck me as a mildly entertaining romance novel, Crossed Wires by Rosy Thornton. It's fairly recent, published in 2008, but it reads like something out of the 1970s, with a character getting indignant about racism and the person being discriminated against keeping a stiff upper lip about it.

Part of the interest of the novel, for me at least, is that it's very, very British, and an American reader is left to imagine what kind of prejudices the male protagonist, a professor at Cambridge, has about the people in Sheffield, where the female protagonist lives, and vice-versa. When the female protagonist, Mina, thinks about the male protagonist, Peter, she "didn't suppose [he] had to spend his coffee breaks listening to people wittering about shoes. Although she found it hard to imagine what people in universities did talk about...."

The author, quite obviously of the professorial class herself, is at her best when describing the hysterics of a graduate student who has just handed in her thesis and is now discovering mistakes that she hadn't seen before. The scene reminded me vividly of a conversation I had years ago in a shared graduate student office with an older woman who told me that I had just veered over the line to what she described as "baroque worry."

Peter has a friend named Jeremy who livens things up every time the author allows him to make an appearance. As soon as he's introduced we learn that he has a partner named Martin and that "'Partner' was Jeremy's own word; when in company, he liked to follow it with the explanatory gloss 'partners in crime' and a lascivious leer." Peter suspects him of selecting packages of cookies "especially with innuendo in mind" on at least one occasion, when he is offered a "Viennese chocolate sandwich."

The novel ends predictably, with even the children of the couple falling immediately in love with each other. I feel a bit churlish about my lukewarm reaction, since The Zen Leaf and Moored at Sea had such nice things to say about it.

Trivial Pursuit for Book-Lovers

Children's: What author uproots a Massachusetts family to the Gold Rush town of Lucky Diggins, in The Ballad of Lucy Whipple?

Classics: What followup to The Web and the Rock was Thomas Wolfe's last novel?

Non-Fiction: What nation did David Halberstam describe in Ho and The Making of a Quagmire?

Book Club: Whose 1998 novel Filth interrupts its narrator, Edinburgh detective Bruce Robertson, with comments from the 10-foot tapeworm inside him?

Authors: What pen name did Mary Challans grab from a 17th-century British play, for eight novels set in ancient Greece?

Book Bag: What real-life politician is skewered by Garrison Keillor's satire Me, by Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente?

Hard Rain

It was the fall of 2004, when Ron and I heard Eleanor's sixth-grade band begin to stomp their feet and clap their hands--stomp, stomp, clap! stomp, stomp, clap!--that we became aware that what we thought of as the rebellious songs of our adolescence had been fully taken over by elevators and middle school band directors.

Then, in the spring of 2008, we realized that it wasn't enough to be relieved when our kids weren't assigned to the creationist middle school science teacher, that we should have protested the first time we heard about him giving handouts about how dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time and then collecting the handouts at the end of each class so parents wouldn't see them.

Now it's 2011, and 17 degrees outside. I've been thinking of going out to one of the two stores in town looking for a bouquet of cut flowers to help me bear having to take down the Christmas decorations. But I'm not sure I'm up to the whole ordeal--a parking place far enough away from the door that I'll have room to extend my stiff leg into the frozen slush to get out of the car, cheery smiles for the people I pass, soft muzak on the store speakers, displays of the headline in the local paper about three murders near the lake we like to frequent in warmer weather...it might all be too much.

It's like this poem, "Hard Rain," by Tony Hoagland:

After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood: there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can't turn into a soft-drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hold golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

"You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy,"
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
"about all those people you killed--
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time--"

And everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood--
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present.
Should I say something?
Signed, America

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth--

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.

I like the line about how "the level of deep feeling has been touched" because it seems to me to get right to the heart of the matter--what business is it of yours if my deep feeling is wrongly bestowed? Who gets to define "wrong" and why? Is there such a thing as evil, and if so, can I point my finger at a person and say that there's no more room for forgiveness, that he's already "History"?

Well, yeah. Not only can I, but I probably should. Although it would be a dreadful world if everybody stalked around showing their true feelings every day (no more of what Holden Caulfield calls "phoniness"), maybe one thing January is for is facing some of the gritty realities that get covered over with lovely growing things during the rest of the year.

Hmm, I'm not the only one thinking like this today; see this xkcd.

Three Seconds

Three Seconds, by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, is a Swedish crime mystery being released today in the U.S. in a new English translation by Kari Dickson. I was sent an advance copy by Katrina Alvarez, marketing director for the digital agency Wiredset, who is also providing two copies for the giveaway.

The winners of the giveaway, chosen by Random.org, are:
(comment#2) FreshHell
(comment#5) ReadersGuide
Congratulations! I'll be providing your addresses to Ms Alvarez, who will be sending you a copy of the book directly.

So what kind of mystery is this? I'd call it gritty; I learned all kinds of things I had no idea about that are evidently true, according to the authors' appendix at the end of the novel. Realistic details are part of the appeal of the novel; the book jacket identifies Anders Roslund as an "award-winning journalist" and Borge Hellstrom as an "ex-criminal." Here's an example of something I didn't know: amphetamine, evidently a popular drug in prisons, can be processed with and hidden inside tulip buds.

The protagonist of the novel, a secret operative named Piet, murmurs to himself a seemingly lovely but puzzling line about how he loves poetry and tulips, before it turn out that he uses the tulips for drugs and he doesn't read the poetry, but uses little-read library books to smuggle drugs and gun parts into a prison.

The real interest of the novel is taking the little bits and pieces of the mystery and trying to put them together to figure out what Piet is going to do before he does it. I failed. I had no idea what he was planning most of the time, especially the elaborate set-up with "the barrel of diesel and the window" in a prison workshop. The title doesn't turn out to be much of a clue, by the way.

The plot has to do with corruption of the police force in Sweden, a topic that isn't going to carry the interest of an American reader very far unless she assumes that cops are much the same everywhere:
"This damned system....Criminals working for the police. Criminals' own crimes being covered up and downplayed. One crime is legitimized so that another one can be investigated. Policemen who lie and withhold the truth from other policemen. Damn it...in a democratic society."

The ending, in which Piet's story finally dovetails with the story of Ewert, a murder cop, is extremely satisfying, and the mystery is entertainingly complex. But the characters are quickly sketched, for the most part, and most of them are full of gratuitous angst. The writing is workmanlike and spare:
"The strong sunlight had become uncomfortably warm and made his jacket itch on his neck and his shoes feel too tight....Piet Hoffman had a dry mouth and swallowed what should have been saliva, but now was anxiety and fear."
These depictions of the Swedish spring sunlight and Piet's fear are so baldly stated that there's not a lot of room later to enlarge the description to evoke the even hotter sunshine of an Atlanta summer and the extremes of fear that the protagonist feels as his predicament worsens. He's got a dry mouth for the entire length of the novel!

If you like excitement, read this one fast. That's one clue the title does provide.

Three Men in a Boat

We've always had a good time on road trips with the whole family, except for the first year of each child's life (neither one of them could stand their infant car seats), and part of our tradition is to go to the library and find an audiobook we all want to listen to together. For our most recent trip, I got the audio version of Jerome K. Jerome's comedy classic Three Men in a Boat, because it's long been one of Ron's favorites while I'd never gotten very interested in it, and the kids had never heard of it before.

I chose Ian Carmichael's reading of this book because of a review at A Striped Armchair; that was the review that decided me, after reading about this book at Booklust and Things Mean A Lot. Although I don't usually remember who spurs me to read something, I always wonder what spurs a blogger revival of a particular classic, and note where the revival first comes to my attention. Also, I was looking for audiobooks for our upcoming trip.

Our enjoyment of the traveling tale was enhanced by the teenagers' insistence that we sing along to "I would walk 500 miles" (featured in a road trip episode of the tv show How I Met Your Mother) after every stop along the way.

Another thing that greatly enhanced our enjoyment is how recognizable the characters in the tale are--we grinned at the portrait of Eleanor--the hypochondriac--and then at a second portrait of her as the person afraid of two feet of water. Scarcely were we done grinning at that when we were amused by the portrait of Ron as the expert on packing who wants help with the manual labor. And then came the bit about singing comic songs, which, while not true in the details to the way Walker sings them, made us laugh in recognition anyway.

One of our very favorite parts was this true-to-dog-life portrait:
"he labored under the fixed belief that, whenever Harris or George reached out their hand for anything, it was his cold, damp nose that they wanted."

Another good part is when the three men try to open a tin of pineapple, using a pocket knife, scissors, a sharp stone, and finally the mast of the boat. They are ultimately unsuccessful and end up throwing the oddly dented tin into the river "...and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot..."

Three Men in a Boat is the kind of book that is best read at leisure; you'll enjoy the humor so much more if you're not in any particular hurry because it's a kind of quiet, subtle humor that builds to absurdity. Take this long example:

I knew a young man once, he was a most conscientious fellow, and, when he took to fly-fishing, he determined never to exaggerate his hauls by more than twenty-five per cent.
"When I have caught forty fish," said he, "then I will tell people that I have caught fifty, and so on. But I will not lie any more than that, because it is sinful to lie."
But the twenty-five per cent plan did not work well at all. He never was able to use it. The greatest number of fish he ever caught in one day was three, and you can't add twenty-five per cent to three--at least, not in fish.
So he increased his percentage to thirty-three-and-a-third; but that, again, was awkward, when he had only caught one or two; so, to simplify matters, he made up his mind to just double the quantity.
He stuck to this arrangement for a couple of months, and then he grew dissatisfied with it. Nobody believed him when he told them that he only doubled, and he, therefore, gained no credit that way whatever, while his moderation put him at a disadvantage among the other anglers. When he had really caught three small fish, and said he had caught six, it used to make him quite jealous to hear a man, whom he knew for a fact had only caught one, going about telling people he had landed two dozen.
So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he has religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin with. For example, if he did not catch any fish at all, then he said he had caught ten fish--you could never catch less than ten fish by his system; that was the foundation of it. Then, if by any chance he really did catch one fish, he called it twenty, while two fish would count thirty, three forty, and so on.
It is a simple and easily worked plan, and there has been some talk lately of its being made use of by the angling fraternity in general. Indeed, the Committee of the Thames Anglers' Association did recommend its adoption about two years ago, but some of the older members opposed it. They said they would consider the idea if the number were doubled, and each fish counted as twenty.

To make a long story short, this is a great book for a road trip; it makes short stories long and its effect is to make a long trip seem short.

Free E-book of the month

From Phoenix Picks science fiction publisher:
Our free give-away for January (by popular request) is Nancy Kress’ novella ‘Act One’ which was a Hugo and Nebula nominee in 2010.
Gardner Dozois of Locus writes that Act One is “one of the best of the
year...a compelling novella about a once-famous actress and her devoted
manager who get much more publicity of an unfortunate sort when they
inadvertently become embroiled with an act of biological terrorism with
potentially world-changing results.”
As a special treat for the new year readers will also be able to download
a short story by Hugo and Nebula winner, Alexei Panshin. ‘Sky Blue’ is
taken from Alexei Panshin’s critically acclaimed anthology, ‘Farewell to
Yesterday’s Tomorrow.’

The Coupon Code for January is 9992365. Instructions and download link (as
usual) at: www.PPickings.com.